On Birdman, the Death of Cinema and the Cowardice of Inarritu

Birdman is an interesting experiment, consistently bordering on brilliance, which somehow makes me loathe Inarritu even more. Five minutes into the film, after a series of letters spell out a quote, a meteor rushes the earth and Keaton meditates while floating, I was ready to walk out, convinced that Inarritu had done it again, but I stayed. That may be a strange way to start, so allow me to crank it up a bit more: People have been predicting the death of cinema since its inception; at first, it was a mechanical death: the idea that films were a novelty which would not survive the next attraction. Once it became obvious that cinema was here to stay, the metaphorical death notices began. Godard has said cinema is dead at least a dozen times over the last week, every critic predicts the end to be near whenever there's some sort of advancement and, more literally, Agnes Varda depicted M. Cinema laying on his death bed and dying on his 100th birthday. I guess this is my jumping off point, no pun intended: Inarritu is not saying anything that Varda didn't say twenty years ago, but Varda said it; Inarritu was too afraid to do so!

Birdman is, at its root, a film about the death of cinema, with Inarritu becoming an unwitting accomplice in the demise. Inarritu uses this film to say "fuck cinema, fuck cinematic theory, fuck cinematic criticism, fuck cinema!" To begin with, there is a certain cinematic specificity that is intentionally not adhered to: within medium specificity, this film places three different media above the cinema. The first is theatre: the content is theatrical, but so is the form. Cinema tends to follow a system wherein time is consistent at the deficit of space. A million shots may place themselves in every corner of a room, but, in a narrative, the million shots, when placed together, will simply constitute a million continuous seconds. In this film, with its single "continuous" take (more artificial than Hitchcock's in Rope), the space remains consistent with a ludicrously inconsistent temporal effect resulting from it. Moving from one corner of a room to another will introduce new characters, a quick tour through the labyrinths of the set leading from day to night. Space becomes submissive to time, like in the theatre, where a quick turn of the unmoving stage will create a new day.

Then, the beat poetry turns this play-film into an unusual musical of sorts, wherein the words are no longer cinematic. As the percussionist plays off to the side, the words change tone, they go up and down, high and low, fill silences: the words are no longer of importance, the cinematic words have, again, become submissive to the beat, to the poetry, to the sounds of the streets. After all, it is the streets which, supposedly, create the sound that infests the set and the play-film. The play-film is ultimately about seeing the best minds of one's generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked. Poetry has, in the past, been successfully transported to film: Jarman's films were frequently poetic, in particular War Requiem and Blue. The Song of Lunch managed to actually create a narrative screenplay out of a poem, but, again, the poem was twisted to fit the body of film, not the other way around. Another medium swallows up the cinema.

Finally, painting or sculpture invades this already vulnerable play-poem-film through the "beautiful" cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki. One aspect of cinema that all theorists thought to be the most cinematic was the close-up, the ability to show the face better than anyone else can. This play-poem-film decides to disprove that by creating grotesque close-ups that resemble something between the paintings of Egon Schiele and the distorted sculptures of Evan Penny; one scene in particular made Emma Stone look like a simulacrum, existing without any indexicality! Inarritu betrays the cinematic form and medium, selling off all of its benefits to other media, resulting in Birdman, the play-poem-painting-sculpture-film that comes forth from his experimentation.

Already, Inarritu has created a film that has totally removed cinema (or at least diminished it) from the final product. He then spends the rest of the film dismantling the society around cinema. How does he do this? There are a variety of not-so-subtle moments where this dismantling is apparent. In one discussion, Roland Barthes is mentioned, but he is laid by the wayside in favour of "pig semen" and talks of Birdman. Riggan's mirror has a bit of paper attached to it which reads "a thing is a thing, not what is said about it", a clear indictment of criticism, in this case film criticism, perhaps also another stab of Barthes' "Death of the Author", claiming that a thing is only what it is at conception, at the insistence of the author, and nothing else: cinematic journalism, cinematic criticism, cinematic theory, all placed aside, unimportant to Inarritu and his refusal of cinematism.

Then, Riggan's identity comes into question. Riggan is an original who no longer has work, portrayed by Michael Keaton, the original cinematic Batman who no longer has work. The similarities between the concepts of a Batman and a Birdman do not need to be discussed, as they are plainly obvious. The film (the play-poem-painting-sculpture-film) takes place near Times Square, in order to allow Riggan to constantly run into the intellectual property of other filmmaking studios. The screen is frequently filled with the images of transformers, superheroes and other mass-produced, entirely sellable beings from popular blockbusters that have come since the last Batman/Birdman film was made (1992) and Keaton/Riggan's career ended. The television is showing Robert Downey Jr., whose career flourished after taking on a superhero role, following in the footsteps of Keaton, with Riggan no longer a well-hidden metaphor. With Batman the property of others and Birdman all anyone can talk about, Keaton/Riggan is stuck in this endless loop, one which, unless this Inarritu play-poem-painting-sculpture-film succeeds, he will never be able to leave.

