Adios, Howdy! Adios, Heidi!

We here at The Daily Wenzel freely admit that we have a love/hate relationship with the City of Calgary and find their recent decision to retire Heidi and Howdy, the cartoon polar bear mascots of the 1988 Winter Olympics, sad and frustrating. You will not find us waxing rhapsodic for these two lovable characters that for only a few more short days will grace the entrance to Calgary, via Highway 1. Our problem is not so much with the nostolgia of the pair, but rather that the decision is symptomatic of larger, underlying issues with Calgary.

The official reason for the removal of the Olympic Mascots is that they are inconsistent with the official branding and logo of the city. While their removal has been decided, their fate as not, as some want to keep the two, and others are simply content to have them recycled.

Our problem with the situation is Calgary's decided ahistorical nature. The Winter Olympics, of which Heidi and Howdy are part of the enduring symbol, was a key aspect of our city's emergence on the international scene. It was used to demonstrate that Calgary, a metropolis of less than thirty five years, deserved to be treated on the same scale as the other major cities of the world. That this event did not find some recognition in the new "brand" of Calgary becomes problematic. Furthermore, the potential destruction of Heidi and Howdy is consistent with a city that routinely bulldozes historical landmarks. When the signature lions on the Centre Street bridge fell into disrepair and the City wanted to remove them, it took a fair amount of public pressure to have the lions replaced and the originals preserved at the Glenbow Museum. Surely there is room for Heidi and Howdy at the Olympic Museum at Canada Olympic Park?

Calgary as a muncipality is over 100 years old and it is extremely difficult to find a building that pre-dates incorporation. The population of Calgary was quite small, so this is perhaps understandable. But should it be almost equally as difficult to find a pre-WWII building?Heidi and Howdy are not alone, simply joining and increasing number of historic neighbourhoods and buildings being converted into offices and condos.

A ridiculous proposal?

After being front page news last week that a serious attempt by Canadians to meet their Kyoto targets would cost $195/tonne in carbon taxes, this little article seemed to have slipped by. As we mentioned, the government's arguments rest on assumptions, and we were happy to see that UK economist Phillipe Crabbe pointed out that the government's price is contingent on it's time frame. Meeting Kyoto goals by 2008 would lead to excessive costs, but phasing in aspects of a climate change programme over several years would still allow Canada to meet its emissions targets while keeping any carbon tax cost to under $50 US/tonne.

Again then, we have a federal government looking to obfuscate and delay on an issue they claim to be concerned about.

Good Grief, Lucy!

We'd like to take a moment to welcome a new blog to the scene, and wish our sports correspondent Alana Marchetto well. Responsible for most of our insightful tennis coverage she has decided to launch her own blog, Good Grief Lucy (based on her resemblance to the Charles Schultz character - making us Peanuts) combining her love of crotchet and knitting, with her incisive knowledge of sports. While we hope she'll still come around to offer her valued opinions during the big tournies, her new home gives her greater scope to cover all of her favourite sports.

While you're there, check out the photos of her great knitting and crotchet projects.

Lust for Life

Perhaps to the surprise of all, Iggy Pop turned 60 today, celebrating forty years as an artist. Responsible, in part, for birthing punk. Iggy once commented that it was seeing a really bad Doors concert, in which Jim Morrison, drunk and bloated, displaying obvious contempt for his audience, that inspired the creation of the Stooges and the confrontational persona of Iggy Pop. To have survived, let alone continue to make music and perform live with an intensity rarely equaled by performers half his age (we saw him at SXSW this year) is astonishing in and of itself, but to consider that he created music within a context of self-destruction, alcoholism and drug abuse, elevates that success to another level entirely.

For the record, "The Passenger" is one of our favourite Pop tunes of all time (that, and virtually anything of Raw Power), since it provided the soundtrack of our meeting our good Bassano del Grappa. On a student summer tour of Europe, backpacking through northern Italy, a few of us were enjoying some gelato at a local gelateria, when "The Passenger" came over the speakers. Perking up, we caught the attention of del Grappa who explained that we were listening to a cover version performed by some friends of his, and that they would be headlining a small outdoor concert later that night in the piazza. del Grappa offered to show us and around, arrange tickets, and find us a place to crash, and the evening ended up being one of the highlights of the trip, as afterwards, del Grappa and his friends dragged us through the back streets and drinking holes to celebrate the successful show. "The Passenger" had been their finale, and the song's stranger in a strange land atmosphere became very real for us.

A Tale of Two Governments

Both the Canadian Federal Government and the Alberta Provincial government made major announcements yesterday and the results could not have been more different from two Conservative governments.

First, provincial Premier Ed Stelmach announced his inaugural budget which contains $33B in spending. This is perhaps one of the largest public expenditures in Alberta for quite some time and sounds good to a public waiting to hear that the Tories are going to reinvest the provincial surplusses back into the social infrastructure. Granted, a significant amount of the money is simply a restatement of already declared projects, or cost-overrun allocations (themselves problematic and a seperate issue for the government to deal with). But in light of recent movesw to back away from such options as rent controls, releasing nearly half a billion dollars to deal with the housing crunch sounds like the governemnt is interested in solving the problem. What Albertans are looking for is evidence of a vision for the province that is going to reward the sacrifices of the 1990s. Stelmach's budget, while admittedly not containing a lot that is new, nevertheless represents significant spending and an indication that the governemnt is taking a small step in the right direction.

The Federal Government meanwhile, announced it's vision for the environment, or rather failed to do so, instead appeared content to offer a nightmarish interpretation of someone else's. Environment Minister Baird's comment's that Kyoto was a "risky" and "reckless" proposition that threatened 275,000 jobs jeapordizing the Canadian economy with recession. Several critics have pointed out some flaws with the underlying assumptions of the government's report, but at The Daily Wenzel we also noticed the difference between this report and the one the UK releases at the end of summer that attempted to calculate the relative costs of not doing anything regarding climate change. Admittedly this is a much harder task, but even conservative economic estimates would mitigate some of the costs projected by the government. For example, should provincial governments go through with tentative proposals to ban incadescent light bulbs, then certain jobs and revenues would be lost to the economy, however the increase in sales and demand for compact flourescent bulbs would lessen, if not surpass those numbers - certainly this is a very simplistic example, but recognizing the potential economic spin-offs of pro-Kyoto technologies and developments ought to have been incorporated, a feature not reported so far. Also, any projected costs associated with meeting or not meeting Kyoto measures woudl have to include estimations of the economic impact that changing conditions would have on crops and livestock patterns, it could very well be, as the UK report suggested, that the costs of not meeting Kyoto targets or some other significant cliamte change attempt, well outweigh the costs of doing nothing, or very little.

Waiting somewhere in limbo is the government's own Clean Air Bill, which is supposedly in the process of beign revised based on the earlier criticisms. Many Canadians support moves to deal with climate change effectively, and it is widely thought to be one of the leadding, if not the leading issue for the next election. Quebec, as a province, is pro-Kyoto, and yesterday's announcement is unlikely to earn the Conservatives more support in a provine that they need to either expand or maintain support in. Similarly, the disaffected Liberals who voted for the Conservatives in the last election are unlikely to be comforted either, this move simply yet another reminder of the ideological differences between the two parties.

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms

Today marked the 25th Anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada, a document that came into being with the patriation of the Canadian Constitution in 1982. The Charter guaranteed Canadians freedom from persecution or discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, religion, and language. It has also been used to extend these rights in to many other realms by the courts, earning it the scorn of conservatives who have long felt that it has allowed the judiciary to make laws, instead of simply interpreting them. That this is still the feeling today was evidenced by the silence coming out of Stephen Harper's government today. Left-leaning and liberal Canadians will argue that it was the reluctance of conservatives to implement the Charter, or avoid dealing with its implications in areas such as sexual orientation that forced the Canadian courts into their current role.

The patriation of the constitution also saw Quebec remain aloof from Federation, creating a constitutional crisis that led to the failures of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, as well as the second Quebec Sovereignty Referendum. Ironically, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had envisioned the patriation of the constitution as the first step in taking the institutions of the Canadian government into the 20th century. Charter of Rights and Freedoms
was meant to deal with the lingering 19th century antagonisms between Canada's French and English populations. While individual rights have certainly flourished, Canada is no further down the road Trudeau and hoped for than we were twenty-five years ago.

From One Anniversary . . .

It was sixty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play - if you believe such things, but at any rate, this week mark's the fortieth anniversary of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, widely thought to be the greatest, most important, and/or influential album of all time. While many articles and tributes will be written to attest to how great the songs were, how iconic the album was (true, true), we'd like to focus on something that we here at The Daily Wenzel feel is the album's true accomplishment.

We forget sometimes that rock and roll was barely ten years ago when Sgt. Pepper was released. Furthermore, the concept of an album as a single piece of vinyl was less than twenty. Throughout much of the 1940s, an album was a collection of 78s or 45s packaged together. The notion that you could listen to four or five songs continuously was still new. The crowning achievement of Sgt. Pepper was that it was the first concept album, where a theme linked every song together (even if the link was pretty tenuous in some cases). The rise of the concept album became a potent weapon in the rock arsenal during the psychedelic era. It also led many artists to move away from the creation of a radio-friendly single because the Beatles had demonstrated that rock and roll could be a piece of art. These albums quickly found a happy home own the emerging FM band which was licensed by the FCC to be album-oriented so as not to compete with the highly commercialized AM band.

