Rodney Graham, Freud and Nietzsche's Concept of Eternal Return

Rodney Graham, Vexation Island
Karel Fialka vs. Akiko Kiyama The Things I Saw / The Misidia Monarchy
Adriano Celentano Prisencolinensinainciusol (Greg Wilson Ruff Edit)*

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I ghostwrote this essay for a Concordia student 5 years ago.

~

Rodney Graham is one of the most important and exciting contemporary media artists, not only in Canada, but internationally, and his work has proved consistently playful and demanding, asking the viewer or observer to sort through a variety of historical allusions, games of meaning and visual puns to arrive at a suitable conclusion, the nature of which may or may not have been intended by Graham. As I intend to reveal in this paper, Rodney Graham’s looped film and video pieces, his“unending fictional narratives” (or “cyclical narratives”) have their roots in the works of Friedriche Nietzsche’s concept of “Eternal Return” (or “Eternal Recurrence[1]”), as well as the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud.

WHAT IS ETERNAL RETURN?

Mustachioed philosopher and horse-rights activist Friedrich Nietzsche derived the idea of Eternal Recurrence from German philosopher Heinrich Heine, and presented the idea in a parable in The Gay Science:

“What if, some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you.”[2]

Nietzsche’s insistence on this concept marked one of the beginnings of the modern era (and with it, of course foreshadowed certain descriptions of the post-modern condition), breaking as it did with the Judeo-Christian/Aristotlean conception of linear time that had so dominated Western thought

That is, as in Graham’s loops, a moment (such as in Vexation Island (this film is described in greater detail further on in this paper) when Graham’s character, “Robinson Crusoe” shakes the tree, producing the coconut which knocks him back to the sand) leads to another moment, which leads to another one, and so forth, repeating and repeating. There is no end, only the circular path, what Christopher Miles rather artlessly calls “circular behavioral inevitability.”[3] The very moment that the coconut falls upon Robinson Crusoe’s head determines that it will be repeated again and again, ad nauseum.

Nietzsche, frightened and petrified at the ramifications of his nighttime demon’s visit (Eternal Return), writes in The Will To Power that one will be able to endure it through “freedom from morality, new means against the fact of pain(…); the enjoyrment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the ‘will’; abolition of the concept of necessity”[4] – describing the exact methods that Graham uses to deal with the loops, his own constructed models of eternal return. This “counterweight to this extreme fatalism” is often mistaken as dilettantism on Graham’s part, an unwillingness to engage himself, but I contend that Graham is instead participating in Nietzsche’s “mystery world of the two-fold voluptuous delight, my ‘beyond good and evil,’ without goal, unless the joy of the circle is the goal.”[5] As we will see later, Graham finds parallels between his own “dilettantism”, his Eno-esque[6] nature (from sculpture to film to photography to pop music) and Freud’s ‘hobbies’, which caused him no small amount of criticism, too.

In Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the author articulates the concept of Eternal Return as not so much a description of reality as an idea to contrast with the “unbearable lightness of being”[7] – the fleeting and novel occurrences that make up our existence. For Kundera, eternal return is an existential parlour game of sorts – the familiar multiple universe theme of comic book and science fiction. Taking this into account, Graham’s looped films offer the viewer an opportunity to take the challenge, entering a world of Graham’s creation that through repetition, embeds every detail with gravity and meaning, and impacts how she or he may come to view the minutia of daily life after.

In another looped work Verwandlungsmusik, similar to Cage’s performance of Erik Satie’s Vexation piece, Graham re-writes a piece of looped music used at the end of Wagner’s Parsifal opera[8] to allow for the scene transition (not composed by Wagner), and tears it apart, re-looping the components of the piece so that by the time they return to their original form, close to 40 billion years will have passed. 40 billion years is as about as close to eternity as I can conceive.[9]

GRAHAM’S LOOPS

Lenz, 1983 is a work of looped text, extracts from an untitled 1835 novella by Georg Buchner, Edgar Allen Poe’s The System of Landor’s Cottage and Freud’s landmark psychological book Interpretation of Dreams.

Rodney Graham’s first cinematic looped work was Dr. No (1991-94), a repeating and painfully recreated segment from the 1962 James Bond spy thriller Dr. No (the set design by Ken Adam, Hollywood’s modernist par excellence[10]) which featured Rodney Graham, in the role of Bond, returning to his hotel room, post-night cap, and preparing for bed. After this, his looped films became more intricate and allusive, beginning with the four film series, comprised of Vexation Island, How I Became A Ramblin’ Man, City Self/Country Self, and A Reverie Interrupted By the Police.

1997’s 35mm short film “Vexation Island” (which premiered at the 1997 Venice Biennale and set the stage for international recognition), alludes to Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe. The loop begins – we find Graham done up in 18^th century finery, unconscious on a deserted beach, a parrot nearby. Graham is awoken, startled by the parrot, throttles a palm tree in front of him, shaking it to retrieve a coconut which promptly falls on his head, knocking him out, the coconut ending up in the sea. As the sequence repeats, we notice that Graham’s head already has a wound on it, prior to the coconut making contact with his head, Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence already richening the experience. More than simply sloppy film-making, the wound’s ahistorical presence reveals the cyclical nature of the film, the repetitive process that weighs down every act throughout the film as it runs on. It goes without saying that Graham’s masturbatory throttling of the tree and deadly coconut ejaculation carry with them the imprint of the Freudian sex and death drive[11].

1999’s How I Became A Ramblin’ Man was an experiment in the drastically commercial form of the music video, with Graham cast as a cowboy minstrel, in the vein of Lee Hazlewood, riding from the horizon, dismounting, singing of his life’s journeys, mounting, riding back and returning again, eliminating the expanse of space and freedom of the Wild West that he alludes to, through this mechanical repetition.

His 2000 4 minute long film, entitled City Self/Country Self relies on the repetition of an action to at once add gravity and to take it away, evoking the life and death cycle. In City Self/Country Self we are introduced to a particular Grahamian technique in his loops, possibly alluding to eternal return. The film is a loop of a fairly pedestrian gag – a country bumpkin (played by Graham) is booted in the buttocks by an urban noble (also played by Graham), both decked in appropriate nineteenth century clothing. As the film repeats, one begins to notice certain details that add the gravity and depth to the situation – we notice that the dandified noble is wearing a shoe on one foot which appears to be either specifically designed to accommodate a rather lengthy and pointy foot (is a mark of blue blood an extended foot, specifically designed for kicking ass?), or fashioned to extend his foot, to be used in kicking the posterior of the peasant, who is either genetically predetermined to have a rather large posterior, or, in anticipation of feeling the brunt of the nobleman’s boot, padded his pants. Regardless of ass or foot enhancements, as the film loops, the viewer soon becomes aware that this event is not an anomalous occurrence, but one that both noble and bumpkin are prepared for, and have been engaged in for time eternal.

A Reverie Interrupted by The Police (2003), the final film of four, sees Graham cast as an old-time convict, being led onto a stage by a grim-looking policeman, who allows Graham to play a piano set on a stage, in handcuffs. Graham, in prisoner’s stripes, opts for a half-hearted rendition of a wretched pseudo-Schoenbergian piece. His heart’s not in it, obviously, and four times the piano cover is depressed, producing a sonic effect mimicking that of the gavel that sent the wretch to his fate. Soon enough, the policeman gathers Graham up and drags him back. And soon enough, Graham appears on stage again, to play the sloppy Schoenberg, which incrementally attracts the viewers’ interest as the sequence repeats itself.

