#70: 13 years clean and sober

I’ve been clean and sober for 13 years. I haven’t had an alcoholic beverage or unprescribed drug since October 23, 2007. Other than writing something here every year, I don’t mark this anniversary in any way. It’s not a celebration for me, and not something that should be congratulated inside or outside the 12 step recovery rooms. It’s just an arbitrary accumulation of days, 4750 with leap years I think. But I do take it as a moment to share my experience in case it might be helpful to a still suffering alcoholic/addict, or someone close to them.

One of the things one hears in recovery is that it’s a one day at a time program. When I began getting sober - either 6 or 7 months before I finally quit, or 24 years before that, depending on how you count - if someone said that I wouldn’t be able to drink or drug for the next 4750 days (13 years/52 months, 676 weeks) it would have seemed unfathomable, and probably not worth trying. After all, that’s basically how I felt for most of the time that I was out there. There is a meditation that is frequently used in some recovery rooms, that articulates this wonderfully: “JUST FOR TODAY I will try to live through this day only, and not tackle all my problems at once. I can do something for 12 hours that would appall me if I felt that I had to keep it up for a lifetime.” This is wisdom that I was taught, that I try to apply to everything in my life. Being human, I frequently forget it and find myself getting too invested in outcomes, and trying to play god. I don’t believe in god, but sometimes I believe I am god.

No one could have convinced me back in 2007 that I would find myself not fighting alcohol and drugs. But today I’m not fighting them, nor have I even “sworn off of them”. “The problem has been removed. It does not exist for us. We are neither cocky nor are we afraid. That is our experience. That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.” (big book of AA).

I don’t want to drink. I’m not jealous of other people who drink. I don’t fantasize about drugs, and how they might solve my problems today. I’m not nostalgic for the “good times” that I had drinking or getting high in my past. And, yet, today I have all sorts of problems that are only manageable one day at a time. Psychiatric, neurological, and physical problems. Work problems. And many of the other problems that people have. I don’t ever, except for fleeting moments, imagine that I can take away, manage or even just say “fuck it” to any of those problems by drinking or drugging. The tricky phrase in there is “except for fleeting moments”. It only takes a “fleeting moment” to guzzle a drink, pop a few pills, or take a toke. I’ve heard of that happening, and I’ve seen people quickly go from clean and sober, to relapsing, and to dying shortly after (overdose, suicide, cirrhosis, hepatitis, etc.)

The challenge is to stay in “fit spiritual condition”. That means a lot of different things to people. For me it means avoiding behaviours that I will regret. It means avoiding self-centredness and resentment. It means living in acceptance, not denial. I don’t always succeed, of course, but it’s the path I’m on thanks to the example set by other recovering alcoholics and addicts, and thanks to how they have helped me directly and indirectly.

William Cope Moyers put it this way in his book Broken: “But what really matters is what's under the hood, and without continued attention to routine maintenance and repairs, it isn't long before the same old engine spoils the new ride.”

Most people don’t recover from drug and alcohol addiction. For many (most) of us who do, it turns out that a very simple program is what saves the day, and allows us to transform our lives. It mainly involves meeting and hanging out with other alcoholics and addicts on a regular basis. There are some suggested steps as well that involve acceptance, honesty, personal inventory, making amends, living a spiritual life (whatever that means) and service to others. That has all played an important role in my life, but I continue to think that connecting with others is what saved me and what continues to save me. It’s simple, but most people in active addiction won’t do it. No matter how shitty my life had become when I was drinking, I just didn’t want to quit. Drinking was the only way I could manage the consequences of my drinking, making matters worse and necessitating more drinking, and down the spiral I went. If I could imagine a way out it was switching to a life of opioids and benzodiazepines.

For some reason I hit bottom, as they say, but it wasn’t some a-ha moment after some unthinkable act. I ended up in detoxes, daytoxes and a rehab (Homewood), I had problems at work and problems at home. I didn’t know what day it was and I didn’t know true from false. I was manic and I was depressed. I hated myself. In all of that, my family supported me (eventually with “loving detachment”), as did my closest friends. Gradually, I hit bottom. I guess that day was October 23, 2007, which for some reason that feels like a bit of a miracle, I just stopped relapsing. I was no longer in denial. Thanks to the people in my recovery circles, I’m alive today, clean and sober, and occasionally even serene.

Have a good day.

(Facebook post with comments: https://www.facebook.com/jimshedden/posts/10158879211387152?comment_id=10158880303197152&notif_id=1603499468250723&notif_t=feed_comment&ref=notif)

#69: Melancholia

Let’s start with this picture. I often talk about autumn light: “I am attracted to this light the way I'm attracted to that melancholic state just before depression, that feeling of reflective calm that isn't quite happiness, but is a stillness. It's precarious of course: which is why I associate this time of year (in the past) with falling in love and horrible breakups, creative exuberance and self-absorbed intoxication.” (http://www.jimshedden.com/500-people-places-and-things-that-define-jim-shedden/2018/10/2/23-autumn-light)

The light today has some of the qualities of autumn light, but it isn’t quite that. It’s not sharp enough. It’s nice and windy, and there’s a warm breeze, but I’m not quite experiencing the stillness, the push-pull of melancholy and reflective calm. It’s something like that though. Perhaps it’s just a weird weekend coming at the end of a very weird six months. The light is cooperating, though, making it impossible to feel entirely sad or depressed, but those feelings are present, in a bit of a dialogue with bliss.

The picture was taken in my mother-in-law’s condo in Waterloo, where I am for my first time since COVID19 measures were announced, and the first time since my father-in-law Dave passed away. That was in May of this year, and we are just now burying him, and celebrating his life. We all say “celebration of life” now, but isn’t that better than all that dour mourning which, at many of the funerals I attended over the years, consisted of a lot of shoe gazing during painful sermons, followed by awkward sorry-for-your-loss encounters with the survivor, and then a few rounds of Wonder Bread sandwiches. Bring on the celebrations of life.

Still, I remember enough of reading Freud (I was under his spell throughout the 80s), to recall Mourning and Melancholia, where he argued that these are two similar but ultimately very different responses to loss. Mourning is considered healthy because it takes place in the conscious mind, whereas melancholia is where we delegate the process to the unconscious mind, where it tends to fester and mutate into various toxic behaviours.

That was Freud. Today I associate my melancholia with my quite conscious awareness that this weekend Meredith goes back to Oakville, where she will form a new bubble with a small group of Sheridan musical theatre students, and who knows when I’ll see her next? It also means her new cat, Bob Fosse (still a kitten really), will move out of our lives for some time. Christmas? The successful dissemination of a vaccine? Anyhow, I am melancholic, not mournful, because I don’t really know what I am feeling, mixed as it is with optimism and excitement about the year ahead for her, despite being, really, the weirdest and most frustrating year possible for anyone who has committed their lives to the performing arts.

I am melancholic. Is that even the word? Is it gloomy? Lugubrious? Doleful? No, I think it has to have the suggestion of reflection, and of possible insights. That’s my twisted idea of the word, of course, because technically speaking, melancholia is pathological. I will continue to say that I am melancholic.

