Drifting without direction, crippled by convenience and firmly affixed to the furniture, the hamster-like humans featured in Pixar’s recent animated epic are meant to remind us of ourselves – those of us still inhabiting this obsolete orb called Earth. It’s a light-hearted but heart-breaking exposé of our tendencies to become motionless machines of malaise. Funnily enough, in the midst of our laconic laziness, it’s a robot that is reminding us how to be human.

If you’ve ever wished you were more inquisitive and adventurous, and able to find meaning and value in the mundane refuse that surrounds you, you should meet Wall*E. The tiny tank-like trash-compactor robot from the movie of the same name, Wall*E is a binary binner that puts the most avid dumpster-diver to shame. He can find more excitement in a thrown-away VHS tape of an old musical than most of us exhibit when we encounter major milestones in our lives.

Seeing Wall*E celebrate what the rest of us would abandon, and innovate where the rest of us would have given up, was embarrassingly enlightening. It was as if Wall*E had called me an unimaginative and lethargic sad-sack who should start being more grateful and involved with my surroundings and clean up after myself. Except, of course, this was communicated through chirps, beeps, metal fingers tapping together, timid politeness, and plenty of old-timey musicals.

Sometimes, when an episode of Gilmore Girls shows up on my TV (I’m not sure how they keep doing that, although I’m starting to suspect my wife might have something to do with it), I find it hard to focus on all the Stars Hollow drama. It’s not that Luke’s Diner doesn’t have enough gossip to go around: it’s just that the dialogue hogs all the attention. It seems the screenwriters are hijacking each piece of dialogue as means of showing off their own cleverness.

It’s like that with the movie Juno: the leading lady’s mouth produces a non-stop stream of well-written idioms and clever proclamations that seem uncomfortably out-of-place in a 16-year-old. It’s less like character development, and more like ventriloquism. While Juno’s motormouth provides the bulk of the levity in the movie, it certainly makes it a little harder to believe she is anything more than a deliberately constructed container for the screenwriter’s ideas.

“It’s just that you’re so cool and you don’t even try,” confesses Juno near the end of the movie, to a shuffling Paulie Bleeker. “Actually,” he stammers back, his voice squeaking a bit. “I try really hard.”

Like Bleeker, Juno is a movie caught awkwardly between earnestness and pretentiousness. The visual and sonic ideas are precious and artful, but its cleverness kind of clouds the sincerity. By the time Juno and Bleeker are playing their acoustic duet at the end of the show, it’s hard to tell if Juno has actually changed that much from the Stooges-loving 70s-punk-rock chick she claimed to be, or if it’s just another excuse to include a great song.

Best moment: The opening credits, a live/animated hybrid accompanied by a great folk song called “All I Want is You,” by a guy I’ve never heard of named Barry Loius Polisar.

Most questionable moment: The abundance of Napoleon Dynamite-isms. One of the very first spoken lines in the movie is this: “Jeez Banana, shut your friggin’ gob, okay?” I kept expecting Juno to bust out the “Vote for Pedro” t-shirt.

I paid two pounds (approximately 0.9 kilograms, for you Canadians) for Radiohead’s intangible new release, the digitally delivered seventh album, called “In Rainbows.” Since the stunt was announced in early October 2007, this album has everybody talking, but for the first time in Radiohead’s career, the conversation has nothing to do with their music.

“In Rainbows” is music to become familiar with, not music that captures your attention. It’s not music to share with your family and friends, unless you’re hosting a “Serious Music Discussion Night.” It’s not music you listen to for fun, unless you define fun as “a period of discouragement and longing.” Plain and simple, like much of the Radiohead catalogue, “In Rainbows” is music to be lonely to.

The album opens with “15 Step.” As electronic drums set up the song’s over-complicated rhythm, drummer Phil Selway joins in to add a little more confusion. Thom Yorke begins inserting quotes he heard during the day: “Won’t take my eye of the ball,” “Did the cat get your tongue?” and so forth. You can’t sing along – because you don’t actually want to, because the words are unclear, and because your voice doesn’t sound good when you sing like Thom Yorke. Congratulations, you’ve just been alienated.

