Crammit Hall

Foie Gras and the real world.

2009-05-09T16:24:00.002-04:00

As I've said before, I'm an atheist, and pretty firm about it. But something that bothers, even embarrasses me, is the spectacle of protests and legal challenges against the smallest display of religiosity - the use of the word "god" in public proceedings, etc. Part of what sticks in my craw is the meaninglessness of it - honestly, I don't see how anyone is put out or feels like they're getting their rights trampled - and how that triviality discredits opposition to serious instances of religious intrusion into public life. The other problem is that it's not honest. The sort of person who's going to pick a fight over a line in a national anthem making reference to a belief that 90% of the world holds to some degree or another is the sort of person who's mostly pissed about being part of that last tenth. And what they probably want is not just for that display to be taken down, or the words to not be sung, but for everybody else to start being atheist too. (Personally, I don't give a rat's ass what the rest of y'all think. I also don't care that everybody else seems to think AC/DC aren't the worst band in the world, so long as they don't force me to listen to their weak shit.)

And here's where we say hello to one of the most delicious foodstuffs I have ever consumed: foie gras*. If you don't know, it is goose (or sometimes duck) liver with an insane amount fat in it; the flavour is similar to sweetbread drowning in butter - it is an astonishing thing to eat. It is also, unsurprisingly, fantastically unhealthy and not at all cheap. In the four years since I first tried foie (as part of the incredible tasting menu at Beckta), I have had it about three or four more times, and even that feels a little excessive.

All that flavour does not come without another cost, of course. The process of creating the fat-riddled liver involves force-feeding the fowl for the last two weeks or so before slaughter. There is a natural gorging stage in the life of migratory geese, where the birds will voluntarily over-eat to similar (although less extreme) effect. (An 'ethical' version of foie gras is produced by slaughtering birds at this stage, although it is by necessity a seasonal thing.) Most production of foie is done by gavage, or deliberate force-feeding of corn and, naturally, this is considered by some to be unacceptably cruel.

A number of bans of foie gras production have been enacted - in parts of the EU, Turkey, Israel, and California (although it doesn't take effect for another three years) - although these have little effect, since the vast majority of it is produced in France, Hungary, other parts of the US and Quebec. The city of Chicago briefly outlawed its sale in 2006, but the ban was short-lived and widely ignored. We in Ottawa have had a charming group of protesters who have harassed two excellent restaurants so far (Domus, and then Stephen Beckta's Play) through picketing and abusive emails and telephone calls. Beckta capitulated recently, although I was pleased to see that the protesters can claim no moral victory - his opinion hasn't changed, he just wanted to stop getting screamed at. (Sincerely, to anyone responsible for troubling Mr. Beckta, who is a very nice man, or his staff: go fuck yourself.)

I would like to emphasise that I don't entirely disagree with the protesters' position, much in the way that I don't disagree with many things vegans say about the consumption of meat. I won't attempt to say that eating artificially enlarged goose liver (or beef, or cheese) is just fine and dandy. There are genuine ethical questions - or rather, there aren't - raised by the consumption of meat and dairy, and it's not hard to see why the protesters feel it's an issue worth getting worked up about. But it is difficult to understand why they feel that their tactics are an acceptable response, or why they feel a right to regulate what a small portion of the public chooses to eat when it goes out. Indeed, one wonders why they've chosen to pick on small, independent local businesses whose methods they would otherwise applaud, and who in turn support local, sustainable farms.

It's true, as the protesters breathlessly insist, that some foie gras is produced from geese kept in cages and treated poorly - crappy foie that no restaurant worth eating at would serve. In much the same way, one can get lousy meat of any kind from shitty, cut-rate producers who treat animals (and most likely their workers) poorly, or you can give a shit, pay a little more and get meat raised by people who care about what they're doing. Chefs - good chefs, at least - are well aware of the conditions under which their food is produced, and generally will buy locally from farms that they can visit (or even work at) whenever possible. The notion that the protests are about "informing" restauranteurs about what they're serving is laughable.

I’m reminded of what Ian at Mariposa farms was saying about it – foie gras is actually a canard (pardon the pun); the activists actually would like to ban the eating of meat entirely, but since that wouldn’t attract much support or produce results, they pick on something smaller. Which, tactically, makes some sense; but again it’s dishonest, and it’s picking on something that makes such a tiny difference that it distracts from a useful resistance to factory farms or the raising of battery hens (why not encourage people to support to restaurants that use sustainable and smaller-scale suppliers instead? Oh, right, those are the same places.)

It’s easy to pick on something that hardly anyone eats, and that has great photo ops and it’s easy to exaggerate about, because you’ll get some result you can point to and say, ‘we saved some ducks’ lives’ (that’s an actual quote from a protester’s comment to the Citizen.) But of course, they didn’t save any ducks’ (let alone geese's) lives. There were two possible results: those livers will be sold somewhere else, or the farm that provides Beckta with his foie will stop producing it (and/or possibly go out of business, since I would assume it’s a fairly profitable commodity.) But the ducks will still die, as all living things die, and if they’re out in the wild, they will most likely die more slowly and painfully than at the hands of a farmer. While it might be a comfort to squishy urban liberals that the duck died a ‘natural’ death in the jaws of a predator or under the wheels of a car, I can't imagine the duck sharing that rosy view.

*I'd like to emphasise that crispy, pan-seared foie is pretty much the only preparation I enjoy. I've had foie poutine, and was slightly repulsed by the texture.

The strike, and general political carping.

2009-01-25T12:34:00.002-05:00

It's day 47, now. Tomorrow, January 26th, is the day that Parliament resumes business after the pirogies or prorogation or whatever you want to call that nonsense they got up to back in November.

My analogy of choice was to a poker game, where both sides overplayed weak hands. Harper threw down a pair of twos (the pre-budget announcement) and said "ha!" Dion and Layton countered with their own pair of twos, but with an outside ace (the coalition), whereupon Harper called the cops (GG) to break up the game. And as miserably as things worked out - our government was AWOL at the moment that everyone else (he said smugly) worked out that our economy's fundamentals were, in fact, completely fucked - I think that the pirogieing was probably the least-bad option available.

Had Harper pushed his exceptionally dumb move - and had the coalition idea not come together, or if Duceppe had chosen not to support the Liberal/NDP partnership - we would have faced an election again almost immediately after one called, unnecessarily and unwanted by all except Harper. And it would have meant that in three years, we'd have voted federally three times, to effectively identical results. And Harper could claim - he'd almost certainly still be minority PM - that the political instability had led to the economic woes, and if he'd had a free hand, by gum, things would've been just peachy.

Alternatively, as would have been a tactically smart move, had Dion, Layton and Duceppe had kept mum about their plan until after they voted the mini-budget down and then announced their plan to avoid an election, the roars of umbrage from conservatives - and as much as I don't like it, there are a significant number of them - would have been louder and more unreasonable than they actually were. And that was just for announcing their intentions. When the next election came along - and it would come well before things stopped getting worse economically - the Conservatives would have the golden opportunity to point to the state of affairs and claim that things were just fine until their firm hands were wrenched away from the tiller.

Both scenarios would result in medium-term gains for the CPC, and the serious possibility of long-term damage to both Liberals and NDP. As events actually transpired, Harper now - I hope - faces a party disillusioned about his leadership and tactical skills, an array of provincial leaders demanding he start dealing with their woes, and an uphill climb to that majority status that seemed so close a few months ago. The fact is, he'll never get it. Another leader, one with skills and empathy and a willingness to work with the opposition - for no real reason, I'm thinking Peter McKay, although he's probably unpalatable to Western conservatives - could get there if things don't go quite as miserably as I'm fearful they will. But Harper has, I think, fluffed his last, best shot.

The Liberals, whom I don't support by the way, got a freebie; when Ms. Jean sent the MPs home early, it gave the Grits time to do the housecleaning they needed. While I have problems with Ignatieff on a small raft of issues, the fact that he's a smart, worldly guy and not ashamed of it is kind of refreshing. And I say 'refreshing' in contrast not only to the last few Conservative/Reform leaders (Day was dumb and provincial, Harper is smart but small-minded) but also those on the centre-left and left (Layton is smart but uninspired about it, Dion was smart but seemed apologetic about it, and Martin appeared to not be aware if he was smart or not.) I don't know if the Liberals will be able to recover in time for the next election - and I agree that this country needs one in February 'like a hole in the head' - but if we make it to the what-the-hell?-fixed-election date in 2010, I would hope that the Liberals will be looking at a clear improvement, and possibly even a win.

(Part of why I don't think the CPC will manage to get out of their doldrums - other than the economy tanking - is that their front bench is wafer-thin. What potential heirs to the throne exist? A few years ago I might have said Chuck Strahl, but like most of the others, he barely gets to utter a peep. Prentice or McKay might be decent, but the former's a Harper loyalist and the latter used to be Progressive Conservative, and I'm sure some hard-liners suspect him of Red Toryism. Outside of that: I don't see the next leader coming out of Ontario, now that they've made their breakthrough; and that leaves precious few names in Cabinet who aren't bumbling idiots [eg., Rona Ambrose, Jason Kenny] or total fuckwads [Vic Toews, Gary Lunn])

However, one thing that was exposed in that tumultuous week last year was the depths of petty, bitter feelings roiling under our boring surfaces. Sure, the pro-Harper protesters may have been party activists, but they were still there, and the letters to the editor and cranky phone calls to cranky radio shows might be from, well, cranks, but...these are, presumably, that large minority of the public that votes Conservative and doesn't mind Pierre Poilivre's immature assholitry (for example.) That unwillingness to accept that the other side might have a legitimate point used to be something I saw only when I looked at the politics south of the border, and I really need to stop thinking that we're special and different. We're not.

And here's where I get to the OC Transpo strike. When the strike started on December 10th, I wailed and gnashed my teeth that because of the pirogieing, the drivers couldn't be ordered back to work until January 26th at the earliest. And since our terrible, terrible Mayor had decided that he didn't give a crap about settling quickly - and in fact, seemed primarily concerned with getting his way and damn the torpedoes, er, public - it looked like things were going to run right up until Xmas. I never, in my worst imaginings, thought that an elected city council would be so stupid as to let a transit strike run more than a couple of weeks.

But our mayor, aided by a scurrilous local press, has painted the issue as one of greedy union vs. all that is good and great. And a large part of the public bought it, at least for a while. There's certainly still a good constituency of people who care about exactly one thing: their property taxes. The rest of the city, for them, can go to hell; they've got their car, they're still getting to work and they're still getting out to their local Wal-mart. The fact that city businesses are losing an estimated $8 million dollars a day doesn't seem to bother them, so long as the city holds the line on property taxes. (These people are also probably going to bitch if their federal taxes don't go down, even though the Feds are starving the provinces - particularly Ontario - and thanks to the GST cut, are now facing structural deficits on top of the need for massive infrastructure spending.) And to gauge from the rhetoric - which might, of course, just be hot air - there's some very deep anger that's not going to fade quickly once this gets resolved, and that is frighteningly personal. (My own theory is that people stuck in traffic are stewing and getting angry; those like me, who have to walk to work - an hour and change each way - are getting exercise and fresh cold air, which keeps us level-headed.*)

It's depressing, really, to realize that you live in a city, a province, and a country full of mean, petty, blinkered people. And of course, there are lots of great people around who are smart, generous, open-minded, considerate, and so on. But I do wonder if they're not the minority.

So it turns out that Rona "Unsafe At Any Ministry" Ambrose has announced that she doesn't intend to order our bus drivers back to work, and that the city and union need to work it out themselves. Which, if this were December 9th, might be an admirable stance, given the city's half-witted negotiating technique, and intransigence on the one issue that union had announced they'd go to the mat on. I suspect that Mayor O'Brien's lack of experience with unions - his old job was running a staffing agency - has left him with a bunch of right-wing bullshit about them in place of understanding, which would explain why he was willing to waste two weeks on a free vote that any idiot - except the one that mattered - could have predicted would be soundly rejected. I'm pleased that as of today, at 12:30, city council appears to have sidelined O'Brien and made an overture to the union that 'revises' their bargaining position. But it's ridiculous that it's taken a month and a half for us to get here.

*smug? moi?

Another Year End Round-Up, In Which I Am Surprisingly Nice About Nostalgia For The Goddamned Eighties.

2009-01-09T22:25:00.004-05:00

So, last year was pretty rotten for me personally, what with one of my favourite pair of socks wearing out. Oh, and the break-up. That was pretty bad too.

Movies: I saw about three new movies last year, so I'll just say: Wall-E was the best one; there were a couple of comic-book adaptations, and Planet B-Boy, which I think by default was the worst one I saw. But it was still pretty good.

Books: I read a Jane Austen book this year! I had no idea she wrote comedies. I'd probably have given her a chance much earlier if I'd known that.

The Other Arts: My friend Liz made me feel like a Philistine with her list of theatre- and gallery-going. It then occurred to me that I went to galleries in three provinces (Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba), attended a performance by the National Ballet in their fancy new home, and...well, okay, I didn't see any plays or operas or anything. But I did see the Yves St-Laurent retrospective and thought it lacked context. How's that for a trenchant criticism? BAM!

Music: On the other hand, I listened to a lot of new music in '08. And it was a very good year.
1. Torche, Meanderthal
You know, I miss new Superchunk records. This more than makes up for the lack. Thunderous and catchy at the same time; not unlike Chavez at their best.
2. Fucked Up, The Chemistry of Common Life
Like I said about their last record: this is hardcore living up to its potential. This is hardcore getting old gracefully.
3. Deerhunter, Microcastle/Weird Era Revisted
Not sure which one I like more, the glossy one or the cavernous one.
4. Oneida, Preteen Weaponry
Runs the gamut from space-rock to spacey Kraut-rock. Three songs, 40 minutes, bliss.
5. Cadence Weapon, Afterparty Babies
The best rapper in all of Alberta strikes again, and is witty and nerdy and samples Brian Eno.

The many, many runners-up:
Not-Really-An-Album Category
Girl Talk, Feed The Animals; Jay Reatard, Matador Singles '08.
The former is a mash-up (and the best and most shockingly vulgar dance party you'll have all year), the latter is the best singles comp I've heard since Tossing Seeds.

I-Wish-It-Was-1985-And-I-Was-Watching-Friday-Night-Videos Category
M83, Saturdays=Youth
To be honest, I kind of hate this record, but can't bring myself to stop listening to it. There's a lot of really stupid, embarrassing things on it - pretty much every time their female vocalist opens her mouth, for instance, and the whole thing is like the soundtrack to a John Hughes movie about goths - but it's got something. Or else I'm just stupid.

I-Wish-It-Was-1985-And-I-Was-Signed-To-Homestead Category
Parts & Labor, Receivers
Okay, there's a little too much technology here to sound that retro, but the sound of this record is very 80's Midwestern postpunk (yes, that's a thing.) And it's a kickass album, too.

Snotty Punks Still Rule OK Category
No Age, Nouns; Titus Andronicus, The Airing of Grievances; Born Ruffians, Red Yellow and Blue; Tokyo Police Club, Elephant Shell.
Very quickly - No Age are the arty Angelenos, Titus Andronicus swear a lot, Born Ruffians are punks the way Jonathan Richman was a punk, and Tokyo Police Club...well, they're just fun.

I-Wish-It-Was-1986-Or-Possibly-1994 Category
Vivian Girls, s/t; Los Campesinos!, Hold On Now, Youngster/We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
I thought earlier this year how unusual that a band would release a full-on twee album in 2008, and then that band - who are Welsh, even - released a second one. And the Vivian Girls decided to channel either the Shop Assistants or Scrawl (both perfectly acceptable, but hardly au courant.)

I Do So Listen To Metal Category
Disfear, Live the Storm; Harvey Milk, Life...The Best Game In Town; Earth, Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull.
Disfear are for the kind of person who does yoga while blasting Motorhead. It's a shame that challenging, unpredictable bands like Harvey Milk get lumped into this 'genre' and ignored, because you (yes, you) would probably like them if you gave 'em a chance. To say nothing of Earth, which is what you should be listening to during yoga class. Really!

Worst thing I heard all year: Hercules & Love Affair. Antony (of the Johnsons) brings his horrific voice to some truly wretched dance twaddle. Avoid at all costs.

Looking forward to 2009: New albums from Neko Case, Andrew Bird, Belle Orchestre, Tim Hecker, Mastodon, Buried Inside, Dan Deacon, and Grizzly Bear; the Watchmen movie (fingers crossed), and an end to this frackin' bus strike. Happy January!

Rebounding (in oh so many ways)

2008-07-18T20:10:00.002-04:00

Things are in flux these days 'round the, well, let's call it the former Hall of Crammits*, in case you hadn't heard. We've called it quits as a couple, J and I; we're both a little heartbroken about it, but we're still on good terms so don't a) feel the need to give us that tilted-head-sotto-voce "how're you doing?", and b) worry about tiptoeing around us. We're doing fine. I think. (Booze helps.)

All of this came down as the new Death Cab for Cutie record, Narrow Stairs, was getting some heavy rotation around the house. As with most of their other albums, it's littered with breakup songs, like "You Can Do Better Than Me", and "Your New Twin Sized Bed" ("You look so defeated lying there...with a single pillow underneath your single head"). So needless to say, it's a tough one for either of us to listen to without getting upset. Thanks a lot, emo jerks.

Of course, it's also a pretty good record; I've liked most of theirs since my friend Cara introduced me to We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes back when. They've hit something of a plateau over the last couple - I doubt they'll ever improve on 2002's Transatlanticism - so this, like the last one, peters out really badly and contains a couple of outright duds. The single and heart of the record is the eight-minute "I Will Possess Your Heart", one of those creepy songs that will probably (like "Every Breath You Take" or "The One I Love") have the verse lyrics get ignored by thousands of dumbassed couples who prefer to latch on to a cursory reading of the refrain. (I guess it's good that they point themselves out like that.) The intro runs more than four and a half minutes before the first line is sung, and that's something I just adore; the way it feels like the song's nearly done before you realize that everything so far has just been preamble. (My old band Kepler had a song early on that did something similar, and it was long my favourite to play.)

~

I don't know why Band of Horses aren't gigantic. Their second LP, Cease to Begin is one of those summery, good-time rock records that can catapult an otherwise average band into the world of stadiums and beer endorsements. It's a decent improvement over their first record, Everything All The Time, which lacked that hard-to-define but essential rock element, 'oomf.' This time around, the group sound like they've toured out this batch of songs, and found a balance between the often-delicate arrangements and the desire to bring the (southern) rock. Admittedly, I still don't always follow what they're singing about, but again, that's not what's going to bring them the hordes of fans. No, what's going to pull 'em in are the partyable rockers ("The General Specific", "Islands on the Coast") and the sensitive songs ("No One's Going to Love You"), both of which they manage ably. Their singer's voice, too, has improved; it's now reminiscient of Carl Newman's (Zumpano/New Pornographers) reedy, high-but-not-falsetto tone, instead of Jon Anderson (the horrible elf-dweeb from Yes). So that's been a daily listen for me the past month.

I'm also kind of taken with Born Ruffians' Red Yellow and Blue, which had been on the long list for this year's Polaris prize but didn't make the cut (more on that in a minute.) It's an odd record - there's songs that wouldn't sound out of place in a Swell Maps set, and others that remind me of Jonathan Richman's rougher material - and I'm not sure exactly what to make of it. But I suspect that, not unlike their Warp labelmates Grizzly Bear, it's a record that'll reward persistence.

~

I like that the Polaris Prize exists. I have no idea if it's creating much of an effect on Canadian music, either in terms of sales or output, but at least for me it's an encouragement to look up homegrown groups that I might otherwise have never heard. (My friend JCarnie has clips from some of this year's nominees on her blog, for thems that want a sampling of Canada's newest hitmakers.)

The shortlist came out last week, and to win, I'm putting my theoretical money on Basia Bulat's staggeringly dull and charmless Oh! My Darling (given last years' winner, the equally uninteresting Patrick Watson). It's not a bad list, although a little predictable (it's all the hipster favourites!) but having seen the original pool of potential nominees, I'm disappointed with a couple of their omissions. As I said above, I think Born Ruffians should have been included, and I'd rather have Cadence Weapon and/or Thee Silver Mt. Zion instead of, for instance, Stars' unperforming In Our Bedroom After The War or Holy F*ck's good idea/lame execution dance machine. But I am pleased that the Wearkerthans' Reunion Tour and Black Mountain's In The Future are nominees; I'd be content with either of them, or even Caribou's Andorra taking the prize. But as I said above, I'm guessing I'll end up grumbling.

~

I recently saw David Fincher's Zodiac, which was awfully long and had Cloë Sevigny. To be fair, despite its significant length (nearly 3 hours) I only looked at my watch a couple of times; and Cloë's part was mercifully small. The film is based on the true story of the Zodiac killer, who apparently terrorized the San Francisco area in the late 60's and early 70's before disappearing (he was never caught, and his identity remains, officially, unknown.) The focus is on a homicide detective (Mark Ruffalo) following the case over the years, and a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist (Jake Gyllenhall) who becomes increasingly obsessed with the killer. Given the subject matter, there's little gore - given the fact that he only actually killed a half-dozen people, I guess that makes sense - and it's all over well within the first hour. There's also an entertaining performance by Robert Downey Jr., as the Chronicle's crime reporter, who slowly dissolves into a fierce alcoholism. Which, I know, is a huge stretch for him. Here's the thing, though: I usually have a major hate-on for Downey, and not only did I enjoy watching him in Zodiac, I found him terribly engaging in Iron Man. (Maybe I just don't like him clean-shaven.) Actually, I think the main difference between his younger roles and where he's at now is that he looks like he's having fun, and it's an infectious kind of glee.

The other notable thing I saw recently was Pixar's latest release, WALL-E. My feelings about it are pretty similar to what Phil Nugent wrote, although I did only tear up a bit (what with my metal heart and all). This now brings the number of films that have made me cry to five (for the record: Dancer in the Dark, Hotel Rwanda, When The Levees Broke and Ratatouille, also a Pixar joint.) There's very little dialogue, and none at all for the first half hour or so; and like with other Pixar films, there's very little pandering. No cutesy pop-culture references (although there are homages to 2001, a couple of clips from Hello, Dolly! and there's an air of "we just recently watched Silent Running" to the who thing), minor celebrity voice-casting, and not a single character who would qualify as 'sassy'. If I had kids (shudder), I'd make 'em watch WALL-E and tell them, "This is why you're not allowed to watch that Shrek trash."

~

*So I guess that technically, this blog needs a new name. And anyone able to direct me to a one-bedroom in walking distance of downtown available for September 1st (under $950/mo.) is my new best friend.

Out of hibernation

2008-05-22T23:42:00.002-04:00

Sorry about the vanishing act there. So. Lots of new stuff...so I'll talk about old TV and old music.

In the "big disappointments" category: one arrived, as it often does, in a red Zip envelope. You probably haven't ever heard of the series Buffalo Bill, let alone ever seen it, because it didn't last terribly long, wasn't popular, and as far as I know, was never shown in syndication. It did get at least one good - heck, great - review when it first aired back in early '83, which I read at the time, and is why I looked it up.

Unfortunately, it's fucking awful.

The series starred Dabney Coleman as a misanthropic, self-centred, hapless talk-show host (not unlike a malicious Alan Partridge), which sounds like comedy gold waiting to happen. However, the scripts are weak and predictable, the surprisingly sturdy supporting cast are wasted, and there's a laugh track (which only highlights the fact that the preceding line wasn't funny.) The show also looks a lot older than it is - roughly about the vintage of The Bob Newhart Show, with the exception of the opening credits, which have that almost-handwritten typeface so popular on California-themed restaurants in the 80's. If it weren't for the women's haircuts (uniformly pouffy) and the lack of trouser flares, I'd have guessed that this show sat in the can, unaired until Coleman became bankable after Tootsie and/or series regular (and writer, apparently) Geena Davis attracted some notice for...um...also Tootsie.

More enjoyable was Chinatown (although I probably don't have to tell you that). If you haven't seen it, it's an excellent modern noir; as much a story of water rights and the development of Los Angeles as a story about a murder (like how Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, with its digression into the destruction of public transit in post-war L.A.) Jack Nicholson puts in a great performance of the kind he hasn't since, oh, The Shining, which can be startling if (like me) you're used to him being JACK™ in every role.

We also finally got the classic love triangle story Jules et Jim, which Jess surprised me by liking immensely (given her earlier disdain for the other nouvelle vague films we've seen). It's a difficult one, I've got to say; the mercurial Catherine (who loves both Jules and Jim, among others) is painful to watch, and Jules either needed to grow a pair or admit that he's out of his depth with her (a lesson that, ahem, certain other men could learn from). Also weird: Henri Serre (who plays Jim)'s startling resemblance to Chris Noth.

My favourite scene of the film - and it's the most new wavey moment in it - is where the three leads are walking down the street after having attended a play, and the men start criticising the direction, script and staging in such a way that it could easily apply to Jules et Jim as well. Which is what I've decided is my favourite thing about that school of filmmaking - their absolute refusal to let the audience 'lose' themselves in the artifice of it all. It takes some getting used to, but it is possible to love a film even when you're being reminded that yes, you are watching a construction.

- -

My recent musical fixation has been Roxy Music, particularly their early albums For Your Pleasure and Country Life (and no, I am not merely fixated on the cover art.) It's a little strange, to me at least, that this represents my first real stab at listening to the band, given that I've been a long-time fan of Bowie's glam phase and my total adoration of Brian Eno's pop records (which came out immediately after his split with the band). I've also always liked Bryan Ferry's voice - he had a trashy pop hit in '85 with "Slave to Love", which I enjoyed in the same sort of way I like Steely Dan (and wow, that's another story): it's sulty and mature and sounds like being quietly drunk in the afternoon. But, alas, my brother had only a copy of their 1980 album Flesh + Blood in his collection, and so my first impression was that I really didn't care for their weak shit.

Years passed, and every once in a while I'd hear somebody talk about Roxy Music's early, weird phase, and I'd think about checking them out; but then I'd forget, but then I'd buy a Sea and Cake record and my desire for languid, decadent pop would be sated for another couple of years. And then there was that scene in Lost in Translation, after which I knew I needed to get a copy of "More Than This". Unfortunately (again), it's from Avalon, which isn't a very good record - too eighties by half, and even that song is much glossier than I'm comfortable with - but I think I gave it a fair listen before discarding it.

Their first few, though - in the years 1971-74, man, that's some excellent stuff. The band, particularly on the self-titled debut, anticipate the jarring angularity of post-punk, while still the spectre of prog-rock (Ferry had auditioned to be vocalist for King Crimson prior to forming RM) hangs over the proceedings. The group's rough edges (aka Brian Eno) get smoothed out on Stranded (1973), and by 1975's Siren (with its hit single, "Love is the Drug") there's little remarkable about them.

It's interesting to see how the band hasn't been lionized as glam icons the way that, for instance, T. Rex were. A quick side-by-side comparison of their music (the former's "Out of the Blue" vs. Bolan's "Ride A White Swan"): one's sexy, noisy and overblown, while the other's a jangly but straightforward blues song with hippy-assed lyrics. Go figure. At their beginnings, of course, Roxy Music were thoroughly aligned with glam-rock (no doubt aided by their aggressively pan-sexual appearance) but perhaps they're one of those bands who started as out cool in a subculture but squandered it through bland MOR success (cf. The Police, the Bangles).

- -

And my last recent curiosity has been, apparently, women with the last name Deschanel. First off is Zoey, who appears on the slight but endlessly charming album Volume One, with singer/songwriter M. Ward (under the name She & Him.) Ward isn't someone I've had any real exposure to; he's on a couple of Merge Records compilations I own, and generally I skip his contributions. He's often touted as a brilliant songwriter by the same critical sources who rave about, for instance, Ron Sexsmith, which I take as evidence that I'm not missing anything I'd enjoy. But She & Him is quite a different beast: her voice, while far from perfect, has a winning sassyness, and the arrangements are sunny and twangy with an early-60's pop feel. It's not going to change the world, but "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?" ought to liven up more than a couple of parties. (She's also an actress, which I keep forgetting, even though I've seen her in like, five things, and look forward to seeing her in The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford.)

Then there's her sister Emily, who appears in the post-mortem-investigation-drama (and really, how did that become a whole genre?) Bones, which we've tuned into the last few weeks and found, to our surprise, a real gem. The show is based on the life and novels of Kathy Reichs, although to what degree I'm not sure (she gets writing credits on every episode, although that doesn't necessarily mean anything). The interplay between Deschanel and co-star David Boreanaz is stellar; when combined with their supporting cast of oddly sexy medical examiners, the effect is a little dizzying. (One treat is John Francis Daley, formerly of Freaks and Geeks, whose role as a smug, boyish FBI profiler teeters between love-to-hate and just-plain-love.) Individually the two are entertaining enough for their own programs - Deschanel plays up her complete social alienation without being Spock, while Boreanaz...heck, he could host a telethon and I'd watch for hours (shut up). Having just jumped in at the end of their third season, there's a good possibility that the show isn't usually this good, or that it's about to suck mightily. But for the moment, I'm still very intrigued.

Wait, what?

2008-01-01T14:52:00.000-05:00

2007 was the first year in a while that went past in such an even-keel blur that it took me a minute to realize, last night whilst polishing off a bottle of nice Argentinian Malbec, that it was a pretty damned good year for me. Sure, there's lots of miserable shit going on in the world, but here in the warmth of Hintonburg, life is pretty sweet. I didn't have to look for work, or move,

It has, however, been another of those years where I don't get to see all the films or hear half the records I wanted to, so my year-end list is going to be one of those ones like the CBC does, although I'm not going to claim that obnoxious 'reality' shows on MTV or drunken Bush-apologist Christopher Hitchens were anything but passing annoyances.

1. No Country For Old Men. A stunningly dark, almost completely humourless Coen brothers masterpiece. Bloodier than Miller's Crossing and with a moral centre that's almost a perfect opposite to Fargo's Marge Gunderson.

2. Nina Nastasia & Jim White, You Follow Me. My favourite songwriter and my favourite drummer ditch the other players and make up the volume and then some. Interestingly, it frequently sounds like the guitar is holding the song together while Jim goes about his merry, thundering and meandering way.

3. 30 Rock and The Office. It took us a while to recognize just how brilliant the former show is - which, given our embarrassingly pathetic love of Tina Fey, is surprising - but sometime earlier this year, Jess and I realized that this one-two punch of blink-and-you'll-miss-it humour was nearly flawless, and yeah, if you ask us to do something with you on a Thursday night, we'll probably bail on you to watch TV and we won't even feel bad about it.

4. The Dirty Projectors/Grizzly Bear at Barrymore's, January somethingth. At the time, I'd enjoyed Grizzly Bear's Yellow House LP fairly well, although I was a little anxious about how it would translate into a live show, and I'd never heard of these Dirty Projectors. There were two local openers, the first of whom flat-out sucked, and the second, the appallingly-named As The Poets Affirm, were merely very, very disappointing (I'd kind of expected them to be more of an A Silver Mt Zion/Set Fire to Flames thing, instead of just a rock band with a cello.) So, the Dirty Projectors took the stage, and their singer's got a faux-hawk, and the collar on his polo shirt is turned up, and he's got a fucking scarf on indoors, and I'm right away ready to hate this band with a special new kind of loathing I've been saving for a big occasion. And yet after three songs, I was pretty sure that they were the best band I'd ever seen (or at least in the running.) They played an inscrutable kind of new-wave take on contemporary R&B, but rather than playing songs, they seemed to be hinting at things and playing around the music. Quite something. Oh, and Grizzly Bear were also very good.

5. Knocked Up. Yes yes, it's got its share of problems with realism; on the other hand, shut up, it's really damn funny.

6. LCD Soundsystem, The Sound of Silver. I didn't mind the first LCD album, although I have no idea why it was a double CD when there's barely an EP's worth of good songs on it. This, on the other hand, is solidly great; the music is infectiously energetic and hooky, and the lyrics (particularly "North American Scum" and "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down") are like what Mark E. Smith might write if he was American.

7. The Walrus. Canada's best magazine had a stellar year; the special issue on the Arctic and the most recent, "Cities" issue stand out, but there hasn't been a dud since...sheesh, I can't even remember. Essential reading for Canadians interested in where we're at and where we're going.

8. Battles, Mirrored. Robotic elves make an scary/funny album. I really can't describe it any other way. If robotic elves made a record, this is exactly what it would sound like.

9. Kingdom Shore. Mark Molnar has made a lot of music - with Seppuku, Buried Inside, and in my favourite incarnation until now, with improv trio Higney/Mulnar/Gulikson - but this is far and away the most impressive and best-executed of the lot. Strings and laptops, together at last.

