An Eary Mystery (the left ear can't hear what the right hand is doing)

Here's a question: do you listen to the phone with your left ear or right ear? And are you left handed or right handed? PLEASE COMMENT IN THE COMMENTS SECTION, reporting your preferences, if you'd care to report - I'd be very curious!

I currently have an ear infection in my left ear - it's not painful, but it's like there's an obstructive bubble of tissue blocking the canal and muting sounds. I find it rather uncomfortable listening to the phone with my left ear in this state, and I noticed that when I transfer it to the right ear, it sounds WRONG, different. (Try this yourself before you continue reading, if you want your observations to be unprejudiced by my description of my experience). When listening to someone talk into my right ear, I can make out the words people are saying, but it takes more work to process them; they come from a greater distance, sound less like "speech" and more like "sound," and it's like my brain has to make an extra effort to make sense of them.

This got me thinking about "earedness." A friend I spoke to today says he favours his left ear for the phone, too; he offered the theory that it was an issue of handedness - he's right handed, and so listening to the phone with his left ear leaves his right hand free to take notes and such. A reasonable theory, except - I'm left handed and left-eared, both.

Preliminary forays into "internet literature" on earedness are contradictory - one article says (reflecting the conservative view, and my own intuitive sense of things, given the above experience) that we listen to speech and any fast clicking sounds primarily with our left ears, and long sustained tones (music) with our right. Another article says exactly the opposite; both apparently reflect scientific studies. Neither mentions phones - though if the majority of left-handed people are also left-eared, it would do a lot to back up the former position, and require the authors of the second to do some explaining.

I will continue to look into this...!

Sonic Youth's The Destroyed Room: Music to Live For

Coming out of Grindhouse (see below), I'm not the only one who's depressed. A friend and I talk after the film about how undermining an experience it was, both of us wondering if we're too sensitive, too porous; we both know that it's going to take us awhile to shake the bad feeling it's left us with. Just as a crappy film can sully us for hours, though, we both know very well that art has the capacity to lift us up, to strengthen us; neither of us would have gotten through our adolescence without music, to choose one example, and knowing this makes us somewhat intolerant of garbage. As young men, through art, we found an alternative to the rather bleak, unpromising realities around us, a way of expressing our emotions, knowing them, understanding them, a way of seeing the potential for human communication exalted, when so much around us seemed (and seems) to degrade it. I badly needed to balance out Grindhouse with an aesthetic experience that would redeem my day - and so, sucking in my pride at frequenting our corporate eyesore, HMV - with its giant banner of Tony Montana presiding over the DVD section, crappy corporate music being pumped out of the speakers, and suburban-shopping-mall vibe - I popped in and did what I do so often when I feel lost and without comfort: for better or for worse, I went shopping.

The first CD I bought today: The Who's Quadrophenia. This was my favourite album when I was fourteen or so, mostly for "The Real Me" and "Love Reign O'er Me." I listened to it, found myself in it, time and again, tried to work out the words to the songs (my copy came without a lyric sheet) and discussed their meaning with friends. In my grade 8 drama class, I blush to remember that I once did a "dramatic recitation" in a faux-British accent of the narrative included in my gatefold LP, which I'd memorized (something I don't think I've ever mentioned to anyone, so here it is: a blog-first revelation): "Now it's just the bare bones of what I am... a romantic, is it me for a moment?" It's hard to believe that I haven't owned it since I got rid of said gatefold, and a lot of my other records besides, sometime in my teens - around the time that I was discovering punk (which was slow to arrive in the suburbs - we're talking about 1982, here).

I approve of my past self's decisions, though. I'm proud to see that even then, I was starting to mistrust "classic rock." Part of it was surely just overexposure: most of what gets labelled thus has been chewed over and spat at us so often that it's become an offense. That wasn't entirely my reason for jumping ship, tho': I think I was beginning to notice even then that there's a whole lot of vital musical culture that the overpraising of such bloated "masterpieces" as Pink Floyd's The Wall, say, serves to obscure - I mean, find me someone who owns that recording in any format, and ALSO owns a CD by, or has even heard of, the Minutemen. Albums like the Who's Who's Next are so safely consumable that George W. Bush can drop references to songs on it ("Won't Get Fooled Again") in his bungled aphorisms; it might as well be "Born in the USA" (the original electric version, not Bruce's various acoustic attempts to rebrand that song). Classic rock is like a vast fortress of officially-approved, unthreatening popular culture that towers over all of us, asking us to serve it, rather than the other way around; it's only meaning increasingly seems to be that "baby boomers are cool," and it's significant that the best albums by most "classic rock" bands are the ones that get the least radio airplay (the Stones' Exile on Main St, for instance, or the still-unavailable-on-CD Time Fades Away by Neil Young and Crazy Horse). Not that I even want to get started on radio; I don't have to, because its conservative, corporate, payola-seeking nature has rendered it almost completely irrelevant.

Quadrophenia, though: for all its "we're making great art" pretension - the very concept of the "rock opera" is pretty fuckin' untenable, post-punk - there's stuff on this album that still has the power to chill and excite me and make a believer out of me all over again, jaded as I've become: the power of Daltrey's delivery of "Love Reign O'er Me," for instance, or the lyrics of "I'm One," or Entwistle's bass on "The Real Me," or the great guitar/bass interchanges on "The Punk Meets the Godfather." I know because briefly I owned the soundtrack to the movie when I was in Japan (1999-2002), with a bunch of the same songs, and liked hearing them again so much I was truly startled. I made a note that I would have to buy and revisit the recording proper again someday; maybe it's just that none of the songs on this album have become a mainstream anthem that it retains its power, I dunno - or maybe there really is something special about it, some vein of honest emotion that it taps into that can't be corrupted by a billion greedy radio stations pursuing all-precious advertising dollars. Seeing the recent Hollywood film Reign Over Me - which I must admit to having liked, but would never have mentioned here if it hadn't come up - I got to hear at least one of the songs on this album again (guess which), and decided that now was the moment, when I badly needed comfort, to actually buy the thing, to bring this album back into my life.

$35 for a double disc CD that has long since paid for itself and that I could download for free, or buy for $10 on eBay: no wonder the music industry is losing money. Fuck it, though: I need this album, now.

As an afterthought, I picked up Sonic Youth's The Destroyed Room, because I'd heard there was a 25 minute version of "The Diamond Sea" on it. One of my favourite songs of theirs, but I never much liked Washing Machine, the album it came on; I'm fussy about their work, and as important as some of their recordings have been to me (esp. Sister and Daydream Nation, and later A Thousand Leaves and Murray Street, if you're curious), I don't choose to own all of it. Bad Moon Rising has some great textures, but the songs aren't that memorable; Evol isn't cohesive enough, despite some great moments ("In the Kingdom #19" - fuck yeah!); most of Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star seems weak, a scattered attempt to come to terms with a certain degree of success that only really finds itself on a couple of tracks ("Tokyo Eye" is killer); Goo borders on being terminally overplayed - the classic rock of the boomer's kids, and I only ever really want to revisit Lee's "Mote;" and Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped, their last two offerings, both kinda flat out bored me (sorry). The Destroyed Room, though - b-sides and rarities. Hm. Well, why not, since I'm shopping anyhow?

I go back to the cash with my Quadrophenia already bagged and add another purchase. Yes, I found everything I was looking for; no, I wouldn't like fries with that. I take it home and put it on expecting to be non-plussed, given what the liner notes describe as the improvised, jammy nature of the music thereon; I expect something a bit undercooked.

