hunter becomes the hunted

Hunter S. Thompson kills self

ROBERT WELLER
Associated Press

Monday, Feb. 21, 2005

ASPEN, Colorado - Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America's underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has committed suicide.

Thompson, 67, died after shooting himself in the head at his Aspen home yesterday.

Pitkin County Sheriff Bob Braudis, who is a close personal friend of Thompson, confirmed the death. Thompson's son, Juan, discovered his body on Sunday evening. Thompson's wife, Anita Thompson, 32, was not at home when the shooting occurred.

"On Feb. 20, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head at his fortified compound in Woody Creek, Colorado. The family will provide more information about memorial service and media contacts shortly. Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family," Juan and Anita Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News. "He stomped terra."

A small group of friends and family members mourned the loss of Thompson at Owl Farm, where sheriff's deputies were investigating and processing the death.

"Details and interviews may be forthcoming when the family has had the time to recover from the trauma of the tragedy," Braudis said in a phone interview from Owl Farm, the rural Woody Creek home Thompson moved into in the 1960s.

Thompson grew up in Kentucky. He is survived by his wife, Anita Thompson of Woody Creek, son Juan of Denver, daughter-in-law Jennifer and grandson William.

Besides the 1972 classic about Thompson's visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was "Dr. Thompson," a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.

Thompson is credited alongside Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with helping pioneer New Journalism - or, as he dubbed it, "gonzo journalism" - in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story.

Thompson, whose early writings mostly appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, often portrayed himself as wildly intoxicated as he reported on such historic figures as Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist," Thompson told The Associated Press in 2003. "You have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."

Thompson also wrote such collections as "Generation of Swine" and "Songs of the Doomed." His first ever novel, "The Rum Diary," written in 1959, was first published in 1998.

Thompson was a counterculture icon at the height of the Watergate era, and once said Richard Nixon represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character."

Thompson also was the model for Garry Trudeau's balding "Uncle Duke" in the comic strip "Doonesbury" and was portrayed on screen by Johnny Depp in a film adaptation of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

That book, perhaps Thompson's most famous, begins: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."

Other books include "The Great Shark Hunt," "Hell's Angels" and "The Proud Highway." His most recent effort was "Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness."

"He may have died relatively young but he made up for it in quality if not quantity of years," Paul Krassner, the veteran radical journalist and one of Thompson's former editors, told The Associated Press by phone from his Southern California home.

"It was hard to say sometimes whether he was being provocative for its own sake or if he was just being drunk and stoned and irresponsible," quipped Krassner, founder of the leftist publication The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International (YIPPIE) party.

"But every editor that I know, myself included, was willing to accept a certain prima donna journalism in the demands he would make to cover a particular story," he said. "They were willing to risk all of his irresponsible behavior in order to share his talent with their readers."

The writer's compound in Woody Creek, not far from Aspen, was almost as legendary as Thompson. He prized peacocks and weapons; in 2000, he accidentally shot and slightly wounded his assistant trying to chase a bear off his property.

Born July 18, 1937, in Kentucky, Hunter Stocton Thompson served two years in the Air Force, where he was a newspaper sports editor. He later became a proud member of the National Rifle Association and almost was elected sheriff in Aspen in 1970 under the Freak Power Party banner.

Thompson's heyday came in the 1970s, when his larger-than-life persona was gobbled up by magazines. His pieces were of legendary length and so was his appetite for adventure and trouble; his purported fights with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner were rumored in many cases to hinge on expense accounts for stories that didn't materialize.

It was the content that raised eyebrows and tempers. His book on the 1972 presidential campaign involving, among others, Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and Nixon was famous for its scathing opinion.

Working for Muskie, Thompson wrote, "was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat." Nixon and his "Barbie doll" family were "America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us."

Humphrey? Of him, Thompson wrote: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while."

The approach won him praise among the masses as well as critical acclaim. Writing in The New York Times in 1973, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt worried Thompson might someday "lapse into good taste."

"That would be a shame, for while he doesn't see America as Grandma Moses depicted it, or the way they painted it for us in civics class, he does in his own mad way betray a profound democratic concern for the polity," he wrote. "And in its own mad way, it's damned refreshing."

