Bonnaroo Part 2: This is Hamsterdam
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Stories on October 19, 2009
For the full story, read Part 1: Border Fuzz first.
Matt kept repeating it on the way to Bonnaroo. “This is Hamsterdam.” He said it when we stopped for gas and greasy food at a truck stop in southern Ohio, he said it while we sat on the balcony of a motel two hours from Manchester, Tenn., and watched rain so heavy it turned the canopy into a waterfall, and he said it while we idled in a 6-mile line of cars on the interstate shoulder, waiting to finally enter the festival grounds.
I put the car in park and took my foot off the brake. The line wasn’t going anywhere. Another state trooper on motorcycle appeared in the side mirror, approaching quickly on the left. Up ahead, an off-ramp was blocked by two cruisers with more troopers beside them, watching our snail-flattering progression.
Matt stared back. “Heavy police presence. You’d think we were being herded off to some prison camp.”
“Hey, Matt, pass the pipe.” Heather’s hand reached out from the back seat.
Matt turned around. “No, you’re not serious. Now of all times?”
“Just one more bowl. Why not?”
The bike trooper rumbled past.
“That guy.” Matt pointed at the bike trooper. “Him. That’s why. We already smoked once here and got away with it. I don’t want to tempt fate.”
“Those guys aren’t looking for drugs. They’re here to make sure nobody cuts out onto the highway trying to get ahead and causes a pile-up.”
“It doesn’t matter what they’re here for, I don’t feel comfortable smoking around all these Tennessee state troopers. We’re not in Toronto. Pot’s a serious thing here. And even if we were in Toronto, this would still be too many cops. Why can’t you just wait until we get inside? It can’t be that much longer.”
And once we were inside Bonnaroo, every recreational drug imaginable would be essentially legal for the next four days.
This wasn’t the first time these troopers had escorted tens of thousands of hippies, hipsters and frat boys into the Bonnaroo grounds. They knew by now what goes on inside and how much contraband they would find if they searched a few cars at random, yet they didn’t seem to care about any of that. They were strictly on traffic duty, tasked with ensuring the stoners enter the designated drug-use area in an orderly fashion.
We didn’t smoke another bowl until we were parked. As we unpacked the van, people were already walking around looking to buy weed. There was no way we were selling what we had. We were nearly extradited to Syria for bringing that pot across the border. You can’t put a price-tag on that.
We dropped MDMA as the sun set, the storm clouds turning its yellow light a bluish grey as they slowly converged overhead.
“How many do you want? Two?” Greg asked.
I shrugged, “one should be fine.” I had never done MDMA before. The myths about it creating pinholes in your brain matter and the association with glow-stick waving, pacifier-sucking ravers kept me far away from it in high school. All I really knew was proper MDMA worked like a filter on your brain that makes everything wonderful for around three to four hours.
“Trust me, you’ll need two,” said Matt, grabbing an extra one from Greg. “You’ll want a re-up.”
The lightning struck with the MDMA. Jagged stabs of white illuminated the sky with a light that echoed off the clouds. Big, thick raindrops fell fast and relentless, drumming on the canopy beside a neighbouring tent while we sat underneath, waiting for the downpour to end. The drumming was so loud it drowned out everything else. Its rhythmic constancy calmed, soothed, made everything okay. It was almost wonderful.
Everyone sounded slightly distant, as though they were talking through tin cans attached with string. I took a deep breath and listened to the sound of the storm, now louder than ever.
“It feels really good to breathe,” I said to no one in particular, discovering that MDMA also removes any ability to think before you speak.
As soon as the rain let up Matt took off, anxious to explore Centeroo, “get a feel for the place,” he said. I tried waiting for everyone else, but after a while I couldn’t resist the inviting smile of the shimmering lights on the other side of the wall.
Centeroo was separated from the campgrounds by a large yellow wall. There were only two known points of entry, both called Shakedown, because Centeroo was a drug-free zone, technically. Shakedown wasn’t air-tight. 
A little weed in a shoe or a tab in a wallet would make it through unharmed — assuming the weed doesn’t reek of foot — but you had to take the effort to conceal it.
I found Shakedown and headed into Centeroo. After driving 1,400 kilometres to get here, I still wasn’t sure what Bonnaroo was. I knew there would be a lot of music, but that was about it. I wasn’t prepared for the incredible nocturnal carnival that surrounded me. A ferris wheel rotated slowly in the distance, bulbs flashing. Lights were everywhere, colours of every hue, backlighting silhouettes of people casting long shadows on well-worn dirt paths as they wandered between one attraction and another.
