David M.'s Fall, in Love, in No Fun City 2014 THIS SATURDAY

This year has seen the highest concentration of David M. musical activity in Vancouver since I don't know when. And it's not done yet! Those of us who would like to see some classic No Fun songs performed without those pesky Christmas references have (at least!) one more chance to see the man do his thing, this Saturday at Slickity Jim's Chat'n'Chew. This time I will be there ! (Tho' I may poke my nose in to catch Mecca Normal at the Media Club, first). I have requested "Ambivalence." Or was it "Ream Me Like You Mean It?" It sure wasn't "Toll for the Troll."

Mecca Normal: Jean Smith mini-interview on Empathy for the Evil, KRAMER, and Unforseen Changes that Change Everything

Mecca Normal by Sean Raggett

Don't know much about KRAMER, but I have a bunch of albums he's on (or distributed on his now defunct label Shimmy Disc). I love Shockabilly, love Bongwater, still listen to both bands.  Never much expected that he would produce an album by Vancouver's (smart, writerly) art-punk duo Mecca Normal, though. I reviewed the new album, Empathy for the Evil, for the Straight here - though they left out my observation that Jean Smith's sense of humour is very much intact and that for those of you who loved The Observer, the band's previous album, themed around the sad realities of contempoary dating, there is one song that could practically be an outtake from that, "Naked and Ticklish." (Ah, lovers with pets). I interacted with Jean Smith a bit about her experiences working with KRAMER and Rat Bastard, so what follows is a mini-interview, exclusive to Alienated in Vancouver.

Allan: I gather from a few places that KRAMER has alienated some people - I've heard that the Bongwater splitup was particularly acrimonious, and I don't think he and Eugene Chadbourne and he get on so well these days. What was he like, anyhow? Also - what exactly is "Between Livermore and Tracy" about? [The album's most textured and haunting track, and also its longest]. I felt like I should understand it... but I didn't.

Jean Smith: Working with KRAMER was great. Rat was great too – he’s a very generous and helpful guy. No problems. KRAMER is smart and funny and a very hard worker. He wants things how he wants them, but whatever... who doesn't? He just happens to have the goods to back up his way. Not that he got his way on everything, but really... there were no problems and ideally we’ll go back and make the next record with them.

Here’s evidence of the studio dynamic. I think I'm the most irritating one out of three at this point.

As far as the meaning of “Between Livermore and Tracy” it would be impossible for anyone to figure out, I think. In addition to the album title, it’s another Rolling Stones reference. Altamont, California is between Livermore and Tracy. The death – a murder – during the Stones free concert at Altamont Speedway fascinates me. I’ve speculated on what that must have been like as a musician on stage to have someone killed during a song – the loss of control and a sense of responsibility. What they were doing in performance had nothing to do with that outcome. In a way, it makes performance seem very ritualistic and static as opposed to fluid and responsive to what’s happening in front of them. They were stuck repeating their songs wearing their rock star garb – prancing and flaunting – and there is no relationship between that performance and the murder. I mean, did anyone ask what Mick was wearing to provoke a man to kill a person?

For the weeks leading up to going to Miami to record, I was going back and forth to the Langley hospital after my dad had a few heart attacks and strokes. Unfortunately, while he was in hospital he suffered a type of delirium that had him hallucinating wildly. This is evidently fairly common in elderly patients. I think it has a lot to do with them not getting enough water, strangely enough. I was the only family member that was into dealing with him in that state of mind. My brother was on the scene dealing with administrative stuff, so that was great, but neither he nor my mother were very keen on listening to my dad's frightening episodes which included him being convinced he was in the Navy, stationed in Asia, helping Stephen Harper (who he despises) deal with the issues of the day. It was heartbreaking, scary and just plain weird to see him like that. He’s a totally brilliant, lucid guy with impeccable verbal skills.

I hated leaving here while he was still in the hospital. I haven’t had a drink in fifteen years, but while we were getting settled on the plane I came close. I was drained from all that had been going on and I started to feel very claustrophobic. Actually, just telling Dave that I was thinking about having a drink seemed to reduce the anxiety. I’d been going to the hospital early most mornings to make sure my dad felt OK, that he wasn’t wondering where he was – or who he was, for that matter. I just wanted to get off the plane and go to the hospital to be with him.

There are more details in the weekly column Mecca normal creates for Magnet Magazine.

