Reg Harkema: The Monkey Warfare Interview

This is the full text of my interview with Reg Harkema about his film Monkey Warfare, as ran in a shortened version in a past Discorder. Monkey Warfare is now out on DVD in Canada and on its way to the Viennale and to Australia! The DVD is available on Amazon.ca and features an entire rough cut of the film, with commentary by Harkema and his editor, alongside the theatrical cut with commentary by the cast - it's pretty cool!

By the way, Warren Kinsella says somewhere online that some of what follows is “unadulterated bullshit,” or something like that.


****

Allan: So you’re from Vancouver, originally?

Reg: Yeah, I was born in 1967. Actually, we actually just drove by the hospital where I was born in British Columbia, Burnaby General.

Allan: We were growing up around here at about the same time, then. I was born in 1968. Were you also on the punk scene here in the 80’s?

Reg: Yeah, I know, it’s really bizarre, y’know, with that little conversation we had when I ran into you, about going to the other location of Scratch Records. Christ, I’ve know Keith (Perry, of Scratch) since I was, like, 17. I met him when he opened that location, down on Cambie, across from the Cambie, and then moved down the street to Cordova, and I guess he’s on Richards now, right? I’m sure we’ve been to many of the same gigs...

Allan: Probably, although I was growing up in Maple Ridge, so I didn’t get out to as many gigs as I wanted to. Were you at the Dead Kennedys at the York Theatre, in 84 or 85?

Reg: No. But I was at Nomeansno’s first gig as a three piece, in ’84, opening for DOA. That was at the York Theatre, as well.

Allan: So you were in the Vancouver punk scene when the Squamish Five were arrested?

Reg: They were arrested in 82, right?

Allan: ‘83, I believe.

Reg: Well, that would have been the nascent beginnings of the whole punk thing for me. It was funny... Actually, let me just grab my beer. One second... Yeah, it’s funny, cos I kinda got into punk through the Pointed Sticks, believe it or not, in the late 70’s, and wanted to go see the Rock Against Radiation show, but I was too young, my Mom wouldn’t let me go. And then I sorta drifted out of the punk scene for a little bit, more influenced by my biker uncles, interested in Motorhead. That was actually the very first gig I was allowed to go to, finally, in 1982 at the Kerrisdale Arena.

Allan: Right, that was the gig that got the Kerrisdale closed down, wasn’t it? It was too loud.

Reg: I would not be surprised. And then I discovered CITR, believe it or not, actually, through a mutual friend who introduced me to someone at a U2 gig at the Queen E. When I got into CITR, that’s when I drifted back into the whole punk thing. And after that I was going to punk gigs and stuff.

Allan: Were you DJing at CITR?

Reg: No, she introduced me to the fact of the existence of the radio station. I eventually did start DJing at CITR a few years later, when I was going to university with some friends.

Allan: What was your show?

Reg: It was called "The Visiting Penguins" I believe. We were always accused of stealing records, but I want to set the "record" straight that nothing in my collection says "CITR" on it!

Allan: All of this was a little after the Five were arrested?

Reg: Yeah, I came on to the punk scene like, just after it. If my Mom had let me go to that Rock Against Radiation, I would have been there, Ground Zero, but I wasn’t allowed to go, cos I was only 12, and didn’t drift back into it until after they were arrested. I never saw the Subhumans, for instance.

Allan: Yeah, neither did I, when I was a kid, tho’ I’ve gotten to see them twice in the last couple of years, so that’s pretty cool... What your first awareness of Direct Action?

Reg: Just the sorta media blitz of it on TV, and my Dad going on about what a bunch of malcontents they were, what a disgrace. My Dad was a former cop, right? A Vancouver City Police cop, working in the downtown eastside. I guess he was a homicide detective at that time, mind you.

Allan: So what were your politics like? How did you feel about it when you heard about it?

Reg: Well, I was, at the time, pretty apolitical, and didn’t even really pay attention to the news or anything, and didn’t really care. It was only until about a year later that I became sort of politicized, when I started going back to the Clash records that I’d bought. I became politicized through U2, believe it or not. I’m not ashamed to admit it now, y’know, although I haven’t really listened to anything since the Unforgettable Fire. But that album War was a big album for me, and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in particular.

Allan: So, like, when you were involved in the punk scene after that... I don’t know if you remember, but there were slogans on the back of DOA albums and stuff at the time, like, “Talk – Action = Zero.” That was on the back of Bloodied but Unbowed (brief plug for Joey and Co: this has recently been reissued on Sudden Death Records). Glen Sanford, the guy who made the documentary on Gerry – he was actually at the Rock Against Radiation gig – reports seeing graffiti around town reading “Talk – Direct Action = Zero”). At the time, to me – I remember being nervous about the whole punk thing, because I was getting into it, and I was, like, 15, and I didn’t really know what it was about or where I stood. For me, that slogan was kinda scary, and they were recording songs like “Burn It Down,” talking about burning down prisons and things like that, in support of the Five. It kinda scared me, but at the same time, but I thought it was kinda cool, back during the Cold War, that people had actually stood up... This is back when we were all walking around afraid that there might be a nuclear war at any minute. That stuff didn’t have an impact on you?

Reg: Yeah, you know, a little bit. Cos once I did become a little bit politicized, a little bit aware – once the narrow crack in the door was opened for me, I kinda went through it full force, and canvassed for them and so on. The DOA song that more affected me than those songs was that “General Strike” song. I think that was like 83, 84, something like that, there was some solidarity movement. They took the name of from the Polish solidarity movement and applied it to some NDP workers movement in BC at the time. I think the song was written for that, and I was really into that song and into the Green Party politics. But it was all less grounded in reality for me and more in teenage playacting, almost. The politics that DOA was kind of espousing and involved in was for me the same as the politics of another favourite band of the time, Stiff Little Fingers. I was as much into Northern Ireland as I was involved in what was going on in British Columbia. It was all kind of at arm’s length. While living with my parents, I mean. I was pretty sheltered, right? I’d grown up in a Christian churchgoing home with a cop as a father, right, so I was never really in the streets, so to speak. Actually, my most “direct action,” if you will, was at that DOA concert at the York Theatre, when I was kinda offended by some anti-religious stuff that was being shouted by Joey Shithead and I leaped onstage and pulled some banner down and unceremoniously got tossed out of the theatre... I wonder if he remembers that? (laughs).

Allan: (laughs) Someone somewhere is gonna read that and go “That was you!”

Reg: And after that I kinda got more into the Violent Femmes and Goth music, after the trauma of that DOA gig.

Allan: You said at the Q&A for the screening of your film that you had sympathy, but not necessarily approval, for Direct Action. Do you want to elaborate on that?

Reg: What they wanted to do, their whole vision of what society can and should be is a hard one to argue with. I still have very left-leaning politics and one of the obvious thematic streams of my own film was the whole bicycle thing and all that. I’ve never owned a car and I ride a bike wherever I go, blah blah blah blah, and y’know, recycle, blah blah blah blah, um, so in that sense I definitely have empathy for their aims, but I just don’t see violence as a solution to anything. There’s a continuum going right up from what they were trying to do to Hiroshima.

Allan: I don’t know if you want to get into a little third person argument with Gerry Hannah here, but Gerry had said to me that he questioned whether it should be described as violence, because, accidents aside, they were attacking property but not people...

Reg: But if I can kick in my cynical Godard side, he was nailing that in La Chinoise a year before the May 68 rioting, when he was showing how awry that can go. I read Ann Hansen’s book Direct Action and I kinda wished they’d been cinema fans, and watched Godard, rather than listening to the Doors. Then they probably would have seen... have you seen La Chinoise?

Allan: I haven’t, and maybe some of the readers haven’t, so...

Reg: It’s a film about a bunch of Parisian students who, during the summer away from school, they decide to take over someone’s relative’s apartment, and they spend the whole summer studying Mao and debating the use of violence versus non-violence in terms of trying to affect change in the world, and one of the members of the cell, so to speak, is ejected because they refuse to submit to the party line of the rest of the members in their decision to use violence. And near the end of the film, they decide to undertake a violent act, and assassinate a Soviet minister who is visiting to open a new wing of the Sorbonne, the Paris university, which throughout the film these students have a real problem with, because of the indoctrination students are undergoing... They decide to do this political assassination. It just goes wrong. The woman who goes in to do the assassination gets the looks at the hotel registry where the Soviet minister is staying, but she reads it upside-down and goes into room 23 instead of 32, and shoots the person there, so then she has to go back to room 32 and shoot the other guy... In the middle of the film, there’s actually a discussion with a philosopher who was involved with the Algerian resistance movement, and it’s an interesting discussion, because he actually advocated violence in the Algerian resistance, but it was because there was a widespread social movement backing him. Which is the point Ann Hansen makes throughout her book, is that they felt isolated, because in North America there is no widespread social movement backing people to overthrow the establishment, simply because everyone’s too content here... I guess I should mitigate what I’m saying. If you’re in an oppressed nation, where you’re under the boot of a dictatorship, certainly I guess violence maybe is an option...

Allan: Here, we’re too comfortable, so it stands out as a fairly unusual behaviour. It doesn’t win a whole lot of approval for the cause.

Reg: No. And you become that which you’re fighting against.



Allan: You talked to both Ann and Gerry in researching the film?

Reg: We talked to Ann and Gerry – my girlfriend, Cindy Wolfe (who acts in the film, was in charge of the antiques department, and helped secure music rights), talked to Ann and Gerry not in researching the film so much, but in researching a photo that’s used in the film, that’s in Ann’s book, to find out who had the rights to it. They had to remember who the photographer was, and the photographer was a BCTV photographer, so then we had to figure out who owned BCTV, and, y’know, all along the food chain until we found someone who was willing to sign off on it.

Allan: So Ann and Gerry weren’t really directly involved?

Reg: No. I mean, Ann was indirectly involved, because her book (Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla) was a huge influence on Tracy’s character. I gave it to her as research material.

Allan: What was the book Don McKellar read to prep for his role?

Reg: He was reading Fugitive Days, by Bill Ayers, who was one of the Weather Underground. He was Bernardine Dohrn’s husband and lived underground with her. It was funny, because Bill Ayer’s book was in the New York Times book review on September 11th, 2001, and Ann Hansen’s book I think was released shortly before, between the lines. (This is especially ironic because of the history of Reg’s development of the screenplay for Monkey Warfare, which was based loosely on characters in a previous project he’d started, Bad Chloe. Bad Chloe was “about a couple of young radicals in love. The script ended with the character Chloe suicide-bombing the Molson Indy after her boyfriend Nick is run over by a Coca Cola truck.” Harkema’s first pitch meeting for the project was scheduled for 9 AM, September 11th, at the TIFF).

