The new Meat Puppets album: an appreciation, buried in a long-winded essay about commercial radio and punk rock

There is a joke that one of my favourite university professors, Tirthankar Bose, told once in class that I remember well. He told it about Bengalis, because he was from Bengal, and thus allowed to crack a joke at his own group's expense, but it could as easily apply to any group that you want to target.

Since I identify still, sort of, as a punk - at least an old one - I will tell his joke, but repurpose it to be  about punks:

A man (nevermind why) is being treated to a tour of hell. (In my mind, as Dr. Bose told his version of the joke, I imagined the man and the Devil in a sort of golf cart-like vehicle, driving through red-hued caverns). Satan, serving as guide, is pointing out different fates people are suffering: drowning in feces, roasting in flames, hanging from hooks, that sort of thing. Most are shackled; all are miserable. Then suddenly they pass enormous vats of boiling oil with no lids on them, and you can see the arms and legs of the condemned splashing around at the top. The man looks to Satan and says, "hey, everyone else here is shackled, but they seem to be free to try to escape; why are there no lids on that pot?" 

Satan grins: "oh, they're punks. As soon as any of them start to climb out, the others pull them back."

...which brings us to my wife Erika, and a step closer to my writing about the Meat Puppets' new album (I'll get there eventually). Whenever Erika has to listen to me rant about the shittiness of this hit song or that, or the bafflingly persistent lameness and conservatism of commercial FM radio (the only place in the world where Aldo Nova's "Fantasy" is still relevant or remembered), I know (or suspect) that part of her is judging my crankiness skeptically. Because for her - as an outsider to the subculture, exposed mostly only to it through the filter of, uh, me - punks are hairshirt-wearing weirdos, who disguise powerful and important messages in perversely inaccessible packages. Compare, say, Drum and Bell Tower's version of "Pride and Prejudice" to the Rebel Spell's original - or compare, say, Crass to Jeffrey Lewis doing covers of the same: she'll vastly prefer the folkier, more accessible, more-listener friendly version, and has been heard to say things like: "If you have a message that powerful and meaningful, wouldn't you want to package it in a form that has the widest appeal imaginable, to get your message out there? By making it so aggressive, strident, and noisy you're limiting your message to just a narrow club, aren't you? It's like they want to be heard, but only by people who are already part of the club."

I'm paraphrasing, but of course, she has a point. I do see it. I generally rebuff it a little, saying that the noisiness and aggression of punk are best understood as a reaction against bloated, self-indulgent "Comfortably Numb" bombast of classic rock radio, on the one hand, and the sort of perverse mutations of popular music that happen in radio land - which I think of as a sort of bizarre parasitic tributary (if you don't mind some badly mixed metaphors) off to one side of the enormous flows of human creativity and music.

It wasn't always that way, for me. Like, I think, Erika, I used to think of the world of music as being some sort of subcategory, some sort of function or subset of, the world of the radio. Radio was the primary source, the umbrella overhead, the "heaven" from which the angels of song descended, if you will. A generous host, it offered you a range of options, and you chose among them: and that was the world of popular music. I think some people - maybe mostly people who came of age before the internet - still think that way, which – I think - is why when "straight" friends of mine hear some fantastic song that they've never heard before, by a band they've never heard of before, their reaction is (sometimes) “why isn’t this on the radio?”

The answer, I suspect, reveals some degree of confusion on their part. It isn’t on the radio because the radio is not a benign monarch over the realm of music, is not a hallowed hall of learning and beneficence, devoted to offering its listeners the widest possible range of musical knowledge. It can be that, in its more public-spirited forms, but most generally, speaking specifically of commercial radio: it’s not about “playing good music” at all, at present. Radio as we know it now is closer to being a parasitic growth off one tiny limb of the realm of popular music. Over time, the parasite has developed an odd symbiosis with the host organism. Both have mutated, and mutated each other, while striving further to mutate those – the third party to the symbiosis – who enter into the sort of trust relationship, as listeners, with them, accepting the radio’s confirmation of their identity and values, and being soothed by it. You have to accept the range of options offered – you have to agree to the deal, which may come at a cost - but if you do, the radio will serve to bolster your limited choices and affirm that they are right at all turns by offering you nothing that challenges them. You will belong. You will be able to answer phone-in trivia questions about all the same bands, and feel yourself superior to people who can't answer them. You will, if you phone in to request a song, have the good sense to request a song that is already on the radio, and not one from "outside;" don't waste the DJ's time by requesting Big Star or some other band that has been written out of radio history, because no matter how pretty or poppy the song is, it's not going to get get airplay. Instead, you will accept that Aldo Nova's "Fantasy" is still relevant, and maybe request it, or perhaps some Billy Squier. In turn, the radio will cater to your tastes: you will hear nothing offensive – nothing too noisy or abrasive, nothing too political or outspoken, nothing too foreign or thought-provoking. You will be guarded over by Bob Seger and Corey Hart and Aldo Nova and Bon Jovi and Nickelback, who will set an outer limit on your tastes and expectations; you might get the odd bit of classic rock, maybe even a few songs from back in the day when real music actually made it onto the radio, but not so much to keep you from hearing the Police sing “Every Breath You Take” on a weekly basis. As long as you streamline your tastes to fit within the radio's parameters, as long as you accept its conditioning, it will affirm, celebrate and nourish those tastes. You will belong, you will fit, you will have a comforting sense of fellowship with everyone else who listens to the radio along with you, and erase all other genres, bands, and music fans from your field of vision. You will never, ever know what you're missing - because if you do, you might jump ship.  

I mean, I was there once, myself. I know people like that, I remember being - when I was a suburban kid of 12, like that too; and I remember the trauma of discovering (at about age 14) that the radio was not what I thought it was, at all, that it in fact had been betraying me. I remember phoning CFOX, for example – a Vancouver radio station, for those reading this in other cities - back in 1982, to ask why DOA’s War on 45 didn’t get any airplay. The album had just come out, and was fantastic, and I was having to fit my head around why you couldn't buy it at chain record stores (which were all I had access to in the 'burbs), couldn't hear it on the radio, could be forgiven, even, for not knowing the band or the genre it represented even existed (which was the case for me, up until age 14). I earnestly asked whichever DJ answered to explain the situation to me. “It’s great, they’re a local band, they’ve got a lot to say, and the songs are terrific, so why not play it?” The DJ explained (off air, of course) that the music made by independent bands wasn’t up to snuff in terms of production quality; it just didn’t sound good enough to play on the radio. Even at 14, I was pretty sure that that was a crock of shit. War on 45 sounded pretty damn good to me (and you do sometimes hear songs off it on CFOX, now, to boot, if they're having some weird special program that allows for it). The lesson I was learning at the time was that radio wasn’t to be trusted, that it was NOT the benign library of musical knowledge it presented itself as being, and that, in fact the world of music was the larger “umbrella” category, with radio being a tiny subset. I’d mistaken the tributary for the ocean, the parasite for the host. 

In a way, saying of a song, now, "this is great; why isn't it on the radio," seems as naïve as suggesting surprise, confronted by a singularly delicious or exotic food, that it is not sold at McDonald’s. The answer is, "because it's McDonald's, stupid." 

The idea that there are market-driven cultural institutions that siphon off, channel, and distort offshoots of the flow of human creativity – however we should call it – has various implications that are begging to be explored. Because T-Bone Burnett’s superb and essential SXSW keynote address is still echoing in my head, I’m inclined to apply this understanding to the internet. Like music before commercial rock radio took its present form, like cinema before network television, the internet WAS once a vast, complex, flowing thing. Various corporations – Burnett calls them “surveillance capitalists” - have found a way to channel and siphon that flow, in ways not dissimilar to the ways that commercial rock radio has channeled and siphoned the flows of human popular music, so the diverted energy – it’s kind of like building a dam, really – can be used to benefit them. As Burnett observes, we’re not even really on the internet anymore, we’re just on Facebook or Google or whatever narrow tributary we've been directed into; the idea of a vast and free realm you can explore and find different information in and connect with different people through - the "ocean" of the internet - has been replaced by these narrow channels, these for-profit corporate websites and apps where we are no longer the kings, but the serfs. And just like with commercial rock radio, the people who have assented to the symbiosis with Facebook and Google and so forth - who grew up with it, without having been jolted to question it - accept that it is a benign sort of “parent,” a given, a fact of life. John Oliver, in a rant about Facebook, noted that in some countries (Burma, I think, is the example he used), "Facebook" is now synonymous with the internet: and really (for me, too), on a de facto level, that's the case everywhere. It's deeply disturbing, and - I agree with Burnett - something needs to be done about it.

That said, I came here to write about the Meat Puppets, and I'm going to. The thing is: when I'm engaging in rants like the above, bashing the radio, in particular, I think that Erika - who listens to the radio vastly more than I do - suspects that I'm one of the punks in the vat of oil, mentioned above. When someone from the world of punk gets signed to a label, modifies (or "commodifies") their sound a bit, and tries for a hit, she thinks my railing against it - my growling about sell outs, commercial compromises, watered-down sound, or whatever - is mostly perversity; I'm grabbing the person climbing over the lip and dragging them back into the vat with me. And it is true, of course, that there are a lot of examples of bands I loved at one point, who began at least with a toe in punk, who changed their sound to get on the radio and please their corporate masters, who I then stopped listening to. I was part of the dogpile on X's Ain't Love Grand,  for example -  not their first album on a big label, but the first that really reached for (and, if I recall, briefly achieved) the brass ring of radio play (I think "Burning House of Love" played on CFOX back in the day). I genuinely liked some of the songwriting on that record - the live version of "Burning House of Love" kicks ass, say -  but I hated the way it sounded. It's not that I was a Manzarek loyalist, because I actually didn't like the production on More Fun in the New World that much, either, in different ways; it's X's masterpiece, in terms of songwriting, but it has a thin, tinny, under-developed quality to it, not fully capturing the liveliness or richness of the music (or so I thought at the time; I'm repeating a feeling I remember from when the album came out, without having really done the work to check if it is still valid, but I suspect strongly it is). And even still, More Fun in the New World still sounded way better than Ain't Love Grand. 

