A Better Life Dog Rescue...?

A day or two after reporting in the Straight, via Eargoggles' Clayton Holmes, that the proceeds for DVD sales for The Rebel Spell would go to A Better Life dog rescue, I encountered troubling news stories online that the people who run this rescue operation were supposedly breaking into private residences to liberate dogs who were being "abused" (by the standards of A Better Life, anyhow),  then re-selling the pets. This is something the RCMP allege that A Better Life are doing for profit - something the founder, one Jan Olson, and her partner deny. Without any evidence one way or the other, I'm willing to believe their denial, actually - this sort of action seems far more likely to stem from idealism (and maybe a bit of a vigilante streak) than the profit motive - but I'm still troubled, particularly in discovering that this is a controversy that has followed the group for some time; here's another story, from 2009. Personally, I don't really like the idea of any private group - people with no public oversight, accountable only to their own consciences -  breaking into private property for any reason, let alone to take things and redistribute them (...and this applies whether we regard a pet as property or not). Unless they have a pretty damn good moral justification for taking such an action, this is stepping wayyy too far outside the rule of law for my tastes; between pets being left alone for a few hours and people breaking into homes and yards, I have a pretty clear moral sense of what the greater evil is. And the whole "report abuse" function on their website seems a little too Stalinist, a little too open to abuse in its own right... I actually have no pets of my own precisely BECAUSE I would consider it wrong to leave them alone for long periods, as I would be obliged to do; but that doesn't mean I think that everyone should be made to follow that rule, under the penalty of vigilante action.

So I guess I won't be buying this DVD by The Rebel Spell. Bummer, I would have liked to have seen it.

Frustrations continue

Grrr! In order to get Gmail to work properly, I had to upgrade to Internet Explorer 9, and now IT'S all fucked up - bizarre, ugly, unwelcome changes, with half my remembered websites vanished, and a new understanding of tabbed browsing that Makes No Fucking Sense (the URL for the website is in one tab while the NAME of the website is in another, taking up twice the amount of space for the same amount of information and badly crowding the top toolbar, so that opening a third tab seems dubious and a fourth impossible. News to Microsoft: if I can't tell from the URL and the fuckin' page in front of me what website I'm on, having the information on a separate tab isn't going to help). Meantime the upgrade DID solve my previous problem with the "new look" of Gmail (the layout was getting all bungled and overlapped when I tried to reply to a message), but created a new problem, a bizarre and unnecessary dead zone of white space running along the left inner margin (where the messages start); plus the icons for Bold, Underline and such that are supposed to run horizontally across the top of a message I'm typing have a weird tendency to leap into a double spaced vertical formation, so that the message suddenly disappears, leaping a mile below the level of my screen). NOTHING WORKS PROPERLY - or else is designed so badly that even if it is technically working properly, it's a friggin' mess. Would someone PLEASE teach these people the meaning of "leaving well enough alone?" ...or how about that other old saw, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it?"
Meantime, now that I've started blogging again, I'm starting to remember why I tried to quit - that sad old feeling that I'm talking to myself, writing words no one reads, while sitting alone in my room in the suburbs. Pathetic! Fuckit, I've gotta get out of the apartment....

Rogers dies: the ongoing saga of the death of the video store

NOTE: the below has been amended. I had been (mis)informed by the manager of the last surviving Rogers Video in Maple Ridge that all Rogers rental stores were closing. This is not the case - locations remain open in Vancouver and elsewhere. Mea culpa! So what's below has been edited...

Hard to believe how fast things have happened. When, in April - a mere eight months ago! - I wrote my obituary for video stores, Blockbuster and Rogers still had hundreds of locations across Canada, and Videomatica hadn't announced its closure. Now Videomatica's rental location is empty (though its sale store appears to be flourishing in the back of Zulu Records), Vancouver's gargantuan HMV (not a rental store, obviously, but still a major source of physical media in the city) is weeks away from shutting down, Blockbuster has undergone a two-tiered store closure and no longer exists anywhere in North America, and - I discovered today - Rogers Video is now doing the same with all but its busiest locations - which will have a very direct impact on me: now that I've accepted busing some twenty blocks out of my way to rent movies - which is what I did today, and how I made this discovery - I learn that in fact, in a week's time, Maple Ridge will be left without a single video store (one little indy still exists in Pitt Meadows, so intent on bucking the trends that they still rent VHS tapes as well as DVDs. Pity they don't have anything like a decent selection of movies). Actually, I should amend that: there is one Asian convenience store with a small selection of new arrivals, who may emerge as the successful "last man standing" of this die-off. It's not exactly going to suit my needs.

