Book (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver)

Movie (Atlantic City, Louis Malle, 1980)

Television Show (The Rockford Files, Hill St. Blues, Sopranos)

Band (Los Lobos)

Singer/Songwriter (John Hiatt)

and girl singer: that would have to be Mary Margaret O’Hara.

You may never have heard of her, except for the fact she’s the sister of SCTV alumnus Catherine O’Hara.

MMO is a kind of cross between early Ricki Lee Jones and some great jazz diva. She moves like a toy running out of batteries, sings like a religious movement, and all at a tempo that perhaps can best be described as alt.Canadian.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/walkoffame/ohara.html

She was a Toronto art student in the 70′s. Slowhopes first saw her at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, in the mid-1980′s, in a field, in a driving rain, hopped up on (for the first time) magic mushrooms and scotch (easier to sneak in than beer). She was part of a band (we think) called something like the Cuban Fence Porch Climbers, although that was 20-odd years ago and it was, ahem, raining that night.

We remembered, in the fog of our hallucination, and the mood of our whiskey, thinking the gal singing lead for the band was an absoute genius of tempo and tone–but it coulda been the ‘shrooms, right?

In the winter of ’87, we found ourselves in Parkdale, on the way west end of Queen Street in Toronto, at some venue of some sort, quite a bit more clear-headed. MMO had left the band by then, and sang solo, and we were there, waiting to discover it had just been the drugs.

It wasn’t. MMO was the real deal.

And shortly thereafter, she released her solo LP, Miss America, on Virgin Records. Slowhopes loved that record, and spent many a Vancouver rainy night at Birch and 10th Street, holed up in the Shaugnessey Apartments listening to it, predicting all manner of greatness for MMO–but instead, it turned out to be the only real album she ever made.

Despite that fact, MMO continues to be a bit of an urban legend,and Slowhopes really really wishes she’d just make another record.

There’s a class war brewing over the steps because personal trainers have turned the boulevard on 4th Street into a public gym. When Slowhopes lived there, sneaker companies would sometimes do shoe promotions. TV crews would shoot the workout artists, and needless to say, the steps were an outstanding view in more ways than the one looking out at the ocean.

Of course, it’s a little stressful to own one of the $7 million homes that line Adelaide (among them, Santa Monica Councilman Bobby Shriver and Don Bachardy the ex-lover of the late Christopher Isherwood), but the Santa Monica steps are also a wonderful example of the genius that is America when America gets it right: the steps are all about enjoying beauty, they’re as green an activity as you can get, they’re non-exclusive, accessible, fun, and free. Maybe it’s more of an example of California getting it really right– only now, there are cops posted, writing $158 citations to anyone who lies down (as Slowhopes did every day for 9 years) to stretch and do a few stomach crunches.

Wrong! (How can California, with the all-time workout artist as its gov, allow this to happen?)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/us/25santamonica.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Reply to: Job8548322111@craigslist.org
Post Until: Credit Crisis Ends, or Global Economy Returns to Medieval Era. Which ever comes first.

The U.S. Federal Treasury is seeking to hire a secretary who can help explain how to end the global credit crisis. Normally, we wouldn’t post such a significant job on craigslist, where any old unemployed, morbidly obsese, socially-challenged, Second Life-obsessed, professional-poker playing types can apply, but hey — desperate times, etc. etc.

I mean, face it: if they took all the economists from Princeton, Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago, Wharton Business School, MIT, Stanford, the London School of Economics, Oxford, Cambridge, and Germany, and locked them all in a gym and told them they couldn’t leave until someone sinks a three point shot, and as a result they never, ever left, do you think the global economy could get any worse than it is now? (Where were we the day they told all the economists that their jobs are just like meterologists–you get to be wrong 90% of the time and still get to keep your job, providing you have good chemistry with news and sports?)