It is the light, the shortening of days, the wind (warm, but getting cooler), and the changes ahead for everyone. Did I Iook forward to school? For the most part, no. When I was younger, I got horrible knots in my stomach, wondering who was going to bully me that year, and wondering why that girl that I had a crush on wasn’t assigned to my class, and wondering how the hell I was going to survive phys. ed., it always, without fail, resembling the gym class in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life without any of the humour. I still get knots in my stomach that remind me of being bullied, and remind me of gym class (frequently one and the same of thing), the bad years of boy scouts (there were good years), when it was just “gym class by other means”.

Once we were past all that, I would be lifted from my despondent state by whatever we were reading in English, and whatever we were studying in History. Everything else was hit and miss, even music, which I loved but I just wasn’t a very good musician, so there were many moments of guilt, remorse and shame, and all that got pushed underground to the terrain of melancholia. French, hit or miss (I liked when we read Paul Verlaine). Mass Media, an optional course taught, but which I loved because I got to make super-8 films, work with a Sony Portapak, and write a big essay on Bruce Springsteen, “the saviour of rock ’n roll” (1979!). Geography should have been great, but was not. Shop class was torture, aside from a few rare moments of zen bliss in Drafting, but the rest was fear and intimidation.

I actually have some pretty positive memories from high school, mainly because of some friends I made that, thanks to various internet technologies, are friends again and I’m reminded that I was lucky to connect with that small cluster of people that helped me deal with the other 2800 people, and with my general sense that I was a loser one day, a superior being the next day, but most importantly that they we were all freaks and geeks, punks and mods, tragically hip all the way.

I have tended to fall in love this time of year, whatever “falling in love” means. I find it hard to remember the specific feelings I felt for this person or that, just a memory of the the fear that gripped me, the nausea, the excitement, the disappointment, and knowing that each unrequited love state, and each breakup, and each breakup after the breakup, was the end of the world. I can’t understand how life goes on the way it does. Why does my heart go on beating? Why do these eyes of mine cry?

That time, those high school years were also defined by my part-time jobs and some great people I met there. And, just as I fell in love more times than is useful back in high school, I also fell in love a lot at Mother’s Pizza Parlour and Spaghetti House, and Town and Country Buffet Restaurant. Same mix of unrequited love and awkward, painful breakups followed by reconciliation and not with a bang but a whimper breakups. I fall in love too easily. I fall in love too fast. I fall in love too terribly hard, for love to ever last.

(Actually, I fell in love with Shellie in the autumn of 1993, or maybe it was earlier, but I was certainly going through a bit of melancholia for a while there, but then we were too busy having a good time living life to notice.)

People who know me know that I have a number of challenges, and that the major ones have something to do with this unhelpful amount of reflective lowness. I am an alcoholic/addict (same thing to me) in recovery, clean and sober for almost 13 years. There are moments in one’s recovery where joy and ecstasy are clear and present but most people I know in recovery, still have this edge, a bit of negativity maybe, cynicism but a well-behaved variety. Anyhow, I certainly have it. I don’t have the desire to drink or use drugs, but I haven’t entirely replaced the role that they used to play in my life. I don’t enjoy being around people who are drinking or high, even though I went a number of years where that didn’t bother me. Finally, my recovery was interrupted by this whole covid19 etc. time. We have meetings on Zoom, and that’s really helpful, but I’ve lost the more subtle human to human connection that helped keep me sober all those years. All of this is making me sad and tired.

I am also manic-depressive (technically “bipolar II”, but I liked the descriptive language we used to use). I am increasingly aware that my primary treatment for this, the venerable lithium carbonate, which pushes my moods into a narrow bandwidth that is usually not manic, for which I am so grateful. I get glimpses of my past behaviour from time to time, small shadows of the out of control brain activity that wanted to kill me. Lithium also helps me from falling too far into the depressive abyss, but I find it less effective on that score. I seem to have two primary emotions: flatness and detachment, and then melancholy. I don’t feel that any of these feelings are dangerous, but there are moments when I wish I could experience the exuberance, the exhilaration, the manic energy that used to be define me. That thought is dangerous. That’s why people like me stop taking their medications, or switch lithium out for Adderall or cocaine, and then end up committing suicide. So I’ll stick with the program.

On the other hand, what is most debilitating right now is a chronic neurological condition that possesses my body, especially at night, totally fucking me up and sometimes flipping me into a bit of a manic state. Not one that has caused me to be delirious or anything, but not happy either. I guess this doesn’t cause me to be melancholic but it definitely hijacks any serenity I have.

Back in high school I read a lot. I loved books with a melancholic tone, at least what I perceived then to be a melancholic tone. I’d have to re-read them, because I find that every book I go back to seems totally different. But I loved Camus, Hesse, DH Lawrence, Margaret Laurence, Dostoevsky, Hamlet, King Lear, and on it goes. I also got into poetry, and that led me to a lot of great places but, once again, I loved the dark, brooding Keats (But when the melancholy fit shall fall/Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud/That fosters the droop-headed flowers all…), the French Symbolists, the Beats, Jim Carroll, Patti Smith (of course).

But music mattered the most and still matters. I find with music I am permitted to return to previous melancholic states, often getting in and out of them in three minutes. When I am in my flat, unemotional state, music reignites my emotional side, sometimes giving me a little blast of exuberance, and sometimes allowing me to feel with, and deal with, any melancholia I’m experiencing.

I repeat: I know that I am perhaps using the term melancholia wrong. What does this sound like?

All Tomorrow’s Parties - Velvet Underground

Pale Blue Eyes - Velvet Underground

You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go - Dylan (but I also like the Miley Cyrus version)

I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You - Tom Waits

Happiness is a Warm Gun - The Beatles

Atlantic City - Bruce Springsteen

When We Were Young - Adele

If We Only Have Love - Jacques Brel (Mort Shuman version)

The Amorous Humphrey Plugg - Scott Walker

Back to Black - Amy Winehouse

Love in Vain - Robert Johnson (Rolling Stones version)

Memory Hotel - Rolling Stones

No Woman, No Cry - Bob Marley

I Believe - Buzzcocks

Alison - Elvis Costello

Redemption Song - Bob Marley/Joe Strummer/Johnny Cash

Sunday - Stephen Sondheim

Summertime Sadness - Lana del Rey

Take this Waltz - Leonard Cohen

Misty Blue - Dorothy Moore

Kind of Blue - Miles Davis

The Ballad of Lucy Jordan - Marianne Faithfull

Blue Bayou - Roy Orbison/Linda Ronstadt

Suicide is Painless - M*A*S*H soundtrack

Windmills of Your Mind - Noel Harrison (Michel Legrand, composer)

#68: The Death of the Bookstore

All things must pass.

Nothing has affected my life as the emergence of the Web. My work, family, intellectual, creative, and recreational, lives were all completely transformed. How I work, read, listen to music, watch movies, connect with friends, shop, cook, and repair things, are completely different today.

