Critics Who Know Jack Read online

  I Don’t Like Mondays, by Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats. The British (Irish) returned after half a decade of Bruce Springsteen and singer-songwriters like James Taylor, Jim Croce and John Denver. Geldof and the producers of the video (as the 80s were the height of video) set his ragged harlequin looks against a backdrop of British middle class-ness with the parents and the band sitting, watching the telly, as news of a girl shooting up a classroom in San Diego came to light in the British media. This song, with its courage to expose the underbelly of a young girl’s madness and dissatisfaction is the counter-balance to the lyrical She’s Leaving Home by The Beatles in the summer of ‘67. When the girl was asked by the authorities why she shot her fellow students, she replied: I don’t like Mondays! The clip, punk-infused, popism of Geldof and his band captures the edgy sentiment of unhappiness with Thatcherism and boredom of being. Video brought us many great visuals for the songs they interpreted and as far as the form was new, the inventiveness was high as new mediums always have a vanguard of artists who break as much ground as possible in their explorations of social and political conditions.

  Fast Car, by Tracy Chapman. For all The Beach Boys and Bruce Springsteen car songs, this 1980s Grammy winner in the Best Single category brought back the singer-songwriter at her/his best acoustic aura. In the language of “symbol” and “semiotics,” Chapman, as an African-American, signified the disenfranchised, inner city black youth that was economically challenged and dreamed of escape. The desire to get in a “fast car” and drive away from the trap of poverty varies greatly from the Beach Boy fun driving and Springsteen’s teenage and young man romantic need to get away from the suffering of the city and “nowhereness.” In reference to males, the car is an obvious metaphor for sexuality. But Chapman’s narrator is a gentle, hurt woman who wants just a bit of relief if not the total dream of escape. There is a feel to the song that suggests: Even if I could do it only once in a while, things might be better. Chapman’s Fast Car is without growls (as in Springsteen) and not merely a moaning for the road. It is a plea. The song’s release was a decisive moment for the return of the acoustic, singer-songwriter as American radio came out of Punk and was on the cusp of Grunge and Rap, though teen male Metal never feared for a loss of audience.

  Fight the Power, by Chuck D. and Public Enemy. The articulation of rage and the return of long language songs with political force and intent. In the tradition of Langston Hughes and the feel of The Black Panthers, Public Enemy took the title from an old James Cagney movie and turned the Irish on its head. Cursing and challenging the icons of white culture (Elvis and John Wayne), Public Enemy also introduced “Rap” to a mass audience and its true uninterrupted “Blackness.” It was: Move over white culture time. Listen to the voices of rage in your impoverished inner cities! And: We don’t need you! attitude. With Public Enemy, other bands such as NWA (Niggers With Attitude) and the film-making of Spike Lee, African-Americans found their way onto the airwaves without the glitter of Berry Gordy’s Motown and the soft romantic sounds of Marvin Gaye and the Supremes. It was also the flip-side to Michael Jackson’s Neverland fantasies and Vegas-propelled expression of African-American experience and paved the way for Hip Hop, Gangsta Rap and even the anomaly of the white and angular Eminem into the two-thousand decade.

  Hurt, by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. The band’s name alone gives you the depth of the narrator’s Jesus-on-the-Cross suffering, though many would argue that Christ never suffered self-indulgence and Freudian whining. This song experienced a second tiering when the ailing C&W, man-in-black icon Johnny Cash was filmed at a piano with aging and quivering fingers and a face full of doubt and humility, singing: You can take it all, my empire of dirt. I will let you down. I will make you hurt. Both an atheistic and Christian interpretation of the lyric can’t avoid the mature expression of pain. And reckoning of the human soul against its own evils with the articulation of what Jean-Paul Sartre and the French existentialists referred to “as living without deliverance and the hope for it as you wake up to your next day.”

  THE INTERNET CAFÉ

  Espresso is espresso and an internet connection is a world of light, with rays and waves to the satellites that allow their function, crowding the invisible yet increasing weight of ether.

