Leap In The Dark

It's always been said that the hardest form or genre of writing to create is comedy. Suspense, thrillers, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and just your everyday novels are all a walk in the park compared to trying to write something that will make people laugh from beginning to end. What increases the difficulty is that you also have to create an interesting story to go along with the comedy, or else things get very boring very fast.

The ones who are able to accomplish this best are usually the satirists because they have a point in mind beyond making you laugh. If the writer's sole intent is to be funny or even if being funny shares equal billing with plot, characterization, and all those other things that serious novelists consider important, the result is that the things that make a novel a novel (plot, characterization, and all those other things that serious novelists consider important) suffers accordingly.

So its very serious business when an author sets out to write a funny novel. He or she, as the case maybe depending on the gender of the novelist, has to decide how they are going to make it funny. Are the characters going to be funny people doing funny things in a funny world? Or is the novelist going to "play it straight" (which has nothing to do with sexual orientation, and doesn't preclude having gay characters) where things are funny because of what happens to those involved and not because of whom they are.

This is one of the things that I would think that makes comedy so hard to write, all the pre-planning that must be involved. Everything you write has to contribute to the "funnyness" of the final result as well as make the story click along. The last thing you want is someone laughing at your story because it's fallen ass over teakettle off of its plot line with all the aplomb of someone falling off their six inch stiletto heels. (Hence the story line clicking along bit – think about it)

Don't think for a moment that those asshole reviewers aren't all waiting out there for you to do just that – they'll sharpen their pens and fill them with that special spite ink they save for just such an occasion and slap you about with so much backhanded praise you'll be bruised for joy and wish they'd have had the honesty to say they thought it sucked as a novel, not said stuff like quite a lot of really funny bits tied together with a flimsy excuse of a plot so that even more funny bits could be written.

If some effete long haired critic said something like that about a book I wrote I'd want to track him down (a woman is naturally effete so she wouldn't be described as long haired and effete in quite that derogatory a manner) and snap his pencil neck and then gouge his beady little eyes our with the sharp bits left over from snapping his neck. Perhaps a little over the top, but worth it in a sort of statement making, boy that really pissed me off, kind of way that will prevent you from becoming a real danger to society.

So what does all this have to do with the price of eggs and Robert Rankin's latest book The Toyminator. Surprisingly enough quite a bit for both, but you'll have to read the latter to understand the former – suffice to say that chickens coming home to roost is something to keep in mind when reading the book. (I'm less certain about "all your eggs in one basket" or "Do chickens have lips?" but what's good for the goose is good for the gander and it doesn't do to preclude anything, but I won't be cowed into giving more of the plot away then necessary for the review)

Mr. Rankin's premise of a land where toys, Toy City, (formally Toy Town Land but with population explosions, and the birth of industry Toy City just naturally evolved) walk, talk and go about their daily business just as humans do in a world very similar to ours except with the one obvious difference, the toys are alive. They are still toys in that some need to be wound up with a key periodically or they run down, or they have expressions painted on their tin faces permanently, (which is actually kind of sick when you think about it, so don't) or they are known by what their function is.

For example it’s the twelve wind-up-cymbal-playing monkeys who are the first victims of the mysterious series of murders that begin to plague Toy City, where not only are the corpses dead (obviously) but they are hollow. As if their very essences have been sucked out of them by, by, well if the police knew the answer to that question they probably would have solved the case already and wouldn't have needed to enlist the help of Eddie Bear and his buddy Jack.

Eddie and Jack (Jack is actually a meathead – human – used to go with a girl named Jill but it ended badly and he's had little to do with the humans who live in Toy City anymore) have recently re opened their old detective agency as a means to keep body and soul together. Which makes it very ironic that their first case turns out to be along those very lines – find out whose stealing the souls of all the toys in Toy City before they all turn into dust.

Together they face challenges (you try drinking a beer without opposable thumbs) deal with moral issues (is it gross for Jack to be thinking of going all the way with his dolly girl friend) and face the terrible dilemma of whether or not to shoot themselves as they see them fleeing the scene of a crime. Aside from the hell that plays on pronouns it does offer a solution to what has been happening to the murder victims: they are being replaced by doubles.

Of course knowing what's going on is only the first step, finding out who, why, where, and how will take up the rest of the book and a good number of the pages that you'll find yourself reading. Those pages will include a trip into the world of men for Eddie and Jack, a very bizarre car chase through the streets of Los Angeles, and an equally bizarre bombing raid on Toy City.

The problem lies in the pages you might find yourself not wanting to read. Sometimes the joke, the premise of the toys being alive and the ensuing circumstances, begins to wear a little thin, and the plot isn't quite sufficient to sustain the humour. Some of the sub-plots and jokes are a little thin – the poking fun of cop movie clichés in the scenes with the human police in Los Angeles, and the injection of other movie clichés in other scenes becomes tiring.

What's disappointing about those and some of the other less inspired moments is that they seem such a let down from what Mr. Rankin has been able to establish. He has an obviously brilliant sense of irony and a vivid imagination, that when his attacks on clichés become clichéd themselves the drop off in quality is a lot further than it would be for a lesser writer.

He appears to have fallen into the trap of obtaining the laugh becoming more important than the story, and when that happens the quality of both the humour and the novel depreciate. The Toyminator has all the potential for being a classic piece of humour and satire, but Mr. Rankin too often is tempted by the lure of the easy laugh and occasionally becomes exactly what he is making fun of.

There are a number of quite hysterical moments in the book, but the further you go into the book the more it begins to sound like an excuse for a series of one liners. Like I said at the onset of this review, comedy is exceptionally difficult to write and while I believe Mr. Rankin shows that he is capable of doing it successfully in places and that only increases the disappointment when he fails to deliver.

The Toyminator is a funny book, that could have been even funnier if Mr. Rankin hadn't opted for the easy laugh with such frequency. I hope he brings back his cast of characters for another go round, but lets them dictate more of the story. Then he could have a work of real comic genius on his hands.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:46 AM | Permalink

I'm sure you've all met old farts who tell you "ah that's not how I remember it being" when they see or hear something celebrating a time they lived through. The problem for people like me who talk like that was there's never been any proof that the eighties weren't all Duran Duran and bad synthesiser music sung by guys with hair hanging down in their eyes and posh public school accents.

But now our heart's pain can be eased and we can stand up proudly and exclaim, "You see, this is what is was like, this is what I was doing on Friday and Saturday nights through the early eighties" The good folk at MVD Video have released a disc that is sure to have you caught between happy reminiscence and amazement that you came through the times unscathed and your hearing relatively intact.

Bad Brains Live At CBGB 1982 won't make you all warm and fuzzy inside from sentimental nostalgia but it will make you feel like you can trust your memories again as compared to what corporate music wants people to think was happening in the eighties. Of course I doubt if Bad Brains ever intended to be warm and fuzzy or were considered music by the Industry. They would have been more apt to cause the machine to blow a gasket than be a cog in the smooth running of its operation.

First of all, who'd ever heard of a thrash hardcore punk band made up of four Rastafarians? Then again who'd ever heard of a thrash hardcore band that would play a reggae tune extolling the virtues of Jah every fourth or fifth song, then go right back into speed rock that makes Anthrax look like a stroll in the park? Even the music industry isn't that tolerant of people's drug habits and any A+R guy walking into corporate headquarters trying to sell his bosses on a band with that description would have been shown the door as being dangerously unstable.

Which was the point after all. You were peeled back to raw emotion at one of those concerts. So much raw energy confined in a small bar area makes it pretty damn hard to think rationally. If you had spent three nights, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day crammed into CBGBs for a hard core festival headlined by the Bad Brains you'd probably end up looking seriously fucked up, down, over, and sideways.

Not the best way to show up at a big shinny, glass and metal, office building where you're trying to scale the ladder of corporate music America. Especially back in the early eighties when the first whiffs of what it meant to be under the thumb of Ronald and Nancy was just making itself felt. There was no room in Fortress Amerika for that kind of behaviour anymore.

Everything was being buttoned down under suits and ties and swept under carpets. That oh so brief burgeoning of musical freedom and anarchistic energy that marked what really frightened the straight and narrow about Rock and Roll was being brought to heel again. With nothing to sustain it's initial outburst the vitality that burst out in the 1970's in small pockets in New York City, London, and a few other major metropolitan areas, burnt into ashes from which no Phoenix would ever arise.

Back to the concert DVD, over those three days Bad Brains played around four hours of music and from those hours have been culled the footage that's made it onto disc. Absolute chaos has been crammed into 60 minutes of screen time. Walk into the room where this is being played unaware of what is being watched and you could be forgiven for thinking that it's outtakes of either a Jerry Springer show gone bad, or footage of a riot.

But then you notice how a clear space is formed around the man with the microphone and the bodies recede like an ebb tide as he begins to sing. Whenever each song begins the crowd (young males) swarm on stage and fling themselves with abandon into, onto, and over each other. Chaos you think; but watch carefully and see them pick up the microphone stand each time its knocked over, give another person a hand up, and responding to some unseen signal magically vanish from the stage when the vocalist steps forward to screech, err sing.

What I remember and what I see is a complete absence of violence. Not once when I was in those bars did I ever have fear of being an intentional victim (unintentional yes, accidents do happen) of someone's anger or drunken rage. Not like today where I refuse to go into the bars where at least one fight every weekend in my small city's bar district seems to result from the music and atmosphere.

The Bad Brains appear to be a reggae band; what else would you call four dreadlocked men who have a "Lion of Judah"(referring to Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie) sticker affixed to their bass drum? So when they wind up and hit you with the power of hard-core thrash and the lead vocalist screams an incomprehensible stream of raw energy passing for lyrics, the shock of appearances being misleading is pretty severe.

But where their real talent shines through is the fact that every fifth song or so, they play a reggae tune. I'm not a musician, but I've watched enough of them play over the years to see them have difficulty adjusting in mid-gig from playing at one tempo to another one. Whenever they've switched from a high speed to a slower beat they will invariably have accelerated by the end of the song.

But not Bad Brains, they are able to catch their breath and step into a completely different groove barely missing a beat. From the bassist and the drummer to the lead guitar player and the vocalist, they sound like they've been playing reggae all night long. Even looking at the audience you couldn't tell; guys who had one moment been pogoing away, happily flailing limbs in all directions, are now standing docilely by the stage rocking back and forth to the reggae beat.

That in itself is a testament to the band's abilities, to be able to exert that much control over your audience that they can be brought from a high pitched frenzy down to calm almost instantaneously shows their impact as performers. Some of that is of course lost on the transition from live show to tape, but moments like those help to illustrate it.

If you go into watching this expecting incredible sound and visuals, well you're at the wrong end of the decade to start with, and the wrong side of the music business to end with. There were exactly two cameras filming this and the sound was probably what they could get from the mixing board at the club. The fact that the sound has any clarity at all is absolutely amazing considering the atmosphere in the club and the attendant ambient noise.

Wisely, I think, the version I saw in stereo (there is a 5.1 surround option but I live in an apartment and didn't think a sub-woofer for this disc would have been fair to the guy living below me) edited out most of the club's noise and focused on the playback of the band only. In fact the sound was good enough that even amid the noise of thrash I could hear each instrument distinctly enough to tell that these guys knew how to play. When they slowed down for the reggae the sounds quality was confirmed, with it's lack of distortions and only the occasional feedback that used to plague club shows in the early eighties.

What I especially appreciated about the camera work was they made no attempt to change the event to suit the shot. There would be shots of the vocalist through a maze of thrashing legs and arms as he was singing in his small oasis of calm. Occasionally he would retreat to the high ground of the drum riser and we would all sit back and watch the stage become a seething mass of bodies.

Instead of trying to pick out individuals in the heaving mess the cameras would zoom right in so all that you'd see would be unconnected arms, legs, feet, and hands flailing on the screen in front of you. It was one of the best visualizations of a mosh pit dance scene that I've seen on screen, because it wasn't staged.

There is a short interview section with some fans in the extra bits, which doesn't amount to much, save for one excerpt where a guy is trying to describe what it's like to completely abandon yourself to the music. He can't articulate it completely, but you can see in his eyes how much it means to him, and that's what matters.

For those of you used to the highly choreographed posturing of rap stars, and their pretence of threat, or the fake sexuality of Brittany Spears and her ilk, the raw unbridled dancing of the mosh pit must have looked like violence. Forget the mosh pits they have now at the mega concerts where you'll be shot if you get within a yard of the stage, they have as little in common with the one at CBGB's that night as Brittany does with Patti Smith. With no real connection to the music, there is no point in them except the testosterone-induced one-upmanship that can produce violence.

I know I sound like the typical old fart saying that's not the way it was when I was young, but at least I'm not saying you have it better. As far as I'm concerned we had it far better then you'll ever have. Watch the DVD Bad Brains Live AT CBGB 1982 and you might get what I'm talking about. But be careful, it's been know to induce independent thinking.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:32 AM | Permalink

"You can't live in the past".

"Time heals all wounds".

"It's time to get on with your life."

These have got to be three of the most common things said to people who are in recovery from crap that's happened to them in the past. People who have no understanding of what it means to try and rebuild yourself from the heart outward and the ground up are most often the "caring" individuals who spout these absolutely useless words of advice.

Whenever I hear someone saying any of the above, or any number of variations on the theme, I feel like grabbing them by the shoulders and giving them a good shake. Maybe that way their brain will start firing on all cylinders for a change. After I'm sure I've got their attention, I would calmly explain a few things to them as per their trite little aphorisms.

First of all what the hell are they implying when they say stuff like that? Most times they are "subtly" telling you're being self indulgent and you need to stop wallowing in self-pity. That really becomes evident when they follow up their earlier words of wisdom with "everybody's had a tough life – look at me" as if that would settle the matter.

Hey guess what, not everybody is the same. I know that's a difficult concept for some people to get their heads around but it's true. We all have different aspirations, desires, and psychological make-ups; and that's only a start. They also seem to be able to ignore the fact that some things are harder to recover from than others. Nope they are the litmus test against we are all to be judged against.

The phrases themselves have very little meaning, or are comfortably ambiguous at best. Nobody actually lives in the past; sure time heals all wounds, some of them kill you eventually; and how do you know someone is not getting on with what he or she consider to be a life. Just because they don't do what you do, how does that make them a zombie?

Let us look at some harsh realities of people in recovery from crap that happened to them in the past. First of all the longer you've put off dealing with it, for whatever the reason, the harder it is to recover and the worse it beats the stuffing out of you. It doesn't matter to you at that moment in time that time may or may not heal that particular wound; it's wide open and gaping at that precise moment and sucking you whole soul into its depths. Finally, just what is recovery anyway if it isn't trying to get on with your life?

I can tell you from personal experience that being in genuine recovery is not something you do for fun and want to do for any longer than you have to Implying that you can turn the process off and on at will and all of a sudden be better is not only insulting it shows an ignorance of what the process entails. Any person who can blithely say "get on with your life" has never done the work, no matter what they claim to have overcome. The fact that they have that attitude at all is the first clue.

In my experience the people most inclined to say things like that are still too scared of that process and feel threatened by anyone who has the courage to even contemplate moving beyond who they once were to become who they could be. When I use the word recovery, I'm talking about the recovery of the self that lives in the realm of potential not about getting better from something.

I've written about the work Dr. Jeffery Young has done in past posts but I'll recap for those who haven't read them. Each of us has been shaped irrevocably by what has happened to us during our formative years. Our means of reacting to circumstances, the people we are attracted to, what we expect others to do from us, what we think we have to do in order to be accepted, and so on were all imprinted dependant on what happened to us mainly in pre-pubescence.

Dr. Young has worked out various patterns of behaviour, what he calls Schemas that can be caused by a variety of potential circumstances in a home life. If you were the child of alcoholics you will grow up expecting to be treated in a certain manner, and continue to use the behaviour patterns, or copping mechanisms, that got you through that time period.

Sometimes, because that's what you are used to, and equate it as what is normal, you seek out those same circumstances over and over again throughout you adult life. The familiarity of the situation is comfortable for you because you can predict what will happen down to even when the relationship will be ended.

Co-dependency has the benefit of allowing you to tell yourself that you are doing something good, because you are trying to help somebody else. In reality all you are doing is helping to make the hole all the much deeper to climb out of for both of you.

Sometimes it takes a traumatic event to realize the trap you're in, other times you hit bottom, and sometimes it just seems to happen for no apparent reason except some part of your brain has decided enough is enough. Whatever the reason you have committed yourself to the complete overhaul.

The problem, or the great thing depends on your mood that day, is that once you discover that things need fixing you can't stop until you're done. The first, and sometimes hardest step is finding someone who you can work with to help you along the way. Even if you can do the work on your own, and you should anyway, you need to have a professional ear to bounce shit off of. Someone who understands how the brain works so you don't end up just fooling yourself.

Personally I think this whole process of recreating oneself is the closest thing to a miracle each of us can perform. Giving birth to a child and raising it is taking an empty vessel and filling it up; re birthing yourself is looking at what you are, completely, honestly, and dispassionately and excising all that's unhealthy.

