Last Week, This Week...

As I struggle with everything and all things, somehow "Bad Ambassador" by Divine Comedy makes me feel comfortable. I know I've posted it before but here it is again, because it makes me feel good.

Socio-political Drag-Queening

Suffering through the herky-jerkiness of post-bar boozing, let me TRY to describe tonight's moment of horrible revelation.

There I am in the bar, wearing another crotchy outfit, my intention to thwart the bad boys who arrive to pick up the cheap girls. I'm thinking: here I am, a plague, a negative thing, something which makes girls feel good and boys feel bad. Crotch, feathers, silliness. You bastard crappy men.

Then I speak to Rachel. At the video bar, she's sitting down and alternating water and alcohol. She starts off in the usual way: "I love your outfit, I respect what you're doing." So I move in to feel good and to try to be a little bit humble.

But then she says the Important Thing, which completely changes my impression of the night: "If I wore that outfit, people would think I was a slut."

I can't belive this: NOBODY HAS EVER SAID THIS TO ME. Fifteen years of doing drag -- silly, over-sexed girl drag -- and no female has ever explained to me that *I* am able to do something that SHE cannot do. She goes further: "When people look at you wearing those clothes, they say you're adventurous and fantastic. If I were to wear those clothes I'd just be a slut."

And holy cow...RACHEL IS RIGHT. Sitting there, drinking her water, without being accusastory or vicious, she has told me something I have NEVER REALIZED. I can't even begin to explain how this affects my personal idea of "what I'm doing." I can stand here and criticise women for being "over-sexed," meanwhile wearing a ridiculous outfit that no girl in the bar would ever THINK of wearing. Because I can be "odd" while she'd just be "sleazy."

Why am I wearing my outfit? To thwart the men. But what do the WOMEN think when they see it? I'm sad to say that I've never thought about it. "Duh," say the females I ask. "Of course, I could never get away with wearing something like that." They feel too fat or too thin or too conservative or too desperate, and there I am just NOT CARING.

Sigh.

Weighing In & Getting Kicked Out

My hostessing never went further than handing out cheese and Ritz crackers at my parent's parties. But I've always wanted to be the perfect hostess, and I have always fantastized about an actual JOB as a hostess. I think such a job would be wonderful because I'd get to meet lots of strangers without needing to actually spend much time with any of them.

To improve my party skills I bought Betty White's "Teen-Age Dance Book" (1952). Besides teaching you how to cha-cha-cha, it also provides tips for dressing, dating, and party organization.

There are far too many gems in the book for me to present them all at once, but here's my personal favourite: Betty White rhetorically asks "Wouldn't you like to try some new ideas for admission to a Dance instead of the usual 'Tickets please at the door'?" One of her ideas is sure to catch on in any social group...it's called "Weighing In."

If you can borrow the school scale, you can have fun weighing your guests upon their arrival at the Dance. Those weighing above a specified number of pounds agreed upon by the Committee could be charged for the price of admission. Guests whose weight falls below that number could be admitted free. Or just the opposite.

Because EVERYBODY wants to be publically weighed before a dance.

Betty and I can't turn you into the perfect Dance guest overnight, but I can leave you with her list of strict prohibitions, which she entitles "NEVER, NEVER, NEVER."

• Chew gum at a dance.
• Slouch while sitting or sprawl legs.
• Remain seated while being presented to an older person.
• Cross a dance floor. (Go round the outside.)
• Leave a girl standing on the floor.
• Create a scene (in emergency request the assistance of a host, hostess, or chaperone).
• Indulge in "horseplay," sliding, or running.
• Be inattentive or unco-operative while the hostess runs a mixer.
• Slight one person in order to dance with another.
• Serve yourself with refreshments before looking out for others.
• "Court" or indulge in awkward "holds" while on the floor.
• Become a dance exhibitionist.
• Criticize your partner's dancing.
• Doodle on the furniture or play with decorations.
• Join the dance without acknowledging hostess.
  

The Spoken Film

I'm going through the back issues of The New Yorker chronologically, and they've finally gotten to "The Jazz Singer." The magazine's movie critic makes some interesting statements in the October 15, 1927 issue:

With a first-night audience clapping and bellowing with joy at the end of his first picture, at the Warner Theatre, Mr. Al Jolson stepped to the front of the stage with a tear in his eye and said he was glad they liked it. The film was "The Jazz Singer" and probably nobody liked it much... The shouting was about Mr. Jolson and the Vitaphone. I have said a lot of unpleasant things about the Vitaphone, but all my words are eaten.

