Instead of the raw energy that spoke of freedom and questioned authority, he took the music to Hollywood and Las Vegas and smoothed all it's rough edges away. What he was performing after his return from his tour of duty in Germany wasn't going to inspire anyone to change let alone change the world around them. While other North American and British performers were making music that challenged the status quo, Elvis was being neutered by a desire for fame and fortune. While his apologists can blame his management all they want for the direction his career went in, it couldn't have happened without his acquiescence.

The one thing you can't deny about Elvis is the iconic status he managed to achieve and the industry he spawned. Elvis imitators, or tributes as they prefer to be called, have become as ubiquitous as fast food franchises. The majority of these tributes have all the originality and zest of fast food as their primary goal of how to snag some of Elvis' fame for themselves is more important than any attempt at originality. There have been exceptions to this rule, Dread Zeppelin who did reggae covers of Led Zeppelin material while being fronted by an Elvis impersonator for example, but most others have just worshipped the Elvis icon.

All of which makes the forthcoming release on Mental Records of the CD/DVD combo Back From The Dead by G. G. Elvis & The T.C.P. Band that much more welcome. Billed as a Punk Elvis tribute band G.G.Elvis & The T.C.P. Band (Taking Care Of Punk) have taken the Elvis icon. stood it on its head, and given it the drop kick it desperately needs. Totally irreverent, more than a little rude, and quite a bit crude Back From The Dead features a CD of thirteen thrash/punk versions of Elvis covers, and a DVD mockumentary about the new King himself G.G. Elvis.

It's hard to know where to start when talking about Back From The Dead. Do you start with the inclusion of an intimate scratch and sniff photo, or introduce the band to it's breathless public? On the other hand the music is important too, but than there's also the up close and personal interview with G. G. himself on the DVD, which includes the epic tale of how he pulled the band back together. Of course there's also the music video on the DVD which gives adoring fans a chance to see the band in action.

I think in order to fully appreciate the impact of Back From The Dead you'll need to be introduced to the members of the band before we go any further. On guitars we have Elvis of Nazareth and Elvis Vicious, Elvis '56 is handling the bass, "Has-Been" Elvis is on drums, Little Sister sings harmonies, and of course the man himself, G.G. Elvis, sings lead vocals. Now I know what you're thinking - thrash/punk versions of tunes that Elvis Presley made famous; how can even a band blessed with names like those above carry that off.

Well I'm here to tell you, true believers, that they do it fine style. First of all they've brought their own unique touches to the tunes by blending some of them with classic punk tunes. So on the opening track they have melded "Blitzkrieg Bop" by the Ramones with "That's All Right Mama" by Big Bill Crudup (what you thought Elvis wrote that tune?) to make a great, hard driving, punk song. Through out the disc they do things like that to surprisingly good effect. Who would have known that "Holiday's In The Sun" by the Sex Pistols would work so well with "Suspicious Minds"?

In all seriousness though what I found most impressive about this disc musically was how well they performed everything. Sure they play fast and furious and G. G. growls/howls the lyrics, but at the same time the vocal harmonies are right in key. Any discordance you hear is deliberate, not because these folk can't play their instruments or can't sing. Just because it's thrash/punk doesn't mean that the arrangements aren't tight and they can't play note perfect music. I think what's most impressive is how all of the adaptations sound perfectly natural. They haven't just grafted the lyrics of old songs onto a punk sound, but have taken the original tunes and reworked them into something new.

On one hand these discs are of course a send up of the whole Elvis thing, but on the other hand they obviously have an appreciation for the music or they wouldn't have taken the time and the energy to make such skilful adaptations. Of course the fact that they have made that effort also makes the send up and the joke that much more effective. They really are G. G. Elvis And The Taking Care Of Punk Band, and don't you forget it.

The DVD is a little bit of a let down as they can't sustain what was started with the music and it's somewhat sophomoric with a little too much dependance on toilet humour. The funniest part of the DVD is the music video without audio. They've staged a mock interview show with G.G. and cut away to the band's new music video. We're treated to shot of the band playing away and singing without any audio. After about thirty seconds of this subtitles come on the screen assuring the viewer that there's nothing wrong with their audio system, only they weren't able to afford to pay the Elvis estate synchronization rights to include audio tracks on their video.

The subtitles continue and say they thought about going ahead anyway without getting the rights -"Hey were Punks after all"- but their lawyers told them how much they could end up being sued for and they decided they weren't that punk. I think that sums up what's best about the whole two disc set, is the ability of the people behind the project to poke fun at themselves at the same time as they are poking holes in the Elvis myth.

Back From The Dead, a Punk Elvis tribute, by G.G. Elvis and the T.C.P. Band is an affectionate, and mostly intelligent, parody of Elvis Presely's iconic status in American popular culture. It features thirteen great adaptations of tunes that Elvis recorded, with assists from some classic punk tunes, a silly DVD, and some great musicianship. You can pre-order your copy from Mental Records preparatory to its June release date and pick it up at most of the usual on line suspects once it goes on sale officially.

Of course no matter what, the modus operandi still remains the same as it did back in the days of the uniformed officer driving his black and white; solving the crime and maintaining law and order. Shows still start with a crime having been committed and the police force doing their best to solve who done it. The biggest change that's occurred in the years of police dramas is how much time is spent with the police officers outside of their life on the job site. Instead of the characters being one dimensional figures representing the forces of good, they now lead as complicated, if not more complicated lives than the rest of us.

Television writers caught on to the fact that being a police officer and around criminal activity for a large percentage of your day could potentially have an effect upon your existence away from the office. Whether a cop wants to or not he will bring his work home with him from the office as you can't just shut off what you've seen during a day of dealing with anything from murder to traffic offences. This has led to the creation of police dramas with scripts that take into account more than just the character's work life, and that include characters from the character's home life.

One of this new breed of police procedure shows was the British cop show, starring Scottish actor Tom Conti, DNA, that dealt with the high tech world of modern forensic science. Forensic scientists search a crime scene for microscopic physical evidence that can be used as proof of a person's involvement in a crime. In DNA Tom Conti plays Joseph Donavan, a driven Forensic Science cop with his own history of medical problems, and a dedication to the job that causes strife on the home front.

While it did air on Canadian television, there probably weren't many opportunities for North American audiences to see this show. Acorn Media has gathered together the first two seasons of the show into a two DVD package, D.N.A.: Complete Series One & Two. Disc one contains the two parts of what must have been the pilot movie from season one, and disc two contains the three episodes from season two.

Now I'm not familiar with the North American versions of these types of shows so I have no basis for comparison, but what struck me most about this series was the balance that was struck between science, character, and plot in the scripts. The science is important of course, because that's what the characters use to solve the mysteries in the end, and the evidence upon which the plots turn. Yet it's not the be all and end all of the shows, and its also shown to be as fallible as the people who use it, as easy to manipulate as any other type of evidence, and not the great miracle for crime solving that it sometimes is made out to be.

Science is important to the plots because that's what the lead character does for a living. Yet instead of only having it used as the means by which the mysteries are solved, the plots deal with the various problems that face forensic scientists when actually trying to solve a crime. Evidence that appears black and white in a laboratory, ends up not being any use in court. A fingerprint proving somebody's presence at the scene of a crime doesn't necessarily make them the culprit because there is no way of dating when the fingerprint was left. Was the blood that spattered the coffee cup with the finger print sprayed there at the same time the finger print was left, or did it happen some time later?

Of course what's most important in all of these dramas are the characters and DNA is no exception. When we meet Jo Donavon he has been retired from the force for a number of years, and we find out that he hadn't left under the best of circumstances. He had made an error on his last case that resulted in both someone's acquittal and his own nervous breakdown. He's now a successful writer, but still not fully recovered from his breakdown. When faced with stressful circumstances he dissociates to such an extent that he doesn't remember where he was or what he did for great stretches of time.

