Resonance

Wall-Eyed

2009-05-21T10:19:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid in Baltimore, one of my favorite TV shows was a local offering called The Bob McAllister Show (yes, the same Bob McAllister who later became the host of Wonderama). In addition to the usual helping of cartoons, McAllister also featured live action sequences in which the star dressed up as a superhero and did various ridiculous superhero things. It was funny, in the broad, slapstick way of children's entertainment, but what I remember most the amount of time I spent trying to figure out how they did the special effects. Some were fairly easy — for the “flying” sequences, McAllister was simply strapped to a board on a truck and driven around, an gimmick any seven-year old could figure out — and some weren’t (who knew from blue screen at that age?), but overall it made for a significant formative experience. My curiosity about special effects had made me aware that storytelling was a process, and it could be just as interesting, and far more instructive, to focus on how a tale was being told than merely to follow the plot.

Whether this was the first step toward a career in criticism or simply reflected a natural predisposition to analysis is a chicken/egg question I’ll leave to others, but for whatever reason I can’t help but think about the things I listen to, look at, or read. And while that sometimes leads to understanding larger truths about a work, it can just as easily leave me irritated by questions about plausibility, logical consistency and the like. Instead of being intrigued by the mechanisms that facilitate the narrative, I’m distracted by the clanking of their machinery.

Which brings me to Wall-E, a Pixar feature many critics felt was one of last year’s best films. It’s not hard to see why; the film is visually sumptuous, consistently amusing, beautifully paced, and blessed with an appealing cast of characters. It even has a nice moral about the evils of materialism and mindless, endless consumption.

It just doesn’t make sense, is all.

Even if you ignore the way the story scales the whole of human existence down to one city and one spaceship, and accept the notion that robots not only have emotions but fall in love in accordance with heterosexual human norms, the film still asks its viewers to swallow a lot of absurdity. Some of that is simply the price of making the characters more appealing (read: human-like). For instance, there’s no reason a robot would flinch or shudder the way Wall-E does, but because those gestures telegraph emotion, they’re a useful tool for the writers to express Wall-E’s feelings. So we overlook them. There are also some elements that exists as exaggerations in the service of a larger point. Take the opening sequence, in which the camera pans across a city in which half the towering buildings turn out to be, upon closer examinations, huge piles of stacked, compressed garbage. As cartoons go, it makes a powerful image, but think about it for more than a second and it seems utterly implausible. If there really were that much garbage lying around this city, wouldn’t the streets have been several stories deep with trash? And if so, how could anyone living there have possibly made it to Buy N Large, much less to one of the massive space ships that shuttled humankind off the planet?

Still, there are other plot points that simply disregard logic. Start with the Axiom. We’re to imagine this spaceship as the ultimate luxury cruiser, offering robot-assisted entertainment and relaxation to all aboard. At a casual glance, it seems a reasonable product for Buy N Large to offer, but ask yourself: What’s the economic model here? If no one on the ship is creating income, who’s paying for everything? (And how, after seven centuries in space, could the ship still be producing tons of garbage every day? Is there some sort of matter-generating machine on board?) Even the basic social interaction seems implausible. For instance, there’s a touching sub-plot that arises after Wall-E inadvertently tears two passengers away from the all-encompassing video screens that have defined their soft, fat existence. Finally seeing the world around them, they meet and fall in love, which is apparently a novelty on the Axiom. Cute, sure, but if everyone is leading an isolated, electronically-assisted existence, where did the babies in that nursery come from? How could the ship’s population have continued for all those centuries? And, creepier still, why are there no old people or children, just infants and generic adults?

And so on. Of course, it’s not hard to find similar flaws in any other work of fantasy or speculative fiction; the variations on “there’s no sound in space” may be as infinite as space itself. In that sense, the real irony of Wall-E is that if the animation had been a more cartoon-y, I doubt I would have been bothered by half those things. Render a story in ink, with all the natural exaggerations and simplifications that come with the creations of pen and brush, and it’s amazing how easy it becomes to swallow all sorts of silliness, from interstellar railroads to galaxy-traversing battleships. Make it look real, however, and people will expect it to conform to the rules of reality.

Idol Evenings

2009-05-07T00:03:00.002-04:00

As a critic, I try to make a point of not allowing suppositions or presumptions colour my opinion. If I’m to review something, I make a point of not arriving with my mind made up ahead of time. It’s only fair.

In my personal life, I’m not always so diligent — especially when it comes to choosing how I spend my leisure time. As a result, I’ve spent the last eight years happily avoiding the phenomenon that is American Idol. Oh, sure, I’ve been aware of the show; I was familiar with the judges and the winners and the basic format, so I knew all about William Hung and Sanjaya Malakar and votefortheworst.com. But I never had to watch the show, so I didn’t.

In fairness, I should mention that I don’t watch much TV, period, and seem incapable of the sort of every-episode viewership shows like Idol demand. (It’s even worse with serials; despite valiant efforts and a lot of VCR programming, my wife and I have failed to ever see a full season of the Sopranos, MI5, or 24.) I should also add that, apart from a few performances by Jennifer Hudson and Kelly Clarkson, I’ve not been particularly impressed by the post-Idol work of any of the finalists.

After watching both of this week’s episodes, I have to say I feel utterly vindicated in my presumptions. It may have been “rock and roll week” on Idol, but the performances didn’t rock my world. If anything, they left me in despair, wondering in what world the evening’s performances would have been considered rock.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start by looking at the positives.

There’s no disputing the level of musicianship on the show. The performances may not have been to my taste, but there was no shortage of ability on stage. In fact, it would not be exaggerating to suggest that each of the contestants had, overall, better chops than the singers whose work they were covering. The one exception here would be Danny Gokey, who clearly cannot scream as well as Steven Tyler. Or James Brown, Paul McCartney, or several dozen others I could name. But the ability to scream does not seem to be something they look for in Idol contestants (as opposed, say, to in audience members), so we’ll let that pass.

So why didn’t that surfeit of technique strike me as being a virtue? Yes, Adam Lambert showed plenty of power and conviction when he sang “Whole Lotta Love,” and his high notes were rock solid. They were also carefully massaged with vibrato, something that made Lambert’s performance seem smoother and more like “great singing” than what Robert Plant did on Led Zeppelin II.

But “Whole Lotta Love” isn’t supposed to be “great singing.” It’s supposed to be raw, nakedly powerful, bluesy and elemental. Frankly, it sounds better without the vibrato, which is one reason Plant always seemed more of a great rock singer than the more polished Freddie Mercury.

And the sad thing was, Lambert’s performance was by far the best part of the show.

Allison Iraheta’s version of “Cry Baby” was an admirably athletic rendition of the Joplin oldie, and managed to convey a hint of emotion despite Iraheta’s apparent belief that feeling the blues means singing as hard as you possibly can. (Although I blame Joplin as much for this.) She was similarly full-on in her duet performance with Lambert, but at least the material — Foghat’s hard-grinding “Slow Ride” — supported her exertion. She shouldn’t have been cut, but was.

Kris Allen, who looks like a K-Mart knock off of the young Michael J. Fox, sang “Come Together” as if he’d never heard the Beatles’ version. That’s some sort of accomplishment, surely, but not one I’d care to applaud. The original was preternaturally cool, twisting a Chuck Berry car race lyric into a series of stoned non sequiturs, but Allen felt more comfortable playing it hot and funky, and ended up making the classic cover band mistake of ruining a tune by trying to improve on it. He also joined Gokey for a trainwreck rendition of the Styx tune “Renegade,” and let’s be honest here — if “Renegade” is what this show considers “classic rock,” no wonder I didn’t like it. Still, Allen made it through both looking cute and Fox-y, and that was enough to ensure his return.

As for Gokey, well … words fail me. I understand that he’s a big audience favourite, but I don’t get it, at least not on a musical level. The rasp in his voice, which presumably passes for character in Idol-land, actually worked against the melody in “Dream On,” and there was a strange tenseness to the performance, as if Gokey saw the song as some sort of terrifying personal challenge — which, given how he handled the final note, was very likely the case. Factor in his less-than-awesome share of the Styx tune, and I came away from Tuesday’s show wondering how this guy ever made it to the finals.

Then, on Wednesday, Ryan Seacrest showed one of the Ford “music videos” (read: commercials) the finalists had made, and suddenly all became clear. Gokey has a perfect jingle-singer voice, gritty enough to vaguely recall Michael McDonald, but otherwise utterly lacking in character. And sure enough, each of the others sounded equally at home in the ad, hitting their mark every time and singing with the perfect degree of bland professionalism. It was as if they’d each found their calling. As Seacrest might have put it, they were home.

Live or Memorex

2009-05-05T11:16:00.002-04:00

There's a fair amount of footage online from Britney Spears' concert at Mohegan Sun, where a fan got onstage during "Womanizer." The great thing about this clip (the kid turns up at 2:20) is that Spears is clearly screaming at the intruder, yet no scream is audible.

Oh, for the good old days, when singers at least sang along to their pre-recorded tracks...

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Tomorrow's fish and chips paper

2009-03-28T16:28:00.001-04:00

Blender was shuttered this week. The news wasn’t a huge surprise, given that Folio had reported in January that ad pages there were down 30.6 percent. Not a promising indicator, that. The issue currently on newsstands weighs in 72 pages, which is pretty close to a “mayday!” signal. So it was hardly surprising to hear that Blender’s new owners, Alpha Media Group, were pulling the plug.

What may come as a surprise to some is that Blender was a failure despite having a paid circulation of roughly 780,000. It wasn’t that the magazine couldn’t find readers; the problem was that it couldn’t find advertisers who wanted to reach those readers. One of the ironies of magazine publishing is that the larger your circulation, the more dependent you are on advertising, as printing and distribution costs become too high to be covered by the cover price. That’s why niche magazines with small circulation often survive while larger, mass-market titles fail.

I worked at Blender for about seven months, until I quit to move to Canada. I edited the reviews section, which was one of the magazine’s strongest features. Unlike most American pop magazines, which seem to treat the reviews section as an afterthought, Blender recognized reviews as a major selling point. Not everyone agreed with their approach, of course, and even writers who contributed to the section complained about the enforced brevity of the reviews (110 words while I was there, although they later ballooned up to 135). But there’s something about the discipline of short reviews that really focuses criticism, requiring the writer to make a point clearly and succinctly.

Thinking about the demise of Blender left me wondering just how many now-defunct publications I’ve written for over the years, so I decided to assemble a list. It’s roughly chronological and as complete as I could manage, although I’m sure I’m forgetting something:

New York Rocker
The Baltimore News-American
Musician
Record
BuZZ
Standing Ovation
Request
Model
Guitar for the Practicing Musician
Fi
Guitar World Acoustic
Tracks
Bang
Bass Guitar
Blender

A little knowledge...

2008-08-06T14:16:00.003-04:00

A little while ago, I came across an entry posted by Scott Woods at Rockcritics.com called Meme of the Day: It’s All About the Music, Man… It was essentially a selection of contrasting quotes, taken from the website’s archive of rock critic interviews, on whether or not it’s important for rock critics to know something about music. Naturally, there were quotes both pro and con, and probably the smartest comment was Jon Pareles’ commonsensical observation that, “A critic should learn as much about music as possible, from any angle that seems interesting music theory, history, psychology, literature, theater, acoustics, religion, dance, anthropology, film theory, pharmacology, economics, fashion, linguistics, electronics, sports, and all the other things that touch on music.” (And yes, for what it’s worth, I’m among the critics quoted.)

Anyway, I happened to be reading this while listening to listening to James Brown, and as such flashed on a comment that has bothered me for years. The piece was an essay Lester Bangs wrote decades ago for Musician magazine, called Free Jazz/Punk Rock. At one point, he’s discussing alto saxophonist James Chance, of the Contortions. Here’s the quote:

“And come to think of it, his sax work has a precursor in James Brown, too: that guy who stood up in the middle of the title cut on Brown's Super Bad album and took that horrible raggedy solo which probably got him fired.”

If you have only a passing familiarity with Brown’s “Super Bad,” it’s easy to see what Bangs is driving at. The solo, by Robert McCullough, is overblown and frenetic, eschewing the usual blues licks for something approximating John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” approach. Granted, McCullough played tenor, not alto, and his solo lacked the honking cacophony of Chance’s playing, but the point is clear enough.

Still, the last four words bugged me. Sure, I recognized that Bangs was riffing off Brown’s reputation as a disciplinarian who fined players for bad notes, but come on — what sort of control freak would fire a guy for “a horrible raggedy solo” and then release the track anyway? Logic should tell us that had that solo been a firing offence, we never would have heard it; the take would have been junked, and someone else’s solo would have been on the single.

Especially since the producer of “Super Bad” was James Brown himself.