Second influential aspect of Sgt. Pepper was that it was also the first album in which the artists adopted a persona, the Lonely Hearts Club Band, performed not as themselves, but as their alter egos. Without Sgt. Pepper, where would David Bowie and his legion of followers be? Similarly, hip hop is also indebted to the Beatles for the freedom to experiment that they initiated.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band stands out as one of the great rock albums of all time for a lot of reasons. These are just two that we like.

. . . to Another

An anniversary that we're much more interested in celebrating, or at least generates far more whistful nostalgia, is the tenth anniversary of the first self-titled Storm and Stress album. While we cannot say that the album burst onto the scene in 1997, it nevertheless quickly achieved cult status. Those of us who liked it found it's atonal meanderings remarkably fresh, a dramatic break from the verse-chorus-verse song structure. Blake Butler, of emusic.com, called it a "garbled cacophony of untamed genius" a phrase we whole-heartedly endorse. Elvis Bonaparte recalls eagerly talking up the album to others who had admited to listening to it.

"I was so excited," Bonaparte says, "It was like nothing I'd ever heard. When people would say to me things like, I can't get past that first song [We write threnodies. We write explosions.], I'd eagerly agree, saying 'Yeah, neither can I, it's just so good' and the other person would just stare at me and I'd realize that they were one of the many who just didn't get."

"Back when I was hosting Radio Free Nowhere during CJSW's drive home slot, I remember playing it one day and someone called in and asked if these guys were going to finish tuning up," laughs Sean Marchetto. "Man, I loved that song. I've kicked myself forever for missing them when they were in town. I think they played to twelve people."

"Somebody gave it to me as an example of what rock should be," recalls Bassano del Grappa. "I never really thought of them as a rock band. They were always a form of sonic art to me. Somehow managing to capture that whole New York no wave thing from the early 1980s, but merging it with the Chicago sound that Tortoise was just starting to get a lot of traction from."

Storm and Stress were Ian Williams (guitar) of Don Cabellero, Erich Ehm (bass), and Kevin Shea (drums). Their first album was produced by Steve Albini, and their second, Under Thunder & Flourescent Lights, recorded in 1999, but released in 2000, by Jim O'Rourke. The Touch & Go promo paragraph for the first album captured our fin-de-siecle sentiments exactly, but the band, with such a jarring break from the prevailing musical landscape seemed to offer a way out, however brief.



Bassano del Grappa

Enviro Update

Longtime Daily Wenzel readers may have noticed that we've been rather quiet on the environmental front these last few weeks. Despite some major announcements by the federal government, and the official opposition party regarding their green policies, we have refrained from commenting. In large part it is because we do not consider this news. Very little substance is being discussed in these reports, and then policies themselves are merely consistent with established frameworks. Even what we would have considered the most interesting piece of news, which occurred some two weeks ago, namely Baird's announcement that Canada would not take part in any international carbon trading scheme - a proposal publicly mused over by his predecessor Rona Ambrose, is in keeping with the Conservative move to retreat from the international stage (peacekeeping not withstanding).

However, we would like to share the following newsbit, as it shows that our feelings are shared elsewhere. The failure to fund new research into climate change only supports the public perception that Stephen Harper and his government are not concerned with climate change, but are simply reacting to immediate developments, in much the same way Harper recognized the Quebec nation to stave off a similar BQ move. Similarly, just as that political powerplay is likely to come back to haunt Canadians, we can only imagine how these environmental moves (or lack thereof) will affect us down the road.

The Table of Elements

It was a large grin that Il Professore, Sean Marchetto was wearing today (truth be told, Marchetto does not like to be called "The Professor", a trend started by Bassano del Grappa when del Grappa discovered that Marchetto was a school teacher with three university degrees, one of which being an advanced degree in American history, but only a Masters' not a PhD as Marchetto tries to point out, though "professor" is the Italian equivalent of high school teacher). Too many times to mention, when our conversations turn to hiphop, Marchetto will reference the "four elements of hiphop" as outlined by some bygone rapper, and all of us will stare at him blankly. Today, Marchetto appeared in The Daily Wenzel office wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with "The Four Elements of Hiphop" done up in the style of a Periodic Table of the Elements, something that Marchetto, as a chemistry teacher, would be quite familiar with. We don't know where he found it, but his was a look of vindication.

So, what are the four elements of hiphop? The emcee, the DJ, the B-Boy, and grafitti - all four post-modern forms of communication - literature, music, dance, and art. More than this we cannot say - we'll have to entice the Professor to give us a lecture, only this time we'll take notes.

The Stuff of Legends

So we had heard from FFWD/Exclaim! writer Aubrey MacInnis that fellow Calgarian Chad van Gaalen had missed his SXSW show because of an argument he had had at the border with US Customs Agents. In further conversations with MacInnis and later, back at the Calgary Airport, with members of the AA Sound System, the story goes that the Customs Agents started searching through vanGaalen's bags, prompting the musician to become irritated and defensive, calling one of the agents a "douchebag", at which point he was denied entry to the US. Rather than simply fill his spot at the SXSW music conference with another artist, the organizers instead helped to arrange a closed circuit broadcast of Chad vanGaalen from his home in Calgary.

How much of this story we do not know, like we suggested though, it is the stuff of legend. Click here to watch the YouTube version of the closed circuit broadcast.

Reliving the Moment

Someone brought in the new iTunes Live in Soho EP of The Good, The Bad, and The Queen and it did what all live albums are supposed to do, evoking for us memories of their live set at SXSW. As good as Damon Albarn's songwriting is, and as much as it makes us what to be young and British and railing against the remnants of Empire, what we cannot escape is Paul Simonon's magnificent bass-playing. Back at Stubb's in Austin, we were captivated by his stylish looks and movement on-stage, but listening to the live EP we began to appreciate his work more and wondered at how much involvement this ex-member of the Clash had in the the evolution of the musical landscape created by The Good, The Bad, and The Queen.

Since Tuesday I think it's been played a dozen times, and something everybody wants to hear once the stereo is turned on.

Turnin' Pages - Book Update

March was a busy month in terms of book reading. In addition to Douglas Coupland's Jpod, which was quickly passed around the office, quite a few other books made their way through our fingers.

John Sellers' auto-biographical essay, Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life, caused much chuckling, for his insights into the nature of the indie rock fan (any fan really) were quite funny and many of us could see ourselves reflected in his work at different points. Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets was something of a different story however. Ehrenreich attempted to tackle the sublimation of desire that has taken place in most Western nations, she sees the rise of Protestantism and mass industrialization as working to rid daily life of passion and ecstasy. This is not a new argument, though it is one that we tacitly support, however not for any reasons that Ehrenreich gives. For a child of the Sixties, Ehrenreich really ought to be able to do a better job. Numerous books from the Sixties speak to this same topic, from the writings on sexual repression of Wilhem Reich, to the expressions of free love of Charles A. Reich and Norman Brown. Even Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter-culture covers the same ground. It's hard to believe that Ehrenreich never came across any of these authors. By the same token, she devotes a chapter to rock n'roll and later mentions Guy Debord and the role of the Spectacle, but never talks about Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces, a book that served as an introduction to the Situationists for many a rock fan, and even has the same topic for its thesis.

If you've never read any of the above, then Dancing in the Streets may make for a good introduction to a topic that has seen much more written about it than Barbara Ehrenreich would have you know.

Elsewhere, the graphic arts ruled. First through Tara MacPherson's lovely collection of work, Lonely Heart, comprising her first series of paintings, posters, sketches, and concert posters. Playful yet full of gothic brooding, we were instant fans. Second, Susie J. Horgan's earliest photographs have been released in Punk Love, documenting the early days of the D.C. hardcore scene. Horgan was responsible for taking the Teen Idle's album cover of the boy with the x's on his hands, as well as the legendary picture of Alex MacKaye (brother of Ian) sitting at the bottom of some steps with his head in his hands - the image thta was later used for the Minor Threat cover. Horgan's pictures include scenes from the early Minor Threat shows, shots of Ian MacKaye skateboarding, and images of Ian MacKaye and an equally young Henry Rollins goofing around in Rollins' ice cream shop. Finally, Hilly Kristal's photo-collection documenting over thirty years of CBGBs turned up on our desks. How do we rank this? Yes, CBGB's is/was an institution, though we all have our own CBGB's in our own neighbourhoods. Filled with photos of people who have performed or visited the club and interspersed with quotes, CBGB & OMFUG is a good afternoon of reminiscing. A lot of the early photos are available elsewhere, though it is handy to have them all in one collection. The best part perhaps is David Byrne's essay on the nature of the interaction between club and community.

Hills alive with music and sounds!

So much music has passed through our office this month that you'd forgive us for being somewhat reluctant to post about it all, especially if you factor in the amount of music that we brought back from SXSW and still haven't taken out of our festival bags.

But let us begin in those distant days before SXSW and what we were listening was dominated by The Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. While some of us were hesitant, fearing that the band might be caught in a sophomore slump, these fears proved deeply unfounded. From the first listen we were entranced with Arcade Fire's ability to evoke the streets of Montreal, capturing that unique blend of modern alienation and despair thoroughly steeped in feelings of Catholic longing and guilt.

We were also quite taken with a little EP from The Bombay Bicycle Club. Four songs blending the Strokes, Sonic Youth, and the Smiths. Jangly, pop-oriented guitar songs. Beirut's Pompeii EP helped to whet our appetites for their SXSW performance, as did repeated listens of Blonde Redhead's Misery is a Butterfly.

