Get ready to take them away, Rusty

By “bad,” we are not referring to routinely mediocre, ineffective, uninspiring or non-creative advertising; rather, we aim to draw attention to campaigns that are egregiously insulting to consumers, to the culture, and to human civilization.

To qualify for an Amphon, an ad must invoke a reaction from the viewer that would result in any logical and reasonable person demanding a lengthy jail sentence for the parties responsible. (The legal justification for insisting upon incarceration comes under the French lèse-majesté precedent, whereby it is a offence punishable by a jail term to offer an insult to the state. Thus, the Amphon is named to honor Mr. Amphon Tangnoppaku, a 61-year-old resident of Thailand who this year was convicted under a lèse-majesté provision, after sending offensive text messages to Queen Sirikit, the Thai monarch. Amphon is currently serving a 20-year stretch. That seems about right.)

So. Mr. Bailiff? Please stand by, as we are about to announce the three Canadian winners of Amphon Awards, for the year 2011. And here they are:

•  The BRONZE AMPHON goes to the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, for their campaign known as “Dalton McGuinty is the Taxman.” Proverbially snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory, these ads miraculously turned Ontario’s widely unpopular two-term Premier from a reviled lame-duck identified with eight years of unremittant scandals and ineptitude, to something very different and unexpected: the pitiable target of a bully’s taunts. The creators of this disastrous campaign didn’t bother to articulate the vision or policy ideas of the sponsor, PC leader Tim Hudak, likely because they miscalculated public sentiment, and deduced the province was crying out for anyone-but-McG. Which, arguably, they were — up to the precise point when Mr. Hudak’s people unleashed these uncalled-for TV spots, laden with sarcasm and negativity. Political attack-ads seldom backfire, but these did, allowing the Premier to crawl back into office and improbably form a minority government.

•  The winner of the SILVER AMPHON is a familiar name to those who follow the Bad Ad scene. It’s Rogers Communications, with their late-2011 campaign called “Free Tablet Offer.” Rogers, by word and deed, have maintained a longstanding habit of openly insulting their mobile-phone customers. Rogers has become famous for their usual practice of dangling a so-called “free” gee-gaw, contingent upon the client entering into an expensive long-term contract (which always contains convoluted terms, disguised service fees and onerous early-exit penalties.) It is a fact that these dodgy practices by Rogers, along with those undertaken by their few competitors, have spawned the creation of an entire federal agency, the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS.) It is also true that the number of complaints to CCTS rose by 115 per cent in 2011, over the preceding year. Additionally, there are numerous web sites and forums devoted to discussing the dubious tactics of Canadian mobile phone providers: A Google search of the phrase “I hate Rogers” returns a remarkable 7.6 million results. That number is roughly equal to the number of the company’s Canadian customers.

The contempt may be mutual. Rogers’ TV advertising has been distinctively snide in tone, often to the point of appearing openly contemptuous of its customers. The spots airing in Q4 of this year represented a new level of belligerence (watch one here.) The spokesman for the offer is an unpleasant young man who seems to have deluded himself into thinking, thanks to the current promotion, that he’s gotten the better of Rogers. This leads him to boast insufferably, in his wife’s presence, that he plans to purchase phones as presents for his children, simply so that he can obtain a “free” tablet. She makes a mild, passing suggestion that they share use of the tablet, at which point he conveys to the camera his open disdain for his spouse, and her wifely entreaties. This is how Rogers sees its customers: Vain, stupid, self-absorbed, easily duped. The same actor-portraying-weasel makes his unwelcome return appearance in a second spot, where he continues to bask in his ability to get one past his phone company, at which point he flamboyantly rejects the friendship of the cohort with whom he is watching a football game on television. Welcome to Rogers World, where there is no virtue or verity — no regard for truth, beauty, love, fellowship, or family — that counts for more than the vague promise of getting another crappy new toy for “free.”

• With that, we can now reveal the recipient of this year’s GOLD AMPHON. For several years now, the financial institution, TD Canada Trust, has been consistently waging its “Grumpy Old Men” campaign, which depicts the elderly in a mocking light. You know how the contemporary image of the senior Canadian is that of a vigorous, energetic, engaged citizen still active and happily making valuable contributions to our evolving society? In the vision presented by this big bank, you can forget all that. TD deploys two decrepit oldies as figures of ridicule, who have been trotted out for the sole purpose of standing in contrast with their dynamic, au courant money-lending operation.

On one level, this might be considered an audacious creative approach. After all, how many hundreds of billions of dollars have Canadian seniors placed in low-yield accounts in TD Canada Trust, and how badly does the bank want to risk pissing them off by portraying them as laughing-stocks — dehumanized props, unable to do anything, except kvetch into the camera? But, that’s just it. It’s as though, in the mind of TD, it’s not even worthwhile to imagine the consequences of offending that segment of the population. Aging Canadians, according to this view, are nothing more than the lumpen bodies you step around, on your way to conduct your important banking affairs. The two clueless fuddy-duds in the TD spots seem to play no role other than as objects. They are not fellow-citizens, neighbors, relatives, retired ex-colleagues, war-veterans, or your future self. They are caricatures, cynically objectified for the potential profit of someone trying to sell you a term-deposit, mortgage or car loan. And, make no mistake, these ads proclaim that by the time you’ve finished repaying your bank debts, the only interest TD will ever take in you is as something to point at, and laugh.

It’s stunning that any major institution would insult a segment of its depositors, with such casual cruelty, for so long a period, without resulting in a long series of complaints to a provincial Human Rights Commission. But, that is the Canadian way, to shrug in response to aggrievement. In many countries, those who give offense to such an extraordinary degree would answer not to a mere human rights tribunal, but to the criminal courts.

You may disagree with such draconian measures. You may feel that when a company insults its constituency with Bad Ads, it is sufficient punishment to avoid doing business with that organization. However, we say to you bleeding hearts: Nuts to that. Put the offenders behind bars.

That is the essential thinking behind the lèse-majesté legislation, and that is why these awards are named after Mr. Amphon Tangnoppaku. In a truly just world, the recipients of the 2011 Amphons, those parties responsible for perpetuating the year’s most outrageous Bad Ads, would have already been photographed and finger-printed, have completed the perp-walk, and would right now be taking their place alongside the unhappy Amphon, in detention, where for the next 20 years, the only audience for their disrespectful utterances will be… each other.

Exposing his money to Canada still nags at Naguib Sawiris

I’m shaking my head in wonderment over the international telecom mogul who proudly goes by the imposing handle of Mr. Naguib Sawiris. I’ve devoted much serious effort to analyzing his name, using state-of-the-art anagram-finding technology, and I am now able to report that there are many revealing phrases concealed therein. By far my favorite is: “I saw gab-is-ruin.”

So true, so true. “Gab is ruin,” and it has been ever thus for consumers, as we regard the monthly bills from our mobile telephone carriers.

Mr. Sawiris saw this, and did more than merely observe. Two years ago he acted upon his vision by investing a half-billion dollars in a Canadian mobile telecom startup known as Wind Mobile. (If only Mr. Sawiris had performed the due diligence of seeking out anagrams within that brand, he would have found “I’d blow mine,” which, regrettably, appears to have foretold how his investment would perform.)

Last week Mr. Sawiris offered this forthright comment to the Toronto Star regarding his decision to sink dough into a Canadian business proposition: “In retrospect, it was a mistake.”

Mr. Sawiris flew in from Egypt, filled with big plans for his service, which operates in two dozen countries. But what Naguib Sawiris could not have understood is that Canada is not a country in the same sense as other countries, such as, say, Luxembourg or Slovakia.

Similar to those other jurisdictions, we issue currency, and passports, and maintain a state broadcasting service, display a smartly designed flag over courts and post-offices, and, all in all, evince a fairly presentable citizenry. But, to a greater extent than certain other nations, Canada has only ever been about one thing, and that is protecting the interests of its business establishment.

That’s the singular, overarching principle that forged this great nation out of disparate territories, built the railroads, tamed the wilderness to harvest and ship the natural resources, settled the Golden West and the uninviting lands north of the 55th parallel, established the Wheat Board and the Dairy Board, left the banks and underwriters alone to do their thing, created and perpetuated our unique culture. And, to enable the preceding accomplishments, Canadians devised the protective tariffs that kept the foreign robber-barons from acquiring and defiling our great commercial institutions; that is, until recently.

When Canada became a signatory to the supranational trading bodies created at the tail-end of the 20th century — your NAFTA, your GATT — it was suddenly a requirement that we become less obvious in using regulations to prop up the tiny number of groups that had thrived under our traditional mercantile system. And so we complied, but only to the extent of making it less obvious. The revised regulations seemed cleverly inspired by Barry Levinson’s great movie “Avalon,” especially the comment made by the teacher, after a student imploringly asks if he can go to the bathroom: “Yes, you can. But, no, you may not.”

