Category Archives: VanRamblings

The Music of One’s Life | Tom Waits | Closing Time +

December 9, 2018A & E, Music, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Pomona, California, Los Angeles county, 1950s, birthplace of songwriter Tom Waits

Thomas Alan Waits was born on the 7th of December in 1949, in Pomona, California, a little town located between the Inland Empire and the San Gabriel Valley, situated within Los Angeles County. His father, Jesse Frank Waits — about whom Waits would later say … “he was a tough one, always an outsider” — taught Spanish at a local school and was an alcoholic, while his mother Alma was a housewife and regular church-goer.
Waits was the second of three siblings, having both an older and younger sister, raised (as he’s often said) in a middle-class household, his “a pretty normal childhood”. He attended Jordan Elementary and later on Hilltop High School, where he was bullied. It was at Hilltop, though, where he learned to play the bugle and the guitar, while his father had earlier taught him to play the ukulele. Summers, more often than not, he visited maternal relatives in Gridley or Marysville, both small towns about 50 miles north of Sacramento, in northern California. Waits recalls that it was an uncle’s raspy, gravelly voice that inspired the manner in which he later sang.
In 1959, Waits’ parents separated and his father moved away from the family home; it was a traumatic experience for the 10-year-old boy. Alma took her children and relocated to Chula Vista, a middle-class suburb of San Diego. In Chula Vista, he fronted a rhythm and blues school band, The Systems, where he developed a love of soul singers like Ray Charles, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett, as well as country music and Roy Orbison. Later on, Bob Dylan became a catalytic influence, with Waits placing transcriptions of Dylan’s lyrics on his bedroom walls.

Novelist Jack Kerouac listening to the beat of a new generation, where as he wrote, “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.” Excerpted from Kerouac’s 1956 novel, On The Road.

In high school, Waits was a self-described “amateur juvenile delinquent”, interested in “malicious mischief” and breaking the law, a “rebel against the rebels”, as he eschewed the hippie subculture then growing in popularity, inspired instead by the 1950s Beat generation, with a great love for the work of Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. In 1968, at age 18, he dropped out of high school.

The Howl, Allen Ginsburg, September 1956

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating …

Waits spent much of the next three years traveling, picking up odd jobs here and there, taking college classes in photography, while all the while pursuing his musical interests, including learning the piano, all of which led to gigs along California’s coast, opening for acts like Tim Buckley, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

Early in 1972, Tom Waits landed a gig at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, where he came to the attention of Herb Cohen, a music impresario, record company executive, music publisher, and personal manager for Linda Ronstadt, Frank Zappa, Buckley, and Odetta, among other artists. Cohen signed Waits to a publishing contract with Troubador Records — it was at Troubador that Waits came to the attention of David Geffen, who gave Waits a recording contract with his Asylum Records, the recording sessions taking place in Hollywood’s Sunset Sound studios, the resulting album titled Closing Time, released in March 1973. The rest, as they say, is history.

In a down period of my life, living in a tiny apartment in Coquitlam, teaching school, my Master’s programme falling apart, and the state of my marriage — if such a thing even existed anymore — undecided at best, I took solace with music from Waits’ 1980 album Blue Valentine, most particularly his version of Leonard Bernstein’s Somewhere, from West Side Story (which, for me, is the definitive version of the song). As you can hear, by this point in his career, Tom Waits had developed his signature raspy and heartrending voice. Both songs remain among my favourites to this day.

Stories of a Life | How Can You Locomote Yourself from A to B?

December 8, 2018fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Lord Nelson Elementary School, on Vancouver’s eastside, where I attended Grades 1 thru 3. The portable on the left is where I experienced a happy and rewarding Grade 2, in Mrs. Goloff’s class (I liked her, I thought there was a solid goodness about her and a genuine affection, as well as a deep respect, for students) from September 1957 thru June 1958.

In the summer of 1959, after I’d completed Grade 3 at Lord Nelson Elementary School in Vancouver (my memory of Grade 3 only slight), in August of ’59, my parents moved from Vancouver to Edmonton to be closer to family — on both my mother’s and father’s sides of the family.
In Alberta at the time, the provincial government had adopted what they called an “Enterprise Programme,” a focused academic programme meant to engage students intellectually while providing them with the tools they would require to compete successfully at post-secondary university. While all other Canadian provinces had adopted a two stream programme, one academic (university bound), the other vocational (meant to prepare students to work in the trades), Alberta was having none of that — educational achievement at the highest possible level was Alberta’s goal, the curriculum requirements rigorous, demanding and challenging, and consistently above grade level. The Enterprise Programme was defined by competition and the striving to become the best possible student — failure was never an option, doing your best was expected and required, academically and socially. Future leaders were being trained in Alberta.

“The provincial government meant to produce the best and the brightest, informed by a progressive educational ideology that Alberta was the first Canadian province to adopt in the 1950s, an educational philosophy that was child-centred, subject-integrated, with an activity-based approach, known in Alberta as the Enterprise Programme, focused on content centered courses in History, Geography, and Civics integrated into a new course: Social Studies, which was taught across all grade levels, this new subject emphasizing the development of democratic, co-operative behaviour, and inquisitiveness through experiential learning.”

Lynn Speer Lemisko & Kurt W. Clausen, Connections, Contrarities and Convolutions: Curriculum and Pedagogic Reform in Alberta; Faculty of Education, SFU, March 1, 2017

In the summer of 1962, my parents made the decision to return to Vancouver — the reasons are unclear to me, but whatever the case, in the summer of 1962, living at 2136 Venables Street, I found myself enrolled at Templeton Secondary School, then the toughest school in Vancouver (that mantle would soon be claimed by VanTech — but in 1962, Templeton was the school where all the toughest “juvenile delinquents” were enrolled, although truth to tell, many of the tougher students found themselves behind lock and key at the Brannen Lake Juvenile Correctional Facility).

From Grades 7 through Grade 12, I attended Templeton Secondary. Based on my experience in Alberta, I was enrolled in the academic programme at Templeton, whereas every person I’d attended Grades 1 thru 3 with at Lord Nelson found themselves enrolled in the vocational stream. Odd, I thought to myself at the time. Another odd thing I found: from the spring of 1963 on, my grades never soared about a C-average — whereas in Alberta, I’d been a straight A student. Unlike most others enrolled in the academic programme, I was required to take vocational classes — and from Grade 8, I was enrolled in typing and secretarial classes, unlike any other student in the academic stream. Although a typing speed of 160wpm would serve me well later in life, I still found it odd, and just a bit concerning, that I was required to take three clerical classes each year through to graduation.
From Grade 8 on, I was also concerned that when I submitted an essay in Social Studies or one of my English classes, it either came back to me with a C, a D or a fail — with a comment from my teacher that someone other than me had written the essay, or I had either plagiarized or copied directly the work of someone else. By the time I reached Grade 12, where I had achieved an A- average in French, was taking the lead in the school plays, and editing the student newspaper, I was surprised and disappointed to receive a D in English, and a fail in History and Geography.
I recall one spring afternoon in 1968, the teacher having turned down the lights, with soft music playing in the background, the teacher asking the students in my Grade 12 English class to write a stream of consciousness essay, which I was only too happy to do. When I submitted the essay to the teacher, she took a glance at the essay and tore it up, saying to me, “You didn’t write this. You either copied it from someone else or had the essay prepared in advance (note. there had been no notice of a stream of consciousness essay taking place in class that day). You receive a fail for the essay. I’m disgusted with you.”

A dozen years later, I was the Assistant Director of Teacher Training, PDP 401-402 at Simon Fraser University (a position I held while working on my Master’s degree). The English teacher referred to above had taken a seconded position as a PDP Faculty Associate — in essence I was her boss. When we first connected, in September, at the outset of the 1980 academic school year, almost the first words out of her mouth were, “I had a student with your name at Templeton Secondary. How odd that you should both have the same name,” at which point I informed her that the Raymond Tomlin she had taught, and the person standing in front of her was one and the same person. She looked aghast, stammering, “But how?”
I told her I had a 3.8 grade point average and two undergraduate degrees, and was currently enrolled in a Master’s programme at the university, letting her in on what I am about to write and record for posterity now …
In June of 1968, when I was about to graduate, as was the case with all of the other graduating students, I met with Ken Waites, the patrician, white-haired Principal at Templeton Secondary School, in his office with the door closed, and this is what he said to me …

“Well, Raymond, even though you’re a couple of courses short of graduation, given your failing grades in History and Geography, I am nonetheless going to graduate you anyway — because any kind of academic future is clearly not in the cards for you. I want to tell you something that we’ve kept from you for the past five years: for each of those years, you were recorded as having the lowest IQ of any student enrolled in the Vancouver school district, not just at Templeton, but city wide. Your teachers and I had often wondered, given your low IQ, how it is that you locomoted yourself from point A to point B. Someone with as low an IQ as you shouldn’t even be able to speak — but here you are.

You’ve probably wondered to yourself, why you were required to take three clerical courses each of the past five years. The answer is easy: you spell well, and it was clear early on that you had an aptitude for secretarial work, your typing speed and accuracy superior. Your guidance counsellor and I determined a long time ago that the best course in life for you would be to enter the clerical field, to be a secretary — because, clearly, you are possessed of no academic skill whatsoever, although you seem to have done well in French.

I have had these meetings with all graduating students, providing what I believe to be sound advice on how each student should proceed with his life following graduation. In your case, your best — and I would say, your only — hope is as a secretary. Thank you for meeting with me this afternoon, Raymond. All the best in your future.”

In 1970, my new wife insisted I enroll at Simon Fraser University, where students with an inferior academic record were being accepted, in order to build the student body. In my first semester at SFU, I achieved 3 C’s and two B’s. In my second semester, 3 B’s and 2 A’s — and every semester after that, straight A’s (not that I ever cared about grades, as did many of my fellow students — I was just hungry for knowledge, and curious about the world, eager to learn as much as I could, at one point early on not leaving SFU’s Burnaby campus over an 18-month period). I loved to read, I loved to write, I loved to learn, I was curious about everything — being at Simon Fraser University and hanging out with and being challenged by the best and the brightest was like a dream come true for me.
My curiosity about life, about all aspects of our existence on Earth remains to this day — I want to read all of the papers of record every day (and I do!), to engage with nation builders and city builders, to work with persons of conscience, to work towards better, fairer, more just. And I am afforded that opportunity each and every day, surrounded (outside of my plangent housing co-op life) by strong-willed persons of conscience who mean to build a better and more just world. As such, my life is near filled with joy!

Arts Friday | Best Cinema of 2018 | VanCity Theatre

December 7, 2018A & E, Cinema, Vancouver, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

As occurs each December, Tom Charity — one of the kindest, most thoughtful and erudite men of our acquaintance, a great lover of film and who, as it happens, has long acted as the absolutely superb programmer of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s year-round Festival cinema venue, the Vancity Theatre, once again, this year, for your edification, enjoyment and just plain delight presents the Best of 2018, one time only, year-end, must-see screenings of the very best 2018 cinema had on offer.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Thursday, Dec. 27th, 8pm, Vancity Theatre.

Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times arts critic, writes, “Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” casts a remarkable spell; it wraps around you, like a delicately scented cashmere shawl woven from music and color and astonishing faces.” Absurdly pleasurable to watch and to listen to, with its effortless display of poise, as Chicago Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper writes, “Anderson shoots and paces Phantom Thread almost like a 1950s mystery, and there ARE some dark elements of intrigue in the story — but this is not a Hitchcockian tale of lust and betrayal and murder. It’s a fascinating examination of an obsessive-compulsive, maddeningly self-centered, magnificently talented man.” Captivating, unsettling, entrancing.

Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, Friday, December 28th, 8pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

Here’s what we wrote about Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace last Friday …

Far and away the strongest and most affecting independent film of 2018, director Debra Granik’s first outing since 2010’s multiple Oscar award nominee, Winter’s Bone (in which Jennifer Lawrence made her début, gaining a Best Actress Oscar nomination), Leave No Trace tracks a father and daughter living precariously off the grid, introducing us to an incandescent 17-year-old Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, who lives a tranquil life sheltered with her loving, PTSD suffering father, Ben Foster, in an urban Oregon woodland, in perfect harmony with one another, despite all. Uncompromising, authentic, raw, heartbreaking, brilliant, haunting, full of grace, and riveting throughout, Leave No Trace is a multiple Gotham & Indie Spirit Award nominee — including Best Actor, Supporting Actress, Director and Feature — and a must-see Best of 2018 film screening.

