I just need to post a link to the very best and smartest, yet pained rant I have read in a while. I appreciated the fire, yet felt shamed for my own state of wallow. If you go ahead and read it, keep watching Chris Hedges, he writes a lot of thought provoking material:
Retribution For A World Lost In Screens
I came across this via countercurrents, but it originated at:
Truthdigs
And my apologies for calling a desperate plea a "rant", but really, where are we but ranting at this point?
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Mad Max: The Classic and The Apocrypha
The other night my local popcorn house screened one of those holy of holies, 1979’s Mad Max. I live in a town of cinema lovers and a good twelve of us made the pilgrimage through the new climate’s perpetual rain to pay our respects to feverish visions of collapse. It was a glorious night of scratchy popping images and sound that rivals that of those doohickeys you hung off your car door at the drive-in.
Remember drive-ins: we loved our cars so very much we didn’t even want to get out of them when we went to the movies. That sentiment is significant to the version of Mad Max that got off the ground.
Mad Max opens with the cryptic words “A few years from now” printed on the screen as we pan back from the arches of a really dilapidated Halls Of Justice swaying in a drought plagued wind. With that we are introduced to a failing industrial town limping along in the early days of financial collapse. The town population idle about in diners and trailers, pretending the world is normal. It’s not unlike a scenario a “few years from now” where folk drink weak tea and wait patiently for the recession to end.
The film focuses on two kinds of disenfranchised youth. The first are marauding bands of unemployed young men who carouse and ride the roads on stolen gas. They are like ghosts who mime the things they knew from previous life: looping through endless commutes between town centres and distant factory jobs.
Because we have all studied a little sociology, we know things can’t go well from here. A society is in peril when it cannot employ its youth. Men without a function quickly regress into an aggressive antagonistic state, and men without paychecks cannot secure wives and even more quickly regress into leather pants, motorcycles and bizarre homoerotic theatrical rituals. I know it is true because I have seen it in Mad Max.
The other kind of disenfranchised youth, and I will say here, it takes a subtle film goers eye to differentiate them as they also parade about the highway in defiant leather using mayhem as a desperate stopgap to keep the immense despair of civilization’s collapse from pouring down onto them, are the local police. They recall Little Alex’s colleagues from A Clockwork Orange who trade in their gang colours for a civil servant paycheck(or at least a vehicle) in one of those professions that truly blossom when the shit hits the fan. See, if you had spent your vacations in South America, India or Russia instead of some disney resort island, you would already have a template for crumbling societies where the wealthy retract every limb they can and employ as much of the riffraff as possible as security enforcers to keep regular folk away from the canned tuna and the soda pop. Perhaps that is why the lead villain was named Toecutter—he sought to nibble away at the edges of what power remained.
You might be inclined, in these first few minutes, to think that perhaps you are about to watch a film about the last of the heroes holding civil society together and at bay from nefarious barbarous haters of law, order and good hygiene. But again, this is a film of subtlety and nuance—it’s not just guns and macked out cars. The action sequence that opens the film has virtually the entire town’s police force running down a villain until they kill him in a fiery explosion of overkill. We know he is a villain because we witness him . . . speeding. Not only does he speed, but he goes by a pseudonym(as only super villains do), The Night Rider, and he spouts nihilist poetry right into the radio. This is an instructive part of the film. If you are trying to hang tightly to the remnants of society, you don’t invest in schools or civic projects, you hammer down on the citizens who have nothing left to lose, the ones who've gone a little batshit because they were on the edges that fell apart first.
I won’t give away the rest of the film for those who haven’t seen it, but in between the Village People antics of the Last Police and some bizarrely idyllic moments of Max’s family life, we get to bear witness to the final crumblings of civilization, which of course open the doorways to the apocalypse and a spectacular film franchise.
It’s almost sad to note that George Miller had virtually no budget for his fantasy film and had to resort to filming reality. So, the dusty dying towns are real, the boarded up buildings are real, the deserted industrial plants are very real. Inadvertently, Mr. Miller struck a chord in the film goer by basically filming a documentary and punctuating it with exploding cars.
What is less familiar to people is his original script, the one before even his meagre financial backers got their sticky fingers into it.