There are other cases. From every band (Sonic Youth, say) that made a painless transition to a major label and kept putting out quality material, with little or no appreciable change, there are probably five I can name whose bid for radio success turned their music into watered-down drek. I mean, compare the Payolas' "TNT," for example, to any of their hits. Compare Doug and the Slugs' "Not on the Corner" to the songs of theirs that you'll hear in the waiting room of the dentist's office. But the thing is: that doesn't mean I didn't WANT to hear those bands on the radio, that I didn't want them to have hits and houses and "commercial success;" I just didn't want it to come at the cost of EVERYTHING I LIKED ABOUT THEM. I remember struggling for a whole year to find a way to like the Replacements' Don't Tell a Soul - but it wasn't that they'd gone over to the majors or tried to write songs with some hit potential that was the problem, because they'd done that with Pleased to Meet Me, too, or even Tim, and those are probably my two favourite Replacements records. So the difference isn't the label, it's that Pleased to Meet Me still sounds like the Replacements, whereas Don't Tell a Soul - is like a glass of gin that you've added milk to, to make it easier to digest. It was like after Pleased to Meet Me the band pulled up their suspenders and took stock: "Well, we made our most commercial record to date, and it still didn't get us any airplay. Guess we'll have to start listening to the label, maybe they can make us some money... Maybe we can just compromise a little..."

(Remember that line from Paul Sorvino in The Gambler? "Once you ain't a virgin, you're a whore?")

I mean, when X sings, "Will the last American band to get played on the radio please bring the flag," and namecheck DOA, Black Flag, the Flesh Eaters, the Minutemen and the Big Boys - or when they write a song about punk called "The Unheard Music" - they're not saying they don't want their music heard on the radio; they're not celebrating that they're living in a musical ghetto, saying that the vat of boiling oil is where they belong. They're complaining. They feel like they have every right to have the music they love (and the music they make) heard on mainstream broadcast media, without substantially changing it (as they would eventually do, but no matter). It's not the punks' fault! It's not that they delibrately make inaccessible, poorly produced, noisy music, designed to alienate listeners; I mean, in some cases, that's true - it's not like I'm saying CFOX, say, should play GG Allin or Flipper or such - but there are tons of bands - X included - that make music that is very easy to listen to, that COULD have a mass mainstream audience, if they were given the opportunity, that you'll simply never hear, then as now, on mainstream rock radio, and it's not a matter of the music at all; it's because mainstream rock radio is hopelessly conservative and run by coin counters who won't risk playing anything that could upset their safe little deal. As soon as you start playing real music, you risk breaking the spell of recycling the same old shit over and over. The trance created, the soporific bland safety of Bob Seger's "Against the Wind," is actually a delicate one, that can be broken, and radio execs know this. I mean, I remember liking that song myself, when I was 12. I owned the single. I believed. Two years later, I discovered punk, and never looked back, and wince that I still hear that fucking shitty song playing on radio stations in public. 

Anyhoo, let's come to the point, shall we? No band I love, associated with punk, has had as complex or strange a history regarding making music with commercial appeal as the Meat Puppets. While it is no surprise that their first album didn't get them much commercial radio airplay, or even, masterpieces that they are, their second or third, starting with 1987's Mirage, the band began an on-again-off-again romance with the idea of making music that at least could have commercial appeal. (When Curt Kirkwood sings on Rise To Your Knees about stupid stars that kept getting in his eyes, that's what I've always taken him to be referring to). Mirage is a quantum leap from the trippy, tingling, southern-fried acid folk of Up on the Sun towards polished, glistening psychedelia, of a kind unrelated to other musics usually described as psychedelic (except maybe some of the more countrified output of the Grateful Dead, but even that’s not quite right). I've never fully been able to embrace the album - it is too clean, too polished, and I'm glad they took a step backwards with the follow up, Huevos, towards something rougher and rawer and more in keeping with their live sound. But I never regarded Mirage as a "sell out" or anything. It was more polished and mainstream-sounding than their previous output, sure, but it didn't really seem like the band was compromising its vision, since it was still plentifully weird and unique, enough so that there was never much threat that it would get radio play. Without that possibility - reinforced by the fact that they were still signed to SST at that point, when everyone knew independent labels like that just couldn't get their stuff on the radio, no matter how good it was - it seems more of a conscious experiment with a cleaner sound than it does a dilution of vision. Their songwriting is preserved, and the cleanness and crispness of the production is actually in keeping with the band's MO of reinventing itself every few years, since no two Meat Puppets albums ever sound exactly alike, anyhow. 

No, the album of the Meat Puppets that seems to show them starting to compromise their presentation a little is Forbidden Places, their 1991 major label debut, which, while still remaining weird - I mean, there wasn't much threat of "Sam" getting on the radio - does seem like they're deliberately digging into classic rock roots at time. The monster riffing on "Nail It Down" makes it sound like it was written after a marathon session of listening to ZZ Top, Aerosmith and Skynyrd and drinking tequila. It sounds like rednecks in a pickup truck could blast it on their way to the construction site - like it would fit right in on a mixtape between "Walk this Way" and "Just Got Paid." It's about the furthest, to that point, the band had gone in that direction, and while it's still enjoyable, I have to admit that I struggled with Forbidden Places. There are some giddily great moments on it, but in 1991, it raised questions about integrity and direction. Were the Meat Puppets on the cusp of selling out? Would their next album do to their legacy what, in 1992, Soul Asylum's Grave Dancer's Union - the shittiest of all the major label/ radio hit sellout albums, and ironically maybe the most commercially successful - did with Soul Asylum, and retroactively sully the band's entire back catalogue? (It took me 20 years before I could listen to Soul Asylum again after Grave Dancer's Union, and I'm not talking about their "new material," but albums of theirs I actually had loved previously. "Runaway Train" suddenly managed to travel back in time and taint "Cartoon," which was one of my favourite songs when it first came out: oh, is THIS what the band was aiming at? Suddenly I could hear things in "Cartoon" that I hadn't noticed before, the "incipient sellout," percolating under the surface. What have I been party to? Guhhh....

Neverminding that Forbidden Places actually came out before Soul Asylum's sell-out, I was very afraid that if I stayed with the Meat Puppets, if I let myself accept "Nail It Down," I would be participating in a process of dilution and diminishment, and that, if they followed the album up with a commercial sell-out, I would have been somehow complicit in the process, and feel even more disgusted with them and with myself. I didn't want to ever lose respect or love for the Meat Puppets, and Forbidden Places made me nervous that someday I would... it worried me, even though I liked a lot of the songs on it.

It was never that I didn't want the Meat Puppets to succeed, though - to climb out of the vat. It was that I didn't want them to succeed by substantially compromising their values. It's a different thing, and the proof I can offer is that Too High to Die, their next album, is actually even more of a commercial-sounding, radio-friendly record than Forbidden Places, and yet it's actually a kind of masterpiece. If I were doing a Mark Prindle survey on Facebook about the most successful attempt (artistically, not commercially - we're not talking about Nevermind, here) by an underground band to reframe their sensibilities, in order to court a more mainstream audience (including radio play), I think I'd pick Too High to Die as the album (after which I'd probably give a nod to the Butthole Surfers for Electric Larryland, which in a way is more impressive, because it's so much more unlikely). While I am not wild about every song on it (I've somehow never gotten into "Violet Eyes") on a whole, the popcraft on Too High to Die is so engaging and charming (and still so true to the band's quirky aesthetic) that, had it somehow worked to get them noticed - and it sort of did; it got them closer than they've ever been before or since, I think - I would have been overjoyed. I mean, the single "Backwater" is one of the least interesting songs on the album, but I was delighted to hear it on the radio occasionally and see the video on MuchMusic, and when, shortly thereafter, Kurt Cobain brought the Kirkwoods onstage for "Oh Me," "Plateau," and "Lake of Fire," I was really, really, really happy for them, and really pleased with Kurt; I was no fan of Nevermind by that point and had sort of tuned Nirvana out, but I thought that was a stellar, and really touching, use of his celebrity stature. It was fun to hear "Lake of Fire" on the radio, even if it wasn't one of the Pups' recordings of it. (There are two - one on II, and a hidden track after "Comin' Down" on Too High To Die, which I'm guessing the band deeply regretted not listing on the back cover, once Kurt made it an unexpected hit). 

Things got complicated after that, of course. Cris developed his drug problem, the band put out an album (No Joke) that I somehow never bothered with, then kind of fell apart and reformed in a very different lineup in 2000 for another album, Golden Lies, which I ignored at the time and am only just now getting into. It seems a pretty odd, ambitious record, incorporating even elements of rap; I've read Chris Walter, also a huge Pups fan, saying on Facebook that it's his favourite Pups album, and that has perked me up to check it out. It didn't capture my attention back in the day, but I was in a weird place, musically, at that point, living in Japan and dividing my listening between avant garde jazz and noise, on the one hand, and reggae, and, as far as punk went, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros. I probably would have ignored whatever the Meat Puppets did, but it didn't mean I didn't like it; I just wasn't in the mood.  

No: the real return to full on pups obsessiveness began with Rise to Your Knees - the CD that reunited the Kirkwood brothers, even if Derrick Bostrom wasn't on board anymore. I love that album, and reviewed it when it came out for the Nerve Magazine thus. I was feistier then, bit of a cunt, really, but I'll stand by it. This is the long version, that never saw print: 

Meat Puppets: Rise to Your Knees (Anodyne)  

In the name of love for what is great, let’s be ruthless, shall we? The Meat Puppets, before now, in their whole sizeable catalogue, have put out two AND ONLY TWO great albums, Meat Puppets II and Up On the Sun, on which their entire importance hinges (I’d be prepared to concede Meat Puppets I has greatness in it, for all its sludgy singular sputter, but, uh, great meals generally have to be cooked, and it ain’t, so I leave it off the list). Yes, there are other moments in their back catalogue that I am fond of. I’d be willing to concede in a minute that “Forbidden Places” or “Evil Love” or “Look at the Rain” or “Liquefied” or “Not Swimming Ground” or so forth are damn good rock songs, if the competition is Nickelback or, say, your standard advertising jingle; but if you compare them to Meat Puppets II and Up On the Sun (and mebbe Meat Puppets I), you’ve got (on the one hand, like) great vital people’s culture, raw and authentic and heartfelt and worthy of the attention of a 22^nd century Harry Smith; and then, spread like pieces of silver across the other hand – the one you jerk off with, perhaps – you’ve got some stuff that mighta shoulda coulda been on FM radio, almost, or, say, the Left of the Dial compilation. Which you’re free to like or not, and sometimes I do, and silver is nice, and I jerk off too, but in the long view, who fuckin’ cares? If it weren’t for mebbe I and cert. II and Up, I wouldn’t, probably. Whether it hurts to admit it or not, most of the Pups later discs are, face it, TAINTED BY THE MARKETPLACE, period. They are Ain’t Love Grant compared to Wild Gift – or, sigh, Three Way Tie (for Last) compared to Double Nickels; they ain’t toxic, but they ain’t that great, either. Judged by recorded document alone, it’s the gargantuan undisputable greatness of their second two albums that, up til now, have made the band worth noticing at all.

