Control Alt Delete: sexual tech support for the emotionally stunted

If you have asked the question “what's next” for North American culture, Cameron Labine's Control Alt Delete seals the deal that anything goes. The take home question from this movie is: is it post-modern Freud that a man wants to have sex with the motherboard of his computer?

Aptly named by writer and director Cameron Labine, the movie is a technological satire set during Y2K that looks at the way the current generation tends to balk when sex stops being “just sex” and crosses the threshold into the emotional complexity of a “relationship.”

Contol Alt Delete centres around Lewis, a fleshy computer programmer battling with the stress of his promotion as project manager tasked with solving the impending Y2K crisis. On the home front, Lewis is losing hold on his girlfriend Sarah who is put out that Lewis has all but shut down their sex life in favour of internet porn. Lewis turns to porn to beat the heat of the mounting pressure to outperform adult entertainment stars in the bedroom and, at the same time, live up to the expectations of his job.

When Sarah leaves him, Lewis falls into a depressed stupor, letting dishes pile up in the sink as he delves deeper into his obsession which degenerates into a sick fetish for the machine itself when he can no longer reach climax while surfing for sex. Lewis has a tryst with a sleek new model (of computer, that is) while he is working late at the office, drilling a hole into the side of the tower large enough to do the deed. When the office goes on a manhunt for the “computer rapist” Lewis creates a front by asking out Jane, the office assistant. What unfolds is a discovery about the world beyond his own sexual perversions.

First screened at the Toronto and Vancouver International Film Festivals in 2008, the movie was picked up by E1 Entertainment Canada and opens in Vancouver on April 23.

Labine thought it would be fun to make a social satire about a guy who “goes all the way” and makes his computer his actual partner. With the light touch of a power button, a person has easy access to a functional, one-way, low-maintenance relationship, he explained. Culturally, it has become too easy to turn to a computer rather than dealing with the messy task of trying to be with a real person who doesn't come with tech support.

The crux of Labine's message is Lewis' insecurity in accepting the love of a beautiful woman. What's more, he isn't sure who he is supposed to be for her or what she wants from him.

“Because he watches pornography and sees all these men performing in certain ways, he feels like his body doesn't match that and his performance doesn't match that and he's so caught up in what other people do that he has trouble believing he is sexy or desirable for his girlfriend so he builds up this thing in his head that he isn't good enough for her and so therefore he kind of isn't.”

Cracking the code of womanhood is too much for him and he becomes the nerdy version of a renegade lover. That his computer is a means of escape is something Labine thinks a lot of people can relate to.

For Labine, Lewis stands in as a poster boy for the current generation's Peter Pan syndrome where sex is concerned.

“In sex, and in other areas, we're immature in a lot of ways and allowed to remain that way. Which is a luxury and gives us a chance to explore but eventually we need to become adults and own our sexuality and deal with them and share them,” he said.

This point is further amplified in that the names of all characters share the suffix “son”.

“I liked the esoteric idea that they're all sort of sons, kids in grown up bodies. They're sons and not men. I feel like my generation was allowed to remain children in a lot of ways.”

Hungry to access the power of the machine itself, Labine doesn't lust after the monitor where the scandalous images flash at lightening speed but rather wants to penetrate the deep cavern of the hardware.

“Lewis is a computer guy so he knows that that's where it all happens. That's where the exciting stuff is. What he'd be doing now is sort of interesting because now of course there are fewer and fewer towers now it's all skinny little laptops I don't really know what he'd do, I don't really want to think about it,” he said.

The inspiration for the story was based on Labine's discussions with his brother—Tyler Labine is cast in the role of Lewis—about insecurity around sex and attraction and how they both deal with “those things” but he clammed up about what sort of research he conducted when writing the film and whether it was based on a true story.

He did offer assurance that neither he nor his brother, to his knowledge, have ever had sex with a computer. When asked what he would change about the film, Labine didn't shy away from saying that were he to shoot it again, he would have let people in on Lewis' emotional hardwiring.

“I think in retrospect I would have tried to let people into Lewis' mind a little bit more. I was sort of interested in keeping them outside and have them guessing at why he was doing things.”

The moment that reveals the greatest insight into Lewis' character is when he fights the urge to manhandle his first computer, a Commodore 64, partially as a form of self-punishment for messing things up when things get intimate with Jane and also because he wants to return to something virginal and retrieve the spark that ignited his first wet dream.

“I think he's feeling like the good part of him is gone but he stops and he's not able to have sex with it because there's still something there. There's still something pure in him and then he throws it away because I think he's afraid but then he goes back to get it and he's found that innocence again and I think he realizes 'it's okay, this computer thing is a big part of me this is who I am. I don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.'”

Whether you're interested in probing into the perverse psyche of a broken man who is terrified of love or you simply want to find how much RAM Lewis' PC can take, you'll have to catch the film when it comes. Viewer be warned, it just might go viral.

Blackberry Wood: Big Top Tents and the Dance Steps from God

What made modest, undiscovered Vancouver band Blackberry Wood land regular gigs in London, England and score an invitation to the biggest music festival in the United Kingdom was not their extraordinary talent or the fact that they were creating unparalleled sound as big name musical geniuses. What made people pay attention was their inimitable wacky energy and an infectious vibe of straight-up, unpretentious fun.

They’ve driven through “pea soup fog” to play at the Antic Banquet in a cow field-turned-circus tent and bedded down in a yurt and a tranny trash trailer. They’ve performed a show for a daycare audience. They’ve careened through the streets of London, the cabbie blasting their CD while they attempted to fix a nearly broken bridge with a frantic promoter fearful they wouldn’t make the show that would secure their careers: landing them a spot at the 177,000-person Glastonbury Festival.

This laidback band is a trick to pin a genre on. Their sound slips from gypsy folk to ragtime to country and slides in a bit of hiphop and world beats. They are a carnival band with a Kerouacian air of rolling in from an extended backwoods road trip. Fit to compete with the cast of Moulin Rouge, they seem ready to strike up a take-no-prisoners burlesque hoedown just about anywhere you put them.

To learn what sets these wild characters apart from other bands competing for CBC Radio 3 airtime, I was escorted to the rehearsal by drummer Amrit ‘Basmati’ who is an Indian version of Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. We walked from the SkyTrain through the well-manicured back alleys of Yaletown, feeling the faux Chinook air streams from condo vents blowing in our faces mix with the damp chill coming in off False Creek.

We were met by the band’s ringmaster Kris Mitch, who forewent a handshake for a hug on introduction. He looked like a master craftsman of some antiquated profession – cobbler, milliner or typesetter which stood out in stark contrast to the brightly lit storefront displays that flanked the nondescript door. Heading down the industrial rabbit hole past a maze of crudely numbered wooden storage lockers, Kris led us to a colourfully decorated converted live/work space. As well as being Blackberry Wood’s front man, Mitch scored the space by standing in as the building’s alarm setter.

Delving into how the band came to be, Kris put on a once-upon-a-time voice of how four years ago on New Years, he and Corinne, his partner and saxophone player were invited by a friend in Uclulet who owns a campground to play a set at the lodge. They packed up their two-person electronic surfer country band and played to a patchwork audience of loggers, international surfers and First Nations. It was such a hit that they were asked back the next year for their second gig. Four years later they are a six-to-nine person outfit that gigs every weekend in B.C. and journeys to London, England every other month to do lineup of as many as 20 shows.

Trumpet player Jack ‘Mandu’ yowled from the sidewalk to be let in and Corinne doggie-bagged the building keys, chucking them out the window with, “I hope it doesn’t sail away like a parachute, Woo-hoo!!” A few minutes later he materialized, fresh-faced and soft-spoken in an Amish looking hat and a lightly stained, threadbare pink plaid collared shirt, rolled up to the elbows.

Chomping at the bit to start the jam, Amrit occasionally punctuated Kris’ story with his drumsticks, keeping everyone on their toes with his barely contained, explosive energy. Interjecting with his voice like a drumbeat itself: powerful, unapologetic.

Kris launched into the fantastical tale of how he met Stranger Than Paradise producer Amanda Rogers on MySpace. The story goes that Rogers, having never met Kris save for the internet, left the keys to her London flat to a friend to give to him so he could stay. “She walked in the door two days later sometime, totally covered in mud wearing pantaloons and Wellingtons returning home from the Glastonbury Festival,” Kris said. He asked Rogers to get him a gig and ended up staying a few days, opening for Victoria-based Immaculate Machine at the Brixton Windmill. “And that’s how we met London,” he said.

The secret of his success lies in his history of hustling skills, picked up when he founded and booked as many as 250 bands for Music Waste, his antidote to New Music West.

“After doing that a few years you know how to put things together so that they grow so now I do it for the band instead of a whole bunch of other people,” he said. Still travelling on a shoestring budget while on tour, they are mastering the finer details of what gives a band chops: how to enjoy sleeping in close quarters “like sardines” (Corinne), “like caterpillars when they come out of the cocoon” (Kris) “like Boy Scouts,” and managing the ebb and flow of ever-changing band members.

Where change and crazy new ideas are concerned, they roll with it like a pirate ship on the waves of a gale….