That is essentially what Canada’s telecommunications regulators told poor Naguib Sawiris: Yes, indeed, foreign man, you can compete with our fat, sassy domestic suppliers, and certainly we wish you loads of luck. But, at the end of the day, no, you may not.

And so Wind Mobile, along with Mobilicity, and Public Mobile, and the other newcomers to the Canadian cellular scene, find themselves blocked by arcane stipulations that somehow seem not to pose much of an impediment to the three established providers, which in this case are Bell, Rogers, and Telus.

If you are used to this kind of distinctively Canadian situation, and it exists in absolutely every sector, you learn to merely shrug and mutter about it over your Tim Horton’s bagel. But, it will go without saying, that is not Naguib Sawiris’ way.

He calls Bell, Rogers, and Telus “pampered” – bound to be regarded as a hurtful descriptive — and demands to know, “Why would an Egyptian like me be in 25 countries, and a big company [like Bell, Rogers, and Telus stay] here? Because they’re pampered. How can you create innovation if you close up yourself like that? Why don’t we have Rogers in the U.K. or Germany? Why is Vodafone everywhere? Why is France Telecom everywhere? What’s the argument? I don’t see it.”

Of course, he doesn’t see it. That’s because, unlike Bell, Rogers, and Telus, he isn’t entirely fixated on cheesy little acts of prestidigitation intended to short-change the local yokels. Wind Mobile is so clueless to the ways of Canadian telecom that they don’t even charge the infamous monthly “system access fee” that Ted Rogers fabricated, and his heirs are still slapping on my monthly invoice. (Learning of Mr. Sawiris’ travails made me curious enough to contact Rogers to ask about the additional seven bucks I’m still required to fork over each month simply because Ted could never resist the urge to spearhead any small-scale swindle. “I thought Ottawa told you to stop billing these bogus charges,” I told the service representative. “That won’t apply to you,” was the response. “You’re still on a three-year contract.” You see? Sad, sorry Wind Mobile is ill-equipped to even think of keeping its customers captive through long-term contracts. Their middle-eastern philosophy of unaffected plain-dealing may suit a transaction in a Cairo bazaar, but in Calgary it will be regarded as something worse than merely suspicious.)

Naturally, the Rogers group didn’t need to respond to Mr. Sawiris’ criticisms about remaining parochial and cloistered; but they did, through Ken Engelhart, a regulatory affairs vee-pee. The Globe & Mail reports Mr. Engelhart’s comment that his company “once operated a U.S. cable business, but sold it in 1989 to invest further in Canada’s wireless sector.” Well, actually, that’s not the whole story. As part of its rationale for seeking permission to acquire Maclean Hunter, which owned cable systems in the New York City suburbs, Rogers persuaded Ottawa regulators that Canada needed a national “champion” to compete on a worldwide basis with global media giants such as News Corporation, and the like. Shortly after getting regulatory assent, Rogers decided they didn’t need to take on the entire world after all, or even take on Fort Lee, New Jersey. They ditched the Maclean Hunter asset, and concentrated on noodling out penny-ante schemes to squeeze a few extra nickels out of the domestic Canadian market, where the tough boys and bad girls they encountered in the vicinity of New York City were always turned back at the border.

Handed the chance to compete against the world’s best, Ted Rogers and his cadre did not much care for the odds, and high-tailed it back to their well-appointed club on a leafy street in Toronto, where Gus the barman never fails to make solicitous small talk about your children, doesn’t waste precious moments asking if you’d care for your usual order, and never bothers to ask you to sign a chit. We all know each other here. It’s true that occasionally one of the members will run afoul of some out-of-town chancers, or encounter some bad luck in any of its various forms, or fall victim to unforeseen circumstance. Pity about the Eaton family, wasn’t it? Always sad to see those you know so well ripped to small pieces by sharks.

But, you know, there’s nothing at all wrong with liking things the way they are. And one other lovely thing about being here is that there’s never a problem locating a parking spot not too far from the canopy that leads to the front door entrance, where the door is held open for those who belong. That’s what makes this our home, all the expected little niceties. The very word “home” will convey an exact meaning. Home should always be – homey.  Comfortable.

This is the mind-set of the very business class that Naguib Sawiris so horridly calls “pampered.” Well, how would the man from the land of the pyramids ever understand us? He’s not in the club, and he will probably continue to expose his resentment and frustration, even after Ken Engelhart thoughtfully has taken the time to sum it all up for him, as he did for the Globe & Mail reporter. “The fact that we are very efficient,” said Engelhart, “is one reason why I think [Wind] and the other new entrants are finding it so difficult to compete in Canada.”

Speaking of iTunes, for all the eulogizin’ and wailin’ and breast-beatin’ over the death of Mr. Jobs, I’ve yet to hear anyone acknowledge his role in obliterating a significant 20th Century art-form, namely the record album cover.

It’s true that album covers have been on the way out since 12-inch LPs were downsized to CDs and cassettes — but it was Jobs who unleashed iTunes, and brought down the curtain on the days of music-as-packaged-goods.

Voormann's revolutionary 'Revolver' design -- an art-form made extinct by Steve Jobs

And, therefore, it was Jobs who took away the jobs from geniuses such as Dean O. Torrence, who started out warbling as the junior partner in Jan and Dean, and later became a pre-eminent designer of album cover art, through his firm, Kittyhawk Graphics. It was Jobs who might just as well have smashed the knuckles of Klaus Voormann, creator of the visuals on the Beatles’ “Revolver” LP. Perhaps Jobs didn’t exactly strut into the Rijksmuseum or the Musée d’Orsay, and spritz lighter-fluid over the displayed treasures, but that’s only because every vandal works to his own modus operandi.

The death of Jobs, coinciding with the rise of cloud computing — now, there’s a symbolic image that just begs illustration by a neo-Raphaelite — caused me to consider the rich heritage of the album cover, as a now-defunct art-form. Everyone seems to have their favorite cover, and it’s nearly always the Andy Warhol commission for the Velvet Underground and Nico LP (aka, “the Banana Peel cover”), the functioning trouser fly on the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers”, or that grossly overrated, committee-determined pastiche that is the fold-out cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

I would disagree. I say that a standard of graphics excellence was established by the Chairman of the Board, Mister Frank Sinatra, through the design of the jacket on his 1966 Reprise Records release (FS 1020), “That’s Life.”

I say further that the design of this album cover has never been surpassed, and it will remain eternally the ne plus ultra of the genre.

That's Life, baby: The greatest LP cover of all time

Where, you may demand, is the evidence to support this bold claim? Let’s begin with an examination of the title. The dominant element is typographical, deploying an Egyptienne Bold typeface, with the artist’s name rendered in an outline font, with the album title in a cyan-filled variant below. The color choice of cyan accentuates the mood of defiant cool that overwhelms the title track (exemplified by that tune’s familiar extended Hammond-organ introduction, performed by Michel Rubini.) We take note of the close-kerning, and the virtual absence of leading between lines, which creates a flow-together effect that unmistakably associates Old Cyan Eyes with the message of the title. Four words, one copy-block: FRANK/SINATRA/THAT’S/LIFE. The resulting conclusion can only be, here is Sinatra; here, inextricably, daddio, Life follows, Life in the only form we would ever wish to recognize. Cocktails. Cocktail waitresses. Rascally companions to join you in teasing the cocktail waitress. Late hours, a phone number scribbled on a cocktail napkin, and someone in the dim distance playing a Jimmy Smith tune on the Hammond B-3. So, set ‘em up, Joe. It is Joe, right?

FRANK/SINATRA/THAT’S/LIFE. Those are some powerful four words that can effortlessly evoke such a bacchanalian scene. Try adding just two more words, and you’d surely wind up in a gurney, awaiting a liver donor.

The secondary element is the pseudo-expressionist illustration, by an uncredited artist. On first glimpse, this seems like a typical mid-1960s pastel-stick execution following the fashion of the time. This is the halfway point of Modernism en route to becoming Pop Art. Peter Max has yet to attract any notice beyond a couple of blocks in the nascent East Village, and Leroy Neiman and Andy Warhol are not yet warmly received by their bank managers. But in 1966 the successful post-war commercial artist cleaned and put away his brushes, reached toward the oil-crayons, and learned the techniques of the forcefully applied smudge to canvas. What is implied through the pastel blur is a world finally gaining momentum on the declining side of mid-century, with the population engaged in gassing up their little Honda motor scooters, and wondering if it was too early to reserve hotel rooms for Expo 67.

Men with hats and amalgamated teeth, going places, mid-century

Mrs. Irma Councill was the most prolific and best-known Canadian working in this pseudo-expressionist genre, and for a time you saw her work everywhere. Her portraits of business moguls, politicians and hockey players were published in Weekend and The Canadian magazine, and it may have been her artistic approach that influenced period advertisements for the Meteor Montcalm, Macleans toothpaste, and Inglis appliances. Or else it was another crayon-wielder with reductionist tendencies, about to feel the hot breath of psychedelia charging in close from behind.