Inevitably, the Web has wreaked havoc on many of our existing institutions. For example, the book's place in our culture, and therefore, the viability of the bookstore, have been undermined.  

I don't take this lightly and I don't celebrate it. I have always been a bookworm, and have almost always earned my living through some aspect of book culture.

When I was a kid I used to go downtown with my mother. She would head to Spadina to buy fabrics and I would head to the comic book stores, and then we’d rendez-vous at a tiny little diner called the Lite Bite. To a kid from Scarborough this urbane diversity was a revelation. That there seemed to be a special place designed just for me – the comic book store - was an even bigger revelation.

The comic stores were a gateway drug to bookstores. Over the years, I’ve fallen in love with many of them, and I’ve had a repeat of that “this was especially made for me” experience. I found myself spending hours, sometimes entire days, at Pages, This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, CineBooks, Letters, the Village Book Store, and many others. The World’s Biggest Bookstore, Chapters, and Indigo belong on the list, too.

I lament the passing of books, but I lament the passing of the bookstore even more. The love I have for printed books is now shared with various means of reading, writing and producing in an online world, but the social and urban function of the bookstore hasn’t been replaced by anything yet, unless I just can’t see it.

I realize there are still a handful of great bookstores. I don’t think the trend is going to reverse itself, however.

I’m not recommending that anything should be done: special days to try to convince people to shop in droves, interventions by government bodies, or block grants from the Canada Council.

Looking back, this day was almost inevitable the moment Tim Berners-Lee posted the first web page. I wouldn’t give all that up to save the bookstore as used to know it. I am sad to see it go, however, and remain optimistic that some new phenomenon capable of as much as culture-inspiring and city-building will eventually emerge from the ashes.

#67: Blair Dickey/Sven Blues

I promise to write the whole story later, from Mother’s Pizza to Wouldstalk, and with David Curtis, John Korhammer, Mike Duckworth, et al. One day.

#66: I am sleepwalking.

I am sleepwalking. I am sleepwalking but I feel the need to take stock, to do Interim report at just over 5 months pseudo-quarantined during this very real pandemic, during which we also saw the mainstreaming of Black Lives Matter, a decentralized movement fighting for sustainable transformation - Freedom, Liberation and Justice - in our world. In both cases, there is evidence that perhaps we can think and act locally and globally. And yet, there is ample evidence that democracy is in retreat (U.S., Russia, China, Hungary, Libya, etc.). All of this is happening, but I am sleepwalking.

The soundtrack to my sleepwalking might be “Summertime Sadness” by Lana del Rey (https://open.spotify.com/track/2dBwB667LHQkLhdYlwLUZK…), but here’s the thing about music. For me, it’s the one thing that can consistently lift me from depression, sadness or just being down in the dumps. Even, or especially a sad song. A sad song when I’m sad. A happy 3 minute pop song takes me from sluggish to motivated. Beethoven’s 9th gives me purpose. Einstein on the Beach gives me great hope for humanity and the creative process. Other art forms can have an effect on my mood, but none as consistently as music. I’ve tested this out about a billion times over the past half-century.

I am benumbed. I am on psychiatric wonder drugs (primarily lithium carbonate) that keep me alive by eliminating the highs (mania) and the lows (depression) of my brain activity, but primarily the highs that would otherwise drive me to the brink, and be a menace to society. On a good day, that means I am chill: motivated but not fast and furious; happy enough, but not exuberant. I love people but sometimes I can’t connect, and I am somewhat indifferent. Flattened out. Like there’s a gauzy layer between me and the world. There are other strange side effects like a vastly slowed-down metabolism, and tremors in my hands. It feels like “Sorrow” (The National) sounds: https://open.spotify.com/track/5UXW4T4W80gThrchHR1Mgt…

Intellectually, I get it. The cycling mood states of yesteryear in combination with my alcoholism were done. It was Change or Die. So I’m basically happy with this state I live in, but I do sometimes wish I could occasionally be as passionate and spontaneous as I used to be. On the other hand, my current condition means that I’m indifferent to my indifference. And how do I know that what I took to be passion wasn’t just mania?

It’s funny that I have tears and fears, because this song seems perfect: https://open.spotify.com/track/0Qv7xi6uPSqH2k82tOkGSt…

I think sleepwalking is an apt metaphor. I’m functioning, productive, happy enough, sometimes even focussed, but it’s all happening within this sleepwalking state.

I have a whole other thing, a neurological disorder that is hard to describe briefly and, really, I don’t want to make this a catalogue of my symptoms. It’s an ongoing matter, however, and I have been treated for a number of years, but the treatment started to backfire. I tremble and I shake and I go insane. I can’t sleep and I need to sleep. It triggers mania sometimes, and I can’t afford for that to happen. I’m a basket case: https://open.spotify.com/track/6L89mwZXSOwYl76YXfX13s….

My mind and my body are already weird enough without the added weirdness of isolation, boarded up shops and restaurants, signage, masks, rules, and regulations, and uncertainty. Financial uncertainty. Employment uncertainty. The Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” comes to mind (https://open.spotify.com/track/1H5N26VqHR4JhuaRKY2I0u…).

I kind of like working at home, but that’s partly because I get to isolate, even if I have to pseudo-connect over Zoom. I can read, watch films, listen to music and podcasts, write, do all of my work, and even eat and drink, all from the (sick) comfort of one room. Isolation really does sound like Joy Division’s “Isolation” (https://open.spotify.com/track/1UWbBFaZNksb3AmgldkprR…) Something people don't always understand about mental health, is that some of us at least some of the time, like being in those depressive states (and of course manic states as well). We are comfortable in what appear to be uncomfortable states. I know that I am like this with depression. It can be a warm blanket, a way of shutting out everything but that crappy warm blanket. Alcoholism and drug addiction are like this too, but they are a bit more understandable given the whole oblivion factor.

I am stressed. It sounds like this “Girl Anachronism” by The Dresden Dolls: https://open.spotify.com/track/6Zbv79YWB0iZSXwIwEsIOP….

I am sad. I am lonely. I am fidgety. I am out of shape. I can’t sleep. I can’t get anything done. I am out of place. I can’t really describe this, so I can’t get help because maybe it doesn’t exist. I hate my meds. I’m in a daze. I am just old enough not to be young. I am boring. I eat too much. It’s a mad world, but after all, I sometimes find it beautiful, exquisite, irresistible. And I am not alone. Cue REM’s “Everybody Hurts”, https://open.spotify.com/track/6PypGyiu0Y2lCDBN1XZEnP….

#65 #COVID19cinephilia

100 deliberately chosen, but still somewhat random, films to rekindle my film romance, some of them films I’ve never seen, some I haven’t seen for 30 or 40 years, mostly chosen by me, but some great choices by Shellie and Meredith too.

1. The Beguiled (Sofia Coppola) 

2. Les demoiselles de Rochefort (Jacques Demy) 

3. Shoot the Piano Player (Francois Truffaut) 

4. Two Weeks in Another Town (Vincente Minnelli) 

5. Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson) 

6. Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh) 

7. Daisies (Vera Chytlova) 

8. Welcome to L.A. (Alan Rudolph) 

9. Speaking Directly (Jon Jost) 

10. Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (Federico Fellini) 

11. Pas de deux (Norman McLaren) 

12. Black Panthers (Agnes Varda) 

13. Glenn Gould Off the Record/Glenn Gould On the Record (Roman Kroitor and Wolfgang Koenig) 

14. Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins) 

15. Brian Eno: 1971-1977 - The Man Who Fell to Earth (Ed Haynes) 

16. A Master Builder (Jonathan Demme) 

17. Jesus Christ Superstar (Norman Jewison) 

18. Smithereens (Susan Seidelman) 

19. Maidstone (Norman Mailer) 

20. Boy Howdy: The Story of CREEM Magazine (Scott Crawford) 

21. Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold) 

22. The Harder They Come (Perry Menzell) 

23. David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride) 

24. Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders) 

25. Wanda (Barbara Loden) 

26. One from the Heart (Francis Coppola) 

27. Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann) 

28. The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir (Mike Fleiss)

29. Eno (Alfons Sinniger) 

30. Filmworker (Tony Zierra) 

31. Inside Out (Pete Docter)

32. Lenny (Bob Fosse) 

33. Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff) 

34. Festival (Murray Lerner) 

35. Magnificent Obsession (Douglas SIrk) 

36 Les parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy) 

37. Camera Buff, Krzysztof Kieślowski

38. Pal Joey (George Sidney) 

39. True Stories (David Byrne) 

40. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling) 

41. The Fireman’s Ball (Milos Forman) 

42. Streamers (Robert Altman) 

43. The Centre Will Not Hold (Gregory Dunne) 

44. While We’re Gone (Noah Baumbach) 

45. This is 40 (Judd Apatow) 

46. Smoke (Wayne Wang) 

47. High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh) 

48. Le samouraï (Jean-Pierre Melville) 

49. Un flic (Jean-Pierre Melville) 

50. The Big Country (William Wyler)

51. The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer) 

52. The Color of Pomegranates (Sergei Paradjanov) 

53. Secret Honor (Robert Altman) 

54. 20 Feet from Stardom 

55. Phantom Ride (Stephen Broomer) 

56. Shadows (John Cassavetes) 

57. A Secret Love (Chris Bolan) 

58. The Twist (Ron Mann) 

59. Targets (Peter Bogdanovich) 

60. Liza with a Z (Bob Fosse) 

61. Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders) 

62. River of Grass (Kelly Reichardt) 

63. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (William Greaves) 

64. Rodney King (Spike Lee) 

65. Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee)

66. Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach) 

67. Country Music (Ken Burns) 

68. Jump In! (Paul Hoen) 

69. Giants of Africa (Hubert Davis) 

70. Homo Promo (Jenni Olson) 

71. Dying Laughing (Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood) 

72. The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye) 

73. The Owls (Cheryl Dunye) 

74. Field N****s (Khalik Allah) 

75. Summertime (David Lean) 

76. The King of Staten Island (Judd Apatow) 

77. Whered’ya Go Bernadette (Richard Linklater)

78.Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee) 

79. But I’m a Cheerleader (Jamie Babbit) 

80. Motherless Brooklyn (Ed Norton) 

81. Knock Down the House (Rachel Lears) 

82. UC Berkeley (Frederick Wiseman) 

83. Manifesto (Julian Rosenfeldt) 

84. Altman (Ron Mann) 

85. The Graduate (Mike Nichols) 

86. Hamilton (Thomas Kail) 

87. The Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman) 

88. Across the Universe (Julie Taymor) 

89. My Own Private Idaho (Gus van Sant) 

90. Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple) 

91. Six by Sondheim (James Lapine) 

92: How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying 

93. Trio A (Yvonne Rainer) 

94. Beware the Holy Whore (RW Fassbinder) 

95. Man on the Moon (Milos Forman) 

96: Jim and Andy (Chris Smith) 

97. Her (Spike Jonze) 

98. Voluntourism Unleashed (Brad Quenville) 

99. Will Work for Views: The Lo-Fi Life of Weird Paul (Eric Schrader)

100. Brakhage (Jim Shedden) 

#64: Milton Glaser

Milton Glaser, June 26, 1929 – June 26, 2020. It goes without saying that he’s one of the greatest designers of our time. His work gives me so much joy, and I’m wondering if he was perhaps the first designer I ever noticed. I’m attaching nine of my favourite Glaser designs.

#63: David Thomas, R.I.P.

My father-in-law Dave Thomas passed away yesterday, May 14, 2020 (b. September 20, 1938).

I met Dave back in 1993 at Shellie’s 30th birthday party. I wasn’t dating her yet, but I was at the party. It was extremely crowded, like nothing is today, so I didn’t really speak to anyone else that night but Shellie, and her parents, Barb and Dave. Dave thought the wine I brought, a Châteauneuf-du-Pape, was impressive, but not as impressive as the fact that we were able to get into a full-on conversation about the things that really mattered in life: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis… well, you can see where I’m going. We both loved the blues, r&b, and rock and roll. I think it’s fair to say we hit it off. Shellie and I did, too, but that’s another story (we were married three years later, and Meredith was born five years later.)

Over the years, conversations with Dave and I always ended up at music. The reverence for Chess Records blues and Sun Records rock ’n roll never went away, but, along with Pete (his son, my brother-in-law) who is equally obsessive about music, our conversations expanded to include the Clancy Brothers, Hank Williams, The Band, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Aretha Franklin, Hank Ballard, doo wop, and The Tragically Hip. In his later years, it became obvious that Dave even had a fondness for show tunes.

Dave was alway so full of life, that it seems impossible that he’s no longer with us. He was really into whatever he was into: there’s no other way to put it. Whether he was working out, which he did most days for most of his life, playing tennis, or teaching judo or gymnastics, Dave did it with verve, and a competitive sense that I admire, but which I believe is foreign to me.

Dave was extremely pissed off when his knees decided that tennis was no longer in the picture.

Probably because I don’t know one thing about sports (not one), Dave seemed to know everything about sports. He was especially into basketball, baseball, football (American, Canadian, pro and college), tennis, and golf. He claimed to not like hockey, because of the violence, but still knew more about it than anyone in my orbit. In my previous job, my clients included a number of major sports team like The New York Jets. We had the opportunity, then, to take Dave to a few NFL games. Dave and I started with the Chicago Bears, and then Barb, Shellie and Meredith joined us for a Jets game and Buffalo Bills game. Those were definitely among my most memorable moments with Dave, even though I felt like a total alien at the games, and even Dave was taken aback by the sometimes manic, obstreperous and ill-advised fan behaviour. I think we all felt, well, really CANADIAN at those games, with our low key modesty, and our subdued fondness for cool decorum. Still, it was the craziness of those games that made them memorable.