  Some cafés acquiesce to the gods of Bill and Steve with plug-in stations throughout while organic coffee brews for at least a quarter or more than the traditional pricing at Italian cafés. You won’t find old men in rumpled sports coats playing cards and smoking endless cigarettes at the modern internet café. They, in their age, have been left to their wives and shopping for rapini and tending their gardens against the harshness of northern climes. Instead, the internet café spectrums from soccer mom yoga mat carriers to young men with scruffy half-beards and The Gap’s latest bad plaid Bermuda shorts. Rocking their babies back and forth through simulated ‘70s aviator sunglasses and a big dog (always a big dog) to catch the fancy of most of the other patrons also with a big dog (or sometimes a small dog treated like a big dog).

  And it’s not hard to imagine as the world turns more surreal, a day when all the yoga mats and aviator sunglasses and babies are gone and grown and the dogs (big dogs) sit and caffeine their brains out to the tune of Sultans of Swing and say under their breath: I thought they would never leave! — while howling with barky laughter and panting for water. (Seems the only reason for the dog owners to change the iPod setting and put in or take out their earplugs). Needless to say, there will be no tipping, but maybe a wag of a tail. — WOOF! WOOF! And in semiotic wonder (see Roland Barthes reference in a later section) there will be a city ordinance that all stop and go traffic signals will require barks of various types and lengths before crossing the street in a new Rover’s Babylon.

  GERRY “THE FAIRY” AND THE JABOUR BROTHERS

  I

  n my old hometown before I claimed another town as home, there was a granite and limestone ridge elevated over paved streets, running down to a river. There were many of those ridges with the layered rock suggesting a primordial Time. A time of cavemen and women as modernity tried to rise to the occasion of time and space. As these ridges were elevated, they usually had a sloped and flat green back with shrub and forest growth. Often a street person could be found sleeping on a cardboard box from the nearest department store. Or a mattress thrown away by one of the many growing working-class families in the area. Because the height and exposed limestone layering hung over the street below, the back end (where we ran and played and killed snakes) was named Nanny Goat Hill (implying what it took to negotiate the Hill’s rock and craggy stubble).

  One day as I chased my brother down The Hill with great enthusiasm and vigour, a man in a trench coat and cap (he looked like he might have been from a wharf in Hamburg) leapt up from his sleep. He stood there with nothing on under his trench coat but a pair of boxer shorts and long black knee socks. My brother yelled “Run!” as the man hollered at our trespass and his eyes winched under a set of eyebrows that seemed made of steel wool. “It’s Gerry the Fairy!”

  As we made it to the street and the smell of oven bread from a nearby house, we caught our breath. My brother went on to tell me that “Gerry the Fairy” was known in the neighbourhood for flashing both boys and girls and the occasional housewife. “Should we tell Dad?” I asked. “He already knows,” my brother responded. “Why do you call him a fairy? Isn’t a fairy a girl, like Tinkerbell, small and blonde and pretty?” “They call him a fairy because he doesn’t have a wife and scares little kids.”

  As I look back to those years of childhood and brotherly camaraderie, I recall the skill at wordplay both my brother and I had inherited from our mother who could sing and rhyme like a nightingale when she wasn’t chasing us down with a switch or spraying us with a water hose to beat the inner city lower town heat in summer. And I think of how that name has embedded itself in my memory. Fairy. Not because of the suggestion of his perversion but because of the rhyme of the nomenclature itsel
f and how it covered the sadness, loneliness, desperation and slight mental imbalance that was likely this old man’s circumstance.

  By his nickname and look, Gerry became a “myth” to us. One of sleaze and unkempt-ness and warped sensibility. The “signage” we assigned him was no less cruel than scientists putting electrodes on research monkeys and then claiming it disturbed their (the monkeys’) sleep. Though not totally responsible for the denigration of another human being’s character (he was thus named long before we came along), our sense of secular catholicism allowed us to put food out for him when he wasn’t around or was asleep on his cardboard — even if just to see him come out for it. The last time I saw Gerry I was alone. He was walking up to the top of The Hill to the cliff side, 30-feet up over the street. I remember how gently the wind tried to iron out the wrinkles of his long light-brown trench coat, and how strongly it held him as he stood at the cliff’s edge, looking down.