10. Miracle Fortress, Five Roses/Panda Bear, Person Pitch. I call this one a tie, because I kept hearing Miracle Fortress songs and thinking, "man, I love this Panda Bear record!", and vice versa. By now I can tell them apart, of course, and it turns out they actually don't sound much alike - Miracle Fortress are relentlessly sunny and poppy (not unlike the Wondermints) and Panda Bear is like remembering a sunny day a long time ago when your heart was broken and it was actually kind of cold out (not unlike the weirder ends of the Beach Boys, only with a lot less structure).

There were a lot of older things I picked up on this year - Lost, Joanna Newsom, Jesu, The Children of Men - and other things that continued to go over my head - grime and/or dubstep (huh?), J.K. Rowling's writing, the idea that Michael Rappaport is funny - but that's not the point of these lists, is it?

Anyhow, I hope that this New Year's Day finds y'all well and warm and regretting, even if only a little, something fun you did last night, and looking forward to doing again next year, only louder.

Another rant against the 80's...

2007-10-01T23:51:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to work out how to sum up a lot of the stuff that's been going on in my life, and a big ol' gripe seems as good as anything (maybe a list or two...)

Viewing:
First on the block, one of the more recent things we've seen was part of the first season of Moonlighting. For the first two or three years it aired, there simply wasn't anything else on television that compared; and as anyone who watched it knows, it stands as the single best cautionary example of how not to handle romantic tension in a TV show. And I sure loved it, as a teenager, partly because it was funny and clever, and partly because it had Cybill Sheppard.

Well, it didn't hold up terribly well. Granted, we watched the pilot and then the first regular episode, and very few shows are at their best right out of the gate. (Newsradio, for example, which hit its stride faster than most, still had to have a couple of clunkers in order to get the expository nonsense out of the way.) So maybe I'm not being fair when I say that the dialogue sounds corny and slow and the plots predictable. But it's interesting to see how Willis' character looks after twenty years. At the time, sure, he didn't seem like a smug, obnoxious fratboy - but that was mostly because there were so many other, more smug, much more obnoxious fratboys being fÍted in the public eye that he seemed funny and tolerable by comparison. Nowadays, that persona is best represented on the tube by Steve Carrell's Michael Scott on The Office - a man whose attempts to be funny and likeable are pitiable, when they don't make us laugh uncomfortably (or callously). Who says there's no such thing as progress?

Going back a ways in our viewing was Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish; I'd heard some good things about it, and some of that may have to do with the fondness people have for S.E. Hinton novels. The film also has a pretty good cast: Nicholas Cage, Lawrence Fishburn, Matt Dillon, Tom Waits, and, if you like that kind of thing, Mickey Rourke (I don't.) But it aims for a theatricality, with a muddled setting (half-big city, half-small town, and a bizarrely 1950's kind of 80's) and it just didn't work for me, in part because Dillon, in particular, wasn't up to what should have been the demands of the script (see also: Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho and Much Ado About Nothing). The appearance of the film, however, was clearly influencial on a generation of commercial and music-video directors; seeing it now means having to remind yourself that the visual clichés you keep seeing weren't clichés at the time. It doesn't make it more fun to watch, though.

What would have made better fodder for directors to rip off: I Am Cuba, an early-60's Soviet propaganda film about the Cuban Revolution, shot in a lustrous grain of black and white. The story isn't great, of course, but as I said, it's agitprop and it does what it's supposed to in that regard. What it also does, though, is look beautiful, and take full advantage of the limitations of the medium in capturing the vibrant colours of the foliage, the burning villages, or the Havana nightlife.

Less beautiful was Superbad. It passed the basic test of a comedy film with flying colours - Jess and I laughed long and loud, and were giggling at it for a couple of days afterwards. It's got problems, though, starting with an astonishing crassness (even compared to other Apatow-related projects like Knocked Up) and, most troublingly, a sexist (hell, misogynist) streak a mile wide. There's the usual fat-ugly-guy-dating-skinny-hot-girl ugliness, but that's nothing compared to the way the boys talk about the girls, or how the object of Evan (Michael Cera)'s awkward affections Becca (Martha MacIsaac) has internalized that attitude. The film is on firmer ground where the friendship between Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan. Ultimately, it's a weaker movie than either The 40-Year Old Virgin or Knocked Up; you'll probably laugh a lot, but you might not like yourself for it later.

There's also an exchange in Superbad, where one of the girls asks her friend to bring her "80's dance mix" to a party. My initial reaction ("you kids weren't even born until, what, '89?") has since been tempered with the recollection that there were people I knew, born in the early 70's, who spent their teenage years convinced that the zenith of human culture had passed shortly before their birth. And I'm more than willing to admit a lingering fascination with the pre-disco 1970's, a period widely seen as unredeemably loathesome little more than a decage ago.

But my real complaint is, as always, with the part of the past that's the subject of the misplaced nostalgia. The 1980's produced a lot of interesting things: hilarious cynicism (e.g, Spy magazine); a truly amazing age of hip-hop (that would be the late 80's); great, abrasive post-punk; a wealth of independently produced movies; and the infrastructure, like film fests, distribution companies, and record labels that have produced and made available most of the best in either medium for the last two decades. What it didn't produce, however, was much good television, or good dance pop, or fashion that anyone should even look at again. And if you're ever looking to counter the notion that there isn't a lot to hate about the Reagan decade, try this phrase: "The episode of the Super Mario Brothers show guest-starring Milli Vanilli."

Listening:

I normally talk mostly about what I've liked, but recently I got to hear something really, really bad, and wanted to make mention of that. It's a band called Maximo Park; their latest record (Our Earthly Pleasures) was one of a batch of albums that we recently decided to give a trial listen to. And hoo, it's awful - glossy and vacuous. What's slightly funny is that I just read an interview with their singer, and he claims to be listening to a lot of different things (Johanna Newsom, Clipse, the Shins), and yet his band ends sounding like fucking James. Only worse, if that's possible.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Dirty Projectors, with a truly odd album, Rise Above. The album consists of Black Flag's Damaged LP, re-written with only the lyrics left intact; musically, the covers resemble the sort of art-punk that Ginn & Co. probably despised - Talking Heads, DNA, Wire's post-154 output - when they don't resemble east African guitar pop. And then there's lead singer Dave Longstreth's jagged falsetto to contend with. It's not an easy listen, even (or especially) if you like hardcore punk, but it's rewarding.

Conversely, the Toronto band Fucked Up's Hidden World does a great deal within the HC style. It helps that the shortest song on the record is two and half minutes (the longest is over nine), and that the instrumentation extends beyond guitars and drums (although there's certainly a lot of guitar). But there's more - the songs are powerful, lively and...well, not exactly catchy, but they're tuneful. And that's not something that happens often in hardcore, and I'd hope it'll open more than a couple of ears.

2007-08-20T07:12:00.000-04:00

We also started into the first season of 24, which both of us missed (or avoided) at the time, and...well, lots of people like it, so it's probably worth at least checking out, right? Eh. Anyway, the show kept our interest enough that we felt the need to see it through to the end. But there's very clunky, expository dialogue, technology fails only in convenient ways, and I hate just about every major character on the show - they're either whiny and helpless (we started calling the Bauer family "the Stupids"), or morally cartoonish. Or, in the case of Dennis Hopper, actually cartoonish - I'm pretty sure I've only heard worse accents when people are trying to be funny.

Needless to say, we won't be checking out season two.

On the other hand, there's an article in the New York Times today about chapters 13-22 of R.Kelly's Trapped In The Closet, and the headline, "Outrageous Farce From R. Kelly: He’s In on the Joke, Right?", makes me want to go back and watch the first chapters again. No, really - the idea that this insane, fucked-up work isn't an attempt to create something serious makes me love it all the more. Oh, and Will Oldham has a brief cameo, which perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised by.

The good TV recently was the first disc of Simon Schama's The Power of Art, a BBC art history program. We'd been rabid fans of his History of Britain when it aired on TVO last summer, mostly for his obvious relish of the more lurid stories; one of our favourites was the one about Mary, Queen of Scots' head falling to the ground when, after her beheading, someone picked it by the hair (not realizing it was a wig). The Brits may not be able to cook, but they sure know how to throw a regicide.

Anyhoo - art. The first three programs deal with Caravaggio (painter, boozer, murderer, Knight Templar), Bernini (sculptor, architect, womanizer, buddy of the Pope) and Rembrandt (painter, spendthrift, Dutchman); and in each case, Schama weaves together the artists' life story, major works and some historical and æsthetic context into a reasonably compelling whole. It's not as juicy - not often, at least - as his earlier series, and perhaps as a consequence it relies rather heavily on dubious re-enactments (I'm pretty sure Caravaggio didn't sound like a small-time London thug). Still, the subject matter is interesting enough, and there's enough time spent looking at the art itself to make the program well worth checking out. (Some later episodes cover Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent Van Gogh, the last of which provided JCrammit the thrill of hearing Schama say "fucking".)

~

The magazine Stylus recently ran a list of the 50 Greatest Rock Drummers, and needless to say, I've got a problem with it. First off, you've got Billy Cobham (pretty clearly a jazz drummer) and Tony Allen (who played with Fela Kuti); and if we're going to start opening things up like that, then the number one position had better be Ronald Shannon Jackson or Elvin Jones, not the tit from Led Zepplin.

Secondly, the tit from Led Zepplin shouldn't be number one anyway, because he, like the band, was and is grossly overrated. I'll grant that he's a good drummer - not as talented as Ginger Baker (Cream) or Jaki Leibezeit (Can) or, for that matter, Zach Hill (Hella) - but better than competent, and inventive enough to deserve a place, oh, somewhere in the twenties, maybe between the guy from the Jesus Lizard and the guy from Khanate.

But he does show up at number one, and Keith Moon - a notoriously sloppy drummer - gets to be first runner-up. One of the sad facts of life for drummers (in rock, at least) is that how well you play is less important than who you play with. When you look at the Stylus top ten, this becomes violently apparent. The inclusion of Leibzeit I'll grant might be because he's a very good player (again, I'm not sure he's better than Zach Hill) or it might be because of Can's enduring hip cachet. Stephen Morris' placement at #5 absolutely is due to Joy Division's hallowed place in alt-rock history, and Charlie Watts? He gets the kind of compliments that the dumb but earnest kids got in school - 'well, he's certainly steady!' But, actually, he's not; listen to "Honky Tonk Women", where he speeds up like crazy. No, Watts is a decent drummer, but like Moon, Bonham, and at least another third off Stylus' list, his greatest achievement was joining the right band.

There are a couple of other stupid inclusions on the list. Grant Hart (Husker Du, #44) sticks in my craw because of their reasons for including him: he can sing and play drums at the same time! Hey, you know who else can do that? The guy from Triumph. And Phil Collins. Both of whom are better, chops-wise, than Hart is, was, or will ever be. Unfortunately for them, they didn't play in cool bands.

Bill Berry from REM (#20) is pretty good, too. But that's it. He's just pretty good. I wouldn't even imagine he was a terribly influential drummer for college rock bands at the time - the Feelies had more of a reputation for their rhythm section; the guy from Camper Van Beethoven played with a smaller kit and did more with it, and Larry Mullen Jr of U2, who's placed at #21, is not only a better player, he's also much better-looking.

Who do I like? The most egregious omission, in my opinion, was Jim White, who plays like a motherfucker for the Dirty Three, on Cat Power's Moon Pix and with Nina Nastasia (particularly on the just-released You Follow Me). Also very good: Rey Washam (Scratch Acid/Rapeman), Mac McNeilly (the Jesus Lizard), Brit Walford (Slint, The For Carnation), and Scott Plouf (Spinanes, Built to Spill). But quibbles like this is what inane lists are for, and why nerds like me enjoy them so much.

2007-08-05T15:48:00.000-04:00

Normally, I don't think we're really summer blockbuster people. But for Harry Potter, we made an exception (opening weekend, no less!) Earlier this year, Jess borrowed the first four DVD's, and watched them all over a couple of days (I stuck through all of the first and third films, most of the second and not a great deal of the fourth). In brief: number one is fine, number two is too long, number three is terrific, and I'm going to guess that number four is pretty good.

Jess has now finished all seven books (and cried at the end of the last); I stopped reading the second one about a chapter and a half in (Rowling's prose, at least what I've read, does nothing for me, and I don't find Potter terribly sympathetic.) I may give the rest of them a try at some point, but I also just picked up Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy in anticipation of the upcoming Golden Compass movie, and I think that'll fill my kidlit quota for the year. (Incidentally: in an article on the Potter books, Pullman's books are described as having a "killjoy, Santa-Claus-is-dead socialism". Dude. Write a book just for me, why dontcha?)

So anyway (yes, I'm getting back to my original point here) we saw The Order of the Phoenix, and it's pretty good. Jess pointed out that several significant sections of the book were left out, including, I think, a couple of characters. I countered this by asking if she seriously thought what the movie needed was more plot. At a lean (cough) 2 hours and 20 minutes, it's the shortest film of the series; and while my ass appreciated the (relatively) brief running time, it results in some blink-and-you-missed-it moments. For the most part, though, it's not difficult to follow without having read the books, or even having paid much attention during the previous films. The large battle scene between the titular group of good wizards and Voldemort's followers at the end of the film is quite smartly done - visually impressive, but clearly beyond the ken of Potter et al. - and maintains the students' perspective. It makes the battle difficult to understand, but it shows plainly how far out of their league the students were.

There are a couple of things I'd complain about, if I could find someone who'd listen: there's not nearly enough of Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy), who's slimy and evil in a way that, unfortunately, can only be called 'delicious'. The scene during the 'O-level' exam doesn't make a lick of sense - I would gather that the students all got zeroes for running out on the test, and yet were cheering about it? - and there are a couple of story threads that get dropped rather suddenly (Harry kisses a girl who is never seen again, for instance.)

But it's a good, dark story, balancing its tripartite foci on Harry's adolescent angst, the fight against Voldemort and the Ministry of Magic's paranoid authoritarianism (and Imelda Staunton does a wonderful, evil impersonation of my high school guidance councillor - or maybe she's trying to be Margaret Thatcher as a PTA member, it's hard to say).

Next blockbuster to grit our teeth over: The Simpsons. Will it suck as much as the show has lately? Yeah, probably.

~

Some recent music acquisitions:
Bjork's Volta is nuts. Of course it is, I can hear you thinking, she's batshit crazy and makes videos where she's married to a cat. But despite the Timbaland production, the Lightning Bolt drumming and weird aggressiveness, it's not half as strange - and far more listenable - than her last one, Medúlla. My biggest complaint is with the presence of guest vocalist Antony (of Antony and the Johnsons) whose voice is horrific - like a really, desperately bad Nina Simone impersonator (or the woman from Coco Rosie who sounds like a guy). As he's only on two tracks, it's not so bad; still, that's two write-offs.

Menomena's Friend and Foe is hit and miss. The opener, "Muscle'n Flo", is a strange, fractured tune, catchy and angular; the rest of the best songs on the record ("Air Aid", "The Pelican", "Ghostship") could be described in similar terms but don't sound much alike (one of the band's great strengths). The worst ("My My", "Running") sound like art school kids channelling Supertramp. Luckily, the dreck is outweighed by the good stuff, and it's a record I'd heartily recommend.

Feist's second (or third) solo record, The Reminder, is solid. I loved portions of Let it Die - the title track, "Lonely Lonely", even "Mushaboom" and the Bee Gees cover - but there were nearly as many duds - "Gatekeeper", "Leisure Suite" - and it felt, I dunno, padded, maybe. (I saw her performance at Babylon on that tour, btw, and it was phenomenal, despite the weaker portions of the record.) I haven't found this to be the case with the new album. The first two singles, "My Moon My Man" and "1234" are smooth, sexy pop, upbeat without being schmaltzy; and the rest of it has an eclectic, mature feel. Serve with unoaked chardonnay and seafood canapes.

If you've missed My Bloody Valentine, lo these last 16 years since Loveless came out, you might want to investigate Jesu's Conqueror. Sure, it's "technically" a metal record, is by Justin Broaderick (ex-Godflesh, Final, Head of David), and it's on Hydra Head (home to Botch, Cattle Press, Pelican), but just listen to those washed-out, blurry guitars - it's like 1991 all over again.

Other fun things I've heard lately: Battles' Mirrored (best described as 'robot elf music'); El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead; Murs' 3:16 the 9th Edition; Oxbow's The Narcotic Story and Stars' In Our Bedroom After the War (less overtly sexual than their last couple of records, but still pretty hot.)

~

In Crammit news, um, there's not really any news. I'm growing a beard, in preparation for having a 'stache as part of a Halloween costume. I also went to the dentist for the first in over 15 years, and not surprisingly, discoverd that my fillings are (over-)due to be replaced, and both of us need root canals. Gah!

There's a shitload of good shows coming up in September & October; the ones I'm most excited about:
- Animal Collective & Eric Copeland (of Black Dice), Sept 7th
- Great Lake Swimmers, Sept 12th
- Ruins, Sept 16th
- Grizzly Bear, Sept 22nd
- Bloc Party (meh) w/ Deerhoof (!), Sept 30th
- Caribou w/ Born Ruffians, Oct 2nd
- Magnolia Electric Co., Oct 4th
- Eric's Trip, Oct 5th
- Torngat, Oct 12th

And, of course, the Rizdales w/ Casey Comeau et al. this Friday, the 10th at the Black Sheep.

Screaming, screaming, screaming for creemees*

2007-07-03T19:10:00.000-04:00

Three years ago or so, I went to see 28 Days Later, a zombie-esque horror film, as part of a double bill at the Mayfair. For whatever reason, they'd put it with the true crime flick Owning Mahowny (a pleasant little number starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Hurt and Maury Chaykin, who didn't play the token American this time), so I was sort of half-calm, half-keyed-up going in to the second half of the bill. As Jess has since joked, 28 minutes later, I left the theatre shitting bricks; I nearly screamed at an older couple who popped out around a corner on my walk home, and I had to stop at the Aloha Room for a drink to settle my nerves. Running, screaming zombies, people.

So today I checked out the sequel, 28 Weeks Later, in what I'm going to say was aversion therapy or something. The opening scenes, in a claustrophobic boarded-up cottage that gets overrun by the infected, are about as bad as anything in the original; we can tell from the get-go that things are going to go horrifically wrong for this disaster-movie group of corpses in-waiting (a elderly couple, a somber young man, [half of] a newlywed couple, and our protagonist and his wife) and wow, do they ever. Blood goes flying, and cowardice saves our man who dooms his wife to a bitey death.

The story moves on to cover the recovery and reconstruction after the infected have all died of starvation and, presumably, the virus has run its course. The American military have set up their Green Zone perimeters and sniper positions on the Isle of Dogs, and...yeah, can you guess where this is going? Things go very badly, there's a lot more running and screaming, and London gets napalmed. (Idris Elba, aka Stringer Bell from The Wire, shows yet again that he can play a cold and brutal killer like nobody's business.) In any case, this time I made it through the whole thing with only a few flinches. The absolute terror of the first one - particularly the opening scene, and the part where they have to hack up one of their friends with a machete - is somewhat blunted by familiarity, and by the distraction of the political subtext.

~

We've also been watching a few of John Waters' later movies. Hairspray was the first of his I'd ever seen, and, okay, it's really campy, but I still enjoyed it an awful lot more back in '91. And no, I have no intention (I mean it, Jess, I'm not kidding) of seeing the musical version. Pecker was terrific - a poke at artsy po-facedness, at the condescension of the cogniscenti, at tourism - and terribly funny. Serial Mom is also a scream - it's easy to forget how funny Kathleen Turner can be (or that Matthew Lillard can be funny at all) but her over-the-top version of Martha Stewart (because come on, that's totally what it is) is enough to make you forget those awful films she made with Michael Douglas. Lastly, Cecil B. Demented - again, what the hell, Melanie Griffith? Just when I think you suck like Meg Ryan, you do something like this. The movie - about a underground director-turned-kidnapper and his band of film thugs - isn't as good as the previous two, but again, it's funny and throws lots of film references. I can imagine that it's just the kind of thing a younger me would love the crap out of. (It also co-stars Alicia Witt, who looked really familiar but whom I couldn't place. She did play Cybill Sheppard's daughter in the short-lived Cybill, which I really liked, but after a while I realized that she mostly reminded me of my friend Liz, particularly in voice.)

~

In our real, unmediated lives, the big news was our trip to Vermont. Originally, it was to be an all-out shopping/seafood/whatever trip to New Hampshire and Montreal as well, but owing to bad (probable layoffs) news at work, we cut it back to a couple of days in VT, the cheap state. No, I'm kidding, it's lovely there. The scenery's all gorgeous, the weather cooperated with us almost the entire weekend, and the city of Burlington is probably the nicest I've visited in the entire US.

Some things we did:
• ate at a great, local-food restaurant with the unfortunate name of Smokejack's, and at a BBQ place called Big Fatty's.
• Got sunburned and blistered feet walking around the amazing Shelbourne Museum
• Saw a terrific Low/Wilco show, and many, many hippies
• Shopped at a K-Mart and a Macy's (the latter of which is almost exactly like the Bay).

Some things we didn't do:
• take the Lake Champlain ferry, because it was really expensive and would have meant a two-hour delay in getting home
• try Steven Colbert's Americone Dream ice cream, because we're forgetful
• go into Hot Topic, because we remembered we're not twelve.

I also bought a couple of metal CD's: Neurosis' Given to the Rising (which is heavier and more rock than The Eye of Every Storm and just plain better than A Sun That Never Sets) and Pig Destroyer's Phantom Limb, which is insane.

For a long time, the most nuts, thrash-metal thing I'd heard was Napalm Death. And okay, it probably still is - the entire thing, particularly the drums, sound so fast as to be blurry, and the lyrics are still indecipherable fifteen years on - but there were other things that pushed my envelope of noise incrementally: Maximillian Colby's excellent (and tragically only) album; various singles by both 400 Years and the Sleepytime Trio (who, interestingly enough, both featured Max Colby alumni); Botch's We Are the Romans, and Converge's staggering Jane Doe. Each one, on first listen, made no sense at all to me, except that I knew it had something powerful, and that I liked all that crashing and screaming and noise. And each one was faster, more complicated and begged for adjectives like "brutal" and "punishing". Pig Destroyer are like that. I've read a review here and there, suggesting that this is one of those landmarks in the evolution of a genre (in this case, grindcore) but I'm in no way able to judge either that claim or even the album on its own terms. It's just really, really loud and scary, and it doesn't sound dumb for trying, which is quite the accomplishment.

*we were told, in Burlington, that a fun thing to do was walk down the boardwalk and get a "creamie". It turns out that this a) just means a soft serve ice cream, and not a bizarre sexual thing, and b) it's spelled "creemee". I don't think I'm easily squicked out, but this rivals "slurpachino" for revolting food names.

FTT

2007-06-05T20:59:00.000-04:00

I'm just about fed up with the Harper Tories. I felt some trepidation when they were first elected, tempered with the knowledge that they weren't going to be able to pass the worst parts of their agenda without serious compromise. And in a lot of ways, that's been borne out. In some instances, changes in the political landscape - like the rising importance of environmental issues to conservative voters - have prompted them to take positive steps despite themselves. So while I don't agree with most of their policies, they haven't been a disaster, and I'm sure somewhere in their record I'd find something I could support.

No, the problems I have with them are to do with style. Let's start with the first thing they did: "Canada's New Government". Apart from being an obnoxious phrase, the implication that they've replaced the structure of our government is misleading (and worrying) - but I guess that's what rebranding is all about. If they were being honest, why bother changing the phrase "government of Canada"?

Then there's the fact that they're hanging on to it well past the point it could reasonably be considered accurate. A "new" government, I think it's fair to say, wouldn't have introduced a budget or had time for (multiple) cabinet shuffles; nor should it have had time to have had all the stationary changed. A couple of suggestions for words to replaced "new": "current", "present", "temporary", "provisional", or "soon-to-be-replaced."

It's not surprising that they're clinging to the phrase, though, when you listen to anything Harper (or the couple of cabinet members he allows off their leash) has to say. Phrases like "when we came to office", "the previous government" and "after 13 years of foot-dragging" appear like flies on sherbert. Sure, after every change of government you can expect a flurry of finger-pointing and blame-laying - and that's fair. The Liberals could have done a lot more on the environment, on native issues, on federal-provincial relations, etc., and I didn't have a problem with the first couple of months of chastisement. After that, though, things quickly got to a 'put up or shut up' point, which was at least a year ago. Once you're established in power, complaining about what the last guys didn't do is either whining or campaigning.

The latter is fine, if you're in an election campaign. Which, as you may have noticed, we're not. We also don't yet run our campaigns outside the country; the Tories haven't seemed to have realized this yet. In fact, just today, Harper used his meeting with incoming French President Sarkozy to point out, yet again, the Liberals' poor record of restraining carbon emissions. As was said the time Rona Ambrose fit a year's worth of piss in a 3 minute summit speech, no-one else is talking about their predecessors (and given that the French guy has been in office for what, two weeks now? - he's the only one who could be forgiven it). So rather than do something constructive (and no, intensity-based guidelines are not something), the Tories are choosing to talk about how the other guys just talked but didn't do anything.

So that leaves us with whining. And it fits with the other thing the Tories are good at: being some testy-assed, thin-skinned little bitches. Harper's shit-fit last Thursday ("When the leader of the Opposition is able to stand in uniform...then I'll care about his opinion...") was probably his most fascistic moment so far, but he's always shown himself to be a humourless prick.

He's also shown himself to be the political equivalent of a grade-grubber. There's rarely been a major policy announcement that hasn't had Harper as the sole speaker; despite having run on promises of political reform, the only things he's done have been to make the Supreme Court confirmation process awkward, add an extra couple of days of voting, and set fixed election dates. (Gosh, thanks! Token steps are just as good as real ones!) The Tories have also been playing to their base - their knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing base - from the moment they came to power; their petulant unwillingness to speak to the press, their offensive statements about opposition politicians' loyalties (seriously, fuck right off with that shit) and their running childish attack ads with no sign of an election anywhere in sight are of a piece with Harper's lack of humour or pleasantness. He tried very hard to be presented as 'boring' in the 2006 campaign, as if this might make him look like less of a robot. What it did was highlight the fact that he IS boring - I'm half asleep the second he opens his mouth - and that all he's got going for him is the ruthless, uninteresting drive of the control freak.

Of course, it's not really getting him the power he wants. He's still ending up Prime Minister of this country, which stubbornly refuses to be the place he's pushing it to be.

The title of Linda McQuaig's new book, Holding The Bully's Coat (which I'm more tempted to buy with each passing day of cringing and eye-rolling) sums up where this all gets us. Harper today bloviated about how committed 'we' were to action on climate change even as it was clear that he'd be backing Bush's non-action plan (his line about being a "bridge" between the EU and US is, of course, horseshit). He also commented on the peabrained American plan to place anti-missile defense installations in eastern Europe and Putin's sabre-rattling reaction (which is understandable, if not helpful). Harper's statement: Russia has nothing to fear. Well, one can imagine Putin thinking, that's a fucking relief.

Bush isn't helping, of course - how could he? He's plainly incapable of seeing another's point of view, and so he's prattling that "The Cold War is over," while blithely taking near-precise steps to bring it back. It's almost as if, I dunno, he's drunk or something.

I've read Americans say it's taken Bush the Younger's reign to make them miss Reagan; it's taken Harper's to make me miss Mulroney.

Grab Bag o' Updates

2007-06-05T20:31:00.000-04:00

April and May weren't terribly exciting around here: we took turns getting sick, we watched some unimpressive movies, and we ventured out to a couple of Lynx games. But things are more interesting (see photo, below) with our new addition. I've got fascinating new scratches in all sorts of surprising places, for example. (I've also now realized that it's just as well that I'll never have kids, because I would totally be one of those parents who thinks everyone wants to hear all about the supposedly cute things the pisher does.) We're also planning an outlet mall shopstravaganza in New Hampshire and Kittery, ME for the Canada Day long weekend, which grew out of our plan to catch up with the Wilco/Low tour in Shelbourne, VT. It's a lovely thing to get the hell away from this town on July 1st, and being in the US for it should be interesting - I'm curious to see if I'll feel homesick, or even (gasp!) patriotic. Yeeg, let's hope not.

Films:
Is there some reason The Host hasn't played in Ottawa yet? Am I going to have rent Gorgo or something to get my monster-movie fix?

I'll try to keep our movie wrap-up manageable. First off, GO SEE Knocked Up, NOW. I really can't over-emphasise how funny, smart and sweet a film it is. Go. Now.
(Amusingly, Judd Apatow & co. are being sued by Asshole Report columnist Rebecca Eckler for having plagarized her book, Knocked Up. Two reasons I could tell the film wasn't based on anything she'd written: it was funny, and it was coherent.)
Zip's been pretty good to us recently; the best among them was Wong Kar-Wai's In The Mood For Love; I'd seen it before and loved it, and was quite chuffed that Jess was smit with it as well. It's romantic, it's heartbreaking, and so very little actually happens that you can concentrate on how nice everything looks. Also good was Finding Neverland, and as always, Johnny Depp's on-screen charisma is quite something. It's a charming story, of course, and there's lots of heartwarming and carpe diems and so on; as schmaltz goes it could have been a great deal worse. The children are mostly inoffensive and Kate Winslet is decent (although most of her role involves looking brave suffering through some mysterious ailment) but Depp really dove headfirst into his part. It was also nice to see MacKenzie Crook (Gareth from the UK version of The Office) not playing Gareth.

Talladega Nights was another comedy we were eagerly waiting for, and it's pretty excellent in much the same way that Anchorman was. Which is to say, there's some really terrific stuff early on, but the film loses steam when the plot becomes important. It's also worth noting that both Talladega Nights and Knocked Up have Kristin Wiig, who is fast becoming our favourite of the current cast of SNL, and who needs a starring vehicle very badly.

Hotel Rwanda - which has the distinction of being the second film that's ever made me cry (the first being Dancer in the Dark) - was one I had to watch alone. Given the subject matter, there's a lot less blood than I'd expected (less, for instance, than in Children of Men) but the film does a great job of capturing how the situation deteriorated so quickly and the dread and horror of the families trapped at the hotel. The performances are terrific; Don Cheadle (as real-life hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina) maintains, as best he can, the calm disposition of a high-end service professional until nearly the end of the film, when his arsenal of favour-earning scotch bottles runs out. (A more callous person could suggest this as a customer service training film.)

Book:
I recently finished Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, a surprisingly thoughtful argument (some would say polemic) in defence of atheism. I say 'surprisingly' because I'd heard and read a lot of people describe the book as if it was a gibbering, sophmoric rant. (I will concede that it does focus primarily on the three Abrahamic monotheisms, which I don't think weakens its argument so much as shows the author's awareness of his audience. Still, I would have liked to have seen a little more breadth in his examples.) Admittedly, he doesn't give any quarter to believers - or rather, to their beliefs, particularly where they intrude in the public realm - but he's not a dick about it, and he doesn't counsel others to be, either.

Dawkins' argument against the existence of god(s) starts with the essential point that the burden of proof shouldn't and doesn't rest with atheists - that may seem obvious, but the debate is rarely framed that way. He doesn't work especially hard after this on proving the absence of a deity (he does make the point that such a being is so staggeringly unlikely that it's not worth serious consideration.) The arguments made in favour of god's existence are disposed of quickly and effectively, and he does write a couple of chapters on the negative aspects of religion - he acknowledges that bad people will do horrible things for many reasons, but religion (like nationalism) allows good people to do evil deeds. He also turns his attention to the associated issues brought up against the atheistic worldview - that 'godless' morality is arbitrary and relativistic, that it ignores the beauty of nature, that it's nihilistic. What makes the book such a good read - and why I can imagine it would wipe the floor with professional grouch Christopher Hitchens' similar God is not Great - is Dawkin's humanism, his appreciation of the wonders of the universe, and his humour. Anyone expecting a frothing rant should be pleasantly disappointed.

Music:
I've had a copy of the Joanna Newsom record, Ys, for some time now, having heard that it was an improvement over The Milk-Eyed Mender (her creepy, Melanie-at-the-SCA debut). And, okay, maybe it was, but given that the shortest song clocks in at 7:19 (and the longest is almost 17 minutes) it was a tough one to even start listening to, let alone hear enough times to have an opinion on. So after some patient listening at work, I'm firmly now of the opinion that Ys is, indeed, much better than her first one, and even goddamn amazing. Her voice is still an acquired taste, and her lyrics are much weirder than I could possibly explain.