It wasn’t just sports though. Perhaps because he was an editor (at the Hamilton Spectator and the Kitchener-Waterloo Record), perhaps because he read a lot, or perhaps because he just payed attention to things, Dave knew a lot about a lot of things. Spelling, grammar and style, for sure, but Dave could speak with confidence about history, politics, flora, fauna, cars, film, television, planet earth, and the cosmos. And he was always able to draw on his knowledge bank casually and modestly (I could learn from him).

I know it’s a cliché to say that so-and-so was first and foremost committed to his family, but that was absolutely true with Dave. If you knew him I’m sure you’ll agree. Dave was passionate about his interests and activities, but he was alway first and foremost the greatest husband, father and grandfather that anyone could be. Nothing mattered to him more than Barb, Shellie, Pete, and Meredith (and in-laws are in-laws, but he loved Kelly and me unconditionally too, with or without the Châteauneuf-du-Pape). We can all take our cue from Dave on this score.

Dave also unconditionally loved his sister Bobby, of course, and Dick, and Michael, Jill, Alicia, Dave, Kevin, Lisa, Sahra, Denise, Robin, Bryn, Kat, Chirs, Jennifer, Nicole, and Andrew, and their extended families.

Finally, it has to be said that Dave was a pun pundit. Dave had a photographic memory but never developed it. He was a very logical grammarian: he had a lot of comma sense. OK, I’ll stop there! Dave was funny all the time. Non-stop. Punstoppable. He loved his puns, but he also loved old-fashioned dirty jokes that weren’t that dirty. Really, any form of humour appealed to Dave. He always saw the humour in every situation. He embraced humour to deal with the most important issues: religion, politics, censorship, sex, bigotry, fear, and language itself. George Carlin was a god to Dave, except that neither of them believed in god, but you get my point.

What a pleasure to get to spend so much time with someone who enjoyed life so much, and passed that joy on to others so generously.

Dave Thomas, R.I.P.

#62: David Bowie

In 2013 the Art Gallery of Ontario presented the fabulous David Bowie Is exhibition that the V&A organized. I had the privilege of being the Gallery’s spokesperson for the show, taking special groups, media and VIPs through the exhibition and providing additional background on Bowie’s role in shaping visual culture as we know it. I’ve been a Bowie fan since 1974 (when I was 10) so this was a major honour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBTpH3d2v9A

Apollo recently visited the Art Gallery of Ontario to check out the David Bowie Is exhibition. Daniel Ashworth interviewed Jim Shedden, who is the Manager of...

#60: The Devils

Film #12/100: The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGZlNO1rHvY

and a TV doc on the film (with many clips) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xeg1yIvalSo

"In 1971 the English filmmaker Ken Russell released The Devils, his depiction of the celebrated seventeenth-century demonic possessions at Loudun and the witchcraft trial of the priest Urban Grandier that followed. For this, he relied on John Whiting’s 1961 stage play of the same name for much of the dialogue and on Aldous Huxley’s famous 1952 novel for most of its historical details. To these elements, however, Russell added his own original interpretation, turning The Devilsinto what he describes as “my most, indeed my only, political film”—an excoriating attack on the corruption and tyranny of the marriage of church and state. The film was instantly controversial, inciting outraged press headlines and public protests in the UK. Moreover, The Devils’ frank portrayals of sexuality and religious zealotry provoked the British Board of Film Classification as well as Warner Brothers, Russell’s own studio, to demand significant cuts. The film’s original X-rated version was out for just a brief run before it was withdrawn, and, for almost forty years, The Devils was only available in a severely redacted R-rated version." (Darryl Dee, Wilfrid Laurier University) 

The Devils is one of the most intense films I've ever seen. I put in a category with certain films by Salo (Pasolini), I Only Want You to Love Me (Fassbinder), Satyricon (Fellin), Epileptic Seizure Comparison (Paul Sharits), and Illuminated Texts (Bruce Elder). All pretty different, but equally appealing to me, while also being close to unwatchable. 

I saw The Devils tonight in a program introduced by Guillermo del Toro and Richard Crouse, two of the nicest guys in the world. During the "workshop" after the film del Toro said, "oh and I forgot to mention, this film isn't for everyone." The audience - or maybe it was just me - broke in howls of laughter at this understatement. 

Here's a 40 minute conversation from 2012 between Crouse and del Toro that Crouse conducted when his book on The Devils was first published. 

But it was for me. Despite squirming in my seat from time to time, I had that warm feeling I used to get in the late 1970s and 1980s watching films at the Bloor (Fox/Brighton/Revue), and then the AGO (before I worked there) and Harbourfront Centre, when my body and mind were in the process of receiving something new, something that expanded my worldview.

I really had that feeling tonight. Like, "what the hell is this thing? Is THIS what film is? Or could be? Are there more films like this? If there are, where the hell are they?" I LOVE that feeling. I LOVE when people are free with cinema the way so often are with theatre, with literature, and with music (and less so, in my opinion with visual art, but that's another story). Sure, there's lots of crazy cinema out there, but it tends to be the low-budget and no-budget variety, and that stuff turns my crank. But what a great feeling I get when it's clear that not only was there a visionary director at the wheel, but that lots of other people approved large budgets for big and crazy films like this. And that's true for Fellini, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Kubrick. The 60s and 70s were great. 

I wasn't sure if I would still like the film. I saw it somewhere around 33 years ago, and that was before VHS and it couldn't have been on TV. I think it was at the Bloor, but I could be wrong. I liked the film, but I didn't become a huge Russell fan ever, in part because I always thought Tommy was a mess, and I never liked Altered States. 

I DID like Women in Love, which I saw at the Revue (I think) in 1981, the day before a grade 13 English class test on the book. I got 100% on the test and gloated because I never read the book. I was an idiot though because, while the film is quite strong, it's an amazing book, something I'd figure out several years later when I finally read it. 

I didn't like Lisztomania, but maybe I would today. Maybe I liked Tommy more because I could relate to the music. Or maybe I didn't like Tommy because it's the first moment where The Who begin to lose their way. I'm conflicted about both films. Kind of intrigued with Rick Wakeman's score for Lisztomania but that wasn't enough to make me think highly of Russell. 

Mahler was quite good, and so was The Music Lovers (the Tchaikovsky film). I haven't seen any of these movies, however, with the exception of Tommy, for more than 30 years. 

Except now The Devils is fresh in my mind and there's no question to me that it's his greatest achievement, but I'm open to persuasion of course. 

The hard part. Why do I love this film? 

I like what del Toro said: "Art can be subtle, or it can be Ken Russell." This is a film where "if you're not shouting, you're not being recorded." And yet, there are some quiet moments, brief punctuating scenes, where the film has its power. Like when Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed) is being asked by Laubardemont  if he "loves his Church", to which he quietly answers "not today." In the context of this film, that comes as a great cathartic moment, but it's also spiritual. The whole film, according to del Toro, can be seen as Grandier's journey from the mind to the world, from idea to reality, and from the Church to spirituality. 

A young Derek Jarman designed the sets, a truly remarkable beginning to a brilliant career. I'll say more about Jarman later. 

