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/

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’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.

My radio show, The Kitchen Bang Bang Law, is about cutting-edge culture. It’s about dreaming beyond the barriers of cynical ‘common sense’ through radical sonic art forms, be they the working blues of the 20s or the avante garde drone of today. I try to feed the listeners’ imagination by having lots of creative guests – this past year, I’ve talked to theatre artists Émilie Monnet, Alison Darcy and Cat Kidd, activists / artists / curators Stefan Christoff, John W. Stuart and Kevin Yuen-Kit Lo, video artist and activist John Greyson, performance artists Victoria Stanton, Amalie Atkins, Janine Eisenaecher and Laura Margita, musicians Elwood Epps, Malcolm Goldstein, Christian Richer, Kathy Kennedy, Jahsun of Kalmunity Vibe Collective, Jean Smith and David Lester of Mecca Normal, Brahja Waldman and Kyra Shaughnessy, and poets and writers like Ian Ferrier, Moe Clark, Gail Scott, Carolyn Marie Souaid, Endre Farkas, Moheb Soliman, Jane Gabriels and Kaie Kellough. I also recorded and broadcast excerpts from a Concordia University Master Class delivered by two major poets, United States of Poetry producer Bob Holman and co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Anne Waldman.

If you’ve ever listened to one of my shows, please consider pledging some cash during my funding drive radio show. It happens on October 25, from 12 to 2 p.m. Call the PLEDGE LINE during my show, 514-907-9424, and talk to the friendly people at CKUT.

OR consider pledging on-line. Go to www.ckut.ca and click on ‘make a pledge.’

 SPECIAL GIFTS OFFERED ON THE KITCHEN BANG BANG LAW!

Besides all the remarkable gifts available from CKUT for your pledge (which you can see here http://ckut.ca/funding/node/3), for listeners of The Kitchen Bang Bang Law, I’m offering a special selection of vinyl LPs, CDs (and even a VHS tape!) from this year’s crate-digging. There’s folk, punk, rock, jazz … something for everyone! (None of the LPs are current reissues, they’re all from back in the day.)

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – Live /`1975-1985 (5xLP box set) for a $30.00 pledge

Buzzcocks – A Different Kind Of Tension (LP) for a $15.00 pledge

Joan Jett – Bad Reputation (LP) for a $15.00 pledge

Elton John – Madman Across The Water (original textured LP gatefold sleeve with booklet) for a $25.00 pledge

Elton John - Tumbleweed Connection (original textured LP gatefold sleeve with booklet) for a $25.00 pledge

Jean Michel Jarre – Equinox (LP) for a $10.00 pledge

Jean Michel Jarre – Oxygene (LP) for a $10.00 pledge

Laurie Anderson – Big Science (LP) for a $20.00 pledge

Vangelis – China (LP) for a $10.00 pledge

Style Council – The Cost of Living (2xEP gatefold) for a $20.00 pledge

The Teardrop Explodes – Wilder (LP) for a $10.00 pledge

Paul Horn – Inside The Great Pyramid (2xLP gatefold with insert) for a $25.00 pledge

Eurhythmics – Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (LP, Mexican pressing) for a $15.00 pledge

Hejira inner sleeve

Joni Mitchell – Hejira (LP gatefold) for a $20.00 pledge

Judy Collins – Who Knows Where The Time Goes (LP gatefold) for a $10.00 pledge

Carole King – Tapestry (LP gatefold) for a $10.00 pledge

10cc – The Original Soundtrack (LP gatefold) for a $10.00 pledge

Stanley Turrentine – The Man With The Sad Face (LP) for a $10.00 pledge

Gene Krupa – Big Noise From Winnetka (Japanese CD re-issue with replica LP sleeve) for a $20.00 pledge

Bauhaus – Shadows and Light music video compilation (VHS) for a $10.00 pledge

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.

