RIP Billy Bang

From Vietnam infantryman to underground revolutionary to free jazz violinist who collaborated with (among others) Sun Ra, Sirone, Charles Tyler, William Hooker and William Parker, Billy Bang led a more interesting life than most, at least according to his Wikipedia page. I have a couple of CDs with him on them... My respects...

Peter Brötzmann to play VIJF!

Yes, folks - European free jazz powerhouse Peter Brötzmann (official site here, but be warned - it's LOUD!) will play the Vancouver International Jazz Festival this year, with his unit Full Blast! Mats Gustafsson is coming back, too, with his power trio The Thing. This is some SERIOUSLY MUSCULAR free jazz - so get ready to have your earwax blown out your assholes! (Now if only someone would bring Borbetomagus to town...).

Without Mercy opens for Death Angel tonight...

Of the local metal bands I've checked out, Without Mercy stand out as one of the strongest - female fronted, with complex and challenging music that is still aggressive as hell... I'm more interested in them than I am in headliners Death Angel (tho' that might change after tonight's show at the Biltmore...). So...

RIP Sidney Lumet

Sidney Lumet has died at age 86. My favourites of his films - Prince of the City, The Offence (which I haven't seen in years but was fascinated by), Network, and his adaptation of Equus. Never did see his adaptation of Cassavetes' Gloria... always respected his films, at the very least...

Cooked and Eaten, Bison BC in the Straight

Got to bullshitting with James and Masa at the Interurban gig for Black Wizard last week, and a Music Note came of it. Check out Cooked and Eaten's Myspace here!

Japan again...

Reminding y'all - Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and Empire of Passion play at the Cinematheque this weekend, two dollars of each ticket being donated to the Red Cross for relief work in Japan (where there have been mixed successes and outrages, if the media is accurate. Even Japanese fishermen aren't very impressed about the dumping of radioactive water. Add to my rant below that Japan is a bit behind the rest of the world in terms of environmental safety standards... Still, the main leak appears to have been plugged...).

The best t-shirt for toddlers ever

...spotted at a Maple Ridge clothing boutique. I mean, as conflicted as I am about Back in Black (an album that I loved at 13, rejected as reactionary, status-quo reinforcing, sexist garbage at 15, and am shamed as an adult to admit continued fondness for)... if I had a kid...

Find your candidate, as long as he's not Conservative

Thank you, Toronto blogger Dave Till, for writing exactly the article I would hope to write, tracking down links to provide reasons why Canadians should not vote for the Conservatives. Thanks to Rabble.ca for the nice poster, which can also be downloaded as a printable PDF - see the link.

If you don't already know the candidate for your riding, you can find the information online quite easily. Find the Green Party candidate here, the New Democratic Party one here, or the Liberal one here. (Having looked at all three for my riding, I think I'll be voting NDP, myself, but have put the Green Party first since they are being excluded from the televised election debate). Apologies to the Marijuana Party, the Pirate Party, and so forth for not listing their links, but it seems fairly important that people NOT squander their vote on protests or jokes in this election; we need to oust Harper.

The art of looking on the bright side

Was immensely cheered this morning to read a comment on a Japan Today post about the ongoing nuclear emergency in Japan. TEPCO has been dumping low-level radioactive water directly into the Pacific Ocean to make it easier to get at high level radioactive water, which appears to be ALSO leaking into the Pacific Ocean, where there are concentrations of radioactive iodine being found several million times the legal limit... apparently cesium is also showing up. Grim stuff, but the commenter on that Japan Today article, going by the name of Laguna, on April 5th - today - made the observation that, "on a brighter note, this will ironically be fantastic for the ecosystem," since the total mistrust of seafood that will follow on this disaster will likely bring a stop to Japanese overfishing, and possibly lower the demand for seafood worldwide! "My suggestion is to use this disaster as an opportunity to declare most of coastal northeastern Honshu a marine sanctuary." I'm not sure I buy it, but it helped untie a knot in my stomach, so... good stuff!

And in Japan...

I don't suppose it would do us much good to start stockpiling water and such, but... in Japan, TEPCO are now trying to absorb the radioactive liquid leaking out into the ocean with sawdust and newspaper and something similar to the absorbant material in diapers. Unfortunately, it's not working. Radiation levels are rising along the US coast and presumably here, too.