One could do an amazing projecting tying Hitchcock, Russell, Jarman, and del Toro together by focussing on their profound use of sets. 

Here's Russell on the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB3GcSSovTk. 

And Reed on the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y52KZqzjVs

I also liked what del Toro said that "nobody suffers like Reed", not just in this film, but this is the masterpiece of suffering of course. "He could have been sculpted by Rodin in The Devils." 

So that was an interesting discovery last night: a film that I kind of thought I hated today feels like one of the greatest moments in cinema history. 

There is no middle ground with this one, though. 

#59: Keewatin Dewdney's Maltese Cross Movement

This was originally posted as a Facebook Note on July 2, 2016.

Maltese Cross Movement. Keewatin Dewdney, 1967.

Keewatin Dewdney’s Maltese Cross Movement brought me such joy the first time I saw it. I believe that was sometime around 1986 or 1987 and that it was either in a program that someone like Marc Glassman had put together at the Rivoli, or something I previewed at the CFMDC for possible inclusion in an Innis Film Society screening. I wish I could remember, but what’s for certain is that we programmed it every opportunity we could at Innis.
I’m sure I was intrigued by the fact that A.K. Dewdney, aka Keewatin Dewdney, was the brother of Chris Dewdney, the poet and essayist, who had inspired me a few years earlier when I was in my small press and performance poet phase. I might also have been impressed to know that Keewatin Dewdney wrote the Computer Recreations/Mathematical Recreations column in Scientific American, a post he inherited from Godel, Escher, Bach’s author, Douglas Hofstadter.
What really intrigued me, however, is how this film stood alone and apart.
It stands apart from Dewdney’s other films, all of which I love and have programmed as well: Wildwood Flower, Scissors, Four Girls, and Malanga (I’m not sure we ever actually showed Four Girls). It then stands alone from all other avant-garde films. Nothing in the work of Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Stan Brakhage, Yvonne Rainer or anyone else is like this film. These are straightforward observations, but a welcome reminder: at its best, the avant-garde has been radically anti-formula. There are “structural” films and “lyrical films” and “autobiographical films” but, at the end of the day, they each tend to stand on their own much more than “westerns”, “musicals” and “chick flicks.” Dewdney’s five films can only be described as “Keewatin Dewdney films”, and then one would have to add that what unites the films has more to do with underlying structural obsessions that might be motivating Dewdney, and less so the viewer experience of the films.
This film posits that the projector is at least as important as the film itself.
In looking around for scraps of information and insights about this film, I came across this amazing document from the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, an essay by Keewatin Dewdney. It’s a piece Dewdney wrote in 1967 when he made this film that had only existed as a mimeographed document till 2001: http://www.filmstudies.ca/journal/pdf/cj-film-studies101_Dewdney_discontinuous.pdf. A teaser: “We are now in the process of being released from the assumption of continuity and the cinematic schools this assumption has imposed. Delightful as it has been, continuity has given us little more than a visual re-hash of the literary experience (poems included). Anyone objecting violently to this statement surely has a big stake in continuous cinema. The same person will feel enormously threatened by discontinuous films. At the Fourth Ann Arbor Film Festival last year, many in the auditorium groaned during The Flicker, not bored but frightened.”
I wish I could show you the film. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a version on YouTube or Vimeo. However, how about Margaret Atwood’s description of a book Dewdney made, an adaptation of the movie? “It Typescapes is classical, Keewatin Dewdney’s The Maltese Cross Movement is decidedly romantic, as its merge-and-takeoff last page poem emphasises. According to Alphabet 15, it’s based on an underground movie of the same name, but those who haven’t seen he movie can react only to the book as book. Dewdney uses a collage technique, linking pictures with an organic-looking matrix of tiny hieroglyphics which may or may not be decipherable into English. There are a few recognizable words, and two symbols, a maltese cross and a moon, which weave through the pictures, sometimes together, sometimes apart. The oversize fingers, ears and eyes coupled with machines etc. suggest a McLuhan extended-senses theme, but a linear-sequential interpretative approach doesn’t work (unless there’s some Rosetta Stone I missed). What The Maltese Cross Movement does is to provide the reader with a lush field of images from which he can improvise his own poems (“make a world”, as the first collage says). It raises scrapbooking, that you thing you did with old magazines and a pair of scissors while recovering from the measles, to an art.”
That all pretty much applies to the film as well.
As far as I know, William Wees has written most extensively about the film, first in an article in the now defunct Cinema Canada. Wees argues the point about the projector, not the camera, “is the filmmaker’s true medium. The form and content of the film are shown to derive directly from the mechanical operation of the projector - specifically the maltese cross movement’s animation of the disk and the cross illustrates graphically (pun intended) the projector’s essential parts and movements. It also alludes to a an apparatus, from its central mechanical operation to the spectator’s perception of the film’s images… (His) soundtrack demonstrates that what we hear is also built out of the continuous-discontinuous ‘sub-sets.’ The discontinuous sounds have been stored up to provide the male voice on the soundtrack with the sounds needed to to repeat a little girl’s poem: The cross revolves at sunset The moon returns at dawn If you die tonight, Tomorrow you are gone.”
If you get a chance to see it, you must.

PS: Since I first wrote this, Stephen Broomer wrote what is probably the best overall article on Dewdney’s films: http://elumiere.net/especiales/hancox/dewdneybroomer_en.php.

#58 Mike Nichols

I generally think of myself as an auteurist, being largely attracted to artists with a discernible personal vision that pulses through their work, whether we’re talking about Godard, Fellini, Brakhage, Sharits, Sondheim, Coltrane, or Patti Smith. This is a Romantic conception of art that makes it easy to forget more eclectic artists like Mike Nichols, even though his work has been in my imaginative life since I first saw The Graduate 40 years ago. Nichols has been in the back of my mind since he died in 2014, shortly after he directed Death of a Salesman starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2012. Hoffman, one of the greatest performers of our generation, committed suicide in 2014. I wonder if this performance was captured, canned for some future release or if it’s gone now, along with Nichols and Hoffman. It reminds me that one of Nichols greatest achievements was directing the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, after and with the famed stage version starring Taylor and Burton. Nichols’ first film, WAOVW? would be a gift simply for capturing a definitive moment in theatre history, similar to West Side Story and Streetcar Named Desire, but I think that WAOVW? feels like more an an autonomous work as a film. This is just a hunch, and Nichols’ direction is likely only part of the explanation: Haskell Wexler’s always-perfect cinematography and the performances obviously have a lot to do with it.//Nichols would prove that his debut wasn’t pure luck, however, when he released his second film, The Graduate. His second film! Once again, performances by Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross and the then-unknown Dustin Hoffman (!), had something to do with, as did Simon & Garfunkel, a choice Nichols made when they were cutting to the film to “Sounds of Silence” a temporary solution. The rest is history.//Nichols’s other films are all solid, but sometimes underrated. I highly recommend Silkwood, Catch-22, Postcards from the Edge, Gilda Live, Carnal Knowledge, and The Birdcage.//Ran out of room for the brilliant Elaine May, Buck Henry, Robin Williams, and others.