 Now: my great joy that Cris Kirkwood has cleaned up and reunited with his brother PROBABLY biases me, dig? I’m a sentimental schlub at heart, and I don’t 100% trust my own judgment on this’un: BUT it sure does seem like the reunited (if Bostromless) Pups, having actually LEARNED FROM EXPERIENCE – a joyous but impossibly painful thing, as anyone who has “risen to their knees” will affirm - and having taken similar stock of the situation, decided they really don’t give a fuck about that ever-promised commercial breakthrough that never quite happened, blown a whole bunch of shit out their asses and, revitalized and rejuvenated and ten pounds lighter and grateful as hell that they can make music again, have recorded a third (or fourth, if you count I) great album, perhaps as good as or (yes, I’m willing to say it) maybe even better than those others. The album is Huevos-direct (no endless fuckin’ around with songs to polish’em up), but with better sound and better songs; and the lyrics have that epic Blakean quality that sometimes taps so deep it makes you wanna weep. In "Island," Curt sings, “you’re the grass, you’re the trees/ you’re the thing that makes the wind/ you’re the roots of the sky (?), you’re an island;" there are other songs about spitting into the wind and such that seem to put more on their sleeves than their crypto-mystical lyrical tendencies normally allow for, which may account for the slightly melancholy tone of much of this disc. The solos are spacy psyched-out desert-scorched journeys; and the general feel is like somethin’ you might hear comin’ out of Mescalito’s ghetto blaster as he dances around a cactus, with his genitals out, kinda like the strange prehistoric bird ref’d in Zabriskie Point, soaring through the canyons o’ yr. soul. I bought it (only $11.99!), and I stuck it in my Discman, and I listened to nothin’ else for four whole days; when I finally gave it a breather, it was to put in a different Pups disc for the purposes of taking stock, and now I’m goin’ back to Rise and being staggered all over again. The Meat Puppets have, as they sing, taken the “stupid stars” from their eyes, and, doors of perception righteously cleansed, are staring out at you with this album, completely open and accessible and THEMSELVES, man, makin’ music from their cacti-fed souls. Whether the world is brave enough to meet their gaze remains to be seen, but I sure hope so, because I LOVE THIS ALBUM, full stop. I am so happy. It is better than anything you were expecting, and maybe even better than anything you were hoping for.
 It’d be a happy irony if THIS were their breakthrough, eh? 

That commercial breakthrough never happened; the album was probably a bit too artful and odd and demanding to ever have much of a chance. While I don't listen to it as often as I do than Too High to Die (which I weirdly don't even mention in that review), it's still a near perfect album. It kinda reminds me of my favourite Neil Young album, Zuma, actually - seems of that era, that sensibility. And if it's maybe a bit to blame - by setting the bar a bit too high - for the fact that it didn't "break" the band - that is not true for anything they've done since. Sewn Together, Lollipop, Rat Farm, and now Dusty Notes are all beautiful records, worthy of vastly more notice than they've gotten, carrying forth the torch of 70's rock and roll in an intelligent, rich, creative, and playful way (with maybe a smidgen of roots and country music creeping in around the edges, not that that's anything new for the band). It no longer feels like the Pups are consciously trying to get on the radio with any of these records, so they're, none of them, remotely describable as "sell outs;" it feels like they've accepted their lot and have resolved to just be the best Meat Puppets they can be, but (especially with Dusty Notes) they're now (apparently effortlessly) crafting stuff that COULD be on mainstream rock radio, or in some cases mainstream country radio, without diminishing their identity in the slightest. They've learned exactly the perfect balance of elements, and they SHOULD be filling arenas with music this good. 

The ongoing neglect of this band - the degree of divergence between critical esteem (and actual stellar musical accomplishment), on the one hand, and commercial neglect and listener indifference on the other - continues to astound me, but none of it is the fault of the Meat Puppets. And as often is the case, I find myself cheerleading wholeheartedly, with Dusty Notes: maybe THIS time, the mix of elements will be right, the stars will line up, and suddenly the Meat Puppets will be elevated to superstar status, and get the payoff (and comfy retirement) they so richly deserve? 

I mean, to hell with the vat joke, I'd be delighted if that came to pass, especially if it happened around an album this good. Dusty Notes captures pretty much the entire range of the Pups' musical expression; from the delightful, bouncy twang of the opening rock tune, "Warranty" to the Hal David/ Paul Hampton cover of "Sea of Heartbreak" - the best "country" song on the album, which mostly faithfully captures the flavour of Don Gibson's original (which is actually several magnitudes weirder than what the Pups do),  there's not a remotely compromised moment on the record, and only one song that is actually probably too heavy for radio play ("Vampyr's Winged Fantasy," which, after a Crime of the Century-esque keyboard intro from new member Ron Stabinsky - goes full on "Attacked by Monsters" or something, giving the album its sole trip to the land of heavy riffage). Other favourites include "Nine Pins," with Cris on banjo, and the mellow, Dead-like "The Great Awakening," "Nightcap," and "Outflow," which almost sounds like some sort of traditional folk song, so effortlessly perfect are its rhymes and choruses. There's an ethereal, noisy, plateauing grandeur to the Curt's solos, too, that takes me right back to Rise to Your Knees. There is so much sheer pleasure to be had from this album - even if it's a bit mellow and melancholic at times, and maybe gives a hint that the band are getting, like all of us, older - that it deserves every ounce of commercial notice that it gets, and probably quite a bit more than that, too. 

And DERRICK BOSTROM is back! He left the Meat Puppets for the longest time, even ran a competing website; I never really got to the bottom of why that was, but he's amply welcome back in the fold (and I'd like to thank him for having the sense not to grow a beard to rival the Kirkwoods; it would just be too much hair for one band, if he did).

Anyhow, there are a few great rock records out now for old punks like me - the Flesh Eaters' I Used to Be Pretty and Bob Mould's Sunshine Rock are two others that I've been enjoying. But the band I'd most like to see get notice is the Meat Puppets. It's long past time for them to be widely regarded as one of the greatest American rock bands of the last four decades. If you've somehow missed out their recorded output (or if you've been neglecting them for the last while) starting (anew) with Dusty Notes would not be the worst move you could make. And if you like the Meat Puppets, you'll probably agree: this is one of their best-ever albums - maybe not up there with those aforementioned landmarks, but at least in the top five albums they've recorded (II, Up on the Sun, Too High to Die, and Rise being the others, by me, though the exact order I'd stack them in depends on my mood of the moment).

Now all we need is a Vancouver show...

Shane Burzynski's Fun and Games, this weekend at the Badass Film Festival, plus Amazon Hot Box and Lesbian Anilingus and more!

So: I acted in a movie!

A short movie, mind you - Fun and Games, directed by Shane Burzynski of the Northwest Horror Show. It's playing in the North American shorts program of the Badass Film Festival, this Saturday afternoon at the Vancity Theatre. Adrian Mack has given me a nice plug on the Straight website. (Does their rendering of "anilingus" seem right to you? It seems more like it should be "analingus" to me, but that also seems a bit wrong, since it makes me want to read it in a way rhythmically similar to "analogous," stressing the second syllable. Actually, I am not sure there is an established spelling convention for the word; Wikipedia offers both, and a diagram, if you're at all confused as the nature of the practice. [Why do they use lesbians for that diagram, I wonder?])

I should note: the anilingus/ analingus is in a different film - Amazon Hot Box, an homage to Women in Prison films of yore, also playing at the Badass. Come to think of it, that anilingus is probably of a lesbian variety, too, as is the analingus in Jess Franco's Wanda, the Wicked Warden, which the film is presumably riffing on - though note, as with all WIP films, these are the lesbians of the horny straight male imagination, who bear little resemblance to the real deal, many of whom I am sure are sick of/ offended by these cheap caricatures; I wonder if Amazon Hot Box addresses any of these issues, by having less cartoonish, more developed, less villainous lesbians? (The poster, below, makes me think, "no"). Lesbian-friendly or not, Amazon Hot Box stars Vancouver's own Tristan Risk, and is apparently a lot of fun if you're a WIP fan; I have not yet seen it (and am not a huge WIP fan; my favourite film in the subgenre is a serious 1955 noir called Women's Prison, with Ida Lupino, and that film doesn't even have a shower scene, so that tells you where my head's at; though I am game to try this).

As for Fun and Games (where no asses are licked, lesbian or otherwise), I play a father whose badly-secured handgun is found by his young son, Anthony (played by a terrific local child actor named Jaden Oehr, who is also in Riverdale). Anthony treats the gun like a toy, and runs off to show it to his buddy (Julien Rayne Delong), with neither of them seeming to realize just how dangerous it is. You can see the trailer here - it's a pretty great trailer, actually, though you don't see me in it. The t-shirt I am wearing in the film belonged, in fact, to my own father (it's an "I've Fallen and I Can't Reach My Beer" shirt). The film has a great premise - the centrepiece of the film, two children playing with a loaded gun, is so inspired that I can't believe I've never seen its like before.

So with no further fuss, here's a brief interview with the director, Shane Burzynski, who will be at the screening (as will I). See you Saturday?

 (Julien Rayne Delong)

Where did you come up with the premise for Fun and Games? 

The idea for the film actually came from a scene in Ingmar Bergman's The Silence. There's a scene in the movie where a little boy is running around a hotel with his cap gun and has a moment where he stares down an employee who's changing a lightbulb and pretends to shoot him. It just sort of made me think "what if the gun were real" and then I just thought that a child with a gun could be an interesting premise for a short film. After that the idea for the ending came to me and it all just fell into place after that. Its the only script I've ever written with ease!

How did you find your cast?

Casting calls were set up by a friend of mine who was set to produce this short originally. Unfortunately she had to bail out just after we set up the casting call, but she posted on several groups. For your part I just had you in mind from the beginning as I thought that you had a look close to what I wanted for the father.

Your director of photography, Turner Stewart - (who I see also worked on an upcoming horror film with Larry Fessenden!] has a fantastic eye, and really did great work making the film look stellar. Where did you find him?

I know Turner through Vince (D'Amato) and what used to be Shivers Film Society, he and Dionne (Copland) were helping Vince with Cinemafantastique and the rest of their screenings and we just became friends through that. We both have similar tastes and want to make movies so it all just made sense.

