The Animation Pimp

Do facts alone convey the essence of a story? Isn’t it just as likely that a person, object or event remains unseen, uncovered only through our senses and imagination? Four recent works that fuse elements of documentary, art-house narrative and animation—Ann Marie Fleming’s The Long Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor, Paul Fierlinger’s A Room Nearby and Chris Landreth’s Ryan–challenge our understanding of what can be revealed dramatically in a film. They demonstrate that animation, unbound by rules of gravity and logic, can be used to take us towards a deeper understanding of the world around and within us.

Today, more than ever, we’re seeing documentary and fiction films using animation to enrich projects by giving them new possibilities of space, texture and humour. Even TV animation has taken the authentic route with MTV’s Downtown, which, for the pilot episode anyway, used actual street recordings from a New York neighbourhood. Oxygen network’s Drawn From Life by Paul Fierlinger used real interviews to tell stories of everyday American women. And Saturday Night Live continues to feature an animated segment called Fun with Real Audio, which takes actual recordings of celebrities and political figures, and places them in a different context in order to satirize the speaker.

Perhaps the most famous animation hybrid is Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. The rotoscope-style animation software created by Bob Sabiston serves a variety of technical and conceptual purposes for Linklater. First, the rotoscope technique – which, in a sense, allows the filmmaker to trace over the photographic image - complements the ambiguous dream/wake duality of the film: it’s reality and yet it’s not. Secondly, the animation serves as a visual springboard into the minds of the various characters, bringing their theories and perspectives to life. Finally, the animation becomes an active participant in the film in that it caricatures the characters as they speak. Different artists were used for each scene, giving each space and character a unique personality. This adds another layer of existential fragmentation while, at times, playfully poking fun at some of the characters. At the same time, the lack of a cohesive style along with the shifting, floating, dislocated backgrounds and landscapes keeps the viewer on edge, at a distance.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam
Ann Marie Fleming’s new feature-length documentary The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, ‘stars’ her great-grandfather, a world famous vaudeville artist, magician and acrobat. In it, she uses animation for transition scenes, animates old photographs and comic books, and re-creates some of Sam’s old acts.

“I first started using animation because I didn’t have any actual footage of his act,” says Fleming. “I had incorporated animation into many of my other films and I am always drawn to use it to represent things that cannot be represented by live-action: counter-stories that show metaphorical political and emotional states.” Sam becomes an almost living, breathing character. In old photographs we see eyes, hands and legs move. “Somehow animating the gorgeous old photos and illustrations gave the film a contemporary look,” adds Fleming. “I didn’t want Sam to be some historical footnote.”

Like her great-grandfather, Fleming is also a magician of sorts. “Animation is the legacy of magic, the great grandchild,” states Fleming. “The first filmmakers were magicians. The first films were collaborations between photographers and magicians. In some ways, animation is the magic in the film.”

American Splendor
While animation doesn’t play a major part in American Splendor, it serves as an important tool in conveying the film’s themes of perception and identity. When the “real” writer Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti, anxiously waits in line behind a slow old lady at a grocery store, an animated version appears as his conscience. Very quickly, the scene shows us that Harvey’s anger has less to do this with the old woman than with his own existential frustrations.

In a key scene, when Joyce, Pekar’s future partner, arrives at a bus station to meet Harvey for the first time, she is unsure which drawn version will greet her. Pekar had famously worked with many different artists, and each had their own take on him. As she waits, we see a trio of cut-out and drawn versions of Harvey.

The film is bookmarked by two scenes that place Paul Giamatti’s Harvey within shifting animated and composited backgrounds. These are minor parts, but they add humour to American Splendor and could not have been conveyed as effectively in live-action. The use of animation also enriches the ongoing notion that there is literally, no single Harvey Pekar, but many.

Paul Fierlinger
One of the most consistent users of the animation documentary is American Paul Fierlinger. While animating for Sesame Street in the 1970s, Fierlinger worked with voice actor Jim Thurman whose direct speaking delivery was warm and unaffected. Fierlinger was influenced by Thurman’s technique, eventually using it for a film called And Then I’ll Stop (1989), which featured a handful of alcoholics recounting their battle with addiction. Much of the film’s power comes from often harrowing, unscripted first person voices. Fierlinger’s drawings are stark and minimal as they take us into the minds of each addict. Fierlinger has since made many interview or direct speaking films: the autobiographies Drawn From Memory and Still Life with Animated Dogs, the Drawn From Life documentary series and the recent PBS production, A Room Nearby.

“When you turn on the radio,” says Fierlinger, “within two seconds you can tell if the voice you hear is that of a news reader, an actor or an authentic human being who was recorded on location. The pictures I draw to our sound tracks are just illustrations of the voice. Of course it’s not all that authentic by then, because the pictures I present, the music, the editing–all of those old crafts–will distort reality nicely so that we can have a credible story, too.”

Similar in structure and tone to earlier animated documentaries, A Room Nearby mixes Fierlinger’s own insights about loneliness with stories told by real people, including film director, Milos Forman. Fierlinger’s sketchy, unpretentious drawing style accompanies each of the stories. Fierlinger’s greatest strength is his ability to find interesting, articulate and sympathetic people. The unaffected nature of each speaker derails any speck of sentimentality. The exception is Forman’s tale, which at times betrays the authenticity of the other stories because we see that he’s reading from pages he has written.

Oddly enough, Fierlinger is finding more success with his work on the documentary circuit. “Perhaps it’s a fresher way of presenting personal observations,” suggests Fierlinger. “Talking heads are to be avoided as much as possible in real documentaries. Everybody knows those to be a cop-out, unless you find a talking head of Rasputin. But talking heads in animation are fun and quirky; just think of Creature Comforts.”

Animation’s cold shoulder is somewhat surprising given the power and uniqueness of Fierlinger’s work. Fierlinger does tend to repeat himself stylistically, but that can be said of most animators. Perhaps there’s a feeling that Fierlinger relies too much on his soundtracks. Without the unaffected, warm voices, would Fierlinger’s images be enough to hold our interest?

Ryan
Chris Landreth’s (The End, Bingo) project, Ryan is one of the most anticipated short animations of the year. Ryan is based on interviews Landreth conducted with former NFB animator, Ryan Larkin. A one time Oscar nominee, Larkin fell on hard times and now lives at the Old Brewery Mission in Montreal. He earns his living as a panhandler. The interview in the film takes place in an old, run down cafeteria, which is filled with an assortment of, literally, broken characters.

Landreth, using Maya software, recreates Larkin as a fragile, incomplete person. We see a portion of a face, but much of Ryan’s body is twisted busted or just not there. As Ryan reflects on his life, Landreth uses animation to create spaces that simply would not be possible in live action. In one poignant scene, we see a young, complete Ryan, with hippie threads and long hair, come to life in his award-winning film Street Musique. He is filled with joy and soon begins dancing with his creations. Occasionally, we hear from other observers. Landreth also shows us his motivation: he sees elements of his mother in Ryan’s life.

Chris Landreth has created a technical and conceptual marvel with Ryan. In revealing Larkin’s inner landscape, Landreth has delivered us into a deeper, richer reality. We see the ‘real’ Ryan Larkin that our eyes cannot see.

A Hybrid Future?

When Disney announced in 2003 that it wouldn’t be making drawn animation films anymore, some began to fear that the form itself might disappear, to be assimilated into a new digital world. Certainly, with the onset of recent technological developments, animation is changing but it’s always been changing. Like any art form, animation is not – or at least, should not be - some staid process. It has always been in a constant state of flux; facing new technologies and concepts is not exactly new.

There is no doubt that animation is taking on a new hybrid-like form. However, films like Waking Life, Ryan and The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam show that the genre and its techniques – not to mention its concepts - are far from extinction.

In embracing old and new technologies, leading-edge artists and their films show that animation - for all its potential paradoxical and fantastical possibilities - can actually take viewers to deeper, more realistic, levels of human understanding than conventional live-action or documentary work.

In this sense, animation might just be the pivotal ingredient in a new 21st century art form.

This man was born in the wrong century. He should have been a sea captain in the 1800’s.
Sterling Hayden’s Agent

What confuses me is I ain’t all that unhappy. So why do I drink, I don’t know.
Sterling Hayden

It must have been in the early 1990s when I first came across this strange figure called Sterling Hayden. A friend was taking a film noir class and they were showing the films at a local art house theatre. There were two films that night: Underworld U.S.A by Sam Fuller and The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. The Killing struck me most because of its bizarre plot, bizarre characters, played by bizarre B actors like Elisha Cook Jr. and Timothy Carey. Most notable though was the protagonist who delivered dry, monotone lines as if he had a million better places to be. He turned out to be Sterling Hayden. I rented a few of his other films like Dr. Strangelove and The Asphalt Jungle and found equally captivating apathetic performances.

Hayden, as it turns out, was an interesting fellow off the screen. In life, Hayden had sailed around the world by the age of 20, ran guns for Tito, ratted on fellow commies during a HUAC hearing, headed out to see again, against court orders, to Tahiti with his four kids, wrote two acclaimed books, was an alcoholic, got busted for weed possession in the 1980s, all the while beginning to resemble a Greek god with his long white hair and freakish moustache-missing beard.

To look at Sterling Hayden, you’d be tempted to open up a bag of clichés: “he was a man’s man”, “after him they broke the mould.” But beneath his macho armour was a feckless boy. He was the classic ‘live for the moment not in the moment’ kinda guy, always running off towards the next destination before finding time to savour his last achievement. He ran away from home to go to sea. He ran away from sea to go to Hollywood. He ran from Hollywood to go to war so he could make Madeleine Carroll long for him. He stood 6’4”, had blond hair and was a guy who captured people’s attention. He joined the commies to show a woman, who he probably wanted to sleep with, that he wasn’t all talk. He ratted to save his floundering career. He was one of those guys who always needed drama and when it wasn’t around, he’d create it. Then when life fucked him over, as he expected it would, it only confirmed his belief that life was a piece of shit. He couldn’t even keep his name straight. At different periods, he was known as Montaigu Walter, Sterling Walter, Buzzy Walter, Sterling Hayden, Stirling Hayden, and John Hamilton! In short, Sterling Hayden was a fucked up human being just like you, your dad, and me.