Was our Mrs. Councill the anonymous illustrator who painted Frank for “That’s Life?” Or — here’s an odd thought — was it Frank hisself who commissioned and undertook the work, as a self-portrait? It is known (through an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show) that Sinatra painted recreationally in the Modernist style. Could it have been none other than the Chairman who is responsible for depicting himself as the distorted gargoyle who appears on the cover?

Whoever had the task of slapping pigment on medium, it was someone who saw the singer clearly, knew him well, and didn’t much like him.

Out-of-proportion headgear

The chapeau is the key element, recognizable from previous images of Frank, but here displayed out-of-proportion, with a tumefied hatband that could be taken, in a current context, as a gang-banger’s colors, or, from a timeless perspective, as a pirate’s bandanna. Why the giant lid? Through the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Chairman used fedoras to rakishly conceal his advancing male-pattern alopecia, and this great big hat nicely suggests a coming acceptance of the “I, Claudius” hairpiece he would begin to affect at the earliest point in the 1970s.

Suggestive sniffer?

Yet, here the shocking volume of the hat accounts for fully forty per cent of the composition of the head. Sombreros may take on these dimensions, or a Stetson worn whimsically, but never a hipster’s fedora. The explanation, as I see it, is that in the artist’s view, the headgear must form a convenient metaphor for male potency. This is a fully engorged noggin, and the artist has freely borrowed a pint of devilry from the caricature of “Mr. Punch” that appeared on the cover of the mid-1800s editions of the British humor weekly. And as is the case with Punch, there is something vaguely kinky about the way Ole Blue Eyes’ nose is drawn, a visual pun that should make normal people feel squeamish.

Having courted and won the television starlet Mia Farrow, who was half Frank’s age on their wedding day, Blue Eyes is seen through the artist’s eye as a satyr who is entirely self-delighted with his own extended capacity to pull hippie broads. The picture fairly cries, “Ring-a-ding-ding!”, with all the unspeakable connotations that phrase delivers.

The Chairman needs a rest

Frank was 51 when he waxed these sides, not necessarily a terrible age for a male, but a trying time for the self-styled Lothario. And, make no mistake, he was a terrible male, a surly survivor of a lifetime of bad behavior. The mid-stage Frank who could philosophize, “That’s life,” was a man entering his Pantaloon Years, the time of becoming an aging buffoon. A slender, handsome youth, known as The Voice, (nidus of swooning post-war bobbysoxers), Frank now appears well along the way to becoming hideous. His debauched expression, the pouchy eyes, the newly-forming jowls, all offer the visage of a roué who began his Las Vegas mornings in mid-afternoon, consuming what was reported to be his favorite breakfast: scrambled eggs eaten from the chest of a hooker.

Dental work projected toward your throat

The artist stylized the Sinatra smile, again appropriating the manner of the mid-century airline advertising illustration. His teeth are streamlined into a smoothly amalgamated band of white, in perfect contrast to the icy blue hatband. The teeth balance against the declaration of his name. The symmetry invokes mild terror in the viewer, as “FRANK/SINATRA” and his exposed teeth seem to be projecting from the album cover, and into your exposed throat. That’s how thin is his veneer of affability. Do not be deceived by the aging Pantaloon with the tired, but defiant eyes, this sad old dandy, costumed for the preceding decade, with the new young wife we all know he will not be able to hold past a year or two, at most. (His wife during the 1951-7 period, Ava Gardner, had already sized up the Twiggy-like Mia Farrow, and sniffed, “I always knew Frank would wind up in bed with a boy.”) They are lining up to bet against him in the Sands, the Sahara, and the Circus Circus. You two-dollar punters may not see past the Frank-smile, the smooth white-streak of molars, incisors, bicuspids, but that will be at your extreme peril. He is cornered, dangerous. Those capped white choppers — perhaps the best work ever by the very finest orthodontist in Beverly Hills, Dr. Lenny Bloom — will tear the flesh from your face where you stand, no different than if Frank were an alarmed orangutan set off by a moving shadow outside his zoo cage.

What kind of face would instill this type of fear? The journalist Gay Talese makes it crystal-clear in his revealing April 1966 profile of Sinatra, published in Esquire magazine, just as the lithographers were counting their cardboard inventory for the cover of the “That’s Life” album. Unforgettably, Talese recounts the Chairman’s impulse to pick on Harlan Ellison, a formidable figure in the L.A. entertainment community. Frank demands to know what Ellison, who is dressed in Carnaby Street gear, does for a living, and Talese records the ensuing dialogue here:

“I’m a plumber,” Ellison said. “No, no, he’s not,” another young man quickly yelled from across the table. ”He wrote The Oscar.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sinatra said, “well I’ve seen it, and it’s a piece of crap.”

“That’s strange,” Ellison said, “because they haven’t even released it yet.”

“Well, I’ve seen it,” Sinatra repeated, “and it’s a piece of crap.”

Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, “Com’on, kid, I don’t want you in this room.”

“Hey,” Sinatra interrupted Dexter, “can’t you see I’m talking to this guy?”

Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, “Why do you persist in tormenting me?”

Frankie goes to the Stony Lonesome

In sum, Sinatra arrived on the cultural scene already a bully (see mugshot, left), and, now, at his half-century, he suddenly found himself transmogrified into a square, to boot. This, from the man who is all set to set you straight on what life is: “Riding high in April, shot down in May.”

That’s Life? Sheesh. Frank was precisely one of those crazy adults you’d encounter somewhere, perhaps in your parents’ rumpus room, someone who would seem delighted to tell you all about the many fascinating experiences they’ve had — “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,/ A poet, a pawn and a king” — until you commit the error of trying to get an innocuous word in edgewise, along the benign lines of “Gee, Uncle Frank, you’ve certainly had some interesting jobs in your time,” and then he abruptly snaps and begins shrieking violent gibberish. “Pisherke! What the hell do you know? Hah?” All you can do at that point is walk away with your Hires Root Beer and try not to shrug too visibly while another adult says, “Frank, come on. He’s just a kid. He din’t mean nothin’.”

Yes, Frank belonged to, was the epicenter of, that unknowable Adult Life, into which you had to be out of your mind to peer too closely. Your child’s curiosity might want to know: What kind of songs could come out of someone with that kind of face? But the knowledge could never make sense; not then, not now.

For the music contained within this eternally perfect album-cover is as sorry a collection of schlock as it is possible to imagine. It is mercifully short: a scant 25 minutes of product, spread around 10 tracks. However, it is some crazy material, consisting of two Gilbert Bécaud compositions and one Michel Legrand, leading to the idea that this might have become Sinatra’s great lost Charles Aznavour/Jacques Brel project, if only anyone had thought to invite them. (Click here, if’n you dare, to hear the Chairman sing the album’s title track.)

But the rest of the brief LP is a mish-mash of movie soundtrack tunes (“The Impossible Dream,” “Somewhere My Love [Lara’s Theme”]), interspersed with the truly ridiculous. In the latter category is the Chairman’s take on “Winchester Cathedral,” a novelty record by the New Vaudeville Band that somehow caught on with the kids. The song was originally performed by some teenaged British musicians goofing on the music of their grandparents, a spoof of Rudy Vallee — which was the mannered crap issued on 78 RPM records in the 1920s and ‘30s that Frank’s natural, unaffected style (that is, Bing Crosby’s style, refined with a trace of ethnic flavor), pressed on 45 RPM sides in the 1940s and ‘50s, blew out of the water. The idea of Frank goofing through a version of this oddity could only have been intended by someone wishing to cause him harm: “Vo-vodey-oh-do.”

And, yet, there it is. Sinatra, the famed perfectionist, reduced to the most clueless form of pandering. Outside the studio, the Viet Nam war is the story. Frank’s son and namesake endures a kidnapping. Life magazine explains how the Negros are demanding their rights in the south. JFK is gone; LBJ will not run for re-election. Nixon’s in session with his Manhattan psychiatrist, Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker. Guns are being trained on RFK, MLK. And then Mia’s lawyer tells you she wants a divorce.

No wonder he appears so uncomfortable on the cover. You can read right through the look in his eyes, as interpreted by the illustrator, and know his thoughts: “Are you laughing at me? You’d better not be laughing at me. Christ, they’re laughing at me.”

This is plainly a man on the verge of something, wondering if it makes sense, at his stage of life, to keep tamping down that building force within him — or do you give in to your impulses? Only seven years earlier, he had sung, “Something’s Gotta Give,” and the audiences loved it, but in 1966 it seemed that the end-result of the long period of suppression would be blood running from the nose of some wise-guy Hollywood screenwriter, right down the punk’s ruffled Edwardian shirt. It would take three more years before that force would be unleashed, when the “Life” Sinatra was shouting about in “That’s Life” would veer into a different direction altogether.