Wanted: YOU have a facility with numbers, although the Ph.D from the above-mentioned elite institutions is probably optional at this stage. Any and all agility with addition and subtraction will be considered. A gift for multiplication highly desired. A passion for long division would be a gift from above.

YOU see macro-trends before macro-trends come crashing through the door, toppling the global economy like that 80 foot wave that sank Clooney in The Perfect Storm. Even spotting a micro-trend–for example noticing that small, quirky independents often hog all the Oscar nominations, would be appreciated, if only to keep us posted on what the good movies are, because we’re so over super hero sequels. We’ve asked the smartest people on the planet to weigh in on this global liquidity crisis, and frankly, we don’t like smart people so much anymore. Stupidheads–you have our ears!

YOU aren’t afraid to go negative in a room full of sunnysiders.  Frankly, over here at the Fed, we have all had just a few too many can-do conference calls with old Ayn Rand Hands, Alan Greenspan chatting from his tub in Georgetown about how fantastic American economic fundamentals are. We could use some hick from the sticks, or at least Bob Costas or some real midwestern bad haircut to come over here and tell us it’s the end of the beginning of two decades of hell, and bring along some sandwiches, because the free lunch has officially ended.

YOU are familiar with the terms derivatives, liquidity, trillion, TARP, Too Big To Fail, rescue package rather than bailout. That’s what we talk about when we talk about money these days, baby. (If you can explain deflation, run, don’t walk, over to the Treasury. We’ll keep the lights on!)

YOU have an interest in going on CNBC from time to time to pontificate about the state of the global economy. It wouldn’t hurt if you were a hottie of either sex–the better to take the viewers’ mind off the bad news you will invariably be delivering. If Aaron Eckhart’s agent reads this, he would make an excellent Secretary of the Treasury. Call us?

The Secretary of the Treasury is employed at the discretion of the President of the United States, or until the money runs out, whichever comes first. You will have at least $350 billion with which to spend your way out of this crisis, maybe more.

After all. The United States is simply too big to let fail.

This is a contract position. It may last until 2012. Maybe even until 2016 if the stimulus package takes and people all replace their DVD players with Blu-Rays at the exact same moment in early 2010. Questions? Email us at: soyouthinkyoucanbesecofthefed@gmail.com

• Compensation: To be discussed. It’s all about national service these days, so don’t get your hopes up.
• This is a part-time job. Some weekends, such as when it’s necessary to rescue Citigroup, et al, from oblivion.
• This is at a non-profit organization. LOL!
• Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster. This means you, Goldman-Sachs!
• Please, no phone calls about this job! We’re busy saving the economy!
• Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests. Yes, we got the memo, GM. Now go design a hybrid and leave us alone!

 

 

But Slowhopes grew up in Canada, and came of age dreaming of a Blue Bomber Grey Cup triumph, only to have his heart smashed into smithereens year after freaking year in the 1970′s by the Edmonton Eskimos, whose name Slowhopes can barely type without wanting to punch someone.

Tonight the Calgary Stampeders won the Grey Cup, 22-14 over the Montreal Alouettes, at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. It was a very Slowhopes kind of night–almost a sellout (“One of the largest Grey Cup crowds in its 96 year history,” said the radio play-by-play guy. “A near-capacity crowd!”)

Meanwhile, the Stampeders put the boots to the Alouettes in the second half, after nearly being blown out in the first half.

Slowhopes dipped his toe in the sportswriting pool a week back, writing a feature about the Stampeder QB Henry Burris, so we had the opportunity to hang out at McMahon Stadium one day prior to the Stampeders’s Western Final match v. Vancouver, which they won.

There’s two things about CFL players you notice when you’re down at field level: 1.They’re gigantic (relative to civilians; relative to NFL’s, they’re runts); and 2.They’re pretty much down to earth guys. CFL players earn about what a corporate media sports reporter earns, creating the absolutely unique (give or take the NCAA) situation where the guys interviewing the players all earn about the same amount of cash as the brunt of the fans attending the game.