  • • •

  “Goddam Jabour Brothers!” Carson would say on his way back from the grocery-hardware store where he was employed as a delivery/stock boy. Carson was old enough to have a steady job. French-Irish in ancestry, he stood low to the ground with slicked back duck-tailed hair, while shuffling in his Wellington boots with jean cuffs turned up a la Teddy-boy-Greaser. Carson was semi-literate. Couldn’t really read through a comic book. But he was older (even than my brother) by a good five years so we tended to take his word as authoritative. “Goddam cheap Jabour Brothers!” he would stammer though with pride that he had work.

  The Jabour Brothers were actually three brothers from Lebanon who had emigrated to North America to try and make it in the “Dream.” Short on humour, they worked long days and nights to keep up an inventory for the French, Italian, Lebanese, Irish mix of immigrants raising families and themselves chasing the Dream. They were Maronite Christians and you could see them in suits on Sundays. But Carson never expressed resentment for their “otherness” — only for the long demanding hours his employment with them required.

  And with this, I remember the one African-American gentleman who would come to my mother’s house on bread-making day and knock on the door as he removed his hat. And that my mother brought out a loaf and placed it in his hands (open like Jesus multiplying fish yet without stigmata) and he would nod his thanks slowly and surely until next week. And through my mother’s actions, our eyes would look at this man of height and his great silent dignity and emotionally would take on his cool and gentility into the day.

  FAILING ART CLASS AND BUILDING A MODEL FROM SCRATCH (MAKE THAT SCOTCH!) IN THE KEY OF F

  “Our assignment for next week is for you to hand in an Eskimo soap-carving,” Mrs. Andrews announced in late spring grade nine. We were to buy a bar of Ivory soap and look at the pictures of Inuit art and freely copy a style from one of her art book texts. I hated Ivory soap given a skin condition I had as a kid. It left my skin dry and itchy and the smell was nauseous to my system. Weeks earlier I had handed in a peculiar imitation of Van Gogh swirling clouds with purples and yellows and a Mexican bandit standing with guns ready by a desert cactus. I still don’t know where that came from. Maybe from seeing The Magnificent Seven with Eli Wallach piercing threats into Yul Brynner’s Russian-accented gun-slinger. But I got an A for it and thought I could cruise my way through the soap-carving assignment.

  So when it came time to hand in the carving and Mrs. Andrews awed and wowed at the work that other students were handing in, I told her I had forgotten my bar of soap on the bus to school. Not good enough was the verdict. My zero on that negated the A and I came up with an F. Next up was grade ten and a photo essay of some kind.

  Having an older brother who was good with cameras and ship and car models, it dawned on me that I could take his racing car models (that had working engines in them), grab his camera and shoot the cars as they raced around a figure eight track. There I was, all set to shoot. Hitting the release button as the cars flew around, and trying to hold a camera in the other hand and catching stills of the cars as they raced around. I was totally excited at the prospect of amazing shots coming out. “No one is gonna have any photo essay like this!” I thought, as the pasta cooked in the kitchen and my brother tuned a guitar in his room next to me. “Okay, I’m coming,” I said, answering my mother’s call to the dinner table. And assured myself: “I’ll get this finished after dinner.”

  Dinner was superb but, as I sat there into my tenth meatball, I couldn’t think of anything but cars flying down the track and the smile that would bring to my teacher’s face. Dinner having ended and the family hunkered down to some prime time TV, I sat on the floor of my bedroom cross-legged and fumbled around with the camera and cars. Ten shots in I thought I had enough footage to make a great sequence. The next evening I took the film roll in for developing and thought cars, cars, cars for a week. When they came in, they were blurred yet colourful. Kind of like one of those Einstein descriptions of what happens to stationary bodies when they move through time. But you couldn’t make out the cars’ shape unless you were told. My stomach clenched as the photo essay had to be handed in the next morning.

  “What happened?” my brother asked. “Did you get an A?” “No.” An extension. An A for effort but an F for presentation. What to do? An extension usually meant you got another shot at a project or at least more time. In this case I had two days. There was no way my brother or I could figure out the magic of catching the cars in motion ‘cause we didn’t have any kind of movie camera. So one night as my brother was out folk-singing his heart out, I snuck into his room, grabbed some airplane glue and a little box model of a Spitfire and sat myself down cross-legged on the floor again. My idea was to take a couple of shots of a finished model I would put together myself and present it to the teacher.

