One Shot, One Life

The legendary calligrapher Sesshu would spend many days preparing himself — and then put the whole weight of his soul into one fierce stroke of the brush.

Estonia, January 1943: The Red Army busts through the Leningrad Blockade and marches in to the capital city of Tallinn. Huddled in the dark in a root cellar a hundred miles to the West, I can smell the raw, dank earth. Just me and my mother, father, and sister, surrounded by sacks of potatoes. Above, sirens blare. The Russians are hardly liberators. They’re almost worse than the Nazis. They will soon cull the population of Estonia to a million people, and who knows what fate befalls my family if we don’t manage to flee on one of the last boats out.

We end up in a displaced-person camp — the first of many. Food is scarce. Some weekends we walk deep into the German countryside to barter with farmers. On one occasion, my mother exchanges her precious fur coat for a bag of eggs and vegetables.

My father lands a part-time job at the UN relief organization UNRRA — and to the great joy of the whole family he sometimes brings home a can of Spam, baked beans, a jar of strawberry jam.

As the repatriation efforts begin, we’re told to gather our few belongings yet again. One day a tall American soldier with an aw-shucks smile scoops me up and presses a Hershey bar into my hand.

The next five years are a blur of barracks and cots and lineups and boredom. We are in and out of refugee camps until I am seven years old. Then come another five years of refugee camps in Australia.

My whole childhood unfolds in a bubble.

We’ve been kicked out of our own country by the Communists, leaving everything behind. So anything that smells of collectivism is anathema to my father.

I can hear him muttering late at night: “Those Commie bastards. . .” I pretend to sleep but listen intently to the drunken banter of Estonian expats . . . “I’d like to line those fucking commies up against a wall and mow them down one by one . . .”

But I can also hear them argue, other nights, about a book called The Decline of the West. The idea that Western civilization is decaying and may soon die off.

My father was a tennis champion. His actual job was as a lawyer for the Estonian government, but who he was was an athlete — and something of a national hero. Before WWII started, he was the number one single tennis player in the Balkans. He captained Estonia’s Davis Cup team and played Wimbledon. But he could never beat Sweden’s Kalle Schröder. That’s why I think he named me after him.

When I stepped onto campus at the University of Adelaide, I’m not sure I had a political bone in my body.

I noticed two types of students running around. There were the beer-drinking righties with their Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle, more British than the British. And then there were the Gauloise-smoking, coffee-sipping Lefties, with their Kierkegaard, their Nietzsche, their Sartre and Camus. I wondered: Which side am I on?

I studied mathematics because my parents, with their refugee mentality, pushed me into the sciences so I could make a “decent” living. My heart, though, was set on philosophy.

The philosophy department in Adelaide was firmly in the British “logical positivist” camp. Every word, every sentence, every thought had to be rigorously scrutinized for logical purity — all religious and metaphysical nuances were weeded out by Occam’s Razor.

Wading through Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus I found a few gems: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” In his Cambridge lectures he would often bury his head in his hands and mutter, “I am a fool ... I am a fool.” At least that was the legend we’d been told.

Later I read his Philosophical Investigations. Here the hard dogmatism of his Tractatus gave way to something softer, more forgiving. A few of his aphorisms had a mystical ring to them. Wittgenstein fought for Austria in WWI. After glimpsing the Russian enemy for the first time, he wrote in his diary, “Now I have the chance to be a decent human being, for I’m standing eye to eye with death.”

The punch of that quote stayed with me. Maybe because it carried a message that something more than logic must be at stake. Wittgenstein’s last words on his deathbed were “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

A friend introduced me to classical music. His love for Berlioz, Bach and Beethoven bordered on the obsessive, and some of it rubbed off on me. I joined a record club, and once a month when the disc arrived, I’d put my head close to the gramophone late at night. The dark tones of Sibelius. The sublime quiet movement of Beethoven’s 9th. The triumphant cannon blasts in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. And later in life, the dissonant forebodings of Bruckner and Mahler.

In my final year, someone passed me a copy of The Outsider by Colin Wilson, one of Britain’s so-called “angry young men.”

Whoa.

Here was a kind of grand, unifying theory of the fully alive Western man — a spiritual and cognitive seeker, a freelance warrior soul. You could learn a lot, Wilson was saying, from the intrepid scouts who had gone to the edge and reported back. Kafka. Nietzsche. Camus. T.E. Lawrence. Dostoyevsky. Nijinski. Van Gogh. What these artists were chasing was intensity — a rare thing in a culture that seemed frightened of such animal impulses. All of them had experienced what Wilson called “moments of vision.” Some of them were a little nuts. But they saw further, vibrated faster, sucked the stars out of the sky.

The Outsider was written like the author thought he was going to be shot at dawn. I ripped through it. It was ecstatic. It promised deliverance to a higher plane of being. The idea was that you could catch lightning in a bottle if you just had the guts to stand out there in the thunderstorm, with an open heart.

Sartre thought everything is pure chance — “life is a useless passion”— but my feeling has always been the opposite: that we humans are on the verge of an evolutionary leap to a higher plane.

Then one day I discovered what Wilson’s ecstatic vision of rebellious authenticity really looked like.

It was late one Saturday night. After a long bull session in somebody’s room, drinking beer, getting high on something, a few of us ended up in a loft in the warehouse district. The tenant was a rawboned guy with long messy hair and a beatnik beard. On his wall, a smash of posters, newspaper tear-outs, scribbled musings. Behind his bed a stolen DETOUR sign.

This guy’s whole existence said: You can rebel.

The Australian government paid my way through university, and in exchange I gave them three years of my life. I played computer war games for the Department of Defense, helping the government decide what kind of military hardware to buy. As soon as my contract was up, I hopped on a boat heading for Amsterdam.

But the boat made a stop in Yokohama. There, unfolding all around were the mysteries of a culture that turned everything I believed inside out. I was entranced. Three days later the boat left for Amsterdam. I wasn’t on it.

I got a job with a consulting company, and soon after started my own marketing firm, grandiosely called International Computer Research (ICR), in Tokyo’s Roppongi district. I made tons of money. That’s no brag: in the booming Sixties anybody could.

I hit the clubs most nights with my ad-agency pals. Behind the scenes, I dabbled in judo & Zen. Savored Kawabata’s The Sound of The Mountain, Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colors, Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human. Then one day... Basho.

a quiet temple pond
a frog jumps in
plop

What made Japan so fascinating was that that this sparse, ancient Buddhist aesthetic could survive the blast of go-go postwar capitalism. The legendary calligrapher Sesshu would spend many days preparing himself — and then put the whole weight of his soul into one fierce stroke of the brush.

one shot,
one life

One afternoon I caught Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru and walked out of the theatre stunned. Then I discovered Yasujiro Ozu. On the surface not much happens in Ozu’s films. In Tokyo Story there’s a scene of an old couple, who have come from the country, sitting on a park bench in the sunlight. They don’t speak. Nothing happens. The scene lingers for what feels like forever. It is incredibly profound.

In the bars, night after night, I met disillusioned American GIs on R & R leave from the Vietnam War. They told me harrowing stories of their lives over there. Many of them went AWOL, hiding in their girlfriends’ apartments until the military police tracked them down and dragged them back to their units.

Then I got wind of another uprising. It had started in Paris’ Latin Quarter and quickly spread around the world.

The English-language Japan Times reported that furious young men and women were rising up against consumer capitalism. Students, artists, nurses, doctors, bus drivers. They occupied campuses and factories and hospitals, singing songs, issuing manifestos. All over Paris they sprayed slogans like Live Without Dead Time and Under the cobblestones, the beach!

Through the speakers of GI radio came a siren call out of Haight-Ashbury. Otis Redding had a pretty good view of things from the dock of the bay. “If you’re going to San Francisco, wear some flowers in your hair...” That lifted my spirits every time I heard it. The spirit of ’68.

It was time to see what it was all about.

“Feed your head,” Jefferson Airplane sang.

Grace Slick would later say that song (“White Rabbit”) was inspired by Miles Davis’s Sketches in Spain. She said it meant follow your curiosity. But everyone knew what it really meant.

LSD was the original love drug — ecstasy before there was Ecstasy. An empathy machine. It dissolved boundaries between individual people and between people and the world. It made us all truly get the idea of the collective. No one understood “we’re all in this together” like the hippies.

The people I was meeting in San Francisco were like the guy in that smoky loft in Adelaide.

There are moments in history “when millions of people surge into the streets and refuse to leave until real shifts are made in the social order. These moments accomplish in days what takes history years or even decades.”

The American historian George Katsiaficas called it The Eros Effect.

In a blink there is a total values shift. “Instead of patriotism, hierarchy or competition being dominant, people construct new values of solidarity, humanity, of love for each other.”

Mainstream sociologists consider these cultural heaves a kind of mass hysteria, bursts of madness. And yet, as Katsiaficas put it, “when we look at them from the bottom, from the perspective of ordinary people, these are moments of freedom. Leaders are unable to control the love of people for each other.”

In these moments, something universal within us is ignited. And radicalization and revolt follow as day follows night.

In San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, I found myself in the middle of an oxymoron — a community of mavericks. We felt a lot of things were broken, and we had ideas about how to fix them. We’d take this old world our stuffy parents believed in, and set it free.

I bought a used VW beetle and drove all over America.

I was 200 miles from Memphis when Martin Luther King was shot and the riots broke out everywhere at once. I headed south to Mexico, then deeper into Central America. Through Guatemala and Nicaragua (when Anastasio Somoza was still in power). Through Costa Rica and Panama. I spent half a year in what was then still called British Honduras.

Chatting with all the other five-dollars-a-day backpackers, I learned the real story of how the Panama Canal was built. How, before Castro, Cuba was America’s gambling brothel. How the CIA trained death squads in Brazil and propped up Pinochet in Chile and let Baby Doc Duvalier run amok in Haiti.

The same questions kept bubbling up: What is America? The country was built on slavery, their Monroe Doctrine has been doing dirty deeds in Central and South America for a hundred years. They have a long history of interfering. Just as they were doing again now in Vietnam.

Yes, America saved the world from the Nazis in World War II; but — at least at the level of their administration — they are not the beautiful people on the right side of history that I had so fervently believed in. It was like handing over my American History textbook and upgrading to Howard Zinn.

But on good days you could ride the cultural riptide out beyond those shoals and escape. The Beatles. The Graduate. Ginsberg. “Follow your inner moonlight / don’t hide the madness.”

Wherever I went I’d find a rep cinema and slide into the anonymous dark to catch a matinée.

I returned to Japan, married my soulmate Masako, and together we decided to start a new life in Canada.

The National Film Board of Canada had a reputation as one of the most exciting documentary filmmaking institutions in the world. No artist could fail to feel its pull. As soon as we arrived in Vancouver, I bought a 16mm projector and all I did the first few months was watch NFB films over and over again.

It blew my mind.

Norman McLaren was a gateway drug to his brilliant, troubled protégé Ryan Larkin, whose psychedelic short film Walking left me in an existential reverie. That you could take the private world in your head, your wildest and most profound stirrings, and splash them across a moving wall and still call it truth was a revelation.

Light, hand-held cameras and portable sound recorders were opening up new ways to make documentaries. All kinds of innovative cinéma vérité moves were suddenly possible.

A bunch of us started a film commune in the house on False Creek that’s now the site of the Adbusters offices. We made experimental films and subsidized ourselves by selling mandarin oranges from roadside stands at Christmastime.

The best thing we did was Schizophrenic Superman — a collage of comic book cutouts assembled to the beat of a square dance record I found in the basement. It was a big hit in the weekly film showings we held on Sunday nights, complete with cheap homemade beer infamous for giving everyone the trots.

For the next 15 years I made films. My first real success was Ritual, a half-hour documentary about Japan shot mostly with a hand-held Bolex camera. PBS picked it up and it aired repeatedly across their affiliates. This was my passport into the NFB, and over the next 10 years I made a series of documentaries for them about Japan and the global economy.

In the spring of 1989, British Columbia’s forest industry launched a slick multimillion-dollar campaign called “Forests Forever.” On billboards, in newspapers and on TV, the industry bragged about the marvelous job it was doing managing the province’s forests. Rest easy British Columbia, their ads proclaimed, you’ve got nothing to worry about, you’ve got “Forests Forever.”

This made a few of us green-minded filmmakers very angry. We decided to make our own 30-second TV spot telling the other side of the story: that British Columbia’s old-growth forests were being decimated at an alarming rate and the future of this precious resource was far from secure.

But when we tried to buy airtime, we were in for a shock. None of the TV networks would take our money.

We decided to fight back. We fired off press releases, got our story into the newspapers, started a newsletter, launched a legal action against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

We never did get our counter-ad on the air, but in a victory of sorts, the CBC finally relented and stopped running the Forests Forever campaign. We were ecstatic.

Meanwhile, our newsletter had become quite popular. It was exhilarating to have a voice, to speak truth to power. When I told my journalist friends I was thinking of starting a magazine, they warned me against it. (“Your garage will fill up with unsold copies. You’ll go bankrupt. Your wife will divorce you.”)

Taking a cue from a little NGO startup across town named Greenpeace, we called ourselves the “Journal of the Mental Environment.”

In the beginning Adbusters was a typical Lefty rag, full of impassioned essays, rants against evil corporations and fervent calls for radical change, with nary a photograph or cartoon for comic relief. We mimicked the Utne Reader, The Nation, Mother Jones and championed all the Lefty causes of the time.

We decided to rely only on subscriptions and newsstand sales. We vowed never to sell space to advertisers. And bit by bit we embarked on an aesthetic journey. A journey, you might say, to get off the grid — to abandon that boring, text-centric look of most progressive magazines . . . to create a magazine that was less about the content you “consume” than a river you jump into.

After a few years, Adbusters was all over Canada. And then the US. By the mid 1990s we were selling briskly on newsstands around the world.

What everyone remembers from that period are the spoof ads on our back and inside covers. Absolut Vodka. McDonald’s, Philip Morris, Obsession, Nike. We went after any mega-corporate ad campaign that pissed us off. These companies had spent millions to build a nuclear glow around their brands, and now, in deft, judo-like moves, we threw them onto the mat with the power of their own momentum.


— from Manifesto for World Revolution