We also acquired Julie Doiron's latest offering, Woke Myself Up, and while we are enjoy her return to lo-fi rockdom, we do not feel that we've been able to give the able its full due, and expect to hear more from it in April.

The Return from SXSW featured the introduction of the Great Lake Swimmers' album, Ongiara, but their quiet overtones were quickly overtaken by the surprisingly catchy pop-work of the Tokyo Sex Club, who we passed up seeing at SXSW in order to see the Stooges. A fair trade, but we realize that we would have been just as happy watching Tokyo Sex Club open for Cursive. Their high-energy three song Smith EP (again owing a debt to the Strokes) demonstrates that the band would have been a much better time than Spoon. We also picked up the Pony's Turn the Lights Out which is proving to be an enthralling textbook display of guitar work.

However, the class of the end of March clearly belongs to Modest Mouse and their new release, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. As quirky as ever, but with the extra guitar pop of Johnny Marr, we are perfectly happy sailing off into uncharted waters with the band.

The Politics of Boredom

Alright, so perhaps not quite the posting that we would envision for the above title, and we promise we'll give it a much better go next time around. However, politics and boredom do seem to go hand in hand these days. Despite all of the excitement generated over the provincial elections in Quebec, we at The Daily Wenzel were not surprised in the least to find the Liberals ekeing out a narrow margin. This is perfectly in keeping with the way Canadian politics works. Separatist governments in Quebec only seem to thrive when the Liberals hold power in Ottawa. This is in part because Quebec, like most of Canada, is fundamentally Liberal, and having Liberals in office federally means that we agree on some many major issues that smaller issues can take a bigger stage. People only seem to want to debate separatism after health-care, social services, free trade, etc., have all been taken care of, issues that the Liberals seem to be much better at generating consensus around.

When the Conservatives are in power however, there are so many other issues that the electorate tend to disagree with, that the conversations rarely get to separatism. There is a weird idea floating here that an argument could be made that a Liberal government is bad for national unity, simply by being a victim of their own success.

Federally however, the success of the Liberals in Quebec does not necessarily mean an election is out of the question. The issue with the election is result is to see who made the biggest gains. In the last federal election, the Liberals lost significant ground, allowing the Conservatives to take the rest of Canada. The recent results most likely signifies that the Liberals would be triumphant in Quebec once more, causing Harper and Co. to have to wait for the Ontario numbers before calling an election.

SXSW X The Numbers

Our final tally:

1 movie
2 conferences
3 cities
4 days
5 assignments
7 magazines
8 bars
10 guest speakers
14 cds
15 hours sleep
31 bands
42 phone calls
72 text messages
550 miles driven
3454 miles flown

Twitterpated

We are currently testing out a new software applet called Twitter. Our username is, of course, DailyWenzel, and in theory you can use it to find out on your mobile when The Daily Wenzel has been updated. Bare with us, and send us feedback.

SXSW Band Shakedown

The Good
The Early Years
Voxtrot
The Mountain Goats
Bloc Party
Les Breastfeeders
Polyphonic Spree
Les Savy Fav
Daniel Johnston and his Night Mares
Maritime
Andrew Bird
Lee "Scratch" Perry
Million Year Dance
Art in Manila
Kings of Leon

The Bad (or at least indifferent)
Calla
Aqualung
Apostles of Hustle
The Annuals
Badly Drawn Boy
The Simple Kid
Spoon

The Queen!
Beirut
Blonde Redhead
The Dears
Buzzcocks
Peter, Bjorn & John
Field Music
The Stooges
The Good, The Bad, and The Queen

The Indescribable
Perry Farrell

SXSW #5

On the final day of SXSW we stumbled around the city of Austin little more than zombies, shuffling from bar to bar watching bands. Highlights must include unexpectedly seeing Lee "Scratch" Perry as we attempted to find a UPS station to mail back some posters. In retrospect, one of the more surreal SXSW moments must have been being mistaken for members of another band, as we stopped to watch Million Year Dance perform in an empty parking lot on our way to the Omni Hotel.

At the Omni, we gathered our strength and focused our attention. There were many hard choices to be made, starting with Cursive or the Stooges? Things were not made easier when we heard that 400 Blows was also playing at midnight. Furthermore, some of us wanted to go see Field Music open at the Cursive show, while others were pulling for the Buzzcocks, having missed their earleir show. Spoon and Kings of Leon were also getting big hype, countered with Tokyo Police Club. Most of decided on starting the evening at the Cursive show, catching Art in Manilla and Field Music, before heading over to Stubbs for Iggy and the Stooges, Spoon, Kings of Leon, to meet with those who had gone to the Buzzcocks. Art in Manilla seemed rather etheral and poppy, but it was Field Music that caught us off guard. For starters, our initialy impression (incorrect) was they were somewhat ambient and spacey, easily complementing Art in Manilla. The Sunderland trio took significant time getting set up properly, and the crowd grew restless as they complained to the soundman about minor changes. However, as soon as they began, it all proved worthwhile as they produced one of the best sounds that we heard throughout all SXSW, even though the backyard, chain-linked, tented-awning stage was perhaps one of the crudest performance spaces (only Maritime and Million Year Dance had to deal with worse). Furthermore, their angularity completing surprised us, sounding something like a poppier Mission of Burma, but with keyboards.

Afterwards, we ran over to the Stooges show, only to find the line-up extending all the way down Red River, across the street along 9th and up the block. Realizing that there were hundreds of people in line, we hustled back to the Cursive show, where a half-block line-up had already formed. We texted the rest of our group to suggest that we were bailing on the Stooges. Luckily, it turned out that the hype of the Buzzcocks had been so great that they went from openers to headliners, and our colleagues decided to head straight for Stubbs. They were near the head of the line when we sent our message and quickly ran back to join them in line as Kings of Leon started in all their Texan, trailor-park fury. Queens of the Stone Age might do it better, but that's not really a knock. Spoon on the otherhand, left us cold. Technically proficient, we simply did not understand where they were coming from.

Iggy, however, we understood all too well, and were immediately held in thrall by his vitality. Like James Brown, you kinda get the same show with Iggy Pop but there's still something heartfelt in the animosity he generates. Of all the shows we saw, he was the only one who through himself repeatedly into the audience, hugging and touching its members (though after unzipping his pants and prancing around for ten minutes, we all thought we were going to see his), no doubt causing the SXSW security team to wince. The head of security must have popped a vessel when Iggyy finally invited some fifty people to come onstage at the end of his set to dance. It ws unbelievable.

Once it was over, and we negotiated the ensuing bedlam, we piled into the rental car and drove off to San Antonio where our 6:25 departure was waiting for us, ending our SXSW adventures.

SXSW #4

By Friday morning, the plucky staff of The Daily Wenzel needed some time to recharge. Down on sleep, we called for a late morning before heading off to see the trade show, check out the posters and artwork available at Flatstock, sit in on a session about the future of Digital Music, and of course, check out a couple of bands. Perhaps most surprising was the Buzzcocks. Generally, we are not fond of old punk bands reuniting and trading in on our nostalgia. We do not want them to relive their youth so that we can relive ours. We would rather move forward, culturally speaking, and find new ways of saying things that resonate with these times. The shock of the Buzzcocks though, was just how timely the music actually was – they sounded every bit as vital as they did twenty years ago. Perhaps that’s something of an indictment on the current crop of punk bands. Certainly, somewhere out there are bands that would level the Buzzcocks like the old men they are (Adam Kamis of CJSW and Broken City swears that 400 Blows could do it), but in general, the Buzzcocks are more than likely to crush what passes for most people as punk.

Other bands that we saw while hanging around the Convention Center were the Polyphonic Spree and Daniel Johnston and his Nightmares. We were a little puzzled by the attraction of Johnston, a sort of Neil Young character back by much younger men and women, but the Polyphonic Spree made an impression. We had actually passed the backup singers for the Spree in the hallway earlier in the day. They were practicing their “dance” routines, and we mistook them for girls from the previous night’s roller derby. One of the things that caught our attention, was not just the similarity of the Polyphonic Spree to the Flaming Lips, but also the debt that the Arcade Fire owe to the Spree. Many people have commented on a connection between the Arcade Fire and Belle & Sebastian, a link that we see, but never really made us comfortable. After seeing the Polyphonic Spree, their influence seems fare more important, even if the Arcade Fire have twisted it and made it somewhat darker.

Popping out for a bite to eat brought us to the Pure Ultra-Lounge, where Maritime were setting up shop. Having been passed recommendations by various eastern seabord media outlets, we stopped to check them out. Despite having virtually no stage presence (passing as members of average Joe Public is one thing, but the lead singer actually stopped to answer his cell phone in the middle of the set), we rather enjoyed their songs, but felt they still have quite a ways to go.

We also checked out the rather lacklustre The Annuals, before making our way to Peter, Bjorn & John's second show of SXSW. The Convention Centre halls echoed with the sound of people whistling the melody from "Don't Care About Young Folks", which seems to be one of the top singles of this year's SXSW. As is the way of SXSW, the conclusion of the PB&J show saw us rush off to Stubbs to try and catch Andrew Bird's show. Despite the line-up, we managed to catch the last few impressive songs.

