Vancouver Mixtape
Destroyer at Richards On Richards (RIP) by Femke Van Delft, not to be reused without permission(but trying to find a home in Maple Ridge)
Destroyer at Richards On Richards (RIP) by Femke Van Delft, not to be reused without permission
FUCK THE OLYMPICS!
Jesus fucking Christ.
After I get dressed, I make my way to 224th, intending to make my noise complaint to someone with a little more authority. What I see, as I approach, makes me aware of how futile my gesture is. Hundreds of people - HUNDREDS of motherfucking people, including what must be all the children of the community, their teachers and parents and cousins, are standing up and down the street to see the torch come through town.
The woman shouting into the microphone and pausing for cued cheers - "the 2010 Olympics are coming to VANCOUVER!" - keeps using the words "all of us." All of us want this. All of this support this. All of us are here to welcome the Olympics torch.
A very important scene occurs shortly thereafter, though we have no reason to realize its importance at this point: Keaton and Neeson are in bed, on about their lovemaking, when the little girl wakes up - she's had a nightmare - and as children will, she comes into her mother's room and gets in bed, where, after a few soothing words, she falls asleep. Neeson and Keaton don't uncouple, and we can presume that they may well continue their lovemaking - it's not shown, but an attentive audience would no doubt be able to pose the question of whether they might; we discover later - in court - that they did. The scene is interesting in light of what follows; Nimoy has very cleverly seduced us by showing us these images in the context of what seems a wholly healthy, indeed damn near ideal sexual partnership evolving, and I suspect most audiences won't react to these images at all, going along with the story. Even if they do continue their lovemaking, the viewer might feel - it wouldn't really be a bad thing, would it? I mean, I don't know that *I* could be so sexually unselfconscious in that situation - I feel a wee bit uncomfortable having sex if there's a cat or a dog in the room, let alone a sleeping child - but bully for them for being so un-hung-up; the scene presents the moment as normal behaviour between them, and seems not in the slightest damaging or traumatic. It becomes one of two key episodes in a custody battle that ensues, when Keaton's ex-husband gets wind of his wife's new relationship, and the rules by which it is unfolding. The other episode - which again we learn about without seeing, which, for some reason, really got on Ebert's nerves - is best left to viewers to discover, but it is of a piece with the previous - normal, wholesome, if rather uninhibited behaviour that, in later light, comes to look malign and suspect, from the point of view of a jealous ex and a legal establishment dominated by straight, patriarchal, sex-negative values.
Motorhead in Vancouver, by Femke Van Delft. Not to be reused without permission.


My only real association with Paul Quarrington is Whale Music; I'm familiar both with his novel and the delightful film made from it (starring the great Canadian character actor Maury Chaykin in a rare lead role, as a drug-addled, burned-out rockstar, loosely based on Brian Wilson, who finds himself drawn back into the human realm by a mysterious young female visitor). Cinephiles interested in Canadian films need to seek this one out, as an eminently likeable experience; tho' written in Toronto, certain familiar landmarks will give it away instantly as being filmed in Vancouver. The book is great fun, too! It's enough for me to want to take off my hat at Quarrington's passing - and I may pick up the solo album mentioned in that obit, to hear his song about the experience of dying ("Are You Ready"). Quarrington died at 56, after a brave battle with lung cancer, and kept working right to the end.
...So I ended up returning that king sized bed I'd bought, having discovered that my greedy addled impulses had not accounted for just how much goddamn space the thing would take up; it was like having a beluga in the bathtub. It cost me a couple hundred clams out of my refund to unload it, but doing so was a relief; I found myself quite happy to return to my air mattress - which was quite comfy, even if it looked like I was camping in the corner of the suite. I've been sleeping on it again for the last week or two, unproblematically - but the idea of buying a bed has never been far from my mind.
Antichrist opens later this week at the Vancity Theatre, brilliantly double-billed with Day Of Wrath. I simply need to see both these films on the screen. I have seen the Dreyer, about the persecution of an old woman as a witch, before; I have no way of knowing beforehand whether I will enjoy the experience of watching Antichrist, but I've found things to admire in every Lars von Trier film I've seen. As perverse and maddening as he can sometimes be, he is certainly one of the few larger-than-life auteurs that I'm aware of at work in cinema today, and many of his works (Zentropa, the original Kingdom TV series, and Dogville especially) I love deeply. The fact that this is a relatively large production starring two fine actors (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg), dealing with very ambitious themes (apparently death, grief, guilt, sex, misogyny, and violence), that it is nonetheless being described as a horror film, and that it has been praised for both the beauty and surreal impact of its images is more than enough to pique my curiosity - to say nothing of the astonishing image used to promote it (above). The controversy around the so-called "sexual violence" in the film - both male and female genitalia are wounded, I gather - neither disturbs nor interests me much, but I have nothing against boundary-pushing cinema (provided there is a certain seriousness to it - I'm not talkin' Cinema Sewer, here). Plus a friend of mine who is a fellow admirer of serious cinema - it was our mutual admiration for Ingmar Bergman that united us initially - has praised it, as has another friend who knows his horror, cult and exploitation fare; I would be very surprised NOT to be impressed by this movie, given all the above. I missed the VIFF screenings, couldn't make it to its too-short run at the Ridge, and an attempt to hail the director for an online interview predictably bore no fruit, so there's no way I can offer anything more than this to generate interest - which I would like to do, because I would like to see the still criminally-underattended Vancity Theatre flourish and because I'd like to encourage more people to see REAL CINEMA as opposed to Hollywood bullshit, that I might feel less alone in the world... It saddens me to think that the Friday show I plan to attend may be just as poorly-attended as Peter Watkins' astonishing Punishment Park was, last week (I counted seven other attendees, including the cinephile who'd come with me, the night I was there).
Jeffrey Allport at Solder And Sons, photo by Dan Kibke. Not to be reused without permission.
Well, Dad never got to see this one: I have my first cover story in a non-English-language magazine, a German feature on Motorhead, in the December/January issue of Ox Fanzine (a metal/punk zine of great quality, if you'll take a testimonial from someone who can't read German). It's based in part on the interview I did with Lemmy for The Skinny, to plug Motorhead's Vancouver appearance last October - but with photos from that gig, by Bev Davies and Femke Van Delft, and a Bev Davies portrait of Lemmy from backstage at the Vogue gracing the cover, all taken in time to plug Motorhead's December German tour. The article has been expanded and adapted for German readers, with Lemmy graciously agreeing to some follow-up questions, though it has a similar area of concern (war, Lemmy's fascination with Nazi iconography, and the darker side of Motorhead). My father read the Skinny article, and was impressed with Lemmy - one of the few people I've interviewed he said that about; in fact, at one point in the interview - talking about the leftover hatreds and resentments of history - I mentioned my father to Lemmy, how Dad never got over what happened to two men from his hometown who were psychologically destroyed by their time in Japanese prisoner of war camps. I can actually spot the reference in German to "mein vater," where I mention this to Lemmy; I wish Dad had been around to see it. When it was still in draft stage, I joked about it with him at the table in my parents' old apartment, reading him the section in English and saying "so you'll be famous in Germany," or something silly like that - and he laughed. That may well have been his last week before he went into the hospital.