Keeping It Real: David Gordon Green's Joe

Nicolas Cage (right) and Tye Sheridan in Joe, directed by David Gordon Green

For a guy who’s given a lot of pleasure to the world and who is in a risky, unstable profession where only John Cazale and possibly Maria Falconetti can claim to have achieved a perfect batting average, Nicolas Cage sure does take a lot of shit. When Cage was still in his twenties and sufficiently unguarded to talk about his artistic ambitions in a way that sounded nakedly arrogant, entertainment writers scored off him by calling him an ingrate who didn’t know how lucky he was to have been a part of an Oscar-winning crowd-pleaser like Moonstruck. When, after winning the Academy Award for Leaving Las Vegas, Cage recanted his expressed reservations about the mainstream and threw himself into the action-blockbuster marketplace with The Rock (in which he was very funny) and Con Air (in which he was less so), the wheel turned and it became fashionable to denounce the actor as a whore, and a hammy, eye-popping whore at that. Seriously, didn’t the world learn its lesson during that awful period when even the Bressonian purists at People magazine took to making fun of Michael Caine for his work ethic?

Cage, like Caine, clearly likes to work, and there are always too few worthwhile projects around. Just as clearly, the man has made some bad choices: say what you like about the very notion of a Ghost Rider movie, two of them are a lot. But compare Cage’s overall track record, and the jeering press he gets, to those of some other stars who the media treats reverentially, and you can see that not all bad decisions are regarded equally. Meryl Streep is supposed to be very intelligent, and after almost four decades of working in the theater and movies, she ought to have picked up on a few of the warning signs about which kind of plays transfer successfully to the multiplex and which ones don’t. Shouldn’t she have guessed how the film version of a stagebound scream-a-thon like August, Osage County was likely to turn out?

Return to Greatness: Al Pacino in Manglehorn

As the title character in David Gordon Green’s Manglehorn, a lonely, irascible locksmith in a small Texas city, Al Pacino gives a display of battered grandeur. After too many years of outsize, hammy acting, usually in movies unworthy of his gifts (including the one that finally won him an Oscar, Scent of a Woman in 1992), Pacino has lately returned, somewhat mysteriously, to the understated style, dense with turbulent, conflicted feeling, that placed him at the top of his generation in The Godfather I and II and Scarecrow. I’ve sometimes enjoyed the coarse, ranting, kinetic Pacino that replaced his early deep-dyed Method persona – certainly in Dog Day Afternoon, which he was magnificent in, and also in Sea of Love and Carlito’s Way and City Hall – and I’ve loved him on stage as Shylock (a role he’d botched earlier on screen) and O’Neill’s Hughie and Teach in American Buffalo. But his work in The Humbling and now in Manglehorn has a mournfulness and contemplativeness that take us back to Michael Corleone but have deepened with age and are responsive in new ways (ironic humor in The Humbling, solitariness and haunted nostalgia and sudden, unpredictable bursts of anger) to the unremitting presence of adversity. Though their styles are widely different, what Pacino pulls off in these pictures reminds me of Burt Lancaster’s accomplishments in his late sixties, in movies like Atlantic City and Cattle Annie and Little Britches. (Pacino turned seventy-five this year.)

Genius: James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour

Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg in The End of the Tour.

It's only the end of August and it's already been a terrific year for movies. They've arrived from all corners of the globe and each with very distinct sensibilities that set them apart from the demands of the marketplace towards being generic. Besides the quirky enchantment of Paddington, there was Olivier Assayas' sumptuously satisfying Clouds of Sils Maria, the sublime sweet sadness of the Brian Wilson bio pic Love & Mercy, Carlos Marques-Marcet's erotically charged 10,000 km, Alex Gibney's fearless scrutiny in Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and his nuanced consideration of Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, the conventions of the western being freshly reexamined in Slow West, and the new rendering of an old theme in Ex Machina. There was the resurrection of director David Gordon Green (George Washington) returning from the wilderness of mediocrity (Pineapple Express) with Manglehorn where Al Pacino equals the bold work he did last year in the largely ignored The Humbling (which was the movie that Birdman pretended to be). If someone was trying to pose the argument that cinema was dead, I would point to these pictures as signs that the art form is still alive and breathing quite nicely. Now James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now) caps off the summer with the extraordinary The End of the Tour, a perceptive comic masterpiece that cuts to the quick of timely questions about celebrity and artistic authenticity and the movie does it with an intelligent wit that is as probing as it is poignant.

