I'm pleased to bring to your attention that U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and not Bono, has been nominated to head the World Bank. I've always liked Wolfowitz; he's a bright guy, and he's been pretty candid when contrasted with the thugs and yes-men who clutter up so many of the posts in the Bush administration. (For instance, Wolfowitz once acknowledged in an interview that the weapons-of-mass-destruction rationale for the invasion of Iraq had been highlighted for its PR value, because the other rationales, such as upholding human rights and establishing Arab democracy, were unlikely to appeal to the self-interest of the average American voter. He took a lot of grief for this confession, but I think it speaks well of him that he was willing to admit the obvious.) It should be noted that one of Wolfowitz' first moves after the announcement was to call up Bono and have a lengthy, detailed discussion about debt relief.

Am I the only one who finds Bono hilarious?

Hotel Rwanda.
Thu, 31 Mar 2005

What does it say about Warren's and my shallowness that the first thing we discussed coming out of "Hotel Rwanda" last night was the lead actress' enormous head? Kissing Don Cheadle, who played her husband, she looked like a giantess preparing to devour a small child.

Somehow Warren had Don Cheadle confused with former "Saturday Night Live" regular Tim Meadows, star of "The Ladies Man". This led to a discussion of the character's catchphrase, "Let's go back to my place and do it up the butt", which for some reason never caught fire in the manner of "Could it be...Satan?" or "I'm getting verklempt". Meanwhile in Rwanda a million skeletons rolled over in their mass-graves.

"Hotel Rwanda" is a pretty pedestrian movie, but a useful history lesson. Nick Nolte plays a character loosely based on Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, in charge of the UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda, who had to sit back and watch the slaughter while in Washington and at the UN the bureaucrats dickered about the precise meaning of the word "genocide". In the end the Hutu militias were swept aside by a badly-equipped rabble of ethnic Tutsi insurgents, which raises the question of how little effort it would have taken to suppress the violence if the western powers had bothered to intervene. How much firepower do you need to intimidate a gang of hooligans in Hawaiian shirts and purple fright wigs, most of them armed only with machetes? A few thousand soldiers, maybe? A couple helicopters? But western leaders allowed themselves to be terrorised by images of African anarchy, and wouldn't risk even that much involvement. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said to Colin Powell, when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and she was trying to convince him to send troops on some far-flung humanitarian mission that he regarded as excessively risky: "What's the point of having this superb military if we're not ever allowed to use it?"

RE: Hotel Rwanda.
Fri, 01 Apr 2005

Warren Brooke wrote:

I don't really understand international politics and the rules of getting involved. Was it a civil war, was it a genocide, I don't know.

Sin City.
Thu, 07 Apr 2005

Apologies to all who attempted to call me last night. I muted the answering machine so that my computer repairs and early bedtime would go uninterrupted. I had a nice long sleep and woke up at 6:50 AM from a bizarre homoerotic dream where Batman was having anal sex with the Joker in order to bring about the second coming of Christ. Turned out I had no sandwich materials with which to make my lunch so, my morning routine being shortened by several minutes, I wound up arriving at the office early. I figured I'd be the first one here, but somehow I still wound up being among the last. Maybe all my co-workers had the same dream.

I wanted to say something about "Sin City". It's pretty good if you have a taste for dismemberments and eviscerations. I'm not slagging it; I don't mind those things, and I thought the gore was handled quite artfully, if not exactly tastefully.

Frank Miller, who created the comic, is credited as the co-director of "Sin City", even though he has no background in film. I imagine his involvement must have been less in the minutiae of camera placement and editing, and more in establishing the general look and feel of the thing. The result disproves the idea that art in one genre has to lose something of its character to make a transition to another genre - the usual justification of directors who wreck a good novel or comic book in transferring it to the screen.

Alan Moore, who created "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", had no involvement in making the film version of his comic book - which turned out to be an utter dud. I recall reading an interview with Moore just after the movie came out, where he justified his decision not to get involved. He quoted an old anecdote about how a friend had once asked Raymond Chandler if it bothered him how Hollywood was always "ruining" his books. Chandler took the friend into his library, pointed to his books up on the shelf, and said, "There they are, they're fine."