It's a great disc. From the start, the songs are both texturally rich and tuneful. There's little singing - Kim's voice pops up a couple of times, and Thurston's on "The Diamond Sea" - but these aren't "just jams;" the songs have a polished richness that is completely captivating, and never quite gets to sound like the "generic SY" stuff that tends to dominate the SYR discs (which mostly sound so much LIKE Sonic Youth, and accomplish so little else, that I almost never spin the ones I've kept). It shares with Quadrophenia the quality of being extremely ambitious, musically, but it does so less preciously, less self-consciously; the band aren't letting their pride, their ego, their own awe at what they're doing shine through in every song, they're just really getting off on it themselves... I lie back on the futon and listen - assisted with a brief pull on whatever's left in my pipe - and for the first time in I don't know how long, go through a CD from start to finish, doing nothing OTHER than listening to music. I am filled, elevated, moved, delighted; and am very pleased that the 25-minute long track that closes it is not a radical reworking of "The Diamond Sea," with 15 minutes of irrelevant noise jamming at the end, but a real 25 minute long version of that song!!! (Don't get me wrong - I love Sonic Youth's noise jams, but you never know, with them - it could have been five minutes of song and twenty minutes of feedback). Their website describes The Destroyed Room as a "a band-chosen collection of near-hidden Sonic Youth gems," and gems they are indeed - shiny, fascinating things that refract the light in all sorts of colours, throwing ghostly patterns on the wall that move and shimmer when you hold them up and turn them. I could stare into this album for hours -- it's easily my favourite release from SY since the too-short, but also rich, NY City Ghosts and Flowers, and will end up on my shortlist of essential recordings by them.

I just wanted to briefly thank Sonic Youth for this disc. It got me through what could have been a bad night, otherwise - just like their earlier albums did for me so often when I was younger. I feel cleansed and rejuvenated (tho' I think I have a cold coming on). It's nice to be reminded of what music can do, from a band that I have thought too little about in recent years.

I didn't get to Quadrophenia at all that night, but I didn't really need to.

For the Record

Avoid Grindhouse. Cute a concept as it is, it left me feeling sullied and stupid, staring blankly at the world like I don't belong here. It's a movie for "them" - the predatory shopping narcissists for whom our consumer culture poses no problems. Anyone with any degree of sensitivity will be depressed and disturbed - it's actually LESS forgivable than Sin City, and as with that film, it's the Tarantino portion that gives the most offense. No matter how numb you are from work, no matter how much the accumulated shit of your life leaves you desiring a soporific, an "entertainment," an escape - three hours of masturbating to internet porn will leave you feeling better about yourself, more refreshed, more inspired. Or stay home, read a book - whatever! But avoid Grindhouse; it's ugly, immoral, cheap, and, worse of all - it just isn't that good.

Michael Ondaatje Presents The Hustler, by Robert Rossen, May 1st

Sorry, Kat, you're getting bumped down one! The Vancity Theatre has put up its listings for May! There's one event that is absolutely essential viewing - I've already snarfed up a bunch of tickets online, and recommend y'all do the same, for on May 1st, Michael Ontaatje will be introducting The Hustler, Robert Rossen's 1961 film about a young, ambitious pool hustler (Paul Newman) determined to beat the unbeatable Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). This is a long-standing favourite of mine - a film I revisit every couple of years. A friend of mine was pretty skeptical when I lent him the DVD: "It's about POOL, ferchrissakes - what's he gonna recommend next, Hoosiers?" Then he watched the film, and like all the friends with whom I've shared it, he was sold. The characters are so richly drawn and human that they're fascinating, and their interrelations, while completely convincing and grounded in the particular, verge on the archetypal -- particularly those between Newman and his corrupt "manager," George C. Scott ("you owe me money, Eddie!"), and his despairing, alcoholic girlfriend (Piper Laurie, giving a hell of a performance - one of my favourite female characters in film, actually). Most of what makes the film great is due to Walter Tevis' fine, fine novel (and it's unfortunate to note that - if I've got this right - the author got royally screwed on the adaptation), but Rossen has still managed to make a hell of a good film here. I'll be very interested to see what Michael Ondaatje, introducing the film for the May 1st screening, has to say about the relationship between the written and filmed texts, since I know he's a fan of Tevis' writing (I have an enthusiastic blurb from him on the cover of Tevis' chess novel, The Queen's Gambit). This is THE event for May (though I'm pleased to see David Lynch's Inland Empire will be making its way onto the VIFC's screen, too). Oh, and it looks like there'll be a new Guy Maddin film to screen!

I know too little about Czech New Wave films and the work of Robert LePage to enthuse just yet, but I'll keep you posted. It ain't Clint Eastwood, anyhow...!

The Corporation Woman: An Interview with Katherine Dodds

If you’ve seen The Corporation on DVD, you might have already encountered Katherine Dodds. An energetic filmmaker and promoter, Dodds (through her project Good Company) was deeply involved in the marketing of that film, and she appears on one of the extras. The bulk of the interview below deals with her work on that film and her interest in promoting films that lead to social outcomes; to this end, videophiles might want to note that the webstore for Good Company’s site, Hello Cool World, stocks several of the most interesting documentaries I’ve seen, all dealing with pressing social issues.

A few “for instances:” they stock Winter Soldier, an absolutely essential film about the Vietnam war (right up there with Hearts and Minds and In the Year of the Pig), in which soldiers discuss atrocities they personally saw and committed. It’s of great relevance to understanding how America fights wars and is disturbingly relevant at the moment. Also connected to the 1960s, they also have Investigation of a Flame, a recent short documentary on the Catonsville Nine; it’s not a great work of film, but the radical priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who went to jail for their protests against American involvement in Vietnam, make fascinating subject matter, and the film will serve until The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and Emile de Antonio’s In the King of Prussia come back into print in some format. Other favourites of mine are the recent Manufactured Landscapes (the first shot of which, involving a tracking shot through a Chinese factory, is probably the single most compelling sequence in any documentary I’ve seen - certainly one of the most compelling I've seen lately) and A Crude Awakening (a very disturbing and important film about peak oil). Jesus Camp, about the Christian right and its indoctrination of children, is pretty chilling, too (make sure you’re familiar with the Ted Haggard scandal before you see it). I haven’t seen everything they stock – I haven’t actually caught up with Scared Sacred yet – but anyone with so many cool films at hand (including The Corporation, of course) has to have some pretty interesting things to say. In some cases, Dodds was also behind the grassroots/viral promotion of these films when they played theatrically, as is the case with the very engaging documentary by Gary Burns, Radiant City, opening on April 6th at the Vancity Theatre.

I talked to Katherine – Kat, for short – a couple of weeks ago, in the Chinatown offices of Good Company.

How do you choose films? Distributors contact you?

In part yes. We think of ourselves as selecting issues, and we have a fairly wide range of issues that we’re interested in. The films that we have been working on started quite specifically with relationships with two particular filmmakers.


The first of course being Mark Achbar of The Corporation (a film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbot and Joel Bakan, who also wrote the book of the same name), and then The Take,, which was made by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein. So that’s why we started working on films with Good Company and Hello Cool World. I had done PR for a lot of documentaries before that, but it wasn’t turning it into its own mission, which Hello Cool World has become.

What was the Manufactured Landscapes connection?

The Manufactured Landscapes connection was that the distributor of that film, Mongrel Media, was also the distributor of The Corporation, so I had an ongoing previous relationship with them, through The Corporation’s release. They suggested this as a film we might like. I watched it. I particularly loved it, and found out that Mark Achbar also particularly loved it, so it made sense to champion it, so to speak. But they came to us fairly late. We prefer, actually, to start earlier if we’re going to work on a film, so we can help build the audiences for that film more than six weeks before its release date!

Essentially, the model began with working on The Corporation and that wasn’t a short term model. My involvement with The Corporation began almost ten years ago, when the film was just a germ of an idea. It was basically years in the funding, and then years in the making, and my role during those early years was as friend and communications consultant, and then as it became closer to being released I also raised the money for the new media component and became the producer of the website. And then moved into taking what money there was into publicity and leveraging it into what became a fairly substantial promotions budget for a documentary. What I did was somewhat unprecedented, because I was in the position of having produced the money that I then got to spend, and in fact “producing” the promotion component for the film, which isn’t usually how films get promoted.

