Arts & Entertainment Luke Simcoe aeditor@ gmail.com “Cats of Mirikitani” By Duncan DeLorenzi Tre Cats of Mirikitani was presented by Cinema Politica, a group dedicated to providing free public screenings of films with political messages. This particular screening was made possible by the efforts of the group Necessary Voices as well as the staff at The Vancouver Public Library. Discovered living on the streets of SoHo by documentary filmmaker Linda Hattendorf, 80 year old Tsutomu ‘Jimmy’ Mirikitani is a ‘grand master artist. Jimmy spends his days painting and drawing, and sometimes selling his works to passersby. His subjects include cats, flowers, persimmons (a type of fruit which grows in Japan), and the Tule Lake Concentration Camp. It is July 2001 and one of the first paintings we see Jimmy working on is a depiction of Hiroshima following American’s nuclear attack. He wants to remind people of the significance of the date August 6, 1945, and he paints the picture both as an honour to the family he lost on that day as well as sign of remembrance. Broad strokes of colour reveal a heightened sense of trauma while dark, smudged images convey the crumbled buildings and ash. Mirikitani’s painting disturbingly depicts the chaos as well as the eerie stillness of war and carnage. It is a strange happenstance of fate that just over a month later the tragedy of 9/11 occurs and Jimmy’s exhortation of the insanity of violence becomes reinforced. Amidst the devastation Hattendorf goes on a search for Jimmy. She soon finds him on the deserted streets, in his usual spot, working on his paintings amid the ash and the dust. It is at this point that she decides to take him home to her apartment. Over the next year we learn more about the life of this man as he works on his paintings. In the meantime Linda desperately tries to convince him to apply for Social Security. We discover that after spending the first three years of his life in Sacramento California, Jimmy’s mother picked up and moved the family back to Miajima, a city in Hiroshima prefecture. Jimmy grew up in Japan but in 1937, at the age of 18, his father wanted him to enlist in the Japanese Imperial army. Jimmy abhorred the idea, claiming that he was an artist, “not a soldier boy,” and soon he set off back to his land of birth. Back in California he continued to pursue his artistic ambitions, but in 1942, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the American government rounded up all those of Japanese ancestry. Though an American citizen, and 25 years old at the time, Jimmy was sent to the Tule Lake concentration camp in the California desert along with thousands of others. There he met a boy who followed him around everywhere. The boy loved cats and constantly asked Jimmy to paint them for him, which he willingly did. an Eerie, Arty Film The boy eventually got sick and died, as thousands in those concentration camps did, but Jimmy kept painting cats. Three and a half years later, “men from Washington D.C.” came to the camp and persuasively asked all of the prisoners if they would give up their American citizenship. Many of them, including Jimmy, felt helplessly compelled to do so. As the film progresses and Linda persistently tries to getJimmy government assistance, we learn more about the man and what happened to him after he was released from the concentration camp. This is a fascinating and heartbreaking account of a remarkable struggle for artistic expression. Jimmy’s_ candid outbursts will make you tear up and smile at the same time. Homeless for 25 years yet still doggedly independent, Jimmy’s life is an example of the ability of the human spirit to persist in times of adversity. A touching and affecting film The Cats of Mirikitani demonstrates the healing and transformative powers of art. It will leave you feeling reassured that despite the scars left by terror and violence, compassion and kindness still form the basis for reaching out to humanity and will undoubtedly lead the way in its evolution. Song of the Week “Dumb All Over” by Frank Zappa By Patrick MacKenzie Many people think of Frank Zappa as the guy with the freaky hair, thick mustache and goatee who said fuck on stage and ate Alice Copper’s shit. Zappa certainly said fuck on stage more than once — the shit eating part is pure confabulation, but it certainly didn’t do 14 his career any damage. However, what casual listeners and outright detractors may not know is that Frank Zappa was hugely political, and “Dumb all Over” may go downas his most overtly political song. Any serious Zappa listener will be able to name the genres his music has touched on, or, more accurately, turned upside down: mainstream pop, hard rock, heavy metal and jazz, just to name a few. “Dumb All Over” takes a decidedly hard rock approach; but there is something more going on. Before Rage Against the Machine and the obviously inferior Limp Bizkit, that is to say before the melding of hip-hop and heavy metal, Frank Zappa seems to have been the first to rap over a hard rock track. The backing music over which Zappa rhymes is repetitive and bass heavy. Musically, and compared to his other songs, “Dumb All Over” is perhaps unremarkable in its willingness to exist as a monotonous quasi-heavy metal track. In fact, it seems that the music takes a back seat to lyrics that are clearly articulated to the listener. There is no equivocation here. “Dumb All Over” is direct in its meaning: humanity, as it presently stands, as it did way back in 1981 when the song was first thrust upon the world, is stupid. Zappa raps through a compressor, “if our chances/ Expect to improve/It’s gonna take a lot more/Than tryin’ to remove/The other race/Or the other whatever/From the face/Of the planet altogether.” Although the song starts out sparing no one (“Whoever we are/Wherever we’re from/We shoulda noticed by now/Our behavior is dumb”), Zappa reserves his most pointed barbs for religious conservatives, both Christian and Muslim. Check this out: “You can’t run a country/By a book of religion/Not by a heap/Or a lump or a smidgeon/Of foolish rules /Of ancient date/Designed to make/You all feel great/While you fold, spindle/ And mutilate/Those unbelievers/From a neighboring state.” Does any of this sound familiar? At the same as time the backwardness of Islamic law horrifies the liberal sensibilities of western democracy, the Christian right (or should that be wrong?), with its identical belief with in the absolute truth of a “text,” presents a vision of the world that is wholly in keeping with the religion with whom it so joyously rushes towards conflict. Dumb all over indeed.