I don't often read reviews in Pitchfork, mostly because they're so incredibly annoying. Last week, I found Rob Mitchum's review of the new Stars remix/covers album Do You Trust Your Friends?, a song-for-song recreation/reinterpretation of their 2005 record Set Yourself On Fire by various bands they'd toured or recorded with. His take on the record seemed to have more to do with his dislike of the trend towards remix and/or cover albums; he does gripe about most of the tracks' weaknesses, and then gives the thing 1.8 out of ten.

It is a pretty self-indulgent collection; Mitchum overstates the case only slightly when he says Stars have "commissioned their own tribute album." Fair enough, although I'd be willing to bet he didn't bitch about Tortoise, Microstoria, Six Parts Seven, or Björk doing the same thing (to say nothing of Van Morrison). And I've got more of a problem with Amy Millan's boring, self-indulgent solo album. It's worth pointing out that Stars write very good songs - arguably better than any of the contributors to Do You Trust Your Friends? - that do lend themselves well to reinterpretation.

The ideas here are often good - "Ageless Beauty" reimagined as a bouncy, acoustic number, or Apostle of Hustle's faintly latin take on "One More Night" - but are foiled by poor execution. The best tracks - The Dears, Metric, and Final Fantasy - know where to leave well enough alone; the remainder, mostly straightforward dance-y remixes, manage to be both cluttered and boring. While I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't already like Stars quite a bit, c'mon, one point eight? It's not like it's an Andrew Ridgely record.

The li'lest Crammit

2007-05-13T22:34:00.000-04:00

Meet The Commish. (We're hoping it's a name she grows into.)

Actual updates later, when we're not busy gushing over how cute it is when our kitten falls over.

The sunshine puts me in a good mood. It'll pass.

2007-04-20T22:17:00.000-04:00

I think there's a lesson for horror movie directors in Jonathan Glazer's Birth: that little kids can be highly disconcerting, but no matter how Midwich Cuckoo'ed up the tykes are, they're not scary.

It (Birth, I mean) is a mildly interesting film, about a woman who is visited (harrassed, really) by a 10-year old boy (played by Cameron Bright, who we'd also seen as the kid in Thank You For Smoking; on the negative side, he was also in X3 and Ultraviolet) who claims to be her dead husband. While she seems to be laughing off his claims early on, she's obviously fascinated and is quickly seduced by the idea that he could be the man she lost a decade earlier. For his part, the boy seems obsessed solely by his love for her and doesn't appear entirely comfortable in (or entirely aware of) his pre-adult status. A good part of this is due to Bright's powerful stare; for a little kid, he can put on a self-possessed look that'll serve him well in the underage drinking department. Thankfully, it doesn't get into any of the how's or if's of the possible reincarnation (there was a scene that led me to think that it was all a scheme to gaslight the poor woman, but alas, no.) And the realization from my first paragraph came near the end, when this creepy little kid faces off against an adult woman (I'm not spoiling it!) and loses, easily. Oh yeah, I thought, he's just a little twerp!

Nicole Kidman, who stars in Birth, is an actress I like, although there's a couple of weird things about that. For one thing, I'm pretty sure I'd never seen her in anything before this; the only thing of hers that I'm sure I'd want to see is Eyes Wide Shut* (no, I'm not kidding - what, you thought I was going to say Bewitched?) and in a lot of other cases I get her confused with Naomi Watts (whom she doesn't resemble, and can't hold a candle to). The other problem is that she's had, it appears, a fair amount of Botoxing, which leaves her with an unfortunately limited range of facial expressions. Jess & I had a good chuckle doing impressions of her "concerned", "angry" and "happy" face - all of which involve a blank stare (Jess has also expanded this to making fun of Julianne Moore and Andie McDowell; the former I like, the latter is one of many reasons I'm embarrassed for having liked sex, lies and videotape.) She still did a fairly good job in the role, and her Jean Seberg-esque 'do is quite flattering; I just wish it hadn't exposed how paralyzed her forehead muscles were.

Speaking of embarrassment, I'm semi-ashamed to admit that I've started following the re-made Battlestar Galactica. Not as ashamed as if it led me to watch the original again, or if I'd used this space to write STARBUCK IS A MAN (shit!). It's not as great as a lot of its boosters claim - the writing is frequently melodramatic and many of the characters are about as deep as a puddle - but it's well set-up to explore some reasonably weighty issues: what it means to be human, the moral limits of self-defence, that sort of thing. This is in stark contrast to the late-70's version, which seemed focused on using up mass quantities of excess gold lamé - like the sewage system, a valuable service but not fun to watch in action.

I probably haven't mentioned how much I've come to adore The Walrus magazine, which is a big oversight. I've got about 2/3rds of their issues so far (it started in '04) and it's been good to see it develop. It would have been pretty easy to call it the poor man's Harper's for the first year or so, but two things have conspired to fix that. First, obviously, the magazine is starting to find its focus, and is attracting better and bigger articles and writers. Secondly, and maybe this is just me losing interest, but Harper's has taken a steep decline in quality - perhaps since the takeover of new editor Roger D. Hodge (never trust a man with alliterative names) - but maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention. I don't remember the last issue I was excited about, in contrast to the latest Walrus, which is chock full of goodness. (The other thing I've come to love from them is the cover art - the recent Bruce Mau-designed cover was just one highlight of their steady rise from 'like a cover of The Atlantic, only with Trudeau' to 'can I get this framed?')

*Kidman will, it turns out, appear in the upcoming Golden Compass, which I do desperately want to see, and also will be in The Invasion with Daniel Craig later this year. Bright will be in Juno, which I'd never heard of until this evening, but it's loaded with Crammit Hall favourites: Michael Cera and Jason Bateman, Rainn Wilson, and Allison Janney. And Juno, whew, is Jason Reitman's follow-up to Thank You For Smoking. Damn!

Oh yeah: some good things happening in the real world, apart from baseball season:
Kelp Records will be having a bunch of events at various locations (Sounds Unlikely, the Carleton Tavern, the Navy Club) the weekend of April 27th, with their excellent line-up of bands (The Flaps, the Acorn, Andrew Vincent & the Pirates, Greenfield Main, Rhume, Camp Radio, etc) and the ever-more elusive Two-Minute Miracles. Several of these events are free.
Acid Mothers Temple play Babylon on April 30th. Sure, it's a Monday, but how often do you get to see Japanese psych-noise bands? Not enough, that's for sure.
And the Wilderness Club will play in Toronto, finally, on May 19th, at Mitzi's Sister on Queen West. Then we will take a lengthy rest while various members buy houses, visit Norway, and write songs.

How I wasted March

2007-04-09T09:27:00.000-04:00

Back in 1985 or so, P.J.O'Rourke had a piece in Rolling Stone called "Trite Lights, Pig City", that followed his meanderings around various hot New York clubs. I'm not sure exactly why a) I owned an issue of Rolling Stone, or b) I remembered it so clearly; in any case, it was in my mind as I was reading Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City last week.

The O'Rourke story was mostly about the sort of scene I'd assumed was described in lurid detail in the novel - he and two friends go bar hopping over a few nights of increasingly exclusivity, until they reach a place with exactly six other people (none interesting, most from New Jersey). They end up escaping to a tavern and declaring the entire scene dead. It's an entertaining piece, given O'Rourke's average - I'd call him the funniest right-winger I've read, if I'd read another right-winger who was funny.

The novel does have a fair amount of boozing, cocaine abuse and so on; it's mostly about a young would-be-writer hitting bottom following a nasty breakup. But other than a passing picture of NYC in the early 80's, in the start of the recovery from its own collapse in the 70's, it's not a terribly exciting read. (Part of that is because of the degree to which the book has been borrowed from since, by writers like Irvine Welsh and David Gates, and in any number of films about the young and ambitious in New York. For example, The Last Days of Disco.)

Which leads me to: we saw Whit Stilman's debut feature, Metropolitan the weekend before last (and have Last Days of Disco taped and waiting for us). I'd wanted to see this for some time, since it'd had good reviews at the time, and LDoD was a film I'd enjoyed (despite the presence of Cloë Sevigny). It's pretty good, too; the performances are weird, either stilted or theatrical, and the dialogue is very mannered, appropriately for a film that references Jane Austin so often. It follows a young man who almost accidentally falls in with a group of his former classmates, and his weirdly sudden adoption of and by this upper-crust clique. He's a weird guy, the protagonist - initially proclaiming himself a socialist and morally (morally!) opposed to elaborate social outings, and spouting strong opinions on books he unapologetically admits he's never read (quiet, you). Within the space of a week (the film takes place over the Christmas holidays "not so long ago"), our hero has become dependent on his newfound group for entertainment and taken the most outspoken elitist among them as his mentor. It's worth a warning that the last 20-30 minutes are just painful, but there's a passable conclusion to the story in the last few minutes.

Strangely enough, Stilman has only made three features so far (the two mentioned and Barcelona; according to a year-old interview, he's working on something "soon"), which are related through a number of characters, and (the two I've seen, at least) deal with social decay among awful rich kids. Honestly, his films should be torture - his characters are largely unsympathetic to start and usually get worse with time - but he's got a way with dialogue that makes it easy to overlook their self-important declarations. I wouldn't say he's a brilliant filmmaker, but he's worth watching.

I caught another nebbishy film after calling in sick (ahem) the other day, the in-hindsight overhyped Sideways. I'd loved it at the time, but there's more than a couple of wine-tasting (and -guzzling) montages, several scenes that go on much longer than neccessary, and a soundtrack that is fucking awful. Really, though, the film sums itself up very early on with an amazing exchange, ostensibly about wine, between Paul Giamatta and Virginia Madsden:

PG: "...[I]t's a hard grape to grow, as you know...It's uh, it's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and uh, thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention...And in fact it can only grow in these really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world. And, and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Then, I mean, oh its flavors, they're just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and... ancient on the planet."
...
VM: "No, I- I like to think about the life of wine. How it's a living thing. I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing; how the sun was shining; if it rained. I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes. And if it's an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I'd opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it's constantly evolving and gaining complexity. That is, until it peaks, like your '61. And then it begins its steady, inevitable decline."

The scene takes place less than half-way through the film, but nearly everything else in Sideways is like an aside to it. Okay, that, and then the final 15 minutes or so, when Giamatta drinks his '61 Cheval Blanc in a fast food joint while noshing on fried chicken. I like to think that as long as I'm not doing that, things in my life can't be all that bad.

We're also now working through the first season-and-a-half of NewsRadio. What's most surprising is how quickly the show finds its footing; after two middling episodes (including the pilot) it feels lived-in and relaxed in a way that very few programs do. The characters have their stock elements, but even Phil Hartman's Bill McNeill (presumably modelled on The Mary Tyler Moore Show's Ted Knight) has a level of un-self-conscious weirdness and such an utter lack of likeability that it's difficult to imagine his existence on a pre-Seinfeld television landscape. The show didn't go for depth, complexity or even particularly highbrow humour, but it wasn't dumb and it recognized that its audience wasn't either. We're not going to follow it into its Jon Lovitz-fed decline, but for 4 seasons at least it's a damn fine laugh.

Shows coming up? My word yes. The Wilderness Club plays Irene's on the 13th, with the Jupiter Ray Project, and I think that's actually our last show for a while, as we've some record stuff to get cracking on (and some new damn songs to write, Casey*). The 14th and 21st of April are crazy - Jim Bryson at the Black Sheep, Do Make Say Think at Barrymore's and the intriguing-but-I-haven't-heard-yet Jetplanes of Abraham at Zaphod's on the former, and Muffler Crunch w/ Mississippi Grover at Irene's and the Wooden Stars w/ Tusks at Babylon on the latter. The 27th of April brings Pawa Up First to the Black Sheep - we saw them a couple of years ago and were both impressed by their krautrock-esque stylings - and we're horrified to see that the opening act are the inexplicably lauded My Dad vs. Yours, who are just awful.

*I'm fired, aren't I?

Spring and stress

2007-03-14T20:59:00.000-04:00

The snow's melting and the big project at work's wrapping up, so finally I'm able to squeeze a few words out again.

First off: I can't remember if I'd posted this up last time, but there's a new-ish High Hat up, and as always it's a tremendous read (I'm particularly partial to Matt Rossi's ode to Providence, RI, myself, but as always, there's plenty to enjoy).

we, by which I mean I, have been pretty slack about getting through my zip disks the last couple of months. Akira Kurosawa's 1980 samurai epic Kagemusha sat, partially watched and radiating waves of guilt, from late December until about two weeks ago (it's probably an enjoyable movie if you're in the mood for 3 hours' worth of court intrigue, marching, and battle sequences where the action takes place mostly off-camera. I'm pretty sure I've never been in that mood, but who knows.) We also made it part way through Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend The Knee before Jess bailed (no jerk-off motion this time, though); personally, I didn't like it as much as any of his other films I've seen (Saddest Music in the World, Careful, and the short Sombra dolorosa which appeared on a DVD that came with an issue of The Believer.)

The Squid and The Whale was a film I'd heard a great many good things about, although I think I must have missed or blocked out the description of how staggeringly painful it is. Written & directed by Noah Baumbach, a Wes Anderson collaborator (a writer for The Life Aquatic), it follows the separation of a married couple, played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney; it shares something of the look of The Royal Tennenbaums (the large house on a leafy street in Brooklyn, the rumpled collegiate way everyone dresses, the tennis), but in tone the films couldn't be much farther apart. From the opening scene, where the family (the couple has two boys, 16 and 12) play quite possibly the most passive-aggressive game of tennis in the history of sport, there is so much selfish loathesomeness on display it's a wonder the movie isn't harder to watch. And yet the story is greatly compelling, and the characters - while not the kind of people we might want to hang out with - are difficult not to hope for. It also impressed me a great deal that Jeff Daniels, who I've always considered to be a bland, generic nice-guy kind of actor, is able to pull off being so incredibly unlikeable (by the third time he says "Don't be difficult" I was ready to knee-cap the guy.)

Things you can learn from our experience about this movie: it's not a good hangover film. I'm sure you could figure that out yourselves, but, just in case.

I also watched Sud Pralad (aka, Tropical Malady), a surrealistic Thai film from a couple of years back that I'd heard good things about. It's certainly a beautiful thing - the first half just glows as it follows the love between a soldier and a country youth (and considering that the two men don't so much as kiss, the passion between them comes through pretty clearly); they travel around a bit, they listen to music, and then the youth wanders off into the forest. And almost exactly half-way through, the film changes gears, and now the young man has possibly become a tiger. The second half has narration but almost no dialogue (I believe the character with the most lines in the second hour is a monkey). It's a perplexing film, but it's unpretentious, rewarding and sweet, and I hope it - or Apichatpong Weerasethakul's next feature, Sang sattawat (Syndromes and a Century) - gets wider attention.

It's not just been the, ah, esoteric selection of films that have been keeping us from getting our money's worth out of zip recently; we've also sprung for digital cable, so we're more distracted than ever now. I should point out that the process of switching to digital was just about the most confusing and poorly-explained bureaucratic clusterfuck I've ever had to deal with (well, Jess actually dealt with it for the most part, bless her heart), and that given the choice, I'd never deal with Rogers again. But, alas, with the alternative being Bell, we're stuck with Uncle Ted.

Anyway, one of the better channels we've got now is the CBC/NFB Documentary Channel; although I missed Jandek on Corwood last weekend (I was busy painting my teeth), last night they showed loudQUIETloud, which followed the Pixies reunion tour of 2004. As much as I loved the Pixies (and it's quite a bit), the film was just depressing - the years have not been kind to them, and while the concert footage made the shows looked like more fun than the one I saw in 1991 ('92?) in Toronto - when they clearly hated being anywhere near each other - it still seemed very lacking. Sigh.

~

There's also been a fair amount of music acquisition here, too. I'm a little disappointed with Ohbijou's Swift Feet for Troubled Times - I'd heard very good things about the band (including that they'd played as Mike Feuerstack's backing band at some Snailhouse shows in Toronto), and while they're clearly good arrangers, the songs didn't grab me, and at times...oh, sometimes indie rock just sticks in my craw really, really badly. I know, I love it most of the time (I've got a fucking Henry's Dress 10" single, and more than one Cub single), but my tolerance for preciousness just isn't what it used to be. (Hence, I'm not as smitten with the seemingly infinite number of Of Montreal songs I've gotten off eMusic in the last few months.)

Lily Allen's Alright, Still has been my favourite of late, and I'm a little embarrassed about that. It's terrific, don't get me wrong - frequently hilarious, catchy and upbeat. But, like when I first got into the Magnetic Fields (ca. Holiday), this is the anti-soundtrack to my life. Seriously, what could be less me than dancey songs about life in London, from the perspective of a devilishly smart, 20-ish clubby girl? Incidentally, if you've only heard the single ("Smile"), I'd recommend giving the rest a listen before you judge (particularly "LDN", "Everything's Just Wonderful" and "Alfie").

The new Arcade Fire album...well, my view of the band is biased and I'm really, really happy for their success. And I do like the new record, quite a bit more than Funeral - they spent their recording budget wisely, bringing their sound up to the level of their ambitions. But my problems with their songwriting haven't gone away: a lot of Win's lyrics are just rubbish, and a lot of their songs are decent, simple tunes with over-elaborate window dressing. Still, it's an enjoyable record, and I would recommend it even to people who didn't like the first one.

Wincing the Night Away, the latest Shins release, is also an improvement over their last (Chutes Too Narrow), but I don't feel the need to qualify my praise so much here. Again, the production budget clearly has gone up somewhat, but the main improvement is simply that they're written better songs here. Their sound is still very much in the 80's 'college rock' mould - any one of the Shins' records wouldn't sound out of place in the Frontier, Homestead or DB records catalogue - but this one's a lot softer, which, old crank I am, sits well on these ears.

Oh, and there's the new Low record, Drums and Guns. It's weird. Lots of drum machines, loops and samples. I'm pretty sure I like (most of) it, but it takes some getting used to.

~

Other than that, we're doing okay. Jobs are good, the wine rack is full, and we have things pencilled on our calendar as far away as September. It's finally warm enough that we're opening the windows, and eyeing the balcony as a place to enjoy again; and I've got to say that having daylight savings time this early in the year is disorienting. It's supposed to be warm out when you spring forward, damn it. It's also supposed to feel completely overdue when it happens, not something that sneaks up on you. (Speaking of sneaking up, 37 is an age to put a fellow on edge. It's not one of those years you'd expect to make you feel ancient, but there's something about the sound of the numbers that makes it seem like it might as well be 45.)

And a correction: the Wilderness Club will be playing Babylon on the 23rd, not the 30th. We're also playing sometime in April, I think, and there's rumours we'll be playing Toronto in May. Fingers (mine at least) are crossed.

K-Tel

2007-02-04T11:48:00.000-05:00

First off: Yes, if you have a mixtape I gave you, please, email the tracklist or post it in the comments; I'm sure some of them will be embarrassing (I think there's an OMD song on one of the tapes I made for Cara) but isn't that the whole point of this? Cringing?

Second: The only 70-second long song I have is by Howe Gelb, and I suspect it's more likely to make you feel like having a little lie down than any sort of invincibility. Better places to look: Napalm Death, Converge, or Agoraphobic Nosebleed (although for them, 70 seconds would be an epic - even 17 seconds is a little on the long side).

We were out shopping today, for curtain material (didn't get any), records at the fabulous new record store, Sounds Unlikely (5 Arlington St. - spent over $150 without really trying) and clothes at the Village des Valeur in Gatineau (a $20 3-piece suit for me, a $4 cashmere sweater for Jess). There was also a brief foray into the record section, where I found a K-Tel compilation from 1983 (Hit Express or something like that), but I didn't get it.

Here's the thing: K-Tel Records' compilations slavishly followed the top 40 of the day, and so when, in the late 70's and early 80's commercial radio became rigidly formatted, the top 40 became utterly bland. Here's a simple comparison, between the first sides of 1972's 22 Explosive Hits, 1977's Right On and 1982's Radio Active (all three of which we own.)

22 Explosive Hits
The Candy Man – Sammy Davis, Jr.
Nice To Be With You – Gallery
A Simple Man – Lobo
Don’t Pull Your Love – Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds
Layla – Derek & The Dominoes
Guilty – Al Green
Vaya Con Dios – Dawn
If Not For You – Olivia Newton-John
Wild Eyes – Stampeders
Day By Day – Godspell
Popcorn – Hot Butter

So, there's at least one really great song here (I meant the Al Green, by the way), and some schlock (Sammy Davis Jr), a weird novelty hit ("Popcorn") and pre-Grease Olivia Newton-John covering Bob fucking Dylan. (If you haven't heard Olivia's early work, particularly "I Honestly Love You", consider yourself lucky. Dan Hill's "Sometimes When We Touch" is only marginally more treacly.) But the sounds are all over the map: hard rockin' shit sits next to soul and wuss-pop, capped off with quasi-experimental electronica (well, in much the same way that Underworld were "experimental"). It's pretty amazing at how bright and sunny this music is - I mean, all of it. One wonders what depressed teenagers listened to in 1972 (I mean, if they hadn't discovered the Velvet Underground or the Stooges. Rod McKuen?)

Right On
Shake Your Booty – K. C. & The Sunshine Band
I’d Really Love To See You Tonight – England Dan & John Ford Coley
You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine – Lou Rawls
Strange Magic – Electric Light Orchestra
Getaway – Earth, Wind & Fire
The Cisco Kid – War
I Got To Know – Starbuck
Take It Or Leave It – Moxy
Magic Man – Heart
The Best Disco In Town – Ritchie Family

Again, a little bit of everything (although no novelty hits this time - side two does include the theme song from "The Young & the Restless", which apparently charted*). Two flat-out disco songs, two wussy pop-rock numbers, two hard rock songs and slow, groovy one suitable for stoners or people who drive enormous cars very slowly (uh, that's the one by War. They also did "Low Rider".) There's also Lou Rawls, filling in for Barry White as the make-out song singer, and Earth, Wind & Fire's overly slick funk (side two features the Ohio Players, who are much better). The mood is a little less pollyana-ish (nobody's talking about any fucking Candy Man) but it's still largely fun. I don't suppose I need to point out that there's not a hint on this record of the existence of punk rock.

*mind you, so did a prog-rock version of "The Lord's Prayer", so you see how fucked-up the seventies must have been.

Radio Active
Who's Crying Now - Journey
Take it on the Run - REO Speedwagon
Morning Train (Nine to Five) - Sheena Easton
Don't Want to Wait Anymore - Tubes
Falling in Love Again - Michael Stanley Band
Feels So Right - Alabama
I've Done Everything for You - Rick Springfield
Private Eyes - Hall & Oates

Everyone who thinks 80's nights are fun: you suck. The first two songs here are enough to indict the entire fucking decade; it's hard to imagine music less enjoyable. Sheena Easton's saccarine pop, sort of a low-rent Sandy Denny/Petula Clark thing, seems weirdly appropriate for an age whose best songs all seemed to be about bored office workers. Well, except that it's cynically free of angst or depth. Nevermind. Tubes sound just like Foreigner or Journey or Toto, and the Michael Stanley Band somehow manage to have less personality than that. So far, we've heard 5 songs and exactly one production style. There's the odd hint in Alabama's gluey ballad that they used to be a country band, but it's not like it makes the song any more distintive. I'm slightly amazed that the closest thing to an acknowledgement of New Wave comes from Rick Springfield - considering, for one thing, that he'd been on the charts for 10 years at this point (his "Speak to the Sky" appears on 1972's Believe in Music, another K-Tel comp we've got). Which makes his teen idol status in the early 80's more than a little creepy. But lo and behold, he's got the best, most distinctive and only listenable song on the whole side. And Hall & Oates wrap things up with their mindless, Gary-Numan-esque ode to stalking.

There are a couple of things worth noting about this collection as a whole: for one thing, it's remarkably uniform. Not just stylistically - most of the songs do fall into that same non-genre, the not-rocking rock song - but also sonically. The drums all sound basically the same, the vocals are mixed at the same spot, there's compression up the fucking wazoo. But also, it's very very white. Every 70's collection had as much funk and soul as rock; the closest Radio Active gets is Blondie's "Rapture" (there is a song by the Police on side 2 as well, but it's not one of the ones that's reggae-ish.)

Somewhere at the end of the 70's, there clearly was a major cultural shift, and it's tough for someone like me (born in '70) to figure out from here where it started. I'd love to pin it on the election of Ronald Reagan, or maybe the release of The Big Chill - but it just seems that somewhere between 1978 and 1981 North America got collectively freaked out by disco and decided that it was time to start being more uptight about everything. I suppose that this must also have been a time when radio program directors started clamping down on their dj's - the Andy Travis effect, perhaps - and ensured that nothing weird or off-style made it on air.

Come to think of it, the economy's lack of growth for several years probably caught up with a lot more people as the decade went on, and when times are tight, people don't feel so liberal about, say, music, or dress, or behaviour (there was serious talk of marijuana decriminalization on both sides of the border in the late 70's, but that turned into "just say no" and the War on Drugs soon enough...)

Next week: who sucks more, The Eagles or Billy Joel?

90 minutes, high bias, tabs in.

2007-01-18T12:49:00.000-05:00

I've been reading this book that Jen gave me, Mix Tape, which has little essays and quips about the cassettes they've given or received, from various musicians, writers, filmmakers, and so on, as well as a lot of cassette covers (and some actual cassettes). It's a heartwarming little book, particularly for an inveterate mix-tape-maker like myself. [It turns out there's a new memoir by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield called Love is a Mix-Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, which I now must buy]. I haven't made one for anybody in a long while - I think the last one was in '99 for woman in Toronto named Beth, and I missed my opportunity to include the song "Charles" by Scrawl (which is a distaff version of the Kiss song that has, I'm sure, plagued the life of every woman with that name since) but she did say "thanks for the crazy devil-music", and didn't immediately lose interest in me. (I'm not sure what the 'devil-music' in question was. I only remember two songs from the tape, Cornershop's "My Dancing Days Are Done" and Wilco's "Via Chicago", neither of which strike me as particularly good woo-ing songs.)

The first tapes I made for a girl were for one Carla Slover, back in tenth grade. I don't remember how it came about, since we weren't friends and I didn't have a crush on her or anything. I think what happened was, she asked to borrow a tape that my brother had made me, and she hated all of it (particularly Jonathan Richman, and in my books if you hate Jonathan Richman you are a bad person) except for Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels' "Devil With A Blue Dress". So she asked me to make a tape with stuff like that on it, and I promptly made her a tape with the things I liked, which at the time included Tom Waits' "Frank's Wild Years", a song that I included on just about every mix I made until my brother moved out and took his copy of Swordfishtrombones with him. She hated it, although I recall her asking for another one. I never really talked with her after that year, so I don't know if she kept the tapes or even listened to them much.

Generally, I've only gotten mix-tapes of the "here, you need this music" variety (quite distinct from the love-letter tape, aka "the good kind"); most of them came from my brother (and about half of them included "Shake Some Action" by the Flaming Groovies). Jen gave me a tape once with Perry & Kingsley's The In Sound From Way Out, a Boss Hogg EP and some assorted tracks (including the Hawaiian Pups) which I've since lost (or maybe it broke?); and my newly re-found friend George sent me a tape of Game Theory's Big Shot Chronicles, rounded out with most of Mo Tucker's solo recordings (I'm pretty sure I've lost that too.) The one exception was the break-up tape that Meredith made for me, which was pretty good, but which I smashed into many, many pieces and left strewn around her vacated room. I don't regret smashing the tape; I deeply regret not taking a picture of the room. Even she said that it looked really cool.

I used to keep lists of the tapes I made, for a few years in the mid-nineties, but I appear to have thrown them out*. It kept me from repeating myself, and allowed me to keep track of curious little patterns that emerged. For example: nearly every tape had 13 songs per side. It didn't matter if I started off with a ten-minute Brian Eno track ("Fullness of Wind", from Discreet Music, on a tape I made for Ao) or if I tried to include only two-minute punk songs, at forty-five minutes a side, it always added up to 13 songs (as it turns out, 45 divided by 13 is 3.46, as close to the perfect pop-song length as doesn't make a difference.)

I've always felt that there's a definite pattern that a mix should have (with examples included)

• An intro song (ideally it should be song one, side one of the record it's on, and should take a long time getting started (eg., "Exercise One", by Joy Division)
• Five or six tracks of up-tempo, bouncy songs. You can change styles of music here, but try not to bounce around too much. And if you're going to include songs that say "baby I'm a-want you", this is the place to put them. Personally, I never felt they were all that good an idea.
• A longer, slightly slower song, followed something short and weird ("Tokyo Storm Warning" by Elvis Costello, then "I Just Wanna See His Face", by the Rolling Stones)
• the tail end of side one, which should be down-beat but not specifically slow; something with a long coda works nicely ("23 Beats Off", by Fugazi) You may also wish to include a short (< 2 min.) song to fill up that last little bit of tape; fast songs are good here. Resist the urge to put in something by They Might Be Giants.
• Song one, side two, should be short, wistful and winsome, and have no drums. The best song one, side two song ever written is "Sunday" by Helium; "Fill Your Heart" by David Bowie works nicely as well. The worst? I once included selections from Nurse With Wound's Gyllenskold/Brained in this position, on a mix for Marcia. I have no idea what I was thinking.
• The next few songs should be album tracks, not singles - longer, more serious - and if you're planning to include things you're not sure your listener will like (but you're hoping to convert them) put 'em here. Avoid getting maudlin - it's easy (for me, at least) to turn side two into a mope-rock vortex that can't be broken out of.
• Once you reach the mid-point on side two, things should start building up - either louder, or faster, or both (I like to put Chavez or Eleventh Dream Day around here; similarly, late-period Superchunk, eg. "Here's Where The Strings Come In" works well)
• There should be something of a conclusion to the second side, a longer powerhouse of a track followed by a shorter denuement. For a good sense of what I mean, think of the end of side two of Abbey Road.

In High Fidelity, Nick Hornby suggested a whole lot of rules exist for mix-tapes, but there's only one I hold to, which is only one song by an artist per tape (unless your tape is all pairs of songs.) For me, the guiding principle was always the flow of the thing, and I never understood people who planned out exactly what was going to go on their tapes ahead of time; the next song was always suggested by the last few seconds of the one I was recording.

Despite all the user-friendly interfaces, this is harder to do with a computer playlist, and in particular the shuffle function on iTunes has made me a lazy, lazy man. It doesn't produce good mixes, at least not often, and since it can run all day without attention, makes it easier to disengage from the music. When I switched over to making mixed cd's (sometime around 2001), I found it difficult to cope with the lack of a side two, and the quasi-narrative structure that provides. I've tried to approximate that by including a track that breaks the flow (on the first mix-cd I made for Jess, it was an Empress song that she hated, and skips every time) followed by a 'song one, side two' song (in that case, "What Good Is Love" by Mark Eitzel). I don't think it works all that well, and now that we're moving past the mercifully brief mix-cd era, I don't feel all that strong an urge to come up with an approach for a longer, single-sided set.

And charmless as the playlist can be - which is to say, entirely - it does still present the opportunity to offer up a snapshot of yourself; rather than the posed, intentional image you give with the mix-tape, a few shuffled tracks from one's library (see the Onion AV Club's Random Rules) is, well, like letting someone hear the things you left off the mix.

There was an asinine Rogers commercial running recently, in which a girl tries to woo a guy with a cellphone and a thousand songs. First off, a thousand songs isn't a love letter, it's a tiresome book. [Currently, my iTunes has 864 songs, with a total playing time of two and a half days.] What's more, she's shown getting songs from the guy's friends - which defeats the whole purpose of the mix, since it's supposed to be personal, not just a lot of songs. Of course, it's just a commercial, and I doubt that love-struck boys and girls are handing each other gigantic collections of songs they had help putting together as tokens of affection, but you never know; kids do miss the point a lot of the time (see: 80's night. Better yet, don't.) Still, I wonder if there will be an analogous symbol of hip love years from now, that the teenagers of today will look back on with half-embarrassed smiles.

*if I've made a mix-tape for anyone reading this, and you've still got it/them, I'd love to see even a partial track listing, 'cause I'm just that kind of vain.

Catching up with last year.

2007-01-17T23:50:00.000-05:00

I've already now caught three of my most-wanted-to-see films of '06 this month, Stranger Than Fiction, Borat and Children of Men. There's also a bunch of new records I've acquired, some of which appeared on a great many best-of lists, although only one that'd fit on mine...

Stranger than Fiction has the moderately clever premise that a man (Will Ferrell, here showing that he can turn his intensity down almost far enough) in the real world begins to hear the voice of a narrator, who, it turns out, is the writer of a book in which he is the protagonist. It's handled lightly, and with more attention paid to the romantic subplot - like Nora Ephron adapting an Italo Calvino story - so you get the feeling something intellectually interesting could have been done with it in abler hands. Oh, and Ferrell sings "Whole Wide World" late in the film, and it's hard not to love him for it.