George Miller was an emergency room doctor, that is to say the sort of person with an enormous will to work long and hard and face ugliness with optimism and determination. Not the sort of man who makes depressing end of the world films. I have it on good authority from the internet that his original script was much more uplifting.
In it, the film opens on the same scenario, only our cast responded differently.
Being the last formal social institution standing, and inspired by the same “the people need a hero” speeches that made it to the final cut, our heroes throw out the rules they knew from the dominant economy. They sell off most of the town’s cars and motorcycles to a nearby city that isn’t yet so badly degraded as the periphery. They cannibalize and sell off great chunks of the various industrial plants too. With the seed money, Max starts a horse ranch. Miller depicts him as the kind of visionary hero who invests for the long haul: Horses, of course are self-fuelling, self-reproducing labour and transportation machines that also manufacture fertilizer. Goose, in an inspired fit of pragmatism, uses his share of the seed money to start an ostrich farm. The hearty plains birds do well in the outback and provide a steady food supply to the town that the world forgot. Yes, in the original, we don’t have to watch vibrant life-affirming Goose get barbecued. Soon everyone is gainfully employed in the busy pursuit of keeping the community alive and well.
Initially, before they retire the last of the cars, they form road crews who, with pickaxes, tear up segments of the highways at intervals, to make their little oasis less inviting to those who would just pillage their way to the end. The recently unemployed chemical engineers from the plant immediately start repurposing the asphalt for more constructive uses.
The mechanical engineers, relieved from the odious and underemployed duty of keeping the cars running set themselves to building windmills and other equipment that can generate electricity from the surrounding environment. With very little formal education, many of the towns people get in on these endevours. It was to be filmed as a montage to BTO's "Taking Care Of Business"
The until now perpetually unemployed post grads from various humanities programs form the ambassador league and build ties with nomadic indigenous tribes who are developing a loose trading web with other towns. There is a glorious scene where, once the cancerous growth economy is abandoned, it becomes clear how easy it is to forge alliances with the aboriginals. Had it been filmed, the audience could have thrilled in the tension of watching tribes who might have essentially taken control of the economy as pedestrian railway barons--overseers of all trade, but instead form mutually beneficial trade schemes, as had been their wont for millennia.
the third act opens a year later and a majority of the biker gangs have come asking to trade labour for food and are accepted into the town and it turns out there was nothing especially villainous about them.
The final scenes, had they been filmed would undoubtedly have earned Mel an Oscar. George’s script was, even in this benevolent version, still called Mad Max. Just for very different reasons. The film was to close many years down the road. An aging Max has become one of the town story tellers. He entertains and educates the children with frightening tales of how things were before. He speaks of poisonous smoke billowing into the sky, of faceless men in the castles called “banks” who decreed when people could work, and whether they were allowed shelter. We, as the audience, can see his stories for what they are, cautionary tales, designed in a “lest we forget” fashion. There is a perversion of these scenes in the third Mad Max movie, so all was not lost.
The great ending warmth that was to bring the audience to tears comes from Max saying these are his tales of the Mad World that came before, and the children laugh merrily at Max, unable to believe any of his stories because they are just too far fetched, and they dub him “Mad Max”.
The screen fades with max looking up into the clear starlit sky with a never-lost relieved look. Wind turbines tilt lazily in the background, and just before the screen goes dark, we see the soft loving look of Max’s wife pushing some grey hair behind her ear as she watches the children cavorting about over top of Max in their glee.
Well, anyway, that version of the script never got made, but we still got a pretty nifty Mad Max Trilogy, revolving around violence and a lust for fuel. Pure fantasy, I know(it's not like the whole world will go to war over gas), but not every movie can be a social drama.
Remember drive-ins: we loved our cars so very much we didn’t even want to get out of them when we went to the movies. That sentiment is significant to the version of Mad Max that got off the ground.
Mad Max opens with the cryptic words “A few years from now” printed on the screen as we pan back from the arches of a really dilapidated Halls Of Justice swaying in a drought plagued wind. With that we are introduced to a failing industrial town limping along in the early days of financial collapse. The town population idle about in diners and trailers, pretending the world is normal. It’s not unlike a scenario a “few years from now” where folk drink weak tea and wait patiently for the recession to end.