It makes for a nice atmosphere.

http://www.cbc.ca/sports/football/story/2008/11/23/grey-cup-game.html

It  was better! Those were just a bunch of dumb sports events. This was a play. Plays aren’t televised, beer companies don’t sponsor them, and gasoline companies don’t issue stamps featuring the stars of plays, which is why we know who Bobby Orr is, but Willy Loman sounds like the name of the guy your old man used to play bridge with on Friday nights.

Bravo to Catherine, for saying to helll with the nattering nabobs of negativity, and pushing forward with Bone Cage!

Slowhopes salutes you!

http://thechronicleherald.ca/ArtsLife/1090879.html

This is actually a revision of an earlier post on slowhopes, but it’s better, and has nifty graphic art and links to other cool stuff.

http://thegrangehall.com/2008/10/20/growthiness/

How great is that?

Here’s Catherine’s bio in the Playwrights Canada Press:

Catherine Banks

Plays by Catherine Banks include Bone Cage, Eula’s Offer, The Summer of the Piping Plover (UpStart Theatre); Three Storey Ocean View (Mulgrave Road Theatre, Toronto Equity Showcase); and Bitter Rose (Women’s Theatre and Creativity Centre). Bitter Rose has aired on Bravo! Canada. Her work has been performed in Manitoba, Toronto and St. John’s at the LSPU Hall. Three Storey Ocean View won the Silver Medal in the 1995 du Maurier National Play Competition and was nominated for a Merrit Award for best new play in 2000. Bone Cage was awarded the Special Merit prize in the 2002 Theatre BC New Play Competition and was showcased at the National Arts Centre’s On the Verge 2005. Her work is poetic, darkly humorous, courageous and beautifully theatrical. Some of her characters, Lud in Three Storey Ocean View and Clarence in Bone Cage, have been described as Atlantic Gothic. Always a writer, Catherine started professional life as a Special Education teacher. She began writing plays while raising her children, Rilla and Simon. She currently lives and writes in Sambro, Nova Scotia.

Anyways, Catherine has been having her plays produced for a long time, so the only thing late blooming about her is getting a little national attention for her consistently excellent work. (She is studying to get an MFA because the irony of these gigs is that you may be a much-produced playwright short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award in drama, but unless you have an MFA, it’s impossible to get a job teaching it.)

But it gets even better: Banks, fed up with being told by artistic directors that Bone Cage had too many characters, too many set requirements, and too much gritty language to produce,said to hell with it, rented out a prestige theatre (the Neptune), raised 37K, helped build sets, drove to Halifax (she lives in Sambro, NS), and produced it herself, with the help of a few talented members of the Halifax theatre community.

Result: she made back over 36K, snagged critical kudos, and is now not only shortlisted, but Slowhoped!

There are thousands of playwrights out there — not to mention screenwriters, novelists, poets, bloggers — with a script in a drawer, who wait patiently for someone to give them permission to unleash it on the world.

But you know what? No one has very much invested in giving you that permission. Every artistic director at every theatre is under terrible pressure to put bums in seats–and that was before the economy caved in. They all have to sift through the scripts, arrange the time-consuming readings, conduct the workshops, give the notes, get the thing rewritten–either that, or they can reach into their grab bag for the latest Off-Broadway critical hit, arrange to get the rights, and produce a play that’s already been audience-tested.

And it’s just as dodgy for a book editor, or — particularly — a Hollywood development exec to ever push something new. New might be original. New might be Quentin Tarantino. But new might also be Skeet Ulrich making the cover of Vanity Fair magazine as the next major movie star.

I wonder if the person who pitched Skeet to Graydon Carter still works there?

We’re thrilled to see Catherine recognized for her writing, and inspired that she had the guts and determination and sheer doggedness to get it out into the world, instead of leaving it in her drawer.

