progressive imposition

politics is not the time for team sports

2011-04-22T12:01:00.003-04:00

For a game with such grand significance, politics sure is complicated isn’t it? Here we are with another election and our five teams have taken the field. Do you support red, orange, green, french, or blue?

In the various media, we hear opinions about who we should support and how doing so will serve the greater good of the country. Most of what is expressed avoids rational argument in favour of emotional commitment. However, one message particular to this election is often discussed in the popular media, although the significance remains debatable. In this capacity, I join the chorus of dissent against the governance of the Progressive Conservative party. Under Harper’s leadership, the foundation of the Conservative ideology has shifted. The party has gone from attempting to maintain the fiscal and operational integrity of Canadian institutions to one which in attempting to pass ideologically-motivated legislation seeks to undermine those very same institutions.

Despite the numerous controversies which Conservative actions have created, I have noticed a disturbing rhetorical trend in conversations with friends and acquaintances who are planning to support the Conservatives on May 2. Usually the debate will begin when I question them as to why they want to vote for their Conservative MP. The answer they provide is always about Stephen Harper. He’s better than the other leaders, they say. I’ll point out that Conservative policies have entirely betrayed the fiscal responsibility which the Conservatives unwaveringly champion. Some of the Conservative supporters to whom I speak recognize this problem. They also frequently disagree with the social, environmental, foreign-affairs, law enforcement, and human rights policies which the Conservatives have promoted or legislated for over the last five years.

Invariably, I am saddened at the end of our chat. After I have presented – to the best of my graduate-school-trained abilities – rational, empirical data which proves with little doubt that what the Conservatives say about their position on the economy or health care or crime is wrong, supporters will respond “Ya, I know. But I can vote Conservative without supporting all of their beliefs. It’s important to show your support. And anyway, our leader is better than yours.” Fuck, here we go.

Politics is different from sports, where faith unsupported by reason has no consequence. Let’s say that you are a Leafs fan. Year after year you pour money, time, and tears into your team they still end up one of the worst teams in the league. Fans are clearly being gouged with high ticket prices while the owners and management enjoy the massive financial success of the team. Regardless of data which clearly demonstrates the futility your remaining a fan, you will likely continue to support the team. Frankly, nothing really that bad happen in the world when a shitty sports team being supported. After all, at the end of the day it’s just a game on TV. Even when the Leafs play terribly year after year and show little interest in improving their game in order to provide their cheering fans with actual results, you can hold your head up high and say “The Leafs are the best team in the league.” No harm, no foul.

With politics, another game is being played, even though like hockey it is largely a phenomenon of television. If a shitty political party maintains its support, then harm will in fact be done. Under the Conservatives, for example, institutions will likely disappear in the name of “cutting the fat” and “reducing taxes”. The cost of living will raise for the poor and the middle-class, while the services available to them decline or disappear. Pubic wealth represented by institutions such as education and health care will be diminished while private wealth will be enriched as corporations take over governmental services and raise prices to generate profits.

It is a predictable irony that a government in the age of transparency demands the privilege to conceal itself from the public, and one which should not be tolerated. History has taught that such privacy is the endgame for morality in governance. Frankly, it’s time to stop supporting the notion of a singular prime minister leading the country to greatness. Canada is a Parliamentary democracy, not a Prime Ministerial one. By this I certainly don’t mean to diminish the office of the Prime Minister. I mean to suggest that there is an element to Quebec politics that all of Canada needs to learn. Quebec tends to elect strong parliamentary representatives to represent their interests in parliament. It is time for Canadians across this country to support their parliamentary officials, and not listen to any Prime Minister who views parliament with contempt. If this means that you honestly vote Conservative, fine. But know that the Conservatives have demonstrated that won’t play with parliament and that they find the opinions of Canadians as represented by the politicians to be irreleant to governance.

O/H @ whatnext? festival

2011-02-07T00:01:00.002-05:00

O/H @ whatnext? festival from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.

O/H (Christina Sealey, Richard Oddie, David Foster)

Christ's Church Cathedral, Hamilton
Saturday, February 5, 2011
presented by New Harbours Music Series and Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra

ambient sound + lighting, beer. p + c O/H, qzh, Throwaway Digital 2011

talking on james street north, episode 4

2010-11-17T12:01:00.002-05:00

talking on james street north, episode 4 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.

In November of 2005, I formalised an informal talk amongst artists, writers, activists, and community organizers. Issues discussed included gentrification and economic development, the purpose of a life in and with art, the experiences of running an independent gallery, the politics of community, and the community of politics.

The participants for this episode are Jeremy Freiburger, Matt Jelly, Dane Pederson, Quintin Hewlett, Andrea Carvalho, Matt Teagel, Steve Mazza, and Gary Buttrum.

camera + sound, p + c = qzh 2005

talking on james street north, episode 3

2010-11-16T12:01:00.000-05:00

talking on james street north, episode 3 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.

talking on james street north, episode 2

2010-11-15T00:01:00.001-05:00

talking on james street north, episode 2 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.

talking on james street north, episode 1

2010-11-14T12:01:00.002-05:00

talking on james street north, episode 1 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.

The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are running scared

2010-08-05T00:01:00.004-04:00

I am a regular supporter of the TiCats, and dreamed of playing on the team through my football-playing youth. I plan on attending this Saturday's game, and look forward to a Cats victory.

However, I am deeply saddened by the manner in which the TiCats organization is bullying the city over the new stadium. I have lived for most of my life in this city, and have worked diligently in the arts and education communities to help the city to succeed. The East Mountain stadium is a step in the wrong direction, for numerous reasons having to do with the quality of life in the city, the continuation of the revitalisation of businesses downtown, and the need for our social infrastructure and development plans to move away from the 'sprawl' mentality which is completely unsustainable.

I noticed that a 'rally' is being held today at Carmen's banquet centre (who would be the only beneficiaries from East Mountain outside of the TiCats). However, it seems that this is a limited seating event which required an RSVP. Such does not a rally make, but rather an instance of people agreeing with each other without having to face opponents. The East Mountain plan was pushed through at the last minute to sideswipe City Council and avoid debating the severe shortcomings of the proposal relative to the City's interests. Furthermore, the TiCats have not provided empirical figures demonstrating that West Harbour will fail. Consequently, the only conclusion a reasonable person can reach is that the TiCats are scared of allowing the benefits of East Mountain to speak for themselves. Instead, they use bully tactics to get their way in the face of concerted grassroots opposition. Their way IS the highway in this instance.

Personally, I feel that the Stadium would be best located near Confederation Park. Given the options of East Mountain or West Harbour, the residents and city of Hamilton will only benefit from West Harbour. The reason that the TiCats want East Mountain is so that they can monopolize the incidental profits from games -- parking, concessions, merchandise, etc. Public money will be spent on the stadium, and it should not be used to support private industry in this manner. Public money needs to be spent in the interests of the public. The public is interested in West Harbour.

Our City Our Future

Disaster is the New Normal

2010-05-19T00:01:00.006-04:00

Earth Day came and went this year with little fanfare. Token stories about turning off the lights and cycling to work made their usual rounds in the news media. The 24-hour news networks sent camera crews to schools to watch children sing and make paper signs demonstrating the need for everyone to recycle things like paper. As always, nothing really changes for most people. Just the passing of another single day devoted to all things Earth-friendly – whatever that means – during which the penitent ritually cleanse their sins from the rest of the year. And then at some point in the late morning, news broke about a massive oil spill happening in the Gulf of Mexico.

British Petroleum, the company which “owns” the oil well, reports that 5,000 barrels of oil per day are spilling into the ocean, while independent experts have calculated a rate of flow as high as five to ten times that amount. For the past three weeks, we have all watched as the circus shitshow of BP’s improvised attempts to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf have failed. Their latest effort – a tube which has successfully diverted some of the oil to ships at the surface – is clearly intended to recover oil in order to bring it to market, rather than actually stop the flow of oil into the Gulf.

Meanwhile, efforts to mitigate the environmental disaster have centred upon not allowing the oil to reach the Louisiana and Florida shorelines. The logic in play revolves around the fact that the oil which stays underwater will not threaten anyone’s opinion on BP, offshore drilling, or oil use in general. Nevermind that the real environmental damage occurs under the surface of the water, as the marine ecosystem in the Gulf collapses due to contamination. Or that the Gulf of Mexico is connected to every other oceanic body, to which the oil could spread. In the age of the televisual out of sight is, of course, out of mind.

While many among the talking heads on television enjoyed their own hyperbole about this event having the potential to be the single worst environmental disaster in the history of the United States, the reality is that the Earth has been bleeding like this for decades. The BP oil spill is merely a singularity which makes visible a much larger field of gravity.

Certainly, there are many legitimate concerns about how the spill happened. It is true that the oil industry was able to lobby American lawmakers to the point where lax regulations and an “industry knows best” mentality removed some safety protocols which may have averted or mediated the spill. However, pointing fingers at the companies who successfully sell their products to consumers who want them is misguided. We North Americans are absurdly inefficient in our use of energy. It is our desire for an abundant supply of oil which convinced BP and other oil companies of the benefits of offshore drilling. We must now understand that the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico are being discoloured by our inability to reduce oil use when alternatives to fossil fuels are increasingly presenting themselves.

In this capacity, it is we who are spilling the oil into the gulf, and we don’t stop there. As an aggregate dynamic, oil consumption is a process of continual spillage. We spill the remnants of oil into the atmosphere after it has been burned for energy, and we spill oil into the landfill after it has been transformed into plastics. The fact that such “spills” are relatively small in terms of each individual allows each of us to justify our mutual environmental disaster as the “normal way of doing things”.

As we get used to an increasing number of wide-scale environmental disasters, the rather ominous prospect arises that we have come to accept disaster as the new normal. In the wake of continual news about environmental damage around the globe, one might say that the BP spill is just another oil spill. Once the spill has been “contained” – an absurd impossibility – we will move on with our days, go for a drive, and buy another soda.

We must understand that humanity now functions as blind gods on Earth. Ours is the Anthropocene era. Our desires produce change which affects the entire planet, and we are engaging in this change without any idea of the consequences. The first conscious change we need to make is rhetorical. Whenever people talk about environmental issues, the phrase “saving the planet” comes up. The problem with this phrase is that it abdicates us from our responsibilities. Most people do not view themselves as heroes who “save” things, but as normal people living normal lives. They ask themselves How can one person make a difference? and so they don’t attempt to change their lifestyle much. Instead of “saving the planet”, we need to strive to “not wreck the planet”. Such a phrase might then allow a person who chooses to drive four blocks to the corner store to view this action in terms of wrecking the planet instead of not saving it.

There is one hope which must be retained, no matter how remote and complicated the scenario presents. Several years ago, BP adopted “Beyond Petroleum” as a new motto for the new millennium. Perhaps after a few more months of oil contaminating the waters which sustain life on this planet, human civilisation will finally understand the sublime and graceful logic of these two simple words.

the suffering of animals and the call to mercy

2010-01-30T12:01:00.005-05:00

I feel obliged to address a column published by Rosie Dimanno in the January 28, 2010 edition of The Star. In the article "Skater Weir brushes off zealots in fox fur flap", Dimanno chastises animal rights protestors who are critical of figure skater Johnny Weir's use of animal fur in his costumes. It is clear that Mrs. Dimanno has a very particular opinion, and certainly she has the right to express her views. I am not condemning her ideology about the subject, but rather the painfully unprofessional journalism which she evidences throughout her piece. Principally, she condemns the views of animal rights activists without actually addressing any of their concerns.

For example, Dimanno quotes a letter from of one of the animal rights activists, and in the next sentence states "Animal rights zealots are parasites who feed off the peltry sins of celebrities in order to command media attention". There are two problems here. Firstly, she does not address the actual words expressed in the letter by the activist. Animals are indeed killed in order to provide decorative fur for clothing in a time when synthetic substitutes are available. The letter calls for a moral inquiry into the situation, and Dimanno responds by sidestepping the issue. Secondly, the use of the word "zealot" has clear negative connotations which will definitely colour the opinions of Star readers. Later in the article, she calls animal rights supporters "the righteous Cute 'n' Cuddly brigade" and "wackadoo crusaders".

While Dimanno might not care what animals go through, as a writer who publishes in a newspaper that ostensibly adheres to the traditions of journalism, she should be more engaged with her story. Instead of providing a substantive defence of the use of animal fur for clothing, she resorts to childish namecalling. In short, her language denotes a lack of critical inquiry into the issue which she purports to be writing about. Her column is no better than the numerous blogs which proliferate for free on the internet. Is The Star not supposed to adhere to a higher standard than uninformed punditry? If Dimanno's article is any indication of the journalistic principles in operation at The Star, then I cannot think of a reason for the continued existence of the paper beyond maintaining the salaries of incompetent writers.

For the record, I am an academic and a vegetarian who supports animal rights to the same degree that I am support human rights. If Dimanno wishes to engage in a more critical debate in future articles, perhaps I can suggest that she actually do some research instead of demonstrating her ignorance.

Read the original article here.

Pros and cons of a human cull

2009-12-30T00:01:00.006-05:00

Re: 'Pros and cons of a human cull' (Editorial, Dec. 7)

I am one amongst many who are becoming increasingly concerned with the overpopulation of humans in the suburban and rural areas of the City of Hamilton.

The humans have been increasing in very large numbers over the past several years, and are now becoming bolder when it comes to approaching forests and, indeed, our creeks throughout the area.

In addition, the human population has in recent years become a bane to grazers who border the wooded areas and ravines throughout the city.

As a resident of Dundas living on a ravine, I have lost access to my shrubs and gardens to the ravenous land appetites of these intruders who only share if they are too stupid to put up a fence.

As many forest dwellers can attest, humans will turn almost anything into private property and the significant cost of the loss falls to the animals who live there.

As well, humans have devoured countless resources, leaving residents of the Earth with environments that are bare from the ground to the heights the humans can reach.

We animals of the forest try to keep our properties looking presentable year-round, but after the humans have satisfied their appetites at our expense, our homes take on a shabby appearance in spite of our continuing efforts to enhance their appearance.

I, and many others, call on the Hamilton Conservation Authority to do the right thing and help protect the land and sky and especially the forest animals from this ever-worsening situation.

The human population must be reduced -- now.

Sincerely,
A. Deer

PS: I apologize for the delay in responding to the article of December 7. As I am unable to change my word processing software to accommodate my cloven hoof, typing for me involves patience and frequent use of the delete key.

While the above letter is intended as satire, I cannot help but note the seriousness with which it was written. The author of the original words views life forms as disposable when they inconvenience him. It seems rational to him that the deer population should be controlled, as otherwise they threaten human activities such as driving and the appreciation of one particular style of landscaping. He spends countless hundreds of dollars per year on plants and he wants to appreciate their beauty. Fair enough, Mr. Moore.

However, the attitude on display by supporters of the cull is at the heart of the environmental problems which have begun to define the twenty-first century. Let me put aside for the moment the argument of the rights of the deer not to be killed. Let me also put aside the argument that in the grand scheme of things the deer have just as much right to eat Mr. Moore’s shrubs as he has in finding them beautiful. Human activity has historically been in a sense selfish. Every human activity involving the environment was made rational through property laws – if you owned something, then you could do what you like to it. However, the environmental consequences of such activity can no longer be ignored. Human habitation is increasing at the expense of non-human ecosystems.

Modern science suggests that the only way for humanity to survive and prosper is as a component of a larger, healthy biosphere. In order for such to occur, humans will need to live in symbiotic relationships with other life forms. The ideology that humans should be masters of the Earth for their benefit is currently resulting in a rate of species extinction not seen outside of unique catastrophes in the archaeological record. With this in mind, Mr. Moore, is it not logical for you to do a little research into which among the thousands of plant species not eaten by deer is attractive enough for you to plant in your garden. Surely, such diligence will avoid extending the financial and moral expense of “humanely” culling a deer population from those Hamilton taxpayers who thoroughly enjoy the co-habitation of the deer in the west end.

letter to the Hamilton Spectator

The state of academic freedom in Canada

2009-09-18T00:01:00.001-04:00

"The state of academic freedom in Canada" from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.

Denis Rancourt, former University of Ottawa professor recently fired for refusing to grade his students, whose struggle has received national media coverage and whose firing is being investigated by the Canadian Association of University Teachers

September 18, 2009; McMaster University student centre

Electroluminescent @ New Harbours

2009-06-08T12:01:00.003-04:00

Electroluminescent -- New Harbours Music Series Vol. 2 from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.

Christ's Church Cathedral, May 8, 2009

last-second-idea improvised dolly camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Electroluminescent, qzh, Throwaway Digital

today and the other one

2009-05-28T12:01:00.006-04:00

The professors were dancing and it was a party that I didn’t like: the usual story. An old flame walks into the bar and conversation stops, at least toward me. They know us both, I thought. Everyone else was making noise with each other and some were dancing. I complained to my friends not in the room through my phone, and we all typed for over an hour. Steve and Michael and Mel and me. I typed that my own confrontational psychology was at fault. I wondered why some of the people dancing in the room with me talk about art but are offended by the life processes which often create it. Steve typed, you are beginning to ask the big questions of life because you have a qwerty keyboard on your phone now and are a Mr. because of it. Me phone no smart. Take long type stuff. I typed that it was research into being one of those fucks with a mobile. That was definitely your duck with a noble face, Steve typed. Ha :) that is predictive text for “fuck with a mobile face”.

In the room full of dancing professors, I began to laugh. I typed to everyone who wasn't with me, is my friend my phone or is my phone my friend? I don’t know, Mel typed. I typed, it’s really only myself that I don’t like, so I put everyone else in a bag. I’m so bored. I look at people having fun around me. They barely know how to entertain themselves let alone others. Mel typed that academics are as I describe, but I knew I was lying and really just being mean to myself again. Other people happily moved in circles and were smiling. Jesus, Mel typed. Come home. I want to buy a bike.

I found a conversation after putting my drink on the bar. Alyson was a nice girl, but in a photograph I made later some people would confuse her with a television and become mad at me. I went to the washroom and when I got back the bartender had stolen my drink. You’ll have to buy another, he said and I waved my hand once in his face from down to up and left.

I’m back in Hamilton and it’s raining. Mel phoned while I showered and I missed it. She had typed as well. Her message was black on white. Cadillac cruising style bike. Good for me? Please advise as per VM I just left. I called her and she said that she had a bike ready for her. She was part of a business trading community. Businesses trading services and sometimes goods to each other using the internet and no money. A restaurant wanted photographs of their food, and Mel quoted high. She had not found anything to buy with her credits until this bike. I don’t know what it is though, she said. You’re the bike guy, so I want you to come see it.

Mel and Noel came in their big black truck, and with me in the back we drove down James North. We stopped on Canon and parked at Pho. Across the street was the bike shop. We entered and Mel fell in love with a Dutch bike. The bike store guy said that all of the machinery was contained, so she could wear anything and ride it around. Just go to work in your work clothes, he said. Or you could ride to meet friends and have a drink without special clothes. Mel liked that she could wear a dress and the shoes that she was wearing with a potential for heels. It’s so hot, she said slowly. I’m fingering it in the ass. It’s my bike and I want it. Noel said that we should go look at the other barter bike, because Mel still had credits and we should see if it would be worth selling. I said that we should see if Bike store guy would trade it in. I like Bike store guy, Mel said. He’ll take it. We left the store saying that we would be getting a new bike for the bike store guy.

When we got east, we stopped at a Tim Horton’s and bought the usual. They gave us three coffees instead of the two Mel and Noel wanted. Mel had already paid with her card, so I sold the extra double double to a guy in the line behind us. He gave Mel one dollar fifty, so she earned five cents for the deal. I said that I worked for Tim Horton’s for four years and lived on my tips. The trader was in a strip mall surrounded by offices. On the second floor, no one was inside and two of the barter bikes were against the wall. They were a matching pair of Cadillacs. I said we could just ride these bikes away out of here and why is there no security at the barter. A minute later a woman came from a room and said hi. Mel told her that she would take the barter bike for girls.

I lifted the barter bike into the bed of Noel’s truck after he placed blankets against the metal. We drove back to the bike store guy and came smiling with the barter bike. I told you we would come back, Mel said. Now how do I turn this bike into that bike? Bike store guy laughed and looked on the internet. My friend Matt came from downstairs with grease on his hands. We talked and I went down into the repair floor of the shop behind him. Get your hands dirty, he said and handed me a derailer.

