How could that be?

Look at her.

She’s stunning.

I, of course, had the blunt interests of a boy who knew nothing about women or sex– although I was very interested in both– and I simply accepted Hollywood’s casual objectification of these mysteries. I didn’t know somebody was attractive unless Hollywood signalled to me that they were, something they usually did by a display of nudity. And so the promise of Jessica Lange, Kim Basinger or Jamie Lee Curtis taking off their top in some accessible, high velocity movie was simply too much for me to resist.

Streep, who even at a young age seemed to be playing adults rather than sex toys for naive adolescents, was cast in the sort of films that my parents might be interested in, in “prestige” films, and even though she was of the same general age as all the other celebrities I lusted after, she was stood apart from them, a European cousin, or something.

As an adult I came to love Meryl Streep. Not so much for her acting, which was always somehow obscured for me by her reputation for “acting,” but for her presence. Talented, charismatic and beautiful, she’s also fantastically articulate and charming, and like everybody else I was super keen to hear her speak at the Golden Globes.

Her speech was widely celebrated.

Meryl Streep, Hollywood’s single-combat hero, called to our better angels, and as we sat there listening it was as if the Stature of Liberty herself was speaking. Expecting to love every word of it, I was surprised to discover that I did not.

Although she might have been joking when she referred to the roomful of beautiful, insanely wealthy and adored people sitting before her as, “The most vilified segment of American society,” it made me roll my eyes . Whether she intended it with any irony or not is unclear, but the thrust of her argument was that Hollywood, full of outsiders and foreigners, was representative of some sort of scrappy refugee success story rather than a consumerist ideal of near-unattainable privilege. She continued, saying that if Trump had his way, all America would have left would be football and mixed martial arts– and as she said this, her voice rising in certainty, finger wagging, she admonished, “Which are not the arts!”

The home crowd cheered.

I don’t know.

I had thought I was the home crowd, too, but was I supposed to believe that actors were rescuing America from the things that the people who lived there liked? That football and MMA were unworthy to watch unless they were recreated in movie format starring celebrities?

Something like that?

I wasn’t sure.

Her audience was rapt, hanging on every word. And they were all so beautiful and dewy, so earnest and self-congratulatory in expression, so not of this earth that I imagined them separating from the rest of the world and rising up, up, up in some magical balloon that they knew the rest of us, so smitten, would never be able to let go of.

Her condemnation of Trump’s nascent war on journalism struck me as wanting, too, because there is likely no industry that succeeds so brilliantly at manipulating the press as does Hollywood. The Hollywood Foreign Press, who are responsible for the Golden Globes, are little more than a marketing wing for the industry, trading off favourable stories for glamorous access.

When we see our celebrities on the red carpet refusing to be objectified by not revealing who made their outfit and thus striking a blow for equal rights, we have to keep in mind that they’re still accepting money to advertise that dress.

Hollywood is about money.

Period.

If art or diversity or empathy is a byproduct of this pursuit, all the better, but if Meryl Streep were being honest with herself and the rest of us, she might acknowledge that she, like Trump, depends on a compliant media to promote her work and spin her narratives.

And so it goes.

Everything touches everything else.

It’s not like Streep was saying anything crazy, though. She was trying to do good, but her blind spots were, well, Hollywood in scope. Her words were tangled in contradictions, a stinging disregard for those who might not agree with her, and an imperious detachment from the pedestrian, discount store lives the rest of us struggle to lead, and that actually demoralized me.

Politicians and actors, I have found out, have all too much in common.

I was 13 years-old, hopelessly white and just starting high school. I wanted to be cool but didn’t have the foggiest notion how to go about it. Cool was an undiscovered, mythic country that existed off at some unknowable distance, and I was lost, so very, very lost.

Eventually, I learned that the best passage to this land was through music. At the time, while punk and new wave were exploding around me, Billy Joel was my God, and this was not cool.

I found out that the music I had been listening to was wretched kid’s stuff, as were the lame, middle of the road radio stations I pledged allegiance to. If I wanted to be cool, I had to listen to college radio, CKCU specifically.

Listening to this radio station felt subversive, like receiving secret transmissions from a dangerous and lawless place. Unlike the chipper and inauthentic DJ’s I had previously been listening to, the ones who used sound effects and clearly knew nothing about music, the college DJ’s seemed singularly interested in what they were playing, as if it was their holy mission to bring “good music” to you. It was, I think, my first exposure to what might be thought of as the alternative scene.

It was here where I first heard the voice of Nadine Gelineau. She was a DJ at CKCU, and for whatever reason she struck a chord with me. I loved her. I mean, I was in love with her.

Her voice, so knowledgable, confident and fun, suggested worlds I had never imagined. It was a voice that for a 13 year-old boy in Ottawa, was a path, a path to a world of music and cool and all that lay beyond, a path out of the childhood I had always inhabited and on toward something much grander. Her voice conjured the possibility of thousands of different lives.

She was a legend. Hosting radio shows, spinning discs at the counter-culture clubs, championing music and just generally being Ottawa’s single-combat hero of cool, she was the way we collectively wanted to be seen. She gave us all hope and pride, I think, and now she is gravely ill. I hope that she’s able to get through it and return to herself and the legions of people whom she loves and love her.

The thought of her passing is a kind of cataclysm. Ridiculously, it seems impossible, but time, it just slips away, quietly sliding away into a larger and larger pool now forming beneath and behind us. Who knew that pool would get so big and we would get so old? Who knew the present would so mercilessly raze our beloved past?

I was recently reminded that the last song she played at all the club sets she performed was Enjoy Yourself by The Specials.

At the time it struck me as a drunken party song, but now when I listen to it, there’s a sadness and inevitability to it. It was an appropriate song for Nadine to have played, I think. It’s a funny time, that last song of the night, bittersweet. I never wanted it to end, I wanted it to stretch out infinitely, with more and more people joining in, each one a light in the greater constellation of who we were, each one shining so brightly.

So, thank you Nadine, thank you.

( Photo courtesy of Julie Beun)

He was one of the boys I grew up with in Ottawa, and he was a great guy. Modest, kind and good at everything, he was well liked, the sort of person you always wanted around. Parents watching him grow felt proud, confident and happy in the future that was unfolding before him. He was like all the other pure and wonderful boys we grew up amidst, and whenever I saw him, I saw the happy reflection of all of us who grew up together in that neighbourhood, smiling back.

He jumped from the Alexandra Street bridge last week, falling 120 feet before landing in about six feet of water and then pulling himself to the rocks along shore. Using the word miracle, the police officers said that they had never seen a person survive such a high fall into such shallow water.

The Alexandra Street bridge, which was built around 1900, connects Ottawa to the city that lies directly across the river, Hull, Quebec. I cannot express to you just how important Hull was to teenagers growing up in Ottawa during the 1980’s. At the time, Ottawa was a very conservative, even timid place. There were rules that governed everything and an almost soviet conformity enveloped the city like a cloud. However, in Hull the drinking age was 18, you could buy beer at corner stores and bars stayed open until 3:00am. We flocked there by the thousands, crossing the Alexandra bridge like we were a part of some migratory pattern.

For me and my friends, sheltered, underaged kids who only knew optimistic, suburban existences, the unfettered liberty of Hull was a small glimpse into what we imagined the realm of adults could be. It was a place full of potential. Every time we crossed that bridge we felt that a “first” might take place– the narratives of our lives just then beginning to take shape. It was a never-never land where we could dip our feet into the future, while still returning home each night to the safe nest our parents had constructed.

To this day the bridge has the steely permanence of an antique.

Cantilevered, it vibrates when you pass over it, as if an echo of all the trains that once crossed. Our transits, often by foot or bike, were always made at night. With the water in view beneath the cross-hatched metal and the wind, now feeling slightly alien and hostile pushing at you, a feeling of vulnerable and solitude presided. With untethered blackness above and beneath, and the ghostly hum of the bridge moving up through your body, you were in limbo, as if moving from one realm into the next.

It was here on the Alexandra bridge, perhaps feeling lost between these two worlds, where our dear friend decided to step off. He did not do it at night, but during the prosaic, naked day. What was taking place in his heart at that moment must have been indescribably mysterious and painful, a motivating state of mind that’s bleakly impenetrable to the rest of us, who only by the grace of God, have remained on solid ground.

May he forgive himself everything, and find peace in this living world where he will be forever loved. And may he always remember that he pulled himself to shore. The miracle of his life was of his own creation.

At Sanagan’s Meat Locker the guy working the cash wore a baseball cap that said Jimmy’s Coffee. It had brownish, indeterminate stains and smudges on it, and somehow this made it look deadly cool. I told him I liked his hat, and he said, “You like all the meat stains on it, don’t you?” I nodded. “Yeah, whenever I’m in the back room I’m constantly getting banged about by all the hanging carcasses, it’s like getting whacked in the head all the time by those pugil sticks on American Gladiators!”

Later, I went to Mackenzie’s Pub on Bloor. The man sitting to my left had a shaved head and haunted eyes. He stared straight ahead, his right hand slowly, almost tenderly caressing the sleeve of his jacket. He never looked over at anyone or up at the bank of TV’s above the bar, but straight through the skyline of liquor bottles in front of him and into his fragmented image staring back at him from the mirror. He seemed intense, maybe even angry, as if immersed in a circumstance that was overwhelming and forced– Led Zepplin playing chaotically in the foreground, as if emanating from his head and not the sound system all around us.

When I got the bill from the bartender for $19.89, she exclaimed, “Good year!” I didn’t know what she meant and said, “Sorry?” “Oh, 1989, I was in high school then, it was a good year,” and then a small, embarrassed, maybe even somewhat melancholy laugh, before she turned to another task.

Here is one of the columns I just found while cleaning out an old box:

Q: There’s a girl in my Latin class who I’m absolutely nuts about. Should I tell her?

A: NO, THERE IS NO WAY ON EARTH THAT YOU SHOULD TELL HER!! (Is it Marie-France Lapoint? She is CRAZY hot, especially in those green cords!!! Drool!!!)

Look, this girl who may or may not be Marie-France Lapoint, is probably completely out of your league and dating a guy who lives in Europe or goes to university in the States. You should spare yourself the humiliation of rejection and just wait for her to notice you and your totally cool sweater.

It’s not always easy to do this, but it’s ESSENTIAL that you try. Look at her all the time, but pretend like she’s not important to you because you’re popular and your family is rich. Your indifference will make her think there’s something wrong with her, and this insecurity will probably make her try to be nice to you, and when this happens you should still play it really cool, like you would never have a crush on somebody like her but you’ll talk to her in boring, old Latin, and then when she gets really, really hammered at a party you should make your move!! The master has spoken.

Q: My parents want me to take Computer Science but I think it’s a stupid waste of time. What do you think?

A: First of all, parents are useless. They’re completely embarrassing and don’t understand anything! Of course Computer Science is a waste of time!! Fortran and Cobol?

They sound like robot names! Only nerds take that class and they’re not learning anything important or fun. Rest assured, the world is not going to be run by Cobol and Fortran. However, I do think that computers are going to be really important, one day giving us instant access to pictures of naked women (Kim Basinger and Jamie Lee Curtis!!) and sports scores.

Computers will be like libraries, only they’ll be small and with you all the time, like on Star Trek, but things are going to move so quickly in the future that studying something like Fortran in 1983 isn’t going to do you any good at all. Ignore your parents and take gym or something cool and remember, don’t hangout with any phonies!

Q: If I want to appear of age in a bar, what drink should I order?

A: A Screwdriver. And wear a Harris Tweed hat.

The master has spoken!

The bar was pretty much off-limits for us at this age, but every once in awhile we might catch a glimpse of one of our teachers leaving the pub. It felt scandalous, that, like seeing the gym and math teacher skinny-dipping. Teachers just weren’t supposed to be people, more like mannequins, and to see suggestions of a life exterior to our school was shocking.

The Mayflower was a part of the constellation of my youth, part of a web that included the vintage clothing store Andy Upstairs (impossibly cool!), Cantor’s Bakery (awesome cookies!) the Penguin, (so sophisticated!), Johnny Shampoo ( New Wave haircuts!) the Party Palace (best hot dogs in the city!), and many other small points of light that connected our high school years.

