#90 Moments of Perception
Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada
[from Goose Lane Editions catalogue]
Moments of Perception
Edited by Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg
352 pages
Published: November 16, 2021
Non-Fiction / Art & Architecture
ePub: 9781773102443 $19.95
Film is the art form of our times. It has formed the background of our lives, informed visual arts practices, and formed our culture’s stories, its memory.
Moments of Perception is a landmark book. The first history of twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Canadian experimental filmmaking, it maps avant-garde film across the country from the 1950s to the present day, including its contradictions and complexities.
Experimental film is political in its very existence, critical of the status quo by definition. In Canada, some of the country’s best-known artists took up the moving image as a form of artistic expression, allowing them to explore explicitly political themes. Mike Hoolboom’s exposure of the horror of AIDS, Josephine Massarella’s concern for the environment, and Joyce Wieland’s satiric look at US patriotism are just a few examples of work that contributed to social movements and provided a means to explore issues of race and gender and 2SLGBTQ+ and Indigenous identities.
Featuring a major essay on the history of the movement by Michael Zryd and profiles of key filmmakers by Stephen Broomer and editors Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, Moments of Perception offers a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving history of Canada’s experimental film and moving image media arts.
#89: I AM HERE playlist
Our forthcoming exhibition, I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces, was partly inspired by the bits of wisdom embedded in popular music. Every section of the exhibition was named after a particular song. You can hear all of them, plus a few other songs that belong on the list for context, and because they're great.
The list: I Am Here - Pink
Our House - Crosby, Stills and Nash
Our House - Madness
We Are Family - Sister Sledge
Food, Glorious Food - Mark Lester, Harry Secombe, Peggy Mount & The Boys (from Oliver!)
Fight the Power - Public Enemy
Ultralight Beam - Kanye West
Happiness is a Warm Gun - The Beatles (or anything else from The Beatles/“The White Album”)
Dance to the Music - Sly and the Family Stone
My Favorite Things - Julie Andrews
My Favorite Things - John Coltrane
Let it Bleed - The Rolling Stones
Andy Warhol - David Bowie
The Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes - Elvis Costello and the Attractions
On the Street Where You Live - John Michael King (or Vic Damone or any other “Freddy”)
Life is a Highway - Tom Cochrane
On the Road Again - Willie Nelson
Groupie (Superstar) - Delaney & Bonnie
Superstar - The Carpenters
Superstar - Sonic Youth
Wrecking Ball - Miley Cyrus
Kodachrome - Paul Simon
So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘n Roll Star - Patti Smith
Everyday People - Sly and the Family Stone
Panorama - The Cars
Being Alive - Dean Jones (or any version - from Stephen Sondheim’s Company)
Here's the playlist if you have Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5sIHwE2c8s7sn4UzC5ylfm?si=73c90d118ea440af
#88: Fiona Smyth
As featured in our forthcoming exhibition, I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces. A mural (and the book cover) and an imaginative timeline of the technologies of self-documentation. Both works were illustrated by Fiona Smyth . The exhibition opens April 13. https://ago.ca/agoinsider/compacting-illustration?utm_source=AGO+email+communications&utm_campaign=f61def448f-AGOinsider_February_23&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d4ab708299-f61def448f-245840197
#86: WOMAD
I worked on the last WOMAD in Toronto. I was the co-programmer of the accompanying film series, so I didn’t play a very central role, but it was fun to put my film programming skills to work at an organization that I loved, and still love, Harbourfront Centre, and for this game changing festival, one that changed who Harbourfront Centre was. It was their last year partnering with WOMAD as their own homegrown programming programming didn’t need the support and validation from the mothership anymore. Perhaps I’ll write more one day.
#85: High School Music
On this day forty years ago, December 31, 1981, I went downtown to a New Year’s Eve concert featuring Maja Bannerman, Handsome Ned and the Sidewinders and The Government. The show was at Mercer Union, an artists’ run centre that was located on Adelaide St. at the time. I didn’t know what Mercer Union was, and I didn’t know what artists’ run centres were, and I had no idea that I would have some kind of affiliation with one or more of them for most of my adult life (so far). I went with my sister, Lisa, and my friend David Keyes, and I’m sure we bought our tickets at the Record Peddler. I know the draw for me was The Government (https://open.spotify.com/track/125aikDb420xmgkNGr9fYH...), a band that defined cool downtown for me, everything I longed for in my fantasy escape from the suburbs. Handsome Ned and Maja Bannerman would become part of that fantasy in due course.
The evening was what I had hoped, though I like many great moments in my life, I have a lonely memory of it, perhaps because I had no way of actually connecting to any of the people in attendance (Lisa and David notwithstanding), without getting blotto and then doing so in a blackout. Perhaps it’s because I took enough of an opiate that night, and for my first time, that I thought maybe I was going to die. I’m sure I had a case of paranoia as I went home and got up the next day, visited my girlfriend and then went to work.
New Year’s Eve, and especially New Year’s Day, have always filled me with anxiety and loneliness, along the same lines as Labour Day, each of them being the mother of all Sundays.
I suppose I’ve had some good New Year’s Eves, but they always come double-edged. For a number of years, and a number of times in my life, I’ve held parties because it beats the alternative - going out. Hilariously, a party we held for many years where we’d invite both sober alcoholic/addicts and “normal” imbibers was intriguing to the CBC, which led to an interview on “Out in the Open” that they ran 2016, 2017 and 2018, but is still available the way things are in this era: https://www.cbc.ca/.../eat-don-t-drink-and-be-merry-an....
I don’t remember much about other high school New Years. Mostly I worked my restaurant/banquet job, and in earlier years stayed home to listen to top-whatever countdowns on the radio while my mother ate lobster.
I made a Spotify playlist (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3daskNNDhqT6IZlpwfJueH...) recently called High School. Like most of my Spotify playlists, it’s kind of random, probably a bit too sprawling, and impenetrable to anyone but me. In this case, it’s a playlist about what I listened to in high school (1977-1982), what I fantasize I listened to in high school, songs that hadn’t been recorded yet when I was in high school, songs I fantasize about singing in the band I fantasize about being in when I was in high school, and songs that I should have listened to in high school had I been as cool as I thought I was.
It’s not complete. It’s just a momentary fantasy. 71 songs, 4 hours and 27 minutes, the length of a basement party.
Some of the choices are obvious. “Top Down” and “Picture My Face” (https://open.spotify.com/track/0zYGqo3pLiVJUYCcwrn21h...) from the first Teenage Head album: a huge amount of fun and more exciting than many of the other punk bands I was into, a band that my sister Lisa and a few of my newfound friends at Mother’s Pizza (who taught me a lot about music) could agree on. We played the hell out of the record, and compared the production quality of the singles (“better” in both cases, but less pleasing to my already DIY sensibility). We saw them at every high school performance we could get to, every Knob Hill Tavern gig they’d let us into, at Danforth Music Hall, somewhere in Stoney Creek, everywhere and anywhere.
“Days of Wine and Roses” (https://open.spotify.com/track/2inEzpdn0vqBap0YJ2eD2o...) by The Dream Syndicate came out once I was in university. That album, and handful of EPs and singles by the band, along with music by The Gun Club, The Cramps, The Blasters, Rank ‘n’ File, and the Violent Femmes, were the bands that gave me hope after, to my mind, punk, new wave (as we originally understood it) and postpunk were finished, giving way to synthpop, New Romanticism, etc., etc. These bands, and hardcore bands like the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag, were the saving grace apparently. The truth is, those bands were great, but I eventually grew to hear good things in Tears for Fears, A-Ha, Depeche Mode. I’ve come to realize that there are periods of our lives that we lock into, periods that we decide define our identity to the exclusion of everything else, and then we turn off. At least, I do or, I hope, did. Nothing beats adolescence for carving out one’s identity, but I am trying hard to call me on my own bullshit, even while I sentimentalize it!
When I have the fantasy that I had a band in high school, one possible version of it involves showing up to the Battle of the Bands and we’re The Dream Syndicate, a band that is not punk but is so punk, a band that has to appeal to anyone into 1970s hard rock, from Neil Young and Crazy Horse to the alt protopunk variants like the Velvet Underground and The Stooges. That’s my band. One of them.
The Stooges’s “Not Right” (https://open.spotify.com/track/6ghf1333jb7cJ9sQCgMRWl...) is one of a dozen or so songs by the band that were always heavier and more exciting than most punk bands. That was part of the musical experience of the time for me. I loved everything New that was happening during that great period in music (and film, art, literature, DIY-ness), but it was impossible to disregard the greatness of what had gone before, what wouldn’t have been on our 1050 CHUM radar screens growing up, but was happening parallel to all that other greatness.
I was too cool to be into Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, but had a song like “Beggin’” appeared by some new band out of the blue, I’m pretty sure my ears and my brain could not have resisted: https://open.spotify.com/track/7wVQgvVVX4penHEGrF5eCL...
Like almost all of my high school “discoveries” I found that my friend Kim was already into them. Actually I took my cue first from Jim Morrison, because I discovered that The Doors opened for them at the Whiskey a Go Go or some such LA place. The Doors were still cool to me, even though they were profoundly uncool by my New Wave standards. I still like The Doors, but I still love Love. I am almost shocked every time I play their music, from their garage rock classic 7 & 7 Is (https://open.spotify.com/track/0OJnkHGtb0kbUiKrboCuJg...) to Alone Again Or (https://open.spotify.com/track/1XuccRABkfUVB4FjSVhjL1...), a song so astonishingly beautiful to my 17 year old self (and my 58 year old self). I am convinced the first few songs I heard were all from the Johnny Cash greatest albums that came out in 1965 and included the mariachi-infused “Ring of Fire” and “It Ain’t Me Babe”; years later an (arguably) mariachi-infused “Alone Again Or” would become a huge favourite, played over and over again on vinyl, on tape and now online. I think I bought most of my Love records at Peter Dunn’s Vinyl Museum, but at A & A’s Yonge St. as well I’m sure (hello Kim, hello Lisa). I am tempted to go on and on about Love and I did, back in 2007 near the beginning of my Facebook Group, 1000 Songs, followed by a conversation with some of my favourite people: Alan Zweig, Rick Campbell, Gary Westwood, and Steve Winwood. https://www.facebook.com/notes/1000-songs/song-57-alone-again-or/10150206403561451/ PS: Scott Walker's "Seventh Seal", an inarguably mariachi-infused psych/crooner gem, hit me as strong as Cash and Love. Too much to say here.
A big part of my high school experience consisted of going downtown to bars like The Beverley (my favourite), the Spadina Hotel (Cabana Room mainly), and Start Dancin' (not a bar) and others to hear bands like the Rent Boys (https://open.spotify.com/track/2RYbxnAVvKEaUak6i1rVMn...), the Sturm Group, the Rheostatics, the Dave Howard Singers, Fifth Column, and so forth. The music I heard then, and the connections I made still live with me, even if sometimes very tenuously.
I’m not sure if I listened to the Spencer Davis Group when I was in high school, but I should have. This song, I’m a Man, is pure pleasure whether it’s this original (https://open.spotify.com/track/3FBQJqRo62hW0RvGoJXWdB...), or Bob Seger or Chicago. Steve Winwood is a reminder that it was possible to be musically accomplished as a young teenager. Apparently you have to work at it harder than I did.
“Nice ‘n’ Sleazy” (https://open.spotify.com/track/2CeBK22RiNWepnaCs0yHPb...) was one of the first punk songs that my sister owned, and maybe the first either of us had on a picture sleeve. The Stranglers are a band that still sound fresh and exciting to me. My fantasy band would play “Golden Brown” and “Hangin’ Around” (https://open.spotify.com/track/4OvQsAObGMF3dpkCV6DZzb...), as well as their version of “Walk on By” (https://open.spotify.com/track/468OjJdSYyN77e1tYj4O6Y...).
Richard Hell and the Voidoids were like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and Patti Smith to me: “HOLY SHIT!” That anarchic energy cut through everything for me, and still does, though today its part nostalgia, and part genuinely reminding to cut the shit and focus. I love “Blank Generation” (https://open.spotify.com/track/5OGfBbWmRRkDiZiJbu5WIr...) and their version of John Fogery’s “Walking on the Water” (https://open.spotify.com/track/4qbhCFHUmMMXnP09MKMcZP...).
Which reminds me: CCR have never grown tired for me.
And did I mention Neil Young and Crazy Horse? It was so exciting that Rust Never Sleeps came out while we were in high school. It seemed impossible that my generation could have an album as earth-shattering as Everybody Knows this is Nowhere or After the Goldrush, but time has proven that, to me at least, Rust and Live Rust are two supremely high points in their career.
Sometimes I know it’s just nostalgia. So Some Girls is my “favourite Rolling Stones” album, but I can’t sustain that position. Exile, Sticky Fingers, and Let it Bleed are obviously “better” and each is also “my favourite".
I really must be going. Happy new year!
Rent Boys Inc · Song · 1982
33Alan Zweig, James Anderson and 31 others
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Lisa SheddenHappy New Year, Jim. I miss spending New Year’s Eve with you.
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· 19h
Aldona SatterthwaiteHappy New Year, Jim. As I'm mostly an introvert, I love spending New Year's Eve by myself. I've never liked New Year's Eve parties--everyone so desperate to have a good time and all that false bonhomie. Nuh-uh. Instead, I make myself a really fabulous dinner, drink a little Prosecco (or champagne, if I'm feeling fancy), and usually watch all five hours of the BBCs production of Pride and Prejudice (the one with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle). This year, I might check out Get Back, the Beatles' documentary on Disney+, instead. Cheers!
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· 19h
Kerry DooleFine choices!
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· 18h
Rick CampbellHey, Jim that’s quite a piece! Are you sure it wasn’t NYE 1980? Andrew told me that their opening gig for XTC at the Concert Hall was The Government’s last gig and that was October, 1980. I know because I moved to the UK the next day.
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· 15h
Jim SheddenRick Campbell I hate to disagree with Andrew JP about his own band, but I was at several shows when I was in grade 13, which was 1981-82. I have street posters to do it, not to mention an interview with Robert Stewart in one of my zines that took place in 1982 and the band was still together, but I guess that must have been the end.
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· 13h
Rick CampbellJim Shedden Okay. Maybe they broke up more than once! Billy Bryans wasn’t their first drummer so…
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· 12h
Jim SheddenRick Campbell Its possible that a show I saw of theirs at the Palais Royale, on September 18, 1981 (my birthday) was the first show with Billy Bryans. I believe he also played with every band that night.
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Nick Smashthanks jim. this very much echoes my own experiences.
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#84: New Year’s Eve Parties as heard on CBC
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#83: Incomplete
And what have you done?
Thoughts on incompleteness in lieu of New Year’s Eve resolutions.
I hope you’re having a great holiday. I am, though I am somewhat melancholy. It may be the cloudy skies but I think it’s more than that. I feel this overwhelming sense of incompleteness. That can be tied to the number of loose ends in my life right now, projects in limbo, and projects at the mercy of a worldwide pandemic. It might just be my neurotic personality, but I think it’s more than that as well. And what if it isn’t? My experience of the world right now can only be described as “incomplete”. Doesn’t really matter what caused it. Perhaps I have a combination of imposter syndrome, anxiety, and FOMO, all of it made hyperbad with coronaphobia.
According to my Myers-Briggs indicator results time and again for almost 30 years, I am an ISTJ, which means, among other things that I thrive on closure. That can be a good thing, of course, but creative work thrives on open loops. One has to be patient, adventurous, uncompromising, and yet determined enough to bring the project to fruition when it’s due, or when it’s ready. Open loops are one thing; spinning one’s wheels incessantly is another. And one needs to be wise enough to walk away or put things on ice when the universe just won’t budge.