All three other crew members [also including First AD Tonjia Atomic, director of Manos Returns, and Jordan Barnes-Crouse on sound] are award-winning filmmakers themselves with a decent amount of stuff under their belts.

(Jaden Oehr)

Do you have any experience with guns? Do you know anyone who is pro-gun? Are you worried about reactions from "the gun people" out there?

I actually really like going shooting! Guns can be fun and I enjoy going to the gun range but not *everyone* should have guns like so many people down south like to think they should. A part of me is a little worried about potential backlash and I have already started making my social media accounts private just in case, they can get childishly defensive (offensive) with people who criticize their ways.

As I recall, there was talk of Trump on set - my character is a Trump supporter, I gather. Are you concerned about the film getting tagged as anti-American?

I wouldn't really call it anti-American so much as anti-NRA/Conservative "Patriot". It makes me sick to my stomach how far some of these idiots take their "culture", like how you can open carry an assault rifle to a vigil filled with children uniting against gun violence. That's a point where you should really be re evaluating your life as far as I'm concerned. Its why I wanted to make them look as foolish as possible in this short.    

(Isabelle Bottin as the neighbour)

Were there any interesting behind-the-scenes stories from the shoot? Any lucky accidents? Any near disasters? What was the hardest part of putting the film together?

Surprisingly, shooting was when things actually got easy! Wrangling everything else together to GET to shooting was the true test of my patience. People were dropping out left and right for all sorts of reasons and it was hard to find the locations when we couldn't pay for them or for permits. I was truly amazed that we managed to pull off a shoot with two kids wielding a realistic gun inside the city limits with zero hassle from anyone. 

Anything else to say about Fun and Games, or Badass?

Overall Fun and Games is the first project I can say I'm satisfied with. There's still some little tweaks that I need to make like erasing some things off the gun but in terms of story and direction is definitely my proudest work. I'm really glad that we have Badass and that David and Marc are keeping things going so well and giving these films a chance to be shown on the big screen. Hopefully we'll have some more stuff for next year as well.

More information on the Badass Film Festival, starting tomorrow at the Vancity Theatre and ending Sunday at the Rio, is online here (VIFF) or here (VBAFF). Facebook page for Fun and Games here. 

Am I looking forward to the new Tarantino? Um...

Mixed feelings about the prospect of a new Quentin Tarantino film. Mixed feelings about even wasting time writing about such things, actually, when time and energy for writing are so limited of late. I mean, there are horrible things going on in the world, important things going on, and none of them involve a discussion of the new movie by Quentin Tarantino. But it's on my mind, and I want to clear some cobwebs from my head, since I have more serious writing to do this week, so...

There was a time when I loved a couple of Tarantino's films - namely, Reservoir Dogs and Jackie Brown. I respected and enjoyed other projects he was involved with, too - From Dusk til Dawn, say - but I loved those two films enough that I developed an investment in the idea of liking him, and for years, I really looked forward to his new project, whatever it might be. In the case of the films of his I have not enjoyed or respected much on first run - including Pulp Fiction, which initially struck me as trivial and disappointing - I have watched most of them multiple times, figuring I might learn to appreciate them more, or decide on reconsideration that my lack of appreciation for them might be blamed on me, not him. To that end, I believe I have tried Inglourious Basterds four times now, taking it on faith that surely people - peers, respected critics, film studies professors - who were proclaiming it a masterpiece (and taking it seriously, to boot!) - actually saw something I didn't ("it must be my fault; I'll give it another shot.") I even saw Death Proof twice, and last night marks my first viewing, since the opening weekend, of Django Unchained (I despised it the first time through). Truth is, on second viewing, all of these films get more enjoyable and interesting, once I have gotten over the disappointment and dismay and in some cases the anger which marked my initial reactions to them. Approached with high hopes and expectations, they had pissed me off; but approached again months later, with sufficiently lowered expectations, I had to admit in each case that there were likable and interesting things in all his films...

...although I have yet to attempt The Hateful Eight a second time, and may not, ever, because by the time of that film, my fondness for Tarantino, the time of my regarding him as a filmmaker I cared at all about, had waned; and also because it is the film of his I've found the least to enjoy about, the first time through. Even Django Unchained, the film of his I responded to most badly on initial viewing, had entertaining and effective moments on first viewing - best use of a Jim Croce song in a film, say - that made me willing to go back and give it another chance, but the impression The Hateful Eight left of plodding, pretentious, pompously overwritten dullness, punctuated with brutality, self-indulgence, and punches to Jennifer Jason Leigh's face, make it seem uninviting to revisit. I am not saying I didn't respect the film - it was, in a way, his most "writerly" film in a long time, as I said in a review. I just didn't find it much fun to watch.

I have, I think, two main issues with Tarantino, now: the first is that he plays with serious themes in a trivial and sensationalistic way, and the second is that, talented as he may be, he's just so goddamn full of himself. To speak to the first issue: Django Unchained features horrific violence and depictions of brutal racism in the context of what essentially is a cute, white-saviour buddy movie with a smartass happy ending and enough humour throughout that it plays mostly as a comedy. Like the severed female leg rolling down the road in Death Proof, the film has moments that disturb far more than the theme or story justifies, such as escaped slaves being torn apart by dogs, or the testicles of Jamie Foxx on display, as he hangs upside-down in the "castration" scene. It's kin to Africa Addio or something, raising serious issues while cavorting in the realms of rank exploitation, where the former end up ultimately in service to the latter. Even the so-called blaxploitation cinema of the 1970's had a higher moral purpose than Django Unchained. I thought, revisiting it, of Roger Ebert's review of Betrayed, a Costa Gavras film about neo-Nazis that may also not have the moral gravity or seriousness to properly house some of the horrific, race-related images in it. Ebert writes of "a particularly disgusting and violent scene in which Berenger and his right-wing buddies capture a black man and then stage a 'hunt' in which they chase him through the forest at night and finally kill him." In the context of a not entirely negative review, he nonetheless concludes of that scene:

It is reprehensible to put a sequence like that in a film intended as entertainment, no matter what the motives of the characters or the alleged importance to the plot. This sequence is as disturbing and cynical as anything I’ve seen in a long time - a breach of standards so disturbing that it brings the film to a halt from which it barely recovers. I imagine that Costa-Gavras, whose left-wing credentials are impeccable, saw this scene as necessary to his indictment of the racist underworld he was exposing. But Betrayed is not a small, brave political statement like Z, it is a Hollywood entertainment with big stars, and vile racist manhunts have no place in it.

I'm not sure that Django Unchained really even knows what to do with its black characters. It gives the majority of its speaking time to Christophe Waltz's main character - the white saviour who literally liberates Django from slavery and teaches him how to be a bounty hunter - and the second-largest share to a racist plantation owner, who is allowed to discourse freely about phrenology and racism and given attractive qualities perhaps beyond what the narrative requires. The most fully-developed black character is a smart but servile "house negro" played by Samuel L. Jackson, who, you come to understand, is the real brains of the plantation; but the main relationship in the film, the one that sets the action in motion, between Django and Hildegard, is almost totally undeveloped - she's basically a McGuffin, with very few lines of dialogue indeed. It is important that a film that presumes to depict the deepest horrors of racism not participate in it, but the fact that Django and Hilde's relationship gets less screen time and less dialogue than the "education" of Django by his white liberator, the contest between the white liberator and the white racist plantation owner, and the relationship between the plantation owner and his most valued servant, is telling and troubling. Django and Hildy are supporting characters in their own movie. Why thoughtful people bought into the film puzzles me; about the only way to enjoy it seems to be to completely turn off ones brain and passively accept it as an entertainment, without asking questions of how brutal it gets, how ultimately uninterested it seems to be in its main black characters, and how little it actually really amounts to. It does work fairly well if you do that, mind you - if you approach it with a truly lowest-common-denominator, "here-we-are-now-entertain-us" vacuous grin - but it's not really what one would call a thinking person's movie. I wonder what Armond White made of it?

None of that is the most annoying thing about Tarantino, though. The thing that pisses one off the most is that his awareness of people's esteem for him went to his head a long time ago. There was a time when film geeks talked about "the new film by Quentin Tarantino," but you don't have to do that anymore, because that kind of phrase has practically become his celebrity tagline, his directorial "I'll be back" catchphrase, written in huge letters at the start of his trailers. They even presume to count down his works for us, in case we've stopped bothering: "the eleventh film by Quentin Tarantino," I believe the trailer I saw for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood declares. There's a bombast to this that suggests Tarantino has been caught in a kind of feedback loop, as a film geek who knows how film geeks think and who wants the esteem of fellow film geeks: he will now geek out about his own movies for you, in case you've lost the desire.

You remember that trashy, cruel article that circulated online about Tarantino's foot fetish? The moment that stands out is when Tarantino describes Kill Bill as one of his "seminal works," and the author, Beejoli Shah, quips that it should be someone else who describes a filmmaker's work as "seminal." In a way, that seems exactly the point. Tarantino has lost all humility before his texts, apparently, and all sense that cinema should serve some sort of high moral purpose. I can't imagine a movie about movie making with a Manson family subplot will deliver him (or us) of this tendency. I want to be excited about it - I haven't fully lost the desire to like his films - but I suspect I will go and be, at best, pissed off, and then maybe watch it three more times on DVD, trying to see what other people missed.

Anyhow...

Spear of Destiny last night

I didn't even bother linking the Straight piece I did with Kirk Brandon, but I did do one - a quick email interview to plug the show. Kirk told me last night that he thought the Vancouver show was the best of the tour so far. It was pretty amazing - you know that feeling when you stumble onto something great you've completely neglected? I shot a couple of clips from later in the night...

While my wife is away

We sent Erika off on her business trip to San Antonio by playing her John Wayne's The Alamo. The hokiness of the film notwithstanding, it has some pretty amazing visuals, and I finally got to play her a Richard Widmark movie (it was also her first John Wayne and her first Laurence Harvey, but Widmark is one of my favourites of the day).

Turns out that before she left, though, she passed on her cold to me, though it seems to have hit me much harder than it did her: I spent last night, for instance, uncontrollably shivering, feverish, and blessed with a headache. I've taken the day off work and am going to do nothing today but watch movies (and scribble a few notes). Trying to pick things Erika might not care for, or that I can't vouch for.