One on One: Moonlight

Mahershala Ali (right) and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight.

I’ve never seen a coming-of-age movie quite like Moonlight, written and directed by Barry Jenkins. It’s the story of an African-American kid from a poor neighborhood in Miami told in three parts, each one capturing the boy, Chiron, at a different age: nine, sixteen, twenty-six. (Given the three-act structure, it’s not surprising to find out that the source material is a play, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.) In act one Chiron, known as Little and played by Alex Hibbert, lives with his mother Paula (Naomie Harris), who turns tricks for crack money. Tiny and delicate, Little is bullied by the other boys; the only one of his peers who shows him any kindness is Kevin (Jaden Piner), who tries to teach him how to stand up for himself in a fight. Little is hiding from the other kids in an abandoned house sometimes used by junkies when Juan (Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer, finds him and takes him home to his girl friend Teresa (Janelle Monáe) for a meal. Little is shy – and stubborn – to the point of non-communication; it isn’t until the next day that Juan and Teresa get him to tell them where he lives, and when Juan drives him home Paula isn’t grateful for his generosity, since he’s the man she buys rock from. Still, Little, who has no male role models and has to negotiate his mother’s substance-fueled moods, adopts Juan and Teresa as surrogate parents, and they’re tender and patient with him, riding out his silences and answering the questions he can’t ask anyone else. The other boys make fun of the way he walks and holds himself and call him a faggot; their merciless ragging has the effect of causing him to struggle with his sexuality before he’s old enough to even see himself in sexual terms. When he asks Juan and Teresa what a faggot is, Juan tells him it’s “a word used to make gay people feel bad,” and in the macho street culture of the neighborhood Juan’s instinctive egalitarianism and lack of bias, which come from his openheartedness, feel like a small miracle. He and Teresa are a gift to this brooding, complicated kid, who alternates between avoiding everyone’s gaze and seeking to make direct contact, his huge, demanding eyes fixed on Juan or Teresa or Paula or Kevin. Juan treats Little like a son, counseling him that he has to make up his own mind about who he’s going to be. He never lies to the boy; when Little finds out that he deals dope to his mother and confronts him about it, Juan doesn’t deny it, though for the first time you can see the shame in his face. Clearly he’s not the right paternal figure to get the kid through his troubled childhood, but he’s the only one Little’s got.

A Borealis of Canadian Talent

James Gordon performing at Kitchener's Registry Theatre in 2010.

There’s a gaggle of geese, a pride of lions, a murder of crows, and (wait for it) a flock of seagulls! But what does one call a whole bunch of Canadian artists? Well, I’d like to make a pitch for a borealis! That’s right, a “borealis of Canadian musicians.” Why? Because the aurora borealis is the name for the Northern Lights, and Canada is…northern; and because Borealis Records is responsible for so many of the records released north of the 49th parallel! You shouldn’t really call what these people do ‘Americana’ but no-one seems to have affixed the ‘Canadiana’ tag to anything, so we’ll just call them ‘roots’ music and be done with it. But ‘roots’ could mean anything couldn’t it? I mean, we all have roots in something or another and so, too, do these releases. First up Linda McRae.

Ad Hominem: Battles Over Broadway and the Role of Personal Identity in Criticism

 Max Gordon Moore and Adina Verson in Paula Vogel's Indecent. (Photo: Carol Rosegg)

Let’s start by accepting the premise that white men (a group which includes yours truly) have managed to make quite a hash of things over the last few centuries. One need only glance at today’s headlines to see the ways in which blithely privileged males have negatively affected our politics and culture. There’s been a strong, necessary, and long-past-due movement in the last few decades to remedy this state of affairs in the arts. However, a recent controversy in the world of theatre criticism has pointed to some concerning issues that arise when we apply this attitude to the question of whether and how the identities of critics and artists should affect the former’s responses to the latter. It stems from a series of statements on social media from playwright Paula Vogel, followed by “A Collective Call Against Critical Bias” on the theatre website HowlRound, in response to the early closings of Vogel’s Indecent and fellow playwright Lynn Nottage’s Sweat on Broadway.