According to Myers-Briggs language, “People with the Judging preference want things to be neat, orderly and established. The Perceiving preference wants things to be flexible and spontaneous. Judgers want things settled, Perceivers want thing open-ended.” I have learned, with this particular preference of mine, to work against preference, to embrace open loops, incompleteness.
When I finish something, even if I downright hate it at the time, it almost always ages well, for the simple fact of being finished and out in the world. The most infantile of fanzines, quaint posters for quaint events, awkward essays and articles, homely books, and amateur videos - these artifacts become less embarrassing over time and, instead, are reassuring stakes in the ground. Fortunately I have enough of these to battle the entropy of my decaying memory. They remind me, too, to persevere, to get to the finish line.
I’m not just talking here about my various projects, but also books read and not read, films and plays seen and not seen, travel ambitions, purging of stuff, photos scanned and not scanned, digital file management, recipes tried, repairs and renovations, 12 steps taken, community and charitable commitments, and family obligations.
Another part of me refutes this need for tangible completeness. I realize that my character, my imagination, and my overall consciousness is shaped by the journey, the overlapping experiences. This is made abundantly clear by travel. These days when we travel we create photographs and video, buy objects that help us remember the stops along the way, like this Pendleton shirt that I’m wearing is a marker of a brief time in Portland, Oregon. But even my travel experiences when I created or collected very little documentation, shaped my life enormously: I think of camping trips and trips to Montreal, Cape Cod with my parents and sisters; my first trip to Europe - Budapest, 1991; various trips when I was at Bruce Mau that are primarily only marked in my mind (eg, Copenhagen, Rotterdam/The Netherlands, Vienna, Ghent, Paris, Essen, Basel/Weil am Rhein, Atlanta/Cartersville, LA, SF, Chicago, Orlando, and a hundred trips to New York). But in some ways each trip was an act of completion, just as each household chore is an act of completion.
A few Incompletions from the past disturb me to varying degrees:
My film, Music Swims Back to Me, that went off the rails during the pandemic. It’s possible that we will find a way to finish it, but I am in mourning to tell you the truth. The stars are not aligned it seems.
Travelling to Italy, an ambition that goes back 35 years with me, and that I haven’t been able to make happen. The pandemic negated the last such plan (we were supposed to go in May, 2020). I think any significant trip to Europe right now would allow me to let go of the Italy ambition, because I’ve added to it the desire to go to Norway, Finland, Sweden, back to Denmark, maybe Iceland, return to Belgium and the Netherlands, more UK and Ireland, more Germany, and on it goes.
A book I started writing on the filmmaker Dziga Vertov (primarily Man with a Movie Camera, in the early 90s. I think I got about 40,000 words or so into it and then abandoned it. I haven’t had the courage to just throw the manuscript away, but there is no book there.
My website jimsehdden.com is a bit derelict. I know nobody looks at it but when I was updating Linkedin and the profile info on all my social media sites, I thought that it was ridiculous that I didn’t have my own site that reflects my life, projects, writing, and media files. It’s underway, but kind of pathetic.
My 12 step program. I’m clean and sober, but during the pandemic (of maybe even before it) I just drifted away from the fellowship and the structure that is the reason I’m alive today. I have to find my way back.
Never finishing Middlemarch, Bleak House, Infinite Jest, anything by Pynchon,
Walking out of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles when it was shown at the AGO around the time I started working there. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon and I thought I was going to die of boredom. Since I have seen several Akerman films that I quite like, and since this is highly regarded by various people that i respect, I’m pretty sure I was just in a pissy mood that day, and that it’s time to Complete watching the film.
Same goes for Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev.
Learning another language. I sleepwalked through French in high school, always getting 80s and 90s, but retaining nothing. I wanted to rectify that, and I’ve had ambitions to learn German and Italian. I did take a few Italian classes with a bunch of friends in 1992 or thereabouts. But I abandoned it. I feel like I still need to master another language even though it will now be harder than if I had done so in my 20s or 30s.
Learning to play piano properly. Learning the guitar. Learning to sing.
Becoming a better cook again.
Learning InDesign again. I understood it enough to lay out simple books years ago. When I look at it now I haven’t a clue how to even start. I need to have that skill in my toolkit again.
Reconnecting with friends who have disappeared from my life for one reason or another,
Is it my new year’s resolution to dive back into some of all of these abandoned dreams?
Maybe. But this year I will be launching a major exhibition (I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces), with an ambitious accompanying book, and I will produce at least 8 other publications for the AGO. I will be working on another exhibition that opens next December that could not be more exciting to me personally (but that’s all I can say right now). I will be continuing to disseminate and promote my book, Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (ed. with Barbara Sternberg, and major contributions by Stephan Broomer and Mike Zryd). I will independently publish a book on the painter Mashel Teitelbaum, and help produce a book on Inuit and Sámi culture. I’m going to continue working on improving my neurochemical and mental health. I’m going to make some unexciting but necessary home improvements. I’m going to travel to NY and maybe SF again…. I hope. I’m starting a music salon with Meredith and Shellie (February? At the Dominion tavern). I’m going to get new glasses, orthotics, work boots. I’m going to the dentist. I’m going to spend time with my father and sister. I’m going to get my recovery program back on track. So maybe I’m not going to learn German
#82: Dave Hickey's Air Guitar
Dave Hickey R.I.P. Hickey is the third cultural critic to die this month who changed my way of thinking. In Hickey's case, his collection of essays, Air Guitar, blew my mind when it needed to be blown. I barely knew his work before Air Guitar, but I read the book when it came out. I was working on a film about Stan Brakhage, and Hickey had a cantankerous, dismissive piece about Warhol and Brakhage films that I found strangely appealing. I didn't agree with it but I still found Hickey's position liberating. There was something energizing about his insistence on speaking personally and honestly about his subjects, about his very active crossing of boundaries, and how that meant a series of "essays on art & democracy", including reflections on Hank WIlliams, Liberace, Cezanne, Perry Mason, LSD, Flaubert, Chet Baker, Lady Godiva, Siegfried and Roy... well, you get the picture. Hickey allowed me to get out of my critical and aesthetic rut.
#81: The Beatles: An Illustrated Record
I think it’s safe to say that this book changed my life as much as any gift. It turns out my musical sensibility was informed as much by reading about it music as it was by listening to it.
For example, for a number of years I was reading rock magazine articles about Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Television, the NY Dolls, and Richard Hell before I heard any of them. By the time I actually heard them, I was already sold. Similarly with the Beatles, by the time I got this book (1975) how much Beatles music had I heard? Barely any. I had a few solo records by the Wings and Lennon, and some random singles like “Photograph”, but in terms of actual Beatles songs I’m pretty sure it was “She Loves You” (we had the single), “All You Need is Love” (the theme song for Family Finder!), “Good Day Sunshine,” “Yellow Submarine”, “Hey Jude”, “Let it Be”, and maybe 3 or 4 more songs. Honestly.
But I was pretty sure the Beatles were my favourite band. This book sealed the deal, even before I had my copies of the blue and red anthologies. Combined, the book and the red and blue anthologies got me through Grade 7 & 8, while punk and new wave were waiting to happen.
I remember the book basically being a comprehensive annotated discography or Beatles records, along with pretty great photographs, press clippings, and quotations. I remember the images with the Maharashi Mahesh Yogi pretty clearly, not to mention the Two Virgins album cover (I was 12!). I also remember that it was pretty critical of the solo albums, especially All Things Must Pass. The latter is considered one of the high achievements of the Beatles solo universe and, over time, I have become more and more partial to the solo records as a whole. They may not be Revolver or Sgt. Pepper’s or The Beatles, but I suspect “the next Beatles album” that many fans wanted to see happen, might have been a dreadful clusterfuck. Maybe. it seems clear to me that at least Jean, Paul and George had solo work to do that would not have been supported by the other Beatles.
Anyhow, many wonderful hours and years with this book. Thanks mom (R.I.P.) and dad. And thanks for the Polaroid Swinger too.
#80: The Polaroid Swinger
For Christmas of 1972 I got a Polaroid Swinger camera. It was my first camera and it was one of my most memorable gifts ever.
However, the word “memorable” is open for discussion. The model I’m showing here was too funky looking to resist, but I think it was discontinued in 1970. I think there were spinoffs of the original Swinger, and that’s what I must have had. Perhaps it was the “Super Swinger,” which was apparently released in 1972 and sounds like my camera. The pictures were tiny, black and white, and expensive. I seem to remember that an 8-pack costs something like $20, 50 years ago! I was nine years old and had no income.
My memory also tells me that I got the camera in 1974, even though it can’t be.
I LOVED this camera. I still have a handful of photos I took with it. My love of taking pictures (there is no term for that outside of shutter bug) went dormant for five or six years after that when I bought a Nikon EM, and others that followed, until I settled on my iPhone camera like everyone else.
PS: since I was about 17, I have been saying to my various families that we should give up gifts and only make charitable donations this time of year. I still feel nauseous at how much conspicuous consumption and self-centred expectation dominate our souls this time of year. Did I get it? Is it the right size? Is my gift to them better than theirs to me? Is that good or bad? When can I return it? Is it fake? Is it generic? Is it a regift? Who gives gift cards anyway? Who gives cash anyway (actually, no one says that)? A panettone again?
All of my liberal guilt and disgust aside, though, I realize that a) I really like giving people gifts and b) a number of gifts have really changed my life, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in large ways, when you get right down to it. The Swinger was one of them.
#79: Jim at 14 (years of sobriety)
Jim at 14
October 23, 2021
I have been clean and sober since October 23, 2007. I have not had an alcoholic beverage or an unprescribed drug since that date.
Since I don’t even crave alcohol or drugs today, it seems like an eternity. But since I know how easily that can change, how my addiction can turn on me, it also seems like only yesterday.
From a very young age when I had tiny sips of booze at Christmas, I fell in love with it and obsessed it all year round. When I was 12, though, I began reading all kinds of books about addiction and pop psychology. A few years before that my father went to George Brown College to study to be an addictions counsellor, something that intrigued him after his own path to sobriety began at the former Donwood Institute. He didn’t follow through with that, but I was afforded a library on the various facets of addiction and sobriety as the world understood those concepts in the mid-1970s. On top of that, I was attracted to novels (what we would now call YA literature) like Tuned Out, mostly drug and addiction scare literature, and then books like Sara T, Portrait of an Alcoholic (also an after school special). And, for a few years there, my musical hero was Randy Bachman, a Mormon and therefore straightedge.
The point of all this is that early education on alcoholism and addiction did not temper my excessive alcohol and drug use. I had the negative and positive example of my father and various people he met at Donwood. I had all those books and pamphlets and novels and short stories and films and TV shows, not to mention the example of my childhood musical hero Randy Bachman. Through grades 7 and 8 I had decided there was no reason to ever drink or drug.
When I was 14, in grade nine, I started getting alcohol here and there, at first to fit in with people I wanted to befriend, and then because I loved the feeling of oblivion, letting go of me and my fears. Within about a year, however, I discovered that alcohol (and drugs) allowed me to cope with life even when I wasn’t partying. It helped me ask girls out on dates, it helped me in social situations where others weren’t partying, it accompanied me at practically every live performance (and I went to scads and scads of them), through pre-drinking, sneaking out at intermission to go to, say, to The Morrissey when I was watching a show at the Concert Hall, and by sneaking alcohol into venues in craftier and craftier ways. I even occasionally drank at movies, eventually needing the sedative effect to keep me grounded. I also took all manner of drugs - hash, mushrooms, LSD, but mainly pills, uppers, downers, and all-arounders. Alcohol was my drug of choice but if you took it away, I’d have used more of those pills, more regularly. I believe I am an addict with a preference for alcohol, but I don’t believe, at base, that I have a different affliction than someone addicted to crack or opiates (when did we start saying opioids?)
When I was 18 I started suffering consequences, including troubles with the law, but at this point and right until the end of my drinking, it was all about getting away with it, because nothing mattered more than getting out of myself. I remember when I was waiting for trial, my father, who was supportive throughout, pleaded with me not to go into any bars until I was free and clear. I was underage after all and there was no reason to throw gasoline on fire. I agreed with my father, and then that night I went to the Jolly Miller with my sister. This is not a bar I had ever been to, but the opportunity to have another night of drinking despite my father asking me stay out of trouble till my trial, on and despite my agreement with him, was too great. I went to the bar, got drunk, and got into an outrageous argument with the bouncer’s girlfriend. For some reason, the bouncer had to call the cops. They weren’t after me, but I was looking for trouble.
When I was 20 years old, after an out of control weekend drinking with a friend in Peterborough, I woke up with the worst possible shakes. We were at his parents house and there was no possibility of having a drink. I also realized that I had lost my glasses, the beginning of an expensive pattern that I continued right until my last relapse (I hope) 14 years ago. In Peterborough it meant insanely wandering around the whole city and Trent campus looking for my glasses. We never found them. I swore off alcohol forever, got on the bus to Toronto because I was working in the comic book store that night. On the way to my shift, I picked up a 24, and took the edge off throughout my shift.
I spent the next 24 years meaning to quit, sometimes quitting for 2 weeks, 6 months, and once even 15 months. But each time I reserved my right to drink again, which is exactly what I did. It was killing me, it was damaging the person that I wanted to be, but drinking was too compelling. And when it stopped being compelling, I still couldn’t stop, even though I wanted desperately to quit. I needed to drink to deal with the effects of my drinking. I would drink, or take a sleeping pill, to get rid of the shakes. I would be so thankful when the shakes had passed, I was so happy to be alive that I found myself forever swearing off again… until around 4pm, and then I would end up in a local dive bar just for one or two (that would turn into 8 or so), then to a LCBO to make sure I could maintain the inebriated equilibrium, only to repeat the cycle the next day. My whole life was like this quote from Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde”:
“Mrs. Morse had been drinking all afternoon; while she dressed to go out, she felt herself rising pleasurably from drowsiness to high spirits. But as she came out into the street the effects of the whisky deserted her completely, and she was filled with a slow, grinding wretchedness so horrible that she stood swaying on the pavement, unable for a moment to move forward.”
In the spring of 2007, I managed to back myself into a corner pretty badly, and I had to agree to get sober. I found myself drifting from private counselling to a daytox program to finding myself drunk and, to top it all off, behaviour that increasingly suggested I was manic-depressive (a term I prefer to bipolar disorder). The counsellor at the daytox program proved to be a life saver, eventually persuading me to attend recovery meetings. I eventually ended up at Homewood Psychiatric Hospital in Guelph. Homewood was a civilized but firm institution that allowed me to dry out, to start getting honest with myself and others, to understanding that the only solution they had was to get us on a lifelong pattern of 12 Step meetings and, as a bit of a sidebar, allowing me quality time with a psychiatrist where she put me on lithium carbonate, which I take to this date. It regulates mental/emotional cycles and contributes to my sobriety: my alcoholism wasn’t caused by my manic-depression, but they feed each other.
It’s interesting that I can take pills for manic-depression, my neurological disorder, achy muscles, sunlight deprivation, and other issues that come and go. For my alcoholism there are no such pills and, though I applaud the various scientists working on the case, I do wonder if they will ever succeed. So far there have been pills that make you violently ill if you drink (antabuse), naltrexone to eliminate the pleasure and reduce the cravings, campral for withdrawal symptoms, and a handful of others. These are not so compelling sounding. For a drug to be effective in “curing” my alcoholism, it would have to take away my self-centeredness, my fear, and my resentments. Addicts don’t have a monopoly on these character defects but, for me, when they are inflamed, there is always a danger that I might drink, drug and fall into a melodramatic, melancholic, poor-me (pour me a drink), self-flagellating, stupor.