Mel came down the stairs wearing a new tshirt. I’m shopping, she said, and I need bags. She went back upstairs and picked out a saddle bag for the new Dutch bike. Matt said he thought the internet trading idea was a good one. Bike store guy unlocked the bikes in front of his store so that Mel and Noel could try them out. I went next door to Mixed Media to see Dave. We talked and he gave me some money for a CD of mine which had sold. Sweet, I'm up to 26, I said and watched a kid on a new bike fly past the window. I thought that he had grabbed a bike from next door as Noel was out riding, so I chased him down the street. He stopped when I said that he dropped something. I asked about the bike and he said that the bike was his so I took a picture and went back to see the bike store guy. He said it's not mine and went back to the internet.

Noel came back in the store after riding a black Dutch bike. I like the men’s bike, he said. I was sceptical of the Dutch, but now I’m sold. Look at the seat. It’s like a cloud. Hey, I hear you did some crimefighting there. Mel came into the store with the Dutch and said that she didn’t fit the bike, but that they could get one in her size by Monday. The bike store guy said that he would try to sell the Cadillac. Three fifty for the old new and a thousand for the new new. Mel was really happy and we went back to her place.

Noel offered me his bong and smoke which had come from a field. He threw chicken on the barbecue and cut up a pineapple for me. Everything burned as it should and was soaked in tequila. Noel insisted that I smell the food. Mel’s sister Rebecca came over and got dressed. She rehearsed her lines for the stand-up that she was going to perform that night. They were printed on paper like a movie script. Mel told me that it was funny the other night when she ran through her Q’s, including one who knew everybody and Robert De Niro. She called that Q on her phone and thought it was me. She told Q and not me to come over for a smoke. It took her ten minutes before she realized that she had called the wrong Q, but she was too embarrassed about using one Q for another to not bring him over. The part of the story that I already knew was when she called me. I came late and had to leave early. Q didn’t smoke pot, but had come early and stayed late. Mel was annoyed and wanted my Q to be above his Q in her phone so that she would not make that mistake again.

Rebecca was eating some of the cooked pineapple and spilled it on the counter. We laughed and she took some of the chicken. I can’t cook, she said. Do I have chicken in my lipstick? You don’t want me for a housewife. I don’t want a house wife, I said. I don’t like houses. She repeated the joke to her sister and I was ta-da but didn’t smile. It was almost nine. They called for a car and I had to go home. We said goodbye see you on the weekend, and I walked in the rain as they were driven to comedy.

Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

New Harbours Music Series 2.2 - Electroluminescent

2009-05-02T12:01:00.002-04:00

Ryan Ferguson has been performing as Electroluminescent for nearly a decade. His music draws upon a variety of influences including Krautrock, American minimalism, and the Osaka noise and improv scenes. Ferguson has spent much of 2009 on tour in support of his recently released album Measures (Black Mountain Music), which spent several months on the Canadian college charts.

Asked what he intends for the New Harbours performance, Ryan is adamant that Friday’s performance will be a unique one. “The cathedral sounds amazing. I’m interested in the way that sound moves around it. If you can get the sound up into the arch of the ceiling, it spills down the walls. I have wanted to play in the space since I heard about [New Harbours]. But I didn’t want to do my usual set in there. It’s going to be an all-synthesizer set. Sort of an ambient set. It’s a composed piece and not an improvisation. It will be specific to this night.” Ryan cites the building’s acoustics as being of particular interest to him. “I’m adding to the traditional PA rental for the church. I’m going to be running two stereo mixes around the cathedral and I’m going to add a sub as well, right in the centre. The bass frequencies are going to be at the very heart of the cathedral. I found that when Gasoline Gathers hands played there and they pointed their amps up to the ceiling, their sound fell down the walls and I found that really interesting. I want to see how I can get the sound to move around a little differently.”

The New Harbours Music Series has consciously sought to examine the acoustic properties of the many different instruments used by the performers. For Friday’s performance, Ferguson will focus on vintage synthesizer technology. “All my old stuff is coming. I’ve actually been drawing a diagram, where pieces are going to fit and where things are going to be inserted into the signal chain and stuff. I’m going to be using to Korg MS-10 and the Moog that I always use. And I’ll be using my Yamaha CS20, which is a dual-oscillator monosynth. Still no polysynths though. The other day, I say a Korg polysynth for about $500. Which is not a good deal, it’s about what you should pay for one. I was really close to buying that just so I could have a polysynth for this show. But I decided not to. The other synth that I’m going to use is the Roland MC-202, which is actually a sequencer, but it has a synthesizer section built into it. I have a Jupiter 6 that I was thinking of bringing, but it’s really heavy and cumbersome, and there are a lot of knobs and switches to figure out. I already have enough knobs and switches to figure out!”

New Harbours welcomes Ryan Ferguson as Electroluminescent along with Atlas of the Universe to Christ’s Church Cathedral this Friday, May 8, 2009 at 8pm, as part of the Art Crawl. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $5.

electroluminescent
atlas of the universe

Canadian ISPs begin to shake down their users during economic downturn

2009-04-20T00:01:00.001-04:00

After reading Steve Arnold’s article concerning Cogeco’s new fees [Hamilton Spectator, April 2009], I cannot help but come to the conclusion that Mr. Arnold is either naive in his research or was hoodwinked by Cogeco’s PR efforts. Not only are several factual problems evident, but the tone of Mr. Arnold’s article suggests a degree of contempt for any Cogeco customer who voices dissent over the new fees.

First, some corrections are in order. Movie downloads are not 4GB each (except for some pirated DVDs). Standard definition films are typically 700MB. He is correct that many hi-def films are around 10GB in size. Importantly, I have to challenge Mr. Arnold’s suggestion that the only “heavy” internet users are those who download films for two reasons. There are many other net usage profiles that use similar bandwidth. I cannot help but wonder whether movies were singled out as the media continues to debate film “piracy”.

As an instructor at Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, I have a degree of access to digital trends and usage profiles. Mr. Arnold claims that most customers are using less than the 60GB cap contingent with Cogeco’s average data plan, as it is sufficient to view “1.25 million web pages or ... 6 million emails.” There are indeed some users who use the internet of 2009 just as they did in 2000, when video hosting and telephony were relatively non-existent and file sizes were smaller. Yet, many webpages in 2009 contain streaming video content; for example, the average bandwidth for YouTube is roughly 150MB per hour. Furthermore, one can easily purchase more than 60GB per month in video and audio files from services such as iTunes. If a user wishes to upload video or photographs to an online hosting service such as flickr or vimeo, they will instantly become what Mr. Arnold calls a “heavy user”; I know of one artist who uploads at least 100GB of photographs from her home every month. Finally, education is rapidly deploying online through protocols such as WebCT. I can speak from experience that my students exchange many GBs of data for school projects.

The internet in 2009 is used for a great deal of legal software distribution, and file sizes rise nearly equal to the exponential rate of Moore’s law. It is not uncommon for modern software to be many GBs in size. The Windows OS downloads many MBs of updates every week. If I chose to purchase Adobe CS4, the download is over 10GB. Computer and console games are rapidly moving from a retail purchase model to an online distribution model, and most games are between 2 - 15GB in size. Finally, many computer users know that sometimes computers crash and software must be reinstalled. In the online distribution model, reinstalling means re-downloading. Frankly, I cannot believe that a family with two or more children online will ever be able to remain under the 60GB limit.

I am fully aware that there is no such thing as unlimited internet. Some software, especially bittorrent, does need to be shaped so that overall net traffic can flow smoothly. However, I am offended by Cogeco’s subtle association of net usage with environmental responsibility, as evidenced by Marie Carrier’s suggestion that the new fees will “make the customer responsible for their usage.” In a time when responsible usage of electricity and natural resources such as gasoline have entered into the public discourse, the “responsible usage of the internet” is a cynical and damaging marketing ploy.

The reason that the Canadian Internet experience is beginning to slow down is not that more people are downloading. The problem is that companies like Bell and Cogeco have used their monopolies to increase their profitability by limiting investment in new technologies. It is for this reason that Canada has slipped from the top three to the bottom twenty in terms of international ranking of broadband speed and service. I wonder how happy Cogeco customers will be with their 60GB cap if they were to learn that customers of other cable ISPs get much higher caps. Comcast in the States, for example, has recently imposed a 250GB cap, which is infinitely more reasonable than 60GB. Japanese customers get to use their internet for ten times cheaper per MB than Cogeco customers. If Cogeco faced competition, then we would have a higher download limit in Canada.

There is no technological reason for the discrepancy. For example, in 2000 I routinely used 100-300GB per month and Cogeco never complained. Now they say that they must limit downloads so that the net doesn’t slow down for “average users”. If my downloading 300GB per month ten years ago didn’t slow down the net, why is it a problem after ten years of computer hardware developments? The reason is that as broadband access multiplied and more Canadians switched to broadband, companies like Cogeco banked the profits and didn’t invest in expanding their infrastructure. Where, for example, is the fibre optic network promised years ago?

this is not creative writing

2009-02-26T12:01:00.004-05:00

i came to a slight realization on the bus this afternoon.

some biographical detail is required for this self-indulgence.

when i was really young, i used to write for pleasure. usually the writing occurred when sitting alone in the hallway outside of a classroom, after i had been kicked out by the teacher for disrupting my friends after having finished my work. in every subject except handwriting, i finished class assignments exceptionally fast and then became an exceptional nuisance to the teacher. one morning in the fourth grade, my notebook was taken from me after the teacher found it full of stories about monsters and daemons, knights and astronauts, and other mythologies about the past and the future. at first i thought that she was mad about the violence and gore which i frequently included, and perhaps even highlighted -- this was, after all, the era of the Reagan Star Wars laser defence shield and high-body-count television and action films. my parents were called in to the school for a meeting, and i found out that the teacher didn't like all of the swear words which i had used. my father told her that to keep me from acting up in class and getting kicked out into the hall, she should let me write down the words which kept me occupied. i remember his words from that afternoon very well: "any damn word he pleases".

and so from that day i kept writing for pleasure. for the transmutation of an afternoon into a semi-tangible vision. for the loss of ego into imagination. for the fruits of productive isolation. for the way that some of my words seemed to have been worthy enough to have been printed and read by others, who then generated more words in response. for the spaces and patterns made by the writing if you looked at the whole page and unfocused your eyes. for the way that after i produced and dot-matrix-printed a series of newspapers for myself, i felt like i was part of the media which captivated me from birth. for the simple control of the ink as it left my pen and tainted the paper. for the pleasure of both failure and success. for looking to the earth and the sky and reaching through time. for something to read.

words were fun because of their appearance and sound as well as their meaning. in this sense, the joy received by writing is precisely the joy of writing experiencing itself. pleasure in this context is a derivative of subjectivity. by the age of ten or eleven, i had come to appreciate the difference between the writing which gave me pleasure and that which was deemed "good" by virtue of adherence to function or evaluative protocol. while it may sound obvious, i really liked the pleasure, the pleasure as a pleasure. the functions or evaluation of my words provided no real feedback to me. so what if i received a perfect grade for something which i had written, when i knew that the writing had given me little harbour and as such was an essentially misrepresentative process? -- as an aside, the school projects from my youth which i have come to cherish most highly do not come from my representations of truth, but rather from fictions which i was able to pass off as truths: an en-francais book report and improvised oral presentation of a translation of James and the Giant Peach involved an elaborate inter-species taxi, cake delivery, and dating service; a history paper written in high school involved an invented civilization from the Eurasian steppes which was feared throughout the western part of the roman empire for their mounted female fire archers and which had been conquered through the religious practises of an equally non-existent but territorially-aggressive group of midget barbarians; an eighth-grade science report for an invented species of reptile involved several photomicrographs of tissue samples taken from my father's "cancer collection" along with an audio recording of its mating call which i had created using a two-litre pop bottle half-filled with used motor oil; a grade thirteen kinesiology paper which examined a fake west asian sport whose history and rules were inspired by the menu of a vegetarian all-you-can-eat Indian buffet. often, i would invent extended and cross-indexed bibliographies, and on one occasion i even forged the Dewey decimal cards which kept stock of the inventory at my high school library to prove the existence of several of the non-existent books referenced in a ten-page term paper to a teacher. all of this work received top marks from ostensibly qualified instructors at ostensibly well-regarded schools.

and i kept writing. on the back of a transfer, waiting for a bus. on a napkin, waiting for a friend to return from a restaurant bathroom. in the margins of a newspaper, waiting for my mother to return from a store. on the sides of packing boxes, waiting between lines of customers at work. on the sides of buildings, waiting for my city of Hamilton to return to life. the joy seemed to be that i could fill the time otherwise spent waiting for things to happen by elaborating the happenings of my own invention.

then university happened, and i lost my attention to the joys which free writing provided to me. for some reason my writing began to tailor itself to function more than to the self-reflexive/self-excessive process of writing. i began to write only when given either an academic or a financial opportunity. remuneration, that's what writing had become. more to the point, it seems as though i now only write when i feel that i have a purpose to do so. to relay information. to invite. to make a cultural sell. the joy of purposeless writing from my youth has departed from me. until i realized that i play with words all of the time. i can, in fact, not help but play with words whenever i am given the slightest opportunity.

sitting on the bus today, waiting for my laptop to boot while the snow-covered fields of industry rolled past my window, i came to understand the illusory fiction of purpose. society provides to us a definition of purpose as a geography inhabited by adults who must guide children and the irresponsible away from the random vectors of their instincts. purpose requires a judge, an evaluative agent which can dispense truth and due consequence within the bounds of reason created by the system of evaluation itself. "purpose" is the forced conscription of innocence and creative association into the armed guilt against pleasure which many in society define as reasonable and responsible function. "purpose" is a means of looking beyond oneself to view subjectivity solely within the circumscription of ecstasis: what can you do for others with your words and how will they use them? "purpose" burns off the body, rejecting corporeality as an impurity which detempers the truth of representation. it is a means of working for others for the purpose of instrumentality: I am my words, my words are the truth; you can trust me and here is what you need to know. to be subsumed to function is to engage in a self-inflicted form of wage slavery.

writing is a geography of play. woe to thee, land whose king is no longer a child.

Christina Sealey and Richard Oddie -- Living Spaces: Imagining Hamilton

2009-02-01T00:01:00.006-05:00

Art Gallery of Hamilton
January 24 to May 18, 2009

Christie Sealey is well-known for her intimate and expressive portraiture work. Since she and collaborator Richard Oddie have been residents of Hamilton their entire lives, it was only a matter of time before the city itself became her principle subject. Her new exhibition at the AGH examines the city as a constellation of subjectivities. She juxtaposes the intimacies of a moment, usually with another person but also with the environment of the city itself, with a sense of alienation and introspection. Her depiction of the 401 highway as it frames Cootes Paradise is particularly noteworthy, as is a portrait of a young woman seen reflected in the small mirror of a dilapidated washroom. Through her work, Sealey suggests the question am I really all of the things that are outside of me?

In addition to the paintings, the exhibition includes audio work that Sealey constructed with Richard Oddie. Interviews with many of the city's residents are layered with location recordings from around the city to produce an audio program that invites narrative supposition.

For more information, please refer to the Art Gallery of Hamilton webpage.

Sun Circle @ New Harbours Music Series vol. 2

2008-12-13T00:01:00.003-05:00

Sun Circle, New Harbours Music Series vol. 2

stationary camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Sun Circle, qzh, Throwaway Digital

Deerhunter @ Lee's Palace

2008-11-13T00:01:00.005-05:00

Deerhunter at Lee's Palace in Toronto, Nov. 12, 2008

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting, some shyness

sorry about the sound, as the side of the stage was rather loud and my microphone couldn't help itself from being overdriven

P + C = Deerhunter, qzh, Throwaway Digital

New Harbours Music Series 2008 "Trailer"

2008-10-31T00:01:00.004-04:00

New Harbours Music Series Trailer from Quintin Hewlett on Vimeo.

A summation of the musical performances featured at the Spring 2008 New Harbours Music Series.

Performers include Orphx, Polmo Polpo, Michael Snow + Matthew Boughner, Slither.

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Orphx, Polmo Polpo, Michael Snow, Matthew Boughner, Slither, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)

A nicer version of this video is available from Vimeo.

Holy Fuck @ Pepperjacks

2008-09-20T00:01:00.003-04:00

Holy Fuck @ Pepperjack's Cafe, 19.09.08

handheld camera, ambient lighting + sound, beer

P + C = Holy Fuck, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)

Janek Schaefer - Extended Play

2008-08-13T12:01:00.002-04:00

Janek Schaefer
Extended Play
[2008, L-NE]

There really is no way to avoid or reproduce the “presence” of an art piece. A great deal of aesthetic experiences in the post-formalist artworld investigate the ontology of subjectivity, frequently by grounding the viewer of the art piece in a self-reflexive and participatory creative gesture which feeds back into the piece in question. In terms of audio, the space in which a musical work is installed is usually of principal importance to the meaning of the piece.

L-NE is an offshoot of Taylor Deupree’s 12k label which has been mandated with documenting audio installation work. In 2007, British composer Janek Schaefer exhibited Extended Play at the Huddersfield Art Gallery. The piece reflects upon the wartime experiences of Schaefer’s Polish mother. Schaefer sampled some phrases from a patriotic Polish folk song that was broadcast by the BBC to Polish resistance fighters in order to relay intelligence information on the day that Schaefer’s mother was born. Schaefer, along with Michael Jennings, then arranged this material into a ten-minute chamber piece for violin, cello, and piano. Each instrument was separately pressed onto a 7" record. The vinyl was then played on three motion-activated turntables that would interrupt the recording every time a viewer passed by them, thus invoking randomised intersubjective elements into the piece.

Of course, in order to release a linear audio version in a home-listening format, much of the original’s thematic content had to be removed. Schaefer has offered a more textured and ostensibly minimalist investigation of the original sources than the installation would have allowed. For the first three tracks, he focusses on a single instrument each. Throughout the album, but with these pieces in particular, Schaefer allows ample space for the microscopic textures of the old recordings to be defined. The sounds of the turntables are laid on top of the original, so along with a cello one can hear dust and crackle on the surface of the vinyl, a declination as the power is cut, as well as the jarring sound of the needle as it retracks within a groove.

The phrases are simple and the tones are drawn out to emphasize the texture of strings being played. ‘Accoustic Ensemble’ comes closest to capturing the intentions of the original installation. Schaefer has crafted the piece by using the original recordings played back at a variety of speeds. There is a certain emotional vibrancy to the piece, perhaps due to the density of instrumentation, but more likely due to the subtle overtones of elation – usually carried by the violin – located above the melancholy which encircles the listener through the rest of the album. Like much of Schaefer’s previous work, this is music of muted beauty and complex pleasures.

MP3: Janek Schaefer - Vinyl Cello Duo

Larry Di Ianni and QZH talk Liberally for 90 minutes

2008-07-24T12:01:00.004-04:00

Quintin Zachary Hewlett: First of all, I want to thank you for meeting with me. I wasn’t sure that you would want to afford my questions after our email exchange. Let’s just leave the past where it is – I am not going to bring up Red Hill or any other bugbears. Let’s just get to the Green Shift plan. I like it, and I have to say that for the first time in my life I’m considering voting Liberal.

Larry Di Ianni: Thank you. Hopefully you will like what I have to say. Well, at any rate I’ve come to appreciate the plan. When it was first being talked about, I thought Oh Gosh, how confusing is this? People are going to be totally confused by it. All of the stuff that you hear, that this is not the time, the economy’s bad, energy prices are going up. In fact, this is the answer. This is not the problem. It really is the answer, so I’m quite enthused about it.

QZH: Is that the primary problem that the Liberal Party is faced with? Essentially a PR campaign about this plan?

LDI: Well, I don’t know if it’s a public relations campaign, although PR is always part of politics. Or, at least getting the message out, which is how most politicians would put it rather than public relations. But certainly informing people and dealing with some of the myths. The Conservatives after seeing the plan have ridiculed it. I was sort of offended, personally, by their reaction.

QZH: I’d like to focus on the latter part – we’ll deal with that shift in a second. I think there’s two aspects of it which are important. One of which you just mentioned: the shift in taxation, and I’d like to get to specifics about that. But just before that I’d like to deal with something that’s perhaps on the minds of Hamiltonians more so than those from other large municipalities. Shift of course invokes cars, invokes transportation. There’s a mall in Oakville, one of the larger ones, and there advertising campaign is “Shift into High Gear”, and they have luxury items on display. Of course, you have to drive out to the mall, there’s no real transit to get there otherwise and it’s not near any residential areas. I’m wondering specifically for Hamilton, which is very much predicated on the highway model and has been for a long time – you just have to look at King and Main streets, and from an infrastructure point of view the rapid transfer of people using individual [automobiles] is the ideological framework for this city’s development. I’m wondering very specifically about the Infrastructure Surplus commitments in the Green Shift, how can Hamiltonians very specifically and Canadians in general come to understand that this fund is not necessarily going to go to highway development but instead to mass transit, which is so required for Hamilton.

