Author: James McNally

Olympic Excitement!

With just two days to go until the Opening Ceremonies, I’m like a kid on Christmas Eve. Despite all the drug scandals and terrorist threats, these Olympics are still quickening my pulse. Here are some stories I’m watching:

  1. Canada’s Perdita Felicien (PDF) looks like a good bet for a medal, hopefully gold. I just heard today that her main competition in the hurdles, American Gail Devers, will be taking the place of Torri Edwards in the 100m. This bodes well since Devers will be competing in two high-pressure events, while Perdita can just focus on the hurdles.
  2. American 1500m runner Carrie Tollefson has had an interesting journey to the Olympics. Although she won the US trials in July, she hadn’t reached either of the Olympic standards (“A” or “B”) and was in jeopardy of losing her place on the team. She had until August 9 to make the standards, and along with other hopefuls Amy Rudolph and Jen Toomey, she’d been running a flurry of races in Europe over the past few weeks in an attempt to qualify. She made the “B” standard just a few days ago and due to some other permutations, she’ll be the sole US runner in her event. I’ve been following her career for a while now, probably because she’s tall and blonde and beautiful, but she’ll have her work cut out even trying to reach the final against the powerful Russian women. She’s only ranked 39th in the world. (Her selection to the team also dashed the hopes of Suzy Favor Hamilton, who suffered a panic attack while leading the race in the Sydney Olympics and crashed to the track. These would have been her last Olympics.)
  3. Still on the 1500m, Canada’s own Carmen Douma-Hussar (PDF) has been getting precious little attention, even though she’s ranked a very respectable 12th and was the silver medallist at the 2004 World Indoor Championships. Along with Malindi Elmore (PDF) (16th), she’s showing the world that Canada’s women are very strong contenders at this distance.
  4. Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj has dominated the 1500m distance for years, but has never won an Olympic gold medal (he won the silver in Sydney). In the runup to this year’s Olympic competition, he’s been beaten several times, finishing a remarkable 8th in one race. After getting treatment for allergies, he’s started returning to form, but will he be able to hold off Kenyan Bernard Lagat (bronze in Sydney)? And what about rising American star Alan Webb?
  5. In the men’s 10,000m event, Ethiopia seems to have it all sewn up. But the interesting story is whether it will be veteran Haile Gebreselassie (perhaps the greatest distance runner in history) or young up-and-comer Kenenisa Bekele who prevails. This will probably be Gebreselassie’s last Olympics running this distance; he’s stated that he will probably begin running marathons very soon.

As you can tell, I tend to focus my attention on the track. Despite the fact that even more athletes will undoubtedly fail drug tests in Athens, I’m hoping for an exciting and competitive Games.

I’ll probably be posting more here during the Games. But also keep your eye on Runner-Up for stories that won’t make the front pages of the newspapers.

Music Survey

  • First Record Bought: Led Zeppelin (the first one) (1969), purchased at Halliday’s TV shop at the Parkway Plaza in Scarborough, 1975. My reaction was “this band can play, but the singer sucks!”.
  • First Concert: Queen, touring their “Jazz” album, 1978.
  • Favourite Music Movie: URGH! A Music War (1981). Runners-up: Rock and Roll High School (1979), with The Ramones, and Stop Making Sense (1984) with Talking Heads.
  • Favourite Music Book: Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.
  • Favourite Songwriter: Britt Daniel (Spoon)
  • Favourite Producer: Steve Albini
  • Favourite Record Label: Matador
  • Favourite Magazine: I rarely buy music mags anymore. I picked up Paste recently, and though it’s skewed a bit older (ie. my own supposed demographic), it’s well-written and attractively laid out.
  • Favourite Bassist: Barry Adamson (Magazine)
  • Favourite Album Cover: Surfer Rosa (1988) by the Pixies, art by Vaughan Oliver.
  • Favourite Teen Idol: Avril Lavigne. I’d like to tell her a few jokes, make her smile a bit…
  • Artist Who Broke Your Heart: PJ Harvey, when she stopped playing guitar and started wearing dresses.
  • Artist You Will Always Believe In: Ask me again in ten years.
  • Singer Who Makes Your Skin Crawl: Shania Twain, Cher, and all those other fakers who put their crappy voices through computers to sell records.
  • Singer Who Makes You Swoon: Maria McKee, PJ Harvey, Björk
  • Favourite Sound: Music
  • Album You Will Always Defend: Meat is Murder (1985), by The Smiths.
  • Album You Own That No One Else Does: Stands for Decibels (1981), by The dB’s, and Crazy Rhythms (1980), by The Feelies. No one I know owns these, anyway…
  • Classic Album You Own but Don’t Like: Rumours (1977), by Fleetwood Mac.
  • Artist You’re Supposed to Like but Don’t: Sonic Youth
  • Song You Can’t Stand by an Artist You Like: Silver, from Doolittle (1989) by the Pixies.
  • Band That Should Break Up: The Rolling Stones
  • Band That Should Re-form: Not sure they’re completely disbanded, but it’s unlikely we’ll get any new music from Neutral Milk Hotel. I’m holding out slightly more hope for My Bloody Valentine.
  • Guilty Pleasure: A-ha’s “Hunting High and Low” (1985); I’m finally not ashamed to admit that they were pop geniuses.
  • Favourite Music DVD: My bootleg URGH! A Music War (1981) DVD-Rs.
  • Concert You Wish You’d Seen: Elvis Costello at the El Mocambo in 1978.
  • Dream Collaboration: Thanks to MP3 mashups, this one is becoming irrelevant. 😉

Breathless

Brooke and I saw Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) the other night. It was my first time seeing it, though Brooke has seen it several times before, and says it’s one of her favourite films. Frankly, I had mixed feelings (though I gave it an 8 on IMDB). Some people can immediately dissect a film into its parts and can expound at length on the editing, the cinematography, the sound design, and lots of other “technical” aspects of the movie. I’ve never been able to do that, at least not upon my first viewing. I guess I have to ingest the whole before I can talk about any of the parts. And for me, the whole was somewhat unsatisfying, even disturbing.

I tried to distance myself from the obvious charms of the movie: Paris in the Sixties, exciting “French New Wave” flourishes like jump-cuts, the gorgeous Jean Seberg. And what I found was a film about two people with no souls. Michel and Patricia are completely amoral and aimless, and I could find no sympathy for them. This always makes watching a film difficult for me. And even though Brooke grudgingly agreed with me, it was still clear that she loves the film and I, well, not so much.

I was struggling to figure out whether it was just me being contrary, so I grabbed Pauline Kael’s book For Keeps off our bookshelf. Imagine my relief when I read:

“What sneaks up on you in Breathless is that the engagingly coy young hood with his loose, random grace and the impervious, passively butch American girl are as shallow and empty as the shiny young faces you see in sports cars and in suburban supermarkets, and in newspapers after unmotivated, pointless crimes. And you’re left with the horrible suspicion that this is a new race, bred in chaos, accepting chaos as natural, and not caring one way or another about it or anything else…The characters in Breathless are casual, carefree moral idiots.”

I think seeing the film for the first time at the age of 39 has a lot to do with it. If I’d seen it twenty years ago, I may not have suspected that the characters are poseurs, that even the filmmaker may be a bit of a poseur. I might have mistaken their chilling soullessness for “cool” and tried to imitate it.

When I see Breathless again (and I think it is worthy of another viewing), I certainly will pay more attention to the revolutionary camerawork and editing. With the moral vacuum at the heart of the film now recognized and named, that seems to be the only place left I’d want to look.