How easy it was for me to love “Avatar.” I got to imagine being the guy who saved everyone. Not just the population of a world, but the good mother Gaia herself.

So James Cameron tripped up occasionally, but hell…

Audio from the “Avatar” trailer (2009); video from “Pocahontas” (1995)

The most effective subversion of that old narrative came in the moment when Jake Sully’s Na’vi lover, Neytiri, entered the shipping container where his human body was stationed and gathered her frail little lover into her powerful arms. No imitation here, this was quite startling, especially for a white boy nearing the end of a pumped-up movie: here’s a Pocahontas who’s suddenly your mother and who could kick your ass all the way to bedtime: a fitting heir to the other warrior women associated with James Cameron… (…)

Still, it’s safe to establish it as a given that “District 9” is far more savvy in its narrative depiction of a soldier switching sides and bringing knowledge to the enemy. By simply giving bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe a love interest on his own side of the cultural divide (that is, Tania van de Merwe), Neill Blomkamp’s film is able to avoid the Pocahontas meme altogether, while at the same time exploring how propaganda can be effectively used to divide family members against those who don’t follow party lines.

It ends up being a more resonant exploration of butting cultures, just as Blomkamp’s short film version did a few years ago:

Neill Blomkamp, “Alive in Joburg” (2005)

Cameron’s film is perhaps not even as savvy in this regard as Darren Aronofsky’s psychedelic “The Fountain,” a film more honest about its appropriations. Hugh Jackman plays not just a white man, after all, but a Spanish Conquistador, stealing the life-giving properties of the Mayan world tree and getting his comeuppance for it:

Darren Aronofsky, “The Fountain” (2006)

“The Fountain” clip brings up another thought about “Avatar”: Wouldn’t it have been great (wouldn’t it have been awesome) if the Meso and South American cultures had been able to band together with the help of a swift and convincing communication system like the one Cameron employs in his movie, rather than remaining enemies to one another, compromising with the Europeans, protecting their families and, as the debunked myth goes, mistaking the white men for gods. Bring on the dragons and they could have kicked a lot of Spanish (English, French) ass instead of doing something so un-alien as to seek alliances and hope to protect their loved ones from destruction.

But though “The Fountain” itself is a little more down to earth, “The Fountain’s” world tree is arguably more alien than the one in Cameron’s film, albeit light years closer to home. Just look what it does to Jackman’s Conquistador. Talk about awesome. It even recreates the Big Bang. Cameron likes to go big, but I don’t think it would ever occur to him to go that big.

Curiously, there’s one characteristic both trees share—the way their hairlike fronds reach out to touch your fingers. Perhaps Cameron owes Aronofsky a debt there. Or perhaps they both owe a debt to the person who first hooked a plant up to a lie detector.

vibrantenergy, “The Extrasensory perception of plants”

But Cameron’s great world tree’s death cannot be topped. It’s breathtaking. When the Na’vi wept over the carnage, some of us wept right along with them, perhaps more than we might have in a more down-to-earth film on the same subject or, for that matter, a documentary.

Personally, I think the Lorax makes a much better choice, speaking for the trees rather than to them.

But I wonder if I’ve satirized the themes of the film enough to atone for buying into its white boy hero.

Because there’s a resonant layer to “Avatar” that I haven’t seen discussed, at all, in any forum—a layer I found quite unique, which made an impression I didn’t even really understand at first. Later, when I googled the subject with appropriate words, the top hits featured a link to information about another movie, a bit about the Olson sisters at the Oscars, and several porn sites.

What I saw, hidden beneath the Hollywood eventualities and the cultural stereotypes both subverted and upheld, was a barely spoken narrative about the lost brother, or, more specifically, the lost twin.

pidlive, “Pid Meeting His Long-lost Twin Brother”

It may simply have been a convenient plot device for Cameron to give Jake Sully such an identical twin brother, who happened the be ‘the smart one’, a scientist, so the megacorp behind the DNA construction of these avatars might finger our wheelchair-bound marine to take his place when he died. He may not have meant it.

But a twin is a twin is a potent symbol for a deep, mysterious relationship that Captain John Smith, for example, did not share with anyone back in Pocahontas’ day.

risewiththedead123, “My Lost, Lost, Lost, Lost Twin Brother!!!!”

Jake Sully doesn’t dwell on the relationship in any way beyond stating his mantra, more than once, that his brother was the scientist and he is the soldier.

But there’s a moment at the end of the film when our heroic white man and his avatar are placed head to head, sleeping like children, and the world tree is asked to form a connection between them, through those mysterious fronds and the connective tissue of the planet itself.

Somewhere in that moment of psychic fusion between Jake Sully and Jakesully-Avatar, I felt the presence of the lost twin: Two brothers lying head to head, sleeping like children and making contact through the veil that divides the known from the unknown.

It was a simple leap from that known & unknown to the human & the alien, the one & the other; all of us & all those who we love who aren’t here anymore.

You may not see it. It might not really be there. Maybe this is cheeseball stuff. But my thought was something along the lines of: I want that.

I had a brother who died when I was very young (and so was he). He was the wisest person in my world, so his death was a defining moment for me. I’ve come to realize that it fixed my ten-year-old self in a bit of amber that was and has continued to be difficult to rupture in my later life.

I was naive enough in the years that followed to make a vow that I would take his place, in my ten and eleven and twelve and sixteen and 21-year old impression of what that meant. That is, I vowed to become like his twin and to try and live like someone on borrowed time. It’s taken me a long time to recognize that such a vow can cause difficulties in recognizing and embracing new stages of adult life. But that’s okay. I can’t say I would have it any other way.

