At some point in my early twenties, I was at an extremely dull party. That’s an essential part of being in your early twenties, at least that was my experience of it, attending boring parties. Mostly because you haven’t figured out what’s what quite yet and can’t discern the shit from the shinola. Or at […]

After I lost my job at the strip club, I almost immediately got myself another form of employment, this one very different to sitting around all day chatting rubbish on a microphone while deadbeats watched naked women writhe. This job involved working on the line at a meat packing plant. If you’ve never done such […]

After one of my numerous attempts to live in America had not panned out, I found myself back in Shitberg, Canuckland,desperately needing work. After a week of drink drowned depression, I started hunting in the want ads every morning. The jobs I found in there were invariably terrible. I will admit to my own naiveté […]

Werner Herzog once said that there are only four essential genres of film: musicals, documentaries, kung-fu films, and pornos. To this I would add one other: the Elvis Movie. You may retort by claiming they are just a bolt-on to the musical category, but you’d be wrong. The Elvis Movie is a genre, completely self-contained, […]

I arrived in Wicker Park in the dead of winter. Chitown was under several feet of snow when my taxi pulled up in front of my Chicago Connection’s place. Many a Chicago resident wanted to claim to live in Wicker Park at the time (it was so hip, Hollywood made a film starring Josh Harnett […]

My two year old daughter has become obsessed with a terrible book she found in amongst the volumes we put upon her shelves; it is from the 1970’s and is filled with “cute quotes” from small children, many of which are crushingly outdated, such as “You tell me to use my imagination – then you […]

When I was nine years old, I had two best friends. One was Berthold. He was really short and funny looking, sort of like a slightly mutated version of Opie Griffith from the Andy Griffith Show. A bad bowl cut and an unfortunate in the context of where we lived German accent added to the […]

There are two things that are either generally known about the Shaggs, or can at least be easily ascertained by doing a google search of them and avoiding the ones that deal with misspellings of a common British term for having sexual intercourse: one, that Tom Cruise is rumoured to have bought the rights to […]

Jazz musicians have a reputation for being weird, outré, strange. Thelonious Monk’s middle name was Sphere; Miles Davis was so infamously difficult to interview because of his tendency to ramble that journos dubbed him the Prince of Darkness. But in the deviation from the norm sweepstakes, the grand prize must go to Sun Ra. Born […]

I have been involved in the making of a few indie flicks in my time, both in front of and behind the camera, most of them understandably not available on Netflicks at present. People ask me if I ever miss the world of film. I always say, emphatically, no. Here’s a taste of why that […]