That was the end of the ring-a-ding-ding decades, and the birth of his career-shifting LP, “Watertown.” The new release would be sheathed in a very different kind of record cover. Regrettably, that album’s cover-design would scupper the bold new venture, straight from the get-go.

To be continued

Protest-sign graphics go well beyond the scope of the 1960s technology

There are widespread protests against corporations, and globalism, and whatever, on Wall Street, Bay Street, everywhere, similar to when I was a college boy — but what seems to be absent from the mix right now is protest music, and that’s kind of a shame. Back in the day, no one knew much about the fine-points of protesting, lacking, as we did, such necessary instruments-of-organization as the latest updated version of Facebook for iPhone, or a copy of Adobe Illustrator for creating bold statements on placards. But, golly, did we ever have the music.

Ochs

This brings me to the recent documentary film about the ’60s protest-singer Phil Ochs. I found it to be pretty decent, but not quite the standout movie the subject deserved. During his short, gifted, turbulent life, Ochs famously had a way of wearing people down. Small wonder, then, that the film grows tiresome after a while, even as it treats superficially, and tries to gloss over tactfully, the more soul-crushing aspects of the artist’s rise and fall.

Sean Penn, then referred to as “the bad-boy actor,” was threatening to direct and act in a proposed Ochs biopic, some 15 years ago. Penn could only have seen Phil as a kindred spirit, as a brother-activist and as a misfit with heart-unfashionably-sewn-to-sleeve. But his intended cinematic vision seems to have gone nowhere. Concept not bankable? Isn’t that the question they are said to always ask in showbiz accounting departments? In any case, I’d guess that the relentless intensity required to live in the skin o’ Ochs must have caused Penn to veer toward something less inherently depressing.

Regardless, the actor appears on screen in the new documentary, which is titled, after an Ochs tune, There But For Fortune. Fortune turned out to be rotten to the songwriter, but you probably would have predicted that was coming. The Ochs musical journey began in picturesque fashion, with our lad toting a guitar through journalism school at Ohio State University, and finished abruptly in 1975, at the end of a noose in the kitchen of his sister’s bungalow in Long Island.

In between, the documentary captures him as an edgy, goofy, anarchistic presence, who cheerfully antagonizes his admirers, many would-be benefactors, close friends, lovers, and musical contemporaries. Most of all, he seems to get under the skin of Bob Dylan. Dyl was known to be particularly cagey and uncomfortable around those he deemed competitors, such as his fellow folksinger, and quasi-brother-in-law, Richard Farina. (Farina took revenge on the callow l’il Bob in this song.) Several of the movie’s testimony-givers speak of Dyl’s gratuitous cruelty to Phil, who for his part seems to have regarded the Minnesotan in abject awe. As someone recounts to the camera, “Phil set out to be the greatest folksinger in the world. Then he met Bob and realized he was never going to be anything more than second-best.”

Of course, it’s never just that cut-and-dried. During some of his recent performances, Gordon Lightfoot has told much the same story, of his arrival in Greenwich Village with untrammeled ambition during the heyday of the folk music boom, only to slam against the reigning wunderkind, Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing. As Lightfoot recounts the experience, “I said to myself, ‘Give it up. You’re never going to catch that guy.’” And yet, Dylan was always, and remains, generous in paying tribute to Lightfoot’s body of work — while it is recorded in various accounts how he often seemed to go out of his way to treat Ochs with amused derision.

There’s a familiar anecdote involving Phil riding through Manhattan in the back of a limo hired by Dyl, and Dyl turns to Phil and asks for an opinion regarding one of the lesser tunes on the “Blonde on Blonde” LP, “Sooner or Later One of Us Must Know.” It is one of Dylan’s most inconsequential songs, and Phil had the temerity to say so. Bobbo went ballistic at the criticism, and ordered Ochs out of the limousine. Before the door slammed shut, Dylan reportedly shouted a taunt: “You’re not a folksinger. You’re nothing but a journalist.”

This reveals several intriguing points. The recent documentary chalks up the antagonism to a fundamental creative difference: Ochs continued to hone his facility for writing political material long after Dylan abandoned the genre to focus on poetics. (Click to hear one fine example: Ochs warbling “Cops of the World.”) But that overlooks the obvious. Dyl and Phil came into the world concurrently as doppelgangers, two introspective kids from the middlemost parts of the middle-west who parroted the voices they heard on the radio in their bedrooms in small-town post-war heartland America. Dyl, in thrall to disparate influences such as Woody Guthrie and Bobby Vee, became intent on making outsider music, and, in one frequently told tale, was driven by his enthusiasm to wreck the piano pedals during an early performance in the Hibbing high school gym. Phil, born in San Antonio, Texas, steeped in John Wayne films, was relocated by his parents to the Buckeye State, where he attended military school, fantasized about becoming James Dean, succeeded at becoming a rebel without a cause, strumming guitar chords in his dorm room while reading the New York Times (eventually cutting a brilliant record titled “All the News That’s Fit to Sing.”)

Dyl and Phil separately found their way to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the early 1960s. They became, to use the current term, frenemies. On separate stages, they would warble the old ditties by Cisco Houston and Woody Guthrie and the Weavers, and scribble down some original tunes of their own. Dyl would write “Masters of War” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Phil wrote “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” They both attracted a following at Gerde’s Folk City and the adjacent coffee houses. Each evening, slumming ad-industry hipsters in narrow ties and sharkskin suits would buy them drinks between sets. Women would take them home. The older singers they grew up idolizing — “Hey, isn’t that Josh White in the back of the room?” — dropped by to pay tribute. They began to get some out-of-town gigs, in Cambridge, Mass. and Rush Street in Chicago, and places like the Bohemian Embassy or The Riverboat in Toronto, Canada. They signed record company contracts and appeared at the Newport Folk Festival, right around the time the Beatles were about to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Beatlemania changed everything. Dyl got fully into the spirit of things, went electric, was booed by purists during live appearances. In Manchester, an audience member sees him pick up an amplified guitar, yells, “Judas!” This makes Dyl angry. He storms away, to smoke dope with John Lennon.

And then dope changes everything. Dyl’s poetry goes free-form and kaleidoscopic, and he no longer pretends to be interested in current events and the political scene. Phil sticks with the traditional subjects for a while, but the influence of the Beatles and the electrified Dylan is too great. His songwriting begins to forsake the political for the personal. My friend Martin Myers remembers sitting on a dock in Muskoka one summer with some of his boyhood chums, when a friend-of-a-friend made his way north, to hang around the cottages, and pass the time drinking beer. This stranger carried a guitar, and drank bottle after bottle of Cinci or Red Cap, and kept playing the same chords over and over, trying different lyrics. “Sit by my side; come as close as the air…” Shit, what rhymes with air? Then the American mystery man would head off looking for a pay-phone, so he could call a girl he was deeply in love with. Honey, what rhymes with air? Then back to the guitar, and another beer, and the unfinished lyrics. That was Phil Ochs, writing his best-known and most-enduring song, “Changes.”

Phil released his last of three LPs on Elektra records, “Phil Ochs in Concert,” and it contained the completed “Changes,” suggesting that his forthcoming work would follow a less specifically political direction. He waited nearly three years before recording “Pleasures of the Harbor” for Herb Alpert’s A&M label. (Click to hear one of the lesser tracks, Miranda.) The record was a stunning work, with recurring ragtime and baroque motifs, but by then the Beatles already released “Revolver” and then “Sgt. Pepper,” and Dylan recorded his landmark, “Blonde on Blonde.” By now this business of making folk-rock music was being taken seriously as a commercial enterprise by adults. There were now critics who wrote about the rock music scene for a living, in big daily newspapers, and they pointed out that the Ochs work didn’t quite measure up to landmark status. His subsequent records also received mild praise, at best.

Phil became discouraged, began drinking to extreme excess, wallowing in his uncertainty. Manic episodes followed, along with depression. He became an acute embarrassment on Bleeker Street, not making sense, unemployable, unendurable. Richard Nixon’s re-election in 1972 is said to have been the last straw, as Phil fell over the edge of despondency.

Losing himself in travel, between pointless non-remunerative assignments to review popular films for the underground press, he is attacked and strangled by robbers in Africa. He persuades himself that his voice is ruined, but rallies somewhat when Watergate brings down his bete noir, Richard Nixon. Ochs takes on the self-invented identity of “John Butler Train,” and acquires the unpleasant habit of threatening strangers with a ball-peen hammer. As Train, he discovers a nasal young songwriter, Sammy Walker, who has a retro sound, the sort of adenoidal timbre Dylan enjoyed when he was 20. Train/Ochs promotes Walker’s career and finds him a record deal, insisting, “Sammy will be the greatest folksinger, better than Phil Ochs, greater even than Bob Dylan.” Walker releases one very good album, followed by a disappointing one, and then vanishes forever.

