Leap In The Dark

A few years back I ran across an acquaintance of mine who I'd almost forgotten about. Well he's not really anyone I know personally, but John Prine has been around for most of my adult music listening life. He feels like one of those folk you'd see everyday on the bus on the way to work or school, who'd you'd not be friends with but whose company you had come to accept as part of your life.

Then one day you change jobs, or leave school and you stop seeing them. Years later if you happen to run into them, no matter what the circumstances, they provide a comfortable feeling of familiarity in a world which might not have turned out the way you expected it. So it is with John Prine and his music.

I had been listening to him all the way through the seventies, starting with his first release on Atlantic Records John Prine (The album with the three songs he's still probably best known for: "Hello In There", "Illegal Smile", and "Sam Stone",), Sweet Revenge ("Christmas In Prison" and "Dear Abby") and anything else he put out in those first ten or twelve years of his career. There was even one memorable concert experience during that time before his voice started to deteriorate in the late eighties and early nineties.

It wasn't until 1996 that it was discovered John had a cancerous growth on the outside of his neck. The first doctor he went to told him not to worry about it, and it wasn't for another year that anyone bothered with it. When it was discovered to be malignant the doctors did their best to shield his larynx from the radiation to preserve his vocal chords as much as possible and he's come out the other side with his voice only slightly deeper.

When he was fully recovered from the treatments John wrote an open letter to those who liked his music and songs indicating he was ready to go back out on the road again and feeling better then he had in a long time. The casual informality of his relationship with his fans, like that fellow passenger I talked about earlier, allowed him to say that he hoped "… my neck is looking forward to its job of holding my head up above my shoulders" as much as he was to getting back to singing.

It was the Billy Bob Thornton movie Daddy And Them ( a movie that's worth watching just to hear Andy of Mayberry worry about being "corn holed") that brought John Prine back into my life. Not only did he play one of Billy Bob's dysfunctional family members in the movie (he turns out to be the one willing to push the family to pull itself together) he provided a song for the movie, "In Spite Of Ourselves", a typically bittersweet love song about a couple similar to the one portrayed by Billy Bob and Laura Dern in the movie. Somehow or other, despite all the strikes against them, they are able to love each other and find a way of making it work.

It was the title song from an album John had done where teamed up with a variety of women vocalists, to record some of the classic duets of country music. After watching the movie I rushed out and picked up a copy of it and rediscovered the joy of listening to John Prine all over again. The interesting thing about that, was he had only written the one song, "In Spite Of Ourselves" of the fourteen tracks recorded, but he is so distinctive in style and presentation the songs became his.

Except perhaps for the duets with Iris Dement, the rest of the tracks were John Prine accompanied by someone else. That has nothing to do with him hogging the spotlight or lack of talent on the part of the other singer, but more to do with the strength of his personality. Just singing and playing guitar he has presence that people with twice his fame and notoriety can only dream of.

But to really appreciate John you have to listen to him singing his own music and you need look no further then his most recent release on Oh Boy Records (his own label) Fair & Square to experience that treat. In fact if you're like me and still relatively new to coming back to listening to him you'll be happy to know that he seems to have a obtained a comfort level that was absent for the longest time.
.
His songs are still matter of fact with only some poetic flights of fancy to soften the edges of reality, but it's that unsentimental nature of his material that gives it such universal appeal. Songs like "Glory Of True Love" sings the praises and itemizes the merits of true love in terms we can all relate to, but without being simple or melodramatic. The tune is so up-tempo and cheerful that you wonder why everyone else makes such a meal out of the subject.

His biggest strength as a songwriter has always been his ability to make his listener empathise with his subject matter; the old couple in "Hello In There" is a perfect example. He shows he hasn't lost that touch on Fair & Square with songs like "Long Monday" with its lyrics about the feelings of longing generated by missing someone you care for deeply and "Some Humans Ain't Human" with its description of the ways in which people can be mean to each other and some folk, including Presidents of the United States, just don't get it.

Although his other recent works, Missing Years and Lost Dogs & Mixed Blessings, have been good discs (His duet on the latter with Marianne Faithful is not to be missed) the Grammy award winning Fair & Square from 2005 seems to have recaptured the intangible elements of his song writing and performing that made his earlier work so memorable.

If that person you used to see on the bus all the time began to sing you his songs and managed to make it feel that of all the people on the bus he was singing only for you, that would go some ways in describing Prine at his best. Although Fair & Square wasn't written for you alone, it sure feels like it was, and there's no finer feeling than having a CD performed just for you.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:00 PM | Permalink

In his introduction to his most recent collection of writings, Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman explains how the title refers both to the topics of the included material and the nature of stories themselves. Stories like the human heart, dreams, butterflies, and egg shells may at first glance appear to be made from insubstantial materials, but on second look we see they all have unexpected strength.

While the heart may break metaphorically it is also the strongest muscle in the human body, beating a tattoo of 60-70 beats a second for years on end, and butterfly wings may look translucent but a Monarch can fly from Toronto Ontario to the rainforests of Brazil. Similarly a story is made up of twenty-six letters and punctuation, or air and vocalizations, but some have been around for thousands of years, long outliving their creators.

While Gaiman makes no claim that any of his stories or poems will fall into that latter category it's hard not to think about those words while reading through this collection. Not necessarily for their durability or their literary merit, but their understanding of how fragility does not detract from durability. Survival is not only for the strong, but the meek and the lost manage to find their way through the twist and turns of fate with equal dexterity.

From the morbidity of "Feeders And Eaters", the absurdity of his inverted Sherlock Holmes story "A Study In Emerald", the humour of "Forbidden Brides Of The Faceless Slaves In The Secret House Of The Night Of Dread Desire", the pathos of "Harlequin Valentine", and various other stops along the road of human and inhuman behaviour, Gaiman explores the enduring qualities of fragility.

This is unusual territory for a fantasy writer to be exploring, and somewhat unexpected from a writer like Gaiman who is best known for his whimsical humour and the almost nineteenth century sensibility which imbues so many of his creations. But the short fiction format is known for providing writers with the means to explore areas far removed from their normal haunts.

Such is the case with Fragile Things and although Gaiman has always shown an implicit understanding of human emotions and desires, these stories dig deeper and resonate louder then some of his longer work. It's as if the constraints of the media have assisted him in getting to the heart of the matter with more efficiency.

Something that I've always admired about Gaiman is his ability to maintain neutrality when it comes to his main characters. He leaves it up to us to judge their actions and character instead of nudging us in any direction with the nods and winks of biased description. Somehow, because of this maybe, we are able to form opinions of them almost from the moment they make their first appearances on the page.

In a novel an author has the luxury of letting atmosphere contribute to the way his reader reacts to characters, an advantage the short story author is obviously lacking. But there is something about the way in which Gaiman writes, perhaps this comes from familiarity with his work, but from nearly the opening paragraph we are wrapped into a cocoon of atmosphere that establishes precedent for the events that follow.

By being able to prepare the way for his characters, and then giving them their heads, his stories are able to move forward quickly without any of the jars that you experience in a less accomplished author's short work. There is a seamless flow to these pieces with none of the reliance on device or trickery that annoys me about most work in this genre.

I've noticed in the past that writing a short story has a lot in common with buying clothes or shoes. You have the option of going with something that has a lot of flash and pizzazz but is short on longevity or you can pick something a little plainer in style but a heck of a lot more durable. This is not to say that the latter is unoriginal in content, in fact quite the contrary, but the packaging it comes in is made to last with no reliance on gimmickry or sleight of hand.

Neil Gaiman is an imaginative and inventive novelist whose flights of fancy, whimsical nature, and ability to be equally at home in both the light and dark parts of the human psyche without resorting to the voyeurism employed by so many of his contemporaries, has made his name synonymous with high quality fantasy. Fragile Things not only reaffirms his abilities as a writer, it shows his capacity for storytelling is on par with those he dedicates the collection to.

Like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison before him he can hold the robin's egg that is a short story in his hands without crushing the shell and ensure that at its centre lays a sturdily beating heart. These are Fragile Things that the passage of time will have difficulty folding, bending, or mutilating. They are as durable as stories themselves and as long as there is air to breath and ears to listen they will be told.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:18 AM | Permalink

Coyote is steamed; boy I'll tell you I've not seen that one so angry in a long time. He came by my house the other day and he just couldn't sit still. He'd go to sit down and then he pop up again like someone put one of those big burrs on his butt.

"Coyote" I said, "have you got one of those big burrs on your butt? Sit down and stop with your pacing. You're making me tired just looking at you." Truth is he was making me nervous; Coyote pacing and steamed like that will sometimes get ideas, and Coyote with ideas is bad news. The world can't take many more of Coyote's good ideas, and another great idea from his noggin, - well let's just say you'd better hope they invent interstellar travel before that happens.

So I'm trying to get that Coyote to sit down and stop his pacing – to calm down and not be getting any ideas. "Sit down Coyote – have a burger. You want some tea Coyote? I've some real nice tea here" I say showing him the pot of tea sitting on the table beside his chair and all.

He looks over at me, and comes stomping across and sits down beside me, in his chair. He's careful to tuck his tail up so he don't sit on it – he's had trouble with his tail in the past and… but that's another story, this is this story not that one. So the steamed Coyote he sits down and he drinks his cup of tea. And he's huffing and puffing into his tea as he's drinking it. He's talking under his breath and muttering and drinking his tea all at the same time.

"Hey Coyote you're going to get real bad hiccoughs if you're not careful drinking your tea like that. You've got to be more careful 'cause you don't want to be burping and hiccoughing all over the place now do you? That’s' not a good thing for you to do."

That one listens to me this time 'cause he remembers how it was last time he hiccoughed and burped all over the place and although it makes him smile with his big tongue lolling out in that Coyote laugh, he knows he doesn't want to do that again. Now that I see him all relaxed like I figure it might be okay to ask him what's made him all steamed up.

"Now Coyote you gonna tell me what you doing coming over to my house all steamed up disturbing the dust with your pacing to and fro? Something got you all riled up and if you just keep steaming and stewing about it you're going start cooking yourself and I don't want the smell of burning Coyote fur in here" is what I say to him.

I'm hoping that if I get him talking he won't be getting any ideas. He doesn't think that well when he's talking which is a good thing because the last thing you want is Coyote thinking. Too much trouble comes from those Coyote thoughts I tell you.

From somewhere, while he's slurping his tea, (Coyote got no manners no matter how hard he tries to be refined and mannerly he'll always let himself down by the way he eats and drinks, slurping and slobbering), he brings out this book and slaps it down on the table. Slaps it down so hard that it makes all the little sugar cubes in their bowl jump up in the air and the milk in its pitcher spill and the tea in my cup jump into my saucer.

He just keeps on slurping his tea all this time, not noticing anything and as I'm pouring the tea from my saucer back into the cup and cleaning up the spilled milk, I look down at the book and see that it's by that story teller guy Neil Gaiman and its called Anasi Boys. I look over at Coyote, slurping away at his tea as if he won't be seeing any more tomorrows, so I pick up that book Anasi Boys and am trying to figure out what this nice looking book could have done to make Coyote mad.

It doesn't have any arms or legs so it couldn't have been pulling his hair or trying to set his tail on fire, or any of the other things that normally make Coyote all upset. Since this little book couldn't have done any of those things, it must have been something it said to rile up Coyote so much. So I pick up that book and open its pages to see why it got Coyote so upset.

It, the book, starts to tell me that the story is about two brothers who have never really met and who are as different from each other as if they were the sun and the moon, the only thing they have in common being there father. The little book starts out by being about the one son Charlie Nancy who everyone calls Fat Nancy even though he's not fat at all, which doesn't make much sense until the book tells me about Fat Charlie's dad.

Now Fat Charlie's dad's last name may sound like Nancy but it's really Anansi, and Anansi is a God, which is something Fat Charlie doesn't find out about his dad until after he dies of a heart attack, his dad that is not Fat Charlie, while singing in a Karaoke bar in Florida. For Fat Charlie his dad dying of a heart attack while singing Karaoke is only the last of the really embarrassing things that his dad has done over the years that has made Fat Charlie feel humiliated.

Most of us have a time in our life, usually teenager time, when our parents only have to stand next to us to embarrass us, to make us feel mortified. Fat Charlie feels like his whole life has been like that around his dad. Nobody called him Fat Charlie until his dad did when Fat Charlie got a little chubby when he was ten. But when Fat Charlie's dad named something it stayed named and nothing anybody did could do anything about that.

But you see that's what Anansi the God was like, he was a tricky little fellow who was always coming up with ways to get things he wanted by tricking others out of them. Sometimes it would work and other times they wouldn't work, especially if the other person had heard enough stories about Anansi and had learned how to be tricky. Anansi's best story was how he took all the stories and all the songs away from Tiger.

Tiger says I to that book, you mean like the big cat? That's right said the book, cheerfully. (It’s a very cheerful little book with lots of laughs in it, it's been telling me jokes all the time I've been telling you about it. I've been laughing at the books jokes, but quiet like cause I don't think Coyote would like it too much if I laugh too loudly at its jokes; I don't think he'd like it if I was laughing at all at the books jokes to tell you the truth. So I'm laughing quietly while Coyote makes lots of noise slurping tea so he can't hear me laughing) the big cat. Well says I if Tiger is tiger who is Anansi?

"Why Anansi is Spider" says that book Anansi Boys, "who better then to tie all the strings of the world together and weave them into stories than Spider? He was born in Africa but he came over here with his people to make sure the stories about living weren't forgotten"

"So what's your story about, the story about his boys, is it a story about living too?" I have to talk quieter now and not laugh so much at the funny stories the book is telling me because Coyote isn't making as much noise and is starting to wonder what I'm doing. I can tell because he's pretending he's not looking at me and he's not very good at pretending not to care what goes on around him.

The book thinks for a minute and says that he's about all sorts of things, he's about Anansi so people can get to know him better and understand what he's like, but, the book says, he's about telling the tale of Fat Charlie and his long lost brother and what they give each other. Fat Charlie has spent his life being very scared about being Fat Charlie, while his brother Spider has spent his life doing all those things that Fat Charlie can never quite bring himself to do because he's too afraid of messing up.

Spider got all the charm, glamour, magic and Godliness and Fat Charlie got all the human baggage and became an accountant. Both of them are lopsided and need to learn how to be a little of each other and that's what they spend their time doing. At first they rub up against each other all wrong and make trouble, but then they both figure out what they need and start to help each other.

"Sounds like you're a good story I tell Anansi Boys, with lots of good people and some strange people to make it a funny story. But what's this Neil Gaiman done in you to get Coyote so steamed that you can see the smoke coming out of his ears? Does he say Coyote is stupid or that he has bad breath or that he farts a lot? Does he tell embarrassing stories about Coyote when he was just small, like he tells those funny stories about what Anansi did to Fat Charlie, Crow, Tiger, and other people or even like the one where people used one of Anansi's own stories to get back at him?

From what you say I can't see anything that he's done to make Coyote unhappy. These are just the type of stories that Coyote likes. Just the type of stories that Coyote is always in or always telling people to teach them stuff." I stopped talking then and looked at the book.

The book just sat there as I looked at it, not saying anything anymore, which was a good thing because now Coyote wasn't just pretending he wasn't looking he was looking and listening. I looked over at Coyote thinking about what I'd just said to Anansi Stories and knew why Coyote was so steamed.

I sat and thought for a bit, which is hard to do when Coyote is staring at you with his yellow/brown eyes, and his tongue hanging out and his ears pointing forward. Then I slowly nodded my head and turned to Coyote and I put my hand on the book and said to him. "Why are you pretending to be a Spider in this story? Nobody who knows Coyote is going to be fooled for long by that disguise. You think you are such a tricky one Coyote showing up at my house pretending to be mad at this Anansi Boys book so that no one knows that it's you pretending to be this Anansi. You're not fooling me sitting there slurping my tea all over my house and making my sugar cubes jump and spilling my milk."

Coyote was still looking at me but now he was grinning, grinning that grin which he thinks makes him look smart but really makes him look a bit silly but we won't tell him that. So he grins that big grin and makes what he thinks is an awe shucks you found me out face and tries to shrug his shoulders.

He gets up to leave and even says thank you for the tea, which only happens once in a blue moon, and still smiling he heads off to where ever Coyote goes and I yell after him that he's forgotten his book. He looks back over his shoulder and tells me to keep it, and then he lopes off into the desert again.

I sit there looking out over the desert watching the stars come out from their hiding spots behind the blue sky and I pick up that book Anansi Boys by that Neil Gaiman fellow and I say, "Sometimes you just have to tell Coyote what he wants to hear" and the Spider in it's web up under the porch roof nods it's head and the book says yes, and we sit and wait for the moon, listening to all the stories going on all around us.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:10 AM | Permalink

In the wake of the September 11th 2001 attacks on the United States, Canada, like her neighbour to the south, created a slew of new laws specific to the detention of people as related to terrorist activities. These laws gave the government the power to detain people not just for committing terrorist acts, but also for their potential to commit said acts.

While that's all very well and good and maybe even necessary, the difficulty lies in defining exactly what a terrorist act is. Part of Canada's law defining a terrorist act was struck down as being unconstitutional the other day by Superior Court judge on the grounds that it impinged upon the right to freedom of religion.

In his ruling he said that defining terrorist activities as criminal acts motivated by religion is a serious infringement on religious freedom. While some are dismissing this action as not really being that big a deal, because it doesn't add anything to the already nebulous definition of what actually is a terrorist act, the fact of the matter is that it does eliminate the possibility that anybody is going to be picked up as a potential terrorist based on their religion,

It seems that Canada is using a process of elimination in an attempt to define what exactly constitutes terrorism and an act of terror. As it stands now our attempts are in line with pretty much the rest of world and the United Nations. But the problem is nobody has actually defined what exactly terrorism is. U.N. Resolution 1566 might say things like attacks on civilians to coerce a government into do or not doing something are acts of terrorism, but there is no definitive definition as to what makes a person a terrorist.

The problem is there is a certain amount of moral ambiguity about some of the ways we would define terrorism. One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter is one of the most often repeated paradoxes of the twentieth century when people are talking about geo-political realities. If we have to start with that as an accepted reality are we ever going to be able to come up with a definitive definition of terrorism?

Was the U. N. on the right track in trying to define it by the activities carried out by a group in attempting to achieve it's goals, or is their an actual philosophical difference between those who are freedom fighters and those who are terrorists? Just because we support their cause, the Africa National Congress and Nelson Mandela for instance were declared a terrorist organization by the government of South Africa but they had worldwide support, does that make them right.

Sentiment is a dangerous thing and can cause a person to lose track of the reality of who or what it is they are condoning. Back in 1980 there was a group Irish Republic Army prisoners who went on a hunger strike because they wanted to be political prisoners and not treated like criminals. There was a lot of popular support for them both at home in Ireland and abroad in North America (where it really counted of course because the happy Irishman Reagan was president of the United States) But a few years later the pendulum swung against them when they began their bombing campaign again and blew up a car bomb in a public square killing numerous people for apparently no other reason than to show that they could still get away with it whenever and however they wanted.

The I. R. A. and other groups like them claimed to have fought for freedom but they always seemed more than willing to deny others their freedom when it suited their needs. Denying others the ability to move about at will because you might be waiting to blow them up for no other reason that they are a different religion then you are doesn't sound like fighting for freedom to me.

It sounds more like using innocents to blackmail governments into doing what you want, or to sap the morale of the public so much they will pressure their government into caving. This was much the same tactic used in World War Two by both sides to justify their bombing of civilian targets; destroying the morale of a nation's citizens in the hopes of speeding up the war's conclusion.

If that isn't an example of using the citizens of a country to coerce its government into making a decision I don’t know what is. But at the time most political leaders and public fully endorsed the policy. In fact bombing raids are still carried out where we know that civilians could be at risk, but we consider that acceptable because we are not directly targeting them.

The real problem with trying to define terrorism by its actions, motivations, or the composition of the group doing the deed, is the fact once we start looking too close the case can be made for almost any act of violence or warfare against another people be called terrorism. If one country chooses to attack another country, no matter how noble or just their actions might seem they are still going to be committing acts of violent aggression against another group of human beings.

I'm not saying that I'm naïve enough to believe that there are not times when the only course of action is to take up arms, but I don't believe that we can differentiate between acts of violence by labelling them with words that denote one as being better than another. Blowing up a civilian aircraft is despicable and cowardly and is the action of people who have no regard for human life.