Unless the way would be for me to see my brother again.

Or just feel the top of his head, through the hairlike fronds of a world tree.

- Sean Dixon

railroad33, the Kyle Railroad (Kansas to Colorado)

Evoke an emotion to match the power of a moving train. How do you do that? Maybe it’s an ambition too big for American movies, wherein too often it feels like the first rule for an actor is to be cool. Maybe it’s because the Method does not instruct you to match the power of a locomotive. Or maybe it’s just because our poor language, once the language of Shakespeare, now gets droned and compartmentalized by serious business-minded people all over the world.

Here’s a pop quiz though: If you want to make your American movie as relentless as the train that moves across its landscape, what do you do?

Well, you could dub it into another language for a start.

Andrei Konchalovsky, “Runaway Train” (1985)

Are these not great performances? Eric Roberts with snot all over his face? Jon Voight, finally getting to show the world in 1985 what a glorious asshole he is? Rebecca DeMornay, playing a doe-eyed innocent too soon after “Risky Business” for one concupiscent teen to properly appreciate? A Russian director of an American movie with a script by the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (himself the primo director of the greatest, most outsized actor of the 20th Century, Toshiro Mifune): Language becomes secondary in a film like this.

Dubbing though. What a cheat. What a cheap shot. I’m so sorry. You can’t even understand what they’re saying. (Don’t be surprised: Even the English sounds dubbed.) Still, the scene feels elemental. And look at that: We’ve already got our American movie (full disclosure: it’s one of my favourites). But something doesn’t seem quite right about it. It feels too foreign or something.

So what else could you do? Well, really, maybe the easiest thing would be to give up and move your movie away from America. And if you want your language to be as large as your train then set it to music and sing it.

Mani Ratnam, “Dil Se” (1998); Song: A.R. Rahman, “Chhaiyya Chhaiyya“

Language is secondary in a movie like this too. Or maybe not, since I don’t understand what they’re saying. But why is it so stirring to see singing and dancing atop a moving train? Could it be because it shows how we really move on the surface of the earth? Getting up to all our business of courtship while all the time whirling through space at 108,000 km/hr? Not to mention the fragility of those soft forms clinging to that rolling satellite of ore. They’re like rain dancing on the window of a moving car.

Still, this wouldn’t be right for our American train movie. It’s way too big for a non-CGI project. It’s like an asteroid. There’s such force at work here, Bruce Willis might have to quietly step in and blow it up.

So what would you do? Well, you could keep your Indian setting, bring your Americans there, and throw in a cobra.

Wes Anderson, behind the scenes on “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007)

Or, if you’re Lars Von Trier and you want to make your American movie, you could keep the singing and restore the English, but cast second-languagers and slow down the train a bit.

Lars Von Trier, “Dancer in the Dark” (2000); Song: Bjork, “I’ve Seen it All”

I mean, after all, English is a great language for trains. More train songs have been written in English than any other language, no? The straw men say there are no more epics, but try singing this list back to back. It would take a Homer. Take that, straw men. Take that, Shakespeare.

But you still haven’t answered the pop quiz. You’ve got an outsize American/ international movie called “Runaway Train” and you want to make it more palatable for a normal, business-minded, English-speaking American audience. You want an American movie with American actors speaking American lines in an American setting. What do you do?

What do you do?

Well for one thing, you hire a Canadian to write it. And get rid of that fucking train. Who wants a vehicle with an alternate energy source anyway? That’s just boring.

Jan de Bont, trailer for “Speed,” written by Graham Yost (1994)

Conclusion: Railroads are not to be trusted in America. They’re Stalinist. Always telling you where to go. Further, anyone who pals around with train cars should be exposed as a Socialist entity as well. Like, for example, the English language itself. Or perhaps not the language as a whole but certainly its complex usage. And here’s the proof, straight from that hotbed of American Communism: “Sesame Street.”

Bob Dorough, “Conjunction Junction” (”Schoolhouse Rock,” 1973)

No wonder Obama wields the language so well. Looks like he’s going to grow that Hitler mustache for real in no time.

You betcha!

- Sean Dixon

Howard Roark played by Gary Cooper, “The Fountainhead” (1949)

They altered his design so he blew up the building.

They changed the cladding from titanium to aluminum so he blew up the building.

The acoustics weren’t right so he blew up the building.

The government taxed the building so he blew up the building.

They put a daycare at street level to indoctrinate children, so he blew up the building.

It was his fucking building so he blew up the building.

Someone pointed out that the inventor of the wheel was likely not denounced by his brothers, the first harnesser of fire was probably not burned at the stake, so he blew up the building.

‘You know what I mean,’ he said, and he blew up the building.

Someone remarked in passing that Rudof Diesel was not opposed by anyone though he was almost killed by his invention when it blew up in his face, so he blew up the building.

A scientist presented her new idea suggesting parasites and hosts formed symbiotic relationships which gave rise to more complex organisms, spawning evolution as we know it from the smallest cells to human beings, so he blew up the building.

The Five Kingdoms of Life

To be more accurate, the scientist postulated that a single cell organism made an unsuccessful attempt to consume another single cell organism and so the two together became a double celled organism. Over time, they formed communities that eventually came to be known as ‘plants’, ‘animals’ and ‘humans’.

He puzzled over the implications of this and then he blew up the building.

Dancing Volvox

Someone suggested he wasn’t supporting the ideas of a fellow creator but still he blew up the building.

He started to feel insecure after that. The reasoning mind, he thought, cannot work under this form of compulsion...

He overheard the chief engineer calling it his building so he blew up the building.

He was going to blow up the building but the chief engineer blew up the building first.

The chief engineer was a parasite. Er, rather not a parasite but a dog. The chief engineer was a dog. How dare he call himself a creator. So he blew up another building, one the chief engineer had built, which the chief engineer was on the record as calling a ‘level perfect building’. It was a building in Cleveland. He blew up that building. Suck it, chief engineer.

There was no God, just him, so he blew up the building.

He was feeling depressed so he blew up the building.

Someone looked at him funny, so he blew up the building.

He wanted to prove he still had some verve so he blew up the building.

He wanted the afternoon to be like a movie so he blew up the building.

Someone replaced the chair with something more comfortable so he blew up the building.

The rational benefits included jizz in his pants so he blew up the building.

The Lonely Island, from the album “Incredibad” (2009)

The para—er, dog—responds to serious intellectual arguments like an adolescent boy, so he blew up the building.

Who does she think she is? He blew up the building.

He hoped to prove there was something beyond the physical, so he blew up the building.

Maybe no God but God? He blew up the building.

Eliding the principles of Objectivism with the intellectual tradition of the Prophet, he blew up the building.

Chastened that, in a moment of weakness, he chose religious belief over intellectual superiority, he blew up the building.

Anyway, it was a fucking ugly building so he blew up the building.

He hated having to explain himself so he blew up the building.

He hated the god who created him so he blew up the building.

He hated the author who created him so he blew up the building.

He didn’t want to cry so he blew up the building.

He blew up the building but you don’t understand, it makes me feel good about myself, it makes me feel like anything is possible for me, it’s a metaphor, you just don’t understand, nobody understands, I love this book and it’s about me and you don’t understand and I don’t have to explain it to you.

He blew up the building.

- Sean Dixon

There’s a segment in a story by Mary Gaitskill called “Trying To Be,” in which the central character is at a party and everyone keeps asking her if she’s Italian or French. ‘No,’ is her answer, and again, ‘No’, until finally she tells the last one, ‘I’m from Illinois’ and he drops her elbow, turning away in apparent disgust.

Well, the same thing happened to Buster Keaton, only you have to substitute the party (or most of it) for the Silent Era, the last questioner for the advent of talkies, and ‘Illinois’ for the sound that emerged when Buster opened his mouth.

When the audience saw Keaton in his silents, his skin was silk, his eyes were mink, his expression was pure glamour even when he was doing something hilarious. He could have got his portrait taken mid-pratfall for the cover of Vanity Fair. Crop around his face you’d never know he was in flight. Except maybe in this one, a brilliant clip from “The Cameraman,” the last great film he made, harbinger of a simple, mature style that would never come. Here Keaton gets a bit unkempt. Not to mention naked.

“The Cameraman,” 1928

In all these silent films, he was always showing himself to be a regular guy, a bluffer and a boaster, as eager as any American to keep his eye on the main chance. He played a soda jerk, a boxer, a sailor, a cowboy, a cameraman, a train engineer. So why was everyone surprised when he opened his mouth and out came whisky and cigarettes?

“Doughboys,” 1930 -- (click on picture to watch video)

The answer is, they just were. As far as they were concerned, Buster Keaton ruined his image as soon as he made a sound.

There were other problems too — booze and the encroaching nightmare of script-driven studios. Scripts were the ruination of his method, so this was a chicken-egg dilemma if there ever was one. The booze got so bad that he was sent for a ‘cure’ (to a place where they used to pour liquor down your throat in vast quantities for days on end, trying to learn you to hate it) where he married a nurse and didn’t remember doing it.

But his career wasn’t over over. It was only over until he lost every shred of the youthful aspect of his beauty. He spoke with all his baritone glory in films made close to the end of his life, but still the most iconic appearances remained silent, right up to the end: “Sunset Boulevard,” Canada’s “The Railrodder,” Samuel Beckett’s “Film” (Keaton: ”What I think it means is that a man can keep away from everybody, but he can’t get away from himself”), and this little home movie, filmed in France:

Paris, 1960(?)

His face had always been sad though. It had that sad look from the beginning. He’d seen people turn away before, he would see them turn away again. He might as well have been from Illinois.

- Sean Dixon

The fourth estate once stood like Rome, surrounded by high walls, bursting with standards, wisdom, riches and reputation, broadcasting well-honed messages to the world. Now it has to contend with the likes of this:

Republican Congressman Mike Castle (DE) in Georgetown, DE (July 10, 2009)

Here is a good old-fashioned town-hall, pre-internet, pre-print even, but this town-hall is different from the ones in the old days in that it has been recorded and uploaded in an ongoing effort to build a quorum of like-minded paranoiacs, myth-makers, misinformation-peddlers, xenophobes, racists, self-pitiers, cowards, fear-mongers, etc., who want nothing better than to plunge the world into a new Dark Age the likes of which has not been seen since Konstantine saw the cross of Jesus shining through the sun in 312 AD. Historians tend to say the Dark Ages started later, but this date of Rome’s instant conversion is looking more and more fitting to me.

So the walls of the city are breached and the occupants scattered. And their tools are taken and distributed to the four points of the compass. Where there was once a vast plain with a single McLuhan megavillagecity, soon there will be hundreds of thousands of villages, millions of them. Some of these villages are interested in being interested in the things of this world, others aren’t. Whoever it was that said when given a choice between the myth and the facts, choose the myth, probably didn’t witness the Internet.