#57: Recovery (for @BellLetsTalk and feat. Eminem)

I normally write something on #bellletstalk day on January 29 on Facebook. But I couldn’t do it again, not there in any case, and not on Twitter, which is where Bell wants us to post. The truth is, I post about my addiction, my bi-polar disorder (manic-depression) and my recovery all the time. I do it because it helps me continue to be detached from both conditions, and a complicating neurological disorder that made my life hell for some time. And I do it so that I might be helpful to someone who is still struggling, or struggling again.

Today I kept in touch with my addiction by listening to Eminem’s superb Recovery album, and by writing a blue sky proposal for a project about intoxication and creativity (we’ll see). My recovery wasn’t like Eminem’s, on the one hand, but exactly like his in his fundamental ways: couldn’t quit when I wanted to quit; couldn’t predict what would happen the minute I first started drinking or using; total humiliation and adamant commitment to sobriety; relapse (another one of Eminem’s albums), of the most, boring, pathetic kind; seeing the light. For me, it was seeing just enough light to accept help, at first in a “day-tox” program and several detoxes (each time I relapsed, or got caught relapsing, by my day-tox counsellor (someone to whom I am eternally grateful), then a bit more light and I was ready, and happy, to go to 12 step recovery meetings, something that I continue to do today and that I credit with keeping me alive, sober, and even occasionally serene. I also went to Homewood in Guelph, to attend the dual disorder stream of the addiction program (ie, I got the most psychiatric attention I’ve ever had for my manic-depression). It was a great experience: I cried almost every day.

I’m extremely grateful that I was somehow given the willingness to stay alive and recover.

#56: Johnny Cash's Greatest Hits Vol. 1

It’s possible that my first memory was listening to some song from this album in my my parents’ living room in 1967, the year the album came out. It’s possible: I think it was either that or Expo 67. Either way: my favourite memories of 1967 involved this record. Country music. Rock and roll. Johnny Cash. June Carter.

I know that, when asked to teach a song to my fellow students in kindergarten, I chose “Ring of Fire.” I guess this is what I’ve always looked to rock and roll to teach me about love (dark and ominous sounding, and somehow transformative). It also taught me that the best rock and roll is sung with a really deep voice, and ideally with a strong female partner and a mariachi band. It’s rare that I get all those things in a song but when I do, I’m reminded of “Ring of Fire”. (Scott Walker’s “Seventh Seal” has no June Carter equivalent, but his voice is deep, and there’s mariachi accompaniment).

The superb version of “It Ain’t Me Babe”, my other favourite cut from the record was 3 years old, also uses a mariachi arrangement.

For the longest time this greatest hits record, along with the other Johnny Cash album that my parent owned, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, were my two favourites. There weren’t too many others to chose from, mind you: maybe two dozen LPs at the most, and a handful of 45s. I could list them, but today I will just honour Johnny Cash.

There is a part of me that thinks that music should always sound like this, so I came into my musical life believing that his version of “It Ain’t Me Babe” was the only version: I took a long time to accept that that the Turtles version was equally good, and Dylan’s version is occasionally what I need.There are a few great Cash original on the record like “I Walk the Line” and “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town,” but the cover that became definitive like“Five Feet High and Rising”, “Orange Blossom Special” and “Jackson” are the majority of the record.

I like a lot of things that are very different from this record. And I go months without playing Johnny Cash. But, when I do, it’s always hugely joyful, and it sounds like DNA.

#55: The Beatles, 1967-1970 (Double Blue)

In 1976, I was given the Beatles 1967-70, the “Beatles Blue” double album for Christmas. I think it was the most important Christmas gift I ever received.

I felt like I was a Beatles fan pretty much all my life, from the time I heard “She Loves You”, the only Beatles record we had growing up, and generally discovered the Beatles in mass media. But, by the time I got the Blue album, I think I knew no more than 10 Beatles songs. So double blue was the largest single dose of musical greatness I had ever experienced. I’m not sure anything has ever topped it.

By the way, the year before I received this record, I was given a book about the Beatles that was lavishly illustrated and went through the career album by album. I read and re-read it and lived by it. So I knew a lot about the Beatles, but had little access to the music, certainly not the songs on this set. I had only heard Elton John’s version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, for example. Did I know much besides “Here Come the Sun”, “Let it Be” and “Hey Jude”? It’s easy to take this record, and therefore the bulk of the Beatles career, which is to forget what original and compelling songwriters they were, almost unparalleled in pop music. And how I can’t live without John’s voice or Paul’s voice: I can’t choose; I won’t choose. And how extraordinary the arrangements and the production are, wonderfully underscoring how good a drummer Ringo actually was and how seamlessly the horns, strings, and “additional percussion” co-exist with the guitar-guitar-bass-drums combo.

This record was an excellent foundation for the music-consuming and novelty-seeking journey I was about to embark on, as I began to purchase records more aggressively, make and exchange mixtapes, and connected with more like-minded musical souls. We relished punk and new wave, Kate Bush, Roxy Music, Bowie, and Brian Eno, and that was all brilliant, but the Beatles were alway there for me, providing context for all that was new. Today, double blue sounded like my favourite record once again.
And I haven’t even discussed double red.

#54: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

Back in August, 2015 I went to see a production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, presented as a Bravo Academy for the Performing Arts Summer Teen Contemporary Musical Theatre Intensive in Toronto. I had heard of it, but not of its composer and lyricist, William Finn, nor its book writer Rachel Sheinkin, nor of Rebecca Feldman, who wrote the original story. Meredith was studying and performing with the Bravo Academy, and assured me this was worth seeing. It certainly was. Among other things, it sparked a huge interest in Finn, and two of his other pieces, The Falsettos and A New Brain. His output is modest but original, to say the least.

Last night we saw a new production of Spelling Bee put on by the Victoria College Dramatic Arts Society at U of T. Originally they were going to present something different that fell through, so the cast and crew had 24 days to pull this together. It was superb! There was very little evidence that it came together under these circumstances. The performers were were fantastic channellers of their characters’ tortured personalities. They were also hilarious, and wonderful improvisers which was understandably necessary a few times!, This seemingly light spoof of our contest-crazed culture does seem to suggest that the whole thing might be character building for the contestants, or does it? In a pivotal scene, Marcy is given the word camouflage, to which she responds, “Jesus Christ, can’t you come up with a harder word than that.” Jesus Christ then appears on a scooter and delivers a brief deadpan shrug as far as the whole enterprise is concerned, and inspires Marcy to sabotage the game and take control of her own life.

Without going into too much detail (because I’m not capable of it, and I’m going to run out of room), I would say that one of Finn’s principal artistic devices is to build his songs around the characters’ distinct voices with exaggerated qualities. Anyone who has seen or heard Falsettos will be familiar with this approach. I’m not quite describing what I mean here, but I’m running out of room and steam.

