RUCKUS 3!

An eclectic cabaret of performances to raise funds for the Ruckus Society
January 24, 2011 at Casa del Popolo

With experimental electronic sound artist Freida Abtan

and the madcap bluegrass electro rockabilly of Dante’s Flaming Uterus!

Dru Oja Jay, co-founder of the Montreal Media Coop and a member of Climate Justice Montreal, will talk about his experiences in the campaign against the Alberta tar sands, and share his thoughts on the recent failed environmental conference in Durban, South Africa.

Hosted by Vince Tinguely

Tuesday, January 24
Casa del Popolo
4873 St-Laurent Boulevard

Doors 8:30 pm, show starts 9 pm

$5

“The Ruckus Society provides environmental, human rights, and social justice organizers with the tools, training, and support needed to achieve their goals. Working with a broad range of communities, organizations, and movements – from high school students to professional organizations – Ruckus facilitates the sharing of information and expertise that strengthens the capacity to change our relationship with the environment and each other. We believe building partnerships with organizers and communities to create spaces for participatory learning, networking, and resource sharing is the most powerful way we as individuals can contribute to actualizing positive social change.”

For more info on Ruckus Society: www.ruckus.org

Performer Bios:

JAN DESROSIERS is a founding member of Dante’s Flaming Uterus, The Church of Harvey Christ Redeemer (as Reverend Norm) & Central Dispatch. He has performed music, sound-art, theatrics, installation & controlled spastic body/vocal acrobatics in Toronto, (MOCCA, the Drake Hotel for Deep Wireless), Guelph, Winnipeg, the free103point9’s Wave Farm (Hudson Valley Region of the U.S.A), Vancouver and Montréal. He can be found on ckut 90.3 FM radio McGill, & on the Kunstradio archives, (Austria). Desrosiers is a graduate of the University of Manitoba’s School of Art & Concordia University (Montréal), and is presently painting, illustrating, playing music/noize, working simple electronics or gadgeteering.

http://www.myspace.com/dantesflaminguterus

FREIDA ABTAN is a Canadian multi-disciplinary artist and composer. Her music falls somewhere in between musique concrete and more modern noise and experimental audio and both genres are influential to her sound. Her work has been compared to bands such as Coil, and Zoviet France, because of her use of spectral manipulation and collage.

Freida primarily works with samples of both musical and non-musical objects that she records herself and then manipulates, often beyond recognition, through techniques derived from musique concrète and through successive layers of digital signal processing. She uses structures reminiscent of popular music and more abstract compositional variants to sequence these sounds into melodic songs before incorporating her own treated voice.

As well as having created visual shows for and performed with the internationally renown group Nurse with Wound, Freida has presented her own sound and visual work at festivals across North America and Europe. Her first album subtle movements is available on United Dairies / Jnana Records. Her most recent release the hands of the dancer is available on finite state and through Jnana Records.

http://www.freidaabtan.com/

DRU OJA JAY is a Montreal-based journalist, organizer and solidarity activist. He is a co-founder of the Media Co-op, and a member of Climate Justice Montreal. He has reported from the industrial moonscapes of Northern Alberta and the bureaucratic absurdity of UN climate conferences, and has participated in direct action campaigns and mobilization in solidarity with communities affected by Canada’s industries and governments.

http://montreal.mediacoop.ca/

MASS CULTURE END-OF-THE-WORLD BLUES

ONE

The swing dance of
The car plants
Bodies interpose themselves
Between arc welded parts
Crashing crushing
Crescendos of consciousness
Swinging through feverish
Interlocking machinery

Electronics and tooled machine parts
Send signals in syncopation
Audience receives the shock wave
And dances

Pyramid schemes
Men at the top
Control a few men who
Control a few more men who
Control a few more men who
Control a few more men who
Know nothing but what they are told

So they invade your country
Or they break your arm
With a police baton

Something in me wouldn’t click
The grain of sand in the gears
Never pulling my weight
I could never fit
In the clack clack machine racket
Flowing through
Work and
War

TWO

It’s too easy to destroy the world
It’s too hard to save it
It’s uphill all the way
When you don’t have a car
When you don’t have that
Prosthesis
Mechanism
Armour

The warning signs
Melted glaciers, torrents, droughts
Still too subtle for clownlike primates
Busy driving their toy cars in their toy towns

Mine mine own –
Like fat men
In a famine

The winners
Can no longer win
If the winners
Want to continue
To live

What impossible dream
Could change this picture?
What IDEAL could sway them
From the consumerist delusion
What better illusion,
What finer dream?

THREE

In the night which you don’t perceive, being of it
What is the crack without the addict?
What is the addict without the need?
It’s all one, the drug, the drugger,
Desire and object
Supply and demand,
We’re stupid algebra –
Illiterate so the mathematicians
Can manipulate us like
So many unknown quantities –
x, y, z

Shoulder to the wheel,
Nose to the grindstone,
How do people actually enjoy themselves, anyhow?
Like there’s sun and green fields and trees
But it is the rest that matters,
Wherever, whenever
The being able to be at rest
The being able to just be
Letting thoughts come and go –
I know you can do that, little Buddha
I have seen with mine own eyes
As you raised a lotus,
And spoke with glowing eyes
And smile and shrug
Of its beauty

FOUR

Oh you want to hear about desire
My desire for this thing to be shaken into a billion shards
An earthquake that runs through the internet
A hurricane that moves through circulating currency
My teeth in your throat, do you hear?
My teeth tearing out your throat

As my mind writhes
Like a python
Lashes like a live wire
Smoking sputtering
Sparking in a
Filthy puddle

God I wish I could just
Wreck it wreck everything
My cock gets hard
Just thinking of it

The darkness I feel coming
Like the advent of winter
Like the fall of night, swift
That darkness of vision

The bored, dead man
Frozen in front of a screen
Waiting waiting waiting
For something, anything
To happen

FIVE

If you look at
it, if you observe
the structure

Just there

At the point where
truth ran up
against the
supposed exigencies
of power

From that point
You can see
A flaw

It runs through
everything from
that point

Through every level
beyond that point
like a fissure
like a hairline
fracture

Spreading wider
in ripples, throughout
everywhere

And that is why
this thing can’t
be ‘fixed’

It has to be
torn down and
rebuilt

SIX

Tides and sunlight
Birds and the patterns birds make
Leaves, the way they move in the wind
Grass and trees forming islands of coolness
Skunks, racoons, squirrels, and rats
The rain
The kiss of air
Bite of cold
Clang of heat
Even in the city I am with you

Bird of prey
Her black wings arch as she
Gazes with a predator’s gaze
Into my eyes

Ragamuffin
I look back at you
With the glazed eye of mortality
Still and calm as a lake at dawn
Everywhere I turn now
Death, death, death
My own death, the death of these times
The dead weight of our stasis

Eternity eyes
Seeking some map, some
Sunshine on the ink blot
The socked-in closet
That life can clamp
Down to

Nothing’s concrete
It’s all flowing
Like a world of melting
Tiger stripe ice cream
Days and nights
Blood in veins
Tears
Air moves in oceans
Over frozen plateaux
Ocean flows
And mind,
Words / images / feelings
Peace my darling
It’s all peace
From the vantage point
Of the nearest star
(Light flows
Across silent space
So cold and old)
And up close
No control
Just eternal flow

SEVEN

Help people
Be with people
Love people

CKUT FUNDING DRIVE

CKUT’s annual funding drive is fast approaching. I’m posting this message in the hope that you might consider pledging a few dollars to my radio show.

I’ve been doing campus and community radio since 1985, and I’ve been on-air at CKUT since 1995. This year I’ve been the volunteer music department rep on CKUT’s steering committee, seeing first hand every week the back-breaking work the people at CKUT do to bring alternative radio to Montreal and environs (via the airwaves) and beyond, to the world at large (via the internet).

I’ve always been proud to be part of a community that isn’t about making a profit. Instead, CKUT FM is about consciousness-raising, 24/7, 365 days a year, carrying news and information you won’t hear anywhere else – on the topic of social justice, human rights, environmental activism, gender equality, you name it. We do it all on a shoestring budget, so when we come calling for your help during our funding drive, you know we really need it.

SOME POETRY RECORDINGS

I went over to my friend Annabelle’s home recording studio back in February 2010 with a folder of poems to record. I’d picked them from a wide range of files – some pieces were written recently, others go all the way back to 1992. I recorded about 35 poems that day in a marathon session, then took the results home to play with on my home computer.

I’ve been making home-recorded poetry and audio art since about 1983. My approach to the latest set of recordings was similar, although this time I’m using an eMac with SoundStudio software to build my tracks, along with a Radio Shack Disco Mixer, Hondo Electric Guitar, Sansui Stereo Receiver, Marantz digital recorder borrowed from CKUT, and whatever else I could think of. Track 4, ‘How Can I Help’, uses a home recording by Hugh Orr recorded in June 1985.

The first two tracks of the set I’ve posted on Soundcloud are the most ‘industrial’-sounding. They mellow out after that …

I”ve included some of the texts I recorded on this blog post (below). ‘The Star Who Never Was’  can be found here.

APROPOS OF CARS AND FREEDOM

I read two poems on CKUT FM’s ‘Radio is Dead?’ on June 20. ‘Oilers’ has been published in Four Minutes to Midnight, and it also exists in audio and video form. ‘The Long Drive’ was published in the British Corporate Watch anthology This poem is Sponsored by … : Poems in the face of corporate power. You can listen to the reading here.

OILERS (slightly revised June 20, 2011)

On average, every human on earth consumes one and a half liters of water per day.

On average, every human on earth consumes two liters of oil per day.

On average, every human in North America consumes eleven liters of oil per day.

I came out of my house one day, stood on the second storey landing and looked up and down the street. Cars lined both sides as far as I could see; and I knew that beyond the horizon, the lines of cars continued, on and on, moving and resting, forever and ever, amen. And I thought, “There were cars when I was born, and there will be cars when I die, and what kind of a world is this anyway?”

It’s what I call “The Deal.”

MORE UNFINISHED WORK

I recently filled another notebook, a year-and-a-half of dreams, thoughts, poems. Here’s a few of those still-being-edited poems that I read in April at the High Wire series and at the Four Minutes to Midnight launch of f.a. nettelbeck’s last book.

Discipline! From now until then. Dregs of training trail after everything I do, all that I am, frail human clay molded to fit this world. These strings of letters, letters strung into words, words into phrases, into poems, stories, instructions, exhortations, essays, anonymous obscenities. I was taught to speak, taught to write, taught to see the shared fantasies and illusions that make up social ‘reality’; all along I think I’ve secretly desired no more than to somehow impossibly recover my own earliest perceptions, before language imposed its own ‘view’ what did a clover look like? A blade of grass? A stone? Whole catalogues of sensation compiled by the wobbly baby head, hands, feet, skin, hair, elbows, nostrils, ears, eyes. The immediate – reality. All else like an expanding invisible bubble taking in neighbourhood, city, nation, planet, solary system, Rand McNally galaxy, the conceptual impossible (really) universe. Always secretly suspecting somewhere a fundamental mistake was made. Somewhere in the superstructures of thought, the underlying bedrock of belief, of our shared ‘truths’. Perhaps someone lied, perhaps we lie to ourselves. Some flawed foundation stone, such that everything, the whole human project is cursed. Is it the way we string these words together? See those stars in the sky? Perfect, horrid zeitgeist, rotting from within. Think we grasp something, some situation, only to see it turn and alter instantly, like a kaleidoscope, like a universe seen from a reverse perspective. Confusion, fear, paranoia, until we return to the source, to a vast, heaving ocean under dark skies, and stand there with another, one who could be loved. Wordless.

– 2 Nov 09 –

NEW WEBZINE LAUNCHED

Kaie Kellough and Fortner Anderson, two esteemed contributing editors to issue 1 of litlive.ca.

January 18 witnessed the gala launch of litlive.ca, a new Canadian webzine devoted to all forms of Canadian literature in performance. As the managing editor, I encourage you to check out the site, and feel free to comment on or critique any of the articles you might read.

Here are the texts of a couple of new poems I read at the launch party:

Untitled 1 (props to Mr. Selman)

Our subtle power.
The comfort of contact made
The sense there is a project,
There is a community of purpose.

We cannot cry as we go,
We are by definition
A celebration.
Resolute, bold, loving.

Something I sense now as a possibility,
Something I can help with,
Something we all hoped for against hope,
Something of the beauty we all believe in,
Something light limning shapes still uncertain.

– 9 Jan 11 –

Untitled 2

Thunderous politics
The Egyptian lion roars
Waking to every doubt, every fear, every worry
Dusty square, milling crowds
Wanting the cold blood of the lizard
To withstand the shock of
All the worst of the human circus
Threats and clubs and guns and jails
And closer to home
Just silence
Silence and the slow collapse
Of rickety relationships, loves and alliances.

As the grasping grasp after whatever as ever
I’m mailing a Sylvia Plath package
Using unstamped stamps from forgotten envelopes
Studies of suicide bombers are delivered
While all these desperate passions converge
In one great shout for freedom and democracy.
Their bright, bright moments
At this distance only dimly illuminate
Our own arctics, our slow icy progress
Toward something much more
Than the simple satisfaction
Of a single man’s obsession.

– 5 Feb 11 –

FACEBOOK™, PROZAC™ AND HELL’S HALF-ACRE

The authors digesting a Vietnamese brunch.

William wrote to Annette, to Coleridge and the Frenchman – I received a letter from Mrs. Clarkson, a very kind affecting letter, which I answered telling her I would go to Eusemere when William went to Keswick – I wrote a little bit to Coleridge. We sent off these letters by Fletcher. It was a tremendous night of wind and rain. Poor Coleridge! a sad night for a traveller such as he. God be praised he was in safe quarters. Wm. went out, and put the letters under the door – he never felt a colder night.

- Dorothy Wordsworth, from her journal, February 24, 1802

This email thread began when a mutual friend ‘finally’ joined Facebook, and Scott and I began ruminating on the nature of this social media.

January 14: Vince to Scott

Facebook is pernicious, but it fills a need for an atomized ‘community’ (ie. spread across the planet rather than sensibly in one physical location). And it fills the same need even when we live in the same city, where people don’t have the time to ‘see’ everyone they know every day. I don’t see X for months at a time, for instance – about as infrequently as I see you, actually!

So as a Facebook user, I’m not happy to be part of a data-mining experiment, but I like the way FB brings together various things (photo albums, messaging, etc.) that we were doing already in a less integrated way. But what is FB doing to human consciousness? What strange shapes will it be taking? And what is next?

January 14: Scott to Vince

Nice summation of Facebook man, and good questions. I am undecided. It is really good – I mean in the same way that email is really good, for cutting down distances. I have friendships that frankly would not have existed without it.

January 22: Scott to Vince

Hey, a contribution to this discussion in The Guardian.

The article doesn’t go very deep, but it’s interesting to note that there is some negative coverage. The closing sentence (‘Before everyone travelled on the bus or train with their heads buried in an iPad or a smart phone, they usually just travelled in silence.’) seems odd to me – as if we have no short term memory. Before people were on iPhones or BBs they listened to music on walkmans – tapes first, then CDs. And before that, I suspect there was more chatter or at least present-mindedness. My mother tells a story about taking the horrid tram as a young adult in Ottawa, being forced to breathe in the smell of sweat from working girls reaching up to steady themselves on transit.

CKUT FM’s MAGIC SOUNDBOX!

think inside the box

I’m contributing to this collaborative audio collage …

Live Radio Art Performance: storytelling–sound art–music–radio ether

***********************************
LOCATION: L’Envers, 185 Van Horne (just east of Parc Ave)
DATE: Thursday, November 18th
TIME: 7pm or 9pm SHARP!
COST: $7-12 Sliding Scale
***********************************

Three times a charm. CKUT invites you into our third Magic Sound Box. Modeled after a concept developed in Kingston at CFRC radio station, we take you back in time when radio was King. This time around we’ll focus on the concept of ‘storytelling’ – as education, as entertainment, as cultural continuity, as the only thing and everything.

This live radio transmission art show (or tell…) takes the audience inside Radioland – inside the magic sound box – highlighting the many talents of CKUT, exploring the limits of aural imagination and indulging in the intimacy of sound.

Amateur and veteran sound-makers will transform a large open venue. The plan: create an enclosed area with large swaths of fabric, turn off the lights…and make radio. The audience is inside the box, the performers are on the outside. Some of the sounds will be mixed through a quadrophonic speaker system and some will use the natural acoustics of the space, inviting our listeners to enjoy the spatial qualities of voices, instruments, field recordings and electronics.

For this performance all you need is ears, we’ll turn out the lights, and twist and weave a variety of stories and sounds together.

More information:
culture@ckut.ca | 514 448 4041 x2593
magicsoundbox.blogspot.com | www.ckut.ca

Performance d’art radiophonique en direct :

contes — art sonore — musique — éther radio

***********************************
…LIEU: L’Envers, 185 Van Horne (à l’est de l’Av. du Parc)
DATE: Jeudi le 18 novembre
HEURE: 19h ou 21h JUSTE!
COÛT: $7-12, échelle variable
***********************************

Jamais deux sans trois. CKUT vous invite à l’intérieur de notre troisième Boîte à sons magique. Inspiré d’un concept développé à la radio CFRC à Kingston, nous vous transportons dans un passé où la radio était puissance régnante. Cette fois, nous présentons le thème du récit. Les histoires servent à éduquer, à amuser, à assurer une continuité culturelle – raconter est une action primordiale et essentielle.

Cette transmission radiophonique en direct transporte les auditeurs à la planète Radio – et dans la Boîte à sons magique – permettant de découvrir les talents divers de CKUT et d’explorer les limites de l’imagination auditive et l’intimité que nous offre le son.

Amateurs et vétérans bruiteurs transformeront une grande salle ouverte. Le plan: créer un espace fermé grâce à des tissus suspendus, éteindre les lumières… et faire de la radio. Les auditeurs dans la boîte, les performeurs en dehors. Certains sons proviendront d’un système de haut-parleurs quadriphonique, d’autres utiliseront les qualités acoustiques naturelles de la salle. Les propriétés spatiales d’instruments, de voix, d’enregistrements de terrain et d’objets électroniques seront donc mises en évidence.

Vous n’avez qu’à apporter vos oreilles à cette performance. Dans l’obscurité, nous allons tisser et tresser ensemble une variété de récits et de sons.

Pour plus d’information:
culture@ckut.ca | 514 448 4041 x2593
www.magicsoundbox.blogspot.com | www.ckut.ca

IMPRESSIONS OF CKUT IN BYGONE YEARS

In the fall of 1987, I was living in Point Saint Charles with a friend, down on Rue Center across the street from the old abandoned Sherwin Williams paint factory. We’d decided to see what life would be like living without a phone. What happened was that almost all of our Plateau friends forgot we existed – we might as well have moved to Mars. On rare occasion we’d receive visits from the very few who still remembered we were alive.

I’d been doing campus / community radio since 1985, when I’d landed a bi-weekly all-night radio show on the Halifax station CKDU. After a brief stay in Vancouver in 1986, where I had a show on CITR, I had moved to Montreal, where I was astounded to learn that Montreal still didn’t have a campus station on FM! WTF?!?!

I’d gone down to McGill to apply for a show – but the closed-circuit McGill station was totally swamped with applications at the time, since they’d recently won their bid for an FM license. I got a show on Concordia’s cable FM station, CRSG, but having done FM shows for a couple of years, I missed the sense of having a substantial audience out there.