LDI: Let me refer to this simple and useful book...

QZH: It’s well-produced. I read it.

LDI: Have you read Dune?

QZH: The Frank Herbert series? Yeah. Actually, when I was about six, I went to see the bad David Lynch version of it in the theatre. Disappointing.

LDI: The novel was better.

QZH: Well, [oil] is definitely our spice, and there’s no easy way to get off of it. Considering that costs are going up almost exponentially, and they’re not going to go down. A good indicator for this can be seen in the tarsands, because while most of the tarsands is deemed “industrially-recoverable”, it’s only deemed recoverable when oil reaches a certain price point.

LDI: When I was a kid, we were talking about the tarsands. This is generations ago. We’ve got oil galore, it’s just too expensive to retrieve it. Once the price reaches a certain level, it will be economic and we’ll have oil coming out of our you-know-whats. We’re at that point now, and the fact that we can make it an economic reality means that things have gotten to an exorbitant level. And then, we weren’t thinking of the environmental impact.

QZH: We’re still not really thinking about the environmental impact.

LDI: Yes we are! The Green Shift certainly thinks about that. [laughs]

QZH: Well, again I hope that it is legitimate. I do believe in Dion, however.

LDI: A decent man. I got to know him last year. I don’t know him well, but we’ve been at many functions together and we’ve had a few chats. He’s chalk full of integrity, very bright, thinks well on his feet. He answered some tough questions at a function a week or so ago about with humour and good solid information. But he’s not a sound-bite type of guy.

QZH: That’s the problem with having knowledge and integrity: you don’t fit the media.

LDI: That’s something that you either have or you don’t perhaps. But I’m hoping that people can see beyond that. That there’s a man with substance here. And there’s strength; he’s not a weak man. I read a biography on him he’s an interesting individual because of his background. How he grew up, the influence of his father, how his own thoughts were gelling as things were developing in Canada. Nationalism was flourishing in Quebec City where he grew up. And he took some principled stands in very much a Captain Canada way. He told separatists that they were not going to break up the country on a whim; there were rules for such things and [Dion] implemented those. He was reviled by the separatists in Quebec because of that, because he made it difficult and you couldn’t fudge things any longer. I quite like him, and I hope that Canadians give him a chance. I hope that they see the integrity in him and the passion. When I was mayor, I went to a sustainable cities conference in Montreal. It was great, and they had environmentalists from all over the world, it wasn’t just Canadian folks.

QZH: Who flew in on their jets...

LDI: Well yes, they had to get there and they were from all over the place. But they’re sincere people.

QZH: Yes.

Complete transcription available here.

here's the audio for the conversation:

Larry and QZH

Fat Tuesday Masquerade

2008-07-07T12:01:00.004-04:00

Nudes by Melanie Gillis and Ward Shipman
Mask Art by Laura Hollick, Ryan Price, Michelle Purchase
and countless local mask-making newbies
Fire Spinning by Hot Carl

You can find information about this facet of this month's James North Art Crawl by clicking here.

Slither @ New Harbours Music Series 1.3

2008-06-30T00:01:00.002-04:00

Slither plays Christ's Church Cathedral as part of New Harbours Music Series 1.3, June 13, 2008

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Slither, qzh, Throwaway Digital, 2008

The Urban Moorings Project

2008-06-14T12:01:00.001-04:00

Hamilton’s art community has a vibrant history of engaging with public installations. When dislocated from the antiseptic confines of the art gallery, art becomes more fluid and more of a subjective and discursive enterprise. The Urban Moorings Project is a group installation on the wetlands of Cootes Paradise. Artists Susan Detwiler, Noel Harding and David Acheson, Steve Mazza, and Tor Lukasik-Foss have created floating sculptures and gardens which are intended to question the nature of human industry and ecological preservation. Curator Nora Hutchinson describes the project as “travelling canvas, one that is ever changing…sun on calm waters extends and mirrors perfectly the sculptures and their reflections on the bay. Morning fog, dusk, and the terrible beauty of Hamilton’s factory plumes of smoke and fire play a part in this ineffable landscape. Culled into the visual frame of floating homes, there is the call of birds, the hush of wings and the sound of water lapping…”

Asked why Cootes Paradise was chosen, Hutchinson responds that when one is at Cootes, a “quiet beauty is experienced”. Hutchinson researched the history of the area, and decided that the artists would dialogue with a historical community of floating homes that was situated on the shores of Cootes prior to the 1950s. “Dubbed ‘Shacktown’ by the locals, the houses were built by workers so that they could live near their industrial workplaces. Their homes were mostly made with materials at hand – tin, tar, wood, brick. They built their homes on the water in order to easily respond to the pressures of urban development. When forced to move, they simply floated their homes upstream to a new location on the Bay. The second dialogue between the artworks and the location of Cootes Paradise, concerns the restoration efforts of the RBG to clean up the water and landscape of Cootes and to re-introduce native plants and fish. Responding to both historical and ecological issues, the artists' sculptures will be made mostly with pre -purposed materials and with a focus of using symbols for cleaning the water, to creating islands, and to address the post-industrial landscape.”

For the site, Tor Lukasik-Foss has created what he terms Viking Soliloquy Chair. Made from re-claimed oak, cedar, and mixed media, the chair transforms a sinking Viking ship into a piece of floating stage furniture useful for all manners of monologues and songs. Susan Detwiler will install a shelter frame in order to grow edible plants from household cleaning tools such as brooms, swiffers, and mops. In their piece entitled Romance Park for Endangered Turtles, Noel Harding and David Acheson have created a series of turtle basking platforms. Along with Water aeration and wetland plantings, the piece intends a theatrical stage upon which the terms of environmental engagement are to be interrogated.

For Steve Mazza, industry in Hamilton is examined as a fossil of the past which considers “what it means to live in an industrial city, in an industrial province, in a country that doesn’t seem to want to be industrial anymore”. His sculptural piece playfully engages with the notion that industrial endeavour is outdated and remains extent largely as an urban-scale museum somewhat invisible to the city’s hopes for future development and the dreams of individual citizens for a ‘perfect community’. Mazza’s industry is hermetically sealed in a greenhouse structure which suggests the need to remain conscious of the city’s past, which informs the present in both architectural and environmental terms.

Irene Loughlin of Hamilton Artists Inc expects that the public will respond in a positive manner to the installations. “This exhibition of sculptural art works is non-traditional in that it takes place outside of the gallery. A person might suddenly come across the artworks while strolling down a pathway in a walk at Princess Point. The strategy of placing art in a public place highlights the fact that art is part of our daily life and that art is a valuable part of our daily experience. The artworks respond to the elements, are reflected in the waters of Princess Point, and are affected by the wind... The installation becomes alive, pointing to the rich history of this historic site.”

Urban Moorings opens Saturday, June 21 at 1 pm at Princess Point in Cootes Paradise and will remain in place until August 5. An artist panel discussion follows at 6 pm June 26 at the McMaster Museum of Art. A film about endangered wetlands in Finn Slough, British Columbia will then be screened at Hamilton Artists Inc July 11 at 7 pm. Finally, a panel discussion between the artists involved in the project and the RGB will take place at the RGB auditorium on July 13 at 2 pm.

Hamilton Artists Inc presents URBAN MOORINGS
June 21 - August 5
Coots Paradise

Sois jeune et tais toi (photographs)

2008-06-10T12:01:00.002-04:00

Digital Maggies, 2008

Hunter and hunted, 2008 (Graeme Weir)

I am Error, 2008

A Winner Is You, 2008

Demolition Special, 2008 (Graeme Weir)

New Harbours Music Series 1.3 -- Slither + Fossils

2008-06-08T12:01:00.003-04:00

New Harbours Music Series 1.3
Slither + Fossils
June 13, 9:00 PM
Christ’s Church Cathedral
262 James street North
Free Admission

The noisier and more experimental end of jazz has always been a troubling beast to many listeners. Throughout the history of the genre, musicians have been simultaneously playing within traditional structures and emphatically breaking past them in search of new musical horizons. Free jazz attained a popular zenith in the late sixties with reed players such as John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, and the genre was able to proliferate commercially despite the demands which it placed on listeners. Over the next two decades however, jazz was concretized in the public imagination as a genre of rigid formalism associated with easy-listening radio stations. Experimental jazz quickly relegated itself to the Japanese, European, and North American underground, where it remained a fertile though somewhat marginalised scene.

Michigan duo Slither are among the newer generation of musicians who work within the amorphously-conceived genre of free jazz (which is at this point more appropriately termed “free improvisation”). Clarinetist Heath Moerland and saxophonist Chris Pottinger have been performing torrid live shows for the past few years. Described as “Today’s jazz for today’s playboys” by Thurston Moore, Slither perform a combination of reeds and electronics that serves well to reinvigorate free improvisation fans and other aesthetes of the nearly-impossible. The cacophony which they create certainly falls within the noise camp, and a great deal of spectral beauty can be discerned as the horn instruments wash themselves of the sonic detritus. Indeed, the last time Slither performed in Hamilton, an amplified dish rack proved itself a worthy addition to the performance.

Local noise practitioners Fossils will also be performing at New Harbours. A trio centred upon the weekly improvisation sessions at band member David Payne’s downtown apartment, Fossils have been internationally championed as being among Canada’s elite experimental acts. Tape manipulation, no-input mixer feedback, prepared guitars, and an arsenal of electronics conjure a dissonant and distopic aesthetic of tortured landscapes and strained human relations. Much as the DJ scene of the 1990s revived interest in the vinyl culture of the previous generation of music listeners, the tape culture represented by Fossils signals to children of the 80s and 90s that their long-forgotten cassettes can still find a use despite the wear of neglect, magnetic drift, and oxidation.

Slither and Fossils play the final concert in the spring 2008 New Harbours Music Series at Christ’s Church Cathedral this Friday at 9 PM.

untitled (June 3, 2008)

2008-06-04T00:01:00.008-04:00

laying, face fragile,
in thought i am marginal to her story,
while everyting else pours into her, being

so, with grace
and upturned intentions, she is smiling
sideways, gravity marks time for us

as i, hold, still
and soft as death or a sidewalk
when life enters and exits without fanfare

until a warmth comes
closer. submersed and paralytic,
in vain do i sit beside her so

june 3, 2008

Sois jeune et tais toi

2008-06-01T12:01:00.001-04:00

featuring DJs Gary Buttrum and Carla Coma,
as well as mixes from special guests

dance and silent auction
Loose Canon Gallery
Friday June 6
9pm

pay what you can
$5 suggested

all money from door, beer, and auction will
be donated for cancer research at Princess
Margaret Hospital

Michael Snow + Matthew Boughner @ New Harbours

2008-05-27T12:01:00.002-04:00

Snow + Boughner in an improvised performance inside Christ's Church Cathedral on May 11, 2008. This concert was second in the New Harbours Music Series.

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Michael Snow, Matthew Boughner, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)

an open letter to Hamilton Police Services

2008-05-22T12:01:00.001-04:00

As a language instructor who has worked at Mohawk and Columbia International colleges as well as McMaster University, I am deeply concerned with Mark Nimigan’s suggestion in last Wednesday’s Hamilton Spectator that Hamilton Police Services begin focussing on “clean[ing] up” the downtown core by arresting individuals who swear in public. If police are to be used as agents of the cultural hygiene policies of a few motivated bureaucrats, then an extremely dangerous precedent will have been set.

I wish to argue with Mr. Nimigan that Hamilton Police Services does not have the authority to arbitrate what use of language constitutes “vile” and “filthy”. Police forces are not semioticians, anthropologists, or linguists, and the public should not expect them to be trained in these fields. Not a single word can in and of itself be deemed either vile, filthy, or harmful to the public. The discursive contexts in which words can be deemed as harmful to the public interest are already covered by Canada’s Hate Speech laws. Any other curtailing of public speech treads on the rights of individuals to free speech as protected under the Charter of Rights.

When viewed in terms of his support for a project of cultural hygiene, Mr. Nimigan’s suggestion that entrepreneurs don’t want to “come downtown and open a restaurant or specialty shop given the atmosphere down there” is laughable at best. Mr. Nimigan’s suggestion that “taxpayers” and “little old ladies” are the victims of individuals whom the author views as undesirable for the core stinks of the elitist and fascist rhetoric which characterised the eugenics policies undertaken by authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century. Mr. Nimigan, I wish to emphatically state to you that Hamilton’s poor national reputation will not find a solution in the forced removal of certain individuals from the city’s public sphere.

Two issues serve to keep many entrepreneurs from the core: blight and taxation. I wish to suggest that Hamilton Police Services be used to enforce property standards in the downtown core so that buildings are properly maintained as they are legally mandated by existing property by-laws. The collapse of the Balfour Building, which has seriously effected the operation and financial status of entrepreneurs on King William street such as Thai Memory, is the principal witness to the need for police enforcement of property standards. Furthermore, a redeployment of public health resources to aid in the core’s instances of drug abuse and mental health issues would be of benefit to the area’s atmosphere.

Entrepreneurs in the downtown core pay a higher proportion of municipal taxes as compared to suburban areas. It is largely for this reason that entrepreneurs chose to locate themselves along Hamilton’s expanding periphery rather than be contained within what should be a high-density downtown business area. As the periphery expands, Hamilton taxpayers in the core must bear the financial burden for the expansion of infrastructure – sewers, water, roads – that fuels suburban growth. The departure of stores from Jackson Square and the Eaton’s Centre have a great deal to do with this fact. Large department stores prefer suburban locations because they get free additions to their development plans.

Policies of cultural hygiene are misguided at best and more often signal a grossly-unjust disregard of the rights of individuals. Mr. Nimigan, if you wish to see the city face court challenges under sections 2b, 2c, and 24 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, then by all means please move forward with your plans to act as arbiter of cultural hygiene for the city of Hamilton.

Thai Memory fundraiser @ Pepperjacks Café

2008-05-18T12:01:00.001-04:00

Once known for its fantastic Victorian, Edwardian, and modern architecture, downtown Hamilton has been garnering some media attention south of the border for the degree to which city council has allowed its heritage to decay. The architectural legacy of the city of Hamilton was built with steel money. Now it seems that the decline of the industry parallelled city council’s conscious decision to feign blindness and neglect to enforce the property standards legislation already in place to protect older structures. The collapse of the Tivoli in the summer of 2004 marked the beginning of public awareness of this issue. More recently, the collapse and controversial demolition of the Balfour Building on the Lister Block suggests that the city endeavours to maintain its unstated policy of “Demolition by Neglect”.

One notable consequence of the Balfour’s tragic end is the economic plight of local businesses along King William. Where the city falters, small business people and grassroots community organizations have attempted to restore the downtown to its former glory. It is shameful that the city has repeatedly stressed the need for private enterprise to restore downtown and then allowed positive economic developments in the core to flounder as a result of council’s own inability to demonstrate the leadership necessitated by their legal mandate. After having a successful first year of operations, the Thai Memory restaurant, located adjacent to the Balfour site, has had to close as the demolition process slowly continues. The restaurant’s owners Toon and Pat Satasuk have worked very hard to ensure a top-flight dining experience. Now their efforts are stalled as the city finally begins to get its act together on this matter.

Positive communities do not neglect their member citizens. As such, Pepperjacks Café, also located on King William, is hosting a benefit concert on Friday evening to raise money to assist the Satasuks through this financially difficult transition. Performers include the very capable Sarah Good and Terra Lightfoot, Annie Shaw, legend-in-the-scene Mark Raymond, and the always-amusing Matt Jelly. DJ sets from Jeremy Greenspan of the Junior Boys and scene-stealer Gary Buttrum will keep your ass moving well into the evening hours.

Pepperjacks Café
Friday, May 23: 9 PM
38 King William Street

30 / 30 -- Thirty Years of Hamilton Artists Inc

2008-05-12T12:01:00.003-04:00

This video was initially six metres wide by two and a half metres tall, and had separately-edited intertitles. The audio was initially presented in a three-channel discreet mono format with stereo music accompaniment.

Without prejudice toward the previous fifty, I am fond of the last twelve minutes of the video.

Now 30 / 30 can be watched in a crappy online version, taken from a DVD source that I made a year and a half ago. The text remains readable on lower-resolution monitors, but is a bit small for 1680 or 1920. Frankly, some sacrifices need to be made to ensure a large distribution with a minimal cost. Perhaps I will format this for a 60 by 90 pixel cellphone to make the film eminently portable and completely unwatchable. Then I would surely feel as though the video had "made it".

Notes from the DVD:

30 / 30
a video by Quintin Hewlett, done in 2006

30 / 30 is an impressionistic celebration of art as it is practised in the city of Hamilton, Ontario. The impetus for this video project was to document the 30th anniversary of Hamilton Artists Inc., which is one of the oldest and most influential artist-run centres in Canada.

Diverging memories, artist feuds, technical issues – the loss of the audio masters to the digital ether, a continuously degrading camera – and reluctant or reclusive participants served to obscure an easy description of the Inc.

A polyphonous dialogue emerged from the ruined attempt at linear narrative. It was decided that any representation of the Inc. would not be authentic if it did not attempt to contain the various agreements, innuendos, discord, observations, myths, and political positioning between the members of the Inc.’s democracy.

An interview between two artists of the Inc.’s “second generation” in the 1990s is the structural locus for 30 / 30. This interview was itself structured upon the board game Trouble, which was chosen to serve as an aesthetic distillation of the interview process as well as a gag intended for Inc. insiders, for whom the two players represent the “troubling” of the Inc. The filmmaker chose to himself participate by the rules of the game being played, typically in the form of camera movement and thematic juxtaposition between events in the game and images juxtaposed in the other video field.

The video ends with two gestures of disruption, one material and the other symbolic. Alternately, they are optimistic and pessimistic toward the future success of Hamilton Artists Inc. The filmmaker intended this ambivalence to avoid the principle difficulty inherent to any “career retrospective”, namely that the summation of past glories suggests a decidedly inglorious future.

The video here presented was initially formatted for a large-screen and wide-stereo-image presentation at the Hamilton Artist Inc. gallery for December 2005 and May 2006. Fonts and graphics were resized for better display on conventional televisions, and the audio has been reduced from one stereo background music source and three discreet mono interview sources to one stereo image. Headphone monitoring is highly recommended.

Woodhands @ Pepperjack's Café

2008-05-08T12:01:00.000-04:00

Woodhands at Pepperjack's Café, May 3, 2008

handheld camera, ambient sound and lighting, beer

P + C = Woodhands, qzh, Throwaway Digital, 2008

T H & B closing performances

2008-05-06T12:01:00.005-04:00

a brief document of the closing performances of T H & B, May 3, 2008

performers, in order of appearance:

Tor Lukasik-Foss
Lesley Loksi Chan
Reinhard Reitzenstein & Gayle Young
Dave Hind

handheld camera, ambient sound and lighting

P + C = qzh, Throwaway Digital, 2008

Stars of the Lid @ The Music Gallery

2008-04-30T12:01:00.002-04:00

Stars of the Lid played a great set at The Music Gallery in Toronto on Monday April 28, 2008.

stationary camera, ambient sound and lighting, ~ 1.5 minutes missing from final piece

P + C = Stars of the Lid, qzh, Throwaway Digital, 2008

Gas High

2008-04-24T00:01:00.005-04:00

As another week passes in 2008, we read daily reports about the rising costs of gasoline in this country. Motorists scream in alarm as gas prices continually reach new highs: greater than $1.20 per litre in Ontario; greater than $1.35 per litre in Québec. Rural commuters complain that they require nearly a quarter tank of gasoline just to reach the nearest gas station; some of them question the futility of remaining employed when faced with the economic reality of paying more to commute to work than they actually earn at their job. Every month of the year 2008 has seen a significant rise in the oil futures market, which as of April 23 has priced the May crude oil inventory at nearly $120 per barrel. That might not sound like much until you consider that only 10 years ago the price reached an all-time low of $11.