---

AP writer John Rogers in Los Angeles contributed to this report. Includes content sourced, quoted from Aspen Daily News.

you can't fuck with a diva

Crystal clear

Rufus Wainwright, lauded by his peers as the most extraordinary songwriter of his generation, used his tortured relationship with his famous family to feed his muse, and took so much methamphetamine that he went temporarily blind. In New York, Tim Adams meets the 'true heir to Verdi'

Sunday February 20, 2005

The Guardian UK

There was two foot of snow on New York's streets the day I went to meet Rufus Wainwright. The city was shut down and hushed; my yellow cab slid and revved painstakingly down Broadway, the driver cursed -eloquently in Italian, and I sat in the back listening to tracks from Wainwright's albums on my Walkman, hoping we did not get stuck, wishing I owned a hat.

There are few places on earth as self-consciously dramatic as Manhattan in a blizzard, and in this mood the city could have no more appropriate soundtrack. Rufus Wainwright sees himself in some senses as the true heir to Verdi, clinging on to his every operatic note as if for dear life, violins swirling as he unpacks his heart, mixing American songbook verve with raw self-revelation. He sings of imaginary and foolish love, of absent fathers, of narcotic romance and the premature death of -matinee idols; he aspires to the condition of Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall. By the time I got to the little Thai restaurant on 14th Street, near his apartment, I feared my lip might be trembling.

Wainwright is, in person, necessarily much smaller than his voice would allow. He sits ordering his usual soup in a red sweater knit by his mother, quite childishly delighted by the snow. He's 31, but looks younger. He is nervy and needy by turns as he talks, as arch and confessional as his songs, now reliving his recent near-death experiences with drugs, now affecting a demonic camp laugh about his love life. His friend Elton John, who helped him get into rehab a couple of years ago, after Wainwright had gone temporarily blind from his crystal meth addiction and was crying all day every day, calls him 'the as-yet unheralded American treasure'. Michael Stipe sees him as the new Nina Simone. Martin Scorsese, for whom he played a lounge singer in The Aviator, came to think of him as a 'one-man Greek chorus'.

Wainwright has also, of late, by necessity, become a protest singer, in a suitably blowsy fashion. When we meet he has spent the past couple of days, on and off, watching the unsettling spectacle of the inauguration of his President, and it has left him a little shaky. 'It really is so sinister looking, it's so very Shakespearean,' he says. He talks of preparing an escape route from America, of the powerful forces within the new government that would like to see homosexuality criminalised again. 'I think that the Americans who elected Bush into office are probably worried about terrorists, but enemy number one, the source of all evil, is gay people.' The previous day, he says, a German journalist had asked him if he felt like a Jew in 1933. If anything, he said, he felt like a homosexual in 1933.

His new album, Want Two, begins, pointedly, with a soaring setting for the Mass for Peace, 'Agnus Dei', before going on to offer a different kind of prayer: for the arrival in America of the Gay Messiah, a second coming if ever there was one. 'He will then be reborn,' 'Rufus the Baptist' suggests, 'from 1970s porn/wearing tube socks with style/and such an innocent smile.' Such lyrical prophecy has predictably exercised the Concerned Women for America, among others, but Wainwright is more than happy to unleash a few arrows of desire in their direction. Everything is a religious war these days, he says, and he feels obliged to assert his own faith: 'I'm not born again, I'm not Kabbalah, God forbid, but I did have an experience hitting 30 that I needed to lean on something that assured me that everything is going to be OK. I had to regain a lot of my belief in fairy tales, in happy endings. A childish innocence where you are not afraid all the time any more, and I think that pertains to the album art, you know, the cover...'

The cover in question, for Want Two, depicts the singer dressed as the Lady of Shallot, in full pre-Raphaelite splendour, prone and pale among flowers. It makes a companion piece to his previous CD, Want One, where Wainwright appears in armour, vulnerable as St Sebastian; less a double album than a camp diptych. He is a bit outraged that his 'record company or whoever' saw fit to put a large sticker over the picture of him in a frock, ostensibly to advertise a DVD of a live concert, though he can guess at the business wisdom: 'Even radio stations and record stores are extremely reactionary right now,' he suggests, bleakly.

There is another sticker on the album, too, one of those that says 'Parental Advisory'. In Wainwright's case you can't help feeling that the warning is directed somewhat pointedly towards his own mother and father. The singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III announced his son's birth to the world in his song 'Rufus is a Tit-Man', in which he half-jokingly weighed up the new competition for his wife's favours: 'So put Rufus on the left one/And put me on the right/And like Romulus and Remus/We'll suck all night.' His mother, Kate McGarrigle, one half of the celebrated singing McGarrigle sisters, retaliated with the tear-jerker 'First Born': 'He's his mother's favourite and his grandmother's too/He'll break their hearts, and he'll break yours too.'

Wainwright says his earliest memory is seeing his mother loading the U-haul trailer in which she left his father and took Rufus and baby sister Martha from New York to live in Canada. He was three at the time, 'and just really terribly worried why they were putting the dining room table on this truck'. Loudon Wainwright subsequently communicated with his family regularly in song. 'He certainly dealt onstage I think more directly with the anatomy of his family than any other performer I know,' Wainwright says. 'He had a song for every family member, every situation. And my mother did the same thing in a way. At the same time, though, my father was very distant from us and very hard to get to at all.'

That relationship and that absence is at the root of many of Rufus Wainwright's own yearning melodies, he believes, but it finds its most poignant expression in the extraordinary song 'Dinner at Eight' on Want One which describes a confrontation with his father at a restaurant some years ago. 'We had just done a shoot for Rolling Stone together,' he says, 'and I told him he must be really happy that I had got him back in that magazine after all these years. That sort of kicked things off. Later in the evening he threatened to kill me. So I went home and wrote 'Dinner at Eight' as a vindictive retort to his threat.' The song recalls again the original occasion of their parting. 'Why is it so,' he sings, 'That I've always been the one who must go.../When in fact you were the one/ Long ago... in the drifting white snow/ Who left me?'

Does he still feel he is playing for his parents?

'No, I think it just sometimes it hits you. I was in Paris recently and a little jet lagged. I got to the end of the set and sang 'Dinner at Eight' and I was just inconsolable. Just crying. It can overwhelm you in two seconds.' He laughs a little. 'The rest of the time, of course, I like to think that I am singing to dead composers. I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe. Those are the ones who I hope might be interested.'

Rufus is not the only one who dwells on the family break-up. The night before I met him I'd heard his sister, Martha, singing at a charity gig in a bookshop in Greenwich Village. She mines similar territory to her brother, though in a slightly more aggressive fashion. In interviews Martha Wainwright is relatively sanguine about her growing up. 'It wasn't the Von Trapp family,' she says, 'But the issues that I have with my mum and dad are much less than those most of my friends have with their parents, probably to do with the fact that there are no secrets. It's probably saved me a lot of money in therapy because I am aware that it all comes out in the wash.' Still, her first album will carry the title of a song which, she suggested on stage, was written for her parents: 'Bloody Motherfucking Asshole'. She has a voice that is a more rough and ready version of Bjsrk's, capable of anger and sudden beauty; if Philip Larkin had been able to primal scream, I thought, it might have come out like this.

Rufus has an older brother's love of his sister; he included a picture of himself and her as toddlers on his first album. He has been surprised by her career. 'I was always the one who was going to be a star,' he says, with mock offence. 'Or so I thought. I asked her to come and play with me once, for fun, and before I know it she had, like, eight songs she'd written. As every gay person knows: you can't fuck with a diva. She has this incredible imperious quality. So that has added a bit of extra spice to the family.'

Wainwright's exit route from the competition and difficulties of home was his sexuality, he says. 'I could always escape into this demi-monde of homosexuality, which I feel really indebted to. It stopped me being a mummy's boy.'

He flirted briefly with girls when he was young - he had a girlfriend at an international summer camp in Lyme Regis when he was 13 ('A very Victorian girlfriend, I hasten to add. Taking long walks along the Cobb, drinking cider with these gypsies in a field') - but he always knew. 'I was hyper-developed sexually, understood what I wanted and thought I would go out and get it.' Staying with his father in London when he was 14 he picked up a man in a bar and was raped in Hyde Park. 'I was very terrified; Aids was at its zenith. My mother and father could not handle even me being gay. We never talked about it really.' He took to listening to Verdi's Requiem all day in the dark. His father thought he should go to boarding school and sent him to Millbrook in New York State, the setting for Dead Poets Society. 'It was the best thing that ever happened to me,' he says.

Wainwright was always writing songs. He released his first track when he was 13 for a movie and was nominated as best male artist in the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys. By the time he was 18 he was ready to be a star. 'It was all in the eyes,' he suggests, smiling at himself. He recalls sitting in a bar, too young to drink, with a record company executive, who was being insulting and seen-it-all. 'I was saying no, you don't understand, I am on a mission to bring back songwriting, I'm going to be a legend - I admit I was a bit annoying - and I looked at him and sort of gave him the eye. He looked at me for the first time. "You know what," he said, "you might actually make it."'

Wainwright then had his first few run- ins with New York, which were miserably unsuccessful. 'I was working in a movie theatre; it was incredibly hard to play anywhere. I failed and left and went back home. I decided perhaps I should attempt my launch in a more hospitable environment, so I went to Montreal.'

He played there in the street or wherever, made little flyers for his shows, mostly at a place called Cafe Sarajevo, full of refugees from the Yugoslavian wars. 'They were a tough audience, but I learnt a few things.' At the end of the summer his father, who thought he was up to no good, gave his tape to Van Dyke Parks, who worked with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, famously. Wainwright was immediately signed to DreamWorks, flew to LA and lived there for three years making his first album. 'For a while I was in one studio, kd lang was one side, the Rolling Stones on the other, so that was good.'

Parks helped him to create the big orchestral sound that is often set as a counterpoint to his brutally personal singing. 'My theory was,' he says, 'I have always gravitated to those chords, and it would be better to start big and to kind of sculpt down to the essence over the years than to start with the essence and then get bigger. I liked opera, I like Bjsrk, I was very interested in Morrissey, I had a sort of punky phase, so that all got thrown in.'

When Wainwright returned to New York it was with a successful debut record, and everyone who had ignored him was now extremely pleased to see him. He hung out with fashion people, survivors from Studio 54, drag queens, David LaChapelle and Kenneth Anger. 'It was a glorious moment in my life,' he suggests. 'Drugs were abounding. I was the It Boy.' But traumatised by his first teenage gay encounter, he struggled always, he says, to find love. 'I had a string of straight boyfriends. Guys I would occasionally have sex with, maybe only make out with, but never be allowed to say they were my boyfriend.' That, he suggests, was perfect for songwriting, because he would always be longing for something. 'But the serious downside was that I would need to satisfy myself sexually. To get to that other place I would do drugs; there is this kind of Babylonian village that exists in this city. I am happy it does exist, but it is not where you want to end up.'

One of the places he ended up was in a lot of 'Boogie Nights' moments, 'with 20 naked people in my apartment and me in my bathrobe playing 'Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk',' [his tortured little hymn to addiction]. It was methamphetamine - crystal meth - that brought this part of his life to a close. Wainwright had tried the drug, he says, once maybe 10 years ago, then the next year he did it four times and so on. 'Now it is very available. If you walk down to Chelsea, the gay area, every second billboard on the street is about the dangers of crystal meth. It is like speed, but the effect it seems to have on gay men is that decades of anxiety about sex and fear of disease just goes away and you are just off to the races.' He would have lost weekends, violent fantasies. 'At one point, I can't remember whether it was in the act of sex or just before, this single thought came into my head: the ultimate orgasm is death. And I knew that was where I was heading. I wanted it in some way, this highly sexualised death.'

His final cry for help was prefaced by the most surreal week of his life. He first had to do an episode of Ab Fab, playing himself as a 'druggy boy about town'; he then found himself hanging out for a couple of days with Barbara Bush, the daughter of the President, at a fashion show and a party, 'and that freaked the shit out of me; she's a kind of ditsy sorority girl but I had this sense, the state I was in, of her being so very close to evil.' The next night he 'had this debauched evening with my mother and Marianne Faithfull... it would not be fair to go into detail, but use your imagination.' The drugs had already caused him to lose his sight on occasion, and all the while, hallucinating, it was images of his father that kept flashing in front of him.

'I realised suddenly just how unhappy I was,' he says, still in thrall to the memory. 'I believed I had two choices. I was either going to rehab or I was going to live with my father. I knew I needed an asshole to yell at me, and I felt he fitted the bill. I wanted to become him in some way.'

Wainwright wasn't sure who to call to help him make this choice. 'Then I thought: gay, songwriter, drug addict. That kind of narrowed the field. I knew Elton, I'd sung with him before, so I called him up and he was incredible. He said, "Rufus I know exactly where you are: you have to get to a clinic"; he offered to book me in.'

Wainwright spent a month at the Hazelden in Minnesota, detoxing and undergoing therapy. He will not talk about his subsequent sobriety, but suggests he has stuck with the programme.

'When you are young if you are lucky there is this gorgeous period where you don't have to atone, and life graces you with events that are beautiful. For me that well dried up. I had to realise I am a human being like anyone else, and that I have to do boring tedious work, in order to figure out my problems.'

Some of this work was done in the studio; on his release from the clinic he threw himself into Want One and Want Two. The songs inhabit his self-analysis; some, like the haunting 'My Phone's on Vibrate' - 'the story of a boy, me, walking from bar to bar trying to find a go-go dancer I had spent one night with' - recall nights of desperate craving at a slight comic distance. Despite their intimacy, such songs show Wainwright's ability to transcend the strictly personal. The albums proved to Wainwright that he did not need the drugs, that he could come of age without them. Neil Tennant, of the Pet Shop Boys, suggests of this work that 'I can't think of a better songwriter working today than Rufus Wainwright.'

'I would say if you look at a clinical dissection of what a career should be I'm in a good place,' Wainwright says. 'My voice is at its height. It will probably become more soulful but it still has a bit of the youthful acrobat in it. Most of all I feel really needed all of a sudden; I feel I can bring a slight ray of hope and variety to this ever more depressing world.'

This sense of purpose is illustrated, for him, by 'Gay Messiah'. 'It was written ages ago as a party song, to kind of liven up a dinner table,' he says. 'And then as the political climate thickened it became a kind of liberal anthem. On stage I began to preface it with a plea to go out and vote Democrat. And now it has become a kind of literal prayer. We do actually need this divine porn star to come down and teach us what it means to be human again...'

That he has survived, Wainwright suggests, makes him feel vindicated.

'It is not so much I feel blessed but I do feel some higher power wants me to live. Like: you are going to be an example.'

He sounds like he feels chosen?

'No,' he says, quickly, seeing the implications, giggling crazily at his pretension, 'it's more like I've been hired. I just got a song from Burt Bacharach; he called me yesterday. How amazing is that? I'm a songwriter in New York in the snow. I feel that it is my duty. There is this great tradition from Cole Porter to Rodgers and Hart. I feel a bit like I've finally got the job...'

· 'Want Two' (DreamWorks) is released on 7 March; Rufus Wainwright tours the UK in April

well jumping gee whillikers

I coulda sworn this Bill Tieleman fella was a rightwing apologist for the likes of Gordie C et al, a dishonourable draftee of the Fraser Institute for the criminally, morally insane... musta been thinkin of somebody else! LOL

Political Connections

Curmudgeon Explains the Throne Speech

By Bill Tieleman
The Georgia Straight
February 17, 2005

"Andy Rooney" laughs at Liberal "jokesters".

Did you ever hear one of these corny, positive messages on someone's answering machine? "Hi, it's a great day and I'm out enjoying it right now. I hope you are too. The thought for the day is: 'Share the love.'

Beep. "Uh, yeah...this is the VD clinic calling... Speaking of being positive, your test results are back. Stop sharing the love."

-- Andy Rooney

Political Connections columnist Bill Tieleman was so confused by the B.C. Liberal government's throne speech last week that he begged his curmudgeon friend Andy Rooney of CBS's 60 Minutes to explain its positive message to readers.

