This is two months old, but I fear they’d take away my Canadian indie-rock fan card if I didn’t link to the A.V. Club’s Canadian indie-rock primer. Only complaint: No worship at the altar of Matt Murphy, he of Flashing Lights and Super Friendz non-fame. (I keep waiting for the SF’s blog to tell me when I have to exchange currency to buy a new album.)
In other Canadian indie news: While their music isn’t for everyone, I’m sad to hear of the breakup of the best-named band in North America: Quebexico (Ottawa). It’s like all of NAFTA, smooshed into one noise band! It will also be a shame to see their classic track “Smoke Em Like Pierre Trudeau” retired.
Also of CanCon note: the ’80s-college-radio-mixtape fun of Dog Day (Halifax), Sloan-circa-1991-alikes The Meligrove Band (Toronto), the fuzzy grad-student twee of The Superfantastics, and the neo-medievalists of The Saffron Sect (Toronto). Particular love for the first three.
October 23, 1956: A rebellion starts in Hungary, against the Communist government and, by extension, the Soviet Union’s dominion over the nation. Two days later, the government is toppled, and reformers are put in power.
November 1, 1956: The Soviet Union, having decided to intervene, sends tanks into Hungary from the east. On November 4, they penetrate Budapest; by November 10, the Soviets have killed more than 2,500 Hungarians and crushed the reformist government. Many of the movement’s leaders would later be executed, and over 13,000 are imprisoned.
December 6, 1956: In the finals of the water-polo competition, defending gold-medalists (and all-around water-polo bad-asses) Hungary face…the Soviet Union. You can probably guess why this match is remembered as the “Blood in the Water” match.
You probably couldn’t guess, unless you’re a sharper man than I, that a documentary about the match would be executive produced by Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Liu. Seriously.
A terrific piece in the Guardian about James Fenton, the official poet laureate of crabwalk.com. He has earned the title by (a) being virtually the only living poet I know anything about, and (b) leading what I daresay is the most interesting life of any of his contemporaries.
I prove (b) by citing a few of the subjects covered in the piece:
— He “rode the first North Vietnamese tank into the Presidential Palace when Saigon fell in April 1975”
— He is “the one-time film critic of Socialist Worker, slapped over the wrist by the comrades for an over-enthusiastic meditation on the joys of the Carry On series”
— He “was kidnapped in Belfast by the IRA”
— He stormed the Marcos palace alongside Filipinos on the day Ferdinand and Imelda fell
— He spent years as a foreign correspondent in southeast Asia, then covered politics, theater, and books for various British newspapers
— He translated a Verdi opera into English
— He was the inspiration for and costar of one of the greatest of travel books, Into the Heart of Borneo
— He “purchased and ran a prawn farm”
And, on top of all that, he is broadly ranked the finest living British poet. That’s the kind of poet I can get behind.
The article mentions the judgment of Alan Jenkins, that “the best poem about war since Auden’s ‘Journey to a War’ is Fenton’s ‘In a Notebook.’” That prompted me to track it down; it’s below in image form to keep the Googlebots from finding it.
This clip goes out to those of you (a) finishing your Nanowrimo book this week, or (b) with an Amanda Peet obsession. (A group that, for the record, does not include me. She’s fine enough, I suppose, but I was a little floored when I saw she was Esquire’s favorite woman of the past seven years. Quoth Michael Bluth: “Her?”)
I realize this looks like the start of a CGI battle scene from Lord of the Rings, but it’s actually just the biggest crowd you’ve ever seen:
That would be the pastor Reinhard Bonnke, who does these sorts of massive faith-healing events across Africa. Have wanted to write something about him since I did this story in Nigeria in 2005.
Fun piece (by Friend of Crabwalk Reese) on dueling versions of the history of Tabasco. There’s an official book produced by the McIllhennys themselves (by Shane K. Bernard) and an independent one (by journalist Jeffrey Rothfeder). Proponents of the latter say Bernard is just a shill for the company, which has some fairly, er, interesting moments in its past; proponents of the former say Rothfeder is just out to slander a family-owned Louisiana institution.
I take no stance on the controversy, except to make three points:
(a) my natural instinct is always to go with the journalist (you know, being one and all);
(b) but I’ve read Bernard’s two previous non-Tabasco books and they both struck me as honest and quality (particularly his excellent The Cajuns);
(c) whenever I take out-of-town visitors to visit Tabasco HQ on Avery Island, they’re invariably creeped out by the weird antebellum plantation aura of the place — particularly the strange racial politics of the short film they show on the company tour. It feels a little like I’d imagine a United Fruit town in ’20s Costa Rica did.
New evidence says he was actually forced to flee prosecution for his printed comments about Shirley Temple. (He’d written a review of one of the eight-year-old ingenue’s movies and perceptively noted that some portion of her male audience was attracted to the weird sexualization of a child.) The Temple people sued, and Greene realized he was facing jail time for his review — so he ran away to Mexico, which had no extradition agreement with Britain.
I can’t tell you how awesome it is that one of the top candidates to lead the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is a man named T-Joe Savoie. Which is maybe the most Cajun name ever. Savoie is pronounced “sahv-wah,’ by the way. And the “T-” prefix is traditional Cajun for “Junior” — as in Joseph Savoie Jr. (“T” is a corruption of the French “petit,” as in my 31-year-old cousin T-Ron.)
Norman Mailer debates Marshall McLuhan on, among other things, the nature of violence. From the CBC in 1968.
I’ve been reading a lot of Mailer obits and remembrances lately — fascinating fellow, both for his successes and for his failures. While it’s difficult to approve of much of his life, to a writer, his sheer size as an artist — the Himalayan scale of his ambitions — is inspiring. So much about creating art is tied up in hesitations and stepbacks and questioning. This was a man with no fear at all.
Sometimes I remember I have a blog. This is one of those times. To sum up: I am alive, working and learning happily in the American northeast. More to come, I pledge.
Note, if you will, the new addition of my Twitter feed in the sidebar. It should help you with your Fresh Josh needs.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
Fun piece (by Friend of Crabwalk 
