Transfixing

The Abstract Expressionist exhibit at the AGO is a beautiful thing. Not just because it's full of beautiful things, but because even though it's not that large, it's really well put together and thought provoking. It makes you realize how an artistic movement gets defined by its most controversial works and artists, but really contains so many more styles and attitudes, some of which are contradictory.
There were, of course, dazzling paintings by Pollock, De Kooning and Rothko that I felt mesmerized and transfixed by, but also some more unexpected things. The exhibit included photographs by Aaron Siskind that blurred the definition of “abstract.” I mean, can photographs be abstract? This at least is what I was thinking when I looked at his photos of rock piles and peeling paint on walls. There were a few Robert Frank photos as well, a poem by Edwin Denby, whom I'd never heard of, and some actual female artists! A sculpture by Louise Bourgeois called Sleeping Figure was one of the most beautiful pieces in the show, and there were paintings by Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler. Is it significant that, while Pollock and De Kooning piled the paint on (not to mention, in Pollock's case, adding cigarette butts, keys, thumbtacks and other stuff) to sit so predominantly on the canvas, Frankenthaler used a staining method in which the paint sinks into the canvas?
Also, it made me realize once again how different it is to see a painting in person, so to speak, rather than a reproduction in a book. On the page, Ad Reinhardt's “Abstract Painting” looks like a flat black canvas. But when you look at it close up, you can see shapes emerging from the blackness, and different intensities of colour. It's hard to see what this painting has in common with De Kooning's Women, but they're both amazing and I'll be going back.

Let's do the time warp again!

Worlds collided and old folks came out of the woodwork at the Garrison twice in the past couple of weeks, when two books about ye olde Toronto punk scene were launched. The first was for Jennifer Morton's book about Bunchofuckingoofs, Dirty Drunk and Punk, which featured a set by that particular notorious ’80s punk band; soon afterward came the party for Don Pyle's Trouble in the Camera Club, which collects photos he took of Toronto punk shows as a high-school kid and ties them together with a witty, perceptive and modest essay about those times. Don presented a slide show with characteristic charm, and later there was a set by the reconstituted Ugly, featuring Greg Dick subbing in for the late Mike Nightmare, and then a set in which the Sadies backed up various vocalists on some local punk non-hits. Surprisingly, there was no Steve Leckie sighting; where the hell was he, I wonder? I didn't see any Diodes either; it was Pyle himself who sang their songs.

It's always hard to re-create the reckless energy and passion of early punk; there's an excitement that only comes from hearing a style of music that's really fresh and possibly veering out of control, when no one really knows what's going to happen. But there's also a lot to be said for musicians who've been playing for more than 20 years, as the Ugly and the Sadies have. They reminded me of how many good songs came out of Toronto at that time, and what a shame it was that nobody stepped up to start a label back then. And they didn't even do the obvious “hits,” like Screaming Fist, Tired of Waking Up Tired and New York City. It was lots of fun, even though I didn't think Damian Abraham really needed to smash a glass on his head to add excitement to his terrific cover of the Poles' CN Tower. Fifth Column's Caroline Azar took on the Curse's Shoeshine Boy (with Patsy Poison in the audience!), and Nick Flanagan did a pretty good job on the Teenage Head set (with Gordie Lewis as a special guest). RIP Frankie Venom.

Frozen River

A list of the most Canadian movies ever made by Americans would of course include Slapshot and Fargo, but it also should include Frozen River, an amazing 2008 movie by Courtney Hunt which I recently saw. How this beautiful film managed to stay under the radar despite two Oscar nominations is a mystery. Is it the bleakness of the setting, in and around the Indian reservation that straddles the Canada-U.S. border near Cornwall in darkest winter? Is it because nobody knows anything about Hunt, who also wrote the movie? Is it because it was by and about women and doesn't have any car crashes... well, not exactly? I don't know, but it's worth watching just for Melissa Leo's performance as a mother of two who works in a dollar store and dreams of a double-wide mobile home. After seeing her all glammed up at the Oscars this year, it was shocking to see Leo's face, tired and haggard and unadorned with makeup and swollen from tears and so bloody emotionally expressive. And she's not the only remarkable thing about the movie: there's also great acting by Misty Upham as a young Mohawk woman who smuggles people across the river and Charlie McDermott as Leo's teenaged son. But it's Melissa Leo's face that stays in my head.

Canadian Music Week Fest Thing

They changed the name of Canadian Music Week, for some reason, to Canadian Music Fest. Which is not to be confused with Juno Fest, which happens the week of the Junos like Canadian Music Week used to. But it seems that Juno Fest actually celebrates Canadian music more than Canadian Music Fest does. I mean, the cover of the guidebook for CMW/F featured those Canadian music legends Sammy Hagar, Nikki Sixx and Melissa Etheridge. What were they thinking? There are so many Canadian musicians they could be celebrating instead of those three non-Canadians and by the way their heydays were decades ago!
Anyway, the best thing I saw was the Montreal band Elephant Stone, who managed to work a sitar into some amazing rock songs and made it seem natural. They were all great players, too. The drummer was doing some lovely stuff. Other than that, J. Mascis was the most memorable. He was the absolute opposite of the first time I saw him, at Lee's Palace a long time ago, when he turned his back on his audience for the whole show, and asked for no lighting as well. That was annoying. This time, he sat down, facing the audience and even took requests. He's mellowed in his old age.

Marwencol

Marwencol is a fascinating movie about one of my favourite subjects, the ability of creativity to heal or at least comfort. It's a documentary about a guy who was badly beaten in a bar brawl, to the point where he doesn't remember much about his previous life, even being married. As he recovered, he began building a miniature world. He invented a town in World War II Belgium called Marwencol, and populated it with mail-order action figures, Barbies and magnificently detailed sets involving American and German soldiers and local inhabitants. He based many of the characters on people he knows in his upstate New York town, changing their hair or faces if necessary. And he takes beautiful photographs of them.
Apparently he was a terrible alcoholic before the beating, but now he doesn't drink at all. He builds his sets, takes his photos and walks along the highway dragging a toy jeep so that it will look convincingly mud-splattered for the camera. His neighbours treat him gently and respectfully, and in fact one of them even gets him a show at a New York gallery. The amazing thing is that, while the movie is often funny, it never laughs at this guy, instead walking a very thin line between showing us how weird he is and showing us how interesting his work is, and how and why it got that way. I now regret throwing out my mouldy Barbie dolls. They could have been the victims of some sort of chemical attack....

The endless shadow of WWI

The culture is having a strange World War I moment, or at least I am. The book I just finished reading, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, is all about England in the years leading up to that war—especially a bohemian family with kids who run wild in the woods and characters who make puppets and write fairy stories. The war looms like a giant black cloud over the pastoral scenes, and I couldn't help wondering which of the beautiful young men would never come back from France or Belgium.
Then there was Downton Abbey, the exquisite PBS/BBC miniseries about life upstairs and downstairs in an English country house in 1913. The first season ended with the announcement of war, and I'm partly dreading the next one, when no doubt many of the young men will be slaughtered or forever altered.
And now there's PJ Harvey's amazing new album, Let England Shake, which references WWI specifically, but also war in general. It's a big change for her—she usually sings of lust and anger in a growly voice with harsh blues guitar chords. This time she sings of death, blood and devastation in a strangely sweet voice with melodious keyboard and guitar sounds. It's shocking, almost like enjoying the beats of a hip-hop song and then realizing that the lyrics are ignorant and evil. Except that despite the blood-stained earth and the bodies hanging from battlefield wires, I still love Let England Shake... it's a beautiful piece of work.
Is it that WWI still occupies our psyche so much, that we're still freaked out at the massive change and destruction it set loose, or is it being used as a way to think about more recent wars? Like the way MASH was a way of dealing with Vietnam indirectly...

Revisiting the Runaways

There's so much to like about Floria Sigismondi's movie The Runaways, like the acting by Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon, the dead-on costume design and of course the music. But considering that it comes from a director known for dark and creepy videos, there's something strangely toothless about it. We do see some glazed eyes and a collapse in a telephone booth, but there's really very little of the dark side of their story—and it peters out at the end without going into the reasons why they broke up, which might have been exhaustion as much as the metal vs. punk argument. Not that everything has to be about the music industry's ugly underbelly, but I was left with the feeling that there's a whole chunk of the story that's not being told. Maybe it's because Joan Jett was the executive producer and it was based on Cherie Currie's memoir, and they're being self-protective, but still, you'd think they'd have a few things they'd like to get off their chests. Interesting bit of trivia: Riley Keough, granddaughter of Elvis, plays Currie's twin, Marie.
The Runaways never got their due as writers and musicians in their heyday; they were laughed at and seen as nothing but jailbait lust objects. How frustrating that must have been for them is left out of the movie, which is disappointing.

Moments of music bliss

It's a bit late for best-of-2010 lists, but so what? I made a list of the best live music shows I saw last year. Here they are in roughly chronological order:

Stars at the Mod Club
They still haven't surpassed Your Ex-Lover is Dead, and maybe they never will, but The Five Ghosts is their best album since, and they played it so beautifully. It's the give-and-take between Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell that makes this band stand above others, and the tunes of course.

Metz at the Garrison
These local geniuses can pummel the hell out of a rock song. Why aren't they huge? Perhaps they should put out an album instead of seven-inches—much as I love that format, it's not going to get them the attention they deserve. They're absolutely exhilarating live.

Pavement at Olympic Island
After unforgivably long lineups for beer and washrooms—and I'm never a fan of crowds + hot weather—this could so easily have been a waste of time. But Pavement was wonderful from start to finish. They didn't have new material, but it didn't matter with so many great songs. The icing on the cake was the moonlit ride back to the city in the QCYC boat.

Raul Malo at Hugh's Room
His voice makes your knees weak and your spine go all soft so you kind of collapse in your chair. He's so good, the words Roy Orbison and George Jones can be used in the same breath.

Teenage Fanclub at the Horseshoe
Three brilliant songwriters with seemingly endless beautiful melodies in them. They're aging but still writing and singing great songs. And they're Scottish. And one of them moved to Canada. What is not to love?

Nick Lowe at the Mod Club
First time playing with a band in years! The criminally underrated singer-songwriter played a bunch of his best songs—The Beast in Me, Cruel to be Kind, When I Write The Book, Heart of the City, there are so many!—with the kind of backing band that is so understated because they're so damn good. Why Ron Sexsmith came on stage and left without doing anything was a mystery, but Nick rules. On what would have been my late best friend's 50th birthday, and I barely shed a tear. Time heals, slowly.

Jim Bryson & the Weakerthans at the Horseshoe
Jim is an awesomely talented singer-songwriter who never gets the attention he deserves. That's said so often it's like a broken record. But it was a smart move to make a record backed by the Weakerthans, who seem to have reined in some of Jim's meandering tendencies and provided a solid backing for his songs and a steady balance for his onstage persona. Finally.

Lightning Bolt at the Great Hall
OK, there I was standing in the middle of the floor, transfixed by the unbelievably intense two-man assault. It was an experience of music as a physiological response more than an emotional one. I thought to myself, this is crazy, this is so intense, I am feeling this shaking my entire body, am I really enjoying this? I'm still not sure if it was pleasure exactly, but it was something remarkable. Also, afterward it was great to freak a young guy out that an old bag like me had enjoyed Lightning Bolt.

Chris Dignan at Lulu Lounge
This freaking ageless young man evoked the ghost of the great Suckerpunch—which he fronted, what, 15 years ago?—with a swinging garagey-surf rock show led by his guitar and voice.

Lowest of the Low at Lee's Palace
There's a lot of 90s nostalgia on this list, but these guys actually reformed to play their freshly reissued 1990 debut album, Shakespeare My Butt, which hit a massive nerve with a whole generation of people. It must be frustrating to have not managed to hit that nerve again, or at least not so successfully, but those songs really are perfect shots to the heart, able to evoke a time and a place with impressive clarity. And they play them beautifully.

St. Simon's Choir at St. Simon's Church
Every year this choir blows me away with their exquisite harmonies, blasting through the church and through my body without benefit of microphone or amplifier, and for free. It's something I take for granted, since it's always been there. I hope it always will be.

The ghosts and Christine Fellows

I love the way Christine Fellows doesn't follow the rules and structures of pop music. On her new album, Femmes de chez nous, there's a song in completely free time. She only realized that when she tried to add some overdubs to her vocal and piano tracks and was told it would be impossible.
I marvel at her ability to do what sounds right to her despite the conventions of music. I had a wonderful interview with her and only wish I could have had more than 350 words to write about her album and the DVD of the live performances she did as part of her artist-in-residency program at the Musee de St-Boniface Museum in Winnipeg. It was inspired by the story of four nuns who travelled from Montreal to Winnipeg by canoe in 1844. It took months, and when they arrived, in the middle of the night, people could hear them singing as they came down the river.
I mean almost anybody could be inspired by that, but Fellows made a beautiful album about Franco-Manitoban culture out of it. And though she's not religious, she said that a series of weird things happened to her when she was finishing the project—a hard drive crash that forced her to re-record some of it, some funding that was promised but didn't come through, things breaking down and getting lost. The film editor told her that the nuns weren't finished with her yet, and she had to go back to the museum. So she did, and she said she “may or may not” have hidden some sort of offerings to appease the ghosts. Whatever she did, it worked.

Return of the Jayhawks

The Jayhawks took a while to get going last night. Or maybe I did, because it was so weird to be at a show and not drinking.
Is it so wrong that virtually every concert-going experience I've had has been influenced by alcohol? Perhaps, perhaps not, but one thing's for sure: a drink or two does help dull the irritation caused by standing in a packed, hot room, being regularly knocked around by people pushing past you and deciding to stand right in front of you. The band's job is to lift you past that irritation, and eventually they did.
I still think it's all about Gary Louris, he's a better guitar player, and his voice is really the essence of their sound. Plus his songs, of course. The best ones are all his, as I discovered years ago when he did a solo show at the Horseshoe and sang them all. Still, they have some lovely harmonies and I liked the keyboard player. No self-consciousness, no attitude, no turning their backs on the audience or hiding behind their fabulous haircuts—just letting the songs stand on their own. God, I love unfashionable bands!

Blood and Feathers

I guess I can see how some people found Black Swan too over the top... it was outrageous, but I completely and utterly enjoyed the ride. It's kind of like a female version of Fight Club—something that delves into and picks apart (sometimes literally... ouch) our ideas of femininity the way Fight Club poked around in mens' psyches. Ballet is pretty much the perfect vehicle for it, since it's where women have to starve themselves, torture their bodies and never get old in order to succeed. And that's not even counting the nasty and psychotic storylines most classical ballets have.
I loved the way Darren Aronofsky borrowed from Polanski, Cronenberg and Hitchcock, loved all the mirrors and the creepy subway tunnels and the scary bunnies and the way the faces switched back and forth. Awesome, and Natalie Portman deserves the Oscar which she will presumably get.