And now here is a Persian song, showing some signs of Western (Latin) fusion, apparently about an unsuccessful lover:

Neda Jalali, Saeed Moeni and Eric Tompkins at The Main in Vancouver

The election in Iran took place on June 12, 2009. Still, a lot of hope remains that much is happening behind the scenes, a power struggle between clerics who are truly shocked at the carnage vs. those who believe that blood should flow in the streets (and in the courtrooms, and in the prisons). Even if Ahmadinejad was legitimately elected, must the punishment for voicing your displeasure be death?

My Iranian neighbour says there’s never been a legitimate election in Iran. They’ve always decided in advance who will win, and stuffed the ballot boxes accordingly.

Many of us here in the west still have our Twitter accounts set to Tehran in a one-time bid to confuse the efforts of Iranian security seeking to destroy the bug-bears within their borders. Blowing smoke from the comfort of our homes seemed a better option than folding our arms and sitting it out. Even if there were those who poked a bit of fun:

Twitter is the newest forum to follow the functions of these Global Villages. In this most level of all playing fields, if you tweeted to disparage, it was rumoured you were a paid member of the Iranian Police or a volunteer Basij. And maybe you were. But, in the nastier realm of tweeted commentary, you were more likely a sociopathic, narcissistic fake, masquerading as a Basij, giddy to be mistaken for one, taking refuge in the internet as you evoked the damp undergarments of dying protesters, typing with a single finger while you held your cock with your other hand.

Or else, as in the screenshot above, you were what the narcissist aspired to but could never be: witty in your suspicion of the ease of it all:

(@banjobanjar is me. I was wrong to pick a fight with the above tweeter, for reasons outlined below.)

For all of these the forum was the same, and it was also the same as that of @PersianKiwi, who was probably many people and who sent dispatches followed by everyone from you and me to anchors on the evening news, who were forced to sign off and disband because one of their numbers had been arrested and would soon be forced to name names.

I witnessed all of these message-types, dizzying as they passed through my Twitter feed in late June, along with the spammers who were apt to tweet something supportive, including a link you thought would show a scene of the demonstrators putting the police to flight but really sent you straight to a marketing page.

And the Kool-Aid punch revolution tweeter had the good sense not to append his bits with #iranelection. If he had, his missives would not have merely entered the personal devices of his friends and followers (and me). They would also have bunged up the cell-phones and computers of the protesters of Tehran, not to mention the flickering screens of the policemen who’d have surely appreciated their wit.

Because in the global phenomenon that is Twitter, each hash mark (#) represents a village all its own.

But there’s a better to go along with the worse.

At the centre of the village of #iranelection, people go up to their rooftops every night. Some have cameras. Some upload videos. One of them was recorded the night after the Grand Ayatollah Khamenei shed tears at Friday prayers. This one knew the police would be coming in the morning. When the Supreme Leader has wept, it means that tomorrow, children will die in the streets.

Okay, it’s not much of a video. You can’t even see anything. But I would throw away my newspaper for this.

Poem for the Rooftops of Iran (June 19, 2009)

I don’t know which is more stirring — the single voice in the foreground or all the others rising up from the city behind. Is this the way it is when we have no other way to communicate? Checking in from the heights, the rooftops, the towers, the treetops, always in the dark, expressing defiance, taking and receiving courage, finding the will to go on in the morning? Are these the facts? Or is this the myth?

If this is a sound that travels across time as well as space, then how queer it should end up on Twitter and Facebook, via YouTube, in this new dark age.

My neighbour who just got back recently from Tehran says it’s still like that, every night. The police come and mark the doors, as best they can, so that their compatriots on the dawn patrol can come and bust them down. In the mornings the night criers get up early, run downstairs, wash their doors clean. The next night, it all starts up again. My neighbour laughs when he tells it. I’ve heard this laugh from him before. It doesn’t mean what he’s saying is funny. It means that what he’s saying is just the way it is.

- Sean Dixon

Why do you search so diligently for sorcerers? Take the Jesuits -- all the religious orders -- and torture them. They will confess. If some deny, repeat it a few times. They will confess. Should a few still be obstinate exorcise them, shave them, only keep on torturing. They will give in. Take the canons, the doctors, the bishops of the church. They will all confess.

            -Friedrich von Spee, 17th century Jesuit priest, with regards to the Inquisition

Twice I’ve depicted happy, joyful executions here on Ryeberg. The pattern has barely even occurred to me. I apologize to anyone who might have experienced anything senseless lately. Because there is also the solo death, the lonely death, the meaningless death, the really stupid death.

And then there is the innocent death, conducted in the name of an ignorance that burns all in its path — rational minds doing the work of careless, reckless nature, cutting a swath as terrible as a house on fire with your children inside it, or your friends’ children, or anyone’s children in it.

No celebration there.

As with Jeanne d’Arc in Carl Dreyer’s masterpiece of close-ups, there are no words for this kind of condemning. No sound at all in fact (the way it’s presented in the clip above) to help you with your mourning and your dread.

In the film, Dreyer has cut even the dialogue from from the final print, leaving only the faces of those who stand in judgment. Their silent ignorant jawing. The occasional glimmer of awareness of their own colossal continent-burning stupidity. And, beyond that, the face of Antonin Artaud, whose reaction cannot be described or even understood. Cruel and kind and crazy and full of longing. Does he want to be a part of her innocence or a part of their relentless nature? He wants to make a celebration of her death, but isn’t it way too soon? Or he wants to comfort her, but she can’t be comforted. What will become of him when all this is done? Will he pound the earth or praise the sublime nature of being?

And then there is Maria Falconetti. A comic actress, who has never before done film, and who does not understand its limits.

Sorry it cuts off. You have to see the whole film. You can choose to watch it in silence, as was intended, or you can watch with a beautiful score. The music makes it easier to watch. Why is that?

I watched this film with my mother-in-law a year and a half ago when she was fighting a very serious illness. Three weeks away from her death, she was still very much alive, fighting patiently and with much humour. We watched the film with the score instead of the silence. She had grown up behind the iron curtain in Prague and had never seen any of these silent expressionist masterpieces — had never even really heard of them. She had seen the films of their heirs, though. She’d always loved Ingmar Bergman particularly, but had never seen his sources — the clay from which he was made.

Carl Dreyer.

The “Passion of Jean d’Arc” was a revelation for her. It was for me too, but I was proud, so proud, to have found this for her, to have given her such a revelation. We saw it together, watched it twice in a row, tears streaming the whole time. My wife and father-in-law came to rescue us at the end of the second viewing. They were laughing. We had gone mad.

I thought of it again the other day upon receiving the news that friends have lost a daughter. I find I can’t say any more about it than that. They lost their daughter. Why do these things happen?

… no wind, and no hope of heaven, and no wish for heaven, since the meanest of people show more mercy than hounding and terrorist gods.

            -Annie Dillard, “Holy the Firm”

- Sean Dixon

Funny the difference between the internet and real life. Trolls make posts using invective they would never dare speak out loud. I was in a hardware store once and overheard someone buttonholing an innocent store worker cussing out some politician or other. When I waded over to have a live internet-style debate, he looked mortified and fled.

Not to be holier than him. I’ve been on that side of the coin too. There’s a big bad garbage strike going on in Toronto right now. Last week I watched a woman pull her SUV up to the corner of my street, jump out and daintily add her take-out scraps to the rising pile of garbage at a city bin. I followed her into a nearby bakery and tried to admonish her for littering. She turned on me with all guns blazing. ‘What do you want me to do? Sleep with it under my pillow? Don’t you have anything better to do?’

‘But.. You littered!’ I squeaked, as I turned and fled, worried about causing a scene.

I thought I might give her scraps to the big dog that was waiting in the SUV, but that struck me as cowardly in light of my evaporated debating skills. So I walked away, nursing the many l-esprit d’escalier come-backs that might have take place.

The internet be different, of course. We cowardly trolls can rail to our heart’s content if we wish to. Maybe we can even use these forums to give ourselves the courage to speak out in real life. Like, for practice! Maybe one day we can even make revolution! We Calibans, grousing about the abuses of Prospero. Revolution of the trolls!

Freedom high-day high-day freedom! Freedom, high-day freedom!

There’s only been one trolly style post here on Ryeberg. Naturally it was at the expense of Lynn Crosbie, who writes a weekly column for The Globe and Mail, rave-central for Canada’s trolls. She pores over the entrails of popular culture, searching for meaning and finding it. Those devoted to dissing her like to imagine themselves adhering to some higher culture. And so, in the name of that higher culture, they hurl abuse from a safe distance. So how does that higher culture help them again?

But YouTube videos often do the opposite. Here are dispatches from the front lines of celebration, risky displays of vulnerability that are normally the purview of families and other intimates. Yeah, you might get upset when a father videotapes his young son stoned after a trip to the dentist. But if you look a little further, past the controversial video, you might witness the ease and comfort that that family feels with one another (not to mention their video camera.)

Not so much exploitation here. Just a lot of attention and support for a kid learning the art of joke-telling (and having a little trouble maybe.) It makes me hard pressed, referring back to this, to see any exploitation in the notorious bad dentist trip.

On the other hand, YouTube can serve as a trolly soapbox, like the Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. But it can record moments for which there is no better forum, moving snapshots of lives going by. Pure joy.

Jill and Kevin’s Unexpected Wedding Entrance

This is the kind of live-action snapshot for which youtube was made. No wonder it’s gotten four and a half million hits in the six days since it’s been posted. You’ve probably seen it already.

- Sean Dixon

There was a time about ten years ago when I saw two operas in one winter. The first was world renowned, the second only seen by loyal subscribers of the Canadian Opera Company and me.

The first was a production of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” paired with a presentation of the choral symphony “Symphony of Psalms” as a curtain raiser. In that short piece, an invisible hand wrote names of dead people one by one in enormous calligraphy above a line of singers. I can’t remember how I knew they were dead. Still, it seemed stately and reverent until I recall noticing at a certain point that there was room for exactly four more names. The aggregate of all the others had created four rectangular blank spaces of equal size, ready to be filled. I remember thinking, So if they stop singing right now does that mean these guys get to go on living?

The effect, to me, was no longer of a memorial written on parchment. It had turned into a ledger.

The evening continued with “Oedipus,” but I was no longer in any mood to appreciate the bolts of red cloth and huge mountain of plague victims transforming magically into naked writhers caressing their several breasts. Everyone was awed by this spectacle. To me it was reminiscent of the tumescent doodles I would draw in my math notebook when I was fifteen. On the way out of the theatre, I ran into a colleague — a local theatre critic — who said, “Wasn’t that incredible?”

Apologetically, I said I thought it was rather a bunch of bullshit.

The French writer Michel Tournier might call what I experienced “benign inversion.”

As a result, right becomes left, left becomes right, good is called evil and evil is called good.

I’m sure I don’t understand it in quite the way he intended, since he was writing specifically about Naziism (in his book “The Ogre”), and his title character Tiffauges’ mad reaction against absurd wartime exhortations and slogans. But I identify with the unexpected flip in sympathy while witnessing a performance, when I have observed precisely what I am being compelled to feel, a good audience member, as clearly as if it were a written slogan on the wall, and simply cannot — will not — won’t — no, I won’t! No no no NO!