Ochs finally drops the Train schtick, to the relief of all, seems to be on an upswing, even manages to resume performing, and turns up in Toronto one Saturday for an evening set at the reborn Riverboat Coffee House.

I sat in the back of the room and drank a couple of cappuccinos with a high school friend. Ochs seemed to be going through the motions on the small stage, a tired amnesiac vaguely remembering who he used to be. After his last set was done, the sparse audience was enthused, and a girl cried, “We love you, Phil.” He smiled. “Come back soon,” someone else yelled. He nodded, and seemed to look wistful. I wondered where he was staying in Toronto, thinking it probably wasn’t the Park Plaza. There had been stories in the Village Voice about John Train’s odd behavior, which included sleeping off his benders on the streets. Within a year of the Riverboat gig, Ochs would be dead by his own hand, and the news would rate only a few paragraphs in the daily papers.

A sad story, no two ways about it. However, the body-count of groovy young troubadours from the era, and more particularly the list of artistes from the Electra Records back catalogue, is well past single digits at this stage of things. Farina’s long gone, of course, along with Dave Van Ronk, Hamilton Camp, Bob Gibson, David Blue, Tim Hardin, Tim Buckley, Jeff Buckley, Dave “Snaker” Ray: gone to flowers every one. You needn’t bother keeping track of the close-calls, such as Dyl’s motorcycle accident, Dyl’s histoplasmosis, Lightfoot’s aneurysm, Lightfoot’s stroke. While, in contrast to the mortal next-generation, several of the older cats, Woody Guthrie’s contemporaries, including Pete Seeger and Oscar Brand, are not only still drawing breath into their tenth decade, but are still performing on occasion. That’s some unpredictable business, the protest-music business. Dylan becomes an industry, cranking out books, radio shows and nightly stadium concerts; Ochs gets to play a tragic corpse in a second-rate documentary.

Yes, well. Perhaps that hints at an explanation for the 2011 phenomenon of protests without the accompanying protest music. It still requires passion to take to the streets, but these days it only takes ten minutes on a computer to get, or make, music. For all the sweat, cigarettes and madness that previously went into the creation of music, the tunes of 2011 are all just part of the stack of digital content maintained in the cloud by one big company or another, for your listening enjoyment. For all the tears behind those ‘60s tunes, it all adds up to just a few more bloodless bytes toward your monthly download cap. Power to the people, the signs read, but if you can’t have power (and, pal, you can’t), here: have an iPod with touchscreen.

And yet, Ochs will be recalled as more than another doomed soul from a bygone age who fell under the weight of some bad fortune, along with dumb-ass behavior. His was an evocative, meaningful voice from a memorable time and place, and you, as a media consumer, should welcome the chance to spend a little more time with his memory. If the movie that prompts you to remember is not quite as good as it should be, why quibble? Netflix will have something else picked out for you in the streaming queue, right?

Jack Layton, the late NDP leader

Jack Layton, the recently deceased leader of the official Canadian opposition party, never pretended to be a friend to the business community. He was ardently committed to the principles of democratic socialism. Those two designations—non-friend to Bay Street, and constantly campaigning socialist—do not always need to go hand-in-hand, but in Mr. Layton’s case, they absolutely did.

Through his time in charge of the federal New Democratic Party, his top-level observations and policy statements regarding big business in general, and Big Pharma in particular, were dependably uninformed, and reliably calculated to annoy captains-of-industry. Correspondingly, those of us involved in the outskirts of healthcare derived much enjoyment from mocking his party’s antediluvian views on the subject. We found it especially comical when he proposed establishing, at taxpayer expense, a new state-owned drug discovery company that would bequeath its innovative therapies to all the deserving people of the world. Never mind that the last successful commercial enterprise of any sort Mr. Layton ran was probably a Gazette route in Hudson, Que., back in his childhood. After all, all you need to do to create a thriving drug company is go hire some bureaucrats; nothing more to it, really.

That aside, you generally knew where you stood with Mr. Layton, which is an extreme rarity in the present-day political sphere. Canadian politicians are known to pay lip-service to the principles of free enterprise, to the need for research, and to the importance of the private sector. And, then, when the chips are down, or when they think no one is watching, they will surely find a way to abandon the previous high-minded doctrine, and slip the spoils to their friends. (Are your ears burning, Allan Rock?)

The former Liberal Party head, Michael Ignatieff, seemed poised to continue this leadership tradition of speaking one way and acting another, and it may be said that Mr. Layton delivered an invaluable service to the nation by eliminating Mr. Ignatieff’s political future, during the course of a televised election debate earlier this year.

Pointing out that Mr. Ignatieff had “the worst attendance record in the House of Commons of any member of Parliament,” Mr. Layton did not disguise the joy he took in lambasting his opponent. “You know,” he said, “most Canadians, if they don’t show up for work, they don’t get a promotion. You missed 70 per cent of the votes.” Mr. Ignatieff’s response was to mime the mannerisms of a punctured balloon, right down to his final disappearance behind the furniture, for which Canadians will always owe Mr. Layton a debt of gratitude.

Voters’ subsequent response to this exchange was to elevate the New Democratic Party from fringe status, to that of parliamentary opposition. This stunning outcome had little to do with the quality of the NDP’s policies, philosophies, or personnel—all are lame—and everything to do with Mr. Layton’s ostensible attribute of genuineness. It will not dishonor his memory to point out that he was not entirely what he seemed. It is never an easy trick, to convincingly fake authenticity. But, for those who would seek public office, duplicity is as much a requirement as a snazzy necktie, and Mr. Layton certainly lived up to that required standard.

Indeed, when the subject turns to the politics of healthcare, we far prefer Mr. Layton’s brand of manipulative, self-serving naivety, if that’s what it was, to the crazed bombast of the U.S. politicians now vying for the Republican party nomination for the presidency. There, one candidate, Dr. Ron Paul of Texas, was recently asked apropos of his opposition to government-mandated health coverage, whether he agrees that the wealthiest nation in the world should simply let its ailing and uninsured citizens die without intervention. Dr. Paul, a physician who seems to have permanently misplaced his copy of the Hippocratic Oath, did not directly answer the question—but his audience did, lustily, with cries of “Yes!” and “Let them die!” This exchange contributed one more moment of disgrace to a shameful phase in American society. We Canadians may fall short when it comes to a number of measures, such as individual audacity, corporate philanthropy, and the overall number of locals who succeed in pro jai-alai careers, but watching Dr. Paul’s performance marked one of those times when you silently acknowledge our country’s continuing values of fundamental decency and civility.

As a senior Canadian politician, Mr. Layton offered business interests absolutely nothing with which to agree, but he conducted himself with acceptable decorum and the slightest trace of humor, and we sort-of didn’t mind him, in spite of everything.

“We actually didn’t mind him, sort-of. Not that much, anyway.” There is a sentimental epitaph that few other contemporary political figures will ever earn, or deserve, as much as Jack Layton.

Recently, Big Pharma’s demonstrated strength has been in chemicals; communications… not so much. Truth to tell, Big Pharma has often been really, really awful at the communications part, especially when it comes to conveying the much-misunderstood “value proposition.”

Hey, Rube! Odd that the medicines have gotten better, but the message has become less clear

That is a major irony for a sector which has its early-19th century roots in the travelling medicine-show circuit, where interlocutors once spieled with enough directness, and with sufficient persuading power, to expeditiously separate the yokels from their greenbacks. But maybe we’d better strike that last phrase. Perhaps a less provocative selection of words might be “…to have demonstrated product value to a potential stakeholder group,” although the historical record shows the first description was usually the more accurate one.

Be that as it may, it remains odd that while the medicines have improved beyond measure during the last century-and-a-half, the communications effort undertaken by pharma has become correspondingly worse. There are too many examples of poor and faulty communications to enumerate—but as one random example, try squinting at the incomprehensible disclosures that follow DTC ads on US television, before deciding whether or not you concur with our point.

James Murdoch: A fellow from Fleet Street

Many of these American DTC ads seem to be broadcast on the Fox News Channel—which is an apt venue, given the large size of the Fox News audience, and its demographics, which skew toward older viewers. Perhaps that is what GlaxoSmithKline board chair Sir Christopher Gent was thinking two years ago, when he recruited James R.J. Murdoch to serve as a non-executive director of GSK.

Murdoch, of course, is the son of K. Rupert Murdoch, the founder of the News Corporation empire, which owns and operates U.S.-based Fox News. “Our newest director, James, here, is a fellow from Fleet Street, and all that,” Sir Christopher may have told his fellow board members. “Just the right sort of chap to assist in getting out our message, what?”

Well, that board appointment happened two years ago, long before the exposure of the Murdoch media companies’ deep involvement in unseemly—not to mention illegal—activity. However, before terms such as ‘phone hacking’ and ‘blagging’ became known to the public (meaning, gross violations of privacy laws, and impersonation with wilful intent to defraud), the Murdochs’ Fox News Channel was engaged in a smear campaign aimed at derailing President Obama’s plan to expand health coverage to the uninsured. Famously, Fox News has been a tireless adversary of nearly each of Obama’s programs and policies, but the network’s preponderance of voices opposed to what they demonized as ‘socialized medicine’ quickly moved beyond earnest disagreement with a policy proposal, to something far worse.