For the record, McCullough — who joined Brown’s band at roughly the same time as the Collins brothers, Bootsy and Phelps — appeared on at least three more sessions with Brown after cutting “Super Bad.” He was ultimately replaced, in 1971, by St. Clair Pinckney. So no, he didn’t get fired for the solo.

But the most pointed refutation of Bangs’ point is on the record itself. Roughly four minutes into the original single, as McCullough starts in on a second solo, we hear Brown urging him on: “Come on! Come on, Robert! Come on, brother! Blow it, Robert! Blow me some Trane, brother!” How Bangs could have missed that is hard to imagine — perhaps he only half-remembered the track, and didn’t have time to re-listen before filing his piece? — but Brown’s exhortation to “blow me some Trane” suggests that he not only approved of what McCullough was playing, but was encouraging him to push the envelope.

Which brings me back to Pareles’ point. A writer who tries to “learn as much about music as possible” will be less inclined to let hyperbole lead to nonsensical statements, and that can only strengthen his or her writing. Had Bangs grasped that James Brown actually intended to merge avant-garde jazz and funk on “Super Bad,” he might have made connections that would have lead to a deeper understanding of the music, and a better essay overall. Instead, by assuming it to be an aberration, he squandered any potential insight on a joke. And not a particularly funny one, at that.

The curse of celebrity?

2008-07-31T16:18:00.003-04:00

"WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) -- Sen. John McCain's campaign today wasn't content with simply launching a new attack on Democratic rival Sen. Barack Obama. The McCain team held a conference to further accuse Mr. Obama of being 'the world's biggest celebrity.'"

Aha -- that's the problem with Obama. People like him. And if the last eight years have taught us anything, being liked is not part of the job of being president.

Coming soon, the new campaign slogan:

Vote for someone nobody likes. McCain '08.

Better Late Than...

2006-09-22T16:41:00.000-04:00

This is a review from the Guelph Jazz Festival which was to have run in the Globe and Mail on September 11, but got bumped due to coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival. Not that I'm complaining Â— the review of the Virgin Music Festival was bumped back, and coverage of the Canadian Opera Company's Ring Cycle and new opera house opening was also curtailed. There's only so much space, after all.

Still, it seems a shame to let the thing disappear into the ether. So here's what it would have said had the festival run some other week:

Steve Coleman and Five Elements/Gyorgy Szabados & Vladimir Tarsov
At the Riverrun Centre in Guelph Saturday

Reviewed by J.D. Considine

In the ’60s, after Ornette Coleman freed jazz from the shackles of chord changes, the avant garde embraced the notion of "free improvisation,"in which musicians spontaneously created music without any preset plans or material. Although occasionally transcendent, the results were more often chaotic, coasting on energy while studiously ignoring recognizable melody.

Perhaps that's why a growing trend in today's avant garde integrates pre-prepared themes and structures into what is otherwise an improvised performance. Steve Coleman, whose group Five Elements headlined a double bill at the Guelph Jazz Festival on Saturday, calls this collaborative approach "spontaneous composition," and it has huge advantages over the free-flowing cacophony of old.

But simply having a handful of themes and an organizing structure is not enough. It'’s also important to have a sense of balance and dynamics, and in that sense Coleman and crew would have done well to study their opening act, Hungarian pianist Gyorgy Szabados and Russian drummer Vladimir Tarasov.

Szabados and Tarasov (who were making their North American debut as a duo) are an unlikely pair of jazz dynamos. Largely unknown outside of Europe, the two look more like aging academics than cutting-edge improvisers, and are as grounded in the European classical tradition as they are in jazz. Indeed, elements of what they played — particularly the eloquent silences and melodic use of percussion — owed more to composer Pierre Boulez than to bebop.

Even so, the two made it clear that improvised composition doesn'’t have to sound random to maintain a sense of frisson. Although their hour-long first selection had its moments of roiling rhythms and untrammeled dissonance, there were also regularly recurring themes, ranging from a surprisingly tuneful triplet figure on Tarasov’s tom-toms to a vigorous, two-handed march from Szabados.

Not only did those elements anchor the performance in recognizable melody, their use subtly altered the way Szabados and Tarasov listened and responded to one another. There was a genuine sense of play to their interaction, a joyful intertwining of wit and discovery that drew the audience in and brought them to their feet, demanding an encore.

Coleman’s set, by contrast, seemed more like homework than recess. With the six members of Five Elements arranged in a semi-circle across the stage, each reading from a thick sheaf of sheet music, they looked ready for serious business, and after an opening salvo from Coleman'’s alto, serious business was what we got.

At first, the group — which, in addition to Coleman’s alto, included trumpet, trombone, bass, drums and voice —— focused on pulsing, rhythmically intricate drones (imagine Philip Glass as interpreted by a college lab band). Various solos emerged, and then a new sequence announced by a sort of disjointed bebop melody. Many minutes later, a new pulse pattern was introduced. And so on, for 90 straight minutes, with only occasional changes in tempo, dynamics or mood.

There were some standout performances. Singer Jen Shyu did an exceptional job of making the voice seem as much a jazz instrument as any horn, and her wordless improvisations were beautifully phrased. Trombonist Tim Albright was a revelation, delivering slyly virtuosic lines while maintaining gutbucket immediacy, while trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson occasionally evoked the ghost of Booker Little. And Coleman himself remains a strikingly original voice on alto, being both less harmonically oblique than Anthony Braxton and more obviously bebop influenced than Ornette Coleman.

But those bright moments accounted for maybe 40 minutes of the two hours Coleman and Five Elements played. The rest was cluttered and monotonous, offering little textural or harmonic variety (would it have killed them to change key occasionally?). It was, in short, a performance by the group and for the group, and the steady exodus during the second number spoke to just how much that self-indulgence tried the audience’s patience.

Swell Maps

2006-08-22T11:08:00.000-04:00

Has anyone else noticed that Google Maps is something less than totally reliable?

A couple weeks ago, we were going from Ajaccio (on Corsica) to Nice. We were supposed to depart from Ajaccio at in the early evening, but because of rough seas the ferry company loaded us onto a bus and drove us halfway across Corsica to I’lle Rousse, where we were put on different ferry (and still had rough seas). Thanks to the unscheduled detour, our arrival in Nice was pushed back several hours, and it was nearly 3:00 a.m. when we staggered off the ferry and began to make our way to the hotel we’d booked. My wife had got directions off Google Maps, so when we got to the ferry terminal’s exit, she consulted her printout and announced we were to turn right.

Long story short, we should have gone left. Google showed our hotel as being well along the Blvd. Carnot, and so we set off to lug our bags and baby up the distressingly steep Avenue de Saint-Aignan (imagine the author as a rather cranky pack mule, pushing a stroller). But when we got to the point indicated by Google, we found their map was about 40 addresses off — in fact, the hotel was at the bottom of the hill we’d just climbed, a short walk in the opposite direction from where we turned right.

It was 3:30 a.m. when we finally staggered to our room. Admittedly, the Google-derived wrong turn probably only cost us 20 minutes, but with a baby to put to bed and a 9:30 a.m. train to catch, that 20 minutes amounted to eight percent of our night’s rest. Grrr.

Now, I’m not going to be an idiot and insist that Google owes us 20 minutes’ sleep, but I am curious if others have had similar experiences. How far off was the map? Did you complain to Google? Is there a corrections mechanism?

In the Air Tonight

2006-08-15T22:28:00.000-04:00

Having just flown back to Canada from Paris during the latest air terrorist panic, I have to ask: If the airlines are so keen to keep bombs off jetliners, why did my flight show the Steve Martin movie R.V.?

Murder By Numbers

2006-06-13T16:03:00.000-04:00

One of the bigger hits at the recent EMP Pop Conference was a paper by Randall Roberts called Dave Marsh-ing My Mellow: The Rolling Stone Record Guide and the Creation of the Canon. The talk, which was accompanied by a very ambitious PowerPoint presentation, attempted to use statistics to expose the biases that underlay the first two Rolling Stone guides (and by extension, the whole Rolling Stone rock aesthetic).

Roberts’ talk was hot for three reasons. First, it addressed rockism — which by the last day had become the unofficial theme of the conference — without resorting to any of the usual popist rhetoric or counter-arguments. Second, it was quite funny, and not just because of the PowerPoint. And third, it involved multi-colored graphs derived from spreadsheets — a labor-intensive, number-heavy approach that was well beyond the lyric parsing that makes up most rock writing.

But that’s the problem. Having been on the same panel as Roberts (delivering a talk called My JPOP Problem — and Yours), I greatly enjoyed his delivery. But re-reading the paper, which he has posted here, I found myself thinking that, amusing though it is, his argument ultimately doesn’t add up, despite having been so warmly received. If the stereotype of rock critics as former English majors is even partly true, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that innumeracy runs rampant in the field, and that my colleagues would accept Roberts’ analysis so uncritically. To quote a recent Dilbert strip, “And you know it’s accurate because I used math.”

So let’s look at the way Roberts used math, and discuss what he could have done but didn’t.

Before proceeding, I should mention that I’m not exactly neutral on the topic of the Rolling Stone guides. I wrote for three of the four volumes (only David McGhee has contributed to all four), and The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, which provided the grist for Roberts’ mill, was the first time anything I wrote ever wound up in a book. Roberts quotes me twice in his paper, but in neither instance were my words mocked or misrepresented. So this isn’t personal.

What bothers me about the essay is that Roberts promises a lot — for instance, that “[b]y understanding the unconscious biases of the editors, we can more fully understand what exactly we were taught, and how some of our pleasures came with the added baggage of shame”— and delivers little. His graphics may be colorful and his observations droll, but the points he makes are too often irrelevant or misleading, Worse, there are many larger points he could have made, but didn’t.

Fortunately, he describes this paper as “something I’m expanding/revising,” so perhaps a later version will address these issues.

Let’s start with the fact that the statistical analysis tells us nothing about “the unconscious biases” Roberts seeks to reveal. There is, for example, a bright, colorful pie chart breaking down the artists included in the second record guide by race. Because this follows by several paragraphs a sentence in which Roberts writes, “It didn’t cross my mind that of the 52 reviewers who appraised the records, only three were women, nor did I question how many black critics chimed in,” it’s easy to assume that the race chart reflects the bias of the mostly male, universally white reviewers.

But does it? One of the things the editors — Dave Marsh, who Roberts routinely castigates, and John Swenson, who Roberts largely ignores — make clear is that there wasn’t much filtering going on in choosing who got covered in the book. Unlike the Trouser Press or Spin record guides, which assiduously excluded albums that didn’t match their aesthetic criteria, the first two Rolling Stone record guides took the attitude that if it was in print and wasn’t jazz or classical, it got reviewed. (Later Rolling Stone guides were much more discriminating.) As such, Roberts’ pie chart is less a reflection of bias in the media than of bias in the recording industry — a different issue altogether.

Then there’s the notion of artistic bias. Roberts’ stats are derived from the star ratings. But because he sticks to the blunt tool of averaging (adding stars together, then dividing by the number of albums), the conclusions he derives are limited. Even so, he presents them as a sort of scientific insight — the Beatles, he reports. “were .8 of a star better than the Stones.” In other words, “You know it’s accurate because I used math.”

If, on the other hand, Roberts calculated the standard deviation of the ratings in a particular genre, as well as the averages, he would have a much stronger tool for deducing evidence of bias. Standard deviation reflects the amount of variance within a collection of ratings. If the ratings are all close together, the deviation is small; if the ratings vary greatly, then the deviation is large. If, say, there were a large number of blues artists whose albums averaged 3.5 stars with little deviation, and a large number of MOR artists whose albums averaged 0.25 stars with little deviation, one might deduce that The New Rolling Stone Record Guide values blues more than MOR.

Or not. My wife, who is a mathematician, points out that “using means and standard deviations to look at these things depends on two things: 1) the album guide reviewers were randomly chosen from the population of pop reviewers; 2) when the editors assigned the review jobs, they did so randomly; and 3) there is a large set of data. On this third point, whether or not there are small-sample issues would be up to Roberts to determine; he has the data and he'd have to look in a stats book to learn how to test whether or not his data set is a small one.” Of course, the reviewers were not chosen at random, and while there was some element of chance in doling out the assignments — reviewers had some choice in their assignments, but that choice whttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifas limited by what had already been claimed by others — it hardly fits the classic statistics model.

She suggests using histograms to graph the ratings. (You can read about them here and here.) When a histogram graphs a genuinely random or unbiased collection of data, it produces something that looks like a bell curve. When the data points are loaded with extremes — for instance, a ranking of NBA salaries or of biased reviews — the result looks quite unlike a bell curve.

Another approach Roberts might have taken would have been to look at the extreme ends of the ratings system -- the five star and no star reviews. He does make a stab at this, writing that, “Seventeen women released 5-star records — five percent of the 378 total masterpieces in the canon.” He also reports that the Rolling Stones’ “5-star ratio was a mere 19 percent.” But that doesn’t really tell us much.

But if one were to sort the artists who got five-star ratings by how many they got — one, two, three or more —then track that data by genre, the resulting map of “indispensable” albums would provide a fair representation of the Rolling Stone canon. Seeing how they’re distributed across genres would say a lot about what kind of music the reviewers valued most.

It would also be interesting to repeat the exercise with those albums deemed “worthless” — the no-star recordings. This would provide insights simple averaging can’t. After all, an artist whose sole release gets a bullet and one whose five album catalog all get bullets would each end up with the same average (0 stars). But writing off five albums conveys a level of contempt well beyond what Roberts describes as acts being “swatted away like flies and flicked out the window.” Again, analyzing that data by genre would say a lot about the kinds of music the reviewers were incapable of respecting.

There are problems with Roberts’ paper beyond the math. His prose manages to be both purple and clunky (“The opus that is The Rolling Stone Record Guide begins on page one…”), and he has the unfortunate habit of making his points through misleadingly selective quotes. For instance, he writes, “How did English-speaking bands line up against one other? Rolling Stone has an answer: ‘At their best, Chilliwack was the finest Canadian rock band, outrocking BTO and outwriting Burton Cummings.’” When he read that line at EMP, it got a big laugh, in part because people found it amusing to think anyone would rank the near-forgotten (in the US) Chilliwack above BTO. What the review (by long-time Globe and Mail reviewer Alan Neister, who really does know Canadian rock) went on to say was this: “But a lack of consistency kept it from international success, and only these albums remain in print,” A bit less risible when you get the whole thought, eh?

Roberts also tends to personify the views advanced by the book as reflecting the taste and will of Marsh, as if Swenson and the other 52 reviewers were merely standing on the sidelines. While talking about the reviewers’ distaste for metal, he writes, “Marsh’s Hammer of Justice came down hard on Motorhead.” Unfortunately, the review he quotes is credited to Malu Halasa, not Dave Marsh.

Such sloppiness is repeated when Roberts turns his attention to the guide’s coverage of hip-hop. He writes, “By 1982, the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, the Tom Tom Club, Fab Five Freddy, Kurtis Blow and Trouble Funk had released 12-inches, but the Guide ignored them.” Well, no. First off, the book states in the introduction that it chose not to review singles (which is what 12-inches were). Secondly, although Kurtis Blow’s singles may have been ignored, his two albums weren’t. They are reviewed by Dave Marsh, on page 47.

The last point I’d like to make has to do with the notion that the Rolling Stone record and album guides were intended to reflect and propagate the official party line of what Roberts calls “the Empire of Rolling Stone.” Many of the contributors to the guides were not regular reviewers for the magazine, and I’m unaware of any effort during the compilation of those books to ensure that the guide rating matched the magazine rating. Hell, many of the rankings changed from volume to volume, sometimes drastically. There may have been biases at work in the reviews, but it’s probably overstating the case to ascribe them specifically to Dave Marsh or Rolling Stone.

Better Late Than...

2006-05-07T09:53:00.000-04:00

One of the vagaries of print journalism is that sometimes there simply isn't enough room to get everything into print in a timely matter. What follows is a review I wrote for the Globe and Mail of Gary Morgan and PanAmerica! that met just such a fate.

Gary Morgan and PanAmericana!
At the Montreal Bistro in Toronto on Monday, April 24

Reviewed by J.D. Considine

If there’s any truth to the saying “talent will out,” then there will undoubtedly come a day when Gary Morgan is widely recognized as one of the brightest big band composer/arrangers in the business.

For now, however, the former Torontonian is merely one of the better-kept secrets in jazz. Based in Manhattan, he has been directing and composing for a Latin big band he calls PanAmericana! (yes, the exclamation mark is part of the name). On Monday, he brought his book and a select group of Toronto musicians to the Montreal Bistro, where they blew the roof off the joint for two sets. It was the sort of performance that makes you understand why Morgan feels entitled to that exclamation mark.

There’s no denying the guy’s mastery of his trade. Where many big band arrangements seldom move beyond the primary colours of saxophones, trombones and trumpets, Morgan’s charts work from a surprisingly varied and subtle palette, both by adding less common voices (two French horns as well as having the saxophonists double on flute, piccolo and bass clarinet) to the mix, and by taking a more orchestral approach to the ensemble, so that the instrumental voices are woven together in a rich tapestry of sound.

Moreover, because his PanAmericana! project draws from a variety of Latin musical traditions, Morgan has also mastered the art of writing rhythm — samba, bembe, beguine, you name it. As such, his charts are not only written around very explicit beats, they use changes in the rhythmic pulse as part of the compositional development, as well as additional fuel for improvisation.

Although Morgan’s crew had only a few hours of rehearsal, they performed with such authority you’d have thought this was their regular Monday night gig. It helped that Morgan had assembled an ace rhythm section, with Hilario Duran on piano, Roberto Occhipinti on electric bass, and powerhouse drummer Mark Kelso augmented by two percussionists. But it wasn’t just the rhythm section; the whole band seemed not only to get what Morgan was aiming for, but responded enthusiastically to his direction.

This wasn’t easy music, either. Morgan’s arrangement of Deanna Witkowski’s Happening At Once, for instance, was built over two distinct rhythmic ideas, one a loping, West African-derived 6/8, the other a more conventional Cuban pulse. On top of all that, there was some delightfully kaleidoscopic interplay between the brass and reeds, which sketched a harmonic structure every bit as intricate as the rhythm. Not only was it played beautifully, but there was an illuminating contrast in Morgan’s soloists, with tenor saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff varying his phrasing in response to the rippling shifts within the percussion, while Kevin Turcotte’s trumpet opted for a straight, boppish line over the roiling rhythm.

There was also a wonderfully inventive treatment of the Cole Porter chestnut I Concentrate on You, which opened with gorgeous pedal-point harmonies before slipping into a sly, sophisticated beguine. Mark Promane offered a wonderfully tart solo on alto saxophone, but the highlight of the performance was probably the arrangement itself, which loaded increasingly dense harmonies into each verse so that Porter’s habit of ending a minor-chord line with a sunny major-chord resolution took on additional impact with each iteration. Brilliant stuff.

By the time they got to the hymn-like opening of Milton Nascimento’s Vera Cruz at the end of the first set, Morgan had made it clear that he deserves to be thought of in the same terms as classic big band composers as Chico O’Farrill and Neil Hefti. Here’s hoping that doesn’t stay a secret.