The Vitaphone was a record carefully synced up with a reel of film; the record and the film played simultaneously, and the sound was amplified and played into the theatre. It was (at the time) the most effective way of syncing film and audio together, but it took two years before Warner Brothers found the right way to apply the process.

One limitation appeared to be that the sound needed to be "dubbed" by the performer, instead of recorded live at the same time as the filming. So it wasn't deemed practical to recall actors to re-speak their lines and try to sync them with the original film recording. Perhaps this was more complicated because the idea of "dialog" in a movie was an extremely loose one; the actors often ad-libbed (or babbled) during the filming, relying on the subtitles to tell the story.

For this reason it was probably considered more practical to only use the Vitaphone when exact synchronization wasn't necessary.

Previously, the film critic for The New Yorker had mentioned those applications for the vitaphone: playing marching music when the soldiers march home on-screen, for instance, or playing the sound of a motorcycle during a slapstick chase scene. But audiences accustomed to silent films found these intrustions noisy and weird.

It took "The Jazz Singer," with its musical interludes, to strike a comfortable balance and open the door to a new concept. And it took Al Jolson to perfectly dub his singing and his dialog into the Vitaphone.

That evening will probably turn out to be an epochal one in the history of the movies, for questions were answered and questions were raised. True, the speaking movie is not so new; but hitherto it has been a novelty without much grip. Now it has shown what it can do... An article in a recent Variety mentions spoken sub-titles, but that will not prove to be enough. In "The Jazz Singer" after the singing, or after a short bit of dialogue, the silent mouthings of the characters seemed flat and silly. A new and fertile field of writing, acting, and directing is in view, with possibilities that can hardly be guessed. Will the spoken film have to aim at two audiences, the metropolitan and the rural, instead of one as now?--and consequently make two separate types of pictures, one for the city people and one for those in the country?

He's correct that audiences would no longer be satisfied with the "flat and silly" silent films, but he's actually wondering if "metropolitan" audiences would remain loyal to silent films and "rural" audiences would demand the spoken film. This says something about either the snobbishness of "metropolitan" audiences...or, more likely, the snobbishness of film critics.

TAXES!

I resist doing my taxes because they consist of two hours of labour followed by some kind of bad news. We could at least be REWARDED for suffering through this ordeal, but to PUNISH somebody for finishing their taxes is pure sadism.

I have a splitting headache, a cramp in my hand, a facial tic, cold feet, an upset stomach, Morgellons disease, and a $550 debt to the government. I've never needed to pay this much before...it seems to be due to the Ontario Health Premium. If my $550 results in somebody getting timely cancer treatment then it's all worth it. Couldn't the last page of the T1 form have a picture of a smiling child in remission?

Après-Midi d'un Phone

We continue to unravel the mysteries of "The French Phone," using only New Yorker magazine as our guide. In the October 15, 1927 issue we get more details about Bell's telephone monopoly, and also finally learn the REAL name of the French Phone:

The French type of apparatus is increasingly popular. The company avoids the use of he term French phone, however: its official title is Bell system hand-set. Several hundred experts have been at work since this instrument was devised, improving it, but experiments still go on. The phone does not survive satisfactorily the rough treatment it receives, although it is as durable as the old desk type of instrument. Slamming the headpiece on to the delicate plunger and knocking the whole apparatus on the floor present problems in durability...

It is even now, however, superior to any other of its type, the engineers report, and is the only French instrument the company allows to be used. Employees are instructed to report any "alien" instruments and the company then orders them removed. In investigating faulty transmission the officials first determine whether the subscriber has an outlaw instrument...

Just Because it's Sunday: "Slippery People"

During the Talking Heads' stellar "Stop Making Sense" concert, the band slowly arrives -- one by one -- and are gradually joined by guest musicians.

Here we've got Funkadelic alumni Lynn Mabry and Edna Holt (Bernie Worrell isn't on stage yet but Jerry Harrison is up to the task). It's all incredible except for Tina Weymouth's parachute pants.

It's Sunday and it's beautiful outside. This is one of the most beautiful things I can think of. If you've never watched the concert video, now's the time. Listen to Weymouth's chunky-funky bass breakdown and check out two of the best backup singers around. And in case you didn't know it: yes, David Byrne is a wicked guitar player.

Wayout

Whenever I'm feeling particularly bored or aimless I find myself playing Paul Edelstein's 1982 game "Wayout." It's annoying -- endless featureless corridors, a map-stealing "Cleptangle," deliberately confounding mazes, and windy areas that seem to serve no purpose but to make the game longer -- but I'm a sucker for labyrinths and it's a good time killer.

