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Gimme Some Lovin’: Did John Landis, Hollywood’s king of schlock comedies, unintentionally save black R&B?

Back in 1980, one movie challenged Hollywood’s colourblindness by showcasing some of America’s top rhythm and blues talent in the guise of a mainstream comedy. Not only did it revive the fading careers of the likes of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker and Ray Charles, but it also introduced a whole new generation to the timeless soul and funk of America’s R&B all-stars. Surprisingly, that movie was The Blues Brothers.

It’s surprising because few would ever describe that Dan Aykroyd/John Belushi vehicle as a powerful piece of black filmmaking—not even director John Landis. Hot off 1978’s unexpected hit frat-house comedy Animal House, which came in at #4 for box office moneymakers that year (just behind Grease and Superman), Landis was suddenly a director in demand . . . moreso than his previous two releases (1978’s Kentucky Fried Movie and 1973’s Schlock) would have ever predicted.

But, as the affable Landis told his audience at the Victoria Film Festival back in February, where he was doing a live Q&A with noted Canadian film journalist Richard Crouse, his heyday in the Hollywood spotlight was still a few years off—but he would never have been offered the likes of An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places or Michael Jackson’s Thriller had The Blues Brothers not hit all the right notes at just the right time.

Live from Los Angeles, it’s the Blues Brothers

No real surprise the director would choose to work with John Belushi immediately after Animal House—despite the comedian’s escalating drug habit, and then subsequent enrollment in rehabs for the treatment for addiction—especially since the original casting for Animal House was supposed to feature Aykroyd as well. And the popularity of the Blues Brothers as a legitimate band had mirrored Belushi’s own rise to Hollywood stardom since their debut performance opening for Steve Martin at the Los Angeles Amphitheater in 1978—an appearance which spawned their first album, Briefcase Full of Blues, which subsequently hit #1 on the Billboard 200 charts before going double-platinum and spinning off a pair of top-40 hits (their covers of “Soul Man” and “Rubber Biscuit”).

With Belushi and Aykroyd’s Jake and Elwood Blues personas now firmly fixed on the music charts, and their 1979 departure from Saturday Night Live, in retrospect it seems almost inevitable that they’d start looking for an onscreen outing for the Blues Brothers. But, as Landis told the VFF audience, the idea of showcasing black R&B stars didn’t exactly find a ready audience in American film distributors.

“‘This is a black movie,'” Landis recalled industry reps telling him after one preview screening. “‘White people won’t go see this.'” (They were wrong, of course: The Blues Brothers topped out at a respectable #10 for domestic box office in 1980, pulling in some $57 million that year alone.) He also recalled how the owner of the second largest theatre chain in the United States told him point-blank, “‘I won’t book this movie—I don’t want black people in my neighbourhoods.'”

No colour please, we’re mainstream America

Keep in mind Barack Obama was only 19 in 1980 and, as the future president was entering his 20s, America was about to embark upon the Reagan era. (To put that in context, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party had already taken power in England and, here in Canada, Joe Clark’s Conservatives were about to unseat Trudeau’s Liberals.) And Martin Luther King Jr. Day, while first proposed in 1979, wouldn’t be officially observed until 1986. “MTV wouldn’t even play black acts until Michael Jackson’s Thriller,” Landis noted (without, it should be said, taking any credit for directing that breakthrough music video.)

Up on the silver screen, the only other top-10 films with significant black roles that year were Stir Crazy (Richard Prior) and The Empire Strikes Back (Billy Dee Williams’ turn as Lando Calrissian). Check the AM dial and the only notable black acts were “safe” disco hits like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” and Diana Ross’ forgettable “Upside Down,” as well as the radio-friendly likes of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.” TV wasn’t much better, with only The Jeffersons widely challenging the colour bar. And while the fading disco era was just evolving into what would become electronica’s Chicago and Detroit house movements, it was still early days for black America’s hip hop scene, leaving R&B as the main game on the wrong side of town.

Enter Aykroyd and Belushi who, as Landis told us, “exploited their celebrity to promote this kind of music. The whole ‘mission for God’ line in the movie was me making fun of Danny Aykroyd because he was such an evangelist for rhythm & blues.” And while it’s easy now to look back in awe at the lineup of R&B royalty he was able to feature in the film—Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway—Landis admitted it wasn’t hard to interest them, since all had been in career slumps since the mid-’70s.

“When we started in 1979, R&B was considered over,” he told the Victoria Film Festival’s mostly white audience. “None of the ‘name’ acts in the film were big at the time—the only one who had any sort of career was Ray Charles, who was doing country & western. It wasn’t so much, ‘How can we get them on board?’ . . . we’d just pick up the telephone and they were, like, ‘Okay, I’m, in.'”

