A first world democracy with third world religiousity and problems

An interesting radio piece from the Australian Broadcasting Company, courtesy of fellow DY hack Jane O'Dwyer, soon to be departing our office and Nippon's fair shores to head up PR at Australia's National University,
and yes she is going to hate that picture and the link.
Summary
A discussion with researcher Gregory Paul, about his world-first study of data from the developed democratic countries in which he found a clear relationship between high levels of religious belief and practice, and social problems.

He finds the United States - the most religious of the western democracies, indeed the only strongly Christian nation remaining among the advanced democracies - does not emerge well ...

'Exceptionally Christian and anti-evolution America performs unusually poorly
in terms of rates of homicide, juvenile and adult mortality, STD infections,
abortion, and teen pregnancy and birth. America is the only first world nation to retain second and third world rates of religious belief and practice and disbelief in evolution, and is the only first world nation to retain second and third world rates of societal dysfunction.'
Tune in here to listen, just scroll down to Tuesday Oct. 4 and pick your media or download the MP3

Flashback
I went to see the String Cheese Incident last week (special thanks to Doug at Buffalo Records, purveyor of fine roots music, for squeezing me onto the guest list) and met a couple of guys from San Francisco who were here on business and took some great shots of the band and Tokyo in general. The rest of Evan and Michael's photos of Tokyo, including the requiste shots of school girls in Shibuya can be found here.

Doug's excellent photos can be seen on his new bilingual blog

Documentary charts life of two-fisted poet
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff WriterBukowski: Born Into This

Four stars out of five
Written and Directed by John Dullaghan
Cast: Charles Bukowski, Linda Lee Bukowski, John Martin, Taylor Hackford

"I'm what they used to call down at the bar a 'good duker.' That's the highest compliment there is," poet and author Charles Bukowski tells an unidentified interviewer at one point in Bukowski: Born Into This.

Bukowski's pugilistic attitude is part of his legend, along with his drinking and womanizing, all irresistible subject matter for interviewers and documentarians, but Born Into This director and writer John Dullaghan has managed to resist the temptation to wallow in the sordid side of Bukowski's world, turning his lens instead to the man's prolific literary output.

The film opens with a clip from a reading in which Bukowski refuses to continue until the organizer provides another bottle of wine and then proceeds to make a half-serious threat to physically eject a heckler--it is vintage Bukowski, but as the film unwinds, one starts to wonder how much of "Buk's" macho bluster was clowning for the crowd, how much of it was self-defense and how much of it was sheer drunken bravado.

Born in Germany in 1920 to a doughboy and his war bride, Henry Charles Bukowski Jr. landed in Los Angeles at the age of 2. Apart from a brief period of collecting rejection slips and wandering the United States in the early 40s--he took a bus to Florida after dropping out of college "to get as far from my father as I could"--he rarely left that city again.

In one interview, Bukowski credits his abusive father for making him a writer.

"When you get the shit kicked out of you long enough and long enough and long enough, you have a tendency to say what you really mean. In other words, you have the pretense beat out of you. My father was a great literary teacher. He taught me the meaning of pain, pain without reason," Bukowski tells an interviewer.

Along with D.A. Levy, Doug Blazek and others, Bukowski was labeled by critics as one of the "Meat Poets," a group that shared the Beats' fascination with finding the ecstatic and sorrowful in the everyday life of the common man, but eschewed the Beats' love of prosaic metaphor and flowery description in favor of a sometimes brutal, often vulgar, directness.

The movie amounts to a series of well-crafted biographical vignettes interspersed with interviews with those who knew Bukowski and anecdotes from the bad boy of American letters. Dullaghan's original interviews tend to focus on Bukowski's working life and personal relationships while leaving the more colorful aspects of his career to be related in clips from older interviews with Bukowski.

For example, the viewer is presented with the writer regaling a German television crew with the story of how he lost his virginity at 24 to a "300-pound whore" juxtaposed with Dullaghan interviewing Bukowski's longtime publisher John Martin about his decision to sell his collection of first editions and use the money to publish Bukowski's poems.

Martin tells of negotiating an agreement in 1970 to pay Bukowski 100 dollars a month for life, the minimum the writer thought he needed to live on, whether wrote or not, on the condition he quit his much despised longtime job as a night-shift postal clerk.

Of the many heartfelt reminiscences in the film, one of the most touching moments is a graveside interview with Bukowski's widow, Linda Lee, as she talks of his death in 1994 from leukemia.

For the most part, the film consists of Bukowski speaking revealingly and honestly about what he knows best--himself. Born Into This is a comprehensive biography without being overwhelming in its detail and paints an evenhanded, often heartbreaking, portrait of one of the most intriguing writers of the last century using his own words.

'Until I Find You' bloated, but brilliant
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

Until I Find You

By John Irving

Random House, 824 pp, 27.95 dollars


John Irving's latest doorstop of a novel, Until I Find You, is his most autobiographical work and at over 800 pages certainly the closest he has come to emulating his 19th-century idols Charles Dickens and Herman Melville. Irving's 11th book is a delightful, frustrating and inspiring book that, despite certain shortcomings, ranks as one of his best.

Standing head and shoulders above his more recent novels, The Fourth Hand and A Widow for One Year, Irving's latest work shows a writer at the height of his powers who has sadly fallen victim to major writer syndrome--a condition afflicting commercially successful authors as diverse as J.K. Rowling and Tom Wolfe that leaves awestruck editors unable to trim bloated manuscripts. Until I Find You is a very good book, but expunging about 150 pages of well-written set pieces that do nothing to advance the plot and little to develop the characters would have made it a great book.

Until I Find You tells the story of Jack Burns, the bastard son of a tattoo-addicted organist and ladies' man, and the choirgirl daughter of a tattoo artist. The first 100 pages comprise a detailed account of 4-year-old Jack's travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, around the ports of the North Sea, supposedly in pursuit of his father, William, who seems to leave a trail of broken hearts behind as he goes from one grand cathedral pipe organ to the next.

The pair track Jack's father from port to port before returning to Toronto, where Jack starts school as one of the few boys at the formerly all-girls St. Hilda's, where his philandering father was previously employed.

A beautiful boy, Jack is doted on by both the prostitutes of Amsterdam and the older girls at St. Hilda's. One in particular, Emma Ostler, nearly 10 years his senior, becomes his lifelong protector and later stepsister, sexual educator, roommate and benefactor.

Jack becomes a star actor at St. Hilda's, even in female roles, and goes on to become a movie star known for playing in drag.

In a clever autobiographical twist, Jack Burns even wins Irving's 1999 Academy Award for best adapted screenplay.

Along with Irving's Oscar, Jack also shares a sizable chunk of Irving's personal history. Both were separated from their fathers as infants, though Irving was later adopted by his stepfather, and both were seduced and sexually abused by older women as preteens. Missing parents and older woman-younger man relationships have figured prominently in all of Irving's work and are major themes in the latest film adaptation of his work The Door in the Floor, based on the first part of A Widow For One Year. The theme of sexual abuse and dysfunction is front and center in Until I Find You, as Jack develops a lifelong fixation with older women and Emma with younger men.

Another of Irving's favorite themes, loss, grief and regret, is also central to Until I Find You, with ever-present tattoos symbolizing characters' sorrows--one of Alice's specialties is a broken heart tattoo, and each of the tattoos that make up William's full-body covering comes with considerable emotional baggage.

Discussing tattoos, Jack's stepparent at one point tells him: "Life forces enough final decisions on us...We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can"--one of a number of epigrams Irving underscores by having Jack borrow them from his life for movie lines.

Irving's fondness for metafiction is also in evidence and the reader is treated to a number of capsule versions of the movies Jack stars in.

These stories-within-the story contribute to the novel's length, and Jack's adult retracing of his childhood voyage around the North Sea, which begins with a startling revelation that forces both Jack and the reader to reassess everything they think they know about Jack's parents, helps justify the detail provided in the first 100 pages, but an inordinate amount of the book dwells on Jack's early childhood as one of the few boys at the exclusive St. Hilda's without much in the way of subsequent payoff.

As in much of Irving's previous work, most of the characters are outsiders looking for their place in the world, a goal Irving seems to have finally achieved.

Hey! if you've read this far, obviously you are interested in John Irving (or a very dedicated Woodshed reader - Hi Mom!) in which case you may want to read the interview with the man published in the DY the same day.

Soul on ice
Hockey is back at last, and the Habs are flying out of the gate with a last minute 2-1 win over the Bruins. Jack Todd over at the Montreal Gazzoo has an insightful, if optimistic, column on the bleu-blanc-et-rouge's chances this year.

The friendly skies
Thank god for airline security staff, otherwise we might have to ride with people whose ideas we disagree with and even be exposed to satirical t-shirts

Clearly people with more time than brains

Minutemen guarding the U.S. Canada border. I'd love to see some of these goofballs sit at their posts in the middle of a Manitoba or Northern Ontario February.

Nothing like a nice rumor to cost people their lives

No proof of helicopter being fired at in NOLA

"I love the smell of ink and bourbon in the morning..."
Berkley Breathed is back and in fine form this week

Betcha didn't know...

The JP Morgan and Rockerfellers once plotted to overthrow the U.S. Government and install a facist dictatorship

and no, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat when I say I think they finally have succeeded

Chaos at the Superdome - - or not

Digby has a longish, but excellent post on the rumours and hysteria that probably killed more people than the ficticious baby-raping looters at the superdome.

