Category Archives: Pop Culture

Arts Friday | Animation as An Expression of Human Experience

October 30, 2020A & E, Arts Friday, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

Canada's National Film Board, the Animation division

All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick. It’s right there in the name of one of the earliest devices used to project slides: the magic lantern.
If you take an image of an open hand and an image of a fist and project the two in sequence, you’ll convey the illusion of a clench.

“What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame,” Scottish-Canadian experimental animator, the late Norman McLaren — a director and producer with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), and a respected pioneer of hand-drawn animation and drawn-on-film animation — once explained, stating that ‘Animation is the art of manipulating the invisible interstices between frames.”

Arising from VanRamblings’ coverage this week of the meaning behind the majority BC NDP win in the recent provincial election, we failed to make mention of International Animation Day — which occurred this past Wednesday, October 28th — celebrated by the National Film Board of Canada through the streaming of 12 films, all of which are permanently available now – for free viewing – on the National Film Board website.
As Mercedes Milligan wrote this past Tuesday in Animation Magazine …

Now in its 14th year, this annual NFB event gives Canadian audiences the opportunity to explore a host of new works by Canadian and European filmmakers working in the National Film Board’s cutting-edge, internationally renowned studios. The rich 2020 selection puts women in the spotlight — both female directors and strong female characters — and features a wealth of different animation techniques.

</ br>Vancouver-based animator Ann Marie Fleming’s new animated short, Old Dog

Made by world-renowned animators, the outstanding animated films in this year’s International Animation Day programme have won prestigious awards and screened throughout the global festival circuit.

Long one of VanRamblings’ favourite arts and culture writers, Katja De Bock is now a publicist with the NFB (lucky, lucky them!). Here’s what she wrote to VanRamblings earlier in the week on one particular film she cherishes …

Old Dog, the latest film by Vancouver’s Ann Marie Fleming, started off as a way of talking about aging, inspired by Ms. Fleming’s namesake, Ann-Marie Fleming, whom she often gets mixed up with in Internet searches.

Ann-Marie has a company in 100 Mile House, B.C., that makes technologies for aging dogs, and also for their humans. Animator Ann Marie was struck by the compassion her namesake has for these vulnerable animals, as she helped them to navigate the latter stages of their lives, and by how much dogs have to teach human beings.

The COVID-19 pandemic made Ms. Fleming (the animator), whose elderly parents live overseas, reflect on how we take care of our elders and how our global values are being put to the test.

According to Ann Marie, animation is the perfect medium to tell this story. It makes the experience of the human and the dog more universal and helps us understand the unbearable lightness of being.

Now, as it happens Ms. De Bock informs us — and now, you — Old Dog is also featured at this year’s SPARK Animation Festival in Vancouver — which, by the way, began yesterday, and is set to run through Sunday, November 8th, and in addition to films will feature workshops, panels and talks by the world’s most talented artists, directors, and studio luminaries.

This year’s SPARK Animation Festival pass is only $25 — which will give you access to the dozens of films SPARK has on offer in 2020.
Guess what VanRamblings is going to be doing for the next nine days!
On Arts Friday, VanRamblings will leave you with this special treat …

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Ann Marie Fleming’s Old Dog, a presentation of the National Film Board of Canada

Music Sundays | Laura Nyro, and Christmas & The Beads Of Sweat

October 25, 2020A & E, Music, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

On this post election Sunday, a needed and necessary break from politics.
Last Sunday, October 18th, would have been beloved American singer-songwriter Laura Nyro’s 73rd birthday, born Laura Nigro on that date in The Bronx, New York. Ms. Nyro passed far too early on Tuesday, April 8, 1997.
Years ago, for me, one of the great joys of my life was playing the breadth of Laura Nyro’s music library during my regular afternoon shift on Simon Fraser University’s CKSF radio, when I was in love with her music, and simply couldn’t get enough of the albums she released, and I softly spun.