(Once I remember being in rehearsal for something and expressing the concern that we were going to be guilty of that very presumption, and the director said to me, ‘So what you’re saying is, you’re an asshole.’)

Tiffauges: ‘Has anyone ever tried to define and produce that absolute gray that resists all inversion? I’ve never heard about it if they have.’

(’Yes, I’m speaking for the assholes like me.’)

Later in that same COC opera season I saw what was considered a modest production of Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites”.

The characters wore habits and barely writhed, there were no mounds of bodies or displays of gargantuan penmanship, there were no bolts of red cloth or stentorian sovereigns expressing hamartia. There were no ledgers.

It moved me in a way that I didn’t think was possible with opera.

“The Dialogues of the Carmelites” is set during the French Revolution. A girl named Blanche de la Force seeks refuge in a monastery after her entire family is slaughtered at the guillotine. She is self-centred and petulant and can’t face the truth of what has happened to her.

In the finale, the nuns who have served as the chorus for the entire opera have themselves been sentenced to death. There are fifteen of them, and as they sing in chorus, they go to climb the stairs. A slicing sound cuts off each voice, one by one, until there is only a solo. The last nun, Constance, once confessed the joyful dream that she and Blanche would die together, horrifying her friend. Now, at the moment of Constance’s death, her friend is not here. This is by no means a surprise.

Except her friend is here. She is suddenly standing beside her. She has come to love these women who have been patient with her petulant ways and given her succor and shelter. In the end she does not wish to live in a world without them. And so, without skipping a beat in the music, she follows Constance up the stairs.

The mise en scène is different in the video below, but the scene itself is the same. Its demands are as stripped down and simple as any Beckett play (itself a remarkable feat considering this is a period piece.) White robes, crosses marked on them with charcoal, the illusion of no make-up. No spectacle. Merely humans and song. The music is so simple and powerful, the performers themselves weep through it, at considerable risk to their vocal control.

Francis Poulenc, “Les Dialogues des Carmélites” (Opera National du Rhin, 1999)

Was it not expected that I should weep too? Was it not presumed? I wept. Blanche de la Force was selfish, bitter, shallow. She didn’t have any regard for the women who surrounded her, impressive though they were. She was given love and returned nothing. This is who she was, until — just like that — she became the opposite of who she was, transformed from bitter to accepting, from shallow to solid, from fearful to courageous, from weak to strong, from blanche to la force. And, tragically, from living to dead — a mouth open but singing no more.

Blanche de la Force surprised me. She had experienced a reversal, had performed her own kind of inversion.

On my way out of the theatre that night, I ran into a colleague — a fellow playwright — who asked me what I thought of all that bullshit. Abashed and apologetic, I said I supposed I was a sucker for the subject matter. Regarding me as if I’d just been moved by a bodice-ripper, he asked, “What subject matter is that?”

“Fear of death,” I said.

Overcoming the fear of death turns it into a celebration. And the celebration of death is, of course, the celebration of life. We want to be singing at the end of the day.

Parachute Club, “Rise Up” (1983)

- Sean Dixon

Recently, I had a misunderstanding with a fellow Ryeberg curator that hinged entirely on the negative perception of the ukulele.

I saw an essay here about a music video for a popular song, and then later came across a ukulele cover. So I posted the link beneath the essay, adding that perhaps this was all you really needed to play it.

The author read my comment and replied that if something so simple as a uke could cover it, it would mean it was a brilliant song.

This would have been my argument too, so we seemed to be in agreement. But the response had a slightly hostile tone which I put down to the author thinking the uke cover sucked. It took me a day or two to uncover the truth, which was that the author thought I thought it sucked.

Which meant I thought the original sucked.

Which meant that I sucked.

All because of the assumption that everyone hates the ukulele.

Lots of clichés in the world but there are few I hate more than the theory implicit behind the following joke:

Definition of perfect pitch: When you throw a banjo into a dumpster and it hits an accordion.

I find the attitude revealing in the way you might if someone mocked an unconventional person. My response:

Which reminds me of my favourite dis: Once, when banjoist John Millard was playing a gig, someone called from the audience asking why he’d didn’t play guitar instead. John replied that he’d love to have a guitar. If he had a guitar, he said, he could set it down in the middle of the stage and take a shit in it.

This is not to say I have not abused the delicacy of these much-maligned instruments on occasion.

I used to play the concertina. Or that’s not quite true. I used to strap one end of the concertina to my open hand and then hurl the opposite side away from me. I was trying to master a kind of one-handed playing style for the benefit of a street performance, but it didn’t work and anyway I ended up hurling the other end too far one day and tore the instrument in half.

As might be expected.

And not like this at all:

After destroying the concertina I moved on to a bugle that got covered with dents because I used to throw it spinning up into the air and then not catch it.

I might have destroyed my ukulele too but I ended up loaning it to a musician who failed to return it. One might wonder whether he knew what he was doing.

+++

The accordion is a big instrument, but it’s also portable. It takes both hands. It breathes with a big set of lungs while strapped to your body.

So: I’m having trouble deciding between two final vids. Behind door number one there are high production values and a performer whose hair and make-up have been done by professionals. He wears a tuxedo and performs a piece on the baby grand piano with long, muscular fingers.

And then the floor collapses and the piano falls and lands on a guy who’s warming up to tell the joke about the accordion and the banjo and the dumpster.

