Chowderhead Bazoo

Vanmag: Trumped Up

In these troubled times, who dares to follow Donald Trump on his Way to Wealth (TM)?

Spraying bromide after bromide, the speaker continues his rapid-fire barrage. He’s like a displeased coach, a pump-it-up high-blood pressure case browbeating the chumps. He’s Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross and there’s no coffee because coffee is for closers.

“Fake it ‘til you make it,” the guy’s bellowing. He repeats it, this time with a coda of cackling. “It’s a game. Write this down. Money is a game. Who wants to make money right now, today? Right now. Today. Right. Now. Today.” Suddenly he’s a malfunctioning Stepford wife. He just keeps saying it. “Right now. Today.”

Right now, today, I’m at a Donald Trump Way to Wealth seminar at the Marriott Pinnacle hotel on Hastings downtown. The bellower is Rick Brown. There’s a fairly small crowd on hand, maybe 150 strong, comprised largely of varying minorities, all here presumably to learn the “secret recipe for success” vaunted on the Trump website. Nobody looks that eager. With the economy melting down like a Mexican facelift and the local real estate market crawling deeper into a pine coffin, I can’t blame them.

One of eight such seminars hitting the Lower Mainland this weekend, the set-up looks pretty low-overhead: screen, podium, clip-on mic, uncomfortable chairs. Only the Pinnacle Ballroom’s brocade wallpaper and sleek light fixtures hint at the world of twinkling riches we’re supposed to be aspiring to.

A recorded video from the founder of the Donald Trump University, a certain Donald Trump, perks the crowd up marginally. Needless to say, he too is bellowing, but I’ve lost the drift of his spiel—something about money. Money and, of course, Donald Trump.

The old, overly winter-bundled Kenyan guy next to me sits with arms folded. “You want money?” he asks me. Realizing he’s not offering a friendly handout, I feign team-player enthusiasm with a quasi-spunky “Yes!”

“Who doesn’t?”

Not everyone is so forthcoming. It’s either the economy or that special Vancouver brand of warmth keeping things chilly, the audience church-quiet save for coughing and the rustle of Gore-tex. A few queries to taciturn attendees as to what they make of current conditions and what they hope to learn here yield pretty much the same response: “To make money.” Gee, thanks. Can I quote you on that?

As a clueless thousandaire with little interest in the intricacies of finance and real estate, I realize I’m out of my depth. Listening to Brown, I’m hopelessly lost in a jungle of acronyms, a swamp of business-speak. I remind myself that I’m just here for the show, and although the show’s free I keep my guard up. The first toke is always free. But the optimism is getting to me. The current housing nightmare is now a “buyer’s market,” Brown exhorts. The eradication of the middle class is simply a great opportunity to pick your favourite side in the wonderful aftermath. What’s it going to be, rich or poor? (Where’s the third option: barbaric warlord of an apocalyptic wasteland?)

“The Industrial Age is over,” Brown shouts. “We are now in the Global Financial Age.” Ignoring the fact that so far this age kind of sucks, he neatly illustrates the school of thought that got us into this mess to begin with: purchase a house, slap up some marble and mirrors, and spray-paint the faucets gold. Dazzled dupes buy the illusion and you’re gone long before the paint starts flaking. The ol’ fakin’ and makin’—and flakin’. More cackling.

“Is he going to talk about Surrey?” a man in front of me asks his friend. What does he think this is, some kind of seminar? Sorry, buddy - it’s a sales pitch and here comes the hard sell. Brown goes into overdrive, demanding that people who are truly, truly serious about wanting to make money stand up and direct themselves promptly to the sign-up table in back. Despite the fact that he was only minutes earlier preaching deception, about a dozen people take the walk, most conspicuously a beaming Gordie McHockey kind of guy who seems to think he’s won a t-bone at a meat draw.

Are there no casinos? Are there no lottery kiosks? Perhaps it’s simply some persisting notion of the North American dream at work here—bigger, faster, louder, more—where platitude-spouting cartoon characters like Dr. Phil and Donald Trump are your teachers, where wealth plus media visibility equals wisdom.

A Trump University “enrollment” sets you back $2,195 for a weekend “wealth-building” seminar where, according to former and would-be Trump U. scholars on Epinions.com, you get another pitch for the software and the mentor program upgrade. I may not know my asset from a hole in the ground, but I can certainly spot the real wealth-building going on here, the real secret recipe, and it’s not even costing them any gold paint.
___________________________

Vancouver Magazine

Quote of the Day

"The only thing worse than drinking alone is not drinking at all."

- Shecky M. Radigan.

Picture of the Week

The Beatles: Now Available with Non-stick Coating

Late last year Ringo Starr announced to the world that he would no longer be signing autographs or answering fan mail. The world at first was stunned. And then outraged. From Ringo, only silence while the furor mounted. Three long, tense months passed until a few weeks ago the silence was mercifully broken.

“It's 2009 and I feel fine,” Ringo reported, along with the news that he was resuming his John Hancock duties. The world can now breathe a sigh of relief. All is forgiven.

And that's just it with these Beatles guys—all is always forgiven. They're not only Teflon, they're Teflon covered in Pam, as untouchable and impervious as the mob or maybe even Revenue Canada. It defies reason.

Despite early dust-ups with Jesus, Charles Manson, the CIA, and LSD, no band can claim to have weathered so many years of fame and scrutiny with so little scarring. Look at the Stones—the anti-Beatles in more ways than one, reduced now to pop-culture punching bags, swaying wearily in the winds of history as all trace of their credibility withers away. While the Stones busied themselves with self-parody, the Beatles became an unassailable monument.

It helps that the Beatles broke up when they did. They never overstayed their welcome. More bands should really look into this. But even before they imploded, the mythology was already firmly in place. Turning this mythology into an industry was inevitable, yet no amount of naked cash-grabbery or reheating of the leftovers seems to make a dent in their reputation.

Obviously, somebody allowed 1978's Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to happen, somebody signed off on the recent Across the Universe sap-fest, but do you think the Beatles took any heat for it? Time after time, they manage to keep a comfortable, yet profitable, distance from the flames.

They even had the big hairy balls to release two “new” songs as a marketing ploy to shift Anthology units in 1995 and bring long-simmering Fab Four reunion fever to a boil, even though one of them was already completely dead. The words “crass exploitation” escaped nary a lip and Anthology went on to set crazy sales records.

Not even Las Vegas—the land of laughingstock has-beens easing gently into endgame careers of nightly schmaltz-peddling—has been able to make a bitch out of the Beatles. Unbelievably, the indignity of some Cirque du Soleil monkey thrusting his bumpy leotard around inside a neon trapezoid to the strains of “Eleanor Rigby” didn't seem to faze anyone, least of all the Beatles.

Heather Mills, the former Mrs. Paul McCartney, found out the hard way that you don't fuck with a Beatle. She may have snagged 50 million—chump change—but it was clear from the get-go that her effort to paint the beloved ex-mop-top as an abusive lout would fail miserably. He's the cute one, for Christ's sake. And now she's the deranged-pariah one. And, say, how's erstwhile McCartney adversary Michael Jackson doing these days? Exactly.

But getting back to Ringo, I have a pet theory about him: he's the luckiest man in showbiz, given that he's proven even more Teflon-coated than his former bandmates. Not only that, it's beginning to look more and more likely that he will simply refuse to die—just for the irony. He will bury Paul. He might even outlive Keith Richards. And still slaving away over a pile of fan mail, Ringo will be heard to remark, “It's 2049 and I feel fine.”

___________________________________

Georgia Straight - Pop Eye

Wahooga Time

Bring On the Dancing Millionaires

Now that we're all in the bail-out business, can't we at least get a little more bang for our buck in the entertainment department? Today’s big corporation suits and sundry CEO's are proving to be a solid letdown. As far as fat-cat millionaires go, they're about as exciting, eccentric, and colourful as robot accountants, so bland and pasty that they can't even work up a decent projection of evil.

If I'm going to be forcibly scooped up by the ankles and shaken down for my tax-payer loot, I demand that these stiffs spice up the act. Would it kill them to live up to our expectations a little bit and start acting like walking cliches? North Americans like their millionaires crazy and larger than life, plain and simple. So where are the lovably bumbling Dudley Moore Arthur-style drunks, the Thurston Howells, and the yee-hawing Texas millionaires from the "Flintstones" and the "Simpsons?" Howard Hughes, William Randolph Hearst - where'd you go? I say the recent parade of yawn-bait in front of the U.S. senate has been a disgrace to the archetype, unless by some stretch of the imagination they're all hiding Kleenex box shoes under the panel tables. If only.

Locally, we fare no better; it’s one mono-toned, starchy, white guy after another, droning on about real estate, the market, the Olympics – whatever – and constantly being wrong about everything they’re supposed to be experts on.

Rampant greed, incompetence, and thievery - all of the turd that helped clog the collective North American toilet - is much easier to accept when the log-layers are a load of laughs. Sucked into their vortex of doom, we don't even get a standard-issue top hat and monocle-sporting Monopoly guy to cheer us up. How can you stay mad at the Monopoly guy? Seriously, at this point I'd even take a roguish Richard Branson or loud-mouthed Ted Turner. Donald Trump they can keep. But I want them to dance.
_______________________

Straight Blog

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's -

Commission for Moonspinners' guitar guy's 50th birthday - in wonderful, horrid Sex Pistols colours.

Does Not Compute

"How can I find your stuff online?"

Okay, you better grab a pencil and make some notes here, because its a long, complicated procedure and it's going to require all of the technological skill you can muster.

Seriously - I can't be the only one who gets this. As a reformed Luddite at least ten years behind most of the wired world, even I know how to use Google, and even I would feel silly asking that question. But I get it all the time.

Now that no trifling question that arises need ever again remain unanswered with a computer around, I'm still surprised at how many people seem to forget that they have the internet. Surely they see the bills - what do they think they're paying for? (Insert "series of tubes" joke here.) Where do they get their Lolcats?

I know in the scheme of things it's a minor complaint, but there's a bit more to it when you're a freelancer trying to get as much of your work in front of as many eyes as possible and you find out that an AD couldn't even find your highlighted weblink in a short e-mail. "Oh, I didn't see it there right in front of me."

In many ways, I really hate the Digital Age, perhaps more so than I did when I was ignoring it. The speed and convenience of e-mails, for instance, has turned everyone into a bustling communications centre - it's like a part-time job - where professional etiquette gets buried in the cyber-heap of super important dispatches. When I used to do business by phone and fax, people would actually reply to questions like, "did you get the artwork?" or "where's my check?"

Likewise, I know of at least one instance where I lost a job because the person on the hiring end was not able to find me online. I can't even begin to imagine what she was Googling, seeing as my name will produce this very blog at the tip-top of a relevancy-sorted list. But by the time I sent her clickable links, the job was gone and I was forever lost in her bulging inbox. I like to think that she hired a Nigerian penis enlargement company by mistake.