every buck you rake

Bring on the Night

'80s sensations the Police play the first of more than 100 sold-out dates in Vancouver on Monday



The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 26, 2007

By Amy O'Brian

It's been three months since the Police -- perhaps the biggest band of the 1980s -- announced they would be embarking on a 30th-anniversary reunion tour.

Tickets for the more than 100 tour dates sold out in minutes. The band spent the past two months in rigorous rehearsals. And guitarist Andy Summers is getting anxious waiting for the tour to finally kick off here in Vancouver on Monday.

"What makes me nervous is sitting around, waiting too long. I want to get on with it, you know?" Summers said Friday in a phone interview as he was heading out to one of his last Vancouver rehearsals with Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland.

Summers isn't alone in his anxiety. The Police reunion tour, likely to be one of the highest grossing of the summer, is also one of the most highly anticipated as well. The Police disbanded amicably in 1986 and each continued with a solo career. But legions of fans and critics are now waiting to see if the magic the band created back in the early '80s is still there.

Summers is confident they still have it, even if they're all well into middle age and aware of certain physical limitations.

"We have to watch it. It's just being smart -- diet and keeping fit and all the rest of it just so we can deliver the intensity," said the 64-year-old.

"It's either that or get coked out of your head every night. So what are you going to do?"

There's an expectation that the band will deliver the same intensity -- night after night -- that they did during their sold-out tours more than 30 years ago. But Summers knows that cocaine binges aren't the way to get him through the next four months.

He says the band has been retooling some of their mega-hits, but not to the point of being unrecognizable. They've been reworking songs to breathe new life into them and to maintain their own enthusiasm about the material.

"We've got all these famous songs, but we look at them like new pieces of material and so to a point, we've reworked them. But obviously all the famous riffs are still there -- you can't play Every Breath You Take without me playing that guitar, obviously," he says in a quick-paced British clip.

"We constantly fiddle with them, but because they're alive, they're living, they're not dead.

"We spent the last two months rearranging and fiddling around until we felt it was good. We're looking for some intensity in the songs that may transcend the original recorded versions."

That may sound ambitious, but Summers is so confident that the trio has achieved a new level of energy that he hints at the possibility of a live recording some time in the near future.

"It's got to the point now, where I think we've got to record this all live because it's so killer at this point. They all sound like new material," he says.

But while the old material may sound new-ish, don't anticipate any completely original songs. Summers says the band was advised not to write any new material for the tour, simply because that's not what fans have paid up to $225 a ticket to hear.

"A band like ours, with so many hits, that's what people want to hear and that's what they're paying rather high ticket prices for -- not as high as some, but it's a lot of money," he says.

"You do all the hits and then, if that whole thing goes well then there's always the option afterwards of continuing, maybe recording a new album or something. But at this point, there's not actually any new songs because I don't think people want to hear them."

He makes a valid point. With hits like Roxanne, Don't Stand So Close to Me, and Every Little Thing She Does is Magic -- all songs that continue to be played on radio, at weddings and at school dances -- there would hardly be any room on the set list for new material.

As for why the Police's repertoire of reggae-inspired '80s hits have had a staying power other bands have not enjoyed, Summers has a few theories, but no concrete answer.

"I hope it's not just nostalgia," he says.

"I think we were a great band live. We could really put these shows over very well -- coupled with the fact that the songs were also good, most of them are hits. How many bands can do, like, 21 hits?

"And also I think the [main] thing is we got off right at the top of the curve. We didn't continue on and on and on like U2 or the Stones.

"We left this sort of incredible nucleus of energy and the mythology of the band, which I think has stayed all the way through. And of course the music itself has never been off the airwaves."

Despite all that, though -- despite the pep talks the trio must have given one another after they agreed to the tour, and despite the warm reception they received after playing Roxanne at the Grammy Awards in February, Summers says there were still moments of hesitation and doubt before the tickets went on sale.

"Your expectations start to build up and then I really had a moment of paranoia where it was like, 'Well, wait a minute. Maybe we're just completely kidding ourselves that people really want to see us. Who's going to remember us?' I know we were huge in the mid-'80s and all that, but what if in fact, they don't remember us?" he says.

"Happily that's not the case. There was just this sharp intake of breath as the tickets went on sale as we all waited to see how it would fare by the end of the first day and you know, it all sold out within minutes. I think we sold out Madison Square Garden in four minutes, which is some sort of a record."

Summers -- who's spent the past 30 years working on film scores, playing small jazz venues, and writing an autobiography as well as book on his impressions of the guitar -- is humbled by the enthusiasm surrounding the reunion tour and says it's a bit like turning back the clock.

"I still find it somewhat shocking that we could sell out these stadiums so fast. I mean it's like, it's not 2007. It feels like a few months later in 1984. That's what it feels like," he says.

"But it's a loaded situation because there's so much expectation. We haven't played for a long time, and we've got to go out there and just deliver a killing show that's got all the vitality, like we're 18 years old, which is what I certainly intend to do."

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portrait of a true prince amongst men

Life of a ladies' man

The poet, icon and new grandfather spends a lazy afternoon over wine, cheese and cherry pie talking about his nostalgia for free love, his failure as a junkie and the secret to finding romantic contentment at 72. 'Believe me, what you want is someone to have dinner with,' he advises. 'Sleep with from time to time, telephone every day or write.... Make it very modest.'

The Globe and Mail

May 26, 2007

By Sarah Hampson

MONTREAL -- The park is like a poem: self-contained and spare. Smokers sit on benches in the morning drizzle. Pigeons swoop over a small gazebo, under the limbs of stately trees. There is a solemn-looking house, three storeys high with a grey stone facade. It's the only one that faces this park in the east end of Montreal, and it's his. There are two big front doors, side by side. No numbers. No bell. No indication which one is right. You just pick, and knock.

There is more than one way into the world of Leonard Cohen, and on this day in late April, they are all open.

Cohen, now 72, novelist, poet and singer/songwriter, is a cornerstone of Canadian culture, but he dances in our heads mostly unseen, like a beautiful idea. It is rare that he makes himself available for scrutiny.

Here he is, though, a gentleman of hip in black jeans and an unironed dress shirt beneath a pinstriped grey-flannel jacket. Atop his thick white hair, combed back off his deeply lined face, a grey cap sits at a jaunty angle, and in the breast pocket of his jacket, instead of a handkerchief, he keeps a pair of tinted granny glasses. Standing in the cramped foyer to which both front doors open, sporting a wry, knowing smile, he politely ushers you into the house (once partitioned into two dwellings) that he has owned for over 30 years.

Now is a new Cohen moment, and while he acknowledges that his increased creative activity is partly to compensate for the millions he lost in royalties at the hands of his former manager, he seems to be enjoying the attention. Next week, as part of Toronto's Luminato festival, his drawings get their first exhibition, at the Drabinsky Gallery. There's a new concert work by Philip Glass, inspired by Cohen's art and poetry from his 2006 Book of Longing, which was published after a 13-year silence. In 2004, he released his 17th album, Dear Heather.

Earlier this year, expanded editions of his first three albums hit the market, as did the critically acclaimed CD, Blue Alert, that he worked on with his lover, Hawaii-born songstress Anjani Thomas.

There is nothing off limits in a discussion with Cohen. Over a bottle of Château Maucaillou, Greek bread, a selection of Quebec cheeses and a fresh cherry pie, bought for the occasion from the local St-Laurent Boulevard merchants, you learn that he prefers to sleep alone; that he is no longer looking for another woman; the real reason he secluded himself in a Buddhist monastery for almost five years; and that a small, faded portrait of Saint Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century native woman and heroine of his novel Beautiful Losers, hangs on the wall in his kitchen, above a table holding a fifties radio and a telephone with on oversize dial pad.

He will entrance you in the stillness of a moment that stretches to five hours, and in the end, because you happened to ask, playfully, he will say sure, come back any time for a soak in the claw-footed tub, one of several in his house, that sits in a closet of a bathroom under the slope of the stairs.

"I think of it all as notes," Cohen says in his rich, deep voice. Seated at a long pine table in the dining room, which overlooks the park, he is talking about his drawings in a casual, almost shy way.

A collection of self-portraits, landscapes, objects and portraits of women, sketched throughout his life - in Greece, when he lived on the island of Hydra; on Mount Baldy, at the monastery outside of Los Angeles where he was under the tutelage of Zen master Kyozan Joshu Roshi; in Montreal; in L.A., where he has a second house; and during travels in India - they will be sold in signed, limited-edition prints.

"There were years when I would do a self-portrait every morning. I have hundreds of them. It was just a way to start the day with a kind of device to wake up."

"Like a cigarette?"

"Instead of a cigarette."

He quit four years ago, on a doctor's advice.

"I do miss it," Cohen says. "Much longing," he adds, almost in a moan. (He once wrote a poem about the "the promise, the beauty and the salvation of cigarettes.") "I said I'd start smoking again at 85." He allows a pause. "If I make it."

He continues to flip through a copy of Book of Longing, which contains many of the drawings, several that have been manipulated and coloured with Photoshop on his laptop. "Here's a good one," he points out, reading the words beside a self-portrait of glum bewilderment, dated Nov. 18, 2003. "Back in Montreal. As for the past, children, Roshi, songs, Greece, Los Angeles. What was that all about?"

His self-portraits never depict him as happy.

"Well, who is? Is this unique to me?" he asks with a soft chuckle. His friend and fellow poet, the late Irving Layton, once described Cohen as "a narcissist who hates himself."

"I was able to speak to myself in a very frank sort of way," Cohen continues. "I would do it while I brewed my coffee. I would set up this little wood Wacom tablet, and a mirror, a little mirror, and I'd just do a very quick sketch and then, what that sketch suggested, I would write something."

The drawings are "transcendent decoration," he says, touching one on the pages with the tip of a forefinger. "If it has any value at all, it's because it's harmless and doesn't invite any deep intellection." He points to various sketches, one of a Hires root-beer can, another of a candlestick, his granny glasses, a Rolex watch he saw in a magazine. "I have always loved things, just things in the world. I always just love trying to find the shape of things."

And the nude women? "I would just see a beautiful woman photographed in a pornographic magazine. I would see a figure in Playboy or something like that, and I'd just take the form." He draws a breath like an inhalation of cigarette smoke, holding it for a moment, exhaling in a sigh. "I rescue her. I put her back in the 12th century, where she belongs," he says, half-joking. "You know, I couldn't get anyone to undress."