If anybody can tell me how to use the fireflies to find the exits, that would be much appreciated.

Open Ears Festival: April 28

Whew! The final night. After lunch and drinks with my mom (and a few ZZs), time for:

7:30 PM - KWS: Urban/Wilderness

Or perhaps 8:00 PM, depending on your source. I came in late but managed to see most of what transpired.

I always assume that people "dress up" when they go to the Centre in the Square, and I'm always surprised that nobody does but me, which means I don't learn lessons very well. The KW Symphony performed four pieces, the first two of which I saw from a blurry perspective and far removed from the ideal acoustics.

Kleines Requiem fur eine Polka (Henryk Gorecki) and Crystal Fragments (Peter Hatch). Nope, I didn't like them. Didn't feel a thing. Had the usual thoughts about deliberate unconventionalness, though both pieces had a fair share of melody and structure. Sitting, staring straight ahead, thinking about my footwear, it ocurred to me that somebody looking at my face might think I were enjoying the music or at least paying attention. Usually you can tell when somebody is enjoying their own disconnected internal world, but not always. So I stared straight ahead, thinking that I might look appreciative, while only staring straight ahead. I tried to imagine how people look when they appreciate things, but I didn't want to experiment for fear of getting foundation on my gloves.

The world premiere of Linda Smith's Wilderness grabbed me by the heart and didn't let me go. Quiet and meditative, no gimmicks, it appeared to come out of her soul without guile or self-consciousness. Lovely.

Peter Hannan's Side with Entropy, however, wins this year's Muffy award for most awful Open Ears piece. In order to qualify for this award the performance must be high-falutin' and pretentious...and totally fail to achieve its goals. After introducing the piece as an attempt to blend electronic gadgetry and samples with a modern orchestra, Hannan bashed out an awful string of cheesy sci-fi boops and whizzes, even worse than the ones you saw on Star Trek. This might have worked if it somehow matched with what the orchestra was playing, but no...they were off on their own tangent. It was laughable and stupid. Not quite as laughable and stupid as last festival's opera about serial killers...but close.

At every festival there are people who rave about the performance even when you can tell they didn't like it. Two elderly ladies were gushing to each other afterwards: "It reminded me of...Star Wars! Or E.T.!"

10:30 PM - Scanner: Alphaville

(That picture up there is of Beetle and I waiting for the show to start...thanks for all the fun, Festival-Buddy!)

Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) gave us a smart and funny introduction to his project: radically recutting Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville" and providing a live soundtrack to it. Without the dialog -- and with most of the human scenes removed -- I might have found myself hungry for plot, but instead I just drowned in beautiful cinematography and remarkably human electronic music. Images of faces and buildings and cars and machines -- lots of machines -- with inexplicable body movements and long quiet static shots, I found it difficult to separate the music from the film. Sad and funny and over-the-top, not a single false note, sheer innovative brilliance without seeming forced or derivative. Loved it.

11:00 PM - Systatic

By midnight the party was just starting at the Former Kitchener Legion. Billed as sort of an unofficial "after party" for the festival, it was shaping up to be an shockingly average hip-hop night. No liquor, only beer and wine. Uncomfortably warm and stifling. People from the festival filtered away into the night, adequately replaced by the very young techno kids who were surely the target audience. The beginnings of a strange gut-rot and the realization that I'd put off getting sick for far too long: I was not feeling well and I couldn't stand the music.

Then the drums started piling up around the dancefloor and I knew we were in for some raucous tribal drumming.

Definitely time to leave before that happened.

As a postscript I dipped into Club Abstract, but my metabolism was winding down and alcohol wasn't going to help. Time to go to sleep and reflect on the festival.

By far, my favourite moments were Barnyard Drama and Scanner. I guess what I liked most about them were their willingness to embrace some degree of convention, and their largely unpretentious demeanor. It didn't hurt that they both consist of extremely talented people.

Those two shows alone were worth it but I saw enough other fun things to make it more than worthwhile. Now it's time to get back to my life, and I'm actually looking forward to that.

"Chewing Gum" - Addictive, Maddening

Ever since I first heard it at Delirium last month, I haven't been able to get Annie's "Chewing Gum" out of my head. I go to sleep humming it and I wake up humming it.

I figured the only cure was to find the CD ("Anniemal"), which turned out to be surprisingly difficult. But now that I've got it I can begin exorcising this demon, and I'll start by embedding the video:



By the way, those Delirium gals deserve credit for being way ahead of the culture curve. Annie might be old hat by now, but they were playing April March's "Chick Habit" years ago.