Allan: So you weren’t personally in touch with any of the members of Direct Action...?

Reg: No.

Allan: What about Terry Chikowski, the security guard who was injured at Litton Industries (the Toronto branch of a US company, manufacturing Cruise missiles in Canada; they were the target of Direct Action’s biggest action. I interviewed Terry awhile back, but haven’t found a publisher for the piece yet).

Reg: No, until I talked to you, I didn’t even know the guy’s name, or whatever happened to him.
(Mild Spoiler Warning: from here on in, spoilers begin to accumulate. If you hate any spoilers, you’d best save the rest of the article until after you see the film. If you don’t mind mild spoilers, it’s safe to continue for now).

Allan: He’s actually in Las Vegas right now as we speak. He’s off visiting his money, he says... anyhow. Your characters seem like they’re in a state of denial or remorse – they seem to have suppressed a lot of their political feelings in reaction to the fact that the security guard in your film is injured. Am I reading that correctly? Are they supposed to be running from their pasts?

Reg: Yeah, they’re both carrying huge amounts of guilt. I don’t know how well this comes through in the film, but part of the guilt is a result of them inwardly blaming themselves for what happened, but outwardly blaming each other?

Allan: Ahh. Okay. Yeah, I can see that there, tho’ I didn’t at the time...

Reg: It probably could have been drawn a bit better, but there’s a moment, after they reveal their secret to the young girl, where Don is saying “It was my fault,” and it becomes a little dialogue between the two of them... It has resonance any time I watch it, but I’m not sure it’s having resonance for the audience.


Allan: I wanted to ask you what you wanted the film to say, actually. There’s a sense of something generational going on. You’re very aware of the radicals of the 1960s in the film, and then there’s Don and Tracy as radicals from the 80s from Vancouver, and there’s this young kid smashing up SUVs, so there’s a sense of something being handed down from generation to generation. The last line of the film – “You guys should have taught me how to make a Molotov cocktail” – do you think they should’ve?

Reg: I dunno, I mean... there’s no real message to the film. The last line drives a lot of the screenwriter types crazy, right, because it doesn’t really wrap it up and bounce it home, if you will... I’m not really offering a message; it’s more really a discussion of whether they should have or not, and it’s more speaking to the overriding framework, in my mind, of how society takes our idealism and beats it down so that we’re slotted into these little units that function, not for the betterment of our society, but for the way the powers that be want our society to work. Most obviously the nuclear family, right? So at that moment that she says that to them, they’re kind of like her surrogate parents. And what do parents do? They practice a form of censorship on their children. And what do the greater, overriding “parents” in our society, the powers that be, do? They practice a form of censorship on the masses. That’s why we go into this whole discussion of hidden histories and what history is taught, y’know? We’re taught how Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to pull the wall down, and that ended the Cold War, but we’re not taught about people like the Vancouver Five and the radical anarchist movement. Going back to what you were saying of the possibility of there being nuclear destruction at any moment, I’m sure you had that whole experience of a loud bang happening at school one day, and thinking, just for that moment, “This is it!”

Allan (laughs): Right.

Reg: Or what was that movie, The Day After...

Allan: The Day After, Threads – The Road Warrior. It was even a fantasy, back then... What do you think the Five’s effect actually was? Something like that, blowing shit up, people getting hurt, getting sent to prison... that’s gonna have repercussions that are going to be very hard to trace, very hard to map, y’know?

Reg: Well, I mean, it’s interesting, because Ann Hansen addresses that a bit in her book, and I find it hard to argue with a bit of what she’s saying, y’know? It kinda makes you wonder if there was a way for what they’ve done to influence larger segments of society, these actions would have a greater practical effect. She talks about how Litton Industries pulled up their factory and all their contracts out of Canada, and Red Hot Video actually having to shut down some of their operations.

Allan: I’ve heard about the Red Hot Video thing, but I’m not sure about Litton, actually. I’ve interviewed Chikowski, and he continued working at Litton for years after the bombing.
Reg: But they had a contract to make the Cruise missile, and that contract was lost after that action happened...

Allan: Maybe Chikowski is wrong...

Reg: Where I’m taking it from is Ann’s book, so... It’s a little section at the end of the book.

Allan: Hm. How do you think it affected punk rock?

Reg: On reflection if I look back from what I know now, certainly it did. At the time, though, I was such a fringe element. I was a snotty 17 year old kid pulling down banners at DOA shows. “Free the Five” seemed like just another cause.

Allan: ...okay. Well, let’s come to Warren Kinsella. Did you read the chapter on Gerry in Fury’s Hour? (which I'd lent Reg about a day before the interview, btw).

Reg: Yeah, I read that thing. I was a little bit disappointed, because obviously the guy has written a few things and obviously he’s got half a brain, but he’s got an axe to grind. It brings out the worst in human character. It just seemed to be a polemic and a character assassination than anything else. It’s just really prurient and juvenile, some of the stuff, where he just takes stuff Gerry Hannah said out of context and just make some kind of joke about it.

Allan: It seems really snide.

Reg: Snide, exactly.

Allan: It’s unfortunate, because he’s doing an important thing, because he’s interviewing Terry Chikowski. You’re talking about not knowing Chikowski’s name until I mentioned it – I didn’t know his name until I read Fury’s Hour. In a way, I’m kinda grateful, because I was one of these Free the Five people when I was a kid, I was supporting this, and I didn’t want to think about Chikowski very much.

Reg: But you’re someone who is trying to see both sides of it. Kinsella is doing the research and finding this guy to shove it in Hannah’s face.

Allan: The theory that’s coming up from talking with Hannah is that a lot of this stems from Kinsella being pissed off that Hannah wouldn’t do an interview with him.

Reg: Yeah, exactly. I’m not surprised by that. It seems like a personal grudge thing is going on.

Allan: Okay, so enough of the Five, enough of punk rock. Let’s talk about eBay for a bit.

Reg: You know, if you look in the movie, there’s a couple of inserts in the movie of it being this website called Antiques Online. And I dealt long and hard with the issue of how these people don’t have credit cards or anything, and how are we gonna make it legit that they could sell online. We worked long and hard on it, and after screening the film a few times – people just fuckin’ don’t care. No one things to themselves, okay, these people are underground, how can they do this. And in fact it’s always referred to as eBay, as well, in reviews. I tried to consciously make it not eBay, so no one would go “you need a credit card to sell on eBay,” and no one cares. (laughs).

Allan: Is there meant to be any commentary on the commodification of punk or punk nostalgia...? At one point the girl takes the Don McKellar character to task for placing too much value on his books as artefacts that are worth something...

Reg: Definitely. There’s a commentary along the lines of how our idealism is commodified and made palatable and sold, definitely. The Baader Meinhof book – Ann Hansen herself went to Europe in the 1980s in the waning days of that and was inspired by what was going on there – and now it’s become this book to be valued, so hopefully it will make some money when they need it when they’re too old to get some medicine, or something...



Allan: I mean, the film doesn’t seem cynical per se, but you’re certainly not very optimistic about the state of things right now.

Reg: Oh yeah. When the movie’s released and the Vancouver Sun coverage on the movie comes out, I think there’ll be a Katherine Monk interview with me and three actors, and the large bulk of the interview is them talking about what a sense of hope the movie has, and me refuting everything they say.

Allan: Yeah, it’s pretty grim. This is our idealism: hiding underground, rooting through trash, selling shit on the internet and hoping to stay alive. That’s not very optimistic.

Reg: I think that what it comes down to is the actors live in the world of their characters and see their characters as going beyond the last frame of the movie, where as I see them almost as little chess pieces and there lives end at that last frame. So for me, it’s over, boom, there’s no hope. 23 years from now, no one’s gonna give a fuck, so let’s deal with it. Live in the now, man. Whereas they’re like, “They’ve formed a little family, let’s go on.”

Allan: We arrive at the nuclear family.

Reg: Which... I’m hard pressed to see the positivity and the hope in that.

Allan: There is the sense... Our own families, we don’t usually get what we want from our own families. Everyone has leftovers. But in the way that we seek out alternate histories, you seek out alternate fathers and figures of inspiration, other teachings. And in a way, this girl has found people who can look out for her, and have at least a little bit of wisdom that they can impart on her. So there’s a little bit of hope there.

Reg: I guess, y’know, as long as she applies aloe vera leaves to her face every day and it heals and all that, and she doesn’t rat these two out, they may have some kind of understanding, sort of relationship, because her involvement in threatening guerrilla activity has probably come to an end. So I guess in that sense there is some hope.

Allan: So if you were to make a sequel, what would you do?

Reg: (laughs) I dunno. I keep thinking in terms of the last scene which was never shot, actually, which I wrote for a sales agent who was really interested in giving us some money up front. She wanted to see a couple more scenes and one final scene after that one to bring to her people, so she could convince them to give us some money so we could shoot in Super 16... She never did, but the last scene was them winding up on a beach somewhere and Tracy unwrapping Nadia’s bandages and her face is all healed up, and Don reaching over and putting on a record on the portable record player, and the song is “Revolution Blues” by Neil Young, and that was gonna play over the end credits. So I guess the sequel would be Agitation in the South Pacific. Or Toronto Island. Something like that.

Allan: I really liked the song you used over the end credits, Leonard Cohen’s “The Old Revolution.”

Reg: Yeah, that came pretty late in the game. All the music was kinda in the realm of “Yeah, we’ll be able to afford it,” which is why we used it, and that one was a little bit pricier than anything else, but the producer managed to get it inexpensively, relative to Leonard Cohen. We were actually going to end with a Weird War song at one point, or the Halo Benders. They have this song, “Bomb Shelter Parts One and Two,” which has got these great lines in it: “Next time you’re at one of those big concerts waving your lighter, don’t waste your lighter fluid! Take it to the streets, let ‘em know how you feel!” And that was gonna dovetail into our little Molotov cocktail thing with Flick Harrison after the end credits (which, I gather from IMDB, may be removed from the theatrical version of the film “for legal reasons.”) But yeah, “The Old Revolution” is so appropriate as a poetic summation of Don and Tracy’s relationship in the film – “Into this furnace/ I ask you now to venture/ You whom I cannot betray.” They’re held together by that secret, and the whole fire thing...

Allan: There’s a generational thing there, as well.

Reg: Yeah. And those paying close attention, hopefully, will pick up on the fact that it’s the same song Nadia labelled as “hippie shit” earlier in the film...



Ifny, Allan, Reg, and Flick Harrison; photo by David Repa, we think!

