DEAS SLOUGH

REIFEL SANCTUARY — DECEMBER 2010

Santa -- an anagram of Satan.
Evil is everywhere and protean, ever reinventing itself in forms as various as reality television, Madonna's new clothing line and, of course, Oprah Winfrey.
Anyone who happened to see her recent "Oprah's Favorite Things" show would have to agree. She was giving things away to her packed studio audience. The gifts weren't cheap and there were enough of them to dole out to each and every person in the audience, which was made up almost invariably of women.
An army of FedEx elves trouped in with Santa hats and cartons of stuff, the cheapest of which appeared to be an electric grill and it just went up from there.
It was the last word in decadence. The audience went berserk. There was weeping and wild screaming. Greed had transformed everything, even sexual demarcation because people were making out willy nilly, it didn't seem to matter with whom.
Beneath the folksy drawl and the illusion that she's just like you and me, Oprah is a truly scary woman. It's bad enough that her so-called book club has made her a player in the business of literary taste-making. She's had political clout too, of course, since Obama probably couldn't have been elected to the American presidency without her. Suddenly race had become a commodity as marketable as anything else.
Much the same thing has happened to gays and lesbians, the trade-off of more tolerance and leaving marginality being a drop into the tyrannical vortex of the market and mainstream culture. In other words, insult by homogenization.
In a previous show, Oprah took the whole studio audience to Australia to see Hugh Jackman. The final gift on the most recent show was a seven-day tropical cruise on the world's biggest ocean liner. There was a momentary intake of breath, then the ravishment and shrieking began. The camera turned to Oprah, beaming with casual celebrity, her expression beyond smug, as sure of her place as Cleopatra.
—Lloyd Dykk

FLYING HIGH

I like Katherine Monk.
A former colleague and fellow flick critic, Ms. Monk was always an ebullient and affable presence as we sat through (me often yawning) the preview of yet another innocuous Hollywood... ummm... (how shall I put it, delicately?)... pile of shit.
But later, when it came time to put notes and quotes (scrawled in the gloomy dimness of a near empty theatre) into words, Ms. Monk sometimes stumbled as she tried to put one word in front of another.
I’ve written some clunkers myself under deadline but nothing that should set a good desk editor’s hair on fire.
Case in point: Ms. Monk’s review (in both the Vancouver Sun and Province ) of the new Natalie Portman vehicle, Black Swan, is a classic example of someone attempting to write above themselves.
Either that, or she was channeling Gene Shalit.
While she awards Black Swan a generous A-minus, Ms. Monk performs an ungraceful pas de deux with readers that left me (as they say in the film blurb business) “breathless.”
Like a dog lapping up toilet water, I enjoy a scintillating simile as much as most. But Ms. Monk fell as flat as my fallen arches with this description of a ballet dancer’s foot.
“Have you seen a dancer’s feet [Well, no actually]? They’re such a microcosm of physical trauma, they conjure images of a Civil War battlefield.”
Oh really. A Civil War battlefield. Those must be some big honkin’ feet. Not to mention what I imagine to be cannonballs between the toes, as well as Union and Confederate corpses hidden beneath the heels.
But wait, kids, there’s more.
We’ll skip over the say-what? phrase “binary of beauty” and the malapropism in the description of the director’s daring turn as he “manipulates the elements to exacerbate the edge.”
How you worsen or degrade an “edge” seems more suited to a blacksmith than a film director. She may have been thinking of “enhancing.” But let’s not quibble.
Let’s take our dulled blade and cut to the chase (I also like mixed metaphors) when Ms. Monk compares the director’s deft touch with the “manly dexterity of a patriarch before the family turkey.”
Yes, he must be a manly man, even though he wields an exacerbated edge.
But Black Swan is no turkey. It’s “the kind of movie that will reawaken your love of cinema."
(Sorry, was I snoring?)
Mercifully, Ms. Monk did not close with the retch-inducing Hollywood cliche “a triumph of the human spirit.” although she may have been sorely (as sore as Gettysburg) tempted when she closed with “A complete triumph in every regard.”
Now that’s a binary beauty of a phrase born to be a blurb.