Then you have to figure out who you would have been if you had been allowed to, and find the means of becoming that person. Each reaction that you have to an emotional stimulus has to be analysed to see if you are reacting to the present circumstances or the past. Which voice are you listening to, the one that belongs to the person standing in front of you or the one that called you a useless shit thirty years ago because you bought the wrong brand of beer?

When I hear people dismissing this type of journey with meaningless catch phrases because they don't have the guts to do the same thing, are willing to live blind and deaf to the possibility of giving voice to their true self, or because they need to hold on to having somebody else to blame for their troubles, it makes me appreciate those people who attempt it even more.

It's not living in the past to strive to overcome it's effects on your present; not waiting for time to heal your wounds takes a lot more strength than simply sitting back and being a martyr; and what else could you call reclaiming your if not getting on with it? Perhaps that's the problem, those who say those types of things need to understand what they are talking about. Or it is that too much to ask?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:13 AM | Permalink

"You can't live in the past".

"Time heals all wounds".

"It's time to get on with your life."

These have got to be three of the most common things said to people who are in recovery from crap that's happened to them in the past. People who have no understanding of what it means to try and rebuild yourself from the heart outward and the ground up are most often the "caring" individuals who spout these absolutely useless words of advice.

Whenever I hear someone saying any of the above, or any number of variations on the theme, I feel like grabbing them by the shoulders and giving them a good shake. Maybe that way their brain will start firing on all cylinders for a change. After I'm sure I've got their attention, I would calmly explain a few things to them as per their trite little aphorisms.

First of all what the hell are they implying when they say stuff like that? Most times they are "subtly" saying you're being self indulgent and you need to stop wallowing in self-pity. That really becomes evident when they follow up their earlier words of wisdom with "everybody's had a tough life – look at me" as if that would settle the matter.

Hey guess what, not everybody is the same. I know that's a difficult concept for some people to get their heads around but it's true. We all have different aspirations, desires, and psychological make-ups; and that's only a start. They also seem to be able to ignore the fact that some things are harder to recover from than others. Nope they are the litmus test against which we are all to be judged.

The phrases themselves have very little meaning, or are comfortably ambiguous at best. Nobody actually lives in the past; sure time heals all wounds, some of them kill you eventually; and how do you know someone is not getting on with what he or she consider to be a life. Just because they don't do what you do, how does that make them a zombie?

Let us look at some harsh realities of people in recovery from crap that happened to them in the past. First of all the longer you've put off dealing with it, for whatever the reason, the harder it is to recover and the worse it beats the stuffing out of you. It doesn't matter to you at that moment in time that time may or may not heal that particular wound; it's wide open and gaping at that precise moment and sucking your whole soul into its depths. Finally, just what is recovery anyway if it isn't trying to get on with your life?

I can tell you from personal experience that being in genuine recovery is not something you do for fun and want to do for any longer than you have to. Implying that you can turn the process off and on at will and all of a sudden be better is not only insulting it shows an ignorance of what the process entails. Any person who can blithely say, "get on with your life" has never done the work, no matter what they claim to have overcome. The fact that they have that attitude is the first clue.

In my experience the people most inclined to say things like that are still too scared of that process and feel threatened by anyone who has the courage to even contemplate moving beyond who they once were to become who they could be. When I use the word recovery, I'm talking about the recovery of the self that lives in the realm of potential not about getting better from something.

I've written about the work Dr. Jeffery Young has done in past posts but I'll recap for those who haven't read them. Each of us has been shaped irrevocably by what has happened to us during our formative years. Our means of reacting to circumstances, the people we are attracted to, what we expect others to do for us, what we think we have to do in order to be accepted, and so on, were all imprinted dependant on what happened to us mainly in pre-pubescence.

Dr. Young has worked out various patterns of behaviour, what he calls Schemas that can be caused by a variety of potential circumstances in a home life. If you were the child of alcoholics you will grow up expecting to be treated in a certain manner, and continue to use the behaviour patterns, or copping mechanisms, that got you through that time period.

Sometimes, because that's what you are used to, and equate it as what is normal, you seek out those same circumstances over and over again throughout you adult life. The familiarity of the situation is comfortable for you because you can predict what will happen down to even when the relationship will end.

Co-dependency has the benefit of allowing you to tell yourself that you are doing something good, because you are trying to help somebody else. In reality all you are doing is helping to make the hole all the much deeper to climb out of for both of you.

Sometimes it takes a traumatic event to realize the trap you're in, other times you hit bottom, and sometimes it just seems to happen for no apparent reason except some part of your brain has decided enough is enough. Whatever the reason you have committed yourself to the complete overhaul.

The problem, or the great thing depending on your mood that day, is that once you discover that things need fixing you can't stop until you're done. The first, and sometimes hardest step is finding someone who you can work with to help you along the way. Even if you can do the work on your own, and you should do as much as possible on your own anyway, you need to have a professional ear to bounce shit off of. Someone who understands how the brain works so you don't end up just fooling yourself.

Personally I think this whole process of recreating oneself is the closest thing to a miracle each of us can perform. Giving birth to a child and raising it is taking an empty vessel and filling it up; re birthing yourself is looking at what you are, completely, honestly, and dispassionately and excising all that's unhealthy.

Then you have to figure out who you would have been if you had been allowed to, and find the means of becoming that person. Each reaction that you have to an emotional stimulus has to be analysed to see if you are reacting to the present circumstances or the past. Which voice are you listening to, the one that belongs to the person standing in front of you or the one that called you a useless shit thirty years ago because you bought the wrong brand of beer?

When I hear people dismissing this type of journey with meaningless catch phrases because they don't have the guts to do the same thing, are willing to live blind and deaf to the possibility of giving voice to their true self, or because they need to hold on to having somebody else to blame for their troubles, it makes me appreciate those people who attempt it even more.

It's not living in the past to strive to overcome it's effects on your present; not waiting for time to heal your wounds takes a lot more strength than simply sitting back and being a martyr; and what else could you call reclaiming your if not getting on with it? Perhaps that's the problem, those who say those types of things need to understand what they are talking about. Or it is that too much to ask?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:13 AM | Permalink

The bump on the top of my head was starting to make me wish for bed and a cold compress, and the last thing I wanted to be doing right now was sitting in a dank cellar chatting with the two folks, no matter how good their intentions had been, who'd made me feel like this. Still there was something compelling about the way her lower lip trembled when she was emotionally distraught that made me want to investigate how she reacted to other stimuli.

But those were idle thoughts suited to other occasions, and even contemplating them made me wince with pain. Anyway, they looked like a couple of nice earnest, concerned types who wanted to save the world, and from previous experience I knew that was one road better left un travelled. They weren’t casual about anything, and politicized sex was always on the low end of the enjoyment scale for me, especially when working on a migraine.

I suggested that we keep in touch and if they thought of anything more, or if anything happened, that might lead me to an answer about who croaked the professor and what happened to the Kyoto accord. I told them if I ever did get any answers that I would make sure they were filled in, if for no other reason so they could stop bashing people over the head that came into the store asking about the Kyoto accord.

Couldn't be good for business if you kept hauling concerned environmentalists down into a cellar and giving them the third degree. Unless they had a sideline in headache remedies: "Hey does that store of yours have anything for a wicked headache, induced by a minor head trauma?" I asked her pointing at the point on the noggin he had tried to stave in.

He had the good grace to look embarrassed and mumble another apology, while the smile she bestowed made me start reconsidering my earlier resolution and thinking a little tender loving care administered by her capable mouth might not be such a bad thing after all. But when my eyes made contact with daylight, it was still only mid afternoon, when we reached the street all thoughts of anything but lying alone in bed with the blinds drawn and me out cold quickly vanished.

Even her bashful, eye's down looking up at me through her eyelashes, "Is there anything else that I can do for you…" only elicited a request for a cab. Her suggestion as she shepherded me into the cab that she'd call tomorrow to see how I was doing, was laden with meanings, but all I could do was smile weakly and mumble my address to the cabbie.

His initial reluctance on driving me was quickly overcome by my suggestion that the quicker he got me home the less chance there was of me puking on the back of his head. Mentioning the names of a couple of gentlemen I knew in the people cartage business who were known for their efficiency in dealing with those who upset their friends helped to overcome the last of his doubts.

It also ensured I was spared the usual commentary on the state of the world that cabbies seem to believe is their prerogative to deliver. By the time we pulled up to the office whatever placebo she had given me was slowing me down sufficiently that I tipped the cabbie a twenty, which led to the unprecedented site in Ottawa of a passenger having his door opened for him by the driver of his hack. He also did me the favour of pointing me in the right direction of my buildings door, so I didn't wander dazed into traffic.

Harry the day doorman had seen me in quite a number of states before this, but even his eyes showed some concern as he clocked the state of my pupils and the discreet swelling on the back of my head.

"You want me to check on you every couple of hours or so Mr. Steve, to make sure you haven't slipped into a coma?"

"Actually", I told Harry, "a coma sounds pretty attractive right about now. Just get me on the elevator and hit the button for the right floor and I should be able to take it from there." The last thing I needed right now was to be mother-henned by six foot–seven-inch, 300lb, ex linebacker with one eyebrow, a shaved head, and a gold loop earring the size of a hoola-hoop. Nope I just needed my bed and a lot of pitch dark.

Which I almost didn't get until I remembered how a key and lock mechanism worked, after surviving that challenge, navigating through the clutter of the office to the private room in behind was nothing. The only distraction was the flashing red of the answering machine light, which caused a momentary fixation, quickly overwhelmed by the intense pain its pulsation produced in my skull.

I let the back of my knees hit the side of my bed that allowed it to welcome me into the comfortable bosom of its embrace. I wish I could say I slept like a log and didn't feel anything until I woke the next morning, but I was disturbed all night by wild dreams that featured Ms. Magnesen and the environmentalist cutie literally tearing me in half; Professor Magnesen lecturing both of my parts on separate occasions on how to control emissions; and in amongst it all was the sound of people pounding at my door and yelling for me to wake up as they were the police and it was long past time that decent people were awake and at work.

Unfortunately that last part turned out to be true, (I don't want to think about the implications of the other parts thank you very much) and I eventually had to stagger to the door so as to prevent the noise from continuing. It was only as I turned to lead my old buddies from the crime scene back into the apartment that I realized the ten o'clock I had read on the dial of my bedside clock meant the next morning, not later that same evening.

"I didn't even know you drank tea, let alone took sugar in it" was followed by harsh laughter from behind as the assholes chortled at my misfortune. "Was that one lump or two?" That ain't the kind of shit you deal with before coffee on the morning after the day I had had yesterday. I couldn't even muster the energy to give them a baleful stare, let along a snappy retort.

I didn't know what I had done to deserve the honour of a home visit, but I figured I'd better be slightly somnambulant before trying to cope with the excitement of it all. I pointed in the general direction of where I remembered my bathroom as being, and received a leering grin and a sweeping, be my guest, arm gesture in return.

It was only after I had held my head under the cold tap for five minutes that I began to realize the potential for trouble that a visit from two cops, who were being overtly genial, could forebode. For two guys like McIntosh and Gates to show up at my door without kicking it down first meant they had either come to gloat or…I couldn't think of any other reason.

If they were going to arrest me they would have kicked the door down and hauled me away, that would seem more their modus apprehenda- so to speak- over this polite routine. Of course this all could just be an elaborate game of good cop bad cop, as I noticed Gates hadn't done anything except show his teeth at McIntosh's jokes. Like with any wolf that could mean he's laughing or readying himself to go for your throat.

When I could look in the mirror and only see one of me looking back I figured I could just about cope with the boys in bad suits and headed back out to the office area. Still studiously avoiding any sort of contact with them I headed to where the coffee pot that was my morning cup awaited. From the damage inflicted upon my kitchen and the depreciation in the level of the pot, I could see my guests hadn't hesitated on making themselves at home.

"You must have finished the lumps off last night" Gates called through " We couldn't find anything but these packets of "nude" sugar. Oh and your out of cream." It's a good thing I like black coffee cause 25 years with no chance of parole is a long time to spend behind bars, and guards inside don't like cop killers.

After gulping a first cup, burning the roof of my mouth and finishing the process of returning to consciousness simultaneously, I poured a second cup and headed out to meet my early birds, hoping I wasn't the worm awaiting eating. From the way Gates was looking at me like a side of beef I couldn't help feeling that prospect was pretty good.

"Who gave you the love tap?" McIntosh asked pointing his chin at the lump on my head.

"Someone who wasn't as genteel in looking for information as the police officers of our nations capital. Now what can I do for you boys, I wouldn't want to think I'm holding you up from serving and protecting the good people of Ottawa" I tried to look at them with as much innocence as I could muster with my eyes still slightly crossed and the knowledge that the last time I had seen them a dead body with a machete in its back had plopped at my feet weighing heavily on my mind.

"It's what we can for you chum" Gates was licking his lips, hopefully licking off lingering drops of coffee but it was hard to tell what was going on behind those beady little eyes. "We thought you might like to know the identity of the stiff who fell at your feet the other night. We thought hearing his name might jar your memory, although I see others have tried less subtle means. Which reminds me do you need to report a crime, we're police officers you know and we're here to protect the public." He laughed a horrible little laugh that sounded like a cross between a growl and the wind blowing over a grave on a cold November night.

"That was just a misunderstanding, and why should hearing the dead guy's name jar my memory?" I was trying to think if I had given beautiful anything like my card which she could have given her dad which would take some explaining if it were found on his corpse.

"The crime scene boys found this", he reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic baggie of the type you use for sandwiches, pot, and evidence. This one held a piece of yellow paper torn on two edges so it had obviously ripped from the bottom corner of a larger page. "Your ad in the yellow pages was found in Mr., I should say Dr./Professor Magnesen's jacket pocket with the name of the bar scrawled on it, and the words "last brass pole on the barkeep's side" written in the same hand."

He paused and looked at me, and just in case I hadn't caught the implications of what he was suggesting, spelt it out for me." We think you were arranging to meet him there, and you've holding out on us for some reason and we want to know why?"

I took a sip of my coffee and looked up at him. "Well that's better then your usual average, batting .500 could almost make a person think you know what you're doing. Yes I was supposed to be meeting him at the bar, but I wasn't holding out on you because until you just told me I had no idea that the corpse at my feet was Dr. Morgensen.

We had only talked on the phone up till that point, which is probably why he had the directions on where to find my scrawled on my ad in the yellow pages. I just figured he had shown up after the murder and found the bar locked up and him not able to get into seeing me. I've been hoping to hear from him again since, but now it looks like that hope is a pretty vain one…"

It's always good to leave a thought or sentence hanging when talking to cops, they don't like to think you know everything, and it gives them the illusion that they have some room to manoeuvre with you even though you've built a pretty thick brick wall up for them to run into. And if they do have something in reserve, you can always hold on to I hadn't finished.

I wasn't going to have to worry about that this time, because although it was obvious they didn't like it, they didn't seem to have anything more than that piece of paper connecting me to the dead doc. If they thought otherwise, obstructing a murder investigation would be the least of my worries. I'd have to start worrying about my name finding its way to the attention of individuals I don't want knowing it.

They had finished their coffees by then and knew their chances of refills were non-existent, so they'd have to head over to Tim Horton's and have an official coffee break if they wanted any more. Gates was out the door and McIntosh was close behind him, when he turned and looked back.

"This is more than just a divorce case gone bad, peeper, it's even more than just a homicide. There's a lot of pressure on us to get results, but results that end it without it going far. There's talk of not letting it go further than this room, unless something else shows up soon.

Everybody's called the chief today from the horsemen, to the spy guys, and somebody from Parliament Hill to ask that we keep them posted. Everybody's walking around the station house right now so uptight that they're scared to fart. Whoever worked you over last night was an amateur compared to these boys from up high. I've heard that they can make it so you get to the point that you want to tell them what they want to hear just so the pain will stop."

He nodded at me then and closed the door behind him. Have a nice fucking day. It looked like my time on this case was running out fast no matter what I wanted, so the option of another day in bed, however tempting was a no go. The problem was that unless something fell in my lap pretty soon this case was no go as well.

I had to hope that someone was having more success than me or I could be looking forward to a long time away from home.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:55 AM | Permalink

There was a scene in the Douglas Adam's book The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy where his character Arthur Dent says something that we would consider harmless, that turns out to be a deadly insult to another race of beings. The consequences of Arthur's unknowing insult were astonishing; a civilization was wiped out and an invasion of earth was only prevented when a Cocker Spaniel swallowed the invasion fleet (something to do with space, time, and relative sizes)

I might have got some to of the details wrong, it might have been a Labrador retriever that swallowed the invasion fleet, but I think you get the gist of the matter. How hard it is to translate ideas and concepts from culture to culture. It's not even always a matter of having to work translate from one language to another, although that complicates matters even more, because you can share a language but not an approach to conceptualizing with it.

Our way of thinking is shaped by the philosophies that we have been immersed in from the moment of our birth. I can reject them all I want intellectually and search for another means of defining how I live my life, but they are still the concepts my brain uses to bring definition to ideas and philosophies.

To give you an example I've been reading the books of Ashok Banker now for the past year and a half, specifically his retelling of the classic Indian epic The Ramayana. Through out the six books of the series the central figure, Rama, is continually described as an adherent of Dharma and its his absolute devotion to that concept in the face of all obstacles that lends him his greatness and earns him the admiration of even the Gods and Goddesses.