Borat...well, Borat was very funny, particularly in the parts that weren't in the trailer. But that's the problem: I wouldn't watch this a second time, because a great deal of the character's hilarity comes from not knowing how far he will push his unwitting subjects. On the plus side, I think it's pretty safe to imagine that Cohen is now done with the character of Borat, and is free to just be regular funny.

Finally, Children of Men is just incredible. I'm actually having a hard time thinking of a better science-fiction film, one that actually lives up to the quality of sf writing. There's not a lot of time-wasting exposition or credulity-straining explanation of why people around the world became infertile in the late 00's or how society became so completely shredded. We're simply thrown into it, and follow the story of this guy (Clive Owen, whose acting here is just jaw-dropping) attempting to smuggle a mysteriously pregnant woman out of totalitarian England. As a warning, it's quite incredibly violent, starting very shortly into the opening scene, and interrupted by a number of very tranquil, even happy scenes, which is probably why it's not easy to inure yourself to the bloodshed.

~

We did check out a few movies on disc recently as well - Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, which Jess did not hate nearly as much as Last Days (and so has agreed to give Drugstore Cowboy a chance) and Closer, which was surprising in a couple of ways: Julia Roberts wasn't bad, and who knew Natalie Portman could act? No-one whose sole exposure to her had been those Star Wars atrocities, I'd bet.

And lord, gobs of music: if you haven't heard Jenny Lewis' Rabbit Fur Coat, damn, you are missing out. Ditto her (ex?) band Rilo Kiley's More Adventurous. I also found another Ryoji Ikeda album, Matrix - like the other of his I've got, +/-, it's based on the interplay of sounds between the speakers (for this one, the sound of the record changes as you walk around the room or tilt your head.) If you're not looking for something quite so out, I'm also fairly happy with Gruff Rhys' Candylion; it's not very different from recent Super Furry Animals albums, so if they're your bag...um...there you are. Similarly: Built to Spill's You In Reverse, which is very much like some of their last record mixed with some of the one before that. Less impressed: Broken Social Scene's self-titled record (as Richard said, it sounds like two records playing at once*); Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped (which I'm sad to say is the best thing I've heard them do in about a decade, but still is only middling); and Band of Horses, who get raves from Pitchfork, which shows that perhaps I'm on to something when I take their good ratings as red flags. Yechh, they're boring.

In other, things...um, not much. It's a couple of weeks old now, but you (especially if you are Kira-Lynn) should read Phil Nugent's article Helen Hill and the Death of New Orleans, which is excellent, and more than a little heartbreaking. There are a few good shows coming up (Priestess on the 18th; my bandmate Marie-Josee on the 19th, the Essex Green on the 30th, Ghislain Poirier & Vitaminsforyou on the 1st of February, and Slayer in there somewhere too); I'm hoping to actually leave the house a little more often this year, rather than my play-more-shows-than-watch plan from last year (which was not fun.) Oh, and speaking of which: the Centretown Wilderness Club will be headlining at Babylon on the 30th of March. We will have new songs, in case you're wondering.

*My iTunes went all screwy the other day, as I was listening to Amon Amarth's With Odin on Our Side, and it started playing two tracks at once. And what do you know, it sounded terrific. I'm not suggesting you go buy two copies of it to try out at home, but...

Listy, listy.

2006-12-23T11:28:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm pretty sure I've bought all the records and seen most of the films I'm going to this year. So I might as well put 'em all in pointless, annotated lists.

5 Albums:

Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
I had been lukewarm on this when I first heard it, but mercy me, it's spectacular. Easily her best work, and trounces everything else I heard this year.

Bobby Bare Jr. - The Longest Meow
This is what Paul Westerberg's solo career should have sounded like. Hell, this is what the Replacements (post-Bob) should have sounded like.

Nina Nastasia - On Leaving
Califone - Roots & Crowns
Centro-Matic - Fort Recovery
Sure, it's kind of plain late-90's guitar alt-rock - not unlike the Grifters, or Girls Can Tell-era Spoon - but goddamn, I still really like that sound.

5 Excellent Songs:

Comets on Fire, "Lucifer's Memory"
The Mountain Goats, "Woke up New"
Grizzly Bear, "Marla"
Cat Power, "The Moon"
Malajube, "Montreal -40" (What? They can't all be depressing)

5 Disappointing Records:

Amy Millan, Honey From the Tombs
When I heard Ms. Millan was doing a solo record of country music, I was sort of hoping it'd be a big-arrangement, countrypolitan thing. Alas, it's an attempt to be 'rootsy', and her voice isn't suited for that. And, alas again, the songs are fucking boring.

Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid of You And I Will Beat Your Ass
When this record is on - which about a third of it is - it's very good, and given that it's their eleventh record (not counting compilations), the fact that it's not immediately dismissable is pretty impressive. But it's badly in need of an editor.

TV On the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain
I think, if I hadn't expected so much more out of this record, I'd be pretty impressed with it; damn you, critics!

The Mountain Goats, Get Lonely
The Sunset Tree was going to be a tough act to follow; adding on to that, the fact that the strongest song on the album ("Woke Up New") was released some months before the record on a Pitchfork/eMusic free MP3 comp, so I probably should have lowered my hopes accordingly. It's not a bad record, again, just...I wish it could have been a little more.

5 Films:

The Science of Sleep
Tristram Shandy
Little Miss Sunshine
Thank You for Smoking
Casino Royale

In case you're wondering, no, I didn't see a lot of current movies this year. Hey:

5 I Missed, And In So Doing Made An Error I Must Correct With All Haste:

Bon Cop, Bad Cop
Borat
The Fountain
Stranger Than Fiction
When The Levees Broke

~ ~

So, in case you weren't aware, we're having an informal, drop-by Christmas day brunch here, which will run from whenever we're up and have picked up the bagels (probably 11ish) into the afternoon. Mimosas and Caesars will be served.

Couldn't have said it better myself

2006-11-28T19:03:00.000-05:00

Quote from Ken Dryden on the 'Nation' resolution:

"This feels wrong because it doesn't feel as serious as it must be.

It feels like games - bad, manipulative, opportunistic games. Political games. Box somebody into a corner so they say or do something they don't want to say or do just to get out of the corner. Just to save face. For them to box the other guy into saying and doing the same. So we all save face, and all get into a bigger box - a bigger box called "the future." Except that box is somebody else's.

And all of these games, these manipulations aren't really about now. They are about creating the slippery slope for later."

For the next couple of days, at least, you can sign a petition against it. (from Winky)

Drink and rock, a dull film, and four new records.

2006-11-27T23:16:00.000-05:00

November, as Morrissey said, spawned a monster, and I call this monster Sobrietor. Yep, we've been off the sauce for the past month, in an ill-fated attempt to save money and maybe cut some calories (which might have worked better if we hadn't replaced wine with snacks) We're looking forward to a sensible, mature reacquaintance with a bottle of red wine (probably a Shiraz) with dinner on Friday, and probably a dram of that $100 scotch (18 year-old Caol Ila) I bought in a moment of weakness. So yeah, if we've seemed like the boring old fogies recently, it's almost over, and, finally, we should start stumbling out into the world again.

December 2nd, in particular, is a night crowded with excellent options, and we're thinking we might take in different parts of it - there's Evil Farm Children, Four'n Giv'r, and Mississippi Grover (who I completely forgot to see on the 22nd, like a jerk) at Irene's, the Acorn's CD release with Ohbijou at Babylon, and the Hilotrons with Animal Collective's Avey Tare and Múm's Kria Brekken at Maverick's.

The last of these gets my immediate vote - I've never not enjoyed the Hilotrons, and both Animal Collective and Múm are bands I've liked in a half-hearted way, the sort of fence-sitting like that usually gets cured either way by a live show. There's also the consideration that there's next to no chance that either group will be passing this way again anytime soon, if ever. But it's going to come down to how much I feel like watching what could be a desperately precious bit of freak-folk. I went as twee as I can stomach in the 90's, and I'm not going back now. I hope. Oh, and then there's the fact that I really, deeply hate going to shows at Maverick's*.

Ohbijou interest me primarily because I'd heard they're a sometimes-backing band for Snailhouse (still one of my favourite musicians and songwriters), but I haven't looked them up online or anything, so have no idea what to expect (which is, for me, enticing). The Acorn, on the other hand, I've seen a couple of times recently, and while I really, really like them, it's not like they won't be playing more shows here soon.

And the Four'n Giv'r et al show would be good for the rawk, which I've been neglecting, I'm afraid (Jess is certainly going to this one, if you're wondering.) Prime example: we skipped the Muffler Crunch/Blackball show at the Dominion this past weekend, which (I'm told by my bandmates) completely kicked ass. But see, this is where Sobrietor bears his fangs: it'd be just wrong to go to the Dominion and not have a pint. And doubly so when there's a band.

~

We haven't been dipping into movies so much recently, partly because of an on-going Alias obsession - having finished season 2, I can confirm that Lena Olin is still spectacularly hot, particularly while brandishing an automatic weapon - and partly because The Last Picture Show is a daunting thing to tackle. Sure, it's got a young, lithe Cybill Sheppard, and it's in black and white, and it's slow and depressing as all hell and over 2 hours long...huh. Yeah, that's been holding us up.

The thing we did watch, and by "watch" in my case I mean "gave half an hour before stalking off in boredom", was Napoleon Dynamite. The portion of it that I saw seemed like perfunctory button-pushing, aimed squarely at the sort of person who laughs at Wes Anderson films but wishes they weren't so eggheaded. I stand by my suspicion going in that it's not much more than the Sundance Festival version of Revenge of the Nerds✝.

~

That I like the Blood Brothers' Young Machetes surprises me. Although the music is Drive Like Jehu-ish math/spazz (which I dig), the singer's voice(s?) should drive me up the wall - he's got that bratty-scream/whine that usually makes me reach for the eject, and then the matches. But, for whatever reason, I'm really liking it so far. It's a toss-up, though, whether in ten years it'll be something I listen to sporadically but rarely make through end-to-end (like Soundgarden) or something I bought once, and now wonder what the fuck I was thinking (like Daisy Chainsaw - seriously, was I drunk? Daisy fucking Chainsaw.)

Malajube's 2nd album, Trompe-L'Oeil, is a joy and a half. I'd bitched earlier about that list of 'hot' Canadian bands - well, this is one of the four that struck me as worth investigating, and damn. The group's sound - which I'd call neo-glam, if I felt like inventing genres - is glossy, largely up-beat pop with one foot firmly on the dancefloor, and even when the music gets proggish or downtempo, it doesn't feel unduly sombre or pretentious (quite a feat for a rock record with this much flute.)

Tin Fists, the new Acorn EP, is quite similar to their previous, the excellent Blankets! There's the plucky guitar work, the almost-but-not fractured drumming, and the unobtrusive production flourishes; the songwriting hasn't changed noticeably, although it's nice to hear them do more pop and less of the downer-folk (and on that: the last song, "Maplebees", is a lovely little waltz, pretty and tender without being maudlin.)

Red Sparrowes is an Isis-related band (project?) on Neurot Recordings, who'd been described to me as post-rock, although it's closer to Pelican, or the Texas school of post-rock (Explosions in the Sky, Paul Newman) than Chicago's (Tortoise, The Mercury Program). But like most of the genre, it's hard to get excited about; yes, it works and it holds your attention when neccessary, and this brings the rock a lot more than most, but it's still 8 minute-long noodly guitar instrumentals. Oh, and their new album (Every Red Heart Shines Towards the Red Sun) is a concept record about the Great Leap Forward. Enjoy!

*Don't forget: Casey Comeau & CWC opening for the Kruger Brothers, December 13th at lovely Maverick's! Gritted teeth!

✝Speaking of which, Garden State is on deck. Hi-yoh! No, I'm kidding - we just finished watching it, and it's very cute. Zach Braff is adorable. So is Natalie Portman.

You've got to take the crunchy with the smooth, I suppose

2006-11-15T00:07:00.000-05:00

Well, I guess expecting two elections in a week to go the way I wanted them to was a little unrealistic. At least now, to quote Ottawonk, now we've got our very own Mel Lastman. Does this make us world-class too?

You can, however, cheer yourself up by grooving to the Solid Senders this Friday at Zaphod's, opening for Pas Chic Chic (ex-GY!BE/Fly Pan Am/etc., although you wouldn't guess it to hear 'em). I know I will be (very, very gently) rocking out.

Or you could read the brand-new issue #7 of The High Hat, which this time around is mostly about Robert Altman. There are also excellent articles on The Wire's Jimmy McNulty and the fistfight in Deadwood, as well as an interview with rock-critic/author Joe Carducci.

Politics, music I don't like, and music I do.

2006-11-11T14:21:00.000-05:00

It's probably not a shocking revelation that I'm quite happy about the results of the US mid-term elections. If you read Matt Taibbi's cover story in Rolling Stone's last issue, it's pretty easy to why it's not even about ideology, and more about keeping this particular batch of especially corrupt, lazy and authoritarian Republicans from retaining control of the legislative agenda (and the committees, and the responsibility of overseeing the executive, and...) The departure of Rumsfeld was a nice little bonus, and kudos to defeated Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-Rhode Island) for being an honourable fellow even after he's been shown the door, in opposing the (re-)nomination of loudmouthed asshole John Bolton for UN ambassador.

It also looks like the mayoral election in Ottawa is still all over the place; surveys released in the same week show either Munter ahead of O'Brien or vice versa. Chiarelli doesn't appear to be a likely winner, which is also fine with me (I've got nothing particular against him, but that's hardly enough when there's a perfectly decent alternative). I've also realized that I spoke a little soon on my ward - Ms. Smallman has said that she supports the city's current LRT plan, which I don't care for (and sure, it's selfish of me, but I really don't want my commute time to double, which it will if or when the O-train gets shut down next April. OC Transpo has proposed a replacement bus route, which, to be blunt, they can stick up their asses.)

~

When I was younger, by which I mean the years 1982 to 1985, I was a Doors fan. (Sometimes I flatter myself that I got over them the second I discovered the Clash in late '83, but, sadly, I wasn't that bright a teen.) Since then, I've viewed them with the sort of contempt and loathing ex-smokers have for their old habit, even past the point of fairness. This is a pretty fair (and entertaining) review of their new box set, which compiles their 6 studio albums and some outtakes; I'd agree, grudgingly, with the assessment that they weren't all that bad if you ignore their fans and try to ignore the lead singer.

One thing I've noticed, though, even when I still liked the band, is that every cover of a Doors song is crap (and seriously, I challenge anyone to give an example that's not). And I have two possibly complementary theories as to why this is: 1. They weren't actually very good songwriters, but were excellent musicians, and so it's quite difficult to improve on their performances and arrangements of those songs, and/or 2. Bands that choose to cover the Doors do so primarily because they've got lead singers with Morrison complexes - and so end up picking the worst, most cringe-inducing crud the group produced, rather than, as Mr. Freeman there might have suggested, something from mid-way through Morrison Hotel that's less tied up with the sort of moronic baggage that causes people to hang out in a Paris graveyard when they could be doing something productive, like heroin.

~

Two other bands I liked a great deal as a teenager, and which I didn't so much grow out of as stop following, were REM and U2. The former I gave up on immediately upon the release of Monster, and I haven't bought a single thing of theirs since - I did listen to New Adventures in Hi-Fi a couple of months ago, but it just reinforced the rightness of my decision. U2 lost my interest somewhere between The Joshua Tree and Rattle & Hum (the latter of which I've been told isn't quite so bad, although I doubt that's true.) But for a time (by which I mean roughly 1984 through the spring of '88) both bands were, in very separate ways, tremendously important to me and my still-developing tastes in music. So I was intrigued to read this REM vs. U2 article in Slate, although it's pretty slight, and up until The Joshua Tree hit, U2 were still a pretty obscure group. Not REM-obscure, but more like Smiths-obscure, or Depeche Mode-obscure: the kind of thing a person who looked perfectly normal might listen to, even obsessively, but it'd still be a bit of a surprise. Whereas a normal-appearing person would not have any idea what you were talking about if you asked them about REM, at least up until Document (1987).

What I'm getting at, in a ham-fisted way, is that while I understand the author's putting the two bands' music in opposition to each other, up until I read the article, I didn't think of them as even existing in the same universe - one might as well compare the careers of Van Halen and the Kronos Quartet. But there are parallels - REM's first three records (if you count the EP) were recorded with Mitch Easter (of jangle-pop band Let's Active), before starting a lengthy partnership with Scott Litt, who replaced their softly burbling early sound with radio-friendly rock crunch and a wider spectrum of styles (and perhaps not coincidentally, was at the boards for their crucial late-80's/early 90's career zenith). U2, on the other hand, started out with Steve Lillywhite, whose production style is almost cartoonishly loud and unsubtle, and then moved on to working with Eno and Lanois, who toned everything down (and let's face it, U2 is a group in desperate need of toning down at all times) to great commercial success.

Also: both bands appeared on The Simpsons, although U2 were in a much funnier episode. And isn't that really how success is judged?

Talkin' about other people talkin' about music.

2006-11-04T22:06:00.000-05:00

I've mentioned before that I hadn't been buying a lot of records recently, and it was starting to bother me. Or if I hadn't, I'm sure saying it now. I have taken some steps to rectify this - taking care to check out new stuff on eMusic regularly, stopping by Birdman Sound and listening to some local bands' MySpace pages. I suspect that by the end of the year, I'll probably be able to come up with a semi-respectable top 5 (or even 10) list of records, because we all love a list.

Which drew me to this, the list of the "Hottest Bands in Canada" (2006), as chosen by a bunch of music bloggers (I was lead to it from Dial 6-1-3_). And, okay, so there are some reasonable choices on the list - The Arcade Fire, Junior Boys and Broken Social Scene (#'s 26, 18 and 6, respectively) make sense, and people who get on the cover of Exclaim (Jon-Rae and the River, #13) or sign to big-assed foreign record labels like Sub Pop (Wolf Parade, tied for #9) and Warp (Born Ruffians, #11) are likely to be the groups people are excited about.

But holy crap, am I ever finished with indie rock.

I duly checked out the linked songs from the bands I didn't know on the list, and some of them I can imagine being moderately interesting to see live (Henri Faberge, Jon-Rae & the River) or maybe even worth buying if it's not too expensive (Tokyo Police Club, Malajube). But the overall trends - the wimpiness, the dance-punk aesthetic, the not-good singing - are just perplexing to me. I don't begrudge the youngsters moving on to, well, sounding like parts of 1981 and about a third of 1987, but why bother?

Anyway, I have found some stuff that I'm very happy with, and goodness, some of it is even current. My two main recommendations are Bobby Bare Jr's The Longest Meow and Nina Nastasia's On Leaving. The former lists in the liner notes, "11 songs - 11 people - 11 hours", and indeed it was recorded in half a day, with his usual band plus members of My Morning Jacket (and, IIRC, Lambchop), and it sounds like, and I'm just going to go ahead and be immodest, the Golden Famile on a really good day. Nina Nastasia's new one had me worried, or at least the reviews did - I loved, loved her last two records, particularly Run to Ruin, which veers from gorgeous to terrifying in seconds. So when I read that the new album was a more straightforward folkie affair, and didn't have Dirty Three drummer Jim White, I put off buying it or even giving it a listen. But, it's really good - not Run to Ruin good, but very good nonetheless.

Also picked a copy of Mastodon's Blood Mountain (on vinyl!), and sure, it's not for everyone, but if you're ready to try some prog metal, you probably can't do better than this. I know there's already a bit of a backlash against the tokenization of metal, with Mastodon standing in the role Public Enemy used to hold in hip-hop (ie., that one group that indie-rock-loving critics and fans decided was acceptable to like and include on year-end lists, which allowed them to ignore the rest of the genre with a clear conscience because hey, I said I liked It Takes a Nation of Millions), but goddamn, Blood Mountain is really fucking good - considerably better than Leviathan, their last one.

Imagine if I'd posted this in October, when I wrote it? That would have been pretty cool.

2006-11-04T21:14:00.000-05:00

It turns out that Woody Allen had at least one more good film in him; we finally saw last year's Match Point, and it's a damn sight better than I'd expected it to be. It's not funny, which is weird - even his serious films usually have funny parts - and apart from some patter between two detectives, there's hardly even any displays of wittiness. Scarlett Johanssen is very good, of course, as a struggling actress (Nola) engaged to an old-money scion, Tom; Jonathan Rhys-Davies, as an equally struggling tennis instructor (Chris), finds his way into the family as well - first through a friendship to Tom, and then through marriage to Tom's sister Chloe. Sparks fly from Chris and Nola's first meeting, although their inevitable affair doesn't develop until after she's broken up with Tom, and Chris and Chloe are married. And although he passionately loves (or at least lusts for) the volatile Nola, he's unwilling to leave the financial support of his new in-laws (who have since installed him in a lucrative job and breathtakingly luxurious apartment). Obviously, things aren't going to end well for Nola; but the theme here is spelled out right at the beginning, with the line "I'd rather be lucky than good."

It's not much like any of his other films; there's no Woody stand-in, it's quite long (just over 2 hours), there's a sex scene (a pretty hot one, at that) and nearly everyone is well-adjusted and gentile. The qualities on display here, plus the knowledge that Allen's character plays Johanssen's father, makes me think that Scoop might actually be an enjoyable one. Here's hoping the late 90's were a bad fluke.

There were a few other films in the past couple of weeks - I decided to give another John Woo/Chow Yung-Fat HK-action flick a try, but unfortunately it was Once a Thief, and good lord, it was awful. Sort of what I'd imagine Beverly Hills Cop 3 might be like, which is to say, not funny, and only worth watching while guns were being indiscriminately fired. I gave up on Cold Mountain pretty quickly, myself, although Jess quite enjoyed it; conversely, I loved the shit out of The Winslow Boy while Jess was enraged by the actors' (mostly genuine) British accents and the glacial pace. We did both, to our surprise, find ourselves riveted by Friday Night Lights; for a sports movie, it's quite good. There's no bullshit 'triumph over adversity', nobody learns any dumb lessons about themselves, and it's made very clear that football is the only way these guys are getting out of town (and how vitally important it is for them to do so.) Now, I'm not suggesting it was so good you should start watching the show, but it sure took the edge off a miserable, cold Sunday afternoon.

Up now we've got The Last Picture Show - one of the most depressing things I've ever enjoyed, about a small Kansas town decaying in the 50's - and The Mayor of Sunset Strip, the documentary about Rodney Bingenheimer (DJ, hanger-on, promoter), so it's feel-good time for us Crammits.

~

I've been pretty lame about updating here recently. My weak excuse is that work's been busy, and October's never when I'm at my best; if you're reading this, I probably owe you a reply email, and possibly a couple of bucks. But things are good around here. The fireplace has turned out to be the second-best aspect of this apartment (after the laundry facilities in the kitchen) - frequently, I'm finding the place a little too warm when it's on - and the uptick in busyness at work comes right at the time that a lot of desks are sprouting bowls of 'here, take some' candy.

As for the local elections, things look pretty good; I'd be happiest if Alex Munter won for Mayor (and he's got a pretty healthy lead last time I checked) and especially if he endorsed the Friends of the O-Train LRT plan (which he's publicly ruminated on.) In our ward (Kitchissippi) the three main candidates are all pretty good - Christine Leadman, in particular, has been a longtime arts booster and makes appropriate noises about development in the ward. But, all other things being roughly equal, I'm voting for Vicky Smallman, because I'm told she came to see the Wilderness Club's shows at Irene's.

Oh, which reminds me: We're opening for the Elliott Brood* at Barrymore's (woo!) on the 11th, so come see us enjoy the 2nd largest stage we'll have played on. Also, Mississippi Grover will be playing at Babylon on November 22nd and...well, there's a bunch of other shows that I'm interested in to varying degrees. Tell me if there's something good, 'cause I never get out these days.

*also playing will be Dear Judah, aka Adam Solomonian, who I'm pretty sure I've played about half a dozen shows with in various guises, and if he's the guy I'm thinking of, he's usually pretty good.

What's up with giant hand obsession, Gondry?

2006-10-19T07:42:00.000-04:00

This past weekend started out awful (I had food poisoning and a fever, and Jess was pretty sick too); but we spent Saturday morning watching the closest thing to a cartoon in the house - Get Shorty, which was surprisingly good. John Travolta shows a surprising amount of charm in it; I wouldn't go so far as to say he's a great actor in it or anything, but his character is an easy one to root for. Anyway, it's an entertaining way to pass an hour and a half, and didn't require we pay full attention or be completely awake. Which we weren't.

Saturday night was the Ottawa debut of Tusks, my ex-bandmate Samir's new group (opening for the Acorn, who were excellent as always) at Babylon. They sounded much like the last Kepler record, only more so - about three or four songs in, it clicked and I realized that this was what he'd been aiming for them to sound like on Attic Salt, or possibly even Missionless Days. In any case, it was excellent, well-orchestrated (but not orchestral) pop; slick, but not grossly so - to put on my fake-record-critic pants, like the Fleetwood Mac album their name references, minus the coke abuse and millions of dollars. Also: better haircuts.

On Sunday afternoon (after an embarrassing and painful accident, proving that I can't be trusted with as complicated a task as drinking water in a car) we caught The Science of Sleep, and yes, it's very good. Gael GarcÌa Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien) is just stellar as Stéphane, a young man who has trouble discerning the difference between his dreams and the real world. Frequently the viewer shares this difficulty - ostensibly 'real' scenes will start falling apart, water turning into cellophane, wads of cotton batting will float in the air held by an appropriate piano chord, and so on. He meets his crafty new neighbour, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), and awkwardly falls for her (nearly every review I've read suggests that he's initially attracted to her friend Zoë, but I'm inclined to think that Stephanie just assumed that he was interested in Zoë. At least, that's how I interpreted his being upset at the novel he dreamt he wrote, I Am Just Your Neighbour and a Liar. By the Way, Do You Have Zoë's Number?*)

It's a sweet and poignant film, but doesn't pack the emotional wallop of Eternal Sunshine, which puts me nearly in tears every time (especially the scene in the collapsing house in Montauk). There's a scene in The Science of Sleep that come close - Stephanie puts a very drunk Stephane to bed, and says to him, "It will happen the way you want, if only you'll trust that I love you." But this one is much harder to approach, and I'm still not sure how much of the film is meant to be taken literally, and how much is Stephane's adolescent and subjective view (the more I think about it, the more I'm thinking: all of it), exaggerating his emotional clumsiness and inability to communicate. I also can't heap enough praise on the character of Guy (Alain Chabat), Stephane's erratic and frequently sex-obssessed co-worker; Chabat steals nearly every scene he's in with a sort of understated fearlessness that's quite enjoyable.

*This would have been a great title for a record, and maybe in ten years, it will be.

Making the least of Autumn

2006-10-11T07:25:00.000-04:00

Last year at this time, we hosted a lovely potluck and enjoyed the crap out of the long weekend. This year: not so much. We both came down with colds - Jess way more than me - and stayed in, for the most part, watching Harvey Birdman (thanks, James - we finished it in one sitting) and The Wire, loading up on cough syrup and vitamin C.

The haul from zip last week was pretty sweet, except for the inexplicable arrival of the bonus features disc of Wong Kar-Wai's brilliant In the Mood For Love (nice features, kinda pointless without the film.) Started off Friday night with Rushmore - and of course, it's an astoundingly good film, particularly considering how it was only Wes Anderson's second (after the good-not-great Bottle Rocket). We both noted that Jason Schwartzman is about a centimetre away from having a full-on Peter Gallagher monobrow (which we decided is close enough to count), and he's going to be a great old-man actor, when he finally becomes an actual old man.

Our other two films for the weekend were disappointing, both at least partly because I'd seen them both before and hadn't lived up to my recollections, and also because there wasn't an ounce of sublety in their combined four-hour running time. The first was Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal (1989), which stars a bunch of poorly-coiffed mainstays of Quebec cinema (Robert Lepage, Lothaire Blutheau, Remy Girard, Johanne-Marie Tremblay) as well as a lot of bit parts with hair straight out of a Honeymoon Suite video*. I'd try to be less superficial in my judgements if so much of the film wasn't painfully dated (the incidental music, in particular; it sounds like lead guitar parts swiped from a Mr. Mister out-take.) It's a good story, though, and the 'Jesus was a radical' angle is played in a way that suggests the mystical elements of Christianity can, if not should, be ignored (which I appreciate).

Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, on the other hand, suffered mostly in comparison to The Wire, much as I'm sure any western would when held up against Deadwood. There are enjoyable parts to the film - Benicio del Toro, of course, is charming in that half-lidded way, and Eric Foreman...I'm sorry, Topher Grace is, well, trying hard not be Eric Foreman - and it's certainly photographed very attractively. But Soderbergh's view (and I agree with it) is on such prominent display, with so little shading that maybe I understand why Jess was siding with Catherine Zeta-Jones (and Alec Roberts) by the end of the film (for me, I was loyal to Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman). I'd recommend, with a pinch of salt, the British mini-series version, Traffik, which isn't as stylish, but covers more territory and doesn't pat itself on the back quite so hard.

Anyone interested in seeing Michel Gondry's latest joint, The Science of Sleep, with us should get in touch by, I dunno, Thursday or so. It's playing at the Bytowne until next Sunday, and it looks good 'n' weird.

In band news: The CWC will be opening for Elliot Brood at Barrymore's on November 11th; this time, there are no conflicts with other bands, and so no excuses, unless, of course, the show is really expensive, or sells out quickly, or you just don't like our band.

New records have yet again been purchased: Merzbow, Minazo Volume II (crazy, ear-piercing noise; I can't really recommend it to anyone, unless you're ready for some totally insane shit); Comets on Fire, Avatar (crazy, ass-shaking psychedelic stoner rock, but a lot softer and prettier than I'd been led to expect); and Carla Bozulich's new solo LP, Evangelista (excellent, creepy, haunting, and not at all like her work with the Geraldine Fibbers or Scarnella). I also downloaded the Bang on a Can version of Terry Reilly's In C, which is going to make Jess so happy! I honestly don't know why she'd complain - this version is a full 1/2hr shorter than the other one I've got...

And fun link of the day: this idiotic op-ed from world-class shitheel David Frum, suggesting some brilliant responses to North Korea's nuclear test, like punishing China (wtf? with what, exactly?) and encouraging Japan to acquire their own nukes (despite the fact that the Japanese constitution strictly forbids it). At least the Times didn't mention that Frum is Canadian, so our shame remains private. For now.

*which is, I suppose, an improvement over the bad-ass guy from Arcand's Decline de l'Empire Americain, who swaggered around as if he didn't resemble the guy from The Box.

Why am I in such a Whirl?

2006-10-03T18:01:00.000-04:00

The other day, I decided to sit down and a give a listen to Jess' copy of Aurora, the last Crash Vegas album. It's not a great album; in fact, I'd go so far as to say it's not even a good one. I recall liking Crash Vegas' first single, "Inside Out", in much the same way I liked, for instance, the Grapes of Wrath (enough to listen if they were on the radio, not enough to care if the rest of the record was decent.) None of their other singles (apparently they had some) made any impression on me, and the next time I paid them notice was for their version of "Pocahontas", from the inferior Neil Young tribute album Borrowed Tunes (it also appears on Aurora). Although the arrangement was not particularly original and the recording rather bland, singer Michelle McAdorey's delivery was superb. (I should point out that Borrowed Tunes, a collection of lacklustre Young covers performed by tired Canadian bands, seemed particularly ill-advised in light of the excellent 1990 Neil Young tribute The Bridge, featuring excellent and inventive contributions from Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Nick Cave, and the Pixies, as well as the less-well-known but still very good Loop and Nikki Sudden.)

On Crash Vegas' final tour in 95/96, the group Lifelike Weeds (ex-Phleg Camp guitarist Eric Chenaux and drummer Gavin Brown) were recruited to replace two departing members, and this spawned a fruitful collaboration between McAdorey and Cheneaux. I was advised to check out a solo performance of his ca. 1997 at Gallery 101, and he spent most of the evening bouncing off his foot switches and mangling his guitar strings in an entrancing manner. For two songs, however, McAdorey joined him on vocals - once for a song of his (the title of which escapes me, although it appeared on his long-out-of-print debut album More Remote Than the Puma) and a final song of her composition, the latter of which was unbelievably good. They (perhaps) announced that the song in question would be appearing on her forthcoming solo record; but it was another three years before she released Whirl.