Which will introduce these remarks from Dennis Miller, the one-time Saturday Night Live jester, now reinvented as a social commentator, appearing on “The O’Reilly Factor” news program (04/13/11): “I do believe in Darwin, in that I believe in the survival of the fittest, to some degree… I do think people want to give. I think they’re getting sick of propping up losers, and I think we’ve reached a point in history where we have to separate those who break our hearts and deserve it, and those who are just screw-ups… This is the Serengeti Plains. If somebody’s going to perpetually exhibit a limp, they’re gonna get fed on… That’s the way life works.”

And that illustrates the nature of the problem concerning Fox News, and many of the other Murdoch outlets, which thrive by tantalizing, and pandering to, mass audiences’ most primitive and least enlightened instincts. We do not say it is unacceptable to criticize authority, nor that It is impermissible to find fault with many aspects of publicly funded healthcare. (We have, and we do.) However, the term that applies to those who orchestrate contempt for the unlucky and the desperate, for one’s own commercial gain, is “indecent.” This is what Fox News trades in, each night: indecency. The further transgressions of Mr. Murdoch’s senior-most executives, employees and ex-employees have been well documented—notably those of an incendiary madcap named Glenn Beck, who skirted around encouraging an armed overthrow of the U.S. federal government.

That said, it makes for an especially dodgy set of circumstances when a leading global healthcare organization maintains a directorship for an individual whose media properties amplify the attitudes toward life espoused by a Dennis Miller: “This is the Serengeti Plains. If somebody’s going to perpetually exhibit a limp, they’re gonna get fed on… That’s the way life works.” Is it, indeed, Mr. Board Chairman?

Miller claims to speak for Charles Darwin, which is a ludicrous misreading of Darwinian thought. Darwin never claimed that it’s alright to despise your neighbor, because you judge him to be weaker, dumber, poorer and less deserving than you. To claim so is to deliberately cross-pollinate Darwinism with the solipsistic childishness of Ayn Rand. On the other hand, it’s possible to imagine Rupert and James Murdoch nodding in fervent agreement whenever their microphones are used to convey this kind of message.

But it’s inconceivable that Chris Gent, or any other director of a major Life Sciences group, might see things that way. That is because the two synchronous elements of the pharmaceutical industry are well established, and you would no more want your organization associated with unworthy chemicals than you would want it connected to dishonorable messaging. No healthcare company can ever be seen as there to condone the infliction of injury. The same can’t be said of the Murdoch Family, its law-breaking employees, its scurrilous newspapers, and its discordant broadcasts.

Which begs the question: Is a person such as James Murdoch fit to hold a directorship in a group such as GSK?

Do not follow the example of Michel Lavoie of Montreal, who last weekend rode in a big bus to the world-famous West Edmonton Mall, where he threw himself from a hundred-foot-high platform, tethered to some kind of sproingy apparatus, after handing someone eighty bucks to facilitate the experience. (Michel’s big adventure is depicted below.) And, in the name of all that is rational and hygienic, do not attempt what was accomplished by Stuart Maddin of Vancouver, which was the consumption of a giant portion of fish-and-chips at midnight in the lounge of the Hotel Macdonald, only to wake up the next morning, conduct a little business, forcefully deliver a scientific lecture, and then head back over to order precisely the same super-sized meal in the same venue, a mere 12 hours later. Someone really needs to talk to Stuart about his intake of deep-fried foodstuffs, except that having just celebrated his 91st birthday, he’s unlikely to feign too much interest in homilies about alfalfa sprouts and wheatgerm, and their benefits to longevity.
 Determined to avoid the erratic behavior of my fellow conference-goers, I slipped away one morning in a rented Hyundai Accent to 16060 Stony Plain Road, in northwest Edmonton, and ate a quiet breakfast at Hap’s Hungry House, consisting of two slices of sourdough bread, one scrambled egg, and two pots of Hap’s watery coffee. I was in the company of R. Allan Ryan of Toronto, who ordered the veggie omelet, and declared it to be fully optimal. Hap appeared to be a middle-aged fellow affecting short pants and a brushcut — which is referred to in Portland as the total Tom Peterson Look, and known nationally as the Full H.R. Haldeman — and how Hap did hustle, backing up his crew of perky and efficient waitresses by adding timely ice-water fill-ups and deftly timed dirty-plate removal. “You see that?,” Mr. Ryan remarked. “There is Hap, doing exactly what an owner is supposed to do. Very rare these days.”

Tom Peterson, longtime Oregon appliance kingpin

Bob Haldeman, longtime Nixon henchman

I made a note to myself on the serviette: “Be like Hap.”

The coffee is traditionally brewed pale and weak in the non-chain restaurants in the west, I have found. Hunter S. Thompson, in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” takes note of the thin ‘Golden West’ coffee offered up in Nevada diners, and during my formative years, I was sustained by this style of coffee in the Mill Race Restaurant in Eugene, Oregon. It is also a staple in Arizona, Utah, Montana, Idaho, and the portion of California north of Stockton, as well as the British Columbia interior, and vast tracts of Washington state outside of King, Pierce and Snohomish counties. These days, I’d prefer something more full-bodied and Starbucks-like, when offered the choice, but you learn to make do.

You make do in Alberta’s capital by betting with the odds, which means avoiding the many dubious attractions abutting Hap on Stony Plain Road, which include dozens of bars that would never pass muster back east, not even in Scarborough, Ontario. Stick, by all means, to the tried and true cultural destinations: the admirable system of civic parks, the extensive public library, the art gallery, the Citadel Theatre. Tommy Banks, a jazz pianist, formerly hosted an inadvertently hilarious variety show from that same Citadel Theatre, broadcast weekly across Canada on the CBC. The program began with Tommy making his way confidently across the stage toward his piano, where his trademark horn-rimmed glasses sat atop the instrument. The camera lens remained out of focus until Tommy located his specs, and placed them over his nose, at which point the camera image sharpened, and the TV viewer caught a 20/20 view of the stage. What drivel. Typical Edmonton cornball nonsense, I used to think, watching the show. Many years later, I stumbled upon the information that Steve Allen had used the exact same opening on his seminal network TV program, 20 years earlier, and that Tommy had built his franchise by blithely ripping off the master. What can you do when presented with evidence of such cultural larceny, except (1) name a street after the perp; and (2) place the thief in a facility where his activities can be controlled? And so it happened that Tommy Banks was appointed to the Senate of Canada in 2000, by the Right-Honorable Prime Minister Jean Chretien. Because who could envision kicking off a new millennium without Tommy Banks riding a piano stool in the Upper House?

Shannon meets Tommy Banks at the Citadel Theatre, Edmonton, 06/11

I was telling David Perry via e-mail about Senator Banksy, the Ivory-Tickling Solon from Wild Rose Country, and he instantly one-upped me, something he’s been doing without effort since high school. Maestro Perry, a concert violinist who used to perform with the Edmonton Symphony, was stuck on a bus with Tommy for an entire summer, covering the very length and breadth of the province of Alberta. Each night, the musicians would file out of their coach and assemble on stage, to back up Tommy’s rendition of “New York, New York,” with lyrics re-written (by Tom) to refer to a good number of the local cities, towns, and villages. Hearing this gave new meaning to the phrase “imminent mental collapse,” and I couldn’t help but wonder how Tommy managed to find a couplet that rhymes with Medicine Hat that isn’t “nuts to all that.” Plainly, it was that gift of syncopation that led M. Chretien to select Banksy for the Senate, over yours truly.

Faced with months of bouncing through the badlands, hearing Tommy warble something along the lines of “It seems there was this feller,/And didn’t he hail from Drumheller?”, it became a small enough wonder that Perry high-tailed it as far away as possible, landing in the orchestra-pit of the philharmonic of Sapporo, Japan.

I recall that one of Tommy’s frequent guests on television was Clarence ‘Big’ Miller, a talented blues-shouter with an agreeable manner. I used to make a point of watching the Banks show each week, because Big Miller was pretty damned good, and also, let’s admit it, out of the hope that one week Tommy would fumble, a consequence of myopia, and insert the temple of his glasses directly into his eye-socket, causing him to yelp in pain for the entire length of the program. Sadly, if that event came to pass, I managed not to tune in on that occasion. Big Miller was far more than just a beefy sidekick to Edmonton’s-Answer-to-Steve Allen. He had an acting career that, at its pinnacle, led to his unforgettable role as Abdullah the Butcher in the Canadian cult classic movie, “Big Meat Eater.” Better that we let that go, for the moment, but those inclined can enjoy the big man in action, below.

