Review of "The Trinity Sessions"

I have a confession to make: I have a crush on Margo Timmins, lead singer of the Cowboy Junkies. She's a beautiful woman, with auburn hair and sea-green eyes, and she has the voice of an angel. You can't fault Tony Bennett for wanting to sing with Canadian chanteuses like Celine Dion, Dianne Kral, or kd lang (he sang with lang), but for my money, I would rather listen to the Cowboy Junkies on the night of an Aurora Borealis north of Sixty than listen to any of the other three in a smoky bar.

It's because of the ethereal vocals of Margo Timmins. Dion, Kral and lang have garnered more acclaim south of Point Pelée, but Margo Timmins' vocals are more in line with what you would expect to hear in heaven after you die. Her voice is soothing, like a lullaby. This is the voice that the poor, wayfaring stranger would expect to hear in the afterlife after his or her tale of woe has ended. That's what I mean by "ethereal."

The Cowboy Junkies are siblings Margo Timmons on vocal, brother Michael on guitar, and brother Peter on drums, and cousin Alan Anton on bass. They are generally classified as "alternative country." What makes them country, you could say, is their choice of some of the material on their 1988 "The Trinity Session" CD: Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Dreaming My Dreams with You," and the Patsy Cline standard, "Walking after Midnight," as well as Cowboy Junkies originals like "Blue Moon Revisited (Song for Elvis)" and "To Love Is to Bury." Plus, there's lots of fiddle, pedal steel, and dobro here, and some lonesome harmonica on the last two cuts, "Postcard Blues" and "Walking after Midnight."

What make the Cowboy Junkies decidedly alternative is the way they render their material. On Williams' "I'm So Lonesome," Margo Timmins bends notes more like a blues singer rather than a country singer. It's the blue notes that make her sound like somebody who comes from much further north than Nashville, strange to say. There's no hillbilly twang in her vocals, and not much Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey, either. She doesn't sound anything like Patsy Cline on "Walking after Midnight," yet makes the song work.

And then there's the choice of material: the Cowboy Junkies' biggest hit, Lou Reed's "Sweet Jane," is off of this CD. What could be more alternative or non-country than Lou Reed, New York-born and bred? Yet the Cowboy Junkies brought out the beauty in this song by slowing down the tempo and made it a hit. It was something different, and that's what alternative music is all about, isn't it?

Let's look at the other musicians in this group. Drummer Peter Timmins uses lots of high hat and brush, like Nick Mason of Pink Floyd. As for the guitar of Michael Timmins, Margo's other brother, there's more rockabilly than Chet Atkins. The guitar work of Michael Timmins probably owes more to Carl Perkins or Shadowy Men From a Shadowy Planet, or even Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers, than Chet, except that the music of the Cowboy Junkies is much more laid back. Michael Timmins is a guy who seems to like his toggle switch in the fourth or fifth position.

Another Timmons, John, contributes guitar and backing vocal on "Misguided Angel" and "200 More Miles," while Jeff Bird plays fiddle, mandolin, and harmonic. Kim Deschamps contributes pedal steel, dobro, and bottleneck slide guitar while Jaro Czerwinec plays accordion. Steve Shearer plays harmonica on "I Don't Get It," "Postcard Blues," and "Walking after Midnight."

In listening to the Cowboy Junkies, one senses that Margo Timmins is always singing a cappella, which she actually does on the first cut, James Gordon's rendition of the traditional "Mining for Gold." This isn't to say that she seems unaware of her band mates. Rather, she stands apart from them. There's the sense of solitude in a crowded room, or in a crowded subway terminal. Everything is happening around her, like she's off on her own trip, yet somehow still a part of it all.

Here, she's like Bryan Ferry, formerly of Roxy Music, accept that her delivery is all smooth, with no jagged edges.

It may take a couple listens to appreciate this CD. If you are country purist, you will probably prefer Reba MacIntyre, Gretchen Wilson, or Patsy Cline. But if you're willing to listen with an open mind, you might find that there are lots of directions that country can go.