Last night it was Rollover. Jane Fonda rejoins Alan J. Pakula for a tale of corporate conspiracy, banking, and paranoia about Saudi Arabia; it also features some convincing sexual chemistry between Fonda and Kris Kristofferson. It has a few strikingly crappy elements (dullest title sequence I can recall and a soundtrack to rival the awfulness of 80's porno soundtracks) but overall it's a strong and interesting Pakula, which seems to be about the sexiness of money. (Will Jane and Kris still want to fuck each other once the economy collapses?). Pakula was a great American filmmaker, and this is a very worthy, somewhat neglected item in his canon; though I still have no idea what a "rollover" is (the film doesn't explain its banking terminology much).

Today, I started out with Argento's Phenomena, which is a really odd item. I had watched and enjoyed (beyond my expectations, actually) The Cat O' Nine Tails, a couple of weeks ago, and thought I would attempt another of his films; truth is, I've never really gotten Argento, though I haven't tried very hard, and always - every time there's a ballyhooed screening of Suspiria - wonder if I'm missing out. There are definitely interesting things in Phenomena: from psychic communication with insects to a pretty young Jennifer Connelly vomiting and being plunged into pools of feces, corpses, and maggots; from a wheelchair-bound Scottish entymologist (Donald Pleasance) with a chimp helper - who turns out to be the hero of the film - to a razor-wielding, deformed, homicidal dwarf-child. Lots of maggots, too! As with Fulci, there are occasional moments of incompetence - often involving cringeworthy dialogue, placed in the mouth of actual English speaking actors, but clearly written by someone for whom English was not a mother tongue. Inventive as it is, though, Argento manages to do something Fulci does not: he bores the hell out of me. Scene after scene drag on pointlessly; I can see why the American distributors cut 20 minutes out of the film, because there is at least that much fat on the bone. Some critic out there, I gather, has posed the question of, what do you make of a film where the most convincing performance is given by a chimpanzee? I had thought I might watch two Argento's today, but no - if I do another Italian horror film, it's going to be Fulci.

But that will be later. After slogging my way through Phenomena - the most boring killer dwarf/ psychic insect connection/ vengeful chimp movie ever made - I followed the thread from Argento to his sometimes-collaborator George A. Romero, for one of the few films of his I've only seen once: Bruiser, which I didn't like much at all back in the days of VHS. To my amazement, I appreciated it much more now - though the most curious thing about the film ended up being that, in searching out Leslie Hope, who I knew I knew from somewhere, I discovered she played Joanie in Cassavetes' Love Streams. The film itself is barely a horror movie at all: a doormat of a man (played by Jason Flemying) loses his face, literally, and sets out to get revenge on his cheating wife, his treacherous best friend, and a truly obnoxious boss (Peter Stormare giving one of his broader performances). The climax takes place at a carnival of grotesques while the Graves-era Misfits play. It's not top-drawer Romero, but it is one of the better later entries in his filmography.

Oh, and Tom Atkins is in it, so I'm following another thread and watching Night of the Creeps now (which I've never seen! Tho' I rather loved Fred Dekker's The Monster Squad). Then maybe Fulci's City of the Living Dead, then maybe REC 4, which I've never seen.

It's not a bad way to spend a sick day.

Things you think about when you can't sleep

Ever feel like our society, as organized, doesn't make sense?

It's easy not to. You get caught up in the maze, let the maze become your reality. The cheese at the end is the goal. Don't ask questions, like "why am I in this maze?"

I'm not losing my grip, here, folks. I just wanted to register some basic confusions (none of which are that new or original, but which are the sort of thing that you might find turning around in your mind when you find yourself awake at 5am, unable to fall back to sleep).

Let me give you a few examples:

I am at Starbucks. I want a cookie. I do not want a bag. I have never understood the need to bag everything - to put something either a) in a package that I will throw out within one minute of being handed it, or b) on a plate, which will require work and water to wash. The employee has the cookie in their tongs, ready to tend it over, when I say, "please don't put it in a bag." The employee becomes confused.

"How do I give it to you, then?"

"Why not just put it in my hand?"

"I'm not supposed to do that."

"You don't actually have to touch my hand - just hold the cookie above my hand and drop it in. It's easy!"

Employee looks confused. "I'm sorry, I..."

"Okay, then put it in this napkin. I might actually use this napkin - at least it won't go directly into the garbage."

The employee looks at me, then looks at the bags. Do they follow their training, or the more logical request of the customer? I sigh.

"Okay, just put it in a bag."

I try not to resist, lately, in fact. I realize it's confusing to people, so I try to shut down the objections when they occur, and just make my fair share of garbage like everyone else. But there's an element of this every time I go into a coffee shop, or pizza slice joint, or other fast food establishment: Why do we need to make garbage at all? Why not organize the buying and selling of stuff so there is radically less waste?

Nevermind straws: how is it in 2019 we still have restaurants that will sell you food on disposable plates, to be eaten with disposable, single-use plastics, which you will - having finished your meal - shovel directly into the garbage, because there is no recycling in place? How is this even legal?

There are attempts to fix the problem in some restaurants, but some of these don't think through things well enough: for example, I ate at a falafel place on Granville a couple weeks ago, where the falafel was served in a biodegradable container... but there was no compost bin; so you still had to throw the container into the garbage when you were finished. "Thanks for trying, I guess..."

Sometimes, in dim protest of how strangely our world is organized - which sometimes leaves me feeling like Herzog's Kaspar Hauser, if I think too much about it - I will answer the question of "do you want this for here or to go," with, "whatever makes the least garbage," since I've found that the answer is not always obvious. Sometimes "for here" means more garbage. Sometimes "to go" means they will put your food on a paper plate and then put the food and the plate in a bag. It's hard to know how to proceed, so asking for the least amount of stuff that I will immediately throw away seems a fair gambit.

It's almost like they should start asking you, "would you like trash with that?"

Then there's the weirdness of packaging at all. I used to - when I indulged utopian thinking, which I don't bother with much anymore - imagine a society where everyone carried around containers with them when they went shopping. Sure, you have a travel mug for your coffee or tea - but why stop there? If you want a litre of milk, you bring your container to a milk dispenser. If you want a gallon of oil - cooking or automotive or whatever - you bring your container to an oil dispenser. Instead of a billion plastic packages with different products in them - picture the soft drinks in a cooler, here - wouldn't it be possible to meet our basic needs as a society by organizing stores so that there was next to none of this?

If the burden is too much, for people to bring their containers to the store, why not have all beverages delivered like milk used to be, in reusable, returnable glass bottles? Because, nevermind reusable cloth bags for your groceries: why not have a society where ALL PACKAGING IS REUSABLE? This need not just be a matter of beverages; if you want a dozen eggs, or some apples, or a steak, or some noodles; you go to a shop - organized kind of like a butcher shop or baker's shop - and make your order and they give it to you in a reusable container that you can BRING BACK TO THE SHOP THE NEXT TIME.

As often is the case, the reason we don't do this is "because capitalism." Because we live in a society predicated around competition, we have a billion different varieties of fizzy sugar water - to go back to that imaginary soft drink cooler - with different packages, asking you to choose between them. Does this actually make any long-term sense, though? I'm not proposing some grim, grey socialist dystopia where everyone just drinks Victory Gin all the time, but do we really need so much variety? Wouldn't it make more sense to organize, from the top down, a society where there were, say, fifty different non-alcoholic beverage options (or pick a number) which required no packaging, which you could pour from dispensers into your own reusable containers, producing no waste at all? If these were regulated in some way, perhaps we could do something of the fact that 90 percent of these soft drinks have no nutritional value whatsoever, and/or are actually quite bad for you...?

Again, there are people who seem well-intentioned, who do ask some of the necessary questions, and pose well-meaning solutions. During the brief time I was a student at UBC, I noted that some of the cafeterias there, by policy, had no bottled water options in them, because of issues of water politics.

That's great - a good first step. Here's the problem: there still were twenty other drink options, all of them involving sugar and dye... and water, lots of water! So it wasn't that they wouldn't sell you water in a plastic container; they would only sell you water if sugar and dye had been added to it. It's like they thought the other beverages were made from some other magical substance...

There's so much else out there, so much that does not make sense in contemporary life, that exists "because capitalism." It's one of the reasons I don't drive: because the idea of everyone owning their own fossil-fuel-burning personal transportation device has never made sense to me. Why not JUST have buses, trolleys, and trains? (Cars zip by the window outside in the snow as I type this.) There's a fascinating documentary out there, called Taken for a Ride, about how, in fact, most major cities in North America, at the start of the 20th century, had environmentally-friendly light rail systems, which were the dominant mode of public transport; these were dismantled, in most cases, because of pressure from automobile and fossil fuels industry, who wanted to encourage cars and roads, instead. Even buses were preferable to light rail (to the lobbyists of the day, or whatever they were called back then) because they encouraged a model of roads that people could drive on. So we end up with, instead of environmentally sound trolleys and trains, billions of individual fossil-fuel-burning cars - one or two per adult, I guess is the dream - and urban planners who design cities around this mode of transportation, further entrenching the problem.

Have never owned a car. Have never wanted to. I'll ride in them, but for most of my 50 years, I've happily gotten by without them. Most people I know have owned at least five of them, over the years. 

Another example: I was reading that the world's insect population is in rapid and problematic decline - something I've been noticing for years, which is finally surfacing in public discourse. It's due to our farming practices, of course. It's one of several competing doomsday scenarios out there, from peak oil to global warming to nuclear apocalypse... I posted the article I linked above on Facebook, and my old friend Alan ("like me, but spelled funny") commented: "The solutions are known, we can feed the world with a different way of farming, one that includes insects, and trees and mushrooms, etc (and more labour!) but it would terribly disrupt the economic positions of the entrenched interests and so onwards we go wiping out the ecosystem."

Yep, that's it exactly. There are times in my life where, if I allow my mind to go there, living as a human on the planet seems like I'm trapped in insanity - illusion and greed and short-term thinking everywhere. It shouldn't oughta be this way. It's very strange to me. It's one of the reasons that I chose to brand myself as alienated, here on this blog: because sometimes, looking at the world around me, it seems like every system I am implicated in is almost totally insane. (It's also one of the reasons I can kind of see Ted Kaczynski's reasons for dropping out and living in a cabin. Mailing bombs, not so much - but I do have his manifesto; it's an interesting read).

And now it is time to pee, and make breakfast for my wife, who will be getting up in five minutes for work.