Donavon is called out of retirement because a murder occurs and not only does the crime scene look exactly like the one which caused his mental breakdown, his name is written in blood on the wall of the victim's apartment. As Donavon is slowly drawn back into the world of police work, we are introduced to his wife and son, and see how both his job and his health issues have impacted upon their lives and the relationship he has with each of them. He is still suffering from dissociative episodes so severe that when a second body shows up in the exact same circumstances he can't be sure that he's not the culprit. That both men turn out to have been his wife's lovers only makes him more of a suspect.

What I've always preferred about British television over North American, is its willingness to take time to develop the relationship between the characters. Kate, Donavon's wife, is shown to have every reason to feel alone and neglected. On the other hand she also truly loves her husband and is incredibly frustrated by his seeming unwillingness to talk with her. She didn't go to the other men for love, but for companionship. Samantha Bond as Kate does a remarkable job of communicating the confusion, frustration, and anger of her character, while still being very convincing expressing her character's love for her husband.

Tom Conti is a wonderful actor and his work as Joseph Donavon is a testimony to his craft. While we sympathize with Jo as he tries to come to grips with his health issues and hope that he solves the crime, he is not the most likeable of people. His tendency to be egocentric and to be a workaholic are a combination that ensures he ignores those around them unless they do something drastic to catch his attention. Conti is able to communicate all of this to his audience simply by having his character go about his business. He is the type of actor who is so comfortable in the skin of the character he is portraying that he can communicate information about that character with a twitch of an eyebrow or the lifting of a shoulder.

DNA, like so many other British television shows, is a well acted and smartly scripted show that relies on intelligence more than shock to hold an audience's attention. The box set of DNA: The Complete Series One & Two available from Acorn Media as of May 13th/2008 gives viewers in North America an opportunity to enjoy all five episodes of this well executed police drama. An opportunity that fans of good television won't want to miss out on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More often than not when you meet a werewolf for the first time in a story or movie you're not left with a favourable impression as they're usually ripping someone's throat out. They never get to wear fancy clothes in the movies, partly due I suppose to the tendency for clothing to suffer during their transformation from human to wolf. (There is some debate as to what happens to a werewolf's clothes after they change from human to wolf, and more specifically what they do about their clothing situation when they convert back to being a human). Then there' the whole bestial thing - there's just no talking to them when they change into their wolf selves.

So it can't be an easy life being a werewolf in the first place, but can you image what it must be like if you were a teenaged werewolf, filled with all the usual adolescent angst, and being outlawed by your family? Well that's the situation that seventeen year old Kalix MacRinnalck finds herself in as the heroine of Martin Millar's The Lonely Werewolf Girl, published by Soft Skull Press, and distributed in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

In a fit of anger young Kalix attacked and almost killed her father, the Thane of the MacRinnalck clan, and for that crime had to flee the families ancestral home in Scotland and seek shelter in the mean streets of London. In spite of her tender years, and being skinny to the point of emaciation as a human, Kalix is a fearsomely powerful werewolf when the battle rage takes her. She was born during a full moon when werewolves are unable to resist the change so she and her mother were both in their werewolf forms. The majority of werewolves are born as humans, so when Kalix changes into her werewolf form she becomes twice as fierce and powerful as kinsman double her size.

All things considered this is a good thing, because not only has she been outlawed by the family, but the clan's ruling council has demanded she be brought back to stand trial for nearly killing her father. Some of them aren't too fussy about what shape she shows up in for the trial; in fact some, like her eldest brother Sarapen, would be happy if only her heart were to show up for the trial. All of which means is that Kalix finds herself having to be continually on her guard against being captured or killed by minions of the family's various factions. Her circumstances are complicated even further by the fact that she is so filled with self-loathing that she's not only anorexic as a human but has developed a taste, well more an addiction, for laudanum.

Not eating for days on end, and taking a very powerful opium derivative on a frequent basis can leave one's resources rather drained. Which is how Kalix ends up being sheltered by two human teenagers, Daniel and Moonglow. Daniel accidentally saves Kalix from one of her brother's more reprehensible minions, and she is so weakened by lack of food and drugs she is unable to resist when Moonglow decides that Kalix only needs some understanding and compassion to feel good about herself again.

Of course Daniel and Moonglow might live to regret, if they live, getting involved with the scion of the MacRinnalch clan as all of sudden they are drawn into a world inhabited by more than just depressed teenage werewolves. First of all there's the rest of Kalix's immediate family, which aside from her previously mentioned eldest brother includes her mother, The Mistress of the Werewolves and matriarch of the clan; her sister Thrix who wants as little to do with the family as possible so she can concentrate on her career as a fashion designer; her other brother Markus who has a thing for women's clothing; and the cousins Beauty and Delicious who fancy themselves as rock and roll stars but haven't been sober enough in a couple of years to play a note.

On top of that are the various minions of all the parties involved, werewolf hunters armed with guns that fire silver bullets, and Thrix's main client, Mallveria, Queen of the Hiyasta, a race of fire elementals from another dimension, who has become addicted to human fashions. It's bad enough when they all start showing up at, or in the vicinity of Daniel and Moonglow's small flat in Kensington, but things get really chaotic when the Thane dies as a result of the injuries he sustained from Kalix's attack on him, and the MacRinnalch clan descends into civil war as both Markus and Sarapen claim the throne.

It is safe to say that there probably hasn't been as funny, or weird, a werewolf story written as Lonely Werewolf Girl. One moment there's a ferocious battle raging with werewolves ripping each other's throats out, and the next we're in the midst of a fashion crises. Mallveria has discovered that her deadly rival in the fire elemental realm has been stealing all of Thrix's designs and showing up wearing the same outfits. It's a toss up as to who is the more deadly - Sarapen in his quest to become the new Thane of the clan or Mallveria in her desire to be the belle of the ball and see her rival burn, quite literally, with jealousy at the glory of her outfits.

Along the way Martin Millar also manages to tell the story of how Kalix goes from being a lonely werewolf girl so filled with self loathing that she cuts herself and suffers anxiety attacks if she's treated well, to a werewolf girl with friends who make her realize that she's not such a bad sort after all. By turn hysterically funny, terrifying, and even a little heartbreaking, Lonely Werewolf Girl is a brilliantly designed and elegantly written book. What makes it even more remarkable is that in spite of the inanity of some situations and its fantastical elements, it also happens to be a very real book in its treatment of Kalix's problems.

She doesn't magically become a well adjusted werewolf teenager filled with joie de vivre. Instead she has to face up to her internal demons in the same way any other person dealing with her problems would, through hard work and lots of soul searching. In fact all of the characters in the book are drawn with a equal amount of depth. It would have been easy for Millar to make someone like Mallveria for instance nothing more than a caricature of a fashion slave. Yet he takes the time to make her a multi dimensional character who becomes more interesting as we get to know her.

Lonely Werewolf Girl has a lightness of tone that makes it a delight to read, but that never diminishes its characters or trivializes issues of importance. It's one of those rare books that make you laugh and think all at the same time, and feel better for having read it.

In the case of Western popular music and its relationship with the instruments of Indian Classical music, the sitar and tablas predominately, it was more often than not the first instance, with the sitar being used more like a "neat" sounding guitar than anything else. The time signatures and structure of Indian Classical music precluded pop musicians from doing more as the differences between the two were seemingly insurmountable. It wasn't until musicians like Harry Manx took the trouble to properly study Indian music - a minimum of a twelve year commitment - that the two have began to be blended successfully.

