FILM REVIEW - RELIC (2020)

 

 

 

When is a horror movie not a horror movie? When is a ghost not a ghost? When a haunted house story is an allegory for Alzheimer's and dementia. Relic is the directorial debut of Australian screen writer Natalie Erika James and it's a gripping, emotionally jarring journey through the trauma of watching a loved one be consumed by the loss of self and identity that happens when old age crosses over into irreversible mental decay. 

 

Relic brilliantly adapts the classic horror trope of the haunted house into the gut-wrenching nightmare of watching a loved one slowly losing their grip on reality and bringing you along for the ride. Throw in the complications of strained familial relationships and the stakes become that might higher and the cost of the tragedy that much more visceral. All of this is rendered with intricate sensitivity and detail by the trifecta of a cast, representing three generations of the female side of this family struggling to cope with the matriarch's slide into darkness. 

 

The atmosphere that drenches this film from start to finish has you feeling like you're part of the mold growing out of the walls in this old house. It's a home that's losing its cohesion, becoming increasingly unfamiliar, alienating and claustrophobic while, at the same time, seeming to "get bigger" as the sense of confusion takes over. The pacing of it also manages to alternate between hypnotically static stretches, where it seems to lean into a Lynch style sense of suspension of time, and more frantic sequences, particularly as it ramps into a climax that leave you grasping for the couch cushions as the walls close in. 

 

It's a truly haunting story, made even more heartbreaking because of the emotional resonance that so many of these scenes leave behind. There's a lot of sophistication in this story telling and it's all matched by a visual attention to detail that brings it to life in a way that'll stick with you well after the credits have rolled. 

Damn impressive. 

 

P.S. The sound design and score is amazing to boot with some fabulously textured music and atmospheric sounds giving it that extra sense of depth.

DAVID BOWIE - STATION TO STATION @ 45

 

January 23 marks the 45th anniversary of the release of David Bowie's 10th studio album, Station to Station, released on this day in 1976.

With Ziggy Stardust seeming like a distant memory by the time of this release, Bowie was firmly in the grip of his "Thin White Duke" persona and the epic cocaine habit that accompanied it. Bowie was so out of it at the time of this recording that he, and much of the band, remembered very little of its production beyond the distaste for Los Angeles and the belief that ""The fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth". That decadence and indulgence, however, didn't stop them from creating one of Bowie's most seminal and significant albums.

Musically, it continues along the path of "blue eyed soul" that had been forged with the previous LP, Young Americans, but there were the seeds of intense experimentation being planted here that would set David's trajectory directly into the Brian Eno produced "Berlin Trilogy" throughout the remaining years of the decade. The core band of this album would also remain intact throughout this period as well with bassist George Murray, guitarist Carlos Alomar and drummer Dennis Davis.

Conceptually, the album is preoccupied with David's favorite muses of the era such as Aleister Crowley and occultism. Bowie was also involved in the filming of Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth and the character created for that feature became a central inspiration for his Thin White Duke persona, which Bowie described as "a hollow man who sang songs of romance with an agonized intensity, yet felt nothing — ice masquerading as fire". The persona has also been described as "a mad aristocrat", "an amoral zombie", and "an emotionless Aryan superman". For Bowie himself, the Duke was "a nasty character indeed"! Bowie became so possessed by the role at the time, with the help of the drugs, that he was often criticized for his close brushes with fascistic tendencies. Personally, he was a mess and deep into delusion and paranoia, with fantasies of witches stealing his semen, secret messages from The Rolling Stones and an irrational fear of fellow Crowley enthusiast, Jimmy Page. It's no wonder he'd flee to Berlin after touring the album to dry out and get his head on straight.

Despite all of the chaos and madness surrounding the times, we're still left with an incredible artifact of Bowie's genius, which even in the midst of his madness at the time, still managed to shine through and manifest an album that stood as a beacon for the emerging "new wave" of the late 1970s and still holds up today thanks to its unassailable song-craft and musicianship.