MIDGET LOVE

Here’s my midget love for you, my boring infatuation turned sour and stupid with time. You so big with drugs and money and nonsense and I so tiny and so wet, so wet I sizzled on the grill of your indifference. Your hot dry mid-eighties war machine muscle, your little dot of fem in the thick of skinny boy anger. This is no war on drugs, I’m nothing like those former sexcrazed hippies of the sixties turned seventies biblethumping childbeating bearded patriarchal paranoiacs my past is littered with narcotic dreams, narcotic nightmares, narcotic obsessions and narcotic love affairs, I’ve learned you can smoke enough dope to refloat the battleship Potemkin but turn down one joint and your a CSIS suspect, you’re a Preston Manning recruit you’re making room  for prolifer conventions in your storage shed and selling souls to Coca Cola. Returning such sentiments I declare the counterculture ossified, a fascist state, braindead and staggering through the wreckage of past glories, its children reduced to repeating the same old stories, old boomers continually mating dope consumption with materialism, pot video daydreams, LSD jet holidays to exotic places, coke stardust glitter on the Hollywood sign and smooth heroin rides down endless shopping  mall escalators. And booze, let’s not forget booze, we always forget booze, it’s what makes everything forgettable enough to repeat every day so each day’s a plastic supermarket bag, each day’s a blank tape, each day’s more landfill. Drunken bastards in Chechnya and Bosnia, drunken shits in political office, revolution in a bottle and religion on a blotter, love comes in pill form over prescription counters. Midget love crouching and slipping along under tables in every tavern, slithering  through every soundtrack, greasing the gears of a fabulously  trashy and pointless culture. Because we can’t go on if we aren’t blinddrunk and we can’t resist unless we’re stoned silly. You want your preachers hard left or hard right because you want to be told exactly what to do, because your mind is mush and you can’t recall the last time you did exactly what you wanted to do, it’s been so long you don’t know what you really want.  Just a reassuring voice to tell you it’s okay. Well, it’s okay, it’s okay. It’s okay. Okay? Whatever you think you’ve done wrong in your life the next person thinks is trivial. So just accept this my midget love for you. I’ve done worse and I’ve done better, I’ve run wet and I’ve run dry and every war is stupid.  Every war is stupid, every war is stupid, every war is stupid and every war is stupid.

∞

It was the beginning of the twenty-first century. Everyone was acting as if the entire twentieth century didn’t happen, because they were doing exactly the same things they had always done. They were acting as if the rubber plantations in the Belgian Congo never happened, and as if World War One didn’t happen. They were acting like the stock market crash of 1929 never happened, and neither did the Great Depression, which didn’t go on for ten years. It didn’t go on until World War Two didn’t happen. Thirty million people didn’t die in that war that never happened, and even though people talked the holocaust to death, they acted as if Jews and homosexuals and Gypsies weren’t murdered because they were different. Anyway, the harp seals did it, and the harp seals dropped atomic bombs on people in Japan. And then there wasn’t an arms race that turned the world into a paranoid hell in the fifties. The Beat writers were wrong and anyway nobody read books anymore. The sixties never happened and if they ever did it was to provide the advertising industry with an endless supply of emotional ammunition. The seventies almost happened, except Vietnam won the war. A peasant army whipped The United States of America, except it never happened. There were no terrorists in Ireland and France and Germany and Italy and Quebec and all of Latin America, and Iran didn’t have a revolution and Yassar Arafat was never a terrorist because the seventies didn’t happen. If anything happened in the twentieth century it was the eighties, because that’s when everyone was on cocaine and Ronald Reagan made profits a holy pursuit. The evil empire threw in its cards and the world was free, free at last! But the nineties didn’t really happen because if the nineties really happened Russia would be a rich capitalist paradise, and if the nineties really happened there wouldn’t be any talk about global warming and ozone holes and ecological collapse, so much talk that some people began to think it might really be happening.

It’s the beginning of the twenty-first century, and it might really be happening.

∞

I need the people I fear to need – these people fitted with eyes, who seem to see me, look to me, know me as someone and remind me I am not transparent, a wraith fading in the day’s light. As for a core, conviction, certainty of self, all I find is a body in natural decline, a consciousnessness that can turn and turn on itself, finding nothing to feed on. This emptiness is terror. The brief thaw falls back under the onslaught of heavy snow and brusque wind, I wish I was like the warehouse up the street, brick indifference with a jaunty water tower crown.

My self-confidence in company withers to a whine in solitude.

I’ve glanced through these old notebooks, I’ve seen the sterility of independence.

No wonder the homeless wander – the streets knit them a train of thought,

Passing windows, store fronts, doors,

Motley and cheerfully indifferent to whose head they occupy.

The mind’s a shark swimming sleepless through the city.

The old man’s painting, his cats and dogs and little bicycle cart defy reason.

There’s nothing to think about, it’s all been thought out.

All solutions exist, there, under that bushel.

Damn it, the music’s gone again – the music of my life – the syncopated beat and insouciant step of it, wasted. We’ve foundered on the rocks of a hard life and she scrambles for a twig while I drift, eyeing the joker sky. Not a cloud, every day is a mystery to me. I like having no great plan in mind. I like a future of surprise. There’s a flotilla of projects pulling me along, this way then that, random, beautiful things built with love. If this is drowning then let the tides take me, I feel at home here, this is my faith, my church, my calling. I can see where schemes get us – the world of human schemes. There’s no plan to paradise but hell is a development designed down to zero.

∞

Suture together the split, the dark and light, trace the line of half-light, the uncertainty of dusks and dawns, stay still for as long as it takes for all your incarnations to march in review, glue the shards of shattered kinships, conspiracies, collusions, desires, unspoken – make demon and angel wheel and tumble together like sex mad adolescents, give murder and childbirth adjacent hospital beds, marry indiscriminate fucking with the highest form of platonic love, shower yourself with lottery millions today and become penniless overnight, binge and purge, only spiritually – walk the tightrope without a net and only a single hour of sleep, let the changing seasons linger, let them turn as slowly as an old wooden wagon wheel, let us forget our speed and our bright power, let us find time, and bank the embers of something deeper, and more lasting.