On the other hand, Western Jazz music has had more of a successful history when it comes to the incorporation of Indian instruments. With it's openness to experimentation in time signatures, and musician's improvisation skills, there have been successful attempts at integrating the two styles of music for some time now. Notable examples of this were John Mclaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra's first releaseThe Inner Mounting Flame in 1971. Subsequent McLaughlin releases, Shakti in 1975 and Remember Shakti in 1999 only confirmed his abilities when it came to fusing the two styles of music.

McLaughlin was the obvious choice therefore to create an original work for a unique collaborative project between American Jazz and Indian Classical musicians honouring the music of Miles Davis; Miles... From India, released on Times Square Records. Where else were the producers going to find someone who not only played with Miles at one time (1969 - 72) but also had his history of experience with Indian music? "Miles...From India", the title track of this new two disc set, is a perfect example of what the producers hoped to create with this release in that it brings together the two traditions to create a unique work inspired by the music of Miles Davis.

In 1972 Miles Davis incorporated tablas and sitar in his recording On The Corner, and its the music from that release that inspired this music. Co-producers Bob Belden and Yusef Gandhi came up with the idea of revisiting Miles' Indian influenced music, (his 1972 recording On The Corner included tablas and sitar), utilizing both musicians who had appeared in the original sessions and Indian Classical musicians. The began by having the musicians in India record their parts for each song, and then took these tracks back to the States where the American Jazz musicians were asked to improvise to them. None of the American musicians were allowed to listen to the music prior to the time they actually sat down in the studio to record, ensuring that they were only able to react to what they heard and not pre-plan anything.

As far as I can tell the purpose of this was to ensure that they wouldn't be influenced by any preconceived notions they might have had about the music based on their own experiences with the original compositions. The result of their only being able to react to what the Indian musicians created was not only the creation of almost completely new pieces of music, but an almost perfect fusion of the two styles of music.

While its difficult for me to pick out specifics to cite as examples, experiencing the music as a whole is overwhelming and it was far too easy to just let myself drift with the sounds and rhythms generated by the musicians, a couple of moments stand out in particular. Vocalist Shankar Mahadevan is one of India's most popular singers and his voice is used in numerous Bollywood productions. On Miles...From India he uses his voice like an instrument so that on "Blue In Green" and "Spanish Green" he "sings" the melody of the tunes.

Most of the time Jazz vocalizations, scat, are staccato exhalations of sound that accentuate the rhythm more than the melody. That's not the case with Shankar's work on these songs, instead he has taken the role of a horn or other lead instrument and recreated their parts with his voice. The result is that both songs have a warmth and emotional depth that can only be achieved via a human voice. Shankar Mahadevan's range and breath control are such that he is able to bring the same sort of expression to his "solos" as that of a horn player, which in turn allows American Wallace Roney's trumpet an opportunity to create beautiful counterpoints and harmonies.

It's only when you hear the Carnatic Violin played that you realize the differences between it and the violin those of us in the West are used to hearing. There's something about the quality of its sound that makes it seem somewhat unearthly. On "It's About That Time" Kala Ramnath's playing caught my ear right from the start and it was the main thread that I followed throughout the whole piece. Even when it was mixed into the background for another's solo, its flavour could still be heard in how it coloured what the other musicians were creating.

In the past I've never been fond of Jazz violin, it always seemed to lack a certain fullness of sound and felt scratchy and weak when compared to the horns or woodwinds. Perhaps it's the way its been recorded in the past, or the way other musicians have related to it, but whatever the reason I've always thought it sounded out of place. Kala Ramnath's Carnatic Violin on the other hand felt like it was perfect instrument for "It's About That Time". Not only did it sound wonderful on its own, but it worked beautifully in tandem with the other players.

Miles...From India is a remarkable collection of music featuring some of the best musicians of contemporary American Jazz, Indian Jazz, and Classical Indian music coming together to honour one of the most brilliant composers of our time. Miles Davis not only created remarkable music on his own, but he provided the inspiration for some of modern Jazz's best and most creative minds. Everybody from Wayne Shorter to Chick Corea and John McLaughlin played with and were influenced by Miles and his innovations. While some of them might have pushed the envelope of fusion much further then he did, he was the one who put their feet on that path.

It is only fitting, therefore, that a collection of music in his honour is such a bold attempt at fusing two such disparate types of music. The fact that it is so successful is surely a testimony to his genius as a composer. Miles...From India is not just an example of how to properly bring East and West together musically, it is as magnificent collection of Jazz music that you are liable to find anywhere these days.

The world spins around and ten years later, in the 1980s, I couldn't read the obituary pages of my local paper without reading that a man of my generation had died of unknown causes, leaving behind special friends, but very rarely, a wife or parents to mourn him. AIDS was very much a mystery in those early days in the mid to late eighties, but even then we knew it was caused by sharing bodily fluids and the quickest way of catching it was through unprotected sex and sharing a needle. It was only a matter of time before it spread beyond gay men. Sex and Drugs were "very good indeed" no longer.

When the Canadian Red Cross came clean about not testing their blood properly and giving hemophiliacs infected blood, (and oh by the way if you received a blood transfusion between these dates you really should get yourself checked), the "innocent victim" syndrome in AIDS reared its ugly head. Just what the world needed - another way to stigmatize people who were dying because they had sex or shared a needle. The Christian right in North America had already labelled HIV and AIDS as the wages of sin, and being able to say they only have themselves to blame, while others are blameless, only added fuel to the pyre they were building to burn the sinners.

In the preface to her book The Wisdom Of Whores, Elizabeth Pisani says that when people ask her what she does for a living she cheerfully replies "Sex and drugs" as it's easier than having to explain to people that an Epidemiologist studies how diseases spread in populations. For ten year of her life, starting in 1996, Ms Pisani worked on the front lines of HIV/AIDs research looking for patterns in how the disease was spread, developing ways of curbing the spread of the diseases, trying to figure out how many people were potentially at risk, and of course dealing with the political fallout that always seems to accompany sex and drugs.

In the course of her work she has run police roadblocks in Indonesia carrying blood samples and used syringes, sat on street corners with prostitutes in the border towns of China and Tibet discussing the economics of their trade, worked with the transgendered prostitutes of Indonesia, argued policy with officials from the UN, the World Health Organization (WHO), Muslim Clerics, and brothel owners in Thailand. The Wisdom Of Whores are the conclusions she has reached after these ten years of field work about what works in the fight against HIV/AIDS and what doesn't work. These conclusions are backed up by not only her years of personal observation, but by the data she has crunched charting the growth of the disease and the effectiveness of the various means used to prevent it's spread in different countries and among different social groups.

One of the most frightening things about this book is, at the time it was being written, the amount of influence being exerted on HIV/AIDS programming by people with political and religious agendas. From Muslim Clerics in Africa and South East Asia saying that not using condoms proves how faithful you are, the American government going so far as prohibiting their staff from having access to research that proves the effectiveness of condoms in preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STD), to American policy that tries to prevent any agency, whether they receive American money or not, from advocating the use of condoms as a preventative measure; it's more important to these people that their view of the world is adhered to than the disease be prevented from spreading.

In spite of the statistical evidence that Ms. Pisani cites, that over 70% of the people who sign pledges vowing to abstain from pre-marital sex end up having pre-marital sex, the American government still preaches abstinence as the answer for preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. The fact that the majority of these people also practice unprotected sex is even more damning. That those figures are from the US, and not a country with a flourishing sex trade, makes the whole abstinence argument even more spurious.

In spite of what any number of groups might want you to think, according to Ms. Pisani's research very few people are sold into the sex trade of South East Asia as slaves. It's more a matter of simple economics; a women can earn more in a half hour as a prostitute than she would for making 150 t-shirts in a sweat shop. If people are really so concerned about women in the sex trade maybe they should consider paying a little more money for their brand name t-shirts so these women have a viable alternative to make money to feed their families.

In all of these countries where condom programs have been implemented within the sex trade infection rates have been halved and continue to decline. The programs that work best are the ones like the one implemented by Thailand. The government allows the brothels to operate as long as the women working there use condoms, if they don't the government closes it down and the owner loses his source of income. By routinely randomly testing all the women working in the brothels for STDs the government is able to tell if condoms are being used. Not only has this helped prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS but it has also cut down on the spread of all STDs among clients, brothel workers, and all of their families.

The sharing of needles by intravenous drug users is of course the other big way that the virus is spread. In spite of this, resistance to needle exchanges as a means of prevention still runs high. Those who believe in the war on drugs are convinced that needle exchange programs encourage drug use and don't want anything to do with it. Yet statistics presented by Ms. Pisani shows that needle exchanges not only help prevent the spread of disease, they work to help people get off drugs. Two or three times a week they are in contact with social workers who can give them referrals to treatment programs and provide them support in quitting drugs and a good many of them take advantage of it.

The other big issue that Ms. Pisani raises is the need to balance treatment and prevention. While nobody wants to see anybody die when there are drugs available that could prolong their lives for as much as ten years, the problem is now that too much of the HIV/AIDS budget is being spent on treatment and prevention is falling by the wayside. As a result people are still being infected in spite of everything we know. Politicians are much happier when they can say they are giving money to treat pregnant women so they don't spread the disease to their unborn child, or to treat a child who was born with the virus, than they are in announcing money to help people who have sex and use drugs from catching it.

The Wisdom Of Whores is like a gale of fresh air being blown through the musty smelling bullshit that has surrounded the whole HIV/AIDS issue from day one. It's not just the holy cows of the right Ms. Pisani takes on either in her battle to save lives. Everything from peer counselling to confidential testing is put under her microscope for analysis; saving lives and preventing the spread of the disease is what concerns her not what people think is right. I'm sure this will get a lot of people's backs up, but it's hard to argue with her statistics about rates of infection.

It's hard to imagine a book about a subject as dry sounding as epidemiology being a page turner and entertaining, but Elizabeth Pisani has managed to do just that. She is irreverent, but never irrelevant; by turns angry, compassionate, and frustrated, she is a refreshingly human voice among so many speech makers. Sex and drugs might be taboo subjects for most people, but they are Elizabeth's bread and butter, and according to her they are at the root of HIV/AIDS. The Wisdom Of Whores paints as true a picture as possible of the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS and where it stands today as you're liable to ever read. As well as the book you can also go the Wisdom Of Whores web site to receive even more up to date information and join in the ongoing discussion on how the world is doing in its fight to keep people alive.

The Wisdom Of Whores can be purchased directly from Penguin Canada or an online retailer like Amazon.ca

From Lewis Carrol, C. S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, to the latest generation of J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman, they have inundated us with great books that have been and are being turned into remarkably good movies. The latest of these to be given its celluloid treatment are Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, as book one, The Golden Compass, was released in cinemas in December of 2007 and on DVD Arpil 29th 2008. Going upon the recommendation of the person who has always been my best guide in all things literary, my older brother, I picked up a copy of the two disc special edition release of the movie this past weekend. (I don't know about anywhere else, but in Canada it was only three dollars more then the regular edition at Jumbo Video in Kingston Ontario)

I have to confess that I went into this movie completely blind, knowing absolutely nothing about the story or the series. I didn't even know it was a trilogy for goodness sake; it wasn't until the movie was winding down that I turned to my wife and said "Do you get the feeling that this is a to be continued in the next movie point we're coming to?" Talk about being out of touch, although in my own defence the books were released between 1995 and 2000 and in those days I wasn't paying attention to much of anything. I didn't even notice Harry Potter until 2002 when I was given a copy of The Philosopher's Stone while recovering from surgery. (It's only known as The Sorcerer's Stone in the States - they changed the title and "translated" the text from British to American for American readers)

So my first exposure to the world of The Golden Compass came when I slid the DVD into the optical drive on my MiniMac this past Saturday, and I'm now good and hooked. (First thing Monday morning I sent a pleading e-mail to my contact at the Canadian distributor of the books to see if they could get me review copies; there was a new omnibus version released just over a year ago on which I'm placing my hopes) I can't remember when I've been so instantly captivated by anything as I was by this movie. From the opening sequence with the voice over supplying the introduction to the world the movies would be set in to the final frames in Scoresby's flying machine near the North Pole the movie had me glued to my monitor.

Now I've not read the books, so I won't be able to tell you how good an adaptation of the actual book this is, but what I saw was as brilliant a piece of story telling as any that I've ever seen on screen. As both director and screen writer Chris Weitz has done a masterful job of making sure that the movie works as a stand alone work, so those of us who haven't read the books never feel like we're missing information. While there are points in the movie where you may wonder, now why is so and so doing this, you're never left hanging and an explanation will eventually be given. In fact one of the things that impressed me most about Mr. Weitz's direction and storytelling was his timing. He doles out the information that the story needs to progress in ways that don't interrupt the flow of the action but that still gives us the opportunity to catch our breath and integrate what he's told us into our understanding of what's going on.

In this way he gives us a slight edge on his main character, Lyra Belacqua when it comes to knowing what's happening, but only in a general way. For instance we know that the people who run the world, The Magisterium, have nasty plans in store for people - especially children - but we don't find out the details until Lyra does. It's a standard technique for storytelling in movies, but he's done it so well here that it builds the suspense and develops the plot at a rate of speed that strikes the perfect balance between credibility and maintaining tension.

Of course this movie is going to live and die based on the performance delivered by whomever is cast in the central role of the lead character Lyra Belacqua. Once you see Dakota Blue Richards in the role, you won't be able to imagine another person playing her. Culled from a cattle call that saw them audition 10,000 young women across England, Dakota doesn't strike a wrong note ever in her performance. It's hard to believe that she had no professional acting experience prior to this movie considering the range of emotions she's called on to display, and how well she's coped with working with computer generated image (CGI) characters.

Two of the characters Dakota has to spend most of her time on screen with were CGI creations. Her personal Daemon, Pantalaimon (the voice of Freddie Highmore) and the armoured bear Iorek Byrnison (the voice of Ian McKellen). What look like perfectly natural conversations and interactions in the final product on screen, were anything but during the shooting process. At times the young actor would be acting out a scene with a green blob of a puppet, or talking to a blank wall. It doesn't seem to have made the slightest bit of difference to her though, whether she was working with a live person or a puppet as she carries off every scene she is in with equal aplomb.

As far as the rest of the performances go, they were all pretty much wonderful. From Christopher Lee's creepy cameo as high ranking official in the Magisterium, Sam Elliott as Lee Scoresby the airman from Texas, to Donald Craig as Lyra's Uncle Lord Asriel everybody not only gave lovely performances, but looked like they were having a great time doing so. Even Nicole Kidman, who I've only liked in a very few roles before, seems to be having fun as the very scary Mrs. Coulter. It says a lot for the director that everybody's performance had that extra spark that only happens when an actor remembers what it is to make believe again.

As this was the two disc special edition version of the DVD, the second disc was all special features. While the technical features about how they shot the CGI sequences will probably be of interest to some, I've reached the point of, seen one blue/green screen seen them all. The parts I did enjoy were the interviews with both the author Philip Pullman and the director Chris Weitz. I'm always fascinated to listen to somebody discuss their process when it comes to creating, and it was interesting to see the two men talking about the same material from their respective perspectives of creator and adapter.

The Golden Compass is a wonderful movie, full of magic and adventure that will appeal to anyone whose imaginations were ever fired by the great children's literature that has come out of England. I can't speak to how the movie worked as an adaptation of the first book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, but I can say that this is a great piece of cinematic magic, and I am looking forward to its sequels. Now if I can only get my hands on the books I'll really be happy.

