Also keep your eyes out for the Unfold special edition covering the mighty Klik Amsterdam animation festival coming up on 15-19 September.

Eurovision song contestant Maggie MacNeal. 1980. You have been warned. But oh so scenic!

Mokum – Trippel X ft. Sharla Sookha from Michiel Eijsbouts on Vimeo. Another heartwarming, and kind of hilarious, love song  to Amsterdam with the video providing another fine, and kind of hilarious, tour of the city. In Dutch.

So it was refreshing to talk to conductor Otto Tausk about control for Nyenrode Now (pages 16-18). He’s not only the most acclaimed Dutch conductor of his generation, but also a nice inspired guy. And he could put things into perspective: “Having a conductor is like using a condom, it might be better without one but it’s definitely safer.”

Our talk made me realise how my musical development was perhaps somewhat stunted by my scary school teacher. Thanks to her I moved away from classical and took on a more rock’n’roll direction. But who knows? Perhaps there’s still time to take control. Thanks Otto.

And thanks to my conductor friend Greg Hubert who gave me a crash course on how to conduct a controlled interview with a conductor about control – he was my Deep Throat with a baton.

Believe the hype. Anvil! The Story of Anvil is indeed an amazing documentary — Spinal Tap come to life. Some of the lines are just so perfect, it’s hard to believe it’s not scripted. But once you meet these guys you know that it is not scripted just very very true. Actually this film would probably be too painful to watch if you don’t know that this documentary finally brought their career to life and they’re doing some major touring again. Oh Canada!  So just download it, rent it or go this week to the Melkweg Cinema for the full volume impact.

Head down to Paradiso this Friday 29 January for the best of Pips:Lab. You can look upon PIPS:lab as a kind of A-Team — where the ‘A’ stands for ‘Art School Dropout’. Actually, they are more like MacGyver — but then with a sense of humour and a taste for Human Growth Hormone. But seriously, PIPS:lab tells a heart warming, and often brain melting, story of what happens when a collective of artists from a variety of disciplines seek to create everything, from software to vocal harmonies, themselves. Combining new media, theatre, music, film and photography — along with tech, chuckles and raw public interaction — PIPS:lab produce everything from theatrical performances to installations. And it’s all done live in your face, right down to the video editing.

For example, their Washing Powder Conspiracy show is a groovy, funny and catchy laundry-themed multimedia theatre concert. And while loose and wacky, the show is still tighter than two people in a washing machine. Everything — from the sing-along tunes and primal screaming right through to the light graffiti artistry and outfits — refers to washing powder. Things that did not quite make sense from earlier in the show are later power edited live to form new backdrops for yet more nonsensical acts of madness. Where else can absurdist speeches about detergents be magically transformed into radical political statements? Meanwhile all the happy chaos is rhythmically backed by a washing machine, three dryers and a sextet of irons. And remember folks, your whites can always get whiter…

Meanwhile, staying in touch with friends and loved ones just gets easier and easier these day. And now it’s even possible to stay in touch with the dead thanks to the internet community DieSpace. Step right up folks! Yes indeed, with laptops, cameras and light sensors, PIPS:lab has created a interactive musical show about post-mortem social networking. And with today’s ongoing ‘grayification’ of society, it’s not such a crazy idea — especially if you believe the onstage marketing manager/show master. Meanwhile… Your mug shot is being projected on the screen since he chosen you, above all others, for a DieSpace Premium Account!

OK, maybe you just got to be there…

He sure sings it like he believes it. But I heard the story that he actually wrote this as tribute to the ports of Antwerp but then ‘Amsterdam’ just fit better.

Previously:
Brel Under A Bridge

My pals, the Anacondas, just released this great new video that comes backed with a heart-warming story from the world of subsidies. After trying to get a relatively straight arts subsidy to make this video, they gave up and instead got one that ties in art with education — apparently that’s where the funding money is these days. For a week, the band worked with teen students building props and filming stock. The results speak for themselves as another solid bit of evidence that — yes indeed — the kids are alright…

This week my token whisky rabbi drinking buddy Geoff Berner is touring the Netherlands with his kickass klezmer trio. Don’t miss his show in Amsterdam on Tuesday 1 December 2009 at the Nieuwe Anita.

Ah yes, the lone troubadour… One human. One instrument. And a stack of tunes. Once they were a dying breed but now a renaissance seems to be in full effect where one inspired freak falls in love with a mutant instrument and proceeds to learn how to use it as both a lover and a weapon. Personality helps too — and singer/songwriter/accordion-player Geoff ‘The Whiskey Rabbi’ Berner has that in spades. Already a respected cult figure in Scandinavia (thanks in part to his colleagues Kaizers Orchestra) and his native Canada, his songs have been covered by everyone from ukulele legend Carmaig de Forest to Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq. Certainly he has the ability to transfix any crowd he’s confronted with since it turns out that everyone’s a sucker for klezmer-based tunes that drip with politics, sex and drink — no Jewish wedding to be found here, just one ‘Lucky Goddam Jew’ (as another song is called) who knows how to play and sing from his heart. Berner’s motivation is simple: ‘I want to drag klezmer music kicking and screaming back into the bars.’

 

So once a guy has a taste for it where can he find some more whisky rabbi drinking buddy types? In Odessa a hundred years ago perhaps?

Geoff: Well, contrary to some beliefs, Jews are actually a pretty hard-drinking racial group. Many of My People can give the Irish a run for their money. There are a large number of traditional drinking songs, including ‘Di Mashke’ (‘the whisky’). Most of them put forward the idea that drinking hard liquor is a privilege of adulthood and we should thank G-d for it, and a man who doesn’t drink is basically good for nothing.

My song ‘King of the Gangsters’ is about Benya Krik, a character in a series of short stories by Isaac Babel, set in the Odessa underworld in the teens. Babel makes Odessa sound like a wild and fascinating place. I think that his stories make the point that when a people is oppressed and denied power in society, its men and women of great talent often emerge from the criminal element, for better or worse.

 

But time travel is a bit tricky (and I can imagine green zero emissions time travel to be REAL REAL tricky). So what would be a more realistic option?

Geoff: I recommend hanging out with Bob Cohen, leader of my favourite klezmer band, Di Naye Kapelye. He lives in Budapest, speaks Yiddish, Hungarian, Romanian, three dialects of Roma, Zulu, and Brooklynese. He can tell dirty jokes in all these languages. He can tell you where the best food is in places that you’ve never heard of. He was once a Rastafarian for 10 years, and was the first American tourist in Grenada after the invasion.

You should read his crazy blog here.

 

So I’ve basically lived outside Canada for almost 20 years. But I spent a lot of that time writing about the world from the perspective of a Canadian peckerhead. Now I am planning to return to Canada for a longer stretch to write about Canada from the perspective of eurotrash. That’s my plan… And my question is: what went down in Canada in the last 20 years that may have passed me by that I should really know about if I want to write about the state of Canada…  socially, culturally, politically… new flavours of beer… that sort of thing…

Geoff: Canada. What the fuck is it? What’s changed in 20 years?

Well…

The gap between rich and poor has widened. So your middleclass friends whose careers are progressing will have more STUFF than you ever thought possible. And also they will be stepping around a lot more homeless people on the streets of the cities.

There are far fewer CanCon Rock heroes for the young. The internet has cancelled out the effect of the CanCon radio regulations. The Tragically Hip are still going strong, but they don’t fill arenas, and there’s no one who’s come up to take their place. Sure, the Arcade Fire are huge, but most Canadian teenagers don’t know they’re from Canada, and don’t care anyway.

People work harder than they did 20 years ago. That is, they work ALL THE TIME, constantly using their iphone/blackberry to check on what’s happening with work. At the bar.  In the car. At the kid’s soccer practice.

It’s fucking WARMER here, man. You’ll notice it. Even in Ottawa. The river freezes later, and thaws way earlier. In BC, we’re used to seeing crocus flowers shoot up in January now.

We’re at war. When I was growing up, everything was about how Canada hadn’t fired a shot in anger since Korea.  How Lester B. Pearson invented peace-keeping and that’s what our army was all about. Now, we get an average of one body bag a week, like clockwork. And have done for several years now. It’s a slow drip, drip, drip in the national consciousness that’s slowly changing our national character, making us more militaristic as a country.

Beer: People with university degrees now exclusively drink decent tasting beer from the micro-breweries. Some of the small Canadian beers are better than even some English ales. Working class people still drink Canadian and Blue. And they think people who drink ‘that fancy shit’ are faggots who think they’re better than everybody else.

Wine: People drink a helluvalot more wine than they used to here. Lots of Australian wine.

Drinking and driving is still practiced far and wide in Canada, to an astonishing degree compared with Europe.

People aren’t living in Canada. They don’t know where they’re living. They’re living on Facebook.

All of Canada is noticeably less white than it was 20 years ago. Canada has done the best job of integrating minorities of any country I’ve ever been to. Sikhs, Chinese, Muslims, Jews, can all wear whatever the hell they like to school, work, whatever, and nobody says boo. We know from experience that in a generation they’ll all be wearing blue jeans, if they’re not already.  Even working class people eat sushi, curry, Ethiopian food, whatever. That didn’t happen in the 80s.

Even the conservative party isn’t immigrant-baiting anymore. They’ve figured out that there’s a huge electoral gold mine in the immigrant community, and that, wonder of wonders, most immigrants believe in traditional families, hard work, low taxes, and long jail sentences for criminals–just like the Tories! That’s why the Tories will win the next election.

Anything I’ve left out?  Oh yeah: Curling is making a comeback.

“Once upon a time in the East, there was a Bloc-buster of a film genre — one that the unrestrained could call the ‘The Red Commie Musical’. These films came packed with tunes, drama, dance, romance, sheer wackiness and — most endearing for the modern Western viewer — a solidly alien conception. Who knew musicals could help sell the idea of a worker’s paradise?…”

Read more here.