He was born Montaigu Relyea Walter, but a godfather apparently convinced the boy’s parents to call him Sterling. His dad gave up the ghost when he was nine, his Mom married a guy named James “Daddy Jim” Hayden, and Sterling Walter became Sterling Hayden. Life with Daddy Jim was no picnic. Daddy Jim was a loser. He was eternally on the verge of landing ‘the big deal’ that would elevate the family from poverty to wealth. At different times, he even set the family up in a posh hotel, enrolled Hayden in a rich kid’s school, and bought two cars in one go. The pot of gold never came and instead the family moved from town and town, often in the middle of the night, to avoid creditors. Hayden’s life was, not surprisingly, fairly miserable until they moved momentarily to a place called Tumbler Island in Maine. In this seaport town, Hayden found escape from the sour, frightening loneliness of a depression that ate away at his parents. After Daddy Jim turned deadbeat and bailed on the family, Hayden ran away and landed a few small jobs on ships. Despite constant advice that he return home, Hayden was sea driven. Over a fairly short amount of time, he proved himself a worthy seaman and by his early 20s had sailed around the world. As he became more known, local papers began to follow his exploits. It was here that the demon seed of Hollywood was first planted.

After winning a boating race in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a newspaper article featured a shot of Hayden and talked about his Hollywood good looks. The lack of economic and domestic stability that came with a life at sea led Hayden to consider the Hollywood possibility, but not before he first helmed his own ship. When that ship went tits up, Hayden, already insecure about his sailing abilities and feeling pressured to help out his financially and emotionally starving mother, went to New York and through some friends managed to land a screen test with Paramount producer, Edward Griffith. While he figured he flopped his screen test, apparently Hollywood knew better, and signed him. His first role was opposite Madeleine Carroll. The two fell in love almost at once and from there on Hayden listened to his groin rather than his head. After begging his producers to loan him money to buy a schooner, the insecure Hayden, fearing that Carroll was falling for another man, decided to quit Hollywood and join the war effort to impress the cause-loving gal.

Hayden’s war years alone would make a good yarn. He went to England for commando and parachute training, returned to the U.S. after he busted his ankle, tried to become a Lieutenant in the Marines, but was rejected. He returned to sailing briefly, married the now suitably impressed Carroll, changed his name to John Hamilton, and joined the Marine Corps. Deciding he loathed the service, Hayden pulled some strings and got himself hooked up with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S.’s first intelligence unit. As an OSS member, he found himself all over the Mediterranean running supplies and guns, primarily to the Yugoslav partisans through German occupied areas. By 1946, he was back in Hollywood with a Silver Star, a citation from Tito, a fascination with communism, heavier drinking bouts, and, ironically, an ex-wife. All this nonsense for a woman who was long gone by the end of an adventure he started to win her affection.

During 1946, Hayden gets a couple of acting roles, buys another boat, continues to flirt with communism, and drinks and fucks his way through most nights. Finally, when a Hollywood gal tells him he should shit or get off the pot, Hayden once again succumbs to his fear and joins the Communist party. He goes to a few meetings, stays quiet and listens loathingly to the hyperbolic pretensions of the other members. “The appeal was manifold.” Hayden told Tom Snyder. “To begin with I just came out of a couple of years of WW 2. I wanted to appear to be tough. I had profound admiration for the partisans. I came back to Hollywood and part of me believed in the ideas that these people were fighting for, but I also enjoyed the fact that I could go to dinner parties and begin talking this way. I got out because I’m not a man who can take discipline.” He realized, too late, that he’d made a dreadful mistake.

Meanwhile, Hayden was about to make another poor decision. In 1947, he met and married Betty-Ann de Noon, a young woman he met on Laguna Beach. Within the year, Hayden realizes he’s mistakenly joined another party. Meantime, the doomed couple live on a ship, he makes more films (“abortions,” he calls them) and she bears him a couple of sons. In the next decade, the couple marry and divorce three times, have four children together, and go through a nasty custody battle.

The 1950s started out pretty well. Hayden was offered a part in John Huston’s film, The Asphalt Jungle playing hoodlum Dix Handley, a farm boy eager to earn money anyway he can so that he can return home to buy the family farm. Hayden had hoped that Jungle would lead to a flood of good offers, but none came. He began to wonder if his communist activities (however superficial) might be a cause. As such he arranges to meet with FBI officials so he can clear his conscience and clarify his relationship with the communist party. Afterwards, he finally understands Faust. He has sold his soul to save his ass. But he was wrong, his confidential meeting reaches the press and just when he thought the commie bullshit was behind him, he is called before the House of Un-American activities. During the 1951 session, aired on CBS-TV, he ratfinks his way back to work. “I did it because I was weak. I didn’t want to go to jail,” Hayden told Tom Snyder. The roles begin to pull in for the stoolie. America’s new golden boy is even offered the role of Tarzan—but turns it down—and then makes a series of interesting films that expanded his range ever so slightly: Andre De Toth’s Crimewave, Joseph Lewis, Terror in a Texas Town and two more very fine roles as the title character in Nick Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) and another Johnny, Clay this time, in Stanley Kubrick’s early masterpiece, The Killing (1956). Despite his rapacious success, Hayden was drinking steadily, seeing a shrink, buying and selling boats, and struggling to avoid financial collapse, in part because of a long and nasty custody battle that finally saw him ‘win’ his children in 1958. But by 1959, he was on the run again.

In the spring of 1958, Hayden again decided to bail on Hollywood. This time he would sail around the world. He planned to take a crew and his four children aboard his schooner, Wanderer and set sail for the South Seas. Problem was that his wife got wind of the plan and had her lawyers ask for a court order to prevent Hayden from taking the children on the voyage. When the ruling came down in favour of the wife, Hayden ignored it, borrowed some money, and in January 1959 sailed to Tahiti, a fugitive from justice. Along the way, crewmembers bail, he is stranded in Tahiti with no money, fails to write the great novel that is in him, and is unable to make a promised documentary film of the experience. He returns in 1960, where he is forced to go to court again for another custody battle. Amazingly, he turned up a winner again. He was sentenced to five days in jail and ordered to pay a fine of $500, but the sentence was suspended.

In late 1960, Hayden met and married another woman, Catherine (Kitty) McConnell. McConnell seems to have understood Hayden more than his past wives and the two remained together until his death in 1986. By this time, Hayden was taking on fewer acting roles. However, he did take on a couple of notable roles including the lead in a John Frankenheimer adaptation of William Faulkner’s The Old Man (Hayden was so terrified of the live aspect of television that he began fasting to calm his nerves), and a towering performance as Colonel Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Hayden’s beautiful psychotic Ripper was largely influenced, again, by his inability to feel comfortable on Kubrick’s set. “My father had to do one scene about 40 times.” Says son, Andrew, “He couldn’t get the scene right, but Kubrick said that’s what he wanted, the terror and intensity.” Ironically, Hayden’s Ripper was a fanatical anti-communist convinced that the communist had infiltrated the drinking water of America.

Hayden, at long last, found his writing chops, scribbling the candid autobiography, Wanderer (1963). Following the completion of Strangelove and Wanderer, Hayden turned his attentions almost entirely to writing. “I immediately thought I’d try a novel.” Hayden said. “I worked for five years, about as hard as I was able. I had $68.000 in advances from Doubleday. I did 2 complete 1500 page manuscripts.” For whatever reasons, Hayden was dissatisfied with the manuscripts and turned more and more to alcohol. “There’s something glorious and savage about that direct relationship between cigarettes, alcohol and writing.” By this time, Hayden had purchased an 1890’s railway car and was using it as an office. There were days when he didn’t drink until the afternoon, and there were days when he was spiking his morning tea with booze. He’d stop drinking here and there, but when he began to feel well again, he immediately returned to the bottle. Hayden’s fear of sobriety was common. He was terrified that he would become a dour dullard. “When I say I’m gonna make a force drive to stop or go dry out somewhere in Pennsylvania, does this mean that I’m never gonna go to Paris, sit in a café, drink and laugh and watch the world go by. Let’s face it, alcohol has a million good functions.” But the good it apparently brings was nowhere near Hayden as he found himself unable to write anymore. He went for treatment, attended AA meetings, but nothing did the trick. “The diabolical thing is you’re always more drunk than you know. The way you feel is where you are and booze could take me higher in fifteen minutes.”

Finally, around 1968, a concerned friend came over and told him he was killing himself and that he should maybe try some grass. Hayden was reluctant because his book was a ‘booze book’ (he was also drunk throughout most of the writing of Wanderer). During another visit, the friend left behind some grams and a few months after that, Hayden puffed the weed. “I was down, really down, baby blue, BABY blue. I took my VW and hid it, locked the door [of the railcar] and made a note to myself to remember where I put the keys. I smoked a couple of clay pipes full and I thought what everyone else thinks: nothing’s happening. So I got up to get some red wine, but thought, ‘I don’t want a drink.’ So I sat back and…’well…ok.’”

Of course, grass didn’t solve the problem. Instead Hayden began to mix the two. “Grass in my experience takes me up so high and I find it’s so beautiful I just wanna cool it and you can’t smoke anymore so that’s where the wine comes in.” Hayden’s love of the weed became so profound that he began smoking almost everyday and logging his feelings during each high. Every once in a while, Hayden would continue to fast “on grass, water and headphones.” He felt that it was the best way for the body to get some sleep, to allow it to slow down and rest.

Meanwhile, Hayden grew weary and depressed. He decided to drift. “If the wind goes north, I’ll go south.” He drifted through Europe by car, motorbike and finally a barge (called, The Who Knows?), which he subsequently parked along the Seine in the middle of Paris. He ignored calls from his agent and didn’t read cables. Naturally it was hard on his wife, Kitty. She was social, she liked the land, and here she was, being pulled all over the place by a lonely alcoholic desperately in search of the harmony and serenity that vanished when he was nine years old. “It was difficult on my wife.” Said Hayden. “I really wanted to get away then. I let everything go by, though I was broke. I wanted to write again, but was in no great hurry. It’s a lovely way to live.”

Hayden didn’t see his drifting as escaping. He felt that those who work 9-5 and have two weeks of holidays were the ones escaping. “The home guard. He’s the escapist. An escape into the security of the job.” Hayden was a man of the senses. We have the power to see and feel and yet so few of us do. “Unselfishness is a form of death. You gotta go as best you can. You gotta go alone…or if you’re lucky, you go with a loved one, whatever sex or form…whatever…let her rip.”

