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Update on Michael Cahill

Allow me to turn to a more personal, less literary/artsy subject today…

I was in Chicago on the weekend with friends. I came back on Sunday night, got home, and out of habit checked the stats on this blog – a habit borne of curiosity generally, and my occasional question of whether this is a worthy pursuit specifically. I was stunned to see more than triple the average number of visitors to the site on the weekend.

After more searching through the stats, I discovered that the majority of visitors were coming from search engines like Google, and all were searching the name of my late uncle, Michael Cahill, whom I’d written about here and here.

Noting that this couldn’t have been a random surge, I searched for a while and noticed that America’s Most Wanted had re-broadcast their story on his murder (which I originally wrote about here). Furthermore, a news blog in Virginia recently focused on the crime also.

It’s several days later and I’m still getting a lot of traffic from people, from all over N. America and even Europe for that matter, looking up Michael’s murder. Strange. The whole thing is strange – the incident itself, tragic obviously as it was, and now this surge of interest which more than eclipses all of the previous Michael-related traffic I’ve received since AMW first broadcast the story. I don’t quite understand the invigorated interest, but I’m happy that more people are curious; it means that there are that many more people who may be able to help out in solving the case.

Helps that Berkeley Breathed is involved I guess, which is one of the more hard-to-believe aspects of the story.

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UPDATE (April 2020): http://imagitude.com/michael-cahill/michael-cahill-coda/

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A sign

I’ve been unable to parlay this into a larger essay – this is not to say there isn’t an essay in it, but rather the time and thought necessary to write it has been elusive. In Toronto, there is a gentleman by the name of Reg Hartt. He runs a program called Cineforum, where he screens classic silent films, censored cartoons, and obscure treats like the ever-reliable “Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon” mash-ups. His advertising is ubiquitous in the city; black and white ads stapled and taped to hydro posts and litterboxes, with large sans serif block letters: “SIDDHARTHA by HESSE“, “SEX AND VIOLENCE CARTOON FILM FESTIVAL“.

Nobody comes close to Reg when it comes to promoting on the street. He is tireless.

In any case, one day I saw the following ad for a lecture at Reg’s. It is a phrase which has stuck in my mind like a thorn:

SO LONG AS MAN
WANTS GOD ON EARTH
THERE WILL ALWAYS
BE A HITLER
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Book Review: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Readers of this blog (both of you!) may have caught my previous mention of the strange road I took in finding Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita – not only the book itself but also this particular translation (self-published by Michael Karpelson – more on this later). Without exaggerating, it was well-worth the effort.
How does one describe this book? Well, considering all the fuss over Harry Potter as of late (or perennially, as it would seem), The Master and Margarita would seem a perfect literary tonic for anyone looking for speculative adult fiction. Hailed as one of the best pieces of Russian literature (not just speculative) of the 20th century, such praises can also be intimidating; visions of a depressing, Dostoevskian St. Petersburg, and the obligatory poverty and mental illness which filter to a bleak (if well-rendered) conclusion. This is not that kind of book.

One day, two members of the reigning literary elite meet in a park to discuss problems with the subject matter of one of their poems – it’s not atheistic enough, says the elder, and thus not worthy of publishing (this being Soviet Russia, under Stalin’s rule). No sooner is the question (and denial) of the devil raised, than the two are greeting by a tall, dark stranger who appears out of the blue and proceeds to describe how one of them will die. And, albeit under fantastic circumstances, it comes true.

Pretty soon, the stranger and his motley troupe – a clownish bloke with a broken pince-nez, a fang-toothed redheaded goul, and a large, talking black cat who walks on his hind legs – occupy a townhouse in the centre of Moscow from which they direct a chaotic spell over the city. Anyone it seems who gets in their way – usually members of the cultural privileged classes – either vanishes, winds up in the sanatorium, or is vanquished to another part of the country.

Who are they? What are they doing? All of this is unravelled (and exploded) the further into the book one reads. We meet the eponymous Master, a discouraged writer whose seminal work on Pontius Pilate is lain to waste by the bureaucratic tendrils of the sycophantic literary scene, and his faithful lover, Margarita – a married woman who would do anything to be free of her chains and reunited with him.

The Master and Margarita is a wild, throw-the-rulebook-out-the-door tale which manages to weave outrageous satire with eloquent speculation on morality. Bulgakov’s novel confidently navigates between deft, fantastic comedy and touching, emotional drama – without one disregarding the power of the other. Written under the tyrannical reign of Stalin from 1929 until Bulgakov’s death in 1940, it is both a response to the madness of that period and a triumphant individual statement.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something fantastic and unpredictable to consume them. It is truly a book that can be read and re-read numerous times, with each pass being as fulfilling as the next.

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (ISBN: 978-1411683051) is available at a friendly independent bookstore near you. Or online at any number of vendors.

A note about this translation: The translation I refer to above is the latest, by Michael Karpelson. While listed on Amazon, he is currently making small revisions to this edition which, combined with other projects in the works (another book by Bulgakov as well!), means it will not be available for the next while. If you like, I’ve received permission from Michael to post his email address – if you contact him, he can arrange for a copy of the existing edition to be shipped to you, as he did with me. His email address is: mkarpelson (at) gmail (dot) com. {psst – support independent publications}

Another note (June 24, 2010): I recently read another translation of M&M, by the prodigious team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I’m a little surprised, because it seems as if it’s longer than the Karpelson version (ie. it has slightly more content in places). Maybe that’s just me. It’s certainly the easier of the two to purchase, so I put this out there for you to contemplate.

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Preface This

If there’s one trend in film that I cannot understand (or sometimes tolerate) it is the rise of the Director’s Introduction.

Today, someone asked if I’d watched the DVD of Bon Cop Bad Cop, a Canadian feature film which had been a box-office smash when it was released last year. He then told me that there was a Director’s Intro where Eric Canuel talks about – wait for it – how successful the film was at the box-office. And if that weren’t bad enough, you couldn’t skip through it to the film that you had just paid money to either rent or buy. Why anyone would think it a good idea to hold the paying audience ransom so that they could congratulate themselves on making a profit is the sort of provincial-minded Canadian bullshit that I’ve unfortunately come to expect from a country pathologically unable to take its head out of its ass. But why does any film need an introduction in the first place?

I remember renting Spielberg’s Munich last year. Not only did he have an intro (optional though it was), but in it he more or less apologized for his film – politically. Could you imagine Bertolucci apologizing for The Conformist or Orson Welles apologizing for Citizen Kane? Spielberg: the man who has brought more money into the box-office than nearly anyone in history, who in his prime innovatively defined, through works like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind “the film for everyone”, now prefaces his work as if there had been a manufacturing error of epic proportions which caused hardcore pornography where there used to be sunsets.

What the hell is going on? Do we not trust ourselves? Are we becoming so fearful of litigation or clouds of doubt on the horizon of our career’s posterity that we must now preface our work, selling its merits as if applying for a loan, as if spending the millions of dollars to make the film was, in retrospect, an uncertain mistake?

Guillermo del Toro, in his introduction to the Pan’s Labyrinth DVD talks briefly about how much weight he lost during production. Terry Gilliam, who filmed an introduction for the theatrical run of his much-maligned feature, Tideland, stood there reminding us that his film was about the world through the eyes of a child. Indeed, it’s as if the general public were being treated like infants.

In my writer’s group, during our monthly meetings, we will read new work aloud. We have a firm rule: you do not preface your work. You do not say “I was trying to write about…”, or “This is based on a story…”. No. Stop it. If it’s good, it will stand up on its own accord. If it’s good – even if I have questions – I’m comfortable that I will be able to find this out on my own after the fact. If you need to explain your work before you present it to an audience then chances are you have not produced a work that an audience should be seeing (as opposed to, say, yourself).

When I see a film, I want to see the film. I do not want or require a preface where somebody “explains” things for me or, worse still, some risk-averse apologia. I’m a big boy, I can handle it.

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It’s a start…

[yes, the artsy, philosophizing, photo blog has been getting political lately. I will try to balance this out with unnecessary essays on Camus -ed.]

The news just broke that the UN has approved (up to) 26,000 peace keepers to be sent to Darfur. From the Globe and Mail:

July 31, 2007 at 3:59 PM EDT

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to authorize up to 26,000 troops and police in an effort to stop attacks on millions of displaced civilians in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Expected to cost more than $2-billion in the first year, the combined United Nations-African Union operation aims to quell violence in Darfur, where more than 2.1 million people have been driven into camps and an estimated 200,000 have died over the last four years.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the resolution as “historic” and urged member states to offer “capable” troops quickly.

The resolution, number 1769, invokes Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, under which the United Nations can authorize force. The measure allows the use of force to be used for self defence, to ensure the free movement of humanitarian workers and to protect civilians under attack.

But the resolution, which has been watered down several times, no longer allows the new force to seize and dispose of illegal arms. Now they can only monitor such weapons.

Gone also is a threat of future sanctions, but British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned on Tuesday that “if any party blocks progress and the killings continue, I and others will redouble our efforts to impose further sanctions.”

“The plan for Darfur from now on is to achieve a cease-fire, including an end to aerial bombings of civilians; drive forward peace talks … and, as peace is established, offer to begin to invest in recovery and reconstruction,” he said on a visit to the United Nations.

Some (perhaps rightly) are comparing this to Rwanda – not the existing massacre, mind you (that’s been done quite well already), but the handcuffing of UN peace keepers. As the article says, UN soldiers can only fight back in self-defence. I can only hope, and call me a blind idealist, that the lessons of Rwanda will have been learnt.

Like the title says, it’s a start. Two hundred thousand civilians have already been killed in Darfur. At this point, anything more than a diplomatic gesture is a sign of hope.

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Intolerant Alternatives

For those who don’t live in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), there are two papers which demonstrate the zero-sum game of “providing an alternative voice” in mass-market traditional media.

The first, which I submit as The Intolerant Right, is The Toronto Sun, a daily newspaper distributed through most of Southern Ontario. In short, pro-conservative, pro-law-and-order, pro-military, anti-liberal, anti-big-government, anti-humanist. They regularly publish op-ed pieces which make numerous references to City Council as being infested with socialists. They once published an editorial “cartoon” which allowed you to paint-by-numbers a portrait of Toronto’s mayor, David Miller, which ended up portraying him as Adolph Hitler.

The second, which I submit as The Intolerant Left, is NOW Magazine, a weekly news/community paper with wide distribution including outside the GTA. As opposed to the Sun, NOW is pro-socialist, pro-community, pro-union, anti-police, anti-military, anti-corporate. NOW operates under the impression that the world’s problems can be solved with townhall meetings. The recent clash between the Chilean U-20 soccer team and the police was, without bothering to investigate, blamed squarely on the police who were identified as racists.

Don’t get me wrong, NOW has a good arts section. The Toronto Sun, for that matter, excels in sports coverage. However, as regards editorial thrust, both papers are heinously biased and often responsible for stoking the coals of hatred.

And thus we come to that auspicious moniker: the “outsider” or “alternative” media voice. People who devour the Sun feel that everyone else is too liberally biased and that their paper “tells it like it is”. Those who fawn over NOW feel as if every page uncovers the organic truth, conspiratorially cloaked by the interests of Big Business. Yet, despite the obvious differences between the two, faithful readers of both feel as if they are getting the inside track on enlightenment.

This is one of the pernicious problems with being the “outsider” or the “alternative” in the traditional media market – it’s bullshit. You know it. I know it. Yet – and kudos for consistency to both the Toronto Sun and NOW – one can predictably ascertain the editorial reaction of both papers without as much as a few seconds of applied imagination.

Me? Generally, I’m left-of-centre, I do think there is a clear history of corporate greed which has threatened to extinguish individual rights (let alone entrepreneurship), and I don’t want our laws to be dictated by the tenets of any organized religion. However, pure socialism is a Romantic Dream – it assumes everyone is the same, which is the summit of naivety if we must include the criminally violent or the unfortunately stupid. Yet, I believe that culture needs federal funding and should not be treated like an elitist nice-to-have. Also, I would rather have another 4 years of David Miller’s ineffectiveness than yet another malicious, vindictive clown like Mel (The Black Cauldron) Lastman or a ruinous corporate-minded manipulator like Mike Harris at the provincial helm.

The problem with any form of media claiming to the be an “alternative” is that “being alternative” (as opposed to say, trying to approach the complexity of the average person’s viewpoint) becomes a ball-and-chain by which they have to editorially tow the line, whether or not it devolves into predictability (or self-parody).

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“The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe.“

– Peter De Vries

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