"I think 99 percent of it is [expletive]," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong ?bad things happened. But I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything ... 99 percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."


Inside the Superdome, where National Guardsmen performed rigorous security checks before allowing anyone inside, only one shooting has been verified ?and even that shooting, injuring Louisiana Guardsman Chris Watt of the 527th Engineer Battalion, has been widely misreported, said Maj. David Baldwin, who led the team of soldiers who arrested the alleged assailant.

Watt had indeed been attacked inside one of the Dome's locker rooms, where he entered with another soldier. In the darkness, as they walked through about six inches of water, Watt's attacker hit him with a metal rod, a piece of a cot. But the bullet that penetrated Watt's leg came from his own gun ?he accidentally shot himself during the commotion. The attacker was sent to jail, Baldwin said.

Tiny patriots
This from Patridiot Watch by way of The Talent Show, which asks the question, "What's next? Puppies singing "God Bless America"? Jesus posing like the Statue of Liberty?"

To which we can only reply "Yeah, probably."

Amen

As usual Bilmon says it better than the rest of us. I see nothing here to disagree with. The west, especially the U.S. is screwed if they stay in Iraq and the average Iraqi is screwed if the U.S. leaves and screwed if they stay.

Mature jazzy soul sounds from teen prodigy
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer

The music business' unfortunate tendency to pigeonhole artists based on genre seems especially odd in the case of singer-songwriter Sonya Kitchell.

Her debut album, Words Came Back to Me, recorded for New York-based Velour Music Group and released earlier this month in Japan by P-Vine Records is an easy-on-the-ears amalgam of jazz-inflected classic-style soul and pop, with elements of rock, blues, folk and gospel that showcases Kitchell's versatile vocal chops and potent songwriting skills.

Her smooth-as-silk-delivery and jazz roots often lead to comparisons to Norah Jones, a comparison Kitchell is clearly uncomfortable with: "I've met Norah a few times and she's really a great person, but there is really only room for one Norah Jones. I think we do very different material. She's got this country thing going on and that's not really what I do. I like to rock...I don't really consider myself a jazz singer."

Mining the same musical vein as Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones and Carole King before her, Kitchell seems destined to be shunted into the ambiguous adult contemporary classification.

But can an album really be considered adult contemporary if the performer in question is only 16 years old?

Seeing her perform, Kitchell's maturity as an artist is immediately evident. Aside from a youthful enthusiasm for pleasing the crowd, there is nothing teenage about her smart and sophisticated sound, the result of far more musical experience than her age would suggest.

After singing on stage for the first time in a school show in the first grade, Kitchell was hooked on performing and says it's the high she gets from connecting with an audience that has kept her touring the club and festival circuit.

Kitchell went from the primary school stage to voice lessons and singing in a gospel choir, an experience that has had a clear influence on her vocal style. At 10, she performed with a jazz band at the 1999 Special Olympics World Games and won a Kennedy Center award for promising young jazz composers at age 12. By 13, she had an agent and was playing jazz clubs with a band composed largely of her former music teachers and musicians she'd met through various workshops near her home in rural western Massachusetts, where she lives with her younger brother; mother, a graphic designer; and father, a painter and successful abstract poster artist. When not on the road, Kitchell attends a nearby performing arts high school.

Her live set in Tokyo, with Kitchell accompanying herself on guitar backed by bandmate Miro Sprague on piano, was a jazzy, laid-back affair with the young diva clearly at ease on stage. Kitchell's singing has an affectless, emotive quality reminiscent of Janis Joplin, without the rough timbre of the later.

Songwriting is something that has come naturally for Kitchell, who wrote her first "real" song on Sept. 11, 2001, in reaction to the events of that day.

"I do most of my writing at home, just sitting down at the piano or with my guitar until something comes to me...I wouldn't say it's an enjoyable process, but it's really exciting when it flows."

Since then she's penned over 100 songs, including all 13 tracks on Words. She says she has already put together enough material for a second release and hopes to be back in the studio soon to make an album she predicts will be more oriented toward folk, rock and soul.

But does living the life of a professional touring musician mean missing out on the typical aspects of teenage life?

"Definitely, but there's nothing I can really do about that. My life is definitely not typical, but then there's the question of 'what's typical?' It's not typical to not be going to a regular public school if you live out in the country, it's not typical to be going to Europe or to be in Japan, but everything has its pros and cons."


"Words Came Back to Me" is currently available. (Sep. 22, 2005)

Danger in our schools
And people say I'm exaggerating when I talk about having seen bears all the time in when I was a kid. The area mentioned is not more than a few blocks from my old neighbourhood in the Sault.
Click the link for the full story


Local schools take precautions after bear sightings
Some in city's north end bring children in from outside
By Michael Purvis Local News
Tuesday, September 20, 2005 @ 09:00

Recent bear sightings have schools around the P-patch and Sault Ste. Marie's north end keeping an eye out for threats to students. Some schools in the city's north end brought children in from outside after neighbours reported bears in the area on Friday. "

Osprey Media Group Inc. - The Sault Star:

Peace Activist Cindy Sheehan Says She Was Roughed Up at New York Rally Scuffle

Reincarnation of Peter Pan
Kevin Wood / Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer
Kensington Gardens

By Rodrigo Fresan, translated by Natasha Wimmer Faber and Faber, 384 pp, 24.95 dollars


The 100th anniversary of the first performance of Peter Pan has brought renewed life to James Barrie's personification of youthful spirit. There has been a new film version of the play and even a movie made about how the diminutive Scotsman was inspired to write his most famous work. None view the story through a darker glass than Kensington Gardens.

Argentine expatriate novelist Rodrigo Fresan weaves an inventive double helix of literary DNA, intertwining a fictionalized biography of Barrie, the most successful dramatist and author of the Victorian era, with a first-person account of the life of Peter Hook, a fictional children's novelist who has stepped over the edge of reason and into a Neverland of his own creation.

A sort of ying-yang duality lies at the core of the novel, with each element of Barrie's life story having its counterpart, in some cases a funhouse mirror reflection, in Hook's life.

The son of an iconic swinging '60s rock star couple, Hook grows up on a posh estate called, a bit too obviously, Neverland. His parents, the children of wealthy aristocrats, are the nucleus of a rock band called the Beaten Victorians--a sort of anti-Beatles who lament the loss of traditional British values while still embracing the psychedelic scene.

Like Barrie, Hook loses a much loved brother and is neglected and unloved by his parents. While Barrie's mother shut herself up in her room after the death of Barrie's elder brother, Hook's grief-maddened mother dies in Peter Hook's arms singing the chorus of her hit single "You're Not Mine" to her young son after biting off his earlobe.

Unlike Barrie, who stayed childlike in many ways throughout his life, Hook becomes a hardened, cynical adult almost overnight after taking LSD in Kensington Park as a young child.

Hook grows up to become the J.K. Rowling of his world, penning a long-running series of best-selling children's novels starring Jim Yang and his time-traveling bicycle. While Peter Pan is the boy who refuses to grow up, Yang's time-traveling leaves him unable to do so. Fresan makes clear that in as much as Barrie's Peter Pan was inspired by and modeled on the Llewelyn-Davies brothers, Yang is very much Hook's literary alter ego.

Hook tells the story of his life, intermingled with Barrie's, to Keiko Kai, a Japanese child actor cast to play the part of Yang in the first movie based on Hook's work. Hook has kidnapped the young thespian and has sinister plans to wreck his own reputation and try to destroy the "virus" of children's literature forever:

"I was infected; and terminally ill, I consecrated myself to the virus--literature--whose mission, hardly secret at all, is to kill reality and annihilate childhood, supplanting and improving both as much as possible until they've become immortal stories that will never grow old."

Fresan, like Barrie and Hook, understands that children are not innocents in the sentimental, blameless way that adults generally portray and imagine them, but only unknowing or perhaps unconcerned with the consequences of their actions, whether noble or brutal. Pedaling back and forth in time like Yang, Hook, propelled by Fresan's often surrealistic descriptions and energetic, magic-realism tinged storytelling takes his young prisoner well beyond the "second star to the right and straight on 'til morning."

Kensington Gardens is a fascinating, dark and yet whimsical meditation on the nature of childhood, fantasy, neglect and imagination.

(Sep. 18, 2005)

After all, Cajun is actually a derivation of Canadian
This despite the wingnut whining about how no one is helping the US. Note the date of the story. Sept,8. CBC News: Louisiana senator: Thank you Canada

Today's heroes
If this doesn't break your heart, you ain't got one.
Survivor Story: 6-Year-Old Leads Five Toddlers, Baby To Safety - News - MSNBC.com

a joke
A lobbyist, on his way home from work in Washington, D.C., came to a dead halt in traffic and thought to himself, "Wow, this seems worse than usual."


He noticed a police officer walking between the lines of stopped cars, so he rolled down his window and asked, "Officer, what's the hold-up?"


The officer replied, "The President is depressed, so he stopped his motorcade and is threatening to douse himself with gasoline and set himself on fire. He says no one believes his stories about why we went to war in Iraq, or the connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda, or that his tax cuts will help anyone except his wealthy friends. So we're taking up a collection for him."


The lobbyist asks, "How much have you got so far?"


The officer replies, "About 14 gallons, but a lot of folks are still siphoning

(courtesy of SSquirrel at Eschaton)