The Book or The Movie

I am currently reading Life of Pi. Having seen the movie and the vivid images it contained, only the strong recommendation of a friend now brings me to the book.

Two very different media. Strange bedfellows. My copy of Life of Pi bears a still from the movie on the cover and the words "Now A Major Motion Picture". People who have experienced neither book nor movie better get cracking here it seems to imply.

The usual progression is book to movie. We'll ignore those sad novels that are written from a script, following a movie or television show.

So which is better, the book or the movie? Since one is a spoiler for the other, which should it be? Is there a strategy for choosing which to experience first? Should I be scanning the news of upcoming films to see if I need to get in a book quickly?

A great book is no endorsement of the movie. One of my favourite novels is The Magus by John Fowles. Woody Allen once quipped that the only regret he had in life was going to see the film of The Magus.

I have always loved Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. At some point I read the source material, The Luck of Barry Lyndon, published in 1844 by William Makepeace Thackery. The disparity between book and movie is huge, but both creators achieve something unique. Kubrick gives us a straight rendering of the story, with only an unknown narrator joining in from time to time, all his words taken from Thackeray. And so Kubrick's skill as a film maker sweeps us along in the story. The final scene, two and a half minutes long, has four people around a table and although not a word is said the drama is
intense. Only a master could do this. Thackeray on the other hand has the main character tell the
story, and we quickly see two realities, his subjective rationalizations and biased views, versus the negative reactions of those around him to his raving egotism, which he continually misreads. This is the sort of social satire Thackeray was famous for, and that Kubrick has decided to not attempt in his film. The two men have largely created two different Barry Lyndons.

Books leave so much to the imagination, can interweave the exterior and interior worlds, handle great subtleties, use the poetry of words, say so much more in 350 pages than a film in ninety minutes, or even three hours. In a movie the characters are separate from us, there on the screen. In a book we are often aware of their thoughts and emotions and perhaps able to see them as ourselves.

Movies present us with ravishing images, can be wonderful blends of sounds or music. The sheer visual drama of a movie can be breathtaking, it's hard to imagine a writer doing equal justice to the Sun's Anvil sequence of David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia. But perhaps someone could describe it, that immense space of heat, dryness, blinding light and flat nothingness.

I love both books and film but prefer books. That someone made a movie of a boy and a tiger adrift in a lifeboat on the Pacific, and managed to create so much visual interest, is impressive. But I'm finding the book richer, my identification with Pi more meaningful. Nevertheless some images from the film haunt me, in particular the liquid eyes of the adult Pi, the actor Irrfan Khan.

Some Thoughts on the Novel Away, by Jane Urquhart

For some reason I was expecting this book to full of mood and poetry and clever language with little plot. Wrong on the last point! It's a wonderful tale of an inter generational family saga moving from Ireland to the shores of Lake Ontario and including historical events such as the Irish potato famine of 1845 and the politics of Thomas D'Arcy McGee, one of the Fathers of Confederation. Urquhart is a master of description, and the endless details she precisely presents of the natural world, or the everyday objects of people's lives, counterbalance the intense longings of the characters. Magic and mystery are liberally included, especially regarding the two young ladies who are "away" or spellbound, but Urquhart kept me sufficiently grounded that it never felt like a fairytale. I appreciated seeing the world through Irish eyes. And as someone who grew up on the shores of Lake Ontario, not so far from the book's O'Malley farm, albeit a hundred years later, the descriptions of lake and shore resonated deeply.

My (Brief) Time As a Poet.

In the Seventies my best friend was a poet, about to be published. Through him I met a gorgeous woman, also about to be published, who invited me to live with her. It only lasted a year, but during which time we went to many poetry readings and had writers over to our apartment, including her half brother, son of one of Canada's foremost poets. Despite all the verse swirling around me, I felt no urge to start stacking phrases vertically on the page.

Several decades later I found myself composing a poem in my head, wrote it down, and soon found a second one following it. I started going to a weekly reading series held in the corner of a bar, where I made a number of new friends. The poems kept coming, sometimes just a vague feeling that I had to explore to find out what it wanted to say. At other times some experience of mine provided the material, although I often felt uneasy, wondering to what extent I'd tampered with the details to serve the poem. Nevertheless I loved writing.