These throne speeches you Canadians have--I just don't get it. The government writes this speech boasting about how great it is, and then you make the Queen's representative read it. How proud can you be of your accomplishments if you won't even make the damn speech yourself?

Anyway, I don't know why anyone would have a hard time understanding the message behind the B.C. Liberals' throne speech--it's dead simple.

"British Columbia is positively the best place on earth to eat your vegetables with Daniel Igali!"

What's so hard about that? It's not exactly like breaking the Da Vinci code, you know.

I actually really like your premier, Gordon Campbell. He is one great comedian.

Now, the lieutenant governor, Iona Campagnolo--she's the Queen's handmaiden, or whatever you call it, for B.C.--well, she reads the speech for Gordo.

So here's my favourite line of the whole throne speech: "Today, we are entering a golden decade for British Columbia."

So, I wondered to myself, did Premier Campbell think up that line himself while he was stepping over beggars in downtown Vancouver? I bet Campbell meant a golden opportunity for food banks and pawn shops.

But there were so many wonderful lines in the speech that really had me laughing out loud.

Like this one, saying the government will work: "To lead the world in sustainable environmental management, with the best air and water quality, and the best fisheries management, bar none."

Jumping gee whillikers, is that ever funny! The B.C. Liberals are promoting the use of coal-fired electricity plants and they dramatically increased the number of polluting fish farms, and then they had the minister himself tip the owner off before government inspectors arrived to bust it!

And the best air quality: too rich! These guys actually overturned rules that banned smoking in bars!

That was just the start. Next Iona reads that the government is committed "to build the best system of support in Canada for persons with disabilities, special needs, children at risk, and seniors."

No flipping kidding! What a laugh riot! The Liberals went to the Supreme Court of Canada and won a case to make sure they didn't have to pay for treatment for autistic children, after they promised to help them! They tried to make 18,000 people with disabilities fill out a 23-page form just to keep getting their measly, chintzy benefits! The Liberals were going to cut 9,000 of them off completely until they got caught out.

Kids at risk? They cut the Children and Families Ministry budget by $171 million since 2001. How risky is that?

And seniors, hoo-boy! The Liberals promised to create 5,000 new long-term care beds by 2006, but guess how many they've done so far? A whopping 170. You just have to like how brassy these guys are. Of course, it's not our fault, they say, it's the fault of--wait for it--the NDP! I didn't know the NDP were in power the last three and a half years.

Then there's this one: "There is new wealth to sustain expanded services for those most vulnerable in our society."

The only problem is, the Liberals ain't gonna let them have any of that new wealth! It's going for tax cuts, not welfare, buddy. Just what were you thinking?

And have you ever noticed the way these Liberals listen and show sympathy to people, like in the statement "Your government recognizes that rising tuition costs are a concern to many B.C. families"?

Of course they "recognize" rising tuition costs--these Liberal jokesters allowed them to double in only three years! They're so concerned, they're going to keep allowing schools to raise them, but just not as much as before.

And I like this idea, that the government "will build on the Dream Home China project". Now, I'm not sure, but I think the Dream Home China project was built by children in a Communist dictatorship that bans elections, the Falun Gong spiritual movement, real unions, and health and safety rules. Dream on.

Here's another good one that makes me chuckle: "It takes time but, in every area of health care, progress is apparent." Apparently, no one in the Liberal government ever gets sick! If they did, they'd notice waiting lists have increased 30 percent since they won the election and they might just see patients waiting for beds in ambulances, emergency-room hallways, or even linen closets. Progress is apparently different in B.C. than in the U.S.

But don't you worry. The government is making sure you won't get sick because "it will act now to increase by 20 percent the proportion of British Columbians who eat the recommended daily level of fruit and vegetables."

This is radical stuff, by golly. In my country, former president George Bush senior once told everyone that he refused to eat broccoli, and now we have Gordon Campbell telling voters they have to chow down things they don't like.

I think that's probably why Campbell recruited that Olympic wrestler Daniel Igali to run for the Liberals: to make people eat their broccoli!