So, why is any of this important? Because, in one final "insult" to cinema, Inarritu has personified cinema in Batman! Cinema is often personified as someone with dignity, someone who feeds and cares for us viewers, someone who would make a good parental figure. Inarritu portrays cinema as Batman, the same old crap before said crap was old! Cinema is portrayed as the first step in its own destruction. Inarritu made this film as yet another cry of "cinema is dead and you have killed it; long live the cinema". That is, of course, the first problem with anyone complaining about the death of cinema: the implication or insistence that it was someone else and not them. If cinema really is dead or dying, Inarritu and his tired antics are at least partially responsible; it's strange that one of the most exciting films about the cinematic condition came from someone so boring! There's also the fact that he decries modern cinema by making a superhero film, but that is too blatant and obvious to necessitate discussion here. In Varda's film, M. Cinema was laying in his death bed: Cinema was dying. Here, cinema is senile, cinema is demented, cinema is slowly but surely losing his mind. The world has abandoned him and he doesn't realize it. That is a bold stance: cinema as lunatic rather than cinema as diseased, afflicted by unnamed disorders. Of course, he (referring to cinema) does everything he can to stay relevant. He writes in superpowers for himself, he flies, he has visual effects, he writes in a hot lesbian scene and he even shoots everything in one long take (again, extremely artificial). None of this is enough, though: the world is changing and cinema is being replaced by new media, by cell phone cameras, by youtube, by giant electronic billboards and by its original enemies, television and theatre. Cinema cannot continue and he is dying!

So, the death of cinema: not a particularly novel concept, but always a brave concept to follow. What is wrong with the direction? Why loathe Inarritu? Because he is a coward! This film is about the death of cinema: either cinema lives or he dies. There is one answer: is cinema salvageable or is he laying dead in a gutter somewhere? Inarritu spends the entirety of the third act, in his magic realist mode, throwing Birdman off roofs, putting bullets in him, having him jump out windows and yet, he continues to live: certainly, this is a continuation of the artifice present in the whole film, but for once, I demanded an answer.

Cinema/Riggan/Keaton/Birdman/Batman threw himself off of a balcony in a state of delusion, clearly in the real world due to the interference of others, but then he flew, he flew across the city, ending up...getting out of a cab, back in reality. He shot himself in the head with a gun in the real world (well, on a stage in the real world) and ended up blowing off his nose and living with zero actual neural damage. Finally, he throws himself out of the window (it is pretty obvious at this point that cinema's disorder may be suicidal tendencies) and the result is left up in the air. This is, no questions about it, an act of cowardice. This is a film that takes place in the real world, Cinema/Riggan/Keaton/Birdman/Batman a product of his surroundings, driven mad by the inadequacies of life. If his daughter sees him fly (or whatever that ending was supposed to signify), the whole film results in the work of a man who went out of his way to deconstruct cinema, bring it to its knees and run away screaming as soon as the cinema began to bleed. The cowardice may have resulted in something brilliant: perhaps the daughter of cinema, whatever she may be, has come to lead us on a new direction, but this cowardice is still unforgivable! Birdman ends up becoming the story of a doom-predicting prophet who ran home at the first sound of a trumpet.

The Anti-Canon Manifesto

I. The Enemy

Whenever a new art form gains prominence within academia, a group of self-appointed scholars will inevitably rise up to dictate the correct way for one to enjoy the works of that formal medium. This dogma has come to be known as the canon. These canons have existed with each and every form and medium of art, giving importance to certain painters, writers and creators over others, thus setting the path for how each form will be studied for years to come. Canons have been seen as necessary, because they allow beginners and novices to gain an introduction to an art form. However, the issue arises once the viewer gains an understanding of the art form and, rather than moving in new directions, continues to follow the set path. Arguably, one of the most egregious offender of this canon abuse, along with popular music, is cinema, which has the misfortune of being both a young medium and an expensive one. As a result, the cinematic canon has been heavily diluted to a small, chosen few, which are then, without question, fed to another generation of academics, making sure the cycle continues, as new cinephiles watch and re-watch the same handful of films over and over again. This selection also comes from a position of power, resulting in a final product which is western above all else, with the added detriment of coming from a viewpoint that is white supremacist, male chauvinist and generally bourgeois. This is just the beginning of a series of issues which inherently pervade the canonic system, specifically the cinematic canon, which will demonstrate why the dependence on this system needs to be lessened and why this system needs to be removed from the academic circle.

