Confessions of a Boho Cinemaniac: Nothin’ Beats My Local Art Moviehouse (Take That, Becardiganed Bourgeois Idolaters of Box Office!)

When I’ve had my fill of pixilated airborne snakes and pirate sideburns, I make my way to the humble little picture house in my neighbourhood. I duck in, buy popcorn from the Tammy Faye look-alike who’s always smoking, and sit back to enjoy a good flick. I find I don’t even need to bring a date to enjoy myself.

With only one screen, the Cinéma de L’Amour will never have the greenbacks to serve up Box Office dynamite. Instead, their programmers scour the independent and foreign circuits (especially, it would seem, France and the Czech Republic) to bring me reels you’ll never see at your suburban, quiet-desperation, Starbucks-sipping Cineplex.

As a regular, I’m welcomed by name. The other kinoscenti are local eminentoes: landlords, professional chess kibitzers, and Portuguese men in their fifties who tend to keep their bulky coats and dark sunglasses on until the film starts. These guys are so into it that they won’t even sit next to you while watching. You can see them nodding furiously in recognition of the director’s auteurial savvy. And they’re not about to be distracted by their bladders—hence the frequent bathroom breaks. Afterwards, I’ve tried to get the odd filmlovers’ discussion going in the lobby, but I guess they feel I’m a little wet behind the ears yet to have anything worthwhile to add. Nevertheless! Amid the intense, anticipatory silence, it’s clear what the “L’Amour” is all about: the love of good cinéma.

I’m aware that independent film is more “hard-hitting” than the usual Hollywood fare. In fact, if you watch attentively, you’ll start to notice that through subtle editing and lighting effects, the love scenes tend to be more liberal. Hey, I’m sorry, but the beamer-driving, median-income-earning stout burghers are just going to have to deal with it. There will always be snivelling Babbitts to take offense at this kind of direct, no-nonsense art. These guys just don’t get irony. Take last week’s third of a quadruple-bill: Sgt. Pecker’s Lonely Hearts Club Gangbang, an uncompromising, scathing, satirical, hyphenated-adjective look back at 1960’s popular culture. But for the prude-shtapo, it was just a clichéd love story of the old boy-meets-girl-and-girl-and-girl variety. Well, all I can do is quote promoter Bobby the Brain Heenan, when he said of the sport of professional wrestling (no link to L’Amour should be inferred), “For those who get it, no explanation necessary; for those who don’t, no explanation will do.”

But I’m troubled by all the empty seats I always see around me at the Cinéma de L’Amour. I’d like them to be filled with local families instead of butter stains. Sad to say, a time may come when the playbill reads “Fermé” instead of “I Can’t Believe I Did the Whole Team.” I don’t want to see the theatre go out of business or be prostituted into an acting school or frenchie community centre. Come on so-called Canada Council for the Arts, we need these outposts of independent culture. I’m calling on my readers to make a difference here. Hey, it’s only $4 to get in, and they have a new feature every week. So grab a ticket and I’ll see you there. Just don’t sit next to me.

An Open Letter to Wal-Mart:

Mailed to:

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Bentonville, Arkansas, USA 72716-8611

September 25, 2006

Dear Wal-Mart:

I have taken up space in these pages defending you against the demented charges of the liberal cancer. Whether you were aware of my efforts, I don’t know. I saw that it was beneath you to reply to those lumpen, as it would have been to thank me for horsewhipping them. You have real work to do. As for them, they may carry on their witch hunts against the successful. I shall stand by you on principle.

Or so I thought. Today I took a trip to the South Shore of Montréal to exchange my Ontario driver’s license for a Québec one. Next to what you would call the DMV, shone the aluminum siding of one of your outlets. In the parking lot, associates in Québecois true blue vests tapped their cigarettes into the ashtrays provided. They were so focused on their next challenge that their faces looked almost blank. Just like you, they have work to do. I hadn’t planned to, but I decided to go in, elbows out, and hunt for bargains. You see, I’d never actually visited one of your stores.