So part of my recovery has been doing the things I have to keep those defects at bay. If you know me, you might wonder if that’s working, but I’m pretty sure it is. I’m pretty sure the combination of things that I am doing in that regard (as well as taking lithium) has made me more chill (or at least neutral). I am not prone to disappointment or anger, but I’m also less prone to excitement and anticipation. Something may be lost in tamping down these emotions, but I can’t afford to fall off the wagon. I’m pretty sure I might die.
The most important part of my recovery though, has been the sense of community that I’ve found in fellow alcoholics and addicts, the idea that I’m “no longer alone”. That idea has had many meanings over the years, but it is the constant, and I fully expect it to be the core of my recovery as I go forward.
(PS: I have the occasional beef with the way some people interpret 12 step groups, but, rest assured, I have been an anti-authoritarian atheist the whole time I’ve been involved and it has not been a problem. I have been allowed to get and stay sober, be part of the community, do service on every level, and voice my opinion on all matters.)
#78 Labour Day (The Mother of all Sundays, the worst possible Sunday Doom Syndrome)
Labour Day.
A virtual Sunday. The most virtual Sundays of all of the Holidays.
Everything I’ve never accomplished comes back to haunt me. Every flawed project, and every disaster comes back to haunt me.
Everything I fear about the future - work, health, family, friends - gives me anxiety. I jump to conclusions all over the place. I am overwhelmed by what I need to do, and what might happen to me. I am full of worry and stress about the consequences of my actions. I think I can’t cope.
I’m tense and nervous and can’t relax.
Low-grade existential dread. I read somewhere that someone described as wondering if she had been productive enough AND whether I had relaxed enough on the weekend/long weekend/holiday/vacation. The answer is “no” to both questions.
This is the burnout syndrome common to the millennial generation, but I’m almost 58. Damn: more anxiety. Have I accomplished enough? Have I been a good father, friend, husband, son, employee? I can’t bear to think about it.
Whether I sleep any other night of the week, I am typically up all night on Fridays, the pressure to “relax” and “let go of the week” too much, so the occasion to do so backfires. Sunday is the other night I can’t generally sleep. And then it’s Sunday: did I get enough done? Did I relax enough? Can I fix everything, finish everything, learn everything,, and do and be everything?
This is ridiculous, but as tangible as can be. This feeling, and “the Sunday Doom Syndrome” in general goes back to when I was 11 and beginning grade 7 at Henry Hudson Senior Public School (still there). I don’t think think there’s much that can actually be done about it, aside from the mindfulness-meditation-yoga-gratitude-YouTube videos-CBD gummies lazy susan of modern non-pharmaceutical treatments for the range of conditions that ail and define us: PTSD, ADHD, OCD, borderline personality disorder, bipolar affective disorder, paranoia, anxiety disorders, schizoaffective disorder, alcoholism and addiction, eating disorders, and on it goes.
Those are good things and, in the form of the AA steps have been largely responsible for saving my ass. The AA steps can be summed up as Surrender, Hope, Commitment, Honesty, Truth (Disclosure?), Willingness, Humility, Reflection, Amendment, Vigilance, Attunement, (Meditation/Mindfulness/Prayer), Service. Something like that. When I have been actively practicing the steps, I swear I’ve been less tormented by Sunday Doom as I am today.
So the answer is obvious.
An end to the current phase of capitalism would be a start. Not that long ago, when I would have been a coal miner in Scotland or in Quebec, my days would have been longer, entirely toxic, and with death perpetually at the door. My only respite would be a Sunday that would revolve around church, its own form of torture for me, despite, I’m sure, momentary blasts of pressure from being part of the congregation, and the joy of music that comes with that. But, a few hours later, back in the mine. We’ve made a tiny bit of progress but, given the massive amount of wealth we’ve managed to generate, we seem stuck with the current model of 40 hours (or much more if you’re “management”), with relatively little time actually to exist as homo ludens (playing-humans) as opposed to home sapiens (thinking-humans or homo ergaster, working-humans).
I can’t actually abolish capitalism, or even postindustrial capitalism or whatever you want to call this strange “wonderland”, which is too bad.
I am stuck then with that lazy susan, starting with acceptance, and then maybe a mix of gratitude and meditation, if that can be separated from rumination. And then - action. Like, why I am I writing this and not reading/ Or at a film? Or meeting with like-minded souls in AA? Or getting in touch with this person and that person and so forth? Or playing with Meredith’s cat, Bob Fosse? Or maybe organizing the basement (which I have turned into a creative activity in the past). Or perusing the archives at the TPL? Or wandering through some Toronto park? Or, perhaps (and only perhaps), cooking, but that activity is so full of anxiety and negative feelings, that I’m not sure I can move it back to where it might be helpful for some time.
Otherwise I am simply listening to Nick Cave and hoping that something transformational will come from it.
#77: Stan Brakhage and Ronald Johnson in Conversation (1996)
I post this issue of the Chicago Review here because there is a discussion between the late Stan Brakhage and the late poet (from Topeka, Kansas), in Boulder, Colorado in 1996. The interview was conducted by me -such that it needed “conducting” - for the purpose of inclusion in my 1998 documentary, Brakhage. Like much of what I recorded during that time, it wasn’t usable at all in my introduction to Stan, but it made for good for print transcription. R.I.P. Stan and Ronald. http://docshare01.docshare.tips/files/14733/147330535.pdf
#76: The Avenue Open Kitchen
50 Lunches
Lunch #2: Avenue Open Kitchen
7 Camden St, Toronto, ON M5V 1V2
(416) 504-7131
I love diners. Greasy spoons of the "cheeseburger, cheeseburger" variety. DIners and their close cousins NY delis, "dining rooms," "family restaurants", fish and chip joints, and value steakhouses.. Downtown Toronto 25 years used to be teeming with them: everything from the Lite Bite (Queen & Spadina - my favorite), the Stem, Murray's, Switzer's, The Bagel, The Varsity, The New Varsity (another favorite), Student's, The Grad Restaurant, Fran's various locations, Al's (Queen & Duncan), Nick's (Queen & Duncan - am I right about these two?), Lindy's, the Tulip, Senior's, Mars, Kos, the Patrician, the Skyline, Sunset (it used to be just one location!), the Golden Gate/GOOF, Elvis Restaurant. They haven’t completely disappeared, but they’re getting close.
The Avenue Open Kitchen opened in 1983. I was introduced to it in early 1999 by by friend Dan Donaldson when I was working at Bruce Mau Design. I loved like I’ve loved almost no other restaurant and, as it turns out, from 1999 to 2010, when I left Bruce Mau Design, I ate there at least 1000 times. That sounds insane, even impossible, but it’s only an average of twice a week over ten years. Even counting for the years where we barely left the studio, and even counting for all the time I spent travelling, it’s still probably 1000 visits.
It’s tiny and cramped and comfortable, a little bit like some diners in New York, only a little more casual. As for the food, they make a great breakfast and they’re excellent with the basics - smoked meat, club sandwich, etc. - but I tend to get the entrees: blade or prime rib roast; shepherd’s pie; macaroni and cheese; beefaroni; pork chops; and other things along those lines.
I am very comfortable in such places and seek them out wherever I am. I believe that 900 of my 1000 visits have been alone, and that is almost my preference. I do always run into certain characters there. For example, I suspect architect John Shnier has been to the Avenue even more times than I have and, when he he lived and worked in the area, the same was true of Jason Halter.
If you’re willing to go to lunch with me, I will always be happy to go to the Avenue.
(As far as this list is concerned, this is the farthest from the AGO that we will venture.)
#75: Listening in Depth
Memo to Alan Zweig: I’ve been meaning to mention that this was one of the first albums I ever heard it. It was part of a tiny eclectic collection we had around 1967 when I was three or four, and that ranged from Johnny Cash to Bert Kaempfert. I have fond memories of any and every record from back then but especially this classic of parallel 60s listening. My sister retrieved this from my father’s house, and I was surprised/not surprised that there wasn’t a scratch on it: we were most careful to be on our high-fidelity best when playing it. Though I was most enchanted by the Sounds in Motion collage when I was young, I remember pulling it out of retirement when I was a teenager, to discover that my earliest listening experiences included Stravinsky, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, Bartok, and Duke Ellington, alongside Percy Faith, Johnny Mathis, and Polly Bergen. I look forward to seeing you soon.
#74: Beans/Kenesatake Resistance
A film I love today #13. #afilmilovetoday Thus far, each film I've written on has had a link to a free online source for the whole film. I'm breaking that pattern with the first film I've seen a movie theatre since February, 2020, Beans. Beans is a 2020 Canadian drama film directed by Mohawk filmmaker Tracey Deer. I only identify her as Mohawk because it's clear that the content is somewhat autobiographical, looking at it does through the 1990 Oka Crisis, or Kenesatake Resistance. Deer lived through this as a child, thus informing the experience of the lead character, Tekehentahkhwa (nicknamed "Beans").
This isn't the place for reviews or the like, though it is tempting to write the like. I'll just say that I loved everything about this film, including the fact that it made me think about how much my own take on the Oka crisis has evolved, especially in recent years. At the time, I was I was just finishing my M.A. in Political Science, where I had a heavily Marxist worldview. I was beginning my (short-lived) career as a professional film programmer, and found myself at the Montreal Film Festival near the end of the standoff/crisis (both inadequate terms). I considered myself "with" the Mohawks, and against Bourassa (so much so), Mulroney, the RCMP, the Quebec provincial policy, and the armed forces, and the needs of bloody golfers. But, aside from thinking it was a miracle that I made it to and from Montreal without any aftershock from the bridge closures, I didn't really connect this to my life, my existence as a "Canadian". It still seemed like an isolated incident, and not one only understood as part of "Canadian" history, which is closer to where I'm at today.
I think at the time I was probably fixated on the history of the Mohawk people and the Wyandot (Huron) people, and their relationship to the Jesuits, and all that. The history is long, complicated hard-to-believe.
I think it's safe to say that, despite my obliviousness at the time, this was where my understanding of Canadian history as fundamentally an act of domination by Europeans against the indigenous populations, began. The lights were turned on, and then up during the Canada 150 "celebrations" that were impossible to celebrate, without qualification after qualification (as the AGO's show Every.Now.Then demonstrated powerfully).
The Kenesatake Resistance made evident to European settlers like myself the nature of the conflict between the Mohawks of Kanehsatake and the Canadian government, and the had lives and violent existence the Mohawks continued to suffer. It made evident the complete failure of the political system, and the deep racism in Canadian society. Beans was so powerful for in that it found a way to go back to these facts, and back to the lived violence of Mohawk people, in ways that (because of empathy? creativity?) might just reawaken inquiry, demands for justice, and effective action.
#73: Jim Shedden and Bruce Elder discuss "Brakhage in Toronto"
Recorded in Toronto, December 1, 2019.
Jim Shedden: I found this quite horrific poster — I guess Kate did it, maybe Paul — where we did a double bill, I guess probably for Halloween, with David Lynch’s The Grandmother and The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes. That could not have been the first. But you know what there was though — he came to town and he did a screening at Ryerson and a screening at the Funnel.
Bruce Elder: Yes.
S: And I went to both of those screenings. And that was that. And that was when he met Marilyn.
E: Yes, that’s right. And that was shortly after Stan and I had become — when Stan acknowledged me as a colleague. It was an interesting relation, up to that point. I first met Stan in peculiar circumstances, and I think it’s worth describing these peculiar circumstances, because in a certain sense, our first encounter established the cast of our relationship. Or it provided some of the intellectual underpinnings of that relationship, because, as I alluded to a moment ago, at first our relationship was very formal and professional, if you will. I was a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Toronto, and not long after I did my comprehensive examinations, the graduate program director convened a meeting of all of the graduate students in the department. In those days you had those kind of poster-board flip charts, and he had a prepared set of flip charts showing how many students there were in top-drawer universities in North American enrolled in PhD programs, how many retirements they expected over the next several years, what enrolments they were expecting over the next several years in universities, et cetera. The story was that none of you have a chance of getting a job. That’s basically what you’re looking at.
S: It’s amazing that things got so much worse, and they got less honest. At least then they told you the truth. I had so many friends with PhDs who were, like, suddenly shocked.
E: [Laughing] Yes, that is a huge change. But I was not from a wealthy family, I was from a hardscrabble family, and there was not the same level of funding for graduate students that there is now. One of the things I found — Cathy found actually — going through the file folders was the offer for the graduate assistantship that I would get and how much they would pay me. I had even forgotten that they were prepared to pay, but there wasn’t the same level of funding that there is now. And the idea of years with no income and facing tuition and living expenses and racking up a huge debt and then not finding an academic position seemed kind of preposterous. It didn’t seem something that I could afford to do, simply as that. So, I thought what might I do with my life — moreover, at the time, I was already publishing poetry, and that was certainly what I knew I wanted the focus of my life to be. I wanted to be a writer, a poet, and so I realized I was facing the question that all creative people face, “How do I manage to pay the bills? How do I keep the wolf away from the door?” There’s no way that publishing poetry is going to pay the bills and pay the rent and keep the wolf away from the door — I have to figure out something. And again, while I was at University of Toronto, there was an ad in the Varsity — a fellow who was setting up a film company to make instructional documentaries. This was out in Whitechurch-Stouffville, and I can remember going out and meeting this fellow. I thought, “Maybe I can make a living making instructional movies,” because in those days there was a market for that kind of film, and film distributors, if they did their job well, they were making reasonable incomes, and the filmmakers providing the material to these people were doing OK. There were several companies in Toronto that had full-time staff making documentaries of a more instructional character, so I thought, “I could do that.” Since the apple never really falls very far from the tree, I could be a teacher in that way rather than in the university. That seemed like a good idea, but I realized I didn’t have any knowledge about how to make a film. As a graduate student at the University of Toronto, I had a certain interest in learning about film. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a filmmaker, but that was the era of cinephilia. Anybody who was interested in contemporary art, contemporary literature, contemporary painting, contemporary culture, would be interested in the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Fellini and the Taviani brothers …
S: Cassavettes …
E: Exactly. Bresson, who was a great passion of mine — I was already very very enthusiastic about Bresson’s films; Antonioni — filmmakers who have continued to interest me right to the present. Anyway, I thought that it might be a good idea to learn a little bit about the craft of film. Handling the materials helps you think about what it is that camera people and directors and editors are doing, how a film gets put together, how meaning gets made in cinema. So, I had gone to take an evening course at Ryerson, and they opened up a program. They were getting ready to become a university, and they offered a fourth-year course, if you will, for students who had graduated from the three-year diploma program, so I thought I would go and do that advanced diploma. They opened that advanced diploma programme as a kind of experimental curriculum to help them form a four-year program ending in a degree. While I was there, they asked me to stay behind and set up the courses in film history and film theory — subjects that I hadn’t studied. I might say, in fairness to Ryerson, there were not film programs at the time. Peter Harcourt was offering a course in film studies at Kingston, and Grahame Petrie at McMaster offered a course in introductory film studies. Joe Medchuk, around the same time, was hired, I think in the architecture school, to give a class in film to people in architecture.
S: Just like today, the art studio program is in architecture at U of T now, too, so nothing changes.