The film focuses on two kinds of disenfranchised youth. The first are marauding bands of unemployed young men who carouse and ride the roads on stolen gas. They are like ghosts who mime the things they knew from previous life: looping through endless commutes between town centres and distant factory jobs.
Because we have all studied a little sociology, we know things can’t go well from here. A society is in peril when it cannot employ its youth. Men without a function quickly regress into an aggressive antagonistic state, and men without paychecks cannot secure wives and even more quickly regress into leather pants, motorcycles and bizarre homoerotic theatrical rituals. I know it is true because I have seen it in Mad Max.
The other kind of disenfranchised youth, and I will say here, it takes a subtle film goers eye to differentiate them as they also parade about the highway in defiant leather using mayhem as a desperate stopgap to keep the immense despair of civilization’s collapse from pouring down onto them, are the local police. They recall Little Alex’s colleagues from A Clockwork Orange who trade in their gang colours for a civil servant paycheck(or at least a vehicle) in one of those professions that truly blossom when the shit hits the fan. See, if you had spent your vacations in South America, India or Russia instead of some disney resort island, you would already have a template for crumbling societies where the wealthy retract every limb they can and employ as much of the riffraff as possible as security enforcers to keep regular folk away from the canned tuna and the soda pop. Perhaps that is why the lead villain was named Toecutter—he sought to nibble away at the edges of what power remained.
You might be inclined, in these first few minutes, to think that perhaps you are about to watch a film about the last of the heroes holding civil society together and at bay from nefarious barbarous haters of law, order and good hygiene. But again, this is a film of subtlety and nuance—it’s not just guns and macked out cars. The action sequence that opens the film has virtually the entire town’s police force running down a villain until they kill him in a fiery explosion of overkill. We know he is a villain because we witness him . . . speeding. Not only does he speed, but he goes by a pseudonym(as only super villains do), The Night Rider, and he spouts nihilist poetry right into the radio. This is an instructive part of the film. If you are trying to hang tightly to the remnants of society, you don’t invest in schools or civic projects, you hammer down on the citizens who have nothing left to lose, the ones who've gone a little batshit because they were on the edges that fell apart first.
I won’t give away the rest of the film for those who haven’t seen it, but in between the Village People antics of the Last Police and some bizarrely idyllic moments of Max’s family life, we get to bear witness to the final crumblings of civilization, which of course open the doorways to the apocalypse and a spectacular film franchise.
It’s almost sad to note that George Miller had virtually no budget for his fantasy film and had to resort to filming reality. So, the dusty dying towns are real, the boarded up buildings are real, the deserted industrial plants are very real. Inadvertently, Mr. Miller struck a chord in the film goer by basically filming a documentary and punctuating it with exploding cars.
What is less familiar to people is his original script, the one before even his meagre financial backers got their sticky fingers into it.
George Miller was an emergency room doctor, that is to say the sort of person with an enormous will to work long and hard and face ugliness with optimism and determination. Not the sort of man who makes depressing end of the world films. I have it on good authority from the internet that his original script was much more uplifting.
In it, the film opens on the same scenario, only our cast responded differently.
Being the last formal social institution standing, and inspired by the same “the people need a hero” speeches that made it to the final cut, our heroes throw out the rules they knew from the dominant economy. They sell off most of the town’s cars and motorcycles to a nearby city that isn’t yet so badly degraded as the periphery. They cannibalize and sell off great chunks of the various industrial plants too. With the seed money, Max starts a horse ranch. Miller depicts him as the kind of visionary hero who invests for the long haul: Horses, of course are self-fuelling, self-reproducing labour and transportation machines that also manufacture fertilizer. Goose, in an inspired fit of pragmatism, uses his share of the seed money to start an ostrich farm. The hearty plains birds do well in the outback and provide a steady food supply to the town that the world forgot. Yes, in the original, we don’t have to watch vibrant life-affirming Goose get barbecued. Soon everyone is gainfully employed in the busy pursuit of keeping the community alive and well.
Initially, before they retire the last of the cars, they form road crews who, with pickaxes, tear up segments of the highways at intervals, to make their little oasis less inviting to those who would just pillage their way to the end. The recently unemployed chemical engineers from the plant immediately start repurposing the asphalt for more constructive uses.