It was done mostly online?

It was done on and offline, through grassroots, using the web as a way to reach those people and a way to communicate with them. So, when you ask mostly online – no, it was actually activating literally tens of thousands of offline people in hundreds of places across – mostly the US, but also Canada; Canada’s just smaller – who engaged their networks to literally poster, leaflet, hold separate autonomous events around the launches in various cities – the amount of things that went on, we never even had time to document. That set the bar, and we haven’t been able to do anything of that scope since, because there haven’t been the resources.

Resources doesn’t necessarily need to mean throwing money at it, either; it’s also time. I can’t stress enough that Mark and I had been involved with audience development with The Corporation for five years, so when Mongrel Media came to me five weeks before it launched in Canadian theatres, we had built an audience that was tens of thousands of people we could directly email at that time. I didn’t have that luxury with a film like Manufactured Landscapes, but we were able to re-engage our existing network, which included a substantial number of people who came to us through The Take.

What’s happening with The Corporation online now? It still has a strong presence.

Yeah. We’re probably in, version seven of the website. It’s evolved as the needs change. At first it was really just to collect data – we wanted to get people’s emails. We had that from the very first, very simple site. We had two agendas with it – to get people to sign up and to have a press kit with a password, so that we could actually monitor who was downloading the press kit and maintain contact. But we had, right from the very beginning, a box saying, “Tell me about other films or projects around similar issues.”. It’s really about the issues that we start from, not necessarily the film per se.

Have any of the other films gotten in contact with you through The Corporation?

Yup. The Corporation put us on the map. Aside from relationships that I’d built just through local networking, people hadn’t heard of Good Company or Hello Cool World. About a year ago, we made the decision to expand and brand HCW as part-and-parcel of The Corporation, as the vehicle to move towards action that we wanted to do all along, and we’ve come up with a mission statement for Hello Cool World that fits with all the projects we take on, and that’s ‘Ideas to Audiences, Audiences to Action, and Action to Outcome.”

Which ties in with the Campaign for Corporate Harm Reduction.

Yes, exactly.

Can you describe that?

Very briefly, the Campaign for Corporate Harm Reduction is us saying that we want to find a way to sustain this network – this social network, in order to offer things back to those who have supported our launches. Post-launch, while I can say, ‘Yay, we managed to get money to launch the film,’ that money, after a year, was gone. So what we’re trying to do now is figure out how we can sustain the momentum of all these people who asked two questions endlessly, in the year The Corporation was released: and that was, “What can I do,” and “When can I buy the DVD?’ Now it’s pretty easy to buy the DVD, but we’re still, still, still getting questions, we’re still getting essays from people who have been moved by the film.

Tell us about house parties.

When the DVD launched we encouraged house parties to be registered on HelloCoolWorld.com , and we’re still getting feedback from these people. We’ve had 300 feedback forms filled out. We asked questions about what we can do about the corporation – the institution, as in, the problems that the film exposed. So what we’re trying to do with the Campaign for Corporate Harm Reduction is to review the feedback we’ve had in order to create a strategic response.

Specifically we had this debate concept going, which is really a faux debate, but what we’re asking people to do is to write about whether we should re-write, regulate, or reform the corporate institution. Really, those things aren’t mutually exclusive, but what they’re designed to do is to take this generic “What can I do?” and the band-aid answers to that, and try to get people, anybody, to try to think strategically in various directions; because it’s my opinion that we need to attack all of those areas. Rewriting would be the corporate personhood issue – rewriting the corporate charters. Don’t let corporations have the kind of rights they have. “Regulate” would be becoming more stringent in calling to account the regulations that exist already. Strengthen democracy – make the penalties higher. Better government, or however you want to put it. “Reform” would be taking the corporate “social responsibility” folks – this would be things like the business leaders of the future – and saying, “Okay, if you really do want a different kind of corporation, how can we make that happen?” It can’t be entirely voluntary, given the legal nature of the corporate charters.

And what comes after house parties & the debate?

I want to seek out more outcome stories, because I keep hearing inspiring things about what has happened because of the film.

I can give you two quick examples – and it was actually the rough cut screening that did it. When I was at Media that Matters at Hollyhock last year I met a human rights lawyer from Seattle who said, ‘By the way, I saw one of the rough cuts’ – this would have been one of the three and a half hour versions of the film. And he said, ‘I had some input into the Democratic Party platform for the State of Washington, and because of that film we put the issue of corporate personhood on, and it got passed, and it’s now part of their platform at a state level. And then recently, as in, less than a year ago, it came up for question, and the members voted it back.

So the issue of corporate personhood, at a state wide level in the US, is now part of party policy – the notion of the rights of corporations as persons, to revoke corporate personhood as one of the causes of harm. It’s one of the root causes of harm that the film presents. It’s not necessarily the only issue people come out of the film with, but corporate personhood is sort of something that a lot of fringe activists have been working on and it hasn’t been on any agenda. So having it on a state wide political agenda is huge, it’s major. Many campaigns could be fought to try to make something like that happen. I found out about it by accident, so... we would like to be able to look for those stories.

The second one is more at a different level, and that’s where we had all 56 Grade eights from Holy Name School in Essex, Ontario, write into the forum, which we thought was quite remarkable. Mark actually responded to each and every one of them, and I got in touch with their teacher, and we managed to get a little bit of money from the Atkinson Foundation, and we took a trip to Essex and spent two days with those students, and I’m cutting together a short piece that’s going to go online about that, in the next month or so.

There, what had happened was that the teacher, who had happened to see this film, just by accident, on TV Ontario, got very interested and decided to use it for curriculum for the entire year. The point at which his students had written was sort of at the tail end of the year, with his students having become really immersed in this film, and when we went and spoke to them, they had engaged with it at a fairly deep level, and this is 13, 14 year old kids, so... on one hand, we have party platform policy in the United States, state-level, and here we have grade eights in Essex, Ontario. The film elicited that kind of response, which I think is completely remarkable.

Really, everything we’ve done since, is about connecting films and audiences with the ongoing action that needs to be taken for something to make a difference, beyond it just making a difference when you see it in the film. That’s what makes us different: from the point of view of distributors, and even of filmmakers, their job’s been done. It’s a success, the film was made, it obviously did have an impact – there’s a lot to be proud of, but from my point of view at Hello Cool World, we now want to take that third part of our mandate and actually see some results from it. And I don’t see it as a six month project, I see it as a ten year project, just like the film – it was ten years from idea to launch; this is the same sort of thing.

Right.

One of the very early things that happened when the film was first launched, Tima Bansal from the Ivey School of Business, worked with Mark to create a curriculum that’s being used there with business students, that also went on to the educational DVD and it’s hardwired into there and there’s a Power Point presentation that you have to go to the Ivey school to get the code to access, so that students can’t get it – it’s for instructors. It’s free, but it’s controlled – it’s free if you have the educational copy.


So business students are grappling with the issues raised by The Corporation?

Yes, exactly.

And all of these pieces are part of the solutions we want to promote through very different audiences – high schools students, future business leaders, anti-fascists, soccer moms, government policy writers, you see what I mean! We’ve promised – and someday, whether it’s at my own expense or not – I will write the framework for action that goes with the campaign for corporate harm reduction, based on all this feedback.

So these are the kinds of areas that I’d like to be able to have possibly different campaigns, but strategically linked, so that we could really try to get a sustained effort to try to change the nature of the institution. And why I call it the Campaign for Corporate Harm Reduction – it’s a little bit tongue in cheek out of the health field, but also that the problem is too big. The idea of rewrite-regulate-reform is that we’re engaging with the institution, that institution that does exist, whether we want it to or not – how do we change it so that less harm can be done by these corporate entities?

Out of curiosity, how did you feel about the Battle of Seattle as a model of dissent?