Not recognizing the next band, we made our way to the back of the crowd to touch base with other folks who were feeding us updates on other shows, when the next set began. We asked a Swedish journalist next to us who happend to be holding a SXSW schedule, the name of the next band and he shrugged, saying "The Perry Farrell Featherlife Family". We turned around and saw Perry Farrell, of Jane's Addication and Porno for Pyros, shaking his shiny, silver clad booty at the audience. We, and the bikers to our otherside, were completely taken aback. None of us knew if this was satire, self-parody, or part of Farrell's new age seriousness. It was bizarre, it was riveting. Checking Bands, Blogs, and Buzz the next day revealed that we were not the only ones fascinated by this apparent trainwreck. Did we mention he wore a sweater? Or that he had a go-go girl in a one-piece mini-skirt outfit? That he called us his brothers and sisters and offered to do unspeakable things for every member of the audience if only he had the time?

Perry Farrell was followed up by Badly Drawn Boy, who we normally like, but appeared to have a very off night. He lost his train of thought several times, appeared awkward in front of his audience, stopping and starting the same song several times. Despite this, he closed with a cover of Foreigner's "Don't Stop Believing" and the crowd loved him for it.

The highlight of the night, and indeed perhaps the festival, was Damon Albarn's The Good, The Bad, and The Queen, who we must admit was almost upstaged by the ever stylish ex-Clash bass player, Paul Simonon. However, Albarn's ability to craft a musical world and populate it with people, history , and details, is a force to be reckoned with. The show was subtle and sophisticated, less a gig than a dramatic musical production. Someone suggested to us that The Good, The Bad, and The Queen, was one of the most important albums about Britain to come out of Britain in the last thirty years. Not being British, we don't feel that we can really agree, but we certainly aren't going to go out of our way to disagree.

SXSW Breather

Trying to maintain The Daily Wenzel while keep up with everything that's going on at SXSW sometimes makes us feel like the kid from Almost Famous who keeps trying to write his story while on tour with the band. Ultimately he locks himself in the bathroom and takes refuge in an empty bathtub. This afternoon we kind of feel that way, but with a break in action just before the Lee "Scratch" Perry show starts, we have a small opportunity. Some of our members have left to do a radio broadcast for CJSW 90.9 FM back in Calgary so those of us left are trying to get some work done.

Check out our special SXSW site, www.bandsblogsbuzz.blogspot.com to see how the blogosphere hype is shaking out.

SXSW #3

With just a few hours of sleep we are off to San Antontio for a technology conference in the morning, and then back to Austin early in the evening for a session on China as an emerging market for Western music. After dinner, we saw the upcoming documentary Helvetica, on yes, the typeface of the same name. A fascinating, and often humourous film, we have been unable to view the world the same since. A must see.

The evening's music, was located primarily at Stubb's. Despite hearing a lot of hype and a few singles from Aqualung, there set was rather disappointing, coming off as a cross between James Blunt and Snow Patrol, though some may argue whether that amounts to a credible difference. The Apostles of Hustle came on next, and at times delivered a good show, but were a little too stylistically diverse, from their clothes to their sound, and were unable to show a degree of consistency. The problems of the Apostle of Hustle were shown more clearly as soon as The Dears took the stage and, along with Bloc Party, who were headlining and perhaps repaying SXSW for helping to launch last year's phenomenal North American tour, were perhaps one of the most successful one-two pop punches we've seen in awhile. It is arguable who pulled out deserving the No.1 spot more, a win-win for the audience.

SXSW #2

We left Calgary at seven o'clock Wednesday morning and arrived for our connecting flight in Houston early, at a little before noon. At the airport, while looking for a bite to eat, we heard mention that there had been a tornado sighting a few days earlier, but thought nothing of it, although it soon appeared that our flight was going to be delayed half an hour. A little while later, our flight was delayed another hour, on account of extreme weather at its originating airport. Next, the flight was announced to be overbooked. We began to think of driving straight to Austin and by the time our flight was announced delayed another hour, we were already on our way to the rental agency with our bags when he heard about road closures in southern Houston on account of washouts.

Luckily, we were heading north, and despite the hard rain in Houston, things cleared up about half an hour out of town, and there was just sporadic bursts through to Austin. Once we checked in and picked up our passes at the convention center, it was on to Emo's to catch a double bill of The Early Years, Callas, and Voxtrot in one room, and Beirut, the Mountain Goats, and Blonde Redhead in another.

Highlights here included the crescendo, wall of sound, descent into showgazing reverb madness that was the Early Years, and Voxtrot really made the most of its hometown status, delivering a high energy show. But it was Blonde Redhead in the Main Room that had the audience. Simply taking the stage changed the atmosphere of the club, making things darker, with shrieks of feedback piercing the air like lightning. Playing mostly songs off their upcoming album, things appear to be more muscular and menacing a complete contrast to the innocence and exuberance of Beirut - sweat-drenched, hanging from the rafters, playing their backyard bar mitzah Bowery folk music.

SXSW #1

With little over seven hours of sleep in the past seventy-two, we have planned for a late morning start tomorrow in an attempt to catch up on sleep. However, we promise to update The Daily Wenzel with a complete SXSW update, including an account of our almost, but not quite, harrowing trip into Austin.

With luck, we'll even post some pictures.

Compass Bearing - SXSW

Up and at'em early in the morning. The espresso machines on rapid fire as we all prepare for the short jaunt out to the airport to catch our flights to Austin and SXSW. Once there, we'll be making contact with other members of the Calgary media namely Fast Forward, CJSW, and Beatroute Magazine. We are prepared to be overwhelmed by bands, music, and film. We can't imagine what this week is like for the residents of Austin as a small town of music industry types descend on their city. One estimate we saw suggested that 17,000 people will visit the SXSW festival at some point, though by this time SXSW is really three festivals or conferences in one: music, film, and technology with each one drawing a sizable crowd.

Some things on our agenda for SXSW: the 4AD Showcase tonight, featuring (among others) Beirut and Blonde Redhead, both of these bands have been getting heavy rotation in our office speakers. The film Helvetica. Yes, it's about the typeface - hey, we read The Gutenburg Galaxy, it's only natural. People have been telling us to check out Andrew Bird all week. Damon Albarn's The Good, The Bad, and the Queen seems like a one-time only deal. Most anticipated pre-SXSW rumour? Arcade Fire to play a secret show. They've got a four day window in their Ireland/UK tour to pull it off. Crazier things have happened.

Check out our SXSW side project: Bands, Blogs, and Buzz.

Jonesin' for Jpod

Almost all of us at The Daily Wenzel have enjoyed the many books of Douglas Coupland, though being the reflective academic types, there has always come a point where we choose to disagree with his sense of social direction or interpretation. Rather than wallow in the sense of shiftless and closure to success central to Generation X, we wanted to celebrate it. Shampoo Planet was good, but came too soon after our own European sojourns and our views on its social function and meaning coloured our enjoyment of it. Similarly, a difference of philosophical and metaphysical opinion clouded Life After God.

But not Jpod.

With Jpod, our views and Coupland's finally mesh, as he presents a vision of society that we've always had. Unlike the characters in Microserfs who toiled ceaselessly for the MotherCorp because they believed in the saving power of technology, the characters in Jpod are jaded beyond belief, and use obscure elements of pop culture to try and assuage themselves. More interestingly is there relationship to their work, where they are seemingly trapped in the so-called Jpod, but are free to come and go as they please, showing up for work at all hours of the day, sometimes even going to work specifically to sleep. Technology is no longer a saviour, Coupland scatters late 1990s spam email throughout the book, as if to remind us how naive things once were, but rather a poor substitute. The characters inhabitants of Jpod are so divorced from human contact that one of them builds hug machine for everyone on the floor to use.

Douglas Coupland has once again proven himself to be a skilled novelist, capable of capturing the zeitgeist. We can only be pleased that his interpretation meshes with ours.

This is Sparta!

Last Friday night we all gathered for an excursion down to one of Calgary's premier movie theatres to watch the debut of 300 on the giant IMAX screens. Readers of The Daily Wenzel will know that we have been somewhat giddy in our anticipation of the latest Frank Miller adaptation, but giddier still were the crowds of people awaiting the opening of the movie.Young college age men, generally speaking, some of whom arrived dressed in cardboard Spartan outfits, were occassionally accompanied by women, but other movies were also drawing heavy that night and the atmosphere was quite heavy with anticipation. Clearly, tonight was a spectacle.

The movie itself was far more stylish than its audience. Background screens were impeccably rendered with fantastical images meant to give weight to the terrors of Classical hyperbole. The action equaled uits anticipation. 300 is a blood fest, but not in the way that some horror movies are awash in gore. In 300 the action during hte battle sequences speeds up during the approach before slowing down for the kill. The computer generated blood literally floats across the screen.

Yes, the movie is ultra-violent.

Yes, it is hyper-masculine.

Yes, it is awesome.

Jean Baudrilliard is alive and well and living in Paris

We have just received word that influential post-modernist thinker Jean Baudrilliard has past away. His thoughts of media and the role of symbols in daily life will continue to influence our thinking nevertheless. One of Baudrilliard's key themes was the poverty of daily experience, matching up quite well with that of Guy Debord and the Situationists. An event, no matter how large or catastrophic, cannot be real unless it is directly experienced somehow. The increasing reliance on mediated images meant that more and more people experienced life second hand, and what passed for "real life" became more and more "unreal".

In keeping with his theories then, for us at The Daily Wenzel, Jean Baudrilliard is alive and well and living in Paris.