I expected a wide selection of lowish to moderate quality goods at unbeatable prices. Even your rabid detractors grant you that much. So I set out in search of toothpaste, cleaning products, breakfast cereal, pens, etc. OK, so you don’t carry Allenbury’s soap, or the Pentel pens I like, or my brand of garbage bags, or a few other things. I guess it wasn’t my day. You’d get that stuff in for me next month. But what really got me was that among the stuff you did have, your prices were higher than my neighbourhood markets (Segal’s and Sakaris).

Now, the fame of Segal’s may not have spread quite as far as Bentonville. Those who know Segal’s Grocery know that it’s a special place—the prices are phenomenal and it’s deservedly famous. But these guys have to pay St. Laurent rent, and they have one zillionth the floor space of a Wal-Mart, and they have a skeleton staff, and they’re killing you. Sakaris prices are more normal, but I found comparisons not in your favour. Thirty cents more for a box of Cheerios means something to a coupon-clipping Scot. Everywhere I turned in Wal-Mart, everything was comically shoddy or overpriced. There was almost noone else there. The muzak was awful. I stopped humming. The muzak stopped. There was no muzak. I had to get out.

Asphyxiating, I grabbed a family-sized bottle of Pine-Sol and checked out. Back in the lot, I read the label: Poison, Do Not Swallow. Why had I bought this product I’d never bought before? I had floor cleaner at home. I sweated freely. The grizzled Wal-Mart associates, puffing away, looked me over. They seemed to say, Well bub, are you gonna do it? We all used to teach like you. But none of us had the guts to do it.

Curses and derision on you Wal-Mart, and bad luck to you. Your prices aren’t the lowest. You’re a sham and a shame. You suck. You have no reason to exist. You’re the thing that should not be. You're a fleck of sand in God's eye. You’re a symptom of the post-modern whatchamacallit. You’re stealing my oxygen. You killed Socrates. You make my students play violent video games. You make people like me into incoherent, ranting liberals.

Sirs: I don’t intend to take my business to Wal-Mart any longer.

Yours very truly,

DT

From the Poland Files: He Did It for La Patrie

After work one day, we went to Mózg, the town art bar. Mózg means Brain, or A Brain, or even The Brain. It was spacious and comfortably pretentious: black velvet curtains hung on the walls, grotty sofas, beer-stained canvases for sale. The clientele were mainly young men with ponytails and glasses who wanted to discuss politics, and lovely girls who didn’t. At Mózg you could buy 40 kinds of vodka, and two kinds of beer—both of which went down like razors. Behind a mesh of chickenwire, there was a girl drilling the anti-theft devices out of cassettes and selling them.

Steve got in the first round of beers. We English teachers shuffled to our corner sofa and got down to another night of ETT (English Teacher Talk, or shop talk. The acronym was based on the pedagogical concept of TTT—Teacher Talking Time. Both TTT and ETT were supposed to be minimized to create nurturing space for the emergence of a real conversation.)

Kieran complained about his students. Sarah complained about her students. Steve, fiddling with his earring, complained about his students. I started to tell them about a great book I was reading, interrupting myself to complain about my students. Everyone drank furiously—this was going to be a long night.

Thankfully, Will arrived, plunked himself down and told us about the time he used to be a parking valet in London and had had to drive an arch-criminal’s Harley the wrong way through the Dartford Tunnel to get it to an armored parking garage on time. He bobbed, he weaved, he ducked mirrors. Later he got a phial of poppers as a tip. We nodded appreciatively as he drained his glass. Will and his shoulder-length red hair were twenty years older than the rest of us. None of us had any real idea where they’d come from. One of the new teachers, too clever by half, began asking questions trying to pick holes in the story, but we shut him up quick. It was a great story, and we were glad to hear it. Will’s pasts were replete with sex, drugs, violence and John Bull outdrinking and overcoming all feeble gestures towards modernity. Like cartoons, there was no problem of guilt or neurosis. The dead were reassembled off-screen to turn up again with such energy that there was no time to ask questions. All there was to do in this town was drink or go to one of the two one-screen theatres to soak yourself in Hollywood’s more bankable reels. You took diversion where you could get it.