“I work when I get broke or when something comes along that has some integrity or guts.” With the exception of a handful of roles including The Godfather, 1900 and The Long Goodbye, Hayden was generally accepting roles for the first reason. His role in Robert Altman’s Noir parody, The Long Goodbye was probably the most memorable of his latter roles. In it he played, appropriately, an alcoholic Hemingway-like writer. It was one of the few roles that Hayden looked back upon with fondness and he attributed his success to “the prodigious powers of pot”. Hayden was stoned throughout the shooting of the film. “That was first thing I ever did that I could actually stand to watch on screen-the first time I wasn’t acutely mortified.”

Hayden was supposed to get the role of the fisherman Quint in Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws, but the IRS levied his acting monies so he was reluctant to take the role in a half-assed film without seeing a goddamn dime. (They also took his vintage railcar and impounded it). Around the same time, Hayden finally completed his first novel, Voyage, which became a massive best seller.

The 1980s provided more of the same. Hayden took on a few roles including a couple of absolute duds (Venom, 1982—which Hayden left because he was too drunk to work, and Gas with Howie Mandel!). In April 1981, Hayden, now 65, was busted at a Toronto airport was possession of weed. “I had 3 1/2 ounces of Lebanese hashish in my pocket,” Hayden told film critic Gerald Peary. Hayden cut off, once again, with no fine and no probation. “I’d only been arrested twice and that was in civil rights demonstrations.”
His final film appearance was as the subject of a German documentary called Lighthouse of Chaos. The film was shot aboard Hayden’s barge and he was in a constant alcoholic stupor throughout the film. When he wasn’t gripping a bottle, he was smoking hash and rambling on about life.

By 1982, Hayden was finally convinced by a doctor that he had to toss the sauce. “It makes combat look like going down an elevator.” He began to settle down as best he could, living a few months on the barge and the rest of the time in Connecticut or California, where he died on May 23, 1986 of cancer.

Hayden could never completely settle down mentally or physically. He tried too hard to find meaning in life. Even if it seemed like he was carefree, he was actually unable to just let go and embrace the stupidity of existence. For all Hayden’s talk about doing what you want and experiencing the natural beauty of life, he was also drunk or stoned much of the time. Hayden was no better than the home guards he criticized, they escaped through domestic security, while he got drunk and fell off barges. Drinking was less a disease than a crutch for Hayden. It’s almost as if he needed uncertainty and instability, but he was smart enough to ensure that his life never completely came unhinged. In the end, he couldn’t even fully embrace a past he longed for because that past never really existed. The past Hayden sought through sailing and writing was the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Hayden became a man in an unfound present looking for something that never was. He was homeless in his homeland. He was homeless in himself.

The root of his frustration and fears may have been the death of his father. Maybe he wanted to show his father he was someone, hell maybe he wanted to succeed where Daddy Jim failed at every turn. Hayden seemed so scared of becoming an average, normal guy. But he failed to see that that was an average, normal fear. We want to carve our own paths. Ironically, Hayden’s struggle to find his rhythm was simultaneously what made him unique and just like every other schmuck. And yet, this is what makes Sterling Hayden so special. He never pretended. He never tried to hide the cracks, the inconsistencies or the darkness that lurked within him. He was just like us.

Some say he was born in the wrong century, but I don’t agree. However unrealistic Hayden’s view of the past might have been, he at least acknowledged their roots. He was exactly what that the amnesic 20th century needed, a man who saw the power in origins. With each vessel he sailed, Hayden embraced the breezes emanating from a time forgotten; he carried them forward with hope that we too might hear their voices.

S’come full circle already? I always thought that 360° came when you were a geezer. I’m only 36. Was sorta hoping I was at/near the halfway point.

In 1992 when I started with the Ottawa festival, I saw Raimund Krumme’s film, Crossroads. Now at that time, I was a film studies student. I had little interest or knowledge in animation. Then came Krumme. I was blown away. The drawing was nothing special, simple, thick black lines. But the ideas, wowee! All this philosophical stuff jam packed into a six-minute short. I think I like this thing called animation.

1996. Just had my first animation article published about - you guessed it - Raimund Krumme.

So if you’re looking for someone to blame for, you know, the whole ‘me making some folks uncomfortable about their (or my?) existence in cartoonland, then hey, Raimund IS the man to call. In fact, next time you see him at a festival just tell him straight up: “Thanks a lot, Raimund. Thank’s a bunch for encouraging Robinson to join our ranks. Asshole.” And then give him a good ol’ forehand/backhand slap. Tell him I said it was okay.

Rather than scribble something that pretends to be new, I’ve pulled out the article I wrote 8 years ago. I was curious to see how my writing had changed and compare it to how I NOW felt about ol’ Krumme’s films. Kinda like when The Police re-did that song. So let’s have a look at some of the main bits and see how it all reads:

The Powers That Be: Raimund Krumme

First off, this title is awful. Titles are important. They set the tone, direction etc… This is a snoozer. Probably the worst title I’ve ever come up with along with this one.

Given the increasing obsession with technology in animation, it’s refreshing to discover the work of Raimund Krumme. Somewhere between Buster Keaton, Samuel Beckett and Chuck Jones, Krumme turns minimalist line drawings into complex, imaginative, and often humorous meditations on class, power, mass media, and with anironic twist, animation itself. Structured around an allegorical journey, Krumme’s exiled Keatonesque ‘everymen’ travel through barren, absurd, and often cruel landscapes in a quest for self-knowledge. And in Krumme’s work, like that of fellow countryman, Wim Wenders, the landscape also functions as an equation of a character’s state of mind, often reflecting a deeper inner torment.

The key to stabilizing the characters’ torments is through power. But power itself is an ever-changing and often superficial entity….

This is TOTALLY wrong.

…Watching Krumme’s creative manipulation of space is not unlike viewing the films of Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan or Gene Kelly, whose physical manoeuvers and astonishing use of space as a supporting character, defy all reason. While academics can ponder over the sociological and philosophical implications of each scene, there is an emotional element at work, contrary to Krumme’s Brechtian ambitions that are quite simply hypnotic. …

Hmm… holy serious man. Where’s the humour, the self-reflexivity, the swearing? This reads like a guy not far removed from University. Not sure if I agree with the landscape stuff anymore cause Krumme’s films don’t really have much in the way of landscapes. The place they’re WONDERING about (yes…with an ‘o’) IS the landscape itself. The landscapes inside folk’s heads—and of course the landscapes are ultimately taking place in Krumme’s head. But wait..the landscape I see takes place inside my head and the one YOU read takes… oh never mind. Check out all those allusions too! Who else refers to Chuck Jones, Jackie Chan and Bertolt Brecht in the same piece? Pile of crock really, just a reflection of my own tastes at the time. Threw in the Jones reference for the cartoon fans. Oh… yeah… the last 2-3 lines are a small bag of garbage. “Quite simply hypnotic!” Sounds like I’m reviewing theatre for the New Yorker.

Born in Cologne in 1950, Krumme spent his post-student years dabbling in a variety of activities. In addition to teaching, Krumme also illustrated, and produced radio plays for children. Krumme’s entrance into animation was, he notes, “quite by accident”. A company approached him to do drawings for a children’s film. He did the drawings, went to the set, and ended up directing the film, a cut-out piece entitled, Phantomes des Chateaux (1980). Krumme would go on to direct three more films for children, Spaghetti (1981) (about a boy who, forced to eat his spaghetti, instead attempts to build his own world out of the food), Puzzle (1982), and And The Chair Flew Through the Window (1984)….

I didn’t like these films much. Still… I wish Raimund would go back and try different styles.

….Rope Dance was the first film that enabled Krumme to shift from making films for children towards a more personalized style. In the film, two characters (based on Krumme’s relationship with his father) struggle for control of a rope within a continually shifting rectangular plane. While some have viewed the film, in its seemingly negative view towards the father, as cruel, Rope Dance is an innovative and tender meditation on the transference of knowledge, and with it power, from generation to generation. What elevates the film beyond Krumme’s previous work is his marvelous use of the rope and rectangle. The rope, a symbol of knowledge, undergoes continual shifts in the film as the characters develop. Initially, the rope is a series of tracks that the father lays for the son, then just as quickly the rope becomes a means of control as the son becomes a puppet under the unbearing control of the father. For a moment there is peace as the two swing the rope in unison over the rectangle which has now become a well. Later the son attempts to break free of the rope in order to join the crowd, but the father is unwilling, indeed unable to let go. Eventually the son assumes control of the rope, and in the film’s most tender moment, the son returns to lead the now blind father.

Note the polite structure here. We’re gonna go chronologically. Who were those ‘some’ who viewed the film as cruel? I’ve no idea. Actually I’m spot on here. I just re-watched the film and have to say that I agree with the above. Now that I’m a father, the film’s all that more touching. And for a minute I was thinking… “shit Raimund, this is sentimental, romantic fruit loops.” But then I was thinking about my two non-existent fathers—neither of whom I have contact with—and realize that I’m still connected by a thread because of my inability to get over their shitheadedness. So I’m doing a dance with say 2-3 ropes.

…The result of Krumme’s fascination was Spectators, a biting parable about public reaction using the relationship between a film and its audience. Krumme, who admits to finding the power of the masses, “quite frightening”, was also motivated by the importance in Germany at the time to possess uniform opinions….

In Spectators, the cinema becomes a repressive environment where people lose themselves in a series of images and sounds…..

Spectators reveals, like Fritz Lang’s Fury a fear of the often reactionary and over-emotional power of the masses. Krumme’s frantic, dizzying camera reflects the ever-changing moods of the audience, while the refusal of a central character reflects not only the lack of individuality in contemporary society, but also the need to be led (which is nicely illustrated through Krumme’s nod to Animal Farm where the audience turn into rows of clucking chickens). And again, space plays a pivotal role in the film. In contrast to the open spaces of Krumme’s other films, Spectators offers a constricting, claustrophobic landscape that at once bears a close resemblance to a prison…

This aint bad in some ways. I got the personal stuff (festivals) and the politics (german reunification). Note the references: Animal Farm to show the animation folks that I KNOW and Fury, to show that I KNOW MORE THAN YOU. Too many friggin adjectives though. Writing like a tightass, Hiding behind school book names.

It’s kinda funny that I hate the cinema. It’s overpriced, crowded and you’re forced to check your personality in at the door. Everyone has to react and behave the same. No talking. No mobiles. No laughing when you should be crying. All must applaud in unison.