Suburbia now on Blu! Plus keep your eyes peeled for Alien Boys, and random movie thoughts

Last year, I did a bunch of writing around a screening I hosted of Penelope Spheeris' film Suburbia - I have interviews online with her, say here. Welcome news for fans of that movie: the film is now on Blu-Ray - and while a brief flip through didn't blow me away with its image quality, it looks and sounds a HELL of a lot better than my old DVD did. The kind of lazy "punk rock clip art" cover aside, that is (take heart - the art is reversible, with the classic 'punks on parade' image on the flipside). And there are bonus features, including a commentary by the director. It's part of a budget line that Shout Factory is putting out so it shouldn't be too pricy (a blu ray for less than $30 Cdn seems to be the exception to the rule these days, sadly, at least for films that aren't knocked off in the millions, but I paid $27.99 for it, before taxes).

Also punk-rock wise, one of the things I did at that Suburbia screening - which I kind of dedicated to the late Todd Serious - was play video clips of the Rebel Spell, Freak Dream, and Alien Boys (Jeff Andrew did a little performance, too; he has a new acoustic cover of song by the Rebel Spell here). It was kind of meant as a gesture - for people who came there for the film - to show some cool things about the punk scene in Vancouver, to people who might not otherwise know about it - though I'm pretty sure most people who came were actually on the music scene in Vancouver, so they hardly needed it. It sure was fun playing "Bash Hop" on the big screen, though. Anyhow, relevant to all this is that there will be something soon appearing on Alien Boys, apropos of their kickass new album and the corresponding record release show (Feb. 9th at the WISE). I did not - I will say it bluntly here - really like Self-Critical Theory, but Night Danger is amazing, and I'm excited to have interviewed Sarah, the singer... more on that to come...

What else can a guy who is awake at 5:35, nursing a cold, and trying to burn off some midnight oil before he goes back to bed, possibly say? (Actually I think I'm up for the long haul, until Erika gets up for work, since I don't want to wake her by slinking back into the bedroom. So I better say something). I got nothing to say about the Loudon Wainwright III show I recently saw except that I really enjoyed it and was blown away that he came out to sign stuff, since he doesn't seem that kind of a guy. After the show I felt bad that I hadn't shouted a request for "Dump the Dog" when he asked if there was anything we wanted to hear (we ended up getting "Motel Blues" that way).

I equally have nothing to say about the Richard Thompson show coming up except that I really like his new album, which is much more of a "rock" album than a lot of his stuff, even reminding me a bit of recent New Model Army (it works really well on a mixtape with anything off Winter). I'm excited that he's bringing a band, since I have only ever seen him solo (when he was on Salt Spring a couple years ago). That's February 6th at the Vogue.

Live-music-wise, that's about all I'm paying attention to at the moment, so here's some spew on movies I really liked, and one I didn't.

When I was a kid, I used to buy horror and SF movie magazines - Famous Monsters, Fangoria, Starlog, that sorta thing - and developed this strong desire, based on a feature I read, to see this movie called Laserblast. I forget exactly which mag it was featured in, but it looked crazy cool and had a story that appealed: alienated teenager finds a laser in the desert, dropped by a human-like alien baddy, who has been killed by two reptilian stop motion alien types, who just leave the dude's gun laying on the ground. The kid stumbles across it, puts the laser over his arm, figures out how to work it, has fun blowing away some cacti - then starts to mutate, taking on "alien" qualities himself, as he decides that he can use the gun to kill anyone who has tormented him. (Whether the changes the gun is causing are "making" him kill or whether his killing is causing him to mutate is left a little vague). Meantime, the reptilians are hunting him down, just like they did the original alien! It was an appealing premise, but the film was nowhere to be found (in Maple Ridge, on VHS, in 1982 or so, which is the time period we're talking about), and I've never stopped being curious about it: basically any film genre I remember seeing ads or articles for back then, I still kind of want to see, and this magazine feature - which boasted the above image on half of one glossy page - made it look particularly exciting, so when I saw that Laserblast came out as part of a deluxe "collector's edition" that really goes to town, with a giant, bigger-than-the-biggest-VHS-box box, a fucking ALIEN FIGURINE, and a blu-ray/ DVD edition of the film... I kinda was excited! (The box is big enough I half expected a real VHS tape to be included, but no). There's a copy on the shelf at Metrotown Sunrise, if you're curious -  but it's not cheap (and I don't believe my copy is signed or numbered, unlike the one linked above). The ad from the Full Moon features page sorta says it all:

And sure, having a big box instead of a tiny one is kinda fun, if a bitch to fit on the shelf. Trouble is: this movie is simply not that good. It starts out well enough, as we meet the kid, get to know him a bit, and see a ranty, hammy performance by Keenan Wynn, as an obsessive, conspiracy-minded paranoid (another staple of 80's exploitation, Roddy McDowall, pops up later on, but is sadly a bit under-used). Soon enough, tho', Laserblast starts to annoy with cutesy car chase music, kind of in Dukes of Hazzard/ Last House on the Left mode, complete with moronic cops; it also has a fairly aggravating role for Eddie Deezen, as an abrasive geek; and - worst - has at least one scene that drags on far too long, a rather dull "pool party" centerpiece that wanders for veritable MINUTES without advancing the action one whit, and seems to assume that looking at people in bikinis is interesting enough as cinema that it's a good place to pad out the lean runtime (you know a movie is not well made when it is under 90 minutes long, yet you're still glad when it finally comes to an end). Laserblast also doesn't do very much to explain why the protagonist seems to toggle back and forth from being under the influence of the alien gun - which involves dramatic makeup - to being his normal human self; there are elements of his transition and trajectory that are not really made clear (unless I fell asleep during those parts - I do think a couple scenes induced napping). The stop motion is fun and a few scenes are actually engaging but otherwise I'd give it a pass.

And yes, folks - overpriced or not, I finally DID get the film - had an opportunity to grab it at less than the original price and figured that I could scratch a 35 year old itch that way. Even at a discount it wasn't worth it - let that be a lesson to me! I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with my alien figurine, besides leave it in the packaging, so it doesn't depreciate in value (it's not like I actually want to play with it!). At best, I can hope that the whole ridiculous package will turn into a hot collectible some day so I can at least break even when I sell it.  (Anyone want it? It's actually really great, don't listen to me!).

Moving on, here are movies I liked lately. The Favourite, the new Yorgos Lanthimos, is fun - a bit lighter than some of his other films, and less overtly surreal, but still dark and strange (nice ducks!). It deals with the ways people suck up to power (and how power can deform you), and in fact, seemed to be a disguised commentary on Trump, but then, that's what I thought about The Death of Stalin, too; like that film (but unlike Mary Queen of Scots, say), The Favourite will appeal to people who don't even care about the actual history involved, since it is more interested in using historical figures in service of allegory than it is in history for its own sake.

Theatrically, I also really liked Clint Eastwood's The Mule, which is one of his gentler films, really, and maybe the best thing he's done since Gran Torino (tho' I've missed a couple in there). Meanwhile, Mile 22 is enjoyable, if no big deal - a step down for Peter Berg, whose best film is probably his previous, the superb Patriot's Day - but Mile 22 co-stars the guy from The Raid, and is, weirdly, being sold for a mere $10, brand new in blu, at Walmart. The price alone makes it worthwhile - and it does have some very crisp action scenes for Raid fans. If you find the plot initially overcomplex, take heart - it is just (over)compensating for how simple and linear the story will eventually become.

What else? Elaine May's superb Mikey and Nicky, with Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, has just come out on blu-ray from Criterion. If you like "actor's movies" this is a must-see, charting the disintegrating friendship between two low-level hoods; Falk and Cassavetes did a ton of stuff together, but this film really lets you see the two play off each other, even more than they did in Husbands, really. Would go great on a double bill with Machine Gun McCain, or Gloria, or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (I'm just sayin').

Oh, and Erika and I also recently dug up an old 90's thriller, Just Cause, with Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne (and with Ed Harris giving one of those performances that chews the scenery so hard you're kind of impressed with it: when his scenes are over, there isn't anything left of the room but splinters, and smallish ones at that). We were initially utterly gripped by the meticulously plotted, character-rich first half, but grew distressed by the increasingly predictable and politically problematic turns in the second half. This is kind of a spoiler, but it's one of those films that invokes "liberal sympathies" (here involving racism against blacks in the United States, police abuse of power, and the death penalty) only to completely turn things around on you, once you are hooked and believing yourself on the side of righteousness and truth, to reveal that both you and the main character have been played. While sternly lecturing audiences on their liberal self-congratulatory pride - which is an at least somewhat interesting thing to do - the film reveals that the sympathetic, educated, soft-spoken black character who has been railroaded HAS BEEN FOOLING YOU ALL ALONG, and aha, is in fact a manipulative, drooling psychopath, PRETENDING to be a victim, because it is to his advantage... while the evil, suspect-torturing cops, including  Laurence Fishburne, in "black cracker" mode, are actually on the side of truth and justice. It reminds one alternately of three other 90's films - Primal Fear, Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear, and ultimately The Siege, which also pulls a last-act switcheroo, where the film reveals that the young Muslim student who seemed to soft-spoken and intelligent and likeable really was a terrorist all along, because, you know," they all are, really." Just Cause has maybe the most racist caricature of a black man committed to film in the 1990's? I suppose there may be worse, but...

Ed Harris is still crazy great in it, though. Spit flies from his mouth as he screams, veins bulge, and his eyes are just terrifying. He looks a bit like a badly constipated Chris Cooper in the pic I just used, but his performance is fantastic, if you like Ed Harris, and I mean, we ALL like Ed Harris, right? He alone makes the film worth watching.

Come to think of it, Just Cause actually has an interesting similarity to the much loved Canadian horror film Rituals, which I gather has finally come out on blu-ray.  If I were an actual, enfranchised film scholar, and not just some guy on a blog, I would probably dig deeper to find films that work as "transformation engines," where a character with sympathetic, liberal politics at the beginning is forced by the mechanisms of the plot to abandon them and become a killer by the end, dispatching of the very people he claimed sympathy for. In Rituals, it's Hal Holbrook, as a conscientious doctor, who is forced ultimately to (justifiably) kill the victim of a botched surgery, liberal sympathies be damned; with Just Cause, it's Connery's anti-death penalty, anti-racist, anti-police brutality defense lawyer who is transformed into an agent of death, killing a black "victim" of police brutality and affirming that the brutal cops were right all along. At least, I'm pretty sure that it's Connery who ultimately must kill the bad guy in the film. I kinda forget - by that point in the film, I was so disappointed by how formulaic and kinda racist it had become that I had kinda stopped caring...