II. The Canon Hinders Conversation

This is the root of all the problems with using the cinematic canon in academia; the canon makes sure that certain topics will never be discussed. The most obvious way that this occurs is by placing certain films out of the reach of criticism. The established academic canon of cinema has placed Citizen Kane at the top of the "list" for many years, which ultimately means that this film is not to be questioned; this film can be revered, whether blindly or through deliberation, and the questioning of it is to be discouraged and actively prevented. As a result, we return to the blind auteurism of early Cahiers du Cinema writing, the same kind of hero worship that led Francois Truffaut to decide that the worst film by Jean Renoir is inherently better than the best by Jean Delannoy. When the "best" films ever are forced on an audience before they have even had a chance to see them, there are really only two results: either the viewer eventually agrees or disagrees and is, therefore, discredited. These two results are also rather problematic in their own areas. The former leads to academic groupthink, with everyone liking or disliking a certain film merely for its placement within the canon, while the latter will frequently lead to simple contrarianism, with certain critics and academics attempting to make a bold stand by speaking out against a film, giving no good reason beyond "it's not that good". It was this empty iconoclasm that led many film critics to speak out against Citizen Kane's number one placement on the Sight & Sound poll, arguably the most respected dictator of the cinematic canon, which then caused it to fall to number two, being replaced by Vertigo, a film which had been consistently on the same poll, peaking at number two the previous time the poll was taken, making no difference in this matter whatsoever! In an attempt to claim that change is occurring, this drop-and-replace event happens frequently on a variety of cinematic aggregators, with zero difference being made to the general makeup of the cinematic canon. Of course, this lack of conversation is merely the root of the serious issues with the cinematic canon.

III. The Canon is Exclusionary

This can be seen as a continuation of the canon's ability to hinder conversation by excluding certain cinemas from general access. Looking at some of the most popular canon-based lists, including the Sight & Sound critic's poll and other, larger lists, one thing becomes clear: canonized films are an unusually homogenized bunch. A canonized film is most likely to be directed by a straight, white male from the United States, with the films often not "keeping up" with modern standards, proven by the continued appearance of films like Birth of a Nation on such lists. Furthermore, the majority of any canon ends up being composed of films from a few specific countries, namely the United States, France, Italy, Japan and Russia, with occasional contributions from other countries which could pass themselves off as productions from one of these countries, specifically American-favoured films from Great Britain and French-favoured films from Belgium and such surrounding areas. The 2012 Sight & Sound critic's poll proves this, as does the 2002 edition. 1992 was the last time that this poll included a film with no participation from these five countries, when Pather Panchali became the sole film from none of these nations to be included on this list. Similarly, on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They toplist, a list dedicated to aggregating all toplists into a definitive one, the highest-ranking film with no participation from any of these five countries is Persona, the Swedish film landing at number 24. In fact, the top 100 only contains twenty-two films which are not considered productions of the aforementioned five countries, but, even among this selection, a large number are co-productions, including several UK-USA co-productions (although British films in the top 100 tend to be overly Americanized films endorsed by Hollywood). Of these 22, only thirteen had no producing help from those five nations. Similarly, the top 100 of the list only contains one woman (Chantal Akerman, director of Jeanne Dielman at number 83), with the next women not showing up until positions 137 and 339!

There are, of course, approximately two hundred countries on earth, so how does the canon ultimately account for that? Through a system of tokenism. Most filmmaking nations are allowed a specific number of canonized filmmakers, depending on a variety of factors. For example, Poland has had three filmmakers "accepted" by the academic community (Kieslowski, Wajda and Polanski) at the loss of the likes of Zulawski, Holland and Krolikiewicz, while Iran has only had two filmmakers accepted, Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf, at the loss of many others. Obviously, European nations are allowed more "spots", while countries considered more towards the third world are allowed less (Brazil is allowed Rocha, while Algeria is allowed the Italian Pontecorvo!) There are also other groups which fall into this tokenistic system, wherein women are allowed several spots (Akerman, Denis and Varda) at the loss of the likes of Shepitko and Duras. Discounting the middle east, all of Africa is essentially allowed one spot, taken by Ousmane Sembene, while South America is represented by the already mentioned Brazilian Rocha. There is one way to beat this tokenism and that is to remove oneself from one's nationality. It is rather telling that Polanski and Kieslowski did not become famous until they began working on productions based out of the base five countries, just as Kiarostami eventually ended up directing films in France and Japan. And it must not be forgotten that the ultimate sign of "making it" is still considered directing a film in the United States.

Why does all this matter? Because the canon dictates who gets to make more films and what films end up available to be viewed by the most people. This means that the most canon-friendly films will be released on readily available home viewing formats, while receiving more advertising within academic circles and publications. This will also lead to a higher demand for works by the canonized director, causing producers to seek them out, leading to more and more productions. This will of course lead to further canonization, causing this cycle to repeat itself again and again. While academia is supposed to be all-encompassing, this makes it clear that this could not be further from the truth. With the current trajectory of academia, the broken canon will never be fixed.

IV. The Canon is No Longer Necessary

One final issue with canons is that, in the modernized world, with the advancement of technology, canons have simply become defunct. To begin with, the canon is a concentrated effort to make the subjective objective, which, again, leads to contrarianism. This contrarianism then leads to splinters within the canon, leading to several vaguely interconnected canons. This is to say that there are now dozens, perhaps hundreds, of canons which still attempt to keep an artifice of singularity. Canons have split into lists based on genre, country, movement, etc., which begin with canonized films and then evolve into lesser-valued films, which is to say that these sub-canons serve as regular lists of recommendations, with a slight hint of authority. If that hint was removed, nothing would change. In fact, modern technology has proven this. For example, private torrenting websites have taken over the role of the canon with the removal of authority. On some of these websites, nameless and faceless individuals recommend films, which will then be placed in a spotlight and given awareness. These films end up with an audience through a system similar to personal, friendly recommendations. Add to that the proliferation of websites like the Internet Movie Database and it becomes clear that personal exploration may be the future of cinematic discovery. The majority of academics have access to the ultimate tool for unearthing cinematic treasures and yet, they continue to adhere to the old-fashioned canon. Is there any way to break one's dependence on the canon?

V. The Battle

There is a way and, just as with the proliferation of the canon, the destruction of the canon must be set forth by the academics. The rejection of the canon must first be implemented in the pedagogical system. Students can always seek out the canonical; academia should teach them how to find non-canonical material. Students should be taught how to discover what may not be otherwise discovered. Academia should teach about how to discover and how to discuss films by unknown filmmakers and, perhaps more importantly, contemporary filmmakers; filmmakers who have not managed to become canonized. When every filmmaker and film movement is equal, it becomes simpler for every film to be recognized, every filmmaker to be considered and every film movement to be legitimized. Only then can we break our dependence on the canon and manage to study film as objectively as possible. This is what we need to strive for. Film studies still follows a system wherein some concepts and objects are unquestionable. This is what is holding this field back. This must be remedied. Death to the canon!

A Treatise on the Mosh Pit

I. Definition/Form

The mosh pit is a form of dance/accompaniment attached to a variety of musical genres, including various incarnations of punk and metal music. It is also a ritual, which can be compared to certain religious experiences, due to its spontaneity and formal procedure, which come together to create something similar to speaking in tongues. The act of moshing involves a group of people gathered in a tight crowd bumping and ramming into each other; the tightness is an important element, as this will somewhat force the individuals into the act, as they navigate through the flesh. Moshing can also incorporate other acts based in these subgenres, including stage diving, pogo and hardcore dancing, but these are occasionally restricted based on elements like the venue or the performer. The mosh pit, beyond being a cultural aspect of these genres, also serves as a form of mini-society within the vaster society of these mentioned countercultures. It works as a society, which in turn creates roles for its individuals, as well as working as a spiritual experience. Before going further, it is important to mention that my experience with mosh pits comes exclusively from punk shows. These experiences may differ within a metal environment, but this treatise is specifically aimed at the mosh pit as a part of the punk show.

II. The Pit as Society

To the outsider, the mosh pit seems like a war zone, a state of total disarray with no rules or boundaries. The truth is the opposite. These pits have their own unspoken rules which dictate how the group operates. Essentially, a mosh pit is social anarchy on a much smaller scale, wherein the participants take care of each other with no overseeing authority. Added to this is a state of controlled chaos, creating non-violent frenzy with the knowledge that the individual's life is not in danger (people have died in pits, but these are often cases where a performer or internal individual decided to take the role of overseeing authority and rile up the crowd to be unsafe or more violent). Despite the lack of order, a mosh pit is a gathering of individuals who, unusually, take the form of cogs in a machine; the individuals must be able to bounce off of each other in order for the pit to work.