Can we carry the burden of Climate Change?

Speaking in Belgium on proposed European plans for climate change, an EU official talked about challenging developed nations to tackle climate change in meaningful and significant ways. Not only has the EU proposed some large scale ideas, but is also actively pursuing smaller ventures aimed at encouraging the average citizen to take control of climate change initiatives. Recent moves have included tax measures to favour energy efficient appliances (a similar program in Canada was cut by the Harper government), increased use of biofuel mixtures (recently announced by Harper), and the banning of incandescent light bulbs (being considered in Nova Scotia, already underway in Australia, and Venezuela while Cuba accomplished this two years ago).

In Alberta, the big news is Ed Stelmach's decision to reduce "emission intensity" per barrel of oil from the oil sands, while allowing the overall number of barrels produced to expand. The other major announcement was a clever play on the idea of carbon capture and storage. According to British journalist George Monbiot, in his book Heat: How to stop the world from burning, the burial of carbon dioxide is an effective measure for the removal of the gas from the atmosphere, but it is also very useful for squeezing the last bits of oil out of abandoned oil reservoirs, Monbiot confides that this would be his nightmare scenario. Guess what the Alberta plan calls for?

Welcome to the Thunderdome!

Some of us from The Daily Wenzel were taking a break at the nearby Lina's Italian Supermarket and Deli, and over espressos talked about a recent article in Sports Illustrated with some of our neighbours. The article in question was SI's coverage of the Asian Games, recently held in Qatar, and at one point makes reference to a competition between India and Pakistan in which the crowds were whipped up in a frenzy of excitement prior to the match. Describing the scene, the author summed up the situation with the remark, "Welcome to the Thunderdome". One of our party felt that this was a "derogatory remark" in keeping with "prejudiced, colonial notions" about Asians, and particularly the citizens of India and Pakistan, as little more than barbarians. To this we disagree, though we admit that on the surface it may seem that our issue is little more than semantics.

We are moving into an age where people may recognize the phrase "Welcome to the Thunderdome" as coming from the Mel Gibson movie, "Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome" without having seen the movie itself. This presents some problem as people have a tendency to confuse images of the Mad Max film with impressions of the film, compounding this with several terms that have an unfortunate tendency to be used interchangeably. For example, a barbarian is someone who has not been acculturated into ancient Greek civilization while a pagan was someone, specifically in later stages Gaelic, who refused to be incorporated into the Roman empire. This is not the same as a savage, a person who had not been exposed to the Christian theology, while an infidel was someone who refused to accept the Word of God and a heretic being a person who deliberately distorted that Word.

What we have in Beyond the Thunderdome is a population of once civilized persons rendered uncivilized; a people at one time rational and willing to follow a legal code reduced to lawlessness and emotional brutality. This is the terror of the thunderdome, not the encounter with some kind of primitive and violent culture, but rather that that culture could be us. Nowhere in modern life does that occur more frequently than in riots and large scale sporting events such as the World Cup, the Olympics, College Sports, and yes, it would appear, the Asian Games.

You Best Believe I'M Talkin' 'Bout Love, L-U-ME

A recent university study into narcissim among U.S. college students suggests that American youth are far more self-centred and obsessed than they have been in the past. This comes as no surprise to us at The Daily Wenzel. We believe that individuals construct meaning, expectations for normative behaviour, and personal identity through the experiences that they have in everyday life. As more and more of life becomes mediated, especially for the young, popular culture becomes more and more of a reference point for normative behaviour. Many shows geared towards youth feature a single main character triumphing over various forms of adveristy. While this character may do so with or without the help of a supporting cast, quite often adults or parents are visibly absent. If you think of popular shows such as Buffy the Vampire-Slayer this becomes quite evident. Buffy's parents were divorced, her father absent, and her mother often unaware of her daughter's activities. Teachers were often sources of conflict in disguise, and the school principal an obstacle to overcome. The only adult was the school librarian who offered advice but generally did not intervene in the conflict itself. This basic trend has been repeated in many other shows such as Kim Possible, Dora, Smallville, and to a lesser extent, Veronica Mars, where while the father may be more involved, he is clearly presented as less a parent, and more an equal.

This is juxtaposed with a prevailing middle-class trend towards smaller family sizes and much more active parenting. In an earlier post about childhood activities such as Murderball, we mused about the rapid disappearance of public spaces where children can gather without parental supervision. Increasningly these spaces are becoming virtual, and tied to ego-centric activities like MySpace pages. All of this inevitably reinforces a child's belief that they are uniquely special and destined for greatness.

http://www.davisenterprise.com/articles/2007/02/27/news/307new0.txt

Unfit to Lead

There's been quite a bit of political news focusing on environmental issues over the past ten days or so, and most of it has been quite embarrassing. Despite promises that they were constructing a "greener" perspective, the Federal Conservatives, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, continue to talk about"reducing the intensity of emissions". Thus under current proposals, the Alberta Oil Sands projects, which is perhaps the single greatest engineering feat and environmental catastrophe of our time as Canadians, would be allowed to increasing the amount of emissions it generates. Granted, each barrel of oil would produce less pollutants, but the overall number of barrels allowed to be produced in the region is set to expand dramatically.

When asked about the plans, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach expressed his concern that the science behind climate change is not certain enough to risk jeopardizing the Albertan economy.

This in turn led to our favourite moment of the week, as David Suzuki, visiting Calgary on his "If I were Prime Minister" tour, called the Premier out publicly, saying he was unfit to lead.

Young Trudeau book wins prize

When we initially read the first volume of the Nemni's biography of the Pierre Elliot Trudeau, we thought to ourselves that this was historical revisionism in action. The image of Trudeau in the Canadian psyche is so strong, that he dominates our collective imagination, either as the saviour or the devil of Canadian politics. Regardless of one's opinion, and indeed, everyone has an opinion on Trudeau, we all reacted to the same pieces of public knowledge and public acts - the Trudeau we thought we knew, for good or ill. The Nemni's then, succeeded in showing us a new Trudeau, troubled by contradictory ideas and trying to come to grips with ideals given to him through his educational institutions, and those provided by his experiences in the wider world.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2007/02/28/cohen-prize.html

Similarly, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. served as one of the key "official"historians of the Democrats in the 1960s, being an intimate of the Kennedys, and one of the guardians of Camelot.

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/03/01/schesingerobit.html

Music Update

A couple of things have been Floating On the airwaves here at the Daily Wenzel the last few weeks, not least of which have been Arcade Fire's Funeral, or Modest Mouse's Good News For People Who Like Bad News, as well their respective singles as we gear up for the new albums. Blonde Redhead's 2004 release, the hauntingly beautiful, yet surprisingly fragile (for a former Touch & Go band) Misery is a Butterfly has perhaps been getting the most play.

In between, Chumbawamba's latest polemic, A Singsong and a Scrap, a collection of pro-worker songs of resistance and rebellion, including the Clash' "Bankrobber", has been finding it's own airspace as well. With all the songs being performed either a capella, or acoustically, the band seems to have completed its metamorphosis from piss and vinegar youthful punks, to thoughtful rootsy hippies. Also making the office charts are two new K7! albums, Appendix, a collection of solid, yet somewhat dissonant remixes from Funkstorung, and the one that we're quite interested in, as it seems a return to more organic, rock-based samples, Joakim's Monster's and Silly Songs.

To be fair, Blood Stained Love Story, from Saliva, a Memphis-based Creed/Nickelback band with serious adult contemporary religious rock tendencies got one play in the office, but has not been back since.

March Madness

No, we're not talking about college basketball.

March is shaping up to be quite the music month. The release of the new Bloc Party album , and the new Damon Albarn side project, The Good, The Bad, and the Queen, have only served to whet our appetite for major releases by the likes of The Arcade Fire and Modest Mouse. That Blonde Redhead have a new set for March doesn't hurt, nor does the slate of new music being released in advance of the spring festival circuit which kicks off with Austin's industry orgy known as South by Southwest, something we at the Daily Wenzel are desperately trying to wrangle our way into.

In the beginning . . .

A decree went out from Harper Augustus. According to the decree every man was to go to his own city to be passported. (Adapted from the Book of Luke)

Granted our neighbours to the south may have a bit more of a role to play in the sudden passport requirements of Canadians, however, Harper must ultimately be front in centre in what could be a very personal experience for most Canadians with the federal government.

Some of us went to the Harry Hays building last week, the Federal outpost in downtown Calgary to renew our passports. Typically such a visit might take half an hour with a return trip ten days later to pick up passports. On New Year's we noticed the new requirements for visiting the United States on travel websites, and thought it best to wait a awhile, expecting a passport rush leading up to the Jan. 23 deadline. A month later we decided to go in.

From all accounts, ours was a typical day and the people lining up around us were somewhat resigned to fact that they would be waiting at minimum two hours before getting to the passport office with their papers. Two and a half hours later, we arrived at the pre-screening desk and were told that it would be an hour from this point. Officials had been moving throughout the line checking for signatures of guarantors, but it was at this second pre-screening station that people really started to be weeded out. Three of the seven people ahead of us had their photos turned away, most commonly for glare, but occassionally for size or too much smile on the face of a four year old. Luckily, the pre-screeners informed everyone, they still had an hour before their pre-drawn number was up, so they could hurry to one of the photoshops and get new pictures taken. After we made it into the Passport Office Proper, the security guard announced to everyone that from this point it would be at least an hour before we could approach the wicket for processing. He recommended that we all leave and get something to eat to prevent fainting.