Laura Nyro, the song Up on the Roof, from her 1970 LP Christmas & The Beads Of Sweat

A bit of background on Ms. Nyro: As a child, she spent summers in the Catskills with her family, where her father played trumpet at various resorts. She credited the Sunday school at the New York Society for Ethical Culture with providing the basis of her education; she also attended Manhattan’s High School of Music & Art. While in high school, she sang with a group of friends in subway stations and on street corners.
Her father Louis Nigro’s work brought him into contact with record company executive Artie Mogull, and his partner Paul Barry, who in 1966 auditioned a young Laura Lyro, then all of 20 years of age, subsequently going on to become her first manager. Mogull then set about to negotiate a recording and management contract for his young protégé. On November 29, 1966, Laura Nyro released her début album, More Than a New Discovery, for the Verve Folkways label. A song from the album, Wedding Bell Blues / Stoney’s End became a minor hit for Nyro, especially on the west coast.

Later, other songs from the album became hits for The 5th Dimension, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Barbra Streisand.
On Saturday, June 17, 1967, Laura Nyro appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival. Soon afterwards, impresario David Geffen approached Mogull about taking over as Nyro’s agent. Geffen became her manager, and together the two established a publishing company, Tuna Fish Music, under which the proceeds from her future compositions would be divided equally.
Geffen also arranged Nyro’s new recording contract with Clive Davis’ Columbia Records, and purchased the publishing rights to her early songs.
The new contract allowed Nyro more artistic freedom and control. In 1968, Columbia released Eli and the Thirteenth Confession. Eli was followed in 1969 by New York Tendaberry, another highly acclaimed work which cemented Nyro’s artistic credibility. Nyro’s fourth album, Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, was released at the end of 1970. The set contained Upstairs By a Chinese Lamp and Been on a Train (one of my all time favourites), and featured Duane Allman and other Muscle Shoals musicians.
In the early 70s, there was no greater reflection to be had on a rainy autumn afternoon up on the fog-bound hill at Simon Fraser University than to be snugly sequestered, and warm inside the tiny broadcast studio at CKSF, lights down, experiencing Laura Nyro’s melancholy Been on a Train.

The following year’s album release, Gonna Take a Miracle was a collection of Nyro’s favourite “teenage heartbeat songs”, and was recorded with the blues vocal group Labelle (Patti Labelle, Nona Hendryx, and Sarah Dash).

In 1976, Ms. Nyro released an album of new material, Smile, after which she embarked on a four-month tour with a full band, which resulted in the 1977 live album Season of Lights. After the 1978 album Nested, recorded when she was pregnant with her only child, she again took a break from recording, this time until 1984’s Mother’s Spiritual.
Between 1968 and 1970, a number of artists had hits with her songs: The 5th Dimension with Blowing Away, Wedding Bell Blues, Stoned Soul Picnic, Sweet Blindness, and Save the Country; Blood, Sweat & Tears and Peter, Paul and Mary, with And When I Die; Three Dog Night and Maynard Ferguson, with Eli’s Comin’; and Barbra Streisand with Stoney End, Time and Love, and Hands off the Man (Flim Flam Man). Nyro’s best-selling single was her recording of Carole King’s and Gerry Goffin’s Up on the Roof.

Laura Nyro’s final album release, Walk the Dog and Light the Light came in the late summer of 1993, with the song, Oh Yeah Maybe Baby. I remember going down to Zulu Records, when it was located at the corner of 4th and Burrard, with my friend J.B. Shayne, who all but took my hand as he led me into the store, and to the bin where Walk the Dog and Light the Light lay, the album becoming the soundtrack of my life in 1993.

Nyro passed away April 8, 1997, at the age of 49.
She was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010, and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

Arts Friday | The Impact of Cinema in Pre-Pandemic Times

October 23, 2020Arts Friday, Cinema, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

Nostalgia for a Time When Going to the Movies Was a Pleasure We All Enjoyed
Each and every one of us possess within us memories of our experiences visiting the cinema: as a child of attending at the movies with our parents; our first foreign or independent film with a group of friends; or simply visiting our local multiplex cinema to catch the latest superhero blockbuster, or making the pilgrimage to one local film festival or another.
Pre-pandemic, going to the movies was still a popular past-time, even in an age when media consumption and “film viewing” has radically changed (think of the Netflix revolution). In North America in 2019, there were 1.3 billion cinema admissions — a not-insignificant, nor surprising figure.