Note should also be made of the outstanding support band behind Jake and Elwood, which Saturday Night Live keyboardist and bandleader Paul Schaffer helped Belushi and Aykroyd form: blues guitar great Matt Murphy, Blood, Sweat & Tears trombonist Tom Malone, SNL sax player Lou Marini, plus the famed likes of Donald “Duck” Dunn and Steve Cropper—two of the three MGs behind Booker T & the MGs. (Cropper also co-wrote such iconic hits as “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”, “In the Midnight Hour” and “Knock on Wood.”)

Can you dig it?

When asked what makes The Blues Brothers still so memorable, Landis didn’t even hesitate. “It’s really the music more than anything,” he readily admitted. “The musicians . . . it was amazing working with those guys. John Lee Hooker was live, James Brown was live . . . the others [Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles] were recorded, although they did have trouble with the lip-synching, because they never sing a song the same way twice. But the whole point of the movie was to introduce you to rhythm & blues.”

And it seemed to work: following the box-office success of The Blues Brothers, interest in all of the major R&B acts in the film surged again, with their music careers getting a much-needed kickstart that has never really faded. The Blues Brothers themselves scored another top-40 hit with “Gimme Some Lovin'” once the film’s top-selling soundtrack hit the stores, which led to a national tour and their third album, Made in America . . . the last album cut before Belushi’s death in 1982.

The film’s other contribution to popular culture? Reviving the popularity of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses (a look Belushi copied from John Lee Hooker himself). As Landis explained, they needed about 250 pairs of Wayfarers to film The Blues Brothers, but since they were considered “black” sunglasses, Ray-Ban had cut production by then and he had to send people out to scour black neighbourhoods across America just to find enough pairs for the shoot. (Of course, following the success of the film, Ray-Ban quickly struck a juicy $50,000 Hollywood product-placement deal and soon found themselves forever linked with Tom Cruise’s face as a result of 1983’s Risky Business.)

A mission from god, indeed

Looking back , it’s easy to write The Blues Brothers off as yet another lame-ass, overblown Saturday Night Live sketch writ large (or indeed, the film that made all those other lame-ass, overblown SNL sketches-turned-movies possible), but Landis is clearly pleased with its legacy—despite the film’s inherent problems: the cuts the studio insisted upon to make the film more palatable to mainstream white audiences, the ridiculousness of all those automotive pile-ups (which, contrary to popular myth, did not set a record for the most number of car crashes onscreen to date—as Landis explained, “We had a 24-hour bondo shop working in Chicago . . . one car would have 50 to 60 collisions, then get repaired overnight and be ready to shoot again”), and Belushi’s escalating drug abuse. “By midway through the movie, it was getting really bad,” Landis said. “We were all surprised he lived as long as he did . . . I’m still angry with him [for dying].”

Yet it’s the surprising cultural impact and bending of the colour bar that obviously keeps The Blues Brothers close to John Landis’ heart. Who knew that two fictional white-trash brothers from Chicago would lead to an unexpected merging of mainstream popular culture and black R&B?

—————-

A specialist in popular culture, John Threlfall has been a freelance writer for over 20 years, including a five-year stint as the “walking encyclopedia of popular culture” for CBC Radio One’s Definitely Not The Opera and 12 years on staff at the Victoria-based alternative weekly Monday Magazine. He was also one of six Canadian Gen-Xers featured in the NFB documentary Le Temps X and co-authored the quirky guidebook Victoria: Secrets of the City for Arsenal Pulp Press. By day, you can find him working in the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts; by night, he’s usually in a darkened theatre keeping busy as one of Victoria’s theatre critics.

Move Over Rocky Horror Picture Show: The 21st Century Has Its Own Midnight Movie

By Matthew “Gus” Gusul

If I were to re-visit the 2010 version of myself he would never believe that in two short years, he would be writing an article about Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. In 2010, when I was first forced to watch the movie by my wife and brother-in-law, I assumed (and hoped) I would never watch The Room again. It is a terrible movie. It has very little merit as a piece of art. If someone set out to intentionally make the worst film ever, they would fall short in comparison with this movie. In my opinion, everyone involved in the creation of this work should be forced to sign a decree commissioned by the government, monarchy, papal office, or some Hollywood higher power that all parties involved will never again, under any circumstances, engage in another artistic endeavor in their lives and to do so would be criminally and artistically negligent.

The Room is written, directed, produced, and starring Tommy Wiseau. Hmmm. Warning signals go off at this point. It is the story of a man who is in love with a woman who cheats on him with his best friend. He discovers the affair and the audience sees his world unravel. “Everyone betray me. I am sick of this world.” Also, the movie features a number of sub plots that are briefly introduced and go nowhere. There are major holes in the plot, long pointless panoramic views of San Francisco, characters inexplicably entering and exiting the story, a game of football played in tuxedos in a back alley, and as far as I can see, no reason why anyone should watch it.

Against my better judgment, my wife and I attended The Room at Cinecenta on the University of Victoria campus on a Saturday in late January 2012. I knew little of what to expect going to this movie. All I knew was that the movie was terrible and that we needed to bring plastic spoons. I went with a sense of dread, but I was surprised at my experience. I had fun and my eyes have been opened to a 21st century cultural phenomenon.