This was the first piece we did when we set up to record. I’d been writing about the whole thing and posting on FB, so I had all that material with me. Dave started playing something I'd never heard and I played piano to that in another room, then I added vocals. In a way, it was a gesture from David to help me claim the state of mind I needed to get down to work. I tend to sing about things that are going on in my life as a way of processing what’s happening and this song needed to happen.

“Between Livermore and Tracy” represents the state just before something unforeseen changes everything forever. I didn't call home for the time I was in Miami recording. I didn't want to have to deal with death while I was in the studio. We were only gone about a week and he was back home when I got back. He's fine now. He’s 89 and my mom is 94... somehow.

Mecca Normal will open for Mirah at the Media Club on November 15th.

Nerdfest 2014: some photos!

I may have missed Bison and the Misfits this weekend, but I briefly checked out Nerdfest 2014, curated at the Rickshaw by the former "oboe of death" from Scythia, Morgan Zentner. If you're looking to buy chainmail or a polished, sterilized horn to drink your mead out of, Nerdfest seems like a great place to go; it was also quite amusing as a voyeur. My experiences with Zombiewalk (and the odd Halloween costume) have taught me the power of the costume, so I'm endeavouring to be a little less judgmental when it comes to things like the SCA, LARPing, and so forth. Turns out I was actually pretty entertained by some of the manifestations of nerdiness on display - including a costume contest that I  caught only a portion of.

There were cool demonstrations of fencing and swordfighting from Academy Duello, who let people who visited their table pick up the swords and see how they felt.

There were skillful firedancing routines from Vesper Sephony that I had a poor view of and did not photograph, and there was a quirky striptease in reverse from Diamond Minx, beginnning pretty much nude and then adding layers (which she presumably took off again later).

There was also a miserable, drunken clown, Sir Buttercup Von Dingus, whose deadpan negativity and joylessness I'm pretty sure was meant to place him in some category of meta-clown humour, in the vein of Shakes the Clown or something that Andy Kaufman might have done. Where the joke is that you're not at all funny, it's hard to know how to respond, and I was most curious to see what he would do  when people started shouting things like "you're not funny" at him - which eventually they did - because his routine did seem to invite heckling. (He just told the heckler to shut the fuck up. I don't know what I'd expected, frankly. A homicidal rampage?). Briefly, somewhere in there, the sheer grim badness of some of his (mostly circus-themed) jokes - about falling in love with Minnie the Midget, and being "nuts over the girl," for instance - actually struck me as really, really funny, but I kept being nervous through the remainder of the evening while he was moping around the audience, flopping his big clown shoes as he walked. You never know what a grim clown, in character, is going to do.

There was one band I did not really understand, the Runaway Four (formerly the Tasty Animals), who really brought the nerd to Nerdfest, since they appeared to be playing video game music, with a bit of added jazziness and maybe at least a smidgen of awareness of the realm of Frank Zappa. I personally have nothing invested in video game music, and unlike many audience members, did not cheer when their performances - to judge by what was being projected on the Rickshaw screens - veered towards the realm of Super Mario, which - gasp! - means very little to me. The smiling white cloud on their keyboard stand was probably some sort of video game reference too. Did I get it? No. The Runaway Four may have successfully out-geeked me. There were certainly some people dancing through their interminable in-joke of a set. And, uh, they did it well. The drummer's cap looked like a big amanita muscaria, but that was presumably some sort of Mario reference, too?

There were also lots of cool merchants. My favourite by far was Makosla Creations, who had super-cool fimo dragons on display. If I were wealthier and the dragon type I would have gotten one. Ragnar the Trader's drinking horns - which gave the MC ample opportunity to joke about the time he spent polishing his horn - were what caught my girl's eye, but we ended up going home hornless. We didn't really need one: I found a horn of my own later that night, and shared it with her.

As far as music, I much preferred the music of the second act, Blackberry Wood, who did a swing-tempo rendition, for instance, of the Cure's "Love Cats," and who had pretty cute stripy costumes, complementing the substantial curves of a couple of their members. They kind of reminded me of the Creaking Planks, but in a peppier, zippier mode. It was fun!

With apologies to the Whiskeydicks, I missed the rest of Nerdfest - I was going to try to catch some of Bison's show down the street, but the cold rain and my poor choice of jacket interfered with that decision, too, so my girl and I ended up going home. I got to drop in at the Electric Owl and nab the new Bison EP, so I was happy. Still, Nerdfest seemed like a pretty entertaining event! Let's hope a good folk metal band gets added for their fifth year next year, I'd like an excuse to take the girl to a folk metal show...