I hear that Erika's awake now! Time to go back to bed. If you haven't seen Rituals, do so (it is not in at Videomatica yet, but they do have it on order; and it can be purchased online, I'm told).

Tonight at the Cinematheque: I Heard the Owl Call My Name and The Silent Partner - plus Ganja and Hess, coming soon

Right, so has everyone read my John Werner piece? Vancouver punk bassist returns to England to reunite with a legendary band from whose wake sprung Theatre of Hate and Spear of Destiny? And you've all noticed that Spear of Destiny plays the Astoria in a few weeks, right? Best and biggest piece I have done in some time, if I may say so myself. There are a few significant aspects of the story that I left out, but I may be able to fill in a blank or two in a subsequent piece, if I have the time and energy to write it, as the Spear of Destiny gig gets closer. We'll see.

Meantime, I notice there's a singularly interesting double bill at the Cinematheque tonight. I have been aware of, and compelled by the title of, Margaret Craven's I Heard the Owl Call My Name since I started going into used bookstores as a child, and learned that owls were, to some aboriginal peoples, seen as omens of death, which idea always appealed to me. The novel is ubiquitous - or was at one point - but I didn't know that both it and its film adaptation were set in BC, though I did gather it had something to do with a priest visiting a remote Canadian First Nations community (that of the Kwakwaka’wakw, previously known as the Kwakiutl). Tom Courtenay is a fine actor, and it's good to hear that the First Nations characters are played by First Nations actors; beyond that, I have no idea what to expect, but I think I'll check it out - feel like, as a Canadian, I should know this story.

Remarkably different (save for the involvement of director Daryl Duke) is the Toronto-shot crime thriller The Silent Partner, which I have seen on at least three occasions, but none recent. My memories are somewhat dim, but I remember loving it when I first saw it, as an eleven year old, cross-legged in front of the TV, and I'm kinda thrilled to have a chance to see it on screen. The plot, as I recall it, involves a meek-seeming bank teller - played by Elliott Gould, emerging from a mid-career slump to remind you how good he can be - who, realizing that he is about to be robbed, opportunistically arranges to steal his own bank's money, such that the robber gets the blame. This, of course, invites the wrath of the robber (played by Christopher Plummer, as one of those robbers with a talent for disguise; if I recall, in the course of the film, he dresses both in drag and as Santa); it's been years since I saw it, but I remember being very entertained by the cat-and-mouse game that ensues, and it's right up there with Rabid and Jacob's Ladder in terms of disturbing representations of Santa Claus, if memory serves.

Both of those films are playing as part of the newest installment of The Image Before Us, a series devoted to representations of BC on film (and yes, The Silent Partner is not a BC film, but it's a BC filmmaker, so good enough for me). There's lots else in the series, which I hope people are attending to, but nothing I can add much about.

However, while I'm mentioning films that particularly excite me, let me note, if you haven't seen Bill Gunn's Ganja and Hess, coming in February, you might just need to. It's a very strange film - a vampire love story that seems more of a meditation on African-American identity and heritage, using the idea of vampirism to juxtapose Afrocentricism with Christian religious services. (Spike Lee made a fairly faithful remake, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, which also threw in a bit of hip hop culture). It is oddly talky and philosophical at times, but filled with charged images, and a very potent soundtrack, as I recall. It plays with a blaxploitation classic, Sweet Sweetback's Badasssss Song, which I have never seen, but I love the ways that early 1970's American filmmakers bent exploitation cinema to higher moral and political purposes - which I expect is the case with the latter film as well - so this is also a double bill I'll be marking my calendar for. Ganja and Hess is truly a singular film, ambitious and weird and sensual and disturbing, so I hope this screening creates a whole new audience for it.

Strange Dreams of Jodorowsky

On the cusp of plunging back into my regular work routine, I get a morning where I get to sleep late, since Erika has to go off for some blood tests and can't have breakfast... so I don't need to make it. In bed, in the time before I wake (at 9), I dream that there's a new Jodorowsky movie, and that my friend Mark is telling me I have to see it. I make a pilgrimage to Vancouver by bus; as often happens, my dream backdates me so that I am living in Maple Ridge, still single, and commuting out (even Mark doesn't live in Maple Ridge anymore, but in the dream he does). I find myself the only person (I think) in a theatre where a very strange movie indeed plays, about a man who loses touch with reality, moving through a hallucinatory landscape the details of which escape me - there are animated creatures, strange visual distortions, vivid colours, and an overall impression of visual accomplishment ("Jodorowsky's most visually sophisticated movie ever!"). It is more dream than real. Our protagonist journeys through this weird world to where his family lives, and then, to his surprise and confusion, finds his family are entirely normal; the weirdness goes away, and he is faced with the strange prospect of re-integrating, after his "trip," into a normal family life... was it all a dream?

...at which point something happens; I find myself - perhaps because the main character has decided to go to a movie, and he is, aooarently, my analogue - outside the theatre, and invited in, and once inside, I discover that I too am in the midst of a hallucinatory landscape, with no semblance of the real world. Stars are present - Harvey Keitel is there. Strange creatures, colours, weird distortions of the normal; I can't recall many details. I expect Jodorowsky in full-on magus mode to appear from behind a curtain. The strangest thing about this dreamlike second part of the dream is that it does not seem like a dream, it does not seem like a movie. It is all real.

At which point, suddenly, I find myself settling back down, and I am in a theatre filled with merch, including DVDs of the movie I've just seen, and one blu-ray - PAL formatted, I am warned. The dream, the movie, it all goes away, but I am left, like the protagonist of the dream-within-a-movie-within-a-dream to ask myself: what just happened? What is real?

I am very impressed with Jodorowsky for having accomplished this - for making me dream a complete departure from reality, for actually causing me to hallucinate. He'd always said that he wanted El Topo not to be watched on drugs, but to BE the drug. With his new film, he has succeeded beyond the wildest imagination; how the hell did he do it?

It turns out there were other people in the audience all along, too. I wonder what they made of it? I am eager to call Mark and ask him what HIS experience was... as I leave the theatre to catch the bus back home...

A happy New Year with Petunia and the Vipers and the Myrtle Family Band: updated with added Petunia deets!

UPDATED with Petunia news in the second and third paragraphs!

Fantastic night last night, dancin' to Petunia and the Vipers at the WISE Hall with my wife Erika. They have a Monday WISE Lounge residency, again, but this was in the hall proper, with a full crowd, an enormously busy dance floor, and, among all the youthful types, what seemed to be a pleasing number of people in the audience in their 70's and 80's - which reads as a great validation of how successfully the band channels vintage country swing (with traces of mariachi and Roma jazz and rockabilly and lounge exotica and such): because as big as oldtimey music is on the Vancouver scene right now, you don't see a lot of senior citizens in the audience for the Staggers and Jaggs or the Still Spirits or Devil in the Wood Shack or so forth. The Myrtle Family band - which I believe contains members of the Burying Ground, whom I once plugged in BC Musician (RIP) and who is, I believe, playing the WISE again on January 10th - warmed us up nicely with playful, female-fronted post-war swing, including a version of "Rag Mop" (aka "Ragg Mopp"), which used to be one of my father's favourite songs to sing when he was in a good mood. Between bands, there was a dance lesson, for those who wanted to learn how to Charleston; followed by a nice long set from Petunia, which I captured a bit of video of, here, here, and here.

Initially, when writing this, I noted that Petunia seemed to be "disappearing into his band, compared to the days of 'Mercy'" - because last night it really was "the Vipers with Petunia," which I took to be a deliberate, stylistic choice, because I had actually been chatting with a local musician about the differences between "Petunia," whom I've seen solo (or with Al Mader) many, many times, and "Petunia and the Vipers," who tone down the stark Lynchian yodeling cowboy element and amp up the Bob Wills, full-band experience. Said musician and I are both fans of the stark, Lynchian, yodeling cowboy aspect, and so I thought that last night was the most extreme example of this tendency to emphasize the music yet, but it turns out that there's a much simpler, less worrisome explanation: Petunia had a sore throat! He covered it up pretty well, I think - although now that I think back, there wasn't that much yodeling to be had last night, was there?

Anyhow, I missed passing on a bit of news, because I couldn't hear it all in his between-song stage patter: Petunia will be starring in a web-based series, which, as Petunia reports, is "directed by Beth Harrington, the last person to interview Johnny Cash before he died, for his words on the Carter family, which went into the film she made called The Winding Stream" (trailer here. ) Harrington, if I understand correctly, was actually at the gig last evening too; the show is called The Musicianer, and is a narrative, not a documentary, Petunia says. Petunia also tells folks that "for the 'real' Petunia, please go and check out the videos from the Rickshaw Theatre coming out (nine in total) every few weeks on our FB page, and forevermore viewable on YouTube or our website."

In any event, it was a great evening, and thanks to Clay Holmes for his keeping things so well-lubricated, drinkwise; Norm for facilitating my late ticket buy; and Petunia and Stephen Nikleva for putting up with my panicky emails when I saw that the show was sold out. Nothin' much else to say - Happy New Year, even if you were at Lanalou's or the Anza last night. Lookin' forward to The Musicianer. Here are some photos from the WISE:

More on Mandy, plus my issue with geek culture

Okay, I tried Mandy again last night.

As you may gather from my previous post, I have some hostility towards what I regard as the fanboy mentality. There's an element of "wouldn't-it-be-awesome," prurient giggling idiocy afoot within so-called "fan culture" that I find irritating and unwelcome and best avoided. Much as I love movies, and horror movies and science fiction movies in particular, I very seldom visit stores that cater to their fandom, never go to fan expos, and never even look at websites like Ain't It Cool or such which promote what "movie geeks" are taken to like, these days. Perusing the headlines at Ain't It Cool just now, I see things like "Holy Shit! The new trailer for Dark Phoenix looks awesome!" Or, say, "Disney's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge Theme Park Opening Announced with a Video!"  But I know nothing of Dark Phoenix - don't even know what it is; have found Disney vaguely repugnant since childhood; never go to theme parks; and gave up on Star Wars about five movies ago, I think - after the one where Darth Vader is "born." (which websites like Ain't it Cool actually regarded as a good film, sealing the deal that they are meant for someone else). The sort of stuff that "geeks" of that self-described sort ejaculate all over - Pacific Rim, Ready Player One, what-have-you - seems loud and annoying and trivial to me, mostly, and I'm mostly content to stay away.