CHRIS & COSEY - TECHNO PRIMITIV @ 35

 

 

Celebrating its 35th anniversary today is Chris & Cosey's fourth studio album, Technø Primitiv, released on January 24, 1986, by Rough Trade Records in the UK, EU & Canada (and eventually Wax Trax in the US in 1990).

While their previous LP, Love & Lust, had shown some movement towards a more "pop" friendly, mainstream sound, Technø Primitiv firmly placed itself on a footing clearly aiming for accessibility as opposed to the extreme experimentalism and confrontational styles of earlier C&C work or their prior incarnation as half of Throbbing Gristle. Technø Primitiv made no bones about offering up catchy tunes and toe tapping beats and it set the tone for their course throughout the next decade. At least that was the case as far as material released under the Chris & Cosey banner. They'd continue to maintain a foot in the avant-garde via their alternate creative outlets such as Conspiracy International.

Of the pop friendly C&C albums released during this period, Technø Primitiv stands as my personal favorite, with a solid set of compositions and the use of state of the art (for the day) electronics. In fact, it was those cover photos of their gear which tapped into my own techno-fetishes as I clocked more than one piece of kit that I had in my own arsenal or at least had access to at the time. Seeing and hearing things like the Roland TR-707 drum machine in action when I had one sitting in my living room created an instant empathy with the album and it influenced more than a few of my own compositions at the time. And, while some of those sounds may show a bit of their age when I listen to it now, the album always brings back special memories of that time and the creative energy it encapsulated.

WORKING ON A CHAIN GANG - STAR TREK DISCOVERY, SEASON 3 REVIEW

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ALL OF SEASON THREE 

 

Star Trek Discovery has wrapped up its third season and, while it was not without faults, it was also not without merit and I think the latter outweighs anything that could have otherwise dragged it down. Overall, there is one thing which has, since the very beginning, kept this series afloat and that is undoubtedly its cast and the characters they’ve created. Indeed, the most frustrating thing about the show is how we always want to know more about the peripheral characters because someone in this production has managed to stuff this ship with people and creatures we want to get to know much, much more.

 

Season three did a lot to flesh out some of those secondary characters while it continued to focus on the principal cast to mostly rewarding ends. We got more screen time with people like Detmer (Emily Coutts) and Owosekun (Oyin Oladejo) with the former providing some great moments as she dealt with her PTSD post time-jump, something I was so relieved to see was actually trauma and not some invasive AI sub-plot as was theorized by some fans. We got a lot of new characters as well who mostly managed to make positive contributions. Among those were the gender-fluid duo of Adira (Blu del Barrio) and their non-corporeal partner, Gray (Ian Alexander), plus Starfleet Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr), who all managed to step into their roles with confidence and a sense of defined identity which helped make them empathetic and appealing additions to the show. We had a surprisingly effective romantic lead in the form of Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), who also brought in a fancy cat for company! There was even the surprise recurring appearances by acclaimed director David Cronenberg as the mysterious Kovich, who rivalled the casting of Werner Herzog in The Mandalorian for coolness credibility. Apparently shooting in Toronto has its benefits!

 

The weakest links in terms of new faces, however, were to be found in the ranks of the “villains”, which is where the season had its biggest struggles. Characters like Osyraa (Janet Kidder) and especially Zareh (Jake Weber), were no more than gangsters lacking any intrigue in terms of motivation beyond the typical lusting for wealth and power. Criminal syndicates are simply boring as far as science fiction is concerned. It’s too mundane and real world to be of interest. What Trek fans want for adversaries is not simplistic “good vs evil” conflicts.

 

What made something like the Borg an interesting adversary is that they represented a truly alien society and value system which was inherently incompatible with the kind of humanistic free society idealized by the Federation and Starfleet. Their conflict wasn’t based on one wanting to do “good’ while the other wanted “evil”. It was based on the concept that their very definitions of those terms were fundamentally different. In other past classic Trek cases, conflicts arose from misunderstandings and ignorance and problems were resolved through the exposure of ideas and information which changed the way the players saw the game. These are the kinds of conflicts Star Trek has always done best. Characters like Osyraa and Zarah don’t represent anything that inspires analysis or reconsideration. They have no depth and no redeeming qualities. When they meet their demise, it inspires no more reaction than “good riddance”. There’s no regret that we couldn’t have worked it out with them. There’s no sadness in that their situation had any tragic irony. They’re just assholes we’re happy to see the end of. And they weren’t even particularly challenging or intimidating assholes at that.

 

As for the main cast, we had a lot of wonderful moments happening with them. Saru (Doug Jones) went through an empowering arc where he explored his role as captain. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) got to develop some real depth beyond her giddy awkwardness and grow into someone with emotional depth and confidence. Stamets (Anthony Rapp) & Culber (Wilson Cruz) got to nourish the rekindled spark of their romance by growing their family through the informal adoption of Adira & Gray. This relationship had some of the most moving interactions of the season, especially Stamets’ trauma and sense of betrayal with Burnham as she refused to allow him to rescue his family in the penultimate episode. This was something that left a scar that I’m sure we’ll see impacting their interactions in the next season of the series.

 

Even the weakest of the main cast, Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green), got to develop a much needed sense of humanity. It’s always been clear to me that this entire series has been built around the journey of Michael towards the captain’s chair of the Discovery. But her character has been problematic in some ways as she’s been an easy target for the incel crowd to throw accusations of her being a “Mary Sue”. While watching the third season, I also took the time to give the first two seasons another viewing and you sure notice how stiff and humorless Michael is at the beginning. Season three sees her develop a new lightness and emotional freedom that is a huge improvement for the character, even as she continues to exhibit the same kind of misguided rashness that got her into trouble way back at the beginning of this journey. In the end, they’ve tried to sell this as her defining asset that’s going to be here distinguishing feature as a captain, but I do still feel a bit unconvinced by that assessment.

 

But the biggest star of this season’s cast has to be Michelle Yeoh as Emperor Philippa Georgiou. She managed to stand out in a big way which is going to do a lot to help set her up for her eventual return in the planned Section 31 series. Her character underwent a sweeping transition from brutal tyrant to somewhat less brutal mother figure for Michael. Her story came to an amazing climax with a surprise return to the Mirror universe (and a delightful callback of TOS’ Guardian of Forever) where we got to see the entire cast playing their true Mirror selves as opposed to pretending to be those characters as we saw in season one. Having Georgiou be the only one in that story to understand the existence of an alternate reality and know the truth about the potential it presented pushed her character into some fascinating interactions. Now, this was not without its moral issues. There is some uncomfortable ground to cover when it comes to this “Emperor”. It’s a bit like asking an audience to accept that Hitler could be turned into a nice guy if he’d been given a chance to serve with some good people. It’s a tough stretch to make that leap, but you can’t deny the appeal and charisma of Yeoh, who pushes aside such sticky questions with a sweep of her hair and a high kick or two.

 

In terms of the story telling, the show has made a shift away from the serialized, season long story arcs that dominated the first two seasons of the show. They managed to find a somewhat stable footing by balancing self-contained, episodic stories alongside the seasonal arcs, though I must say that the smaller stories were often much better than the main threads that held them together. As mentioned previously with my issues regarding the seasons main antagonists, the Emerald Chain, the whole idea of a criminal syndicate is pretty tedious conceptually and not at all engaging for an audience looking for strange new worlds and alien lifeforms. They are, in the end, no more than grubby thugs lacking any likability and their story was not at all “fascinating”, to borrow a term from an old Vulcan friend. The mystery of the “burn” was somewhat more interesting in that it turned out NOT to be the result of some invading force or anyone with any nefarious intentions. There were a lot of theories floating around about it, including that Starfleet or the Federation were somehow responsible, and I was relieved that none of them came to pass and the reality of it was something actually entirely unexpected. There were a lot of people expecting the Federation to turn out to have some sort of corrupt motives throughout the season, but none of that came to pass, which was a relief for me as that would have been far too cynical for this show and its sense of purpose.

 

As for the smaller episodic stories, there was a lot of touching base with the past in order to get a footing in this new time. The jump of 900 years into the future is something I’ve been begging for from Trek ever since Voyager ended. I’ve been desperate for the franchise to take a leap forward instead of backwards. I was rather disappointed when Enterprise turned out to be a prequel and then this trend continued through to the JJ movie reboots and the first two seasons of DISCO. When they announced they’d slingshot the ship into the far future, I was thrilled at the prospect of getting into uncharted territory and the potential to see some really wild hyper-futuristic tech and cultures. The series did deliver on some of that with the new toys and tools that gave the show a fresh look, though with perhaps a tad too much lens flair. However, in one regard, the regular revisiting of older places and people was a little big of a letdown, but then there was also a lot of great story lines that come from those trips that paid off in terms of character development and world building. After all, we do need to get a sense of context here and I think that was mostly accomplished throughout the season. Seeing where planets like Earth, Vulcan and Trill are now gave us some understanding of where things have gone in these centuries.

 

Season four is looking like it’s set up to offer a greater focus on episodic stories as Discovery enters into a role of emissary to reconnect with long lost Federation members as they deliver fresh dilithium supplies. I only hope we end up meeting some new faces and races along the way. We are well overdue for some “strange new worlds and civilizations” rather than the same-old-same-old. The new series based on Captain Pike’s era on the Enterprise looks set to offer some of that and I hope DISCO does too.

 

Having Star Trek back on the TV screen these past 4 years has been a real treat for an old Trekker like me who’s been following the franchise since it began when I was 3 years old. There’s a lot of sentimental attachment here and I’ve been satisfied with most of it through its various incarnations. Some things have landed better than others and some were downright unappealing, but Discovery has been something I’ve been onboard with since its debut episode, even when it was struggling to find its identity. I think it’s been working towards realizing its potential all along the way, however, and I think its trajectory remains, for the most part, on target. There’s always going to be some things that don’t work as well as others, but I think they’re trying and there are some really dedicated, sincere people involved in these shows and the proof is in the pudding (or maybe the hasperat).

FOURTY YEARS ON - THE NOBODIES GO NOWHERE

The Nobodies, spring 1981

 

40 years ago this month, sometime early in January, 1981, I attended my first musical jam session with some high school friends.  This was the first time I ever seriously attempted to play with other people and put my foot on the path of pursuing my creative passions in earnest.  It was a day I’d been building towards for a few years beforehand, gradually developing my abilities and putting together a little arsenal of gear as a foundation for such activities.

 

It all started in grade 8 music class in 1976-1977.  That class started playing ukelele because it had only 8 pupils and the teacher didn’t want to do a standard curriculum with such a small group, so he taught us all to play stuff like KISS songs.  This got me wanting to play electric guitar, so I started taking private lessons in the autumn of 1977.  My folks bought me a budget Gibson’s Les Paul copy and Canadian made RAM practice amp to facilitate my interest.  I then switched to a Fender Precision bass copy in the spring of 1978, but I got bored with scales and folk standards and gave up playing both after a couple more months and quit taking lessons.  My guitar and bass then sat abandoned in a corner of my bedroom for over a year until I started listening to a lot of punk and new wave music throughout 1979, cumulating in March of 1980 with the purchase of Public Image Ltd’s Second Edition.  That album lit a fire in me to want to play music for real.  The tunes on it were simple to learn and it’s unconventional structure showed me that I could compose in any manner I preferred and I had no need to adhere to traditional, formal musical techniques.  As such, I started to “unlearn” what I’d been taught by my music lessons and reimagined what it meant to play guitar and bass.  This also got me wanting to get a synthesizer, which I put together a downpayment for by selling my half of the used junker car my brother and I had picked up earlier that year for $400.  The $200 I got from that was enough to get me a Roland SH-1 mono-synth and a BOSS DR-55 Rhythm Composer.  I also picked up a Traynor guitar amp, which was a step up from the RAM.  My gear collection was rounded out by a little portable cassette recorder that had a built in condenser mic.  This was all in place by the end of 1980.

 

Playing Mike's drums at Mark's place, January 1981

 

As 1981 kicked off, the times, people and place were all in alignment and we got together at my friend Marks’s place, in the basement game room of his parent’s house.  It was a classic wood paneling finished basement with a long shuffleboard table along one wall.  Along with my gear, another kid, Mike, brought his drum kit, someone had a microphone and there was probably another amp and guitar lingering around, but I can’t recall.  It was a meager setup to be sure, but it was enough to make a glorious noise.  Aside from myself, Mark and Mike, there was Rob, who tried to play bass, and Dan, who did vocals.  There may have been one or two others coming and going, but I can’t recall.  We were all about 17-18 and in our senior year of high school and we fancied ourselves as Thunder Bay’s only legitimate “punks”.  As for the music we made, it was a shambles of mostly Sex Pistols covers like God Save the Queen, Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle and some piss-take rip-offs of Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust.  An eleven minute cassette recording of our sloppy mess survives to this day.

 

I remember taking that recording home that night, playing it and being in wonder over the fact that we’d actually managed to almost sound like we were somewhat competent.  As sloppy as it was, the energy of it was palpable and the rush of endorphins from doing it was enough that it became an instant addiction.  This one day kicked off a flurry of jam sessions which would dominate the rest of the year.  After we’d worn out our welcome at Mark’s basement, it was on to my place to do more recording.  First we jammed in my bedroom, but soon we relocated to a corner of the unfinished basement in my folks house for the remainder of the year.  We also quickly abandoned doing cover versions of songs in favour of making up our own tunes, mostly improvised on the spot.  

 

The Nobodies go to prom, June 1981

The “group” quickly solidified around myself, Mark and Rob, though we did recruit a girl from school named Debbie to do vocals on occasion.  We called ourselves The Nobodies and, as we gradually settled into a routine, we started to add more bits and pieces of gear to the arsenal.  Mark and Rob started to pick up gear for themselves such as guitars and amps and I managed to snag a cheap drum kit from my cousin to replace the “trash kit” I’d made out of buckets and tin trays.  By the end of the summer, thanks to our part time jobs after school, the three of us had saved enough money to upgrade our recording facilities from the cassette recorder to a lovely Akai GX-4000-D reel to reel deck.  It had “sound on sound” functionality, so we could do primitive multi-tracking by bouncing recordings back and forth from the left to right tracks and back again.  We found we could get away with 3 or 4 bounces before the sound got too murky.  We didn’t do any live gigs that year, but we recorded like mad and quickly amassed an impressive collection of original works.  

 

Looking back on this first year of intense activity, I can still feel the buzz of it in my soul like a distant electrical hum.  There was so much momentum kicked off at that time that it kept me pursuing my muses in the arts throughout most of the rest of my life until the present day.  It’s only in the last 5 years that it feels like the gas has been running on empty for me as I rarely find myself inspired to want to create anything.  Only writing now regularly attracts my efforts, for the most part.  I’ve had to come to terms with the reality that all the work I did over those four decades doesn’t really matter to anyone.  The few who care are certainly appreciated, but my shelves of tapes, hard drives and data discs will never have any value beyond my own obsessions.  Once I’m gone, there’s no one who’ll work to continue preserving them and they’ll end up in a landfill somewhere.

 

Album art for unreleased recordings, spring 1981

 

Yet I’m sitting here, compelled to commemorate this milestone as if it has some significance.  The truth is that it does have meaning and value, but only to me and possibly the people with whom I shared those times.  We are, after all, merely the sum of our experiences and these ones made me the person I am.  They are the mirrors I passed through in order to comprehend the world around me and the spirits that shared it.  The artifacts which remain are useful only in the sense that they can be time machines for traveling back to those experiences for brief moments.  Doing so serves the purpose of revealing the distance traveled by comparing then to now.  If it has any significance to anyone outside of those directly involved, perhaps its as an example and inspiration to take the chance on trying things like this in their own lives.  In some ways, we all live partially vicariously through the experiences of others.  At most, I can hope that those vicariously living through my experiences find them a little inspiring or at least entertaining.