This past week, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie was designated as the National Board of Review’s Breakthrough Performance award winner!

Make sure you catch The Death of Stalin on Saturday, Dec. 29th, 8pm, Vancity Theatre.

This past spring, recently-elected Vancouver City Councillor Colleen Hardwick and her husband, renowned actor Garry Chalk, caught a screening of Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin at the Fifth Avenue Cinema, and came out of the theatre raving about the film to all who would listen. High praise, indeed, from persons of conscience in our community who cherish film as the critically important art form of our age.
Says New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, “The Death of Stalin is by turns entertaining and unsettling, with laughs that morph into gasps and uneasy gasps that erupt into queasy, choking laughs,” Iannucci’s take-no-prisoners directorial style perfect for this blackest of farces, political satire of the first order, and a farcical, frightening and a timely reminder that things could always be worse — which in the time of Trump is going some.

Part of a double bill, Mandy on Saturday, December 29th, 10:10pm, Vancity Theatre.

Says CineVue’s Tom Duggins, “Mandy is not just hideous, hilarious and thrilling — although, it’s all of those and then some — it’s also a meditation on personal grief which loses no poignancy for all its blood-soaked insanity and eye-melting psychedelia.” Not enough praise?
Try this, from the Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov, “Mandy, though, is flat-out orders of magnitude a more emotionally adept and shockingly powerful film in virtually every department, from the dazzlingly insane cinematography and lysergically-inclined production design to what I can only believe is Nicolas Cage’s single best performance to date.”

Multiple award winner, Foxtrot, on Sunday, December 30th, 8pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 74th annual Venice Film Festival, says the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday, “Samuel Maoz’s award-winning Israeli film is graced by superb performances, especially from Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler, this gentle, dreamlike but admirably process film offers a devastating portrait that bursts with integrity and tough honesty, even in its most lighthearted moments,” and as the Los Angeles Times’ lead film critic Kenneth Turan writes in his review of Foxtrot, “An intricate, dazzling cinematic dance, Foxtrot goes both deeper in and further out than standard-issue cinema. It’s profound and moving and wild and crazy at the same time, simultaneously telling a specific story and offering an emotional snapshot of a country whose very soul seems to be at risk.”

Paddington 2, on Monday, December 31st at noon (New Year’s Eve!), Vancity Theatre.

Probably the most enthusiastically reviewed film of 2018 — and this from a usually cynical crowd of film critics — here’s just a bit of what’s been written about Paddington 2: “An exquisite reminder of the wondrous things that can happen when a storyteller of boundless imagination avails himself of some rigorous discipline (Justin Chang, L.A. Times); and from Time Out London film critic, Helen O’Hara, “It’s a family adventure that’s the right sort of heartwarming, delivering real human emotion through the medium of a small bear.” Others have written about Paddington 2: exemplary, beguiling, enchanting, whimsical, heartfelt, humane, delightful, heartwarming, and “a sequel that surpasses the superb original.”

First Reformed, on Tuesday, January 1st at 7:45pm (New Year’s Day!), Vancity Theatre.

Perhaps the best reviewed art film of 2018, a comeback film for Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver), winner of the prestigious New York Film Critics Circle & Gotham Awards for Best Actor for Ethan Hawke — the prohibitive favourite for a Best Actor Oscar — as well as Best Screenplay for Schrader with both critics’ organizations, critic Godfrey Chesire writing, “A stunning, enrapturing film, a crowning work by one of the American cinema’s most essential artists,” while Roger Moore in Movie Nation writes, “A powerful, disturbing crisis of faith drama that takes on the raiments of a thriller, and a tour de force for the understated acting of Ethan Hawke.” Not to be missed.

Edge of the Knife (Sgaawaay K’uuna), on Tuesday, January 1st at 10pm, Vancity Theatre.

The first feature film to be spoken entirely in the Haida language, Sgaawaay K’uuna is based on a popular Haida legend, Gaagiid/Gaagiixiid (Wildman), the 19th century set film relating the tale of two families who gather together for their annual Haida Gwaii fishing camp.
A man, Adiits’ii (Tyler York), flees into a forest and transforms into a Gaagiid/Gaagiixiid (Wildman) after experiencing a tragedy. Throughout, Sgaawaay K’uuna offers mythic, human scale storytelling, where every life is sacred and no one is beyond redemption, as riveting a tale of survival and forgiveness as you’ll see this year, or any other year.
Sgaaway K’uuna, or Edge of the Knife is derived from the Haida saying: ‘The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife; as you go along, you have to be careful or you will fall off one side or the other.’