It wasn't unusual for a ruler to conscript people from across his land to spend their lives on these projects without giving any thought as to the affect it would have on the people left behind. In China alone it is thought that as many as three million people have died over the course of constructing and restoring the The Great Wall. There has actually been more then one "Great Wall" as the first was constructed under the China's first Emperor Qin Shi Huang circa 200 BC. This first wall was built along the Northern border of China and very little of it remains today.

As is its wont history recounts the fates of Empires without any mention of the individuals who might be caught up in the events described. What cares history for the plight of a silk worm farmer's wife whose husband is conscripted as slave labour to construct the Great Wall Of China? It's up to the story tellers to try and bring home to us how the sweep of history takes its toll on those caught up in its ebb and flow.

In Binu And The Great Wall, published by Random House Canada, author Su Tong has adapted a story that's been passed down from generation to generation for over two thousand years that tells the story of Binu, whose husband was taken away to work on the Great Wall. In his preface to the book, he tells us that the wonderful thing about myths are they take harsh realities and make them larger then life. This helps to cushion the impact of the experience while still allowing the author to impart its full meaning. (Binu And The Great Wall is one of a series of books retelling the myths of various cultures that have been commissioned from authors around the world by Random House)

In Mr. Tong's version of the story he has created a world that is larger than life where many fanciful things occur. Yet at the same time it is also firmly rooted in the reality of the time period and the situation of his main character Binu. It's his ability to skilfully interweave the mythical and the real that allows the character of Binu to become larger then life for the modern reader without turning her into a melodramatic cliché.

In Peach Village, where Binu was born, it is forbidden to cry and young women are trained from an early age how to avoid having tears appear on their faces. Some learn how to cry in through their ears, with the ears themselves providing an impressive reservoir within which to store their tears. Others are considered lucky because they can cry from their lips resulting in them having beautiful gleaming lips. But Binu never learned any of these means, as her mother died when she was still young. Although she had started to learn how to cry with her hair, she had no control over her tears and wept copiously.

As a result she was alienated from the rest of the village and nobody but the orphan Qiliang would have her in marriage. Yet they are happy together, so when he is torn from her side and taken away to work on the Great Wall on the other side of the Great Swallow Mountain she is devestated. If the people of Peach Village thought that Binu had cried before, they hadn't seen anything yet. It's when she has a vision of her beloved working without a shirt that she makes the fateful decision to set off to find him. She can't bear the thought of him facing winter without a proper coat and resolves that she will travel across the country to make certain he is warm.

Of course everyone thinks she is crazy. She sells everything they own in order to buy a coat and travel. 'You don't even know if he's alive' the other women of the village tell her. 'All of us have lost husbands, sons, or brothers and you don't see us selling everything we own to go off and make sure they have winter coats, do you?' But Binu won't be dissuaded, for without Qiliang she has no life, so what is the point of a life without him?

The world is determined to make her quest as difficult as possible though. When she goes to buy a horse or a donkey to ride to her destination she discovers that all the animals have been commandeered by the army for the war being fought. The only companion, man or beast, she can find for the journey is a blind frog who is the reincarnation of a blind woman who drowned searching for her son. So she sets out to travel the great distance nearly alone and almost immediately is beset with troubles.

Her precious bundle containing the winter coat for Qiliang and her few coins is stolen almost at once, she is sold into bondage to act the role of a thief's widow, and as she nears her destination she is arrested because she is suspected of being an assassin's accomplice. But in the end she does it make it to the Wall. According to the myth of Binu when she arrived at the wall and discovered her husband was dead her grief was so great and her tears so plentiful that the Great Wall broke and the dead awoke in honour of her sorrow.

Su Tong has written a wonderfully, magical and human story. In spite of the fact that Binu And The Great Wall is a tale replete with sorrow, it is an uplifting affirmation of the strength of the human spirit. There are times along the road where she decides to give up and to lay down and die, giving in to despair. Yet life won't let her give up that easily, and there is always something that keeps her going, even if it's only the desire to die with her husband and not alone.

We live in a world where millions of people are torn from their families on a regular basis by war, famine, disease, and economic realities. Refugee camps around the world are filled with families that have been ravaged by grief and the anguish of not knowing whether loved ones still live. Binu And The Great Wall may have first been told over two thousand years ago, but the story is still relevant today. With his retelling Su Tong gives us the means to try and begin to understand that reality. It is a beautiful and magical story cut with the sharp taste of reality; a perfect myth.

Readers in Canada can pick up a copy of Binu And The Great Wall either by ordering it directly from Random House Canada or an on line retailer like Amazon.ca

Drums, or some sort of percussion, is and has been part of every culture's musical language. When Native North Americans gather to play the large communal drum that is now associated with Pow Wow celebrations, they refer to the sound it generates as the heartbeat of the Mother - the sound of the source of all life. Perhaps, on some level or another, that explains all of our fascination with the sound of the drum, as it reminds us on an unconscious level of the first thing we ever hear - the sound of our mother's heartbeat while we are still in the womb.

From such humble beginnings people around the world have developed not only a variety of means to help them express their relationship to that rhythm, but an astounding number of patterns has evolved from that one basic beat. It sometimes seems that from that heartbeat each culture has developed a pattern that expresses something that is unique to them, while maintaining sufficient elements of universality that they are able to find common ground with other peoples.

In 1991, Mickey Hart, drummer from the Grateful Dead, fulfilled a dream by bringing together great drummers from around the world to create a record based entirely on percussion. The recording that resulted from this collaboration, Planet Drum, was so impressive that it was awarded the first ever Grammy in the World Music category. Seventeen years later, as part of their Mickey Hart collection, Shout Factory Records has re-issued Planet Drum so that a whole new generation of percussion enthusiasts can enjoy the fruits of their labour.

The recording was designed to be a companion for a book that Mr. Hart had written of the same name. The book, and the recording, were created with the intent of giving people an idea of the numerous ways that humans have devised to make rhythm, and the variety of sounds that are generated through those efforts. To that end he recruited musicians from a variety of cultures: Airto Moreira from Brazil brings the Latin beat of South America; Babatunde Olatunji and Sikiru Adepoju from Nigeria the distinctive sound of the West African drums; Zakir Hussain represented Northern India and T.H. 'Vikku' Vinayakram the sounds of Southern India.

These five, along with Mickey Hart and vocalist Flora Purim, went into the studio having no idea what they would come up with. After listening to the thirteen tracks that were the result of their sessions you'd never know that they had never played together before, and nobody had ever tried to bring together such a diverse mix of rhythmic backgrounds. Even more remarkable is the fact that instead of them first doing one song in one tradition, then the next in another, they drew upon a variety of inspirations to form the basis for each track.

The fourth song, "Dance Of The Hunter's Fire", is an example of building one culture on top of another, as its origins lie in Africa. While the two drummers from Africa play their interpretation of how that beat should sound, 'Vikku' from South India improvised around them in the style he would normally use for his music. The result was the creation of an interesting counterpoint for the central pattern, providing accents where there might not have been ones before, yet still sounding like they belong in exactly the places they are being played.

While they follow this pattern for some of the songs, starting with the sound of one culture and adding on to it, other songs are built around a means of creating sound. "Jewe" was created using the human body as the instrument. All five musicians created sounds by slapping on their own chest with cupped hands and singing at the same time. As each voice has a different pitch, and each person was "playing" themselves at a different speed, it was an interesting study in contrasts of sound, pitch, and rhythm.

On other songs the group took for their inspiration natural sounds to create the piece of music. The track "Mysterious Island" for instance had its origins in a recording of wave sounds that Mickey Hart made on the beaches of the island of Kona in Hawaii. On the other hand "Temple Caves" didn't use the actual sounds of caves, inspiration came from the knowledge that Paleolithic trance dancers used the naturally occurring sounds of the cave; the flapping of bat wings, dripping of water, and the echoes of their own foot steps, as the backdrop for their dances.

In both instances the musicians created a new "language" in order to try and recreate the sensations of the two different experiences. Instead of merely playing the rhythms and sounds of their own cultures they drew upon the ideas expressed by the other members of the ensemble and blended them with their own. As each musician did this, each of these songs became something unique in its own right.

Planet Drum is an amazing collaboration of cultures from around the world. Not only are there songs on the disc that feature distinct rhythmic traditions working in tandem to create wonderful mixtures of sounds and rhythms, there are songs where entirely new patterns are born. This disc is an amazing example of the wonders that can be created with sound and rhythm and is a joy to listen to.

T Bone Burnett has never been one to follow the herd in anything that he has done. Whether he's producing a Robert Plant and Allison Krauss collaboration, acting as musical advisor to movies like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain, or recording his own music, he's always marched to the beat of his own drum. Two years ago he released his first release in more then a decade, and The True False Identity was a collection of the exceptional lyrics and musical experimentation people had come to expect from the man who penned songs like "Hefner and Disney" back in the eighties.

Tooth Of Crime, on Nonesuch Records is not just an example of Burnett going places that other popular musicians would fear to tread, its also an indication of just how much he invests of himself into a project. Burnett first started work on the material included in this disc back in 1996 as part of a collaboration with noted American playwright - and sometime actor - Sam Shepard.

Shepard first wrote the play Tooth Of Crime back in 1972, and in 1996 he re-staged it with material that Burnett wrote for the actors to sing as part of the performance. The CD that's being released on May 13th 2008, isn't a cast album from the play though. Instead Burnett has taken the framework that the play offered and used it as the context for the songs included on this recording. Some of the songs are from that 1996 performance, while others are ones that Burnett started work on back then, but only now has had the time to complete to his satisfaction.

Although written back in the early seventies, the play's theme about the illusionary qualities of fame within the context of a culture where someone is designated a celebrity for who they are and not what they've done - think Paris Hilton - is still relevant today. However don't come to this CD looking for literal attacks on the cult of celebrity, Burnett is far more subtle than that. The music and the lyrics of each song combine to create almost abstract impressions expressing a mood or emotion that illustrates an aspect of the theme.

Musically the songs range everywhere from the twisted Rockabilly sound of the opening "Anything I Say Can And Will Be Used Against You" to a ballad like "Kill Zone". Each of the styles are deliberate choices on the part of Burnett as they generate the different moods and emotions that he wants us to realize accompany the rise and fall of today's instant celebrities. There's the greed and ambition of the person on the way to the top, the ruthlessness of those who are stars not wanting to surrender their position, and even the momentary doubts that they might have about the cost being paid to achieve their flickering fame.

Some of the songs defy definition in terms of popular music. "Telepresence" is a chilling combination of spoken word over a distant layer of muted, tortured, and distorted electric guitar sounds. Desolate and devoid of any human warmth it expresses the true emptiness that lies at the heart of trivial stardom. "It's the Jesus channel baby, make the metal scream, make the metal scream" Burnett intones, making sure we know that all those sacrifices that have been made for stardom haven't resulted in anything close to salvation.

As you can tell from those descriptions Tooth Of Crime is not an easy disc to listen to in terms of content. It presents a very bleak image of a society where people desire fame for the sake of fame. What's more it appears that those who achieve fame never get to enjoy it as they spend all of their time obsessing over how to hold on to it. Isolation seems to be the only reward for celebrity, as those around them are either potential usurpers of their position or only interested in them for what they are, not who they are as people.

Musically and lyrically it presents the listener with challenges that one doesn't normally associate with popular music. Even songs like "Sweet Lullaby", with it's gentle, country tinged, musical introduction, becomes unsettling with the addition of Burnett's vocal track. His voice has been treated so that it sounds like its being heard from a great distance and through an old radio speaker. The contrast between that and the warmth of the music adds an edge to an already emotionally ambivalent lyric, dashing the humanizing potential that the introduction implied.

While I am familiar with some of Sam Shepard's plays, Tooth Of Crime was not one that I knew anything about before listening to Burnett's CD. While a knowledge of the play would probably enhance the experience of listening to the recording - it would be interesting to know about the characters who sung the songs and the circumstances in the play that inspired them - the CD stands as a work of art in its own right.

There are not many composers of any genre who are as capable of creating music that rewards its listeners to the extent that T Bone Burnett does. Not only is he an innovative musician he is also an intelligent lyricist. On Tooth Of Crime he demonstrates just how gifted he is in both areas.

I remember the section that they used to have at Sam The Record Man's central location in Toronto Canada fitting that description. The store itself was a marvel, three stories high filled to bursting with records of every genre and description and the walls covered with autographed pictures of everyone from Alice Cooper to Luciano Pavarati. The folk music section for this store was up on the second floor, across the hall from the Jazz/Blues and Singer/ Songwriter sections (which is where you'd find the popular folk singers). I actually used to spend quite a bit of time up there, looking at the covers of the people from all over the world as you could find everything from the massed pipes of the 48th Highlanders to traditional music of South Africa lurking in those bins.

You have to remember the only exposure that most of us had had to music beyond the borders of Europe was the sitar music that George Harrison had incorporated into various Beatles songs or his own solo projects. The really adventurous had perhaps purchased the occasional album of Ravi Shankar's after his appearance at the Monteroy Pop Festival introduced him to the pop music crowd. Aside from that there wasn't anything like what we've come to take for granted today where musicians from a variety of cultures band together to explore sound and rhythm.
It wasn't until 1975 when Mickey Hart joined Zakir Hussain's Tal Vadya Rhythm Band that musicians from a variety of national backgrounds joined forces to combine influences and see what they came up with for the specific purpose of creating a recording. The band was renamed, Diga Rhythm Band after Mickey joined, and in 1976 and recorded their first album; five songs using a variety of percussion instruments ranging from tablas of India, dumbeks of the Middle East, talking drums of Africa, vibraphones, and a full trap set from the West.

What with Mickey Hart and the late Gerry Garcia contributing guitar on two tracks, you could be forgiven thinking that the recording would end up being dominated by Western sounds. It only takes listening to the first track to dispel that notion, as it's soon obvious that both Hart and Garcia have allowed themselves to be swept up by the music and aren't exerting any undue influence on the proceedings. The self titled album that was the result of this first collaboration, Diga Rhythm Band was the first in a series of five recordings that Mickey Hart made with various percussionists from around the world. Now Shout Factory has re-issued all of these recordings under the title of The Mickey Hart Collection with each title for sale individually.

On Diga Rhythm Band we hear the most amazing combinations of rhythms, as on each song the various instruments' sounds are layered to create textures of music that go beyond what you would normally expect to hear from what are primarily percussion instruments. Take for example the fifth song on the disc, "Tal Mala" which translates as "Garland Of Rhythms". If you think about what a garland of flowers is like, a circle of flowers that, depending on the length, can either be worn like a crown or draped over ones shoulders like a necklace, that has neither a beginning or an end. Now imagine a series of rhythms laid out along those lines.

Now multiply that into garlands of differing lengths for different instruments and imagine them interwoven around one central point so that they are being played in relationship to each other and individually. It's like a complicated dance where each dancer has their own specific steps they have to follow that also interact with the steps being performed by the other dancers. If you were to imagine that each dance, or rhythmic pattern, were like the rings in a circle, with those in the centre being the smallest and having to repeat most often, than you'll have a good idea of what happens with the music on this piece.

If I can stretch the analogy just a little more, picture the dancers all wearing different colours, and moving in their patterns within and around each other. Now think of those colours in terms of sound and you'll start to get an idea of how the sound on this piece works to create the effect it does.