Each time I think that I've come up with a way of being able to put into words what I know emotionally Dharma to be, my intellect fails me. I can use words like fulfillment of duty to my heart's content and although it might tell you that there's a relationship between duty and dharma it still is off the mark.

It's not that the English language is unsuitable for explaining the concept, although it would be probably less awkward if I did speak Sanskrit, it's just that I keep wanting to impose our structure of thinking on it. It's extremely difficult to throw off thousands of years of genetically imprinted thinking, and forty-five years of implementing it in just over a year.

It's like peeling back multiple layers of skin from a fruit or a nut; each time that you think you have worked your way through to the kernel of truth there's another husk between you and the truth. Subtle nuance that aren't thick enough to prevent you from seeing the ultimate goal, but they are sufficient to keep you from touching it.

For instance, I recently ventured the opinion that one could choose to fulfill or not fulfill ones Dharma. But I was gently corrected and told that Dharma was either adhered to or not adhered to and choice had nothing to do with it. I think I understand the difference, but I don’t think I'm capable of putting it into words except to hazard that dharma simply exists and choice implies doing something. I can choose to do, or not do, that which helps me fulfill my Dharma but I can't choose Dharma.

I still don't know if even that's right, but that where my thought process has taken me to after a year and a half of reading, thinking, and talking about it with others. It's been a slow and steady progress towards understanding on something deeper then an intellectual and philosophical level and I'm still only getting occasional glimpses of the complete picture.

To me this diversity of thought is something that is to be celebrated and be in awe of. I find it amazing that the human race, with its one basic pattern, has developed such a diversity of means to express concepts and beliefs. But if we look back at the scenario put forward by Douglas Adams we can also see how this beauty can become dangerous if we allow ourselves to be wilfully ignorant of the rest of our planet's inhabitants.

Instead of having the decency to be grateful for the abundance we have been given, some of us, too many in fact for anybody's safety, believe that they represent the only right way of thinking and being. Not only do these people not make any attempt to see what beauty the person next to them has to offer, they work hard to extinguish it and replace it with there own beliefs.

You want to guarantee that someone is going to resent and hate you for generations to come? Simple, try and steal their language, culture, and belief system away from them and jam yours down their throats. One of the few occasions that I know of that this didn't happen was in Canada. No not with the native people who lived here when the Europeans showed up, but between the English and the French.

In the mid 1700's when the British finally defeated the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham outside of Quebec City they knew they would need to keep them as allies in the years to come. So they guaranteed them the right to speak their language, practice their religion, and control the education of their children.

Of course they more then compensated for that one moment of compassion with their actions throughout the remainder of their empire as they blithely banned the languages and beliefs of any and everybody else whose country they expanded into. The residue of that resentment is what feeds a good chunk of the terrorist actions around the world.

Haven't you ever wondered why the men who are the authority figures of these organizations speak like they have gone to Oxford or Cambridge University? It's because they either have, or have been taught English since they started schooling. India is not one of the largest English speaking countries in the world because they chose to be.

After so many years of getting away with our hubris of believing we could act like we want and treat people with disrespect and disdain things have started to come back and bite us in the ass. We shouldn't be so surprised, there is only so long that people can take being stepped on before thy chew the boot.

The only way we can even begin to stem the tide is to change the way we treat others and begin to make the effort to understand our differences and celebrate them. It doesn't mean your going to have to become a devotee of Dharma but it does mean stopping believing yours is the only way. Of course it's a two way street and both sides have to prove to each other that they are willing to take the leap of faith required for this to work.

Nobody says this is going to be easy, it is far easier to try and kill someone than to get to know them. Maybe it's time we started, we need the practice.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:18 AM | Permalink

I spend a lot of time hoping I'm going to be wrong. Does that sound like a strange thing to say? Let me explain, I tend to think the worst of most people, but especially those who are our leaders. Be they political, religious or whatever I'm usually of the opinion that those who want to be leaders are the worst people for the job because they want it.

Most people who strive to be leaders of anything from a country to a clubhouse do so with the intent of imposing their will on who ever is subject to their leadership. How many leaders of anything do you know that have genuinely striven to reach a universal consensus of some sort among those who they lead? I don't care what the politics of the person are, whether I agree with them or not isn't even relevant, they don't give a rat's ass for those who have a different opinion.

Leadership these days is all about divisiveness and the obtaining of power, not about building a unified country or whatever. You can tell there is something wrong with the system when one of the most important polls for a politician is his disapproval rating. As long as I only alienate this many people I can still cling to power and impose my will on whomever I'm ruling. Now that's leadership.

I'm not naïve enough to believe that anybody is going to be able to have a 100% approval rating, there is always going to be extremist elements of a society who aren't going to be satisfied with anyone or anything. But shouldn't the object of a leader be to try and find common ground with as many people as possible while guiding his or her organization, country, or religion to achieve its goals.

That's right I said its goals not his or her goals. Most countries already have a series of goals laid out for them to try and achieve on a daily basis – it's a thing called a constitution. In Ontario Canada where I live when you incorporate a company as a not for profit organization you write out a constitution which contains the objects of the company and how you plan to go about achieving them. So if one of your objects is the eradication of child poverty you have to say how you're going to go about getting that done.

If you are going to be the leader of a country, your focus should be on how are you going to fulfill the objects of your country's constitution, not how you are going to impose your will upon the country. If your constitution says "All men are created equal", or guarantees freedom of speech, and the right to assemble shouldn't you be trying to convince people that you have the best plans to ensure those objects are fulfilled?

But what we mostly get for potential leaders are those who want to impose their will upon a country, or even worse leave their mark on history. Leadership is all about ego and the expression of personal power no matter if the person is on the left or the right. In fact far too many leaders tend to look on their constitutions as things they have to circumvent in order to do what they want to do, or that it should be changed to reflect their view of the world.

Secular leaders are bad enough, but when it comes down to it the worst ones for abusing their positions are religious leaders. Then again religion lends itself to having such a multiplicity of interpretations even among just one faith, it should be no surprise that each faction would have a leader trying to impose their vision of the faith on the flock.

Even within the individual sects (or denominations as Christians say when referring to themselves) there are divisions. Not all Catholics believe in the same ways of realizing the objects of their faith any more than all Suni Muslims agree with how Mohammad should be worshipped. Other religions, like Judaism with its reform, conservative, and orthodox divisions, have degrees of belief that signify the intensity of their adherence to the laws of the faith.

While Muslims may have individuals who speak for, or claim to speak for, an area's population of adherents, and there is a Chief Rabbi in Israel, and Tibetan Buddhists have the Dali Lama (I'm not familiar enough with other faiths to speak about their hierarchies) only the Catholics that I know of have a process akin to an election for their leader. Not that we're talking about broad based participatory democracy here, as the only folk voting are the Cardinals, who were all appointed by a pontiff in the first place.

Here too they are divided into the usual political factions, ranging from the very liberal to the very conservative. The person who is elected pope gets to set the tone for the church's response to issues, and dictate to Catholics and non-Catholics alike whether or not they are being good. While the adherents of that faith may have ceded him that power through their acceptance of the system that elected him, the rest of us are none of his business.

When Pope Benedict (literally translated from Latin as good word or good speech) was first elected slightly over a year ago I had the feeling he was going to be one of those who had to pass judgement on matters that are none of his business. Of course his argument is that everything is his business as he is the representative of Jesus Christ on earth it's his duty to see that we're all adhering to the laws of Christ as interpreted by Benedict.

Instead of simply being content to minister to the souls of the millions of Catholics around the world, which ought to be more then enough power for any one person, he wants to flex his muscles so that he is considered one of the major movers and shakers in the world. He already has the press eating out of his hand, in so far as they will record verbatim any comment he makes, giving him access to the world stage.

He's had the gall to tell Canadians that they are turning their backs on God because we believe in freedom of choice and equal rights for all people. Not being a Christian I always make the mistake of thinking that Christ was about compassion and understanding, but according to the gospel of Benedict there is either his (Benedict's) way, or a path to Hell.

If it's not bad enough that he deems himself fit to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries he also seems to think he has the right to make speeches where he quotes dialogue critical of the Muslim faith without saying whether he believes it or not. Not only is it offensive for the leader of one religion to be critical of another, taking shots at Muslims like that shows an amazing insensitivity to the world around him.

Preaching a sermon which contains "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman…" is about as stupid as throwing kerosene on a fire in an attempt to quench the flames. What could he have hopped to accomplish by saying that without any explanation as to his motivations. Vatican officials are saying that it was his attempt to open a dialogue between the faiths, but the majority of Muslims, from the most moderate to the extremist, are understandably taking it as an insult. Maybe he's looking to be martyred by a suicide bomber so he can have a fast track to saint hood,

Is he so proud that his thinks because of the position he serves that he is allowed to point out to other faiths the error of their ways? The second part of that quote says: "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The head of the Catholic Church has a hell of a lot of nerve criticizing anyone for using force to spread the word of God in the name of their faith. They have to have one of the worst records in history for doing the exact same thing.

In fact up to slightly more then a hundred years ago, the Muslim empires were far more tolerant of diversity among their populations then their Christian counterparts. They may have charged Jews and Christians an extra tax for practicing their religion, but they never tortured them into converting, or forced them to flee for their lives.

What good is Benedict doing the world he so devoutly claims to serve by spewing forth hatred and hypocrisy? The only thing being served is his pride and his ego. It's like he is saying, I'm the pope, I can say what I want whenever I want and you have to believe me because I'm the only one who knows the difference between right and wrong.

I really wish that the people who become our leaders weren't so damn predictable. Instead of trying to fulfill the objectives of their country as set forth in their constitution, and working with others to do so, they impose their will and push their personal agenda no matter the relevance to the country's objectives. They became leaders so they could be powerful, and they are going to be powerful whatever the consequences.

I'd really like to be wrong more often.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:40 AM | Permalink

Some weeks, the life of a writer seems to have little to do with actually writing anything, but more to do with mastering the technology that's supposed to be helping make our lives easier. The software to help us prepare our manuscripts and the great programs that on line companies have developed to help you promote your work when you've got it ready. The wonder of modern times and its technology; right!

Sometimes it can almost make you miss the days of typewriters and carbon copies. Probably not in reality, but in theory and sentimental memory the idea sure does sound good. Especially after the week I've had dealing with printing and uploading. Enough to make me pick up a chisel and a hunk of rock a la Fred Flintstone for the rest of my projects.

Did you ever wonder if the world had screwed Bill Gates over in some previous life? How else could you explain the horrors of trying to format anything using his damned software? Come to think of it, how else could you explain his success without there being some sort of huge Karmic debt involved?

Well I was seriously wondering about what I had done to piss him off in a previous life this week, when I went and tried to print off the manuscript for my novel. At 340 plus pages it just seemed like a little much to do at home so I decided to put it on a floppy disc and take it down to a good inexpensive printer. That's when I ran into the good old demon of pagination and how documents can change from machine to machine.

You ever try to make your way through the help file that comes with Word 2000 – all I wanted to know was how to make sure that chapters didn't jump from page to page whenever they felt like it. When I took the disc to the printers on Tuesday I knew chapter one started on the top of page three. It even said it did on the computer screen down at the printers when I checked it before hitting the print command.

But somehow or other the first paragraph ended up stuck on the bottom of page two like the after thought to the table of contents. In fact every single chapter decided it wanted to invade the previous page. So I had a complete manuscript with a bunch of hooligan sentences hanging around on the wrong pages smoking cigarettes and getting into all kinds of trouble.

I debated sending it to the publisher like that for two seconds, include a note in the covering letter apologizing and making disparaging comments about Bill Gates' parentage and hope they'd be okay with it. I discarded that idea as quickly as I thought it pretty much, and realized I would once more have to make an attempt to figure out the mysteries of chapter breaks and pagination.

I quickly discovered the key was in knowing exactly what it was that you wanted to search for in the help file. By lucky happenstance I decided to type the word chapter into the keyword section of the search engine and the first result listed was how to separate chapters. After only three attempts at reading the section I was able to get the basic gist of how to work it, and after only four or five attempts at doing it I was not only getting chapter's separated, but I had figured out how to have different Headers for each chapter, and have the page numbers be continuous.

I don't think I have had the equivalent feeling of accomplishment in years. Not even finishing my final draft of the manuscript could compare to the feeling of having put one over on Bill Gates and Microsoft. Yeah I know that's a strange way to describe figuring out how to do something really basic in a word program but there have been so many times that I've felt like help files have been written with the intent of preventing me from using the software that when I figure it out I feel like I've won a battle with the creators.

But figuring out my manuscript wasn't the only challenge I was presented with this week. When I had published NaNoWriMo Notes I had decided to list it with the Google books search engine. This had involved setting up an account with the Books Partners program and uploading a pdf version of the text to their server.

I was able to overcome not having a pdf converter program by downloading a copy of the book from my publisher who converts all written text to pdf files upon uploading. Then it was simply a matter of uploading that file to Google. Sounds easy, and in fact it was at that time.

The problems began last weekend when I decided to upload a revised copy of the text and the covers for the book. Before proceeding I contacted their help people and asked how I should go about it. They said as long as I uploaded a file of the same name as the one they had already it would simply replace it.

Now to upload anything to the Google Books Partners service you need to not only have them in .pdf for text and either .pdf or .jpg for images, you have to name them in a certain fashion. Text files have to be called by their ISBN and image files have to be prefixed with the ISBN and followed by either frontcover or backcover. Again, I was able to accomplish this without too much difficulty.

Except for one problem, I had uploaded the wrong front and back covers. I only discovered the error when I went to send out covers of my new book, Voices Of Creation: The Blogcritics Inteviews 2005-2006 to those people who had participated in it. I couldn't find them anywhere in the images file on my computer

It was only when I noticed that I still had images files named NaNoWriMo front and back coveer, that I wondered what were the files named with an ISBN that I had uploaded to Google. A quick email to the Google support desk confirmed that as long as I uploaded two more image files of the same name they would be replaced just like the text file had been in the last go round.

Fine and dandy I said. So I proceeded to rename the files appropriately and went to upload the correct image files. By now I guess Google had decided it had enough out of me, and refused to recognise my files as being in the proper format. I tried everything I could think of but after five times of getting the "this is not a accepted format" error notice I wrote the people at support again. I tried everything they suggested and continued to get the same message and wrote them back again. They just told me to email them the files as attachments and they would upload them for me.

Now I know I made the initial mistake and have no problem accepting responsibility for that, but what the hell could have happened to make Google decide that a file format that was acceptable one day was no longer acceptable the next day. I even double-checked with the help desk that the format I was using was okay and they said it was fine.

It was when they started talking about downloading a new Internet browser and trying with that instead of Internet Explorer that I surrendered to the inevitable and had them do the upload for me. This was beginning to sound way too much like work and more then just the simple point, click and upload that I'd been promised.

Of course our concept of work has changed because of computers, and we have heightened expectations about how things should come easily without any fuss and muss. If I were to remind myself what it was like to use a electric typewriter, or a manual one; when no spell check existed and making a correction involved using something that should have been called lumpy paper instead of liquid paper, I'm certain I'd be eternally grateful for all the technology that I have today.

Of course you could go back even further to the days when you had to carve your own quills, grind your own ink, and paper was made from linen or hide scrapped very thin. But I'm sure you'd hear people back then complaining about the consistency of the ink, or the poorness of the quality of the feathers and linen. Some things just don't change.

The thing is though, from the guy who complained about his latest shipment of goose quills always splintering, to me muttering under my breath about Bill Gates, I hope we're not making excuses for our work. What kind of writer would I be if I said it was the fault of my software that my work sucked? A poor excuse for one in my opinion. It's the poor craftsman that blames their tools for the job badly done.

What does drive me crazy is the that these so called labour saving tools and assets for writers take so much time and energy away from the actual creative process. Even when everything works out the way it's supposed to they have you jumping through so many hoops to accomplish simple tasks that you are almost worn out before you begin your day's work.

For one reason or another a great many of us writing have only a limited amount of time they can use for their craft. When you end up depleting that time on trying to take care of the ancillary stuff that is involved with those things designed to make your life easier it can leave you especially frustrated.

There's lots to love about modern technology and what it has done to make my life as a writer easier (I'd be lost without spell check) but at the same time there are occasions when its capacity to frustrate far exceed its capabilities to help. In the long run, of course, I'm still in a far better situation then any of my predecessors, but that doesn't prevent weeks like the one just past from making me seriously wonder about what sort of Karmic debt I'm paying off by having to use the equipment of these modern times.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:12 AM | Permalink

I came across an article in the most recent edition of The Mohawk Nation Drummer newspaper that was datelined last July. That may sound a bit dated but as the story was dealing with an ongoing situation that faces Native people across Canada the dateline isn't really all that important.

