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....