Mike Watt, meanwhile - legendary punk bassist for the Minutemen and fIREHOSE, continuing bass-man for the Stooges, and solo recording artist in his own right, coming to town April 26th - has just sent out a mass email referencing the Last Poets' "When the Revolution Comes," with that title in his subject line and the following as the message, referencing how we

...will party and bullshit and party and bullshit and party and bullshit and party and bullshit and party and bullshit and party and bullshit and party and bullshit and party and bullshit and party and bullshit

when the revolution comes

...so has the revolution come at all close to us yet? Did I miss something? Guess I better keep reading the news...

a few brief movie notes...

...so of course, that Day the Clown Cried thing was a really, really well-thought out April Fool's Day joke, which they tip at the end of the podcast. Well-done, guys! (Now what's with all these alleged torrents of the film that pop up when you search for it?). Anyhow, I watched three films - or two and a half - on Friday, waiting for Black Wizard to start.

The Adjustment Bureau was the film I had the least hope for on setting out - since big-budget PK Dick adaptations are often rather annoyingly and inappropriately action-packed (Minority Report, Paycheck) - and so it left me pleasantly surprised, telling a recognizably phildickian tale of an ambitious young politician who runs into a sort of angelic bureaucracy responsible for making sure human life goes according "to plan," who are as determined to keep him from the woman of his dreams as he is to resist their input. The film captures Dick's romantic side in a way few adaptations of his work have, and does a fairly nice job of illustrating concepts of determinism versus free will; while there's a bit too much running around towards the end (and the film as a whole is nothing particularly exciting to look at, with a rather mundane visual sensibility), it's a likable, solid commercial film, with Matt Damon and Emily Blunt doing fine jobs with their characters (tho' I thought Terence Stamp, who plays an angelic higher-up, seemed a little unconvinced by the whole affair; who could blame him?). A solid B+ of a movie, not the worst way one could spend a couple of hours in the cinema.

Hobo with a Shotgun, on the other hand - which I somehow had high hopes for! - is a depressingly demeaning experience - a garish, insincere movie that has more to do with an irony-heavy misapprehension of the appeal of exploitation cinema of yore than with its purported themes (poverty, class rage, etc; at least that's what I'd hoped the film would be taking on, rather than its bottom-drawer resort to generic vigilantism; it does take a bite out of Bumfights, but without doing much to convincingly elevate itself above that level, save for abusing ersatz bums, not real ones). It has unrealistic, unlikable, cartoonish characters, cliched "bad punks" who torture people at random, Godawfully broad writing and acting, and excessive, silly, somewhat depressing violence; not even seeing George Strombolopolous - how the hell is that name spelled? - killed with an ice-skate can motivate me to want to claim it as being somehow "Canadian." I found it - and the tittering of the people behind me - ugly enough that I walked out after forty minutes; it's the worst of the Grindhouse fallout thus far. Rutger Hauer keeps his dignity, but that's about it...

Finally, Essential Killing, the new film by Jerzy Skolimowski, has mixed rewards. It begins very strongly, with Skolimowski using the mechanisms of cinema to make the audience identify utterly with a jihadi, Mohammed (played by Vincent Gallo) as he strikes out at invaders in, we assume, Afghanistan, where he is himself taken down, bagged and shackled and stuffed into an orange jumpsuit, and taken to a cell where he is tortured and frightened by violent, unsympathetic, and coarse Americans. Finally, he is rendered off... to a snowy country where there are moose wandering about, and people appear to be speaking Polish? What? Up to that point, the film is entirely credible, bold, and compelling, perhaps taking a moral stance that has more to do with western liberal guilt than the actual realities of the mujahadeen - but doing it with conviction, bravery, and immense skill; were he an American, this sort of film would have had him dubbed a traitor just a few short years ago. However, the decision to set Gallo's escape in a snowy eastern European country (rather than, say, a remote military base off Cuba or other such recognizable locations) seems to have more to do with the realities of budget and the convenience of working in the director's home country than it does with any historical realities or meanings the film wants to get at. Even if one is willing to shrug and roll with it - and I was - from then on, the film's hold on your mind and attention slowly dwindles down to a rather disappointing ending, well out of porpotion with the powerful start. Gallo never speaks, perhaps because he couldn't pull off a credible accent or a Middle Eastern language; that would be fine, if he were at least shown praying or calling on Allah now and then - which is something I would guess a devout Muslim in his position would do! Mostly he just suffers, and hallucinates a bit, as he tries to survive while starving and freezing in the woods. When, after about forty minutes of his ordeal, he runs into a farmhouse where he encounters a lone widow, played by frequent Polanski actress Emmanuelle Seigner, her muteness also seems a contrivance, designed to avoid a messy tangle of accents, and her kindness to Gallo doesn't seem particularly motivated, meaningful, or moving - a symbolic salving of wounds that doesn't really satisfy, dramatically (or help him much). Having a "sister of mercy" appear might, I suppose, be said to reflect Skolimowski's sincere sorrow for the sufferings of the Muslim world since 9/11, but by that point, Gallo (being white, and doing nothing much with his performance besides wearing a beard to really identify himself as a Muslim) has been transformed into a sort of persecuted everyman, as non-specific culturally or politically as the two escapees in Figures in a Landscape... replacing something politically charged and focused with something far vaguer. The film does have a poignancy throughout, and many compelling images, and it's a welcome return to cinema for Skolimowski, a very interesting, under-appreciated filmmaker; but it ended up being a lot less than I'd hoped, sorry to say.