#53: Robert De Niro and Al Pacino

The Godfather Part 2 was released on this day, December 20, in 1974. I didn’t see it until 1980, at the Bloor Cinema for $1. It is considered by many to be the greatest film of all time, possibly greater than the first Godfather. I’m more of a long (non-hierarchical) list maker myself, so I’ll just say that both films are favourites of mine and would both end up on a list of my 100 favourite films. On the other hand, I get it when I hear people say “greatest”.

This film is on many minds, of course, because it stars both Al Pacino and Robert de Niro, two of the greatest actors of our time. There I go again with “greatest”, after saying that it’s not really how I view the world. That being said, I can rhyme off role each has played that I’m happy to see over and over again. For Pacino, it’s Michael Corleone, Frank Serpico, Sonny Wortzig (Dog Day Afternoon), Steve Burns (Cruising - that mess of a movie that I’m anxious about mentioning), Tony Montana (Scarface), Richard Roma (Glengarry Glen Ross), Vincent Hanna (Heat - which I just saw two years ago!), Roy Cohn (Angels in America), plus, I’m sure, many great roles from films I’ve never seen or don’t remember seeing (eg, Carlito’ Way and Donnie Brasco). Who could top such a list? Maybe no one, or maybe de Niro: (young) Vito Corleone, Neil McCauley (Heat), Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), Rupert Pupkin (King of Comedy), Jake LaMotta (Raging Bull), James (Jimmy) Conway (Goodfellas), Max Cady (Cape Fear), Michael (The Deer Hunter), John “Jony Boy” Civello (Mean Streets), Louis Gara (Jackie Brown), Jimmy Doyle (New York, New York), plus many films I haven’t seen, or that I am forgetting. 

Pacino and De Niro only performed in the same feature narrative films four times: Godfather II, Heat, Righteous Kill (which I haven’t seen and wonder if I ever will), and now The Irishman. By most accounts, Righteous Kill is the first time that De Niro and Pacino really perform together, but the film is considered very lightweight, their roles weak, and their performances lacklustre. They are only in Godfather 2 together for seconds, and then in Heat they don’t appear in the same shot: they are in the diner sequence together, but not the same shot).

The Irishman was long awaited and much hyped, partly because of the opportunity to see these legends finally perform on screen together in a major film. I watched most of The Irishman on my computer. I should have gone to see it at TIFF, or I should at least have watched it on a TV screen, but I kept putting it off. So I watched it over three days in a very distracted state. I liked it a lot, understanding why a few of my friends, and a handful of critics, were highly critical and, in a couple of cases, completely dismissive. 

Because I haven’t seen the whole movie (but I’ve seen the ending), and because I didn’t see it in a proper context, I just have to leave things at “I really like it, I like it a lot, I understand the criticisms but they don’t matter to me that much, I don’t mind that it’s not cinematically or narratively groundbreaking, I wouldn’t necessarily put it on my top 100 list, but maybe my top 200 list, and I can live without the CGI, to say the least.” 

Oh, and De Niro (Frank Sheeran) and Pacino (Jimmy Hoffa) are pretty great together. Finally. 

#52: The Polkaholics

David Keyes, my best friend for a while in high school and beyond, replied to a poster from two (Rick and Soon) who were looking for a drummer, and who somehow made it clear that they were on the experimental side of things. Dave hates when people do this, but they had a bit of Beefheart in them, and a bit of hardcore, and a bit of funk, and a bit of Zappa, and probably a lot of influences I wouldn’t recognize. Mostly, though , they were just the Polkaholics. They played the usual places - Cabana Room, Cameron House, maybe Larry’s, etc. - they hung out with (and performed on the same bill with) Fifth Column, Believer’s Voice of Victory (BelVoxVicto - aka Spontaneous Human Combustion/SponHumCombo). They were intense, kind of scary (Rick was anyhow), and not always what I wanted to hear. But I was thrilled to see David so swiftly prove his creative abilities and make a mark on the Toronto music scene (and beyond). They had a cassette (K is Kate Who Was Struck by an Axe), which I think they disowned because it sounded so terrible (admittedly, I was the one who put it out). They had an EP and and LP, both produced by Toronto’s prolific and exacting Michael-Philip Wojewoda, and recorded at the Music Gallery (when It was an actual place where that sort of thing happened).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH-oTAXIaZQ

#51: Mandy Patinkin

Mandy Patinkin’s singing (in the role of George Seurat) on the original cast recording of Sunday in the Park with George in 1984 truly changed my life. I opened up to Broadway musicals generally because of his voice, and that recording in general. I established then, and maintain to this day, a standard for Broadway vocals, for sure, but vocals in general: if someone isn't as original as Patinkin was in Sunday, if someone doesn't own the music the way Patinkin does, then I'm not so interested. I walked around U of T campus for a couple of solid years playing thi cassette on my Sony Walkman (from a very small repertoire of cassettes, and unrivalled in terms of holding my attention). I wouldn’t actually see a performance of Sunday for 25 years after first hearing it, a quite amazing production at the Shaw Festival in 2009.

#50: Innisfree Farm

For a short period of time in the 1980s, I was responsible for the Harold Innis Foundation. That’s not as illustrious as it sounds, but we managed to put on a few conferences and lectures, and eke out some publications (more on those later?). The main thing we did, however, was own and manage a farm and conference centre on Delhi, Ontario, near Tillsonburg (“my back still aches when I hear that word”). It was Harold Innis’s birthplace, and purchased in the late 1960s in order to facilitate conferences around Innisian themes (political economy, geography, communications). It didn’t fulfill its mandate, but certainly provided a great retreat for Innis College students. I was very fond of the farm: it was a place where I felt somewhat at home with my peers (somewhat, but more than usual). It was the site of a certain amount of Dionysian debauchery: a little too much drinking, a tiny bit of shagging, and definitely skinny dipping. That was all overstated, though. I mostly remember making ambitious group dinners with Mike Zryd, Sirje Jarvel, Robin Gibson, and others. And I remember planting trees, sleeping in the “pit”, hacky sack (which followed Innisians wherever we went), and some low level dramas. I started doing this as a student but, by the last time I went, I was responsible for the Foundation, which owned the farm. I convinced the Board of Directors to sell the farm shortly thereafter. When I looked at the finances, I realized that we had been in denial for many years and we were going to lose the farm in any case. We were also jeopardizing various scholarships that were in trust to the Foundation and it was that fact that convinced the Principal of Innis College at the time (who did not want to take the politically unpopular move of selling the farm - who would). And so that was that. There’s more to this story, but probably this is already of interest only to Innis students from the 1980s. The bottom line, however, is that Innisfree (a reference to Harold Adams, of course, but also to Yeats’ great poem) shaped me in ways that I only understand now.

This article, from the Innis Herald, the student paper, gets the story right, more or less. I can’t expect the author to know the little details that I know. PS: more on the Innis Herald, which I co-edited, later. As for the photos attached: yes, that’s Kate MacKay (not a local resident as the article suggests). And, yes, that’s me in the white t-shirt, white socks and white Adidas shorts!