It was shaping up to be an unremarkable night, when a very large Polish man in jeans and a sweatshirt approached us. He had the #2 shaved head, jutting chin and heavy build that you only see on Polish men or professional boxers. He asked whether he might be permitted to sit down. We said sure. He sat down. He looked at us in turn. I tried to guess whether I came up to his shoulder. In a steady voice he said something in Polish that we didn’t understand. We swallowed hard. Then he said in good French:

“I overheard you speaking. Forgive my rudeness. I always enjoy speaking with foreigners because it’s the only real talk you get around here.” I got over my surprise to translate this for my friends. We were all surprised: English, German, Russian, maybe, but you just didn’t meet locals here who spoke French. His name was Grzegorz. He was indeed a local. Before Solidarity and the fall of communism he’d vamoosed to join up with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Those were his brothers, his real family. Those were men who acted like men. Once you’ve lived in the desert with men and drunk under the desert moon and fried and eaten snakes together and practiced garroting each other, you’re brothers.

Following our approach with Will, we egged him on and asked him all kinds of fool questions about secret missions and death and glory. He clammed up and half turned away, telling us that he knew we thought he was a dog. No, we told him, you’re no dog. Tell us more about Tunisia. No, he said, it’s no use, to you I’ll always be a dog, a dirty dog. Not at all, we said, winking to each other, how can we show you you could never be a low-down dirty dog to us?

He said we could look at his tattoos, that would help. A couple of us demurred. But by now we were high on our own hilarity and really kinda curious so we said, OK, show us. He lifted his sweatshirt, turned away to reveal the kidney area of one side of his back. The swastika was black, turned 45º, about six inches across, scored into him with a blunt needle unlikely to have been held by any very sober hand. Kieran groaned. Sarah clapped a hand to her mouth. Grzegorz rolled up his sleeve to show us more. He had some cryptograms jotted across his bicep.

“I know you think I’m a racist dog,” he said. “But this says death to Jews and Muslims. We all got this one when we were initiated.” Well of course he did. Will tried to change the subject by asking about the fate of a bar he used to bounce at in Tunisia. The rest of us tried out cowardly excuses to ready ourselves for a cowardly back door sneak-out. When Grzegorz saw how antsy we were, he told us he hadn’t meant to offend us, and he was taking us all out for a steak dinner. We pointed out that it was past midnight and Polish restaurants close at eight. Besides, even though we were English teachers trained to live on beer, some of us had actually had dinner.

“You will come with me,” he said, in the same toneless French. “Taxis for everyone. I’m buying you all steak dinners.”

“Nowhere to go. Next time.”

“I know a woman in the country who’ll cook us all steak dinners.”

Yes, his plan was to tumble his poor aunt or sister-in-law out of bed, tie on her apron and make her cook for ten. Jesus. Did he really think she had a decade of fresh steaks and trimmings in the fridge? What did he really want with us? Just what bad habits had he picked up during those long Tunisian nights, staring up into the mad face of Orion? Was I going to be just another statistic—the latest English teacher turned gimp? Would we be pressed into his local chapter of the Legion and marched across the desert to garrote Semites indiscriminately? We were cowards. We knew this had ceased to be a time for politeness, but we went on declining as politely as we could. He would have none of it, we were leaving in five minutes for steak dinners. He got up to piss. We scrambled for the door and clattered down the stairs and through the alley to the silent street. The icy air burnt our lungs. Not far away we poured ourselves into taxis whose moustachioed, Sobieski-smoking drivers whisked us home.