But why is it considered more of an affront then mobilizing thousands of people and pieces of equipment with the intent of taking life and destroying property? Just because one lays claim to the reigns of power in a country does that give you some sort of exemption from being responsible for the deaths of people? We say that terrorism are acts of violence which have no military objective, whose only purpose is to kill and spread fear as if somehow having a military objective makes killing acceptable.

Perhaps the reason we struggle to define, or differentiate between terrorism and other forms of violence is that too many of the justifications used by groups we refer to as terrorist sound far too similar to the ones utilized by everybody else. How can we obtain moral high ground if we let terrorists have the same reasons we have for utilizing violence as a means of problem resolution?

When the judge in Ontario struck down the law which would allow someone to be defined as a terrorist if he committed a crime motivated by his religious convictions he was only bringing Canada into line with rest of the world. We still have laws on the books that will allow us to lay charges against individuals as terrorists, but those same charges could have been laid without any special provision made to the criminal code of Canada.

In fact by giving these acts the appellant terrorist aren't you also giving them what they want by making them out to be some sort of hero instead of being a common criminal? Judges have a lot of leeway when it comes to sentencing a person for an act, or an attempted act of violence and could put a person away for a good long time even without calling them a terrorist.

Whether I like it or not is irrelevant, but our society has two types of violence, authorized and un-authorized, there's no point in beating about the bush and trying to qualify that any further. We are never going to be able to come up with definitions of terrorism that will not in some ways paint us with same brush. It doesn't matter to the person who is killed whether it was a terrorist bullet that took their life or that of a soldier: dead is dead and there's nothing you can do about it after the fact.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:06 AM | Permalink

It used to be this world was a great place to be a God in; why only a few thousand years ago the heavens and earth were filled to bursting with all sorts of deities, spirits, demons, and things that go bump in the night. Put together any group of humans larger then a family unit and they were bound to have found someone who they counted on for guidance and arbitrary justice.

Things have changed in the past millennia; with the rise of monotheism and larger concentrations of humanity in single places individual Gods have fallen out of favour. If you're no longer in need of someone to guarantee a bountiful crop, or to provide aid to hunting parties it's pretty hard justifying the worship of the one who provided you with that assistance.

It must be bad enough as a deity having your raison d'être pulled out from under your feet, but compared to what's happened to some of your fellow travellers, you should be counting yourself lucky. Think of all those Gods who were uprooted by their adherents and taken to a new world only to be gradually forgotten about or dismissed as inadequate for the demands of their new lives.

One day it's all sacrifices and offerings, the next it’s the cold shoulder and you're left dumpster diving in order to survive. Who'd have thought the name that once caused the heavens themselves to tremble with their passage are reduced to begging for crumbs of belief and a snatch or two of prayer.

What must be even worse is seeing what has relegated them to the back of the bus. Modern man has taken to worshiping "things" or the means that enable him to accumulate things. Televisions, personal computers, cell phones, all have their own personifications making an appearance in the pantheon now.

Such is the situation in the world you enter when you wander the pages of Neil Gaiman's American Gods published by Harper Perennial. (Just a quick note of thanks to HarperCollins Canada for supplying me with the books to review for this spotlight feature on Neil Gaiman at Blogcritics and where ever else these reviews are appearing) Immigrants and travellers to North America hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years in the past brought their deities with them. By carrying out their rituals of worship and carrying the names in their hearts they gave life to their Gods on this foreign soil.

From the blood thirsty warrior Gods of the Norseman to the spirits of the jungle of Africa they have all been left stranded without believers waiting for the inevitable ending when the last heart ceases to believe. For now they exist in various states of decrepitude, some better off than others, but mainly old people well past retirement age awaiting the end.

Like the majority of people Shadow is completely unaware of any of this (there's a paradox here waiting to be posed: if mortal man was aware of the fact that his ancient Gods were fading into oblivion, wouldn't that awareness be sufficient belief to prevent their fading) and given his circumstances he could easily be forgiven for not having any faith at all. He's just about finished a three-year stretch in prison and is eagerly awaiting his reunion with his wife. A good friend has even held his job for him so that he won't even have to worry about the black mark of "convict" on his resume.

Two days before his release he's called down to see the Warden and although prison and paranoia are close companions the news he's given is even worse than he could have imagined. His wife and best friend were killed in a car accident the previous night. In one stroke the future he had planned upon release is torn away and he is left bereft of anything resembling plans. (That they were found in a compromising position is just a bonus- the cherry on top so to speak of you worst case scenario for getting out of prison)

The first time Shadow meets the mysterious Mr. Wednesday is on his flight home from prison. Due to an overbooking he was seated in first class where the weird old man who somehow knew so much about him offered him a job. The man is so persistent that when the plane is forced to land due to inclement weather, instead of waiting for it to clear Shadow rents a vehicle to complete the trip by car.

But those whom the gods have selected, or however the saying goes, don't find it that easy to give them the slip. So it goes for Shadow, for who should be waiting for him at the diner he stops at for lunch but Mr. Wednesday (Woden's Day, Votan, Odin, all father of the Norse Gods) It's over lunch that Shadow first learns about the war that's in the offing between the Gods of the Old World and the Gods of New World. How even though the old ones are dying out the new ones are impatient and can't wait to shuffle them off this immortal coil.

As Mr. Wednesday explains it to Shadow the problem is that the New Gods feel threatened because they are afraid of being replaced and going out of fashion like the old ones are doing. They are the product of people's ever changing desires like the old Gods, but they like the things they represent come with built in obsoleteness. When anyone is scared, be they Gods or mortals, they look for a target they can lash out at, so they feel like they are accomplishing something.

In American Gods Mr. Gaiman show his deft touch of blending the fantastical and the mundane so that although a great number of the characters in the book are either Gods, spirits, or some other form of magical being the story always stays firmly rooted in the plausible. What else are the old Gods going to be like other than how they are depicted in this book?

Can you see any of them going quietly into a retirement home playing checkers and doing low impact aerobics until the end of time? No they are going to be out in the world making use of their understanding of human nature (running confidence games, doing a little fortune telling), or their natural abilities ( The Egyptian Gods of the underworld Thoth the Ibis, Anubus The Jackal, and Baast the Cat run a funeral parlour) to survive and blend into the world around them.

If you have any familiarity with ancient civilizations and their religions, it will be fun (at least it was for me) to try and figure out who everybody is. Mr. Gaiman has done his research and has included plenty of little clues as to who is who, and has developed their human selves from their Godly characteristics so as to accentuate who they are. What I found especially gratifying was the fact that he didn't attempt to make any concessions for their characters to make them more palatable for a modern audience.

It all of a sudden becomes harder to be sympathetic towards a character that demands human sacrifice as his or her due. Are you still ready to support the so called good guys in the war of the Gods, the one whose side Shadow is on, even when some of them have no problem devouring human beings and think nothing wrong with a throat being slit in their name?

But no matter what character flaws any of these deities might have, they are at least an extension of ourselves and seem far more real and earthy than the Goddess Media who talks like a Madison Avenue representative. Given the choice I know who I'd worship any day of the week.

As in most books by Neil Gaiman American Gods is wonderfully written with moments of transcendent splendour and glimpses into the darker side of human nature. But unlike so many writers today who seem to take great pleasure in only depicting the dark and slithery parts of our mind he maintains a balance that shows us although horror and violence exist so do hope and beauty.

One of things that I found interesting about this book is that he changed his style of writing with his change of locale. Other books I have read by him have all been set in England and there has been a certain tone to them, a way of putting words together on the page that was decidedly English. Here he has changed that so it feels like a book written by a North American.

This may not sound like much, but it is almost as hard for an author to write in another culture's voice as is it is for an actor to assume an accent and make it sound authentic, not an imitation. Mr. Gaiman manages the job so well that if you didn't know you'd think an American had written the book.

That may not sound like much of a big deal, but in order for this book to work it was essential for it to sound as authentic as possible because the location is such a key element in the book. God's are a reflection of the people they are worshipped by, and in the case of the aged and almost forgotten ones whose grip on survival is so tenuous, they no longer reflect the desires and manners of those who brought them here.

Gaiman's ability to accurately portray the people and expressions of America has to be spot on so that the differences are thrown into sharp relief. Anything less would have detracted from the story made it far more difficult for the reader to be drawn into the story.

Neil Gaiman is an author with a unique perception on the world that surrounds us, and even when he travels down paths that are familiar he is able to show us things in a manner we may not have thought of before. In American Gods he examines the way in which we believe and poses questions about belief that may cause some people disquiet. Belief is a very powerful weapon that can be exploited and used against those who are most devout, but it can also provide solace and comfort in times of need.

Perhaps it's not so important what you believe in, but more important that you believe at all. In American Gods we see how strong the power of belief can be. Without it Gods become just another collection of old immigrants bemoaning their lost opportunities but with it they are omnipotent. Kind of makes you wonder who needs who more doesn't it?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:29 AM | Permalink

In North America we take pride in our cities that date back to our original days of settlement and think of them as old and historic. So it's a little bit of a blow to the ego when you discover that a city like London England has ancient sewer systems that predate even our oldest European settlements.

In other parts of the world cities older then our eldest ones have grown up on top of the ruins of even older settlements that exist entirely below the sub-basement levels of the newer structures. Ancient houses stand empty, vainly awaiting the return of inhabitants and streets and avenues are equally devoid of the traffic that once filled them. Forever cut off from the sun, rain, and other elements they are the empty shells of lost civilizations.

But are they really as empty as we believe? Could it be possible that beneath our feet as we go about our daily business a whole other city carries out its affairs without our noticing? Well according to Neil Gaiman in his novel Neverwhere published by Harper Perennial, it's not a possibility but a reality. In the catacombs, sewers and abandoned subway lines that exist beneath London England a separate world not only exists but thrives.

Richard Mayhew is a recent immigrant whose head is still slightly spinning from his transportation to the big city from rural Scotland. It hasn't helped matters that he's been chosen for the role of fiancée and husband to be by a very ambitious and beautiful young women who seeks to mould him into a shape where he is best suited to achieve what she sees as his potential.

Given those circumstances, and his overall feelings of disorientation; of not quite being in step with those around him, what happens is to only be expected. While rushing to a dinner engagement with his betrothed they stumble over an injured girl's body on the sidewalk. When she pleads for Richard not to call an ambulance he decides to take her to his apartment instead. This one compassionate act irrevocably changes his world.

Through the mysterious Lady Door who he's rescued Richard is introduced to the second, and lower, strata of London life. In the short time it takes her to recuperate he learns about communicating with rats and pigeons, that mysterious passages exist between the two worlds that have no relation to time and space, and that if lower London has elements of the fantastical it also has its share of the horrible.

But his worst shock comes when he finds that when he attempts to continue on with his normal existence in the days following his encounter with Lady Door and her associates he seems to have become invisible, or perhaps beneath notice. Like the homeless person huddled in the doorway we avert our eyes from or stare through unseeing, Richard had become a non-entity.

As his desperation grows to be seen and recognized he realizes that his only hope of getting his life back is finding the Lady Door. With the assistance of a group of Rat Speakers, people who can speak to the rats, he is guided to where he had heard Lady Door say she was going to be next.

In many cultures, and many old tales, a person must make a metaphorical journey into the underworld or the dark to come to an understanding of themselves. Richard Mayhew's travels through the underworld of the city of London are his equivalent of that quest. Whether he knows it or not his travels to assist the Lady Door in her search to find those who killed her family will give him a sense of self that he was lacking previously.

Unlike others who attempt to write in the urban fantasy genre, Neil Gaiman imbues Neverwhere with a feeling of whimsy that makes even it's darker moments less intolerable. It's like we are Richard Mayhew for most of the book and feeling his wonder at the novelty of the whole experience. Even the sheer terror of having to deal with his fear of heights and overcoming them becomes something to revel in only because it gives him the feeling of being truly alive for the first time.

As usual Gaiman proves himself a master at creating the weird and wondrous, with characters ranging from the benign to the stunningly evil. Each one is treated to the same luxuriant treatment of being drawn with words that describe them in careful detail, while still allowing a good number to their traits to come out through their actions and conversation.

Perhaps it is because Gaiman is used to writing in a way where it is easy for someone to illustrate his stories, but each and every description he offers us of a new local easily brought forth an image in my mind of what it should look like. In fact the whole time I was reading Neverwhere, I was able to gradually piece together a picture in my head of the entire world that the story was taking place in.

To my mind what really proves Gaiman's effectiveness as an author in these pages is how easy he makes it to believe in the existence of this other world beneath our feet. Where do the people go who have slipped between the cracks in our society? On a daily basis the majority of people walking the streets of a city do a remarkable job of not recognising the presence of others who look different than they do.

Adding to the believability of the situation is his refusal to romanticize the people or the circumstances. Some of the people stink and do disgusting things to make a living like fishing through the outflow pipes of the sewers looking for "treasures" that could be anything from a used cell phone or a dead body.

It's no paradise below the surface where those not wanted by our society have a life of ease and plenty. There is starvation, famine, and crime down there just as much as there is above ground. But at least here they all exist and are seen and heard. They all have a sense of identity aside from the one given them by the society that had labelled them simply, homeless, drunk, or crazy.

Richard Mayhew hadn't been one of those unfortunates, but he was still lacking in identity before his journey, allowing himself to be defined by the people around him instead of working to create himself. We all crave identity, and as Richard discovers when you are no longer given recognitions status unless you are very self-assured and aware, you are very quickly lost.

The homeless, the eccentric, and the odd are all designated by our brains as "not there", if they aren't there on the streets and the sidewalks of our city, where are they? Neverwhere postulates that they have created their own world, where even if they aren't physically much better off, at least here they have a purpose and an identity.

Neverwhere is a wonderful adventure story about a journey through a vast underground world full of wonders and horrors. It is also about the same journey we each can choose to make through our own world of wonder and horrors that lies within us. Enjoy it for the story, and think about it for yourself.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:20 AM | Permalink

I have a problem and the only thing for it is to confess to it and get on with my life. I don't know if they hold meetings for this or not, sort of like Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) does for Alcoholics, but I will stand up in this public venue and say to you: My name is Richard Marcus and I'm addicted to words.

It's true; I have no control over this compulsion to use as many words as possible when writing something. If I can use two, even three words, instead of one, I will. Why else would there be such a creature called an adjectival phrase if we're not meant to use it?

I know that's a heretical way of thinking in these days of less equals more, where people communicate via text messages that have turned language into a series of coded short forms that rob it of any passion. But I can't help myself, in fact just thinking about txt. msg. makes my need to be verbose become so strong that it will take wing like a flock of starlings in full fall flight, twisting and spiralling across the skyscape, in an amazing display of natural synchronicity; and the words will dance across the screen of my laptop with no regard for propriety or fashion.

See I did it again, right there in front of you, on a public site. I dared to use adjectival phrasing to create imagery that may or may not have been pertinent to what I was writing about, but were an expression of what I was feeling at that precise moment in time. Were they tangential, excessive, self-indulgent flights of fancy so to speak? I'm sure many of you would answer in the affirmative to that question and wonder what was my point in doing so.

There never is a point I just do it. I can't just have one word, or write socially, I have to take it seriously all the time, and write as if my life depends on it or I start to feel sick. Have you ever seen anybody go through word withdrawal, believe me it's a nasty. The worst are the poets, wandering around slack jawed and drooling, occasionally stopping their endless pacing and literally grasping at the air with their hands in an attempt to grab hold of a thought or stanza that might be floating through their heads.

It's not like I guzzle or spew them out all at once you know, I usually utilize them over a few pages so as not to nauseate or sicken by too quick an intake, but the result is still the same; an overabundance of words. In fact it seems that by stretching it out and prolonging the experience, that I somehow exasperate the situation instead of achieving my intended purpose of trying to provide some relief from the excesses of my affliction.

For affliction this is, and like any other illness verbosity has its symptoms and causes, of which the former are obvious and the latter myriad and tedious in their detail. Sufficient to know that like any other addiction the reasons lie buried within the psyche of the afflicted and need to be revealed through the careful pulling back of layers of memory, in much the same way as the dance of the seven veils exposes mystery after mystery as each piece of coloured silk wafts to the ground, until the final core stands naked and exposed.

What childhood trauma or early life experience could cause a person to contract an undying love of the English language? What horrible experience makes it necessary for them to fortify their sentences with bulwarks of indomitable predicates, nouns, pronouns, similes, allegories, analogies, and metaphors? Were they made to memorize pages of the dictionary or simply forced to suffer through one too many classes on post-modernist theory?

Or has it just been, as in my case, a reaction to what they see as the simplification of the English language down to the level of simpletons? As the world strives to cater to an ever lower and lower common denominator, there are going to be those who sicken at the sight. Their illness will manifest itself within the context of their creative field; thus for musicians it will happen in how they choose to perform and what, painters in what they choose as subjects and their methods of depiction, and writers of course in their use of the tools at their disposal.

I wouldn't worry about it spreading out into the world at large, addictions aren't usually contagious, and treatments seem readily available in the form of corrective medications designed to allow people to function at a reduced capacity of intellect and emotion. Of course that doesn't mean there aren't going to be those who are unrepentant and unwilling to undergo treatment for their affliction, but they can continue to be marginalized with the concentrated efforts of everybody.

Unfortunately I don't think there is any hope for me any more, so you might as well give me up as a lost cause. I'm hopelessly addicted to the plague of excessive word use and love of the English language. I guess I'll just have to learn to live with it. Can you?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:46 AM | Permalink

Sometimes I can't believe how fortunate I am. In spite of so many real world considerations, like health and financial circumstances, in some ways I'm in the position I always hoped to be in. Able to devote the majority of my energy to doing what I love doing most: reading and writing.

It's just one of those ironies of life I suppose that it took becoming ill to be able fulfill my ambitions, but hey I'm not going to complain. The circumstances aren't that much different from those of a person who has a full time job of some sort who is trying to do the same thing. The only difference is where we have to expand energy not devoted to what we want to be doing.

I've talked a lot about writing in the past, but one of the benefits that I haven't really mentioned is how it has brought back my pleasure in reading. Prior to starting my online writing I was going through a fallow period where I was having difficulty in finding anything of interest to read. I almost felt like there was nothing new left to read.

I was slow to start reading, even though I could read better then most people my age, it just wasn't something I was interested in. One of the problems was the level of reading that was expected of you in school was so basic that I just assumed all books were either along the lines of Dick and Jane or those my parents read full of small type and no pictures. It wasn't until someone finally had the good sense to introduce me to Paddington Bear by Michael Bond that I discovered books could be of value.

By the time I was seven or eight it was obvious I had outgrown the children's section in the library so the librarians consented to give me an adult card. It was a different world through those doors to the other side of the library. The bookcases towered over my head so instead of being on eye level most of the books were well beyond my reach and literally unobtainable.

That didn't matter because at least I had a far greater selection to choose from. From that time on till I was out of high school I read anything and everything: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Joyce, Miller, Kerouac, Durrell (Gerald and Lawrence) Hemingway; pretty much the whole gamut of 19th century naturalist/realism and 20th century modernism. From there I moved on into the beats; Ginsberg, Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and all the Algerian expatriates.

Of course there were also the poets; cummings, Ferlinghetti, Elliot, Pound, Stein, Plath, Cocteau, Beaudalaire, Rimbeau, and Bukowski. On top of this were all the textbooks for my university courses that were mainly literature and theatre (being a theatre major). In high school I had studied Latin and read the classic Roman literature, and in university I travelled back to the earliest days of the written and performed word when writing was young and printed materials were almost non-existent.

By the time I had come to the end of this period of my life, in my mid twenties, it felt like there was nothing new left to read. Even if there were I just wasn't interested anymore, I was throwing myself into my work in theatre full bore and they're just wasn't time enough in the day for reading. I was either in the theatre or sleeping for 90% of my time. In that other ten per cent I tried to cram the rest of what's commonly known as a life.

It was only after leaving the theatre did my mind start to turn back towards the written word. At first it was only sporadic attempts that didn't usually result in many finished pieces. It wasn't until I started writing my own blog in March 2005 that I began to find the confidence that assured me I could finish anything I started.