Matt appeared beside me as I walked.
“So yeah, this is a pretty cool place,” I said.
Matt smiled, “this is Hamsterdam.”
I finally understood.
Bonnaroo Part 1: Border Fuzz
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Stories on July 26, 2009
Matt ran his fingers through his hair, rocking back and forth and shaking his head slowly in his hands.
I looked over. “Calm down man. Nothing’s going to happen. We’ll be fine.”
“Look, there’s nothing you can say that will calm me down right now. I’ll be calm once we cross the border.”
He continued his finger-combing. “How much do we have? No, wait, I don’t want to know.”
All together we were carrying less than an ounce of weed in the minivan, keeping us on the safer side of the line between partially fucked and totally fucked. It was the 25 MDMA pills stashed away in one of Greg’s bags that put us over that line.
I had also packed over a dozen Cake Pops: chocolate-coated balls of cake and cannabis icing (served on a stick for convenience), prepared by a friend back in Toronto. They were well-made; you could barely taste the weed. Perhaps I could offer some to the border guards if they hassled us.
And the guards were going to hassle us a little. I was sure of that. There’s something about a borrowed minivan filled with bags and boxes driven by four people under 25 heading to a music festival that just screams “random search!” and if the border guards found anything, that was it — our trip would be over before it began. All we could do was play it cool and hope we didn’t look like a threat to national security.
We probably should have crossed the border clean. You can get whatever drugs you need at Bonnaroo, but we still took the risk bringing some from home. Sure, our Canadian weed was better (and cheaper) than any of the American schwagg we’d find in Tennessee, but that alone wasn’t enough for me to justify smuggling it. I mostly did it because I was curious; I wanted to see if we could get away with it. So much of what we do is influenced and regulated by threat of punishment if we cross some arbitrary line, be it a law or a border. I wanted to know just how empty the threats really were.
The only one of us with clean bags was Matt, aside from the under-the-counter Adderall he had on him. The border guards might wonder why he was carrying prescription amphetamines in a Tic-Tac container, but that was more inconvenience than illegal. Then again, it didn’t matter whose bags were carrying which drugs; we’d all be equally fucked if the guards found them.
Traffic at the border was surprisingly light. We didn’t have to wait long before we pulled up to the booth and Greg handed the guard our documents.
“Citizenship?” the booth guard asked as he flipped through the passports.
“Canadian.”
“What is this?” he held up my enhanced driver’s license, something I picked up specifically for this trip, since it was now impossible to enter the States with a regular Ontario driver’s license.
U.S. border guards are among the most serious people in the world. No matter what you tell them, you’ll always get the same look: like you’re lying and they know it.
But he asked, so I told him. “It’s an enhanced driver’s license.”
“No it’s not,” he snapped, an odd response considering the words “Enhanced Driver’s License” were printed in bold above my photograph.
The booth guard waved the license in front of the RFID scanner anyway in an attempt to show me that he was right and I was a lying terrorist. The scanner beeped.
“Oh, so it is,” he grumbled, apparently angry at the license for proving him wrong.
He asked us the standard questions: Where were we going? Why? How long? Were we bringing any fruits or vegetables with us? Nothing out of the ordinary. He gave us the border guard look the whole time, but after a while, I thought we were free and clear.
“Pull your car around to the side and park it,” he ordered, pointing around the corner to where other cars were being dissected trunk by trunk. “You’ll get your documents back inside.”
Oh shit. Oh shit. Shit shit shit. They were going to search us. What would they find? Maybe nothing. Probably something. Border guards search vehicles for a living; they know their way around a minivan filled with contraband.
No one said a word as we parked and headed inside. Straight faces all around. None of us looked interested in cracking. That might change once they led us into separate rooms and began the waterboarding, but in the meantime, we were stone-cold pros.
Our interrogator was sitting behind a reception desk, next to the elevators and across from the vending machines. He didn’t seem like much, and it would be easy to confuse his workspace with a DMV waiting area. Still, he made us sit and wait for five minutes, just to let the tension mount. We could no longer see the minivan, so we had no way of knowing what they had found so far. I’m sure he knew that.
When the reception guard eventually called us up, he started running through more of the standard questions. It didn’t make any sense — by now they probably had my stash, the Cake Pops and Greg’s pills. Heather hid her pot with care, but the other stuff gave them enough of a reason to tear everything apart anyway. They had us by the balls, yet this guard was still asking us about our borrowed minivan.
“You mean you all have jobs but none of you owns a car?”