It's not a long record, and it's not perfect - both "John" and "Fog Waltz" are drab folk-dirges - but it's pretty goddamned great. The blend of the quirky, near-spastic guitar leads, and frequent bowed guitar over McAdorey's tremolo'd rhythm parts and intricate vocal lines is reminiscent of the later Gastr Del Sol records (if Grubbs or O'Rourke had stronger voices and more of a commitment to melody), which, needless to say, I fucking adore. I wouldn't consider myself up to the task of judging the lyrics - to my ears, they sound good but rarely say anything profound or even particularly coherent. The notable exception is "On A Friend's Being Insulted", where the lyrics are taken from a Frank O'Hara poem; the refrain is (as best I can decypher it) "Cello strums/like blood on ice cubes", which is as musical as writing gets, to my ears. The overall atmosphere of the record is a little hippy-ish, although it puts me more in mind of the early 60's than outright psychedelia.

She did play a few shows after the record came out, and my friend Liz and I saw her show at the late, lamented Hi-Fi club in 2000, and she, Chenaux, and a melodica player (Martin Arnold) did a fine recreation of the record - alas, I don't remember if there were any other songs performed that night. I'd been waiting and waiting for a return performance, or another release, until early in 2002, Eric Chenaux (with Michelle McAdorey, a billing that should have given me pause) was due to perform at the Black Sheep. While it was nice to hear her voice again, she sang only a couple of songs, with most of her and Chenaux's guitar playing consisting of notes bent past the edge of the fretboard, causing the strings to buzz out. This might not have been quite so irritating if it hadn't been a staple of every song in the performance. I did eventually purchase their CD Love Don't Change (Rat-Drifting, 2003) and I suppose I shouldn't be so disappointed with it. There is a standout track, "Put In Music This Ballad For Me", which, like the best material on Whirl, lets a clattering racket run roughshod over a pretty melody. Sadly, it's only about 4 attractive minutes out of an hour of clanging, buzzing squonk-blues.

In any case, this all led me to look into what had become of the pair since then. Chenaux has been continuing to perform solo and with other improvisors around Toronto; he also just released a new solo LP, Dull Lights, on the exceptional Constellation label. If McAdorey is continuing to make music, there's little evidence of it around; indeed, unless there's another ex-musician with her name skulking around Toronto, it appears she's now a yoga instructor.

Vacation Week in Review

2006-10-01T13:52:00.000-04:00

Okay, so on my three stated goals, I kinda fucked up. I did cook a couple of meals, but we also ordered in, which doesn't count. Some cleaning was done, although the place is by no means straightened up, and in fact I'm ignorning a large amount of laundry right this second. I also did not finish watching The Singing Detective or Dekalog, although it did cross my mind yesterday.

I have been playing a lot of Psychonauts, though; it's got a lot of the elements of standard third-person adventure games - you hit and shoot at things, you collect power-ups, there are occasional puzzles to be solved and so on. However, the game primarily involves sending yourself into the minds of other people of varying sanity, and completing missions there. There are common elements in each mind: figments to collect, censors - business-suited men who attack while saying "no! no! no!" - and constantly weeping suitcases, which are, of course, the person's emotional baggage. The environments you face, however, are wildly varying. One mind is a retro-themed dance party, another is a board game, and in the mind of the mutant lungfish (don't ask) you get to wreak havoc over the denizens of Lungfishopolis, levelling their buildings, climbing their skyscrapers and swatting away their airforce. Good times.

There were also other films, this week, from Zip - Less Than Zero, Flirting With Disaster and Harold & Kumar Go To While Castle. Starting with the last of these: well, it's pretty damn funny, and let's just say we were in the right state of mind to enjoy it properly. It's a much less guilty pleasure than, say, Dude, Where's My Car?, but let's not get hysterical here, it's still just a comedy about getting fucked up. Oddly enough, Jessica knows (or at least knew) the actor who played the 'business hippie' (Dov Tiefenbach), and naturally, used to get high with him back in Hamilton.

Flirting With Disaster has Ben Stiller in his standard repressed nebbish role, travelling with his wife (Rosanna Arquette) to meet his biological parents. Naturally, his adoptive parents (Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal) are aghast, and passive-aggressive about it (and everything.) Along for the ride is an employee of the adoption agency (Téa Leoni, whom I hadn't realized can be pretty funny); hilarity ensues. Actually, it is a pretty good combination of madcap comedy and the more modern, painful variety. There's obviously a fair amount of similarity between this and Meet The Parents, and while the later film has Owen Wilson, it's also full of juvenile humour and a De Niro cardboard cutout, so I'd pick Flirting with Disaster as the better entertainment. I suppose I should have mentioned that Flirting is by David O. Russell (Three Kings, I ♥ Huckabees), so this makes me that much more eager to see his first feature, Spanking the Monkey (which I'd heard glowing reviews of ever since it came out in '94, but I guess I just couldn't bring myself to rent a film with such an awful title.)

And Less than Zero su-u-u-u-cked. I don't know why people rave about Robert Downey Jr's acting, I don't know why movies set in LA ever have those montages of establishing shots - what, you think people don't have a very clear idea of what LA looks like? you think the setting is ambiguous? - and I don't know why there are so many parties with walls of TV screens (I guess that was late-80's shorthand for 'artsy'). The only remotely enjoyable part of the film is the villain, a coke dealer played by James Spader with languid, smug menace (it's almost campy, and if he'd taken it that far, it would have gone a long way to making this crap watchable). Skip this and watch some Whit Stilman instead.

The Anaconda Ball Pit

2006-09-23T13:26:00.000-04:00

If you hadn't already noticed, I can be a pretentious little dipshit sometimes, with my French New Wave films and "I just downloaded an Ornette Coleman bootleg" and "ooh-la-la, I'm reading some fucking 6th Century philosophy like a douchebag" routine. But really, I've yet to smother my inner child, that jean-jacket-wearing, Dukes of Hazzard/Smokey and the Bandit-loving, nose-turned-up-at-quiche little hick. And in that spirit, last night JCrammit, Kira-Lynn and I went to the opening night of Jackass 2.

In our defence, there's really no better way to see that movie than in a crowd of amped-up teenagers (mostly boys, of course), who'll hoot and cheer every time someone gets kicked in the nads; I know I wouldn't have laughed so much (and it was a lot - my face still hurts) if I was watching it in an empty theatre. Also, we'd missed our first choice, The Black Dahlia (which has been getting very unfavourable reviews, but has Scarlett Johanssen, so I'll give it a shot) and nobody else wanted to see Fearless.

One of the nice things about seeing a big, dumb movie is that it's preceded by trailers for other big, dumb movies; in this case, a could-be-good-but-probably-is-horrific-beyond-belief Christina Ricci/Samuel L Jackson thing called Black Snake Moan, the live-action Transformers, and the Borat film (and I'm happy to report that his appearance drew a few immediate cheers, which leads me to not completely despair over the state of the youth of our city). But the best, by which I mean the worst, was an exceptionally long trailer for The Grudge 2. For a start, the trailer made it clear that Sarah Michelle Gellar's character would be killed off early on, leading me to think that she probably wanted as little to do with the thing as humanly possible while still getting paid (not that Gellar's acting, such as it is, is much of a draw). But, and here's where going to the movies with a loose cannon like K-L pays off, the trailer makes many attempts to build the spooky atmosphere where the innocuous looks scary, but our guest starts yelling out "OMG THE CELLPHONE'S RINGING! I'M SO TERRIFIED!"*, and by the end of trailer, a good half of the crowd (clearly the film's target audience) was jeering and laughing.

As for the movie itself - whaddya want? Here's a quick run-down: Bam gets branded on his ass, Steve-O gets beer funnelled into his ass and puts a fishhook through his cheek (then kicks a shark in the head), Johnny Knoxville is hit by bulls at least 5 times, and some other guy whose name I don't remember drinks fresh horse semen (with the highly quotable follow-up comment, "Yep, that's come alright.") There are several scenes of vomiting, a couple of nasty snake bites, and a John Waters cameo. In a way, talking about it is much like reviewing pornography: kind of pointless, because its function is so different from the rest of filmed entertainment that the critic's role is reduced to saying if it does what it's supposed to (make you laugh, get you het up) and maybe listing a few of the acts performed.

We also tried watching DIG!, the Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown Massacre documentary, but Jess found Anton Newcombe too annoying to last more than 15 minutes. So, I get to watch that one on my own later - which works out nicely, because I've booked the week off for vacation. We're not busy at work, and I've built up almost a month's worth of vacation time over the last couple of years - in 2005, for instance, I only used 5 of my vacation days - so I figured I should take advantage of the government's largesse. Plans for the week: clean this place the fuck up (starting with the ugly pile of cables next to the computer); cook impressive dinners for my sweetie; finally finish off The Singing Detective and Dekalog; play Psychonauts until it hurts.

[This post's soundtrack: Eleventh Dream Day's Eighth (1997), and The Costello Show's King of America (1986), the latter of which I've owned for several years but have never, for some reason, listened to start-to-finish before. It's pretty good, but no Blood and Chocolate.]

*No, she doesn't actually speak in text-messaging abbreviations.

Update on the Crammits

2006-09-16T11:52:00.000-04:00

Our trip last weekend to Brighton and Prince Edward County was really lovely; I'm ashamed to admit that I was almost totally unaware that that region even existed until maybe, maybe five years ago. I'd pretty much taken the stretch of the 401 between Kingston and Port Hope to be a void - like highway 7 between Kaladar and Perth, maybe - so it was pretty exciting to see a whole new bunch of landscape and little towns. The highlight of the trip, I'm very pretentious to say, was our stop at the Sandbanks winery, where we dropped money we don't really have on a few bottles of red (Baco Noir and Cabernet Franc, both remarkably fruity & full-bodied) and one of white ("Dunes" Vidal, more of a sittin' on the porch in hot weather just drinking kind of wine, albeit a really good one). Also, we got to see Lake on the Mountain (It's a lake! on top of a mountain! much as advertised!) and the cute-to-visit/probably-awful-to-live-in town of Picton, and we rode the Glenora ferry (woohoo! ferry!). We also saw a great many Union Jacks flying, which suggests either a lot of British expatriates (possible) or pretentious tits making too big a deal out of their Loyalist ancestors (more likely.)

There was also another attending of church, this one considerably less pleasant than the last one (see "Take it Outside, God-boy" to get a sense of how lightly I'm using the word 'pleasant'.) For starters, there were a lot more children, and if there's one thing I dislike more being held in close quarters with than Christians, it's kids. Particularly when they're young enough to crap their pants (my 'enjoyment' of Spiderman 2 - which I'd rate as only marginally better than X3, or a papercut - was marred by the scent of baby poop, and the couple, I'm sure, not bothering to take their whelp out to change it.) This was compounded by the guy (I'm not going to call him a minister - he was in a ratty polo shirt and cargo pants, so tough boogers to him) prattling on for well over an hour, with the message* of the sermon being, "You should believe more strongly, and prayer is important." Is it? Gosh, thanks, that cleared a whole bunch of shit up.

Anyway, I'm done with that - I'm uncomfortable enough with the hypocrisy involved in faking out when I'm a guest of people who insist grace is said before meals, and trying to look attentive during a sermon (particularly such a nebulous one aimed almost strictly at reinforcing a quasi-magical faith I most decidedly don't possess) is beginning to make my stomach turn.

*Jess would also point out that he based the sermon on a particularly contentious biblical verse, and his interpretation was questionable at best. I would agree that the verse in question - the one about Jeebus and the olive tree - makes the 'son of god' sound like a petulant little jerk.

A correction from last week: The Acorn/Tusks concert will be taking place October 14th, not the 11th as previously reported.

And an addendum: Casey Comeau & Richard Jeffrey (and possibly other members of the CWC) will be headlining at either Dekcuf or Maverick's (I can't remember) on October 7th, as part of a benefit for a local bird sanctuary.

Shiny, circular.

2006-09-16T09:08:00.000-04:00

We borrowed the first season of Alias, the Jennifer Garner-starring spy drama created by J.J. Abrams (Lost, Felicity) about a young CIA double-agent working in a rogue spy agency called SD-6. Like with the former show, the action sequences are gripping, and we're nearly always left with a heart-stopping cliffhanger at the end of each episode. Unfortunately, like the latter show, Jennifer Garner is frequently (especially in the very early episodes) shown having a little sob in her candle-lit tub, listening to some of Kate Bush's "B" material (or worse...much, much worse). In the show's defence, the cloak-and-dagger side of things is very well done, and Garner is far more convincing in her (many) fight scenes than Sarah Michelle Gellar ever was in Buffy (and I love Buffy). But there's entirely too much attention paid to 'Tippin', her Brian-Kracow-assed buddy who's too dumb/stubborn/smitten with Garner to accept the blatant sexual overtures of his hot 20-year-old intern assisstant. He also wastes an inordinate amount of screen time trying to find out who killed Garner's fiancee, despite her constant demands not to, since she knows it was SD-6 operatives who won't have any qualms about plugging him, too. Jess, who's more tolerant of the show's many flaws, has been tearing through it, and every couple of episodes, I have to ask her if a cap has been popped in the douche's ass yet. And so far, sadly, no. However, I'm told that the second season, particularly the lovely Lena Olin (as Garner's mom), kicks significant ass, so perhaps I'll pick up the story then.

It's been announced, finally, that the 1998 Bruce McDonald/CBC series Twitch City is coming out on DVD on October 17th. I'd caught a few episodes during its initial run, but - and I can't remember exactly why - the season was done before I'd had a chance to get into the habit of watching it. I also forgot (or never knew in the first place) that there was a second season of the show, which is a nice little surprise. As a result, the few pieces of the show I saw didn't exactly make sense, but I'm hoping that being able to watch the whole shebang in short order should clear things up (for example: why is ¸ber-hottie Molly Parker shacked up with a scrawny, agoraphobic TV addict? Hey, waitaminute...)

The features on the discs haven't been announced - I'm crossing my fingers for commentary tracks, because I'm a sucker for them, particularly with tight-knit casts like this one - and considering the show's cult status and heightened profiles of McKellar and Parker, the presentation ought to be a little more lavish than, for instance, the unimpressive first Newsroom set (which has one(?) uninformative commentary by Finkleman, cast bios - possibly the only feature less useful than web-links - and a behind-the-scenes featurette which shows some of the cast eating their lunch. Good times.)

Similarly, McDonald's second film Highway 61 is due for release on the same day. It's quite a treat, as I recall - Don McKellar plays a barber and would-be trumpeter in northwestern Ontario (possibly Thunder Bay), and he and Valerie Buhagiar drive down the titular Pines-to-Palms Highway to New Orleans, to deliver a corpse. There are a few bits of inspired casting - Art Bergman and Tracy Wright as demented shut-in rock stars (channelling Iggy and Patti Smith), Earl Pastko (whose acting credits include "bartender" in both Dog Park and Battlefield Earth) as would-be-Satan Mr. Skin, and Jello Biafra as a US border guard (and believe me, he nails it.) I don't remember how the film ended, which bodes ill (I suspect it's more than a little anti-climactic) as does my recollection of the music (lots of early-90's Can-rock), but on balance, it's one of the best English-Canadian films of its time, and showed McDonald's potential as a commercially viable director.

Most desperately in need of DVD release: CTV's excellent drama series from last year, Robson Arms

Ken Finkleman's other TV works - More Tears, Foolish Heart and especially Foreign Objects.

Winnipeg Babysitter, an homage to the freaked-out Winnipeg cable-access shows of the 80's by one Daniel Barrow.

And a North American release of Chris Morris' unbelievable news-magazine satire Brass Eye.

2006-09-06T07:30:00.000-04:00

Thanks to all our guests from Saturday - our house is now pleasantly warmed, and Jess is thoroughly in her 30's (I am so dead for writing that.) We spent all of Sunday in our pyjamas, as it happens, nursing hangovers of varying strength (Jess: not so much; me: extreme) and watching cartoons while resolutely ignoring the mess around us. We followed it up with La Grande Séduction, a 2004 Quebec film in the Local Hero/Waking Ned Devine vein of gentle, small-town comedies where everybody knows each other and the day can be saved by some zany plan. It's a little earthier than Ned Devine, and lacks the charm of Local Hero's Peter Riegert, but it's a feel-good film that doesn't reek entirely of schmaltz (and throws in the odd good joke).

We had been hoping to see one last baseball game for the season on Monday, but instead caught a matinee of the excellent Little Miss Sunshine. For a movie that could have been full of stock characters and obvious satire, it's remarkably nuanced and sharp. The teenaged son, for instance, who does not speak for the first two thirds, has a blow-up that is so affecting (or was to me, at least) I was ready to jump out of my seat by the time he actually lets go. In fact, all the main performers do a great job; Greg Kinnear's face sliding from expectant elation to frustrated despair is practically worth the price of admission by itself (well, that and Alan Arkin's advice to his grandson).

As it happens, btw, Battle of Algiers was even better than I'd remembered it, although I think I'd blocked out the torture scenes. I'm not sure if it's wrong of me to find the look of colonial Algiers enticing - swanky cafÈs and clubs on broad, palm-lined avenues, with the French dressed in their late-50's finery - but, alas, I do. It's also worth noting that this is, along with another by Pontecorvo, Burn!, one of the best anti-colonial resistance films ever made; one of the bonus features is a discussion ("How to Win the Battle But Lose the War of Ideas") with an ex-CIA anti-terrorism chief, who points out how precisely Algiers works as either a lesson on what not to do, or a resistance handbook (depending on which side you're on).

Jessica, on the other hand, gave the film about half an hour before wandering off to her books (no jerk-off motion or snarky comments this time, luckily). Can't win 'em all.

Several good shows coming up:

Ukrania!'s CD release, with opening act The Empiricals (faux-Asian pop), Barrymore's, Sept. 15th ($10 adv.)

The Hilotrons w/ Socalled (yes!), Barrymore's, Sept. 16th ($10 adv.)

The Wilderness Club plays on the 23rd of September at Irene's, the same night that the Solid Senders are at Zaphod's. I will not begrudge anyone choosing the latter.

Jon-Rae & the River, Zaphod's, Oct. 11th ($8 adv.)

The Acorn, with Tusks (featuring ex-keplerite Samir Khan, and Shaw-han liem, aka I Am Robot And Proud, among others), Babylon, Oct. 11th ($8 adv.)

Finally, Buried Inside's annual Halloween Hardcore show, Babylon, Oct. 31st ($10).

Please pretend this went up last week; it'll make more sense that way.

2006-09-06T06:58:00.000-04:00

I try not to give up on books, if I can help it. Some, like Under the Volcano, I don't feel that bad about abandoning, when the tedium outweighs any possible payoff in terms of entertainment or insight. Others, like The Alexandria Quartet are just so long and/or dense that I have to put them aside, sometimes for months at a stretch, but eventually get back into. And there are those, like Crime and Punishment, I like to think of being in the latter category, but I know that I'm never going to reach the end of it for as long as I've got anything else at all to do.

And then there are the ones I ditch like, to paraphrase Iain Banks, a man scraping dogshit off his shoes. Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 525 AD) seemed like a neat little book to own, when I picked it up at a yard sale last summer. In the intervening months, I'd become more interested in that era of history and somewhat less interested in philosophy; so the context of book now interests me a good deal more than its content. It was written while Boethius, a former consul of extensive classical education in the then-waning Roman Empire, was imprisoned and awaiting execution (by bludgeoning, as it happened) for suspicion of having conspired with the Byzantine Empire against King Theodric of the Ostrogoths. And while there are some interesting thoughts on the subject of Fortune (as might be expected from a man whose luck had turned so spectacularly), he gets bogged down into a long, circular and predictable discussion on the nature and source of happiness (guess what? it's god!) which gets annoying very quickly.

The other reason I'd picked it up in the first place was that it's referenced numerous times in John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (which I'd strongly recommend to anyone who's never read it, and would also like to know what happened to, since I think I loaned my copy to somebody, but now forget who it might be.)

We also watched a couple of baseball games last week, with Patrick and Romps, and had a fantastic time. It's a shame we hadn't tried it earlier, since it's good, inexpensive fun, and a pleasant way to spend a summer evening outdoors without, y'know, having to put up with all of that 'nature' bullshit. But, alas, now the team's leaving us the year after next for Allentown, PA, which I believe I'm required to refer to as 'gritty' (to distinguish it, I suppose, from the rest of eastern Pennsylvania, which is just so pastoral. Why not refer to Winnipeg as "flat" while you're at it, you slack-assed journo creeps?). The move is understandable, considering the severely lame turnout the Lynx get here, but it's still a shame.

In viewing material, Jess finished off the second and (unintentially) final season of Carnivale this weekend. I didn't get into the show, I'm afraid; partly I think it was because of a couple of less-than-glowing articles I'd read, and partly because I knew that I was going to be left hanging if I got invested in it. In any case, she was pretty impressed by the show - and I have to admit, there were parts that came close to living up to the over-portenteous tone that the show wore me out by the middle of the first episode. We've also got from Zip the 3-disc deluxe version of Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, and while some of the bonus materials look impressive (documentaries about the making of the film, about the Algerian resistance, etc) I suspect most of them are going to last 5 minutes before we look at each other and say, "You done with this too?"

For me, the exciting arrival was the third season of The Wire. I was introduced to the show in late 2003, through some posters on a music web-board, one of whom was circulating tapes they'd made of the first two seasons. I was unemployed at the time, and stayed up to unreasonable hours watching the 24 hours (the tape with episode 13 of S1 was broken) in four 6-hour sessions, pausing only to get another glass of wine and step out on the fire escape for yet another cigarette (it's very compulsive television).

And then the third season's broadcast was delayed until 2004/2005, and in the meantime, the first two seasons came out on DVD - agonizingly, over a year apart - and I was taunted now and again with hints (or huge spoilers) of what was going on in the show. You could probably hear my teeth grinding from across town.

So, it had been nearly three years since I'd seen a new episode when the S3 box arrived a couple of weeks ago, and I'm happy to report that it rocks. Some highlights: a return of the focus on Avon Barksdale's crew; still lots of Bodie (one of my favourite minor characters) and Omar; and McNulty has developed to the point where it's really clear why everybody (Daniels, Rawls, Jay, his ex) hates his guts so much. He's fun to watch be a dick for a while, but eventually he's less a loveable bastard and more just a royal pain who needs to cram a ham in it.

Two films, and a record

2006-08-16T23:08:00.000-04:00

We did see a couple of movies this past weekend; the first being Penny Marshall's A League of Their Own, which was, well, a sports movie. There's a whole lot of montages, some rote characters, a big game with a come-from-behind victory and some valuable lessons learned by all. I'll give it this much: when Geena Davis' character hurts her ankle in the playoff final, it's not played for her 'triumph over adversity' or some shit. What the film could have used is more scenes with Davis and Tom Hanks, and a lot less of Rosie O'not-fucking-funny-Donnell's cardboard cutout. Jon Lovitz was, however, served up in almost exactly the right amount.

But the one I wanted to write about was Kenneth Brannagh's Love's Labour Lost; this makes, for me, three of his Shakespeare films I've seen now (the other two being Henry V and Hamlet). It's staged as a musical of the 30's or 40's mould, making it by far the most radical transformation of setting of the three (Henry V has Derek Jacobi in modern dress as the narrator, but is otherwise a fairly straightforward mud, blood & costume drama; Hamlet is shifted from a medieval setting to the mid-1800's but is word-for-word, and thus three merciless hours long). The songs used are from other classic musicals, and Jess pointed out that up until the late 60's, it was generally possible to lift songs from musicals and have them make sense in other contexts (as here), but that after that point, the musical was generally written with songs as part of the plot rather than as interludes (usually songs about love and/or how much fun it is to dance and sing, which don't require much in the way of background explanation.) I'd heard a similar theory once before - that Sondheim, in particular, had irreparably damaged the musical, although I hadn't quite followed the explanation (or rather, wasn't especially interested in the theory.)

In any case, Love's Labour Lost worked pretty well - the cast was pretty good, especially considering the requirements of the roles (lots of singing and dancing, including a scene where the four male leads tap in iambic pentameter), and although the ending fell kind of flat, the pacing and placement of songs felt natural. We were pretty sure we saw Rachel Weisz in there somewhere, too, but alas, we had no idea what we were talking about. Also: not to sound overly PC or anything, but holy crap, was it ever nice to see a film where the token black guy and the token black girl were hooked up with anybody other than each other. Please people, what fucking year is this?

---

The second Nouvelle Vague album, Bande à parte, which Jessica bought about a month ago, has the same m.o. as their first, self-titled release - new-wave and post-punk songs performed in a cool, bossa nova-ish style. The selection of covers on this one runs a wider stylistic gamut than the previous - from top-40 dance pop ("Blue Monday", "Heart of Glass") to the noisier end of things (the Cramps' "Human Fly", The Buzzcocks' "Ever Fallen in Love?") and the cultish ("Bela Lugosi's Dead", Visage's "Fade to Grey") - with, obviously, mixed results. Again, the songs that work best are either bouncy ("Dancing with Myself") or sultry (Echo & the Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon"), and while there's nothing here to compete with the erotic giddiness of "Too Drunk to Fuck" or "Just Can't Get Enough", nor "Friday Night, Saturday Morning"'s dreamy ennui, it still has its (sometimes guilty) pleasures.

Unfortunately, despite the panache with which the first album was pulled off, it was still at heart a novelty - and any attempt to follow it up puts the group in a double-bind. Mess with the formula (downplay the retro-jazz feel, add new singers) and you risk sounding like Frenté!; stick with it and sound like a weak retread of a superior debut. Unfortunately, again, they've done a bit of both, highlighting the uneveness of quality here. The source material, in particular, seems to have been selected almost at random - the Bauhaus cover seems an especially poor choice, given that there's so little there to build on; it sounds like they were aiming for something between sultry and menacing but hit preening and anemic. It's a difficult record to recommend on its own, but as a supplement (or b-side) to the first album, it's not entirely bad.

Jess' 30th.

2006-08-09T19:47:00.000-04:00

Oh, I know she doesn't like her age being pointed out, but that's the way it goes. She needs to embrace these, her "carlsberg" years. (Suggested presents: late-period Paul Simon CDs, v-necked sweaters, deck shoes, no-nonsense coke.)

Um, you might want to ignore that last one.

Anyhoo, if Jess hasn't mentioned, and it's likely she hasn't, we're planning a shindig for the 2nd of September, to involve bowling at the Westboro Lanes (Wellington near Parkdale), to be followed by a proper, hors d'oevre's 'n' shit sockhop here at Crammit Hall 2 (convenient walking distance from said lanes.) If you're interested in the bowling part, please RSVP to the email address that should be listed around here somewhere for me (Michael), otherwise, futher posts will update on a specific time for the Casa del Crammitos part of the evening.

Also: K-L: I have no idea why we never go to the movies together. Because you don't call me when you're going? Seriously - bring it. I am the worst and/or best person to be sitting next to in a film.

X-Men: World's Whiniest Superheroes.

2006-08-07T17:15:00.000-04:00

After our last movie outing (the Al Gore doc), I dunno, I guess we were feeling that we needed something a little fluffier, and we ended up at the third (and probably final) X-Men installment. Was it common knowledge that it was shit? Because really, it stunk to high heaven, and we felt inadequately warned. A few ideas of how it could have been a better film:
1. Kill Storm (Halle Berry) instead of Xavier.
2. Kill Storm instead of Cyclops.
3. Kill Storm as well as Cyclops.
4. Drop the Phoenix storyline altogether, and when Mystique gets 'cured' into being just a normal human, have her and Nightcrawler argue the theological implications of mutants and the cure for the remainder of the film in a French restaurant, as an homage to My Dinner With Andre (perhaps even going so far as to cast Wallace Shawn as the sommelier, who brutally kills Storm when she makes a joke about she's 'not drinking any fucking merlot'. 'That's Paul Giamatta, you talentless fuck!', he could scream, before driving the corkscrew through her throat).

So, long story short: Halle Berry really dragged the thing down, but in fairness, Hugh Jackman was phoning it in too, and the problems with the acting were outweighed by the failings of director Brett Ratner (the man responsible for both "Rush Hour" atrocities) - the action sequences were completely muddled, the story was unfocused and cluttered, and potentially interesting storylines were dropped or abruptly introduced. For example, it might have been considerate of Ratner to have explained who Kitty Pryde was when she first appeared onscreen, instead of an hour later, so that those of us who didn't follow the comic might have understood who this skank was horning in on Anna Paquin's ill-considered action. (I realize this is a lot of thought to put into an action movie based on a comic book, but the fact is, it could have been a very enjoyable film that, like most good science-fiction, explored complex issues in a mature, if metaphorical way. Instead, it was a schmaltzy, overblown piece of tripe.)

Other exciting developments in Crammitland: we've joined a gym again - this one out at Westgate (it runs about $30 a month, and seems pleasantly short on weight-throwing testosterone junkies or siliconeful gym bunnies), and so please stop me immediately if I start talking about 'reps' or what I can 'bench' or how 'ripped' I am. And by stop, I mean punch me in the nads.

Kira-Lynn informed me the other day that she saw a movie with a character exactly like me in it, and that he (I assume it was a he) expressed opinions similar to my own. Now, she wouldn't tell me which film, or what character it was, so I've been left to guess, and not having seen that many films recently, I'm going to guess that it was probably Rainn Wilson in My Super-Ex Girlfriend*, which I'll take as a mild insult (if you've ever seen his roles in Six Feet Under or the American version of The Office - where he's the Gareth - you know why). On the other hand, she did say that the me-character dies, which was supposed to upset me for some damn reason, so I'm baffled. Anyone with any suggestions? Because yes, I'm just vain enough to want to see a filmed version of me (and morbid enough to want to see the not-me get killed.)

Oh, and I finally bought some new records recently - the debut (and final) album from Toronto math-rock band From Fiction (it's excellent, if you like math-rock); Japanese noise-metal trio Boris' Pink (it's more Motorhead than Amplifier Worship and more arty than Akuma no Uta, and well worth investigating even if you don't think you like noise or metal); and Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, which of course is excellent (although it often feels like a sketchbook of song ideas and fragments, which can be annoying if you're looking for another Blacklisted.)

Now if only the Solid Senders would put out a record...

*which, incidentally, I really want to see, and really want to be hilarious, although I suspect all the funny parts - eg., the shark-throwing bit - are in the trailer.

2006-07-24T17:32:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry - Jess pointed out that the last post didn't actually state that I'd performed on Saturday night. So: yes, I played drums with Kepler on Saturday, for the last three songs (Upper Canada Fight Song, A Workhorse, and I'm a Parade). And yes, it was fun, although a little nerve-wracking, and given the choice, I might have picked different songs to play (Vociferous Designs, Our Little Museum and Elemental: Blood or Water, for instance) but given the way Parade gave us that sing-along ending, I'm glad Samir picked those ones. If I neglected to tell you (or anybody, really) it was partly because I knew I'd only be playing for about 20 minutes, and partly because it was supposed to be a secret - and hey, I did get a bit of a cheer (not just from Jess) when I was brought up on stage, so that was nice. And like I said, it was as good an ending as any band could hope for.

On Sunday, after a hefty brunch, we saw An Inconvenient Truth; we left the theatre pissed-off and more than a little depressed. It's been said in nearly every review, but for a glorified PowerPoint presentation, the movie's pretty absorbing. Gore is charming, often funny (sometimes corny, but less so than, say, David Brenner) and handles his weighty subject with professional ease. Since his 'transformation' is mentioned so often, I'll go ahead and say that I never thought Gore was wooden, at least not by the standards of politicians (where a pasty Kenny G. fan like Clinton is considered 'slick', and not 'a total dork'). The film does have a lot of scenes of Gore fiddling with his laptop (in a car, on a plane, in a hotel room) and some desperately annoying shots of him looking thoughtful in a barn while his voiceover about his sister's death by lung cancer plays; and that was, for me, the best illustration of what was wrong with the film - not enough of Al Gore's talk on climate change, too much of what climate change means to Al Gore. Films like Swimming to Cambodia and My Dinner With Andre show, no matter what Jessica says or how often my dad falls asleep during them, that people talking, unadorned, can be riveting, can even put an audience on the edge of its seat, and I would have liked the film a lot more if the director had gone with a straight film of Gore's presentation.

Still, and I don't suppose this needs to pointed out, the artistry of the film is of secondary (at best) importance, and as an alarm and call to action, it's a winner. There are some clumsy appeals to emotion - a CGI polar bear (cub, of course) attempting to climb on melting ice floes, for instance - that bothered me, because it shouldn't be necessary. Imagery like the satellite photos of major reductions in polar ice sheets (combined with helicopter footage showing the scale of melting involved), or comparison photos of various glaciers (particularly in Colorado's Glacier National Park) from a few decades ago against current ones are devastating enough. As I said at the start, it sure worked on us cold-hearted Crammits.