Nightcrawler, John Wick

I saw and enjoyed John Wick tonight. It's a savvy, smartly made, funny, violent, and very entertaining film, obviously made by people with a taste for John Woo films and maybe rock videos, with a nod or two to past Keanu vehicles and excellent use of Marilyn Manson's music. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

But it's disposable, empty garbage compared to Nightcrawler, which is a film with real meat to it. It had me thinking throughout of Night and the City, not only for its amoral/ immoral but nonetheless charming protagonist, but for its rather thorough skewering of capitalism. I have no idea who Kim Linekin is, who reviewed the film for the Straight, but her advice that you'll enjoy yourself if you set your expectations low isn't really that apt, and her review reveals more about her than about the film. It's really great; if you like films noir, if you like thrillers that reward reflective viewing, you'll eat it up. And it's quite intense at times, too! Go see it - just trust me.

Divorce and Demons: an un-remarked upon subgenre of horror

It might just be an accident; perhaps I watched the wrong two movies in proximity to each other. But I'm suddenly wondering if there's an unremarked upon subgenre of horror that uses demonic possession and/or exorcism as a tool for exploring a parents' reactions to changes in their children, after getting divorced.

The two films that seem to work the same theme are The New Daughter (2009) and The Possession (2012). They both have a fair bit in common. In both films, there are two children who are being raised by their father, after he separates from their mother. In both films, one of the children - a female, of course  - becomes possessed by an ancient evil, and starts to manifest strange and unwelcome behaviour. In both films, peripheral characters are killed as the demonic possession gets worse. There are di rigueur scenes in which the father must research the nature of the demon, reading books and talking to scholars and priests and so forth (in The Possession, filmed in Vancouver, one of the experts is played by Jay Brazeau!). The climax in each case involves the father putting himself at risk to save his daughter, who has now transformed into something nearly unrecognizable and very dangerous. There seems to be some sort of element of projection at work, a desire to offset the cause of the unwelcome behaviour: my child is not acting in this strange, destructive way because he/ she is pissed off at me for having fucked up my marriage - nooo, it's because she's possessed! The fathers in both films - played in the first by a rather wooden Kevin Costner, and in the second by a very warm and likable Jeffrey Dean Morgan - have rather different degrees of success; in the first (SPOILER!) the Dad and his whole family are, apparently, eaten by the demons (or monsters, or whatever they are), while in the second, the father not only saves his daughter, but his marriage... but still, the parallels between these films run deep enough that they seem to be tapping into the same pools of the collective unconscious. Plus I feel like I've seen other movies like this, which I can't now bring to mind...

Obviously The Exorcist and The Brood are important films in the development of this subgenre, but what's curious is that there doesn't seem to be a list made of "divorce horror movies." There are lots of divorce movies listed on line, but they're all stuff like War of the Roses or Kramer Vs. Kramer. Googling "demons and divorce" seems to net a lot of websites where people actually believe demons are at work in causing a divorce, that give helpful tips for battling them, but that's not exactly what I want. And of course, looking for demonic possession movies online gives a long list of non-divorce-themed films. This seems to be a job for those fancy Netflix search engines - except I don't have Netflix. Could someone maybe do a search for "demonic possession divorce movies" or such? I'm really curious what other films deserved to be grouped together here.....

Nerdfest 2014!

You know, I'm not your typical nerd. I have no interest in the SCA or D&D or LARPing or gaming. I don't bother with (most) comic books or (most) fantasy novels. Besides Hallowe'en, I only dress up for Zombiewalks, and those only infrequently. But Nerdfest 2014 still looks like a lot of fun. Yo yos, burlesque, swordfighting, the Whiskeydicks... the lineup looks pretty entertaining. Might just check this out!

Maps to the Stars: a review

Saw Maps to the Stars last night. It's an interesting experience. It seems like Cronenberg has come to prefer a very cool, detached mode of filmmaking; however dramatic the subject matter, the tone of movies like Cosmopolis and A Dangerous Method is very deliberately cold - like Cronenberg is taking this chilliness to be his signature (the exception in recent years, of course, is Eastern Promises, which is fairly warm and lively, but that's starting to seem like an aberration). In her Straight review, Janet Smith takes this somewhat reptilian detachment as a fault, and she may be right; it does make the film a bit of a challenge for viewers, something compounded by the difficulty one might have finding characters to identify (or even sympathize) with. Even the two children who are the moral centre of the film are both fairly damaged/ damaging individuals, and the subject material - a  scathing/ puritanical depiction of the moral corruption in Hollywood - is almost worthy of Bret Easton Ellis (I didn't see the film he made with Paul Schrader and Lindsay Lohan, but this is what I was expecting that to be; I bet Schrader will love this movie). I was somehow under the impression, before seeing the film - which tends to get described as a "satire" - that it was going to be funny, but really, folks: it isn't. This is one of the darker, crueler films in Cronenberg's career, and while on its own terms I have to say it succeeds, it's still a fairly unpleasant and demanding experience.

It's still worth seeing as a Cronenberg film. It is very much his film; interestingly enough, it bears a fair bit of resemblance to The Brood, which I wasn't expecting, and if you're as invested in Cronenberg's cinema as I am, you'll have some fun chasing down the echoes and trying to see how they expand and reflect on Cronenberg's body of work. John Cusack's Rolf-y body therapist has a mirror relationship to Oliver Reed, in that earlier film, and his therapy seems to have something to do with stirring up some of the ghosts that haunt the film's characters. As with The Brood, too, there's a fairly nasty scene where a character is bludgeoned to death. And of course, themes of child abuse are rife, though abuse and incest haunt so many of the characters in the film that they almost become normalized.

Besides Bret Easton Ellis and Cronenberg's own The Brood, I was surprised to find myself thinking of other texts that Maps to the Stars owes something to. Atom Egoyan's Speaking Parts looms large in the background; the film shares with early Egoyan a sort of talismanic need to repeat certain lines and motifs, to set them echoing against each other, even where it is highly unlikely that so many characters would have parallel lives. Like that film, too, questions of casting a role are fraught with incestuous or quasi-incestuous backstories. There are other films I thought of, as well. The character played by Evan Bird, the young man turned into an utter asshole by his time in Hollywood, seems to come as an echo of the title character in Don McKellar's Childstar - which is also the work of a Canadian poking fun at the Hollywood celebrity industry, only doing so in a way that is actually fun to watch. Finally, I was reminded, more interestingly - though this counts as a spoiler - of Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses. While the children in the film don't have a trace of the purity or idealism that Mishima ascribes his protagonist, their final decision does read as a rejection of the corrupted adult world, an act of protest. I don't recall having been prompted by a film of Cronenberg's before to think on so many other similar or related texts.

That's not necessarily a good thing, mind you. I suspect that one of the reasons I spent so much time looking at the film in terms of its relations to other texts is that it's not all that pleasant or rewarding to watch it in terms of its reflection on the real world. I can easily imagine someone arguing that the film is cruel, unfair, and definitely unsubtle; there's a bit of a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel feel to the affair. And Cronenberg didn't do something I was kind of expecting: since having noticed, a few viewings ago, that Viggo Mortensen's haircut in Eastern Promises is a variant of Cronenberg's own favoured hairstyle of late - which makes for a very odd autobiographical resonance, like Cronenberg is somehow using the character to comment on his own ambitions - I was expecting him to implicate himself in this film, so it doesn't just seem like he's standing in the wings clucking his tongue. Maybe he'd have a character like Erland Josephson's in Bergman's A Passion? (Improperly known here as The Passion of Anna). Without that, I'm not sure this film won't be taken by Hollywood as a "fuck you" from an outsider, which I guess is what it ultimately is (unless someone wants to argue that the John Cusack character is somehow figuring Cronenberg. I couldn't see it, myself).

All the same, I was glad to see the film. Best farting scene in a movie that I can recall. Julianne Moore should win an award for this role, it's a brave one. Mia Wasikowska - the love interest in Aoyade's The Double - is also very good in it; I want to re-watch the 2007 Australian killer crocodile movie Rogue to appreciate her role in it anew - I believe its the earliest film of hers I've seen, made when she was just a teenager. Oh, and Maps to the Stars has one of the most achingly beautiful title sequences I've seen, with very unusual music from Howard Shore. The credits run at the end, so I sat there hoping it was a Shore soundtrack. How could it have been otherwise?

One for The Misfits

Schedule conflicts will keep me from interviewing Jerry Only of the Misfits but I want to say publicly, apropos of their November 9th concert in Vancouver, that:

a) (First, as a disclaimer). I like Danzig's solo stuff well enough - the first two albums with the classic lineup are great - but, heresy or no, those early Misfits albums just never got the hook in me very deeply; it wasn't a style of punk I liked much. I didn't bother with the Michale Graves years at all. Until recently, my most cherished moments with the Misfits are simply bits of amusement at the ubiquity of their brand ("why is that 70 year old Chinese man wearing a Misfits t-shirt?").

b) I have no problem at all with the idea of the Misfits bringing in a sort of '50's classic rock'n'roll flavour to their music and becoming a bit more of a pop band; from my point of view, this actually is an improvement, since I never found their original stuff that hooky, and since my own rock consumption has been a bit more backwards-looking these days (there was some GREAT music made in the 1950's and early 1960's). Hell, I might even just buy their album of 50's covers at the show; I like it a lot, and I hope they play some of this stuff live!

c) The Misfits album I have enjoyed the most - and I've owned Walk Among Us and the one with "Where Eagles Dare" on it - is their 2011 release The Devil's Rain, fronted by Jerry Only. It's very catchy, very fun, and I like the way Dez Cadena's guitar sounds - he plays a style of solo, to the point and catchy, that I like a lot. I enjoy some songs more than others, mind you; I'm especially fond of the awesome title track, written about one of the great 1970's cult horror movies, with a bizarrely name-brand (if not exactly all-star) cast, including William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Ida Lupino, Tom Skerritt, Keenan Wynn, Eddie Albert, and brief appearances by John Travolta and Anton Szandor LaVey himself. I love that movie - the big melting scene at the end is almost worthy of Bosch - so it may prejudice me a bit in the song's favour. But I also really dig their UFO/ paranormal song  "Unexplained," say, or for something a bit punkier, "Jack the Ripper," and I do like the album as a whole. I realize this is going to scandalize some Misfits fans out there, but this is probably the lineup - Jerry Only, Dez Cadena, and Eric Arce - that I am most excited to see. I'm more excited about this than I was about the Danzig and Doyle show (which I didn't go to). Jerry deserves total respect as a Misfits frontman.

...So there! Oh, and d) I am gaining no favours from anyone from writing this, for the record. I didn't get to talk to Only, so I'm not cadging a guestlisting or such. If I turn up at the show - and as always with gigs these days, there's a good chance I won't - I will be there as a payin' customer. I'm kind of excited.

Nightbreed: The Director's Cut: Mark Alan Miller interview

There's a ton of great horror movies coming up at both the Cinematheque and the Vancity Theatre this Halloween season, but nearest and dearest my heart is Nightbreed: The Directors Cut, screening October 30th at the Vancity. Yes, it's even dearer to me than The Wicker Man. Read my three part interview with Mark Alan Miller here:

http://www.straight.com/movies/760346/nightbreed-directors-cut-part-one-occupy-midian

http://www.straight.com/movies/760416/nightbreed-directors-cut-part-two-magic-and-detective-work

http://www.straight.com/movies/760461/nightbreed-directors-cut-part-three-tribes-moon-react

By the way, if there's ever going to be a spinoff to Nightbreed, I would love to know the backstory of this dude. The more I see him the more he reminds me of a cooked turkey:

Erika Lax on Stickboy: review #2

Sunny Shams and Megan Latham, by Tim Matheson; courtesy of the Vancouver Opera

(Note: the following was always part of the plan; I - Allan MacInnis - was going to write a review of Stickboy. See the previous post for that. And my girl, who was the driving force on our being there, was going to write her own piece. So here it is!).

The poetry of Shane Koyczan has been something that has moved me to tears since the first time I heard him perform his spoken word piece “We Are More” at the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Olympics. After having watched him on television, presumably moving millions of Canadians, I searched him out online, devouring each of his spoken word performances I could find. I have since bought his poetry, and completed two school projects that have featured his work, and continue to look for ways to be moved by what he does. So when I found out that his latest book, Stickboy, had been adapted into an opera, I knew I had to see it.

My boyfriend Allan is most often the planner of our cultural outings. He is the sort of guy who is ravenous for entertainment in the form of live music (a good amount of which is rowdier, darker and rougher than I enjoy), and movies (often of the film noir, art house or other “oddball” genres). He has mentioned on several occasions that he doesn’t like opera, doesn’t like classical music, and dislikes a good deal of poetry, so I was surprised when he suggested we go and see this production. In fact, after one argument we’d had about bullying, and discovering some pretty major “insensitivities” (on his part) around the subject, I was really thinking that maybe this should be one thing I do on my own. After all, I wasn’t about to shell out for a special evening like this, based around one of my favourite poets/writers of all time, only to have it torn to shreds by someone who is rather used to being critical of shows, both musical and theatrical. I wanted to go to the opera, and have my own full experience of it – without worrying about his critical eye, and how much he might be hating it. After convincing me about his desire to go (he’s a writer, about cultural events – and live music – and he wants to support writers and Canadian artists and so on), we made our plans for opening night.