Klactoveesedstene

2006-04-01T14:41:00.000-05:00

A joke:

The drugs having finally worked their way through his system, Charlie Parker returns from the grave and announces he’s going to start playing again — once he gets his alto out of hock. The news sets off a media sensation, and soon offers are pouring in from various firms wanting to “present” Parker’s return. Ultimately, Pepsi (hoping to boost sales by luring Boomers away from Starbucks) makes the highest offer, and Bird is set to make his comeback in a Pepsi ad.

Soon, it’s the big day. An all-star rhythm section has been assembled, a string section has been hired, arrangements have been written, and a very select group of guests have assembled to hear the first Charlie Parker solo in over 50 years. Finally, the cameras are in place, the microphones are ready, and Parker enters the studio to tumultuous applause.

He puts horn to mouth, nods to the conductor, and the music begins. The audience is transported, as half a century of bottled-up improvisation flows into the room. When the music ends, there’s profound silence, then riotous applause. Some of the guests and most of the musicians are in tears. Parker beams.

Then, from the PA, comes the voice of Pepsi’s creative director. “That’s great man, great. Just incredible,” he says. “Now for the second take, could you make it sound more like David Sanborn?”

V too, Schneider

2006-03-28T20:04:00.000-05:00

I reread Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta for the dozenth time last week, and was as before both dazzled and disappointed. Dazzled by the richness of the world evoked, and the way Moore plays against (stereo)type in casting his hero; disappointed by the slack predictability of the ending, and the fact that V’s world ends not with a bang, but a whimper (No. 10 Downing St. notwithstanding). I shouldn't be surprised, of course, as superhero fiction seems to be, almost by definition, more about premise than conclusion. But still — if V exists as a practical criticism of English nationalism and the fascistic undercurrents it harbors, its “rip it up and start again” solution seems, well, depressingly glib.

But hey, it’s just a comic, right?

Besides, whatever problems I have with the comic are nothing compared to the problems I expect from the film. Not to pre-judge the thing, but the ads alone remind me of what it is I find so tedious about film versions of comics: The fight scenes.

In David Lloyd’s rendering, the fights are brief and decisive. When V goes to Westminster Abbey to attack Bishop Lilliman, his battle with the guards takes only a single page, and half is mere set-up. In the first frame, we see the startled face of a guard. In the next, we see V, running low, headed for the gate. The third frame echoes the first, giving us V’s implacable mask. Then, a picture from near ground level, with V’s running legs in the foreground while, not far in the background, the guards reach for their sidearms. Then a frame showing an automatic pistol being drawn, followed by an image of V, knives out and running. Next, one hand dropping a pistol. A different hand thrown up, its pistol flying free. Then, finally, the bodies of the guards on the pavement, as V’s cape trails out of sight.

If you ignore the text – which is Lilliman praying, the words placed for ironic affect — the page takes mere seconds to convey its information. It’s fast and brutal and conveys the ferocity of the attack, but because operates mainly through speed and suggestion, it neither lingers on nor wallows in the violence of V’s foray.

Judging from the ads, the cinematic V for Vengeance not only plays out the fights in real time, but fetishizes the inhuman speed and agility with which V dispatches his foes. Of course, that’s to be expected from the guys who gave us The Matrix, but the film not only glorifies the violence (by turning it into a sort of hyper-athletic spectator sport) but encourages the viewers to root for V.

Thing is, I’m not sure that rooting for V is what the story demands. Ultimately, V himself is a cipher – that’s part of the reason the ending works the way it does, with Evie imagining various faces underneath the mask — and one whose moral stature is, high-flown talk aside, deliberately ambiguous. Like Delia Surrage, the former Larkhill Prison doctor, we’re caught by his charisma and fascinated by what he can do, but those who end up admiring him probably aren’t getting the point of Moore’s story.

All of which makes it easy for me to understand why Moore would have insisted his name not be associated with the movie. There are some stories that remain best told in non-moving pictures, and V For Vendetta is one.

Girls On Film

2006-03-18T09:28:00.001-05:00

From a recent New York Times article about David Joseph and his porn company Red Light District, which brought us the Paris Hilton sex tape (and is trying to bring us the Kid Rock/Scott Stapp groupie tape):

Even if he never gets a chance to sell the video. Mr. Joseph is already chasing another celebrity tape. He would not name names, but did drop hints. "It's a girl," he said, smiling mischievously, "and she's in the music business."

And who might this girl be? Britney Spears? Christina Aguilera? Lil’ Kim? A Simpson? Let the guessing begin.

ZZZZZZZZZZZ...

2006-01-19T19:30:00.000-05:00

What, is it January already? How did that happen?

Sorry for the long snooze. Look for (actual) new content soon — presumably when I don't have a squirming five-month old on my lap.

Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor...

2005-11-21T16:59:00.000-05:00

... is the best Kylie Minogue album ever.

Cat Heroin

2005-11-13T13:49:00.000-05:00

A couple weeks ago, the local grocer had a special on what looked like a new kind of cat treat. Because my cat Miles will occasionally turn up his nose at kibble (imagine!), treats are a handy tool for keeping the little fella fed. So I figured I would try the new stuff.

Turns out I should have read the label more carefully. What I bought wasn’t cat treats but very fancy moist food called Iams Select Bites. (The fact that the labels mention “gravy” and “sauce” should have tipped me off, I know.) Worse, Miles decided within his first nibble that this was The Best Cat Food Ever, and could he please have some more. NOW, dammit! And it isn’t even the meat he wants — mainly, he just licks off the gravy and leaves the rest.

In the past, when he’s become obsessed to some new food, it proves a short cycle and he grows bored of it after a week or so. Not this time. All I have to do is merely move in the general direction of the kitchen, and he’s at my feet, looking up at me with a plaintive expression and meowing piteously. If that doesn’t work, he tries tripping me.

I could just stop buying the stuff, but Miles has been my cat for 18 years now, and has earned a few indulgences. So for now, I’m stuck buying Iams. Still, let this serve as a warning to the cat owners among you: Shop carefully, or your kitty may end up with a two-dollar a day habit!

Everything You Know Is Wrong

2005-10-15T16:06:00.000-04:00

One thing that really frustrates me about many reference works on rock history is how frequently they offer misinformation. Not on the big stuff, of course, but too often the tiny details that flesh the story out are, frankly, wrong.