Almost as important as the discovery of my own capacity for creative writing, was the rediscovery of an appreciation for reading the written word. How else was I going to be able to judge my own work if I wasn't constantly comparing it with others? With this in mind I began to search out books that I could review.

By having to look at all the particulars of what it was I liked about a book not only did it help me understand what my own writing needed in order to improve, it also helped me rediscover all the things I liked about reading. Some people claim that analysing a book takes all the joy out of it for them, but it depends on the intent.

When I reviewed a book I was looking for the things in it that made me like it or dislike it. I wasn't trying to dissect it, the author's intent behind writing it, or any of the other things academics do that take the joy out of reading. I went looking for the heart that beat within the story and in doing that I rediscovered what it was about reading that caused my pulse to race.

Of course there have been other perks that have gone with reviewing books. I've had the pleasure of coming into contact with some very interesting and intelligent authors who have not only allowed me access to their creative process by exchanging correspondence with me, but have also given me access to their writings in the rawest of forms.

As a reader I thought I had achieved the ultimate satisfaction when I was sent someone's galley proofs to read. For me it was a thrill knowing that I was able to read the book well in advance of the rest of the reading public. But recently something even more exciting happened, another author has asked me to be a reader for his newest work. He sends me pages by email the moment he finishes a draft.

I read it and send him back my spontaneous impressions and thoughts; as a reader what did I like about what I read. I'm not reviewing the book; in fact I do my best to shut off my critical faculties so that I can react more directly as a reader in regards to like and dislikes.

I love it because it's freeing me from the shackles of my rational brain while I'm reading, which means I'm reading purely on instinct. So not only I'm I having the opportunity to play a role in helping somebody else create something, but I'm also remembering what it was like to read for no other reason but the joy of reading like when I first started as a child.

It's funny how things go in circles like this isn't it? I began writing in the hopes of being able to write something that I would like to read, but the results have far exceeded my expectations. Not only have I succeeded in my primary goal, but I've also been able to rediscover my own love of reading for the pleasure of reading.

What more could a person ask for; to not only find what they are looking for but extra treasure as well.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:53 AM | Permalink

One of the claims to fame that the Internet can legitimately trumpet is its international nature. Anything you write has a chance of being read by anyone in any country in the world. It doesn't even matter what language you've originally written something in (I've seen articles of mine reprinted where my computer can't display the letters or the only words I've understood have been proper names) translation facilities are sophisticated enough to overcome any barrier.

If I needed any further proof of the International nature of the Net I don't even have to look beyond where I publish my own work. Blogcritics is an online web magazine with readership and contributors from all over the English speaking world, Desicritics offers content primarily aimed at the South East Asian population scattered around the world, and my own blog, Leap In The Dark, is hosted by the Epic India portal operated by Indian author Ashok K. Banker.

I suppose this is old news to most of you, and it's something I usually don't give much thought to either. I write something, put it out there, and people will read it or not. Under most circumstances there's nothing wrong with that either. I write a lot of reviews on books, music, or films and most of my non-review material can be classified as general interest; topics that can cross cultural boundaries and political borders. It doesn't mean you are necessarily going to agree with me but in most cases the frame of reference is universal.

A couple of months ago I started to write a semi-regular feature on Canadian politics for publication at all three sites. Looking back on it I realize my motivations for this were in no small part influenced by a bout of latent chauvinism. Why, if there was so much being written about the United States by everyone, not just Americans, couldn't there be at least a little bit about Canada?

It's not as if we're some non-entity country with no role on the world stage. We've been a member in good standing of the G-8 group of countries since its inception, part of almost every major peacekeeping force that the United Nations has ever sent out (Heck it was a Canadian who came up with the concept – Lester Pearson during the Suez Crises in the fifties), a member of NATO since the beginning, and are still honoured in Holland and Greece for the part our army played in the liberation of their countries in World War Two.

Given all that why wouldn't people be interested in the internal workings of the country? Now I wasn't talking about reporting on local issues or anything silly like that, but some of the major political issues that face the country as a whole. Health Care, federal elections, nefarious behaviour on the part of elected officials and civil servants, excesses committed under the new anti-terrorist legislation, our role in international situations like Afghanistan, and our social legislation which created a stir when we legalized same sex marriages or talked about decriminalizing marijuana.

While some of those issues did elicit lots of comments, anything about gay marriage is guaranteed to get people going, a good deal of the time, especially when away from my own site, I felt like I was talking in a vacuum. Hardly anyone was interested in the issues that in Canada were considered a big deal. Even topics that affected our neighbours to the south like the arguments over softwood lumber duties and the negotiations for a new treaty didn't attract much attention beyond readership in Canada.

I began to wonder if anyone really cared about what happened in Canada. The fact of the matter is, why should anyone outside of Canada care what happens here?

Do any internal decisions that Canada makes have any real impact on the rest of the world? Perhaps if we all of sudden imposed massive import duties on any goods where the equivalent is manufactured in Canada by Canadian companies (not subsidiaries of foreign owned groups) or slapped massive export taxes on natural resources that other countries depend on folks would take notice.

But that's not Canada's style. We don't hold other countries toes over the fire; in fact we barely even let disputes fester for very long without looking for a compromise solution. What else would you expect from the country whose armed forces helped accept the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the United Nations? Outside of the hockey arena we are one of the most non-belligerent nations you're bound to meet.

The reputation Canada has created internationally (outside of a few pockets of very strange extreme right wing elements in the United States) is of such a benign nature nobody can believe anything we do will create any ripples that extend beyond our borders. Much like the Northern Scandinavian countries we produce individuals who play a role on the world stage, but are more concerned with the quality of life within our borders than about influencing lives beyond them.

Who but a Canadian is going to be interested in the Romanow report on Health Care and how its recommendations are being ignored by government after government? Is anybody outside of Canada going to care whether the Conservative Party of Canada fiddled the books so as to be able to solicit more money from people as donations? A change in government in Canada has nowhere near the implications of a change of government in the United States, India, Russia, or China for the rest of the world.

Now that I come to think about it, I like the fact that nobody is really concerned about what happens in our country. It means nobody is worried a new government might decide to start bombing them, think about cutting off their oil, or any number of other aggressive behaviours. Other countries know they can count on us to send aid in the event of an emergency and not look to see what advantage there is in it for us or attach any strings and conditions to it so as to exert influence on their social policy.

Other countries don't need to know who the Governor-General of Canada is or because we are a constitutional monarchy she is the titular head of our country to appreciate what we offer the world. Given the option of having people desperate for news about what's happening in Canada because they fear how it's going to affect them, and having them not being interested because they know there is nothing to worry about, I prefer the latter circumstance.

I'm not such a Canadian chauvinist, or egotist as a writer, to want people to read my articles on Canada because all of a sudden we are notorious. In fact my chauvinism says that it's a sign of our good quality that people don't need to read about us.

.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:59 AM | Permalink

It had to happen sooner or later but I'm sure any Republican Senator or Representative facing an election this coming first Tuesday of November would have preferred it four weeks later. George Bush used the V-word in reference to his folly in Iraq. He didn't actually use the word himself, but he acknowledged that the situation in Iraq was indeed analogous to the V-word.

Now die-hard conservatives are going to complain about leading questions from a Clinton Democrat (A.B.C. correspondent George Stephanopoulos who got the President to admit the similarity was a former Clinton administration flak) attempting to discredit the policies of the administration in the lead up to the elections. But George Bush has been around politics all his life and should know how to avoid an easy yes and no question.

In fact all he was asked was if he believed the current circumstances in Iraq were analogous to those surrounding the Tet offensive in 1968. He could have easily said, "No I don't believe the circumstances are at all similar". Truth be told he would have been quite correct militarily if that had been his reply. There is really nothing in common with the situation in Iraq and the circumstances of the Tet offensive in terms of what's happening in the field..

What Stephanopoulos was fishing for, and hooked George on, was a comparison between the feelings of the American public now towards the operation in Iraq and the burgeoning feeling of widespread outrage about the war in Vietnam that Tet engendered. It was George's willingness to go along with that assessment that could prove problematic.

Thinking about it some more I realize that any official administration statement linking the two operations, even saying weather conditions were similar would not look great in print. (Vietnam was never a war – it was a police action and the war has been won in Iraq so we're not allowed to call them wars. It's such a nasty word anyway, implying death and destruction like it does, maybe we should just do away with it altogether.). Bush likens Iraq to Vietnam as a headline, no matter what the fine print, would have any Republican hoping to be re-elected this November running from the President like their butt was on fire.

Vietnam is the great bogey monster of modern American military history. It's not so much that they lost the war on the battlefield; it was they didn't understand the battlefield well enough to be able to obtain the easy victory they felt was their due. From the earliest part of the twentieth century the American military had wandered the globe with relative impunity intervening whenever they felt the need.

Ever since Teddy and his roughriders rode up that hill they had protected American investments and interests without any difficulty. America loves a winner and it is her manifest destiny to be one with ease and end up covered in glory.

Vietnam ended all that. There was no easy victory and there was no glory, there was just a seemingly endless stream of unmet expectations and casualties. The Pentagon can blame the media all they want for turning the public against the war in Vietnam, but all they were doing was there job. They reported what the politicians and the generals promised and then they reported what actually happened. Was it their fault there was such a gulf between the two?

The military has spent the last thirty years restoring the finish to their reputation that Vietnam tarnished, There were a series of small wars and invasions, Panama and Grenada, that they carried out with apparent ease, and the first Gulf war gave them the opportunity to perfect their control of the media during an armed conflict.

America was going to be proud of their military if it was the last thing the Pentagon did and they didn't really care what they had to do to accomplish that end. The one lesson they learned from Vietnam was that without public support they weren't going to be allowed to play with their toys and be given millions of dollars to spend. So all their efforts have been geared towards that end.

For the first while things were going along just swimmingly. The invasion went according to plan, the non-existent Iraqi army collapsed like the house of cards they were and casualties were minimal. They even had a triumphal march into Baghdad. It's only been since the "war" has ended that things have begun to unravel.

First there were the revelations that soldiers had been having fun torturing prisoners, some even going so far as to have their pictures taken with them as mementoes of the occasion. There were the various "rebel clerics" who had to be put down which resulted in the heavier casualties then had occurred in the invasion. (That one of the "rebels" had been an opponent of Saddam', his father had been put to death by the ex dictator, seemed to get lost in the shuffle)

But the torture was able to be passed off as the work of rogue elements ("you're always going to get a few bad apples who are going to spoil if for the rest of the class" – although how they all ended up working together and how nobody else in the prison seemed to know it was going on remains a mystery) and the public was willing to accept a reasonable amount of casualties as long as there was the appearance of accomplishment. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs after all.

So even those events weren't the disasters they could have been. The Pentagon handled them with the dexterity of a Madison Ave. agency smoothing over their celebrity endorser's nasal problems. It's only been as the occupation has dragged on and casualties have mounted that unease among the general public has begun to grow.

The problem for the Pentagon is that they have nothing they can announce except casualty reports. There are no battles, aside from the occasional raid on a suspected insurgency hide out, so there has been no decisive victories to celebrate and make the mission appear to be progressing.

Seventy-three American soldiers and who knows how many Iraqi military have been killed so far in October as they come under increased attack in Baghdad from insurgents. Ten Americans alone were killed last Tuesday and forty Iraqis yesterday in attacks in various regions. Numbers like this make it very difficult for the military and the administration to keep painting a rosy picture or predicting a day when American troops might start coming home.

It's that last detail that is most problematic for many Americans. It's obvious that if American troops were to withdraw today the Iraq would descend into an outright civil war. But it's also obvious that the American public is beginning to tire of the ever-increasing casualty numbers.

In a recent poll two thirds of the respondents said they disapproved of Mr. Bush's handling of the war, and that 45% thought the Democrats were more liable to make correct decisions regarding the war as opposed to 34 for the Republicans. Those are not the kind of numbers that make politicians running for election happy.

No matter how hard they've tried to prevent a repeat of Vietnam the military has failed. Iraq, like its predecessor, was the subject of many promises and while they have fulfilled some of them, they have yet to be able guarantee the one thing that is beginning to matter most; an ending. Public opinion turned against the war in Vietnam because of mounting casualties in a seemingly interminable campaign.

History is repeating itself whether the Pentagon likes it or not, and the longer the conflict drags on the more it will. If George Bush was correct in agreeing with his questioner that there are similarities between the current situation in Iraq and those surrounding the Tet offensive in regards to public opinion then the Republicans should look to their history books.

The Democrats were in power in at the time of the beginning of the Tet offensive. By the time the following November rolled around Richard Nixon was starting his first term as a Republican President. If things are allowed to continue as is it's not just this November they need to worry about, but 2008 as well.

The Pentagon thought they could correct the problem of losing public support by controlling the press. Unfortunately it also depends on producing results as promised. That's the real lesson they've failed to learn from the Vietnam War.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:52 AM | Permalink

"So now the end is near…" or something like that anyway are the lines from that old Sid Vicious classic "My Way". There he is in his white tux jacket standing at the top of the big staircase crooning it out for all he's worth, for the opening lines anyway, then it's the Sex Pistols/punk/howl/thing that comes screeching out of his mouth.

Well Sid did it his way, but that's not the way most of us choose to go out, in the Chelsea Hotel on bad Heroin and in a bad way. But old Sid must have been pretty much D.O.A. when he checked in the Hotel anyway – maybe even when he checked in with Malcolm and the boys back in the beginning. He was too much punk for most tastes – nihilism to the max – and made sure of the no future part. Because in reality he didn't have much of a future and a part of him knew that, somewhere in that fucked up drug and alcohol riddled brain he knew after this – this being Nancy and the Chelsea Hotel – it was downhill on a bumpy roller coaster to hell.

So what's Sid got to do with anything, except that I was thinking about finishes and endings, and doing things the way you plan on it and the whole "My Way" thing popped into my head. Which of course brought the late Mr. Viscous to mind and caused my mind to start wandering down the path of the choices made that brought me here instead of maybe my version of his lonely hotel room and empty life.

Which in turn might prompt some among you to wonder what any of this has to do with NaNoWriMo Notes and the price of bread. Probably nothing for the latter, but something that my tortured brain says has to do with the former; at least in terms of bringing things to a close – ending – making a finish.

Last year in October, perhaps a little earlier in the month, I began the first of two projects that have preoccupied, if obsessions can be said to preoccupy, me for the greater part of the ensuing time. Bless Dr. Pat's head (former esteemed Books Editor for this site) for his forbearance; allowing a relatively green writer the freedom to sink or swim in the potential pool of self-indulgence that became "NaNoWriMo Notes".

Initial objectives of the series was to provide updates and reports on my progress in the November nuttiness known as the National Novel Writing Month. Of course with its now close to 75,000 participants worldwide the National part of the title is obsolete, but why change a good name and all the memories of a young Robin Williams it evokes.

The object of said contest (NaNoWriMo for short) is to write a minimum of 50,000 words during the course of November for no other reason then to say you did it. Sure some people have used it as a springboard to make a rough start on a novel, but for the most part it's just an exercise in spontaneous creation: how far can one bit of inspiration be carried.

For some people it can feel like running with one of those medicine balls that sadistic phys. ed. teachers used to make pre-pubescent kids throw at each other in an attempt to show that they could stand up to the weight of the world being suddenly tossed in their direction, tucked under your arm. To others it's no more weight than one of those plastic baseballs that seem to have more holes in them than plastic. Pick it up with one finger and run with it for days leaving the medicine ball haulers far behind.

Ask anyone who has any experience with me and they'll gladly tell you I've some strange peculiarities, which if you're being nice you'd call eccentricities, but could also be called psychosis. (Is there no plural for this word psychosi, psychosises? According to my spell check it's one of those annoying plural is singular is plural words which I never even know how to say let alone use properly in a sentence) Tell me to write 50,000 words of a story in a month just for the sheer hell of it, something no obviously sane person would attempt, and it's like offering me a treat. What, how can you be stressed by this, I can't think of anything that could be more fun!

Ask me to go out to a mall, walk down a busy street, or even go to a social gathering where there are going to be people and noise, and I'm a basket case. I don't want anything to do with it, them, or whatever. I come over all faint, I make excuses, and if I do go I hide under clothes and a hat with a brim. In fact ask me to have anything to do with the normal goings on in the world and I could easily be reduced to a quivering mass of jelly.

It's not even like I'm some classic serial killer social misfit "he was always so quiet and kept to himself" type of guy. I'm happily married, have one or two close friends, and am reasonably personable; it's just that modern life and most of the people living it freak the shit out of me. I take some drugs to help me cope and see a shrink whose job is to try and ease me back into the swing of things, but I'm not overly interested in doing that, thank you very much.

I think this is where we can fit in the hotel room and Syd Viscous now. You see quite a number of years ago I was defining myself by imagining me through the eyes of others and always, of course, finding the results wanting. (Whether they did or not is another thing all together) Living like that requires a great deal of outside "assistance" in whatever form you feel like at the time and puts you on that down elevator to a cold slab in the morgue unless you hit the emergency stop button.

I was close to the basement before I even found where the stop button was on the control panel, and I still had to choose whether or not to push it. Hitting it and starting to walk back up the stairs was probably the hardest decision I'll ever make. Making it was only helped me see the stairs; climbing them is another matter all together. Lots of people stop but never climb out, but I couldn't see any purpose to that.

But to make the climb you have to find a reason inside yourself, for yourself. If you do it for somebody else, or because the gun to your head has someone else's finger on the trigger you're just going up the down staircase. In my case it started as just simple survival instinct. Not wanting to check out caused me to hit the stop button in the first place, and once pieces of the past started to click into place and I came to understand the whys and wherefores for me being how I was, there was sufficient motivation in that basic urge to get me climbing.

Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome is the fancy name they give to the way you feel after having your whole system; physically, emotional, spiritually, and psychically, put through a meat grinder. The longer you were tenderized the finer you were ground the harder it is to recover. The grit that saw you through surviving the storm gets you to the first couple of landings but that vanishes and soon you're bereft of everything, including excuses.

If poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about self-styled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you – nobody else – who determine your destiny and decide your fate. (e.e. cummings)

There it was in black and white spelt out for me in a book I'd carried around for years. Hell I'd quoted those lines to people many a time to show off what a great fucking "artiste" I was, but hadn't ever taken them to heart in any shape or form. I was stuck on the landing and all along the answer was right there waiting for me to remember it. I could do whatever the hell I wanted, but I'd have to do it and commit to it whatever it was.

Or, I realized, it meant that anything I did, work, personal relationships, etc. had to be given that type of consideration. I was the one responsible for my part in everything I came in contact with and there could be no excuses ever again. Let me tell you it's one damn steep climb, and I've got plenty of cuts and bruises from where I've fallen along the way and I've had to re-climb the same time set more then once.

It would have been very easy to decide I had no future like Sid, but instead I opted to keep trying. I found the means to help me climb the stairs and that was doing the one thing that had always been a constant in my life, writing. But now I started to write for the sake of writing and myself, not to get people to like me or earn their respect or whatever else might be offered as a reward.

The idea of NaNoWriMo appealed to me because it was a perfect example of doing just that. Nobody really cared what it was you were writing, just that you were writing. I had tentative plans for the story I was writing and thought I could see where it was going beyond the 50,000 word quota, but at the same time I didn't even have a title for it until after the first 10,000 words were written.

The idea behind this series initially was to try and let people share in the excitement and drama, if any, of being involved in a contest like this. But when I spoiled that plan by hitting the target mark with something like ten days left in the contest, I began to shift the focus. Eventually it became a sort of guided tour through my process of actually taking this thing I started with no expectations and turning it into a novel.

I'm sure at times it appeared self-indulgent and bordering on naval-gazing to some people, and I'm the first to admit that there probably were elements of both involved. But writing is a self-absorbing process, not something you do as part of a team usually, so that was as inevitable as bears and popes.

Everything about the process was fair grist for my mill including whining about the industry and the difficulties involved in getting an agent let alone published; the drawbacks of self-publishing and why I wasn't interested in that route for the novel; the tedium of editing; and even a rejection notice from my first tantalizing query. (They had actually requested further chapters after my initial submission before ultimately turning me down)

The "Notes" managed to take on a life of its own independent of the novel it was supposed to be commentating on to the point where I self-published the first twenty-four instalments in a book form. NaNoWriMo Notes: An Exercise In Creative Insanity is now for sale at Lulu.com and I think I've sold two or three copies. The irony isn't lost on me that the commentary might be the only thing published from the whole exercise, but since I didn't expect anything, something is a pleasant surprise.