The mechanical engineers, relieved from the odious and underemployed duty of keeping the cars running set themselves to building windmills and other equipment that can generate electricity from the surrounding environment. With very little formal education, many of the towns people get in on these endevours. It was to be filmed as a montage to BTO's "Taking Care Of Business"
The until now perpetually unemployed post grads from various humanities programs form the ambassador league and build ties with nomadic indigenous tribes who are developing a loose trading web with other towns. There is a glorious scene where, once the cancerous growth economy is abandoned, it becomes clear how easy it is to forge alliances with the aboriginals. Had it been filmed, the audience could have thrilled in the tension of watching tribes who might have essentially taken control of the economy as pedestrian railway barons--overseers of all trade, but instead form mutually beneficial trade schemes, as had been their wont for millennia.
the third act opens a year later and a majority of the biker gangs have come asking to trade labour for food and are accepted into the town and it turns out there was nothing especially villainous about them.
The final scenes, had they been filmed would undoubtedly have earned Mel an Oscar. George’s script was, even in this benevolent version, still called Mad Max. Just for very different reasons. The film was to close many years down the road. An aging Max has become one of the town story tellers. He entertains and educates the children with frightening tales of how things were before. He speaks of poisonous smoke billowing into the sky, of faceless men in the castles called “banks” who decreed when people could work, and whether they were allowed shelter. We, as the audience, can see his stories for what they are, cautionary tales, designed in a “lest we forget” fashion. There is a perversion of these scenes in the third Mad Max movie, so all was not lost.
The great ending warmth that was to bring the audience to tears comes from Max saying these are his tales of the Mad World that came before, and the children laugh merrily at Max, unable to believe any of his stories because they are just too far fetched, and they dub him “Mad Max”.
The screen fades with max looking up into the clear starlit sky with a never-lost relieved look. Wind turbines tilt lazily in the background, and just before the screen goes dark, we see the soft loving look of Max’s wife pushing some grey hair behind her ear as she watches the children cavorting about over top of Max in their glee.
Well, anyway, that version of the script never got made, but we still got a pretty nifty Mad Max Trilogy, revolving around violence and a lust for fuel. Pure fantasy, I know(it's not like the whole world will go to war over gas), but not every movie can be a social drama.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Happy Canada Day
Youtube video of peaceful protest in Toronto.
Link: Peaceful protest of G20 in Toronto
Not that long ago footage like this would have cause outrage and public outcry from regular run of the mill Canadians. Now, we are willing to spend a billion dollars to make it happen. The outcome: no new tax for banks, and cut the fuck out of social spending. They should be so lucky the protesting was as peaceful as it was.
Welcome to the middle ages with cell phones.
Link: Peaceful protest of G20 in Toronto
Not that long ago footage like this would have cause outrage and public outcry from regular run of the mill Canadians. Now, we are willing to spend a billion dollars to make it happen. The outcome: no new tax for banks, and cut the fuck out of social spending. They should be so lucky the protesting was as peaceful as it was.
Welcome to the middle ages with cell phones.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things (in no particular order)
A long while back, a fellow blogger sent me an award that came with an entreaty to list fave blogs and fave things. I never got round to that, being busy with school and other favourite things. So fave blogs is still coming some dry day down the pipeline. But, here are a few of my favourite things.
1. 1912 Wilson Upright Piano. I once owned a piano. My at-the-time-wife and I found it in a burnt down house. I was up for just hauling it off, but she felt we were reformed from youthful shenanigans and contacted the realtor and the owners, who said have at it. Sadly, it had belonged to the man of the house who perished in the fire, and his kids didn’t want it. It was undamaged, sitting like an angel in the charred mess, with a bench full of songbooks, and sounded beautiful even before it was tuned. I took piano lessons and mauled the keys until my teacher, retracting his earlier statement that anyone could learn, told me to find a new hobby. I loved plinking it anyway. My infant daughter played at least as well as me. Oddly enough, it was the same year we found a violin in an apt we moved into. Good year for musical discord.
