The Sound and the Fury: Allison Crowe Live at the Heliconian, Saturday July 26, 2008

I’m embarrassed for the millions of Torontonians who skipped the Allison Crowe concert at Yorkville’s Heliconian Hall Saturday night. A paltry turnout of a few dozen seems a disgrace in a city where we make a fuss about how cultured and intellectual we all are. But stunning songstress Allison Crowe is a consummate professional and she performs as if each and every one of the lucky attendees is a dignitary or a celebrity. I get the feeling she’d give her heart out like this even if only one person showed up, or to an empty hall. This is, after all, Allison Crowe, whose tagline “why music? why breathing?” can only be understood by seeing her live.

I hope by now she needs no introduction, but for those who don’t know there’s life beyond Nirvana- or Glen Gould- BC’s Crowe is the feisty do-it-yourselfer who didn’t care for the music industry’s long list of can’ts and shoulds. Or, perhaps, for the way it ran itself in homogenous circles that sometimes entirely skirted genius. Instead of weeping at the state of affairs, she did what any other madwoman would do: she did it her way. She started the label Rubenesque Records, and began touring the globe.

The thing is, this sister’s got nothing to prove. Her vocal prowess blows half the world’s divas out of the water. As if that weren’t enough, her real talent is the way she makes love to the piano, easing it gently to life. Then, the strength with which she pounds that thing is enough to make the walls come tumbling down. The girl was studying classical music at age five, a mere twenty years back. But it’s clear she was born knowing how. A gift of this magnitude is not something you can learn or practice. How this self-professed awkward  beauty can command the angels and demons to her attention is a mystery. Her piano style has been compared to Beethoven and to Fats Domino. But the blood she squeezes from her instrument turns all of her teachers into her students. All this from an innocuous-looking siren who says, “Umm, when I get nervous, I go to my dorky place.”

Crowe sings a string of songs from her latest album, Little Light, and though everyone should rush right to allisoncrowe.com and scoop up everything on the menu, you can’t get back what you missed last night. Crowe live and Crowe on record are two different things. Something is lost in translation, something in the sound of both her piano playing and her singing. While her records still stand strong beside her influences- Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell, Edith Piaf- there is a special magic that can’t be layered into digital sound.

Regardless, Crowe’s songwriting also shows a craft and maturity and experience level that few artists can rival. Her interpretations of admired artist’s songs- (notably Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen- the Crowe version is practically a cult of its own)- are exquisite. Her cover of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time would make Cyndi herself jealous. But the depth of her own work is much more mesmerizing. Influences like Tori Amos, Counting Crows, jazz, gospel, and grunge mingle seamlessly. A soul so old has no business inhabiting this goofy, down to earth girl who tells us to pay her insanity no mind. “I’m totally nuts,” she says outright. Songs like Disease show she’s totally serious abut that: the piano is terrified of her. The way she stomps her feet to the beat and throws back her head to let out the terrors of this world feels like a massacre and a baptism at the same time. Before this operatic nightmare- a song that left the word ‘brilliant’ back on earth- she was more tender, coyly caressing our skin with Northern Lights, the prettiest song that Sarah McLachlan never wrote. Next, she moves into Happy People, which is reminiscent of her idol Tori Amos. Too bad that up against all of these formidable divas, Crowe’s soaring vocals leave them behind every time. Come on girl, you should still be learning how to play Amazing Grace on the piano, not blowing all your masters to smithereens without even trying.

Joni Mitchell played the Heliconian Hall way back when, so performing here is very special to Allison Crowe, who, yes, has followed in the footsteps of the first lady of folk- and yes, blown her out of the water. “I look up to her a lot,” Crowe tells me after the show. “It’s pretty cool to think she sang right here! This is a woman who managed to go through life doing things her own way.”

I ask her if she was disappointed by the small turnout. She usually performs to much larger audiences now, around the world. But her shining eyes aren’t lying when she says she performs to whoever is there, with no expectations. “Once only three people showed up,” she confessed. “It was an amazing night. Those people showed up to hear me, and that’s all that really matters.”

Crowe confesses that having such an awesome gift is scary. “It’s terrifying,” she says. “Sometimes I’d love to be able to stay in one place. A stable life? I don’t know what that is.” I tell her sometimes I’d love to throw my own uncertain trade out the window, but it’s the only thing I’m good at. But then one person emails to say they were affected by my words. It’s almost better than money. “It’s really, really scary to be this driven,” Crowe admits. “But then, I get to sing for people!”

It’s been some time since Crowe was in Toronto, and she’s got only one day to see the sights with her friends. And what will she do while she’s here? “I’m going to see Batman on the big screen,” she says.

The last song- before the three post-ovation numbers, that is-  is I Never Loved A Man the Way I Love You, made famous by the Queen of Soul.  For all the priestess’s phenomenal powerhouse pipes, it is Crowe who is the master of her refrain. Umm, Aretha who?

Meet writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

More Bad News for Soy

When the eccentric and genius composer Moby, bald, Christian, and famously animal-product free, made some cracks to defend his vegan diet, he may have been more right than he knows. If you want gay kids, feed them soy milk. He was being facetious, of course, deferring to breeder meatheads who think you can ‘catch gay.’

Yeah, well, unfortunately, nature is a tyrant and it’s not a pansy cruelty-free diet that might make kids gay, but hormones. And soy is full of hormones. While many eagerly point at the growth hormones pushed into cattle, profit per pound, as unhealthy, some are sadly consuming even more dangerous hormones without the proper protein to balance the poisons. It seems all the moobs young men are sporting these days might stem from soy…it’s clear that early menstruation in young ladies- I’m talking early, as in five or six- is coming from soy. We don’t know what effects this potent endocrine disruption has on the sexual orientation of our children, not yet. Not everyone cares if their kids are gay, and some might prefer it. But I’d prefer it happen without any orchestration from malnutrition and bean toxins.

While the gay gene/bean is yet to be determined, the breeder’s sperm count is not. And while arguably, we do not need any more babies anywhere on this planet, hormone balance is still a massive indicator of overall health. Plus, if babies are made, which they often are, it would be nice to pass healthy genes, not twisted ones. In the news today- in Human Reproduction Medical Journal- men who eat soy- some as little as half a serving a day- have sperm counts IN HALF OR IN THIRD of those who don’t.

41 million sperms per milliliter may seem like more than enough, but the average joe has 80-120 million per milliliter.

A man is considered infertile if his count is 20 million or less.

True, the head honcho science dude said the results are inconsistent, still under study, I’d rather err on the side of caution with all the already-proven ways soymones mess with our endocrinology.

Both Now Magazine and a friend made the joke about how “it’s not working in China” ha ha wink wink. Neither were aware that no one in China eats soy- they eat pork, and eggs, and seafood and veggie stir fries. And yes, in those stir fries they use a bit of soy sauce.  2 tbsps a day as a condiment.

I’m totally serious. Everything we think about soy has been taught to us by a massive propaganda machine that does not concern itself with our health or welfare.

Peggy Hill- Quote of the Day

“I guess we’re just different that way, Hank, but I need EXCITEMENT to feel excited.”

-Peggy Hill

Quotable Kramer

“One point three million dollars? Darling, I spend that much on aftershave,”

-Kramer, pretending to be looking at real estate when he really just needs to use a bathroom

Wonder Bred: an art show manifesto

this manifesto is from an art show in 2003 called Wonder Bred. I came across the artist’s statement recently and think it sums up much of my writing work as well as my visual art.

My work cannot be limited by cavalier academia, which inquires about such elusive ideas as, “What is art?” Nor will my imagination be limited by mass culture and its trends, here today, gone tomorrow, back next season, so last season. My art spans the world of the intellect, the soul, the mystical, and the shopping mall. Whatever I feel, wherever I find wonder, whatever I wonder, I create.

I concede that these creations are clever, born of a caustic wit and a need, never outgrown, to play, to play tricks, to play with toys. They aren’t ideas formed in art school, with serious labour applied to anatomical attention or to space and light. They have a certain unschooled feeling about them, yet my imagination is not uneducated. To the contrary, I devour voraciously every aspect of as many cultures as I can digest. My education began early; looking at dead insects, raising my hand fifty times in Sunday School to ask questions no one could then or can now answer. It continued in the Niagara Falls library, reading about fish and poetry, about Michael Jackson, the occult, Indian tribes, and other anthropologies. I am formally schooled in journalism, but prefer the Enquirer to the Globe: it tells far more about human nature.

Hence, celebrity finds its way into my wonder. The academics might push away the importance of pop culture, striving for the higher mind, yet I know what guerilla scholar Camille Paglia knows: that academia has little place in ancient or modern anthropology, that the clues and the cues for who and what we are begin with the commonplace. Celebrity and shopping fills in a void where we have become spiritually hollow. We seek to consume, in a desperate and almost ritualistic manner, the fantasy that fame and wealth create. Celebrity fails us, as religion did, but failing pantheons are all we have ever had. We must question the failure of our gods, or our God, and of ourselves, as they reflect too poignantly our own shortcomings. If we have the ability to analyze, we can grow. If we lack this ability, we can depend on artists and reporters and teachers to show us the variety of signs, but there is no place where we can find complete truth.

Andy Warhol was an artist who changed the face of art completely and permanently. Whether we love or hate his excessively simple works, and his often distasteful archeology, we must see that his contribution to the changing of the imagination was incredibly important. Andy didn’t live by any rules but those of his own neuroses- the same rules by which we live our own lives! He pushed the boundaries of what is art, because he didn’t care about the answer. He bridged what we refused to link: mad with mundane, sacred with ordinary, massive manufacturing with elitist craft. He was a creepy pervert who loved speed and feet; he loved to observe the madness of freaks and film it, with zero form applied. He believed in shopping and barely felt the suicides of his friends; he wore sloppy shoes and spoke so quietly no one could hear him. Much of his work was actually made by others: without Photoshop, he couldn’t manufacture his ideas fast enough. He had to manufacture, as if he were a company. He couldn’t spend weeks on a piece when there were a thousand pieces to be made, so he printed hundreds of replicas of his works in hundreds of different shades. Repetition was the hallmark of his work, yet the things he captured weren’t mundane. Monroe, electric chairs, dollar signs are far more reflective of Western religion than the exquisite and carefully rendered works of the Renaissance.

Inspired by the things I love and the things I loathe about Andy Warhol meant using some of the cues from my own imagination. Unlike Andy’s work, mine might contain a commentary. My take on the electric chair comes in the form of Canadian psycho Karla Homolka. She occupies a special place in my personal archeology because I went to high school with her, attended the memorial for her sister, whom none of us knew then that she had killed. Using digital tools to colour my portrait of her, I call the piece, “I Shop Therefore I Kill”, demonstrating my belief that too much reverence for objects leads to a narcissism special to the 21st century- the inability to differentiate between object and human. Traditional religions, both monotheistic and pagan, did not lose the way we have lost, the sacredness of the thing: objects were ritualized in ways we have lost touch with and seek to recover by buying more of them.

The desire to fill an emptiness created in part by our culture extends to all sorts of addictions. The ancient shamanistic act of vision questing is also a hunger in these times, but we use magical substances to escape reality rather than to transcend the ordinary and recover the real.

When we lose our sense of wonder, we cannot glean the satisfactions that we require from our objects and from our consumption. We have removed all of the spiritual and literal nutrients from our excavations. We can recover the nourishment that our soul demands simply by stopping to look into the madness of our creation, to see the way a star glitters on the Cartier in the window, to chew the hell out of boring old poets to get at the heart of what they were trying to say. The classroom and the supermarket forget that this is how to edify the masses, but there is no way around it. We must open our souls to the life and decay around us, to play with portents as if this world were a playground, to twist back the ideals sold to us into their original, or into new shapes. We must go back to the way we discovered things as children, and ask millions of questions, to tease the living daylights out of our authorities, to revel and reveal, to laugh and to sob and to wonder.

I might go shopping
Just to buy those things that are eluding me
Just to buy something from the mall
I feel so empty, so I might go shopping
Just to buy those things that will make me feel
Just to buy those things from the mall

-from Go to the Bank by James

manifesto from Wonder Bred, by Lorette C. Luzajic, www.thegirlcanwrite.net

RuPaul Says

“You’re born naked, and the rest is drag.”

-RuPaul

Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor with Richard Jenkins

Despite my reputation for abject emotionalism, I seldom leave a cinema sobbing uncontrollably. But after Tom McCarthy’s very special film The Visitor, I could not stop crumpling my face into a dwindling roll of toilet paper. Nor could I stop myself from dropping into a pub for a few glasses of chardonnay to help numb the pain as I collected my thoughts.

The review I’d read in one of the Toronto weeklies hadn’t said much about the film. It gave it five stars, and said something like “a professor from Connecticut returns to an apartment he keeps in New York City and finds a couple living there.” Not much to go on, admittedly, but the reviewer said that telling anything else would give too much away.

I am indeed intrigued by being randomly led into films or books, and rather than head toward the surely fun new Angelina Jolie action flick, I took a gamble that this would be something special.

Walter Vale, a bored and lonely widower, is sleepwalking through a meaningless life. His only joy is the piano. His wife was a pianist, but he has no knack for the thing at all, and the film opens with him dismissing yet another piano teacher. By chance he is called to a dull economics conference to present a paper he co-authored. He protests to his superiors that he barely worked on the paper- he really just lent his name and a small contribution to a burgeoning researcher. His partner is ill, however, and he has no choice but to head to New York to make the presentation alone. He enters his seldom-used apartment, one he kept with his wife, only to find two illegal immigrants living there. They had rented it from a scam artist.

Richard Jenkins as Walter recalls all the forgotten subtleties of acting that are swept under today’s special effects and wild chemistry and big names and huge plot lines. Most of Walter’s depressed, curious, shy utterances are along the lines of ‘thank you’ and ‘I will.’ Somehow, these simple deliveries convey the wild transformation going on within him. At first, he is terrified to find the beautiful Senegalese woman in his bathtub, and her Syrian boyfriend throws him up against a wall. Soon, as the couple realizes they have been duped, and that they are indeed in Walter’s apartment, the trio is reduced to awkward pleasantries as the couple attempt to arrange lodging. Walter feels for their plight and goes out on a limb to invite them to stay for a few days.

This chance encounter with strangers from far reaches of the globe changes him forever. Forget the fast pace of New York cop shows, the glitz of big name art, commerce, or fashion: New York is made up of these diverse peoples, and their everyday struggles to land free from strife near Lady Liberty. Haaz Sleiman is Tarek, a handsome and funny Syrian who wants nothing more out of life than to be left alone and play his drums. Danai Gurira is Zainab, an alien from Senegal who handcrafts jewelry and ekes out a living in the street markets. When Tarek and Walter discover their mutual love for music, Tarek insists on bringing the old professor to jazz clubs and outdoor drumming circles, and Walter surprises himself by learning how to play.

One day Tarek is arrested in the subway and taken to a detention centre, despite his protests that he is not a terrorist. He disappears into the immigration system, and Walter does everything he can to protest this injustice. He even takes Tarek’s mother to see Phantom of the Opera, a lifelong dream of hers, and she opens up about their life in and escape from Syria.

The fears, the hopes, the anguish, the built relationships, and the uncertainties that make up the life of people who are desperate not to fall through the cracks- here’s a film that effectively shows another side of the North American dream story. As I watched the film with my BFF who struggled to gain Canadian citizenship after leaving Peru, we both recalled the emotional hell of immigration, from two different perspectives.

I’m Canadian born, and grateful. We both thought of our Lebanese friend Sal who was heading to New York City to sign some official documents the morning of September 11. Needless to say his trip was cancelled that day, and his family waited many more years. Of course, the whole time, I was waiting with anxious terror for my husband to receive citizenship. He was a sailor from Serbia, one of the most war torn and volatile political situations in the world. I lived in constant terror that he would be deported and that I would never see him again. What happened instead was even worse, and that the contributing stresses led to addictions from which he was unable to escape. He died before his papers were processed. Now, like Walter, I’m alone.

And hence the reason for my teary-eyed exit from the cinema. Now there have been many films about the horrors of world politics, the dream of North American freedom, the epics of the immigration waves, the building of the Irish or Italian boroughs or the plight of refugees, the struggles and the victories and the defeats. But this quiet little film by Tom McCarthy, with its understated humour and its unflinching realism, is the one you will remember.

And what was the moral of this story without a happy ending? That you never, ever know who will touch you or how, you never know what you will lose, and like Walter with his new bongo, you never know what you will be given.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.