What kind of CIA mind games was this guy playing? Perhaps our lack of car ownership flagged us as terrorists, because only terrorists share things like cars. Genuine freedom-loving patriots own their own cars and they wouldn’t think about letting another person get behind the wheel unless a briefcase full of money was involved. That’s the American way, not our extremist car-sharing fundamentalism.
I began to wonder what would happen to us once they found everything. They would probably lock us up for a long time. And getting caught smuggling drugs isn’t like being convicted of massive fraud or political corruption — we’d be sent to real prison, the type where inmates’ colons get rearranged in the shower on a daily basis.
None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for September 11th. When those planes hit those towers, America lost its collective shit. While the country was still in shock, Americans were told the best way to fight the terrorists was to shop, forfeit civil liberties, and bomb a couple of countries back to the stone age, so they did just that. Once it became apparent no one felt any safer, they turned to their borders. Slowly but surely, it became more and more difficult to enter the U.S. legally without a cavity search, and we were the result — nothing more than collateral damage in the war on terror.
The interrogation ended without any mention of illicit substances or smuggling or terrorism and the guard gave us back our documents, but we still couldn’t leave. Something was up.
As we sat back down to await our fate, an armoured truck pulled up just outside the entrance. Matt nearly shat himself. We were sure it was there to haul us off to Gitmo or whatever eastern European interment camp the Department of Homeland Security set up to extract information from Canadian drug smugglers.
The guard at the entrance motioned towards us. This was it. We were about to spend the rest of our lives being tortured and gang-raped, all because we tried to bring drugs to a music festival. Counter-terrorism at work.
“Ok, you can go,” he said.
We filed out in stunned silence. They were letting us go? Aside from one or two bags on the top of the luggage pile in the back of the minivan, everything was as we left it. We all figured they were going to find something; it never occurred to us that they wouldn’t even bother searching.
We made it through, drugs and all. We fooled the U.S. government. This must be what freedom feels like. Eat that, Uncle Sam!
We didn’t say anything to each other for the first couple of blocks, but once we were absolutely sure we were clear of the border we erupted in a fit of laughing and cheering and clapping in celebration of our perfect crime. Even Matt was ecstatic.
“I think you all owe me an apology,” he said. “You called me paranoid when I said I was worried about crossing the border. ‘It’ll be fine,’ you said, ‘we’ll get across no problem.’”
“And that’s exactly what happened,” I said.
Heather pulled out one of the three joints she was carrying in her pocket. Matt stared at her in disbelief.
“You had those on you the whole time?”
Heather shrugged. “Yeah. It’s not like I can get at the rest of the pot right now. I rolled these for the road.”
“What the fuck? What if there had been dogs? Were you trying to get caught?”
I started laughing again. “Who cares man, we made it! Woo! Next stop: Bonnaroooooooo!”
Matt just shook his head.
Polishing China’s Turds
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Politics, Rants on October 2, 2008
(photo courtesy of the Globe and Mail)
China’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympic games was trumpeted as a milestone along the nation’s road to superpower status. The Olympics were supposed to be a turning point, a coming out party for a better, more advanced and more enlightened China; one that respected human rights and freedoms like a western democratic nation instead of the dissent-stifling communist dictatorship it used to be.
That’s what we were told, anyhow.
The reality is that, despite all of the promises and empty gestures, the new China is just like the old China. Don’t let all of those fancy, futuristic athletic venues fool you; it is still a nation that holds total control over its more than 1-billion people. It is still a nation ruled by propaganda that preaches silent acceptance over curious inquisition. It’s still the same old China.
In fact, the Beijing Olympics showed the world the only real difference between today’s China and the China of the 20th century: this China is powerful, powerful enough to stare down the "old money" of the international community – the G8 – and silence even their most legitimate criticism of China.
Criticism on issues like pollution. During the Olympics, Chinese authorities ordered half of Beijing’s cars off the road, something a democratic nation with a free press would never dream of demanding from their citizens. Even with those drastic measures in place for months in advance of the opening ceremonies, Beijing’s air quality was still well below the standards of the World Health Organization by the time the Olympics started.
And that’s just hot air compared to China’s other shortcomings during the Olympics.
As part of their Olympic bid, the Chinese government promised to allow protesters in designated protest zones during the games. Granted, the zones were set well away from all Olympic venues (or any areas of interest in Beijing, for that matter), and protesters were required to acquire official protest permits before any demonstrating could begin, but at least it’s a step in the right direction, right?
Well, it would have been, if any of the 77 protest applications were ever approved. Instead, most of the applications were simply ignored, while a few were rejected and a couple of applications filed by Chinese citizens led to arrests. Even a Chinese police officer has to see the irony in arresting someone for submitting an application to protest legally.