Scanning the room, we saw that there were twelve wickets, only half of which were open. While we left to grab a bite, we discussed the Attorney General's press release stating that the Harper government had yet to act of any of her 2005 recommendations to fix security breaches and processing flaws within the Passport Office. We found it odd that a government so concerned over terrorism would be so blaise about security gaps at such a sensitive location. We also found it highly annoying, and somewhat arrogant, that the Harper government would allow the Passport Office to be half-staffed. Either they were unprepared for the numbers of passport applicants or else cared very little for the trouble to average citizens.

Our passports were finally processed after four and half hours of waiting. Instead of ten days, we were told it would be four to five weeks.

Egad. . .

Late night internet surfing always yields the strangest things.

Literally mouth-watering photos of espresso shots from http://espressoporn.blogspot.com/ - we admit we have a problem.

Similarly, we find this http://ben.szobody.com/in.mov altogether too fascinating.

Valentine’s Day Is Over

Yes, Billy Bragg’s “Valentine’s Day is Over” has always been one of our favourite post-Valentine’s songs, with it’s cheerful lyric, “the bicycle chain fell off my bike today, it’s now wrapped ‘round my heart”. In an era of personal playlists, we here at the Daily Wenzel would like to suggest a few easy listening pieces for post-Valentine’s.

Should I Stay or Should I Go - The Clash hover on the edge of a dillema and we're never quite sure if it's personal or political, but the result is a bass hook and a refrain that lives on.

Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division write one for the ages. It was FFWD publisher, Ian Chiclo, who introduced this song as a "Valentine's Day song" one year during his CJSW radio show, "The 2 1/2 Hour Coffee Break". It's always struck with us, again, one of those moments in a relationship where, looking back things could go either way.

Technicolour Girls - Speaking of going either way, Death Cab for Cutie's torch song get's to the essence of post-Valentine's relationship's when they sing about the leather jacket "proving to be on temporary loan".

Butterfly - from a concept album devoted to the rise and fall of relationships, Rivers Cuomo concludes Pinkerton with this image-laden gem.

Miss Otis Regrets/Just One of Those Things - We freely admit that we have a thing for Cole Porter, and nothing sums up both ends of the morning after spectrum from the despair of Kirsty MacColl voice on "Miss Otis Regrets", nor the head-pounding of nighttime revelry encapsulated by Shane MacGowan in "Just One of Those Things".

Ice of Boston - legend has it that this is the song that got the Dismemberment Plan signed, and all you have to do is listen to the bit about Gladys Knight to capture the vision that we have. Even if it's about New Year's.

Feel free to suggest others.

Jam-packed environmental action

sEven in this tech heavy era, it seems like we can't stay as informed as we would like, as fast as we would like. With all of the enviro-debates occurring this week we almost wish we could have several direct video feeds set-up to monitor everything. For starters, there seems to be some talk of a post-Kyoto protocol in the works amongst the G8 nations, but whether this turns out to be a Kyoto II, or some kind of watered down Kyoto, or even anything at all, although given recent political developments in Britain it seems likely that something positive will result.

The Canadian federal government meanwhile is gearing up to debate a private members' bill calling on the Harper government to hold itself to the Canada's commitments under the Kyoto Accord. While some view the bill as mostly meaningless, since it lacks any effective measures to hold the government accountable, it gives the political parties another chance to posture on their environmental platforms in advance of a general election.

A little closer to home, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is arguing for greater Clean Air funding for Alberta. Although this is most likely a political attempt to take advantage of federal money since a common complaint among Alberta premiers is the inequality among transfer payments, however there is an element of truth to Stelmach's position. Currently, federal funding is being released on a per capita basis, where Alberta would be entitled to roughly a tenth of the funds, but as the province is home to the pil and gas industry, it is responsible for a third of all the country's emissions and air borne pollutants.

Kino Update

As one might suspect form our sporadic postings, we here at The Daily Wenzel have found ourselves pulled in several different directions, but managed to settle down to watch the lovingly filmed documentary New York Doll, about Arthur “Killer” Kane, the bass player for the legendary New York Dolls. In 1974 the Dolls suffered through a drug induced break-up, with Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan eventually dying of drug overdoses, and David JoHansen and Sylvain Sylvain cleaning up and finding other musical outlets. Arthur Kane however was stuck in somewhere in the middle. Having bottomed out into alcoholism and fallen through a window, he discovered God in the form of the Book of Mormon, and took up a job at the L.A. Temple.

When Morrissey had the idea of having the Dolls reform for his 2004 Meltdown, Arthur had not seriously performed in over twenty years. What follows is a bittersweet story of his return and sudden departure from a musical stage that has haunted him since 1974.

As a side note, watching David JoHansen relaxing and smoking cigarettes, one wonders if he was the inspiration for the Gorillaz’ Murdoc Nicchols.

Marxism, Post-Marxists, and a slow realization that after everything you've just ended up back at the starting point . . .

Quite a while ago, most of us at The Daily Wenzel would have considered ourselves non-Marxists. While we sympathized with the plight of working classes and riled against the rich and the status quo, our Maxists friends seemed altogether too stuffy and intent on bringing about a paradigm that was outdated and historically flawed. If you keep insisting on asking the same questions, we thought, you were always going to arrive at the same answers. How do you come up with new answers? we wondered. Obviously, asking new questions was they key, but how do we know if the questions are really new and not just different by degree instead of kind? A change in context, we argued, would yield a new perspective with new questions, but what could create a new context we then asked?

Well, we paused and thought. Quite a few mid-morning cappucinnos were consumed, and eventually we felt that a real change in context could only come about by a change in the daily living conditions of people. People constructed context based on how they lived their lives, and so if they somehow changed the way they lived, they could change the questions they thought to ask. What enabled people to change their daily lives, mainly technology, but what fuelled technological change? The economy.

In that moment the image of our laughing Marxist friends loomed large overhead.

That was a few years ago and the technological development of society has continued to increase rapidily. People now commonly speak of living in an Information Age and we find ourselves coming back to our thought on what causes a change in daily life. Our original answer of the economy does not seem so powerful now, as we are coming to the realization that context is dependent on meaning, and the question we should have been asking is what gives daily life meaning? The answer to that varies by time and place. In the feudal age that Marx describes, it was religion. The industrial revolution enabled the economy to envelop all of society. In this so-called Information Age, it is not so much the information that is important, but the manipulation of it. What gives our lives meaning is the lives and meaning we see reflected back to us in the media.

Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle seems more relevant now than ever before.

Modest Mouse single released

Just how big has been the impact of Montreal's Arcade Fire? One piece of evidence is a new single that has crept out of the Modest Mouse music camp (and we're quite smitten with it). The new single "Dashboard" retains some of the fast-paced guitar work characteristic of early Modest Mouse, it also includes a lush orchestral backdrop and choral harmonies - demonstrating that Isaac Brock has learned a thing or two from some of his former students.

The new album, We were dead before the ship even sank is due out in March.

Education - the Alberta Advantage?

Speaking of education, the Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has recently announced that he will be returning over $1 billion of education taxes to municipalities. Prior to the Klein government changes in education funding starting in 1994, local schoolboards acting in conjunction with the muncipalities set a portion of civic property taxes to be used to fund schools. The schoolboard operating budgets came directly out of this levy. Under the Klein government, the province collected this money from the municipalities and then returned to the schoolboards in the form of per pupil grants, with additional monies granted for capital and special projects. Critics of this plan have long argued that under the new system the large urban boards of Calgary and Edmonton have seen their funding levels decrease, inhibiting their ability to meet the specialized needs of at-risk, special needs, and ESL students who tend to migrate to the urban boards. Furthermore, this has put negotiations between local schoolboards and locals of the teachers' union in an awkward place since the schoolboards do not have control over their income, but the union locals cannot negotiate with the province who actually holds the purse strings. Is it any wonder then that labour relations have reached some of their highest tensions in the last thirty years?

At any rate, the education is still underfunded. Urban schools are in various stages of disrepair and the provincial teachers' pension plan has an unfunded liability over the $6 billion mark. Somehow though, Premier Stelmach feels comfortable refunding money to the muncipalities to be used for municipal projects like road construction and repair.

All Quiet on the Western Front

While we would like to say that things have been quiet here at the Daily Wenzel since we've all been off in Paris at the climate change meetings, the truth is somewhat (alright much) more mundane. Readers waiting patiently for pronouncements or opinions on the recent parliamentery debates between Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Opposition leader Stephane Dion over the environment will have to wait a while longer. Given the reporting in the media these energetic exchanges signify the jockeying for political positioning that accompanies and imminent election. Unfortunately an explanation, exploration, and evaluation of these different proposals has been sorely lacking. Readers familiar with the ideas of Guy Debord contained in his book The Society of the Spectacle (available at right) may recognize this as all-too-characteristic of corporate media coverage.

While we are attempting to find out more about these positions, we were surprised at the various levels of coverage presented to the Paris Climate Change conference report that human activitiy is "likely" (meaning 90% causal) to be the prime influence on global warming and climate change. What surprised us is that while it is difficult to find out information of Canadian political responses through the media, most major media include a direct link to the conference's 21 page report. Putting information in the hands of people is one of the most productive strategies to change opinions on climate change. Educating them however, is also a necessary next step. . .