This is how the Canada Council described Bone Cage in its release:

Drama

Catherine Banks, Halifax, Bone Cage.
(Playwrights Canada Press; distributed by the publisher)
(ISBN 978-0-88754-787-4)
A big play about tough lives in rural Nova Scotia. Bone Cage puts these lives under the microscope and scrutinizes them with piercing intelligence. The play resonates far beyond its rural setting to probe the struggles and hopes of people everywhere, particularly those trapped in dead-end jobs. At times it’s a struggle to dream. This play spans history and is a play for today – tragic, funny, nuanced and poetic.

Here’s part of what one Halifax blogger, Ron Foley Macdonald, said after seeing Bone Cage:

Surrounding the not-so-happy couple is the wreckage of two generations of broken families, limited economic opportunities and environmental degradation, all encapsulated by Jamie’s older half-sister Chicky, played with precise longing by Kate Lavender.

And yet in the opening scenes of the play, Catherine Banks provides enough late adolescent and early adult joy to remind us all that these are tough, real characters who take their enjoyment when they can get it.

Consequently, there’s enough profanity, drinking, violence and sex in the play to scare off polite audiences and mainstream producers. Put on independently by Forerunner’s Playwright’s Co-Op, Bone Cage is perhaps the most spectacular full-scale launch of a new Nova Scotia play ever.

Slowhopes has always treasured the journeymen, those third line grinders, cornerbacks coming off knee surgery, aging, immobile backup QB’s (hello Gus Ferrotte!) and of course, the Jamie Moyers of the world–guys in their mid-40′s, on their fifth or sixth team, grinding away at a reduced level of play but still collecting a major league paycheck on sheer guile.

This isn’t a new deal, either. Slowhopes has always revered the journeymen, all the way back to his beloved Winnipeg Jets, who were themselves a journeyman franchise in a journeyman pro hockey league (the World Hockey Association). People like Norm Beaudin, Dave Dunn and Slowhopes’ personal fave, Bobby Guindon, the personification of the third or fourth line grinder who always seemed to show up big in the spring, when the Jets were en route to winning yet another Avco Cup ( a trophy named after a journeyman finance company).

We were reminded of our journeyman love by the emergence of Matt Stairs, a New Brunswick guy who dreamt of playing in the NHL, tore up a knee or something, switched to baseball and then proceeded to spent the next 15 or 16 years swatting over 250 home runs for about a dozen major league teams.

All of which set the stage perfectly for Stairs’ pinch hit home run in Game 4 of the NLCS v. the Dodgers, a titanic blast which effectively put the Phils in the World Series for the first time in 25 years. It was also one of the hardest hit baseballs Slowhopes has ever seen.

The New York Times recently gave Matt some journeyman love:

http://mlb.mlb.com/media/video.jsp?mid=200810143618349

Phillies Have an Unlikely Mr. October

And then the night the Rangers won the Cup, in 1994, after 50something years of futility, rather than rioting, Rangers Fan celebrated in a way that was respectful of non-Ranger Fan, even as it was euphoric.

Result: no cars burned. No storefronts crashed in. 0 arrests.

Now we see they’ve brought hockey to Brooklyn. Sure, it’s minor league, Eastern Hockey League style hockey, but we’re talkin Brooklyn here!

Slowhopes is pro minor league sports. The tickets don’t cost much. The atmosphere is intimate, the players more accessible and the traffic getting out after a game far more manageable.

Just the other day, we were reflecting on how much we don’t miss going to see games these days, after a lifetime spent at arenas, ballparks and stadiums, looking for a trough to pee in.

We aren’t sure whether it’s the big-money, or the big showbiz, or simply the fact that games are for kids, and the grownups who take their kids to see them, then sit and do a slow boil over the price of everything.

Better you should take your kid to the boroughs to see the mighty Aces kick a little Eastern Hockey League ass!

This is from Monday’s New York Times:

Watch Out for That Stick, Er, Fist: Professional Ice Hockey Bursts Into Brooklyn