That's about it for now...

A print of The Day the Clown Cried located

...in Spain. That's a podcast - fascinating - check it out (but make sure to listen to the very end!).

Stephen Harper on Gay Marriage

Fuck this man!

The Rebel Spell in the Straight

The Rebel Spell at a past Under the Volcano, by Femke van Delft, not to be reused without permission.

Hey, the Straight ran my review of the Rebel Spell's new album! (And a great album it is - anyone with even a FONDNESS for punk, politically-charged songwriting, or an interest in Vancouver music, should check it out!). View their new video, addressing the surveillance state, here!

Excited about the election

Fuck all this shit you read in the news about Canadians being apathetic and bored of going to the polls - that's EXACTLY the sort of attitude the Harper administration is counting on. We have a chance to OUST the Conservatives decisively, and to stand against the neo-con agenda, from the pillaging of the environment to the dismantling of Canada's social infrastructure to all that bovine prairie creationist/ homophobic/ anti-abortion/ Randroid America-loving bullshit that they haven't been able, as a minority, to ram down Canadians' throats yet (but would love to). Not exactly sure WHO I want to vote for yet, but I know who I want to vote AGAINST! More to come...

The third homicide of the year in Vancouver...

...is on the same corner as the gig I'm going to tomorrow. I really should just stop reading the news.

Black Wizard this Friday at the Interurban

Black Wizard by Femke van Delft, not to be reused without permission

Utterly excited to see Black Wizard on Friday at the Interurban (at Hastings and Carrall, near the new home of Scratch). Those of you who don't know the band yet - I'm only discovering them recently myself - should check their Myspace page to hear some of their songs; they're pretty classic & sincere-sounding blues-meets-psych stoner metal whom I suspect will sound really damn good live... I sure could use a good show right about now...

What you've got to understand about Japan...

Reading the news from Japan these days makes me want to cry, punch someone, and stop reading the news, all at the same time.


The thing about Japan - ask anyone who has lived there - is that it is in no way as technologically advanced as its public image would have you believe. Maybe some people are getting the picture, now, but for years - since the days of the Bubble economy, when the west was terribly threatened by Japanese dominance of various markets (...especially cars!), we've tended to vastly overestimate their capacities; the fantasy - which in many cases is all you'll see represented over here, even still - is that they all are computer geeks, have a plethora of weird electronic gadgets, can manufacture anything to higher standards than the rest of the world, are perhaps the most advanced nation in the world, technologically speaking.


There might be some truth to some of these claims - but there's also a deep confusion about the realities of life in Japan, which the Japanese won't ever do much to correct, since they LIKE this public image an awful lot. Japan HAS had a powerful economy at times, and DOES have some stunning tech, but when I was over there, I also witnessed all sorts of total backwardness - X-rays being given without lead vests to protect one's bits; powerlines strung right over houses (or were they houses built under powerlines?); and a nuclear accident at a plant where it seems some Japanese Homer Simpsons, in a rush and not necessarily so well-trained, were mixing materials in buckets (see here and here). While it seemed like EVERYONE had a cellphone that was smaller and more functional than the ones we were using at that time, there was also a surprising amount of computer illiteracy, with most of the students and many of the teachers at the high school where I taught - admittedly not an elite school - having great difficulties doing even the simplest tasks on a computer (not that they weren't without special challenges; just ask yourself how one would go about typing in kanji. This was in 1999-2002, by the way, when most westerners, especially kids, were already online).


Nevermind the bizarre construction projects and misguided public works - I heard tales of bridges built without roads at the other end, of land harvested from the sea that it turned out no one actually wanted, and saw with my own eyes rivers that had been drained so their banks could be lined with concrete and "fortified," seemingly needlessly. Nevermind the degree of unregulated noise pollution, the weirdness of seeing vending machines smack in the middle of two ricefields, or the giggling insanity behind SOME of the gadgets on hand (from toilet seats with control panels that heated the seat in the winter, to UFO catchers filled with sex toys; I never saw the vending machines with schoolgirl's panties in them, myself, but we've all heard stories, right?). These can all be seen as relatively harmless eccentricities, present in every culture.


No, if you really want to know how behind the west some aspects of Japanese culture can be - rent an apartment there for a couple of years.

For the three years that I spent in Japan, I lived in a Leo Palace, one of a chain of apartments that among other things, though being relatively recent constructions, like many apartment buildings, had no central heating and maybe no insulation (everyone had to pay exorbitant fees to heat or cool their apartment, depending on the season, with an air conditioner; without running the aircon, my thermometers often read that the apartment was colder inside, during the winter, than outside). The hot water, rather than operating through a central hot water tank, was heated outside individual apartments, as well, with un-insulated pipes out on my balcony that froze up every winter (this was not in the backass of the countryside, but the suburbs of Tokyo. Imagine not being able to shower in the morning in a supposedly first world country because the hot water was frozen in the pipes!). My stove in the tiny, tiny kitchen was a single electric burner placed right next to the sink, as if water and electricity are a good mix; I shocked myself more than once and shorted out the burner a couple of times, which was hard to avoid doing. At one point during a cleaning I noticed a black smudge on the living room wall, which I tried to clean off with a wet rag, to discover that whatever material the wall was made of was WATER SOLUBLE, turning into a gooey, muddy, irrepairable patch, much worse than it had been, because of my gentle attempts to clean. The front door wasn't flush with the door frame, with a half-inch gap at the bottom to let cold air, dust, and insects in (leading to one memorable ant invasion in my kitchen, when a whole colony discovered where I had stored my spent pop cans, awaiting recycling day); no wonder there were billions of cockroaches everywhere, even in new buildings. When there was a windstorm, too, there would always be a very visible line of dust that had blown in my front door that I had to wipe up. During rainstorms, meanwhile, drainage was so poor the streets would routinely flood, so that everyone had to contend with walking, cycling or driving in five inch rivers of water for a couple of hours, as a regular feature of life; maybe there was no way, given the severity of storms, to construct drains that worked - but there WERE deep, narrow ditches lined in concrete at either side of the road; they just weren't EFFECTIVE. Plus I'm really not sure if the concept of lessening damage to homes with the use of lightning rods has made it over there, since when lightning hit near my apartment one time, not only my computer, but my TV and the control panel for my hot water system were both completely, irrepairably fried.


Meantime, there were all sorts of exorbitant we're-fucking-you-because-we-say-we-can fees that came with renting an apartment, like a surprise gift I had to give to my landlords of around $250, over and above the rent, that was required to renew my lease: because more than a lot of places in the world, shit rolls downhill in Japan. (Anyone ever seen Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well?) The wealthy, the powerful, and the connected royally fuck the average consumer on a regular basis, and being a good Japanese means taking the fucking with grace: bowing deeply, muttering "sho ga nai," and thinking of the Emperor while you're being plundered. That's how you get phenomenon like karōshi - death from overwork, doing insane amounts of unpaid overtime to prove your loyalty - or what were, when I was there, comically exorbitant fees for internet usage at home. The average Japanese is trained from elementary school on to take a fucking without complaint - read Karel van Wolferen's The Enigma of Japanese Power for a serious analysis, if you don't believe my rant. Everyone KNOWS that that's what it's like, too - you just don't admit it publicly.