From the beginning “turn your cell phones off” reminder – a short video performed by Shane, suggesting that you do so, “or else…” – the audience was in.

The story, about The Boy who gets bullied as a child, and grows up to become the bully, is based on Shane’s own personal experience. Sunny Shams (whose name I was thrilled to see, as I’d met him when he was about 8 and I was working at his parents’ business, Alexander’s Coffee Bar in Sidney, BC) performs as The Boy, in a beautifully sensitive, and emotive way. Watching his soft, gentle, tortured character being beaten and teased in the first half of the opera, I was amazed to see his convincing transformation into the bully at the end.

This opera is humorous, and heartbreaking, without being portrayed in an overly emotional way. With illustrations by Giant Ant, and voice-over narrations by Shane Koyczan, Stickboy is an ingenious way of bringing together the traditional medium of opera, classical music performed by a small orchestra, and more modern poetics and visuals. It’s making opera accessible to a younger generation, and putting the spotlight on the difficult problem of bullying.

Shane has generously bared his soul through offering his story, and tenor Sunny relates it flawlessly with a touching and thought-provoking performance. The Boy’s grandmother, played by strong mezzo Megan Latham, was wonderful to watch, and an absolute joy to hear.

I was pleased to discover that whatever the ingredient in Shane’s poems and delivery that makes my bottom lip quiver and tears roll was absent from this production. That’s not to say that it was emotionless, not at all. There were still a few tears shed on my part, and definitely some laughter – namely at the use of the word “fuck” sung in an operatic style, and later during the show, when my generous rump, crammed into the narrow seat at the Playhouse, began complaining to me only moments before one of the bullies started kicking The Boy’s seat, and singing “Fatty, Fat Ass”, over and over again!. The thing that moved me the most was the five minute-long standing ovation at the end. The audience was clapping enthusiastically, and I was moved to tears at, what seemed to me, a perfect ending to the part of a life filled with rejection and bullying. Acceptance, and appreciation, and love for the generous sharing of such personal and intimate experiences. Thank you Sunny Shams, the Vancouver Opera, and most of all Mr. Shane Koyczan for this beautiful gift.

P.S. Allan enjoyed it a lot, too! Yay!

Stickboy, Shane Koyczan, and an Unexpected Night at the Opera

My girlfriend, Erika Lax, has described British Columbia spoken word artist Shane Koyczan as a "genius." She's used him in two Youtube videos she's done - a funny, smart kinetic type piece, and a charming mini-movie she made for a school assignment. She admires him to the extent that when she went to an art gallery opening last week where he was bound to be present (while I was sidelined in Maple Ridge with a cold), I felt kind of sexually threatened: I haven't told her about this, but I imagined the dude putting the moves on her, and fantasized fearfully that she would no doubt dump me in a flash for the guy. Hell, who could blame her? And even though (as far as I know) nothing happened between them besides a nervous (on her part) handshake, I have to say I'm kind of jealous of Koyczan's success. I'm happy enough with where my writing is these days, but it's one thing to be published in the Straight, and another thing to be on its motherfuckin' cover.

But nevermind all that: I'm actually not entirely sold on his work, either. I think he's got a great sense of humour, and comes up with the occasional brilliant one liners - like the "don't fuck with the bees" bit in his recent video "Shoulders." It's a very smart way of connecting the lessons learned in childhood with respect for the environment, and I like how it resonates off the colony collapse disorder phenomenon: that one line is rich, dense, witty, and to the point, all things I admire in poetry, and he sets it up very skillfully. He loses me later in the same piece, however, when he starts rhapsodizing about environmentalism; I mistrust anyone who makes rallying-cry pronouncements of this sort, like he's waving a flag so people can line up behind him. The more intense he gets, the more I find myself wondering what's for lunch. And while there's some good storytelling in his Stickboy-related "To This Day" piece - pretty much everything involving the word "chop" - on the whole, it actually gets on my nerves, particularly as it draws to its conclusion: its just a little on the feel-sorry-for-me side, with his anger about what he's experienced poorly disguised under sentimentalized music and moralizing conclusions straight from the Oprah Winfrey world (bullying is bad!). Erika and I got into a mini-quarrel over the piece, in fact. I believe I made reference to this masterpiece of insensitivity by the Eagles in the course of the argument. But even though my flesh was kind of crawling at parts of the video, my reactions were just strong enough that they made me curious; something was happening under my skin that I did not understand. So I pretty much insisted that I was going with her to see Stickboy, the new opera with a libretto by Koyczan, about his experiences of being bullied in school. Besides, that way if Shane put the moves on her at least I'd be there.