The next day we could not agree whether from the street a voice had been heard booming out “I am not a dog! I am not a dog!” But sometimes since, bored with those who pass for lunatics these days, I like to think that I did hear it.

Papal Infallibility Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

What is this garbage news making the rounds about the pope “apologizing”? The New York Times, Washington Post and others have reported with straight faces that the pope is “sorry”—that the reaction to his anti-Islamic remarks has not been the one he wanted. Wha’ Happen’? Any six year-old knows that “I’m sorry you reacted the way you did” ain’t no apology. What a sheer waste of column inches. You know the copy editors must have had second thoughts about running this kind of Catholic-pandering pabulum since they dragged a bona fide Vatican scholar out of mothballs to tell us this is all “extremely unusual.”

The maunderings of the popes and ayatollahs and mullahs are not news. These guys believe in angels and devils and the inferiority of women and an impending purification through apocalypse. The Catholic Church officially accepted the Copernican model of the solar system in 1999. They stand firm against gay rights, birth control, and penicillin. Well, he’ll probably come out against penicillin next week. It’s not 1106, it’s 2006, and if it’s not quite science fiction, if we haven't achieved all we should have, at least we can be serious. Agenda-setting media, please stop reporting this stuff so we can get on with the real world.

Poem of the day: T. S. Eliot's "The Hippopotamus"

Learning Teaching/ Teaching Learning,

and Other Irritating Antimetabole (Quiz Thursday)

I’m teaching four college English courses this fall, mostly night school. Two introductions to college English, one class on the American satirical novel, one survey of genres through humour.

And literary humour is serious business. I make sure they know that as long as I'm in charge, there'll be nothing funny about it. I'm well aware of the multinational publishing and entertainment synergies waiting to gobble up my top students with six-figure starting contracts. All their lives, these kids have had it drilled into them by parents and tv that the only way to get ahead in an interconnected global economy is to study English literature. A tear welling up, one of my students told me how his parents back in their Chinese village used to dream of him going to a Canadian school in order to master writing essays comparing the satirical techniques of Leacock and Nabokov. Now he is on the verge of achieving their dream, and he already has a five-book deal inked with an academic publisher. I smiled broadly to keep my chin from wobbling.

For once, my lesson is clear: now that we've abandoned the horse-and-buggy Copernican system for the hypercaffeinated hack and slash of the Thomasfriedmanian Flatworld, only students who have been trained in the latest rhetorical and compositional skills will be able to compete. More and more, college English essays and even specialized articles are being outsourced to literary sweatshops staffed by young and ambitious Indian and Honduran belletrists—some as young as 12. In North America, those students who can’t keep up with the latest Chaucer theory are shunted into “softer” fields like law, computer science and engineering. And all most of these graduates have to show for their stint in higher education is a bitter look as they hand you your grande frappuccino.

This is a great shame. We should respect the value of a degree whether it’s in liberal arts or not. There are other ways to value people than whether they can tell you the difference between a Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet. What about those who rebel at the thought of giving in to social pressure, taking a quick-and-dirty degree in English or philosophy, and getting that easy job, car, and house that come with it (if you translate the Latin fine print on their BA’s)? Are they not men? Why punish someone who followed his boyhood idealism into inorganic chemistry or marketing?

We need to bring these disillusioned folks back into the fold. To start with, English departments could be more generous in sharing their massive research endowments with their weak sisters. As for my small role, I remind my students not to lord it over anyone that their financial security is guaranteed. A college education should be about more than just broadening your horizons and imagination by exploring the greatest ideas and writings in human history. Learning to use WordPerfect, to make smells in a laboratory, to do tequila body shots, to find your true identity—be it jock, nerd, preppie, slut or freak—all this will make you a more complete person and better able to make conversation with those less fortunate than you.

Notes on Inequality

Of all our motivations, greed is the most quantifiable. This fact explains why statistics on economic inequality are more compelling than “data” on gender, cultural or age difference.