Cohen closes the book, places it on the table, and lifts his eyes in an expression of calm anticipation. Every question, he greets like an invitation to make himself understood. Leonard Cohen, the icon, is a concept he likes to toy with, as if it is both him and not.

"I got this rap as a kind of ladies' man," he says lazily and without irony, at one point. "And as I say in one of the poems, it has caused me to laugh, when I think of all the lonely nights" at the monastery. "As if I'm the only guy who ever felt this way about women," he continues, with a smirk. "As if I'm the only person who ever had some sort of deep connection with the opposite sex."

"Have you learned a lot from women?"

"Oh, yeah. You learn everything from women."

"Everything?"

He leans in. "It is where you move into uncharted territory." He shrugs slightly, his small, neat hands held in front of him. "The rest is just reinforcing wisdom or folly that you have inherited. But nobody can prepare anybody for an encounter with the opposite sex. Much has been written about it. You can read self-help books, but the actual confrontation as a young person with desire, this appetite for completion, well, that is the education."

"And what a ruse that desire for completion is," you suggest, "because ultimately, you're still left with yourself."

"What's left of it," he puts in, laughing.

Cohen sits back in his chair, his ideas as well-worn and familiar as old sweaters. "Of course, women are the content of men, and men are the content of women, and most people are dealing with this - whatever version of that longing there is. You know, of completion. It can be spiritual, romantic, erotic. Everybody is involved in that activity."

Cohen exudes an air of permission. Nothing unsettles him. He will explain all: the eclectic collection of objects in his house - the black-and-white picture of the dog on the pine sideboard (it's of Tinky, the Scotch terrier he grew up with) that sits beside a modernist sculpture in silver by his childhood friend, Mort Rosengarten, that stands next to an antique pot, inscribed with Arabic symbols, which his father liked and that came from his mother's house when she died.

Ask him about the graphic signatures, or chops, as he refers to them, that he designed and stamps onto several of the drawings. Perhaps they are too private to explain. They look like a secret code. "Not at all. Not at all," he murmurs. "This one is the old Chinese writing of my monk's name, Jikhan," he says, pointing to one. "It got into the press as the silent one, but it just means ordinary silence." The poet as an absence of communication. Roshi, who assigns the names, likes irony, presumably.

"Yes, could be," Cohen says. A beat of silence. "Since Roshi doesn't speak English, it's almost impossible to discern what he means."

"These two interlocking hearts, I designed for the cover of Book of Mercy," his 1984 poetry collection, he says, moving along as he describes another chop. "I established this Order of the Unified Heart, that is a kind of dream of an order. There is no organization. There's no hierarchy. There's just a pin [for] people of a very broadly designated similar intent."

"And yours is?"

He thinks for a minute. "To just make things better on a very personal level," he says. "You're just not scattered all over the place. There is a tiny moment when you might gather around some decent intention."

"And what has been your most decent intention?"

He places his hands on the edge of the table. "I can't think of any right now. There must be one or two."

"Beauty, maybe."

"Beauty, certainly," he responds.

It is often said that Cohen is hard to define. There's Cohen, the son of a prominent Montreal clothier and the grandson of a Jewish scholar. Cohen, the law-school dropout. Cohen, the novelist, the poet, the songwriter. Cohen, the sexual bad boy who becomes a monk.

But he disagrees. "I always felt it was of one piece. I never felt I was going off on a tangent." He admits, though, that he "drifted into things. I suppose there has been an undercurrent of deliberation, but I don't really navigate it." According to legend, it wasn't until he encountered folk singer Judy Collins, in 1966, that he decided to publicly perform songs he had played for friends. The following year, she introduced some Cohen songs on her album, including his big hit Suzanne. It was in 1968 that he released his first album.

Cohen didn't seek out a musical career as much as it seems to have found him. Which is what is happening now with his drawings. He appears to have fallen into a whole new career.

He takes in this observation, looks out the window for a moment and then brings his attention back into the room.

"That's why I say free will is overrated," he drawls in his smoky voice.

"It was terrific. The best kind," he says. "We had these appetites that we understood, and it was wonderful that they were taken care of. It was a moment where everybody was giving to the other person what they wanted. The women knew that's what the men wanted."

Don't ask how the subject of casual sex in the sixties came up. It was part of the unfolding of the Saturday afternoon, the laziness of it, like an endless meal of many courses, which you keep expecting to end but never does. You cover one subject, and thank him for his time, thinking he may be tired of talking now, but he doesn't take the opportunity to say goodbye. "Here, relax, eat," he will say. "Have more wine. Would you like a piece of cherry pie?" And then the conversation continues.

"If you could have it so much," I ask, "didn't that devalue it?"

Cohen offers a frank expression. He could be talking about apples. "Well, nobody gets enough of anything," he explains matter-of-factly. "You either get too much or not enough. Nobody gets the right amount, in terms of what they think their appetite deserves.

"But it lasted just a few moments," he says about that time. "And then it was back to the old horror story, whatever it is that still exists. You know, I'll give you this if you give me that. You know, sealing the deal: What do I get, what do you get. It's a contract."