During the games, not much attention was paid to China’s working poor. That’s because they were hidden behind a giant wall built to keep the international media’s eyes looking elsewhere. I suppose that was the solution Chinese officials reached when they realized they couldn’t actually sweep those slums under a rug.
The wall is a perfect example of the lengths the People’s Republic will go to in order to maintain control of their image and their power. What they have displayed in the past few months, rather than the image of a new and reformed China, is a willingness to ignore and cover up any problem, no matter how easily it could be solved. They would rather strive for the appearance of perfection than actually work towards achieving anything positive.
With August and the Olympics now a distant memory in the face of a potentially catastrophic financial crisis in America – the nation formerly known as the world’s only superpower – it might be wise to take another look at China. A close look. In a few years, this might just be the nation that is leading the world, so perhaps we should start holding it accountable for its actions before we lose our ability to voice a dissenting opinion.
What we need to do is stand up and tell China we see through their facade. We need to say that, no matter how polished, a turd is still a turd.
TIFF Blog #4 – Me and Orson Welles
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Entertainment on September 15, 2008
Adaptation by Committee
I’m going to admit right off the bat that this movie wasn’t one of my first choices when I looked at the film list for this year’s TIFF. It was more of a plan B movie, but I wasn’t able to get tickets for Synechdoche, New York, or Zach and Miri Make a Porno, or even Pontypool: a Canadian movie that you’ve probably never heard of that was also sold out, so when I had to pick a film to use my remaining vouchers on, I chose Me and Orson Welles. It was directed by Richard Linklater – a director whose films are at least serviceable and at best, Dazed and Confused – and it’s about the guy who made Citizen Kane. I figured it was a safe bet.
After seeing it, I can safely say that Me and Orson Welles is indeed a safe bet, and that’s its biggest problem: it’s too safe. By no means is it a bad movie: it’s technically and aesthetically pleasing and it has some very solid supporting characters, including a top-notch interpretation of Welles by Christian McKay that could probably land him a best supporting actor nomination if the film it was in wasn’t so… safe.
It was adapted from the book of the same name by Richard Kaplow, and I have the slightest feeling that the adaptation process went something like this: producer reads book, calls agent – agent calls other agent, who calls writers – writers gather in a room and pick the book apart piece by piece, voting on which parts stay, which parts go, and what they should add in. It’s adaptation by committee. Somewhere down the line, a director is called in, but not until some actors and actresses have already signed on. Every decision probably went through about five different levels of approval, four of which were lawyers.
The overall goal was probably to create a film that could appeal to everyone and make its money by generating some Oscar buzz, but with every idea toned down to a PG level and nothing truly unique or remarkable to carry it, Me and Orson Welles feels as empty as the suits behind its production. I know what it’s trying to do; it’s trying to convey the feeling of being swept up in the surreal magic of the flamoyant genius that was Orson Welles, as well as the difficulty of knowing and working with him personally. All of that is in the film, but the delivery falls so flat that you never really feel it yourself, as much as you may want to.
The film’s main character is an aspiring actor who just so happens to luck out and land a role in Welles’ stage production of Caesar. The role is played by Zac Efron, whom you may know from the latest piece of propaganda for pre-teens brought to us by Disney: High School Musical. Over the course of the film, it would make sense for Efron’s character to grow and develop as he discovers the vast differences between studying acting in a classroom and performing on stage with Welles, but we never get a sense of this from Efron, who seems content to ride the same slightly fascinated/bewildered look on his face for the entire time he’s on camera.
Linklater did a solid job putting the film together, but I couldn’t help but feel like he was phoning it in, perhaps because he couldn’t do any directing without also making a million phone calls. As a result, most of Me and Orson Welles is very basic in both style and structure, very cliched. There’s nothing there to really draw you into the setting of the film or distinguish it from other 30s period pieces. Again, I’m not sure if this was actually Linklater’s fault – as I doubt he was actually allowed to do much directing on his own – but his name is attached to the film, so he does bare some responsibility for the finished product.
All in all, Me and Orson Welles proves that safe is death when you’re making a film. Aside from a few strong supporting characters, it’s hard to find any life in the film. Yes, it is technically sound and there are no major problems with the story or dialogue, but that’s only enough to make a movie mediocre; it’s not enough to make a movie worth seeing. For some reason, Me and Orson Welles doesn’t strive to be anything more than mediocre, which is the worst possible thing a movie can be. At least bad movies tend to draw some attention and box office numbers (if they couldn’t, Disaster Movie would never have been made and Uwe Boll would be homeless), but mediocre movies simply fade into obscurity with no money or awards to show for it.
