Four-peat

Alright. I promise the next post won't have moving pixels. Only words. Cold, heartless words.

Keepin' it real on Canadian TV

A continuous source of nationalcivic pride for me as a Canadian has been the unprudish nature of our advertising standards relative to our neighbours to the south. I mean, damn straight we showed Janet Jackson's boob over and over again in news coverage without pixelation. Damn straight people can say "fuck" unbleeped on The National. Damn straight we had The Sopranos uncensored on conventional network TV--granted, a year or so after everyone had seen the episodes already. Damn straight when archive footage of 9/11 is aired, we show angles of the planes crunching into the towers good and close, rather than the various patriotic editing tricks CNN made standard policy starting September 18th or thereabouts.

On that note, some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that apparently the version of The Tudors airing Tuesdays at 9 on CBC has been subject to editing that's been culling the amount of visible skin relative to the show's authentic cut aired on premium-cable-channel Showtime. If the standards of public decency set by the series' predecessor-of-sorts, Rome, are any indication, this means that the adorable Natalie Dormer's substantial pair of Boleyns have likely been out for a jaunt or two unseen by Canadian eyes. This is a shame, as I feel this would tremendously improve the show's watchability--what I've seen has fallen far short in terms of the sheer naughty fun that Rome was, even when that show's characters kept their clothes on. (Vorenus and Pullo versus the gladiators remains the greatest five minutes of television in years.)

The good news is that Canada remains capable of putting out PSAs that blow pussy American your-brain-on-drugs clean out of the water. Check out reaction from our Yankee brethren here and here to the latest Ontario WSIB spots, which I've embedded below. Not sure if I prefer the borderline Looney-Tunes violence of the construction worker spot, or the gore and screaming of the cook one.





So be proud, Canada. We may be slipping in the sex and loose morals department, but shocking stool-loosening violence? We've still got it, baby.

Movie glut

2007 wound up being a year where I found myself flagging a fair number of movies as worth seeing, only to let them slide off the radar one by one (Yes Grindhouse, I'm including you here). There is a chance to redeem myself, however, in the frantic race to the finish.

Indeed, the to-watch list has built up an unfortunate backlog for the traditional cinematic onslaught between now and Christmas. I fear the only feasible solution will be expensive.

Here's where we stand:

• Lions for Lambs ⁽¹⁾ (14-Nov, **)
• Lars and the Real Girl (17-Nov, ****)
• American Gangster
• No Country for Old Men
• Beowulf ⁽²⁾
• Southland Tales
  
• The Golden Compass ⁽³⁾
• I Am Legend
• Juno
  
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
• Charlie Wilson's War
  

Important provisos:
¹ - All Tyler's fault. Wouldn't have been on the list to begin with.
² - must be in IMAX 3D
³ - Subject to complex web of emotions related to the books being among my favouritist things in the world and not wanting to taint that experience.

Attention faithful readers: If you demand I join you in attendance at one of these films, I'll probably say yes. Even if I don't really like you all that much.

Of trivial note: I created the IMDb page for one of the above films something like five or six years ago. Seriously.

MATT DAMON!

(Joking aside, he's right, you know.)

"Roll out, you bitch"

This is timely.

I went from grin to shit-eating grin when the "Olde Fortran" made an appearance.

I blame our school system

Overheard at karaoke, as two youngish guys onstage embarked on a spirited if a bit laboured rendition of "Whiskey in the Jar," prompting rather curious commentary from two other youngish guys at the next table:

"I don't know it either, but you're right, it totally has an East Coast sound."

I suppose I can console myself in the knowledge it at least wasn't "Hey, isn't this a Metallica cover?"

On the relative dispersal of humour throughout the workforce

Evidence the funniest taxonomists work in paleontology: Smilodon

Evidence the funniest Academy Awards hosts work in snooty high-brow print, too: Steve Martin

Evidence the funniest advertising people work in the beer sector: Too many to list. However, I humbly submit the below video be considered yet another worthy inductee into the manifold collection of examples.

Stall speed

There isn't a one-month gap between this post and the last one. Not at all.

I find the easiest way to spontaneously put myself in the mood to write something on the blog is to turn on MuchMusic and try to say something cutting about the filth that children these days put into their brains. Unfortunately, I can't quite claim that rationale today. Instead, particularly asinine commentary from a certain Liberal MP with a certain reputation for consistent verbal asininery who appears at an asinine frequency on Politics with Don Newman drove me up the dial this afternoon in search of something that at least knew it was stupid.

Fortunately, every weekday at the same time CBC Newsworld brings the nerds of the world the latest on procedural wranglings in the Senate (oh, that Bill C-288's a slippery one...), MuchMusic brings the recently-home-from-highschool set the cerebral enema that is MuchonDemand -- now, I might add, with a newly-restyled holy-shit-it's-not-2004-anymore "MOD" logo.

Now, on a purely statistical basis, the three frustrated remote-control punches that convey one from channel 19 to 22 should replace the aforementioned idiocy with Matte Babel's smiling countenance and some sort of silly interview with Kelly Clarkson's cleavage. This afternoon, I guess I beat the odds, for what did I happen upon but a bona fide music video premiere? And not just any old video premiere, but the latest from Good Charlotte.

Remember when these guys were young and whiny? To my utmost surprise, I discovered that this is no longer the case. Now they're just whiny.



Watching these fellers decay before our eyes has been a truly terrifying process, and proof that emo is ultimately as subject to the laws of entropy as any other genre. At least the Rolling Stones made it to something like 40 or 50 before they started to look like, well, the Rolling Stones (or at least what my generation has always known them to look like). But these guys? Still well shy of thirty, and the ugly brother (as opposed to the tormented one) is briefly revealed to be quite rebelliously balding under his oh-so-punk porkpie. Balding! Poor dude didn't even get his shot at boinking Hillary Duff before his scalp started going all Phil Collins on him. As if sharing a name with a Disney dog from the late seventies wasn't bad enough.

That said, I think he can take some solace in staying out of the lead in the freak show race. That honour has to go to the creepy-looking keyboard player, who seems to have laid unquestioned claim to the group's Keith Richards slot in terms of embodying Skeletor chic. It took me a few minutes to realize why he was instantly conjuring up images of sexual perversion in my mind, and then I twigged that he's definately got a Riff Raff from the Rocky Horror Picture Show thing going on. As often occurs in such situations, I just called in Wikipedia for snarkiness backup, and it has informed me that when not unexplainedly switching between keyboard and guitar mid-video, the guy's side project is working on a children's book entitled Damious McDreary: A Boy and his Bat, which, cheerily enough, involves a small boy and his pet bat. What's the over-under on the kid cutting himself before the last page?

Born too late

Undoubtedly, a relatively large number of articles from The Onion are funny. However, there is a considerably smaller pool of them that are not only funny but, for lack of a better term, profound. Today I was reminded of this trusty old chestnut, in which the writers quite presciently forecasted a looming "retro crisis," in which the continually-shrinking temporal gap between events and the nostalgic echoes they engender could result in the dreaded "futurified recursion loop." While the article didn't get too specific about what form this conflagration could take, I have a suspicion it might involve us crashing into Kelsey Grammer over and over again.

While I spotted no skirts today (see preceding posts) I did spot what I believe is the first genuine intrusion of my middle-school era across the retro threshold and into the main front of mass-market-backed commercialized nostalgia. Another one of those MuchMusic flip-bys that had previously reintroduced me to Avril Lavigne's thighs this time resulted in me watching the latest production by an outfit known as hellogoodbye. Wikipedia informs me that their name is a reference to "the general transience of opportunities." I think their name is a reference to the general shortage of names that haven't been taken already.

Anyway, the video in question will be reproduced below, as including YouTube clips spices up the visual impact of the blog and breaks up blocks of text.


Now, pathfinding tendrils of '90s nostalgia have been creeping into our era for some time now. MC Hammer pretty much had a retro incubation period of about seven years, tops--driving up and down your town's main street pumping "2 Legit 2 Quit" from your pickup truck definately had ironic cachet by around 1999. His hip hop colleague Snow managed to do one better, timing his comeback album to exactly coincide with that moment that a new release from "that Informer guy" would tug on our heartstrings, although I gather his prison sentence had something to do with that, too. I don't want to even have to mention Dustin Diamond, so I won't.

But I think this video marks the '90s's Wedding Singer moment. There's a cross-the-board referencing of the early '90s--the hobbies, the fashion, and so on. There's the direct linkage between the band in question and the childhood era that they would have found themselves in at that time. There's also the complete lack of wink-wink nudge-nudge. This is key, I think--retro in the purest sense isn't at all self-conscious or apologetic about its origins. It just uses visual cues to set a broader tone as innocuously as possible.

Perhaps more interestingly of all is the phenomena of time-collapse. The video openly anchors itself in the summer of 1991, and certain aspects of it do tend to match that quite nicely--neon T-shirts, Ray-Ban sunglasses, twisty straws, and even, broadly speaking, the electronic pop genre as a whole. But pogs are definately anachronistic to this period; while the game dates back to the '30s in Hawaii, some of the more unusual Googling of my internetting career confirms my personal suspicions that the pog craze was distinctly tied to the 1994-1995 period, or in other words they're about four years early. The keytars are a nice touch--nice to know someone other than the Doodlebops are making use of them--but I think there's a bit of historical revisionism at play here, too, as I reckon the keytar was good and dead by '91. It's like a special fictional '90s has been created which blends together all sorts of catchy images without real regard for historical accuracy, per se.