None of that is to say that there's anything WRONG with being a geek. I'm not judging. I'm all wrapped up in popular culture too, and if you flash back to my friends and I in the 1980's, we were quipping lines from Repo Man at each other - often involving pointing out "ordinary fucking people" in our proximity - or using "I take your fucking bullets!" like a private idiom, whenever the social circumstance (figuratively) permitted it. ("You stupid fuck, look at you now" was easier to adapt socially, actually, as I recall). We recited dialogue from Carpenter's The Thing at one another. We were using "I'll be back" as a one-liner before Schwarzenegger's people figured out kids were doing that and tried to give him a one-liner or two in every single movie he was in. I may have grown tired of all that, or just grown up, but I still consider myself a geek, in some sense of the word that probably doesn't mesh with how it is used now.  Hell, if you go back early enough I seem to recall even having a toy light saber, and plenty of Star Wars trading cards to boot.

So it's not just that I'm being a snob, here: I like a lot of crap, too. And I don't, though it puzzles me, think that the people who ejaculate over crap culture online (I will continue to point at Ain't It Cool, as a perfect example, but there are tons of others) are insincere or cynical about doing so. There's a sense that they genuinely WANT to participate, that when the new Star Wars/ Star Trek/ Marvel Universe/ DC Universe movie comes out, they genuinely are keen for it, WANT to see it, WANT to buy the merch that goes along with it - that they think that that's what participating in popular culture entails. It's weird to me - weird to me to see grown men in superhero shirts, weird to me to see grown men shelling out fifty bucks or so for replicas from The Fly or The Thing or Spawn or such - but I don't begrudge them; I just try to stay well-clear of the things they like, because time has shown me that the current movies said geeks find most satisfying - The Shape of Water, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Aquaman, whatever - will at best seem like a trivial amusement to me. It's  not being a geek I object to, it's just that the things that KIND of geek gets excited about do not move me at all - or move me in the opposite direction, as in, "make me want to get away from them."

Which brings us, sadly, to Mandy. There are at least a dozen things that knowingly wink out from the film, from geek filmmaker to geek audience, to forge a presumed bond. I have no doubt the people at Ain't It Cool (or Den of Geek or whatever the hell) loved it to pieces. There are heavy metal t-shirts in abundance. There are references to popular cult movies (Including use of the line, "don't you fuckin' look at me;" gee, where have I heard THAT before?). There are digressions into anime that add very little to the film that I could discern except giving it added appeal to the anime freaks out there. There are three elaborately costumed evil biker figures that obviously evoke the Cenobites of Hellraiser (but with fighting skills). There's a chainsaw fight, right out of Hooper's sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There's even a killer phallus that evokes the thing the guy in the "lust" murder in Se7en is made to wear. And there's a very, very silly scene, when Cage, setting out on his revenge mission, pauses to forge his own weird-ass weapon - some critics have described it as an "Orc sword" - not because the plot demands it, not because the theme demands it, not because there is a shortage of weapons at his disposal, but because it will look "badass" to see people killed onscreen with a fancy sword. No explanation is provided, or seemingly needed, as to why a lumberjack HAS a forge for said sword in his basement, or knows how to use it, because who cares? The sword is cool to look at, and Cage can kill people in colourful ways with it, and that's really what you want to see, isn't it?

Nope, actually, it isn't.

None of this would annoy me at all - not even the unnecessary, cutesy nods to other films - if it wasn't for the things that Mandy does very, very well. If it was just some trashy compendium of in-jokes and playfully inventive gore, like Rodriguez's Planet Terror, for example, I probably wouldn't care about it much, but nor would I have any basis for judging it. It's BECAUSE it is visually and sonically brilliant in its execution and construction, it's BECAUSE it has deeper, larger ambitions than wallowing in trash cinema, it's because it seems willing to make demands of its audience, it's because it even seems to have some IDEAS in there, that its failings come as such a letdown. There are even moments where you think the film is going to be ABOUT something, that it has actual meat on its bones. Its Manson-like cult leader, played by Linus Roache, is brilliantly written, and there are two scenes in the film that stand out as being very rich, resonant, and powerful, the sort of scene you come away from the movie wanting to think about. The first - the real peak of the movie, by me - is where Jeremiah Sand gives the abducted Mandy acid, and then, in the midst of swirling, trippy, tracer-streaming visuals, puts on a record of music he wrote (he's presented as a sort of failed folk musician: his messianic ego trip is justified by his outrage, in his own mind at least, at his having been rejected as an artist). The song he plays is about himself, and as he strokes his naked body - his uncircumcised cock very much the centre of the screen - he speechifies grandiosely about how the world is his. Mandy - taking it all in, tripping - comes to a sudden, dramatic realization of how ridiculous he is. You're playing a song you wrote... and the song is about you? She bursts into laughter - humiliating, cruel, but very, very apt laughter at how absurd this little man's ego is. He cringes - and it's brilliant. The scene captures something very real and honest and interesting about psychedelics, about the freedom from ego they can afford, about the penetrating insights that can flood you; and about how badly things can go when ego reasserts itself under their use. I mentioned earlier that I preferred both van Bebber and Harkema's Manson movies to Mandy, for the insights they offer and the earnestness with which they offer them, but watching Mandy again, I have to say that at that moment, the film is on the cusp of brilliance. It's as close as it ever comes to being great, as Mandy laughs, and Jeremiah recoils, and the streamers swirl all around. The scene is lessened a little in impact by the ironic, unnecessary Blue Velvet reference that I mentioned earlier, but it still works, still has you believing that you're watching something great transpire. You don't realize that, at that moment, you've actually reached the thematic and emotional peak of the film, barely even halfway into it - that it's going to be all downhill from there.

I realized last night that I don't actually object to the bum-trip that follows, with Mandy burned to death inside a sleeping bag, as punishment for her disrespect, while the Nic Cage character is made to watch. It's an ugly and cruel thing to stick into a trip movie, and I feel sorry for anyone who watched the film on psychedelics, for what that must have felt like, but actually, it seems to me that the problem with the scene is that it pulls its punches. Because if you're going to burn the moral center of your film to death, alive and onscreen, you have to do it in a way that counts. You have to think of Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc or Ken Russell's The Devils, say. You have to cry, to suffer, to scream along with your protagonists; to convey the depth of trauma required, to make the scene have the emotional impact that is needed, you can't hide the suffering and death inside a fucking bag. Mandy's death is nowhere near as painful as it needs to be for the audience in order for it to work. Hell, you're even allowed to indulge the belief that Mandy might still be alive, that the person in the sleeping bag is someone else; there's a subplot involving a second victim, a chubby guy, and on first viewing, I suspected that maybe it would turn out that HE was the one in the bag, and that Red and Mandy would be reunited at the end - all of which you gotta lay at the hands of the director, because you don't see how Mandy GETS into the sleeping bag; you don't hear her screaming; you don't get a final exchange between her and Cage. You don't even see her face, between her laughing at Jeremiah and the bag being lit on fire. You just watch the bag burn, writhing like something is inside it, and see Cage's traumatized reaction. It's about as sanitized and abstracted and safe and gutless as a scene of someone being burned alive onscreen could possibly be. It needed to be on the level of strength that Heather Matarazzo's death scene in Hostel 2 has, needed to be nearly impossible to watch, but if anything, Cosmatos tries to make it as painless as possible.

And even still, there is potential in the film. I was still with it at that point, still willing to forgive. The scene isn't as strong as it could be, but it's strong enough, and you know there's going to be a powerful resolution ahead. Which brings us to the other peak of the film, as you might guess: the final confrontation with the cult leader at the climax of the film, where Cage - Red - humiliates him completely, reducing him to a kneeling, pathetic specimen offering to suck cock to be spared. THAT death is graphic, and satisfying, and a worthy degradation, and even if it ends up in a cinematic cliche - Cage walking away as Jeremiah's church burns behind him - it works well enough to be satisfying. 

The real problem with Mandy lies in what exists between these peak moments. A lot of reviewers, of the ones who criticize the film, harp on the "boring" opening, but the slow build is fine by me. It's gorgeous to look at, and if we don't get to go particularly deep into the characters of Mandy or Red, we get to like them well enough. Andrea Riseborough - who, I didn't realize, was in the other film I saw last night, as well, The Death of Stalin - has a very charismatic, compelling mien, and manages to convey a sense that her character has great depths of wisdom and soul even when she is given almost no interesting dialogue with which to do it. Her scar, her penetrating gaze, her paintings, her Black Sabbath shirt - it's all very nicely handled and kind of makes you love her along with Red.

No, the people who describe the first hour as boring - the fanboy contingent, drawn to the film for the promise of seeing Cage go batshit - almost all seem to like most the stuff that I like least, the stuff that begins immediately following the great little Bill Duke cameo: namely, Cage's "awesome" revenge. That's where the film panders to its fanboy audience the most, positively going Wolfcop in the endeavour, like Cosmatos polled his friends and fans and stuck stuff in that would gratify their desires, regardless of its bearing on whatever theme he might have been developing. You get the sword-making, the pretty much meaningless and unnecessary confrontation with the Cenobites (who actually are peripheral to the film's plot). You get the chainsaw battle, and the flaming head-cigarette lighter scene (as I expected, people in the theatre laughed aloud at that). The promise of the film's stunning imagery and soundtrack and that high-watermark set up all gets lost in a bunch of silly crap, that seems to exist to fill a void between the great premise and the decent climax: it's like Cosmatos came up with the two peak moments - the death of Mandy and Red's final confrontation with the cult - then shrugged and, in the absence of other ideas, just filled the film up with crap.

And it IS crap, folks. The key selling point of  the film - Cage finally in a film where his overacting is not out of place - is crap, crap sold to sniggering fanboys, without any heart or soul or value behind it. It is, I suppose, entertaining crap, if that's what you want - and it is certainly TRIPPY crap; but I couldn't give less of a fuck about Nicolas Cage doing badass shit. I wanted a move that was ABOUT something, that actually has ideas, a purpose, something to offer; that didn't just gesture at brilliance, but WAS brilliant. Lighting a cigarette on a flaming severed head isn't brilliant, it's cheap, it's a cop-out, it's an insult to the film's potential and the faith people are bringing to the theatre. The film could have been so much more. It actually makes you believe that it IS so much more, briefly; and then it isn't. I very much suspect that I'll never watch it again. I already had given away the Blu-Ray I bought of it to a friend who liked it a whole lot more than I did, before revisiting it on the big screen, and wondered if I would regret having done that, but you know what, I didn't, and I don't, and I'm done with it. Sorry, Mandy. Sorry, Panos. Sorry, fanboys - you can keep this one.