In a more recent interview, Moore confessed that he'd been naïve to assume that the public would draw a distinction between the comic book version of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and the movie blockbuster that was known, for inscrutable marketing purposes, as "LXG". Regardless of how he tried to distance himself from the crappy adaptation, the public would assume that the source material was as crappy as the film. So his new policy is to forbid film adaptations of his work altogether.

But there is another alternative - which is to be sufficiently involved at every stage of the process that the screenwriter and director can't ruin your vision. This seems to have worked for Frank Miller, and it worked for Daniel Clowes, who was closely involved in the adaptation of his "Ghost World".

I think the point is that, while there's nothing most of us can do to prevent Hollywood from producing boring, stupid movies, those lucky people who do have any influence should exert every effort to make sure that stupid movies don't get made. Because movies are a large part of our culture, and a stupid culture makes every one of us stupider.

If that means going to Hollywood and arguing with the men in suits who want to cast Sean Connery in the lead role, then you should do it. If it means writing the screenplay yourself, then you should do it. If it means camping out next to the director and raising a fuss when he tries to slap a happy ending on your bleak story, then you should do it. These duties might be unpleasant, but you can't get off the hook by saying everyone in Hollywood is cynical and corrupt, they can't be trusted to adapt a work of literature - or even a comic book - faithfully. The truth is that they can make decent adaptations, but they usually don't unless someone forces them to. To sell the rights to your creation and then say, "It's out of my hands now," is just laziness. To refuse to sell the rights to your creation at all is almost as bad. The sad truth is, "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" would make a very good movie. Unfortunately, now we're never going to get a chance to see it.

The growl hole.
Mon, 11 Apr 2005

Dean Drobot wrote:

After hearing "The Band Known As Sea Water Bliss" people get a certain impression. (I imagine they liken it to "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" ... catchy, sort of sad, sort of folky.) Then they hear Growl Hole and they aren't expecting it. They don't know if you are serious or not.

I think one thing that throws people off is that they can actually understand most of my lyrics. People have been conditioned by thirty years of self-indulgent rock-n-roll songwriting to accept any half-articulate, improvised mumble as a legitimate form of creative expression. They'll keep a straight face through the most godawful, meandering, pseudo-poetic, stream-of-consciousness baloney, then scratch their heads in confusion at a perfectly straightforward narrative. I'm not sure if this is a failure of rock-n-roll or a failure of education. People have got the false idea that "serious" poetry is necessarily oblique and incomprehensible. Therefore they associate obliqueness with sophistication, and clarity, I suppose, with simplemindedness.

Or maybe I'm just projecting blame for my own literary inadequacies. A hole that growls...? Now, really...

GM mango.
Sat, 16 Apr 2005

Here's what I think should be the top priorities for genetic engineers:

1. HAND MANGOES. The mango is a wonderful fruit, but jesus, what a pain in the ass peeling it. Even after you get the rind off, it's too juicy and slippery to eat with your hands. If you could eat a mango like you eat an apple, I'm convinced it would soon rocket past pears, peaches, and oranges to the top of the fruit hierarchy. Get those genetic engineers to work making a slightly smaller mango with a tasty, edible skin.

2. TALKING DOGS. Cos we all want to know what they're so damn excited about.

3. HEADLESS LIVESTOCK. I have to admit, ten years after I took up the practice, that non-meat-eating really stinks. The vegetarians try hard, but they have yet to come up with a non-disappointing substitute for the hamburger, the hot dog, the corned beef on rye, or the BLT. Now, many vegetarians avoid meat because of health considerations, but for the rest of us whose motivations are purely ethical, the root of the problem is that there is no way to consume animals and animal byproducts without causing those creatures to suffer. But what if we could engineer animals that had no brains and no central nervous systems, and therefore no capacity to suffer? We could stack them up in airless, confining pens, fatten them with feeding tubes, and slaughter them messily with blunt instruments, and there would be no ethical consequences: they would feel no more pain than a potato plant. Then all the vegetarians could go back to eating hamburgers and Jello and quit getting on everyone's nerves. Why aren't the genetic engineers working on this? Busy curing cancer, I guess. Well, hurry it up, I want a ham sandwich.

American Splendor.
Sat, 07 May 2005

"American Splendor". I saw it at the theatre about a year ago, but I wanted to take another look on DVD. It's still a pretty good show.