The article was dealing with the reactions of Assembly Of First Nations Chiefs to a letter to the editor of a newspaper that Prime Minister Stephen Harper wrote last July in regards to the issue of Native fishing rights. Mr. Harper referred to Native fishing rights as "racially divided fishing programs"

That expression has been used in the past by people who are trying to rouse racial hatred against First Nations people due to their being given the right to hunt and fish out of season. They're being blamed for everything from the depletion of the Salmon stocks in the Fraser River, to the over fishing off the West coast of Vancouver Island because it is propagated by people like Mr. Harper that they can set up nets whenever they feel like it

The Supreme Court of Canada ruling that guaranteed these rights simply affirmed the original treaties that had been signed by individual bands with the government over a hundred years ago which allowed them to continue on with all their traditional means of survival, including hunting and fishing.

If they are going to enter into an out of season commercial fishery operation, they have to be able to offer some proof that the tribe had conducted trade with other nations with fish in the past, before they can start. The problem is of course when those original treaties were signed everyone still thought they were dealing with the bottomless barrel of fish scenario.

Dwindling fish stocks have nothing to do with the huge trawlers plying the seas off the West coast for years do they? Nope it's got to be those pesky natives and their racially preferential treatment. They're out to steal food out of decent, law abiding, Christian, White folk's mouths with their sneaky rights. They're aught to be law.

Now obviously Stephen Harper didn't say anything like that, but as there have been code words utilized by those opposed to minority rights in the past, "race based fisheries" are the ones most guaranteed to make red neck blood boil in Western Canada. Why else would Mr. Harper write a letter about the fisheries to the editor of the Calgary Herald, a city with no fishing industry, but the heartland of Conservative Party of Canada support, save to send some sort of message to his constituents.

This is a lot like his comments on Gay Marriage, where he has sworn to bring in a free vote on the issue in the house of parliament, where anything the government does is meaningless without mounting a court challenge. Like the rights of same sex couples to have civic marriages, native hunting and fishing rights have been guaranteed by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Any act of parliament that runs counter to a ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada isn't worth the spit of the politician who read it out in the House of Commons. So why does Stephen Harper say he'll oppose racially divided fishing industries when he knows he can't do anything about it? So he's on record as being opposed, and those of like mind will know who they can count on to be sympathetic to their causes.

For me the issue around his writing the letter isn't so much the position he's outlined in the letter, although that is bad enough, but the fact that he wrote the letter in the first place. What is the Prime Minister of Canada doing making policy statements in the Letters to the Editor section of a regional newspaper? He wasn't even acting as a private citizen expressing an opinion; he said, "we will". Unless he's now taken to referring to himself in the third person plural like royalty, that implies he's talking on behalf of his government.

What kind of leader publicly fans the flames of an already volatile situation by implying a linkage between fish stocks depletion and Native fishing rights? He can't be so unaware as to not know there has already been violence and unrest around the issue from both sides in the dispute? Instead of taking a leadership role in trying to find a solution he's just riling up emotions.

It is interesting to note that in spite of various promises and pleas for patience from the new government's Minister of Indian affairs on plans for replacing the Kelowna accord, the only announcements the government has made in regards to Native policies have been along the lines of Mr. Harper's letter to the editor. In spite of any reassuring words to the contrary it really looks like the Conservative Party of Canada is maintaining their old Reform Party platform of "they lost the war, tough luck" on Native issues.

There is no doubt that fish stocks off both coasts of Canada have been horribly depleted. The salmon population making the annual migration in the Fraser River has indeed been reduced substantially. Off the coast of Newfoundland where the Cod have run out, because they don't have any Natives to blame anymore having driven the Beothuk to extinction in the early part of the twentieth century, they use the harp seals as the scapegoat.

Out West they have a better situation because up and down the coast and along the whole path of the Salmon's run there are native tribes who they can blame for depleting the stocks because of their fishing year round. Nobody seems to think that who knows how many years of continual commercial fishing, an ever increasingly polluted ocean, and river systems' environments being changed because of erosion and human wastes, could have anything to do with the reduced populations.

We have reached a point in the history of the world where certain species of fish have had their populations fall to dangerously low levels. There have to be bans on fishing for some fish and set levels for how much in a year any one person can catch of others. I don't care who you are, nobody should be allowed to over fish and destroy a species for money.

But using those circumstances to fan the flame of racial disunity is something low and callous that you'd come to expect from a white supremacist or other divisive organizations. For the Prime Minister of Canada to even begin to walk down that path is irresponsible and reprehensible. The fact that he made these statements in the form of a letter to the editor of a newspaper where he was in no danger of incurring immediate rebuttal and his remarks would be given maximum coverage only compounds the reprehensible nature of his conduct.

A good leader should approach a contentious issue with the idea of minimizing its divisive nature, especially if a solution seems to be a speck somewhere out on the horizon. Stephen Harper seems not to care how deeply he carves rifts between people as he long as he is able to win support for his policies.

It makes me wonder what kind of country he is trying to create; and for who?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:55 AM | Permalink

How many times have you read the following in a help wanted ad or job description: must have good verbal and written communication skills? Almost all service industry jobs these days seems to demand proficiency in those areas from candidates considering employment.

When I read that I assume they mean they require people who can express themselves intelligently and have the ability to articulate ideas clearly and concisely. They want you to have the ability to write a letter outlining a position or explain something verbally to a customer. I would also believe that they require you to be able to listen and understand what you are told by your supervisor and a client.

Every day I sit down at my laptop and try to communicate an idea to what I hope is a wide and diverse audience. Whether I'm reviewing something, telling a short story, or writing a novel it all amounts to the same thing and in order for people to form an opinion on what I've written they have to be able to understand what it is I'm talking about.

That's fair enough; it's my idea so that should be my responsibility. But do the people reading, or in some cases listening, not have any responsibility in the communication equation? Are they only passive recipients who have to be spoon fed, or should they take some active, participatory, role in the proceedings?

How much should a writer or a speaker expect his or her audience to think about what they are saying? How much work should we expect them to have to do to understand what we are trying to communicate? Unlike television which is designed to feed people information and entertainment, writing engages the mind simply by demanding it be read while personal conversation requires immediate give and take on the part of its participants.

I would think that by sitting down and reading something, getting involved with a conversation, or listening to a speech there is a tacit understanding you are agreeing to make use of your intellect in an effort to understand what is being told to you. If we think of it in terms of a contract between the parties do we need to negotiate the amount of effort the audience should be expected to exert?

There is the argument to be made that it depends on the circumstances and on the audience. There is some validity to this if you know you are speaking to a very specific readership or group of people. It's not a matter of playing down to them or being condescending, it's simply a matter of communicating to them in the language they understand. If you had the ability would it not make more sense to speak Spanish rather than English to a Spanish audience?

The circumstances generated by the Internet and blogging is something different again. In many ways it's the equivalent of the old art of pamphleteering where someone would print out short articles to be handed out on street corners etc. so that they could communicate an idea to as many interested people as possible.

You're not writing for an audience who may necessarily agree with you, but those who are willing to make the effort required to read what you've written. If you are totally incomprehensible nobody is going to bother reading you and you won't have any audience. In theory, as long as you're honest and consistent in what you do, you should attract the audience that you want.

But there's a problem with my great theory unfortunately and that's reality. Have you spent anytime recently in public places listening to the conversations around you? (Or if you're like me and have exceptionally loud neighbours you can do it from the comfort of your living room.) Have you heard what they consist of?

I always used to laugh at the expression the art of conversation but I don't anymore. It seems to me that people no longer talk with each other but at each other. Conversations have become competitions. Instead of being an exchange of ideas where views are shared in an attempt to find common ground, or information that is of interest to both parties is passed back and forth, more often nobody listens to each other, but simply hold forth in an effort to either be the centre of attention or convince everyone they're right.

No matter who your intended audience is when you write on the Internet your topic ends up being more important than your ability to communicate or your style of writing. More often then not people haven't even bothered to listen to what you have to say, have misunderstood your point, or bother to respond to what you've said and merely state their own opinion.

It's beginning to seem that for more and more people the idea of a contract between reader and writer, speaker and listener, doesn't exist anymore. No matter how you write or talk people don't seem to want to pay attention to anybody else. Communication has become a one-way street where my way or the highway is the byword.

It really makes me wonder what companies are looking for in employees these days with those ads asking for good communication skills? Than again, think about the last time you phoned a call centre for help with something…

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:33 AM | Permalink

It was sometime last winter when I first heard the guitar work of Bob Brozman. I had received his CD Blues Reflex and had been left speechless by the sounds he was generating with his collection of Resonator guitars. Seeing him in action with them on his new DVD Bob Brozman Live In Germany I felt like I had never seen anyone play guitar before.

It wasn't as if he was doing anything brand new, in fact he was doing something so very old and simple. But it was what he was doing with those styles and how he was using his guitars to obtain his results that was truly awe inspiring. He had three Resonator guitars, a lap top Hawaiian style, a ten string Ukulele from Reunion Island, and the bottle neck of a 1973 bottle of Matuse Wine.

The National Company made Resonator guitars from 1926 – 1939 before the electric guitar became widely accepted as an instrument. It's metal body and resonator cones allowed a player to generate a much louder sound for playing live, and it was much beloved of many a blues player, including Robert Johnson, because of the sound it created when played with a slide.

With the refinement of the electric guitar, with its pickups and volume controls, the Resonator guitar's future was guaranteed to be as bright as the dodo's. The only people playing them were people who were still wedded to recreating that original sound of the twenties and thirties. John Hammond, one of the leading exponents of that style of guitar playing still around, plays a Resonator guitar his father bought him in a pawn shop in the fifties that dates back to the thirties.

It's because of Brozman and his interest in Nationals, that National style guitars began being built again in 1989. The new company produces everything from copies of vintage guitars to new models including a Baritone with a longer neck to allow a player to achieve a lower range then before. Working from designs that Bob came up with the company built a prototype for him which he "roadtested" before they put it on the market.

Okay so why I'm spending so much valuable review time for a DVD going on about guitars? You know what they say about seeing is believing? Well let me tell you once you see what Bob Brozman does with a Resonator guitar aside from simply strumming, plucking, picking and fingering you'll understand how important this instrument is to him and the music he creates.

He's a solo performer, no drummer, percussionist or bass player to keep the rhythm for him; just him, his guitars, his guitar cases and the wooden box he's sitting on to keep the beat. The Resonator's have such a forceful sound that the tempo set by his strumming hand, or even the individual fingers picking out notes, enables they rhythm to be established and maintained for the whole song.

All the while that his hands are busy with the guitar, his foot is stomping out the base drum line on the hard shell of one of his cases, driving the song along like the pistons of an engine. Watching Brozman play is such a confusion of arms, legs and other body parts in motion that it's quite a wonder that a song actually materializes out of the confusion.

But not only do they materialize they are amazing to hear. He's travelled all over the world playing with musicians from Reunion Island off the coast of Madagascar, to Hawaii, to Papua New Guinea, and back to the Mississippi delta. Everywhere he's gone he's picked up musical information that he incorporates into his own creations.

But instead of treating them like precious relics that are to be kept on museum shelves and not to be tampered with, he plays with them to create new sounds that have the old as a solid base. Even songs like the old Edith Piaff standard "La Vie En Rose" are made into something new while hanging on to the elements that make them recognizable and enduring.

The only other cover he performs on the whole DVD, Bob Brozman Live In Germany is the old Robert Johnson song "Love In Vain" made famous by those guy from England the Rolling Stones. While he retains elements of the original song, his style of playing brings it new life and rescues it from its iconic status to make it a living breathing blues song.

That's what makes his music so damn refreshing, is not only is it some of the most alive and vital stuff going, it represents a gesture of defiance towards the pre-packaged, market analysed stuff that passes for popular music these days. Half way through his set in this concert he stops to teach his audience a quick lesson on the nature of rhythm in an attempt to break through the wall that has been built up by conventional music that prevents people from truly feeling and hearing music anymore.

He then proceeds to show how that while most new music has only one beat to it, music like the old style blues, Hawaiian, African, and Indian have two distinct rhythms going at once in the same song. This is what gives those genres their vitality and ability to resonate an emotional chord in its audience. Being somewhat rhythmically challenged personally I wasn't able to fully appreciate the distinctions he was trying to make, but I was able to appreciated the incredible passion he was able to generate with his use of rhythm and melody while he was playing.

Recorded in a club in Cologne Germany, Bob Brozman Live In Germany is a study in how to make a great concert disc. Sure there is the advantage of working in a small venue, but it also looked like they had at least three hand held cameras right up on stage, and two more out in the audience for long shots. I don't know if they shot "live" editing while shooting, or took the raw footage and pieced it together afterwards.

Whatever they did do the results were wonderful. Close-ups when needed wide angles when important, and amazing shots of his hands at work all over the guitar. I was a bit worried about the thinness of the sound, until I realized I hadn't set it on 5.1 surround yet, and then it was amazing. It fact what is really good about this disc is they allow for all three types of systems, dts, surround, and plain stereo, so that no one is deprived of the best sound possible for their system.

There are two special features included on the disc that are absolute musts, one is an interview with Bob, where you find out a great deal more about what he thinks of contemporary music and it's so-called celebrities. In a nut shell he considers most of pop music's stars lazy and the majority of pop music is designed to stop you from thinking with its monochrome rhythm.

The second special feature is a short guitar workshop where he runs through the wonders of open tuning and what a player can accomplish with it. He also goes into more depth about the different aspects of rhythm and why it is so important to a guitarist. I have to confess to be completely lost for most of it, not being a player, but when I played for a musician friend later, his comment was "Well my life's changed forever now". I'll take that as a positive comment.

Listening to Bob Brozman play guitar is a wonder, watching him play is a revelation as to how underused the guitar is by most people who play it. It's the difference between watching someone play "Heart and Soul" on a grand piano and someone else playing a Beethoven Sonata. They are both played on the same instrument, but are universes apart in emotional and intellectual definition.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:21 AM | Permalink

In Canada we have three political parties on the national stage that pretty much cover the spectrum of mainstream of political thinking these days (With apologies to the Bloc Quebecois, but they really are a regional party on the national stage) We have the New Democratic Party (N.D.P.) who can't decide whether they are in the "New Labour" mould of Tony Blair or the older European social – democrat form as practiced in Scandinavia; the centre-right Liberal party who are socially liberal but fiscally conservative; and the right – wing Conservative Party Of Canada (Which was the result of a merger of two parties the ultra right wing Reform party and a party very similar to what the Liberals are today the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada) who are socially and fiscally conservative.

The N.D.P. claim to represent the little guy and are defenders of social programs, the Liberals like social programs but also like the business community, the Conservative Party Of Canada calls itself fiscally responsible which means it spends money on things which fit its moral agenda but not much of anything else. Hey but they're all pretty clear about these things in advance and make no bones about it, so if they get elected and start doing what they said they were going to do people shouldn't be so surprised.

The Stephen Harper led Conservative Party of Canada have always been pretty ambivalent about the Kyoto Accord on greenhouse gas emissions and have vacillated between officially withdrawing from it, or just unofficially letting it fall by the wayside. While on the international scene, like the most recent G-8 conference he might sign a communiqué supporting a program to help developing countries reduce their emissions, back at home he's cutting that funding from his spending plans.

Using the familiar mantra of protecting taxpayer's money as their excuse, they are not going to spend the 1.8 million dollars that the previous government had pledged towards that program. Of course they're not so concerned about taxpayer's money when they fast track military spending by cutting out the unnecessary step of asking for tenders and bids on the projects. Nope they'll just hand out 15 billion in spending without any care about getting the best deal for the buck.

But like I said, fiscal responsibility for them means spending money on what they think is important. Although since you can say that about every political party that's not exactly a fair criticism, the only reason people complain about it is because we don't agree with their spending priorities.

There's a problem though if we let ourselves get caught up in the small fry issues of how much is being spent on what and what's being cut from where. We miss out on the bigger problems that face the economy and how the Conservative Party of Canada's agenda will do the most damage in the long term. The whole issue of foreign ownership of Canadian firms, specifically firms involved with natural resources and research and development has implications that may not be felt until years down the road, but could end up causing the most real damage.

There's even a new name for it, the process of losing ownership to foreign companies, it's called Hollowing Out. It refers to the fact that while the company might be located in Canada the ownership is void of any Canadian presence.

In recent months this has been most noticeable in three industries: mining, steel, and natural gas. Much has been made of how both China and India are looking to guarantee their supply of natural gas and fuel through the acquisition of companies in Western Canada and their attempts to purchase various concerns and properties. In fact the two countries have even gone to the extent of beginning negotiations to join forces so they stop bidding against each other and driving prices up to their detriment.

But the ones that have really been striking close to home are the recent sales or bids for some of the biggest names in Canadian steel and mining. These companies have been the cornerstones of industry in Canada for literally more then a century. Inco, Falconbridge, Stelco, and Defrasco are names that are familiar to almost every Canadian who pays any attention to the world of labour, industry, or business.

The major concern about foreign ownership is as usual what happens to the local company now that it's owned by a corporation in France, Belgium, or Germany? If the parent company starts feeling the financial squeeze where are they going to lay off jobs first? Their home country where they need the support of the locals, or Canada where it doesn't really matter what people think of them?

In the first wave of foreign ownership back in the postwar boom of the 1950's we didn't even have our own manufacturing base. Most of the companies were what's known as branch plants. American corporations would open for business here; hire locals to do the factory work and send the profits back home. When times got tough in a recession workers could show up for their shift and find the plant locked and management back in the States owing them wages and severance packages.