So let’s go straight to door number two:

Behind door number two, there are lower production values including a shaky camera, poor lighting, lack of focus, background noise… and the accordion.

The performer’s face is mostly turned away, her shoulders are up. Muscles taut. She pushes the instrument and it pushes back. It’s sexy. There’s a dance that happens as she plays it — a push/pull of the tango variety.

I don’t even know what the band is called, though I believe it might be the Andy Sheafe Trio.

And the player: I don’t know her name either. Perhaps she is no virtuoso. I don’t know anything about it. She’s good but it’s the struggle that makes it so compelling, so beautiful. She pulls that thing against her body, curls around it and holds on for dear life.

There’s a woman sitting at the bar who’s privy to a close look. She seems to be saying to herself, Man, I wish I had a lover like that.

And the men murmuring in the background, repeating the joke over and over about the banjo and the accordion and the dumpster, are doing their best to ignore her. They can’t look at her. They’re afraid of her. They can’t compete.

- Sean Dixon

I was in a production of Marlowe’s “Dr Faustus” once, in first year university. Our Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium, was sleeping with the director. At least that’s what I thought at the time. For the part, he dressed her up in a spandex body suit that was frankly ridiculous.

In other words, not like this at all:

But like so much theatre, our production was a potent combination of the ridiculous and the most definitely not ridiculous. It also featured the great Canadian poet and teacher Jan Zwicky in the part of Mephistopheles.

(I played one of her minions, with such youthful vigour as I recall, that, at the flick of Jan’s wrist, I used to hurl myself head first off the back of a riser, straight down into the vastness of space, though the floor was only a few feet away.)

The iconic Mephistopheles that sits in our subconscious comes from Goethe more than Marlowe -- a fat, smiling lascivious man, like Emil Jannings in F. W. Murnau’s silent film version.

But that’s not the character that Marlowe wrote, nor what Jan Zwicky played.

Her Mephistopheles, and Marlowe’s, was more gourmet than gourmand -- an aching aesthetic scholar who had not lost an ounce of appreciation for the world’s beauty. That she was fundamentally separated from that beauty even as it was at her fingertips was the special quality of her damnation.

Meph: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

But she could still experience it vicariously through the hungry, human, as-yet un-damned Faustus.

I’ve never seen anyone else play the part, so for me, Jan’s interpretation will always represent Marlowe’s vision. I recall her subtly expressed disappointment at some of Faustus’ more childish demands, and yet she was just as ready to grant those demands as she was to peel back the most sublime secrets of the universe. The chance to see Helen was, for Jan’s Mephistopheles, more about the latter than the former:

Meph: Faustus, this, or what else thou shalt desire,
Shall be perform’d in twinkling of an eye.

There was also a feeling in Jan’s performance that she considered herself the only companion equal to Faust’s intellectual gifts. If he were not so blinded by the beauty of a woman who was in fact long dead -- the epitome of earthly beauty -- he would see in his Mephistopheles more a Helen than that lugubrious Greek dame creaking her elastane way across the stage.

Faustus: Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.

Still, Jan’s Mephistopheles was dutiful to her underworld master. She set the trap -- offering the learned doctor a headlong plunge into the riches of the world -- and let him snare himself.

Faustus: I, John Faustus, of Wertenberg, doctor, by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer prince of the east, and his minister Mephistophilis; and furthermore grant unto them, that, twenty-four years being expired, the articles above-written inviolate, full power to fetch or carry the said John Faustus, body and soul, flesh, blood, or goods, into their habitation wheresoever. By me, John Faustus.

In the end, Lucifer comes to drag the doctor down to hell (an inadvertent foreshadowing of the playwright’s own great reckoning in a little room not long after the script was penned). Not even Goethe, two centuries later, could bring himself to do the doctor like that. He created the part of Gretchen, a character to whom F. W. Murnau later tied Faust’s salvation even as the old man clutched her knees and they burned at the stake together.

Of course, Google, like Mephistopheles, puts wings to the world at our Faustian heels as well. Like Jan’s Meph, it is a companion equal to our gifts. We can learn and hear and see so much. But there is so much to see.

In the clip above, we saw, on our computer screens, a man and woman, both damned, both burning, both blissfully happy.

They were delivered even in their damnation. We, on the other hand, get our damnation with our delivery. If we’re not careful, we end up living our lives in little boxes, eyes glued, seeking so many Helens to suck our souls through the pixilated barrier.

No fire here for us to happily hurl ourselves upon. You have to venture out into the world for that.

- Sean Dixon

When I first saw her name, I pronounced it to rhyme with Sinbad or Iliad, which was really stupid because the pronunciation of her name follows the same rules as mine.

I saw an ad for “The Lion and the Cobra” in a Montreal Weekly Magazine in 1987, probably the Hour. I scrounged the money together to buy the record even though I didn’t own a record player (and in fact would never own a record player again.)

It was of course ingenuous of me to judge that book by its cover. But my judgment turned out to be correct. There was no disappointment there. Just amazement.

Sinéad O’Connor’s voice has changed since those late eighties, when it was raw power:

Sinéad O’Connor, “Troy” (Pinkpop Festival, 1988)

It was power she needed four years later, in the early nineties, when she had to push back against the catcalls she got for challenging the Catholic Church to come clean about child abuse (begging the question, who’s booing now?)

There was mockery from Madonna, who has never been a rebel (she just plays one on TV) and misogyny from Joe Pesci, who said he would have punched her in the face if she had insulted the pope on his watch.

And then there was this.

Sinéad O’Connor, “War” (Bob Dylan Tribute Concert, 1992)

Sinéad doesn’t need to push back like that any more though. These days she can afford to make other tonal choices. I can find no better example than this performance of a prayer, in which her voice is just plain pure deepening:

Sinéad O’Connor, “Jeremiah” (The Sugar Club, 2006)

Look at the way, in all three of these vids, that she checks in with her fellow musicians. When things are going well, she casts back a bright, beaming look, a “Hey, I think they liked that.” When things aren’t going well, she bears it alone.

When I hear her sing, there is no else I would rather be. I don’t have that kind of identification with other singers. But there’s something kinesthetic about O’Connor’s powers. She’s literally transparent when she sings, physically transparent. Luminescent. She leads you through the cave of a song with a torch, and you feel the heat of the flame. It’s why I could judge that book by its cover. Because you can see the sound in her.

- Sean Dixon

I’ve never been much of a social satirist, though I still hold out some hope. One of my hands down heroes is the great French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, better known as Molière.

My admiration started when I was a student, when I was called upon to play the role of Moliere in a play by Mikhail Bulgakov about the difficulty of being an artist under the thumb of a tyrant—in Moliere’s case Louis XIV (though this Sun King bore no small resemblance to Bulgakov’s own colossal irritant—or irritating colossus—Joseph Stalin).

In preparation for putting on our play, we were obliged to view a four-hour biopic of Molière’s life, made by the great French theatre director, Ariane Mnouchkine and starring Philippe Caubère in the performance of a lifetime.

The movie features grand countryside vistas and cinematic scenes in bustling marketplaces (including, if I remember correctly, a man flying high above the city with a pair of mechanical wings) showing how comfortable and capable Mnouchkine was with the medium…

But its climax is contained, very theatrically, in a stairwell, with the players in Molière’s company carrying their tubercular actor-manager up to a destination that will never be reached. One gets the distinct impression, watching, that the players are running up and down and up and down on the same two or three steps, the way one might perform such a scene onstage.

Molière’s death is one of the most famous ever recorded in the annals of the theatre. He was in the middle of a performance of Le Malade Imaginaire, a play about a hypochondriac, when he collapsed onstage, coughing up blood. He got up and completed the performance before collapsing again and being carried home to his death, still in make-up and costume. He died with his show-must-go-boots on.

The thing that amazes me now, looking at this clip twenty some odd years later, is the fact that the actors are so young. They’re younger than the parts they’re playing at this point in their lives. When I first saw the film, I was playing parts like this too, with greasepaint and streaks of white in my hair. So it’s a part of this film’s tribute to the theatre that I failed to notice the first time around. How could I? I was younger than they were. But the film gives actors a chance to act—to project themselves out of themselves—rather than merely present slight variations on themselves, which is how actors are most often obliged to behave in contemporary cinema.

The music, which I heard for the first time watching this scene, is the famous aria of the Cold Genius from Purcell’s opera King Arthur. The aria is also known as The Cold Song, and it was famously ripped off by Michael Nyman for his soundtrack to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover — an accomplished movie albeit unloved by me…

Nyman claims to have transformed Purcell’s aria by repeating the phrase countless times in a minimalist fashion. But it has always seemed to me that Purcell was just as aware of the power of minimalism in his day as Shakespeare and Cervantes were of the power of postmodernism in theirs. Just because somebody coined a term, doesn’t mean the action it describes did not previously exist. Language might have power, but it shouldn’t have the power to erase history. That’s just Orwellian.

I want to be clear. I’ve got no problem with borrowings, literary or musical. What bothers me about this one is the notion that Nyman thinks he has boiled something down to its essence—through the use of this term minimalism—which Purcell had already boiled down to its essence. Like he learned something from the man and then turned around and claimed to have made it up himself.

Nyman’s take is also less stirring, less beautiful, less. It’s mediocre, more akin to Mnouchkine’s depiction, if I remember correctly, of Lully.

Before Nyman, the Cold Genius aria had already been rendered with great (ahem) minimalist power in a performance by Klaus Nomi, who recorded his own chillingly beautiful take on it not long before his death.

Recently, when I posted the climactic scene from Mnouchkine’s film on Facebook, somebody wrote to say I should check out the Nomi version. I think I’d heard it once long ago, perhaps even before I saw the Molière film, but I didn’t put the two together until just that moment.

Thus we have Nyman’s mediocre composition book-ended by two great performances of the brilliant piece of music from which it cribbed.

I sympathize with Nyman though. I really do. I know what it’s like to labour in the shadow of genius. I had to contend with the problem every night I played the Molière part. I would begin the performance inadequately, stepping alone into a spotlight and trying to perform a solo bit designed to portray the man’s improvisational ability and comic timing. Night after night, I failed.

The director, Alexander Hausvater, finally pointed out to me, with some exasperation, that by the end of the show I always had command of the ensemble and could always pull of a variation on the solo opening bit, this time from Le Malade Imaginaire, without any problems at all. I always had the audience in the palm of my hand. Could I not please bring the expertise I had acquired by the end of the play to the start of the play?

I could not. Nor did my awareness of this irony help me in any way. I never got it at the start. I always had it by the end.

The truth was, it took a full two hours traffic to teach me how to be anything like this man.

Perhaps, if I had learned, like Nyman, to stand on the shoulders of greatness, rather than honouring it in the manner of Klaus Nomi, I might have fared better. In my efforts to rise to Molière’s level rather than pulling him down to mine, I only got it a little bit right.

But I cherish that little bit. It’s a little bit of genius. Not cold genius either. I still recall the heat of it. And it’s all mine.

- Sean Dixon