TriumphAnt

Whine o’ the week:

A couple days ago, I called a 1-888 number to order a replacement bunch of cheques on one of my bank accounts. It was about 10 pm. After some ten minutes of following instructions and entering the appropriate responses (following each with the inevitable octothorpical “pound key”), I was directed to proceed to the point at which my final order would be confirmed. Only then did I receive a recording advising me that “Our hours are [whatever they had decided was 'regular office hours']. Please call back then.”

The next day, when I did call back, I let the hapless actual person with whom I connected know exactly what I thought of an organization that elects to go the automated ordering route, but then chooses to shut you out when you call outside “normal” hours (is there such a concept any more in this era of 24-7 everything?) and only telling you of this fact after you’ve spent ten minutes processing your order. He had the honesty to inform me I was not the first person to make this complaint, but was not possessed of the authority to make the change himself.

When we reached the point where he wanted to know how many cheques I wanted, I asked him what their pricing structure is. “You can get 50 free; a second 50 will cost you $30, plus shipping.”

You tell me, please. Can a hundred copies of an item possibly cost $30 more to print and ship? (Hint: The correct answer is ‘no’, until you begin talking about an object with a serious technical complexity or a significant weight, a combination cellphone and locomotive, say.)

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Never say never, as someone infinitely wiser than I once intoned. (And no, I don’t mean the Cubby Broccoli estate.)

If anyone has been reading this blog long enough to recall my rant a long time ago when I recounted a family sojourn to a movie at one of the great, garish, gaudy and noisy Cineplexes on the same night as Opening Night for the (then) latest Harry Potter movie, you will also recall that I swore up, down, left, right and nine ways from Sunday that being anywhere near a Cineplex on the night a new Harry Potter movie opened was something I would do in future only after I had persuaded myself it would be an improvement over my alternate proposed diversion – sitting down at a wooden table and systematically driving large and rusty carpenter’s nails through my hand with a croquet mallet.

(Hello… Guinness? Is a 125-word long sentence cause for any interest on your part? No, OK… but you say it is cause for apologizing to anyone forced to read it? Oh, I see. OK… sorry everybody. But I digress.)

On a recent, otherwise perfectly sane Friday evening, we were entertaining a friend of my daughter’s who was staying over because her parents were out of town for the weekend. In appreciation, her mother had thoughtfully swung by a local Cineplex and purchased, in advance, tickets to the very first night’s showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the most recent screen treatment of author JK Rowling’s bank account. It took some persuading, but my infinitely wiser spouse suggested an entirely novel approach to the scenario – “Why not just decide you’re going to enjoy yourself?”

All day Friday, I listened with growing fear to the day’s news reports of full-house attendance at the matinee showings, plus the news that the day’s advance ticket sales had broken all records for the advance ticket sales for the previous record holder – the final episode of the Star Wars sextaga. And all day long, visions of near-maniacal hordes of Potterphiles – most of them former 10-year old girls who became ardent Potter fans from the moment the first book appeared, and who now likely were all 20-year old co-eds dressed up in skimpy little Hogwarts schoolgirl uniforms fitting considerably more tightly for the passage of the intervening years since their wearers had attended the very first Harry Potter movie… (Hmmmm. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe my wife’s advice was going to be not so hard to realize after all.)

Unfortunately, because I was going to be chauffeuring, I couldn’t fall back on my preferred anaesthetic of a couple glasses of a really fine Cabernet Sauvignon… or a couple glasses of 20-year old Taylor-Fladgate tawny port… or a couple glasses of the Isle of Skye’s Talisker single malt with a smokiness so powerful you would swear someone has perfected the art of grilling scotch… or a couple glasses of Maker’s Mark single-barrel bourbon… (or of course the aforementioned nails malleted through my hand)

But as it turned out (was it not ever thus?), the actual experience was all the more anti-climactic for its having borne no resemblance whatsoever to my panicky imaginings. Oh there were many, many Potter fans present, to be sure. But they were incredibly well-behaved and although the line of eager fans waiting to get into the theatre was indeed festooned with Hogwarts scarves and the occasional wizard hat, it was also festooned with a sea of mp3 players and even laptop computers on which, amazingly, at least one group of fans over whose shoulders I snatched a peek were engrossed in watching one of the previous Potter movies.

In fact, the worst thing that happened to me that whole evening came when I was hauling a flimsy cardboard sheet hilariously misnamed a “tray” onto which the helpful snack counter clerk had placed the two-and-a-half gallons of Coke back to our seats (the result of my ill-considered shoulder-shrugging acquiescence to the chirped, “For only 65 cents more, you can Super-Size it!”). Unfortunately, one of the lids had been affixed only loosely to the barrel-sized cup. Coupled with the complete non-stability offered by the so-called tray, I had a shirtfront covered in Coke by the time I got back to my seat.

And the movie? It was everything a complete onscreen entertainment experience should be. The comfort level of already knowing the principals meant that you could be catapulted into the plot almost immediately without having to sit through first-time “establishing scenes” that line up who is who and where each fits into the Hogwarts hierarchy. As a result, there was much more emphasis given to the more human elements of the characters this time round, with a not-so-subtle emphasis on relationships, the value of good friends and the ability of a really good friendship to overcome the occasional bump in the road.

Oh there was some moralizing – for example, we must believe that in a fair fight, good will pretty well always triumph over evil. (SPOILER ALERT / SKIP THIS PARENTHESIS IF YOU DON’T WANT A PARTIAL PLOT REVELATION: Actually, make that “real good”, because at least one of the characters on the “good” guys’ side gets killed in this outing.)

Other moralizing was connected to the aforementioned value of good friendships. But none of it was used like a club to bash you over the head. There is a lovely moment near the end of this movie where the films’ three best friends are standing together on a Hogwarts’ balcony at end of term. As they stand watching the bustle of departing friends, new friends and various and sundry students for their (I assume) summer break, with arms locked together, it is given to Hermione to speak what it probably on all their minds: “It’s not going to be the same ever again, is it?”

No, luv, alas. It isn’t. And even if what is to come is better in some ways, they – and we – are compelled to come to terms with the simple fact that we must always move on from countless times and places in our lives that we no doubt wish we could hold onto forever.

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“I can’t go back there any more; you know my key won’t fit the door.”

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Which leads me to board a similar train of nostalgic thought related to another couple of recent movie viewing experiences. Not so very long ago, a friend of mine leant me yet another superb Martin Scorcese rockumentary. “No Direction Home” is an in-depth three-hour-long look at the early career of Bob Dylan. Dylan fans will revel in it; those new to Dylan will be mesmerized at the discovery of just how much power, if not outright divinity, was imparted to him by his legions of protest-driven fans.

I count myself somewhere between the two categories. (Between “fan” and “new”, that is.) I’m nowhere near – yet – being among those who have deified the man but certainly one of my most heavily-played albums while I was in university was his “Highway 61 Revisited”. In my case, it was because I really liked the poetry in “Desolation Row”, a song I still find myself ear-worming from time to time. But the album also unleashed what is now pretty well acknowledged to be Dylan’s anthem, “Like a Rolling Stone”. (With the title song, Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” is generally acknowledged by music critics to be “not his best but certainly his most influential”. But I digress.)

What really surprised me was the discovery that before I got interested in seriously listening to music, there was a time when people – whole auditoria full of people – were absolutely passionate about the music they listened to, and its meaning.

The Dylan film, for example, makes much of July 25, 1965, the day at the Newport Folk Festival when he strode onto the stage with an electric guitar and a back-up band to shatter his legions of folk fans for whom he was never supposed to be more than a voice, a message and an acoustic guitar. Depending on whose version of events you believe, any number from “not that many” to “half the audience” became exceedingly angry. Pete Seeger claims in the film that he was prepared to take an axe to the cables linking the microphones to the sound system, thus achieving what might well have been folk music's first-ever case of going ballistic. Here’s a brief, but pretty graphic summary of the effect Dylan had on the crowd that evening.

In the Scorcese film, we are also taken to a follow-up concert in England, where fans are heard screaming things like “Judas!!” and “Where’s Woody Guthrie, Bob??” while Dylan takes a couple seconds to tell them, “C’mon, this is still protest music” before cutting loose with his newly-electronicized sound.

The movie also shows the power given to some musicians at the time. Dylan appears at the same Washington march where Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” speech, and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie are shown giving concerts where, clearly, it was important that their message be heard, regardless of apparently minuscule audiences in some cases.

But Dylan is accorded the last laugh by Scorcese. Despite his apparent onstage determination to take his music in his own direction, it is also obvious that the angry audience response has clearly jarred him. In a later concert, once more in England when he steps to the stage one last time before entering an eight-year long concert absence, amid yet another round of audience boos at the appearance of his electric guitar and his band, Dylan turns to his back-up musicians and can be heard clearly saying, “OK, play it f-**-king LOUD!”

Here endeth Part 1 of the introduction

Part 2: In 1970, a group of (then) pretty darned well-known musicians boarded a CN train in Toronto after playing a concert at the Canadian National Exhibition. They included The Grateful Dead, The Band, Janis Joplin, blues legend Buddy Guy, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, among others. The trip, which stretched into a five-day rail journey west with a series of four or five mega rock concerts at each major stop, was the subject of a whole bunch of film that someone shot, but which promptly vanished into an archive somewhere until it was only recently discovered a couple years ago. Someone then had the wisdom to string it all together into a movie and “Festival Express” – the name given to the week-long rolling party – is the result.

To some, it will be fascinating just because it has some new footage of dead people, including just a barn-burner of a finale by Janis entitled “Tell Mama”. To others, will fascinate because it has captured, as did Woodstock, the spirit of a generation that really did get pissed off at “the PIGS!” who wouldn’t let them get into a concert free, and who called absolutely everyone “Man”.

And to others – like me, I discovered – it generated a strong but wistful sense of nostalgia for a time and state of mind I can’t (or more accurately shouldn’t) go to again – because I’m a responsible adult and getting so drunk that you can’t even see straight is just not something I could get away with (nor would I want to). There’s a scene, for example, where the event’s organizers actually bring the train to a stop somewhere in Saskatchewan because (a) its passengers have drunk its bar car utterly dry; and (b) the conductor knows that the station is right beside a liquor store. After passing the hat and collecting over $800, the musicians then proceed to deplete the store of a large chunk of its inventory, including a huge promotional bottle of Canadian Club.

The next scene is probably a couple hours later in the bar car and Rick Danko, one of the members of The Band, is regaling the car with a slurred blues tune, “Ain’t no more cane”. Sitting right beside him, equally blasted, is Janis Joplin and one can only imagine that the entire car by this time is well and truly converted into an equally drunken state and is either in the bleary-eyed audience or trying (badly) to be part of the chorus. The musicians on this cut are identified on the movie’s official website* only as “Rick Danko and Janis etc”.

I know I certainly wound up at many a university party as an “etc”. Once, back before a glass bottle was considered a possible terrorist weapon and barred from concerts, I had armed myself with a 26-ounce bottle of Alberta vodka. Not wanting to carry two bottles (one of mix), I had simply dumped an entire envelope of Tang crystals into the clear liquid, leaving myself with a single bottle of the world’s most potent screwdrivers. The concert in question was a Canadian band carnival, with the finale going to Crowbar. Crowbar was fronted by an enormous bear of a man named Kelly Jay, and he accented his stage image with a huge fur hat. This night, he was in party form. Feeding off the audience response, the vast majority of us no doubt oiled by lubrications as creative – if not more so – as my own un-watered screwdrivers, Jay eventually climbed atop a huge stageside speaker tower to lead a loudly drunken sing-along version of Crowbar’s single biggest hit, “Oh, What a Feeling”. I know I got back to the residence, hoarse to the point of laryngitis, after that show. But I’ll be darned if I can recall just how.

* Click “Enter site / USA and Canada” and make sure you’re speakers are on.

So partly because I am enveloped by this light fog of nostalgia, and partly as a message to the coming tidal bore (pun intended) of election coverage, I think I’ll leave the last word this time around to Mr Dylan:

The Times, They Are a-Changin’

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.