Well, the Battle of Seattle was the beginning of the whole “indy media” phenomenon. I was there. Mark had three different crews. I was running around getting tear-gassed – I got tear-gassed for the first time there. One of our cameramen ended up in jail with the keys to the car (laughs). It was very crazy – of course it was exhilarating. I myself noted at the time – which of course sounds like an over-determined thing to say after the fact – all these cameras, all these cell phones, all this media. It was the beginning of citizen media at the frontlines. However, I think the legacy of that is what we’re seeing now in general, which is that anybody can publish, but there’s still a lot of work required to actually have credible sources and to have a decent analytical framework, and to have strategic suggestions that don’t sort of just involve batting up against power. And I’m not opposed to batting up against power – I quite enjoy it from time to time – but I don’t think it’s going to change the institution when such hugely powerful forces are behind it. So I absolutely think there has to be a multi-pronged approach, and that’s where the future lies.

However, there’s never been the tools that there are right this minute. But now we have to face the root cause of our own disorganization, which is just the lack of any real unity, or of any kind of standing together of different factions of progressives, the left – however you define them – towards some sort of end. Which is why we’re often at a disadvantage with those who have no qualms about high-handed ideology and mobilizing people through it. This is where the crisis right now is, and this is, in a way, why I think The Corporation has a chance and is not done yet as a sort of mobilizing force, because what we saw was the coming together of groups that don’t work together around that launch. There were sufficient points of entry in the film itself for many different people to rally around it

Manufacturing Consent, which will be re-released in June with lots of cool extras, after fifteen years – the shelf-life of that film goes on and on and on, and I think The Corporation will too. It doesn’t have the mega push and notoriety of, for example, the Michael Moore films. We actually opened the same week in New York as Fahrenheit 9/11; we did get a lot of media coverage, but we were “the other film” and he was the main story, whereas in San Francisco, we were the main story. But we seem to be enjoying the “long tail effect.”

I think had we not had that particular competition for the same audience – we were definitely at a disadvantage, because to get Fahrenheit 9/11 onto 2000 screens costs millions and millions of dollars, like that’s just what it costs, instead of the couple of million that went into The Corporation for P&A, all told, from four markets. Even though it did very well, the moment where we might have been able to manifest more for less was a little bit subsumed by the Fahrenheit 9/11 phenomenon. But I think what we’ve seen since then is that there’s been no lessening up of the popularity of the film. It did extremely well on DVD, it continues to do well on DVD, and it has been downloaded off the internet half a million times, so that the growing impact of it is what I’m wanting to harness, and quite simply put, we need some resources to be able to maintain that effort. It’s been a volunteer effort for the last year on my part to keep The Corporation "continued campaign" going.

And people should send contributions to -?

They can go to the website, Hello Cool World or thecorporation.com, and donate. They can “donate for downloads” – we’re asking people if they’ve illegally downloaded it to donate, or they can go to the next button and donate specifically to the Campaign for Corporate Harm Reduction, and that money goes into sustaining Hello Cool World, which right now doesn’t make any substantial amount of money from DVD sales. We’re trying to widen our capacity to do that.
We have two things we want to sustain with Hello Cool World: one is the social network that we have – a fairly wide base, a fairly good base right now – and the capacity for our webstore to become an alternative distribution outlet. It’s not going to be exclusive – we are non-exclusive. At the moment we don’t have too many titles that don’t have distributors attached. Conceivably if we were in a solid enough position, we could help filmmakers self-distribute films, but what we can’t do, which is why they go to distributors, is offer them money up front, at this point. If we were able to generate funding to Hello Cool World – if Hello Cool World itself could become the draw for funding and funders – then we would be able to offer a lot more back to people.

But our allegiance really still is to audiences. That’s what’s different from distributors – it’s our audiences that are our asset, and it’s our audiences that are the reason we do it, and if we can’t connect the audiences and follow through with the outcome, because our audience is an audience that wants something to happen because of these films. They don’t just want films to happen, they want something to happen. I have two fairly large focuses; one is, of course, corporate globalization, and the other is sex and gender and the whole realm of sex ed, which we are dealing less with films around that, and more with non-profits, and we have some cool projects, like the Won’tGetWeird.com website and things like that. There’s no reason we couldn’t combine all of that.

If we had a more sustainable base we could do so much for people, because what we really, really excel at – and I think we proved it with The Corporation – we know how to develop and package and do outreach for campaigns. We could become a very mobile, non-exclusive social marketing engine for a lot of projects and a lot of campaigns. And to do that we will in the future be looking for ways to fund Hello Cool World – to fund it as an entity, not just the projects.

Let’s talk about some of your other HelloCoolWorld titles – a couple of favourites that you think people might profit from looking at.

Well, I really love Manufactured Landscapes. I think it’s a wonderful film. I think it’s really remarkable. I think it’s also got the potential to connect people to issues in a way that aren’t explicit in the film. There are some DVD extras that go in a little bit into the connection between Edward Burtynsky himself and what he’s up to in the film. Edward Burtynsky, the subject, of course, of that film, also has books – he’s a photographer – but what a lot of people won’t know, that isn’t obvious, is that he also received a TED Award – it stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design - of quite a substantial amount of money, and he gave it to the worldchanging.com folks, who have put out a book, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, which they’re billing as a kind of high tech futuristic version of the Whole Earth Catalogue. It’s a great book, I think it’s a great project, I think it’s a great connection. We’re not selling that book right now, mostly because we can’t guarantee that we can sell enough through our store, but we have a link to Amazon – so if you buy it from Amazon through us, then we get a little affiliate cut, which you can do with Amazon.



Any other films you want to get behind?

I really think that everyone should go see Radiant City, which is not on DVD yet, and therefore not in our store. It’s on our campaign page – we’d really love to see this film do well, because we think it’s got some interesting things to say about urban sprawl, which is the message of it – but it’s also a very creative film. It’s one that Mark Achbar really loves as well. It’s quite different than all our other straightforward documentaries, but if you see it, you’ll see that there’s actually a connection to the issues that we’re dealing with, and there’s actually even a connection to Manufactured Landscapes. I mean, the real buzz right now, besides global warming, is urban sustainability. We have another film that will come out on DVD after this release that is called A Crude Awakening, and it deals with peak oil, and all of these films are starting to connect – but I think Radiant City has a wonderful quirky quality to it, that would appeal to fans of Canadian films...

And anyone who grew up in the suburbs.

And anyone who grew up in the suburbs. Which I didn’t, but...

I did.

But I’ve stayed out of the suburbs. I’ve managed to escape!

The other thing, campaign-wise, is that we’re working with Odeon on that, and they’re letting us promote it with some grassroots tools, where we can actually focus on some of the little message moments in the film and not even necessarily say that it’s a film. So – this notion of the viral “getting the message out” that’s sort of linking people to what’s going on, in that there’s a film release but there’s also something more, is part of what we’re getting to do with that project... It’s doing what we want to do, which is extracting out of the film, right?

You can see these things at Hello Cool World?

Yeah, Hello Cool World campaign pages. Follow the links to Radiant City and you’ll see all our little viral stuff that’s happening, plus the trailers. It would be great if you put one of the little viral things on your blog.

Gary Burns' Radiant City at the VIFC

Gary "Waydowntown" Burns' Radiant City opens April 6th at the Vancity Theatre. Essential viewing for anyone who survived the suburbs; winner of a special jury prize for best documentary at the last VIFF. Some very interesting comments on the film here.

Air Guitar Nation

It's not the usual thing I'd recommend to people, but Air Guitar Nation - which follows two American air guitar heroes, the Korean-American East and West coast champion C. Diddy and his dogged (twice defeeated) challenger, Bjorn Turoque, to the International Air Guitar competitions in Finland - is very, very fun. I think if I started thinking about this movie - about the implications of a culture where people compete to best imitate rockstars - my head would get sore quite quickly; and if I actually issued complaints about the film - that it doesn't show us enough of the non-American competitors, say, or that it too seldom allows us to actually hear what song the different performers are actually miming to - I'd seem like a spoilsport. I laughed out loud at times, and I don't do that often in movies. Opens Friday.