Over the course of the 20th century, we got so used to cheaply-produced, easy-to-access oil that we put it into everything. The biggest user of oil is of course transportation. We must not only consider personal vehicle use, which in and of itself is vital to a modern high-tech economy. Nearly half of all transportation in North America is freight. In order to stock local stores with all of the consumer products which we take for granted, oil is a cost input. Many of these products are currently shipped by trucks, which constitute the least-efficient mode of freighting goods to stores. As the price of oil rises, naturally the cost of everything that we buy – from chewing gum to plasma televisions – will increase as well.

On a more fundamental level than transportation, the world is bearing witness to the most dangerous reality of our present era. Food prices are escalating drastically as food producers must index their prices to account for the rising costs of their fuel and oil-based fertilizer inputs. Canadians may currently enjoy consuming tropical fruits in the dead of winter, but that luxury will not be so readily available to working families as the cost of a can of peaches approaches $5. While many understand that food prices invariably rise with inflation, citizens of western countries will not peacefully tolerate an exponential rise in the cost of such a basic provision as food, the cost of which will marginalise them as equally as the west has marginalised so-called developing nations over the past century.

Look around your house and you will locate innumerable products and services which would not exist in a mass-market context without a readily-available supply of cheap oil: plastic products, fertilizers, medicines, cosmetics, clothing, building materials, household chemical agents, home heating, and electricity (in some areas of North America). It is unlikely that modern industrial civilization will be able to continue to produce the cheap plastic items which currently populate our lives and our landfills. The economically marginalised of the future will enjoy short, brutal lives digging through landfills in search of the plastics of the 20th century, from which oil will be reconstituted and utilized by those wealthy enough to isolate themselves in a transplanted 20th century lifestyle of oil dependence. I hate to simplify reality and push a metaphor too far, but oil is and always was a dinosaur whose extinction was prolonged by human genius.

Y2K was an expression of the millennial angst inherent in a transition between centuries; it shared a tradition with medieval anxieties from a thousand years ago. Collectively we breathed a sign of relief as the computers continued to function and the planes did not fall out of the sky. Then we all moved on with our lives to enjoy the new millennium. Peak oil will fulfil these dormant anxieties and prove to be the long tomorrow which will obliterate everything that modern civilization has come to appreciate as “the good life”. In the pages of View and elsewhere, myself and others have repeatedly stressed both the nature and the importance of this concept, and I will not repeat myself here except with the following provision: without accounting for future growth in oil use and potential arctic deposits, there exists slightly less than 30 years of conventional oil reserves on the entire planet. Most people reading this article will be alive thirty years from now.

Don’t worry, you might say; in Canada, we have a few trillion barrels of oil, which will fulfill the oil needs of the planet for at least the next century. While I will presently ignore the fact that one hundred years is not much time when placed along the scale of human history and that such mathematics merely postpones the inevitable for a few generations, a more important fact must be considered. Canada’s tarsand oil deposits represent the dying vanities of modern industry. They are an environmental nightmare second only to China’s legion of coal plants. More importantly, they are the most expensive source of oil currently known. Much of the tarsands cannot be economically developed at even today’s high price of oil. These deposits will become financially feasible as oil approaches $200 per barrel and nuclear reactors, needed to evaporate the water necessary for oil extraction, start to become commonplace in the prairies. Ask yourself if you will truly enjoy a world in which the only way to produce enough oil to meet the “needs” of the world is to price it beyond the reach of the vast majority of the Earth’s inhabitants. This is the paradox which will terminally damn the world’s poor and middle classes.

Industrial civilization will transition from bathing in oil to rationing its use to those projects deemed most vital. Enlightened leadership will currently require the proper investment of oil as we enjoy the peak of world production – building massive-scale renewable energy plants and mass-transportation networks; reserving enough oil for the medical requirements of the next century; and perhaps most importantly, rationing enough oil for the production and distribution of affordable food supplies. Only then will the economic and social hardships of the transition from the era of plentiful oil to that of marginal reserves be minimized.

Citizens of democratic countries must demand action now and not when the pumps run dry. Resource scarcity leads to panic, which in turn leads to massive social unrest and violence, which in turn leads to civil and international warfare and ultimately to fascism. With a degree of willpower, sacrifice, and Obama-esque positivism (“Yes we can! Yes we can!”), then modern civilization will prove stronger as a result of the transition from a society of waste and excess to one of mutual and exponential socio-economic benefit. It is however my greatest fear that the true lessons learned over the 20th century – namely greed, vanity, and avarice – will ultimately lead to indifference toward the plight of those left out of the oil loop. Of course, the Pentagon in the U.S. has its own mathematics concerning the issue, namely the use of nuclear weaponry to dissallow foreign oil use by foreign populations. Darfur, Haiti, and Iraq are the opening wounds in a process which may prove to scar us all. Welcome to the 21st century.

Cursed @ Cashbah

2008-04-18T00:01:00.002-04:00

Video from the Cursed show at Casbah on March 28, 2008. There is also one song from Taken at the end of the video. Sorry Taken fans, I am not among you.

My apologies Goodfellow; I tried to brave the crowd for good shots, but after enjoying a boot to my newly-unbroken hand I decided to retreat to a safe elevation. Forgive the first few minutes of blank / chaotic screens, as at that point I was getting my ass kicked in by the crowd.

handheld camera, ambient lighting, soundboard audio + ambient sound, ass-kicking

Soundboard audio courtesy of Donny Cooper.

P + C = Cursed, qzh, Throwaway Digital, 2008

Orphx @ New Harbours Music Series

2008-04-16T00:01:00.004-04:00

Orphx @ New Harbours Music Sries 1.1, April 11, 2008

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Orphx, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)

Polmo Polpo @ New Harbours

2008-04-16T00:01:00.001-04:00

Christ's Church Cathedral, April 11, 2008

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting

P + C = Sandro Perri, qzh, Throwaway Digital (2008)

i woke up this morning as the ex-mayor was stealing my mail

2008-04-14T12:01:00.007-04:00

I woke up this morning, made some tea, ate my breakfast and opened my front door to see that the ex-mayor of Hamilton Larry Di Ianni was rifling through my mail. We exchanged pleasantries, and he forced a campaign handbill upon me. He asked me the manner in which i employ myself, and after mentioning that i had taught for Mohawk and McMaster, he tried to bond with me by discussing his past as a teacher of high-school english. We laughed and talked about student life. Despite the fact that in his hand ex-Mayor of Hamilton Larry Di Ianni was holding several of my financial statements along with a notification of an unsolicited offer for a pre-approved mortgage and credit card and a flyer suggesting that now is the season for me to get my roof fixed, the day had started off pleasantly enough. I noticed that the letter at the top of the pile which he was holding was a phone bill.

When I asked Larry Di Ianni about specific policies in which i am interested -- high-speed rail from Windsor to Quebec City, light rail for the cities; all using Hamilton steel and jobs from the province's shrinking automotive sector -- he brushed me off and referred to the bullet points on his campaign poster. I was indeed impressed, as it did clearly and emphatically state that "He can do more! He will do more!"

I then asked him to clarify his environmental policies, with specific regard to the transportation needs of working Ontarians. He reminded me that he built the Red Hill Creek Expressway. I reminded him that i had met a few very personable individuals who sat in trees seeking to block construction of another highway through part of Hamilton. I further reminded him that it was a rather undemocratic idea for him to have used city lawyers to make the protestors financially liable for the security measures required to "contain" them. I then reminded him that one Matt Jelly had invited him to a public debate over the issue, and that he had refused to participate.

At this point, Larry Di Ianni put my mail back into my mailbox.

He told me that while we might disagree on traffic concerns, that his record for obtaining provincial funding for municipal social services and job creation speaks for itself, and proves that he will be a force for change if he is elected federally. After all, he can and will do more.

I quickly realized that ex-Mayor of Hamilton Larry Di Ianni was campaigning without a platform, and would only listen to those points which might already agree with Liberal policy. I mentioned the concern that i had for the inherent problems of integrating an economy based on resource extraction and speculative trading (with particular emphasis on energy futures) with the real-world environmental depreciation of many of the biological processes which are fundamental to the continuation of modern civilization as we have come to enjoy it. Food prices are getting as out-of-control as our nation's oil inventory.

Larry Di Ianni then expressed the Liberal party's desire to invest in "green technology", such as biofuels. He elequently explained his enthusiasm for this emerging industry. I agreed, but wondered how we could rationalize the fact that biofuel trades land intended for food with land intended for energy development, and that the poor and working families will naturally suffer as a result of exponentially-rising food and fuel costs. I also said that my grandfather had been a wheat farmer in Alberta, and wondered whether growing a field of plants to make enough biofuel to allow the combine and other harvesting equipment to harvest the field of plants intended for biofuel was a winning strategy in the race to sustainability.

Larry Di Ianni mentioned that he himself was about to be a grandfather. He noted the importance of family life, then bid me a good morning after saying that i was remarkably well informed for a young man who introduced himself as a friend of Matt Jelly. "You should work for my campaign!" he stated enthusiastically. I told him that I would come to his thing if he would come to mine, and I began to relay information about the May 9th New Harbours performance with Michael Snow. He said that he was always interested in the arts, but could not attend. Using his Blackberry, Larry Di Ianni quite eloquently confirmed to me that he had two stag parties to attend that evening. Then, after reminding me of a pleasant Red Hill Creek Expressway drive which he and Matt Jelly experienced, ex-Mayor Larry Di Ianni left me to my porch and tea.

Which got me to thinking.

Larry Di Ianni, I will take you up on this offer. I will work hard to get the youth voters onside with the Liberal party. I will smile for grandmothers everywhere, and dance like a monkey in a suit for the continuing benefit of the federal Liberal party. The federal Liberals were an effective and socially-minded governing party forty years ago, and perhaps some prodding from the youthfully militant will aid to rid the Liberals of their more dogmatically conservative impulses. Red is not normally my choice for political colours, but I would love the chance to help bring some real issues to public debate.

Of course, this would mean that I would have to work for a self-described "Man for All Reasons".

If anyone wishes to contact ex-Mayor, federal Liberal candidate, and enfant-terrible Larry Di Ianni, he can be reached at the following email address. Feel free to speak as liberally as possible when congratulating the ex-Mayor for his contributions to life in the city of Hamilton.

ldiianni@cogeco.ca

-----

Mr. Hewlett,

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. As you may know, Mr. Di Ianni was selected by your local Liberal riding association to represent the Liberal Party in the next election. As such, he enjoys the full support of the Leader and the Liberal Party of Canada.

Having said that, I have shared your comments with Mr. Di Ianni in the hopes that he can address your concerns personally.

Regards,

Daniel Lauzon

Directeur adjoint des communications / Deputy Director of Communications

Parti libéral du Canada / Liberal Party of Canada

-----

Quintin,

Imagine my shock at reading your letter, as well as the slanderous blog fabrication of the conversation we had on the front porch of your home.

Upon checking our records, my canvassing partner, who was standing just below the steps of your porch, recorded you as ‘possibly supportive’ after what I described to him as a friendly conversation. In fact, based on our exchange, I did ask you to volunteer during the election. I certainly would not have done that had I sensed your lack of support. So, I can only assume that your behaviour was duplicitous: pretending civility, while harbouring mischief. I have already asked my friend to alter our records, so we won’t bother you again.

I suppose when you told me that you were Matt Jelly’s friend, you were trying to give me a message. Because I have had very civil conversations with Mr. Jelly in our last encounters, I didn’t until now understand your true intent. I have no problems with people not supporting me. I do have problems with outright lies and fabrications. Your blog contains many of these untruths that reflect neither my statements to you or the tenor of our conversation.

You are correct on one count. My pamphlet is not a platform; it is a candidate card intended to introduce myself as a Liberal candidate for Hamilton East Stoney Creek to constituents. You will note that the card contains the following: My Experience; my community Involvement; my personal biography; some of my accomplishments in politics; and a testimonial assessment, from the local newspaper, on my abilities in office.

Nowhere does it include the Liberal Platform and the reason is simple. There is no election yet and the platform has not yet been released. At the doors, I do talk about the general themes that have attracted me to be a member of the Liberal Party and its candidate in this riding. These themes are: Infrastructure support for cities, Poverty Reduction, Manufacturing assistance, and Environmental Sustainability. Mr. Dion has talked about each of these over the past months, and details will be released at the appropriate time. Each of these is important to Hamilton and will be well-received when details are released.

Contrary to your exaggeration in the blog essay, I do recall your mention of rail transportation being important to you. I mentioned my support for this as well, and I have actually written about the need to improve in this area. Why you would mis-represent our conversation is mind-boggling.

What disappointed me most in your entry, however, is your slanderous lie about me taking your mail. How dare you? I know you stated in your letter to M. Dion that you had the intention of being ‘avec humour’, I see nothing humorous about accusing someone of such an intrusive act. I ask you out of decency to retract that allegation.

Common sense will tell everyone that I am knocking on doors to solicit support, not to pry into people’s private mail. The accusation is bizarre. My canvasser friend was flabbergasted when I told him about this allegation of yours, as was I.

In fact, as irony will have it, I have crossed paths with the local postman on more than one occasion as I knocked on doors in the neighbourhood and he and I joked about being on the same route.

Similarly, I have met with a good deal of support in your whole area, with people agreeing to take lawn signs during the campaign supporting my candidacy. I won’t reveal the number of signs to protect my campaign’s strategic position, but even on your street, I met with considerable success. I am sure that each of these residents can be called upon to summarize the content of our positive exchange, if need be.

In summary, Quentin, I have no problems with your support of someone else at election time. I do have problems with duplicity, exaggeration and mischief-making.

Larry Di Ianni, HESC Candidate

-----

Mr. Di Ianni,

In relation to the article which I posted on my blog, despite the funny title the heart of the matter is of course the number of political issues which I raised with you.

The matter of you "stealing my mail" was intended as humour, and was not intended to slander your reputation any further than what you yourself have done while Mayor of the city of Hamilton. I am fully aware that you had my mail in your hand with my phone bill on top simply because you were placing a campaign handbill into my mailbox.

Poetic exaggeration is key to satire.

After the strong-arm tactics which were used by yourself and your administration to push the Red Hill Creek Expressway into existence, I feel that you made yourself into a caricature worthy of some derision. With this in mind, I wrote that you "stole my mail". If I could draw a picture then you would have a big nose and funny facial features, but sadly I cannot do so. I hope you understand that no individual who read this post actually thought that you were stealing my mail for any devious purpose, and in conversation with them I did make it clear that you were just scattering handbills around the neighbourhood. My readers, as such, were more concerned with the fact that you did not have any adequate responses to the issues that I raised with you.

You suggest that since I disagreed with your statements, and yet was wholly civil during our conversation, that I acted in some way in a duplicitous manner. Well my mother ultimately taught me well: I believe that all humans deserve to be treated in a civil manner. You are a personable and generally friendly person, Mr. Di Ianni, and I do not wish to slander you as a person. Perhaps one day soon we could play chess together: as people. But you have to understand that politicians are not simply individuals. In their public function, the individual humanity of a public figure is abstracted into a more hybridized entity which shares an ontological space with creative enterprises -- the fiction of celebrity, if you will. It is with this "hybrid" that I dialogued when I wrote the piece on my blog. Words are words, Mr. Di Ianni. You have yours, and I have mine; we occupy the space in between our respective language. In transubstantive terms, neither of us is fully represented or constituted as individuals by them.

In my youth I was certainly more militant, and would likely have removed you from my porch with a litany of curses. Now that I have aged and grown a few beards, I have come to understand that change in civil society must come through peaceful and productive discourse. Of course, for this discourse to be productive, both parties in conversation must actually hear and understand what each other is saying.

It is with this last point that I believe my satirical article to have found its mark. Namely, you weren't listening to what I was saying, except for when it already agreed with aspects of your campaign. In your response you mention that we agreed when I raised the topic of light and high-speed rail to your attention. A clarification to your "agreement" is necessary. I must counter that I raised this particular issue at three different times during our brief chat, as for years I have been of the opinion that rail is the solution to Hamilton's highway problem. The first time I mentioned it, you started talking about your production as Mayor of Hamilton.

After the second time, when I explained the benefits to the Ontario manufacturing sector that such a project would entail, you mentioned that the Liberal party is the sole party which supports "Manufacturing Assistance". In my blog I mentioned that the only times in our conversation during which you seemed to be listening to the points that I was making occurred when my thoughts strayed into territory covered by the Liberal political platform. While I understand that the official platform is as yet unreleased by the Liberal party, you must agree that a certain political trajectory is quite readily visible to anyone who pays attention to federal politics.

The city of Hamilton is populated with a very high number of working-class families who will not be able to afford the oil required to transport themselves as gas prices continue to rise as oil supplies continue to fall (perhaps as a federally-appointed Liberal, you will come to see that oil production worldwide stagnated a few years ago and is now in decline). Perhaps if I had used the current buzzword LRT to describe my position on rail then you would have remembered the issue that I tried to have you remember. Rail development surely would have helped back in 2003, when Red Hill was peaking as an issue and Stelco was bottoming out. Plus, by taking on such a project Hamilton would have proved itself two years ahead of Al Gore's cinematic popularization of environmental issues.

Perhaps your confusion around the civility of my behaviour and the hostility of my actual statements to the ideologies which you represent is due to the fact that many of my opinions are frequently heard coming from the revolutionary left. Those who are forced closer to the margins of society -- including the protesters on whom you unleashed city lawyers to "recoup" the security costs of their containment -- do indeed make their ideas known in what can to more conservative eyes be described as "crazy". While I do believe that at times more vehement acts of political dissent are necessary, those times are only validated by larger social crises. I myself wish to take a more academic approach. It is with a certain perverse hope that, in the not-too-distant future, a legal team will be able to demonstrate your own financial liability in the matter, as the environmental costs of this development will be itemized as financial losses to the residents of the city of Hamilton.

Your support in the liberal party is assured; I can understand why you have been chosen as a candidate for Hamilton East as your success is a virtual inevitability. Right now the Liberals need some winners, and such is the life of party politics: pick the winners before the ideologies. For at least a few years, you will likely collect cheques as an MPP.

By the way Mr Di Ianni, I checked my own records, which due to my "single" status does not rely on a partner of canvases but rather my own memory. There was no canvassing partner present at the base of my stairs. You may indeed have been walking in the neighbourhood with one, but this person was not present during our conversation. Then again, I sat on my porch drinking tea for the next fifteen minutes and didn't see anyone catch up with you down my street. I assume that for the sake of expediency (not something for which the Liberals are known, by the way) your canvassing partner was busy canvassing a different street.

Perhaps we could test each other's memory: roughly three-and-a-half minutes into our conversation, there was a loud cheering sound in the neighbourhood. Pointing to a truck three doors down from me, I made a joke: "I trust that was from the school, and not the construction guys after having moved something heavy." You laughed then proffered your own joke. We laughed together. Mr. Di Ianni, having canvassed those houses, you had just come from that direction and your joke corrected my statement. They were not construction guys at all. Do you remember your own statement, which correctly described the work and the workers? I certainly do, and perhaps your response will authenticate which person's ability to remember allows a more "truthful" version of events that spring morning.

It may come to pass that I am wrong about your potential as MPP. Perhaps by then you will have come to understand such concepts as "sustainable development", "peak oil", and "suburban sprawl". Until then, your legacy remains tied to the Red Hill Creek Expressway which, while of short-term economic benefit to some people, will be a grey stain on the landscape of Hamilton for decades to come.

If such is mischief-making, then I stand properly accused.

q x

-----

Thank you for your reply. I am familiar with satire, Quintin, and still don’t find your headline humourous or satirical. Obviously neither did some of your friends who had to call to ask if I was really stealing mail. You sort of prove my point. At some appropriate moment, perhaps we can talk in detail about each of your assertions about the road, my motives and my legacy in the city, as well as the protesters and the role of the city in resolving that issue. It would require some time to do that.

I do appreciate civility and always return the courtesy. You are obviously a bright, educated young man and would be deserving of some time.

However, you have reached conclusions based on your own biases, not the record. And that can be the subject of our discussion. The only concern I would have is that you might again publish an exaggeration, or fabrication or satirical version of the conversation without giving me the opportunity to rebut on your blog. Perhaps we can invite some listeners to hear the conversation, just to keep it on the record. I say this without any implied formality…I would want it to be very informal.

A second point, I am running Federally, not provincially (so MP, not MPP). I hope to win based on a record of service, but ultimately, our voters will decide; and I’m ready for their decision and will respect it.

As for my canvassing friend. He is only there to keep records, so he doesn’t do other streets. I am going to every door myself in this pre-writ period and he was there, rest assured.