God may like Reba, Gretchen, or Patsy, but the angels probably prefer the Cowboy Junkies. When I die, I hope to hear the Cowboy Junkies in heaven.

Elisabeth Eaves' Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping

The next time you go to a gentleman's club, maybe you should ask yourself this: who pays for it all? Who pays the dancers, the bartender, the waitresses, the deejay, and the bouncer?

Chances are, you think that all the money that you pay at the door, a cover charge that may cost you ten dollars, and the outrageous price for a beer (about ten dollars) pays all the people that I have just mentioned.

Well, that isn't what I get from Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping. Elisabeth Eaves' memoirs about her life as a nude dancer in the Seattle area in the 1990s. In her years at the Lusty Lady in Seattle, Eaves had to give a cut to everybody that I mentioned, except the waitresses (who also make most of their money in tips). She had to tip the bartender, the deejay, and the bouncer; otherwise she couldn't work, because the deejay wouldn't deejay and the bouncer wouldn't bounce.

Not that Eaves was complaining about the money that she made in tips. Where else can a woman make $500 or more working four to six hours a night but at a topless bar? When you get down to it, dancing topless or naked for women is about as close as most of them will ever get to playing a professional sport for men.

Trust me: the only people who have any reason to complain are people who work with the Internal Revenue Service. But that's only if the IRS doesn't get its cut too.

Granted, there are very few strippers making 100 million dollars over seven years like Alex Rodriguez, but not many people make a thousand dollars a night only working part time either. And while comparing topless dancers to professional athletes may be stretching it for some people, isn't injecting your breasts with silicone the feminine equivalent of taking copious amounts of steroids like male athletes do?

There are those in both dancing and sports who might consider the use of silicone and steroids to be cheating.

However, what athletes like A-Rod don't have to deal with are groups of spectators masturbating as they step up to the plate. Nor will they likely see everybody in the front row box seats flicking their tongues at them. I doubt that the janitors at sports arenas have to throw away very many used condoms, or the handy wipes that were used to clean up semen that somebody left in the seats.

People like Elisabeth Eaves usually are not considered athletes, but when you look at the bodies of some of the women who are actually worth watching as they dance aux seins nus, you have to wonder why they aren't considered athletes. They help to keep Fitness USA going too. Lots of dancers run a few miles a day and spend a few hours each day at the exercise bike, just like A-Rod.

However, we consider nude dancing to be a form of prostitution. And it is, isn't it? When you pay a woman to rub herself all over you body in what is called a "lap dance," you are paying for what is called frottage, or "rubbing." And even if you only watch, isn't that voyeurism? You're still paying for sex, even if you only get to first or second base with her.

Well, here's an uncomfortable truth for some people: a woman can be both an athlete and a prostitute. It's what some men would like from a woman in bed. The advantage that some women have is that they can make lots of money by renting out their bodies for a few hours a week while most men can't. We don't like to tell our daughters that money for sex can be a good way to discover America while hitchhiking, but we all know that women can see the world that way, if they really want to.

Feminists like to point out the hypocrisy behind the sex trades. Good girls don't, but guys want them to. And when they do, they had better kiss their reputations good bye. When a woman like Elisabeth Eaves takes off her clothes, then she's a slut or a whore. It's what feminists call "the double standard."

Well, this double standard cuts both ways. Topless and nude dancers are very willing to take their money, but when men pay lots of money to watch women strip or perform sex acts, dancers are usually the first to think that something is wrong with the men who pay. In other words, good men don't pay for sex, but women want them to. And when men pay, look out! Women lose respect for the men who shill out the cash, no matter how little or how much cash he donates to his favourite charity.

This is a double standard, and it's not about love. It's show me the salad! Those that have get more.

What exists among both clients and servers, however, is an appalling lack of respect, according to Eaves' memoirs. We all know that men who patronize gentleman's clubs can be misogynist jerks who should be grateful to the women who serve their penchant rather than hating the dancers and themselves for being in topless bars. But the same antipathy is also prevalent among the dancers: $500 to $1,000 is easy money for four to six hours work, and dancers are lucky to be making it, particularly in this economy. Yet most of them don't seem to like the men that provide this easy source of income.