When the system backfires enough that a public scandal DOES emerge - like the horrifying historical example of the Minamata disaster or, from my time there, the Snow Brand milk scandal, where it was discovered that a major producer of dairy products was just dumping returned, expired milk products back into the vats of new milk, to be repackaged and resold, leading to widespread and serious food poisoning - the government and the media are generally bent on minimizing any face-losing shame that might attach to the corrupt incompetence that flourishes in the shadows, rather than taking steps to make sure such things can never happen again; public image trumps public safety, nine times out of ten, and if you ever do fuck up - well, you just have to bow deeply enough to be forgiven... It's un-Japanese to make a fuss about such matters, after all... you're supposed to "gambatte" and endure...


And so: for those of us who have actually LIVED in Japan, when we read a story like this one - "Radiation in Japanese seawater spreads north" - we feel a sense of horror, sorrow, and rage that might not be present in the hearts of those of you who actually buy into the Japanese myth of hyperefficiency; and we read all sorts of things between the lines that others might not.


"Highly radioactive iodine seeping from Japan's damaged nuclear complex may be making its way into seawater farther north of the plant than previously thought," the article begins, and we ask ourselves how it can be that anyone could have been UNDERESTIMATING the dangers at hand in a case like this, and whether in fact the trouble was not that the "previous thoughts" were wrong but were LIES that someone has now been caught in, forcing an admission of error. "Mounting problems, including badly miscalculated radiation figures" - NO SHIT! - "and no place to store dangerously contaminated water, have stymied emergency workers struggling to cool down the overheating plant and avert a disaster with global implications." And we think, sorry, folks but it's a bit late for that...


Skipping down a bit, we read, "the contaminated water, discovered last Thursday" - because no one realized that pumping a plant damaged in a tsunami full of corrosive seawater, as TEPCO had started out doing, then replacing it with fresh water, would lead to contaminated water coming out; hell no - "has been emitting radiation that measured more than 1,000 millisieverts per hour in a recent reading at Unit 2 — some 100,000 times the normal amounts, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said... Airborne levels outside the unit are more than four times the level that the government deems as safe for humans." And cynical or not, what we think here is that the numbers don't add up, that radiation is being emitted at 100,000 times the normal amounts, leading to airborn levels "four times" what is safe for humans... but wait, 100,000 times the radiation leads to four times the risk? What?


"Plutonium — a key ingredient in nuclear weapons — is present in the fuel at the complex, which has been leaking radiation for over two weeks, so experts had expected some to be found once crews began searching for evidence of it this week. As such, its presence is no threat to public health, officials insisted." These officials should be made to eat said plutonium, then. And what a nice word that is, what a fine rhetorical device: "insisted." The subtext of that word is, "look, WE'RE not saying this, THEY'RE saying this." Riiiight. "Only some of the plutonium samples were from the leaking reactors, they said. The rest came from earlier nuclear tests." (Whose face is being saved here, exactly - and how can you save your face and bury your head in the sand at the same time?). "Years of weapons testing in the atmosphere left trace amounts of plutonium in many places around the world." To which we must add a measured, "yeah, right." And even here, you notice the reporter using nice distancing measures like the words "they said," because it's starting to be obvious that what officials say in Japan doesn't always attach to reality - unless it's the reality of needing to cover their own asses.


"Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano repeated Monday that the contaminated water in Unit 2 appeared to be due to a temporary partial meltdown of the reactor core." Appeared? Temporary? Partial? ...you see how truth leaks out, a wee piece at a time, in public statements like this, but note that none of this means that the meltdown has been averted. It IMPLIES that... but it doesn't MEAN that. "He called it 'very unfortunate,' but said the spike in radiation appeared limited to the unit." "Appeared" = "they don't know and don't want to get in trouble when it comes out that it isn't, which it inevitably will" - maybe as soon as the next paragraph. "However, new readings show contamination in the ocean has spread about 1.6 kilometres farther north of the nuclear site than before. Radioactive iodine-131 was discovered just offshore from Unit 5 and Unit 6 at a level 1,150 times higher than normal, Hidehiko Nishiyama, a spokesman for the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, told reporters Monday... He had said earlier there was no link between the radioactive water leaking inside the plant and the radiation in the sea. On Monday, though, he reversed that position" - does that mean that he admitted that he lied, or that he was merely capable of making public statements that were completely, dangerously wrong? Which would be worse? - "saying he does suspect that radioactive water from the plant may indeed be leaking into the ocean." Suspect, right? It's not KNOWN, regardless of the fact that it's pretty much fucking OBVIOUS...


"Closer to the plant, radioactivity in seawater tested about 1,250 times higher than normal last week and climbed to 1,850 times normal over the weekend. Nishiyama said the increase was a concern, but also said the area is not a source of seafood and that the contamination posed no immediate threat to human health." I mean, Jesus Christ, folks, read between the lines there. It's not a source of seafood? (It's not connected to other parts of the ocean? Fish never swim through it? What?). It poses "no immediate threat to human health?" (But please don't ask us about the long term risks?).


"On Sunday, TEPCO officials said radiation in leaking water in the Unit 2 reactor was 10 million times above normal — an apparent spike that sent employees fleeing the unit. The day ended with officials saying the huge figure had been miscalculated and offering apologies... TEPCO vice-president Sakae Muto said a new test had found radiation levels 100,000 times above normal — far better than the first results, though still very high... 'We will work hard to raise our precision in our work so as not to repeat this again,' he said, but he ruled out having an independent monitor oversee the various checks despite the errors." ...because, however overwhelmed TEPCO and the Japanese government actually are, the last thing these people will do is admit that they need help: half of Japan can melt before they'll lose face by asking a foreign body to step in, it would be the biggest humiliation the Japanese have endured since losing the war, because it would mean that their precious myth of "technological advancement" really was nothing more than that - a myth.


Don't get me wrong: I loved much of what I experienced in Japan, have often thought of returning there, but none of this horrifyingly black comedy of errors unfolding comes as a surprise to me. I don't wish to be NEGATIVE, or to EMBARRASS anyone, but if a "state of emergency" could ever exist that merited a foreign intrusion into Japanese turf, this is it. It makes me very angry, it makes me very sad, and it makes me very scared for my friends in Japan - all of whom are in Saitama, to my knowledge, but that's close enough for discomfort. Sad, sad days for the Japanese people - the disaster has only just begun.

PS - oh, by the way, certain episodes of the Simpsons have been pulled for being in poor taste, in light of the current situation.

A few upcoming gigs of note

Paradosis bassist rocks out, photo by Femke van Delft, not to be reused without permission

I'd already posted something on the Acid Mothers Temple gig, March 29th at the Biltmore; a few other gigs have caught my attention this week. China Syndrome, fronted by 64 Funnycars' Tim Chan, do an engaging power pop highly reminiscent of the more muscular tunes on the first two Big Star albums (tho' they also mention the Replacements, Guided By Voices, and The New Pornographers in their self-description); they'll be playing a benefit concert for Japan, April 1st, along with Payday Millionaire and Dow Jones & the Market Shares. That's at Lanalou's, Japantown, 362 Powell St. Also on the first, Black Wizard, a stoner doom/ blues band whose Myspace songs are kind of fucking terrific, plays the Interurban Art Gallery, next door, I believe, to Scratch, at Carrall and E. Hastings. For those of us metal freaks enmired in the suburbs, meanwhile, on April 2nd, there'll be a Pitt Meadows fundraiser for AdStock, featuring Nylithia, First Reign, Northern Guard and Paradosis - four bands for $10, at the Pitt Meadows Heritage Hall, 12460 Harris Road. Nice that not every cool gig requires me to travel to the city... tho' that Black Wizard show is looking kind of appealing...

Alvarius B. discovery

Y'know, I never bothered to try to figure out the joke behind Sun City Girls/ Brothers Unconnected/ Sublime Frequencies guy Alan Bishop's alternate name, Alvarius B.? I mean, so many musicians have given themselves goofy names that meant absolutely nothing that one wouldn't necessarily think that Alvarius B. had to mean anything at all. But it does, apparently - it's a reference to an endangered psychoactive American toad, the alvarius bufo, also known as the bufo alvarius,or sometimes the Colorado River Toad, whose skin exudes a form of DMT. Isn't that nice to know? Now who exactly are the Blood Operatives of the Barium Sunset, I wonder? ...I love that album.