Vogel and Nottage are two of the most prominent and respected playwrights in the United States at present, and yet they none of their works had ever made it to Broadway before, so it was disappointing when their respective plays announced that they would close early (although, in a surprising and virtually unprecedented development, Indecent subsequently extended its run at the last minute). In both cases, lukewarm reviews from The New York Times likely played at least some role in limiting their runs. Vogel took to Twitter to comment, “Brantley&Green, 2-0. Nottage&Vogel 0-2. Lynn, they help close us down,&gifted stra8 white guys run: ourplayswill last. B&G#footnotesinhistory.” Nottage added, “The patriarchy flexing their muscles to prove their power.” Vogel subsequently qualified her initial statements: “Btw I like well written pans of my plays (John Simon!) NYT was not a pan. Is there a manipulation of marketplace that dismisses women&POC?” and “I respect Ben Brantley. I served on a pulitzer jury w/him. He is not the enemy. hope to have more thoughtful dialogue. We need a better way.” She also took pains to emphasize that she was not disparaging Lucas Hnath or J.T. Rogers, the aforementioned “gifted [straight] white guys” whose A Doll’s House, Part 2 and Oslo continue to run on Broadway.

New York Musicals: On the Town and Hello, Dolly!

On the Town at the Barrington Stage

Though they’re best known for writing Singin’ in the Rain, the funniest movie musical ever made, the book and lyric writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green were the most notable proponents – perhaps even the inventors – of the New York musical. During their long-term and prolific collaboration they worked together on On the Town, Wonderful Town, Bells Are Ringing, Do Re Mi and, on screen, It’s Always Fair Weather, all of which unfold against the backdrop of a bustling Manhattan peopled with colorful caricatures of New York types. There’s an exuberance in the way Comden and Green employ specific New York settings: the Greenwich Village of the 1930s in Wonderful Town, the subway in the “Hello, Hello There” number in Bells are Ringing, Stillman’s Gym in It’s Always Fair Weather. Their first Broadway show, On the Town, which just closed in a marvelous production at Barrington Stage in the Berkshires, begins and ends in the Navy dockyard, and in between takes us to Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History, Coney Island and the interior of a taxi driven by a boisterous female cabbie named Hildy. It’s a valentine to the city, seen through the eyes of three young sailors who encounter it for the first time during a twenty-four-hour furlough.

A Change Is Gonna Come: The End of the Obama Era

As many of us this week watched President Barack Obama exit the presidential stage with dignity, grace, and even some humour, an inescapable melancholy also permeated the air. Besides the passing of a historic moment in time, one couldn't help but notice the new history about to be made. We were about to watch Donald Trump – a populist demagogue who built his road to the White House by spending years attempting to delegitimize Obama in a Truther campaign that questioned his citizenship – become president. He continued by bullying opponents, toadying up to Russia and hiding his tax returns (which may provide clues to why he plays footsies with Putin), proudly promoting the traits of a sexual predator, exploiting racism and fear, and making promises that pander to anger rather than seeking the means to healing the wounds that stoke that rage. The democratic dream hasn't died and I believe it will survive the man about to be president who has chosen to demean those ideals. But the Obama era, which opened the door to finally laying rest the stained legacy of racism and exploitation, could not close that door on those who sought to ignore it. The idealistic impulse in American exceptionalism is not bathed in light. "America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, lynch mobs and escapes, its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings," critic Greil Marcus writes in The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. "The story of America as told from the beginning is one of self-invention and nationhood." He also reminds us that prophetic voices – from John Winthrop to Martin Luther King Jr. – were "raised to keep faith with the past, or with the future to which the past committed their present." That is also true of the popular culture that reflects that covenant.

An Espionage Masterpiece: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave

Damian Lewis, Morgan Saylor, Jackson Place, and Morena Baccarin in Homeland.

The word “homeland” makes me kind of queasy, especially when used by the Bush administration in launching the Department of Homeland Security nine years ago. It’s reminiscent of the beloved Nazi “fatherland.” The less patriarchal “motherland,” preferred by the Soviet Union, sounds just as creepy. But as the title for a new series on Showtime, Homeland makes for a tantalizingly tense television drama in which creepy is a good thing. The brilliant Claire Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a crack CIA agent taking medications to mask bipolar disorder. Mandy Patinkin is a marvel as Saul Berenson, a seasoned spook who’s her mentor. As performers, they’re both at the top of their game.

In the October 2 debut, the inciting incident takes place in Iraq, where Carrie is on an unauthorized covert mission. After a jailed militant awaiting execution tells her that an American POW has been “turned” by al Qaeda, she’s busted before learning more details, put on probation, and reassigned to the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Of course, nothing can keep this obsessive woman from the work that gives her life its sole meaning.

Canadian Music Man: Bernie Finkelstein's autobiography True North

To paraphrase Gordon Lightfoot, “There was a time in this fair land when the music did not run…” It was not “long before the white man and long before the wheel,” but it was long before Bernie Finkelstein, and “the green dark forest was…silent.” Then Bernie heard the music, and decided to do something about it.

He’s one of the Bernies. Alongside Bernie Fiedler and Bernie Solomon, the Bernies were big in Canadian music. Fiedler ran the Riverboat Coffeehouse, Solomon was a lawyer, and Finkelstein managed Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan (among others), and their collaboration put everything under one roof: artist management, concert promotion, a record company, music publishing and a concert venue. It was genius, except, as Bernie Finkelstein says in his book True North: A Life in the Music (McClelland & Stewart, 2012), “things in the music business are never straightforward. It’s not a business for the faint of heart.”

All Hail the Comic Muse

Mike Nadajewski and Kristi Frank in On the Razzle. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

This piece includes reviews of On the Razzle, Blithe Spirit and Village Wooing.

This summer the Shaw Festival has been bowing to the comic spirit. In addition to Shaw’s The Apple Cart and The Playboy of the Western World, which mix serious and humorous elements, the roster has included productions of four comedies from different eras: Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance (1730), performed outdoors in an improvised version – the only one of the quartet I didn’t get to; Shaw’s Village Wooing (1934), this season’s lunchtime one-act; Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941); and Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle (1981). In truth, the last of these can claim connection to several periods. It began in 1835 as a one-act English play by John Oxenford called A Day Well Spent, which the Viennese playwright and actor Johann Nestroy adapted seven years later as Einen Jux will er sich machen (He’s Out for a Fling). Thornton Wilder reworked it for Broadway in 1938 as The Merchant of Yonkers – a failure, despite direction by the legendary Max Reinhardt – and then again in 1955 as The Matchmaker, which altered the story about shop clerks out on the town by inventing the assertive, charismatic title character (played by Ruth Gordon on Broadway) and reconfiguring the play around her. It was filmed the following year with Shirley Booth in the role and featuring three talented young performers early in their careers: Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine and Robert Morse. In 1964 The Matchmaker became the musical Hello, Dolly!, which, of course, ran for years. On the Razzle is Stoppard’s rewrite of the Nestroy, not the Wilder, so there’s no Dolly Gallagher Levi dashing around in aid of the young lovers while manipulating her sour-faced client into marrying her rather than the widow he’s after or the fictitious millionairess she’s promised him.

Opening Your Ears: Stan Rogers' Fogarty’s Cove

First time I met Stan Rogers I was watching my friend John play at a little coffeehouse at the Jewish Community Centre in Hamilton. John was in the middle of a song, probably “If I Was a Carpenter,” when the door swung open and a giant silhouette back-lit by the streetlights proclaimed, “hi! I’m Stan Rogers, just back from playin’ little honky-tonks and bars all across northern Ontario…and I’d be happy to play for you!” John never quite recovered.

Next time I met Stan was at Bill Powell’s third floor apartment just off Gore Park in downtown Hamilton. I was there to audition for a folk festival. I knocked on the door, heard a voice call, “come on in; it’s open!” Stan was listening to a young duo. I took my guitar out of its case to tune up. The duo left. Stan said, “Before you start, I have to show you something.” We walked the length of the apartment to the front bedroom. Bill Powell, painter, head of Creative Arts, founder of Festival of Friends, and all 'round local legend, lay stark naked, passed out on the bed not unlike Santiago at the end of The Old Man & the Sea. 

A Musician Revitalized: Ron Sexsmith at the River Run Centre, Guelph (Oct. 21, 2011)

Singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith

Let’s get something out in the open right away, I’m a big fan of Canadian songwriter Ron Sexsmith. I’ve seen him live a dozen times, bought all his CDs, including various artist collections on which he only has one tune. I was also privileged to be invited to the taping of his episode of Beautiful Noise (a made-for-cable music show).

Friday night in Guelph we were in the presence of a different Ron Sexsmith. I last saw him in Hamilton’s Studio Theatre, an intimate venue with table seating. He was just starting to get the reviews for his new album Long Player, Late Bloomer, and the documentary, Love Shines, was just starting to be shown at festivals. It was April. Sexsmith had added a pianist to his band, and was playing Hamilton, then being feted at Massey Hall, before leaving for a European tour. He seemed tentative. He had a cold and it marked some of his vocals. The news had come out that Sexsmith had been considering getting out of the business. Although he bravely soldiered on, and gave us a fine show, his confidence was shaky. You can hear this show on CBC’s web site.

