The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 59

THE OTTAWA CITIZEN ARTS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2002 E3 Oh to sing, and not stand for anything il4 I From the belly of a boathouse The critical raves over last year's In the Belly of a Whale have barely begun to cool off, but Danny Michel is already back at work on his fifth solo album. He has been recording material both in Toronto and in his southern Ontario boathouse home studio all summer, although there's no release date yet. Michel performs at 9 p.m. tonight and tomorrow at The Black Sheep Inn, 753 Riverside Wakefield, Que. Admission is $10.

Blurtonla returns Toronto's bearded rock saviour is back. Guitarist and producer Ian Blurton (who was sporting prodigious facial hair long before Weezer's Rivers Cuomo made it cool) is touring with his band Blurtonia in support of the long-awaited follow-up to 1999's Adventures in The Kingdom of Blurtonia. Blurtonia performs with The Chickens and the Glen Nevous Retraction at 9 p.m. tomorrow at The Dominion Tavern, 33 York St. Admission is $10.

Saddle up Insurgent Toronto country band The Sadies quickly earned the status of a must-see band in Ottawa thanks to their blistering, country-rock energy and now-legendary encore sets that never seem to end. Front-men Dallas and Travis Good (sons of country trio The Good Brothers) should find themselves right in their element when they hit the stage of The Black Sheep Inn with opening acts Dick Smith and Mike O'Reilly Band at 8:30 p.m. Saturday. Admission is $10. Super Sunday In case Danny Michel and The Sadies weren't enough, The Black Sheep Inn boasts not one but two shows this Sunday.

The Backstabbers Country String Band performs with opening act The Herb Girls at 4 p.m., followed by Ottawa Kepler and Snailhouse at 9 p.m. Admission is $5 advance and $7 at the door for each show. Kepler and Snailhouse are wrapping up a joint tour across Western Canada. After the Sunday night show, Snailhouse performs at The Manx (353 Elgin St.) on Monday while Kepler opens for Do Make Say Think at Babylon on Tuesday. Three for free A triumvirate of hard rock hits the capital tonight in the form of Clarkriova" Scratching Post and Vancouver's Shocore, fresh from a gig opening for The Headstones.

The show takes place at 8 p.m. tonight at Zaphod's. Admission is free. WES SMIDERLE Nightlife Kinnie Starr has been in the public eye for a good six years now. Plenty of time to rack up a few regrets.

career took off to a roar-ifig start in 1996 with an indie debut, Tidy. The disc earned her a slot touring with Veda Hille and Oh Susanna on the Strappy Bitch tour, and led to a tig label deal in 1997, which went sour almost immediately. Starr managed to extricate herself from the contract by 2000 and released a plucky indie album called Tune Up featuring her trademark blend of hip-hop and multilingual rapping and the often gleefully confronta- tional attitude she displays during live performances. Ironically, it's some of her off-the-cuff remarks during interviews that Starr admits she Wishes she could take back. She's worried her frequent discussions about being part-abo-' irrginal and various feminist issues (including her vehement stance against cosmetics and tampons) have become distractions.

"Those types of things can 'Teally pigeonhole an artist," -says Starr, speaking from her parents' Northern Ontario home. "I'm proud of the music I've written, but I feel like people have been more interested i in what I stand for than the mu- sic that I make." She admits she was on the vbrge of quitting music altogether two years ago when she wrote Sun Again, which later became the seed for the upcoming new album of the same name. The Vancouver-based singer adopts a much more laidback, melodic and dreamier tone on this new disc and enlists the help of numerous guest performers including Lily PjTost, Moka Only and Spek with the Dream Warriors). Starr performs just two shows this month. She'll release Sun Again across Canada early next year, although she sounds as though she'd like to unveil it almost anywhere ex; cept Canada.

She cites othel-2 options like Britain, the United States and Japan, where she toured in ApriL Starr says she appreciated the unabashed enthusiasm of Back to the price of success, says Kinnie Starr: 'People expect me to represent their political maybe 1980s pop stars Haywire won't be Charlottetown's only Can-rock success story for much longer. The Rude Mechanicals perform a pleasing blend of roots-rock and pop. The band's bassist and singer Matt Mc-Quaid says there is a noticeably larger appetite for unknown bands in Toronto, though it might simply be a result of the city's larger population. "People just come out willing and eager to hear new music," he says. "Playing a club like The Horseshoe, you know there will be people there just waiting for some good bands.

When you go on stage, you know they'll give you the first song. And if you can impress them with thatrthey'll listen to your set" The Rude Mechanicals perform with Treebeard at 9 p.m. Monday at Zaphod's. Admission is free. playing in numerous bands throughout high school, they came together in university as The Rude Mechanicals, taking their name from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (three members were involved in a university production of the play at the time).

After releasing a pair of polished indie albums and enjoying increasing success in Prince Edward Island and the rest of the Maritimes, they all decided to seek their fortunes and fresh venues in Toronto. So far the move has worked out well. The Rude Mechanicals have hit all the right clubs (including an opening slot for at The Horseshoe Tav-rerrr) and are about to record their third album at Chemical Studios with producer Moe Berg (from The Pursuit of Happiness). If the good fortune continues, in search 3 a if I rf' 1 'IT 4 7 It --s. I' of a winning series formula ISM A cult following in Canada has been Japanese audiences, and the fact that she could perform there without any political baggage.

"I've developed a cult following in Canada where people expect me to represent their political beliefs. I don't have that in Japan," she says. "They just love the fact that I can rhyme and play guitar. It's a freeing experience." Kinnie Starr performs at 9 p.m. tomorrow at Zaphod Bee-blebrox, 27 York St.

Admission is $10. Rude awakenings The leap from Charlottetown to Toronto is huge, daunting and fraught with peril, but P.E.I, rqfk qujnjet. The Rude.Me ciiahicate are" vefy-happyTthey took the plunge. The musicians grew up just outside the provincial capital. Most have known each other since they were kids, but after nostalgia just a coda for the '60s, the show's arsenal of nostalgia hit a younger audience, too.

Ten years later, and it was time to tap into the next generation hiding in its past. That '70s Show! was made for late-blooming boomers and early onset Gen-Xers, and it displayed a self-awareness that reflected its audience. The Fox show's title made fun of the fact that it was trafficking in nostalgia. But nostalgia it was and another hit. When Fox brought out Thar '80s Show! last winter, it seemed a likely winner.

The timing was better than its predecessor; those nostalgia-besotted viewers now in their early 30s would have been right in the middle of their high school years in the mid to late '80s. But therein lies the seeds of the show's quick demise. Unlike every other nostalgia series, That '80s Show! was not about high school kids. It was about young adults. Think about it: viewers who were young adults in the 1980s would be over 40 today, part of a demographic with such diverse interests and so little time it is unlikely to spawn a mass audience for anything.

Do Over is the less interesting of the two. Also, That '80s Show! was also not particularly nostalgic. It had all the right references, but lacked heart. It didn't deal in nostalgia, but kitsch; it was an inventory of old things to make fun of. There was some logic to this approach: programmers know that the 30-plus audience of today is a cynical bunch, not happy about being the bust between a population boom and its echo, and raised on treacly reruns of The Brady Bunch.

That's enough tojsour anyone. Go Watch Listen Learn Do Make Say Think is an instrumental Toronto-based quintet consisting of two guitarists, a bass player, and two drummers (as well as guest trumpet and plenty of weird sound effects). Named after the verbs that adorned the walls of the classroom members once used as a rehearsal space, DMST is a jam band, without the traditional hippy earthi-ness. The sound is industrial, brassy, and generally unpredictable (although the band still occasionally falls prey to the usual jam band temptation self-indulgence). Currently touring in support of its latest album, Yet Yet, Do Make Say Think performs with opening act Kepler at 9 p.m.

Tuesday at Babylon, 317 Bank St. Admission is $8 advance and $10 at the door. Here, he fiddles with the underpinnings of the future, not just his own but that of everyone around him. As in Back to The Future, such meddling can have unlooked for consequences back in the present. The program takes the time to get viewers acquainted with Travis and his angst his ongoing platonic relationship with his brother's sweet wife, his unresolved feelings about his late father so that when we go back to his past, things have some relevance.

There is a lot of heart in this series, a soundtrack to gladden the ears of any 30-year-old, and a scene-stealing comic performance by Brampton-born, Vancouver-raised Tyler Lapine, late of the Canadian-made kid-dy-com, Breaker High. That Was Then may just outlast the season. Alsocomingup: Down from the Mountain: Today at 9 p.m, on CMT. D.A. Pennebaker co-directed this behind-the-scenes look at a group of musicians who gathered to celebrate bluegrass music, first on the soundtrack the Coen Brothers movie Brother Where Art and then in a concert that inspired an international tour, including a stop at the Ottawa Blues Festival this summer.

Performances (in rehearsal and on stage) are punctuated by casual interviews with musicians and fans. Robbery Homicide Division: Tomorrow at 10 p.m. on CBS and The New RO. This new cop show is an interesting-looking ensemble drama in the style of Homicide: Life in the Street, but for many Ottawans its biggest attraction will be Merivale High alumna Klea Scott. Scott, a veteran of CJOH's You Can't Do That on Television, played a patrol woman on the shortlived Steve Bochco series Broofclyn South in the late '90s.

She has risen to the rank of detective in the new i i I 1 "1 .1 series, and plays opposite another Canadian expat, David Cubitt (TVaders, 7irfcs). Remarkably, Scott's return as a series' lead comes the same year as that of another Canadian actor who appeared on Brooklyn South: Edmonton-born Gary Basaraba of the new, multi-perspective police drama, Boom-town (premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. on NBC and CTV). While on the subject of Canadian connections, Boomtown was written and produced by Graham Yost, son the beloved film buff Elwy and successful Hollywood screenwriter (Speed). Yost slyly inserts a minor Canadian character in Boomtown's opener Sunday, a TV news producer who loves the LA.

smog. Chiefs: Sunday at 8 p.m. on History. Brian McKenna writes and directs the stunning two-hour premiere of this five-part series profiling some of North America's great aboriginal leaders. The programs recount the compelling history of Sitting Bull, the Sioux chief who defeated George Custer at Little Big Horn, then developed a life-long friendship with a North West Mounted Police major when he took his people to Canada looking for asylum.

The film uses the same mix of archival material, artists' impressions and dramatic monologues that McKenna employed for his TVO series, The War of 1812, but the quality of the cinematography and the acting is so good, the work is a marvel to behold, even better in its visual impact than McKenna's work for the CBC, such as The Valour and the Horror. August Schellenberg speaks the words of Sitting Bull in dramatic recreations, while Raoul Trujillo narrates. Other hour-long episodes in the series on Poundmaker, Ponti-ac, Black Hawk and Joseph Brant are written and directed either by McKenna or aboriginal filmmaker Gil Cardinal (Big Bear). Clockwise from front: Penn Badgley, Angela Bethany Goethals, Gigi Rice, Michael Milhoan, Natasha Melnick and Josh Wise star in Do Over, a teen sitcom whose characters are transported back to 1981. TonyAtherton Television The first sign of age is neither crow's feet nor grey hair.

It's nostalgia, and it hits us all hard for the first time at about 30. Thirty is the first of the dreaded birthdays, the ones we might have trouble admitting to. By 30, life is getting real. All those old saws about reaping what you sow are beginning to make horrible sense. Unless you're an internationally renowned brain surgeon, a critically acclaimed novelist, or the director of a multinational corporation at 29, by 30 you're liable to think life is passing you by.

So instead of looking forward to maturity, which seems to offer only more insecurity, we begin to look back with bittersweet fondness on our immaturity, now imbued with a serenity we probably never really felt. Television, cagey psychoanalyst that it is, learned a while ago how to make hay from our discomfort. In 1972, ABC introduced a series called Happy Days, specifically aimed at the 30-year-olds dead centre of the prime audience demographic who had come of age during the late 1950s and early 1960s. This show about high school greasers, dweebs Jiand rock 'n' roll became a long-'wfnninghit Wonder Years, ABC's 'earning evocation of the late Jj6os, didn't show up until when members of its target audience Tjos high school grads were well into their 30s. But since the early '70s veri really whose parents are divorced and whose sister is in drug rehab.

An electric shock knocks him silly and when he comes to, he's in a little league uniform, he's a high-school freshman, his parents are fighting under one roof, and he still has hair. He's also an unlikely candidate for school vice-president and, he's sure, about to make a fool of himself just as he did 20 years ago. Do Over's comedy is rushed and overstated, and the show is only incidentally set in the 1980s, so its nostalgia is limited. That is not the case with That Was Then, still a comedy but running an hour each week. On the eve of his 30th birthday, a slacker named Travis (James Buillard) who's been in a funk since his obnoxious older brother married his high-school crush, is zapped by lightning and wakes up in ff 88.

So now TV is trying again, with a formula so obvious that two new series are using it. Paying homage to Back to the Future, a movie dear to every 1980s high-school alumnus, Do Over (which started earlier in the month on WB and will show up later on Global) and That Was Then (which begins on ABC and The New RO tomorrow at 9 p.m.) are both about miserable thirtysome-things in dead-end jobs who get zapped back to their miserable high school days and given the chance to set their lives rights. It's compromised nostalgia Gen-X style: life sucks now because it sucked then. Do Over is the less interesting of the two, a pretty conventional teen sitcom, time-warp notwithstanding. Young actor Penn Badgley plays the 14-year-old 1981 incarnation of a 34-year-old, balding paper salesman.