On the drummers of the jazz festival

Eugene Chadbourne with Ghosts on Fire, featuring Han Bennink on drums, at the Cobalt, June 20th, 2007

(Photos by Femke van Delft)

Didn't get to see much at the jazz festival, but I DID manage to see six astounding drummers at work.

Alex Cline, Nels' twin, in town with adventuresome west coast jazz fixture Vinny Golia, wins the award for most intense, focused, and drummerly drummer - his technique is astonishing, tho' vaguely inhuman, so fast and precise it is. I haven't grooved on the twin thing since I went to elemetary school with the Power sisters (whose first names were never really mentioned and are certainly not remembered by me- they were always just the Power sisters, or sometimes the Power twins, their twindom and vaguely superhero-esque surname completely defining them). I wonder if Alex and Nels went to the same elementary school? I wonder if there is any sibling rivalry between them? (I wonder if they saw Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, and how they felt about it? I haven't asked many questions about bein' a twin in my interviews with Nels). Odd to note similarities and differences between them, particularly since they're both so musically gifted. My current theory about Nels' success with Dylan van der Schyff last year - the two REALLY hit a groove together - is based around the fact that Dylan's technique is very similar, in ways, to Alex Cline - and also to Scott Amendola, drummer for the Nels Cline Singers... Who have a new CD out, by the way. It MUST have contributed to their chemistry.

Chicagoan Hamid Drake, in town with the delightful Indigo Trio, an AACM offspring of Nicole Mitchell, was by far the sexiest drummer in the festival, exuding a calm, powerful charisma, while seeming quite laid-back. If any of the festival's drummers were to attract groupies, it'd be Hamid. His drumming, too, was sexier than anyone else's, more rhythmic, more, well, AFRICAN feeling - the night really harkened back to the pan-African resonances of the best of early AACM stuff. I'd like to interview Nicole Mitchell if she comes back next year - she did a terrific job of leading the high school intensive, too, who sounded even MORE cookin' than when Mwata Bowden was here. Maybe it's because they were all male, and Nicole Mitchell is considerably more attractive than Mwata? Sorry, Mwata.

Anyhow: least likely to attract female groupies, unless they looked like Faye Dunaway in Barfly: Paul Lovens, drumming with Eugene Chadbourne and with Aki Takase's delightful Fats Waller Project. With his rolled up shirtsleeves, necktie, and shaggy graying hair, Lovens wins the prize for looking most like a jazz drummer and for exuding the most charm - in a vaguely slovenly, affable, I'd-drink-with-this-guy kind of way. He looks like your uncle Pete, or some guy you met in a bar and told your whole life to. He also seemed to have the most varied bag of tricks of any drummer; maybe it's just that I haven't seen him before (unlike Han Bennink), but I never knew quite what he would do next.

Han Bennink, of course, wins the prize of prizes, the MVP, the gold star beside his name. As goofy and scene-stealing as he is, as overtly as he craves your attention, and as familiar as his, well, shtick, has become, I have yet to see a jazz musician match him for enthusiasm. Han is to avant garde jazz what Iggy Pop is to punk - a true enthusiast who drives others further and faster than they normally would go on their own, by virtue of his own irrepressible intensity. Some of his tricks included sticking a drumstick in his lips and using his mouth as an echo chamber as he hit it, shaping the sounds; drumming with his boot on the snare drum (with both hands working sticks and the other foot workin' a pedal); throwing drumsticks on the floor, in a spontaneous-seeming, perfectly rhythmic gesture that seemed showmanlike at the same time; sitting in front of the stage (when he played with Ab Baars at the Roundhouse) and drumming on drumsticks that he laid across his ankles; throwing said drumsticks over his head to crash into his kit when he was finished with them, again managing to produce sounds that worked; disappearing behind a curtain to play a hidden piano - quite well, I thought!; and finally, ending the performance at the Roundhouse by dropping his snare drum on the floor, to crash perfectly in time with the close of the piece. It was equally a delight to see him a week or so previous, filling in for an absent Ron de Jong at the Cobalt, as Eugene Chadbourne jammed with Ghosts on Fire. My review of that is in the current Nerve Magazine, otherwise bereft of articles by me. Han Bennink at the Cobalt! Thank god Femke caught a photo of it - no one would believe me.

Damn, I love Han Bennink. Oh, he was also the hardest hitter of the festival, natch. You seldom hear how LOUD he hits on CD.

All these guys were great, tho', as were - to tip my hat to the locals - the two drummers for Fond of Tigers, who blew Tortoise away and really generated an amazing amount of excitement at the Commodore last week. There'll be a review in next month's Nerve - the drummers were Skye Brooks and Dan Gaucher, and they were fantastic. The band needs to work on their quieter passages - they don't hold the attention - and there are strong similarities between many of their songs, but when they get going, it's quite phenomenal, especially live. This is a band to see, if you can get a chance.

That's about it for the jazzfest for me this year. I spent more time volunteering than going to shows!

Hostel Part Two: A Thoroughly Enjoyable Revolting Horror Film

In The American Nightmare, I think it’s Carol J. Clover who makes the cleverly memorable comment that horror films are “boot camps for the soul,” in which, through surviving a process of ordeals, we emerge strengthened. In his Hostel films – in which the very rich pay for the right to murder young backpackers rounded up by an evil Slovakian hostel –Eli Roth seems to have found inspiration in this concept of horror: in both movies, initially decent, innocent characters with whom we identify are toughened up - even made sadistic – by the course of events, having learned a trick or two from their captors. When Paxton performs the final murder in the original Hostel – killing a victimizer, of course, since he’s the “good guy” – he is not the same horny, affable, ugly American youth we meet at the beginning of the film; he even tortures his tormenter in much the way he was tortured, cutting off two of his fingers. This all riffs, of course, off the transformation the film makes in its viewers; by suffering along with Paxton and his less fortunate comrades, we too are (ahem) “empowered” to use the violence that has been used on us – sorta like the scrawny kid who, bullied in grade two, becomes a bully in grade four. So much for taking down the master’s house with the master’s tools.

I didn’t like the first Hostel much. An equal mix of tits and carnage, it seemed fundamentally reactionary, and suggested – at a time of tensions between the US and Europe over support for US actions in Iraq, including the torture of prisoners – that Americans were currently victims of torture, not perpetrators, unfairly singled out by Europeans, who were the real sadists. A bizarre transference of guilt, really – ridiculous bullshit. It made for an amusing spin on American self-importance (and provided an accurate reflection of the level of anti-Americanism in the world at that time) that the right to kill Americans at the murder resort fetched a premium, but given that the ending of the film has Americans fighting back, using violence to counter that anti-Americanism – well, I couldn’t get behind it much. Blood-spattered and troubled flag-waving is still flag waving, even if you have to dig a bit to get at it.

To my surprise, I like the second Hostel film very, very much. It vastly expands on the simple plot of the original, telling the story both from the point of view of the intended victims – in this case, a trio of girls – and from the would-be victimizers (two brothers from America, who fly out because the older one of the two wants to help his emasculated sibling and because he thinks he’ll acquire an edge in corporate meetings, if he’s killed someone; nice that Americans are the evildoers here, and that the hostel simply services them). We also get to meet the Hannibal Lecter-esque founder of the resort and to spend a little time getting to know its employees, who seem distressingly like people “just doing their job” everywhere in the world (bored and semi-competent). Such fleshings-out make the film a tad more believable than the first, and the various brilliant little details that we’re treated with keep us wholly engaged with the film on the level of craft. When a severed head in a box is brought as a gift to one of the evil, powerful people at the upper end of Hostel’s food chain, we see the box being delivered as reflected in the man’s sunglasses. When, in a grotesque run-up to one of the torture scenes, a young and very vain woman, about to be tortured, is “prepared” for the client in a makeup room, Roth sets her in front of a Hollywood makeup mirror rimmed with lightbulbs, as a, shall we say, cutting commentary on the culture of glamour. Even the opening sequences, where the diary, photos, and postcards acquired from one past victim are thrown into a furnace to dispose of any evidence of her passing, have a creepy brilliance to them – showing us the burning away of sentimentality and innocence, as part of the transformation Roth’s cinema proposes to engineer in us. There’s also a perversely brilliant and all-too-real auction scene, where you get to watch a variety of unwholesome rich assholes bidding via palm-pilot for the right to murder our three heroines; bizarrely, you may find yourself rooting for certain characters to win, as if our own masochistic vanity requires a suitably attractive murderer. None of this makes the film brilliant, but it does make it very watchable, a well-crafted and creepy experience.

The most interesting aspects of the film cannot be delved into at length without spoiling the story, though. It is NOT reducible to a defence of American violence, however; it barely touches on the US-versus-the-rest-of-the-world paranoia that made the first film so objectionable, focusing instead on the current state of affairs between men and women (and men and men – it contains some very interesting peeks into the darker corners of the male psyche). It's even more interesting for doing this while provoking interesting meditations on class hierarchy and privilege. Europe IS figured as the source of our hierarchical value-system which allows the rich to exploit others, and there's a costumed bacchanalia that suggests that there has always been a dark underside to our traditions and cultures, which horror movies - or murder resorts - partake in -- but neither of these things serve to displace US guilt; rather, we are reminded that our cultural roots ARE European, even if Americans are more "businesslike" in their figuring of hierarchy, and, by virtue of forgetting their history and ancestry, can pretend to greater innocence... The squeamish can rest assured that there is only one scene that is nearly impossible to sit through comfortably, a very literal bloodbath that conclusively lays to rest any claims to innocence that the audience might make. In a time when mainstream fare seldom addresses issues of class and shies well clear of feminism, Hostel 2 is provocative and pleasing to see – a nicely liberal corrective for the prior film, in many ways, even if, once again, we emerged hardened. Toughening us up to fight critics of America is very different matter from toughening us up to not be victimized by the rich and privileged.

Spoiler alert – that’s the best goddamn castration scene I’ve ever seen, too; it makes even I Spit on Your Grave look pretty tame by comparison. I absolutely love that the dog handler tries to stop his dog from... well, anyhow...

Disturbing Dream

Another weird dream: though I'm not sure of my identity in it - it was almost like a 3rd person omniscient dream, if you can imagine that - there's a couple of evil, cynical people who work at a newspaper, and they summon a couple of ghosts by promising them a reward that they patently won't get, to help them harvest skins and maybe souls of people who have died in the city and whose corpses are hidden in various places - an erotic asphyxia case hanging in a public bathroom stall, a naked man forced into the trunk of a car, etc. I think maybe the ghosts will get the souls, but the newspaper people will get the skins, which they will use for nefarious purposes. The last part of the dream was spent walking from place to place in the city, uncovering the dead. Creepy.