FREUD!

Freud’s concept of visual defamiliarization “entfremdungsgefuhl” – which he believed indicated repression and affected constructions of reality. In 1996, Graham published an essay called “Oeuvres Freudiennes” – writings on the works of Freud resulting from indepth research on Freud. In an essay entitled Siting Vexation Island, (published in a book of essays on his work entitled Island Thought), Graham discusses how his earlier experiences of the cinema (his father doubled as a projectionist for a logging camp in the interior of British Columbia) were experienced in “close proximity not only to the patriarchal authority but also to the cinematic apparatus itself.”[12] One can also see in Graham’s work an engaging with Freud’s concept of visual defamiliarization – the tongue-twister “entfremdungsgefuhl” – the presence of which indicated repression and affected constructions of reality.

“Freud treated them as clever fictions created later by the unconscious to veil other, real, memories – often of a traumatic nature. In his own analysis of his own so-called “Botanical Monograph Dream” in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud alludes to this concept in a footnote that research has show is not really a footnote at all, but an association – for Freud’s essay entitled Screen Memories cites a personal recollection, Freud’s snatching of a bouquet of yellow flowers from the hands of a little girl in an Alpine setting and the theme of the forgetting and violent misappropriation of flowers plays an important part in the dream where another memory is evoked: the four year old Freud’s gleeful destruction of an illustrated feuilleton on Persia (ripped apart leaf by leaf like an artichoke, Freud recalls) in the presence of his younger sister and under the (oddly) approving gaze of his father. Whenever I envision these scenes I see them in garish Technicolor.”[13]

As Graham alluded to in the quote above, he was involved in an earlier work, a 4 page insert into Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, an analysis of one of Freud’s dreams, entitled “Dream of the Botanical Monograph”, rendered in the same typeface and paper as the book itself and written in Freud’s style, meant to be seamlessly integrated into the book and expanding on Freud’s work as a result of Graham’s research into Freud.

As a result of his many diversions into a variety of mediums (photography, music, sculpture, installation works, drawing), Graham has often struggled with, and been criticized for, not applying himself in one area, and consequentially some feel that his work has suffered from a lack of focus.

“I’ve always identified with Freud in this respect because Freud had this problem. I did some research on Freud for part of my work a few years ago. During the period he was making most of his important discoveries, he was being criticized at the time for spending too much time on his hobbies – he had all these other interests. But these interests informed the transformation of his ideas. This was something that plagued him for years, this criticism of being too absorbed.”[14]

The criticism may be mostly the result of Graham’s willingness to present his pop music works (such as his double LP Rock Is Hard) in gallery and artistic settings, not cowtowing to the high art/low art dichotomy that even throughout the past 15 years or so, in the age of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, still irks critics every now and then.[15]

Freudian Inner States: Dreams and Psychoanalysis

Halcion Sleep and Photokinetoscope both explore and poke fun at the Freudian idea that the unconscious can be navigated by voyeuristic observation, tying it to the suspect idea that film is a medium that reveals meaning. The 26 minute long video Halcion Sleep features a double dosed-up Rodney Graham (the brand name of the sleeping pills is Halcion) chauffeured from a suburban Vancouver area to his downtown apartment, sleeping and dreaming, we assume. The prostrate Graham, spread out across the back seats in a vehicle, mimics the physical state of the patient on the analyst’s couch. This is surely a non-traditional approach to the “interpretation of dreams.”

The riveting and beautifully conceived 2002 piece Photokinetoscope is a nod to Albert Hoffman’s accidental discovery of the hallucinogenic properties of LSD, with a few cinematic and musical nods to cultural touchstones like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barret. Comprised of a film five minutes in duration, shot in 16mm, and a 15 minute long 12” LP, the film is activated by placing the needle on the groove of the record (mimicking Thomas Edison’s photokinetoscope, but differing in that the film will start no matter where the needle is place on the record, thus producing a more random effect, a de-synchronization). In the film, Graham, sitting in Berlin’s Tiergarten park, ingests a quantity of lysergic acid diethylamide from a blotter, and bicycles about on an older style “cruiser” bicycle. The viewer scours the face and actions of Graham, looking for the effects of the very hallucinogenic substance, but though his inner state may be in flux and turmoil, he remains relatively placid throughout, confounding the armchair psychoanalysis of the viewer of the piece. At the end of the film, Graham playfully rides his bike backwards (that nod to Newman’s gag in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), a patient’s playful gag on an over-eager Freudian observer. “My point is, the trip is the thing.”[16]

It could be that the shadows cast by Nietzsche and Freud over the 20^th and 21^st centuries, particularly in the Westernized world of contemporary art, are unavoidable, but I am aware of very few artists who are willing to engage these two thinkers on the same level as Graham – directly and indirectly. The majority of Graham’s works are deft combinations of Nietzschean loop trickery and identity games cast within Freudian dream states. Like Nietzsche’s ubermensch ideal, his playful Dionysian, Graham has no interest in uniting the fragments of modernism, but derives value and pleasure from taking up. The paranoia that Kafka beheld in modernism and the schizophrenia that characterize the post-modern condition are fields of play, to be navigated with the intellectual tools left behind by the two Germanic intellectuals who so perfectly defined the neuroses of the 20^th century, and in the end, Graham creates something more cerebral and intellectually invigorating than his pieces may first seem to be.

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[1] In the interest of full disclosure, in the process of researching for this essay, I came along an article in Cinemascope #19 by Jason McBride, that made a conjunctive leap from Graham’s loops to another fashionable existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, but where McBride uses Kierkegaard to affix an idea of blissful security to Graham’s loops, I see a shade more critical process at work.

[2] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science New York: Oxford Press, 1988: p. 341

[3] Miles, Christoper. “Lost In The Moment.” Art in America, March 2005: p.?

[4] Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will To Power NY: Oxford Press, 1988: p. 1060

[5] Ibid, p. 1067

[6] In reference to musician, producer, artist and author Brian Eno.

[7] Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. New York,1988. p.3

[8] It behooves one to mention Nietzsche’s somewhat difficult friendship with the composer Richard Wagner.

[9] Lubbock, Tom “Out Of The Loop”, Independent (London), The October 2002, p. 35

[10] Adam designed the sets for another deceptively titled film that may have been initially regarded as a medical thriller: Dr. Strangelove.

[11] Freud, Sigmund Beyond The Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton Press, 1961: p.42-43

[12] Graham, Rodney “Siting Vexation Island”, Island Thought, Toronto, C. Pavilion, 48^th Venice Biennale, 1997, p. 27

[13] Ibid.

[14] Cranfield, Brody “Relaxing With Rodney Graham” Discorder Magazine, March 2002, p. 12

[15] I’ll speculate that critics might feel that his albums lack the ironic (Brechtian?) distancing that constitutes the secret passkey into the art world for elements of low and middlebrow culture.

[16] Graham, Rodney “A Thousand Words: Rodney Graham Talks About the Phonokinetoscope” ArtForum, November, 2001, p. 33

* Many thanks to Brett Stabler for this.

The Golden Man & College Girls

Bappi Lahiri Everybody Dance With Me

It always happens that the day after I need it, I finally come across an amazing song or couple of songs that I really could have made use of the night before. Case in point, I DJed at Casa del Popolo last night for Thums Up!, playing a selection of Bollywood hits and also-rans. People came out, I screened the Amitabh Bachchan film Bombay to Goa and fun was had. But had I played the above song, I think it would have lifted the bar just that extra special bit...

Bappi Lahiri is the hefty gold-loving disco king of Bollywood, known as The Golden Man. His most recognizable work in the West is his soundtrack to Disco Dancer, Jimmy being sampled by MIA, but yadda yadda yadda, our concern here is the narcissistic go-go freakout Everybody Dance With Me. This song obviously owes a gigantic debt/royalty cheque to Iron Butterfly's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vidda, but pushes it one step further with a Morricone-esque trumpet intro and some guest vamping from an unidentified female playback singer. And just to make it all the better, the movie's called College Girl.

Passwords

Stolen from Emmanuel's Facebook for its dramatic qualities,
and good composition.

Passwords Life After Summer (Single Edit)

Emmanuel Ethier, of Coeur de Pirate, is a talented multi-instrumentalist and (get this) all around nice guy to boot. When he's not traipsing around foreign lands playing with Beatrice & co, snapping photos, and running into Alicia Keys, he's honing and perfecting this sort of stuff along with a couple of other folks under the name PASSWORDS. It's a great song, and there are strong progressive elements here (not unlike Mew), along with steel drums lifted from calypso and a rolling sea-shanty rhythm, all culminating in a delightful finale with guitar theatrics reminiscent of Built to Spill.

Down in the Basement

Joel Alme The Queen's Corner
Joel Alme On This Night of Loving Arms
The Band It Makes No Difference

That Europe is nothing
but a great big auction.
Bunch of old worn-out places.
It's just a big fire sale.

I watched Cat On A Hot Tin Roof the other night, finding myself in need of some mid-century melodrama to wash down the remnants of my 21st century weekend. The garish and grotesque children of Gooper and Sister Woman, costumed and done up provided a nice humorous counterpoint to the sniping of Maggie and Brick, young lovers turned wounded harpie and unresponsive alcoholic (respectively, if not respectfully). But more than the great dialogue and resonant themes of filial crisis and personal anxiety, personal disappointment and scarred relationships finally redeemed, I was struck by the cobwebbed bric-a-brac and crated goods in an old plantation basement. It was the similarities between the cellar in Big Daddy Pollitt's mansion stuffed with Old World antiques and the hoarding impulses exhibited by another cinematic self-made man: Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. Like Kane, Big Daddy also looted the Old World and raged against the shabby, decaying continent, although instead of a sled named Rosebud, Big Daddy, near the end of his life, ruminated ambivalently about an old suitcase left to him by his hobo father - containing his father's uniform from the Spanish American Civil War.

I find it difficult to believe that Tennessee Williams saw antiquing as a decadent affection of a moribund society: by virtue of him being a southern homosexual in that particular era he would (stereotypically) have a fine appreciation of it... But rather, it was the desperate conquering mindset behind it all. Big Daddy, patriarch of the Pollitt family, traipsed through Europe with his wife, buying up culture - a Philistine's desire to own what he could never truly have, mirroring his own attempts to buy his family:

The human animal is a beast that eventually has to die. If he's got money, he buys and he buys. The reason why he buys everything he can, is because... of a crazy hope that one of the things he buys will be life everlasting...

Big Daddy's son Brick, played by Paul Newman, twice speaks to just how futile it was: "You gave her things, not love," and "You own us, but you don't love us." Unlike Kane, Big Daddy eventually reconciles with his family, and the film (and play) is less of an epic than a family drama which ends on a note of reconciliation and hope, even if Big Daddy's spastic colon (of all things) will soon bury him beneath the rich pasture he saved from the swampland.

So: clutter, acquisition, old basements. Some of my fondest memories of my great grandparents are of summer afternoons spent climbing up cherry trees, gorging myself and retiring to their musty basement to root through old boxes for toys, watches or comic book adaptations of the Count of Monte Cristo: typically pastoral and nostalgic, just like all memories of elderly relatives should be. (At the height of my teenage pretensions, when I'd talk for hours about Godard to anyone who'd listen (no one did), I still nurtured a sweet tooth for Euro schmaltz films about children in rural France or Italy after World War II.)

Later on, I'd try to feign an interest in high modernism, the chic minimalism of Wallpaper* magazine, but it never really rang true. And when I worked for a season on a reality television series about design, the trend at that time was to declare war on clutter. A declaration made by the tightly-coiffed hostesses, targeting these rank and unsophisticated amateurs. That, no joke, struck me as a remnant of the minimalist mid=century impulse - fervently ahistorical, utopian, without the messy complications of history and emotion, although enacted in the lowbrow masquerading as highbrow but at best middlebrow arena of reality TV. Not entirely future-obsessed, there was the occasional a nod to times past: Philippe Starck's grotesque Louis Ghost Chair for Kartell or a damask on some throw pillows. (The at once clever and meaningless presence of a Samuel Beckett photograph in a gilded frame on the set of France's Tout le Monde en Parle always baffled me, for example.) Reality television now has a new enemy - hoarders. Poor sods.

All of my discomfort with a nice modernist line, cubes and 90 degree angles is almost certainly owing to growing up in western North America. Aesthetic self-loathing is a powerful force: Germans, sick of the burden of their own history, gobble up Karl May's cowboy & Indian books and come to North America wearing feather head-dresses or Stetsons and spurs; and Japanese fans of Road to Avonlea invading the east coast of Canada... Closer to home, many of our parents' generation decided that gravitas, authenticity and enlightenment was left somewhere along the side of the Silk Road when Marco Polo was returning to Europe from China, (he figured that pasta was lighter and the carbohydrates more filling) so made pilgrimages to ashrams in India, monasteries in China and Tibet, and (more frequently), hash dens in Afghanistan.

The problem with blank canvases in history, is that so often the . Okay, sorry, I'm joking about that...

The compulsion to hoard items, to maintain, but at the same time, I don't see. In many ways, hoarding and collecting are pre-moden impulse: vestigial remnants of a time when icons and charms had intrinsic animistic properties. It's not like the most tech-savvy amongst us are entirely immune to it: a Blackberry or iPhone or Smartphone must have some talismanic properties, given the way we compulsively clutch at them, beyond the boundaries of good sense. (I do it myself.)

I didn't think of myself as a particularly superstitious person, and there's a lot about an animistic view of life that I find reprehensible and preposterous, but when it comes down to how I actually live my life, I'm a pre-modern - I assign emotional value to ludicrous items, and I tend to obey arcane rules in modern life that don't stand up to close scrutiny. For the longest time I wouldn't step on cracks in sidewalks for the fear that I might harm my mother's back. From the earliest I can remember, I was obsessed with doing things (like, God, of all things, cracking my fingers and toes) in a repeating pattern of fours.

Humanity is not a rational animal - motivated as we are by passions, superstitions, and a lust for shiny baubles. For the majority of the 20th century, one of the most barbarous and unsettling on earth, the neuroses of civilization's leading nations were taken care of by adherents to a doctrine created out of the mind of a Viennese cocaine fiend (who thought that parental empthy was misplaced narcissism) and who could, at times, seem like nothing more than sophisticated witchdoctors. Noted sociologist (also ex-husband of Susan Sontag and father of David Rieff) Philip Rieff believed that modern culture amounted to a "mourning for the Christian past,*" which may be true, I guess. But to me, it seems that if it is Christian, it's far more Catholic than Protestant. That we all have our icons and remnants of the cross, and that we are all more like Big Daddy Pollitt, coming to terms with our own mortality and failures in a cellar filled with junk we've acquired in order to avoid Death. Not very profound, I know, but when I started writing this earlier this morning I promised myself I'd finish it. Enjoy the songs.

* (I'm paraphrasing Peter Homans here. Homans goes on to describe Rieff's writings on Freud as being drenched "in irony, display bitterness, sadness, and not a little despair. But irony is the trope of mourning or, rather, of the inability to mourn.") Peter Homans, The Ability to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis

10% Inspiration, 90% Irritation

NPR contributor and self-loathing copywriter Shalom Auslander takes rightful aim at the overwhelming paucity of sense, intelligence and shame in the Meet the Happy New Me, Same as The Crappy Old Me piece in March's issue of GQ (it's not yet available online, sorry). Once again, overzealous ad execs are caught praising the strength of the Nazi brand (and what great synergy - Hugo Boss & Volkswagen!). Of course, recently Montreal's own Mitch Joel was making a big hullaboo about the dearth of authenticity in personal branding, which makes about much sense as complaining that prostitution has lost its focus and become too commercial. I realize that at some point everyone in any job must do some serious psychic maintenance in order to maintain a sense of purpose, but let's be serious 2.0 marketing gurus: clever viral videos are fun, but you're not creating new experiential paradigms that challenge people to create, feel, live better or love with passion and inspiration. A little honesty and humility, please. Maybe you can profit from honesty - just think of Dudley Moore's ad agency stacked with idiot savants in Crazy People.

There's a certain breed of marketing manager/employee/guru/whatever that drives me absolutely crazy, and not just because of the constant strip-mining of culture and history for teachable moments (or quotes that will look good as signatures on their e-mails), but also because of their conviction that advertising and marketing is a great creative wellspring which changes lives and create monuments to the human spirit that will, if not dwarf, at least equal the great achievements of civilization. That this conviction exists in an environment devoid of any moral component makes for such stupefyingly moronic moments as the one described in Auslander's piece, when an ad exec quips, "Say what you want about the Nazis, but they knew branding."

A couple of other bracing tonics that I'd recommend, along the same line, are George W.S. Trow's 1980 New Yorker essay Within the Context of No Context (excerpt here) and Thomas Frank's amazing book The Conquest of Cool (excerpt here) about just how much of the 60's counterculture was manufactured by advertising gurus and lifestyle marketing an impetus for, rather than a response to, actual changing demographics. Frank is probably best known to most for What's the Matter With Kansas or his writing for Harper's, but before all of that, he edited the Baffler and wrote in a marvelous Menckian mode that avoids the imperial tone of Lewis Lapham. (As much as I love him, part of the reason I stopped reading Harper's were the incessant harping about the Decline & Fall of the American Empire.)

Get Me Out Of This Place

Dicevo tirarmi fuori da questo luogo, prima ero ancora nato

Toto Cutogno Africa
Joe Dassin L'été indien

In 1976, an Italian man who would go on to become a leading voice for the European integrationist* movement by the name of Toto Cutogno spoke of other international concerns. Specifically, reconciling his easy-going Mediterranean heritage with the encroaching anxiety and concrete cityscapes of high modernism. Like all good bohemians, he looked towards an idealized primitive - in this case, south to Africa.

Any of you who are into Moments of Relaxation, Tranquil Moments, or taking mind-trips to exotic locales through the power of your Hi-Fi while reclining in your Gae Aulenti-designed rumpus room may recognize certain sonic similarities between this mellow groove and Joe Dassin's L'été indien. You're quite perceptive for an idle member of the leisure class. Tuto Cutogno wrote a number of songs to be recorded by Joe Dassin, the Pan-Atlantic chanseur son of blacklisted American film-maker Jules Dassin.

* Was his 1990 Eurovision winning entry Insieme: 1992 a neo-functionalist or intergovernmentalist anthem?

The hips locked, o'ho, and I made jam!

Pino D'Angio Ma Quale Idea
Creative Connection You're My Heart, You're My Soul

Italian Pino D'Angio's Ma Quale Idea occasionally gets credit as the first instance of Italo Disco Rap, and while that's an arguable point (Kano's I'm Ready also came out in 1980), the song, built atop McFadden & Whitehead's Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now, is just frankly awesome. It's a baritone-voiced roller that fills dancefloors with people and minds' eyes with visions of sparkling lights, dart collars and louche ladies wearing Thierry Muegler gowns. And an old guy rapping about... a disco lady with snake eyes? Okay, so it's stretching it to call Italo Disco Rap a genre, with all of the conventions and trappings that ensure a section in a record store or a folder in someone's MP3 collection, but as Carmen's Throw Down and MC Miker G & DJ Sven's Holiday Rap would follow later, and I love all of these songs, it's enough of a genre for me.

It's hard to pinpoint the moment where Italo Disco turns over and becomes fully absorbed by Hi-NRG. Probably when it became all octave-bass lines, 130BPM, and that Mike guy put on the oversized sunglasses. Creative Connection prove that the cross-over wasn't entirely terrible, with their 1985 cover of the Dieter Boehlen penned and produced Modern Talking song You're My Heart, You're My Soul.

For your edification and entertainment, here are the translated lyrics to Ma Quale Ideal...

I caught her in the disco with a snake look
I went close to her
She was already out of her mind
I looked at her
She looked back at me then I let myself go

In comparison Fred Astaire was static and clumsy
I shot a kiss in her mouth
A kiss with a bang

On the footloose dancing floor then I shook her up

sending her to the air
catching her back
leaving her breathless
She fell into my arms
She was madly in love

I held her fast by her hips
I turned her into jam
Oh yea Oh yea..Is that how you say it ?
And then...and then

What an idea ! But what idea ? Can't you see she is not easy ?
What an idea ! But what idea ? She's malicious but knows
How to take care of a big bully like you
And besides what makes you so special that another one hasn't got ?
What an idea ! But what idea ? Can't you see she is not easy ?
What an idea ! But what idea ? Beware, she is smart
She will lead you in circles but you will never get

The things you want and tell me, what are you going to give her ?

I had a great thought, I brought her in my den

I poured an orange juice and she burts into a laughter
She clung to my whiskey
She gulped down five litres

She seemed to be out of her wits
She kissed me
I kissed her
All of a sudden I held her tight but she slipped away

She looked at me
I looked at her
I stopped her
I caressed her fairy face
But she looked like a potato
I caught her, shook her up and down
Turned her into an omelette
Oh yea is this how you say it ?
And then

What an idea ! But what idea ? Can't you see

Grand Collectif

It's Nuit Blanche this weekend, and Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila and the always-on-the-mark DHC and Darling Foundry are working together to present a that combines everybody's favourite surrealist parlour game (Exquisite Corpse) with the visual work of the noted (and Tate collected) artist. Anyone who shows up is welcome to contribute to a script, with the visual cues provided by Ahtila's screen direction. For a Rodney Graham fan such as myself, Ahtila's gorgeously crafted images and deft cinematic touch are pure eye candy.

More information ici: www.dhc-art.org

6pm - 2 am
451 & 465 rue Saint Jean
Gratuit

Friday, February 26th CFCF, Trebek, Advaance, & Jay Watts III

CFCF Big Love
(Fleetwood Mac cover)

This Friday, the Creamery presents a very special evening with two of Montreal's funnest DJs and swellest fellows, CFCF and Trebek. This is part of a new monthly series, and support will provided by residents Advaance and myself, Jay Watts III. $5 at the door (cheap), drink specials and lots of fun.

More information on the Facebook page.
Jupiter Room (3874 St. Laurent)

Leave The Gun. Take The Hamentashen.

"Leave the gun. Take the hamentashen."
Nino Rota Love Theme from The Godfather
Billy Vaughn Theme from Love Story

I live in Outremont, which is a borough in Montreal with a substantial Hasidic population. Like Williamsburg, but with upper middle-class French people. The Hasidim walk around clutching I love NY shopping bags, pushing strollers, talking on cellphones and smoking, and sometimes you can even catch a really chic matron in Prada loafers (at least one thing they have in common with Pope Benedict). So, when last week I first heard melancholic brass instrument sounds emerging from the apartment below, I suspected that it was a couple of these least cosmopolitan sect of the most cosmopolitan people on earth (Jews!) that were responsible.

"Such mournful music," I thought, "such a tragic song for a tragic people, wronged by history, seeking solace and comfort in Solomon's songs!"

Being from British Columbia and attending school during a lengthy run for the NDP (social democrats) as the dominant provincial party, I was used to this sort of ethnic show-and-tell. A bunch of well-meaning pedagogues shuffle a deck, get students to pick cards, fashion a close-approximate to the national costume and everyone eats perogies, dumplings or whatever doughy treat assuages their carb-lust*. (The poor Inuit, lacking breadstuffs and grains, never made much of a showing. They were a warlike peoples who would periodically raid the tribes to the south for their bannack, I bet). My friend Ali Rahman, an ethnic type himself, abhorred the coming of multicultural days, as he was put upon to bring the samosas. In school districts not as low-rent as mine, the closest analogue was a model United Nations. All great fun until a kid brought a kirpan to school.

And so, these thoughts swirling in my head, lying on my back, I gave myself to the music, to the pathos and emotion, I thought of the Russian steppes, the shtetls of the Pale, etc. etc. etc. A feeling of familiarity washed over me: my own sympatico-ness with the Semitic peoples! Or, wait, was it? No, I wasn't empathizing with the plight of the Jews, I was actually recognizing the song as Nino Rota's Theme from the Godfather. The next morning these curious Hasidim played the theme from Love Story.

Now maybe it so happened that, preparing to play something from Exodus or Fiddler on the Roof for a Purim party, these people of the Book had to end up buying the Great Movie Themes sheet music book, but sadly, I think I just live above band geeks.

* The French, being the French, elevate doughy peasant foodstuffs to high art. The croissant is both delightful and also a typical arrogant gesture, being a crescent moon fashioned out of dough, a historical FUCK YOU to their Islamic enemies. Or so I've heard. I'm waiting for a Parisian patisserie to give the world its first pastry based on the headscarf.

Del Shannon In The Balkans

That's Del Shannon! With Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra!

Del Shannon So Long Baby
Del Shannon Hey! Little Girl

There have been some very dark days in the global multi-cultural music racket. European stabs at mixing electronic production techniques with folk genres were, for many years, real earsores to anyone in spitting distance of a local cafe, or boutique hotel lobby. Waiting in line at your favourite Starbucks, anticipating starting your day with a nice venti and a wonderful scone, you were likely to be assaulted by a Gypsy Kings knockoff. And heading down to the cafe that, under close scrutiny, is actually just a front for International Development students honing their slam poetry skills? Manu Chao. Ick! (At their worst, you would be served by barista with dreadlocks and a scratchy scarf from an indigenous tribe in central America; at the best, a Pashmina Poetess who'll end up in law school). But there have been bright spots...

I went to a mixed-culture marriage during the height of the Balkan Wars in the 90's, as you can imagine, it was a pretty tense scene, especially after the bar opened up. And then, a couple of years ago, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with the break-up of the Yugoslavian republic. What remains is a desire to travel there, and a fondness for David Rieff and Balkan brass band music. That fondness for Balkan brass bands also contains within it a kernel of concern! A WHOLE KERNEL! And that concern is mostly that the cartoonish and delightful aspects of the genre aren't solely represented by Gogol Bordello, or TV Carnage bits with Slavs with weird body shapes wearing funny Communist-era nylon sweaters... So for any brass band members out there seeking, I propose that you and yours cover the above two Del Shannon songs, which in their structure and tempo would fit the brass band format, and give a little nod to middle America, or at least NPR.

Del Shannon, by the way, was awesome, not just a parent rock standard. Check out the above photo, with Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra!

ONB/NFB: Montreal By Night

Colette, a lonely cigarette girl who speaks Old Normandy French, out for a night out on the town. She wants to get married: she's in love. A cute little tale of miscegenation and outdoor checkers.

Use Ether To Subdue Robber

Pop Winds In Harmony

Montreal's newest Great White Hope for pop redemption, the Silly Kissers, will be launching their new 10" Precious Necklace this Friday in the definitely unromantic concrete-bunker of the Torn Curtain. Along for the ride will be Grimes (that's Claire Boucher, who just released a cassette of her own), and Pop Winds. I've already covered the Silly Kissers and Grimes, as well as the solo work of Sean Nicholas Savage in previous posts (here, here and here), so my focus right now is the trio Pop Winds, who seem to be cut from the same cloth as Air France, Lemonade, Tanlines as well as other Sincerely Yours groups: re-formatting Afro-Caribbean poly-rhythms for the less-than-temperate regions of the earth. As superficial as the sampling or adopting of these 'tropical riddims' might be, it's nothing to get your Bermuda shorts in a bunch about - it's pop music, and it rarely gets as lyrically distasteful as 10cc's Dreadlock Holiday or the Bill Wyman song I posted yesterday (Je Suis en Rock Star). If anything, the song that comes to my mind is Siouxsiee & The Banshees' Hong Kong Garden.

So yes, fine, there are the vocal acrobatics and loops of Animal Collective, and those rhythms, but the sentiments and songs are expressed through the production and composition techniques of two very much-maligned genres - 80's industrial and goth. Whereas the post-electric explorations of musicians of that time (Death in June, Current 93 et al.) led to them marching in the wilderness of a martial-pastoral folk almost anti-modernist in its adoption of acoustic instruments, Pop Winds are more comfortable with studio technology, and (in so far as I can tell) less inclined to fascist imagery. And yes, we have a saxophone. (Say what you will about the excesses of the sax-drenched 80's, there's a sonic place the instrument occupies that no other instrument can really move around in.)

It's appropriate that a lot of the lofts and re-appropriated workspaces that house these musicians and events are dank, ranging from the cavernous to the claustrophobic. It's the perfect place to dream of tropical escape in the middle of a bleak Montreal winter. If you're in Montreal, you can catch Kyle Bennett, Devon Welsh & Austin Milne of Pop Winds in just such a place this Friday.

UPDATE: Via Twitter, Pop Winds are recording a new full-length right now at Master Tone in Montreal.

Silly Kissers / Grimes / Pop Winds
DJ sets by Why? Alex Why? and Rough Shape.
Friday, February 19th at the Torn Curtain

Age Ain't Nothin' But A Number (& A Potential Felony)

"It's okay, I'm an artist."

Andre Williams Jail Bait
Billy Childish & The Buff Medways Just 15
Langley Schools Music Project You're Sixteen
Bill Wyman Si, Si Je Suis Un Rockstar
West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Eighteen Is Over The Hill
New Order Fine Time
Hayden Bad As They Seem
Steely Dan Hey Nineteen
Kate Bush The Infant Kiss

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any musician, in possession of a good fortune, is always in want of a too young wife. Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones made Mandy Smith his wife at age eighteen after having dated her for five years. (Two years later they were divorced.) At age 23, Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old first cousin, Myra Gale Brown.

It quickly becomes depressing cataloging the actual transgressions made by popular musicians against age taboos in the lifetime of good ol' rock n' roll, so let's discuss the age perversion within the music itself. (We'll leave out the rich vein of schoolgirl felony songs - far too many to list here.)

I don't think that Andre Williams, former pimp, coke dealer and man responsible for the christening of Lil' Stevie Wonder, regrets much in his life. Mostly, he regrets getting caught. And in Jailbait, he issues a stern warning to a chicken-hawking pal to mend his ways. Set to a vamping go-go beat, this is also a world-weary protest against what he sees as the terrible injustice inherent in jailbait cases: the bait goes free while you languish in jail.

In Just 15, Billy Childish takes his below-the-belt approach to romance below the level of acceptable taste by confessing his love for a fifteen year latch-key kid and vowing to fight her father, should the poor working man show up unexpectedly.

I don't know what sort of extremely tasteless behind-the-scenes record industry machinations caused Jerry Lee Lewis and Ringo Starr to duet on an updated version of Sweet Little Sixteen. Similar thinking must have been at work when Ringo recorded and popularized Johnny Burnette's You're Sixteen in 1973. In 1977, teacher Hans Fenger in Langley, British Columbia, had his students record a version for the Langley Schools Music Project. Given that the musicians on this recording were actually 16 or thereabouts, this is possibly the only age-appropriate version of this song ever recorded. Sung by a children's choir, it's either remarkably chaste and cute, or all sorts of wrong. You decide.

Bill Wyman's Seventeen is such a weird droning drum machine dreamscape about a jeans model/actress, that I didn't even want to bother putting it up. Si, Si Je Suis Un Rock Star is faaaaaaaar more interesting as a song: it's got an undeniable bouncy appeal (your parents heard it during their first and last vacation by themselves at Club Med after your birth*), and as a Rolling Stone, you wouldn't expect anything less from him than a confusing soup of self-aware paternalistic post-colonialist sexual imperialism set against a globe-trotting backdrop! Problematic! As the oldest Stone, Bill Wyman was tailor-made for this theme, thus even in this song, the line "They'll think I'm your dad and you're my daugh-ter!"

At their best, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band are an amusing example of turning oil fortunes into dreamy Californian psychedelic rock through the familiar process of bohemian slumming. At their worst, they are a pricey mistake made by this author when, back in the golden age of compact discs, he decided to shell out far too many clams for some self-indulgent pap re-issue that had Kim Fowley's paw-prints all over it. (Now that's a man who'd have something to say about age perversion and rock music!) Despite the astonishing title, I don't think Eighteen Is Over The Hill is a true age perversion song, as it as a lament for the lost beauty of a golden youth. Or something about narcissists wearing tin-foil hats.

When the the baritone-voiced club king of New Order's acid-house influenced 1988 single Fine Time muses that "You know I've met a lot of cool chicks / But I've never met a girl with all her own teeth" you know that this is not your typical tale of man and girl. It's the same skewered and twisted mixture of longing, humour and weird lyrical puns that makes New Order such a delight, or a bunch of pub-stool jokers in night-clubbing clothes.

Ontario's bearded troubadour Hayden (nee Paul Hayden Desser) goes to the well of age perversion in Bad As They Seem, only to (like New Order) draw from it water that runs deeper and more amusing than your average paean to Lolita. At first pining for a sixteen year old neighbour, Hayden soon turns his gaze to that sixteen year old's mother. Trapped working the same job from age fourteen and living in the same house until forty-three, a perpetual pubescent in Peter Pan purgatory lacking both the joys of childhood and the comforts of adult companionship. Aww...

In the world of popular music and rock n' roll, Steely Dan has always been noted, commended (and scorned) for the general maturity of their sensibility and humour. Admittedly this is a field with little competition. In Hey Nineteen, even the magic combination of expensive tequila and cocaine can't bridge the generation gap between a middle-aged Aretha Franklin fan and his teenage lover.

Of course, it takes Kate Bush to out-creep the rest of these notable perverse musicians with a nanny's tale of an infant kiss from those "lips that speak of adult love" in The Infant Kiss. That mischievous little boy, that predatory preschooler: "a man behind those eyes!"

* Did Dudley Moore ever do a third Arthur film after Arthur 2: On The Rocks? Was it set in the Caribbean? Cause y'know...

"You're so mature for your age."

Many thanks to Sean Michaels at the incomparable and long-standing mp3 blog powerhouse Said the Gramophone for the kind words. Do yourself a favour and keep tabs on his regular missives for the Guardian. And please, people: don't go in for any of that guilt by association stuff. In so far as I know, Mr. Michaels lives and loves within his age.

The images are from the late Eric Rohmer's great film, Claire's Knee.

Operation: Calypso!

Lord Kitchener Dr. Kitch
The Mighty Sparrow Yvonne Sorry Now

Okay, well...

On Friday evening, I stopped by a Dollar store on avenue du Parc - one of those places with a heavy fluorescent buzz and off-brand toys that seem funny until you realize that some poor kid with a single mother is wondering how he'll be able to pass off his underwater warriors from the Operation: Calypso line* ($1.25, includes action figurine and three bendable attack fish companions) as part of the GI: Joe universe. My mission was to find a mask, or some items with which to construct a mask for a party happening later.

And...

After poking around, I realized that masquerade parties only appeal to two constituencies: girls and drag queens (good thing for masquerades that the first constituency makes up 50% of the population). A guy would only actively participate in one to placate/impress a girl he's got his eye on. Maybe it's a whiff of Robespierrean French Revolutionary abhorrence at the mores and modes of the Ancien Regime that turns us off. Do you know any men who liked Sofia Coppola's Mario Antoinette, for example? Panned by critics, but adored by more than a number of women I can think of.

But...

Given that my current ladyfriend and Valentine wasn't even going to be at the party, it seemed all sorts of stupid to strap a piece of cardboard with cat whiskers around my face; to wear while making chit-chat with a production assistant wearing a beaked mask like the Knife, circa Silent Shout.

I haven't learned much in my six years as an Anglophone in Montreal (certainly not French!), but I have learned to mostly make nice. I think it was this spirit of going along with a culture not my own that made it seem plausible to me that I'd be peacock-strutting around a bar with a bunch of other fellow revelers in a goofy mask. Francophones recognize that Anglophones have some tired and embarrassing idee fixes, hang-ups and sacred cows that it's best not to harp on (middle names, getting married before procreating, monogamy, selling home-made jewelry on Etsy), just as Anglophones realize that, for the sake of cultural peace, it's best not to make fun of gymnasts in leotards and face-paint dancing around a giant egg to New Age music**. They're reasonably accommodating, and we're assimilating. Or at least keeping our mouth shut. But sometimes, before you're even aware, the spirit of assimilation has come over you, and you're engaged in some pseudo-minstrel show. Speaking of which, I think the Olympics have to be the longest running and most expensive minstrel show in history.***

So...

I ended up at Sparrow, talking about adult things like having children and watching a girl named after a Verdi opera carve a dancefloor of her own out of the middle of the room, soundtrack provided by former campus radio aficionado and current nice-guy Mitz Takahashi.

* I don't think that these toys had anything to do with the 1969 British invasion of the Anguillans in the Caribbean, but the thought that they could is amusing...

** To say little of the fact that most of our linguistic continental brethren will happily shell out hundreds of dollars to watch that spectacle when it shows up in Las Vegas.

*** I've had a real Saul to Paul on the road to Damascus moment after watching this video. The Separatists were right. Get me out of this stupid country.

I started writing this lengthy piece in mid-December about melancholy and dance music and the minor 7th, starting with Arthur Russell and working my way up to the Russell-esque stylings of Kelley Polar... I've tried to return to it a couple of times in the past couple of months, but I've always been defeated by it. Maybe if I'd spent more of my weekend mornings in the mid-90s coming down from designer chemicals, listening to The Orb's Pink Fluffy Clouds I'd be able to power through. All this to say that I've posted about it now, so I'll feel obligated to finish it in the next couple of days and post it.

Clubbable

The Har-You Percussion Group Welcome to the Party

You may be brilliant, of high position, inordinately wealthy; not one of these
things shall avail you aught if you are not clubbable.

Lewis Saul Benjamin

Michael Ondaatje, by Sheldon Grimson

Michael Ondaatje is the kind of author who'll eat an apple with a paring knife.

"Listen, Brahms, Hungarian Dance 1 in G Minor is great, but I gotta say, you don't look like much of a gypsy."

Orchestre Afrizam Kenga
Orchestre Afrizam Zebola

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the Awesome Tapes in Africa blog in a column in the Montreal Mirror, referring to it as "a tightly-wrapped gift from another globe-trotting trust fund brat." Naturally, the maligned blogger took the time to fire me off a feisty e-mail calling me names and proclaiming just how very un-trust-funded he was. In my defense, I thought it came across a little more tongue-in-cheek when I wrote than, well, now, when I read it.

Truthfully, I don't care if someone's parents kicks in cash to underwrite their aimless bohemian wanderings, and as for all of the arguments about the cultural politics of consumption and authenticity in music and appropriation? Well, I find them all incredibly tiring. I don't really have better things to do than read page upon page of music nerds trying to assuage a guilt that I guarantee they had to fortify with a whole lotta critical theory before it turned to shock n' outrage, but I like to think that I do. Zzzzzzzzzzz.

And all that time spent so that we can navigate some hierarchy of maligned cultures that's constantly in flux in order to properly understand, listen to and create music? If Vampire Weekend wasn't around, we'd all be listening to Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Riiiiiiiiight.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Orchestre Afrizam. These songs are from 20ème siècle Ike Ike, recorded around 1973 (or so). The songs are inspired by Congolese dances, Zébola and the Kwassa Kwassa. That's not entirely correct, as Zébola is a term that refers to an ailment (a woman is attacked and possessed by an evil spirit) and also a therapeutic treatment (the woman enters a trance, identifies the spirit and later completes a series of complicated dances. Having thus wooed the spirit, the spirit turns benevolent.) The silk-voiced crooner is Mr. Pepe Ndombe. Ghana and Nigeria tend to hog all of the attention when it comes to blogged Pan-African pop from the 60s and 70s, thanks in part to the continuing popularity of Fela Kuti and some highly-regarded and highly-recommended compilations that Soundways (like Ghana Soundz) put out a couple of years ago, but the Democratic Republic of Congo has a lot of very worthwhile stuff as well. (For example, Orchestre TP OK Jazz).

Three Maudlin Songs To Improve Your DJ Game

Blue Rodeo Lost Together
Neil Diamond Mr. Bojangles
Fleetwood Mac Hold Me

Ever since I saw the scene in Penelope Spheeris' classic LA punk cult film Suburbia where the management clears the room by playing some old time jazz, I've been convinced of the absolute necessity of playing a spectacular and fitting song at the end of a DJ gig. Something that speaks as much to the one night standers as it does to the sad and lonely single people nursing warm bottles of soapy ale. So, here goes, a couple of sure-fire that will elevate your from simple bar-room clearing to emotional catharsis.

I have a very distinct memory of playing Blue Rodeo's Lost Together as a closing song one night and watching a couple enact a theatrical slow-dance to it that would be best titled, "." A real snapshot of how the common people live and love." Our was a moody big lug of a guy, with a big mess of hair, a quiet demeanor, and a matching jean jacket and jeans. He looked like he could be in Blue Rodeo. His partner was a younger woman, dressed a little too trashy for her own good, and looking too aged for her age. Together, they moved, hands held, pushing apart and pulling back together, in a pantomime tinged with prairie pathos. It was a real moment of human feeling, made possible by Cancon regulations and the diminished expectations of the hardscrabble Canadian working class. (Authenticity's hard to come by in this post-modern era, so it's important to notice it and laugh silently at it when you can.)

Doesn't Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo sound like Neil Diamond? Blue Rodeo even has an album called Diamond Mine, which any close-reader worth his or her salt knows cleverly refers to Neil Diamond. And Neil Diamond has a song called Forever in Blue Jeans, which is about as close to a Blue Rodeo mission statement as I've ever read.

Mr. Bojangles. I bet when Sammy Davis Jr. performed Mr. Bojangles on German television, the audience wept and wept and wept. They wept because here it was, wasn't it? Proof of the victory of the American ideal over the hard-headed Teutonism that had driven them to wage war like the world had never seen before. And a sparky, petite, soft-shoed black Jew with one eye (just like Claus Shenk Graf von Stauffenberg!) was singing to them about a tap-dancing guy and his dead pet that he met in a jail in a formerly French city in the south of the United States! Man, that must have really let loose the floodgates. War guilt and silent shame and pet death.

As a parting shot, Fleetwood Mac's Hold Me is three minutes and forty-nine seconds of . If the other too suggestions are a touch too morose, Hold Me will let your revelers depart on a high note.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Berlin's Take My Breath Away, The Cars' Drive, and Leonard Cohen's Closing Time.

Karaoke & MURDER

Klaus Kinski? Why not?

It's a poorly kept secret in the Canadian music industry that Danko Jones is an angry man. (Danko Jones himself, is a poorly kept secret in the music industry, as well!) Jordan Robson-Cramer of Magic Weapon/Miracle Fortress/Sunset Rubdown has attested to Mr. Jones' hostility in interview, and the man wears his attitude like a single black glove. That is, foolishly, and mostly in a music video.

But could there be something more behind his angry man persona? Yes. It's because he comes from a culture where rage, homicidal impulses, a fuck-you attitude and Sinatra can all coalesce into cold-blooded murder, simply from some off-key warbling as a drunken crooner follows a bouncing yellow ball and sings "the record shows, I took the blows, and did it myyyyyyyyyyyy wayyyyyyyyyyy."

From Saturday's New York Times comes this story about The My Way Killings - incidences where a poor rendition of Frank Sinatra's classic My Way sparked enough anger to cause blood to be spilled, over six times fatally, to say nothing of times the violence was less-than fatal and unrecorded.

The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?

Thankfully, such extreme measures have yet to cross over to North America, which means that Steven Tyler (formerly) of Aerosmith can do bonkers-shit like show up to a karaoke night in Palm Springs to belt out a couple of songs while he's in rehab and not fear for his life.

Grouper

Grouper Heavy Water/I'd Rather Be Sleeping

Liz Harris of Portland, Oregon is Grouper and she specializes in atmospheric and ambient pop songs that best accompany an IV drip. This is from 2008's Dragging a Deer Up A Dead Hill.

Thums Up! Classic Bollywood Sights & Sounds In Montreal

Meri Haton Mein Nau Naw
from Chandni (1989)

Tomorrow is the first night for Thums Up, a Bollywood DJ night at the recently expanded Casa del Popolo. Since the demise of the Garam!Garam! monthly, which also focused on sounds of the subcontinent (with DJ Valeo (formerly Khiasma, of the Masala blog), I've had the opportunity to DJ some of my Bollywood favourites along with Rishi of phenomenal psych-pop outfit Elephant Stone. Having enjoyed it quite a bit and being given the opportunity to by Niki at Casa del Popolo, I jumped at the chance to do a Bollywood monthly.

As my tastes lean towards the Golden Age and pulpy 60s & 70s films, I'll most concentrate on Burman & Rafi-penned hits, unforgettable songs from playback queen Asha Bhosle, and forgotten gems from Bollywood's golden age, while we'll project some movies featuring the daring-do of matinee idols Amitabh Bachchan, Anil Kapoor, and Dharmendra.

There's more information on the Facebook event page.
Casa del Popolo - 4873 St. Laurent, Montreal, QC

New Lo-Fi Fnk Song & Video

Lo-Fi-Fnk Marchin' In

What was the last thing the Swedish twosome Lo-Fi FNK did? Want U from the Kitsune Compilation? God, that's ages ago. Well, I'm glad they're back. They leaked this song yesterday. With both this and a new Caribou track (which is about divorce, maybe?) released recently, 2010 is shaping up to be the proper successor to 2006 that 2007 never was.

The Yankee Dodge: Solvent Abuse & Diethyl Ether

from Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker

Dubri durnomu brat
Dity i durni hovoriat pravdu

Julianna Barwick Cloudbank
Julianna Barwick Bode
from Julianna Barwick's album Florine

I first heard about ether abuse during a youth group visit to, of all places, a Bible College. A couple of the students were repeating a campus legend about a bogeyman who used ether to subdue his young male victims before violating them in the preferred method of the citizens of the more memorable (and less hospitable) of the two cities, Sodom & Gomorrah. At the time, I remember it being, like most aspects of a bible college, at once antiquated, comical and fucking weird. Thinking back to the prairie roots of many of these students and their families, an ingrained fear and historical knowledge of ether abuse and lecherous family members makes more sense.* Evidencing a lack of imagination common to Bible College campuses, the midnight molester was known as Ether Man.

Hoffman's Drops were, for many years, Western Culture's greatest boon to ether imbibers - a daily fix in a flavoured lozenge. Called Hoffmanstrophen or Hoffman's Drops (or more formally, spiritus aethereus), the mixture of ether and alcohol was created by Freidrich Hoffman (or Fredericus Hoffmanus), a 17th and 18th century physician and chemist.

From their creator's hands, Hoffman's Drops bounce through Western History like narcotic karaoke balls - making an appearance in many works of literature, including Leo Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood & Youth and War & Peace, Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo and even Soren Kierkegaard's Sickness Unto Death. Louis XV preferred to mix it with a bit of sugar, and for Queen Victoria's Royal Consort, Prince Albert, it was his preferred sleeping aid. The Pragmatist philosopher William James reportedly drank it with his students. By the late 19th century, Hoffman's Drops were being used to treat everything from coughs to depression to vapours, and offered as a suitable alternative to alcohol by temperance lobbyists. (The lesson here seems to be that, whenever something is presented as a healthy alcohol alternative, it will be far unhealthier and get you way more fucked up.)

From such initial illustrious heights, Hoffman's Drops fell - becaming the equivalent of crystal meth - prairie fire. To the great number of Canada Ukrainians immigrants to Canada in the first part of the 20th century, upset at having traveled across the globe to find they were in a just as cold and unforgiving place as their homeland, cough drops were their only solace.

Several families who had moved from Stuartburn to Peace River in 1913 actually returned when they realized Hoffman's Drops were not available in the remote colony. Near Calder, Saskatchewan, in 1911, forty-eight bottles of Hoffman's Drops were consumed at a dance in several hours.

Ukrainians in Canada: The Formative Period, Orest T. Martynowych

As you can see, the depressed Slavs took to the drops with a relish that has made their reputation since. In so far as I can tell (and Wikipedia can tell me!), the only notable remaining population of ether lovers are the Lemkos**, a small group of ethnic Ukrainians who primarily reside in the Carpathian Mountains, and drink a kropka of ether along with either milk, orange juice, or water and sugar. As compared to simple spirits, the appeal of ether is in its rapid intake rate and the relative rapidity with which the effects wear off without a hangover, making it possible to get drunk multiple times throughout a day. The downside being that ether is highly flammable, making for some dangerous belching and memorable historic deaths.

This low earth music takes into itself each movement
of ether, grows and slims itself, and rings with light,
And rings the shrouded bell of night until it reaches
The meeting point of the Eternal and of Nothing

Bohdan Ihor Antonych

The poet Antonych, who died at the age of 27 in 1937, and who declared himself a "poet of spring intoxication," provides an early cultural touchstone for ether use amongst the Lemkos.

* Also, that the creator, Friedrich Hoffman, wrote a treatise on witchcraft De Potentia Diaboli in Corpore in 1703, which posited that one's receptivity to the Devil could be determined by a variety of factors, including sex, diet, age, and climate.

** "I have to congratulate the Lemkos," said Mr. Steforak, who came to the Vatra with his Lemko wife. "They keep together better than the Boykos or the Hutsuls."

READING QUESTIONS:
If Sodom gave us sodomy, what lost act of the Judeo-Christian sexual canon did Gomorrah give us? What of Admah & Zeboim?
When was the last recorded case of vapours? Is the female hysteria epidemic finally over?