In an indirect way, Lou Reed, who also came to his terminal point on Sunday, was a part of that network, too. A friend, who had a particularly keen and scholarly interest in music, introduced me to the Velvet Underground in grade 10, and although they weren’t of our generation, that band opened a big, thrilling window into the world that could be. Impossibly cool, dangerous and Avant-garde they were the very opposite of Ottawa, representing everything bigger, edgier and closer to the bone than we were.  When I put on my Velvet Underground and Nico t-shirt I felt transformed, as if lifted up and out of my high school life and moving toward a limitless and exotic horizon, and now, some 30 years later, the news on Sunday reminded me that horizons recede and end, too.

And so, a melancholy day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLaq5usTJrg

She was the daughter of a British diplomat and she lived in a huge, failing stone mansion. I cannot tell you how much that impressed me. She had an accent so delicate that each word she spoke seemed to unfurl from her mouth like a flower, like a fragrance. Oh, how I was crazy for her, how I ached for her lips, but she preferred the bad boys. She liked them wicked and unpredictable. Boys who were born under punches, boys that didn’t ask questions and liked to fuck. I played tennis and coached T-ball.

I remember having my arm around her once when we were returning from a cottage. She was asleep, her head resting on my shoulder. It was autumn and the lake we were driving by was so beautiful, the leaves an astonishment reflecting off the water, like a choral reef turned into light.

And Louis Armstrong, the forever of Louis Armstrong, was playing in the car, as if narrating, and I had my arm around Rebecca Harris who was so wonderfully asleep and safe and nestled into me, and it was a perfect moment that I wanted to sustain for eternity. Yes. This was it. Yes. And then the car hit a bump and I bounced up and hit my head on the roof and Rebecca woke up, startled. For the rest of the drive home I kept my arm around her, but it was different now, all wrong. It was like my arm was pinned behind her back and neither one of us was comfortable, and the Louis Armstrong that was playing became the crappy, sanitized Louis Armstrong and the lake fell behind us as we entered into the junk land that ringed the city, passing hamburger joints and lonely, broken homes, places and things that weren’t quite where they wanted to be.

That’s an awful lot.

Obviously, this has nothing much to do with the quality of the films and everything to do with the marketing of the films. In order to feel invested and fully participatory in the event, we, as audience, go out to see as many nominees as possible– even if the movie happens to be Lincoln. It’s kind of like Black Friday for movies, only without discounts. What’s particularly funny about this cynical display is that one of the prime motivators for the audience in seeing the movies is to simply confirm  that we have MUCH better taste than the Academy. In fact, we will later Live-Tweet about what a horrible, self-congratulatory and vulgar spectacle it all is. But of course, we end up paying them for the privilege of doing so, rendering the ironies so plentiful that it actually gets tiring to think about them.

No matter, this year, the movie that most people are expecting to win for Best Picture is Argo. The film, for those of you who haven’t seen it, is based on the rescue of six US diplomats during the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979.

Personally, I think that the movie is fine and little more. The one thing that really stood out for me was the opening, a graphic novel kind of prologue in which the historical background for the movie was efficiently and elegantly set. I’d give them an award for that, but for the rest?

Meh.

But Argo probably will win.

Here’s why:

First off, the Academy has always favoured the historical, and this one is appealingly set in an era that all Academy members can vividly recall (they’re at the center of history!)– so for them the movie is kind of like flipping through an old high school yearbook. It’s a story told through the experience of white people, about the vulnerability of white people isolated by impenetrable dark-skinned people, getting rescued by white people.

In short, Argo champions idealized versions of the audience that’s watching the film.  This is a relatively typical Oscar construct though and should be considered practically boilerplate. Where Argo really scores with Academy voters is in embedding Hollywood into the core of the story.

In Argo, for this whole scheme to work, the CIA has to recruit Hollywood to make a fake film, one that will serve as cover so that the hostages can be rescued. Suddenly, people working in Hollywood get to see themselves in a kind of romantic, even noble light. Competent, funny and successful, they have brash, cynical exteriors, but pure hearts. Working in secrecy behind the scenes and out-smarting everyone they meet with impressive sangfroid, they’re the coolest people in the room—the work they’re doing important, rather than self-serving and shallow. And this speaks directly to the Academy voter, allowing them to imagine themselves  in the best possible light, so yes, if I had to bet, I would bet on Argo for Best Picture.