I will alter my approach, however, and bring him to the doors with me from now on.

Again, I appreciate your response and ask again that you alter your offensive headline on your blog, or at least make it obvious that you are taking ‘poetic’ liberties.

Thank you.

Larry Di Ianni, HESC Candidate

Dr. Lewis R. Gordon - Overcoming Disciplinary Decadence: A Pedagogical Imperative

2008-03-27T12:01:00.001-04:00

another lecture, this one by the eminent Lewis R. Gordon

Overcoming Disciplinary Decadence: A Pedagogical Imperative

Dr. Atif Kubursi - Is Economics Relevant?

2008-03-26T12:01:00.006-04:00

A lecture from Dr. Atif Kubursi should prove to be a good travelling companion. I too like to commute with music, but sometimes talk is more productive.

Is Economics Relevant?

new harbours music series 1 - Polmo Polpo / Orphx

2008-03-20T12:01:00.007-04:00

now with myspace goodness:

www.myspace.com/newharbours

NEW HARBOURS ANNOUNCES SPRING CONCERTS IN HAMILTON, MICHAEL SNOW AMONG PERFORMERS

The New Harbours Music Series Demonstrates Significant Cultural Influence For The Newly Revitalized City Of Hamilton

HAMILTON, ON – Music fans in Hamilton have long been organizing events for contemporary music. Musical performances in warehouses, stores, basements, and vacant buildings have been significant happenings for those in contact with the musical underground. Now, a series of spring concerts will bring experimental music to the industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario in a more official capacity.

The New Harbours Music Series intends to showcase regional, national, and international artists and performers who engage in experimental musical practises. Presented by the Hamilton Artists Inc. and coordinated by a volunteer committee of local music fans and musicians, the series is dedicated to supporting a wide variety of experimental music.

The concerts will be part of the monthly James Street Art Crawls, and will feature performances from the internationally-renowned multi-disciplinary artist Michael Snow (Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the first Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts), Polmo Polpo, and Slither, with local artists Orphx, Fossils, and Matthew Boughner.

“With the participation of Michael Snow, who ranks among the most significant and well-known artists in Canada, the New Harbours Music Series intends to bring attention to Hamilton’s art community,” says Quintin Hewlett, who is a member of the New Harbours organizing committee. “The James North art district is a jewel largely hidden to residents of Hamilton, who frequently look to Toronto for their culture. That city, great as it is, serves as a black hole sucking in everything from the surrounding cities. Meanwhile, I know people who have come to Hamilton from Europe and the southern U.S. to see shows here that they would not be able to see otherwise. People need to be made aware of what is occurring in their neighbourhood. Local artists like Orphx and Matthew Boughner have an international following. With New Harbours, we intend for Hamilton to experience its own event horizon.”

This series will occur April 11, May 9, and June 13, 2008 inside Christ's Church cathedral, which is located at 252 James Street North. In addition to the wonderful acoustic properties of the building, the cathedral was chosen as the inaugural venue for the music series as it is one of the most significant architectural and historical landmarks in Hamilton.

Furthermore, the downtown location of the cathedral allows this music series to be included in the James North Art Crawl, which is a monthly event currently gathering a national reputation for the increasingly influential output of the community which it fosters. The continued development of the art community in the James Street North gallery district is a prime indication of the rising economic and cultural influence of the revitalized city of Hamilton.

Culture needs to metastasize. we're already planning series for the fall of 2008, as well as spring 2009. New Harbours Music Series will continue to be an integral part of the cultural output of Southern Ontario.

April 11: Polmo Polpo + Orphx
www.cstrecords.com/bands_polmopolpo.html
www.myspace.com/orphx

May 9: Michael Snow + Matthew Boughner
www.actuellecd.com/bio.e/snow_mi.html
http://www.myspace.com/brownbirdcanread

June 13: Slither + Fossils
http://www.tastysoil.com/
www.myspace.com/fossilstrio

###

If you would like more information about New Harbours Music Series or the James Street North gallery district, please contact Ian Jarvis (ian@hamiltonartistsinc.on.ca) or Quintin Hewlett (quintin.hewlett@gmail.com)

Stars of the Lid -- And Their Refinement of the Decline

2008-03-18T12:01:00.005-04:00

Stars of the Lid
And Their Refinement of the Decline
[Kranky, 2007]

The music of Stars of the Lid – Texas-based duo Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie – can at worst be described as contemplative. Listening to a Stars of the Lid record is not unlike listening to Eno’s early ambient period or the chamber pieces of Arvo Pärt. While the instrumentation is quite varied and the atmospheric dronescapes frequently invoke the aesthetics of cinema, this is not music seeking cathartic release or narrative direction.

This is music that evolves rather slowly over long durations. One is intended to bathe in the textures and drone of each sound and engage in what can paradoxically be described as “situational transcendence”. Each sound is allowed space to be examined in detail. Naturally, the relative tranquillity of the affair can tend to provoke in listeners a degree of lethargy or rumination if one wishes to allow it.

Unlike a great deal of contemporary music of this sort, Stars of the Lid does not rely on generative compositional processes or purely electronic sound sources. For much of the album, live instrumentation is used not solely in opposition to the relative silence of the electronic drones, but to examine the manner in which the timbre of each instrument can serve to define an acoustic space. For example, album opener “Dungtitled (In A Major)” allows a complex harmonic interplay to develop between flugelhorn, cello, and violin as each instrument introduces a static tone which quickly decays into the electronic background, while the two-part piece “Articulate Silences” is notable for the use of a chamber orchestra.

The band started issuing albums in the mid-nineties, and in recent years have learned to be rather judicious in their release schedule. And Their Refinement of the Decline is the duo’s first album since 2001's monumental Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid. Fans of ironically-titled tracks will appreciate the allusions to the drug-induced states experienced by typical fanboys of ambient music. This nomenclature, here continued from previous albums, explains this album’s title.

While it does not achieve the brilliance of Tired Sounds, this new album demonstrates that McBride and Wiltzie are continuing to perfect their craft as they explore the inner depths of sound spaces. And Their Refinement of the Decline is an impressive release and well worth the acquisition. Stars of the Lid – accompanied by a string section and a 16mm film projectionist – will be playing at The Music Gallery in Toronto on April 28. Christopher Willits and Ken Reaume will also perform.

MP3: Stars of the Lid - The Daughters of Quiet Minds

another bullshit night in suck city

2008-03-12T00:01:00.003-04:00

Justice Yeldham @ Casbah Lounge

2008-02-27T00:01:00.004-05:00

Australian performer Lucas Abela might offend many before his music properly introduces itself. The sight of a human face contorted by a transparent sheet of glass is enough of a grade-school-shenanigan turn-off that a listener must be sufficiently disciplined to endure the performance. The noises which are produced by Abela's instrument of choice for his Justice Yeldham project are indeed varied and sufficiently detailed that repeated listens are quite engaging.

Simultaneously, however, one cannot deny the immediacy of the performance, as Justice Yeldham is a highly visceral and surprising display for the uninitiated. As demonstrated in the video above, quite a few members of the audience were caught off guard by the show. Indeed, an interesting audience dynamic was on display at the Casbah, as on the main stage next door Broken Social Scene member Jason Collette was entertaining a large crowd of university-themed indie music fans. Those who found themselves witness to the destruction of Abela's instrument were necessarily shocked out of their faux-vintage Sevens.

Steve Mazza - Future Tense, transit gallery

2008-02-20T12:01:00.001-05:00

March 4 to March 30, 2008

Exploding Star Orchestra - We Are All From Somewhere Else

2007-10-10T00:01:00.001-04:00

Exploding Star Orchestra
We Are All From Somewhere Else
[Thrill Jockey, 2007]

I was quite thrilled – and indeed a little surprised – by the appearance of cornetist Rob Mazurek’s new outfit Exploding Star Orchestra at Pepper Jack’s Café (now, with the demise of The Underground, Hamilton’s best music venue). Mazurek, a long-time player in the influential Chicago scene, has surrounded himself with an all-star cast of players including Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, and the seemingly omnipresent John McEntire. After numerous live performances throughout 2005-6, the band retreated to McEntire’s studio for recordings which resulted in this year’s release of We Are All From Somewhere Else on the venerable Thrill Jockey imprint.

Unlike Mazurek’s previous outfits such as Chicago Underground Duo, Exploding Star Orchestra is more rooted in trad jazz. “Sting Ray and the Beginning of Time”, the opening suite of the album, would hardly sound out of place within Charlie Mingus’s output of the late ‘50s to the mid-‘60s. The first part of the suite invokes a highly propulsive energy, as McEntire’s rock-solid marimba is flanked by two drummers playing complex polyrhythmic patterns while the wind instruments stage tastefully improvised solos over several shifts in tempo and mood.

One should not expect tradition to overbear Mazurek’s orchestrations, as throughout his career he has been known more for his avant-garde analog and digital manipulations than for his bop and big band references. Furthermore, the digital manipulations of Mazurek’s processed and layered of sounds – notably the use of processed sounds of electric eels in the album’s opening suite – betrays the affections of jazz purists. As such, the album’s concluding suite "Cosmic Tones for Sleep Walking Lovers" owes more to Steve Reich and Sun Ra’s more adventurous excursions than to the swing era. That being said, the third part of the suite has quite a swing to it, and leads nicely to a downtempo, breathy, and “floating” conclusion that leaves the listener pondering whichever infinitudes are of intrigue.

As always, the integrity of jazz is maintained in the manner of Janus: an eye to the past balanced by an eye to the future. While not a groundbreaking release by any means, We Are All From Somewhere Else provides a thoroughly enjoyable listen.

MP3: Exploding Star Orchestra - Sting Ray and the Beginning of Time, part 1

slightly open letter to John Baird, Canada's apparent Minister to the Environment

2007-09-19T12:01:00.001-04:00

Hey kids! Here's a fun activity! Click the photograph below to send your thoughts to John Baird, who is supposed to be Minister of the Environment. Of course, there are several meanings to the word "minister":

min·is·ter /ˈmɪnəstər/ Pronunciation[min-uh-ster]
–noun
1. a person authorized to conduct religious worship; member of the clergy; pastor.
2. a person authorized to administer sacraments, as at Mass.
3. a person appointed by or under the authority of a sovereign or head of a government to some high office of state, esp. to that of head of an administrative department: the minister of finance.
4. a diplomatic representative accredited by one government to another and ranking next below an ambassador. Compare envoy1 (def. 1).
5. a person acting as the agent or instrument of another.
–verb (used with object)
6. to administer or apply: to minister the last rites.
7. Archaic. to furnish; supply.
–verb (used without object)
8. to perform the functions of a religious minister.
9. to give service, care, or aid; attend, as to wants or necessities.: to minister to the needs of the hungry.
10. to contribute, as to comfort or happiness.

—Synonyms: answer, tend, oblige.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.

Of course none of these definitions -- with the possible exception of a loose interpretation of numbers 3. and 6. -- apply to John Baird in relation to the environment.

bairdj@parl.gc.ca>

Honourable John Baird
Minister of the Environment

Dear Minister Baird,

Despite your continued denial of the legal realities behind Canada's participation in the Kyoto protocol, the Canadian public will see that our legal obligations be met. Either this process involves your Conservative government, or your party will be held accountable at the next election.

At some point in the near future the Conservative party will begin to understand what many leading economists have said for years: the environment is the economy. Please come to the realization that short-term capital gains will be irrevocably lost as the expenses associated with climate change and environmental degradation mount to precipitous levels. For the sake of your own future accountability, start listening to what climate scientists such as James E. Hansen and economists such as Sir Nicholas Sterne are saying.

Mr. Baird, if you do nothing to address this problem in the short term, the legacy of your term as Environment Minister will consist solely of a tax file recording the income you received from your brief tenure. Your name will be forgotten along with that of every other martyr to the introversions of blind business interests. I am appealing now to your vanity: do you not wish to be thought of more highly than as a smiling business lackey who has repeatedly proved inept at and ignorant to the understanding of the science associated with the environment.

I am writing to provide you with my comments on your department's recently published "Climate Change Plan for the Purposes of the Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act 2007".

I must remind you of your obligation to obey the laws of Canada. The Kyoto Protocol Implementation Act requires you to produce a plan to honour Canada's obligations under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions to an average of 6% below the 1990 emission levels between 2008 and 2012.

Although the "Climate Change Plan" lists numerous small steps to curb the growth in Canada's emissions, your plan foresees Canada missing the 2008-2012 Kyoto target by a wide margin, and in fact not reaching the target level until sometime after 2020. Under your approach, regulations on heavy industry - the source of almost half of Canada's greenhouse gas pollution - will not come into effect until 2010, and even then they fail to set a binding cap on industrial emissions.

Minister, you have promised to make your "best efforts" toward Kyoto. No one could read your plan and call this the best that Canada can do. Your plan fails the test that the law sets out, which is to honour Canada's Kyoto commitment.

I realize this is a difficult and demanding task, but it is the law, and it is your responsibility to uphold the law. The climate crisis is too grave to allow any more time to be wasted. We need you to take real action now.

Sincerely,

Quintin Hewlett

Spectrum @ Virgin Festival

2007-09-08T00:01:00.001-04:00

While most of the Virgin festival was mediocre at best (with the exception of a fine showing by Bjork), what I found to be the biggest letdown was a rare Canadian performance by Spectrum. One-time Spacemen 3 member Sonic Boom is an indisputable treasure of the 80s and 90s rock scene.

It seems, however, that a "contract dispute" caused a delay in the performance by over half an hour, and left several members of Spectrum absent from the stage. After 15 minutes of decent, if not wholly remarkable, spoken-word soundscapes, the set was terminated.

all photographs captured with an Olympus point-and-shoot digital

kerosene daydream

2007-07-25T12:01:00.001-04:00

MP3: Kerosene Daydream @ PJC, 24.7.07

the sweet(corn) little lie, part one: oil

2007-06-18T00:01:00.002-04:00

MP3: The Last Poets - White Man's Got A God Complex

Ever since September of 2001, the North American mediasphere has been continually repeating a mantra about reducing our collective dependence on oil imported from the Middle East. There are a variety of reasons for this desire. First and foremost, there is a security concern regarding Persian Gulf oil. Due to a complex web of colonialism, resource exploitation, and a
religious/cultural reaction to modernity, the Middle East is a violent and dangerous place to do business. Furthermore, there is the issue of sustainability. Logic dictates three courses of action: either North Americans get used to consuming about 70% of the oil that they currently enjoy using, or instead find new local sources of combustible fuel. The third option is that which the Bush White House refers to as apocalyptic, namely the termination of the American way of life.

The first option is perhaps more logically sound. By investing hundreds of billions of dollars into mass transportation infrastructure and currently-available high-efficiency technologies, per capita oil consumption will decrease. Further reductions in consumption can be realized by regulatory changes made possible by effective governance, such as a mandatory improvement of vehicular gas mileage (as a better first step, the production of non-hybrid consumer vehicles could be banned) and the termination of taxation subsidies to unsustainable residential development (suburbia, urban sprawl). Basically, the age of the single-occupant, low-efficiency vehicle must end. Traffic sprawl leading to road rage and long commutes spent away from families, as well as the fact that automobiles amount to about 30% of carbon emissions leading to climate change, should signal to most logical people that this most inefficient and unsustainable use of oil is the result of myopic and short-sighted planning and development rather than “the way things just are”.

The current generation of technology is perfectly adequate to handle this challenge. Any politician who delays current legislative action to promote a more sustainable energy infrastructure, and instead promotes the research and development of future clean-technologies over the application of current clean-technologies, is being entirely disingenuous to their electorate. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that such politicians are spineless bastards who are in the back pocket of corporate interests and can't see the future beyond their own pointless careers.

Let us turn to the second method of reducing North American dependency on Middle Eastern oil. To this end, a little history of the business of oil is required. When Americans first began to utilize oil, America itself was the gold-standard for oil production in the world. No other nation on Earth had either the oil resources or the technological infrastructure to realize the amount of oil which America brought to world markets. The U.S. became exceptionally rich, as the cheapest oil on the planet fuelled most of the economic progress of the 20th century.

Then came 1970. Although the debate certainly did not happen in the 1970s, at this point America came to understand the reality of peak oil by experiencing an energy crisis. American oil production has been in drastic decline ever since, with only the discovery of a few small oilfields to offset the monumental loss in production capacity in the existing ones.

As a quick primer, peak oil refers to oil production models. Unlike other natural resources such as metals or timber, substances, such as oil, which are confined under high pressure under the Earth’s crust typically follow a bell curve of resource extraction: after an initial high investment, oil flows ever more cheaply until production peaks. At the point of peaking, oil production is at its highest and oil prices (under the whims of market capitalism) are at their lowest. However, the remaining half of the oil reserves that remain underground require an increasing amount of energy to extract, which results in an irreversible and exponential increase in cost. There comes a point before the depletion of oil reserves where it takes more energy to extract the oil than you actually get from burning it. Perhaps this last fact explains why oil companies are on sound footing when they claim that we will never run out of oil.

Of course, as anyone who lived through the 1970s can attest, along with high costs come resource scarcity and social unrest. North America witnessed gas stations which closed due to the unavailability of oil, a major spike in the price of domestic goods, and the first major economic recession since the end of the Second World War. (On a progressive tangent, the 1970s also saw the rise of higher-efficiency vehicles and the environmental movement.) Suddenly the Middle East, which contained the world’s only other large source of cheaply-recoverable oil, entered into American consciousness. For the sake of simplicity, let us ignore the geopolical problems, and the resultant rise in terrorism, which have plagued the Middle East since the late 1970s. Focussing on what North Americans actually care about, oil prices fell to “normal” levels over the 1980s and 90s, bottoming out around $12 per barrel just before 2000.

Fast forward to 2007. The Middle East is increasingly shrouded in flames and misery, gas prices are the highest they have ever been, and America is in the fourth year of its military occupation of Iraq. While we will have to wait about a decade or so to state conclusively, many experts have calculated that global oil production will peak sometime between 2002 and 2010; the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, for example, believes that the peak happened in 2004. And yet, it seems that ex-President Bush Sr’s 1992 prognostication that “the American way of life is non-negotiable” has come to pass. Vehicular fuel-efficiency standards have bottomed out, suburban sprawl continues unabated, and the energy-dependent North American lifestyle is increasingly under attack from all corners, including Europe, while it is simultaneously increasing its energy footprint. Most North Americans are blissfully living their lives as though there are no limits to resource consumption, and that there should be no plan for our future other than “business as usual”.

Apparently, North Americans will not alter their oil-dependent lifestyles; the freedom to drive 300 kms back and forth from work everyday supercedes any rational distribution of what is an increasingly scarce resource. So where is North America looking for its oil if not from the Persian Gulf? It should come as no surprise that the Alberta oilsands figure most prominently in the discussion. These oil deposits, discovered many decades ago, are only now coming into use. To answer the question as to why Canada was not the oil powerhouse of the 20th century that it will be for the 21st, we must understand the nature of this resource. To be brief, the oilsands require a certain oil price to be reached before they can economically be brought to market. When America invaded Iraq in 2003 and oil jumped to $35-40 dollars per barrel, oil prices reached the point at which development in the oilsands was economically feasible.

With prices currently between $60-70 per barrel, North American oil companies are making hundreds of billions of dollars from the 175 billion barrels of oil available in the oilsands. As prices climb towards $100 per barrel, suddenly another 150 billion barrels are “economically recoverable”. As the price of oil continues to increase, the majority of Alberta’s 2.5 trillion barrels of hydrocarbon deposits will come to market. All of a sudden, America will have the world's largest forseeable energy reserve within reach of an easily defendable pipepline.

This reality seems to provide a degree of logic to American foreign policy: destabilizing oil-producing regions increases the price of oil, which allows the oil in Alberta’s oilsands to suddenly be “economically recoverable”. To this end, it is my fear that for the sake of economic development Canada will increasingly ignore certain geopolitical realities as America continues the hostile practise of oil market inflation. In fact, in regards to the 21st century’s most important energy resource, the oilsands have the potential to allow the United States to finally realize its latent philosophical dream of manifest destiny, as Canadian resources become the principle concern in maintaining the American way of life.

fuck it. photographs.

2007-06-06T00:01:00.002-04:00

sometimes words are fickle poneys lost in wide fields, with almost two months of frantic pursuit providing little but nostalgia and inclination. in such times, my forehead is likely to be bruised red by frustration and anxiety about a degree of impotence realized through worry. with small trickles of blood clouding my vision, it can be dificult to view the world properly. i stop trusting my capacity for judgement (or more appropriately, the legitimacy of my capacity for judgment), and i consequently allow technological mediation.

this last statement is only true if we consider language (words) to be an ancient technology. if such is the case, then i might need to rediscover fire in order to progress beyond painting on cave walls. oh well...

fuck it. photographs.