Possession at Blim (great cult film)

The Polish film Possession is a very weird and dark look at male-female relationships - so dark and weird that I cannot begin to describe it fairly, and not just because I have no faith that my reading of the film will hold water. It screens at Blim on June 28th; fans of unusual cinema should endeavour to check it out - it has an obsessive, paranoid quality that will linger in your brain for weeks.

Civic Duty, Vancouver-style

...so there I am, walking along what I guess is Sunset Beach - the demarcations between beaches here are not clear to me - and I decide to walk down to the water. It's raining lightly, but I don't mind. As I crest a slight hill I see that there's a large gaggle of geese gathered at water's edge. I gesture my peaceful intent and decide to sit down by a log and observe them. Then I stop.

There, stuck into the log, just where I was planning to sit, are two used syringes. A third is lying on the sand, cap on.

I sit at an adjacent log and contemplate the needles. Would make a hell of a photo, if I had a camera with me; a friend of mine is contemplating starting an ironic postcard series, and the three needles shot against the background of False Creek, with a 'Welcome to Vancouver' emblazoned above it, would definitely work - particularly if you took the photo when the sun was setting. Joggers, cyclists, and dog walkers go by on the walkway, indifferent. I don't really want to turn my morning stroll into an act of civic duty, but how can I not - I'm my father's son, and he wouldn't even hesitate. I pick up an empty cigarette carton - probably left by the same junkies - and put the needles in it, pointy end down. After some indecision, I take them to the Acquatic Center, guessing, correctly, that they might have a sharps disposal bin.

Welcome to Vancouver.

Eugene Chadbourne again!

Eugene Chadbourne, left, Allan MacInnis, right. Photo by Dan Kibke

In addition to his tenure at the VCMI, which has already begun, Eugene Chadbourne will play three shows in Vancouver, starting Wednesday with a Dick Dale tribute band from Calgary at the Cobalt, for Fake Jazz night. Expect surf rock with a twist - Dr. Chad tells me that he played with this unit once before and it was a hoot. Then there's his Friday 5:30 PM show with Paul Lovens on June 22nd, followed that evening at the Culch, where he'll be singing and providing guitar and banjo accompaniment with Aki Takase's Fats Waller Project. My current print interview with Dr. Chad is findable at the Nerve online (check the archives if you're viewing this after June 2007) - we talk about Phil Ochs and his fondness for covering country tunes, and sort of neglect his "protest-song" side. The meat of the interview is below, without my interspersed prose:

On Phil Ochs:

I saw him several times when I was a teenager, I
always had to go alone because all my friends hated
his voice. He was a huge inspiration. One thing that is
interesting is in Boulder, Colorado, he did his rock
and roll shtick and nobody objected at all. I thought
it was weird when that "Gunfight in Carnegie Hall"
disc came out with the audience getting upset, I
thought New Yorkers must be really uptight. His life
of course ends with a horrible tragedy, including
several stupid biographies that came out after he
killed himself.

Reacting to my observation that "I don't like country music that much, but I love
your recordings of country music," and my request for his theory of how that works:

I don't know the answers to any of this for sure but I
do hear alot of it. In the '80s I would hear that
albums such as There'll be No Tears TOnight and
Country Protest "turned on" punkers to country music.
I just assumed they hadn't heard anything they liked
yet in the genre and I just happened to be that. In
the beginning there was a split between the avant
garde fans that liked the combination and those that
didn't, a split that has continued.

On the spontaneity of his shows - does he plan the set in advance?

I would rather not but I sometimes have to just to
make sure the show is going to move comfortably. Paul
and I might plan the first number and during the show
we may discuss what is coming next, but most of it is
spontaneous.

On the origins of his duo work with Paul Lovens:

Ironically the duo with him came up when the chef of
the Victoriaville fest turned down my duo with Jimmy
Carl Black, saying there was too much rock and country
and the festival crowd would not see what a great
guitarist I am in this context. This is of course the
opposite of the usual public reaction to free music.
So Paul Lovens and I had been talking about playing
together as he was getting attracted to the banjo
playing and picking he had heard in other contexts
involving me at festivals.

The Victoriaville fest went with the new combination
based on the idea that we would tour on the way up and
not present "the first meeting." Still expecting a
largely free improv set, the festival was surprised
that Paul had encouraged me to play all the country
and rock stuff, because he wanted to play it too. He
is like a big fan of drummers such as Charlie Watts,
Gary Chester, Earl Palmer. We also play together in
two other groups right now, one of which is also
playing in Vancouver, the Aki Takase Fats Waller
Project. Another is called New Directions in
Appalachian Music and involves Phil Minton, Mike
Cooper and others.

On how he seemed a lot more normal than I expected when I met him at the airport last time, then magically turned into a Looney Tunes character onstage:

I am not really in control of any of these perceptions
and think they are stupid to talk about. Why would you
expect someone to act the same way at an airport then
they do at a concert performance? My wife gets alot of
this from local yokels who think I sit around the
house playing the electric rake all the time or
something.

Another funny variation was the guy running a college
radio festival in Cleveland: he wanted to be assured I
would actually show up since "your music is so weird,
how do I know you will?"

On how he feels about "Outsider Music" as a term and phenomenon, and if he ever gets stuck in that box:

Another dumb label, I prefer the kind that relate to
buildings, garage rock, chamber music, loft jazz,
bedroom tapers.

I have been part of the "Outside Music" festival at
Chicago's Intuit Gallery, which shows outsider art.
My inclusion was controversial: it is true, I am not
an outsider in the sense of these artists because I
work profesionally as a musician. But many of them
survive from their professions too. In the art world
it is mostly employed as a term so collectors can keep
the price down on various types of work, a control
mechanism. In the music business they couldn't get the
price down any lower so I am not sure what the fuck
they are doing.

Does he have any labels for himself?

Not really, I like that comment of Capt. Beefheart's,
"my bottle doesn't have a label on it."

On what is a Eugene Chadbourne fan is like:

A sincere, socially conscious and usually brilliant
individual who has no time for crap.

On his daughters:

All three of the daughters actually are pretty
involved from time to time, Lizzie as a lyricist and
Jenny as an organizer and driver.

On Molly's future music career and how having Eugene Chadbourne for a father will affect her:

You are assuming she will have a music career. I am
not sure what she will do but she has a research grant
this summer to conduct an oral history related to the
establishing of Ladyslipper Music, a distribution
company for women's music founded in the Carrboro area
in the '70s. She graduates from college in the fall
and has been studying Spanish, semantics, literature,
women's studies, among other things.
She is very serious about music. She tends to talk
about things like sounding out of tune, kind of a
forbidden subject in the Chad world but I let her get
away with it.

Does Dr. Chad have more serious projects and more frivolous ones? Is there a hierarchy of importance in his musical world?

Almost anything has equal promise in my opinion. At
the same time if I decide to do a gig with two
teenagers backing me up I might expect less then if it was Paul
Lovens I was playing with. I try to put the same
amount of my own bravura and aesthetic into everything
I do, though, even if I am playing a song or two for a
class of little kids, I want to be playing in such a
way that if a hip jazz fan walked in they would freak
out and say "wow!"

What 3 CDs would he advise people to buy?

As you may have seen when I lord over my KKK mart

(explanatory note: when he sits onstage with a bunch of

his homemade CDs in a guitar case after a show), I
steer people toward whatever sides of my music they
are most interested in, and then it would also depend
on the nature of their collection. "There'll be No Tears
Tonight" is a groundbreaking record in some ways so
many people would like to have that. The CD version of
"The English Channel" is such a crazy assortment of
noise that I think every household should have one. I
am currently quite fond of "Horror Part 10: Concert
Band Massacre by Evil Spell" in which a pile of rare
vinyl recordings by the Grimsley Stage Band in
Greensboro get mutilated in my lab. Paul Lovens thinks
the debut recording of New Directions in Applachian
Music is the greatest CD ever and won't stop listening
to it. Collections such as "Duck Chad" and "Doc Chad
Coffee Cure" present good examples of what I am up to
currently. In some cases the best documentation is not
home made by me. The Get out of Iraq Now quartet
(GOIN) is represented in my catalog but I prefer the
new DVD production by the Straw into Gold company.

Does he still have family in Canada?

Yes, father, father in law, sister in law, brother in
law... I am stopping off to visit my dad.

On what he does in his freetime when in Canada:

Most often it has something to do with nature...

Any funny stories about visiting Canada?

No, but it isn't that Canada isn't funny. Most
performers would tell you a story about a border
search. Shockabilly was held up at the Winnipeg border
for hours and hours, they really thought we were
troublemakers and idiots and would have no resources
to raise a bond or make anything happen that would get
us across the border. Meanwhile we called my brother in law, who owned
several clothing stores in Calgary and could arrange a
bond even with the Stampede in progress. The promoter'
father turned out to be a retired colonel, he called
the customs people and apparently tore a hole in them.
When they allowed us through, the guy in charge said
"I am impressed, I had no idea you guys knew anybody
like that."

On Dr. Chad and Lenny Breau

I interviewed him and both that piece and the review
of his gig ran in the Calgary Herald in the early
'70s. He was doing some nice modal playing in the McCoy
Tyner style at the time.

How do you feel about yourself as an AMERICAN musician?

I don't even see myself as an American person.

It seems to me that you are intractably American - I don't think any other country could have produced you.

I am not sure if that is a compliment or what. There
are many Americas.

You're obviously often very critical of your country (like Phil Ochs). How do you feel about being an American?

I must be like everyone else, able to distinguish the people from the politics, that is really important.

Probably a lot of the Shimmy Disc bands doing a sort of playful psychedelia (King Missile and Bongwater and such) were kind of derivatives of the "Eugene Chadbourne genre" - would they have existed without Dr. Chad? Who does he see as a peer group?

Shockabilly was so influenced by so many other
psychedelic bands, however, that accepting what you
are saying is kind of ignoring history (editor: he read me

wrong, really!). Bongwater was
clearly an attempt to continue what Shockabilly was
doing, minus me, but then it evolved due to Ann
Magnusson's influence more than anything else. I
don't see any connection with King Missile...A peer
group for me is musicians in general, all of them, all
ages.

I love the Yes Men

...a new prank in Calgary...

