It was at the Foothills Hospital earlier today, where I was accompanying my mother who was to receive minor foot surgery, that I first noted that the time was 11:11, my mother’s most beloved and cherished numerological synchronicity, and then the two of us discovered together that poet and classicist Anne Carson, who is my favourite living Canadian writer, has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Fresh on the heels of Alice Munro in 2013. My response to the announcement of Carson’s receipt of this esteemed but also bizarre prize was so extreme I think we’d have to call it giddy orgleeful. I supposed you’d have to ask my mom. In my home I have a deeply cherished portrait of Carson by Mecca Normal vocalist and one-woman portrait industry Jean Smith. What would A.C. do? I often pause to consider. Upon bumping into her by accident in the dark I may have occasion to find myself softly moaning. Pleadingly, you might say.
LEAFY ORTHOPEDIC
One of my favourite quips in 70s cinema comes from Thomas McGuane’s adaptation of his own novel 92 in the Shade (1975). During a scene that finds Peter Fonda in the bathtub with Canadian Margot Kidder, who was at that time married to Thomas McGuane, Fonda asks her why they make soap on a rope and Kidder quickly and caustically replies that it’s so you can retrieve it in case you sallow it.
Sonny Rollins, "Way Out West" [Official Visualizer]
When we speak of Canada’s two mythic solitudes, as consecrated by more-or-less-forgotten Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan, we must in kind speak of two distinct and awfully discrete national cinemas operating very often at cross-purposes with one another. While Anglo-Canadian cinema for the longest time mostly kept its hands to itself when in came to trespassing against Hollywood’s dominion over popular narrative cinema and its international dissemination, Québecois people had their hand forced from the beginning: they had to make Québecois movies for Québecois audiences because who the hell else was going to do it? They don’t call it distinct society status to sound snooty. If you didn’t hear it before I’m here to lay it to you: Québec is distinct as fuck. This is incidentally how most of the children in staunchly and repressively Catholic Québec of 1952 found themselves watching the savage ritualistic scalding of La petite Aurore l'enfant martyre. The movies and traumatized and/or demystified kids have always travelled in tandem. The province of Québec had a whole entire star system functional only within its own modest borders before English Canada could even find its own ass. The whole global culture entered a radical phase of tempestuous transition and peptic upset in the 1960s and Québec was not exempt, though the province’s hard lean into Marxist politics and open debauchery put unambiguously to shame anything going on in the Anglo Zone of Solitude, largely because those folks hadn’t previously been living under the thumb of the Catholic Church the way the Québecois had and so hadn’t nearly the steam to blow off. So...as it should happen...along with the FLQ/October Crisis in 1970…we have…Deux femmes en or, a raw and racy sex comedy by the husband and wife team of Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond, a huge hit in one province only, and the film many believe to be the lynchpin of the Maple Syrup Porno cycle, which lasted only as long as the counterculture did, from about ’68 to ’71, but definitely made some people a ton of money. More sets like this, pretty please! Feed my eyes, cruel demon!
I’ve been in the company of Allan Moyle and Frank Vitale, who together with their friends made Montreal Main and The Rubber Gun in 1974 and 1977 respectively. Dope, drop-outs… transgressive poetics…gutter punk spunk. Having heard them tell stories, I’m confident that Allan and Frank got up to more mischief and into more trouble than should technically be survivable. Of their onscreen collaborators, present in both aforementioned films, the queer autodidact and painter Stephen Lack looms eternally largest. For example, it would definitely seem to be the case that Lack did prophesy AIDS years before it happened, and it is definitely true that he can rap wild and free like Bob Dylan on speed only with a gaze far, far, far more chilling. He would somehow go on to appear in films by David Cronenberg, Larry Cohen, and Jon Jost. Nobody else can boast that, fella. Allan Moyle would go on to direct cult Hollywood movies Pump Up the Volume (1990) and Empire Records (1995) as well as lovely lowkey Cape Breton classic New Waterford Girl (1999). Honk if you're in the process of invading Canada. There is a scene in Pump Up the Volume where Samantha Mathis and Christian Slater are fooling around and Mathis pulls her sweater off over the top of her head revealing that she has nothing on underneath. It’s a scene I once studied at some length. Amazingly, Allan told me that the studio felt uncomfortable with that scene and tried to compel him to cut it but he just kept saying he wouldn’t and so it stayed. Thank Christ for artistic integrity! I mean…the studio said whaaaaat? They’re over tits now, are they? Pfff. Go figure.
Fox and His Friends (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1975) 🇩🇪
The Rubber Gun (Allan Moyle, 1977) 🇨🇦
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Nome Noma: Québec Post-Punk et New Wave[Full Album]