E: [Laughing] Exactly, the circle keeps turning. So, in fairness to Ryerson, there weren’t people, and I was after all interested in poetry, I had read aesthetics, I had a certain interest in critical studies, critical theory, critical analysis, so I think they thought that I might be able teach myself the rudiments of film studies, figure out what a course might have to be, and supplement the existing practical curriculum in filmmaking with film studies courses. Well, the summer before I was to begin teaching, I became anxious — “What am I gonna do in these courses?” — and I was flipping through a filmmakers’ newsletter, which also happened to contain an article by one Stan Brakhage titled “In defense of the amateur,” and I read it with some interest, but what I was most intrigued by was an advertisement: “Summer institute in film studies.” It was to be in New England, that year, in Durham, New Hampshire, and there would be a course in documentary taught be Ricky Leacock, a course in scriptwriting taught be George Bluestone, a class in photography taught by Jerome Liebling — the year before, it had been offered by Diane Arbus. Somehow Ed Emshwiller was involved — I’ve forgotten if he was giving a course or was there as a speaker or whatever it was. And there was a class in teaching film studies, by a chap by the name of Gerald O’Grady. It turned out that Gerald O’Grady had put together the summer institute — that was an O’Grady extension activity. So, Cathy enrolled in the class in teaching film studies; I enrolled in the course in scriptwriting; and my parents loaned me their car for the three weeks of the course. We drove down to New England — many adventures in Boston in getting there, but I’ll let those go — and the classes began. Cathy came back for lunch after the morning of the first session and was talking about Gerry O’Grady and what a wonderful fellow he was, and that he was teaching at Rice University and was giving advice in the high schools and colleges and even public schools in Rice, and that he had a course at Columbia, and that he was also teaching an extension class at NYU, and that his home appointment was at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and that he was on airplanes every day of the week, and so on. And I thought, this guy sounds like an operator. He sounds too ambitious and entrepreneurial to be a genuine scholar. I was kind of sniffy and thought he must be a terribly ambitious entrepreneurial sort, not spending enough hours in libraries and too many hours on planes promoting himself or whatever. But — let that go — Gerry insisted that all of the faculty who were teaching would do a presentation in the evening to the entire group of students — excellent idea as far as I’m concerned. Ricky Leacock would come and give a session on his films to everybody who was involved in the summer institute; Jerome Liebling would talk about his work in documentary films and how photography had led him to documentary filmmaking; and, one evening, Stan Brakhage, who was also teaching there that year, gave a session on his films. I saw the films Western History, Window Water Baby Moving, Door, I can’t remember what else, but certainly those films in that first session, and I knew that this was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life — that this was the new poetry. Of course, I had been aware of McLuhan’s writings, and sat in on classes that McLuhan gave, and went to public talks that McLuhan was giving at the University of Toronto. My brother used to participate in the seminars, and he brought home many, many stories about the wondrous work that — my brother, who worked with Northrop Frye, also brought back tales of what was going on in the science and technology seminar at the coach house. And I looked at this work by Brakhage, and I just said, this is the new poetry. This is electric poetry. This is poetry for our time. This is what I need to be doing.
S: Was this in 1972?
E: Yes. And so convinced was I of that, by the way, that I’d gone down the summer before I had begun teaching, and I had no income whatsoever — we were both living on Cathy’s modest salary — and I told myself I needed a camera, and walked along the corridor at the school, and I saw a sign, “Bolex for sale.” It was a Bolex REX-5 with a 12:120 Angenieux lens, a motor for the camera, a 10mm lens, a Macro Switar, and a 25mm and a 75mm lens, and an array of accessories for the Bolex — all of this for five hundred dollars. Well, that would be five thousand, seven thousand dollars now, but in comparison to what Bolexes were going for at that time, it was an absolute bargain.
S: Then you need to buy film.
E: [Laughing] Yes. And it turned out, the chap demanded cash. He wouldn’t take cheque, he would take any other form of payment; he wanted cash. So, I went over to the administrative office for the summer institute in film studies, and asked Peter Feinstein, who later became Hollis Frampton’s manager, if you will. He then went off and began administering projects in medical research et cetera, but for a time he was deeply involved in experimental film, and Hollis’s manager. So, I walked in — here I am, from Ontario, this is New Hampshire — and I said, “Could you give me five hundred dollars, and I’ll give you a cheque in return?” “Oh sure, no problem.” [Laughing] and he handed me the five hundred dollars and we went out to buy the camera. We had to go to the back woods of New Hampshire, which is really lovely — it really is wild — and this chap had been building himself an A-frame house out in the woods. Very much an Emersonian-Thoreauian sense of things — we have to get back to the land and back to nature. There really was a strong strain of this among certain people in New Hampshire, and I guess he decided that his A-frame was more important to him than the Bolex. He had been at the summer institute the summer before, and he had heard Stan Brakhage speak. [Laughs] And when he heard Brakhage speak he was absolutely converted, and he had to immediately buy himself a camera and start on the path to become an avant-garde filmmaker. Anyway, after this, I began sitting in on Brakhage’s classes on the songs.
S: So, at this point, when you saw Brakhage’s films, you hadn’t seen very many other experimental films.
E: I had seen several works by the Kuchar brothers. I had seen one of the first screenings — not the first, but a very early screening — of Michael Snow’s Wavelength. I was utterly appalled at the response of the audience to it. You’ve heard stories of the reception of Michael Snow’s early films in the early days, and there was jeering and hissing and booing. I was involved in organizing the arts festival at McMaster, and we had brought up programs of experimental film, and we already had enough of a sense of how you could fund bringing up poets and writers — I brought up Allan Ginsburg and Kenneth Rexroth; Susan Sontag came; the Exploding Plastic Inevitable Came, and in fact went to a party in Dundas, Ontario at Peter Rowe’s house with Nico and Gerard Malanga. And shortly after that, McMaster had also brought in one of the very early screenings in Canada of Chelsea Girls. It happened on a day not too unlike this — it was such a trek to get to McMaster for the screening, and there was almost nobody there, because already the snow was two feet high by the time the film was over, and it was almost impossible to get home. Anyway, to fund the arts events, we also arranged programmes of work by the Kuchars — Hold Me When I’m Naked and Sins of the Flesh, and of course we put those in the engineering department’s building, so the engineers would see the posters for Hold Me When I’m Naked. And they flocked to it of course — helped pay the bills — and then they’d leave early. This wasn’t exactly the film that they were expecting to see. [Laughing]
S: So, you were versed already, but it was Brakhage that —
E: Brakhage was missing. We had also met — speaking of trying to learn a little bit about the cinema — Cathy and I also took an extension course that summer in filmmaking, and it was experimental filmmaking, and it was taught by a chap by the name of Henry Zemel, a name that may ring a bell for you or may not. Henry Zemel was a very good friend of Leonard Cohen — in fact, when Leonard was in distress in Nashville, at that time, Henry Zemel had to go down to assuage his anxieties and to talk him into continuing the work that he had gone to Nashville to do — and Henry Zemel had worked at the National Film Board and was friends with Arthur Lipsett. We had already screened work by Arthur Lipsett. I knew of Lipsett’s films by this time — was really quite familiar with them — and then Cathy and I met Lipsett on that occasion. Lipsett films were among the first that I showed to Stan Brakhage when he was exploring Canadian films. The first, of course, was Hart of London, but that was followed very shortly by other work by Jack Chambers and Arthur Lipsett. But there was a confluence of influences at that session in New England. First, encountering the work of Stan Brakhage, seeing this new electric poetry. O’Grady is, of course, utterly McLuhanite in his outlook. He revered Marshall McLuhan; he thought that McLuhan was one of the great theorists of art at the time. He was very deeply impressed by McLuhan’s interest in pedagogy, and the importance of thinking about media in order to understand its potentially baleful effects, and perhaps steering our understanding of altering our nervous system in a way that we would be able to respond more effectively to the new media. And of course, that had been a strain of thinking that I had been exposed to before going, but O’Grady’s incredible passion for this really had an impact on me. And then, finally, after seeing Brakhage’s film that evening, the next day Brakhage was signing copies of the book that he had just released — his first book, The Brakhage Lectures, in the Good Lion Press edition. I don’t know if you remember that …
S: I think so — those are the lectures on Meliès and that sort of thing?
E: Yes. And the first was “Now let me say it to you just as clearly as I can, the search for an art either in the making or appreciation is the most terrifying adventure known to man, for it will threat the soul with terrible death and it will leave the mind moving,” et cetera. [Laughing] Anyway, I of course, after seeing the films, wanted a copy of the Good Lion Press edition of The Brakhage Lectures, and asked him to sign it for me. He was always a very gentlemanly sort, and so, when I went up, “Please Mr. Brakhage, will you sign my book?” he asked me why I had come to the institute and what I was interested in, and I guess I had told him too that the films had had really a great impact on me, and that I was an aspiring poet — I was already a published poet, in fact — and I knew this was the new poetry of our age. So, he said, in signing, “Have you read Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era?” I said no, I hadn’t read it. And he said, “Please, read it. It’s the most important piece of critical writing on poetry that I’ve read in decades.” So, I did. And of course, Hugh Kenner was also a student of Marshall McLuhan. I think Kenner’s dissertation was the second dissertation that McLuhan had supervised. McLuhan introduced Kenner to Ezra Pound on a trip to a conference and so on. So, in a way, that reading of Pound’s verse just re-emphasized for me a new way of thinking about verse, a way of thinking about verse that was rooted in McLuhan’s ideas of the transition from written forms to a return to oral forms in poetry. So, all that came together at once in that first encounter, and really, it’s continued to shape how I think about Stan Brakhage. We’d see each other from time to time. I found ways to invite Stan to come to Toronto and present works. This was in ’74–‘76 — that period of time, right up I guess until around 1981 or ’82. I don’t think I invited him between ’82 and ’86. But, from time to time, I was able to invite Stan to Toronto. He was always very cordial, very gentlemanly, very kind, but it was very clear that he saw me as an academic. He began to read from time to time pieces that I had written, and moreover he had heard of films that I was making, and knew that they were growing longer. Long films, for him, were — despite his having made The Art of Vision — associated with structural films, and structural films, for him, were a moral failure, and I do mean not simply aesthetic, but an aesthetic moral failure.
S: He had to kind of re-construct that idea later as he started to watch films again. But I’ve seen him say that. I even remember telling that story about the fateful visit — he was terrified of having to watch Lamentations, because it was not only long, it was really long, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to like it.
E: It was actually at Miami. Until that time, as I say, Stan thought of me as a critic, an intellectual — a dry-as-dust intellectual — who would probably be making very, very derivative work in the structural vein. I remember, he had come up to show The Text of Light, and he saw me and Cathy in the audience at the end of the screening, and he called us over, and he said, “Why don’t you come out to … we’ll go out for coffee together,” and another couple he saw in the audience at the time were Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, and he invited Michael and Joyce to join Cathy and me and him and Joe Medjuck and Linda Beath, who had decided to distribute The Text of Light, for a coffee. And we went to the Courtyard Café for a coffee — I don’t know if you remember what the Courtyard Café was, but it was pretty prestigious, and the cost of a coffee and a cake was absolutely extraordinary. So of course, you could imagine this of Linda Beath, it was all, as they say, Dutch treat, so Michael and Joyce had to pay for their coffee and cake, and Cathy and I, and we were wondering how we were going to make the bill. Michael Snow looked at the bill and winced and said, “Ah well, easy come, easy go.” But Stan was very — he acknowledged that he knew me, that I was working on experimental film, that I was a critic of experimental film, and he was certainly very gentlemanly, but he thought I was a dry-as-dust academic. And then, we were invited by Bruce Posner, actually, to an even in Miami — Miami Waves I think it was called, if I’m not mistaken. Another piece shown on that occasion, by the way, was a slideshow by one Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, also shown at that event, and Sandra Davis was there showing Maternal Filigree. It was a lovely, lovely event.
S: And what were you showing?
E: I had one program that was short films and The Art of Worldly Wisdom. We hadn’t really said anything by this time. And then the next day was Illuminated Texts, and I ran into Stan in the washroom, who told me he was looking forward to seeing the film after the previous evening’s, and he was really taken with the previous evening’s work. And then, after Illuminated Texts was over — you recall, I’m sure, how effusive Stan could be when he was impressed with a work that he had seen, and he’d certainly speak up from the audience and ask questions and deliver a discourse on the work.
S: “This is the best lasagna. The platonic essence of lasanganess.”
E: [Laughing] Yes, it was that sort of style.
S: I never felt like he was lying when he said that, by the way.
E: No, no, this was deeply felt passion. And he was capable of being really carried away by work that touched him. And it was evident at the end of the screening that Illuminated Texts had had a great impact on him. I can still remember what it was that he began talking about at the end of the film. First of all, he knew it was on history and technology and nature and so on — he identified those themes in the work — but he also saw in in a contrast — and there is, absolutely is — between geometric forms of construction and natural forms, between biomorphic forms and geometric forms. And of course, he associated geometric forms with anxiety, fear — an attempt to control nature, to impose a grid on nature — while natural forms were the expressions of a vital urge within nature itself. I mean, that’s one of the great themes of Dog Star Man, isn’t it, which is also, in a sense, an extended creation myth repeated over and over. It’s not that the myth begins and we see nature evolving, but it is about the creative force that is running through nature and bringing all that is to be, creating all of the beautiful luminous particulars. So, he was taken by the contrast between geometric forms and natural forms, which of course comes out again in the Telling Time book — there’s one article specifically on that, and then he also alludes to that theme in writing about other works of mine. But it was hilarious about Miami. These were the days in which the Colombian cartel was shipping drugs into the United States through Miami — you know that popular television program. [Laughing]
S: I’ve seen the Brian De Palma film with Al Pacino. [Laughing]
E: Anyway, so he’d describe afterwards how we became friends — and he did tell the story that I think you’ve heard, that when he was invited he looked at the program and he saw, well, they’re going to show the hour-long film and this and that, and the three-hour film — thank goodness they’re showing the eight-hour long film! But behind that story is too — what’s hidden within it … well, not so hidden, but what motivates it of course is a sense that when he’s invited to events and can see other experimental filmmakers’ work, that he was obliged to go and see it and to talk with them about it and so on. If Lamentations had been there, “Oh my god, I’d have had to go to the eight-hour long film, because I feel that’s my obligation to the field.” So that’s something in itself. Anyhow.
S: Before we move on from there, I wonder what he thought of Nan Goldin. I mean, I don’t need to know, but I’m just saying.
E: I don’t think that ever came up with us. I remember going over and taking a look at it and being quite shocked with its explicitness, but of course that’s a kind of social documentation. I think she’s a very, very good photography. I don’t want to be taken as making derogatory comments when I say this about it. But, mostly, it’s social documentation of people at the edges, at the margins of society. It’s a document of a subculture, and that’s a kind of a genre that … I had known Tulsa, Larry Clark’s book, from long before that, and Chelsea Girls and so on. And yes, I think Stan had been living amongst … that documentation of a subculture was a common practice in New York among acquaintances of Stan’s. So, I don’t think he would have seen it as a shocking new work. So, anyway, he’d tell this story of how he saw the program before and then he was so glad that they were only showing the three-hour long film by Bruce Elder and that he wouldn’t have to see the eight-hour long film. So, there we all were — Sandra and Stan and Cathy and me and Bruce Posner — in this swamp in Miami, and bullets are flying over our heads while the movies are being shown. He really did describe it that way as though he we were in the den of thieves, a very dangerous, dangerous place, and here are these small band of people interested in avant-garde art showing their work to one another, and he sees this work and he just falls in love with it. And, in fact, I knew actually, before we had gone to Miami that I’d be seeing Stan again later that year, because I had been asked who I would invite to the Kodak Lectures, which were a series of lectures at Ryerson with really major artists. The funding was very good; we paid a pretty good fee for people to come to the events. Robert Frank came.
S: He did that one at Innis — I mean at the AGO.