Cohen's sexiness, powerful still, is in his accessibility. His open-door atmosphere of hospitality - an invitation to authenticity, to say and ask what you want - makes him an age-appropriate ladies' man. He is interested in people, in what they think, and he will ask about their lives. But his manner is not invasive or louche. He borders on paternal, or would, that is, if your dad liked to write about cunnilingus and fellatio as if they are fancy Italian appetizers.

"Believe me, what you want is someone to have dinner with," he advises on having a relationship later in life. "Sleep with from time to time, telephone every day or write. It's what you set up that is defeating. Make it very modest. And give yourself permission to make a few mistakes. You know, blow it a bit. Have a few drinks and fall into bed with somebody. It doesn't have to be the final thing."

Thomas appears several times. "See you later, sweetheart," Cohen calls softly to her when she leaves with a friend to go shopping. Rosengarten, whom he has known since their childhood growing up together on Belmont Street in affluent Westmount, and who now lives nearby, drops in for a chat and some food.

A little later, a light knock. "Ah, a tap tap tapping at my chamber door," Cohen says as he gets up. A graduate student, a young man in his 20s, who has written a dissertation on Cohen in his native Italian, has sought him out. Speaking to Cohen in French, he explains his work; gives him a copy; asks if he can speak to him some time at length for future papers he wants to write. Cohen assures him he can. Asked to sign an autograph, he bends down nimbly on one knee in the foyer to do so.

It is not the Cohen of his lyrics or of his sullen self-portraits who moves about this house of austere aesthetic. He is a gentleman to his partner, the friend in the neighbourhood, a gracious host. It is in his humanity, his feet of clay, that he is most comfortable.

He talks easily about his earlier years, unburdened by nostalgia. "My constitution is what saved me," he says of the time he used a lot of drugs, especially during the writing of Beautiful Losers in 1966. "I'm not a really good drinker or a really good junkie. My stomach just doesn't permit it. I was very lucky in that respect, because a lot of people I know, especially in those turbulent times, just didn't survive it."

Similarly, he displays no longing or fondness for his time on Mount Baldy. He left the monastery in the late nineties. Not because he couldn't find what he was looking for. Rather, he says, "I had completed that phase of my training."

He had gone there to cure himself of his excesses. He worked in the kitchen and as a secretary to Roshi. But it was not all about serenity. "They're not saints, and you aren't, either," he says of his fellow monks. "A monastery is rehab for people who have been traumatized, hurt, destroyed, maimed by daily life that they simply couldn't master. I had been studying with Roshi for 30 or 40 years, but when I actually decided to live with him and really commit myself to the daily life - I did always do that for several months of every year - but when I decided to do it full-time, I had just come off a tour in 1993, and yes, I felt dislocated. I had been drinking tremendous amounts on the road and my health was shot."

Cohen, who has two grown children from his long-term relationship with Suzanne Elrod - not the Suzanne of his famous song - is a grandfather now. Cassius Lyon Cohen was born a few months ago. Still, there's something more at play beneath his palpable equanimity. And it might be as simple as this: The man is happy.

"I always had a background of distress, ever since I was young," he admits. "What part that played in becoming a writer or a singer or whatever it was that one became, I don't know. I didn't have a sense of an operational ease," he continues. About life? "Just about one's work or one's capacity to earn a living; a capacity to find a mate or find a moment of relief in someone's arms," he says, trailing off.

He looks up. "I don't know what happened," he says sweetly. "Something very agreeable happened to me. I don't know what the reason is. That background of distress dissolved." He leaves a small silence, then offers a mischievous smile. "I'm worried now that my songs are too cheerful because I'm feeling well. I think I may be irrelevant pretty soon."

Has Thomas, who is 48, played a part in that happiness? "That might very well be," he allows. He met her in 1984, when she was singing backup for him. They didn't become lovers until 1999. "When the background of distress dissolves, you're able to see people more clearly."

"People who love you, you mean?"

"Yeah, or don't," he says. "You're able to appreciate the authentic situation. You can just see things more clearly. It's a veil that drops. You're not looking at everything from the point of view of your own suffering."

Relationships are often difficult, he says. "I find that people want to name it. The woman is saying, 'What is our relationship? Are we engaged? Are we boyfriend and girlfriend? Are we lovers?' And my disposition is, 'Do we really have to have this discussion, because it's not as good as our relationship?'

"But as you get older, you want to accommodate, and say, 'Yeah, we're living together. This is for real. I'm not looking for anyone else. You're the woman in my life.' Whatever terms that takes: a ring, an arrangement, a commitment, or from one's behaviour, by the way you act. You make it clear by minute adjustments. A woman goes by. You can look, but you can adjust so that it's not an insult, an affront or a danger. You're with somebody, and you want to make it work. I'm not interested in taking off my clothes with a woman right now."

He and Thomas live together, but they have separate bedrooms on different floors of the house. "I like to wake up alone," Cohen explains. "And she likes to be alone. We are both impossibly solitudinous people."

If advancing age and his love of Thomas have promoted happiness, so too has Buddhism. What Cohen has developed is a practice of detachment. "You have to take responsibility because the world holds you accountable for what you do," he explains at one point. "But if you understand that there are other forces determining what you do, then there's no pride when the world affirms you, no shame when the world scorns you. Also, when someone does something to you that you really don't like or that hurts you, well, a feeling of injury may arise, but what doesn't is hatred or enmity, because those people aren't doing it, either. They're just doing what had to be done."

