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This is me not blogging on a certain author's passing.

The End of Violence: A Lament

As First Published at www.Hockeyinsight.com

There is no nice way to put it. The National Hockey League is sharing a room with an elephant the size of Gibraltar and even if there were clear solutions neither the owners nor the PA have anyone in the driver’s seat with the fortitude to make tough decisions. It’s a case of a thousand cuts and if it doesn’t mean death it means a right proper castration at the alter of player safety.

Over the course of our favorite sport’s modern history, you might have been forgiven if you thought it mismanaged, bizarre, even a touch self-hating in parts, but you could never call it sterile. If fancy passing, iconic goals and Lady Byng-ing it up with the less fortunate are the head and heart of the league, then Sherwood dentistry, blood spitting fisticuffs and dirty checks are most certainly it’s guts. The Stan Mikita, Claude Lemieux and Gordie Howe legacies might not shine as brightly as Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and … Gordie Howe, but they’re there nonetheless and history would be sorely lacking without them.

Fighting, for starters, is on the way out, beginning with the CHL (more a weather vane for hockey’s big league than any other feeder system for any pro sport). David Branch has said as much when pressed, and it stands to reason that if the kids aren’t allowed to fight, then the services of enforcers won’t be required in the minors. That all but evaporates the pool of tough guys for the league to draft, unless they want to go nosing around the octagon to see if Keith Jardine knows how to skate.

That’s ok, because on the one hand, most fans consider fights to be an amusing but ridiculous sideshow, but on the other hand, watching Iginla trade knuckles with Lecavalier after two and a half periods of agitation, that’s something you tell your grandkids about. Now fighting has taken a convenient backseat to the newest bugaboo, head shots. Talks of banning or even curbing fights have been pushed back for a while, but it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. Head shots cause career ending concussions, brain spasms, and are in all ways a thing to be avoided. But players duck, players put their heads down, and in a league that lets mutants like Chara play against regular sized people, head shots are going to happen unless body contact is ruled out altogether.

The same forces that rally against demolition derbies, smoking in the workplace and unprotected sex are now lined against violence in hockey. No, not violence, just fighting, head shots, interference, charging, elbowing, hitting from behind, and a nice fat caveat reserved for whatever causes the next big injury.

So when Charlie Tator, the doctor with a man-sized hunger for his fifteen minutes, calls out Don Cherry for promoting an aggressive game, he does so with crippling, flat, sterile reason in his corner. Don can give him the one-fingered Kingston Salute, but he can’t sit down and argue because all the good doctor has to point to is Don Sanderson, or Steve Moore, or Mikael Tam or the dopey stream of players past and present coming out of the concussion closet. These are tragedies all, and products of violence in hockey. There is no more compelling motive than these examples, and no reasonable objections can be made against taking all measures to prevent them. Hockey is just a game, and a game is not worth more than life. End of story. Grapes will argue and preach for self-governance amongst the players, a policy he knows is doomed to fail, all the while loving the kids on the ice and the game itself the way guys like Tator can’t understand. The way Don sees it, hockey is one or two new rules away from cashing in the very spirit that makes the game great in the name of safety and reason.

Hockey is dangerous. These boys get paid to go real real fast, to throw their bodies around, to drop the gloves and to hurt each other on purpose. They do it because there is a desire for violence amid the glory, a need for the unsanitary that puts asses in the stands at Joe Louis Arena the same way it did at the Coliseum. You don’t get the frenzied electricity that makes hockey fans hockey fans without the threat of fists, sticks, shoulders and elbows bubbling in the pot. They go hand in hand and it’s what makes our sport better than anything else out there. No one would ever suggest that the game can’t change with the times, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. At some point, when someone gets hurt, the NHL, it’s players and it’s fans have to say “So it goes” or abandon it altogether.

Hockey is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be played tomorrow in such a way that would negate all but the most basic risks. Players could skate across center ice with their heads down, wingers could screen goalies with no thought of reprisals, and the weakest of men could taunt the strongest with as many barbs as they could imagine. We can have a kinder, gentler NHL and there is sickly, constant pressure to move in that direction.

The NHL’s debate about violence is really a debate about identity. Hockey is a sport like no other and the rough stuff is a big piece of what sets it apart. Without the mean body checks, the fighting, the missing teeth and the violence, how close does hockey really get to soccer on ice?

Fall on Your Knees: Bummer

What the hell do authors have against Cape Breton?  If you only read CanLit and never visited you would think the whole island is a festering pool of hateful priest rape, incest, polio, crippling poverty, depression, drownings, murder, am I missing anything?  This Bird, Marie Anne-MacDonald, follows a long line of hack Feminist authors and writes the most depressing tripe, full of evil weak-spined men and strong but bat shit insane women hacking their way through horrible lives.

Balls.

I'd like to think, and I suspect, that our author has gone through some horrible experience, and that this sort of sewage is her therapy rather than a product of manic depression for manic depression's sake.  The story is revolting and desensitizing for no good reason other than to shock.  Not shock us out of apathy, or into action, only to make us feel sick.  

I've been to Cape Breton, if it's poor but by god you couldn't want a more beautiful spot filled with the nicest people one could hope to meet.  So I spent the better part of the book irritated.

The text is minimalist in all the wrong ways, and the cadence makes you sea sick before you even realize that you're reading rape scene after rape scene.

Perdita Felicien presented this novel after consulting her "Literary friend".  If losing at your sport doesn't qualify you for CBC darling status, then not reading regularly will.

I am super glad this book is in the Circle of Winfrey, I was getting blue just thinking about the books I like that she has endorsed.  Steer Clear of Fall on your Knees  

Avatar: Good

Before I talk about Avatar, I want to talk about Transformers II.

This photo is not from Transformers II you say.  No, but I think it illustrates a point.

Transformers two was ridiculous and anyone who doesn't think so is foolish or a bean counter.  But Transformers had something going for it, not plot, not acting, not je ne sais quoi.  Transformers had Wicked awesome robots tearing each other apart for a good chunk of the movie.  Robots fighting Robots is very cool, so I liked Transformers, much to the chagrin of my more snobbish associations.  That said I had to like it despite what seemed like a great deal of effort on the part of the filmmakers to evoke a contrary Response.  My love for Optimus Prime can move mountains.
Avatar is not Transformers.  Avatar is passably acted, by that I mean it isn't revolting at any point.  There are no Jar Jar moments and there is no Shia Lebeouf.  The plot has been compared to Dances with Wolves, but I think gets closer to Braveheart.  Insofar as the plot is a vehicle for the visuals, fine.  They went to amazing lengths, considering the fantastic scope of the story, to avoid insulting my intelligence.  Avatar is a fucking great movie!  It's butter on whole grain popcorn.   The 3D is great without being ridiculous, the story is exciting and hits all the action high notes that make the 10 year old in me squeal.

There is a scene in this film where a Mech fights a Warrior Princess riding a Lizard Panther that lasts a good 5 minutes.  For all of you who know what I'm talking about, just rest your eyes for five seconds and think about that.

vs

The Film is PG but it didn't feel like that hampered it, you can get good action movies without chopping heads off it seems and I'd be pleased as punch to take my kids to see it for an excuse to don the Buddy Hollies again.

Calls of Racism, of Neo-Colonialism, of Blasphemy, of deep fried leftist propaganda, etc etc have been, um, called.  Maybe, but lighten up already.  It's a goddamn movie.

I had a coupon for a free movie, but the talking acne colony at the concession/ticket stand told me my coupon was only good for 2D movies, and Avatar was a 3D movie.  That extra D cost me a mortgage payment.  Imagine my surprise.  I was pretty uptight when I sat down, and because I had heard a handful of reviews that said it was garbage I was ready to ruin the movie for everyone, but it was not Garbage.  It was good.  The McDonald's Avatar toys that came with happy meals, they were garbage.   

This movie made more money than you could spend.  It is not the greatest movie ever made.  It is just awesome.

Nikolski: Multicultural Montreal Makes Me Merry

Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski is the reason "Canada Reads" is awesome.  I shouldn't think I'd ever have occasion to read this book otherwise, and I really liked it.  It was a charming, light and funny read and absolutely unlike anything I've read since Fruit last year.  That it won a GG for translation probably means it captures most of that which is usually lost in translation, so I do feel comfortable saying Dickner maybe swung for the fences a little bit more than he needed to, but the result still feels like a comfy small town story that spans the country and the Americas.

      The picture he paints of Montreal is really cool.  I'm so soaked with Toronto-centric media that having a go at the multicultural hodge podge of big cities through a different lens is refreshing to the point of giddiness.  The characters are troubled without being tragic, and the overall arc of the whole shebang is happy.  It's a quick read and it makes you smile.  I should be frequenting that city a lot more than I do. 

Generation X: Death to Hipsters

The world is going to end in a great ball of nuclear fission, and all the Pepsi bottles from all the landfills in Michigan and the great plastic garbage bag continent floating in the North Atlantic will be vaporized and instantly kicked up into a whirlwind the size of Australia. The prevailing winds from the fallout are going to rain down liquid polymers all across the eastern seaboard and well into Manitoba, instantly fossilizing anyone caught by surprise, fusing charred flesh with bits of snow fence and dismembered GI Joe arms and legs.  And when a society arises from the ashes, half-cockroach half-Nebraska field hands who's ancestors happened to be exploring Cold war bomb shelters at just the right time, they'll stare in awe at the Tableau of bipedal Titans frozen in time, wearing big bead necklaces and kaki shorts standing in line for chances to win six months of free text messaging.

Thanks to Canada Reads 2010 and Douglas Coupland, I've had to re-evaluate my stance on reading in public, kinder eggs and hygiene for hygiene's sake.

Verdict:  I cannot say I am very fond of Generation X.

 The heros of this novel clumsily hate all things plastic, workaday and futile.   Drinking themselves numb in the desert at what they suspect and hope is the end of the world, they tell beautiful little stories, true or otherwise, and seek out small measures of epiphany all the while minding their waistlines and abandoning all but the purely masochistic sexual relationships.  Dropping completely the ambition and money lust that characterized the eighties so appropriately for middle class America (Alex P. Keaton be Damned).  














Wikipedia declares that I belong to this navel grazing subcategory, and insofar as it means I am angst ridden, I suppose they have an argument.  So houses are too expensive, job security is a thing of the past (hehe) and the world is free falling to disaster whether I tell it to stop or not.  But I came of age in the tech boom and bust, where kids with vague ideas were driving cars normally reserved for first round draft picks, all on the tabs of Boomers and their mutual funds who had sensibly weathered a handful of nifty recessions and figured it all was fine  and dandy. There really is one born every minute and since we're not running out of bubbles any time soon all these fatalists could have had their three-car garages  if they had slugged it out for another 5 years.

Cynical is not the same as intelligent, but Coupland declares everyone should stare at his protagonists as if they were dilettante sages in a world gone stupid.  They can only feel in ironies; imagine achieving enlightenment by rolling your eyes for seven years.    

Maybe if I was born five years earlier, and in an AMC Javelin on it's third clutch, and tended bar across the street from a boarding house where William Burroughs once got arrested, maybe then I would "Get" Generation X, and then Ms. Ryder would be asking for MY number.



The saving grace of this book is the ending, a moment of beauty that has to be read to be believed and is really quite something.

I Can't Get a Decent Haircut in This Town

There is an element of alchemy to haircutting that I do not understand.  I would never suggest the trade is an unskilled one, on the contrary it is an art upon which a great deal depends when it comes to a professional's clientele.  No matter your station in life, a bad haircut is worn at your spirit's peril and on the other hand a terrific hair cut can open doors and glide the rest of you through them.  I have extensive experience with both these scenarios.

I do not consider myself a particularly difficult client when it comes to hair cuts.  My hair is extremely thick and that very fact has been a consistent if one-sided topic with every haircutter I have ever encountered, from the hyper-permed Thunderdome refugee who saved me from my mullet, to the vicious electric razor-wielding OAC football captain bent on my ritual humiliation.  It may be thick, but all I ever wanted for the last two decades was a number two on the sides and back, and short on top.

There are no shortage of Barbers in Georgetown.  In the radius of a short walk I have half a dozen options when in comes to trimming down an imperceptibly greying blessedly thick head of hair.  The generic cheapskate unisex option is open, but the one next to me is lousy with that particular militant single mom vibe, they remember you and your specific opinions on a wide range of subjects and their quality of work runs in direct correlation to your political compatibility. Not good.



There is a wonderful man across the street who runs a spartan outfit wedged between a diner, and a vacuum repair shop.  A giant poster of a peasant girl from the old country picking grapes with cleavage that could launch a thousand ships at least dresses the far wall along with hot rod calenders that cover most of the chips out of decades old paint and plaster.  The fellow smiles, makes a few off colour but appropriate comments about the weather in the beautifully broken english no one can pull off as charmingly as old Italian men and sets to work humming bits of music that probably comes from Operas.  This would be the most perfect hair cutting place in the entire world, were it not for the fact that the haircuts are horrible.  I find clumps of two inch too long hair for days afterwards and end up doing my own sad hack job that makes me look like an malnourished Okie up for the picking season.  I could even let that slide, but for this gentleman rubs his crotch against my shoulder for the entire duration of my haircut.  I've been to him twice, and I've been subtly molested twice.  His place doesn't look very prosperous, and I sort of feel bad about dodging it, but where I come from, unsolicited sexual man-healing is a deal breaker.

There is a place in our mall staffed by half a dozen retired gentleman who have been rehashing the same argument in some Eastern Block tongue for as long as I've been living here.  You come out of their place looking like a bad Sopranos extra, but after a wash it ends up being a pretty good haircut.  Unfortunately I've been effectively blacklisted, as my son was momentarily possessed by a shrieking demon earlier this year during my hair cut that very quickly cleared the place out.  I can't speak their language, but I know fear when I see it, these guys pegged my one year old as something diabolical, and cross themselves whenever I get within twenty feet of their shop.  Bummer.

My fall back has been this proper little quintessential barber shop in town.  The haircuts are somewhere between good and very good, but never very good.  The atmosphere is good, relaxed, busy, old posters and photos concerning the town, hockey, the longevity of the business cover the walls and evoke a simpler time.  The Barber is something of a celebrity in his own right, being forever voted the town's favourite and counting such luminaries as Mike Holmes and ... Mike Holmes as customers.  He greets everyone as "Neighbor" and works contentedly and appropriately.

but...

His politics are just wonky.  He opens every haircut with a loaded comment about our boys overseas, the untrustworthy nature of the Persian, and the unstoppable wave of crime throughout the GTA thanks to decades old conspiracy laden immigration policies.  He gages your response and will weave the conversation from there between hockey, local issues, personal anecdotes and back to charged nationalist-minded diatribes that back you into a with us or against us corner all the while with a razor blade centimeters from your jugular.  I don't mind politics, and I love jawing with hard liners of any persuasion, but in the prone position I'm never 100% certain I'm safe with this fellow, and there are too many places around here to dump a body with half a haircut where no one would ever find it.

I'm thinking of growing my hair out, but I always look like such an idiot...