It was a time of wonderful poems and wonderful people. The poetry community in Toronto at that time was inclusive of all and every gathering was a celebration of our creativity. I was particularly pleased when I could perform from memory, or read something that made the audience laugh. Eventually over eight years I had about two hundred poems, and published a little chapbook. I was convinced that everyone should play with poetry.

Then it stopped. I kept trying to write but the poems fell flat. I think I had reached a certain level of ability and was stuck there. Perhaps I should have switched to a new style or a new challenge.

Recently I felt something inside trying to express itself and ended up with the best poem I've written in years. I hope that feeling comes again.

Hippie Redux: #37 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

Love-Ins, Happenings and Electric Circuses

I once went to a Toronto park for a Love-In. All I remember was a woman with a peace symbol painted on her chest, her décolletage only revealing the upper half.

Then there was an Electric Circus (1968-1970) on Queen St. E., modelled on a club in New York, sort of proto-disco and proto-rave. It held 38,000 square feet of floor space, a total environment, including a strobe-lit dance hall, chambers designed to effect specific effects (a “womb room” for instance), and costumed participants. I remember an earth-shaking playing of “South California Purples” (Chicago) in the main room - with dancing and strobe lights - it was a total spectacle.

And Happenings? Well, with a lady friend of mine I once visited a couple we knew in Toronto. We lit candles, turned out the lights, put on some Donovan, took our clothes off and all four got in a warm bath. Definitely a happening.

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Photo: Art Kane

Strange Days Have Found Us !

The new music of the Sixtie's was amazing for the variety of style and focus created by various bands. The Doors carved out their own unique territory. With surreal lyrics by Jim Morrison, theatrical arrangements by the band, and the inclusion of extended numbers on the first three albums (The End, When the Music's Over, Five to One), the Doors presented us with music as psycho-drama, dealing with the inner quest, exposing what is hidden behind assumptions, a balance between the carnal and the mystical. We'd never heard anything like it.

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The 1968 Democratic Convention, The Black Panthers, the Weathermen

Peace and Love was not on everyone’s mind in the Sixties.

In August of 1968 10,000 demonstrators arrived in Chicago to protest at the Democratic Convention. Chicago’s mayor, Richard J Daley, know for his dictatorial style, greeted them with 23,000 police and national guard. Mayhem ensued with beatings and copious tear gas in the streets. Eight of the organizers were arrested and put on trial for conspiracy to riot as the Chicago Eight, although after many years in court charges were dropped.

The Black Panthers were originally formed to police the police. Armed patrols shadowed the police in Oakland. Soon becoming a national organization, needless to say their existence was fraught with conflict with the government, and resulted in many deaths.

The Weathermen Underground undertook bombing of many government buildings, with advance warning to prevent human casualties. A secret leftist organization, they declared war on the United States.

The end of the war in Vietnam in 1975 reduced the radical agenda for many groups, although the current Black Lives Matter movement echoes the original concerns of the Panthers.

Hippie Redux: #34 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

Bitches Brew: Music was Music

I remember being in a communal hippie house in 1967 in New Hampshire. Several people were excited to bring home the new jazz album Sorcerer by Miles Davies. In those days music was music. We loved rock but any music that was new and fierce was ours, even from a forty-one year old jazz trumpet player. In 1970 Davis came out with Bitches Brew, a double album of long improvisations including electric guitar, electric piano and electric bass. The bass player, Harvey Brooks, was from a rock band called the Electric Flag. The music had strong funk, african and rock influences, was a huge hit, and was highly influential. It sat in my record collection with Let It Be by the Beatles and Sticky Fingers by the Stones.

Hippie Redux: #33 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

The Underground Press

During the Sixties there was a rapid expansion of newspapers known as the Underground Press. Most cities in North America had at least one, and others popped up in Italy, the UK, Australia and even India. Generally they conveyed all that was seen as revolutionary, counterculture and bizarre, with art work from the outer limits, long rants on this and that, and cartoons that were at best abstruse, at worst offensive. In San Francisco it was the Oracle, in Toronto the Harbinger. Most of these rags disappeared mid-Seventies, but the Georgia Straight, from Vancouver, was able to change and is still published today as an entertainment magazine.

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From Marilyn to Angela

When I have watched a Marilyn Monroe movie, that beautiful woman has always disappointed. It is hard to imagine today the role thought appropriate for women in 1960. It was basically being a housewife and subservience to men. Marilyn never had a chance to appear as a real person.

In 1964 a congressman suggested that gender equality be included in the Civil Rights Act, he was greeted with laughter, but the law passed with the amendment intact.

There were a number of factors that enabled a new role for women in the Sixties. Childcare came on the radar. Abortion, generally clandestine, became an option. The Pill was approved. Economic and social changes required more women in the workforce.

The Sixties saw a massive wave of activism on the part of woman. That most of the current activist organizations were dominated by male chauvinism became obvious, so women formed their own structures. The FBI infiltrated the movement, considering it the enemy. There was considerable dissension within the movement between mainstream and radical elements, but overall it was a time of great gains.

Many powerful woman came forward, either as activists or in print. Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir and Angela Davis (pictured).

Successful events included the protest at the Miss America Pageant in 1968, the Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970.

As with the struggle for racial equality, the struggle for women’s rights continues.

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Pictured: Several bands in front of one home.

San Francisco and the Summer of Love

Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco was an area of grand ornate Victorian mansions bordering on Golden Gate Park. In the early Sixties the cheap-rent rooming houses set up in the now run-down buildings attracted artists and musicians. Several local rock bands, including the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, lived communally each in their own house. With the freedom of the park next door and the Fillmore Auditorium and Avalon Ballroom not far, the area became the home of the Hippies. In January 1967 there was a Human Be-In in the park that drew 30,000. Communal groups like the Diggers, the Family Dog and the Free Clinic cared for the community and put on events.

The media covered it all. That summer, called the Summer of Love, I received a letter from a friend who had made it there. My hitchhiking took me as far as Cleveland where food poisoning and a hospital stay turned me around. But not others – 100,000 youth soon swamped the area. The scene became less than ideal. Dirt, disease, needles, abuse. In October a mock funeral was held called “Death of the Hippie” to encourage people to take the revolution back home.
The original culture, I suspect, slowly drifted out of the city to the North. In 1996-7 I made numerous visits to a girlfriend in Humboldt County, Northern California. Up in those wooded, pot-growing hills, I found many beautiful people, and discovered some of what I had missed in 1967.

For The Last TIme

A poem I wrote in response to my cancer diagnosis.

I want my friends to know
that I will die.

When is not important...2 days?
…20 years? ...63 months?

And I want to start dying
today - now in fact -
I've waited too long.

As I sit here for perhaps the final time
in the evening sunlight under this tree.
And every breath becomes almost my last.

And tonight, I’ll savour
scallops in white wine
as if it's the last time I may taste them.

And tomorrow, if I'm still alive, I will
walk to the club on College street
that always plays latin music.

And dance like there's no tomorrow.

How sad these people around me,
obsessed with only living -
careening through life.
The forward momentum they must maintain
somehow so strident, predictable.
With no idea where their mad
rush is heading.

No such craziness for me.
I'm just hanging around
balanced,
like a man who loves mountains.
The long climb up thrills him -
so does skiing all the way back down.

Ah, the sweetness of being mortal,
knowing I'm more ephemeral,
unique,
than the mountains the sky, the sea,
even that old tree over there.

How peaceful I feel sitting in a bar
enjoying what could be my last whiskey.
(Pleased I asked for an eighteen-year single-malt for the occasion.)

And that woman Anne
- eight months ago -
surely I need to send flowers now
in case she’s my final lover.

And I want my friends to know
that they will die.
I want my friends to start dying too,
to join me in dying.

And we'll sit there laughing, reading poetry to each other,
for maybe the last time.

Happy with our dying
and our living.

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The Voices of Bob Dylan

In the early sixties, Bob Dylan was the darling of the folk musical revival. He sang with the rough rural tones of his hero, Woody Guthrie. And some songs, like Blowing in the Wind, were anthems for the protest movement.

In 1965 he changed his voice. He mounted the stage at the Newport Folk Festival with a four piece band behind him, strapped on a Stratocaster electric guitar, and tore into “Maggie's Farm”. There was booing from the audience. His new music, with surreal lyrics, was sung in a wry, often sardonic tone, with words twisted and elongated.

In 1967, after a long seclusion, his voice became spare and prophetic on the album John Wesley Harding, one of my favourites.

Two years later we reacted in dismay with rumours his new album was country. Nashville Skyline had Dylan on the cover smiling in a cowboy hat and even included a duet with Johnny Cash. Reluctantly perhaps, we accepting his lowered pitch and more natural phrasing.

In the following decades his voice shifted from album to album. This year's album, Shadows in the Night, his 36th, finds him covering Frank Sinatra songs. It has received critical aclaim. Dylan probably feels he has the right to try some mellow crooning. Any roughness now comes from his 74 years.

This man wrote some of the best music of the age, stood as a mysterious and charismatic presence, and treated us to one of the most unique and changeling voices.

HIPPIE REDUX: #29 Why I'm Glad I'm Over 65!

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

Almost all my life I have lived in the modern rational western culture. It's worldview or understanding of reality has conditioned me and continues to impress itself upon me in a thousand subtle ways everyday. But despite our acceptance of it, this consensus reality is only an opinion about the nature of life and I believe rife with distortion and error. If I spent an hour within the body, heart and mind of a Yanomami native in the Brazil jungle, I might be amazed at how his reading of the real is different from mine. If I have had to continually wear blue-coloured glasses all my life, I soon fail to see the blue cast, but get a huge shock when I take them off.

There was a hope in the Sixties that taking LSD would be this shock. A shock to help you see that you are responsible for your own vision of life, rather than having it surreptitiously dictated to you by the dominant paradigm of the established order. Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.
It was suggested that every hippie do at least one LSD trip. I did my trip. It was beautiful, fun, but I can't say it was a game changer. I think it takes more than a few experiences of an alternate reality to develop an independent head. It is ongoing work, however much people like Timothy Leary (pictured) or Ken Kesey might have hoped otherwise. But I think a truth about our situation was emphasized.

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Photo: Art Kane

Jefferson Airplane, Take Me to the River !

This is one of my favourite bands of all time. They achieved a looseness and spontaneity in their music that was almost jazzlike. A wild and emotional feel. In Grace Slick and Marty Balin's duets they wound their voices in and out of each other like some ecstatic choir. With songs like White Rabbit, Somebody to Love, and the gorgeous Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil they were the ultimate San Francisco band. Photo: Art Kane.

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The Beatles !

Amazing how quickly the Fab Four entered our hearts. In the early days of Beatlemania the sheer joy and energy in their music was irresistable. So too the haircuts and cheeky manner. I remember sitting with friends in the cinema when Richard Lester's A Hard Day's NIght started playing. We were shocked that we almost couldn't understand their thick Liverpool accents, but we got their mad humour.

We heard eagerly every new single when it came out on the radio, and albums were major events. Their style began to shift with albums like Revolver, then came the magnificent Rubber Soul, followed by classics like Sgt. Peppers, and the White Album. Incredible music!
I saw them in concert in Toronto in 1965. It was almost impossible to hear what song they were playing, no wonder they stopped touring.
As with many bands who split up, solo work never achieved quite the brilliance as the ensemble. But John, George, Paul and Ringo all kept making great music. And Paul played a dynamic three hour arena set in Toronto this summer at the age of 73.
Their four very different personalites blended to a unique whole. We could love them all, but still have our favourite. Who was yours?

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Steal This Website !?!?

Abbie Hoffman was an american activist and perhaps one of the most colourful characters in the 60’s. He co-founded the Yippies (Youth International Party) in 1967, an organization that existed as anarchy only. The counterculture had two poles, the “flower power - change the world through love” extreme and the “revolution in the streets - off the pigs” side. The latter included the Black Panthers, the White Panthers (sic), the Anti-Vietnam War movement and the Yippies. Hoffman, like Jerry Rubin and others, was a master at theatre and communication and famously wrote a book called “Steal This Book”. He had trouble getting it published but then it sold well, (no records if it stole well!). Hoffman was one of the “Chicago Eight” charged with “inciting to riot” after the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. The drama of his life continued until his death in 1989.
Hoffman’s famous quote was, “We were young and arrogant and crazy and naive, but we were right!”

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Allen and Jack, New York City

Before Hippie There Was Beat

Jack Kerouac's classic novel, On The Road, was published in 1957, although written ten years earlier. It was thinly-veiled autobiography and portrayed the lifestyle of Kerouac's circle of friends, later known as Beats or the Beat Generation. Like the Hippies who followed them, Jack and his friends rejected the conformism and materialism around them.

They moved restlessly between New York, San Francisco, Mexico City, Paris and Tangiers. Their music was found in Afro-American jazz clubs. Their intoxicants were tokay and marijuana. Their joy was uninhibited sex and poetry as spontaneous as possible. They were some of the first white Americans to not only study the Buddha's path but try to embody it.

Many in the next generation found On The Road an influence, including Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Hunter S. Thompson and the Doors.

And while Kerouac succumbed to alcohol in the Sixties, Neil Cassady was the driver for Kesey's psychedelic bus, while others like William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all contributed to the counterculture. And Jack's dear friend, Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl, was not only considered a key Sixties figure but continued his passionate dedication to social activism, gay rights, Buddhism and wild poetry until his death in 1997.

From On the Road, “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn...” by Jack Kerouac.

From Howl,"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..." by Allen Ginsberg.

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Photography at 33 1/3.

The Sixties may not have been the best decade for photography, but there were two interesting developments. Much was done in portraiture, both of celebrities and musicians. And the one square-foot area of the LP record became a great mass media for both art and photography. Photographers like Art Kane, Robert Frank, Richard Alvedon, David Bailey, and Pete Turner made some stellar images. We enjoyed albums even before popping the shrink wrap. Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, In the Court of the Crimson King, Axis Bold as Love - Jimi Hendrix, Disraeli Gears - Cream, Grateful Dead - Aoxomoxoa, the Doors 1st, the Who Sell Out, Bookends - Simon and Garfunkel Pink Floyd - Ummagumma, Hot Rats - Frank Zappa, Let It Bleed - Rolling Stones, Bitches Brew - Miles Davis. Humour and shock was valued, although often banned in some countries (See the Blind Faith “girl with jet model” for instance). Pictured - The Mother’s of Invention by Art Kane. I am writing Hippie Redux every two days and also posting it on my facebook.

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It Came To This.

On May 4, 1970, four Kent State University students were killed and nine injured when members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire during a demonstration protesting the Vietnam War. I remember going down to the American Consulate in Toronto that day and watching people throwing paint at the building and police on horses chasing people in the crowd. Neil Young immediately wrote a protest song called Ohio and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young recorded it and rushed it out as a single. It mentioned Nixon, “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming” and repeated the lines “Four dead in Ohio” and “We’re finally on our own”. The song was banned on some AM radio stations. This image won the Pulitzer Prize and became a symbol of the counterculture’s alienation from the government and the military - industrial complex.  .....................photo: John Filo

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February 24, 1968, Volume 1, No 6,
Our Price: Twenty-Five cents.

A photo of the Rolling Stone magazine I have kept for 47 years. I read this mag continually and obsessively from the first issue til the late 80's. As well as keeping me up on musicians and turning me on to great albums, the photography was often excellent (see Annie Leibovitz - John and Yoko cover for instance) and they always had one in-depth report on some social or cultural phenomena (usually bizarre, usually from California, Hunter S. Thompson anyone?).