during the daylight hours. There is no sky, it is an illusion of light refracting across our atmosphere. There is no blue sky. There Is No Blue Sky. THERE IS NO BLUE SKY. Thinking, believing, there is a blue sky is mankinds first religion. Religion is aboot limits, and Man needed limits because Man is constantly afraid so He chose to worship The Sun and The Day because daylight shows us the earth while darkness shows us the universe. So even before the debate started on whether or not we should get out of our tree we’ve been worshipping lies and terrified of Truth. This could explain some of “Trudeaumania” (1969-2000)… and maybe even its recent parody “Trudeausuperfluous” (2007-2007).
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I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
… we were all going to die tomorrow. I grew up knowing tomorrow was never coming… so, where’s the Atomic Bomb I was promised? Because nobody ever trained me for what forever was going to feel like. For the first eighteen years of my life I was raised to be prepared for the bombs to fall… but the fucking things never came. Another eighteen years later and I’m getting pretty tired of waiting so somebody better start pushing some fucking buttons soon because I am definitely not prepared to wait another eighteen fucking years for there to be no tomorrows.
Todays activists keep moaning aboot how we’ll be held accountable by The Children Of Tomorrow, but no generation ever holds the previous one to account. No one is to blame except those living in today’s bombed out village or industrial wasteland: “I didn’t break it, it was broke when I walked into the room, and I’m not picking it up because I had nothing to do with breaking it.” After all, the survivors must be to blame otherwise why would they be punished for living there in the first place? No one is ever held accountable therefore everyone is both blamed and blameless. There must be consequences, we must start penalizing retroactively. We must start beating the elderly more often and with more gusto. Bats. We should all have bats.
“Bach Piano Concerto No.7 in G minor BW”
…for my friend Sisyphus and her sore brain.
In 1906 A Canadian Inventor Stepped Up To The Mic…
…and became the first person to transmit his voice via electromagnetic waves. On Christmas Eve, 1906, Reginald Fessenden — born near Montreal — made the first radio broadcast in history. Radio operators on ships in the Atlantic and Caribbean became the first people to hear a human voice emitting from equipment specially fitted to receive the broadcast. These radio operators and their Captains heard Fessenden speak for a few moments, then he played a record, and finally played “O Holy Night” on his violin, singing the last verse as he played. Fessenden then asked his listeners to send letters telling him where they were when they heard the broadcast… making him the first in a long line of night-time Radio Disc Jockey’s to wonder aloud “is anyone out there?”
There is a lot of confusion regarding how certain inventions come aboot. The Light Bulb was invented, for example, by James Woodward — a Canadian who, several years later, sold the patent to Thomas Edison. The alkaline and Lithium batteries were also invented by a Canadian, and credit again was given to Edison. It has also been assumed that because Guglielmo Marconi managed to send a few beeps and boops to and from a transmitter that he invented radio. He didn’t. This gets a little more complicated because Marconi did his beep boop thing in Canada, and his experiments were mostly paid for by the Canadian government, while the majority of Fessenden’s work was done privately in America. This has long been a problem with the Canadian Government… we rarely trust our own until they’ve become successful elsewhere, meanwhile any old European Fascist can use their accent to get a taxpayer grant.
Marconi later won, along with Karl Ferdinand, the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics “[for]their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy”. But it was Fessenden, again, who invented wireless telegraphy back in 1900. In fact almost all of Marconi’s work, especially the work which won him a Nobel Prize, was based on Fessenden’s inventions. When he was a child Fessenden had watched Alexander Graham Bell — a fellow Canadian (kind of) — give a demonstration on how to use the telephone. Two decades later, in 1900, near Virginia, Fessenden transmitted the world’s first wireless telephone message using Wireless Telegraphy: “One, two, three, four. Is it snowing where you are Mr. Thiessen? If it is, telegraph back and let me know.”
In the end, though, it was Marconi who got rich by being a better businessman and self-promoter… he was also great friends and a dinner companion with Italian Premier Benito Mussolini, but this seems to get left out of the school textbooks. Ahem. Anyway. Reginald Fessenden went on to improve the Light Bulb, work later credited to Thomas Edison. Fucking Edison. Fessenden won the Scientific American’s Gold Medal in 1929 for the Fathometer, a device which could determine the depth of water under a ship’s hull. Eventually Fessenden held 500 patents, including the invention of the turbo-electric drive for ships, insulating electrical tape and many other underwater wireless communication devices including “the first practical man-made sonar oscillator”, which allows for ship to submarine communications. And what else did Marconi do? Oh yeah, he had some pleasant dinner conversation with Mussolini. Because they were both fascists… and good friends.
Reginald Fessenden, the man who invented three forms of wireless communications, died mostly in obscurity in Bermuda. The Canadian Encyclopedia still does not recognize his work and when American science texts mention his work they usually refer to him as the “American Marconi.” When he died his patents had all been sold by his much richer investors to large American companies, although he had recouped some money through several lengthy lawsuits. Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was born October 6, 1866, in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and died July 22, 1932. According to Wikipedia “three of his most notable achievements include: the first audio transmission by radio (1900), the first two-way transatlantic radio transmission (1906), and the first radio broadcast of entertainment and music (1906).” Those are some spectacular achievements… someone should tell those Nobel people.
Phil The Alien (Comedy — 2004)…
a movie aboot a beaver, an alcoholic shape shifting alien, his band and Jesus.
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My grandfather built dams for forty years… in fact he built most of Canada’s mega-projects between 1960 and 1985. He was the project manager or engineer for projects like Churchill Falls, Rogers Pass (the longest railway tunnel in the western hemisphere) and the Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine (Boucherville) Tunnel. He also consulted on dams and other projects built in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Algeria. On one of his projects a mountain was in his way so he filled it with dynamite and made it disappear into a mushroom cloud (it’s one of my favourite photos). He is the only non-Architect to have his work become a part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. His daughter, my mother and an Historian, is in the process of having a beaver added to our family crest. All of which is ironic considering what my grandfather did to the beaver which built a dam on the river feeding the lake he had his cottage on. It may have taken two attempts but I’m pretty sure that beaver is still in orbit. Beavers are strange and very resilient, animals. They’re also very large. Surprisingly large. Especially at 2am on a dark street in Ottawa when you’re walking home listening to White Zombie at maximum volume on your Walkman. They’re actually large enough that when you first see one on a dark street in Ottawa you’ll think “Holy shit, look at that massive dog… wait… dogs with a hump that bad in their spine would be incapable of walking around dark streets just west of downtown Ottawa.” Then your next thought would be “Holy fuck… is that a fucking wolverine? Having never seen one outside of a comic book it may very well be a wolverine. Tonight,” you’ll think “may be the night I die of a wolverine attack. How fucked is this?” But then the hairy beast will freeze and lift its huge flat tail and slap it on the asphalt with a sound which will barely register over “More Human Than Human” — which would actually make it very loud — and it will give you a vital clue as to what this weird little beast thing is. “Holy Jeezus Fuck…” you’ll say out loud in shock and disbelief, “that’s a fucking beaver.” At least that’s what I said… after 2am just west of Ottawa’s downtown while walking to my apartment in Hull, Quebec. They say an adult beaver can grow to be four feet long and apparently they can’t see very far. They’re mostly right. It was spring and it had been raining for days and the Ottawa River was running fast and high, which might explain why this massive wannabe jacket was actually waddling in the direction of Ottawa’s Little Italy. But it had caught my scent (or heard Rob Zombie) and was now rearing back on its hind legs and I swear to Christ that big-tooth bastard was up to my chin and pissed off enough that it was chattering those humongous teeth at me with those little front claws clasping and unclasping the air like it was trying to decide whether to leap for my neck or draw a pistol. You haven’t felt fear until you’ve stared into the blank brown eyes of a chattering beaver. Actually at this point I was kind of laughing. Pissed off or not it was just a freaking beaver. So I did my best to herd it back towards the river and away from Ottawa’s Italian community. It took aboot an hour — beaver do not move very fast even when pissed off — but I walked the confused beaver back to the calm water of the Lebreton Flats Canal. Once across the bridge and into Hull I found another confused beaver trying to chew through a chain link fence at the EB Eddy plant. But it was late and I was too tired to play with beaver anymore.
“And who doesn’t love Candy?”… asked the clinically depressed hunter. “My parents.” replied the prostitute. “Phil The Alien” is a perfect example of why the Canadian movie system sucks. Phil The Alien has an excellent cast, first time director Rob Stefaniuk does a great job with his zero budget, and he has written one of the funniest pure-Canadian humour movies ever put on screen. But there are two problems with Phil The Alien… 1) the pre-production budget. Stefaniuk had to take the main role because he couldn’t afford a leading actor. Very few Canadian movies can raise enough money during pre-production to sustain a movie through to the end. So Rob became “Phil” and a stuffed toy became “The Beaver”, Phil’s best friend. The two special effects were not bad in an Apple iMovie kind of way, but the “ray-guns” were toys. Literally. 2) the distribution. English-speaking Canadian movies are not distributed to English-speaking Canadian theatres so much as left at their door where they may be picked up and adopted by a kindhearted manager who may play the movie for a few days but, really, he has so many better paying movies which have all sorts of pre-production money and who can afford to have their characters carrying real guns with real blanks and not cap-guns. If you want to learn more aboot why Canada’s movie industry mostly sucks I wrote all aboot this a while back in: Five Essential Facts AbootCanadian Movies.
Phil The Alien definitely does not suck… basically the movie is a riff on the classic Walter Tevis novel “The Man Who Fell To Earth”. Phil — not his real name — is a shapeshifting alien who can move stuff with his mind and levitate who survives a spaceship crash which kills his father. He’s found by a (roughly) 15-year old kid who offers Phil medicine in the form of whiskey. A bewildered and drunk Phil is then chased out into the wilderness of semi-Northern Ontario by the kids clinically depressed father, and is taken in by a beaver who may or may not be an assassin contracted by a super-secret American agency. Eventually Phil finds God in a jailhouse conversion, sobers up and heads out on the road with his rock band. In between Phil crash landing and his escaping Earth this movie has some of the funniest moments and lines in Canadian cinema and definitely the coolest moment involving a song by Rush. The stunning Nicole DeBoer plays a Quebecois assassin with a Parisian accent while Joe Flaherty — one of the original SCTV group — voices “The Beaver” and the great Graham Greene plays Wolf the bartender. There are a couple of scenes involving the leader of the super-secret American force of baddies that suck pretty hard, but the scene where two puppies get killed with a cheese-grater more than makes up for any minimal suckage. Overall I think the moral is “alcohol is your friend, but never trust a beaver… especially the talking ones carrying sniper rifles”
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Phil The Alien: Canadian Movie
Phil The Alien Trailer (2004)
Directed by Rob Stefaniuk
Starring Rob Stefaniuk (Phil), Nicole DeBoer (Madame Madame)
and Joe Flaherty as “The Beaver”
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I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
FUBAR (Comedy — 2002)…
a movie aboot mullets, beer, heavy metal, Canadians and a cancerous right nut.
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Fuckin’ eh, just give’r boys… holy good keerist did I have a mullet back in the day. Long in the back? Four inches past the shoulder blades. Short in the front? Right up to the hair-line. Black jeans, thick clunky white running shoes, a Guns n’ Roses Tour shirt and a bulky army surplus jacket in which I could hide ten bottles of beer. That was my uniform back in the mid to late 1980’s.
Every weekend was a 14-hour Risk marathon where you brought your own two-four and everybody pitched in for a couple ounces of weed or maybe a few chunks of hash. Halfway through the weekend we’d make a drunken midnight border run into Quebec for more beer and munchies using the country backroads in my friends busted station wagon.
Sometimes ten of us stuffed into the wagon bouncing around and hitting the ceiling as we skipped from one pothole to the next then to the next and then that one and that huge one just near the blind switchback curve that never made any sense at all — how fucking drunk were those road builders anyway? Aboot as drunk as us.
Always the same jokes then back to the farm house where we’d call our friend the Big Shot Montreal Radio DJ and request Blue Oyster Cult or Led Zeppelin or Big Country and get a charge when he’d mention our names over the stereo with the oversized speakers.
Then it’d be time to take out the guns and start doing some midnight barn hunting. Shotguns, rifles,pistols, a sawed off 410 shotgun with a two foot-long muzzle flash, a .375, a 10 and two 12 Gauge shotguns… line up the empties and give’r. Sometimes we’d take the tractors — a little Massey, a big John Deere and a tiny John Deere riding mower — and tear around in the fields.
A few nights we even took them out onto the highway for some tractor-on-tractor drag racing. Usually by the end of these constantly consistent weekends we were drinking Coke mixed with Folgers coffee crystals and scrounging in the freezers and cupboards for tins of beans in tomato sauce or smoked kippers, scraping the coffee table for the last ghost remnants of hash or going back into the ashtrays looking for roaches. I was a teenage headbanger, a hoser and I did my best to give’r every weekend.
Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition…FUBAR the movie was filmed in and around Calgary, Alberta and cost aboot as much as the filmmakers could get out of their VISA accounts and maybe whatever mom and dad would kick in… like the occasional meal or floor to sleep on.
FUBAR debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in the ‘Park City at Midnight’ category to rave reviews. The Hollywood Reporter called FUBAR “One of the top 10 movies to watch” and The National Post proclaimed it “An overnight cult classic”.
There are these two headbanging hosers with giant mullets who grew up together. They’re best friends. They shotgun beer together, they’ve got a band and this third guy show up and wants to make a documentary aboot “the average man”. So they agree and everyone becomes famous. It’s actually aboot these two comedians who came up with “hoser characters” based on people they knew “back in the day”.
It’s a ‘mockumentary‘ that people on the street mistake for a real documentary, at which point they then react in bizarre and funny ways. Sound familiar? Sound like maybe some British dude’s movie aboot America and Kazakhstan? Of course both are riffs on Spinal Tap… but still.
The reactions from the people who the filmmakers find along the way are hilarious and disturbing. There’s also a cancerous right ball and a totally unexpected and weird death scene with a bizarre wake and funeral.
FUBAR definitely does not suck, it’s soundtrack includes AC/DC, Iron Maiden, The New Pornographers and SUM 41, and it’s definitely worth seeing if only to get a glimpse into the wacked and wacky world of the Canadian headbanger. But also if you want to piss youself laughing… at people like the teenaged me. Which, really, when I think aboot it, probably isn’t that cool for you to be doing. Fuck you’re an asshole. FUBAR’s also a really good tutorial on how to properly shotgun a beer. Wanna shoot a couple with me? See? I can only stay mad for so long. Beer makes friends.
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FUBAR: Canadian Movie
FUBAR Trailer (2002)
Directed by Michael Dowse
Starring David Lawrence (Terry) and Paul Spence (Dean)
“The Hockey Song”; ‘Stompin’ Tom and the Hockey Song’ (1973)
Even Stompin’ Tom’s Taking For The Habs Now…
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There Has Been A Tradition For Forty-Years…
…in Canada where we welcome the spring when the Maple Leafs are out. Every year since 1967 the Toronto Maple Leafs — of the National Hockey League — either fail to qualify or are out of the playoffs by mid-March or early April. This year the Leafs were out in April, a little later than some years but still worth the wait. Obviously, with Global Warming, the Leafs will be out much earlier in coming years. So next year expect the Maple Leafs to be out in February, in 2009 they’ll probably be out around Christmas… somewhere even the drowning polar bears are weeping for Leaf Fans.
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If you find a broken link, or the YouTube stuff isn’t loading
properly, let me know and I’ll find an alternative…
I’m Canadian, it’s what we do. Off the ice.
cultural sn:afu 