Just like this interview. It has been arranged, and so he will do it, graciously, without hesitation, annoyance or impatience. Finally, when you insist you must leave, he worries if you are dressed warmly enough for the cold weather. He gives you one of his scarves, and goes upstairs to retrieve an old Gap sweater he wants you to wear. He calls you darling. He finds a pin for the Order of the Unified Heart and gives you one, and a ring, too, with the same design.

Earlier, he had explained that even if despair has lessened, challenges remain. "This isn't very different from the monastery," he says, referring to his current situation. "It's the same kind of life, which is sometimes difficult, like everybody else's. It's a struggle for significance and self-respect, and you know, for righteous employment, to be doing the right thing."

Part of that, clearly, is inviting people, strangers even, into his house of unadorned walls, simple white curtains and old wood floors, nourishing them with food and ideas and hours of delightful conversation, and then sending them back out into the world, the one with the smokers and the drizzle and the pain.

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virtual local boy made good

Johnny Depp Film Feast is coming

This talented actor, who has made a ton of great flicks, is virtually a local boy made good

The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 19, 2007

By Dominic Patten

A "royal flush of talent" is what Kenneth Tynan, the great British theatre critic and occasional impresario, once called the subjects of a collection of his essays. There is no doubt that, in their time, Johnny Carson, Mel Brooks, Ralph Richardson, Louise Brooks and playwright Tom Stoppard, who is still alive today, deserved such praise.

In more recent years another Johnny, a different and yet similar kind of Johnny as the past king of late night television, has come along deserving of similar kudos.

You might call him Capt. Jack Sparrow, Gilbert Grape, Donnie Brasco, J.M. Barrie, or Raoul Duke, but he's no Johnny come lately nor easily.

"Johnny Depp hasn't just done the Hollywood films, even though he could," points out Leonard Schein of Festival Cinemas. "He's not just a pretty boy actor, but someone who has really thrown himself into independent films and unusual roles."

In that vein, next week The Vancouver Sun and Festival Cinemas are pleased to present the first Johnny Depp Film Feast.

Running from May 21-24 at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas, we are showcasing a truly unique cannon of work by featuring a film a night of Depp's. From Finding Neverland with Kate Winslet and Chocolat with Juliette Binoche to What's Eating Gilbert Grape with a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there's truly something for everyone to savour.

Partly we're putting on the feast because these are great films that haven't been seen in all their glory on the big screen for a while, partly it's a precursor to the much anticipated release of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End on May 25, and partly because it just seems obvious to us that Vancouver should be the home of such a series.

After all, it was our town that provided the backdrop for the transformation of the then-unknown actor with the killer cheekbones into a star. That's right, from 1987 to 1990, Depp played Officer Tom Hanson on 21 Jump Street, which was shot here on our streets.

The teen cop drama, one of the first ongoing productions in what would become the Hollywood North of today, made Depp, in his first major role, an instant teen idol.

Supposedly he was very uncomfortable with that moniker, but you never got that impression when you'd see him chatting with fans while the crew got ready to shoot a scene over at a Point Grey school. Nor, during the time he spent here, when you'd see him at clubs like the Roxy and the Luv-A-Fair, hanging out, often with then-girlfriend Winona Ryder, and yakking with almost anyone who passed by about how much he loved Iggy Pop and the Rolling Stones.

Sure there was that incident where he got himself into some trouble with the police after an altercation in a downtown hotel lobby, but for many Vancouverites the 43-year-old from Owensboro, Kentucky, is virtually a local boy made good. Real good in fact.

Perhaps because he's been around for more than 20 years now, and is more successful than ever, it's easy to forget that Johnny Depp's career has had extremely agile legs. After he left the ratings bonanza of 21 Jump Street, a move that many thought crazy at the time, the laws of demographics and the David Cassidy teen sensation downward spiral should have ensured the last dying breath of Depp's notoriety as his audience grew up, took off their retainers and pulled his posters from their walls while ditching their New Kids on the Block and Nenah Cherry albums.

Yet, that was not to be the case. Depp's audience, like his range as an actor, actually grew. What saved Depp from being lost somewhere east of Jump Street spinoff star Richard Grieco or west of Different Strokes' Todd Bridges? Well, as his tender work in 1990's Edward Scissorhands and later, as the man who brought Peter Pan to life, in Finding Neverland, revealed, Depp has the dual value of being both a crowd-pleaser and genuinely dramatic.

When you throw in the swagger and the way-past-the-horizon gaze in his eyes as Jack Sparrow, you have to ask yourself, how often do you get that onscreen? The answer is, not very often at all.

I think that, unlike his mentor and hero, Marlon Brando, Depp's range comes from being comfortable enough in his own skin to stretch it. Yes, he's occasionally stumbled, but as his homage to Buster Keaton in Benny & Joon and other flicks, and his emulation of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards in the Pirates movies, display, Johnny Depp is, in the best and truest sense of the word, a great stylist.

At the same time, unlike the tub-thumping of a Sean Penn or cringe-inducing arched mannerisms of a Nick Cage, Depp isn't afraid of the emotional heavy lifting that films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape require. In that sense, he's almost effortlessly muscular in his craft.