Upcoming DVD releases: IF....! Makavejev! Jod!

Lindsay Anderson's If.... is to be released by Criterion! Oooh! Add that to upcoming DVD editions of Jodorowsky's first three features, Schatzberg's Panic in Needle Park, and the Criterion editions of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil and Makavejev's Sweet Movie and WR: Mysteries of the Organism, and things are looking up for 2007!

Plus Old Joy is coming out soon - my favourite film of last year. Whee!

Nomeansno's Rob Wright reads Martin Heidegger

Pretty fun.

Nomeansno play the Red Room April 4th, btw, and tickets are now being sold at the usual places. The great Canadian rock band. (Lotsa cool live stuff on Youtube, too).

Zodiac, Hollywood, and Me

I hate going to see commercial movies.

My being a snob has nothing to do with it. I love movies. I love being entertained by movies. It's true that I chose my apartment based on proximity to the Cinematheque - but the Paramount Vancouver is even closer. I went to see Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong five times there. Snobs wouldn't do that. Or what about Constantine? I saw that about five times, too, and a couple more times on DVD. Hell, I even saw Hellboy twice. I can even admit to having truly enjoyed a romantic comedy recently, if you're comfortable with my thus labelling Stranger than Fiction.

That I can think of, these are the only big-budget, relatively high-profile Hollywood films that I've actually liked in the last few years. None of them are great works of film art; I would be embarrassed to even mention them in certain circles. The thing is - from offensive, morally bankrupt idiocy like Borat to mediocre messes like The Number 23 (which, having gone through a post-Illuminatus year of 23's myself, I was predisposed to at least want to like) - there really hasn't been much competition; for all the movies I've gone to, I've seen little evidence of any great love of cinema of late, or even any particular respect, coming out of the cultural quagmire of Hollywood (okay, I suppose Pan's Labyrinth deserves a nod for effort but it's arguably not even a Hollywood film, for one, and really, a couple of months after viewing it, I find I don't care about it much. I'm sure I'll feel the same about Children of Men a few weeks from now). Films that have been lauded as great - The Queen, for chrissakes? - have been yawn-inducing, trumped up TV fare at best. That Apocalypto gets 66% positive on Rotten Tomatoes says something, but not that it's a pretty good film. Craft, attention to detail, belief in the power and value of stories - they've been mostly replaced with hype and image and noise, often in the service of reprehensible values (Hostel, for example, which I don't reject because of its sadism but because it presumes at the current time to vindicate America for the crime of torture, framing it instead as a victim and displacing that guilt onto the Europeans) or at least highly questionable ones (The Sands of Iwo Jima). Even exploitation cinema can't be counted on anymore - witness Hannibal Rising. And Jesus, don't get me started on the few canonized directors still out there. The Departed? Don't make me laugh. I enjoyed Miami Vice more (and I didn't enjoy that very much).

It's not that I'm totally hard to please, either. I mean, I'm probably going to watch A Scanner Darkly for a fourth time sometime in the next few months because I still can't figure out if I like it. I'm willing to give a movie a chance, if it has potential. This is really quite remarkably kind of me, considering how badly I've been disappointed by certain films lately (I mean, I actually got excited when I heard that Brian de Palma was adapting James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia - any cinephiles who've seen it know how that must've felt. I'd actually made time during my Toronto vacation to see it the week it opened. Sigh.)

Feeling as grim as I do about the state of things, when I realized that David Fincher's Zodiac was playing at the Paramount - I guess it opened last week, relatively unhyped - I didn't allow myself to hope for anything at all.

I just got in from watching it, and I wanted to tell y'all that it is a great work of film art (will I feel comfortable about that bold declarative statement a week from now...? Hmmm). It is a beautifully crafted police procedural movie, a fine treatise on the nature of obsession, a richly observed portrait of San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s, a gripping thriller, and a finely scripted, perfectly acted drama. The cast includes Mark Ruffalo - who I kind of liked in Jane Campions In the Cut, but like more now that Fincher has wiped the grease off him from he wore in that role; the ever-enjoyable Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko, to you); the excellent Elias Koteas (didja ever see Hit Me? Great, underappreciated Jim Thompson adaptation - it's based on A Swell-Looking Babe, and as far as I know, is his only star turn); Chloe Sevigny, who is sexier as a nerdy bespectacled 60's librarian-geek type than in her last film role I saw, which I will resist the urge to say anything cute about; even an okay turn from the almost redeemable Robert Downey Jr, who carries over just a bit too much of the manic quirkiness of A Scanner Darkly into this film, tho' he has his good moments). It will reward multiple viewings, like Fincher's Se7en (which is nowhere as mature, though equally beautifully crafted). It doesn't require my description - if you're sensitive to violence, it might be upsetting at times, but other than that detail, I think the less you know about it, the better off you will be. I have nothing at all to say about this film, but: Go See It.

Oh: make sure to void your bladder first, since it's a tad long. If you really need more writing on it to convince you, Tom Charity does the film justice here. (Hi, Tom).

The Context of Reception: two songs that you can't really play anymore

Blogging from the computer lab at work, having been prompted to reflect on somethin' by a song overheard during lunch: "The Shape I'm in," by the Band (you know - "ohhh, you don't know/the shape I'm in"). It's actually one of the least offensive songs that you'll be forced to listen to while you stuff food in your face on your break - but I wonder if any of the hack radio DJs who spin the tune realize that Richard Manuel, who sings the song, hanged himself awhile back? I guess no one really DID know the shape he was in - it almost makes it an act of bad taste to play the song, knowing this.

Another one: Joan Jett's cover of Gary Glitter's "Do You Want to Touch Me There?" I have considerable fondness for Joan Jett - I even recently picked up Bad Reputation, which features that song, mostly because I'm planning to interview the Rebel Spell and, for some reason, Erin of that band reminds me a bit of Jett, as a thoroughly credible female rock guitarist. Also, I'm really pleased that Ms. Jett is interviewed by Nardwuar in the new Razorcake, I liked her in Light of Day, and sure, I'd touch her there if she'd let me (I wonder why she doesn't age? The blood of young virgin boys, I bet). Speaking of which, the trouble with that song is that history has revealed that Gary Glitter is a pedophile, which turns the meaning of that song into something far darker than can be borne - it literally ruins the song, being able to wonder what exactly the guy had in mind when he wrote it. One wonders if he makes royalties when it plays?

Hey, maybe Nardwuar takes Jett up on this topic - I should finish reading the interview!

Imagine the Sound - free jazz doc at the Vancity Theatre

Archie Shepp

It’s an odd thing for Ron Mann to have made a documentary about free jazz in 1981. By that point, the form’s most passionate proponents, Albert Ayler and John Coltrane, were long dead; one of its most intelligent and influential innovators, Ornette Coleman, had abandoned the form; the energies of black radical 1960’s politics that had once charged the music and made it dangerous were almost completely dissipated; and the surviving musicians had become, for the most part, comfortably embraced by the (mostly white) middle classes as a prestige form of entertainment, a high art akin to avant garde classical music (I can’t say too much bad about that because I’m sitting in that row myself, but in a way it’s almost as odd as Christianity becoming the predominant religion of Rome.) To director Mann’s credit, he very nearly explores this question with the musicians he interviews for his documentary, Imagine the Sound (playing again on the 23rd and 28th at the Vancity Theatre); for the most part, though, he is content to have discussions about free jazz past, while filming four survivors doing their thing, such as their thing was, in 1981.

There are a few problems in this approach. First off, Archie Shepp – who, rather to my surprise, seems the most wholly likable of the musicians interviewed, unpretentious, laid-back, and articulate – had, by 1981, completely stopped playing anything that I can comfortably call free jazz, having moved back in time to earlier, easier forms, apparently having gotten out of his system whatever it was that once made his music so goddamn powerful. What’s left is pretty ordinary, boppish jazz (he wears a suit and tie while playing it, even, and, um, appears to be smoking tobacco in that pipe); this conveys very very little of Shepp’s potential. I mean the man no disrespect – and I even enjoy some of his later recordings, particularly those with Horace Parlan – but the performances here don’t excite very much; and the more interesting things Shepp gets into talking about – like his feelings, as a Floridan, about what he saw as the complementary approaches of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X – are cut away from fairly quickly, as we shift to the other musicians covered. Of course, the question of “What happened to you?” is not raised at all – what first time filmmaker could dare? Actually, I’d have liked the film more if the whole thing had been devoted to Shepp, his trajectory through jazz, his time as a radical, and so forth – an exploration of the Shepp of the 60s and the Shepp of the 80s, and what each could rightly be said to mean for jazz.

Paul Bley, too, also wins points for having interesting things to say, but jeez those sounded like vaguely bluesy, 70’s, Keith Jarrett-y tunes he was playing on the piano. It’s pretty weird to see: at one point, he directly starts plucking the strings of the piano, which, in improvised shows, usually signifies a complete departure from tunefulness into pure sound and noise. Not here; he might as well have continued on the keys. Given that the questions he’s asked tend to revolve around the radical nature of free jazz, one is not sure that Bley, based on the music he plays, is the best person to be talking to; while his music doesn’t offend, it also fails to really invoke the ferocity and innovation of free jazz. There are a dozen musicians I would have focused on before him. I’ve never really gotten his importance.

A weirder case (by far) is that of Cecil Taylor. Tho’ I’m no judge of poetry, I kind of liked the rhythms of his delivery for the piece he recited, much more than Shepp’s beatnik-ish delivery of “Mama Rose.” Alas, almost every other time Taylor is allowed to talk into the camera, he comes across – and I was amazed by this – as an effete, pretentious wanker, impregnated by his own self love. There is one “interpretative dance” piece – I don’t really know what the fuck to call it, since he’s not interpreting anything but his own apparent egomania – that is an embarrassment to behold; maybe it looked better in 1981, but that’s hard to imagine. This is a terrible shame because - in a complete inversion of Bley and Shepp – he plays with all the ferocity and passion and intelligence that he ever did, and of the musicians documented, is the only one who has the power to really convey what free jazz could be (and often still is, when you can find it). Perhaps his precious self-presentation is actually an integral part of this, is somehow a means of refusing to be comfortably inducted into the middle classes - resistance through self-involvement. His musical performances alone make this film worth seeing, though. The first extended piece he plays, which begins with fairly quiet, spacious angular notes and Cecil half-singing over them, his mouth responding to what his hands are doing even when little sound comes out – teaches us more about improvised jazz – it’s inherent logic, it’s expressive capacity, it’s passionate focus – than anything anyone says in this film (especially him). It's a jaw dropping bit of filmed music - well worth your time.

The thing about Bill Dixon is that I’d never heard about him before seeing this film. Is he an important figure in free jazz? Has he worked with important people? Other than the detail he offers on camera that he formed the Jazz Composer’s Guild, there isn’t actually much history provided. The same goes for the rest of the musicians, whose backgrounds are only dealt with in the course of the interviews; as with Mann’s other documentary from this period, the more ambitious Poetry in Motion, there is no narration, no argument, no structure save that suggested by the sum total of what the musicians say and do, which very often touches on common themes. That’s fine, in fact, except I still don’t really know who Bill Dixon is. Seems like an interesting guy, if a bit difficult. His music neither grabbed me and shook me – as he says at one point was his inclination in the 1960’s – nor bored or upset me. The most distinguishing feature of his performances, in fact, is how feckin’ bored his bass player looks; I get more excited teaching ESL classes. When he’s on camera as Dixon is being interviewed, said bassist even appears to roll his eyes in disgust a few times. It’s kind of a shame he wasn’t allowed to say anything – it would have livened up the proceedings a bit.

So, uh, yeah... this is NOT a bad film to watch, if you like free jazz, but I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. People who know about free jazz won’t get many questions answered, and, unless they’re the sort of jazz fan that loves EVERYTHING jazz, won’t get THAT excited by the music. On the other hand, people who are being introduced to the form won’t really “get” what they need to, in order to go away even half-educated; if they enter the film in the dark about why such a noisy, aggressive form of jazz, liked by so few at the time when it was being made most passionately, is actually of singular importance - they will remain mostly in the dark on leaving. I wanted to like this film a lot more than I did, particularly since I have a vested interest in seeing people attend the Vancity Theatre (our nicest cinema, imperilled by bizarrely crappy attendance).

You know who I’d like to see a jazz documentary about? Charles Gayle.

Now THAT would be an interesting film.

Nomeansno and my Head

Someone on the Nomeanswhatever forum stuck a video on Youtube of the band playing "The River" (my favourite Nomeansno song) at the Horseshoe in Toronto last September, and y'know, I'm pretty sure that the guy with the baldspot in the crowd in front of Rob might just be me? I mean, it's not like I'm that good at recognizing the back of my own head, but the pattern baldness is pert-near identical...

A Very Difficult Free Cell

29230.

Here's a hint, but it's hidden - drag your cursor over it to see it:

The second column from the right is crucial. Unpack it first, and then work on the right-most column. Only then will you be able to get anything else done.

Good luck!

Vancity Theater - upcoming excitements

What does it mean that the Vancouver theatre with the nicest seats, best projection equipment, and film fare to rival the Cinematheque (if they were rivals, which they aren't) STILL is so poorly attended? It's bizarre to me how few people make it out to screenings at the Vancity, particularly when the Cinematheque, just blocks away, is doing fairly well... I don't get it. Granted, this hasn't been their strongest spell - I had no use for the Clint Eastwood retrospective they just ran; but you'd figure SOMEONE would. Nope: I hear on the wind that even ol' Clint couldn't get bums on seats. Is it simply a lack of advertising? Laziness? A guilty fear in the hearts of Vancouverites that we don't really deserve a venue so nice? Why don't people go to the Vancity Theatre, aka the Vancouver International Film Center? It's easy enough to find - it's right next to the Starbucks at Seymour and Davie... Having loved so many of the films I've seen there, I despair that the venture will fail if people don't get out; but what can I do? I can only enthuse about the films I'm enthusiastic about. In the next few weeks, this means:

1. Imagine the Sound - an early Ron Mann documentary on free jazz, featuring footage of Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley and Bill Dixon (okay, I'm not sure who Bill Dixon is, but I love some of Archie Shepp's work and I'm dyin' to see the Cecil Taylor footage; he's a pianist of amazing energy and invention). Hard to review a film I haven't seen, but I'll probably make sure to check this out for the first screening, on March 20th, in case I want to see it again March 28th...

2. Hard Core Logo: This is actually a First Weekend Club "Canada Screens" rental event, not something the Vancity Theatre is putting on - but still, it's a hilarious and perceptive tale of aging Vancouver punks reuniting for one last tour; it's so richly observed and accurate that you don't have to be a punk to get it. Directed by Bruce McDonald and based on a book by Michael Turner. I've watched the film maybe five or six times and am very much looking forward to it playing on the big screen. Plays at 2PM on April 1st.

3. Network: Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet are the artists behind this cynical assault on corporate media. It's from 1976, so it is a tad dated (particularly in its targets; the Black Panthers and Angela Davis are set up for a few sucker punches, for one). It's still timely and interesting, and there's not much chance you'll get to see it onscreen any other time in your life... And what can I say, I love William Holden, and Chayefsky's dark, smart, at times enraged screenplay is a delight (he also penned Altered States, which I retain a guilty fondness for, and the George C. Scott vehicle, The Hospital. It is impossible to imagine a screenwriter this savage and intelligent currently being employed by Hollywood). It runs on April 3rd: mark your calendar.

4. Radiant City: I caught Gary Burns' critique of suburban life at the last film festival and was delighted. It offers us a pretty grim prognosis for the burbs, mostly from the point of view of two kids marooned there, but also from a variety of commentators -- all of whose names I've forgotten, tho' one co-wrote The Rebel Sell. It's dry and funny and cutting and all too familiar (I grew up in Maple Ridge): I liked it a lot more than the other Burns' film I've seen, Waydowntown - tho' I enjoyed much of that, too. One tip - don't read up on the film beforehand; especially don't look on IMDB, lest certain surprises be spoiled. The film runs from April 6th to 12th. I wish I hadn't already seen it, so I could go again - but it doesn't require more than one viewing, alas.

There are many other films playing - the schedule for the next month is viewable at their site. (Terkel in Trouble, showing for the next few days, was fun but not quite fun enough to recommend; and I'd probably see Linda Linda Linda if I weren't kinda sick of Japanese cuteness. Too bad I don't much care about wine - I want to support this theatre anyway I can!).

Pancakes and Noise

I gather this time I will have a kitchen! Location to be announced the day before the event.

Photos from last year's noise pancake event are here. It will have a been a year and six days exactly since so many pancakes and so much noise were last yoked together in our fair city. Come for the pancakes. Come for the noise. There is no other reason to attend.

The New Creation's New Creation

Hi! Are y'all looking for my writing on the New Creation? Well, I still haven't recovered from my Jan-Feb writing binge - and mostly just want to chill out and avoid new projects, except for ones I have deadlines for or have already promised out. I've told New Creation fans that I will post some unpublished Chris Towers/Lorna Towers material, to correspond with my Nerve Magazine article. Well, that's a ways off. You can, if you like, read my enthusiastic blurb for their new CD on the Scratch site - or see this blurb for Troubled. At the moment, tho', I can't even find my transcripts for the interview! This may not happen, folks...

The Tom Holliston/ Show Business Giants interview

Photos by Jillian "Jillo" King!

Okay, so his solo CDs, which I think are actually far better - and can be bought at Red Cat, locally - he caved and we ended up talking. This is the full text of the article that appears in this month's Nerve Magazine - or at least it will be the full text, once I get the whole thing transcribed. The first chunk follows!

See you at the Show Business Giants show on March 17th at the Anza Club, I hope!

Allan: That’s Tom Holliston?

Tom: Yes it is.

Allan: Hey, how are you doin’.

Tom: I’m a few minutes early. I wanted to ask you a favour, if you could possibly do it. Do you have a phone book? Cos I just moved, and we’ve realized we don’t have a phone book.

Allan: No problem. I’ll get it and be right back.

Tom: Thank you! A yellow pages. We want to order some food! We don’t really have everything set up – we want to get some Indian food but, jeez, there’s nowhere... no phone book here.

Allan: Okay – getting a yellow pages. (Sets the phone down).

Tom (is silent, waiting. I kinda hoped he’d say something cryptic into the tape for when I was transcribing it later).

Allan: (Opening phone book). Okay, so I’ve just flipped to the restaurant section. Uhm.

Tom: It’s the Sitar.

Allan: The Sitar? That’s the place in Gastown, is it?

Tom: Yeah.

Allan: Okay, here it is... 604-687-0049, and there’s a minimum order of $25. Do you want to call me back?

Tom: We’re okay for now. I’ll call them in about an hour. Thank you!

Allan: No problem – I may actually put that into the interview! Okay... so – you’re a really interesting songwriter. You seem to me a champion of the obscure – you dig into some very odd... Uh... I’m sorta trying to categorize your songs, and figure out where they fit. You have lots of songs about things people normally don’t care about – your slacks, bats, gingivitis...

Tom: Ford wrote the song about gingivitis. That’s the first song he ever wrote on a guitar, and I can’t take credit for that one, and the song “Bats,” the lyrics for that one were written by Rob Wright.

Allan: Ah! Okay. But... I think of you sort of like the Auteur of the Show Business Giants – I think in some way, all the songs have your stamp on them. Or no? I mean, how collective are the SBG?

Tom: I suppose Ford and John write toward the band’s style, which is originally myself and a fellow named Steve Bailey, who used to be in a band called the Neos, years and years and years ago. And we sort of had an idea that we’d have a band where it’d be us, cos we couldn’t find anybody else who wasn’t already in a band, so we thought, we’ll just have a band and get different people to play sometimes, and then it sort of developed like that, and then people sort of fit their attitude or their style, I guess, toward what we were trying to do, which... I don’t... It’s not wilfully obscure, but I’m not very good at writing love songs and stuff like that, and I’m really interested in encyclopedias and dictionaries and, y’know, arcane and word origins interest me. And so does celebrity or call to celebrity, because I grew up watching the Mike Douglas show a lot on TV in the 70’s, the early 70s, mid 70s Catskills comics were really at their peak, like, the days of Shecky Green, and that sort of celebrity is kind of gone. There’s a different style of celebrity, but I think it’s... nowadays I don’t think people actually have to do anything, y’know? I think Madonna is one of the most influential people of the 20th century, as far as I’m concerned, because she ushered in a whole new art and lifestyle where, if you change your trousers every twenty minutes you can stay on top, y’know. So that sort of interests me a lot.

Allan: I also grew up watching the Mike Douglas show and whatnot, but you sound like you’ve thought more about it than I have.

Tom: (laughs). I guess so! It’s not really that productive, in that sense.

Allan: How was this past notion of celebrity – are you being critical, do you think we’ve become shallower?

Tom: No, I don’t think so. I mean, it’s an interesting study. Celebrity status is as common as asphalt, y’know, just from that perspective... although I think there’s certain things I don’t think people can do anymore. I mean, there’s certain, like – I don’t think it would be possible to make Valley of the Dolls anymore, because people just aren’t that big. People don’t have to act or don’t really do anything, they just have to be themselves. I think (back then) people still were expected to sing or act or do something, or have a quick, fast quip, y’know?

Allan: Hmmm?

Tom: Perhaps I’m just completely out of touch with what’s new and modern, but I just don’t see anybody out there to take the place of the old six people who used to be on The Match Game.

Allan: (Laughs)

Tom: There’s just sort of a different... there’s just not the same sort of shabbiness and trying really hard, but, y’know, to hide the fact that you have a one bedroom apartment. Even if it is in Beverley Hills, it’s still just a one bedroom apartment. I’m not very... I don’t explain myself so good...

Allan: No, no, it’s great, you just – after you speak, you may hear me sitting here sounding confused, rustling paper trying to figure out, okay, where do I go now?

Tom: Okay.

Allan: So do you consume a lot of media? Do you read tabloids or things like that?

Tom: No, not at all. I try to avoid them. I mean, I would just... I mean, I think... I don’t smoke, but if people aren’t allowed to smoke in public places, I think – I mean, I can’t help – I dwell on petty details and stuff like that, and I dwell on things, but I really don’t enjoy looking at supermarket tabloids, because I find them very fearful. I don’t know, just sort of thinking - folks who devour, I mean, who actually are absolutely fascinated by Jennifer Aniston – although, I mean, on the other side of the coin I’m really interested and fascinated by how well the Toronto Blue Jays are gonna do this year, so I guess its – people’s different passions. Allan: I mean – I was wondering if you were exploring things in a sort of scientific way. Do you watch television?
Tom: I don’t have cable. Once in a blue moon when I’m in a hotel room, or something like that, I watch TV for half an hour and I’m kind of – well, I am almost literally shocked about how bad it is, like, how trite, how embarrassingly shallow. TV’s the kind of thing I think I would watch behind closed doors and shut the blinds so nobody would see me, cos I find it – well, it’s partly because it’s not – you can’t – I think people now who are in their early 20’s, if they were at all interested, have really missed out at 11:00 on a Friday night, watching The Incredible Two Headed Transplant – that just doesn’t happen anymore? And I don’t think TV is very fun anymore, like, y’know... But then again – I think I’m such an utterly subjective person, I cannot – this is not how the world is, this is how I see the world, and so I think those are two very different things. I don’t think my opinion carries very much weight or counts for very much. But that’s just how I see things, and I just, sort of, write about ‘em. I can’t help it! (laughs)

Allan: Part of my thesis – the songs are often on obscure or misperceived things. You also have a lot of songs about, sort of, middleclass life, and people just sort of – “Carrying the Ball for Hair Design,” “I’m Always the Last One to Know,” “Big in Real Estate.” Lot of songs about everyday details – you make little fascinating novels out of them, these moments of human experience that no one would really care to notice or write about.

Tom: No, because they’re unimportant, but I mean, that’s like 95% of everything is... The fact is that if something great suddenly came out of the ground, the fact would be that the ground would have still been there for quite awhile, y’know? And why not document the ground, rather than the great thing that came out of it, because that’s what everybody else is doing? And, y’know, why at this place – I think – it doesn’t really matter to me so much what the end result is, it’s like, why did it happen here? How did it come to happen, I find, a lot more interesting. I think it’s quite boring, though. It’s a pretty boring way of looking at things.

Allan: I’m not entirely sure I understood any of that...

Tom: I have a tendency to speak in very poor analogies, and uh, it’s just – middle class, whatever, things like that are of little or no consequence. I mean, say, okay, you can look across the street, and an hour later, something else is there, and everybody is interested in what this thing is now, but no one was looking there before, and there could have been just as many things going on, or not going on. Like, end results – I just sort of think – end results – I like to find out about, I’m interested in things that happen before some great result. Backgrounds, the stuff that’s taken for granted. I think it probably has a lot to do, in my young teens, with listening a lot to the Village Green Preservation Society, which probably influenced me, as much as – besides maybe Chuck Berry - as much as any music at all.

Allan: I’m a Kinks fan, but I don’t know that one – I’m more of a Muswell Hillbillies man – Why Village Green?

Tom: I just love that record from when I first – I dunno, when I was 13 or 14 and got a hold of it, because it was out of print and didn’t sell very well, y’know, but the Kinks period, the Ray Davies period, from like 68 to – I think Muswell Hillbillies was the last really, truly great record that he wrote, in my opinion... but I just love the different approaches he has, like, you know, writing about something after its happened, rather than writing about the event happening.

Allan: Can you tie that to a specific song?

Tom: I just like sorta putting together songs like “Alcohol” and “Holiday,” y’know? Like, there’s one song about drinking and there’s another song about going on a holiday, but there’s not a song in-between about a binge, and then having to go on a holiday... Y’know, there’s not like a – the middle ground is left out.

Allan (guessing): They’re kind of slices of life?

Tom: Yeah, and I love that, because, y’know, I wish – I just love that style in approaching songs that way. I think anybody can come up with a better song than, y’know, “My Girl” by Bill Henderson and Chilliwack, y’know, and each and everyone one of us to try to do everything in our power to at least write something that’s not as bad! Cos I mean, I get mad and I have temper tantrums, if I go into a restaurant and order some food and a couple of minutes later someone puts on classic Clear Channel rock, and I just get up and leave because I didn’t pay to hear this, y’know? And I’d love to see more people do that, because I mean, I think I have a perfect right, because f we’re really loud the police come to our door and tell us to turn it down because of the decibel limit, but I think there’s also a bad taste, shit-limit... I mean, a lot of people say, “I just tune it out, it doesn’t really bother me,” but it bothers me because its invasive...

(To be continued...!)

Weapons of Mouse Destruction II: The Battle Continues

As you may recall, my first mammalian kill (not counting the flesh foods I consume daily) was of a mouse that got stuck in a glue trap by my fridge this past summer. One of several little fuckers I saw scampering around that week, I felt quite a bit of guilt over its contorted form - it had suffered for hours in a twisted, grotesque position before I discovered it. What to do to put it out of its misery as quickly as possible? I had an old frying pan at hand. I put the mouse in a newspaper, took it and the frying pan into the alley behind my building, set it on the pavement, and raised the pan high over my head...

The resultant blow, while dramatic, may not have killed the mouse, but I didn't really want to CHECK, dig? I tossed the paper AND the old frying pan in the dumpster and returned upstairs. I had lived in the building for two years without a single mouse. A friend who has lived over by City Hall for several rodent-free years also was reporting mouse activity, and a friend since has said she's been seeing mice: perhaps this is connected to all the gentrification in Vancouver, with mice abandoning demolished old buildings and seeking new, safer homes?

A few weeks later, a second mouse was caught in a snap trap in my "living room" area (that section of the bachelor suite where I entertain, in other words). It wasn't killed; I was sitting at the computer when the trap snapped shut, and it began to squeak in desperate protest, dragging the trap behind it as it crawled along on its forelegs. I worried it had been paralyzed by spinal damage, as I rushed to free it into a trash bin, but it seemed ultimately okay. I took it some blocks away and released it - I didn't want to kill again.

For awhile, I was mouse-free. This winter, its started up again. I returned home from a film to see a fat, apparently pregnant mouse scurrying for safety under my Morris bed area (which I use for storage). I put out more traps - I'd left out a couple of glue traps from the initial summer panic but I didn't want more, since they obviously cause suffering. I put out two humane traps - nicely designed and so far completely useless - and a couple of fresh snap traps. A week ago, I got back from work to find a mouse stiff and dead in a trap in my kitchen. Scoop it up, throw it away, put out a fresh trap.

Today I discovered that one of the glue traps I had had somehow moved. I shone a light into the corner: a mouse was curled inside, apparently in a position of repose, but not, it seemed, dead. How it dragged the trap two feet, while completely stuck, I don't know.

I really had no idea how long it had been in there, and I was out of old frying pans. How to deal?

A hammer. All I've got. I mean, what - a buddy suggested filling a bucket and drowning it, but who wants to be drowned? One swift, decisive blow would be better... but there's a problem: how to protect yourself from being spattered by mouse blood?

Okay: I put the mouse and trap in a plastic bag. I peek inside at the mouse while doing so and make the mistake of inhaling through my nose; I learn that the smell of a dying, scared, shitting mouse is similar to the smell of the sulphur off a lit wooden match. Sharp and unpleasant and given to lingering.

I wrap my hammer's head in plastic bags too, and I double bag the mouse.

But with the mouse in a bag in a bag - how can I know if the mouse is dead? How will I know, even, where to strike?

I get a better idea: suffocation. Less of a panic than drowning, maybe - it takes a bit more time. It's a recommended method of suicide, after all - Jerzy Kosinski killed himself by putting a bag over his head. It's even in the book Final Exit.

I quadruple bag the mouse, and take the package down to the dumpster. None of the terror of drowning, none of the violence or possible human error of a random hammer blow. It's the best I can offer - I am an amateur in matters of death. I don't fish anymore, since I kill so badly.

I throw away my last good glue trap, to be spared such future problems.

Cinema Aspirant Birthday Event March 9th: DEATH WATCH

Some films regularly pop up on my list of favourites because I think they're great works of film art - Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, say. Others are there because, while I think they are good films, they strike deep and resonant personal chords: Bruce Sweeney's Dirty, for instance, or Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch (La Mort En Direct). For my 39th birthday event, I'll be showing a rare European cut of that film - with Japanese subtitles and a substantially different ending from the previous North American release - at Blim, at 197 E. 17th avenue at Main. The film starts at 8, and there'll be free sampler CDs on hand for the first 15 or so people who arrive (after last year, when I made a big whack of these for a screening of Love Streams, actually ON my birthday, March 7th - and had two friends attend with me - I am trying to be conservative). The film deals with voyeurism, technology, the responsibility of making images, and male-female relationships; it stars Harvey Keitel, Romy Schneider, Harry Dean Stanton - and, in my favourite of his many roles, Max von Sydow. Hope some folks will attend!