∞

Have I forgotten how to write poems ? The paper crackles in protest – we near the end of the book, me, my pen and paper – I wonder what I’ve said that bears repeating. The space of her gaze, my gestures – handful of screws, laughter at her sex games, I’m really indifferent and that’s sad – maybe dangerous too but certainly sad. I lose sleep to anger, free-floating like a shark adrift on a current – warm Bahamas waters – lose sleep to fear, to doubt, to worry … to frustration … to ‘no exit’, to another day of nothing, to the sloshing about of fragmented factoids, old communal noises, no charity, to no end, eternal war and intrigues, pointless conflicts, selfishness and greed, geopolitics, the pettiest gossip, the grind of work and the fear of lost work, dull films or no films, the fifties or the seventies, eighties, or right now, small needs to fill while huge desires go wanting, people coming and going, all this feeling of being apart, of isolation, of lack of communication, of fragmentation, of no direction, of futility, of why not blow my brains out, of everyone plodding forward with nothing but platitudes to offer, of depthlessness, of hunger beyond any physical need, of thirst deeper than any reservoir, total surrender to my own futility, my emptiness, my bullshit stance, my need, my fears, my illusions, my deep hopelessness, my utter lack of hope, the loss I worship as the pure sign of my honesty with myself, all I have left, all I have.

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.”

We agree to be infantile in our response to reality, in exchange for … what?

For instance, the thrill I felt as a child, riding in my uncle’s big black gas guzzler with the tail fins, as we pulled into an A&W drive-in for the first time in my life, and it was JUST LIKE ON TV …

Or my TV moonshot child glee, or

Watching all those tons of Jumbo Jet coming down over my house, trailing black smoke and roar and roar and roar …

And oil was just there, like air, water, or earth, shoving me and my family into our slot at the A&W, or shoving a rocket to the moon, or shoving a jet through the sky.

It’s what I call “The Deal.”

The deal being, we can cry all we want about the war in Iraq, the war in Columbia, the war in Afghanistan … but at the end of the day we’re all supposed to climb back into our cars, and drive back to work. JUST LIKE ON TV. That’s the deal.

Caltex. Gibson Energy. Halliburton. Phillips. Royal Dutch / Shell Group. Austral Pacific Energy. B.P. Global.

I grew up on oil, twisting the parked Volkswagen steering wheel oil, shuttling from one town to the next oil, Richelieu plastic ice cream tub oil, tupperware, gas mower, car to mall, car to work, car to school, car for work, car for pleasure, but car, always car, car, car, car …

Southern Ontario, early eighties, we all smoked those oilers. Those little glass tubes with thick greeny-black goo, heat it and spread it on a rolling paper and smoke it with tobacco and all that tar and nicotine and cannabinoids go coursing down into the lungs. We’d smoke all those oilers and then tool around in Hackey’s old car, southern Ontario, early eighties.

Callon Petroleum Company. Occidental Petroleum Company. Anadarko Petroleum Company. Kuwait Petroleum Company. Berry Petroleum Company.

Sandy was an oilman and he came to the east coast in the early eighties when oil prices were over thirty a barrel and offshore exploration was just starting up, and who remembers the Rowan Gorilla? Figured he could get on the offshore trip. He applied here and there and he waited and he waited and he waited and he waited and he waited and he waited and he waited and he waited and then he went back to Alberta, where there’s plenty of oil, plenty of oilmen, and plenty of oil jobs.

Franklin was a sailor and he got a job with some oil company back in the early eighties and he flew out to Japan and came back on a brand new supertanker that was three or four football fields long. Then Franklin went north on a Korean-built ice breaker that cost fifty million dollars and he supplied the oil exploration platforms on the Beaufort Sea. Until the third time he was almost killed on the job, and then even two hundred dollars a day wasn’t enough to keep him up there, and he came back to Nova Scotia and drove a milk truck.

As for the oil platforms in the Beaufort Sea, when the price of oil went down again the oil companies abandoned them, abandoned tens of millions of dollars of equipment up there, it was cheaper than getting them out again. All that shit’s still up there.

Western Petroleum Company. Iraq Petroleum Company. Teton Petroleum Company. Petroleum Company of Trinidad and Tobago.

And it was oil for the military, and oil for the carnival, and sleepy late night oil for the parking lot job, and it was oil for the bus that went from east to west, and it was oil for the city buses criss-crossing Vancouver, and oil for the minibus that went from west to east again, oil for every plane ride, train ride, car ride, every bit of food I put in my mouth, oil for every album, cassette, CD, oil for the clothes on my back, and it’s so normal to fly three thousand miles, it’s so normal to think shrink those distances daily, it’s so normal, it’s so normal, shit you buy at the depanneur normal, Mission to Mars normal.

But oil, always oil, wake up with oil and sleep deep at night in dark pools of oil. Breathe oil, eat oil, shit oil and fuck oil. Love your momma and your papa oil. Leaving on a jet plane oil. She’s got a ticket to ride oil. Baby you can drive my car oil. Love is a stranger in an open car oil. On the road oil. Fear and loathing in Las Vegas oil. I get up every morning oil and look up and down the street oil, every street’s lined with cars oil. Oil.

Never mind the Columbian cartels, the Mexican narcodollars, the Afghani poppy farms. Oil is the real drug, oil is the real addiction, the rest are just window dressing when you’ve got PVC fetish gear oil, plastic shopping bags blowing in the tree branches oil, seagull head trapped in plastic six pack rings oil, Greenpeace Ship Arctic Sunrise oil, every slick new computer DVD XBox something plastic casing oil, flying flying flying whether it’s to the WEF or to the WSF oil, and gridlock, gridlock, everywhere you look, gridlock oil lock oil.

China National Petroleum Corporation. Turkish Petroleum Corporation. Abraxas Petroleum Corporation. CITGO Petroleum Corporation. BHP Billiton.

Oil is a perniciously addictive substance. Oil and its derivatives: kerosene (shoot those rockets into space for our TV multiverse spy satellite convenience), gasoline (the crack cocaine of the petroleum trade), plastics and polymers (see how far you get in your day without a plastic fix).

Side effects of an oil habit include: filth, grime, cars, concrete, roadways, trucks, SUVs, motorcycles, automobile accidents, hit-and-run, drive-by shootings, car bombs, filth, Abrams tanks, Blackhawk helicopters, cell phones, computers, suburbs, factory outlets, factory farms, Wal-Mart, eighteen wheelers, eighteen wheelers, eighteen wheelers, eighteen wheelers, eighteen wheelers, filth, stench, heat, cancer, respiratory diseases, smog, road rage, tourism, Middle East politics, OPEC, G8, Ken Saro Wiwa, Hugo Chavez, Barack Obama, Stephen Harper, filth, Exxon Valdez, geopolitics, globalization, economic growth, global warming, eco-collapse, melting polar ice caps, severe weather systems, filth, Colombia, Ecuador, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, Georgia, Kazakstan, Nigeria, Burma, Alaska, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, war, and eventually, death.

It’s what I call “The Deal.”

THE LONG DRIVE

I wonder what the drive is. The license plate, the cannibal calliope, the rushing flash of flesh, flash of flesh. And nuts make trees sometimes, and sometimes seeds make grass. Because we’re all a part of this carpet called life on earth, wall to wall whatever if there were any walls.

And I’d like to be a bomb, ticking and wound up in a pocket on the way to whatever. I count life out in cigarettes and sterile sperm, my city life, country life gone, gone, long gone and longing’s never gonna get it back again. Because there’s too much time piled up between here and there. Too much history, too much civilization, too much human behavior, windowpanes between me and the weather. A bubble boy at home among all the others of his kind, wondering what sort of bomb could ever take back the centuries before he was born, take back the witch trials, the conquistadores, the monks and hospitals, the ideas that kill, all the ideas that can kill.

Dead corporate officers fall tonight, their days crushed like beercans and old cars, their tailored cuffs dragging in mud the colour of old blood. This curse is for you. I am native to nothing nowhere and so I claim the earth as mine.

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 –

Failure to be ‘part of’ some great blob entity. Musicality lacking in the clamour clank of the T-34 Tank mode of persuasion. Clap of a flat iron mine to its thick armour rind, if force is the way this beast sways, then some stray force can counter in a pinch. The universe seeks balance, harmony, not massification and brute power.

The body has forgotten its optimal state – poised, relaxed, alert, lithe, alive, in motion or at rest. It meets an immovable object, it compresses, it strains, it buckles, it bends. Avoids what it cannot oppose.

One finds oneself attempting something with language, but maybe language is stymied by sheer stupidity, by incomprehension, by animal appetites ruling simple social structures – greed, for instance. A community united in greed. (English, for instance – a greedy language.)

Ways and means, ways and means, ways and means, ways and means.

– 12 Nov 09 –

What is this great inner glow?
I am like a body-bulb
Lit by an amber filament
That dispells the clatter of
Anxieties and random thoughts
In a special spectral spacial light

Winter cold,
Some fears as to nothing
Nothing adhering to somethings
I can divine that I’m already so
Fearful of so much and so many
One more is nothing or
One more is
The tipping point …

Set off, and soothed by so little
Mothers know, with their pacifiers and rattles
Our frail baby grip on things
Surprisingly strong and yet feather light
And our trust, absurd and equally endearing

The Shakespear in me
The delight with hifalutin DeQuincey-isms
And well-turned phrases and
A subtle show of ankles amidst
Snowy lace petticoats

Just being around someone smart
Can make one feel smart

After all, mind must imply structure
And all the rigidities, inflexibilities
All the channels, circuits, networks
Necessary for the free and easy flow
Of ideas

The infrastructure of intellect
Schools and schools of thought
As layered as old abandoned wiring
Of ancient Plateau apartments
The exposed bones of antiquity

But this ‘inner light’ experienced as real
Real as somatic interiority ie. ‘Feelings’
This is new, seems new to me
As opposed to the old stale thoughts
That often rob me of my rest

– ? Dec 09 –

The body gestures of fine-boned poets
The confusion of the young
Sharp glances and sudden discussions

But really it is the breath of hope
Like spring’s stealthy advances
Those new fresh green buds now leafing up
In trees all over these city streets

The unlikeliest of faces
Similarly glowing and opening up, receptive

It’s memory, memory of love or loves
How my love just poured, in torrents,
In jets like a slashed jugular
It’s been so long since I’ve even had
The faculty of shining my love light around
And now I’m remembering
How much I really loved
So many people
And in a way, so unconditionally
In exactly the way I always wanted to be loved

I guess it might have been
Seeing those violet eyes once again
And remembering
Our younger selves
In the gaze that flowed
Back and forth between us

And in remembering this
I want to bring this visioning
This spotlight love
To bear
On present days and nights

– 21 Apr 10 –

Repair of self thru young fan base
Old weird grudges and complaints
Trickle thru recordings
Sleep ebb and flow
Word pair spare flair
I want the pale moonlight of
Her regard
Uncensored nothings whispered by
Unconscious lips near sleeping ears
Care of the self, share of the shelf
Sexy danskin and playing with hair
Eye make-up and little black stockings
Poise of mind like a lightly held dagger
Long craggy face framed in fur
Voice of experience, thickened and husky
Boys poised in noble thought
Ironic, Byronic, catch of the throat
Dusk faun positioned at edge of wood

Sometimes consciousness ebbs –
Sometimes flows.

– 16 Dec 10 –

Like shelves collapsing
Order subject to gravity yields chaos
Debris piled at the foot of a wall
So goes the world
With nothing to keep it alive
Without love, without food and water
Without light, without air

My ears drink birdsong like a mouth sips water
The sparrows congregate in the naked bushes
They dart in the alley, in squadrons they fly
They hush at my step
Great conclave
Holds its breath

Never mind me
With my errands
My “where mushrooms? where rice?”
The sky persists in its beauty
Beyond clutter, beyond collapse
The subtlest shift in light, colour
Clouds lower in downtown
Angelic light leaks through
And blue, a hole to the north
Blue, with chimney smudges south
Friendly grocery clerk
As close as I come to human contact
Today.

– 4 Jan 11 –

The viral load – just a mild bug
Blown up city-size by the moral indifference
Of newsprint
Daily exhortations to murder and rape
In easy-to-read comic form
Invisible to a stunned and degraded populace
Who’ve had, after all, their fill and more
Of murder, mass murder, rape, mass rape, war

Weary battalions
Saints, marching still in ragged formations
Of hope, that blue-eyed bitch
She of the iron-seeming resolve and
Enormous appetite for sex and booze
Calling for change, calling for movement
Raising the dead, healing the sick
Confronting indifference with her
Glorious dreams

Is it always to be this mad black-and-white wheel
Spinning, blurring my sense of self
Lost between some impossible ideal
And the truly lost chaos of hopelessness?
I’m a wreck, here, riding this whirlpool
Called ‘daily existence’
Staring into a pit, or else
Watching the distant unattainable stars spin.

– 3 Mar 10 –

What a baddish, deathish February.

∞

Who steps into the
Power hole
The huzzing buzzing swimming hole of power
To bathe in money and fuck the consequences
To cleave to a dubious flow?
It seems like life
I mean it simulates a source of life
Yet it’s the very opposite in its
Shrivelled results
Still its adherent dangle before me
Like ripe fall berries or
The translucent, pendulous abdomens
Of mosquitoes gorged on blood
They soak up the resources
They march in lockstep with its ‘logic’
Make plans, fly places, do important things
I guess it’s normal
But I keep seeing it all against a backdrop
Of things ending
Of a finality
Am I just crazy?
Or do I continue to trust my feeling
My overall sense of impending disaster?
As I sit in February dark insomnia thinking
I feel like
I really am alone, and lost
In the midst of an ever increasingly lifeless
Frenzy of hopeless routine
Presided over by desperate drones
Who’ve long since stopped questioning
The sense of wisdom of their own actions.
I’ve found for myself
A little pocket of resistance
A flower, a blossom of vitality, of hope
And I feed it, I nurture it
With what fuel I can spare
Praying that this hopeful glow
Might catch, might ignite all the
Dry, desperate deadwood of this night
Bring on a new day.

– 11 Feb 10 –

The cacophony of life symphony segueing into
Sympatico and sinfonia without only a bonely
Da da da

Musical ear drowning in near beer but
Molly will hatchet that check on the
Mahogany table top smartly, heartly

Trundle bundle mangle bangle unrue spunrue
(I rue the day I rue the day I rue the day)
Pull on a pullover and hang up a hang out
Out on the hang sen sen

Like a runaway Joan Jett sneaker class
Peasant last hearing voices making choices
Lesley surfboard scuba suit Nova Scotia

Tumble rundle waves Atlantic waves, and
They’re some cold baby

Awfully awesome awe some awful full of
Awe some full some some some full full fullsome
Awesome fully full full

Like a contract like a legal document like
Like a codicile like like like a binding
Agreement like arbitration like a big
Deal in turnaround like like like

You call this writing? You call this writing? You call this writing? A table full of activists, activities late at night, food and drink and long conversations, yes I call this writing.

– 9 Feb 10 –

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 –

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.

January 23: Vince to Scott

I browsed the Guardian article earlier today … it is interesting that a number of academics have come out against FB recently. Remember, the internet at first served exactly that community – academics! (I mean, after the Pentagon.)

I think it’s sort of hairsplitting or just minor adjusting that is happening around the new social media networks – people are nervous because there’s no way of telling where it is leading us. But the positive aspect of these media is precisely what I liked about writing letters in the age of snail mail, for instance – the chance to ‘get one’s thoughts down’ before sending them out (blurting them out) – also, the opportunity to maintain friendships long-distance.

I’m reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals (in a book called Home at Grasmere that weaves her journal entries with her brother William’s poems written around the same time) – and their main concern, every day, is getting the mail. Going out on a walk to ‘meet the mail’ – anticipating letters – responding emotionally to letters – writing letters, mailing letters. Social media indeed! (Of course there was also the occasional thirteen mile horse ride that separated them from where Coleridge lived at the time.)

January 23: Scott to Vince

I find it interesting that you’re more or less positive about Facebook. On the surface it seems to run at odds with your sceptical or critical outlook on ‘mainstream’ things. I say that delicately because I don’t think I’m writing it in as nuanced a way as I could. There are many problems with Facebook – it tends to emphasize a kind of narcissism, the problem we have as humans with dealing with new technologies that get the better of us (the example of people checking their iPhones during a funeral being pretty strong evidence that technology’s got the better of us), and of course the very serious issue around privacy and marketers.

I tend to think that as a communication device, it’s no more or less serious than the person using it. You use Facebook to maintain strong bonds with people who are far away, snowed in, busy, what have you. I have managed to have and maintain strong friendships in other cities (Montreal), other countries (the US and Switzerland) because of FB and emails (mostly email, actually). I suspect if it weren’t for email, you, R—, N–, would no longer be friends, but you are, even though we haven’t lived in the same place, in your case, since 1997, R—, since 1992, N– since 1988. Three guys I expect at my funeral not checking their iPhones.

People manipulate its function to serve their purposes (a good thing and a bad thing). For example, I am right now telling you I’m spending the week in New Orleans at a conference, and that I will spend Monday afternoon (when nobody knows I’ll be there yet) going down to the Gulf coast to take photos of the oil spill. I can tell you that I am ambivalent about chasing disasters to get good photos, but also that I’m really excited to see the Gulf and the devastation (assuming I can find the mess – a lot of it has been cleaned up). I can also tell you that I’m spending two days shooting commercial videos for our client, and doing a social media presentation to a bunch of business people where none of the nuance of our FB discussion will be apparent. I can also tell you that I’m about to post ‘Spending the week in New Orleans at a conference, shooting videos and doing a social media presentation’ on my Linked In and Twitter accounts for TOTALLY different reasons and with a TOTALLY different message than what I just described to you. Both are possible, immediate and meaningful in their own way due in part to the medium. The latter, of course, is a manipulation of the message for my own ends (I make my living this way, and it increases, ever so subtly, my value), and the ends of conversing with a buddy (the ambivalent message).

Re-reading your email, I think there is an important distinction to make between the Internet and social media (particularly apps and FB, Twitter). The Internet is open, distributed, very difficult to control. FB, Twitter, and most other services like them, are closed – they are served up by one company and their own server farms. If FB goes down, the internet will not be there to back it up, everything on FB disappears (to us, though the information is still there) when the servers shut off. A better example are those services like bit.ly that shorten links. If bit.ly goes down they estimate billions of links on the ‘internet’ will be broken. The links themselves – not shortened – would still be fine. This issue – the closed nature of social media – is potentially pretty serious.

January 23: Vince to Scott

The reason I’m ‘more or less positive about Facebook’ is that I’m more or less totally negative about the more overarching qualities of Western ‘Civilization’, and so my feeling is that the difference between being alienated on Facebook and being alienated on just plain old email / blogs / flickr / websurfing is a relatively small one. Facebook assuages a pervasive sense of disconnectedness, brought about by an oil-driven hyperculture that spreads people all over hell’s half-acre who are still biologically ‘hardwired’ to live in village / tribal social interconnectedness. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just offers a slightly bigger bandaid than email / blogs / etc., just as those bandaids were slightly bigger than snail mail, telephones, commuter drives … none of it makes our social structure less alienated. We are all Major Tom, ‘floating round my tin can far above the world’.

I think it’s true, what you say, that Facebook is ‘closed’ where previous stuff was ‘open’. And it’s a datamining thing, of course. And it is doing strange things to our old compartmentalized concepts of ‘private’ and ‘public’, not to mention ‘past’ and ‘present’ (when you are suddenly back in communication with people you haven’t actually talked to for 20 years). That’s what I mean by its being a huge social experiment of which nobody can imagine the outcome.

I’m not worried about ‘losing everything’ if and when FB fails, simply because I don’t keep anything of great value on FB. The photo albums are all copies of jpgs I have on my hard drive and elsewhere. The texts are ephemeral (although apparently there’s a way to download them!). It’s not a thing that we ‘have’, as such, FB is a constant series of flows of information.

Facebook is here because we need it. It fills a need created by our living in an already highly artificial, technological environment. Nostalgia for a ‘simpler time’ when we didn’t need these things is a very real and very important feeling, in my mind. But to get rid of the need for Facebook, we’d have to get rid of a whole heck of a lot of other stuff. There are movements in that direction – notions of ‘permaculture’, ‘slow’ culture, hand-made crafts revivals – but for now the main thrust of our ‘civilization’ continues to be in exactly the opposite of the direction I think makes sense.

January 23: Scott to Vince

When I said ‘losing everything’, I didn’t mean it in a metaphorical sense – it is a true distinguishing feature of FB versus the internet. FB exists on FB’s computers. The internet is distributed among thousands or millions of computers. There is a movement afoot – I need to study things like this – to bring about more “human” social networks. One of which, I don’t remember which, asks you to “host” a portion of the service on your own server. They are directly addressing this issue of FB being a “hosted” platform by distributing it. Interesting idea, unfortunately I doubt many people understand/care that FB is on someone else’s computer. Tom Berners Lee is upset but nobody seems to listen to him much anymore.

I think you’re right about hyper modernity and life being oil-fueled and alienating. I live it everyday, and yet bonds of friendship – let’s for the sake of argument talk about our friends in Wakefield (20 km from our house) – are still so important to living a good life. Slow food – as in, I cooked the Christmas ham for 9 hours – goes with this kind of friendship. Playing music together. Shooting the shit, hanging out in each other’s hot tubs (wish I had one), going for a cross country ski. When I’m down – which happened in a big way a little over a year ago – this stuff brings me back.

But the alienation is really serious. My friend Emily wrote a book called Lonely: Learning to Live with Solitude a few years back – a kind of memoir/research piece, the style often used by Americans when talking about ‘personal’ subjects. It touched on some of these themes, making a careful distinction between loneliness and depression. I kept on feeling like a book called Alienation should be written because it’s exactly that. Anything that humanizes helps but so much that humanizes comes, in the current situation, at a great cost.

I read the other day a story about anti-depressants in the St-Lawrence River, coming from Montreal’s sewage treatment plant. Tiny quantities, but enough to be found in the tissues of fish. In the article, more or less in passing, they mentioned that 25% of Montrealers are on anti-depressants. 25% – now there’s a social experiment to rival Facebook. Holy fucking shit. Imagine if they found, which seems likely, that anti-d’s (this is a term used in parlance on the subject) damaged soft tissue, say your liver, or your brain, and that it affected 25% of the population. It would be like ‘thalidomide society’ instead of babies. That on top of the fact that wow, 25% of people feel it necessary (or have had it foisted upon them) to take pills to address what ails them. And what is that exactly? Stress, speed, fatigue, lack of real communication, bad diet, no exercise, too much screen time, not being able to connect with those around you, substance abuse, bad childhoods, the list goes on but oil fueling quite a few of them. 25%. And you’d think Montreal was a kind of ‘happy’ place, what with the partying and general level of laughter and gregariousness (compared to, say, Ottawa, where the overall culture is very closed and rather sad).

Hobsbawm just wrote a book – How to Change the World which talks about Marx’s continued impact (what it is, what it should be?) and I wonder if that’s still the place to turn to begin to find a different way, or at least an avenue to help us understand just how badly everything is fucked up.

January 24: Vince to Scott

Ha! I saw that article about the fish too! And had the same though, ‘Hmm, funny they only mention in passing that A QUARTER OF THE CITY IS ON PROZAC.’

Perhap another quarter of the city is like me, smoking dope until they realize they’re not doing anything productive anymore … drooling over the Facebook newsfeed and watching the YouTube links.

I went to Words and Music at the Casa recently, which was a ‘real’ event with ‘real’ people … my favourite piece of the night was Kaie’s commentary on being mugged, in which he (almost inevitably) referenced Facebook, eliciting a knowing chuckle from the audience.

But my ambivalence stands, probably because I’ve always been this bashful type who feels more comfortable hiding behind words in print than in a face-to-face situation. Hence the ‘love of letters’ (’tis a literary life) which, once that died out in the nineties, led naturally to email which led naturally to Facebooking.

If an alternative to this whole alienated mess ever comes up, will I even be able to recognize it? Will I be able to plug into its matrix? Will I be able to parse its interface?

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

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.

So in the fall of 1987, I ventured once again down to the basement level of McGill’s Student Union Building. At the time, the newly-christened CKUT (formerly the McGill Radio Club or something) occupied one large front room, where the spoken word, news and music departments and the rest of the management / administration all worked together higgledy-piggledy … it was like an old-school newspaper office, all hustle and bustle, phones ringing. Computers were not very much in evidence yet so the staffers were glued to phones, rather than glowing screens.

It was kind of an intimidating atmosphere to a typically shy and insecure introvert-types. Nevertheless I camped out until someone noticed my existence, and after some hemming and hawwing the then-music director (or maybe assistant to the assistant, I don’t recall anymore who I talked to) allowed that I might co-host an hour-long Canadian music spotlight called In From The Cold, along with three other new volunteers.

In From The Cold ran on Tuesday nights from eight to nine. It was preceded by a show hosted by some guy who went by the on-air title ‘Braindead’, and was followed by the garage rock show Subterranean Jungle, hosted by Flipped Out Phil. (Subterranean Jungle lasted well into the nineties.) As it happened, the four co-programmers of In From The Cold did our first show just one week before CKUT went on-air, so everybody was thrilled to pieces and nervous as hell. Over the next few months I did segments on Courage of Lassie, NoMeansNo, The Dub Rifles, and any number of other bands. It was like ‘Canadian indie rock 101’.

The MCR was an absurdly tiny slot-like closet facing an even tinier ‘guest booth’ behind a window. You got to it by walking through the record library, which was also absurdly tiny. (At the time, of course, it seemed amazingly huge.) Because of the dimensions of the MCR it was almost impossible to have musical guests (unless they were playing a kazoo).

The PCR was even more absurd. In the frenzied competition between CKUT and CRSG over the first Montreal campus/community FM license, someone at CKUT thought it would be a good idea to install a full eight-track recording studio in another closet-sized space – if only to rival CRSG’s claim to fame, an eight-track studio where many local bands had cut their albums in the 80s. The result being that CKUT hit the FM airwaves with a massive debt, and an eight track recording studio that literally had no space to record a band. The debt resulted in the airing of corporate ads for the first year or so – I distinctly remember the Molson Ex ad I played every week. (Once the debt was paid off, corporate ads were dumped and have never been run since.)

The radio at home was locked on 90.3 FM, of course. It counted as our sole contact with the ‘real world’ (no TV either) … if the ‘real world’ consisted of being able to enjoy the ranting of Lydia Lunch and Karen Finley in the afternoon, indepth interviews with former CIA agents talking about CIA-sponsored heroin shipments from the Golden Triangle at the supper hour, and Voivod late at night. The station would literally blow my mind whenever I listened to it. It was the greatest alternative radio station I’d ever heard – no holds barred – definitely mind- and soul-expanding.

At the time, CKUT held mandatory monthly programming meetings for music department and spoken word department volunteers. The spoken word department was huge – the original mandate of CKUT devoted a full 35 per cent of its air-time to spoken word content, when most campus stations were barely managing 10 per cent. The meetings were convened in the basement hallway outside the station. These meetings were basically informative, and fulfilled the same purpose that CKUT’s email newsletter does today.

Over the course of those few months the thrill of being a programmer began to wear off for my co-hosts, given mid-term exams and the like. By the end of February I found myself the sole host of In From The Cold, at which point I cornered the music director (by this time I knew who did what function at the station) and proposed doing a theme show called This Show Is History instead. Actually I proposed either doing a theme show, or just leaving, and he decided the theme show idea was interesting. So I was stoked – no more all-Canadian content! The format was one I’d worked on over the year at CRSG, putting together interesting news clippings, articles, audio clips and cool underground music on broad themes like ‘The Environment’, ‘Information’, ‘Economics’ and ‘Health’. A kind of bricollage or collage of some elements of a spoken word show, and some elements of a music show.

Unfortunately, my relationship hit the skids around this time, and by June I was living alone in an apartment I couldn’t afford, with the welfare payments for under-30s at the time being somewhat less than $150 per month. After doing 15 episodes of This Show Is History, the last being on June 28, 1988, I split town for four years. (By 1992 the welfare situation in Montreal had vastly improved.)