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.