“Bodysnatchers” takes over, introducing Radiohead’s first memorable rock riff since “Just.” The panting drums carry the song like a dogsled team. Each time this track starts, within three seconds, I’ve got my air guitar plugged in. “Has the light gone out for you?” Yorke demands, “Cause the light’s gone out for me.” This is a rock song for the apocalypse – but then again, Radiohead songs were bred for no other occasion.

Track 3 – bear with me, this isn’t actually a track-by-track review – is when the album’s mood and personality is finally established. “Don’t get any big ideas,” the listener is encouraged. “They’re not gonna happen.” Selway’s waltz rhythm is purposely ironic, taunting the listener with a rhythm you’d be tempted to snap your fingers to, while Thom Yorke is busy pissing pessimism all over the percussion.

Throughout this record, you’ll find that drummer Phil Selway is given one of the most prominent roles on this album, with his human rhythms winning out over the machines. His diverse beats, from the meandering hip-hop of “All I Need” to the quick straight-time rhythm of “Weird Fishes,” provide something tangible for the listener to hold on to. It’s a vital role to play in an album that doesn’t make an effort to stick in your head.

If you’re in the mood for a little bit of isolation, with a side dish of “haunting melodies,” this is the record for you. In public, this record alienates, but in private, it provides nothing but empathy. If you ever find yourself commuting to work on mass transit, lost in an anonymous sea of faces and burdened by the insincerity all around you, put on “Videotape” and let the scattershot percussion blend in with the sound of traffic and movement that surrounds you, and let the cyclical, soothing piano line carry you off to the pearly gates. Keep in mind that when Thom Yorke says this will be on videotape, he only means that figuratively. It will actually be on TiVo.

Music has changed so much since “OK Computer” and “Kid A” took everybody by surprise. After all of Radiohead’s vital work providing new creative direction for music, it seems they’ve finally arrived at a sound and a style that is firmly their own – and it’s a style that revels in despair, remains in darkness, and relishes desperation. While for many, this type of musical sadism helps heal wounds, for me, it suggests that it’s time to be looking for music that is actually looking forward. It is Thom Yorke’s line from “Faust Arp” that summarizes Radiohead’s new release for me: “I love you, but enough is enough.”

The 2007 Calgary Folk Music Festival, a four-day foray into the world’s best music, took place during the last week of July 2007 at Prince’s Island Park, and the resulting noises and sounds made me wonder what on earth I’ve been doing with my ears my whole life. For posterity and for your perusal, I present to you, The 10 Most Amazing Performances of the 2007 Calgary Folk Music Festival.

(All photos taken by Kevan Gilbert, unless otherwise noted)

10. Final Fantasy

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Gunn]

Owen Pallet (who performs as Final Fantasy) is not a solo violinist, he’s a one-man orchestra with shirt-tails and foot-pedals. The virtuosic kid has so much talent and innovation that it makes me want to scream, but that would interrupt his music – and that would be blasphemous.

I don’t know how long he’s been playing the violin, but it’s as if he reached the limit of training and theory and started thinking, “In what other ways can I use this violin? Can I pluck its strings? Can I play it lying flat, like I’m sawing a two-by-four? Can I yell at it? Can I sing while I play it? Can I use guitar looping pedals to make a symphony?”

The answer to all these questions was yes, and Pallet’s innovation was transcendent. He used dissonance only as necessary, careful to employ nausea and noise only to make the beautiful passages even prettier. His lush loops let him accompany himself, sometimes stepping up to his keyboard to introduce new layers, and regularly offering his voice as an additional instrument, his unassuming tenor giving way to a heavenly falsetto. Owen Pallet’s performances this weekend were groundbreaking tutorials on how to subvert the cold rules of reality to instead fulfill a fantasy.

9. Nathan

“Trans Am, take me away,” she sings, a careful, child’s voice from a mouth on a face that belongs on a living room figurine. Her name is Keri Latimer, and her two pom-poms of hair atop her head only add to the precocious music that sounds much, much too mature to belong to her. Evoking Eisley and the Innocence Mission from verse to bridge to chorus, the dark folk songs of Nathan disarm, unhand and enchant with startling force.