The even more thought-provoking part is that hellogoodbye were probably too young to be going to overnight camp in 1991. (Lead singer Forrest Kline is apparently 22 at the moment.) Throw in the fact that their target audience is even younger--back in 1991 they were probably more worried about not wetting the bed--and I think the plot thickens considerably as to the whole appeal of this retro thing. You might think that retro is aimed, first and foremost, and those who lived through it the first time. Not so. I think it's aimed at those who were just a shade too young to have lived through it the first time. It's as if deep down we all wish we had been born five years earlier, that we'd been some sort of cooler older cousin. There's this mild pathological myth we tell ourselves about our childhoods, somehow coaxing our birthdates back a few years and retroactively maturing our perspectives.

My age cohort is just as guilty of this sin, I think. There's a heavy dose of Degrassi nostalgia linked to we early-'80s children, for instance, even though its honestly a bit of a stretch for some of us to claim Snake and Joey Jeremiah and the gang as true contemporaries. We might reflexively look back at Cobain as the Jesus of our generation, without doing the cold hard math and calculating how old we were when he did himself in. (JFK-style, I can still remember where I was when I heard the news, but it's revisionism of the worst sort to think that this event through our entire grade into some sort of state of paralyzed mourning. That was a privilege for the older kids.)

This little pattern might help clear up the whole pog mystery, as that likely was a part of the band's childhood which got caught in the shuffle when the whole video was timeshifted the requisite five years back. It also explains why no real premium was placed on historical accuracy: the 18-year-olds calling in requests to see hellogoodbye aren't likely to realize that the relationship between pogs and Ray-Bans is akin to the relationship between cave men and dinosaurs.

Postscript: For reasons I'm not quite solid on, I also get an odd Napoleon Dynamite vibe from the video. Now there's a movie that did something which was in many ways even weirder, namely play fast and loose with the concept of era altogether. Production design clearly dates huge chunks of that movie back to the near past, and yet other elements clearly set it in the present, and I get the overall sense that you're honestly not supposed to worry too much about that, or just chuckle about how backwards rural Idaho is. In writing this, I was also reminded of Donnie Darko, which also has a fairly unusual relationship with the year 1988 which eschews easy categorization.

500 words about Avril Lavigne

Pre-bed channel surfing led to me momentarily happening upon a rerun of this afternoon's Much on Demand (MuchonDemand?) , which, these weeks being these weeks and said weeks being the weeks following the release of Avril Lavigne's latest single and CanCon restrictions being CanCon restrictions, meant I unsurprisingly enough got to see Ms. Lavigne in video form.

I thus note my pleasure that she remains looking rather fecund, and continues to very carefully balance the trashy and drunk-doable with the inaccessible starlet thing. Full marks to her stylists. They wanted to plant the idea in my head that I could hypothetically bump into her and Spouse41 outside some shitty club, talk some smack, give said kid a titular Fat Lip/Pain for Pleasure and lead her giggling approvingly away to the corner for her Happy Ending. And they did. Crafty buggers.

With Ms. Lavigne's continued movement deeper into the heart of her third decade, I can also happily report that the trend line involving the progressive removal of her clothing continues where we left off after album number 2. It would appear fishnet legwear has now fully supplanted ersatz neckties as Ms. Lavigne's identifier of choice. This development I greet with considerable glee. And, I daresay, redirected circulation.

Mind you, enough talk about that. How about some sensible cultural commentary?

See, I believe this video marks the first time we have seen an interface between the concept of Lavigne and the concept of choreography, more specifically the school that traces its ancestry back to Michael Jackson and his assorted zombie groupies.

Yup, li'l Avril has taken it upon herself to do the dance routine thing. Now, we're talking entry level here: Avril, looking calculatedly accessible in her aforementioned hosiery, sort of shimmies in the middle of a pack of reasonably attractive contemporaries; not quite a full-on "Baby One More Time" dance-pop setup, more shades of Gwen Stefani crossover girlrock/dance-pop. Hesitant and restrained as it might be, the line has nonetheless been crossed.

Interestingly, other shots in the video make a point of showing Avril, true rocker that she is, playing along on guitar. Its smells suspiciously like the music video director got cold feet that this might be cited as the video where Avril went Britney and needed a visual counterweight. And, to be fair, Avril looks more natural hammering away on an electric guitar than Lance Bass ever would.

Still, I can't help but feel that with Ms. Spears's fade into self-parody, the brains behind Avril Inc. have realized the coast is clear to drop the act. When bubblegum starlets lipsynching over canned beats dreamed up by fabulously wealthy black men was the hegemonic force in youth music, it was absolutely essential Avril keep both feet planted on the stage, guitar slung over her shoulder, clothing loosely covering her skin. Anything less would call into question her place as pop's Joan of Arc, standing at the head of the army of instrument-wielding non-dancing eyeliner-wearing rebels.

But those days are gone. France is free. My Chemical Romance has sacked the capital. And I'm jonesing for a piece of Joan's ass.

Edit: The artistry in question: