Rss

Muhammad Ali (more-than-a-boxer on war and justice)

Posted by :James Howden On : February 5, 2007
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, , , ,

Some people thought I was a hero. Some people said that what I did was wrong. But everything I did was according to my conscience. I made a stand all people, not just black people, should have thought about making, because it wasn’t just black people being drafted. The government had a system where the rich man’s son went to college, and the poor man’s son went to war.

Muhammad Ali (65 in January), looking back on his career- and life-altering decision to refuse to go to Vietnam in 1967. Quoted in Dave Zirin’s Edge of Sports on-line column.

Super Stuff

Posted by :James Howden On : February 5, 2007
0

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,

Artie’s Megtastic Brontoplasm Heavy Definition MonsterScreen (not its real name) loomed at the end of the den. TechBoy was racing around fitting his EarPiercer MaxVol Screamers — these were not your dad’s stereo speakers — the better to further stun the cerebral nerve endings of the only geezer invited to the Super Party. (That would be me.) Eight trays of wings were on the table – one for each of us, as it groaningly turned out – along with crunchies, chewies and slurpies. We weren’t a beer-swilling crowd, but we were ready to assert our North American manhood in every other way we could. After all, da Colts wuz playin’ da Bears for the World Championship of the Excited States of American Football. Hooting and hollering ensued, especially during that wacky first quarter, and Sparky, one stressed-out and neurotic little pup, went canine straitjacket on us. Ya gotta love living room sports.

The commercials. I soon realized I was with a crowd that was at least as interested in the ads as the third-down conversion rates, and I’m not just talking about Artie’s wonderfully excitable Mom. (These guys were more into the technical aspects of the telecast reception than in any Manning-to-Harrison connection. Vafa meditated at length on how the virtual first-down line was generated). Somehow, we were able to get the American commercials – including a stunningly amateur one from Detroit replacement window installers who take fibreglass very seriously – instead of the Global Canuck substitutes. (Take that, CRTC!!) There was a busy and amusing series of Lord of the Flies work-is-a-jungle-riot ads for a job-search company. There was an uncomfortably homoerotic and homophobic (tough double!) spot that I can’t imagine will sell a lot of Snickers bars. As usual, Bud Light has some of the best creative minds in America helping it to sell insipid and slightly poisonous beverages. (Best line of the night: But he’s got a chainsaw!)

And Coke poured more megabucks into helping us to associate sugar, caffeine and gas with our psychological well-being. The incredibly expensive video-game styled ad, in which Joe Cool rights all the wrongs of the street and inspires a giddy festival of urban happiness, was one that I quite liked. It’s a 2007, hyperactive version of the old I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony / I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company. (I know it’s a tooth-rotting soft drink, but I’m a sucker for brotherhood and global harmony.) The chiselled young men I was with didn’t appreciate the “Wonderland in the Coke Machine” ad much, but I could see it through the eyes of the little boys that have lived in my house for so long. It was imaginative, incredibly expensive, and pretty darned cute. I waved a sourpuss white flag, though, for the salute to Black History Month, which appeared to link Holy Coca-Cola with all the most heroic moments and characters in the African American story. Yecch. That was but one expression of the Dungy/Lovie factor, the aren’t we a wonderful country to have black coaches for the all the dark young men that we pay so well to entertain us sentiment. Not to mention that CBS Cares, apparently, about much more than ratings, although the accompanying series of images of beautiful black children and noble black elders seemed, well, just a little too self-congratulatory. But maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh: even clumsily celebrated racial progress is racial progress. (I think.)

The game. I like football. My playing days are a foggy image in a cracked rear-view mirror. (The older I get, the better I was. What a great line. Wish I’d written it, wonder who did.) I don’t even watch it that much anymore, though I read more pigskin commentary than is healthy. It was my first time seeing the Lovie Smith Bears, but I’ve seen the Colts several times over the last few years. I’m a great admirer of Tony Dungy, and was anxious to have all the call-in sports radio meatheads stop braying about Peyton Manning being over-rated. (Envy grows like a titanic and atom-powered cancer among low self-esteem sports fanatics.) I was pulling for the Colts.

Early on, it looked like I was rooting for the white-hatted cowboys who were about to be chewed up by the baddies. What a crazy, sloppy, interesting first quarter, so unlike the usual tense blandness. By halftime, though, a Colts victory was looking pretty inevitable, as long as they refused to kick to Devin Hester. I stayed tuned in to the play, though most of my younger brothers had gone to cyber-geek guy talk that I can barely understand. I was a little disappointed (how greedy can I be?) that the Horseshoes couldn’t translate their skill and power into a more dominating final score. It’s a bit mean-spirited, I admit, but I was pleased to think of Edgerrin James – the former star runner for the Colts who left them for extra millions – watching the SB in a football desert. I loved the cleverness of Joseph Addai, James’s replacement, with his quickness and subtle spins and shifts. I was thrilled by that gorgeous toe-dragging sideline catch by Marvin Harrison; one of the unfilmed highlights of my football “career” was an eleventh-grade grab a little bit like that. (In my mental video library, anyway.) The Sanders interception of a one-winged duck thrown by Bears QB “Bad Rex” Grossman reminded me painfully of the worst ball I ever threw to a wide-open, touchdown-ready teammate. (It was grade 12, and that quacking attempt at a long pass was in the air so long I could’ve almost run and caught it myself. The coach switched me to linebacker soon afterward). And I was grateful that the deeply Christian Dungy didn’t echo the Colts’ owner’s proclamation — did you hear it? — of the Universal Creator’s undivided interest in the gridiron success of the Colts. (Such a little God! No wonder so many people find it hard to believe.)

When I was a kid, the ferocity of football was attractive, though it was always the sweet catch, the nimble cut, the tightly spiralling throw or punt that really thrilled me. As an adult, I came to see that football is the best TEAM game there is. In a high school, say, it has the potential to do more for the spirit of a large group of (possibly) undermotivated and emotionally isolated young men than anything short of wars and revolutions. Sorry to go all socio-political on you, but I guess I’m glad that the Colts won without the worst of the in-your-face, look-at-me macho freakshow posturing that takes so much away from the team feeling of football played well. And despite all those fumbles, there was some good football to watch last night, in between the main attractions. Thanks for the High Def, Mr. B. It was good to pretend I was 22 for awhile.

What Difference Does It Make?

Posted by :James Howden On : February 5, 2007
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , ,

You may have noticed the scarcity of posts over the past couple of weeks, all because of a family trip to Guadeloupe. Computer access was scarce, and there was lots to see. So you can look, over the next week or so, for a flood of reflections on that fine adventure and other things I’ve been meaning to tell you.

The trip has me asking one positively nagging question of myself. It’s another round of a skullbound parlour game that I’ve played many times over the years. I’m getting to be good at it. I’m learning to take the most sneering or self-righteous dismissal, the verbal brutality of a nasty rhetorical question, turn it inside out and tame it. I make it do what I want. Wanna play?

Here’s a question covered in thorns. Who do you think you ARE? Alice Munro made it the title of a short story collection, and she showed the essence of that all too prevalent Canadian attitude: a prim, haughty disapproval of ambition or boldness or extraordinary achievement. I hear that voice in my head, still, almost every time I try to step out of my comfortable furrow. Now, though, I can often turn it around, asking the question sincerely rather than for the sake of making a harsh judgement. When I ask it in that tone of voice, I use it to gently challenge myself or someone else to consider first principles of identity, to get a little more self-aware. Okay, who or what IS a human being, and what does that all mean for me right now? How do you see yourself?

Another of my favourite turnarounds, in the same vein, begins with the incredulous What do you think you’re DOING? We generally use this when we catch someone doing something that we don’t approve of or understand. (My students and my children have heard this blurt more often than I’d like.) However, I like to play Socrates a little – or maybe just fumble about like rerun TV’s detective Columbo. I grind off the sharp critical edge and make the question into a sincere probe. How do you understand your behaviour and the attitude behind it? Do they show some sense of purpose, some higher commitment? Do they help you get where you’d like to go? The examined life is no picnic, but it’s worth living, as the real Socrates said.

Guadeloupe, warm and bright and new to us, suddenly seems distant on a minus-30 northern morning. My tan is already fading. Listen: if you take a trip but there are no lasting results, did it actually happen? I started to wonder, in our last days there and on Air Canada homeward, so what difference did this make? When I was a kid, this question had a bitter, defiant edge. Whatsa DIFF? we would say pugnaciously. It was meant to shut down an argument, and our antagonist, snottily “proving” that his actions and words weren’t worth a damn. (Sometimes, it had a more discouraged feel to it; nothing that I do is going to matter, so why bother?)

So, again, I found myself extracting the poison from a toxic question. What difference does it make became a personal challenge to nurture whatever seeds of usefulness and joy we had planted. There are new friendships to develop, fine memories and educative bits that we can treasure and build on, and the chance to reflect on our work and life back home. (There were times I hated to be away from my work table, but I’m so lucky and glad that I was. I like it here better today than I have for awhile.) My bride and I travelled with our six-year-old, and that furious learning and those wide-open eyes are a spur and an admonition. We’ll see what the difference is. I’ll try to make sure there IS one.

The Martin Quest

Posted by :James Howden On : February 5, 2007
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , ,

Just before we left the country for a couple of weeks (though I wasn’t aware of it ’til last night), my favourite Martin gave a nice plug for this site on his much more visually dazzling one. Since Martin has given me dozens of hours of help getting this thing going, I must certainly return the favour. Marty subtitles his site “A Growing Repository of All That is Good”, and for my money, he’s actually being somewhat humble when he says that. It’s massive, and it’s very, very good.

He pours a sensational amount of time and intelligence and technical skill into his site. It’s full of news and visuals on his family, his posse and his faith community — Martin is one of the Dynamic Bahá’í Dudes of Ottawa — but also some very thoughtful information and lively discussions on the most important parts of our world conversation (so say I): spiritual enrichment, education for peace, the power of unity and the search for the ultimate set of speakers. There’s always something happening at The Quest.

ODY: Weeks 20/21. The Song is the Thing.

Posted by :James Howden On : January 25, 2007
0

Category: On Second Thought

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There was a part of me that hoped that by this time, nearly 150 days into this crusade, I would be obsessed. By and large, my habits are pretty well established when I’m at home, and it’s no great inconvenience for me to get my work done. But knowing how I can get utterly locked in to patterns of thinking and concentrated (if brainless) activity, I had thought vaguely about how to manage a raging addiction to guitar playing. How will I handle it when I stop coming to meals? What’ll I do when my writing day begins to suffer because the boy just wants to play?

Well, safe at home, I guess. No worries about dependency yet. I recently read a piece on Tom Morello, the rocker with a brain (and a social conscience, and a lifelong love for the Cubs, I believe) from Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. He started on the guitar relatively late, as a Harvard freshman, but made his own fervent pact to play each day, no matter how many essays were due. Legend has it that those playing sessions could last as long as eight hours. (Show-off! Creep!) Mine have approached ONE hour, oh, maybe twice.

And unless I start heeding advice from the Sonshine Boys – Dad, you gotta play more SONGS! Find stuff you like on-line, or write your own! They can be as dumb as rocks, but they’ll get you pumped — that kind of momentum will never be able to sweep me along. DAMN, but I’m a slow learner!

Songs, songs, songs. So what are the great songs I’ve loved, the singable songs for the very middle-aged? Time for a list, in no particular order, and then I’ll see which ones are actually Playable By A Guy Like Me:

Lorelei (The Pogues): might be simple enough, and so much feeling.

Jungleland (Bruce Springsteen): wow, but maybe too complex? One of the greatest songwriterly things ever. And Blood on Blood, or almost anything from Nebraska.

Eleanor Rigby (The Beatles): is a cello required?

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Jimmy LaFave): I love the LaFave version of this old Jimmy Webb song. On a Bus to St. Cloud is another melancholy, lovelorn ballad that Lafave delivers well, a song by Gretchen Peters.

So many from Bruce Cockburn, but let’s say “Tie Me at the Crossroads” and “Great Big Love”. Maybe I should learn one of his sensual ones, though; odd that this introverted, rather intellectual master guitarist has written some of the sexiest stuff ever. “Sahara Gold”, par exemple.

Boots or Hearts (The Tragically Hip): some alt-country type should record this, I’ve always thought. Locked in the Trunk of a Car knocks me sideways, but I don’t know how campfire friendly it is. Son One wants me to learn Wheat Kings, but it doesn’t get me. Not yet, anyway, but it is a three-chorder.

Naïve Melody (Talking Heads): I wonder if these are too funky for simple guitar playing. Byrne does a guitar-only rendition of Psycho Killer on Stop Making Sense, which may be manageable.

Road Trippin’ (RHCP): I don’t like earlier stuff much, but Californication is a terrific album. Real melodies and harmonies.

And this is so much fun, I could go on and on and never actually learn any of ‘em!! Ah, resistance. I’ve been reading a lot about you in The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and here you are, Resistance, you old seducer. There is one song that I’ve been working on, though, and the satisfactions are strong. It’s a chord progression to play behind a prayer I’ve learned to sing: Blessed is the spot, and the house, and the place, and the city, and the heart, and the mountain…where mention of God hath been made and His praise glorified… It’s a sweet and lovely invocation of the holiness of all places, when the spirit is given its due. And blessed is the spot where music is made, too, whether couch or bedside, but the chords are a bit tough for me: A, A7, E, E7, and D are more than manageable, but I still stumble over three bar chords. There’s a B minor, and A#7, and an F# minor.

But The Spot has begun to prove to me the wisdom of my young teachers. It’s nice to play something that sounds like a song. Keep at it, ol’ fella. 147 days down, and better days to come. Maybe even a little compulsion, for a change.

‘Abdu’l-Baha (“never the twain”?)

Posted by :James Howden On : January 22, 2007
0

Category: He Said/She Said

Tags:, ,

The East and the West must unite to give to each other what is lacking. This union will bring about a true civilization, where the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the material….We all, the Eastern and the Western nations, must strive day and night with heart and soul to achieve this high ideal, to cement the unity between all the nations of the earth. Every heart will then be refreshed, all eyes will be opened, the most wonderful power will be given, the happiness of humanity will be assured.

‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in 1911. (1911!) From Paris Talks, p. 21

Ice Dreams

Posted by :James Howden On : January 17, 2007
0

Category: All About Sports

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,

I grew up in a little Canadian town where we played ball near cornfields or in leafy squares, and got the hockey sticks out in late September. For reasons that I still can’t entirely explain, I became a hoops hostage in my mid-teens. I officially became a Basketball Guy, I think, during the UCLA Bruins’ astounding 88-game winning streak. I was a fan of Bill Walton and his Gang (and, later, of their coach, the legendary John Wooden), who were by early 1974 pursuing their third straight undefeated championship season. I remember my anguished disbelief when Notre Dame knocked off the Bruins in February to end the streak – it was a big enough game to actually be on television – and again two months later, when NC State (and the gloriously soaring David Thompson) beat them in the NCAA finals. (Or was that the semis?)

I had played the game for about a year and half by then. I was a grade 11 and thought I was getting good, but Haldimand County clay didn’t exactly ooze with hardwood competition. Or hardwood, for that matter: I played mainly on tile and that sort of parquet floor where the fingers of wood are always coming loose. I’ll bet there weren’t more than ten people in my town who even watched the Final Four that year, and most of them were the oddballs on my team whose skates were dusty, who believed that playing basketball was The Thing.

But before all that – with my Red River cereal and Riverview Dairy milk (home delivered!) – I ate and drank other sports: Hamilton Tiger Cat (and four-boy) football, Montreal Expos baseball (and endless games of “scrub” on the town square) and, especially, hockey (every kind, everywhere). I worshipped Gordie Howe from afar and the impossibly big and fast young men of the Junior D Caledonia Corvairs from as close as I could get. (I’d stick my nose right through the iron fencing that ran around the end boards.) The Sutherland Street Hockey League was fabulous in those days, and the games never stopped for long.

I don’t watch a lot of hockey in the regular season anymore, though I still pay attention. (I know the Ducks are no longer Mighty, and that Alexander the Great plays wing for the Washington Capitals.) But when CBC ran its annual Hockey Day in Canada last Saturday, I had cranked our coal-fired television up to watch. The Canadian hockey Goliath has often been something I wanted to take my slingshot to, but there’s still so much to love about the sport. I saw parts of all three games, but what grabs me by the heartstrings is what comes in between on Hockey Day: the grateful words of NHL players remembering their roots, the interview with that grinning guy who kept outdoor hockey alive in his Quebec town for 40 years, the rink that is the best hope of a struggling northern Saskatchewan community. I eat it up. It moves me to my sports-loving core. Gosh, I even got misty over the Tim Horton’s ad — yes, I insist on the comma! — with Sidney Crosby laughing and stickhandling with all the little fellas. I used to be one of those wee sprouts on skates, before Timbits or full facemasks had even been invented. And now, at an age where I should perhaps have outgrown these things, this ol’ basketball coach still has occasional hockey dreams: all that speed, the cool wind on my face, maybe one more great glove save from my goalie days…

Back in my hometown, there is a new twin-pad arena complex that has the town pretty excited. (Somebody had the smarts to get a new library built in the bargain. Come on, boys, you can read, too! ) I hope kids smile when they play, that they’re taught the speed and skill of that wonderful game, not just systems and corner grit. I hope the parents have some perspective. (I often had too lofty ambtions for my basketball coaching back in what folks always insisted was a hockey town, but there was one benefit: nobody thought their kid was going to the NBA.) The great Canuck poet Al Purdy described professional hockey as “this combination of ballet and murder”. True. But at its purest, and in the deepest caves of my memory, it’s a cool and an ever-gorgeous game. (And there are no goons, and no uptight, gum-chomping coaches. And I get to play forward whenever I want. And man, I can really fly out there…)

Dyer Straights: A High School Confidential

Posted by :James Howden On : January 14, 2007
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , ,

If a remarkable speaker came to a school and nobody listened, did he actually say anything? (If a tree falls in the forest…) I do the odd suppy teaching gig, and I got thinking about an assembly held in a small-town high school of my intimate acquaintance.

It was the spring of ’02, I think. The principal had booked a speaker; not the usual “you-have-so-much-to-gain-from-getting-involved-so-hey-whaddaya-got-to-lose!” motivational banter from a caffeinated twenty-something with a degree and no job.  This was a lecture on Canada’s place in the world from a greying Gwynne Dyer: historian, writer and commentator on international affairs. (I’m still not sure what he was doing in the Home of the Blue Devils.) The staff had been poorly briefed, and the students didn’t know what was up, but it was a substitute for fourth period, so we trooped down to the auditorium at two o’clock. At least, those of us who hadn’t already escaped to Timmy’s or McD’s.

I was superbly biased: I’d read Dyer in newspapers, seen him on The National, and been wowed by his eight-part documentary film, War. (It made me want to teach history.) He’s a brilliant guy, rumpled and wryly funny, so I was looking forward to hearing him speak. (Yes, I often feel alone. How’d you know?) He spoke for 50 minutes, with two major points to make. He put our present world situation in perspective, apologizing for the role he plays in the media’s portrait of the world as a frighteningly violent and despairing place. (I don’t think he would retract the grimly but clearly optimistic tone he took that day, but his recent book IS Future: Tense — The Coming World Order? His biggest concern there was America’s singular quest to police the world, including this typically blunt Dyer-ism: “The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq.”)

But back then, the end of the Cold War had him arguing the following, in spite of the threat of terrorism: “The world is in better shape than it has been in my entire lifetime” and “World War III has been cancelled!” He argued that the generation of high schoolers he was facing had great reason to be hopeful about the world they were inheriting. Second, he argued that “the single best thing Canadians have done” was the 1967 reworking of the Immigration Act. It has steadily transformed Canada from an inward-looking population descended from northern European settlers, he said, into “a representative sample of the human race”, the most diverse country on earth. Sure, there are problems, he explained, but not only does this diversity make us truly interesting, but it gives us a creative advantage in the global marketplace, and is the key to diluting French-English antagonism and preserving Canadian unity. Whew!  It was a big message for suburban white kids on a Thursday afternoon.

There were twin conclusions to the talk.  One was Dyer’s: “It’s a great country—take good care of it!” The other, after an odd delay — so that our guest could leave the room, I guess — was our vice-principal’s dressing-down of the students for their rudeness and lack of attention. Which message are they going to remember? I wondered. I was moving past my own reaction (impressed) to Dyer to consider what the rest of the crowd got from it. I picked out one red-headed Brain that I’d worked with in class and cross-country running. “Hey, Chris, Canada’s in the world — who knew?” I said, and he smiled. He’d obviously been tuned in; he separated himself from those around him by his unbroken attention and by laughing at Dyer’s subtle jokes. (Mentioning the sexual revolution of the 60s, he had deadpanned, “Pity you missed it”). Chris’s buddy Ryan admitted (well, confessed, actually) that he had understood most of Dyer’s talk, noting a bit sheepishly that “we always listen to CBC Radio and my dad always talks to me about this stuff”. These guys felt a little alone, too.

Most of the students I talked to had more to say about the V.P.’s 30 seconds than about Mr. Dyer’s hour. Pressed to comment on his address, comments ranged (but not too widely) from “It was boring/stupid” to a disgusted “He just stood there and talked” to a more self-examining “I tried to pay attention but I couldn’t follow it, so of course we’re gonna talk a bit…” I was amazed.  We hear all the time about kids and short attention spans and how information needs to be a jump-cutting jolt of entertainment to get through to them. I was facing them daily then, but I was still surprised by how many had surfed to another channel (if not another location altogether) before Dyer had finished his opening comments, or, in some cases, spoken at all. Perhaps I didn’t want to think about how little of my own chalk-stained raving had flown right past bland and pleasant faces…

Granted, we hadn’t been very well-prepared. Students who heard afterwards from a teacher that Mr. Dyer had been shot at several times in the course of his globe-trotting journalism, or spent time as a sailor, said “I wish they’d told me that before!” And we should have prepared the kids much better. It was an afternoon that made high school teaching feel, just fer a second there, like the ultimate tilt at a bored and impervious windmill. But thanks for coming out, Gwynne.

(Hey, my site seems to be working! A condensed version of this piece will appear shortly in my hometown weekly, The Grand River Sachem.)

Chicks Dig the Long Haul

Posted by :James Howden On : January 13, 2007
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , , , , , , , , ,

Sprung! There was nobody home and no particular deadline. My bride was on the family road, and Sprout the Last had an after-school playdate with his buddy that promised to extend into the evening. (Mom and Friend of the Year nomination: Josée!) Jailbreak! Run to daylight!

Flee to that beam of light in a dark, dark room: Escape to the Bytowne Cinema! I didn’t much care what was there, but wasn’t displeased to find out that Shut Up and Sing!, the Dixie Chick-flick, was on. I’m not a big country music fan, but it had been hard not to be fascinated by the boiling stew of disgusted American overreaction when the DC lead singer mouthed off in London. So I was interested to see what this documentary made of the mess, and why these Chicks were in the middle of it.

Do you remember? Tanks and troops were massed on the Iraqi border, tens of millions of people around the world were massed in pre-emptive protest, and the DC happened to be in London where a huge crowd had marched for peace, perhaps that same day. “We’re with y’all,” lead singer Natalie Maines told the audience to roars of approval. “And just so you know, we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas…” And once word got back to the American networks, the if you’re not with us you’re against us neo-con PR steamroller had a gorgeous target. The DC were beautiful, popular, female and sold most of their records in the so-called Red states. And the world of country music is redneck-friendly. (I played the heck out of Garth Brooks’s The Hits for several years, and loved how he had  gradually brought gospel choirs and a social conscience – “When we all can sit / In our own kind of pews / We shall be free…” – to country music. Still, I found it hard, no matter how catchy the tune, to listen to a song like “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association”, which “represents the gun-rack, bare-crack, achin’ back, overtaxed, flag-wavin’ fun-lovin’ crowd…”)

When it came to the “disgusting traitors” who “should be strapped to a bomb and dropped on I-Rack” (people actually said things like that), the country music world spoke with one voice. The Chicks were Satan, and must be destroyed. The film, directed by Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck (Gregory’s girl, I think), follows the DC from the grainy video taken of THE ACT in London in 2003 and throughout their at first slack-jawed, then stubbornly defiant reactions to the uproar. It culminates in the release of a new and very different Dixie Chicks album in 2006. (Cynics might call the entire movie a marketing ploy, just as climate-change deniers devalue Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as campaign fodder. And hey, the Chicks certainly understand marketing, but they also paid a huge price for their stance.) At the controversy’s height, not a country station in the U.S. played them – they had been for some years the biggest-selling band of any genre – and their record and concert ticket sales went way south. Yes, and there were disc-burnings, public floggings by the likes of Bill O’Reilly, and death-threats both vague and direct. One of the most chilling sequences in the film shows the Chicks before a concert in Dallas, where metal-detectors and 24-hour surveillance were the order of the day. They played their arses off that night. Tough Chicks.

Not surprisingly, they come across well. After all, when you’re in a contest with ignorance and xenophobia and time has shown you to be on the right side, it’s hard not to look good. For example, another strong scene has the Chicks and their spritely manager, Simon Renshaw, meeting with a PR consultant not long after the deceivingly easy early going in Iraq. The audience I was in laughed hard (and bitterly) over lines like these: You’ve got to lay low. The war is going so well, and it’s only going to get better. The President is incredibly popular, and his approval ratings are only going to climb… We were treated to the infamous time-dishonoured footage of the smirking Bush’s aircraft-carrier congratulations on “a job well done” to the Forces of Goodness. The Dixie Chicks were (and, to some extent, remain) a more corporate, commercially oriented act than I generally favour, but I came away impressed. These are talented women: Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, sisters and the basis of the band, are prodigiously talented musicians, and Natalie Maines can flat-out sing. She’s a compelling stage presence, and even in back-stage or hotel conversations, the camera can’t let her go. Neither could I.

She’s so watchable. It’s easy to see how she could become a shit-storm magnet. She is an alpha female: charismatic, funny, bright, tough, principled, and a self-confessed “bigmouth”. (Fluently foul-mouthed, too. I never quite get used to women making as many oral sex references as men might. BJ jokes abound, and all the Chicks join in.) But they are ultimately very appealing. (Shots of the darling seven children and interesting husbands they have among them, not to mention Emily’s childbirth experience, don’t hurt.) The women managed not only to stand together but to emerge, from what I saw and heard, a better and deeper and more interesting band because of their struggles. Heck, they’re even helping to write the songs. Shoot, I may even buy the new album. Shut Up and Sing is a good night at the movies. Not only did it entertain me and interest me musically, but it was a nervy case study of the mass psychology of war and patriotism and the precarious nature of free speech.

And I didn’t pay a dime for babysitting.

Canada in the World

Posted by :James Howden On : January 10, 2007
0

Category: At First Glance

Tags:, , ,

Old and Borrowed, But Far From Shabby

The Howden telegraph runs very slowly at times, and I often like it like that. For example, Big Sister just forwarded to me a fine article that gives a perspective on how Canada is seen (and NOT seen) by the world. It’s terrific and relatively timeless commentary, but the one timely reference told me that it had been written some time ago.

Close to five years ago, in fact, which may surprise you. (It did me.) The infamous “friendly fire” incident, in which four Canadian soldiers were killed by American flyers in Afghanistan, happened in 2002. A writer named Kevin Myers, in the UK Sunday Telegraph, wrote this fine piece that goes far behind the story-of-the-moment to get to what so little of our media diet provides: a deeper understanding of the way things are, and why. It was called “A Salute to a Brave and Modest Nation”, and you can find it here.

Whether you are a proud Canuck or you know little about Canadian history and achievement – and these categories, unfortunately, are NOT mutually exclusive! – you may find this interesting, even illuminating. (It may even feel like a vicarious pat on the back from out of the blue.) It’s well written and worth reading, even a half decade later. The good stuff always is.