Of course, he is overpaid, and sure, no man should legally be allowed to be that good-looking but Johnny has that truly rare ability, as both an actor and a celebrity, of taut professionalism -- to play almost every role as if it were himself, and yet not, simultaneously.

The reality is Johnny Depp really does seem to have found a way to live both inside and outside the Hollywood system, balancing blockbusters and more intimate or unusual movies. In an age of never-was trying to be has-beens, that alone should guarantee the man his own film festival.

The fact that he's made a ton of good movies, in a variety of genres, convinced us it was time to give him one.

We hope you agree.

The Johnny Depp Film Feast features Finding Neverland on May 21, Chocolat on May 22, What's Eating Gilbert Grape on May 23, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on May 24.

All shows are at 7 p.m. at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas at 2110 Burrard St. Tickets are $10 at the box office or online at www.festivalcinemas.ca. Go online to www.vancouversun.com to read past reviews of all the movies featured in the feast.

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Lots on the music menu next week

The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 19, 2007

By Amy O'Brian

Blame it on Sasquatch: too many good bands, not enough time, money or energy to see them all.

The Sasquatch Music Festival next weekend at the Gorge amphitheatre in Washington state is bringing a disproportionate number of excellent musical acts to our neck of the woods during the coming week.

And while you could choose to drive the six or seven hours, camp out with 20,000 other music fans and see all the bands on the Sasquatch roster, you could also stay put and catch many of the acts at venues around Vancouver this week.

It would be a costly and exhausting venture to try to catch all the Vancouver dates, but you certainly can't complain about the lack of choice.

Next week, two of Sasquatch's headlining acts -- Bjork and Arcade Fire -- are playing at Deer Lake Park in Burnaby before they head south to the Gorge. Bjork is at the park Wednesday and Arcade Fire is there Thursday.

The Icelandic queen of eccentricity has never played a show in Vancouver, according to a search of this newspaper's archives, and it's been nearly two years since Arcade Fire played a Vancouver show.

The same night as the Arcade Fire show, Ozomatli -- a nine-piece Latin-infused group from Los Angeles -- is playing at the Commodore. And then next Friday, Manu Chao -- the Paris-based world music sensation -- takes over the Commodore.

British "folktronica" guy Patrick Wolf plays an early show Friday at the Media Club before heading south to Sasquatch.

And they may not be playing at the big outdoor festival, but it should also be mentioned that Friday also sees Virginia-based hip-hop duo Clipse -- whose album Hell Hath No Fury was at the top of last year's Best Of lists -- take the stage at Sonar.

Rest up.

when burlesque was queen

Gypsy Rose Lee in Vancouver, April 1955. (Bill Dennett, Vancouver Sun)

When burlesque was queen in Vancouver

An academic looks at the simpler, seedier times when as many as 35 clubs featured the bump-and-grind

The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 12, 2007

By Peter Birnie

Vancouver's seedy side has grown so shameful that we're gaining a worldwide reputation for turning a blind eye to the state of our Downtown Eastside. Just ask the thousands of tourists who, facing the perfect storm of our taxi shortage and traffic gridlock, recently went wandering into Hastings Street on the first full day of our cruise-ship season.

There was a time, however, when seediness had a simplicity to it, when a rough-and-tumble town with an almost charming lack of guile gasped in horror at the mere suggestion of such a thing as female nudity. Yet, despite the best efforts of police to keep a lid on it, burlesque was once queen in Vancouver.

As the musical Gypsy opens at the Stanley Theatre with its tuneful take on the life of Gypsy Rose Lee, who often bumped and ground in Vancouver, University of B.C. Prof. Becki Ross is completing almost a decade of research into the fascinating period from about 1945 to 1980 when bump-and-grind had a firm foothold here. Dozens of people agreed to talk to Ross, who has doctorates in sociology and women's studies, about their experiences for a book she plans to title The Shake, the Rattle and the Pole.

"It's quite a mix," Ross says, "of ex-dancers and club owners and booking agents and choreographers and musicians."

Notable by their absence are the men who watched.

"It's just a measure of the ongoing stigma," says Ross, "that men who were regulars at that time and may still be even now, at the shrinking number of clubs in the city, would hesitate to come forward."

Full nudity on stage was not decriminalized in Vancouver until 1972. Striptease, which up until then had been the fairly sedate domain of burlesque artists like Lili St. Cyr, Tempest Storm and Gypsy Rose Lee, shifted toward pornography and, as befits our patriarchal culture, exploded in popularity.

At its peak in the 1970s, Ross estimates as many as 35 clubs catered to the trade. Now just one of a handful is the pioneering Penthouse on Seymour, rumoured to soon make way for condos.

"Underneath all these glass towers and urban spas and doggie daycares and fancy coffee shops and bike-rental places," says Ross, "is the whole social history of Vancouver."

For decades the vice squad tried to keep a lid on things. Ross finds it ironic their efforts were made more difficult by well-meaning tourism boosters.

"Vancouver was being advertised as this playground of the north all over the continent, but I'm sure the civic boosters never thought about the playground as including the striptease venues that would never have been seen to be legitimate recreation or leisure."

Ross uncovered a deep divide between east and west.

"The affluent West End uptown clubs were those like the Palomar, the Cave, Isy's and the Penthouse," she notes. "On the east side were clubs like the Smilin' Buddha, Harlem Nocturne, Kubla Khan and New Delhi."