WR: Mysteries of the Organism at the Cinematheque

Too many movies to see that I'm excited about, plus there's the jazz festival and Eugene Chadbourne to consider... one must-see arthouse film coming soon that I had to mention was Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism, at the Cinematheque next Friday and Saturday (June 29th and 30th). It's seriously worth taking a break from all that jazz to go see it - it's a shocking, funny, sexy, and very intelligent film about the life and theories of Wilhelm Reich. Those of you who missed my last Discorder column - I have terminated my column, and don't really consider the last installment a piece of my writing, since it was changed a fair bit, for no good reason - might want to heed my advice now and make plans to check it out; it's a pretty special film, so much so that the image from the film has long graced the cover of Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel... Tuli Kupferberg is in it, too... I'll be at the Friday show.

Pointed Sticks New Single, Nomeansno Boat: Ah, Fandom

I just got news of the band's first single in 26 years, courtesy of Ian Tiles. The splash page for it, with more info, is here; the official site is under construction here. I love the title and the gesture and I hope the Japanese dig the heck out of it. For those of you without turntables - because it's gonna be a real honest-to-god 7" -- Ian points out that it is "suitable for framing."

In other news, the most ridiculous Nomeansno auction I have ever seen is ongoing at the moment; it's more of a satire of fandom than a money-making device. If this link doesn't work, search out item number 200117558197.

For the record, I have a chicken recipe framed on my wall that Tom Holliston signed and gave me. It was that or the lamb.

An Item I Lost

An XL t-shirt, number 260122974945, bid to $33. I had bid $32.

Last Minute Bidding Blues: Phil Ochs, Eugene Chadbourne

I hate it when I wait all week to bid on some special item on eBay and then FORGET TO DO IT.

I forgot to bid on this Phil Ochs album some dude in New Westminster was selling, for example - a live, Canada-only 1974 release of a late-period live show, where Ochs is interspersing protest songs with versions of "Okie from Muskogee" and Elvis tunes, while wearing his (cynical?) gold lame suit. The audience heckles him, and he jousts back. The cover is priceless, and as live albums go, it's as odd and special an artefact as, say, Lou Reed's Take No Prisoners. It gets mentioned in my Eugene Chadbourne article in the Nerve this month (not online as I write, but go here, check the contents, or if you're seeing this after it was initially posted, the archives for June). It turns out Chadbourne saw Ochs play live when he was younger, something I did not know. Speaking of Chadbourne -- whose jazz fest return I am most looking forward to (also see here, for his show with Paul Lovens and Japanese pianist Aki Takase, covering Fats Waller tunes) -- I also recently forgot to bid on a signed edition of There'll Be No Tears Tonight, also on eBay and also mentioned in the article. Both these items were radically underbid upon, considering their scarcity and importance as artefacts; the Ochs went for a scant $9.95, with one bidder. It's just as well someone else won them, tho'; they should ideally go to a home where there's a turntable, all things considered. I was just gonna stick the vinyl on the wall, underneath my decorative Monkey Warfare LP, courtesy of Reg Harkema.

By the way, Reg tells me that Monkey Warfare is due out in July, I think it was, on DVD with some cool extras, including a rough cut with Reg and his editor doing commentary. By far the coolest Canadian film of 2006, and you can tell'em I said so.

More on Eugene later - I have outtakes from the interview to post.

Cindy Sheehan's farewell note

Something anyone concerned with the peace movement in America should read: Cindy Sheehan's "retirement" from anti-war activism.

Bizarre Dreams from which I Wake Up Crying

The night after a visit with my parents, I have two interlocking dreams shortly before I awake, and cannot fully sort out the order of events in them, save for the moment that comes last; I know it comes last because I wake up with tears in my eyes. For convenience's sake, I'll separate the narratives.

In the "first," I am in an apartment building to pick something up from a woman I don't know. Not exactly sure why or what - a purchase off eBay, perhaps, which may be an unusual version of the Clash's Combat Rock, because when I leave her apartment, I have acquired such a thing. On picking it up, though, I find that she is having a vicious fight with her boyfriend; he in particular is being quite abusive, standing in the doorway screaming at her. I sheepishly say "Excuse me," and she apologizes for the scene and gets me my item. I apologize for interrupting and leave. Then, in the elevator, I discover that the CD I am carrying - Combat Rock - is special in ways I hadn't figured. I want to put it in my CD player, but for some reason, I feel like I need a surface on which to do it. I go back to the apartment of the fighting couple - they have calmed down since - and ask if I can use their counter to change the CD in my Discman. They eagerly invite me in and I go about my business; as I do this - as if changing a CD were so complex! - the woman offers me tea and brings me an LP by a Krautrock band, Xhol Caravan, asking me to help identify some of the figures in the surreal, and very orange, landscape on the cover. Some of them, she thinks, are made of sugar; there's a tower, I respond, that seems to be made of non-dairy creamer. She goes away, and the man takes me aside, and proceeds to explain the scene I'd interrupted; he is glad I returned, since it gave them an excuse to stop fighting...

The "second" dream: I am in some sort of performance space that also sells CDs, and after seeing a highly abstract, flickering film introduction, in which one tries to sort out the band member's faces, I find myself dancing to a rare live version of Pere Ubu's "The Modern Dance." (In the dream I think I incorrectly identified the song as being off Dub Housing; somehow my sleeping mind is less efficient at keeping track of such details). I want to know the recording the song is on, because it's terrific, so I go to the counter at the front of the space and am handed a box set of live recordings of bands, the only one of which I recognize (or recall now) is an otherwise unreleased "Ubu live" disc (one of the other CDs is of classical music, but I don't know the composers; I stand at the counter, wondering if they're avant-gardists). I am stunned at how much I am enjoying the music, which continues to play, but the box set costs $45.99 and I don't know if I'd want the other recordings on it. I try to explain this to the shop girl, so she understands my hesitation, but she is rude to me, saying slightly sarcastic, cutting and disrespectful things - more of an attitude she has, probably, than a deliberate attack on me, but I find myself really bothered by it. I decide not to buy the CD and she makes some snotty comment - not really to me, and somewhat under her breath - about that. I go to leave, then return to the counter and start to demand she apologize. I deserve to be treated with respect, am a customer and have been entirely civil with her and do not merit her sarcastic asides. She argues with me and I get angrier and angrier, until I have completely lost control and - rather like the boyfriend in the "previous" dream - am yelling at her harshly, refusing to leave, demanding contrition; she is getting upset herself, but it's not giving me satisfaction. Suddenly a small bearded man approaches me - the manager? - and begins to say very soothing things about how he understands that I'm a good man and just want to be treated with respect. He puts a hand on my shoulder, and I feel afraid that if I trust him, he's going to punch me in the chest and push me out the door; but he doesn't, and continues to say soothing things, and suddenly I collapse crying, REALLY crying. Sobbing. An immense release of emotion, complete and utter catharsis - yowling and sobbing, tears spurting from my eyes.

As I wake up, I discover that I am crying still. The photo I've attached to this post is an old one, in which - shortly before my digital camera broke - I tried to capture the peace I felt the last time I really cried. I wonder at my dreams, in the brief time allowed before I have to go to work.

Jamie Fessenden's THE SACRIFICE in Xtra West

A coworker of mine lent me a DVD of a shot-on-digital feature a friend of hers had made - a DIY gay-themed occult horror film with bottom-drawer production values and a great story, called The Sacrifice. Directed by New Hampshire-based horror buff Jamie Fessenden (pictured at the top), it's one of those films where the modesty of means actually ends up making you root for the filmmakers and quietly cheering when they pull it off; I was surprised, when it finished, by how much I'd enjoyed the experience. It's filled with esoteric, genre-related in-jokes, a fairly dark sense of humour, and it has a thought-provoking story - I still haven't quite worked out what the relationships between the characters "mean," thematically, subtextually, archetypally, or psychoanalytically, but I found it fascinating, particularly since Fessenden isn't afraid of - is in fact interested in - entering some fairly dark regions of the human psyche. (I tend to prefer gay cinema that's a bit on the dark side - like, for instance, the transgressive and whip-smart Swoon, about the Leopold and Leob murder/kidnapping, or the films of Gregg Araki). Since I really enjoyed the film, I thought it would be kind of cool to interview Fessenden for Xtra West, Vancouver's gay and lesbian newspaper, where I'd yet to appear in print. They liked the story, and the interview has just been published in this week's issue; The Sacrifice, meanwhile - if all is going according to schedule - should be on the shelves at Videomatica now.

One quote I couldn't use in the article, offered here as a teaser, though it's completely unrelated to the film at hand: Fessenden and I were talking about the ways that horror cinema, with a few exceptions like David DeCoteau, has steered pretty clear of gay themes, to his disappointment. "Werewolf films are a particular pet peeve of mine," Fessenden said. "If the werewolf is male, for me, that’s a particularly homoerotic thing – you’ve got this guy who keeps running around naked all the time in the woods! And a lot of werewolf films kind of chicken out on that – you don’t even get much nudity in them, or anything else. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a werewolf film myself." It will have to wait until his sequel to The Sacrifice, The Resurrection, is finished, Jamie says.

Since we were on the topic of werewolves, I had to ask about the Canadian-made Ginger Snaps films, which (though they don't always live up to the greatness of the ideas behind them) I quite like. So does Jamie, it turns out. "The Ginger Snaps films are wonderful – especially the third one. I really love the one where they go back in time to sort of the origin of the thing. Some people debate it, but I think it has some very powerful moments. I love it!"

The Sacrifice tells the story of a geeky gay Goth kid who is drawn by a handsome blonde boy into a deep mystery involving Satanic ritual abuse in his town. Fessenden, who is also a composer, gives a great Bernard Hermann-esque score to to the piece, by the way - he was very flattered when I drew the comparison, but I don't believe I mentioned that in the article... Check out Dunkirk Studios' website for more, or pick up Xtra West - it's a pretty fun read, if'n I do say so myself...

Someone Else Who Doesn't Like Cell Phones

Based on this, someone should tell the Taliban about the bee theory.

Displaced Penguin, still no bees

A field in Seattle; a huge flowering shrub at the West Coast Express station in Maple Ridge; the wildflowers and flowering cultivated plants downtown: I stop to inspect the flowers whenever I can, and not for aesthetic purposes. I am dying to see a honeybee. I am in a state of quiet panic about it - it's making me very paranoid.

I have seen one bee this year, to my recollection. It was a large black and yellow bumblebee, and it was crawling on the sidewalk, looking confused, like it would soon die. (Healthy bees generally prefer to fly; you don't often see them near-immobile on the pavement). Not only have I seen no bees, I have seen no hornets or wasps. Dandelions are already gone to seed, months early, but bees, hornets, and wasps seem to be almost completely absent. Whatever is causing colony collapse disorder, it's terrifying me (and yes, I have cracked "bee afraid, bee very afraid" jokes. They aren't funny anymore).

Meanwhile, here's my latest displaced animal note - a penguin 5000 miles from home. I am connecting the dots (which no one else is doing) and assuming that the vast number of animals that are losing their way and ending up where they shouldn't MAY be connected with the bees that are abandoning their hives, and that both may relate to some human interfence in the environment - whether it be raditation from cell phones or global warming or... hell, I don't know. There seems to be a new story like this every few weeks, often involving seagoing mammals - I've posted similar tales about seals and manatees in the past.

It totally fits my sense of things, that this would be the way the world ends - something no one even notices is going on until it is much too late.

28 Weeks Later is Profoundly Immoral

Note: in its wisdom, Fox Atomic has not made images from 28 Weeks Later available to the general public - there' s no press section on their site for lesser media representatives like myself to lift images from; all images on the site are presented in a Flash Player that doesn't readily lend to their being downloaded. Not to be frustrated, I'm illustrating what follows with an image from Fallujah, in Iraq. You will see why presently.

28 Days Later was a very likable film. 28 Weeks Later is, I think, profoundly immoral and offensive. My saying this may be puzzling, because to many viewers, the films will seem very very similar, and for good reason. They share a host of features: the Rage virus as phlebotinum; jagged edits of shaky, grainy, hand-held digital video images that really get under your skin; images of a deserted London; running, raging, red-eyed “zombies;” a central focus on the family; and even the music of Canada’s own Godspeed You! Black Emperor, which worked so well in the first film that they’ve made the same passage, I believe from “East Hastings,” the primary soundtrack to the sequel. I need to step back a little bit and set forth a few basic principles before I can even begin to lay clear my objections to the film.

A vast and surprising number of viewers seem to have no idea just how complex horror and action films are. The vast majority of viewers seem to read movies on the level of “story” alone, or even simply spectacle; the idea that some of the most formulaic action and horror films out there also have themes, to say nothing of sometimes even more subtle subtexts, seems to be lost on a great many. I’ve emerged from seeing all manner of films asserting they were “about” things that no one else among the people I viewed them with was aware of; when I try to explain what I’ve seen, I am constantly confronted with comments like, “You’re reading way too much into things.” From my point of view, I’m usually stunned how most people read nothing at all. Lots of folks approach films as entertainment, as stimulus, not as text; even professional film critics – of the more commercial variety, mind you – generally do a piss-poor job of reading the films they watch.

One rule of thumb for reading a film – I’m not sure where in the canons of film theory this was first articulated, but it’s generally accepted as a given – is to look at whatever disturbances begin it. What is upsetting, confusing, or unpleasant in the prelude to the film? What problems do the protagonists face? Chances are that, whatever the ordeal of the film – the specific form of which will often, but not necessarily, relate in some way to the disturbance at the outset – it will involve overcoming the flaws or problems that are articulated in the prelude. A few examples may be in order: at the beginning of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Cary Grant is indecisive about committing to a romantic relationiship and too-in-the-sway of his mother, which is part of the problem. The ordeal of the film involves him possibly losing his relationship and his life if he doesn’t overcome these weaknesses; interestingly, he must battle and defeat an evil homosexual couple, overcoming, thus his own overly feminized aspects and said dominance of the mother, which their gayness is the logical extension of. At the end of the film, gays defeated, he can get married and perform sexually. This pattern is typical of Hitch: he generally equates the dominance of the mother or of the female with male homosexuality, and requires that both be overcome, so that masculinity and marriage can flourish; Strangers on a Train is another interesting example of this. Psycho doesn’t follow a conventional narrative formula, but relates, since Norman is sexually confused (and being played by a gay man) and his mother is definitely dominant, if dead.

A few more contemporary examples may be in order. Die Hard – the first one – is “about” the primacy of white, masculine, American authority in the family, as most purely experienced among the working classes; it’s sort of a an average American white man’s self-pitying, self-validating masturbatory fantasy (as is The Last Boy Scout; Bruce Willis is a sort of poster boy for self-pitying, self-validating, masturbating white male authority). Consider it: John McClane, at the beginning of the film, is coming to visit his wife, who is working for a foreign corporation. She doesn’t appreciate him, wants a career, is tired of his self-pity, self-dramatizations, and cranky world view. This is the problem that must be overcome, the sign that the universe is out of order: the Virtuous White Man is NOT BEING APPRECIATED - and his wife has a career of her own. Through a series of ordeals, he must defeat a sophisticated, European terrorist and his gang, prove himself smarter than his superiors, and rescue his wife from the consequences of her own foolish desire for independence. (I don’t recall there being any specific pokes at Japanese companies operating in America, but they’re clearly part of the problem, not of the solution, and corporations and international business are generally framed in a bad light, assumedly since the men in the film's demographic feel threatened by them). By the end of the film, we have confirmed that McClane’s cranky world view is in fact an accurate perception of things as they are; the universe has been restored to order, symbolized by his wife finally being subordinated to him again – leaving the ruined building, abandoning her career and aspirations for an independent life, once more under the arm of her potent and powerful hubby, where she belongs, and belonged all along (if only she’d realized it in the first place, so much trouble could have been spared everyone!). It’s plain as day, but try telling anyone that the film is about how women shouldn’t work, and people will generally look at you funny. Trust me: it’s a conversation I’ve had more than once.

28 Days Later, mind you, is not a particularly subtle film, and enough has been written about the aspects of social commentary in its Romero-directed precursors that savvier viewers probably could pin down a few thematic threads; zombie film watchers generally represent a higher class of filmgoer than Die Hard fans, too – or did for the longest time; the form is being somewhat vulgarized now, as the pointless and thematically void Dawn of the Dead remake evinces. Still, if I said that 28 Days Later is about survival in a society that has completely broken down, which is meant as a dark mirror for our own; that it suggests that our survival requires people have an open mind to new forms of relationships (overcoming racism, for instance, in the form of the mixed couple at the center of the film), and that there is a profound mistrust of white male authority in the film – as symbolized by the soldiers and their deranged leadership, and the threat they represent to the two female leads and thus to the survival of the surrogate “family unit” at the heart of the film -- most fans of the film would probably be with me. Neverminding its plot device of misguided animal activism – which seems irrelevant to any of what follows – the film could be read as extremely progressive, and much in line with Romero’s project (which, with the possible exception of Land of the Dead, typically places non-whites and women in the role of protagonists and regards “the old order,” most often represented by the police or military, as oppressive, atavistic, or at the very least fraught with difficulty). Even though again 28 Days Later has a white male hero, he has to battle and overcome the institution of “white male power” in order for there to be a happy ending, and is at times shown the inferior of his black female counterpart. It's ultimately pretty liberal-friendly.

28 Weeks Later is far more complex and harder to read. In order to do so, I’m going to have to spoil most of the film for people who haven’t seen it. I’ll warn you when the spoilers are particularly destructive.

At the start of the film, a surrogate family is holed up in a farmhouse. Actually, the main couple are a real man and wife pair, but there are surrogate grandparents, surrogate siblings, etc. There are also rage-zombies outside – even Ken Eisner notes the parallels with Night of the Living Dead and the “theme” of family, while failing to get much further into the film. While the drama of the original film centered around the question of whether the family can possibly survive, though, the entire impulse to family – or indeed, any sentiment that holds people together – is depicted as the enemy in 28 Weeks Later, the center of the problem, the thing that must be overcome. Thus: the woman at the table, in the opening sequence, who is convinced that her boyfriend will return is a threat to the safety of the surrogate family. The impulse to let the uninfected child who pounds on the boarded up windows into the house and protect him is a threat to the safety of the surrogate family; we can assume it helps the zombies (well, Rage carriers, but it's more or less the same thing) figure out where the fresh meat is. The zombies are more or less invited into the house by the woman hoping her boyfriend is outside; her peering through the slots in the boarded up window incites them to break through it. The surrogate family are thus placed under siege, and in trying to help each other, end up almost all being killed. The man and wife pair are separated; seeing he has no choice, rather than indulging the hopeless impulse to protect his wife – who is inside protecting the child – he takes off. This sets in motion the key disturbance of the film, and what I guess is meant to be its explicit theme: sometimes you have to cut people loose and look after yourself. As the film frames it, there is little doubt that if the man (Robert Carlyle, by the way) had stayed with his wife or gone back for her, he would have died; no good would have come of it. He makes the right choice, and the action of the film serves to vindicate him, as, in the rather complex narrative that follows, it is abundantly proven that sentimentality (like that which has him looking over his shoulder at her as he flees) is a bad thing, dangerous to indulge.

This message, in itself, is not entirely objectionable, I suppose: the theme that “sometimes selfish sentiment needs to be sacrificed for the good of the whole” in fact runs throughout the zombie genre – for example, in Night of the Living Dead, the parents who refuse to accept that their daughter has been bitten and is going to become a zombie run the risk of jeopardizing all the other survivors in their party and pay the ultimate price – being eaten by their own kid. (One is also reminded of Tom Savini pretending he hasn't been infected in From Dusk til Dawn). When survival requires it, you have to be honest about your chances in horror films; denial is dangerous, and that's fair enough. The problem is the alternative posited to selfish sentiment in the film, and how it interfaces with the film’s subtext, which is clearly meant to resonate off audience’s awareness of what is being done in Iraq.

This is most explicitly triggered early in the film, when the “safe area” in a post-Rage London is referred to as the “Green Zone,” aka Baghdad; the American military are defending it, and the area outside the Green Zone is off-limits and dangerous, as in Iraq. The “family” at the heart of this film exists within this world – Carlyle and his two children, who were safely out of the country when the virus hit and return to him the titular 28 weeks after the virus has died down and he has been safely evacuated. He lies to them, rather than trying to explain that he chose to save his ass by abandoning their still-living mother; his inability to overcome his guilt at having done perpetuates the problem – if he were more bravely honest with his kids about the reality of the dangers out there, some of what follows could be avoided.

Spoilers begin to mount here on in, but since I think I can easily convince you this is an immoral film unworthy of your money, fuck it. Examples of clinging to the sentiment of family, as the root of all evil, persist. The children endanger everyone by voyaging into the forbidden zone in order to find a photo of their mother. They further endanger everyone further by actually FINDING their mother, who has survived, an immune host to the Rage virus. She is brought back to the “Green Zone,” and Carlyle, in his sentimental desire for forgiveness, kisses her – and thus contracts the Rage virus, which he spreads through the safe zone; it quickly runs out of control.