Federer wins - again

For a moment it looked like we had a match going in the men's Australian Open Final. Fernando Gonzalez took Roger Federer into a first set tiebreak only to gain two meager points. Starting off the second set, Federer looked as if any worry about losing had passed and he proceeded to break the Chilean calmly, going 6-4, 6-4 in the last two sets, becoming the first man since Ivan Lendl in 1980 to win a major without losing a single set.

Gonzalez, for his part, played an exciting first set, giving Federer perhaps his toughest challenge of the tournament, but it was if the Swiss Maestro had simply been using the match opener to take the measure of Fernando, because afterwards, it was all Federer. Among our office staffers, we are excited at what the Australian Open showed in terms of promise on the men's side, Gonzalez will hopefully be able to to follow up his strong showing, as we hope Safin and Murray will. Blake and Nadal ought to continue their strong play and we are curious to see what happens now to Roddick.

For the women, however, it seems unfortunate that our angry comments about the lack of consistency in the women's game proved too true in the final. After her father and coach asked her to tweak her serve prior to the match, Sharapova fell apart under Serena's withering stare. But we are left to wonder, what sort of coach would undermine their player's confidence so soon before a major match? We too echo commentator Mary Carillo who asked why parent/coaches are so common in the women's game, and nearly absent on the men's side?

The big question though, still centres around Federer. Many consider him to be the best men's player of all time, and so the question becomes, can he be considered the greatest without either a French Open title, or a Grand Slam? What will it take for naysayers like Pete Sampras to hold their tongues?

What's up with the Grups?

Given that a few of our staffers at The Daily Wenzel and even more of our friends have entered parenthood, it was perhaps inevitable that Adam Sternbaugh's article "Up With Grups" from New York made it's way to us. Furthermore, since many of us cut our teeth at "hip" institutions like Calgary's CJSW, Fast Forward, and VOX, we could all see ourselves somewhere in Sternbaugh's article about post-adolescent hipsters clinging to their youth.

While Sternbaugh's article spends more time discussing the consumption patterns of the parents he observes, he still delivers his observations on their attitudes and behaviours close to the mark. Having said that, we would like to offer a few comments:

1. Sternbaugh seems surprised that the adult members of the Gen X community are purchasing frivolous items geared towards a younger generation. He comes close when he mentioned that Gen X graduated into a recession. It wasn't just the recession however, marketing consultants at the time noted that members of Gen X were proving unusually cynical towards advertising, and many companies elected to skip Gen X as a consumer target group, aiming more towards their younger companions, the 'tweens. Now, flush with cash after the dot.com craze, ad execs are looking once more to Gen X'ers who find the attention flattering and no less susceptible now than any other generation.

2. We are experiencing one of those odd moments where two popular cultures are cohabitating in the same mass cultural space, namely that of the 1960s "counterculture" and its descendents, and that of "mainstream" society. The generation gap that Sternbaugh speaks of is a product of the clash between these two cultures. Grups, having grown-up in the media space occupied by the counterculture are perfecting at home listening to the music of the current counterculture. It is akin to fans of Frank Sinatra picking up on Michael Buble. Grups are simply trying to find their way through parenthood in the same way that hippies and punks did before them.

The Champ is Here!

Whether he moves on to the eventual championship or not, Roger Federer's thorough dismantling of Andy Roddick will go down as legend. Roddick summed up his relationship with Federer, saying "Are you sure you can call this a rivalry?"

Woe is the women

In the women's game there have been so many breaks of serve, often four or five times in a set, one after another, it's maddening. It seems like all you need to do in the women's game is hold serve while in the men's game holding is a given and the game is premised on trying to gain the break. It seems impossible to imagine that a women who looks obviously out of shape and is fighting a visible cold, that has barely played any high level competitive tennis over the last eighteen months can enter a grand slam tournament and reach the finals. Is simply surviving the best the women's game can manage? What happened to the will to win? Clijsters and Hingis appear buddy-buddy in the tunnel just moments before the match and Clijsters sprays sixty-five errors - we feel obliged to give full credit to Serena Williams, what she lacks in conditioning she more than makes up for with her will to win.

Until more women learn to harness their talent, the women's game will not, and cannot, measure up to the men's.

Speaking of the men, and harnessing talent, Fernando Gonzalez continues to impress us. Picked by our assorted office courtwatchers as an early favourite, it seems like Gonzo's partnership with new coach Larry Stefanki is a match made in heaven. Stefanki has taken other players, such as Kafelnikov and more recently Tim Henman, to the heights of their careers. Gonzalez has always been a creative and intriguing player, but under Stefanki his energy has been focused, giving him the power of Andy Roddick and the anticipatory shot-making nearing the realm of Rodger Federer. Suitably dispatching Nadal yesterday, Fernando makes his first foray into the semi-finals of a Grand Slam and it remains to be seen whether he can withstand the pressure and stress that comes travelling this deep into a tournament.

We hope to see him in the final.

We also hope to see another match worthy of the highlight reel emerging from yet another Federer-Roddick clash. Typically the young American gets put through his paces but Roddick's recent exhibition win over Federer will have some supporters suspecting the return of Andy's mojo, but we have our doubts. Nevertheless, this one should be good.

Music Update

Amidst all this tennis we've still been listening to our fair share of music. One of the albums that barely missed our top ten faves of last year was Built to Spill's You in Reverse, an album that's been getting some pretty heavy play lately, at least the stellar epic "Goin' Agaisnt Your Mind" with it's heavy reverb and distortion droning on into the seven minute mark. Similarly, we've revisted the Arab Strap's live album Mad for Sadness which contains a delightful intermezzo of feedback and distortion that demands to be played at maximum volume. We are somewhat disappointed at the band's announcement that they were breaking up last month, though not really surprised.

Also finding itself in heavy rotation has been Blonde Redhead's multi-lingual Melodie Citronique five song EP with their post-modern no wave take of various European chanteurs like Serge Gainsbourg's "Slogan". Our favourite has been the Italian "Chi E E Non E" and we were quite excited to come across their 2004 album, Misery is a Butterfly and are very excited about their forthcoming album "23" to be released in April.

Battles in the Blistering Sun

Upsests abounded this weekend, with the "young guns" making good on last year's promise. From Monfils, Gonzalez, Djokovic, and Andy Murray. With Safin out, and Camerin finally retired from the doubles court, Fernando "Gonzo" Gonzalez is now the player we most hope see pitted against Roger Federer. Perhaps the unpredictable Chilean will find some of the form that won him the bronze medal in Athens.

With so much tennis under the bridge it seems best to start with the lead off broadcast match of Serena Williams and Shahara Peer. Granted Williams is lacking in fitness, but Peer's relentless assault in the first set caught many off guard, including Williams, who used the occassion to curse loudly using language that would cause even Marat Safin and Andy Roddick to blush. Regardless, Peer's physical play forced the question of Serena's conditioning, exposing her lack of movement and highlighting the dominance of Williams' serve and forehand.

Earlier in the day Andy Murrary demonstrated that he had the talent to go toe-to-toe with Rafael Nadal, with many arguing that the young Brit allowed Rafa to escape with the win, failing to follow-up on numerous break point opportunities.

Despite a surprisinglylarge build it, the challenge of Djokovic failed to materialize against Federer on an otherwise busy day of upsets. Amelie Mauresmo could not solve Safarova, while Mardy Fish continued his improbable run, by bouncing David Ferrer .

Clash of Titans

It was a match that lived up to expectations, with Andy Roddick and Marat Safin squaring off in one of the most anticipated tennis matches of the Australian Open. The hard-serving Roddick, looking to show off his net moves, attacked at the net every chance he could, but the wildly inventive Safin did his best to hold the aggressive American at bay. At times Safin looked bewildered by his own talent, stopping to curse his play and earning a caution from the chair umpire. Roddick, doing his best to keep his own temper in check, managed to battle through Safin's moments of brilliance to best the Russian in four tight sets.

Elsewhere, Daily Wenzel staff writer Bassano del Grappa was disconsolate as Maria Elena Camerin lost to Elena Dementieva in a match that, at times, was much closer than the 6-1, 6-3 scoreline would indicate. However Camerin is still alive in the women's doubles, and del Grappa has been gracing us lately with the merits and beauty of the doubles game.

Small Victories and Sweet Anticipation

In our heart of hearts we knew that Canadian Frank Dancevic was unlikely to advance past Lleyton Hewitt last night. However, ever the optimists pre-match banter found us grasping at whatever facts we could. Hewitt might be hurt, or at least still tired from his opening round five set match. Hewitt is under a lot of pressure, having worn out his welcome with the Australian tennis public. Maybe Hewitt will fall down and hurt something. Instead, Dancevic fell down, appearing to strain somethign in his back. The Canuck with pluck, in a yellow jersey that's vies with Serena Williams' electric lime outfit for brilliance, ultimately lacked the composure and pace to keep up with Hewitt, two things he's sure to pick up this year as Dancevic becomes the first Canadian man to crack the ATP Top 50, and only the third ever to do so. We look forward to the potential of seeing him at more events throughout the year.

Bassano del Grappa meanwhile, already happy at Maria Elena Camerin's victory over Vesnina, was wildly elated at the news that Camerin and Dulko had bested the American pair of Granville and Gullickson. Now the man from Paderno keeps one eye on the telly and the other rivited to the online scoreboard. We can't imagine what could happen if Camerin could somehow eke out a victory over the soft-serving Dementieva later today.

