Seth has become a prolific face of Canadian comic art; a face that connects a glasses and top hat-donned head to a trench coat-covered body with a tie. The Drawn & Quarterly darling is known for his comics, graphic novels, cardboard city Dominion and recent illustration work with Lemony Snicket.
Seth’s Dominion captures the man’s nostalgic personality from the shots of him discussing himself under a warm golden spotlight, his pretend old-timey video footage of walking along train tracks and through the woods, him acting out handmade puppet-like plays and animated shorts of his stories. Each part is cinematically beautiful, and brings fresh life to his work, but combined it does leave a slight sense that he directed the documentary on himself, not someone else. “There’s something really valuable about doing art for yourself,” he says. Fair enough.
Seth draws lines between his work processes and his inspirations. He’s been fixated on telling his parents’ stories besides his own. His childhood has made a big visual and emotional impact on him. “Memory is a blueprint of sensation,” he says. It’s clear he’s a very sensitive person, which is good for a skilled storyteller. As he’s grown, he’s made his environment his art project – he’s made everything around him into something special, including his wife’s barber shop.
If you haven’t checked out any of Seth’s work yet, you will want to by the end of this documentary.
Seth’s Dominion screens again on Thursday, Apr 30 @ 9:45 PM at Scotiabank Theatre 8
I’m not an activist of any kind. I’ve never known Greenpeace to be anything other than Greenpeace International. In my defence, it was literally before my time. But given that man-made environmental and ecological issues are the defining dilemma of this generation just like the A- and H-bombs were in the 50s for the baby bombers (sorry, boomers), it really can’t be brushed aside easily. Compounding that, my lack of any inkling as to the origins of Greenpeace implies a multiversal divide in my intellectual curiosity that I still debate whether to accept. Along came this documentary to the rescue: and it’s perfect. Who better to introduce Our Home and Native species of “flora” and “fauna” than a British filmmaker, now at the “point-of-no-return” as we head toward the global meltdown that few heeded 40 years ago?
Greenpeace started with hippies. And substances. And transcendence. But the origin was far closer to home than I had imagined. In the 1970s, draft-dodgers from the US coalesced with a rampant social movement, rediscovered nature awareness, drugs, rock music and mysticism in Vancouver to form a maelstrom of… laid-back Canadian hippies. From this swirling solution of perfectly random, normal people, a nucleation event began to occur around the Vancouver Sun journalist Bob Hunter. At first it was a reactionary act toward the nuclear bomb test at Amchitka which grew the nucleus, calling itself Greenpeace. Then came the active effort to save the whales aboard and seals at home, which established a self-sustaining growth along different crystal planes. And when the rest of the world saw and realized: “wait a minute, we’re all in the same solution!” So other nucleation events occurred and dozens of equally galling Greenpeace hippie groups spawned abiotically. And then they all had the same thought: “Wait another minute, we’re not some mindless molecules, we’re people! We can’t be the same!” And so the activism turned inward, cresting into a power struggle. Meanwhile, Bob Hunter was encased suffocatingly in an organization that he believed was no longer primarily focused on their real, ecological/environmental mission, and disappointed that people with the same lofty goals can’t/won’t play together. But eventually, the film halts the negativity and screeches toward a warm (pun-intended) ending.
After Greenpeace, Bob Hunter (NOT his namesake who’s an executive for Toronto Raptors/FC/Maple Leaf) went on to CityTV in Toronto, and reported on ecological issues for the remainder of his life. His voice (well, words from his writings) bonded the film together seamlessly. Whether by design or by necessity of the content, Rothwell’s use of that narration receded as this legacy film progressed, working beautifully in parallel with Hunter’s bowing out and retreat from the eco-movement’s power-center. The film carries the spirit of Greenpeace’s late co-founder with clasping hand in gentle march toward the shining seas of greater tomorrow. I say that without the mockery that I generally hold for mystics and hippies. Not only is the film well edited as a historic review of the origins of the Greenpeace organization, it was careful to also impart lessons that all past events have the potential to illuminate and provoke. Chief among them, how will we shepherd this even more fragile environment that we now have, as “sovereign” nations of people with wholly different needs, traditions, and aspirations? The lesser instructives include: should you change your name and appearance to match Tolkien characters? (Answer: Yes. “Walrus Oakenbough” sounds badass and tree-hugging at the same time). Or, must you become silver-haired to look like you gave life your best shot? (Answer: Not really, but it certainly adds gravitas). Speaking of “silver-haired hippie Canadian environmentalist,” at one point in the film a thought came to mind: “where is David Suzuki?” If you want more proof that the visceral hate between climate-change deniers like Patrick Moore (another Greenpeace co-founder) and other environmentalists plays out like a bad family feud, rest assured it is still alive. I’ll leave the left-right-center political conundrum and the position of the Edmonton Sun/News within that totem pole to your imagination.
How to Change the World will be screened again Monday April 27, at 9:30PM in Bloor Cinema. Go and see if you can put together how saving whales and damaging the Nazca lines are related.
A few minutes into A Life in the Death of Joe Meek, a new feature-length documentary about legendary British producer and sonic innovator Joe Meek from American producers/directors Howard S. Berger and Susan Stahman (its title a reference to the 1960s play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg), Keith Strickland of the B-52s compares Meek to Brian Eno and Kraftwerk. While the comparison may seem far-fetched at first, the numbers (Meek produced more than 250 singles between 1960 and 1967, including the first Billboard no. 1 by a British group, the Tornados’ “Telstar”) are simply staggering, and the influence of his pioneering use of overdubs, echo and—more generally—the studio as a musical instrument in itself can be heard in countless recordings by everyone from Wreckless Eric to Mr. Bungle to Atlas Sound. This year, the NME even named Joe Meek the greatest producer ever, topping a list that included such notables as Phil Spector, Quincy Jones, Rick Rubin, Dr. Dre and George Martin—a testament to the importance of his legacy. To put it mildly, and although he made his share of poor musical judgments (including advising Brian Epstein not to sign the Beatles, passing on David Bowie, and convincing the Moontrekkers to get rid of their teenage singer, one Roderick Stewart), Joe Meek was—and his accomplishments remain—a big deal.
If all Meek had ever done was to engineer and produce dozens of groundbreaking hit singles and revolutionize the way music was recorded in Britain, that alone would surely provide enough fodder for a fascinating music documentary. That his life was also marked by several professional falling-outs, paranoia, a fascination with the occult, stories of tantrums and the challenges of being a homosexual man in Britain at a time when that was enough to get arrested means that there is plenty of material for a film twice as long as A Life in the Death of Joe Meek.
What there is precious little of is footage of Joe Meek at work in the studio or being interviewed. Berger and Stahman overcome this problem by drawing on several interviews with industry insiders, biographers, family members, Meek enthusiasts, and a lengthy list of musicians (including the aforementioned Strickland, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Yes’s Steve Howe, Edwyn Collins, Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos and members of groups who recorded with Meek such as the Tornados, the Honeycombs and the Cryan’ Shames). While this means that A Life in the Death of Joe Meek has to rely largely on a collection of talking heads to tell Meek’s story, it nevertheless manages to cover all the bases, from his solitary youth in Newent as an electronics prodigy (he is said to have assembled the region’s first working television in his parents’ shed) to his first experiments with sound mixing as an engineer for the International Broadcasting Company, to his untimely death in the still-mysterious murder-suicide of his landlord at the age of 34. The meat of the documentary is devoted to Meek’s years at 304 Holloway Road (“It didn’t look like Abbey Road. It looked like your grandfather’s garden shed, you know, where your grandfather was experimenting”, says David John of David John and the Mood), but Berger and Stahman also find time to examine Meek’s struggles with the stodgy British music industry as an independent—and innovative—record producer, his obsession with Buddy Holly and his perceived rivalry with Spector, whom he believed was stealing all his ideas.
Where A Life in the Death of Joe Meek falters the slightest—perhaps out of necessity to keep the film’s running time under two hours—is in presenting the more technical aspects of Meek’s recordings. The producer’s sexuality and relationship with bassist Heinz Burt of the Tornados are discussed in lengthy and often uncomfortable segments (some suggest that Burt was gay “for money”), but those looking for a Classic Albums-style breakdown of the recording techniques used on Meek’s biggest hits for the most part will not find it here, though discussions of his work on the late Humphrey Littleton’s only hit, a jazz instrumental by the title of “Bad Penny Blues” (which Page calls “phenomenal”), and I Hear A New World, a concept LP only released in full long after his death, are both illuminating.
Ultimately, A Life in the Death of Joe Meek aims to paint a complete picture of Joe Meek as a studio genius, a gifted and inventive recording pioneer, as well as a flawed human being—and in that respect it is a resounding success. Those already familiar with Meek’s work will find in this documentary a detailed oral history of a fascinating period in British music that is too often overshadowed by the emergence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. For everyone else, A Life in the Death of Joe Meek will serve as the perfect introduction to one of popular music’s most idiosyncratic character—and one of its most unique back catalogues.
To most North Americans, Edwyn Collins is little more than a 1990s one-hit wonder, a dashing Elvis-like figure in the video for a Top 40 single culled from the Empire Records soundtrack—and recently revived by the Black Keys—that brought him a brief moment of fame on these shores. In fact, Collins’s long career dates back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he and his bandmates in Scottish indie upstarts Orange Juice released a series of critically beloved singles and LPs that attempted (often wildlysuccessfully) to fuse wry, literate British songwriting and jittery, funky disco rhythms—imagine CHIC’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards raised on a steady diet of Kinks records—and that remain a towering influence on British indie pop groups from Belle and Sebastian to Franz Ferdinand. Following the demise of Orange Juice, Collins embarked on a solo adventure marked by severalexcellentsingles of idiosyncratic indie pop (and a great collaboration with Bernard Butler) that rarely—the Northern soul tribute “A Girl Like You” being the lone exception—found the wider audience they richly deserved.
When the news broke in early 2005 that Collins had suffered two major cerebral hemorrhages in less than a week, had lost the ability to walk, talk or play the guitar and would need a long period of rehabilitation, even his most loyal fans would have been forgiven for assuming that they would have to settle from now on for a trickle of archival releases, perhaps the occasional compilation of demos and b-sides. That the last seven years have seen Collins not only release Home Again the album he was recording at the time of his strokes, but also complete two excellent new LPs—both 2010’s Losing Sleep and 2013’s Understated are well worth anyone’s time and money—is nothing short of miraculous.
The Possibilities Are Endless, a new documentary named after one of the few sentences Collins said during his hospital stay following the two strokes (the others were “yes”, “no”, and “Grace Maxwell”—the name of his wife and manager) and directed by James Hall and Edward Lovelace (Werewolves Across America, Katy Perry: Part of Me), chronicles over several years Collins’s difficult recovery and return to music. Instead of giving us a conventionnal music film featuring talking heads and performances, Hall and Lovelace mostly eschews both to create a more impressionistic, disorienting and ultimately more powerful document that seems to seek—particularly in its first half—to place the audience inside the head of Collins as he deals struggles to express his thoughts, his choppy, halting diction contrasting with onscreen images of the singer in his youth, a wiry, magnetic bolt of energy and charisma. As the film progresses, we see Collins slowly regain some of his motor skills, his sense of humour (he quips, “Sharon Osbourne!” when Maxwell gives him some advice in the studio) and creative spark with the help of his wife—a particularly touching scene features Collins singing “Searching for the Truth”, from Losing Sleep, at a live session, with Maxwell strumming the guitar strings as his hands forms the chords on the neck.
There is refreshingly little sentimentality in The Possibilities Are Endless—a reflection, perhaps, of Edwyn Collins’s own perspective (“Looking back is not for me. Looking forward is the way”, he says before returning to the studio)—but its nuanced depiction of Collins and Maxwell’s complicity and strength in the face of enormous odds is powerful, beautiful and inspiring. A truly remarkable film, and one that deserves to find a wide audience—much like “A Girl Like You” did twenty years ago.