But a year has rolled by and November is almost upon us again which means it's NaNoWriMo season again. The Paths Life Takes (the title I ended up with for the book this was supposedly all about) has been mailed off in its entirety to a second publisher and I'm awaiting another verdict on its relative merits. So it's time to shut this down before it turns into something you'd see on Oprah on a slow day. (Judging by the content of this last instalment it's not a moment too soon I'd say)

There's not going to be any big production number to end this off with, I'm most definitely not going to sing "My Why", but I will say thank you to all those who bothered to peak in now and again and I appreciated most of your comments. These were fun to write, and also helpful in that they would help me clarify thoughts about things. Hopefully those of you who read them laughed occasionally, and not just at me but with me as well, and they made you think on occasion. If not than why the hell were you reading them?

Joyce ended Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Man with that memorable quote about going forth to recreate the conscience of his people in the smithy of his soul, or something along those lines anyway. My aspirations aren't quite that lofty, but I'm going to keep writing and keep seeing what comes of it for a while yet. It's only the end of this series after all, not me.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:14 AM | Permalink

Steven Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada are hate mongers. Does that sound a little extreme to you sensitive ears? Well how else would describe a political party which is introducing legislation that would make it legal for anyone who felt like it to speak out against a group, refuse services to a group and in general treat them like second class citizens because of who they are.

They've given the bill a nice sounding name; it's called the Defence Of Religions Act". You see it's meant to defend the rights of poor Christians against the contamination of having to have homosexuals as equal members of society.

Now we all know that real Christians have no compassion and are filled with hatred against those who are different from them. So the government is moving in a timely fashion to ensure that they can tell anyone they want about the evils of homosexuality. Contravening the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the process, by denying them the services of a government office by a government official based on a reason of race, creed, colour, or sexuality, the government has spared no effort to ensure that real Christians everywhere will be able to discriminate to their hearts content.

I mean if you, as a good Christian, were a sworn officer of the court who had taken an oath to uphold and enact the laws and Constitution of Canada wouldn't you want to be able to refuse to do so whenever it was convenient for you as an individual? If you were a Justice of the Peace whose duties include performing civil, secular, marriages for those couples who don't want religion to play any role in their marriage, shouldn't you be able to refuse to marry them because you don't like them for who they are, because it offends your religion?

Well the Conservative Party of Canada thinks so. In fact they are going to let you if they have their way. In spite of the fact that the existing laws state that no religious organization has to perform any act that contravenes the tenets of their faith, our fearless government seems to think that is not sufficient protection for those people who wish to discriminate.

But they're not just going to defend your right to refuse to marry gay couples; they're going to do a whole lot more. You'll be able to refuse to do business with openly gay businesses. It says gay activist companies in the bill, but I doubt if anyone will argue with you too closely if you just refuse service to any business you know to be run by gays. (Aren't they all radicals anyway – buggers are lucky they're even legal, right?)

It gets even better though. Under the new act you're going to be able to get up in public, in front of school students, and in front of your congregation and tell everyone just how evil homosexuals are. In direct contravention of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms you'll be able to get up and disseminate hatred against a group based on their sexual preferences.

Now of course this isn't just limited to Christians, anybody who wants to can discriminate against homosexuals, but the government's main audience are their people. In fact I'm sure if they had their way they would try and figure out how they could use this bill so they could refuse service to anyone they wanted. The word precedent springs to mind when dealing with legal matters.

If somehow or other this bill makes it out of the House of Commons as law, and manages to stand up to the multitude of court challenges it will face, think of the possibilities. You could refuse service to anyone you wanted because they offended your religious beliefs.

Of course you may have to subject all potential clients, employees, customers, or tenants to questionnaires to make certain they didn't practice, believe, or hold to anything that might even possibly be considered offensive to you at some point in the future. You just can't tell by looking who or what somebody is these days can you?

What is especially wonderful about this bill is how it makes it sound like the government is doing something noble. Defence of Religion sure does have a nice ring to it doesn't it? Yet what it really is doing is allowing people to carry personal prejudices into public and making it legal for them to act on them. In other words reversing years of civil rights legislation and activity.

Canada has a very deliberate policy of separation between church and state in order to prevent the very activities this law would legalize. All people are equal under the eyes of the law supposedly and all of a sudden an exception is going to be made in the case of two groups on religious grounds. One group, homophobes, are going to be allowed to discriminate at will under the guise of religious freedom. The second group, homosexuals, will be subject to discrimination whenever somebody decides they offend their religious beliefs.

Religious beliefs are a highly personal matter and can change from individual congregation to congregation no matter what the faith. In many cases it can even change from person to person in the degree to which they adhere to the tenets of their religion; not everybody keeps as strict observance of rules as everybody else.

But personal beliefs are just that, personal, and have no place being imposed upon the public at large where they will come into conflict with another's personal beliefs. The law already protects the right of people to worship in any manner they choose and how they see fit. No faith, denomination, or congregation can be forced to do anything that goes against the beliefs of its community

Defence of Religion is the right to gather and worship your God, Goddess, or small fuzzy creatures from the planet Zarcon in the way that your community finds meaningful. It doesn't give you the right to refuse to treat anybody else the way you wish to be treated just because they aren't like you. That's discrimination.

Advocating, approving of, or anyway of saying that's all right go ahead and do it, discrimination is saying that those individuals are less worthy then others. To write a law which allows for one group to be discriminated against by anybody who feels like it is to give official sanction to the belief that they don't deserve to be respected or treated the same as the rest of us no matter how you word it.

No matter what else you say you are encouraging people to dislike those people because you have given the legal right to discriminate against them. The government says homosexuals can be treated like dirt; that means they are is going to be the next logical though in the minds of many people. What's next: gay bashing in self-defence because their presence infringed upon your religious rights?

Steven Harper and The Conservative Party of Canada are advocating one segment of our population deserves to be discriminated against because of who they are. That's hate mongering and it's illegal in Canada. Does anyone know how to make a citizen's arrest?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:32 AM | Permalink

Way back when at the height of the Cold War between the forces of good (The West) and forces of evil (The East) when Germany, especially Berlin, was still considered a combination of no-mans and everyone for themselves land, a British writer David Cornwall adapted the name John Le Carré and changed the face of the spy novel.

He had the temerity to suggest that just maybe our guys weren't all heroes and their guys weren't all villains. Then there were his heroes; oh sure there were some rough and tumble field agents and the like, but even they were a far cry from James Bond and his exploding women and sexy cigarette holder. (Or is that the other way round) Nary an Alpha Romeo or handgun to be seen and they never hung out in the casinos of the world playing black jack or baccarat.

But it was his re-creation of the British Intelligence Service as the old boys network that it was; from faded leather elbows on the sweater jackets worn by the Don like heads of department, the weak tea served at meetings, the bad plumbing in the buildings, and of course the deep cover spy (or mole don't you know old chap) that was so captivating. In the hang over of Philby, Burgess, and MacLean, the original three Moscow agents discovered working for British Intelligence, and the subsequent revelations about Sir Anthony Blunt (The Queen's Art Historian for pity's sake) Le Carré's triad of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier…Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People so blurred the lines between reality and fiction that when later adapted for television and George Smiley was recreated by Alec Guiness, I'm sure most people couldn't help but picture Sir Alec as the face of British Intelligence for years after.

The end of the Cold War didn't mean an end to spying and it didn't bring a stop to Mr. Le Carré's writing. The tenor of some of the writing changed, becoming more introspective, especially as the lines between "good" and "bad" grew so faint as to be almost non-existent. When today's staunchest ally could be tomorrows deadliest enemy for reasons that weren't really pertinent to the investigation (Best just get on with it old son, leave the brain work to the wallah wallah's) the ability to walk backwards while looking like you were walking straight ahead became essential.

As the world changed so did Le Carré books and characters to reflect that changing nature. No longer the ubiquitous Oxford or Cambridge Dons populated the pages of his backroom meetings or clandestine drops. Accents from around the world began to make appearances as he kept pace with the polyglot nature of the shifting axis of power. With each new book where would Le Carr'é's burgeoning social conscience take him was the question the a reader asked.

His books have never become polemic to the point of lecturing, but they make clear that he is unhappy with the rapacious nature of the world. Everything centred around wealth and greed instead of some misty ideal of serving one's country or a least preventing someone else from serving their country at your expense.

So it should be no surprise that in his latest novel The Mission Song Le Carré is once more showing how money does indeed make the world go round. This time he has chosen an innocent for us to see the world through, whose naivety slips only once or twice, but enough for us to know that he is not quite the naïf he depicts himself to be. Bruno Salvador works as an interpreter, but in the rather unique field of the tribal dialects of Africa.

Bruno is the by-product of a lapse of celibacy on the part of an Irish priest on missionary work in the Congo with the daughter of one "parish's" headmen. Bruno's father convinces the young girl that she should surrender her new born to the some good Carmelite nuns, because as he rightly says a half-breed son would not sit well her father. She did as instructed, and returned to her village where she and the rest of her clan were wiped out in one of the frequent intertribal violent incidents that mark the history of the Congo.

Bruno was raised in the mission where he saw his father everyday, although it wasn't until he was ten that he found out that "Father" and father were one and the same, and became fluent in English and French. Because he was obviously a half-caste and different nobody would play with him and he was dismissed as a metis or worse. It was this isolation and a natural affinity for languages that made him into the translator he became in adult life. He would sit and watch and listen, gleaning tidbits of information about the different languages and the nuances that separated them.

With the aid of the Mission where he was raised, when his father died, he was turned by magic into a British citizen and repatriated "home" to live in a Catholic boys boarding school. Although details are not supplied in detail, so to speak, your worst fears are of course true, although Bruno seems somewhat ambivalent about the whole thing. But as a result of acquiescence with a certain member of the clergy, he manages to receive quite an extraordinary schooling in all sorts of translations specialties.

When he graduates he quickly works his way up the ladder and soon has clients among the merchant bankers who are dissecting Africa amongst themselves and need someone to translate delicate financial negotiations, the press for translating informants (one of those married him to take home to poppa and shock, but she was bored by his desire to conform and soon bored of her novelty), and of course, finally, Her Majesty's Government started hiring him on a part time basis to serve Queen and Country.

Needless to say it's through his affiliation with the latter people that Bruno finds himself whisked off to a mysterious island somewhere North to translate between three Congolese power brokers, an independent consortium of businessmen, and the self proclaimed saviour of the Congo who will lift the people from poverty and liberate them from the tyranny of Rwanda and others who have raped and despoiled their country for ages.

At the conference table Bruno only speaks French, English, and Swahili. But during meal breaks and times out for a breath of air, he's down a flight of stairs into an electronic surveillance pit to eavesdrop in any of the dialects the delegates choose to talk in amongst themselves for privacy.

When he discovers it's all just a guise for the same old same old; revolt, bloodshed, people dying, and foreign nationals stripping the land of millions of dollars of natural resources Bruno wants to do something but is not sure what. He secrets on himself seven of what he considers the most incriminating tapes and some of his notes in the hopes that he can prevent events happening.

Le Carré hasn't lost any of his abilities as storyteller as the years have progressed and his writing is still as crisp and clean as it always has been. His agents still talk in that strange polite manner that belies murderous intent, and make everything sound like words you'd hear exchanged in any civil servant's meeting. They could be arranging the shipment of twenty thousand pens or twenty thousand mortar rounds for all anybody can tell by the inflection of their voices.

It's this casualness and urbanity of their conversation that makes them so wantonly evil and greedy. These are the direct descendants of those who made the Empire the merciless place it was. Masters of pillaging with a pen stroke they cast a jaundiced eye over the remnants of colonial rule around the world and see how they best suck new blood from a stone.

Fifty years ago coltan was just hunk of useless rock, now every cell phone in the world has to have some in it or it wouldn't function. Of course there are always the old favourites such as oil, gold and diamonds just to keep everyone happy. They can sit directly in front of the people they will be screwing out of millions of dollars and tell them what a positive thing they are doing for their country and not skip a beat as they congratulate them on their courage and foresight.

In reality they are just reprising their role as colonial masters without having to deal with any of the problems associated with occupying a country. These modern methods are far more efficient and nobody ever need find out which country is taking advantage of the situation. Its globalization refined to an art form; the ultimate in free trade.

For Le Carré this is fairly straightforward stuff with only a little bit of mystery surrounding Bruno himself. Can he be really as naïve as he makes himself out to be? There is the occasional clue dropped that maybe he is not quite who claims he is, the wide-eyed half blood African child who grew up under the not so tender care of Roman Catholic priests. How is it that everything so conveniently falls into place for him? Perhaps he really is what he says he is, or is he too good to be true?

The Mission Song shows Le Carré is as in tune and aware of the world around him as he ever was, and just as quick to point out the various moral ambiguities our countries get up to in the name of duty and the country's well being. This is his attempt to plead for the people of Africa that one day we might just leave them the hell alone to try and recover from the mess we have left them in.

If we could only keep our greedy hands to ourselves, he seems to be imploring, the day may come when Africa will be able to flourish like it deserves. That's a good dream to hold onto.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:07 AM | Permalink

There were two headlines in today's Globe and Mail, one of Canada's national newspapers, that caught my eye. They both dealt with the war in Afghanistan and to my eye provided an interesting perspective on how well the objectives of this conflict are being met. One dealt with the war effort, while another was about life for about fifty per cent of the civilian population.

We can't seem to have a week go by without new reports of casualties, deaths most often, of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. Today was no exception as the names of two soldiers killed while guarding road construction were released. It seems the area that we spent so many lives and time pacifying last month isn't as peaceful as was thought.

What was cited as a victory, turned out to be the Taliban just doing what guerrilla forces the world over have done since the Napoleonic Wars in Spain in 1805 when the term was invented (Spanish for small war); retreat in the face of superior firepower and come back to fight again another day. Over the last couple of weeks five Canadians have been killed along the same stretch of highway by either rocket attacks or bombs planted along the roadside.

I think the Canadian military have been taking stupid lessons from someone, which is depressing because you always kind of hope that the people leading the soldiers of your country might have a few brains. Judging by two comments quoted in the press today, I have to say that hope took a pretty sever beating.

The first example was one officer's attempt to paint the Taliban an even darker shade of evil, by saying that they are obviously against roads, because they keep attacking the Canadian soldiers who are guarding the building of a road. You don't think the attacks have anything to do with the fact that the Canadians are seen by the Taliban as an invading force has anything to do with it? Nope its just those godless Taliban are against roads.

The other officer, obviously attempting to offset the death of two more Canadian soldiers reported that in the ensuing skirmish that many rounds were exchanged with the Taliban, and that by the end the Canadians were shooting far more than the Taliban were. You don't think that maybe the Canadians were shooting at an empty hillside and the Taliban had left shortly after they had done all the damage they could without sustaining casualties?

It's not often a lightly armed guerrilla force is going to get into a drawn out conflict with a heavily armed troop of soldiers who can call in air support now is it. But this officer seemed to make it a point of pride that Canadian soldiers could blow up an empty hillside as well as any army in the world.

It was almost five years ago when the Canadian army followed the American lead into Afghanistan with the intention of overthrowing the oppressive Taliban regime and rooting out suspected terrorist training facilities. We were filled with horror stories, true unfortunately, of the horrendous treatment women were undergoing at the hands of the fundamentalists who were ruling the country. Their interpretation of the Koran was the Muslim equivalent of the Christian barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen take on the bible.

So what are we supposed to make of the fact that after five years of supposed democratic rule that just down the street from where the Canadian army is based is a prison housing a thirteen year old girl jailed because she had refused to marry a fifty year old man who she had been traded to by her father in exchange for another teenage girl? Or that in the same prison a husband, wife and daughter are all in jail because they offered a young woman who came to their door shelter not knowing she was a run away from the same sort of arrangement?

Because of their compassion the three of them were accused of prostitution and have been in jail since. According to Amnesty International and other human rights organizations the practice of jailing women for disobeying their male relatives or husbands is almost as widespread now as it was under the Taliban. These aren't isolated cases in small hill towns either but major metropolitan areas like Kandahar where there is a heavy international troop presence.

In other words in five years time the only thing that has happened is that a nice face has been put on the same old attitudes. Even when the fighting was at an ebb and the Taliban was supposedly "defeated" it seems like nothing was done in a real way to try and improve the lot of women in the country. Women are still considered as property that can be bought and sold on the open marketplace and seemingly nothing is being done about it.

Five years ago when our government agreed to send troops into Afghanistan it was an understandable attempt to liberate a people from a truly contemptible circumstances. Can anyone tell me what the objective of the mission is now? Why are we still fighting against an enemy that was supposedly vanquished before the invasion of Iraq? Why are the conditions that we were supposed to correct still in effect? The longer this war lasts the more questions there are raised then are answered about Canada's involvement.

When the Conservative Party Of Canada led by Prime Minister Steven Harper announced they would be keeping the previous government's commitment to expand Canada's role in the war in Afghanistan the majority of Canadians opposed the idea. With the government's parroting of Bush "We will stay the distance" rhetoric and talk of extending the stay of troops in combat situations, Afghanistan is fast becoming a major political issue in Canada.

In fact it is probably fair to say that Steven Harper's political future could hang on how well he deals with this issue. The province he needs to make serious gains in, Quebec, to win a majority government is also the province most opposed to the war. When there was even rumour of a Quebec battalion, The Vingt-Deux, being sent over seas the reaction was strong enough that the idea was quashed before it was spoken of officially.

Even a hint that a further expansion of the war would cause direct Quebec involvement would cause his shaky support in that province to disintegrate completely. His rigidity on social programs already harms his chances in Ontario, so not only can't he afford to lose support in Quebec, he is in need of gains there to even maintain his minority government status.

It would be ironic if the war everybody else seems to have forgotten about brings down a government in Canada.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:22 AM | Permalink

Why are we always so quick to surrender authority to someone else when it comes to decisions about ourselves? Specifically why is it that as soon as we are in the presence of a person in a white coat we automatically assume they know more about our state of being than we do ourselves? Wouldn't you think it would be the opposite, that we are going to know how our body reacts in certain situations far better than someone who has only met us once or twice?

"Nobody has any problems with that…" or my personal favourite, "Now that's strange I've never seen that before… are you sure you've done everything I told you to do?" Implying that it could never be there fault that you've swollen up like a bright red balloon after having an allergic reaction to something, something that you had warned the doctor about to which he had replied "Nobody has any problems with that"

I've had sort of a hit and miss relationship with the medical profession over the years, I've been accused of exaggerating the amount of pain that I'm in after knee surgery by some arrogant prick of a resident and been told to stop being a baby and that they're going to send me home. Then when he goes to recast me (whoever had put the cast on after surgery had forgotten that there might be some post surgical swelling and my circulation was cut off so badly my toes turned black until they got someone to loosen the cast) he discovers an infection in the incision that would account for the amount of pain I was in. Oops the patient was right not the doctor.

The latest fad in hospitals is to reduce stays as much as possible. All in the name of the almighty dollar; get that patient in and out as fast as possible, or heck, don't even keep them if we can help it. Let the family deal with them at home. So what if they can't walk. Procedures like gall bladder removal, hernia repair and appendix yanks that used to require a minimum of a day or two in the hospital are now Day Surgery, in and out the same day, or at best an overnight stay.

To be fair the doctors don't set a lot of this policy, it's just the guidelines they are forced to follow by the hospitals. I'm sure they were asked what, under ideal conditions, was the minimum amount of time needed for recovery for each of those procedures, and were then instructed to adhere to that schedule. My complaint is that perhaps the doctors could take each patient into consideration as an individual instead of treating us all as a singular mass.

I believe that these new guidelines are probably costing them more money in the long run than if they had kept the patients in for the amounts of time they had previously. If they were to examine the numbers of patients who have to come back to hospital within days of being released and be readmitted or treated for extensive time in emergency they would probably find they are spending the same if not more money on patient care now then they were before.

Let us use me as an example. Friday morning just past I went down to the hospital to have a hernia repaired. This procedure that used to involve a hospital stay of a couple of days is now done in Day Surgery under a local anaesthetic. You don't even get knocked out anymore. Perhaps for somebody who is in perfect health and has no other complications at all they are able to go home a couple hours after the surgery and be fine.

Now the doctors were well aware that I have a pre-existing chronic pain condition in the same vicinity of my body but didn't seem to think that warranted any special consideration. So I was sent on my merry way an hour after surgery was over. By mid-afternoon I was in so much pain I couldn't move. None of my oral analgesics, 10-mg. morphine pills taken two at a time, were giving any relief at all.

In the province of Ontario, Canada where I live we have a twenty-four hour health line that we can call to speak to a Registered Nurse at all times for a quick consultation. When I phoned that line at 7:30pm that night she told me she would check with a doctor on call and either he would phone me within a half hour or I should get to emergency as quick as possible. Fifteen minutes later they phoned back to tell me to go to emergency at a specific hospital and they would be expecting me.

I was at that hospital until 1:30 am and during that time they pumped as much morphine into my body as they could in an attempt to bring the pain under control. But because they are not an in patient hospital they had to ship me by ambulance to another hospital across town. There was a surgical team on call there who needed to examine me in case I was bleeding into my abdominal cavity or my wound.

I ended up staying there until 2:30pm Saturday when they finally managed to get the pain under control enough that I could lay at rest in comfort. The conclusion that they came to was that because I suffer from chronic pain already, my tolerance for pain is less than other people's and conversely my tolerance for morphine is higher. If I had spent the night in hospital receiving proper pain management to begin with, there never would have been any of these problems.

So I ended up taking up two beds in emergency, one in each hospital, an ambulance ride, between the two hospitals, a huge amount of intravenous morphine, and finally a bed they had to book for me in case they needed to admit me to the hospital. (When my wife phoned looking for me on the Saturday afternoon as I was heading home in a cab she was actually told that I had been admitted and was passed up to the room I was supposedly in. It took her talking to six people to find out that I was already in a cab on my way home)

What is disturbing is that I'm not the only person that this happens too. Even if you cut the hearsay accounts in half concerning people who have been released from hospital and then had to be rushed back in again a few days latter, the numbers are too high. Of course there are bound to be a few people where unavoidable complications occur after the fact, but for so many people to have to be readmitted there is something wrong with the system.

Doctor's have to stop treating people like they are all the same and to not treat anything as routine. Cutting a human body open is never routine, especially when you are inserting a foreign object like a piece of mesh in the body as they do for hernia repair. If they have any doubts about a person's ability to recover they should automatically be admitted to hospital and err on the side of safety rather then expediency.

But the responsibility is also ours as patients to ask questions and make sure that all our concerns our being addressed. I don't know if it would have helped or made a difference if I had reminded people about my other condition, or asked for assurances that it wouldn't make a difference in my recovery. But I should have trusted my own knowledge of my body over that of the doctor's opinion and at least tried to say something.

Until we have the courage to take control of our own bodies and reduce our dependency on someone else's opinion on how we are feeling, we will continue to find ourselves in situations that might have been avoided. Of course it also depends on the willingness of the doctor to listen to you. But if fewer of us were to treat them like gods, perhaps they would stop thinking of themselves as ones.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:09 PM | Permalink

In a documentary feature included in the DVD Steve Goodman Live From Austin City Limits… And More Kris Kristofferson tries to explain what Steve was like by citing a poem by a South American poet. The Poem talks about a man who scales a high mountain and looks down upon all the people on earth and sees them each like a spark of flame.

Some of the flames simply burn, others waver, but some are so bright and hot that you can't even look at them. Kristofferson paused then, and you could see him struggling to control his emotions, and he said that Steve was like that; full of so much energy inside of him that it was almost too much for one body to contain. Kriffstofferson laughed then and said that it took him a while but he finally learned to stop having Steve open his shows for him. He got tired of the critics saying that Steve would blow him off the stage.

From 1969 until his death in 1984 Steve lived with the knowledge that his days were numbered. For fifteen years he fought off the Leukemia that would eventually cause his kidneys and liver to fail in a Washington State hospital, writing and singing songs that made people laugh, and moved their hearts. He never received the popular acclaim that his songs did, Arlo Guthrie had the hit with "City Of New Orleans", but those who knew him or heard him sing understood the wealth that he had to offer.

For those who never had the privilege of seeing Steve Goodman perform live while he was with us, or if you're like me and only managed to see him once many a long year ago, finding out that a DVD was made of two of his concerts is like discovering the sunken treasure chest at the bottom of the ocean. Steve Goodman Live From Austin City Limits… And More was released in 2003 by the label he founded, Red Pyjama Records, and as usual with Steve's stuff flew under everyone's radar.

The majority of the material is taken from two concerts he performed on the inestimable television show Austin City Limits, the first in 1977 and the second in a show he recorded in tandem with his buddy John Prine in 1982. Sandwiched between the two halves of Austin is an interview given by Steve in 1983 overlooking Wrigley Field from the roof of one of those apartments you always see people watching games from.

Steve said no and explained he wrote it like he would write any song; he was bored and travelling on a plane and needed something to do. Since he was flying into Chicago for a concert for the first time in a while he was thinking about Chicago and that made him think about the Cubs, and that made him think about this guy lying their dieing.

The public never knew about Steve's illness until it became impossible to disguise it anymore. When that time came, instead of lamenting or whatever, he laughed in its face, giving himself a new nickname, "Cool Hand Leuk" and releasing an album called Artistic Hair. The album cover featured a picture of him with a post chemotherapy hairstyle standing in front of a barbershop and a big idiot grin on his face.

Watching Steve perform, especially in the first half of the DVD, is like watching a firework splutter and spark all over the place. Sometimes he'll just simmer with an interior passion as on songs like "My Old Man", a song for his father, or "Old Fashioned". Other times he explodes like a Roman Candle and you'd swear this little five foot two inch Jewish guy from Chicago was imbued with the spirit of a revival meeting leader.

On the song "The 20th Century Is Almost Over" he stops strumming on his guitar and stands back from the microphone and shakes and shimmies so much that his feat leave the ground; his arms flail about him and the vocals drive out of him with such force that the audience is forced to start clapping along spontaneously. There's nothing forced or artificial about the moment, it's as natural as breathing for Steve to become that passionate about his music.

No set in Austin Texas would be complete without the inclusion of "You Never Even Call Me By My Name" which was a song that Steve and John Prine wrote together with the sole object of cramming every last Country and Western cliché into one tune. When they realized they still hadn't mentioned, trucks, mothers, jail, Christmas, trains, and the dog dying, Steve wrote one last verse including all of them.

In an interview on the documentary part of the DVD John confesses that he was so embarrassed by the song that he told Steve to leave his name off it when he recorded it. When the song became a hit for someone else, Steve phoned him and asked if he wanted to reconsider so he could share in the profits, John said no he would stand by his word. The next day Steve showed up at his house with an antique jukebox from the 40's worth around twelve thousand dollars as a present.

The 1982 concert excerpts are slightly more subdued than those from 1977, but they show Steve's wit and empathy as a performer to their fullest extent. The opening song "Talk Backwards" features him doing just that, singing half the song lyrics backwards, in a hysterical piece of nonsense reminiscent of the pieces he wrote with Shel Silverstein of Dr. Hook fame. "Elvis Imitators", his peon of praise to those folk who make their living pretending to be Elvis, offers a hint of his former ebullience as he does a brilliant Elvis imitation himself, complete with guitar and hip gyrations.

One of the biggest ironies of Steve career was the song he probably received the most recognition for was one he didn't even write. "The Dutchman" was written by Michael Smith, but for me and probably quite a few others, it's Steve's version we will always hear in our heads.

Steve was joined by Jethro Burns, mandolin player extraordinaire, for "The Dutchman" and two other tracks. An instrumental called "Tico Tico" and this little tune you might have heard of called "City Of New Orleans". For those of you who are most familiar with Arlo Guthrie's version of the song, it will be something of a shock probably to hear it in its original bluegrass version, but that's how Steve wrote it.

I'm sure all the usual clichéd metaphors have been used to describe Steve's short life and none of them probably do justice to what he accomplished. But watching and listening to people like Marty Stuart, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, and Arlo Guthrie in the documentary portion of the DVD trying to find the right way to describe their late friend, and stumbling around at a loss for words, I don't feel so bad knowing that anything I say won't be sufficient.

Watch the DVD Steve Goodman Live From Austin City Limits…And More and maybe you'll be able to find the words in your heart that work for you. I know that for me it managed to remind me of the fact that one human being can light up a city with the power of his or her convictions, and that the light given off by that energy can be a shining example for others.

Steve Goodman's ashes are buried beneath home plate at Wrigley Field.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:47 AM | Permalink

The 1970's saw quite a few pop musicians deciding to move beyond what they saw as the confines of the simplicity of the three minute hit song. Some went the route of progressive rock self indulgence featuring long drawn out electronic keyboard extravagances of excess, others started to perform longer and longer guitar solo's which meandered on into nothingness until they lost their point, but a very few looked at what the jazz fusion groups were doing and saw something there to emulate.

Under the influence of Miles Davis groups like Weather Report and individuals like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea were stretching jazz into a meeting with funk and rhythm and blues. At the same time a limited number of bands were utilizing jazz influences in their pop music. Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears, and Lighthouse were using horn sections and other unconventional rock instruments to help create a sound that was different, but they were still working within the pop/rock format.

The honour of being the first pop band to produce a rock/jazz fusion album was Steely Dan with their recording of the record Aja. As part of their Classic Albums Series Eagle Vision, a division of Eagle Rock Entertainment, has produced a DVD documentary on the recording of the album. They've gathered together Donald Fagen and Walter Becker the two front men of Steely Dan, and a group of the session musicians who played on the album to help recreate its production.

Prior to Aja's release in 1977 Steely Dan had already had five albums in the top forty in the U.S. But Aja became the band's biggest seller reaching number 3 and number 5 in the U. K. Although the recording was listed as being by Steely Dan in fact the band at the time only consisted of Fagen and Becker, the remainder of the musicians used on the album were all session men.

So, what goes into making a hit album, especially one where the sound is going to be something completely different from what had been heard in pop music circles before? First of all you need to have two people who are totally convinced that they know exactly what they want and are willing to be demanding enough and patient enough to not be satisfied until they have achieved their goals.

How persistent were they? Well according to one recording engineer, for one track they brought in seven different guitar players on seven different days waiting for the person who could play the song the way they heard it in their heads. Because no one aside from them could envision what it was they were aiming for, it was almost impossible to communicate what it was they wanted; in fact I suspect that they weren't sure themselves until they actually heard it played.

According to the same engineer above it became something of an exercise in tedium at times for him. He would show up knowing he'd be hearing the same guitar lines for yet another day and was really beginning to despise the song and Fagen and Becker to an extent. It wasn't until he heard the final results that he even understood what it was they had been trying to accomplish.

For the musicians involved it was also a matter of not really knowing what was going on except to try and play the parts they were given when they showed up in the studio for the day, or week. Sometimes Fagen and Becker would try entirely different combinations of musicians on the same song in their endless quest for finding the right sound. A guy could come to the studio one day and lay down tracks and find out latter that nothing he had done had been used and an entirely different group of players had ended up recording that cut.

Eventually Fagen and Becker realized they were going to need people who were adept at playing a multitude of styles and the musicians they settled on were guys who had played more popularized versions of jazz with people like Frank Sinatra and other singers of standards and the carefully arranged music of an earlier era. These were guys who were used to coaxing nuances of sound out of a bar of music in a way that rock and roll musicians never worried about.

After taking us through a track-by-track breakdown of songs like "Aja", "Black Cow", "Peg" and others, the directors gathered the session players they had been interviewing along with Fagen and Becker and had them perform instrumental versions of "Peg" and another song they had talked about "Josie". Listening to them without the familiar sounding vocal tracks one associates with Steely Dan the songs take on a life that I had not previously noticed before.

They sounded like the jazz-fusion music that I would have normally associated with bands like Weather Report, or perhaps the more jazz influenced songs of a group like Traffic. Thinking back to the work that Fagen and Becker demanded of their musicians and themselves, one could easily hear the results shining through in these instrumental versions.

While this documentary clearly shows that Fagen and Becker were driven and perfectionist in a way that perhaps rock musicians weren't used to, they were also correct to be as demanding as they were. The Classic Album Series is of interest to anyone who has ever wondered how their favourite albums came into existence. Classic Albums – Aja is no exception; a first rate documentary from a first rate series.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 01:48 AM | Permalink

How long do you think it will take for people to begin to notice that George Bush's hand is stuck up Steven Harpers's butt? They really are like a cheap vaudeville act in that you never see either set of their lips moving. Soon we will start seeing pictures of them together with George drinking a glass of water in order for Steven to look like he is speaking independently?

I wonder what it is about Canadian Prime Ministers and the way they treat American Presidents. With very few exceptions they are either annoyingly sycophantic like Mr. Harper or former toady to Ronald Reagan, Brain Mulroney, or so deathly afraid of them they despise them. Who can ever forget the image of Mulroney and Reagan singing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" as the chiselling bastard was selling the country away during the negotiations for the North America Free Trade Agreement?

I think for Mr. Harper part of it is that he's horribly disappointed that the people and press in Canada don't treat him like the way Americans treat Mr. Bush. Canadians don't accord the office of Prime Minister any of the respect that the Americans give the office of their leader. How else could a person like Bush command respect if not for the office; it's sure not for his sparkling intellect?

What Mr. Harper forgets is that he's not Canada's head of state; nope that honour belongs to whoever happens to be Governor General. (In this case a black woman of Haitian decent, Michelle Jean, is the Queen's representative in Canada) Canada is a constitutional Monarchy and for all you listeners out there preparing for Jeopardy and the category "Obscure Forms of Government" that's where you have an elected parliament, with a figure head monarch, or a representative, as head of state.

So Steven can run around acting all presidential, but he has to remember that come the morning after he is beholden to parliament for all or any of his power. In other words his office carries little or no cachet. Our system of government should put more emphasis on what a political party can do rather then any so called leadership qualities of the Prime Minister.

Of course that's not always the case, but so far to my mind the only individual who has been able to make a splash on the world stage while Prime Minister of Canada was Pierre Trudeau. No one else has come close to having the charisma to be able to have a direct influence on events. Sometimes it was a negative influence, but influence it was all the same.

So here we have Steven Harper standing and delivering, or getting one of his minions to do so, in this case Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor, for George Bush. Mr. O'Connor had the nerve to blast fellow NATO members about their unwillingness to offer their soldiers up to slaughter like Canada and The U.S. are in Afghanistan.

He seems to have forgotten that not so long ago Canada was operating under those very rules of engagement that he is so quick to condemn, that Canada has never considered herself one of the aggressor countries, and that close to 60% of Canadians have no interest in seeing our soldiers "pay the ultimate sacrifice".

But the worst part of this is he's changing the face of Canada. We've never been seen as militaristic, aggressive, or any of the words normally associated with countries that have goals and interests they support with military power. We don't want to be that and most of us have been very proud of our record as peacekeepers around the world.

It used to be that a Canadian flag meant impartiality and could be trusted by all sides in a conflict. When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the United Nations Peacekeepers it was only considered natural that Canada should be part of the team that accepted the award on behalf of the peacekeeping brigades around the world. We invented the term and the concept for goodness sake.

Our original role in Afghanistan was to be doing what those other NATO nations are being criticized for by our government. We were there to help the people of Afghanistan not kill them. Hasn't anyone wondered why after four years of being over there our casualties have pretty much tripled?

Even in the days of the original warfare back before the invasion of Iraq by the Americans Canada's troops weren't subjected to this type of risk because that's never been considered our role to play in armed conflict since Korea. I know it wasn't Harper's decision to change the role our troops are playing in this conflict but he's enjoying being the leader of a country at war far too much for my liking.

If I have to hear the smug, self-satisfied expression "they've paid the ultimate sacrifice" again from his lips I might puke. He sounds like he's proud of the fact that he's sending young Canadian men and women to their deaths. In fact he's so proud of what he's doing he's talking about extending their tours of duty "until the job is done".

That's funny I didn't even see George Bush in the same room, let alone the same country, and his voice is coming out of Steven Harper's mouth. Talk about your dummy acts. Where have you heard those words before, albeit in reference to another war, but still coming from the mouth of George Bush? If Bush's hand isn't up inside Harper controlling his mouth I'd be surprised.

Now wait a minute you say, what about the softwood lumber deal, what about the backing down of passports for the border? What about them I say? The softwood lumber deal pretty much screws Canada's lumber industry out of five billion dollars owed them in illegally collected duties, allows the American industry the right to cancel the deal without notice whenever they want, and instead of a tariff being paid to the American's they have to pay an export tax to our government. Monty Hall couldn't have made that sound attractive.

The passport thing is probably hated as much by the Border States as it is by Canadian industry, and I can see pressure being put on the Bush administration from Vermont to Washington as nobody wants to lose the cross border business. The only ones screaming for the border passes are a few extremist right wing cuckoos, or those who border with Mexico where the "problem" is something different all together.

There's one other thing everyone might want to remember. Just before the last Canadian election Steven Harper had an unprecedented meeting with George Bush. How often does the leader of an opposition party in Canada, or in any country for that matter, meet with the President of the United States? All we were told was that they had discussed items of mutual interest. What's even more interesting was that this meeting lasted longer then the official meeting between Prime Minister Steven Harper and President George Bush, and there were no photo opportunities afterwards.

It was pretty obvious by then that Steven Harper's party was going to be forming a minority government in Canada in the upcoming election. You don't think the two of them might have been planning which bones the Bush administration was going to throw Harper's new government to give them credibility?

Border passports and the softwood lumber deal had been festering for a good long time so if Harper could wave his hands in triumph over his great accomplishment at standing up to the Americans that would go a long to silencing critics that he was merely Bush's puppet.

To be fair, the two of them have a lot in common to begin with; homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and a belief in protecting the rights of those who advocate any of the above. In Canada it is illegal to advocate hatred or discrimination against anyone on basis of race, creed, sexual orientation, or anything else that might differentiate one group of people from the mainstream.

But Steven Harper believes that law is unfair because it prevents Christian Schools from teaching that if you are gay or believe that a woman has the right to decide what happens to her body you are an abomination. He sees nothing wrong with teachers getting up in classrooms and using their position of authority to teach new generations hatred in the guise of belief. I don't see much difference between that and them getting up in front of their classes and teaching that blacks are inferior to whites and that segregation is acceptable, Jews are to be hated because they killed Christ, and that Muslims are dirty heathens and have to be killed for their own good.

But even with all that in common, one can't help but suspect that George Bush is pulling the strings that make Steven Harper dance. With one hand up his butt and one pulling the strings the illusion is pretty hard to discredit. But once you think about it, it's obvious, Steven Harper is George Bush's dummy.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:45 AM | Permalink

Far too many times special benefit concerts put on for people in need have the feeling like nobody save for those who organized the event have any idea of why the concert is even taking place. The performers come out and play their asked for song, and maybe mouth some platitude and the massed audience, both live and at home watching the simulcast "live" feed in the comfort of their living room are sitting back and enjoying the show.

Every so often somebody will get up and address the crowd, but their ears have been so shell-shocked by the concert noise they can't make out a word of what's being said to them even if they cared to listen. But once in a long while there comes along one of these concerts where through a combination of circumstances and organizational savvy the audience can't help but be aware of the reasons for the event they are attending.

Judging by the double DVD released of the event, From The Big Apple To The Big Easy, such was the case with a benefit concert performed in New York City for the city of New Orleans just weeks after Hurricane Katrina had left the city in ruins and displaced thousands upon thousands of people from their homes and loved ones.
It was one of those rare events where those on the stage and in the audience were equally cognisant about what they were all doing there on that night.

To begin with nearly three quarters of the musicians who performed that night had lost everything they owned when the floodwaters hit, as they were residents of New Orleans. If nothing else it proved the indiscriminate nature of a hurricane as both the renowned and the barely known were equally bereft. From the Neville Brothers of international fame to the Rebirth Brass Band of far less acclaim they were all, as Aaron Neville's baseball cap so eloquently spelled out, evacuees.

The mood of the evening was set with the opening, as the Rebirth Brass Band and horn player Troy Andrews walked through the audience playing a traditional funeral dirge that leads mourners to the graveyards of New Orleans. "Dirge/Celebrate" started with the band playing their mournful air out among the high rollers on the floor of Madison Square Garden, and saw them climb to the stage to switch gears to lead us back to the living with the dance music associated with after the burial service is over and done with.