Put that puppy to bed.

2006-07-23T22:42:00.000-04:00

Samir & kitten, Moncton NB, October 2002.

The final show of my old band Kepler yesterday was a happy, nostalgic ol' night. For a start, I hadn't seen much of Samir, Jeremy, Mike or even Jon in the last year or so, and so that was good. And we got along very well, in a way it felt like we hadn't since, oh, probably early 2000. Not to mention, seeing the boys rock out the songs from Attic Salt was just amazing. I'll be the first to acknowledge that it was hardly uncommon for Kepler shows to be lugubrious affairs, but last night's was just stunning in a all-the-stops-coming-out way.

On top of that, the audience was just wild - I'd be surprised if we ever had that large an crowd in Ottawa, and I certainly wasn't expecting to hear people yelling out requests (or singing along.) But it warmed my heart a great deal, and I think we were all very happy with how well it wrapped things up on such a postive note.

Message from Ian Blurton to Mike Feuerstack, in a bathroom, Thunder Bay ON, Sept. 02

There were two running jokes on our cross-Canada tour in the fall of '02; the first was Nick Nolte - Jon & Jeremy had spotted him stumbling, drunk and/or otherwise fucked-up from a TIFF party, and a few days later was his DUI arrest (and that beautiful mugshot). The second also started in Toronto, the night before as we were loading out after our show. Jon noticed a rather scraggly-looking fellow leaning into our van, talking with Mike F., and wasn't sure what to make of it. On the one hand, the guy seemed kind of drunk, but then Mike really did appear to be conversing with him. Then Jon noticed that he seemed to be just mimicking whatever Mike said ("yeah, we're driving out to Victoria," says Mike, and the guy says back, "Yeah, we're going to Victoria too", and when Mike said we were going to play the Halifax on Music fest, so did the dude). So Jon taps him on the shoulder, and says rather brusquely, "Hey. Bud. Move along, we gotta go." And the guy turns around, looking mystified (or out of it) and says, "Bud?" But then he turns back around and continues talking to Mike.

Of course, it eventually turns out that the guy isn't some drunk, it's Ian Blurton of Blurtonia (and ex-Change of Heart, and...), who had produced the second Wooden Stars album, and did know Mike. And naturally, Blurtonia were touring across Canada that month as well - we didn't play any shows with them, of course, but they were often at the same venue the night before or after us - to the point that Mike bumped into Ian on the ferry back from Victoria to Vancouver, and he (Ian) was considering tracking down Jon with an empty coffee cup and asking him for change.

And as his note suggests, the story probably wasn't nearly as funny to Ian as it was to us.

Jeremy Gara, Samir Khan, Jon Georgekish-Watt, Brighton, March 17, '02

Thanks.

Shopstravaganza 06!

2006-07-15T17:58:00.000-04:00

Today I bought my first-ever bottle of cologne - in fact, it's the first time I've ever had any kind of scent other than deodorant. It's Jean-Paul Gaultier "Le Male" (if you're ever stuck for gifts for the man who has everything except an overpriced bottle of stink), and it seems to be driving my lovely fiancee appropriately bananas, so, fine. I do feel a little like I've been fleeced, but it's a nice, not-overpowering wood & vanilla scent, it's a lot cheaper than some of the other other ones we checked out and as I said, is appreciated by its intended audience.

This is not, by the way, an invitation to sniff me.

I also spent a good 2-odd hours looking for a pair of shorts to replace the ones I threw out last year. I'm very embarrassed to admit that I love clothes shopping, but I'm good at it (if I may be grossly immodest). I've developed a reasonably good eye for what's going to fit well and what's going to make me look (more) stupid; and I've come to enjoy making fun of jackoff disco shit (y'know, pre-distressed suits, shiny shirts with illegible run-together silkscreening, everything in American Eagle or Club Monaco). In the end, I found a pair of linen cargo shorts at Old Navy, which I normally despise - a) it's not old, and it barely qualifies as a navy, and b) they make shopping like having your teeth pulled out at a garbage dump run by 14-year-olds. Oh, and all those fucking awful ads. Please go to hell now, Old Navy.

Oh, and we also bought some beer. Hooray for beer!

Happy Bastille Day

2006-07-14T22:39:00.000-04:00

Before I start bloviating again, a few personal/music notes: thanks to the people who came out to see us (the Centretown Wilderness Club) at Bluesfest Wednesday (especially Kira-lynn, because she likes to be mentioned, and she said I looked cute)- it's nice to feel loved (musically). Also, a heads-up that my former band Kepler (1997-2006) will be playing their last-ever show on the 22nd of July, so if you never saw 'em, it's then or never. I just found out how to post photos here, so I'm going to start with a bunch of the ones I've got from those days next week.

And further, it looks like the Golden Famile are packing it in as well, at least for the foreseeable future. Experienced, crotchety drummer seeks loud rock band for to get his ya-ya's out...

And lastly, if you didn't see the Fiery Furnaces tonight at Bluesfest, I hope you've got a good excuse. Because they brought the fucking rock.

Two Sundays ago, we Crammits and the ever-charming Jen & James went to see The Devil Wears Prada, and it was an enjoyable experience, because the flaws in the movie (and there are a lot of 'em) don't outweigh the fun of watching Meryl Streep tear it up. In a role that could have been painfully broad and cartoony, she plays the Anna Wintour character with clipped, quiet imperiousness - rather like how you'd expect someone (other than Scott Thompson) to play Queen Elizabeth II - every absurd request (a copy of the as-yet-unpublished Harry Potter book, reservations at "that restaurant I read about the other day") and off-hand put-down* is so dry it's a little breathtaking, and eventually, quite winning. By the time she delivers her tour-de-force speech on the importance of high fashion design - and it's a convincing monologue, too - it's hard not to ask yourself, dammit, why isn't her coffee there yet?

As I said, though, most of the rest of the film is dreck. I'm sorry, that's a little harsh - it's boring and ill-focused. I don't care about Hathaway's schlub boyfriend feeling neglected (I doubt that the movie would suffer at all if all the straight males had been edited right out) or her Friends also-ran pals, or her burgeoning journalism career. Come to think of it, I don't even care about Hathaway's montage-filled transformation from earnest, clean-faced J-school grad to stylish professional, but I guess they need a narrative, of sorts, and it's hard to find an easier way out than to chew scenery and montage, montage, montage. (I'm not kidding, by the way - there are probably a dozen of them, only one of which - where Streep repeatedly enters the office, throwing a series of apparently very expensive bags and coats on Hathaway's desk - is anything except jackoffery.)

Other exciting things in our lives:
1. Jess' contract with StatsCan is almost certainly going to be extended another 3-6 months, which is cause for great joy, and unclenching.
2. We overheard a particularly great bit of teenage-girl shit-talking the other night - there's nothing like size 2 hoodrats calling each other 'fat bitches', eh?
3. We've got a new fridge. Woohoo! (we've been without freezer or decent refrigeration for about three weeks now - it's been pretty fucking shitty.)

*In this last, Stanley Tucci gets some good barbs in too, particularly to Hathaway - after he points out that "2 is the new 4 and 0 is the new 2", she says she's a size 6. "Ah," he says, "the new 14."

I'll take "The Quiet Earth", please...

2006-07-11T22:11:00.000-04:00

I've been reminded, recently, of the degree to which I used to think about the end of the world, particularly in my early teens. From '83 through, oh, '87 or so, I'd pretty much assumed that I wouldn't survive to adulthood, or at least that the world as I knew it would be gone by now. I don't know if there was something particular about that time: the mid-period of Reagan's presidency (and that 'joke' about the bombing beginning in five minutes), the years of shuffling Soviet premiers and the last few kicks of the Cold War's proxy battles (Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the almost-funny Grenada) that made it so nerve-wracking for kids to watch the evening news.

Of course, reading science-fiction novels endlessly for those years probably didn't help, what with their many variations on the way things could go horribly amiss for humanity. I'd always imagine how I'd survive in such circumstances (not well, usually) but in the interests of giving y'all something to read that's not a half-assed movie review, it's time to rank the nightmare scenarios.

Solar flare/Supernova F

Pro: So fast we wouldn't even know it happened.
Con: what good is that?

Giant meteor strikes Earth C-

Pro: Visually very impressive, fascinating new coastlines.
Con: massive destruction of infrastructure, need a new atlas.

Bizzare inexplicable thing that suddenly incapacitates or kills billions of people. A- without triffids, D with.

Pro: Crazy freak-out looting sprees and desctructive impuses run rampant! Power negligently left on, frequently.
Con: Long-term prospects even for individual survival not good, many pets trapped indoors. Horrible man-eating plants all over the place (possibly).

Bizzare inexplicable disease that slowly incapacitates or kills billions of people. B+

Pro: Again with the looting, many housing options.
Con: Electric company employees have plenty of time to turn off power; corpse disposal (or rat infestation) becomes a problem.

Environmental devastation C+

Pro: lots of warning, things don't completely fall apart straight away.
Con: unavoidable, things do fall apart.

Complete nuclear devastation F

Pro: um, at least I'm still alive?
Con: Everything else.

Partial nuclear devastation D

Pro: local civil society somewhat intact, loosening of rules, kind of an adventure.
Con: eventually the fallout, or the giant gila monsters, will get you.

Zombies! F

Pro: great opportunities for exercise, running from the zombies.
Con: Zombies.

Alien invasion B-

Pro: exciting, in a pants-shitting kind of way, aliens might be really cool-looking.
Con: high chance of horrible end by death ray, low chance that the common cold will actually kill the aliens.

Dear Babylon nightclub.

2006-06-28T22:46:00.000-04:00

Many live music venues, when putting on a concert, like people to show up. In order to facilitate this, they often advertise their shows, through posters, listings, and so on. You don't done this much, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps you've moved past the need for material things; if so, I'm very happy for you, as you're in an enviable position many of the world's religions promise yet so rarely deliver. However, this seems unlikely considering your drink prices. Or possibly you just don't like people much. This doesn't make a lot of sense either, as why would you have concerts at all? Maybe you're trying to be mysterious, and have lots of 'surprise', unannounced shows that get great word of mouth.

Again, and here's where we're really getting to the crux of the matter, this would make more sense if more people knew, through word-of-mouth, about your shows. If, for example, you provided accurate information on, say, your website. Because, y'see, after getting the date wrong on the Socalled show last month, it turns out now, that I've missed it by a day. And lo and behold, your website advertises the show, quite clearly, as being tonight, not last night.

Amusingly enough, the doorman pointed out that only about 30 people showed up last night, despite it being a pretty good show. This reminds me of another event, a few years back, when the now-very popular band Stars played their first Ottawa show. There was one, I stress one poster for the concert, which I only saw the day after the show, and there was a tiny, tiny listing in the Xpress, which is how me and my ex, and exactly 9 other people, found out about it. We actually called ahead, because it seemed so odd, and the guy who answered asked, "How did you find out about it?"

Ha!ha!, that's some funny stuff. And yet, even as I wipe away my tears of laughter, other tears, more rage-induced, follow, as I think of the times my various bands (well, mostly Kepler) have played to those few people we've told personally about the show, and finding out later that your listings said we were to play a week later.

These things shouldn't be secrets, Babylon nightclub; people want to see concerts, and bands want to make enough money to pay for gas and their drink tabs, and so on. I'd even assume that you'd rather have more than 11 people show up in an evening. If it's such a chore to put up posters (even just a few), update (and double-check) your website, or send listings to punkottawa.com, then perhaps it's time to reconsider the whole live-music aspect of your business.

with bitter affection,
MCrammit.

Take it outside, God-boy.

2006-06-23T19:02:00.000-04:00

I attended a church service this past Sunday, for the first time since, um...well, an awfully long time. With Jessica's mother in town, we went out to the "LifeCentre" in Blackburn Hamlet - which I think Jess picked because it looked likely to have air-conditioning - and it was a church of the type Martin Amis (or possibly Julian Barnes) described as "happy-clappy". The general vibe of the congregation I'd compare to an especially dorky crowd enjoying the shit out of, say, Moxy Fruvous on an off-night. There was a contemporary christian pop band (in fairness, they were decent musicians), playing songs staggering in their repetitiveness (and I say that as a fan of Philip Glass); the pastors had a breezy, corny-comedian-meets-Oprah style; and they gave away a barbecue.

I've been conciously atheist since my mid-teens, although I don't think I ever 'got' the idea of god (or God, if you prefer) so it probably went farther back than that. I didn't ever feel that I'd rejected a faith per se, although for a time (mostly during my early 20's) I did have that vehement anti-religious fervour that often characterizes lapsed Catholics and the like. I think I've moved on (or grown up?) since then, and have stopped calling Christians "God-fuckers", which was probably uncalled for. I did go through a couple of phases of wanting to be Jewish, the first after I discovered Woody Allen, and the second after reading about secular Judaism; neither outweighed my unwillingness to get circumcised or stop eating barbecue ribs.

My distaste for religion came primarily from a political angle (the discovery of my dad's book Marx for Beginners and a collection of essays about the then-nascent religious right in the early 80's US), but also from my mother's attempts influence me towards her faith - she's been a Jehovah's Witness since I was about 10 or 11, although I don't recall her conversion beyond the arguments she and my father had on the subject of Christmas. I apparently attended Sunday School for at least a couple of years (maybe when I was 5 or 6?), although any attempt to remember it invariably turns up episodes of the Simpsons, and I'm pretty sure we were never told that in hell, we would "eat not of burning hot coals and drink not but of burning hot cola."

When we moved to England in 1977, my parents stopped attending church - probably because the only one in town was Church of England, so I'm assuming they weren't Anglicans. The local church was a beautiful, drafty old (and I mean seventeenth century, possibly older) stone building, next to the school (which itself dated from the 1800's), and we did go inside a couple of times (possibly for choir recitals, or pageants). We did have to sing hymns - serious, pretty hymns - every morning in school, because England has the odd situation of being a very secular country where religious instruction is part of the public school system. But we learned as much about Roman and Greek mythology as we did about Christianity - it was presented, or maybe I just took it, as a cultural and historical matter, and not to be taken any more seriously than Tolkien or Roald Dahl.

I also attended some sort of religious service (or revival?) shortly after I came back to Canada; the family next door, whose younger son I'd become friends with (and whose older son had taken to pushing me around) took me along to an evening service, possibly at that Metropolitan Bible Church down on Bank St. near Gladstone (my knowledge of the city at the time was pitiful, but I do recall the place seemed more like a theatre than a church). I suppose, in hindsight, it was probably a Baptist or Pentacostal service - the minister or preacher or whatever had a loud, energetic style and a big hairdo (I might be making that part up) and the crowd was exhorted to stick around after the service to get good'n'saved. In any case, it conviced me to roughly the same degree that the chain letter I received from my cousin a few months later did, which is to say, not at all, but it was fascinating to watch, for a little while.*

I had a similar experience last Sunday, although I found it odd that there was a near-complete lack of discussion of scripture, which you'd think was a pretty important part (FWIW, both Jessica and her mom were quite unimpressed with the place as well). Each of the three pastors very briefly quoted from the Psalms, but then mostly talked about personal things - as I said before, breezily, like a not-so-good motivational speaker. One fellow talked about hockey, the next about working on an oil rig (which threatened to capture my interest sporadically, but luckily, he digressed into a feel-good story about one his co-workers quitting the bottle); and the last one, who was father to the other two, was so incredibly dull it was not a surprise when he mentioned that he'd worked in finance for 30-odd years. Which was nice for them and everything, but it all seemed rather self-indulgent, and I had to ask myself where the fucking hairshirts were already.

(*In hindsight, it seems weird that my parents, themselves split in their beliefs, would allow the neighbours to take me at such a supposedly impressionable age to a thing like that, so far out of their own tradition. I'm also a little freaked out that the neighbours brought me along - did they think I was in need of saving or something? I asked my parents if they remembered anything about it, and they gave me a weird look and said it was the first they'd heard of it.)

2006-06-20T16:53:00.000-04:00

Yes, after last week's flurry of productivity (three whole posts! My cup runneth almost half-full!) I've clammed up a bit. Not a whole lot to say, I'm afraid.

We did go through a little flurry of film- and TV- watching two weekends past (along with, of course, party-going and fashion-show-attending); and we were hoping to have Arrested Development's third season in our claws by now, but alas, Fox has pushed the release date back to August 29th. It wasn't enough to just cancel it, you've got to spit on the grave, eh?

Oliver! is one of those few musicals that I'm not entirely embarrassed about liking (I should note, there are few enough that I know, let alone like, let alone am willing to admit a liking for, so this is some pretty select company indeed), probably because much of its music was burned into my memory at a very young age. I'm also not sure that I've ever seen the movie end-to-end before; it could even be that I've never seen any of it other than the opening sequence at the orphanage. Anyhoo, it's entertaining enough, although the little pisher who plays Oliver, like so many British children, just makes me want to bully the crap out him.

American Beauty was quite the big deal when it came out in 1999; I managed to avoid seeing it until now by amazing self-restraint, and a complete lack of interest. Unless I'm quite mistaken, it marked the turning point in Kevin Spacey's career, where he stopped being a very good character actor (in The Usual Suspects, Swimming with Sharks and Glengarry Glen Ross) and started being a Serious Bankable Star. It also meant that he would no longer be making any good films, and a quick run-down of his output since then (K-Pax, Pay it Forward, The Shipping News*) pretty much confirms this. Hence, I was somewhat prejudiced against the film, which is unfair of me (but so what?), and I was pleasantly surprised, for the most part. I didn't find it the revelation many people claim it to be; possibly, as James noted, because I've already seen Magnolia and Fight Club (which aren't that similar, but mine the same emotional malaise). The writing rarely moved above the banal and the characters weren't great; the lives of quiet desperation they all lead felt like they picked them out of a catalogue ("What have you got in a brooding, arty teenager?") I don't think it's insulting to Chris Cooper to say that his performance here was the worst one I've seen (playing a closeted, weapons-fetishizing caricature of a fascist dad); he did better work with his character in The Bourne Identity, to say nothing of Lone Star or Matewan. Mind you, in those cases, he wasn't playing such a cut-out. Most of the other roles were adequately played - the teenagers were largely boring, particularly Thora Birch, who if you want see play a disaffected teenager, does a much better job in Ghost World; I did like Mina Suvari's blustery show of sexual overconfidence, at least when the script let her. Annette Benning, whom I always like (even in schmaltz like The American President) but rarely convinces me she's anyone except Annette Benning, was on par; Peter Gallagher was kind of icky, which is also what he always is (the only thing noticeably different about him this time was that he had two eyebrows).

*yes, I've read the book, and it's just fine. If you want to defend the movie, knock yourself out, but don't ask me to respect you for it.

On Sunday, we saw Crimes and Misdemeanors, which as I mentioned last time, is my favourite Woody Allen film. Jess hadn't seen it before, and was suitably impressed; I was reminded how completely amazing just about everyone's performance was - particularly Anjelica Houston, whose character I never thought of as particularly central (except as a moral question, but not as a person.) It's also a shock to see how quickly Allen aged after this; here, he's late-middle-aged, but vibrant, and two years later, in Husbands and Wives, he already looks like an old, tired man.

And over the course of last week, we watched (separately) the first season of the incredible (and now-cancelled) HBO series Deadwood. First off: Ian McShane, as the dastardly Al Swearengen, is fucking great. I can think of few characters on dramatic TV shows who are so delightful to watch (the two that come immediately to mind are Jimmy McNulty from The Wire and Livia Soprano, which suggests HBO is really on to something). Second: the rest of the cast, particularly Brad Dourif's Doc Cochran and Robin Weigert's Calamity Jane, are also great - if there's anyone even uninteresting, it'd be either Sol Star (a largely uncomplicated nice guy sidekick played by John Hawkes; Robin to Seth Bullock [Tim Olyphant]'s darkly troubled Batman) or Jeffrey Jones' A.W. Merrick (publisher of the Deadwood newspaper, and, to me, a bit of a ham.) For those interested in such things, the depth of research into the history of Deadwood, South Dakota, is phenomenal (right down to the fact that when EB Farnum says "motherfucker", it's historically inaccurate, as the phrase was not in common use at the time - unlike "limber-dicked cocksucker", which is used more than a few times). But if, like me, you just enjoy the shit out of the dramatic conflict that comes with the development of civil society - or its potential impostion, in the form of annexation by the United States - the density of the plotting and complexity of the character relationships is more than enough to make this some of the most compelling television available.

On deck: Anchors Aweigh!, starring Gene Kelly & Frank Sinatra (you have fun with that, Jess); McCabe & Mrs Miller, Robert Altman's 1971 western (and apparently an interesting companion/comparison piece to Deadwood), and Time Bandits - which I shouldn't have to explain to anybody.

Woody Allen: Whiny Genius, or Hilarious Prick?

2006-06-09T18:37:00.000-04:00

I don't remember which was the first Woody Allen film I saw - I do recall seeing little portions of Sleeper, Manhattan and Take The Money and Run in my early pre-teens, but the first one I'm sure I saw start-to-finish was Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* which I saw (accidentally - I'd meant to see John Sayles' The Brother From Another Planet) at the Mayfair when I was 16 or so. I'm not sure why that prompted me to see anything more of his, since (note rating below) I didn't really enjoy it that much.

In any case, my appraisal of his films (if one of his isn't on this, I haven't seen it - sorry, Interiors):

The Big Four (what I think of when I think of Woody Allen: half-comedies, half-romances - but not romantic comedies, oh no - of such a depth and feeling that I want to live in them.)
Crimes & Misdemeanors The best. A morality play where the good are punished and the wicked prosper, with some remarkably sharp humour and a slew of fantastic performances by Martin Landau, Jerry Orbach, Sam Waterston, and especially Alan Alda. Probably the last film where watching Woody himself wasn't painful. A++

Annie Hall Nearly note-perfect, playful with the medium, and a genuinely romantic love story in service of top-notch laughs. I can't imagine what a revelation this must have seemed when it came out - considering that all his work to date had been broad satire or slapstick. The cameo by Marshall McLuhan is probably my favourite scene, although it's a damn tough call. A+

Hannah & Her Sisters A heartwarming tale of real and attempted marital infidelity. The performances by Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest are particularly great; Michael Caine is, well, Michael Caine, and Woody is starting to show his age, but like in the rest of the Big Four, is doing it with grace and charm. A

Manhattan I should note that I've never been to New York, and I'd probably think less of this if I had a less romanticized view of the city (and that view was fed, in large part, by these four films). Doesn't manage to balance the humour and wistful romance nearly as well as the others, but still great. And it's got Wallace Shawn. A

The others:
Bullets Over Broadway Allen uses a stand-in (John Cusack) for his nebbishy playwright, and the stand-in knocks it out of the park. I couldn't say if it's the writing or Cusack's performance, but either way, I can't think of another Allen protagonist this good. And he's got some great people to play off, particularly Jennifer Tilly and Tracey Ullman, but really, it comes down to Cusack and Chazz Palminteri's gifted mob henchman Cheech. The story - a remarkably effective essay on artistic and personal integrity - is better and funnier than anything he's done since, and arguably before (While I don't include this or Purple Rose in the Big Four, I prefer both of them to Manhattan, and this, at least, gives Hannah & Her Sisters a run for the money.) A+

The Purple Rose of Cairo For some reason, I've seen this more often than any other Allen film. Good thing I enjoy it so much. Interesting to note: not only is Allen himself not in the picture, but there isn't an Allen stand-in; I think this is his only film where that is the case (and I don't think it's coincidental that this is one of his strongest films.) Hilarious, tragic, and a very clever idea. A+

Husbands & Wives Pretty good, but also torture. What's wrong with it? The presence of Juliette Lewis (whom I despise) for a start, and the jarring hand-held camerawork, too (intended to give it a documentary feel; actually makes it look cheap.) But the characters are worse: Mia Farrow's passive-aggressive Judy, Liam Neeson's simpering Michael, Sydney Pollack's complete bastard Jack and Allen's self-pitying Gabe; all are nearly impossible for feel sympathy for. Add to that the feeling that the whole thing was his pre-emptive strike against Farrow as he demolished their marriage (it's probably not really, but at the time, that's how it looked.) But again, it's a very well-written observation on the nature of relationships, and that's the other part of why it's tough to watch. A-

Sleeper Combines the slapstick, Marxian humour of his earliest films with satire and a touch of the warm intelligence that marks his best work. Dianne Keaton is especially good in this, and watching the chemistry between her and Allen is delightful. B+

Zelig A mockumentary, set in the Depression, about a man so desperate to fit in he becomes like a chameleon, able to change his appearance (and, to a degree, lose his self-awareness) to blend in with those around him. While, at first, it seems like a pleasant little conceit, it builds into a clever satire of the common willingness (especially of that time) of people to lose their identity to the larger group - and the point is driven home most forcefully when Zelig leaves the US for Nazi Germany (and in a hilarious scene, remembers his identity during a speech by an increasingly distracted Hitler, whom he's standing behind; the film does a great job of putting Allen into archival footage, well before CGI). B

Broadway Danny Rose A good, largely gentle comedy about a talent agent whose roster consists of talentless acts; a respectable minor work. I only got around to watching this earlier this year, despite knowing that it was made during my favourite period of his career. B-

Mighty Aphrodite Some decent parts, particularly the Greek chorus; if not for Bullets Over Broadway, it'd be the best work he's done since the split with Mia Farrow. If that's damning with faint praise, so be it. Again, it's sometimes clever and sometimes well-written, but seeing Allen leave his prime so far behind him is a little painful. Did this really win an Oscar? C+

Deconstructing Harry Not bad, considering how far his average quality has dropped in recent years, but not great, for sure. Billy Crystal, surprisingly, does a good job of being a loathesome jerk (and the Devil), and maybe he should start going for more villain roles, because he's sure a pain in the ass as anything else. There are some good ideas in the film, and the structure is reasonably clever, but the execution is quite lacking. C+

Shadows and Fog Based on a very short, Kafka-esque play Allen included in one of his books (Without Feathers, I think); it feels like a lot of padding around a kernel of a good idea. Or possibly, two ideas for short films grafted together. Christ, Madonna was in this? I don't remember that at ALL. C-

Everyone Says I Love You If Allen wasn't in this, it would make a much, much better film. By this point, he's dragging the rest of the cast down, and it strains credibility to see him doggedly pursuing Julia Roberts while he looks like he's having a hard time with the stairs. Ignoring him, it's a decent little story, again, and a funny idea (a musical performed by non-singers), although the ending's pretty corny. Good performances by Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn (surprisingly) and Tim Roth. Very stilted performances by Drew Barrymore, Natasha Lyonne, Julia Roberts (who is easily the worst singer of the entire cast), and Edward Norton. D+

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* A little immature in places, and not exactly insightful or significant, but an entertaining little trifle. D+

Celebrity Allen uses a stand-in (Kenneth Brannagh) for his nebbishy journalist, and the stand-in gets hit with the ball, then manages to hit himself in the face with the bat. To describe this film as 'dreadful' doesn't really do it justice; it's a trainwreck the way that I imagine Altman's Pret-a-Porter is*, in that satires of celebrity culture are well-nigh impossible for celebrities to pull off. To the best of my recollection, there's exactly one good line, where Brannagh-as-Allen is told by a woman he's improbably picked up that she's a playwright. "What are your plays like?", he asks, clearly taking her to be an idiot. She thinks for a minute, then asks, "Do you know Checkhov?" He nods dumbly; "I write like Checkhov," she states flatly. There, I've just spared you from ever having to see this worthless crap. F

*as an aside, looking at the Altman-esque cast list for Celebrity, it does pain me to have to say such awful things about a movie that has Bebe Neuwirth, Allison Janney, Famke Janssen, Debra Messing, Gretchen Mol AND Tony Sirico. Alas, I must.

Melinda and Melinda The thought of Will Farrell in the Allen-stand-in role had me chomping at the bit to see this, but then, I'm a moron. The larger structure of the film (two playwrights each tell a story about Melinda arriving uninvited in the middle of a dinner party, one as a comedy and one as a tragedy) could have been turned into a fine film, and perhaps if he'd made it in 1986, Allen could have pulled it off. Unfortunately, it's mostly Chloë Sevigny mope-facedly schlepping around, Will Farrell being not funny, and...christ, I don't even want to think about it. The tragic part wasn't tragic (because it's hard to give a shit about any of the characters, let alone feel sorry for rich people who make trouble for themselves) and the funny part isn't funny (because Will Farrell does a weak job with rotten material). If Allen ever makes another good film, at this point I'll be shocked. F

What's Up, Tiger Lily? Horrible. I managed to get about half an hour into this, without so much as cracking a smile, before it just got to be too many unfunny, racist jokes to make it worth suffering through in the vain hope that it might rise to the level of a bad MST3K episode. Do not watch this film. F-

Meme time.

2006-06-06T21:13:00.000-04:00

Am I really doing this? Tip of the hat to Hayden.

"Fun" with iTunes:
Number of songs: 1585 (I recently edited a bunch out)

First group, alphabetically: !!!
Last group, alphabetically: Young Fresh Fellows

First song, alphabetically: "?, Feat. Kurious" (MF Doom, from Operation: Doomsday
Last song, alphabetically: "Your Thing Is A Drag" (Sharon Jones, from Naturally)

First album, alphabetically: !!! (yes, a little predictable.)
Last album, alphabetically: Zeroes and Ones (Eleventh Dream Day)

Shortest song: "Spaim", Botch (0:14)
Longest song: "Delerium Cordia", Fantômas (1:14:17 - yikes)

First dozen songs that come up on shuffle:
"Mad Foxes", Destroyer (Your Blues)
"Point to B", Prefuse 73 (Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives)
"Contact Blitt", KMD (Black Bastards)
"Without Mythologies", Weakerthans (Left and Leaving)
"You Got Me", The Roots (Things Fall Apart)
"Cheesecake Truck", King Missile (Mystical Shit)
"Tiny Voices", Joe Henry (Tiny Voices)
"Fontana", unknown artist, unknown album, downloaded from UBUWEB.
"Look Away", Game Theory (Lolita Nation demos)
"They're Not Witches", Guided By Voices (Alien Lanes)
"Stop", The Dirtbombs (Dangerous Magical Noise)
"Milkman", Aphex Twin (Girl/Boy EP)

The meme goes on with questions about how many songs have swearing in them - let's just say, a lot of them do.

Do you even know what 'cliffhanger' means, you ass?

2006-06-01T16:42:00.001-04:00

We Crammits are not a pair to shy from the unusual, the tasteless, even the just plain bad. We've watched Spice World, we own a copy of the Shaggs' Philosophy of the World, and there's Theodore Sturgeon's "Venus on the Half-Shell" (written under the name Kilgore Trout as a send-up of Kurt Vonnegut, which apparently did not go over well) kicking around here somewhere. By myself I've seen such drivel as Constantine, Species and Twenty-One, and our Zip list right now includes Myra Breckenridge, Tough Guys Don't Dance and The Brown Bunny.

All this is to make it clear that we're not unfamiliar with crappy and/or incompetent art. But we watched as much of R.Kelly's serial/video/debacle Trapped in the Closet, Chapters 1-12 as we were capable of the other night, and hoo boy, it's something else entirely.

It's difficult to know where to start in describing this monstrosity. I guess I'll go with the obvious: R.Kelly isn't much of an actor. There is a 'name' actor involved (Michael K. Williams, aka "Omar" from The Wire, and I hope his paycheque was very hefty), but all the performances are a little hard to judge, because not only does the song "Trapped in the Closet" contain every line of dialogue, but it also describes every action taken by every character as (or a second before) it happens. It should also be noted that the song, unsurprisingly, is quite bad, and lacks meter in a very profound and almost alarming way. The plot manages to be both pathetically simplistic and bafflingly convoluted; the characters are wafer-thin (and seemingly possess random, sporadic clairvoyance) and are all so emotionally unstable it's staggering that any of them would have survived to adulthood.

Some highlights of the story: A jealous husband, suspecting his wife has just cheated on him and the other man is still in the house, searches for him in the dresser; R.Kelly scratches his head in confusion with the business end of a loaded, cocked pistol, the trigger of which his finger is still on; R.Kelly and his wife make love under several giant portraits of R.Kelly, while R.Kelly's pants are still on (although he breaks off their lovemaking due to a leg cramp); a pie-eating midget gets chased around a kitchen, then delivers the line, "I think I done shitted on myself."