Harmonizing from stage-right with line-for-line precision is Shelley Marshall, whose black Johnny Greenwood locks obscure her face as she pumps a purple accordion in time to a shuffling beat. The beatkeeping is done by an aggressively talented percussionist who somehow manages to balance and play his guitar atop his drums while keeping rhythm with his feet, occasionally switching it up to blow breezy solos into a mounted harmonica. Meanwhile, the ironclad bassist keeps the band rocksteady with his grounded fretwork. This band, hailing from Winnipeg, is a lighthouse on the plains; they’re a unique prairie beacon that gave us some beautifully unified performances, and managed to upend all our best guesses as to who this mysterious “Nathan” really is.

8. Six String Nation

The arbitrarily chosen assortment of musicians that filled the side stage on Saturday morning were not what you’d call a natural fit. The ensemble was made up of four members from Lubo Alexendrov’s Bulgarian gypsy group, two Americana country-styled bluesmen on lap and pedal steels, an unseen bass player, very Canadian songster Hawksley Workman and his everpresent sidekick, Mr. Lonely (aka, Todd Lumley).

While many of the mixed-musician sessions that took place this weekend found the performers taking turns to perform their own songs, Six String Nation was an hour-long jam session. Each musician would get the chance to set the pace with a rhythm, a chord or a riff, and the other players would weave in and out with surprising dexterity. You’d be amazed, as we were, how well the pedal steel can get along with gypsy folk, or how a disco beat set by Hawksley on the drums can accompany a country dirge. This was beautiful improvisation, on-the-fly inspiration that came to define what it means to be folk.

7. Bettye Lavette

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jenniedo]

Since when do legendary soul divas from Detroit stop by to pander to placid white audiences on the Canadian prairies? The Calgary crowd was preoccupied with emitting friendly vibes and folksy expectations, and suddenly Bettye Lavette brought the funk. Her very serious, very incredible backing band set up an infectious groove, and with a Jackson-esque yelp into a wireless mic from backstage, Lavette strutted out in an all-white outfit to begin breaking our hearts en masse.

Out here in the Canadian west, the closest we come to funk and soul is odor and theology. I’d wager that after her show concluded and Lavette swaggered backstage again, at least half the audience pulled out their “to do” lists and wrote down, “Get some funk.” The Bettye Lavette concert was an astonishing explosion of Motown energy that made all of us wish we had even 10% of the rhythm, soul and sexuality that was bring broadcast from the stage. But in true soul form, the sensation was not called inadequacy, it was empowerment. Soul powah.

6. Sarah Slean

“I wore pink for you, Calgary,” teased Ms. Slean, striking a pose at the lone grand piano at the centre of the mainstage. Slean is both cute enough to get away with that, and talented enough to still be taken seriously playing the piano in a pink dress with pink heels. She’s got arms and legs as thin as two pairs of chopsticks, which is half sexy and half hellish, her shrunken frame making us all think about metabolism, anorexia, drugs and other things that make people skinny. Whatever experiences Slean has struggled through, they inform a dark, deep and soaring collection of melodies and words which must be some of the must beautiful songs ever written.

Sarah Slean’s rich, angelic alto never once missed her intended note. Her classically-trained fingers seemed to know the piano’s needs and wants, with five microphones dipped into the open grand’s torso to pick up and transmit every key played. Slean’s performance was transcendent and charming, intimate and explosive. With no accompanying band and no backup vocalists, Sarah Slean sat alone at the piano and provided one of the most pitch-perfect solo performances of the festival.

5. Rufus Wainwright

Surrounded by nine talented men in stripes, and himself decked out in an absurd costume of brown lederhosen, Rufus Wainwright was clearly in his element. Bursts of cinematic jazz from a brass section of three, caterwauling piano rhythms from Rufus himself when he wasn’t busy gesturing grandly at the mic, and surround-sound choir backup from all nine of his band members made for a lush, well-orchestrated sound. There was nothing but bliss and revelry from Rufus, whose little boy smile never left his face during the whole performance.