While "Tal Mala" is probably the most ambitious of the five creations on Diga Rhythm Band, each of the other pieces has their own distinctive flavour that makes them exciting. On "Happiness Is Drumming" for instance, Gerry Garcia's unique guitar sound is incorporated into a rhythmic pattern that both compliments and accentuates his playing. While the song is by far the most Western sounding of any of the tracks - gradually the percussion seems to work its influence on the guitar until it begins to sound more like another percussion instrument than anything else.

Listening to this disc, thrity-two years after it was recorded, what is most amazing is how it doesn't sound the least bit dated. There is nothing on this recording to suggest it couldn't just as easily been made last year as 1976. Long before the term "World Music" entered into our lexicon of terms for music, Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussain, and the others involved in The Diga Rhythm Band had already discovered there was a great big world of music out there just waiting to be listened to by those willing to open their ears wide enough.

What most of these articles fail to mention is the cost that's being paid for these great economic miracles. In China the majority of the labour being supplied to fuel the motor of the economy is as close to salve labour as you can get and still be paid for your work. People work long hours for little pay. in conditions that would see plants in North America closed in a second. Of course these are merely technicalities, nothing for us to worry about; it's not like we live there.

India has become the call centre to the world it seems. Almost every time you phone a company for technical support these days, no matter what country you're calling from, you're more than likely to end up talking to someone in Mumbai or Bangalore. But call centres and a burgeoning IT class don't hide the inequities that still exist in Indian society or that huge numbers of people still live in poverty so abject that we wouldn't even begin to comprehend its depth.

The only place you're liable to read about the reality of life in India today is on the pages of one of the many books making their way out of India to the shelves of book stores in North America. Joining those ranks is The White Tiger by first time novelist Aravind Adiga published by Simon & Schuster and just recently released in North America. In his book Adiga not only peels back the gloss of the economic miracle to expose the rot beneath, he instructs us in the means by which a small minority of the population are able to subjugate the majority.

A white tiger is the rarest creature in the jungle, only coming along once in every generation. When Balram Halwai was still able to attend the excuse for a school in his village he was singled out by a school inspector as being the white tiger of his contemporaries for being able to read and write when nobody else could. The inspector promised that Balram would be given a scholarship to attend a proper school so that he could fulfill his potential. Unfortunately fate had other plans, and his family were forced to pull him out of school to help pay off their debt to their landlord.

We learn Balram's life story courtesy of letters he has taken upon himself to write the premier of China in order to educate him so that he won't be fooled by any of the false pictures the politicians he meets might paint about life in India when he comes for his official state visit. He decides that the best way for the premier to understand what life in India is like by telling him the story of his, Balram's, life.

The first lesson Balram has for us is the reality of rural life in India. In his small village everybody is beholden to one of four landlords. If you want to grow anything you have to pay money to one person, it you want to graze animals you have to pay money to another, if you want to use the roads to make money as a rickshaw driver you pay 10% of everything you earn to a third, and finally the fourth one owns the waters so if you wanted to fish or use the water to transport goods you pay him.

It's after Balram's family is forced to borrow money from one of the landlords to pay for a cousin's dowry that he has to leave school and start working in teahouses. But Balram is destined for greater things, and his grandmother comes up with 600 rupees so that he may learn to drive and get a job driving for a wealthy man. Through blind luck he happens to show up at his landlord's compound on the day the youngest son has returned from America and needs his own driver, and begins his long climb out of the darkness of poverty.

Of course he's not just a driver, it turns out he's expected to cook, clean, and do whatever else his new master needs him to do. When his master moves to New Delhi, Balram moves with him and drives him around the capital as he greases the palms of all the various political fixers and parliamentarians that need greasing in order to ensure the family business survives. A hundred thousand rupees here, two hundred thousand there, and Balram sits in the front seat seeing nothing, but witnessing it all.

At one point he asks the premier why he thinks and Balram and the rest of the servants are so loyal to their masters. Why don't they demand a cut or threaten them with the police, or at the very least stand up to the masters who they out number by at least a thousand to one? Balram calls it the Rooster Coop syndrome. In the markets in New Delhi hens and roosters are stuffed into wire cages where they spend their days pecking and shitting on each other fighting just to breathe. According to Balram it's the same for the poor of India, they are so busy fighting among each other for the chance to breathe that they will never be able to escape their cages.

Of course the threat of violence against their families if they misbehave is a factor as well. Balram recounts how a servant of one of the landlords in his home village did something wrong, and the landlord had his entire family killed in retaliation. Balram says it would take a unique individual, a White Tiger even, to be depraved enough to risk the lives of his entire family to steal the seven hundred thousand rupees his employer is carrying in a red leather bag to bribe a politician.

In The White Tiger we watch Balram suffer humiliation after humiliation and be expected to take it. His employer's wife gets drunk one night and forces Balram to let her drive and she kills a child. They make him sign a confession saying he was driving just in case the police decide to press charges against. It's just taken as matter of course that as their servant he would only be too glad to go to jail for them, after all you can't really expect them to go to jail now can you?

Balram's letter to the premier of China is like the confession of a Catholic penitent to his priest, save for one detail. He's not seeking absolution for any crimes that he has committed, he's just using himself as an example to let the premier know the facts of life in modern day India. Bribery and corruption are what grease the wheels of the great economic miracle of India, wheels that are still being turned by slave labour. Underneath the statues of Gandhi, behind the pictures of the beautiful temples, is corruption so ingrained that it's taken for granted as being the way things are and always will be.

The picture Aravind Adiga paints of India in The White Tiger is of a nearly feudal society in the guise of a democracy. If even a tenth of what Balram describes as normal operating business is actual, and there is no reason to believe otherwise, than India's economic miracle is as much a lie as China's. The country might have gained its independence from the British at the end of the 1940's but the majority of people in India are still trapped in servitude.

In the end what makes the events in the book so believable is the character of Balram. He is the perfect servant. He worries whether his master is eating enough, takes pride in him when he behaves honourably, and is disappointed with him when he is weak. For all his protestations about the system, he is still as much a part of it as anybody else and it takes an enormous amount of strength and luck for him to live up to his name of white tiger.

When he does he shows that he's learned his lessons well and knows how to grease the wheels with the best of them. He's not some reformer advocating change, although he dreams of opening a school where children get a real education so they too can be white tigers. There's no room for mercy in the jungle that is Balram's India, and the more tigers he has on his side the better.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga can be purchased either directly from Simon & Schuster or from an online retailer like Indigo Books

Ever since I read my first Howard Engel detective story featuring his character Benny Cooperman from the fictional small town of Grantham, Ontario, Canada, if I imagined him looking like anyone at all it was Saul Rubinek. It turns out I wasn't alone in that as Rubinek played Benny both times he was brought to life on celluloid by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in television adaptations of two of Engel's books. Small, sort of round, rumpled, and obviously Jewish, neither Rubinek or by extension Benny are what one would call hard boiled.

So what is the opposite of the hard boiled detective - soft boiled? It just doesn't have the same ring to it as hard boiled does it? Yet what do you call a guy whose mother keeps wondering why he can't be more like his older brother the successful surgeon who lives in Toronto, and whose father was in the ready to wear business for fifty years before retiring to become the gin rummy champ at the club? Instead of whisky for breakfast at some down at the heels bar in a grimy part of the city, Benny lives for egg salad sandwiches and a glass of milk.

The other thing about Benny is that if he gets hit, either in the head or the heart, it hurts, and in his newest adventure, East Of Suez, being published by Penguin Canada on May 8th/08, he's still recovering from a serious bang on the head that's left his memory scrambled and his reading ability reduced to spelling words out letter by letter. After months of rehabilitation Benny has finally returned to his office in Grantham in order to close down his Private Investigation business. He figures that there's not much good he can do for clients if he's no longer able to remember their names or the particulars of their case the second after they tell him.