Nora Hutchinson, 2005

Water Only, 2006

Indeterminacy, 2004

lonely_fixed, 2005

inside is outside, 2005

under the weight of judgement, 2004

in case there's extra, 2006

untitled but female, 2005

untitled, 2004

butterfly wings can change the Earth's
climate, 2004

butterfly wings can change the Earth's climate
(easily understood remix), 2004

[note: click image for larger resolution version]

forward to the future

2007-04-24T12:01:00.002-04:00

One day soon, computer AIs are going to datamine things like email, and discover interesting patterns of "structural" anxieties manifesting through email forwards.

I received the first copy of this email in December of 2000, shortly after the first Bush election. I then received a whole bunch of emails with slight variations on this text shortly after the 2004 election. Suddenly, in early 2007, this forward returns to my Inbox.

you can tell that this text is a response to an election by the date given for "Come-Uppance Day", which is November 2. The presidential elections are always in the first week of November, and the 2004 election was nov. 2. Weirdly enough, this latest round of circulation doesn't follow any American election, save last november's midterms which saw the Democrats take back the House and Senate -- a move slightly antithetical to this email's call for "Revocation".

The attribution of this letter to John Cleese is what I find most interesting. This little addition opens the door to all kinds of theories. The reader is granted an authoritarian vindication for the sense of enjoyment they gain by reading the email, thanks to a more credible satirist. A desire for Empire, represented not only by the British history invoked in the email, but also by the legal framework and interpellative process by which the forward is structured (the reader is interpellated as an Imperial subject), suggests an unconscious and reflexive application of guilt on the part of Americans who are against Bush's policies, and yet do no further political action than send dispirited emails to each other at work. Furthermore, by invoking Cleese, a "friendly" subversive (Cleese was the most conservative member of Monty Python), the email is an impotently nostalgic return to the radical culture of the sixties -- a culture which was instrumental in realizing the most important anti-war measures of the late twentieth century.

That last point begs reflection: can a degree of political agency be realized by the citizenry? The most America seems to be able to do is send email and get its wishes vetoed by the President.

Fossils + Boughner @ Loose Cannon

2007-03-28T12:01:00.003-04:00

Wednesday, March 28 was supposed to be one of the landmark nights for the Hamilton noise scene. Local acts were to be joined by genre stalwarts Prurient and Burning Star Core. Thanks to the whims of the border agencies which kept the headliners from entering Canada (obscenity laws!!!), only the local acts were able to perform. Despite the logistical chaos of a wholly improvised show, the evening's performance proved solid enough. Fossils (David Payne, Scott Johnson, and Jeremy Buchan) & Matthew Boughner were able to invoke a variety of harsh soundscapes throughout their short but inspired set.

Sadly, my attempt to preserve an aural record of the evening was foiled by the incapacity of my $2 microphone to not be overdriven simply by the volume of the performance. The MP3 file below requires explanation, as the recording process did indeed alter the sound. First off, I was using a Creative Zen, which records and compresses data to MP3 in real time. To dampen the sound and keep the crappy vocal mic from distorting, I placed the recorder inside a cloth bag, which I then covered with my jacket and some random pieces of clothing that I found on the floor. Furthermore, I used my arm to cover this whole mound of crap for the duration of the recording. Despite my hand and at least five centimetres of cloth in the way, the volume level produced during the performance was enough to overdrive my microphone to the point of distortion. Since I was actually at the show, this new "filter" on the sound is an interesting addition to what was heard that night, and serves as a nice reminder of the aesthetic divergence of performance and the process of archiving. For those of you who were not there, consider this audio file to be tangental to the live performance, and in no way indicative of how the musicians wanted themselves to be heard.

You have been warned / invited to listen.

MP3: - Fossils, live @ Loose Cannon (compressed and contained through a voice recorder direct to MP3)

Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity

2007-03-17T12:01:00.003-04:00

Deerhoof
Friend Opportunity
[Kill Rock Stars, 2007]

‘The Perfect Me’ opens the record at a riotous pace, and listeners will quickly understand that the Deerhoof of 2007 is a more precise animal than evidenced by the noisier songs of their early output. This time the San Francisco trio wants to rock in a slightly more conventional manner. Of course, for this arty band convention is a slippery concept. Think of how David Bowie returned to the fold by releasing his famed Berlin records after Station to Station and you might get a sense of how Deerhoof views convention. Some of the band's ideas are a bit retro: the slinky riff at the heart of ‘Believe E.S.P.’ comes straight from 1973, vintage Orange tone intact. Others are a little more inspired by modern electronic cacophony.

Throughout the album, drummer Greg Saunier provides a loose, busy, and muscular rhythmic foundation that sounds like how drums were played before metal made precision famous. The chorus of ‘Matchbox Seeks Maniac’ would not have sounded too out of place in one of Pete Townsend’s operas. Of course, the band’s fractured, video-game-like compositional aesthetic keeps things far more interesting than simple rock nostalgia suggests. And Satomi Matsuzaki’s twee vocal performance of fairytale-epic lyrics is as childishly saccharine as ever. All this cacophony might be expected by longtime fans, but it is this album’s melodic cohesion that ranks Friend Opportunity among the best of this prolific band’s career.

MP3: Deerhoof - The Perfect Me

Boris with Michio Kurihara - Rainbow

2007-03-17T12:01:00.002-04:00

Rainbow
Boris with Michio Kurihara
[Inoxia, 2007]

Longtime Boris fans have come to expect a different approach to hard rock composition with each new release. Originally famous because of their extended, fuzzed-out drone records and extended Sabbath odes, the band has also been known to engage in several detours into more traditional songwriting. For their new album, Boris have teamed with current Ghost player Michio Kurihara, who is one of Japan’s more fiery guitarists. Naturally, there are solos aplenty scattered throughout this album’s nine tracks. The album opens with the slow burner “Rafflesia” before moving to the late-60s lounge-inspired “Rainbow”. If you are into the band's more psychedelic side, you might want to focus your attention on the strong middle and end sections of this release. The lengthy feedback-and-tom interplay of "Fuzzy Reactor", for example, will extend many a horizon.

Many of the songs on this album sound entirely in line with the emo-cum-shoegaze compositions found on 2006's Pink. This tendency is perhaps best exemplified by “Starship Narrator”, the third track on the album, which is notable for Kurihara’s tasteful harmonic phrases. While in many respects Rainbow is the most accessible release in the extended Boris discography, some might prefer the more restrained chaos of this record to the epic bombast which brought the group to the attention of heavy music fans around the world.

MP3: Boris with Michio Kurihara - Starship Narrator

Hamilton Harlots fundraiser

2007-03-08T12:01:00.001-05:00

an open letter to Stockwell Day and the Conservative Party of Canada

2007-02-12T12:01:00.002-05:00

Hon. Stockwell Day,

The other day, I somewhat accidentally managed to come across your blog, and while I am supportive of the need to express your feelings with your constituents, I do wish to challenge some of your assertions.

First of all, let me deal with this procedural detail: I am aware that your personal site in no way represents either the Canadian government, or even indeed your own party. I am also aware that this email address represents an official government of Canada member, and therefore you are not legally required to address non-governmental issues. At the same time however, I cannot separate the opinions expressed on this website as more or less "Official", as they will inform your decisions regarding governmental matters.

I hope it is no surprise that the environment is suddenly a Political Issue (sorry for the capital letters, but since you espouse the National Media...) I have to mention the issue that's perhaps most important for 2007 is Climate Change.

Now just to make the reference, as your writings on the subject are two months old, I would like to quote the following:

"Maybe all my constituents living high up on the West Bench, or Lakeview Heights , or the hills of Logan Lake will soon be sitting on lakeside property as one of the many benefits of global warming.

All I know is last weekend when I got home from Ottawa there was more snow in my driveway than we usually get in a year.

And I was begging for Big Al's Glacial Melt when the mercury hit -24°. Do not despair, my fellow dwellers of the Okanagan and Nicola Valleys ."

I must take your expertise in the matter of Climate Change as proof of your well-read and thoroughly scientific examination of the facts at hand.

Can I take these sets of statements as proof that you do not consider Climate Change to be an important issue? After all, the climate changes on a daily basis, especially in reference to one individual person who might only have the vantage point of one location at a specific point in time. One day in June it's warm, and then come December one looks around and experiences colder weather, at least here in southern Canada.

And so, in late November you came home to witness the accumulation of "more snow in my driveway than we usually get in a year". Might I suggest that having "more snow" is consistent with the fact that as the climate warms and the glaciers melt, more water circulates around the planet as precipitation, which in the winter months in Canada falls as snow. Of course, having more precipitation in some areas means that other areas will experience the opposite. Somewhat tangentially, I wish to mention that my grandfather sold the wheat farm he had been running since the 1940s in Stavely, Alberta after nearly ten years of droughts in the 1990s.

Can I here mention that while it was cold out west in December, southern Ontario did not receive any winter until February. While some record low temperatures were set in B.C., we in southern Ontario enjoyed record highs, including one January day which was nearly 15 degrees. See how the Climate Changes as you include other perspectives?

Frankly, I do not wish to dwell on the science or consequences of Climate Change, as this area has been well-covered in the past year by the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, published by the British government, or the preliminaries of the upcoming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Just in case you missed them, they can be read online:

It is not my intention to provoke any name-calling, buck-passing, or any other such immature approaches to democracy. Frankly, I'll lay my cards down on the table and state that I do not believe that the Conservative party cares one iota for the well-being of the planet. Your party (although, not your party alone) represents corporate and industrial interests, which by their very nature (both legally and ideologically) place their own economic interests above any other interest, including the welfare of the public.

The problem with this approach is that it is our very capacity for industry and corporate exploitation that is at issue here. We abuse the Earth in the name of profit. Furthermore, adherence to the profit motive is not a rational decision when viewed in the context of unequal distribution of economic resources. The only way that anyone can say that "we have to keep industry going at its current pace" and speak from an ethical foundation is if this inequality is addressed. The economics, thanks to people like Sir Nicholas Stern, is clear on this issue. In sixty years, it is not likely that the average person will be able to afford the consequences of climate change; the wealthy will be immune to change in real terms, while the poor face an extinction-level event. In a world in which 2% of the human population controls 50% of the wealth, you cannot talk about the morality of contemporary business practices as the solution to Climate Change.

All that climate change is doing is giving the issue of inequality a temporal dimension: we can act now while we have the choice to either act or not, or we can be forced into change as our climate becomes increasingly inhospitable to our lifestyle. I personally will endorse leaders that espouse leadership by making the energy policy choices necessary for the benefit of all humanity, not simply the business elite. Leaders should be able to see the horizons of history and society, and act according to the interests of human civilization.

From the contents of your own website, as well as the numerous statements that have been made by members of the Conservative government, I cannot in all honesty state that we as a nation are enjoying Enlightened Leadership (see: another Big Idea!).

As a personal message to you Mr. Day, might I appeal to your Christian instincts? Due to the limitations of human nature, are we not intended to be stewards of this Earth and not masters?

2006: The Year of “You”

2007-01-22T00:01:00.001-05:00

In the middle of December 2006, Time Magazine released its annual Person of the Year issue and stirred up a small media frenzy by proclaiming this year’s winner to be the somewhat eponymous “you”. The idea behind this proclamation is the supposed influence of the accumulated efforts of the “little people” against the might of concentrated power. Thanks, Time, for yet another sentimental ode to the “little people”. This media-constructed humunculus – “you” – has, according to this particular arm of the Time-Warner media empire, taken power away from the corporate and media elite by means of YouTube and Wikipedia, open-source software and user-produced media, and Web 2.0 and cellphone cameras. What a magical and revolutionary time in which we live, when technology is available to liberate the individual.

Well, please forgive this “little person” writer from Hamilton for questioning the wisdom of the Time-Warner empire trumpeting the technological utopia which awaits, but Pardon My Lunch Bucket.

Ok, just so the cards are on the table here: one of the largest media conglomerates in the world is telling us that through the collective will of our user-produced efforts, the power dynamic is switching from elite control to mass, democratic control of the mediasphere. Finally, after years of neglect by the media hierarchy, suddenly the voices of the mass citizen are being heard. The will of the people is now more accurately realized. Democracy 2.0, if you like. But of course, we won’t know the full story of this revolution unless money is exchanged so that a certain media conglomeration will release to the masses this knowledge in the form of a paid-subscription magazine. Which sounds suspiciously like that old democracy that we already have, and which for the vast majority of the working population amounts to Democracy 0.7 (beta).

So what? you might ask, they’re just trying to sell magazines. And here we come to the point. Time-Warner sells roughly 5 million monthly copies of Time Magazine in North America. It is not unreasonable to assume that an end-of-year special issue sold around the holiday season has the potential to double those sales figures. All told, production of this magazine amounts to roughly 200,000 tonnes of waste and consumes roughly 1,000,000 trees per year. You might assume in an era of blue-box programs that Time-Warner could use recycled paper to print, instead of cutting down virgin forests. In 1994, they did indeed move to a 10% recycled-paper mandate, but changed that stance less than a year later.

To make the issue even more obsessive, I am not so sure that the metallic foil used to create the mirror on the cover of the 2006 “You” issue of Time Magazine is the most recyclable thing. I would guess quite the opposite in fact, and thus the whole issue would end up in the trash in the face of the economic reality of recycling, namely who sorts the shit. Furthermore, we can talk about the environmental impact of the energy spent producing and distributing the magazine. Long story made brief, by purchasing this issue, “you” are indeed making waves in the world. To summarize: this corporation cuts down forests and contributes to climate change to sell us a product describing how we the “little people” are affecting positive change in the world.

2006 was for many the year of environmental awareness. After the surge in environmental “events” over the past three or four years, the media could no longer ignore the science of climate change. Leaders of the world’s nations are now almost universal in their call to address the issue. In the wake of a poll suggesting that 70% of Canadians think the environment to be one of the most important issues for the country, the notoriously anti-green Conservative government has done an about-face and reinstituted the Liberal government’s previous environmental policies that it had scrapped the year before (read: no new money, in real terms).

In light of the urgency of the matter (as of January 21, 2007, I would like to welcome most people who live in southern Ontario to the beginning of only our second week of “proper” winter temperatures) I think that Time Magazine’s rather empty gesture can be easily co-opted into something of greater significance. This indeed is the time in which “you” is a needed concept in relation to societal change, but not in the superficial manner suggested by Time .

Conceptually speaking, Time’s notion of the power and influence of “you” is misguided at best, and self-serving and delusional at worst. If Time Magazine were serious about its conception of this all-important “you”, then it would have printed a magazine containing user-produced content of the type it is glamourizing. A whole issue created by the readers. Or it might have put a different image on its cover, such as what I have here produced in five seconds.

An even more interesting discussion would be about the true power of this “you” in relation to social change. Along the lines of, say, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine a few years ago. Remember that little “you” event, when millions of Ukrainians participated in daily protests and general strikes until the leaders who stole power gave up control of the government to properly elected officials?

Such efforts might prove useful in dealing with the fact that 70% of the American population wants the Iraq war to end at the same time that the White House is requesting the commitment of additional troops. Follow that example of “you” from eastern Europe: stop going to work, stop going to school, stop going to the mall, stop everything until the war stops. Then when the war stops, put an “American” spin on the event by going back to work and fighting for health-care. Surely, Time could mobilize its wide readership to act for change by talking about this revolutionary “you” power in a more legitimate sense than they have. But then again, in the process Time-Warner would probably lose a great deal of ad revenue, among other things.

And yet the Time article was not wholly wrong. The technologies to which it refers in judging the importance of “you” are indeed progressive technologies. But the important thing about YouTube is not that more and more people are making videos about politics using Lego parts. It’s that people are realizing that they would rather spend hours and hours making said Lego masterpieces than sit and watch network television or otherwise participate in the traditional mediasphere.

I am well aware as to the reasons why a legitimate debate concerning the true impact of “you” on human civilization and the Earth as a whole will not happen in a publication such as Time Magazine. That discussion might begin by investigating the degree to which journalism has fallen from its once important function as arbiter for the public good.

Don’t listen to the media elites as to why this change occurred toward the end of the last century; they’ll tell you that they are simply providing that which “you” are demanding. After all, it was “you” that brought to television American Idol and to the internet the execution of Saddam Hussein. So it will be “you” that programs the next revolution: a people with revolutionary potential are reduced to staring into the cover of a magazine in a supermarket, trying to find themselves.

FWCI no more...

2007-01-10T00:01:00.001-05:00

Normally I don't put too many personal details on this site, but today I found out from Paul Schaffer that my old high school has closed. It was a great school, and I credit several of the faculty there for setting me in a decent direction in those rather turbulent times of my youth.

Apparently this is not new information, but the fact that I learned nothing of this event until now reflects the fact that everybody I know from Thunder Bay has long since left that town. There is always a sense of sadness in a small town as it ages...

no snow = me cry now

2007-01-04T12:01:00.000-05:00

It's January 4, and I am outside wearing just a t-shirt and pants. As I was biking home from work today, I passed several groups of kids who were outside playing. Not a single one of them was wearing a jacket. In Hamilton, it's currently 8.4 degrees Celsius, and from the picture you can see quite obviously that there is no snow on the ground. Statistically average temperatures for our region tend to hover around -4.5 degrees Celsius. This time last year, January was exceptionally warm and was followed by a cold February. When I was a child (we're talking the 1980s, so not really that long ago), winter was a season lasting many months, usually from early November through to late March. From the look of things currently, it seems as though southern Ontario will once again experience a drastically shortened winter season, perhaps only a little more than one month.

For those of you outside North America, now is traditionally the time in which the whole of Canada is stuck in a deep-freeze. The winter is a major component of our national cultures and identity. Furthermore, the season is a source of revenue for some and an ecological necessity for others. I myself am a big fan of snow, and its rather conspicuous absence so far this year suggests to me something exceptionally alarming. More alarming however is the fact that other than a major breakup of ice in the Canadian arctic, the weather is not really being discussed in the general media.

There was a bit of an awareness campaign that was sparked by the release of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change by the British government. Frankly, this little bit of bedtime reading should be mandatory in schools and boardrooms.

Oh yeah, that same British government is expecting 2007 to be the hottest year in recorded history. So far, we're off to a tragic start.

Happy Holidays

2007-01-03T12:01:00.002-05:00

From all of us from who knows where, Happy Holidays!

Junior Boys at Pepperjack Café

2006-12-18T12:01:00.002-05:00

Hamilton has proven itself quite capable of producing a diverse array of musical performers. Many local acts have come to define their respective genres. And yet the most popular -- pop music, itself -- is the one area in which Hamilton’s music scene remains relatively obscure. The city has come to be known for its noise, art-rock, hardcore, drone, indie, and various other forms of good independent music. But a Top-40 hit has been largely elusive for the Steel’s musicians.

Enter the Junior Boys, who produce synth-heavy pop with sentimental lyrics and a vocal presence that has more than a passing nod-and-a-wink to Faith-era George Michael. If it weren’t for the digital complexities in their production, you might assume their music to be a post-New Wave revivalist act. In that difference, however, can be found the true pleasure of their music. Like the decade’s other great electronic music producers, Junior Boys realize that a subtle tempo shift, a beat seemingly misplaced, or a glitch made rhythmic are key to bringing out a sense of sensuality in machine-based music.

The rapid success of 2004's Last Exit was precipitated largely thanks to the online music scene, as critics and bloggers devoured some of the freshest beat production of that year’s pop music revival. It was no surprise that Junior Boys embarked on extensive overseas touring for the year following the first full-length.

Despite the band’s hipster-name-drop status, recognition remains somewhat elusive in this country. Perhaps it is mainstream Canada’s predilection for mind-numbing, recycled bar rock and painful, faux-sexuality teen-pop that’s keeping Junior Boys off the radio.

Junior Boys co-founder and principal sonic architect Jeremy Greenspan reflects on the genesis of this year’s critically-lauded album So This Is Goodbye. “A lot of the new album deals with travel, and the feelings of disorientation, etc, that go along with that. I guess some of that has to do with all of the travelling that we did on the first record. Touring has obviously become a big part of our lives and all of those experiences are bound to be reflected in the new music that we've been making.”

