ADVENTURES IN THE NOISE RACKET

FingerDog rocks da house.

In solidarity with all non-musicians everywhere who are trying to put hard-working musicians out of business (especially those musicians who have spent several years earning a degree in, say, jazz), FingerDog is launching a sudden, gnarly post-listenable CDR at Expozine!

The disc features droney clattery guitar excrescences produced under appallingly lo fi conditions last summer, mixed with even more egregiously badly-recorded vocal ditherings (some might call them ‘poems’) captured this week on a cheap cheap cheap cheap cheap old old old old old microphone plugged into a laptop. Recording conditions were so absurd, we had to use a sad pair of iPod headphones to check out our ‘mixes’ because traffic noise from outside was drowning out the powerful laptop speakers.

The results are, if anything, majestic.

You’ll find copies on sale at the Four Minutes to Midnight table at Expozine. You can also check out the ’sounds’ of FingerDog at their rudimentary myspace page.

 

In related noisy news, the last few copies of the name no name mini-CD, featuring more of my grimy collaborative work, are on sale in the Casa Del Popolo’s distroboto machine. Just look for the sign of the four-leaf clover.

MR. NETANYAHU, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!

*Artistes Anti Apartheid XI
n’oublions pas les prisonnier-e-s politiques en Palestine

———————-
Mercredi, le 11 novembre 2009
20h00 $8 à l’avance | $10 à la porte
La Sala Rossa
4848 St-Laurent
Montréal, Québec
———————-

http://www.tadamon.ca/post/5034

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=173501016896

avec des performances de

* Antoine Bustros
Visual Music Project trio

Antoine Bustros, piano, clavier
Benoît Piché, trompette
Greg Smith, échantillonneur

Le nouveau trio Visual Music Project de Antoine Bustros sera accompagné d’une projection d’extraits du film documentaire « Territoires » de Mary Ellen Davis. Antoine Bustros est un célèbre compositeur de musique de films depuis plus de vingt ans et il a composé des bandes sonores d’une grande variété de styles musicaux et d’instrumentations. www.antoinebustros.com

* Seven Arrows

Joe Grass, pedal steel
Rebecca Foon, violoncelle
Andrew Barr, batterie et percussion
Sarah Pagé, harpe
Yuki Isami, flûte et shinoboe

Le mélange effervescent de tintements et de tonalités riches le plus étrange que vous n’aurez jamais entendu. Ce nouvel ensemble rassemble de merveilleux et merveilleuses musicien-ne-s de Montréal, provenant d’ensembles reconnus internationalement, dont des musiciens de Lhasa de Sela et Silver Mt. Zion

* Trio oud

Sam Shalabi, oud
Omar Dewachi, oud
Pierre-Guy Blanchard, percussion

Sam Shalabi, un célèbre musicien et compositeur Montréalais, va exécuter une série de pièces méditatives au oud. Shalabi, un des plus uniques et prolifiques musicien Montréalais de la décennie, explore tout les styles; de la musique classique égyptienne au free-form psych-rock. Le dernier projet de Shalabi est Land Of Kush chez Constellation.

Omar Dewachi, est un musicien et un universitaire. Il a fondé Qurna, un projet de musique conceptuel et expérimental selon un répertoire de Maqam irakien.

Ce concert est le onzième de la série Artistes Anti Apartheid, dans le cadre de la campagne internationale de boycott, désinvestissement et sanctions contre l’apartheid israélien.

* Tadamon! Boycott, désinvestissement et sanctions
http://www.tadamon.ca/campaigns/boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-against-israeli-apartheid

commandité par le festival Suoni per il Popolo et CKUT radio

—

* Artists Against Apartheid XI
remembering political prisoners in Palestine

———————-
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
20h00 $8 in advance | $10 at door
La Sala Rossa
4848 St. Laurent
Montreal, Quebec
———————-

http://www.tadamon.ca/post/5034

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=173501016896&ref=mf

performances from

* Antoine Bustros
Visual Music Project trio

Antoine Bustros: piano, keyboard
Benoît Piché: trumpet
Greg Smith: sampler

Antoine Bustros’s new Visual Music Project trio will be accompanied by projected excerpts from ‘Territories’ a documentary film by Mary-Ellen Davis. Antoine Bustros is a celebrated film music composer for over twenty years, scoring soundtracks that cover a wide variety of genres and instrumentation. www.antoinebustros.com

* Seven Arrows

Joe Grass, pedal steel
Rebecca Foon, cello
Andrew Barr, drums and percussion
Sarah Pagé, harp
Yuki Isami, flute and shinoboe

The strangest mix of effervescent tinkling and full rich tones you’ve ever heard. A new ensemble bringing together beautiful musicians from Montreal from internationally celebrated ensembles including the key musicians for Lhasa de Sela and Sliver Mt. Zion.

* Oud trio

Sam Shalabi, oud
Omar Dewachi, oud
Pierre-Guy Blanchard, percussion

Sam Shalabi, celebrated Montreal-based musician and composer will be performing a meditative set on the Oud. Shalabi, one of Montreal’s most unique and prolific players over the past decade explores everything from classical Egyptian music to free-form psych-rock. Shalabi’s latest project is Land Of Kush on Constellation.

Omar Dewachi is a musician and academic, founder of Qurna, a conceptual and experimental music project of Iraqi Maqam repertoire.

This is the eleventh Artists Against Apartheid concert occurring within the international campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli apartheid.

* Tadamon! Boycott, divestment and sanctions
http://www.tadamon.ca/campaigns/boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-against-israeli-apartheid

co-sponsored by the Suoni per il Popolo festival and CKUT radio

Tadamon! Montreal
tel: 514 664 1036
email: info[at]tadamon.ca

POETIC CANADA

I’ve just been published in Canadian Poetry no. 64, a poetry review put out by the English Department of my alma mater, The University of Western Ontario. (HBA in History, 1982.) It’s a special issue on Anglo-Quebec Poetry, guest edited by Jason Camlot, and featuring scholarly studies on Rob Allen, David McGimpsey, Erin Mouré and Carmine Starnino, among others.

My piece is in a class of its own, “Documents.” ‘in search of the poetic in everyday life’ began as a rumination on the day when Canadian poetry was transformed from a distant, fusty concept to a vibrant, living presence in my life. I suppose it’s also about my own birth as a poet. Jason Camlot heard me read the piece at Erica Ruth Kelly’s chapbook launch at Cagibi last year, and asked me if I’d contribute it to Canadian Poetry.

An earlier version of ‘in search of the poetic in everyday life’ appeared in my November 2008 prose chapbook Drift.

100 SHOWS AND COUNTING …

Kaie Kellough rocks the mic.

I’m co-hosting a gala spoken word show Sunday, October 25th at Sala Rossa. It includes some of the most talented spoken word / poetry purveyors of Montreal. There’ll also be a dash or two of cabaret, a yummy side order of performance art, and a simmering thick trance vibe courtesy of Pharmakon. With spacial guest star T.L. Cowan coming all the way from Edmonton, and members of the Throw Collective national slam team. Information is below:

Our 100th Wired on Words and Music Show is coming up this weekend,
on October 25th, in a special showing at the Sala Rossa, 4848 St-Laurent, Montreal.

The event will be a packed literature and music show and will feature some of the top names in spoken word, many of whom have appeared in our shows over the years, including:

Alexis O’Hara – audio artiste extraordinaire
D. Kimm – poet, audio artist and director of voix d’ameriques festival
Taqralik Partridge – slow-burnin’ Inuit spoken word artist
Pharmakon MTL – eerie trance improv music – spoken word & multiple guitar and vocal harmonies
TL Cowan – in from Edmonton for one night, she puts the GRRR in girl.
Fortner Anderson – the spoken word man
Kaie Kellough – Excellent D-D-D-dub/poetry specialist and author of Lettricity.
Geneviève Letarte – fabulously talented Québec poet, performer and translator

Hosts for the evening will be Vincent Tinguely and Ian Ferrier

Think of it as a big celebration for a show that grew up with spoken word in Montreal.

Wired on Words and Music
100th Show
at the Sala Rossa
4848 St-Laurent
Sunday October 25th
$5
doors open 8:30; show starts 9:30

First 25 people at the door get a free CD from Wired on Words Productions

All proceeds go to send the Montreal Slam Team to the national slam finals in Victoria, B.C.

For more info, write to the

poets@wiredonwords.com

a golden cloud of the metaphysical

Sally: "My wrists are on fire!"

I call this batch of poems ‘metaphysical ‘ because that’s where my mind seems to want to go, lately – it prefers not to concern itself with the strictly material . Mining reality-perception for nuggets of insight. If I’m going to maintain a subjective perspective in my poetry, I can’t get away from ruminations on mortality; but if I am more and more aware of the limits of life, I am also growing more aware of its infinite charms. (And if that seems paradoxical – that’s poetry for you.)

‘Metaphysical’ might imply ‘God’ to some. While I certainly show symptoms of the classic Western Civilization God-lack hangover, my cosmologarage does not house a personal jesus roadster. After pillaging the Catholic pantheon, flirting with paganism and indulging in a most sincere period of goddess-worship, I find the impersonality of the scientific-objective universe to be most comforting. It calls to our imagination, can’t you hear it calling? It is endless mystery. It will haunt us as long as our species walks the Earth.

(I remember when I started sending poems around to various quarterlies, back in the late eighties, there was one that quite pointedly, in its submission guidelines, told prospective contributors not to send any poems that contained the words ‘soul’ or ‘God’ or suchlike. Happily for that editor, should he or she chance across my little blog entry here, these poems contain neither word, except for one example of the negative form ‘soulless’.)

‘Metaphysical’, in my mind, has more to do with the function of ideals in our lives, and how we express them to ourselves and each other. We’re in a very conflicted time … an infuriating shouting-match of a time … certainly we’re on the cusp of enormous change, change that none of us can really understand on an individual level.  And beyond the simple nuts-and-bolts issues of how these coming changes are going to be dealt with, on individual and collective levels, locally and globally … there’s also the question of how we’re going to arm our spirits to meet these changes.

Are we going to go off the deep end and call it Apocalypse? Take refuge in fatalism? I can understand the allure of Death Writ Large – this world is a fucking pain in the ass, after all, and who isn’t fed up? – but if we’re collectively considering ‘ending it all’, then the way is also open for radical, joyful change, an opening of the way, at last, to all the crazy hopeful ideas that have been waiting in the wings.

While the dying forms (big industry, big money, and – dare I say it? – big religion) have kept throwing the dice (“one more time, baby, I’m feelin’ lucky tonight!”) and kept the door barred against the rapidly changing face of the future, still, fingers of light shine through. These poems are about that.

Memory unfolds memory unfolds memory unfolds memory …

Spark plays fetch in the Petawawa River.

My latest batch of poems immediately suggested a number of themes to me. This posting gathers several of the ones that seem to be concerned with memory.

∞

I want to remember because
We are the only ones who remember

Because everything rolls on
Like an avalanche
Like a hurricane
No
Just like an ocean wave
Of forgetting
Things and things
Swept away heedlessly by time

And we are the only ones
Who care to remember

We are the only ones who care
We cling to memories
We can love a thing, like a book
Or a song
Or a picture
We’re just trying to make
something, anything
Last

In the midst of an
Explosion of cascading changes
A simple ocean wave
A hurricane
An avalanche

Not something greater than ourselves
Just ourselves
But mediated
Transformed, transfigured
Carried safe through time
As an image, a word
A thought

Simply because
We care to remember

Simply because
We care

– 12 Oct 08 –

EDGEWALKING

There was the time I thought about killing myself just because it would be so wonderful to never again feel such pain. If the pain hadn’t stopped I might’ve done something foolish. But it stopped, or more accurately, I stopped it. I picked up a guitar and wept with it and when the last chord chimed I was past it.

VAGABONDAGE

Graffiti left by Rimbaud near Karnak, Egypt.

… J’avais en effet, en toute sincérité d’esprit, pris l’engagement de le rendre à son état primitif de fils du soleil, – et nous errions, nourris du vin des cavernes et du biscuit de la route, moi pressé de trouver le lieu et la formule.

- Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Vagabonds’

One of those themes not known to inspire summer blockbuster films, the idea of homelessness is central to last year’s Wendy And Lucy, directed by Kelly Reichardt, and Vagabond, a 1985 release by France’s Agnes Varda. I picked up both at Montreal’s Grand Bibliothèque recently, amongst more prosaic fare like Stargate Continuum, and of course it’s the smaller, more thoughtful films that have stayed with me, while the special effects vehicles fade as quickly as the indigestion wrought by a bag of Frito’s ‘Original’ Corn Chips (‘Original’ cuz only the Undead can eat the BBQ-style).

WALKING SPANISH DOWN THE HALL

The latest issue of The Apostle's Review.

Just a couple of random and unrelated things literary / artistic that I have had the honour to be included in. First, an artists’ book called Drop Names that I co-created with Victoria Stanton in 1995 has appeared in the newly-launched ‘virtual’ exhibition Artists’ Books: Bound in Art. The exhibit is a project of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. Our work is only represented by a single picture, but there’s more than 140 artists’ books digitized on the site and available for browsing.

Second, two of my poems have appeared in the latest issue of The Apostles Review, a Spanish-language literary magazine published here in Montreal. The poems, ‘The Aesthetics of Emotional Control’ and ‘Prayer’, originally appeared in my triple-chapbook set SEX, POWER, MYTH, which I self-published back in late 2004. Alejandro Saravia bought a set at the launch party, and was quite taken with a few of the pieces.

Some of you might remember our performance at the April 2008 Words and Music at the Casa, where I read my poems in English and Alejandro then read the translated versions. At first, he’d translated a few of them just for his own pleasure. Then he floated the possibility that they might appear online. Imagine my delight when they actually appeared in print! It’s a really nice magazine, too, and features a lot of Spanish poets and prose writers, including Saravia himself, Angel Mota and Nela Rio.

IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK

garage rock extraordinaire

It is eight o’clock and I’m lying on my bed reading Miranda July. I’m reading No one belongs here more than you and I’m hearing Miranda July’s voice as I read – because I know what her voice sounds like. I’ve seen the movie she did, Me and you and everyone we know, and she not only wrote and directed the film, she starred in it. So it’s Miranda July non-stop, 24/7. Her voice is the voice of Miranda July the movie actor, not Miranda July the psychotic-sounding Kill Rock Stars recording artist. When I heard those CDs – and those CDs were the first I heard of Miranda July – I thought she must’ve been about as punk rock as it gets. Then I saw her videos at GIV, this place in Montreal that has a big library of artist’s videos – and DVDs now, I guess – and the projector kept fucking up on one of her videos and so we – there were other people there watching the videos too – we only got to digest this one video of hers in weird pieces, because it just kept stopping. Miranda July of the videos was definitely out to disturb the audience. Like the one with the baby – that was disturbing. Not disturbing like Ju-On, but disturbing like pushing the audience’s buttons to show the audience that hey, look, you’ve got buttons I can push to disturb you a little. By the time she got around to doing a movie, she’d toned it down. Same with No one belongs here more than you. Or maybe I’m just used to her now.