The American military have (supposedly) no choice: with the virus out of control, the entire population of the town must be destroyed, to protect the world from the possibility of a resurgence of the Rage disease. The order is given to execute everyone, even those not visibly infected: in the chaos that has descended, no chances can be taken. We are placed on ground-level, for the most part, as the uninfected strive to survive against both the marauding rage-zombies and the arbitrarily death-dealing military. Carlyle’s two children form the heart of a new surrogate family that springs up, comprised of a female scientist who (for good scientific reasons) wants to preserve the kids so their blood can be studied, on the chance that they’ve acquired their mother’s immunity; and a soldier who (sentimentally) disobeys the command to exterminate civilians. He will later be aided and abetted by a friend, who also chooses to disobey orders for sentimental reasons.

In the meantime, we are treated to a vivid depiction of the extermination of civilians – a vast firebombing sequence larger even than the one in Apocalypse Now, and happening in a city: the entire green zone is spectacularly torched, with innocent, non-infected civilians whom the army is supposed to be protecting being set ablaze with the snap of fingers. If you don’t think of Fallujah while this is all going on – y’all know that the equivalent of napalm – napalm-by-another-name – was used there, right? – you probably need to give up your subscription to the Province and find a better source of news.

If you disagree with firebombing civilian centers, you’ll love Plan B: when some Rage-infected survivors of the scorching are seen, nerve gas is used.

Now, you see, for me, at this point in the film, regardless of the question of whether it was okay for Robert Carlyle to have cut and run - the overt disturbance of the film, which in fact obscures the real subtext -- the stakes have been raised considerably, because the film seems to be offering us the following choice: either we approve of the firebombing and gassing of civilian centers (to get at the terrorists hidden among them, say – or zombies, or whatever) OR we cling to the sentimental impulse to respect human life, to regard those we would firebomb as being like ourselves and thus worthy of respect, and place ourselves in danger. This is basically a fascist question, and it is absolutely chilling that Boyle and Garland – who made the (liberal, anti-fascist) first film and are involved as producers of the second – would be willing to frame it. It is absolutely imperative, for the film to have any shred of morality to it, that the decision to exterminate everyone be proven the incorrect approach, and the “sentimental” respect for human life, however imperilled or troubled, to be ultimately vindicated.

It isn’t. The kids survive, but by doing so, spread the Rage virus to the mainland. The “bad guy” in the film is thus not hysterical, murderous authority, as in 28 Days Later, but any human impulse that would object to hysterical murdering authority. The army was right; Tony Blair was right; George W. Bush was right; KILL THEM ALL, it’s the only way we’ll be safe. (I guess this kill'em all to save our own asses thing also vindicates Carlyle post-mortem, tying up the other thematic thread quite nicely: not only is it okay to cut and run from your family to save your ass, it's okay to napalm them, and everyone else too).

If the film could be defended on any grounds, it perhaps could be said to be a provocation, “raising the issue” of what is being done in Iraq in the name of preserving our privelege; I mean, I don’t think that defense could hold water, but if ANY defense of the film COULD be issued, it would have to go along those lines. For it to be a credible defense, among other things, it would require that viewers emerge from the theatre deeply unsettled, asking each other if we are really bad people, for allowing atrocities to be committed in our names.

I profoundly doubt that that sort of conversation is taking place in movie theatres, but I dunno. I will now visit Rotten Tomatoes and see how many negative reviews mention Iraq at all...

Odd animal migrations: Arctic Seal Hits Florida

I prefer stories about manatees being found in unusal places (one actually turned up off Manhattan not long ago), but I think the principle is the same - water dwelling animals are swimming far from home; this Arctic seal, found in Florida, for instance. No one is explaining why it's happening; I am privately assuming that it is a new phenomenon, related to climate change...

David Lynch's Inland Empire at the VIFC

Went to see Inland Empire at a sold out screening tonight. Sat in a plastic chair at the back of the auditorium because all the other seats were taken. Arrive early if you go to see it - there're still a few days left.

The film starts out and you feel okay. We're in Lynchland, but it's interesting enough. Seems to be about infidelity and the relationship of movies to reality; there's something like a plot that emerges, after a few strange bits, and you feel more or less comfortable - it's no weirder, initially, than Lost Highway or Mullholand Drive, offering us a story about a movie being filmed, which may or may not have a bearing on another movie in the past; the relationships in both movies may be spilling over into reality and there's a certain degree of narrative suspense, involving very "Hollywood" questions of who will sleep with whom and what the consequences will be. My favourite bit in this section of the film involves a creepy turn from Grace Zabriskie, who echoes Robert Blake's character in Lost Highway. I remember getting off (literally, I'm afraid) on some of Zabriskie's erotica (a funny but sexy short story called "Screaming Julians" in one o' those Susie Bright anthologies, I think) and am always amused to see the uses Lynch can put her to - generally unflattering but often quite compelling. (Does it mean anything that Laura Dern's main character in the film is called Nikki Grace?).

Anyhow, about an hour in, the film starts to get very strange. We move into an overlapping series of semi-narratives involving various characters, many of whom are played by Laura Dern, who really shows her breadth as an actress in this film. (It's no wonder she helped produce it; she seems to be living out a similar trajectory at three different levels in the film - the affluent, the suburban, and the dirt-poor - and inhabits each strata convincingly). At first we feel like we're being treated to dreamlike digressions, voyages, perhaps, into the female interior, and expect that we will wake up at some point, returning to the master narrative somehow enriched by these digressions to make better sense of it, recalling, say, Mullholand Drive - which gets very strange in parts, too, but eventually resolves itself into something coherent. We wait, but, though certain bits pay off - there's a scene where a group of prostitutes who serve as a sort of interior chorus talk proudly about their tits, to quietly hilarious effect - the film delights in frustrating us, setting up our desire for coherence but never quite rewarding it. The narrative and the question of who will fuck whom having been abandoned, this becomes the dominant mode of "suspense" the film generates: will it make sense? When it's all over, will I get this? Lynch dangles the carrots of understanding just out of our reach, almost as if to see just how far he can make us go without letting us take a bite; he makes of the film a colossal mindfuck (a word one Dern character actually uses to describe the experience's she's had, apparently mirroring our own perceptions). He does this for about two more hours.

While Lynch is a master of mood and tone and succeeds in stirring the desire to SEE to a creepy level of intensity, the last third got a bit much, for me.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, never one to be one-upped, concludes that while some have complained that the film is incoherent, the emotions Lynch is presenting on the screen are plain as day - among them, a sort of loathing for Hollywood and its cheapening of human emotion (he makes a great deal of what I guess is the film's climax, in which a dying Dern - in one of her various incarnations - vomits blood on one of the stars on the Walk of Fame). Clear that Lynch feels antipathy towards Hollywood - Rosenbaum is right that that is in there, and there are constant other references to spectatorship, the cheapening of experience on TV and in movies (most notably figured by a sitcom within the film, complete with laugh track, starring giant rabbits); certain scenes at the end deliberately echo Mulholland Drive, taking place in a cinema where Dern watches her own image onscreen - an image of herself watching her own image, and on into infinity... All told, this self-reflexive one-hand-clapping "cinema about cinema" stuff seems to only account for about 50% of the last two-thirds of the film, however. What's with the Slavic subplot? What's with the framing device involving a prostitute (?) being beaten by her pimp(?)? When Laura Dern shoots the badguy, what the fuck is the meaning of the giant surreal face that appears? Why have her talk about gouging the eye of a potential rapist to a sort of shrink-character (whose role is what, exactly?)? What's the point of all the class stuff here, and do the stories the prostitutes tell (or the homeless people watching Dern vomit) have any bearing on anything? What's with the whole issue of the death of a son - whose son? Why a screwdriver, and what's the whole "I've been programmed to stab someone with a screwdriver" thing about? Is it meant to signify characters trying to escape the plot of the narrative they're in - never really having autonomy, slaves to the master plan of the artist - or is the resonance meant to be deeper, dealing with how we're all slaves to our subconsciousness, to drives we can't fully master?

In the end, you settle into a sort of resignation: none of this, it turns out, is going to make sense after all, save what sense you impose on it. It's crafted to frustrate being resolved into any one reading; the film would probably be a failure if it could be wrapped up with as tidy a bow as Rosenbaum brings to his reading of it. It's actually something of a service to the film to call it incoherent; it means you've resisted the urge to oversimplify, to chop off limbs to fit the bed you've made for it.

Since I don't really know what the hell to make of the film, though, I can't really evaluate it. I suspect it will best lend itself to people who want to go for the experience of being tripped out, who don't care about whether it amounts to anything, enjoying the aesthetic experience for its own sake (a "shamanic journey," as a friend said of the film, a drug trip, which you can make what you will out of). I'm not actually interested in that sort of cinema - even El Topo, which I'll be attending Tuesday at the Cinematheque, is quite coherent and cogent and applicable to life, by comparison to Inland Empire, which I am currently planning to simply forget about; I've been frustrated enough by it to not really want to think about it much more. I do like stories that have meaning, nice little meanings you can wrap up in a bow and contemplate. Or, even better, that leave you asking interesting questions about life and experience, questioning your relationship to the world, stimulated to look at things differently.

This was not such a film experience. Leaving Inland Empire, I just felt like I'd been bludgeoned, fucked with, and finally dismissed. For all the film's obvious craft and ambition, I can't really recommend such an experience to anyone.

Old Joy on DVD

Go figure... one of the best-received films of the last film festival, Old Joy, starring Will Oldham, who sold out three shows in a row when last he played Vancouver, has just been released on DVD, and very few of our stores have had the wit to stock it. I dropped by HMV last Monday night at midnight, just as they were putting out the new stock (it was released on May 1st): they'd never heard of it, though were busily emptying cases of Jodorowsky. A&B Sound and Future Shop - forget about it. Scratch say they'll be getting a copy any day. So far the only place that I've found selling it in the city is Videomatica. Maybe the rental stores are faring better?

This is a really beautiful, quiet film - lots of meditative silences and lovely photography, but also a very moving, if subtle, story of friendship, alienation, and life in contemporary America; it follows two friends and their dog (actually the filmmaker's dog, Lucy) on a camping trip to Bagby Hot Springs. The less said before you see the film the better; it's not that it offers up any particular narrative surprises, but simply deserves to be experienced with as a few preconceptions as possible.

By odd coincidence, just as Old Joy was my favourite film of 2006, Police Beat (due in July on DVD!) was my favourite film of 2005. Both films imagine the mountains, forests and landscapes of the Pacific Northwest - Old Joy more explicitly, though the working title for Police Beat was, in fact, Cascadia... It DOES comfort me to see forests that remind me of the forests I've explored in BC, to see landscapes that speak of home; even the grubby little suburbs of Portland at the beginning of Old Joy are pretty much exactly like the town I grew up in, Maple Ridge (where I'm currently blogging from, visiting my parents).