Big Miller is dead, alas, but there is a park named for him — part of that admirable system of civic parks — and it is adjacent to Tommy Banks Way, the street named for his teevee companero. If six degrees of separation is the usual measure, there is next to no separation of anything in Edmonton, and that is the principal reason why I counted down the hours until I could get the hell out. Of course, in this mounting desperation, I neglected to consider that the streets all run one-way downtown, and that the expeditious route in from the airport could not be re-traced the same way back. So, after a couple of misdirected turns, I was lost on a greenbelt beside the beautiful Something-or-other River, and then further lost while crawling along the streets of fashionable Old Strathcona, and eventually on Highway 2, which was unexpectedly shut down in the aftermath of a fatal car crash. Traffic was re-routed through the IKEA parking lot, where I turned to the passenger seat and said to R. Allan Ryan, “Dude, we’re going to miss our flight.” He replied: “No!”, as we crawled for two hours along thoroughfares named Misery Drive and Extreme Tedium Boulevard, arriving at Edmonton International Airport five minutes before our scheduled departure. The nice woman at the Westjet counter reassured us that it would only be seven, no, eight more hours until the next departure to Toronto, more than enough time to head back to Stony Plain Road and shop for a gun, score a crack-cocaine rock, and charge a quart of rye from Mom’s Liquor Barn, and find someone to start work on that sleeve-length tattoo project I’ve been thinking about, the one with the entwined images of daggers and blood-dripping eyeballs and the BMW logo in flames and my name spelled out vertically in an Olde English Bold font, along with some selected scenes interpreted from Paul Theroux’s novel “Saint Jack.” Instead, we decided it was time to forget Edmonton, so we made prompt tracks for Calgary’s airport and spent the whole of the evening in the departures lounge with several hundred uniformed NATO soldiers from Norway and the UK, who were returning from maneuvers somewhere near Lethbridge.

I very slowly ate a hamburger at Chili’s over the course of five hours, and tried to imagine how Senator Tommy Banks might would have worked Lethbridge into his musical ode to Alberta. I got stuck trying to rhyme “Lethbridge” with “take hostage,” which doesn’t scan, and isn’t very good wordplay by any standard, so I arrived at the decision to just concentrate on the hamburger.

Finally, a good call. It was an excellent burger, well worth enduring a bit of inconvenience in order to enjoy.

Let’s raise our flimsy plastic cups

Rather, several who have sampled this spate of new products have used the phrases “quirky” or “perplexing” or “pretty much unfathomable” — or, if the reviewers are in an especially bad mood and disinclined toward putting a lot of effort into phrase-conjuring, there is always the old reliable “yuk.”

It would not be entirely fair to apply the last descriptive across the board, however, since it really only applies directly to Molson 67, a seltzer-based tincture, into which a vauge suggestion of lager has been callously set afloat. This must be the stuff old Lucifer is forcing H.L. Mencken, and his Baltimore barroom chums, to perpetually drink in Hell, as retribution for having loved the hops too well in life.

Molson continues to promote their diluted beverage as a friend to dieters, although there is scant evidence to support the rumor that the product was named to commemorate Karen Carpenter’s body weight, as recorded in the autopsy report. (We make further light of this ultra-light brew in this post.)

No sooner had beer-aficionados grown accustomed to declining proffered bottles of Molson 67 (using the ritual retort, “No, thank you. Why not save it, and pour it over your petunias?”), when the company brought forth another surprise, a beer chock-full-o’-air. That was the so-called Molson M, with the M supposedly designating “microcarbonation.” Whereas everyone I know recognizes that the letter actually stands for: “Mmmmmaybe you’d like to take that away, and bring me a pint of something I’m not ashamed to be seen with.” More here about this beer that wants to be known, with all due creepiness, by the 13th letter of the alphabet.

Perhaps responding to the realization that naming a product “M” could only be an open invitation to Mockery, the Mook managers last week re-drew their organizational charts. Pete Coors slipped quietly into a vice-chairmanship, and a seventh-generation dauphin of the other founding famb’ly, Andrew Molson, was elevated to the chairman’s gig. Possibly old Andrew is a tad more attuned to what the man-in-the-beer-store whispers behind the Mooks’ backs, since he also happens to own a couple of big public relations outfits in Montreal, National Public Relations and Cohn & Wolfe Canada.

Or perhaps not. It’s easy to envision Andrew’s first day after being put in charge of the place. He may have proclaimed: “My PR experts tell me that customers find the names we’ve given our new products to be ridiculous! Ridiculous! No more of these ridiculous brands! Things must change. I want the name of our next new brand to be sublime, not ridiculous. Do you hear me? Sublime! Always aim for the sublime!”

To which the product development team must have shrugged and said, “Youse crumbs hoid da boss.” That would explain the following press release, issued just recently: “Molson Coors proudly launches Molson Canadian 67 Sublime.” The bumpf rambles on to explain the brand is “a new beer certain to prove all the rage on outdoor terraces… this summer.”

Taking in the full measure of this venture involving the cross-breeding of a very sorry lager and green Kool-Aid, you’d need to conclude that the project offers all the elements necessary to gain entry into the annals of bad-marketing history. Seemingly, each box has been ticked, every vital question answered:

• Is this a poor product concept? Yes. It is an singularly unpromising idea, to take a thin, taste-free lager — subdued, you might say — and attempt to add the missing flavor by subsuming a crushed lime gumdrop.
• Could the brand identity be any more stupid? It could not. Whether you use the ‘sub’ prefix to connote ‘below’ or ‘less than,’ or whether you simply riff on soundalike wordplay (“Finally, there’s a sub-par beer to pair with your meatball sub, or your subgum”), it is plain that Molson 67 Sublime sets a new industry substandard.
• Does this represent a new bottom in this company’s 225-year brewing tradition? No. This low-cal alco-gazosa should only appeal to a tiny segment of clueless occasional sippers who are unfamiliar with the phrase “Caveat Emptor.” Far more problematic is the Mooks’ stated intention to assault the high-end of the beer-drinking spectrum, by acquiring local craft and specialty boutique breweries, and placing them under Molson oversight. Toward that end, they’ve gone so far as to spin off a new unit, known as the Six Pints Specialty Beer Company. According to one Ian Freedman, who will head up the venture: “The skills and the business model required to be successful in seeding, nurturing and growing specialty beer brands is very different from those required to build powerhouse brands like Coors Light and Molson Canadian.” By which he may be revealing his understanding that if you try to squirt seltzer and lime-ade into a knowledgable beer-drinker’s glass, you may be surprised to find yourself on a direct route to the orthodontist’s chair.

Or perhaps Molson, after spending far too long in what is, after all, a basic sort of game, simply thinks they know better than their typical beer-swilling customers. Perhaps that is what they do indeed think, based on the the headline they issued with the above-mentioned press release: “Molson Coors to Educate Consumers on Quality Beer.” Can they really be that insufferably arrogant, or are they simply that detuned and obtuse? Either way, and regardless of what they’re pouring, the edjamacation is bound to be better than the beer.

Look, I’m no economic theorist.

Ten months ago, I scribbled down some stuff about a Canadian development that just seemed to be one more of those strange and unwelcome occurrences that happen routinely up here (comparable to when one o’ them big ole bears trudge their way down Highway 11 from Algonquin Park each spring and attempts to board the Toronto subway, and are dealt with sharply by a uniformed member of  Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113, who loses patience with the bear’s slowness to present a valid pass.)

The issue back last July was the inability of retail pharmacies in certain parts of the country to keep many different prescription drugs in stock. There were convenient explanations offered, which ranged from the conspiratorial, to the political, to the highly mundane. However, since the matter was restricted to Canada, it was met by Canadians with a characteristically phlegmatic response, which was, “Well, I suppose it shall be no more drugs for our grandmama, then. Poor old duck will die, and we will be very sad indeed. We shall miss her, but we mustn’t complain too loudly, you know. Wouldn’t wish to place any more stress on anyone. We do have the finest healthcare system in the world, after all.”

In other words, it seemed right then to be a quintessentially local issue. Little did we imagine that we were witnessing one of those rare occasions when Canada was in the vanguard of a continent-wide phenomenon: the emergence of a startling new paradigm involving the pharma industry’s inability to supply drugs.

Here is how the Washington Post recently framed the topic: “Doctors, hospitals and federal regulators are struggling to cope with an unprecedented surge in drug shortages in the United States that is endangering cancer patients, heart attack victims, accident survivors and a host of other ill people” (check out the article from 04-26-11.) This illustrates yet another difference between the national temperaments of Canada and the United States, with the former taking things in a kind of resigned stride, while the latter goes immediately apeshit. “It’s a crisis,” a Utah pharmacist screams at the Post‘s reporter. “Patients are at risk.”