It was a packed house filled with over 150 weirdos, nerds, and innocent bystanders (like me), corralled in by the freaks (like my wife) who enjoy this movie. Many of them were dressed like characters from the movie and playing catch with a football. This cult even has its own greeting, borrowed from the movie. Instead of saying hello to each other, the greeting of choice was “Oh hai, Marc”, a quote from the movie. Okay? …The movie started and we quickly learned some of the rituals of audience behaviour. Every time a character would inexplicably exit the scene, the audience would yell, “But you just got here!” During the long panning shots of the San Francisco skyline the audience would yell, “Go! Go! Go!” until we were returned to the action of the film. At several points in the movie, audience members threw plastic spoons at the screen and yelled “Spooooooooooooons!” It took some time to sort out what was going on, but I eventually realized there was a framed picture of a spoon in the main room of the house where the couple lives together. If you see the picture – yell and throw. Throughout the entire show people yelled or booed or cheered at the film, except one scene that takes place in a flower store. At the beginning of the scene, people in the audience shush everyone. The audio and video are not in sync and the audience finds humor in this poorly executed editing. This moment highlights the delight the audience finds in this poor quality film.

This phenomenon is not unique to Victoria. It has been happening since 2003 all over North America, and is just starting to enter Europe. Originally, The Room was released as a drama. Audience members started showing up to screening to mock the movie, and creator Tommy Wiseau changed the film’s listing to dark comedy. Now this movie has drawn a cult following that has made it a full-fledged movement complete with Internet memes, YouTube videos, and merchandise. The beauty of this phenomenon is the community created by moviegoers and fans who attend, not to celebrate brilliance as is often the case, but to celebrate poor quality; the epic fail that the movie represents. This movie is something we can all excitedly boo.

Perhaps this says something of a generation and of 21st century art culture. We have been wowed in so many ways. How many times has a masterpiece been crafted for cinema? All of us can name titles of tens, if not hundreds, of excellent films. The new generation has proclaimed that it enjoys poor quality art, giving rise to 21st century art culture, one that enjoys celebrating and making light of the shortcomings of The Room.

This is a phenomenon that will not go away. Trust me, I checked with the 2020 version of myself on this one. If you haven’t done it yet, go see this movie. If you don’t, you will be left wondering what all these weirdos, nerds, and innocent bystanders are laughing about.

Journalists’ Courage takes Many Forms

A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter’s Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring

By Nahlah Ayed

Published by Viking, 356 pages, $32

Out of the Blue: A Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness

By Jan Wong

Self-Published, 263 pages, $21.99

Despite many Canadians’ knee-jerk damnation of the print media, two new books prove beyond a doubt that journalists’ courage exists and that honest reporting can have a powerful effect upon readers.

Both Nahlah Ayed, who works for CBC news, and Jan Wong, now a former employee of the Globe and Mail, tell their stories in a direct and personable way. Both books demonstrate that standing up for oneself in the face of trouble is crucial to self-respect and good reportage. It is neither fair nor relevant to ascribe different layers of heroism to either woman. Both face challenging circumstances and are able to write clearly and decisively about their situations.

Ayed, now in her early 40s, was born in Winnipeg and grew up comfortably there, one of four children of Palestinian descent. Thanks to her mother, she became fluent in Arabic, which became a powerful tool in her career when she joined the CBC in 2002. Since then she has reported from Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. Talking to Ayed as I did recently in Toronto (I taught her years ago when I was a journalism professor at Carleton University) is like taking a vitally compressed short course in Middle Eastern history and politics. She’s a beautiful, soft-spoken woman with a spine of steel. Ayed says in her book’s Acknowledgements that her work as a reporter has “always been about trying to understand,” and that comes across clearly in her careful and honest narrative.

Despite her youth, Ayed truly is an “old hand” when it comes to the Middle East. Her family lived – by choice, as a way to reconnect with their culture – in a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, when Ayed was a child, and her tenure in war reporting began with the First Gulf War. She’s reported at all the conflicts leading up to and including the Arab Spring. Although her publisher wanted Ayed to write a fully personal memoir, the reporter resisted because she rightly believes the story is about the people she interviews, not herself. There are glimpses of what sort of a woman Ayed has become – feminist, principled, consumed by her job, steely under pressure but still capable of fear – but this is definitely a far cry from a tell-all. And that’s as it should be: Ayed may be off to a posting in London in the short-term, but she will continue to cover the world’s volatile places indefinitely.

“When I look back now,” Ayed writes towards the end of A Thousand Farewells, “the Middle East is often just a blur of guns and violence, of explosions and assassinations, of breaking news bulletins and conspiracy theories playing endlessly in my mind.” Despite that, she has managed to deliver a book of great humanity, one that reminds us that human beings – with the same flaws and flesh as the rest of us – inhabit those troubled places. “I always marveled,” she says, “that anyone would care to talk to us in the midst of so much turmoil, and yet they did, the hundreds of people I met and interviewed over the years . . . “ That they did is, I suspect, tribute to Ayed’s tenacity and compassion.

Even though Ayed’s reports have filtered relentlessly into Canadians’ living rooms for the past decade, Jan Wong is possibly the better-recognized journalist of the two, partly because she is nearly two decades older, with four previous books, and partly because of her famous/infamous “lunch with” column that everyone read in the Globe and Mail when she still worked there.

Wong’s dispute with her former employer — and her almost-publisher Doubleday — is complicated, but she outlines it crisply in Out of the Blue. Her inimitable brand of sardonic humor sparks the narrative as she tells of her own oblivious slide into depression, her battle with the Globe and its insurance company, and her subsequent recovery and new life. This may well be one of the most polished and professional “self-published” books you’ll ever read, but one would expect nothing less from the indomitable Wong. She says she’s invested over $30,000 in the venture, a sum that would give many writers pause. But in the first month of publication, she’s
already garnered more reviews and publicity than many senior authors receive even when touted by a prestigious publisher.

As Wong notes wryly, conflict and controversy always help to sell stories. But I would say Wong deserves whatever success this book brings her: she’s faced down the Dragon Despair, she’s stood up to a pusillanimous set of managers and she’s managed to write coherently about two of life’s most devastating experiences: falling prey to extreme depression and being fired.

Kudos to Ayed and Wong: proof that well-honed words can triumph over violence and corporate self-interest.

Enthiran

Directed by: S. Shankar. Starring: Rajnikanth and Aishwarya Rei.

2010 Sun Pictures. In Tamil with English subtitles.

When I was growing up on Montreal’s South Shore, a trip to the local Indian grocer was always a treat. It was one of the few connections my sister and I had to my mother’s native land. The pungent aromas of masala and the fine mist of dust would always coax a sneeze as we stomped off past the syrupy laddus and salted treats to the video rental section to choose a movie, usually one which featured a sassy monkey. Most Indian grocers in Canada have a well-stocked selection of Indian films and music, a tradition that continues today.

Not that I’ve moved to the west coast, I find myself missing my connection with the South Asian community. Burdened with that longing, I stumbled upon Enthiran, a recently released Tamil-language Indian sci-fi blockbuster.

Enthiran means “The Robot,” and this isn’t a Bollywood movie. It’s actually Kollywood. The difference? Bollywood movies are usually in Hindi and filmed in Bombay (my family will never call it Mumbai), whereas Kollywood caters to Tamil speakers and is located in the state of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost point of the country.

Enthiran is like a mash-up of The Terminator, The Matrix and the live action Transformers. Dr. Vaseegaran, a brilliant robotics expert creates Chitti, a sophisticated, sunglasses-wearing robot made in his master’s image. This allows both roles to be played by Rajinikanth, a big action star in Indian cinema. Think of him as the 61 year-old Indian version of Chuck Norris. Indian make-up artists have a true gift, as the actor doesn’t look a day over 35. Chitti forms a bond with Vaseegaran’s girlfriend, Sana (played by veteran Bollywood star and former Miss World, Aishwarya Rai) and helps her get into and out of several mischievous (and some very dangerous) situations.

Hoping to make his creation a masterpiece, Vaseegaran gives Chitti emotions, which leads him to fall madly in love with Sana. This doesn’t jive well when Chitti’s evaluated by the military. Apparently stuffing roses into live grenades and telling the army brass you’re in love with your creator’s girlfriend is NOT appropriate behaviour for robots in the Indian Armed Forces.

Every hero needs a villain, and Enthiran doesn’t disappoint. Enter Dr. Bohra (Danny Denzongpa), Vaseegaran’s mentor, friend and competitor in the robot-making business. Bohra is incensed that his robot can’t even walk while Chitti single-handily caters an Indian wedding. Suffice to say, when Bohra finally gets his hands on Chitti, he turns it/him into a murderous machine fuelled by rage and leather jackets.

In order to appeal to a more general audience, the filmmakers invest considerable screen time into the love story. Comedians Santhanam and Karunas appear as Vaseegaran’s dim-witted assistants and provide most of the comic relief. Their scenes are often over-cranked, a film technique where the slapstick action is slightly faster and jerky. The effect is like watching Buster Keaton and the Keystone Kops try to trip up The Terminator. It’s silly, but it works.

If this were a standard Hollywood blockbuster, we’d already be into sequel territory. Director S. Shankar will have none of that. Barely passed the intermission, you really do feel like you’re getting two movies for the price of one, and the 165 minute run-time reinforces that feeling. Unlike western films that favour a three-act structure, Enthiran‘s structure is closer to five.

And yes, in matching with its Bollywood cousins, there is singing. And dancing. And dancing robots who sing. Shot in locations like Machu Picchu, Vienna, Rio de Janeiro and Hanoi, each musical number has its own theme, style and feel. One musical number serves as a visual representation of Chitti morphing from an emotionless robot to a love-struck Casanova. Digital flowers and butterflies bloom from circuit boards as we’re flung through a fibre-optic cable into a giant metallic room with a silver-suited Chitti and techno-clad Sana surrounded by dancing robots with an uncanny resemblance to Doctor Who’s Cybermen. Canadian musicians could only dream of making music videos with these kind of production qualities.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Enthiran, and recent Indian cinema, is the inclusion of English dialogue. Whenever a character gives an order, or makes a firm, technical statement, it’s in English. Since I hail from La Belle Nation Province, where our two official languages co-exist in a begrudging temporary truce, I was surprised at the film’s bilingualism.

That’s not to say the film is without faults. The combination of so many special-effect shots and an extremely tight turnaround time following principal photography means corners had to be cut. Some effects are mind-blowing in their complexity, while others are very noticeably CG. Despite all its flaws, at a budget of $37 million, it’s a fraction of the cost of Michael Bay’s explosive disaster The Transformers and creates an emotional connection between audience and characters. Go figure.

To date, Enthiran has grossed an estimated $82 million worldwide. Not quite in the same league as Hollywood blockbusters, but when you factor in producers’ marketing costs, Enthiran is probably much more profitable. Who knows how much more it would have made with a sassy monkey?

–With a strong background in comedy, Montreal native Ryan Harper-Brown has worked in film, television, print, radio and live theatre. Ryan has an MFA in Writing from UVic and an MA in Film and Television Production from Australia’s Bond University. He currently works as a sessional instructor for UVic’s Writing Department.

Orlean Revitalize Doggy Legend

Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

By Susan Orlean

Published by Simon & Schuster

324 pages, $29.99

BY JESSICA LAMPARD

Susan Orlean published her first book Saturday Night in 1990, and has written for the New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of nine non-fiction books, including her 1998 bestseller The Orchid Thief.

With her latest book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, Orlean uses a potent mix of historical facts, description, and personal details to illuminate the reasons why movie-star dog Rin Tin Tin has “managed to linger in the minds of so many people for so long, when so much else shines for a moment only and then finally fades away.”

After all, the original Rin Tin Tin died back in the 1920s after a regular-length romp on earth. Yet his legacy still endures, even after many of his movies have been lost and his television show cancelled.

The book is full of factual details, which range from sad to funny to just plain fascinating. Orlean reveals that certain folks worked to further Rinty’s legacy at great personal cost (one producer spent millions of dollars and ended up living out of his car largely because he believed in Rin Tin Tin’s star power). She also presents numerous dog-related snapshots of history. For instance, Orlean tells us briefly about the self-professed “two crazy women” and their trick poodles who drove together in their caravan with a gun for protection, providing dog-training services all across the country.

And the result ends up being more about people—specifically, the mysteries of life such as fate, luck, individuality, love, and passion—than about Rin Tin Tin himself.

Throughout the book’s various mini-stories, Orlean tethers her narrative to Rin Tin Tin’s owner, Lee Duncan. Lee is profiled so acutely, we end up developing for him an empathy that’s usually reserved for family. Orlean allows this understanding to form by sharing intimate details of his life; we learn, for instance, that Lee grew up in an orphanage and could connect most easily with dogs.

Also, Orlean further adds to the sense of intimacy by commenting on her characters with kind-hearted wit. In reference to one of Lee’s journal entries in which he describes Rinty as “bubbling over” with excitement, for example, she suggests that “(s)ometimes he bubbled too much, and in one case attacking a porcupine, which filled his movie-star face with quills.”

Orlean also gives her subject wide appeal in part by drawing connections with Rin Tin Tin to the most basic of archetypes: the hero. As Orlean explains, “Dogs, in fact, were the perfect heroes: unknowable but accessible, driven but egoless, strong but tragic, limited by their muteness and animal vulnerability.”

She regularly applies this trademark flair for condensing her research into bubbles of perfectly formed insight, which are scattered evenly throughout the book. For instance, she informs us that while many other dogs could perform athletically on cue, Rin Tin Tin was perhaps most gifted at expressing complicated emotions. And therein lies part of the reason for his enduring stardom, according to Orlean. In her own words, “many of Rinty’s plots revolved around him making choices between pack mentality and individual judgment, an almost impossible feat for a dog.”

Orlean has devoted ten years of her life to transcribing the story of Rin Tin Tin, and the devotion shows. Much like the mysterious Lee Duncan who first brought Rin Tin Tin to fame, Orlean lets the characters emerge as fully formed individuals acting independent of her narrative, never allowing her own colourful commentary to steal the show. As a result, the Rin Tin Tin legend has been given new legs yet again—this time by Susan Orlean.