Rufus had the privilege of being Thursday’s closing act, and his Broadway-style performance sent people home to bed with a pleasant buzz of satisfaction. His decision to conclude the concert with his cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was brilliant; he had the whole crowd in a swaying singalong. While the Folk Fest was just another tour stop for Rufus, his presence was meaningful, and gave attendees a hopeful pride in the future of Canadian music, as well as for the rest of the Fest.

4. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings

Funk is hard work. Demonstration: the Dap Kings, possibly the hardest working band at the Festival. Their extremely tight dress code supplied an extremely tight sound, but their formal suits didn’t stop them from sweating the night away. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings poured their hearts into their soul — they did it with brass, they did it with class, and they did it with pure, unstoppable funk.

Sharon Jones herself is from the hometown of James Brown, and it seems like soul runs freely in that city. “Lock up your sons!” the guitarist (moonlighting as MC) declared, before Jones overtook the stage like freshly freed prisoner, wild eyes ready to woo you, voice ready to vindicate you for the sin of being a boring-ass white person. During the performance, she taught the crowd how to dance (instructions, demo AND danceable music included), and her capable MC/guitarist did a phenomenally classy job making us all feel good. Besides Bettye Lavette and the New Orleans Social Club, no other show came close to showing off the sheer muscle and discipline of the fabulous Sharon Jones and her Dap Kings.

3. New Orleans Social Club

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Digg Doug]

The very existence of the New Orleans Social Club makes me want to permanently disown irony. While many bands (let’s say, Tokyo Police Club, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and other similarly-named groups) choose names that “ironically” have nothing to do with their group affiliation or place of origin, the New Orleans Social Club is overwhelmingly, breathtakingly, unapologetically legitimate.

Consisting of some of New Orlean’s most accomplished, elite instrumentalists, these five black musicians got together after Hurricane Katrina claimed their equipment, their homes, and some of the city’s best music venues. The NOSC play a devastatingly cool blend of funk, jazz and blues that is so gritty, it exfoliates your heels. Check it: piano man Henry Butler is blind, and lead guitarist Leo Nocentelli unleashes blistering solos upon your head while staring you down from behind his foreboding shades. The performance by the New Orleans Social Club was probably the most unexpectedly awesome showdown of the whole weekend.

2. Hawksley Workman

Mr. Workman dispensed three eclectic performances this weekend, and none of them ended with the audience still sitting down. From Hawksley’s warbling “Oooo”s to the listeners’ adoring “ahhh”s and the eventual standing Os, these performances featured Hawksley’s expert manipulation of vowels and consonants into blistering, poetic rock and roll.

On Friday night’s mainstage, Hawklsey’s brisk performance mingled with purple stage lights, blue twilight and his delicious backing band The Wolves, and steadily coerced the frightened crowd into believing that his brazen songs really were as colourful and tasty as they claimed to be. Tracks from his latest album (a sedate, folksy affair called “Treeful of Starling”) blossomed from bleak saplings into living, breathing, walking forests, and songs from his older albums found themselves injected with unexpected interludes, alternate words and surprise endings that demonstrated Hawksley’s restless, experimental spirit.

1. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user Digg Doug]

Let me set the scene for you: On the far right, we have a black man with natty dreads in a pirate hat, holding a beastly-looking guitar with yellow and red buttons, held together with electrical tape. His name is Futureman, and the device he is clutching is an electronic drum kit that he invented himself. He plays it with one hand while holding a drumstick in the other to play the kit, standing up.

To his left is the saxophonist, a bald man with a pointed goatee who managed to play two saxophones at the same time, different notes harmonizing with each other, his glowing red head about to explode.

On the far left, we have a man named Victor Wooten, who has been called the world’s bass player. The concert ended with a solo from Wooten that spanned over five minutes, involved his hands warping into impossibly twisted configurations, moving so rapidly over the fretboard they were virtually invisible (all the while expelling notes in a sequence that was still completely awesome to listen to), and then concluded with Wooten spinning his guitar in a circle around his neck while continuing to play.

And in the centre, holding it all together, alternating between a regular banjo and a purple MIDI banjo with horns, was Bela Fleck himself, the most normal looking man onstage. Dressed in jeans and a red New York t-shirt, Fleck defines “unassuming,” and yet was likely the most prodigious player of the performance. His lightning-quick picking joined with the over-the-top eccentricity exuded by his bandmates, creating a show so terrifyingly wonderful that the standing ovation would not go silent for a full five minutes after the lights went out.

Saturday night on May 19, 2007 at the Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary brought 3000 people into the three-floor concert hall to see Feist perform. Raised in Calgary herself, Leslie Feist has more than a passing connection to the city and the venue: at age 6, Feist took the stage to sing for her very first time, with a community choir, on the same stage she stood that night at the Jubilee. She told us so in concert.

In fact, she told us a few different stories that night: one about how she performed at the Jubilee again at age 16, that time as an extra in an opera. Another about how in the ’88 Olympics in Calgary, she was part of a group of 1000 children dressed in bright colours that volunteered to take part in the formation of the Olympics logo during the opening ceremonies, and how it recently occurred to her that that’s how she got the idea for the video for “1 2 3 4.”

The reason I bother with these stories is because they kind of came define the concert. Feist’s mother and grandmother were apparently in the audience, and on her hometown stage, dressed in a semi-formal black dress, Feist’s concert felt like a community Christmas concert, in the presence of family, friends and fellow citizens, all of us cozily listening in to Feist tell stories about her childhood, and play songs that she’s learned since she’s been away from home.

The Christmas concert vibe was amplified by a glowing net of Christmas lights behind the band, which would glow alternating colours, green, blue or red. A trumpet player contributed lush, soaring brass melodies and harmonious behind Feist’s vocals, and an occasional saxophone, slow and moaning, added to the atmosphere: a brass band helping round out new arrangements of your favourite songs.

Feist quietly opened up with “Honey Honey,” the second-to-last track from The Reminder. With no introduction, the band snuck onstage in the dark, and Feist began recording loops of herself harmonizing with herself, the opening breathy wails of the song circling around a slowly-plucked harp. The gorgeous and subtle introduction gave way to an explosive, crunchy-guitar ending, from which Feist and the band launched into “I Feel It All.” It was a great introduction, and the crowd was ready to swoon and be swooned.

Since Feist last left us, we’ve had a couple years to learn every word and beat on Let It Die. You’ll be happy to know that every track from that now-classic album (and there were five: Gatekeeper, Mushaboom, When I Was A Young Girl, Let It Die and Now At Last) have evolved into sophisticated, living, breathing things. Gatekeeper developed a shuffling drum beat all the way through, and in concert, featured an incredibly beautiful extended trumpet solo by one of her bandmates. A tapdancer appeared for Mushaboom, and When I Was A Young Girl grew into all-out tribal warfare: triple the percussion, zebra-patterned spotlights, and fierce experimental vocals from Ms. Feist.

On the flipside, songs from The Reminder that one would be expected to be the most fully grown, were instead the most malnourished. Both My Moon, My Man and 1 2 3 4 – upbeat, danceable tracks born for stardom – were too quick and unpolished; too much rush and not enough motion.

These missteps were compounded by a few mechanical mistakes that took a few minutes to fix, as well as Feist’s frequent guitar gaffes (missed chords, imprecise picking) throughout the show. These kinds of malfunctions, which in any other concert would make the concertgoers blush with sympathy, were instead kind of endearing. This being Feist’s Hometown Christmas Concert and all, we were easily able to forgive our girl for making mistakes. Not only that, but Feist’s style is an intimate, transparent one, a style which incorporates mistakes into a friendly, spontaneous aesthetic.

After the show, I concluded that two factors make Feist who she is as an artist: her voice and her friends. Her voice, if you’ve heard it, is a given: instantly likeable, ever seductive, Feist’s singing seems to come with the blessing of all legendary female vocalists who have gone before her. Even in concert, with all production aspects absent and no chances for multiple takes, Feist sounds fully herself, fully in tune and fully expressive. It’s her friends behind her, nurturing her ideas and fleshing out her sound, contributing discipline and professionalism to her free-form approach, that help carry Feist from the category of hometown hero to world-class singer-songwriter.

A review of Feist, live at Calgary’s Jubilee Auditorium (Saturday, May 19, 2007).
This is a review of the opening act, Chad VanGaalen. To read the part about Feist, click here!