This last statement brings to mind how pop music responds to the world which consumes it. Are creative people destined to a sense of responsibility to society? More importantly, does it even matter to have a “meaning” behind pop music other than the fact that a given group of people like it for a given amount of time?

“Pop music is ultimately an incredibly malleable art form,” Greenspan muses. “The thing that is best about making pop music is that there are no rules. All that is important is that it moves people, in some way, and that people want to listen to it over and over, and beyond that a musician is free to experiment as much as possible. That can be extremely liberating.”

Typical for musicians who compose in a studio setting, the Junior Boys live experience has evolved significantly since the first tour. “I think we've become much more comfortable as a live unit. We take playing live far more seriously than we used to, even though we still think of ourselves as a sorta "studio band". It is far more interesting for us now that we have added a third member (Dave Foster on drums) to our live lineup. Dave adds a lot to the shows.” The addition of a live drummer should prove particularly invigorating to the rather introspective direction that the new music has taken.

Pepperjack Café, the venue which is hosting the band’s performance on December 26, is no stranger to audiences who seek danceable performers. Even with a packed room, there is space to move if one is so inspired. Greenspan is candid about his appreciation of the local scene: “The last time we played in Hamilton, we had a great time. It was the first show that we did with our new lineup and we were pretty nervous. Luckily the show was a big success, and hopefully the next show will go just as well.” Rising scene-stealer Gary Buttrum will be on-hand with one of the better DJ mixes being produced these days, providing yet another reason to attend early and leave well into the night.

MP3: Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye

Joanna Newsom - Ys

2006-12-14T12:01:00.005-05:00

Joanna Newsom
Ys
[Drag City, 2006]

The success of Joanna Newsom’s 2004 album The Milk-Eyed Mender tore the pixie-voiced harpist from the warm yet fiercely overprotective clutches of “outsider music” into the fickle puritanism of that year’s folk-revisionist indie mainstream. If that sentence seems a wordy introduction, feel free to avoid Newsom’s new release. Ys is a baroque, lyrically-dense album which revels in the self-placating joy of wordsmithing.

Over the course of five long tracks, lushly orchestrated by Van Dyke Parks and mixed by Jim O’Rourke, she examines many of the triumphs and platitudes which come to determine human relationships. On “Monkey & Bear”, for example, the mutually-dependent titular couple escape from a farm only to learn about the harsh realities of life without a food hand-out. They find success as entertainers as one of them manipulates the other; the latter realizes the narcism inherent in this acceptance, and ultimately dissolves the relationship.

It is quite interesting that fans of instrumental music have taken an interest in Newsom’s output. Her lyrical performance is indeed quite acrobatic, and much like Bjork’s is definitely an acquired taste. However, those with a sense of adventure will want to explore this satisfyingly dense album.

MP3: Joanna Newsom - Emily

Leafcutter John - The Forest and the Sea

2006-12-14T12:01:00.004-05:00

Leafcutter John
The Forest and the Sea
[Staubgold, 2006]

London-based John Burton has been producing interesting variations of traditional electronic music for several years. Not happy with the limitations of either analog or digital sound sources, under the Leafcutter John moniker Burton has released several albums featuring his uniquely introspective amalgam of groove-based and electro-acoustic music. Unlike contemporaries Four Tet or Matmos, Leafcutter John preferred abstraction to propulsive grooves, which perhaps explains his status as a peripheral collaborator to the mainstream of electronic music.

Soon into the pastoral eloquence of album-opener “Let It Begin”, subtly metallic drones begin to add a dirt-ridden subtext. Likewise, in “Maria in the Forest”, narratively-suggestive location recordings are gradually transformed into digital noise leading to an abruptly interruption by more folk-inspired musings on acoustic guitar. Propulsive rhythms issue from the inky depths of drone partway through “In the Morning”. A piano and bell cascade into digital abstraction, only to return as lullaby “Seba”. All of the tracks demonstrate an obsession with the fractal-like textures created by acoustic instruments, and Burton allows the listener enough time to breathe everything in.

The Forest and the Sea is an attempt to tell a story; this gesture is not alien to either electroacoustic or folk music. Leafcutter John has proven quite adept at sculpting with the temporal nature of sound. With this new release, he demonstrates that what is normally a cold and cerebral aesthetic can be a bodily experience as well.

MP3: Leafcutter John - Seba

check out his software, which lets you play in a sound-sculpted forrest

gay, constitutionally so

2006-12-08T12:01:00.001-05:00

Thankfully the Conservative motion to reopen the same-sex marriage debate was rejected by Parliament this week. Frankly, there is little that the government can do to restrict people from marrying each other, regardless of sexual orientation. Judges throughout the country have upheld the notion that the right to marry a loved one is constitutionally-bound. Under Canadian law, the only way to circumvent the Charter of Rights is to use the Notwithstanding clause.

There is an important legal distinction here, however. Even if the government were to invoke the clause and remove from homosexuals the right to marry, that revocation would still be an acknowledgement that homosexuals possess the legal right to marry. The government would then have to justify the reason for removing a fundamental human right from a particular group of its citizenry. Naturally, that justification falls apart when all you have are religious doctrine and talk along the lines of, "well, that's just the way it should be".

It's time to put this issue behind us. Hopefully this latest rejection of a motion supporting intolerant, old-world attitudes of man-woman perfect family bliss means that we can ask our government to take a harder look at issues which are more important for the country.

entre-acte: ending suburbia

2006-11-24T12:01:00.001-05:00

The Guardian mentions that there is a high likelihood that Britain is going to use taxation as a means to control vehicular emissions and encourage energy conservation. This week saw a monumental amount of rain fall on British Columbia, while simultaneously people in Alberta were playing golf in shorts and tees.

As a pleasantly informative digression from your individual fulfillments, why not expend a little electricity watching The End of Suburbia? While the video is sensationalistic at times, the message is well expressed and the history behind the rise of suburban life in North America is quite arresting. Peak oil and climate change are occurring more or less coincidentally, and this happenstance should prove informative to our actions over the coming decade.

there is no war in iraq

2006-11-14T12:01:00.001-05:00

I am not against the War in Iraq, because it is not happening. Shocking words perhaps, but let’s not forget that the actual War part of the War in Iraq ended on the first day of May, 2003 when Bush landed on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California. Since then, America has been executing operations “In Iraq” in an occupational capacity, as it were.

I also do not really care about the 2,838 dead American soldiers (up to November 10, as confirmed by the U.S. Department of Defense) whose ashes are being sprinkled throughout our cultural landscape. First it was with every newscast that we got used to the saying along the lines of “2,838 American soldiers killed in Iraq so far..." Since then, dramas and comedies have taken up the cause, talking about “our heroic dead”. Talk shows tell us that the war is going badly because the number of American soldiers who have been killed is on the rise. Furthermore, Democrats have been using the tragedy of “our heroic dead” as a means to gain votes and win America’s favour away from the Republican party. I don’t want to suggest that I wish soldiers who die in war their deaths, but focussing moral outrage on the tragedy of American deaths is akin to giving honour to the invasion itself.

The main reason that I disbelieve in an Iraq War is the fact that there is no way to bring the conceptual and logistical focus of the hostilities that the American occupation of Iraq to the American populace in a direct manner. Soon after 9/11, American voters needed to be convinced that their country had found itself “in a time of war”, and thus should follow their leadership without question. That the American government successfully convinced Americans that they were at war when not a single shot was fired on U.S. soil has proven to be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns since Big Oil hired a few “climatologists” to show how normal our climate is these days.

My father was born in England in 1941 and entered life knowing that his country was at war. Enemy planes flew over his head and dropped bombs throughout the southern part of the country. Schools, factories, and offices held bomb drills because they were actually being bombed. Many families had learned the extent to which war would affect their lives, and exactly why their soldiers were losing their lives to defend the country. Step forward two generations, and we witness an entirely different situation. Despite the fact that not a single Iraqi military unit ever came close to American soil, that country was demonized to the point where most Americans seemed to actually believe that it posed a very grave and immediate threat to their existence.

In fact, it turns out that the direct opposite was true. Iraqis live daily with hostile planes flying overhead, with daily bombings, with soldiers who break into their homes for random patrols, and with military prisons full of “non-combatants” who are tortured for information that they quite likely do not possess. It is they who are truly living “in a time of war”. We are not in fact hearing their stories or documenting their lives – or even counting the number of deaths that have occurred since the invasion began. Consequently, for those of us in the West the war is not really happening; there is no zero degree of immanence with warfare.

We need to legitimately talk about the fact that deaths within the Iraqi population are not being tracked. We need to talk about the studies on Iraqi casualties which have been released by various organizations which suggest that the death toll for the Iraq occupation ranges from about 75,000 to over 600,000. When the number of dead in Darfur reached 400,000 we began to talk of genocide. So what then of Iraq? Until we can begin to honour the deaths of the untold number of Iraqi dead, I do not want to hear another word about the tragedy of 3,000 dead American soldiers. Frankly, complaining about American casualties during an American occupation is akin to complaining about running out of bullets while simultaneously firing the gun.

We hear things like the U.S. infusing a half-billion dollars into Iraq’s healthcare system and we are to assume that the American government is itself generously offering its funds for reconstruction efforts. Corporations such as Bechtel (who recently announced that they will be leaving Iraq), Halliburton, Dyncorp, and Research Triangle Institute, have greatly expanded their portfolios:

✓ Running the Los Alamos National Laboratory
✓ Gas and oil field development in Russia and elsewhere
✓ Products and services for the oil industry
✓ Drug discovery and development
✓ Reaping billions from the untold suffering of the Iraqi people.

Since 2003, America has attempted to expand its economy using another country’s seeming instability as a pretext. Industry analysts have repeatedly stated that America’s economy is tied to its energy resources. Given that these resources are in decline as compared to demand, you can begin to see that future growth is not possible under the traditional economic model. An infusion of resources is required, and thus we come to the Invasion of Iraq. All of the so-called reconstruction efforts have surrounded Iraq’s oil infrastructure, which is now controlled by American corporate interests.

The recent congressional victories by the Democrats will hopefully end any Neo-Con hopes to further expand into Iran. This is a shame, really, as I personally wanted to see the Greatest Hits of the Twentieth Century, as performed by the American government in a single decade. We had covered the Gulf War and the preliminaries of Vietnam (Iraq being Cambodia to Iran’s Vietnam). With a return to the Korean war and the second Great War of human civilization, my hopes were rested on one man: George W. Bush. Sadly sir, you let me down last Tuesday. Hang your head in shame. Your Risk-like attempt to take over the world is being delayed.

I find that it is not simply my cynicism that suggests that the Democrats will in fact do little to change the situation in Iraq. Surely the John Kerry-era talk about bolstering the soldiers’ armour remains key to Democrat strategy two years later. If the Dems ably demonstrate that they support the troops more than the Republicans, then they have a chance at the Presidency and their own Thermidor. The GOP must be hoping that the occupation turns considerably against American interests. Catastrophic violence in Iraq is exactly what will allow a Republican president in 2008.

Let me be clear about one thing: if the Democrats don’t force the Bush White House to bring the soldiers home by Christmas, then they aren’t fulfilling their potential. Forget the bullshit about how staying the course in Iraq will keep the country from the horrors of sectarian violence. The line of thought that includes the notion that peace will be found in Iraq only by means of the U.S. military is exactly what led to the invasion in the first place.

Hopefully, the Democratic mantra reflects a newfound sense of conviction and determination. If they really and truly wish to present America as distinct from the unruly, arrogant philistine that it has demonstrated itself to be ever since the right-wing coup in 2000, they can begin with the following: kindly and immediately get the hell out of Iraq. Furthermore, maybe last week’s Democratic victory will transform the party from one of excuses into one of material reality. This past weekend was one of the most bloody since the occupation began; Mrs. Nancy Pilosi, the ball is in your court.

torture guardin'

2006-10-13T12:01:00.001-04:00

I recommend listening to the following while reading this article:
MP3: Meira Asher + Guy Harries, "Torture -- Bodyparts"

Ah, torture in the fall.

With all the recent talk about the United States Senate legally authorizing the use of torture for the continued execution of the War of Terror (oops, that’s a typo; there should be a colon after “War”) as well as the renewed public interest in the Maher Arar case, my thoughts have moved to a new place: are we at the end of history as we have known it so far? I do not mean to suggest that the human experience of life will stop or that the world will be uninhabitable or anything quite as apocalyptic as all of that. While all of the proceeding is true, if not likely, I am presently talking about a change in the zeitgeist and not the material conditions of human civilization. Instead, the course charting, over many centuries, the emergence of the modern individual from the bondage of despotism is itself altering in a rather dramatic fashion.

It appears as though a certain regression is emerging as the dominant philosophy of the modern subject. Insular, self-reflexive, and superstitious to the point of being totemismistic. Solutions to problems have become things that you buy, and so far the War on Terror has cost America around $400 billion, and some people are going so far as to suggest that the war in Iraq alone will cost the US economy over $2 trillion). On the point of totemism, I’ll leave the last word to the American government, which has again proven a certain arrogant disregard for the international community. On helping to pass the Detainee Interrogation Bill, which allows the White House to suspend what most people call human rights at its discretion, Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo, said: "Some want to tie the hands of our terror fighters. They want to take away the tools we use to fight terror, to handcuff us, to hamper us in our fight to protect our families." Sometimes I too think that my family will only be safe when enough people have been waterboaded into making up yet another Arabic-sounding name.

waterboarding in Antwerrp, 1556

The public sphere has been relatively clean and gore-free since the end of the Second World War. Only occasionally and in isolation have events of significant violence occurred. In the decades that followed the 1940s, however, there was not a sense that violence pervaded the dominant culture in an open manner. McCarthyism, Vietnam, the October Crisis, and other forms of localized and violent division can be seen to be more akin to the residue rather than a reanimation of prior horrors. Many of the institutions that have kept the world relatively peaceful despite occasional lapses of barbarism, such as the United Nations and the concept of human rights, came about as a direct response to the horrors that much of the world experienced in the 1930s and 40s.

However, it seems as though this generation, which has not seen the full extent of human misery except though media reconstruction, is seeking a more intimate association with violence. This trend is occurring on two levels. The first is among those who understand that the true power of the modern subject is to realize existence as they imagine and then by means of technological access drastically alter their environment. Witness not only the rise in school shootings and other acts of urban guerilla violence, but also the tactics employed in terrorist deployment including the planes that were flown into the World Trade Center (9/11 is the remix album for the aviation industry). In each case, small groups of people using readily-available consumer technology and services caused a significant amount of political and social disruption.

The second level of the modern desire for violence is an issue of representation. Torture-as-entertainment is certainly not new, however the entertainment industry moved from gladiatorial fights to horror movies at about the same pace that society moved from despotism to democracy. However when you begin to analyze the manner in which violence is being represented in contemporary media, it becomes clear that the public’s bloodlust is rising. Computerized depictions of violence, usually in microscopic biological detail, in video games, films, and television are increasingly common. More screen-time is being given to close-ups of wounds, and many acts of violence are depicted in slow-motion so that the viewer can more casually receive all of the visual information.

Torture has become a common thematic device in cinema and television these days. Many horror movies are realistically depicting the violence of torture rather than the fantastic and supernatural gore that was previously quite popular. Torture has even entered into mainstream tastes through shows like Lost and 24. The war in Iraq has itself become a remix project, as YouTube documents many attempts to turn war footage into music videos and reality-style television.

Let’s get back to the American government for a second. First and foremost is the White House’s often-noted disregard for the international community, and with the United Nations in particular. Arguably, when America usurped the UN’s authority it demonstrated to every other nation that strength can legitimize any ideological position. We are still waiting for answers as to why Israel bombed the UN observation post in Lebanon.

In relation to the DI Bill, President Bush said: "The American people need to know we're working together to win the war on terror." With all due respect given to discretion, that’s the fucking scariest statement by a human that I have ever read. The American government is allowing violence to escalate because, deep within the conditioning of many of their officials, they truly believe that America is strongest when it is applying strength to others. The American people, consciously or not, want torture to become an authorized ritual meant to release insecurities about their national/personal security.

How do I know this? Rather than examine in detail the extent to which the DI Bill undermines the foundations for civil governance that most of the world’s nations have utilized since last hacking themselves to pieces, the media has taken upon itself to focus on the case of a Republican Congressman who sent dirty messages to pages. You are supposed to feel safe now that an aggressive, manipulative predator is out of power: Fox News is both ecstatic and confused (Foley is a Republican) now that he can no longer touch the body politic with his filthy pedophile hands. Thanks to the implications of the DI Bill however, the government will indeed be touching us all, and in ways that can at best be described as Guantanimaginable.

America is, apparently, a Christian nation

And it is here where history for the modern subject ends. As of September 27, 2006, the American government can officially attach electrodes to your genitals. Mark Foley did leave his mark on government after all. A new history will emerge as necessary – in this capacity, Gabriel Range’s “fictional documentary” Death of a President, which screened at this year’s TIFF, is a significant development – but that is beside the point. Historically speaking, it is during these interregnum periods that violence has proliferated and become accepted by an increasing percentage of the population as the principle means to ensure survival. Hopefully, the upcoming elections in America will allow a more rational government to reorder its international associations in a positive direction. Only with the major countries united under international law will chaos be avoided. Truly, it is not a precipitous drop from officially-sanctioned torture to even more absolute and widespread horrors.

steal this movie

2006-10-03T12:01:00.001-04:00

A report recently issued by the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) concluded this week that movie pirates cost the American economy over $20 billion in lost taxes, jobs, and revenues. It should be noted that the IPI limited its research to data supplied by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). With this one gesture, the highly contentious issues of intellectual property copyright and consumer protections were thoroughly ignored. Instead, the public has been handed yet another industry manifesto in the guise of legitimate and productive discourse.

As a side-note, to take get a decent view of the biased nature of the IPI, here's a great video feed of a Capitol Hill briefing from September 19 concerning health care.

Watch the archived video of IPI's Sept. 19 Capitol Hill Briefing The Dangers of Undermining Patient Choice: Lessons from Europe and Canada. (depending on your system, in order to see the video you might need to copy the URL from the website that opens into Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc)

The issue of media piracy can be viewed as one of the defining examples of the problematic transition from a culture of physical media (books, records, film stock, etc) to one of digital ephemerality. No longer do I need the information contained in a film to be delivered to me using film stock, magnetic tape, or metal sandwiched between plastic. Instead, films can be delivered in a less tangible way. Many people already experience digital delivery of films and television through their cable boxes, which is a service that the MPAA and similar organizations endorse. Others happily avoid both pay-per-view and the movie theatre by downloading movie files from the internet. This last fact is where the discussion over fair use of intellectual property is most required. For the moment, I will ignore the tragicomedy surrounding the MPAA’s numerous legal suits pending against consumers who wanted to see MPAA films. Instead I want to focus more on the media distribution system itself.

Currently, there is no technological limitation to the immediate digital delivery of films, television, and music. Those among us who know where to locate such things on the net can tell you that downloaded films are often of comparable quality to a DVD. In some cases, downloads are of superior technical quality than the official release – think of high definition, which was not available until a few months ago.In the case of a few select films, marketing decisions might render a particular DVD issue less-than-optimal. North American issues are frequently censored or otherwise altered in order not to offend the more “puritanical” mores believed to exist in this continent.

Stanley Kubrick’s unfinished 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, for example, has a highly problematic North American release. The film was digitally altered so that it would receive an R rating, and as such the narrative continuity between audience and protagonist is demolished (ie: the film’s meaning changes). Now I myself am an adult with the emotional maturity to handle looking at an erect penis or a simulated act of fellatio. Apparently, so are Europeans, who were treated to a non-altered DVD issue. Thanks to the brilliant marketing decision to incorporate region-coded limitations into the DVD format, I cannot even play a legitimately purchased European DVD on my North American player. I have to point out that it is highly likely that Stanley Kubrick wanted me to see the version of the film that he actually made, and not one that is region-specific. In this spirit I feel fully confident in my rights as a consumer to download a European DVD-rip, burn it to a disc, and then show this version to students or friends. Since I feel that I am more enlightened about this issue than the marketing department at Warner Brothers, I will supercede their authority over which version I am allowed to watch. When contacted, the MPAA mentioned that each region gets the “optimal” version of the film, and that region coding is intended to curb piracy. It seems that China is at the heart of the issue, and here we come back to the IPI report.