One thing I missed here was the connection between cinema and society. Cinema aint no different than shopping malls, dinner parties, or getting gas. Most folks hide their essence behind a mask of conformity. We repress all that stuff that we’re REALLY feeling. Course if we express every TRUTH at every turn, there’d be fistfights and chaos. I’m still learning how to suppress truth from others. Funny, cause I lie to myself oh-so-very well.

Like Rope Dance, Crossroads features a basic symbol, in this case, an intersection. A man crosses the screen and walks along the frame of the film. The frame soon becomes a tightrope, then a road which leads to an intersection. Now the man must decide which path to take. In deciding his course of action, he must confront the advice of his shadow and three other men. But the man soon finds that each path only leads him back to the center. Soon, all four characters, (echoing the brilliant scene in Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. that finds Buster trapped within the frame and at the mercy of the editor), enter spaces which suddenly change from corridors to walls. What appears to be hopeful one moment turns to entrapment the next. It soon becomes apparent that no matter how hard the characters try, they simply aren’t going anywhere. But inexplicably Krumme’s characters, in spite of the impossibility of their actions, do go on.

S’bout right. Did I mention that the four characters are all part of the same person? Lot of Heraclitus in this here film in the sense that life is a continual cycle: up = down, beginning = end etc… The Keaton reference is okay, but pushing it a bit, but there is a lot of Beckett influence here. If there was ever a man to do a Beckett adaptation…

Passage, Krumme’s most recent film, merges elements of Leo Tolstoy’s story, Master and Man with a dash of Tex Avery, Fred Astaire and Jerry Lewis, to create one of his most explicit and absurd political commentaries. Two men, a porter and his master, have to cross a frozen pond. Fearing the danger ahead of them, each tries to follow the other, leaving their social roles behind. But once the danger is over, everything returns to its original state.

This is the worst passage (heh heh). I’m not saying a damn thing here….and the Astaire, Avery and Lewis comparisons are embarrassing. I mean it’s got some funny moments…but in that Beckett haha we’re all gonna die sense.

Despite the Tex Avery inspired lunacy of Passage, we should not overlook the value of the message underlying the film: hierarchy is culturally, not naturally conceived.

OH PLEASE! Give me a break mr. Preacher. You’re spouting Prof. hand me downs.

The Magic Flute is technically unlike anything Krumme has done before. Working on computer for the first time using TOONBOX, a 2D animation palette, Krumme, like his characters, entered a new and at times frustrating creative environment. While TOONBOX enabled Krumme to do things he couldn’t do by hand (eg. Changing colours) and relieved him from tedious work (eg. inbetweening), it was not an entirely happy experience. Krumme found that he had to compromise a great deal and that he was often forced into a subservient role with the computer. But Despite his overall unhappiness with the final product, he admits that he would like to work on computers again.

Boring! This is filler, folks. I didn’t like Magic Flute cause it didn’t fit in with my ‘thesis’, and hell, it was just plain boring, but rather than just say I didn’t like it I kept it in to keep the continuity and then just talked about the software to avoid saying anything about the film. You could tell that Raimund was having a hard time with the technology.

In 1994 Krumme was approached by producer Ron Diamond to do a commercial for Acme Filmworks in Los Angeles. And while Krumme is the first to acknowledge the financial rewards of doing advertisements, he says that the offer also gave him a chance to work in a new creative environment. …

…Krumme had come to a stage where he felt it was time to leave Germany….Krumme has since completed a number of commercials and will continue to work for Diamond and live in California for most of the year, returning to Germany for a few weeks every summer.

I visited Raimund with some chums in the late 90s. He lived near some gangland area. I was a bit panicky. Then we get to his house and in passing he tells us about some shooting that happened downstairs. For the rest of the evening, I keep my eye on his huge living room window, ready to duck at the slightest sound.

Also, after teaching at Cal Arts for a few years, Raimund headed back to Germany where he remains. He still does the occasional commercial for Acme.

At the moment, Krumme is storyboarding a new film tentatively called, The Message, which addresses the problems of communication. He is also animating thirty minutes of the film “Harold and The Purple Crayon” based on the classic children’s story. In the future Krumme would like to further explore the computer field, and work in live action with artificial backgrounds.

Obviously, Raimund has finished The Message. It’s ok, but not his best work. It feels a bit dated, something that Lenica or Schabenbeck might have made in the sixties. And by the way, the Harold project never happened. Too bad. I mean that cause it was the perfect vehicle for Raimund’s style.

One of the common criticisms of Krumme’s work is that “it’s all the same”. Not only does this criticism imply that an individual aesthetic is defined solely by its technique, it denies story and plot its rightful place within the artist’s style. And while Krumme’s films from Rope Dance to Passage certainly bear an unmistakable ‘Krumme-look’, it is reductive to reduce these complex and varied works to a single style….

Ya know I’m not sure that I agree with me anymore. Sure, Krumme challenges himself conceptually, but he seems content to keep using the same style and I’m not sure I dig that these days. It’s like Pärn, Schwizgebel, Plympton and Mulloy, they’ve all found their cozy little room in the trailer park of art and seem content to stay there. Personally I find that a bit stagnant. I admire folks like, say, Andreas Hykade , Jonas Odell, Mati Kütt Joanna Priestly, George Griffin, and assortment of others for at least trying out new bikepaths.

But perhaps the most important aspect of Krumme’s work is his craftsmanship.

I canNOT believe that I said this. Attention to craftsmanship is turning animation into an ornament – real pretty to look at, but kinda useless.

Unlike today’s technological dynamos who view craftsmanship solely in terms of technique with scant attention to story. Krumme’s work is inspiring because he merges a deceptively simple story and technique into a creative and complex imagining of contemporary society.

OKAY… I sort of redeem myself here. Raimund HAS some pertinent ideas and isn’t obsessed with technique.

And, in what is perhaps his ultimate irony, Krumme’s basic black and white drawings allow us to see that the reality we take for granted is not black and white.

Even some 8 years later, I still get a kick out of most of Krumme’s work—specifically Rope Dance, Spectators, Crossroads and Passage. Many of the ideas I saw then hold true today and I’ve even seen new threads like the determinism vs fatalism at play in his work that I didn’t catch before. The whole power thing though is wrong. Krumme’s characters fight for a power that comes from freedom.

Oh yeah! Check out that nifty final line. I like it. Course it’s a bit of a contradiction because I’m using that line for absolute- no buts-about- it, closure. Why couldn’t I just stop wherever? Hey wait a second, this is all a bit like a

Written for Animac Animation festival in Spain (2004)

Piece done for the Ottawa Xpress in early 2007. My first cover story actually.

Most of you know how a Canadian (Joe Shuster) co-created Superman, but can you tell me who Canada’s first superhero was? Any idea who Dave Sim, Chester Brown or Julie Doucet are?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

Don’t feel so bad. It’s a story that’s become familiar, tiresome and oh-so Canadian.

Faced with an apathetic and relatively modest public in their own country, Canadian artists are forced to seek U.S. markets to earn a decent living. It happens in film, writing, animation, and in the Canadian comic industry, as Ottawa writer John Bell reveals in “Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe.”

To make matters worse, comics, like animation, are further burdened with the misnomer that they only exist for comic and kiddie purposes. Few people are aware that both art forms produce provocative, poetic and deeply personal works for adults. As a result unique comic artists like Chester Brown, Dave Cooper, Julie Doucet and others, remain unknown to most Canadians.

In “Invaders from the North”, Bell traces the highs and lows of Canada’s comic book history from the early –and rather lame- attempts to create Canadian superheroes (Northern Light, Nelvana, Johnny Canuck) to the more mature and unconventional works of contemporary artists. Along the way, Bell touches ongoing problems that have threatened the industry, notably censorship (including a nice anecdote about how a young Brian Mulroney won a debate contest with his denunciation of comics. Perhaps not coincidently, the second censorship movement emerged during Mulroney’s tenure as Prime Minister), U.S. cultural imperialism, brain drain (i.e. when our artists leave to work in another country), and the apathy of the Canadian public.

Bell’s book is well researched and illustrated (highlighted by a nifty cover illustration courtesy of home boy, Dave Cooper), but his argument that Canada has “conquered” the comic book universe isn’t all that convincing. Certainly, a number of Canadians have excelled and achieved international success (most notably Todd McFarlane), but to say that Canada has had a significant impact on the comic book industry (the way, say, that Canadians have had on the animation industry) might be stretching it. It’s also a shame that Bell doesn’t give us more insight into the work of many of the artists. Too many are given quick mentions. Only Chester Brown receives a detailed critical and biographical examination. Still, these are minor quibbles. Bell’s book is passionate, informative and long overdue. Hopefully, it will kick start more detailed writings about some of Canada’s unsung contemporary comic artists.

Chris Robinson interviewed John Bell via email to discuss his book and the problems facing Canadian comic artists.

When did you first get interested in Canadian comic history and why?

- I started my research on Canadian comics about thirty years ago. At that time, I had read quite a bit about the history of American comics and realized that our own comic-art tradition had been ignored — like much of our popular culture.

You talk a lot about the early attempts to make distinctly Canadian superheroes, but it seems to me that it’s not really in the Canadian tradition to create such a world.

- That’s true. I think that Canadians are too sceptical about power — and perhaps even heroism — to fully embrace indigenous superheroes. Although Canadians have played — and continue to play — an important role in the superhero field, it remains in many ways an American genre.

Is it too late for us to create a superhero? Isn’t it time we just say forget it and embrace Seth, Dave Sim and their ilk?

- The superhero genre has certainly faltered at times, but it will persist. It was once aimed at twelve-year-old boys. It now seems to be produced for twenty-two-year-olds. Perhaps this is progress.

Should we just accept that ‘artistic’ comics has and will, like poetry or artistic animation, always have a relatively small, cult audience? Is that really such a bad thing?

This is an interesting point. Comics are no longer a mass medium and must thus find a new audience. However, as Drawn and Quarterly has demonstrated, that audience will likely be found by packaging and presenting comics in a new way and in new venues. The resulting audience will likely be somewhat smaller — but hopefully bigger than that for Canadian poetry (and I say this as a former editor of Arc)!

Few people realize that there’s a long history of animation in Ottawa, can the same be said of comics?