If Igali put me in a full-nelson hold, I guess I'd eat my broccoli too. But then I wouldn't think B.C. is the best place on earth anymore. *

--

Bill Tieleman is president of West Star Communications and a regular political commentator on CBC Radio's Early Edition.

'bout a sharp dressed man

They come runnin' just as fast as they can

coz every girl crazy 'bout a sharp dressed man

Today was an altogether different kind of day...

I went a shoppin' - not for toothpaste, toilet paper or tar paper. No sirree bob! I went hunting for clothes. Man's clothes. I'm talkin' socks, shoes, shirts, trousers, a jacket - the whole shootin' shimozzle.

Yeah, yeah. I know, I know. Who fuckin' died?

Well, you'd expect me to look half-decent at a funeral, a weddin' or some such thing but the truth is, I've never owned a fancy, stylin' piece of clothing in my life. Shock and awe!

Laugh it up, fly boy/girl. It's not that I don't appreciate the fineries as they apply to mens' and womens' apparel. I do! I truly do. Let me afford you an example of what constitutes happenin' haberdashery in my mind's eye:

Do clothes make the man, or does the man make the clothes? Some guys wear it swell... and I'd rather have a whisky, take some time to think about it, thank you very much.

Anyway, Wolfe and DK accompanied me up and down Robson Street today in a tireless effort to find me some duds for a job interview with a big bank on Thursday. Not my gig but 'business casual' attire is what we was after and Rick consented to help me out if I would agree to heed his fashion advice. Of course I humbly agreed to follow his lead. W1 helped pick out a couple fabulous plaid shirts for me 4-5 years ago and I've been in his debt ever since.

So I called DK to make sure I had some backup, should Wolfey threaten to take me places I simply could not, would not, perhaps even should not go.

DK and I met Wolfey at shop no. 1 on Robson. W1 was already in the change room upstairs trying on various garments because we were 5-10 minutes late. Pshaw! Truth is, we could have been there 15 minutes early and Richard would have been trying on clothes before we even found the bloody store. He's addicted to the cloth - plain and simple. Whereas I might have a stubborn streak that refuses to adorn myself in stylin' threads, Wolfe is my finely-tailored opposite.

Here's what worked for me/us today...

I stand outside and smoke a ciggy whilst Wolfey scours the store for ideas and bargains. DK either follows dutifully behind W1 or blazes a trail on his lonesome. If there's anything of remote interest, I enter the store and gaze upon selected garments. Wolfey then suggests I try something on, I grunt and moan, shuffle my feet and because he's doing me a big favour, I do as I'm told. I try it on, it fits, it doesn't fit, he likes it, I don't I like it, he cringes, I whinges and then we move on.

It only took 4-5 stores and 2-3 blocks before we managed to buy a great jacket, a great shirt, a pretty cool pair of shoes (square-toed units, TC) and a pair of expensive black socks by Kalvin Klein to match. Two hours and $350 later, the dirty deed was done. Despite the fact that I felt particularly ill near the end (due to a lingering cold, not obnoxious sales clerks), we completed the mission in high style and elevated spirits. Richard even bought a pair of skookum shoes (only $56!!) and Mssr. DK, a damn fine pair of trendy dungarees.

I went home, tried the whole mess on for good luck and the ensemble worked like a charm. A couple hours later, I photographed my stellar collection of (3) ties and emailed the digipic to Mr. Wolfe. W1 and neighbour Mr. Wanderoff reviewed the selection and quickly chose a suitable button-cover. Now, it would seem, I'll all set to impress The Bank early Thursday morn. Now that wasn't so hard... was it?

Stay tuned for pics of yer man in an entirely new state of splendour... you won't want to miss this episode. I think I might have grown-up a little bit today. A man can't hide his true self inside a pair of well-worn workboots forever, right?

Only time will tell... thx allot, gentlemen. It's a start!

the more things stay the same

My pal Karen is preparing a project for her first-grade class and she asked me to assemble a collage of "My Funny Valentine" song versions to play for her 6-yr-old charges.

It's an auditory event to examine how the kids might interpret various instruments, arrangements and vocal stylings that have come to embrace this tasty Hart/Rodgers chestnut.

WTF? See how each song treatment differs in terms of emotion, style and um, overall hummability (I imagine).