One observation. One of Harvey Pekar's definitive comic stories - "The Harvey Pekar Name Story" - is reproduced in the film. In the original story, as drawn by Robert Crumb, Harvey simply stands in front of a blank wall and tells the story of how there came to be three listings in the Cleveland phone book with the unlikely name of "Harvey Pekar". For forty-eight consecutive frames, our perspective of Harvey never varies - we never get closer, or see him from another angle. Now and then, he turns slightly to one side or the other, scratches his belly, grimaces, but basically he just stands there relating the story, like a stand-up comic without a microphone. Or a punchline. In fact, the last frame contains no words, just Harvey staring out at us, his story finished, waiting for us to turn the page. The whole thing is a masterpiece of understatement. It's hilarious and slightly sad.

In the movie, as Paul Giamatti's Harvey tells the story, he wanders to and fro, is dropped into a street scene, shares the frame briefly with a ringing telephone, and is otherwise buffetted on all sides by every trick of animation the filmmakers can muster. There's ten times more stuff going on than in the comic, and it's ten times less interesting.

I'm not sure if the lesson is simply that less is more. I think the point is that comics and film are very different media, and a speech carried over from comic to screen is going to suffer by having its natural rhythms disrupted. At one point in the story Harvey describes the first time he saw the other Harvey listed in the phone book: "I was listed as Harvey L. Pekar...my middle name is Lawrence...he was listed simply as Harvey Pekar - no middle initial...therefore his was a purer listing."

The line isn't particularly funny as I've quoted it above. What makes it work in the comic is that it's broken up over two frames, over two rows in fact, and the eye has to travel from one frame, down a row, and over to the left side of the page in order to read "...therefore his was a purer listing." I can't explain why this is somehow funnier than reading the passage all in one chunk. It's a question of rhythm, as ineffably and undeniably correct as a Groucho Marx line reading or a Fred Astaire dance move. In the film, Paul Giamatte gives the line the best reading he can - the fact that "purer" is an exceptionally hard word to clearly enunciate couldn't have helped - but the scene just isn't very funny.

Now, the screenwriter wasn't necessarily going for funny when he incorporated this speech into the film, and I'm not saying it doesn't work in context. I just thought it was interesting to compare it to the original. Pekar comes across as little more than a grouchy working class schlub in the film - there's very little focus on the artistic side of his life - which is a pity, because for a guy who "can't even draw a straight line", as he says, he's an exceptionally talented comic book artist. You need to go to the source material to be reminded of that.

Clock ticking.
Fri, 13 May 2005

It seems like I can't concentrate on anything for longer than a couple minutes. That's a suitable attention span for completing most government business, but writing a decent email requires a slightly longer outlook.

I think my problems are related to aging. I was discussing this with Warren a few weeks ago. I was saying, there are a limited number of connections in the brain. At the age of twenty-eight or twenty-nine or so, you've already explored all the connections that are worth exploring. Ideas that seemed profound to you at the age of eighteen or nineteen seem mundane now. And the flow of new ideas stops.

Warren argued that the number of connections in the brain was immense, like the grains of sand on a beach, and that you could go on counting the grains of sand forever. That's true, I said, but the correct analogy is looking for seashells on the beach. After all, our brains are mostly filled with useless crap - the plots of cartoons we watched when we were kids, for instance, or boring information about our aunts and uncles. These are the grains of sand - numberless, but also valueless. The seashells are the few interesting ideas that occasionally wash up on the beach. Sometimes they're in plain view, other times you have to dig for them a little, but at any rate by the time you've reached your twenties you've scooped most of them into your little plastic pail, and all you can do is dig random holes in the sand, or else sit on the beach and wait for new seashells to wash in.

There's another analogy that comes to mind: the "Hubbert peak", which refers to the point where half of all available petroleum reserves have been depleted. Since companies tend to suck out all the easy oil first, after the first 50% has been exhausted, the remaining 50% is increasingly difficult and costly to extract. Maybe the same thing goes with the human brain: I passed my Hubbert peak a few years back, and now I'm on the declining side of the bell curve of mental productivity.

RE: Clock ticking.
Mon, 16 May 2005

Warren Brooke wrote:

I think the whole analogy only works if we think of neuronal connections as static and finite . . . . I think a more likely scenario would involve multiplying seashells . . . . Every time you find an interesting seashell and stop to examine it, you find that underneath there are two more seashells . . . . Good ideas spawn more good ideas.

Saskatchewan Centennial Gala.
Fri, 20 May 2005

So did anyone else witness the Saskatchewan Centennial Gala on CBC last night? I tuned in right at the end, just as our royal visitors were paying their respects to the performers assembled onstage at SaskPlace. I missed the edifying spectacle of the Queen shaking hands with Theresa Sokyrka, but I watched her tottering past a lineup of befeathered Indians and gold-lamé-clad teenage jazz dancers, smiling benignly and absent-mindedly on each one. Prince Philip trailed her, stopping to shake hands and offer small-talk to a random sampling of colonials. Then the Queen and the Prince reached the end of the receiving line and the camera followed them backstage, where they climbed into their car and were gone from the building before the song (a Muzak version of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi") had finished playing.

I don't mean to be bitter, but what happened to the good old days, when aristocrats sneered at the vulgar entertainments of the hoi polloi? I'm not saying we should have an aristocracy, but if we insist on having one, let's at least make sure that it establishes and adheres to aristocratic standards of good taste. Those standards might be arbitrary - they might dictate that the laziest performance of classical music is accorded more respect than the most adventurous jazz - but at least they're standards. Instead we have a Royal family with no discrimination whatsoever - a Queen who will sit smiling through the most mind-numbing and amateurish pageants, who offers the same lazy applause whether she's watching Don Giovanni or Saskatchewan Express, who will smile just as patronisingly at Leslie Nielson playing a clumsy Mountie or Olivier playing Hamlet. People always complain about the crassness and lowest-common-denominator-chasing of politicians, but politicians are at least allowed to express opinions that might alienate some members of the electorate. George Bush prefers country music to gangsta rap, and is unafraid to say so. Jean Chrétien liked Harvey's better than Burger King, and he didn't care who knew it. Our Queen just sits through one tacky gala after another, smiling at the stage like a mentally handicapped person, nodding politely at everyone and everything, a symbol expunged of all meaning, an incomprehensible glyph. This, apparently, is what a royal family must do to retain its privileges in a democratic society: they have to become imbeciles. If they had any self-respect they'd have rejected this bargain out of hand and retired quietly to nurture their corgis in the countryside somewhere. Perhaps we should begin hinting politely that it's time for them to do just that.

The Batmobile.
Mon, 27 Jun 2005

"Batman Begins". It's a pretty good show, but because it tries to treat the mythology seriously, some of the sillier aspects of the character really stand out. For instance, the Batmobile. Now, I can appreciate that Batman's mansion is located out in the boonies somewhere, where public transportation is poor, and he needs a personal vehicle to get downtown. But do we really need so much emphasis on his car? The whole point of Batman is that he's an enigmatic nocturnal creature who lurks in steam-filled alleyways or atop Gothic towers, his cloak flapping in the wind. The new movie handles this stuff very well. He swoops down from rooftops, lunges suddenly from the shadows, strikes terror into the hearts of evildoers. And then...he hops into his tricked-out Hummer and drives home. One of the film's action centrepieces involves the Batmobile being chased through downtown by half of the Gotham City Police Department, smashing through concrete barriers, even leaping from rooftop to rooftop, while a police helicopter buzzes overhead. Now this would be fine for Vin Diesel, or even for James Bond, but we want Batman to exercise a bit more discretion in his getaways. I found it disappointing.

I'm not saying they need to get rid of the Batmobile, only that it needn't be foregrounded quite so much. As I related to Warren after the show, back in the '70s even Spider-Man had a Spider-car. More like a Spider-buggy, actually, as I recall. Now, the logic behind the Spider-car is just as sound as the logic behind the Batmobile. Granted, Spider-Man lives downtown and therefore has no need to commute. But still, his crimefighting adventures must occasionally take him out to the suburbs - the Hamptons maybe, or Newark - where there are no convenient tall buildings from which to swing. A vehicle would be handy for such excursions. But the folks at Marvel recognised that, however useful a Spider-car might sometimes be, the image of Spider-Man tucked sedately behind the wheel of a bright red dune buggy clashed with our romantic idea of Spider-Man somersaulting amid the skyscrapers. And so the Spider-car was quietly done away with. But I guess the Batmobile makes a good tie-in for toy manufacturers, so we're probably going to be stuck with it for a while.

PS. I wonder if Wonder Woman's Invisible Jet had an Invisible Cup Holder?

Do the paramecium!
Mon, 04 Jul 2005

Warren and I went to see "War of the Worlds" on Saturday. I was curious to see how they would handle the ending. I assume everyone is familiar with the resolution of the novel, but just in case, I won't reveal it. Suffice it to say, it's a bit of an anticlimax.

The anticlimax fits with the original story, which is a parable of humility. Wells was writing at a time when Darwin's theories were new and still controversial, and I'm sure he thought it would be a valuable lesson to show humankind deposed from its centrality in God's creation. He's careful not to make the Martians evil, exactly; it's only that they're as indifferent to causing us pain as we are to the lower animals. In the end, nothing humans do can stop the invaders, and we're only preserved through an accident of the same natural selection that has brought us low.

So the question re Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" is: Does he keep the original, anticlimactic ending? And if so, how does he dramatise it? Or, does he come up with a brand new, more crowd-pleasing ending - and turn the movie into "Independence Day II"?

I think either solution would be unsatisfying, and I won't ruin it for anybody by revealing his decision. I'll only say that, yup, it's unsatisfying. The rest of the movie is pretty good. The alien war machines are scary as hell, and though it would have been more fun to see them rampaging through Wells' original Victorian England, rather than modern day New Jersey, I suppose that would have tripled the cost of the film. Imagine the challenge of fitting every screaming extra with a top hat. And bustles for the ladies. And those bicycles with the big front wheels. It all adds up.

Peter Jackson is remaking "King Kong", with Naomi Watts and Jack Black, and he's chosen to set it in the 1930s. I'm jazzed about it. But I have a fearful premonition that, like "Sky Captain", it will be a huge flop. Young moviegoers don't care for period movies. I think they find the costumes and accents weird and confusing. And it's difficult to cast rappers and pro wrestlers in starring roles.

Dickens - Chesterton - Waugh.
Fri, 15 Jul 2005

I am twenty-nine years old and have just finished reading "David Copperfield" for the first time. I was led to the book by G.K. Chesterton. In reading the Penguin collection of his essays and poems, some months ago, I was obliged to skip over the essay on "David Copperfield", in case it should gave away any plot points that I might prefer be kept a surprise. In order that I could go back and read Chesterton's essay (and also that I could borrow the DVD of the 1935 George Cukor production which has frequently caught my attention at the library), it was necessary that I, in all promptness, read the book.

I don't have anything to say that Chesterton doesn't say, about the tidiness of Dickens' ending - the way David's silly wife Dora is conveniently disposed of, and Mr. Micawber is sent off to Australia to become a magistrate. I will say that Chesterton is perhaps slightly harder on the character of Agnes than she deserves; it's not her fault that she's boring, sensible, and self-denying, nor is it her fault that David married Dora first. Chesterton goes so far as to say that David's remarriage to Agnes is in some way less real than his earlier marriage to Dora. I'd have to say that Chesterton allows his Catholic prejudices to overshadow his critical faculties here.

No more on "David Copperfield". But one thing more on Chesterton: I wanted to mention that I'm onto Evelyn Waugh, who borrows a passage from one of Chesterton's essays for an early chapter of "Brideshead Revisited". In "Simmons and the Social Tie", Chesterton mentions a certain "Mrs. Buttons, a charwoman in Battersea", with "a powerful stoop and an ugly, attractive face", whom he has selected as the representative of her gender. He writes, "...When I hear the modern generalisations about her sex on all sides I simply substitute her name, and see how the thing sounds then." Thus the declaration, "Woman, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw, drops her tawdry luxuries and demands to grasp the sceptre of empire and the firebrand of speculative thought", becomes, "Mrs. Buttons, leaping to life at the trumpet call of Ibsen and Shaw", etc. "...It is extraordinary," Chesterton concludes, "what a difference the substitution seems to make."

In "Brideshead Revisited", Captain Charles Ryder is plagued by a certain vulgarly pragmatic, though incompetent, junior officer named Hooper: "Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting 'Hooper' and seeing if they still seemed as plausible."

Elsewhere in "Brideshead", Waugh quotes directly from one of the Father Brown stories, so it's doubtful that he was trying to get away with anything; the "Hooper" passage is probably something in the way of an homage, or an inside joke, a little sideways wink to fellow Chesterton fans. If that was his intention, it certainly works on that level. It gave me great pleasure to detect it.

Mo' money.
Sun, 17 Jul 2005

I was renting a couple videos from 49 Cent Video this afternoon. The girl behind the counter told me I had a late charge. "For what?" I asked.

"Fraggle Rock."

I smiled sheepishly. "How much?" I figured sixty cents, maybe a buck.

"Six dollars and forty cents."

"What? For a day or two?"

"It was seven days late."

I stood there squinting. A memory floated up. "Someone called about this. They said it was overdue, and I said I'd already returned it. Then they went to check and they said yeah, it had already been returned."

"Uh-huh," said the girl behind the counter.

A pause. "So," I said.

"So the computer says it was seven days overdue," she said. "I could maybe knock a day off."

I stared hard at the counter for ten, twenty seconds. "Could we just put it off, and I'll talk to a manager or something?" I finally said. So she wrote the manager's name and number on a piece of paper and I paid for my rentals and left the late charge for another time. No point getting worked up over it. Just a little mistake.

Still, I'm not sure what to do. Call the manager and make a fuss? Or just quietly stop renting from 49 Cent Video? Or shrug and pay the six bucks? Why not? It's like drawing a Chance Card in Monopoly. Sometimes you win a beauty contest. Other times you gotta pay the Poor Tax. Just shrug and pay. Easier than throwing a tantrum every time. And really, it's only six lousy bucks.

But then again, why should I be paying for someone else's mistakes? Is someone gonna pay for mine?

Hmm. What's the sane, measured thing to do here?

Folkies.
Mon, 25 Jul 2005

Warren and I went to see the folkie-country girl band Nathan on Saturday night. They were playing at the Brass Monkey, which is up in that second-level space on 21st Street where the Zoo Bar, among other failed nightclubs, once dwelled. It's a pretty nice venue. Not too dank, fresh air breezing through the open windows, not too crowded. They had a good mix of young hippies, overweight hillbillies, and old dudes in ties.

I like Nathan. I even bought their CD - I think it's the first CD I've bought in over a year. Between sets I turned to Warren and said, "These guys are awesome. They've got everything I've always wanted in my own band - banjo, accordian, theremin..." I paused for effect, and Warren anticipated the punchline. "...Cute girls," we concluded simultaneously.

I wish I'd been able to come up with something clever to say to the cute lead singer when I was buying the CD, but the best I could do was "You guys are awesome." Pretty weak, Michael. In retrospect, I should have asked about the theremin. Where did you learn to play the theremin? How much did your theremin cost? What's it like playing the theremin? Is it rad? It looks rad...

Musical girls.
Thu, 04 Aug 2005

A couple weeks ago, when Warren and I went to see that band Nathan, I was dismayed by my tongue-tied efforts to make conversation with the cute lead singer while buying a CD from her. After the show I came home and checked out the band's website, where I found a link to add yourself to their mailing list. I clicked it and a blank email message popped up. So I filled up the message with various flattering comments about the band and the lead singer's assured playing of the theremin. I also gave them a bit of advice: when you're encouraging your audience to clap along with a song, I wrote, it's important to also tell the audience when it's acceptable to stop clapping. It's embarrassing to look around and realise you're the last person still clapping.

So a couple days ago I got a nice letter back from the cute lead singer. She apologised for the clapping thing and said she hoped I wasn't too traumatised by the experience. Then she asked where she could listen to a recording of the rock opera. Apparently she'd clicked on the link to seawaterbliss.com in my signature file and browsed around the website, but of course there's nothing there to listen to, only stuff to read. What a wasted opportunity.