- Dave started working at a very young age with an Ottawa small-press comics creator and publisher named Barry Blair. Blair was later involved with an Ottawa-based alternative-comics company called Aircel. Among the other notable creators who have been associated with the city over the years are Stanley Berneche, Pat McEown, Dale Keown, Denis Beauvais, Ron Sutton, Stuart Immonen, Greg Kerr, Tom Fowler, and Troy Little.

Why don’t you give other artists the same detailed exploration that you give Chester Brown.

In addition to a general survey of Canadian comics history, I thought it would be useful to provide two in-depth studies; one focussed on a theme within our comics tradition, the other on a single creator. Admittedly, choosing one creator was very difficult; however, I decided to focus on Chester because the trajectory of his career encompasses most aspects of the post-1975 revolution in Canadian comics. I also very much admired his dedication to his art and his fearlessness.

Comics have it seems almost swung too far to the adult/mature audience leaving almost nothing for kids anymore.

-For someone who grew up during the fifties and early sixties, when comics were omnipresent, it is shocking to see how few titles are now aimed at kids. This has to have a negative impact on the audience for comics. It’s probably not a fatal mistake, but it is a signficant oversight.

Okay, geek question, who would win a battle of Canadian superheroes?

- Nelvana would trounce all the guys. No question.

Another Ottawa Citizen piece.

K.C and the Sunshine Band closing the Blues Festival!?

It actually makes sense, sort of.

“We were a rhythm and blues/pop band,” says Harry Casey (the “K.C.” of the Sunshine Band) about the roots of a band that was as big (the first band since the Beatles to score four #1 hits - Shake Your Booty, Boogie Shoes, Get Down Tonight, That’s the Way (I like it) - in one year) as you could get in the mid-1970s.

Fortunately – or unfortunately – K.C. and the Sunshine Band got swept into the disco wave that began in the mid-seventies. “There was a little resentment when it first started happening,” says Casey, “because we were really pre-disco. It was our sound that became what disco is today. I thought that when they renamed it they had once again slighted r&b as being something so popular. Even today they call it hip hop, but they won’t give r&b its due.”

But perhaps it’s disco that hasn’t received proper credit. Since the term was first used around 1973 (when it referred to music that was made for discotheques), disco has been slammed and ridiculed as a lame period in music history. For many, the term disco conjures memories of John Travolta strutting on the dance floor in his white suit and button down shirt from the film, Saturday Night Fever, or the shrill voices of the Bee Gees, or, worse still, Rick Dees’ novelty hit, Disco Duck. With its unsightly fashions, cheesy strobe lights, mirrored walls, and exclusive clubs, disco was viewed as a reflection of a crass new conservative and Narcissistic generation.

“Nonsense,” says Will Straw, Professor of Communications at McGill University. “Disco was, in a sense, what happens when city dwellers (blacks, Hispanics, gays) produce a culture which also appeals to white city dwellers, both middle class and working class (e.g., Saturday Night Fever.)”

If anything, disco and 1970s dance culture was an extension, not a rejection of the social movements of the 1960s. It was almost as though the new generation was saying, “look, enough talking, enough protests, let’s just shut up and dance.”

“To me the seventies was a celebration of what everybody picketed for in the 50s and 60s,” says Casey, “for peace, love, harmony etc… the seventies was a celebration of it all finally happening.”

“The late 1960s was all about the so-called rainbow alliance, where all of these groups could be more powerful if they came together and supported each other’s causes,” says Tim Lawrence, author of the acclaimed book, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979.

“By the early 1970s,” Lawrence continues, “these radical movements were largely in retreat, and my own sense is that the trajectory of these movements carried on, but in other forms. One of the most important of these was the dance floor, an underground and protected space where people could get on with their thing — express themselves — in relative privacy.”

In a sense, disco and dance culture did what rock, rallies, and protests couldn’t achieve. On that dance floor, race, class and sexual orientation vanished.

By the late 1970s, disco had become so popular that it became, as all things commercial invariably do, the target of ridicule and hostility. A Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl initiated the most infamous anti-disco stance. When the former rock station announced it was becoming a disco station, the Detroit DJ was livid and decided to do something about it. In 1979, Dahl asked listeners to bring their disco records to Chicago’s Comiskey Park (home of the Chicago White Sox) so that he could blow them up and end disco forever. As Dahl lead a chant of “disco sucks”, fans stormed the field and set fire to thousands of disco records. The event did not alone kill disco, but it certainly triggered its death knell.

Disco certainly wasn’t the first commercial craze to hit society, so why was there so much venom and hostility directed towards this seemingly utopian sub-culture? “In part,” says Lawrence, “the backlash was homophobic and racist and sexist — it was about white straight men who normally enjoyed occupying the centre stage of culture and politics feeling that they had been marginalized by a popular culture that was most obviously enjoyed by gay men, African Americans and women — so they wanted to seize back the centre ground.”

But it wasn’t just disco haters who turned on the genre. “DJ and dance aficionados also turned against disco,” adds Lawrence, “because the genre was “exploited” in the aftermath of Saturday Night Fever, when the major record companies jumped on the bandwagon and thought that anything they put out with a four-on-the-floor bass drum would sell records. A lot of it was simply awful music and it didn’t sell.”

These events played out during a testy time in the U.S. which was undergoing a economic recession. Disco provided people with easy outlet for deeper frustrations and fears. Before the decade was done, disco – and with K.C. and The Sunshine Band- put away its dancing shoes.

Disco became big again in the 1990s when a wave of 1970s nostalgia emerged. Casey, who had retired in the mid-1980s, came back just in time. Today, K.C. and the Sunshine Band are a popular touring group, but will anyone admit being a fan? Despite the passing years, disco seems toexist, like candy, as a guilty pleasure. Those who admit to getting down on occasion to “Boogie Man” (and I’m one of them) or “Stayin’ Alive” do so with the wink of an eye. On a cerebral level, we’re aware of how cheesy the lyrics are and how goofy the dance moves were, yet on a purely sensual level, we can’t help but shake some booty to the music. It just feels too damn good.

“Music in the present divided us,” says Straw. “Music from the past becomes everyone’s property, even if we hated it at the time. The surest way to get people dancing at a wedding is to play a popular 1970s disco song. So it’s mostly about how music ages, I think, overcoming polemics and taste war and becoming shared heritage. Disco is easily revivable now because it’s lost the faceless anonymity for which it was criticized in the 1970s.

For Harry Casey, the answer is simpler: “It was great music. You can’t deny it. The music picks you up and makes you feel good.”

Never imagined I’d give this much energy to a show I loathed. Money talks. Originally written for The Ottawa Citizen
If cocaine was the drug of the 1980s, Miami Vice was its TV equivalent. Everywhere you turned in the mid-eighties there it was. Guys with pastel coloured clothes, loafers, sunglasses, and carefully coifed hair. If the high school preps weren’t blasting Jan Hammer’s synth-driven Miami Vice anthems, they were playing pop music from the show. There wasn’t a hit song of the time that wasn’t featured on the show (Phil Collins can thank the show for much of his 1980s fame). Even the two stars, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas – ala William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy- recorded their own awful records. Miami Vice worship was so intense that my mother even named one of her cats, “Tubbs”.

I didn’t get it then. I don’t fully get it now. Today, removed from it’s original context, Miami Vice comes across as a fusion of the campy Pamela Anderson show, V.I.P and the stylish pretensions of C.S.I. Regardless, there is no denying that Miami Vice was a TV revolution in its time. No TV show before or since has had such an intense and wide spread cultural impact. Fusing MTV, fashion, and Film Noir, Miami Vice turned the tired cop show genre on its rump. Along the way, the show influenced the sounds and fashions of the eighties and made Miami – previously considered a haven for geriatrics – one of the coolest cities in the world.

It started with two words: “MTV Cops”. The author was then NBC President, Brandon Tartikoff. MTV had begun broadcasting in 1981 and had become a massive success with young audiences. Tartikoff wanted to figure out how he could bring the MTV style to network television so that he could attract younger viewers with money to spend. He took his piece of paper to a former Hill Street Blues writer/producer, Anthony Yerkovich. Yerkovich, as fate would have it, was working on a movie idea about a pair of Miami Vice cops. Yerkovich (who supervised the first five episodes after the pilot, then left to develop film projects for Universal) was had long been fascinated with Miami. “Even when I was on Hill Street Blues, I was collecting information on Miami,” he told Time Magazine in 1985. “I thought of it as sort of a modern-day American Casablanca. It seemed to be an interesting socioeconomic tidepool: the incredible number of refugees from Central America and Cuba, the already extensive Cuban-American community, and on top of all that the drug trade. There is a fascinating amount of service industries that revolve around the drug trade–money laundering, bail bondsmen, attorneys who service drug smugglers. Miami has become a sort of Barbary Coast of free enterprise gone berserk.” Tartikoff liked the idea and gave it a go.

The TV cop show had traditionally been for an older adult audience. Their protagonists looked, well, they looked like regular cops. They were middle aged, not particularly attractive and didn’t really care about their clothing. Miami Vice changed that. Miami Vice cops would be young, good looking and well dressed. Sonny “James” Crockett (Don Johnson) is an ex-college football star who lives on a boat with his pet alligator, Elvis, drives a Ferrari and wears pastel coloured linen shirts, t-shirts, loafers. Ex-New York cop Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) is more stylish, wearing Armani suits (Typically, the duo wore at least different Ricci, Versace and Boss suits in each episode—always in shades of the show’s approved colours like fuschia, pink, green and peach.) Their clothes and lifestyle immediately stood out. How could low paying cops afford expensive clothes and cars? Well, Crockett and Tubbs weren’t normal cops. As undercover agents, the producers realized that the duo could legally use confiscated material for their work. Besides, if the duo were to play convincing underground drug runners, they had to look the part.

But it wasn’t just the clothes that made the show, there was also something different about the sound and look of the show. With it’s use of pop music of the time along with flashy Film Noir inspired cinematography, Miami Vice looked and sounded like it was a movie. The series was shot on location to give the show an added sense of realism and the music was prominent that it became another character. Inspired by MTV videos – which relied on gestures, looks and music to tell a story – music became another way of conveying the story to the viewer quickly and without words. In the pilot episode –and for many, the most defining image of the series – Crockett and Tubbs drive through the dark and slick city streets of Miami as Phil Collin’s In the Air Tonight plays over the scene. Crockett is exhausted and on the brink of collapse. He’s dealing with a failing marriage, an unhealthly lifestyle, and he has just learned that one of cop friends is leaking information to the bad guys. Using Collin’s sombre song, the stillness of the Miami night, and the dazzling clash between the city street lights and the smooth black chrome of the Ferrari, the producers convey Crockett’s emotions without using a single word.