Last weekend in Guelph, however, he was a changed man.

Setting the Template: The Original Star Trek

The crew of the original Star Trek.

It’s too bad the makers of Star Trek Into Darkness didn’t actually pay attention to the TV series the new movie is based on. If they had they might have recognized that what made the original Star Trek so special was its originality. So why on earth did they decide to not only revisit the premise of the terrific season one episode “Space Seed” that introduced Khan (Ricardo Montalbán), a genetically altered super-solider, from the Starship Enterprise’s past, but also to crib so much of the excellent second movie in the Star Trek film franchise, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which brought Khan back to face Captain Kirk and his crew anew? The result: a pale film, one that failed to do justice to the show and even the first new re-boot of Star Trek (2009).

What made the original TV series so lasting, I think, is that it really was like no science fiction series that came before. Prior to Star Trek’s debut in 1966 (it ran for three seasons until 1969), the few glimmers of intelligent science fiction on TV were manifest in the original Twilight Zone (1959-64) anthology show and little else. Thus when Gene Roddenberry conceived of the series, which he initially pitched to NBC as “a Wagon Train to the stars,” figuring the suits would respond better to the western TV show reference, he made sure it was an intelligent, complex show that spoke, in disguised futuristic science fiction terms, to the issues of its time, like racism, war and gender differences. So lasting was the show’s groundbreaking impact, in fact, including in its depiction of American television's first interracial (albeit tame) kiss, that when Nichelle Nichols, the African-American actress who played Lt. Uhura on the show, and whom I once had the great pleasure of meeting, mused about leaving it, none other than the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. urged her to stay with Star Trek, citing Uhura’s value as a role model for young African-Americans.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXI

Brian De Palma's Home Movies is a 1979 low-budget independent film made with the help of his film class at Sarah Lawrence as a hands-on training exercise. (They were given the primary responsibilities of raising money, arranging the shooting schedule, and editing the film, all under De Palma's supervision.) What they got was a spirited primal comedy laced with episodes from De Palma's early life that also came to make sense of his movie obsessions. Kirk Douglas (who had just starred in De Palma's last thriller, The Fury) plays a film instructor who uses the medium as a form of therapy. His prize student Dennis Byrd (Keith Gordon) decides to turn the camera on his family life, which is filled with enough neurotic issues to fuel numerous sessions. Besides competing with a favoured and pompous older brother (the hilarious Gerrit Graham, who played the glam rock star, Beef in De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise), Dennis also has to deal with a mother (Mary Davenport) who pops pills because of her philandering husband (Vincent Gardenia), a physician on whom his son ultimately turns his lens to catch him in the act. When his older sibling brings home his girlfriend, Kristina (Nancy Allen), Dennis is immediately drawn to this striking blonde while still torn by guilt over his parents' marital issues. Home Movies is a shaggy satire with Oedipal gags that pop like party balloons. While the picture has a relaxed charm compared to the fervently exciting thrillers, Carrie and The Fury, that preceded it, the themes of voyeurism and fear would carry over effectively into his next picture, Dressed to Kill, where the comedy and horror have a more lasting after-bite.

Flamboyant Disguise: Behind the Candelabra

Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra

Last Sunday night I saw Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in a position I never imagined I would see. They were in the throes of passion, with each other! These two action film heroes portrayed Liberace and his chauffeur lover Scott Thorson in Steven Soderbergh’s biopic Behind the Candelabra. Based on Thorson’s memoirs of the same name, this made for HBO film was a brilliant evocation of a more innocent era, when people just didn’t believe what was staring them in the face. In one of the first scenes, Matt Damon (as Thorson) attends a Liberace show in Vegas and comments to his date, “It’s all so gay!” and his friend says, “The ladies don’t think so.” As Thorson looks around, sure enough, it’s confirmed, the ladies are in love with this flamboyant piano player.

Shell Shocked: A Tortoise and Hare Story

A turtle. It was the most harmless pet you could get, and your mother would probably fall for it… once. It didn’t do much, snapped at some lettuce, rolled over a bit, maybe, sunned itself on a rock. Kinda boring. So why would a cool bunch of rock’n’rollers name themselves after these dull critters? Maybe because The Turtles weren’t that exciting either. They had a fat guy with crazy curly hair and glasses who, together with a slightly slimmer guy sang all the songs, and some other guys whose names I never really knew. And I had a whole pile of their records. 

The Turtles

One of them was even produced by Ray Davies of The Kinks. That was cool… but it didn’t make The Turtles cool for some reason. Maybe they sang too pretty. “Elenore, gee I think you’re swell!” Goofy, but gorgeous. “Happy Together!” Instantly memorable. They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and a whole lot of other TV shows like The Smothers Brothers, Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, these adult-oriented talk shows were the only place a teenager could get a glimpse of rock’n’roll back in the day. You’d watch dancing bears, jugglers, maybe an interview with Talullah Bankhead or a song by Sophie Tucker and then The Turtles would sing “She’d Rather Be With Me”. Still, these guys didn’t look very cool… they looked more like… ME!

Their songs were written, at the beginning at least, by the songwriting partnership of Alan Gordon and Garry Bonner. “Happy Together “ knocked The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” out of the #1 slot on Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart and was named one of the Top 50 songs of the 20th Century by BMI after generating over 5,000,000 performances on American radio. And still The Turtles were not cool. They had more hits, some written by Kaylan and Volman, some by other writers. Then The Turtles broke up, Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (the two hefty singers) were on their own. They were forbidden from using The Turtles as a group name, and in fact they couldn’t even use their own legal names due to a law suit. They chose the nicknames The Phlorescent Leech and Eddie and sang backup for any number of top recording stars. Frank Zappa invited them to add vocals in The Mothers. All of a sudden they were cool. 

Fake Blues: ABC's Roseanne

Roseanne Barr as Roseanne Conner in ABC's revival of Roseanne. (Photo: Adam Rose)

One of the truest and weirdest signs of the changing attitudes towards television is the central role that “reboots” of classic shows have taken on in critical discussions of the state of the art. (Everyone is a pop-culture critic now, and that’s truer for TV than it is for most things.) Most of the reboots that have attracted the most attention are of shows from the 1990s, such as The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Full House, and now Roseanne. It’s easy to see why: they’ve been gone long enough to inspire feelings of nostalgia, but are still recent enough that most of the key members of the casts can be tracked down and put back to work without the aid of walkers or jumper cables. (Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 should probably be counted a remake, like the current version of Hawaii Five-O, because its main cast is new, but players from the original version, notably show creator and star Joel Hodgson, have turned up in cameos to give their blessing to the new kids on the block.)

Oh What a Feeling: Crowbar at Hamilton's McIntyre Performing Arts Centre (Nov. 17. 2012)

Kelly Jay & Roly Greenway (composers of “Oh What a Feeling”)

As memorable as “Shoo-doot-n shooby-doo” or “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom” and every bit as meaningful, “Ba-bada-baaa ba-bada-baaa!” is the war cry of Canadian rock’n’roll.  Or, it was for a generation of us, and recent events have shown just how important that simple chorus was.  Roly Greenway and Kelly Jay Fordham were inducted into the 2011 Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame for their classic one chord tune “Oh What a Feeling”.  And this weekend, their band Crowbar received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hamilton Music Awards.  The award was presented at a long ceremony on Sunday night, but on Saturday night, Crowbar rocked the joint at Mohawk College’s McIntyre Performing Arts Centre.

Crowbar was the first band to benefit from Pierre Juneau’s new Canadian Content legislation (a law designating the implementation of 30% mandatory Canadian content by all radio stations) in 1970.  Because of this legislation, everyone in Canada could finally hear on the radio just how great our own music was. Their success, mixed with the fact that Margaret Trudeau was a fan, led to photo-ops with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.  They achieved huge success in Canada, but because people south of the border thought “Oh What a Feeling” was about some illicit substance or other, they received little airplay in the USA.  On Saturday night, they made enough noise to wake our neighbours from their slumber, and keep the rest of us dancing for another 40 years.

Some of the Best: Favourites of 2010

Unlike other critics, I've always kind of enjoyed compiling a list of favourites from the previous years. It gives me a chance to look back on the year and examine what I've read, seen or listened to. Some of what follows was not necessarily part of 2010, but I only got around to it this past year. In fact, one example is over 70 years old. A few I've written about on the blog in 2010, but not all. So, sit back, relax and, hopefully, enjoy.