Gambare, Koara kacho!

I am a well-informed, well-traveled, highly educated individual, rarely surprised by anything anymore. Coming across this movie (it's an ENTIRE movie), my crust of jadedness cracked and once again I realized anything is possible in this world.

Note that just because he's an adorable koala doesn't mean he doesn't have to deal with real executive problems, like a cheating wife. But it does mean that he can totally get away with public urination.

Revival from Obscurity

Around this time, blogs and newspapers like to run retrospective features, often lists enumerating what the editorial staff considers to be the most significant developments of the past year. The Guardian did one based on reader nominations, here's one from fox news and finally, to end on an obscure note, here's the CBC's Saskatchewan list of web stories. In Canada, the number one story, according to a news poll, was the death of Jack Layton, which, coming as it did after the NDP's best electoral performance in history, combined human tragedy with political consequence. However, that very real consequence - a leadership scramble within a radically transformed NDP - rapidly vanished from anyone's view, and a lively, bickering horse-race among a surprisingly large and colorful pool of hopefuls is taking place largely out of view. So I step up, gentle reader, to help guide you through the contest, introduce you to the contestants, and hold your hand until the Canadian left has chosen its latest contender for the leadership of Canada.

And to those who doubt that the internal leadership contest of a political party could be fascinating stuff, I refer you here, where you can watch Francis Urquhart make his bid for the Tory leadership.

Prison-related culture

There's something fascinating about prison life, a combination of intense

psychological desperation and lurid criminal brio making it a great inspiration for art, high and low. Prompted by all the carceral rumination I've been doing as a result of these posts, I started asking people about their favorite prison movies, figuring I could compile a top ten list. It turns out that someone's beaten me to the punch (www.prisonmovies.net) and ranked 230 US and international films by quality, complete with snarky one-line reviews. I will let their list stand, but I make the following comments:

1. The Shawshank Redemption is a little over-exposed, but it's still pretty awesome

2. The list missed Blood In, Blood Out, which though a little over-the-top, made quite an impression on me as an adolescent. The main take home message: Californian pr

ison gangs are really scary.

3. Papillon got enough love so that I would remark upon it.

Prison has also been a great subject for music, with Nick Cave's Mercy Seat a personal favorite of mine. But, despite a life best described as "completely punk," his convict growl is a bit of a pose - he never spent an (serious) time behind bars, though it's not inconceivable he overnighted at a city jail after a particularly nasty bender. Johnny Cash is perhaps the best known prison bard, due partly to such classics as Folsom Prison Blues and partly because of a willingness to identify with convicts, as in his two prison records, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison and Johnny Cash at San Quentin. Though never in jail for long, he successfully cultivate an image as an outlaw, a badass, an all-American desperado type, and he certainly had more than enough grit to back it up.

But Lead Belly, for all Nick Cave's punk-rock posturing and Johnny Cash's country

-western swagger, makes them both

look like backup dancers for hair metal bands. A pioneering bluesman credited by some for innovating the beginnings of modern American music, he had the hardest history of the three, born a penniless black man in 1888 and coming up in the Deep South when segregation and white supremacy were at their most intense. He did not merely sing about prison, he spent all together 11 years in lockup, 4 in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison for knifing a white man, and 7 in Texas for murder. His musical talent became known to his captors early on, and the governor of Texas would occasionally bring guests to the prison to hear Lead Belly preform. It was only late in life that Leadbelly reached broader audiences, mainly through the efforts of folklorists who wanted to promote traditional American musical culture, and save it for future generations. On some of the early recordings, made while he was still behind bars, his clapping is accompanied by the jingle of his manacles as the he moves. So, despite my love for Cash and Cave, in the prison authenticity olympics the gold goes to Lead Belly.

Prison Travelogue - Louis Theroux goes to jail

In keeping with the topic of the last post, here is Louis Theroux in San Quentin Prison:

For those of you unfamiliar with him, Louis is the son of Paul Theroux, the travel writer, and a successful tv journalist in the UK, specializing in long-form documentaries on difficult personalities, difficult places, difficult communities, or all three at once. I recommend anything by him, but on this topic you can also check out his pieces on crime in South Africa, Philadelphia and the California super-prison for child molesters (for some reason available only in German).

Adam Curtis, my favorite BBC Bolshevik

Adam Curtis is kind of my hero. He left academia and joined the BBC, where he makes this remarkable documentaries detailing various schemes, plots and fantasies by different segments of the financial, security and political elite. Also, he hates rational choice theory, which gets you a lot of points in my book. He's been working for 25+ years, and most of his stuff is on youtube, but here is the first part of his latest series, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, which features Californian techno-utopianism prominently:

Disclaimer: To my knowledge, Adam Curtis is not a Bolshevik

Successful Alcoholics

For those unfamiliar, funnyordie.com is a site hosting short comedy videos, some user-generated, some written by a professional staff, some featuring complete amateur talent, and some starring remarkably famous Hollywood types (Don Cheadle, Will Farell [whose production company also owns the site], James Franco, etc.). You can vote the pieces "funny" or "die," and they gain profile and prominence based on those votes. It's been quite successful commercially (Sequoia, a big venture capital fund, bought a giant stake in it) and produced some seriously amusing pieces -Drunk History, Acting with James Franco, and Between Two Ferns to name a few. The pieces are almost all short (seven minutes tops), goofy and light. Nothing to take too seriously.

And now they've made this:

Successful Alcoholics from Jordan Vogt-Roberts, TJ Miller & Lizzy Caplan from Lizzy Caplan

Funny. Painful. Brilliant.