Miami Vice used both original music and popular songs of the day (which was uncommon on TV because of the high price of buying the music rights). Jan Hammer, a Czech-born composer, who made the music in his home in upstate New York, created the show’s memorable synthesizer drenched score. Accompanying Hammer’s scores were a variety of pop hits that were in regular rotation on MTV. Songs by Tina Turner, U2, Roger Daltrey, Glenn Frey (who also appeared in a number of episodes), Frankie Goes To Hollywood all appeared as musical interludes on Miami Vice. Once the show became popular, musicians were lining up to get heard on the show (Eventually, a Miami Vice soundtrack was released on record. It was an instant best seller - unlike the dreadful recordings by Johnson and Michael Thomas).

Another innovative and influential aspect of the show was it’s multiracial cast. Tubbs and Crockett were the first black and white cop team since The Mod Squad and I Spy. Accompanying them was a cast of Latino cops and villains that reflected Miami’s multiracial population. What made the casting even more modern was that they didn’t stereotype Latinos as the bad guys. In fact, many of the crooks were white guys and Crockett and Tubb’s grim and mysterious boss (played by Edward James Olmos) was Latin American. This was a far cry from the very white world of Adam 12, Dragnet, Streets of San Francisco and most cop shows.
Image didn’t tell the whole story. Underneath this neon pastel glam was a dirty, unsavoury world where druglords ruled and cops routinely sacrificed their lives for lousy pay. In fact, contrary to its MTV inspiration, the Miami police department is a pretty barren and ugly place. The male cops look old and tired in their casual beach shirts and the female cops walk around in hooker costumes. In most cop shows, the lines between good and evil were clearly drawn: cops were good and criminals were bad. It was a black and white world where every crime was solved, every criminal punished. Crockett and Tubbs were different. They weren’t great cops and they didn’t always get their man. Often, they allowed personal emotions to get in the way of their work. It was sometimes difficult to tell if they were chasing a criminal because it was their job or because they wanted retribution (e.g. in the Pilot episode, Tubbs wants to kill the drug lord who murdered his brother). The lines between good and evil often blurred. It was hard to tell who was good and who was bad. Crockett’s wife even tells him in the pilot episode that he’s just the flip side of the same coin and that’s he more interested in the action and style than with good and evil. It would be a common theme throughout the series. In many episodes, cops turn out to be bad guys. In one episode, Crockett suffers amnesia and turns to a life of crime. This was virtually unheard of for a TV Cop show and it certainly inspired later shows like NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire.

When Miami Vice debuted in 1984 it was not an instant hit. It didn’t help that NBC put the show on Friday evenings against Falcon Crest, a popular CBS soap opera. Very quickly, though, people caught on to the show’s glamourous style, explosive action and charismatic leading men. By the summer of 1985, Miami Vice reruns were finishing in the Nielson Top Ten and it was becoming a ‘must see’ show. Before the end of the first season, Miami Vice supplanted Hill Street Blues as the top cop show on television and earned an astounding 15 Emmy nominations.

Miami Vice then exploded off the screen and into the streets. Kenneth Cole introduced “Crocket” and “Tubbs” show. Macy’s opened a Miami Vice section in their young men’s department. “The show has taken Italian men’s fashion and spread it to mass America,” Kal Ruttenstein, a senior vice president of Bloomingdale’s told Time Magazine in 1985. “Sales of unconstructed blazers, shiny fabric jackets and lighter colors have gone up noticeably.” TV Cops had never looked better.

The rest is television history, but as an old pre-Greek philosopher once said, “the way up is the way down.” Given its enormous cultural impact, Miami Vice’s fall came almost as quickly as it rise. Critics complained that the show was all style and no substance. Even one of show’s directors, Lee Katzin, admitted “the show is written for an MTV audience, which is more interested in images, emotions and energy than plot and character and words.” St. Elsewhere producer, Bruce Paltrow (father of Gweneth) was more blunt. “It’s hip and glib, but not very deep.” In 1989, the pink neon sign was pulled and Miami Vice was off to TV heaven.

Twenty-years later, Miami Vice doesn’t hold up too well. In one sense, the show was so influential that much of what it pioneered feels so commonplace and cliché today. The show also relied so heavily on music and fashions of its time that –unlike unfashionable shows like my personal fave, Columbo – it looks dated and tacky. Still, Paltrow was pretty much spot on in his criticism of the show. Despite it’s air and pretensions, Miami Vice is not a deep show. It wants to be in some ways (the moral ambiguity of its characters), but rarely is their any depth to justify the emotions the characters are feeling. In the first season, for example, Tubbs falls hard for the daughter of the drug lord (Calderone) who killed his brother. But there is nothing in the episode—aside from some glossy MTV love scene – that justifies this intense love affair. In the end, Crockett and Tubbs are simply not believable as undercover cops. How are they able to keep going undercover in the same city again and again? How is that the drug guys don’t recognize these two mavericks of style? And if they’re undercover, why are they hanging out at the police station (I asked my ex-undercover cop uncle and he confirmed that an uncover cop wouldn’t be hanging around the station. In fact, most cops wouldn’t even know who is or isn’t undercover.). In the end, Miami Vice was nothing more than a cool looking poser feigning a world weary cynicism and moral ambiguity that it didn’t fully experience, earn, or even understand.

Critiques aside, Miami Vice’s cultural impact cannot be denied. The show breathed fresh air into a dead Television genre by moving away from the simplistic preachiness of cop shows towards the more shadowy and contradictory world of Film Noir, and also spawned a new breed of hollow buddy/action films (from Bad Boys and Rush Hour to, ironically, the new Miami Vice feature). While the show’s dark tones were inflated and superficial (much like C.S.I. today), it’s willingness to explore darker themes did open the door for more complex cop shows like Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, and The Wire. For that alone, I’m almost willing to forgive Miami Vice for littering my late teens with Jan Hammer, pink shirts, loafers and a housecat named “Tubbs”.

Almost.

Originally conceived this for Chunklet Magazine, but finally ran in The Ottawa Citizen in 2006. Neglected to plug Jack Benny and Phil Silvers, two of the pioneers of TV asswipes.

Let’s call them, err, ‘AH,’ and follow
Chris Robinson as he charts their rise on
the small screen,
and reveals what it says
about each of us

When Nate Fisher bit the dust on the final season of Six Feet Under, the
reactions were astonishing in their venom. Many Six Feet Under faithful
(mostly female) were delighted that the “a–hole” had got what he deserved.
Sure, Nate had his dark moments: he cheated on his pregnant wife with his
sort-of stepsister. But otherwise he was a normal guy. He had good and bad
days, and that’s precisely what made Six Feet Under a powerful, poignant and
honest show.
It’s also something that HBO, more than any network, has done best. On shows
like Six Feet Under, The Wire, and in particular Deadwood and The Sopranos,
we’ve been introduced to characters who are not your typical TV cardboard
cutouts. Characters like Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen are so complex and
unpredictable that our allegiances constantly shift. One minute we loathe
them, the next we empathize.
Even after all these years of television, we’re not quite sure how to react
to the AH.

Archie Bunker
and The rise of the asshole

Television has always had its share of AHs. Among the pioneers are Jackie
Gleason (The Honeymooners), Archie Bunker (All in the Family), Basil Fawlty
(Fawlty Towers), and George Jefferson (The Jeffersons). Add Fred Flinstone
to the list: AHs can be animated.
With the exception of Bunker, the men were playful caricatures mocking the
myopic dimwit within us all. Their actions were tempered by supporting
characters (usually their patient and forgiving wives), who provided a more
agrarian perspective.
Archie was the most profound.
See TV on Page F2

Continued from Page B1
Through his bigoted and misogynistic behaviour, the show’s creators offered a
reflection of white American working class men, who having grown up in the
prosperous and orderly 1950s now found themselves in a world they could no
longer comprehend. Women wanted to work. Blacks wanted equality. Children
questioned their parents.
The voice of this new generation was provided by Archie’s daughter, Gloria
and her hippie liberal husband, Mike (more famously, “Meathead”). In almost
every episode, Meathead and Archie clashed over race, class or gender.
Through these dueling characters, All in the Family captured the growing
complexities and disappointment of post-1960s America.
With the exception of a handful of AHs, including the entire Ewing family
(Dallas) and Family Ties’ Alex P. Keaton - the inverted offspring of Bunker
- television of the Reagan era was primarily littered with saccharine fare
like Alf, Facts of Life, The Cosby Show and Who’s The Boss?
That changed by the end of the decade with a new, animated sitcom about a
dysfunctional family, The Simpsons.
TV comedy in the’90s -
Seinfeld, The Simpsons
Homer Simpson was a return of sorts to Bunker, a loud, opinionated lout with
little care for the thoughts and feelings of others.
Unlike Bunker, Homer is the modern emptyman; a man of little education,
ambition or beliefs, and blissfully ignorant. What little he does know comes
to him through television. As much as his intellectual daughter, Lisa, tries
to challenge him to “wake up,” Homer dwells in Plato’s cave, seeing only the
shadows of things, not the things themselves.
While many episodes end with Homer coming to a new realization about himself,
his family or the world, his awareness is short lived. By the next episode
he’s forgotten everything, and back to his immature and facile ways.
Seinfeld (1990) was the first sitcom with an entire cast of AHs. Jerry,
Elaine, George, Kramer and most of the secondary characters (Newman,
Peterman, Puddy etc. ) were selfish, petty and occasionally nasty people
with little concern for others.
Of the numerous examples, the two most infamous were when the gang reacted
ambiguously to the death of George’s fiancé, Susan. George had a difficult
time hiding his relief that her untimely death - she was poisoned by licking
cheap envelopes that the miserly George insisted on buying for their
wedding invitations - saved him from marriage. Then, in the series’ finale,
Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George were sentenced to a year in prison for
standing by idly while a man was being robbed.
In many ways, Seinfeld was an extension of Family Ties and The Simpsons in
that it was a portrait of a solipsistic generation. And like those shows,
Seinfeld excavated unsavory characteristics that existed within all of us
and took them to extremes.
Seinfeld’s co-creator, Larry David, took things up a notch with his follow up
series, Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000). The show’s premise was simple. It
followed a day in the life of Larry David, the wealthy co-creator of
Seinfeld. Naturally, there was more. Larry, the inspiration for Seinfeld’s
George, routinely gets into petty arguments and fights with friends, family,
colleagues and strangers because of his often insensitive and brutally
frank opinions. Larry David is the AH within us all - or at least some of
us.
If Bunker was a poster boy of post-’60s intolerance, Homer , David and the
Seinfeld gang - not to forget other misanthropic comic masterpieces like The
Larry Sanders Show and British import I’m Alan Partridge - became a release
valve from the stifling effects of late 20th century political correctness.
Through these characters, our most brutally honest thoughts and feelings
were brought to the surface. The characters said the things we would never
dare to speak.
“That’s the guy that I wish I was,” said David in January when asked if he
was like his character. “I love that guy. This is the guy (pointing at
himself) I can’t stand. But … I can’t get enough of that guy. That guy
does things I wish I could do. He behaves the way I want to behave.”
We tolerate and even admire these AHs because they are harmless. They are
taken to extremes that would not be tolerated in the real world. The people
who, for example, humour and feed David’s misanthropic neuroses in Curb Your
Enthusiasm would in reality ignore him, or perhaps beat the crap out of him.