One warning to anyone considering buying the DVD, though: the commentary track is very, very odd, since it's punctuated by very long silences. It's impossible to tell if the people involved - director Kelly Reichardt, her cinematographer Peter Sillen, and filmmaker Michael Almereyda, who has nothing to do with Old Joy and says at the outset that he doesn't know why he's been asked to moderate -- are uncomfortable with each other, said things that got edited out at a later date, or, most likely, are just moved by the meditative qualities of the film to watch it in silence, perhaps also helping them cope with social awkwardness... It's pretty weird, though. There are six or seven minute stretches where the film simply plays and you wait, wondering if and when anyone is going to speak again, and if they're going to say anything more interesting that "it rained while we were shooting this scene" before lapsing into another long silence. It would have probably been better to just turn the film over to one person - Reichardt - and let her say what she wanted to... She DOES have interesting things to say when she speaks. Maybe she just doesn't really believe in the whole idea of commentary, though? It's not actually necessary.

I like that she sought out a story that she could write her dog into, in any event. Dog lovers would like this film.

Michael Ondaatje on The Hustler

Michael Ondaatje's reason for selecting The Hustler for his Cinema Salon showing earlier this evening at the VIFC had to do with the craft of the film - viewing the film at age 19, shortly after coming to Canada. It was the first time - I can only roughly paraphrase - that he became aware of film as a work of art, consciously crafted to take a certain form, and it left a lasting impression on him. To my surprise, he had little else to really say this evening - certainly he had little prepared; he shared his enthusiasm for the movie, and praised the lovely new print we were privileged to watch, but offered no particularly deep insights, placing himself not particularly above the audience in terms of his thoughts about the movie - he was actually quite down to earth and relaxed about the whole event, which, don't get me wrong, was quite pleasing to see; I had never imagined he would be an approachable sort, and besides, I went to see the film on the big screen, not to hear him. He did TALK, mind you: Ondaatje expressed considerable enthusiasm for Walter Tevis' (non-SF, post-alcoholic) novel about competition, third in a sort of series after the two Fast Eddie books, The Queen's Gambit - a chess novel that I have on my shelf but have yet to read, including an enthusiastic blurb on the front cover from him. I was somewhat disappointed, though, that he had next to nothing to say about the differences between the novel of The Hustler and the film, which fascinate me; he confessed that he hadn't looked at the book in something like 25 years, and invited me, when I asked, to explain the different ending, which I did. I actually re-read the novel expressly for the purpose of being prepared to see the film again on the big screen, so that, if the opportunity arose, I could engage Ondaatje, as a fellow fan of both Tevis and the film, on the topic. Ah, well - so much for having done my homework!

Anyhow, for those curious, the film IS very different from the book. What makes the movie so remarkable is the archetypal force of the characters; though Bert, Sarah, and Eddie are all wholly believable, their trajectory seems pregnant with meaning. It resonates deep in the viewer's mind - at least is does mine; it is impossible not to think about fathers, teachers, competitors, lovers, losers, hustlers and predators when watching the film, to position yourself among these characters, to see them as types and polarities also present in ones own life, and to try to abstract some sort of lesson from their drama: what does their interrelationship teach you about life? What is the meaning of Sarah's suicide, of Bert's need to defeat others, of Eddie's need to win, and - where does it leave you, as a human being? What do your own feelings during the film say about your own failings, your own vices, your own virtues? Why do you feel so RECOGNIZED at times in the film - when these characters are mostly talking about pool and gambling, neither of which you might give the slightest damn about? As one of the audience members commented after the screening, getting Ondaatje's agreement, it seems a very moral film, which is very true. Oddly, though, for all it's moral force, all the sense that you've learned a lesson from the film, it's very difficult to tidily "sum up its meaning." Asked about this, Ondaatje shrugged and said it was about the characters, about "everything," and didn't really try to grapple at all with it. I don't blame him, and I will follow suit, but -

- what really interests me about the difference between the film and the novel is this: much of this "archetypal, moral" quality of the film - the sense that you are supposed to be drawing lessons from the experience - is present only IN the film. In the film, things unstated or very subtle in the novel are accentuated, underscored, made more obvious - one example would be Sarah's shockingly bold comment at the bus station that the four hours before her bus (allegedly) leaves wouldn't give her and Eddie very much time (...to have sex). It's a great line, really surprising and revealing, and got a laugh from the audience, but while its absolutely true to the characters in the novel, it is, in fact, an invention of the screenwriters - who time and again strive to accentuate the developments in the book, to exagerrate them, to make them larger than life and thus more "cinematic." (Sarah's speech about how if Eddie ever says that he loves her, she'll never let him take the words back - one of the most memorable moments in the film - is also their invention). This tendency for them to underscore passages in boldface, to state the unstated, to really dig deeper into the meat of the novel, strip away some of the unnecessary details and get the essence of things on the screen is responsible for most of the "archetypal" quality of the film, and also says a great deal about the differences between cinema and literature. While, obviously, one does think about winning and losing when reading the novel, and learns and grows along with Eddie, the book is much more concerned with staying true to its characters and finely observing their lives, perceptions, emotions; and none more than Eddie's. It is much MORE about the "characters and everything" than the film; it's compelling and rewarding and a really admirable novel, but in the way of a very well-drawn character study, and the sense that you've just watched a Greek tragedy or an obscure morality play situated in poolhalls is almost completely absent when you close the book. You may wonder how much of Eddie is in you - but you won't wonder what the meaning of the Eddie-Bert-Sarah triad is; it's just not a question that will come up.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the ending. In the film, Sarah insists on coming to Kentucky; locks horns with Bert; and is eventually seduced and destroyed by him, committing suicide out of her own despair - her belief that she is "perverted, twisted, crippled" - but also, perhaps, to rescue Eddie from Bert's clutches, as a sort of desperate act of love. (This is certainly the effect her sacrifice has; it's almost a Christian act, dying so that the one you love may live). All of this is a complete departure from the book, in which Eddie goes to Kentucky alone; there, he vacillates between two extremes. He thinks Sarah is too much of a loser, too romantically drawn to dramatic failure and suffering (and alcohol); he wonders if she will just hold him back. Yet more instinctively, when he passes a jewellery store, he finds himself contemplating buying a wedding ring for her. He decides, finally, that he can't be with her in the long term, that he's indulging a folly, and goes on about the business of pool, playing Findlay. When he next sees her, it is clear that he has decided to move on, but he offers her a very fond goodbye, and wants her to know that he really did think about buying a ring (he gets her an expensive watch instead). She understands and accepts, and he walks out of her life into the final confrontation with Minnesota Fats (and Bert). Nowhere near as dramatic as in the film, and nowhere near as pregnant with MEANING - but also nowhere near as contrived. Sarah's suicide and the events that lead up to it actually betray the realism of the novel and even of the film, to some extent - we leave the poolrooms and bars and suddenly find ourselves in a Hollywood melodrama - a really GOOD one, but one that definitely does have the mark of Hollywood on it, and of drama and of Greek tragedy and all that, too. A lot of things totally extraneous to the game of pool and the novel's fixation on what it means to win; the story of The Hustler (the film) brings to mind Wim Wenders (once famous, now probably forgotten) quote - which I'll have to paraphrase, so long has it been since I've seen it mentioned - that stories only take place in stories.

So different are the two experiences, the novel and the film, that I've never really been able to choose between them, as to which I like more. The film is a great adaptation of a very good novel; it probably ranks higher in the hierarchy of great American films than the book ranks in the hierarchy of great American novels; but comparing the two is quite a lesson in how an adaptation can be faithful and yet still be radically different.

On the way out, I offered my copy of The Hustler (which I'd brought along) to Mr. Ondaatje, as a thank you for having selected this film - it was great to have seen it on the screen. He said he had a copy of it around somewhere, but thanked me - and signed the book I thrust at him. He seems like a nice chap... maybe I'll get to The Queen's Gambit sometime soon.

El Topo at the Cinematheque May 8th - Jodorowsky fans take note!

Okay, it's somewhat lazy of me, but here's a first: I'm copyin' out verbatim a press release for the upcoming Jod screening at the Cinematheque. (It's late and I want to get to bed). All errors I didn't catch should be attributed to the authors o' the release!

A Friends of Jodorowsky presentation

The cult film that was the first “Midnight Movie” returns to the screen at last

A restored “El Topo” ready to blow minds again

Vancouver audiences will have their first chance in over 35 years to see the film that launched the midnight movie phenomenon and became a cultural icon to a generation. El Topo (The Mole) is an explosive tale of blood, sand and surrealism. Locked away for decades in the vaults of Allen Klein, the Beatles' former business manager, El Topo has not been distributed in years, nor issued on video (Al note: in North America. It's been available in Japan all along, with optical fogging on the genitals). When Klein’s son took over his father’s interests, it was decided to restore the film and let the world have another look. Now the film has been HD digitally restored and is being released to art houses and in a DVD set of the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky.

In the fall of 1970, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky arrived in New York with a print of El Topo under his arm. There was no attempt to open the film in Mexico, where it was made, because Jodorowsky had had problems there with the censorship of his first feature Fando Y Lis. El Topo premiered at the Elgin theatre in New York City on the night of December 18, 1970, where it ran continuously every weekday at midnight, and at 1:00am on Fridays and Saturdays, until the end of June, 1971. Within two weeks of the first screening, El Topo was doing turn-away business. Ben Barenholtz, owner of the Elgin recalls that “within two months, the limos lined up every night.” El Topo became a must-see item.”

JOHN LENNON AND YOKO ONO INTRODUCED EL TOPO TO THE WORLD
Among the regulars at the midnight screenings of El Topo at the Elgin in the spring of 1971 were John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Ex-Beatle Lennon, was blown away by El Topo. He wanted his manager, Allen Klein to purchase the rights to the film. So in June, Klein’s Abkco Films acquired El Topo and re-opened it at the up-scale Broadway Cinemas in the winter of 1971 to mixed notices from mainstream New York reviewers. Regardless, the film became an art house cornerstone all over North America.

The power of El Topo lay in its ability to address the counterculture directly. It’s style is a synthesis of Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and Jean-Luc Godard. El Topo’s relevance ranks highly amongst other important texts of the counterculture generation, including J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, R. Crumb’s “Mr. Natural,” and Carlos Casteneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan. No one who sees this film ever forgets it.

El Topo is playing at the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver on May 8 for one night only. Not since 1971 has El Topo been shown in its full glory.

Tuesday May 8, 7:30 pm at Pacific Cinematheque, 1131 Howe St. Vancouver.
More info: http://www.abkcofilms.com/