Sorry to Bother You, on Wednesday, January 2nd at 8:25pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

One the best reviewed comedies of the summer of 2018, Sorry to Bother You offers a roiling mix of wry race comedy, economy-grade dystopian speculative fiction, and inspired/demented midnight-movie Silicon Valley satire — it’s also as funny and as caustic as hell. Oh, and did we say that Boots Riley’s début feature film is also a welcome hand grenade of subversive power that is all at once incendiary, hilarious, alarming, anti-capitalist, infectious, absurdist and provocative? Gosh, I think we just did.

Support the Girls, on Thursday, January 3rd at 8:25pm, at the Vancity Theatre.

Saving the best for last, writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s heart-of-gold film offers a fresh perspective on the lives of marginalized people, in a story about sex, race, class, and age, all without ever coming off as preachy or lecturing, even given its winking/earnest double entendre of a title.
Here’s what respected film critic John Anderson had to say in the Wall Street Journal …

The unlikely, bittersweet, bristling comedy Support the Girls is easily one of the best films of the year, and the most sympathetic to women, despite having been made by a man. How can this be? Luckily, Andrew Bujalski’s remarkable movie — with its killer performance by Regina Hall (who just won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress, and is a lock for a Best Actress Oscar nod) is not just about women. It’s about men being idiots. And no one is arguing ownership of that narrative.

Humble, restrained, breezy, heartwarming, never hectoring, delicate, cogent, tender, tough, empathetic, controlled, victorious, tumultuous, brilliant, bracing & utterly phenomenal, you need to see Support the Girls.

The Music & The Stories of One’s Life | A Horse With No Name

December 2, 2018A & E, Music, Stories of a Life, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

When Cathy and I left for Mexico in February 1972, we crossed the border at Tijuana, and took a bus to Mexicali, where we boarded a train for Guadalajara. On the way home, though, we crossed the border at Nogales, Mexico, approximately 600 kilometres east of Mexicali — which meant that when we entered into the United States, we landed in Nogales, Arizona rather than San Ysidro, California.
Whatever the case, we were happy to be heading home.

Once in Nogales, Arizona, we stopped in at a popular local diner for breakfast (it was approximately 8 a.m.), after which we headed over to the highway, where we stuck our thumbs out, hoping for an 85-mile ride to Tuscon, Arizona, all dusty and laden with backpacks, of course.
A kind young man picked Cathy and I up just outside of Nogales, and as luck would have it, he was on his way to Tuscon. Once we’d loaded our backpacks into the back seat, and were comfortably ensconced in his late model Ford sedan, as we barrelled down the I-91 highway heading north, he turned the radio on. After two months away, the song that follows just below is the first song we heard on American radio, a song that would soon rise to #1 on the charts, and which Cathy and I remember to this day as signalling the first jaunt of our journey home, to Los Angeles initially, and then to our home atop Burnaby Mountain, at SFU’s Louis Riel House.

Somehow a song about the desert as we trundled our way through southern Arizona on a warm, breezy, dusty sun dappled Tuesday morning seemed entirely fitting — Cathy and I just looked at one another & smiled.
Once in Tuscon, we once again put our thumbs out at the side of the highway, and soon found ourselves on the second, 113-mile leg of our journey home, this time to Phoenix, and afterwards on the last leg of our route back to our friend’s home in East LA, a 372-mile ride to from Phoenix to Los Angeles. We made it back to Los Angeles around 8:30 p.m.
In fact, we arrived in the Westwood neighbourhood of Los Angeles, where our friend Bachi (Manuel Vittorio Esquivel) was kind enough take the 22-minute drive from East L.A. to pick us up, and bring us back to his home. We stayed a couple of days, and then jumped into our Datsun 510 — a wedding present, as it happens, and a vehicle that Bachi had serviced in our absence, all in prep for our 1277-mile leisurely sojourn to Vancouver.