Opening act: Chad VanGaalen

I think every opening act I’ve ever seen has somehow convinced me to follow up with the band. It’s through the wonder of opening acts that I’ve been introduced to bands like Eisley, The Music, and Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks. Given this track record, I was looking forward to seeing who would warm up the stage before Feist took it over as the headliner. The merch table in the lobby, just beside the Feist stuff, featured robo-Japanese pandas on black shirts, and the blocky font seemed to say the band was called “Chrovangralen.” The only clue this offered was that it would probably be really weird sounding. Maybe like Deerhoof or something.

Turns out, the strung-together all-caps text actually read “Chad VanGaalen.” He’s a guy from Calgary, who brought his band along for the tour with Feist, and will be opening for her for the whole duration of The Reminder tour.

Chad is definitely someone you call by his first-name. Even though his surprising vocal presence could easily take centre stage, he seems more comfortable playing his guitar in the corner by the drummer. Chad takes an unassuming skinny-tall-guy’s slouch, wearing jeans and leaning into the mic like he’s just trying to tell you about an idea he had.

And he’s got plenty of ideas: five giant hand-drawn cardboard cut-outs of animals were hanging out on stage with the band, and these critters seem to inhabit Chad’s imagination. He drew all the animals himself, draws the cover art for his albums, his t-shirts, his website, and draws just for fun in his spare time – and it’s mostly strange, magical animals. His lyrics are spotted with images of pterodactyls and “wind-driving dogs,” but that’s where his music takes a turn for the career-defining. His friendly quirkiness is matched with a wide-eyed sense of apocalypse: “I wish a were I comet,” he sings in one songs, “speeding towards Planet Earth.”

Like a smarter, more stable Daniel Johntson, Chad VanGaalen makes music in his homemade bedroom studio, recording tapes and tapes full of music, and stuffing them into suitcases and forgetting about them. “Most of these songs are new ones,” he told us at the show. “I’ve been getting bored of all the other ones.” He writes and evolves quickly as an artist, and even his set at the Feist show demonstrated that: the boy can’t keep himself within one style of music.

The most surprising thing about Chad – the thing that made my wife and I stare at each other in amazement while he performed – is his voice. VanGaalen has an incredible voice: during his uptempo rock songs, he pulls off the plain, singing-like-I-talk sound of the Weakerthans or Pavement, but once he drops that persona, he showcases an incredibly powerful falsetto. (Here: go to his page on CBC Radio 3 and listen to his song “Somewhere I Know There’s Nothing” while you keep reading). Sometimes with the fragility of the Innocence Mission, and sometimes with the concert hall intensity of a Jeff Buckley wail, Chad VanGaalen is morphing into a powerful monstrosity from his own library of creatures. More than just a kid from Calgary, Chad has the capacity to make a significant mark in music.

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Recently signed to the legendary label SubPop, you can check out his videos on YouTube, his page on MySpace, and his write-up on Subpop or Calgary-based Flemish Eye Records. You can also read this interview with him from a couple years ago – it’s a really interesting read about Chad’s music-making process — or this one, from Coke Machine Glow.

The story of Dan Brown, famous author of even-more-famous best-selling book The Da Vinci Code is a curious one. As often re-told in the various author biographies around the web, this is how Dan Brown decided to be an author: one day, while at the beach in Tahiti, he finished reading some random paperback and said, “Hey, I can do that.” Thus began his illustrious novel-writing career.

What was Dan Brown reading that was so inspiring? Was it Steinbeck’s East of Eden? Or maybe Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Nobel Prize winning work One Hundred Years of Solitude? Or maybe another classic work of fiction that masterfully weaves a complicated narrative in with incredible characters, beautiful passages and remarkable insights, inspiring Brown to strive for those same heights? Well, sort of. It was Sidney Sheldon’s “Doomsday Conspiracy.” Here are the first couple sentences from the featured editorial review on Amazon:

“A science-fiction — yes, science-fiction — novel from the master of soap. And one with a MESSAGE, too, just like the SF of yore–the clichés of which Sheldon shamelessly recycles as he ham-handedly depicts an earth under threat of invasion by aliens ticked off at — what else? — our destruction of the environment.”

When you read a zero-star novel from a Z-list author, of COURSE your reaction should be “Hey, I can do that.” Virtually ANYBODY who received a grade higher than a B- in high school English could do that. It doesn’t mean that your novel will be gloriously well-written, but yes, you can probably “do that.”

Dan Brown had amazing commercial success with The Da Vinci Code, thanks to his admittedly sharp ability to pick the exact topic that would infuriate Christian audiences, and delight secular readers: the idea that Jesus was just a regular guy. As a result, an army of motivated and angry Christians accidentally gave Brown the publicity boost he needed, while secular audiences reveled in talking about how mad the Christians were getting. Nice move.

His book really did outrage the Christian community, to a phenomenal degree. Campus Crusade for Christ made movies, brochures, study guides, presentations and websites all dedicated to debunking the theories of the book. Same with Focus on the Family, and same with a billion other Christian organizations that would get more than a little tiresome to name.

While all the upset Christians were busy reciting the mantra, “It’s just fiction, it’s just fiction, it’s just fiction,” SOMEBODY should have piped up and said, “Wait! The Da Vinci Code is more than just fiction! It’s also horribly written fiction!”

Thankfully, somebody has finally said exactly that, and even explained why it’s bad writing. Geoffrey Pullum of LanguageLog has composed a very enjoyable dissection of the first few sentences from The Da Vinci Code. I highly recommend reading it in its entirety on the original site, but I’d love to share a few passages here for your enjoyment:

I am still trying to come up with a fully convincing account of just what it was about his very first sentence, indeed the very first word, that told me instantly that I was in for a very bad time stylistically.

The Da Vinci Code may well be the only novel ever written that begins with the word renowned. Here is the paragraph with which the book opens. The scene (says a dateline under the chapter heading, ‘Prologue’) is the Louvre, late at night:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

I think what enabled the first word to tip me off that I was about to spend a number of hours in the company of one of the worst prose stylists in the history of literature was this. Putting curriculum vitae details into complex modifiers on proper names or definite descriptions is what you do in journalistic stories about deaths; you just don’t do it in describing an event in a narrative. So this might be reasonable text for the opening of a newspaper report the next day:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière died last night in the Louvre at the age of 76.

But Brown packs such details into the first two words of an action sequence — details of not only his protagonist’s profession but also his prestige in the field. It doesn’t work here. It has the ring of utter ineptitude. The details have no relevance, of course, to what is being narrated (Saunière is fleeing an attacker and pulls down the painting to trigger the alarm system and the security gates). We could have deduced that he would be fairly well known in the museum trade from the fact that he was curating at the Louvre.

As Pullum concludes, Brown’s writing is “not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad.” It seems amazing to me that critics and Christians alike forgot to notice how badly the novel sucked, and instead spent millions of dollars making it famous through anti-Da Vinci Code campaigns. The Da Vinci Code is just a faux-edgy paperback thriller from a sub-par author who got lucky by angering an enormous audience that specializes in making religious pet peeves public. While this advice comes about four years too late, I suggest to anybody thinking about getting mad about the book or about Dan Brown: “Just ignore him, he’ll go away.”

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When somebody says “It’s a Woody Allen film,” I think you’re supposed to go, “Oh, wow, great, can’t wait to see it.” It’s supposed to indicate that an aging but prolific writer has produced yet another high-quality movie that is bound to touch audiences worldwide with its wit and humanity. In Melinda and Melinda, saying “it’s a Woody Allen film” means that a once-credible film-world has-been managed whip up a pretentious, irrelevant screenplay in only one month’s time, didn’t bother to have his editor read it over, and decided not to splurge on frivolous extras like dialect coaches and trained actors. This movie is a piece of junk, and the biggest flaw is that it’s a Woody Allen film. Whatever that means.

(more…)

Tonight I was clubbed by Beowulf and Grendel. A latecomer into the Epic Movie Craze that’s been galloping throughout the film world for the past ten years, this film manages to turn an archaic Norse poem into a dull, disjointed, dialect-challenged drip of a movie. (more…)