PACIFIC CENTRAL STATION

SINGER BY BERNIE LYON — NOVEMBER 2010

So we then dug him out from under the metal.
We carried him home to our city
And buried him under a huge stone, an
Arch, which we named
The Arch Triumphal:
It weighed one thousand hundredweight, so
The Unknown Soldier
Would never, no matter what happened, stand up
On Doomsday,
Or be hauled up into the light,
With his blotted out face before God,
Or point at us, making us known,
And hale us to judgement.

Bertholt Brecht, Legend of the Unknown Soldier: Beneath the Arch Triumphal.


I wear a poppy, but mine does not seem to spew cliches and thinly veiled militaristic and moral drivel like squirts from a prank clown flower.
But the Vancouver Sun’s Shelley Fralic has a poppy with that power (Remembering the power of the poppy, Nov. 11). Her stepping off point is the remembrance (get it?) of her presence when the Olympic Flame made its way along a one-km route in Labrador. Her focus is one of the torch-bearers (oh-oh, symbolism alert!), a 23-year-old member of the Armed Forces who recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan.
(Never mind the confluence of militarism with Olympic spectacle; Been there, done that with The Third Reich.)
We learn the young corporal is “quiet and dignified” — which of course are code words for compliant and duty-bound. The ideal soldier. A cipher in fatigues. And if he’s one of many who’s a dead-man walking, at least he’s doing it so not to wake up the neighbors.
Fralic isn’t really aware of cultural code of war; she just mindlessly repeats it, like a ventriloquist dummy whose schtick is propaganda rather than one-liners.
We learn she wears her power poppy to honor all those who have “sacrificed much, some even their lives, in order to preserve the peace and freedom I cherish today.”
That’s a line that could have been delivered from the pompous actors in any war machine — Greek, Roman, Prussian, Canadian, British, German — even the Taliban. Who wouldn’t rationalize death and destruction by waving the flags of “peace and freedom” although given those sentiments would be couched in religious rhetoric by radical jihadists.
Of course, the tragic irony here is that we are not free, unless you believe that freedom means being able to choose between flat-screen TVs from Wal-Mart or Price Club, or the freedom to vote for the lesser of two idiots or ideological shills. Or that the “sacrifices” that preserve this straw freedom are really the dirty work of corporate statism, preserving not freedom or peace but more down-to-earth privileges of oil, corporate interests and geo-political control.
After her blitzkrieg of homilies, Fralic seems to declare her heart victorious and turns back to the young corporal who told her that “being a soldier in Afghanistan was hot, tiring and busy work but that if things turned out as planned, he would be spending his next Remembrance Day — today — in Kandahar.”
Yes, duty and compliance is what Fralic really celebrates here, and when you translate the code, she's spinning a word-dance of death.

BASEMENT 3
BY BERNIE LYON — OCTOBER 2010

WELCOME HOME

BASEMENT 2 — 2010
BY BERNIE LYON

NORTH BURNABY

BASEMENT WALL — 2010
BY BERNIE LYON

WEST BROADWAY — 2010

IS THIS THE NEW POLITICS?