The governments of Canada starting wising up to this practice, realizing it was doing nothing to actually help our economy in the long term, and started a foreign investment review board that would make decisions on applications for foreign ownership of Canadian plants, and set regulations for outside companies wanting to set up a business in Canada.

The amount of actual regulating this board would do and does depends entirely on the flavour of the government of the day. But in general they've tried to strike a balance between allowing the capital Canada lacks to be invested in our economy, ensuring that majority control stays in the hands of Canadians. Decisions that effect Canadians are at least being made by people who are going to have to wake up in the morning and see their names vilified in the local news media, not by someone sitting in Paris, Bonn or another foreign capital.

But the cycle of foreign ownership seems to have picked up speed again. Of course the Conservative Party of Canada wasn't around when it started, but they also don't seem to be doing anything about it. In fact they keep bleating on about making Canada a place that's more inviting to invest in. In other words giving out special tax breaks for money invested in Canada etc., jobs created, and plants opened.

Now that all sounds very good on paper, and I'm all for anything that's going to put people to work and give them hope of a better future, but will these jobs be here in five or ten years down the line when the employees are reaching an age where starting over again becomes difficult if not impossible? That's what's happened before when these companies have bailed, employees who had given twenty to twenty-five years of good work were left in their late forties and early fifties with no other marketable skills, or a job market that doesn't want to hire somebody who is going to be retiring in ten to fifteen years.

When government's encourage foreign ownership and investment they aren't going to be placing conditions on how the money is spent. Wouldn't want them to think we don't want them here now would we? Who cares what happens in ten year, we'll have retired on our great government pensions by then. We'll have lots of nice statistics showing how many jobs we created this year when we go into the election and that's all that matters.

Now I'm not saying that the Conservative Party of Canada are the only ones who are guilty of this way of thinking, but they are the ones who are currently pimping us to the world by making ringing pronouncements like "Canada is open and ready for business". What does that mean in reality? How much of our future are they prepared to trade away for a quick roll in the hay to bolster their political fortunes by increasing job numbers?

Is this why they are being so wishy-washy about Kyoto so that they don't have to apply the rule about emission reductions to foreign investors? Are they reneging on our contribution to helping developing nations offset the costs of reducing emissions, because we are trying to steal business from them?

I can see the new brochures they send out now. Thinking of investing in the Developing World? Consider Canada as a viable alternative: laxer environmental controls, no need to worry about Kyoto accord emissions, generous tax allowances, no need to worry about tropical diseases and nationalist revolutions. Canada, the best little developing nation in our hemisphere: you've seen the rest now raid our nest, natural and human resources ripe for the plucking, we're bent over and ready for…!

Conservative governments and economists have been talking about the short term pain of globalization for years now, but no one seems to mention the long term pain of what happens when the global investment heads home with their pockets full and our forests, mines, and oil fields empty. What we really need is a government who would be dedicated to the short term pain of actually developing our own economy and figuring out ways or securing investment dollars from within Canada to establish Canadian businesses.

Without that we will continue to go through cycles of boom and bust dependant on the fortunes of other economies far more then we need to be. We're never going to be a major economic power in the world, our population base is just too small for that, but that doesn't mean we are stuck being dependant on others for creating jobs and industry. But we are dependant on a Government who will care about the future of Canada. This one doesn't.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:08 AM | Permalink

Whether or not I fell like the proverbial ton of bricks, it sure felt like I had been hit over the head with them. When I came to it was with feelings I'd normally associate with the morning after the night before washing over me. The pain cutting through my head made it feel like I was ready to be outfitted for a Frankenstein stitch job, or at the least some sort of zipper assembly that would keep the top part of my head from separating from the bottom.

But there were some noticeable differences, most obviously being the fact that it seemed my legs were bound to the chair I was plopped into and my hands in lap were first tied to themselves than connected to my feet's bonds via yet another cord. For vegetarians they certainly knew their way around trussing the main course for roasting and basting at 375 degrees for a couple of hours until done.

Whoever was responsible was either brilliant or blind lucky and it didn't matter which as the result was still the same. Any time I tried to fidget with my feet in the hopes of loosing their bounds the ropes around my hands seemed to tighten and vice versa. I figured by the time I had loosened anything significantly either my hands or feet would have fallen off due to lack of circulation..

What with my head still feeling like the axe was still sticking out of the back at a jaunty angle, and my limbs trussed like a pork roast, I was quite content to sit quietly and await what was ever coming. It could explain why the next thing I knew was that I heard the sound of voices whispering in front of me. Dozing off had the unexpected payoff of reducing my head pain substantially, as well as allowing some free eavesdropping time as the voices were obviously under the impression I was still out.

"I thought you said you didn't hit him that hard? He looks like he's got brain damage," said the first voice. It sounded like a woman's, deeper than most but still a woman and I suspected it was the one who I had followed into the dead end.

"Hey you were the one who was all panicky about being followed. Anyway what does it matter, he's just another Fed. We'll give him a shot, find out what he knows then let him go. If he shows up back at headquarters sounding like he's a few bricks short of a load whose going to notice over there? Most of them talk like they've seen recent contact with the flat edge of a 2 X 4 anyway."

They thought I was a fed, while it was slightly insulting; it was also understandable given their circumstances. It also made life both a little easier and a little more precarious at the same time. If I was able to convince them of the fact that I was working the same side of the street as they were and not a fed they might not look on me with such suspicion. Of course if I wasn't able to do that I could end up being injected with some sort of truth drug that also seemed to remove a good chunk of a person's reasoning skills.

"Well the horsemen are going be happy if you keep making their job easier by knocking out everyone whose sneaking around behind their backs trying to figure who offed the professor, and who is trying to stuff the Kyoto accord so far up a chimney at the same time, that it will just be so many more toxic emissions if it can't be found soon." I had decided to try and brazen it out with the truth, cause sometimes you never know people might believe you.

It was kind of hard for me to decipher their reactions as I was seated in the centre of the pool of light cast by a naked bulb hanging over my head like that Greek dude's sword, and they were lurking in the shadows. I could tell that I had startled them, but that could just as easily be put down to them not knowing I was among the conscious more than anything else.

Whatever other effects my little speech might have had on them, at least it got them to come into my circle of light. I was right about the woman's voice, it belonged to the one who I'd followed from the store. She was your typical granola number down to her lack of make up, thick socks and expensive German made sandals. It didn't stop her from being attractive, but in an earnest political sort of way that I knew from experience could fast become tedious.

The guy was cut from the same cloth; only he had a slightly harder edge to him. He was that new breed of political activist who the cops hadn't figured out yet, computer and tech savvy, with no worries about employing violence if attacked. Cops hadn't managed to upgrade their thinking from the days of passive resistance and when they ran into people who picked up their tear gas canisters and calmly lobbed them back at them it still confused them.

The demonstrators had their own version of shock troops now who would stand up to the first wave of a baton flailing riot cop charge to give their more passive brethren and sisters a chance to escape. The guy in front of me was a prime example of the type, tall, leanly muscled and tough as whip cord. I had no trouble believing that he'd been the one to administer the love tap that left me counting teeth with the tip of my tongue.

After, I don't know maybe thirty seconds – maybe an hour – of them staring at me and me trying to stare back at them without staring because it seemed to hurt just a little too much to use my eyes that much, and without anybody saying anything. I was just about to try again when she spoke up.

"What do you know about Professor Magnesen?" she asked

"Now that's an interesting first question to ask, not why were your following me, or what do you want, but about a person who I haven't said I even know. What I do know is that you know him, which I didn't know before; thanks" I said brightly.

She certainly turned a very pretty shade of red when she flushed, whether it was with anger or embarrassment didn't make much of a difference in my book. He on the other hand didn't have the same redeeming qualities when he flushed. If he was pissed at her for giving something away, or pissed at me for being a wiseass was irrelevant as he was bound to take his displeasure out on me not her.

"Okay smart ass we you've proved that you aren't just another pretty face, but why should we believe that you're not a cop and you still didn't answer her question about what you know about the professor. So why don't you be a good guy and answer the lady's questions and maybe I'll forget what a rude bastard you were to her." He reached behind him and pulled one of the largest hunting knives I've ever seen out of belt sheath and began cleaning his nails with it. He saw me staring at it, and nodded his head once as encouragement that I shouldn't be shy about speaking my piece for much longer.

"Well first of all I know he was working on a project for the government that would have reduced green house gasses substantially while actually improving the economy instead of harming it, until the government changed and his program funding was yanked. I know that he started meeting with some environmentalists about something or other and that some government department was starting to get very interested in his files at home."

I paused for breath here and tried to gauge their reactions, but neither of them was giving anything away. They both were just staring at me waiting to hear what I had to say next. So far anything I had told them didn't tell them what they really wanted to know; who I was. The feds would have known all that I had said up till now so they still didn't have any reason to believe me when I said I wasn't working for the government. I was going to have to lay as many cards as possible on the table.

"A short while I was contacted by a client to investigate the disappearance of the Kyoto accord. I got a call at the office one night and I was supposed to meet someone over at a strip club in Hull. He showed up alright, but he arrived to see me with one of the biggest hunting knives I've ever seen sticking out of his back." I said this last bit being very careful not to look at the blade whose point the guy was now digging into the wooden tabletop in front of me.

"Since then I've been trying to trace backward through his life in an attempt to figure out who killed him and what he'd been working on that has people so scared that even after he's dead they're still trying to shut him up." I followed you", pointing with my chin at the woman" because I hoped you'd be able to help me find some answers. Given my reception I can only hope that we might be of some assistance to each other."

The guy and the woman exchanged glances, she raised an eyebrow and he nodded his head in return. He kept the knife in his hand and came at me with point pointed directly at my chest. He flipped it over in his hand so that the cutting edge was pointing up and swung the knife up and through the ropes binding my wrists. He then bent down and sliced through the cords around my feet.

He stepped back and took up his position beside the table again as I shook my hands and feet in an attempt to restore some of the circulation that I'd lost while I'd been strapped in. More and more I'm convinced that I would never be cut out for bondage. I just don't like mixing work with pleasure that much.

I was still busy rubbing at my wrists and ankles when the woman spoke up. "Look", she said, "we're really sorry about all this", waving her hand as if taking in the basement, my skull and being tied to a chair, "but ever since the professor was killed we've been really scared about what's going on. Why would they want to kill him just because he had good ideas about how we could reach our commitment to the Kyoto accord and be able to help other countries do the same."

"Yeah", said the guy," I hope I didn't do too much damage, but our nerves are stretched pretty raw right about now. Not only can't we figure out why anyone would have wanted the professor dead, we don't have much idea as to who could have done it. When you showed up nosing around…well we though we might be able to crack you open about who you were working for and get some answers."

He sighed, and shook his head. "But we're still no further ahead and there aren't even any clues to go on. It doesn't sound like you know that much more than we do." He sucked in a big breath of air." Damn this is frustrating. He was so close to answers, in fact we believe he might have even had them already, but was playing it close to the vest as he could see the departments he had built for research and development slowly being dismantled due to budget cut backs and funding not being renewed. He had contacted us late in the summer before the Election, knowing that even a potential Stephen Harper victory would destroy his life's work"

"When they couldn't do that, they destroyed him instead" her voice was choked as if close to tears, and I looked at her closely. "The reason he approached us was that I had been a student to his at the University. One day, accidentally he said, by coincidence he said he came in here and we got to chatting. He wanted to know what I was up to, If I had kept up being active in environmental groups after leaving school. He also wanted to know if I had been following the discussions about global warming in the papers and was as worried as he was by what he called the irresponsible science issuing from some world capitals"

She paused as if to gather her thoughts, or to just take the deep breath that would see her through the rest of her story. "After a while he asked me if I knew a couple of other people who were active in environmental groups who might like to learn some information that they could put to good use. So we began to go over to his house at odd hours to try and shake off any potential tails. Judging by the outcome to date we haven't succeeded in doing much except getting our patron killed"

The silence that followed her little speech was exceptionally empty as we all sat with our own thoughts for a minute or two. Finally she broke it and in a rather choked voice looked at me, then over at her erstwhile companion, and asked the question whose answer I had come looking for. "What do we do now?"

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:25 AM | Permalink

It's September 9th today and the nights have been starting to get cold for the last little while. The daylight hours are getting less and less with it staying dark until six am and the sun setting before eight at night now. When the air starts smelling crisp and the leaves begin to turn, men and women brave of heart and weak of mind begin to think of NaNoWriMo.

There are only fifty-two days left before you set pen to paper, fingers to keyboard, and begin the slow ascent towards the goal of writing 50,000 words within the month of November. There's the thrill of the first day that you easily surpass your daily word requirement, the agony of the days where you struggle to make the bare minimum needed to ensure you'll scrape in under the wire, and of course the greatest feeling of them all passing the finishing line as your word count clicks over the magic threshold to equal 50,001.

Labour Day weekend has been and gone, so the "Three Day Novel" writing contest has passed you by yet again. The only literary competition left which has nothing to do with merit, or lack there of, left is the National Novel Writing Month. (Or NaNoWriMo as it's more familiarly known)

Let us face it, what else are you going to do in November anyway? Talk about a depressing month; it's not winter yet so it doesn't have the redeeming qualities of snow to alleviate its greyness. It's not fall anymore so the trees are just naked sticks shivering in the dank wetness with no colours to brighten your day.

Sure you can go for walks in the freezing rain and look at the Christmas displays that the stores put up the moment Halloween ended or there's always the fun of … well I'm sure if you thought hard enough you could think of things to do in November. But why bother when someone has saved you the effort of figuring out how to stave off Seasonal Depression by driving yourself crazy with an attempt at achieving a goal that's difficult but not impossible.

Perhaps NaNoWriMo is a little too much like the old Chinese curse of "May you live in interesting times" for some of you in terms of the demands it will make on you emotionally, mentally, physically, spiritually and psychologically. But I would think it's a fair trade off for avoiding depression. Instead of being like all the other grey spectres around you, bummed out by the weather and the very Novemberness of it all, you'll be frazzled, anxious, inspired, and ecstatic.

You ever see the movie Sean Of The Dead? It has these wonderful opening shots of people walking around like zombies going about their daily routines; cashiers at a supermarket scanning items and putting them in bags, people walking down a street in headphones all listening to the same music shuffling and jerking. All before anybody becomes a zombie; in fact some of them seem to have a little more purpose after they become undead – a focus is a marvellous thing.

That will be the difference between you and the November zombies that surround you. You'll have a focus. Something that will give you a purpose outside of your normal existence, something that will break you out of any rut that you may have fallen into with or without knowing it.

It might drive you crazy at times, but at least you'll be alive. Every morning you'll wake up and have something to do that matters to you, something that you've decided you want to do, not that someone has made you do or is demanded of you by what you do for money. The fact that it is something creative is almost a bonus.

But what a bonus; how often in your everyday life to do you get to express yourself creatively? When was the last time you took on a project of this magnitude that would force you to stir your creative juices on a regular basis? I know that's probably where a lot of your anxiety is coming from, but don't worry about it, it's part of the process.

In fact if you want to deal with that anxiety the best thing to do is to start planning your assault on the 50,000-word plateau in advance. Start thinking about your story now; the characters, what they are going to be doing, how they are going to be doing it, where they are going to be when they are doing things, and who they are going to be doing what things with.

Oh and you'd better come up with a plot as well. They usually help to give your characters a sense of direction, a focus for all that who, what, where, how, and why stuff that I started to mention in the previous paragraph. If you are so inclined you can make up big charts that show how each character is going to interact with other characters and hang them on the walls around where you will be working. It will give you a feeling of accomplishment before you even get started.

But if you use them for the actual project, think of them as guidelines not rules. The last thing you want to do is have something that's going to stifle your creative juices. If you get an idea from something you've just written don't ignore it because it's not on your list, go with it and see where it takes you and it will make for much more interesting writing and maybe even reading.

The real reason for doing any planning is to reassure yourself that you're not in over your head. Once you lay stuff out like that on paper or in chart form you'll realize how few 50,000 – words actually are. Once you understand that, you'll be amazed how what at first seemed insurmountable begins to look eminently doable.

The National Novel Writing Month is a wonderful way to spend November and who knows it may even be the beginning of your great novel, the one you always knew you could write if you ever had the opportunity. If you want to make a stab at it then you can go on over to the NaNoWriMo site and sign up. They don't usually open for registration until October so you still have time.

Enjoy.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:37 AM | Permalink

The moon is full tonight, or early this morning, as I'm writing. I've been taking peaks at her out the window since she starting coming up over the horizon. At first she was hiding out in the branches of a trio of huge cotton woods we have in the neighbourhood, but now she's broken free of their clutches and is sitting pretty in the sky.

Looking at her, and thinking of all that has been associated with her throughout the ages by imagination, superstition, fear and religious belief I can't help thinking of how much magic has gone out of the world. Even in the relatively few years that have marked my stay on the planet to date its been slipping away from us like water through our fingers.