The most important thing to remember about a mosh pit is that a pit is always an agreement. This is something important that some individuals seem to forget, so, to repeat for emphasis: a pit is always an agreement. A lot of shows, usually shows with a more poppy sound or indie appeal, tend to have one guy who insists on starting a pit; this person, referred to as he, because it is invariably a man (for several reasons to be discussed later), will forcibly and insistently bump into the people around him and ruin the atmosphere, because some shows were not meant to have mosh pits! This is a disagreement towards the possibility of a mosh pit. An agreement is always visible; agreement is innate; the moment that agreement is reached, movement begins and things immediately get going. How does the society of the pit handle disagreement? There is a succession of steps: after the individuals around the offender show their disdain and it becomes clear that he will not stop, members of the pit will forcibly remove him from his position, often by pushing him away from his position or even physically dragging him away; certain shows will even see the offender beaten, but that is not a frequent sight. This may seem to conform to western cultural standards, but it differs in one important way: the individual's removal is collectively agreed upon and it is not committed by an individual who has been given the job (similar to a bouncer or a police officer), but rather by the "faceless individual" closest to the offender. This self-policing also comes in other varieties, including, among others, removing the shoes of people who forcibly attempt to crowdsurf or removing those whose expressions are not appreciated by the crowd, such as removing a hardcore dancer, one who throws fists and elbows and kicks at the other moshers, in a show where such dancing is not appreciated.

Another important rule of the pit involves watching out for all individuals. A pit is ultimately an example of a mutual, benevolent violence, a social group whose purpose is to release energy, not to harm others. As such, the most important rule is that you always cease all movement when one member of this group falls and make sure that the fallen individual is standing and safe. With a good mosh pit, it is often impossible for anyone to fall anyway, due to the large number of people gathered in a small space, but, in the unlikely case, it is always important to gather and raise the fallen; again, in a good pit, this will happen almost immediately: depending on the crowd, this may run the spectrum from offering a helping hand to grabbing the person in any way possible and dragging them up (the easiest way to do this is to grab the person under the armpits and drag them up!) This rule is one that often surprises the opponents of the mosh pit, who see the activity as a form of ultraviolence; who often imagine that a fallen individual just becomes a better target; picking up a fallen member is absolutely the most important aspect of the mosh pit!

Finally, the boundaries of the pit are an important aspect to remember. The mosh pit is a small subculture of the concertgoer. As such, mosh pits have to be concentrated. The area set aside for the pit is often an area directly in front of the stage, which has come to be known as the pit area (or perhaps was called a pit, where the name mosh pit comes from; chicken or the egg, essentially). The venue, in these cases, is laid out like so: the immediate vicinity in front of the stage is the pit, in the form of a circle. In this area, anything goes! The participants can dance, bounce off each other and ask each other for assistance for whatever reason. Immediately around the pit, there is a chain of people who serve an underappreciated importance. These people do not want to partake in the moshing, but they still take on the task of making sure that the pit is contained, in order to "protect" the people outside the pit, the third and least interesting layer. This chain of people are usually "respected" by the pit, which is to say, they are usually recognized and not involved against their wills. On the other hand, the people of the chain are also given extra power, pushing the moshers away when it looks like they are about to leave the boundaries of the pit. To reiterate, the mosh pit is essentially a perfectly-governed anarchic society. Of course, there is also a personal importance attributed to one's involvement within a mosh pit.

III. The Individual in the Mosh Pit

As has been mentioned in the previous segment, all the individuals within a pit serve their own purposes, whether it is as part of the chain or as instigators or protectors. It is important to remember that a pit is, at its core, a cooperation of individuals, like atoms within a molecule. Unlike regular society, a mosh pit does not have singular roles for each individual; instead, each individual carries the possibility of all roles, whenever they may become useful (one clear differentiation, again, is a member of the chain immediately outside the pit, who, as long as they are part of the chain, only serve one specific role). The most obvious individual role is the mosher (intentionally named as blatantly as possible) which refers to the very act that makes a pit a pit: this role consists of constantly moving and attempting to make contact with those around you. Another role is, again, picking up the fallen, which falls on those nearest to the fallen individual. Yet another role is the launcher, an individual who helps those who wish to crowdsurf from within the crowd; another related role is the surfee or the water, if you will allow for the metaphor: these are the people who work to keep the surfer up; after all, a fall from that high could be dangerous. These people are tasked with two related objectives: hold the surfer up and keep them from falling down, even if it is by holding on to their foot while someone else has their arm. One final role, often one which is non-consensually trust upon the person, is the barrier: the group of people "tasked" with keeping the moshers from running into the stage, by placing themselves at the edge of the stage: these people have the best view, but are also constantly battered during the performance. These people differ from the chain outside the pit, because most of these individuals will leave their position at some point and be replaced, unlike the frequent steadiness of the chain.

One issue that comes from the individual in the pit is unfortunate sexism that tends to be prevalent in the pits. A common complaint among women who attend punk shows is that mosh pits are unwelcoming to women. As a result, the pits tend to include very few women, although the pits at concerts including more political bands, female musicians or more pop-based sounds tend to include more women. Women tend to face two issues in these pits. They are usually heavily avoided, not necessarily out of malevolence, but out of the belief that they must be protected. In the worst case, there are cases of people going out of their way to grope women who mosh or stagedive. This is ultimately the one thing that keeps mosh pits from being a perfectly egalitarian social environment. Thankfully, though, there are more and more feminist and queer-friendly scenes popping up all the time, so this issue may soon become an issue of the past.

IV. The Mosh Pit as a Spiritual Experience

Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of the mosh pit is its ability to mimic religious spectacle and result in its own form of spiritual awakening. Similar to concepts like the sweat lodge, the mosh pit accomplishes this experience by draining the individual of all hydration (it is, of course, also important for the individual to cooperate with this step), resulting in a new state of exhaustion. There are a variety of steps that need to be taken to insure a proper spiritual experience in a mosh pit. First, the pit must be inescapable. This result can be attained by placing one's self in the centre of the pit, allowing crowds to gather to the back of the immediate area, making "escape" impossible. Once the pit begins to come to life, a few physiological results occur: you begin to sweat, both from movement and proximity, and you begin to ache, both from movement and contact. This contact also fits a religious context, similar to the self-flagellation that is an important part of certain Abrahamic religions, except this "self-flagellation" comes as a part of teamwork, with each individual aiding everyone else. This contact also reaches another level of spirituality with more modern concepts of sharing energy. While this may be an unpopular opinion, a pit can be as small as two people; the point is to play off of each other, search and destroy in a way; two or three or a hundred people target each other and bounce off of each other, to exchange this energy through bodily contact, while depleting one's own energy.

Where does this all lead? The dehydration and depletion of energy will eventually lead you to a point where you feel like death is imminent and this is where the experience reaches its zenith; it is when you are near death, even as a state of mind, that everything suddenly falls into place. This is the point of the mosh pit; once you reach this point of dying, suddenly you will lose your ability to feel pain, your ability to feel fear and your needs for rehydration; suddenly, you become a part of this group who are all dying and you no longer care! That is the beauty of the mosh pit: the transcendence of death. Punk has always been a lifestyle that has been constantly "dying"; every famous punk declared its death at one point or another, with the belief being that it was at their moment that punk survived. As a result, punk is constantly in a state of dying, making it the most ephemeral form of art or expression. Similar to punk's constant teetering between life and death, this deathly experience in the pit is also an ephemeral one, lasting only as long as a show. This is another part of the appeal of the pit: unlike life, you die and then it's over; the show's end brings you back to life. There is another parallel to death that comes with crowdsurfing. Often, the surfer will find their way to the front where they will be forced to find their way back to the pit, which is to say that the surfers will essentially fly their way out of death and out of the experience, again leading to some major spiritual paradox. Once you leave the venue, you can go back to your regular life, until the next show where you can die again, if only to remind yourself that, like punk, you are in a constant struggle between life and death!

Boyhood

Boyhood tells the story of a young boy growing up from the age of six to nineteen. There is nothing novel about that. The method is where the novelty lies, wherein Richard Linklater essentially tells the story in real time, filming for a few days a year in order to show the characters literally growing. This film tells the story of life itself and, while the story itself isn't particularly interesting (how could it be?), it is in the documentation that the brilliance of this film lies.

Boyhood serves as an index of the events of each year that it documents, while never overtly mentioning the year: each year is made indexed through the use of the music of the time and the events of the time, but also the visual aesthetics of the time. The scenes that begin the film actually look like they were shot in the early 2000s; the advancement of camera technology can be seen throughout the film. Similarly, the fact that these scenes were shot at the same time as the events they were portraying meant that there was advanced knowledge and all the events played out without any bias. For example, when Ethan Hawke tells his kids that they should vote for anyone but Bush, the scene contains a real liberal optimism of the time, which honestly had people believing that Bush had screwed up enough to lose the election. We know now that that did not happen, but how was Ethan Hawke to know that? It seemed like an inevitability.

Speaking of Ethan Hawke, this film also works as an index of the actors in the film as they go through life. When the film begins, Hawke is happily married to Uma Thurman and is just beginning to live down that awful version of Hamlet, while Patricia Arquette had just divorced Nicolas Cage and was doing some crap! You slowly see them as their careers move along. You can point out when real-world events happened to these people by figuring out where in their lives they are. Even more interesting, this film is also Linklater's documentation of his daughter reaching adulthood. It's easy to just say the number twelve, but that encompasses a long period of time. If we accept the birth of cinema as 1894, this film took ten percent of cinema's entire history to shoot!

Of course, it needs to be pointed out that, going in, I was wary of this fil, because this is not in and of itself a novel idea. Filmmakers have captured a variety of moments of one person's life in the past, whether it's the "every seven years" approach of Michael Apted's Up Series, the transition from childhood to middle age of Francois Truffaut's Antoine Doinel saga or the similar story of children growing while their father is in prison, told by Michael Winterbottom in Everyday. I am in no way trying to argue that Boyhood is superior to any of these films, but this film does contain one element that the rest don't: this story is not told in a vacuum. Apted and Truffaut's films are all about the people with the world around them being mere window dressing, while Winterbottom, avoiding this, simply keeps his characters isolated. While the children grow, the outside world is kept out, keeping the children and their parents in a sterilized environment consisting of home and jail. Boyhood is not in any way in a vacuum as has been clearly argued here. The outside world is just as important to the boy as the boy is to his environment; there is a perfect mixture of nature and nurture involved, that is necessary in order to make sense of the story.

Boyhood is not a perfect film. In fact, there are a lot of loose threads and happy coincidences that keep it from reaching perfection as a narrative product. However, as a document of humanity, it is a necessary text. Leaving the theatre, all I could think was "what if The Tree of Life was filmed like this? What if Malick does something like this next?" It's not like his releases come out any faster than Boyhood!

NXNE 2014

I have been going to free NXNE shows for about five years now and I went to my first ticketed event last year with Natalie Angilletta when we went to see FLAG, but this year was my first all-out, NXNE experience with a wristband, a bicycle and the incomparable Francine Dibacco as a shaman of sorts getting me into the right state of mind for four straight days of shows and drinking (the Canadian dream)! Since I have a compulsive need to get everything in writing, I considered a variety of ways that I could get this in words and decided that it would work best to just pick out the best shows as recommendations of sorts.

THURSDAY

Tobacco: Just kidding, but can I complain for a second before the good stuff? I have nothing against electronic music; some of my good friends are electronic musicians! However, 1) who the fuck puts an electronic musician between Weaves and tUnE-yArDs (that hurt to write), 2) who the fuck goes to a show to see a performer who is ENTIRELY obscured by a screen for the whole performance and 3) who the fuck schedules an electronic show in a sit-down venue? Isn't the whole point of electronic music to make people dance? Why did it take so long for all the dudebros to get up and start dancing? We didn't make it far into this one!

The Pizza Underground: This Velvet Underground "cover band" really should not have worked and many will argue that it doesn't, but there is definitely something to be said for a ridiculous band which takes itself seriously. Coming out with a pizza box and whatever other instruments they had and refusing to break character takes some work and their stupid puns just sweetened the deal. Walking a tightrope between brilliance and utter garbage, this band manages to stay on the right side.

Odonis Odonis: HOLY SHIT! This was a real surprise. At 1 AM, after going all over town and being extremely tired, we decided to go to the Garrison and have a drink. Luckily, that was when this band was about to go on. This is a great time for really heavy, but not mindless music (so much of that at this year's festival) and this band exemplifies that, with a guttural and yet melodic sound that you can't not headbang to.

FRIDAY

Swans/St. Vincent: There's not much else you can say about these two performers. It would be a better write-up if they were uninteresting, but Swans' earth-shattering attack (the floor was seriously vibrating), filling up YDS with what sounds like the battlecry of a murderous extraterrestrial race, followed by the amazing voice and brilliant stage antics of St. Vincent was destined to be great and that's what it was. On another note, Annie, we all love you, but no one walks out of a Tim Horton feeling guilty because they think you're stealing. That statement made no sense, but I'm sure we all forgive you!

Courtney Barnett: One of the highlights of the festival! Being at the Silver Dollar, I was within a metre of her, when she started performing. Listening to her music and seeing her videos convinced me this would be a stoic, peaceful performance. That idea was quashed the second she went into her first guitar solo, looking and sounding less like Bob Dylan and more like Jay Reatard! Since her catalogue is so small, consisting of twelve released tracks, it meant that she played every song, including a heavier-than-usual version of Avant Gardener which automatically made me realize that I was in love. I talked to her after the show, but forgot to propose, so that's something for next time.

SATURDAY

Weaves/HSY/Perfect Pussy: This was just a really unusual combo, which is why I really dug it. First, Weaves, who I saw on Thursday, played a thirty minute set with a strange sort-of psychedelic music followed by HSY's heavy (flashbacks to Odonis Odonis), jumbled sound followed by the total sensual assault of Perfect Pussy. This tiny room had been set up with two gigantic speakers on the sides of the stage which made the whole room shake and was in a constant state of knocking me over (this may not be true, but I was in an entirely different world by this point; I had a mental situation going on at the time and mixed with my penchant for self-destruction and heroic alcohol intake, I'm not certain how true some of these events were). I also saw the horrors of the all-ages moshpit; seeing a bunch of pre-pubescent kids moshing made me wonder if an adult could be charged with child endangerment for jumping in. One final note on Perfect Pussy: I really hated their recorded music, but, in a rare case, this is one band that only works live; recorded music can be altered, quieted, silenced. This is a band that needs to be heard at FULL VOLUME!

Tom Robinson: This may have been the best show of the whole festival! I ended up getting semi-lost on the way to this show at the Drake Hotel and arrived a few minutes late. I walked into a mostly empty room, maybe twenty people altogether, to see an aged man on the stage with a guitar in his hand and a microphone in front of him, singing Up Against the Wall (side note: Up Against the Wall and similar iterations of it is one of the most popular titles for really amazing songs). The rest of the hour at this show, which can truly be called an "intimate show", consisted of Robinson, a man who hasn't released an album in seventeen years and who hasn't toured regularly for twelve years, singing his greatest songs (an a cappella version of Martin, a brand-new, unreleased song about bankers and, of course, a singalong version of Glad to be Gay) and accompanying each one with a story (how Glad to be Gay points out the closeted gay men in the bar, how a scary-looking bartender complained about it being too catchy, how he was looking for a Canadian musician to do backing vocals and guitars at the show and he found one in the form of his assigned driver (whose name I wish I remembered)). Tom Robinson's wit, charm and generally pleasant personality made for a wonderful show that very few people saw!

Simon Amstell: Yeah, I guess Saturday was generally a good day. I skipped out on seeing The Last of England to see this show, so Amstell has better be funny! And he delivered, in the form of most self-serving, narcissistic, Alan Partridge-esque version of Simon Amstell imaginable. He basically told large segments of his life story, riffing on the Nelson Mandela situation, his love life, his relationship with his father and his strange god complex. He also occasionally stopped to admonish certain audience members, including one woman who was texting in the front row ("you can see why that would be a problem for me with you sitting in the front row, right? I know it's good when you get a text, because you think 'oh, I'm popular', but when you get a lot of texts, that's the number of people who don't want to talk to you!") and another woman, this time more jokingly, who dared to speak to him ("I'm very important, you know, right?" "Right." "Don't talk to me!") He also frequently commented on his own jokes: which ones work, which ones don't, which ones don't translate well, Overall, I spent about an hour laughing. I also later realized that this was the first comedy show I had ever been to!

METZ: I had no time to reminisce about Simon Amstell. I had to get my ass to Lee's Palace before midnight. I ended up getting to a long line, not knowing for certain if I would get in or not. I wanted to end this festival with a bang, which would consist of almost total self-destruction at worst and my imminent death at best! Luckily, I got in, got a beer, drank it up and stepped into the middle of pit area in front of the stage. These three guys came out (I have to admit, I didn't expect Metz to look like that) and the patented Metz sound began! And the floor came to life. This show kind of showed me the difference between two types of brilliant show: Courtney Barnett and Tom Robinson kind of exemplify one version ("I heard this song and this song and it was great") and Metz exemplifies the second ("there was music involved...I think"). While the Metz sound blared, I got stepped on, slammed into the stage, punched in the face, gut and crotch and headbutted in the jaw; it was one of the greatest experiences I have ever had! This show was total brutality and I wouldn't have it any other way. Funny moment: at one point, after getting slammed into stage, I turned around and in my daze, screamed something, which probably didn't make a sound anyways. This resulted in one woman running up to me and punching me in the stomach. My adrenaline and endorphin levels were so high that I felt nothing and just gave her a sick grin, to which she responded with a smile and a thumbs up, before disappearing back under a heap of bodies. This is the sort of thing that only happens in a pit! I left that show wet with sweat, some of it mine, after getting hugged by pretty much everyone that I bumped into, picked up off the floor or otherwise contacted. Not to get into morality here, but the moshpit is the most incredible form of therapy and the least damaging form of violence imaginable.

There it is. My overlong retelling of about eighty hours of my life, hours which consisted of very little sleep, too much alcohol, a mental semi-breakdown and a quest for total self-destruction. I enjoyed the hell out of it and would totally do it again, but...maybe not until next year!