Near the beginning of Stone Story, a documentary that straddles Stone’s 70th and 71st years, he addresses the camera: “Close your eyes and pretend that the world does not contain poverty, racism, inequality, injustice,” he says. “If by living the way I do, is taking a step in that direction, then I’m going to go for it.”

If Stone’s story originally epitomized a kind of racial and class privilege—“Look at me, not conforming to middle-class expectations”—by 2016, its meaning has shifted, and his initial choice to eschew normalcy has given way to inescapable familial and economic consequences. Acutely aware of this, filmmaker Jean-André Fourestié centres the film not on Stone, but on the broader family dynamic—what the stone rolled over in its quest to gain no moss. While his ex-wife and daughters own homes in the U.S., where they visit, eat meals, and celebrate together, Stone rents, living paycheque to paycheque, working part-time as an overnight security guard at a soulless condo in the burbs. Stone’s communal lifestyle in Mile End may now have as much to do with economic necessity as a desire to live out hippie precepts.

While she reminisces about meeting—and dancing with— Janis Joplin at Woodstock, Stone’s eldest daughter Debbie seems the most torn when it comes to her father’s choices. She recounts a story on the bus where the group had run out of food and money. They pulled over at a Jack in the Box, and sent Debbie and Jacquie inside to beg for food. When the girls returned with bags of cheeseburgers and fries, the adults gobbled them up—barely remembering to feed the kids who’d secured the meal in the first place. “They treated us like little people living grown-up lives,” Debbie tells us. “But we weren’t adults—we were children.” At one point, Debbie concedes that it may all have been worth it for the memories; at the same time, though, she calls her stepfather Alan Katz “dad” more often than she does Martin.

For his part, Stone asserts that he wanted to show his kids that a different value system was possible. (And, to his credit, according to a short pre-screening introduction Fourestié gave at Cinema Parc in Montreal, Stone wanted his family to feel free to share their unadorned perspectives on his great hippie experiment.) Intentions aside, though, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what comprises Stone’s alternative value system. Communal meals? Jam sessions? Smoking pot on a balcony, surrounded by plants? Stone is open with his friendships, with his home, with his overtures of a better tomorrow—but his friendships seem fleeting, his family relationships, strained. It’s easy to see what Stone has lost—deeper relationships, financial security—but it’s harder to see what he’s gained. Occasionally, his naivete borders on the painful-to-watch—he mentions that he never locks his door, for example, and then proceeds to dox his address in stages over the course of the film.

In the latter third of the film, we learn that Stone’s youngest daughter is struggling with an illness that has threatened her life. Stone, unsure if he can handle seeing her sick, hasn’t visited her in years. Meanwhile, Debbie’s years of hard work have finally paid off, and she’s purchased a rural hobby farm in Canada with a new partner—bringing her physically closer to her father, whom she visits. Martin, who has rented the same apartment for 40 years—along with an estimated one hundred roommates—has just received a notice of lease non-renewal from his landlord. After a quick catch-up, Martin presents Debbie with the notice. She holds it in her hands for a moment, folds it up and gives it back. While she says, later, that she finds her father’s situation “sad,” she isn’t willing to step in and fix his problems. Her father has abdicated his familial responsibilities her whole life, and she’s done picking up the slack.

Stone Story’s pacing is a bit erratic, its conclusion lacking, its parallel storylines meander side by side, interacting only clumsily. It’s not a great film—in fact it’s easy to see how Fourestié could have cut it differently, interposing narration instead of relying on parallels to make narrative points—but it is a profoundly sad film, with a profoundly sad takeaway: the economic realities of capitalism are inescapable, and they catch up to us whether we want them to or not.

“Having a message should be cool,” says Toronto hip-hop artist Rich Kidd on the power of rap. Kidd hosted First Out Here: Indigenous hip-hop, a documentary by Noisey, in which Kidd visited Winnipeg, Regina and Toronto to meet with Indigenous hip-hop artists. Kidd, born to Ghanian parents, says he drew a lot of parallels between Black and Indigenous communities when it comes to the social and political issues both face. “I don’t enter things with expectations,” says Kidd, ” but I knew that anything I would encounter would exceed what I thought just because there’s a lot of history.”

Audio engineer David Strickland was one of the Indigenous artists featured in the film. Strickland, whose clients include Drake and Jamie Foxx,  says he doesn’t like the terms “native or Indigenous hip-hop.” He’s proud of his indigenous culture, but adds that he’s not limited by it because he tries to avoid being pigeonholed. “There are a lot of people who don’t know that we have that quality of artists. We are not all a certain way—so I say, be subjective.”

The film focuses on artists such as Drezus, Winnipeg Boyz, and T-Rhyme all reflect on the issues that surround their culture and community, from missing and murdered aboriginal woman to discussing the challenges they face trying to earn respect and popularize their music outside of the indigenous community. Strickland hopes the film helps shed some light on the artists’ talent, not just the Indigenous struggle. His advice to emerging indigenous hip-hop artists in transcending stereotypes and reaching mainstream success is simply: originality.

“Don’t just talk about the girls and the bling,” says Strickland, “that’s the problem in hip-hop, everyone is trying to cover everybody else, but back in the day we had 20 different flavours.” Kidd is also reminiscent of  mainstream hip-hop—even referring to Tupac as sort of the “Che Guevara of hip-hop” of his time. “There was a point in rap where it was cool to be militant about what you believe,” Kidd adds, “and to stand up for your culture, beliefs and rights – that focus is so far off now.” Kidd believes that those that control mainstream and commercial music aren’t interested in promoting songs with strong messages, largely because they have the power to affect change.

“If we are told that this f**kery is going on day after day,” he says, “then we’re going to want to change it.” Kidd adds that the hip-hop community has the opportunity to watch these issues like “eagles” and to “intercept the path of where our generation is headed by leading them to the right direction and using our voice for positive change.”

The film was screened for the public by the Regent Park Film Festival in April and is available on YouTube through Vice’s sister channel Noisey. 

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As of the time of publishing this blog post, you’ll have about an hour and a half to answer our fearsomely difficult question: In what year was This Magazine founded? Leave your comment below!

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Tell us your favourite Joy Division song to win two tickets to Friday's screening of "Joy Division" from Images Festival.

Our friends at Images Festival have very nicely given us two passes to the screening of Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division, screening this Friday, February 5, 2010 in Toronto. So, in order to make sure the swag goes to a true JD fan, we’re asking you to leave a comment below naming your favourite Joy Division song. We’ll collect all the entries and pick someone at random to get the tickets. The Guardian called the documentary “a must-see” in their 2007 review:

This is a very powerful and moving film that perhaps goes deeper than Control in exploring the full reasons for [Ian] Curtis’s suicide…. There are no actors or recreations. There are no twists for dramatic effect. It’s all vividly real. […] Two full days after seeing Joy Division, the documentary, it’s difficult to shake off the impact of some of the interviews, or the feeling that this story is ongoing, in all of us, in the lives of people left behind, many of whom are only starting to understand what happened with the benefit of age and experience.

We’ve seen it, by the way, and it is every bit as fantastic as it sounds. And now you can see it on us! Click through to leave your comment and enter. The Rules:

1. To enter, leave a comment below naming your favourite Joy Division song.
2. One entry per person — in other words, multiple comments don’t get you more chances to win. That said, feel free to advocate for your song or convince others of its awesomeness. Banter!
3. The draw will close on Thursday, February 4, 2010, at noon, EST. We’ll draw the winner Thursday afternoon.
4. Make sure we have a way of contacting you — in other words, sign in with Twitter or Facebook, or make sure you leave your real email address (which won’t be visible to, or shared, with anyone else!)

The Islamic punk music scene would never have existed if it weren’t for his 2003 novel, The Taqwacores. Melding the Arabic word for god-consciousness with the edge of hardcore punk, Michael imagined a community of Muslim radicals: Mohawked Sufis, riot grrrls in burqas with band patches, skinhead Shi’as. These characters were entirely fictional.

But the movement they inspired is very real.

Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam follows Michael and his real-life kindred spirits on their first U.S. tour, where they incite a riot of young hijabi girls at the largest Muslim gathering in North America after Sena takes the stage. The film then travels with them to Pakistan, where members of the first Taqwacore band, The Kominas, bring punk to the streets of Lahore and Michael begins to reconcile his fundamentalist past with the rebel he has now become.

By stoking the revolution—against traditionalists in their own communities and against the clichés forced upon them from the outside—“we’re giving the finger to both sides,” says one Taqwacore. “Fuck you and fuck you.”

Sounds to me like a much-needed retort to the kind of reductive, ridiculous, or racist (or all three!) portrayals of Muslims in Western pop culture. Can’t wait to see it. Taqwacore plays this weekend in Toronto, and opens in Montreal on Monday.

Clinical Psychologist, Galen Buckwalter, chronicles life in a wheelchair on Rolling--Thirteen/WNET New York

Generally if I find myself awake at four in the morning, the best thing on TV is Vince Shlomi pitching the SlapChop or Billy Mays yelling at me from beyond the grave.  But this morning, I caught an unapologetic and often uncomfortably unflinching documentary on what day-to-day life in a wheelchair is like.

Having first aired in January 2008 on PBS, Rolling gave three wheelchair-using L.A. residents the opportunity to film every moment of their lives, over the course of two years. This happened when physician and filmmaker Gretchen Berland mounted handheld cameras onto their chairs, chronicling the daily triumphs and struggles of life from a sitting position.

The first to take a camera was Galen Buckwalter a clinical psychologist, responsible for developing and validating eHarmony.com’s original matching questionnaire, who became a paraplegic after a diving accident when he was 17. The second is Vicki Elman, a former business manager at the UCLA School of Medicine until her Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis meant she was unable to work. At the time of the documentary, she was the president of Californians for Disability Rights and  advocating for a bill that would make it easier for disabled people to live at home.  The third and final person with a camera was Ernie Wallengren. A writer-producer on television shows like Little House on the Prairie, The Waltons, Baywatch and Touched by an Angel.  His camera shows how  Amyotrophic lateral Sclorosis [ALS] was slowly taking away his motor functions and eventually, his ability to breathe.

It takes tremendous courage to expose the daily struggle of disability in all its unvarnished consequence, but sometimes it’s too morose and, dare I say, too pathetic. The three subjects always seem to be smiling through gritted teeth, constantly trying to push the hard reality of their situations to the back of their minds with black humour and misdirection.

You watch Vicki struggle over the phone to get her electric chair’ battery fixed. This culminates in her chair losing power on a para-transit bus. The driver explains that dropping her off is company policy.  He abandons her in front of her door, while she cries into the camera Blair Witch style. It isn’t until it gets dark that a neighbour happens by and lets Vicki into the  house. Until then, her utter helplessness is on full display for all to see.

Vicki Elman champions disability rights and struggles for her own, when she films herself for Rolling--Thirteen/WNET New York

The humiliation doesn’t stop there for her.  At another time,  she falls while getting ready for the day, immobilized on the floor without pants until her neighbours and friends once again come to her rescue and, after several collective attempts, get her back into her chair. Of course, this comedy of errors is full of laughter and black humour, pointing out the ridiculousness of the situation, in that “How-did-I-ever-get-here?” kind of way. Combine this with watching Ernie Wallengren filming himself slowly succumbing to ALS, and I have a problem with this documentary.

Actually, not so much the documentary, but the sentiment it may instill in a viewing audience with limited to no exposure to people with disabilities.  Watching this, you can’t help but feel sorry for these people, and if I’m feeling this way, there’s no telling how many able-bodied people are using this as their barometer for what it’s like to live with a disability.

I don’t want my interactions, especially with women, to finish like this:

“So, if you don’t mind me asking, what, um, what actually happened to you?”

“Well, I have a disability–cerebral palsy, actually”

“Awwwww. Wow, that must be really hard. I can’t believe what you all go through.”

“Well, it’s really not that ba–”

Spending so much time behind the camera on shows like The Waltons and Baywatch, Ernie Wallengren turned the camera on himself in Rolling--Thirteen/WNET New York

“Oh, you don’t have to put on a brave face just for me (insert comforting, but degrading shoulder pat here) I saw this documentary on PBS; I know your pain.”

I know that Rolling was real, but its realism doesn’t do me any favours. What able-bodied person would want to hang out with or date a person with a disability if they figured they needed to peel them off the floor, let them into their house, or watch them slowly degenerate and die? It’s just depressing.

Sure, there are things pertaining to my disability that would induce heavy sighs from those who don’t have one, but that’s why I’ve never put my daily life on film. Highlighting weakness and vulnerability has unintended consequences. Sure, it counteracts that courageous superhero stereotype that’s so popular in the media, but it keeps us down as well, propagating the mistaken belief that we’re all just a perpetually dependent, ultimately unreliable, weak link in society.

I don’t need that going to any viewing  audience—thanks a lot PBS.

Is Aaron Broverman off his rocker? Weigh-in. There’s a copy of Rolling online, for viewers like you.