Categories
Technology

This could be very cool!!

ABBA members to launch ‘new digital experience’ next year

NEW YORK — The members of ABBA are reuniting for a “new digital experience” next year.

The iconic Swedish pop band made the announcement Wednesday, but didn’t offer much detail. They said they are teaming up with Universal Music Group and entertainment mogul Simon Fuller (“American Idol,” Spice Girls) to “create an original entertainment experience … that will enable a new generation of fans to see, hear, and feel ABBA in a way previously unimagined.”

ABBA includes Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog, Bjoern Ulvaeus and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. They formed in Stockholm in 1972 and last performed together 35 years ago. The four members made a rare joint appearance in January for the opening of a Stockholm restaurant inspired by the “Mamma Mia!” musical.

ABBA’s hits include “Dancing Queen” and “Take a Chance on Me.”

Categories
Concerts

Can’t wait see her live!!

Tove Lo Plots 2017 ‘Lady Wood’ Tour

Swedish pop star Tove Lo will embark on an 11-date North American tour next year in support of her new album, Lady Wood.

The trek begins February 6th at Showbox SoDo in Seattle and includes stops in Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto and New York before wrapping February 24th at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. Tickets will be available via Tove Lo’s website and go on sale October 28th, the same day Lady Wood arrives.

Tove Lo already has a handful of dates scheduled for December as part of the traveling Jingle Ball 2016 tour. Her first appearance on that trek will be December 1st at the SAP Center in San Jose, California.

Lady Wood marks Tove Lo’s second LP and follows her 2014 debut, Queen of the Clouds. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Tove Lo said Lady Wood was Part One of what she saw as a double album to be continued next year. “The whole album is about different kinds of rushes in life,” she said. “The first chapter – ‘Fairy Dust’ – describes initiating [a] feeling, and then the second chapter ‘Fire Fade’ is when you start to be a little bit more aware and vulnerable.”

Tove Lo Lady Wood Tour Dates

February 6 – Seattle, WA @ Showbox Sodo
February 7 – Portland, OR @ Roseland Theater
February 8 – Oakland, CA @ Fox Theater
February 10 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Novo
February 15 – Minneapolis, MN @ First Avenue
February 16 – Chicago, IL @ House Of Blues
February 17 – Toronto, ON @ Massey Hall
February 19 – Boston, MA @ House Of Blues
February 20 – Philadelphia, PA @ The Electric Factory
February 22 – New York, NY @ Hammerstein Ballroom
February 24 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club

Categories
People

May he rest in peace.

Pete Burns, Dead or Alive Singer, Dead at 57

Pete Burns, lead singer of the Eighties goth new wave band Dead or Alive and their smash “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” died Sunday after suffering cardiac arrest, his management said Monday. Burns was 57.

“It is with the greatest sadness that we have to break the tragic news that out beloved Pete Burns of (Dead Or Alive), died suddenly yesterday of a massive cardiac arrest,” Burns’ Facebook alerted fans.

“All of his family and friends are devastated by the loss of our special star,” the message read. “He was a true visionary, a beautiful talented soul, and he will be missed by all who loved and appreciated everything he was and all of the wonderful memories the has left is with.”

Boy George, who weathered comparisons both musically and stylistically to Burns, tweeted of the Dead or Alive singer, “Tearful about the passing of @PeteBurnsICON he was one of our great true eccentrics and such a big part of my life! Wow. Hard to believe!”

The androgynous Burns, who began cross-dressing as a six-year-old, emerged in the late Seventies as a member of the goth band Nightmares in Wax, which released their lone EP Birth of a Nation, highlighted by the single “Black Leather,” in 1979 before adopting the name Dead or Alive.

After a string of singles, including “The Stranger,” Dead or Alive released their debut album Sophisticated Boom Boom in 1984, with the band transforming KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way (I Like It)” into an unlikely hit.

“The trouble is that people are all too ready to jump to conclusions about anybody who they think looks a bit strange. They think you must be mentally subnormal,” Burns once said of his unique appearance in an interview. “Over the years I’ve had to learn how to deal with people who refuse to take me seriously. That’s where I learnt the blunt side of my character.”

The following year, Youthquake arrived accompanied by the group’s biggest hit “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record).” The single reached Number One on the U.K charts and peaked at Number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2006, the song returned to the British charts – at Number Five – following Burns’ infamous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother.

Three years later, Flo Rida and Kesha’s take on the song, dubbed “Right Round,” topped the Billboard 200 and shattered then-digital sales records.

The singer also recorded notable Dead or Alive hits with “Brand New Lover” and “Something in the House.”

Following the Eighties, however, Burns became more known for his reality TV appearances and ever-changing look – Burns underwent countless cosmetic surgeries over the past decades, with heavy physical consequences – than his music.

“People redecorate their homes every few years and I see this as no different. Changing my face is like buying a new sofa,” Burns told the Daily Mail after another string of surgeries left him virtually unrecognizable.

As Dead or Alive’s only constant member, Burns continued to tour under the group’s moniker until his death.

Categories
Movies

Whether it’s good or bad, and it’s poor opening suggests bad, I still want to see KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES.

Box office report: Madea clobbers Jack Reacher, Moonlight shines in limited release

Keeping up with time-tested tradition, Tyler Perry’s latest installment in the long-running Madea series debuts at the top of the domestic box office, pulling in a stellar estimated $27.6 million across its first three days in wide release.

Boo! A Madea Halloween marks the fourth in Perry’s franchise to launch at the top of the North American chart, the first being 2005’s series kickoff Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which set sail at No. 1 in 2005 with a $21.9 million weekend gross.

Though its three-day total is enough to keep the Tom Cruise action flick Jack Reacher: Never Go Back at bay, Boo!’s $27.6 million registers the Madea series’ third highest-opening (unadjusted for inflation), falling behind both 2009’s Madea Goes to Jail ($41 million) and 2006’s Madea’s Family Reunion ($30 million). Further proving Perry’s ability to speak to a niche audience with targeted content, Boo!, while a critical disappointment, earns a rare A grade on CinemaScore from polled audiences.

While the Jack Reacher sequel settles for a No. 2 finish, its estimated $23 million opening gross is a significant improvement over its forerunner’s $15.2 million start. The film also pushes its per-screen average higher than the original Jack Reacher’s, tallying $6,085 from 3,780 screens as compared to the 2012 flick’s $4,538 per-location average at 3,352 theaters.

The $60 million picture is also the top-grossing film at the global box office, taking in $54 million total ($31 million from international territories), a 28 percent increase from the worldwide haul of the first Jack Reacher movie. Never Go Back attracted mostly older, white males to cinemas this weekend, with 57 percent of moviegoers identifying as male, while 82 percent were over the age of 25. The film nabs a decent B+ grade on CinemaScore on top of negative critical response.

Easily clearing its $9 million production budget at No. 3 is Ouija: Origin of Evil, a horror sequel that continues 2016’s trend of producing inexpensive genre titles that go on to solid critical and financial success. The film rakes in an estimated $14 million from 3,168 theaters for a per-screen average of $4,438. Critics were kind to the prequel on Friday (it stands at 81 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences weren’t impressed by Sunday’s end: Origin receives a poor C grade on CinemaScore, indicating a sharp drop next weekend is likely.

Ben Affleck’s The Accountant takes a light 43 percent dip to No. 4, adding just over $14 million to its ballooning domestic total, which now hovers around the $50 million mark after 10 days in theaters. The Emily Blunt thriller The Girl on the Train rounds out the top five, making an additional $7.3 million across its third weekend for a North American total of $58.9 million. The week’s fourth new wide release, Keeping Up with the Joneses, manages a paltry $5.6 million from 3,022 theaters in the No. 6 slot.

On the specialty front, A24’s impending Oscar contender Moonlight celebrates one of the best opening weekends of the year so far, averaging $103,685 and selling out in each of its four locations between Friday and Sunday. The film also sits atop the list of the year’s best-reviewed films with a 99 percent score on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic as of Sunday morning.

Michael Moore in TrumpLand, the director’s surprise documentary about Donald Trump, opened on two screens this week, averaging $25,100 for an estimated $50,200 finish, while Chan-wook Park’s The Handmaiden grosses an impressive $91,600 at five theaters. A restored version of the Jûzô Itami classic Tampopo (originally released in 1985) premiered this weekend, taking in $17,200 from a single location.

Year-to-date box office is up 3.5 percent from the same frame last year.

Check out the Oct. 21-23 weekend box office estimates below.

1. Boo! A Madea Halloween – $27.6 million
2. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back – $23 million
3. Ouija: Origin of Evil – $14 million
4. The Accountant – $14 million
5. The Girl on the Train – $7.3 million
6. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – $6 million
7. Keeping Up with the Joneses – $5.6 million
8. Kevin Hart: What Now? – $4.1 million
9. Storks – $4.1 million
10. Deepwater Horizon – $3.6 million

Categories
Music

I can’t wait to hear it all!!

Warner Bros. Promises Previously Unreleased Prince Music

Warner Bros. Records is about to unveil two projects by the late megastar Prince that include previously unreleased material.

Prince 4Ever is a 40-song compilation of his biggest hits from his Warner Bros. days along with the previously unreleased song “Moonbeam Levels,” recorded in 1982. It’s due in stores Nov. 22 and will feature a booklet with new Prince photos shot by photographer Herb Ritts.

Warner Bros. also says the Purple Rain deluxe reissue will come early next year. It will feature a second album of unreleased songs.

Categories
People

More sad news. May he rest in peace.

Comic-book artist and ‘Preacher’ creator Steve Dillon dies at 54

Artist Steve Dillon, who co-created the comic-book series on which the AMC show Preacher is based, has died in New York at 54.

His brother and fellow cartoonist, Glyn, confirmed the news on Twitter but did not go into the details of his older brother’s death.

The English-born Dillon got his start at age 16 by providing the artwork for Marvel UK’s Hulk Weekly. While still in the U.K., he worked on Doctor Who Weekly, for which he created the character of Abslom Daak, Nick Fury and Warrior.

He left for the United States in the 1980s and began the next phase of his career at DC Comics, creating artwork for Skreemer, Animal Man and The Atom. His first big success came in the early ’90s as the result of his partnership with writer Garth Ennis on the Hellblazer series.

Dillon and Ennis reteamed in 1995 to create the acclaimed Preacher for Vertigo Comics, which is still revered as a classic work. It earned Dillon the Eisner award, the comic-book industry’s equivalent of an Oscar, in 1996. USA TODAY’s Brian Truitt described the series as “ultra-violent, often funny and slightly blasphemous.”

AMC premiered its well-received TV adaptation of Preacher, starring Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga, in May. The show, wrote Truitt, managed to “make the network’s zombie hit The Walking Dead look like TheCare Bears.” The show returns for its second season in 2017.

Along with Ennis, Dillon returned to Marvel in 2000 to work on The Punisher. His other creations include the Dogwelder character for Ennis’ Hitman series.

Seth Rogen, who serves as an executive producer on the TV version of Preacher, called Dillon “my favorite comic artist who drew my favorite comics.”

Brian Lynch, who wrote the animated film The Secret Life of Pets, wrote, “Thank you for Preacher and some of the greatest Punisher stories. I can’t believe this, this stinks.”

Categories
Star Wars

I love this casting news!!

Donald Glover cast as young Lando in Han Solo ‘Star Wars’ film

Donald Glover is joining the “Star Wars” universe.

The acclaimed actor and Grammy-nominated artist, has been cast as young Lando Calrissian in the still-untitled Han Solo standalone film, set for release in 2018.

The movie, from directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, will show Lando “in his formative years as a scoundrel on the rise in the galaxy’s underworld.”

Lando was played by Billy Dee Williams in “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi.”

Glover joins Alden Ehrenreich, who was cast as Han Solo in July.
“We’re so lucky to have an artist as talented as Donald join us,” said Lord and Miller in a statement. “These are big shoes to fill, and an even bigger cape, and this one fits him perfectly, which will save us money on alterations. Also, we’d like to publicly apologize to Donald for ruining Comic-Con for him forever.”

Glover was formerly a cast member on NBC’s beloved cult comedy “Community.”

He now stars on FX’s “Atlanta,” which he also created, and will appear in “Spider-Man: Homecoming.”

“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” opened in December and broke records at the box office. To date, it has earned over $2 billion worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” opens in December.

Categories
People

I was lucky enough to see both Secret Path shows this week and each was powerful and heartbreaking. Stay strong Gord!

Gord Downie’s Unknown Path

None of what follows is to say that last summer’s glorious national outpouring wasn’t the astonishing thing it was, when the Tragically Hip and its lead singer, Gord Downie, diagnosed with terminal brain cancer last December, took a goodbye tour and stopped the country still.

The self-described King of the Hosers and his band had composed the true national anthems of a generation. The Hip’s last waltz created something else again: a collective stillness that reminded millions of Canadians of what it meant to be here, and what it will mean when Gord Downie isn’t.

But that was last summer. This story isn’t about that. This story is about what happens to Gord Downie next.

On the band bus last Monday, halfway between Peterborough and Ottawa, Gord Downie is talking about reading and writing and listening to music, which means he is talking about his memory. Two craniotomies since last December to remove a glioblastoma multiforme in his left lobe, plus radiation and chemo, have left him with an unreliable one. For the ultra-literate, hyper-word-conscious Downie, this is a cruel fate.

You can see his scar, a sunken valley dropping down his left temple from under the ever-present fedora or ballcap. He has his hats made at Lilliput Hats in Toronto, “at College near, what’s the name of that street, the one that’s west of Spadina, but not as far as” – “Grace?” – “not as far as Grace. Oh, God, you know, starts with a B,” and on it goes, until finally someone says “Bathurst!” and Downie says, “Good boy!” and is so visibly relieved you would think his house had just been rescued from a flood.

“It feels like it’s all melding together,” is how he sometimes describes his memory. He can change subjects faster than a hockey team can change lines, but he always has, and it’s not clear that it’s not intentional.

Downie has been in Peterborough with five of the best musicians in the country – Kevin Drew, Dave Hamelin and Charlie Spearin of Broken Social Scene, Kevin Hearn of Barenaked Ladies and Josh Finlayson of Skydiggers – to rehearse Secret Path. It’s a collection of songs Downie wrote with Mr. Drew and Mr. Hamelin, set to an animated film based on a graphic novel by Jeff Lemire, who is to graphic novels today what Downie was to rock in the late-nineties. The songs, book and film tell the true story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Ojibwa boy who ran away from residential school in 1966 and died of exposure, 50 years ago on Sunday, trying to walk back home to his family, 600 kilometres away. It’s Downie’s latest, proudest project, and possibly his last. The next night, in Ottawa, where the band bus is headed, the lads are performing their rock opera for the first time at the National Arts Centre.

Downie hates the fact that he can’t remember names, which leaves holes in his patter. He gamely tries to fill them. Favourite Dylan album? He can remember the album cover but not the name of Street-Legal. He knows Van Morrison made an album in four days, but no longer recalls that it’s Astral Weeks. “Hey,” he says to the group when someone asks, “do any of you know what my favourite Hip song is? What’s the song, Vienna …

“ Springtime in Vienna.”

“Yeah. Good. Jesus.”

His conversation flows like that now, forward but sometimes around. “I’m thinking the way I talk now is like the way a native person walks. And the way they talk. And if we want to take a moment” – he pauses – “and prepare our thoughts” – “no one’s going to jump in. It’s about patience, and respect.” He appreciates the consideration more than he ever did before. “I appreciate it, because I just discovered it.”

His portable pill box, mostly anti-seizure medication, has at least 50 compartments. He gets the pills from his younger brother Pat, a former sound engineer in Boston who has moved to Toronto to take care of Gord (Pat, 48, has separated from his wife, as Downie did from his before he became ill). “I can’t be left alone,” Downie says. “Apparently.” Their older brother Mike, 56 (a documentary filmmaker and co-producer of Secret Path) is on the bus as well. They’re the kind of family that under duress takes refuge in family. When their father Edgar died last Halloween, each brother took a souvenir from his belongings. Mike took his wedding ring; Pat took a gold chain; Gord took his false front tooth, which he carries in a jewel bag and occasionally produces in meetings. No further description necessary.

Downie has started to read again – he couldn’t remember anything long enough to do so immediately after his operations – and can now put in 15 to 20 minutes with a book at a stretch. He feels stronger than he did, but doesn’t know how long he has: His cancer is the kind that can change its mind. “But I may be one of the lucky ones. I’m reluctant to say, because I’m kind of throwing the snake eyes. What if I live another seven years, and people say, ‘you asshole!?’”

He worries more now about his emotional ledger. He has always tried to be like his father, “but it’s impossible. Because I’m conveniently cutting out all the times I was a dick. But all the people forgave me for that. Or it feels like that. I think those people knew that I didn’t want to do that, didn’t want to be like that. And after this thing happened” – he makes a judo chop toward his head, his standard move – “they all were friends.”

Still, his recovery has been uneven. A month after the first seizure last December, he wrote and recorded 17 as yet unpublished songs with Kevin Drew, in four days. The songs were about people who have meant something to him, and contain a detail only that person will recognize. Very Gord. It was a freer way of writing. “I kept trying to write them in the way I’m talking to you, or the way I talked to, you know, Mansbridge. Taylor Mansbridge.” This time it’s an intentional joke. (He makes lots of those.) “I came home from that recording session thinking that I had reached the peak of the hill, the, you know, learning curve. And then two days later I had this horrendous seizure.” That led to operation two, to chemo and radiation. Six weeks before the summer tour, he couldn’t remember the names of his albums. He has recorded some music with the Hip since, but has written very little in his ever-present Moleskine notebook. He labels them with letters of the alphabet. He’s up to Y. He says he’s not worried.

He claims to forget the names of his kids, but it seldom occurs. Will he miss them? “I won’t know, will I?” he asks, fake sneering. Louie, his 16-year-old son, is on the bus too, sitting on a bench under the bus-brown enamelized walls – it’s like riding inside a large intestine – in the protective custody of all the people keeping each other company while Gord Downie fades away. Louie had a panic attack when he first learned his father had had a seizure. He’s tall, skinny, wants to be a drummer. He played his first gig last Saturday; his father, 52, was his roadie. “That was exciting for me to see,” Downie says. The band’s name was Lois Lane – until they discovered that another band, a Dutch girl group, had already taken it. Now Louie’s band is considering Dutch Girl Group as an alternative.

The other name Downie never forgets is Edgar – his father’s. The Downie boys worshipped him, and still do. Three days after they buried him, Gord Downie had his first seizure. It was a bad winter.

“He was so Zen,” Downie says. “And if you said that to him, he’d say, ‘What’s Zen?’” Edgar sat down when he peed, out of consideration for his wife and daughters. “We all do that,” Gord says, and the brothers nod. “Small little guy.” Edgar hated anything really frightening, really upsetting, really ugly. Downie now understands he was the same, but couldn’t admit it as a teenager. “Maybe that’s why I became a writer.”

There’s a long pause. “That could be my sensation as I’m going out,” Downie muses. “‘Oh, there’s Edgar.’ That’d be fabulous.”

Today, the morning of the big show, 27-odd members of the Wenjack family are allegedly visiting Ottawa’s Museum of Civilization. But Pearl Wenjack is hitting the Rideau Centre to shop.

“I wanted to do something, naturally,” says Chanie’s older sister as she makes her way to the indoor mall. “But I didn’t know how.” She had been praying to the Creator that she might get a call from Oprah Winfrey – “that’s the only show we watch” – when, one morning a year and a half ago, the phone rang. “Hello?” Pearl said.

“Hi,” a man’s voice replied. “I’m Mike.”

Mike Downie first heard about Chanie Wenjack in a short CBC Radio documentary in 2013. The story shook him. He’d heard of residential schools, but like most Canadians didn’t know much about them. Mike began to dig into the story. He found a 1967 Maclean’s story about Chanie’s death, by Ian Adams. Mike told Chanie’s story to his pal, the novelist Joseph Boyden, hoping they might write a screenplay together. Boyden mentioned it to Gord, also a friend. The following morning, Gord called Mike. He too was hooked. It happened so fast it was almost weird.

When, according to one insider, Boyden’s screenplay didn’t seem to be materializing, Gord Downie started to write poems tracing Chanie’s fatal walk down the tracks to home. The poems became songs and an album recorded three years ago by Kevin Drew and the band. The songs were followed (after Mike and Gord suggested it) by a graphic novel courtesy of Jeff Lemire. Eventually, after Edgar’s death, Gord’s cancer and the Hip’s famous last tour, Mike and his production partner, Stuart Coxe, persuaded the CBC to take on an animated film version of Lemire’s book, to be attached to Gord’s music. (It airs Sunday on CBC at 9 p.m. ET.)

All of which was impressive, but for the touchy question of cultural appropriation. Was Chanie Wenjack’s story fair game for a bunch of white guys? As if to underscore the question, a (fairly) good-natured artistic rivalry sprang up: Boyden – who is of mixed Scottish and Anishinaabe heritage, and a friend of the Downie brothers – wrote a Heritage Minute about Chanie last summer, scooping the anniversary of his death. He also recently published Wenjack, a slim book, with a rival publisher. (The Downie-Lemire book is already scaling the bestseller list and being reprinted, despite a run of 50,000 copies.) Boyden has also collaborated on a new album by A Tribe Called Red, a crossover First Nations hip-hop band. This game could be called Downies and Indians.

Mindful of their outsider status, Gord, Mike, Pat and a slew of First Nations elders went to Ogoki Post in Northern Ontario to visit Pearl Wenjack in September. The result was the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Fund, dedicated to “cross-cultural education to support healing and recovery.” Between the 1880s and 1996, 150,000 children were sent by the federal government to residential schools in Canada. More than 20,000 are thought to have died while at school. It isn’t clear Chanie ever understood why he had to go away.

This is the darkness Downie and his cohort are drawn to. “I’ve spent my last 10 years with the Barenaked Ladies playing If I Had a Million Dollars,” Kevin Hearn says. “It’s a thrill to be part of something dark, something serious.” But it was Gord who seemed to feel it most intensely. He was muttering about Secret Path as he came out of one of his surgeries. During the tour he knew the lyrics to The Stranger, one of its songs, better than he knew the words to the Hip hit Bobcaygeon. There are spiritually inclined elders and partners on the Downie team who think the Secret Path project is making Gord Downie stronger.

“I didn’t know there were residential schools up there until 12 years ago,” Downie says. The more he learned, the more he wondered why he didn’t know more about them, why they weren’t talked about in school. (The subject is only now being included in the history curricula of all provinces.) He thought the presence of a 10,000-year-old indigenous culture had the potential to make Canada unique in the world. Instead, “we decided to put them away in a third-floor bedroom and lock it. It’s just baffling to me.” Canada had never felt like a real country to Downie (as fans of his Hip songs know); without reconciling the twin solitudes of the indigenous and non-indigenous, which he considers to be a 150-year-project, it never will.

“You start looking at all this stuff,” Downie observes, and “and it does start putting a damper on all the stuff we’re doing to celebrate 150 years of nationhood.”

Secret Path is his attempt to change that path in the uncertain stretch of time he has left. “If this is the last thing I do,” he says, “then I’m happy.” So far, it’s working. The fund opened with $3-million in major donations, but since the premiere on Tuesday has raised another $100,000 in small gifts. The average donation is $8.

At first, when the lights went down in the National Arts Centre on Tuesday, the audience didn’t know how to react: It didn’t know what it was watching. There was Gord Downie’s familiar shovel-of-gravel of a voice, the familiar jean jacket with the lapel compass and a beaded poppy commemorating First Nations veterans. But everything else was unfamiliar: the six monitors to help him remember the words, the haunting, almost orchestral music, the spare chanting lyrics, the tom-tom pulse of the drums driving the starkly drawn boy’s journey down the endless railway tracks in the huge animated film on a screen behind the band.

By the third song they were applauding. By the end, they were standing. The Governor-General was there, and you could hear the Wenjack relatives whooping it up in front. Placards throughout the lobby warned of an emotionally difficult evening, and offered professional counsel to anyone who needed some. (Several did.) Weepers were asked to deposit their Kleenexes in birch-bark baskets, so their sadness could be burned away, according to native custom. The ushers collected 30 bags of snotty tissue by the end of the show.

Of course, as grave as Chanie Wenjack’s story is, it was the added irony of Gord Downie’s situation, his own looming stagger down the short track ahead of him, that gave the show its extra shudder. Never mind that the lyrics had been written three years earlier, before Downie was dying. You could feel the resonance especially in the penultimate number, The Only Place to Be, as Chanie, frozen and hungry, lies down beside the tracks for the last time: I’ll just close my eyes/I’ll just catch my breath… I’ve got lots of time/My whole life ahead/This is the only place to be. The end is very near by then, and in his fevered mind he sees his home, and his father, and happily leaves this world and enters whatever place it is the mere memory of someone can come from.

Then the final anthem rolled out, the lyrics riding over resolving chords: I feel here… I hurt here… I lived here, here and here, I die here, here and here. More places than we ever know, that is, more significant than we ever imagine. That seems to be the way a life goes, whether it is white or native. That was Gord Downie’s point, and his retort to the anti-appropriationists.

“The white man will only listen to the white man,” Claudette Commanda, a local Algonquin elder, said of the play’s intentions. “If Gord Downie’s gonna be the white man that is going to go out there and raise the social conscience of Canadians and government, so be it.” Sheila North Wilson, the Grand Chief of Northern Manitoba who had been with Gord up in Ogoki Post, took a more generous view. “One of the greatest gifts a man can give is to give his life for his friends,” she said. “And that’s what he’s doing. Decades later, that’s what we’ll look back on.”

Maybe. Reconciliation has eluded Canada for 150 years, and while a more inclusive school curriculum is an improvement, it’s still a long haul. On the other hand, three days after the Downies left Ogoki Post, Pearl had another call.

It was Mike again. The brothers wanted to build a log cabin next to hers. She couldn’t believe it. “That’s where Gord wants to spend his last days, up there,” Mike said. “You and I are gonna take care of Gord.” Pearl is okay with that. She’s taken care of dying people lots of times, and her brother-in-law is the local builder. He’ll be cutting the logs in the spring.

And if the house becomes a visiting artist’s residence after Gord dies, one of a future string of such houses on indigenous lands across the country financed by the fund, well, Mike Downie is a guy with a lot of ideas. Until then, Gord says, “I need to see my kids, so I’ll go back and forth. I dream about it, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. Because of the feeling you get when you go up there. The people I’ve met, they’re so beautiful.” Which is another way of saying they don’t judge you, because they too know what it’s like to face extinction.

Categories
Books

It’s a great read!

Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’: 10 things we learned

Tramps like us: baby, we were born to read.

Hardcore Bruce Springsteen fans will already have a copy of his new memoir, Born to Run. Everybody else should hurry up and get one.

As a writer, Springsteen is funnier than you might expect and adept at getting into the nitty-gritty emotion of his life.

His prose style appears easy-breezy, but he’ll sneak up on you with a lovely turn of phrase or incisive observation that’s profoundly affecting.

Springsteen also admits: “I haven’t told you ‘all’ about myself. Discretion and the feelings of others don’t allow it. But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise: to show the reader his mind.

“In these pages I’ve tried to do that.”

He succeeds. Here are 10 revelations from Born to Run:

1. Depression turns up in Springsteen’s family, particularly affecting his father, Doug. When Springsteen was 16 and his grandmother died, his father became unhinged to the point where Springsteen had to face the fact that his dad was truly not well.

The author is almost too good at describing what it feels like to face the black dogs and in the chapter titled Zero To Sixty In Nothing Flat, he does just that. Depression hounded him when he was in his early 60s, and he writes about how wife, Patti Scialfa, and anti-depressants saved his bacon.

2. You may have known Springsteen was raised Catholic, but the book makes it clear that he was CATHOLIC. He was even an altar boy, and writes about getting cuffed by the priest at a 6 a.m. mass for not knowing his Latin responses.

His fifth grade teacher tried to help:

“Sister Charles Marie, who’d been present at the thrashing, handed me a small holy medal. It was a kindness I’ve never forgotten.”

Anyone who ever got backhanded by a guy in a surplice and cassock can relate.

Doing hard time in ye olde Catholic Church and his often rocky relationship with his father appear to be the crucial elements of Springsteen’s formative years. Not in a good way.

He was eventually able to work things out with his father, however.

3. As he learned to play guitar, a young Springsteen fantasized that the Rolling Stones would come to town, have a crisis and need him to replace an ailing Mick Jagger. The fantasy was always the same: The crowd went wild!

4. Springsteen hates the sound of wind chimes. In his childhood an abusive neighbour had some at his house on Institute Street.

5. At age 21, he didn’t know a single person who’d ever been on a plane, couldn’t drive a car himself and had never had a drink. One of the best things about Born to Run is how Springsteen captures 1950s and ‘60s small-town America and shows how profoundly life has changed for regular working stiffs over the last 60 years.

6. Other than a brief stint tending his aunt’s lawn, Springsteen says he has never worked at anything other than being a musician and performer. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have his doubts. About landing on the covers of both Newsweek and Time magazines in 1975 he writes, “I’d fixed it good so we couldn’t go back, only forward, so that’s where we went.”

7. Thanks to unpaid taxes, lousy first contracts and the usual young artist errors, Springsteen was broke until 1982, a decade after he first signed with Columbia Records.

8. The singer had an unexpected late life friendship with Frank Sinatra, which began after he and his wife were invited to a party by Sammy Cahn’s wife Tita — who Patti had encountered at the nail salon.

9. After the terrifying Northridge earthquake of 1994 in California, where Springsteen and his wife and kids were living at the time (his youngest son had just been born), the singer called Tommy Mottola, then president of Sony, and got a corporate jet to take him and his family back to New Jersey. In a 508-page memoir, that’s the closest thing to any sort of ‘star’ behaviour that ever comes up.

10. He works hard at being a good and present father to his three kids.

“Our house was free of gold albums, Grammys or another musical mementos. My kids didn’t know Badlands from matzo ball soup. When they were children, when I was approached on the street for autographs, I’d explain to them that in my job I was Barney (the then-famous purple dinosaur) for adults.”

Springsteen is straight-up about his kids’ response to seeing his first music video (for Dancing in the Dark) many years after it was made:

“Dad, you look ridiculous!”

Categories
Awards

Congrats to all of the nominees!!

Drake earns a record 13 American Music Award nominations

Toronto-born rapper Drake earned a record-breaking 13 American Music Awards nominations on Monday, surpassing Michael Jackson’s 1984 mark of 11 in a single year.

Rihanna received seven nominations, and Adele and Justin Bieber tied with five each. Beyoncé and the Chainsmokers each received four nominations. Bryson Tiller, Twenty One Pilots, Carrie Underwood, Fetty Wap and The Weeknd earned three nominations each.

In the favourite male pop/rock artist category, three Canadians are in contention — Drake, Bieber of Stratford, Ont., and The Weeknd, who hails from Toronto.

Nominees for artist of the year are Adele, Beyoncé, Bieber, Drake, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Rihanna, Twenty One Pilots, Carrie Underwood and The Weeknd.

Nominees for the title of new artist of the year are Alessia Cara, the Chainsmokers, DNCE, Shawn Mendes and Zayn. There is no overall song of the year category this year; instead, honours will be handed out for best song in the categories of pop/rock, country, rap/hip-hop and soul/R&B.

Nominations are based on a metric that includes sales, airplay and social activity tracked by Billboard magazine and its partners. Winners are determined by fan votes on the show’s website or through Facebook and Twitter.

Drake, now based in Los Angeles, is riding high on his collaboration with Rihanna on Work, and on his One Dance, recorded with Wizkid & Kyla, which was named song of the summer by Billboard. One Dance, a single from the album Views, was a No. 1 hit in Canada and Britain, as well as several European countries.

He has been nominated 10 times before without winning. Jackson, who died in 2009, has the record for the biggest AMA winner, with 26 overall, once taking eight in a single year.

Last year, One Direction won artist of the year honours, Taylor Swift’s Blank Space was crowned song of the year and Sam Hunt was named best new artist.

The awards show, known for its occasionally raunchy or outrageous performances, will air live Nov. 20 on ABC from the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.

Nominees in selected categories:

Artist of the year:

Adele.
Beyoncé.
Bieber.
Drake.
Selena Gomez.
Ariana Grande.
Rihanna.
Twenty One Pilots.
Carrie Underwood.
The Weeknd.
New artist of the year:

Alessia Cara.
The Chainsmokers.
DNCE.
Shawn Mendes.
Zayn.
Favourite male artist:

Justin Bieber,
Drake,
The Weeknd.
Favourite female artist:

Adele.
Selena Gomez.
Rihanna.
Favourite album:

Adele’s 25.
Bieber’s Purpose.
Drake’s Views.