A Message from DBAWIS

DBAWIS is on Hiatus until September 5th. In the meantime, don’t forget to visit our site and catch up on the over 1500 articles by entering the name of your favourite DBAWIS scribe in the “Archive” window, and have at it. Great reading for the Dog Days of Summer. See you with Fresh Fun on September 5th!

The Writers – Roxanne Tellier, Pat Blythe, Frank Gutch Jr., Cam Carpenter, Jaimie Vernon, Gary Pig Gold, Doug Thompson, and past contributors, Nadia Elkharadly, Justin Smallbridge, Geoff Pevere, and the Sometimes Darrell Vickers. Not pictured are Guest Writers Ira Robbins, Bobby Singh, and Jade Dunlop, plus friends who have contributed a column or two over the years

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JAIMIE VERNON – GODS OF THE HAMMER

Roxanne Tellier: My Toronto – Part Two

Toronto was a different place in the late 1970’s and early eighties. Although it’s easy to look back with rose coloured glasses, it was, in fact, a watershed time for Toronto musicians. Everywhere you turned, you were surrounded by outstanding music, made by dedicated and very talented players, who enjoyed the freedom to create their art, and make a living at the same time.

 

 

Geoff Pevere: Ridley Scott – Mack or Hack?

I’ve let the matter settle and sink in for a couple of weeks, so I think it’s time to say it:Prometheus may be one of the worst movies I have ever seen.

This is not stated lightly. I am fully aware that I have seen maybe a hundred thousand or so movies in my lifetime, and that I have seen more bad movies than any reasonable person ought to. That’s why I wanted to give the after-effects of Ridley Scott’s epically appalling exercise in ponderous new-agey wanking some time to clarify their impact. Which they have. Prometheus is a crap movie of legendary and timeless proportions.

Geoff Pevere: Cosmopolis VS Teenage Girls

I doubt the summer, or maybe the entire year, will provide me with another movie experience quite like the one I had last night with Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg’s new adaptation of one of Don Dellillo’s least-admired novels.

The movie itself is a challenging piece of work: largely taking place in the back of a spacepod-like luxury limo conveying Robert Pattinson’s soulless Wall Street billionaire-bloodsucker to a haircut on the other side of a riot-stricken Manhattan (nicely and not in any way unobviously played by Toronto), it plays out as a series of largely deadpan, abstract-theoretical exchanges between Pattinson’s dead-eyed uber-broker and various people who are briefly along for the ride.

Geoff Pevere: Welcome to Geezerville. Population: Us.

The confirmation provided by this week’s Canadian census data that the country’s gone geezer – more Canadians than ever before are over 65 – provided an opportunity to consider a paradox. If so many of us are old, I was asked to ponder, how come there are so few codgers in pop culture? As a question, it’s more interesting than good, but in that it’s perfectly apt, as most popular culture itself is more interesting than good.

Geoff Pevere: Music on Television 1969

In the course of watching practically everything I own for the purposes of launching some truly insane encyclopedic websites – one on westerns, one on crime movies and TV, one on cult entertainment and one on rock culture – I spent nearly fifteen hours recently in 1969. My Lord, what a fucked-up year.

For the rock culture site, I pulled out two DVD collections I’d had for years but not yet watched. (One of the reasons I’m starting these websites, apart from pure obsessional perversion, is so that I am compelled to actually look at just about everything I’ve accumulated over the years.)

Geoff Pevere: The Hard Core Logos

The beauty of Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo lay in its acknowledgement of things already gone. A fiction feature about a documentary being made about a near-legendary punk band embarking on a doomed crusade to re-boot the old glory, the movie played sadly and sharply into the myth of rock music as an eternally rejuvenating force. It ain’t. Sometimes it just makes you feel older and reminds you there’s no going back.

Frank Gutch Jr: A Bit of All Right…Things That Make the Music Business Better (including free stuff)

You know, as much as I bitch and obsess over the state of the music industry in this chaotic world, every once in awhile the clouds part and the sun shines and the music overtakes everything.  I live for those moments.  They are moments I would not trade for anything.  Late nights and early mornings listening to very early Yes and Cargoe and Cowboy during my all too few days of hippiedom.  Uncovering music during my decades in the record business and being the first on my block to “get” Big Star and Damnation and The Call and so many more bands and musicians I would have completely missed had I been an accountant or bricklayer.

Guest Columnist Jim Slotek: Canuckleheads 2

Geoff Pevere is on assignment for CBC Radio and will be posting every other week for the next little while. This week, one of Geoff’s peers, Jim Slotek, shares his own views on Canada’s Current Comedy Standings and Comedy in general.

To paraphrase an old axiom about actors, my erstwhile film reviewing colleague Geoff Pevere could rewrite the phone book, and it would make for interesting reading. But I’m sorry to say I’m not down with his last column.