E: That’s right. Oh, there were two. The first was actually in the bottom of the library building. There was L72. You’ve been in that building — the same room that Jonas gave his Kodak Lecture in when Stan died.
S: Right. I remember doing it. We collaborated on the Frank. Don allowed us to do that, which was kind of crazy because we only had two hundred seats, and it could have been in Ryerson Theatre or something, easily. He was funny. Remember, here was his lecture, his actual lecture that day. [Long pause] Any questions?
E: [Laughing]
S: And it was great. It was perfect. That was all he had to do.
E: The talk at Ryerson was so — I can remember going out to dinner with him before. He had come partly because he was friends with David Heath, a guy I liked very much.
S: I’ve never met David Heath, but I have the important book.
E: Dialogue with Solitude. And the book that came out of the Art Centre in Kansas … Manifestations, was that it? No. I can’t remember the title of the book. It had something to do with … it’s a play on solitude. Can’t remember the title, but the catalogue is extraordinary, and one began to see from that book — it collected a number of unpublished photographs by David Heath, and David Heath was a really important documenter of the Beat scene in New York City. And yes, Dialogue with Solitude has the wonderful photo of the person reading Howl and another picture of Gregory Corso and so on, but in fact, most of what David was doing while he was in New York City was going to Beat haunts — cafes, readings, lecture series, soapbox sort of events in churches in New York where the Beats were declaring the need for the transformation of society and so on, and David was documenting all of this. Anyhow, we went to dinner, and I have to say it was one of the — unlike Stan … when you went to dinner with Stan — and you’ll remember this — Stan could carry the conversation, talk about poets and painters that he knew, had wonderful anecdotes.
S: Frank would have been kind of depressive …
E: He couldn’t carry it. The conversation just — it didn’t take place. And then, so we left from this dinner, which was very, very awkward, and went over to the L72 for the lecture, and it consisted of: he’d turn and look at the screen, turn back and look at the audience with a puzzled look on his face, look at the slide, look at the audience, again, bewildered, and then he’d look, and he’d say, “I shot this in Wisconsin in nineteen…fifty…three.” Next slide.
S: He wouldn’t show slides at the AGO, but the one thing I remember that was really kind of profound, I think, was that someone asked him in the audience — it was about two hundred nerdy boys from the photography program presumably; those were the days when women were barely in the program, and then it turned over overnight — and one of them asked, “Is there anything you’d like to do that you’ve never done?” and he said, “I’d like to make a good film.” And I thought, fuck, it’s true, this is this genius almost, or whatever, and he’s made these films, but none of them are actually good. I mean, he hasn’t. I mean, I showed Pull My Daisy when we did the Outsiders and I argued against it. I said “I don’t want to show this,” because I don’t think it’s actually as good as the photographs. I don’t think it’s as good as Diane Arbus; I don’t think it’s as good as Marie Menken. This is not what we should show. If we’re going to show anything, we should show Cocksucker Blues, which I actually do think is a pretty good film — complicated, but … which he doesn’t want to show. Someone asked him about that — that was the first question, of course; someone asked him about Cocksucker Blues, and he goes, “I don’t know, why don’t you go ask Mick Jagger?”
E: I actually think Pull My Daisy is more of an Alfred Leslie film than a Robert Frank film.
S: I can live without it. I hate to say it, but it’s not my thing. It’s fine as a little document of the moment, but it’s not equal to the things that are around it being produced by those people.
E: Do you like Conversations in Vermont?
S: Ehh.
E: I do, actually.
S: I mean, I don’t mind the rest of the work. Me and My Brother — it’s all fine, but if I think about what has influenced people, including filmmakers more, all of those films, or The Americans. The Americans, right? To the reader, we are far from Brakhage here.
E: [Laughing] Yes.
S: There is a key moment, though, because what happens, of course, after Miami, is that he’s now open to your work, and he comes to Toronto. And — am I right — he comes to Ryerson, and that’s actually when the Kodak Lecture is?
E: He does a number of events. He went to the Funnel one night. On the Friday afternoon, he gave a talk to just Ryerson people, mostly students and faculty. You may have come to that.
S: You might have invited us to that. I think it was like — we were me and Tracy and Brad, that guy who disappeared, and Kate, and we were all just sponges at that moment.
E: I suspect that you were there, and then in the evening he gave the Kodak Lecture in L72, if I’m not mistaken, and then on Saturday he went to present at the Funnel. They hung up signs with stars on it: “This way to see art star Stan Brakhage”. It was clear that there was a sort of cynicism about this great man’s work.
S: We were there. 507 King Street West, right near my house.
E: He was going to give a talk to just students, just a conversation, on Sunday. The people who were organizing the Kodak Lectures at that time had asked me to recommend someone to give the lecture, and I said, well, why not Stan Brakhage, and I got in touch with him and got his commitment to come, and from then on I was quite excluded, including from the lunch that they had with him before the Friday afternoon talk, and there were many bits of mischief that went on at that. And because I had been excluded from all the planning, I didn’t know the date that he’d be coming, The National Gallery contacted me about screening Lamentations, so Cathy and I went to Ottawa for that purpose. And of course, I also discovered that the people who had organized the Kodak Lectures hadn’t made any arrangements for any sort of social events or hosting — taking him out to dinner after events. When I saw that, I said to Marilyn, “Look, would you make sure that Stan has company?” For dinner, lunch — would you kind of take on hosting responsibilities.
S: This is Marilyn Jull, who at that time was actually the acting education film officer, I think. She was not actually — she was filling in for Helen, I think. I always remember her as being the experimental … but I’m not even sure that that’s true.
E: I think this is just before. I think she is still at this time a student. In the summer, she took over as the … but this was November, and I think she took over the interim job in April or May the following year. But Stan met Marilyn then, and of course they became fond of each other.
S: And he wanted to do two things while in Canada, I remember now. He wanted to go to the McMichael, and he wanted to go to the Glenn Gould Museum, which doesn’t exist.
E: Yeah, that was actually the … the trip. So that was February. November, we met in Miami. In February, he comes up to Toronto and does a series of events and meets Marilyn, and then he, in June or July, decides that he wants to come back to Toronto. Marilyn by this time is working at the distribution centre. He wanted to look at all of my films, and he did. I can remember that patch of time very well because he would start screening in the morning and look at films until eight o’clock at night, and he and Marilyn would have dinner, and after that, Stan would call and we would have just turned ourselves into bed, and the phone would ring, and Stan wanted to talk about the films that he’d just seen. And that of course would go on for some time. Wonderful. Some of the best days of my life.
S: By coincidence then — I hadn’t really met him then — but on that trip when he was doing that, I was working for Cathy. I was doing some basic bibliographical research on Snow, Chambers, Wieland, Rimmer — I can’t remember what. I saw a copy of it the other day. It was printed on my nine-pin dot-matrix printer from my $4800 XT computer. The printer was probably a couple of thousand bucks. [Laughing]
E: And if you have any of those printouts now you can hardly read them, they’ve become so faint. [Laughing]
S: Does it say Jack Chambers or … Patricia Gruben. You never know. Just kidding. Anyway, so I was in the Centre, going through the files while Marilyn was showing him Lamentations, and so we got into a conversation about it, because we had already shown it at Innis and vaguely written on it for the Varsity. I must have seen it when I wrote that, but maybe not. And there were lots of things going on. So, to me, that’s where it all … you’ve got Marilyn, you’ve got Lamentations, we’ve got all of this stuff going on then, and by then Innis is getting formed. None of us doing anything professionally yet on that side, except for Bart. And then we bring him back. At that point is … it’s complicated, because when he’s there watching Lamentations, he’s just decided he’s going to divorce Jane. They’d separated, and then he got back together, and then he made a film — he made Jane — and that was made right at the moment he decided.
E: The film that was called Confession at one time.
S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to me, what’s interesting about it is how it all kind of … and then he eventually writes “On Canadian painting and cinema,” which is partly his trip out West, but partly about the McMichael and all this kind of thinking. And then we had him — it was many years later, in the ‘90s — but we had him do these talks through the gallery on our Canadian … and they were totally unlike anything that had ever happened, and unlike anything that’s happened since, because when he’s speaking, he’s absolutely convincing. When you go back, it’s a little harder. Like, when I’m trying to explain what he says about Varley’s “Liberation,” I’m not convincing. He’s convincing, but my secondary take on it is like … I don’t know if that’s really… But it was inspiring, and I still actually have more reverence for those works that I see every day than I would ever have had, had Stan not come in and upset the apple cart. He didn’t know he was upsetting the apple cart, because it’s not as if he’d spent time reading Dennis Reid and Harper and all these people and all that. He wouldn’t know all the people working at that time, like Gerta Moray — he wouldn’t know any of that stuff. It was just his eyes. Certainly he’d read a lot of things, but probably not the orthodox Canadian historical texts.
E: He had a love of galleries. You remember; you’ve mentioned it already. Even in the trip that he came up to see my film, one of the things that he wanted to do was to go to the McMichael. We’d taken him there previously; we took him there later. Every time he was in Toronto, he wanted to go to the McMichael. But one of the treats that I experienced was when the Art Gallery of Ontario was closed for renovations. Stan had gone through the Group of Seven rooms before, but while it was under renovation he wanted to see the work by the Group of Seven at the Art Gallery of Ontario. So, I knew that Dennis Reid was aware of who Stan Brakhage was, of what his importance was. He’d seen his work in New York City and he knew of Stan’s colossal importance. So, Cathy telephoned Dennis and asked whether it would be possible for Stan to see anything, and Dennis made arrangements to take Stan and Cathy and me through. And then, I mentioned to Mike Snow that the four of us were going to go through the collection, and he said, “I’d love to be with you.” So, again we called Dennis and asked if it was okay if we brought Michael along, and he agreed. So, Dennis and Cathy and Stan and Mike and me went through the collection. They were just at the point where they were installing the small sketches in the drawers, so he was taking Stan through, and Dennis would open the drawer and you could see Stan — it was like a drawer with a treasure in it. And Stan would stare at it and comment on it. It was a wonderful tour, with Dennis offering a lot of historical background to each of the paintings. And then he had a Lawren Harris, and it was mounted on a pedestal between sheets of plexiglass, and it was a double-sided piece. On one side, there was a Lawren Harris piece from the Rocky Mountains series — those very schematized paintings, simplified forms, in white with a peak and a light above the peak and so on. A very kind of theosophical painting in its own way.
S: So, moving toward the abstract works that he’ll do, but not quite what we call now “the Steve Martin works.”
E: [Laughing] That’s right. And then, on the flipside, was a pure abstraction, and abstraction in that style of the Taos, New Mexico painting group. So, it was a two-sided work, and then I said, “Interesting to see one form of theosophical painting, and then another.” And Stan became quite perturbed by this. To some extent, it was because it was out of his convection, that no artist will ever turn his thoughts over to an ideology, a system of religious beliefs, a system of artistic beliefs — will never take over a set of beliefs from another, that it must be original to the person and grow out of the person’s own uniqueness, his own individual being. And to say that Lawren Harris, whom he loved — I’ll step back from that a little and mention the time that Marilyn and Tom Tibor and Jim Tenney and Cathy and I went out to the McMichael Gallery, and — I’ll admit, not without some feeling of shame, but it’s a feeling that persists nonetheless — the Rocky Mountain series and the iceberg series of Harris are not my favourite Lawren Harris paintings, and we were there, standing in front of one of the iceberg paintings, I think. Same kind of thing — peaked form, white shape, a light glinting above it as though a light coming from another dimension into fleshy material reality. And for me, it really is too shaped by an idea, and it’s not a work whose form really grows out of a complex set of formal explorations. It’s as though it’s a simplified, pre-existing form that’s imposed on the painting. So, I allowed — I feel awkward saying this, but — that’s my thought about Harris’s painting of this period. And Jim Tenney shared my belief, my skepticism. Then Stan said, “No, this is a perfect example of moving visual thinking.” This wasn’t a term that was coming up in his writing at the time; this is just before he introduces it into his writing. It’s a notion that is being formed at this time in Stan’s life. So, I asked him, “What do you mean by moving visual thinking? And how is this an example of moving visual thinking?” And he said, “I’ll tell you. I’m thinking now about my home and Arapaho Peak” — that peak that overlooks Boulder, where he was living — “and I first have a vague sensation, and then I begin to form a kind of template for the well formed, well worked out, detailed image. Before that comes to my memory, there is a vague feeling of energy, and then there is a sense of the kind of un-fleshed out template that the image will evolve from. That template is moving visual thinking.” And then I said, “It’s just as the prime matter of vision is being shaped into an image?” And he said, “Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.” I still wasn’t entirely convinced of the merit of the painting, but I did find it a really telling statement of what he means by moving visual thinking. And of course, that sense of what moving visual thinking is relates to the story Stan tells that he took from Charles Olson. Charles Olson was attending the Ezraversity, going and visiting Pound out on the lawn of St. Elizabeth’s and Pound would discourse on translating Greek poetry, on the form of Greek tragedy, on Sappho, on Confucian ethics, on Major Douglas’s economics, et cetera, and would speak about his own poetry and sometimes read texts and provide verbal glosses on the text and the like. But, quite often, after some time, Pound’s monomania would manifest itself and he’d begin to fulminate against the Jews. And on one occasion, Olson, who was of course quite liberal — he had had a minor post in FDR’s administration — at one point he couldn’t take this fulminating anymore. Brakhage was aware that that went on. He had been invited to go to the Ezraversity, to accompany friends to the Ezraversity, and he refused to go. Anyway, Olson hears Pound fulminating, and says, “You know Ezra, I have Jewish blood in my veins.” He didn’t know whether he did or not, but he was criticizing Pound. He just couldn’t take it anymore, and he just wanted to object to what was occurring. And Pound gestures toward Dorothy, “Dorothy, bring me the book!” And the book is a book of European names, and a record of whether anyone of this name had married a Jewish person, whether someone with this name might have Jewish blood in his veins, as Olson had claimed. Olson didn’t even wait for the response, to learn whether in fact the book bore him out or not, and he left, and he went to his hotel room and lay down. And then, he says, “The master” — who the master is is not identified in Olson’s writings, but Brakhage got from Olson that it was Pound — “The master came to me in a dream and said, ‘From rhythm is image, from image is knowing, from knowing, there is a construct.’” And I take it that this is a story that Stan was fond of recounting, and I take it that he saw this about moving visual thinking. I said, when he thinks about Arapaho Peak, there is a vague feeling that begins to run through his body, rather like a rhythmic pulsion. You might remember Dennis Lee’s comments on cadence and so on, and how a poem begins, and it begins with a throb, which he calls a cadence — a kind of pulse which begins to make itself felt in the body, and then out of this emerges a kind of image for the poem, in Dennis Lee, and a kind of template for an image, in Brakhage’s moving visual thinking. And then, it becomes fleshed out, from rhythm, the pulse, is image; from image is knowing, as it becomes more and more a worked-out representation of reality; from knowing, there is a construct, which becomes the system which we build around image, and image-knowledge if you will — something that Stan then goes on to fight against. His exchanges with me and the dangers of image — “Bruce Elder is the master of picture, and he’s doing everything that he can to avoid picture” — and a fair amount of Telling Time is on our differences and our debates over this. From rhythm is image; from image is knowing; from knowing, grasping the world through representation; and then this becomes a system of understanding the world — a construct. And this is what Stan thinks art work should avoid.