2. Cow’s Milk. We(milk and i) are currently enduring a separation, but my whole life, nothing has brought me the kind of comfort, joy and nutrition as milk has. Chocolate cake is pretty nice, but there isn’t really any reason to have it if you can’t wash it down with milk. Incidentally, I spent many years languishing in illicit substances, and without milk—the only thing I digested in a consistent and satisfactory way--I may well have died from malnutrition. So, without milk, I would have missed out on some of the weirder adventures in my life, as well as some of the more mundane times as well.
3. Jazz. Does anything need to be said? If I can’t have Jazz, I am packing up my toys and leaving the sandbox. And by sandbox, I mean life. When life is great, jazz is a perfect soundtrack to accompany it. When life is so terrible that you want to erase yourself so as not to make others uncomfortable, jazz is a survival tool. Jazz is everything. Too hot in the summer, throw some jazz on. Blue over a girl, throw some jazz on. Ace your finals and celebrating, throw some jazz on. Baby won’t sleep, throw some jazz on. John Coltrane's take on the song Favorite Things is definitely one of my favorite things. There’s a song in Grease, “Grease is the Word”. In highschool, someone told me it was the greatest song ever because you could substitute any word for grease and have a spiritual epiphany about life. Well, jazz is the word(preferably with milk).
4. My Sense Of Smell. I'm a heavy smoker, and by all accounts my nose should just be an ornament in the middle of my face(thank god it isn’t just that, as it is a big lumpy nose). But I have a hyper keen sense of smell. This sucks sometimes, when your passing that hepcat who fell into the vat of Old Spice, but more often, I have enjoyed the complex nuances I get out of life, from the smell of trees, foods, fabrics, papers, people. True, I pray for the death of the automobile which tries to commandeer the entire realm of smell. But, the smell of tomato stems, baby scalp, cumin, grapefruit, or a woman on a hot summer day, make all the grunge worthwhile. Perhaps my nose is even defective. When it rains, I would swear the wet apshault smells like corn husks.
5. Water. I can’t swim to save my life. Seriously, when I took swim lessons, I barely managed the dog paddle and turned treading water into the decathlon. And skinny as I was, I sunk instead of floating. I don’t go anywhere near bodies of water without a lifejacket. And why knock lifejackets, you can float at peace in any lake or ocean with them. But I have spent more time in the bath tub than some people do at work or in their marriages. I'm a music lover, and being in water is like making a song happen in your head. I believe, when I am told, that once, we crawled out of water. That water love is even before thinking of how nothing tastes better than water if your pale Scottish ass has been cooking in the sun, or you are recovering from a night of debauchery, or worse, both.
6. Opera. Some folk are middle of the road, some folk are extreme. Unfortunately, I fall under extreme. My moods are so volatile, I can’t actually keep up or keep track. Luckily I have opera to help out. I put some Verdi, or some Wagner, or some Strauss, or even some Glass on, and lo and behold, it tunes me in. Sometimes I need to cry, or I need to get angry, or I just need to fully grasp the holiness of sunrise, and opera guides me. If you don’t get opera, you are just taking up space in my sandbox.
7. Animation. I don’t know what to say here. Fleischer, Lantz, Disney. Rene Laloux, Ralph Bakshi. Japanime. Cheap Saturday morning animation from the 80’s. Love. Love. Pixar, Dreamworks. Love. Indie flash cartoons on the internet. Love. Much of life is tedious. Much of it is sad, often out of your control, sometimes sad of your own making. Animation is always there to help you on your way. As much as I love film, it is a pale substitute for animation. And I will go out back to share a can of whupp-ass with anyone who disagrees.
8. Curry. I’ve done a lot of mushrooms, and taken a lot of acid, but nothing takes you on a trip like curry. Some of the best dinner parties I either threw or attended were debauched in curry. My best personal recipes grew out of the local Indian food store. Sometimes, in the excesses of youth, my friends and I would boldly combine curry with the music of Klaus Schulze or early Tangerine Dream. We would gorge ourselves and leave orange peels strewn about and then float around the room on fire with the best spices, soundtracked by space music. To this day, when I get a dinner wish, I can’t ever diverge from Saag Paneer. It’s mostly spinach and bland cheese, but again, I'll duel defending it. I once had an exterminator swear to me that it was curry that attracted cockroaches. My only answer was, those little fucks have been around alot longer than us, maybe they are onto something.
9. Beer. Ahh, what needs be said. The great peaks in my life, and some of the dankest most regrettable moments are accompanied by beer. The best treatise on the fermented beverage was written by Jack London, simply titled, “John Barleycorn”. It details the heights and wells of that most Canadian of beverages. For all the ill, have you ever spent a long day in 30 degree temperatures painting a fence and then cracked open a beer in the fading light?
10. Books. Jeeze, that`s pretty vague, isn`t it? children’s books of faerie and myth. Scif-fi escapism. Political analysis. Physics. Biology. 19th century Russian literature, beat lit. Satire. Graphic novels. Psychology. Norwegian pastoral novels. Anthropology. Disdainful French lit. Pagan studies. History. Indulgent Canadian Literature. Philosophy. Grease thought grease was the word, but the word is the word. If it gots words, ahs a in. It really is a toss up for me which I would survive longer, a drought of water, or a drought of books.
11. Dogs. Everyone who doesn’t love dogs to death, raise your hands. OK, good, now get the fuck out of my sandbox. Dogs and humans have been living together and relying on each other for at least 40 000 years. Some people deride them for their slavish devotion to us, but you have to remember how slavishly devoted we are to them also. They protect us, they hear and smell for us. And we feed them and caress them far more than we ever do another human. They will always come and nuzzle you and offer companionship when you have been a complete ass and alienated everyone else from your life. And they understand the important things: food, frolic, fucking, and sleep. We could learn from our dogs: Live large and hard and bury your nose when you have been bad, and when all else fails, nap.
I have other favourite things, things that keep me going, but that is a basic list. Don’t ask me for the blog list, I read too much to narrow down a list.
1. 1912 Wilson Upright Piano. I once owned a piano. My at-the-time-wife and I found it in a burnt down house. I was up for just hauling it off, but she felt we were reformed from youthful shenanigans and contacted the realtor and the owners, who said have at it. Sadly, it had belonged to the man of the house who perished in the fire, and his kids didn’t want it. It was undamaged, sitting like an angel in the charred mess, with a bench full of songbooks, and sounded beautiful even before it was tuned. I took piano lessons and mauled the keys until my teacher, retracting his earlier statement that anyone could learn, told me to find a new hobby. I loved plinking it anyway. My infant daughter played at least as well as me. Oddly enough, it was the same year we found a violin in an apt we moved into. Good year for musical discord.
2. Cow’s Milk. We(milk and i) are currently enduring a separation, but my whole life, nothing has brought me the kind of comfort, joy and nutrition as milk has. Chocolate cake is pretty nice, but there isn’t really any reason to have it if you can’t wash it down with milk. Incidentally, I spent many years languishing in illicit substances, and without milk—the only thing I digested in a consistent and satisfactory way--I may well have died from malnutrition. So, without milk, I would have missed out on some of the weirder adventures in my life, as well as some of the more mundane times as well.
3. Jazz. Does anything need to be said? If I can’t have Jazz, I am packing up my toys and leaving the sandbox. And by sandbox, I mean life. When life is great, jazz is a perfect soundtrack to accompany it. When life is so terrible that you want to erase yourself so as not to make others uncomfortable, jazz is a survival tool. Jazz is everything. Too hot in the summer, throw some jazz on. Blue over a girl, throw some jazz on. Ace your finals and celebrating, throw some jazz on. Baby won’t sleep, throw some jazz on. John Coltrane's take on the song Favorite Things is definitely one of my favorite things. There’s a song in Grease, “Grease is the Word”. In highschool, someone told me it was the greatest song ever because you could substitute any word for grease and have a spiritual epiphany about life. Well, jazz is the word(preferably with milk).
4. My Sense Of Smell. I'm a heavy smoker, and by all accounts my nose should just be an ornament in the middle of my face(thank god it isn’t just that, as it is a big lumpy nose). But I have a hyper keen sense of smell. This sucks sometimes, when your passing that hepcat who fell into the vat of Old Spice, but more often, I have enjoyed the complex nuances I get out of life, from the smell of trees, foods, fabrics, papers, people. True, I pray for the death of the automobile which tries to commandeer the entire realm of smell. But, the smell of tomato stems, baby scalp, cumin, grapefruit, or a woman on a hot summer day, make all the grunge worthwhile. Perhaps my nose is even defective. When it rains, I would swear the wet apshault smells like corn husks.
5. Water. I can’t swim to save my life. Seriously, when I took swim lessons, I barely managed the dog paddle and turned treading water into the decathlon. And skinny as I was, I sunk instead of floating. I don’t go anywhere near bodies of water without a lifejacket. And why knock lifejackets, you can float at peace in any lake or ocean with them. But I have spent more time in the bath tub than some people do at work or in their marriages. I'm a music lover, and being in water is like making a song happen in your head. I believe, when I am told, that once, we crawled out of water. That water love is even before thinking of how nothing tastes better than water if your pale Scottish ass has been cooking in the sun, or you are recovering from a night of debauchery, or worse, both.
6. Opera. Some folk are middle of the road, some folk are extreme. Unfortunately, I fall under extreme. My moods are so volatile, I can’t actually keep up or keep track. Luckily I have opera to help out. I put some Verdi, or some Wagner, or some Strauss, or even some Glass on, and lo and behold, it tunes me in. Sometimes I need to cry, or I need to get angry, or I just need to fully grasp the holiness of sunrise, and opera guides me. If you don’t get opera, you are just taking up space in my sandbox.
7. Animation. I don’t know what to say here. Fleischer, Lantz, Disney. Rene Laloux, Ralph Bakshi. Japanime. Cheap Saturday morning animation from the 80’s. Love. Love. Pixar, Dreamworks. Love. Indie flash cartoons on the internet. Love. Much of life is tedious. Much of it is sad, often out of your control, sometimes sad of your own making. Animation is always there to help you on your way. As much as I love film, it is a pale substitute for animation. And I will go out back to share a can of whupp-ass with anyone who disagrees.
8. Curry. I’ve done a lot of mushrooms, and taken a lot of acid, but nothing takes you on a trip like curry. Some of the best dinner parties I either threw or attended were debauched in curry. My best personal recipes grew out of the local Indian food store. Sometimes, in the excesses of youth, my friends and I would boldly combine curry with the music of Klaus Schulze or early Tangerine Dream. We would gorge ourselves and leave orange peels strewn about and then float around the room on fire with the best spices, soundtracked by space music. To this day, when I get a dinner wish, I can’t ever diverge from Saag Paneer. It’s mostly spinach and bland cheese, but again, I'll duel defending it. I once had an exterminator swear to me that it was curry that attracted cockroaches. My only answer was, those little fucks have been around alot longer than us, maybe they are onto something.
9. Beer. Ahh, what needs be said. The great peaks in my life, and some of the dankest most regrettable moments are accompanied by beer. The best treatise on the fermented beverage was written by Jack London, simply titled, “John Barleycorn”. It details the heights and wells of that most Canadian of beverages. For all the ill, have you ever spent a long day in 30 degree temperatures painting a fence and then cracked open a beer in the fading light?
10. Books. Jeeze, that`s pretty vague, isn`t it? children’s books of faerie and myth. Scif-fi escapism. Political analysis. Physics. Biology. 19th century Russian literature, beat lit. Satire. Graphic novels. Psychology. Norwegian pastoral novels. Anthropology. Disdainful French lit. Pagan studies. History. Indulgent Canadian Literature. Philosophy. Grease thought grease was the word, but the word is the word. If it gots words, ahs a in. It really is a toss up for me which I would survive longer, a drought of water, or a drought of books.
11. Dogs. Everyone who doesn’t love dogs to death, raise your hands. OK, good, now get the fuck out of my sandbox. Dogs and humans have been living together and relying on each other for at least 40 000 years. Some people deride them for their slavish devotion to us, but you have to remember how slavishly devoted we are to them also. They protect us, they hear and smell for us. And we feed them and caress them far more than we ever do another human. They will always come and nuzzle you and offer companionship when you have been a complete ass and alienated everyone else from your life. And they understand the important things: food, frolic, fucking, and sleep. We could learn from our dogs: Live large and hard and bury your nose when you have been bad, and when all else fails, nap.
I have other favourite things, things that keep me going, but that is a basic list. Don’t ask me for the blog list, I read too much to narrow down a list.
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