“Is this the new politics?” The Globe's Gary Mason asks (Juvenile blogosphere war turns partisan websites into smear machines — Sept. 14), concluding his condemnation of biased Vancouver civic-affairs bloggers who throw agenda-ridden reportage into cyberspace like spaghettini against the wall for other media to gobble up.
His theme, by now yesterday’s news among online regulars, is that many blogs are about “settling scores” and “axes to grind.” And the result is a “corrosive” effect on “reasonable” debate and reportage.
“Maybe I’m old-fashioned,” Mr. Mason reflects, “ but I don’t see how any of this benefits local government.”
Mr. Mason may be right. But only because the bloggers that irk his sanctimonious principles play by the same rules as almost all conventional media.
Since the yellow journalism days of William Randolph Hearst up and through the conservative regimes lorded over by such modern newspaper barons as Conrad Black, Leonard Asper and Rupert Murdoch (who recently purchased the Wall Street Journal to provide a hardcore right-wing counterpunch to the New York Times), newspapers and other mainstream media have staked a claim to “objectivity” that is as transparently partisan as the virgin-white winter jackets emblazoned with both the Olympic and CTV logos worn by Vancouver news anchors Bill Good and Pamela Martin during their tenure as “objective” news providers for the Winter Olympics (CTV was the official Canadian broadcaster).
This is not to say good and useful journalism does not exist that valiantly strives toward (but can never arrive) at “objectivity.” But this noble enterprise is almost always thwarted isomewhat by the elitist, statist and corporate entities who exert a silent agenda that is largely implicit (and reporters self-censor either consciously or not in order to stay employed) and occasional audibly explicit.
I did my tour of duty for both of Vancouver’s major daily newspapers for more than 20 years (as a reporter, sportswriter, film and TV critic, and pop-culture columnist). I can recall many times when myself or others were instructed either to cover something to satisfy the cravings of power elites, or were, conversely, commanded to not follow a lead because it would upset those same ethereal entities who exert an invisible power in the same way our everyday culture wields an invisible violence to maintain a semblance of social order.
You want specifics? I remember more than a decade ago a reporter being turned away from a story on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside because “no one wants to read depressing stuff,” or something to that effect.
As a news writer I had a story turned down because its subjects were seniors and the paper was on a youth-oriented marketing campaign.
During my time as a film critic, I was summoned to a boardroom, where a slick theatre-chain rep not-so-subtlety encouraged me to write more positive reviews.
I have seen political cartoons poignant but so edgy that they were spiked (dispatched to the trash can).
I could cite dozens of examples like these. Some laughable, others tragic.
Talk about corrosive.
So where are my sources? My accountablility? Maybe they’re hiding behind the same unnamed sources and convenient, agenda-based news selection employed consistently by what Mr. Mason would call respectable “news organizations.”

Maybe I’m new-fashioned, but I like the fact that bloggers of all bits and bytes have found voices not necessarily tethered to a largely white, upper-middle class, free enterprise theatre of “truthiness,” as Stephen Colbert once put it.
Yes, some bloggers dish out tasty “facts” while they feed off rumor and innuendo. My God, stop the presses!
Simply put, blogs have offered a voice to individuals and micro-communities most often shunned by major media — unless relegated to the letters-to-the-editor, or if they’re lucky, the opinion page. Some voices are reasoned, some irrational, some hysterical.
But it’s up to me (and all of us) as sovereign individuals — not the gate-keepers of mainstream media — to make the call.
Is this the new politics?
I hope so.
LEE BACCHUS

STATE OF AFFAIRS

SPEAKEASY 2010

(click to enlarge)

SOME RECENT IPHONE SNAPS
(daughter has Nikon in Montreal)

BY BRITTA BACCHUS
(Her blog here)

The Yearling, 1946, should come with a disclaimer: "Animals were offed in the making of this so-called classic, which incidentally is shown regularly on Turner Classic Movies." And The Yearling isn't the only one. There's also Old Yeller and let's not even talk about Bambi.
These are the bring-downs of all time since in each one, an adorable animal is "killed", and why? So we can learn a life-lesson. So children can pick up some tips about "coming of age", though if they're like me, they're more likely to run screaming from the theatre and bear the trauma for life.
What was the point of these exercises in sadism?
Suppressed feelings perhaps, if you note the time when they were made. There was a cold war going on that you could feel even domestically. Toughness made you good. Kids could be kids but only up to a point and not for too long. And nothing could spell out the death of innocence like the death of an animal — the cuter the better. It's funny kittens didn't come in for it.
But there is a stunning exception to the use of animals as propagandistic devices in Leos Janacek's opera, The Cunning Little Vixen from 1924.
This has everything — talking, singing, dancing animals, gaiety, sadness, exquisite music that seems to have come from the very forest, and tears that have been earned.
— Lloyd Dykk
(Lloyd's blog can be seen here)