The east-end joints were rougher, downscale clubs, and racism meant that dancers of colour performed only there.

"For the most part," says Ross, "the dancers of colour did not make as much money as the white, blond headliners. They did not ever attain the same marquee status as those women did."

Despite the divide, bump and grind was a remarkably diverse business. Ross found that the names of club owners could be Indo-Canadian or Chinese-Canadian or African-Canadian.

"The clientele was mixed, the ownership was mixed and so were the dancers," she notes.

Ross maintains the scene was so robust from 1945 to 1980 that it oiled the postwar economic engine and greased the wheels of the city's economy.

"Thousands of workers were employed," she says. "Not just the dancers, but the bouncers and ticket sellers and hat-check girls and cigarette girls and promoters and the choreographers, photographers, costume designers, secretaries, bookkeepers, kitchen staff, the prop and set and lighting specialists, waiters, cleaners, bartenders, musicians and, of course, the lawyers who defended the clubs when they were busted by the vice squads."

Phew! But she's not done. What about those who sold hosiery and makeup and alcohol, or the retailer at the Pike Place Market in Seattle who sold many a Vancouver stripper her Springolators, those Barbie shoes with steel shafts so perfect for dancing?

"Not to mention," Ross continues, "the cab drivers, hair stylists, manicurists, security guards, wigmakers, tanning salon operators, fabric retailers, drug sellers, child care workers and media pundits."

Legendary Vancouver Sun nightlife columnist Jack Wasserman died in 1977, but Ross was able to interview the equally iconoclastic Denny Boyd before he died in 2006. Ross is keen to talk to anyone else who had a hand in the booming burlesque business. You can e-mail her at: becki@interchange.ubc.ca

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'The little book that could' chosen for library club

The Vancouver Sun

Saturday, May 12, 2007

By Rebecca Wigod

It's fitting that the Vancouver Public Library has chosen Ruth Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats, as the book it hopes all Vancouverites will read this year. The Japanese-American writer, who has a home in B.C., did the research for it in the library's central branch.

Speaking there this week, at the first event in the library's One Book, One Vancouver program, Ozeki said, "I know all of the little corners where you can set up a computer and a workstation and work, unmolested, for quite a period of time."

After writing the manuscript, she combed the library for books on finding an agent and getting published. My Year of Meats came out in 1998, won several prizes and continues to attract readers with its blend of serious issues -- food quality, the environment, cultural differences, corporate sponsorship of media production -- and wacky humour.

She calls it "the little book that could."

And Joan Andersen, chair of the library's board, says it's a great choice for the city-wide book club because it will stimulate discussion and create a sense of community.

Ozeki, 51, was a documentary filmmaker before she turned to writing. She was living on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside when she wrote My Year of Meats, which grew out of her experiences in film and TV production.

The protagonist, a Japanese-American woman named Jane Takagi-Little, is in Japan directing a show called My American Wife, which is sponsored by the powerful U.S. meat-industry lobby group BEEF-EX. The other lead character, a Tokyo housewife named Akiko Ueno, is a devoted viewer and tries all the show's recipes -- even when they call for dousing a rump roast in Coca-Cola.

Ozeki told fans at the library that Akiko is married to Jane's boss, "the PR rep for BEEF-EX in Japan. The women are connected by this television show, this rather oppressive man and this corporate umbilicus."

Originally, Ozeki considered exploring her ideas about corporate sponsorship of media with a story about Big Tobacco. But then she realized that "there's nothing funny about cigarettes, but there's something funny about meat."

The author, who divides her time between New York City and B.C.'s Cortes Island, said: "I do this hybridization thing. There's humour in it, but there's also pathos, as well."

The library has prepared a 10-page reader's guide to My Year of Meats that calls the novel "an entertaining and moving read."

The library's Janice Douglas, creator of One Book, One Vancouver, said the program will be shorter and punchier than in the previous five years. Instead of spanning four months, events have been planned for May and June.

-30-

ring-a-ding-ding!

The wholesome rebel

Alexandra Oliver got a private school education, then became a slam poetry star. So, as you can imagine, her new book is both sweet and edgy



The Vancouver Province

Sunday, May 6, 2007

By David Spaner

Whimsy with an edge?

Vancouver poet Alexandra Oliver is proof that the street-smart and the light-hearted are not incompatible, that were Doris Day and Courtney Love to meet they might just become best friends for life.

Case in point: Oliver's new book of poetry, Where the English Housewife Shines. The poems may be written in by-now-unconventional conventional light verse, with old-style rhyme, and they often begin innocuously enough, but suddenly turn tough.

"Whimsy is ultimately very subversive," says Oliver. "You draw people in and there's some undertone that lingers and haunts people."

Oliver, who now lives in Seattle, will have a Vancouver homecoming May 11 when her book is launched here.

Befitting someone who mixed her teenage goth years with a Crofton House private-school education, Oliver proclaims in her poem "Ring-a-Ding-Ding," "I grew into a dame who loved the shame of loaded guns and cheap affairs" and "I've learned that her body is a temple and mine's a drive-in movie." In "How To Be a Team Player," Oliver assails the concept of corporate loyalty: "When the concept of The Team falls into the hands of some big cheese, You may be fighting at full steam an outbreak of an incurable disease . . . I love the other guy, Who gives it as much as I, As cook or lawyer, nurse or spy, But I can choose my own team, Thank you."