  Dinner time came ‘round again and, given it was close to Christmas, my dad had his friend drop in afterwards and they raised a glass of wine, then a glass of scotch. As I was asked to clean off the table after my dad and his pal’s ribaldry, and being in the kitchen alone, I took the drink glasses and noticed some remains that looked sorta like ginger-ale. The taste was deep and hard. I gasped for water and, taking a sip, I felt kind of good but a bit dizzy. I returned to my position on my bedroom floor and resumed the model building. “How do I get this glue out of this little tube?” I asked myself. The model had so many pieces. “How does he do it?” I asked, trying to channel my brother’s finger dexterity.

  I managed to snap the end of the tube off with my teeth and noticed the smell was sweet but I had to get the glue out of my mouth. I couldn’t figure out how you could stick the pieces of the model together from such a small tube, still I hung in, rubbing at my nose in the process. I felt dry in the mouth and thought that ginger-ale drink in the kitchen was good. I snuck the bottle out of the cupboard my dad kept his ‘goods’ in and took another sip. I tip-toed to my model as I could hear the TV on in the rec room downstairs. My room smelled like glue as my fingers pulled and pushed the model into shape. I sneezed twice and my throat went numb.

  Next morning I took my model into class. “The wings are backwards,” my teacher informed me. “Where is the photograph?” “Well, there’s one on the model box. See,” I said, holding up the image of the Spitfire. “Yes but you were supposed to take a picture, no?” “The camera didn’t work ‘cause it got glue stuck on it,” I offered. “Well, you’re going to have to have an F for this,” my teacher announced for all to hear. More disappointed than embarrassed, I moped at my desk and thought: “At least it’s getting close to Christmas. Maybe I will have some more of that ginger-ale for the holidays. Maybe I should try playing my brother’s guitar.” It took me years to learn how to tune it. A sip of scotch always brings that laborious process up a notch. Thank God for automatic tuners. In the key of F — all is forgiven.

  VANCOUVER PINES

  Height. That’s the eye’s first experience as I wander this Pacific city with its shorelines and rolling streets. Then the myth of one bei
ng at the end of the continent (but for Alaska above you) and the feeling of lumberjacks and whales and islands that can take you even further away. But there’s little relief from your sense of wonder which becomes an entrapment of sorts. An entrapment bound by sea on one side and mountains on the other. The immediate feeling is at once a sense of freedom and being stuck. Together these two sensations run with you and you find the salmon inevitably fantastic yet the bears a bit too plentiful — especially when you wander off the well-trodden paths by mountain golf courses — and then as they say — you are really “in the woods.”

  Black bear! Ah oooh! At least it’s not a wolf or a grizzly chasing you up a tree. You got a chance to escape and leave Big Smokey to all the salmon berries and mud he wants. Of course, he can be a she and that’s even more dangerous. You’d feel like a major moron if you came across a mother who wanted space for her young. You know, intruding without any indication you had planned a visit. Didn’t call ahead. You learn respect fast unless you’re an idiot. You don’t even have to be ecologically-minded. Just scared out of your pants. If you’re lucky you find your well-hooked ball and scurry out. If you’re not, you’re walking mud-trails back to the greenhouse with your pants full of burrs and your head full of growls and teeth.

  Then of course there is the placid approach. There you are on the sixth hole ready to tee off and in the distance a black bear and her cubs walk leisurely across the fairway and you and your day partners wonder at the loping ease with which the mother bear leads her young across this man-made acreage. But at least here you can see the furry enemy. Not like playing a filled-in-swamp outside of West Palm Springs, Florida when you thought your ball was going to land smack on the green and it ends up by a mini-lake, just on the edge of the water trap. So you think: Maybe I’ll retrieve that one. I’m down to three so I better, otherwise I’m gonna have to borrow another and go through the ritual of You lost another — ha ha! ribaldry known to many a once-in-a-blue-moon golfer.