Death is a time to mourn a loss and rejoice in the potential for a new life, hence the name Rebirth Brass Band, and the purpose of this concert. By opening the evening with this act, the organizers made it clear what their intent was; a mourning for what had happened, a celebration of what was, and a way to help New Orleans begin again.

Disc one of From The Big Apple To The Big Easy features primarily the music of New Orleans being played by her people. After the Rebirth Brass Band was finished Bill Bradley, the host for the evening, told the audience about the circumstances of most of the musicians they were going to see that night, and then got down to the serious business at hand of introducing the music.

Predominant for most of disc one is the Allen Toussaint Band, who play a wonderful New Orleans Jazz/Blues style of music. Through out the disc they are joined by a variety of singers doing a variety of musical styles. Appropriately, and wonderfully, Clarence "Frogman" Henry performed his classic "I Ain't Got No Home". In spite of having to hold on to the microphone stand for support, and being helped on and off stage while leaning heavily on a cane, he proved he could still do the vocal tricks that gave him his nickname.

I don't know about the rest of the audience, but it was watching him that brought home to me the reality of the situation of Hurricane Katrina. As he was being helped from the stage I was wondering how did he manage to escape the floodwaters to safety? What about others who are old and infirm with less fame then him, where were they staying during this time?

It was the same for each of the older musicians from New Orleans. Looking at them and watching them perform it was hard to believe that these were people who had just lost their homes and a lifetime's worth of mementos. Or maybe that's what helped them lose themselves in the music so effectively. The music was one thing the hurricane hadn't been able to take away from them and to perform with such vitality was an act of defiance and affirmation.

Disc one closed with four songs by the blues band for the night – Ry Cooder, Buckwheat Zydeco, and Lenny Kravitz. While each of them on their own were quite incredible, it was the final song of the disc when they were joined by Irma Thomas in a performance of "Backwater Blues" that was most emotional. Backwater Blues was written about the flood of 1927 when a great many poor blacks lost their lives in the Mississippi coastal towns because the levees of Louisiana turned the water "back" up the river and flooded them out.

For Ms. Thomas it must have been doubly emotional singing that song, not just because of the history, but her own circumstances. Not only had she lost her home, but her club as well had been completely submerged. At the time, only a month after the storm nobody knew what the process would be like for reclamation so she must have felt in limbo at the time.

For me the only low part of the two-disc set were chunks of the second disc where it turns a little too much into "celebrity turns" at times. Although John Fogarty tears up the place with "Born On The Bayou" and "Proud Mary", and Elton John does a rendition of "Levon" with the most fire in his belly that I've heard in years, the extended Jimmy Buffet set was tedious, and Simon and Garfunkel just seemed tired.

Thankfully The Dirty Dozen Brass Band were there to inject a whole bunch of life into the proceedings. Along with guests Dave Bartholomew and Elvis Costello on "The Monkey", Diana Krall and Troy Andrews on the Fats Domino classic "I'm Walkin'", and Kermit Ruffins for "St. James Infirmary" they brought the spirit of New Orleans back to the stage again.

It was only fitting that the final songs of the concert featured New Orleans' most famous brother act – The Neville Brothers. (They also featured the only overtly political statement with Cyril Neville wearing a hand scrawled message on a white t-shirt stating "Ethnic Cleansing in New Orleans) The first song they performed, "Carry The Torch", was by themselves, and then they were joined by The Meters for "Hey Pocky Way" and "Amazing Grace".

As a grand finale what could be more fitting than "When The Saints Go Marching In"? Started by The Neville Brothers and The Meters, they were joined on stage by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the Rebirth Brass Band plus all the other guests of the night. It was a fitting send off to a night celebrating the people and the music of New Orleans.

From The Big Apple To The Big Easy is a wonderful record of a quite amazing event (100% of net profits from the sale of the DVD will be used to benefit victims of the hurricane). Not only was it a collection of some amazing music, but it serves as a reminder to the rest of the world, specifically the rest of America, of the spirit and grace of the people who live in New Orleans.

The music of New Orleans is the lifeblood of a great deal of the music of North America. From Jazz to Soul to Blues, and Rock and Roll it has been the primordial pool where the music has evolved into what we know today. When you buy this disc you are not just helping people whose lives are devastated by disaster, you are putting money into preserving a piece of the genuine cultural heritage of the New World. If we have our own distinct sound it comes from that city and those people.

The folks at Rhino Records have put together some video samples for you to watch, so you're not buying sight unseen, and they've even provided a multitude of formats for you. There's Irma Thomas with the Allen Toussaint band – singing, "Time is on My Side" (which she wrote) in three speeds of Windows format: 56.wvx, 100.wvx, and 450.wvx and in Real audio and Quicktime. Lenny Kravitz with Allen Toussaint Band - "Hercules”: 56.wvx, 100.wvx,450.wvx, Real Audio, and Quicktime.
The Neville Brothers &The Meters - "Amazing Grace": 56.wvx, 100.wvx, 450.wvx, Real audio, and Quicktime. For those of you who want to send someone an E-Card about the discs they have that too.

From The Big Apple To The Big Easy does the remarkable; it captures the spirit of New Orleans. Even if the money weren't going somewhere where it's desperately needed, it would be worth what ever is being asked as the price for this disc for that reason alone.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:34 AM | Permalink

There are many important issues facing the world today; North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, the whole of the Middle East, and all the other hot spots where sparks are continually flying. But amidst all these stories really important issues are being overlooked, issues that if left unresolved have the potential to bring Western Civilization to a screeching halt.

Through one of those great mysteries that confound even the best of minds, somehow events have conspired to make three days from now Friday the thirteenth during the month of October. Just eighteen day before All Hallows Eve, the night of pagan ritual and sacrifice, the night the dead walk amongst the living, it will fall with the sound of a ladder falling on someone's head as they walk under it.

It's like a black cat has walked across the collective Path of all Western Civilization. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong because the worst thing possible has already happened. We have a Friday the Thirteenth in October. Do you think I'm over exaggerating the danger to our society? Have a little faith in the stupidity of your fellow human please.

Let me give you an example of something that happened to me just recently, and see if it doesn't send a chill down your spin as it did mine. I've been waiting to have a very minor surgical procedure done, repair of a hernia. It's so minor I won't even be knocked out they will just freeze the area, but I still need to be booked into a operating theatre and there has to be time on my surgeon's schedule to fit me in etc, etc.

Due to the fact that the hospitals in my city are also the ones for serious problems throughout South Eastern Ontario, I figured it might take a while before I could get an appointment. Last week the doctor's secretary phoned, and the first thing out of her month after identifying herself was to ask if I was superstitious. I thought this was a very odd thing for her to be asking me, and so I asked, justifiably I thought, why?

Well she hemmed and hawed for a second, and then said, "I've got a day this month which I'm having a horrible time getting filled for surgery". It only took me a couple of seconds before I asked if there happened to be a Friday the Thirteenth in October. She answered in the affirmative and continued by saying that people were turning down surgery dates because of it.

To say I was dumbfounded is an understatement. "Don't people realize how hard it is to get an surgical appointment in this city?" I blurted out. "Thank God, she replied, someone who doesn't live in a cave". Naturally I took the appointment and was exceedingly grateful for the rest of the city's stupidity.

Of course this led me to start wondering what the heck was so wrong with the number thirteen that high rises skip numbering a thirteenth floor, and I bet we don't use a twenty-four hour clock like nearly everyone else in the world because we don't want to have a thirteen o'clock.

It really puzzles me about what's wrong with thirteen, when did we learn to hate, and fear it so badly. It's a perfectly natural number – the moon goes through thirteen cycles every 365 days so it has a place in the natural order of things. (Of course we've also created strange tales about the moon and how it can change men into bestial things – but the moon is another topic of conversation all together)

Paraskavedekatriaphobia is the word for people who suffer from a pathological fear of Friday The Thirteenth. Significantly it is only in the English speaking and Portuguese speaking world that Friday is cursed. The Spanish and Greeks, think that Tuesdays are the day which thirteen turns into one of misfortune.

Even the normally reliable wikipedia doesn’t seem to be able to come up with anything that helps to explain the origins of a person suffering from triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number thirteen save for the thirteen lunar cycles of a women, and because Judas was supposedly the thirteenth apostle and he betrayed Jesus.

There are traditions where the number thirteen is considered blessed. In some Native American societies North America is considered to be resting on the back of a giant turtle – hence the name Turtle Island. According to certain teachings, the thirteen squares in the centre part of a turtle's shell represent the thirteen character traits a person needs to learn to be a good member of the community.

Something that thirteen and Friday The Thirteenth do confirm is the power of belief. Those who believe that they will suffer some sort of misfortune due to Friday The Thirteenth have a better then average chance of doing so because they have talked themselves into it. Of course Friday the thirteenth isn't the only superstition that people suffer from; there's black cats, walking under ladders, spilling salt, and goodness knows how many more

Probably of any of them only walking under ladders may have some sort of practical reasoning behind it; someone must have noticed you're more likely to get hit by a dropped object when you walk under a ladder as opposed to when you bypass it. Or it might even refer to the times when people used to empty chamber pots out of their windows onto the street below and you didn't want to be to close to the wall.

I used to dismiss superstitions as silliness that people believed in as more of a joke than anything else. So I was quite shocked when I was told people were turning down dates for surgery because of what day of the week it was. That was carrying the joke just a little too far in my books. But it seems this is no joke for many people.

Don't people think there are enough real things to worry about without having to create ones out of thin air or based on information that's out dated by hundreds of years or more. Superstition is the stuff of ignorance and fear which gives rise to hatred and intolerance. Don't we have enough of that already without helping it along?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:24 AM | Permalink

At some point early on in their relationship as Producer and performer Chris Blackwell of Island Records reports that someone asked Bob Marley if Chris was his producer. Bob said "No Mon he's my translator". While that was a good joke, because of Bob's heavy accent, Bob might have been more accurate is saying that Chris was his interpreter for the work he did on the early Wailer's albums.

In part of their new DVD series Classic Albums Eagle Rock Entertainment has released Bob Marley And The Wailers: Catch A Fire. The purpose of this series is to take a closer look at how some of the seminal works in pop music came into being. In the case of the Wailers' Catch A Fire, it represented the first attempt by any Reggae group to seriously attempt to crack the British and American mainstream markets.

Until Catch A Fire the only Reggae music that had done anything on the charts in England had been silly novelty songs or the occasional mainstream musician utilizing some of the unique rhythms in their own material. But a full-length album of serious reggae music had yet to meet with any success at all.

The DVD takes us back to 1972 when the Wailers were just starting out and the core was still Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, and Bob Marley. They had travelled over to London England in an attempt to try and score a record deal or at least get someone outside the Jamaican community to pay attention to them. Considering how renowned all of these men, especially Bob and Peter Tosh, have become since then it was surprising to hear of the antipathy that most of the popular music world felt for Reggae music at the time.

The producers of the disc have put together interviews with many different people to get their perspectives on the disc; the session men hired by Blackwell to do overdubs on the album, the original studio musicians in Jamaica who recorded the original eight tracks that Island Records worked with to make the final cut, and various other figures in the lives of the three principles of the Wailers at the time.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting from this behind the scenes look at the creation of an album, but I don't think I expected it to be this interesting and informative. One of the main things it did for me personally is it revised my opinion of Chris Blackwell of Island Records quite substantially. Listening to him talk about what he was trying to do for the music and Bob, I was impressed with his humility and the commitment he was willing to show to an unknown band that were performing music that had no history of sales in either mainstream America or Britain.

He gave them four thousand pounds (about $10,000) –to go off and record the album and trusted them to bring him back something he could make use of. When the disc switches back to Jamaica they inter - cut old footage of the recording session with interviews with the session men who appeared on the original disc. They focus especially on the drummer and bass player from the old band who try to explain how a reggae song builds on itself while it is being played.

One of the interesting things about the recording sessions is that I was sitting watching the old videos of them in the studio, and I realized they were all in one room together playing. Initially I thought these were just the rehearsals prior to the band members going off to record individually, but these were the actual sessions. But thinking about what the drummer had said about a song evolving as it's played, with the drummer and the bass feeding off the leads to add frills to their playing it made a lot of sense for them to record "live".

When Bob brought the tapes back to London to play them for Chris Blackwell and his engineer, they had had to double up on most of their tracks because of only having eight to work with in the first place. With the entire band recording at once, there was also a lot of spill over of instruments into microphones that the Island engineer had to cope with as well.

Bob and the rest of the Wailers realized that they would have to make some compromises with their sound in the initial albums in order to break through and attract an early 1970's audience. So it was with their blessing that Chris Blackwell brought in a couple of session players to smooth out the edges to make it more palatable for, specifically, the North American market.

One of the most fascinating parts of the DVD was when they focused on the actual remixing of the material. The people at Island Records made the master tape and the board available for the shoot. Chris Blackwell and the original technician than sat down and took us through track after track and what they did with it.

They would then switch over to the session men who talked about how they tried to make what they knew about music fit in with Reggae and how they came up with the added bits you had just heard through the board. At one point the keyboard player, John "Rabbit" Bundrick, was describing how Bob Marley was showing him what he wanted and laughing because of the way in which he would do it. (Not caring about what keys he was hitting, just giving him the pattern to fit the music rhythmically)

Bundrick looked into the camera like he was looking into the past and said, "He was playing from the heart and I learned that from him. As a musician you're always wanting to learn something new" This is more then thirty years latter and it sounded like he was talking about yesterday. Wayne Perkins (a guitar player brought in for the sessions) and him both talked about not understanding how the music worked initially and how they had to let both it and Bob work with them to find the groove and the proper touch.

Perkins was especially funny. An American from the South, he said that it didn't sound like anything he had ever played before "from Blues to Church music". Then as he was trying to figure out what the hell he was going to do it came to him – "It was backwards". From then on he had no problems. (If you listen to Catch A Fire again and the song "Concrete Jungle" that guitar leading off the song and sustaining through it for a while is Perkins. He said when he finished that bit Bob was so excited he came bounding out of the booth and tried to stuff a joint the size of a two by four in his mouth)

There's a lovely scene near the end where Chris Blackwell and the engineer are sitting listening to the original eight-track recording, just smiling and ever so slightly Blackwell is shaking his head. When the music stops he gets sort of a wistful expression on his face and says something to the effect of, "We could have released it just like that, it sounds so great you wonder why we didn't. But I thought we had to do what we did if they had a chance of it breaking into the big markets. We all thought that"

That's where I really gained new respect for the man because I could hear the regret in his voice that he had to tamper with something so good, and that even now he was still second-guessing his decision – even though it was probably the right one. Even with the modifications the album only sold 40 thousand copies that first year. Over the years as the band gained in popularity sales eventually amounted to over a million. But in those early years there was no guarantee of Reggae or Bob Marley ever achieving the fame and popularity he and the music have obtained since.

Chris Blackwell took a sizable risk on signing The Wailers, they were an unproven commodity, but as this documentary shows they were astute enough to realize they would have to make some compromises at first in order to achieve their dream of spreading their message. Bob Marley And The Wailers: Catch A Fire is a wonderful documentary on the process of building a great album and the birth of a new musical form. Anybody who has an interest in Bob Marley or Reggae will find this DVD both fascinating and a pleasure to watch.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:01 AM | Permalink

If one were to go by what was offered for sale in New Age stores or the in some of the World sections of music stores, you'd think the only type of music Native North American's created was by serious looking men playing flutes or doe eyed women singing rhapsodies to Mother Earth. In some ways that's not so very far removed from the singular way in which Natives were represented in early Hollywood movies where they were depicted as terrible savages.

This new definition is as one-dimensional as the earlier one, and in some ways just as demeaning in that it reduces a whole culture down to the simplistic ideal of the noble spiritual savage. Not only does the depiction miss the point of the role music plays in the Native community, but it also precludes it from ever being anything but an artefact. It would be like keeping the visual arts of Europeans stuck back in their earliest cave drawings and not recognising any of the progressions since.

There's a new series of DVD's that has been released by Arbor Records of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada that has broken down the components of the Native gathering know as Pow Wow into eight one hour episodes. In Pow Wow Trail Episode 7: Pow Wow Rock contemporary Native North American music is examined in detail. From the traditional playing of the Drum for the dancers to the contemporary musicians who carry that spirit forward with modern instruments all aspects of aboriginal music in Canada and the United States is examined.

It's Buffy Saint-Marie, probably one of the most well known Native musicians today, who explains the term Pow-Wow Rock. She says it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the Pow-Wows per se, it's just that since the music is an extension of what happens during the gatherings, and that their music all originates from that base it makes sense to call their contribution to contemporary music by that name. It's also the name they choose for it, not what someone else wants to call it which is important.

Buffy is only one of a number of Native musicians whose opinions on the music are relayed through this disc. Although some of the interviews and performances have been picked up from other broadcasts and edited into this DVD, what each person has to say is so pertinent to the issue at hand that you don't even notice until the credits what's been done. Also on hand are the three women from the a-capella group Ulali, Robbie Robertson, and Keith Secola of Keith Secola and Wild Band of Indians a Native rock band that mixes traditional and contemporary instruments and music.

Until I'd watched Keith Secola I'd never realized how much in common the falsetto singing of the men sitting around the big drum have in common with the high pitched wailing that so many hard rock singers do when they sing. Take Geddy Lee's voice from Rush and picture it chanting around the big drum at the Pow-Wow and you'll get it.

In rather sharp contrast to Keith and his rock and roll approach are the women of Ulali. While at first listen and glance they may appear to be completely traditional as they sit on stage playing hand drums and singing in their own languages their view of the music and their approach far exceeds the boundaries of North America.

A point that they raise about music, as does almost everybody else interviewed, is that of course it is universal and what people sometimes fail to realise is that if any culture today were to delve back into their past far enough they would find they were as tribal as Natives. The first instrument that any of us ever hear is the heartbeat of our mother in the womb.

The tribal drum one hears at the Pow-wow recreates that sound and is referred to as the heartbeat of Mother Earth. It resonates with all of us because we have all heard it whether we remember or not. To the women of Ulali this is the most important part of their music, which is why they utilize the drum, the most common instrument in all cultures, to act as the common denominator that allows everybody access to their songs, not just natives.

While these modern singers still hold on fast to the idea that singing is the way in which they best communicate with their creator, because it allows them to open their bodies and spirits in a way that talking or writing just can't do (Keith Secola says that every song is a prayer as far as he's concerned) they also know that they speak for their communities.

To that end people like Buffy Saint-Marie and Robbie Robertson have begun making political statements with their music. As Saint-Marie rightly pointed out she's been singing political music for years ("Universal Soldier", and "Now That The Buffalo Are Gone") but that she still finds them the hardest things to write. She doesn't just want to hector people, but wants to pack as much information into a song "as isin a four hundred page text book".

She also talks about how difficult it is to get record company executives to go along with putting out an album with songs on it full of chanting and tribal drumming as mainstream music. If you have heard either of the songs that excerpts are played of on this DVD; "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" or "Starwalker" the chills that go up your spine when she her voice rises into the stratosphere on her chants will either make you think the executives are deaf, or were deathly afraid of getting in trouble for letting a "renegade" loose.

Sometimes the strongest statement you can make is a personal one. Standing up and being counted like Robbie Robertson did in the early nineties was as important to him as a person as it was to the community for him to self identify at last. I doubt if there were many people who knew that he came from the Mohawk Six Nations Reserve near London Ontario Canada until he wrote the soundtrack for The Native Americans television series on Turner Broadcasting.

In an excerpt from an interview he had give elsewhere Robertson explained that for the longest time he had felt the need growing inside of him to let it out but the opportunity just wasn't there. As soon as it did present itself he grabbed it and has been running with it ever since.

He talked about the first music he ever heard being the sound of the Pow Wow drum and how it's always been inside of him. He didn't begin writing politically oriented music though until he talked to Leonard Peltier from his cell in Lewisburg prison. Peltier is the Native American in jail on trumped up charges on the shooting of an F.B.I. agent on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1970's. There had been a shoot out between members of the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) and the F.B.I. in which two agents had been killed.