Does it get better than this? Yes, yes it does. Because on top of the disaster that is the actual movie, there's the commentary track. And unlike most commentaries, this actually shows R.Kelly watching Trapped in the Closet, smoking a cigar, and turning around to address the camera behind him. Of course, every once in a while, a second camera will be used, one that faces R.Kelly; not that this stops him from turning around to address the one behind. The content of the commentary seems to indicate that R.Kelly a) loves the shit out of R.Kelly, and b) assumes R.Kelly fans are drooling imbeciles, or at least unfamilliar with even the most basic conventions of film and television work. He marvels at the brilliance of the story; he seems to think that his various plot twists (few of which make any sense, none of which are particularly exciting) are "cliffhangers". He also over-explains things that have been made plain by the hand-holding narration/singing, and reminds the audience to pay attention to things like peoples' names, and the fact that the song rhymes.

And finally - in case all of this wasn't enough - these "Chapters 1-12" are only the first part of a planned 32 chapters. Keep your eyes peeled, folks.

Funny Pictures of Fat Men.

2006-05-29T22:37:00.000-04:00

It's hard not to judge the Simpsons current output against their salad days. Considering it's been close to ten years since the show was in its prime, and at least five since it started producing genuinely unfunny episodes more than once a season, it might be more productive to look at each year's work on its own merits rather than as points on a sharply declining curve.

But I keep watching based on their past quality, and by that standard, last week's episode (the season finale) was dismal and sad. Their nonsensical (and often tired) plots and pointless celebrity walk-ons were far more forgivable while they were still in service of providing reliable, if somewhat cheap laughs. Those days, of course, are past now, and at this point the laughs are few and short-lived. I've despaired that we'd ever see another "22 Short Films About Springfield", or "Marge vs. The Monorail", but isn't is possible they could write something as heart-warming and thoughtful as "Bart Sells His Soul"? At least the finale had the decency not to have Mandy Moore play herself, but it was still very of-the-moment - and as a rule, the Simpsons does a better job when the skewer in general terms rather than particulars ((yes, that was a mildly amusing Brittany Spears send-up; but in five years it won't be funny the way Drederick Tatum or "Corey" - who appeared well after both Coreys, Feldman and Haim, were where-are-they-nows - still are).

It might not have been so bad if the Family Guy episodes that followed weren't so much better. Obviously, FG relies too heavily on middle- to low-brow pop-culture references and (usually crass) slapstick for there to be room for the kind of subtlety and depth found in, say, "Last Exit to Springfield" (if you're wondering, that's the one where Homer becomes union boss). Nor is FG likely to produce supporting characters the equal of Troy McClure, Kent Brockman, or the magnificent Hank Scorpio (conversely, it's hard to imagine the Simpsons ever having as inspiredly bizarre characters as Mayor Adam West, or the Greased-Up Deaf Guy). Still, MacFarlane et al. have developed their show into a brilliantly self-contained world; and like their competition, have gone from banal to superb after only a couple of misfiring seasons. And in doing, have sharpened their own very dark, ugly humour to a point that the Simpsons writers either can't or won't match.

[As an aside - the Simpsons were able to produce their own dark moments of humour - "Homer's Enemy", aka the Grimes episode, was incredibly hilarious for a show that ended with a man being electrocuted to death. But very rarely does the show reach the queasy-making depths Family Guy regularly plumbs. A good example of where they go when they go dark was from the episode "Lisa and the Angel". The townspeople are burning down various scientific centres - a museum, robot lab, and Christian Science Reading Room - and out of the burning lab comes a robot on fire, lamenting, "Why? Why was I programmed to feel pain?"]

What it comes down to, why it is that The Simpsons was so fundamentally great, and why Family Guy will have to settle for being really, really funny, is that Groening &c. aimed to satirize, in the best sense of the word, American society. They've stepping back from that, and are trying, it appears, to satirize, in a less-impressive sense of the word, the sitcom format, specifically, themselves. And it's interesting, at times, and they've got the longevity and the archetypal players (I think the first two seasons had to be bad in order that the following ones could feed on the corpses) to just have episodes that play with the narrative and so on. But most often, they just send the Simpsons to Brazil or Italy or Canada and make some very obvious jokes and have somebody, let's say Moe, say "Whaaaaa!?!" and mug to the 'camera' and hope that that'll pass for funny.

MacFarlane, though, appears to have set his sights a little lower, creating an Archie Bunker-esque ugly American - on the commentary tracks to the 3rd season of Family Guy, he invokes All In The Family more than once - and hits much more regularly. There are too many pointless musical interludes, too many cutaways to one-off gags and too many jokes that rely on the audience recognizing a 15-year-old TV commercial. But even with that, the humour is relentless enough - certainly, one of the keys to both shows' success has been their ability to pack their shows so tightly with jokes that any that are missed or fall flat there's no time to look at your watch - that it's forgiveable. And if that sounds like I'm damning FG with faint praise, it shouldn't - for the moment, there isn't a better sitcom on television. It's just that there used to be one that had no flaws that needed forgiving.

More Grousing about Politics.

2006-05-26T17:45:00.001-04:00

I swear, my next post is about how the Simpsons have totally jumped the shark.

I had written, shortly before the election (for a post about strategic voting that ran out of steam):
"I'm not sure the difference between [the Liberals and Conservatives] is going work out to be much more than rhetorical."

Mmm, this crow is delicious!*

Our fearless leader has put both his feet in it this week; the first was in a childish - or alarming - spat with the national press gallery. In what's become a pattern for conservative governments seemingly everywhere, Harper decided that the media needs to get the government's message typed up clearly, dammit, and skip all that side-show asking questions crap.

I can understand that he's taking his cues from Rove et al. on how to control the news cycle and be in perpetual campaign mode; but how things are going for the Shrub administration right now, I've got to wonder why he's not working to distance himself from that sinking, bombed-out wreck.

Of course, not taking questions you don't like has been a fixture of American Presidential politics since at least Reagan's day; how he got labelled "The Great Communicator" is a bit of a mystery, since he spent very little time talking to the press, and eventually (when the Iran-Contra affair erupted) called reporters "sons of bitches" (yep, there's that folksy charm for you). It's an unwelcome, but not entirely surprising development that it's being imported here, and it's heartening to see that our press isn't so docile as to stand for it.

One would hope that few outside of the National Post (aka, "Asshole Report") and their "readership" will see Harper's petulance for anything other than what it is.

His other own-goal this week involves Iran; according to a typically well-researched Asshole Report front-page story, the Iranian government was planning to force religious minorities (notably Jews) to wear badges identifying them as such. In case anyone didn't get the rammifications, the story was accompanied by a large photo of a pair of German Jews wearing the Nazi-mandated yellow stars. Harper spoke out on this issue; and certainly, that would be a worrying development in country that has already shown itself to be distressingly intolerant of, well, nearly everything.

Or rather, it would be, if it were true.

Now, to counter anyone who says I'm relentlessly negative, let's start with not being snarky. The Iranian government does do some pretty unpleasant things, and their president makes outlandish claims on a semi-regular basis, so it's not unimaginable that he might have said something along those line. Also good: Harper, clearly, read a newspaper, or at least looked at the front page of it, which is more than can be said for President Junior, by his own admission. It may be that someone on his staff just gave him the gist of the article, but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he read it, maybe even the whole thing, all by himself. And we're all very proud of him for it.

Unfortunately, Mr. Harper still needs to work on the whole 'reading critically' thing; when one paper claims a front-page scoop that no other news source has any wind of, it's probably best to be a little skeptical until it's been confirmed by an outside source. And you'd think the Prime Minister would have access to some pretty good other sources on foreign affairs - for example, CSIS, I've heard, occasionally looks into things that go on in other countries, and Harper's probably got the phone number of somebody in their office he could ask about that kind of thing. There's also, it turns out, a whole government department with Foreign Affairs right in its name, and I'm pretty sure double-checking hysteria-inducing newspaper articles is the kind of thing they could do, sometimes even the same day.

Sadly, he didn't think to check with anyone else before speaking, and voila!, he (and by extension, Canada) looks like a horse's ass, and our ambassador in Iran gets a nasty phone call from their government. (That part concerns me less, actually - considering their government's likely complicity in the death of a Canadian journalist, and their unwillingness to even appear contrite, I'd say they owe us some diplomatic slack.)

I can't say I'm terribly sad that the Conservatives are having a rough week; more, please.

Speaking of embarrassing corrections: Lederhosen Lucil & Socalled - yes, at Babylon; no, not yesterday. Wednesday, June 28th, still $8 adv./$10 door. Clearly I need to drink more coffee, or possibly much less.

*There was one issue that I thought, in my naivete, the Conservatives might abet themselves on, and that was on devolution of power from PM's office to the House. In particular, I thought it might help to reverse the annoying trend towards 'presidentializing' our elections - ie., making them referendums on the party leaders' personalities. (Incidentally, the best suggestion I've heard to improve our election campaigns came from Thomas Axworthy of Queen's University, who suggested replacing the leaders' debates with issue-specific ones for various ministers and critics from the portfolios responsible.)

Alright already

2006-05-19T23:40:00.000-04:00

In case you were wondering when, if ever, I was planning to shut the hell up about the damn Sopranos discs, it's now, because the first of them finally showed up Monday. So far: not nearly as good as S1, but they seem to be working up for a good long story arc.

We did also get through Quentin Tarantino's surprising Jackie Brown last week; I'd seen most of his other stuff previously, and usually like it well enough. Or more accurately, I'd enjoyed Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and both Kill Bill installments, thought True Romance* was amusing but hardly great, and thought Natural Born Killers* nearly as odious as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (the latter film, however, has the advantage of not being pretentious twaddle.) But Jackie Brown has several advantages over his other films: the two main leads (Robert Forster and Pam Grier) don't spend their time shouting or quipping at each other, but talk like grown-ups; his thugs (Samuel Jackson and Robert De Niro) aren't presented as noble or even terribly intelligent; and almost all of the violence occurs offscreen (to the point that when Bridget Fonda's character is abruptly gunned down by De Niro, it's quite surprising and even a little horrifying. For a single killing to have that effect in a Tarantino film is quite something.)

Two things on the negative side: a) Samuel Jackson's hair is really distracting, because it's just so awful, and b) Briget Fonda. Sure, she can pull off playing an obnoxious stoner, but it kinda felt like she wasn't really acting.

Recently noted things:
- the great Lederhosen Lucil will be at Babylon next Thursday opening for klezmer-hiphop artist Socalled ($10)
- Casey Comeau & the Wilderness Club will be at the Black Sheep Inn on Sunday, June 4th in the afternoon, possibly with another artist, although who knows. I'm just the drummer.
- the Golden Famile will be at Babylon for some sort of radio conference show on June 5th, possibly with another artist, although who knows. I'm just the drummer.
- the new High Hat is finally up, and well worth reading.
- International Slayer Day (06-06-06) is fast approaching. I recommend Reign in Blood (it's the one with "Angel of Death"), although South of Heaven has better riffage, and Seasons in the Abyss is also pretty great.
- Arrested Development's third and final season comes out on DVD mid-June. I'm hoping one of the extras is an hour of David Cross cursing out and/or laying a beating on some Fox executives.

*yes, I know he only wrote these. They've still got his grubby pawprints on 'em.

The Banks round-up, again.

2006-05-03T17:35:00.000-04:00

When I started into Iain Banks' Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram, his first non-fiction book, it gave me the idea to write a brief review of his books, both as Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks (his nom de plume for his science fiction works). It was interesting to get a sense of the author as a person after having read (as far as I can tell) all of his major works of fiction (save one; see below). He comes through pretty clearly in his writing, but the differences between his protagonists and the non-fiction narrator (and Raw Spirit has some autobiographical elements) are quite pronounced.

He seems to have stabilized as a writer in recent years; his latest books (Look to Windward, The Business, The Algebraist, Dead Air) have had a similar calmness - the stylistic experimentalism of The Bridge and the space opera action sets of Consider Phlebas are replaced by a style I can only describe as being what airport books in a much, much better world would look like.

That probably sounds a little dismissive; I don't mean it to. Maybe I'm so used to his proudly leftist political philosophy that I take it as a given; it also helps that I happen to agree with most of his views, so unlike many writers (especially sci-fi writers, who can be an unpleasantly libertarian lot) I'm not spending the whole book trying to ignore or fight the unspoken world-view that lurks around the corner of each page (or, in the case of someone like Heinlein, screams from cover to cover).

So, here we go - starting with Iain Banks (the non-genre fiction): As I said, his style isn't quite literary fiction; he tends towards first-person narration, and with the exception of the Bridge and Feersum Enjinn, doesn't gussy it up with unreliable narrators or quirky voices or anything.
The Wasp Factory (1984) If you've read only one Banks, this is probably it. In many places, extremely unpleasant - there's a great deal of cruelty to animals, three murders of young children (described in varying degrees of detail) and assorted bizarre behaviour. The style is a little rough, but it's a brisk, exciting read. Recommended by Mike Stipe and Peter Buck during an interview on MuchMusic back in '86. B+

Walking on Glass (1985) When I read this, I loved it, but in hindsight it's a little weak; three seemingly unconnected stories about a young man in love with a mysterious woman, a paranoid schizophrenic and a grouchy old man trapped in a prison-castle. There's a vaguely hinted-at science fictionish element to the third set of chapters (the book is broken into six or seven chapters, each of which is subdivided into a section on each of the three characters.) They do pull together, somewhat, right at the end; I will admit that it's done far more gracefully than, for instance, the ending of Zadie Smith's White Teeth. Not bad, but a bit of a stumble. C+

The Bridge (1986) Much, much better. A man has a car crash on a bridge, goes into a coma, dreams about dreaming and an enormous bridge that stretches off to the horizon in both directions. Sections of the book are written in a very heavy accent, which makes it fun to read out loud; other sections explore the man's subconscious in rather disturbing ways. Violent, exciting, sexy, funny, name-drops Los Lobos and The Rezillos. A

Espedair Street (1987) The story of a former songwriter and bassist in a prog rock band of international renown. The book follows three threads: his years starting out and becoming famous and rich, the week or so preceding the 'current' action, and his sitting up waiting for a train to take him out of Edinburgh trying to decide if his chosen course of action is a wise one. Clever, funny, and ultimately heart-warming - one thing I've failed to mention previously, is that Banks is capable, like no other author I've read, of writing a very satisfying ending that's neither bleak nor cloying. This book and The Bridge are particularly good on this front. A-

Canal Dreams (1989) Ouch. I didn't even finish this. Awful, awful, awful. On the plus side, his first female protagonist, which he got much better at in later books (notably Against A Dark Background and The Business) Sections I read: F

The Crow Road (1991) The one I'd recommend, I think, to most people as the best starting point for Banks. It's got the requisite 'where are we now?' narrative shifting (the point of view will change from last year to now to something written in a diary from the mid-70's with little notice), the endless pop-culture references, and some sexy bits. Also some Tory-bashing. Ultimately, it's a murder mystery (or is it?) but it's also a sort-of-not-really coming-of-age story, if 'age' in this case means 25. It was made into a BBC miniseries, and the parts of which I've seen were very good. A-

Complicity (1993) Long story short: a treatise on the morality of dispensing divine justice ourselves. A series of nasty, poetic-justice kind of murders of CEO's, judges and so on, are interspersed among the chapters about a chain-smoking, mildly amoral journalist (one of my favourite of Banks' many scoundrel protagonists). One of my favourite of his books, I've realized, and yet I don't own it. A very mature work. A+

Whit (1995) Strange, and good, but mostly strange. Follows a young woman from a reclusive religious society as she travels to London to visit her famous sister. Doesn't make any grand statements, is frequently quite amusing, would probably make a pretty good film. Nothing special, though. B-

A Song of Stone (1997) Set in a war, in Europe, probably sometime in the 20th Century; follows an aristocratic man and his wife pretending to be refugees fleeing the combat. I'm drawing a blank on a lot of it, mostly because it was frequently a very unpleasant read. If it makes any grand points, I don't remember them. C-

The Business (1999) Again with the multiple timelines: this one deals with a massive, ancient company (dating back to the end of the Roman Empire), and specifically a woman fairly high up in it, and her dealing with two major incidents (an embezzlement investigation and a deal with a Himalayan kingdom), only not boring. Like I said above: it's an airport novel - not a lot of thinking required, some very funny parts, and a good crackling pace. The protagonist, in particular, is fantastic. B

Dead Air (2002) A shock jock in London gets involved with a mobster's girlfriend, other exciting stuff ensues. This would probably also make a pretty good film, unlike the Business, which would require so much back-story you'd want to throw up. B

And Iain M. Banks: Banks' style doesn't change that much when he writes sf; obviously, he drops the pop references and tends to put in more action. But beyond that, his characters still crack wise at each other, drink heavily and generally live well.
Consider Phlebas (1985) Okay, not so much in this one: it's set during a long and large space war between the Idirans (large, 3-legged imperialists) and the Culture (a communist, decentralized society governed, such as it is, largely by sentient computers). It's a pretty good book; it's more interesting because the main character is actually fighting for Idirans, and the Culture come across as the villains (despite the fact that he most often returns to it as his setting of choice). B-

The Player of Games (1988) A master game player (hey!) from the Culture travels to a distant empire where one's place in society is based on how one plays a staggeringly complicated game that's run once every four years. A somewhat ham-handed political tract, but also a fun read. C+

The State of The Art (1989) The Culture visits Earth, ca. 1978. Did I say The Player of Games was ham-handed? This is less subtle. Possibly because I tend to hold similar views to Banks, it's refreshing to read long speeches pointing out that human society seems specifically arranged to emphasize misery and produce the worst possible outcomes. Also features the best two-word description of humanity I've yet come across: bigoted and gullible. (This refers only to the novella; the paperback edition, which I don't own and have never read, includes other short stories.) C+

Use of Weapons (1990) Like Complicity, at least a portion of this deals with our imperfect attempts at justice; the main narrative deals with a military specialist's coming to grips with a particularly gruesome past. Also a Culture novel (he's a contractor for them); surprisingly funny for a book in which major characters are skinned alive. B-

Against A Dark Background (1993) His first non-Culture science-fiction book. A woman is pursued, from birth, by a deranged religious cult convinced that her death will bring their church into glory; she, meanwhile, is searching for the last of the powerful but unreliable Lazy Guns (Banks has the Unfortunate Tendency to Unnecessarily Capitalize things he Considers Important; he's also often too clever by half.) Again- funny, violent, a real ripping yarn, but doesn't ask too much of the reader. Probably his best novel with a middle initial. A-

Feersum Enjinn (1994) Buddy decided to get experimental again. In basic terms, it's a story about palace intrigue in the far-distant future of Earth, viewed from two or three quite distinct narrators. One of them, from which the title is taken, writes phonetically, with an accent and a variety of abbreviations he's made up (bags, for instance, which means boys and girls). The story is reasonably good, the formal trickery is very clever. A problem with this, and all of his subsequent science fiction novels, is that he builds things up to the point that when he reveals the Feersum Enjinn, you wonder why all the hoopla. It's far more pronounced in the next four novels, though. C

Excession (1996) Not much to recommend here. A return to the Culture, and introduces one of my favourite of his alien species, called The Affront (an astonishingly vicious and dangerous group - also hilarious, in the same way a friendly, far-right wing Texan with an anti-aircraft gun can be hilarious). The story isn't terribly interesting, and doesn't resolve itself well. The first of his three 'boring' books. D+

Inversions (1998) Honestly, I couldn't tell you what this was about. Except that wow, it's boring. D-

Look To Windward (2000) Christ, dude, what happened to you? Head injury? Dredging up an event referenced in the appendix to Consider Phlebas (the destruction of a star by the Culture during their war with the Iridans), this story involves a remarkably long-term revenge plan hatched by the remnants of the species destroyed in said event. It's not bad, but, like with the previous two novels, his characters aren't memorable and the plots aren't developed interestingly enough to hold the interest even of a fan like me. D-

The Algebraist (2004) Whew, a bit better. Another non-Culture story, and again, sadly, the main characters aren't exactly riveting. The background and setting are very good, though, and he creates, for the first time in three books, a villain worth the name, and interesting non-human species. It's a lot longer than it needs to be, though. C-

To be honest, I enjoyed Raw Spirit more than anything else he's done since the mid-90's; he's again funny, and hedonistic, and political, and he's got a subject to throw his cleverness against. It happens that it's a subject I'm interested in, and one that touches on Scotland and getting drunk, both of which he writes about in such an infectious passion it's hard not to want to give one or both of them a try, preferably immediately. Here's hoping he gets more projects like this thrown his way. clink!

You should see mah new house-ah.

2006-05-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

Yes, we are finished with the moving now. We're still unpacking, but it's getting; so feel free to drop by New Crammit Hall (aka Crammit Hall 2: Nerds in Paradise). Also, Tristram Shandy was goddamn brilliant. It's at least as good as 24 Hour Party People (the previous Winterbottom/Steve Coogan film) and maybe even better than Adaptation (which similarly attempts to film an 'unfilmable' book, and similarly spends more time talking about the industry). I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I strongly doubt that there'll be a film anywhere near as good released this year.

There's been one contender, however, for the #2 spot already, namely Thank You For Smoking. While it's certainly easy to lampoon pro-smoking advocates, the film works for its laughs (and bitter jabs). Aaron Eckhart (whom both Jen & Jessica expressed some lust for) plays a tobacco-industry lobbyist with sparkling charm, and is surrounded by an able cast (particularly the Hollywood scenes, featuring Rob Lowe as more-zen-than-thou agent and Adam Brody as an especially unctuous, and occasionally surreal, assistant.) Well worth paying full admission.

Zip has decided to start shipping a bunch of Jessica's more idiosyncratic picks - this past week has given us The Princess Diaries, Spice World and today, Brigadoon. I skipped the first but we watched the second on Monday - of course, it's a stupid movie - and it's quite entertaining at times. The number of odd cameos (from the likes of Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Elvis Costello, Jennifer Saunders, and The Wire's Dominic West) is kind of mind-boggling; I guess there was either a lot of money involved, or else a bunch of British actors realized that of all the cheap cashing-in projects they could be involved in, this would be the least objectionable (if nothing else, their kids could watch it). The actors most often on screen (Richard E. Grant, Alan Cummings, Mark McKinney) don't look like they're having nearly as much fun, possibly because their scenes involve the "plot" in some way.

I do want to say, Zip had better ship me that first Sopranos Season 2 disc soon, or I'm going to go batty. There's only so many upbeat flights of whimsy a man can watch before he needs to see something with brutal beatings and gratuitous swearing, and by "so many" I mean, two, maybe three, tops.

(afterword: Woody Allen's Zelig was just mailed - crisis deepening...)

Irish go home!

2006-03-17T17:07:00.000-05:00

(the title of this post, by the way, was the answer a friend of mine gave when asked what "Erin go Bragh" meant.)

I'm going to express my feelings on St. Paddy's day with, in my mind, the best quote on the subject, from The Simpsons (in the voice of Kent Brockman).

"St Patrick's Day - when everyone's a little bit Irish, except for the gays, and the Italians."

I did completely forget to follow my usual tradition of wearing orange on the 17th, just to see if anyone knows enough to get offended (so far, just one person, and I've been doing it almost every year since 1997.)

So, as mentioned in the last post, we watched some Dr. Who this week. Yes, we are that nerdy. In our defence, it was "The Androids of Tara", one of the funny-and-not-overly-embarrassing Tom Baker series from the late 70's, and part of the larger "Key to Time" story arc (which has some genuinely awful sections.) I'd been hoping that the commentary (featuring Tom Baker, Mary Tamm [aka Romana mk.1] and the director) would be amusing and/or edifying, but, alas, it was a bit like listening to three old theatre people talk about something they were in 20 years earlier, when they were in their prime, which they now are most decidedly not. Wait, it was exactly like that. I turned it off when they started talking about how much they were impressed with the special effects in Gladiator.

As an aside, I should mention that I used to be a pretty big Dr. Who fan as a kid and up until I was 14 or so; then I discovered better, 'serious' speculative fiction films (Silent Running, Blade Runner) and writing (Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, Frank Herbert, etc.) I also shoveled up a lot of crap, like Robert Heinlein (who writes a good adventure yarn but tends towards fascist politics and irritatingly self-righteous libertarian protaganists) and Piers Anthony (most of his work just makes me want to give him a solid cock-punching). I still like well-written sf now and then - I'm just enough out of touch with it that I'm not sure what to look for. Well, besides Iain M. Banks (and it appears my big post* about him has been eaten by Blogger, which upsets me slightly. Long story short: get Complicity, Against A Dark Background, Espedair Street and The Crow Road; under no circumstances get, read, or even look at the cover of Canal Dreams.)

The next film up, likely, is Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train(s), and I nearly jumped up with glee when I saw that. I've only seen it twice now (once in film class, and once on video), but it's a film that sticks with you. Three interlocking stories are shown, in sequence (an idea lifted by Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction), of two Japanese tourists, an Italian woman, and three working-class guys (one of whom is Joe Strummer) in Memphis. All three stories are, in essence: the day passes, then they stay in a seedy hotel (where the desk clerk is Screamin' Jay Hawkins), and during the night, a gunshot is heard. It's a simple enough story, like many of Jarmusch's other films - three guys get thrown in jail, and break out; a young man travels west to find work but finds trouble and death instead; a contract killer runs into problems with his boss; several people drink coffee and smoke cigarettes - but made with so few of the features of Hollywood films that it's startling, and once you get used to it, quite enjoyable.

Speaking of which: we're off to see Tristram Shandy tonight. Prepare for gushing at the geniuses that are Steve Coogan and Michael Winterbottom.

*in the spirit of which, I think I may resurrect my album buying guides, which I wrote for those few artists whose entire oevre I've heard. Everybody loves a list, right?

Crammit Hall II: Crammit Haller

2006-03-13T21:51:00.000-05:00

So, you may be aware of our upcoming move out of downtown to the wilds of Mechanicsville (I've decided that I'm not going to euphemistically call it Hintonburg or Parkdale, because that's not what it's called. It's Mechanicsville, it's dodgy, suck it up.) It's kind of exciting, because it's a neighbourhood I know only slightly (more as a place to pass through or by) and those are getting rare for me, although I'm not brave enough to try moving to Vanier (yet).

Our new place looks pretty sweet: washer & dryer right in the kitchen, a gas fireplace (strangely and sadly, electric stove, though), and a nicely sized balcony off the living room. It does lack the charm (and built-in bookcases, and 12-foot ceilings, and foot-thick stone walls) of Crammit Hall Classic, but that charm is preventing us from saving money or taking vacations, and we'll be happier with the extra dosh and mass-produced windows that open without the help of a crowbar.

We'll also be very happy to get away from the noise of downtown; I think we're starting to get stressed out from all the yahoos ya-hooing at all hours and the endless traffic. We will miss having a grocery store across the street, and being within walking distance of our favourite pubs and shops and so on, but since we're moving partly to save money, it's probably for the best we'll be staying in a little more.

So, other details: it's a two-bedroom/two-bath apartment, on the second floor of a building that looks maybe 20 or 30 years old, maybe half-again as big as where we are now; bad but plentiful cupboard space, and laminate instead of hardwood (I had been a hardass about that for many years, but eventually decided that I'd rather not have to leave the house to do laundry than nitpick on an aesthetic issue, particularly when I'm only renting). The street we're on is one block long, which appeals to me for some reason, and it's mostly little wooden houses in varying states of repair; I kind of doubt they're getting snapped up by gentrifiers quite yet, but soon.

Sorry if that all was a little boring. We've recently escaped the grips of February Crabby-Assed Days, which runs every year from Feb. 1st through 37th; activities include the staying in, the grunting or yelling, and the finding of fault in everyone but yourself. If we've been a jerk to you recently, please remember, it's all part of the fun.

We have seen a few great films, though - Yellow Submarine, which I still can't believe Jessica hadn't seen before (and she loved, completely loved), and the 1940 Howard Hawks comedy His Girl Friday. If you wanted to show "they don't make 'em like they used to", this is a fine example to point to - Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell's repartee is brilliant and fast - I mean, blink-and-you'll-miss-it fast. There's also a few very knowing jokes - Grant says "the last man who crossed me was Archie Leach, a week before he cut his own throat" (Archie Leach is Cary Grant's real name), and describes Ralph Bellamy's character as looking "like that fellow from the movies...you know, Ralph Bellamy."

We also just finished Some Like It Hot (Tony Curtis & Jack Lemmon in not-convincing drag, Marilyn Monroe falling out of her dress), which isn't quite as funny or sharp as the aforementioned His Girl. For one thing, Jack Lemmon is in it. I don't like Jack Lemmon, with the possible exception of him as Shelley "The Machine" Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross - and there, it's because he plays such a completely unlikeable, bitterly washed-up bastard that I can't help enjoying his endless comeuppance (at the hands of Kevin Spacey's equally unlikeable office manager, who delivers my favourite line in non-Cohen Brothers cinema, when asked by Lemmon why Spacey's shopping him to the police: "Because I don't like you.") There isn't anything specifically wrong with Some Like It Hot other than that, it's just that the humour's a lot more broad and Curtis & Monroe (or Lemmon & Curtis, for that matter) have none of the comedic timing and chemistry that Grant and Russell are so blessed with.

Zip's been sending a raft of older films to us recently - on deck is another Hawks classic, The Big Sleep (which I've heard is one of Bogart's best roles, and I just discovered that the screenplay was by William Faulkner), and we've also got Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. I'm not sure if this is making up for the month or so where all we seemed to get were cartoons or documentaries, but I'm getting an itch for something with explosions or Tony Soprano.

(Just got an email advising that "Dr. Who: The Androids of Tara" just shipped. Kick ass!)

New Things, and Older Things.

2006-02-10T23:48:00.000-05:00

A couple of updates on the Banks post:

1. Inspired by his descriptions of the various single-malts, I've picked up a bottle of 15-year old ("Mariner", as it's called) Bowmore whisky (whisky is Scotch, whiskey is Irish). My reasoning for the brand choice was that it's from Islay (a particularly good region, home to large-flavoured whiskies), while not being nearly as peaty as Laphroaig (another Islay) which I like, but has more of a bite to it than I enjoy. He also speaks highly, in case you're interested, of Talisker, Macallan (of course) and Edradour. He also loves Laphroaig, but points out that lots of people (even those who love their whisky) can't stand it.

2. My comment "Christ, dude, what happened to you? Head injury?" turns out to have been in phenomenally (accidental) bad taste. Banks relates a story about crashing (and totalling) his wife's car in the summer of 1998; he did walk away from the accident, but did get a nasty bump on the head when the car rolled. Still, Look to Windward did totally suck.

Balance is so important to find. Those who read my - ahem - reaction to Rent were probably waiting for the other shoe to drop. And drop it did. We started watching Gus Van Sant's Last Days together on Wednesday night; during a 5-minute receding shot while Kurt Cobain-stand-in Blake (Michael Pitt) sets up a big racket with guitars, drums and an Echoplex, Jess made the jerk-off motion at me and walked out of the room. Now, I'll admit, it's not the easiest film to love. Out of the film's 97 minutes, there's probably 15 minutes' worth of dialogue - almost none of it from the protagonist (or rather, none of his dialogue is audible - he mumbles incoherently and subliminally almost the entire length of the film). There's also next to no plot; vague hints are given that Blake is at the end of his rope, that an unnamed woman has hired a private detective to check up on him or just find him for reasons left unstated, and that his house is occupied by shiftless moochers whose reaction to their friend and benefactor's suicide is to worry that suspicion will turn towards them, and who promptly leave town. Against this, however, the film is simply beautiful; the editing (or better yet, lack of it - many of the best scenes of the film are single shots several minutes long), the framing (again, quite often the action, such as it is, is put to the margins of the screen, or cut off), and especially the sound, which is just phenomenal.

Anyway - like I said, I'm not going to fault anyone for not liking Last Days, and generally, if you're going to hate it, you're going to hate it a lot. And we've got a couple of older films (His Girl Friday and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) coming up, plus the possibly-soap-operaish fourth season of Six Feet Under, so at least we'll be on the same page.

Which reminds me: We were finishing off the second and final season of the Showtime series Dead Like Me this past week. It follows a young woman named George who, in the pilot, is killed on her lunch-hour by a toilet seat falling from a Russian space station; she's then made a Reaper, and has to go around collecting souls, assigned to her by a perpetually grumpy Mandy Patinkin. However, it doesn't pay, so she still has to work (she lands a job at the temp agency she'd been working for when she died), and she spends about half the first season skulking around her old house freaking out her family (who don't recognize her).

The show could have used some focus, though. It followed her increasingly irrelevant family right to the end, and while various random deaths and the collecting of souls drove each episode (making unfavourable comparisons to Six Feet Under inevitable) often it's a sideline to her learning some valuable lesson about life, and then the needle on the schmaltz-o-meter leaps into the red. It does aim for humour for a few moments in each episode, but it's rare that there's a memorable joke or a genuinely affecting scene. At the risk of sounding like a shill, it's not HBO, it's just TV.

The bloody election

2006-01-19T22:42:00.000-05:00

I'd written a lengthier (I know, but it really was) post on the subject of strategic voting (against it, specifically), but I've discarded it after some thought. Instead, here's some well-written posts over at Tilting At Windmills (which, after some surfing around, I've found to be one of the more astute of the Canadian political blogs.) It's satisfying to finally not be only reading about American politics - yes, there some great US political commentary blogs (and that's not to mention The Rude Pundit, who does swear a lot more than most, but also wrote some great posts after visiting New Orleans, and some photos), but I'm not American, and most likely neither are you. The only other Canadian political blogger I've paid any attention to is Liberal attack poodle Warren Kinsella, who once kicked me out of a band; he did, however, include my brother and me in the thank-you's in his book, so, I probably shouldn't hold it against him. Also, I was a very sucky drummer at the time, so I can't really blame him. On the other hand, his current taste in music, to judge from his top 10 lists, is...not...good.

Anyhow, I'm very pleased to see this campaign coming to an end. The three main ROC parties (I don't count the Bloc because I don't get to see their campaigning) have run advertisements so awful, so amateurish that I long to hear one of those US-style attack ads ("...But Senator Jenkins wants to let crack dealers into public schools. Do you support that?") I've also wondered what's happening with their promises - after reading this analysis of the GST cut vs. the income tax cut, I've come to the conclusion that the Tories have absolutely nothing, zero, in their platform that I can agree with (I'm sorry, that's not quite true - they've said they'll cut the "Right of Landing Fee", aka the head tax, and work on accepting foreign credentials, but then so does just about every other party). The Liberals have made some frankly bizarre promises - the one about never using the Notwithstanding Clause sticks out - um, were you planning to beforehand? And the NDP are, as usual, disappointing in their meekness - it's one thing to know you're going place third, but it's quite another to aim for third.

So, I'll probably be voting NDP, partly because it's what I always do, but also because Mr. Dewar does seem committed, informed and decent. There are two other candidates I like, both of whom have very hard-to-spell last names (and it's a quarter after twelve, and I'm tired) for the Green and Marijuana parties, and I'd encourage anyone (in Ottawa Centre) still undecided to cast their votes to one of these three.

To be young, and in love, and in Ottawa...

2006-01-10T23:00:00.000-05:00

We here at Crammit Hall are a cynical bunch. Or at least, this half of us is. But, we do have our moments of romanticism now and again. In that spirit, and also after some hectoring, we've decided to get married. We don't have a date, or a location, or an invite list, or...let's face it, we haven't agreed on anything. I'm still holding out hope for a Deadwood-themed ceremony, though ("Do you, Jessica, take this cocksucker...")

We also spent the weekend in the company of Jen and her lovely new James, who, despite a few cute-as-puppy-poop public displays of affection, were well-behaved and most lovely company. Speaking of which: we saw three films this weekend, two in the aforementioned company. The first, Rent (it was Jessica's choice! Really! She forced us!) would probably be best left unreviewed by me. Suffice to say, it rests in the company of Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Matrix Revolutions and Species; ie, among the worst, most unforgiveable crap I've ever seen. Sorry, dear.

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is a fascinating documentary by Errol Morris, consisting primarily of interviews with four subjects - a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener (he makes animals out of bushes and hedges), a biologist specializing in the naked mole-rat, and a robot designer. Now, I personally found the last two the most interesting just in terms of their fields, but as the film moved on, all four of their areas of expertise seemed to overlap, or at least to have regions of clear similarities. Morris often emphasised this by having, for instance, footage of hedge-trimming voiced-over by the robot designer.

In late 2003, I saw Denis Arcand's The Barbarian Invasions, and was extremely impressed; I considered it a close 2nd or 3rd to Lost in Translation for my favourite of the year, in fact. But it wasn't until this weekend that I saw The Decline of the American Empire, his 1986 film dealing with the same group of characters - ex-hippies (and a couple of younger friends), now bourgeois fauculty in the history department at (presumably) the University of Montreal. It's not as good as the later film, although it does have a narrower focus (the characters pretty much only talk about love, sex, and history; Arcand doesn't try to highlight every problem facing modern Quebec while telling a heartwarming story about family and death), but it is much better than, say, The Big Chill, which it invariably gets compared to.

Arriving in the mail this week: a Jean Renoir one-two punch of The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. Who's ready for a lockdown?

Oh, the lists.

2006-01-03T21:00:00.000-05:00

Five Records:
Low, The Great Destroyer
Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree
Wilco, Kicking Television
Buried Inside, Chronoclast
Fembots, The City

Five Records that might have made the list if I'd heard them:
MIA, Arular
Sufjan Stevens, Illinoise
Broken Social Scene
The Flaps
Meshuggah, Catch Thirty-Three

One that might have made the list if it had been two or three songs shorter:
Death Cab for Cutie, Plans

One that would have made my 2004 list, had I made one, and had I bought the record in 2004:
Bobby Bare Jr., From The End of Your Leash

I didn't buy a lot of records this year, and so this does feel a pointless exercise. It also explains why I couldn't come up with a top 10. Still, who doesn't love a year-end list? Seriously, though, I've started to worry that I've passed the point where I'm excited about new music and will only pick up older records (or new ones by bands I already like). I think this is mostly because Art Brut (who are getting lots of good press) did nothing for me. I probably shouldn't be worried, though - if my list was 10 items long, it'd pretty much have to include things like Black Dice, DangerDoom, and Prefuse 73 (none of which I'd consider especially conservative in sound and style.)

Five films I enjoyed*:
The Constant Gardener
The Wedding Crashers
Kung-Fu Hustle
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Curse of the Were-Rabbit

(*which is not to say that I think they're the best, just the ones I liked the most)

Five I didn't see yet that I'd expect to hit that list:
40 Year-old Virgin
C.R.A.Z.Y.
Tropical Malady
Oldboy
The Best of Youth

Two that stunk:
Constantine (aka "How I Quit Smoking With The Help Of The Best Satan Ever")
Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (aka "At Least It's Over")

I did go to see a fair number of movies this year, although it was pretty scattershot; some very good stuff side by side with, as you can see, some deeply awful crap. I'm afraid I don't have much of an excuse for the drivel, either. I did just see Capote on Monday; and it was excellent and features a great performance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman (whom Jessica seems unable to identify no matter how many times I point out which films he's been in).

Further to my complaint about my taste in music: It does worry me a little that two of my favourite films of the year were in the top ten in terms of ticket sales. I could argue that the success of the Wedding Crashers and Mr. & Mrs. Smith represents an improvement in the public's tastes, but then Star Wars actually was number one, so that theory falls pretty flat. Again, I'm pretty sure my tastes aren't ossifying (I saw three French New Wave films this year!), and as long as Zip doesn't keep sending me damn cartoons (curse you, Sealab 2021!) instead of Antonioni, I won't worry in 2006.

Four great current tv shows:
House
Family Guy
Robson Arms
Arrested Development

Would have been on the list if it hadn't spent all year blowing donkeys:
The Simpsons

It's been easy to say the Simpsons have been going downhill for years now; it's also generally been untrue until fairly recently. Why is it flailing so? The basic problem, of course, is that it's not very funny - it used to be the case that episodes with nonsensical plots and pointless celebrity appearances could be forgiven on the grounds that they were still often hilarious. But the jokes keep getting weaker, and the stories are rarely funny (let alone clever), and jarring stabs at hipness (like Marge saying "triple-x throwdown") pile up, and it becomes harder and harder to sit through an episode.

There was also a recent bit of ugliness; after an unusual swipe at the Simpsons in a Family Guy episode, Groening et al swiped back, referring to FG as plagarized. The charge isn't unreasonable, but they've made it before (and better), and it would have felt less petty if it hadn't appeared in such a rote, uninspired episode ("The Simpsons are going to Italy!").

Five great concerts:
Khanate
McLusky
J'envoie
B.A. Johnson
Belle Orchestre

My favourite concerts I played at:
Golden Famile @ Music For Cats showcase (Babylon, June)
Centretown Wilderness Club @ Red Fay cd release (Irene's, July)
Centretown Wilderness Club @ Casey Comeau's b-day (Club SAW, August)
Golden Famile w/ B.A. Johnson (the Avant-Garde Bar, October)
Unnamed band @ The Happening, (Club SAW, January)

It's been a pretty good year as far as playing shows went - I try to balance out going to concerts vs. playing them, and between my two bands it came out reasonably even. I'm hoping next year is a little more heavily weighted towards performing, although tentative plans are in place for both groups to record (and if there's one thing I love as much as playing live, it's recording.)

Five non-pop-culture things that made 2005 excellent:
the moving in with Jessica
the new band
the not working at a call centre anymore
the sweet, sweet lovin'
and the browned butter.

2005-12-14T17:14:00.000-05:00

We saw The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe this past weekend, Jen, Jessica and I. Now, I didn't read the Narnia books as a kid, so I don't have the emotional attachment to the stories that many people do; I also didn't finish the series (I gave up early in the fourth book). However, I did find the first couple of books quite enjoyable as kidlit goes - better, for instance, than the Harry Potter books I've read - and if I caught the Christian allegory at the time, I don't remember it. So I tried to watch the movie on its own terms, though, and not just catalogue where it wasn't like the book.

First off, right from the opening pre-credit scene, it's obvious that we're meant to dislike Edmund (the second-youngest). And sure, he's a wussy little irritant, but his older siblings treat him with such contempt, and are themselves such toffs, that I started off thinking that he was the guy to root for. As it turns out, of course, he's got the serious character flaws of siding with the bad guy (Tilda Swinton, by far the best character and actor in the whole mess) and enjoying Turkish delights (which I find repulsive, although I'm told if you've only ever had Big Turk bars, they're about as representative of the real thing as cheese doodles are of 7 year-old cheddar). Edmund is the only character to evolve significantly in the movie; Susan warms slightly, and Peter drops a little bit of his jagoff attitude, but by and large, they (and Lucy, the youngest) are still the same little pissants at the end, when they're crowned kings and queens of Narnia, for some reason we're left to guess at.

The CGI effects are often impressive - the centaurs and fauns are particularly convincing, and the battle at the end is exciting enough - but the animals' faces didn't work for me at all. The fox was the worst of the bunch (he looked like a Muppet), but even Aslan didn't fare too well; essentially, major characters with inexpressive faces = big liability. It doesn't help that Liam Neeson voices Aslan without significant inflection.

It wasn't an awful movie, but it certainly suffers by comparison to the Lord of the Rings (and the comparison is an unavoidable one to make). The only point I can think of in favour of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is that it'll probably look better on the small screen (which is where I'd recommend waiting to see it.)

Also saw The Kid Stays in the Picture, a documentary on actor-turned-studio-executive Robert Evans. Evans' career as a producer - which ran from the mid-60's to the mid-80's, then picked up again by the early nineties - makes for a largely interesting story, but he narrates the story (it's based, apparently, on a book he wrote) and he's got a highly irritating style of talking. "Was it exciting? You bet it was. Did I make some bad moves? Sure." STOP ASKING YOURSELF STUPID QUESTIONS, YOU WANKER. I did enjoy his description of Ali McGraw (briefly his wife, before she ran off with Steve McQueen during the filming of Peckinpah's The Getaway) as "snot-nosed", though.

And finally got Scanners from zip; I'd seen the poster for it when I was 9 or so (whenever it came out, I guess) and the thought seeing someone's head explode didn't really grab me; I was still mostly interested in the Thunderbirds and Star Wars. Since then, it's been sort of a background interest; I've wanted to get through more of Cronenberg's early work (but I'm far more excited about Videodrome, if only to see the acting debut of former Ontario cabinet member David Tsubuchi), and anything with "Seeing Things" star Louis Del Grande has got to be at least a little worthwhile. As it turns out, of course, Del Grande gets only three lines in before his head explodes.

To be honest, it's pretty disappointing. There's only the one exploding head, most of the acting is pretty bad (Michael Ironside does a good job as the villian though) and it just doesn't have enough of a Cronenberg feel to it. Where, I ask you, is the fetishization of technology? Where are the thinly-veiled surrogate sexual organs? C'mon.

It's the little things, or, hedonism

2005-11-20T22:59:00.000-05:00

Big Night is a lovely little film that's largely about food, but also about the bonds of brotherhood and the problem of artistic integrity. In some ways, it's not that great - Stanley Tucci, whom I dislike more with each film I see him in (despite loving said films) drops his accent every few lines; Ian Holm is wildly miscast as the brothers' rival restauranteur Pascal (and is either awfully written or simply decides to give an absurd, overblown performance); and Minnie Driver's in it. To counter that, there are a few really good cooking scenes, Allison Janney, and the oh-so-true line, "Eating good food brings you closer to God." (Well, obviously, I'd qualify that statement, what with the atheism and all.)

And that thought led me to think about the simple pleasures in my life. And the less-simple ones, but primarily the ones that leave me firmly in the view that if human beings aren't built strictly for enjoyment, then I don't know what the hell's going on. Sooner or later, nearly every task now done by humans will be able to be performed better by a machine (which is either going to require massive reordering of our economic system, or shitloads of violence and/or repression), with the exceptions of artistic endeavours and our various sensual pleasures. Which makes me think that if this is all we're good for, we should do more of it. So screw you, puritans!

And speaking of simple pleasures, we here at Crammit Hall are not in the best of moods tonight, as we've discovered that we cannot have baths, as the overly elaborate plug has broken (this on top of the excruciatingly slow drainage we've been saddled with since the day we moved in. The renovation job they did on this place was pretty slap-dash in a lot of ways.) And Jess had gone and bought a bath bomb at Lush this afternoon and everything. (Incidentally, Lush makes a really good shaving cream called "Prince", which is quite expensive, but is also the only one I've tried that didn't result in a) many, many cuts, and b) not much hair coming off my face.)

I consoled myself (ha! ha!) with a lengthy run of We ♥ Katamari (the most stupid fun video game I think I've ever played) this evening; we've both been completely addicted to this since I picked it up last weekend and are constantly humming the various soundtrack songs, and then cursing when we realize what we're doing.

Finally - further to a previous post: contrary to my expectations, most of my new co-workers are friendly, moderately interesting (although they do talk about their kids a lot) and not at all unpleasant to be around. So, again, yay for new job.

This getting up at 6am crap is for the fucking birds, though.

No ninjas, but some links

2005-11-06T20:53:00.000-05:00

In response to a couple of comments: Hi Liz...yes, it is good to be a desk guy again, but alas, we have no internet access at work (we can access the CBC site, and most federal & provincial sites, but nothing else. It's pretty dull) so I have to comfort myself with a book of philosophy. How were the Pornographers?
Kira-Lynn: Also, hello. Nice to meet you as well...Lawrence Greenspon? I get him confused with another Green-something guy, whose name is probably also Lawrence. Is he the jagoff pundit, or the dickweed lawyer guy? Wait...do I care? Anyway, here's hoping we see you again soon.

Okay, anyone else reading can pay attention now.
Have been downloading music again from the fabulous WFMU site, a source for all your out-music needs (at least, those not covered by UBUWEB's extremely impressive collection of sound-poetry, sound-collage and recordings of 20th C. counter-culture figures)

Anyone who's wondering why the suburbs of France are burning should see La Haine. Everyone else should see it too, 'cause it's fucking great (sadly, only available on VHS in North America at the moment; I'm pretty sure Invisble Cinema has a copy).

I put on Game Theory's Lolita Nation on Friday, and discovered to my delight that Jess quite enjoyed it (she passes yet another test unscathed!) If you're unfamiliar with this particular masterpiece, you should make at least a perfunctory effort to track it down. Also: The Jazz Butcher's A Scandal in Bohemia, yet another of my mid- to late-teen years' soundtracks, which is leading me to to think I'm going senile and nostalgic and will soon obnoxiously dance around the kitchen to Let's Active a la "Big Chill", or else I just haven't heard these in a while and the paucity of good new records these days is giving me the chance to revisit them.

Speaking of which, I'm told the new Reigning Sound album is fantastic in a Flying Burrito Bros. kind of way, and why haven't I got it yet? Also: the Boris/Merzbow collaboration Sun Baked Snow Cave, for those of you who like Japanese stoner-metal/avant-noise records. Which, I'm sure, is just about everybody. Right?

And while I'm at it, the other records I've enjoyed this year, in no particular order:
Odd Nosedam, Burner
Prefuse 73, Surrounded By Silence
The Go! Team, Thunder, Lightning, Strike
Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree
Pelican, The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw
DangerDoom, The Mouse and The Mask
and of course, Low, The Great Destroyer.

I'd like to count two compilations (Stereolab's Oscillations From the Anti-Sun and Nurse With Wound's Livin' Fear of James Last) but they really shouldn't count. I also would like to point out that I'm very proud of my own band's record (Golden Famile's Nobody Loves A Growler) and quite enjoyed my ex-band's record too (Kepler's Attic Salt).

And in closing, holy snappin' crap I'm long-winded today. Must have been all the coffee.

Afternoon of a Million Zillion Ninjas

2005-11-05T20:27:00.000-05:00

Somehow, while shopping today, the topic of ninjas came up. So this was me:
"Oh yeah, ninjas totally love an ass-kisser. They're so vain. They'll be like, 'So, honestly, you didn't see me coming?' And you'd say, 'No, man, it was totally like, woah! In fact, I'm not even sure where you are right now.'"

Hi! Could I speak to...uh...

2005-10-24T23:06:00.000-04:00

This week marks a major turning point in my grouchiness, and, to a lesser degree, career. After three years, I'm coming off the goddamned phones. [For anyone who doesn't know what I do for a living, I'm at the collections call centre for Revenue Canada. No, I don't care about your opinion of the tax system or the government.]

I could probably talk about how much call centre work sucks, which it really does, but let's consider how much worse it could be. For example, it's not shovelling animal feces, or plucking and disemboweling chickens. It's not performing autopsies, or cleaning up after them. There has been very little ingesting of other people's bodily fluids, and at no point during the past 36 months did I have to scrub any toilets that weren't my own.

Still the job has its petty annoyances. Let's start with the guy who called in while taking a shit. Now, I have no idea what was going through his head - probably, "gonna be here a while", 'cause he sure sounded like it was taking a lot of effort - but I do have to say he probably has left me with the best story I'm going to get out of that job. And I'll give him this: he wasn't eating during the call, which is all-too-common, and should be punishable by, oh, death.

I'm also a little disappointed I can't mention the minor celebrities (or their bookkeepers) I got to speak with (or leave messages for, but, non-identifying information: two political commentators of national renown, one CanCon classic rock band, one CanCon "where are they now?" candidate (the answer: broken up, in debt to their label, in good spirits about it), and one no-kidding punk icon. Oh, and possibly a really fucking famous film director, although I half-doubt it.

So, I move on to the brash world of pencil-pushing, and I'm debating breaking out the skinny ties in honour of the event. My job is very boring, I'm an office clerk...

Thanks. Really.

2005-10-09T18:38:00.000-04:00

I was thinking about writing some trite crap about this being one of my favourite times of year, but it isn't. Not, of course, that I don't have fond memories of Thanksgivings - for a few years in the mid-80's, my family would go up to our "cottage" (a very rustic lodge inside the base in Petawawa) for the closing-up weekend, and there'd always be four or five other families around, many of whom were good for card games, darts or evening conversations around the fireplace in the main building. Other than that, we really didn't have the sort of family gathering around the long weekend that many people seem to, and we certainly didn't attach much importance to it.

October, however, has historically been my 'jerk' month. I found (also in the 80's sometime) that I might have been an affable fellow in September but by this time, I was a sullen, antisocial bastard ready to lash out at the slightest provocation. By early December I'd be back to normal, but it was usually a tough slog through November. It hasn't seemed to be the pattern so much recently; I don't know if that's because I'm a dick some other time or if it's been spread evenly over the other 11 months. Anyway, this is the time year I give thanks I'm not a damn teenager anymore.

Lots of stuff has happened at Crammit Hall since last I wrote, and many of those things are either too boring or too sordid to discuss here. We have, of course, seen some films and some concerts and bought some records and read a little. Sorry, I won't be talking about them much, except to say that I seem to be getting a lot music Jess doesn't like these days (for example, Khanate, or Black Dice.) I will also point out that I seem to be spending more money on fancy-assed bottles of wine than on records, which is either a sign I'm getting older, or that I'm becoming even more pretentious.

OK, so it's the girl's turn

2005-07-29T23:39:00.000-04:00

It's nice to type on this new keypad.

I hate that I have to listen to Michael's crazy music though. Seriously, what the hell is this? Some band called Unwound. Honey, your music is effed up.

I have decided - no more white wine for me. I just had a glass of Michael's parent's homemade plonk, and I am a little ill from it. So HUZZAH only red wine from here on out...

You'd think I'd have more to say right now, since it's been so very long. But, really, I don't. My life = not that exciting. No matter.

I will, however, take this moment to bitch about the store Red Velvet. I used to really enjoy that store (well, looking in the window, at least, since I could never afford to shop there), but right now they have the most horrible window display. A beautiful silk dress, probably at least $300, and completely puckered down the centre front seam. What is up with that? It's a shame, that women will still pay ridiculously high prices for shoddily made clothing. Men would never put up with that.

That is all.

Friday, Several Things

2005-07-29T22:30:00.000-04:00

In case you were wondering how domesticated Crammit Hall's residents were becoming, I walked in the door tonight, after a long day at work (for anyone who's ever worked in a call centre, I logged over 160 calls today, in 7 hours) Jess handed me a glass of wine and told me to start carving the chicken (which she'd just finished roasting.) Then we sat eating (corn, boiled potatoes and the chicken) and watching What Not To Wear.

As penance, I'm listening to Black Dice's Creature Comforts right now. It's barely audible above the TV, but that's sort of okay; I think it's working pretty well this way.

We saw The Iron Giant two nights ago (completely forgetting to see the Acorn show, yet again - seriously, Rolf, we love your band, but you need to book a show in our living room or something) and I'm not kidding, both of us cried. Plus, I think we were both a bit jealous of anyone who got to see this as a child, since it's got such a positive, free-to-be-you-and-me-but-not-neccessarily-Alan-Alda message, and a great sense of humour (like Brad Bird's subsequent masterpiece, The Incredibles) that you'd be hard pressed not to grow up cool after seeing it. It's nice to see well meshed hand-drawn animation with computer enhancements - see also the early-80's mini-feature Rock and Rule - instead of just straight digital work...not that I don't think Pixar pulls off its computer-only animation, just that nobody else does.

Crazies are out in force tonight on Elgin; so far, a fire truck, an ambulance, and two cop cars have stopped in our neighbourhood tonight. However, no amusing screaming of the "Bitch! You don't fucking know me!" variety. Yet.

Other big cultural explosion in the house: McSweeneys has apparently found a few copies of William T. Vollman's Rising Up and Rising Down, the 7-volume, 3,000-page study of "violence, freedom and urgent means" (essentially, a long answer to the question "when is the use of violent force morally justified?"), and, having had my appetite whetted by the 600-page abridgement, I've gone ahead and paid the $120 US for it. Actually, what's really killing me are the shipping charges (as you might expect from a 20-lb box of books). On top of that, we've also got coming from them issue #16 of their quarterly (the usual high-quality short and sort-of-short fiction), the Future Dictionary of America (a sort of update of Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary", but with a CD of hip bands, include the now-omnipresent Death Cab For Cutie, whom I still totally love), another McSwy's t-shirt for me (a rather hypnotic one, at that) and Michel Houellebecq's book on H.P. Lovecraft, which I'm totally juiced about also. I've enjoyed what I've read of Lovecraft (essentially, the short story collection The Dunwich Horror) and I have no trouble imagining that Houellebecq's thoughts on Lovecraft would be enlightening and enjoyable.

Anyway, that's our week - thanks to Scott for the lovely evening of drunkitude and conversation at his Eastern Ontario Gothic Mansion last weekend, and please stop poking the corpse. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah

2005-07-20T12:44:00.000-04:00

So I forget to write. I'm negligent; that's what I do. I will, however, promise not to complain about the heat, because it's boring, and because we get so little decent weather in this country it's best we don't bitch about it when our cups runneth over. Also, I'm secretly crossing my fingers for another blackout, 'cause that last one rocked.

Since the last post I wrote was primarily about films, ah, I'll probably have to talk about some more. The last few Zip rentals have been moderately good - okay, Dodgeball was kinda ass, but no more than you'd expect from Stiller, Vaugn, et al - especially Band of Outsiders, which features a great interlude of the three main characters dancing (synchronized!) in a café. There's a similar scene in Hal Hartley's excellent Simple Men (probably my favourite of his films, if only because I saw it first) although it lacks the narration and cut-away sound editing.

In a similar vein, finally got Breathless (the Goddard version), which I actually did not enjoy nearly as much. Partly it was because, I think, Jean-Paul Belmondo's character struck me as a totally unsympathetic prick*, and possibly because the style took some getting used to (and so I was softened up for Band of Outsiders, which I saw about a week later).

Fahrenheit 9/11 was a mixed bag, for me - the first hour or so (largely about the 2000 US election, George Bush's Vietnam non-record and his presidency until the Gulf War) was mostly good. His decision to only use the sound of the planes hitting the towers was pretty sharp (I've never before had a really strong emotional reaction to 9/11, even the day of) and his background on the voting 'irregularities' (ie., blacks getting their votes discarded) in Florida was fine, if a little brief. A lot of the tying Bush to the Saudis (and then the Afghani governing council to soon-to-be Chinese oil giant Unocal) struck me as tenuous at best, and less likely to be a sign that anything untoward is going on than people with the last name Bush have small address books and don't like talking to strangers. The fact that Hamid Karzai was an ex-Unocal advisor could simply mean that Karzai speaks Pashtun and English, has some business training and is (or could be with a bit of effort) well-connected in Afghanistan, and who knows - after nearly 20 years of occupation, civil war and a local government of psychotics convinced that things were better in 900 AD - maybe people matching that description are thin on the ground.

Up next are Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August, which I swear I didn't know had Richard Gere in it before I zipped it; Coffee & Cigarettes, and I will totally sue Jim Jarmusch if I start smoking again afterwards, or if it sucks; and Super-Size Me, which unfortunately seems a little past its best-by date. I'd much rather see Spurlock's reality show, which sounds less like a game show for people deeply into humiliation, and more like a series of scientific experiments (for people for whom the scientific method, objectivity and control groups are just so much balloon juice.)

I should also mention that I'm posting this with a fancy-pants new Macintosh, having lost my third PC in ten years to the ravages of a gummed-up hard-drive and fried power supply. I'm salvaging as many mp3's as possible, but it's frustrating (also known as 'probably for the best') that I won't get to play Civ 3 again. I suppose any game that takes more than a week to finish (hello, GTA San Andreas) is a bit of a waste of time, but it's more rewarding (yes, that's what I said) than any of the Sisyphean games like Tetris that end only when you lose.

I haven't bought any new records in almost a month (last purchased was Smog's "A River Ain't Too Much To Love", which is good-not-great), an almost unthinkable thing. Am curious about a couple of things out there (Common, Wolf Eyes) and am trying to decide if I should jump into free-jazz headfirst (by buying an Albert Ayler 3xLP set) or if prudence is the better part of, um, a good record collection. Any thoughts into this, or recommendations, are appreciated.

*this is not to say I don't enjoy unsympathetic characters - just that Michel grated much more than most. Also, unlike Martin Amis' total bastard narrators in "Success", his shittiness wasn't rubbed in my face, and unlike Aqua Teen Hunger Force's Master Shake, his assholery isn't hilarious.

My latest problem.

2005-06-10T17:16:00.000-04:00

I want to take a cool shower but Michael isn't home and I can't unzip my dress.

Brain Spew

2005-06-09T11:56:00.000-04:00

My dad wants a Space Pen. I fully support his decision. He's having his hip replaced next week, so he wants a pen he can use while lying down to do crossword puzzles. Again, full support of this.

I have decided I need to get healthier. Can't be a fatty any more. None of my clothes fit and I can't afford to buy new ones. I wish I were naturally thin, "I can just eat and eat and I don't gain a pound!" Bitches. I have to struggle for every ounce. And it is a struggle, since I love candy.

Enough. Listening to someone bitch about their weight is almost as boring as hearing someone talk about their workout schedule. (Mr. Mark, you know what I'm talking about.)

I think I'm going to start my own business. I want to have a clothing store of my very own someday, and I have to start somewhere. Sadly, I don't know where. Research must be done. Like everything else in my life, I want it now.

I am friggin' hungry. I need a sandwich.

I started reading Microserfs again yesterday. I love that book. It makes me wish I thought more deeply about not only my own life, but my relationship to my body. The way in which my cells store memory, the way I treat my body as a shell to carry my brain around... I need to connect again.

Jen loaned me Absolutely Fabulous series 1 - 3 yesterday. I am already overloading on Edina.

"Sweetie. Darling. Look at me darling. Look at me. Tell me honestly - does mummy need work done?"

Weekend Update.

2005-06-07T12:51:00.000-04:00

Thank you to everyone who came to the housewarming of Crammit Hall. It’s nice and toasty now, and we love you.

People met people. People got other people’s e-mail addresses. New friends were added to LiveJournals. New blogs were created and linked to and from.

God, the weekend wore me out.

Michael’s show on Saturday night was awesome. The Reverend Glasseye was something else. Truly great.

This weekend is shaping up to be another busy one. Friday night The Acorn is playing at Babylon. Saturday morning is the Ladyfest Craft Sale, in the afternoon we must grocery shop – I think we are also going to sign up for the organic fruit baskets at the Byward Fruit Market. I also have to get my car fixed since I am going to my parent’s place in two weeks. The evening will bring BBQ goodness with Chris & Katie. Sunday we are going to go to Jen’s to wash cars and drink Margaritas – the last time we did that we ended up wandering suburbia, drunk, at 10PM. Should be fun.

I work my double shift today, and it's shaping up to be a busy night – hooray for tips for Jess!

Le Bitch.

2005-06-01T21:56:00.000-04:00

I hate stupid rich people. I see a lot of that at work. It pisses me off.

I wonder what my life would be like if I were rich - if I would still feel the need to enrich myself emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

Who am I kidding? I just want pretty clothes.

Also: Party Friday night. Be there (well, here) or be square. 8PM until whenever.

The Other Half

2005-05-30T21:47:00.000-04:00

I finally moved the last of my crap out of my old place tonight, and so nearly a month after getting the keys I feel like this is my no-kidding new place (I'm celebrating with a hilariously large glass of wine and some Kayne West. The Fall's Bend Sinister is more traditional for me, but hey, it's two thousand and something.)

We're procastinating on a few good films we've had from Zip (which is a good service if you have a long list of films you want to see and don't mind getting them in a completely arbitrary order. Which we do) - right now, Fahrenheit 9/11 (which I've heard varying reports on, from "good agitprop" to "if one of my students submitted this, I'd fail them"); M (which Jess is not into seeing, so I probably should be watching it now while she's working, but I'm too beat for something like that) and Chasing Amy (Jess raves about this, but I'm not convinced - I've only seen one Kevin Smith film, Dogma, or as I like to call it, Crapma).

But the one I'm juiced about is Bruce Macdonald's Roadkill - I haven't seen this one in years...well, since it came out in '89 or '90. Macdonald's resume is odd - excellent stuff like Highway 61 and the series "Twitch City" (both of which are inexplicably unavailable on either DVD or even video) sit uneasily with Picture Claire (starring Juliette Lewis, Gina Gershon & Mickey Rourke - as damning a cast as a film not starring Lou Diamond Phillips could have) and some of the dismal sci-fi series Lexx - but his major works (Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside and Hard Core Logo) are all well worth checking out, if you can find them. And if you know someone with "Twitch City" on tape, give me a call.

If I don't get to post again before the end of the week - big, tiring weekend coming up. Our housewarming Friday, and most excitingly, the Music for Cats showcase on Saturday at Babylon - Reverend Glasseye, the Weapons of Mass Seduction & Mono Hum. Bring earplugs.

Everything you never needed to know about Crammit Hall.

2005-05-29T21:42:00.000-04:00

Michael no think good when he tired. So I'm left to make the first Crammit Hall post all by myself.

This is the blog that we started to let people know about upcoming Crammit Hall events, as well as all the random crap that fills our lives.

For example: Last night, while leaving a party, my friend Annette grabbed my ass and said, "That's for Michael."

He loved it.

Crammit Hall is the name of our apartment, we wanted people to think we lived in an estate or something. It's named after the baby we will never have, Crammit. I mean, Kermit. Michael seems to think Kermit is an appropriate name for a child. How wrong he is.

We live here with Noah (the cat who rules our lives) and squintillion pieces of media. Keep checking back for more! I will be linking here from my LiveJournal when it's updated as well.