If I have any criticism of dancers after having read Eaves' memoirs, it's this: they would love to bite the hand that feeds them, because— like the clientele that they serve— many of them loath both themselves and their customers for being in gentleman's clubs. This is a perverse symbiosis, one based on mutual antagonism between the customer and the provider of goods and services.

Even though Eaves' memoirs were published by a press that specializes in feminist literature, Seal Press, her tone is not strident. Rather, her style is journalistic. She attempts to lay down the facts, and then lets the reader make up his or her mind. That's a good route to take, if you want to win a Pulitzer price for journalism.

If I have a major criticism of Bare, it's this: the writer is like a young musician who really knows her scales but isn't ready to compose yet. I don't have much of a feel for the author's personality, or even the personalities of the dancers that she writes about. The reader gets a descriptive and logical, linear narrative and some biographical information of the dancers Maya, Cassandra, Delilah, and Leila (the author herself), but you won't feel as though you have known these people all your life when you're finished with the book.

If Eaves sought to inform, she has succeeded very well. But if she wanted to get people to question their own values and attitudes vis-à-vis nude dancing and sex, or make you feel some sympathy or empathy for nude dancers, she misses the mark by a mile. Early in this book, she says that some of the dancers were really great people, but you still wonder why after you're done reading this book. Other than physical descriptions, you still don't know these people, though you think that money and material possessions are obviously very important to them.

Unlike the journalist, the writer of memoirs is supposed to inject more of him or herself into the work than he or she would in writing a newspaper article. However, Eaves leaves herself out of it, for the most part— like a good journalist, but not like a good writer of memoirs.

I would like to think that Elizabeth Eaves would be a lot of fun at a party, with a joke and maybe an anecdote or two, but you don't get that from reading Bare. Eaves seems neither interesting as a person or very interested in people, though she might be a fascinating individual and find other people very fascinating. We don't know.

Eaves has a great opening line: "I was naked." The problem is that her style is so matter-of-fact that she could be describing herself taking a shower.

All we get are the basics, and that's a little too bare. Like nakedness itself, Bare feels only skin deep. You still don't know what made an educated and presumably intelligent woman would decide to become a topless dancer, other than the money.

There's no need to write a book about it, if you were only in it for the money. All Elisabeth Eaves had to write was, "I was naked, and I got paid for it."

That seems to be the naked truth about stripping.

Review of Cat's Eye

Canadian author Margaret Atwood is probably best known for The Handmaiden's Tale, in which she envisages a future world where women are forced to wear blinders, much like horses, or pilgrim women in the 1600s. Her follow-up to Handmaiden's Tale was Cat's Eye in 1988.

Unlike Handmaiden's Tale, which is set in the future, Cat's Eye is set in suburban Canada in the late 1940s or early 1950s, when that phenomenon that we call "suburban sprawl" today was just beginning to manifest itself in Canada and the United States. The main character is an artist, Elaine Risley, who has drawn some controversy through her work. A constant motif in her paintings is a cat's eye, which anybody who was an aficionado of marbles as a child in the 1950s and 1960s might remember, was a greenish marble with a möbius strip in the centre that looked like a cat's eye.

However, Elaine doesn't remember why this marble is so important in her work, until she digs up a little girl's purse with the marble inside. The discovery of this marble conjures up all kinds of childhood memories for Elaine, who grew up with her father, an entomologist, in central Ontario. She has two close friends, Carol and Grace, before a newcomer to the neighbourhood, Cordelia, joins the group and makes herself the leader.

Cordelia is, by turns, both cruel and kind to Elaine, Carol, and Grace. Then, at Cordelia's urging, Carol and Grace push Elaine down the slope of a ravine in the dead of winter and leave her there. With just a vision of the Virgin Mary to guide her home, Elaine is half-frozen by the time she gets there, and she concludes that she doesn't need this Ghostly Trio for friends anymore.

Cat's Eye is perhaps Margaret Atwood's most sociological novel, in that we get a slice of post-war Canada, when green spaces in North America were starting to be cleared for development. Suburbia, let alone "exurbia," didn't exist before World War II. Back then, people thought, "Hey, what's a few frogs! They can move somewhere else." But this was before Rachel Carson's publication of Silent Spring in 1964.

What you see in Cordelia, Carol, and Grace are signs of a generation that has little or no connection with nature, because they don't seem to understand that somebody abandoned at the bottom of a ravine in the wintertime (like Elaine) could freeze to death. Somehow, I doubt that people of previous generations in that part of Canada would have done something like that, unless they intended to commit murder. Cordelia just wanted to be mean, it seems, and Carol and Grace were only playing follow the leader. However, Milgrom probably wouldn't have been surprised if the results of their action had been tragic.

We also get a glimpse of the sexual mores of the 1950s when Elaine was at university. Atwood reminds us that adolescents in the 1950s were quite active sexually, yet "going all the way" was severely frowned upon. In her formative years, Elaine makes out with lots of boys, but they never get past "first" or "second base" with her. Not only was sexual intercourse a taboo, but "good girls" didn't let boys lift up their skirts or squeeze their breasts. When Elaine finally loses her virginity at university, she moves in with the boy and seriously considers marrying him.

The character of Elaine Risley is part autobiographical for Margaret Atwood. Like Atwood, Elaine grew up in the wilds of Canada, where her father was an entomologist who studied insects in their natural habitats. Like Atwood, Elaine was mostly home schooled, and it's a traumatic experience for her when she goes to school with other children and finds that the life that she had been living with her father is considered strange. Children at Elaine's age want very badly to belong to the group, but Elaine is ostracized because she is "different."

Children can be cruel. Atwood's portrayal of the friendship between little girls rings far truer than what you get in The Ya-Ya Sisterhood. "Buds" for life? Few people can be both as treacherous and as moralistic as a child. In childhood, you keep your friends close and your enemies even closer. With friends like Cordelia, Carol, and Grace, Elaine doesn't need enemies.

Cat's Eye is also a study in mental illness, because Elaine meets Cordelia many years later and finds that Cordelia has had several nervous breakdowns and has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Of course, some of the signs of mental illness manifest themselves early in Cordelia, for instance, her vacillation between kindness and cruelty towards Elaine, Carol and Grace. She also has delusions of grandeur, thinking that she was named after the Shakespearean character because she was destined to be a great actress when most likely, her mother probably only liked the sound of the name.

Elaine wants to feel sorry for Cordelia, even thinking that she ought to, but she can't, because what her friends, Carol and Grace, did to her at Cordelia's behest is still too painful. Here, you could say that Elaine is like the victims of a mass murderer, like Michel Lépine, who shot fourteen female students to death at the Polytechnic School in Montreal in 1989 and then shot himself. Had Lépine been arrested and tried for murder, the families of the dead wouldn't have wanted him eligible for parole in a few years upon conviction. Yes, they might concede, Lépine was mentally ill, but you wouldn't want someone like him ever to walk the streets again, even if he "got better."

In Cordelia, you get a child who is both as wantonly cruel and as moralistic (as opposed to moral) as Adolf Hitler, who was still fresh in the minds of most Canadians at the time Cat's Eye takes place. Most people think that Hitler was mentally ill, too.

As an adult, Elaine understands that something was terribly wrong with Cordelia, but she remembers how evil she thought Cordelia was when they were both children, and she can't easily forgive or forget the pain. Like most people who have been victimized, she's probably afraid that Cordelia might victimize her again. Like the families that survived Michel Lépine's rampage, Elaine doesn't achieve real closure, either.

You might say that the cat's eye is, for Elaine, an all-seeing eye, like the Masonic eye on the U.S. one dollar bill. The eye is able to see the past, present, and future. The discovery of this marble inside a purse allows Elaine to see the past in relation to her present, but she cannot see into the future, though she may try to predict it based on what she has remembered from the past.