What a novel idea! That's what I said too... Anyway, here's my final tally. Ms. Karen will choose a handful of these tracks to play for the lucky wee buggers:

Ahmad Jamal - My Funny Valentine
Anita Baker - My Funny Valentine
Arturo Sandoval - My Funny Valentine
Ben Webster - My Funny Valentine
Bill Evans - My Funny Valentine (Live)
Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong - My Funny Valentine
Billy Bragg - Valentine's Day is Over*
Billy Eckstein - My Funny Valentine
Björk - My Funny Valentine (Live at 'Gling Glo')
Carly Simon - My Funny Valentine (amazing)
Carmen McRae - My Funny Valentine
Chaka Khan - My Funny Valentine
Charlie Parker - My Funny Valentine
Chet Baker - My Funny Valentine (Live, w/ orchestra)
Chet Baker - My Funny Valentine (my fave, natch)
Chet & Stan Getz - My Funny Valentine (Live, Stockholm)
Dinah Shore - My Funny Valentine
Duke Ellington - My Funny Valentine (sublime)
Ella Fitzgerald - My Funny Valentine
Elvis Costello - My Funny Valentine (sigh)
Etta James and Bill Evans - My Funny Valentine
Frank Sinatra - My Funny Valentine (Live in '59)
Gerry Mulligan - My Funny Valentine
Gotan Project - My Funny Valentine (a thrill!)
Grant Green - My Funny Valentine
Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis - My Funny Valentine (Live)
Jamey Abersold - My Funny Valentine
Joe Dassin - My Funny Valentine
John Coltrane & Miles Davis - My Funny Valentine (Live in '58)
Julie London - My Funny Valentine
Keith Jarrett - My Funny Valentine (Live in Juan-Les-Pins)
Lena Horne - My Funny Valentine
Linda Ronstadt & Wes Montgomery - My Funny Valentine
Michael Buble - My Funny Valentine
Miles Davis - My Funny Valentine (Live)
Miles Davis - My Funny Valentine
Miranda Sex Garden - My Funny Valentine
Nancy Wilson - My Funny Valentine
Nat King Cole - My Funny Valentine
Nico - My Funny Valentine
Nina Simone - My Funny Valentine
Paul Desmond - My Funny Valentine (Live)
Perry Como - My Funny Valentine
Pieces Of A Dream - My Funny Valentine
Rachelle Ferrell - My Funny Valentine
Ricki Lee Jones - My Funny Valentine (Live)
Rufus Wainwright & Kate McGarrigle - MFV (Live, Letterman)
Sam Brown - Valentine Moon*
Sarah Vaughn - My Funny Valentine
Stan Kenton - My Funny Valentine
Stephen Merritt - My Funny Valentine (Live, Spin Mag)
Stylistics - My Funny Valentine
Steve Earle - Valentine's Day* (Live - I love this)
The Whispers - My Funny Valentine
Tom Waits - Blue Valentine*
Tony Bennett - My Funny Valentine (Live in Paris)
Toots Thielemans - My Funny Valentine (Live)
Vesta Williams - My Funny Valentine
Wes Montgomery - My Funny Valentine
Wynton Marsalis - My Funny Valentine (Live)

Amazing, eh? I've been listening to the same bloody song for the past 2 days and yet, I cannot stop myself from listening to just one more... so beautiful, so rewarding. I loves their infinite pleasures, over and over again - all tender & sweet.

My Funny Valentine
Written by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers
© 1937 Chapell & Co Inc (ASCAP)

Behold the way our fine feathered friend
His virtue doth parade
Thou knowest not my dim-witted friend
The picture thou hast made
Thy vacant brow and thy tousled hair
Conceal thy good intent
Thou noble, upright, truthful, sincere
And slightly dopey gent

You're my funny valentine
Sweet comic valentine
You make me smile with my heart
Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable
Still you're my favourite work of art

Is your figure less than Greek
Is your mouth a little weak
When you open it to speak
Are you smart

Don't change a hair for me
Not if you care for me
Stay, little valentine, stay
Each day is Valentine's Day

--

* just to fuck 'em up a bit ; - )