 

 

 

 

Books – Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

A Book Review by Kimberly Vaness

Charlotte Gill was nineteen when she planted her first tree. The seedling took: Gill spent nearly two decades as a silviculture laborer in some of the deepest wilderness in Canada. Between planting seasons, she lived in Vancouver to try making a go at the writing life. In 2005, she published her novel, Ladykiller, to critical success. Gill now writes full time, after trading in the shovel for the pen, and teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

Eating Dirt showcases Gill’s down-to-earth voice, even while she contemplates the motives of humanity. Her descriptions of raw wilderness in British Columbia helped me imagine how exhilarating the solitude of tree planting would be. In each chapter, she reveals the biology behind her workplace, and the secluded thoughts of the tree planter. Gill is passionate about her job, and like a clear-cut, it shows. “There are so many living creatures to touch and smell and look at in the field it’s often a little intoxicating. A setting so full of all-enveloping sensations that it just sweeps you up and spirits you away, like Vegas does to gamblers or Mount Everest to climbers.”

Gill does not shy away from noting the irony between planting trees and logging trees, and questions humankind’s hunger for growth. She comes to conclusions, and I found myself nodding in agreement. “If an object exists in this world, it can’t stay intact, unexamined, unused. We’re biological capitalists. If it lives we’ve got to make the best of it. We’ve got to hunt, cook, and taste it. Whatever it is, we’ve got to harness and ride it, pluck it and transform it, shave it down and build it up.” Gill’s honesty takes hold of readers and packs them into her silviculture world. At times, it feels as though the reader and Gill are embarking on a physical and psychological journey together.

A humorous undertone is also present in the book. “If we could return ourselves like appliances from the Shopping Channel, surely we’d request different components.” From Gill’s descriptions of muggy mornings, to sweltering hot afternoons—and all the bites, blisters, and bears in between—I earned a new respect for folk who plant trees. Gill captures silviculture between the pages, and through her own personal experiences truly makes this a unique piece of creative non-fiction.

You do not need to be a silviculture laborer to enjoy reading Eating Dirt. The book is appealing in its fresh visual descriptions, and its sneak peek at a largely undocumented subculture. Gill’s employment around the pristine Great Bear Rainforest is also relevant to today’s controversial Northern Gateway Enbridge Pipeline, which plans to cut straight through the British Columbian old growth forest.

Kimberley Veness is a third-year Writing and Environmental Science major at the University of Victoria.

Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe By Charlotte Gill

Review by Kimberley Veness

Charlotte Gill was nineteen when she planted her first tree. The seedling took: Gill spent nearly two decades as a silviculture laborer in some of the deepest wilderness in Canada. Between planting seasons, she lived in Vancouver to try making a go at the writing life. In 2005, she published her novel, Ladykiller, to critical success. Gill now writes full time, after trading in the shovel for the pen, and teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia.

Eating Dirt showcases Gill’s down-to-earth voice, even while she contemplates the motives of humanity. Her descriptions of raw wilderness in British Columbia helped me imagine how exhilarating the solitude of tree planting would be. In each chapter, she reveals the biology behind her workplace, and the secluded thoughts of the tree planter. Gill is passionate about her job, and like a clear-cut, it shows. “There are so many living creatures to touch and smell and look at in the field it’s often a little intoxicating. A setting so full of all-enveloping sensations that it just sweeps you up and spirits you away, like Vegas does to gamblers or Mount Everest to climbers.”

Gill does not shy away from noting the irony between planting trees and logging trees, and questions humankind’s hunger for growth. She comes to conclusions, and I found myself nodding in agreement. “If an object exists in this world, it can’t stay intact, unexamined, unused. We’re biological capitalists. If it lives we’ve got to make the best of it. We’ve got to hunt, cook, and taste it. Whatever it is, we’ve got to harness and ride it, pluck it and transform it, shave it down and build it up.” Gill’s honesty takes hold of readers and packs them into her silviculture world. At times, it feels as though the reader and Gill are embarking on a physical and psychological journey together.

A humorous undertone is also present in the book. “If we could return ourselves like appliances from the Shopping Channel, surely we’d request different components.” From Gill’s descriptions of muggy mornings, to sweltering hot afternoons—and all the bites, blisters, and bears in between—I earned a new respect for folk who plant trees. Gill captures silviculture between the pages, and through her own personal experiences truly makes this a unique piece of creative non-fiction.

You do not need to be a silviculture laborer to enjoy reading Eating Dirt. The book is appealing in its fresh visual descriptions, and its sneak peek at a largely undocumented subculture. Gill’s employment around the pristine Great Bear Rainforest is also relevant to today’s controversial Northern Gateway Enbridge Pipeline, which plans to cut straight through the British Columbian old growth forest.

Kimberley Veness is a third-year Writing and Environmental Science major at the University of Victoria.