Recently, I was reminded of a great thought experiment in economics: imagine witnessing an hour-long parade of society’s earners in which each man’s height corresponds to his income. Call the average man 5’10’’, then someone earning an average income will appear that tall, if less then shorter, if more then taller. What you would actually see, in any modern economy, is forty-five minutes of insects and midgets and dwarfs jogging past, then ten minutes of six and seven footers. In the last few minutes, giants ten to thirty feet and more. In the waning seconds of the parade, things get weird, as the paraders—rock stars and athletes—get so huge you can’t see their heads from the ground. Finally, at the very end, Bill Gates’s sensible shoes descend like the trademark Monty Python foot and squish everything.

As economic pornography, this vision allows different forms of voyeurism. First off, it seems hard to reject the idea that the giants are unjust and have somehow appropriated their stature from the vertically challenged. The whole thing reminds me of an Industrial Worker poster of the nineteen-teens: Pyramid of the Capitalist System (click to enlarge).

This image makes the same height = riches parallel, with a good dose of medieval Wat Tylerism (note the 3 estates of the realm on top). The nefarious Capitalists are just above the oppressed masses, living it up, and surely, as Marx noted, taking the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

But getting back to the parade of inequality, some problems come up. How can you prove that the riches of the wealthy belong to the poor? When I pull his string, my talking Nietzsche doll says that this statement makes no sense—that it’s just a symptom of our Christian slave morality. As all my aristopals who were kicking back poolside in St. Petersburg 1917 keep telling me, had they known all along that the poor in fact own everything, they would have had no incentive to earn or at least preserve their ill-gotten fortunes. The point got them nowhere. And Russian backwardness is as topical today as it was in 1750.

Vast economic inequality is one of those dreary facts of life that gets along just fine without philosophical justification. Scottish Enlightenment Economics, objectivism and supply-side economics make virtues of self-interest and even avarice, but the truly rich have never wasted their time with such salon-conversation stuff. Why should they? It’s always been the task of cheap job-seekers to write the government and academic documents cloaking laissez-faire in the spirit of the times.

The Bush administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy are a lightning rod for what passes for debate on this issue. To hear many commentators tell it, the cuts are not only unjust but insane, bankrupting Washington in an anti-New-Deal Skull and Bones ritual suicide. This last charge is scurrilous. The administration knows what it and the Democrats will never say out loud: the wealthy create wealth for investment, the poor, by definition, do not. You can question the social justice of tax cuts but not their viability as a strategy for propping up the economy in a difficult time (whether it's the optimal strategy is another question). The treasure of the wealthy does not just go into stuffing their mattresses and wife-swapping: it must be spent outside the black market or invested. But seeing the cuts as an effect rather than a cause of inequality doesn’t make for exciting, politically-polarized editorial copy.

Aside from the American government, Wal-Mart takes the most flak for unpatriotically “creating” inequality. The Matterhorn of this brand of blarney is the shoestring documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. Ex-employees complaining of racism on the job (something minorities with no education or skills never find outside Wal-Mart), mom and pop’s hardware store forced to shut down (no interviews with customers—they have none), enabling thieves and rapists to operate in their parking lots, the Bentonville cabal’s inexplicable reluctance to don Santa suits and give its millions of Bob Cratchits generous benefits packages, and other crimes against humanity.

Pull the other one. No doubt upper management are cynical plutes floating fag jokes at the golf club, but they work for an American public corporation designed to turn a profit for its shareholders. The worst that can befall them is termination. To hang onto the Marxist fantasy and The Capitalist Pyramid, you have to equate Karl’s English midlander, cigar-chomping, wife-swapping venture capitalists with today’s salary-leeching, health- and self-conscious, psychoanalyzed, interchangeable MBA’s. As such, they’re at least entitled to pass the buck.