(In 2001 Howard Engel suffered a stroke that left him with a rare condition called alexia without agraphia, which scrambled his memory and left him unable to read but still able to write. He had to learn how to read all over again and come up with methods compensating for not being able to remember a person's name the second after he heard it. Since the stroke not only has he written an account of his recovery, The Man Who Forgot How To Read, this is the second Cooperman novel he's written with his hero having to cope with a similar condition)

But the best laid plans of mice, men, and private investigators never seem to work out the way they're supposed to. When an old school friend shows up in the office one day while Benny is trying to spell his way word by word through old case files, she convinces him to pick up stakes and head off to South East Asia and investigate the disappearance of her husband in the small country of Murinam.

Vicky and her husband Jake had been running a successful diving business for the tourist trade, when the government decided they wanted more than just the taxes the couple were paying, and nationalized the company. When the local politico who took it over ran it into the ground, he hired Jake back to run it and set him up to take the fall for the place's mismanagement. Benny's job is to see if he can find out what happened to Jake, recover any of the family's fortunes, and of course come out the other side alive.

Murinam still holds onto more then a few mementoes of it's French past, and is also marked by the more recent disaster of the tsunami. Fading and crumbling French colonial architecture mix with wrecks of ships cast up on shore three hundred metres from the beach, and a community of European and North American ex-patriots that seem to have stepped from the pages of a Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham novel. Acclimatizing is complicated for Benny by his inability to remember the name of his hotel or the names of anyone he meets even with the use of his memory book. (a note book to write down everything he's come to know his memory will fail to retain)

Yet in spite of being slowed down by the quirks of his brain and his bout of the local version of "Tourista" stomach, Benny soon finds himself ankle deep in suspects and intrigue. When dead bodies start showing up, and the police and government start taking a little too bit much of an unhealthy interest in his nosing around, Benny knows he must be getting somewhere. Now if only he could remember what it was he said or who he saw that could have triggered those reactions

With East Of Suez Howard Engel has created another wonderful story featuring the self-deprecating and intelligent Benny Cooperman. We can't help but admire Benny as he muddles through his days, vainly trying to remember the name for the local three wheeled taxis, while gradually chipping away at the mystery that surrounds the disappearance of his client's husband. The sounds, sights, and smells of Murinam's capital city. Takot, come to life vividly on the page as he wanders its streets, sampling the food and chatting to any and everyone who might help him crack the case.

All of the characters Benny meets, from the pretty marine biologist, the Catholic priest running the orphanage, and the writer who specializes in travel books for the Kosher trade interested in exotic locales, are potential players in his little drama and wonderful colour for the reader. Of course any one of them could also be a cold blooded killer, and as the bodies start to pile up Benny has to hope that he can read his own writing quickly enough to prevent himself from joining the body count.

Don't come to the pages of a Benny Cooperman novel looking for a hard drinking, hard talking guy packing heat. The only heat Benny might carry would be pocket warmers for a stake out in the middle of a cold Ontario winter. Of course in East Of Suez he won't need to worry about his hands getting cold from the chill of winter - in fact he might just start finding it a little too hot for comfort.

East Of Suez by Howard Engel goes on sale May 8th 2008 and can be purchased either directly from Penguin Canada or other on line retailer like Indigo Books

In Canada, as in other areas of North America, after the government was unable to commit actual genocide against the Native population they decided to settle on the next best thing and try for cultural genocide. Towards that end they enlisted the aid of both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in establishing the Residential School system. A generations of Native Canadian children were taken from their families and placed in this school system in order to drive the "Indianness" out of them.

To that end they had their identities stripped from them through changing their names, forbidding them to speak their languages and practice their religions, and teaching them that the ways of their parents were evil. They were forced to speak in either only English or French, depending on what part of Canada the school was in, and given training in the most menial of professions. The girls were put to work in the school kitchens and laundries so they could learn how to scullery maids and the boys were put to work as janitorial staff and given basic training in how to be unskilled labour.

Aside from having to cope with the terror of being away from home and family, they were also subjected to physical and emotional abuse as punishment for attempting to use their own language or attempting to follow their traditions. On top of that large numbers of both the boys and the girls were sexually abused on a regular basis by the staff of the facilities. As a result of the residential schools - the last one was closed in the 1970s - generations of Native Canadiens found themselves unable to fit in either the White world or the world of their parents.

The colour of their skin named them as second class citizens within society at large, and they didn't have the skills sufficient to find steady employment. On the other hand they no longer had the traditions of their own people to turn to for solace, and they couldn't even talk to their parents anymore as they no longer spoke the same language. With their identities stripped away, suffering the effects of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse, and having no means to earn a living, is it any wonder that they and subsequent generations should feel as if they have no future?

When the African National Congress became the first majority rule government in South Africa's history one of the first things they established was a Truth and Reconciliation Committee whose mandate was to travel around the country hearing from people about their experiences under apartheid. Headed by Bishop Desmond Tutu, their mission wasn't simply about apportioning blame, but to try and find a way out of the hate of the past by facing up to the the truth and accepting it. You can't undo the past, but you can come to terms with it so it no longer controls you. The Canadian government hopes that under the guidance of Native Canadian judge, Harry LaForme, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Committee, will be able to begin that process in Canada.

Although slavery was outlawed in the United States with the defeat of the Southern states in their Civil War, segregation of Black and White exists to this day. Up until the 1960's it was common to see signs in restaurants, swimming pools, and public washrooms forbidding service to people of colour. In the 1970's white communities were still protesting the forced integration of their schools. Although circumstances have obviously improved, there is still a sizeable economic and social gap between the two races.

While Barack Obama claims to be running for President of the United States because he says he was convinced that people no longer wanted to be divided by race, religion or what region of the country they live in, he doesn't have to look any further than the pastor of his own church to see that sharp divisions still exist between black and white. Rev. Jeremiah Wright has given speeches damning the Untied States for it's history of racism and accusing the American government of using AIDS as a weapon against the Black community.

Memories of Hurricane Katrina and tens of thousands of poor Black people seemingly abandoned by their government as they were dying of starvation and dehydration in the Super Dome are still fresh in plenty of people's minds. When that's combined with the continual foot dragging by all levels of government when it's come to rebuilding the homes that these same people lost when the waters flooded the Ninth Ward, and the obscenely quick way in which residences were bulldozed after the waters retreated before there was chance to see if they could be salvaged, you can see why even people more moderate than Wright might be having trust issues.

America has a tendency to look at the past through rose coloured glasses and gloss over the negative. Why do White police officers still stop Black men driving expensive cars more often than they stop White men driving the same cars? Why is the American prison population predominately Black? Why do more Black people live in poverty and have less access to health insurance and education than White people? The answers to those questions can only be found if you are willing to look the past directly in the eye and accept it and its consequences.

Saying that people don't want to be separated by the divide of race any more is all very well and good, but they are empty words when the reality is that people are divided by race and nothing is being done to rectify it. There are very real fears on both sides of this divide that can't just be glossed over by cheery words and optimism. You can't just wish away history or whisk it under the rug as if it never happened.

For the next five years Justice Harry LaForme will be travelling across Canada and examining over a hundred years of Canadian history in the hopes of finding a way to resolve the anger and recriminations that exist on both sides of the issue when it comes to the history of the Residential Schools in Canada. It's not going to be an easy task for many reasons, and it will open a lot of old wounds that some people might have preferred left alone. But when there is still rot in a wound the only way to prevent it from festering is to air it out.

You might want to think about giving Justice LaForme a call one of these days Mr, Obama and find out what kind of work it takes to bridge these divides of yours. America might be ready for you as a President, but are you ready for America's history?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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