The edge is no surprise from one who was among the groundbreakers in Vancouver's slam poetry movement, now one of the most vital slams anywhere. When Oliver became involved in the mid-1990s, the concept of poets going head-to-head in thoroughly entertaining reading competitions was new to Vancouver.

As the slam movement took hold in 1995, Oliver had just returned to Vancouver, having received an MA in theatre at the University of Toronto and abandoned her acting aspirations. "I had a sense it would bring out the worst in me. It's fun and it's liberating, and you get a great rush from it, but I didn't like worrying about the way I looked at the time. Casting. It wasn't me at all."

Poetry, though, had a distinct appeal and she quickly became involved in the slam scene. Oliver performed everywhere from Lollapalooza to a CBC poetry faceoff, and in 1996 was named to Vancouver's first slam team.

"I was suspicious of it when I first heard of it. I was very idealistic and I thought: 'Competitive poetry? It sounds like figure skating.' But it was great. It motivated you. It got people interested in poetry who wouldn't be interested in poetry. And it was fun. The atmosphere was very intoxicated. We were in our twenties and this was really exciting stuff."

Oliver no longer performs at slams. "I enjoy performing but I wanted to work on stuff that could be read and enjoyed on the page as well, instead of pandering to audience reaction. But I still really enjoy going to them."

RC Weslowski, who will be performing with Oliver at her book launch, is a mainstay of the current scene. "It's neat that Alexandra has sort of progressed beyond the poetry slam world," he says. "Her poetry is very smart and very funny. There's a good dry wit to it."

Weslowski, an organizer of the Vancouver Poetry Slam (the first, third and fifth Monday of every month at Cafe Deux Soleils, 2096 Commercial Dr.), notes it's "a strong and vibrant scene within the North American slam scene. There is an immediacy of it, of somebody getting up on stage. It's not like watching TV. There's something human happening and it's live, for all its faults and beauties."

Moving to Seattle in 2005 provided new writing incentives for Oliver. Recently married, she had a child and her Serbian-immigrant husband was offered a job designing ships.

"I felt like I was removed from the loop," Oliver says. "When you have a child, you become more of an observer. Everything slows down. I began to take everything in: the way couples interact, the way mothers interact with their kids. So all of a sudden I became this receptive device."

She started writing and became involved in the Seattle poetry scene. And she sent her new work, combined with some vintage Oliver, to her old Vancouver friend Justine Brown, now operating Tin Press, a publishing house in London, England. The book Brown has published has the look of a 19th-century pamphlet, including Oliver's own drawings. "I wanted it to have that kind of charm, that slightly off-kilter elegance that things like Punch had."

No surprise that in Where the English Housewife Shines this one-time actor addresses popular culture in such poems as "Terence Stamp." There are local references to everything from West Vancouver to Port Coquitlam, with topics stretching from family ties ("The Tie") to sexual fantasies ("Phone Sex") to her new hometown ("Pioneer Square"). And she defines that Seattle square with references to her old hometown. "Pioneer Square is like if you were to take Robson Street and Pigeon Park and mash them together," she tells me.

"Pioneer Square" vividly creates images of "gold-digging wenches" and boy scouts "handing out favours on benches," adding: "Beware, because misfortune never sleeps." But, like Oliver is wont to do, it ends in whimsy: "Take the family there."

It's the culture clash -- the alternative meets the wholesome -- that helps make Oliver intriguing.

"I'm essentially a very formal person," she says. "It's just the way I am. I grew up with a certain propriety and it is un-erasable."

--

Alexandra Oliver's launch: Friday at 6 p.m. at Forufera Centre, mezzanine level, 505 Hamilton St. The Vancouver Poetry Slam team finals are tomorrow at 9 p.m. at Wise Hall, 1882 Adanac St.

Two poems by Alexandra Oliver:

The Smell of Trouble (2001)

The envelopes of powder keep on coming,
Snowing rashes in assistants' hands;
US rations rain Islamic lands;
CNN hails, “Falling sky!” and bumming
Out the ordinary Joes and Janes
Who swear off letters and domestic planes.

The newsprint whispers horror, gently stains
The digits of the housewives. Little wonder
Markets fold and bearishly go under,
Crunching under slow commuter trains,
Whining, like an orphan, on their wheels,
In the hour of work and morning meals.

This is how a normal person feels,
Tilts their nose to scents of eastern trouble.
A land of rock is bombed to dust and rubble
In the wake of army issue heels.
We lose the scent at night. Returning cars
Trail out beneath dissolving seams of stars.

One of These Days (2007)

We wander to the park. The mothers clump
Barnacular against the little wall,
That thing is loneliness, the blackened hump
Each one of us attempted. It is all
So neatly knitted: waking, messy meals,
The robust pong of diaper and the squirms
Of legs resisting stroller straps. It feels
So odd to covet friendship on those terms.
The sweat suits shuffle, hands scratch digits down
On cards and old receipts. Oh God, who calls
To talk about the pram, the birthday clown,
The infant gyms in vast, suburban malls?
I focus on my son, take on that glaze.
When will you call? Oh soon—one of these days.