I’ve never been to a Wal-Mart outlet and I don’t particularly regret it. I see Wal-Mart as a successful exploiter of inequality, not the cause or even the catalyst of inequality. Like McDonald's or the corporation in abstracto, ad nauseam, Wal-Mart presents a brand-name soft target for the weekend culture jammer. A free market means agents are free to act as Wal-Mart acts. And consumers are free to buy their tv dinner trays there. Revel in your superior taste if you like, but leave them alone. Freedom means inequality and suffering for most: your freedom is naught when you’re at the mercy of everyone else’s freedom. In a perfectly egalitarian world, no one has to get hysterical because we’re all 5’10’’ and we all work and shop at the same place for the same pay. I can hear the greeters now: "Welcome to Gulag-Mart! Welcome to Gulag-Mart!"

On Turning Thirty: The Heyday of the Blood

30 today! One of my favourite Preston Sturges lines is “I’ve got this terrible milestone hanging around my neck.” If you’re getting your RDA of magnesium and zinc, you can expect, six or eight times, to close out a decade. The odometer of life turns over, winks, and rolls on. At these times it’s hard not to steal a moment to check the carnage in the rear view mirror, and peer ahead to the murky horizon, before settling back to dodging all the potholes and shit and roadkill that keep popping up right in front of you. There wasn’t much continuity to my twenties. All I can say is that wherever I went, there I was. I took advantage of my opportunities to make mistakes that would be forgiven such a greenhorn. I travelled and acquainted myself with the full richness of the gong show of life. My friends know that I love to begin tall tales with “I remember one time when I was in Poland….” For those who need references, that was a period at the close of the last millennium, 1996-1999 (e-mail was just a hazy dream; we communicated by dropping messages into pneumatic tubes). It was the rest of times, it was the worst of times. It was a magical time when any young Canadian ne’er-do-well could appear to have work teaching English to Slavs. And it was a lot like work, except for the getting paid part. Highlights of what I learned: 1) Household management. During my stint, I was bunked consecutively with an Englishman, a Scotsman, an American, and a Peruvian. Domestic bliss. One week, I’d buy all the groceries and do all the cleaning, and then the next week, I’d buy all the groceries and do all the cleaning. 2) The power of shrewd negotiation. My employers told me to enter the country on a tourist visa and then they’d arrange a work visa once I arrived. When I got there I found out that they’d had their fingers crossed and I’d be held hostage as a dirty scab and persona non grata. 3) Personal hygiene. Krakow, 1997. Unemployed and slowly imprinting myself into a friend’s sofa, I had to get back my self-respect. A waiter caught me shaving in his restaurant. Only one twist made it awkward: because of my villainous Polish, I’d accidentally bought toothpaste instead of shaving cream, along with a plastic Bic single-blade razor. I’ll always remember the stunned look on the poor man’s face as I peered at him with a face of minty green lather. 4) The sanctity of love. My girlfriend of five months, Edyta, announced that she was ready to middle-aisle it, and we’d best sit down with a calendar. I hesitated, she dropped me like Kryptonite, and last I heard she was happily wed to the guy she’d dropped to go out with me. Since he was her first love, it was only right for her to step up and make an honest man of him. I spent the rest of my twenties getting edumacated at the University of Toronto and McGill. This was the compromise I worked out when I discovered that no way has yet been found to attend the University of Toronto while living in Montreal. I cherish all the clichés and quotes about edumacation, especially the inner strength you get from having a reasonable idea of how ignorant you are. Let’s not forget the Christian humility to be gained from squandering public funds to study neither science, business, medicine nor law. I look ahead to my thirties without resolutions or disillusionment. As for my menagerie of bad habits, I’m counting on my laziness to keep them in check. I don’t have much left to learn about money, having already earned my first million—Polish zloty. With my edumacation, I’ve filled my noggin to the brim, and never have to worry about digesting any new ideas. I look forward to struggling and striving and proving myself all over again. Look at this pic of me, aged 21. Whenever I feel that I may not have accomplished all I can, I remember that I used to hang around bars with a cigarette megaphone. How far I've come. I feel better already.