On the other hand, since the rock opera sounds much more interesting when it's described to you than it does when you actually hear it, perhaps it's a good thing that there are no extant recordings. It's far easier to summon the correct atmosphere with words - words like "satellite" and "laserbeam" and "echo" and "spaceman" - than it is to perform music that actually sounds like those things. Pursuing this idea further, maybe I should abandon the writing of rock operas and stick to the conceptualisation of rock operas. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a rock opera where muppets had sex with unicorns? There. Done. I've created the concept. No piece of music could possibly do the concept justice. Therefore, why waste everybody's time.

Among the songs we're currently recording with Darcy there's one called The band known as Sea Water Bliss, a kind of ryme-of-the-ancient-mariner ballad about an orchestra marooned on a desert island. I think it would sound cool with a mournful trumpet solo, so I got Darcy to give me the number of this trumpet-playing girl he knows. I gave her a call yesterday. She told me she'd be happy to play a solo on the record...if we pay her. Maybe seventy-five or a hundred bucks, she estimated. She says that seeing as how music is her living it would be silly to give away her services for free. This is a perfectly reasonable position to take - I wish I were sufficiently in demand to take it myself - but it sorta messes up the whole trumpet-solo plan.

This is the same conundrum we face every time we go into the studio: how much are we prepared to spend in order to sound good? This shouldn't be so damn complicated. Say you could pay $10,000 to sound as awesome as Loverboy, or $5000 to sound as good as Trooper, or a mere $1000 to sound like the Headpins. Then you could make a straightforward calculation based on your budget and how awesome you wanted to sound. But what if you've paid $10,000 and you find to your disappointment that you sound like Great Big Sea? Is it worthwhile to pay an extra couple thousand bucks in the hope of scraping up to the level of, say, Chilliwack? Maybe you can keep on spending forever and never get there. Or maybe you're just one trumpet solo away from turning the corner. Who's to say?

Oot and aboot.
Mon, 08 Aug 2005

So Peter Jennings, the Canadian-born anchor of the ABC evening news, has died. In a story in today's New York Times there is a paragraph comparing him to his chief competitors, Tom Brokaw at NBC and the deranged Dan Rather at CBS. Unlike the "plain-spoken" Brokaw and the "folksy" Rather, Jennings was "worldly"; he "neither spoke like many of his viewers...nor looked like them, with a matinee-idol face and crisply tailored wardrobe." As evidence, the Times presents the following: "about came out of his mouth as A-BOOT, a remnant of his Canadian roots."

What the hell? I rarely watched the big network newscasts, so I can't say with certainty that Peter Jennings did not say "aboot". But I bet he didn't. Because in my entire life I have never heard a Canadian (or anyone else) say "aboot". Yet the myth of "aboot" is so persistent that many Americans are apparently willing to believe it despite the evidence of their own ears. Even hearing Peter Jennings say "owt" will not disabuse them of their certainty: "Did he just say 'owt'? Nah...it's impossible. He's Canadian. He must've said 'oot'."

Or is it possible that the collective delusion is ours? Is it possible we're actually saying "aboot" and we don't even know it? It's like that old brain-twister that every pothead and imaginative seventh-grader has grappled with: "How do I know that my yellow is the same colour as your yellow? Maybe my yellow is, like, your blue." Spooky.

It's not that I have anything against the idea of "aboot". I kind of wish we did have a distinctive accent, like the Australians or the Scots or the South Africans. If I thought anybody else would play along, I'd even propose a national campaign to encourage Canadians to adopt the "aboot" pronunciation, just for the heck of it. It would be way more fun than Rick Mercer's turn-off-the-lights-when-you-leave-the-room crusade. And it would do more to encourage national unity than any phoney Flag Day, or hopeless Olympic bid, or trying to remember the name of the new Governor General. But I don't think anyone would actually do it. Because "aboot" just sounds funny. Plus, it's hard work. You have to push your lips into an awkward kissy-face position, and it's difficult to get them back into shape for the mushy middle-of-the-mouth vowels that make up the rest of our language. We North Americans have lazy mouths, we don't like to move them more than is necessary. I predict that in twenty or thirty years, even words with "oo" and "ee" in them will be pronounced "uh". The schwa will rule. Ultimately our communication will degenerate into a long sustained mumble, as happened to Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan. All more sophisticated communication will take the form of Flash animations on our cranial LCD displays.