On Saturday I attended a performance of the Universal Gospel Choir in part because one of my friends Adri Lake (herself an accomplished musician) was in the second row. This is a very entertaining performance if you like massed voices and complex harmonies. The UGC are a non-demoninational group of sixty singers who perform inspirational music from a wide variety of world sources. You would probably expect the standard negro-spirituals but they also performed well music from South Africa, Cameroon as well as Jewish and Korean Buddhist music. Since 1985 they perform for charities in a variety of locations. The choir was a sea of ethnically diverse faces like the casting for a future planet in Star Trek but oddly enough, no-one on the stage at that time of African or African-American origin (I've since been informed that they do have a black woman who wasn't at that performance). Actually, if you close your eyes, you might imagine the stereotypical heavy-set black men and women (and maybe Clinton?) swaying on the stage. The choir is directed by the energetic Brian Tate who involved the audience more than once by engaging them to add their voices to the mix. Most amusing was a song where the audience and choir praised the holy virtues of coffee. Here is a link to their official site >>

My latest calculation from the handy quickdrive.com page: 13.2L/100km or 21.2mpg (300.2km/39.913L* roughly 3/4 tank). Okay, I have been driving a bit fast this last tank what with trying to make appointments. Compare with my previous calc.

Norman Jewison talk
Thanks to Praxis I was able to attend a Master Class with legendary director Norman Jewison held at Emily Carr. The format was a question and answer 'moderated' by Mina Shum (director of Double Happiness) and in part was meant to promote the Canadian Film Center, a graduate school of sorts that has had an impressive pedigree of Canadian film alumni (Shum among them). Jewison, of course, has had a career that has spanned many decades of film. A short list of his accomplishments include In the Heat of the Night, The Russians are coming! The Russians are Coming!, Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof, and recently, the Oscar nominated Hurricane. Chances are you've probably seen one of his films, especially if you are a student of film. Clips of In the Heat of the Night and The Russians are Coming!... were shown.

Although I would have liked to have asked Jewison some questions of my own, Shum did a capable job of coaxing some stories from Jewison who had worked with actors as diverse as Sidney Poitier and Doris Day, filmed dramas, musicals and live television. Of his films, Jewison said that much of his success was due to the timing of his content. In the Heat of the Night struck a cord in the middle of the civil rights battles. The Russians are Coming!... was topical at the height of the Cold War.

I was more interested to hear about Jewison's lessons for creativity. Jewison emphasized the importance of owning the material, which explains why he has been the producer for nearly all of his films. From the opening clip of In the Heat of the Night, in which Poitier's character, the black cop from Illinois, is arrested by the hick deputy and is brought before Rod Steiger's cracker sheriff before finally revealing that he is also a cop, Jewison showed how effective the long reveal was (though I would have liked to ask him how he could sell such a slow opening today).

To the artsy Emily Carr audience, Jewison emphasized how their primary job as filmmakers is entertainment and not only should they tell stories that interest them, that they need to make films that interest others. "The worst thing you can do is bore somebody," he said. Harkening back to his beginnings in theatre, (an origin he shared with contemporaries John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet), Jewison said that character and plot had given way to visuals. He said that of directors today, he considers Quentin Tarantino a theatrical director. See Jewison's IMDB filmography >>

This is an interesting interview by the CBC of Mike Scheuer, who at one time was one of only a handful of people who was concerned with hunting down Osama bin Laden. In the interview Scheuer is critical of U.S. foreign policy for giving bin Laden ammunition in the PR war in the Middle East. Read it here >>

Capital bombardment
The cool photo in the inset is an overhead shot of the Battleship Iowa thundering out a salvo (in 1984). What I like about it is that it shows the water displacement from the shock of the explosives used to launch the massive shells through its 18-inch barrels. Just the wake from the shock force alone would probably have tipped a ship of the line from the 18th century. Imagine actually being at the receiving end of those guns.. See the larger photo here >>

One of the cooler stories in the past two days was the role Bridgestone Tire had in rehabilitating an aquarium dolphin in Japan who had lost her tail to a mysterious cell-destroying disease. When Fuji, 35-year old dolphin began suffering from a necrotizing disease, her handlers were forced to save her life by amputating her tail fin. However, that left her listless and unable to keep up with the other dolphins. So in stepped Bridgestone who spent thousands of dollars developing a rubber fin that can be attached for short periods of time to her body. This week she jumped with it for the first time. Read more about it here >>

Last week I picked up vol. 1 of "The Walking Dead", a horror comic by Robert Kirkman. Essentially, it is written like a classic zombie movie but rendered as a comic book (drawn by Tony Moore). It begins after Rick Grimes, a small town police officer wakes up in hospital where he had been in a coma following a shooting incident. Similar to "28 Days Later" he wakes up to find the town in shambles and inhabited by lurching zombies. These zombies are more in the classic slow-moving but numerous variety. Grimes loads up with guns and goes looking for his wife and son. He eventually finds them on the outskirts of zombie-infested Houston hiding in a campsite with other survivors where they believe they are safe. Of course, they are not. The black & white art style is quite nice and the story rolls along like a juicy though formulaic zombie-survivor movie. If you liked the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" and "28 Days Later" you'll bite into this like another trip to the multiplex. Remember, aim for the head and keep moving! Read more about it here >>

The New Scientist has an interview with a former interrogator for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. Some of this I heard before from the Mark Bowden article in the Atlantic Monthly where the same man was interviewed. In this article, Michael Koubi relates about the psychology of the interrogator and the prisoner. What I found interesting was how he said the very few people who didn't break for him were either too unschooled or 'primitive', so he couldn't use any mental tricks to outsmart them. Also interesting is when he says it would find it difficult to interrogate Saddam Hussein because he himself was an interrogator. Read it here >>

Yesterday was the release of one of the most anticipated PC games ever, the sequel to Half-Life which has been nearly five years in the making. I don't have the machine that can play it, unfortunately, but my roomie Kelvin does. He graciously allowed me to play for half an hour and it is a really good game. Then he had to kick me off so I wouldn't spoil any bits. I heard him playing it long into the night... What is good about it? It goes without saying that graphics are top notch but it is the graphics technology that is a bit creepy. The human characters have lipsynching that is eerily realistic. More uncanny valley for you. There is some interesting and fun physics interaction between objects. And then there is the great Half-Life game design in which you the character are immersed in a story that has seamless loads between areas. You are being funneled but it doesn't feel that way as you are playing. Half-Life 2 has the feeling of being polished while Half-Life was a real breakthrough.

I spent some of yesterday trying to find out from various sources what had happened to the woman. The police told me they couldn't for privacy reasons. Then I called the major news radio station and spoke to the news director who was polite but said they wouldn't report on it either because they "didn't want to add to the woman's troubles." Then I spoke to a local community paper and the person who answered the phone said that she hoped the woman jumped after tossing her dog. That feeling was echoed by the other people I called, one of whom, an editor at the major daily, said otherwise they wouldn't report on it unless it tied up lots of traffic. I even tried calling the SCPA and the Vancouver Animal Control to see if they knew because of the death of the dog. But they knew nothing. Finally, on the way to work this morning I stopped one of the people I recognized from the incident yesterday and he said that he believed the police had pulled the woman back in and saw no evidence that she had jumped when he saw them clearing the scene later. Hopefully that is true.

A block away from my building there was a jumper ten stories up in one of the highrises that make up Yaletown. At first I didn't know what the handful of people on the sidewalk opposite were looking at but then, looking up myself, I saw the person. Still confused, I wondered why they were staring at a window washer. But then I saw that it was a woman carrying what I thought was a bundle. Actually it was her white dog. I thought then that maybe it was filming but then there were no cameras present. Then I realized finally that it was a jumper.

I watched and talked with the other people. I said to one: "I wonder if we are encouraging her by watching." "Maybe!" was his response and we continued watching. People were talking to their friends and one person to the police on their cell phones. The police arrived a few minutes later, leading to a car jam.

I wondered briefly about going back for my camera but then I thought, what would be the point of catching her last moments on film. It would be goulish. Yet, there I was standing for ten minutes. The woman was screaming: "help me!" and she was swearing and crying about something. She was shouting: "fuck you!" People paused below to watch and then hurried on. One woman even dragged her two children quickly underneath the woman before the police could usher her away.

Fifteen minutes on I looked up and saw the flash of white when she threw down her dog. The dog landed on the ground in front of her building with a very heavy crash, obviously dead. As I was walking away I could hear her saying: "I'm sorry!" and "I love you!"

Afterwards I tried calling the police to see if they would tell me what happened to her. Two people told me they couldn't because of privacy reasons!