The main event however is the much anticipated match up between Safin and Roddick, a contest to see who rightly deserves the crown of tennis' enfant terrible. What to look for? Hard hitting serves, long strokes and short tempers. Rackets will be slammed on the ground, curses will be muttered under breaths, umpires called into question, and no inch given nor quarter conceeded. It could very well get ugly and a legendary clash of two men wanting desperately to be seen as titans of their sport.

Victory for the Veneto!

With college basketball well into triple overtime on TV, we found ourselves huddled closely over our laptops, our voices joining with Bassano del Grappa in urging his paesana Maria Elena Camerin to victory over Elena Veznina of Russia. After losing the first set, Camerin battled back in the second, only to fall behind 1-4 in the third. However the young Italian, with eyes on making the third round of a grand slam for only the second time in her career, found the reserves required to mount a late-stage comeback, winning 8-6. With a cheer, del Grappa broke out the grappa and espresso, fitting fuel for a long night of Australian tennis.

Australia serves it up hot!

It's mid-January and the mercury is taking a dip on this side of the hemisphere, which means that it's time for sweltering tennis on the other side of the world. It also means that it's time for another "episode" from Andy Roddick. Australia tends to bring out the best in Roddick, from trashy locker rooms to yelling at officials. Yesterday was no exception as the young American took veteran chair umpire Carlos Ramos to task quite heatedly, when Ramos tried to cool Roddick down saying, "I think we should end this discussion," the American, who's words were picked up by the chair microphone, "We'll end this conversation when you say something intelligent."

While some may point to Roddick's behaviour as following the American tradition laid down by John McEnroe, Roddick's behaviour is singularly self-serving (McEnroe at least sometimes deliberately blew points in the face of what he considered bad officiating). Until Roddick learns to carry himself with more deportment and aplomb, he will continue to rank on the outside of the tennis greats. That, and a few more majors.

Serena Williams found herself on the comeback trail yet again, with many questions surrounding her fitness prior to her first round match. Allow she easily defeated her opponent we were all surprised that her bright outfit was not being used to power a small country's energy grid.

Speaking of outfits, it looks like Mary Sharapova ought to spend more time preparing for the extreme heat of Australia, and less time detailing her wardrobe for the benefit of international
media. While Camille Pin appeared fresh well into the fifth set of their first round match despite the withering heat, Sharapova looked ready to pull an Andy Murray and spew. Even on the verge of vomiting, Sharapova still showed more poise than Roddick.

Williams, by appearing fit and healthy for the first time in months, joins Marat Safin in an unusually low draw. Safin, who spent much of last year hurt and unable to defend his ranking, is coming off a stellar Davis Cup appearance where he helped Russia win the Davis Cup. Both of these former number ones could make good runs towards the final. Also capable of making a surprise run could be any number of players in the bottom quarter of the men's draw where Rafael Nadal is suspected of spending too much time contemplating Federer and not enough on his game. If Nadal falls early, that will open the door for James Blake, Lleyton Hewitt, Andy Murray, or even Fernando "Gonzo" Gonzalez.

As usual, we are backing our favourites, Safin and Hingis, while Bassano del Grappa cheers on his countrywomen Maria Elena Camerin.

What we're listening to these days

With the spate of Best of 2006 Albums available these last few weeks, we at The Daily Wenzel have taken the opportunity to catch up on some music that we didn't get a chance to listen to during our hectic regular year-round listening schedule. But you imagine trying to cram twenty albums of so of listening into a ten day period. Regardless, here are some of our more notable:


The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street, granted this doesn't actually belong here on the strength of not being released in 2006, but the Time Top 100 Albums list got us talking and it turns out that none of us had ever listened to the actual album start to finish. Widely considered to be the best Stones album, it is rumoured that the Stones opted not to release any "singles" from it (perhaps to encourage airplay on the emerging non-singles oriented FM dial - Wikipedia disagrees though) and so its' songs are rarely heard on radio.

Snow Patrol's Eyes Open - this record got a lot of people gushing this year. It sounds to us a bit like a cross between James Blunt and Sebadoh. Maybe you had to be there, or perhaps it needs to sit in the record player a little longer.

Beulah's The Coast Is Never Clear, was a direct hit right out of the gate. At times reminescent of the Beach Boys and Wilco, a more Americanized version of Belle & Sebastian's pop sensibilities. We decided we could listen to this one all day long - if only there wasn't so much else to hear (and this really came out in 2001)!

Joanna Newsom - Ys, a critic's darling with some wierd folk overtones. We were a little taken aback at the number of songs surpassing the seven minute mark. Newsom's voice is one of a kind, kind of like Dan Bejar or Danielson on helium - Macy Gray sung folk, but even that doesn't quite capture it. Riveting. We were tempted to turn it off after the first minute, but hung around for the whole album.

Beirut - Gulag Orkestar. Neutral Milk Hotel's 1997 release In the aeroplane over the sea has been one of our favourite albums as it seemed to promise a new direction in sound that their follow-up, On Avery Island, couldn't quite match, and with the band's subsequent break-up we felt was gone for good. However, Jeremy Barnes from Neutral Milk Hotel, is here as a session player on Zach Condon's debut album and making all the same promises. Lon Gislan an EP released a few weeks ago only adds to our expectations.

Yo La Tengo - I Am Not Afraid of You and Will Beat Your Ass. Really, this is perhaps the best album title release in a long while. This is the sort of thing normally used as a working title an then the band gets cold feet or some studio exec puts a kybosh on it. No such second thoughts with Yo La Tengo and this adventuresome, muscular outing melding sixties soul with guitar fuzz.

We Are Scientists - Live Sessions EP. We Are Nerds. We have a high school science teacher on staff. We Are Suckers for their sophisticated pop sensibilites, stripped down here. Some of the songs, like "Nobody Move, Nobody Gets Hurt" are slowed down, heightening the emotional tension.

Cat Power - The Greatest. We loved "Nude as the News" back in the day, and her cover of the Stones' "(Can't Get No) Satisfaction" made her heart-ache and yearning speak to us in a way that Mick never could. It seems like a lot of people are having that exprience with this album and "Lived in Bars" in particular. Smoky, sultry . . .

Alright, so not necessarily twenty but the stacks of incoming records is starting to get high again.

On Leadership

There are two ways to exercise leadership. One is to arrive in a position of power with a vision and execute that vision without alienating those around you. The other is to be in a position of power during some sort of destabilizing event and navigate the ensuing chaos back to a degree of normalcy.

For the past few months, the Prime Minister Harper has shown a decided lack of what we would define as leadership. In fact, reactionary is a better word. Upon hearing that the Bloc Quebecois were about to introduce a motion regarding Quebec sovereignty, Harper beat them to the punch. With the election of former Liberal Environment Minister, Stephane Dion, Harper scrambles to replace the universally criticized Rona Ambrose. However, Harper's subsequent interview on who he considered to be part of the Quebecois nation reveal an astute lack of understanding. Similarly, his failure to name a significant caucaus member as Minister of the Environment, or to use the naming of a new minister as an opportunity to announce a new environmental policy, highlights the absence of vision here.

The environment is widely expected to play a large role in the upcoming federal election. Canadians recently named the environment their number one concern. Furthermore, in this week's edition of Fast Forward David Suzuki suggests that it is time to take a more integrated approach to environmental issues. Some media reports seemed to indicate that Harper would do just that, naming a high profile member of the Conservative Party who could hold his or her own with the Finance Minister to plan joint endeavours on behalf of the enviroment. Naming Baird, a junior MP, does not do this.

Marketers and public relations officials go to where the people are, leaders go to where they want the people to be.

Bookends

It's been awhile sir we've graced this page with the pages we've turned around the office here at The Daily Wenzel. Most eagerly making the rounds has been Gautum Malkani's Londonstani, a tale of first generation Indian youth growing up middle-class and British. Combining elements of A Clockwork Orange and Trainspotting, it chronicles their bling-filled, cellphone-boosting, class-cutting days as they try to establish meaning and identity.

Meaning and identity are also central to Prof. Ross Haenfler's Straight-edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean-living Youth, and Social Change. Haenfler spent almsot ten years observing the Denver straight-edge scene, and his book is an exploration of how American youths use the no drugs, no alcohol, no meat or promiscuous sex of straight-edge as a catalyst for personal change. Sean Marchetto's Tune In, Turn On, Go Punk makes great companion reading.

We've also been readind T. Christian Miller's Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq. The title pretty much tells you exactly what's going on in the book, but nevertheless, Miller does an admirable job documenting the mishandling of Iraqi reconstruciton. While she perhaps spends too much time dwelling on the failures (or maybe there really have been so few successes), she puts most of the blame of the Bush Administration's failure to plan and prepare for the reconstruction. Yes, companies like Haliburton have walked away with billions, but only because Government oversight has allowed it. Events unfolded with a speed and complexity that planners simply did not predict.

Finally, on a more light-hearted note, we have also been perusing the new Gorillaz' "biography" Rise of the Ogre. Quite fun.

A More Toxic Nation?

With the environment shaping to play a much larger role in the upcoming federal election, the profile of our national toxicity has received a big boost. Four MPs, including Rona Ambrose and Jack Layton, volunteered for toxic testing, similar to the kind that Statistics Canada announced it planned to undertake on roughly five thousand Canadians this year. The results showed that the Canadian MPs exceeded many of the recommended safety levels. Click here for more information.