Life By Keith Richards

Reviewed by Tyler Laing

Born in 1943 in war-stricken England, Keith Richards’s time and place very much shaped his musical destiny. As did his mother’s influence. Radio was ever-present during Richards’s pre-TV childhood. And his mother, “being a master twiddler of the knobs” played the good stuff. “She would point out who was good or bad, even to me. She was musical, musical.” But while mum had a role, so too did the dissolution of mandatory national service as Richards left high school. The two years he normally would have spent in the military he instead spent jamming with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones. By 1962 they had formed The Rolling Stones—arguably the biggest rock band of all time.

Before leaping into this gargantuan autobiography, I didn’t expect much more than a heroin-induced, cocaine-fuelled, booze-juiced joyride—an exhaustive look into one man’s excessive sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. And while I got that, to be sure—“There’s not much you can say about acid except God, what a trip!” “I’m on pure cocaine, none of that shit crap, I’m running on high octane.” —this book included more than that as well.

In light of his reckless and irresponsible lifestyle, Richards addresses mortality—his colleagues and friends who die—with an objective eye. “I hate all that crying shit, and moping . . . The fucker’s dead.” Even when it’s his young son Tara, who died while Richards was on tour, he maintains this distance. “Never knew the son of a bitch, or barely . . . it was just a crib death.” He neither writes for sympathy nor caters to sentimentality. For this, Richards should be commended.

But as touching and enlightening and exhilarating as this story is, a smelly fog clings to the pages. The rules of Creative Non-fiction have been debated for decades, but one universal truth exists—don’t lie! Fabrications and recreations are going to happen, but blatant conscious deception is unacceptable. And this is a crime Richards comes dangerously close to committing.
Before I bit into even the first paragraph, I read these words on the jacket: “This is the life. Believe it or not I haven’t forgotten any of it.” C’mon, Richards. Really? I’ve been on some benders before, though my most insane party experiences would be like a morning at the petting zoo for this guy. Even still, I’ve lost plenty of nights—weekends, even—to the blackout. And he openly admits, “sometimes I was absolutely fucking comatose.” So for him to come out of the gates and claim complete mental retention of his experiences is to pull his cock out and slap me with it.

This autobiography is at times a laugh, at others a cry, and it’s definitely a white-knuckled ride through a rock god’s life. But as entertaining and illuminating as the content is, respect must be shown for both the genre and the reader’s willingness to suspend reality. Was A Million Little Pieces a good read? Sure it was. But that didn’t stop the world from demonizing James Frey. Should Richards’s fate be any less cruel?

— Tyler Laing is a third-year in the Department of Writing. He will be
working as a summer intern with Harbour Publishing, starting May 7, 2012.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

By John Vaillant (Knopf Canada, 2010, 329 pages, $34.95
Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

A tiger, wounded by a hunter, returns to stalk and kill the man and terrorize his village before it finally meets its own death in a dramatic showdown. It sounds like myth or legend, but as the subtitle of John Vaillant’s latest award-winning book states, this is a true story, all the more powerful because of its veracity.

Vaillant’s first book, The Golden Spruce, examined the ecological, political and economic reverberations of one exceptional tree’s destruction and won the 2005 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. Now The Tiger has picked up the 2011 B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, this country’s most lucrative non-fiction prize. Both books reflect Vaillant’s acute concerns about environmental issues. “The Golden Spruce and The Tiger are really the same story,” he told the audience at the B.C. award ceremony. “I just told it a different way.”

Despite the similarity in theme, the research requirements of the two projects were literally worlds apart. Not only did Vaillant travel to the remote Primorye Territory in Russia’s Far East, he also conducted most of his interviews through an interpreter. The depth of the information he gathered is a tribute to his journalistic skills and to the talents of Josh Stenberg, whom he acknowledges for his role as “fixer, minder, cultural advisor, counsellor, and historian,” as well as translator.

Vaillant begins the book with an exquisitely rendered scene of high suspense, as the protagonist and his dog move unwittingly through the dark toward their fatal encounter with the Amur tiger that lies in wait for them:

“Then, as the familiar angles take shape across the clearing, the dog collides with a scent as with a wall and stops short, growling. They are hunting partners and the man understands someone is there by the cabin. The hackles on the dog’s back and on his own neck rise together.

“Together, they hear a rumble in the dark that seems to come from everywhere at once.”

Primed by this brief prologue, I was surprised to turn the page and plunge into dense, fact-filled exposition. If you’ve heard about Brad Pitt’s production company optioning The Tiger and are looking for a fast-paced, Hollywood-style adventure, you’d better wait for the movie. If, however, you don’t mind a narrative thread that is spun out gradually, while simultaneously being woven into a meticulously researched and intelligently considered rumination on the relationship between people and tigers, read the book. Vaillant is a master of this writing style, though I would have preferred far fewer footnotes.

Given the current domination of memoir within the literary nonfiction genre, Vaillant’s decision to stand outside this story is surprising and admirable. In a Q&A interview posted on his web site (at www.thetigerbook.com/faq/), he explains that his initial impulse was to write a first-person travelogue. He stifled it out of respect for the story’s “mythic” dimensions and the people involved. “[The] events are so intense and poignant that I felt as if I hadn’t really earned the right to insert myself into them.”