Respond to the news as you will, the stateside metrics aren’t good: 211 drugs now in short-supply, three times as many as five years ago, 89 new shortages already reported in Q1 of this year. In a country that celebrates the ability of the marketplace to provide citizens with access to a dry Riesling to accompany your lobster quesadilla at three in the morning in any Denny’s location, this raises plenty of questions. No morphine? No norepinephrine? And where the cytarabine at? (Cytarabine being the one you never want to run out of, since leukemia and lymphoma patients require that it be administered in a timely fashion, to avoid the onset of a condition that medical professionals describe, with clinical accuracy, as “croaking.”) Deborah Banker of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society explains why a cytarabine shortage is not desirable: “With this drug [patients] can be cured, and without this drug too many of them will certainly die. That’s the simplest way to put it. The disease progresses so rapidly that untreated patients can sadly die within days. There is no time for delay and no certainty of a good outcome if you can’t get a full dose.” Hard to miss her point.

Just as it’s difficult to avoid the reasons why the supply lines have dried up. In Canada, land of private-sector branch plants and public-sector convoluted governance, there is always an explanation that involves (a) greed or indifference originating at one or other of the distant-headquartered corporations, and (b) graft or incompetence at some level of Canadian government or its buraucracies. Things are refreshingly direct in the USA, however. According to the experts cited in the Washington Post‘s analysis, the reason the drug companies can’t provide their product is… the drug companies themselves.

Remember all that consolidation that occurred in the drugbiz, that was justified because companies needed to pool their R&D allocations in the hunt for new drugs to cure disease? Well, the way that played out was that there are now fewer and fewer organizations pursuing ever-bigger research projects — and hardly any manufacturers of the low-margin essential therapeutics that investment analysts don’t care about: your morphine, your norepinephrine. Big Pharma and the biotechies have been keeping themselves busy in the hunt for lifestyle drugs that might provide an adequate return on a billion-dollar development budget. Meanwhile, no one is paying sufficient attention to the old-timey war-horse products that you will want your pharmacy to have on hand, should you one day find yourself in need.

Not paying attention means out-sourcing procurement of fine-chemicals and other raw components to the places where one turns, when one treats his product as a price-sensitive commodity, and is trying to shave his costs. Trouble is, when that Chennai-based supplier has a glitch, or those inspectors shut down the Albanian facility, one is supposed to have a backup plan lined up. Because, otherwise, one’s customers will die, you see. At which point, as Malthus or Adam Smith or J.K. Galbraith or Milton Friedman might predict, one’s client base will no longer be desirous of one’s products or services, having just expired.

Evidently, that instruction was omitted from the management manuals at the Fangool Pharma Factory, or any of the other esteemed organizations that can no longer get the job done — or even comprehend what the drugmaker’s job is supposed to be any more.

Perhaps this is understandable. A quick search of the current career recruitment ads will determine that pharmaceutical manufacturers are seeking candidates for positions with titles such as Senior Vice-President – Outcomes Strategies, or Urban Community Liason Specialist, or Marketing Information Security Manager, or QA Systems Engineer IV, or Paralegal/Contracts Team Leader, and so on. Put plain, here is a business that is drowning in its own process, and oblivious to whether or not the goods are making their way out of the plant and on to the trucks.

Among the thousands of arcane job descriptions, it’s rare to encounter anyone in a pharma organization who actually knows anything about the rudiments of pharmaceutical manufacturing — or pretends to feign any form of interest. One can sympathize: Biopharma and chemical textbooks are what some might think of reading when they can’t find a date on Saturday night, or carry as a prop on a long flight, to discourage a gabby seatmate from initiating a conversation.

But sympathy will only take you so far, precisely the distance to the entrance of the hospital Emergency wing, where you can observe the attending physician shrieking obscenities at the pharmacist-on-duty, who is on the phone to her colleague in Pittsburgh, in a futile effort to locate the drugs that will keep someone you care about from croaking. Good luck to them all; best wishes, and santé to everyone, from an economy and a society that have both clearly lost their way.

It might be expected that someone would grow sentimental, contemplating the symbolism of the Merck complex, which opened in 1969 (Montreal, still in the afterglow of Terre des Hommes/Man and His World) and underwent a continuous series of expansions, right up until 2005 (North America, still in the aftershock of 9/11.) That makes two, or maybe three generations that looked upon 16711 Trans-Canada Highway, Kirkland, as a point of personal, or civic, or provincial, or national pride: the planned suburban centre where Merck’s predecessor, the Charles E. Frosst Company, relocated, away from their crowded original premises at 3571 rue Saint-Antoine, then known as Craig Street.

A Charles Frosst Dingbat, enduring beloved symbol of Merck's predecessor company

Sixteen-Thousand, Seven-Hundred and Eleven Trans-Canada Highway, the green-field site where therapies were invented that brought relief to people all over the world. The place where thousands came to work as recent university graduates, flirted across the spectrometers, pinned pictures of their children to cubicle walls, ate 7 a.m. breakfasts in the cafeteria, complained about their bosses, made lifelong friendships, stayed behind their desks during countless snowstorms, wrapped up late meetings at Le Manoir, slipped away to vote in elections and referenda, accepted condolences after burying their parents, raised funds for Centreaide, frequently found better jobs at other companies, but continued to take pride in having worked for Merck on Route Transcanadienne.

Through that period, 1969 to 2005, great Montreal personalities came and went — Trudeau, Lévesque, Drapeau; Gilles Villeneuve, Richler, Penfield, others. All were impermanent, along with the Olympics, the Seagram empire, this hotel, that bistro, the downtown department stores, a big concert, a great holiday, some little pub you heard about where a character named Auf der Maur drank. Everything came and went — except for 16711 Trans-Canada Highway, which each day attended to its own affairs, while, outside the facilities, man and his world thrashed around randomly.

But, too obviously, box-loads of nostalgia are not listed among the inventory of what the listing describes as “this exceptional industrial asset, situated on 53.8 acres, features approximately 300,000 s.f. of Class A and B office space, 414,000 s.f. Research, Pharmaceutical Research & Development, Pharmaceutical Manufacturing & Packaging Facilities and a Distribution Centre.” When you take stock of the bricks and mortar, you realize that real estate is a much more hard-hearted game than pharmaceuticals, and it has been years since the drug business stopped pretending to be tender.

Out on Pill Hill in the West Island, Merck had a next-door neighbor, also in the Life Sciences industry. The man in charge of the company across the parking lot had worked at Merck for a long time, and often found himself staring across the 1,248 parking spaces that separated the properties — that’s the actual count — into the windows of his former employer’s buildings. Once, toward the end of the year 2003, a visitor came into his corner office, and found him shaking his head. Gesturing across the way, he said, “Have you heard? They’ve cancelled the retirees’ annual Christmas party, as a cost-cutting move. Why would they do that? How much money will that save? The retirees spend the whole year looking forward to seeing the office again. The current employees look forward to seeing their old colleagues. Why would they cancel the Christmas party?”

The visitor cleared his throat, and mentally counted through all the available rationales. The first answer that came to mind was probably the correct one. The worldwide HQ, responding to Wall Street distress calls, put pressure on local management to make tough decisions and cut back on non-essential expenses. Symbolic decisions made under duress very often seem foolish in the next day’s light, and company management would surely not wish to be remembered for denying pensioners their annual cupcake and singalong. But the striking thing was the degree to which the boss of an unrelated company still seemed emotionally invested in that place across the parking lot.

It’s a natural impulse that people have, to stare past the hedges of the largest house in the neighborhood. Sixteen-Thousand, Seven-Hundred and Eleven Trans-Canada Highway was a constantly-expanding showplace, somewhere you would always spot construction cranes during periods when there were few to be seen in the rest of the island. Nurtured by the counter-cyclical economies of Big Pharma, the Merck complex became an insular city within an insular city.

But even the most focused manager eventually comes to learn what his neighbors already know: that all things change, that you can’t live on emblems, and that an impressive facade is not a sustainable measure of success. Perhaps the process of change begins when you ask, “Do we really need to throw a party for the retirees? I mean, we already pay for their pensions.” The next question might be, “Do we really need labs? Doesn’t Quintiles do that sort of thing?” And then someone might wonder, “Are there not places where we can cost-effectively outsource manufacturing?”

With that, you’ve arrived at the useful end of the integrated model that drove Big Pharma through most of the past century. What you’re left with, when you’ve concluded your investigations and analyses and made all the tough calls, is 53.8 acres worth of decommissioned real estate that someone is bound to refer to as a White Elephant, a term that Realtors do not intend as flattery. It’s a fact that other multinational drug companies, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Abbott among them, recently rationalized their Montreal-based operations and relocated in order to thrive. But there is special symbolism on Route Transcanadienne, where the snapping Quebec and Canadian and corporate flags made you think of the magnificent things that bright people can achieve when they are motivated.

No need to turn portentous. The bright people will reassemble, the breakthroughs will continue, and there will be more remarkable achievements ahead — but, right now, where is the harm in taking a few seconds to think about buildings and structures, and all the hopes and dreams they contained?