I would like to think that this movie can do something good for film. I would like to believe this will put an end to Efron’s bid for a serious movie career, but that’s wishful thinking. Hollywood has proven again and again that there’s nothing it loves more than a talentless actor with power eyebrows and perfect teeth.
TIFF Blog #3 – Religulous
Posted by Chris Battaglia in Entertainment, Religion on September 9, 2008
Maher 1, God 0
Bill Maher has balls. Serious balls. Whether or not you agree with what he has to say, whether you find him hilarious or utterly arrogant and annoying, you have to admit he must have quite the pair of big, brass balls. How else do you explain the comment he made just weeks after 9/11, pointing out the hypocrisy of calling the terrorists cowards when no one else dared question the patriotic party line. he was willing to lose his TV show for speaking his mind. You can’t help but admire the balls something like that requires.
Bill Maher’s balls
And that is why Maher is the perfect fit for a movie like Religulous, a tongue-in-cheek documentary examining the roots of people’s beliefs by sending Maher around the world to have conversations about faith with true believers of all stripes. Faith is a touchy subject. It’s also the source of much hatred and violence, and has been since mankind first looked to the stars and began dreaming up answers to life’s great questions. Many people will defend their beliefs to the death. Further still, some are more than willing to kill others just for having different beliefs. But that doesn’t seem to faze Maher, who is never afraid to take that extra step over the line to push the issue and force people to confront the contradictions of their faith, no matter how offensive they might find it. Maher pisses off more than a few people over the course of his Religulous journey, but he never loses his edge or backs down. He also never misses an opportunity for a good joke, taste and social etiquette be damned, which leads to more than a few cringe-worthy moments that had me laughing and tugging my collar at the same time.
One thing Religulous and Maher make perfectly clear over the course of the film is that their quarrel is not with personal faith, but rather with organized religion. Maher can’t understand why so many people follow institutions based entirely on unfounded claims and downright fabrications and focused solely on gaining power and wealth. His strongest criticism is of the contradictions in (and bastardizations of) the various holy texts. It’s both fascinating and funny watching people staunchly defend these books they believe in, even as it becomes painfully obvious Maher knows more about the texts than they do.
Maher’s two main targets are the patriotic evangelical movement in the U.S. and Muslim extremism. He does touch on the absurdities in Judaism, including an interview with an anti-Zionist Jew, but his focus is clearly elsewhere. At first glance this appears unbalanced, but the film explains this choice with a simple population statistic: Christians? more than 1 billion worldwide, Muslims? more than 1 billion, Jews? 14 million. Worldwide. In the Q&A following the film, director Larry Charles addressed this subject by pointing out that the only reason Judaism still plays a major role on the world religious stage is because of its connections with Christianity and Islam.
The documentary is expertly directed and pieced together by Charles, who was also the man behind the camera for Borat and is cementing himself as one of the premier guerrilla comedy directors of our time. Charles’ pacing is spot-on, which is crucial for a film like this, and he clearly understands that the way to best bring out the comedy in both Borat and Religulous is to display the candid nature of the ridiculous situations. In Religulous, he achieves this through the sporadic inclusion of B-roll footage and angles where other cameras and boom mics are clearly visible. There are also a couple of moments when he gets some help from his surroundings, but I won’t spoil those for you. You’ll know them when you see them, and trust me: you’ll laugh.
The crowning achievement of Religulous is its ability to generate laughs from almost every single moment and situation. Each interview is strip-mined for punchlines that Maher may have missed during the fact, which are then inserted in post-production using stock footage or subtitles. It becomes very clear very fast that Religulous is not about to hold anything back, but it’s hard not to at least appreciate the humour that the film finds in blind faith. I’ll admit that I’m approaching this film from an entirely secular perspective, and I’ve never felt the need to hold back in my own criticism of religion, but even believers should be able to laugh at the contradictions and absurdities Religulous unearths.
Religulous ends on a far more serious and bone-chilling note when Maher gets up on his soapbox and pleads with the world to abandon the superstitions and abuses of organized religion so we can move forward as a species before we destroy ourselves over imagined deities. It is a preachy ending, but Maher’s fear is real. Thanks to nuclear weapons, we now have the ability to wipe ourselves off the face of the planet and we have shown time and time again that we are willing to slaughter those different from us simply because we believe our view of the world is the only correct one. It is a sobering, somber reminder of the real threat irrationality without self-reflection (and without a sense of humour) poses to the world, and it makes you think twice about what some of the people Maher interviewed were really trying to say.
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