There was no way of proving who had shot the weapon that had killed the agents, or even to accurately pinpoint which gun had done the shooting. It didn't matter that the agents had been the aggressors in the assault and were supporting a brutal regime on the reserve that kept people in line by terror and there had been countless killings of Natives by the Chief and his cronies. An agent was killed and they wanted someone punished for it, and they didn't care whom.

Since his conversation with Peltier, and he obviously believes Leonard to be innocent of the charges against him, Robertson has utilized his music to support his cause. "Red Boy Underground" may not be only about Leonard and his situation, but he's part of that story.

According to what one learns from watching Pow Wow Trail Episode 7: Pow Wow Rock the contemporary Native musician hasn't strayed too far from the spirit of sitting around the big drum and singing songs that are prayers to creation, but have merely changed some of the means of accomplishing the same goals. As a learning experience about Native North American music both past and present this is a great disc.

The interviews with the individual performers are highly informative, personal, and revealing about the nature of the music and the reason why each of them feel compelled to do what it is they do. It's a bare bones disc in that there are no special features, but than again there is no need for any. It does give previews of the previous six episodes and the eighth and final one, which simply whetted my appetite to watch the rest of them.

Each of the other discs deals with a particular aspect of the gatherings known as a Pow Wow and looks to be a wonderful learning tool for the uninitiated and a powerful affirmation for others who already have information. This disc doesn't cover all the components of modern Native music, except as asides – the thriving Hip Hop and Rap scenes for example are only mentioned in passing – but it would expecting too much especially since it wasn't their particular aim to talk about all aspects of the current music scene.

What they have succeeded in doing is pointing out how the contemporary performer retains his or her connection to the original intent behind creating and producing music. It's about pride in who you are and where you came from and the ability to carry that forward into what it is you are doing today with respect and honour. It's not about making a quick buck or converts, it's about celebrating.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:09 AM | Permalink

I remember the first time I ever heard Black Gospel music live as if it were yesterday. It was a bright Sunday morning on the Toronto Islands, just off shore of downtown Toronto Ontario Canada but as far removed from the city as being 100 miles up country. It was 1978 and the Mariposa Folk Festival still made its home in this picturesque setting and the early morning show this Sunday was a group from New Orleans.

The Zion Harmonisers were five black men of varying ages dressed impeccably in identical suits. They stood on the lawn with the late morning sun shining down upon them singing about their love of Jesus and telling the stories of the bible in song. I'd never experienced anything quite like it in the world. It was like the passion that went into the best religious paintings of the Renaissance had been brought to life in front of my eyes.

The word Harmonisers in their name wasn't just idle talk; that was probably the day that I first understood what was meant by vocal harmonies. Listening to those five voices singing the same song, each one slightly different from the other, but all making up the whole. (I'm sure the soundman won't ever forget the bass singer – he hit a note so deep and resonant that even through the speakers you felt your sternum vibrate, and I saw the technician whipping headphones off his ears – it was a note too big too be held in by anything electronic)

That's the thing about great gospel music, it's such a big feeling inside of the singers that they can't hold it in. The emotion behind the belief has to be released somehow and song is the only force strong enough and pure enough expression of the raw human spirit to carry the sound up and away to the heavens. As the Jewish people would say, from your lips to God's ear, and if their God can't hear the voices of these singers than he needs to get Himself a hearing aid.

The Five Blind Boys Of Alabama (not to be confused with The Five Blind Boys of Mississippi) formed in 1937 at the Talladega Institute For The Deaf And Blind. They had been all taught to play piano via Braille, so they had a basic understanding of music. Not having much else to do they taught themselves how to sing and harmonize with their primary teacher being the radio and the gospel music shows.

They first started performing by sneaking out of school and singing at nearby military camps during World War Two. They didn't start out as the Blind Boys, but as the Happy Land Jubilee Singers and were fronted by Velma Bozman Traylor. When Velma was killed in 1947 they decided to change their name. As they never had any qualms about using their blindness as a selling point up to then they decided to imitate the Mississippi quintet in 1948 and took the name they carry to this day.

Clarence Fountain has led the group since then and continues to sing to this day. Unlike other groups the Blind Boys of Alabama haven't been afraid to experiment with their sound over the years and have toured and recorded with other performers like Ben Harper, George Clinton, Tom Waits, Chrissie Hynde and Aaron Neville.

But through it all they have remained true to what they believe in and deliver Gospel music as passionate as any other group under the sun. Walk With Me Dear Lord released by the Music Avenue label is a fine example of the range of material and the breadth of arrangements that they incorporate into their performances.

"Walk With Me" leads off the disc with an almost pop feel which I found slightly disconcerting as it didn't jibe with my pre-existing definition of Black Gospel music, but it works as a lead in to the more demonstrative numbers. Taken in context with the rest of the disc it makes sense as well because it allows them to build to crescendos and then pull back down again into something more muted.

It would probably be just a little much to expect an audience to be able to sit through seventeen songs as stirring and passionate as "Old Time Religion", so the inclusion of songs like "Danny Boy" which might seem a little strange is understandable. Anyway it doesn't matter what songs they sing, these guys could make a vocalisation of the phone book sound amazing.

The depth of the passion, the harmonies, the intensity, and the sheer joy that they bring to each and every song can't fail to lift up your spirits. I don't care what or who you believe in, it's the belief that matters in cases like this not the specifics of who. Devotion like that expressed by the Five Blind Boys Of Alabama transcends our simplistic notions of religion and divisions of faiths.

It's a representation of the universal power of belief that all of us share for what it is we have faith in. and thus can't fail to move us one way or another. In much the same way that beautiful devotional art whether Muslim, Christian, Hindi, Jewish or any other belief can appeal to us on a primal level, this music taps into an old and sincere part of our being. It is truly ecstatic.

Walk With Me Dear Lord by The Five Blind Boys Of Alabama is a religious experience all on its own and is more then enough reason to believe in the existence of a higher power no matter what you want to call it. Inspiration for music like this can't be found just lying around on the ground, so something or someone somewhere has to be whispering in their ear and giving them direction and guidance.

What other explanation is there?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:01 AM | Permalink

Funk; there are wonderful connotations to that word aren't there? Funk! It just sounds nasty in a really good way, evoking images of people in dark sweaty bars getting all dark and sweaty. There's something sultry about just the very sound of the word that makes you want to move.

Funk was disco's older and more mature brother in the seventies in that it was all that disco promised but could never deliver in terms of energy, fun and excitement. While disco pummelled you with its repetitive bass and drum beats, funk would lift you up with its drive and energy – propel you across the dance floor with the sound of trumpets and the throb of bass mixing with whatever else the band had going for it.

Funk evokes images of elegant men and women while disco sleazy seventies pick-up lines and tacky fern laden bars. Funk rises out of the ground like a primordial rhythm, while disco is manufactured by a machine and has as much organic quality to it as the polyester suits so favoured by its proponents.

Have I made it clear yet which I prefer? I hope so because I'm running out of damn comparisons and silly metaphors to make my point. Now not all funk sounds the same, (unlike disco – oops sorry) as within any genre of music your bound to get variations and funk is no exception.

From the late sixties and early seventies gospel influenced sound of Al Green, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown with their horn sections and beautifully choreographed routines, the punk funk of The Gang of Four that used a speeded up funk base line to lead its assault against conventionality, to the Talking Heads extended funk line-up that gave us the wonderful sight of David Byrne getting down, Funk has displayed a versatility that not many dance rhythms could obtain.

But there has been one figure that has stood out from even the most flamboyant of Funkers to occupy his own strata in this galaxy: George Clinton and those two amazing bands he fronted Parliament and Funkadelic. These two bands went places mere mortals feared to go and took the funk stage show to such heights of excess that it literally ended up becoming financially impossible to tour because of the sheer costs involved.

But it was the music that really set him apart from the others, taking it away from the gospel tinged sounds and moving more in the direction of what was coming out of some of the Jazz fusion groups. Of the two bands Parliament was the more commercial of the two and retained more of the recognizable sounds of the other bands. Funkadelic, with many of the same members as Parliament, were the experimenters who increasingly went in directions further and further a field from both the mainstream of funk and pop music period.

Maintaining two full funk bands, even ones that were successful, was just impractical so in 1981 the two bands merged to form the P-Funk All Stars. At the same time Clinton and other band members began pursuing work outside the band (Two of them Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worell became part of the Talking Heads extended line up). Clinton signed with Prince's Paisley Park label, and also started to do some production work including stuff with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.

In other words the band was pretty much dormant from the early 1980's until the 1990's. It was in 1997 that the CD Take It To The Stage was first released under the name Live and Kickin'. Now this double live disc of George & The P-Funk All Stars has been re-released for a new generation of Funkers to get off on, and for the old fans to remember why they have a pelvis.

The tracks were all culled from a tour the band did in 1996, and the division of the two sides falls along old affiliation lines. Disc one is primarily all the old Parliament showstoppers like "Cosmic Slop" and "Funk Getting Ready To Roll". I defy you to be able to sit still while listening to more than the first two bars of the first song. If your hips aren't moving or at least your toes aren't tapping you're either legally dead or you own shares in Pat Boon. (Which amounts to the same thing)

Disc two is where stuff starts to get a little, how shall we put it, interesting. "Maggot Brain" is so hard that it's almost a metal song and "Atomic Dog" and "The Mothership Connection" see them at their science fiction obsessed best. (One early Funkadelic tour saw them lower a to scale flying saucer on stage as part of the proceedings)

Disc two also features three previously unreleased studio cuts that were new releases from the second go round in the 1990's when George & The P-Funk All Stars re booted their career as a band. The version of "Ain't Nuthin' But A Jam Y'All" included here is an extended take as compared to the one released by the record company to the radio stations as a potential hit.

Clinton's & The All Stars influence is felt today in the fact that they continue to tour and perform live gigs, but also their old material is now the most sought after sounds for sampling by modern D.J.s and Hip Hop singers. I'm not a big fan of that whole business, but if it turns people on to going out and picking up the original music, or checking out George and company the next time they come to town that will be a good thing.

Take It To The Stage is a great overview of some of the best funk music that was ever produced, performed and paraded. If you own no other funk disc, do yourself a favour and pick this one up. You don't know what your missing if you've not experienced George Clinton & The P-Funk All Stars.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:31 AM | Permalink

Coming home has been a common theme in literature probably since before stories were written down. That doesn't just mean going to the physical place you were born or where your family lives, it also involves a psychological and spiritual journey to find that place inside that allows you to be comfortable in your skin.

In his latest book from Doubleday Books (a division of Random House Canada) Dream Wheels Canadian author Richard Wagamese tackles the concept of finding your war home from a number of character's perspectives. Although each person has their own journey to make their destination – with the slight variation signifying individuality- is the same. Home.

Home, in the physical sense, in the case of Dream Wheels comes in the form of the Wolfchild ranch, home to three generations of rodeo Indian/cowboys. Now an Indian cowboy might sound like an oxymoron to some people who get locked into stereotypes, but in the twentieth century anybody who can ride well and has a way with animals is appreciated on a ranch. It's only logical then that some of those people are going to be people of native descent, and some of them are going to get involved on the rodeo circuit.

The Wolfchild's have sent three generations of men into the rings to fight the broncos, hog tie the cows, and most dangerously ride the bulls. It's a bull that's caused the youngest of the Wolfchilds, Joe Willie, – the one who was considered the sure thing – to have to make his long trip home from inside the prison of the hurt and pain of being injured too badly to ever ride again.

Claire Hartley and her fifteen-year-old son Aiden have never had a home. Claire was the daughter of a junkie who died when she was young, and hasn't found a place for herself in the world yet. She travels from man to man, looking for a home in the false promises of support they give her, until she feels like she is trapped with no way out.

When a friend of Aiden's botches a robbery and takes Aiden down with him, Claire knows she has to do something to save her son at least. With the aid of the lead detective on Aiden's case it is set up for them to travel to the Wolfchild ranch to see if the work and the life will help them both.

Wagamese enters the dangerous territory here of cliché. The angry urban black youth meets the angry rural Indian cowboy, after confrontation they find common ground and end up helping each other recover through their respective knowledge.

What saves this relationship, and the dynamic involved, is the authenticity Wagamese is able to bring to each of his characters and the unsentimental manner in which he treats them. They become real people in his hands, and everything they do or say is justified in terms of how he has had them thinking. It makes sense that the two, Joe Willie and Aiden are able to help each other because both of them come from the same place emotionally and whether they know it or not are looking to find the way they fit into the world.

Wagamese has written on these themes before; it's one that affects plenty of Native people, in his previous books. But this time he has shown how easy it is for anyone to become lost, even if they have the solid backing of family and tradition. You still have to choose to be a part of it, because no one can force you to.

Everything is about the choices you make is what it really comes down; even from the time you are small and choose to stand instead of to crawl. The natives in this book have a term for living by choices. They call it walking the good Red Road – not for the colour of their skin, but for the colour of the blood that flows through the deepest and darkest parts of your body. You have to choose whether or not you want to walk the road that brings you into balance with the world by having the courage to look right inside of your self with an honest assessment.

There's no way, they say, that you're going to find your way home if you can't first walk the path to self-awareness. How can you know what your home even looks like if you don't know who you are?

Now if all this sounds heavy and philosophical, and awkward to put into a book form, it might be in the hands of a lesser writer. But Wagamese manages to incorporate everything seamlessly into his story telling. The stuff I've talked about is never put so baldly that it stands out like a sore thumb or takes away from the story at hand.

One of the truly amazing aspects of this book is the way he takes us inside the head of the people who are still cowboys, who ride the backs of bulls. Somehow or other he is able to maintain the romance that most of us associate with the way of life, while at the same time making it real. We come to know and respect these people and their attitudes towards life and each other, not just because they are cowboys but because they are complete human beings.

Dream Wheels by Richard Wagamese is a great story about finding your way in an ever increasingly difficult world. While family and tradition are sure to help you, they can only offer you what you choose to accept. The toughest ride any of us can take is the ride along the path to self-awareness. Wagamese dispels the myths of there being any magic tricks or easy way of doing this, but at the same time he shows us what a liberating experience it can be.

Dream Wheels is a story of hope and courage which is never once mawkish or sentimental, making it one of the most powerful books of it's type on the market today. Canadian readers can order a copy of Dream Wheels through Random House Canada or Amazon.ca.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:46 AM | Permalink

There's a famous picture of Woody Guthrie where along the face of his guitar are clearly seen the words "This Machine Fights Fascists". That picture has long been part of the romantic image that's grown up among "folkies" about the guy who inspired Bob Dylan and wrote some of the most enduring songs of the twentieth century, ones that are sung to this day.

The legends haven't been as flamboyant about his old friend Pete Seeger, and for some reason he's never obtained the status of Woody among the left and the folkies even though he was as staunchly committed to all the same causes as Woody and has continued to be to this day when he is well into his nineties. Radical singer/songwriter Phil Ochs even took shots at Pete and his audiences in the 1960's with his song "Love Me Love Me I'm A Liberal": "I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts/He sure gets me singing those songs".

Pete wouldn't contain himself to singing only about the cause, he would sing old spirituals, songs for children, and he was probably the first world music performer as he would also sing folk songs from all over the world. He also did the unforgivable in the eyes of so many; he and the band the Weavers had a hit. In the days before they were booted off the airwaves as part of the Blacklisting of the 1950's ( Pete had been a member of the Communist Party of America until 1950 when he quit in disgust) they achieved a high level of popularity for their performances of American and world folk songs.

But for all his supposed mainstream acceptance, Pete was blacklisted along with hundreds of other artists whose patriotism was questioned by the American government via the infamous hearings of Joseph Mcarthy into UnAmerican activities. Pete's banjo may not have had fighting words on it, but what it did say :"This Sound Surrounds Hate And Forces It To Surrendor" said all that needed to be said about the man and his music.

Pete came by his appreciation for American folk music via his family, as his father was a folklorist and a music teacher. He was born in New York City in 1919 and even though his family were musically inclined and he himself starting playing ukulele at five, he didn't consider a career in music until 1936 when he first heard a five-string banjo. At twenty-five he dropped out of his life of journalism and Harvard University and embarked on the path he continues to follow today.

From his first group in New York City with Woody Guthrie and others called the Almanac Singers, the work with the Weavers, and his amazing solo career Pete's voice has become one of the most recognisable symbols of the fight for social justice in America. Playing in work camps during the depression, at union rallies when you could still be shot for being in a union, singing the songs of The International Brigade who fought in Spain against Franco, and the music of the civil rights movement in the 1960's his high tenor, and banjo have been a continual part of the soundscape that's called for change.

For all of Pete Seeger's supposed public acceptance he has still never received the same sort of recognition as his famous contemporary. Tribute albums to Woody Guthrie have, deservedly, been made countless times over in the past twenty years with contributions from people like Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, and others. Finally in the past year we've started to see some of the same for Pete with the release of Springsteen's The Pete Seeger Sessions

With far less fanfare there have also been some releases of the man himself singing his own work. One of the more interesting ones comes from a Spanish label, Disc Medi, which has released a double disc entitled Brothers and Sisters whose title comes from a line in arguably what might be Seeger's best known song "If I Had A Hammer" co-written with Weaver's band mate Lee Hays.

The line in fact says so much about Pete Seeger's attitude that it could well be his epitaph: "It's the song about the love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land" Tolerance and reaching out ones hand to walk hand in hand with the person beside you are the lessons he has preached his whole life. It's not his fault that the too many in the world have been too cynical to listen or accept that teaching.

Some might question why we need another recording of Pete Seeger singing songs like "Where Have All The Flowers Gone", "The Big Rock Candy Mountain", "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream" and "Study War No More" and I'd answer we can never have enough recordings of Pete or anybody singing those songs. But for those who need an excuse to make a collection special, the second disc contains recordings that are not going to be familiar to today's audiences.

While some of the titles might be familiar the arrangements are going to be awfully disconcerting at first listen. To hear Woody Guthrie's dust bowl classic "So Long It's Been Good To Know You" performed with full orchestration a la the best Tin Pan Alley tradition is a little strange. But the first eleven songs on Disc Two are taken from old Weavers recordings and concerts and that's how they were being packaged and presented by the record companies of the day.

Even those of you who have heard the classic Weavers Live At Carnegie Hall album from the same period won't recognise these songs as the same ones they are familiar with. There are also some great recordings of the old Almanac Singers, which are hard to come by, singing some of their classic Union tunes, "Which Side Are You On", "Union Maid", and "Solidarity Forever" to present a nice counter balance to the almost sappy production numbers of songs like "Wimoweh" and "On Top Of Old Smokey".

But either way these are versions of these old songs not readily available anymore so these discs are a valuable resource for that reason if none other. It's always interesting to hear how in different periods of time various songs were adapted for popular consumption. It makes you wonder what would be done with songs like "Follow The Drinking Gourd" or "Around The World" if someone took it into their heads to try and make them top forty friendly for today's audiences.

In the summer of 1981 I was fortunate enough to see Pete Seeger perform in concert. It was in the days when he and Arlo Guthrie were still touring together and performing cross-generational concerts. The would each perform their own material while the other sat on the stage watching, and then they would also play songs together, usually ones that Arlo's day had written.

I can still remember Pete Seeger sitting on the stage, eschewing the chair they had supplied for him, cross-legged on a blanket staring up at Arlo as he and his band at the time performed their set. Although at nearly ninety-seven he is still touring and playing, I doubt if I'll get the chance to see him perform again, so I will always cherish having had the opportunity to hear him sing in person.

When Springsteen put out his disc this year, I asked myself why anyone would buy him doing Pete's songs when they could just as easily hear Pete singing them. After listening to Brothers and Sisters I wonder it even more.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:47 AM | Permalink

Normally when one associates popular music with orchestral arrangements they think of either sappy elevator music or the occasional interpretative gem like the Kronos Quartet's performance of "Purple Haze". The possibility of a pop musician being a composer of what someone might call "serious" music, or contemporary orchestral, is usually considered minimal.

Aside from occasional forays by the likes of Paul McCartney with his choral piece, (which was a critical flop and considered a piece of fluff) there really has been only one man among the legions of pop stars who can be said to have any real aspirations and achievements in the field of composition for anything beyond the standard drums, guitar, bass, keyboard formula.

Frank Zappa, best known for his work as an innovative Jazz/Rock guitarist, political agitator for freedom of artistic expression, and founder of the band Mothers of Invention, had a long and passionate interest in contemporary music. From a very young age he became fascinated with the works of Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, and Edgard Varèse. In fact he was so obsessed with the latter's work that his mother arranged for him to call the composer as a fifteenth birthday present.