S: That does remind me of the conversations that came out of the salons, and I want to talk about the salons for a second, because various forms of the salon emerged, inspired, I think … I think, of all of us, Stan was the first to host, in this tiny little apartment that he was renting with Marilyn — I don’t remember where that was, even, somewhere in the west end I think
E: [To third person] Do you remember the name of that street? Windermere! I wanted that because I thought it was so ironic. Wordsworth! [Laughing]
S: I’m going to walk down the street and someone’s going to ask me, and I’m going to forget your name. But I will remember Windermere. I remember that little place, and Stan was like, “It’s possibly the most palatial place I’ve lived in.” You know, he’ll have his own take on it.
E: It was lovely. I liked it.
S: I did too. But he was showing us something he’d been doing for years, and it’s not like we didn’t know about salons — certainly I’d been interested in that culture, and I knew about Stettheimer and I knew about Paris, and I knew all that kind of stuff —
E: There’s another connection that I want to mention, and that is that, when he was living in San Francisco, living in Robert Duncan’s basement part of the time, he was attending the salons that Kenneth Rexroth held at his place. And of course, that was an extraordinary group of people.
S: He was a teenager.
E: Lawrence Jordan also attended Kenneth Rexroth’s salons. Wallace Berman showed up at times. Jack Spicer showed up at times.
S: We have an image of it in “Pull My Daisy” actually. Like, I have this image and I’m really attracted to it, and what was really great was that it really became real here. Stan got the ball rolling, didn’t ultimately stay here, but then you and Cathy began regularly hosting salons around film poetry, wine, beer and sausages — it has to be said. Then I started doing things on Henry Street, and Kate would do things in the art studio off of Baldwin, and Jim Tenney of course did the afternoons.
E: Jim really took them over.
S: And then Barbara Feldman. That’s the other thing too — lots of great things happened at this time. Part of it was that culture and just creating a kind of community of like-minded, like-spirited people or something like that.
E: Stan really had a role in gingering that.
S: But then the other thing was also erasing silos, because we all tend to live in our silos, and I don’t want to live in one — and it’s complicated. I understand now why people end up just being with music people. But in all of that, there was an attempt to bring a mixture of music, film, visual art, poetry, and just kind of fellow travellers were included — people who were interested, but who might be, you know … And I still feel like I have that in aspects of my life, but there was that not even ten-year period where we had that very intense thing going. Stan was not around for most of it, but he planted the seed.
E: Stan planted the seed, and of course, whenever he did come back, we’d organize a salon with him. You remember the wonderful time when he came and gave everyone one of the Songs? He had the 8mm songs. Absolutely precious things.
S: We also did them at Bart’s place too, because that’s actually where we first saw Dave Morris’s films, for example. But at your house, there were, as I said, sausages, but it also was also like, Tati and all these things that were — it didn’t feel so bound by the things you do when you’re programming for the public, you know?
E: You’re quite right that it was extraordinary how transdisciplinary these events were. I mean, I can still remember so many of the people who attended Jim Tenney’s salons — musicians, but also poets … What’s the name of that guy who did Yiddish for Pirates? I’m blanking now, but that fellow would be showing up to Jim Tenney’s salons. He’s also a composer of course, as well as a wonderful novelist and a great avant-garde poet.
S: Nick Gotham, who died a few years ago, was there regularly, and then Paul Dutton and of course, Lorne [?], and then different, you know …
E: But Stan — starting shortly after my parents passed, Stan stepped in in loco parentis, and Cathy and I would regularly get a phone call on Saturday night or Sunday afternoon — the traditional time for parents to call their children.
S: Long-distance rates were cheaper.
E: [Laughing] Yes. And we’d talk, and we’d have long, long, long telephone conversations. I hear that at one time, Stan had such conversations with Hollis as well. But I would say the majority of the time was spent talking about new poetry and about his acquaintances among the San Francisco poets, but also oddly veering into poetry of the Romantic era — many, many conversations about Wordsworth. He became, at one time, remarkably interested in Alfred Lord Tennyson, and I can remember him, in a series of long conversations, passing onto me his latest thoughts on Tennyson, whose poetry he was reading and re-reading avidly at the time. And, yes, about some of the classics, including Homer — he’d go back and visit the Odyssey and so on. This came up, too, when we were talking about my interests in oral poetry and the work that was being done on Homer as an oral poet. And some of the piece for Barbara Feldman … many of those are those sorts of stock idioms — “the wine-dark sea” and so on — emerging in oral poetry. The kind of phrase that a person who is improvising returns to, rather as a jazz musician returning to a common phrase that he will then develop in a new direction. At any rate, when we’d visit — we’d see each other probably three times a year for most of this period — when I’d see him in Boulder, a lot of the time was spent in showing me the art books that he was spending most time with. I remember a long period in which he was interested in Joan Mitchell and in Riopelle, and was one of the few people I knew who knew Riopelle’s work at this time. You were talking about he probably didn’t read a lot of criticism of painting — I think that’s absolutely right, but I think at the same time, what he was doing was spending a lot of time, both in galleries and with art books. He had a huge collection of art books, which he absolutely treasured.
S: And he knew the culture. The first salon he had, he invited Chris Dewdney, for example. And I don’t agree with him on this, but he said, “Dewdney is really the poet we should be celebrating, not Ondaatje” and all that. And I was like, well, I’m not really sure about all that, but sure — it’s amazing that this filmmaker comes up and actually has an opinion about that, and has actually immersed himself and would have known Billy the Kid and “Rat Jelly,” and then Dewdney’s work. That was amazing. It was amazing as a kid, because at the time — that’s still before the congress — as we said, 1989 is the dividing line in that — and when I wrote this article on your film, before I’d really seen his films, in ’85, my daughter is this old now. She’s 22, and that’s how old I was when I did that. So that’s really amazing. And I was only a few years older when I worked on this. I’m so lucky to have met you and Cathy and then suddenly it’s like, oh yeah, Brakhage. There’s Brakhage in my life, of course, in many different ways, for many years, and through different — it’s hard to talk about this, but when you were just talking about visual moving thinking and Lawren Harris and all of that, I was thinking, the interesting thing about all of this is — and I’m absolutely interested in aesthetics, as really an amateur, and art criticism and film criticism and all that — but ultimately I think, when I have an experience with something, I’m not swayed, at least not right away, by anything intellectual. And I think I was when I was younger, when things were still being formed, whereas now I’m just kind of like, “I don’t like those Harrises.” There may be a reason why, or it may be that my retina is just not interested. Maybe I see too many of them, or maybe it’s because I work in the wrong place. There are all these factors that come in, which doesn’t at all invalidate anything that is being said. I’m just realizing now, though — because that kind of came up a lot at the salons — often we were in rooms no bigger than this, watching films in a very intimate way and then having discussions about them, whereas I think if I was … I don’t know. I’m just thinking back to that time when I was maybe more … I was impressionable, which was probably good, in a way, but now I trust myself more; I trust my senses more.
E: Look, one of my reasons for mentioning the time that Stan spent in galleries and his love of looking at reproductions of paintings and even dwelling on them was the encounter with the object itself, and that that should be what’s at the core of our judgment about the work. Yes, of course, as we’re obliged to make discriminations — that’s an increasingly unpopular view, of course, but the fact is, I have to allocate my emotional, intellectual, sensory resources to work that is going to enrich me, that will sustain me, that will make me — I hope — a more interesting and richer and more harmonious human being … of course we have to make discriminations, but at the core should be the actual encounter with the work. And of course, this is so rare in universities. It’s so rare in the art world at present. There is a theoretical construct, to go back to that term. You understand, in moving visual thinking, he’s talking about how we move farther and farther away from this core experience — the way that the work shakes you. Of course, I approach this in writing on Brakhage through McLuhan, as he modifies the slogan that makes him famous, “the medium is the message”
S: “The mass age.”
E: There’s that, but also, “the massage.” The medium is the massage. And it’s how it works you over — you literally experience this colour of green shading into yellow or something of that and all of the variations and gradations there, and they vibrate in you; they are shaking you. That has to be the core of the response, and I think I’ve been brooding in the past few years on that wonderful late book of Brakhage that is still unpublished — and, since you’re here, I’m really going to put in a word: I can’t imagine a more important piece that the Art Gallery of Ontario might publish than the piece titled “The domain of aura.” It really is a piece that needs to appear.
S: Sorry, I’m only sighing because … it’s not what we do.
E: How much work is left!
S: No, it wouldn’t be that much to publish it, but it would be a lot for us to publish it. That’s a whole other three-hour interview.
E: You know, though, that P. Adams began work on it and has been hoping that the piece would … he decided when he read it that it had to prepare, and he’s prepared an edition of it that I understand is all ready to go, but there’s no one to publish it yet. But anyway, I’m just twisting your arm on that one, but that of course began as “The Dominion of Picture,” and he began writing it not long after he saw Lamentations. “The dominion,” because he’s up in Canada, the dominion, and then “picture” because you know that his engagement with me is that “Bruce Elder is the master of picture,” but he is wanting to distance himself from picture — going back to Olson, the construct that develops out of the originary experience, and he wants to track back to that originary experience. But he associates this quite literally with energy, and with body energy that is also attuned to cosmic energies. And I think there’s an aspect of this in Pound — I don’t think we have time to go into that here, but I think we could trace in some way that notion of body energy and cosmic energy and the connection between the two back to his interest in Pound —
S: Also McClure and all those people too.
E: Absolutely. And one of the things I’m writing on now is how much this group shared these ideas, and I even think I can trace them back to Rexroth and those salons. So that’s another topic, but that’s going to take us quite far from our reminiscences of Stan Brakhage, but I wanted to say that that’s, of course, also an aspect of his interest in Liberation — the Varley painting — and he sees that as evidence that Varley had the experiences of aura that Brakhage also had. When I’d see Stan after not having seen him for some months, when we’d first meet in a restaurant just after Stan had arrived in Toronto, or when I’d see him in Boulder, he’d comment on my aura. He claims — and I’m not about to dismiss such claims, that he could see energy forms around bodies. This is not an uncommon claim, and interestingly, given his respond to the theosophical side of — I didn’t finish that … I’ll leap back to that double-sided painting and then I’ll come back to “The domain of aura” … I mention this, that these are both theosophical paintings, and it’s interesting how the same kind of conception of the relation of material forms to that which is above material — spiritual, cosmic forms — manifests itself in both the Lawren Harris Rocky Mountain painting and the American, abstract Taos painting. Anyways, Stan was upset about my saying this was a theosophical painting, on the grounds of the need for absolute individualism and everything must grow out of the unique self and so on. And then Dennis said, “No, Stan, actually Lawren Harris was deeply involved in the theosophical movement and he gave a lecture every year for the Toronto Theosophical Society …”
S: Do you have our book Mystical Landscapes?
E: Yes, I do.
S: It’s a flawed book, but Cathy was right to pick up and have people explore that thread.
E: I actually like the book. But then, Dennis began to tell Stan that in fact Lawren Harris was a deeply committed theosophist and that it was a life-long interest of his. And then Micahael Snow waited … “Yes, those were beliefs that were taken up by so many at the time, and they became almost canonical beliefs so that if you were an artist you subscribed to them,” and then he said, “You know, it’s almost like feminism in our time.” [Laughing]
S: I don’t know, you’ve spent a lot of time talking about Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous …
E: Oh, I do, but I’m not … that’s another matter. [Laughing] I wanted to say that I think that his interest in energy and energy forms and auras as they are written about in “The Domain of Aura” — these ideas go back earlier to the time when he was making what he sometimes called the emignostic [?] works: the Arabics, the Roman Numeral series, the Babylon series, the Egyptian series, and so forth. You see, I feel such unresolved feelings about the different bodies of work that Stan made and what their relationship to one another is, for there’s a part of me — and I really think it’s the Poundian luminous-particulars side of me — that is rapturously enamoured of the photographed films, right from the time of Window Water Baby Moving right through Dog Star Man, right through the Visions in Meditation series, the Vancouver Island trilogy — Mammals of Victoria, The God of Day is Gone. And yet there is also — I wanted to say that when I first saw his films, at the very first screening, I think I saw, in still-inchoate form, an urge toward a kind of abstraction. I saw this in Western History, I saw this in Door, despite their representational content and so on. And that is Brakhage moving toward — there’s a critical piece by Clement Greenberg, “The new sculpture,” and in it he begins to talk about the “common style,” and he’s saying this partly because he thinks that this common style is evident in painting and in sculpture, and it cuts across many different movements in art. He sees it emerging in Piet Montrian as well as in abstract expressionism as well as in post-painterly abstraction and in Barnett Newman and so on, and David Smith’s sculpture. He even dates it back to Rodin. But when he’s talking about it, he says that “the dominant feature of the common style is that it no longer aspires to give the illusion of material; rather it is aspiring to render visual forms entirely optical — whether they are pictorial, sculptural or architectural — and this brings anti-illusionism full-circle. Instead of the illusion of things, we are now offered the illusion of modalities, namely that matter is incorporeal, weightless, and exists only as a mirage.” A very interesting text, but again, that sense of pure opticality, that we’re not representing matter. The illusion is not of material things; it is the illusion that matter is incorporeal, is weightless — ephemeralized, if you will, to use my term. It’s like a mirage. And is that not the character of the Arabics? Is that not the character of the painted films — of masterpieces like The Dante Quartet, of Loud Visual Noises, of so many of them, the painted films — that this has escaped from matter and become purely optical, entirely like a mirage. Greenberg is seeing this as what painting is moving toward, and at point, when he was talking about this emerging he said that this was the Pisgah view, the view from the mountain toward the promised land — Yahweh showing Moses the promised land from this mountain — that that is what painting from the impressionists on was aspiring to be and was moving towards. And I’ll argue that film actually brought us into the promised land, that it could literally — these figures of light on the cinema screen, entirely incorporeal, entirely weightless, floating into this — this is something that cinema is capable of, that no other art is. We still have to make sculpture out of wood or metal or bricks or whatever; we still have to make painting out of goo, but film can literally be like a mirage — the illusion of modalities, that matter is incorporeal, weightless, like a mirage. Film carries us to this promised land, and in a way, I think that what Brakhage was writing after — I don’t know, there was a period in which there’s the Metaphors on Vision and then a series of pieces in which he’s debating photographicness and document and this sort of thing, and at times touting Ricky Leacock as the great film artist and so on, making pieces like the Pittsburgh Trilogy, and then after that, sometime around ’85 or ’86, he begins to move toward this view. He hadn’t read this piece of Greenberg’s; he didn’t use the term “the common style,” but he began to argue, essentially, that film had carried us to this promised land of realizing this common style, and I think that “The Domain of Aura” carries that to its culmination.
S: That’s really interesting, and I hadn’t thought about it that way, and the Greenberg quote is really interesting, but I’m just going to bring it back because we only have a little bit longer and I want to get to at least two things that came up in that era. For me, going back to what you were saying in the beginning about being conflicted, around the time we did the first screening of Brakhage work at Innis, which you may recall, we were starting to see the hand-painted films, and they were very seductive. They were very easy to like. I can show them to people who have no interest in experimental film, and they go, “fuck.” They have that experience. They are astonishing. So, I had that experience. And then, as you know, we had the 35mm film of The Dante Quartet, which, on our reunion, we showed that print. We showed that print because I had to look at it, and of course it looked like any film that had been around for a while at that point — that was the interesting thing — but of course when we showed it, we gouged it, and then I sat next to Stan and —
E: I want to interrupt, because I want to say that what you were doing at Innis at this time was the best way to show experimental films, and that is, you didn’t program a long, long program. It was 45 minutes of film or whatever, and people could ask to re-screen a film. And yes, it’s true when we look at a film like The Dante Quartet, we see it, and we’re just introduced to what we should be looking at, and then we know the next time through what to see. We should see it ten times, but at least you would show it a couple or three times. And then, that led to … [Laughing]
S: Of course, we live on earth, and we might be out here in our experience, but we still have film —
E: [Laughing] And you’d done everything you could to make sure that that 35 mm print would be well projected. You hired a union projectionist; do you remember that?
S: Yeah, yeah. And then we stopped doing that. And then we only hired the young women.
E: You showed it the first time, and everyone was stunned, and then you showed it the second time, and it was apparent that it had been scratched on the first screening.
S: Gouged is the term. Third degree.
E: And you were sitting beside Stan. [Laughing]
S: Well, but then what happened is, Stan was amazing, first of all — he didn’t have a Kubelkian temper tantrum or anything — and then we showed Anticipation of the Night. And so, what happened then was, I’m trying to hold onto something, because I’m so full of remorse, and there is Anticipation of the Night, and I have almost never had such a connection to a film as I did that day. So, I like the term “moving towards.” I don’t necessarily want an artist to be “resolved.” I think a lot of the abstract expressionists became boring. Whereas Pollock — drinking and driving again — he dies before he gets to be boring. But he’s always corporeal still — to me, there’s always a sense of body. It’s just splatter. And I need it, somehow. And I like most of Stan’s films — I do want to get to this — but there are films I don’t like. They’re neither of the ones we’re talking about. Before he really hangs out in Toronto and we emerge — the kids — Stan makes a number—
E: You were young at this time. It’s amazing how much you were doing when you were young.
S: Well you know, when we showed Lamentations, Kate was 19. Tracy was 19. Mike and I were 21. […] was 21. But Stan, of course, in the late ‘80s was having this huge and productive crisis — crisis in his marriage, crisis with the mountain, crisis with everything — and he was suddenly opening up, and that led to The Dante Quartet on the one hand, and these collaborations with Joel Hartling and the avant-garde musicians and all that, and some of that stuff I love. But then he makes the Faust series. Man, I tried to like those. I was just like — most films that I watch are sound films, but I’m like, Stan, maybe you should just stick with silence. Maybe one day, I’ll like them. But I remember that feeling of like, well I expect this. I don’t trust artists who always make good work. I like artists who are messy, who are always throwing stuff out there. The artists who only make a couple of things — Bresson’s always good, but I’m more Fassbinder actually. “Moving towards” is a good term, you know? I still find more solace in that now — someone human trying to deal with the imperfection and the impossibility of knowledge and all that.
E: Well, there’s a heck of a lot I’d like to say about it, and obviously it’s not going to get said, but about the Faust series, I’d like to say, first, that I think it itself is about this tension between representation, or picture as he calls it, and primal energies. This is an aspect of it, and it is reflected not only, but certainly in the relationship of sound and picture. And in fact, some of the text that is used in the Faust series is from “The Domain of Aura.” And so, it is on one hand partly about this, and how it is about this goes back to Gertrude Stein, and I think Stein’s own work on Faust — Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights — is certainly one of the major inspirations for that, as well as the Robert Duncan Faustus play. So, there he has those great sources. Stein is very largely about the use of ordinary words, American language, focus on particulars, immediate locale, local events and so on — very much rooted in particulars and in the American language itself — but the form becomes pure rhythm. You read it and you read it aloud — do you remember Ulla Dydo reading “Business in Baltimore” and so on — and the forms becomes pure … that pulse that I was talking about. The repetition becomes pulse, and yet it is fashioned out of ordinary language, making reference to local experience. So, that tension I think is built into the Faust series. But there is another thing I wanted to say quickly about silence in Brakhage’s films. It’s a topic that we could talk about for a long time, but one of the wonders of the cinema for me is cinema as trans-sensorial. That is to say that it involves sound and image to begin with, or sound and text and image — I’ve tried to push this very far — but interested in the way in which a picture experienced without sound is not experienced the same way as when you put a sound beside it. The picture is changed, the sound is changed. There is a kind of trans-sensoriality, if you will, and Brakhage can be very good at this, but I also think that he chose to distance himself from it, and chose to distance himself from it partly in order to create this experience of weightlessness, of immateriality. Because, one of the things I’m going to say is that sound accompanying picture makes a weightier, meatier, fleshier experience, and he wants it to go into pure figures of motion, of opticality if you will. And so, he has all of his training in sound — violinist, boy soprano, this that and the other … There’s one thing I realize that we have to do, and didn’t do. I remember David asked me to do this, so we’d better do it for them. My name is R. Bruce Elder, and …
S: My name is Jim Shedden.
E: This tape is going to be transcribed and deposited in the Brakhage Archive at the University of Colorado. I give permission to the archive for public access to this recording and transcription. Do you, Jim?
S: Likewise. Full creative commons on my part.
#72: Highlights from the Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario
A bigger accomplishment than first meets the eye. This is the kind of book that eludes museum publishers usually. Every time I look it at it I see its flaws, but I also remember what a triumph it was to finally bring it to life. Makes me miss my former editor Claire Crighton, who began as an intern on the project and ended up as one of the editors (in that technical sense - I still get to be called the editor). Here’s a review from Goodreads:
“AGO: Highlights from the Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario showcases more than 300 of the Gallery’s most significant pieces, from The Malmesbury Chasse to Arnaud Maggs?s After Nadar photographs. Featuring high-quality images and illuminating texts, this remarkable book reveals the depth and diversity of the AGO?s holdings. Each entry includes a stunning reproduction, an insightful account of the work, and detailed archival information. Double-page features spotlight significant collection areas such as Canadian painting and twentieth century portraits. Over the last decade, the Gallery?s world-renowned collection has grown immeasurably, with many individuals and families gifting pieces to celebrate the opening of the AGO?s new building in November 2008. Now readers have the chance to explore many of these acquisitions?including photographs, First Nations objects, African art and pieces from the Thomson Collection in print form. The publication also celebrates the unique architecture and inviting gallery spaces of the new AGO.” https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21975942-ago?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=KlhoNEwQ1F&rank=2
#71: Love in Vain
Song #113: "Love in Vain"
1000 Songs in 1000 Days
April 4, 2008
Song #113: "Love in Vain." The Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed, 1969.
Thanks for all the great comments on the Stones after my “Dead Flowers” posting.
Well, the Stones sure aren’t MC5. Whereas MC5 have probably had their only 1/1000, the Stones have had 2/1000 (and the first, “Imagination”, is a cover) and there will be many to follow.
I’ll admit to being pretty mainstream at the end of the day, despite years of trying to hitch my wagons to various vanguards in music, film, literature, and art. So I made films about Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow, but my favorite films are actually Rio Bravo and Singin’ in the Rain. I like painting, you know, like Cezanne and Monet. I’m working with a friend on a film about the late composer James Tenney, an avant-garde composer’s composer, heir to John Cage, and all that. But my desert island music artists would be the Beatles, first and foremost, then Dylan, Sinatra, the Stones, Miles, Coltrane, and maybe Johnny Cash. If I got to take some classical music, I’d be happy with Glenn Gould, Yo Yo Ma and Herbert Von Karajan. And everyone knows that I love “Sultans of Swing.”
So I’ve been mostly saving the heavy hitters till the back 500 for the most part. That would give me a better chance to more thoughtfully reflect on the music the less obvious music that matters to me. So I haven’t even been thinking about some stuff. Like, how can I even begin talking about Elvis (P)? I’m not worried: I have a few years to figure that out.
But now I’ve let the Stones genie out of the bottle and I have to deal with a couple of more cuts before I return to thoughtful considerations of “Popcorn” and “Bongo Rock”.
Since we’re letting genies out of bottles, let me turn to “Love in Vain,” the great Robert Johnson song and even better Rolling Stones song. Let’s start with Robert Johnson, but just briefly. There are 24 recorded Johnson cuts so we have that many times to return to the scene, though I imagine we’ll probably just come back for a few, maybe including “Kind Hearted Woman,” “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “They’re Red Hot,” “I’m A Steady Rollin’”, “Little Queen of Spades,” “Preaching Blues,” “Drunken Hearted Blues,” maybe a couple of more.
My introduction to the blues went like this:
Vague awareness of the genre and history and hearing its remnants in rock and roll;
Introduction, in a big way, by my co-workers at Mother’s Pizza, at the same time I was being introduced to punk, new wave, Zappa, and what-not, including the Allman Brothers, Johnny Winters;
At the same time (1977-1979) seeing many live concerts including Muddy Waters, B.B. King and others (Ontario Place Forum anyone?);
Forgetting about the blues per se for about a decade;
Spending the next decade, 1989-1999, listening to every blues recording I could, reading every book on the blues I could, spending hundreds and hundreds of nights at bars listening to local and traveling bands, going to larger concerts, traveling to Chicago to attend the (incredible) Chicago Blues Festival and getting out to lots of the legendary clubs including the Checkerboard Lounge (R.I.P.) on the South Side, joining and participating in the Toronto Blues Society… Well you get the picture;
1999-2007: lost any real interest, couldn’t hear the difference from cut to cut, artist to artist anymore, renewed interest in jazz, instead;
2008: return to Moderate Blues Use?
So I overdosed on the blues the way I overdosed on Hot Rocks. But it’s in my heart and soul in a big way. And now I love it when I hear it.
Most of us know the Robert Johnson legend: Robert Johnson was a young black man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi. Branded with a burning desire to become a great blues musician, he was instructed to take his guitar to a crossroad near Dockery’s plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (the Devil) who took the guitar from Johnson, tuned the guitar so that he could play anything that he wanted, and handed it back to him in return for his soul. Within less than a year’s time, in exchange for his everlasting soul, Robert Johnson became the king of the Delta blues singers, able to play, sing, and create the greatest blues anyone had ever heard.
During the height of my addiction, though, I did all the things a blues addict does. I drove with friends to those crossroads outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. Back in 1992 when I did that, there was nothing to see. There wasn’t much in Clarksdale except a kind of sad Delta Blues Museum that ZZ Top had put up some money for (and which I imagine is much more robust these days), but there was certainly nothing to see at the crossroads. But we had to do it.
And why not? Even if the blues per se aren’t your thing, consider Robert Plant’s comment, “Robert Johnson, to whom we all owed our existence, in a way.” For some time, I suspect the influence was usually indirect. That is, we knew about Johnson because Clapton was into him, and had a collection of scratchy 78s that influenced HIS music. In fact, the musician and music historian Elijah Wald has argued that Johnson’s main influence is on rock music. This isn’t a mainstream opinion but it’s pretty convincing: "As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note." Wald responded to Clapton’s assessment that Johnson was "the most important blues musician who ever lived," by arguing that this reputation only began to emerge in 1961 after the appearance the first 33 1/3 LIP of his work. He was not known as a giant among even blues artists for most of the 20th century.
But, among rock artists (and blues rockers), Johnson has been a (and sometimes THE) major influence on:
Clapton (of course)
Johnny Winter
The Grateful Dead
Jimi Hendrix
John Hammond
Led Zeppelin
The Blues Brothers
Rory Block
Bob Dylan
Fleetwood Mac
Peter Green (post FM)
Hot Tuna
Phish
Rory Gallagher
The White Stripes
Lucinda Williams
Red Hot Chili Peppers
The Gun Club (more on that later)
John Mellencamp
ZZ Top
Lynyrd Skynyrd all-covers studio album, "Trouble No More."
…and the Rolling Stones
When Brian Jones first heard Johnson, he wondered who the “other guitarist” was, not realizing that Johnson was getting all that music out of one acoustic guitar.
So I heard all these Johnson recordings at some point but it was on a cassette of a tape-reel of a scratchy 78 or something worse. They were cool, but I didn’t really sit with them. And then I seem to remember picking up successive remasterings, all of them quite affordable because they were public domain. The stuff I have now on my computer is finally compelling but, for many years, I would hear Johnson covers and never really realize it. For example, after hearing every touring blues band play “Sweet Home Chicago” at the Silver Dollar and elsewhere, it still didn’t occur to me that it was a Johnson song. Ditto when I first heard the Stones “Love in Vain” on Let it Bleed. It sounds so quintessentially Stonesian, then I just assumed it was Jagger/Richards. When I looked at the album one day and realized that it was Johnson I was surprised because I didn’t have it and I thought I had all of Johnson’s oeuvre. But when I went back to his stuff I realized that I did have it after all.
Let it Bleed is one of those near-perfect Stones albums, despite all the chaos that surrounded its making. Notably, this is the end of the Brian Jones Stones. He only plays autoharp on “You Got the Silver” and percussion on “Midnight Rambler”. But Mick Taylor is also only on two cuts, “Country Honk” and “Live with Me”. It’s the first album where Richards sings solo lead (“You Got the Silver”). I love every song on the album.
This is the first album where we hear the Stones “go country”, thanks to the influence of Gram Parsons, who was hanging out with Richards. This flirtation on their part would last, on and off, until Some Girls and then, as far as I know, it would go dormant. The most obvious manifestation of this would be on “Country Honk”, but can also be heard on other cuts like “Love in Vain”. Keith has said: "For a time we thought the songs that were on that first album were the only recordings (Robert Johnson had) made, and then suddenly around '67 or '68 up comes this second (bootleg) collection that included Love in Vain. Love in Vain was such a beautiful song. Mick and I both loved it, and at the time I was working and playing around with Gram Parsons, and I started searching around for a different way to present it, because if we were going to record it there was no point in trying to copy the Robert Johnson style or ways and styles. We took it a little bit more country, a little bit more formalized, and Mick felt comfortable with that."
Mick’s take: "We changed the arrangement quite a lot from Robert Johnson's. We put in extra chords that aren't there on the Robert Johnson version. Made it more country. And that's another strange song, because it's very poignant. Robert Johnson was a wonderful lyric writer, and his songs are quite often about love, but they're desolate."
The result is just stunning and, as I said, Perfect Stones. The opening acoustic guitar can only be the Stones. And then hearing the acoustic guitar meet the slide guitar meet the electric guitar (all played by Keith) – ah! The minimal use of bass is almost poetic. Ry Cooder’s mandolin playing IS poetic (and we haven’t heard much about him on this group yet, but it’s coming soon). Mick’s vocals are as good as they get. The drumming is very restrained but, when it happens, could only be Charlie Watts and turns the whole thing into a completely-together Stones song. When Alan (and then others) talked about the Faces not really coming together, I have this song and others on this album in mind as counterpoints. And the Stones had no reason to sound so together.
Keith again: "Sometimes I wonder... myself (about how we developed that arrangement). I don't know! (laughs) We only knew the Robert Johnson version. At the time we were kicking it around, I was into country music - old white country music, '20s and '30s stuff, and white gospel. Somewhere I crossed over into this more classical mode. Sometimes things just happen. We were sitting in the studio, saying, Let's do "Love in Vain" by Robert Johnson. Then I'm trying to figure out some nuances and chords, and I start to play it in a totally different fashion. Everybody joins in and goes, Yeah, and suddenly you've got your own stamp on it. I certainly wasn't going to be able to top Robert Johnson's guitar playing.”
Now, if you want a version of the song that is more reverentially like Robert Johnson but still very original, Eric Clapton plays it beautifully on his 2004 album, Me and Mr. Johnson, along with a number of other great Johnson classics. While reverential, Eric lets the “guitar god” that he came to loathe re-emerge. It’s beautiful stuff and deserves its own consideration some time.
There are a number of other lovely covers, but on an entirely different order than the Stones. These include Keb Mo, Mason Jennings and John Hammond Jr. (In The Search for Robert Johnson, the film).
COMMENTS
I don't like Robert Johnson.
And I don't really accept Robert Plant saying they owe it all to him. If Robert Johnson's blues records were the first ones that Plant heard, then I guess I can see it. For him. And I think that Johnson's songs were the ones that Zeppelin most often ripped off, weren't they?
(I'm not a big Zeppelin fan either.)
It's that "great man theory" of history and it seems to bug me even more when it's applied to music.
Robert Johnson didn't invent the blues.
My problem is I know enough to get myself in trouble but not enough to back it up. Still, I stand by my statement. If you google around the question, you find reviews and books to back up my point of view and lots to support the opposite one.
I'm skimming one article now. He's arguing against a book that tries to minimize Johnson's influence. The writer names other musicians recording at the time - Charley Patton, The Mississippi Sheiks - and basically keeps saying that Johnson's records blew them away.
Not for me I guess. I prefer the Sheiks.
You know, when you gave your history with the blues, you didn't differentiate between Chicago blues - or electric blues - and acoustic or pre-war blues.
I'm listening to Johnson now. Dust my broom. Sweet Home Chicago. Come on in my kitchen.
I guess it's true, on the surface anyway, if you just look at the songs that he wrote, that the sixties generation of blues rockers, most of whom were English, were very influenced by Johnson.
Then again if you just look at the songs, where do you put Willie Dixon?
I'm all over the place. Sorry.
I was a big fan of English blues bands in the sixties. You name it. I had them all. From the less authentic ones like Savoy Brown to the more authentic like John Mayall. And in the U.S., Canned Heat, Blues Project, Paul Buterfield. Even Siegel Schwall, John Hammond Jr.
That was my bread and butter.
And in the seventies, I bounced back and forth every night between the El Mocambo and Grossman's, saw all the local blues bar bands - and Toronto had a lot - like Whiskey Howl and countless ones I can't remember. As well as slightly more famous ones like Hound Dog Taylor who I must have seen a dozen times.
And blues festivals. I remember one on the Toronto Island with Luther Allison among others. And bigger acts like Buddy Guy, I think, at the Colonade and other clubs.
Then I OD'ed on it.
And I was blues-free for decades. Lived in abject fear that someone, even in casual conversation, might tell me that their mojo was working and I'd have to kill them.
Then I heard, I think, Lightning Hopkins, who I still absolutely love. And some of the more "mellow" prewar guys like Furry Lewis. And then Blind Willie Johnson. And Skip James and other things that were introduced to me by Cartmell. And in the meantime, all kinds of stuff was being reissued on CD.
Somehow Robert Johnson had actually turned me off pre-war blues and I had to find out what a range of stuff there was back then in order to become a fan.
So I guess it's not saying a lot at this point if I "admit" that I way prefer the Stones version to the original.
Yeah this is a great cut. I think I've heard it way too much but it's still great to hear it again.
The funny thing is, back in the sixties, when I loved the Rolling Stones, I really didn't relate to them as an English blues band. Not at all actually. They were a rock band. They were very distinct from the other English bands - I'm trying to think of some I didn't mention already - who were definitely playing an electric version of the blues.
Ten Years After. Chicken Shack.
I think I knew that they were very influenced by blues and they played on whose record - Muddy Water? Howlin Wolf?, both? - but It wasn't until they kind of loosened up their sound on Beggar's Banquet I guess, that I think I could start to hear a more "bluesy" feel happening.
Maybe it was, in '68, the rock world was going away from singles and more to albums. Maybe they got a bit less commercial, less of a "pop" band". Maybe that brought out their influences more clearly. Or maybe it had something to do with the changing dynamics in the band as Brian Jones was sort of on his way out.
I don't know. But I can see how you'd end up concentrating on this period of Stones as opposed to the earlier "hit single" era.
So is Robert Johnson your favorite pre-war blues guy too or do you just think he might be the best?
“I don't like Robert Johnson,” says Alan. I guess it’s balls-y admission week, but this beats my “I prefer Dire Straits to the MC5” confession. But now I really have to respond to Alan seriously because he raises all kinds of questions about m own love/indifference affair with the blues (never hate).
Well it serves me right for making my third Stones entry yet another cover. “Imagination”, this and I think we all agreed that “Dead Flowers” sounds like it should be a cover. Maybe the Stones were really covering Townes Van Zandt?
“It's that ‘great man theory’ of history and it seems to bug me even more when it's applied to music.” I agree wholeheartedly. Elvis Presley didn’t invent rock and roll, and was usually embarrassed when credited as such; and Louis Armstrong didn’t invent jazz (nor Scott Joplin, nor Jelly Roll Morton etc.). And if that’s true, then Robert Johnson definitely didn’t invent the blues. Nor did W.C. Handy, Mamie Smith or Ma Rainey (she claims to have invented the term “the blues” but even that’s easily disputed apparently).
That doesn’t mean that, like you, I don’t like Robert Johnson. I do, but not religiously. I don’t like his music any more or less than Charley Patton’s or a number of other artists from that time. And I suspect if and when I select more of his songs for this discussion group, they will usually be channeled by another artist or two, like the Stones here, and maybe the Gun Club’s “Preachin’ the Blues.” I guess I would say of Johnson that he’s not one of my favorite artists, but I’m obliged to reserve judgment given that some of my favorite blues and rock and roll artists – Elmore James, the Stones, Zeppelin, etc. - hear something extraordinary. And when I listen to those artists, like when I listen to Eric Clapton’s RJ cover album, that’s when I get a better glimpse of his greatness.
But now that you mention it, I’d much rather listen to the Mississippi Sheiks. Or Big Bill Broonzy. Or Sleepy John Estes (not as a guitarist, but as an important singer who influenced Dylan, for example). By the way, Johnson influenced the Sheiks but they also influenced him, at least according to what I remember reading (and could probably substantiate on-line right now).
“You know, when you gave your history with the blues, you didn't differentiate between Chicago blues - or electric blues - and acoustic or pre-war blues.” My history with the blues was pretty much all electric, and often blues-rock. In the 1990s, when I was in my bluesmania phase, it was everything. Now I’m most likely to play some early Muddy Waters (acoustic), John Lee Hooker (electric), old country blues (acoustic), Paul Butterfield (electric), but that’ll all change.
“Then again if you just look at the songs, where do you put Willie Dixon?” My take is that Dixon was a bigger direct influence, at least on the surface. I mean, his music’s practically rock and roll: “Little Red Rooster", "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Evil", "Spoonful", "Back Door Man", "I Just Want to Make Love to You", "I Ain't Superstitious", "My Babe", "Wang Dang Doodle", "Bring It on Home"…? I associate him very closely with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, of course, but also Cream, Zeppelin, the Stones, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers Band, and about a blues-rock bands I saw in bars over the years. The Phantoms anyone?
I spend a lot of time in Chicago and, although I’m not currently going out bars, when I can safely say that Willie Dixon influence was still going strong.
(I visited his birthplace in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but wasn’t able to find any significant memorial then, but this was back in 1994 not too longer after he died.)
“I'm all over the place. Sorry.” YOU’RE all over the place? I’m the one who should be apologizing.
“Then I OD'ed on it.” Well, I know the feeling. I look back on my OD with gratitude, though, because it allowed me to spend more time listening to jazz. This is simplistic, and actually outrageous from someone who’s such a fan of the 3-minute pop song and rock and roll, but I got tired of the predictability of blues. For a while anyhow.
“Then I heard, I think, Lightning Hopkins, who I still absolutely love.” Me too. And I have my film background to thank because it was the Les Blank film The Blues According to Lightning Hopkins where I first heard his music.
“And some of the more ‘mellow’ prewar guys like Furry Lewis.” Note to self: do an entry on “Casey Jones”, more than deserving a place in the 1000.
“And then Blind Willie Johnson.” More fantastic 1000 fodder! When I reviewed his songs, it puts the Robert Johnson influence in perspective. For Blind Willie influenced tons of people, and was covered by Fairport Convention, Ry Cooder, Dylan, Beck, the Grateful Dead, Johnny Cash, Springsteen – many of my favorites. And his “Dark Was The Night, Cold Was the Ground” was the foundation of the whole Paris, Texas soundtrack, and is incorporated it into many films and television programs, even Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.
“Maybe it was, in '68, the rock world was going away from singles and more to albums. Maybe they got a bit less commercial, less of a ‘pop" band’. Maybe that brought out their influences more clearly. Or maybe it had something to do with the changing dynamics in the band as Brian Jones was sort of on his way out.” Probably all of the above. I don’t think of the Stones as a blues-rock band the way I do of, say, the Allman Brothers. But, for me, when they play the blues, the really “get it” without losing their identity unnecessarily.
“So is Robert Johnson your favorite pre-war blues guy too or do you just think he might be the best?” I hope I’ve qualified my enthusiasm for Robert Johnson above.
Thanks.
If I knew you were going to answer me point by point, I would have tried to write fewer points.
I guess this discussion sort of points out how impossible it is to do something like you're trying to do and come close to any kind of appropriate balance.
You'd want to have this much of that artist or that genre to match the degree of importance that artist or that genre played in your life. But then you also want to pay tribute to certain artists, whose records you might have played less often but who nonetheless seem to be an important part of the story. That's probably where you start to get f**ked up.
(You notice I do that? I guess that's because i know you guys have kids.)
(Speaking of which, I just ran into Rick M's daughters on the street. His older one hid behind her mother. His younger one stepped forward, said she wasn't scared of me and even went further, declaring that she knows that Alan "is a very nice man". I'm torn as to which reaction I prefer but I think I'm finally mature enough to embrace the latter one.)
Anyway yeah, I guess it's no revelation that there are artists or even whole genres of music where I would never say "This sucks" but only that it's not to my taste. And then there's probably music which I would thoroughly and gleefully trash.
(When it comes to film, I'm probably less open. There's not much that I'd say "that's good but it's not to my taste". Most films that I don't like, it's exactly because I think they're crap.)
I accept that Robert Johnson was a huge influence to the English and American blues rockers of the sixties. I've read that he was much much more influential to those musicians than he was to his contemporaries but that was probably also a factor of record distribution.
But for some reason, the urgency, I guess you could call it, of Johnson's music doesn't work for me in the original version. It's a little too intense, like he's strangling the guitar to squeeze out those notes.
Then again, the heart wants what the heart wants, right?
It doesn't move me. My appreciation is all cerebral (if you believe in that dichotomy, which I'm not sure I do.)
I'm taking the Switzerland position on this one - I'm a Son House man, myself.
I don't know if I'd say I don't like Robert Johnson - there are certainly a lot of acoustic blues artists I play more (Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson) but I can sort of sympathize with Alan's impatience with the cult of Johnson, and/or the weight of everyone from John Hammond Sr. on down perhaps overstating his centrality in the whole blues thingamie.
But I love Led Zeppelin.
I don't think the two feelings are mutually exclusive. Led Zeppelin is to the blues what Norwegian black metal is to Edgar Allan Poe.
I guess I'm lukewarm enough about Johnson that I don't feel I need to lessen his role, mostly because I never gave much thought to it after I did my dutiful taping of the two Columbia records, then replaced them with the CD box set, which I never played again. Which is probably as damning as saying I don't like him, I guess.
And Alan - do embrace Cece's assessement of you as "a very nice man." Feel flattered. She told my brother - her godfather - that she hated him the other day, and that she didn't like all "mans." She's three - I haven't a clue what's going on in her little mind, but it has its own logic.
By the way, I think my brother managed Whiskey Howl for a while in the '70s, Alan, which means that you were probably in the same club with him at some point. Maybe standing at the bar together.
And 30 years later, the same little girl passed judgement on both of you. I don't know why I love the thought of that so much.
Truth be told, I gave my copy of the CD box away to my father-in-law after playing it once. I'm not sure that he's played it. As I said, for me the Johnson magic for me is in how other artists have channeled him.
I do have a bunch of those Johnson cuts as mp3s now but they're hardly in frequent rotation.
Oh, and let me clarify that the "Robert Johnson Legend" isn't my take on him. It's the legend.
I have tried twice in the last four days to write on this song and the blues only to have the thing 86 all my work. I can't do it again. It just kills me. Maybe I'll write about my experience elsewhere. So I'll keep it a lot shorter.
I wrote about how I was 20-21 when I went through my blues phase and it included both British and the old guys plus many modern (in 1976) blues guys too, particularly Roy Buchanan, Dutch Mason, and Rory Gallagher. Muddy Waters was my big favorite and I suppose it was his Hard Again album that did it for me---got me deep into the blues. I also got into Johnny Shines. And Ellen McIllwaine too whose first album is simply amazing. I went to the Albert Hall here in TO above the Brunswick house a fair bit where I saw Otis Rush and Koko Taylor among others. I also used to go see David Essig a lot and he always played a blues set in the course of a night. He was a brilliant National Steel player and great with a bottleneck. It was he that introduced me to Mississippi John Hurt, my current fave. I should mention that when Jeff Healy was playing around at the Clinton Tavern and the Bruns that I checked him out a lot but that was much later. Good old Michael Blitz used to play me some good blues too even though I was scarcely interested at the time and I have some Elmore James he gave me.
I left the music behind except as it related to rock music (Hendrix in particular) for many years until I worked for Sam's in 94-95 in the jazz/blues/world music/reggae/Quebec/country/pop vocal/new age/instrumental dept. (only in Vancouver eh?). Then with all the amazing stuff that had come out on CD I totally got into it again and explored Hopkins, Estes, Slim Harpo, Willie Dixon, and Fred McDowell (notice the Stones connection?) . I also collected a great deal of the Rhino label's Blues Masters series and discovered my real affinity was with Mississippi Delta and country blues. I have a great recording of McDowell with a gospel group that should be heard by all.
My experience of Johnson comes through other artists too but his songs mean a great deal to me. Dutch Mason's version of Walkin' Blues should be heard by all. In fact I have very little actual Johnson in the house. But lots of brilliant covers. Love in Vain itself means a great deal to me; first as I used to sing and play it a great deal in my busking and folk club days, and later in the wake of a terrible romantic disaster, it came to have even greater resonance for me. I had my own train station moment once in Germany that damn near killed me. I understood. it's powerful.
My favorite version is the Stones live in NYC in 1972. They played a number of nights and I don't have it in front of me so I can't tell you which night but it's the one. I now have it on disc and if anyone wants it we could meet up---or you can wait until I can send it as a file (in about a hundred years at this rate). There is something about Watts drumming, Nicky Hopkins' amazing piano, Mick Taylor's remarkable bottleneck slide work, and Jagger's stunning vocal that puts it in a class of its own. The version on Ya-Ya's is okay. It's the same one as in the film Gimme Shelter but the film version has been severely edited. I've seen them play this song twice.
Lastly, I was having a discussion with some guys about blues and Led Zeppelin and made the remark about how Zep stole blues artists' stuff and eventually had to pay people like Willie Dixon some money. One guy said, "That's rich, considering how many artists Dixon ripped off for songs himself." Now that's a new one on me! The accusation is that Dixon had a record label, signed people and stole their songs for his own use, didn't pay them proper royalties and didn't give them proper credit. I didn't pursue it so I can't give more info about this.
My favorite version of "Evil" is on the Roy Buchanan live album (Live Stock?).
My not mentioning the importance of the Allman Brothers in my own blues education was a major faux pas. I still love them too.
"Led Zeppelin is to the blues what Norwegian black metal is to Edgar Allan Poe" may be the best thing that I have read on this site. More from Rick M please!
John Lennon said "Blues is the chair on which all rock music sits" (or something like that) and that kind of sums up for me the whole no rock and roll without blues thing.
Johnson is important because his influence is immense and I don't really think that's a great man of the blues thing; its just what has happened and I would guess that if enough people that I think are amazing say that Johnson is a big influence, then that's good enough for me.
I think the Stones live in New York '72 that Rick C mentions is 26/7/72 or 7/26/72 as you North Americans would have it.