Besides, every comedy needs an ass. That’s the legacy of comedy, whether it
is Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers or Stephen
Colbert. “Good is not funny,” David said in the same interview earlier this
year. “The bad thoughts are funny because they’re unexpressed. I’m letting
these thoughts that go unexpressed - that we all have, all the time - to get
out. It comes from a place inside that somebody else is expressing and that
we can relate to.”
But, what happens when the AH is no longer so funny? Case in point, the
British version of The Office.
Yes, the show is funny, but Ricky Gervais’ David Brent is so utterly
unbearable, pathetic - and, worst of all, real - that that show approaches
tragedy.
Unlike the other AHs, there is no relief from, or for, Brent. We are watching
a miserable human being who is unaware of who he is and how others perceive
him. Brent is a man without an identity. Every gesture, thought, or word is
pinched from some facile fragment of pop culture.
Unlike a similar character like Homer, Brent evokes pain in the viewer
because we not only know people who are like him, but his actions are so
familiar that we find ourselves wondering if we do the same things.
The Office goes farther than any previous sitcom by revealing a side of
ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge.
THE NEW AH
Although there have been AHs in earlier TV dramas (e.g., NYPD Blue’s Andy
Sipowicz, Homicide’s Frank Pembleton), HBO was the first network to give
viewers a new form of the AH, a multifaceted and inconsistent creature who,
depending on his mood, attracts equal amounts of disdain and empathy.
The most notable examples are Nate Fisher (Six Feet Under), Jimmy McNulty
(The Wire), and in particular, Tony Soprano (The Sopranos) and Al Swearengen
(Deadwood). Another strong example is Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), on the
20th Century Fox series The Shield.
The mob boss Soprano is haunted by the past, a man who wants desperately to
believe in old-world values like loyalty and family even as they crumble
around him. He expects others to live up to values that he himself is unable
to uphold. Even as Soprano begins to understand his life better through his
psychiatrist, he reveals how difficult it is to simply toss off the shackles
of habit and rhythm. As such, he often contradicts himself or undermines
the very lessons he appears to learn in his psychiatric sessions. A recent
example came when Tony told his son A.J. that family is the only thing he
count on - only to be shot by his own uncle, to whom Tony had remained
fiercely loyal despite the warnings of most others. Beyond the mob boss
exterior lies a simple, conflicted man.
Deadwood’s Al Swearengen is even more beguiling a creation. When Deadwood
began our stand-in was Seth Bullock, the Etobicoke-born ex-sheriff headed to
the new frontier town of Deadwood to open a hardware store. Initially, the
lines between good and evil are clear. Seth is a stern, upstanding, somewhat
self-righteous hero. The villain is Al Swearengen, the proprietor of the Gem
Saloon and unofficial dictator of the town. Swearengen is a despicable,
ruthless and foul-mouthed creature. He’s also responsible for the slaughter
of an innocent family of settlers.
However, we soon discover inconsistencies in the men. In one episode Bullock
is ambushed by an Indian, whom he overwhelms and viciously beats to death.
Bullock, we realize, is a complex man with a great capacity for brutality and
intolerance. He finds that his notions of good and bad are seriously
challenged by the realities of the frontier. Throughout the series, Bullock
struggles between doing what is good and what is necessary to survive.
Our view of Swearengen takes a similar detour near the end of season one. We
get quick glimpses into his tortured soul when Reverend Smith, who suffers
from a brain tumour, is rapidly deteriorating. In one poignant scene,
Swearengen watches the reverend stumble down the street madly preaching
aloud to animals. Swearengen is clearly pained by Smith’s condition.
In the same episode, Swearengen discovers that Trixie, one of his
prostitutes, has been intimate with Seth’s partner, Sol Starr. Swearengen,
angered by Trixie’s apparent betrayal, confronts Sol and demands he pay for
Trixie’s services. “I’m not paying you,” Starr says. “It wasn’t to do with
you, it wasn’t business.”
Swearengen’s reply is the first of many tortured soliloquies that give us
insight into the complexity of his character: “Don’t you think I don’t
understand. I mean, what can anyone of us ever really f–kin’ hope for, huh?
Except for a moment here and there with a person who doesn’t want to rob,
steal or murder us? … Everybody needs that. Becomes precious to ‘em.”
Led by The Sopranos, Deadwood and Six Feet Under, we see television maturing
and moving away from outmoded ideas of good and bad towards characters and
situations that are not readily definable. What makes the hostile reactions
towards a character like Nate Fisher both surprising and refreshing is that
such shows give viewers the freedom to make their own judgments about the
characters.
It’s through this process that, whatever our opinion, we realize these
morally ambiguous characters can no longer simply be called assholes. They
are far more complex creatures called human beings. And, ideally, through
this attempt to understand Nate Fisher, Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen, Larry
David,or David Brent, we become a bit more enlightened about ourselves.

Jack Benny Show cast

Cast of the Jack Benny Show. From L-R (cast names): Rochester Van Jones, Dennis Day, Phil Harris, Mary Livingston, Jack Benny, Don Wilson, Mel Blanc

Seinfeld_051205113923469_wideweb__300×375.jpg

Seinfeld cast: George, Kramer, Elaine, Jerry

I was going to post an old piece called The Evolution of the TV asshole. While I was writing the intro and acknowledging that I’d neglected a few people, most notably Jack Benny, I started to get obsessive about the common traits between The Jack Benny Show (which ran on radio from about 1933-1955 and then had a successful run on TV from about 1950 to the mid-1960s) and Seinfeld.
Like Jerry Seinfeld, Jack Benny played himself (or a variation of himself). He was Jack Benny, radio (and movie, if you asked him) star. He was cheap, petty and narcissistic (While Jerry was a neat freak and even went to extremes to lower his pant size with a marker..Benny was infamous for being the stingiest man alive and for never revealing his real age. Every year, he remained 39).

The show took place in a variety of settings. Sometimes it was on stage during the production of their radio show…or it was backstage, or at the local diner. They also often met at Jack’s home for parties and rehearsals.

Jack’s regular cast:

He had his Elaine in Mary (Mary Livingston– Benny’s real life wife)who played an uncertain role on the show. She wasn’t Jack’s girlfriend yet they dated and flirted and she often talked about other men.

Phil Harris, the drunk, horny, illiterate (really..his illiteracy was a regular joke) orchestra leader was sort of the Kramer of the show.

Dennis Day, the show’s singer, played a dimwit of a man-boy who lived with an overbearing mom. He was a constant thorn in Benny’s side. Although he and Jack were by no means friends, Day did have a lot of George (ie. idiot, loser) qualities.

Rochester, Benny’s personal assistant, was a cross between Newman and George. Although Benny was his boss, Rochester never shied away from taking on his boss and repeatedly chastising him for being cheap.

Don Wilson was the show’s host. He was sort of like the anchor or straightman (although it can be argued that Benny was actually the straight man. He was a generous comedian who often let his cast get the big laughs at his expense). Wilson was a constant target because of his weight, but perhaps his most notable contributions (aside from his often hyperbolic, sarcastic Benny intros to start the show) were his often clever ways of working plugs for the show’s sponsors into the show. In this sense, the show does anticipate Seinfeld where products were sometimes worked into the storyline (notably the Junior Mints episode).

Supporting Cast

Most of us know all about the remarkable supporting cast on Seinfeld. Through it’s 9 year run, many bit/supporting characters stole the show (Soup Nazi, Kenny Banion, Micky, The Costanzas, J Peterman, Newman etc…..). The Jack Benny show also had a steady stream of outstanding supporting characters who often got more laughs than the star.

Mel Blanc- The famous Warner Bros. cartoon voice actor was on Benny’s show for years doing a variety of bit parts and sound effects. His most notable characters included Benny’s tortured violin teacher, Professor Leblanc, the suicidal department store clerk who is haunted by Benny every xmas, Benny’s parrot, and he was the ‘voice’ of Benny’s beat up old car.

There was the loony old Mr Kitzell, Dennis Day’s bully mother who repeatedly abused Benny, poor Ed guarded Benny’s vault which was located miles beneath his house. Ed had not left his post since at least the U.S. civil war., real life comedian Fred Allen had a long standing fake feud with Benny. Benny even devoted an entire episode to mocking Allen’s show. There was Mabel and Gladys, the incompetent, gossipy Telephone operators who dated Benny a few times. Tough guy actor Sheldon Kearns had a recurring role as the hilarious ‘racetrack tout’. The character would pop out of nowhere and hassle Benny in a menacing, tough guy whisper: “Psst… hey bud.. watcha doin?” He’d then offer Benny advice on everything but horses (eg. in one bit he told Benny what candy to get from the snack machine). There were also many celebrities who appeared. The most famous was Oscar winning actor Ronald Colman who had the misfortune of living next door to Benny.
Probably the most famous bit player was Frank Nelson who played the infamous “Yeeeeeeessssssss” man (The Simpsons’ played a few homages to Nelson over the years). Nelson was in some ways, the Newman of Benny’s existence. Whether he was a waiter, train ticket seller, department store clerk, he existed to make Benny’s life miserable. He was constantly rude and sarcastic to Benny. Their heated interactions often made for some of the show’s best comedy. The show even had recurring characters who were–with a few exceptions– unseen and unheard. The most famous was Frank Remley, the guitarist in Phil Harris’ band. Remley was always late, he dressed poorly, drank a lot, chased skirts, and often ended up in jail. In fact, the entire band were routinely mocked as being half-assed musicians and drunken, criminal misfits.