Like most people I was familiar with Zappa's contributions to pop music via the Mothers of Invention and it was only after he died in 1993 (of prostate cancer) that I came to know of this other side of him musically. I remember not being overly surprised when I heard about it, and thought of all the pop musicians I'd heard throughout the years, he would probably be the one most capable of composing work of serious merit.

It wasn't just because of the obvious depth of skill his pop arrangements displayed, although that was part of it, there was his attitude towards the business of music. He had no time for the trappings of fame or the pomposity of rock and roll stars (I wish he were still alive to deflate a number of super inflated egos out there to this day) and any work he would have done would have been for the sake of the work, not for his reputation as a "serious musician".

But it hasn't been until now that I've had the opportunity to sit and listen to anything that he composed. The Accademia Amiata Ensemble has released a new disc entitled Strictly Off Limits featuring the music of Frank Zappa and Tommy Fortmann, the latter being a composer of like mind to Frank so their music compliments each other nicely.

The Accademia are not your standard classical quintet as they are made up of two saxophone players, a violinist, a bassist, and a drummer with full kit. But they are ideally suited to the demands of the music composed by the two whose music they have chosen to present on Strictly Off Limits. Unlike what we would normally consider a classical composition, which was composed for orchestral players, a contemporary piece does not confine itself to any strict definition. From Fred Frith dropping hammers on his guitars, John Cage opening his piano and playing the strings, or Phillip Glass' tonal soundscapes contemporary composition is as abstract art is to realism in terms of its relationship to the symphony orchestra.

For those who remember some of Zappa's more complex arrangements on his popular albums of the mid to late seventies the music on this disc won't seem completely inaccessible. It is easy to see where he has picked up from where those beginning attempts at composition left off.

The five Zappa selections on this disc can almost be said to be typical of what would expect from him – swirling sounds that repeat, not to the point of monotony, but as emphasis of a musical theme that is then elaborated on by the other instruments. As the longest of the pieces is no more then just over four minutes they have much in common with his "popular" music in terms of structure; self contained pockets of intense energy that say what's needed to be said quickly and concisely.

In fact a couple were so familiar in sound and feeling I kept waiting for the sardonic sound of his voice to interject some comment or other. But it wasn't needed, as the music was more then capable of speaking in lieu of Frank's voice. Somehow he had been able to get his music to transmit his usual scornful attitude towards the pretensions of society. I don't know how you can make music sound satirical but he did.

Tommy Fortmann's music is cut from the same cloth as Frank's but reflects his more conventional orchestral background. Although the men originally did meet when Fortmann was fronting a rock banc that Zappa wanted to sign to his label in the seventies, Fortmann soon after became involved with composition and was receiving commissions from the European Union and the Opera of Zurich.

As I had said earlier his and Zappa's work compliment each other wonderfully, but Fortmann's shows more deliberate intent behind his compositions then Zappa's. While Frank set out to write a piece of music that expressed an emotion, Fortmann's music is put together with considerations of structure and form having more of an influence. He is guiding the listener to where he wants them to go.

That's not a criticism of his work, just an observation, a point of comparison for the listener to work from when trying to take in the two very similar styles of composition. The Accademia Amiata Ensemble has done a remarkable job of showing up these differences allowing us to separate the two men's work somewhat in our minds. But still, if you don't check the credits for each track I'd defy you to identify whose music is who's on first listen.

This is why I said at the beginning of all the pop stars that I am aware of that Frank Zappa would have been one of the few who could write music for this form. He didn't need to put a big stamp on it saying this is Frank's music – sometimes little bits creep in, how could they not – but that makes the experience all the more fun for the listener when you all of a sudden recognise a distinctive phrasing. Strictly Off Limits could be one piece made up of a series of 11 shorter movements easily, so well does the playing of each compliment the other and the amount they have in common stylistically.

For those of you who have never had the opportunity to listen to any of Frank Zappa's contemporary compositions I would highly recommend Strictly Off Limits as a good accessible place to start your exploration of his work in this form. Unfortunately there is the regret in knowing that the potential for new pieces doesn't exist, but maybe that will help us cherish all the more what little of his work that we have.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:25 AM | Permalink

I guess as a person who uses words everyday for more than just the basic communication of needs that passes as conversation these days, but to try and express an idea or an opinion somewhat comprehensibly in writing, to say I've been thinking of language recently may have a "Coals To Newcastle" sort of ring to it. But than again who is more apt to think of language and how things can be so easily misconstrued than someone who writes for public consumption on a regular basis.

I've had people leave angry comments about things I've written because they've missed the tiny word "not" in a sentence. Sometimes, and I'm not saying this is the situation in all cases, people are so keen to get their own point across that they don't really read (listen) what has been stated by an author and assume that they need to go on the offensive in order for their point to be understood. In those cases it of course doesn't matter what the original opinion was because it is only serving as an excuse for the other person to sound off.

But in either case, wilful and accidental misunderstanding, where the disagreement exists, or the failure to communicate occurs, is on a simple intellectual or philosophical level. The gulf is no more, or less, that a difference of opinion where there is a common body of awareness and comprehension to draw upon. Even if my views on a subject are diametrically opposed to someone else's, we have a similar frame of reference for out ideas.

As long as the person comes from the same philosophical tradition, in my case Western European Judeo-Christian, it doesn't even matter what their native language is, our ways of thinking have been trained in similar manners. There are certain concepts that are simply accepted without question and taken for granted when we enter into a discussion or conversation.

Where things become difficult are the occasions we attempt to bridge the gulf between our way of thinking/being and another group whose core philosophy comes from a different way of thinking. They live according to concepts that our minds can't define because for us they don’t exist. Our language doesn't have the capability to define the concept without years of study, because even if a word is translated to mean the same thing, our comprehension of that doesn't encompass the same comprehension as theirs.

Over the past year and a half I've been offering up reviews of Ashok Banker's modern adaptation of the 3000 year old Indian epic tale The Ramayana. The central character, Prince Rama, is defined by his adherence to the principle of dharma. While we can roughly translate the word to equate to our word duty, in actuality there is far more to it than that.

It has taken me countless discussions with an on line group ("Epic India") over the last year or so to begin to understand the full implications of the word. The problem is that the way my mind has been conditioned to think I lack the means to formulate a definition. My language, hence my brain, doesn't automatically go along those paths and I'm forced to try and adapt them so I can think in a different way.

Those differences have caused me to ponder the question of culture in terms of what could be called the human chicken and egg question. Which came first, the language that we use to define our way of being, our way of being followed by the language needed to define it, or did they evolve in tandem. Language does not necessarily mean English, French, or German, more the means we have of defining the concepts and terminology that in turn define us.

In the eyes of some people the Western concept of being given dominion over the natural world to exploit as we see fit is perverse, Inevitably this philosophy leads to wars for control of more and more territory so as to increase the amount of land you have to exploit for your own gain. It really comes down to a belief system based more on what's good for me, not what's good for us.

That of course over simplifies, but if you were to think about it how else would you define a way of life where actions are guided by "will I receive the final reward of salvation"? If even the most apparently selfless is act is guided by that principle doesn't that imply self-service?

I don't mean for that to sound to judgemental, and I apologise if I've insulted anyone, but I deliberately wanted to state it baldly so I could show how our thought patterns are different from other people's. It's not my intent to analysis the Judea/Christian mind right now and discuss its merits and faults. I'm only trying to point out how all that we do is a result of, or affected by our way of thinking.

Everything is filtered through that philosophical approach to the world from our interpersonal relationships to our governmental decisions affecting foreign policy. The whole structure of our society and our culture take their roots from that base and were nurtured into full flower and bore the fruit we now see.

I've often wondered if a person who is denied access to language – born deaf – has to learn how to think and conceptualize as they learn language skills. Until then what tools do they have at their disposal to formulate anything? I've also often thought when I see a person with a new born infant in a shopping mall that they should be arrested for criminal negligence because of the sensory overflow they are inflicting upon that child.

Until we learn language we can't identify anything except in terms of raw emotion. Is it any wonder that small children when awake are continually in tears when they are brought into areas like shopping malls or any other public location? They are terrified because they have no way of defining what they are hearing, seeing and smelling.

It's only as we develop a vocabulary that we are able to begin to understand and define the world around us. The more we refine our vocabulary the more of course we understand and the less threatened we feel by others. But like the deaf child there are vocabularies that we are born without access to, those of other people's cultures and ways of being.

Like infant children who encounter the babble of the shopping mall before they have the ability to define what it is they are dealing with we are scared and react emotionally to that which we don't understand. Until we allow our vocabularies to widen to include other definitions we shall continue along this path and not be able to communicate with over half the world's population.

Communication has to be a two way street or else we end up sitting alone with no one to talk to. That doesn't sound like a very pleasant future to me.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:21 AM | Permalink

There's a sub- folder in the My Documents folder of my hard drive that's simply called Richard's Words. There are slightly more than 570 items in that folder; the majority of which are articles that I've written for publication on the web either for my own blog or for other sites. If you count the documents that are scattered throughout the computer that have been moved into other folders for other projects the number becomes more then 600.

Sitting by itself is another document that's around 340 pages long written during the same period as everything else but for another purpose. That file is my attempt at telling a story for other people to take pleasure in, the same way I've taken pleasure in the writings of other people. In fact each time I sit down to write I set out to either entertain, inform, or perhaps amuse, so that I can give people some of the same experience I get when I read the people I particularly enjoy.

I used to joke about the fact that if I wanted to read something I liked I would have to write it myself, which if you think about it, is conceit beyond belief. What I hadn't realized was what a tough audience I can be, try writing a story that you want to read some day and you'll see what I mean

In theory you'd suppose it would be easy right. You know what you like to read, what kind of characters you like, what kind of writing you appreciate most and what you look for in a novel. Well they're be plenty of slip twixt mouth and pen – or something like that anyway.

First off there is a huge difference between reading a story and enjoying it and sitting down and writing one. Can I hear a round of Duh from the peanut gallery about now? How about not stating the obvious for a change? But the obvious is sometimes so obvious that we miss it in the flurry of excitement of believing we've found a solution to a problem.

In order to sit down and write the story you would like to read, learning how to write well enough to be able to tell it in the manner you like a story being told can turn into a horrendous obstacle. Most of us can't just sit down at a laptop or whatever we use for writing and produce something that's suitable for more then birdcage lining or fish wrapping at our first go.

Non-fiction, which is what I primarily write on a daily basis (although some might say otherwise about my politics, but that's another thing altogether) is quite a bit easier to write than fiction as long as your goal is to simply inform and analysis. Have an opening paragraph that introduces your story, and then tell your story in the subsequent paragraphs, citing examples and source material as needed.

If you are arguing a point, introduce your hypothesis in the opening paragraph and then prove it over the remainder of the article by finding information from credible sources that substantiates your claims. Your credibility in both cases is increased when you pay proper attention to the rules of whatever language you happen to be writing in. It also helps if you are able to make your point as neatly and succinctly as possible.

With blogging the personal essay has begun to make a comeback. Authors like E. B. White, who aside from having written Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan for children was considered the foremost essayist of his day, would write about experiences in their lives and use them as examples or expressions of a philosophy of life.

You start to realize the difficulties involved in writing when you begin to understand that there are very few E. B. Whites or William .F. Buckleys (to give the right their voice too) on the web and the results aren't usually up to their level. This type of non -fiction is a prelude to fiction writing in that it requires the author to have a far better command of language as a prerequisite, and the ability to imbue their writing with personality, wit, and style.

But even this is still a quantum leap removed from the ability to write even the simplest of stories. Successful essayists have had difficulty making that transition: although E. B. White didn't seem to have a problem, Will Buckley's attempts at fiction were far less successful. There's a quality to fiction writing and story telling that calls for more than just the technical ability to organize thoughts and ideas on the page in a coherent fashion, although that is an essential prerequisite.

Creative inspiration, the muse, passion; whatever you want to call the it that provides the impetus for people writing something that is inspiring and enjoyable for others to read is a part of the formula, but not the whole picture. Anybody can have a good idea or be inspired; it's what you do with it afterwards that separates the creative person from others. Do you have the vision to take a flash of thought and turn it into something bigger?

When I had the idea for my series of novels I immediately saw the characters' story laid out for me like a road map. I could see almost everything I needed to know, even down to the tiniest of details like how they would be sitting around a fire in book two, and I hadn't even begun to write book one yet.

That is not to imply that the book wrote itself, because it didn't and it still isn't but unlike previous attempts where I've worked from only a vague notion of what I wanted, I know pretty much exactly what's going to happen all the way across hundreds of years and generations to come. Whether or not I tell that whole story is another matter, the fact that I know the information is what's important.

It's like the actor who creates a history for the character he's playing on stage, probably no one in the audience is going to know what that information is directly, but it will make his performance all the more assured and complete because he knows it. A fiction writer can only benefit from that kind of assurance and confidence. It goes a long way to making what your writing believable if you can believe in it.

Soon after I came to the startling revelation that there was the world of difference between writing and reading, I had a further epiphany: if you're going to write, write about something you want to read about. I had joked earlier about the only way I was going to read a story I liked was writing it, but that's a lot closer to the truth than you'd think. There is no point in sitting down and putting all that effort into something if you're not interested in it. It's going to be crap for starters and you're going to hate every minute of doing it that sort of defeats the purpose of being creative.

Taking on working in the arts as a way of making your living is as close to taking a vow of poverty as you can get these days. Which means like the those friars and nuns of old who took vows of poverty, you're going to have to make damn sure that yours is a true vocation not just a phase you're going through. Unless you're really lucky and happen to be like Steven King and John Grisham in that what you like writing about also happens to be what's extremely popular, you're not looking at making oodles of money.

You have to get your fulfillment in areas other than monetary most of the time, which means you better be writing for the sheer pleasure that writing a story that brings you pleasure brings because that may be your only reward. If you're very lucky maybe you'll get to see other people read and enjoy your work as well, which even if you don't receive a penny for it is an amazing experience.

In my time writing over the past few years my total sales at Lulu.com my print on demand publisher has been about $30.00. But that doesn't seem to have slowed down my productivity. Everyday I get up and sit down at my laptop and begin to write something to post on the web. Some days it is a even a short piece of fiction, but more often than not it is a review of somebody else's work; music, book, or movie.

I consider myself to be incredibly fortunate in that every day this last while I've been able to do what I want to do, and by doing improve little by little. I've already received one rejection from a publisher for my first novel, and the completed manuscript is even now winging its way into another's waiting arms. I've had a quote from one of my book reviews appear on the dust jacket of a book I'd reviewed and I'm on first name basis with people whose work I respect and admire as writers and treated as a fellow writer which always sort of surprises me, but makes me feel proud as well.

I've always been a voracious reader and it now seems like I've become a writer as well: truly the best of all possible worlds.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:50 AM | Permalink

There's a problem with reviewing a movie like MirrorMask, I'm not quite sure where to start. How are any words that I use going to do any kind of justice to what was created through the visual magic and fertile imagination of David McKean and Neil Gaiman. Especially when the final product was realized through the work of the equally innovative folk at the Jim Henson Company.

Obviously I liked the movie, I guess that's not hard to guess from that opening paragraph, but so what? I could end the review right here and just say – watch the movie it's freaking brilliant – trusting that you know enough about the work of the people involved that taking my word for it isn't going to be that much of a leap of faith.

But maybe you want a little bit more from a review or a critique, like how about some insights into the inner meaning or some such crap like that. The deep significance of the fact that the lead character Helena dreams that the world of her illustrations have come to life and has become a reality where she is trapped.

Is there significance that everyone in this alternate reality hides their feelings and faces behind a mask? Or that her evil doppelganger has taken her place in her own world, and that her mother is represented by two separate people in this world; one the queen of the light town and the other queen of shadows town. How about the fact that her other self crossing into the "real" world threatens the survival of both worlds in some form or other.

Of course we can say that the dark princess Helena represents the potential brat and bad teenager Helena could become, or knows that she has the potential to be, and is seeing in her dream state the havoc such a creature would wreck on her home life. The real Helena's family runs a circus and she no longer wants to live the life of a road warrior. She wants a normal life of going to school and hanging out, or that's what she thinks she wants..

Her rebellion takes the form of being obstinate and obstructive, objecting to going on for a performance, even though once she is out in the ring with her father you can see her coming alive as they work the audience. She's just being the typical teenager. But one day her mother collapses and she blames herself for it. "If I hadn't been such an asshole Mom wouldn't be lying in a hospital bed right now" is her state of mind before the dream world hits.

Of course there is the whole significance of mirrors. First, they show you your reflection, but they also turn everything around and backwards. So what happens if you walk through the mirror, and are the one looking back through at your life? You see the contrary you hard at work being everything you're not, but fear you are on the verge of becoming. In order to set things right you have to go back and be who you really are, but first you need to deal with all the things that have been clouding your mind on the right side of the mirror.

That's what dreams are for aren't they? To receive the messages from your subconscious that you need in order to get over hurdles. Neil Gaiman must be one of the few writers around who can carry off this type of script without it coming out sounding like a new age self-help book crossed with a cheap psychological thriller. He achieves that delicate balance of showing her actual life on one hand, and the way she perceives it on the other; letting the lines blur on occasion to heighten the drama, but never overstating or oversimplifying.

Of course in this type of collaboration, between gifted visual artist and gifted writer in a visual medium like film, it's hard to discern which came first the picture or the story. In a question and answer period in the special features on the DVD, they are rather coy about the whole question, just implying that they feed off each other. A picture will suggest something, which in turn will suggest another picture and so on.

At first view Dave McKean's artwork can be quite unsettling with its frozen human expressions on animal forms, but after a while you begin to realize how perfect it is for this film and recreating the dream state. In fact as production designer he was responsible for the whole look of the film, not just the dreamscape artwork.

There are actually three worlds that McKean has created visually in this movie; the dream world, the world of the family circus, and the concrete world of council flats and hospital wards that is the so called real world. He uses three separate colour pallets to help emphasise the differences between each local and creates atmosphere's complementary to each.

The circus is full of the bright vibrant colours of the costumes and lights, the real world is all grey and steel blues, harsh and bleak, and the dream world is full of browns and bronzes looking mainly like an old sepia toned photograph. Only during Helena's brief sojourn in the shadow city with her buddy Valentine does the dream world change, and then it becomes blacks and the darker range of the entire colour wheel.

Because this is a live action movie real actors are part of the mixture that goes into creating the effects of the movie. The four leads, Stephanie Leonidas as Helena and her evil twin, Gina McKee – triple duty as Mother, Dark Queen, and Light Queen, Jason Barry as Valentine, and Rob Brydon as Helena's Father and the Prime Minister of the City of Light, all work beautifully within the artificial world created by Mr. Gaiman and Mr McKean. What is especially nice is that they are not just add-ons to the visuals, but have been incorporated by Dave McKean in his director's cap, as an essential part of the process.

Perhaps everything works so well because Dave McKean has so much control over what is going on. Being both production designer and director allows him the luxury of not having to spend extraneous time consulting with the design team. Of course he might have had some nasty arguments with himself but that's another story for another day.

I had briefly mentioned the extra features earlier and the best thing about them are the two interviews with David McKean and Neil Gaiman individually at the beginning of the extra items, and the very end when they have edited together various question and answer periods that Mr. Gaiman and Mr. McKean had conducted during the promotional tour of the film.

First of all they have known each other for over a decade and they are both very funny men, so these sessions are filled with humour and silliness. But at the same time we find out plenty about how the film was put together and their working relationship. Interestingly enough in all of their years of working together on projects, from comics to novels, this was the first time they ever had to work in the same room together.

Their description of the working environment at Henson studios was hysterical, but also made you realize how it would have been hard not to create something special. They talked about coming into this room that looked like it was right out of an Edwardian mansion, with huge portraits hung on the walls. But then you notice that the gilded frames are surrounding pictures of Kermit playing his banjo, or Miss Piggy in a Tutu and your perception on reality is changed radically.

MirrorMask is a remarkable story told in remarkable fashion by two of the best storytellers around right now. One person is gifted with ability to craft pictures with words, while the other can tell a story with pictures: when those two talents are combined genius is usually the result. MirrorMask is one such meeting of minds.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:35 AM | Permalink