Instead, he takes us into the events through the participants, focusing on Vladimir Markov and Andrei Pochepnya, the tiger’s victims, and Yuri Trush, the game warden charged with tracking and killing the tiger. Although he never met two of these men, Vaillant creates detailed portraits of all of them. He probes far back into their personal histories and maps their lives in an attempt to understand their motivations and fears during the winter of the tiger attacks.

There is little doubt that Markov, a known poacher, tried to kill the tiger so he could sell its body parts on the black market. But rather than make a villain of him, Vaillant takes the same kind of big-picture approach he took with The Golden Spruce. In this case, he traces a line from perestroika and the dismantling of the Communist system to the widespread unemployment in Primorye that pushed men like Markov into poaching as a survival strategy.

Vaillant is donating part of the book’s proceeds to organizations working to protect Primorye’s Amur tigers, which now number fewer than 400. More important, he has raised awareness of the precarious status of all tigers – not by proselytizing, but by speaking to both our primal fear of these beautiful, deadly cats and our fascination.

As Vaillant notes, “Tigers … get our full attention. They strike a deep and resonant chord within us, and one reason is because, as disturbing as it may be, man-eating occurs within the acceptable parameters of the tiger’s nature, which has informed our nature.”

Subconsciously, we all still remember what it’s like to be prey. The Tiger makes us face that ancient terror.

 

Winds of Heaven: Emily Carr, Carvers & The Spirits of the Forest

Directed by Michael Ostroff
Reviewed by Frances Backhouse

 

Like many contemporary British Columbians, I can’t hike on the West Coast without Emily Carr ghosting along beside me. I don’t even realize she’s there until suddenly a shaft of light strikes a cedar in just the right way and the scene before me transforms into an oil painting on canvas. Ottawa-based director Michael Ostroff seems to be subject to the same kind of double vision and has turned it to magnificent advantage in his latest cinematic offering, Winds of Heaven, which premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) in October 2010.

After struggling for recognition as an artist for most of her life, Carr is now widely acknowledged as one of Canada’s pre-eminent 20th-century painters. Ostroff could have simply chronicled her rise to fame, providing a comfortable diversion for her many admirers. Instead, he chose to explore Carr’s relationship to the First Nations culture that so strongly influenced her creative journey. The resulting 90-minute documentary is a nuanced and original take on her work and life, which ViFF executive director Alan Franey calls “[o]ne of the most important films ever made about our province.”

British Columbia joined Canada in 1871, the year Carr was born; by the time she died in 1945, the province had assumed its modern identity. As Carr was growing up, B.C.’s original inhabitants were being increasingly marginalized. Yet, unlike most of her contemporaries, Carr was fascinated by indigenous culture, particularly the work of First Nations carvers. Her paintings of totem poles are among her most famous.  Klee Wyck, a memoir about her visits to First Nations villages, won the 1941 Governor General’s award for nonfiction and continues to sell well. According to First Nations art critic Marcia Crosby, however, Carr’s ongoing popularity does no favours to the people who furnished her inspiration.

“The way [Carr’s] history has been collapsed with aboriginal history has the power to teach very old ideas,” observes Crosby, who, along with ’Ksan museum curator Laurel Smith Wilson and art historians Gerta Moray and Susan Crean, provides commentary through the film. One of Ostroff’s main goals, an admirable one, appears to be refuting those out-dated ideas about the obsolescence and inferiority of First Nations culture. At times this narrative thread threatens to eclipse Carr’s story, but ultimately the integration is successful. My only objection to the film  is that Ostroff comes close to holding Carr responsible for an entire generation’s racist attitudes and hurtful behaviour, not just her own.

Fittingly for a film about art, Winds of Heaven is a treat to watch. John Walker’s fluid camerawork gives us sumptuous footage of wild coastal landscapes and luminous rainforest close-ups that perfectly complement shots of Carr’s paintings, while archival footage and photographs and period recreations fill in historical background.

The dramatizations never show Carr in full—usually only her hands are visible: sketching, painting, typing—but we hear her through the voice of veteran Stratford actress Diane D’Aquila, who reads selections from Carr’s letters, diaries and published writings. What we do see are vivid, believable reconstructions of Carr’s world, including her childhood home, the pension where she lived while studying art in Paris and the Victoria boarding house that she ran for years and memorialized in The House of All Sorts. Scenes of her 1930s painting expeditions into the semi-wilderness around Victoria, with a caravan she dubbed “The Elephant,” are especially striking.

For anyone who is unacquainted with Carr, Winds of Heaven offers an excellent introduction. More important, it challenges those of us who think we already know her to take another look at the artist and her art — and to fully appreciate where both came from.

For more insights into Emily Carr, check out The Other Emily: Redefining Emily Carr, March 2 to October 10, 2011, at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria.