We had quite a bit of trouble categorizing this review of The Shapes of Thought by The Einstein's Brain Project, a joint venture between two Calgary artists, Alan Dunning and Paul Woodrow, and Morley Hollenberg, a professor in the Department of Physiology & Pharmacology at the University of Calgary. The project straddles the lines between performance and film, as well as science and poetics, using Electroencephalography (EEG) devices to visually represent brain activity by measuring the active firing of neurons in the brain. The result is a projection of colourful and amorphous shapes which represent the abstract movement of thought. The trouble came in considering it performance, visual art, or science. Could the scientific measurement and virtual respresentation of the spontaneous movement of brain matter be all three? The Einstein's Brain Project is arguing that it can.

As part of TIMELAND at the Art Gallery of Alberta, The Einstein's Brain Project's Shapes of Thought is a brilliant interdisciplinary performance study of the movements of the mind. With artists Dunning and Woodrow as the art objects, their emotions are rendered virtually in shapes and colour. On the project website, the emotional aspect of this project is emphasized, as they explain, "Participants were monitored by EEG and EKG sensors and asked to recall traumatic events from their past. Participants agreed to undergo hypnosis to aid in the recollection and reliving of events in which they were deeply affected by anger, fear, joy, or other primary emotions." The result is a virtual visual representation of trauma, contrasted in the two separate thinkers depending on the particulars of their recollection. It is, in effect, the abstract yet entirely mathematical representation of emotion.

This project is an interesting counterpoint to the Xenotext project by fellow University of Calgary avant-science poet Christian Bök, which intends to insert poetry in the form of a genetic sequence to a strain of bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans. He describes the project as " a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu, doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S. Burroughs, who declared the word is now a virus."¹ Constrasted with the The Shapes of Thought, the Xenotext project aspires to create poetry and abstraction which can grow outside of the human mind, while the EBP is concerned with the mathematical and mystical representations of abstraction. The approach of the artist in the former is that of a god-like figure capable of creation, while the latter is the mathematically generated representation of psychic deconstruction.

Taken together as two interdisciplinary works spawning from the same academic institution, this obsession with the intersection between mathematically generated variables and the abstraction of thought and existence has begun to characterize the interdisciplinary artistic work in Alberta.

In the context of the 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, the work of the Einstein's Brain Project suggests a new era in poetics and aesthetics; that of a complicity with the simultaneously mathematical and mystical world of science. By integrating an understanding of the abstractions of human bodies and minds with technological advancements which accurately measure the spontaneous chemical reactions both inside and outside the body, artists can look forward to a paradoxically progressive new perspective on aesthetics, which turns the gaze back to the cavernous mysteries of the human body in attempt to map new horizons.

--
¹C Bök , "The Xenotext Experiment", (2008) 5:2 SCRIPTed 227 http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol5-2/editorial.asp

“We stick our magic crystals into the treasure chest, then we turn the lock then the magical gate wishes itself open. Then we ride dragons into space.”

They are Everything is Terrible.

Everything they do is wonderful. You should already know that.

EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE

We’re exhausting through media at a rapid pace. It seems that even the most potently entertaining viral video withstands a shelf life of a little over a week. From there it will then disintegrate into the forgotten favourite folders of infinite accounts. We used to cherish these values. I made serious consideration on which Power Rangers tapes had to be taken on family vacations for repeat viewings on the itty bitty travel TV. Now? We’ve all become circumstantially ADD, taking everything for granted. We’re too fast for ourselves, discarding entertainment at a rate that it could fool your instincts to believe it’s yet another resource we’re squandering irresponsibly, like if it’s gone it won’t come back. After all, that’s how it used to be. Somewhere in-between YouTube and Dailymotion, it’s easy to forget that not everything can be found on the internet. Some things are still gems. Some things have been forgotten. The hunt for the illusive may be illusive itself, but that’s where we meet the bravest hunters.

“We don’t upload anything digital, we have a strict rule. We are not allowed to use anything we’ve found on the internet. It has to be from a VHS tape... Decaying thrift stores and crappy areas of town are the best place to find them. Mom and pop video stores going out of business are the most fertile grounds for hunting... It’s surprising how many there are. We never fail to find them. One thing that sucks is that they are starting to go up in price. We were at the thrift store the other day and they were two dollars apiece, TWO DOLLARS!”

Along with Future Schlock are Commodore Gilgamesh and Yonder Vittles. It’s hard to tell but under the elaborate outfits they are basically a Scooby-Doo gang made entirely up of Shaggys and Velma, investigating spooky and disturbing ghouls of American culture, then ensnaring them in a fisherman’s net. They met at Ohio University, united by a love for bad videos but later separated by destiny. The website, Everything is Terrible, was created as a way to share their preciously awful finds with each other, and as their editing skills became more refined, the world.

“It just sort of happened organically, BoingBoing linked us along with popular blogs. Videogum and Gawker reposted our stuff. We would get hits from there, but it’s become that now people follow us. We are a source.”

Future Schlock told me the others left to meet up with some local video artists, while also cycling a tour of the town. From then until the performance, I critically viewed every group of cyclists that I crossed paths with in and about Trinity Bellwoods (which, of course, is a lot.) I paid more attention to it than I should have, but my judgement held true. Group after group, “No, not them,” I told myself, “they don’t look weird enough.” Eventually at Queen and Ossington, three cool looking guys sharing two rental bikes came to a stop. I angled my head forward, gestured my hand and asked, “You guys wouldn’t happen to be from the internet, would you?” Yonder Vittles’ head turned my way, slowly. His eyes began to bulge like they were loading arks. “HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT” he demanded. I told him, truthfully, that it was a slightly informed guess. We both seemed to hope that interaction would have had a more dramatic conclusion. While at the same time not hoping to kill each other, it was a moment.

WAVE OF BABIES?

“It’s really cool, like, I really love what’s happening on the tour.” Said Vittles, “People will come up to us and have a bunch of very eager questions and bring us cupcakes and VHS tapes, it’s nice to meet people as sick as you are, and are really into these weird tapes.”

While Schlock, Vittles and the others certainly enjoyed the dedicated pastime, both felt there was a much greater purpose to the exercise.

“We were always disenfranchised with TV, and it’s fun just creating your own channel.” Said Vittles, “That’s really my exposure to popular culture in many ways, popular culture that’s marinated for twenty years. We can use it now, ready for harvest... Something we get approached with all the time is, ‘Boy you guys are doing a really good job catching up with this early 90s nostalgia business’ but that’s not at all what we’re doing. It’s archiving things from this post-media shift that happened. After that shift happened, there’s a similar dynamic that’s happening with YouTube, where anyone who can get their hand on a VHS camera can do a car commercial. There’s just this mountain of crap that existed there, it was so sad for us to see these tapes just get lost in history.”

While people definitely see YouTube as a feasible launch pad, it will never match the tragic legitimacy average Jane and Joes saw within the confines of the tiny VHS cassette. “The beauty of VHS is that it’s just like YouTube or DVDs now.” Said Schlock, “There was this point in the late 80s and early 90s where suddenly VHS equipment was cheap enough to access and then cheap enough to mass produce. People who worked in the ‘industry’ so to speak put out these videos. The market became extremely glutted with not only these shotty b-movies but instructional things and religious programming. Everyone was convinced that this was the way to reach the public... I think in the sense that we’re archiving material that no other archive would touch, that there’s a social historic value in that. I’m pretty sure if we had not put Dwayne out there, Dwayne would have been forgotten. That would have been a tragedy. We want to find Dwayne so bad, but his last name doesn’t appear on the video, and no, no one knows. It would be amazing if Brad Pitt was actually Dwayne.”

Dwayne, for the philistines, is a fashion savvy boy who in a tween VHS dance program. He grabbed the spotlight, squeezed it for all it’s worth, and unleashed a dance move so smooth it slices through all conventional rhetoric like a prepubescent shank. He is but one of the many idols, characters, that have gained infamy on the EIT service. While every video is special, some videos are extra special, with characters so memorable you’ll roll restless in your bed at night, furiously trying to shake them from your thought. One of the other favourites of the team is Colby. A robot who sings and dances when read passages from the bible by children.

“Kids will watch anything and even worse, parents will show anything to their kids.” Said Vittles, “I always have this conversation about how disconcerting and icky we feel about these. Do parents watch it or do they buy it, much like how we shop for videos, looking for the really radical cover with super cool graphics, that is probably terrible, and I guess that hits in the parents mind as well, thinking, ‘sweet let’s buy it, they’ll leave us the fuck alone for a while!’ Parents will just trust it, kind of like how you’ll trust the news. Usually it comes in the Trojan horse of educational or silly moral values for kids. They’re just absurd or ridiculous things, and so Colby was born. They have the Colby program that would run the polished show, and then churches throughout the country could purchase psalm books and tapes and instruction booklets to put on your own Colby production. We ran into the coo of coos and found a tape from a small church, the Calvary Temple in suburban Chicago that put on a Colby production on their own with a cardboard Colby. The Christians are much more prolific with this, we get emails asking us why we hit the Christians so hard and the easy answer is, well, they make a lot of shit.  I would totally like to get more faiths into it. I have a couple Jewish tapes, one is like a puppet Passover at Bhuuba’s. I haven’t posted it yet, still trying to figure out how I’m going to use it.”

Colby also has a follow up pal, Psalty, the singing, dancing, camping psalm book.

“We couldn’t bring Colby on tour because, unfortunately,” said Schlock, “Colby took up half the van. He’s huge, like, nine feet tall. Our friend Davey K makes puppets for a show called Food Party, he’s a really talented puppet maker. He made us a life-sized Colby costume. We do a Colby skit on stage where he apologizes to the children for programming them, they all hug, the children say, ‘It’s okay Colby, we’re still friends’ and then Colby gets assassinated by a disgruntled ex-Colby kid. Wish we could have brought him but we had to decide between suitcases or Colby.”

Which finally brings us to the show, the sort of endeavour one troupe would tour to perform. Vittles and I had an extensive and frankly really depressing discussion about the state of politics that’s too severe of a downer to bother transcribing, so instead I’ll tell you about the Sega Genesis games I got at the pawn shop down the street while the others prepared for the show. I got Mortal Kombat II, I got NBA Jam (Tournament Edition), I got Sonic Spinball, and then I people watched at the Mr. Sub across the street while an older, heavier man talked about how rigged the World Cup was over his turkey bacon club. Then I hopped back to the Drake, ordered up a whiskey sour, took my seat and awaited some magic.

SO TERRIBLE

People sat down, as some oldies but goodies played on several screens around us. Raps about milk, puppet shows about wishing trolls, headphone commandos, creepy hug doll dimensions, the works. Then a freak hype man came out and wanted to give us everything if we’d do the same for him. He wore a grey suit, a blue headset and had a disfigured bleeding face somewhere in between Freddy Kruger and a species Doctor Who would outwit. He wanted our affection, and for it gave us his jacket, then his shirt, pants and eventually his hair. He was the icebreaker.

Soon after, ‘they’ came. Now in ceremonial garb, the EIT crew went from human beings to radioactive creatures from the internet. They had glowing owl eyes, fantastic fangs and tusks, wore golden VHS tapes around their neck, bedazzling jewellery around their elastic long arms. These beings were the train collision concoction of a cancelled Saturday morning cartoon, a Jodorowsky nightmare and the freebies they hand out at Bar Mitzvahs. They danced and shook about, welcoming us, warning us, asked if we were having a good time, we said we were, because, well, we were. They wanted to show us a vision of a future we would never comprehend otherwise. They hit play on the feature length that grant us such foresight. A hazy montage of computer made graphics, rainbows and Pat Morita led into this treasure.

2EVERYTHING2TERRIBLE2: Tokyo Drift

“The DVDs are very different from the website.” Said Schlock, “We didn’t do a very good job explaining that in the past, so people when they see them they get overwhelmed. We’ve heard some people say, not everyone, that they can’t watch it all in one sitting, because it’s just really really fast. Every year, we take every single source video we’ve used that year, divide them up, kind of thematically, and then we cut those into little essays on a topic and this time we tried to make a story arc. Make a single movie out of around 150. We chopped them up, sample them, little bits from each source video, string them all together into sort of a narrative. Not the traditional narrative, more of a mix tape. The website is kind of silly and funny, while the DVD is more of an experimental video. Still funny, just more avant-garde. I just said something in French! You hear that Canada? I said something in French!”

It was a lucid sunrise of VHS infection. A just-woke-up barrage of clips and footage strung together in such a method that no one in the Drake could keep their laughter in for more than a couple seconds, if that. Some clips you’ve seen from EIT before, some you haven’t, all arranged n a way you’d never expect, leap frogging from theme to theme. Warning us that strolling down a path of vanity, faith, greed, celebrity sex secrets and kids inexplicably dressed like Adolph Hitler would result in nothing less than a cataclysmic and sorta awesome apocalypse. I felt like I learned a lesson, that’s not a fact, just a feeling. I also feel if I told you this lesson, someone would try and hurt me bad. It was not simply 'bad' footage, it was a celebration of rotten culture, the real North America and its bargain bin mentality.

It ended like it began. The internet beings came out to wish us safety, danced around the floor, barefoot, even though some guy in the front just broke his glass. The legendary Dwayne, the savior, even came out to bust a move. After it was done, I had to say goodbye to my weird new internet friends. I bought a marvelous poster and couldn’t help but notice an incredibly expensive copy of Jerry Maguire on VHS for sale, running any attendee around eighty bucks. They only offered them for sport, as Schlock described, they secretly wanted to hoard them all. “Someday we want to open a video store that has nothing but Jerry Maguire in it. Because that would be the funniest thing in the entire world. ‘Uhm, do you have The Road?’ ‘We have Jerry Maguire.’ ‘Do you have Gone With The Wind?’ ‘We have Jerry Maguire.’ ‘Do you have Jerry Maguire?’ ‘Would you like a copy of Jerry Maguire?’ ‘Sure, do you have it on DVD?’ ‘No, sorry. Just VHS’ We do have a couple Jerry Maguire Laserdiscs.”

OBSCENELY TERRIBLE

While the road of VHS garbage seems infinite, nothing is without finite realities. EIT is more about the spirit than the limits of physical formats. “People are always asking us what will happen when the VHS run out,” said Schlock, “we’ll just move on to DVD. As long as people keep making stupid bad stuff we’ll be there.”

“Some people like the smell of their own farts.” Said Vittles, “I enjoy thinking about the why. Why did you build a dragon costume, a rabbit costume and a bridge over the rainbow river? Why do all of this? Thinking about what their motivation is an interesting psychological exercise. That’s why I like it. I can’t speak for why John Q Darryl likes it. It’s interesting to watch people’s personalities, to struggle to come up with something that appears to be polished, because you’re making something for your basket bedazzling company starting up in Dayton Ohio, and you want to make it polished, it’s very sincere and all about this basket company. You see how professional it looks on TV, so you want it to appear to be like that. But that’s not who you are. It’s a really great example of our contemporary fascination with popular media.”

You can't edit culture. No matter how sophisticated you are, the reality is that under you, above you and around you are those who don't 'get' your ways and honestly don't give a shit. I'm not saying rednecks, I'm not saying outsiders, not even saying small towns, just others. These others have thier share of the culture bowl, and even though coffee table books about pinnacle social landmarks won't give them a glossy photo, it's no excuse to say they never existed. EIT is doing the world an important service, in a highly entertaining way they're documenting vantages of strange reality you'll never participate in, which may be the most important of them all. Things can be forgotten, just pray to Dwayne they aren't.

^{Photo courtesy of jackdylan.com}

1. We are Introduced to The Flaneur:

The word caught my eye for the first time a few months ago. There was a write up on BlogTO featuring Shawn Micallef, about a book he'd just published with Coach House Books called Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto. In the write up, Micallef is referred to as Toronto's most prominent flaneur. Micallef is, most notably, a senior editor at Spacing Magazine. This new book of his is a sleek map laden serialization of his consistently fascinating psychogeography column in EYE Weekly.

Wanting to support a local author, publishing house and book store, I stopped by the now defunct This Ain't the Rosedale Library and picked up a copy. Micallef gives a brief history of the flaneur in his introduction titled “A Flaneur's Manifesto”. The French word basically means "lazy walker", as far as I can make out, somebody who goes for a stroll with no particular destination or purpose in mind. What happens, in the 19th century, is that Charles Baudelaire takes this word and attaches artistic and philosophical meaning to it. The flaneur becomes absorbed by the city in the act of wandering and mindfully observing and as a result their ability to understand modern urban culture, to portray, critique, or simply be inspired by its myriad of phenomena, is enhanced.

An intellectual friend of mine, when I brought up Baudelaire and flaneurism, tried to convince me that all this really meant was that Baudelaire liked to wander around Paris high on Opium, lost in psychedelic reveries, killing time between getting blown by whores in alleyways. While a brief look at Baudelaire's biography suggests that this may well be true, nonetheless his appropriation of this word for inclusion in the vocabulary of philosophers is a valuable gift.

Photo Courtesy of Coach House Books

2. The Casual Flaneur

Micallef's manifesto is prefaced by a poetic Walter Benjamin quote describing "...the magnetism of the next streetcorner, of a distant mass of foliage, of a street name."  The idea of flaneurism was picked up with great zeal in the 20th century by Benjamin, a Jewish German master of insight and cultural criticism. His massively ambitious, never completed Arcades Project chronicles Parisian street life in the 19th century (seemingly the golden nexus of flaneurism) with special attention given to the numerous glass and iron arcades (the natural habitat of the classic flaneur) strewn throughout Paris during the time.

From here, Micallef gives a brief narration of the past several years he's spent strolling Toronto, taking notes, practising psychogeography. Psychogeography, he tells us, is a term invented by Guy Debord and the Situanionists, a pack of anti-capitalist radical thinkers who, in the 1950s, tried to navigate Paris with a map of London. Although Micallef borrowed the term from the Situationists, his aim is much simpler: to get people excited about Toronto, a city that seems to be taken for granted by the people who live in it. He makes a good point when he writes, "Over and over, we're told that Toronto is not Paris, New York, London or Tokyo. We've been trained to be underwhelmed." In the eyes of many Canadians, including Torontonians, Toronto represents "the big city", a cold, faceless, concrete heap of skyscrapers, subway trains, traffic jams and smog clouds. But to explore its deeper character, to treat it as a unique and varied space, in short, to approach it as a flaneur, can yield surprisingly delightful results.

Since Micallef started practising flaneurism several years ago, he seems to have accrued a small following. A while back, I saw him at Yonge and St. Claire, an intersection near my home that I consider to be bland and useless, surrounded by a small group. I knew him as the psychogeography guy from his picture in EYE and wondered if he was in fact the head of some urban exploration club. I didn't stop to ask, I was on my way somewhere to do something, the anti-flaneur. In retrospect, however, I really respect what he is doing, bringing the word to the people and the people to the streets. As far as I'm concerned, if you can make the intersection of Yonge and St. Claire interesting, you can pretty much do anything.

Photo Courtesy of Toronto Life

3. The Flaneur as Artist

A quotation from Elliot Smith that I found in the liner notes of his New Moon LP:

"For a long time I made up most songs walking around at night, just 'cause I like walking around at night."

A few months after being exposed to the idea of flaneurism for the first time, I came across it again, this time as a central idea in the work of a young Canadian artist by the name of Jack Dylan.  You've probably seen Jack Dylan's work, whether or not you know it. His illustrations recently graced the cover of Toronto Life, and he's also done some work for The New Yorker, The Walrus, and The Globe and Mail. Before that he was illustrating about a poster a week for indie bands in the burgeoning Montreal music scene.  Perhaps you've seen them before, through blurred vision after one Steamwhistle too many, plastered on the bathroom walls of Toronto's own (though also now defunct) Whippersnapper Gallery.

At the season finale of Late Night in the Bedroom, a free internet talk and variety show that features local artists, musicians and such, I witnessed Dylan projected on the screen of the Toronto Underground Cinema in a pre-recorded interview.  Dylan sits on a park bench and describes the figure of the flaneur. The way Dylan explains it, the flaneur wanders the streets in search of details with which he can bring his art to life. The specific kind of artistic flaneur that Dylan describes sits not necessarily in opposition to the casual flaneur I have discussed earlier, but he seems to be of a different breed. While the casual flaneur strolls as a form of hobby, or therapeutic exercise, as an act of leisure, the artistic flaneur strolls to feed his art.  He strolls to absorb and to become absorbed in the particular feelings of the city and chronicle the stories of its citizens.

We can see in Dylan's work for Toronto Life a sort of voyeuristic tendency. This tendency is also apparent in his show posters (which comprise the majority of his body of work), which have a contemporary, indie-rock Norman Rockwell quality, depicting tender, relatable, often comical moments for a generation of sensitive, pop culture obsessed art-music geeks. Dylan, a confident but simultaneously self-deprecating character, re-assured the audience that he was not a pretentious artist in the live interview that followed, admitting that his entire knowledge of flaneurism came from its Wikipedia entry. Dylan's loose understanding of the term is indicative of its accessibility. To be a flaneur all you need is the ability to walk around a city. Once grasped (and it really is one of the simpler philosophical ideas to grasp), it is difficult to let go; walk for fun, be mindful of your surroundings, see what happens next.

Photo Courtesy of Kill Rock Stars

4. Flaneur Lit from the Golden Age

If flaneurism provides endless subject matter for visual artists, it is an equally fruitful activity for the writer in search of raw materials. The best flaneur literature that I can think of, off the top of my head, comes from Fyofor Dostoevsky and Marcel Proust (both writing in the golden age of flaneurism) who set their characters loose on the streets of Paris and St. Petersburg to wander in passionate confusion, contemplating love, murder, jealousy, ecstasy and death. Here's a passage from Dostoevky's Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov overcomes his guilt in a moment of rapture as he stands on a bridge above the Neva river observing a Petersburg cathedral:

"An inexplicable chill always breathed on him from this splendid panorama; for him the magnificent picture was filled with a mute and deaf spirit... He marveled each time at this gloomy and mysterious impression, and, mistrusting himself, put off the unriddling of it to some future time."

This rapture that overtakes Raskolnikov, temporarily replacing his angst and guilt, is the effect that the flaneur seeks: the forgetting oneself in the details of a skyline during sunset. Dostoevsky is often at his best when his lead characters weave through the city retreating into their thoughts in one passage, re-emerging in a dusty marketplace or in a bar drinking champagne in the next. His characters are caught off guard by the surroundings of the city as they materialize block by block. One can't help but draw a parallel between these characters and the novelist, who wanders the street piecing together his plot and dialogue, caught up in the act of creation, while the elements of the city are engaged in their own act of spontaneous creation around him.

Flaneur informed literature, in my way of thinking, amounts to literature that recreates the sensuous experience of walking through a city and incorporates places as living things that characters knock up against and react to. In this respect Marcel Proust is probably unmatched Proust, who was able to go out in public less and less as he grew older, spent a great deal of time strolling in the Bois de Boulogne and on the Champs Elyse in his younger days. He was thus well versed in the art of the voyeuristic flaneur,  His characters are, quite famously, often several personages compounded into one or a single personage split into several characters.

Proust would also include many dramatic occurrences from his own life and the lives of those inhabiting the decadent social sphere of which he was a member.  According to Edmund White, in his biography of the author, Proust would habitually bribe the butler of the prominent Comte Henri Greffhule to find out which prominent members of the Paris aristocracy had attended his balls, and what had been said. All in the name of art.

Photo Courtesy of Matador Records

5. This Manhattanhenge Thing and a Few Final Notes

The cover of Fucked Up's 2008 Polaris Prize-winning album The Chemistry of Common Life depicts something that is popularly known as Manhattanhenge (though I've heard it referred to as the Light Corridor, which I think is a much better name). I listened to the album a couple of times and didn't much care for it, but the title and the album art stuck with me. Later on, someone told me about the semi-annual phenomenon in which the setting sun lines up with the east-west streets on the main street grid in Manhattan: a holy grail to the dedicated flaneur.

Apparently this also occurs in Toronto and a couple of other cities with uniform street grids. While I'm already anticipating the next occurrence of Torontohenge in late October, I feel as though I'm familiar with the awe inspiring effect that it is likely to have on me, the overwhelming sensation of the chemistry of common life. It happens downtown at sunset, with the haze that falls over the city, cabs honking, businessmen striding with a purpose, bike couriers dodging in and out of traffic.   It all seems so big that it makes it easier to forget yourself, experiencing the unquantifiable rapture of the flaneur.
Recently, I was standing on the northwest corner of Avenue and Bloor (a superior location from which to observe the Toronto light corridor I'm told), just idling really, killing time. You see the ROM, which seems like a really old building, except that it looks like this big awkward spaceship made of crystal has crashed into the side of this old building and got stuck, and inside the spaceship there are dinosaur skeletons. Behind me is the Hyatt, off to the the west next to the jutting spaceship is a big ochre building, home to the Royal Conservatory of Music. To south is Queen's Park and you can see the top of the Provincial Legislature building poking out on the horizon and right next to me there's Lobby, a hilarious rich person bar that seems out of place in the context of it's neighbours: a Gabby's and a McDonald's.

It's amazing that standing on the ground here, you can see so much. A view like this is nothing more than background to most, and this fact, that most people move through their surroundings as if they were part of it, as if all this were normal, is what makes the position of the flaneur so sublime.

^{Photo Courtesy of Gadgetytech.com}

It is a queer thing, a room stripped bare. It is almost as if an essential layer of my very identity has been removed. It never ceases to amaze me, the extent to which what we own defines who we are, at least within the cultural mileux into which I was born and of which I am an enmeshed part and whole. Nor does it amaze me that the display of said objects is also an extension of my self-definition. There is something about walls stuffed with books and music that tickles my aesthetic pleasure-centre. A schizophrenic "part of me" thinks myself rather pathetic for locating so much of my self in the objects that I own. This me wishes it could assert with existential surety that "No! I am not that which I own. I am no mere consumer. I am a human being dammit!" At which point I pound my fist upon a hard surface. I strip off my branded clothing. I flee naked into the wild forest. I live off berries and nuts. Right, I'm being hyperbolic. I apologize.

I suppose this pleasure in display is a manifestation of what Thornsten Veblen called "conspicuous consumption". However, instead of seeking to display my possession of monetary capital via the purchasing of fancy clothes, cars, tech, bling, etc., it is cultural capital that I flaunt. Even my dropping of Thornsten Veblen's name is an example of this. I need you, the reader, to know that I know who Thornsten Veblen is, because it shows you how smart I am, how culturally sophisticated, how well-read. It doesn't just validate my point. It validates me. It fuels my insecurity. For indeed, it is insecurity that is the dynamo, the thumbprint of God, the driving hunger at the heart of the consumer (me). Financial insecurity, social insecurity, cultural insecurity, personal insecurity, intellectual insecurity, emotional insecurity, physical insecurity, mental insecurity, physiological insecurity, existential insecurity. My motivation for writing this is precisely that: insecurity. Is such an admission somehow genuine? I do not know. I only admit it out of insecurity. But for now, we should get back to concrete matters, or concrete matter, as it were.

Crude wordplay. See, there's that insecurity again. Oh, and be forewarned, "scare" quotes are abundant in this article. Though I prefer to think of them as "think" quotes.

Right, so we were talking about packing things for the move. These "things" were mostly books, vinyl, and cds. I did not realize how many such cultural artifacts I actually owned until I was making repeat trips to my local No Frills grocery store for more boxes. The reason for this, of course, is that I cannot enter a book store or music store without purchasing something. And don't get me started on how much cultural media I download. There never seems to be enough bandwidth. What's more, I purchase and "steal" said cultural media at a far faster rate than I could ever hope to consume it. And though I am an aspiring writer and thus somewhat obliged to consume the products of my trade, at least when it comes to the books, I am incredibly self-conscious of this process. Self-conscious in both a critical and insecure way, if one can really separate the two. Perhaps this notion of "thinking critically" is another manifestation of insecurity. What, after all, is the difference between thinking critically and simply thinking?

Anyhow, all of this got me thinking... about the Kindle. If you frequent Amazon.com or .ca or .co.uk or what have you, I'm sure you've seen the ads for the newest model of the Kindle poised for release at the end of this month. A $139 Wi-Fi version and a $189 3G version. Leaner, meaner, and more "affordable" than ever before. "Is this the future?" I ask myself, considering the dozens of heavy book boxes I'll soon be carting north-eastward. And if e-readers do change the way we consume texts, what does that mean? What would it look like? Is it good or bad? On what terrain and over which issues would the cultural and textual battles of the future be fought?

The benefits to some – resulting in the pollution of culture and dissolution of social bonds to others –  of a device like the Kindle are obvious, and we've already seen the impacts of portable digital tech with regard to other media like music and film. Instead of keeping a massive collection of books, there would be one device that contains your entire collection. In short, it's convenient. No need to go to a book store. You can yoink books out of thin air anywhere at any time. The Kindle lets you take more complex and substantative notes than margins would allow. It's small and lightweight. It reduces the amount of paper we use and is thus, so its advocates claim, more sustainable and environmentally friendly. There is the potential to make rare and out-of-print books easier to get a hold of when you don't need to sell an entire print run, if distributors should choose to make this any sort of priority. And I'm sure there are other potential benefits that I've missed. We may even see a re-emergence of some version of hypertext as a medium, when artists start creating specifically and exclusively for e-readers.

The e-reader may be another landmark in the rapid digitization culture, changing how we in the global north live our lives. The e-reader, like the portable music player before it, and like the "smart" phone, is more than just another toy. The e-reader, in whatever form it assumes, has the potential to contribute to a drastic change of our psychological, cultural, social, and physical landscapes.

Such change, of course, does have an underside.

In July of 2009 you may have heard the news that Kindle users woke to find that two texts had inexplicably vanished from their Kindles. There was no announcement from Amazon. Due to a dispute with the publisher – Amazon having sold the books without permission – Amazon had decided to delete all versions of the disputed books from all Kindles and to quietly reimburse Kindle users. But money wasn't the issue here. The issue was that Kindle users thought their purchases were final. They thought that once a text was on their Kindle, they owned it as they would a physical book. What was revealed by this move by Amazon was that Amazon had the potential ability to retract e-purchases. The issue was not that Amazon had mishandled the situation as much of the mainstream media framed it, though they had, but that the latent potential for censorship and surveillance is inherent in the technology itself. It became imaginable to Kindle users that e-book distributors, or some future third party, could potentially control what texts were available and when, not to mention that reading habits could easily be monitored, at the very least for data mining, and of course policed. Sound paranoid? Well, that's to be expected considering the books in question were Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell.

Censorship and surveillance are certainly legitimate concerns with regard to any method of centralized distribution as demonstrated by the monopolizing practices of large-scale corporations. And with regard to e-books, the battle for such monopolies has begun. Ray Zhang, chief strategist for Hanwang Technology, China's largest producer of e-readers, has likened "China's burgeoning e-book market to the fragmented Warring States period of Chinese history before the country was united" (Mozur, Network World). The same comparison would apply to e-book markets worldwide. As in most markets, a select few large corporations are doing battle for market shares in e-book sales. In the U.S., the big players are Amazon's proprietary Kindle, Barnes and Noble with its "non-proprietary" sales model and Nook e-reader, Sony with its Sony e-reader, and Apple, which has just entered the e-book market with the iPad. In Canada we have the Kobo through Indigo Books, which is now being pushed in the U.S. market by Barnes and Noble's major competitor Borders. Meanwhile, in China, the e-book market is dominated by the Hanwang e-reader, which is said to control 66% of the Chinese market. Numbers vary according to sources, but the most consistent figures I've been able to find with regard to the U.S. market are as follows: Amazon controls approximately 61% of the e-book market in the U.S., while Barnes and Noble controls 20%, Sony 5%, and Apple less than 5%. The remaining market share being divided amongst the numerous smaller fish in the ocean, like the Kobo. I haven't been able to track down any figures on the Canadian or U.K. markets yet, but one would presume them to be similar, sans Barnes and Noble.

And these figures will no doubt fluctuate in the coming years as more and more people make the "inevitable" shift from books to e-books. Compare this to Apple's iTunes which now sells over 25% of America's music (Walmart being in second place) and controls 70% of all digital music sales worldwide. Again, Canadian or U.K. figures are hard to come by. Toss in the exponential growth of the e-book market, and it's clear that the battles being fought between these corporations for control of the e-book market and the resulting cultural and legal fallout are too important to be ignored. In the U.S., e-book sales grew from 2009's figure of 1.5% of all book sales to 5% of all book sales in 2010's first quarter. E-book sales are growing at an even faster rate in China. It is also important to note, as industry analysts have, that most of those making the switch are of upper classes, and marketeers are now brainstorming ways to "solve this problem" to make e-books "accessible" to the lower classes. Is such growth sustainable? Only time will tell. But as generations raised in a world of physicality give way to generations raised in the e-thereal realm of digital media, the answer is likely yes, whether us "old fogeys" like it or not.

Book publishers, of course, have no idea what to make of this. As book sales steadily make the e-shift, debates that plagued the music industry a few years ago are now entering the book industry. Most of these "debates" boil down to how publishers and distributors can maintain control over textual property and earn profits. Indeed, different e-book sales models will result in different cultural outcomes. For instance, compare the Kindle to, well, most other e-readers. Amazon follows a proprietary model, wanting exclusive control over the sale of books on Kindle readers, while, say, Barnes and Noble sells its own e-reader but also sells its e-books in formats it doesn't own, thus allowing them to be accessed through other devices, hoping to compete by offering greater flexibility. Of course, companies are already imposing restrictions on how many devices upon which a "single" e-book is allowed to exist. Such restrictions are entirely artificial and hackers will of course find ways to circumvent them

We could probably get a good idea of what will happen to distributors of physical books by looking at what's happening to the music industry, especially as book "piracy" becomes more prevalent. A number of small booksellers will go out of business as the market tightens its belt. Sales of physical books will drop significantly. They won't vanish. There will likely always be a market for physical books, even centuries from now if the human race survives that long, if only as a niche collectible market. Major booksellers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Indigo will likely shift their entire marketing schemes slowly from the sale of physical books to predominantly the sale of e-books via proprietary and/or non-proprietary e-readers. This will likely mean a slow, whittling reduction in physical retail outlets. The full impact may not be felt until a few generations have passed and we reach that aforementioned group of people raised on digital distribution with views of cultural property completely alien to our own. Certainly newspapers and magazines would be the first to go, considering the newspaper and magazine industries are already on their last legs. And most important as far as I'm concerned, the Creative Commons movement will be able to achieve a stronger foothold and greater relevance in the realm of text.

The difference between e-book, or more appropriately e-text, distribution and digital music distribution, at least initially, may be glimpsed in the histories of artistic production within those media. These histories affect the cultural attitudes and thus legal attitudes toward the cultural products of respective media. Music, for instance, has set various precedents that made digital distribution less drastic a cultural shift. Authors are a much more conservative lot than musicians when it comes to proprietary law. Musical genres like hip-hop are already rooted in remixing and appropriation. Texts don't have any popular equivalent to hip hop and other forms of sample-based music. Furthermore, the e-reader is not just a new way of getting books to people, it is a replacement of books with e-books, which are substantively different media.

Already in the early stages of e-culture, books had begun the move into the realm of free culture like music and video via torrents and streaming, however, the move with regard to texts has been slower, considering few people want to read texts from a computer screen. With e-readers, this will likely soon change. But free texts raise questions qualitatively unique to textual media. For instance, what will happen to libraries? If they don't cease to exist altogether, their function will certainly experience a drastic change. Already libraries are making huge strides toward digital collections, cutting librarian pay, benefits, and positions, whilst archiving or purging the physical stacks. With the mass cultural shift to e-texts, this process will accelerate.

But will distributors like Amazon even allow public libraries to continue functioning, considering that the convenience of simply accessing free texts on demand would cut into their profits and "impede free trade"? One could say the same about physical books, but by rendering libraries digital, you're removing the difference between borrowing and owning a text. Lending times only exist to give people equal opportunity to access books because the physical number is limited. The library only owns, say, two copies of a given book, thus only two people can read it at a time, and the library needs the books back in order to continue lending them. Not to mention that an e-library removes the task of actually going to the library. Furthermore, the library is limited in the number of physical books it may purchase by its budget and by the physical space it has to house those books. With e-texts, books are infinitely reproducible at virtually no cost and infinite copies require no physical space, aside from server space if the storage is centralized, but you get the point. The difference between text and music or video here is that culturally most "developed" do view it as the democratic right of all people to have free public access to texts via libraries, whilst music and video has only recently entered the library. When file sharing began to become popular, we heard digital utopians talk of a universal music and video library free and accessible to anyone, which is technologically and logistically quite possible, though within a free market economy non-feasible. However, now that e-texts are becoming popular, we face a conflict. A library is not "feasible" either in a free market economy unless artificial scarcity is imposed through copyright law and government-funded public subscription services and simulated lending limits. In other words, the practical considerations that made such public services expensive and limited are quickly evaporating, thus artificial limitations will be derived by corporations to preserve free markets.

Such free market considerations will also negate the potential environmental benefit of e-readers.

For instance, e-readers will be designed and built for planned obsolescence. New markets must constantly be generated before old markets stagnate, which means new versions of e-readers must be pumped out. While we have seen announcements of Kindle recycling programs, what percentage of the material is able to be recycled? What are the costs of recycling programs? Are these readers not built from non-renewable resources? Do they not require energy? Furthermore, what disparities will result between "first-world" and "third-world" nations when "developed" countries make the shift to e-text leaving "developing" countries "behind"? These are questions we need to consider. One thing that is clear is that free market models of digital culture cannot result in sustainability. Sustainability requires technological longevity and a slow, intelligently managed cultural transition, which is contrary to free market requirements.

As for me and my walls of books and music... What happens to conspicuous cultural consumption? It turns into a number in a digital library. It doesn't go away, it's just abstracted... unless it's not so much abstracted as reduced to a more refined version of what it was all along, an idea slowly fulfilling itself, reaching toward an idea of itself. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing. I do know I fear we will plunge into this new cultural model too quickly and without thinking how it might be intelligently planned and executed. I do suspect that there are many important cultural battles to be fought on this new terrain and that the winners will determine the shape of the future of texts and beyond. There are many angles to consider. Many more than I was able to talk about here. What we need to do now is to stop, take a breath, consider them, and debate them instead of letting "the markets" dictate our collective behaviour. Will that happen? I'm doubtful. More likely we'll bumble into this newfangled world blindly and then scratch our heads in wonder when problems arise.

The Children's Record Guild Presents "Pussycat's Christmas"

The hidden value of these sexagenarians lies in the flat, geometric illustrations screen-printed on the sleeves. My father's collection comprises a yet-unfaded time-capsule from an era of illustration that, while iconic in its own right, cedes much of its influence on today's visual media to its own Cubist and Surrealist parents. Discoveries such as these are supremely charming, and rare. Thus it is quite a find to stumble upon some new treasure that still manages to convey the retro charm that these CRG records so embodied. Tiny Kitten Teeth is such a find.

Tiny Kitten Teeth is a New Zealand-based webcomic hand-painted by Becky Dreistadt, and written by Frank Gibson. This ambitious project has been online since January of 2009, and in the time since it has garnered a fair share of praise — featured on Illustrationmundo.com and Drawn.ca, the creative duo have also done guest strips for established webcomics such as Penny Arcade and Pictures for Sad Children.

The main story follows Mewsli, a blue, anthropomorphized tomcat recently moved to Owltown, an odd, rather roaring-twenties-esque metropolis built around its august and hoity-toity arts college where Mewsli is to be enrolled. From the moment he steps off the bus, suitcase in hand, Mewsli is caught up in the dubious and financially ill-advised adventures of self-appointed "welcoming committee": Hootenanny, Regal Beagle & friends. This fast-talking hipster crowd of anthropomorphized animals ushers the newcomer through a series of awkward social gauntlets and it is far from clear whether these new self-elected friends mean to keep Mewsli in or out of trouble. Interspersed at regular interludes throughout is a second, not entirely unrelated comic, Tigerbuttah; picture-caption one-shots in which a pun-loving tiger cub makes friends, plays dress-up, and gets into all kinds of mischief (protecting flowers from the sharp beaks of hummingbirds by way of band-aids, for instance).

Tiny Kitten Teeth - Episode 1

Visually, it's a real treat. Tiny Kitten Teeth blends the flat geometry and saturated colours of the 1950s with some of the more feeling textures and brushstrokes of Simon and Schuster's Little Golden Books (1942). The influence of old Disney animations, like Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom (1953) and illustrators such as Mary Blair (also of that era) is deftly manipulated. Dreistadt's guache paintings are dizzying, almost claustrophobic jigsaws of saturated, unearthly colour and bold, even brazen form. She does not subscribe to colour-based perspective strategies (or necessarily any perspective strategies at all), so at moments of narrative intensity, frames and pages often crowd up to a two-dimensional plane, flattened by a background of hot red or neon-electric blue. The cumulative effect is intense, and discombobulating. The brashness of the art nicely offsets the TKT's self-conscious quaintness and tendency toward preciousness, preventing the webcomic from drowning in the nearby dread Swamp of Tweenish Squeals.

It's a kitschy, quirky series — downright odd, in fact. Tiny Kitten Teeth is funny in that other sense of the word that most webcomics aren't. I mean, funny like a cod & chocolate icing sandwich, as opposed to funny "ha-ha." There are laughs to be had, of course, but they come mostly by way of puns and sly visual gags, scattered like Easter eggs for those who take the time to peruse a panel in all of its hyper-stylized complexity: bottles of alcohol come with pirate ships inside, mescal worms as serpents; Mewsi's book collection consists mostly of Pogo, Garfield, and Winnie The Pooh; a roguish, lowbrow horse is named Rapstallion; the ghost of George Washington flutters up out of a crushed dollar bill. In short, the jokes are there, even if they don't immediately rush in to shake your hand and introduce themselves. These are gags which cannot, nor are they meant to carry the reader from page to page; and those who approach TKT expecting gag-a-day humour with regular punchlines will likely wander off in short order, stymied and confused as if they'd just taken a swig of wine from a bottle marked "Welches." But don't let me put you off — if Tiny Kitten Teeth was literally a cod & chocolate icing sandwich then I for one would be packing such a delectable for lunch regularly.

I wouldn't trade in TKT's aggressive and contrary aesthetic for anything, but if Dreistadt and Gibson have a weakness it's in letting that confrontational, off-kilter strategy take over the whole narrative style. Tigerbuttah isn't troubled by this, as each page is one shot only tenuously connected to previous and subsequent pages, but the Mewsli storyline suffers from severely delayed exposition and clarity of context. In other words, TKT takes too long to provide key bits of information, such as Mewsli's reason for moving to Owltown in the first place. This might not be a problem in a printed format, but keep the reader in the dark too long online, with so many other distractions singing siren songs, such long waits between each page update making it even more difficult to keep the narrative thread intact, and one runs the risk of alienating and losing readers.

I'm not without hope that Tiny Kitten Teeth may find its way into print some day, once enough story has been covered for a proper volume — after all, Dreistadt and Gibson are no strangers to print, though their acquaintance is through unconventional channels. Tigerbuttah lately got his very own Golden Book-type story book (currently available for children and inner-children alike through Tiny Kitten Teeth's Topatoco store). The interesting part, from a webcomic/publishing interface perspective, is in Dreistadt and Gibson's use of crowd funding.

Crowd funding (a.k.a. "crowd sourced capital," a.k.a. "crowd financing") happens when a group of people collectively co-operate, usually over the internet, to pool their money towards the effort of some other person or organization. Combined with a threshold pledge system, in which donations are held in escrow until a goal amount has been made, crowd funding is one of the more promising avenues by which to connect creatives with the largest numbers and greatest variety of investors in the internet age. It is not a new way of doing business, but it is one that has the potential to really thrive now that so many of us (and our bank accounts) are online.

Tigerbuttah's book found its funds in this way, via Kickstarter.com, a social networking site that uses Amazon Payments to manage the escrow and transfer of funds. This forward-thinking website takes pledges from anywhere, but at this time only entrepreneurs in the United States may apply (thanks to certain details about the aforementioned Amazon Payments system). Crowd funding is already old-hat with charities, but when it comes to peculiar webcomics with wide readerships and high odds of alienating publishers, networks like Kickstarter hold some serious potential; though Canada is presently excluded, creators like Dreistadt and Gibson are paving the way, proving it possible, and perhaps sometime soon their strategy can be old hat for artists everywhere.

The Tiny Kitten Teeth main event updates a couple times a week.

More of Becky Dreisdadt's art.

News and other updates on the creative duo can be followed on their livejournal.

Karl Dönitz, ich bin so glücklich, du hast keine 300 mehr Unterseeboots bin, es macht mich wollen lernen, Deutsch zu sprechen. Im Moment kann ich nur zufällig Beitrag in Übersetzern, die mehr oder weniger falsch sind, bieten aber die Freude, sofortige Befriedigung. Ist das nordamerikanischen von mir?

Glaubst du, dass wenn Sie hatte 300 mehr Unterseeboots, dass Sie noch die letzte Präsident der Bundesrepublik Deutschland geworden wäre? Wurden Ihre Finger geschnitten, wenn Sie aus dem Wasser heraus, völlig unversehrt?

Ich sehe deine Hände in kleinen Apfel Fäusten und Ihrem Mund eine Kirsche. Deine Haut so weiß und glänzend und leider ausgenutzt. Kann ich Sie anrufen aus meiner kleinen kanadischen Stadt am See, wo Sie alle leben wie Gespenster in historischen Barling Stimme aus meinem Radio?

Ich habe noch nie einen Soundclip eines U oder von Ihnen gehört Karl Dönitz. Ich frage mich, wenn du böse waren, und ich möchte annehmen, dass Sie nicht.

http://www.andreawan.com/

Hippie Love

Fairy Tale

Untitled

"Phantasmagoria" refers to a procession of ever-changing and often fantastical imagery. This sequence of imagery, haphazard and associative, is not something we would see on an everyday basis. A surreal passage through time. The transition from waking to dreaming. The unknown plays a large role in phantasmagoria since what we see in dreams is never clearly rationalized and always appears somewhat alien to our waking consciousness. Because of this, phantasmagoria, or more generally the unknown, has become a popular artistic theme as there is no clear definition or reason behind it – the search for reason is what drives people to explore the unknown, but often the journey proves to be more "fulfilling" than the destination.

While there are artists who depict what they see in waking, there are others who challenge the borders between the conscious and the subconscious.

Cathie Bleck - "The Shaman's Inheritance"

Toronto’s Meta Gallery embraces these surreal yet familiar visions in Phantasmagoria, their summer group exhibition featuring works by many of today’s boldest and brightest contemporary pioneers including Cathie Bleck (Cleveland, OH), Ray Caesar (Toronto, ON), Dean Chamberlain (Venice, CA), Andrew Jones (San Francisco, CA), Kris Kuksi (Hayes, KS), Paul Laffoley (Boston, MA) and Mars-1 (San Francisco, CA).

Phantasmagoria serves as an appropriate entry point into the wild and imaginative realms explored by each artist. In the dark and hauntingly beautiful works of Ray Caesar, feminine surrealist Victoriana plays a large role in evaluating images of fantasy as they merge between realism and surrealism.  However, at the core, Caesar’s works express the many faces of identity and how they can merge with one another and form a collective identity.

Ray Caesar - "Ecstasy"

Andrew Jones is finely tuned to the dark emanations of the human spirit. His seemingly science fiction works express the notion that everything in life can be fantastical, constantly evolving, expanding and growing in abundance. Jones clearly strives towards an emotional connection with the viewer. Experimentation, chaos, and pushing human boundaries are what propel Jones forward in his search for his form of transcendence.

Cathie Bleck’s themes of nature, sensuality and symbiotic relationships resonate with a worldwide audience. Known for her use of Kaolin clay, ink, clayboard, and scratchboard, Bleck uses mythic images to explore the process of art in its most natural state. Her fluid and often poetic works question the connection between reality and fantasy through visual storytelling.

Mars-1 - "Tulpa 2"

San Francisco-based Mario Martinez, better known as Mars-1, creates works that portray an otherworldly, science fiction charm while also invoking a personal, subconscious experience – a perfect mix of the alien and the familiar. Through the process, he also explores the abstract nature of reality and challenges the idea of collective understanding. Mars-1’s free-flowing, ever-expanding pieces consequently mimic the process of understanding and the idea of infinite perspectives.

Dean Chamberlain takes portraiture to new heights with his luminous and ethereal light painting technique, which he developed in 1977. Using a flashlight and coloured gels, he illuminates each individual element in a composition in order to explore the more fantastical aspects of everyday life. Chamberlain’s photographs are hardly just images – they are living, breathing concoctions.

Kris Kuksi - "Churchtank Type 8 with Artillery Flak"

Kris Kuksi’s wildly unpredictable surrealism and rich gothic and baroque imagery allow him to explore and portray the complexities of the unknown. The images he conjures are obscure and grotesque, but each stands the test of time as it questions the very heart of our existence while also revealing the ambiguous and creative nature of life oftentimes shrouded by fear.

Paul Laffoley's idiosyncratic paintings meld both the Dionysian (the purely emotional) with the Apollonian (the purely rational) – a seemingly impossible feat. Most of Laffoley's pieces are painted on large canvases and combine words and imagery to depict a spiritual architecture of explanation, tackling concepts like dimensionality, time travel through hacking relativity, connecting conceptual threads shared by philosophers through the millennia, and theories about the cosmic origins of mankind.

Phantasmagoria will be on display from July 9 to August 25, 2010. Meta Gallery is located on 124 Ossington Ave. Hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 12-6 and Sunday from 12-5.

"Three stilt-walking equine women in white, red and black emerge from nowhere. Amidst fluttering manes and floating silk draperies, the crowd is transported to a world between worlds."

Artist Statement | Mortal Coil Performance Society

Oddly enough, experiencing Mortial Coil Performance Society's Horse Women is exactly like they claim it is: three horse women somehow sprouted out of the Edmonton Folk Fest crowds, danced in unison, bent down to touch the heads and hands of passing crowd members, and made the whole sunlit, candle-toting sit-in a tiny bit more magical than it already was. It was the kind of performance that towered over children on parents' shoulders who reached to touch the elaborate masks, or enthralled visitors like myself, who felt as though they had stumbled upon something quite special in this unfamiliar valley, just south of the North Saskatchewan River.

With the intent to bring "magic and myth" to audiences, the elaborate spectacles erected by Vancouver-based Mortal Coil Performance Society utilize stilts, uniform costuming, and elaborate art objects — like the beautiful horse masks seen in the pictures above and below — to confront and capture audiences with dream-like scenarios. As one of eleven costumed performances under their Chix on Stix public performance series, Horse Women was a beautiful addition to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival's powerful and connective atmosphere, with men and women of all ages sharing the music and the hillside under the gaze of these ethereal characters, and a sweltering sky.

^{Mortal Coil Performance Society | Photo by Curran Folkers}

As a performance society, their practice spans site-specific performances, workshops, lectures, and demonstrations, as well as community programs like Ultimate High, a community-based performance program for street-engaged youth, which uses the physical discipline of stilt-walking paired with the creativity of costume-making and performance to positively influence the lives of marginalized adolescents. They're virtually as magical and wholesome as you could possibly imagine colourful horse women to be, all while offering an absurd facet to the festival of music and humanity that is the Edmonton Folk Fest.

Van Dyke Parks (Second From Left) and His Band

PG: How did you get involved with the Mississippi Sheiks Tribute Project?

VDP: Well, it’s totally rational that I be involved with it because I was born in Mississippi, although I don’t think Steve Dawson knew that. I first came into it because of the fine singer Oh Susanna. She’s a folk singer from Canada and she wanted me to do a string arrangement. I do string arrangements for a living. I was not doing anything at that particular time and so I did an arrangement for her. Steve decided to use it, recorded it, and put it in the album for the Mississippi Sheiks…which is a wonderful resurrection of some music that should migrate to another generation of listeners. And that’s what it’s done.

PG: You said on stage that song writing is, I don’t know if these were the exact words, but that song writing is an involuntary process for you and that you just sort of let the madness take you wherever it will. Would you mind elaborating on that a little bit?

VDP: There’s nothing really beyond that that modifies it in any way because it’s the truth! A song becomes itself without too much conscious intervention, usually. Now, for example, I’m working on a song now in which I had to wipe out about three days work because I didn’t have the geographical fix on the song that I wanted. It’s an epiphany; it’s a process of illumination. Now, if you know what you’re going to do, that’s great, I salute you. Maybe you’re a Presbyterian. Maybe you know where you’re going to be for breakfast tomorrow. Maybe you have some dogma or philosophy or opinion about predestination that completely eludes me. I kind of agree with Beethoven, who said, and I love to refer to a great musician…Beethoven replied to someone who flattered him for his prescience, his ability to know what he was doing, in glowing and unctuous terms, and Beethoven said, “Horse shit!” Or something to that effect. A vulgarism came out of his mouth. He said, “Nobody knows the future.” Basically, nobody knows nothing! I think you have to be able to adopt that humility when you’re doing something creative. You must allow yourself to fail. You must reserve the right to fail. You must let it take you somewhere. In spite of, or because of your obsessions, you bring a lot of baggage when you write a song. Maybe the truck blew up or you lost your girlfriend. Well, songs like that don’t interest me that much, they’re first world problems and I don’t live in the first world! I live in sympathy with the undeveloped world, with the third world. I try to throw my lot in with people who don’t have nothing, who need to hear something in music that will likely refer to them, opening the hearts of that first world!

PG: Something that I’ve noticed in a lot of the music that you’ve been involved with is that sort re-imagining of the American landscape…and also in your arrangements there’s always an undercurrent of uneasiness and dissonance beneath even the more straightforward pieces.

VDP: I think that it’s important to try to agitate curiosity, to affect people with unexpected events, whether it be of a dissonant nature or a harmonic nature…I think it’s important to work hard to attract the casual observer. In this age of magazine formats, a shuffle mentality, the public is pretty hard pressed to want to go along with an exposition. Now an exposition in a song... usually the song form is standardized to be 2 to 5 minutes. It’s not that long! It doesn’t really require that much, and yet it’s hard to find a complicit listener, someone who will go through that and see what a song does to develop. I work hard at that.

Van Dyke Parks

PG: It seems that much of the music you work with doesn’t really fit into that 2 to 5 minute radio format. You did all the string arrangements on Ys by Joanna Newsom, right? That album is magnificent but none of the songs fit into that format.

VDP: No no no, she’s against that. There’s another one that I really love and that’s a recent project with the same orchestra, same composition in the orchestra, and that’s a record by Inara George, Lowell George’s daughter. It’s called An Invitation, I hope you will get it. But that’s using songs that are shorter. But all of arranging, we’re talking about arranging now, it all reacts to the evidence in front of it, which is usually a basic track. In Joanna’s case, a voice and harp only. In Inara’s case, a voice and guitar only. Everything else follows from those two things. What the words were in the song. What that music was at any particular moment. Both of them, in spite of the fact that Joanna is more expansive in her use of poetic licence… Inara less, Inara is more strictured in what a song is supposed to do… but both of them share a sense of anecdote. I think you get that even in the shorter works that I do. I love anecdote: small phrases that are evocative of that emotions being expressed in the song. I’m highly responsive to that and a lot of my favourite writers employ that in their works with writers and arrangers and such. My favourite songwriter/arranger of all time, or of my lifetime anyway, is Paolo Conte, his album called… oh, it begins with an R. [Reveries, 2003]. It’s on Nonesuch. He’s the greatest of all the songwriters alive to me, by far, for many reasons. Multi-talented, he does everything that I want to be able to do and shows that it can be done without any loss in quality between all these particulars that are so important in supporting the communication of a song as a recording. That includes the melody, rhythms, pianistic ability, arranging skill, mixing, a degree of invention and power, the absolute mastery of the lyrics, the lyrical form and an imagination that is absolutely unsquelched, a sense of optimism that could not be more thoroughly informed and yet defiantly confirmational. Out of all of his works you get this sense that it is possible to go on. A sense of comedy, sometimes inappropriate, when you feel like laughing at something that is really funereal. To be able to laugh at man in crisis, realizing that the singer himself is in crisis, as is his song, and that’s Paolo Conte, that’s the guy who does this. I just thought I would let you know. I hold a high standard of what can be done in songwriting and arranging.

PG: I think some people would say that you do all of those things too.

VDP: I’m working on it, I’m working on it! I’m always trying to improve and become more accessible. I think it’s safe to say that I made all of my mistakes on my first record, it was 1968 (Song Cycle). I enjoy being able to do that.

PG: How would you say that when you’re conducting yourself in your own song writing it differs from when you collaborate with somebody else? You work as a collaborator in so many different ways.

VDP: Well, I’ve endeavoured both. I’ve endeavoured to stand on my own two feet and do what I think is right in the presentation of the song. I’ve tried to imbue it with stuff that might somehow alter consciousness in a way, illuminate…but ultimately satisfy. When I’m working for someone else, often I have to go beyond what is all together reasonable in obeying.  So the idea is that it’s a very very difficult social opportunity, working in the arts, even with the beneficent dictator that artists sometimes become. It’s happened in all of it’s forms, all of them insulatory and distracting… Usually I find myself going… in arranging, when I’m making musical literature to support a song where people have to sit down and play something that’s written, so that they all stop playing at the end at the same time? That requires writing things down. That requires premeditation. So what happens is, a song might erupt however unpremeditated or extemporaneous, with that enthusiasm…and then, beyond that big bang, that first rush, often a lot of work needs to be applied to somehow frame it, to give it a proscenium, to draw people in somehow. In the case of a song, a singer, who is saying things and having thoughts. All that needs to be addressed! And in fact, there is no committee capable of handling that challenge.

Arranging or orchestrating, is a monastic process that requires absolute privacy it is so concentrated. Very difficult. I spend up to a week on average, on an arrangement. Whether that means I’m working 24/7 or, to be fair, 12 or 14 hours a day generally hovering around the arrangement. Whether that is for 3 players or for 60. Whatever that is, it doesn’t change. It doesn’t mean that the more populous events, that is, the orchestras, are any more difficult than the smaller ones. In fact, the small arrangements have been seen in cases…we mentioned Beethoven before. Beethoven did his best work in trios, trio music, and some of the string quartets are really amazing. Those are the ones that really get me! The fewer the instruments, absolutely without a doubt, the more difficult the process of writing.

I love the ensemble that I came up with for Inara and Joanna’s records. I use basically the same approach with Rufus Wainwright… and other people… U2. I mean, I’ve seen an orchestra develop which I see as fit for the frugal gourmet. A sonic frugal gourmet because I get the irreducible number of strings, the irreducible number of woodwinds, vibe, to accompany those strings, which are highly divided. They have both rhythm and held notes… I divide the strings, there are three parts for the violins, two parts for the violas, one cello line, one bass line… that all is to serve a purpose. That is, that the strings are numerous enough to start to offer a transparency. That transparency, of course, into the soul of the singer. Stay out of the way! Be unheard… but more felt than heard. Strings need to be numerous. I use 17. Minimus. That’s the smallest number that will successfully start to evaporate and do their job.

PG: What about in the case of when you’re writing lyrics for someone, as you are in your work with Brian Wilson? It’s a very different role to be playing.

VDP: Well, it’s always changing. Lyrics, inevitably, lyrics must follow the music. That’s the way I look at it. I would have a hard time, well, with Shakespearean sonnets. I would do okay, even with… like in one Opera that I was working on with Art Spiegelman, the great cartoonist. We were writing an opera together about the history of comics. There was a lot of work that needed to be done recetiti, that is, just as it was heard at some Senate Subcommittee hearings. I had a great time arranging music, with singing, that followed the exact testimony from the Senate Subcommittee hearings from when they were investigating communism in comics.

So, it’s not without exception, but it is generally the rule that the music comes first. Then a lyricist is brought in sometimes. In the case of Brian Wilson, someone comes in to tell him what he’s thinking. What he’s feeling. Tell him, in words, what he was thinking or feeling. A lyricist could come in and ask the melodian to change just one or two notes. I have never done that. Never change a single syllable. Case in point would be “Heroes and Villains.” “I’ve been in this town so long that back in the city I’ve been taken for lost and gone and unknown for a long, long time.” Not one syllable was dropped. There was no lapse or gap in the probable cause of the melody’s exposition. The first thing you’ve got to do is reverence the melody; melody is everything to me. A lot of people don’t think so. People who have good hair days, who can survive a mosh pit and a sawtooth guitar at a painful level. There are people like that who don’t need the melody. Well, I need the melody!

Before I was in the Mothers of Invention, way back when, when I was a brunette, when I was a student. I studied music, which was called Row Music. It was music that was so dismal, so intelligent, so important, so serious, and being taught in the conservatories. And yet when you walk out of a room after the performance, you have no melody with you, nothing you can possess from the performance! No melody! No rhythm, no meter to sustain a sense of memorabilia. You had nothing to take with you! That music disgusted me. I felt I was wasting my time with it. I sought the physicality of lowbrow music and hoped that I could bring order to it with my intervention, bring purpose to it and make it, rather than a fleeting excellence, something that would be durable. Durable was… is my aim.

That’s what I think you should be doing. Those jobs have to change. Whether it’s writing lyrics for somebody as wonderful as Brian Wilson, or being subservient, or just being alone, which is equally frightening to me. It’s all frightening. Every bit of it is to get up there and throw the sword against the Hydras!

(Woman passes on the street in a wheelchair with a dog pulling her. Both look very happy.)

VDP: Oh, that’s most excellent. Look at that! She should be so happy!

PG: That is excellent…so how did you end up touring material again? Do you always tour?

VDP: No, no, I’m 67 years old. I’ve never done one of these shows. I’ve never played at a folk festival. I don’t feel like my music is out of hand here; that it has a reason for being in this environment that it would not have in a rock arena. This is, to me, what I try to do. If there’s anybody here who has a healthy regard for what has brought us here, it’s me.

I was very frightened to come. Fright would be the best word, the most accurate word, because in any generic driven musical gathering, people think about genre. There is a certain amount of intolerance based on people’s expectations about how much things are allowed to change. I didn’t know if I would get through the performance with people sitting there. But I did.

PG: And it was pretty magnificent.

VDP: It was a beginning; it was a fine “how do you do?” I felt.

PG: How much have you played with these musicians?

VDP: Once before, on the Mississippi Sheiks Project. This is the first time we played these songs together. Aren't I lucky? Lucky to have that degree of devotion? And that’s what it takes, it takes that devotion.

PG: Is there anything else that you want to say? You’ve already given me so much more than I was expecting.

VDP: Well, I think we basically did everything except provide an answer to cancer! But the arts, you see, are where it’s at. We will not find our answers in science alone. Otherwise we would not have seen such a problem with Canadian, British and American collusionary oil interests. We would have cleaned up the gulf before the dispersants contaminated the shrimp we may yet eat. We have a singular collective opportunity here. That is through the arts, to change things. They can only be changed through the arts. That’s what’s going to keep us from getting softball journalism, which is owned by the corporate interests. We need the artists to stand aside and remind the world what its ethical obligation is. That’s what I feel the song form allows. A potent force for remedy of what it is that may ail us.

-Van Dyke Parks will be playing at the Music Gallery in Toronto on September 29^th. See you there.

I have been sitting high atop the hill watching the goings on at Stage 2, a Latin female singer whose name I never did ascertain is singing about how extremely excellent world peace would be. I’m sitting there more for the spectacular view than anything, having wandered away from my friends to gaze upon the wonders of Edmonton’s river valley and distant downtown core from the top of the natural amphitheater that houses the annual Edmonton Folk Music Festival.

It’s day four of the five-day event and I have been pinballing from stage to stage, sampling the myriad sounds for the better part of seven hours. Indian, Arabic, blues, gospel, rock and roll, throat singing, classical guitar, zydeco, Quebecois folk and country have passed through my ears thus far and I have little idea what is in store for me on the main stage at night. I can only be in one place at a time and there are as many as seven stages operating simultaneously on the all-day Saturday and Sunday shows (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are evenings only).

At the close of this singer’s set, I pause for a few minutes to soak in the atmosphere, the buzz that is circulating through this place. It is a gathering of goodness. Happiness radiates off of every single person in attendance as we are gathered to experience something truly fantastic: the Western Canadian Folk Festival. There are a few such events in Eastern Canada, but these are all small and region-specific; the folk festivals that occur in the West are by and large much more widely attended and almost every town in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba has one, big or small. If you wanted to, you could spend an entire summer traveling around Western Canada and attend a different festival every weekend. As it turns out, there are a lot of people who do exactly that.

From the performers for whom these festivals are the proverbial bread and butter, to the artisans who sell their wares in festival craft tents across the prairies, to volunteers who are liable to volunteer at multiple festivals just to continually partake in the atmosphere while pitching in, to admission-paying patrons who simply spend their summer vacations traveling from Folk Fest to Folk Fest, there is something in the air at these events that makes people not only want to experience the Folk Festival in many different cities, but also keep doing it every year. I met a woman in Edmonton who told me that she had been attending the Edmonton Folk Music Festival every year since it began in 1980. I walked around the festival grounds asking people how many years they have been coming to the festival for. The average response was seven. Only two people questioned told me it was their first year.

This year’s installment was my fifth Edmonton Folk Music Festival. I first attended in 2004, but unfortunately was unable to make it in 2007 and 2008. A good friend of mine has been attending for as long as he can remember, his mother being one of the aforementioned craftspeople, spending many years selling her handmade hats at various folk festivals in the summer. To Drew, not going to the Folk Festival isn’t even a consideration; the festival has been a summer ritual since he was a small child.

People in Toronto tend to be very surprised when I tell them that this is a music festival that isn’t completely dominated by young people and I can never tell whether or not the young people here think of the idea of attending a music festival where people of literally every age can be found as being extremely novel or just plain strange.

There are seniors, teenagers, young families, middle-aged people, you name it, and they are almost all repeat visitors partaking in the extremely inclusive positivity that radiates from ordinary people reveling in the music of celebrating being. Of course, by “Folk”, the implication is quite simply “People”, which is why the term “Folk Music” is stretched far beyond the guy-with-acoustic-guitar-singing-his-diary definition that is generally associated with folk singers. Hip-Hop groups, rock bands and electronic artists have been known to grace the stages of Gallagher Park in addition to the singer-songwriters and blues, country and world music acts one might expect. In the terms of the Folk Music Festival, to play “Folk Music” is simply to express who you are and where you come from. It is an earnest celebration of diversity and humanity.

According to Northrop Frye, there is only one story possible in literature and indeed art by extension: it is an attempt to answer the question “Who am I?”, it is the search for identity. This is the central thesis of the Western Canadian Folk Festival, a gathering of artists earnestly displaying themselves, simply attempting to convey to an ageless audience who they are, where in the world they come from, what they’ve seen and what’s informed them as both artists and people. Naturally, given that this is the nature of all art, it could easily be argued that this is the case with any gathering of artists, however, rarely is it so explicitly stated, rarely is that simple statement so plainly and sincerely shown. The festival is for everybody, because it is about everybody.

Nowhere else in such a large gathering of people will you see the same level of respect, decency and courteousness for other people. The unfortunate inconveniences of jockeying for a good spot, worrying about your things being stolen and people just generally being jerks are totally evaporated upon entering the festival grounds. You pick your spot on the main stage hill at the beginning of the day and once you’ve claimed said spot – usually with a tarp no bigger than 8’X10’ – it’s yours for the rest of the day. If you don’t get a good spot, it’s because you didn’t make it early enough and that is one hundred per cent your fault.

There is a great feeling of understanding amongst the attendees that everyone is here to have a good time, so nothing should be done to impede upon anyone else’s good time when they have every right to have the same good time that you are having. You don’t move someone else’s tarp, you touch anything left on an unattended tarp, when an artist is playing you shut the hell up, if you want to stand up, make sure you’re not in anyone’s way. Generally, just don’t be a dick and you’ll have the best time ever. Never in five years have I seen or heard of anyone breaking these rules at the Folk Festival and given the sheer volume of perennial attendees, it doesn’t seem like these things will be changing any time soon. It’s a breath of fresh air for humanity, frankly, a little bit of reprieve from 359 days of road rage, scheming, cheating, cutting lines, being angry at people in the service industry and impatience. People seem to relax.

Booming off in the distance, I hear a twangy Southern accent calling out to the as yet unassembled masses wandering around lazily from stage to stage. I can’t see the Main Stage from where I am, but I can hear everything this American stranger is saying.

“I wonder if y’all like bluegrass? Do y’all like bluegrass? We’re Dailey & Vincent and that’s exactly what we’re here to do. C’mon boys, let’s pick one!”

And just like that, sweet, earnest and oh-so-joyful bluegrass comes thundering around the festival grounds and through the river valley beckoning everyone back to the tarps that they laid down at the beginning of the day, back to their families and friends. My ears perk up in bewilderment and excitement: I did not know they were getting a bluegrass band to open the Saturday concert, let alone one this good. Immediately I bound down the slopes with a tremendous grin stapled onto my face that I fully expect to last forever. This is the best possible thing that could have happened to me on this already beyond-description day. I’m running down the hill so fast, I could slip at any second. I have to be as nimble as the most fearless mountain goat to avoid stepping on anyone’s things or messing up any tarp arrangements. Not only do I want to get a closer look at this insanely talented band that I had no idea existed until this moment, but I suddenly have the profound desire to watch them with my friends.

Some of my people are already there and we all greet each other with enthusiastic cries of “Are you hearing this!?” More friends arrive and we all greet each other with enthusiastic cries of “Are you hearing this!?” followed by discussions of where everyone has been and what everyone has seen. Again, with seven stages operating and thousands of people milling about all day, the odds of you and all of your people being at all of the same places all day is extremely slim. So, on the Saturday and Sunday when the festival runs all day, everyone has been off seeing different artists, doing different things and as a result, they probably have seen something amazing that they want to tell you about. So while the afternoons of these days are spent lazing about the park, when the evening concert on the main stage begins at 6 PM and you are being ushered to you tarp by, in this case, an amazing bluegrass band, it gets you excited for the evening but it is also a call back to earth. It is bringing people together to share in what each individual has seen and done, even over the course of an afternoon. This moment is a microcosm for the entire festival.

Later that evening, I met a man named Keith who was sitting on the next tarp over from me. After striking up a conversation, he told me that he was an electrician and that his work took him all over the country because it is the sort of profession where one must go where the work actually is. He then told me that for about the past fifteen years, he has been taking his summers off to roam around Western Canada and going to Folk Festivals. Just this year he’s been to the Folk Festivals in Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Canmore, Regina as well as some of the festivals that happen in the smaller towns around the prairies. Keith rhapsodized in earnest and in detail on all of the specific differences between all of the festivals that he’s been to, even down to seemingly trivial elements such as the quality of the festival program book, the champion of such category according to Keith is the Winnipeg Folk Festival because of its extreme user-friendliness.

Keith also told me about the recently founded Ottawa Folk Music Festival, which he informed me is a good festival considering how young it was and that it has a lot to learn from festivals such as Edmonton and Winnipeg (the two biggest festivals). Indeed, he said, it seemed that judging by the second time he attended the Ottawa festival, the organizers had taken many cues from the more well established Western events. “I’ve been meaning to get around to seeing Europe and all of those places, but I just really love Canada,” he says.

Of course, the number one reason why people keep returning to these festivals is obviously the incredible music. Just as when people in Toronto seem bewildered when I tell them that the festival that I rave about constantly is also a favourite destination of families with small children and the elderly, they also seem generally perplexed when I show them the artist lineup. “I haven’t heard of any of these people,” they usually say. “That’s sort of the point,” I usually reply. While the Edmonton Folk Festival generally draws a fair amount of big name draws ranging from legendary old favourites to popular young acts, that’s really a clever ploy to get you in the door. Van Morrison, Levon Helm, Calexico, Patrick Watson are all great, but the amount of new music that you have never heard of going in but by the time you leave you are totally in love with is unprecedented. Every year I discover many artists that I would never have even heard of otherwise and even just attending a Folk Festival once would provide anyone a much-needed, enriching jolt to one’s musical landscape.

This would not be possible were it not for people like Terry Wickham, the Edmonton Folk Festival’s extremely savvy Festival Director. In the years he’s directed the festival, he’s been able to turn it from a small, grassroots mini-event to a summer ritual and cultural institution. His prowess as a curator, bringing both big ticket artists, obscure world music gems and other brilliant musicians from just about any background imaginable is matched by his prodigious business savvy that has made the festival not only incredible year after year, but also affordable.

Unfortunately, two years ago, the Government of Canada cut funding from the Edmonton Folk Festival where it usually received upwards of a half million dollars per year in tourism funding. Rather than bump up ticket prices, Wickham added a fifth night to the traditionally four-day festival in order to subsidize ticket prices and keep the festival going at the same pace. A four-day pass costs about $150, and there are no five-day passes. The four-day pass is good from Thursday-Sunday. A ticket to this year’s Wednesday night endowment concert featuring Van Morrison ran $89. Most of the people at the Wednesday night concert were not in attendance for the rest of the festival and vice-versa. This seems strange, but it’s actually quite brilliant. The endowment concert is good for the festival in three primary ways. A. It adds a fifth day to the festival, which no one would ever complain about. B. Because admission to the Wednesday night concert is not included in the four-day pass, most of the ticket-buyers for the Wednesday are not regular festival goers: it draws in new people C. Unsuspecting purchasers of the Wednesday night ticket are completely responsible for the low ticket prices of the four-day pass. Purcahsers of the four-day pass are able to enjoy an entire weekend of amazing music more or less on the dime of the people who don’t even know what they’re subsidizing.

What they don’t know is that they’re missing out on the best thing that anyone could ever do in the city of Edmonton. You leave the festival grounds on Sunday night with a heart full to burst and a head full of songs you never thought you would ever hear. The combination of incredible music and people just being nice to each other for a change is completely intoxicating, so it is no wonder that people come back every year and it is no wonder that people spend as much time as they can trying to soak up as much of that Canadian goodness and they possibly can.

Comments

• August 24, 2010, terry wickham writes: I normally don't read blogs, never mind responding to them. Your blog is very perceptive and you are a true fan of the festival, you "get it" on all levels.The funding we did not receive was a two year stimulus plan [ Winnipeg fest received around $1 million ] It did not affect the year to year operations, though it would have been nice....I point this out as it is the ONLY inaccuracy in your blog. Keep up the great work and feel free to email or call the office during the year. Folk festivals show Canada at it's best. I love that kids and seniors are free. My 88 year old Dad was there this year, as always. While it appears i do all the work, the truth is I work with many very talented people. My proudest boast is that over 22 festivals, I have never fired or laid off a staff member, with the result that the average experience of the 5 senior staff in Edmonton is over 20 festivals each, I am truly lucky to work with friends. Until next year, thanks, Terry

Obviously.

I'm about 90% certain that Van Morrison is one of the music's all time jerk-asses. Maybe it's the alleged stage fright that he still hasn't been able to shake, even after forty-plus years of touring, but it seemed pretty clear to me that he didn't really want to be there. That said, Van the Man can still sing like no white man should be able to sing and his band is little short of divine. His Opening Night performance as part of the festival's endowment drive was grudgingly incredible on both sides of the stage - Morrison mercilessly pummeling the audience with old favourites and recent album cuts despite the very glaring feeling that he would rather be removing his own eyelids with rusty desk scissors, and the audience utterly riveted to Morrison and Co.'s every note, despite Morrison's more or less absolute contempt for everything going on around him, occasionally including his own band.

Nevertheless, the man puts on one hell of a show. After getting "Brown-Eyed Girl" out of the way very early in the set, Morrison was free to embark on several jazz odysseys and even an unexpected rendition of "Ballerina" along with his - and I can't stress this enough - totally ridiculous band. Great way to kick off the festival.

-Gord Downie - Thursday 8:00 PM, Main Stage

"The Hip would be so much better if they didn't have Gord Downie ruining everything they do. I hate that guy, man." So says Keith, the guy sitting on the next tarp over from us on Saturday night as we discuss our respective favourite performances of the festival to that point. Me, I like the guy. I think that not only is he a great songwriter, but that he is also one of the best stand-up comedians I've ever seen. And he exhibits both of these talents at the same time.

Downie's Thursday night set, accompanied by his band, The Country of Miracles, featuring Julie Doiron and Death Cab For Cutie's Chris Walla (who, as it transpires, is also responsible for the production of Downie's latest solo album, The Grand Bounce) was at once riotous, hysterical, strange and extremely off-putting. Renowned for his bizarre stage banter - highlight quips at this performance included "I imagine a sabretooth tiger up to its tits in eternity, "How are you with things that disappear," "I was there when she [Doiron] fell into a hole that was at least sixteen feet deep" and "When this guitar comes off its strap, it's going to make a disagreeable noise, and you'll ask for your money back and [festival director] Terry Wickham will have to rob a bank." - Downie seemed to go out of his way to make the all-ages crowd, complete with seniors and small children, as uncomfortable as possible as he lead his band in gratingly dissonant extended jams, attempted unsuccessfully to engage the audience in characteristically strange chants and made jokes about the G20 Summit in Toronto that no one seemed to get.

I had a great time.

-Session: Natacha Atlas, Calexico, Tom Russell, Tanya Tagaq & Celina Kalluk - Friday, 6:00 PM, Stage 6

One of the coolest things about the Edmonton Folk Music Festival is the sessions, wherein several of the festival performers are grouped together in the same time slot to showcase each other's songs and mix and mingle the distinct sounds and styles that have come together. It functions positively in several ways, most notably in that when the artists in question mesh really well together, the sounds produced can be more or less totally incredible and it also gives smaller artists an opportunity to exploit a larger artist's pull, thus gaining more exposure than they might have. For example, the first of the sessions that I attended at this year's festival I stumbled upon because I wanted to see the enduringly popular Calexico and ended up discovering Natacha Atlas and Tanya Tagaq in the ensuing bruhaha. Natacha Atlas is an Egyptian-born, Britain-based artist who sings primarily in Arabic, but will switch to English or French in a pinch - she is fabulous and her band, again, is extremely excellent, particularly her pianist and violinist. Tanya Tagaq is a throat singer from Nunuvat, who accompanied by her cousin Celina Kalluk, can do extraordinary things with her voice.

Together with Calexico's Mariachi-flavoured alt-country/indie-folk, the three acts produced some spectacular sounds that were both unexpected and brilliant. Arabic alt-country with Mexican horns and throat singing? Excuse me? Yeah, I saw that and it was insane.

Tom Russell was a guy who sang a weird song about his having a degree in criminology and contributed very little to the sublimity that was occurring all around him. Still, though.

-The Levon Helm Band - Friday, 9:00 PM, Main Stage

At last year's EFMF, the Wailers (formerly Bob Marley & the) performed to what was, by the end of their set, a largely unenthusiastic Gallagher Park. For one thing, there was only one original member of the Wailers actually in the band, for another, they played what basically amounted to Bob Marley's Greatest Hits with a young singer who was so far out of his league he may as well have been singing karaoke.

I was concerned that Levon Helm's performance might have a similar effect, with the aging drummer playing all of the Band's most well-known songs more or less totally unchanged and with sub-par vocalists as Helm is unable to sing very much at all due to throat surgery.

Nope. It was awesome.

As has been a theme with the festival this year, Helm's band was pretty much insane and when they did play Band songs, they were fun and slightly re-arranged rather than stale and gimmicky as was the case with the lackluster carcass of the once mighty Wailers. After opening with "Ophelia"  - as it turned out, the only song Helm sang in full by himself, the group ran through a small run of Band songs before launching into a string of tunes from Helm's recent solo work as well as song very tasteful covers, all the while rotating vocalists and demonstrating the formidible prowess of each member of Helm's fabulous band. The sound was tremendous, the atmosphere was exciting and fun and true to rumour, Helm rarely lost his beaming grin throughout the set.

Even the Band songs that they did play weren't necessarily the most obvious choices (though, as was to be expected, they closed with "The Weight") - I certainly wasn't expecting "Chest Fever" to come up. Though he's lost much of his voice, the man is still a fantastic drummer, a wonderful performer and a class act all the way.

-Debashish Bhattacharya, John Boutte, John Hammond - Saturday, 12:30 PM, Stage 3

Debashish Bhattacharya

As far as the sessions go, there are usually two outcomes from the unusual pairings that occur. First, as evidenced above, the artists weave in and out of each other's songs, flowing into extended jams and adding elements to each other's respective sounds that make the experience truly unique. The other outcome is a little more volatile in its successful execution and that is that each artist respectfully keeps quiet while the artists that they have been paired with have their time and simply wait their turn to play. This can be potentially very dull.

Not in this case. While the three artists featured here, largely stuck to their own songs, respectfully keeping silent and giving their counterparts their turn, the meshing of the three artists here provided enough excitement so that an elaborate jam session would have been welcome, but not necessarily essential. Between Boutte, a New Orleans gospel singer, blues encyclopedia John Hammond and Indian mad scientist Bhattacharya - a man who invented the instrument that he then mastered, which is a hybrid guitar/sitar gave enough excitement in their trading off of sounds that any intermingling might have caused the world to implode because a gospel raga might have just been too much for mortal ears to comprehend.

Just the same, Hammond howled mercilessly as he traded between obscure cuts by blues legends and his own classic sound, pounding his already battered guitar into dust, Boutte turned out to have one of the more relentlessly soulful voices around and Bhattacharya was predictably virtuosic. I think they did us all a favour.

-Dailey & Vincent - Saturday, 6:00 PM, Main Stage

Probably one of the most crowd-pleasingly charming performances I've ever witnessed, this seven-piece bluegrass band was, to put it bluntly, simply phenomenal. If you're the sort that can easily get into bluegrass, Dailey & Vincent are pretty much the best I've seen, though by no means do I consider myself an aficionado. Alternating effortlessly between traditional standards, more contemporary country numbers and their own predictably down-home wholesome originals - not to mention a segment where the band morphed into a barbershop quartet - and coupled with their almost cartoonish country charm, Dailey & Vincent were perhaps the perfect way to begin Saturday night on the main stage.

Though technically the brainchild of the titular Jamie Dailey and Darrin Vincent, the whole band deserves credit for this fantastic performance that had all of Gallagher Park bouncing with excitement, particularly one Christian Davis, who handled bass vocals and guitar, a man who is in possession of quite possibly the clearest and deepest voice of all time. I would have liked to have seen him perform with Tanya Tagaq as, again, the things that that man could do with his voice were quite astonishing.

There's not really much I can say here, if you're the sort of person that might like some good bluegrass, once again, I can recommend little better than this.

-Vieux Farka Toure - Saturday 7:30 PM, Main Stage

"He rides music like a steed."
-Patrick Grant

Indeed.

To put it bluntly, Mali's Vieux Farka Toure is a testosterone factory and he basically emasculated every single y-chromosome on the hill Saturday night. It was at once scary, breathtaking and slightly humiliating. And I felt a little bit dirty afterward.

Basically no one can play the electric guitar like Vieux Farka Toure, so everyone should just stop playing the electric guitar right now. You must sign the waiver provided to you at the beginning of a Vieux Farka Toure show that by listening to his music, you expressly consent to the fact that you are now his bitch forever.

Vieux Farka Toure's set consisted mainly of him soloing on his electric guitar like no person has ever soloed on an electric guitar ever over an absurdly tight African band complete with nerdy white drummer who could only ever have stumbled into this band by playing drums like John Bonham's lovechild with Zeus (probably disguised as a moose or something). And as it turns out, that's pretty much exactly how he plays the drums.

After every song, Toure would, in place of stage banter, simply say "OK!" in a slightly bewildered, impatient, but ultimately indifferent manner and then continue his utter domination of the instrument. He plays as though he isn't doing anything particularly interesting at all, aloofly commanding riffs as though they were his whims as his body seethed hot, sticky machismo. Brings new meaning to the term "wanking".

To sooth the aching libidos of ten thousand manned-out revellers following Vieuz Farka Toure, the festival brought out for a two song cameo, one Kate Reid who sings tremendously bland singer-songwriter-y tunes, all of which are about being a lesbian to the point where it is obvious that she is making her sexuality a gimmick due to her unironic and extremely liberal use of lesbian stereotypes in her lyrics. It was kind of like a punchline.

-Van Dyke Parks - Sunday 12:00 PM, Stage 1

I'm not going to dwell too much on this one, because you can read a whole conversation that Steel Bananas' Patrick Grant had with Van Dyke Parks right here. Nevertheless, I will say that the man is a character, an original and one hell of a musician. His set on Sunday afternoon was excellent and it was nothing short of an absolute treat to witness one of America's greatest and most unheralded songwriters.

-Ian Tyson - Sunday 3:00 PM, Stage 6

Ian Tyson

"This is a song about a dream I had, about walking down an electric highway through a desert of glass with a scorpion."
-Me as Ian Tyson, as described to my mother

Canada's favourite singing cowboy. My Grandmother is a huge fan. Easily one of the best performances I saw at this years EFMF. Accompanied by a second acoustic guitar and an electric bass, Tyson, whose music I had relatively little familiarity with, was nothing less than charming in that mysterious cowboy sort of way that is exactly what you want to see of your country singers and to boot he is a great performer, a fantastic singer and pretty weird dude to cap it off. Playing songs primarily from his most recent album, 2008's Yellowhead to Yellowstone, and dressed in a red Hawaiian shirt and cowboy hat (gay guys, big fat party animals, country singers), Tyson played to a memorized Stage 6 his harrowing tales of life on the desert and the songs of his desolate, lonely dreams.

It was kind of like in that episode of The Simpsons when Homer eats the chili pepper that acts like mescalin and gets led around a haunted desert dreamworld by a coyote voiced by Johnny Cash. I feel like all of Ian Tyson's songs exist in that dreamworld of impossible shapes and tough but fair spirits who always have a lesson to teach. His lyrics are extremely evocative, powerful and soulful and his voice sounds like a more gravelly, haunting Johnny Cash - or rather, a Johnny Cash who spends more time thinking about his own soul rather than that of the American working man. Ian Tyson is a legend, and yet to most people my age he is a ghost. Probably fitting.

-John Prine - Sunday 9:30 PM, Main Stage

Closing the festival this year was John Prine, who I also saw at the 2005 EFMF, to as far as I was concerned, mixed results. I didn't really get what John Prine was all about the first time around, but the second time, this year, it was darn near close to magical. Seriously. John Prine is really good.

Like a Dylan who never got over his country phase, or like a sober Willie Nelson, Prine's simple folk songs about, you guessed it, life in middle America, were exactly what the doctor ordered when it came to bringing yet another smashing success of a festival to a close. Prine, whose voice is reedy and occasionally thin, but unfailingly earnest and almost always commanding, is a man who carries himself with a relative ease for singers of his age and genre. Considerably less weathered and broken than his contemporaries, Prine's affable manner, gentle humour and wholly sincere, surprisingly jazz-inflected songwriting proved to be extremely winning.

"Father forgive us for what we must do
You forgive us and we'll forgive you
We'll forgive each other until we've both turned blue
Then we'll whistle and go fishing in heaven."

That about sums it up.

Comments

• August 19, 2010, Riaz writes: Please please please tell me he sung 'Sweet Thing,' for that probably ranks in my 100 favourite songs of all time and is my favourite off of Astral Weeks. Lucky.

The way the festival is structured gives equal credence to complete sets by artists and scheduled jam sessions. It’s very easy to see Patrick Watson jamming with kids from Alberta, or Calexico jamming with throat singers. Just for a few weird examples. You know?

Okay, so after that preamble, it’s sweet anecdote time. On Saturday afternoon, after the very awesome Alejandro Escovedo and the Sensitive Boys blew up the main stage, the whole SB crew toddled off to Natacha Atlas’ set. Her arabic jazz band are seriously freaky and it was exactly the tip we were looking for after a severe rocking. I especially have a crush on the dextrous fingers of her pianist (That’s what she said.)

Stage 6 With Muttart Conservatory

After an amazing set featuring a stunning rendition of Nina Simone’s “Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair,” we split and went in two directions. I don’t know what Curran and Karen did, but Ted Killin and I marched our unsuspecting asses over to Stage 6 to see gospel powerhouse John Boutté jam with Ray Bonneville, Vieux Farka Touré, Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba.

We chose ourselves a spot in the centre of hill and everything began slowly. Each artist did a song by themselves. But then… there was the magical moment where everbody joined in together on a Ray Bonneville song. And then on a John Boutte gumbo soul tune. And then, as they announced, a Desmond Dekker cover.

Unfortunately, the audience had already been blown to smithereens. The sheer combination of Malian virtuosic guitaristry and southern soul and blues had reduced us to our constituent particles and left us just sort of vibrating to the groove. On the horizon lay the Edmonton skyline. One pile of hovering particles behind me, or what was left of me, commented, “Look at that. Zurich ain’t got shit on Edmonton.” And it’s true. The glowing purple pyramids of the Muttart Conservatory, owned and operated by the city, mounted by a treacherous blue sky dotted with cumulus puffballs served as the backdrop for this human apocalypse.

When they finished playing and all of the matter kind of settled back into it’s regularity, it occurred to me that it was unlikely that anyone had been recording the performance or that it would ever happen again in quite the same way. I can’t even find the set list anywhere.

A couple weeks ago the universe turned serendipitous on me. A friend of mine took me out to see Friendly Rich and the Lollipop People at the Tranzac and when the show ended early, I was debatably looking for something to do. I called one of my sturdy friendforces and he informed me that there was a big crazy band party taking place at his house and that I was a fool if I didn’t come. I almost went home to bed.

But I didn’t! A higher force powered me that night, my friends. I skipped and jumped the distance to the loft and entered, only to discover that the band going on stage was none other than the lovely, the punishing, the glamorous, the romantic, the fucking sonic swordsmen (and women!) known as The Ruby Spirit.

Photo Courtesy of the Ruby Spirit

A couple months previously, I’d met Alex Pulec at the Krupke CD release party and asked him if he wanted to do an interview at some point. What followed was communication catastrophe and every opportunity we would ever have to speak would fall away for a number of reasons. He’d even invited me to the very same loft party I was mentioning in the previous paragraph and I’d forgotten about it entirely. BUT THE UNIVERSE INTERVENED, I TELL YOU. FORCES DELIVERED THIS AWESOME BAND INTO MY LAP.

I totally played it cool, too. And they proceeded to rock the face off the space, if spaces can be said to have faces. The people therein were certainly covered in liquidy melted face after the set was complete. And glitter. But not beer, because the kegs ran out.

And we organized some shit! I went by the sweet apartment of co-songwriters Paige Boy and the previously mentioned Alex Pulec and we had a chat, you dig? Like, a conversation…not a cat en français.

While the Ruby Spirit are operating under a new name and new sound, their voices and forms are no strangers to the Toronto scene. Formerly known as Sadie May Crash, The Ruby Spirit has been a band for nearly 5 years, finally culminating in an EP’s birth, a newness:

Alex: It’s been a lot of years in development. It’s the first body of work that we’ve done where we’ve been writing the music we want to write and the vision in clear. Now we have enough people in the band to perform what we’ve been hearing. We’ve always been a four piece for a long time, so now we can add that extra dimension on. That record took 6 months to record. WE used a lot of…

Paige: ..renegade ways of getting it done!

Alex: We had no money so we pretty much really got creative and experimental in the way we had to finish it.

Paige: We had no money but we didn’t want it to sound like we had no money. Tony [Malone], the producer was great because he was just never satisfied. He would find the perfect mic for me to sing through for a certain song with the perfect effect and then, when he was tweaking it, he’d be like “You know what, Paige, I hate to do this to you, but I found a better mic and you’re going to have to do it again. It’s going to be worth it.” And then you have to gather the performance again inside yourself, you know? When you’re recording something and you’ve decided a certain chunk of something is finished, it can be difficult to get yourself back into that same space…but it was never about going back. It was more like I would challenge myself to do something even better than the last time.

Alex: We really all stepped up as a band in general.

In fact, the band stepped up so heavily that they added a fifth member, pianistic aficionado Julianna Eye, who is the executor of Born Under a Veil’s infectious keyboards. And the record is certainly great. It’s a mash of carnivalesque organs and noisy guitars, heavy backbeats and stunning vocal work that’s both streamlined and modern while throwing back to a late 60’s aesthetic that so many attempt but few successfully capture. Its official release date is September 4^th, 2010 at the Great Hall at Queen and Dovercourt. You’d be an absolute jackass not to come.

Paige: We were talking about the live shows and we’ve played sometimes at the Phoenix where there’s really good sound and it’s really large or we can play at the loft party where everybody’s in our face. We were talking about that show and how much fun it was. Yeah, it was a great group of people, but for the most part everyone just let go. They didn’t know the songs, they didn’t know us as a band, but they just got into it and let their guard down. When we’re presented up on this big stage at the Phoenix and it’s this major production and there’s lights and everything, people just kind of stand there and stare at us. And I think they’re enjoying themselves. But they end up just trying to figure us out. Where is this band from? Why do they sound this way?

Alex: The best way to enjoy it is just to let go. We are different because we come from so many different places that we’re kind of an odd fit as a band. That loft party really opened up our eyes because it was less about figuring us out than appreciating us for what we can give. It’s sort of a waste of time to pigeonhole us…or, if someone is going to pigeonhole us, we’d rather they pigeonhole us as sounding like Ruby Spirit, that’s all.

Paige: Before we had Julianna I was like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins or something, you know, with the big kick drum and hi-hat and harmonica all in one. It was a lot of work. Now I have my hands free and it’s easier for the theatrical show….I decided to become this bride of Frankenstein human sacrifice lady.

Alex: Now that Paige is free it’s easier for her to give it to the audience rather than being trapped behind a keyboard.

Paige: A circus needs a ringleader, you know?

And the circus is traveling. Anything could happen. They could get swept into interstellar groove combat with a comparable band from another galaxy. As sometimes tends to be the case with touring. Sometimes.

Paige: After the release we’re going to start on the east coast. Then we’ve got some shows in New York State and we’ve got some shows in New York City. We’ve done the Toronto Circuit a lot, and it’s great, but I think we’re ready to chew off a bigger piece, so we’re going to New York pretty soon.

The band’s myspace can be found here.

As previously mentioned, the CD release is at the Great Hall on September 4^th.

Dig it hot and heavy, babies.

Comments

• August 16, 2010, John writes: Wow! Awesome
• August 19, 2010, Lilly writes: "the lovely, the punishing, the glamorous, the romantic, the fucking sonic swordsmen (and women!) known as The Ruby Spirit." Freakkkking fantastic quote

A Bruce Springsteen show is not really like any other concert you’ve ever been to. The types of people who go to Springsteen shows are the types of people who only go to Springsteen shows. They love the Boss unconditionally, and thus, they find little reason to love anyone else. I’m always skeptical of live acts that have these sorts of audiences. I feel this way because bands with such devout followings usually end up becoming over-rehearsed shades of their former selves, listlessly regurgitating the hits for hungry audiences. I wanted Springsteen to be different, but I doubted that he could be. When you’ve performed "Born to Run" every single night for thirty-five years it must start to get a little tired. After all these years, surely you’ve started to lose touch with why you wrote those words in the first place. At what point do you stop feeling that same magic you felt when you first wrote the tune?

On this night, Bruce and the E Street Band saved "Born to Run" for the encore. Of course, they absolutely nailed it. Right around the time they kicked into the song’s epic breakdown, I began to understand why Bruce still plays this song, night after night: its because performing this song is what he does, and his consciously embracing the act of doing this is what makes Bruce such a dynamic performer. The joy us concertgoers get from seeing Bruce live comes from an almost spiritual belief that it is not performance we are witnessing, but the true expression of an individual’s authentic self. If anything, the manner with which Bruce carries himself onstage bears more resemblance to a preacher than it does a rock n’ roll singer. His music is not the vehicle through which he engages in performance; rather, it is the manifestation of the powerful faith he has in rock n’ roll as a communicative act. Much like a preacher charismatically illustrating the commitment to his vocation, Bruce’s onstage prowess lets us know that rock n’ roll was not his choice, it was chosen for him.

Photo Courtesy of reader2.com

In Performance Studies, Richard Schechner describes the four states of performance: being, doing, showing doing, and explaining showing doing. ‘Being’ refers to existence itself. ‘Doing’ is the act of one’s ‘being’ expressing his or her authentic self through performance. ‘Showing doing’ is the act of performance that refers to the process of ‘doing’ by highlighting the separation between ‘being’ and performance. ‘Showing doing’ is probably the most prominent state, as it refers to the individual who knowingly adopts a foreign persona for the sake of performance. Stage actors, for instance, are always ‘showing doing.’ Whenever dramatic performances are particularly enthralling, it is because the performer is acting so convincingly unlike their actual ‘being.’ Finally, Schechner identifies ‘explaining showing doing’ as “a reflexive effort to comprehend the world of performance and the world as performance.” (22) In other words, ‘explaining showing doing’ is neither the act of one’s ‘being’ expressing oneself, nor is it the act of one’s ‘being’ performing in spite of one’s self. ‘Explaining showing doing’ reflects a state of performance that is more about the performative environment that is enacted.

With performers who are ‘doing’, Schechner is referring to those whose performance illustrates an extension of one’s ‘being.’ Thus, there exists the expectation that the performer is not embodying an external ‘being’, but positioning their authentic ‘being’ in the realm of live experience. What makes the Bruce Springsteen live experience so palatable is being in the presence of his ‘doing’. His persona is that of the American everyman, the rugged kid from Jersey who never abandoned his roots. The assumption is that this cultural position grants him a credible perspective on American life with which he translates to live audiences. Springsteen need not adopt a foreign guise in order to mobilize audiences, for it is the process of his ‘doing’ that allows his performance to thrive.

Of course, you could argue that since Springsteen is now wildly past his heyday, Springsteen is no longer Springsteen being himself, but a performer projecting his former authentic self onto contemporary audiences. Yet, this argument seems unreasonable considering how remarkably unlikable Bruce was throughout the 1990’s. While likely the result of a middle-aged image crisis, ‘90’s Bruce faced a drastic decline in popularity that ultimately signified a personal shift from ‘doing’ to ‘showing doing’. Following the massive success of 1984’s Born in the USA, Bruce began to lose touch with the authentic self that propelled him into mega-stardom in the first place. Instead, he spent most of the 1990’s striving to maintain this mega-stardom by performing as a heavily calculated, rock-star version of himself. He was, essentially, performing Bruce rather than simply being Bruce. When nobody bought it, he returned to what made him successful in the first place: he reunited his hometown band and returned to performing in his more natural and spontaneous manner. Post-1990’s Springsteen performs on his own terms, which includes demonstrating an unwillingness to let his ‘being’ succumb to the external demands of show business.

Schechner outlines that the act of ‘showing doing’ is ‘pointing to, underlining, and displaying doing.’ Springsteen alienated audiences in the 90’s because he was no longer ‘doing’ nor was he even properly ‘showing doing’. He continued to confidently perform under a hyper-real rock star guise but failed to recognize that he no longer actually was this person. His resulting performances were the products of obvious overcompensation: overtly masculine, conventionally rock n’ roll, and fully representative of a performer painfully out of touch with himself. At the time, meaningful performances constantly eluded Bruce, as he found himself unable to clarify his being in the process of performing. When you think of performers like Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie, or Alice Cooper, ‘showing doing’ is the vehicle for creating a spectacle out of the differentiation between performer and ‘being’. Ziggy Stardust, for instance, functioned as an adopted persona designed to evoke the absence of Bowie’s ‘being’ in favour of performative icon.

The sort of unparalleled excitement seen at Springsteen shows is a lot like how concertgoers react to seeing the Arcade Fire live. The last time I saw them live, there was a constant degree of undeniable energy in the room, likely the result of their reputation of excellence, but also that sort of nervousness that comes from knowing you might be about to witness something great. Arcade Fire shows, however, are very much unlike Bruce in their functionality and presentation. For one, the band consistently performs in uniform attire (whether this be their traditional black and whites, or their more recent western wardrobe), an obviously conspicuous choice designed to signify a formal shift from separate individuals to a collective performance unit. Their wildly energetic over-the-top performances do everything short of shaking you by the shoulders and scream “YOU ARE WATCHING A ROCK BAND.” (This is, of course, unless each band member completes all menial off-stage tasks with the same overwhelming determination and excitement - which part of me wishes they did). The show’s visual absurdity is crucial to the Arcade Fire experience because it evokes that passion commonly associated with ‘doing’. Yet, by dawning uniform garb and dressing the stage up with deliberately engaging over-the-top antics, it is easy to recognize that this is not a band trying to present their authentic beings through ‘doing’, but one that is addressing the appealing nature of individuals performing in their most impassioned state.

But this is not necessarily ‘showing doing’, either. For the band to be ‘showing doing’, they would have to be consciously addressing the divide between their performative spectacle and their authentic selves. Their spectacle, however, is not dependent on ‘being’ at all. The Arcade Fire use performance not to highlight the existence or the absence of ‘being’, but to establish a performance spectacle devoid of ‘being’ altogether. In the process, they expose how calculated ‘doing’ and ‘showing doing’ actually is, and how contemporary audiences are often able to harbour a heightened awareness of performative ‘being’ that often renders both ‘doing’ and ‘showing doing’ boring and uninteresting. The Arcade Fire’s method of performance instead functions as a very simple, yet constant reminder that we are, in fact, watching a rock band.

On the Neon Bible tour, the band performed inside a semicircle of tall horizontal light posts at the stage’s forefront and a curved row of small, circular video screens displaying grainy show footage and an array of graphics and video snippets. The setup placed symbolic restraint on the band, keeping them contained within the view of the audience’s gaze. Their relative confinement further signified the context of their existence as performers: On stage, they, the performers, served only the purpose of performing a live spectacle for audiences. The use of video screens augmented this notion, as they equated the band with objects that suspend the viewer in observation rather than ones designed to simply enhance the performance. The entire setup was a conspicuous nod to the fact that a performance was taking place and that concertgoers were also performing their role as the audience. Rather than dominating the audience’s gaze, the band performed within it, positioning themselves in such a way that facilitated the act of ‘explaining showing doing’.

Fans love Arcade Fire shows because they exist without pretense, they engage with the communicative functionality of the spectacle rather than pretending to avoid it. In the process they remain gloriously rock n’ roll yet entirely aware that they are so. As a result, they’re neither striving for irony nor are they cringingly earnest. The Arcade Fire achieve a revelatory sort of honesty that postmodern culture often considers unattainable in an age of heightened cultural awareness. Even when singer Win Butler steps off stage to sing with the audience, as he does most nights, it is not to extend his authority and shove microphones in people’s faces. His destruction of the fourth wall is a jubilant renegotiation of authority that actively posits the concert spectacle as total performance of both performers and spectators alike. He yells and screams and points his fists to the sky, but he never seems to get sick of doing this. Why? Because he doesn’t have to ‘do’ anything at all. That’s our job as audience members, just as long as we don’t get sick of it.

Works cited

Performance Studies. Richard Schechner. Routledge 2002.

“The +15 is the term for a network of indoor Calgary walkways that allow downtown workers to commute from building to building sheltered from the weather. Ghost is a 22-second looped video shot in the +15 at a location where The Glenbow Museum is connected by a bridge to the EPCOR Centre for the Performing Arts. It was a failed music video that explores the relationship between urban culture and the institutions that direct our cultural practices. The venue is a specific corner that once had been a safe place for street people to congregate. Cameras were installed to deter loitering and the system has been successful in maintaining a surveillance method that lets pedestrians know who is around the corner. Ghost represents a simultaneous before and after look at the space and becomes an exploration of formal aesthetics, layers and lines.”

- Ken Buera, Artist Statement on Ghost

Tucked away at the end of the Art Gallery of Alberta's 2010 Biennial of Contemporary Art, Calgary artist Ken Buera's 22-second looped film is a concise and startling piece of contemporary Canadian social commentary. With intersecting footage of a hip-hop jumper passing over and through day-to-day walkway users, the urban spirit of the +15 walkway infrastructure in Calgary is evoked as the phantom in the concrete; passing through unnoticed, jumping in a relentless and dizzying loop before disappearing completely. The practical uses of the walkway are juxtaposed with the aggressive movement of the jumper, whose leaps both invade and evade space in an attempt to reclaim the area's sense of humanity.

Though only 22 seconds in length, the effect of this loop is startlingly aggressive. Guest Curator Richard Rhodes describes the film as an expression of a "failed social contract"¹, as the pedestrians in the walkway move entirely unimpeded and unaware of the ghosts climbing out of the walls. The film, through repetition, becomes the cycle of power and control over public infrastructure and the stifled spirit of urban artists, commenting on the separation between class and culture in a burgeoning Canadian city like Calgary.

What the video suggested to me, in its incessant and aggressive loop, was a lament spurred by public apathy toward surveillance and control. The pedestrians are not only ignorant to the spirit of urbanity leaping from the walls, but also to their surveillance within the concrete infrastructure of Canadian industry. It underscored the sense of disconnect between middle-class Canadians and the thinly veiled subculture of Canadian art, despite the fact that they can, and do, share the same social spaces.

I stood glued to the screen for several minutes as the loop seemed to intensify with my understanding. This simple "failed music video"² unearthed a problem plaguing contemporary Canadians both within the walls of the +15, and without. Cultural apathy, along with the marginalization of artistic subcultures (cultivated by both the subculture itself and the dominant cultural paradigms) have created a divide in traditional ideals of tolerance and understanding that have always been a part of the Canadian cultural fabric. Surveillance and control of public spaces has made phantoms of the carriers of artistic cultural difference, and alienated creativity from public infrastructure.

Though quite scathing in its critique, Ken Buera's film Ghost is an astute commentary on contemporary Canadian urban life. As part of the Art gallery of Alberta's 2010 Biennial of Contemporary Art, it represents the social state of contemporary Canadian art in Alberta while paying homage to the spirit lurking within the walls of the most seemingly innocuous public places.

--
¹ Richard Rhodes' commentary in TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art Catalogue. Published by the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton.

² Ken Buera's artist statement in TIMELAND: 2010 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art Catalogue. Published by the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton.

The nature of the arts festival is indeed prickly at best, the criteria for what makes for a necessarily "good" festival is, like anything, extremely dim and I always wonder whether or not the fundamental difference between a film festival like TIFF and a smaller event like Toronto After Dark or Hot Docs is merely the fact that Brad Pitt might show up for one and not the other. But it is very tough to say, naturally. TIFF is generally a breeding ground for tabloid stories, a chance to see all of the latest Oscar-baiting epics with the slight chance of sitting behind Morgan Freeman as an added excitement. I've always felt as though TIFF was more of a celebrity spectacle than anything, which is why I've never been surprised when the event passes and Steel Bananas never bothered to try and grab some press passes.

Bloor Cinema - Photo Courtesy of Toronto After Dark Film Festival

Just as is the case with music festivals, for many artists with a smaller draw, the festival is one of the best ways to drum up new interest in one's work. However, just like in music festivals, if the festival organizers can't convince a few big-ticket names to at least attend, the risk is run that no one will even show up. For documentary filmmakers who almost invariably garner middling audiences at best (probably on account of the fact that most docs have relatively few explosions and/or car chases), an event like Hot Docs or other like-minded festival with a half-decent draw is one of the few options left to get people to see that filmmaker's work.

Which is why Toronto After Dark is such a curious beast. For one thing, I've already heard that Eli Roth will be making an appearance (fingers crossed!), so people will, you know, have a reason to show up. The thing is, is that Toronto After Dark fills exactly the kind of niche that if it weren't so young a festival, given time could propel its own draw without the help of B-grade filmmakers who happen to be friends with Mr. Quentin. If you are the sort of person that is into horror movies, the idea of a horror movie festival is probably going to appeal to you regardless of starpower for a number of reasons. First of all, big name movie stars rarely appear in horror films because horror movies don't win Academy Awards. Second, Toronto's biggest filmmaking export, David Cronenberg, is amongst the few and greatest of internationally recognized horror auteurs - it's just that kind of town. Lastly, one sees a horror movie for the sake of seeing a horror movie, the idea of several horror movies in one place, to a fan, will be instantly appealing. Once Toronto After Dark carves itself a permanent place in the city's calendar - which I'm guessing it will given a few more years of exposure - I am predicting that it will be one of the last bastions of niche art in Toronto that won't require a legion of limos to remain successful and sustainable for a long time to come.

Comments

• August 17, 2010, Marshall writes: word. lets hit it

The first pulsing resonance each day at Edmonton Folk Fest fills the air in front of the main stage with a time-honoured clack-a-lack-clack of hammers knocking in tarp-pegs. A raffle system gives those fortunate enough to be drawn the opportunity to claim a prime location, and patrons line up in droves in hopes of being the first to receive a ticket. Tent pegs in hand, the eager shuffle quick as they can toward the out-of-season ski hill that acts as grandstand -- running was banned a few years ago due to over-eagers spilling spectacularly down the hill.

I some-crazy-how found a way to tear my eyes away from both the blistering action from one of the more epic afternoon jam sessions on stage six (Vieux Farka Touré and Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba) and the omni-alluring Muttart Conservatory pyramids to note that many volunteers were clamouring into a large tent set up outside of the festival grounds. I had heard rumours circulating that all the volunteers were getting fed like Medieval dukes and I swore to find out if 'twere true.

While waiting for confirmation of my kitchen appointment, fate decided I should slake my pre-appetite by heading over to CORNSTARS, an establishment serving huge onion blossoms de-cored straight out of their oil bath, filling the now-gaping center with a dipping sauce made from horseradish, cayenne peppers, sour cream, chili peppers and Srirachi. Unfortunately, I hoovered the entire unclenched, deep-fried onion into my face, and within twenty seconds of my last bite the media tent called me over to my kitchen interview. Rushing off with thoughts of another potential meal, I willed myself to digest diligently.

I met my guides at the media tent and, heading out in a private golf cart, was able to unearth the extent of Dukedom offered to the volunteers: not just fed while on the job, all volunteers are free to enter on days when they do not work and continue to reap the benefits of the massive meals. One of the volunteers quips, "The food is why some of us volunteer in the first place."

My guides are introduced to me as none other than Glenda Dennis and Elisa Zenari, a mother-daughter force at the festival. These ladies are busily organizing staff and station, given the modest title of 'kitchen assistants', taking a brief break enough to show me around the tent at the tail end of peak hours. Glenda herself has been working in the festival since 1998, but not always in the kitchen: she initially sold and coordinated all the advertising in the program book. Working the kitchen first in 2008, Elisa took over in 2009 following several administration positions these last seven years, and now both work the 'kitchen assistant' title together.

The ladies began their operations mid-July to give themselves ample time to set up one of the largest mobile kitchens in all of North America. For these first few weeks, they can expect to feed anywhere from 60-150 staff out of a small trailer, a miniscule side kitchen that lasts the duration of the time it takes to spread out and paint the oriented strand board floor, construct the walkways, and erect the 7000 square foot tent. This amount of tent space may seem massive, but traffic per meal could be anywhere up to 2100 volunteers, which turns out to be approximately three square feet per volunteer (excluding the space allotted to necessary kitchen equipment). With two of eight large ovens given to dessert duty, as well as operating all of the other equipment, beverages and a serving area, there is not much room for a planning error. Four large trucks, two of which are refrigerated, hold all of the cooking supplies. A 'Commissary Crew' cart these products back and forth when needed and they are only a small section of the volunteers involved in the kitchen, jostling for space among groups designated for Beverages, Desserts, Main Courses, Platters, Serving Line (which includes a take-out crew for those unable to squeeze in a regular dinner time), and finally Salad.

"It is not uncommon to see fifteen tubs of salad ready for the serving line," says Glenda.

Festival Food

These women cannot laud their volunteers enough, for they are a responsive bunch that do not take these meal privileges for granted. Elisa relates a tale from two years ago: during a freezer crisis in one of the storage trucks, the volunteers were among the first to assist the transfer of food before spoilage set in.

"They were just like worker bees, helping out with no questions asked."

They inform me that they feed these helpers two meals per day, failing initially to mention that the meal times are 11am-2pm for lunch and 5pm-8pm for dinner; including time for preparation, these are long, arduous days. Stephane Levesque has commanded the 'kitchen manager-cum-chef' position these last two years and his menus are superb: I ate a plate stacked with two salads (Daikon slaw and noodle salad with a lime-chili vinaigrette), Basmati rice, cauliflower, peas, turnips, and a roasted chipotle chicken, flavoured with smoked paprika. Each dinner includes a round of dessert but, much to my chagrin, I could not possibly eat his sticky toffee pudding cake on top everything else I'd downed. Every meal included a vegetarian option (a beet/walnut loaf during my visit), with varying local meats and sides that appeal to a wide range of taste; I wish I had been asked for access on the day of the red curry chicken pineapple pot pie.

Glenda and Elisa have made notable strides to be environmentally aware: not only is the water sponsor Earth Water (a company that siphons all its profits into the United Nations World Food Programme to provide clean water to thousands), but the Festival also aims to minimize its waste as much as humanly possible, a heavy task when faced with a crowd exceeding 100 000 over five days. All volunteer staff bring their own containers for the drink station, as the use of recyclable plastic cups is reserved for guests and artists, and the entire festival is compost conscious: all cutlery, drinking cups and disposable items were completely compostable, with zealous volunteers backing it up. I once threw out a fork and, much to my surprise, a volunteer whipped his head around and lightly admonished me.

"No man! We're composting everything this year." Plucking the fork from the garbage, placing it in the proper receptacle, "Here, let me scrape off your plate so you can go get your deposit."

Folky Food For Folky Folks

Any vendor vying to participate at the festival must agree to its eco-plating policy, purchasing reusable plates for $2. The plate-cycle completely reimburses the vendor, as they charge each patron an extra $2 at the point of purchase, who in turn receive their deposit with a clean plate from a washing station. Thus, no paper plates were harmed in the entirety of the Folk Fest. This system amusingly spawns a clan of children that take up the business of collecting plates for profit, referred to earnestly as plate-urchins. I overheard one tenacious boy bragging that he had made $104, which means he somehow convinced 52 people that they were too lazy to collect their $2.

Surrounding the plate tent on all sides were independent food vendors, part of a caravan of tents that yawned around the back end of stage one. While traditional carnival confectioneries were sold, there were many unique, reasonably priced food vendors that deserve mention:

The INDIA PALACE RESTAURANT served delicious Chicken Bhuna and Butter Chicken, always with steaming hot naan bread atop the dish, but an Indian performer explicitly mentioned that his culture had more to offer than these few popularized dishes which caused me slight Western guilt.

IRIE FOOD served a wonderful Jerk chicken, whose thick sauce ran through the black bean rice, well-basted chicken falling off the bone having been gently nursed by my incisors.

HOMEFIRE GRILL boasts a contemporary-Canadiana Native-style fusion menu which served Bison (yes, the Woolly Sovereign of its majestic plains) in the form of a burger that made the entire lineup salivate instantly -- a dollop Saskatoon berry relish on top (a berry they also use in tarts) adding moisture to a slightly drier meat. Also on the menu: a savoury, caramelized pulled chicken sandwich.

THE TASTE OF MONGOLIA, while actually serving several dishes, forewent their name and stamped "Green Onion Cake" atop their tent, a dish called "our local love" by Elisa. This popular, inexpensive snack laced with green onions has a soft, denser-than-naan exterior and the customer has three options of sauce:
- soya sauce, for fans of salty and moist
- sour cream, as a smoother accent
- Sriracha hot sauce, adding a latent tickle
I found the hot sauce was not enough of bolster on its own, preferring a combination of all three, using of all three corners of the triangular bread as spades to dig into the separate flavours, biting off each corner in a single mouthful.

This "local love" certainly underscores the entire Festival, transcending the boundaries of their favourite snack. 2400 volunteers concerned with local events and taking care of their environment valorizes the massive effort that ensured every attendee left satiated. Although in hindsight I wish I had unlimited access to Stephen's menus, the fare offered were hand picked as local businesses, blunting any attempt at a corporate presence -- a gleeful departure from GTA events. Glenda and Elisa have given up more than a month of their summer, dedicating themselves to the organization of the kitchen, a commitment that both women undertake ardently; without them and their crews, the festival would have many mouths to feed without the proper provisions.

Thanking the women, I let them get back to their duties as I waddled back toward the main stage, tottering with an overblown stomach, but with a smile emanating from every surface of my body.

^{Crass Drawings For Crass Dudes - Illustration by C.S. Folkers}

"I noticed the lack of light in my front room.
All I could see was FORD!"
—A Toronto Woman

Rob Ford squatting in sweat-soaked chambers,
dreaming of eating skin, Oriental-flavoured,

if elected he will force the “frickin' homeless”
to “work like dogs for trash”

he states in press-release via sauna
“This living is never worth it without Ford!”

His opponents build a bridge across his website
and ride bikes all over it, against bylaws.

“What low people!” “Cease and resist!”
Ford squelches in a nearly-inaudible hum.

He slowly vomits sausages
and hilarious YouTube highlights.

Trucks and cars (human-driven)
run over the dissenting cyclists.

The trucks probably were not sent by Ford,
he would have to jog to make it happen so fast.

Half-elected and killed,
the bicyclists flop over.

A pack of retarded gay immigrant homeless doctors
form a chorus of dirty decisions.

They send human postcards
c/o R. Ford to 680News.

Ford melts in outrage.
“Even all the bacon in this city will not stop me!”

Ford feels crotch area urges. He says,
“My corruption glistening appears to have a chubby.”

Ford laughs too hard,
the machine generating his heart

beat stops for a second.
He bleeds a little bit.

“I personally feel sorry for him...
he needs help... he needs something.”

Dear Rob Ford, I am tired
of wearing signs around my neck.

As ward councillor you promised
to grease what needs greasing.

Get your hands out of your crotch,
your lead widens the size of a city block.

Your campaign pricks like needles and shotguns,
scrubs the city OxyClean, whitened and glazed.

The city is running out of time.

“I’ll bet my life I won’t be able to help you out ...
because I’ve never done this kind of s—t.”

For the record, I’ve never tried monkey brain or brains of any kind. I’ll save that for when I inevitably become a zombie. I’ve also never eaten dogs or cats because I’m afraid of dogs and really like cats. You also can’t really legally buy a dog or cat to eat anywhere besides rural Asia.

Sometimes that doesn’t stop people though. A few days ago 51-year-old Gary Korkuc of Cheektowaga was found marinating a live cat in the trunk of his car. Police stopped the man after he ran a stop sign and found poor 4-year-old Navarro covered in oil and chilli peppers. He has been rescued and put up for adoption. Korkuc was charged with animal cruelty for planning to cook his cat. He also said that Navarro, a neutered male cat, was pregnant.

HE'S OK! Photo courtesy of MSNBC

Maybe Korkuc thought this was a dog-eat-dog... or rather cat-eat-human-eat-cat world and that if he didn’t eat his cat, his cat would eventually eat him. He would be right if he had pet maggots. A paralyzed Austrian man was eaten to death by maggots in late July while his partner slept beside him. The 61-year-old died in an ambulance after maggots devoured part of his back. He apparently had not been washed in a long time. I can think of few less horrific ways to die. Maybe having all my organs harvested while alive and forced to watch Jersey Girl.

And now to end off on a lighter mood, police found a naked man bathing in the washroom of a library with four pounds of stolen Parmesan cheese. He also had a knife, two razors, and two DVDs that were probably stolen as well. I’m going to take an educated guess and say that he was a contestant on Project Runway and creating a high fashion garment out of cheese that he had to model himself.

Sources
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38656692/ns/today-today_pets_and_animals/
http://www.smh.com.au/world/strangebuttrue/paralysed-man-eaten-to-death-by-maggots-while-his-partner-slept-beside-him-20100729-10weh.html
http://www.wlwt.com/news/24025221/detail.html

Some people play fantasy basketball. Not me. I make fantasy maps and how I started doing this, I could never in my life say.

Specifically, the fantasy maps that I have been known to occasionally make are TTC maps, things I'd like to see implemented, things that will never happen, things that should happen and things that may even be downright impossible.

It's obscenely cool.

And, as it so happens, I'm not the only person to suffer from this strange, strange affliction.

Every once in a while on Torontoist, BlogTO or Spacing, an intricate, spectacular and bold new vision for the future of Toronto's transit network appears in the form of a fantasy map - these are almost always infinitely more impressive than the ones I've made - invariably crafted by some Photoshop whiz with a penchant for urban design strategies. Nerds all.

It is at once a spectacular display of profound geekiness and a silly, irreverent and odd exercise in civil involvement. People with absolutely no authority whatsoever crafting in silent and without consideration for money or cost an ideal city to live in. What's really cool about it, but also not all that surprising is that while all maintain a handful of elements that are common - everyone, for example, wants to see an Eglinton subway - the minute differences people come up with, for a transit nerd are rather intriguing. It doesn't take a member of city council to know what might be good for the city and in designing what could be, we are looking optimistically forward for the future of Toronto and sending a message to other citizens that ours is a city of possibility rather than the bleakness painted to us by our municipal government and, more recently, major mayoral candidates. And, it's actually pretty fun to do, you know, like the Toronto is a puzzle or something.

So, I'm taking this opportunity to use this space as a sort of preamble for what I plan on doing with Round Round Get Around over the next three or four months. Specifically I will be talking about Toronto's Transit Nerds in detail, including myself; what our respective visions have in common, how they differ, how feasible are these plans in reality, viewing transportation as a puzzle and why thinking about this sort of thing isn't actually as lame as I'm making it out to be here.

Next month I will offer you my own ultimate TTC fantasy and describe in detail its in and outs. It's true that the time and money that would be needed to be put in to projects such as these would be on the shorter side of infinite, but my aim here is less so to offer you ludicrous schemes for things that will never happen, but to illustrate that the more people start thinking to themselves about how we can make the transit system we all complain about better, the better it will actually become, as well as to show Toronto as the endlessly exciting city that it really is, full of possibility.

The July 2009 issue of Steel Bananas, last year's NXNE/Fringe issue, represented what is still our most significant jump in readership to date. For one reason or another, with the publication of that issue we saw our readership double and we haven't slowed down since. Maybe people were really into reading about NXNE, maybe that was just the time that the SB team really found their stride and people caught on, or maybe people just couldn't steer clear of cover boy John O'Regan's handsome face.

Either way, we're still here today and more and more people seem to think we're doing some interesting things. Or at least that's my assumption, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to keep growing like we have. So, thanks everybody. You're the best.

This July, we're still really into NXNE and we're still really into the Toronto Fringe Festival. NXNE was nice enough to give us a whopping seven press passes (that's almost half of our staff!) and as a result our coverage is nothing short of robust. We've got interviews with P.S. I Love You, Anamanaguchi, Surfer Blood and A Horse and His Boy, an essay about lo-fi aesthetics at the Friday night show at Lee's Palace and a whole slew of show reviews and personal notes from the SB staff who each spent the weekend wandering where their whims took them.

We also have a whirlwind trip through multifaceted San Francisco with our resident travel writer Dave Hurlow, a gushing discussion of the work of marvelously talented and hilarious Canadian webcomic artist Kate Beaton, a trip to Woofstock with King Frankenstein and an interview with the hosts of online cooking show Hot Plate.

Of course, being a Toronto-based publication, it would be entirely perverse to not have any coverage of the G20 summit and it's tragic events and aftermath. Which is why we worked extra hard this month to produce an entire supplement to our regular issue devoted entirely to G20-related content. In it you'll find interviews with Canadian citizens, peaceful protesters subjected to the horrifying conditions of the Eastern Avenue Detention Centre, representatives of the Canadian Civil Liberties Union as well as thoughts and reactions from many SB staff members and affiliates.

As you were,

C.S. Folkers
Associate Editor
Steel Bananas

photos by Madd Hattere

It’s four o’clock in the morning in Montreal at a dive restaurant down the street from a student residence, where you go for the most drunken drunk food of your life.

They're closed, but someone's in there, so a woman starts to bang on the door with six of her friends until they let them in. She demands a pizza, but they remain unswayed: "We're not doing it, we're closed."

"Well I'll do it"

A blur of speed causes them to blink, and now the owners can only account for five girls in front of them -- as they look back to the kitchen, the ringleader has already begun gathering ingredients to make pizzas.

Exasperated, they plea: "You have to take this to go!"

She’s laid back, speaking with a slight slur: "Totally fine man, don't worry about it."

She finishes and even pays for the pizzas, receiving one order free because the owners take a picture with all the girls in the pizza kitchen. The group, now endowed with pizza, walks back home and sits at her home until 6:40 in the morning bawling, for this is her last night in Montreal.

“…and that's not the first time I've been known to make my own pizza at a pizza joint in Montreal. There have been a few... instances...”

This rogue late-night chef is Amanda Garbutt. The Ottawa resident moved to Montreal for schooling in Sociology, but has since completely shifted priorities due to the media force that is her friend.

After growing up in Toronto, April Engelberg was granted internships for CNN in New York and Al Jazeera in Washington after becoming involved with TV McGill; the idea of becoming an official cooking personality would have never occurred to Amanda without April’s background in television. When initially approached with the idea of hosting a cooking show, Amanda's first response was real surprise.

APRIL: "Basically, in second year when everyone moved out of residence, people would tell me they went to Amanda's and instead of going for dinner she made, she actually taught them how to make dinner and they made it together. Then I went over one time and it kind of dawned upon me that I should do the show. Then Amanda laughed really hard for a while, and I had to assure her I was serious."

AMANDA: "It took her a year to convince me."

APRIL: "I started second year, and at the beginning of third year she was still saying 'Yeah, maybe,' and I had to tell her 'I am totally, totally serious,' because she had never done any TV before."

AMANDA: "My first day on camera was the first day of shooting for the Hot Plate. My family isn't even a camera family, so literally no video camera has ever seen my body until this."

Now that the camera has shifted focus to Toronto, the ladies are looking to continue expanding their market. The proud recipients of the Dobson Cup, Amanda and April have decided upon a full commitment to the show.

AMANDA: "Originally when I was moving to Toronto it was to be in the same city as April, so we could pursue the Hot Plate on the side. I had arranged this whole marketing job, I had everything lined up and I said to April: 'You know that if we really want to do the Hot Plate I can't take this job.' She left me alone to think for a few days and then I called her to tell her I quit the job.

[April was thrilled]: "Yeah you did!"

The Dobson Cup is an award given to budding entrepreneurs. Looking at the competition for the Hot Plate, the closest runners-up seem intense: WOODSTREAM, a company that makes their own wood-plastic composites as an alternative to mainstream oil-based plastics, and BestSPEC, integrating robots into the inspection and maintenance of wood turbines. Up against extremely business-oriented competition, the Hot Plate found themselves at the top of the podium with their own plans of expansion.

APRIL: "A lot of people ask us 'Oh, so do you want to be on TV?' Basically, we're really happy with the way everything has gone, and we owe a lot to fans on Facebook and YouTube for how well we've done so far. Our goal for the next year is to keep it as a web series, to put out 25-30 episodes in the year, provide a video for each episode that profiles a recipe in the upcoming book that show our audience how to [prepare the recipes], then maybe reevaluate our position from there."

Their upcoming cookbook will transcend the static pages of print-only publication; no longer confined to the old, yellowed pages of your grandmother’s cake book, the Hot Plate fully supports online supplements. Amanda actually taught herself how to improve her knife strokes watching videos on YouTube.

AMANDA: "The new website coming out is a lot more streamlined for people to go get video tips. The glossary of the cookbook is going to be supported virally with 10-15 second video clips. What's going to separate this cookbook from other cookbooks is that we're trying to support the digital age; new cookbooks should have supporting features online for free."

Although currently tackling twelve-hour editing days, before getting into cookbook production April and Amanda became more involved in the Montreal community: after an article from the Montreal Gazette drew the attention of the Loblaw’s Cooking School in Montreal, Amanda taught four classes there between April and May, and while the Loblaw’s classes attract middle-aged women for the most part, a few younger pupils were starting to tiptoe in. After the classes were done, Amanda kept in contact with some of these older women over Facebook, which allows her to continue to coach her followers.

AMANDA: "We want to offer lots of details on how to properly use the book [and website], and how to use the leftovers from the recipes. They're all written for a family of four, but if one person wants to make the full recipe there are tips on how to freeze, save or turn it into an entirely new dish."

The focus of the Hot Plate has become increasingly more interactive: April runs the Facebook and Twitter accounts and offers prizes, such as Amanda’s cookies, in contests for those willing to try their hand at creating picturesque dishes. She’s recently received video entries as well, but my personal favourite is a zealous entry for their Ultimate Egg Competition. A fan plated a portrait of himself with a ham face, mushroom nose, scrambled egg hair and a tangerine smile, and for the eyes: avocado sclera, hard boiled egg iris, blueberry pupils.

The encouragement for ingenuity in these online contests gives viewers an outlet to hone their hands-on cooking beyond the basics of their every day routine. Amanda wants an audience that responds well to new ingredients, and can take her initial instruction to create something new and different.

AMANDA: "Your beginning recipes are your safety net, they're your guideline. [I want people to] get comfortable with them and then push themselves, try new things, experiment, it doesn't matter. You're in here to watch me make this recipe, and I am going to make a version of this recipe, but I'm never going to take a teaspoon measure out. I'll work with a new ingredient and want to know more about it -- I might know how to cook certain things but I'll want to know where the ingredients come from, what happens to them while they cook, and some of the chemistry behind it. While I continuously learn more about food, I have by no means an authoritative stance on everything. I just like to impart what I've learned onto other people."

In the upcoming cookbook, a certain portion of recipes have been chosen to appeal to everyone's dietary needs, such as vegetarian, vegan, or Kosher -- meat and cheese aren't always combined, as much as Amanda may want that to be the case.

AMANDA: "Bacon isn't wrapped around... cereal. We are making a book accessible to everybody's palate. You don't want to exclude anybody, but for some of the recipes I literally have to have a comment at the bottom to say: 'You can leave out the bacon, but you don't have to, and I wouldn't suggest it.' Bacon and I are kindred spirits. When I come back in another life, it will be as bacon."

MADD: "It'll be a short life"

AMANDA: "Yeah, but it'll be tasty."

I've finally met a carnivore after my own heart, one that selects a short-lived reincarnation in the name of a single bacon strip rather than redo the whole human fiasco. Make sure to peruse the Hot Plate, which April and Amanda will continue to spread throughout Toronto. Not only do they support the growth of BYOB restaurants in Toronto (everyone should), but they have recently been adding local guests to their repertoire -- winning their next contest could be your chance to get into the kitchen with Amanda, keep an eye on their Facebook page for all the details. And stream one of their new episodes below for the lowdown on some serious peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies.

Comments

• July 19, 2010, Emily writes: This looks like such a cool venture! It's a great article Ted!

If you are in a two-piece band, particularly a two-piece band with the standard guitar/drums setup and you happen to occupy the guitar spot in that setup, you had better be concerned about your tone more so than just about anything else. Sloppy sound will ruin your two-piece band immediately; your tone should be immaculate, awesome in the biblical sense. You are a guitar animal, you’ve got nothing to back you up but the percussionist behind you who is generally going to be playing as punishingly loud as possible, so you had better shred riffs so mighty and godlike that lightning bolts spray forth from your fingertips and that your audience becomes giddy from the cloud of serious, unheard-of tone emanating from your amplifier. Yes.

Photo by Scott Thomas Moroz

Kingston’s P.S. I Love You are the sort of two-piece band that are calculatedly loud. Their sound is enormous, especially for two guys, but the musicianship and obvious attention to sound quality bring their music well out of the realm of loud for the sake of loud. Recently, I spoke to P.S. I Love You singer/guitarist/bass-organ-pedal-er/tone-master Paul Saulnier about totally badass tone, amongst other things.

“I want my guitar to sound hot. Or in a way that is not totally piercing to the ears but cuts through a lot of other sounds. I play a Telecaster, and with the help of Gordon from the Kingston Guitar Shop I’ve made some modifications to it to give it a higher output in the treble range. Hopefully this isn’t too nerdy and boring… My guitar amp is a 65 watt Music Man 2X10 combo – it’s a really sweet-sounding amp from the early seventies. That said, I honestly put every knob on ten and it sounds great.”

Behind Saulier on the drums is his accomplice Benjamin Nelson, who joined what had been strictly a solo project for Saulnier. Nelson’s drumming can be described as landing in a strange middle ground somewhere between a drum machine and a tornado. On stage, he is both ferocious and restrained at once, his deliberate chaos fits well with Saulnier’s controlled loud.

“We expanded to a duo mostly because I was playing in another band with Benjamin and I was playing solo shows as well as shows with that band. I realized that instead of using a drum machine, P.S. I Love You would be better if Benjamin was the drummer, mostly because I think that his drumbeats are drum machine-esque. He’s really solid and tight and it both expanded and simplified the sound because when I would play solo shows I would have more gear than a four-piece band.”

Photo by Scott Thomas Moroz

Notably, amongst the gear that Saulnier is still lugging around is the infamous bass pedal organ, which has now become one of the band’s trademarks and adds a quality to P.S. I Love You’s sound that is both extremely uncommon and very much befitting of everything else that is happening within their music. As Saulnier explains, the bass pedal, which is essentially an oversized partial keyboard that one plays with the feet, has been in the band longer than Nelson has, essential to P.S. I Love You’s sound with its ominous, synthetic tones. His particular instrument was made in Italy in the late sixties and he has been using it regularly for over ten years.

P.S. I Love You’s strange, haunting, and abrasive-yet-completely-accessible brand of indie rock, which can be compared to anything from The Cure and Guided By Voices to Constantines and Modest Mouse, has been garnering attention all over the province as well as the internet. Later this fall they will embark on a Canadian tour with like-minded Vancouver two-piece Japandroids as well as Victoria art-rockers, Frog Eyes. In addition to the tour, this fall should also see the release of P.S. I Love You’s first proper album after a self-released EP and a handful of singles. The label for this record is yet to be determined, however judging from the group’s healthy dose of buzz, one wouldn’t be surprised if P.S. I Love You joined the roster of a very reputable indie-rock purveyor.

Furthermore, the self-titled, self-released EP that Saulnier recorded when he was a solo act is now available for the first time digitally, which if you haven’t heard it yet, will surely be able to hold you over until the album proper becomes available later in the year. As far as the new release itself goes, Saulnier had this to say about it:

“We’ve been recording it over the past year or so, with the help of a couple friends who have recording equipment and knowledge. We rent a small room in a big warehouse here in Kingston and that’s where we rehearse and write songs, so we just recorded everything in there… we ended up getting a pretty decent sound out of a concrete room when it was freezing cold. It definitely has a heavier sound [than the EP]. There’s a new version of a song from the EP called “Scattered” which is now faster and I guess more rocking, for lack of a better term. It’s ten songs, and if you’ve seen us play recently, we’ve basically just been playing the whole album.”

Photo by Scott Thomas Moroz

Of course, there aren’t too many indie-rock bands who can get away with being totally ferocious and excellent in the music department while lacking when it comes to lyrical content, however, Saulnier's lyrics are heartbreaking and hilarious; wildly clever, he writes quirky, intelligent and poignant lyrics to accompany brilliantly his band’s ominous, intricate music.

“I write about a lot of things, mostly love and relationships and how they’re always going wrong, but it’s kind of funny and awesome at the same time. I try to be funny in my lyrics, but it’s only jokes that I think are funny. I write a lot of songs about how much I hate my job or romance gone wrong, everything is doomed. That sort of stuff.”

For a long time, up until recently, for the group’s live performances Saulnier was often seen donning a strange stage persona that consisted of either facepaint or a mask that took in both cases the form of a dark cloud over the forehead and a lightning bolt over each cheek. It was always an unusual sight, and like most things, Saulnier seems to have approached this as well with his dark brand of humour. Although the costume has more or less become discontinued, there could be more costumes and stage personas from P.S. I Love You in the future.

“I started doing it when I was a solo act and I thought that the more stuff I could do to make the stage show more interesting and crazy the better. So I designed this face makeup mostly to look like I was a glam rock god who was horribly depressed. I thought that was really funny. If you could see David Bowie or Ace Frehly with their makeup representing how sad they were on the inside - I thought that was really funny so I had lightning bolts coming out of my eyes and a storm cloud where my brain would be. Kind of showing that I’m a brooding monster but with a sense of humour.”

Beaton came onto the webcomic scene in 2007, when her friends pushed her to start publishing her growing stack of very silly comics online. Smart friends, I say with a tip of the hat. Thus was Hark, A Vagrant launched, and in the subsequent three years, this semi-weekly webcomic has garnered tens of thousands of regular readers and fans, while Beaton has been repeatedly nominated for a Joe Schuster Award, lauded in Wired and Macleans, published in The National Post, and has had illustrations accepted by The New Yorker. There's no doubt that Beaton has become something of a heavy-hitter in the eclectic world of webcomics.

Courtesy of kate Beaton

Raised in Mabou, Nova Scotia (on Cape Breton Island), this self-proclaimed Maritimer began her comics career in grade 6, collaborating with a friend on a series of cutting and juvenile cartoons that made their teacher (the comics' subject-matter) cry¹. Since then, it is safe to say that she has honed her wit and craft while still keeping alive that kind of intensely energetic, grade-school glee that goes with singing "Joy to the world, the teacher's dead...." Not that she's out to make anybody cry these days — after all, the vast majority of her Hark, A Vagrant subjects have been mouldering in their graves for a minimum of several decades. Hark A Vagrant, though in no way exclusively concerned with historical material, has gained a reputation for comic strips on history — even one of the site's first major surges in popularity can be traced to a certain comic about Tesla and the ladies, and it is these history comics on which I'll be focusing.

Beaton's educational background (a degree in History and Anthropology from New Brunswick's Mount Allison University) and her employment at museums in several Canadian provinces all certainly provide a foundation for Hark, A Vagrant's material. This webcomic is a gem for history buffs — but the real story is in its appeal to a much wider audience. Beaton's success is one of those myriad ripple-effects out of the invention and growth of the internet. Twenty years ago, the kind of information that is required to appreciate Beaton's more historically-rooted jokes just wasn't ubiquitous or accessible enough for Hark, A Vagrant to have gained a following outside of history departments and anthropological societies — may not have even been accessible enough for Beaton to build these jokes in the first place. I for one, though I've long had an appetite for nifty tidbits from times past, freely admit to having needed to put on my figurative research cap to properly get several Hark, A Vagrant jokes but (and here's the key) in each instance I needed only don it but briefly. Anything you need to know to make a Beaton joke click, you can find within five to ten minutes of an internet search. That's little enough time to make the payoff worthwhile, and oftentimes an obscure lead from Hark, A Vagrant plays the white rabbit, with its fluffy white tail of a joke luring the curious down curiouser research bunny-holes that ultimately provide entertainments all their own. It may very well be this sort of Wikipedia-effect that has helped Hark, A Vagrant to gain such a following down in the States whilst Beaton's Can-con proportions have remained at levels that could make even the CBC proud.

Courtesy of Kate Beaton

When it comes to craft, she's no slouch. Her style is deceptively simple, almost lackadaisical and doodle-like, yet her lines are spot-on where it matters most. Scribbling is not difficult per se, but to make that scribble express and emote like a Beaton character takes some true-blue talent. More importantly, this doodle-like aspect functions as more than just an aesthetic mode; there is a self-deprecatory factor in Beaton's loose, hurried style that reinforces her flavour of humour. Her flavour is, in many ways, distinctly Canadian: her self-deprecation is wry in tone, and cheekily self-aware (as in comic strip 81: "Kate Beaton Stop Being So Hard On Yourself") and makes a delightful and volatile concoction when twinned with the pomp and bombast of, say, King Henry VIII, Hatshepsut or a vengeful pirate captain. Hark, A Vagrant plays with a silly, self-lampooning grandiosity that somehow — with all its flagrant anachronism, self-reflexive ridicule and nonsense — makes the cast of history lectures seem more people-like than ever.

All that said, I'm stuck wondering, where were you Kate Beaton, where were you when I was suffering Canadian History in school? I remember the mood in that class, like an hour-long yawn, and I recall those hardcover text books, filled with literary stick-figures and slightly patronizing question-bubbles (and that heavy magazine paper, I swear the makers of Clue could have added that text book in betwixt the Wrench and Revolver), but I don't recall much of what I was supposed to have learned. Sure, we covered John A. and all the rest, but the material was such a fine-ground dust of refined information that it sieved its way out through pores and hair follicles once the unit test was done with.

Courtesy of Kate Beaton

My strongest memory from any history class was in grade seven, when my teacher wandered off on a tangent about Louis Riel's messiah complex. It was a flash of eccentric nonsense throwing a wrench in the otherwise well-oiled narrative of historical cause and effect which (given its intense distillation for grade school lessons) is frankly inhuman. My teacher gave us a flash of character in the drear wasteland of overly simplified plot. Beaton's history comics remind me of that unusual lesson, only funnier.

In the traditional bifurcation between character and plot-driven narratives, grade and high-school textbooks dig trenches through the chalk landscapes of Plot, whereas Beaton has built herself a carnival driven by Character, and it makes all the difference. Stuff like Beaton's work can whet the intellectual appetite, pique interest and build a memorable foundation for the drier details. Any high-school textbook writers out there? Call Kate Beaton. Seriously. History is bursting at the seams with character, wit, and incongruity, so what's with the curriculum guys? Everybody knows it's easier to eat celery with a little peanut-butter on top³, and, socially speaking, a solid education in History is as necessary as your daily quantity of dietary fibre.

Beaton has a book titled Never Learn Anything From History, available through Beaton's TopatoCo store. For anyone in or heading out to L.A., she'll be participating in her first art show down at Galley Meltdown, These are Their Stories, in which each piece is an artist's take on a one-line episode summary from "Law & Order". You can see a few at the show's website.

Hark, A Vagrant resides here and updates weekly, sort of.

¹ http://thefablerblog.com/kevins-column/creator-interview-kate-beaton-of-hark-a-vagrant

² Assuming no peanut allergies of course. I just couldn't bring myself to say Cheese Whiz; seriously, what is that stuff? It looks like some kind of goo that serves as blood for the villainous extraterrestrial from a 1950s monster movie that never was....

Photo by King Frankenstein

“No, I’m not being dragged by my wife or anything, but it was her idea.” Not that I asked, but a male attendee answered, “we just heard about it, lived in the area and had to walk our dog anyways.” Many "lived in the area" to the casual poll of icebreakers, acting like being there was some secret pleasure or glorious drug. Some weren’t so blushed, one family had told me they were in from Ohio, and the fact they had their dog on them was strangely no more than a coincidence. Why was I there? Honestly, I don’t think anyone needs much reason to embrace nature’s happiest hype device, digging two hands into their wavy fur, and honestly I’m embarrassed to say that my actual excuse was, in all honesty, profit.

Now now, don’t hiss. It’s true, I was there for the skrillz, true, and I don’t even own my own dog. I do love the scruffy buds, I just have this philosophy that the true joy is not had by owning a dog, just surrounding yourself with those that do. My dad’s company made an investment into dog clothes under the inspiration of my aunt, and while it wasn’t a bad idea, their eyes were wider than the stomachs at the buffet, so to speak, and an overwhelming back stock was starting to smother the other fluffy merchandise their services provide. We decided to take the product to the people, the people who’d like it most, and boy their stomachs were larger. It was like hopping from the hunger of a tapas patron to an Applebee’s regular. We gave em tiny jackets, tiny sweaters, tiny vests and kimonos for four dollars apiece so the people came in bulk. Where this put me, however, was in a prime spot to snuggle every medium to XXsmall doggie dog dragged by their owner into our merchandise tent.

Photo by King Frankenstein

A dog took a dump in front of our booth. It was the greatest threat to our mental health next to the elderly woman who spent forty five minutes hunting for the bomber jacket in her dog’s size that didn’t exist. The owner of the lil’ pooper was also having a panic attack. Caught off guard by her pup’s digestive system, she didn’t have a bag to clean up the mess. She frantically called her boyfriend while meandering pedestrians stepped in the slushy landmine. By the time a bag finally came, what was once a mound was just a smear on the pavement. We took some water from the jug we brought and just washed the mess away.

Dogs in sweaters, dogs in biker jackets, dogs in goggles, dogs in hats, dogs in soccer jerseys for teams they don’t know are being rooted for in the World Cup. And while some dogs were much more elaborately garbed, it didn’t mean the owners were not also dressed to impress. Almost every dog/pop-culture pun imaginable was on display, like a moving gallery of the least subtle in-jokes in the world. All except for one, anyways, as one man wore a black tee that read “Beware of Frog” which meant he was either at the wrong event or dabbling in echelons of humour most are too pure to touch.

Photo by King Frankenstein

While I’ve been to many conventions, some of which I’ve written about, this is probably the only one where the object of appreciation is as alive as the fans. If not more. Celebrations that celebrate bring out odd philosophies, as well as drastic rivalries. While at, say, comicon, you’ll encounter bucking between comic, manga and gamer fiends if not full rivalries between those umbrella trees. There were certainly classes of separations, each breed came with their own fan clubs, upon clubs upon clubs. Rescue clubs, breeding clubs and even just photography clubs had shirts, cards, and booths revolving around the centrifuge of Shopsy’s sausages and whatever the hell a ‘potato omelette’ is. But there isn’t that rivalry, this isn’t about chest beating or pet petting. No one was trying to one up another species with size (cause some dogs did look like horses), colour (cause some dogs were painted) or celebrity (because some were look-a-likes). This was just about loving the lovable. A comic can’t love you back, most of the time.

Nowadays he still does some comics and publishes lots of personal images (freely and happily at the web) while he tries to please his clients so he can pay his bills. By the way, his drawing and painting techniques are "tradigital".

His illustrations have appeared in hundreds of magazines, dozens of children’s books  (within mexican borders) and in comic compilations around the globe. He has also made concept design and background art for videogames and animation. In 2008 he made "Gris à travers les automnes" (swiss graphic novel); he published his first sketchbook "Mirador" (Mex)  and a color artbook, "Never Ever After" (NY).

Some shows: Bandée Desinée Mexicaine (Paris ‘02),  Consecuencias (Madrid '05) and Tecnopolis Comics Festival (Solo exhibit, Athens '09).

www.betteo.blogspot.com

Mister Nice Guy

SnowLow

Sea of Eggs

Alright we need to lay down some ground rules.

Peter - Ground rules?

Yeah, so first, no Portal references, none, and like a maximum of oh, say, three YouTube allusions.

Peter - No Portal references will be easy, three YouTube videos max will be difficult.

Photo by Aaron Bernstein

How’d this ensemble start?

Peter - The ‘assembly,’ as we pronounce it in America, actually had a couple of 'begannings.'  In December of 2003, I was a ‘fefteen’ year old boy and I stumbled upon this backend ‘wabsite’ where I ‘doonloaded’ a program called NerdTracker 2. It turned out it was a DOS program where you could ‘proogram’ Nintendo stuff and write NSF, which is sweet! Man I’m doing a bad job at this. Okay, here’s the abridged version. I found this FUCKING program and then I started making music that sounded just like video game music. Then I started to make music that I was writing with my actual band on the Nintendo and it was kind of like rock music, then I added some guitars in it and said, “Woah dude, this is the exact music I want to be making.” I went to college, I met Ary, then we were FOUR GUYS IN A BAND!

Cool! I hear bands have four guys.

Peter - Bands usually have four guys, actually in the States there’s this program where you can get some tax breaks if you are a band with four guys. It’s the four-guy-band-clause. Prop 4Guy. It was introduced by Gerald Ford.

I actually just took apart my own NES. My aunt dropped off a box cause she used to have one, I think these things multiply because there were two in the box.

Peter - That happens, I have six now.

I basically Frankensteined it because some parts worked better than others. There are a lot of chips, prongs, it was very intimidating, this was outside my jurisdiction. So looking at what I somehow manage to do, looking at what you can do, where’s a good place to start in actually doing something with this box of chips?

Peter - For me, the actual challenge comes from programming and the actual software stuff. Basically, the software hacking I just do off tutorials that other people do, Swedish people who know magic and stuff, who can actually make a tutorial so you don’t fuck it up because we’re all stupid. The hardest stuff is really the software, programming new sounds, good sounds, sounds that sound new. That’s my party jam.

For chiptunes as a musical genre, how prominent is the nostalgia factor?

Peter - There’s a lot to be said about that. Anything that you grow up with is going to become art. Anything you experience is only going to be filtered through yourself, soon you are going to want to make something about it, or, with it. For me, I have fun with my friends playing video games, when I had the chance to make my own shit, I was excited about it, that was the initial draw. It’s different for everyone.

Ary - I actually wasn’t allowed video games when I grew up, but electronic music was a big part of my life. I got very sick of all the modern programs, people putting shit together in Garage Band all got really boring. I wanted to find a more primitive, more basic yet at the same time complex form of electronic music. Chiptune music allows that.

Is this, say, somehow in the same lieu of low-fi?

Ary - I think of it more like the punk side of electronic music. You sort of have stuff like trance, compare it to 80s metal, over produced. Then ask yourself if you can take it back to basics. “What’s the best song I can do with one chord?” I have one very simple chip that I have to work with.

A wild pizza party breaks loose - Photo by King Frankenstein

This is something that’s been messing with my head a little bit. You guys are making the soundtrack to the Scott Pilgrim video game. That makes you a chiptune band, which is based off video game soundtracks, doing a soundtrack for a real video game. Does this retroactively cause every video game soundtrack to become chiptune music or vice versa?

Peter - Well, no, I think. There are so many, like, post-modern layers to what’s going on here, it’s scary, it’s awesome.

You’ve opened Pandora’s box.

Peter - This isn’t a Portal reference, but we’ve opened a portal.

I’ll accept that.

Ary - We’ve managed to write music for a video game without making video game music.

Peter - We all composed for this game, it was a really collaborative effort. For one song, I was like, “Hey Luke, write a Hot Water Music/Alkaline Trio song for this level.” And he did, and it’s really sweet. Basically this is just a synthesis of all our influences. What we think would work, if we were scoring a movie it would just be the same thing. There’s this part where you are fighting robots n’ shit at a party, obviously, Ary said, “I’m totally going to write a Daft Punky song.” And he did, and it’s really sweet.

Photo by Aaron Bernstein

You guys were sort of... How to say it... Ambushed by nerds in there. Some nice, others worse. Is this a problem, or do you just have to appreciate it? Are you concerned about this evolving?

Peter - No! I think the evolution of this will lead to something magic. I think that the world is crassly divided. People in America, and the world, and in Canada I guess, always see culture as this kind of divide, say like, nerds and hipsters.

I think that guy at the show saw the divide.

Peter - Which guy?

The one who kept insisting he was a hipster and then hammered you with Scott Pilgrim trivia.

Peter - I think that that guy is an example of how it’s the same thing. Nerds and hipsters are just the same thing.

Ary - Both are awesome and suck for the exact same reasons.

Peter - From where we’re coming from, I never viewed the kind of shit that I love, like say Tim and Eric or Scott Pilgrim to be either nerdy or hip. They lie on the same continuum. Something like Scott Pilgrim is a perfect example. The nerds go, “Oh it’s fuck-n’ hipster shit,” and hipsters go, “Oh this is fuck-n’ nerdy,” and I’m going, “Hey fuck you man.” There’s a group of people better aware of this stuff and just choose not to care. They are having the best time.

You suggest that we move on from this.

Peter - Oh, yes. Please. I think the less that we label our shit the better our lives will be.

You can play Gears of War and listen to Animal Collective!

Peter - Exactly!

Ary - I know this guy who goes to every DIY show and drinks PBR but also is a coding god, he knows every language of it. You can do both and it’s fine.

Peter - When I was a kid I would play Yoshi’s Island and listen to Minor Threat. It doesn’t get any more ridiculous than that. I never feel ambushed, but I feel like what this could lead to is something better. Ambush is just a dirty word.

Ary - If anything we’re just hyped that we’re in the same room.

Last question!

Peter - Oh man, pressure’s on...

Do you guys think you’ll ever upgrade to Sega Genesis?

Peter - Actually, that’s an interesting question. If you were to make it more general, like, are we going to use different platforms, then yeah. Ary is using a new program called LSDJ, a Swedish program, I’ve already started using Game Boy sounds as well as some expansion chips on Nintendo that Konami made in Japan that gives you extra channels. The point is we’ll use whatever tools to make whatever needs to be made. The Sega Genesis is actually becoming usable, and there is some excellent music being made with it. It’s an FM Synth, like a DX7 or something. Hopefully I’ll be smart enough to finish it out, until then. Those bell sounds are really lush.

Photos by Aaron Bernstein.

Comments

• August 2, 2010, Interview with Anamanaguchi: Chiptunes, Video Games and Scott Pilgrim » Dork Shelf writes: [...] This interview first appeared in Steel Bananas. [...]

June of 1998 was the first appearance of a fan favourite book called Young Justice which followed the adventures of the teen heroes of the DC comic universe. The entirety of its regular series, issues 1-56 (plus various special issues), was written by Peter David, a prolific comic book and novel writer, with a special twist. It was funny.

Instead of nonstop drama, we were given wordplay denouncing such expectations, goofy villains, and often times equally goofy heroes at a time when there was very little else like that around. It worked, and it was popular - not every comic can last to 56 issues. In fact, most don’t.

As the comic series was winding down in 2003 a couple of things happened. First was the creation of the Teen Titans cartoon show, again featuring teen heroes of the DC comic universe (though none were the same characters used in Young Justice) in a fun and usually kid-centric show. Its series finale aired in 2006 after 5 seasons and 65 episodes, which isn’t any length of time to sneeze at. While Teen Titans could certainly get very dark and serious (“The Prophecy” was an episode about how one of the heroes was destined to end the world, it’s a downer), my favourite episode is about a guy saving the world via driving around on a moped and capturing sentient tofu. Pretty crazy.

^{Young Justice | Courtesy of Dark Horse Comics}

And the second thing to start at the end of Young Justice was a new Teen Titans comic book. Was this an example of the clever utilization of synergy between a new cartoon show and new comic book? Not at all. Half of the characters appearing had the same name and appearance as those in the cartoon and, while still being wildly different characters, the other half were leftover members of the Young Justice cast, with a very different tone.

One could almost say that the narrative was rebelling against ever having been subjugated to the role of “being funny” as expertly demonstrated when one character Kid Flash (formerly called Impulse), far and away the most fun guy in Young Justice, the only character trying to hold on to that lighter atmosphere in this new Teen Titans book, has his kneecap shot in the first story arc.

Fast forward to the present and the only thing still on the market is that Teen Titans comic, for some reason. I don’t know who’s buying it, I can assure you I stopped a long time ago. But I don’t know, maybe people like it, the book has managed to stick around for 80+ issues, and it doesn’t sound like they have any intention of canceling it.

However after all this time there will be something else new on the horizon: it has been revealed that come this fall there will be a new cartoon starring, you guessed it, the teen heroes of the DC universe. There’s a teaser poster readily available online, and the designs look pretty good, though a little serious. Why should looking serious make a difference, you ask, when the last man standing among all the merchandise I’ve talked about is the serious Teen Titans comic? Well, I’ll tell you. It makes a difference because this upcoming cartoon will be called Young Justice. You know, after that series that hasn’t been around for seven years.

Obviously I’m nonplussed by the timing of the guys in charge - where was the Young Justice cartoon seven years ago? Maybe it takes seven years for a fanboy to ascend to the position of a corporate bigwig that gets to approve comic based projects they enjoyed in years past. I should mark my calendar now.

Although I’m wary of this new show, it seems to have a pretty impressive pedigree: produced by Sam Register, who did the Teen Titans cartoon I enjoyed so much, as well as Greg Weisman, who did the recent Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon. Between the two of them, there has to be a fair balance between humour and the more serious stories, as well as a lot of respect for the source material. As a result I am, like many other Saturday morning kid-at-heart show lovers (in spirit if nothing else), cautiously optimistic. It’s still a weird move as far as I’m concerned.

Illustration by C.S. Folkers

The Terrifying Seafood Activity

For Tien Pham

death in black a dozen wounds no killer found

there has been a shooting in a Toronto restaurant
at a Cantonese eatery on Spadina
the evidence has been tightly wound into video
the details of the killer were ascertained from forward angles

the friends there calculated a code
“Wear a hoodie” was the prescription

perhaps his kitchen run-ins described paint in the a.m.
after the killer had fled Chinatown
walking briskly down Now Ave.
to act out his “deliberate” pain

every Det.-Sgt. was “devastated”
at the seafood shortage in Toronto

the criminal killer shaved
using the screen of a camera
reviewing the video
of early teenaged dining

the killer used a handgun
he is now known as Exodus Slim

a gang walks into the Cantonese kitchen
dying images are appealing to hooded thugs
Police code produces handguns pointed at a dozen heads
Police trying to find out whether the gang ate there beforehand

if the 17-year-old hand held a motive along with the pistol
if they shot at the family range over the weekend
if the gunman really was 5-foot-7
if he was as dark-coloured as the gun

the kitchen had potential
gangs appreciate good cooks

the Det.-Sgt. hides in his room
labyrinthine images are sewn into his uniform
his head and assisted video death
are too close to Chinatown Monday

This news affects the restaurant directly

“Absolutely any attempt to enter the kitchen will be rejected”
Police described his escape in inches
a shot at the entrance terrorized a family at the back
the killer must hide on this tall Saturday

17-year-old kids appealing to help Det.-Sgt.
find patrons of a known range
there are many with a motive
even more who could assist

the gunshot which ended his youth
suggests that the victim was exposed to a bullet
locals have identified the gunshot as fatal
the boy will not recover

the food for once is not suspect
the cooperation of criminal activity leads
the Terrified Toronto Front to believe
the crime is gang-related

although no student investigator wants to touch the case
they will not eat seafood until it is solved

the Police are seated in the restaurant right now
they ordered the egg rolls
it was excellent evidence
crispy and hot

Warning to the reader: Although this story should emerge top to bottom in chronological order (the higher up on the page something appears, the earlier it happened), the first person narrative bits are written in the present tense, while the conversation between Michael and myself refers to events in the past tense. Switching between tenses may cause something akin to vertigo in the reader and possibly mild frustration. This is almost certainly intentional.

Let's start with this story about my friend Stu:

It's Stu's last day in New York before he flies to Bermuda. He goes to the East village, to Porqueta, a tiny little sandwich shop run by a woman who roasts porquetas and nothing but porquetas. He walks in and the place is so small, he's at the counter where there's just two seats and he's facing a wall of glistening pork. Stu eats pork fat, pork skin, all different kinds of pork meat, in a sandwich. Then Stu goes to the East Village Motorino; the porqueta was only a snack. He eats a whole Filetti Pie at Motorino, baked with fresh mozzarella, tiny little cherry tomatoes and thyme in Anthony Mangieri's famous pizza oven, allegedly the best pizza oven in North America. The pie is amazing, it's got a super flexible crust that you can poke and immediately returns to its original shape. With the pie he drinks a glass of gragnano, semi sparkling Neapolitan wine. He leaves Motorino and he's feeling pretty fine, he's had two lunches now and only one of them was a sit down lunch. He goes from there to Momofuku milk bar, which is the bakery associated with David Chang's Momofuku Ssam bar. At Momofuku you get can cereal milk ice cream: milk that has had cereal soaking in it transformed into soft serve ice cream, so that it tastes like the milk at the bottom of your cereal. Here Stu eats a banana cake and drinks a bottle of strawberry milk. Think Nutella, banana bread, then Nutella icing with a crunchy praline layer somewhere in there.

After two lunches, one giant piece of cake and a bottle of strawberry milk, he's walking down the street, on his way now to JFK airport, and a funny feeling comes over him. Stu starts feeling pops and shivers inside of him and he's shaking, sweating, his heart is beating fast. He's wondering if anyone's ever had a heart attack from immediate overeating. He wonders for a little while if he's going to pass out, and then, his body drifts for a while until eventually he's slammed back into reality. He's awake, he's still alive, he goes to JFK and gets on a plane and flies to Bermuda.

Here's what he has to say about this:

Stu: It's important to get the most out of your travel food eating time, there's no point in thinking of food as sustenance when you're trying to experience all the good flavours a city has to offer in a limited amount of time. Any respectable city has enough food that you could die from caloric intake if you're working with a limited amount of time. You're never going to have eaten enough. And so you need to be willing to suffer.

San Francisco

Mark Ibold, the bass player for Pavement and Sonic Youth, is on our flight from Newark. I stare at him awkwardly and at one point during the flight I go over to his seat to talk to him but he is sleeping. At the luggage carousel I call out, "Hey Mark!" He signs my copy of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and tells me that the Toronto Island Concert was in the top five shows of the Pavement reunion tour.

We arrive in San Francisco, meet a third friend and go to a bar called Doc's clock. There's a hand shuffle board table, maybe you know the kind, with the sawdust on it to provide traction for the tiny pucks. I recognize the bartender's Yeasayer shirt, a brightly coloured base with a black psychedelic houndstooth hand on it. He was on tour with Yeasayer one time, he says. He feeds us cheap shots of whiskey and pints of PBR. "Liquor is so cheap it's basically free in America," I think, "even at bars."

We go down the street to Farolitos and order the Al Pastor Super Burritos, with beans and avocado. It is the greatest, greasiest, burrito that I have ever eaten. Shockingly delicious and a challenge to finish. I soak the golden prize in multiple sauces from the salsa bar and almost weep for joy.

At the MOMA SF I walk through a wall of golden beads, realizing that I find modern art sexually arousing.

Bourbon and Branch:

A cheesy speakeasy style cocktail bar. The host gestures for us to come in out of the freezing weather; it is ten degrees celsius and misty. Everyone is wearing a fedora. "Some people," I think, "should never wear a fedora." The host leads us to a book shelf where he pulls at the spine of a book and spins us into a separate room. It's supposed to be this secret chamber outside of reality and there is a cool icicle-like chandelier hanging from the ceiling, but people keep opening the door to reality and ruining the mood. I drink a Sazerac for the first time, the oldest American cocktail in existence, born in New Orleans. The glasses are washed in absinthe and the Sazerac makes me feel like a wobbly newborn.

In the Mission we stop at a bar called the 500 hundred club with a giant lit up champagne glass for a sign. I punch in a bunch of Neko Case songs on the juke box, but we leave before they come one. Outside it is misty and cool, but the palm trees make me feel like I should be wearing sandals.

Frances:

Appetizers: Panisse Frites (Chickpea fries) with lemon aioli, chicken patte.

Stu: The chickpea fries had this super crisp exterior and then the crazy fluffiness of the hummus in the middle, a perfect window pane of deep friedness that you cracked through with your teeth and then suddenly you were swimming in a pool of chick pea mud. When you dipped it in mayonaise it was like goo, window pane and then more different goo on the inside... two layers of garlicky goo separated by an aquarium.

Entrees: Tender pink lamb, Crepe Cannaloni with melted leeks.

Stu: Pat had some kind of bird it wasn't a chicken, it was um.....

Dave: Safe to say it was some kind of game.

Stu: Well, I don't know if they'd actually shot it.

Dessert: we shared the Bittersweet chocolate pot du creme with cherries.

Stu: It was like the same texture as the chicken patte. Everything was just so buttery smooth. It was like the restaurant of buttery smoothnesses, this made it a very feminine restaurant.

Dave: There were cultured homosexuals there, it was run by women.

Stu: It seemed super San Franciscan, right? Things you've had before but easier to digest. There was nothing edgy about it at all, it was almost like pablum.

We met a South American girl on the plane who'd been living in San Francisco. We go to meet her at a bar for her friend's birthday but she stands us up. I go over to some girls and start a conversation, "I'm an artist" one of them says "I make my own clothes and I sell jewelry. I've been reading a lot of Timothy Leary lately and I believe that acid is truth. Jack Kerouac is my favourite author."

"For Chrissake!" I think, but Moody and Stu are coming over and start talking to the other friend and here we are stuck like this for at least fifteen more minutes.

Tartine:

General impressions: Hyper butteriness of the ham croissants, the Croque monsieurs are soaked in sauce and topped with great ingredients: asparagus and tiny little buttony mushrooms, in addition to the cheese.

Dave: A very liberal interpretation of the traditional croque monsieur

Stu: Mhmm, usually its on bread sliced from a loaf, this was a rounded loaf, a big oval shaped piece, thick cut, maybe it was sourdough bread even.

Battle of the Ice Creams

Bi-rite Creamery:

Stu and Moody buy salted caramel ice cream and even though I'm stuffed with croissant and croque monsieur, I want to steal their ice cream it is so delicious.

Humphrey Slocum:

After a taco crawl we hit Humphrey Slocum which has more attention to detail in decor (A taxidermied double cow head graces the wall) and hip clever names like Rosemary's Baby or Harvey Milk and Honey Graham Cracker.

Winner: Bi-Rite.

Columbus Avenue

We visit the MH de Young Museum and pay to enter an exhibit of famous Impressionist paintings that the Musee D'Orsay has leant to SF while they're undergoing renovations. I fall in love a little bit with a steamy Monet train station, but mostly I'm just working hard to stay on my feet.

We take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) under the water and come out in Oakland. Apparently George Lucas was inspired by the architecture of the Bay Area when he was working on his model designs for the original Star Wars Trilogy. The most obvious evidence of this are the huge four legged cranes in downtown Oakland that resemble Imperial AT-AT's (All Terrain Armoured Transport) - those giant vehicles that roam Hoth, the ice planet, in search of a rebel base to destroy. Second only to the cranes is the Trans-America Pyramid in downtown San Francisco, which strongly resembles an imperial star destroyer. The traces of Star Wars architecture are randomly scattered around the area, so that walking about in the sunny, liberal west coast paradise that is San Francisco one can suddenly find themselves staring, head cocked to the side, at a giant relic of science fiction lore.

MH de Young Museum

Pizzaiolo (Oakland):

List of Pies: Tomato sauce with meatballs, white pizzas with majorum, broccoli, rapini and sausage, one with wild nettles and pecorino romano.

Stu: The one with tomato sauce was really good, the meatballs were so smooth. The coolest thing is that we ate the pizzas in a dive bar, instead of the restaurant itself, which was kind of fancy and stylized to look like something in the south of France

Dave: O yeah! It was a real hole in the wall Oakland bar that served cheap jugs of PBR and Jack and cokes with barely any coke in them.

Stu: When I asked if we could bring in the pizzas, the bartender was like "we already got potatoes 'n cheese," or like "rice 'n cheese" or like "Mashed potatoes and gravy... 'n cheese" some gross side dish that everyone at the bar was slopping into their mouths.

We go to see Pavement at UC Berkeley's Greek theatre. We buy eight dollar MGD's served in a plastic safety bottle and watch from the coliseum style stone seats. For the encore Pavement's original drummer Gary Young comes out to play a bunch of Slanted Enchanted with the band. His rhythm is sloppy but damn can he drum fill.

Later we're at a bar called...

Zeitgeist:

Stu: If you wanted to compare it to bars in Toronto, it's kind of like a combination of Ronnie's and the Brunswick house. A hipster bar for frat boys, or a frat boy bar for hipsters.

Dave: The kind of bar you could blast Band of Horses at.

Stu: I still don't know what Band of Horses is but I know you think they suck.

We've met up with our friend from the plane (we'll call her Dorothia) at this point as we sit down to eat more giant golden salsa soaked burritos at a place called Cancun. Her boyfriend passes us all beers from a corner store which we accept hesitantly, but hey everybody's doing it and if it's okay to take outside food into a bar in California, maybe you can bring outside beer into burrito joints too.

Stu: Dorothia had a wealth of practical knowledge of what you literally could and could not do. But I don't think she knew much about what you technically couldn't do.

The Ferry Building:

A general rundown from Stu: Lots of fancy food places that don't have other locations, that just exist in the ferry building. Like a farmer's market where the booths are open all the time, plus there was extra farmer's market stuff because it was Saturday. I knew it was an old terminal or something, I guess it still is a ferry terminal?

Dave: I have no idea!

I was hungover and a bit stoned on headache medicine so I ended up laying on a slab of wood in the sun deliriously napping and looking out on the bay while Stu and Moody navigated the Ferry Building. Here's what they ate there:

1. Cone of Meats and sandwiches with Testa (Italian face meat) from Boccalone, whose slogan is "Tasty Salted Pig Parts."

2. American Bahn Mi (Vietnamese Sub).

3. Grass fed Hamburger.

4. Porqueta Sandwich from Roli Roti: a truck that a Swiss master butcher has converted into a rotisserie showcasing glistening twisting porqueta.

5. Two Oysters.

6. Jellowy Linnaean candy-cot from the Linnaen candy-cot man who had been developing this delicious apricot for fifteen years.

7. A soda carbonated using all natural milk whey.

Roli Roti

Stu: (describing porqueta and the Roli Roti experience) You take pieces of a pig wrapped in a pig's skin and roast them for a million hours with herbs and spices, then you slice it and you chop it up into fine pieces and put it on a bun with some kind of greens and some salt. You have a mixture of different pork textures, some of it's really mushy and fatty, some of it is gooey gelatinous, some of it is crispy, like hard candy crispy. Like the last bite when you get to the end of the tootsie pop. This was better than the porqueta sandwiches at Porqueta in New York. It's not like a roti at all... roti is French for roasted I guess.

Nopa:

Cocktails: White Manhattan, Pisco Sour with Eggwhites

Apps: A Goat Cheese Dip, little fried anchovies with mayonnaise, salad with olive oil poached sea bass.

Stu: The goat cheese toast rounds were perfect. It was like a classy version of a superbowl dip, like you were eating a bowl of cheese salsa. Those anchovies were insane, we ate them head and everything.

Entrees: Pork Chop, Grass Fed Hamburger, Tagliatelle with peas and cream sauce.

Stu: Pork Chop was cooked in a wood oven, it was a little smoky, crispy exterior, lots of pieces of melting fat. Tasted a bit like barbecue. There were a few apricots. Think about a big salt hit from the pork, a lot of smoke, this smooth bacon-y ham texture, with beautiful apricot jam on it

Dave: Eating two or three bites of that cheeseburger changed my life. While I was chewing I closed my eyes and was transported to a better place.

Stu: I always think that the key to a good cheeseburger is to make it thick enough that you have a textural contrast between a burnt caramelized crispy brown outside and the super moist, almost cool, beef tartarish pink or purpleness of the inside. You really can't fuck up a burger if it has that gradation.

Dave: So the recurring theme here is crunchy exterior, soft interior.

Stu: O yeah! Food's about the play of contrasts!

Dessert: Soppapillas (a type of fried pastry) with spiced chocolate sauce.

Stu: Moody was licking the chocolate off the spoon, he looked like he was going to pass out. He'd stopped talking to any of us, he didn't ask if this was okay, this was a communal spoon. He was putting it into his mouth really slowly, in slow motion... it looked like he was nursing.

Dave: In his defense, we had gone from heavy cocktails to proseco, to California red, and we were passing around the straw dogs at this point.

Stu: You mean the white dogs (American whiskey moon shine). The server brought us three different kinds and she was like "can't you tell how different they are?" and I was like "I have no idea!" Moody said he'd had to put his hand up on the wall in the bathroom for support.

Dave: At that point I thought we'd all had that experience, 'cause we agreed that it was the drunkest any of us had ever been in a restaurant. That was the night we ended up at that block party where they were playing "Dancing in the Streets." I caught last call at the liquor store and got a thing of Wild Turkey, we went back to that girls house and I threw up that whole meal meal in her bathroom. Well, not the whole thing... a third of it maybe.

Taco crawl in the Mission:

Al Pastor Taco

The next day we stumble over to the mission and embark on a taco crawl. Argentina and Mexico are playing in the World Cup so the mood is especially exuberant in the taco joints.

Dave: What do you look for in a down and dirty Al Pastor Taco?

Stu: Like most meats on a spit you want the combination of crispy outside, smooth fatty inside. Then I want crunchy onion, a little bit of herbal kick from the cilantro and then the vinegar and spice that comes from the salsa. Corn tortillas are quite flavourful, there's a lot of suppleness, there's almost something kind of creamy about them, they're sweet. There so much nicer than the papery, cardboard tortillas we get in Toronto, even at respected places.

Dave: I found that with foods that are kind of a cultural signature, like the taco or the Halifax donair, there's a special way to eat it that you have to figure out.

Stu: Right, because they give you two layered tacos beneath the meat and you have to split it up.

Dave: It's like the three shells (see Demolition Man), except it was the two tacos. How do you split it up without ruining the taco? They were very sparing with napkins.

Stu: It was hard to find napkins.

Dave: They wanted you to know how to do it, or to figure it out.

Stu: It was definitely a lot of meat piled up on those tortillas, it was not neatly wrapped or anything. There were not a lot of concessions made to the taco neophyte.

Elixir: (Make your own Bloody Mary Sunday)

Stu: I think that bar's been open since the 1890s or something crazy.

Dave: We put bacon in the Bloody Marys. Like cold pieces of bacon out of a pint glass. We couldn't figure out if the bartender was messing with us.

Stu: I knew he wasn't messing with us, I'd heard about the Bloody Mary bacon on the internet. There was an incredible selection of hot sauces. and then spice mixes, a pickle drawer.

Dave: It really helped me to understand how difficult it is to make a properly seasoned Caesar. It took me a long time of putting a lot of stuff in my drink to make it taste right.

Stu: It gave you a chance to try a complex Caesar though because you mixed a million things into it. Horseradish! Don't forget about the horseradish, it gives it a cocktail sauce flavour and makes it more meaty and spicy. The Horseradish tastes good with clam juice probably, right? That seafoody spice combo.

After applying the Caesar hangover glaze we walk in a hungover daze to Dolores park and meet up with Dorothia and some of her friends. It's so sunny, the Pride parade is going on downtown and I notice in this park that the divide between hippy and hipster is less accentuated on the west coast. Hippies and hipsters are actually friends. "Where can I find someone to smoke pot with?" I ask Dorothia.

"I dunno, walk ten steps in one direction and ask."

I walk around the entire park and everyone is smoking cigarettes which is frustrating and I think that's so weird because we're in California and everyone should be smoking pot. I get back to our little encampment looking forlorn but we all smell pot and there are some dudes hitting a joint ten steps away from us in one direction.

"Are you a cop?" the guy asks.

"Yeah, this beard is fake, you're all under arrest." I say, which is maybe kind of a stupid thing to say.

"I've known cops with beards. If you're a cop you legally have to tell me or else it's entrapment. Are you a cop?"

These dudes are real pot nerds and I learn that in Oakland, if you acquire the proper licenses, you can legally grow more marijuana than anywhere else in North America. It's sunny and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. In Toronto, I learn, there's a giant thunder storm and everyone's under arrest.

The next day we all wake up hungry for double cheeseburger.

Red's Java House:

Java House

Dave: I thought that the pier itself eclipsed the meal. Where we were sitting seemed like a cross between a setting in Scorsese movie and an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The Sheer Americanness of eating a double cheeseburger with a coke on a pier... it felt so right.

Stu: You felt like cops would eat there, from cop movies right? You could imagine McNulty or Bunk (see The Wire) going there. Or the cops from The Departed... or Serpico.

It's so sunny and hot that we decide to take the bus to the beach, to see the pacific ocean proper. We're foiled by the microclimates of the west coast and once we've travelled the distance from downtown to the beach we're walking through a cool mist. On the beach I'm intermittently struck by warm swathes of air emerging from the cool. I find a wooden beach horn and start waving it out towards the ocean, chanting "yo-papa, yo-papa," inventing a tribal water worshiping religion as we walk. Further down we all lie down on the warm sand where the swathes of heat are plentiful, and here I fall asleep for half an hour.

Hog Island Oyster Bar:

Happy Hour

5:00-7:00 Every Monday and Thursday at the Ferry Building.

$1 Oysters and $3.50 pints.

Stu: It was crowded as shit and we had to wait, but eventually we did get to eat twenty oysters. My one regret is that we didn't eat forty oysters, Jesus, shit, we could have had so many oysters. They were good little guys, very creamy. Hog Island has their own oyster farms.

Final thoughts, differences between Toronto and SF:

Stu: The quality of restaurants in a place is probably determined by the expectations of the market. In Toronto, people will wait to get tacos from El Asador, and the tacos from El Asador... are objectively bad. You get dried out meats, you get tortillas that taste like... cardboard is too kind, they taste like they're made out of wood.

Dave: You could get a taco on some street corner in the Mission and it would be superior to any Toronto taco?

Stu: I assume that any taco truck in San Francisco is way better than El Asador. Of course in San Francisco they're going to have better tacos, they have a much longer taco tradition.

Dave: What about the correlation between the amazing ingredients that are available in the Bay area and the restaurants that prepare the food?

Stu: I think what's more important is people's expectations. It's not like we have bad ingredients in Ontario, we have good ingredients. And it's not like those taco places were buying their tacos from any kind of fancy artisan purveyors. They were getting it from Industrial Meatland USA. When people have really high expectations it makes the food way better. I don't know why people in Toronto don't have higher expectations. We have pretty high expectations for Chinese food. There should be more competition here, Toronto has like four million people, the Bay area has far fewer than that. But San Francisco is close to L.A. California has a massive economy, there's probably a lot of restaurant dollars to go around. California's got a lot more money to spend on food. Toronto's got some pretty good stuff though too, that didn't we see in San Francisco: I didn't see much West Indian food, much middle eastern food... SF is supposed to have really good Vietnamese Thai, and famous Burmese restaurants.

Dave: I don't even know what Burmese food is.

Stu: They make a salad with tea leaves, it's supposed to be delicious.

Dave: What's Burma called now?

Stu: Myanmar, but I don't think anyone calls it Myanmarese food.

It's telling that the book already appears dated only three years after publication, as Harold opens by discussing the social networking revolution that is/was MySpace. If the book had been written today, we likely would have instead seen a discussion of Facebook and Twitter. Contemporary culture, much of it now digitally mediated, moves fast on the surface. If you blink you miss it. And yet, the logic beneath such surfaces shifts ever so slowly. If epiphenomena like MySpace and Facebook are like earthquakes, cultural logic functions like the movement of the tectonic plates over the liquid stone even deeper beneath. Harold is one of a number of contemporary thinkers able to see beneath those surface epiphenomena to the logic that shapes and is shaped by culture.

Any book that opens with a quote from William Gibson and a line from a Sonic Youth song is bound to get my attention. And OurSpace doesn't disappoint. Bringing together the ideas of such diverse figures as Gilles Deleuze and George Clinton, Neal Stephenson and Lawrence Lessig, Harold writes a book of true, honest, and critical insights. The only thing that bugs me about the book is that Harold, who champions the cause of the Creative Commons, did not have the book itself published under a Creative Commons license as authors like Toronto's own Creative Commons guru and sf writer Cory Doctorow has done with his work.

What marks the Creative Commons movement as different from many social movements and theory of recent history (i.e. Adorno and the critical theorists) is its inherent practical optimism, and this optimism is infused throughout OurSpace in which Harold, to riff off the critical theorists, "refuses" to dichotomize publics against markets. She does not make the common argument that publics are dissolving in markets, an argument that bemoans the emergence of "consumer publics". Nor does she advocate for said flaky "consumer publics". Instead, Harold makes the argument that "publics are everywhere" (xxvii) and that adversity can potentially make them stronger.

In OurSpace, Harold traces the history of media-centered resistance to neoliberal logic, differentiating between what she sees as three different types of strategy: sabotage, appropriation, and intensification. The Creative Commons falls under the third category.

According to Harold, activism must evolve with the times. Drawing from Deleuze's thought, Harold says that the shift from a disciplinary society to a control society requires new forms of resistance and new definitions of activism. She thus advances the Creative Commons or "Copyleft" movement as one that provides fertile ground from which true cultural change may grow, not in opposition to the logic of late capitalism but as an organic process that reconfigures this logic into a new and healthier logic.

OurSpace begins by trotting through the history of the Situationist International and their Dada-inspired resistance against the Charles de Gaulle government in the 1960s. Situationist thinker and activist Guy Debord, ironically famous for his influential book Society of the Spectacle, discusses a process parallel to the shift from discipline to control; a process of cultural degradation from being to having to appearing. The society of the spectacle no longer sells products but images, as Naomi Klein would later echo in No Logo. Harold identifies the Situationists as the precursors to contemporary culture jammers and makes the argument that while the tactics of the Situationists were appropriate and indeed necessary for their time, rendering the logic of the spectacle visible, forcing us to become aware of the water in which we swim, these tactics of negation do not go anywhere. While Harold is careful to maintain their necessity, she argues that a sustainable movement that actually reforms culture cannot come out of such strategies in a control society. As rebellion is appropriated by the culture industry, such rebellion must continue to "negate the [prior] negation". The rebel must always stay one step ahead of the culture industry. The rebel must ever be on the hunt for something new. Something authentic. The next best thing. This, of course, is the same logic that propels capitalism and fuels the spectacle itself. As Harold writes, "business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching" (62).

In OurSpace, Harold discusses sabotage through parody, pranks, hoaxes, and rumours, in turns praising and critiquing groups like Adbusters known for circulating scathing parody ads, the Biotic Baking Brigade who threw pies in the faces of neoliberal figureheads and promoters like Milton Friedman and Bill Gates, and the Yes Men who impersonated WTO representatives and delivered hyperbolic speeches on the WTO's behalf, among others. In these groups, Harold recognizes a generation of media savvy activists taking activism beyond the strategies popularized in the 60s, and she discusses the strengths and weaknesses of such strategies, which are largely consistent with those of the Situationist International, but amplified by their anachronism. Such strategies are eventually rendered by the culture industry as an enfeebled "no".

With regard to appropriation, Harold argues that the hero of appropriation, the pirate thief who steals from the rich to give to the poor, in fact reinforces the logic of property relations. Such figures unwittingly reinforce an image of scarcity, and as we are living in a society of spectacle, image is reality. Such a vision of the rebel hero presumes that publics and markets are separate and in opposition to one another. Furthermore, for such rebel heroes, the game is rigged against them. Harold argues that we need to take stealing out of the equation. We need to change how culture perceives appropriation so that appropriation -- in other words, the very process of creation -- is no longer considered "stealing".

Harold thus resists an Enlightenment conception of authorship, which she argues is both promoted by the culture industry and by the myth of the rebel auteur. In an attempt to shake off the myth of independence promoted by our current cultural logic in favour of a logic of interdependence, Harold turns to the Greek concept of "kairos" (propriety) as an alternative to a cultural logic with "property" at its heart. A logic of kairos, unlike the logic of capitalism, promotes a unity of "public ethos" and "private self", for which, as Cicero once argued, "a speaker and his or her words [are] inseparable" (126). According to Harold, we need to change the ethics of our culture to one that "promotes voluntary obligation and responsibility to one's community, not fear of punitive legal action" (148). This notion might even be taken beyond the mere creation of art to a broader definition of culture in general.

The last third of OurSpace is devoted to a brief history and discussion of intellectual property, which is indeed a contemporary phenomenon, and which perhaps deserves discussion at length in a future steelbananas article, especially with regard to the copyrighting of life. There's a reason that in America's early days Thomas Jefferson made explicit the danger of private interests owning ideas.

While recognizing that intellectual property law is "increasingly deployed ideologically" to shut down dissent (119), among other things, Harold's answer to this is not de-regulation but the redefinition of regulation as represented by the Creative Commons movement. For Harold, the way to open cultural content is through a "'flexible layer' of regulatory options" (149). The Creative Commons movement, as Harold explains, emerged out of the open source movement in the software world. Open source means that code is free, as in it costs no money and may be copied, learned from, distributed, appropriated, and played with under the assumption that ideas cannot belong to any one person and that ideas are in fact healthier when allowed to circulate and disseminate. Anyone who runs a computer on a Linux operating system has some knowledge of the power of open source and the creative possibilities that it allows and the curious interdependent publics that emerge. Creative Commons licences work in a similar fashion within the realm of intellectual property in general, particularly in the art world, allowing artists to define which rights are reserved on their work. So far, four licensing conditions exist to allow for more copyright flexibility:

"attribution" -- a copyright holder can require they be given credit for the portion of their work used; "noncommercial" -- a copyright holder can require their work not be used in commercial works without permission; "no derivative works" -- allows others to copy and distribute copyrighted material if they agree not to alter it in any way; and "share alike" -- one can use copyrighted material only if they agree to make the resulting work available under the same conditions determined by the original Creative Commons license (144).

With the ability to use these conditions in any combination with each other as the licence holder sees fit, Harold argues that the Creative Commons movement is a powerful step towards a more welcoming and human social order.

She challenges the notion, however, that such a commons exists as an "empty space," arguing that this reinforces the notion of an Enlightenment "subject" who "creates" in a vacuum, who fills a void, who owns collective creations. For Harold, "The rhetorical subject is less the origin than a coproduct of a rhetorical situation, of a kairotic encounter" (152), and thus creation relies upon a buzzing, complicated, and crowded field of discourses, as well as constraints and obstacles to be creatively overcome. There is hope in Harold's vision, for the more the society of control attempts to control, the more creative the resistance to control becomes in order to overcome that control. As Harold also notes, invention is not possible without obstacles and constraints. Or as the old adage would have it, adversity makes us stronger.

Do you have any questions for Jane’s Party?

Geez dude is that a Detroit Tigers shirt?

Jane's Party - This one or the undershirt?

I don’t even know!

Jane's Party - I’m a Toronto Blue Jays fan.

Who’s your team of choice?

I’m a Braves fan.

Starting simple, how did the band get started?

Well the drummer and myself have known each other for a long time. We met when we were both going to college in Orlando, dicking around. We both hated school, we both played instruments, liked a lot of the same bands. It was pretty magic the first few times we jammed, but we could never find the right people to play with. We were always switching out people who we played shows with, here and there as a favour. Then one day we were in Miami for the Ultra music festival, not playing it just hanging with some friends, when we went to this crazy after party and Tom and Brian were there. Tom came up to me, told me he heard some of our recordings, thought they were awesome and wanted to play in the band. I told him if he was serious to call me. Called the next day, cancelled his plans to move to Miami, I cancelled my plans to go back to school, he quit his job. We wanted to do this band and that was it.

Photo by King Frankenstein

Why did you decide to go with this style, this sort of like Brian Wilson down a hallway? It’s both reflective but distant from a lot of the stuff we’re hearing and I’m curious as to how it developed.

Naturally and organically. That’s the way it should. I guess at first I was singing loud, high pitched things because at first we were playing in rooms with shitty PAs, so I had to scream to get over most of the stuff. I have a bad habit of writing really acrobatic vocal melodies that I can never execute live. In the studio it’s wonderful, because I can double-track it, live it’s just kind of melted. We’ve always been guitar driven, melodic indie rock music, the bands that influenced us were Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Pavement kind of stuff.

Your first album really took off, what’s it like to hit the ground running like that, is it nerve-wracking, wonderful?

It’s wonderful. I get to see the world, I get to play in front of a lot of people. A lot of people like our music and relate to it. It’s nerve-wracking because everyone’s looking to tear you down for any stupid reason. I’m sure I’ll find a blog somewhere about the red, white and blue shirt I’m wearing tonight.

I saw Wussy last night and one of them was wearing American striped pants.

That’s awesome.

You have nothing to worry about, you’re subtle.

There’s a lot of backlash when a band gets a lot of attention really fast. Haters gunna hate, players gunna play.

Is that not just part of the scene cycle, to love and then hate?

The hype cycle is exactly what you think it is. People build you up and tear you down, the best way is to just not get emotionally invested into that. Keep playing shows, keep writing good songs, your fans will be your fans and be at your shows no matter what some blogger says.

This might be hard for us Toronto locals to understand, but it’s hard not to see the sudden popularity of ‘the surf’ in new music, any insight into that?

Well, we’re from Florida so we come by that theme honestly, there’s a lot of bands that are also keying in on that imagery. Best Coast is playing tonight, Beach Fossils, Beach House. We of drew upon that idea, not because of those bands, we had no idea that people would want to listen to that beach theme. It’s kind of unexpected, also kind of annoying.

It just seems so coordinated.

I promise it isn’t. Great minds think alike.

Jane's Party - Where did you get the name Surfer Blood from? It’s a great name.

We were taking a trip to Gainesville, we were really hung over, we were going to a show. We woke up late, we were in a rush, TJ took some kind of surfer backpack, I’m like, “Dude, that’s so gnarly man.” I was ragging on him really hard. Somehow we came up with the name Surfer Blood, and we liked it because it takes the classic image but also fucks with it a little bit. A youthful, invulnerable in-your-face attitude. Surfers never die.

Jane's Party - Unless there’s a shark in the water.

Do you think this desire for the surf is a form of escapism?

Oh it’s totally escapism. Real life is scary. Current times are shitty. Politics are messed up. People are really irresponsible and fuck up their oil rigs, messing up our earth and there’s not a whole lot we can do about that. So there is some escapism. But for us it was kind of an aesthetic choice, and I don’t think aestheticism is escapism by any means.

Should music be escapism?

No, not at all. If Minor Threat was an escapist band I’d be pretty bummed. If Fugazi were an escapist band I’d be pretty bummed. Music is whatever works for you and whatever you want to go for.

It is the calm after the thunderstorm.

Fashion spent a 2010 Fall/Winter season worshiping Balmain’s party-girl aesthetic with studded handbags, navy sequined cropped jackets, body-con dresses and strappy four-inch gladiator heels that soared above the ground. Men and women raged the nightclub scene in disco colours like fuschia, orange, and purple. Nars’s Schiap nail polish was a popular choice, named after surrealist fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. Sweaters with broad, beaded shoulders and marching band jackets were a salute to the King of Pop’s death.

One fashion year later, that memory is bittersweet. Michael Jackson hits no longer tremble through the speakers in stores. I recently heard a salesgirl chat so loudly with another about her weekend plans that she drowned out a faintly played, radio station tribute of “The Girl is Mine”.

After the rain comes sun, and the summer heat is like a Sunday morning hangover. On the dog days of summer where it’s over 37 degrees Celcius, I can only think of one thing to cool me down, and that’s to be on the water. Quite frankly, the beach wouldn’t be the right cure to those throbbing UV rays, especially with the effects of global warming strutting before the melted eyeshadow on our eyes. Instead of transporting us to tropical island excursions this season, several new designers have taken inspiration from boating trips and sailing voyages for their Resort 2011 and Spring/Summer collections. Being on a sailboat is much cooler anyways.

For some designers, sailing voyages remind them of impressionist artists who took their rowboats into nature and painted abstract flowers. In the impressionist art movement, spontaneity was the drive, and the blurring between lines was an important element that exemplified the feminine and romantic spirit of those days. On the runway, small, multicoloured florals were the predominant print of the season. The floral prints look less Renaissance and more Impressionist in their execution - less Italian and more French in their cultural references. Dresses, blouses, pants, shorts, sailor shorts, scarves, jackets and everything you can possibly imagine down to the ankle socks on your feet were printed in small abstract flowers. Some flowers even bled into the colours of others. These new textile designers give Monet a run for his money. Cacharel and Balenciaga even styled separates together in head-to-toe floral prints, making it hard for the eye to differentiate where the blouse ends and the pant waistband begins. At Jason Wu, long bias-cut dresses with ruffles were given a further Parisian touch with confectionery colours.

Left to Right: Cacharel Resort 2011, Balenciaga Resort 2011, Jason Wu Resort 2011, Jill Stuart Resort 2011 - Courtesy of Style.com

And while florals are not a new Spring trend we haven’t seen before, their enthusiastic whimsy this season are made current by designers blurring the boundaries between the feminine and masculine. The femininity of the printed frocks is juxtaposed with dandy, masculine elements and southern garcon flair, seen through finishing details and accessories. The straw porkpie hat is a popular fashion accessory on the runway, with references to gender pushing artists such as Mary Cassatt, or in the case of the Dior men’s show, Buster Keaton. For women, neck bows and French jabots are worn with tailored men’s shirts or military cargo jackets; tight tops are paired with slouchy pants; exaggerated glasses balance serious shifts; gingham plaid patterns turn up in chain handbags; and high-waisted ankle pants come in waist-to-toe flower prints. I can see the girls on the street pairing these pants with Sperry top-sider boat shoes.

Even men have adopted a creative outlet through their appearance as much as women. Cream coloured suits were splattered with watercolor flower motifs at Kenzo; Lanvin creates a men’s embossed brocade suit; John Galliano has a Degas moment, putting his male models in satin ballet point shoes with jute soles.

Left to right: John Galliano S/S 2011, Kenzo S/S 2011, Lanvin Homme S/S 2011 - Courtesy of Style.com

In some cases, the soft, romantic boating motifs for summer were contrasted by mod silhouettes in Technicolor and nautical brass accessories, as if taken straight out of the Godard classic Pierrot Le Fou, set in the Mediterranean Sea. Junya Watanabe’s Men’s show had jackets in all the primary colors taken straight out of  Jean-Paul Belmondo’s closet. Jil Sander did an entire collection of solid neon basics. Men exposed their ankles in flood pants by rolling up the hems, which proves to be a recession-proof technique that avoids taking your slacks to the tailor. Marc Jacob’s women’s Resort collection was also quirky, whimsical and nautical at the same time. Retro colour-blocked dresses and exaggerated straw boaters reminded me of Anna Karina’s baby blue sweaters and bright red dresses. Prada went overboard in Technicolor accessories, which ranged from ankle socks in fun colors to bracelets that reminded me of the stacked ring toys I used to play with when I was a kid.

Left to Right: Junya Watanabe S/S 2011, Marc Jacobs Resort 2011, Jil Sander S/S 2011, Prada Resort 2011 - Courtesy of Style.com

How is it that fashion has taken inspiration from such opposite eras of our timeline? Although it’s hard to dissect how Renoir’s “Dejuner-Canotiers/The Boating Party” could be reincarnated on the runway, or how designers figure that women and men want to buy clothes that pay tribute to New Wave French cinema, both ideas seem to merge together this season to form the perfect outfits for a summer voyage.

I recently went to a public park screening of Godard’s A Woman is a Woman in the Lower East Side of New York. It was my friend Isabel’s idea -- even if the movie was still trippy after two glasses of wine, we could at least take pleasure in the colours, the costumes, and the art direction. There were hundreds of young neighbourhood intellectuals and artsy fartsies there that night, absorbing the artistic inspiration from this period, while smirking at the crappy, confusing dialogue. They probably would have done just the same in the sixties. The experience was retro, but still fresh.

Perhaps it has to do with the resurgence of existentialism in the air, and that dressing in this eclectic manner is an expression of freedom to live one’s life as passionately as possible. Maybe it’s an ironic commentary on the social divides created by commercial mass market corporations -- screw the gender rules created by the patriarchal society, I want to wear FLOWERS! Maybe women and men just prefer to wear clothes where they don’t have to take themselves too seriously, especially on vacation. Whatever it all means, the beauty of summer is knowing that any day is an opportune moment for an expedition, and a sailing one at that. After a hard year of being bombarded with work, school, papers, numbers, and bills to name a few, it’s nice to relax and play, no?

Everyone’s heard tales of Rochdale College, Toronto’s infamous free-thinking, free-spirited, tuition-free college of the 60s. Residing in an 18-storey apartment building, it was Canada largest co-op housing program and a place for artistic exploration, political discussions, and guerilla academics. Trying to capture all that in a short Fringe show seems an impossible task.

Still, Rochdale: Livin’ the Dream puts in a valiant effort. Written by the Breanne Ritchie, Christopher Rodriguez, and Scott Cavalheiro this show is a lot like the college itself: based on good intentions that fizzled out in the end. It’s a fun reminder of our Torontonian roots in community culture and idealist thinking, but as a play it struggles.

None of the performances were particularly stunning, though Cavalheiro (who plays the Prez, Robert Hilton) is certainly dedicated to his role. Baring his heart (and body!) much to the audience’s amusement. The DJ, Terry “Tallboy” Tunstein (Shamier Anderson) was great, but it’s too bad the credibility of his character disappeared as he tried to put 45s on a turntable without an adapter. Maybe that’s my sound production nerdiness creeping in as a bias, but the whole set was lacking the genuineness that their story called for. It pays homage to the Unknown Student sculpture outside, but the rest of the art representations are purely speculative. The set lacked the psychedelic tones of the original art, the very lifeblood of the college, but you did still get the free-spirited idea of the space.

The true pity is that there is so much history and life in Rochdale’s tale that never got touched on. Instead, as is often the pitfall of young playwrights, the play surrounded a story of drugs and partying, and the inevitable terror of when it all goes wrong. I wouldn’t classify it as an after school special, but it certainly crosses that line at times. It’s a difficult topic to write about well, and it does take some gall to tackle a project of this scale. I look forward to seeing what Ritchie, Rodriquez and Cavalheiro do in the future because I’m betting they can do better. If Rochdale was proof of anything, it’s that good things can come of messy situations. After all, Theatre Passe Muraille is just one of the many successes that emerged from the co-op.

Photo courtesy of blogwaybaby.com

Wedding Night in Canada

A comedy in the surest form, this play opens with the biggest joke of all: that the Leafs could ever land a chance at the Stanley Cup. Wedding Night in Canada, written by Francine Dick and directed by Victoria Shepherd, combines this impossible hilarity and the antics of a bridezilla for an evening of warmhearted chuckles and a sincerity not often found in Fringe.

Heddy, the bride (played by Esther Jaciuk), is furious when her wedding reception is taken over by giant screen TVs and hockey fever. To her dismay, the guests seem more interested in watching the playoffs than enjoying her perfectly planned day and in the temper tantrum of the century, she locks herself in a storeroom. Jaciuk plays a bridezilla with alarming authenticity - you’ve got to wonder what her own wedding day would be like! Flamboyant best man Karim (Adrian Rebucas) is sent in to rally morale. Rebucas, in his Fringe premiere, rallies the entire audience’s morale, stealing the show with his absurd facial expressions and charming physical humour. The groom, John Rowe, makes an entrance of course, but barely manages to win over his bride or the audience.

The design was simple, making it the perfect set up for a fringe show. The actors were in the spotlight, so the audience never once missed a witty joke or an inappropriately placed hand… I have it on good authority that the blocking notes were something akin to softcore porn. (Rest assured, nothing too explicit, just enough to make poor Karim hilariously uncomfortable with the newlyweds). Dick hoped her show will offer a “fun and lighthearted time,” and it does just that.

Overall Wedding Night in Canada is an endearing piece sure to be loved by any woman who’s ever planned an event, dealt with Stanley Cup or Super Bowl party… and every man who fantasizes about the Leafs finally winning something.

Photo by Matthew Filipowich

Contrary to my typical time/space arrangement, I do not currently exist in Toronto – and thus at Eastern Standard Time. Rather, as of last week I have temporarily returned to my roots: Western Canada, Edmonton to be exact, and will be here visiting family and such for the next few weeks. It’s been pretty good thus far.

So, those of you familiar with this column will surely know that I’ve lost my faith a little bit with regards to the TTC, as well as Toronto’s capacity to give a shit about infrastructure. G20 certainly didn’t help, either. In addition to my overwhelming desire to vomit all over Dalton McGuinty’s best suit, I crave little more than to suckerpunch David Miller when his bodyguards aren’t looking and then take him out for coffee where I will apologize for clocking him and explain the best strategy for going about growing a pair. This is of course without even getting into the unnatural, obscene things I’d like to see done to the Fuhrer. But that’s all actually not at all what I wanted to talk about here. I just wanted to briefly remind everyone that those guys are chumps.

Infrastructure is getting to be a pretty prickly issue in Toronto, even more so than usual. Mostly because getting anything accomplished in this city is – you guessed it – more time consuming and costly than the average person’s logic would suggest. As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, I’m often prone to saying that the majority of Toronto’s infrastructure problems are more or less universal as far as larger cities go. Name me a city with over a half million citizens that doesn’t have a tighter-than-reasonable budget and a whole whack of problems that need a-solvin’ and fast.

While far from the utopian Magic City of Efficient Infrastructure that is forever haunting my dreams with its glorious promise – not to mention that it will forever live in the shadows of much greater Canadian cities – I was surprised to find when I arrived in Edmonton, that the city was being developed in many positive directions and with seeming haste. Weird. Usually Alberta is a hot, sweaty breeding ground for politicians of the tax-slashing, surplus-enjoying sort – not to mention Western Separatists – who enjoy little more than giving cities a hard time. Strangely though, there seems to be a lot going on around here when it comes to transit and urban development.

I lived in Edmonton until I was nineteen and at no point was transit even remotely a priority for anyone. I’m the only person I can think of around here who doesn’t know how to drive, so who cares about the ETS (Edmonton Transit System)? This is first and foremost, above and beyond, irrevocably, interminably and staunchly a motorist’s city. Up until recently, I would rank the ETS down with the atrocious mess that is Mississauga Transit. For some reason, though, city council seems to be concerned that people might actually like to enjoy the city they live in.

Seriously, guys, this is some completely unheard of stuff.

Courtesy of the City of Edmonton

Edmonton doesn’t have a subway in the sense that Toronto has a subway. Toronto’s subway (apart from the SRT) is heavy rail, almost entirely underground, and of course it’s much larger. Edmonton’s rapid transit system consists of a single light rail line (LRT) that runs from the northeast corner of the city to the south-central edge with a grand total of fifteen stations end to end. This seems pretty unimpressive, until you consider that one third of the line has been built in the past four years after having being stuck at a measly ten stations since 1992. The two latest additions to the Southern extension project, Southgate and Century Park stations, were just opened earlier this year. I ventured down that way – which given the location of my parents’ place in relation to the extension was no short trip – and was surprised to find that the new stations are operating as though they’ve always been there, integrated flawlessly at street level. I was impressed.

Now it seems as though Edmonton City Council is going transit crazy, with plans to extend the LRT in just about every direction possible, including the construction of a second line to serve the city’s two stranded-yet-primary education centers: the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and Grant MacEwan University (the University of Alberta is already served by three separate stations in the existing network). Not only do the plans for these projects exist, but the city is already finding inroads for funding them and is giving them an extremely liberal timeline for completion.

Of course, there are many differences between TTC and ETS, Toronto and Edmonton. The most obvious of which is that Toronto is a much bigger city with about three times the population in the city proper and almost five times bigger as a metropolitan area. Also, Alberta is typically viewed as a province with money to throw around. Sure. Fine. Personally, I am of the mind that when it comes to budget, infrastructure, etc, everything is proportional. Toronto has three times as many people, it should have three times the budget and three times the demand for infrastructure initiatives. We’re still talking about the same country, so costs should realistically be in the same ballpark. There’s a lot of things to take into account, and there will never be a clear cut answer of which city is necessarily “ahead”.

However, there are a few things that I would like to draw attention to that make Edmonton Transit interesting when compared to the TTC:

1. Edmonton transit, in terms of both subways and buses is one hundred per cent wheelchair accessible. The TTC is not even close to that.
2. Edmonton sets unrealistic timelines. This seems like a bad thing, but in this case I’m inclined to believe that it’s much more irritating to hear in 2010 that something is going to take until 2020 than it is in 2010 to hear that something is going to take until 2014 and then takes until 2020. At the very least it makes projects palpable to citizens and then they can complain about how something that they know about is coming is taking so long, rather than how this thing that probably isn’t going to happen still isn’t happening.
3. This is the big one for me: staggered openings. I don’t understand why the TTC feels that it is necessary to wait until an entire line is built before considering it open. With the Southern expansion of the LRT, Edmonton Transit opened a station in 2006, two in 2009 and two more in 2010. Again, citizens are more content when things are palpable to them. It makes it at least appear as though things are happening. In Toronto, the TTC expects to open the Yonge-University-Spadina extension to York University/Vaughn to open all at once allegedly in 2014, but more realistically 2016-18. But with all of the budget cuts and skyrocketing costs, not to mention the time it takes to get projects off of the ground at all, even projects like this that have been assured to be a done deal are looking less plausible by the second. Why don’t we stagger the station openings over the course of a few years rather than waiting until their all finished? Sheppard West and Finch West in 2012, York University and Steeles West in 2014 and Highway 7 and Vaughn Corporate Center in 2016. Everybody’s happy-ish. The only realistic downside to this is, as we’ve seen with the Sheppard subway, when this happens, governments tend to see opportunities to pack in the project early and halt development because “hey, this should be good enough.”

Finally, much bigger cities are expanding at a much faster rate, including some of the largest rapid transit systems in the world. New York’s subway is expanding, London’s underground is expanding, Paris’ Metro is expanding. Even Edmonton’s comparatively measly LRT is expanding at a much faster rate than Toronto’s subways or light rail transit. There’s a reason I haven’t touched vodka in years: I was saving it for Dalton.

Comments

• July 16, 2010, Fiona writes: Haha, how interesting that you decided to talk about Edmonton! Very funny article. Good times with ETS!
• July 21, 2010, Refreshed writes: woah. a piece on SB that isn't Toronto-centric. I darn near stroked out!

Well, A Horse and His Boy, I'm sorry for mildly underestimating you, because after seeing you the second time, you have been officially promoted from "pretty deece" to "totally rad." Nice!

Photo by Sara Froese, Courtesy of A Horse and His Boy

A Horse and His Boy are of an interesting breed. They play a strange blend of sample/synth-heavy post-rock/electro with lots of screaming. It's really weird and completely excellent.

"When people try to describe our music by using other bands, they always use completely different bands," says keyboardist and co-lead vocalist Nathan Noble, "I think Bauhaus is the only one I've head twice."

"Mostly late seventies art-rock bands," concurs sampler and co-lead vocalist, Aaron Simmons.

I'm going to say think of a Canadian Fuck Buttons with post-punk-ish vocals.

Last year, A Horse and His Boy released their first album on their own label, Open House - or, OH! as it's displayed, which is actually an arts collective that the band has started with other London-based musicians and artists. The record is a five track, thirty-minute intense trip through expansive ambient soundscapes, bizarre synth samples and endless, blissful noise. Their live set is equally as intense, as A Horse and His Boy, who are just about the most mismatched looking group of all time, make an unholy racket, punishing sound systems with the sheer level of noise, which by the time their songs peak is simply mind-boggling.

Aaron: "It's our first record, so it took a long time to evolve. It initially started out as a solo project for me and some of those songs and samples were used in that. Then Nathan and Sam joined and we evolved the songs more and then the other two joined and we evolved the songs more. And then we recorded it. It came out last September, we had been recording it for six months and writing it for about a year before that... It was recorded at a studio in London, a recording school, actually."

Nathan: "Ontarion Institute of Audio Recording Technology."

Aaron: "We worked with one of the interns there, so we got a pretty good deal to use an amazing studio."

Photo by Andrew Colvin, Courtesy of A Horse and His Boy

A Horse and His Boy are just one of a lot of rock bands working today that makes liberal use of a sampler, which as Aaron and Nathan tell me, is a device essential to shaping the group's sound in many ways from songwriting, to recording to the band's live performances.

Aaron: "Usually, I'll just have some samples kicking around on my sampler and so when we feel like jamming we'll just turn one of those on and just write it there in the room, jam on it. Within a few takes of the song we'll have a pretty good structure for it."

Nathan: "There's not a whole lot of planning, the songs just kind of happen. The songs seem to come easily to us, not a lot of hangups, not a lot of disagreement..."

Aaron: "Most of the samples that we use are just things that I've made. When I started out I was using all sorts of different records, but now I will usually just come up with something on my synth and just sample that, have it looping because I am terrible at performing live music."

Nathan: "It's just easier."

Aaron: "Yeah, I wouldn't be able to sing if I was just sitting there trying to play those parts."

Nathan: "The head-pat tummy-rub is pretty difficult for both of us. There's a part in one of the new songs that I can't play and sing at the same time so I just stop playing, but on the recording I am still playing.

Aaron: "It allows you to do a lot of things you wouldn't be able to do live, get a lot of sounds you can't get live..."

Nathan: "So samples are kind of our crutch, but crutches aren't bad..."

I approached Nathan after the band's set at the Gladstone and he expressed to me some frustration with playing in a city like Toronto that the band isn't used to, where they don't have as much of a following as they do in their hometown, London. He told me that he felt a lot of strain in going from London where the band is liable to play for crowds of hundreds to Toronto where the audiences are much less numerous. Of course, the more a band plays in a city, the more of a following they'll get and I'm fairly certain that a group as interesting and unique as A Horse and His Boy should have no trouble in indie-rock crazy Toronto, given a little more exposure and a few more gigs.

"It's pretty easy to get noticed in a place like London," says Aaron.

A Horse and His Boy are a serious, serious band. After their set at the Gladstone, I was officially a convert, I even found their Narnia-referencing name to be charming and appropriate. Their music rides that very fine line between outright experimentation and total accessibility that we all enjoy so much and I personally hope to see them around town more often.

My conspiracy theorist fears are not completely unwarranted. Just last month, a man was infected by a computer virus. Okay, it is not as wacky as it sounds. Mark Gasson, a University of Reader researcher, had a chip implanted in his hand and deliberately infected it with a virus from a laboratory computer. He was testing how simple radio-frequency identification chips like those used to track pets and other animals can carry computer viruses. As implantable bionic devices, like pacemakers, cochlear implants and “deep brain stimulators” become more complex, they will also have the potential to be infected by technological viruses. Imagine how terrifying The Matrix would have been if Agent Smith could control you from the inside. And then he could spread himself to anything you touch because everyone has wi-fi these days.

Courtesy of Maximum PC

But seriously, even animals are more hip than I am. Cats are using Twitter via a lifelogging device equipped with a camera, acceleration sensor, and a GPS. The device detects the activities of what the cat is doing and posts comments on Twitter like “this tastes good” when the cat is eating something or “on a walk” when the kitty is taking a stroll. The reason I never got a Twitter is because I don’t think anyone would be care so much about my daily activities that they’d read updates on me taking the bus or something. Apparently cats are more interesting than I am.

No one I knew got an iPad because they’re just glorified iPod Touches and no one wants to carry around what sounds like an electronic “feminine sanitary napkin”. I really think Apple made a boo-boo on that one but at least dolphins are into it. They’re using iPads to teach dolphins to communicate with us. They can touch their noses (beaks) to a wide assortment of symbols on the screen and tell us when they’re sad or when they’re planning to enslave the human race with the help of Tweeting kittens and our brain pacemakers.

Sources:
Ars Technica
BBC
Maximum PC

Though Bee Thousand is entirely serious about its rock n’ roll content, its lo-fi medium strives to assert a more humorous and flippant tone. This disparity between Bee Thousand’s audible manifestation and tone of its content creates the central territory in which irony locates itself. While it’s lo-fi medium seems like it should express something scrappier and entirely less serious, GBV’s emphatic use of its sonic convention suggests that despite its shortcomings, it is able to express as much, if not more, than the traditionally comprehensible, high budget rock n’ roll medium. The appeal of lo-fi, then, is not in our appreciation for imperfection, but in the ironic appreciation we develop for art that demonstrates one thing, yet says something entirely different. Without establishing these oppositional qualities, lo-fi is nothing more than an aesthetic choice that struggles to translate into more than the novelty of its medium.

Photo by Scott Thomas Moroz

Lo-fi music is a lot like contemporary film intentionally filmed in black and white. What makes it interesting is not its intrinsic black and white qualities, but its intentional lack of colour in an age of advanced filmmaking technology. Once the audience is able to surpass the film’s technological shortcomings, the expectation is that they will locate the ironic disparity between the contemporary film and its seemingly out-of-date medium. A good example of this is Clerks, the Kevin Smith film about the unspectacular nuances of having the seemingly dead-end position of running a New Jersey convenience store. Clerks, released in 1994 and filmed entirely in black and white, is based on a period in Smith’s life in which he actually worked at a New Jersey convenience store. Though Clerks is designed to resemble a recent real life period, its black and white presentation prevents us from assuming that this is so. Rather than immersing us in the more lifelike world of colour, Clerks suspends us in a black and white classic-film gaze that acts as a constant reminder that what we see is distinctly less real than what is actually happening. Had Clerks been filmed in regular colour, it likely would have been less of a spectacularly ironic depiction of boring life and more of simply an unspectacular depiction of boring life.

With Bee Thousand as its primary catalyst, lo-fi has become less of a novelty and far more of a credible medium since the album’s release, also in 1994. While it’s certainly not the first example of a popular lo-fi recording (Springsteen’s Nebraska probably deserves this accolade), Bee Thousand unquestionably stands as the genre’s most celebrated artistic achievement. This, I would argue, has less to do with the songs themselves than it does with the album’s overall flawless mobilization of irony. But just as Bee Thousand exemplified a genre’s core cultural sensibility, it deluded the potential for future artists to achieve the same level of unparalleled spontaneity. In other words, lo-fi is now certainly more of a calculated expression and far less of a creative risk. This is less anybody’s fault than it is the natural progression of cutting-edge art gradually becoming more homogeneous as the medium becomes more commonplace. It’s probably worth noting that in 1999 Guided by Voices traded in their lo-fi sound for a much safer recording endeavor with the Cars’ Ric Ocasek. The resulting album, Do the Collapse, was a colossal flop. Strangely, lo-fi’s growth in credibility seemed to have a backwards effect on GBV. The band broke up in 2004 with frontman Robert Pollard embarking on a relatively successful solo career. It’s probably also worth noting that in 2005 Pollard released a comedy record titled Relaxation of the Asshole. While this is in no way significant to the rest of this article, it’s very much completely awesome.

Though lo-fi continues to become a more palatable term to throw around when describing bands, it remains massively underqualified in describing their live show. Frustratingly enough, this is central to my limited knowledge of both Wavves and Japandroids, the two bands I would be seeing on Friday night of this year’s NXNE festival. I have no choice but to make do, and hope that these artists’ lo-fi tendencies are about more than just an affinity for cheap, novel recording choices. (Wavves were preceded by a set from a band called The Happy Hollows, a ruthlessly energetic band from Los Angeles. I caught half of their set and actually wished I’d been able to see it all.)

A band’s lo-fi aesthetic should be representative of more than just their manifest sound qualities. If this were the case lo-fi would be an entirely superficial descriptor, failing to address the ironic appeal central to lo-fi as a communicative medium. For instance, Guided by Voices, an understandably lo-fi band, would often employ an array of rock n’ roll theatrics in their live shows, including excessive drinking, smoking, windmill guitar strums and Roger Daltrey-esque microphone-swings. At the time of Bee Thousand’s release, frontman Pollard was nearly forty-years old and just recently out of his job as an elementary schoolteacher. Not your typical rock n’ roll band. Yet, the fact that their live show was so unapologetically rock n’ roll seemed like adequate compensation for their remarkably un-rock n’ roll personas. Having a group of middle-aged suburban dudes act like classic rock royalty was not simply mere novelty, but the perfect extension of Bee Thousand’s ironic lo-fi expression.

Wavves, on the other hand, are a young, much-hyped band from San Diego, California. Lead singer Nathan Williams writes hook-heavy, pop-punk songs and records them directly into his Macbook’s internal microphone. Their resulting lo-fi recordings ooze heavy doses of both destructiveness and exuberance. I figured the live show would be a lot like their lo-fi recordings – exciting, energetic and rough around the edges. Even before they’ve played a note, I was already mesmerized by the eight-foot-tall cardboard cutouts of green ghouls they’ve placed on each side of the stage. I did, however, figure this to be a strange choice. Their live show already seemed a lot less accidental than their supposedly spontaneous and haphazard recordings.

By the time their scheduled eleven o’clock start time rolled around, the band was still soundchecking. Williams was demanding more reverb in his microphone while the drummer told mostly unfunny jokes akin to late-90s Blink-182 stage banter. By the time the band finally kicked into a tune, the energy was high and the room got pretty raucous. Despite finally riding some momentum, Wavves brought everything to a halt after the first song, and subsequently every song after that, and continued sharing their grating humour with us. This frustrated me, primarily because their live show seemed to lack all the overexcited qualities that made their lo-fi recorded output so appealing. Instead, the guys just came off looking like a bunch of brats trying to piss everyone off. Constantly toggling room dynamics is an admirable slacker-rock strategy if you allow your songs to set an unchallengeable tone. Unfortunately, Wavves were clinging to their banter as though it were the primary spectacle, therefore marginalizing the strength of their actual songs.

Based on their recordings alone, lo-fi seems like the adequate vehicle for Wavves to emphasize their youthful energy and destructiveness. By pitting their firepower against seemingly oppositional recording circumstances, Wavves come across as a powerfully urgent force on record. Their live show, however, suggests their whole aesthetic is little more than novel choice. That is because on stage, Wavves strive to distance themselves from a room of could-be supporters rather than use their songs to whip everyone into an absolute frenzy. Ultimately, their lo-fi sound is less indicative of urgency and instead painfully symbolic of a band perfectly content with alienating themselves as a means of reaffirming their self-appointed superiority. Rather than using lo-fi as a means of highlighting greater ironic subtext, Wavves’ lo-fi expression appears shallowly fun and self-absorbed.

Japandroids - Photo by Scott Thomas Moroz

For Japandroids to follow up Wavves intentionally staggered and inconsistent spectacle was a lot like a major league batter expecting a series of hard curveballs and instead seeing only lofty softballs. I’d listened to Japandroids’ Post-Nothing a few times before the show and couldn’t help but feel that its heavy dose of earnest garage-rock was exactly what this room needed. Yet, I certainly remained dubious. What I loved about Post-Nothing is how it made Japandroids’ guitar and drum combo appear as full and large as a regular-sized band. Part of this I figured to be due to the album’s limited sonic scope. The instrumental and vocal production is consistently raw, and engineered to peak whenever lead singer Brian King decides scream his face off. Whatever Post-Nothing lacks in sonic perfection it makes up for in sheer attitude and tone of delivery. Despite sounding like a dirty party record, Post-Nothing is desperately sincere in its discussion of adolescent uncertainty and the tribulations of being young, bored and jaded in your hometown. In many ways its attitude/presentation dichotomy is similar to that of Bee Thousand, wherein the limited sonic scope enhances the album’s content by developing an appealing degree of irony.

When Japandroids assembled on stage around midnight, King quickly identified himself, his bandmate (drummer David Prowse), their collective moniker and their hometown. Introduction over. No bullshit (softball already sailing into left-center bleachers). It was hard to tell if his charisma was natural or the result of non-stop touring. Either way, his blistering urgency cleared the air of whatever frustration remained in the room. Clearly, I was no longer doubtful. Japandroids sounded similar on stage to how they sound on record – bleedingly loud and ready to push the limits of their medium to the brink. King spent most of the show hammering out open chords in front of a curiously giant wall of amps. While constantly spitting all over the stage, he frantically leapt on and off a conspicuously placed riser in front of Prowse’s kickdrum. While Post-Nothing thrives by having you believe Japandroids’ overwhelming energy is merely the result of a loud band pinned against a lo-fi guise, their live show operates as a means of proving otherwise. Japandroids’ rock n’ roll presence is positively undeniable. This, of course, only enhances Post-Nothing as an ironic depiction of a very powerful and perfectly capable rock n’ roll band choosing to deliver their content through an intentionally underqualified lo-fi medium. While Post-Nothing or Bee Thousand may appear novel on the surface, it is their careful use of irony that encourage us to look beyond what we normally want to perceive as imperfections.

For the average North American sports fan, the month of June is full of excitement. Why? The NHL and NBA finals are being fought over, the new season of Major League Baseball is well under way, and the CFL and NFL begin preseason training camp shortly. Suffice to say, the evenings and weekends are jam packed with excitement throughout the bars, living rooms and bedrooms of the nation. However, there is a glaring exception from this list: football. On June 11th, the World Cup finals tournament will begin South Africa, and the whole world will watch. Or will they?

Historically, the American tradition revolves around three sports: baseball, basketball and football. The same way hockey reflects Canadian culture and attitude, these three sports have permeated the American sports landscape for generations. The history of these sports in America – and their effect on the culture – is an interesting question, but will not be considered here. The point to be made is that American sports, as with American art and literature, is an introverted beast that ignores all outside influence so as to project their own attitudes on others. Indeed, this pomposity is witnessed in many mediums. Hollywood, for example, is nothing but an over-glamorized media creation used to project particular conceptions and ways of living onto the public through the movies.

Canadian sports media reflected this attitude toward football for years. It makes sense – we are a small nation (in terms of people) that sits directly above America and its huge cultural and media machine. There was little organization of leagues for kids or adults, rarely were top European games shown on the weekends, and the general sense was that Canadians, like our American neighbors, preferred the pigskin to the ball. But as we all know, media is not always an accurate representation of a nation, particularly a country as multicultural as Canada.

Consider the city of Toronto as a microcosm of the nation. Toronto can be described regionally in relation to its variety of dense cultural hubs. Little Portugal, Little Italy, Chinatown, Greek-town and more all give Toronto its rich cultural backbone. Obviously all these regions are distinct because of the differing cultural character, and the most common way in which these cultural minorities project their homeland patriotism is through football paraphernalia.

I currently live in Little Portugal, a region that stretches West of Shaw to Lansdowne, and north from Queen to College. I have only lived here for a month, but it is obvious this neighborhood is football mad. Nearly every shop along Dundas or College has some reference to football, either pictures of the national team, logos of Benfica or Porto (the two biggest Portuguese clubs) or what have you. This neighborhood has been Portugal mad for the month, as have all other ethnic neighborhoods that have a corresponding team in the tournament. This transformation can be expected in every ethnic neighborhood in every city in North America, which is a great thing.

Photo by King Frankenstein

It must be said that the World Cup, unlike any other sporting event, has the power to convey important values such as unity solidarity and equality. Witness the match between Ghana and the Unites States of America, when the players from both teams stood for pictures holding a “Say NO to Racism” sign. The tournament is also a great instigator in nationalism. In 2002, the Ivory Coast – a small island nation in of the coast of Africa – was one of the 32 nations to be involved in the tournament. At the time however, the country was in turmoil: a brutal civil war was escalating by the day and threatening to destroy the country.  But Didier Drogba, the captain and star striker of the football team, appealed to the people of his country to stop the fighting and unite in support of their national football team. The people listened, and for the duration of the countries involvement in the tournament there was no fighting.

My problem with the World Cup is that it has become the epitome of a bandwagon sports event; every four years the World Cup Finals come around, and suddenly everyone has an opinion on the sport. Fred in Missouri and Isabelle of Ft. Lauderdale takes an interest in the sport only to remain relevant in the summer sports scene. Essentially, a bunch of randoms begin to cheer for teams based on the relative hotness of the players. Not only does this violate the universally understood yet never-spoken-of rules regarding bandwagon, a subsection of the complete Sports Fan’s Etiquette Booklet, but it renders the sport of football simply game of kick and chase, for there is so much they choose to ignore.

Fred in Missouri might cheer for Brazil because they have the brightest jerseys, but that is the most shallow reason to cheer for a team. Indeed, there are innumerable other reasons to be a fan of Brazil. Brazil is the undeniable and globally revered hub of football. They are the most successful nation in the World Cup, winning the coveted trophy five times. Brazilian players star for clubs all across the globe, from teams as strong as Barcelona, to minnows such as Sparta Prague. Brazilian players also espouse a particular playfulness and joy in the way they play the game that is reflective of Brazilian culture. The Germans may have a great team, but they play with the stark efficiency and composure typical of a German’s mentality. The Brazilian national team, referred to as A Celecao (the selection), play an attacking, attractive style of football based upon the technical flair and creativity of their players. Furthermore, a number of their players are famous for their extracurricular activities: Romario, a star striker in the 90s, a man who lost his virginity to a goat in his small village at the ripe old age of 8, was an infamous womanizer and party animal throughout his career. Ronaldo, the great star of World Cup 2006 and the most famous footballer since the turn of the century, has recently had some embarrassing tales of his sordid lifestyle exposed in the tabloid press. Any one of these things is reason enough to cheer for Brazil, but the color of their jerseys is not, and I would rather these bandwagon fans not pay any attention at all then to support a team on such a superficial level.

The problem is obviously much greater, reflective of a shift in the mindset of society in the last generation. We all feel an engrossing need to have an opinion on every little thing. We are all becoming extremely vain and narcissistic, and we need everyone to know about it.

Photo by King Frankenstein

This long winded preamble is simply to say that while the world is engrossed by World Cup fever, it is only a month long epidemic, and no one will really get that sick. We will all feign interest in the events in South Africa to make ourselves feel relevant and cultured, but very few of us will consider the sport until the next tournament in Brazil.

There are a few among us – the purist football fan – for whom the World Cup means very little. This is because European football leagues function in an entirely different way to the World Cup. Each country has a professional league, made up of clubs from various cities – there are often multiple teams in a large city. Take London for example: Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Fulham, and West Ham all play in the top league, the Premiership.

Have you ever wondered where all these World Cup players play all year round?  Well that is your answer. They are scattered around Europe playing for their club team on wages that exceed even the NHL average. It is an entire web of culture and intrigue that remains hauntingly absent from Canadian media. The argument I am trying to make is that club football is real football; World Cup football is merely a once in a blue moon event that, while obviously meaningful for the players, does not adequately convey the true depth and intrigue.

In Europe they are soccer mad. Think of the Maple Leafs in Toronto, or Green Bay Packers mad. Imagine this level of devotion, but present in every major European city and in many different neighborhoods of the same city. Indeed, fans see their local teams as a projection of themselves, and therefore serve to validate their lifestyles and ideologies. This type of connection between fans and a team has not been seen in Canada since the free-flowing Montreal Canadiens of the 1970s espoused a certain character that appealed to the ravenous Parti Quebequis nationalist movement. As the great Peter Doherty – co-founder of the Libertines and singer in Babyshambles – said, “ football is the last bastion for the working classes.”

They give the average workingman a great release from their mundane existence, relief from responsibility and the fleeting chance to be involved in a communal setting that reaffirms one’s existence. Another product of this aesthetic is that players come to hold near God-like status for many teams. The reason is an incredible youth system that forms the backbone of a clubs existence. Often referred to as the academy system, this system is a form of football pedagogy, wherein clubs have youth teams that compete with other clubs, the object being to nurture an groom players from a young age to one day become stars for the top men’s team. This creates an inextricable bond between the club and the neighborhood.

Mudhoney - Photo by King Frankenstein

Devon Wong: "I need a crowd of people," sings a street-corner busker, "but I can't face them day to day." I'm feeling poetic, a mood that never yields good poetry. Soleil, cou coupé. The young people squeeze into their skins and drag themselves out to face the approaching night. I'm among them. The streetlights begin their burn cycle and we dance to their hum like...

Oh, enough of that.

We're here to talk about NXNE, and as there is always far too much going on during any given day of NXNE, I think I'll strip it down to my favourite. Friday.

Got off work, downed a quick bite, and headed off to my first show of the night at The Great Hall, 9 p.m. Great Hall acoustics: not so great. Avi Buffalo was playing a stripped-down set. The audience was small, and there were more people with press passes and cameras than without. Avi, whose real name is Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, which is an epic name by the way, has been generating quite the buzz, so I was hoping to be impressed, and while not blown away impressed I was. First off, Avi and crew signed to Sub Pop straight out of high school, and looked like they were signed to Sub Pop straight out of high school. As they opened their set, Avi announced with boyish wonder that this was his first time in Canada, and that it was a big thing for him. I couldn't help but smile at his sincerity.

This sincere and obligatorily awkward charm is inflected throughout Avi's music and was certainly what kept the set afloat. Avi Buffalo play a flavour of smooth, slightly worn, and brooding dreaminess that resists the temptations of weight and full-on-teenage-angst. On the contrary, what Avi Buffalo lack in life and performance experience, they make up for in sheer stuttering, stumbling charm. To say their music is mature beyond their years would be too easy and not quite correct. Avi Buffalo present us with fragile tableaus of youth straining toward maturity, and it is the tension of this sincere effort that lends beauty to their work. I can't wait to hear what Avi and Co. will have to show us after they've had some tours and a few more years under their belts. Sadly I had to miss the full band's performance on Saturday. Avi Buffalo will be playing Toronto again August 5th when they open for Blitzen Trapper at the Opera House.

King Frankenstein: Whenever you see an established act live, there's always that can of worries. They're stiff, they're old, they're over rehearsed, they don't care anymore, it's just about the money and t-shirts now. Because this is the unfortunate reality that is more often encountered, it overshadows the counter-scenario. They're experienced, they know their shit, they're confident, they keep doing it because it's fun and it's all about making you eat out of the palm of their hands. You're set if the latter follows the former, no one eats the mint first.

I saw the first bitty of Iggy Pop's free set. It was awful, not so much because Pop was awful, but because the audience that came out may just live on forever in local infamy. A hybrid beast of ambitious new punks with shit to prove hobbling with older couples who don't know whatthefuck, all leading to a perfect storm of panicked parents, lost sandles and one dude in front of me with a fanny pack who seemed to just snap and gleefully licked the first Skynyrd tee that fell on his face. Meanwhile on stage Iggy went on about how we're all 'crucified for the sake of a dollar' a sentiment that was hard to swallow as banners for Virgin Mobile flapped around all sides

De Le Soul - Photo by King Frankenstein

It took only one night for that grotesque attitude to wash away as another free show in the exact same spot would end the festival properly. 'And it was so real,' repeated my brother, over and over, chomping down the molten waffle we pit-stopped for after seeing De La Soul mere inches in front of our gawking faces. The three men, now over two decades into their amazing career, literally made themselves at home in the public space. They rapped only as they wanted to, strolling around the stage like you'd lazy around your bedroom. Satisfying a packed Dundas Square with hits young and old, laying down beats with casual prestige and even giving a shoutout to Choclair. Come now, you remember Choclair. The crowd welcomed them. No pushing and shoving, no tears and anguish, a communion in complete sync. The only shit disturber left a smile on our face as, twice, she attempted to jump the humble barrier to bear hug Trugoy the Dove. Synergy out of the business room, and memories that cannot be easily replicated. When they said "Leave your name and your number" we said "And I'll get back to you."

Will Perkins: The Brooklyn dork-rockers Anamanaguchi played to an eager,  easily excitable, and unsurprisingly mostly-dude crowd at The Whippersnapper. As 8-bit punk rock poured out from guitars and synths jacked on Nintendo Entertainment Systems, pizza was served and smell of nerd sweat filled the air. Anamanaguchi are a strictly instrumental quartet. Vocals might add something to their music, but the boys rock out hard and make the most of it. Their music is all tone and feeling, without lyrics getting in the way. A pure musical experience with a nostalgic kick for the cartridge generation.

The Ghost is Dancing - Photo by Aaron Bernstein

Devon Wong: After Avi, I grabbed a coffee and killed time until 11 p.m., when CALLmeKAT took the stage at the Czehoski, a Czech/Polish restaurant and pub on Queen West. Maybe two dozen of us packed ourselves into seats at the narrow back-end of the restaurant. Think candle light and the atmosphere of a hearty soup. And onto the stage steps a vision. Seriously, Copenhagen-based pop singer-songwriter Katrine Ottosen is what many of my male friends might call "a righteous babe". And I will admit, yes, that is why I really wanted to see her set. Was that a bad pun? Nonsense, and I scorn your false accusations.

I was pleasantly thrilled that Kat was not just a pretty face. She had some righteous tunes as well, rocking a drum machine, keyboard, and a mean set of pipes. There was even, wait for it, a fucking kazoo solo. That's right. A kazoo solo. How could I not fall in love with such a woman? Somewhere in her set, Kat also informed us that it was her first time in Canada. I do hope it's not her last.

King Frankenstein: My Thursday night was sort of in flux. There we places I needed to be, places I should be, places I wanted to be and places I couldn't be. But I was looking forward to Gold Panda. The little I heard before I liked a lot, but it was tame in comparison to the damage he can do live. A skinny Brit, face sparkled with unshaven thorns, hoodied with a minimal set-up was understatedly unassuming. His trip injected Bollywood electro was his own game. What he was a master of, which I guess should have compared to many previous electric acts in the past, was dramatic timing. Not just timing, but the way he could tug you by a synthetic hook, letting you reel in and out as the pulse steadied and you aggressively awaited the next level he'd take you to. While HEALTH, who also played that show, are about an astonishing blast of energy, Panda was ingenious management.

Gold Panda - Photo by King Frankenstein

Devon Wong: Sadly, I had no time to stay and ogle after Kat wrapped up. I had to speed walk my way over to the Whipper Snapper Gallery, a fantastic not-for-profit art gallery run by the same folks who bring us Late Night in the Bedroom. While most of the SB crew were off watching Japandroids, I was soaking in the ethereal musical styling of one DM Stith, whose debut album Heavy Ghost released on the Asthmatic Kitty label was one of my favourites of 2009. What does Stith sound like? Well, I don't think I've ever come across an album title that more aptly captures the sound of its musical contents. Think label founder Sufjan Stevens if Stevens made music for claustrophobic gothic horror films.

I wasn't sure if Stith would be able to capture the depth and atmosphere of his recorded material in a live set, especially considering it was just him, an acoustic guitar, and a looping pedal. However, my doubts were promptly slain as layers of body percussion, arpeggios, minor chords, and a choir of Stiths wrapped me in their sylphlike embrace. Stith played several songs off of Heavy Ghost as well as a brilliant Sparklehorse cover (R.I.P.), and a new concoction for a "pop" album in the works. Giving off strong vibes of geek-couture, which I mean as a high compliment, Stith kept us entertained with his perpetually bemused tongue-(sometimes)-in-cheek sense of humour through what was at first thought to be technical difficulties but turned out to be the concrete room's acoustics... That is, one note in particular, A-flat if I remember correctly, whenever played or sung, would result in some vicious buzzing feedback. Some adjustments to the volume in the monitor lessened the annoyance of this structural acoustic flaw and did nothing to diminish the power of the set. The small space and atmosphere of the Whipper Snapper were perfect. I was only disappointed that more people didn't show up to share in the experience. The audience was rather sparse. But such is the peril of NXNE.

After wrapping up, Stith manned his own merch table and chatted with fans. One fan told him to check out Canadian band Timber Timbre. I seconded this sentiment.

The Grass - Photo by Aaron Bernstein

Ted Killin: I compare heading into Dundas Square on June 19^th to salmon swimming upstream -- Iggy Pop has drawn such a massive crowd that there actually seems to be no escape from the underground subway onto the Square, and Yonge St. is blocked en masse with front-stage hopefuls, teeming, bodily looking for an avenue to arrive closer to stage. I have two other salmon in tow and we flap our fins, joining the first flow heading toward the center of the Square.

The currents are in constant motion: fish near the front who make the decision to leave must engage the teeming mass to find an outlet, a smaller tributary that will bring the party to the outer edge. These are the lanes that I need to find, those small subshoots that separate the crowd enough for us to wriggle through the parting seas and dash another five feet closer to the glam icon, shirtless and skinny Iggy.

Another obstacle: some nefarious bear has set up promotional tents, designed to divert questing fish into their booths of new product. These tents block several key sight lines to the stage, which drew moans from several fish in my tributary, but I have come to the understanding that there will always be bears in the stream, and rather than waste my energy I wriggle onward, reserving hope that I will catch a glimpse of this gaunt, glorious energy onstage.

Unfortunately, I was robbed of even a glimpse. Fish have notoriously bad vision, but my tributary dried up halfway through the Square; not even a trickle of traffic could pass a line of boulders, tall and unmoving. Standing on tiptail for about fifteen minutes, we finally made way for other hopefuls, catching a side route, resigning ourselves never to make the final run toward Iggy. He sounded fantastic through the speakers, the crowd was thrumming, yet my live music experience could not be satiated without a view of the man himself. A tiny speck in the distance would have sufficed.

This fervour spurred by a huge act in a public space goes to show that one of Toronto’s biggest central open areas cannot reign in a wriggling mass that want to share in the experience of the master Iguana himself. Next time, I’ll swim hours in advance.

Their new album When You Left the Fire was released officially on the 22^nd of June, though their party was on the 25^th. The Friday marking the commencement of the G20 blunders holds a heavy spot in the minds and heart of a lot of people, but for me it will always represent a magnificent juxtaposition in the universe. There’s something about walking through a militarized downtown core in the heat towards a quiet folk show in a cool church that’s enough to make a heathen like myself plead sanctuary.

A week before the release party we got together for a follow up to our original discussion. In the backyard of the glorious and infamous Delaware House, we sat around drinking beer and discussing the fact that this band, formed scarcely a year before, are now booked for the better part of this year on the road at home and abroad, playing a new set of more sonically diverse songs about loneliness and growth.

When You Left the Fire

What follows is very close to being a straight transcription of the actual interview. Present are Scott Bouwmeester, Stefan Banjevic, Will Whitwham and Sean Lancaric. Conspicuously absent is Melissa Dalton, the one factor that would have kept this interview from being a massive bro-down. Alas, bro-downery ensues. Also, note how the band is constantly completing each other’s thoughts and sentences.

Pat: First of all, you guys are done the fucking record.

Will: Finally.

Pat: How does that feel, you know, other than amazing?

Sean: I think it’s awesome. I’ve played on other records before, but this felt like it was the most I’ve ever contributed. I felt that I was learning here.

Will: It’s nice because we took our time and followed up something really sparse (2009’s Hymns of Love and Spirits) with something really dense. Dense… like, 13 tracks long, way more percussion and layering.

Scott: This album was a much bigger project than the previous one. There were way more people involved.

Will: And a greater diversity of song writing.

Scott: It’s great to have something that maybe seems so overwhelming to begin actually completed.

Will: We’re ready for number 3! Well… maybe not in terms of writing, but in terms of feeling.

Sean laughs maniacally for the first of many times. If I noted how often, there would probably be about 1000 words of the interview that just repeat “Sean laughs maniacally.” Just assume that it’s happening all the time.

Pat: Well, if you’re ready for number 3, how does it feel now to look at these songs and say “I have to play these for the next year” or however long you’re touring?

Will: Oh, well we’re okay to play all of those, but we’ll just keep adding things into it slowly. It’s true, you have to focus on the new material, but set lists always change.

Stefan: It’s like with the EP. We released that and played the shit out of it and started writing all of these new songs… we started recording them and the sound of the band had changed a little. Then the EP started getting attention… and so we were like, “holy shit, we just put this out as a kind of first thing and now we have to play those songs again.” But having to play them again led me to reinterpret them and want to reinterpret them. I have a feeling that it’ll be the same with this record. I find I get a second kick from any set of songs.

Will: We’ve been playing a lot of these new songs for most of a year already anyways, so it doesn’t feel like the biggest change.

Pat: How did you guys settle on When You Left the Fire as the album title? I know that’s a fairly basic question, and that it’s the first line of “Hermit,” but what made you settle on it?

Will: And the last line! Anyways, I woke up one morning and… we had had all these ideas of naming the album and none of them were working. I was mixing the last song, the instrumental with the fire track at the end (“Reveries En Couleurs”), and it occurred to me that so many of these songs had fire imagery recurring through them… so why wasn’t the album titled “When You Left the Fire?”

Pat: It’s pretty cool that it thematized itself in advance.

Will: Yeah, the name of the album was the last thing that came.

Pat: So with everything burning, what do you think that means in your song writing?

Will: That we’ll have to move away from fire imagery!

Everyone laughs. There is much jocularity.

Will: It was coincidental that everyone centred around that even though there’s such a wintery feel to the songs.

Scott: I know at least for me that candles and bonfires burning were a really big part of my last summer when all of these songs were being written. They must have worked their way into the songs.

Will: Yeah, it’s what we do in the yard here too. Either Scott’s lighting stuff in the back or there’s candles burning everywhere, in the barn, all over the place.

Stefan: I always think of it as a bonfire. I find that I’ll sit around bonfires with small groups of people that I know really well. I find for the most part they happen when I’m up somewhere with friends. It evokes a certain nostalgia and the feeling of being close with people and with nature. When you live in the city and you’ve lived in the city your whole life, going out to nature is special. It’s something. For me it’s always been one of the nicest things to be around. But then, When You Left the Fire, the leaving turns that on it’s head, it turns it upside down.

Will: Speaking of the bonfire thing… anyone who’s been to a few fires knows what it’s like to be last man or last woman standing at a bonfire. It’s pretty lonely. I think that’s what we were trying to do with the last song on the album… there’s something about that loneliness that permeates through. Even down to Sean's drumming, those rivets ringing out… it’s all very lonely sounding and empty.

Courtesy of the Wilderness of Manitoba

……….

Pat: Well, you guys aren’t lonely. You’re going overseas and shit. How does it feel to become international in scope? Before, playing the Garrison was a big show, now you’re playing in London (England, I might add).

Stefan: It’s really something because we’ve all been playing in bands before, for years, and you’re used to a certain kind of thing around Toronto. It’s nice to feel like this has some steam to it. We work hard, yeah, but it isn’t hard. It just feels like it’s going.

Scott: It’s kind of weird to think that people in Italy and the UK or wherever pay attention to what we do in our basement. Those shows at the Garrison are still a big deal because… yeah, we’re playing in London, but it’s still starting over again in a new city. We played some awesome shows but it’s all relative. It’s like playing for the first time here. It’s nice to have people over there helping us to play shows. We’re all in the same headspace that we’ll go anywhere and play if people want us to go.

Stefan: Another funny thing is that the people who come to the shows over there are the people who really like us already.

Will: A lot of people came to film for people who couldn’t come with them.

Scott: We had people coming to multiple shows too! One guy came to 3 shows…

Will: Four.

Scott: One guy came to four shows!

Will: And wrote about all of them!

Scott: Or we had someone come to a show from Birmingham, two hours outside of London, because someone in London had told him to go see us play. Two hours out of his way!

Will: Also, over there, travelling two hours is a lot because it’s basically across the country. Here it’s like…

Pat: Going to work?

Will: Yeah! People there seem a little more centred around where they live. Travelling long distances isn’t as normal.

Stefan: But yeah, the shows here are still interesting… there are more people and stuff.

Scott: We’ll definitely be in a way better position there when we go back in September.

Will: But most of the shows had like, 40 people. We’ve played much smaller shows in Toronto. I mean, we didn’t play any Phoenix sized shows there, but it was still incredible.

Stefan: But every show we played in London was probably bigger than any out of town show we’ve ever played in Canada, which is interesting. You can cross the ocean and have more people come out than in Montreal.

Pat: Why the decision to go to Europe before going to the States?

Will: We got into the Camden Crawl, which is a festival that happens in Camden Town. It’s really nice. We got into a festival, so we went.

Stefan: Also, there’s more press in Europe, more business people interesting in hearing us and supporting us. We could have gone to SXSW if we really wanted to, but we decided this wasn’t the year because everything seemed to be going in another direction. It didn’t make any sense.

Scott: I think because End of the Road happens so early that it gave us a place to focus. We already knew we were going back in September like 10 months in advance.

Will: End of the Road is how we got into the Campden Crawl, it’s another festival. End of the Road opened up a whole Pandora’s box.

Scott: So why the UK over the US? Because the UK was the first to book us.

Will: And we’re the only Canadian band.

Stefan and Will in unison: …with Wilco, Mountain Goats, A.A. Bondy… and us.

Will: The only Canadian band. And I think if people are checking back on updates in the festival, they keep seeing our name because we were lined up early. And our name kind of sounds like a weird short story. Maybe not weird…

Pat: Well, weirdish. Weirder if you’re not from Canada, probably.

Will: Yeah, probably.

Pat: Your CD release is officially on the 25^th of June. That’s the same weekend as the G20, and you’re playing relatively peaceful music at a potentially violent time. How do you feel about that?

Will: Well, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows what to anticipate and we’re leaving for the tour the next day. Hopefully some protesters might come into the show or something.

Scott: Yeah, my parents really don’t want to come into Toronto because of it. They think people getting teargassed is what happens here all the time anyways, so if it actually happens to them I’ll never hear the end of it!

As before, their myspace.

When You Left the Fire is available pretty much everywhere albums are sold. It’s also on listening posts at every HMV.

The End of the Road Festival schedule and line-up is here, though they’re no longer the only Canadian band.

Dig it, babies, dig it.

Many artists are famous because of these kinds of conditions. Nirvana, for one, had an entire legacy built for them based on this kind of aesthetic. There’s nothing new to say about Cobain, so I won’t, but it’s pretty obvious that his music is so popular because of him and not because of the music, despite the fact that it’s pretty awesome.

The same can be said of people like Daniel Johnston (assuming there are people other than Daniel Johnston who are like Daniel Johnston.) Aesthetically, his music travels in opposition to that of what normally makes people enjoy sonic sensation: he’s not particularly adept at any instrument, his song writing is heartbreakingly juvenile and mostly poorly recorded. But he’s screaming at Being itself, and being himself, and this undeniable fact transcends the sonic characteristics of the music itself and resonates with whole boatload of listeners.

Courtney Love | Courtesy of stylfrizz.com

I had a very interesting experience in this regard this past weekend at the Sound Academy, Toronto’s worst big budget venue. If they didn’t on occasion get such awesome bands, I would never, ever go there because it’s crowded, it’s expensive and it's far away from everything. On the weekend, however, a friend of mine convinced me to go see Hole with her because she had nobody to go with. I talk a lot of shit about being interested in experiencing music outside of the scope of my own preference, so I decided to put my money where my mouth was, literally, and drop the cash to go see a band I’d never really established much of a relationship with or had much respect for.

A few words on Courtney Love. Of all coattail riders who have had pretty successful careers despite being critically frowned upon, Love is certainly a celebrity mess to behold. She will never be able to live down the fact that she was married to, and possibly murdered, the unwilling voice of a generation. On top of this fact, a lot of her music has been co-written by other famous douchebags (see: Billy Corgan.) What Love represents far transcends these facts whether or not any of her music is actually good. Some of it certainly is: Celebrity Skin is pretty undeniable, and the new album Nobody’s Daughter is easily her best recent work and definitely stands up very strongly when compared to the recently work of many of her contemporaries.

What makes Love important is her legions of fans who scream and cry and know all of the words and don’t care what her set list is or how many covers she plays. They’re happy that she’s healthy and singing with her old gusto. They all secretly want to see her implode because her music and her personality have justified their own personal implosions over the years and they’ve, ahem, lived through it along with her music. But why her? Why does it matter? Is she loved simply because she’s so easy to write off, to hate because of what she represents and what she always seems to be selling? Is she so undeniable now just because she finally seems like she isn’t full of shit?

Because the show was very un-full of shit. While it was sort of a greatest hits setlist, as far as I could tell being a casual Hole consumer (teehee), she blistered through every song with the passion and charisma that her ticket price demanded of her. Let us also not forget that Hole used to be a band; now they’re a pack of hired dudes doing as the Empress commands. But so was the audience (not a pack of dudes, but you know what I mean.) She commanded her fans to throw their bras onstage and they did. Tons of them did. They were eating this shit up, man. So was I.

What really hit me were the parts of the set that the Hole fans didn’t seem too enthused about. Love quietly covered Leonard Cohen and Big Star, hinting at a musical taste and self-awareness refined enough to understand that her entire deal is an act for the sake of an act; self-validation and blustery noise to assert dominance over the fragility that gave rise to the noise in the first place.

Maybe the reason Love is critically panned and mostly frowned upon even by those who love her is because she pretty much always seems like an image first, art second kind of a person. But because her art comes from the perspective of bullshit, it appeals to people who seems to feel they’re dealing with a lot of bullshit. “Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to,” could just as easily be sung by a Hole fan into Love’s face because she is exactly that kind of a scapegoat.

When the cult of celebrity and the culture of art clash, which they pretty much always do now, what results is this kind of a blur between the art and the person. Is it still okay to love David Bowie’s Low even though he was ripped on coke and being an anti-Semite while making it? Where and when and why do the politics matter? What does it say about your ambivalence if you don’t give a fuck?

I guess the difference between Love and my Bowie example are that, because of Bowie’s far-reaching career, his art is separable from his politics and identity politics, which were and are always shifting. Love has had the same identity since day one and will until she dies. She hasn’t even made that many records given how long she’s been on the scene, so to speak. Her identity and her art, and thus the identities of those who identify heavily with her art, cannot be pulled apart easily.

It stands to reason, then, that Courtney Love’s great artistic achievement (though I’ll let you judge how great it really is) is not Celebrity Skin or Live Through This or anything she will ever record. Her great artistic achievement is herself. This article is titled The Artist Formerly Known as an Artist not just because I love Prince, but because when the artist sculpts themselves, whether wittingly or unwittingly in a particular way, having a particular face, the music that they make is just a part of building the identity that is their actual project.

Yes, we surround ourselves with songs. I bathe in songs, I eat in songs, I sleep in songs. It is important to remember, all record industry money-hungry bullshit aside, that these songs come from people and are for people. In actuality we surround ourselves in each other. Courtney Love just works as a convenient example for me based on my recent experiences, but the same can be said of any artist who is unconditionally idolized by anyone. We bathe in each other, we eat in each other, we sleep in each other. It’s important not to let that out of sight, or be convinced too heavily that we are not ourselves because of it. If the imagination is a vast lake, then it is important to use its water to nourish your body rather than fill your lungs to bursting. Remember, you’re mostly water too.

Comments

• July 30, 2010, Fiona writes: great title

Sharing in the Chicken of Knowledge Past was evidently not enough to satiate me. But it was cognitively far too much: the digestion has dislodged my primary processing and severely damaged my biological rhythms. I lay flummoxed at the side of the road, watching the traffic pass. My circadian rhythm had been knocked askew--my eyes succumb to imposing external cues, gauging time relative to light reflecting off the vehicles. I need to scale down. But I still have a hankering for chicken...

REBEL HOUSE (1068 Yonge St.):

I arrive before my fellow journeyman, and am shown to the outdoor patio: floor inlaid with brick, adorned with soil-filled planters, four large heaters (unused) and a large parachute overhanging the entire operation, surrounded by wooden gates. I cathect upon a lone wooden sunflower at the back, feeling the effects of time, stuck rapidly losing its leaves but no one else seems to notice. But I am informed we are to be joined by a third guest and we now move to a nook still outdoors, close to the interior dining room. Inside I see vacant booths elaborately stitched with picturesque landscapes; distracting.

The establishment proffers Oven Baked Wings of Rebellion, jerked in the most zealous of spices, charred to the bone, one half kilo.

"Give me half of that half." There were many more wings to be had and I could feel my time limit shrinking down around me. This half order costs $5.95 with sides of kettle fries, vegetables and chived sour cream.

"And a poutine of lesser brutality for my vegetarian photographer, the Madd Hattere." Made with kettle fries, because wings aren't his style.

The wings fly quickly. Close to the bone the skin stretches, moist, the spice transferring well through flame. The heat in my mouth builds each consecutive wing I barrel into, the spindly flat wings break easily in my clutches. Deeper in the pile I encounter insurgent drumettes, but nothing compared to the wing from what must have once been the albatross of the chicken world, a creature that wonders out loud "Why am I so massive?!" I thought its wingspan had more joints than a chicken could dare to have as I savoured the final wingtip of the meal.

I find out that our third member is a fellow known only as Char. "With a name like that, he must have emerged from the taste of the wing itself," I think. He is to drive me tonight, to what ends I am not yet sure. Thus far, he eats my side dishes at my request, for I am destined to be surrounded by vegetarians in my jaunt for chicken truth.

SQUIRLY'S (807 Queen St. West)

Surely the driver has something to do with the shifting of my internal clock, for suddenly we seem to enter a different time period altogether: I find myself sitting in a plastic, sparkling chair, and red leopard print bar stools line the curved bar. I go downstairs to the bathroom to find my bearings, and instead am confronted by a Bell telephone and a cyclical towel rack that has reached the end of its tether.

I dash upstairs to find my wings laid upon the table. My side caesar salad is swiftly snatched up by my driver and the intensity of the situation rises a notch. An ebony man wearing a large rimmed hat leaps from the wall, informing me that there is a back patio; I do not move. Instead, I watch as a mermaid with glasses hangs over the bar, lewdly gazing down the tops of leopard-skin dresses and inappropriately winking at passerbys, seeming particularly pleased with the sexy red walls and pieces of risque art. Even the ceiling is leopard print. Surely I am transported to a different time, through the wheel of Char. Finally, the bartender wears a red shirt that looks as though it were meant to match a different animal.

"Quickly, please! What kind of animal is your shirt to represent?"

"I have no idea actually... several?"

"Oh."

...

"Then I'll just have the Grilled Wings of Jumbo 1980s aesthetic. Medium strength, I don't know if I could take any stronger."

When I start eating the wings, I feel myself adjusting to the chunky, voluptuous feeling spreading through my body. The final wingtip of the evening turns out to be a 1987 wingtip collar that sprouts from my neck and makes me feel more at home. Although I keep accidentally chomping into the dominant bone at the bottom of the wing, well-disguised in the Squirly sauce, my experience remains wholly amped with these dribblers. I decide to take a chill pill and bask with my cool wings, for perhaps the 80s weren't as square as everyone loves to espouse--what's wrong with the decade that brought us the word crakalackin'?

Char shakes his head slowly, disagrees. My attention is wholly drawn to him; we were not meant to stay. Without verbal cue I settle up my $9.95 tab and scram from Squirly's. He'll lead me in the right direction, I know this even in the depths of my chicken-scrambled cognition.

MITZI'S SISTER (1554 Queen St. West):

Darker, ominous, I feel my internal rhythms choke up with fear. Wood grain, black accents and dispersed red are the themes throughout the room. Skulls and flashing ducks line the walls in display cases, and the main hall darkens towards a well lit blue stage, green stage, red stage--lights ever-changing. I am given a water with lemon and I fear that I may be squeezing my last Lemon of Self Doubt.

The waitress arrives and looks concerned at my overburdened belly, worries that their wares may not be able to please me with so much chicken already controlling my various urges, so she first offers me their Moroccan Dry Rub. The look in her eye suggests some sort of physical confrontation, so I take her other suggestion of Tamarind and Lime. These victuals arrive in less than five minutes.

I take the garnishing Lime of Self Importance and spray it all over the pound, also $9.95, and take a life-altering bite. I feel an immediate strong union with Androsthenes, a ship captain serving under Alexander the Great, who described in detail the leaf movements of the tamarind tree. He supplied the earliest known account of a circadian process while I am simply eating chicken, but the Self Importance has already soaked into my thoughts, and the Tamarind of Circadian Descent causes a tranquility in me that I had thought nigh impossible at the outset of my journey.

Then the band begins to play. In a flash I know where I must travel next, this time without Char, who has led me to this final destination to traverse alone.

I walk down the hall toward the ominous curtain, lights changing along the way; red, blue, green. I walk through a confused quartet and knock my nose on the wall behind the curtain, but at last I know I've been cured.

Comments

• June 17, 2010, Nic writes: this is awesome.....and delicious.

Back in May, Offworld editor Brandon Boyer told a packed bar full of starry eyed nerds that, and I’m paraphrasing here, “Toronto is the city that all game dorks envy.” Landing somewhere in between smug, flattered and sceptical, it was a large compliment that was also a little hard to take. Maybe we’re just used to it, maybe we’re just spoiled, but if you scrape each item to the sides of the plate you eventually get to picture what sort of combo meal we’re swimming in. We’re home to Capybara, Jonathan Mak, Metanet among others. Societies, festivities and communions that nurture the scene. A handful of independent game stores dashed around to distract from the littering GameStops. My Dad will sometimes ask if he’s ever told me how many arcades used to reside around town (he has). Plus with Scott Pilgrim going Hollywood, there is an actual chance that ‘cute game nerds’ may become the new Toronto youth stereotype. I guess what I’m trying to say is I had always assumed San Francisco had something to trump us. Guess not.

For five years, trained and untrained imagineers have been gathering at George Brown on King with one singular, yet incidentally varied, task. Get there, get three days, get thinking, get sweating, make a video game. Programmers, artists, musicians, wizards, genies, onlookers panic about as they all team up to make great fun in record time. It’s called TOJam, and it’s serious play.

“It started five years ago as a way to get people to start building games instead of talking about what they wanted to do,” said co-founder Emilie McGinley, “we’d run into them at all these different events and we’d always be talking about all these great ideas they had. The next time we saw them, about a month or two later, they’d tell us again about the great idea they had, but hadn’t actually started on them. So my husband and I, along with a couple others decided to create the Jam. Now these people can come in for three days, focus, and actually walk away with something.”

For those who prefer to touch things and mash buttons over looking over the shoulders or busying workers, there’s the TOJam Arcade, a near month after the initial birthing of these efforted pieces. Located at the rustic Imperial Pub, one drinking bottom floor, one warm top floor and an appropriately dark room in the back are set with tables, laptops, projectors, screens and an audience of minimum three, maximum imagination standing about a rotation of games. Over my shoulder I overhear word of a game entirely about throwing a boxing match, though according to the piece of paper I had missed it by mere seconds. Not to delve on the past I loom over to the nearest glowing sheet of a screen.

A fat blob of a dog hobbles about as nuisance rabbits ambush his patch of tasty carrots. Zen Rankin and his wife Joanna aren’t professional programmers. They aren’t fat dogs either. But having picked up programming as a hobby and impressed by what they saw last year, they decided to pit their stuff with the others for the occasion with Fat Dog: Garden Security Enforcer. “Basically you’re going to lose,” said Rankin, “but you have to act as fast as you can, while you can.” The chubby pug lumbers about, desperately barking at the hopping vermin who stand between him, a safe garden and a high score. When asked why they decided to participate instead of simply gawk, Joanna replied, “We don’t like sleep.”

Creeping upstairs I found a more confined space more jostled with fans, drinks, and huffing projector motors. Off in the corner was one screen described to be ‘the best of the best’. Or at least according to Dave Hill, one of the members of The Sofa Kings, creators of Last Hadron Collider. A game which just happened to be playing at the station when I asked. Inspired by the recently completed quasi-doomsday device of the same name, this title has you playing as a frantic scientist, trying to outrun a quickly growing void after accidentally creating a black hole. “This was the first time I heard about it, actually. I do a lot of work on my own time, my own ‘work’ work. This just seemed like a good opportunity to get some kick in the ass, y’know?” I couldn’t get my own time in with the game, due to its drawing popularity. Typical. I scouted to the other corners to see what was being neglected and why.

“We’ve got brand new programmers, people who program other things like databases for a living,” said McGinley on the variety of turnout, “people in the game industry but told to work on something else other than their personal ideas, sound technicians, students who’ve never built games before, people who’ve never worked in the game industry before and just want to try their art style or their music in a game.”

On the south side of the top floor, corner pocket, a videographer was tying his shoes. I had assumed he was overlooking his game, a simple gem puzzler where you destroyed blocks to match up four of a symbol, but he was just anticipated the place to rest his bum. The other pocket, South West, was a game of a different flavour. “I don’t really know what this is, I think you are supposed to be a child in a house or something,” said the woman in a nearby chair, trying to explain MissTeen USA 2007’s Huas. Best described as a 3D, JPEG compressed art installation, you simply wander around a house with little furniture and less things to do. So not really a game, but certainly interactive. In it, I found a door that led me outside, where out of the darkened brown walls and corners were lush trees akin to that of a escapist postcard. “Yeah,” the aforementioned woman told me, “but wander too far away and you sort of just warp back into the house.” And I did.

In a room full of openly admitted nerds, there is no way to tip a pretty bartender without the unsettling sensation deep down inside you are hitting on her. But a whiskey sour had to be sipped and I certainly didn’t bring my own. I swapped cash for alcoholic commission and went back downstairs to see how things were winding down. By a fishtank, a man sat by a younger girl explaining how his Ghostbuster homage functions. Simply, all you needed to do was hop about a spectre, blasting it with the uncanny particle beam until it gave in. But even for a spectators glance I could tell the jumping was a bit ‘breezy’ and any difficulties she suffered wasn’t just from lack of experience. Or an older programmer breathing down her collar. Immediately after she got up and the games were swapped, I got my hands on a fairly broken title where I played as a ghost looking for my body. The creators admitted it was a work in progress, and that what I was fiddling with wasn’t even the most recent build. To their benefit, a game where you fall through the floor accidentally does go down pretty well with Jack and lemon water.  Better yet, you can’t judge. I’ve never made a game, no less in a month, no less in three days. I’d be lucky to one-up a buried Newgrounds page. So props to anyone for everything.

“Very rarely will you see just another Asteroids clone. People are motivated to do something different, they don’t have any restrictions, no boss standing over telling them what to do.”

Toronto’s a great place for nerd kind. It makes these articles easy. But I never wondered if it could match wits with other urban dorky heavy hitters (mostly out of never knowing what they have in store.) Boyer’s passing, though heavy compliment will probably stick with me. Next time I see a man wearing an NES belt buckle, I’ll tally it up. Word of yet another independent game launching off of a Spadina loft, another tally. Friday night I decide to stay home in favour of Ecco the Dolphin? Actually let's just forget about that one. All of them.

The pelican:

This band:

^{Photo by Matthew Filipowich}

Krupke.

Krupke is a band from Toronto. I met Mike Walter of Keyboards and Xylophones roughly an age ago at a party somewhere. I said I heard his band’s music on their Myspace page. He invited me to their show. I went. It was awesome. B’MO Crazy played. It was weird. Krupke, too, is pretty weird. That was the slap bracelets. They played more shows. I saw more shows. I tried to book them for a show but they couldn’t do it. They played more shows. I saw more shows. They made a record. I saw Mike at shows a few times. We chatted. No biggie. They said their record was actually a thing that they were going to sell to people. I said I wanted one. I said: let’s chat. We chatted, somewhat formally this time. They played a show. It was awesome. I listened to the record. It was awesome. I wrote this stuff. I brought us up to speed.

And so it was, until the end of time. Then it was not.

Krupke is a band from Toronto. They are funny, but not ha-ha funny. They make the jokes that joke. Guess who’s not a comedy band? This band. Krupke is a band from Toronto. You met Mike when I mentioned him earlier. He has this strap that’s made of duct tape I think that attaches his xylophone mallet to his wrist so that he can switch to keyboard and back with ease. It’s fucking impressive.

Over there is Joe. You shake hands with Joe please. Joe plays guitar. When you shake his hand, please don’t crush his fingers because he needs those to play guitar.

You see the one over there? No. Over there. You see her? Yes, her. She’s the drums. Her name is Kate and she is the drums. Wave back when she waves, please. Don’t embarrass me.

Finally, this here is Fiona. She has a pet violin and a pet clarinet. She can make them do the craziest tricks. She also demands high-fives. And, please, be hasty.

Krupke have charged me with an important message:

Krupke is sorry that your pony died.

I personally concur. That – That’s a bummer. Sorry about your pony.

Mike: “One day it just kind of clicked into me that for everyone in their twenties that once wanted a pony, that pony is now dead. And that’s a discouraging thought. I guess with a lot of the music, we’re trying to recapture a youthful feel. [The Pony You Always Wanted Died Today] seemed fitting and it amused us. Most of the things we do we do because they amuse us. And it’s a critical statement.”

Fiona: “It’s sort of cute and happy, but also pretty cynical at the same time. Which there are certainly elements of both in the music.”

Mike: “That’s because you’re cynical and I’m cute.”

So, they’re sorry your pony died, OK?

THEM DEETS (ON THEM RECORD):

Mike: “I guess the overall goal was to make it sound as much like the live show as possible while at the same time not having it just be complete chaos. It was recorded with all of the instruments live and all of the vocals live.”

Fiona: “We were able to go back and fix things after the fact. We had worked on the songs for a while before we actually recorded them, so we had been planning it for a long time.”

Mike: “And then just added a random song like three days before [recording] because we had written a song with the lyrics “The pony you always wanted died today” and we thought if it doesn’t go on this album, it’s going to be kind of weird if it shows up on our second album.

Greg - Courtesy of charliesbirdblog.com

‘WHERE WAS “PONY” RECORDED?’ YOU MAY VERY WELL ASK. WELL I DON’T KNOW. I ASKED, BUT THEY WOULDN’T TELL ME.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Studio, they said.

That doesn’t sound real, I thought.

It’s not what it’s actually called, they told me before I could raise the issue myself. Apparently, Krupke were allowed to use a legitimate studio “after-hours” but as a result are not at liberty to advertise The Pony You Always Wanted Died Today as an official product of that studio.

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLE STUDIOS IT IS THEN! SOMEBODY CALL A LAWYER!

THE WEIRD PART IS, THAT’S NOT EVEN THE WEIRD PART OF THIS RECORD. WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN A TOTALLY WEIRD RECORD EVEN IF IT HADN’T BEEN PRODUCED IN A WEIRD WAY.

HERE’S THE WEIRD PART ABOUT THIS RECORD:

Joe: “The weird part about this record is that a lot of the stuff – probably about half of it – was stuff that Mike had brought in and we kind of just reworked all of it completely.”

Fiona: “Especially in terms of the vocals.”

Mike: “For example, “Fergie” [“My Dearest Fergie, I’m So Sorry I Haven’t Called”] would be a song where I wrote a really good piano and vocal line and I would bring it in and be frustrated with it for a few days because they’ll play something that sounds nothing like I had planned. In some bands, you’ll write something and everybody has their part, the bass player knows to play the bass and the drummer knows what to play. With us, if you’re going to bring in a song, you have to be aware of the fact that it will not sound remotely like you envisioned it and you should let it go because it’s not your song anymore, it’s the group’s.”

I want to know what the original pieces sound like. Because let me tell you, brother, the songs on The Pony You Always Wanted Died Today are something fierce weird. It’s hard to imagine what they might have been like as individual elements before the band ripped them apart and re-birthed them as something wholly tremendous, joyful and strange.

Photo by Matthew Filipowich

ALLOW ME TO GET SOME SERIOUS FOR A SECOND.

I’ve been talking your ear off  - so to speak – for over one thousand words, and haven’t even told you about what Krupke do and what their music actually sounds like. Well, for those of you who are into that kind of thing [knowing what the bands you read about actually sound like], I’ll indulge you:

Krupke are a band from Toronto. That much we know. We also know that there’s someone in the band who play drums, someone who plays guitar, someone who plays keys and xylophone and someone who plays clarinet and violin. Already, that’s pretty interesting, wouldn’t you say? I hope you’re intrigued.

ALLOW ME TO GET EVEN MORE OF THAT SERIOUS FOR A SECOND.

To be one hundred per cent honest and serious, Krupke are in my opinion one of the most interesting and excellent bands in Toronto. Their endlessly inventive art-pop, played most often in a fury of manic glee is at once eccentric, intricate and unusually accessible. Perhaps I’ve stalled so long in describing the actual music of Krupke because it is, as it happens, simply not that easy to describe. Perhaps what they sound like isn’t even the point.

The Pony You Always Wanted Died Today is both brief and ridiculous. Clocking in at a paltry twenty-eight minutes, Krupke’s self-released debut is sometimes disturbing and sometime hilarious, but is always a record of its own. Krupke’s polyrhythmic pop bursts brim with quirky originality and a playfulness that permeates the songs even when they appear hopelessly dark.

Mike: “I think that anyone that is playing very upbeat, flamboyant music and taking themselves seriously-“

Joe: “Is kind of foolish.”

Mike: “There’s something kind of off about that.”

Fiona: “There’s definitely silliness, but at the same time there’s not – we don’t want it to be a comedy band.”

Mike: “Quirky, we get a lot… Whimsical.”

Fiona: “That’s what one of my friends in England said when we heard it.”

Mike: “It sounded better when he said it. [Putting on awful fake British accent] It’s whimsical.

Joe: “He didn’t talk like that. He didn’t try to do a fake accent.”

THUS CONCLUDES THE SERIOUS PART.

Brian - Courtesy of soulsongart.wordpress.com

The Pony You Always Wanted Died Today features quite possibly the greatest successive combination of song titles ever.

Track 3: Monday
Track 4: Monday?

For serious, I died laughing. I’m dead. Krupke’s record killed me with humour. Thanks Krupke. I meant this to be both sincere and sarcastic. From beyond the grave and such.

Mike: “Every band has its own mission statement. For some it will be to be political, for others it will be this or that. I guess our only real goal is to just make something different, something that actually sounds like us and not everything else. I’m really indifferent to whether it’s fun or crazy as long as it’s different. That’s all I really care about.”

And it is most certainly that. Different, that is. The closest I could come to describing what Krupke kind of sounds like would be if I were to ask you to imagine a gang of stoner wood elves playing an arrangement of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory for a crowd of tourists and socialites expecting to see Cats. Even so, that’s still pretty vague.

Krupke - "The Pony You Always Wanted Died Today"

Look at that album cover. Is that not the most gloriously DIY piece of cheesy ridiculousness you’ve ever seen? I love it. And I like to think of myself of being an album art enthusiast. I like it because, as they explained to me, all of the artwork for Pony was a collaborative effort with the band purchasing $53 worth of plasticine and subsequently, as the kids say, going to town. This silly, whimsical character that appears in Krupke’s music is present in all of their accompanying artwork, from the cover of their record, to their publicity posters. It all conveys the same quality of mischievous idiosyncrasy.

Kate: “There is a sort of playful, weird thing that there is a really obvious connection with. And then there’s also this idea of letting something be how it is even if it’s not perfect because that’s what makes it interesting.”

Mike: “I think a lot of the art forms that we use, the main ones, like we do a lot of posters in Papier Mache and plasticine and I think the reason why it works is because if you do something in a medium like that, it doesn’t matter if it’s technically good or not. Kate and Fiona are far better visual artists than Joe or myself, but really it’s just about the idea in the end. We had the idea for a graphic of us being chased by a giant watermelon and in that case it definitely didn’t matter how it turned out because it was such a silly idea. It’s the same thing with our music, it’s about a concept and an idea moreso than anything else.”

Joe: “Rather than trying to make it fit perfectly into some kind of form, if it’s going to go off into this extremely theatrical part, that’s totally fine, if it’s going to go and get a little dark or heavy or shoegaze-y that’s fine.”

Mike: “What does shoegaze even mean?”

Joe: “It’s basically just pop music drenched in tonnes of reverb.”

Mike: “Music for people that wear sneakers?”

Joe: “Yes, and if you only wear sandals, you obviously can’t listen to it. You can, however, listen to Jack Johnson.”

This is what happens, almost every morning during this three and a half week period:

I wake up and can't even decide whether or not I fell asleep. It's still dark out and I squirm out of my sleeping bag. It's probably cold, I curse and hate myself a little bit. I press my palms against the ground and try to stand up. As soon as I'm on my feet I'm faced with the considerable challenge of staying up. The first few steps I take are wobbly and I feel like a penguin or a baby. The rooms spins. I lurch. Sometimes I fall. I get dressed, collect up my things, grumble and mumble obscenities at my band mates, brush my teeth and crawl into our over stuffed van. As we roll back onto the highway, eating Bagel Belts for the 11th morning in a row, feeling barely human, I probably remember that I left my toothbrush in some bathroom and grumble obscenities at myself.

Manitoba and Alberta are barren post apocalyptic patches of tundra, even in May. The nodding donkeys and grain silos and processing plants are all crusted over with frost. In Medicine Hat it is raining sideways. We play at a bar that used to be a strip club on a lit up stage. You can see where the pole used to be. I'm in the bathroom and everyone else is on stage, wondering into the microphone "where's the bass player?" Later on we drive past a Taco Time billboard. Someone has sprayed Viva Vincente on in huge letters and I can't stop laughing. Before bed I quietly drink a shot of Captain Morgan's with our host in his parents kitchen. "I brush my teeth with this stuff," he says, and I think about how awful that would be.

In Calgary we play in a big new club on the outskirts. It seems like there's more outskirt than city in this city, and if this is a place for drinking, I wonder, how come you have to drive to get here. People are friendly because our van is dead. My ex-girlfriend's sister's husband's brother comes to show. "You know we split," I say. "Yeah," he says, "but I still like good music." That night I invent a game where you try and drink a beer while falling asleep.

My GPS malfunctioned and Mike and I are walking down a rural highway outside of Lacombe, Alberta laughing about something stupid, about irresponsibility, and I call the other guys to find out where they are. "The van's dead," Wes says, "like, dead dead." We turn around and look down the Highway at Lacombe. "I know where they are," Mike says, "its back this way." The auto shop is next to an automobile graveyard where our van will end up and I keep thinking the words "elephant graveyard."

We're in a sterile white rental van with good air conditioning and its me and Wes this morning with the others sleeping in the back. The mountains are so big and crisp and clear, better than a movie. I try and grasp them with my mind, but this is too difficult so I take pictures instead and capture them with technology. We are hellbent and strong and full of Kicking Horse and keep driving all through the day. There is no auxiliary cord so it's CDs only, we listen to disc one of Pavement's Deluxe Wowee Zowee re-issue. We bang our heads wildly to "Flux=Rad," which I always thought would work well in a car commercial and I tell Wes to drive up one of the escape ramps for giant trucks that can't stop (this is terrifying, no?)

In Vancouver we are playing at a bar called the Bourbon with swarms of punks and junkies walking the streets outside. The Canucks are in the playoffs and we soundcheck between periods. We are playing against the Canucks. The sound guy tells us to strike a chord the second the final horn blows. A man of questionable demeanor who refers to himself as "The Newfy" is ostensibly watching our van in the parking lot because I gave him a toonie. I hand the bartender my drink tickets and ask her to make exactly what she made for the drummer. "With the mustache?" she asks. Yes, with the mustache.

I am fighting a deadline at my friend's apartment under lock and key the next day and no we can't go to the beach until I finish transcribing words spoken in Toronto in Vancouver. "Okay fine," I say, finally, "I'll finish it tomorrow." The beach is perfect and I see a seal from the dock. The woman next to me, a tourist, tells me its a sea lion and I don't know any better, but it seems like its a seal. I'm amazed that a city could ever be so happily situated. A bowl of urban goodness surrounded by greenery and mountains. Vancouver is always perfect when I visit.

In the back of a record store. I thought this would be all ages but its wild and all the cute Vancouver hipster girls are there in dresses and a few boys with interesting haircuts drinking cans of discount beer and whiskey. I start a beer fight with Rob from Mt. Royal and jump on his giant back. We go down in a pool of beer, falling slowly, timber, like a big tree. No one is injured but my hip is sore for the rest of tour. We fit twenty people in their van dangerously, like an indie rock clown car, and later in the night Mike and I find our way home somehow.

When I wake up the black face paint is smeared and uh oh my friends white couch I am so so sorry. We take a walk and get stoned on G-13, or wait, maybe I'm smoking the organic. We go into 49th Parallel for coffee and it is the shiniest cleanest espresso bar I have ever been to. Everyone in black except the girl at the counter's black shirt says ineffable and I want to say something about that but I'm afraid of what will come out if I open my mouth.

At Zulu records we try and find out if we've sold any CDs but the poor girl is having trouble finding our information. I buy an Okkervil River/Julie Doiron Split EP and Shine A Light for the van. I see the new Pavement best-of compilation and the album art with the Dragon makes me so happy that I buy it for Wes three weeks before his birthday. You can never quarantine the past. At the cash the girl wants to talk about Pavement and this time I decide its okay to open my mouth because here's a conversation I know I can win. Down at the beach with an iced latte, perfect weather, I wax philosophical, which I forgot I knew how to do, about things I forgot I knew about and feel like a college student again. I walk with my feet in the freezing salt water and splash it on my face. Mike gets a call. Zulu has ten dollars for us.

Driving into Kelowna I suddenly think we're in California and it seems very religious.

Lethbridge, Alberta. We drive into an alley next to The Slice and we're talking to each other saying maybe we should move the van when a native man emerges from an alley yelling at us. "Are you telling me to move?" he yells repeatedly and we don't say anything back but really I want to tell him that what he's doing doesn't bother me and no we don't want him to move. We meet a girl from the college who is a bit strange and she says she is painter, but not like houses, like art. And I think this is fabulous when she says this. In the bar we talk to the promoter: there's free pizza involved in this contract, yes? Very professional, and yes there is free pizza so whatever else happens at least we get the pizza.

Back in Medicine Hat I'm lying on the sidewalk in the sun. There are several cups nearby containing several shots of espresso.

Between Medicine Hat and Saskatoon there is a golden stretch of highway that I had forgotten about. My dad was born in a tiny town in the South of Saskatchewan called Val Marie that I think lies somewhere near this golden stretch. He lived there until he was three. It's the canola and wheat crops that give the region its golden sheen. My dad told me that canola used to be called rape seed, and I thought good thing they changed the name. Rape seed is the worst name for a thing that I can think of. When you drive west across Canada you gain time, when you drive east you lose those extra hours. When driving across the golden stretch I can feel time slowly slipping away and understand what it means it lose those hours you thought you'd gained.

There's a young waitress at the bar in Saskatoon wearing a fashionable head accessory who describes the province of Saskatchewan as a woman wearing a plain dress exuding a simple beauty. I tell her this is quite nice and that I will probably steal it. After the venue is closed the bartender puts on some cool jazz and we sit around drinking, pretending we are at an after hours club. I try to impress the young waitress by talking about literature. Jason later tells me that when I've been drinking and I start talking about literature, I adapt an air of dandyish femininity. "I'm going to buy cigarettes," she says and invites me to come with her. She drives her car half a block to the 7-11, buys cigarettes and a taco for me and I thought maybe we were going to kiss. "People are so fucked," she said, or something like that, and I got depressed and had to argue for humanity.

Mondragon. In Winnipeg we play the Mondragon. The Mondragon is a book store, vegan restaurant and organic market co-op that functions on libertarian socialist principles. My sister's friend Esan works there and I hug him for her. I order a cappuccino and my throat itches in protest. Vegan lattes, I remember, are always made with soy milk. Pavement is playing on the stereo we are shown upstairs to the room we're staying in. "Here's the tap, if you need water," we're told. "And there's chocolate covered mushrooms in the fridge. Help yourself. My boyfriend and some other people might be up here later."

Me and Jason are at a party at an art studio in downtown Winnipeg. We bought a case of Budweiser from the native run hotel around the corner from the Mondragon. All of the cutest girls in Winnipeg have congregated here. I push Jason onto a couch and pour beer on his face. Later a man in a bow tie is pouring bourbon from an elevated platform onto my face. I think its someone's birthday. I'm on the dance floor kissing a girl I just met and "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac is playing. Jason gets a text. There is a jazzy hip-hop poetry band playing music in our room at the Mondragon where the other guys are trying to sleep. I have a blister from dancing in my boat shoes and I walk back barefoot appreciating the beautiful architecture that Chris pointed out to me earlier, saying that people from Winnipeg don't appreciate it. I'm convinced that the sofa is a pull out and pull all the cushions off. It is not a pullout. Jason is on top of the couch pillows. I can't stop thinking the word "Mondragon."

There's no sleep in Thunder Bay. I take an energy drink that the bouncer gives me, saying I look tired, for four hours, maybe six hours of alertness. I feel like I'm on ecstasy and Mike and I walk down to the water to get a better look at the sleeping giant. There are some awful cities in this country, I think, in such beautiful places. I cannot fall asleep and we are up before dawn and I cannot stand up properly at all.

Jason is throwing up in the bathroom at the A&W rest stop we always stop at. I'm smoking pot in the parking lot outside. Jason comes back, we lie down on the grass. Wes and Mike are asleep and everyone feels awful. In the van I put on Godspeed and turn up the volume, start making creaking metallic noises with our money box, jamming with Godspeed. The money box solo wakes Wes up and he glares at me, and then this: "Moose!" I say it and then point calmly and we stop. It's a large male, he looks at us and strides calmly across the street. We are on his turf.

Back in Toronto for one night I go over to someone's house for a dinner party, drink too much and say something inappropriate to a friend. And then we are going the other way.

In Quebec we are outside the venue with the door propped open and the van is right there. There is this francophone kid that Jason took on trip when he was a camp councillor and he passes me a joint. "Is there tobacco in this", I ask , and he says no he knew i wouldn't like it. I find this endearing and try my best to speak French. The kids are impressed a little and we help each other find the words we're looking for. Later we go to the Ashton for poutine. I haul on my asthma inhaler and order a medium poutine that comes in a metallic container with a plastic lid. I have a sort of religious experience while eating the poutine and feel like I'm in high school. I can't stop laughing, people are looking, and Mike eats so much poutine he thinks he's going to die. I can't remember where we stayed, maybe a motel.

We drive across that giant bridge from New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island and I think it's completely insane that this bridge exists resting on massive pillars rising out of the ocean. How could this bridge possibly exist? It's a short drive across the island and there's red clay and yellow flowers everywhere and nice churches. I make some joke to the bartender about being an elitist from Toronto and he says he's going to rape me with a potato. We play hockey in a parking garage and it gets pretty serious. Eventually the bartender has to come get us because it is past our set time and where the fuck are we. We come out of the parking garage shirtless, wearing headbands and holding hockey sticks. "Its MGMT!" someone yells. We find a motel that's under renovation to stay in because its cheap.

Driving into Halifax I am anxious and excited and scared. The Halifax Harbour. The bridge from Dartmouth. 'Am I changing as a human,' I ask myself whenever I cross this bridge. "How many of my ex-girlfriends are currently living in this city," we all ask each other.

North and Agricola. Go find a drum kit Dave. I assign myself this task. There is a festival going on in the North end of Halifax. Long Live the Queen. I walk between Gus' Pub and the North Street church. I'm trying to find a kit but also I keep running into everyone I know and standing and talking and drinking beer with them. How've you been. Good to see ya. It is so good to see these people. Julie Doiron plays some songs at the North Street Church and it seems like her whole family is there. She drinks lemon water on stage, says she hasn't been drinking, she's been running, feels great, her daughter gets thirsty and climbs up on stage but she doesn't like the lemon water. Later I end up down at the Khyber for someone's 30th birthday. There is face painting and free beer and veggie burritos and and the DJ is killing it. The dude from Diamond Rings is grilling Burritos. The guy pouring beer looks just like Mike Winter and I tell him this. My ex-girlfriend is there and we paint each other's faces with tender care.

Earlier in the night, drinking coffee before our set, trying to sober up from the afternoon drinking I need to take a moment on the balcony. Everyone is so friendly, it makes me emotional. A lot happened to me in this city, a lot of my personal mythology lives here. I try to explain this to Katie, the air is thick with something. "This place is much more than a city to me," I say. "You are so much more than a man to me," she says, in response to this.

Scream is a double bill affair. Toronto-based artist Ed Pien's drawings paper the walls of the gallery, while the sculptures of Cape Dorset's Samonie Toonoo rule the floor in glass-covered plinths.

Pien's work is indebted to Surrealism— especially in the demonstratively-titled series, Three Minute Drawings (1998), where crude, hurried brushwork and naive technique belie Pien's smooth assimilation of ideas into tiny visual riddles, the answers to which stick to the back of the tongue, uneasily suspended somewhere between articulable and amorphous dream-illogical thought. The walls of the second gallery chamber are dominated by Pien's large-scale composite drawings. These wide spreads are what look like pasted together grids of computer paper, warped by entropic blots of black and delicate colour beneath palimpsestic Gordian knots of intertwined and otherwise conjoined creatures like, but never exactly, human. Here Pien's brushwork is less hurried, more calligraphic and sensual, yet somehow more out of control, more demented than the Three Minute Drawings, and no less automatiste.

Samonie Toonoo, Skull, 2008. Courtesy Feheley Fine Arts. Ed Pien, After the Meal, 1999. Courtesy Birch Libralato Gallery - Photo Courtsey of jmbgallery.ca

In contrast to the mess and fragility of Pien's work, Toonoo's sculptures in horn, bone and soapstone exert a sensual, relentless weight. Toonoo hails from a well-known family of Inuit carvers and printmakers out of the capital of Inuit art in Canada, but his subject matter strays from that stereotypically associated with Inuit art, to include the contemporary and prosaic — as in the balaclava-masked figure of "My Two Balls" (2008), holding out two snowball — and at other times, the cryptic and mystical — such as the skull-faced, prognathous and eerily eager "Seal Spirit" (2009). While Toonoo's work may sound like an entirely different show than Pien's, these two bodies of work have enough in common to keep from sparring in the gallery space— in fact, they harmonize. Pien's and Toonoo's artistic voices contrast, but theme in fugue.

Scream is the second instalment of curator Nancy Campbell's project to present Inuit artists in concert with contemporary artists from the Canadian south. It's an admirable project, or at least, a useful one. The ghettoization of indigenous peoples' art is an obviously condemnable yet still ongoing tendency. Ideally, an Inuit artist could command a solo show in a given contemporary gallery without a rattle or drag from the ball and chain of the speciality Inuit art market and/or suffering the dry myopia of anthropologically-based art criticism. But current conditions are not ideal, and Campbell's duets are at least a deliberate step in the right direction. Her pairing together of these two artists emphasizes thematic commonalities in their work; and this emphasis builds a partial defence against the anthropological tendencies that seem to shackle so much curatorial literature around indigenous art. The main thematic fulcrum Campbell clearly has in mind is in the show's namesake, Munch's The Scream.

Now, I usually find that when a curatorial statement or another such article of satellite literature is a little problematic, the best response is to ignore the text (as long as the text is the sole culprit) and just deal with the art. There are times, however, when textual irks can indicate structural troubles at the level of a show's basic ideological architecture, where wilful ignorance of the text achieves nothing but to insult the intelligence of the artists, curators, and art lovers alike. As you may have guessed from my going off on this tangent in the first place, Scream has put me in the latter position. The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery statement for Scream doesn't do the show justice.

While it is a bit ham-fisted to triangulate Toonoo and Pien with Munch's The Scream, I'm not complaining about that. In fact all three artists have a penchant for revelling in a kind of keyed-up, angst-wrung, go-for-broke emotionality. It's no great stretch to see both the show and its namesake cowled in a certain key of upset, like the restless horror that lingers after that really bad dream you can't properly remember anymore.

Where I do take issue is at the simplifying of this ambience to "the universal anxiety of modern man" and in the reduction of our continued fascination with the key of angst to "the universality of anxiety in contemporary life." Certainly there are representations of modern things in Scream, but as far as I could tell, the show does not go out of its way to engage with modernity per se. It would be easy to lament these points as merely specious, if the meeting of North with South weren't so belaboured (implying a loss-of-innocence narrative) and if Toonoo weren't subsequently posited as the outsider, unaware of pop culture by way of the unsubstantiated claim that Toonoo "has likely not seen The Scream".

It is certainly possible that this Cape Dorset resident has neither sought out nor encountered Munch's most famous work— but this is not something one can merely assume. Cape Dorset does, after all, have at least some TV and internet access, plus a steady stream of art loving tourists. Even in the Scream exhibit, Toonoo has a sculpture of a "hip-hop dancer", so evidently not all pop culture escapes him.  But without further elaboration or substantiation the word "likely" implies that Nancy Campbell has never asked Toonoo outright and has instead settled for a mere assumption that, given the remoteness and isolation of Cape Dorset, and given the seeming isolation of Inuit carving traditions, Toonoo couldn't have had sufficient opportunity to view the veritable Hello Kitty of European post-industrial-revolution art.

One purpose that Toonoo's never having seen The Scream would serve is to play up a certain binary model of genius, where Toonoo's departures from stereotypical Inuit sculpture came from some innate inspiration versus Pien's genius as cultivated by extensive academic study (Pien is, in fact, a teacher at OCAD, and UofT's Visual Studies program). This binary set-up invites other more problematic binaries to become implicit, and glosses over the history and politics of the Inuit art market, where until fairly recently, unorthodox sculpture was more likely to be labelled unsaleable and shelved or unceremoniously destroyed.

Such a domino chain of implicit binaries, while not dire or necessarily offensive, is still unnecessary when these two artists share a deeper, less historically-glossed connection through their intense immersion in the anxious realms of the in-between, liminal and ambiguous.

All that being said, it is a great show.

Scream. Featuring Ed Pien & Samonie Toonoo, Curated by Nancy Campbell at The Justina M. Barnicke Gallery is set to run from June 10 - August 21, 2010.

Exhibition details can be found here

For images and info about Ed Pien, see his website

Images of Samonie Toonoo can be found here

¹ For a clear and interesting article on the genesis of the Inuit Art World, see "James Houston, Armchair Tourism, and the Marketing of Inuit Art", by Kristin K. Potter, in Native American Art in the Twentieth Century, W. Jackson Rushing III, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999) pp. 39-55.

The other day, Steel Bananas editor Curran Folkers and I were listening to Billy Bragg as we discussed the upcoming G20 summit in Toronto. The tone of our conversation was one of fear, trepidation, and not a small amount of sadness. Both of us agreed that we'd rather be at home than out facing pepper spray, CF4 gas, sound cannons, and police detainment or arrest on the Friday and weekend of June 25^th to the 27^th. Nevertheless, we will be out protesting and covering the G20 protests for Steel Bananas.

Personally, I also suffer from a mild phobia of crowds. A few years and a number of shrinks ago the phobia wasn't so mild. To say I would become nervous around people I didn't know, especially in large numbers, is an understatement. I would often hyperventilate. I would sweat profusely. I would find myself paralyzed, trembling, lips and mouth dry, unable to meet anyone's gaze, unable to speak, and on the verge of tears for no reason I could explain. Even today, I have to exercise a significant degree of will to spend prolonged time in public and not let anyone catch on to my discomfort.

The people who name such things call a fear of crowds "demophobia". Fear of the "demos", the "people" -- one of the root words of democracy. Of course, this irony doesn't slip my notice. But I've fought to overcome my fear, and if you ask me, the real demophobes are the politicians and financial elite soon to be meeting behind closed doors and steel and concrete barricades in the heart of a soon-to-be militarized downtown Toronto. Their discussions will not be broadcast. We will have no say in what they decide for us. We will have no say in what issues are even brought to the table. In fact, the real concerns of the majority of the world's population and the natural world will be assiduously and conveniently ignored.

Some of you, many of you, maybe even most of you will disagree with me and, well, I don't expect to be able to convince you. I only hope you don't dismiss me offhand as an ungrateful brat. I've heard some say that people like me deserve to be arrested, or at least to have the shit kicked out of us. I was sitting in a bakery the other day and overheard several men talking about going out on the weekend of the G20 to beat up protesters. I heard similar grumblings concerning the protesters at the Vancouver Olympics who -- as the mainstream media failed to report -- were protesting the displacement of the poor and homeless to "clean up" Vancouver, the billions spent on the games that could have been used for any number of social causes to better and even save lives, blatant violations of indigenous land claims and the copyrighting of indigenous religious symbols for the offensive opening ceremonies, which came immediately on the heels of Stephen Harper's proroguing of parliament, which in turn shut down any possible investigation into the over 500 missing and/or murdered indigenous women over the past 30 years, not to mention the HST, and so on. Many righteous Canadians claimed there could be no legitimate reason for protesting Vancouver's hosting of the Olympics. Protesters are just irrational "delinquents" who like to complain and smash stuff.

Interesting word: "delinquent".  Of Latin origin, it means "completely" (de) "to leave" (linquere). A delinquent relinquishes all responsibility, all connections with the society of which they no longer want to be a part. Drop the "n" and "deliquesce" is an old chemistry term for "to liquefy" or "to melt away". I'll keep this simple and declarative. We are not delinquents. On the contrary, we do not relinquish our responsibilities. We act as we do precisely because we feel a sense of responsibility. That's certainly why I feel obligated to be out protesting and covering the G20. I don't want to put myself in harm's way. I'd rather be working on a short story or spending time with friends and family. But I feel a sense of responsibility to all those who suffer so that I may live the privileged life that I live. As a citizen of the world one has rights and responsibilities. I believe it is my responsibility to do my small part in speaking out against human suffering and those who have the power to combat it but don't. I believe that our so-called leaders are not living up to their responsibilities.

I will emphasize that it is a small part such protests play in shaping change. I have often heard it asked what protesting accomplishes. I've asked this myself on occasion, such as when I wrote about the tamed annual Lower Tuition Fees protest in Toronto, which I feel has been subverted by the very people imposing tuition fee hikes. So what does protesting accomplish, besides being a dramatic gesture of discontent?

To help myself answer this question, I recently attended the Toronto Community Mobilization Network's [http://g20.torontomobilize.org/] "Toronto vs. the G20" teach-in at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education building downtown where an auditorium full of people of diverse age, race, gender, creed, need, and sexual and political orientation gathered in common opposition to the G20 to learn from each other. Causes ranged from indigenous sovereignty, climate and environmental justice, income equity, community control over resources, gender justice, queer rights, rights for the differently abled (not disabled), migrant justice, opposition to colonial occupations, food and water security, workers' rights, and more. Common points of criticism included the scrapping of the Special Diet allowance to help those on social assistance with food costs and the controversial IMF "conditionalities" or Austerity Measures, such as those recently imposed upon Greece. The opening panel also featured a Novotel employee representative, one Ms. Rekha Sharma. For those unaware, Novotel hotel employees seeking to form a union are planning to strike during the G20, which will cause problems for delegates from France planning to stay at the hotel in question. The striking workers are hoping to form the third union in Accor-owned hotels in North America. The other two unionized hotels include one in New York and another Accor-owned hotel in Toronto.

The Toronto Community Mobilization Network itself formed specifically around Toronto's hosting of the G20 in order to connect disparate causes and to provide infrastructure for protesters, including food, communication networks, medical assistance, and legal assistance at the protests themselves. Aside from organizers assuring concerned protesters-to-be, including concerned parents, that the much publicized sound cannons are likely scare tactics to keep us from showing up in force on the weekend-of, tactics were not the focus of the teach-in. What we are protesting for -- namely a society that makes peace and justice its ideals, not profit -- was the focus. And in this regard, we were repeatedly reminded by organizers that the G20 protest will be a fleeting thing. The real lasting change comes out of the hard work done by grassroots organizations before and after.

The great thing about a teach-in like this is that it makes one aware of organizations like the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty or Defenders of the Land, movements like the Raise the Rates campaign, and causes like indigenous sovereignty and the struggle for differently abled rights. Many speakers delivered moving and impassioned speeches, often fighting back tears as they spoke, such as A. J. Withers, author of "If I Can't Dance, Is It Still My Revolution?" who spoke of how "disability" is a culturally, politically, and economically constituted concept built upon the central myth of our culture and political economy that we are alone in the world, or "independent", when in fact we are inter-dependent, together, sharing this world. Most of us don't make the clothes on our back. Most of us would perish without others growing our food. In the name of interdependence, organizers put out the call at this meeting for those who might be able to host protesters from abroad in their homes as well as for potential volunteers to seek out grassroots organizations in their communities to help with the day-to-day running of these organizations, something I plan to take to heart this summer and upon settling in my new home in Montréal for the coming school year.

This leaves us with the question of why protest at all?

It should come as no surprise that, as Hungarian thinker Karl Polanyi once wrote, the “market system [is] more allergic to rioting than any other economic system we know” (Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 195). Polanyi makes the observation that in England, while the Tudor government relied on riots to draw its attention to social issues, post-1797 after the rise of the financial market in England, “rioting ceases to be a popular feature of London life, its place is gradually taken by meetings at which, at least in principle, the hands are counted which otherwise would be raining blows” (195-196). It was not until the nineteenth century that “breaches of the peace, if committed by armed crowds, were deemed an incipient rebellion and an acute danger to the state” (196) and to the market; the two at this point beginning to blur into one. “For under the market economy otherwise harmless interruptions of public order and trading habits might constitute a lethal threat since they could cause the breakdown of the economic regime upon which society depended” (197).

Put simply, we protest as a reminder to world leaders that we are here and we are not satisfied with their leadership. We are not satisfied with their leaving the running of the world to the invisible hand of the "self-regulating" market. We do not have faith in the market to take care of the world's people. And when Adam Smith was talking about an invisible hand, for the record, he was not talking about market forces but God, as in God will run the market for us. This protest is also a reminder to the world that we are all affected by these issues. Our very presence in force is a reminder of the fragility of the market economy's grip upon society. Whether or not this message and the messages of community and grass roots organizations actually get out depends largely on the media in this day and age. But as we see in the mainstream media, protesters tend to be represented as a faceless mob without any goal beyond disruption. Thus this duty rests upon the shoulders of independent media outlets. Often these are under-resourced and largely voluntary outfits like steelbananas. For this reason, we will be in the thick of it, covering the protests, seeing what we see, resisting the mainstream media's claim to exclusive coverage of the event. In the future I hope to be able to bring more coverage to community and grassroots organizations and causes for steelbananas. Feel free to contact me in this regard.

As the teach-in at the OISE building drew to a close on June 5^th, one woman stood up in the classroom to have her say. She expressed her concerns and responsibilities as a mother for her children about the possibility of violence at the protests and the expected fallout of CF4 gas that may blanket Toronto shortly, as well as concern for her fellow Torontonians who will have to work in and around the affected zone of the city, but she concluded that she could not just sit back and watch events unfold on CityPulse 24. I, too, cannot sit back comfortably while the lives of my friends, family, and those fellow human beings who I will never know but upon whom I depend, past, present, and future, are gambled with on the market by leaders convening at the G20. We are your children, mothers, fathers, siblings, lovers, and friends. Arrest us if you will. Beat us up. Spray us with dangerous chemicals and rubber bullets. Blast us with sound. But know that we are here and that we refuse to melt away.

You can contact Devon Wong at devon@steelbananas.com

Post Script: For those interested, workshops will be held, including workshops pertaining to your legal rights on the ground at the G20 protest, at the People's Summit [http://peoplessummit2010.ca] from June 18^th to the 20^th, hosted at Ryerson University and the University of Toronto.

Works Cited:

Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. (1944). Beacon Press: Boston, 2001.

Comments

• June 23, 2010, Devon Wong writes: Comment on the photo captions: The Battle of/in Seattle in 1999 was not against the G20 which had not yet been formed but against one of its precursors, a WTO Ministerial Conference.
• July 4, 2010, Heather writes: Thank you for this well written article, Devon. As someone who has suffered from panic attacks, I can appreciate and relate to alot of what you wrote. I think the term "freedom of speech" gets thrown around so much that we have forgotten how fundamentally important this freedom is- without it, the other freedoms that we currently enjoy would be eradicated. It is scary to me that not only were protesters being silenced by the riot police but that there are Canadian citizens who actually supported the riot cops actions.

I, like many Torontonians, have been keeping a close eye on the security preparations for the upcoming G20 summit in the downtown core. I, like many, have been shocked and upset by the extent of the precautions, the overwhelming cost of the security, and the seeming loftiness with which Prime Minister Harper carries himself over the public’s concerns. Unlike some fellow Torontonians, however, I have also been following underground releases by protest groups, most notably (for the purposes of this article), the Southern Ontario Anarchist Resistance (SOAR).

There are any number of reasons to protest this ridiculous summit. Most of the key international issues that exist today will be tabled and discussed at some point over the two-day conference. Whatever your beef, be it the environment, poverty, social justice, women’s rights, children’s rights or gay rights, you’ll have the opportunity to voice your opinions and concerns for all to hear. Except the protest area will be at Queen’s Park, nowhere near the actual summit. Of course, you’ll also have to get through several layers of police barricade to do it, and something might get lost in the translation.

Photo Courtesy of http://www.thinkingfinance.net

Something has been truly lost in translation for decades regarding protest. Being an active member of political dissent should be something that is lauded, not derided, in our social culture. And yet the words ‘activist’ and ‘protestor’ are used in the same breath as ‘terrorist’ in our culture. The media has never helped, often showing only images of violent protest as faceless activists attack police, riot, smash windows and light cars afire. THIS is the face of anarchy, THIS is the face of protest to the average Canadian, and in that light who can blame them for wanting dissent prevented and punished?

To anyone who understands the term, the face of anarchism is not inherently violent. There is nothing in doctrine or literature on the purest nature of the term that requires violent action in protest. Yet the word ‘anarchist’ is held in the same regard as ‘protestor’ in the public consciousness. It is almost reminiscent of the word ‘communist’ throughout 20th century U.S. history as a term of political affiliation that has been misunderstood and demonized. This is because of a certain breed of anarchist, ones who are dedicated to disrupting the system through the use of destructive force. These gestures are as useless as they are idiotic, and should rightly be condemned by both government and public.

I understand the frustration that one can feel regarding the state of the world, and the overwhelming frustration at the change that never comes. Obviously such frustration requires catharsis, and violent protest can seem like a good way to release that pent-up aggression. But smashing the system, quite literally, has never gotten the public’s attention the way activists have desired. Indeed, the ‘Us vs. Them’ attitude that protestors seem to have adopted is entirely the wrong attitude. And here begin my propositions: that activists think of the public not as ‘Them,’ but as ‘Us’ who don’t know they’re ‘Us’ yet.

Conveying a message to people and getting people enraged about issues cannot involve destroying their civic spaces. If people see violence they shut down, they paint protest with a black brush. They say ‘just a bunch of troublemakers.' If they are communicated with rationally, if they are made to understand the issues in discussion and if they are made to care, then protest has achieved its goal. It is essentially a public relations battle being waged; it is time for activists to adopt a better and more effective strategy. For example, the Green Party were not long ago thought of as a bunch of tree-hugging hippies lost in the past with no relevant issues for the public to listen to. How did they become an official party with 12% of the popular vote? They cut off their ponytails and they put on suits. They got smart. They saw that they were not being taken seriously, so they took steps to ensure that they were. If you believe in your message and you believe in communicating it, then you cannot afford to hide behind the pretentious cloak of ‘integrity.’ You do what you have to do.

The time has come for paradigms to shift. An opportunity exists now unlike any in recent memory to change the public opinion of dissent. With security spending near the $1B mark, with all of the questions being raised about the enhanced police presence, with the wall being constructed in the heart of downtown, and especially with a fake lake in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, more and more question are being asked regarding the necessity of these inane gestures. In order to rally the public, why not lead a two-day long, PEACEFUL protest? Why not call attention to whatever issue you champion by first demonstrating the uselessness of world summits? The frivolity of two-day pageants of photo opportunities in which nothing is resolved can no longer be ignored now that public scrutiny has engulfed the security (over)spending. The use of violence in these protests will only serve to justify the security spending in the minds of the public; staging entirely peaceful protests will demonstrate the uselessness of spending so much public money on a downtown-centered summit, which could easily have been hosted by a military base at a fraction of the cost.

I am not naïve in thinking that people won’t show up who are only in the game for the violence and the destruction. These people will be at the G20 summit. The key to promoting the social responsibility of the protesting community lies in their dissociation with violent dissidents. Rather than assisting the violent protestors, why not actually assist the security forces of the summit, giving the space and time for police to subdue offenders? Regardless of police being ‘the establishment’ or ‘the system,’ you do what you have to do to get your point across. Like the Green Party, you swallow your pride for the greater good. Sacrifice toward an end result is essential, but it should not be the populace that is made to sacrifice their safety and well-being, their cityscape, even their livelihood for the sake of a message. It is the responsibility of the activists to sacrifice in order to promote their ideas. Without the conviction to sacrifice, the ideas ring hollow.

This is a time for rationality. Pure idealism will not do, nor will pure realism. It is in a perfect marriage of idealism and realism that the perfect message will be presented to the public. The proper vision, represented properly, is the only hope that exists for global social change. I cannot stress enough the importance of this looming moment in history; the opportunity for change has not in recent memory been this close. Public opinion has already begun to sway; all it need do now is shift, bend, twist, and finally turn. But every hurled brick, every thrown punch will chip away at the fragile seed of communication that could potentially be nurtured into full bloom.

When opportunity knocks, you open the door.

"The writer wishes to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Elyse Mayo and Shane Fallowfield. The ideas fleshed out in my discussions with them exist within the fabric of this treatise and helped shape my own ideas on the matters at hand. The writer owes much to their insightful dialogue."

Comments

• June 22, 2010, Elyse Mayo writes: <3
• June 25, 2010, Isaac writes: excellent article, Colin. In purely ideological terms, I'm a fan of anarchism, but as you point out, we live in a real world where idealism must make room for realism. Protesters could do FAR worse than to read this before heading out for the weekend.

If this is unnecessarily verbose it is because FOWL's music is beautiful yet inaccessible. Like a mystical experience, the language describing it can only dance around the issue at hand. Luckily, this FOWL jazz is imminently danceable. So I'll let these fingers continue to two-step across these white computer keys and we'll see where we end up.

FOWL is the king of the instrumental story song. Every tune relates some miniature odyssey he has taken, whether on the streets or in his mind. Each song is a unique stream in time and acoustic space with its own special timbre and groove. Noah rides along in his own ark constructed by wiggly slinking basslines, catchy keyboards, living percussion, and a spirit of serious humour. There are probably more notes per minute in a Noah Campbell composition than any dance-electro track available. His music is infectious, fun, and has a tendency of producing intense visionary experiences in the listener. Long-term listening to FOWL's oeuvre may result in increased intelligence, virility, and empathy. However, it will probably leave you with a few rotting teeth—FOWL is the anti-fluoride.

Inastormental

As I write this article there are 13 albums attributed to FOWL. In such a large sea of work, it may hard to know where to first set sail. I have listened to the music of Noah Campbell for years and I would like to recommend three albums to you, Dear Reader. Two years ago Mister Campbell decided to unleash his wave to the world, so he released his InaStorMental through a vanity CD distributor. The masses were unphazed, the CD did not sell. As any fan of strange musick knows, lack of sales is not a reflection of the quality of the work. InaStorMental is an overlong masterpiece which opens with the crackle of a Northern Ontario storm. The song “Breaching the Birthing Canal” is a metal-jazz tribute to his young son. “Life is Sushi,” a tasty platter of licks with a catchy riff, is FOWL's biggest hit. InaStorMental is probably the place to start for anyone who wants a bite out of all of FOWL's fruits.

The other albums that constitute FOWL's finest are Commercial Works and Banging Pounding Racket Noise Vol. III. These two are very good, very different pieces. Commercial Works was created when Noah tried “desperately to meet vague specs for film, TV, video games on a music placement agency's listings.” He made music for horror films, hip-hop for video games, themes for Indiana Jones-style adventures, and atmospheric music for a documentary on jellyfish. Each track is brilliant, brimming with life. They were uniformly rejected. So it goes. They have all been collected on Commercial Works. This CD occupies a sonic space somewhere between Sun Ra, Shostakovitch, and Super Mario. If more than one of these names appeal to you, buy this album. If you have never heard of these people, you might be more interested in Banging Pounding Racket Noise Vol. III, the final part in a series of solo piano releases. The musick therein is a direct line to Noah's brain. By listening to BPRN, you can actually hear him think. While Commercial Works is lacking a spiritual dimension, BPRN represents one man's quest for transcendence and gnostic experience. It is ghostly and beautiful. Sadly, the only album which surpasses the spirituality of BRPN is unfinished and rumoured to be lost. It was to be called TheiT, it was to be a symphony to the moon, and an encounter with alterity itself. It is the Canadian free jazz equivalent of Brian Wilson's Smile. Maybe we will see it in forty years.

The Man Himself

Speaking of encounters with alterity, I recently had the chance to speak to Noah Campbell about his work. His words probably describe his music much better than I ever could. The interview follows.

When did the FOWL project begin and why the hell did you choose that name? Are you some kind of chicken or something?

No. The title FOWL formed from an incident of dire need to defend life and limb against an evil NWO owl which took a liking to my eyeballs one fine feathered day deep in the clear cut jungles of Northern Ontario.

Are you kidding or what?

You know full well there is nothing humorous about this.

What are some non-musical influences on your music?

God’s voice, which is of course thunder. The blistering mind death that is the summer sun. Sushi. Psychically influencing one’s mood in a negative way. Playing cards. A young girl with severe cerebral palsy who died at the age of 3. Tiny yellow wild flowers. The lost love of my life. Interactions with her disapproving parents. Demonic owls. The pain of illegitimate fatherhood. Synchronous pregnancy with a catastrophic ending. The possibility of restitution. The ease with which instantaneous composition is achieved on the white keys. Facing the storm with a smile. The endless possiprobabilities of massive life changes. Moving to Calgary after being evicted from your love’s heart. Musical prostitution. My son's love of the aeroplane. Lame action movies. Unintelligible dance music lyrics. Technology. The possibilities of alternative hip-hopping. Spooky intelligence agencies. Airplane turbulence. Horror. The unbelievable life cycle of the jellyfish. Not knowing what minimalist music actually is. Silly new age cultism.

You have a young son. What impact has this had on 1) your life, 2) your music?

1.)  Made it outstandingly awesome and meaningful in every regard.

2.) Other than becoming the main focus of most of what I write, making it impossible to actually record anything.

You have said that your music is a “direct representation of certain psychic and/or emotional states.” Actually you haven't said this, I have said this. Is this true? How?

Yes. I play the pictures in my head.

Perhaps more accurately, your songs tell stories. How do you approach music in order to deliver some sort of narrative?

My mind wanders. So do my fingers. How can they not be one and the same? Even if I sit without a preplanned concept, some idea, story, sentence, emotion, flavour takes over the proceedings and infuses the notes with meaning. I try to title the music accordingly, but there is always more to the tale than a quick phrase can convey. Usually it’s best just to ask me what’s going on. I don’t expect you to catch the esoteric meaning behind what essentially sound like random notes.

What are the pros and cons of being a one-man band?

Pros: not dealing with others egos, phobias, mental illnesses, physical frailties.

Cons: never playing live.

Your previous efforts to take the world by storm with your particular brand of free jazz have been less than successful. Do you have any new tactics to make your assault more effective?

I’ve stopped fighting the owls and have now chosen to join them.

Tell me about TheiT? I hear it is a teenage symphony to God.

It’s a paean to the peon I once was, believing that perhaps the moon was a deity worth worshipping.

It's hard to know how to end this thing. Can we stop pussy-footing around and just listen to your music? I can't describe, you can't describe it. I think the only person who ever accurately described your work was James Joyce when he said “bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronn!”

FOWL's music can be found at:

http://www.indiepool.com/FOWL001

http://www.myspace.com/fowlmusic
http://www.deezer.com/en/#music/fowl
http://www.last.fm/music/FOWL

Comments

• June 17, 2010, Noah Campbell writes: You can also purchase my music digitally just about everywhere they sell digital music.

NYC indie game developer Mark "MESSHOF" Essen, creator of the provocative sensory experience, Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist, the excruciatingly punishing Punishment and the hilariously bizarre game collaboration with Pixeljam, Cream Wolf, knows just how to both engage and aggravate players within a matter of seconds. But no matter how consistently punishing his games can be, they are also some of the most intense and fulfilling experiences yet.

His latest work, Nidhogg, is a 2-player territorial dueling game in which either player can become the opponent, thus breaking the boundaries between 1 and 2-player games. The tendency to believe you're playing a 1-player game is totally apparent, but with the AI component replaced by another person there's certainly a greater sense of humanity involved. Yet in the end it's not the players who are in control, but instead the omnipresent arrow forever guiding the players as they attempt to reach their ultimate goal, as ambiguous as that goal may seem.

I talked with this inspiring developer to get a sense of where he was taking his latest installment.  I've also included images from both his new and old games alike.

Erika Szabo: You're definitely an inspiration to a lot of fans and developers alike. How/When did you start out in the game industry? When did you start gaining notice for your works?

MESSHOF: I don't work in the industry, I've just been a hobbyist since high school. I think the first game that got pretty popular was Punishment which I made in 2005. Flywrench also gained a lot of attention after Jonathan Blow did a sort of parody game called Nicewrench that tried to take away the game's steep difficulty curve. Flywrench was also exhibited in a big group show of artists under 33 at the New Museum in New York.

M: Mainly this arcade game called Great Swordsman which is a really cool one player fencing/kendo/gladatorial game. I really liked how the collisions were pixel perfect and you had to memorize all sorts of distances and animation times based around that. Will you step into his sword when you lunge at his head from this far away? You have to hit the sweet spot. The one problem was the game was really slow and only one player which made fake outs sort of unsatisfying.

The tug of war came in because I wanted to keep the one hit kills for some realism and to add some more weight to less actions. It still needed to be quick so instead of rounds I modeled it as through it were a one player game and the other player was controlling the enemies that would spawn off screen.

ES: How long did it take for you to develop the game?

M: Six months off and on.

M: It all comes back to the idea of it being a one player game with the enemy as the other player. Since roles can change quickly I just needed something to show who has control of the screen. I think the arrow is all I need.

M: Yeah I definitely played a lot of them growing up. I don't play a lot of the more recent games out.

M: Right now I'm leaning towards two player games because they're a lot more fun to play.

M: In a blimp.

M: Nidhogg will be out soon!

The premise behind Civil War by writer Mark Millar and artist Steve McNiven: after a tragedy in small town America involving some super hero types, an exploding man, and a schoolyard full of kids (here’s a hint: the exploding man was fine afterward), the government wanted to register all the super guys (a big part of which meant revealing secret identities) to try to stop that sort of tragic craziness from happening again. Some super heroes were for this idea, or at least “OK, whatever” about it, and others were dead set against it.

For years, issues of comic books have been devoted to “good guy X meets good guy Y… and fight!” This trope has long since been relegated to the status of cliché, but Civil War was a valiant attempt at re-imagining said cliché with substance behind the in-fighting. The biggest problem from the creator’s standpoint was how to convincingly divide the characters up equally, and then how to keep these various long time allies at each others' throats. Neither problem got a satisfactory answer.

Filling up the ranks of the against side was easy: some fighting for civil liberty/personal freedom and others against “Big Government” seems to appeal to either end of the political spectrum. This is the side of the status quo, as with any long running serial story, the status is always quo.

The “for registration” side was tougher to fill. Despite the fact that Millar wanted both sides to be legitimate options for characters, the “for registration” side invariably came across as the bad guys. The side that creates crazy clones of old friends, takes the dirtiest of shots, and recruits super-villains for their team, as a rule, will be the bad guys.

The characters whose loyalties were the most important for the story were Captain America and Iron Man. If you knew nothing about Civil War and had to guess which side each character was on, I’m pretty sure you’d try Captain America as the for registration/pro-government representative, with Iron Man opposing him on the “good” side. That Captain America, of course he’s a stooge to the man, right?

Well, nope, good guess reader, but that’s not how it went down. You may be surprised to hear that the exact opposite affiliation was the case.

Captain America is, turns out, pretty awesome. Not one to blindly listen to authority, but instead is devoted to the ideals of the mythic America, when Cap is approached to be the figurehead of the “for registration” forces (or else) he busts angrily out of the room and surfs away on a jet fighter. That last part isn’t me trying to sound cool, that’s what happened. The only way it could be better is if the comic could start playing “Free Bird” while Cap soared off into the distance.

What sucks is that the way it all played out, it probably would have been better to make Captain America the “for registration” bad guy, because that would have at least made sense to readers. Instead that role fell to Iron Man, a character who historically subverts authority on all fronts, thinking he knows what’s best despite what he’s told, and does whatever HE wants. A vigilante.

I’m trying to figure out the thought process behind making Iron Man the “for registration” front piece, aka the bad guy, and the best I can come up with is some nebulous idea that because he’s rich, he’s bad? That because he’s a wealthy business man he’d support the government for the sweet contacts and contracts? That ties too much with cynical real world perceptions, forcing Iron Man to fit the mold of a Dick Cheney and Halliburton scenario isn’t fair to the decades of character we’ve been given before. (As a quick aside: sorry, Dick Cheney, but when you shoot a guy in the face and make him apologize for it, the reality becomes Cheney=bad guy. Do I really have to explain this?)

But see, it could have worked. Instead of making it sound like Iron Man was a fan of registration for everyone, like this was a philosophy that he would gladly have agreed to join up himself when he was just starting with the hero thing - let him admit that he’s a big hypocrite. Let him say “listen, I don’t trust you to be able to put on matching socks in the morning, much less go out and try to save the world, but that’s okay. I just need you to go through all these licensing and training programs I’ve deemed sufficient, and then maybe you can be useful. At least you’ll be insured.”

In that scenario, the story could have boiled down to stopping a bad guy, Iron Man, who couldn’t be appealed to using the intellectual argument that you can’t know all the variables and be right all the time, that someone else can know better and help you, who couldn’t be appealed to because he couldn’t get past his innate arrogance and self-righteousness.

The result of that story would have been a reversal: Iron Man would have represented many of the ideals espoused by the anti-registration forces, personal freedom, but hoarded wholly unto himself, while the actual community of anti-registration forces, in joining together against Iron Man, provide the accountability and experience to each other that the common man felt was lacking and started the whole Civil War crisis off in the first place.

This is in contrast to the actual ending: the anti-registration side gives up. Except for the members who don’t. Compelling.

http://misselephante.deviantart.com/

High Waters (2010)

The Second Layer (2009)

The Woman (2010)

Click here to view the film.

What does this course of action even mean? Are you trying to show up your over-achieving younger brother Milton? Or perhaps trying to impress your dear ol' sis, Mississauga? Either way, Markham actually blew a rare opportunity to become a self-sufficient trailblazer, and instead have presented themselves as yet another suburban subdivision statistic.

One particularly impressive councilor had this to say:
"People I talk to don't want this community to look like Toronto," Mr. Landon said, which is baffling due to its vague bamboozlery.

Of course, there are many Markham residents who are upset, and I suppose that's a positive. Check out the Markham Sustainability people. They have prepared a long list of points on the direction that Markham should take as opposed to blind residential development. The main issue at hand is that Markham is in possession of such rich Canadian soil; less than half a percent of Canada's farmland falls into their Class 1 category.

Hot diggidy damn I harbour dislike for Markham.

In also-bad news, reading an article from a publication on loan from Devon Wong (yes, the Devon Wong) I was shocked to find that one of the main dangers of a GMO is that its shenanigans can be nigh untraceable. I thought us humans had invented instruments that could see everything! Shitty.

So I shot a message over to the Big Carrot in an attempt to clarify and henceforth alleviate my concerns, which was promptly responded to by Patrick Conner, the Chair of their Standards Committee. He supplied me with a bit of information regarding Canada-specific GMOs:

"First of all, the only GM crops grown in Canada are Corn, Canola, Soy and Sugar Beet. These are exclusively used in processed foods.

GM foods imported to Canada from the US are Cottonseed Oil, Papaya (from Hawaii), Squash (some zucchini, yellow crookneck and straightneck squash) and Milk Products (as the US still allows Bovine Growth Hormone which was never approved for use in Canada). As far as genetically engineered crops used in prepared, processed foods, much of it, especially GM Sugar Beet is so refined that the protein tag required to positively identify GM presence has been refined out."

One oft-unexplored route to take in an urban setting to ensure that your food is organically grown is, believe it or not, grow it yourself. The pictures throughout this article represent the garden of Greg Misumi, a Toronto businessman whose hobby, if widely practiced, could eliminate the sway that these GMO-touting companies hold on food production. He grows carrots, snap peas, tomatoes, corriander, basil and English cucumbers, spending only a few hours a week on the garden. The top of his building was originally made as a park for the residents, but many banded together to request a division of lots for the purpose of private gardening. Many people in Greg's building are avid vegetable gardeners, even in their limited space constraints, and are an important example for city dwellers who are no longer complacent about the origins of their food.

Big Carrot's Patrick also pointed me towards this campaign of environmental justice, make sure to check out their coverage of a Haitian protest of GM seeds. I think I'll chat with them next month--don't you just love how one conversation leads you straight into another?

Photo by Matthew Filipowich

So these past few months have been pretty slow for transit. Or at the very least, relatively scandal-free, which leaves me with relatively little to rant about. No major announcements. No negative press, because let’s be honest, the TTC can barely afford any more bad buzz at this point; no positive press, because let’s be honest, the TTC can barely afford fresh coffee for the break room at this point. I suppose this does indeed make for an interesting discussion piece: the purgatorial aftermath of the complete and utter meltdown of the Toronto Transit Commission.

Between weary, suspicious customers with their trigger-happy fingers just waiting for an excuse to whip out the old phone camera and catch an operator being huffy or negligent, and being in absolutely no position to provide the much needed service improvements that were promised in response to sleeping collectors etc., the TTC is in a pickle to say the least. Expansion is now guaranteed to be sluggish at best, most of the money is going toward ensuring the existing system doesn’t collapse into itself, and the days of the loveably cranky bus driver are a gleaming, distant memory. Indeed, the TTC is in a transitory phase at the moment. The tangible lack of things for me to discuss here I find highly indicative of the much-maligned transit authority’s current state of affairs. TTC operations seem to have grinded to an awkward, largely undignified halt.

I’ve often found myself coming to the defense of the TTC in the face of accusations of incompetence, lack of service and especially in grass-is-greener arguments about how other cities don’t have these problems. In this case, however, there just really isn’t all that much to say and the TTC has no choice but to simply absorb it all as it helplessly falls into an increasingly intensified version of the sordid state it’s in now.

I used to truly believe that all cities have exactly the same issues when it comes to infrastructure and that Toronto’s transit woes were merely the usual, unavoidable blunders of bureaucracy that occur identically all over the world. Now I’m not so sure, though I still have no idea why. There are so many things that leave me totally baffled wondering why in this case, the grass does appear to be slightly greener just about everywhere else in the industrialized world. Other Canadian cities don’t seem to have this much trouble getting projects off the ground and politicians interested in spending the money on transit initiatives.

I do not have a clue why expansion seems to be infinitely more expensive in Canada than in other countries. I do not have a clue why the politicians in the municipal and provincial governments either have absolutely no idea how much things cost (see George Smitherman’s pretty, but ultimately misinformed transit platform) or have absolutely no interest in building infrastructure. I do not have a clue how Toronto’s transit system fell into such a bizarrely pathetic state. Furthermore, due to the first two of my bewilderments, there does not appear to be many options to solving the third problem.

I think the worst part of this – well, certainly not the worst part, but a pretty bad part of this – is that while it is very convenient to place full responsibility on the TTC, I do think it’s fairly safe to say that most of the TTC’s problems are well out of the its realm of control. It really can’t help that building things like subway stations, for whatever reason, are just really, really expensive. It also really can’t help it if governments don’t want to spend the exorbitant piles of money it requires to build these outrageously overpriced, but ultimately indispensable public spaces.

What’s a transit authority to do?

In this case basically nothing. The embarrassing choice in this case seems to be the only choice. All the TTC can do at this point is stare at its feet with its hands in its pockets, hoping everything gets suddenly better before it has to answer any more questions it isn’t prepared to respond to. We the citizenry require that responsibility be taken for the things that aren’t working as smoothly as they should. The TTC, being on the front line, is an easy target for scapegoating and that isn’t going to change. The sad part is just that it both is and is not the TTC’s responsibility to own up to these issues. As a result, we are left sitting here ourselves with our hands in our pockets, wondering what happened and looking for some kind of reason as to how things came to this.

Most of these women who walk the red-carpet must share stylists. They wear the same hair, some jewelled drop earring, and they have on a carbon-copy dress that I’ve probably seen ten versions of in the past. If you follow this formula, you’re indisputably guaranteed a spot in some trashy blog’s “Best-Dressed List.”

Eva Longoria Parker in Pucci | Cannes 2008 | Courtesy of Zimbio

Maybe it was Eva Longoria Parker in that typical one-shoulder Pucci gown.  Hearing her get praised for this dress truly inspired me to want to gauge my eyes out, cut off my ears and then type this obituary. In that order. After spending fifteen minutes browsing through a gallery of less than impressive red-carpet photos on some gossip website (that proved to have less than impressive taste for putting up said photos), I came to a few conclusions:

1) Black-tie has never seemed like such a snore.

2) I -- a regular mortal being, who cuts her own bangs, has a (below) average income, and prefers to carry vintage briefcases over a Vuitton any day -- have never felt less envious of these unoriginal blue-blooded sheep.

3) No matter how much money you have, sometimes taste is an innate gift, right? The “real” people featured on style blogs seem to get it right a million times better.

In North American fashion, the Cannes Film Festival act as an international publicity stunt for designers, along with other major red carpet events such as the Costume Institute’s Met Gala. In the last ten years, designers have focused on tracking down famous women to model their clothes because the amount of attention and free photographs that will be taken is undeniable. The age-old relationship between cinema and costume has translated to Hollywood and fashion.

The concept of “celebrity” as a publicity stunt used to be, and still somewhat is, crucial. For the regular Joe or Jane, it was like keeping up with the popular girls in high school -- the Plato’s Cave of fashion, if you will. You recognized that face from that film you saw. You related to that face you saw on the screen and thus emotionally identified yourself as an entity in said film. Eventually your curiosity to know more about that face led you to the small print under a Cannes red-carpet photo in some magazine you were reading while waiting in the aisle 3 cashier line at Safeway. For the last decade, most people’s attention to red-carpet gowns has been related to a “false” concept of reality based on what was perceived in newspapers and magazines.

Which is why the red-carpet dress is supposed to be a big deal of eye candy for the average person. Of course, “false” is the keyword, and the frothy, pastel-colored concoctions as of late have recently felt unfitting and unsuitable for our generation. Such formulaic styling choices represent bygone years of taste defined and dictated by a generation of wealthy baby boomers who couldn’t relate to the new millennial generation. When a huge crop of celebrities started hiring the same stylists in fear of being placed on a worst-dressed list on some newsstand, the young millenials began to demand new definitions of glamour.

Timing is important in fashion, and it separates the good from the bad and the ugly. After all, fashion and beauty are related to context. Take for instance, the Sex and the City film. Reasonably successful, especially with fans of the television series who followed Carrie Bradshaw closely as she led liberal feminism in stilettos instead of loafers over ten years ago. The show was timed perfectly with the rise in incomes of the baby boomers, and for their children it painted a desirable life to look forward to.

Consider the sequel’s release, birthed in an age of recession. The second film felt over-the-top, hard to relate to, and uncomfortable to watch (I’m talking about the impractical clothes… not the sex). Gasps of previous excitement now turned to groans, which I heard from a few ladies in the theatre when Carrie walked out of her cab in 90-degree Abu Dhabi wearing a purple, floor-length crinoline skirt to go shopping. The mainstream market formulas of the successful women’s show worked for a particular generation a few years ago, but the same formula couldn’t recreate the feelings of freshness, hipness, and hilarity.

This is proof that what we used to think was “beautiful” on the red-carpet, on screen, and in the magazines, has nowadays shifted to ordinary. It was hard for Kate Beckinsale to revive the same level of public excitement over her blue Marchesa at Cannes when Charlize Theron wore a similar Dior years ago. Ironically, current red carpet fashion is evidence of the lack of imagination that exists among some of the most popular faces in Tinseltown. One of the major issues of the red carpet dress is that it’s short of the aggressive styling seen on fashion runways and in fashion magazines -- the smorgasbord of colour after accessory after piercing after tattoo after runny liquid eyeliner on Poker Face songstresses and other various ingenues. Nowadays, the young, trendy wannabes such as yours truly expect to see more refreshing faces like Tilda Swinton and Charlotte Gainsbourg at these events. Otherwise, they’re just not worth looking at.

Kate Beckinsale in Marchesa | Cannes 2009 | Courtesy of Arizona Foothills Magazine

I can’t help but wonder if boring, cliché red-carpet dresses will follow the same pattern as cliché, heavy handed movies that have done so poorly with movie critics and box offices (that’s YOU, Robin Hood). That’s the relationship between Hollywood and fashion, cinema and costume. Like my good ol’ go-to-date movies that always have a spot in the theatre, there will always be that red-carpet dress that’s “pretty” to look at, and temporarily satisfying at a below-mediocre level. But in the meantime, red-carpet fashion is going to be stuck in its creative rut if some rich bitch doesn’t spice up this schnitz soon.

The Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over tour is the epitome of the reunion gimmick – an overwrought spectacle of a wildly over-the-hill band content parodying themselves into pop culture oblivion. But we can’t really fault the Eagles, can we? By the end of the 1970s the Eagles were probably the biggest band in the universe. It’s tough to downplay a reunion when you penned "Hotel California," or when your greatest hits compilation is one of the highest selling records of all time. Even their 1980 breakup needed to be underlined by Don Henley’s epic declaration that a reunion would only occur “when hell freezes over.” If a reunion had to happen, the Eagles were going to play it up as much as humanly possible.

Cleverly enough, when the Eagles did actually reunite in 1994, they named the tour after Henley’s cheeky claim. While this may have been a bold move for a lesser band, The Eagles had no qualms about their fame. Calling the tour Hell Freezes Over was symbolic of their shameless admission that the notion of a comeback was, in itself, entirely absurd. Would one of the 1970s biggest bands have any relevant perspectives on popular culture in 1994? No, of course not. Did they reunite because they expected thousands of fans would enjoy seeing "Hotel California" live every night? Yes.

The Hell Freezes Over experience wasn’t so much about seeing the Eagles live as it was about consuming the impossibility of seeing the Eagles live. Reunions demand performers assert themselves in a new age of popular culture, and re-contextualize the nature of their entire existence. For the Eagles, this meant emphasizing the unlikelihood of a reunion after a conspicuous fourteen-year absence (a length of time, one would assume, long enough for hell to freeze over). When they reunited in 1994, the band was not relevant enough to comment on popular culture, nor were they irrelevant enough to not sell concert tickets. Essentially, the Eagles became hyper-relevant. Their fame no longer required any explanation – they were famous for the mere fact that they existed, no additional background was necessary.

Reunion tours demand performers reconfigure themselves according to the confines of the event’s cultural parameters. Sometimes bands embrace this notion and other times, not as much. A few weeks ago, Black Francis dropped this bomb when discussing the possibility of another Pixies reunion:

"We're interested in anything that's going to earn us a fair wage. It's not to say it's not about art, but we made that art fucking 20 years ago. So forget the fucking goddamn art. This ain't about the art anymore. I did the arty farty part. Now it's time to talk about the money." (The Quietus, Feb. 18, 2010)

I think this offended people. It probably offended lots of Pixies fans. This, I feel, was probably the least offensive thing Black Francis could have done. It’s not as though Black Francis is a jaded, money-hungry grump. He is simply addressing the fact that reunions cannot function as art because, technically, they seem to function more as traveling conventions of nostalgia. As a member of the reunited Pixies, Black Francis assumes the role of a scripted performer presenting his past achievements for present audiences. The parameters of his performance are limited, and very much unlike those of a typical indie-rock frontman. Getting paid only vindicates Black Francis in participating in an otherwise humiliating event.

Reunions are celebrations of confined collective memory. Nothing new and exciting is supposed to happen at reunion shows, and when it does, sometimes we rather it didn’t. For instance, on the Smashing Pumpkins twentieth anniversary reunion tour, they opted to play as much new material as they did old hits, prompting noticeable displeasure from fans. This, of course, made little sense to frontman Billy Corgan, who spent the entire tour mouthing back at his fans. Corgan’s essential problem was that he mistook his own hyper-relevance for actual relevance. Rather than committing to the conditions of his role as a hyper-relevant performer, Corgan performed new material as a means of insisting on a new cultural position separate from the parameters of the reunion. These notions inevitably conflicted, leaving fans upset and Corgan frustrated.

Corgan failed to realize that all his fans actually wanted was to participate in the sort of experience they hadn’t been able to since the “official” breakup in 2000. Reunions must function as culturally static experiences in order to be successful. They are never about art – the success of the event is predicated on the assumption that an audience will derive pleasure from the experience despite its cultural deficiencies. As pointed out by musicologist Frederick Stocken in Musical Postmodernism Without Nostalgia:

"No-one is under any obligation to perform music written last year or before. It is not like a building which will be there until we make the effort to knock it down. We have, on the contrary, to make an enormous effort to perform a piece of music. We do it not for the sake of duty to the past, or for historical research, but because in the act of performance, which necessarily exists in the present, the music is able to speak to a modern audience." (Stocken, 536)

As Stocken emphasizes, the performer assumes no obligation to perform any piece of music at any time. Live concerts occur because there is a belief that the music will resonate with an audience; it is because audiences exist that live concerts have any significance at all, and it is these audiences that define the parameters for enjoyment. With reunion shows, audiences expect to see faithful references to the past. In other words, the intentions of the performer take a backseat to the expectations of the audience. The possibility for art is limited because the content of reunion shows are necessarily confined to these expectations.

Considering the sorts of constraints reunions put on performers, it seems unusual that a band like Pavement would ever reform. Pavement cultivated an entire aesthetic based on their deliberately contrary approach to popular culture. Essentially, their ‘don’t give a fuck’ attitude was what made them endearing in the first place. A reunion would only undermine these sensibilities, as it necessarily requires they pander to the demands of their audiences. One would assume that their ability to faithfully communicate with audiences would be damaged by the event itself.

For these reasons, it is surprising the Pavement’s transition into a reunion band has been as graceful as it has. This is because, rather than rejecting the reunion’s cultural implications, Stephen Malkmus and co. have dutifully accepted the task of re-contextualizing the nature of their fame. On Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’s ‘Gold Soundz,’ Malkmus shouts, “you can never quarantine the past.” Yet, their 2010 greatest hits compilation, Quarantine the Past playfully contradicts the lyric. Pavement wants us to know they’re in on the gag – they recognize that reunions are both superficial and unnecessary. Their solution has been to play up the absurdity of their reformation and embrace the limited parameters of their new, hyper-relevant existence. If anything, Quarantine the Past is their Hell Freezes Over.

The Pavement reunion tour is not about art, simply because Pavement are no longer the trailblazing 90s band capable of expressing poignant, contemporarily relevant cultural messages. As a reunion band, they will follow firmly in the footsteps of bands like the Eagles, shamelessly discarding the sanctity of their legacy in favour of the calculated conditions of their reunited existence. This should not be disappointing, nor should it discount the strength of their recorded output. Much like the Hell Freezes Over-era Eagles, the two formations of each band are incomparable, as one simply is while the other pretends to be. Issues only ever arise when this division is not made apparent, as it happened with Billy Corgan and the Smashing Pumpkins.

Of course, you could probably argue that a Pavement reunion and their releasing a greatest hits compilation is massively gimmicky, or that it equates to them selling out. Sure, this could be valid. However, it still says nothing of the fact that Pavement really have no bones about who they are now what they’re doing on this tour. They’re Quarantin-ing the Past for audiences everywhere (including Toronto on Saturday). They know it’s not appropriate for one of the most outrageous and contrary bands of the 1990s to be headlining a massive Broken Social Scene-curated festival in 2010. But will I still enjoy seeing them kick out the jams during Trigger Cut? Yes. Fuck YES!

Comments

• June 17, 2010, Cluff Billiards writes: You are the father to my sister of thought.

Do Make Say Think - "Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn"

It’s horrible to admit, but it’s entirely possible that I’ve just been trying to rewrite “As Long As You Love Me” for my entire life. As I got older I was drawn to hip-hop and Bob Dylan for the same reason: density of lyricism and variation in lyrical delivery, using the play of a language I knew to express something in a language I didn’t, and still don’t seem to have unmediated access to.

I know for a fact that other people have totally different things that they look for when approaching music. Par example: every musician I’ve ever met is more likely to listen closely to the portions of a song that relates to the instrument they favour before listening closely to any other aspects. A drummer is more likely to own and listen to music with amazing drumming with a rate of greater quality than say, a piano player. The same goes for people who don’t play music; some people favour music that’s so bass heavy that it won’t play properly on less-than-amazing headphones and speakers while others could listen to theirs on a 50s AM radio and it would probably sound better.

How can we account for this gap in sonic signification? Or, rather simply, why do people like the music they like? How does music make meaning both sonically and through our relationships with music that we claim as our own? How do our differences in taste inform and enrich our relationships?

By way of exploration I’d like to talk for a second about the fundamental differences between lyrically heavy music and totally instrumental music. To return to my previous example, Bob Dylan. It isn’t likely that most English speaking Bob Dylan fans got into him for anything other than his lyrics. Obviously there are exceptions to the statement. Blonde on Blonde is the record that really pushes Dylan over as legendary for most people because his band was finally sounding like and emoting like his lyricism always had. Essentially he married his form and content in way that made both of them pop right off of the record and back into the human imagination cycle from whence they came.

At the outset of his career, the humdinger folk-singer days, he wasn’t doing anything sonically new at all. “Talking World War III Blues” and “Talking Dust Bowl Blues” by Woody Guthrie are pretty much exactly the same song with the lyrics removed, but Dylan’s beat-poetic approach reimagined Guthrie’s old protest song into something entirely new and differently relevant. (But would someone who didn’t understand the lyrics prefer one over the other? Would it make any difference?)

So what is the essential difference between what lyrical artists do and what instrumental artists do? I mean, because of my upbringing and cultural construction I don’t really have many instrumental pieces that remind of times in my childhood, but obviously there are people that do. Whether it’s the magnificence of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme or something by John Fahey or even "Duelling Banjos," instrumental melodies are just as pervasive as poignant lyrics. Perhaps, as with Blonde on Blonde, music signifies most effectively when it seamlessly combines the two. Maybe that’s why Steely Dan and J Dilla are awesome. But there’s something cathartic about instrumental music that lyrical music can never quite capture specifically because it signifies in more, or at least more easily conceivable ways.

Toronto Post-Rock titans Do Make Say Think will be our case study for understanding this difference. Most of DMST’s recorded output has been completely instrumental, branching between different styles and arrangements. Because of the combined sensibilities of its members, DMST can be appreciated as Jazz, Metal, Electronica, Alt-Rock, Orchestral or even pure dainty beautiful folk music. The fact that the band spans these genres over the course of one or two songs can make them jarring and challenging, but at the same time they coax the listener out of the bubble of passive listening because they sound like nothing else that exists exactly because they sound like so many other things all at once. Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn is such an amazing and cohesive album because it is articulate without ever using traditional linguistic words for anything other than song titles. They rely instead on the musical word, the combination of tones and phrases to actually say without ever speaking.

With their last two albums You, You’re a History in Rust and Other Truths, DMST have included vocal arrangements and even all out lyrics on the occasional song, and while this speaks to their diversity and growth as a band, something very different happens when DMST includes lyrics in their music: they become a backing band. On “A With Living,” from You, You’re a History in Rust, Tony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers lends his sultry folk croon to what, without lyrics, would be an interesting and compelling DMST song anyways. Maybe it’s because of my aforementioned tendency to pay attention to lyrics when they exist, but the second Dekker begins to sing, his voice and its signifiers and moods take over the forefront of the song’s expression and make it into something entirely different.

A second possible explanation for dynamic transformation could be that lyrics are the most unexpected thing DMST could add to a song in order to reimagine themselves as an instrumental band (see last month’s article on Tradition for more about being experimental by being conventional). A third may be that choosing to feature a unique voice on a specific song or album regardless of signifiers or sonics always throws the listener for a loop, because the new voice stands out among the familiar ones. Jaco Pastorius made his entire career by playing bass countermelodies with a specific tone where they worked beautifully but could never properly be articulated by anyone else. The second Jaco is playing on a track, you know he’s there. The same could be true of Dekker’s signature voice.

So it seems that, following the example of Do Make Say Think, one can assert that non-lyrical music can say just as much as even the most dense Dylan song. The language may shift, but both lyrical and instrumental enterprise attempt to push through into Being as such in much the same way that any artistic speech has, whether it knows it or not. I guess what interests me most about how differences in timbre and choice of language is that sometimes the most pervasive and downright incredible artists are the ones whose voice is undeniable without having been trained in order to be so.

It’s all well and good to say that Jaco Pastorius is a titan with an undeniable voice, but his voice is one developed through years of playing and education to go along with his heaping amount of talent. The other end of the spectrum are people like Daniel Johnston, who can’t really be said to be a good musician or a good singer in the traditional sense but is still undeniably articulate in a separate meaningful way, perhaps an even more meaningful way. Even a seasoned Opera lover would probably be moved to tears by a close listening of “Dream Scream.” Punk rock functions on the same premise: it’s an institution of ‘tude, where not being able to play the bass traditionally, but doing it anyway is what makes you legendary (see: Sid Vicious). The refusal to be articulate articulates.

From here, I can conclude that songs all undeniably have a message that is defined relationally against the messages of all other songs that exist, as with everything, but that it is also contained within the moods and layers and voices and ideas that make up the relationships of its sonic components. Whether any of these components are lyrical only adds another dimension of potential linguistic expression to the piece itself.

Next month: The Artist Formerly Known As…

We of course confront the question of whether television can be considered an artistic medium at all, being a medium for which economic considerations tend to be more powerful and persuasive than with any other medium, not to mention television's cultural baggage as the so-called "idiot box". The television as a technology has certain values inherent, and in terms of the television industry, to survive, a show needs to keep an audience. It needs to fill advertising slots. It needs a degree of mass appeal. It's in bed with capital. And to many, art, money, and the masses are three completely incompatible terms. Certainly television shows such as M.A.S.H., The X-Files, The Brady Bunch, The Twilight Zone, The Simpsons, I Love Lucy, The Muppet Show, Star Trek in its many incarnations, or the recently laid-to-rest Lost are important pop-culture artefacts. And then there are the "cult"-status pop culture artefacts like Twin Peaks, Six Feet Under, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, Firefly, or my personal favourite, the prematurely cancelled Carnivale. But art? Do these cultural artefacts ever attain that acclaimed status? Do they burst the confines of their material concerns?

Television, along with film, is of course the storytelling medium of choice for our age, with mass appeal far supplanting oral storytelling traditions of yore. But does the economic, social, and technological milieu in which T.V. gestates forever corrupt its products, or is there room for subversion within the medium and in spite of the "business" of television? And to be clear, even Shakespeare was known to be a shrewd businessman and to pander to the (localized) masses, albeit in a non-capitalistic, non-globalized economy, and with an at least less-mediated, urm, medium.

I, for one, have never been convinced of "the medium is the message" argument. The very purpose of art, for me, has always been to subvert, to infect like a virus, to re-appropriate that which attempts to suppress freedom and thought and bend it against itself. That said, there are always politics and culture and limitations and tendencies inherent in any medium and in the technologies that make it possible, and we must weigh what we consider to be acceptable and what we consider not worth saving. Those who know me know that I do not have a facebook account and am hesitant to endorse the wonders of the ipad.

I'm also, however, a product of my era. I was raised watching television. I am aware of its dangers and unlike some I would not go into anaphylactic shock if I had to forego it forever. Yet I also realize that it is an important medium in shaping the minds of our era and it cannot be disregarded. Television is a powerful and influential medium that draws the attention of the masses.

I'm not one who claims that art's job is to "change the world". Changing the world is a matter of hard work and time. Art does, however, help to shape the popular psyche, which can contribute to "change", better or worse, whatever that loaded term may mean. The purpose of art itself changes along with the culture that produces it. Art may have originated in caves with funerary rites and spiritual observance, but that's no longer, entirely, what art "is" per se, if art can be said to "be" anything at all. Shows like In Treatment (produced and developed by Rodrigo Garcia, son of only one of the greatest novelists ever, Gabriel Garcia Marquez) certainly gives pause to think about how far television has come as a medium.   

Breaking Bad, I feel, is another measure of the potential of television as a medium to be bent while still managing to survive and even thrive in the ad hoc, capricious, cut-throat, capitalistic realm of the dreaded television networks. And let's face it: all art, all life, has to find ways to survive in hostile environments.  It is by no means the beating heart of some cultural revolution. As Gil Scott-Heron said, if there is a revolution any time soon, it will not be televised.

Right, so now that I've thrown out some pretty ambiguous and perhaps self-contradictory half-ass garble, let's get to the show in question.

Breaking Bad is the second show that the AMC network has added to its roster, the first being the equally superb Mad Men. Bryan Cranston, best known for his role as the father in Malcolm in the Middle, stars as Walter White: father, husband, and overqualified high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with lung cancer and thus decides to become a producer of crystal meth with the help of his former student Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). Toss in a brother-in-law with the DEA (Dean Norris), a suspicious wife (Anna Gunn), seedy and opportunistic legal representation with late night advertising that would put Toronto's Oliver the Jeweller and Loan-Arranger to shame (Bob Odenkirk -- yes, of Mr. Show), a troublesome art-loving junkie girlfriend (Krysten Ritter), badass cartel hitmen who happen to be creepy expressionless twins (Daniel and Luis Moncada), and a soft-spoken family man slash upstanding community leader slash criminal mastermind hiding in plain sight for a boss (Giancarlo Esposito), and you have a recipe for awesomeness. If you watch the show for nothing else, watch it for the acting and characterization. Bryan Cranston is frankly brilliant, as is every member of the supporting cast, most notably Aaron Paul and Dean Norris.

The show does an admirable job keeping up a brusque plot that often leaves one's jaw on the floor. The scene where the twin hitmen catch up to Walter in season 3 to the tune of Canadian band Timber Timbre's "Magic Arrow" comes to mind, as does the shoot-out between Dean Norris's character Hank and the twins. And yet the show is also able to step on the brakes for episodes like season 2's "Over" and season 3's "Fly", which ask serious questions and force the viewer to stop and think. That's something few shows can claim or get away with. It's also something that the T.V. medium mitigates against, and a way in which the show strains against the confines of its medium, creating juicy meta-textual tension for narrative theory nerds like myself. In "Over", Walter spends the entire episode in and out of the hardware store as he obsessively replaces the foundations of his family's home, at one point explaining to his wife that "There's mould!" Often questions of the arbitrariness of society's laws come into question as Walter struggles to justify the often questionable actions that he is sometimes forced and sometimes chooses to take. Indeed, the overarching question of choice vs. social forces vs. familial duty is one that underlies much of the series. The line between the "criminal" and "the common person" is tested, sometimes blurred and sometimes upheld. Episodes like "Fly", in which Walter and Jesse spend most of the forty-five minute run-time cooped up in the meth lab hunting down a fly, aka "the contaminant", which can be said to represent loads of thematic and emotional baggage, force one to consider the possibility that Breaking Bad has transcended the limits of its medium.

Season three wrapped up last Sunday with a bang... um... literally. And a cliff-hanger. It raised questions at once with regard to plot, emotional arcs, ethics, aesthetics, politics, and culture. It did what all "good art", or what we call "good art" these days, does. It entertained even as it forced one to think. Breaking Bad is as good as T.V. gets. At least, so far.

Goddess! We seek creative harmony in your sweet, tragic paradox. Our city has fallen into blindness. Raise your mask and sweep from beneath us the demons of our frivolity!

INT. GROUND FLOOR APARTMENT ON DUFFERIN - NIGHT

The apartment is messy and two or three bugs dart from beneath the sofa. STARLA BONTECOU and THE GENTLEMAN sit on the sofa smoking a bong.

THE GENTLEMAN
I don't ever talk about tragedy.

STARLA BONTECOU
Why?

THE GENTLEMAN
I don't know. I prefer not to.

STARLA BONTECOU
Pain and tragedy breed truth.

THE GENTLEMAN
Pain and tragedy breed pain and tragedy.

STARLA BONTECOU
Pain tells me who I am.

THE GENTLEMAN
Pain tells me who I'm not.

THE GENTLEMAN exits to the kitchen as MELPOMENE appears to a flourish of horns, unmasked.

MELPOMENE
The Gods smile upon you.

As she drops the bong:

STARLA BONTECOU
I am cursed.

EXT. KEW BEACH - NIGHT

MELPOMENE wades in the water, singing. STARLA BONTECOU sits in the sand.

MELPOMENE
(Singing)
Hear me, O Death, whose empire unconfin'd,
Extends to mortal tribes of ev'ry kind.
On thee, the portion of our time depends,
Whose absence lengthens life, whose presence ends.

Thy sleep perpetual bursts the vivid folds,
By which the soul, attracting body holds:

Common to all of ev'ry sex and age,
For nought escapes thy all-destructive rage;

Not youth itself thy clemency can gain,
Vig'rous and strong, by thee untimely slain.
In thee, the end of nature's works is known,
In thee, all judgment is absolv'd alone:
No suppliant arts thy dreadful rage control,
No vows revoke the purpose of thy soul;
O blessed pow'r regard my ardent pray'r,
And human life to age abundant spare.

STARLA BONTECOU
As part of the totality of Alterity, is it death or life that determines the context of moral judgment? If the singular cosmic act of death absolves all wrongdoing indefinitely, wouldn't it be life that determines the merit of the spirit?

MELPOMENE
The cosmic tension of life and death is indifferent to spiritual merit defined by humans. Ultimately the Gods decide who has best maintained the balance of creation.

STARLA BONTECOU
Even if that means that some people must be horrifyingly evil to balance out the generosity of common humanity?

MELPOMENE
Of course. Tension must be maintained. Life and inter-subjective relation are in a constant state of war.

STARLA BONTECOU
I don't want to spend my life warring...

MELPOMENE
I shall utter to whom it is lawful, but let the doors be closed, nevertheless, against all the profane. But do thou hear, Oh Musæus, for I will declare what is true: Sad Starla, you already have. You have tragedy in your flesh. You know nothing else. Your eyes are already those of an old woman. You have seen too much sadness and no longer remember how to wash yourself clean. Bear your burden with humility.

STARLA BONTECOU
What burden?

MELPOMENE
You must live as a maker of tragedies.

STARLA BONTECOU
No, I can't.

MELPOMENE
Oh! But hear your voice, sad Starla. How many tears has that voice carried? You must spread your tragedies in love. Sing sweet misery and let its wings open eyelids.

STARLA BONTECOU
I hate to hurt people I love.

MELPOMENE
Oh, but aren't those the sweetest of sadnesses?

INT. GROUND FLOOR APARTMENT ON DUFFERIN - NIGHT

THE GENTLEMAN stands with a stool raised in one hand, and a leather whip in the other. STARLA BONTECOU kneels naked, wearing a collar and leash.

THE GENTLEMAN
Do I really have to stay this way all of the time?

STARLA BONTECOU
It's the only way.

THE GENTLEMAN
I can teach you how to be innocent again.

STARLA BONTECOU
I will eat you the second you love me enough to put down the stool.

THE GENTLEMAN lowers the stool and drops the whip.

THE GENTLEMAN
I don't believe in Muses.

Within seconds, STARLA BONTECOU knocks THE GENTLEMAN to the ground and bites off his left ear. With bloody lips as she chews:

STARLA BONTECOU
(Crying)
I love you! I love you!

Karen, Curran, Alex Armstrong, and I have just returned from the book launch of the fabulous Shannon Bell's Fast Feminism. All I can now think about are female phalli. Bouquets of female phalli. And big toes. Grown in vats. Like in a fucking Lovecraft story. I don't know if I should feel nauseous or turned-on or both. Probably both. My big toe's having an erection. It's nine inches long, man. When it goes limp I gotta coil it around my ankle under my sock.

Right.

So I'm not an editor, but I edit on occasion. I'll be editing more shortly when I make the big move to Montréal this September where I hope to start up a Montréal branch of Steel Bananas. Yeah. We're expanding folks. Until then there's loads of shit going down in Toronto. A Pavement reunion... reunions being in fashion these days.  Not to mention the looming of NXNE and the G20. Booze, music, and tear gas people. Party in the streets! Let's make out with some trigger-happy cops. All they really need's some lovin'.

As for this issue, oh man, it ain't the calm before the storm. It's the pre-storm before the full-on, nine-inch strap-on toe of a storm. The six or seven-inch storm if you will. We've got the totally nine-inch... no, make that ten-inch (three-inch diameter) band Krupke in the house... or basement of Sonic Boom. For the record, Fiona is way cuter than Mike. Also, a warm welcome to our special guest (future regular?) Girlofbirthday who lends SB a sense of style.

I join Monsieur Killin in passing a whole-hearted FUCK YOU to Markham. Not to lose my temper or anything. I hear that's inappropriate these days. At least in Toronto. Some private security firm might pay you a visit. To assess the threat. Purely procedural. In Toronto we apologize, as the Bound to Create Theatre company reminds us. Apparently the Marvel Universe is as tangled up and cliché as the real world. Oh, and all's quiet on the TTC front.

Peace, love, and riots people.

Devon Wong
Indentured Servant and Foot Masseureuse to the Editors
Steel Bananas

It did to the members of Bound to Create Theatre company, and they may be the first Torontonians to ever actually act upon it. Their new show, The Complex: A Toronto Tale, explores this passive aggressive nature that Torontonians seem to nurture. It tackles issues like isolation and zoning, and most importantly it looks at what it means to be a resident of the city, questioning the very nature of the Toronto identity. When writer/director Jack Grinhaus first started asking around, he was astounded at the lack of ownership Torontonians had over their identity. We’ve always known that Canadians respond to the identity question with “I’m part English, a quarter Irish, and a third Jamaican”, or whatever countries their grandparents’ grandparents may have been from. But in Toronto? They won’t even tell you that much. Jack claims that most people told him that Toronto’s identity was “no identity”, which he found shocking. Even more telling was the hostility that he met with when attempting to ask people these questions. Half the people Bound to Create Theatre company attempted to interview ignored them, brushed them off, or got mad at being approached. What exactly has got Toronto in such an angry hustle?

I caught a preview of the show as part of the Berkley Street Theatre Festival of Ideas and Creation. It was an action-filled, breathtaking reading and left me wanting more. So taking a page from their book, I decided to conduct a short interview with someone from the show to see what they had to say about the city, and of course, the show. Alyksandra Ackerman, the young assistant director met me for coffee around the corner from their rehearsal space.

SB: Now that I’ve seen part of the show, I’m curious, what is this show really about?

AA: It’s a metaphor for Toronto, a possible path the city could take. If it doesn’t start improving…

SB: From what I saw in the preview it stems from a lot of questions- but does it offer any answers? Does it solve the identity mystery?

AA: Sort of, I suppose. But really its just a grounds for discussion. This entire process has been an interesting forum… And the individual answers to specific questions really gave us some insight. There’s one interview I just love. When [the interviewee] was asked about the issue of Toronto having no identity, she agreed- but continued on, “If we had one single identity, we’d be everywhere else”. To me, that’s exactly it!

SB: You’re not actually from Toronto*. How has that influenced your experience with this play?

AA: I’m actually the only one involved not from here, and it’s been hard to understand all these negative aspects that everyone is talking about- I like the city. I have noticed the “sorry” thing though. I say it all the time!

We get off topic for a bit, discussing our various unfortunate (and strangely apologetic) endeavours on the TTC and comparing what we both believe to be healthy outbursts of assertiveness… like yelling at a woman who tramples you with her suitcase…

But this show has got me watching for those bits of life we tend to ignore. I’m definitely not like the people who grew up here… it’s not that I’m naïve, I just never bothered looking for trouble. Now if I look, I can definitely see the issues with all the people, the traffic, the isolation… Especially after coming from a smaller town.

SB: So you came to Toronto with dreams of coming to a big shiny city- did it deliver?

AA: Well, a dusty one, but yeah. It’s exceeded my expectations. I’ve built a life for myself here, started a career. I’m successful and the city made that possible. She blushes. But I’m not supposed to say things like that! Jack doesn’t want people to think this is a positive show about Toronto- it’s not. It’s important that people examine the less pleasant side of it.

SB: Does Jack hate Toronto?

AA: He’s open about his frustrations and this negative view of Toronto- but I think he likes it more than he lets on. He keeps returning to this city to work in!

SB: There must be something redeeming about the city then. So the experience of the show is cathartic?

AA: No, its a broadening experience, but not quite cathartic. There’s… no release yet. I don’t think it reaches that point, you’re supposed to be agitated.

SB: Tell me more about the actual show…

AA: It’s very powerful. I’m learning a lot from being involved… I mean, we have a Dora-award winning cast. They’re a variety of ages, so is the crew, and everyone is bringing something different into it. Everyone’s been really willing to explore, and it’s very physical theatre. There are some beautiful movement pieces in it… And the rest, well, you’ll have to come see for yourself!

You can catch The Complex: a Toronto Tale at the Walmer Centre Theatre as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival. It opens on July 1^st (an admittedly tongue-in-cheek date for the less-than-allegiant show) and runs until July 11th.

*^{She’s from out west, though when asked she eloquently responds, “Fuck Vancouver, this is my home!”}

At the Boutique | Photos brought to you by the Cheese Boutique

I have said it before and I will say it again: the Cheese Boutique boasts stellar cuisine at every opportunity. A veritable cheese palace complete with ceremonial throne lording over the boutique from a position atop the stairs – glory be. This month the boutique once again proffers a generous hand to our fair city, honouring the best chefs the city has to offer, subsidizing prices for the public every weekend in May.

A table of furs and jaws supplied by the Toronto Zoo acts as the starting checkpoint, exhibiting the pelts of a kimodo dragon, cheetah and the elusive and endangered snow leopard -- in Washington, they have chuffing live specimens, in Toronto we must be content with the fur. An unlikely pair, it turns out the Zoo teams up with the Cheese Boutique on an event called Seafood for Thought.

Sauntering into the terrace area of the boutique, iconic segments of cheese hang from the ceiling for the occasion, plastered with photos and quotes of famous chefs. A large mirror above the chef area gives me the perfect view of the top of her assistant’s head. As the smell of the upcoming meal wafts towards me, I gladly deposit a five-dollar Zoo donation, a paltry fee for an event that grants me superior cuisine. The head chef of Frank in the AGO, Anne Yarymowich, has repeatedly been named one of the best chefs in the city by Toronto Life.

“There is a lot of fabulous competition in the city,” she intones modestly when I bring it up.

Today she serves up Paella Prima Vera, an Ontario-inspired spring paella using ingredients traditional foraged or hunted, augmented with ingredients the cook may bring along. Paella is a meal conventionally cooked outdoors over an open fire, the resourceful cook hunting a rabbit and gathering fresh spring ramps and fiddleheads from the surrounding wild, preparing the meal on fields near streams if possible. With the Ontario country-side and international imports at her disposal, Anne brings chicken, Spanish chorizo, Bomba rice, saffron, smoked paprika, Ontario asparagus, artichokes, east coast clams, all cooked in a meat stock -- rabbit or chicken will do. Anne judicially improves on tradition, covering and rotating her pan during cooking to distribute heat evenly. When the rice is nearly ready she places the clams across surface and drops the lid, leaving it on the flame until the rice is el dente and the clams open their shells soundlessly, as though compelled to eat the dish that has now claimed their lifeless husks. I receive a shallow plywood bowl filled with the paella, Anne slides a rabbit leg on top of my dish and as soon as I am away I pluck it up, a small tender appendage.

The ingredients she uses are vibrant, for spring ramps and fiddleheads are available in the Ontario market for only a few weeks in springtime. Some cooks identify fiddleheads as the culprit of unexpected ailment when undercooked, but Anne defies this unsubstantiated research, cooking the fractious fern to perfection, which emits satisfying soft crunches along with the asparagus and the artichoke.

I walk back to talk to Anne as a familiar customer approaches: “It’s lovely to see you out like this, you’re not only the exec.”

She smiles easily: “Yeah, I always try and keep my hands in it.”

The sponsors of a silent auction have secured a space inside with a private table prepared. I watch in awe as cheese aficionado Afrim Pristine, son of founder Fatos, serves them several rare Spanish cheeses:

Idiazabal and Manchego, both sheep milk cheeses; Cabrales, a rare cow milk cheese from Asturias in the mountains of the Picos de Europa; and Montenebro, an ash-covered goat cheese. He explains that Montenebro is rolled in ash because goat milk cheese contains higher levels of acidity than other cheeses. Ash pervades the outer rim of the cheese and helps combat the tart flavour and settle the stomach.

The entrance fee also grants me a sample of wine, supplied today from Cattail Creek. An independent grower in the Niagara region, they produce wine for several Toronto restaurants and for sale directly from their vineyard. I was given a taste of their Dry Riesling 2007, Pinot Noir 2008, and a Select Lake Harvest 2007. The other events will be hosting several different local wineries throughout the month.

When speaking to Anne of my own post-undergrad aspirations, she informs me that she originally went to university in Ottawa for printmaking, painting, photography, but eventually decided to pursue her career as a chef:

“Cooking for money, what a concept, it had never occurred to me before.”

She was 29 when she decided to cook for food, registering at George Brown. A little older than usual for a starting chef, but Anne believes in a proper jolt to rebound after post-undergrad confusion into a stimulating future with economic durability.

“Change is stressful, but always provides an opportunity for growth, sometimes you just need to take a leap into the void, dive into the deep end.”

So dive into the deep end of life, make haste, for the void isn't going to appear as a tantalizing swirl forever. Look forward to these remaining Cheese Boutique events:

May 16--Anthony Rose, Drake Hotel

May 22--Chris McDonald, CAVA

May 23--John Higgins, George Brown College

May 29--Keith Froggett, Scaramouche

May 30--Jonathan Gushue, Langdon Hall

"The self-image of Modernity that is rooted in bodily experience cannot wholly be grasped in this current preoccupation with the emblematic character of the body as a kind of social advertisement. In fact, the quality of embodiment is almost entirely lacking from this perspective. We might argue that this is rightly so; that Modernity is all about the gradual erosion of qualitative distinctions in favor of universal quantities. Yet we all remain aware of ourselves as bodies in a quite peculiar way, irrespective of the specific qualifications that are, so to speak, added to it by the virtue of our particular social identities. We are aware of a certain weight and a kind of elastic resistance to gravity, a specific orientation in space, a characteristic directionality, and above all we are conscious of ourselves as a uniquely embodied self presence; we were made inseparably enfolded in our bodies. But these too are socially constructed and conventional modes of experience, and this provides us with an entry point into a more general historical understanding of the emergence of Modernity in terms of bodily categories. The manner in which the body becomes the central experience of our world, that is to say, is neither fixed nor 'natural' but is, rather, continuously subject to, and a source of, social and cultural change."

"Body" | Modernity and Subjectivity | Harvie Ferguson

It has been nearly fifty years since Allan Kaprow reinvigorated modernity with happenings. It has been nearly forty years since Gina Pane's Action Psyche, and Renate Bertlmann's Pantomime re-shaped female bodies as active art objects; carriers of social critique. Pierre Molinier killed himself a quarter of a decade ago, after masturbating, with a gunshot to the head, and Istvan Kantor's Blood Campaign ended in the 80s. Where are we now? The last two decades have seen a simultaneous disinterest in the capabilities of the body in physical reality, and a rise in the technologically externalized images of bodily interactions. Socially constructed in the climate of the avatar, the body now populates both sense and abstract identification in a wholly new way. Though the body has always existed as image, its connective perceptual qualities in physical reality still offer the unique and transcendental spontaneity of presence. As part of TransCanadada Motorway Services, I am in the process of investigating post-millennium humanism, a subject which, in its very theoretical constitution, defies a purely theoretical approach. As a short introduction to the forthcoming practice/theory Manifesto on Post-Millennium Humanism, I offer you the concept of Neo-Harmonics, a means of bridging perceptual reality with the expression of art through performance.

Neo-Harmonics is not to be misconstrued as a new form of the Renaissance body, searching for natural correspondence toward spiritual elevation. It is also not to be confused with traditional Harmonic Correspondance in art, though it functions similarly in its connection with the concreteness of presence. What Neo-Harmonics represents is the new emergence of bodily agency, something lost in the paradigm of representation in postmodernity, through the profound experience of touch and shared presence. But oh! Was it ever lost? Is this exactly what the nihilism of the age lamented to lose? I offer these few paltry points as an introduction to the forthcoming longer work, for pondering and discussion. Let it be noted that these are written notes on an entirely perceptual, bodily experience, and should be taken as incomplete representations of the totality of Neo-Harmonics' existence within the body and presence.

NOTES ON NEO-HARMONICS

A: The Body in Performance

• The body should always be present. Film and photography, while offering documentation of the action, cannot be construed as the action itself, regardless of their status as images.
• No aspect of the body's natural transcendence should be overtly staged, meaning that no aspect of the performance should be augmented technologically to symbolize a transcendence outside of the body's physical and cerebral possibilities.
• The body's limitations offer the greatest possibilities for evocative investigation, meaning its subjection to pain, the environment, other bodies, Other bodies, and its fallibility.
• The surreal aspect of the body's mystical properties is as natural as its physical properties.
• Any expression of the body's surreal qualities should be true to their perception, and seek to reproduce, rather than mimic or represent, the essence of bodily transcendence.
• Bodily transcendence during performance does not occur if it is exclusively within the performer.
• Touch transfers transcendence.
• The audience is part of the performance.
• The critical intent of the artist should not be abstract.
• The post-millennium performance artist should seek a simultaneous harmony with its surroundings, its subjection to its audience, and its status as a self-conscious art object. This harmony should extend to the particular artist's honest perception of reality, as only construed by his or her senses.
• Intent and meaning should be present, though admittedly contingent upon the participatory aspect of transcendence.
• Any performance functioning outside of this harmony is a lie.

Comments

• May 18, 2010, Neo-Harmonics | >fruitlet writes: [...] Starla Bontecou | Originally published in Steel Bananas 19 [...]
• May 18, 2010, Adèle writes: I endorse this!
• May 18, 2010, Julie writes: Brilliant work. I'm interested in reading the full work when it's done, and seeing these points put into practice. I endorse this, too!
• May 21, 2010, Prof. Czitsky writes: I think our performance at the artichoke more or less delivered some or nearly all of the tenets here. Unconsciously.
• May 22, 2010, Starla Bontecou writes: Definitely! TransCanaDADA does not perform lies.

Russell Smith writes for the Globe and Mail. He just released a new novel called Girl Crazy. It is a sexy and fantastic novel that should be added to your summer reading list without delay.

“Never underestimate the importance of a good pair of shoes. Go out and get yourself a funky pair of sneakers.” This is Russell Smith’s advice to the young people of Toronto who have no practical use for his formal wear focused fashion advice column, “Ask Mr. Smith.” For this particular occasion I have dressed carefully: Sperry topsiders with brown Calvin Klein socks, my favourite jeans and a dress shirt. I knew I would be coming straight from work so I brought an immaculate, freshly ironed, white dress shirt on a hanger. Despite my foresight, in dangling the hanger off my bike handle, I smudged grease on it and as a result I’m wearing a dress shirt that I’m concerned may be altogether too flamboyant, speckled with dish-water and ketchup.

When I turn the recorder on, Russell Smith is explaining some of the art on his wall. There’s an image of Smith that his friend painted, he tells me, a portrait of him as a character from Thackery’s Vanity Fair, some sort of sea captain, standing on a dock.

About a decade ago, Russell Smith visited my grade 12 creative writing class. At the time he had just released a short story collection entitled Young Men, a sexy, moody exploration into the lives of several confused young men set against the backdrop of Toronto. He recommended that we read A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, which subsequently became the focus of my undergraduate thesis.

He doesn’t seem to have aged much since then. He possesses a youthful energy and excitement, perhaps fueled in part by the press and hoopla in the wake of his new novel Girl Crazy and his recent move. He’s laid back and articulate, tidying up the house as he welcomes me, chatting about this and that, an excellent multi-tasker. He strikes me as a sort of Renaissance man with many occupations and little time to spare, especially these days. He tells me I can keep my shoes on when I enter his home, a gesture I always appreciate (I find this modern mania for taking shoes on and off all the time maddening). Smith doesn’t own an espresso machine right now, but he wants to make us lattes so he sets some water to boil on a stovetop espresso contraption and whisks some milk in a pot as he gushes about how much he loves his new neighborhood. He’s just moved into a new house, the walls are covered with curious works of art, there’s a baby crib with blankets and toys draped over, in and around it by a massive book-shelf. Down the street, he tells me, there’s a Portuguese bar where you can get an exceptional bowl of chili for a mere four dollars while watching the soccer game.

Later on, when the recorder is turned off, he puts on some music, somewhat ambient electronic music. When I ask him what it is he casually tells me that it’s a mix he threw together. He DJs sometimes at a bar in the east end. But he hasn’t been to the east end in a while, it would be the equivalent of going to Bangkok, he jokes. Oh, and he didn’t like my deck shoes, he thought they were too preppy.

Dave Hurlow: All of your novels seem to be set in Toronto, you also live here with your family. What is it that draws you to Toronto as a writer and as a person?

Russell Smith: I’m not from here, that’s what it is. I grew up in Halifax and like anyone with artsy tendencies in a small city like that, you feel very frustrated and that there’s not enough culture. I was a punk rocker in the 70s when I was in high school and the early 80s when I was in university. We always craved a bigger city where you could go see punk concerts and then it started turning into electronic music, a lot of people in the punk and new wave movements got into that. The big choice was to go to Toronto or Montreal after high school, it was still a choice at that time because Montreal was still as powerful a city in English Canada as Toronto, believe it or not. And then years later the choice for the artsy student that wanted to go into film or media would have been Toronto or Vancouver, of course, not Toronto or Montreal. The cool kids went to Montreal because it was a much cooler place.

DH: Still is.

RS: Yeah, but there was a bigger punk scene and music scene in Toronto. So, I went to University at Queens, and we would go into Toronto on weekends. To me it was always a haven because it was the only accessible big city and I knew it’s where I wanted to end up going. But I always felt like a Maritimer. When I first settled here, I got mixed up with a bunch of rich kids who took me to parties that seemed fanciful, that seemed pretentious to me, because of the way people talked and what they were able to eat and how they were able to dress. It seemed very grown up and strangely blasé and I just reveled in it.

Even though I’ve been here 20 years I still have that feeling. I still feel that I’m a Maritimer, so to me, [Toronto] represents the big city. It means the biggest Canadian city even though since then I’ve been to much bigger cities, I still see it and love it as a big city. There’s a lot of fish out of water in all my stories of Toronto, there is often an observer who’s from a small town or a suburb who feels out of place in some way, observing the madness of the big city. The location’s very important, I would even say that Toronto’s a character in all the novels. The mood of the city is unique.

I keep coming back to the city in the summer because of the intense heat here which, for someone from Halifax is stunning. I still cannot get over how hot it gets here in the summer and I think that most people who come here from outside of Canada don’t realize how hot it gets here; they think of Canada as a cold place. When it gets to be 34 degrees here, with pollution and you’re walking through Chinatown and there’s heaps of rotting food, you really feel as if you could be in Asia, with the humidity and I think that’s an incredible experience. I’m always astounded by the stress level it creates. Toronto’s a difficult city to get around - the public transit system is lousy, people have to spend a lot of time on buses or street cars, it’s very spread out, there are different neighbourhoods that are very spread out, getting from A to B is stressful, working here is very competitive and very stressful, and it’s that feeling of the intense heat and the intense pressure that I want to capture.

DH: I used to go to a bar in Halifax called the Sea Horse that was famous for having been a dingy punk rock dive, did you hang out there during your punk rock years?

RS: That was my formative bar. I’ve written a story about the Seahorse actually, you’d recognize it, in my short story collection Young Men. It’s called "Home," written by one of the characters in the book, Lionel, about a bar called the Starfish. In the late 70s, when I first started going to bars underage and then, of age in the early 80s, the Seahorse went through a convulsive metamorphosis.

The Seahorse is a fascinating place, it was the oldest bar in Halifax, there were no taverns legally there until the 1940s because it was a military town and they didn’t want men drinking. So you could only buy booze from government counters or in restaurants where you had to eat, and [the Seahorse] was the first tavern that opened, a very rough-hewn basement bar, and it became a place where longshoremen and other dock workers went. It was all trestle tables and red plaid jackets and black toques. And then it became a place, because it was cheap, for the bohemians of the art college (NSCAD) in the 1970s, and then it became a gay place because of the art college influence, it became a safe place for gay guys to go. Nobody knows why but they lived in complete co-existence with these really rough longshoremen.

It was one of the weirdest places in the Maritimes, the only place you could go and sit next to flamboyant gay art students and dock-workers. A lot of me, and the punk scene was born there. It came initially out of the art college, particularly a group called the Null Set. I was in high school at the time, we emulated those guys, but we were also just copying British punk bands.

DH: You played in bands?

RS: Yeah, several, well, I was called the lead screamer. I played drums too.

DH: In your Virtual Reality column, you recently expressed the idea of creating a literary mythology of Toronto or Canada in the international consciousness. This seems like an extremely ambitious project.

RS: It’s already started to happen, without me, partly as a result of the international festival of authors at Harbourfront. Greg Gatenby, the guy who ran that for many years, brought in so many authors that Toronto started to surface in short stories as only represented by a sort of soulless sterile hotel on a large frozen lake, because that’s where they all stayed and they never had to leave. The events were at Harbourfront, they stayed in the Delta or something, right on the waterfront, and so all you would see if you were visiting Toronto that way would be the overpasses, the lake. It surfaced in an AS Byatt short story like that, somewhere else in a New Yorker story like that. So, that’s what I mean, already there is a mythological Toronto in the international mentality.

There have been a lot of other writers, from Robertson Davies on, who’ve set works here. Margaret Atwood set several novels here that became popular internationally, she’s even started romanticizing the more interesting parts of Toronto like Queen Street West, which people tend to think is my domain, but Atwood did it before me, or around the same time with The Robber Bride. She had a bar on Queen Street where the characters in The Robber Bride hung out, somewhat like the Rivoli, called “Le Toxique.” (laughs) I mean, that’s exactly what I do, this inventing of fictitious places.

DH: I notice that. When I was reading Girl Crazy, for instance, there’s a restaurant called ‘Black Table,’ which I took to mean ‘Black Hoof’ (a hip Toronto restaurant on Dundas Street West).

RS: It’s not Black Hoof, I think I wrote that before Black Hoof opened. I want those places to not be real places, I want them to be unique.

DH: So it’s a different reality that’s interposed or laid on top of the real thing. For someone such as myself, a confused young man who writes about the city and has a hard time distinguishing his life from narrative, there’s an extremely strange feeling of simulacra when I’m sitting in Kensington Market and it’s sunny and there’s pretty girls and I’m reading your book about this guy who’s confused and frustrated and he’s looking at pretty girls, and then I’m looking at pretty girls over my book and my head is just like… exploding.

RS: (Laughs) Well, that would be a weird experience, not everyone who reads it is going to be sitting right in Kensington Market, I hope. I hope it’s going to be read in London and New York. I am writing for people who don’t know Kensington Market. And that’s why only rarely in the book do I name street names. I do occasionally, but the city’s never named in the book as Toronto, so that you don’t have to know Toronto. And I tried, instead of just using College Street as a shorthand I would put “a big street full of cafes near the university” so that people wouldn’t have to have extra textual information to know where we were.

On the question of the fictional reality, it’s really fun, it’s really important to me. The same fictitious city expands through several of my books. There are the same fictitious magazines. Next Magazine, for example, is the free city weekly and that’s from my very first novel, there’s always been a Next Magazine. The most exciting thing is, another novelist, David Eddy who now writes an advice column for the Globe & Mail, wrote a book in the 90s called Chump Change, set in Toronto, and he invented a magazine in it called Next Magazine. I asked him if it was influenced by me and he said for sure, I loved that, the idea that we could share the same fictitious Toronto. Now that’s really interesting because now it’s expanding beyond the borders of my book.

DH: So this community of authors is sort of collectively helping out with this mythology.

RS: Exactly. And the reason it has to be a fictitious Toronto and not pinned to the real Toronto is because then it gives me freedom to make fun things happen. In Muriella Pent, my previous novel, there’s this park of private roads called Stillwood Park. Well it’s obviously inspired by Whychwood Park, but I couldn’t have it really as Whychwood Park because then I would be bound by the physical geography of Whychwood Park. Similarly in Girl Crazy, they’re looking for the new trendy area of restaurants and I put it at Queen and Lansdowne. Well, it’s not there yet (laughs). It will be, I just wanted to be a year or two ahead of the trend. All of those bars, which I have great pleasure in inventing names for: Hexx Key, Meme, Persimmon… the new Ossington I put at Queen and Lansdowne.

DH: Cool, you’re like a literary architect. Are there any novels or authors that sparked an interest for you in a particular literary landscape or mythology?

RS: I studied French Literature in university. So much of French literature is set in Paris because France is such a centralized place, that Paris became that fictitious Valhalla for me. Even after I visited it, I mean my first year in university was at a small town in France and I went to Paris a lot. And I was reading French literature in my small town, set in Paris, and then I would go walk around and look for the places where these things were set. Quite often they’d be non-existent because it was 19^th century literature… and there was a strange, creepy feeling walking around Paris; walking around a fictional place. It was for me, purely a fictional place, and I was in it.

I read this book, a famous French experimental novel of the 1950s, La Modification by Michel Butor. It’s about a guy who lives at number 15 Place du Pantheon, which is on the left bank, and he’s a wealthy guy and he’s taking a trip from Paris to Rome on a train and he keeps talking about this address. He lives there with his wife, there’s a mistress down the street. So I went to see number 15 Place du Pantheon, which is a very Ritzy part of town now, and standing outside of number 15 was a policeman, on guard, as if he was guarding this literary treasure. As if the character himself was a celebrity living in that house (Laughs). It turned out there was a cabinet minister living there, and that’s why there was a policeman outside. But that’s the kind of fun conflation that happens.

DH: Let’s talk about Girl Crazy for a minute here. In the novel, Justin the main character, refuses to return to his complacent life after he meets Jenna, who makes him go girl crazy. He starts going out looking for trouble and some of these scenes after he gets involved with drug dealers and he’s at this seedy underground poker game, these scenes are really well realized. For personal growth, or for writing material, have you ever consciously gone out looking for trouble?

RS: That scene (the poker scene) is based on a real place. Even all the dialogue in that scene was from one evening I spent there.

DH: Really?

RS: Yeah, all the events, except for the buying a gun. Certainly the little drug dealer, all the characters at the table. The only person I camouflaged was my friend who’s another writer who took me there, he said “you gotta see this place, you can use it.” And I wrote down just about everything that happened. I did win a bunch of money, I won a hundred bucks, and it was a hundred dollar buy in… I came away a hundred dollars to the good. I was really excited by the whole thing, by the seedy underbelly. So yes, I’ve gone out looking for trouble.

DH: It’s kind of a breakup novel. That feeling of restructuring your life and being outside of yourself almost gave it a quality of being an origin story. There’s these cool moments in the violent scenes where Justin gets in a fight and he beats someone up and he’s becoming this new man.

RS: It’s a story of metamorphosis, of Justin’s change. But it’s also largely about social class, if I had to sum it up, I’d say it’s a novel about sex and social class. And the things are so intertwined in Justin’s mind. At the beginning, he’s sexually frustrated but also very bored and frustrated and limited by his social surroundings. Particularly his educated friends who are doing the things that educated people have to do now, which are largely boring, PR and networking dinners and all this corporate stuff that he finds soulless. To him that’s sexual repression and intellectual stiflement is part of the same thing, part of the social class. He discovers this other social class, this underworld and finds it much more liberated in many ways, although quite dangerous.

In many ways it’s a very immoral book, an indictment of the educated class, I mean, there’s no redemption, he’s not punished for becoming a nastier person. He becomes a nastier person.

DH: Really? I completely misread it. I thought it was sort of commentary on the educated class and how they don’t step out of their comfort zone enough; they just go to restaurants and read magazines. So I thought it was exciting that this guy is seeing that there’s different ways to be in the world and he’s creating this new personality that’s not so predictable.

RS: Yes, well, that’s all good for him, but it’s not so good for the guy he beats up or the girls he’s now about to seduce. I mean, look, I basically think he is fundamentally a good person, he has compassion, he’s not a psychopath. But at the same time he’s discovered that women like him more if he’s less nice, if he’s just aggressive, then he’s more successful and he gets more of what he likes out of life, so it’s not a great moral lesson.

DH: A big part of this novel is the sensual side, very descriptive scenes where Justin’s watching women in yoga pants walk by on sunny days, the lust, the in depth sex scenes. In the process of writing it, do you sit down and write these scenes in a fit of passion or is there more of an objective craftsmanship to it?

RS: Oh it’s always pretty objective. I never write anything in a trance. I suppose to a certain extent all the scenes are written in a sort of particular trancy mood. In order to write any fiction you have to distance yourself from your surroundings, you have to be in a state of calm and focus. You have to be able to imagine a picture, but also how it smells and the textures, you have to really get yourself into a receptive state that’s quite close to dream. That’s why a lot of writers say they write first thing in the morning, because they’re still not that far from sleep. The sex scenes were no different, all the scenes are written and re-written with careful attention to language. The sex scenes weren’t any easier to write, no. Do you write in a constant state of arousal? Well, no.

DH: I’ve notice a trend, in novels I’ve read recently, I’m not going to single you out here, but in books I’ve read this year by Jonathan Lethem and Michael Winter, in addition to your novel, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of content about the modern communication phenomenon; the internet, communication devices, videogames. In classic literary theory there’s an argument about not introducing these cultural baubles into the narrative because they take away from the timelessness of the novel.

RS: But that’s ridiculous, every novel depicts the technology of its time. In early 20^th century novels people get telegraphs, you can’t cut those out, there are trains in 19^th century fiction. So, in order to depict contemporary life you have to depict people spending a lot of time on communications devices, the problem with it is that it’s not very dramatic. Evelyn Waugh, by the way, said of… I think it was Vile Bodies, he boasted that it was the first novel to his knowledge, in which people spent a great deal of time on the telephone.

So he was boasting at the time of capturing this new technological reality, and I’m sure a lot of critics at the time would have said “that’s boring, people on the telephone is not very dramatic.” Recently, I forget which novelist I read say that one of things that’s interesting about watching characters on television, is that you rarely see them watching television, which is a brilliant thought. We spend so much of our lives watching television that a really very verisimilitudeness portrayal of that life would actually involve people sitting in front of televisions for long hours.

But we don’t choose to dramatize that, it would be like dramatizing the hours we spend sleeping, it would be boring. That’s the risk that anyone trying to portray contemporary life has to take. Do you actually have most of your dialogue happening on Facebook? Well, that would be difficult to accomplish.

Comments

• May 15, 2010, Devon Wong writes: A literary architect. Love it. Great interview. I dare say it may be my favourite sb interview yet.
• May 17, 2010, Ted Killin writes: Could you find out the name of that bar for me? That sounds like a great spot for world cup soccer.

Click here to view the film.

Before I begin proper, for those of you who have not read the series and plan to do so, I shall type in big all-cap letters “SPOILER ALERT!!!” just for your benefit. I know, considerate of me, right? Right. Now that’s out of the way...

I had high expectations going into this series. Several friends had recommended it, and I was hearing lofty praise flying left, right, and center (no political puns intended), comparisons to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, people telling me Fables is their favourite comics series of all time, etc. Now, I’m not going to dump on Fables and say it’s bad, because it’s not, but it isn’t brilliant either. It is what it is, which is entertaining, witty, at times ruminative, and not afraid to ask a few hard questions. It’s nowhere near as complex and nuanced as Sandman. Sorry people, it ain’t. But it’s still kept me reading for a whopping 85 issues thus far, and that’s something... though I do hope it ends at some point, preferably before it reaches, say, 150 issues. At most. Please. I think that’s a reasonable request. Anyhow, it’s a well-written series, enjoyable, but not one with which I’ve fallen in love. And I swear the politics have nothing to do with my luke-warm affections. I swear. Believe me. We’re being honest here, remember? Oh, right, you weren’t supposed to remember that. My bad. Didn’t mean to remind you. Off-topic again. Apologies.

That said, I would like to address what has, for many readers, been a burning issue with regard to the series. I’m talking about the politics, of course -- for those who didn’t catch my subtle “foreshadowing." Par example: Willingham’s “Israel Analogy” made in issue 50 (Vol. 8). For some readers, I have heard, issue 50 was where they stopped reading, so I suppose they’re ex-readers now as opposed to readers. Obviously I did not stop. I’m still a reader. But some did. So what’s so offensive you may ask? Well, first, let me describe the basic premise of Fables, for those who haven’t read the series and ignored my spoiler alert. Basically, there are all these fairytale characters in the public domain that Willingham has appropriated, like Snow White, the reformed Big Bad Wolf (Bigby), Prince Charming, The Frog Prince (a.k.a. Flycatcher), the old witch from Hansel and Gretel named Frau Totenkinder, Pinocchio and his father Gepetto, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White’s less popular sister Rose Red, Jack (of beanstalk fame), Boy Blue, Cinderella, Sinbad, Bluebeard, the three little pigs, Mowgli from Kipling’s “The Jungle Book,” and many, many more. Long story short, an ominous force called “The Adversary” started conquering the fable lands, spreading his fascist Empire, killing millions in the name of peace for billions, and those fables who managed to escape the faceless Adversary’s evil Empire took refuge in the “mundy” (mundane) world. They settle in New York city back when it was still called New Amsterdam, in what they call Fabletown, a section of New York that’s wholly theirs, though the non-human fables are relegated to The Farm just outside the city. The fables are immortal and have been living among the mundys for hundreds of years in secret, though many dream of one day returning to the homelands.

Eventually the Adversary finds them and attempts to destroy them. The fables discover the identity of the Adversary to be Pinnochio’s long lost father Gepetto, who’s a grumpy old man living in a cabin, his wooden puppets controlling the Empire. As retaliation for Gepetto’s attacks on Fabletown, Bigby sneaks back to the homelands to destroy Gepetto’s precious sacred grove from which he carves his various minions. Here’s where we get to issue 50. In order to explain his actions to Gepetto, Bigby outlines for Gepetto an analogy with the mundy world between the fables and Israel. I’ll quote some of Bigby’s words for you:

“Here’s what you need to know about it. Israel is a tiny country surrounded by much larger countries dedicated to its eventual and total destruction... they [Israel] stay alive by being a bunch of tough little bastards who make the other guys pay dearly every time they do anything against Israel. Some in the wider world constantly wail and moan about the endless cycle of violence and reprisal. But since the alternative is non-existence, the Israelis seem determined to keep at it. They have a lot of grit and iron. I’m a big fan of them.”

The internet uproar and debate that resulted was predictably heated, and Willingham has since had to field the issue and defend his pro-Israel stance in every interview he gives. Willingham has said in interviews (see this and this) that Fables is no more political than most comics and that the whole Israel analogy is “just” an example of a real world parallel to the fables’ situation. I too, upon reading issue 50, though realizing said views fit with Bigby’s character, was rather annoyed by the blunt and grossly oversimplified analogy, and which, as an extended conceit throughout the series, paints all opposed to Israel in any way as bloodthirsty evil fascists... though I suppose that’s a problem inherent in the nature of fairy tales. Only in a fairy tale can such an absolute and bipolar conception of morality be viable. Let me be clear, however, in saying that Willingham has every right to offend me in such a way, and despite being offended, I read on. Though after issue 50, I could not help but see the Israel analogy everywhere in the series, as I’m sure Willingham intended. And as Willingham points out in one of the interviews linked above, I could not help but be acutely aware of Willingham’s “right-of-centre” politics throughout the series, perhaps simply because in the comics world writers of the “leftist” persuasion are currently the norm.

My goal here is not to debate over the Israel-Palestine conflict. Go find a forum discussing issue 50 for that. Suffice to say that I do not agree with Willingham and think the issue far more complex than as represented in Fables. What I would instead like to question is how one approaches a work of literature with political views so dissonant with one’s own, whatever one’s politics may be. Do we give up on the work and say, I can’t read this because of its politics? Where do we draw the line? This issue of course is not limited to politics. We could extend it to, say, religion. Do I decide not to read a work of literature because it engages with religious themes? Obviously such a stance is limiting. It would eliminate much of the literary canon, in fact, and many writers of whom I am rather fond. And of course it goes beyond literature. Does an atheist like myself dismiss Neutral Milk Hotel because “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” devotes a whole song to praising Jesus? I would say no, I love the album, but then, there are also some so-called artists whose preaching on whatever the issue, even when I’m in agreement with the stance taken, I cannot stand. So can we then separate the quality of the art from the views of the artist and the views expressed through the art, keeping in mind that views expressed in art do not always reflect those of the artist?

A major problem with asking this question, I think, is precisely the bed-time story characterization of politics as swinging one way or another, that is, falling upon a spectrum of left to right with the end I’m on being good and the other end being evil, and the middle being the wishy-washy shades of gray. Such a one-dimensional take on politics and morality presumes that if someone’s views are A on one issue then they must by necessity be B on this issue and C on that. Furthermore, certain poles of the political spectrum in mainstream culture often do not adhere to their own purported ideologies. For instance, I find it fascinating that the political “left” tends to voice the most opposition to police and military power, while the “right” tends to voice the most support of police and military, whilst the “left” is supposedly for central governmental control and the “right” supposedly for laissez-faire self-determination. Or how the “right” claims to support self-determination yet imposes government restrictions on behaviours like recreational drug use (i.e. marijuana and Stephen Harper’s insane crusade against it), limiting personal liberties that don’t harm anyone aside from offending ‘neo-con’ sensibilities. These are just some of the more obvious contradictions of the left-to-right political spectrum. For how can political beliefs, that is, beliefs pertaining to how civilization should be structured, fall upon a one-dimensional line? What sort of sad statement is that regarding political culture in the world today?

What’s frustrating about Fables is that on the one hand Willingham is capable of subtlety and complexity, but on the other, he often participates in this flattening of politics. Take, for example, issue 76 (vol. 12) in which there is a scene depicting Gepetto’s “integration” into fable society after his Empire is destroyed and he is pardoned by a general amnesty only because Pinnochio volunteered information about the Empire during the war that made its destruction possible in exchange for Gepetto’s life. Seems like there’s some moral texture and dimension going on here, and there is, especially in the Boy Blue storyline, which is my favourite, but the same writer that giveth may taketh away. I refer to Gepetto’s “Luddite” rant against the noise of cities, the obscenity of over-congested city streets with automobiles, the oblivion induced by cell phones upon modern humanity, and Gepetto’s biggest peeve, technological warfare. In Gepetto’s Empire, technology was not allowed for fear it would “empower” people -- because you know we citizens of technologically advanced society are oh-so-empowered by all these fancy gadgets. In response to this, Gepetto’s escort through fabletown, the goblin butler Hobbes, says, “Which nicely argues our point, doesn’t it? Machines: good. Oppressive Empires crushing freedoms along with actual lives: bad.” Here we have an explicit flattening of politics, justifying the use of science to develop better methods of killing and presuming that anyone who opposes technology is in line with Gepetto and his evil ways. A truly peaceful world, according to this logic, is one in which every citizen has access to grenades and automatic rifles and nuclear missiles so as not to concentrate these weapons in the hands of the overbearing few? Of course, this political scale immediately falls apart as soon as we find ourselves facing a pro-Israel Luddite.

To return to the question of whether we can then separate the quality of the art from the views of the artist and the views expressed through the art, I would say no, we cannot, but only in the sense that part of what constitutes the quality of the work is how the writer’s views are presented. I may not agree with an artist’s views, but if they are presented artfully then I will get over it and maybe even adjust my worldview accordingly. In this respect Willingham fails far too often, for it seems that at times when he seeks to present metaphors for the world “as it is” he fails to recognize or perhaps denies that there is no such thing as “just” an analogy. An analogy that claims to be “just” an analogy flattens politics and makes for clumsy writing and dull reading. Why don’t we call a fish a fish and say that an analogy is an analogy, but not just an analogy, for it is an analogy! Damn right.

Comments

• May 17, 2010, Devon Wong writes: As an example of how Jewish does not equal Zionist, check out this website: http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
• May 21, 2010, Isaac writes: it's been a while since I've read some Fables- but is it at all possible that when they say technology should be in as many hands as possible it isn't necessarily weapons to which they are reffering, but information and communication technology (such as we're employing at this moment). And is there any chance you'll agree that saying "Stephen Harper’s insane crusade" is a tad hyperbolic? He's hardly some mad scientist, raving to all listeners.
• May 23, 2010, Devon Wong writes: In Fables, Willingham is certainly referring to communications tech, which certainly is better democratized than concentrated in a few hands, but he is also referring to weapons, and he makes that rather explicit. My point is not that technology shouldn't be democratized but that all technology is not inherently good no matter whose hands it's in. The technology debate is rather complex and i can't get into it here, as i simply don't have the room or time. Maybe another article. I would have to then get into the expert-"layman" divide, and biotech, etc. My point here is simply that Willingham makes one-to-one associations that tech is inherently good and its proliferation associated with a certain set of political views. I want more nuance than what Willingham provides. As for my hyperbole, of course it`s hyperbole. That`s what I do. Though I do believe the fear of marijuana, which exists both on the `right` and the `left` currently, is if not insane at least irrational. Perhaps I should rephrase myself and say `Stephen Harper`s irrational crusade`. And he`s not raving because he doesn`t have to. He has the power to implement legislation makes life more difficult for growers and users and drives the market for marijuana underground. Not only does he have the power to do this, he has done it... ie. Bill S-10 and the recent rash of anti-drug ads. If you want Harper`s take on marijuana, here it is, from the man himself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFp210pZSKk He certainly isn`t raving, but he`s not making much sense either. Marijuana is inherently corrupting, apparently. By this logic we should ban alcohol, too. Certainly cigarettes. If these things can be legal, why not marijuana. Old argument, of course, but we should ask ourelves why culturally marijuana is so offensive to the sensibilities of people like Stephen Harper. I would say it`s less the danger of the drugs and the growth and trade of marijuana, which doesn`t have to be seedy, as the ideological baggage attached to marijuana that many politicians find frightening. Again, perhaps for another article.
• May 23, 2010, Devon Wong writes: In short, tech not inherently good, marijuana not inherently evil. Weapons, however, do kill by their very nature. They are made for the purpose of killing. The trade of marijuana only kills if it`s driven underground, and marijuana itself, unlike shit like cocaine, does not kill.
• May 25, 2010, Isaac writes: cool, yeah thanks for the reply, just wanted to make sure the readers at home had a bit more context for your statement regarding the Harper thing, too often I hear vitriolic statements that don't communicate anything as far as our gov't is concerned.

Click here to view the film.

The dance clubs create the space through which such consumption can occur. The confines of dance clubs encourage the collective connection with rhythm, uninterrupted by the distractions of the outside world. The architecture of dance clubs is reflective of the ideal method for consuming such music. Whereas live bands may play in bars with tables and chairs that facilitate drinking and relaxed enjoyment, dance clubs are built around a central dance floor meant to steer individuals towards dancing and active engagement with the music. By nature of the relative confinement of their spaces, dance clubs operate within their own unique culture. Within these self-contained environments, the most popular music is that which corresponds to the club’s social function, relating to the space within which it is consumed. Its danceable rhythms are not mere aesthetic choices, they are reflective of the music’s essential use – to stimulate engagement through dance within a space designed for such an activity. As dance clubs demonstrate a consistency in their physical characteristics (the existence of a dance floor), the music, in turn, assumes the task of constantly establishing and re-establishing the sort of activity that will take place within the physical space.

Swim seems to operate in direct contradiction to dance music’s optimal uses. True, Swim would certainly not seem out of place within a dance club. However, many of its features demand engagement beyond its danceable qualities. In recent interviews, Snaith refers to his latest record as ‘liquid dance music,’ acknowledging both his music’s electronic aspects as well as its diametric opposite – water. Water restricts movement, but also provides an alternative space of physical navigation. Swim highlights these alternative parameters of movement with his songs of human expression atop definitively danceable beats. “Bowls” for instance, deliberately expresses its human presence through the sound of Snaith physically hitting several brass bowls. While the track maintains its seemingly digital groove, a noticeable human element floats atop.

In addition, identifying water as the album’s central reference point establishes an environment that demands its listeners travel beyond its functional rhythms and examine the other uses the album may take on. When Swim was finally released, a friend of mine recounted how listening to the album while jogging in the rain created a particularly poignant experience. Such an experience did not take place on the dance floor, but during an entirely separate movement-based activity. For the record to be titled Swim identifies the notion that the record is as much about dancing as it is about finding rhythm in seemingly unrhythmic places. When swimming, the individual must configure themselves to the water’s alternate gravitational parameters, which force the individual to perceive their immediate environment differently. While the dance club creates an environment comfortably rooted in day-to-day existence, the swimming pool presents the potential for alternate movements foreign to land-based activity. The direct contradiction between the swimming pool and dance club demonstrates Snaith’s attempt to extricate dance music from its architectural confines. While Swim may function comfortably within dance club culture, its strength lays in its ability to locate alternate parameters of use and therefore, alternate environments for consumption.

Discussing whether or not we can adequately classify Swim as dance music is to limit its potential appeal. Swim aims to encompass all that refers to human movement. While this certainly overlaps with dance music, confining it to such a genre negates the possibility for the album to resonate with the broader aspects of human existence. Swim has as much to say about dancing as it does about jogging and swimming. In short, it makes apparent the inseparability of dancing from human movement and the reasons such things are not mutually exclusive.

Comments

• May 17, 2010, nicolai writes: very dope monsieur.

I was ushered to an unnameable hospital, my stiffening fingers still holding the filter of a honey-glazed joint. My heart was shocked back into its regular rhythms. I was laid on a hospital bed and tubes of varying girth were inserted inside my ailing body. Then there was a lot of nothing.

When I say nothing I mean nothing and not Nothing. It was not the vast capital-N Nothingness that one would expect—that, just like Somethingness, is a carefully constructed lie pushed by the New Existentialist Order (also called NEO). No, this was just nothing. Nada. A lump sum of non-experience.

When I woke up I saw the machines that kept me tied to this earth: heart pump, lung pump, brain pump. One cool unit known only as The Cincinnati Subzero. A gaggle of cooing nurses, rotund and rosy. Additionally, there were three or four capital-N Nuisances standing around. Through the ouroborian tangles of hair I recognized the faces. It was The Pesky Banana Bunch, no doubt lacking their monthly article.

I was planning a large-scale manifesto describing the importance of nada to dada, a topic only hinted at in last month's caNADAda article. Some see it as a shame that I was not able to finish—or begin—the article. Conversely, I was anesthetized for five days straight where I experienced nada first hand. Or rather did not experience. I think most of us can agree that a first-hand encounter is preferable to a dismal rant written on top a genial yellow hue. Instead I am going to tell everyone to fuck off and let me heal that hole in between the chambers of my heart.

I'll get back to you in a month, when they have planted inside me either a baboon or robot heart. Either option presents a badass possibility. I will absorb its powers. You will see. In the meantime I have had the Chaplin here recite my favourite verse of the Tao Te Ching:

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

Now slap on me that opium patch and get out of here. Visiting hours are over.

[Note: This is not a cop-out. His story is definitely true. In light of circumstances, we absolutely didn't expect an article this month from our resident curmudgeon, but some men are stronger and more resilient than others. Our hats go off to the relentless gumption of R. Nansen. Eds.]

When you register a new Myspace page as a musical act, there is a point at which you are asked to describe what your music sounds like in three short descriptors chosen from drop-down menus. The end result can be seen at the top of every band’s Myspace page: “folk/acoustic/ambient” or “grunge/noise rock/experimental” are decent examples of what comes out of this process. The drop down menus can’t ever approach a true description of what a band sounds like, but they do provide an interesting look at how language must always attempt to define new things relationally, positioning the new object or sound or what-have-you in a theoretical framework based on similarity or dissimilarity.

Whenever I get into discussions about genre with anyone, I always end up at the same wildly gesturing “blah blah blah arbitrary! blah blah blah meaningless!” conclusion. It is true, to a certain extent, that genre divisions and descriptors are arbitrary and for the purposes of easy separation and distinction for casual consumption, but they can never be meaningless. The way an artist is presented, whether personally or through social discussion, depends on this theoretical framework of relation and allegory in relation to all of the music that has ever previously existed. As I mentioned a few months ago in my intervarticle with/about the Wilderness of Manitoba, being a folk band in 2010 is near impossible. Folk music in its purest form already exists and thus all music created or placed under the folk umbrella must now re-imagine and reconsider the implications of the genre and its established tropes in order to be compelling.

New and game-changing music is always created through conscious manipulation of the allegorical musical imagination: Dylan ripped off Guthrie with his own twist, Zeppelin electrified Willie Dixon, Paul Simon made the foreign and the local interchangeable, Deerhunter combines punk and ambient and 50s pop into sound collages. Obviously the music created needs to be intrinsically valuable in order to have any real staying power, but the fact remains that historiographic chains of influence pull music from the vacuum and plant it in soil nurtured by the detritus provided by last season’s crops.

A few weeks ago, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings released I Learned the Hard Way, their fourth album. I first heard about Sharon Jones when a friend of mine played me the song “N.B.L,” from 100 Days, 100 Nights. Despite it’s obvious funk soul awesomeness, the tune does incredible and interesting things by embracing musical tradition rather than subverting it, and thus subverting the cultural perception of that musical tradition more effectively than re-writing and re-imagining it ever could. Jones can be considered a revivalist, though soul music never truly went away (and to a certain extent, all good music is soul music, if you get my meaning), but her throwback to a classic aesthetic presented in a way relevant to listeners in 2010 makes her enduring rather than any innovation that actually takes place in the music itself. Even Daptone’s studio devotion to recording entirely to tape, despite the fact that a lot of people still do this or are beginning to re-embrace the technique, gives her music an air of legitimacy that can only be explained by the way it reminds the listener of past while projecting into the future.

I think the reason we seek new music that compells us is because of these allegories. Everyone has heard the defeatist talk: hip-hop died with Biggie and Pac; they don’t make music like they used to; I wish I was alive in the ‘70s because we missed everything good. Truth be told, I would love to be able to go back and listen to jazz in speakeasies or see Hendrix live, but if it meant trading knowledge of the current musical zeitgeist for the opportunity, I’d stay right here. There’s more to know now than there ever has been, right? Isn’t that the way it always goes? “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone,” but it never really leaves. The past always informs and defines the potential of the present, the now, and the now after that, and so on. Joel Plaskett and Robert Plant are both made more interesting by the fact that they sit beside each other on my CD shelf because they constitute each other’s relation to the past and future.

Next Month: Message!

“You get what you pay for” says any reasonable passing thought, but summer is so ripe with objection is it not? A second Dairy Queen Blizzard? With the purchase of any Dairy Queen Blizzard? This is insanity, a crazy world! You should have seen the look on my brother’s emoticon when I texted him the news. 31 cent scoop night at Baskin & Robbins? I love ice cream! I love the world! Free comic books?

Oh, Duck Tails? No, no, I like DuckTales it’s just that. Oh it’s a good DuckTales? I was just hoping you’d have like, I don’t know, something like The Flash or some Ultimates you are trying to haul away. No? War of The Supermen? No, dude, Superman's been lost for like the last year, I'll pass. Oh okay. But this Fraggle Rock is good? Fraggle Rock? Sure, fine then. Okay then let’s check it out.

Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock ~ Archaia ~ Free as freedom

Interesting. I thought the rushing craze of reviving every property that gets a Youtube comment died a few years ago, but I guess I’m wrong. Sure, people watched Fraggle Rock, but aside from nostalgic charm there isn’t much for anyone to get invested with. Regardless, everyone’s favourite funky bunch of pseudo-Marxist Muppets are back and ready to once again spread the ‘be yourself’ message through a myriad of simple anecdotes. In this freebie we get two quick stories, first has Boober deciding to join the Doozer work force after being called a wet blanket, and the second is about making art out of garbage. Oh, and the first page is also a maze with some turnips. Wonderful stuff. The first story’s art (by Jake Myler) is actually really good, with sharp line work and very fluid colouring, while in contrast the second (with art by Jeremy Love) seems inconspicuously incomplete. The rough drafting pencils are sort of smudged all over, you can try to defend the ‘style’ of it, but the ‘style’ is awful. I guess that’s about all I can dig out of this. Yeah, smack your cheek that I haven’t been totally inspired by a free Fraggle Rock comic adaptation, but there’s another event altogether to leave the mind scrambled. No, not the Weed March you weenie.

Free Comic Book day isn’t the only thing putting the staples to paper. In fact it isn't even the only event to get rained on. TCAF has decided to shed its old shackles of bi-annuality to full blown annual. Aware it can put up the dukes towards other comic print gatherings for the uncanny nature, dweebsters to zinesters can once again commune somewhere in between psychedelic scribblers and webcomics. Of course, while the event is free, things will probably run you a small fee. Actually even that’s a half truth, because some artists seem all too willing to pass on their work in exchange for a great anecdote. But regardless, free is free and this is not. So which is better?

Sword of My Mouth ~ No Media Kings ~ A fair 14 dollars

I had heard about Jim Munroe’s unique apocalypse on other sites before but this was my first dip into it. I can see why and how people have been hooked by this post civilization depiction. It's so eerily casual. It's the end of humanity but personality marches on. In a world where the rapture plucked individuals off the planet, leaving the rest to be mutated and laboured under the tyrannical angels, people still remain being people. Free people, no matter what. They love, they live, they laugh and they cry. There's a rich sensation of community made stronger from being demolished, and it shows the Munroe's strength to recognize realistic individuals without siphoning caricatures. Though this isn't the end story to end all. While I love the characterization, the plot leaves a lot to be desired. It is almost completely without tension, which I suppose is 'realistic,' but that very same realism is juxtaposed at other times by near brushes with conventional super hero material surrounding a skeleton handed antagonist and his schemes. It's an interesting and mature read, but there's a sort of 'so-what' sensation by the time you put it down. A good completion to any post-apocalyptic fiction set, but not a corner stone.

I’m at the Beguiling for a return trip. My brother departed to meet friends and I, coincidentally, ran into some other friends who had yet to rail in their freebie haul. The rain’s quit too, and company is nice. You are only supposed to take five free comics, and while the second visit would be a good opportunity to abuse the system, I don’t like to be a jerk. I mean unless I see something really offensive that needs a ripping. They are free and ho-hum for the most part, but I don’t want to come off as a total... Oh wait what’s this? Oh man, I am half surprised they did this. Actually I’m not surprised at all. Well, I guess I can take ONE extra comic, I’ll just slip it into the tote and hope nobody sees that I put my hand on a copy of...

Fame Lady Gaga ~ Bluewater Comics ~ Love don’t cost a thing yo

No self respecting comic website has gone without a massive fan based rant about Blue Water Comics. The publishing house seems to have no quarrels with pumping out an otherwise embarrassing flood of unofficial biographies on whoever is currently making headlines. Obama, Pelosi, everyone who has something to do with Twilight. This isn’t a creative enterprise and I’m not sure it’s a business one either. What’s even weirder is while, if you saw this on the shelf, you’d think it’d actually be about current pop sensation Lady Gaga, but it isn’t. It’s actually about some fat guy whining that music doesn’t inspire him like the Queens, Bowies and other acts most famous before he was probably even born. But then, ah, like a glittery disco ball beam of sun on his inconsistently drawn TV set is none other than Lady Gaga. He heavily investigates the glam stud via the internet before building enough confidence to leave the house to buy an album (people still buy albums?). This is... Hhuh... This is pretty bad. I mean it’s free yeah, but I’m pretty sure the version you pay for may be more of what I’m looking at. I bet it wasn’t without experience that the story follows a fat guy who never leaves the house. No one in this talks like real people. I’ve browsed a fair share of HMVs but no one’s ever uttered the words, “Get your groove on, guy” in stores and or otherwise. There are also missing commas, which is kind of the entertainment in itself. The art shares the fugly too, and anytime someone sweats it looks more like they are melting into glue. Don't worry, I'm not saying that you were going to pick this up anyways. I'm just saying I did and then continued to be awful and read it.

I didn’t know Michael Deforge was actually going to be at TCAF. This would have been a pleasant surprise, but I decided to earn a lot of fist props and ‘hey cool shirt’ referrals by wearing a tee he sold at Canzine. I feel like I wore the band shirt with matching hat to their show. Oh god did he see me? He’s going to think I’m such a dweeb. Okay, maybe I can just try to nab a copy of his new book and slip away. Just inch a little... Almost... DANGIT. I think he saw. He thinks it’s funny. OH MAN I’M SUCH A LOSER.

LOSE #2 ~ Koyama Press ~ Run ya bout’ five bucks.

What made me learn to love the first LOSE was how easily I identified the plight of the artist. Victims of the pop culture saturated world can be helpless to discover uniquity, especially when it finally comes to putting the ink pen to paper. I spent all of high school drawing Batman fan art and I’m sure many reading a series entitled 'NERDVENTURES' have been in similar places. Despite how immensely dark the imagery was, it was difficult not being charmingly entertained by Deforge’s cartoon flooded interpretation of hell. While his abilities as a captivating artist and a designer are holding up their end of the bargain, Deforge has moved on to entirely new themes. Without a TV allusion in sight, we new play witness to the story of Chip, a wee lil’ cowboy who befriends the end of humanity. We’ve sort of swapped to the other side of the mirror, discovering the sublime in bleakness instead of bleakness in the sublime. This issue is overall trimmed. While the first was a bit of a loot bag hopping between Teen Green Lantern and the main misadventure, two is more focused, which will probably cheese off as many people as it will pleasure. As much as I enjoyed it, this isn’t the issue that captivated me, but I’ll probably pick up three when it comes out just to discover how miserable a man with an awesome hair cut can actually be.

I’m not saying that nothing good in this world is free, I’m just saying don’t be too shocked when free things are awful. Free Comic Book day is about getting pretty pictures into the hands of adolescents. TCAF is about silk-screening naked women with eyes for vaginas. Everything has its purpose. Your wallet included.

“Blindsight” by Peter Watts (Tor Books, 2006)

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up on the latest Canadian sf community news, marine biologist and writer Dr. Peter Watts was not too long ago beaten and pepper-sprayed at the Canada-U.S. border by the U.S. border patrol. He was then charged with felony non-compliance for not obeying a border guard fast enough. A defense fund was created and the sf community rallied behind Peter in his support and in opposition to the bogus charges. However, Watts was found guilty, and thus we waited with held breath for the sentencing to fall, which might have put Watts in prison for several years. Luckily, that didn’t happen. One jury member in particular spoke up for Peter, which possibly contributed to the judge’s lenient sentence: a fine and a criminal record, but no jail time. Unjust, but better than it could have been. For a more detailed account of this story, click here.

Now, the book. Set in the late 21^st century, Blindsight is a hard (very hard) sf novel with a new take on several old tropes. For those of you unfamiliar with sf genre terminology, “hard” sf is that which relies heavily upon “hard” science to establish speculative concepts. And true to the sub-genre, Blindsight can be tough going at times for the scientifically barely-literate like myself. However, unlike a lot of hard sf, Blindsight deals with the hard science not merely as a vessel for cool, far-flung, and fantastic concepts -- though it does that, too -- but structurally and thematically as well. The jargon and complicated ideas aren’t just there to legitimate the novel’s conceits. They partly compose the themes with which Blindsight grapples and provide a unique angle from which to probe the novel’s central questioning of sentience -- not of what sentience “is” but of what sentience is “for.” The conclusions drawn are somewhat bleak and not necessarily the author’s own, but also humbling and have stuck with me even weeks after having put the book down.

Blindsight is foremost a first contact story, told to us by the synthesist (the derogatory term for synthesist being “jargonaut”) Siri Keeton who accompanies a small team of experts sent to follow an alien signal back to its source two months after said aliens took a snapshot of Earth in the most dramatic manner possible, by burning up sixty-five thousand probes in Earth’s atmosphere simultaneously. As a child, Siri Keeton underwent a radical hemisherectomy to cure his epilepsy... half his brain was removed... and as a result he is unable to empathize with his fellow humans and the human condition in general. Thus he fakes it, like a well-adjusted and clinically sanctioned sociopath. Siri’s job is to record what the various experts on the expedition say in translation, rendering all that jargon intelligible to the brass back home, and to the common people for posterity’s sake. The book Blindsight is the record of his account.

Blindsight is a book packed with almost too many neat ideas and conceits, enough concepts with which to write several sf novels. I found myself in absolute awe of Watts’s mental acrobatics, at times barely able to keep up, which for me at least is definitely a good thing. In addition to some of his truly fresh ideas, like the biology and cognitive workings of the aliens in the novel, Watts also revisits several old tropes, most notable of which being that of the vampire. The leader of Siri’s expedition is a resurrected vampire named Sarasti. Watts takes the scientific over the mystical approach to the vampire yet is able to retain an aire of mystery where the creature is concerned. He of course completely rejects the hackneyed notion of the Anne Rice / Twilight romanticized vampire that pervades popular culture at the moment. Watts’ vampires are pretty damned scary. The vampire in the novel is said to have been a third branch of humanity called Homo sapiens vampiris that cohabited the planet with the Homo sapiens sapiens and Neanderthals, as Watts describes in technical detail in the book’s appendix. These vampires were so smart they could hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their head at once, and like any smart predator, they knew not to overhunt their prey. However, due to a cognitive impairment of some sort, Homo sapiens vampiris was psychologically “allergic” to crosses, to the perpindicular intersection of two straight lines to create four right angles, which is a pattern that very rarely occurs in nature, and they went into frothing coniptions when they saw said crosses. Thus they were eventually killed off, only to be brought back from extinction in the late 21^st century as super-smart slaves to humanity. Bad idea, right? I have to say, it’s pretty ballsy for Watts to have chosen, of all the vampire weaknesses, like allergy to silver or sunlight, the cross as the weakness for his science-based vampires, and he gets away with it. As for the world in which Blindsight is set, considering the denizens that inhabit it, it’s appropriately sinister, the evil twin to fellow Canadian Cory Docotorow’s take on a “post-scarcity economy” as depicted in the influential Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

All in all, if you’re looking for a dark (yes, at times dimly lit) and mind-blowing sf romp that is both entertaining and may change the way you look at life, cognitive processes, organic chemistry, sentience, and more -- for why else does one read fiction? -- check out Blindsight. Remember, the throbbing in your head is a good ache. Or maybe I’m just a masochist.

Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (Random House, 1974)

Not to be confused with the work of the aforementioned Cory Doctorow, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime was the first novel to win the National Book Critics Circle award in addition to being nominated for a Nebula Award. In Fredric Jameson’s influential Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson describes Doctorow as “one of the few serious and innovative leftist novelists at work in the United States today” (21). High praise indeed, and praise with which I would tend to agree.

Ragtime is set, for the most part, in and around New York city, with a brief excursion to Atlantic City, between 1900 and the outbreak of World War I. The third person narrator jumps throughout the novel from character to character, including various historical figures like Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Emiliano Zapata, and Sigmund Freud, among others; the intertextual allusion that is ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. (Coalhouse being a characterized reference to Heinrich von Kleist’s novella “Michael Kohlhaas”); and two fictional families, the middle class white American family designated Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, and The Little Boy, and the Jewish immigrant family designated Tateh, Mameh, and The Little Girl. The plot of the novel is rather difficult to describe, for just as Jameson writes that Ragtime mitigates against interpretation in spite of itself, existing as historical pastiche that wishes it were otherwise, it is difficult to say where one plot begins in the novel and where another ends. It would be easy to summarize what appears to be the dominant plot lines, the plots that span a quantifiably greater number of pages in the novel, but such a summary does an injustice to the almost episodic character of the narrative. Episodes sometimes humorous, sometimes poignant and heartbreaking, like Mameh having to prostitute herself to her boss, like Freud and his disciples unable to find a public restroom in New York so that Freud might relieve himself, like Booker T. Washington’s bungled negotiation attempt with Coalhouse Walker Jr., like J. P. Morgan inviting Ford over for lunch one afternoon, seeing in Ford a pharoah reincarnated, literally, or like the Archduke Franz Ferdinand mistaking Houdini for the inventor of the aeroplane, etc.

In Postmodernism, Jameson discusses the novel as uninterpretable before going on to interpret it as a novel mourning “the left’s” defeat of itself, which is indeed one major thread of the novel's intricate thematic tapestry. Jameson writes that “E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past” (24), rendering ragtime a work of political and cultural tragedy. However, beyond mourning the death of the “radical past,” it might be said that the book mourns the dissolution of politics itself into culture. It is a post-modern retrospective upon post-modernism’s own roots and the attempt to historicize that which resists historicization. The title of the work is helpful in this regard. Ragtime. The precursor to jazz and then the rest of popular music. The first infusion of colour into the culture of white America. The precursor to the kind of fragmentation, ad-hoc improvisation, and pastiche characteristic of the post-modern.

Throughout the novel there is a definite sense of the retrospective and, thereby, the prophetic, that this is a present reading back into the past. The always moving third-person, past-tense narration contributes to this, but also in the engagement of the themes there is always a strong sense that certain characters know, or have some presentiment of, what is coming, that they can see America's future, that J. P. Morgan sees the culture that Ford’s assembly line will effect, that Emma Goldman prophesizes Marilyn Monroe and the cult of the star when she lectures and heart-achingly sympathizes with Evelyn Nesbit, that Harry K. Thaw, looking out of his jail cell at Harry Houdini, glimpses the narrator’s present, and beyond glimpses reality television and MTV, that which is the future for even the narrator. It is as if the past depicted in the novel is haunted by a future that, for the narrator, and for the reader, has already come and gone and is moving on again. I wonder if, when Jameson speaks of the “insensible colonization of the present by the nostalgia mode” (Jameson, 20) we cannot in turn speak of the past being colonized by the nostalgia mode of the present. In short, read Ragtime and join me in puzzling over the state of the historical novel, which brings us to the third book on our list...

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (Vintage, 2004)

Cloud Atlas by British author David Mitchell is another Nebula award nominee, as well as being shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Man Booker Prize, and is a prime example of a fusion between literary and popular sensibilities, ideas and plot, as well as between multiple disparate genres, including historical drama, political thriller, pulp detective fiction, contemporary comedy, cyberpunk for the bioengineering age, and post-apocalyptic sf. Check out this interview with David Mitchell in which he briefly discusses the difference between genre and ‘literary’ fiction. David Mitchell is also an author who wears his influences on his sleeves, most notably writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Aldous Huxley, and Herman Melville among others, and while not as deft as these masters, Mitchell manages to do credit to such influences as few other new voices this decade have managed.

Cloud Atlas is divided into six novellas ordered in the following manner: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Thus the first halves of the first five novellas are told, then the sixth novella in its entirety, and then the final halves of the five are told in reverse order. The novellas are told initially in chronological order and then in reverse chronological order. The first novella is composed of journal excerpts from a south Pacific sea voyage in the nineteenth century; the second a collection of letters from an English composer in Zedelgem, Belgium in 1931; the third a manuscript set in Buenas Yerbas, California in 1975 about a journalist investigating a murder tied to a corrupt nuclear power company; the fourth a roughly contemporary comedy taking place in the UK and starring a book publisher who later turns his misadventures into a film; the fifth a recorded interview with a revolutionary Korean clone soon to be executed; and the sixth about a goatherd in a post-apocalyptic future Hawaii who must play host to an anthropologist who is one of the last members of technologically advanced civilization. Five of the six “lead” characters are suggested to be the same soul reincarnated across time. In stories 2 through 6, a character is either reading or viewing the record of the previous story, and in each narrative, the character’s reading or viewing is interrupted part way through only to resume later, in the latter half of the novel, when the reader comes to, in a sense, “inhabit” each successive character taking in the story that comes next. As the reader begins the last half of the novel, the reader is “looking through the eyes” so to speak of a character in the story that had concluded before it, each story concluding with the resumption of the character’s reading or viewing of the story that follows. Thus by the time the reader returns to the first and final narrative, there presses the weight of all those layers of narratives within narratives, in a future that is past.

Mitchell does not merely drape his narrative upon this structural ingenuity for its own sake. The structure of the novel is such that it heightens the intellectual and emotional resonance of the six individual narratives. Mitchell takes advantage of the structure to strike complex emotional chords, and makes it look far too easy at that. What is also remarkable about the six novellas that comprise the entire novel is that each possesses its own unique voice, as if the six novellas were in fact written by six different authors.

Thematically, Mitchell has said that the novel’s central focus is predation. And certainly, Mitchell toys with old questions of humanity’s selfish inclinations as well as whether civilization is humanity’s boon or curse, if civilization can or should suppress the beast in man, or if perhaps civilization is itself bipolar and not a singular good set against savagery. Old fare. What renders it poignant, however, is that around this more obvious set of thematics orbits Mitchell’s (I would argue more essential) questioning of notions of change versus constancy accented by the structure of the novel. Above all, Cloud Atlas is the rare sort of “postmodern” novel that can balance the seemingly contradictory sentiments that “Truth is singular” (Mitchell, 185) yet that an ocean is “a multitude of drops” (Mitchell, 509), and that while surfaces may change, there is also something, if only the hope for something, not eternal, but that time can’t touch. Once more, the title puts the work into perspective, for Mitchell has the temerity to name his work a map of the unmappable, a topography of the heights from which the topographic viewer views.

Recently I was asked by a friend for input into the cover art for his band's record, which is set to be re-released with, you guessed it, a new cover. It had been discussed and decided that a new look might be just what the doctor ordered to get the most additional mileage out of the already year-old self-released record. So, naturally, I got to thinking about what makes good album cover art and why having an appropriate cover is essential to having a successful record in general. Because in all honesty, I'm fairly certain that it is. Perhaps it is not so important that a good record necessarily should have an equally good cover, but rather that the cover should be appropriate to what the music on the record is doing.

Of course, there have been many accounts, and indeed even within this very publication about the virtues of owning the physical medium of recorded music as opposed to merely indiscriminately downloading music. One of the most frequently cited of these virtues is in regards to how wonderful it is (and it is) of having the full package of a record, including cover art and liner notes to associate the music with. Generally it makes people feel much more connected with the music that they are listening to. Having something physical to hold in the hands tends to allow for people to attain a greater appreciation for the music's creation, thus forming a connection between listener and artist that does not seem to exist when experiencing music from the desolate sheen of iTunes. Having something as abstract as music detached from a physical entity gives way to alienation from its production because it eliminates context from the work, thus allowing the listener to merely consume blindly the product without consideration for the big picture of what the work is doing.

I am interested, however, in the specific art that appears on the physical form of recorded music. How does it function in relation to the music that it represents? Why is it important to have a strong visual connection to auditory art? Without getting too over my head by diving into the neurological processes of eye-ear associations that I could never properly explain, especially after my ham-handed attempt at tackling commodity fetishism, the album art is the listener's association outside of the music. It is often their first point of reference for encountering a record whether in a store or accompanying a review; it is how we associate with the work when it is not being listened to ("you know, the one with where she's standing on top of the hood of a car holding a sword"). Furthermore, album art helps to augment the music, often providing the colour and tone to the thought process that occurs when listening to music.

The history of the album as a medium is synonymous with the history of totally sweet album art. If we look back to many, of not all, of the albums that have gone on to be known as classics, we can see many, many instances of the accompanying artwork becoming equally as iconic as the music that it represents. I will here use four classic albums of the 1960s to make this point. From The Velvet Underground & Nico's famous banana courtesy of then manager Andy Warhol, and the psychedelic swirls of the Zombies' Odyssey & Oracle, to the rustic simplicity of The Band's self-titled second record and the urban romanticism of Bob Dylan's Freewheelin', album art in the 1960s appears to be designed to conjure certain images in the listener to accompany the overall experience of the hearing the record.

In the case of The Band (top-right), a record thoroughly indebted to traditional American folk music to the point where many of the songs deal with the Civil War in the lyrics, an attempt at creating a classical, well-aged feel to the music is in play. The songs that appear on this record are attempts at resurrecting bygone images of America that the majority of the group's contemporaries in the counterculture were attempting to distance themselves from. The artwork is reflective of this with its two-tone, faded colour-scheme and interwar period typeface. In this way it helps to augment the images raised by the music itself, strengthening aspects of The Band's music that they no doubt wanted to be highlighted.

On the other hand, Odyssey & Oracle by the Zombies (bottom-right) with its bright, colourful busyness is entirely evocative of the hazy psychedelia contained within the packaging. The typeface is likely the standard for stereotypical British Invasion imagery with its lopsided lettering that interacts organically with its surroundings. Odyssey & Oracle is essentially the go-to point of reference for British psychedelic pop; it has, as it was described to me by the owner of Soundscapes, "More hooks than a meat locker" and indeed, its accompanying art is equally important for discussing psychedelic visual art and its relationship to music.

Meanwhile Dylan's record (bottom-left) perfectly captures the wide-eyed excitement of a bohemian environment such as Greenwich Village at the beginning of the counterculture movement, in this case 1963. Dylan's personal, socially-conscious songwriting, nearing the very height of its prowess is echoed in the idealism and freshness of the photograph. The Velvet Underground & Nico (top-left) likewise is highly indicative of its time and place, featuring with extreme prominence the work of Andy Warhol, suggesting its connection to the New York underground scene of the late 1960s and the aesthetic contained therein. I think in this case, the album art is less evocative of the music itself, rather than it is a relic of its context. It ties itself tightly to its time and place affixing the music firmly to its tradition and background.

The Velvet Underground & Nico and its cover are also notable in that it is a textbook example of iconic image association within album art. The banana image is instantly recognizable as being tied irrevocably to that album - in many ways it is more recognizable than any of the songs on the record, as great a record as it is. The iconic image tool, where a single, simple object or image is displayed with great prominence against a very stark background is an effective way of gaining immediate recognition for an album. We can see this in Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation (above), which uses the single candle as focal point with virtually no other recognizable images or details apart from that. While certainly not a flashy cover, and perhaps not even a particularly pretty or edgy cover, it gains its iconic status from its simplicity. It is well-known even before the title of the record for many people who will inevitably point directly to the candle as reference point for the work. The association here lies in the object and less the aesthetic such as in The Band and Odyssey & Oracle.

The other primary aspect of The Velvet Underground & Nico worth highlighting is the aspect of historical context, wherein a work of music can be easily placed within a certain framework of time and place is another important function of classic album art. Particularly if the work, like The Velvet Underground & Nico is doing, is attempting to align itself with a particular aspect of time and place using visual art. That record's art, as mentioned, places it firmly within the realm of 1960s New York underground culture. Similarly, David Bowie's "Heroes" and its artwork function in a way that is both conducive to the harsh, stark soundscapes featured on the record, and also to the context of the record's production and place in the cultural canon.

As the second installment of Bowie's highly influential "Berlin Trilogy" (along with Low and Lodger), and also the only volume of that cycle of records to be recorded entirely in Berlin, the record is highly indebted to German music of the period, particularly Kraftwerk and Can. The artwork of "Heroes" reflects the cool, almost detached artwork appearing on the records of those groups, which in turn reflected a period where the identity of German culture was in a state of rebuilding. The sleek, cold artwork that appears on albums such as Kraftwerk's Autobahn (above) reflects a typical view of German culture as being highly advanced, efficient and sleek.

Bowie's "Heroes" is similar in aesthetic. Unlike its predecessor Low, which takes its cover art from a still from the film The Man Who Fell To Earth starring Bowie and was only partially recorded in Berlin, "Heroes" embraces the visual aesthetic of its influences in its plain, robotic photograph with a disinterested quality to it. The black and white image of Bowie in the stiff, unusual pose with his different coloured eyes staring off blankly evokes similar images to Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express (released that same year), those of urban alienation and lack of personal identity in Germany ca. 1977. "Heroes" is notable in this regard as Bowie, being British, is attempting a recreation of this aesthetic, an assumption of spirit where the time and place of the record is not necessarily analogous to the artist in question. Bowie is attempting a take at something within his own time frame, but outside of his specific cultural background, whereas an act like The Band goes for something both out of their time and place.

On the other hand, in the case of Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (above) we see a contemporary update of an epoch that is completely unrelated to the music presented, though is still appropriate to the overall tone of the record. As the veritable Grand Poobah of contemporary folk records, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea speaks for itself, however its absolutely stunning art work adds a flavour to it that might not be immediate in the music, in effect adding a quality to the music through association of the fantastic whimsy presented in the cover in contrast to the raw power of Jeff Magnum's songwriting. Designed by Chris Bilheimer, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea's imagery is borrowed from turn-of-the-century continental European art, a far cry from late-1990s American indie-folk presented on the album itself. In this case, Magnum is less concerned with assuming the spirit of a certain time or place that is reflected in his music, but is using a very specific set of images to accentuate the music in terms of association. If the cover art is the first point of association for a record, the fantastical, circus-like imagery attached to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea gives the record a quality of being unstuck or lost in time.

This is a flawless album cover because it not only compliments the music, but accentuates with qualities that may not be immediately apparent in the music. Furthermore, it will never be dated because it is not concerned at all with appearing contemporary - it is a timeless image for a timeless album. It borrows from a certain aesthetic or epoch, but is not a slave to the parameters set out by that aesthetic, it brings its own character to it - ie, the transfigured head.

Given that The Velvet Underground & Nico has proven to be absurdly useful for discussing the finer points of album art, we can use that banana as a starting point for discussing the importance of authorship in the design of record covers. Andy Warhol being a household name lends yet another aspect to that album's design, especially because Warhol's name appears on the cover where the band's does not. Obviously it is worth mentioning that who is handling the design of a record is going to speak volumes about the listening experience. Warhol connects the Velvet Underground with its place in history as mentioned, but also provides an insight into the operation of the band, being that the initial appearance of their debut record is directly tied to Warhol's fame. It acts as both marketing tool and aesthetic guide for the record, it forces the listener to experience the record in the context of the band's connection to Warhol.

Similarly, indie-folk band Okkervil River (direct musical descendants of Neutral Milk Hotel) have employed artist William Schaff to design the album art for each of the band's five full-length releases. Schaff's distinct artistic voice has obviously lent its own qualities to the band's work that, given that he is not a member of the band, accentuates Okkervil River's music in ways that the band themselves would not be able to create on their own. Records such as 2003's Down the River of Golden Dreams (top-right) dictate the listening of the record through Schaff's interpretation and the smooth yet strained imagery conveyed by Schaff's art is indicative of his thought process while listening to the record.

This is exactly the case with the artwork accompanying Jon-Rae Fletcher's Oh, Maria (bottom-right), which was released last year. In an interview with Fletcher I conducted for Steel Bananas in May 2009, Fletcher told me: "I gave the album to my friend Steven Cooper and told him to paint a painting of whatever he wanted; to listen to the album a few times and paint whatever – and that’s just what he came up with.” This is a vision of the music completely independent of the songwriter and indeed Cooper's bizarre painting gives the listener its own impression of the album that might not be what Fletcher intended to convey. How it compliments the record is entirely Cooper's interpretation and as a result, his thoughts influence those of the listener.

Surely this is what artists have in mind when they design their own album covers. Chad VanGaalen, a songwriter known as much for the home-made quirkiness of his music (complete with instruments of his own invention and a persona that paints the man as an infamous homebody) as he is for his excessive morbidity, also doubles as an animator, creating his own music videos and album art. His 2008 album, Soft Airplane (top-left) incorporates a very strange piece that VanGaalen designed specifically to be the album cover. Its bright colours stand in contrast to the record's exceedingly dark and sinister tone. While the art certainly has a dark quality to it, its colours suggest a certain playfulness that carries over to the music. This is a representation of how VanGaalen views his own music and he conveys everything to the listener under the banner of a singular vision that is entirely his own.

In something of a twist on this, Thom Yorke has designed most of Radiohead's album art, however under the pseudonym Tchock. Thus, albums such as 2000's Kid A with its desolate, expansive art that is entirely appropriate to the music contained in the album, are given the artist's full vision (though in this case the art direction was a collaboration between Tchock and Stanley Donwood), however under the skew of a pseudonym which suggests a backing away from the totality of the artist in question. Perhaps this is due to Radiohead's being a band and not solely the project of Yorke that the pseudonym is used to solidify the record as being a group effort rather than a singular vision courtesy of Yorke. If this speculation is indeed the case, then this is a move in operation against the initial reaction of the cover art in that Radiohead maintains a certain distance between the music and visual representation.

So, after all of this blathering, what makes for a really great album cover, one that is both unique and has staying-power? First and foremost, the artwork should do something for the music by complimenting or accentuating aspects of the music that are important to both the themes the artist is attempting to convey through the music, and also conducive to the artist's image as an artist. That is to say, a record by a sensitive singer-songwriter probably shouldn't look like Bat Out of Hell. As I've said repeatedly in this piece, the cover is more often than not going to be a listener's first point of reference for a record, so just what exactly that first impression is going to be should be well thought out. I personally like continuity between an artist's works. An extreme example of this would be the uniform look to the records of Daft Punk, such as Discovery, which feature the group's name displayed in the same typeface, however with a slightly different background each time. This for me signifies a certain confidence for an artist in their own image that says that artist has a strong vision of who they are and what they are doing.

One should never strive to be too contemporary. First of all, what is considered indicative of an era is never really solidified until long after that era has passed. Covers that appear to be striving for a look that is overly "new" often fall flat on their faces. A good cover is never forced into any boxes, it is simply indicative of where an artist is in a particular point in their lives - it is a natural fit to an artist's work and speaks to the images that the album gives. It is a solidification of these images. We can't all be Jeff Magnum, unfortunately, but we can be true to ourselves and have a little bit of taste on the side.

Comments

• May 17, 2010, Mike Goldstein writes: Hello - I read your posting with great interest - it's nice to see someone take such an in-depth look into album cover artwork and the elements that separate great cover art from most of the imagery used to package music over the past 40+ years. There are many reasons why designers, photographers, illustrators and art directors do what they do and the stories behind "the making of" many iconic album covers reveal a vast number of inspirations. I've interviewed over 60 of these talented people over the past few years (my most recent is on Dave McMacken and his fantastic artwork for Frank Zappa's Over-Nite Sensation), so if you'd like to really dig deep, I hope that you'll visit my blog and read thru a few of these stories. http://rockpopgallery.typepad.com/rockpop_gallery_news/ Anyway - keep up the good work - always glad to meet another fan of album cover art! Cheers - Mike G - RockPoP Gallery - Portland, OR

What do most of us wish for in life? Health? Happiness? Long life? Freedom? For Loretta, it’s the latter. And how does one acquire freedom in this modern world? Money, of course. And that’s what Loretta’s going to make no matter the cost, in the Factory Theatre’s remount of George F. Walker’s Featuring Loretta, on now through June 27th at the Main stage. One of six one-act plays in Walker’s 1997 Suburban Motel series, a comic series exploring various facets of the underbelly of society, Featuring Loretta is classic Canadian humour theatre at its absolute best.

Loretta’s philandering husband has been eaten by a bear. She is carrying the child of his best friend, being pestered by her family to come home, being pestered by the daughter of the ex-KGB owner of the motel in which she resides and being idolized and admired by, respectively, a screw salesman and an amateur pornographer. What Loretta needs, she decides, is money. As much money as possible and as quickly as possible. The obvious solution? Make some amateur pornography. With the screw salesman as co-star. And with the amateur pornographer as director.

Factory Artistic Director Ken Gass’s long relationship with Walker is obvious as he handles the comedic mayhem of the rapid-fire script with grace and ease. The broad space of the Factory main stage is obviously a comfortable playing space for Gass, a claustrophobic mood mirroring Loretta’s own feeling of entrapment. Between-scene blackouts were not as jarring as they usually are, but still showed a lack of creativity in an otherwise splendid direction. Gass’ natural sense of rhythm and motion enhances the insanity on stage, but the restraint of a seasoned theatre professional kept said insanity well within the reasonable bounds of reality. Adding to this restraint were the blazing performances of some actors with excellent comedic timing.

As the straight-player centre of this three-ring circus, Leslie Faulkner kept the exposition moving and certainly exuded the ‘something’ that makes Loretta irresistible to men. The two male players were equally effective, especially when arguing with each other. As Dave, Brandon McGibbon was suitably nerdy, channeling a dog completely devoted to his owner but occasionally going too far and getting into trouble over this devotion. His sheepishness perfectly offset his violence towards Michael. Kevin Hanchard’s portrayal was reserved but full of energy, his player-esque facade quickly dissolving into novice nervousness as his layers of defense are stripped away. The mens' declining confidence perfectly mirrors Loretta's growing confidence in herself as she slowly realizes that she alone has control over her life.

It was Monica Dottor, however, who stole the show in the end. Her performance as Sophie had the audience in tears every time she entered the playing space; her accent was flawless and her timing some of the finest I have seen. The comedy of the piece was solely in her possession every moment she was on stage, and the audience's laughter proved her effectiveness.

A key element of the comedy of the piece was the brilliant addition of a large window with a full-length blind placed upstairs by set designer Marian Wihak, which provided classic sight gags that had the audience in peals. Her simple, British-farce-style hyperbole of a southern Ontario motel room was subtle enough not to distract from the proceedings but had an authentic and familiar charm that one could recognize at a glance. Kimberly Purtell's lighting design was an effective supporter of the locale, drawing the audience's focus without much flare or originality, or subtlety for that matter. David Boechler's vibrant costume designs were, like the set, hyperbolized versions of the stereotypical characters. They were in perfect harmony with the set design and united the production as a flawless backdrop for the relentless action.

Where the production fell apart, unfortunately, was in the final moments of the show. As the men continue to fight over her, Loretta sits alone on the bed as several projection screens spring to life for the first time in the show, showing pre-recorded images of both the men tussling outside and of Loretta's face. In an otherwise slick production, this moment threw the audience for a loop and many could not discern if the show had actually ended. It was as if sound and video designer Jeremy Mimnagh had said, "well we paid for these projectors; might as well use them."

Unlike And So it Goes, this season’s new Walker production, Featuring Loretta kept both its content and comedy firmly rooted in reality, if only a hyper-reality. It is in this caricature of urban and suburban Canadian life in which Walker thrives, and this production is a clear example of his need to commit to a grounded world in order to create his best work.

Often associated with messy and unprofessional fixes, DIY gets a bad rep for being cheesy but the inner artist knows it can be delightfully “indie-chic” when done right.

As much as I dislike the indie-hipster fad (the thought of skinny jeans, plaid shirts, big glasses, and “ironic” facial hair makes me cringe and want to catch the first streetcar out of the Annex) I have to admit those hipsters are onto something. Maybe that something isn’t fashion, but their celebration and constant reworking of indie culture is key. They’ve developed a DIY cultural movement, perfect for a city as diverse and incomplete as this one.

In Toronto it's said we have only two seasons, winter and construction. In recent months we've been bitching and moaning about the continually delayed renovations on Bloor St and Steeles Ave, and the never improving TTC. No matter where you go in the city it seems as if something is about to be torn down, or is in the process of being built. Yes, the constant construction is annoying in our day-to-day lives, but what we often fail to see is the wonderful opportunity this constant building offers us. Toronto is a young city, a changing city, and as such it is unique. It's a city that doesn't impose on its residents, and instead allows them to shape it to their liking. That's not to say Toronto doesn't have any history, but compared to other global cities, our history book is a couple chapters long at best.

What this affords us is the possibility to form and re-form our own culture. A sort of DIY phenomenon. From the physical buildings to the artscape opportunities, what Toronto is and what it will become is in our hands. Sometimes the result is like to letting a three year old decoupage your favourite household items, but other times our DIY culture turns out functional and surprisingly suave. Toronto itself is famous for its lack of identity. Sure, we have the CN Tower, but there are few things that culturally define the city. As the people of this city we're a mash-up of others, and while that can seem debilitating at times, it also means we have a fresh opportunity to build something. In fact, it's happening all around us. The last decade has been particularly eventful on the indie culture front.

We see evidence of this in the city’s music scene, where indie culture is king. This is celebrated locally - you can see a live band or DJ at virtually every bar on College street and on a larger scale, TO hosts the NXNE festival, Canadian Music Week, and a plethora of other hot music happenings. I suppose you could say it started with Wavelength, but I’ll leave that kind of music trivia to the experts…

The power of indie culture goes well beyond great entertainment, though it seems fewer and fewer people of our generation are realizing it. In a season of municipal elections this is the perfect time to recognize how malleable the future of our city is. Political awareness is a great way to start your own DIY cultural shift. Alternatively, you could always take up guerilla gardening, join the TPSC (the Toronto Public Space Committee), or support your local artists. Hell, you could become a local artist, the possibilities truly are endless. Celebrate indie everything, just leave the plaid at home.

Due to last month's interview with local cycling advocate queenpin Yvonne Bambrick, I was unable to comment on the outrage that was the now infamous budget cuts that have basically rendered Transit City a David Miller vanity project at best. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for me, this past month has been pretty slow on transit-related news, so I will take this opportunity to  discuss at some length the aftermath of the death of transit initiative in Toronto. Woo hoo.

At the same time, is there really that much left to say?

The Provincial Government's announcement that it would be stretching out initial funds allocated for Transit City and other transit initiatives around the GTA over a much longer time frame than initially projected - effectively ensuring that at least half of the total money will never arrive at all - was notably met with minimal uproar from anyone except for Mr. Miller who pleaded over the TTC intercoms to yawning, disinterested commuters. What is the deal with that?

I've used this space before to vent my various frustrations with people who complain too much about transit, as though every late or full bus is a personal slight. My stance has always been the same: sure, things obviously and always could be better, but find me a city that doesn't have the exact same problems in one way or another. If public services were concerned about your being late for your meeting, they wouldn't be public services, it would be your own car, in which case if you're gambling on Queen Street at rush hour. The difference between whether or not you took the streetcar will be shockingly negligible.

The point is, if you do not or do not want to drive but still think the TTC is balls, you should be the most pissed off at Dalton. These service cuts affect transit riders and drivers alike because, as our benevolent Mayor rightly points out, Toronto's population is on the rise and while the current transit configuration is at least moderately successful at adequately handling demand, it will hardly be sufficient at all to sustain Toronto's population fifteen years from now. Why aren't there more angry people? Anyone that has ever had a jam-packed 29 Dufferin speed past them without stopping is going to be mighty upset in 2020 when the city's population goes way up, but can only afford to operate transit at 2010 levels.

Alas, the Provincial Government has moved on to bigger and better things, or whatever. Transit City, once a cornerstone campaign issue and indeed the sole reason why I voted Liberal in the last provincial election, has slid down the government's list of priorities and now it is unlikely that most of the fancy new stuff we were promised will materialize at all. Of course, this is also the work of a government that backed down on its fancy Sex Ed Reform policy the very second the various ultra-conservative "Concerned Parents Groups" raised a fuss. Last I checked, the religious right isn't a targeted voting group for the Liberal party, so as to why in God's name the Liberals are suddenly concerned with protecting the innocent minds of future neocons is anyone's guess. Also, it isn't as though the Liberals are going to lose their majority government any time soon, though it is possible that they are attempting to pander toward voters who believe that government spending is a little too Toronto-centric.

Let's be honest here: no matter what the Liberals do, they aren't about to lose any ground when it comes to their stranglehold over Toronto. A handful of seats are liable to go NDP every now and again, but we all know that a blue Toronto is not in the cards at all. So with that in mind, Dalton probably thinks that giving Toronto a little bit of the shaft isn't going to make much difference in the big picture, where courting voters in other areas of the province might prove fruitful - especially with all of this "Toronto should be its own province" talk being floated around by various MPPs.

So whatever, the biggest city in the country can continue to grow at spectacular rates all the while surviving on severely outdated infrastructure. Fine.

Hey, while we're at it, let's give Alberta some more federal MPs. What with their population being less than a quarter of that of Ontario, having equal representation in parliament totally makes sense!

I will never understand what the deal is with the whole anti-Toronto thing that goes on in this country, much less why politicians even bother to humour the complaints of people who for whatever misguided reason think that too much money goes toward large cities. It's all very silly.

So, now that some of what little dust that was raised has settled, what's left of Transit City? Not a whole lot. The York University subway extension is still a go, though the government continues to grumble that the money may not exist to operate it once it has been completed. The Yonge Street subway extension to Richmond Hill has more or less been shitcanned. The Scarborough RT track conversion and restoration is still going ahead, though that is likely only due to the fact that in this case it is probably more cost effective in the long run to upgrade rather than be forced to close it down all together for being atrociously outdated - the RT cars currently in use are absurdly obsolete and haven't been manufactured for decades. All the same, the extension of the RT will only go as far as Sheppard rather than Malvern Town Centre as was initially proposed.

This is also the case for the three of seven proposed LRT lines that are still on the table for funding. Finch West will go from Humber College to Keele Street, the site of the future Finch West Station, rather than going all the way to Finch Station at Yonge Street. Eglinton Crosstown, originally intended to be the centerpiece of the whole Transit City operation, will now go from Kennedy Station to Jane Street as opposed to the original plan of taking this route all the way to Pearson Airport. Only Sheppard East remains largely unscathed, losing only a handful of stops on its route to Collins rather than Meadowvale. Don Mills, Jane, Scarborough-Malvern and Waterfront West all remain in development limbo each with a relatively little chance of becoming a reality. According to Steve Munro, however, Don Mills is being placed on hold because of talks revolving around the ever-illusive Downtown Relief subway line, the Moby Dick of Transit projects. Though, as Munro duly notes, “Where the money will come from to pay for any of this is unknown.”

So rejoice, friends, for all is not lost after all. The world-class LRT network we were assured would come so quickly and grandly is still on Toronto’s horizon. Only we’ll just half to settle for less than half of it and none of the lines that are supposed to appear are ever going to connect with each other at all. It’s OK though, because the funding isn’t gone, it’s just being “staggered.” And here we are now, in largely the same place we’ll be when these projects actually get finished: with no one really caring and even fewer really surprised. Or whatever.

Canadian mastermind director Guy Maddin, behind the autobiographical "me trilogy" consisting of Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), Brand Upon the Brain! (2006) and My Winnipeg (2007), continues to explore the meaning of home with his latest feature film project Keyhole, an indoor odyssey exploring the surrealistic underworld of unbridled emotions, as well as the intimacy and emotional value of the home itself.

On March 28^th, Guy and I had a chance to talk about his latest projects, our ghosts, dreams and obsessions.

Since Keyhole is still in pre-production, I have included images from his past films.

Hi Guy, it’s good to hear from you. How have you been?

I promised myself I wouldn’t tell people how busy I am, but I’m pretty busy. Trying to get my project off the ground. My producer is very inexperienced and she’s made a few little mistakes. I think she’s battling with her motivation. So, instead of shooting in May like I wanted to it’s looking more like June or July. I hope not because I’d lose some of the actors that have signed up for that. I have trusty old Isabella Rosellini, Jason Patric, who’s old childhood friend Corey Haim died the other day, and then Udo Kier… so they’re all available in June. If it’s delayed I’m gonna lose them all and I’ll be calling you to star in the movie!  [laughs]

Could you tell me a little more about the project?

Sure. The project is an insanely under-budgeted, overly ambitious sort of death plummet that I need to terrify myself out of bed every morning with. It’s called Keyhole. On one front it’s a conventional film project, a feature film, probably 85 minutes long. It would have its premier at a film festival if it turned out okay and eventually come out on dvd and sell in the tens or hundreds. On the other front there’s an internet… kind of interactive component to it.

I’ll mention a few words about the feature first. I think I already have told you, Erika Szabo, but to you, the interviewer, I haven’t. [It’s] yet another loose adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey.” In Homer’s version, Odysseus is returning to his wife after nineteen years away, an unexplained absence. No one’s too sure where he is or if he’s even alive. In my version I’m kind of returning to the very first movie I made, The Dead Father. It occurred to me while reading “The Odyssey” that it was stirring up primal dreams after my father died that he hadn’t in fact died but gone away… that he had gone missing… gone to live with another family, as a matter of fact.  In “The Odyssey” Odysseus is living with another woman, he’s being held prisoner by someone named Calypso… so he’s in some kind of sex slavery [laughs] with someone else. In my dreams my father was just with another family that he liked more.

I remember when you first told me about this.

So when I read it in “The Odyssey” I was thinking holy smokes, there’s something kind of ancient about these dreams I always had, that I should tap into them because the story is really good and has a durable structure and I should build my own narratives concerns on top of this structure, this really proven structure. I kind of wanted to tap into those feelings of abandonment from my dead father dream, but on a bigger scale. By making “The Odyssey” not a boat trip across the Aegean Sea, but a return of the father to the back door of the family house and an indoor trip from that back door way back up to the marriage chamber where he could be reunited with his wife. His son could play a role in interpreting this return and partnering up with his father somehow.

That’s about where the similarities between Homer’s “The Odyssey” and mine end, but it was kind of nice to have a structure like that. The real excuse for me to set an odyssey within a home was because I wanted to continue an exploration I merely touched upon in My Winnipeg, a return to a childhood home, and really try to release the feelings I have about home and about little nooks and crannies within a home and the emotional power some of them can contain. I have no idea if I’ll ever be able to get that on the screen, but I’m gonna try.

I’m reading a lot of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. It’s a strange book written in 1948 and it was a best selling philosophy text that sold over 80,000 copies. It’s pretty readable, very poetic, lyrical reverie about the spaces inside houses: inside of a wardrobe, inside of a drawer, stairways, what basements and attics mean and how they feel. It’s uncanny reading it. Even for a homeless person, home – a piece of cardboard flapping over, leaning a against a tree or something – creates similar feelings of comfort and happiness and coziness in everyone.

I basically want to use this thing to be both a reason for my dead father’s hauntings and of the perpetual haunting I’m left with in my dream life of this lost childhood home of mine. I really hope to connect with everybody and what their homes mean to them. Everyone has maybe one favourite home: the one they’re in now or one they’ve lost.

That’s really funny that you mentioned that… I remember the last time we talked I mentioned how much I missed my home in Canada and now that I’m here I miss my home in Michigan. No one ever bought our old house so we had to put it up for foreclosure. It’s really sad because I spent nine years in that house, which I guess isn’t a lot of time, but that was the longest I’ve ever spent in a home.

But those were nine years from 11 to 20, weren’t they?

Yeah, 11 to 20.

Yeah, those are big ones.

It’s just so weird because now that I’m gone I really regret leaving. There’s no one to take care of it and other things. It’s this physical force that creates so much emotion. It’s not even a living thing, but…

It’s huge. It’s getting to the point where I think if I ever had enough money I’d have to go and buy my childhood home back! [laughs] Even to keep it empty… like I could never make it back to the way it was, it’s a huge thing. Of course that would be stupid and I should move on but…

[laughs] It’s hard…

I know how you feel. Almost everybody I’ve encountered has told me to grow up and move on, but my job is to try and uncover my feelings and try to figure out what they are. Some things are really haunting me big time, and I know that I’m not alone after reading this book, this guy [Bachelard] writes as if everyone feels that way and maybe he’s right, maybe some people just aren’t as in touch with their feelings.

I met one writer in Toronto about a month ago, this woman who told me to buy my childhood home back. [laughs] But to redecorate it would cost a fortune and it would drive me mad probably. I can revisit it whenever I want; my memory of it is almost perfect. I think I’ll just do that and the act of making this movie will make me feel sick of reminiscing about homes, but I’ll be cured of yet another obsession.

And then move on to something else…

I think I’m out of obsessions, Erika. I’m done. [laughs] I’m planning on taking a few years off. I’m in a strange state of mind. It was pretty easy to throw out vhs tapes because who feels like digging up the vcr and plugging it in, so I threw out a couple tonnes of those yesterday. I went through my dvd collection and got rid of almost everything there too. At least I can trade that in for money. I literally took in like four, large garbage bags of dvds. I don’t know…

Why did you do that?

I just felt like… it just sort of feels like I don’t have enough time left to live even to watch these all and I just realized how it’s playing out. I did the same thing with my library too. If I ever did really want to revisit any of these movies I could download them or something like that. No need to have so much stuff. I seem to be in a state of mind where I’m getting rid of things, getting rid of obsessions. I used to collect so much crap... I used to use the word crap affectionately but now it just means crap… kind of like things that used to be really precious.

I can kind of understand, but at the same time having physical things…

I know…

…the physical still conjures sentimental feelings while downloads are so temporary.

I know, I know. Well, I’m not completely insane. I’m not throwing out, like, family photo albums, but for some reason I’m… also I’ve been collecting a lot longer than you have. I’ve accumulated a big amount and it started to get depressing. But I have noticed that I don’t have any obsessions right now, other than this project, so I’m gonna try to do something about it.

On the internet side, I’m kind of constructing what you could call a narrative machine or something. So the feature is set in the house, everything is inside the house, with a limited number of actors: a mother, a father, a son, a girl, a bunch of ghosts. I’d been planning for a long time, and I’d even been planning it with a couple of my shorts, to take lost films, films I’d always been haunted by the existence of -- Murnau’s 4 Devils is gone, Hitchcock’s first two films are lost, films that were either misplaced in shipping or restored poorly, and I realized that the only way I get to see any of these was by making short versions of them myself. I made Heart of the World be a very loose adaptation of Abel Gance’s La Fin du monde, End of the World. I made a short, Odilon Redon that has the same love triangle and some trains in it that Gance’s La Roue had. I thought both of those films were lost, it turns out they just weren’t available. When I made those movies I wasn’t online yet and I hadn’t figured out which films were really lost and which weren’t available on video.

Anyways, I decided that since a lost film is a film with no known resting place. That descriptive phrase, no known resting place, reminded me of a restless ghost, that I was in fact haunted by these lost films as though they were ghosts. So I thought that maybe now was the time to make a whole bunch of these little hauntings. I spent a bunch of time with my friend Evan Johnson researching these lost titles and I’ve accumulated about 100 lost films. I’ve expanded my search into aborted projects as well, films that were started and scrapped or some unrealized ones. There’s something haunting about an unrealized piece as well, where all the love for the material started and then for some reason conception never took place.  I’ve accumulated these things and I’ve written short film treatments for all of them and then breaking them up into little fragments and putting them into a program on a site that viewers will be able to visit.

I’ll shoot all these lost films with one major restriction: I have to use the same world of Keyhole so they’ll be shot in the same house and using the same characters. They’ll be acting out these ordained-for-them haunted film narratives in very short form. Visitors on the site can just pick a menu of characters, there’s a total of 20 characters if you’re counting all of the ghosts and extras, and a menu of lost films and a menu of types of musical scores. Kind of pull a lever on a slot machine and see what kind of narrative comes out.

The program will take these little fragments of narratives and take you through a series of them. The way I’ll link these narratives together will be done randomly by the program but there’ll be stories within stories within stories, about five consecutive circles, but no sooner does the story of one of these lost films start up, someone in one of these stories goes into a flashback and within that flashback is another lost narrative and then someone in that story will read a letter or listen to the radio and that will carry them into another narrative sphere, or maybe a guerrilla will have a dream [laughs] or someone will look into a keyhole and carry it in. Anyways, there will be some sort of chewy center of all this narrative concentricity, something enigmatic, something seminal. From there the program will take you back out through all the eccentric circles until you’re done. The whole thing will take two to fifteen minutes, but will most likely each be around four or five minutes.

I want to make it very uninteractive. I don’t want visitors to feel like they’re playing a video game, I want them to be watching. So you have to decide to be one or the other and I’ve decided that visitors should be viewers and not players. A lot of the playing ends after they make their choices and then they become viewers with one tiny degree of involvement. I’ll probably make it so you can upload your own music so you can try to change the tone of things, make it your own. I’ll make it so you can record the outcome. I have a hunch that nine times out of 10 the outcome will be so non sequitur, fragmented, that it won’t make any sense, but every now and again there’ll be some kind of strange, miraculous narrative and an interesting tone. So I’m hoping that… I know this isn’t going to go viral with teenagers or anything, maybe people might enjoy playing with the parts of vivisected ghosts [laughs] and get something out of them, knowing they’re playing with the material of lost ectoplasm.

That sounds really interesting.

Yeah, I hope it’s okay…

I’m really interested in seeing how this goes.  When will it go up?

I think about a year from now. It’ll take a while. Once I’ve shot everything I’m sure it’ll take quite a while to edit and then trying to load it up onto a program. I’m meeting with a pretty good guy on the site and things seem to be moving forward nicely. I like working in a new territory for a change, I need a change really badly.

Comments

• May 17, 2010, BANSHI writes: Very cool! Can't wait for the film to come out!

http://www.oakyotl.com

Ah ha (I think, too groggy for an exclamation point) so I didn't leave my cellphone set to "loud"— I merely dreamed the obnoxious ring-tone, and now for the surreal conversation. No doubt the scene shall soon shift without warning to a seaside resort or Santa's underground lair or somesuch.

Photo Courtesy of Nick Kozak/Torontoist

"... Seriously?" I mumble. But as the conversation proceeds, as I am reassured in the most realistic and persistent manner that Banksy has indeed come to town. As my grogginess only resolves into a vague yearning for coffee, it dawns on me that I am in fact awake, if not widely so, and that my inamorata's exuberance at the other end of the line is neither dream nor joke. Banksy (or, for the cynic: someone in possession of Banksy's stencils and in collusion with his publicist) passed through Toronto last weekend, and left behind several characteristic embellishments of the urban scenery.

Banksy is a British graffiti artist whose nom de plume commonly adjoins the epithets "notorious," "secretive," and "enigmatic." He was born around 1974, raised in Bristol and beyond that very little is known about this remarkably popular vandal. In 2006 the BBC ran a story that Banksy's real name was Robert Banks. Then, two years later, brandishing a photograph they claim was taken of the artist in Jamaica four years back, The Mail On Sunday named Banksy as one Robin Gunningham. Neither claim has ever been confirmed by Banksy or those associated with him. It all comes down to whether or not you take The Mail On Sunday's word for it— and first, it's worth asking, does it even matter?

As the two of us peddle our bikes out into the unseasonably cold drizzle, the secret identity of the mysterious Banksy is the last thing on my mind. We course downtown on a scavenger hunt with only sketches of directions and all the excitement of a day-care class let loose in Centreville and he could be an army of Nikola Tesla clones for all I care. What matters to me is that, when someone calling themself Banksy scribbles on your city's walls, its more than likely that said scribbles are worth the effort in finding them.

The art of Banksy is characterized by humorous quips, irony, and a stencilled aesthetic indebted to the likes of Blek le Rat. He often plays with a set of recurring characters such as cops, children, and most especially rats. His work has that rare characteristic of seeming obvious and simple after the fact, yet somehow it always takes a Banksy to execute. Rarely does he need to tag his name these days, his work is recognized by style, like an unsigned Rembrandt at a yard sale, and that sometimes includes the cartoon cash signs ringing up over eyeballs. Facelessness, as it turns out, is no great obstacle in the art market. His paintings have gone for as much as £288,000 at auction¹ and though he won't officially confirm any street art as his, there's fair reason behind Torontoist's withholding of detailed directions to the Toronto pieces.

When we get to Queen and Adelaide, it doesn't take long to find a Banksy, or rather a Banksy-shaped lacuna of flat grey paint on the stucco side of a drab office building. Some here are quick to "give graffiti the brush-off," according to the twee slogan that has festooned many a Toronto trash bin.

"Well that was stupid of them," my companion says. "Stucco's really easy to remove."

Her meaning is plain: at least one landlord this week just lost their chance at an extravagant profit on ebay.

Photo Courtesy of Rob Tyrie/Torontoist

It is against just this sort of profiteering that the flimsy information black-out barrier has been erected. Last month, a Banksy image of a guard walking a Jeff Koons-esque balloon dog in Los Angeles was cut from its wall and carted off. According to JetSet Graffiti, the coup was likely perpetrated by the disreputable Doug Christmas, owner of Ace Gallery (where the artists have something of a history of needing to sue to get paid). This is no paltry act of appropriation, even unconfirmed the work could fetch a heady price. After all, back in 2008, a west London brick wall on Portobello Road— on which a stencilled, old-fashioned palette painter brushes the finishing touch on a bubble-lettered "Banksy" spray-paint tag— fetched £208,100 on ebay, and that doesn't include the cost of relocating the wall.²

Tearing down a wall to collect or sell a piece of street art seems rather crass to me. Putting up sheets of perspex over a Banksy (as has become something of a habit in places) to try to curb the fluid overturn of graffiti on a given wall seems silly, and it's far from effective. There are at least two instances in which the perspex has been deliberately breached. Once in Islington, the perspex was removed and after alterations were made, replaced, as part of the ongoing feud between Banksy and King/Team Robbo (this following Banksy's appropriation and adaptation of a Robbo piece from 1985 that was either calculated or ignorant). In Melbourne, where silver paint was tipped through the crack between the top of the acrylic sheet and the wall, the attempt at preserving appears to have incited its very destruction.

Banksy occupies an unusual position, straddling street art and gallery art, commerce and vandalism, fame and anonymity. For some, this is uncomfortable. Banksy's egalitarian street art has attracted a crowd of admirers whose appreciation is expressed through the need to keep it.  The ethic of street art is one celebrating public access and rights to public space, lauding accessibility and an utter absence and impossibility of price tags. Consumerism can become a boogieman to flee and mock in the dead of night, and there is some truth to that position. But what Banksy seems to show is that people will want to purchase and keep something they adore and in the art world, this can lead to a snowball effect where high prices accrue higher prices, and the reason for making a purchase can turn somewhat inside-out, from buying a piece for love of it, to selling it for the demand-driven profit, to buying it for the investment and its expected addition down the road to one's RRSP. Rarely are these various motivations clear-cut or separated.

In all honesty, “selling-out” is an idea that I don't care for. There is an unfair tendency that crops up from time to time to blame an artist for the price inflation, hype and hullabaloo that the international art market rolls around their work. I'm in no position to become an investment art-collector, so I don't care how much money an artist makes or how much their stuff is worth. What I care about is the quality of the work they make, and I think Banksy is top-notch.

Photo Courtesy of Gary Smithson/Torontoist

Our Banksy scavenger hunt was, essentially, all in good fun. Times like these, graffiti is about being where you are, but I don't mean that in any pseudo-zen spiritual sense. It is an aesthetical "I wuz here" and it's the subsequent recognition by others that someone else wuz there too once, and that both of you saw fit to pay close attention to the environment.

Sometimes graffiti carries territorial meanings, but Banksy and the legion of other artists in his strata go beyond this. There is an odd community aspect to street art. Writing your name on a wall can't make it yours any more than writing your name in a reference library book will make it yours when it goes back on the shelf. Street art is more like writing a new story on the flyleaf of that library book, in the hopes of someone else enjoying it, and sometimes even continuing or inserting their vision into your story, until some librarian becomes terribly upset and pastes over the vandalized flyleaf and it's up to a subsequent bookworm to start the process again.

Our first find, a quizzical, sunglasses-wearing rat in a Chinatown parking lot, was shared when complete strangers came to where we stood, and shared in the excitement of discovery. In that moment, that rat formed a fleeting global network of hooligans and citizens. Banksy's visit was a transatlantic signal, Queen Victoria congratulating James Buchanan across the first fragile transatlantic telegraph cable only to have it break two months later, only instead of two months Banksy's cable snaps after two days, and there is nothing wrong with that.

Some of Banksy's art can be found at www.banksy.co.uk
¹ http://www.thelondonpaper.com/thelondonpaper/news/london/banksy-wall-could-fetch-200k
² http://elitechoice.org/2008/01/16/banksy-wall-sells-for-407000-at-ebay-auction/

What made you dare to draw things, then put them on the internet, for all to complain about?

There were two different things. What made me decide to draw things was animation. As a kid I really got into cartoons, I didn't read a lot of comics outside of, y'know, the newspaper stuff, maybe some Archie, Sonic the Hedgehog, things you find at the grocery store. I remember thinking, "Oh WOW, SONIC!"

"HE'S ON THE SEGA GENESIS!"

"I llloove that game!" I drew because, in my head, I was always thinking about cartoons. That was when I was in kindergarten... first grade... but then you get into Jr. High, ninth grade, that's when I discovered web comics. I was still drawing comics the whole time but then I discovered people actually put them on the web. I didn't understand how they did it, but I just thought, "that's interesting." That would be 2001, 2002, when I was all like, "YAAAY!" Wait, maybe it was 1999...

Just so you can feel being on the edge, pre-millennial. WHAT'S WITH THIS SEGA DREAMCAST THING.

Just to make people feel really old, saying I was in Jr. High in 2001.

I was in Jr. High in 2001!

~YAYYYYYYYYYY YAYYYYYYYYYY~

*Fist Pound*

Yeah we pounded that.

What was the process with that? Did you just dip your foot in the pond with that? Tested the market, see what you did and if people liked them, if they reacted to them?

I think I was just excited with the prospect of people reading my comics. Other people, other than just my friends and immediate family reading my stuff. That was really exciting to me. I had no way of figuring out how many people were without the use of old school site counters and shit like that. It wasn't like a 'dip my toe' it was more like a 'I gotta get my shit up on there NOW.' So I learned how to scan, I learned how to use Photoshop as best I could.

Which is still a lot more than most webcomic attempts can vouch for.

It's a trial and error thing. A lot of trial and a lot of error. I sort of had a lot of Geocities sites all connecting to one another. I gradually learned some HTML and eventually a friend lent me a copy of the old Microsoft Frontpage and eventually 'found,' quote unquote, a copy of Dreamweaver, which helped me a little more.

How conscious are you of other webcomics and how does that affect your own work? Is it something you feel makes you need to justify your own efforts or do you just stand among your own?

I'm very conscious of other webcomics because I was made excited by the idea of other people doing it. It's interesting to just see the other stuff out there. I was always into the other stuff. Maybe not so much now-a-days, but as a kid I was like, "What is this? What is that?!" Total kid in a candy store. "Other people do these things that I do also?!" I'm still very conscious of comics I just don't read everything I see. I don't mean being snobby about it, just that I'm working more on my stuff and I'm just reading the ones that I've been reading for a long time. Everything on my link page is everything I read.

Or just links to your site.

Yeah, that too.

A website that sells mirrors.

I'm aware of the scene. There are some aspects that I couldn't give less a shit about.

Comics about video games?

Yeah, sort of. There are some comics about video games that are funny. It's more of like the community of some of them. The old communities I used to be a part of like Drunk Duck, I appreciate that they give people a place to put their stuff but at the same time, I don't give a fuuuuck. I'm not going to be a part of that. I'm not part of that like I used to be but I am still somewhat aware of what's going on. Usually from other people.

You're in the balloon floating away, waving.

And I'm still watching everyone below, going 'interesting' but most of the time I like to focus on my own work.

It's the part of the movie where the boy must leave the mystical tribe he discovered in the other dimension.

But I have a magic mirror you see, and it lets me see them from the other world.

Plus you brought some weird creature back with you.

And it tells me things sometimes but I'm like, "Dude, just shut up. I'm busy."

Why do you think that self-loathing and the internet go hand in hand?

I don't know if it's just self-loathing and the internet, but a lot of artists have that self-loathing. I think that's just due to their up-bringing. I don't know about the up-bringing of all the others, and it's not like I had a rotten childhood, it was fine, but... I don't think I can even pinpoint mine. I just grew up this way. Not unsure of everything. I guess I'm waiting for someone to tell me if I'm doing a good job, which is maybe where that comes from. Self-loathing just sort of happens. It just pops up.

You appear to base a lot of your material off real life anecdotes. What's your sort of filtering system as to what makes it online? Is it just what sends you into a giggle-fit or have you started to fine-tune your process to something more specific?

Whatever I find funny. Like, sometimes if I'm walking around and I see, even in a crowded place like this, I'll see something that'll spark a quick idea and then a small like scene in my head that'll just make me really laugh. Sometimes it's just the timing of it. The timing of a scene where someone's getting so mad they knock over a book shelf. A full shelf of books, in such a fit. "I'm not going to talk to you anymore, I'll topple these books, THAT'S HOW MAD I AM!" I used to do this all the time within friends. We'd try to say something that would just try to be a joke but would end up a stupid pun, we'd look at each other and pretend to knock the movies off the shelf. Just be like, 'NO.' NO. That was our way of saying 'DON'T.' Do you remember the squirrel comic from Gunshow? It was just about a squirrel that decided to start a business, shuffling papers out on the lawn and it goes through the whole process lickety-split. He started. He got a bad deal. He killed himself. That started because I saw a squirrel out of a window when I was driving with my parents out in Arkansas, I thought it looked like he was shuffling papers and the idea just evolved from there. After a while you know what you find funny. You'll find it in day-to-day things. I look for the weird situation. That's what I'm good at. Some people are good at finding punchlines. R Stevens is a great example. Even when you talk to him it's insane, he's a really witty guy.

It's to the point where you aren't sure if he's even enjoying your part of the conversation.

Actually yeah, I wonder when I'm talking to him if he even knows what I'm going on about. But he's a really nice guy.

It's a scary thing to think about, but generations after ours are not going to know a world without the internet. You said you got into webcomics in Jr. High, what do you think is an appropriate age to divulge into this activity? What's a good age to start.

It differs for everyone. Kate Beaton started just out of college and look at her now. I was just in Jr. High when I started, and while I went through a lot of shit I would still, looking back, have just made comics even if I didn't know about the web. It's completely different for anyone else. I want to say a young age. It might just be full of shit for a while, but you know what? It takes a while to get better. I'd say a young age. I know a lot of people would say no to that, but imagine a guy who is, say, 30, staring his webcomic. Maybe he has a pretty good amount of confidence in starting his webcomic, but people are telling him, "No dude, this isn't good, but here's what you could do better." That thirty year old dude is going to go, "Yeah, shut up kid." He's probably not going to listen to some 16 year old punk. A kid would be more adept to taking advice at that age. Honestly I think any age is a good age to start a webcomic, as long as you're open to criticism.

Well my darlings, summer is frightfully nigh!

Now that university classes are out, it seems like we can all get out and enjoy some of that newfangled sunshine everyone keeps talking about. Unfortunately, I've been made to understand that the city of Toronto has some kind of prohibition going on as far as that's concerned. The town's gone dry! Thank God for our friendly neighborhood sun bootleggers who are keeping everyone well stocked with that wonderdrug I like to call vitamin D. Mine's named Gary.

Anyhow, the season of sunshine, beach babes and beach balls shall be climbing down from its mountain after what seems like ages of seclusion to spread the gospel of good vibes and keeping it real. I for one can't wait to get out there and, as the kids say, throw down all over town.

As far as Steel Bananas goes, this month we've got a real corker for you all to sink your virtual teeth into. A real barnburner! A humdinger! We've got an interview with quite possibly the coolest dude in the city, one Mr. Russell Smith, novelist and men's fashion guru. My God, the suave chops on that man! His man-levels are unprecedented. He broke the dial on my man-meter, a device I use to measure manliness.

Also, our good friend Marshall Lau passed on a couple of his short films to us for you all to enjoy and they are, let me tell you, something severely fierce. We've also got interviews with filmmaker Guy Maddin and webcomic artist KC Green, as well as a trip to Toronto's legendary Cheese Boutique.

Plus, I don't know if you've seen it yet, but this month's cover courtesy of Photo Editor Matthew Filipowich is just stunning and just may be my favourite Steel Bananas cover image yet.

Thus Spoke Summerthustra.

Curran Folkers
Associate Editor
Steel Bananas

I’m sorry, classes have ended and my brain has more or less shut down so my attempts at rewording the title were futile. In fact, many of my failed titles were “things that seem like that they would be funny but aren’t really” which is ironicly amusing the-opposite-of-ironic.

I remember accidentally coming across Japanese schoolgirl porn in high school and it was total trainwreck syndrome – I just couldn’t look away. Don’t judge me, I bet most of you have watched 2Girls1Cup multiple times. Anyway, they were putting little squirming eels in her rectum and I wanted to throw up. Why would anyone think that’s a good idea? People are fucking weird. I don’t know if that Japanese porn actor ever had trouble with her poops later but this Chinese man recently died after a half-metre long eel ATE HIS BOWELS. His friends thought it’d be really funny to put an eel up his bum while he was passed out drunk. With friends like those, who needs friends?

Have you ever called anyone a failed abortion? I know I have. See, it’s a good insult because it both implies that the person is deformed in some way and that his/her parents would rather s/he not exist. Also, it’s kind of a funny thought that such a commonplace thing like abortion could fail. (Well, it is in Canada for now – I’m keeping my eye on you, Harper). I have not performed any abortions but based on my experience with taking candy from babies, I would imagine that taking other things from them would not be extremely difficult.

Somewhere in Southern Italy last month, a priest went to pray beside a two-day-old abortion that turned out to be a failed attempt. The hospital tried to resuscitate the baby but also failed at that. Apparently, this was the second time this happened in Italy in the past three years. In Manchester, there is a 5-year-old boy running around who survived three abortion attempts. I’m sure you’re all resisting attempts to make dead baby jokes right now but I’m concerned that these stories are giving anti-choicers (“pro-lifers”) ammunition because failed abortions while theoretically funny are practically horrific. Maybe the medical field should focus more on how to perform proper abortions and less on innovative ways to increase breast and penis size.

Here’s a joke I heard the other day: A bobcat walks into a bar in Arizona and maims two people before being shot and killed by the police. It was probably rabid.

Oh, not a joke? Yikes.

Last month the Paprika Festival served up some spicy dishes. Founded by Anthony Furey in 2002, Tarragon Theatre’s annual festival provides a unique opportunity for young artists to meet and be mentored by experienced playwrights. It’s actually Toronto’s only free theatre festival for young people, showcasing the talent of those under 21. With this year’s line-up ranging from teenage depression to game shows from hell, Paprika had something to satisfy everyone’s taste.

Like any series of original works the festival had its hits and its… less than spectacular pieces. I was lucky enough to attend a performance of the most impressive play of the festival. Evacuate by Katie Alguire was the cream of the crop. Alguire, a young playwright from York University, has spent the year working with Dora-winning playwright Anna Chatterton.

Her one-act play tells the story of a geriatric couple, John and Iris, living in an area of British Columbia plagued by forest fires. They are struggling against the trials of aging, losing their senses, their mobility, their memories, and their ability to take care of themselves. Their children want to send them to a retirement home, but they refuse to leave their house. When a blaze breaks out nearby, they decide not to leave despite evacuation orders.

For such a young writer, the senior voices are surprisingly accurate - she succeeds in capturing their speech patterns and personality, the little nuances that so clearly define a person’s age. Perhaps this is because the story hits close to home for Alguire who has based the characters on her own grandparents. Their stubbornness is also inspired by her own experience. She jokes that the only way her grandparents would leave their house is if they were smoked out, and thus Evacuate was conceived. The dark humour and the very real struggles are both heart warming and heartbreaking.

Last summer I had the pleasure of reviewing Alguire’s Toronto debut, a short play titled The Keepers Secret. As a playwright in residence at Tarragon Theatre, its hard to believe how much she’s grown since her 2009 Fringe show. She has a maturity and honesty that is rare to find in playwrights under 30.

Keep your eyes peeled for a another serving of Evacuate sometime in the near future. The very modest Alguire says “it still needs some work,” but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it on the menu for Fringe shows and other emerging artist productions.

Look at this piece and tell me what you see. Microscopic organisms illuminating a dark passage, maybe an ever-expanding mass of fireflies or perhaps it’s just one of those trippy 3D graphs. Whatever it is, it’s surrealism to the core.

The San Francisco-based Mario Martinez, better known as Mars-1, has been blowing minds for a long time. His works portray an otherworldly charm apparent to anyone familiar with science fiction, and also invoke a personal, subconscious experience unlike anything I have ever seen.

With his latest exhibition, Infinite Tapestry, conveniently nestled in Toronto’s Meta Gallery (recently moved to 124 Ossington Avenue) Mars-1 displays an array of works – all varied, yet still familiar. His attention to detail and sheer imagination challenges the viewer to explore the abstract nature of reality and form our own interpretations in the process.

On April 13, 2010, Mario and I spoke extensively about his creative process and the ambiguities of everyday life.

E: From what I’ve heard from people and press you’re works are science fiction-esque, sort of otherworldly. But it seems to me that they’re more personal than anything else – they provide a kind of subconscious experience. How would you describe it? What do your pieces mean to you?

M: One kind of component to it is that part of it is… it’s definitely a mystery for myself as well. I kind of like it like that because then it leaves it open, makes the boundaries a little wider instead of being a definitive work. Part of the reason of why I enjoy that is because it lets me move around more from piece to piece. You get people who experience the work and look at it and try to pick it apart. They come up with completely different angles I never really consciously thought of. It makes me wonder sometimes if I did it subconsciously. I get a kick out of hearing what people pull out of it. Sometimes there are things a lot of people will see like vaginas and sexual stuff, things that weren’t my intent. But the one that was cracking me up this time - do you remember the big piece in the middle of the gallery? Adjacent to the desk?

E: Yep, I think I do.

M: Well, someone told me it looked like a weird Jesus figure with its little tentacle arms stretched out. I was like... ‘what!?’ [laughs] I mean it’s kind of funny because I can see it!

But yeah, my work is definitely very personal. I feel that some of it, not all of it, has some kind of sentient or some… intelligence or life of its own. I mean not literally, but like something is looking back at you or what I call some of the pieces: ‘metascape.’

I’m not so much inspired by science fiction as I am by fringe science. That does interest me, but it’s never based off of one thing. I just like those fuzzy concepts that we all have within. Our minds kind of wander…

E: Yeah, I never got the impression that it was one sole inspiration. It seems too abstract. The fact that your works are ever-growing shows how abstract they really are. This… abstract mass.

M: Yeah, it’s difficult to finish a painting actually, the deadline just forces me to stop working on it for the most part. It’s really rare for me to actually finish something. It’s kind of difficult. They’re kind of like they’re own weird little terra-forming mini universes or something.

E: How do you know where to start?

M: To keep things interesting for me a lot of the work I do is kind of an ongoing experimentation. I do it to find new progression in my craft. About 90 percent of the time when I start a piece there’s not really a plan. Sometimes there’s a clear idea, but that’s on the rare side. Most of the time I start, almost automatismic, making random brush strokes, I’ll close my eyes and… shew, shew, shew… do it in a few places and just start building up layers.

After that, all the pieces start to fall into place. I start filling in the last bits or keep some things from the background, maybe get rid of others and just let it develop, crystallize as I go along. Sometimes I’ll take a break on it and start working on another piece, let it sit for few days and look at what I did. From there, I start getting ideas. I usually work on several pieces at once where I do that, I start getting ideas and I let them cross-pollinate.

You can see how, with every new body of work, it’s partly starting over. If there’s something I discover on another I start exploring that more. The new stuff I’m gonna be working on is gonna have a black background.

Transcendence

E: Yeah, I saw a few of those pieces at the exhibition.

M: Yeah, those are the newer ones. There weren’t too many new pieces in this show because I wasn’t sure of the size of the gallery and I got so busy. It was getting kind of tight. So some of the pieces were from a show I had in New York… The one in the very back [Transcendence, above] was new and the ones with the black backgrounds were all new pieces as well. The two that were kind of colourful with the black background [Chroma Depth #2, below], those are the newest ones. I really like how colour looks with the black, it almost makes it pop almost like a black light poster. I have to get that out of my system and then get sick of it and never do it again. [laughs]

Chroma Depth #2

E: I really like that growing variation in your works. It leaves that element of surprise, a moment where you don’t know what to expect, but the works are still familiar.

M: They somehow stay the same, but they change at the same time… it feels like I’m changing it, but somehow I’m not. For me, I would go crazy or become bored if I was too repetitive for too long.

E: When I was at Meta, I was looking at Transcendence up close and you could see the elements from your other paintings seamlessly interconnecting. You put so much into your works.

M: Yeah, definitely. It’s not that I feel stupid, but sometimes it seems ridiculous how much time I spent on some of these and how some are never done. You see other artists finishing pieces and I wonder, 'God, am I stupid for doing it like this?’ I’m happy the way I do it, but sometimes I wonder if what I’m doing is right. I don’t think people understand how long I spend on some of these pieces, it seems like I’m getting quicker somehow, but no matter what they take several sessions to get it done.

I have a couple collector friends and it took them awhile to understand, they were kind of impatient. They wonder why I can’t hang out… because I’m working …a lot! [laughs] Sometimes 7 days a week. The only way you can get anything finished is to keep yourself into it and come up for air sometimes. I’m sure you see that with other artist, but sometimes it’s not apparent how much time it takes.

E: Yeah. Well, even as a writer I take a really long time. I work 7 days a week and I write every single day. I don’t have to, I know others can wrap things up fast, but I guess I’m kind of a perfectionist in that sense. I need it to be just so.

M: You want to be proud of it and craft it, make sure it’s something you’re happy putting your name on.

Unified Grid Sphere 2

E: Yeah, exactly. I know it varies by the size, but how long does it generally take you to finish a piece?

M: I don’t know… the deadline is the motivator. The piece in the back of the gallery [Transcendence] I started in October. I didn’t work on it all the time, I worked on it in the background. As the show started getting closer, I began stepping it up and gaining more focus on it.

E: I actually understand what you mean. Since you’re putting it down and picking it back up your sense of time gets distorted and you can’t really tell anymore.

M: Yeah, it does… before a show it starts getting really intense and I start working every waking hour, but leading up to the show I may only spend a day a week. Especially the larger ones, I really lose track. For the smaller ones, if I had to guess, maybe a couple weeks? Like you said, time really distorts because some pieces seem to come together quicker. I think it slows down the more I have to think about what I’m doing. Sometimes I need to pull back, even work backwards a little to cover up stuff if the piece isn’t coming together so easily.

E: The process seems spontaneous. How does a piece begin exactly?

M: Well actually the beginning of the piece is the first part. It better resembles, not finger painting, but more like a child where you’re just like…‘raghh!’...there are no mistakes. That’s how I’ve been starting pieces. I don’t have anything I’m starting on with a purpose, I have no idea of where it’s going. That’s kind of how I get a direction.

Like, I stretch this giant piece on my wall and paint it black and take white and start smooshing the brush around and closing my eyes – kind of like what I was saying earlier. It’s the most fun part because you’re just playing around – you don’t have any attachment to anything you’ve done because it’s happening pretty quick. In an hour it can completely change. If you feel you want to take out big chunks of it or cover up big parts and make it really bold you wouldn’t normally do it on something you put a lot of detail on. That’s where I find, when I come up with something, I gravitate towards it and I’ll use later on in the piece when I feel confident to do certain kinds of brushstrokes or certain type of lines. I’ll happily go over some image that I’ve spent a dozen hours rendering.

Maybe if it was the first time I was doing it I wouldn’t feel comfortable, but maybe I would later on. Everything goes quick at first, but once the rendering starts it goes slow. I could spend a whole day on a 5x5 area getting it just right. So it’s kind of like a push and pull between the light work and the heavy. I like to do both but I don’t think I could do one or the other. It would lose the emotion as well as the gesture and movement of the piece.

Smokestacks

E: What’s the process behind your sculptures?

M: That’s a part I have a harder time with because it has to be more structured. You can’t just sculpt whatever. You have to have a structured idea of what you’re gonna do. If it’s small you can get away with more open experimentation. That’s why I usually start with a smaller piece and make it larger sometimes.

My work from a long time ago was figurative so that’s the only place where some of my sculptures appeared. I like the figurative work in the sculpture setting, it feels nice having a figure as a sculpture rather than a painting. I stopped using these figures in my painting because it felt like there was an end to it, as far as looking at it. You’d stop looking at the piece after a long time. Someone might have it up on their wall for 5 or 6 years and say, 'yep, seen it.'

E: It’s difficult to describe, but it’s as though the figurative paintings remove that freedom of interpretation.

M: Yeah, definitely. I want to experiment more with the abstract in sculpture but it takes a long time and it takes a lot of focus. Also, they’re really hard to sell. They cost a lot of money to make and nobody buys them. [laughs] I do it because I love to do, that’s pretty much the only reason.

E: Please keep making them though! They have so much charm!

M: Oh, I will, but it’s one of those things I have to plan out! If I want to have one ready for an exhibit next year I have to start them now. I can’t do that last minute. Basically I have to start working on something this year to get it done next year. I want to work on something big. The price difference from doing something detailed in bronze to something bigger is pretty small. So it’s not that bad making a bigger one as opposed to a smaller one. Plus it’s really hard for people to buy a tiny, expensive sculpture.

One thing I wanted to mention, and it’s completely bizarre, but so many people ask me what inspires my work. I think you even mentioned it in an email. I don’t know why but so many people asked me that in Toronto at the show. Different people ask, 'so what inspired you?' a slightly generic question. People have said it before, but never to this extent. I was like, 'what’s going on in Toronto?' [laughs]

E: That’s kind of why I omitted that question from this interview because even I thought that it was a bad question. Your works are so abstract, how can you possibly have one inspiration? Everything would serve as an inspiration.

M: Yeah, you totally nailed it down! I didn’t have an answer for anybody. I was like, 'fuck, I don’t know!' I mean, yeah, if I could really boil it down…

Tulpa 2

E: Yeah, that makes complete sense. I think that a lot of people are afraid of the unknown. They want answers.

M: That makes sense. They don’t want to not know so they feel that they need to ask. I’ve shown my works in a lot of places in the U.S., but I’ve never been asked that question so many times. I mean, what’s up with that? [laughs]

E: Well, after awhile, when I looked over some of my questions I’d wonder, 'why did I write down these questions?’ You really have to narrow it down. [laughs]

M: Yeah definitely. I think you shed some light on that one for me. [laughs]

E: Yeah, and some people get so upset about that! It’s not easy to explain something like the inspiration behind a piece. That’s what I like most about your works is how abstract they are. It’s not meant to be explained, it’s supposed to be whatever you make of it, your own interpretation.

M: That’s kind of a component of reality. We try to explain and understand but there are so many subtle nuances swirling around constantly it’s hard to even understand what’s happening – here, out in the universe, and all the little weird discoveries and quantum stuff that keeps opening up. The rules keep changing. I mean, a lot of reality is abstract thinking, there are several things happening simultaneously it’s not easy to understand.

You can see more of Mars-1’s work at his website.  You can find out more about Meta Gallery here.

Whenever I’d ask about Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher I was greeted with a tilted head and a searching gaze. “Uh, well… I’m not sure you’d like it.” Okay, but what does that mean exactly? The clearest answer I got was that there was a lot of swearing. Not really the craziest thing out there.

There are several reasons why people have a hard time describing this book. There’s a natural reluctance to pin down and describe this kind of material to someone when you don’t know how they’ll react, and Preacher, with its rampant gore, gross-out moments and not-so-old-fashioned blasphemy is certainly that kind of material. I’m sure at least subconsciously these guys are worried I’ll judge them harshly for enjoying Preacher. Thankfully, I’m a bit more open minded than that. And alright, maybe it isn’t always easy to nail down this book.

In the broadest sense it could be described as a modern day western, fitting in honour, a self-sufficient spirit and the willingness to just beat down the bad guys into the mix.

I’d like to relate to you a few of the things that struck me as I read the series:

Tulip O’Hare is the girlfriend of the protagonist Jesse Custer, and I was really impressed by the fact that with her, the reader gets a leading female character that wasn’t a stereotypical comic book beauty - she was really tired-looking when she first arrived in the story, and I thought it added some dimension to her. It wasn’t until much later that I realized she was written as though she was that stereotyped vision - the artist Steve Dillon just didn’t manage to get the look right.

While I’m on the subject of Tulip, I may as well bring up something that really bothered me: each time Jesse left her behind to go save the day she got really offended. Irritatingly offended. For whatever reason, after Jesse would explain that he was just scared to death of her getting hurt - in what were immensely dangerous situations no matter how good with a pistol you are - it would somehow equate in Tulip’s mind with Jesse not trusting her, and Jesse would quickly agree that he has no excuses for what he did. Being scared for someone does not equate to a lack of trust. But the characters act as though that is the case because if they didn’t, Jesse and Tulip wouldn’t have been manoeuvred into the proper situations to facilitate the plot.

Unfortunately this is an example of really forced writing that can be found throughout the run of Preacher. But hold on, if that’s the case, why is Preacher so popular?

Well, there’s the shock value for one. Graphic violence is appealing for the wish fulfillment of those with darker appetites, and Preacher certainly delivers on that score. But it would mean nothing if we didn’t want to see some violence, see some retribution done. It’s necessary then that the Preacher Jesse Custer be really good and the bad guys really bad.

In fact the differentiation between the good guys and the bad guys is so stark, so black and white, as to render the characterization as unduly simplistic.

Jesse always knows the right thing to do. He may not want to do it, but he knows what he needs to do. Even when that action is convincing an old man to kill himself for the crimes he committed in his youth. Whether or not death was the suitable punishment for his crime isn’t important, but that Jesse could just decide right away that someone was beyond redemption. That takes either the greatest arrogance or the good fortune of being a cartoon character whose every action is scripted to get the best result. Luckily Jesse is a cartoon.

The bad guy comes off even worse. Starting off as an impressive, intimidating foe with lofty goals, he degenerates to the point that everything about him is stripped away (the guy even loses an ear, leg, and genitals through the course of the story) and he becomes the poster child for the Saturday morning television villain, devolving to the point where all he cares about is revenge. He will happily shout from the rooftops that he is the villain of the piece.

So what is Preacher? It’s anti-intellectual pop entertainment. Maybe that sounds pretty bad to you, but you know there’s something to be said for a nice break from a heavy read. Just sit back and enjoy the ride, root for the good guys, and remember to relax: it’s just another story. I’ll try and do the same.

Comments

• April 16, 2010, Erika Szabo writes: Nice article! Preacher has to be one of my favourite graphic novel series. I think it was the cover art that initially captured me, but once I dipped into the story I was hooked. Vertigo never seizes to amaze me with its wonderful selection of comics.

One example of note: Mel Brooks Presents: Young Fankenstein, on now through this Sunday at the Princess of Wales theatre. (NOTE: This is not meant to read as a review of the show itself, which was wildly entertaining and hilarious throughout. It is meant to be an exploration of the reasons behind it, and why cinema fails on the stage). I want to start by asking a question: what has happened to Mel Brooks? Honestly, he was a force to be reckoned with in the comedy genre in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. His films (most of them anyway) are classic genre parodies and his penchant for lame and silly jokes attracted a legion of devoted fans, even to this day. But recently Mr. Brooks must have run out of genres to spoof, so much so in fact that he staged a wildly successful Broadway adaptation of his classic film The Producers in the early 2000s, which in 2005 he turned back into a movie. A film adaptation of the stage adaptation of a film. It doesn’t get more post-modern than that.

In the case of 1974’s Young Frankenstein, we have arguably Brooks’ best-loved film: widely adored by fans, Oscar-nominated for the screenplay (Brooks, with the ingenious Gene Wilder), featuring staple comedic performances by Wilder, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn, Gene Hackman and of course, Peter "Puttin’ on the Ritz" Boyle. As generic send-up it is almost unmatched, with notable exceptions Blazing Saddles (also by Brooks) and The Naked Gun also in contention. Why would anyone want to futz with such an outstanding cultural artefact? Perhaps Mel Brooks felt like he hadn’t produced anything in, say, five years and didn’t have any original ideas. Why not pull another Producers? (I’m coining that phrase as of now: “pulling a Producers”).

The biggest problems with adapting screen to stage are related to the medium and genre of the piece. In the film medium, a director storyboards his shots and films them according, having complete control over an audience’s visual and aural focus within a scene. On the stage, especially a grand house like the POW, all the director can do is set up the stage picture and leave it to the audience to choose where to look. Devices such as lighting, blocking and mise-en-scene can certainly draw a stage audience’s focus, but in the end the spectators have an entire stage to look at with only tiny figures skirting across it. Hence moments that work beautifully in film (such as the legendary “I don’t got no-body...” gag) wind up seeming forced and serve only to remind us that the moment did happen in the film, and much more effectively, making us feel cheated.

A major part of what made Young Frankenstein so popular upon its release was its faithful mocking of a genre of cinema with which everyone was familiar: the Universal Monster Movie. Brooks utilized many conventions of this genre of cinema in his send-up, most important of which was choosing to film his picture in black and white. These conventions are completely lost on the stage; the musical was in colour (though I think it would have been quite neat to attempt it in black-and-white, though makeup budget would likely prohibit this) and featured none of the generic qualities of horror films because the audience observed the proceedings through a proscenium arch rather than a lens.

The show itself was hilarious, Brooks adding musical numbers at predictable moments in the proceedings, using famous lines from the film as titles for numbers. The show-stopper had to be "Puttin’ on the Ritz," and it delivered as a sprawling, twelve-minute long song-and-dance sequence involving many tongue-in-cheek references to pop culture. But as much as I enjoyed the show, I couldn’t help thinking that I would have been just as entertained, if not more so, by renting the original Young Frankenstein for $2 and watching it in my living room. The stage show certainly did not earn the exorbitant ticket prices of the Princess of Wales.

As much as I rant about the higher purpose and social importance of theatre, mindless escapist entertainment has a certain place in the theatre community as well. I just wish there was some originality left on Broadway, between lacing nostalgic pop songs with smarmy ‘WE ROCK’ storylines and vomiting forty-year-old films on the stage.

Earlier today (April 13), it was announced that this summer will see the construction of dedicated bicycle lanes along University Avenue from Richmond Street W. to Wellesley Street W./Hoskins Avenue, in an experiment that will be the first of its kind in Toronto. Rather than subjecting cyclists to the horrors of open traffic, where even in bike lanes conditions can be somewhat hazardous, the city will be testing out divided European-style bike lanes. This means that there will be one-meter medians separating cyclists from road rage, effectively eliminating one lane of traffic in either direction. Perhaps in a future column, I should discuss why when it comes to transportation, "European-style" in all cases equates to "totally bad-ass."

Seeing as how I have been using this space as a platform to not-so-subtly vent my opinions about this fall's municipal elections, I see no reason to stop now. So here we go:

Predictably, Rocco Rossi (and where would we be if I didn't have something to say about him...) was infuriated by this announcement, stating, "Pulling two lanes of University Avenue out of commission ... is sheer madness. This is a recipe for traffic gridlock and a democratic insult to the people of Toronto" (TheStar.com). The most irritating of the three major "centre-right" candidates, Rossi (former director of the federal Liberal Party) continues to insist upon being as outspoken as possible with regards to anything that might cause motorists a minor inconvenience. Every time any sort of transit or bicycle-related initiative has been taken since the announcement of his campaign, Mr. Rossi has without fail thrown a temper tantrum and made bloggers everywhere wonder why he's considered a big-ticket candidate. Probably money. Fine.

The announcement also called for new bike lanes to be built along Lansdowne Avenue, Bay Street, York Mills Road, Brunswick Avenue, Rathburn Road, Westhumber Boulevard and Spadina Crescent. Overall, a fairly serious 'BOOSH' for cyclists all over Toronto.

This news was further compounded by a major announcement by the Toronto Cyclists Union that their agenda is so thoroughly busy, that they are creating new executive positions within the organization to alleviate the workload of current Executive Director Yvonne Bambrick.

Conveniently, a couple of weeks ago I interviewed Ms. Bambrick at a coffee shop below her office in Chinatown at the Toronto Center for Social Innovation. The Toronto Cyclists Union is what I had planned on writing about this month anyway, so things worked out well.

Before I move along with the interview, if you're interested in reading more about the new bike lanes, The Star has a fairly thorough article on the subject. If you're interested in being the new Advocacy & Operations Director for the Toronto Cyclists Union, some information about the position can be found here.

Right then. Onward and upward:

How did you get your start in cycling advocacy?

I started by volunteering for Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market. I was one of the original people involved in coordinating it and now I'm one of two coordinators; it's our seventh season, so we're kind of a gang by now. I've been on a bike since I was a baby and I just love bikes in general, so when my friend Dave Meslin came to the cycling community in September of 2007 and said "Hey, I've got this idea to start a Toronto Cyclists Union," I said "Sign me up." I ended up being a member of the four-person executive team that helped launch [the union] in May of 08, I was an assistant coordinator and spokesperson, and was subsequently hired after that in an open call as Executive Director in March of last year.

What are the Cyclists Union's goals for Toronto? What are the challenges the organization faces in achieving these goals?

Toronto had a strong cycling culture already and there's a number of smaller niche groups like the Community Bicycle Network that's focused on education and learning about bikes, as well as Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists that has been around for a while. They're focused on providing legal assistance to cyclists. There was no city-wide advocacy group along the lines San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Transportation Alternative in New York, or Chicagoland Bicycle Federation who have changed their name since [to Active Transportation Alliance]. We didn't have that in Toronto, there was no one group or voice for the needs of cyclists.

So the goal is really to speak out on behalf of cyclists and to make sure that the voice of the cyclist is heard when it comes to city building. So, I'm the person that goes to all of the boring meetings and makes sure that we give deputations and support for bike-friendly policy, and to make sure that we voice our non-support for things that are negative or could have a potentially negative impact for cyclists.

So the goal is to provide a voice, and some of the challenges include archaic beliefs that bikes don't belong on the streets of Toronto, that bikes get in the way of cars, that bike lanes are bad for businesses. Things that are entrenched in such dated ideas and beliefs are really at the heart of the challenge. These exist at all levels, even our city council representatives with the urban/suburban divide. Obviously bikes are much more useful and prevalent in the core versus the suburbs. The suburbs were designed around the automobile, which leads to some of the viewpoints of those who represent those areas.

One of the main successes of the Bike Union thus far has been to mainstream the conversation about cycling... I've done over two hundred media interviews since we launched, which is almost unheard-of for any organization to get that kind of airtime and ink space. It really shows the demand there has been for what we've been doing. It's really taking a pragmatic approach; we're advocates as opposed to activists, so there's really none of the whole flag-waving saying "This is wrong" kind of things and more of saying "This is a problem and we want to work to find solutions and show why this is good for everyone."

Yvonne Bambrick rides her neat-o bike up Spadina on a sunny day. Photo/Matthew Filipowich

I saw your speech at the Harborfront Center for the International Festival of Authors with Jack Layton and David Byrne. Continuing from that discussion, and with regards to urban design, what specifically are you hoping to see within the city itself?

I'd like to see the Bike Plan completed. Going beyond that, the Bike Plan is a dated plan already, it's from 2001. I know the City of Toronto's cycling staff at Transportation Services are working on that, they're starting to look at for example where physically separated bike lanes might be feasible [I've got good news for you, Past Yvonne] and how those would connect to the rest of the network.

I'd like to see cyclists get more respect. Considering we're all taxpayers, we all pay rent or property tax in the city, we all pay for municipal roads, and yet we have to fight for any amount of space on there. It's fairly unjust, especially when you consider the relative environmental impact of motorists versus cyclists. You could say cyclists have been subsidizing automobile drivers. Of course motorists have never paid the full price of driving when it comes to collective air space and the broader impacts of automobiles, but that's not part of the story. It's about the benefits of cycling - the more people that are on bikes, the less road space is being taken up. There are so many collective benefits for drivers and pedestrians in having people on bikes.

I guess we're sort of in a transition period in Toronto, and really in all of North America; bikes have for a long time been perceived as recreational and we're moving towards bikes being a regular form of transportation

It really is tough to get around certain things when our cities have been built around the rise of the automobile.

But roads were initially paved as a result of the cycling lobby.

I was not aware of that.

It was cyclists that originally pushed for roads to be paved and along came the automobile and we forgot all about the bicycles, didn't we?

You also have to look at the impact of bicycles on women. It was a huge, big deal for a woman to have a bicycles, it gave them freedom of movement when they were restricted to how far they could walk or their carriages could take them, which would almost always have been operated by a man. So there are lots of benefits to cycling beyond the usual points of discussion.

How are you going about combating the attitudes that motorists have toward cyclists, such as the typical complaints that cyclists run red lights and don't look when they turn and so forth?

Through the mainstream discussion about it, just regularly speaking about it and acknowledging that we all need more education, drivers and cyclists alike. We're working on education. The closest we've got to a public education program right now are the discussions we've been having in the mainstream media. The City of Toronto unfortunately, while there has been money earmarked in the capital budget for the next ten years for cycling infrastructure, there's almost nothing, if anything, for public education around that. So that's something we're trying to push the city towards. Budget woes aside, education does go a long way for motorists. We're promoting Can Bike courses to let cyclists know that there are things available for people who are new to the cycling community.

When it comes to the attitudes of drivers, we are trying to follow best practice and encouraging cyclists to follow the rules of the road. But we also have things like our Driver Appreciation Campaign we did last fall. That was awareness raising in that it was a chance to let drivers know that cyclists will be around in the fall and winter and in times when the days are getting shorter. It was also a chance to thank drivers who are conscientious towards cyclists, to dull down some of the tension that had been highlighted by the Al Sheppard and Michael Bryant case. The outcome of that was trying to talk about mutual respect on the roads. The bottom line is we all have the right to the space, and our conditions aren't ideal, so we all have to learn to get along. We just emphasize respect and playing by the rules.

The things that cyclists get pissed on all the time for are not stopping at stop signs and not going through red lights. Motorists do that all the time too, but we don't paint them all with a brush. Somebody sees one cyclists do it, all cyclists are bad.

We're continuing to reinforce positive messages around the body of bicycles, that cyclists aren't just poor students, but it's everybody that's riding bikes, it's people in suits going to Bay Street, it's women with children behind them going to school and then work. The face of cyclists is changing and people are seeing themselves reflected in people who are choosing to ride, so that certainly helps to humanize it and allow people to see their relatives. So if you consider that the person in front of you on a bike could be your sister or your niece, it really helps.

But the thing about our roads is that - especially in Toronto - we're all so damn busy, we've all got big egos whether we like to think we do or not and when we're on the roads, we're in a hurry. Almost every time, when you're going somewhere you're almost always in a rush, and we all think that we're more important than the people around us. We take everything that other people do personally. It's easy to do that when you're on a bike, because if someone cuts you off, they could so easily have killed you or hurt you so that you wouldn't be able to work or ride a bike again, so it's hard not to take that personally.

If you were to have written the Bike Plan, what would be the things that you would change opposed to the current version?

I would actually have put it in place. In chunks, in big, neighborhood-sized chunks so that this neighborhood is now serviced by bike lanes as opposed to the way it had to be done, which was the path of least resistance. A kilometer here, a kilometer there, it was like horsetrading on council the way they used to get approved. You couldn't get a whole big stretch of them put in because councilors would block them. So we had a lack of action for the longest time and now there's a lane here and a lane there, but they don't connect to anything and people ask what's the point of those damned bike lanes when no one is ever on them. People can't rely on the network. If there was a reliable network that connected from the suburbs to the core and within the suburbs themselves so people don't have to take their car to the corner store... I would have been implementing the Bike Plan all along instead of leaving 375 kilometers for the last year and a half.

So would you say that the suburbs are the areas with the most need for bike lanes?

I would say that at the very least there should be connectors between the major neighborhoods. Having the rail and hydro projects going in is going to be important, but even with that there should be a way to move not only to and from the suburbs but within them. Especially in the suburbs there is way more room, there are edge strips, there is way more space to be putting this stuff in. Just getting it done, and really considering future growth and trying to plan around that, making bike infrastructure a part of that growth so that people that move there can see it as an option when they get there. That's about it.

Oh, and within the Bike Plan, I would also earmark equal amounts of money, maybe not equal, but maybe two thirds to infrastructure and staffing and one third to public education. For sure. That is essential. Infrastructure is only good as people's understanding of how it works and how to interact with it; so making sure that enforcement of bike lanes is as much a priority as putting them in.

For further information about the Toronto Cyclists Union such as how to get involved and upcoming events, they can be located on the web here.

A simple request:

Dear Kevin Drew,

Your new songs are cool. However, I must humbly implore you to please stop trying to make Still Life Still happen. Still Life Still is not going to happen. That is all.

Sincerely,

C.S. Folkers

Usually, when we think of local indie labels, our minds stray immediately to the Paper Bags and Arts & Crafts(s) of the world that are typically the bars against which Toronto's independent music community is judged. While these flashy and influential organizations are still pumping out batches of solid records, one wonders how long their reign as infinite beacons of cool can continue. Paper Bag, the struggling younger brother of the pair, nevertheless responsible for such gems as Rock Plaza Central's At the Moment of Our Most Needing... and The Deadly Snakes' Porcella has, so the rumor goes, decided to focus less on putting out new releases and more on their operations as a management company. Sure. A&C, the overachieving heavyweight on the other hand, fresh off a pair of most excellent releases in Zeus' Say Us and Jason Collett's Rat a Tat Tat (which was produced by Carlin Nicholson and Mike O'Brien of Zeus and featuring Zeus as Collett's band, if that tells you anything), will remain immortal for their hand in a veritable slew of essential records released around the turn of the century. However, an underachieving "next generation" of A&C artists - Still Life Still, Los Campesinos!, Young Galaxy, Sally Seltmann - has lead the finger that seemed terminally glued to the pulse to seem slightly weakened.

Sometimes I think we forget that there are plenty of other record labels running out of Toronto, and a lot of them are just as severely cool as A&C, if not quite as high profile. Spark and Six Shooter immediately come to mind, for example. However, for me, the label I will always immediately point to as being perhaps the most exciting in town, though perhaps also the most understated at the same time, is the profoundly earnest (weewerk) records.

Home to such artists as the United Steel Workers of Montreal, Jon-Rae Fletcher, the Burning Hell and the Barmitzvah Brothers, (weewerk) has made a name for itself by working with some of the most idiosyncratic and dynamic artists in Canadian folk and roots music. Founded in 2002 as a salon/concert series in an apartment above the West Queen West record store, Rotate This, (weewerk) has been pumping out unique and exciting records with a consistency that most labels could only dream of. 2009 saw (weewerk) produce a trifecta of essential and succesful releases - Jon-Rae Fletcher's Oh Maria, the United Steel Workers of Montreal's Three on the Tree and the Burning Hell's Baby - that saw their profile grow only higher. This year's crop of releases include Broken Down Town by Toronto alt-country weirdos Canteen Knockout, another record from the Burning Hell in This Charmed Life, and the upcoming self-titled debut from United Steel Worker Felicity Hamer's rockabilly side project Filly & the Flops should cement (weewerk)'s stature as one of the boldest names in folk music.

Last month I sat down with co-founder and one-man business machine Phil Klygo. I first met Phil last summer when I was covering the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. "Oh man! You're from (weewerk)?" I exclaimed like a giddy little girl. "Ha!" he returned flatly, "I am (weewerk)."

I was impressed.

(weewerk)'s origins lie in the demise of Klygo's former label, Teenage USA Recordings, which in my estimation was involved in one of the more bizarre examples of an independent company being manhandled by a misguided conglomerate with more money than was probably necessary for them to be allotted. Phil can explain it better than I can:

"We were bought out, so to speak, by this other big label called Song Corporation. They picked us up because we were the young label that had our ear to the ground and they were looking to get that covered up rather than them getting involved in it. They were much more mainstream... Song Corporation is interesting itself in that it came and went within probably a year's time.

Allan Gregg, who you may or may not know, has a talk show on TVO and was also - still is actually a member of the Strategic Council, so you know, he helped get Brian Mulroney into power. He was also at the time part of the team that was managing the Tragically Hip. So they started Song Corporation which was going to show all the major labels just how to do things in Canada. So they set themselves up for failure in a bizarre, sort of taunting manner. We, my partner and I, had A&R director positions within their company, yearly wage, it was too good to refuse. Also, we got total control of our company in terms of being able to put out whatever we wanted and we already had a bunch of ideas on the go. So when they came in and gave us this pile of money...

Ultimately with their money we put out eight more records and by the end of it when they were going bankrupt, they were pretty nasty to us and they kind of got us hung up for a bit on legal stuff. But by then Teenage was kind of on its last legs in the sense that my partner Mark and myself were financing it ourselves, working other jobs. So had that not come around, we probably would have wound things up anyway.

Around that same time - 2000/2001 - my partner and girlfriend at the time [visual artist Germain Koh], we were looking at this apartment above Rotate This here on Queen Street, actually the same apartment where we started Teenage way back in 97. I moved out, gave it up to a member of one of the bands that we were working with and when he moved out he asked if we wanted it back. Germaine and I took a look at it and thought if we're going to move into into here, we're going to do something a little different, we're going to make it into an event/salon/gallery type of space. We lived there, ran our personal businesses out of there and whenever (weewerk) was going to have an event, we'd just pack everything from the first two rooms into the back room and we were ready to roll.

It was a really simple idea and it was really fun for us. I think the main point we were trying to get across at that time was to have this alternative space, basically opening the door for mixed events where she would get artists, I would get musicians, sometimes it was just a talk. But whatever, we've got beer in the fridge, open the door, all of a sudden people are coming in all the time to the point where people were knocking on the door when there wasn't anything going on saying, 'hey (weewerk), what the hell's going on tonight? why don't you have a show tonight?'"

So, after that extremely long quote - in this case I felt that I could never paraphrase the story as well as it was told to me - what are we left with? Well, for starters, the seeds of what will become one of the cooler labels running in Toronto. (weewerk)'s first release, the self-titled debut from future Polaris Prize nominees Great Lake Swimmers, set the tone for a great heap of excellent releases from some of Canada's most decidedly non-wispy-bedroomy-sensitive-dude folk artists. In fact (weewerk) has been responsible for releases from some of the most profane Canadian folk and roots artists. From quirky Pavement-enthusiast folk-rockers Two-Minute Miracles, to the effortlessly smooth Newfoundland jazz-folk singer-songwriter Don Brownrigg, to the extremely strange and noisy troublemakers Fembots, (weewerk) has now made its name in purveying the best of Canada's eccentric, soulful and original songwriters.

"It really comes down to the artists you represent and the records you put out - if you don't have good music... That's another aspect I think people get kind of caught up in when they start a record label. They say 'Oh, it's my record label, it's about my logo and me personally, I'm using this to build up my resume.' I'm not trying to build a resume, I'm not looking for employment for someone else - I've done that. Ultimately a label is only as strong as the artists that are on it and the artists have to keep releasing music, keep working, keep playing shows and a label can only do so much to spur an artist to keep going. But if an artist is generally happy releasing music and happy working in the industry in the sense of playing shows and doing the media, that goes a long way towards longevity."

"Since 2007 when I stopped working for CMW, I've wanted to build up the catalog - which I did, I put out maybe twelve records in a couple of years' time. I don't think there are too many record labels in Canada that will put out twelve records in two years."

In addition to his work as the sole operator of (weewerk), Klygo also serves as manager for Great Lake Swimmers and from all of my encounters with him seems to be one of the busier men in Toronto. Surely he has, so to speak, busted his proverbial balls in order to get (weewerk) into the shape it currently forms all by himself. Klygo, despite everything, seems to be a very levelheaded and relaxed guy - certainly not the exceedingly frazzled and jittery mess I would no doubt be if I were in his position. After leaving his position as Festival Director of Canadian Music Week, (weewerk) has seen a flurry of activity for the label on account Klygo's tenacity and obvious desire to be as busy as is possible for one man to be.

"'How do you start a record label, how do you do it?' I don't know, you just do it. What's the most important thing about having a record label? A name, a logo, a website, you should have some funding from somewhere... But these days it's still open to interpretation what a record label is."

Of course, the music industry is subject to change at any given second and it is impossible to predict what direction music is going to take, let alone what people are going to want. Phil Klygo takes a very pragmatic approach to his business and has so far proved his label not only to be cool, but also sustainable. Through a lineup of extremely interesting and exciting artists, as well as Klygo's own dedication, (weewerk) should only grow in influence as one of Toronto's premier independent labels.

"Anyone who starts a record label thinking they're going to make money is an idiot. Because you don't."

There’s a tradition of creature feature actors that’s fairly refined and specific. What brought you into it? Was it to be part of the legacy or something else?

Well while I appreciate that legacy and am a fan of it, when I was a kid I was a fan of Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, watching old black and white re-runs on a Saturday night, it was part of my childhood, but I never set out to do that. Myself? I thought I was going to be a sitcom actor, stand-up goofy guy, nextdoor neighbour type, wakka wakka wakka.

You prefer this to that?

Not a preference thing, it sort of happened accidentally. One of the first roles I got was the Mac Tonite character for McDonalds, crescent moon-headed guy with glasses. That commercial was the fourth paycheque I got as an actor. That commercial turned into a twenty-seven ad campaign for a three year period. It marked me as the tall skinny guy who moves well, wears stuff on his face and doesn’t complain. So, the creature work and prosthetics kind of came and found me, from then on. My name was getting referred within the creature sects industry, where the guys who create this stuff ask, “What tall skinny guy would look good in this alien costume? I know! Let’s call that Doug Jones fella!” It’s just snowballed over the years.

Is it hard to act and interact, always having this physical barrier between your face and others?

There’s no acting that’s easy, really. Now that I’ve done both, with rubber on my face and without rubber on my face. With rubber on your face, the hard part would be emoting through a thick layer of latex foam rubber. Your expression may not read, so sometimes you need to punch it up. Use much more physicality to sell your mood, sell your intention in the scene. The hard part of acting without the rubber on my face is the venerability that brings. I don’t have a buffer between me and the camera, if they’re going to make fun of me, then they’re making fun of ‘me’ now. It’s much more personal. It’s like the difference between walking out of your house in a sweater and walking out of your house in a speedo. Both street legal, but the speedo feels a little more exposed.

Today’s not a speedo day either.

No, no, definitely not. It’s brisk here in Toronto Canada.

It’s just the beginning of spring.

Yeesh, what’s winter like?

Do you feel part of this legacy now?

I’d feel boastful if I said, “well of couurrrse I feel part of the legacy in HOLLYWOOD.”

There are a lot of nerds that will kick your ass if they find out you aren’t grateful for playing the Silver Surfer.

Oh, I’m grateful, I’m very grateful, but if I call myself a part of the legacy? Then I don’t know. People have said yes. I’ve been equated with Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney before by the press and by the studios. That I appreciate.

So it’s not your decision.

Of course it’s not my decision. I think anyone can walk into a studio and say, “HELLO, I’m LEGACY JONES” but it’s really up to the people who watch the movies to decide if I am or not.

Guess it’s good that it doesn’t go to your head. Since it’s all about your physicality people would start wondering why every monster is strutting.

The fans out there and the studio system and the press that have all been so good to me, they’re making me a part of that legacy and for all that I am very extremely, yes, grateful.

Sci-fi is becoming more and more prominent in the film industry. Are you looking forward to this, anticipating these CGI/prosthetics hybrids?

Yeah, I’ve already encountered a lot of CGI meets prosthetics which is great. At first, when the CG world was getting better and better, a lot of us were getting nervous, wondering if the monsters you glue on to your face would be gone forever. For a minute there, they tried to do everything CG but soon after they found that they had to return to prosthetics because the audience, the folks, might agree with me that you need to connect with another human being, make up or not. Connecting with a CG character that was computer generated, you appreciate the artistry behind it absolutely, but connecting to a pair of eyes with a soul behind them? It’s a bit harder. Just recently, Avatar? A wonderfest for me, I loved it, there are CG characters that I related to and loved, thinking of Andy Serkis as Gollum or King Kong? Brilliant work. Amazing. I appreciate the works, but personally I prefer to see a human on screen, in that place, in that costume.

From Pan to fish man, what is the process of identifying yourself with the creature you need to become?

It’s the same kind of steps that any actor would take towards any character they play. Reading the script to find out what the whole story is, what’s that character, how does he play into the story, how does he relate to other characters, I’d start right there. Then, if you know if the character is a part animal or a part alien or a fantasy creature that comes from a fairy tale or made up in the mind of a sick director, then there’s all that kind of discovery to do, to try to connect with them in some way. I end up liking every character that I play, whether he’s good or evil or good and evil at the same time, I need to find a jewel in his heart that I like. I’ve found that with all my characters, I like them all and I embrace them all, even the evil ones cause they don’t know that they’re evil, just trying to survive like anybody else.

All this happened, more or less. In fact, it’s happening right now. It also hasn’t happened yet. The media makes stuff up all the time, so I’ll leave it to you to figure out what’s real and what’s not. Whatever that means.

It’s 11:30 p.m. when I hitch a ride home with Bakka Phoenix manager Chris Szego. My head is pounding from spending too much time in overheated hotel rooms; and apparently Tim Horton's for breakfast, lunch, and dinner doesn’t agree with my stomach.

Chris asks, “So have you decided how you’re going to write your article yet?”

“Nope.” I pause. “I mean, I had some ideas, but none of them panned out. Maybe I should just write about what I did. But that’s kind of boring. Or maybe it’ll be an article about how I couldn’t come up with an idea for how to write this article.”

“Ah, yes. The meta-article. Always a good fallback. You should make reference to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

I’m not sure how to sum up the day I spent at the Toronto Don Valley Hotel and Suites, previously The Crowne Plaza Hotel, where writers, editors, publishers, artists, vendors, and fans, costumed and plain-clothed alike, gather every April for the 29-year-old speculative fiction convention Ad Astra. The convention runs for three days, Friday to Sunday, and though I was only able to attend Saturday, that single day seems too large for language to wrap its frail little arms around. Perhaps this is because I’m saddled not only with describing my single day at Ad Astra but with somehow summarizing the whole of con culture in a somewhat original fashion; which, to put it lightly, is no easy task, and one for which I’m hardly qualified. While I was raised attending plastic model conventions with my father, my exposure to sf fandom has been largely from an outsider’s perspective. How do I describe what a con is? What’s the essence of a con? Though I suppose you could wash up on the question of what anything is, really.

While major cons have come to garner significant media attention over the past few years, like the now heavily commercialized Comic-Con in San Diego, the likes of which have helped render geek chic, a number of smaller conventions that stay true to their less profitable and thus less known literary roots are held each year, predominantly in North America and Western Europe. Out of these cons have emerged entire fan, writer, and professional communities revolving around speculative fiction. Con culture comes complete with its own vocabulary, customs, and traditions, like performances of “filk” (fan-folk) music, masquerades where fans dress up in homemade costumes that are judged by a panel of peers, various forms of gaming, group readings of “The Eye of Argon,” sometimes plays and other performances, writing workshops, book launches, circulating copies of magazines like Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction, zombie competitions, Miskatonic University t-shirts, all things steampunk, vendors, award ceremonies, art shows, dances, etc. Certain hotel rooms become public spaces where attendees may snack and socialize, like the con suite, or rooms for panels featuring authors and other professionals in the industry speaking to various topics. I’ve heard stories from con veterans of growing up at cons, meeting spouses at cons, bringing one’s own children to cons, watching as con kids grow up and have children of their own.

I’m not walking into Ad Astra this year as a total neo/neophyte (first-time con-goer). I attended my first literary sf con, Confluence, two years ago in Pittsburgh as a student at the Alpha workshop for young writers, and I’ve attended Ad Astra since then. Even so, I’ve always remained somewhat aloof of con culture, and having decided to write this article, I think maybe I should approach the subject as an anthropologist would study an indigenous culture. This approach inevitably wrecks upon the rocks of a certain colonial form of positivist arrogance.

After scouting the con suite, to which I do not return, the art show that I find disappointing and disappointingly identical to the previous year’s art show, and perusing the various vendors selling a range of items, from books, to jewellery, to animatronic parrots, to sculptures, to weaponry, I grab a few friends and make my way to my first event: the launch of “Lost Myths,” a blogesque website by Claude Lalumière and Rupert Bottenberg. Lost Myths features “a playful medley of cryptomythological fiction, pantheons, bestiaries, comics, art, games, readings, performances, and more,” to which a new item is added every Thursday. Claude gives a reading of several hilarious yet edgy stories not yet posted on the site, accompanied by a slideshow of illustrations. Upon returning home the first thing I do is check out the website, and it is as awesome as advertised. Free stories! LostMyths.net! And don’t forget to download your own dancing Hippacotora finger-puppet!

Next on my agenda is a panel titled “Monster as Political Statement.” With a title like that, of course I have to be there. It helps that the impromptu moderator is David Nickle, who I interviewed for Steel Bananas this past February. The panel also features author Nancy Kilpatrick and the woman behind the first ever Toronto zombie walk, Thea Munster, a.k.a. Boneyard Betty, a.k.a. Queen of the Zombies. They talk about H.P. Lovecraft, and ghosts, and dragons, and aliens from the Alien film series, and finally Frankenstein. Sadly I miss the first twenty minutes of the panel, in which they must have covered zombies, vampires, and werewolves, as I have to ditch a man in a rather convincing sailor get-up, kind of haggard and baggy-eyed, who starts following me around, going on in a sonorous voice about how he wants to tell me his story.

I think it’s after the monster panel that I begin to lose track of time and what I’ve done in that time. At 2:00 p.m. I step out of the room where the monster panel was held and find myself standing in a line at 4:00 p.m. with a copy of the book Blindsight by Peter Watts in my hand, waiting to be let into the East Ballroom for the autograph session. I feel like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, temporally dislocated.

“Peter’s not here,” David Nickle tells me when I finally get into the ballroom. The walls are lined with authors gazing expectantly at the fans who, after the first rush, only trickle into the ballroom at a rate of one or two every ten minutes or so. There are soon more authors than fans in the room.

“He’s not?”

“He’s at the bar. Tell him I sent you.”

I don’t know what Peter Watts looks like, so Chris Szego offers to introduce me. He’s sitting back in the most dimly lit corner of the hotel bar.

“I have a fan!” he says, sounding surprised.

“David Nickle sent me.”

“I see. I’m guarding Dave’s beer. Tell him it’s safe.”

I encounter Peter Watts again at 7:00 p.m. He’s moderating a panel called “Body and Person in SF.” The room is unbearably hot, and mind-body dualism is eschewed in favour of embodied consciousness.

Watts posits, “What if Cory Doctorow woke up one morning and another Cory Doctorow was holding a gun to the original Cory’s head?”

“Well,” says one panellist, “for one thing, he would think, I wrote about this!”

Intelligent conversation ensues.

I’m in the ballroom during the autograph session again.  A man is taking a picture of me with Robert J. Sawyer.

Robert J. Sawyer is waving goodnight as Chris and I walk to her car. I’m pretty sure he’s waving to Chris, but I wave back anyway.

“The one thing I can’t stand,” says a friend of a friend, “is the use of first-person present-tense. It sounds so hoighty toighty.” Things like this and the proper use of semi-colons are the kinds of issues over which writers have forever parted ways.

I’m photographing people in costumes. The sailor man refuses to have his photo taken, but he continues to follow me. His back is hunched, and he smells of salt. Sometimes he disappears. Sometimes he reappears. I always smell him before I see him.

“Maybe I could write the article on female perspectives of con culture,” I suggest to Maral Agnerian, a costumer dressed in a style she calls “steampunk polonaise.” Maral agrees to give an interview.

Me: “Right... recording now.”

Maral: “OK, well, this was several years ago. It was my first Toronto Trek, back when it was still called Toronto Trek, and I was used to going to Anime cons, so at the time I was wearing a lot of skimpy costumes. I had not yet learned that skimpy costumes and Toronto Trek should not go together, because a lot of the older sci-fi fans have not yet learned that it is not appropriate to openly ogle at young women in skimpy costumes, or they use the excuse that they are dressed as Klingons in order to be rude and crude and horrible. So I was there with my husband and we were hanging out in the con suite, watching a movie, and this dude comes up and sits next to us and says to my husband, ‘You’re a lucky man. A really lucky man. Everyone at the con is talking about what great warp nacelles she has.’ To this day, I’m still not sure to what part of my body he was referring.”

It occurs to me at about 5:00 p.m. that maybe I should interview people about their con experiences. I talk to a woman with a walkie-talkie and pink-streaked hair named Lee, the convention chair and organizer, about possibly interviewing fans. She writes “media” on the back of my name tag and tells me to send her a link to the article. I can’t believe how many interview opportunities I’ve already missed, and I don’t know who I should interview now. I suppose I just... pick someone who looks interesting? I accost a random fan in the hall who says he can’t do an interview now. Maybe later. He’s heading to a panel.

It’s 6:00 p.m. Sarah Jane Elliot and Leah Bobet are giving readings. Leah’s story about an angel trying to knock up a girl in a shower reminds me of Angels in America. Tony Kushner writes in his playwright’s notes to Angels in America, “The moments of magic... are to be fully realized, as bits of wonderful theatrical illusion -- which means it’s OK if the wires show, and maybe it’s good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.”

I ask my friend and author Karina Sumner-Smith to tell me about any memorable con experiences she’s had. I can pass the interview off as an interview with a stranger. No one reading the article will know we’re friends. “No,” she says. “Please?” “No.” But eventually, I convince her to tell me a story.

Karina: “So, one of my first conventions was a Worldcon, and Worldcons are big and slightly overwhelming, especially when it’s your first convention, so I was sort of wide-eyed and wandering around. I had just arrived and just got my badge when this random guy walks up to me with a gigantic loaf of bread wrapped up in a hotel towel, and he says, ‘Hello! Would you like some bread?’ And I had no idea if this was normal or not, and I’m thinking, is he trying to poison me with bread? Is this O.K.? Is this a thing that is done, the random giving out of bread wrapped in hotel towels? I said ‘No,’ my favourite word, even though I was really hungry. So he left me alone. But Bread Man was around the whole time. In fact I’ve seen him at other conventions since. And I learned that he brings a bread maker to conventions and he makes bread in his hotel room and then he walks around with it in the towel so it’s all fresh and hot, and it’s his way to go up to people, because who doesn’t like fresh, hot bread? And then they can have a conversation, and then he moves on. So I’ve since had some of the bread, and it is not bad. Yeah, Bread Man is safe.”

Me: [With the leading questions.] “But I imagine you do encounter lots of actually skeevy guys?”

Karina: “Oh yeah, sure. I’ve been at con parties talking to various people and all of the sudden you realize that everyone else has abandoned you, and you’re just talking to the much older man who says things to open the conversation like, ‘So, I love young girls in schoolgirl costumes.’ And I’m not wearing a schoolgirl costume! And how is this relevant? And my response is, ‘Excuse me, but I need to go... get some grapes. ’”

It’s 9:00 a.m. I’m on my way to Ad Astra. “I believe in convergence,” a crazy man on the subway tells me. “It all comes together, man.”

Another man, also on the subway, once told me, “I believe in divergence. Entropy, man. It all comes apart.”

The sailor is watching me from across the dealers’ room. I find myself growing dizzy, so I flee. I find pitchers of ice water in the hall and down several cups. Always hydrate at a con.

It’s 9:00 p.m. A distant cousin to Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible opens the masquerade. One-by-one, costumed fans take the stage, some performing dances, skits, and routines, while some just strut their stuff. My favourite costume is “Dr. Octopus.ca”. He wears a lab coat, a hat with an antenna, and has four Canadarms strapped to his back. Each is fully operational. He explains the purpose of each arm. For instance, one arm shoots toilet paper from a roll, and he explains that this is to wipe the asses of overfed politicians. His antenna is designed to prorogue parliament by remote. I don’t stick around long enough for the dance where the winners are announced.

I run into a costumed trio after leaving the masquerade and ask to take their picture. I warn them it may be posted on a webzine called Steel Bananas. They agree. “So long as it’s not-for-profit,” one of them tells me.

I pay the $40.00 door price to attend just the Saturday. I get paid about $15.00 an article through our government arts council funding. Let this be a lesson. Always pre-register.

I run into that sailor again, and I have some time on my hands, and I’m looking to interview someone... anyone... please! “Alright, tell me your story,” I say. “Too late,” he says. “Already told it to someone else.” “Can you tell it again?” “You missed your chance. I thought you were the one I was supposed to tell, but turns out, you weren’t after all.” “Oh. That sucks.” “That’s life for you.” “Can you just summarize it maybe?” “I don’t know... I don’t think that would be right. The policy is I only tell it to one person per con.” “Please?” “Oh, all right. I’m sailing, I shoot an albatross. So it goes. My crew dies out of sympathy for the fucking bird. So it goes, but I mean, over a bird!?! I find my way back to land. The end.” “That’s a terrible story.” “It’s a summary! You asked for a summary. Fuck’s sake!”

*

“He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man
He rose the morrow morn.”

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Comments

• April 18, 2010, Shannon writes: Hiya! Awesome article! I liked the anthropological direction you deicded to take on it. Should give people who have never been to a con before some idea of what it's like. Interesting, hectic, fun, dehydrating... ^_^ On a side note, I'm so glad my husband and I ran into you at the con! We forgot our camera at home in the out-the-door rush and I've been scouring the internet hoping that one of the people who took our picture that day had posted it. Then I remembered you and this website. I was so relieved to have found it (second photo down). Thank you again! ;)
• April 19, 2010, Devon writes: Thanks, Shannon! Glad you enjoyed the article and found it somewhat comprehensible, and that you tracked down the photo. Best, Devon.
• April 22, 2010, Devon writes: Oh, and I can't believe I forgot to slip this into the article. The latest news on the Dr. Peter Watts border altercation is not good folks. I do hope he decides to appeal the ruling. See for yourself: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/20/peter-watts-may-serv.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

People seem to really enjoy spring because it means that winter is over and it doesn’t get dark at 4pm anymore. Flowers start to bloom and birds are back from their ambiguous Southern location. There’s something romantic about spring. It smells good. Everyone just fucking loves spring.

I can’t say I’m a fan. I like being shrouded in darkness and waking up when normal people go to bed. I am allergic to flowers and nature and anything that looks like it belongs in a Disney movie. Those damn birds can never shut the fuck up. Romance is fictitious. Don’t be so happy about things growing, they’re all going to die eventually. We’re all going to die eventually. In protest of the overwhelming and undeserved admiration of spring and sunshine and superficial happiness, this issue of weird news is going to be about dead bodies. Enjoy.

I recall a somewhat morbid-but-not-really conversation with a friend last summer about how hard it is to carry someone who’s unconscious because they really do not do anything to help you out. You can’t give them a piggyback ride because they’re not going to hold on, and if you’re going to carry them like a baby, their limbs just go everywhere and you just want to dump their drunk ass in a cab and go home. And then we started talking about how annoying it would be if the person was dead and rigor mortis was setting in because then the body isn’t malleable; it’s like carrying a stiff, heavy board around.

I don’t really know why either of us would be carrying a dead body around, especially one that’s so uncooperative. But even if the dead body was convenient to carry around, we certainly wouldn’t be doing it for five years like this 34-year-old man in Tokyo did. He was strolling around in a women’s university dormitory with a rucksack containing the now liquefied remains of his son wrapped up in plastic sheeting. Apparently, the son died five or six or ten years ago (there seem to be conflicting accounts from him and the child’s mother) and the body’s been sloshing around in his backpack ever since. The police took him in for trespassing on university grounds but I wonder if it’s actually illegal to have your dead son in a backpack at all times. I mean, people have their dead cremated relatives in vases above their fireplace and stuff. Sort of the same thing? I guess one smells a lot better than the other. Now I’m imagining that scene in The Big Lebowski where they’re scattering Donnie’s ashes from a Folger’s tin into the Pacific Ocean. But instead of ashes, a liquified corpse. Remember, it flies into the Dude’s face.

Anyone reading this is probably pretty disgusted by the whole melting dead body thing but I really give props to that 34-year-old Japanese man for being practical. Do you know how hard it’d be to carry around a dead body for five years if it wasn’t a slushy mess? These two German women couldn’t even get through the day. The mother and stepdaughter tried to board a plane to Berlin with their husband/father in a wheelchair wearing sunglasses. They claimed that they thought he was just sleeping which is, in my opinion, the most depressing lie ever. I mean, he was 91 but I think if my relatives couldn’t tell whether I was dead or alive, I’d probably put a gun in my mouth and hope that I was right about the whole atheism thing. I’m pretty sure they were just smuggling cocaine in his lifeless body.

This has been a pretty grim read so far. Even I’m a little down. I actually considered writing something about Easter and bunnies, but the first Easter-related weird news article I came across was about these kids on an Easter egg hunt in Iowa who found more than they bargained for. It was a dead body.

Photo courtesy of nytimes.com

We just played, did the best we could and that was that.
-Alex Chilton

When I began writing this article I thought it would be best to kick it off with a quote that would effectively characterize the late Big Star frontman, Alex Chilton. In the end, this seemed like the ideal choice. Though it was from one of the last interviews of Chilton’s life, he reflects on his Big Star career with overwhelming indifference. Then again, when comparing Chilton’s body of work to his overwhelming lack of success, its no surprise that even Chilton himself had nothing remarkable to say. When Chilton passed away on March 17, 2010, most publications also struggled in discussing the legacy of such a ‘cult icon.’ His significance, however, goes beyond the records themselves. Reflecting on Chilton’s legacy requires an understanding of how Chilton’s work was able to transcend the traditional notions of pop success by sustaining its worth nearly forty years after Big Star’s demise.

During their brief run in the early 1970s, Big Star produced three albums (1972’s #1 Record, 1974’s Radio City and 1978’s Third/Sister Lovers), all of which failed commercially at the time of their release. Big Star didn’t so much break up as they did disintegrate: co-songwriter and guitarist Chris Bell departed after #1 Record to pursue a solo career, while bassist Andy Hummel quit the band in 1973 to pursue a college degree, the result of frustration, apathy and general discontent. Regardless of their dismal sales and lack of notoriety, Big Star are often credited as pioneers of the power-pop genre. This classification, however, still appears problematic, as it associates Big Star with a level of success contingent on audience participation and consumption. Essentially, it is impossible to call Big Star pop since they were, in fact, unpopular.

The trouble with clarifying Big Star’s significance is their undeniable aesthetic ties to both pop and rock n’ roll music, despite being wildly out of touch with both. No doubt, Big Star sounds like a typical AM radio rock n’ roll band. Unfortunately, by the time #1 Record was released in 1972, rock n’ roll’s rebellious elements had gone corporate. The counter-cultural overlap between audiences and performers was now dead in favour of a more definitive division between virtuoso producers and wild consumers. In his article “In Search of An Audience,” Lawrence Grossberg points out that

"Rock n’ roll is inseparable from its audiences. Consequently, every interpretation of the musical texts also interprets their audiences, as well as the relationship among them" (Grossberg 153).

Much of the reason for rock n’ roll’s early success was its ability of its artists to mobilize young audiences, which Grossberg describes as “dedicated to the pleasures of fun and raw energy” (153). Rock n’ roll provided a way for young people to express themselves in a pessimistic, post-WWII society. This rock n’ roll sound was more or less the result of its inseparability from its audiences, who demanded loud electric music through which they could dance, party and vent their frustrations. While the Big Star sound seems to embody these rock n’ roll sensibilities, their disconnect from the era itself allowed the band to approach rock n’ roll as a singular aesthetic rather than an aspect of a particular social movement.

In transplanting the rock n’ roll aesthetic into a definitively un-rock n’ roll time, Big Star stood in a position to create music that did not have to fulfill any sort of social mandate as outlined by its audience. In the audience’s absence, Chilton’s writing reflected his own isolation that in turn succinctly considered the new conditions of youth culture characterized by suburban confinement and a post-Woodstock haze. Though his music should have resonated, listeners in the 1970s were preoccupied with using popular music as an instrument of escape into the mythological and spectacular (via Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd). The last thing youth culture was looking for was Alex Chilton, a young songwriter content to write songs about the new ordinary teenaged world of sitting in the back of a car or hangin’ out down the street.

Yet, these are the sentiments that demonstrate Chilton’s appeal. It’s not that he was a pioneer in any particular genre, his brilliance came from his ability to reapply the original parameters of rock n’ roll and its audiences. Chilton’s perspective is one that uses the familiar rock n’ roll aesthetic to address the new conflicts of a developing youth culture. It’s not that Chilton was preaching a new political bent, he simply just wrote songs about what it meant to be a teenager in the 70s. In a sense, Chilton built upon the notion of rock n’ roll as communicative tool for youths. Despite Big Star’s disconnect from their more popular contemporaries, Chilton’s understanding of the communicative aspect of pop songwriting creates an appeal that remains timeless in its ability to grasp the nuances of teenage life. This is probably why a Big Star song serves as a better theme for That 70’s Show than those 1970s artists who were actually popular. While the prog-rock giants of the 1970s live on through nostalgic appeal, Chilton’s approach is the one that most sustains rock n’ roll’s communicative aspects. It’s just a shame no one cared to listen to it.

When Chilton reflected on his Big Star career, its no wonder he spoke with brevity. Even when his death was reported the following day, many struggled to locate his cultural significance. In a sense, Chilton’s legacy was his lack thereof. His significance lay in his constant attempts to resolidify rock n’ roll’s social basis in the face of a new, socially unstable youth culture. In doing so, Chilton solidified pop as an aesthetic by creating definitively youthful music separate from audiences. With Big Star, rock n’ roll could sustain itself in hyper-corporate musical landscapes by creating a rock n’ roll relationship between the listener and the recording rather than the audience and the performer. Though Chilton is so often referred to as a ‘cult icon’ following his death, he is anything but. His conceptualization of rock n’ roll is one that transcends pop success and continues to find itself of the music of anyone inspired enough to start a band, cut a record and keep the cycle alive.

I had the privilege of sitting down with one of Toronto’s very incredible and very unsung songwriters this past weekend.

Photo by Kirsten White

Tamara Lindeman is The Weather Station. Both times I saw her perform she was backed by an extremely awesome folk ensemble, but due to fluctuating life situations what was a bedroom project expanded outwards has turned back into a solo extravaganza. With “All songs written, recorded and mixed by Tamara Lindeman,” Prince-esque titles topping the liner notes for The Line - her debut LP - moving back to a solo project is certainly an expansion rather than a regression. Released independent of any label last year, the album is an incredible feat of intimate and interestingly produced folk music. Not to mention how emotionally resonant it is: the collection of aching, nostalgic songs never becomes ingenuine at any point during its exploration of aspects of life that can recede into cliché despite the best efforts of even the most seasoned song writer. It’s a record that recognizes the sadness of the past without being crushed beneath its weight; the songs swirl around the idea of loss without ever slipping into trite expressions of want. Instead, Lindeman’s songs come off more like an oil painting of someone trudging through the snow or a double-exposed photograph where human figures appear spectral. While it’s pretty easy to label the music as folk (Lindeman’s chief instrument is the banjo), there’s a hell of a lot more going sonically here than you’d initially anticipate. It says something that Beatroute described it as “like a Nova Scotian ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.’”

Anyways, I could gush about The Line all day, but this isn’t a review, it’s an interview. Go to Soundscapes and buy it. Or get it on iTunes or Zunior or something like that. It’s worth all of your money.

Tamara and I sat down on Sunday night at the Lakeview to discuss the future of the project, making music in Toronto, Entire Cities, recording banjos, touring with Timbre Timbre and singing in the choir of Bruce Peninsula.

How long were you making the record for?

It was a long process… I feel like it was four years but it wasn’t really four years. It was four years from the time that I started writing and started recording. From the very beginning I had this idea that I was going to make an album… just totally focused on it, but there were many months where I didn’t touch it or didn’t write any songs.

What are you doing these days?

I’ve basically been hiding away the last couple of months trying to come up with… well, not trying to come up with, but I feel like I’m going in a different direction. I’ve been trying to find a new voice, I guess. I haven’t really been pushing it, but I’ve been finding myself writing really different kinds of songs and trying to learn how to write a different kind of song than I’m used to writing. Yeah a lot of hopeful stuff and ideally a lot of percussion stuff at some point in the future. In June I’m actually going to the island and I’m going to live in the Artscape, the Gibraltar Point Artscape. I’m going to have this portable to myself and I’m going to live there for the month. I’m hoping that by June I’ll be able to record the whole thing there, all at once. When you record from place to place… I guess nothing matches. And also the island is gorgeous, obviously.

Other than that I’m actually working with Entire Cities right now, recording the overdubs for an album.

What’s the scoop with Entire Cities?

(Laughing) Yeah, we’ve been a band for kind of a long time. I started the Weather Station around when Entire Cities formed and for a while we had basically the same band but totally different music. Now we’ve diverged again but I’m still in Entire Cities. Yeah, so I’ve been putting on a producer hat that I’m not very qualified to wear, but it’s interesting to be in that position. To guide someone’s performance… you know, like “we should focus on that take,” or “let’s give it another shot,” what instrument to put where and stuff. It’s been really fun.

Well, there are lots of different people who play on The Line as a record, so you were in that position there too, right?

Totally! But at the same time it’s different when it’s not just your band. With The Line I would just say, “play this!” and then I could put it together later. With Entire Cities, everyone has to like the song at the end of the process. It’s more collaborative.

Do you think what you’re planning to record on the island is a record in the same sense that The Line is a record?

Oh yeah, it’ll totally be a record. I don’t want to say anything that I’ll take back later, but I think it’s going to be more… minimal. I’m really interested in really intensely focusing in on one sound… like voice, just making it sound amazing or taking one drum hit and making it perfect. I’m interested in having things sound a bit more real. On The Line, I would hide mistakes inside all of the huge layers of sound, which I really like and I think is really cool, but I feel like I’ve already done that.

How do you feel that you’re developing as a songwriter?

Well, I got really good at writing dark songs… for a while I didn’t even know how to think about writing a song in a major key. I don’t want to write sad songs anymore. I’ve been playing around with different tones and contexts and aspects of life.

Being in Bruce Peninsula has really reminded me of the power of singing. It’s been a great workout for my voice. I’ve been writing songs that are way harder to sing because it’s more fun.

Toronto has a really warm and embracing folk music community. As a folk musician, how do you account for that given that you can’t really be just a troubadour walking around with a guitar on their back anymore? Technology factors in so heavily but the aesthetic still pervades.

I think of folk as anything that isn’t loud and electric… but I know this isn’t really folk music. I will often say that we’re folk music but I know we’re not traditional in any way. It’s kind of like when bluegrass was invented in the 30s… there was old time and then there was bluegrass. Bill Monroe grew up in the South and moved to Chicago and he and a bunch of homesick southerners came up with bluegrass. It was like nostalgia music. They didn’t have their culture so that had to make up something that resembled it. Maybe you can say the same thing about Toronto. There’s all these people who live in the biggest city in Canada looking out at something that they don’t have, like a natural environment. For me, I grew up in a very rural setting but I never listened to country music until I came to the city.

Other than that, it’s just the Tranzac and the community of people who are around…

Photo by Julie Fowler

Well, you toured with Timber Timbre.

Yeah! Well, it was a really nice tour. We tried to play a show together a year or so before and it never really came together… and later I was like, “Well, I’m booking this tour, do you want to come?” and he said yes. It was really strange because he had signed the contract with Arts and Crafts the day before we left. It was one of his first tours but it was also maybe his last at the kind of ‘playing in people’s living rooms’ level and a lot of people who had never seen him before saw him and were blown away…

It was also my first tour as The Weather Station, which was really exciting. It was also my first time really playing solo. Before that I always had a band… and actually, at that time I still had a band but they couldn’t come, so I just went on my own. Since then, I’ve sort of un-banded myself again and I’m playing solo now. I was never really all that comfortable having a band because I didn’t know how to be a leader. How to tell people what to play, or know what people should play. I’m also kind of a, well, control freak with my material… I’m kind of enjoying being alone again because I’m so much more nimble and I can indulge in any whim.

Actually, I got to go to South by Southwest with Bruce Peninsula too.

Oh really? What was that like?

It was really interesting. There are thousands and thousands of people, but you still have this feeling of, I guess, connection to your fellow musician. There are literally dozens of bars with tons of really great bands playing everywhere. It’s nice to see that many people around to go see bands that aren’t like, Radiohead and U2… who are relatively small in comparison.

Here’s a take away from South by Southwest: we ran into these people who were from JC Penny and they were there to take pictures of musicians and then copy their clothes. To be sold at JC Penny! You look around and there are corporate sponsorships everywhere, but at the end of the day people are there to play. I’m sure lots of people leave feeling like the end is nigh but my experience was totally the opposite.

☂

The Weather Station will be playing shows over the summer in “the usual places,” like the Tranzac, although nothing is listed on her myspace yet. There are also talks of doing a show in an old legion hall on Niagara Street that is closing down. Hopefully there will be more precise details to come! And, if we’re lucky, some new recordings.

While no SDCC, in Toronto, Hobby Star’s Fan Expo is the biggest boy. A-listers? Debatable, but listed enough make face. Fans come in wolf packs, the Saturday ticket line wrapped around the Metro Center like a thick comforting arm to investors and exhibitors. Though the power over fans is a dangerous power. Many have cried out against Fan Expo. There are ghostly expositions online of rogue dedicators, explaining Hobby Star’s abuse of their might. The evidence isn’t subtle. In the past, Hobby Star has had an uncanny habit of sniping smaller conventions for no reason aside from a show of power. The immediate weekend after any Paradise Comics showing or any alike, Hobby Star would throw a free “fan appreciation” event to siphon away interest. Eventually Paradise Comics would close the doors on their tried and true Paradise Comicon, the emptiness removing Fan Expo’s biggest competition and removing some of the spring in local dork’s steps. Enter the Wizard.

Wizard, aside from being a magical old man, is an American publication, the largest, in fact, on the topics of comic books and nerdity. They throw a series of Wizard World conventions across the US, in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and publicly expanding. They are fairly big deals, once again, not SDCC big deal, but a pretty big deal. Their interest in the city piqued interest in local conventioneers. The idea of having a Wizard World in Toronto inspired the thought that Paradise’ demise was not to be in vain. Oddly enough, there is another event called Wizard World in the same month, but that one is just a bunch of bouncy castles and you need a 12 year old to get in. I was there on behalf of CTV, sent to take some photos of our important panels and then later write a fluffy little blog post.

If you are hoping for a real Rocky Balboa of a story, this is probably the part where you should stop reading and pretend Wizard World went swimmingly and Hobby Star learned a humble lesson.

Eliza Dukshu, actress and girl who was topless in a bunch of Dollhouse promos was to be the star attraction at the three day event. Was to be. She cancelled. In her place was alternative Whedon choice Jewel Staite, black Ghostbuster Ernie Hudson, America’s last next top model Adrianne Curry, her Brady Bunch boyfriend, the dude who was inside the Gorn suit, some people who were unlucky enough to appear in the SAW movies, some lost and wandering post-reality TV contestants and a whole lot of fat retired wrestlers. There were two things I started to hear about from peers when I got there that Saturday morning. That no one showed up on the Friday before, and that the Iron Sheik went on some seemingly homophobic rant about Hulk Hogan.

Not having any concrete task to kill the day with, I started meandering towards the handful of things that I cared in some way about. So I shook the black Ghostbusters hand. It’s sort of disappointing but really believable when pseudo-famous people are, in fact, normal, boring, quiet people. I wish I had a story about some quotable anecdotes and antics thrown down by Mister Hudson, but instead, well, he’s nice. Like he’s a nice guy. His son used to live in Toronto. Now he lives in Trinidad, if I remember correctly. I took a photo and moved on.

Adrianne Curry, on the other hand, spoke as if she was trying to ‘fit in’ at a party. She would go on and on about her level something-something orc on World of Warcraft. How she’d love to boink all the Stormtroopers and how big a turn on Darth Vader is. She was dressed like Wonder Woman, the day before she was apparently dressed like a Droog, the day after I heard she was Leeloo. Eventually I managed to get her talking about travel ethics, triggered by my generic back up question of “so how’re you enjoying Toronto?” She said that, while she had actually never been to Canada in her travels, she would always tell scoffing Europeans that she was native to the land of the proud maple leaf. I took a photo and moved on.

One of the few responsibilities I had was to cover CTV hosted panels. There were two cast members of Battlestar Galactica openly discussing the on-set antics and what it was like to be flushed into a cult phenomenon. I discovered how hard it is to take a photo of four talking people without anyone making a goofy unflattering face. I got some ‘okay’ photos and moved on.

The exhibitors weren’t too happy. The entire retail devoted back end of the hall was kind of glooming, the vendors I spoke to couldn’t get over that, even while there were more fish in the pond this day, no one was biting. I hung around with my friends from A&C Games, and it was a sentiment they kept mature about. A chubby stubby youngster saw the booth and remarked “Yo, these are all old games. Gay fuckin’ shit.” I pointed out that A&C did, in fact, have plenty of current PS3 and Xbox games. He gave me an, “Oh, whatever” and nothing else. I spoke to a jack of all trades booth, selling everything from manga to vinyl. I asked him how many browsed through the LPs and he told me more than I was probably second-guessing. “My store’s out in the middle of nowhere, cottage country,” he said, “I brought a lot of my mainstream, classic stuff and some of the few obscure things (like a Hank IV release) because you never know what’ll sell. There are collectors here. You can’t risk the odd stuff safely from where I am. Wish I could though.”

I bought a six-dollar hot dog (on CTV’s dime and dollar) where I encountered my first old bearded fat angry guy of the day. At first I thought he was being ironic about how the concession stand being out of ketchup was “like a nightmare” but he followed it up with a passionate expose of his offense after receiving pepper when he firmly requested salt. Then someone triggered the fire alarm.

I’ve never seen a convention hall full of people evacuated, but it is a slow, and heckling process. Some went outside to the windy Exhibition grounds, most refused to take gravity to the could-be threat and just hobbled in the lobby. When crammed into a more precise space, the attendant attendees looked more in-folds than ever. I used the opportunity to take a photo of a ‘full house’ and later play it up as a tribute to Wizard’s success instead of a mild bumble.

Wizard World’s try isn’t going to fix the damage that Hobby Star has done. Twenty-five dollars doesn’t sound like much, but pitted to admission and the average fan to tween will only pay it for one and not the other. One gets Kevin Smith, the other gets a finalist from So You Think You Can Dance. One gets Spock and Kirk, the other gets Ax and Smash. One struggles to prove itself while the other, by the end of its opponent's Saturday announces Fan Expo will have Stan Lee. I didn’t take a photo of ex-wrestlers sitting in an empty convention center, because it’s an image that’s both unsettling and hard to shake.

Over the past two issues of Steel Bananas, there has been some conversation about Dennis Reynolds’ article “Am I Really Where I Say I Am?” in which he asked the question of whether music can actually be created to represent actual places within a globalized industry of consumption, with specific reference to Sufjan Steven’s abandonment of the 50 States Project. Devon Wong, in his article entitled "Infighting," took issue with his assertion that The BQM subverts the theme of writing about a specific location by writing about a landmark that is transitory and thus has no history. These are the short-hand notes of what these articles are about.

You can find Dennis’ piece here, and Devon’s piece here.

In The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye contextualizes the development of the human creative capacity, the imagination, through an example placing a character, you, on a desert island with a reproductive partner and eventual family:

“…human society after a while will transform the island into something with a human shape. What that human shape is, is revealed in the shape of the work you do: the buildings, such as they are, the paths through the woods, the planted crops fenced off against whatever animals want to eat them. These things, these rudiments of city, highway, garden and farm, are the human form of nature, or the form of human nature, whichever you like. This is the area of the applied arts and sciences, and it appears in our society as engineering and agriculture and medicine and architecture. In this area we can never say clearly where the art stops and the science begins, or vice versa” (EI 6).

What I want to discuss in this article is the way in which human beings create their own space through manipulation of natural elements: music is like architecture, gardening, technology and everything else in its development except that it takes the air and the imagination for its media of manipulation rather than bricks, plants and microprocessors. We blow the air through our horns, send waves through it with guitar strings and vocal chords in confined and public spaces alike to create our own human form of nature, or human nature. This created space, this locality cannot help but be both physical and imaginary at the same time and is produced in the relation between the two.

Whenever I’m introduced to a new artist or band, and I think the same is the case with many people, one of the first questions I ask is: “Where are they from?” If it’s true that globalization and the Internet music community have dissolved the importance of the local scene, why does this question matter?

I think it has at least something to do with music being considered as a global form of trade. Knowing that Daft Punk and Justice and Air are all French implies that the French have a unique affinity for producing a certain kind of music, manipulating the air in a certain way, building a French electronic vision of human nature.

In our top 25 Canadian records of the last decade list, I asserted that Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot it in People plays like a painting of Toronto because of the unique conditions of its creation and cultural context in which its success arose. The album itself is not about Toronto in the way that Illinois is about the state whose name it puns on, but this in no way demeans its significance on a local level, or its communication of that significance on a larger globalized cultural level. I wonder if people in Illinois and Michigan actually culturally relate to the albums Sufjan so blatantly told them were about their homes or whether they are treated like historical creative endeavors, like M*A*S*H or something. People who fought in the Korean War might have a stronger relation to music or art that situates them in an emotional place similar to that time in their lives more so than to a cultural product that attempts to re-imagine specific temporal context through historical signification.

The airspace manipulated and created by You Forgot it in People does not send waves of “Oh, look at the CN Tower” at its listener, but it does situate the listener in a kind of emotional and artistic interpretation of the world in which its creators lived. Certainly Toronto in the early 2000s was a thoroughly globalized place, as it is now, but the space created and expressed by the record relies on human imaginative geographies, not physical ones, such as the big-band community, the choice to favour presentation over performance, or the framing of the record with quiet brooding string pieces. All of these things say without directly speaking their intention, thus expressing something necessarily outside of normal language but existing in the realm of imagined landscapes, thus creating a locality rather than expressing a location, specifically, though the two are irrevocably linked.

Here’s a different example. Hip-hop is a genre that still takes a massive amount of pride in these created localities. Outkast’s style is permeated by trope developed out of dirty south American funk rap culture and while, like most rap artists, they self-referentially big up their hometown, the created space is not the same as the physical Atlanta because it can’t be. Kanye is the same with Chicago. In the case of the latter, he is definitely a second or third generation hip-hop producer to the point that his music is culturally referential to many kinds of hip-hop music, colouring the music of people like Common and Jay Z in completely different ways than he colours his solo work, but there’s no denying his history as young black man growing up in relation to an already existing culture, building his own locality through air manipulation based on the way the air was manipulated around him growing up. It’s a cultural transaction that transcends physical space while emanating from it.

It’s the kid who adopts and adapts hip-hop to reflect a different kind of life usual that ends up being the most compelling; isn’t that almost the entire reason for Eminem’s success, occasionally ridiculous flow and marketing strategy aside? It’s the exact reason that people are less inclined to enjoy what has been dubbed “emo rap” (Sage Francis, Atmosphere, Doseone) because it reflects a worldview, a locality that directly opposes and deconstructs many of the tropes associated with its aesthetic. These genre conventions don’t have nearly as much to do with physical location as they do with locality. When I say Kanye sounds like Chicago I don’t mean that he sounds like the L-Train Loop and deep-dish pizza and two baseball teams. We culturally transact based on where we physically come from because we build locality from location through imaginative relations to pre-existing examples of both planes of existence.

Next Month: Tradition.

Ambling up Ossington Ave. the other day (which, up-and-coming-neighbourhood status notwithstanding, I rarely do) I came across an establishment called Meta Gallery, located in a white-painted building built like an auto-mechanic's garage and set back from the side walk. The adjoining building's northernmost wall stretched out, painted black-on-black with a peculiar clouds-shaped artefact of more recent paint. This gallery was naggingly familiar, though I was sure I'd never seen it before in my life. It took me until Dundas to realize that Meta Gallery is none other than the the successor to the late Rolly's Garage, and the cloud-like shadow of paint on the wall is all that remains of one of my favourite street-art murals.

I first encountered Rolly's Garage as one of the SummerWorks Festival's bring-your-own venues last year and it was then that I was struck by the frenetic exuberance of its mural of paste-ups: hundreds of round, child-like cartoon figures with gorilla proportions and hipster outfits, ranging in size from tea-cup saucer to larger-than-life, and all stacked and layered on top of one another like the first joyous test drive of a real-life clone-stamp tool meets animate ball-pit.

Rolly's itself was intriguing. Auto shop by day, by night transformed by Robin Lacambra (the shop-owner's daughter) into a quirky venue for the arts in all forms. When her father retired, Lacambra rented the garage from him and kept the art going. However, disputes with neighbours and the insurmountable cost (approximately a hundred grand) of bringing the space up to code regulations eventually shut down Rolly's Garage last fall.

I was reminded again of the Garage, and of its hectic mural, when at approximately the same time that Rolly's was drowning in dire straits, one of the postcards on PostSecret¹, subtitled "Watch Out, Canada!" featured a black-and-white paste-up cartoon on a concrete post, with the caption:

"By Day, I am a 30 year old clean cut business professional. By Night, I am launching the biggest street art campaign that my city has ever seen."

"Street art" is a fairly recent term that emerged as part of the (contentious) move to distance the contemporary act of artfully embellishing public space from the problematic public image of "graffiti," as dominated by ubiquitous gang-associated tags and the unaesthetic "throw-ups" of bored teenagers futzing around with over-large cans of white paint. While a lot of street art (ie. the wheatpasted collage mural that so dominates my attention today) is not technically graffiti (traditionally scratched, drawn, or painted), most street art shares in graffiti-proper's cavalier attitude towards private property.

I was reminded of Rolly's mural, first by stylistic similarity and later, by the subtext of its presence, for the anonymity of street art does not make their intervention in urban landscapes any less of a personal gesture. Street art is a sign left by one person for another to find. It is transient evidence of attention to, and dissatisfaction with details of the shared environment; the infliction of creative humanity upon functional structures; the expression of dissatisfaction with an alienating and, frankly, boring city habitat; and an attempt to do something about that dissatisfaction. Paste-ups are a way to engage more directly with a predominant battle over the inequality of access to public space, a way to contest the indiscriminate postering of the city for the sake of corporate advertising. Flyposted art is a relatively cost-effective battle strategy by which an artist can hope to compete with all those who have grater resources, and far less to say.

Movie studios, television conglomerates and music labels are in the habit of paying smaller companies to paste glossy advertisements all over the downtown area. They do this illegally, without any kind of permission or go-ahead from the city, and they do it constantly. I know from experience that a wheatpasted poster can outlast the elements for months if left well alone, but the turnover of one poster covering another on the telephone poles of, say, Queen West is so high that the average half-life of visibility for any poster in bad weather is about a day. At regular intervals the city figures that those telephone poles have borne enough (and gained enough resemblance to pythons in the process of digesting a supper of whole pig) and someone drives by with a high-pressure water hose, leaving behind clumps of soggy paper like the leftovers from some kindergarten craft project that got way out of hand. Flyposted art functions much like the advertising it mimics, but without the unceasing urge to refer back to some referent for sale. At least, not directly.

Street art worth its space is a complete impression in itself. More often than not, if it refers to some external entity, an entity that enhances the meaning of the art, whereas advertising attempts to build meaning, and confer importance upon its referent. Street art functions as advertising where all art functions as advertising: in the indirect building of an artist's reputation, the main distinction being that street artists are generally anonymous. The scope of a street-artist's reputation is most often limited to his/her peers. Street art goes unsigned, or if signed, it is with a pseudonym. Graffiti-type street art such as large paintings of a stylized name or word, invert and take to extremes the usual signature/image ratio, but the effect rides a boomerang of stylization around near-unitelligibility, and the effect is largely the same. The casual passer-by can likely only interact with street art on the basis of its own characteristics and placement— perhaps more clearly as a work of art than does anyone in front of a Picasso, its price-tag hanging in the room like the smoke from an overly-enthusiastic toaster.

The absence of an artist's name does not force everyone to deal with the art in some Modernist Greenbergian dream-land of attention to pure form. A name is only part of the ego dynamic that goes into art. Obscure the name and there is still a sense of personality. The personal gesture, the faith that someone intended to communicate something to you through this, and no matter how vague or juvenile that missive may be, someone considered it worthwhile. Over time, that artist's style may emerge to hold that aura of personality to a specific series of encounters with their work.

When I found that PostSecret postcard, it was this force of personal gesture. The assertion of personality and intent caught my imagination, and even though the postcard writer and the mural-maker at Rolly's Garage are not likely the same person, they might share the same drive, the same silent, guerrilla campaign of art versus drab and industrial urban functionality.

And when I discovered the mural was washed off and painted over, it was as if the city had struck back at the mysterious art hero, reinstating a no-man's-land of visual boredom, making the unknown artist's work elsewhere more worthwhile.

Thus far, I have described an encounter with street art, lacking prior knowledge of privileged information and that might have been the end of my story in a pre-internet age. The internet makes a postscript possible, and even likely. There is no simple dichotomy of an anonymous artist making a name for themself, and it is not a simple matter of street artist versus gallery artist versus advertiser. Street art in and of itself is utterly unprofitable. It's no wonder the punks loved it so. What the internet provides is a venue and network for a post-hoc "ah ha!" and even the potential for a street artist to earn some revenue ².

I returned home from my stroll, and sought out the details of the Garage's fate, and instead found the identity of my unknown artist: the mural was part of an installation at Rolly's, extending along the wall through the interior of the Garage, set up by one Eric Cheung as part of an ongoing series of "Orphans." (There can be no better name for those wheatpasted characters!)

Overlap between street art, gallery art, and the internet is not uncommon. The success of Banksy and Pixnit attest to that. And this overlap means that should they choose to, with a little daring of a different ilk, street artists can shed their anonymity for those who make an effort to look for them. Cheung is one of these.

The Orphans are also for sale as one-of-a-kind, hand-made plush toys — art objects in their own right and well worth a look.

The art of Eric Cheung & collaborators is gathered at: http://www.at-aw.com and http://atomicghosts.blogspot.com.

I also recommend checking out one of Cheung's other urban projects: Poster Pocket Plants, a collaboration with Sean Martindale, found at: http://posterpocketplants.blogspot.com. It's something to keep an eye out for this summer on those postered hoardings I mentioned.

Meta Gallery, for those interested, is located at 124 Ossington Ave. just a couple blocks north of Queen St West. Their current show includes a lot of digital curlicues and some delightful bronze Martians.

¹Ah, PostSecret! Where voyeurism and the occasional flash of artistry meet under the shield of near-complete anonymity! Where the distinction between fact and fiction is functionally irrelevant!

²And for anyone who might believe that capital gain compromises the purity or integrity of art, I have relegated this footnote for you: printing costs add up!

Comments

• May 13, 2010, Robin Lacambra writes: Thanks for the mention! This is an awesome article. The "man" may strip down our murals, paint over our walls and kick us out of our garages.... but my heart for art is still strong. "Rolly's", the brand, is waiting on non-profit-status confirmation, then we'll be back in business! Not in it's former home, however... but here, there and everywhere. Stay tuned. And I'll for sure stay tuned to Steel Bananas!

“Do or do not, there is no try,” says wrinkly little green thing.

Screenwriting lessons I recall all too often. Scenes are for plot progression, follow strictly the order of cause-effect, ever-advance towards the climax. This all you should care about. Accessibility, appeal, industry, bucks, all you should care about.

It’s pretty simple…

Professionalism.

Stan Brakhage’s on the average wannabe-filmmaker:

He will, as such, tend to always think of himself as “on display”: and if he makes movies, even if only in his home, he will be known for making a great “show” of it and will imitate the trappings of the commercial cinema; and he will buy equipment beyond any need or real joy in it (usually penny-dreadful-junk-stage-props for the “production” of his imaginary profession... rather than any loving re-production of the movements of his living)...

In Defense of Amateur (ca. 1967)

Photo: Stan Brakhage from "The Dante Quartet" (1987)

I’ve been a part of these shows and have seen my share of said personalities. Helping out on these sets mechanical intoxication.

1. Filmmaking, a frame-ready jigsaw puzzle you need just get down to. Start along the edge, group together colors, patterns, use the box as reference. “Getting there, looking like something now, I’m seeing it… are you?”

2. Filmmaking, a giant slimy writhing leech, the harder you squeeze the further it shoots from your grip. Soaring through the murky grey sky, light drizzle, “fuck you!” Frustration, your pistol aims steady, click-click ammo-less despair, you grin and it’s funny. Along comes a ___________________. “Jump it!” Jump it while it’s fresh…

* * *

I was recently at a film shoot for a film I was asked to edit. I was there for the hell of it, maybe learn a thing or two, it turned out pretty okay, except… I came to acquaint with a young lad who was as unoccupied as I was. He was almost too likable, the eagerly-compliant type. On our way to Timmy’s he asked me if I ever thought about the meaning of life. Pleasantly surprised, I told him I do, “hooked on it quite so in fact as a matterly.”

Shortly…

“No meaning.”

Photo: Stan Brakhage from "Relfections on Black" (1957)

I get the usual fix: “and these beautiful trees magically appeared out of thin air and the mechanics of a car undeniably complex likewise its creator and its creator and its creator its creator its creator its creator…”

He wouldn’t let up, asking me questions he knew I had no answer for, waiting for my mind to implode so he would drop by and say hello again. I told him he was a good guy and that we had met just moments prior and that he was straining the possibility of friendship. I told him verbally that beyond my lack of faith I still want to be a good person. I told him telepathically that beyond my tamed words my fist still wanted to be in a face.

A little like so, at war with the invisible with an invisible weapon for an invisible cause. My audience to please? Me? I wouldn’t be looking to entertain or preach (if I ever had anything concrete enough to preach about). At this point in time, if I were to attempt, I would illustrate some Things of the cosmic indifference ghosting beneath our stratosphere, exhuming minds brains and selves a piece and a piece and a piece. The narrow course of Being widening so dearly, pseudo-consciousness being rescued (into living hell!), spurts of oh-so-essential self-expression pitted against the living and lived the laterlive and the afterlive… Quasi-nihilist rebel milquetoast enjoying a session of free jazz, acknowledging that something is going on.

Something must be going on.

I saw Gummo recently and thought it beautiful.

* * *

“What’s the most important thing in your life right this moment?”

“Love.”

Comments

• May 7, 2010, Keegan writes: Great article here. A tearing down of the cohesive ideal in the first paragraph only to build a fragmented but coherent narrative in the end. Stand-alone scenes indeed, with an artfully crafted conclusion. Glad I came across this.

What this essay is about: John Cusack now, John Cusack in the 80s, golden years remembered, golden years misremembered interspersed with vintage pictures of my parents.

Spoiler Alert: While this “film review” does contain Hot Tub Time Machine spoilers, curiously enough, it may also ruin the end of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat’s Cradle for anyone who hasn’t read it.

My Dad’s Top Five Favourite Movies of All Time:

1. Armageddon
2. Top Gun
3. The Bourne Identity
4. Independence Day
5. Wall Street

My Top Five Favourite John Cusack Roles So Far:

1. High Fidelity: Broken Hearted Record Store Geek
2. Say Anything: Romantically Ambitious Kick Boxer
3. Bullets Over Broadway: Plays the “Woody Allen” Character, a Mediocre Depression era Playwright.
4. Better Off Dead: Slapstick Suicidal Broken Hearted High School Student
5. 2012: Divorced Unsuccessful Science Fiction Author Trying to Save his Family

In the men’s bathroom on the ground floor of the A&A building at King’s College in Halifax, located between the cafeteria and the campus bar, someone has written “these are the best years of your life boys, enjoy it while lasts” above the urinal. Someone else, presumably a student, has written in response to this, “fuck you, buddy.” Ah the precociousness of youth.

You live your life in the present, riding the crest of each moment, but there’s always the past biting at your heels, right up until you die. I’ve been told that time and space are actually the same thing, however, if this is the case, I don’t understand why you don’t travel back in time when you walk backwards. Time travel movies always talk about being trapped in the past, but how come no one ever complains about being trapped in the present? There’s no way to verify the past. It’s only as good as we remember it, and yet so often the past is misremembered, forgotten or intentionally misrepresented. The whole idea of “glory days” or “those golden years,” actively designating and mythologizing a specific time in your life as such, just seems so silly and depressing.

Let’s get one thing straight, right here, right now: there is no going back in time. I don’t care how much fun it is to watch Michael J. Fox, Jean Claude Van Damme, a pack of thieving midgets (thank you Terry Gilliam) or Keanu Reeves and the dude that played Bill mess around with the past, you simply can’t do it. Scientists may soon figure out how to travel through time; hell, the bastards may have it figured out already, but if time travel did exist, I promise that you would not be allowed to use it to fix things with your boyfriend, find out where you left your keys or bet on sports - and I know that is what most would want to do.

Now, I’m not trying to spoil anyone’s fun here, or rain on your proverbial parade, I’m just trying to help. The truth of the matter is that there are many instances in my life where I wish I could travel back in time. I wonder about the terms and conditions; would I give my younger self advice and return to an idyllic future? Or would I pick a point to skip back to and live it out from there with knowledge of my alternate future? The happy compromise, I always think, would be to skip back to a specific point with a written set of advice, but no memory of my alternate future. Obsessing over the past is unarguably a bad habit, but often our minds get stuck on things, pulling us backwards when we should be moving forwards.

There are certain movies I know right away that I will be seeing with my Dad. Recent examples include Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes and 2012. While I act as though I’m lowering my standards and catering to my dad’s tastes, more often than not it’s actually me that suggests we should go see one of these movies. The truth is, even the greatest cynic or art house savant, on some level, desires that base satisfaction of a by-the-numbers Hollywood spectacle: the popcorn and soda, the superhero origin story, the massive waves crashing over North American cities, the outright forgetting of oneself, the whole deal. I am no great cynic, nor am I an art house savant, and I’m certainly no exception.

When I found out that there existed a film called Hot Tub Time Machine I knew right away that I had to see it with my dad. Usually my dad is a pretty easy sell, but in this instance, even he was skeptical, “Hot Tub Time Machine?” he said, “I dunno, sounds kind of stupid.” Fair enough, it does sound pretty stupid, so I played to his vanity: “Hey Dad, weren’t you the on-set consultant? I mean, for the hot tub?” You see, my Dad is a hot tub enthusiast, we had a hot tub installed in the backyard when I was twelve years old and ever since then hot tubbing and hot tub maintenance has been a big part of his life (my life too for that matter). I began to see the titular Hot Tub Time Machine as this weird nexus of significant themes in my life:

1. John Cusack: a ubiquitous but widely overlooked actor who has been a point of fascination for me in recent months. Often typecast as the sensitive, intellectual, broken hearted everyman.
2. A Hot Tub: A symbol of modern bourgeois luxury and preferred method of relaxation for myself and my primary Hollywood-style movie-going companion (Dad).
3. A Time Machine: A symbol of nostalgia, of wanting to live in the past, to rectify the misdeeds and missteps of oneself or mankind and forge a better future.

In the weeks approaching the release of Hot Tub Time Machine, I overhyped it, billing it as probably the greatest mainstream comedy since Mallrats. On the day of its the release (March 26) I was on time for once to meet my dad at Rainbow Cinemas on Front Street. The film opens with John Cusack as the same broken hearted depressed wreck of a loser we’ve become accustomed to seeing him play. There is a hilarious scene involving Rob Corddry boozing and nearly killing himself by incorporating the gas pedal of his car into an air drumming routine, then we are at a decrepit ski lodge. There’s a borderline gay hot tub party, a dancing bear, some Russian Red Bull and then… Boom! Time travel. They end up back in 80s, reliving the greatest weekend of their lives.

Hot Tub Time Machine is not a very good movie. Not even by the standards that I was willing to judge it. I think Rick Groen of the Globe and Mail says it best in his two star review: “Funnier than any movie called Hot Tub Time Machine has a right to be. And how funny is that? Not very, but a little, occasionally – just enough.” The problem is, Rick and I were coming at this thing from different angles. Rick Groen thought the title of Hot Tub Time Machine negated the possibility of humour, while I thought it ensured hilarity.

The main problem I have with the film is that the gags are too scattered. In a good time travel movie all the threads of the plot should intertwine neatly, as they do in Back to the Future. I wanted all the characters to diverge on individual missions and then collide in a grand comical finale. I wanted the kind of perfect comical cinematic climax that can be seen in Animal House or Mallrats. But maybe that’s asking too much.

It was with some mild disappointment that I left the theatre. I agreed with Rick Groen that the movie was “just funny enough.” Incidentally, my Dad thought that it was a really good movie, and was in high spirits afterward. I didn’t tell him what I really thought. We drove up to Teronni at Yonge and St. Clair afterward where we habitually sit at the bar, drink beer and eat pasta. During these father-son outings, when we are drinking at the bar, I usually get some small dose of my dad reminiscing about the past.

My Dad went to university for engineering at Waterloo. He recently described to me what it was like working in management at a pro-union factory in Quebec in the seventies. People sold dope in the bathrooms, there were women who hung around the factory that would sleep with workers for money. There was a bar across the street that cashed the workers paychecks when they went there to drink after work. It all sounded so impossibly perfect to me, like a different world that I wanted to visit for a day.

My dad also worked in food processing for a while. He was apparently part of the team that ran tests on Pop Rocks when it was a new product, to prepare it for public consumption in Canada. Him and his colleagues used to produce extra large Pop Rocks that they would swallow whole, gradually making bigger and bigger rocks in some delirious macho candy-themed game of chicken. This was at a time, I’ve been made to understand, when airplanes had smoking sections and people drank between ten and thirty cups of coffee a day. These are the fragments of the past I’ve assembled from my father’s verbal reminiscing.

When I was 21 I took a trip with my college roommates. I met them in St. John’s Newfoundland a few days before we were due in Halifax for our graduation ceremony. We walked the path that led up Signal Hill, passing brightly coloured houses intermittently along the way. From the top of Signal Hill, a gigantic, barren rock jutting out on the ocean, you can look out at the Atlantic and watch the water crashing violently and swirling into the harbour. We stayed at a hostel, we drank too much, I drank too much and almost got my nose broken by a bouncer at a strip club (one of my roommates saved the day with his powerful sophistry). I ran wild down George Street (St. John’s famous pub crawl strip) pretending that my arm was a rocket that I was attached to. Rocket Arm was a character that often came out when I’d had a lot to drink. I believe my roommates had to forcibly restrain me.

In Halifax, a few nights of celebration followed. There was a lot of back slapping, reminiscing, proud parents footing the bill for expensive bottles of wine, extravagant seafood dinners, dancing, crying, hugging, the works. I almost missed the graduation ceremony because I was hung over, drinking coffee near campus and talking to college girls about my thesis. At the ceremony, I dawned the traditional gown and walked in the procession to my designated seat. As our alumni speaker droned on about how climate change was the greatest challenge that our generation would face (this was back when people were worried about that Global Warming thing) I finished reading the copy of Kurt Voneggut’s Cat’s Cradle that I had propped up in my lap. That’s the one that ends with the dreaded Ice-9 substance dropping onto the ocean’s surface, causing the earth to freeze over in its entirety. I had grown my hair long and my face was covered with months of focused facial growth. I had come to graduation like this on purpose as an homage to the classic liberal arts undergrad in all his shagginess. In the photograph, which has a bit of a dull, dusty haze to it, it looks look like I am somebody’s father, graduating in the 1970s, frozen in time. If I had a Hot Tub Time Machine, this is where it would take me, but perhaps 25 is too early an age to be seriously reminiscing about one’s early 20s.

If you spend too much time looking back, then you aren’t as adept at seeing potential paths ahead. There’s a hilarious moment in Mallrats, where Brodie Bruce is walking backwards and lecturing his brokenhearted friend, “you face forward, or you face the possibility of shock and damage,” he says, as he turns around and gets clocked in the face with a metal beam. Say what you want about Kevin Smith, there’s a poetic truth to this moment. We’ve got a pretty good deal as humans in the world, we get to make all kinds of decisions everyday that change our lives and the lives of those around us drastically, why dwell on the past:

- anything can happen

- this is exciting

- try not to think about the past too much

- the future is this crazy thing.

In 1984 John Cusack played a bit role in a little movie called Sixteen Candles. In the following years he would become a unique figure in the teen heartthrob circuit, known to moviegoers as that somber faced boy that constantly faced rejection and pursued perfection. In the year 2000 John Cusack starred in a film called High Fidelity: a retrospective look at a man who had been simply rained on and broken up with for two straight decades; Lloyd Dobbler, all grown up. In 1984, the year that Sixteen Candles came out, I was conceived.

I was also born in 1984, but I say conceived because it holds a different significance; once conception occurs, there’s a pretty good chance of birth, and thus existence, my existence. Try something, just for a second: picture your parents on the night that they met, it's kind of scary. My mom has told me on several occasions that the night she met my father, at a bar, in Montreal, my dad spent the entire night chatting up my mom’s friend, then, at the last moment, as my mom is leaving the bar, my dad goes after her and asks for her phone number. Every time I hear this story I am panic-stricken, I start sweating, suddenly my existence is in jeopardy, “what happens” I blurt out, then, holding out my hands, touching my face, “oh… right.” When they got married she was 27 and he was 26, just one year older than me.

In 1985, Crispin Glover played a supporting role in a little movie called Back to the Future. In the film, Glover plays George McFly, Marty’s father, a successful science fiction novelist. But when Marty accidentally travels back in time, he compromises his parents’ relationship, his own existence and his dad’s career as a sci-fi novelist. HTTM and Back to the Future have a least two things in common, first they both rely on the “I need to make sure my parents do it so I can get born” motif, and they both feature Crispin Glover. To be honest, and I really hate to say this, but Cusack is kind of useless in HTTM. He’s the boring straight man and his character’s plot never goes anywhere. Cusack already had a sweet eighties throw back role in High Fidelity when he reminisced about being a sensitive dude in the eighties rather than actually returning to the eighties. But where Cusack fails as the sad old dude, Glover shines as the one-armed bell hop/ice sculptor; this really is his sweet eighties/time travel throwback movie and he absolutely kills it.

The funniest jokes in HTTM revolve around Rob Cordrry’s character Lou, the best of which involves Lou banging Cusack’s nephew Jacob into existence (via Cusack’s sister), as Jacob wanes in and out of being. The second funniest involves Lou getting beat up by a bunch of ski patrol dudes in a fight where his friends bailed on him the first time around. Cusack and Craig Robinson (the token black guy) were shitty friends who made mistakes in the eighties and they’re still shitty friends prone to making mistakes now. My favourite scene in the movie isn’t even funny, it’s actually kind of sad. Corrdry’s pounding a bottle of Johnny Walker Red at Chimney Corner, the top of some big cabin in the ski resort village, his face all beaten and bruised. Robinson and Cusack show up to apologize for missing the fight but it's too late, he tears them apart for being shitty friends, falls off the roof, and they all almost tumble off and break their crazy necks except that Crispin Glover appears out of no where at the last second and saves their worthless lives.

I like this scene so much because it shows the deepest flaws of all the characters. In the end, everything gets cleaned up. They get the time machine working, Corrdry stays in the past, but meets them in the future where everything is awesome and Crispin Glover has two arms. The almost incomprehensible Hollywood wrap up is just awful; something messy and awful would have been much better.

Suspension of disbelief in the name of fiction aside, let’s be realistic here for a second. If you actually went back in time, it would probably fuck shit up way beyond you not being born, and secondly, even if you thought you’d be able to fix something in your life, you’d probably screw up something else in a bold new incalculable way. Either that or you just flat out wouldn’t be happy with what you thought you wanted. Because that’s how life is, it kind of sucks… but it’s also awesome. I found the scene at Chimney Corner satisfying because the characters’ disappointment with their lives reflected my disappointment with the film; I think all of our expectations were too high. If you have a set idea of what you want your life to look like, you’re pretty much doomed to puzzle over how things could have been instead of coping with the bad and working towards the good. Also, if you get it into your head that Hot Tub Time Machine might be a really funny and awesome movie to go see you’re shit out of luck.

Transcanadada motorway is a way. That is, a path, a route which can be followed but also forged, a route subjectively traveling toward a relevant destination, but objectively set between arbitrary points which have significance as destinations only subjectively. It is a way traveled by many subjects and objects, and is thus a way comprised of many ways. It is a way of reaching subjective destinations and traversing objective pathways through the adoption of many ways simultaneously, or many ways oscillating and jumping between one another always. It is many different ways put together into a system of ways which is itself, on a higher plane, a single way, a way of many ways. It is fragmented ways, different ways, short ways, long ways, scenic ways, direct ways, low ways, high ways, layaways, freeways and unfortunately some non-free ways (though these should be kept to a minimum). It is especially a way of ways which have different names in different places and at different times, but this doesn't mean that they aren't still part of the TransCanadada motorWAY, even if a location identifies against this. Basically, there's room for multiplicity.

It is a contract
filled up
into the prairie line
from the mouth.

In this sense it's a motorway--it's in motion. Those who travel it have no set impression of what it is or what ways it encompasses, which directions they extend in, or to where they lead. Nor does the way of ways itself know which ways it incorporates, or where these ways go--they change at any given moment. This change (like all change) is driven by technology, by progress, by the passage of time. But the motorway also suggests that it is a way which is driven by a personal base of power--it is driven individually, by individuals, a way of many ways driven in different directions by many autonomous personal bases of power towards subjective destinations and/or objective arbitrary locations. Additionally, the way is driven by technology, here meaning inhuman device capable of appropriation and use by the human to facilitate, speed up, or crazify/funnify/DADA the act of travel. Yet any of the motion facilitated in this manner takes place strictly along the pathways outlined within the system of ways.

I was sworn
Canadians must juggle

(Applause)

renewed federalism
NO to tricks.

a bundle of sticks
encompass
scattered energies

TransCanadada is powered by individual agency, working under a collective model without necessarily being limited to movement within the shared goal. Agency moves beyond the theoretical category of structure, powering and delineating the way, which in turn produces and reproduces slightly altered contributions to the common idea.

The way is trans--it is not within itself or the place which encapsulates it, it is between itself, across itself, beyond and above itself. The ways of the way are composed of, at base, 1-dimensional line segments demarcating linear spaces of travel. However, the ways of the transway mesh into a 2-dimensional map of 1-dimensional directions, allowing travel in 2-dimensions. The functional limits of the ways against the topography of their location create 3-dimensional contours. The limits imposed by time, distance, and imperfect travel technologies (motor friction which causes tension and heat) extend the temporal-spatial differentiation of the ways of the way into the 4th dimension. The way transfers above itself into n-dimensional space.

The latter point is worth stressing: when I form a deal of ambiguity and inferential challenge, for one thing, I can know that the sentence is contentful. I hear meaning in the words, just as I hear the speaker’s (or my own imagined) tone of voice.

So too does the way transfer between itself. The transway has no boundaries, as the motor can construct its own way. The way does not end at the freeway, nor at the residential street, nor at the driveway, nor at the footpath, nor at the dog's footprints traced through the carpet in shit, nor in the tunnels made by the bacteria in the shit. Motors forge the motorway forever between and among itself. The way covers all dada, nada is not covered by the way.

The way has no boundaries, yet it is a Canadian way. The way is, however, TransCanada: it is across and between Canada, but also beyond and above Canada. It is beyond and above because it is across and between. Canada is a place which must, for Canadians, be the material base of travel--the producer of human motor identity, the location of reproduction, the home of home. But to understand oneself is to understand others, and vice versa. To move between and across Canada--the home of home--is to move beyond and above Canada--away from home and towards the universal. The way of TransCanadada connects all in the universal sphere of dada; nada is not connected by TransCanadada.

The TransCanadada Motorway is the way of Dada. Dada is connected by the motorway. Nada is not connected by the motorway. Nada is the passivity of being which maintains the necessary binary to support activity. It produces nothing, and stands in direct opposition to the way without motion or force; it is subsumed by activity while still remaining inert, vacuous, and a passive receiver of action.

Almost impossible to have the latter without some degree of the former
often a certain

irretrievable

delicacy of passion deprives him of all relish in the common occurrences of life
prosperity and adversity [become] obligations and injuries

Passion exists outside of blind pluralism. Blind liberalisms and collective unities always offer the risk of homogenization into a singular quiet void, whose limits are understood only in their meekness. The way is not one of quiet inclusivity, but violent prejudice against passivity. A road cannot be passively traveled, as the way turns to meet itself cyclically in the fury of masturbatory control. Passive walkers will be contained to their cycles and killed. Active forgers will build the motorway, each inch of pavement retreating after every advance. Open and singular, the individual nods to the system and takes another step...

not possessed of the soundest judgment
We shall form [...] notions of life
fondly pursued by the rest of mankind

interest or self-love intermix

rougher and more boisterous emotions
entirely independent of every thing external
not to be attained insensible of differences and gradations

We praise
curvature and intestines
Steps varied in many ways
called constant

struck out,
a sense of solidarity
got in power
in Canadian men and women

One that has well digested his knowledge

without them, Canada would no longer be Canada.

destroy Canada?
break up Canada?

that decision lies
some bad news
security in a separate
manageable size

ultimately penalize
those of tomorrow

YES through pride
respect the demanding
Canadian families
second to none
three major trends.

Mr. PLUMB: The number is seven.

his Youth a tangle of diverse and conflicting
spectral type fields of vision,
urged the selection of less
Reckless political expediency

there is a whir of processing

Making that leap
from physical laws
In the 19th century
not a dead end

methods have limitations, but they give us more than enough to get started.

☂

John Nyman
N. Alexander Armstrong
DEON
Starla Bontecou
C.S. Folkers
Adèle Nogi

To endorse this manifesto, kindly leave a comment.

Comments

• April 16, 2010, Grant Hayes writes: I endorse this manifesto. (Applause)
• April 24, 2010, Attila the Pun writes: Here Here! There There! Everywhere!
• April 27, 2010, Richie Holdick writes: Whenever in the endz

✗

Spit so thick you can chew it. Chatter lines harmful. People and capitals are the kindest. We still rely on the railway habit for great Wisdom. His pointed amounts of knowledge hung off the racecar. We is a force: through others, we see ourselves. Doors revolt to such beautiful and true discernment, singing the body erratic. Grapeshot shipyards enliven blazing Will, Progress, and Audacity. We lead on omnipresent tracks. Space is now our culture. Our knowledge is latticework, our days are hooves high aspiring to rediscover continuity. This is our gesture, us who are excited to live: We must punch our world.

Are we content with generalized knowledge? Insecurity? Wisdom pointed to affirm a racer's beauty more than any masterpiece. This that leads us intends us to take the adventurous polyphonic human exam. Man in the world affirms libraries, takes gymnastics, patterns enthusiastic lines on to time like that of a rail. Banners reduce poetry. Fight the content, aspire back, find the way of fearlessness. Courage, sing love, splendor, and enrich the eternal. Bridled aggressive mortals must make the leap. Serpents enliven poets who at every jump affirm the mind. Car needs Man, not the reverse. No flashing income? Don't worry: values died yesterday. By vast fervor or progression, we don't know.

Religions are harmful. Religions are destructive. Their work inspires traditional wars. Wisdom attacks essence and flashing knowledge. Rediscover the mysterious perhaps which leads to truth. Is there an evolutionary leash which leads us to Wisdom? Explosive, our human revolt seeks the circle.

Ecstasy. Beauty. Action. Sniff the fervor.

By the word Is, people want the word Culture. Find the magnificence in man which we once found in the feverish earth. Race to Wisdom yourself. We died in speed. The splendor of the sun seeded the nightly enthusiastic minds bringing a different revolution. Roaring is railway, the need for struggle, the glittering of cowardice. We use slaps instead. We hurl at spiritually usual days. Wisdom is the new action. The spirit of Wisdom sings, scorns, and paws religion. The insomniac with feverish knives.

We conceived the horizon. Will and Wisdom is the last material leap. What will survive? The Word. The Word shares values. The Word dies wise and is born out of a river. All we need is a bridge.

What criteria is needed for a tradition? I thought it was simply called the Earth. So give the wealth to the academies and other suffering bastards. We should have wheels which lead to an electric species of Wisdom. Ecstasy swells a Wise character. Essence leads to what flashing elements hurt nightly.

Routine is quietest with a definite gyration a sudden load of unpleasant dreadful health. A rush of rays stranger than speed a bit vile. Speed builds stimulating mutter. Only hours are lost. Experience life's reign of breathtaking speed and hallucinations. Bright injected rays recall pure mirrors dulled & confiscated. Do you believe sorrow is the base? All your anecdotes are constantly shameful. Small lives must be risked. It's an intense comedown. So. Refresh.

It's April. Words are sometimes insufficient.

Karen Correia Da Silva
Editor-in-Chief
Steel Bananas

The Burrito Odyssey | Photos by Matthew Filipowich

Z-Teca (York University Campus):

A sign reading, "BURRITOHEADZ WANTED!" hung for nearly a year outside an under-construction petty-bourgeois unit inside the mall at York University. The prospect of a burrito joint moving onto campus excited and delighted students and professors alike. Ted and Alex, two "Burritoheads" (Missing that curious 'Z'), spent the whole year yearning and burning for a new burrito to sink their respective teeth into.

It turned out that the place was called Z-Teca (which explains that 'Z'). Upon opening, students lined up all the way out the door. Ted and Alex stood in that line--they stood for far too long. While they waited, they discussed aesthetics.

Ted said, "I just love things which are wrapped: joints, gifts, a lunch in cellophane. Of course there is nothing I enjoy so much as wrapping my member in a well-lubricated protective sheath, and then having that member wrapped within a woman's welcoming lips. Truly, there is nothing so fine as that which can be encased, enclosed, and covered. Burritos are a fine example of the act of enwrapping, second only to the sex act itself. D'lux!"

Alex said, "The universe cannot be wrapped. The world cannot be contained by any mere flatbread. A tortilla is an illusion. The nature of the world is in the spilling-over, the breaking-through. The essence of being is excess, the mess of life cannot not be captured and stuffed inside a tortilla."

When they finally reached the front of the line, their legs weary from waiting, they were forced to face issues of form and content. The options of form were: Burrito, Fajita Burrito, Burrito Bowl, Salad, or Tacos. For contents they could choose Grilled Chicken, Grilled Steak, Beef Barbacoa, Pork Carnitas, Grilled Shrimp, or Vegetarian. Ted's lower jaw jut forth and his face reddened as he ordered a Burrito with Grilled Shrimp inside. Alex ordered the Veggie Burrito Bowl--not for any moral reason, but because he believed that any burrito should be able to stand on its rice, beans, and cheese alone.

Additionally, guacamole was a dollar extra on any burrito except for the Veggie. Everyone agreed this was irrevocably heinous.

The final obstacles between these hungry heroes and their lunch was a choice of Salsa. Both lovers of spice, they chose the HOT option, the Chipotle & Roasted Tomato salsa. As every affirmation of one thing is a denial of other possiblilities, both Alex and Ted commented that the other salsas sounded pretty tasty. Sadly, they did not sample the Pico De Gallo or the Roasted Tomatillo & Jalepeno.

It ended up that the salsa was the real winner of the meal. In fact, every other aspect of the burrito, to hoover a word from popular culture, sucked.

Upon taking the first bite, Ted exclaimed "This tortilla tastes like a dour crepe. Are they using common pancakes to wrap food now?"

Alex's Burrito bowl had no tortilla, so he side-stepped this problem. He did just as the menu told him: "Eat it with a fork!" He mixed the contents of the bowl, creating a slop which was visually appealing, but lacking in flavour. The black beans and the corn tasted like they were poured right out of a can. Both meals were dominated by the plain white rice, spice-less.

"Ted, this is not hot."

"Do you mean hot temperature-wise, or hot spicy?"

"Both."

"Lousy. The shrimp in this is tough, chewy, and reminds me too much of the sea."

"What did you expect? You ordered the shrimp. You sir, are a disgusting mother."

"Verily!"

And thus they left Z-Teca, entirely disappointed.

Burrito Boyz (College & Clinton):

It is not quite a patio. It is a walled-in cave with a garage door and stainless steel furniture. A big screen TV locked into Buffalo news. He is standing at the strange entrance enclave of Burrito Boyz. He speaks: "What is with Burrito Places and the letter 'Z'?" He enters, glides past tiled walls, bright yellow and blue.

Burrito Boyz is everything Z-Teca wants to be but can't. Their ingredients fresh, their staff friendly, their vibe happening. Everyone inside Burrito Boyz is having a good time. Always.

Rocketing through their streamlined process, he orders a small veggie burrito--the smallest, cheapest thing they offer on the menu. The girl behind the glass pulls out a surprisingly large tortilla. She proffers the possibilities of toppings: Refried beans, mexican rice, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, green peppers, salsa, guacamole, Burrito sauce, Sour Cream, Jalapenos.

"Give me everything," he says. He was the kind of guy who wanted it all and wasn't afraid to take it.

She asks, "Would you like some of our XXX Hot Sauce?"

"Yeah, give me double." He was that kind of guy as well.

The burrito is made and put on the grill. Above the grill a sign reads: "PLEASE EVERYONE - Get into the habit of washing your hands after every time you touch something besides food in the kitchen." He looks at the girl's hand. They are soft and sleek. They are clean.

They don't take debit. Don't worry--he has cash.

The burrito spends enough time on the grill to be crispy on the outside, gooey and warm on the inside. The refried beans are spread evenly, thickly. The salsa is robust, bolstered by cilantro. The secret sauce is only called a secret because there are no words which can even approach its deliciousness. It mixes with the sour cream, guacamole, and hot sauce. The effect of this super-sauce is more powerful than any alchemist's potion or ancient elixir. The burrito is well-wrapped. It maintains its integrity and dignity until the end of his eating it.

It is genuinely shocking to him that he is stuffed. That was the smallest menu item, and yet he has a full stomach. The large must be gargantuan. As he leaves, the spice lingers. It tickles him all afternoon.

Bar Burrito (Yonge & Sheppard):

An almost putrid orange painted on most of the indoor walls offset with extremely colourful art by local Lizzy D. Cacti placed in red-rimmed wall sockets are underscored by a slew of sand behind glass, teasing the viewer with a landscape perfect for tucking a toiling ant farm. Maroon booths line the wall, cherry wood chairs placed on the outside of the tables. A small TV is mounted in the corner, spotlights point down onto the cash and back kitchen. Alex and Ted walk to the counter and order two burritos, a vegetarian and another that combines steak and chicken--the men split each in half for heightened enjoyment and shared experience. Emboldened with their forays thus far, both men order the maximum allotted spice. A lull hangs in the air while the man looks at Ted somewhat incredulously.

"Are you sure? I just want to ask and make sure, it's very hot."

Ted affirms his order and the man rings it up, sighing, resigning Ted to a meal hotter than the sun, tantamount to hot coals slathered in lava. The cook steams and presses the tortillas before tossing it onto the grill, and asks the teller how much spice Ted requires. The man relays maximal potent spices, but the other man stops.

"Are you sure? I have to ask everyone and make sure, it's very hot."

Alex looks on, silently demanding the burrito live up to this potentially scripted response. Eventually the gentlemen receive two super-packed, well-grilled burritos: one extreme meat, the other soy meat. Taking a bite, sour cream leaps to the forefront and Alex notes a definitive lettuce/soy divide down the center of the burrito, and although the soy lives up to the purported spice levels, it is cooled by dressing woven through the lettuce. The chicken and steak was much spicier, for there is less lettuce to give way to the mass of meat. Ted has to cool down with a shot of Alex's Mexican fries, the fake cheese actually taking the edge off the scorching burrito. The fries are covered with green onions, salsa, sour cream, and plenty of that plastic cheese. They are delicious; they are disgusting.

The burritos are served in a thick pita, and not even the combined power of chicken and steak can incite sauce drippage at the end. Alex watches the guacamole fade into the mix, glumly. Although there is hardly any rice, the wraps continue to bring delicious spice, and the pleasant mouth afterglow the men are coming to know so well after a burrito walks over your tongue with heat fused into the soles of its shoes.

Johny Banana Mexican Grill [formerly known as Bistro Latino] (Queen & Bathurst):

Vibrant colours that exceed Bar Burrito seem to expound that life is a carnival. In fact, it is written on the wall: "LA VIDA ES UN CARNEVAL." Painted playing cards depict a mermaid, watermelon, moon, sun, and a man dancing with a baton of some sort. A thick exhaust pipe snakes its way overhead. Vibrant neon swirls of paint accompany every picture around the wall, except for a few large mirrors and framed posters of exploitation films starring Mexican wrestlers, including one known as the "Champion of Death" [CAMPEON DE LA MUERTE]. A white baby stool sits discarded by a lonely black paper stand, large white paper balls cover lights above the wraparium. Complete with action figure-esque Mexican wrestler staring you down as you gobble: “¡JOHNY DAME OTRO TEQUILA!” he roars ferociously [JOHNY GIVE ME ANOTHER TEQUILA!].

The men order a chicken burrito with Mole sauce, made with chiles, chocolate, nuts and spices, as well as a Chorizo sausage burrito with potato, both on whole wheat tortillas. As seems to be the norm, both men order all potential garnishes: refried beans, cilantro-lime rice, lettuce, tomato, green pepper, green onion, sour cream, with cheddar and Monterey Jack cheeses, extra spicy salsa added with a similar warning as Bar Burrito. The man behind the counter offers that both patrons follow him through the process and they look on fixedly, expectantly. The chicken with Mole has a myriad of colour and spice inside, and the roller has conquered the uneven layering effect that have stumped many before. A sit and several bites later, Ted tastes green onions and spicy salsa, nasal drips, so he sniffs, a general throb in the mouth occupies his oral fixation. The guava drink he ordered half drained by the the time he quenches the heat to a comfortable level. The Chorizo with potato has less heat and is more cilantro heavy - potato grounds the flavour, steadying the stronger tastes and allowing the palate to explore the diversity of ingredients.

Both men, inquisitive, ask for a flan advertised at the front, Madagascar Vanilla, sounds delish. Yet denied, nothing, nadda, no dessert. "I'll remember this," Ted thought, and these words are the ends to those means.

Big Fat Burrito (Bathurst & Bloor):

Ted and Alex are excited to try the new "high-profile" burrito place in Toronto, the Big Fat Burrito in the Annex. This burrito is already famous for its presence in Kensington Market and the fact that the new location killed the awesome mural outside Lee's Palace.

"I heard they were getting the same artist to do another one," notes Ted.

They walk in the door. It is a squeeze. There are seven people inside; it is about five too many to stand comfortably. Muffled, the live music from Lee's filters through the wall.

Ted orders the Chicken and Alex orders the Yam. The burritos are made quickly. The boys ask the kind cook if he will chop each in half so they can split it. He does it no problem.

They walk out into the night, cradling their packages with care. First they eat the Chicken burrito. The first thing that pops out is the burrito sauce, a roasted garlic mayonnaise. The chicken is marinated with a nice spice, but lacks something in texture.

Ted explains it: "This chicken is not firm and springy. I want density in my chicken!"

Alex says, "Destiny? You want destiny in your chicken?"

Ted says, "Yes goddammit!"

They each gobble their half of the chicken. Alex opens up the Yam and passes Ted his piece. The first bite shocks, the Yam is delicious. It is warm, sweet, and rounds off the garlic and spice nicely. In moments, the Yam burrito is annihilated by their sticky gnashing teeth.

"That was delicious," says one.

"Became kind of a sludge near the end though," says the other.

They both agreed that it was okay, but not nearly as good as the other location in Kensington Market. Nor was it nearly as good as any of the other burritos they had eaten in recent memory. However, a bad burrito is still pretty fucking good by any standards. They had not yet had the best burrito they could find. But it was close. Very close. Perhaps a paragraph or two away...

Utopia Café (College & Clinton):

Apparently the modern Utopia consists of European sceneries portrayed on wall. A long mirror near table their table. Exposed bricks, an ample wine selection, white ceiling, white walls, cream baseboards that rise up toward the tabletops. A shelf full of multicoloured plates stacked at the back of Utopia obstructs a direct kitchen view.

Ted orders two of the daily special: a chicken and avocado burrito served with charred jalapeño pesto cheddar cheese, salsa, sautéed peppers, onions and lettuce. The special sells out only twenty minutes after the order: brash, a server walks up and slashes the blackboard in red capital chalk – SOLD OUT. Ted licks his lips lasciviously to the smells wafting towards their corner table in the wings, as his stomach continues its impatient urges towards the meal to come. Alex should have expected delays during a massive 5:30pm dinner rush, but that doesn’t stop him from heedlessly oogling the other patrons' dishes. When the food arrives, the plate has been pleasantly piled lots of with Costa Rican black bean rice and sesame coleslaw, the burrito chopped in half and laid across, open face showing them all of the toppings they've been anxiously awaiting. After a bite, the slick pesto and smooth guacamole are not as spicy as the emphasis on jalapeno led them to believe. Alex adds some of the 'AHH! Sauce,' a specialty of Utopia with oranges and jalapenos, and compliments the special on its wonderful curves. The stack of rice on Ted's plate slowly tumbles as he slips a fork around its edges. Alex mixes his rice with the adequate slaw, and its sauce offers affable company for the rice. A well-portioned pastiche of innards, the jalapeno pesto spreads evenly throughout the flavour of the wrap, the subtle cheese trembles underneath the omni-prevalent sauce. Usually in the twelve-thirteen monetary range, the special rings in at a satisfying ten ninety-nine. Both men take a warm bath in their minds.

Ted returns to taste a few more offerings, such as the spicy Merguez lamb sausage and Brie burrito, wrapped with grilled onion, lettuce, salsa and red pepper Dijon mayo. The lamb has a sharp, savoury spice, and the Brie cheese stretches out to meet your lip, the Dijon mayo a light thrill underneath all the main, assertive ingredients. The “Goucho” burrito is a marinated medium rare cow with sautéed mushrooms, grilled onions, lettuce, chimichurri sauce, and feta tucked down spine. The mushrooms may have created a soggy ecosystem given enough time, but the men were steadfast in their jawing efforts, and made each bite count. Rather than settle with the slaw, Ted chose a light salad that he preferred. The 'AHH! Sauce' makes a triumphant return, there are many high fives. It turns out 4pm is the perfect time to munch many a burrito in Utopia, which was nearly empty on a gorgeous day, dazzling sunshine through its front windows.

Comments

• April 16, 2010, Emily Killin writes: I'll have to try other places than just the Big Fat Burrito now! Amazing work guys!

Editor's Note: Be mindful that this review contains spoilers.

It is one of life’s greatest frustrations that resolutions are drawn out over time rather than delivered in moments of sudden realization. Only in the most contained situations – in theatres and in stadiums – do we get to live out our dreams of dramatic endings and absolute results. I walked into Up in the Air expecting such an ideal world of clear-cut cause and effect and in a sense it did not disappoint. However, even if the entire film hinges on one moment that occurs 93 minutes in, and it builds up as expected towards this climax, it does not provide the anticipated escapism in its aftermath.

We do not expect romantic comedies to deal with the quotidian and mundane aspects of life. In fact, we expect them to skip over these things, or at least to reduce them all into a quick montage. But Up in the Air, while in the guise of a romantic comedy, is ultimately a film about our day to day frustrations. Rather than fuel our heightened expectations of life, it presents a story precisely about what happens when these are left unfulfilled and we still have to get up the next morning.

The film’s main character, Ryan Bingham, fires people for a living. He spends most of his year travelling through the United States, handing out farewells and compensation packages on behalf of bosses who cannot bear to do it themselves. What seems like a nightmare for most people is ideal for Ryan, who thrives off air travel, hotels, and the sparse living and loneliness that comes with them. He keeps his possessions to a minimum, cuts all unnecessary ties to fellow humans, and frequently runs self-help seminars to convince people to take up his lifestyle. A monk for the modern world, Ryan begins Up in the Air thinking himself the happiest man alive, and the rest of the plot is ostensibly a journey toward realizing how wrong he is.

Ryan’s world is turned upside down by the appearance of two women, Natalie Keener and Alex Goran. The former is a precocious up and comer who sets about revolutionizing Ryan’s company. She proposes that they begin to fire people over webcam, rendering useless the 322 travel days a year that Ryan cherishes. While Natalie threatens Ryan by putting his nomadic lifestyle at risk, Alex causes problems precisely by affirming it. Ryan and Alex meet in a hotel bar, spend the night together, and then compare travel schedules to see when they will be in the same city again. The similarities are not stated subtly: “think of me as yourself, only with a vagina,” Alex tells Ryan.

The way the relationship between the three is supposed to evolve is obvious from the beginning: Alex helps Ryan realize how boring his life is. Natalie’s youthful optimism then convinces Ryan to date and ultimately marry Alex, thus proving that even the most lost human beings have a soul mate waiting for them somewhere. Meanwhile, Natalie begins a fruitful career by restructuring Ryan’s company, which coincidentally allows him to spend time at home with his new family. Maybe Natalie finds her own soul mate as well.

This plot structure is familiar to anyone who has seen a romantic comedy. In these films, everyone deserves and receives the same fate, the same form of happiness based on putting human relationships over everything else. Every romantic comedy will teach you two basic life lessons: that nothing is more important than love, and that once you realize this fact you won’t have trouble finding it. Ryan, who disdains all human relations and preaches about the necessity of complete self-sufficiency, is thus the perfect candidate for romantic comedy conversion, and Up in the Air seemingly sets up the pieces for a traditional outcome. The film builds to its climactic moment, but then, instead of witnessing a heartfelt ending, we find out that Alex is married with kids and wants nothing from Ryan except for hotel sex.

The fact that the pieces fall so differently than expected is not merely a whim on the part of the writers. A trick is played on the audience, but only if we are willing to stereotypically fill in the blanks of Alex’s life, which we are mostly kept in the dark about. We do not know what her job is, why she travels so much, or anything about her life at home. We see her through Ryan and Natalie’s eyes, and we imagine that she must be falling for Ryan like he falls for her. It is assumed that Ryan is the only one of the two who needs to change and that Alex is only waiting for him to do so. When we discover the awful truth we are only stripped of our unfounded expectations. Instead of moving us further into the magic world of film, Up in the Air’s climax jolts us, and Ryan, back into reality. Alex reminds us that life is not a movie, and that we were naïve to ever believe it could be.

Yet even when the film takes this unexpected turn it does not surrender to unadulterated pessimism. The film ends with two contradictory scenes. First, a montage of employees who have just been fired, all speaking about their families and the hope they provide. Then right after we find Ryan staring at the departure chart in an airport, perhaps about to follow Natalie’s advice to use his air miles and “pick a place and go,” or perhaps merely preparing for another business trip. In either case he ends by accepting his nomadic lifestyle again. If one emphasizes the first scene, the film sticks to the romantic comedy message: love and companionship remain the be-all-end-alls of life, and Ryan becomes a tragic case of what happens when we don’t find either. But this is not necessarily the correct reading. Which of the characters shown at the end is the audience meant to relate to: the unemployed men and women who at least have their family to go home to, or the prosperous but lonely Ryan?

If we stick to the first reading, Up in the Air ultimately blames Ryan for realizing too late that his life is dreary and meaningless. The rest of the film, though, tries hard to create sympathy for Ryan. Beyond the fact that the ultra-charming George Clooney does his best to bring out the likeable aspects of the character, Ryan himself does his part by performing the requisite romantic-comedy heroic act: when he realizes that Alex is the way out of his lonely existence he spontaneously travels to Chicago to see her, thus setting up the disappointing climactic moment. By all rules of genre and Hollywood justice – where recognizing the problem is the first step, and then proving it in an over-the-top manner is the final one – Ryan deserves a happy ending. The audience is meant to relate to, or at least sympathize with Ryan throughout the movie, and this is no less true at the end. However at that point of the film, doing so requires swallowing a message far different than what appeared to be coming. Instead of finding out that dreams do come true, we are told that most of the time things don’t change, and that if we do attempt to radically change things we will receive blank stares and rejection.

Up in the Air’s ending is not just an attempt to fuck with the audience, nor a misguided attempt at artistry, precisely because Ryan’s character is treated sympathetically. Like in all good romantic comedies, Ryan is the lost character who gets found and this makes the anti-climax distressing; when Ryan gets rejected, the audience (or maybe just me) is enraged at Alex. The movie itself, though, rightly does not pass judgment on her, because what would be truly reckless is for her to leave her husband and kids for Ryan. “What do you want?” she asks Ryan after her real life is revealed. When he does not respond she continues, “You don’t even know what you want.” But Ryan does know; the problem is that he also knows that he cannot ask for it. So instead of selfishly demanding that Alex start a new life with him he goes back to work, back to circling the globe and living in hotels. In the final scene, even if he can fly for free to any destination he sees on the departure board, Ryan remains trapped in the life he created for himself.

This is what is ultimately so remarkable about the film, and so different from what should have happened if it followed the romantic comedy structure: from beginning to end, almost nothing changes. One could argue that all the characters come to know themselves better, but empirically, in terms of their lives, they end up where they started off: same jobs, same friends (or lack thereof), same lives.

The only character that does change is Natalie, and her case is quite indicative. She begins the film having chosen love over her career and Omaha over the big city lights. By the end, though, she has been dumped and accepted a job offer in San Francisco. Her end result is yet another distortion of romantic comedy expectations. Natalie moves for a boy, as she says – she chooses intimacy over the long-distance, love over all rationality – and for her efforts is rewarded, like Ryan, with heartbreak. Yet unlike Ryan, Natalie is young enough to change. The job she takes in San Francisco is the one she could have taken right after graduating had it not been for her decision to move with her boyfriend. After being the great idealist of the film, she leaves Omaha and it is as if the whole affair never happened.

Natalie’s change is precisely what assures that everything else in Up in the Air remains unaltered. It is also the change that takes place in the viewer, who moves from grandiose expectations for all the characters to a realization that the final outcome is the only realistic one. In both cases the film does all it can to disprove the romantic comedy ideal, and by all accounts it succeeds. None of the characters ends up happy in the ideal sense (Alex especially has problems if she describes her affair with Ryan as “an escape”). Instead, they go through life on the unremarkable paths marked and treaded for them. The film makes clear that these rarely lead to the highest peaks of joy and happiness, but it does not suggest that the characters will be miserable. A hope remains for them, as for the unemployed people at the end of the film, to be content in spite of the fact that things have not worked out as expected. The two final scenes of the film ultimately show the similarities between the film’s characters, all of whom, in the face of unfulfilled expectations, still have to move on with their lives.

In the end, Up in the Air does not outright deny the romantic comedy message – as Ryan says to his brother-in-law, “life’s better with company” – but it does not pretend like any of it will come easily, according to plan, or to everyone who wants it. It does not even claim it is necessary for all to have, since Ryan ends up alone but seemingly satisfied. It leaves us with no expectations, and no suggestions either.

Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that in contrast to stories like Cinderella or Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” where the main characters see great changes in their lives, Hamlet is a play where nothing changes. One never really finds out whether the ghost is actually Hamlet’s father, whether Claudius is the murderer, or if Hamlet himself will be punished in the afterlife for any of his actions; the events of the play are for the most part inconclusive as to what they mean. Vonnegut claims that this makes Hamlet truer to life than other stories because it recognizes a simple truth: that “we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

Up in the Air upsets us because it disrupts our sense of what should be good and bad news. There is no sudden upward shift in fortune for any of the characters, and furthermore the film is littered with people who mean well and get nothing but hardship in return. But it is silly to expect magnificent change in our lives, or grand and just consequences from our actions. Life is not a movie, and it is naïve to think it ever will be. At most it meanders along, offering hints to what the next move should be, but never conclusive answers, and certainly not ribbon-tied resolutions.

In a year when dramas, not comedies, provided the best escapism for viewers – be it to other world in Avatar or other time periods in Inglorious Basterds – Up in the Air offers a striking dose of realism. It pulls the rug out from under the characters and the audience. It tempts both with an offer of great escape, only to reveal that there is none to be found. In doing so, though, it provides a twisted kind of hope and comfort for worried times. Perhaps once we stop trying to escape from our lives, we’ll actually start enjoying them.

You may remember Dan Perjovschi from last month’s piece: Illustration Proclamation: Gary Taxali and Dan Perjovschi.  After writing that piece, I decided to go down to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto to meet Perjovschi and tell him about the uproar that Libeskind’s Crystal caused after its grand opening in June 2007.  By introducing myself to Perjovschi and giving him a copy of this article, I was hoping to add my voice to maelstrom of information that Perjovschi would condense into his cartoon installation.  The illustrations for this article are a selection of the works that Perjovschi produced for Late News, which is currently installed in the ROM’s Roloff Benny gallery. Late News will be on display until August 15^th 2010.

The controversy surrounding the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal (henceforth the Crystal) at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has focused too closely on the building itself, its spaces and materials.  I will argue that the Crystal represents a commitment to a global commercial culture, and I will consider how this commitment has affected the way objects are displayed in the ROM.  Until now, the controversy surrounding the Crystal has been focused mostly on the design of the building, and the consequences of that design for the collections housed by the ROM.  I will review these controversies and clarify their relevance to what I see to be the more pressing issue: that the Crystal evidences our government’s priorities regarding the strategies that it has taken toward promoting Canadian culture.  These priorities are reflected in both the design of the Crystal and the artifacts that it contains, and represent the most controversial aspect of the Crystal.  These priorities are the aggrandizement of Toronto’s retail culture and the redefinition of the ROM’s collections in accordance with an aesthetic suitable to consumer culture.

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at the Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

The Crystal is the centerpiece of a $256 million dollar renovation project, which included the refurbishing of most of the ROM’s existing galleries and the expansion of the ROM store and restaurants (Browne, 142, 143).  The Crystal cost $135 million, and replaced the Terrace Galleries, which were built in 1982 (Browne, 143).  After it was decided that the Crystal would replace the Terrace Galleries, the final plans for the new building made many think that the Crystal would not be as “crystal-like” as they had thought (Browne, 141).  What many people had believed would be a translucent building, clad in opaque or semi-translucent materials, was revealed to be covered mostly in anodized aluminum (Ibid.).  After this change in plans, the media coverage surrounding the renovation focused mostly on design issues.

The two critics who have hitherto determined the agenda of issues surrounding the design of the Crystal are Lisa Rochon and Mark Kingwell.  Lisa Rochon writes for the arts and entertainment section of the Globe and Mail, and published the first and most dramatic of many articles condemning the Crystal.  Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, and has written and spoken about the Crystal in a variety of different forms and settings.  Their focus has been on the decadence of the architectural style, and the poor quality of the interior design. Rochon mentions the three elements of the Crystal that have dominated the controversy surrounding the new building in her article “The Crystal Sheds no Light”: the change to the exterior cladding from some unspecified translucent material to anodized aluminum; the stark, impractical interior of the Crystal; and the arrogance of the design and its mastermind, Daniel Libeskind (R1).  The first of these three issues (the change from glass to aluminum) does not go beyond a criticism of the Crystal’s design to consider the role of the crystal in defining Toronto’s cultural landscape.  Rochon’s article is something of a straw man, but deserves to be recognized for a few reasons.

Rochon turns the Crystal into a pseudo-event, making Torontonians believe that they are being made privy to the sly dealings of Libeskind’s design studio, which dupes its clients with flashy model diamonds only to build massive gray geodes in their place (R1).  Criticizing Libeskind and the ROM’s staff for not understanding that a glass building would not work for protecting precious, light-sensitive artifacts from Canadian weather is meant to make important decision-makers look thoughtless.   Belittling important public figures with pithy remarks can be damaging to the public’s engagement with the institutions that define Toronto’s cultural landscape.  Richard D. Anderson has argued that political participation is negatively affected by mudslinging (38), and it is plausible to assume that representing important cultural decision makers as flakey and irresponsible may have a similar effect on participation in Toronto’s main-stream institutionalized culture.

The use of aluminum on the outside of the Crystal has persisted as a theme in criticism of the ROM, and has distracted from other issues. When media sources set the agenda of issues surrounding a topic in an irresponsible way, the public discourse around that topic suffers (Anderson, 36).  Rochon’s criticism is an example of sensational journalism. Her work has contributed to an inappropriate agenda of issues surrounding the Crystal controversy, and to a demeaning misrepresentation of important cultural decision-makers.

The importance of having a star architect involved in the Crystal project is an issue much closer to the controversy that I wish to bring to the fore.  Mark Kingwell summarizes this issue well, asking: “are the monumental conceptual works [like the Crystal] living up to the responsibility of public money and public attention, or are they large-scale con games feeding the self-indulgence of a new breed of installation artists, the architect as seer?” (43).  Kingwell notes that Toronto is seeking to be noticed globally as a culturally significant city (57).   The audacity of buildings like the Crystal conveys the dynamism and energy that a lively city should possess.

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

In contrast to the supposed link between Libeskind’s style and the cultural dynamism our city needs, Kingwell has pointed out several other consequences of the forces of innovation at work in the Crystal.  Kingwell notes that the interior of the Crystal makes displaying objects difficult because all the walls in the Crystal are slanted (60).  Rochon has also criticized the interior of the Crystal as being disorienting and bleak (R1).  And this is not an unfounded criticism. I’ve found that the lack of right angles in the Crystal makes it hard to orient myself, and the combination of bright white walls and florescent lighting can easily give you a headache.  The attention that the Crystal and Libeskind brought to Toronto was privileged over making a practical space that is pleasant to be in.

The interior space of the Crystal is relevant to more than the artifacts and visitors who will inhabit it.  The privilege given to the grandeur and profile of the Crystal and its maker over the functionality of the space is a sign of a broader shift in focus for Toronto’s cultural institutions. Barbra Jenkins explains that the Crystal is evidence of the municipal government’s effort to attract creative workers to Toronto (170).  Creative workers being that group of well educated workers, so important for the production of intellectual property, who make up the core of any advanced commercial economy according to Richard Florida’s economic theories (4, 5).  New, awe-inspiring architecture will raise the standard of living in Toronto by adding to its cultural life (Jenkins, 178).

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

Rather than simply acting as a tourist attraction, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the ROM is designed to act as the centerpiece of a lively creative community; which will attract intelligent, well-educated workers looking for a city that can accommodate their interests. A high standard of living may help bring innovative people to Toronto, boosting the creative core of the city’s economy (Jenkins, 178).  Jenkins expands on criticisms that only pay attention to the design of the Crystal. Jenkins takes into consideration the relation of the Crystal to economic policy and she explains how the Crystal may not help foster local music and other independent arts sectors; seeing as a new building will produce very few (if any) new jobs for cultural workers  (174, 176, 182).  Jenkins has touched upon the fact that the Crystal is evidence that mainstream institutional culture has been privileged over other forms of culture that could also help Toronto develop as a creative city.  I will consider further what kind of cultural scene is being created and promoted in Toronto.

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

By focusing on the building itself, critics have mostly ignored the significance of the strategies that the government has adopted in an effort to achieve a higher standard of living in Toronto.  Those strategies are a commitment to building on a massive scale; massive in terms of monies and the number of projects being undertaken.  The significance of those strategies being that Toronto’s most valuable cultural institution has become a grandiose performance of power designed to pander to the desires of a monied elite.  The Crystal is more a display of wealth that seeks to establish a relationship with a new global citizenship who move in a space occupied only by the rich, rather than a place focused on communicating with Canadians in a context that is designed to appreciate their unique perspectives.  The first aspect of this criticism must be understood in light of the Crystal’s place within Toronto’s retail landscape.  The second aspect of this criticism relies on an appreciation of how ROM CEO William Thorsell’s approach to appealing to a global culture-seeking community has compromised the museum’s ability to orient its exhibits with the aim of engaging with the unique cultural perspectives of Torontonians and other Canadians.

The Crystal coalesces two post-millennium architectural trends.  The first is that the new museums – like the Crystal addition and other museums designed by star architects – have come to define a space of aesthetic discourse that often seeks to defy the specificity of political or social places in favor of expressing commonalities that transcend political, maybe even temporal, specificity (Becker, 157).  Carol Becker explains how the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain and international Biennales are often examples of how the space of Western aesthetic discourse can find its place in any country in the world (157).  Becker is keen to note that the people who occupy these spaces are often wealthy Westerners who, having the luxury of following these transnational sites of contemplation form place to place, “take the best from each location and move on” (159).

The second trend in post-modern architecture evidenced by the Crystal is the fluidity of the transition between urban context and the built space of a structure.  Fredric Jameson outlines this phenomenon in his 1991 book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  The elucidation that Jameson tries to convey is best understood as an opposition between modern building techniques and some characteristics of recent commercial structures.  Where modern architects attempted to create buildings that existed beside and despite hectic urban spaces, the postmodern structure aims to join with and replicate the urban environment (Jameson, 81).  Jameson makes his point about the nature of commercial structures by considering malls, in particular the Eaton Center in Toronto, while specifically excluding buildings by Gehry, which are similar to the Crystal (80, 81).  Jameson excludes buildings by Gehry in favor of buildings more closely linked to the new scale and pace of contemporary capitalism.  However, the distinction between the Eaton Centre and the Crystal seems less drastic in light of a few similarities.

The narrative that the ROM has sought to impose on its visitors has shifted to the exterior rather than the interior. Instead of being focused exclusively on the gallery spaces, the ROM’s new addition has been spatially oriented in relation to Bloor Street to create a second narrative that exists beside and despite the galleries.  The Crystal is what William Thorsell has devised to bridge “the moat on Bloor” (i.e. the old terrace galleries) (Browne, 138).  To whom is Thorsell reaching out?  The answer is: the ROM’s neighbors on Bloor, the retail giants.  Kelvin Browne notes in his book Bold Visions that Thorsell had imagined the ROM to be “not exclusively about the housing of objects, or the educational use of them, but about creating an institution that people want to visit perhaps for no other reason than that it’s a pleasant spot to have lunch” (139).  Browne’s assessment emphasizes Thorsell’s desire to blur the boundary between the commercial strip and the museum.  Not only has Thorsell moved the front entrance of the ROM to Bloor street, but he has also included street level access to the ROM store and put the entrance to C5 (the ROM’s five–star restaurant) in the Crystal’s courtyard, before any of the gallery spaces. Libeskind even acknowledges a common attitude taken toward the museum space: to replicate in miniature all aspects of nature or culture (and in the case of the ROM, both) (Browne, 149).  The ROM manages not to leave out any aspect of western culture, and, much like the Eaton Centre, recreates all aspects of the urban experience in miniature.

It is clear that the ROM needs to make extra money because of cuts to its operating budget (Jenkins, 182).  But because so much effort has been put into the façade of the Crystal and so much emphasis on the products that lie directly within its entrance, it has becomes obvious that the ROM is now a location designed for one–stop shoppers from around the world.  By investing so much money in the Crystal and the other high–profile renovations in proximity to the ROM (The Gardener Museum, The Royal Conservatory of Music) the municipal government has added to a plan to revitalize Bloor Street that has been an ongoing project for years (Hume, A9).  The commercial heart of Toronto, Yorkville and Bloor west of Yonge, has begun to spread into the museum. Monumental museum architecture of the twenty-first century has become a hallmark of commercial space in Toronto.  The clothing brand and the museum brand have become spaces that reoccur from place to place throughout the world, and Toronto is no different.

In order to examine the similarity between the Crystal’s interior spaces and certain aspects of the transnational art scene, as described by Becker, it is important to consider Thorsell’s vision of the ROM’s permanent galleries.  Elucidating these similarities will help determine the extent to which the Crystal has been used to align the ROM with both globalized commercial and aesthetic interests.  Thorsell has decided that the ROM should be devoid of any narratives that “dumb down” the ROM’s collections, and instead to privilege the objects, letting each artifact speak for itself (Browne, 139).  This vision has lead to the demolition of the award–winning Dynamic Earth Gallery, and resulted in fewer labels and more artifacts throughout the ROM’s galleries.  Thorsell believes the ROM’s collection should be one that caters to an adult audience, and these changes reflect that belief (Browne, 139).

Illustrations by Dan Perjovschi | From Late News at Institute of Contemporary Culture | Courtesy of the Artist

Thorsell’s aversion to narrative seems shallow seeing as the ROM has exchanged the interior narrative of the traditional didactic museum space for an external narrative that functions in conversation with Bloor Street and a wider commercial community.  The Louvre of nineteenth–century France opened its doors in a display of grandeur that enabled Parisians to situate themselves within in a narrative of cultural development that was outlined in a progression of gallery spaces (Duncan, 306).  This opening also signaled a political development: a nation–wide democratic system within which the public was finally privy to the knowledge and treasures of the King  (Duncan, 307).  It is implied that these Parisians played a role in the narrative established throughout the Louvre’s galleries by the very fact of their admittance (Duncan, 307).  The Crystal opens the walls of the ROM in a display of grandeur that allows Torontonians to situate themselves within in a narrative of commercial culture that is defined by the unmistakable concentration of wealth in the area surrounding the ROM.  This opening signaled our participation in a global capitalist economic system in that the centerpiece of our new retail strip finally aligns us with the wealth and stature of other metropolises.  That so much wealth is concentrated in one place mocks that idea that everyone is admitted to this performance.

The Crystal is a political act through which Torontonians have consented to the centrality of consumerism in their new creative city.  The exclusion of technologically savvy galleries as well as those focused on youth education suits this new consumer hot spot nicely.  An internal narrative of cultural development is not needed for a museum whose façade acts as the central point of a commercial arcade spanning three city blocks.  The objects return to the status of treasures displayed in order to satisfy our way of seeing; objects to be ranged over, not penetrated and deciphered.

Arguably the most pressing controversy surrounding the Crystal is whether the Ontario government has taken the correct approach to achieving the vivacity of cultural life in Toronto that will attract young and well educated workers to our city.  Jenkins has been keen to observe this, and to the extent to which Kingwell and Rochon have noticed the emphasis on surface evident in the Crystal, they too have seen aspects of its place in a larger economic culture.  Jenkins does shift away from a focus on the design of the ROM, but her mention of Toronto’s local music scene falls short of a more in depth consideration of the link between the Crystal and the profile and centrality of Toronto’s retail culture in the city’s larger cultural landscape (174, 176, 182).

To what extent does the Crystal represent a commitment to branding Toronto’s Bloor Street as the cultural center of Toronto for the sake of aggrandizing participation in a transnational retail culture?  Are Torontonians content to gawk at the neutral gorgeousness of our mute treasure collection, which speaks in the language of surface and the desire for significant form, for the sake of satisfying William Thorsell’s desire for a more mature ROM?  This controversy will determine how much more of this place, our city and the cultural institutions that define it, we are willing to sacrifice to the space of Western global commerce and transnational aesthetics.  I believe that the ROM evidences the role our government believes culture should play in a political strategy to position Toronto and as globally significant economic center.  Determining whether our representatives have chosen the correct role for culture to play (the role a massive work of art and a nice place to shop) in a strategy designed to make Toronto relevant to a global community of intelligent young workers is an important aspect of the crystal controversy.

Sources:

Anderson Jr., Richard D. “The Place of the Media in Popular Democracy.” Critical Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Politics and Society 12.4 (1998). 481–500. Print.

Becker, Carol. “The Romance of Nomadism: A Series of Reflections.” Art Journal 58.2 (Summer 1999): 22–29. Print.

Browne, Kelvin. Bold Visions. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 2008. Print.

Duncan, Carol. “From Princely Gallery to the Public Art Museum: The Louvre Museum and the National Gallery, London.” Representing the Nation: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1999. 304–331. Print.

Florida, Richard. “The Transformation of Everyday Life.” The Rise of The Creative Class. New York: Basic Book, 2003. 1–17. Print.

Hume, Christopher. “ROM Plaza will Bring Bloor St. New Life.” Toronto Star. 25 Aug. 2007. A9. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Columbia University Press: 1993. 62–92. Print.

Jenkins, Barbara. “Toronto’s Cultural Renaissance.” Canadian Journal of Communications 30.2 (2005). 169–186. Print.

Kingwell, Mark. “Monumental-Conceptual Architecture.” Opening Gambits: Essays on Art and Philosophy. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008. 41–61. Print.

Rochon, Lisa. “Crystal Scatters no Light.” The Globe and Mail. 2 June. 2007: R1. Print.

I’m leaning toward “no.”

Another thing that I’m somewhat conflicted about is how flagrant I should be about overtly criticizing the festival – which I would very much like to do – when I am already aware that this recap is supposed to be this month’s cover story. When a magazine puts something on its cover, does that immediately necessitate glowing support for that thing? I wonder if my general opinion of Canadian Music Week being that I saw many amazing artists, but that the festival itself is not particularly effective is inappropriate.

In this case, I’m going to say “no” again. I don’t think that it’s inappropriate.

In an issue of Steel Bananas that sees its one of its own writers turning on his fellow contributors in a spectacular display of both dissent and solidarity at once, I’m feeling bold enough to say that Canadian Music Week is a good festival, though far from being a great one, cover be damned. Thanks for the jolt of ballsiness, Mr. Wong. I throw my infinite praise behind the many fantastic artists that I saw over the past few days: Yukon Blonde, The Balconies (pictured on the aforementioned cover), Zeus, Jason Collett, Bahamas, P.S. I Love You, Diamond Rings, The Besnard Lakes, Parlovr, The Darcys, The Body Electric, Hemingway and Jane’s Party, you are all fabulous. Some of you are, admittedly, friends of mine and two of you even write for Steel Bananas; nevertheless, you made Canadian Music Week fantastic, much, I’m sure, to Canadian Music Week’s chagrin.

Last year, in a preview of the festival I wrote that “It would certainly seem... that the organizers of the twenty-sixth annual Canadian Music Week festival and conference don’t want you to come to their event at all,” and looking back that is a statement that I still stand by. More often than not, a festival is only as good as the artists that appear, and if we are thinking in terms of this, Canadian Music Week is a very good festival, if paling more than slightly in comparison to NXNE to which it appears to be like a misguided little brother. On the whole I feel like Canadian Music Week misses the mark somewhere along the line despite itself, and I think I have a pretty good idea of where that spot on the line is.

*            *            *            *

Early Monday afternoon: I’m in a slightly more coherent headspace, though I now have no doubt that I am acquiring what will probably be a thoroughly nasty cold. Bummer. Still this article is bound to take a far stranger direction than is likely necessary as my dazed introduction set me off on a line of thinking that is fairly difficult to reverse. I am also pretty happy that I went to sleep when I did, otherwise strange and terrible things might have happened, and you might have had to read them. Trust me, it’s better off this way.

Moving right along though, I find it interesting that in my own personal Canadian Music Week experience I didn’t see all that many bands that I hadn’t seen before, and liked even fewer of the bands I hadn’t seen than I might have expected. It was a festival marked by repeated views with relatively little new talent leaking onto my radar. Unlike last year’s NXNE where I returned home with a plethora of new and exciting things to keep track of, there were only two acts at CMW that I wasn’t familiar with that I can now count myself as keeping track of.

Diamond Rings | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

First was Montreal’s Parlovr who performed on Friday night as part of the Pop Montreal showcase at the Silver Dollar. I had only heard of Parlovr in passing before and had only scoped their Myspace page the afternoon of their show – and even then only in passing – but was thoroughly impressed after they traipsed onto the stage following a face-melting performance by Kingston indie-rock two-piece P.S. I Love You, as well as solid sets by future humongoid giant superstar Diamond Rings and all-female garage rock noisemakers The Peelies. Parlovr are a three-piece band of weirdos who play an odd concoction of synthy, anthemic party-power-pop, and astonishingly loud, fuzzed-out noise drawing influence heavily from 80s post-punk and new wave.

Diamond Rings | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

These guys put on a frenetic, erratic set full of energy and goofiness that counters the fist-pumping self-described “sloppy pop” that can loosely be described as sounding like Japandroids with a hard-on for Devo and Gang of Four. I was impressed by their giddy, madcap energy, their hilarious stage personae and their devotion to making party songs that only happen to be extremely noisy and strange. While I am yet to hear their self-released, self-titled debut album that came out in 2008, from what I have heard on their website, it sounds every bit as exciting, reckless and chaotic as their live set. According to their blog they are recording a new EP, which is nearing completion, and they have signed with Toronto-based Dine Alone Records, who are apparently re-releasing their record.

Yukon Blonde | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

The other serious new discovery for me, an even more important discovery than Parlovr, was found Saturday night at one of the ChartAttack showcases at the Horseshoe Tavern. Vancouver’s Yukon Blonde were easily the best band that I saw that I knew virtually nothing about at this year’s CMW. Their set was absolutely fabulous top to bottom, I was immediately enraptured by them and I as well as everyone I talked to at the venue that night could not stop raving about the west coast four-piece even before their set had ended. As it turns out, their self-titled debut record (released jointly by Nevado and Bumstead) is just as magnificent and powerful as the live set, full of sunny melodies, gorgeous harmonies and an air of nostalgic wonder.

Yukon Blonde | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

Yukon Blonde are part of a recent and increasing rise to prominence of acts who are embracing wholeheartedly the sounds and aesthetics of 60s pop and classic rock to the point where their throwback tendencies become fresh and exciting. This group of artists, which most notably includes Caribou, Zeus, Bahamas, Plants and Animals and Dr. Dog, wear their debts to the Beach Boys and the Band as badges of honor and want nothing more than to expand upon the music they admire the most, with little concern for how their influences might define them. As we all know, classic rock isn’t cool.

In a recent interview with Exclaim, Carlin Nicholson of Zeus explains, “Zeus songs are in a zone that nobody's tapped for a long time… Like, the very intentional back-up 'ooh-wa-wahs' with no fear of doing it on stage, y'know? There are a lot of angular bands that don't do that but I find that even those guys are into this stuff; even the hardest rocking dude will say 'I like the Band, I like Neil Young.' So how come no one sounds like that any more? I mean everybody I know listens to that old stuff. So where is it? Why am I not hearing any new stuff like that?" A couple of years ago that might have been true, even as far back as 2007, anyone so bold as to attempt to revive the earnest, happy-go-lucky aesthetic of the 60s in the steadfastly forward thinking 2000s would have surely been tarred and feathered by critics. In 2010, however, the idea of being less concerned with looking forward, less concerned with posturing newness for the sake of itself and instead embracing what you love the most is becoming practically and finally commonplace.

Yukon Blonde are bearded Band-loving Vancouver residents who could not stop smiling throughout their set as they sang in glorious four-part harmonies to shimmering, reverberated guitar noise. They have an easy-going, lighthearted air about them that matches perfectly with their energetic, upbeat and immediately likeable songs that evoke everything that we like about 60s music today. Their lead vocalist, Graham Jones was, very notably, wearing a Jon-Rae & the River t-shirt, which if you know me, would also know that that obviously went over very, very well with me. The Horseshoe was abuzz with “Holy Shit” on the lips of everyone previously unaware of this very exciting act.

In any case, I am very much in favor of the fact that one thing that I’m really noticing in the latter years of the 2000s and the early stages of this extremely young decade is that all of the best artists aren’t dark and brooding anymore. All of the best music made in the last three or four years has been almost invariably happy, hopeful and genuine. Also, a lot of it has been Canadian. Caribou’s Andorra, LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver, Plants and Animals’ Parc Avenue, Joel Plaskett’s Ashtray Rock, Bibio’s Ambivalence Avenue, Japandroids’ Post-Nothing and Dirty Projectors’ Bitte Orca are all extremely indicative of this. Even when the good tunes have been on the darker side, as in Jon-Rae Fletcher’s Oh, Maria and Chad VanGaalen’s Soft Airplane they are undeniably genuine and sincere. I am looking forward to seeing this trend continue.

Jason Collet with Zeus | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

CMW was kicked off with the most magnificent display of this movement on Wednesday night at Lee’s Palace with the Bonfire Ball Revue, a collaborative performance by Jason Collett, Zeus and Bahamas. Instead of the usual fare of putting one band on after the other in any kind of succession, the artists here all remained on stage for nearly the entirety of the three-hour show in front of a jam-packed Lee’s. Zeus, in addition to playing almost all of their recently released debut record Say Us, also served as backing band for Collett as they have now for several years, as well as for Bahamas, which is the stage name of Afie Jurvanen, former sideman for both Collett and Feist. All three acts alternated songs with no set pattern so the show was always fresh as the audience was always in the dark as to who would get the next song.

Zeus, fabulous as always – I believe this is the fifth time I’ve seen them – are never tiring; their stage presence is absurdly powerful, as is their tone which is so enormous and magnificent that it shouldn’t be legal. Collett, fresh off of his own new record, the decidedly more band-centric Rat a Tat Tat (produced by Carlin Nicholson and Mike O’Brien of Zeus) was charming and exciting as usual. The man is a born performer, an excellent singer, and a charismatic personality who also happens to be one hell of a great songwriter. Collett is easily one of the best live acts around because he is quite simply a total package – he can do it all. Bahamas, however, I had never seen before and was very deeply impressed. I’ve heard his recordings before and they are very good, but I was not prepared for just how smooth and soulful that Bahamas sound really is. The understated, lighthearted Jurvanen has a powerful voice and a relaxed, easy-going sound that would nothing more than to be likened to its project’s namesake. The Bonfire Ball was really a show I am glad to have seen, it was an original, fresh take on the live concert format which not only demonstrated the musical prowess of its participants, but also helped to solidify the growing sense of community within the Canadian music of today.

The Balconies | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

The majority of the other shows that I caught at CMW, however, were from artists that I am already quite familiar with, but nevertheless added a lot to my festival experience. The Balconies, who actually followed Yukon Blonde immediately at the Horseshoe Tavern on Saturday night and whose vocalist/guitarist Jacquie Neville is currently featured on our cover, were stellar as always with their catchy, technically fantastic and very original pop. I like the Balconies because not only are they fun and very good performers, but are also very clever, talented songwriters. Their sound is not easy to pin down. They have been getting a lot of very well-deserved buzz around Toronto these days and their fabulous self-titled debut record has been getting a lot of very well-deserved good reviews. Like Jason Collett, the Balconies are a package deal; they can do it all.

The Balconies | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

In other news, local noise-rockers The Darcys (featuring recent addition to the SB staff, Dave Hurlow on bass) made their first performance without lead vocalist Kirby Best at the Audio Blood Media showcase at the El Mocambo. Best had left the group only a few weeks before the festival, allowing guitarist Jason Couse to step up to the front. All in all, I would say that despite the band’s obvious anxiety about the situation, it went extremely well and in many ways bested their previous incarnation. Being down to only two guitar players as opposed to three has opened up the Darcys sound considerably, rendering it clearer and more direct as opposed to their usual wall of impenetrable noise. Also, Couse as vocalist was forced to stick to guitar where he usually alternated between guitar and organ, which allowed his guitar playing and that of Mike La Riche to really come to the forefront with very positive results.

The Balconies | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

In the end, however, Canadian Music Week is a strange sort of entity; it really wants to be as relevant, as comprehensive and as cool as NXNE, but it never reaches that mark. Notably, this occurs in the sense that CMW has no clue how to market itself. Their posters usually boast the names of artists that would never in a million years appeal to anyone in their core audience, with the likes of Hedley garnering the largest font this year, along with Our Lady Peace. At least this year Constantines, Joel Plaskett and Jason Collett had their names near the top of the poster, last year the quote-unquote “headliners” of the festival included Buckcherry, Default, Hinder and Papa Roach. I would assume that CMW is targeting a similar crowd as NXNE, and if my assumption is correct, then why in God’s name do they make their festival so severely unappealing on the surface. It’s a good festival, but I will never understand how they imagine they might attract people who bought wristbands for NXNE by dangling Hedley in their faces. It’s actually baffling to me. Aside from most of the bigger shows that they put on, CMW is on the whole a pretty well-run and interesting operation with a lot of artists on the bill that would have been well worth seeing.

Slash | Photo by Matthew Filipowich

Though I must say that in general CMW is pretty far away from the pulse of Canadian music at large. I will never understand why they insist on booking the most expensive people they can to be keynote speakers instead of anyone who might have anything interesting to say about Canadian music. Last year’s calamitous keynote by Gene Simmons apparently taught CMW’s organizers nothing and so this year they decided to book someone only slightly more relevant than the utterly obsolete Simmons, in none other than Slash, who allegedly proceeded to discuss nothing in his speech except his recent autobiography. Hoo-rah. CMW’s apparently unwillingness to get in touch with Canadian music on anything but a superficial level I find rather distasteful. Almost all of the performances I saw that were noteworthy were part of showcases organized by entities outside of the festival or were concerts, such as the Bonfire Ball that would have happened even if the festival hadn't slapped its name on them. Fortunately Pop Montreal, ChartAttack and other such organizations have a lot more sense and were able to knock a little bit of taste into the typically uninspired festival.

There is a lot to be said about Canadian music. Our country has produced some of the most unique and sincere music of the past decade; our artists have been doing amazing work in many genres and fields, and many of them have gone on to great international recognition. There is much to be proud of, many albums worth noting and many movements worth praising – many of which were demonstrated at this year’s CMW. The main thing that Canadian Music Week demonstrated, however, was that even though we are doing many groundbreaking and original things, we are still very much a nation with an inferiority complex. Canadian Music Week is a festival with a lot of potential that continuously sells itself short when it could do amazing things. Instead it chooses to be only a few notches better than the Junos, which attempts to award the best of Canadian music, but is the sort of entity that views Avril Lavigne as being edgy. We have made great strides to remedy this and recognize out true artists who are doing wonderful work, unfortunately our own cultural stigmas are still haunting us and are proving extremely difficult to shake.

Sometimes the hilarious can turn serious fast. A case being brought to the Ontario Court of Appeals contains all the necessary elements for comedy: twins, a mistaken identity, lots of wine and sex. Such a set-up has turned ugly, as bitter questions of consent now pollute the otherwise humourous scenario known as The Old Switcheroo. In an unspecified southwestern Ontario city or town, an unspecified woman had sex with what she thought was her long-time lover. Turns out it was the lover's identical twin brother, who is now claiming that she gave proper consent. I do not wish to dwell on the moral aspects of the case, I do not condemn or condone any party. Instead, I would like to explore the Switcheroo and its multifarious appearances. The Switcheroo is a manifestation of the chaotic nature of sex.

In an ideal world, the motion of human sexuality would be harmonious and natural. We would all 'come together' in a unified field of orgasm and good times. The notion of spontaneous flow of sex, flower power love-ins, and guilt-free Grindr hookups is utopian in conception. This is a fantasy that is not represented even in our most fantastical pornographies. Truth is, the principles of chaos rule the sexual realm just as much as they do in modern physics and bad movies. Dissonance in the bedroom (and the bathroom and the chapel after hours) is driven by the desire for Sovereignty. The struggle for Sovereignty is a prime motivator for much strife and comedy. I lean towards Georges Bataille's definition of Sovereignty as “the enjoyment of possibilities that utility doesn't justify (utility being that whose end is productive activity).” It is an enjoyment of life, it is the ownership of your own life, untethered from either future or past. It is what the sages call Samadhi. It is certainly present in all instances of the Sexual Switcheroo. It is transgressive and transcendental. As such, it is considered a scandal to those on the lower rung of consciousness and consent.

The sex scandal is our oldest type of scandal. It will never go away. A look at the headlines of any given tabloid will reveal the basic agonies and alienations of the human condition. Even going back before the mass re/production of popular texts, the basic discord of life (life being the basic discord of sex) is found in the literature of the peasant class. Take for example the 'loathly lady' myth found in minstrels' songs as far back as the 10th century and in oral folk-tales before that. The story, best remembered in Arthurian romances and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, goes like this:

A knight, fraught with chivalry, rapes a wench in a wheatfield. He is given a year to answer the question that sizzled Sigmund Freud: What do women really want? After months of searching, he finds an ugly bitch of a woman who claims to know the answer, but she won't give it up unless he marries her. So he does. It turns out that what women want most is Sovereignty. Remember this, as it is going to come up again in my article (it is in the title after all). In this context, Sovereignty means autonomy, authority, and rule. Basically, a woman wants to hold dominion over the man. In popular vernacular, she wants to wear the pants of the relationship. The story concludes with an interesting twist. The two lie together in the marriage bed, the knight is quite distraught at his chivalric obligation to pleasure his new cow of a wife. He starts with a modest kiss. Before he can go any further, she, thank god!, transforms into a smoking hot babe. She gives him the choice between being hot in the daytime and ugly at night, or vice-versa. Basically, will the wife be publicly flaunted or privately boned? The knight allows his wife to choose, he gives her the sovereignty. Because he transferred the power of choice to her, it turns out she will be beautiful at all hours of the day, forever. Win-win.

This story functions well as a myth, but should not be taken too literally. I learned this the hard way. For years I was a submissive to a series of caustic dominatrices, each one more dog-faced than the last. I never received my trophy wife. Personal gripes aside, this story is significant in that it correctly links the desire for sovereignty with the sexual Switcheroo. The Switcheroo is a very simple and popular concept. It is when someone thinks they are going to bed with one person and in actuality they have sex with someone else. There are many configurations in which this scenario can take place. The Switcheroo can be wrangled via darkness, disguise, or transformation. In all cases it has three common characteristics: 1) It is a transgressive instance in the already chaotic sexual realm, 2) It is fun for at least one party, and 3) In the transcendental moment of the Switcheroo, a divine sovereignty is experienced.

The beast-to-beauty transformation is rare in the actual world, yet rife in representation. In our day-to-day existence, the Switcheroo often takes on a prankish nature. The double-image of identical twins is often associated with the Switcheroo, though it is not always necessary. I do not have a twin, but have been involved in many devious Switcheroos. When I was in high school I had a friend who bore a close physical resemblance to me. We had similar mannerisms and way of talking. We had the same birthday. Even his name was extremely close to mine (R. Nonzen). That is where the similarities end, for he had a much stronger moral compass than I. So much stronger that he had not lost his virginity until long into adolescence. He was a dope with the ladies. So, good doppelganger that I was, I pulled the Switcheroo with him nearly almost every time I got a lady into my bedchamber. I would get the girl all good and wet, then turn off the lights and walk out. Then my friend would walk in and reap the benefits while I went to study thick tomes of Hegel. This one time we pulled the Old Switcheroo and I heard a scream coming from the other room. It turns out that the girl we had switched on did a switch herself! Double-Switcheroo! After we figured it out, we all had a good laugh and a foursome.

In those days we were not serious about ourselves at all. We experienced Sovereignty on a regular basis. So what if the ethics of it were dubious? All objects of thought, such as morality and consent, are suppressed in the moment of the illicit coital act, provided by the Switcheroo. This is a moment of Sovereignty. Enjoy it, then clean up after. Each experience is always new, so why get hung up on questions of consent?

Let's look at this recent case in Toronto from the new formation of the Switcheroo-as-Sovereignty. Every person involved was drunk. Drunkenness itself is liberating. The woman was sleeping in a bed, the man went in to sleep beside her. The woman wakes up, believes she is lying next to her lover. She initiates foreplay. The twin follows along. They have intercourse, but his body feels strange. She realizes it is not her lover, but his brother. So she stops. In my world, this would be the end of it, but now the case is on trial. Whenever a student asks me advice, I always answer, “embrace the chaos of everyday life!” That is the same advice I would give to these switched-off dupes. Remember the famous fragment of Heraclitus: “One cannot step in the same river twice.” It is not the same self, it is not the same river. Flux is constant. Updated to our discussion, the fragment reads, “one cannot have sex with the same partner twice.” Each sexual encounter is bound to be different than the last. If that is the case, what does it matter if you wind up going to bed with someone's twin brother? Embrace it as a Sovereign moment.

The Switcheroo is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It can come as a transformation from ugly to beautiful, as a switch in the dark, or from one guy to his identical twin brother. It has positive and negative aspects which manifest themselves not as inherent qualities to the Switcheroo, but as a reflection of how it is approached. If it approached as a violation of consent, that is obviously bad. If it is approached as a fun trick, it is a little better. If the Switcheroo is approached as a vehicle for transcendental Sovereignty, it is absolutely sublime. Take your pick. Try it today.

Sources:

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share; vol. III, Sovereignty.

McLean, Jesse. "Was woman duped into sex with lover's twin?." thestar.com. Toronto Star, 04/03/2010. <http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/775231--was-woman-duped-into-sex-with-lover-s-twin?bn=1>.

Robinson, T.M. Heraclitus. Fragments.

Picture this: you are on a train full of people and you arrive at a busy stop where many people need to change vehicles to get where they are going. You are standing right in front of the doors; when they open the sea of people standing there parts and you walk through a tunnel of humans, their strange, impatient faces turned towards you. This is not normal.

I read Proust almost exclusively in the bathtub. I like reading long books; long, dry late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century stuff like The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, and so forth. I take some sort of twisted satisfaction in hacking away at these novels a hundred pages at time, like I was engaged in some sort of classic literature pissing contest. In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s meandering six volume tome, is pretty much the holy grail of the literary pissing contest; not only is it goddamn long, it is also lacking in plot and momentum, containing long wandering passages that describe obscure impressions in minute detail, mutant run-on sentences that lead the reader far astray - it can be quite frustrating.

I tried reading Proust on the train, when I was traveling in Europe; I thought it would be romantic. It was terrible. I couldn’t focus and the lack of an engaging narrative left me re-reading passages again and again as the blurry terrain whizzed by outside. Any serious reader knows this awful feeling, the feeling of a lost explorer recognizing familiar terrain. “Wait”, he says, “I’ve seen this before.” I opted, instead to read the copy of Essential X-Men Vol. 2 that I had brought. It wasn’t very sophisticated or European, but damned if it didn’t pass the time.

What I realized, about reading Proust, is that there’s a time and place for it. For me that place is the bathtub, and the time is evening. In Search of Lost Time is like mood music, it’s ambient literature, and accordingly, when I read Proust, I light some candles, put on some instrumental music (perhaps Brian Eno or Do Make Say Think) at a low volume and get in the tub. I find that with very dry classic literature, you need to focus while reading it, really concentrate and actively process the writing. With Proust it’s almost the exact opposite, his prose is dripping! True, you still need to pay attention, but it’s also important to let the words wash over you in order to experience the full effects. Here, to illustrate the intoxicating nature of Proust’s prose, is the famous ‘Madeleines’ passage from Swann’s Way:

… I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory- this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.

I find that moments such as this are the pinnacles of In Search of Lost Time, supported by a slow moving, transient plot in between. There is a certain intimacy in these moments that I share with Marcel Proust, the long dead homosexual asthmatic writer, as I wrestle with his words in the bathtub. If I were to read Proust in public, this intimacy would be lost, or at least spoiled a bit, and that just wouldn’t do.

A lot of people read in public, right out in front of everyone else. Sometimes, when a book is extremely popular, you see it everywhere for awhile, varying faces buried between the same pages of text. Reading Life of Pi in public was a big literary trend for awhile. The summer that Angels and Demons came out, you couldn’t get on a subway car without seeing at least three people reading it. People read on the subway, they eat, watch videos on their smart phones, listen to podcasts. The one thing that people on the subway rarely do is acknowledge one another, a symptom of big city living. There’s a sociological German word, Gesselschaft (as opposed to the more community based Gemeinschaft), which applies to what I’m talking about here. I first found out about Gesselschaft in high school philosophy class. To memorize the word, I conjured the image of a bunch of gazelles hurtling down an elevator shaft. Gesselschaft seemed inherently wrong, and the falling gazelles were meant to represent humans, I guess, losing their sense of community, tumbling hopelessly in a modern industrial setting (the elevator shaft).

The other day, on the crowded Spadina streetcar coming up from Chinatown, the other passengers and I were crammed in so tight that I was pushed up behind a young lady so that the scent of her freshly washed hair (you know this smell, gentlemen, a Proustian trigger of love) overcame my olfactories. Call me a creep if you will, but you know it’s just as likely that I may have been crammed up against a homeless man with garbage dreadlocks. Any red-blooded heterosexual male is going to take some pleasure in accidentally smelling freshly washed cute girl hair… what was I supposed to do, hold my breath? So I happened to smell this girl’s hair and we got off the streetcar and I never saw her again. Gazelle fucking shaft, it’s Chinatown.

Living in a big city like Toronto, it is taken as a fact of life that you will come into close physical contact with strangers everyday. If you walk through Chinatown, you may notice that the physical space between you and other humans diminishes. Chinese people, in accordance with their urban heritage, so it seems, are more comfortable than North Americans in crowded public spaces, importing the population density of Shanghai to North America with them when they immigrate. Torontonians may feel uncomfortable shopping at Yonge and Bloor or the Eaton Center on holidays when it is busy, department store bags bumping up against all kinds of riff raff, but compared to other cultures (and this is perhaps an idea that applies to Canada on a macrocosmic level as well) we have a pretty good standard of personal space that is often taken for granted. In Japan, there are people who are paid to forcibly cram passengers into overcrowded subway trains during peak hours (I imagined that they performed this task in riot gear with plexiglass shields, but I just watched a video and its all done by hand). In Mumbai (second in population density only to Shanghai), subway trains are usually packed with more than three times their intended passengers and as a result there have been something in the range of twenty thousand deaths over the past five years from crushing and suffocation, not to mention the hundreds of pedestrians per-year that are run down by speeding buses and other vehicles in the crowded streets of that same chaotic city.

It makes a lot of sense then that so many people immigrate to Canada, a land of abundant personal space, from places like China and India where personal space is a rare luxury. Having lived in the Canadian cities of Toronto and Halifax most of my life and having not spent too much time abroad, I’ve become accustomed to this personal space that we take for granted in our little gazelle shaft here, and have developed (amongst a plethora long list) an anxiety concerning personal boundaries. When you feel crammed in amongst so many people, exposed to their sometimes ignorant, cruel and indifferent behaviour, you start to lose your faith in humanity. A friend of mine jokingly confessed to me the other day that he thought he might need to take a test to find out if he was racist. Despite the fact that he is a thoroughly intelligent, forward-thinking young man, he felt that their was some hatred for other humans inadvertently growing inside him like a tumour as a result of spending so much time on public transit. To do a quick backpedal on behalf of my friend, I think the term "racist" in the context that he used it denoted a general feeling of malice towards people outside of himself. It just so happens that we live in a city where more than half the people are of a different race, religion or cultural background than myself and my friend. This is the pitfall of the gazelle shaft; the malice you feel for other gazelles may increase proportionally to the density of gazelles you are exposed to and the time for which you are exposed to them.

With the above in mind, riding the TTC on a daily basis between rush hours with enough space to read and bob my head to a beat-heavy playlist I’ve concocted on my iPhone is a pretty luxurious experience. If you want to break down the personal barriers of the gazelle shaft, one of the few ways you can do it without outright breaching social convention is to comment on some piece of fashion that is particular to a fellow gazelle. For example ‘I like your boots’ or ‘that jacket really is a lovely shade of blue.’ Even better, however, is if the gazelle you wish to address is reading a book that you also have read. This gives you an immediate topic of conversation to work with. For this reason I have cursed myself on several occasions for not having read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book that is ubiquitously read by cute girls on public transit. At this level the book becomes a fashion accessory, something of an intellectual peacock feather. Case in point, here is a message I lifted off of the missed connections section of craigslist Toronto titled ‘Catch 22’:

"I was just stepping away from the door, you were passing me towards it.

you said to me it was a great book, i couldn't help but get caught up in your smile, and ended up beside myself in the chaos of commuting.

at a loss for words in that brief time, i said nothing of interest, but really i would have liked to tell you how beautiful you are."

Missed connections postings in Toronto, more often than anything else (with the exception perhaps of M for M encounters at the YMCA of greater Toronto), make reference to brief, or missed encounters on the subway. Why are people so hesitant to talk to each other in public? I’m certainly guilty of this awkward hesitancy to address a fellow passenger, but why?

I can see the edition of Catch 22 in question now: blue, with a cutout image in red of a WWII fighter pilot clicking his heels in mid air. This is the paperback edition that I owned in high school, that I probably leant to an ex-girlfriend somewhere along the way, which I never got back and you better believe it never got read. It’s a pretty sexy edition, eye catching, alluring. The novel as fashion accessory is an undeniable part of our culture, and perhaps one of the keys to breaking the spell of the gazelle shaft.

When I found out that JD Salinger died a few weeks ago (via the city pulse 24 news crawl on the subway), I decided to re-read The Catcher In the Rye. My understanding of Catcher In the Rye was that as the ultimate dissatisfied teenager novel, it was only so good when I was 14 because I was 14. I have extremely vivid memories of reading Catcher In the Rye on the bus, literally hiding behind it as an awkward teen. What I don’t remember is the book being so damn good. For the past few weeks I have been reading it on the subway in honour of my youthful habits, in short bursts, saving it exclusively for commuting. So far it’s been one of the greatest singular novel reading experiences of my life; I’m prematurely nostalgic to finish re-reading a novel I first read when I was 14.

The edition I own, also a relic of high school, is simple; the classic white ‘Little, Brown Books’ version with diagonal rainbow stripes in the top left corner… classically understated with quaint sophistication. I like reading Catcher In the Rye on the TTC so much because the language is simple, it’s easy to follow and, best of all, it’s about a confused young man trying to make sense of big city life and calling out all the phonies around him, creating a sort of literary vortex that mirrors they way I feel a lot of the time when I’m out in public. I’m going to miss hearing Holden Caulfield’s voice in my head when I ride the subway after I’m finished, but strangely enough, I’ll also miss the simple act of carrying around the sleek little edition I own as well; my favourite new fashion accessory. I think all of JD salinger’s works are available in these basic editions though, FYI, sort of like the universally recognizable Kurt Vonnegut editions with the big V shapes on the covers.

A couple weeks ago, I got off work and walked to the bus stop that sits across the street from my friends’ apartment. They saw me from the window, we exchanged gestures, and then the old Junction 40 rolled along and picked me up. I got a text message from my friend who had recently criticized my inability to wear simply coloured outfits (I’m a sucker for flare), congratulating me on my all grey and black attire: “Finally” it read “All Black, Simple.” Settling in on the bus, I was approached by an old acquaintance, a friend’s ex-girlfriend who I hadn’t seen in a while,.“How are you doing you-“ then, spotting my copy of Catcher In the Rye, “Catcher in the Rye reader, wow… could you be any more hipster?”

Whether she was alluding to my H&M girl jeans, navy blue galoshes bearing a lavender stripe, grey vintage pea coat (purchased at value village for $15) or rainbow striped novel, I do not know. But I will tell you one thing; if reading Catcher In the Rye on public transportation is “hipster,” you can call me (popular indie electro DJ) Steve Aioki.

Perhaps one day I will meet a gazelle on the subway who shares the same literary tastes as me, who constantly carries the sweet fragrance of freshly washed hair. Until then I am but a lone gazelle, reading Proust in the bathtub and Salinger on the bus, tumbling helplessly down an endless elevator shaft.

Such was the case with Lost And Found, the world premiere that opened the latest show in the DanceWorks series at the Harbourfront Centre. Choreographed and performed by renowned dancer Denise Fujiwara, the performance was… interesting. And as a critic I mean that with all possible connotations. The show was indeed courageous, but not one of Fujiwara’s best.

At times it was riveting, with spasmodic movements and statuary poses. And it was certainly unique in the topic it tackled - feelings of impermanence and moments of discovery, the universal feeling of being lost. Perhaps it was the vagueness of the topic, and the fragmented nature of its presentation that led to its lack of success - it’s difficult to connect to something that it so purposefully disconnected. Fujiwara moved beautifully, but as the show progressed I felt continually cut off from it. About half way through the performance I found my mind drifting.

Janieta Eyre’s costumes were certainly eye-catching though and provided a bit of comedy, a playfulness that was lost later in the piece. The awkward and elaborate pink fun-fur jacket that Fujiwara wore at the top of the show acted as big fuzzy warning that the dance was going to be… interesting. Her confined hands and backward corset (revealed under the jacket) both served to confine and emphasize the struggles of the character. At first this device was successful, but more emphasis could have been put on the dance itself rather than distracting costumes. Had she moved her hands as if they were confined, instead of having them physically trapped in pantyhose, I believe the message would have been a little clearer.

Denise Fujiwara in the premiere of her solo Lost & Found | Photo by John Lauener

And oh, the text! Why is this always the aspect that dooms a dance show? Maybe its just me, but it seems that 90% of the time when a dancer uses text or voice in their work it doesn’t possess the same energy or conviction as their physical movements. It’s as if they don’t take their voices as seriously as their bodies. The text in this performance was poignant and occasionally witty - especially with lines like: “I’m really attached to my issues” - but its delivered without the same sincerity as her movements.

The saving grace of Lost and Found was its music, provided by Philip Strong: it was surreal, it was graceful, it was perfect! Unfortunately the rest of the performance reminded me of what T.S. Eliot once said, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” Fujiwara is trying to get at something, delving into a key element of the human condition, but she hasn’t yet found the way to make it truly relatable to her audience. I found it to be an intriguing experience, but the meaning was lost to me.

Lost and Found paled in comparison to the latter show of the night, Fidelity’s Edge. The second piece was choreographed and performed by Susie Burpee, in collaboration with Dan Wild, and was absolutely breathtaking. This expression is quite literal - when Burpee held her breath on stage, the whole room anxiously waited to exhale.

Created as the companion piece to Burpee’s Mischance and Fair Fortune (2005), Fidelity’s Edge stands well on its own. The story is supposed to be an exploration of what would happen if Pryamus and Thisbe (the mythical couple from the previous show) were allowed to meet and share their lives, but in reality it’s an exploration of any common relationship. Wild and Burpee capture both the beauty of love and the less-than-charming aspects of need and heartache. It was the most evocative piece of performance art I’ve seen in the past year. It was raw, it was real, and it was playful, performed with the utmost conviction. The dynamic between Burpee and Wild was authentic and intense.

Susie Burpee and Dan Wild in Fidelity's Edge | Photo by Omer Yukseker

This was largely facilitated by the music, original works by John K Samson and Christine Fellows. These artists have also been longtime partners in music and life, adding further emotional depth to the piece. Their music expresses the journey of love, the beginnings and endings within a relationship. And its strangely domestic, relatable - nothing Hollywood here.

Trevor Schwellnus’ set was simple and perfectly reflective of any house. The pale glow of the TV bouncing off the dancers faces offered an interesting use of video in performance, much more subtle than the current fad of video projection. Instead of seeing the video, we hear while the actors see it. Tanya White’s costumes were similarly subtle and sophisticated. They had a marvelous contemporary look, but still moved gracefully with the performers.

My once drifting mind never lost focus on the duo. Nothing could tear me away. At times it was hard to watch; the dancers convulsed, limbs rigid and chests heaving, their embodiment of pain was overwhelming, but I couldn’t look away. The dancers’ love is a like a train wreck, you know it’s going to be messy but you can’t help but join the spectators. The repetition in their movements served as a poetic explanation of the habits we fall into. We relate wholeheartedly to their cycles, Fidelity’s Edge expresses the mundane with a beauty we can barely fathom.

Axe Cop is drawn by Ethan Nicolle, the 29 year-old creator of Eisner-nominated "Chumble Spuzz," and written by his little brother, Malachai Nicolle who (while five when Axe Cop started) celebrated his sixth birthday a few days ago, and wants to be a wizard soldier when he grows up. Malachai's age is essential to Axe Cop and ties it to a thread that has been winding through the art world for over two centuries (and farther back still, in the wider cultural sphere). From Surrealism to Cubism to Naïve art, one can always find a vein of interest in the creative mind of a child, and meanwhile, "child prodigies" are always in vogue. The insidious and pervasive attitude toward a child artist is steeped in the Romantic assumption that a child is somehow purer in intention, more in touch with some natural truth/the unconscious, and that his or her work is guileless, l'art pour l'art. And when a prodigy is involved, following close behind the last roster of assumptions is often a kind of patronizing wonderment at such precious precociousness — not to belittle the quite considerable skill of some prodigies, but the attention lavished on them can be more reminiscent of a circus ape in a three-piece suit: "it's just like people!"

Axe Cop may make "written by a 5 year-old" a main tag-line, but the comic evades all of those aforementioned child-artist pitfalls, and I suspect even the webcomic's audience successfully circumnavigates Romanticism's rose-coloured theories of childhood.

In format, Axe Cop consists of one-page comic-book-style episodes (one of which has been animated², and there may be more to follow), plus a no less important and hilarious, "Ask Axe Cop" series. The story mostly follows the titular character who, after chancing upon "the perfect fireman's axe," takes up a life of killing bad guys 24/7 (except for the occasional hotel-room vacation with 30 TVs and a diet consisting exclusively of birthday cake). His side-kick is Flute Cop, who turns into Dinosaur Soldier when he gets dinosaur blood on him, who turns into Avocado Soldier after eating an avocado¹, then becomes Uni-Avocado Soldier after taking custody of Uni-Baby's (incidentally, another good guy—er, baby) wish-granting unicorn horn, and finally (thus far) turns back into Dinosaur Soldier. Axe Cop and his sidekick team up with Sockarang (a superhero with prehensile sock-boomerangs for arms), Ralph Wrinkles the dog, and a motley assortment of good guys to battle bad guys (who can always be identified by their front-kick technique) such as Bad Santa, King Evilfatsozon from Evil, Evil, Evil Planet Tinko, a (literal) truck-load of ninjas, and Telescope Gun Cop who (in true comic-book form) turns evil when Axe Cop won't let him onto the team after bad guys interrupt side-kick try-outs. Seriously.

Ask Axe Cop #16 | Courtesy of AxeCop.com

The universe of Axe Cop is gory and bombastic, frenetic and quasi-logically nonsensical — not unlike Lewis Carroll's Alice flights of fancy, but with superheroes, dinosaurs, outer-space, more exploding poison than you can shake a sponge at. In fact, as in most action movies, most everything here explodes, and not just when a bomb is planted inside, or when hit hard enough, for there are also several instances of puncture-induced explosion and a clear distinction between good guys and bad. The whole thing reads a lot like a comic-book version of the playground game, "let's pretend _____!" which should come as no surprise, since that's how Axe Cop started out. During the Christmas holidays, Malachai, running wild with a toy axe, asked Ethan to play Axe Cop with him. He brought out a flute (recorder) to be Ethan's weapon as Flute Cop, and when Ethan said he'd rather be Axe Cop than Flute Cop Malachai switched happily and the game began. Struck by the vivacity of his little brother's imagination, Ethan distilled their game into a one-page comic for the family's amusement. Three further episodes later, he secured Axe Man a home on the internet, and the rest is viral history.

Ethan Nicolle's part in this collaboration cannot be undervalued. The artwork is quite good — granted, it's nothing to write home about if taken solely on its own merits of composition, form, etc., but I would be a poor critic indeed if I were so myopic. After all, what is a comic but the offspring of a co-dependent relationship between Image and Text? And in combination, Malachai's screwball little-kid humour and Ethan's professional, straight-man-esque art makes for some of the best collaborative work I've ever seen.

Ethan's approach to Malachai's invention channels the stone-faced Buster Keaton with a hint of Mel Brooks. Under Ethan's stylus, Axe Cop is the quintessential moustachioed cop with Ray Bans and a chiseled jaw. At night, when he goes out to punch bad guys in their sleep, he wears a cat-suit... complete with ears and tail. It is moments such as these that remind me of being a little kid who was certain that "starving" had something to do with the formation of gastrointestinal galaxies. Though they are also puns, Axe Cop's visual gags would be more accurately categorized as hyper-literal moments; and these carry a very five-year-old sensibility over into the final product with remarkable aplomb. Without any preciousness or patronization, Ethan deadpans a 5-year-old's idea of a world that is half Utopia, and half the real world as seen from thigh-height, where anything with wings is capable of interplanetary flight, you make lots of money working at a fruit stand, and cop training consists of writing your name on the sign-up sheet.

Because Ethan translates Malachai's words with such a high level of graphic professionalism, aspects that would have been cute, or simply humoured if drawn in a chlid-like style (ie. the Moon Warriors' absurdly extended list of moves and powers) are instead elevated clear into the realm of parody and satire. In a sense, Malachai serves as a surreal, cultural fun-house mirror, reflecting common entertainment tropes ad absurdum — and the result is a mode of parody that is at once ironic and utterly, refreshingly earnest.

New episodes are released ever Monday, new "Ask Axe Cop" segments every Wednesday and Friday; however, translate that into 6 year-old time and severe schedule fluctuations are forecast.

You can find everything Axe Cop at www.axecop.com.

Ethan's own website is www.ethannicolle.com.

¹ This throws me way back to this tape recording of stories that I had when I was very little. One of those stories was about a runty little baby who wouldn't eat, until someone thought to feed it avocados, whereupon it thrived and grew into a kind of baby Popeye who went around beating up the neighbourhood bullies. Oh Malachai Nicolle, do you know what I am talking about? Or was it all a dream... Another story was about a mouse who just wanted to play the balalaika, but I digress.

² http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZquaoUMfIc

If you walk into the Tranzac or any other comparable Toronto music venue on any night that the Om Tree Folk Collective are playing, you might be a little confused. There’s a dude centre-stage hammering away on an acoustic guitar, singing in a folk-troubadour-meets-Tom-Waits bark that’s as invigorating as it is melodic and cueing solos sections for the different band members that he’s leading through the songs. Each person on stage may have played the songs before or they could be newly arrived, winging an organic creation with the other members of the collective. The result is watching a relationship build on stage between the players and the music they’re playing, which is a rare sight in a music scene that typically values tightness and perfection over energy and organic creation.

For the newest installment of the Hinterview I had the chance to meet up with the illustrious and bearded Chris Eakins of Om Tree Folk Collective to discuss his new EP North River, his collective approach to song and performance, his former band Basement Arms, and living in the ‘burbs and getting knocked up.

PG: Why don’t you start off by telling me a little bit about North River?

CE: In 2008, I was living with my soon to be wife at the time, and soon to be ex-fiancé at the time, and I woke up one morning and realized that I wasn’t doing anything that I wanted to be doing. The Basement Arms had fizzled out by this point. Everyone was working on their own projects so I said, 'I gotta do my own thing too...'

The only thing I could do was leave the person I was with at the time and buy a car, put all of my musical instruments in the car and move to Keswick, about 40 minutes north of here. So I moved into my parents basement for six months and during that six months I recorded like a fiend. I got about 12 tracks recorded…

In August I came down to Toronto and spent basically a month at Brian’s house, mixing the album. I cut it down to 5 tracks because I had a bunch of tunes that were just kind of funny, like “Take Me from Behind on Tuesday” and “Hillbilly Love.” There were also a few that were super duper cheesy love songs that I was writing with this girl down on the dock… I was writing her super duper cheesy love songs trying to convince her that she wanted to be with me! (laughs) So I decided to cut seven tracks from the album. It was going to be 8 but I was convinced to keep the first track “Time to Die” on there.

That was the first track I recorded… it was like, the pits of the depression of changing my life completely over drastically. Now when I listen to it, I’m in a good spot and… well, I can’t really listen to most of the tunes on the album.

PG: So what do you do in that situation? Do you have new material that you’re working on?

CE: I’ve got a new album ready to go, another 12 tracks. This one is a concept album. It’s called For the Birds. I don’t… quite know what the concept is, but it’s an orchestral piece centred around the idea of the birds and bees.

For the Birds is going to recorded with Will (Whitwham) from the Wilderness of Manitoba. We haven’t done much yet, but we’ve been practicing every Sunday and we’re playing a show soon.

PG: Om Tree Folk Collective, the Woodchoppers and the Loneliest Monks all seem to have a similar approach in terms of band setup: invite amazing session musicians and dialogue with them over the songs. How does having a fluid line-up affect your live approach?

CE: It’s just a way to get together with people you don’t get to see on a regular basis and actually have a reason to make music together. Sometimes you need that audience to pull the musicians out of their regular grind and get them to come out. You say 'Hey, let’s talk, have a drink, play a tune together!'

Playing with the Basement Arms for as long as I did… maybe 5 years… yeah, I came in right at the very beginning. They played a couple shows and after I met Brian, the drummer, at Long and McQuade he invited me to a Basement Arms show at Mitzi’s. After the show I walked up to Dwight Schenk afterwards and said 'Hey Dwight, this is the band of my dreams, can I be in your band?' and he said, 'Yup, sure. We practice here on Wednesdays, bring whatever you want.' And I was like, 'Really?!'

That was my first introduction to just coming out and playing. Dwight kicked my ass on a daily basis to just open up, open up, open up. Don’t worry about the parts, don’t worry about anything… just play the music. Sometimes it was just the four of us, but we played a show at St. Stephens where we had literally 35 other musicians. You can check it out on Youtube.

Playing with Dwight, there wasn’t a single show the Basement Arms ever did that felt really stagnant because the songs weren’t ever the same. It wasn’t like we practiced, it was like we jammed and that was the key to music for me. It showed me that music doesn’t have to be beautiful parts that are perfectly in place every single time you play it, it’s about the process of making music with somebody else, or multiple other people, and just enjoying yourself.

I don’t have any pipe dreams of becoming famous with my music. I really could care less. I just want to hang out and play music with my friends. I think that’s the key to what the Om Tree is all about.

PG: I love the title track off of North River. What went into the writing of that song?

CE: That was written actually on the road. I took off to Halifax and I pulled over to go to the washroom of the side of the highway in New Brunswick. And there was a little sign, pointing to a river, like, a tiny little creek and it said "North River"… so, I sat down after I went to the washroom… not in the spot where I went to the washroom (laughs), and sketched the sign and that became the album cover for North River.

By the time I got into Halifax I had the whole “North River” song written in my head. I got my guitar out and sat on a rock by the ocean and wrote the whole thing. The first thing I did when I got back was record it… James McKie played the electric guitar for that.

PG: How does being a multi-instrumentalist change your approach to songwriting when you can theoretically do everything by yourself in the studio?

CE: Being a multi-instrumentalist, there are still certain things that I can’t do and need to rely on other people for. When it comes to songwriting… well, I’m a piano player first and foremost. It’s what I’ve been doing most of my life. I started when I was about 3… I’ve been teaching piano privately for about 13 years now. And you know what? I can’t write a song on piano to save my life.

I wasn’t able to write a song until I learned how to play the guitar. I can take a guitar song and transpose it onto the piano and expand it, but I can’t write on anything other than the guitar… because I’m so shitty at guitar (laughs) it’s really simple so the melody gets a chance to come out. My piano playing is developed in such a way that it doesn’t leave room for anything else, but the guitar lets the melody stand up.

PG: Do you think growing up in Keswick, or the ‘burbs influenced your songwriting?

CE: No, absolutely not. Keswick is a dull boring piece of shit town. I would never recommend that anybody move there. It’s like box house after box house after box house on one main street. If I didn’t get a job teaching music up there I’d probably be in jail (laughs). There’s no community, community centres, the kids just get in trouble… There’s a lot of drugs. I think it’s a huge problem in suburban Canada… what else is there for kids to do? Nothing. If I was to live in Keswick now, I would probably open up a community centre. Just teaching music in a community centre, jamming with kids, getting them off the street.

PG: Hey, but being in the ‘burbs can breed creativity. When your only options are getting hammered or playing music, a lot of people make music… but the other half get knocked up when they’re 17 or something.

CE: Terrifying! I don’t want to ever be knocked up, that would be uncomfortable. A terrible situation to be in. Don’t knock me up, I’m from the ‘burbs.

• Check out Om Tree Folk Collective on Myspace here.
• For the Birds should hopefully be ready by September, but most likely will take until next March!
• Om Tree will invade the Tranzac on May 14^th. I’ll see you there!

Comments

• March 16, 2010, Dan Grant writes: 'Dont knock me up, I'm from the burbs' next album title? I think so. for who? I don't care. but someone!

There was a blackout two days ago in my current basement. I wasn’t in the middle of a video game and my laptop would survive well long enough to check my email again again and again. This new basement is not the same as the last. The walls are much cleaner, though there are doors that lead to nowhere. Two days before we moved in a pipe burst, causing the need of full reparation, afterwards leaving us with a fresh room to clutter. Clutter we did. There’s an unused foosball table, boxes of old toys chocking both walk in closets. Bins of scarves and mismatched gloves. Ugly as the last one was, I don’t remember it ever getting this messy. Or cold, this one gets cold, and currently, is cold. I could build a fort in the dark out of pillows and blankets, but experience seemed so much more lonesome as a solo act. Instead I had alternative plans. While it would be an hour commute up to York, not to mention in the rain, I would be given the opportunity to join some other friends. In some other basement.

I packed up the obvious necessities (Street Fighter II, Joe n’ Mac, Mystical Ninja), debated the worth of hoisting along a single beer, and then hustled against the tiny flowing rivers that spittle down my road. On the bus I dried off my bag under the worries that water would infiltrate my precious SNES carts, while conscious of the grey plastic clacking that would arouse curiosity in strangers.

I get to the Vanier building and head to the basement for the annual York NERDSTOCK. I walk into the ballroom to be greeted by applause at the other end of the room. They don’t notice me, of course, the claps are for my friend Jason Brennan, who had just finished a power point presentation on surviving the zombie apocalypse. Not one to rock the boat, I slip to a hard right and ask where the nearest port to plug in my Mystical Ninja and am directed towards two televisions. One preoccupied by two boys going at the latest Smash Bros, the other preoccupied by a kid given the task to complete Ocarina of Time before the event comes to a close. It was 3:30 and he was at the Forrest Temple, not the landing strip but there’s hope yet. After the presentation formally closes, the lights come back on and the group scatters.

I make myself known by the lords and dukes of the event, Dallas Kasaboski and Michael McKenna, also confidents. I had helped them out in previous years, supplying games, trivia and playlists, though this year I was bogged down with work and had to mostly take a sidestep this time around. I asked how things were going and was given a somewhat exhausted “Great, man.” This is the first time the event had migrated out of Winters College (the residents where the two masterminds dwell) and into the interior of another college, almost on the other end of campus entirely. They spent the night before postering the walls with Batmen, Supermen, Ring Lords and printed scientists.  Tables are smothering in comic books, dungeon manuals and chip bowls.

In the back, an active D&D game, next to them two boys trying to build a trebuchet out of K’Nex, next to them a table with untouchable action figures, next to them a couch with two napping girls in superhero clothing. While there’s only a little over baker’s dozen of people in eye’s reach, the ones who are present are truly holding the namesake. It’s not a big event, or a loud event, it’s more dressed than it is active, but it is a basement. A basement where we feel cozy with our exercises and one with our hobbies. Hard not to argue the Zen in its humility, and even harder to tear yourself away from.

I’d know, when it came time to say my dues, and more specifically see a movie with my brother, turning head from Star Trek being projected on an honest bundle of printer paper tacked on to the wall is a trial in itself. When I left, the player left Link at the fire temple, low on health and arrows and the Nintendo Wavebird controller sinking into a sofa. The Kool Aid, pizza and chips were long since finished off. The trebuchet abandoned. A table full of scrap fabrics for costuming left virgin. An impressive spread of comics undisturbed. It’s a space that took effort, and in it pride, but in rewards gives the strangers who wandered in and out throughout the day a space free of judgement to wallow in nothings. Or to take home Stargate on DVD, one of the many prizes offered for just staying a healthy amount of time. I got Power Ranger stickers. It’s a basement, and I’m returning to my own.

I’m sorry basement, I should have never left you. I enjoyed the vacation but I’ve come to learn that each one is a beautiful thing and worth their appreciation. I miss the one I used to have, even if it was ugly and creepy. You keep me warm. Though not literally, it’s freezing. The power is still out when I got back. My brother and I play a patient game waiting for the other to cave in and call hydro. Both losing that game, we just play Scrabble by candlelight. I forfeited because I kept getting nothing but A’s and U’s.

The power comes back, but the heat will take it’s time. I go down into the basement to grab some extra blankets, the same denim Looney Tunes ones that nuzzled me back in the last house. It’s chilly but I take in the basement a few more moments before returning upstairs.

Jamee Valin is a veritable bundle of energy sitting cross-legged on the couch opposite me. Moments before she had finished giving final notes on the dress rehearsal of locked on SHUFFLE, Valence Movement’s premiere performance of dance theatre, which received a stunning response after its one-night run at the Winchester Theatre on March 10. In the rehearsal studio she had been all business, exhibiting a calm and focused sense of leadership, giving concise and detailed notes. She then told the dancers to work on those sections for half an hour, all the time she had to give to this writer in her hectic schedule. She expected the work to be done by the time she got back.

Valence Movement represents the culmination of a lifelong dream for Valin. “Ever since I started dancing, for the last 15 years, the goal’s always been to own my own company.” Her perfect mix of initiative and artistic vision is a killer combination in the field of entrepreneurship, learning much from her early career doing solo pieces under Sion Irwin-Childs at the Cabaret at the Rivoli. “It was the first time I was commissioned to do choreography, and it made me realize that I was ready to try a bigger show.”

Valin, still a student in the dance department at George Brown College, used both students and faculty from her program as the cast and crew of locked on SHUFFLE. The logistics of staging an event, however, proved to be a challenge. “In my program they really encourage you to stay together with your peers and make your own companies. But they mostly teach you how to be in a company, not really the production side of dance.” And so Valin intrepidly used a class in which students create a business model for a ‘fake’ dance troupe to create a real business plan for her real show.

Working with a company comprised of close friends presents its own unique opportunities and challenges, Valin admits: “They know that when we’re in the studio, it’s time to work. Outside the studio, I’m still just Jamee. It can be tough sometimes, when friendship comes into it. But we’ve got a pretty good understanding worked out.” Calling herself a ‘sit-back-and-watch’ choreographer, she prefers intuition and spontaneity to planning. This approach means putting her utmost faith and trust in her peers, an idea the detail-oriented Valin had some trouble getting over: “It’s like handing over your child, with the umbilical cord still attached, and saying ‘please take care of this.’”

locked on SHUFFLE was the culmination of ten weeks of work by the eleven-member cast, featuring eleven different solo and group pieces which combined text and movement to tell stories and evoke ideas. Valin credits her attitude toward life with the ultimate idea for the show: “I live one day at a time, everything changing but trying my best to enjoy every minute. It’s like listening to your iPod on shuffle; every song is completely different, but you love them all. And you never know what will come next. It’s okay to not know what comes next; it’s okay to be flawed. I’m not into writing down my piece and then getting up and doing it; I just turn on my music and shake my bum and see what happens.”

The soundtrack for locked on SHUFFLE featured uplifting, soulful and catchy indie pop music from a variety of artists, in keeping with the show’s tagline ‘indie dance? IN TORONTO?’ Valin asserts that despite the popularity of indie music, indie film and other indie cultural art forms, dance has not yet found its place in the scene. It is through this indie appeal that Valin is attempting to reach out to a new audience. “If you’re a guy in a dance audience, then you’re dating a girl on stage. Or your sister’s on stage. Or you’re dating a guy on stage. In any case, you’re not there to see dance. I wanted to approach this show like indie music culture; there people have a drink, they scream, they holler, they get excited. Dance audiences think they need to sit there respectfully and applaud politely. I really, really hope they laugh. Have a little chuckle and see what happens.” This message was further communicated through Valin’s pre-show announcement, telling the audience to shout if they want, to holler if they want.

The audience did certainly respond. The hour-long show was as exciting as it was passionate, the pieces moving along with an ease of arrangement and pace. Even pieces that were cryptic in their meaning were enjoyable to the extreme. The full-house standing ovation that finished the show spoke to the audience’s appreciation of the entertaining Wednesday evening, and our appreciation for the gall it takes to strike out on one’s own in the unforgiving artistic community. Valence Movement has arrived, and if locked on SHUFFLE is any indication, they’re here to stay. “I don’t know what’s going to happen after graduation,” says Valin, “and for the first time, that’s okay.”

Comments

• March 16, 2010, Louise Valin writes: WOW! Congratulations Jamee! The review of you and your show is awesome. I wish you continued creative success! xo Aunt Louise
• March 17, 2010, Gail valin writes: Jamee Congratulations Your star has risen, I am so overwhelmed by the obvious over the top wonderful review you received. I am so happy for you and this amazing success at your tender age. Standing ovation, you can't get too much better then that. Continued success in the arts , you have a bright future ahead of you. Love Aunt Gail
• March 20, 2010, aunt Carole writes: I was never so proud of a niece as I was proud of you on Wednesday night - and making it so special by including the tribute to Grandpa Jim was astounding Congrats Jamee and we certainly know that you have a bright future in dance.

Cover | Amazing Spiderman #601 | Marvel Comics

In Amazing Spider-Man #601 Peter Parker gets drunk and has sex with his roommate, whom he doesn't even particularly like. To boil down the responses to that event on the letters page, which the Amazing Spider-Man editors have printed, it sounds like there are basically two responses here: those that think Spider-Man should be an example to people (and therefore should not have done those things), and those that want Pete to be a regular guy, who makes mistakes.

To be a bit more specific I've read it said that Peter Parker is an “everyman,” not a saint, and can make these kinds of mistakes. That particular point I take objection to.

See, Peter Parker is an everyman in a more psychological sense, constantly battling with his own self-absorption, sense of responsibility, and very often a sense of worthlessness (to counter that self-absorption a bit I guess). But as far as Peter Parker's actions and abilities go - nope, not really an everyman. Unless we can all go by the description "orphaned boy grows up with cash-strapped elderly relatives, has a completely alienating personality and therefore no friends in high school, is an absolute genius, and takes a job as a photographer before finishing high school to help pay the bills." Granted, that photography job probably wouldn't have kicked in without the super powers, but who can say for sure, right? Hopefully my point still stands that this isn't really a "normal" guy.

To contrast, a more normal guy is Matt Murdock when he's not Daredevil. Oh, he's smart, no question, but it's pretty clearly part of his narrative that Matt spent years working and studying hard to become the top in his profession as a defense attorney. So to my way of thinking, if I want to see a character make the kind of poor choice that Spidey displayed (and everyone will freely admit to it being a poor choice, even if they're in favour of having it portrayed) in Amazing Spider-Man #601, and it’s an “everyman” mistake, well, I'd turn to Daredevil as the real "everyman" character.

But more to the point, I'd turn to Daredevil because that is actually the kind of mistake Daredevil has made in the past. He’s kind of a cad - it would be an action well within his established character as far as I'm concerned. I don't think we need two supposedly different characters published by the same company (Marvel Comics) to make the exact same kinds of mistakes, otherwise we don't need the other character! Let Spider-Man be Spidey, and Daredevil be ol' Hornhead!

The mistake in Amazing Spider-Man #624, the latest issue, is a far more believable one, that Peter Parker would fabricate photographic evidence to re-create a scene he knew existed at one point, and would help his old frienemy Jonah Jameson get out of a pickle. It's a mistake tied into the mythos of Spider-Man's world, specifically his photography, and raises a very valid concern regarding Peter's career (and by extension all news-people-by-day, superhero-by-night types), and the question of how much leeway does he have with his reporting to safeguard his identity?

In Amazing Spider-Man #33 there is a bit of dialogue to the extent of "and now I will exit this door with my camera snapping so it looks like Peter Parker is taking my photo." Spidey was fiddling with the pictorial truth as far back as 1966! And seeing as how we haven’t heard his conscience bugging him for the past forty years, I’d say Pete is morally good with that action. Whether you personally think it’s right or not, well that’s a different matter, but down through the years it has certainly been a simple and consistent form of chicanery.

Returning to the example in Amazing Spider-Man #624 however, he is actually cutting and pasting (computer-wise) his photo together, a completely premeditated action. The result is he makes a visual anachronism that makes it clear that Peter is peddling phony photos and he’s called on it in front of a huge crowd by Jameson himself, who urges all news media sources to stay away from that untrustworthy photographer!

That sucks! But it’s a risk you take when you fake the news.

And that’s another thing that’s out of character for Peter Parker, for there have been plenty of times when a doctored photo could have done as much good as a well placed web-line, but it’s never come up before because that isn’t how Parker thinks and operates. For whatever reason, he’s conditioned himself to believe that the only good he can really accomplish is in the persona of Spider-Man (for better or worse). In times past, Spidey would have said “Nuts, I wish I got that photo when it was, you know, real.” Then he would have gone out to catch the bad guys and find the real evidence.

What if there was no real evidence you ask? Then that’s one of the Spidey stories that ends in a “can’t win them all” lesson.

The point is, these breaks from established character as I’ve pointed out don’t strike me as the writers making an honest mistake. I’ve got the impression that we’re being fed plot points to get to the next type of story the editors want to tell, regardless of natural character development. “Okay, for the next story Peter’s going to be dealing with losing his job and all of his friends. And you have to get him to that place in a single issue.”

I don’t need to tell you this, but that is sloppy storytelling.

Comments

• March 17, 2010, Paul writes: Saw this reposted (with credit) on noscans-daily.livejournal.com. It's well said. I should point out, though, that there's even greater precedent for Peter's faking a news photograph. There was a time, way back in the beginning (I believe ASM #4), when Sandman attacked Peter's school. After, Peter locked himself in the janitor's closet, grabbed a bucket of sand, set his camera's auto-timer, tossed the sand in the air, and punched the cloud. He justifies the fakery by telling himself that it did happen and he was there. He's just "reenacting" it. He then sells those photos to the Bugle. That's original run, first year, by Stan Lee. Peter's made a lot of mistakes. The writers lately have made even more. But you're right - this one is in character.
• March 21, 2010, Isaac writes: What? I was reposted somewhere? That's awesome

This saga began in June of 2009, when Matt Marshall and I found ourselves on a train bound for Ottawa and the Magnetic North Theatre Festival. This the result of Matt planning to go on this trip and my drunken birthday-fueled declaration that I would go too. As we rumbled across Ontario with cans of Guinness on our flip-down tables, we talked about Matt’s passion for Patrick Marber’s play Closer. I had only ever seen the movie, and Matt had performed a scene study from the script two years previous. The play had never left his head, and we discussed the possibility of mounting the show.

It was an afternoon in the basement of the National Arts Centre that truly lit the powder keg of our production. Four hours spent with Peter Hinton, the English Artistic Director of the NAC, and about twenty young theatre artists discussing our futures and the reasons blocking us from following through with our dreams changed our entire perspective. We wanted to promote workshopping and artistic growth rather than polished productions; the collective learning experience of all artists involved was of utmost importance. Matt, a true actor’s director, believed in the artistic risk that Marber’s play presented. By the train ride back to Toronto, we were drawing up the preliminary production schedule for our company’s premiere production of Closer.

From Closer bt Patrick Marber | Premiere Production by Theatre Bassaris

Matt was set to be artistic director of our company, and to direct the show; I was to take on the roles of general manager and production manager, two roles for which I had almost no training and even less experience. The main thing was that I wanted to DO something. Matt was to return to school for a fifth year in the fall, but I had graduated; there was no end to the summer vacation for me. The rest of my life would be a prolonged summer vacation away from school. I had a low-paying retail job and no real ideas with what to do with myself. What, audition? The slim chance of even getting an audition from a headshot submission was unnerving, let alone the chances of winning a role once auditioned. I wanted to DO theatre, not just WAIT for theatre to happen to me. I had worked too long and too hard to let myself work a series of Joe jobs while ignoring my passion. Matt was the person I needed, a person with the same reckless abandon and sense of adventure that I had. I would fulfill any role required of me, so long as I was DOING theatre.

The summer was spent with me preparing schedules, assessing crew requirements, budgeting the show, researching funding grants and approaching designers/technicians regarding our production. Matt was busy with beginning his director’s work, searching for an assistant director and working with Borna Radnik, our dramaturge, to more fully flesh out his vision of the text. We settled on set designer Sarah Beaudin, recipient of one of three coveted Theatre@York mainstage designs, and costume and lighting designer Travis Lahay, a former Creative Ensemble colleague of mine. I selected second year Sarah Barton as Stage Manager, her first foray into the field for a full-length production. Assistant director was to be Alyksandra Ackerman, a second year student who showed a good deal of potential and initiative. Our venue was to be the Eleanor Winters Art Gallery at York, the perfect setting for a script in which all four characters only ever appear together. We were set to begin, our younger members in place to promote advancement through the company ranks.

All that remained was to assemble the cast for our show. Matt had very specific ideas about who would be right for these complex and coveted roles, and we had to reach as many potential auditionees as possible. Posters went up all over the fine arts buildings at the university, drawing more than 50 total auditionees, far more than we had imagined. This group was narrowed down to 4: Alexi Aslanidis as Dan, Christina Manco as Alice, Wade Noble as Larry and Maya Tekavcic as Anna. These four young actors had the bulk of the responsibility with our show: face down the savage emotions of Marber’s challenging script. Without strong performances, the rest of the production would be for nothing. Matt and I were placing a lot of faith in these four young people, but were convinced that they were up to the task.

What followed were sixteen weeks of rehearsal, culminating in a four-performance run. In this time, Matt took the actors through character exercises, emotional reveals, textual analysis, and finally staging rehearsals. As our company focus was development-oriented, we set up workshops with other emerging artists to guide our young troupe through workshops in movement, voice and character. I spent the rehearsal process writing grant applications, finalizing schedules, liaising with designers regarding logistics of implementation, and finally attending new year rehearsals to get a sense of the show’s progress. As with every production there were hiccups, missed deadlines, mistakes made and problems faced. There was also growth, maturation, transformation and transcendence.

After over $1000 of expenditure, several cut corners, a few creative tussles, a tonne of borrowed and stolen props, as well as set, costume pieces and a tech week of twelve to fourteen-hour days in the gallery to transform it into a theatre space, opening night was finally upon us. It was a night nine months in the making for Matt and I, and I don’t believe either of us has ever been so nervous. The sold-out crowd of friends, peers, colleagues and complete strangers took their places, Ms. Barton called “go,” and the show began.

From Closer bt Patrick Marber | Premiere Production by Theatre Bassaris

Over the next three days we played the show four times, and each was, in my opinion and Matt’s, a triumph. It was an artistic triumph in the sense that the actors delivered powerful, engaged performances, no two the same; in the sense that the designers’ visions were realized to the fullest potential that we could afford; in the sense that Matt staged the version of the play that he saw in his head for two years. It was a commercial triumph as a result of the three sold-out evening performances and well-attended matinee, and we are forever indebted to the audience who took the time to see our little workshop. It was a performance triumph judging by the several extended standing ovations that our entire team earned to the marrow. As Matt remarked to me several times throughout the process, but most notably after the opening performance, “We have a show.”

Theatre Bassaris’ debut production of Closer was a well-fought struggle, and in the end a self-declared victory. And as Matt and I often remarked to each other throughout the process, it was quite easy. Everyone knew their jobs, or learned quickly. We supported each other. We shared the load. In truth, any team of theatre professionals CAN put on a show. The hardest step is the first: saying, “Let’s put on a show!” There is a fear built into each of us of striking out on our own, of accepting the risk of failure and devoting yourself completely to a task, or a number of tasks toward a final objective. To get over that fear is a leap, but trust yourself to take it! Abandon anxiety and apprehension! YOU DO KNOW HOW TO PUT ON A SHOW! Trust in that, and everything else falls into place. In the end it only took a team of ten to stage a full two-plus-hour production, nine of whom were balancing school and work at the same time. YOU CAN DO IT TOO! I cannot repeat that statement enough. You ARE a theatre practitioner – go practice theatre!

After seeing an ad posted on the TTC last month I attended the COG festival on February 20th, an organic growers conference held on Chestnut Street. I wanted to experience a gathering of the minority market in food production, a market vehemently protesting the dominant norm. I skipped down the road to the hotel conference center, ready to involve myself in a fight for the underdog and nab a free organic lunch for my trouble.

Unfortunately, the conference itself is not an event geared towards a casually interested observer: an expensive ticket ($65-$85!) deters those who have only outside interest in organic, and a lecture-based atmosphere can become arduous. Furthermore, each speaker was limited to an approximately twenty-minute slot. While each were able to present a general sketch on their efforts in aiding organic growing, most were time limited and the speakers were only able to present quick bouts of directed anger toward GMO-based growing, and its threatening prevalence in the food market. The ideas presented, although not enough information on their own, have spurred me in the direction of our local organic efforts, and the problems of spreading a renewed sense of vigor towards organic food consumption.

Barbel Hohn was the former Minister of Agriculture and Environment in the German North Rhine Westphalia region from 1995-2005. In her opening remarks, she outlined facts and figures in the ongoing battle of organic versus GMO users: basically that the organic food market has to fight for its proper share of the market against companies that use Genetically Modified foods (GMOs) that are able to sell in large quantities to profit-hungry farmers, and casually overrun the others that want nothing to do with their product. But she truly awoke my interest with her solution, a strategy of turning German farmers into energy producers, offering grants to build renewable energy sources such as windmills on large rural property. However, while her approach certainly helps the state maintain and expand their network of renewable sources of energy, would this offer create effective financial stability to fledgling organic farmers in the face of larger, more flexible competition?

For example, west of Hamilton in a township called Brandt is Ella Haley, a fourth generation farmer, seeking to preserve her family farmland. In her area, she complains that her neighbours use unsafe chemical and sewage sludge treatments from Kitchener lagoon as fertilizer. The unsanitary quality of this practice prevents neighbours from going organic, for the organic branders have strict guidelines of what products to mark with a seal of approval. Ella cannot influence her neighbours to stop this negligent action, and one of the goals of this series will be to research whether there is appropriate action to take against this type of slipshod farming.

However, while this type of fertilizing is allowed, at least there are several international precedents of banning contaminated food. Hohn was quick to remark on her cutting-edge decision to ban British beef due to BSE risk, even before the UN officially sanctioned the action. Yet these large companies always seem to bounce back: even in the face of several health violations, governments seem more willing to turn a blind eye than confront the food conglomerates on further action. A ban on a national level for a product is only ever temporary, but is there any way to target these powerful corporations at the local level? It seems difficult when the prevalence of the franchise market in Toronto is undeniable: Billeh Nickerson, a fast-food poet hailing from BC, wonders “What the hell is up with all the Pizza Pizzas [in Toronto] though? I don’t get it.” After reading this quote in most recent issue of Broken Pencil, it struck me that the slew of Pizza Pizza outlets that we take for granted in Toronto is not the norm across Canada. The reason that Toronto is overwhelmed by Pizza Pizza is that many Ontarians enjoy the ease of online ordering and late night availability, luxuries available due to the deep resources of a large chain of franchises.

But I am mostly concerned with our local organic efforts, such as maintaining the Greenbelt, which celebrated its fifth year on Feb. 28, 2010. The Greenbelt is widely hailed as the best new policy protecting agriculture in Canada - its boundaries encompass the Niagara Escarpment, the Oak Ridges Moraine, Rouge Park, hundreds of rural towns and over 7000 farms. Say what you will about Dalton McGuinty’s time in office, but one of his major successes has been to help establish and protect the Greenbelt. However, Ontario growers remain restless. They want more space protected and the sooner the better. Larger companies fight to exploit the borders of this space, constantly grappling for control. The Greenbelt has opened a framework for protection, but has not been able to go far enough in some places. Lecturers thought it could stretch further to Simcoe south county, Bradford, Innisfield, Brandt, and Prince Edward County. I’m also actually interested in Markham for once, as the community has opted to freeze their expanding urban belt to begin the process of becoming self-sufficient in food production. Local food ensures safety against the quality issues creeping into the larger companies operating today. However, as Ella demonstrates, corporations can sway these local politics if they have a vested interest in the future of an area, regardless of the wants of other citizens.

Overtaking the dominance of the original Fordian auto industry, the food industry has thrived in post-Fordern restructuring of mass production business models. While cars become a superfluous commodity in economic strife, everyone still needs enough calories to keep going, and the speedy eateries of North America supply a cheap, standardized product through assembly line production. Instead of making adjustments to the process itself to improve sanitary conditions, the flow of profits continues due to technological solutions designed to bypass a reevaluation process, which is perceived as a major hindrance to a company. After all, these companies make a living keeping the massive cogs of the food machine ever-rolling.

In an age where every long-standing corporate institution is facing criticism for long-standing questionable practices, it was only a matter of time before the food industry was held accountable. The general public has a better idea of food production, but at this point, it is obvious that the larger a corporation becomes, the more dominance and influence they are able to direct on the political stage. Ideally no one wants a franchise ruining the landscape of a unique, original town-space, but the question remains: would you not rather an organic, secure franchise in town than a standard McDonalds? It is important to recognize and support rapidly-expanding organic brands such as Stonyfield Farm, an extremely successfully organic yogurt company. Also, check out a dizzying map of organic brands uniting in larger clusters of company ownership between 1995-2007. I have a feeling that networks of organic brands will eventually boost organic foods to a much larger market share.

Logorama, this years Oscar-winning animated short, illustrates that corporate logos have always found ways to fill every urban nook and cranny. Since our well-established system of consumerist competition isn't changing any time soon, the only option left is to supplant the North American stockpile of logos with recognizable, necessarily profitable organic alternatives. Slowly but surely this strategy will catch the citizens no longer satisfied with the conditions surrounding the origins of their food. Barbara Hohn believes that proper labeling efforts creates a freedom of choice. Since in democratic capitalism, it is looked upon as undemocratic to place a ban that encroaches on someone else’s business endeavour, the power that the consumer holds above all else is in their choice of product to buy into. In these articles, I’ll be working out just what choices the common consumer has, and whether the organic process needs to be adjusted to fulfill the expectations of the average Torontonian.

Sources:

Find Ella Haley at the blog for Sustainable Brandt, a movement she is active in maintaining.

If the dizzying map was too much, look at the organic corporate structure posted here at the Certified Organic Association of BC.

Comments

• March 18, 2010, Devon writes: If anyone is interested in the fight against GMOs and the hazards of biotech in general, I highly recommend the book "Redesigning Life?" edited by Brian Tokar. (Ted: I'll lend you my copy when the school year ends.)
• March 18, 2010, Devon writes: Also, check out this article "Unraveling the DNA Myth" by Barry Commoner: http://www.mindfully.org/GE/GE4/DNA-Myth-CommonerFeb02.htm
• March 18, 2010, Devon writes: Or any book by Michael Pollan, really... My fave by him is "The Botany of Desire" in which he discusses the history of the apple, the potato, the tulip, and marijuana.

And So it Goes | George F. Walker | Factory Theatre

And So it Goes tells the story of a family dealing with financial decline, weakening bonds and mental illness. Act 1 features mother Gwen (Martha Burns) and father Ned (Peter Donaldson) coping with their paranoid schizophrenic daughter Karen (Jenny Young) with the help of imaginary therapist Vonnegut (Jerry Franken). Yes, that Vonnegut. The Kurt one. Act 2 finds Gwen and Ned attempting to cope with the death of Karen (now a mentally stable ghost in her parents’ minds) while abandoning all concern for their personal well being. By play’s end they have resurrected their love for each other as they end up homeless on the street, losing everything but gaining everything through the power of their delusional minds.

Walker’s writing style was, early in his career, more terrestrial and certainly more faithless with his society. His East End Plays, first produced by the Factory Theatre more than twenty years ago, put on display the harsh lifestyle of the lowest classes of criminals living in what many consider to be East Toronto. With And So it Goes, Walker has found a new paradigm, bolstered by the heavy influence of Kurt Vonnegut’s sense of strange nihilistic hopefulness. Vonnegut’s works were a heavy influence on Walker’s script, though an audience unfamiliar with Vonnegut’s writing could certainly get lost in some of the references and allusions Walker employs. In all, what was missing was the rough-around-the-edges approach of some of Walker’s early work, the roughness of everyday life in the real world.

The direction of the piece only further cemented my belief that a writer should not direct his own work, certainly not on the stage. There must necessarily be a separation of artistic practices, as writers tend to be too precious with their words when directing, allowing ideas rather than character tell the story. Walker could not escape this trap, staging a lateral, uninteresting piece that was archaically slavish to the proscenium arch. With so much potential for creative staging concepts, Walker instead relied on lighting to indicate playing areas, on extended blackouts between every scene to change the sparse set. His script created a world between the earth and the mind but his staging was firmly grounded in the earth, the blackouts serving only to take the audience out of the story and the actors having to work very hard off the top of each scene to bring us back.

Putting two veteran Canadian stage actors in the two central roles was the best choice made by this production. Martha Burns was ethereally stunning as Gwen, a weary contempt transforming into hopeful abandon over the course of the evening. Peter Donaldson was at once goofy and dangerous as Ned, commanding the stage and filling the space with his powerful voice. His obsession with finding his daughter’s killers was understated and believable, his conversations with his daughter’s ghost heartbreaking. Jenny Young went a bit too far in the performance of her illness in Act one, going for cheap laughs rather than accurate portrayal, but was redeemed by her sweet and warm nature in Act two. Playing an historical figure is no easy role, and Jerry Franken did a fine job as Vonnegut, resisting the urge to play the man himself and instead playing the character conjured in the minds of the other characters.

It was the design that was the particularly outstanding aspect of this production. Shawn Kerwin’s set and costume designs were simple, rough and transformative. Costumes were static as well, but allowed enough simple movement with additional pieces to showcase the fundamental changes occurring within the characters. Locales switched seamlessly with sparse, stationary set pieces depicting a voyeuristic window to the outside world from the world of the play. Veteran lighting designer Rebecca Picherak aided in the changes of locale with a complex and well thought-out lighting plot which worked constantly to shift the audience’s focus over the vast stage of the Factory. Sound design and composition by John Roby was subversive, detailing a bustling cityscape and filling the space with life. Rhythmic devices of car horns, traffic and human shouts contrasted the mechanical with the mortal and served to contain the vast ideas of Walker’s text, bringing a much-needed sense of restraint to the entire production.

George F. Walker is certainly a preeminent Canadian playwright, though his reach slightly exceeded his grasp with And So it Goes. Excellent performances and extraordinary designs could not save this work from the grand scope which it tried, yet ultimately failed to exhibit. Terrestrial, city-bound issues of the lower-class are where Walker excels, and though he touched on points of financial hardship and the nobility of the poor, he became too preoccupied with the lofty concepts to which he aspired in the text. Let us hope that he continues to explore this world in the future, depicting the harshness of human life without striving for pretension in the world-between-worlds.

Jeff Magnum | Courtesy of dewdoobrefhugmachine.wordpress.com

You know the old cliché: sensitive singer-songwriter, foot of the bed, softly strumming on an old acoustic guitar. The mood is quiet -- but the sound of the apartment bleeds through: old wood floors, maybe traffic outside. There is a conscious understanding of where the singer-songwriter is. For the listener, this is an open door into the artist’s immediate space of recording. The music is not simply a particular moment in time, but a brief aural snapshot of a performance setting. So many albums get dubbed “bedroom projects” because the image alone evokes an environment that is homely, quiet and above all, intimate. Such a tag suggests the listener is not only listening to music, but is transplanting one’s own self into the small space in which the music was performed.

Music that appears to convey intimacy is, more or less, effective at communicating an experience within a specific time and space. In his essay on experimental music, John Cage points out:

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible”  (Silence 8).

Often, music creates the illusion of intimacy by manipulating an environment to achieve the desired characteristics of silence. But a room is never totally devoid of the potential for noise. Sometimes walls echo, sometimes they absorb sound. The manipulation of silence, therefore, constitutes the conscious removal of the spatial element of sound. A record like Cat Power’s You Are Free creates the illusion of intimacy by eliminating any sounds external to the instruments and voice. The record is no longer a product of time and space, but only time. Though its quiet demeanor presents the illusion of an intimate environment, the record is founded upon a canvas of painted silence that attempts to extricate itself from human presence.

A record that aims to engage the listener through its intimacy is contingent upon the characteristics of the recorded space. This is why live records are so appealing: they communicate the intimacy of the environment and the circumstances of the performance so effectively that the songs adopt a new meaning. Live recordings consciously include crowd levels in the mix and are deliberate about their spatial characteristics. They signify intimacy by communicating the performance as well as fan affection. A studio allows the recording to be more ambiguous about its spatial characteristics, which in turn encourages subjectivity of the listener. The communication of space, then, is as much of a signifier as time. Outside of external documentation, we can never know when a track was actually recorded; therefore space must be used as the signifier for both space and time. While the silent backdrop of You Are Free may appear to communicate moments of both space and time, it pacifies the physical characteristics of its environment.

Can recorded music ever really communicate genuine intimacy?

The moments of intimacy are the most apparent when they deliberately acknowledge the setting of recording. In a studio setting, spatial elements are made apparent through a demonstration of the idiosyncrasies of the recording space. In your typical “bedroom project” record, this is the sound of the old wood floors or the traffic outside.

Although I recognize that we probably don’t need another article that romanticizes the mythology of Neutral Milk Hotel, this example was too perfect to pass up: at the end of the track ‘Oh, Comely’ on In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, someone in the studio yells “HOLY SHIT!” after the take. This recording exemplifies a moment of intimacy through the communication of time and space for a variety of reasons:

a) The “HOLY SHIT!” is tremendously deep in the mix. Whoever yelled it was not in direct proximity to a microphone. We can assume that he was in a separate room watching on. Therefore, we can also assume that though this performance probably took place in a studio, there existed opportunity for others to view the performance. The recording suggests that the artist was not in total isolation because there was an immediate audience with whom this song deeply resonated.

b) The “HOLY SHIT!” could have been edited out entirely but was consciously kept on the recording. The artist did not wish to remove the room from the recording, but to enhance the room to better communicate the circumstances. From here, we can assume that this circumstance must have been truly extraordinary if it elicited a “HOLY SHIT!”

c) Intimacy in recorded music can never be communicated through total silence because total silence assumes a lack of human presence. Cage points out that “try as we may to make silence, we cannot.” The “HOLY SHIT!” merely proves that the recording is trying to translate a particular moment on record. Rather than use silence to achieve transcendence, the “HOLY SHIT!” establishes the dynamic of the physical space that allowed the performance to flourish.

Space is the blank canvas. Even through its expression of nothing, space still says something. When we think of music as expressing intimacy, such music must reconcile its performance with the audible characteristics of the space. An intimate performance is the moment bound to space and unidentifiable in time. It reflects every characteristic of the circumstances of the performance within a space and does not attempt to detach itself from this.

This article is about object identification.

A lot of people download music. Whether legally, through iTunes and the like, or illegally, the fact that music is trafficked in a mainly non-physical format is a significant shift that has taken place largely within the last fifteen years.

This isn’t really news to anybody. Just looking around at the people on the street in downtown Toronto quickly reveals the fact that everyone has significant white earbuds stuck in their ears, and even if they’re listening to other headphones, odds are that they aren’t attached to a CD player or tape deck.

When the Compact Disc (and to some extent the 8 track and the cassette tape) took over as the dominant form of music distribution and consumption from the cumbersome vinyl of old, the middle class consumer who made up a good portion of the music consuming public decided to repurchase all of their old albums in the new format. It’s pretty obvious that this practice facilitated easier listening in say, the car, where the user gained greater control of consumption and basically just didn’t have to listen to the radio all the time. As a result, the late eighties and early/mid-nineties were the heyday of reissues and greatest hits compilations.

In 2010 reissues have become a culture all their own. Many labels spend time unearthing previously unappreciated releases from bands that may or may not have enjoyed any success in their time of existence. A good example of this is Drag City’s 2009 reissue of Death’s compiled mid-seventies recordings under the title …For the Whole World to See. It’s not likely that anyone other than Drag City’s already niche demographic of record buyers would be particularly aware of this release, or that Death would somehow spark a revolution in music today and enjoy any serious monetary or cultural success in its outcome. Something about making available more physical and non-physical copies of music in danger of falling off the map entirely seems important, but what is it? Why does Drag City offer …For the Whole World to See on vinyl as well? Is it merely an obsession with obsolescence or a romanticism of the experience of a certain kind of music listening? The endless cycle of writing and rewriting history, especially when it comes to appreciating art, says a great deal about the ongoing human project of identity building.

On the artists’ side of things, the idea of the album is as de-emphasized as ever. Formerly album-based artists are making the shift to releasing singles and compilations thereof in the place of albums. Canrap guru K-OS said in a press release:

"I'm not going to make any more albums... I think we're just going to drop singles for a couple years and see what happens. If those singles are successful, maybe put out a compilation of the ones that people like and call it an album, like what Elvis and The Beatles did. I've been [in the studio] for 10 years of my life. I kinda just want to stay immediate. I think with Lil' Wayne and our dude Drake, it's showing you don't have to make an album.”

The dissolution of the album on the mainstream pop front line pretty much results from our technological divorce from collections of songs and physical objects, on the both the production and consumption sides of the music industry. There are so many different kinds of music consumers that this doesn’t function as a totally blanket statement, but most North American people have music and albums, specifically vinyls or CDs or cassettes, that represent a whole life history of listening. Not all of us are excessive about it, fiendishly gathering after collectible after collectible attempting in vain to fill all the silence, but nearly all of us have memories like that one album you played every day for the whole summer. (Rick James? Sloan? Jon-Rae Fletcher? The Beatles? What was it?)

In Brett Milano’s book Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting, he states: “The urge to collect records begins with the fascination with the record as an object, going beyond a simple appreciation of the music” (18). Milano’s focus is oriented towards vinyl hounds specifically, “the type who think digital sound is flat and heartless,” but the general sentiment of object identification and the archival process that ensues and lives with us is applicable on a more general level. The art that we possess emotionally, physically and even culturally is a massive building block of our individual and collective identities: “And all the friends that you once knew are left behind they kept you safe and so secure amongst the books and all the records of your lifetime/ What will happen in the morning when the world it gets so crowded that you can’t look out the window in the morning?” (Nick Drake, “Hazey Jane II”). Possession of the physical object of music consumption allows for a tightly controlled documentation of identity and development, as well as a way of relating to a referential web of sonic emotional history that helps us to place ourselves in the now.

“Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person…[it] is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such. The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint; he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond” (Freud, “Identification,” 105).

Our ability to identify with and relate to music on a level akin to other people is because, since the beginning of recording technology, music is in and of itself a sonic stream of human history that is essentially intangible. There are millions of reasons to love or hate a piece of music, to cannibalistically devour it and thus its creators and instruments and histories, but it remains the rope of sand that I referred to in my previous article; ungraspable, inexpressible, non-physical. It’s just that the objects that give us access to this non-physical stream become physical manifestations of what it means for us to participate in each other in this way. As the body is inextricably tied to Being, the record or CD or cassette exists as the body to music’s Being; a physical springboard into the cosmos.

So we’ve discovered why Drag City reissued Death’s recordings on both CD and vinyl. As a large part of the population favours the playlist and the album is dying a horrible, slow death, the fraction of vinyl hounding archivists (who seem to be increasing in numbers) move in precisely the other direction; bringing the non-physical into their bodies by dropping the needle in the groove, or pressing play on the cassette, or organizing hundreds of albums.

The fact is that even though every song contributes to the tradition, the stream, the One Song if you’ll get mystical with me, there’s absolutely no way to ever listen to the same piece of music twice. Even if you listen to the same album on the same stereo on the same couch, your ears have changed. Your mind has changed. You’ve thought a thousand things since last the music touched your brain. It’s the typical user as content, death of the author kind of reasoning; a dialectic relationship arises between the reader and the text, the listener and the song. Whether you feel that listening to an album on the original format of its release catapults you back in time to it’s conception or if you feel that every listening innovation followed carries us into the future by our ears, the fact is that every listen is a step forward into ourselves and Others and a greater understanding of the intangible totality of Being, even if we can’t express it.

Next month: From format to locality. Space is the place?

The city’s streetcar fleet, which is approaching antiquity, is finally and fortunately being replaced by an all-new lineup of fancy newfangled thingamawhatsits which should be trolling the arterials by 2012. As we all know this is a very liberal estimate, as 2012 translates loosely into transit speak as “???????!” Regardless, sometime within my lifetime, there will be at least 204 European-style Light Rail Vehicles on the prowl in Toronto.

The cost of these 204 streetcars the city has commissioned: $1.2 billion. Fine.

Reasonably, the city cannot continue using the current model of streetcar, the presumptuously titled Canadian Light Rail Vehicle for much longer, as the CLRVs and their Articulated cousins that are used primarily on the Queen route have been in service since the late 1970s, thus putting them fairly far out of code. And here we are now, where because of the price tag the general no-brainer of replacing aged public vehicles has become a source of some uproar. I’ve decided, given the fact that last month’s column was nothing but ranting, to avoid sermonizing for today and leave angry taxpaying motorists and transit-illiterate mayoral candidate Rocco Rossi alone for the time being.

Instead I want to talk for a bit about the really cool new streetcars that are being built specially for us, and why I think streetcars are really great in general. OK? Here we go:

So the new cars that are being built by Bombardier are called the Flexity Outlook, which is a low-floor, articulated LRV that has similar models operating in cities such as Brussels and Marseille. Below is a photo of one of Brussels’ Flexity Outlook cars:

Pretty cool, right? These things are larger and leagues more accessible than the CLRVs, plus they will apparently be air-conditioned and just generally all modern and fancy. I’m kind of stoked. Not much is known about the specifics of the Flexity Outlook in Toronto – seeing as how each model has to be very meticulously tailored to meet its city’s needs – however there appears to be some issue over track gauge, which may have to be modified on the street as it differs from standard street car routs, the SRT (which is set to be converted to LRV) and the upcoming Transit City routes. When extending the subway, you can just start digging a hole and away we go because the underground infrastructure of a major city is vastly more complex than one might immediately imagine and the same principal goes for streetcars: the city can’t just pick a model and plonk it down on Queen Street without much thought – it isn’t like buying a car. This is my general mode of thinking for when I’m feeling bitchy about city projects taking way longer than is convenient for me personally: there’s probably a lot going on that I’m not considering.

Anyway, I like the streetcar. I like riding streetcars way more than riding buses; maybe the streetcar seems like a more elegant form of transit compared to the bumpy, dusty crassness of buses. People in general seem to be much friendlier on the streetcars than on buses for reasons I’ll never be able to explain. I like to stick my hand out of the streetcar window on nice days in the summer and the nine-year old toy-truck-and-dinosaur-loving boy in me delights to no end when the operators ring their bells at each other.

Mostly though, I like streetcars in Toronto because they add a lot of character to the city and I think that those lumbering, red sources of motorist rage – slow and bunched-up though they may sometimes be – are something of an identifying point for Toronto. There is a good reason why the city blog, Torontoist’s logo consists of stylized images of the CN Tower, City Hall, OCAD’s Sharp Center for Design and a streetcar: the streetcar is an integral part of the city’s identity and the downtown Toronto experience, in my opinion just as iconic of Toronto as those other things, important parts of our architectural image. Everyone that visits me from out of town is always fascinated upon first encountering the CLRVs traipsing and buzzing down Dundas and indeed when I first moved here, I was completely enamored of their bizarre charms.

There are also many technical advantages to streetcars, as Steve Munro will be quick point out, such as the obvious point of being that they can carry a lot more people than buses. They’re also, on the whole, a lot more efficient, able to run much more smoothly and tend not to need replacing as frequently (as reflected by their cost to the city); to date only one of the original CLRVs has been scrapped completely, though many are now beginning to fail after decades of service. Today I’m not really feeling like going into this, though, as I’m instead feeling very sentimental and am for some reason trying to express my love for Toronto through a discussion of public transit.

Before the CLRVs were built, the city was considering scrapping streetcars altogether, but they changed their minds at the last second. Their extremely car-friendly schemes also at the time included plans to connect Allen Road to the Gardiner, effectively slashing some of downtown’s most vibrant neighborhoods such as the Annex, Little Italy and Kensington to pieces in favor of a network of highways that would essentially make downtown Toronto an overwhelmingly unfriendly place for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders. Instead, goodness won out in the end – perhaps by act of divine intervention, and much to the chagrin of commuters we all get to enjoy a downtown core you’d have to be insane to want to drive in. I for one cannot imagine sitting on some College Street patio without the nasal whir of the 506 filling my ears.

Ladies, gents, and gentiles, this is the first round of In-Fighting, where Steel Bananas columnists wrestle with their own. You may not know this, but we do bicker on occasion, and sometimes heated insults are exchanged, tears are shed, feelings hurt, sense is undone, forgotten, trampled in the dust. And then there’s the make-up orgy. So I figured, why not let the fight spill onto the front lawn for all to see? Perhaps the orgy should be made public as well. The jury’s still out on that.

The first target of my wrath is one Dennis (Danger-Dino the Dynamo, or, Chewable D, if you prefer) Reynolds who wrote an article last month titled “Am I Really Where I Say I Am? Local Music in Contemporary Space”.

Monsieur Reynolds’ article was sharp up until a point... or... until the blade wore dull. Not dull as in boring, of course. Certainly not that. But the precise nature of what the article was trying to argue became a tad muddled when it reached the Sufjan Stevens album The BQE. I can’t say my article will retain its sensical integrity either, as I frantically type to meet our monthly deadline on less sleep than coffee, but I will try my best to unravel the tangled web that Messr. Reynolds weaved.

Monsieur Reynolds first quotes Sufjan, speaking about his album The BQE (The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway), as saying he had intended to create a non-personal album, for whatever artist’s intentions matter post-Barthes/Foucault. However, Mr. Reynolds then goes on to say that the album is less community-driven and more personal than his earlier work, and that the music somehow allows us to find “solace in the traveling experience it creates,” whatever that means. Later in the article, comparing The BQE to one of Sufjan’s earlier albums, Michigan, he writes, “Both are not so much about the physical spaces themselves but the universal experiences one may find unique to a place” (Reynolds). Messr. Reynolds goes on to express the sentiment that the actual BQE, while a particular place, is also a highway like any other, and thus “its appeal is not predicated on a particularly unique American experience” because “[e]veryone understands highway traveling.”

It seems that there is much confusion here. Has Sufjan in some way succeeded in The BQE where the 50 States project failed? Is it a more or less personal album than its predecessors? Which is responsible for the success or failure? Is the attempt to reclaim “America” by creating albums devoted to physical spaces and local histories a noble endeavour or a vain fantasy, especially given the dangers outlined at the beginning of Messr. Reynolds’ article? Where does the particular end and the universal begin, and vice versa? Where does the personal end and the impersonal begin, and vice versa? How the hell can he then go on to compare the 50 States project to the Japandroids and their album Post-Nothing? While certainly the Japandroids do not seek credibility through the invocation of some exotic influence, I would not have known that the album was about “love, despair, and partying in Vancouver [my emphasis]” (Reynolds) if I had not known the context of the album. I would have thought it just another album about love, despair, and partying, because the gods know, there are enough of those being churned out all across the globe.

The first thing I would like to address is the confusing notion of “universal experiences one may find unique to a place,” as Messr. Reynolds expressed it. Is this just a slip of a few fingers on the keyboard, or is there something more here? In other words, is this turn of phrase confusing not only because the article forgot what it was arguing but because the content over which we are arguing refuses to be contained within coherent expression?

In order to decide, let us look at the content more closely. The real BQE. I would argue that it is not just another highway. It is part of a uniquely American experience, being a project of the illustrious Robert Moses, the same man who tore the Bronx in half to put up the Cross Bronx Expressway, thus turning the northernmost borough of New York into the nasty place of which we know today. The irony of Moses’ name has not been lost on his many critics. Moses embodied a uniquely American modernism that has indeed spread across the globe but that is paved in the trauma of a particular nation. His roads bleed smog like still-open wounds across the face of America. Another strange irony: the same man is responsible for beautifying New York’s “Valley of Ashes” made infamous by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby in the early years of the New Deal. He even built playgrounds in Harlem and on the Lower East Side. Yet those who knew Moses also knew that he did not do this out of love for the people. “I’ll get them!” he said of the people. “I’ll teach them!” It was not for the love of the people but for the idea of the public good that Moses did what he did, as Marshal Berman points out in his book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.

Unlike the Japandroids’ album Post-Nothing, the context of The BQE is front-and-center. The context is contained within the album, within the name of the album, as well as in the multimedia experience of its accompanying photographs and video footage of the expressway sold with the album. The context is not merely tacked on. The context is the content. And yet the content eludes the album, for while the BQE is a particular cultural artefact evocative of a uniquely American trauma, it is also a form of trauma that modernism and post-modernism have wrought across the globe. We confront the same difficulty as when we look at, well, anything really. Let’s say death. To look at death as a universal idea we lose sight of the particularity of those who die. We call them “those who die,” not by their names. We do not see their faces. Each death is like the other, because people die, yet each death is also a particular death not at all like any other.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas addresses this universal-particular dialectic in his discourse on “the face” of the human being. The face is at once a human face, like all human faces, and it is human because it is held in common, universal, yet it is also a particular face. At the primordial event of the beholding of the face, prior to cognition, the other is not a specific other as object in a specific context but an other as the possibility of any other, including the self as other, in any context. But as soon as cognition occurs, which is always re-cognition, as soon as the face contains particular meaning, this meaning becomes trapped within the signified, and the addresser and addressee become fixed, particular entities. However, once again, the particularity of the other as an object is unattainable for us, for the other’s face, even as it is re-cognized, continues to slip from its particular manifestation and to exist as something prior to recognition, something non-present and thus un-re-presentable.

That which makes the face a human face is prior even to some universal concept of humanity. Similarly, art is always failing to capture its object in the very pursuit of its object as an object. Though Levinas would probably turn in his grave, I would take Levinas’s description of the face a step further into the realm of artistic expression attempting to “capture” any given object. Thus the structure of the BQE is its particular cultural context, but it also bursts out of that particularity. Like light, at once wave and particle, any object that we seek to describe is at once particular and universal, and regardless of our attempt to express it, it is something prior to both.

Perhaps Sufjan’s one failing is that in the attempt not to humanize the space he does not, ironically enough, “recognize” that he cannot but impose his own humanity on the space and thus render the space uncontainable and unappropriable. Perhaps what the album unconsciously laments most of all is that it can only ever be a fantasy of reclamation. In which case, it is an album not so much about the BQE as it is an album about an album about the BQE.

Where the 50 States project fails is that it is constantly overwhelmed by the personal, by Sufjan himself, inserting himself into the history, though this is a necessary failing. Perhaps it was Sufjan’s frustration over constantly finding his reflection, his face and the faces of others, and his face in the faces of others in the places he sought to document that led him to The BQE, an album that seeks to bypass the artist, to bypass any human face, shedding lyrics in favour of images of steel and concrete to accompany the music. This is at once consciously and unconsciously horrific. Because he could not capture each state he sought to refine the description to a smaller scale, to a “more particular” physical object, only to have what he sought to capture become all the more slippery. The result is gorgeous, but not only for the reasons he had, perhaps, intended. It is beautiful not because Sufjan succeeds in creating a less personal album but because the album, having slipped the conscious grip of its creator, makes a lie of the very intention behind it. It is an album about an album about the BQE, but not necessarily because Sufjan intended it to be so. The very lack of words gapes its silence louder than any words.

To return from the lofty heights of our abstraction, which is also to plunge deeper, a more interesting album to place at the center of this discussion than Post-Nothing might be the recently released Joanna Newsom triple album Have One On Me, and not just because I have a huge crush on Joanna Newsom, but because it really does fit.

It is always difficult to pin down what Newsom is talking about because she is talking about so much and yet nothing all at once. The characters of the album are mostly, it seems, young women dreaming of the foreign and exotic in one form or another, or of a lover far away, though the lover of which she speaks is also, always, the idea of the foreign itself. As in the song “Go Long,” a retelling of the French Blue Beard folktale, of a woman left alone by her roaming husband and told she may open any door in his palace except one, which she opens, and she doesn`t like what she finds. The woman left alone in the song does not seem to know if she is a princess of India or a princess of Kentucky, and such confusion haunts the album both in its content and its form. Where are we in this song? Are we in continental Europe, the Orient, or the New World?

“Have One On Me” is saturated with sounds of “exotic” places, mixing the “traditional” and “global” with more “contemporary” and “American” sounds. A song like “Kingfisher” contains a panoply of exotica whilst never losing sight of the artificiality of that exotica. It sounds like a young girl’s dreams of far-off places, like the yearning of an American woman of a post-modern age for times past in places far away, locked away in that which was, that which is particularly represented and yet general in its romanticism. This is readily apparent given the album cover, depicting a full-colour Newsom decked out like a modern-day Cleopatra, sprawled on a couch that is covered and surrounded by antique exotic paraphernalia. In contrast, the black and white photographs within the album depict the “real life” Newsom, insofar as we may talk about a “real life” Newsom in this colour-drained representation, containing a vestige of the cover art in the form of a single leopard print draped over the back of her chair while she toys with her hair, posing as we might expect of the princess of Kentucky in her stylized faux-overalls.

The final track of the album is telling in that it depicts a woman packing up her pretty dresses and high-heeled shoes, her sparkling rings, coats of bouclé, jacquard and cashmere, cartouche and tweed, etc. The song itself, coming on the heels of the globe-trotting “Kingfisher,” is a sparse vocal and piano affair, until it draws to a close and her closet is empty. The final words of the album, “everywhere I tried to love you/is yours again/and only yours” tell the story not just of a woman letting go of a lost lover but of the loss of an idea of the foreign and old, of a greater elsewhere. It tells the story not of people reclaiming places but of people allowing places to reclaim themselves from our clumsy attempts at claiming them in the first place. The character of Newsom’s final song learns to let this elsewhere simply be. In practice, Newsom/her protagonist does not give up on the foreign, for she continues to appropriate, despite her recognition of the futility of the attempt. She does, however, give up on the attempt to represent her appropriation of the foreign as anything more than appropriation. She recognizes, insofar as one may consciously recognize, that her appropriation functions “through cultural reference rather than cultural experience” (Reynolds), and that to think it can be otherwise is a foolish dream. It is her pretence that she gives up. Then, cue the strings and a blaze of percussion and forbidding, piano-flecked electric dissonance barely hinted at in the album previously, but only for a few fleeting moments.

C’est ça pour, Messr. Reynolds.

My next beef is with an article by a new Steel Bananas columnist. And I hate to pick on a fresh face, especially when I have only met that fresh face once in passing, and I hope we have the chance to get along famously, but Marshall Lau, your time has come. Last month, Mr. Lau wrote an article titled “An Education in the crux of Art Cinema”. Well, I too saw An Education just over a month ago, and I was a little bit confused by some of what I read last month.

To give Mr. Lau his due, his article was well-written and coherent, more than I can say for this piece of shite that you are still, somehow, reading. That, and he knows far more about film than I do, but that won’t stop me from venting my opinions on his opinions like an angry, angry monkey... as opposed to a hungry, hungry hippo. Don’t ask. Way too much caffeine. And my journalistic integrity was down the tube before I started, so let’s just pretend that I’m someone worth your precious reading time.

My beef: Mr. Lau’s thesis. “Art cinema is a representation of reality.” I won’t say it’s not. Obviously it is. But I will say, well, so is all cinema! How can one brand of cinema all by its lonesome hold the sole title of “That Cinema Which Represents Reality”? All cinema, all art, all communication re-presents reality. All perception, for that matter, is a function of memory and thus holds up a distorted mirror to that which is. Even documentation is representation, and I would not exactly call An Education a documentary.

Mr. Lau follows this up with some good ol’ Charlie Kaufman worship. That’s fine. I’m down with that. But then he comes out with this: “Putting it bluntly, classical-narrative cinema films have nothing to do with your life. These films do not represent the reality of your life (if you choose to have your life represent the reality of a film, that’s something else)” (Lau). True, narrative cinema films have nothing to do with your life, but neither does art cinema. And these films do, precisely, re-present the reality of life. Not sure if any films have anything to do with your life in particular, whoever this you may be.

As for Lau’s division between films we see to escape life and films we see to expand our views of the world, one can learn a hell of a lot from films marketed to the escapist audience. I mean, you want to know what your culture’s about? Go to the trash heap. The trash always teaches you more than the treasure. I don’t go to mind-expanding films to expand my mind. Sorry. I go because it feels so damned good to expand my mind. I go because it jerks off my mind.

That said, having seen the trailer to An Education, I was under no illusions about what I was walking into, and I knew it was not to jerk off my mind but to pick apart a bizarre cultural artifact. And I was, as I could not help but be, rather pleased with the sturdy construction of said artifact. Perhaps the fact that I wasn’t going in with expectations of an art cinema throwback had me leave the theatre if not in a post-orgasmic daze, at least satisfied from having eaten a decent meal.

And wasn’t the point of the film to check such expectations? I mean, if you visit France and expect your colour vision to go the way of the dog when you step off the plane, think again. There’s a reason protagonist, Jenny, beautifully acted by Carey Mulligan -- and it is for the acting that I’d highly recommend the film -- who grows up adoring said art cinema and wants desperately to be French, having made love for the first time in an apartment in Paris, wonders aloud to her lover what all the fuss is over sex when it’s really so brief and disappointing. She wonders why so much poetry is written about it.

The point is that what you expect when looking at the fully clad woman is never what you get when her clothes come off. An Education is not a failed throwback to French art cinema of the 60s, or even a mock throwback. It is a lamentation of the death of said art cinema. The film is able to lament this death precisely by not being an imitation of said art cinema.

As for the resolution of the film, is it really as clean-cut as “it’s actually very easy in life, work hard and you’ll get there” (Lau)? The film, after all, does not just end with Jenny getting into Oxford, hurray, she did it, lesson learned, phewf! Sure, it’s a bit more feel-good than the art cinema of yore, and I’m not claiming that An Education is a brilliant film with a brilliant ending, as it is a good film with a good ending. The only thing I’d call near-brilliant in it would be the acting, but I would like us to look at the ending in its entirety and give it its fair due. Jenny returns to Paris with a boy from school and pretends she’d never been before. As with Joanna Newsom’s Have One On Me protagonist, the romance of the place and the time slips away, and Paris is allowed to simply be. It is not the Paris of 60s art-house cinema. It is a contemporary Paris, which is both good and bad. Certainly there is something lost, but we cannot simply remake the old films. We cannot live Paris as we did the first time. We may feign virginity, but we are not virgins. Nor is this ending reality as such. It is a re-presentation of reality. It is also a response to French art-house, but that does not make it French art-house. Call it “growing up” if you will, but I think it more sincere and less cliché than that. It is a paradoxical recognition of the impossibility of recognition. It is a rejection of appropriation in favour of... well, in favour of something I can’t yet name. Perhaps I will never be able to name it. For, as we have seen, re-presentation always fails. The power of French art-house was that it recognized the failure of any attempt to make sense of life. The genuine novelty of An Education is that it recognizes the failure of art-house to make sense of the senselessness of life.

In closing, I encourage other members of the sb crew to take up the in(-)fighting in the months to come. I’m also thinking of finding some way to get the readers of sb more involved in responding to and contributing to what is said in our virtual pages. Because really, we’re just a bunch of folks who like to talk about things we like, and you like things, and you have voices, so if you can think of any good ways for making those voices heard, send me suggestions at devon.x.wong@gmail.com.

Comments

• March 15, 2010, B-Rad writes: Haha, I love this idea! nothing like critique to get things going.

Does the above quote by Deleuze apply to Theatre? Or better yet: can it apply to theatre as an art form? I think it does apply. The state of contemporary theatre ranges roughly from the profit-driven musicals on Broadway to the more independent, thought-provoking theatre pieces. Yet theatre, as with any other art, is plagued by clichés. When Deleuze says “…it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision,” he is undoubtedly referring to the need to escape clichéd art in order to create something new. But aren’t theatre-makers and artists continuously in the process of creating new pieces of theatre? Is that not what automatically happens with art?

Well, yes and no.

Art as entertainment, whether film or theatre, does not necessarily care about cliché or the new. Take James Cameron’s Avatar. Being the highest grossing film of all time, it has wowed audiences around the globe with its stellar advancements in 3D technology and filmmaking. It’s visual candy. As to plot, however, it couldn’t be more overused. Technologically advanced Imperial power seeks a rare commodity (ridiculously called ‘Unobtainium’), and invades a peaceful, nature-loving planet and its people. Pocahontas, Fern Gully and Dances With Wolves have the same plot. The same line of argument could be said of entertaining theatre musicals. There is something fundamental here that I have not discussed, and that is the question of what theatre does as an art form. The old mantra is that the theatre is the ‘mirror to life,’ that is, theatre is supposed to reflect the human experience back to us (the audience). By mirroring humanity back to itself, theatre in fact gives us an insight into humanity. It reflects. Against this notion of the theatre, Deleuze argues that all art is a matter of creating the new, one of composition, not reflection.

It is against this backdrop that the contemporary theatre scene (at least in Canada) can be seen as merely recycling over-used concepts, forms and ideas. It is not striving to the next level; rather it has halted, stopped still-fast and frozen. Contemporary theatre is frozen in place and it is happy to be there for the time being. As in the quote above, the contemporary theatre-maker needs to confront a world of abused, over-used and exhausted concepts and composition, in order to truly create something new.

The immediate question to be put forth to such a bold claim would be to ask: doesn’t this occur with every generation of artists? That is to say, is not each artistic movement eventually superseded by another, which revolts and retaliates against the previous one? Is this not indeed how the history of theatre and art in general has progressed?

There is truth in this objection; yet again I think Deleuze presents us with an interesting reply:

“Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the ‘clichés’ of opinion.”

This point is crucial to grasp, I think. Deleuze is saying here that by acknowledging or recognizing the clichés of an art form, the artist is able to “make other slits,” that is, open up the space for the new amongst the exhausted and reused. The important thing to remember is that although it may seem that with each artistic historical epoch, the emerging generation will react against the previous, this reaction can only be transformed into something new if it recognizes clichés. It is the same with theatre, I think. The theatre of ‘telling the stories of the minorities and underprivileged” is a thing of the last century and so it belongs there. Theatre-makers, artists and theories working in the new century need to realize the old in order to be able to create the new. The theatre is in need of a transformation, a change. In a word: revolution. Deleuze called this process of transformation ‘becoming,’ meaning that art form has yet not realized its full potential. A calling, so to speak. Theatre is in the process of becoming, it is in need of revitalization in order to propel itself further. Yet it cannot do this ‘blindly.’ Who will heed the call?

Brothers and Sisters: Rejoice, for the Vernal Equinox is NIGH! NIGH!

When we think about March we think about spankings and bike rides. We have been to rock and or roll shows for Canadian Music Week for the last 6 days in a row, and have learned that goats are fantastic pets. They're very loyal and affectionate.

March is about fighting with ourselves.

March is about sitting in the bathtub reading the words of stuffy gay Frenchmen.

March is about this breakdancing cat, whose name is Leonard. He will be at all of our parties for the next few years, until he dies from all the stimulants.

March is about hats, organic food, weird news about drivers, and post-millennium architecture.

March is about drinking ginger ale with your special lady or gent.

March is about sunshine, smiles, and the first addition to Steel Bananas' video gallery. We would link it to you but we're tired. Plus, we want you to search through the site for it so you'll become more familiar with your virtual surroundings.

Did we mention that March is about this cat?

Karen Correia Da Silva & C.S. Folkers
Editor-in-Chief & Associate Editor
Steel Bananas

Alexis Barattin is an illustration student and a freelance illustrator from Toronto. She spends most of her time drawing and enjoys experimenting with collage and other media. Alexis also likes really expensive cookies and is trying to learn how to do the cryptic crossword. Check out more of her work on her blog and in Steel Bananas' Spotlight Gallery.

I feel somewhat hypocritical reporting this month’s weird news because it is all about people operating motor vehicles when they probably shouldn’t be and I’m fairly certain that I’m going to be one of those people quite soon. I don’t know how to drive. I remember nothing from driving lessons. I have trouble even walking near cars and other people – I kind of wish we could all give this horseback thing another try. But I have my G2 and I’ve driven on the highway with my entire family in the backseat screaming “YOU’RE GOING TOO FAST.”

I have not, however, attempted to remove any of my pubic hair while driving as Megan Mariah Barnes, a 37-year-old from Florida, did. I’ve seen this story in so many news outlets indubitably because the writers know that everyone’s going to be like, “what a crazy lady, shaving her va-jay-jay while driving." And I agree, that’s some pretty weird stuff. I would rank a moving car to be one of the least desirable places to be holding a sharp metal tool near one’s genitalia. But I think we’re all overlooking the finer details of this wacky tale. Ms Barnes was on her way to see her boyfriend (which makes sense considering the body part she was shaving) and in the car with her were three other people with one of them being her ex-husband. That sounds so awkward to me, driving to see your boyfriend with your ex-husband and friends. Even without the bikini line shaving part. What kind of dolt is this ex-husband? Get a life, dude. And then after Barnes crashed the car, her ex-husband agreed to switch places with her and take the blame for the accident. I feel like that is what-the-fuck part of this story more so than her poor planning skills. I want to mail this guy a piece of my doormat with a snarky note that says “birds of a feather should flock together” or something.

A few months ago, I read a story about a woman who suffered a damaged nerve in her pelvis during a car accident.  This caused her to constantly be in a state of sexual arousal which sounded rad at first but then I realized how inconvenient that would be in every situation outside of a cheesy porno. The woman is miserable and expressed how embarrassing her affliction is and how no amount of sex satiates her.

I would feel such a sense of cosmic justice if that woman was Megan Barnes. This sounds like a cheesy adult film again but what if after preparing for coitus in a moving car that she was operating, and conning her poor ex-husband to take the fall for the resulting accident, Barnes damaged her pelvis nerve and has to live the rest of her life in a state of sexual limbo? I would perhaps reconsider my status as a militant atheist.

What can I say about February? It's one of those contentious months with staggered reading weeks so university students don't throw throw themselves off of the Bloor street viaduct, Valentine's Day meets love-holiday-haters everywhere (does anyone actually buy those cheesy Hallmark bears?) and Family Day touts its obvious holiday mandate of helping those stragglers beat the last residues of seasonal depression. February just seems to anticipate its own end in a sunnier Spring, and is always trying to make up for itself, for its own impossiblity:

Maira Kalman | From the NY Times

Luckily for us in Toronto, there are great cures for the Februaries all over the place. Whether it's walls of Garry Taxali, Monstrous Affections, Winterlicious, launches for hand-made books, or blockbuster cinema to cure the breakup blues, there's some sort of art-crutch for all of us. February may be drabber than its weather, but it challenges us to get our rocks off in more vibrant and interesting ways.

This issue features new faces, a couple of really funny interviews, delicious food, and beautiful artwork: