Category Archives: Pop Culture

Grifters, The Mirror World, The Far Right & Late Stage Conspiracy Capitalism

#CdnPoli | Canadian Politics, #VanPoli Civic Politics, BC Politics, Essay, Media, News, Politics, Pop Culture, , , , ,


UBC professor Naomi Klein: revered academic, author, social activist and filmmaker in a wide-ranging conversation, talks with PoliticsJoe’s Oli Dugmore about her 2023 book Doppelganger, A Trip Into the Mirror World, diving into the industry of conspiracy theory & right-wing propaganda in the digital age.

In the video above, University of British Columbia Associate Professor Naomi Klein — whose work within the university’s Department of Geography focuses on the intersection of crisis and political transformation, and the large-scale shocks which follow — sits down with Oli Dugmore, PoliticsJoe’s Head of Politics and News for a wide-ranging, insightful and subtly exploratory conversation on “truth” in politics.


In large measure, moreso than in Klein’s well-received previous books —  1990’s No Logo, 2007’s The Shock Doctrine, and 2017’s This Changes Everything, to name just three — Doppelganger, A Trip Into the Mirror World offers more of a first-person memoir,  the book an in-depth critique and analysis of late-stage capitalism.

Down the Rabbit Hole Equation, How The Right Has Gained a Foothold Among So Many of Our Friends

Narcissism [grandiosity] x social media addiction + mid-life crisis ÷ public shaming = right wing meltdown.

Don’t be put off by the high falutin’ words above. Naomi Klein is a wonderfully engaging and entirely human scale —  and dare we say, vulnerable — interview subject, whose life is not too dissimilar to yours or mine, believe it or not. Ms. Klein puts on no airs as she helps us understand where we stand as a society in the early part of the 21st century, what bedevils us, the lies which have taken in too many among us, and the threat of the far right to our increasingly fragile democracy.

For VanRamblings, the most distressing aspect of the first half of the interview above arises from the discussion Mr. Dugmore and Ms. Klein have on the attacks, the unrelenting casual cruelty to which Ms. Klein is subject — and has been subject for a very long time — from those on the right, as well as the left, as if offering an opinion, and verifiable truths, somehow translates into committing a crime, leaving Ms. Klein open to death threats and other challenges to her personal safety.

Call us naïve, but VanRamblings has never understood the motivation of those who choose cruelty over kindness as a way of bringing themselves to the world, who choose to attack over finding common cause, and acknowledging our common humanity, and our innate oneness. We find the cruelty to which Ms. Klein is subject to be disturbing, abhorrent and utterly unbecoming in a civil society.

As Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle writes “Doppelganger swirls through the bewildering ideas of the ultra-right that often appear as a distorted mirror of left struggle and strategy,” as Klein’s book sets about to distill the political economies of corruption, crisis in our time, and necessary remediation.

Why Doppelganger? You’ll have to listen to the interview, or buy the book for the answer to that pungent, provocative, easily answered and heartrending question.

2024 Best Oscar Short Documentary Nominee |
The Last Repair Shop

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Porché Brinker plays violin in The Last Repair Shop, which tells the story of technicians who repair public school musical instruments in Los Angeles free of charge, and the kids who play them.

Only one documentary short nominee this year has the full balance of human interest, social relevance and aesthetic appeal that tends to make a winner.

It’s the Oscar-nominated The Last Repair Shop, directed by Halifax filmmaker Ben Proudfoot, who won two years ago for The Queen of Basketball, a New York Times Opinion production, and the composer Kris Bowers, who was nominated with Proudfoot for A Concerto Is a Conversation, another Times Opinion documentary.

This time, both have made their documentary with The Los Angeles Times.

“In a warehouse in the heart of Los Angeles, a dwindling handful of devoted craftspeople maintain more than 80,000 student musical instruments, the largest remaining workshop in America of its kind. In the film, you’ll meet four unforgettable characters whose broken-and-repaired lives have been dedicated to bringing so much more than music to schoolchildren in Los Angeles.”

The Last Repair Shop is a great film, a moving, elegiac and engaging must-watch if you’re a family, a teacher or are dedicated to public education.

The entirety of the film is available on YouTube, or on Disney+. If you have a Smart TV, you’ll absolutely want to watch the film on the bigger screen.


Steve Bagmanyan is the supervisor of the L.A. Unified School District’s Musical Instrument Repair Shop

In The Last Repair Shop, the repair shop of the title fixes instruments for the city’s school district, the film relating the story of the L.A. Unified School District’s Musical Instrument Repair Shop — the last public school district in the U.S. to service musical instruments free of charge — where 11 technicians service about 6,000 instruments each year for more than 1,300 schools across the city.

Steve Bagmanyan, supervisor of the repair shop: “Music can do wonderful things. Music can change lives. Music can take you off the streets. Music can fill you up with joy, with happiness.”

The opening text says the service has been offered to students for decades.

The Last Repair Shop presents the recollections of four specialists (in strings, brass, woodwinds and piano), who share their experiences of immigration, of coming to terms with being gay and even of opening for Elvis in a bluegrass band, a long-term payoff of buying a $20 fiddle at a swap meet.


Porché Brinker in Ben Proudfoot’s Oscar-nominated documentary short film, The Last Repair Shop.

Schoolchildren further testify to how music affects their lives. The contrast gives The Last Repair Shop a gentle inter-generational poignance, as it makes an uninflected case for the importance of financing public school music education.

It’s not just the students whose lives have been changed by music.

The people who repair the instruments all have their own stories to tell — whether it’s about travelling the country with a $20 fiddle from a flea market, leaving home to chase the American dream, growing up gay in the ’70s, or even surviving ethnic cleansing.

And at the centre of each story is music, and a desire to repair — and to heal.

“We all have broken relationships, broken promises. The world is, in many ways, broken. And I think what these people stand for is an optimism that sometimes you can make things whole again with enough effort and care and patience,” Ben Proudfoot says.

“You can’t fix everything that’s broken. But sometimes you can. And for that one time out of 10 where you can, it’s worth doing. And I think there’s not too many lessons better than that.”

The Last Repair Shop is a love letter to the role of music in public education, a testament to seeing how broken something may be — and fixing it anyway.

And it’s a tribute to those who toil away, largely without recognition, in service of the important task of helping the next generation realize their dreams.

Sunday Music | Azure Ray | 2001 | Dream Pop Artists

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Dream pop duo Azure Ray — composed of Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor — employ graceful harmonies, patient folksy song structures, and touches of electronic production to create otherworldly songs that balance tranquility and intensity.

The pair met at the age of 15 while attending the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Together, they fronted a band called Little Red Rocket, which released two CDs, Who Did You Pay (1997) and It’s in the Sound (2000), with the band breaking up shortly after the release of the latter album.

Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor decided to head out to Athens, Georgia, striking out to find a career, forming Azure Ray soon after arrival in their new home.

“My boyfriend had just died and we had written all of these songs that were helping us cope with everything. We had a night where all of our friends and family got together. We played those songs, which later would turn into the songs on our first Azure Ray record, which we released shortly thereafter,” says Taylor.

Their self-titled début album is a quiet, gentle set of lovely and soul-searching songs that incorporate elements of folk, pop, and light electronica.

Following the unexpected death of Taylor’s boyfriend, the two musicians used songwriting as a method of coping with their grief. The intensity of that loss informed the mournful tone of the group’s earliest work in 2001, and would carry through in their sound to some degree from that point on.

The song Sleep was later featured in the 2006 Academy Award-nominated movie The Devil Wears Prada, featuring Anne Hathaway. In February 2015, Taylor Swift included Sleep on a six-song “breakup playlist” made for a fan via her official Tumblr account.

Camilo Arturo Leslie in Pitchfork had this to say about the début album …

Their album cover is simple: just an old, sepia-toned photograph of a little girl. She looks like my grandmother as a child. Nostalgia and melancholy rub off the liner notes and stain your fingertips. The little girl clutches her palms to her ears and wears an inscrutable expression that vacillates from pouty to fearful to verge-of-tears, depending on what mental angle you hold it at.

Azure Ray’s indie music aesthetic is built on pretty, easy-on-the-tympanum pop acoustic guitar strumming. No fuzz, no indigestible chords, just polished production and evocative arrangements. Lap steel guitar, cello, violin, church bells, piano, brass, and tape loops make appearances on these 11 tracks.

The draw of their music is, of course, the duo’s vocals, Azure Ray’s gentle trills offering a haunting balance between the ethereal and corporeal, as well as an understated,  yet distinct feminine strength, not unlike the early music of Linda Ronstadt.

Indie label-ghetto obscurity has kept Azure Ray from attaining massive popularity.

But an indie-ghetto habitué such as yourself shouldn’t have any trouble digging up a copy of Azure Ray’s début CD, or maybe a vinyl copy.

Red Cat Records on Main Street, or Zulu Records on West 4th Avenue, if they don’t have it in stock, could certainly order it for you.

Beautiful, expertly crafted pop songs keep a room in your heart’s hotel (under an assumed name, naturally).

You could also listen to Azure Ray on Spotify, or Apple or Amazon Music, or purchase their music from either of the two latter providers of digital music.

#Cinema | The Slow, Excruciating Death of Hollywood, and Cinema

A & E, Arts Friday, Cinema, Diversions, Essay, Media, Pop Culture,

Every three decades, or roughly once a generation, Hollywood experiences a seismic shift. The transition from silent films to talkies in the 1920s. The rise of broadcast television in the 1950s. The raucous cable boom of the 1980s.

It’s been happening again, for some while now, as most folks have observed.

The long-promised streaming revolution — the next great leap in how the world gets its entertainment — is finally here in all its glory.


Warner Bros. Discovery studio in Burbank, Califoria, one of the oldest and largest Hollywood studios

In the 115-year history of the American film industry, never has so much upheaval arrived so fast and on so many fronts, leaving many writers, directors, studio executives, agents and other movie workers disoriented and demoralized. These are melodramatic people by nature, but talk to enough of them and you will get the strong sense that their fear is real this time.

“The last four years have shaken the movie business to its bones,” Jason Blum, the powerhouse producer whose credits range from The Purge series to Get Out and the BlacKkKlansman.” recently told Los Angeles Times film writer, Justin Chang.

Streaming, of course, has been disrupting the entertainment business for some time. Netflix started delivering movies and TV shows via the internet in 2007.

In 2024, however, the shift towards streaming has greatly accelerated, with Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, Crave/HBO, Prime Video, YouTube Premium, CBC Gem and Kanopy, among other streaming platforms, competing for your movie attention.

Adding to Hollywood’s misery is the abrupt changing of the guard in Hollywood’s highest ranks. Nine of the top 20 most powerful people in show business have left their jobs, including Universal’s Ron Meyer, whose 25-year Universal career ended in 2021. David Zaslav is now in firm control of Warner Bros. Discovery, with Kevin Tsujihara exiting his role as chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. Entertainment, a job he held for six years. Paramount Global CEO Jim Gianopulos was removed, in favour of Bob Bakish, also now on the way out, with the company up for sale.

“It’s not clear that full normal will return even well into the fourth quarter of 2024,” Warner Bros. Discovery Chairman David Zaslav, told Chang in an interview on how Hollywood is faring against the streaming wars, and the slow recovery from the pandemic.


An empty cinema with no patrons. Is this picture an indication of what presages cinema in the future?

Will young people — trained during the pandemic to expect instant access to new movies — get into the habit of going to the movies like their parents and grandparents did? Generation Z forms a crucial audience: About 33% all moviegoers in 2023 were under the age of 24, according to the Motion Picture Association.

“Cinema as an art form is not going to die,” Michael Shamberg, the producing force behind films like Erin Brockovich and The Big Chill” told the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis in a recent interview. “But the tradition of cinema that we all grew up on, falling in love with movies in a theatre, is over.”

In other words, the art may live on, but the myth of big screens as the be-all and end-all is being dismantled in a fundamental and perhaps irreversible manner.