Stickboy images by Tim Matheson, used with permission of the Vancouver Opera

Believe it or not, I loved Stickboy. At least until the intermission. And I cannot fault the production at all (save for one technical detail I'll get to). The music, by Neil Weisensel, is not the same syrup that accompanies "To This Day;" it manages to be dramatic and abstract at the same time, reminding me of the livelier side of American minimalism, akin to things I've heard from John Adams and Steve Reich. The voices were superb, too; Vancouver Island's Sunny Shams is as good a singer as he is an actor, convincingly making a transformation between the second and third acts from a poorly-dressed, picked-on preteen to a somewhat daunting, angry youth whom other kids are scared of (costume designer Carmen Alatorre deserves a big hand for this aspect of the character's development; you don't really appreciate how great the "before" costumes are until you see the "after"). There's also a lot of freshness to the presentation of this material in the context of opera; I'm no expert - besides a Japanese staging of Carmen, this is only the second one I've seen in my life - but I don't think there are many operas where people sing things like "get the fuck off me!" while being beaten on the ground. Koyczan's libretto through the first half is honestly observational, very believable, and, while there is pathos to what our main character goes through, there were many times when the audience laughed aloud, enjoying the storytelling and the cleverness. The background animations  and videos (by Giant Ant, who did the video for "To This Day," and James Nesbitt) are just terrific, complimenting the story on panels behind the stage with images of marching soldiers, school hallways, and occasional details of what's going on in front, as when one bully pins the boy and dangles spit over his face before sucking it back in. It's quite brilliant to use the video to illustrate this, since a) it would be hard to light an actual stream of spit onstage, and b) it would probably be somewhat distasteful for the cast to have to act this particular bit out live.

The production remains powerful and skillful right to the end. One errant, attention-seeking stick of celery aside, the only problem was that in several cases - at least from Orchestra Right, where Erika and I had the same problem - the recordings of Shane's voice were partially drowned out by the music and the action onstage; since his interspersed commentary does not get surtitled on the screen above, you actually lose sections of his text, which really should not happen, and which hopefully will be addressed with subsequent performances. It needs to  either be included in the titles, or played back just a smidgen louder than it was. (Maybe people seated more centrally didn't have this problem?). It also might be advisable for those of us the size of Sunny Shams, Shane Koyczan, my girlfriend, or, indeed, myself to SIT IN THE FRONT ROW, if possible, since the Playhouse has bum-squeezing seats with no leg room, further back. Erika and I both discovered during the film festival that the front row actually has wider seats, and no seats in front of it, so the long-legged and large can stretch out, while still being an appropriate distance back from the stage. (Perhaps, for the large, the seats lent an extra layer of poignancy to the scenes where our protagonist is being addressed as a "fatty?" It's like the Playhouse itself was bullying us!).

In terms of its writing, however, where Stickboy lost me a little is in the final act. It remains more or less believable: the bullied boy becomes an angry teen who cuts himself and, after his family moves, scares the kids at his new school by retaliating in excess of what he experiences. But it also begins to moralize a lot more, to try to dictate the conclusions that we should draw from the piece: that cutting yourself is a terrible, terrible thing, that bullying leads to bullying, that love is stronger than fear, etc. I may be unique in this objection, because the audience broke into loud, emphatic applause for the passage where the boy and his sympathetic grandmother sing about love and fear at some length, repeating the same homilies over and over. Personally, though, I'm not even sure what "love is stronger than fear" means, and was mostly moved to think of Chomsky's comment about good propaganda, that "you want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for." Ditto the dramatic depiction of cutting as a terrible, terrible thing (something underscored by some of the most openly emotive music of the evening and some very intense readings from Koyczan). In point of fact, I think that such "ooh, it's so terrible" representations of cutting actually serve as propaganda for cutting, since they attach to it a significance that it doesn't really need to have.