It would be naive to suggest that Seinfeld is a direct descendant of the Jack Benny show (we can’t overlook the influence of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s own experiences along with other old comedy shows like Sgt Bilko and Abbott and Costello–which were directly mentioned in one Seinfeld episode. In fact, the conversations between George and Jerry were often like the absurd and abusive exchanges between Abbott and Costello), but there’s no doubt that the Jack Benny show, with it’s steady diet of cynical put-down comedy, self-reflexivity (the Benny show performed live and they became famous for making light of their flubs), dysfunctional characters, and a humour that often quietly traipsed the border of the risque, was a major influence on not only Seinfeld but - for better and worse - on many modern sitcoms.

* as a bit of postscript, if anyone knows the clever kid’s TV program, Jack’s Big Music Show, the show is littered with Jack Benny references. The main characters are called Jack, Mary and Mel. They had a southerner named Phil on once (Phil Harris came from the south) and there is the regular appearance of the Swartzman Quartet, barbershop-style singers directly based on the Sportsmen Quartet who regularly appeared on the Benny show.

There are hundreds of Jack Benny’s radio shows online that you can download and You Tube has some nifty archival film footage of the gang performing in the 1940s.

Gee, now that I’m in TV geek mode, maybe I’ll sit down and write my Columbo-Socrates piece.

This musing on fraudulent James Frey was my first piece for The Ottawa Citizen and Arts honcho, Peter Simpson. February 2006, I think.

Since the summer of 2005, a few friends have suggested that I should read James Frey’s A Million Little PIeces. I had a semi-memoir called Stole This From A Hockey Card published in 2005 that dealt with addiction and identity. Being an addict, my friends naturally felt that Frey’s book was perfect for me. I had no interest. I’d lived my own battle and spent the last few years confronting it through writing. I didn’t need to read about it any more.

Then, in early January, Frey’s book was brought to my attention again. This time it was being reported that the guy might have made up a big chunk of the book. My first reaction was “so what?” all memory is by nature fiction. There are parts in my own memoir that might be untrue to my mother or stepfather (who are minor characters in the book). At times I even ask myself in the book if the things I’ve experienced are genuine or have they become unconsciously confused and distorted over the years. I write about my memory of watching some hockey games in the early 1970s as a kid, but then wonder if I really did watch them at that time or if they entered my memory through television replays I saw in later years. Besides, not to get too philosophical, but what is truth anyway? Plato, for one, believed that those who relied on their senses instead of their intellect were living in caves. These people see only the shadows of things (opinion), not the things themselves (knowledge). I prefer to think of truth has been a bit more murky and subjective. My truth, for example, might not necessarily be your truth.

For example, in Nick Tosches’ brilliant biography of Dean Martin called Dino, there are many segments that involve Tosches’ writing about Martin’s inner thoughts. Obviously, Tosches couldn’t have known what Martin was thinking. It doesn’t matter. Those poetic moments conveyed more about the essence or truth about Dean Martin than any amount of facts. And what about the scores of writers who have oh-so-thinly disguised their own lives behind the mantle of fiction? The list is endless: Marcel Proust, Jack Kerouac, Richard Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, Philip Roth etc… Would Kerouac’s Big Sur or Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, for example, be any better or worse if the reader knew that they were reading fact, not fiction? At the end of the day, I felt, Frey wrote a book about recovery. Clearly the book inspired many readers. Maybe a few of them sought help for their addictions. So, what’s the big deal if Frey embellished an arrest or sixteen?

In short, I didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Then came Oprah.

When it came out that Frey not only fabricated a number of parts of the book, but that there appeared to be no good reason for doing so – other than to make the author seem like a real tough, big balls, bad ass – then I started to get annoyed. It was also revealed that Frey had actually initially submitted the manuscript for A Million Little Pieces as fiction – only to have it rejected approximately seventeen times. This was now more than a simple case of poetic license or unconscious error. Frey very consciously made-up parts of this book for no reason other than to paint himself in a more heroic fashion.

That’s when I got angry. Here I am writing books that put my “stuff” on the line as I seek some semblance of truth about myself and my life while this schmuck makes a mockery of it all. Frey’s notion of truth appears to be that which makes him more likeable and wealthy. Wait, there’s something familiar about that… someone who says something that they don’t necessarily prescribe to, but stand behind because they think other people will buy into it: politicians, speech writers, advertisers, celebrity endorsements, exercise and diet gurus (e.g. Weight lost/exercise peddler Suzanne Somers had liposuction). Let’s not overlook so-called “reality” TV shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race. They are so heavily dramatized and manipulated that fake “reality” shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office come off as far more factual and honest.

Why no outrage over these on-going equivocations? Must we rely solely on Oprah to show us what is truth?

I’m now reading the book. Naturally, it’s difficult to read it objectively. I’m constantly questioning every part.
And this leads to maybe the biggest truth about honesty and addiction. For years, people were cautioning me about my drinking, but I didn’t really listen and it wasn’t until I finally confronted myself that I stopped drinking. Maybe it’s the same case here. Should it matter to me, you, Oprah, or the readers if Frey is lying? Should any of us be relying so heavily on one voice to find our truth? In the end, as with life, you encounter and sample different experiences and voices and at the end of the day you decide what suits your life best. You find your own truth.

-

Meantime, Frey carries on. Despite appearing rather daft on Oprah and Larry King (you’d think that Frey could hire a media assistant to help him lie with more credibility), his book sales (which Oprah likely sees a percentage of) continue to climb. Could Frey’s next project be a memoir about writing a fake memoir? Better still, he could write a fake memoir about writing a fake memoir.

In the end, I guess I’m the schmuck. Instead of writing honest and un-heroic tales of dysfunction and addiction so that I could try and sort out my life, I should have juiced it up a bit with more lurid and juicy tales of gunplay, drunken fistfights, sex abuse, suicide attempts, and root canals. Might not have been my truth per se, but I’m certain it’s someone’s truth. In the end, it’s all works out. The reader gets an epiphany, and I get a great big bag of cash and fame. Everyone feels better.

What more is there?

-

There is a beautiful moment of irony about midway through James Frey’s book. After a former rock star visits the treatment to discuss his battles with addiction, a cynical Frey becomes angry at the musician’s apparently outlandish claims of abuse: “Were I in my normal state of mind, I would stand up, point my finger, scream Fraud, and chase this Chump Motherfucker down and give him a breathing. Were I in my normal frame of mind, after I gave him his beating, I would make him come back and apologize to everyone for wasting their precious time.”

Later on the same page, Frey writes: [T]o make light of it, brag about it, or revel in the mock glory of it is not in any way, shape or form related to its truth, and that is all that matters, the truth. That this man is standing in front me and everyone else in this room lying to us is heresy. The truth is all that matters. This is fucking heresy.”

He said it, not me.

-

We will never really know what is or isn’t true in Frey’s book. Like dealing with an addict, there’s only so much we can know about the validity of his words. Only James Frey knows his truth and, in the end, he has to live in his skin, not us.

The weather network pisses me off. No, it’s not because of their very existence. Yes, the fact that we even have a weather channel speaks volumes about the cozy state of things in North America, but then again, if we can have an all sports highlight channel, why not a channel about the wind?

And no, it’s not because getting local weather (unless you’ve got Satellite TV) is a pain in the ass because you never know when it’s on and usually you have to sit through pollen commercials, inane weather history (did you know that in 1975, a storm disrupted an outdoor market in Burnaby? Did you care?), marine forecasts, or that David Suzuki of weather, David Phillips (you know, the genial looking guy who could pass for Bob Rae’s pops). No, what gets me is the increasingly alarmist tendencies of our Weather Network.

Perhaps in need of a rating’s boost since other newscasters have jumped on ‘apocalyptic’ weather stories, the Weather Network seems to have modeled, in their modest way, the sensationalist style of CNN and FOX. When a storm is approaching, the Weather Network screen goes red. Now, it’s always done that, but it was my understanding that it used to happen only when a serious storm was approaching. These days, it seems to go red for any and all storms. Not only that, but now every storm warning comes with a small text that cautions that storms can turn into tornados! That’s like saying all humans are at risk of getting Fairbanks disease (a rare disorder that effects bone growth). In other words, it’s possible, but highly unlikely.

Do we really need an alert for every storm that passes? Seems to me that we lived with storms long before the network came along. Besides, I’m sure I’m not alone in the fact that I love a good downpour. So what if I get drenched on my bike? So be it. It’s life kids. In our neighbourhood, many of us sit out on our porches to watch and listen to the rain. It’s really a pleasant and serene experience. The kids love it too. Sure, there’s a risk of danger with a storm, but is it any greater than crossing the street, driving on a highway, or breathing?

I love knowing that a storm is coming, but if we’re going to have an advisory for every dark cloud, can’t it be more jovial” Maybe the screen can flash as dancing clouds, rain drops and wind jaunt across the screen? Perhaps they can use party horns or kazoos to make thunder and lighting noises? Oh wait, how about the opening of AC/DCs weather opus, Thunderstruck? The choices are many (perhaps we can use our interactive TV buttons to create the storm party screen of our choice?) but whatever your preferences let’s make storm advisories more celebratory and fun.

The same goes for snow days and power outages. People still talk fondly about the blackout of August 2003. Suddenly we were free from our technological shackles. The children played in the streets. Neighbours spoke to each other, had parties and barbecues. Sure, it wasn’t so fun for everyone, but I think there are many who would relish an annual blackout day when for a few hours, we step outside our insulated lives.
Seriously though, what does this alarmist nature say about our society? Are we being treated like babies? “Oh, the poor things need to be careful in the rain.” Have we become a society of wimps? What is perhaps even more telling is that we appear eager for something exciting and threatening to happen. Our lives have become so mechanized, complacent and insular that we appear desperate for any type of action or threat, something that will show us that we’re alive and have something to fight for.

But, it’s a storm. That’s it. That’s all. It’s not a reason to race out to Canadian Tire to stock up on emergency gear in preparation for the apocalypse, but it is a good reason to grab the family and neighbours and sit together outside to enjoy a communal moment.

What happened to the saying throw caution to the wind? Today, caution is the wind.

August 2007