Anyhow, all you scavengers near closing Rogers locations (like the one at Hastings and Slocan, a few blocks west of the PNE) better get scavenging. The one I was at had "Buy One Get One Free" sales on all their rental stock (mostly priced at $9.99 or $14.99), and the shelves were already looking kind of bare...

One caveat, though - don't count on closing locations to honour your point cards. No points are being given for purchases, and all sales are final. Cry if you want.

More Shithead!

Relating to his new(ish) book and Big Takeover #69's feature on Bloodied But Unbowed, I just put up a mini-interview with Joey "Shithead" Keithley on the BT website. Check it out...

Friday: The Rebel Spell!

See my interview with Clay about the Eargoggles release here...

Thursday: Bison!

...at Fortune Sound Club!

Biting the hand that feeds: Gmail's new look

So Google has foisted a "new look" on gmail users today - "streamlined, new, improved!" May I just say that this is one of the most irritating aspects of online life? I mean, granted, I'm a bit curmudgeonly in these matters - unlike people who delight in innovation for its own sake, I tend to like stability and reliability when it comes to tools, since it's the WORK THAT I DO WITH THEM and not the design of the tools that matters to me. As long as they work, I'd really rather not have things fixed, thanks. This is why I still use Internet Explorer, for example; though I did try Firefox for awhile, I see no advantages, no reason that I should re-adjust my habits and routines simply for the sake of using the newer, hipper web browser - everything I want to do online can be done through IE, thanks. It's also why I only reluctantly accept upgrades, since sometimes (think Windows Media Player - yeh, I'm a PC-user, too, natch), they're more like downgrades, completely misunderstanding how a product works and replacing useful, logical functionality with arbitrary, gimmicky nonsense. It's rather like waking up in the morning to find out that someone decided, with no input from you, that your car needed a new paint job, and while he was at it, thought that it would run better on square tires. Too much crap like that can kill a site (Myspace, anyone?). Can we just go back to the way things were, folks? Was there anything WRONG with it that I missed?

The Korpiklaani question I forgot to ask

I wish I'd remembered to ask Jarkko how one dances to Korpiklaani. I'm trying to imagine a combination between moshing and a polka, and it's making my head hurt. Guess I'll see for myself tomorrow!

Jarkko Aaltonen/ Korpiklaani interview - plus Jeffrey Lewis in the Straight

I did an interview for the Straight with Jarkko Aaltonen, bassist for Finnish folk-metallers Korpiklaani (at the left in the photo). The band plays Saturday at the Rickshaw. A few outtakes follow!

A: So... This is your third North American tour?

J: Yes, third time touring, although before the first tour, we actually did a one-off show in Calgary.

A: Is it your second time in Vancouver?

J: Hmmmm - no! Third. On both of our previous tours we’ve been to Vancouver. The first time was at this big ballroom in the city centre and the second time was at the Rickshaw.

A: …which is notoriously in a very bad part of town.

J: Yeah, we sort of realized that the last time we were there.

A: Did any interesting experiences or stories come of that?

J: Well - not really, although - I was in the city centre, whatever it’s called, this sort of walking district there, and I was with a friend of mine, and we were thinking that we need a hotel room so that we could shower and stuff. But we know that we have to get that from closer to the venue, so we go back to the venue, and we start walking this one street [and we’re thinking he’s talking Hastings, here] trying to find a decent hotel that has a room free. And in the end we end up 200 meters from the spot that we left in the city centre. We were back there. Because as you said, that district around the Rickshaw is not really the fanciest. Not that we were looking for a presidential suite…

A: I was wondering if you get asked a lot of stupid questions - I mean, I was watching your Bill Zebub interview in the film Pagan Metal -

J: Yeah, but that guy has made an art from being an idiot! I mean, nowadays if we start getting really really stupid questions, you know the whole idea of the interview is not to be informative but funny. And I don’t mind doing those - it’s another form of interview.

A: But, I mean, I was wondering if there are typical misconceptions that come up when North Americans interview you, due to cultural differences or such?

J: I don’t know if there are any misconceptions as such. The most annoying question that an interviewer can ask is, ‘well, I don’t know anything about your band; can you tell me everything about your band?' That really really makes me want to point him or her to the left side of the van and tell them to go and read the bio.

A: Heh. I bet. But the cultural differences are significant, though - I mean, you guys have actual pagan roots to go back to. In North America, we just have made-up stuff like Wicca and Satanism... I get a bit jealous...

J: Yeah, but on the other hand, as a sociological experiment, it’s a fine piece of art. You take people away from their roots and see what they come up with.

A: ...like global capitalism.

J: …and extreme Christianity as well. (For more on Finnish paganism versus Christianity, see Jarkko's answers in the Straight!).

Also of note in the Straight: Mike Usinger has done a big Jeffrey Lewis feature. Jeffrey plays tonight at the Biltmore - he puts on a great show, y'all should check him out!

Bloodied But Unbowed in Big Takeover

Folks, anyone who cares about the Vancouver punk doc, Bloodied But Unbowed, really has to see what Jack Rabid and crew did with my interviews with Susanne Tabata and Joe Keithley in the new issue of The Big Takeover. It looks FANTASTIC, and even has a photo I've never seen before (of Randy Rampage and Art Bergmann together). I've been doing stuff for magazines and newspapers for seven years and have been in around 20 publications by now; this is bar none the best looking article I've ever been associated with. (It's not a bad read, either!).

RIP Ken Russell

...dead at 84 of a stroke, as of yesterday. Say what one will about his excesses, Russell was one of the first directors of note to come to my attention; here in Maple Ridge, back in the 1970's and 1980's, it wasn't all that easy to connect with real cinema - even once video stores started opening, their stock wasn't exactly handpicked by cinephiles (I remember one of the first video stores in town renting Koyaanisqatsi to people for free because the owners thought it was so bad that they couldn't dare ask money for it). While not all of Russell's films hold my interest now, back then, Altered States, Tommy, Women In Love, The Devils, even Crimes of Passion were important films for me, films to watch repeatedly and talk about with friends, and Russell was one of the first directors whose work I sought out based on his name (along with John Cassavetes - most of whose films were completely unavailable on video for years - and Nic Roeg). His films were relatively easy to find on VHS, all striking in some way or another, and yoked by certain themes and proclivities such that, as a kid with a growing love of cinema, I could grasp that he was an auteur. (The relative unsubtlety of some of his films probably aided my 12-year old appreciation of them - that's how old I was when I saw my first one, Altered States, at the Stanley Theatre in Vancouver during its first theatrical run). Perhaps Russell's passing will stimulate interest in him and prompt Warner's American arm to do something daring like putting out the WHOLE VERSION of his greatest film achievement (see below). My respects to Ken Russell.

Desperate days

...hm. Surprisingly neurotic and unself-confident about my classes, as final essays approach. That feeling that something of myself is really being put to test, here; that big decisions hang on what I do in the next couple of weeks. Not feeling very UP to it, but I'll have to rally soon, because deadlines are getting very, very close.

Jeffrey Lewis returns to Vancouver!

...check him out on Youtube, he's a hell of a songwriter, a lot of fun as a performer, a talented comics artist, and a Peter Stampfel collaborator!

Free the weed!

I didn't weigh in on Occupy, but here's something I will say something about: legalizing marijuana. It's a very, very good idea. Tax it, regulate it, remove criminals from the picture and let those of us who use it now and then relax, forgodsake - I'm sick of trying to be covert about smoking it when it's such widespread and harmless behaviour, sick of the grey area it presently exists in. I smoke pot - in moderation, a few puffs a few times a week - for various reasons:

a) when I've been bogged down all day in some project or responsibility and am mired in a stressed-out, exhausted state, it helps me shift gears in a shorter timeframe, get out of one unproductive mindset and into another more positive one

b) to stimulate the flow of creative juices when brainstorming about a piece of writing

c) to enhance movie nights with a buddy - marijuana and movies go together like alcohol and fighting

d) to enhance various other aesthetic experiences (listening to music, having sex, or combinations thereof)

e) as a remedy for motion sickness - remarkably effective; sometimes when transferring between buses on long commutes I've puffed a bit on my pipe to keep me from getting sicker, and it works quite well

f) to fend off migraines; during periods of my life when I'm subject to them, it is far, far preferable as a means of coping than any of the prescription meds I've tried (like menacingly-named vasoconstrictors, which list heart attacks as a possible side effect; why would I want to pop a pill that might kill me when I can simply take a few puffs on my pipe?).

I fail to see any of these things as being a social threat. What IS a social threat is the violence associated with its criminalization; I have no idea, when I buy pot, where it's coming from, whether I'm financing gang activity or such. I would much rather have the transaction taxed and regulated and above-ground, which is the ONLY thing that the current laws against pot prevent (they don't slow or stop the usage of the substance one iota, they just raise the price and remove the revenue that changes hands from the tax-stream). It's nice to see a few Vancouver politicians joining the call for this highly sensible move; after having recently been called a hypocrite by Marc Emery -whose prison blogs can be read here - even re-elected Mayor Gregor Robertson has joined his voice to calls for legalization. Stephen Harper, predictably, has just said no.

The Korean release of The Devils

The Korean DVD version of The Devils arrived in the mail today. It has the same box art as the Spanish and the proposed art that leaked from Warner Brothers awhile ago. There are, as is typical with Korean releases, no extras of any sort. The option of Spanish subtitles suggests that this is sourced from the Spanish version of the DVD (there are no English subs, only Spanish and Korean). The sound is quite a bit clearer than I've heard it before, but some of the dialogue is whispered urgently with much background noise, so English subtitles would, in fact, make this a more attractive purchase. The image quality and the colours are quite good, compared to the previous options, though some of the church interior scenes have an odd effect I hadn't noticed before, where there's a sort of rainbow mottling of skin tones, for instance during Grandier's trial, when he is led back in with a shaved head; these colours may be meant to represent the way sunlight falls on skin when refracted through stained glass - something the inferior image quality of previous versions would not have allowed me to notice - but since no stained glass is readily apparent in Derek Jarman's terrific sets, I can't quite settle my mind that this isn't some odd defect. And speaking of defects, all the stuff we can presume would be missing is missing - the Rape of Christ and the charred tibia masturbation, most obviously, though I believe there are trims to Jeanne's other masturbation and self-flagellation scene, and if there is supposed to be extended footage of the breaking of Grandier's legs - it's not there, either. We presume the BFI presentation will be neutered in exactly the same way; and since it will be PAL and region-coded, the Korean DVD (NTSC, region-free) may still be your best option in North America, unless and until the American arm of Warner Brothers grows a pair of yarbles and decides to release the unexpurgated version of this film. I wouldn't hold my breath.

...so where the hell is A Dangerous Method?

Grrr! I'm surely not the only person who has been eagerly awaiting the Vancouver theatrical debut of David Cronenberg's new film dealing with the relationship between Freud, Jung, and Sabina Spielrein, A Dangerous Method (that's the Wiki page, official site here, long Sony Classics PDF presskit here). It opened this week in the USA; I had assumed it was also going to be opening here, as well, but it's nowhere to be seen - and according to Tribute.ca, it won't get a Canadian release until January 13th! This is far too long to wait. Maybe I'll read John Kerr's book, A Most Dangerous Method, to prepare myself... that last link goes to an informative and piquant review/ synopsis in The Independent...

Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin!

Wow - just found this clip on Youtube - the young stars of Zabriskie Point interviewed by Dick Cavett! (It's an awkward and uninformative interview, but in a way, this adds to its interest. Those unaware of the bio of Mark Frechette should read here - a very interesting man. Daria Halprin is still around and somewhat of a public figure, but not so much so in relationship to this film; her website is here.)

Spend a minute with The Shaggs

Oh, Lord. I suddenly find myself enjoying a Shaggs song, and worse - I feel like I understand it. What's happening to me?

Three cellphone photos of Mayhem

After falling in love with none of the opening bands (Abigail Williams, Hate, and Keep of Kalessin), I was half-worried that I'd be bored by Mayhem the other night, believe it or not. Extreme metal on my headphones to drown out the banal jabbering of my fellow commuters is one thing; shirtless thugs somberly pumping the goats into the air like it means anything and recycling Sabbathy blues licks is another (okay, so Keep of Kalessin were actually quite a bit better than that, and neither Abigail Williams nor Hate were without their moments, but still, it didn't really engage me). Up til Mayhem took the stage I was wondering if maybe the only metal shows I should go to are local ones - if there's something so tribal about metal that it almost requires a community connection to be meaningful; I'd rather support a local band at Funky's with no pretentions than a visiting band filled with them, and my somewhat stoned notes for the evening kept returning to the theme of how much more I'd rather be watching Bison, who at least look like they're having FUN when they play.*

Then Mayhem took the stage, and from the outset, my opinion changed. Overwhelming stage presence, the heavily made-up singer shrieking into an inverted-cross mike and the shirtless bassist - "the one who was so unpleasant to poor Sam Dunn in that doc" - seeming charismatic as all hell, sinewy and smiling with an evil grimace as he channelled and surfed the band's energy, completely absorbed in the music... which was absolutely relentless, and lit with bright blue and abundant strobes and fog. A crazy, chaotic, and very, very powerful band. They actually namechecked Skinny Puppy, too! (I expected them to maybe drop a reference to Blasphemy, but the praise for Skinny Puppy made perfect sense). The people who came late had the right idea - and I was very happy to see that indeed, by the time Mayhem took the stage, the place was packed.

True: I did leave early, and may have missed some theatrics - but I'm a suburban wuss, and I'd barely slept the night before, so getting home before 1am seemed vastly preferable than waiting til the gig was over and arriving after 2... My three best photos of Mayhem onstage in Vancouver follow:

*And remember, folks, Bison BC plays Fortune Sound Club December 8th.

A massive Rudimentary Peni article

Thought this was interesting - lots of art and lyrics, plus a history of Rudimentary Peni.