Worse, once in print bad info has a tendency to get repeated. Robbie Robertson was in Toronto recently, promoting the Band retrospective A Musical History, and complained that the liner notes to the previous Band box, Across the Great Divide, was “just all wrong. I couldn’t relate to it, because that’s not right, that’s not true, that’s not it… Over the years, there has been a lot of things written and stuff that’s just not factual. And I thought, God, there are people out there who read these things, because that’s what’s out there, so that’s what they believe. Let’s straighten that out. Let’s make it so that’s not a problem anymore.”

A day later, as I was turning that interview into a piece for the Globe and Mail, I re-read Greil Marcus’ essay on the Band from Mystery Train, where I came upon the following footnote on the group’s pre-history: “The names of those bands are too good to leave out: The Robots, the Consuls, Thumper and the Trombones…” Now, here’s version from the Musical History liner notes: “…Robbie and the Robots, Thumper and the Trambones, Little Caesar and the Consuls…” Minor differences all, and yet they make a world of difference. (Little Caesar and the Consuls is much wittier than the Consuls.)

That’s not to harsh on Marcus, but it does speak to the primary weakness of much rock history: It’s based on interviews with the music press, interviews that by and large simply take the musician at his word (or, at least, as much of his word as the reporter can make out). Trouble is, musicians aren’t always the most reliable sources. Sometimes they forget details, or exaggerate to make a better story, or make stuff up to reinforce a myth. Hell, sometimes they lie simply because it’s more fun. Stan Ridgway once told me that he loved speaking with the English press, because you could tell them anything and they’d print it. So he’d make up ridiculous stories involving movie stars and other celebrities, and sure enough, they’d turn up in print a few days or weeks later.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with daily paper reporters on short deadline filing stories that essentially amount to This Is What the Person Said. The news is frequently like that. Unfortunately, where news reporters sometimes follow up their quote-driven stories with investigative pieces that confirm or contradict what was said, pop music writers almost never do. Worse, other writers then reiterate those quotes without bothering to check their veracity, and before you know it, conversational bullshit has been enshrined as historical fact.

Fortunately, that is beginning to change. Writers as far afield as Charles Cross (in his Kurt Cobain biography Heavier Than Heaven), Ned Sublette (in his towering study Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo) and Jeff Chang (in his award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation) have significantly raised the bar for pop music books by doing the sort of research traditional historians and biographers have always done. Of course, correcting all the misinformation floating through the pop world would be a task on par with cleaning the Stables of Augeas, especially given the ease with which bad “facts” proliferate on the internet. But it’s worth trying to maintain standards, and double-checking to be sure the story you’re reading is the right one.

Sheer Heart Attack

2005-09-30T12:22:00.000-04:00

Rock fans have laughed at the weird stuff rock stars demand backstage — what’s known in the trade as “contract riders” — ever since David Lee Roth revealed that Van Halen requested a bowl of M&Ms every night with all the brown ones removed. As you’d expect, demands since then have gotten both sillier and more extravagant, as a quick survey of the riders posted by The Smoking Gun indicate.

Still, nothing on that list prepared me for this little bombshell, dropped by Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida. His band opened for the Stones at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, and as he told the student paper at Villanova, “They had a defibrillator backstage for Keith Richards — or just for whoever was feeling it at the time. I'm serious.”

It sounds like a joke, I know. In fact, there was a Rolling Stones defibrillator joke on the internet weeks before the Maida quote turned up, one of many “gosh, they’re old gags” that trailed in the wake of the current Stones tour. Fortunately, we’ll likely be spared the “Start Me Up” association in real life, if only because they’ve already licensed that one to Microsoft.

Shame, Shame, Shame

2005-09-27T12:43:00.000-04:00

Remember all those horror stories that floated out of post-Katrina New Orleans? The murder and child rapes that turned the Superdome into a terrordome? The rampaging gangs and piles of corpses that made the convention center seem like a rain-soaked corner of hell?

Well, guess what — they didn’t happen. According to the New Orleans Times Picayune (with more from the Los Angeles Times), workers cleaning up both sites found no evidence of widespread murder. In fact, they only found evidence of one possible murder, which will require further forensic investigation to confirm. Obviously, evidence of rape is much harder to come by, but even that seems to have been considerably less common than originally reported.

Good news, then, for those worried that those cracks in the foundation of the American Dream might bring the whole edifice down. Still, a question remains: Why was everyone so ready to believe the horror stories? Is it because raping, murdering and pillaging are the kind of behaviors most people expect of poor blacks in America?

And do I even need to point out how unspeakably racist such an assumption is?

Fake Book

2005-09-08T13:43:00.000-04:00

On August 30, while much of New Orleans was underwater, George W. Bush was photographed playing a guitar given to him by country singer Mark Wills. Numerous pundits with a firm grasp of the obvious, seized upon this to draw comparisons with the Emperor Nero, who allegedly played fiddle while Rome burned. (Never mind that fiddles didn’t actually exist back then; “fiddled” sounds better than “played the lyre.”)

What bugs me about the photo, however, is that it gets described as showing the president “playing guitar,” when at best he’s only posing, trying to look like he’s a-pickin’. How do I know? Just look at his left hand. Like many a duff guitarist, he’s formed the hand shape for an open-G chord — except that instead of having his fingers in place to play G (third fret on the lower E string) and B (second fret on the A string), he’s a fret off, at G-sharp and C. His little finger may be adding an A (fifth fret on the upper E string), but it’s hard to be certain. In any case, were he actually to strum that guitar, the result would be utter dischord, revealing him as someone who doesn’t know diddley about guitar. Instead, he poses quietly, and only instrument geeks like me notice.

I don’t mean to single out the president on this, because instrumental fakery is disturbingly widespread. One of my favorite moments in Oliver Stone’s The Doors is a rehearsal session in which the band is ostensibly learning “Light My Fire.” One of the band calls out the changes, and as he does we watch John Densmore (Kevin Dillon) fingering the chords on guitar. And getting most of them wrong.

Even when the actors know what they’re doing, mistakes can happen. Taylor Hackford was justifiably proud of the fact that Jamie Foxx, who plays Ray Charles in the bioflick Ray, is a trained pianist who didn’t have to fake the keyboard parts. Indeed, the credits feature an overhead shot of Foxx’s hands accurately miming to the classic recording of “What’d I Say” on a Fender Rhodes. But as all vintage keyboard buffs know, “What’d I Say” doesn’t use a Rhodes — it’s a Wurlitzer electric on the track.

I know, I know — this is precisely the sort nerdery that gets lampooned in The Rock Snob’s Dictionary (although why actually knowing something about the craft of music-making counts as snobbery is itself rant material). But every time I see a model mishandle a prop trombone, or watch an actor flailing his or her fingers ineffectually along a saxophone, I’m reminded of how distanced the average person is from the art of music. It’s depressing to think that for many educated people, being able to play an instrument is as much a lost craft as spinning wool or carpentry.

In that sense, having Dubya pose as a guitarist is just one more example of how people get the government they deserve. As if another such example were needed.

All Wet

2005-09-02T18:07:00.000-04:00

It would be hard to imagine anyone following the story out of New Orleans without feeling some measure of shock, pity or dismay. Even with headlines screaming “Anarchy!” (to cite today’s Toronto Star), newspapers can hardly be accused of exaggerating the horror of the situation. Indeed, one of the scariest things about reports from the Crescent City is how essentially anecdotal the news has been. There have been unconfirmed talk of rapes and murders, of bodies in the streets, of thousands of casualties, but so far the authorities have been mum when it comes to concrete details. In this case, no news is definitely not good news; if anything, it suggests we’ve barely glimpsed the tip of this iceberg.

Much has been made about the fact that, to a very real degree, this was an avoidable disaster. As this story in Editor & Publisher summarizes, the Times Picayune has been reporting for several years now on how government funding to maintain the levees protecting New Orleans had been decimated under the current Bush administration — mostly to pay for the war in Iraq. And speaking of the war, that was also why there was no National Guard presence helping out in New Orleans, for they, too, had been sent to Iraq, along with much of the equipment needed to get supplies through flood waters.

That’s not just appalling, it should be embarrassing. By any accounting, the U.S. is the world’s richest and most powerful nation, and yet not only did it leave a major city — a world-renowned cultural center and tourist destination — completely vulnerable to an expected natural disaster, it sat on its thumbs for days as people fought, starved, suffered and likely died. A charitable reading of the U.S. response would be that the disaster was so overwhelming that even the mightiest of the mighty were unable to cope.

A less charitable (and likely more accurate) view would suggest that the Feds did nothing to aid New Orleans because, frankly, they couldn’t be bothered. It may be “the home of the blues,” but it’s also a city whose population is over 60% African-American, which boasts high crime and poverty rates, and hasn’t exactly been a Republican stronghold. Nor is it likely that the bluenoses on the right are especially enamored of the party-hearty atmosphere that inspired the nickname “Big Easy.” Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-Ill) may have made headlines by saying in an interview that New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt, but you can bet he’s not the only person in power with that thought.

Some see echoes of 9/11 in the Federal Government’s ability to act swiftly, decisively and humanely to the Katrina tragedy. Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, suggests that Dubya’s inaction is somewhere between a character flaw and a philosophical stance. As he puts it:

At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don't like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But I’d like to suggest a different reading: Dubya’s posse doesn’t like spending money. Period. Whether that reflects a belief in making government smaller or is simply the sort of selfish parsimony common to the exceedingly wealthy is anyone’s guess. But their record is too consistent to ignore. They’ve cheaped their way through the war in Iraq, refusing to commit sufficient troops or supplies to get the job done, and they continue to cut corners in the war on terrorism. They want to privatize Social Security and other aspects of the social safety net, and have slashed countless government programs. At bottom, all that their talk about making government smaller or more efficient boils down to is Spending Less Money. And that’s essential, because it’s harder to justify cutting taxes unless you’ve done something to cut spending. Like neglecting to shore up a few levees in Louisiana…

Short-sighted? Only if you assume the Feds will eventually bail out New Orleans, and despite the backlash against Hassert, that remains an open question. Once most of the survivors have been relocated — that is, made permanently homeless in some other city — suddenly, the government will begin to stress the importance of restoring the gulf’s oil infrastructure. And most Americans, pissed off by the price at the pumps, will heartily agree. So that relief money Congress is pushing through will mostly go to pipelines, not people. New Orleans, meanwhile, will sit wet and neglected, like some decrepit Atlantis. Just you watch.

What Would Jesus Do?

2005-08-23T17:37:00.000-04:00

Hire a hit man, apparently.

Canadian Living Quiz

2005-08-18T00:57:00.000-04:00

Calling someone a “Newfie” means that they are:

A) New to Canada
B) From Newfoundland
C) A female newt

Instead of states, Canada is made up of:

A) Parishes
B) Provinces
C) Leftovers

The Canadian dollar is known as “the Loonie” in honor of:

A) Canada’s first prime minister, Sylvester Loonie
B) The bird featured on one side of the dollar coin
C) Those who accept it as money

Which of the following Las Vegas entertainment staples did not originate in Canada:

A) Cirque du Soleil
B) Celine Dion
C) Elvis wedding chapels

Indigenous residents of Canada’s northernmost provinces are called:

A) Sammi
B) Inuit
C) Elves

Prime Minister Paul Martin was given a nickname by the opposition based on what popular comic strip character:

A) Mr. Boffo
B) Mr. Dithers
C) Luanne

When a customer at a coffee shop says “double double,” he or she is telling the clerk:

A) That they want two coffees and two donuts
B) That they want double cream and double sugar
C) How to figure out the sales tax

The term “milk bags” refers to:

A) What cars in Saskatchewan have instead of air bags
B) A common and economical way of packaging milk
C) Pamela Anderson’s least favourite nickname

There are more NHL franchises in the U.S. than in Canada because:

A) Hockey is just that popular
B) Small town American mayors will pony up more dough for a sports franchise than small town Canadian mayors
C) Southern parents need a way to show their children that ice comes in a form other than cubes

"Cottage Country" describes:

A) Those parts of Canada where residents can't afford full-size houses
B) Semi-rustic vacation areas in Northern Ontario
C) Canada's national mosquito-feeding program

Wrong Key Donkey

2005-08-11T13:22:00.000-04:00

The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest daily (and my principal Canadian outlet), has a regular feature called “Your Morning Smile,” a reader-generated parade of jokes apparently meant to ensure Canadians get their daily dose of corn. Today’s, courtesy Lloyd Candow of Pasadena, Nfld, reads: “A C, E-Flat, and G go into a bar. The bartender says, ‘Sorry, but we don't serve minors.’”

The joke, of course, is that the musical notes C, E-flat and G comprise a C-minor triad. Hence, “We don’t serve minors.” Ha-ha, right? But being an early-morning literalist, I looked at the joke and thought, “Wait a sec — A, C, E-flat and G is a diminished seventh, not a minor.”

Maybe that's why there aren't more music theory jokes...