Reason and Science have been pecking away at the aura of mystery in the world surrounding us since we first learnt how to drive back the night with fire. There's no question that some of it has been for the best, sloughing off superstitious beliefs that used to result in the destruction of life. We will no longer hunt an animal to the verge of extinction on the theory that in doing so we are ridding the world of evil – wolves and their relationships blood sucking fiends – or burn women because they are witches.

But the down side of those positives is the residue of scepticism that now infuses all of our thoughts, opinions and reactions when it comes to things outside of our frame of reference. We are always going to look for or, say there is a logical, rational explanation for whatever it was that just happened even if we don't have to hand in it.

I belong to a Yahoo group where we discuss Ashok Banker's adaptation of the The Ramayana and ideas and information pertinent to Indian culture and history. I had brought the topic of Ganesha, the elephant headed god, up and another member of the group wrote in to relate an incident that happened in her family's village.

Her family have a temple in the village and one day the priest who works there was walking across the floor when he tripped over something. He looked down and there was a statue of Ganesha sticking out of the ground. He attempted to lift the statue, and even after excavating some of the earth around it, he couldn't budge it.

It came to them that it was necessary for the whole family to be gathered in the temple so that this statue could be released from the hold that the earth had on it. The family gathered from all over India and there were close to a hundred people if not more in this small temple. The priest again tried to lift the statue of Ganesha out from the hole and he rose easily to be place in the alcove prepared for him in the temple wall. One of the family members decided to have the statue dated and it was discovered to be over a thousand years old

Now I may not have got all the details of the story right, but you get the picture. I thought it was a beautiful little story about faith and community. But when I thought about it, I realized a lot of people would look for logical explanations. The priest came back and dug out more of the hole so that the statue would lift out easily. There's no way a statue could just have mysteriously appeared sticking up out of the ground, someone either planted it or there was an earthquake and it got pushed to the surface

Sure those are all possibilities but why can't people just sit back and enjoy a story like that without having to try and analyse it? Why do we have to have logical explanations for everything that happens? You do that and you suck the wonder and magic out of the world.

When there is no wonder and magic left, there is nothing left to feel awe about. Without awe how can you enjoy the beauty that is inherently part of life? The answer is you can't. How many people can honestly say they've had a moment of pure aw, akin almost to worship, in recent years? Whether a moment in nature like watching the full moon dancing in the sky, a piece of music that moves you to tears, or a work of art that leaves you breathless?

Man has always tried to come up with ways of explaining what they didn't understand. Whether it was the Native populations recognising the characteristics of individual animals and creating stories to explain how the beaver got it's flat tail, or at the other end of the spectrum Einstein exploring the theory behind relativity in an attempt to make head or tail of the universe.

I remember the first time I saw the northern lights, and the wonder as I saw the light pulsing in the sky over the stars. It was almost frightening in its sheer beauty and unfamiliarity. I could believe that magic existed in the world after seeing them. Even now, after hearing the different theories about what makes them and pretty much understand it, I still think of them as magical.

Humans have a history of being scared of things they don't understand, and perhaps that explains why we have gone to great lengths to eliminate the mystery and wonder from our lives. Give us a nice safe reason for those bright splashes of colour in the sky and we can all go bed at night feeling somewhat safe.

It would be nice if we could also go to bed feeling a little awe as well.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:01 AM | Permalink

There aren't many illnesses left that carry quite the stigma that mental health issues do. True it is now socially acceptable to go and see a psychiatrist, but even then that's only for something safe called analysis. Once a week you go to the doctor and complain about how awful your life is and he or she sit there and take notes.

In some circles it has become almost a status symbol or a badge of distinction to say, "Oh yes I'm in therapy" They might not be able to tell you exactly why, or if it's done them any good, it's just one more thing to do in a week. To be fair more and more people are seeking professional help for dealing with the ever-increasing amounts of stress that seems to be a prerequisite of living in today's society.

Depression and anxiety are no longer considered "abnormal" as nearly one in four people are now being medicated for one or the other. Hell when the big drug companies are taking out television adse and buying up miles of page space in attempts to sell you the latest be happy pill you know that whatever it is they are for is pretty damn mainstream.

It's when you begin to deviate away from the "normal" abnormalities that the looks start. The slightly fixed smile and the freezing of facial muscles are usually accompanied by a shifting of body weight onto the back foot so in case you start frothing at the mouth or acting in any manner that might be construed as dangerous, they can execute a quick get – a-way.

There's nothing quite like the words bi-polar or schizophrenia to bring a conversation to a complete and stuttering halt You ever want a little personal space in a crowded room all you have to do is work sentences like "my doctor says I'm in a bit of a manic phase right now, but he's hoping the adjustment to my meds will enable me to cope." Grin a little wildly and add a touch of mania to your eyes and you'll find yourself alone in the middle of the room in no time flat.

People with schizophrenia or diagnosed with bi-polar become immediate pariahs to those who were their friends and even some members of their families. If you had any decency at all you would go off and get yourself put away in a mental home and not be such a burden on your friends and family. They'd all be more than willing to help you commit yourself – for your own good of course – if you would only come to your senses and do the right thing.

The convenience of you being shut away is of course all theirs; out of sight and out of mind is how most people would prefer sick relatives or friends. But that sort of behaviour is almost bearable when compared to the abuse some patients are subjected too. Far too often it is family causing the abuse, aided and abetted by the complicity of a society that doesn't care.

When a person suffers from a mental illness one of the assumptions society is quick to make is that no matter the severity of their disease, their ability to assess circumstances has been reduced. When they are living at home and their primary caregiver is a parent, anything the patient says is judged against the parent's description of the same circumstances. A parent could be stealing from his or her own child, be caught and accused by the child but nothing will happen. All the so-called caregiver has to do is suggest the child was off his or her meds for a day or two – and everything the client says is immediately suspect, and will be passed off as paranoid delusions.

Let the child become angry and try to stand up to their parent, and it will be suggested that the patient is becoming dangerous and hard to manage, and the doctor's will up the patient's medication. Let me give you an example of this sort of thing in action.

My wife and I have a friend who is his early thirties. Five years ago he was headed for a nervous breakdown due to stress and other factors. Instead of his mother trying to get him treated for the obvious stress he was undergoing she convinced him he needed to commit himself to a psychiatric ward in the local hospital. While he was there they diagnosed him as schizophrenic.

Since his release from the hospital he has been living with his mother and she has been making his life miserable and he has not a single means at his disposal for resisting. At any time she can arrange a competency hearing that could see him declared incompetent and lose what little say he does have in his life. On a whim she can decide that he's not allowed to have friends or leave the apartment unless it is run errands for her.

Even though she is reaping enormous benefits from his living with her, she continues to act like she is the ultimate martyr and he owes her for all the sacrifices she's made. The truth is that she owes him for quite a bit, the least of which is a guarantee that half her rent is paid for each month by the government of Ontario through our friend's disability pension.

There is also the slight matter that is only paying 30% of the listed rent of "her" apartment because our friend ensures she is entitled to a two bedroom geared to income unit when under normal circumstances she would have had to settle for a single room apartment. So it to her advantage that he continues to think of himself as dependant on her and that he's not capable of surviving a day on his own.

Towards that end, she continually insults him, runs him down to others when he is present, and talks about him in the third person when he is in the same room. Whenever he becomes friends with anyone who encourages him to take pride in himself and his accomplishments she demands that he stop seeing them.

The poor man is so frightened of her and how she can make his life a living hell that he always goes along with what she tells him to do. Like so many other mental health patients he has no one he thinks he can turn to for help and is trapped in a situation where he doesn't have a chance of getting any better.

He is not alone in these types of circumstances. The particulars might be different in each set of circumstances, but the end result is usually the same. There are advocacy groups for mental health patients, but they have to know that they exist before they can contact them. Even if someone manages to establish a contact for him to one of those groups, the patient has to want to change his or her circumstances. In some instances they just feel too frightened to do anything any more.

When a patient is diagnosed with schizophrenia there is no monitoring of their situation done other then a semi annual check up with psychiatric personal to ensure their medication is still working. They are not given access to any ongoing therapy to help them cope with any problems they may be having and are either left to their own devices or the tender mercies of their care givers.

The medical profession makes very little effort to help those patients suffering from schizophrenia once they are released back into the community. Perhaps if there were a more concentrated effort on everyone's part; government, advocates and medical profession this could be changed. Until then people like my friend will be subject to a living hell.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:05 AM | Permalink

The United States of America spends literally billions of dollars each year on military spending. They have one of the most comprehensively equipped armed forces in the world with state of the art military equipment for each arm of the service. If you are in the navy you could be on an aircraft carrier or a submarine that's powered by its own nuclear power plant. If you are in the army, or the marines you have at your disposal all the most sophisticated means of either defending your self or killing others.

The air force claims that it can drop a bomb down somebody's chimney from a thousand feet in the air and has smart bombs that can be programmed to go where you want them to a good percentage of the time. They even have planes that can sneak up on people called stealth bombers because they can elude detection by radar.

It's really quite amazing what money can buy these days when it comes to military hardware isn't it, it's just too bad so little of that money gets spent on training the troops in how to fight a war. Even kids playing with toy soldiers know that in a war the object is to kill more of the enemy's soldiers than he kills of your soldiers. At the end of the battle the side with the most soldiers left alive usually wins.

Now I'm not a military strategist and I didn't go to a military academy, so maybe I'm unaware of some of the finer points of tactics. But it would seem to me that killing your allies and reducing their combat effectiveness would be counter productive to achieving the target of having the most soldiers left standing at the end of a battle.

For the second time since the beginning of the Afghanistan conflict Canadian troops suffered injuries and fatalities from American aircraft either bombing or strafing their positions. On Tuesday September 5th an American A-10 thunderbolt strafed Canadian troops using his Avenger gun. Firing bullets the size of pop cans, he instantly killed one soldier, former Olympian Private Mark Anthony Graham, and wounded over thirty others, five seriously enough to be evacuated out of the country for treatment.

In April 2002 two National Guard air force officers attacked Canadian troops on exercise manoeuvres killing four soldiers and wounding eight others. Yesterday the soldiers were just waking up, having breakfast and preparing their gear for an offensive against the Taliban when they came under attack. Canadian military officers are at a loss to explain how their LAV-3 armoured vehicles could have been mistaken for a group of insurgent Taliban.

Now I can understand how in the heat of a battle situation mistakes can be made, you come under fire, you shoot back but you overshoot or the situation has changed in the ten seconds it took you to respond, and you end up accidentally firing upon your own troops. In theory everyone is supposed to know where everyone else is, but things on a battlefield can change so quickly that enemy and ally positions can switch in the blink of an eye.

According to Major Geoff Abthorpe of the Canadian Army "they're (pilots) supposed to make visual contact…The LAVs were out on an exposed open slope, so what actually happened is hard to say." In other words before you go firing from the hip at anything parked by the roadside you have to have visual confirmation that it's an enemy.

Canadian troops have been taking part in an offensive in the area since Saturday as part of the N.A.T.O. force trying to push the Taliban out of the area. They were preparing to launch an offensive that morning, but were forced to cancel because of the attack. As the day continued the force came under heavier and heavier fire as word spread amongst the Taliban that the troop had been shot up before the offensive that day even began.

So not only did this pilot cause the death of a soldier, seriously injure five others, scuttle a day's operation, he also increased the likelihood of the Canadians incurring more casualties as the Taliban knew they were temporarily stunned by the early morning attack. Fortunately they came through the rest of day unscathed and were able to regroup come nightfall.

The weekend had already been rough on the Canadian troops, as they had suffered four fatalities on Sunday. To lose another of their number to "friendly fire" in such a stupid and irresponsible manner must have been a real moral sapper. The troops had been in position there over night so all air force personnel should have been aware of who was supposed to be where.

Air force pilots in the American armed forces are most often officers, which means the majority of them would have gone to a military academy to help prepare them for their role of leading men into battle. You'd think somewhere along the line they'd have learnt not only about the importance of following the rules of engagement for specific battle field situations but how shooting allies is detrimental to the war effort.

It's really hard to understand how mistakes like this one could happen with all the technology at a pilot's disposal and the fact they were not in a battlefield situation. It's one thing to miss a target and cause "collateral damage". It's another all together to choose the wrong target completely and let loose with your weapons indiscriminately.

The reputation of the American military had taken a bit of a beating in Iraq with tale of torture and vengeance killings against innocent civilians. Killing your allies through carelessness isn't the right way to go about repairing your image.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:03 AM | Permalink

"Jai Sri Rama" Praised Be Rama was the exultation that roared from over half a million throats that gathered on the fields of battle in the island kingdom of Lanka.

"Jai Sri Rama" Praised Be Rama are words that have been repeated for the past 3,000 years by those who have read Valmiki's Ramayana.

"Jai Sri Rama" Praised Be Rama are the words taken up and repeated for readers all over the world in the 21st century by Ashok K. Banker and his modern retelling of The Ramayan. An ambitious project that has spanned six volumes and overcome seemingly insurmountable odds just to make it to bookstore in some countries, it has grown beyond being a simple retelling of a great epic, and come to epitomize the qualities that have led to millions of voices down through generations utter "Jai Sri Rama".

For as Rama adheres strictly to his dharma no matter how tempting it may be to choose and easier path, no matter how much everyone would understand and forgive him if he were to bend even just a millimetre, this retelling of The Ramayana has stayed the course over its six volumes. Not once, as far as my eyes, ears and heart can tell, has Mr. Banker deviated from what he began in the first line of the first book, (Prince Of Ayodhya) a contemporary version that offers no compromises to expedience or fashion.

His Rama is the devotee of dharma whose story has been told by grandparents to their grandchildren, who in turn had heard it from their grandparents. In spite of being written in the language of the twenty-first century I doubt that emotionally or spiritually there is little to separate the Rama who walks the pages of these six books as he who was first immortalized in formal words by the sage thief Valmiki three thousand years earlier.

I can offer no proof of this, not being steeped in the culture or the history of these books or the people they speak to the most directly, I am obviously no expert on these matters. All I can do is report on how they have moved me and increased my understanding of the culture I knew so little of before reading these offerings.

If you have read me often enough you may have seen me write something along the lines that if you want to learn anything about a people, read their stories. History books won't tell you anything about a people, and neither will anthropological studies on their methods of worship and their social practices. You need to read what they have read and listened to far more then you need to read about them.

I can't remember what inspired me to pick up Prince Of Ayodhya in the bookstore. I do remember wondering about it for a few weeks before deciding to try it out. Because of the way the first book was packaged in North America I had assumed it was a fantasy story based on what we in the west would refer to as Indian mythology. Even reading that it was a modern retelling of a traditional epic didn't do much to change that initial impression.

It was only when I began reading that I realized I had stumbled upon something far more special then the simple sword and sorcery tale set in classical India as I was anticipating. Instead I was transported back to a time when the three planes of existence were a lot closer to each other, and the Deva and Devi would still walk the earth alongside mortals, and the Asura demons were still an everyday threat to mortal kind.

When I began reading the series the first three books were already released, so I was able to quickly follow the first with Siege Of Mithila and Demons Of Chitrakut and watch in helpless frustration as the plans of Ravana (He Who Made The Universe Scream) the king of the Asura unfold so that even though he had succumbed to a defeat in battle so complete it looked like he could never rise again, he was successful is sowing disunity among his vanquishers and having Rama exiled from his own throne in the days after his greatest triumphs.

Books four and five, Armies Of Hanuman and Bridge Of Rama were released in approximately annual intervals – depending on which country you lived in. As Rama, his wife Sita and his brother Lakshman prepared to end their years of warfare in the wilderness and their exile, to return and assume their rightful places as King, Consort and Prince at the onset of Armies Of Hanuman Ravana re-entered the picture. Having lured both Rama and Lakshman away he kidnaped Sita and absconded with her back to his island kingdom of Lanka where he prepares to play out the final acts in this drama.

Throughout Armies Of Hanuman and Bridge of Rama while Rama is assembling his forces for and planning his assault on the island vastness of Lanka, Ravana is playing some disingenuous game. In some ways the more he reveals to us what his intentions are the less we understand what he is doing. Every trap he lays, every lure he dangles are layered with hidden meanings. Even in his treatment of Sita he is surprisingly solicitous and careful, even to the point of protecting her from the clutches of other rakshasas that would see her harmed.

By the time that King Of Ayodhya opens all that we are sure of is there will be war, and the war will be of a magnitude beyond our imaginations. Rama's forces made up of the vanar and bears who were marshalled in Bridge Of Rama number close to a half million. Ravana's forces are not as substantial, but are heavily armed and armoured while their opponents come at them with teeth, claws and fur.

While Rama's forces are augmented by Hanuman, the illegitimate son of the God of wind and his preternatural abilities to grow to an enormous size and utilize supernatural strength, the Lankans are led by one of the most accomplished sorcerers the world has ever known. Before the battle has even been joined, before they ever reach his island, Ravana is able to wreck havoc with their efforts and slaughter them by the thousands.

What terrors will he have in store for them once they actually make it onto the island? How about causing the island itself to rise up and take its toll of vanar and bear life as Ravana reshapes it into a form that will allow him advantage in the battles to come? Or creating new breeds of rakshanas that can take away the advantage the vanar's speed and agility give them. But perhaps most horrific, and the thing that comes closest to turning the tide in Ravana's favour, is the corpses of their dead comrades coming back to life to attack Rama's soldiers.

It is only with the timely utilization of a gift that Rama had received on his way into exile, a gift he promised never to use for only his own protection, that Rama was able to stop the slaughter. The Bow of Shiva can only be drawn and fired with aid of the power of Brahma to assist the archer and if the conditions of its usage are strictly adhered too. With the arrow from that bow Rama is able to negate the sorcery of Ravana that caused the dead to re animate and the first battles of the war are finally brought to a close.

Rama versus Ravana. It seems on the surface like the classic battle between good and evil. Rama the rightful king of his people, deposed through deceit, his wife kidnapped, and coerced into a war he wants nothing to do with against Ravana the scourge of all planes of existence. He even invaded the home of the Gods and gave them such a fright they sued him for peace and promised to never directly interfere in his wars against mortals in exchange for leaving them alone.

Ravana the monster with ten heads and six arms whose prodigious appetites have sired countless children throughout the realms and fierce tempers have taken countless lives versus Rama the devoted husband and loving son who is worshipped by his people and all who meet him. Rama, Ravana, Ravana, Rama: two sides of a spinning coin and which ever side lands heads up will dictate the shape of the universe.

But are they; is that truly the nature of their relationship? Yes their actions are diametrically opposed; anything that is good or decent Ravana will do his best to destroy, while Rama will do his best to protect the same. But without Ravana what is there to compare Rama against? Can there be the ultimate example of dharma if there is nothing that opposes that path?

Mr. Banker also inserts some slivers of doubt into the ending, muddying the waters even further. Why would Ravana say to Rama the following before the final battle? "Every hero must have a villain to destroy, in order to prove himself a hero. But not every villain needs a hero in order to prove himself a villain…I existed long before you, Rama Chandra, came into this world in this form and I will exist again and again and again, long after you take your samadhi and depart this mortal coil"

In the end was Ravana only fulfilling his dharma? Playing out his part in an eternal dance that is beyond the concepts of good and evil, as we know them? Is Ravana doomed to play out these steps for a different Rama each time the world needs him so that a Rama can be generated?

As has been the case in the previous five books of Ashok Banker's modern Ramayan his use of imagery and description are so powerful that it takes almost no effort to visualise the scene on the page as pictures in your head. Whether you are crouched with a vanar in the crook of a tree or soaring high above Lanka with Ravana in the Pushpak you see each individual leaf as if it were in front of you, or the vast panorama as if it were laid out at your feet.

Even more incredible are the battle scenes. Somehow he manages to covey the insanity and horror that occurs doing close creature-to-creature combat and brings you into the thick of the battle, without making it particularly gruesome. Even more amazing is that within the hubbub and chaos he creates pockets of time where we learn more about individual vanars and bears then in the previous books combined (with the obvious exception to Hanuman of course)

Almost fifteen years ago a young prince set out from his home with his brother in the footsteps of a guru who had requested their aid to help rid the woods in the outer reaches of the kingdom of a horrible giant and her mutated creatures. Now fifteen years later, after taking the long road home dictated by dharma he is ready to return to pick up the crown that he has been denied all these years.

Over the course of six books Ashok K. Banker has led us on a remarkable journey that has not only been highly enjoyable to read, but represents an extraordinary accomplishment. He has brought a character out of the mists of time, and put the name of Rama on the lips of people all over the world.

"Jai Sri Rama" Praised be Rama indeed, but also praise to Ashok Banker for embodying the spirit of Rama with his achievement.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:43 AM | Permalink

Through out the ages wise people from many cultures have espoused the philosophy of simplicity as the path to follow to achieve harmony and lead as contented a life as possible. Needless to say that instruction has been as open to interpretation as any other edict passed down on how one should lead your life.

Everyone claims to have discovered the path to simplicity and seems more than willing to share their secrets with you for only the price of their book and maybe a course or two. Not only that, but there also seems to appear a multitude of reasons for living the simple life. Enlightenment, peace, personal wealth, spiritual wealth, closeness to the God of your choice; in fact you seem to be able to obtain what ever it is your heart desires simply by following the instructions in which one of the books you've chosen to pick up.

What always astounds me about so many of these books, is not only how there can be so many different ways of living simply, but how complicated so many people make it to obtain simplicity. Doesn't anyone else find it sort of self-defeating that it could take as many as fifteen steps before you can obtain simplicity? What's so simple about that?

Perhaps part of the problem is that they are trying to take a path that was designed to eliminate distractions between those who prayed and their god. It was a matter of divesting yourself of worldly concerns and material wealth and narrowing your focus so all your actions and thought were aimed at service to whoever worshipped.

Almost every faith has those who adhere to something akin to those circumstances, and usually they live their lives isolated from the rest of the world either through physical removal or the taking of vows that restrict their participation in society. There are traditions among all the faiths that are geared to train the mind to assist in the development of that singularity of focus requiring years of study and commitment, if not many lifetimes. (Yes that's a plural – get over yourself, it's their belief let them enjoy it)

To obtain that type of simplicity you have to have something you are prepared to commit yourself to as totally as monks or yogis commit to their faiths. You need a focus that commands the attention of as much of your mind, body, and spirit as is possible for you to surrender or you don't stand a chance.

Of course it can also work in reverse. Instead of searching for something that you can use as a focal point to coalesce your energies around; you have something that you want to become the centre of your attention. You want your life to simplify to eliminate all the unnecessary distractions that you see as getting in the way of achieving that goal or fulfilling that purpose.

For me that focal point has been my writing, and I now realise that I have developed that singularity of purpose and not even noticed. Without much conscience effort on my part my life has gradually evolved into two compartments: things that are part of my writing and things that don't have anything to do with it. As time has passed in the last fifteen months the items in column number two have gradually been reduced.
The only thing that comes ahead of my writing is the well being of my wife and our relationship. Without that place of core strength I wouldn't be able to write anyway; anymore than if my hands were cut off. I'd as soon consider breathing, as her and what we have together, as being separate from my writing.

Everything else either falls into the category of being related to writing or not related to writing. I've been doing a lot of reviews recently; books, music and movies and I was beginning to resent them after a while because I felt like they were taking me away from my writing. But then I began to think about it and realised that was stupid.

First of all anything that I read is beneficial because it exposes me to new ways of expressing ideas and different writer's styles. I don't even have to necessarily like what I've read or how the author's written it for me to get something out of it. (At the very least optimism for my own work being published – boy I'm better than this, someone, somewhere is going to publish me) Then there is the whole process of writing the reviews.

No matter what it is that I'm reviewing I need to be able to write about it in an intelligent enough manner to interest the reader, while at the same time be able to communicate an intelligent opinion. There is also the challenge of coming up with a way of making the actual writing of the review more interesting for myself. All of those things contribute to my skill as a writer.

When it comes right down to it, any time that I sit down at my keyboard to write anything, be it a response to a comment left at one of my posts, a comment at someone else's post, or an email to a friend, is an opportunity to improve some aspect of my writing. It could be a simple matter of ensuring my spelling and grammar are perfect so that it becomes second nature to write with that in mind.

It could even involve taking that extra minute to proof read a casual email for typos and extraneous words. That way I get into the habit of doing it all the time. The more that you care; the more care you take, and the more you'll take care of what is truly important to you. I suppose that's what they mean by being mindful but when I worked in theatre we called it attention to detail.

But no matter how hard I try there are always going to be items in the not related to writing column. Some people will probably consider me luckier than most because I don't have to go out and work everyday as I'm on a disability pension. The downside to that is that I'm disabled which limits the amount of writing I can do in any given day.

Some days I'm lucky and can put in a couple of three-hour stints at the keyboard in a day. Other days I'm lucky to haul my sorry ass upright enough to write long enough to post. So I'd say those two pretty much cancel each other out, the job and the disability.

Of course there are also the mundane details of daily living that can't be ignored, laundry, shopping, and housework all have to be done eventually. When the dust bunnies become dust buffalos and start migrating from room to room even the most distracted individual is going to feel compelled to sweep.

You can't just ignore that stuff or in good conscience dump it on someone else when half the responsibility is yours. No matter what there are always going to be things on the not related to writing side of the ledger that have to be dealt with.

If you are like me and have only limited reserves of energy to expend on anything, or if your limitations are time related, the best thing you can do in either instance is learn how to best utilize the time you have at your disposal. For me it’s a matter of not doing too many of the things in the non-related column that I have no energy left to accomplish what I want to do.

In our world, living simply means being able to keep in mind at all times what is important to you, and applying as much energy as possible towards that goal at all times. It means narrowing your focus to the point where everything is thought of in terms of how it relates to that goal.

Unlike monks who have removed themselves from the world I can only minimize the world's impact on my attempts to serve my purpose. Keep It Simple Stupid, commonly known as the KISS rule, serves as a reminder not to overly complicate matters or you find yourself overwhelmed and unable to do anything at all. I have this feeling that many of those ancient wise men would have appreciated the sentiment behind that thought.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:46 AM | Permalink

So I admit it, I'm a sucker for a woman in distress. It doesn't hurt that when she says my name it sound like a caress or that four foot nine of her five feet seven are legs. Those are just what we call fringe benefits in this line of work. Sort of like free drinks at a bar, or a discount on a sandwich for work done in the past.

So it was pretty much a no-brainer that when that husky voice, made even huskier by tears, washed over my ear I'd be saying yes to doing anything Ms. Magnesen wanted. If it means ferreting around in the muck of the quagmire that we call politics in Canada then that's what I'll be doing.

Lucy's voice sounded a bit calmer, less full of tears when she called me as agreed the next morning. If we were going to get to the bottom of this whole mess there was no time like the present to begin. I was hopping that she would be able to give me some clues, names of any of the Greenpeace and granola types that had been hanging out with her dad in those last days, would be a good place to start.

Unfortunately she couldn't remember any more details about them that morning then in our previous conversation. It looked I'd be getting on a lot closer terms with soy burgers, herbal teas and hemp shirts than what I'd consider good for a man's soul. But those are the sacrifices you have to be prepared to make for the job.

I'm sure you've noticed how groups tend to congregate into a geographical centre of activities, and the granola rollers are no different. In Ottawa they have taken over a couple of square blocks of what used to be the red light district until the girls got wise and moved out to where all the Embassies are and can now get work as escorts and blackmail material. (usually one and the same thing in the Embassy district)

In the end it meant another nice seedy neighbourhood falling victim to the let's improve the downtown core so people from the suburbs want to come here mentality. It's that type of thinking that has ruined more areas in this city then you can shake a by-law exemption on zoning laws at. The first signs of trouble are when the adventurous ones in their S.U.V.'s and Dockers start showing up in your favourite greasy spoon.

Then it's only a matter of time before they're telling their friends about this "place". The next thing you know there's a Starbucks on one corner, a health food store on another, a new age book store on the third and one of those shops that don't really sell anything in particular but whatever it is they do sell it's for quite a bit of money.

The people I wanted to talk to weren't going to be among that crowd; none of them would be caught dead driving anything powered by anything other than their own leg muscles, eating in a greasy spoon, or, if they drank coffee at all, sitting in a Starbucks. They'd be the ones you see working in the health food stores, or the whole earth type eateries that spring up like boils in these new neighbourhoods

You know the type; never smiling, with a pasty grey complexion from not eating enough protein who drift around filling the bulk bins at the health food stores. Or being your surly wait staff at the new eatery that displaced the greasy spoon within weeks of gentrification. They seem to take some sort of grim satisfaction in watching people pretending to enjoy their tasteless lentil and ground nut burgers or making bulk purchases of certified organic brown basmati rice.

The only time they're known to smile is when some pathetic soul tries to order something that gives them an excuse to for the "lecture". It comes in four standard forms; the evils of globalization, the evils of eating meat, the evils of trans fats and other unhealthy by-products of processed foods, and the evils found in tap water and the air we breath.

The latter they seem to take special delight in listing while people are trying to eat lunch. Nothing like a graphic description of the effects of P.C.B.'s on a person's liver to turn you off your lentil and beetroot tofu omelette. Lucy had wanted to come with me on the grounds that she might be able to recognise one of the people who was visiting her father, but I told her that it wasn't necessary for the two of us to suffer, and besides Ididn't know what danger we could be walking into.

So far all that I had risked was doing some sort of permanent damage to both my intestinal tract and any goodwill I might have towards my fellow humans. I remember reading about the Puritans back in history class somewhere and how they were dour folk who didn't believe in frivolity or fun of any kind. But compared to these environmental martyrs those guys would have been a laugh riot.

For all that I still was no further ahead before I walked into this ring of hell that Dante seems to have forgotten to describe. There was only one store that I hadn't been in yet and I didn't hold out much hope of finding anything there. Factual information and New Age bookstores aren't normally to be found within the same orbit, but as the saying goes no turn un-stoned. I've learned never to discard anything as a potential source of information.

Compared to the rest of the places I'd been in my tour through the pits of despair this was a fountain joy. Bright light, and no smell of rotting vegetation made an immediate improvement in my mood, which was only augmented by the smile and plunging neckline behind the counter. As they were accompanied by a pretty face and a cheery voice asking me if there was anything she could do for me, it almost made the day's efforts worthwhile.

Leaning casually on the counter, trying not to be distracted by what happened whenever she inhaled, I quickly spun the tale I had come up with to cover my real intent. My daughter was doing a school project on global warming and needed to find out more information about the Kyoto Accord. Did she happen to know anyone or could she recommend any good books that a single dad could get for his pride and joy to help her fulfill her dream of becoming an environmental scientist?

As soon as I mentioned the words Kyoto Accord I couldn't help notice an increased agitation in her breathing, how her smile had become a little more fixed, and a look had entered into her eyes that could only be fear. Pressing home what seemed to be an advantage I said surely amongst some of these books there must be something about global warming and the Kyoto Accord.

She was a lousy liar, that pretty little New Ager, and she knew it. But she bite her lip and said no, that wasn’t the type of book they sold here. She then made a show of catching site of the time, and making her excuses about needing to see a doctor she hustled me from the store so she could close up for her appointment.

I quickly took up station in the doorway of a store a half block down; there was no way I was going to let my little bird fly without following her. If my guess was right she was the lead I had suffered lentil burgers for and all I would have to do was follow her to where I needed to be led.

Sure enough she came out of the store a minute later. After locking the door she gave the street the quick once over and began to walk briskly away from the store and me. I let her get a half block away from the store before I began to follow her. She was wearing a very distinctly coloured poncho with some sort of bird on it's back that made her easy to follow so I wasn't worried about losing contact with her.

At one point she dashed into a store for a couple of moments and when she came back out she had added a headscarf to her ensemble. If that were meant to fool anyone who was possibly trailing her she was in for a surprise. Not even the R.C.M.P. would be thrown by such a simple deception. I was being careful to keep well back from her so there was no chance of her catching a glimpse of my face or recognising me by some other means, so I almost missed it when she turned off the main road.

When I got to where she exited stage right it turned out to be a dead-end alleyway with nobody in sight. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I noticed a couple of doors in each wall. They were made of identical plain materials, banded with metal; obviously fire doors from the old days when the buildings were first constructed.

It was probably that momentary feeling of being nonplussed that distracted me enough that I didn't notice anyone behind me until I felt the first touch on the back of my head of whatever it was they used to knock me out. I can only assume that I fell like a ton of bricks because that's what you normally do under the circumstances.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:43 AM | Permalink

People get lost for many reasons and in many ways. Some get lost in drugs and alcohol to escape their pain and others, quite literally get lost, by hiding out from the world as hermits. Whatever the reason it takes a lot for them to want to return to the world that hurt them, for them to come in from the wilderness figuratively and sometimes for real.

Missing In America, just out on DVD, is a movie that deals with veterans of the Viet Nam war who came back home to America and discovered that they could no longer be in the world. Scarred internally, and externally, they've retreated into the deep woods in the Pacific North West and carve out a life with as little contact as possible with "civilization".

Jake Neeley (Danny Glover) is one such veteran. He's never forgiven himself for the deaths of the men in his squad when he was on his tour of duty. He's lived out in the woods on his own with his dog, cat, and chickens eking out a survival existence emotionally and physically.

All that changes when an old army buddy (David Strathairn) unceremoniously dumps his American-Asian daughter on him because he's dying of lung cancer caused by Agent Orange. Forced to come out of his shell by the demands placed on him by young Lenny (Zoe Weizenbaum) Jake rediscovers his capacity for caring again.

In the woods that surround Jake live an unknown number of other veterans who have reached the same conclusion, live alone and nothing can hurt you again. The horror that was Viet Nam involved the use of kids to fight against the American soldiers. One of the neighbouring vets was horribly scarred by a grenade thrown by a Vietnamese girl Lenny's age and his mind is as badly burnt by the incident as his face was.

Ron Perlman (proving that he doesn't need latex and prosthetics to be scary or to act) plays "Red", a brooding presence in the woods that looms as a constant threat to Lenny's safety. Of all the veterans "Red" has the least chance of making his way home again, and is the least susceptible to Lenny's brightness of spirit.

You don't have to be a veteran of a war to be broken in spirit and Linda Hamilton's Kate, the owner of a general store that Jake buys his dry goods from, carries her own angst from a haunted past as much as any of the men, (and one woman) in the woods. Even as Lenny's presence creates a balm for the spirits of these damaged people, Red is a constant reminder of the fact that some wild animals can't be tamed or even socialized.

A film like Missing In America is in constant danger of slipping over into the realm of cheap sentimentality and cliché. How many movies have there been made of the curmudgeon brought to life by the young spirited child? Three things have to work in perfect harmony for this type of movie to have any chance of success.

The Director has to be ruthless in the extermination of extraneous cuteness, the script has to stay true to the characters and their potential, not have them turn into something that wasn't there in the first place, and the acting has to be without any artifice, everything played straight and true. It is to their credit that the people involved with Missing In America not only carry that off, they also breath life into the cliché so that it takes on a reality that its probably never had before.

You wouldn't know by watching this movie that it was the first time directing a feature for Director Gabrielle Savage Dockerman. Her previous experience with documentaries may have taught her the ins and outs of being on set and how to frame a shot to its best advantage. But there's no way any of that could have helped her learn how to build a sequence of shots to best reflect the emotional impact of a moment on screen.

Not only that but she was also working with a novice child actor as one of her leads. Too many experienced Hollywood Directors have ruined movies and child actors by turning their performances into caricatures instead of characters. Their movies should come with warnings along the lines of cloying cuteness being carcinogenic. They could take lessons from Ms. Dockerman in how to work with child actors: cute sayings and spunky attitudes are not acting.

Everybody receives help from the script that was based on a story by Ken Miller, who was also part of the scriptwriting team with Ms. Dockerman and Nancy Babine. That Ken is a veteran of the Viet Nam war, and knows of people living in the woods the movie is set in for the same reasons that Jake and the others do, helps ensure the story's authenticity. But it wouldn't have mattered how factual they were if they hadn't crafted a story that let the situation develop in as natural a manner possible within the confines of a movie.

Naturally everything is foreshortened by the time constraints of a movie, but they've done a wonderful job in bringing the development of the relationship between the lonely man and the scared child to life. Each actor is given sufficient to work with to develop their characters realistically and their relationships logically.

The one aspect of the script that may seem at odds with reality to us, the father leaving his child with an old soldier buddy, actually gives the script an even greater air of authenticity. As civilians we don't have an understanding of the camaraderie and trust that is built up within a platoon in the field. You literally place your life in each other's hands on a daily basis. Who else would you trust in this world with a life, a life more valuable than your own at this moment because yours is ending, then someone who had shared that responsibility in the past?

No matter how good the script, no matter how great the director, if you don't have actors who can carry out their assignments your movie is ruined. Miraculously the casting in this movie is a marvel from top to bottom. Danny Glover just keeps getting better and better an actor as the years go by. The emotional depth and intelligence of his work gets more and more sophisticated, as he utilizes more then just his voice and facial expressions to communicate with the audience.

You can see the physical affect that Lenny has on him as he gradually changes from the tightly wound, controlled person, full of self-loathing and fear we meet at the beginning of the movie one step at a time. The first confrontation with Red at a picnic organized by Lenny in order to make friends with Jake's fellow hermits, triggers Jake's own memories and nearly destroys the fragile bridge that's been erected between the man and the young girl.

Danny Glover's performance in this movie is that of an actor at the height of his abilities. He's using all of the skills in his repertoire to define this man who is given a second opportunity in life to hope; a second opportunity for a life.

Zoe Weizenbaum is a neophyte actor, never having set foot in front of the cameras before this shoot. As Lenny she too must be able to show reasons for her behaviour that make sense for the situation. She's a little girl whose mother is dead and her father is dying and all of a sudden finds herself in the care of a total stranger who acts like he'd rather have a rabid skunk as a companion.

Somehow Zoe manages to be all the clichés about the plucky and good-hearted little girl who brings a smile to everyone's face and make it seem real and natural. Probably the most overused work for describing child actors or their roles is spunky, and thank goodness she's not that. Her Lenny is brave and scared in the right mixture, determined to make the best of things if possible, but also not settling for the bare minimum.

Her reactions on meeting some of the other veterans for the first time is perfect, equal parts thrilled that they've come for her picnic and nervous like any child would be when meeting new adults. She only comes out from behind the protection of Jake when she knows that she will be accepted. It's an understanding of the little things that makes a person a good actor, and Zoe Weizenbaum in her performance of Lenny shows a delicacy of touch that would be the envy of many a more experienced individual.

Aside from Ron Perlman as Red and Linda Hamilton as Kate (they're not in any scenes together so no Beauty and the Beast reunion) both who give strong performances in support, David Strathairn as Lenny's father Henry is the other main supporting actor. Although he is only in the first few scenes his performance of a desperate man turning to his final resort is a finely tuned performance that sets the tone for the whole movie.

If even a hint of melodrama had been allowed to creep into his performance the movie's credibility would have been shot. Fortunately his performance is a masterful piece of understatement mixed with emotion that epitomizes the tone of restraint of all the performances throughout the movie.

The initials M.I.A. resonated with veterans of the Viet Nam war probably far more than they ever had for previous wars. Missing In Action, how many American service men and women continue to be Missing In Action, their bodies never found or their remains never identified. They'd go out with their companies on patrol and simply vanish during a firefight, maybe taken prisoner, maybe dying alone in a swamp thousands of miles away from home.

I doubt it was an accident that the initials of Missing In America are the same. These men and women who still live out in the woods or in any other place that is still inhospitable enough for them to get lost in and avoid humanity haven't been able to come home to their families that they left behind when they went off to fight in a war over thirty years ago now. They are still Missing In Action.

There has only been one other movie on the Viet Nam war that I've seen that does justice to veterans as much as this one, and that was In Country. Missing In America isn't an easy film to watch, and that's what makes it such a good movie. If it were easy to watch it wouldn't have done its topic justice. And if there is any group of people who deserve justice it's the forgotten men and women who are Missing In America

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:43 PM | Permalink

I've never been much for short stories, either reading them or writing them. I know they're a specialized art form with all sorts of distinctions between them and full length novels, size only being one of the things setting them apart. It's just I can't help feeling a little ripped off when I read them. There doesn't seem enough room for the things that happen to be properly justified and it feels like an author is forcing something to squeeze into a space that its far too big to fit into.

Of course there are exceptions to every rule, even the ones I make up for myself, and there are writers who have such a discerning eye that they can slice a small moment off the bulk of reality and turn it into something special. J. G. Ballard, James Joyce, Sherman Alexi, Jorge Luis Boges, and a few others seem to have the ability to reduce a story down to its barest essentials; distil its essence so that what other authors might take hundreds of page to recount, they can do in five or six.

The first book I ever read by Thomas King was called One Good Story That One, a collection of short stories. Since that time I've not only added him to my list of authors that I keep watch on for a new release, but become addicted to his short fiction. His stories find their targets with an accuracy that those Pentagon folk can only dream about.

Whether pointed comments about the state of affairs for Native peoples, satirical commentary on historical events and current affairs, insights into the workings and failings of relationships, or momentary glimpses into a life in progress King's microscope picks out the particles that others would dismiss as unimportant. Who else but Thomas King would have figured out the tie in between The Indian Act of Canada and Star Trek? I know I'd missed them until he pointed it out in "Where The Borg Are"

Of course the clues are there for those who know how to look, but not all of us have the eye for stuff like that. But than a lot of us don't look up at the sky too much or wander around Bay St. (the financial district in Toronto Ontario Canada) at 3:00 am so we miss seeing the flocks of Indians migrating in the spring and fall. Who knew that the city of Toronto had special workers whose job it was to pick the Indians stunned by flying into the glass towers of the sky scrapers up off the street and make sure they don't wander around the city streets dazed and confused?

Of course the guys are going to miss a couple every so often, which explains why you see the occasional befuddled Indian downtown. They even have a book which helps them identify what kind they are; you can tell by the feathers whether they are Mohawk, Cree, or Ojibwa. Why you can even get the occasional off course Navajo.

Hey, you don't believe me? Well, that Thomas King has written it all down. The title story from his latest collection, A Short History Of Indians In Canada is all about it. Okay sure story tellers will sometimes stretch it a little, but those are both pretty big stretches for there not to be some truth in them.

The next thing you're going to be telling me that what happened in "Coyote and the Enemy Aliens" is made up. Who else but Coyote would have done that job? Rounding up all the Japanese in British Columbia in World War two and taking away their property and businesses? Ain't nobody foolish enough but that Coyote to think that's a good thing to do.

Of course that Thomas King he's a tricky one too. Just when you think you know what kind of story he tells, he stands those stories on their heads and tells one like "The Dog I Wish I Had I Would Call It Helen". It's about the silly way that men can act towards mothers and children by making promises and not keeping them. They don't know what disappointment can do to a person, but that Thomas King sure does and shows us all

That story would make you cry that one would, if it weren't such a brave story that it made you proud. Sometimes that's the way of stories they can make you feel two, maybe three different ways at once. At least the good ones can, and that Thomas King writes good stories; stories that tickle your belly so that you laugh but they also tickle your eyes so that you cry.

That's a hard thing to do laugh and cry at the same time, it must even be harder to write the story that helps you do that. Of course there's the stories that don't do anything but sit there and make you have to think what they're about. Like that one, "Little Bombs", where the wife puts little bombs everywhere around the house for the husband to find, not real big ones that will hurt him of course, just ones that go bang. But when the woman who is not his wife does the same thing and the woman who is his wife finds out, that causes an explosion all right.

That story made me think, all right, just like that one "Fire And Rain" which might be about James Taylor but then again might not. Or how about "Domestic Furies" about a woman and her dreams as seen through the eyes of her son? Well of course all his stories make your think, because that's what good stories do. But some of them have as many twists and turns in them that they could be the path Coyote walks, and others they just sit there waiting for you.

A Short History Of Indians In Canada has some real good stories in it by that Thomas King fellow, and after you finish the stories its not done yet. You can read about Thomas King in a biography at the end, and there is an interview with him too where he talks about story writing and the different ways that he goes about doing it.

With a good storywriter you never know how the stories are going to affect you. Sometimes they can just sort of creep up on you without you even noticing and turn your head just that much so they change your perspective on the world for a short while. Their influence can sneak up and you don't even notice it happening.

Thomas King writes stories like that, and A Short History Of Indians In Canada could have an impact without you even noticing. Tricky things them stories, tricky like that Coyote, but a lot smarter and don't get into as much trouble (well not often anyway).

Posted by Richard Marcus at 12:59 AM | Permalink

In the early 1970's American Native people started to take action, much like the blacks in the fifties and sixties, fighting back against the hundreds of years of mistreatment their people had received at the hands of the American Government. One of the organizations springing up during this time was the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.).

As all activities on American Native reservations were under the jurisdiction of the Federal government, any policing matters regarding Natives was handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) One of the hot spots in the years that A.I.M. was making its presence felt was the Pine Ridge Reservation. It was here the most widely known of their protests took place when they occupied a church on the land where the Wounded Knee massacre took place (American soldiers killed over 300 unarmed men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in the late 1800's).

One of the participants in the occupation was a young woman from Nova Scotia Canada named Anna Mae Aquash. She would become close to the inner circle of A.I.M. and was active on many levels. In 1976 her dead body was found on a road in the Pine Ridge Reservation. She had been shot once in the back of the skull and had been dead for ten days by the time her body was found.

To this day, although there has been much speculation and plenty of accusations back and forth including, Anna Mae was an F.B.I. informant, no one has been found guilty of her murder. It remains as much a mystery today as it was thirty years ago.

Thirty years ago, Thomas King's lead character in his most recent book, The Red Power Murders, photographer and sometime reluctant detective, Thumps DreadfulWater, had been on the fringes of the group known as the Red Power Movement (R.P.M.). Although never personally active in any of their actions he was pretty well acquainted with most of the central figures involved. When the leader of R.P.M. from that time, Noah Ridge, shows up on a book promotion tour in sleepy Chinook where Thumps now lives, not only does it revive bad memories, but it raises a lot of questions.

The question of why is Noah bothering with an out of the way stop like Chinook is quickly supplanted in Thump's mind after Noah approaches the Sheriff for protection due to a death threat he's received since his arrival in town. The presence of an F.B.I. agent before anything happens and then a corpse turning up only adds to the puzzle. When the corpse turns out not only to be an ex federal agent but one who had been involved in a raid thirty years ago that had resulted in the deaths of two agents and three R.P.M. members, questions start to litter the ground like the snowflakes falling as winter descends on Chinook.

Noah also brings the past with him in the form of Dakota Miles, one time, sort of, girl friend of Thumps, but who had been too involved with the movement for any man to have a hope of becoming a central part of her life. Thumps remembers putting her on a train after she had recovered enough from a suicide attempt, following the mysterious murder of her closest friend and fellow R.P.M. member Lucy Kettle, to travel home.

Like Anna Mae, fingers had been pointed at Lucy as a potential F.B.I. informant, but those rumours had as little substance as the guesses as to who killed her. R.P.M. members getting rid of a traitor; the F.B.I. either directly being behind the hit, or indirectly by planting information through their informer that got her killed by fellow R.P.M. members; or the real informer because she was going to expose whoever it was, were just a few of the scenarios bandied about after Lucy's death.

For some people old wounds will simply scar up and leave a mark that will twinge when the weather gets damp. In others the same wound may fester for years and stay raw and exposed no matter what happens. While Thumps has a good healthy layer of scar tissue and deeper wounds from a more recent past that keep memories of Lucy at bay, Dakota's memories have never so much as scabbed. Lucy Kettle could have died yesterday as far as she is concerned.

As the events of the past start to intrude further and further into the present, Thumps is forced to start peeling back his layers of protective scarring by walking trails he hasn't tread in close to thirty years. Other people's memories, newspaper accounts, and information from case files, long moribund but available through the freedom of information act and the Internet, are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that just gets more confusing each time a new section is filled in.

Is it a coincidence that Lucy Kettle's family was from Chinook and that Noah's book tour showed up here? Could Grover, Lucy's brother be the person responsible for the death threats against Noah? How about the fact that the dead federal agent was the contact for the F.B.I. informant in the R.P.M., and what Thumps asks himself, is he doing in the middle of this mess?

He stayed out of it the first time around because he mistrusted the motives of Noah Ridge thirty years ago. He'd make a lot of noise but never do any of the work after the fact. It was always others who ran the soup kitchens, ensured the schools stayed open, co-ordinated the construction of housing, and anything else that was removed from media attention. How much of these murder threats is just an attempt to increase sales for a book that's barely selling?

When George Orwell spoke out against Stalin and Communist Russia in his newspaper columns and books before and during World War Two he was branded as a traitor by the intellectuals in the British left wing. When a writer is a member of a group who have legitimate grievances, the most difficult task he or she can face is to hold up the mirror of self-criticism and invite people to look into it.

You're not supposed to question, only supposed to say the cause is noble and that's all that counts. They'll use the truth against us so don't rock the boat by giving them ammunition and showing cracks in our unity is the usual argument in those cases. Thomas King has put a lot of boats in heavy seas before this and will hopefully continue to do so in years to come.

The questioning of the integrity of a fictional icon of a fictional Native action group is going to make a lot of people think about A.I.M. and it's leadership. I doubt that it is any coincidence that this book was published in the year marking the 30th anniversary of Anna Mae Aquash's murder. The fact that the case has been re-opened and the actions of various icons of the Native movement from that time are being called into question over what happened makes it even less likely.

Thumps DreadfulWater solves the mystery surrounding the death of Lucy Kettle in The Red Power Murders but he comes no nearer to solving the dilemma of what to do about it. The argument that the ends justify the means (Nobody had better dare take my usage of the word 'means' as an attack on Russell Means) leaves a foul taste in his mouth and an ache in his heart.

He's not so stupid as to deny that Natives have and are still getting a raw deal whenever the government and corporations can get away with it, but he can't reconcile himself to the way Noah Ridge uses the movement to feed his own ego. Sure without him maybe some stuff wouldn't have happened but as a human being he's a self-serving egotist who doesn't care what happens to the people around him as long as he comes out looking martyred and heroic.

Anna Mae Aquash's murder cast a pall over the whole Native rights movement of the seventies and was responsible for a great deal of the discrediting of A.I.M. among the main stream of the Native population and non-native sympathisers. How much of this was deliberately manufactured before her death by the F.B.I. and how much was just opportunistic sowing of discontent after the fact by whoever the real informant was will probably never be known.

Thumps DreadfulWater is faced with the situation people of conscience will always find themselves in when faced with the moral dilemma offered by people like Noah Ridge and the good of a cause. Is a cause better served by letting this type of person do what they do and swallowing the bad taste left in your mouth; does their claim that at least I'm doing something instead of standing on the sidelines and not doing anything, justify the balance of their behaviour and the reprehensible aspects of their character?

The Red Power Murders/I> doesn't offer any easy for either Thumps or for the reader. King knows that each of us have to come to these decisions on our own. Even for those personally involved there are no black and white answers to these questions, and sometimes even posing them is enough to get you in trouble and your loyalty questioned.