In 1930, more than 65% of the population went to the movies weekly. That means for every 5 people you knew, 3 of them went to the movies weekly.
Can you even imagine that?
Eighty-five years ago, cinema-going remained astoundingly popular across the continent, reaching a peak of 1.64 billion admissions in 1946 — even though the North American population was less than half of what it is today.
Why was cinema so popular in times past?
Some of the reasons are fairly straightforward: there was limited opportunity long ago for inexpensive recreational activities outside of the home, television had yet to assert its power, and film was an established medium which exposed millions to different worlds and alluring cultures (or, more often, to the vicissitudes of North American culture).
There was, however, a deeper and perhaps more fundamental reason for movie-going’s immense popularity in North America mid-20th century.
Recent research on movie-going habits in the twenty and 21st centuries has focused on the interplay between space and emotion, and how cinemas act as facilitators of emotional experiences in ambiguous spaces.
Over the years, movies have aided people in helping to reveal new insights into their lives, while allowing a better understanding of the lived experiences of people across the globe, and in their own neighbourhood. Cinema has not only traced our conception of life, but has also served to affect our outlook on life and the lives of others.
Watching a film in the presence of others is different from watching a film alone, or with our family: the collective constellation affects the way viewers experience a film, made all the more obvious once strong emotions and affective expressions come into play: laughter, sadness, shame, anger, screaming, and more often than not (if we’re lucky) being moved to tears.
Different times in history — and different spaces — have served to create new affective landscapes and altered existing ones, making cinema a useful category for historians to study changes in society and culture over time.
The history of cinema has been integrated alongside other sociological methodologies to help form a more refined and complex picture of the past, and in consequence has offered a valuable way of introducing new insights into the establishment of popular culture, and societal development.
The darkness of the cinema environment presents the opportunity to experience a strong shared emotional experience in a public setting, in the anonymous environment of the auditorium. No other public space has facilitated this to such a degree, and this uniqueness reveals how the life of our society developed in specific contexts and in precise locations.
The enclosed and defined space of the cinema auditorium, containing a distinct group in the form of an audience, is an obvious example of community. Patrons in the cinema are aware of both their own emotional response to what they are viewing onscreen, and the feelings of those around them, providing reassurance that our emotional responses to a film are being mirrored by our fellow patrons.
Respected film critic Leslie Halliwell recalled in his memoir on cinema-going that film took “people furthest out of themselves, into a wondrous and beautiful world which became their Shangri-La”.

This utopia was reflected in the very names of cinemas — the Orion, the Rialto, the Plaza, the Regal — and in the architecture of the buildings which encompassed a range of styles including the clean lines of Art Deco and the high theatrics and excess of the “atmospherics”.

The Grandview Theatre, Commercial Drive at East 1st Avenue in Vancouver, in the 1950s

Evidence suggests that many people viewed their local movie-house, whether a stand-alone, second-run neighbourhood movie house or a first-run super-cinema, as a reassuring and familiar space characterized by a hazy emotionality fluctuating between the individual and the group, in the process offering a sense of connection with those who surrounded us.
This ambiguity — the individual vs the collective experience — lies at the heart of what attending at the cinema signifies to people. In few other areas of life are the landscapes of our lives softened to such a degree, in turn making attendance at the cinema a welcoming experience.

Cinemas have long occupied a position on the boundary between the domestic and the public, allowing our emotional experience of a movie concurrently as both communal and private, the evolving emotional landscapes which were crafted by cinema patrons in the mid-20th-century serving to break down anomie while creating a sense of connection.
The fundamentals of our affective experience at the movies has changed little over the past 100 years.
The price of popcorn, however, most definitely has.

Stories of a Life + Music Sundays | Three Resonant Love Songs

October 18, 2020A & E, Media, Music, Pop Culture, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

The first of the three love songs on VanRamblings today is sung by an American avant-garde musical group formed in 2003 by sisters Sierra Rose “Rosie” and Bianca Leilani “Coco” Casady, and may be heard on their 2004 album release, La Maison de Mon Rêve.
Having lead a nomadic life, in 2000 after residing in in New York City for two years, Sierra moved into a tiny apartment in the Montmartre district of Paris to pursue a career as an opera singer. Meanwhile, Bianca had moved to Brooklyn in 2002 to study linguistics, sociology, and visual arts. Neither sister had seen one another for a period of ten years.
In early 2003, Bianca made an impromptu visit to Paris to rejoin Sierra, and the two ended up spending months together creating music in Sierra’s bathroom which, according to them, was the most isolated room in the apartment and had the best acoustics, adopting a lo-fi, experimental approach to production, utilizing a distinct vocal style, traditional instruments, and various improvised instruments (like toys), recording with just one microphone and a broken pair of headphones.
By late 2003, the sisters had named themselves CocoRosie and created what would become their début album, La Maison de Mon Rêve, releasing the recording only to friends. However, word got out about the album, and by February 2004 CocoRosie was signed to the independent record label Touch and Go Records, and the album was released on March 9, 2004 to unexpected critical acclaim. The rest, as they say, is history.
The song Good Friday has meaning for me, as I sent it to Lori (who I’ve written about previously), expressing in the note I sent her that the song had particular resonance because it reminded me of her. After not having communicated with one another for almost a decade, posting the following song to Lori caused the two of us to, briefly, rekindle our relationship.

If 1988, the year I met Lori, was one of the great years of my life, the next great year in my life was 1995, and the summer of the gregarious 22-year-old Australian twins Julienne and Melissa, now all nicely married with great husbands, and two children apiece. That the three of us still communicate today I consider to be one of the great achievements of my life. I love them as much now as I did 25 years ago — both women (who I will write about someday, but employing pseudonyms) hold a special place in my heart.
1995 was also the year that my friend J.B. Shayne introduced me to the music of British singer-songwriter Kirsty McColl, whose 1989 album Kite became the soundtrack of my life that particularly warm and loving summer. I remember alighting from the #9 bus at Macdonald and West Broadway, as Julienne and Melissa were rounding the corner onto West Broadway, having just come from the Kitsilano library.
Spotting me, the two ran down the street towards me, jumping into my arms and wrapping themselves around me — the same thing happened later that summer, when I had just entered the west entrance of the Macdonald and Broadway Safeway, with Justine Davidson — then all of 15 years of age, and someone to whom I’d been close, and in whose life I had played a fatherly role for years — having entered from the east entrance, upon spotting me ran across the Safeway, jumping into my arms, wrapping herself around me, clearly happy to see me. There is no other time in my life when I felt more loved than was the case in the summer of 1995.

I was first introduced to the music of T. Rex (initially known as Tyrannosaurus Rex), the English rock band formed in 1967 by singer-songwriter and guitarist Marc Bolan, when working at LG-FM, by Bob Ness, one of the great all time radio announcers in Vancouver, and more than anyone else of my memory, the father of alternative music radio in Vancouver, when he brought the music of Marc Bolan to my attention.
By the early 1970s, I was a student up on the hill at Simon Fraser University, and arts and entertainment editor at the student newspaper, The Peak — where among my myriad endeavours, I was afforded the opportunity to review five albums a week, one of which was, in early 1971, T. Rex’s eponymous fifth album, and the first under the name T. Rex.
If you haven’t guessed, I am a romantic, always have been, always will be. For me, there is no greater joy than being in love — in which respect I have been very lucky, in platonic and other kinds of love (and even a marriage) with incredibly bright and empathetic women, who are responsible for all the best parts of who I am, and how I have brought myself to the world.
My first great love, of course (and the mother of my children) was Cathy Janie McLean, a striking 18-year-old blonde Amazon of a woman, possessed of a keen intelligence, and the woman more than any other who shaped me, in the early years loved me, and created the somewhat sophisticated wordsmith and bon vivant I’ve been for nigh on 50 years now.
T. Rex’s song Diamond Meadows was a song that was particularly resonant in Cathy’s and my life, a song we returned to for years, when I was at university, and later teaching in the Interior. For me, listening to Diamond Meadows reminds me of a time when I was truly loved, when everything was going well in my life, when I was surrounded by friends, politically and socially active, and a young man of promise and capable of much good.