Confessional time. I'm going to mostly skip my own anecdotes about being bullied, but I used to cut myself, back when I was fucked up kid in my early 20's. On several occasions, I used razorblades to carve crosses into my arms, chest, and belly, and then did what I could - coarsely brushing them, scrubbing them with cloths, spreading the skin with my fingers, rubbing aftershave lotion into them - to make them a) sting and b) scar, since I wanted to be marked by the experience. 25 years later, I still am, have several scars - some faded, some not - on my body, which I'm neither particularly proud of, ashamed of, or even that interested in. True, it was an unhappy time for me, for various reasons, but I'm not entirely sure that cutting didn't, on some level, help me get through the day (I'm a little more self-conscious about the times I got down on my knees and whipped myself with my belt, flagellant-style, because hell, that's just goofy). It's a little difficult to explain why, but I think this matter-of-fact, no-big-deal attitude to cutting is actually a healthier one to adopt; the more meaning you attach to it, the bigger the angsty aura around it grows, then the more this contributes to a certain dark, self-destructive romanticism, the feeling that it's a seriously dangerous, edgy, powerful thing to do to yourself - kind of like suicide, but without the permanent consequence. "Oooh, he cuts himself, ooh." Back when I was doing this - it would have been maybe 1989 or 1990 - it wasn't really something anyone talked about, and it certainly wasn't something that people made a big deal of in the media or so forth; I can remember being surprised, a few years after I stopped, to hear from other people that they had done the same thing, since I thought at the time it was something I was pretty much alone in. I suspect that if I were aware of it as something with a whole lot of drama and darkness associated with it, I would have done it more than I did, and attached more importance to it. Neither of which seem very healthy. The bigger we make a taboo, the bigger the charge we get out of breaking it. I'm not sure that self-harm of this sort needs any more drama attached to it than is implicit in the act itself.

As for bullying, there was a brief moment in the opera where I thought it was going to go a different way. Once the boy becomes a teen, upgrades to cooler clothes and a cooler hairstyle, I wondered if maybe Koyczan was going to take things in another direction: to show that, good and bad, his formative experiences made him the person he is today. I felt happy, in fact, when he first overreacted to one kid telling him to go on a diet; I was glad to see him getting some of his dignity back, even if he takes it out on the one kid a bit more than the kid deserves. Questions of proportion aside, I actually don't think kicking the shit out of a bully is actually that bad of a way of dealing with the problem. and don't need to believe, personally, that the bad experiences I had of bullying led only to bad consequences. Shitty as some of the things that happened to me in school were, I did survive them, and learn how to cope, and even perhaps developed some of my virtues (and, admittedly, my excesses) in response to the shit that I had to endure. I can't speak for Koyczan, but I suspect I wouldn't have become as skilled with words if I had been physically stronger; I had to learn how to manipulate situations, to talk my way out of things, and sometimes to make myself forceful and intimidating enough in my voice and bearing alone to avoid beatings, since I wasn't physically strong enough to be able to really fight back. I don't entirely regret that. Bullying isn't good, to be sure, but nor is everything that comes of it bad; the end of Stickboy seems to offer a rather thorough repudiation of anything based in fear, to endorse the way of love instead, but as much as people seemed to agree with this sentiment, it seemed too simple, too trite, too expected, too easy.

That's maybe in the end a minor disagreement, however. I enjoyed Stickboy, overall, and even if I didn't appreciate the writing uniformly, by damn, I must say the Vancouver Opera has done a fine job of presenting this material. If you had told me a few months ago that I would be going to the opera, I would not have believed you. If you had told me I would have a fine time, I would have raised my eyebrows and shaken my head. In point of fact, I did have a fine time - vastly better than I expected. In fact. I think even my girlfriend was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, and of course, she loved it. (I'll post her thoughts separately, or link to them, or something - she's going to write something of her own).

Shane, if you're reading this, hands off, man. She's mine.

Oh: punks out there might want to know that at no time is the Hanson Brothers' "Stickboy" used in the opera. Which is just as well. It wouldn't fit.

(With thanks to Annie Mack).

Coming in November...

Man, I wish I could go to this...

Being sidelined by illness sucks.

Magic Mushroom Season: a song

It's magic mushroom season
But I can't find a field
I used to know a couple
That had impressive yields

You go out to some farm there
In the foggy morning mist
You sometimes aren't the first one
But there's always some they missed

You walk among the cowshit
You get down on one knee
You ruffle through the foliage
You pick the ones you see

You don't go ask permission
And you don't upset the cows
You do it quick and quiet
Because mushrooms aren't allowed

You might just eat a couple
But don't make no mistakes
The good ones have a nipple
And turn blue where they break

It's rained all through October
And the grass is damp with dew
The birds fly in such patterns
I've never seen - have you?

It's magic mushroom season
But I've got nowhere to pick
But I've got some in my freezer
From 1996

(Just a ditty, but those who have an interest in such matters should check out the Sacred Plant Medicine conference at UBC this weekend. Oliver Hockenhull's preferred long cut of From Neurons 2 Nirvana: The Great Medicines will be screening - read my Straight interview here).