For a film to be considered “legitimate”, it has to go through regular distribution channels, involving lawyers, middlemen, retail expenses, and mark-ups galore. Since so many people get a slice of the revenue, that pie needs to be big enough that everyone is satisfied. The IPI (by extension the MPAA) argued that piracy has cost all of these people their livelihoods (more specifically: $5.5 billion in “lost” earnings; 141,000 new jobs not(!) created; film studios losing 10% of their potential revenue). At this stage it should be noted that all these “loses” remain in the jurisdiction of potentiality. To be fair, there is a case for the loss of potential revenue, however misguidedly optimistic such a concept might initially seem. At the same time however, we cannot let considerations of possibilities consume the argument, which should be focussed on both consumer rights and intellectual property rights. I have a right as a consumer of a cultural product to a direct relation with the art involved; I will not have that right taken away from me by non-artists who believe that marketing concerns trump aesthetic or philosophical ones. Out of this comes a dictum of sorts: it is more important to experience art than to pay for that experience. In this guise, call me a communist if you must.

In China, the consumers are winning. The reason for this is simple: the Chinese market has rejected the idea that films should cost as much as they do in the rest of the world. When the cost of producing a DVD is around 50 cents (not a burn, which can be significantly cheaper than 50 cents, but an officially-printed disc), it should not be sold at retail for more than ten times that price. Consequently, when Hollywood attempted its North American standard pricing of $24.99 - $34.99 it was almost laughed out of the country. No thanks, the Chinese consumer seemed to say, we’ll just make our own copies and sell them at more reasonable prices. Hollywood responded by trying to strongarm Chinese consumers into paying the “regular” price, but after almost ten years the fight has concluded. Warner Brothers recently announced that it would release the Chinese version of Superman Returns on DVD for around $2, thus pricing an official release competitively with its bootleg counterpart. Similarly, when I was in Korea I purchased an official 6-DVD boxset of Kieslowski’s Decalogue for $30, while the cheapest North American release I found was a 3-disc set for $95. I ripped the Korean DVDs to my computer thus bypassing the regional coding, then burned them to DVDs that my player would read. MPAA, please send your lawsuit to: my ass, c/o bite it.

This issue is about balancing consumer rights with those of the producers of intellectual property. I thoroughly believe that the arts deserve financial support, which can involve a significant investment on the part of the consumer. With Hollywood however, we are for the most part not really talking about art but rather product, and consumers will respond in rather mechanical ways to its consumption. Personally, I think that for North America, $5 is a good digital download price, while $10 would be a great retail price (barring limited/special issues). More DVDs would be sold, and while initially the studios would not see higher profits due to the lowered price, any dime-store business student can describe volume as more important than margins in the long-term health of a company.

Groups like the MPAA whine that the high cost of films reflects ever-increasing production costs. No offense MPAA, but that’s your fucking problem (YFP). Not too many industries complain about production expenses while continually raising them. Furthermore, in and of itself production costs do not explain the public’s dwindling interest in Hollywood properties. To paraphrase a conversation that I had with a local video rental retailer, the 2005 Pink Panther remake tanked at retail, rental, and the box-office not because of piracy or lack of marketing initiatives. That movie and many like it lost money because they fucking sucked donkeys. At the end of the day, it boils down to a simple query: why has the cost of making Hollywood films escalated to two or three hundred million dollars? Coupled with the aesthetic and narrative bankruptcy of most Hollywood releases, this trend signals to me that the writing is on the wall for this little self-important group who consider themselves to be at the forefront of world culture. I can just picture the cynics lined up on Hollywood Boulevard: there’s rampant poverty in this country, real wages are declining rapidly, jobs are being outsourced, only half the country has medical care, Asian and Indian cinema are progressing exponentially, an energy crisis is looming, etc, etc, and you are spending how much money to make a Superman movie???

Hammer City Roller Girls

2006-08-01T12:01:00.001-04:00

Note: this article was not published by View magazine on or around July 20, 2006.

Sometimes you just have to hit a girl.

Or, at the very least you have to make sure that if she’s jamming for the other team in a bout, you give her a solid check to keep her from coming straight up the outside lane.

If that last statement is foreign to you, then obviously you missed the February issue of View which introduced Hamilton’s rapidly growing Rollerderby scene. To catch up: two teams of rollerskaters jostle for position within a scrum to allow a lead skater who scores for one team or the other by passing blockers and lapping the whole pack as many times as they can within a two-minute jam.

At its core, the sport combines elements of hockey, rugby, 70s kitsch burlesque, a little roll-bounce, and the bitchslapped soul of rock. Which means a quickly paced game in which some people might get hurt. And that will only make them angrier, since all of the athletes will be wearing really cute uniforms that bring out the best in a roller skater.

Currently, the burgeoning Hammer City Roller Girls league contains the Hamilton Harlots and the Steeltown Tank Girls. While two teams might seem a limitation, the proximity of teams in other leagues along with the half-dozen new faces seen at each practise suggest a bright future for the sport. If you consider that two teams emerged for this relatively new sport in half a year, the promise for an eight or ten team southern Ontario league cannot be too distantly realized.

This Saturday night at Central Arena in Burlington, the Harlots and the Tanks will go head to head for the first time with their holds no-barred. Practises have so far been rowdy affairs, with injuries and retribution equally meted out. With sponsorship from the Steamwhistle brewery and local bands Sons of Butcher, The Orphans, and The Sam Lawerence 5, you can be sure that your beer and rock needs will be met.

Tickets are $10 ($15 if you want to catch the bus from Corktown), and are available at Reigning Sound, the Corktown, or online. The ticket price includes admission to the after-party at Corktown featuring Toronto punks The Screwed.

Hammer City Slam
Saturday July 22, 7pm
Central Arena, Burlington.

Andy Warhol celebrates the death of us all at the AGO

2006-07-05T12:01:00.001-04:00

Andy Warhol,
Triple Elvis, 1964,
aluminum paint and silkscreened ink on canvas.

America is a hybrid nation, stuck between the physical rendition of nationality as buildings, presidents, and a sizeable military, and an internalized ethical identity on the part of its population interpellated as citizens. Importantly, this is a trans-border phenomenon. American business interests, which have proliferated across the globe over the past century, are themselves means of conferring the American form of citizenship upon a foreign (host) population. Citizenship may only be conferred for a moment or two, perhaps the duration of an electronic financial transaction at the point of purchase, but yet the effects of inclusion in this manner are persistent.

The American system has many problems, the first of which is its unmatched economic success. Politically, dominance within the world marketplace has created a series of aggressive, arrogant governments which have guided American foreign policy to its current trends of unilateralism and military conquest.

And yet the philosophical tradition of the nation promises both freedom and opportunity, and to some extent these goals are indeed realized. However, the country experiences a drastically uneven distribution of wealth, most obviously in the uneven distribution of municipal, education, and healthcare infrastructure. Without social support structures, there exists a serious political vacuum manifesting as poverty and criminality unmatched in the developed world. In both cases many rights and guarantees that normally are provisional with citizenship such disappear.

On the other side of the coin lies American Celebrity, which perhaps best demonstrates the cultural supremacy of the American political and economic system. Individuals such as Bill Gates, Paris Hilton, and Dick Cheney enjoy a degree of wealth and social opportunity unimaginable when viewed against the reality that 3 billion people worldwide live on less than two American dollars per day. Celebrities themselves are in many ways dead before their time, as media representations of their persons and lifestyles render them in- and trans-human.

Andy Warhol understood the extent to which America could invent itself as a mighty and surreal transnational entity. His was not an analytic process, but rather by reproducing and manipulating images of household products, car crashes, and various celebrities he came to understand modern citizenship in the guise of a juxtaposition and simultaneity of the sacred and the profane. Citizenship was inclusive (everyone can afford to buy the same products, and consequently consumers become a relatively homogenous group), finite in time (witness Warhol’s fascination with instruments of death, such as those used by the State to terminate the lives of its undesireables) and yet infinite in magnitude (Warhol’s infamous statement to the effect that everyone will enjoy fifteen minutes of fame is rendered inverse by the repetition of Jackie Os and Elvises in many of his silkscreen pieces).

It seems quite fitting that David Cronenberg curated a new Warhol exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario, opening July 9 and extending to October 22. I have a feeling that the auteur of some of modern cinema’s most intellectual and disturbing films might have something to say about Warhol and his creative process. Check out Andy Warhol -- Supernova: Stars, Death, and Disasters 1962-1964 for yourself.

CBC has an interview with Cronenberg posted on its website.

Tory math makes children cry

2006-06-26T12:01:00.001-04:00

Since the minority Tory government was installed in January, the Conservatives have made quite a lot of noise about the importance of their budgetary tax cuts and changes in government spending. In addition to a $1200 per year child support allowance, the Tories have promised a one percent reduction to the GST, a slight increase to the personal exemption credit, a much-needed mass transit credit worth 15.5% of the cost of a pass, and a tax increase from 15 to 15.5 percent on the first $36,000 of your income. That last point is worth noting, as this is the first recorded instance in Canadian history of a government decreasing income taxes by increasing the income tax rate.

In reality, save for the transit credit there is no way that these tax cuts will amount to anything for the vast majority of Canadians. Only those whose income is high enough to allow them to freely spend thousands of dollars each month will see anything of merit. If you have an income of, say, $3000 per month, you might have $500 of it to spend at your leisure. By lowering the GST by 1 percent, you will save around $5 of that $500 per month. A one percent reduction in retail tax does not address any of the problems faced by people who pay taxes or work in this country. It will not stimulate retail sales, or put any extra money back into the pockets of those who might need it.

Furthermore, it really is a shame that the plan for child care in this country fell through the floor. Since when does a $1200 yearly cheque pay for day care? By this, I can only assume that the Conservatives cannot rationalize their costs on this one. If they could, they would see that by giving working families $4.80 per business day (assuming you qualify for the full $1200; since the rebate is reduced by income, if you earn $30,000 you will not see anywhere near $1200) they are insulting employed parents by ignoring their actual living conditions. Furthermore, they are insulting early childhood care providers who surely make more than five bucks in a day. The old Liberal plan for child care was to increase the number of childcare facilities and staff to the point where it could be incorporated into the educational system as pre-kindergarten. Now I don’t like the Liberals either, but that sounds like a real plan. Some might even call it a strategy for future success. Now, to add balance to this argument let’s look again at the Conservative plan.

There is no Conservative plan for childcare in Canada. Instead, the Tories are doing something for which they have criticized every other party: throwing money at the problem. Literally. “Hey problem-with-childcare-in-Canda-wherein-working-families-
cannot-afford-childcare, how are you doing?” Stephen Harper might say. “Here’s $1200 bucks. Go away.”

To analogize, the Tory "plan" for daycare is akin to giving parents $15 bucks a day and calling it a functional educational system. Maybe the Tories thought you could add the $5 monthly GST rebate to the $4.80 childcare “program” to further provide for the well-being of your family. This brings the total amount of care that the Conservative government wishes for your children to $5.04 per day. Which is about the cost of a movie rental these days. Which gives us a TV babysitter in the guise of a Tory Childcare Plan. Moving on. Dot. Org.

More interesting to those who study semantics is the increase in the tax rate for income up to $36,400. I think it works as follows: for many workers, there will be an increase in the tax rate decrease of negative 0.5 percent. That’s right working-poor, look forward to that tax decrease of -0.5% as if you earn up to $36,400 you will not see your taxes go down, but rather in the negative-down direction. Which is up. As in the poor pay more taxes and have even less disposable income for the GST credit.

This now explains to me why the Tories have changed Canada’s strategy for childcare. To the best of my abilities, the assumption works like this. If you get two overworked parents to spend $1200 on miscellaneous crap to appease their tired lives, they will ignore the fact that their kids underperform at school and their taxes have negatively gone down. This underachieving lifestyle is due primarily to the lack of an “environment of intellectual interest”, which usually involves parents having the time to involve themselves or the money to involve other people in the lives of their children. Hopefully, the $1200 also appeases the many single parents who might have a job or go to school and who thus far don’t have any choice but the whoever-works-for-free-oh-wait-you-aren’t-available-anymore policy that they can afford. In either case, neither parents nor their kids in these situations will have a good chance of securing the education they need to get good jobs and move them out of the $36,400 tax bracket. Since more taxpayers are to be found in a bracket which had its taxes decreased by negative 0.5 percent, the economy is stimulated enough to offset the $15 billion in increased military spending. Now that’s how you grow an economy, son!

Some economists hypothesize that the economy would be best stimulated by raising the disposable income of the bottom twenty percent of income earners. Their reasoning suggests that it is better for the economy and most citizens within to have one million consumers spend ten bucks each rather than one man spending ten million in one go. When you consider that the masses are going to make small purchases more habitual and frequent than the wealthy are going to make large ones, you cannot help but assume that tax cuts for the working poor will make more money available to the system as a whole and thus stimulate the economy in the negative-down direction.

None of these economists are in the employ of the Conservative government.

For such a junk budget, the transit tax break is nice to see, even if it is a direct descendent of a Liberal attempt to adhere with the Kyoto accord. Frankly, with the mounting expenses associated with global climate change, now is indeed the time to encourage progressive solutions such as mass transit through tax incentives.

I think the Conservative government needs to go back to school on the tax issue, that is assuming they don't use one of those "10 bucks per day" schools to which I earlier referred. Perhaps the real issue which we should discuss is why $15 billion of our money is being spent on military acquisitions. For example, maybe we could claw that back to $10 billion and spend the other five on a child care program. Oh wait, that was the last Liberal budget, wasn’t it???

I find it more than fascinating that Conservative parties tell us that they are the only ones who have the economic expertise to balance the books while they are in fact a most spendthrift group of faux-economists. Only after a few years will we see whether the Conservatives will maintain Canada’s world-leading budget surpluses (inherited from the Liberals) or squander the wealth for inaccurate tax cuts and bad spending. The fact is, if you search the net for any of Harper’s past writings or speeches, you’ll soon realize that this government is shying away from the media for the very obvious reason that it has a degenerate ideological approach to governance. By giving the Conservatives the vote at last election, we traded a child care plan from a group of lying backscratchers for a short-sighted rebate coupon from a group of covetous and prehensile ideologues whose numbers don’t add up.

By the way, did you notice that your taxes are going up this year?

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-06-16T12:01:00.001-04:00

According to the vast majority of the world’s climatologists, when carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere reach 400 parts per million, we will have attained a level that can only be described as “dangerous”. At this point, the earth’s climate will have reached a “tipping point”, after which there is simply no return to the temperate climate which has sustained human civilization for the last ten thousand years. What puts this little fact into perspective is that our CO2 levels are currently sitting at 379 parts per million, and that number is increasing at a rate of 2 ppm per year (a figure which is itself growing as well). That gives us about ten years, folks.

Scientific data such as this constitute the heart of the film An Inconvenient Truth, which documents Al Gore’s project to bring awareness of the implications of climate change to the masses. Thankfully the film sticks to the climate message without getting bogged down in the behind-the-scenes showbiz minutiae of Gore’s speaking tour.

The facts of Gore’s case are ably presented by director Davis Guggenheim. In most cases, both Gore and the science he presents are allowed to speak for themselves. Gore explains some of the processes behind gathering and interpreting such data – ice cores, atmospheric readings, satellite data, etc. – and then follows through with the results, in a typically professional PowerPoint fashion.

It is important to stress that there is little to no dissension among the scientific community. Gore notes that while scientists are universal in warning us of the dangers we are presently facing, the media has considerably distorted and clouded the issue. You don’t have to look further than a recent Fox News (sic) piece in which a senior member of the National Center for Policy Analysis denounced the science in An Inconvenient Truth by referring to a paper which was published by his own organization (note: the NCPA is not a major centre for climatological research) instead of one from, say the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. You can see some more of Fox News (sic) in action here.

The “tipping point” that was referred to above works as follows. As the atmosphere accumulates CO2 and the Earth continues to warm, the polar ice caps begin melting. Since ocean water absorbs heat while ice reflects sunlight from the Earth, the arctic must be seen as a “canary in a mine”. Gore explains that if even only parts of the arctic melt, sea levels world wide would be raised seven metres, enough to submerge coastal cities such as San Francisco, Shanghai, Calcutta, and New York. When the arctic disappears, we will have a new climate and geography, period.

It’s a message that most people have heard before, although not likely in such a pressing or intimate manner. Gore likens it to the sudden awareness brought forth by science that cigarette smoking would prove fatal to most smokers. His own family earned a fair amount of money growing tobacco over the years until Gore’s sister, herself a smoker, died. We also get to see some telling photographs demonstrating the effects of climate change over the past few decades. One interesting bit of data that has presented itself to recently for this film to document is the occurrence of the fabled North-West Passage – a shipping lane that has been dreamt of for five centuries – in the Canadian arctic this winter. The times they are indeed a changin’.

Some of us had parents who would tell us almost every day of the week to take out the garbage. We ignored and ignored – sometimes even more so when the nagging persisted – and then all of a sudden garbage day had passed and we were left living with a smelly bag of garbage for another week or two. The insistence is more serious in the case of global warming. Since we are out of balance with the natural order of which we are a part, any catastrophic strain on the system is a catastrophe for us. The focus isn’t really on the future but rather, like Gore’s sister, how we live in the present.

After seeing the film, it is hard not to ask the question as to why the Democrats didn’t run with this at the heart of their 2000 presidential campaign. The Al Gore of this film is passionate, funny, intelligent, and a demonstrable leader. Perhaps the fires in Gore’s belly were lit when he saw the presidency stolen out from under him. At the same time, had the American population witnessed the passion and ability of 2006 Gore in 2000, the vote would likely not have been close enough to allow the legislative coup that brought Bush to office. One cannot help but wonder how differently this new millennium might have progressed under an Al Gore White House.

More importantly, maybe some real democratic change can be effected as distribution for this film expands. Gore’s take at Hollywood stardom right before mid-term elections and 18 months before the next presidential campaign might seem like post-modern politics at its best. However, even the most cynical viewers of An Inconvenient Truth will be hard pressed to ignore the consequences of inaction. Begin the process of change by taking several of your more environmentally sceptical friends to see this film.

continue watching the film

when the robots start to sing...

2006-04-21T12:01:00.001-04:00

Upon encountering the aural landscape of Michael Waterman's Robochorus installation, one cannot help but consider the ontology of human creativity. Must all aesthetic experiences spring directly from the artist to be regarded and savoured as a means to discern the contents of their soul? More precisely, can the expressions of an artist be authentic when voiced by a third party? If one is to have faith in transubstantiation by means of pencil, musical instrument, or paint brush, surely there is space in the religious cannon to include machines, robots, and electronic devices.

Waterman's history as a purveyor of bricolage and recontextualization greatly informs his latest installation. The eight individual Robochorus "singers" are homebrew anthropomorphic robots manufactured from the consumer audio detritus of several decades. These sentinels are located throughout the gallery space and sit mute without viewer interaction. When their internal motion sensors are triggered, the figures self-illuminate and begin to emit one of eight harmonic pitches in response to external stimuli. It is with these sounds that Waterman's interest in collage is most evident. Each of the eight tones is comprised of numerous audio sources, including radio broadcasts and environmental audio, which combine into a single, polyvalent drone. As the eight robots are voiced in the harmonic series, when all of them are triggered they can be heard to sing in conversation with each other. Taken together, the robots form the latest in retro home entertainment made public.

Part of Waterman's intention is to demonstrate the influence of commerce on our appreciation of art. The artist seems to want to bring the latent ambiguities of modern electronics and consumption to the fore. By triggering the robots and making them come to life, the audience gains a degree of control over the electronics that Waterman has put into play. Normally, we walk through the valley of technology with blinders; the vast majority of the population has little or no operational understanding of the devices that are consumed. This lack of understanding when merged with late capitalism's mantra of planned obsolescence has resulted in our present-day throw-away economy, which interpellates us as contingent psychotics disregarding the apocalyptic damage we are doing to our biosphere while simultaneously feeding off our nostalgic instincts for the purity of our collective past. We live and breathe garbage on a habitual basis. With Robochorus, Waterman has restructured our forgotten machines from their original functions to a more primitive and abstract level to allow a greater degree of understanding and sympathy.

What was once the latest in high-fidelity audio equipment has here become recontextualized into the latest in post-human technologies. Our machines play on, long after they have become obsolete and forgotten (by extension - does art outlive our critical interest?). By situating the listener as principle agent within a continually changing aural geography, Waterman's robomorphic singers demonstrate the very human characteristic of wanting to be loved (or more precisely, wondering why their love is no longer being returned when once it was so freely given). Individually, their voices are polyphonic yet highly articulated. When heard en masse, the effect is of an unarticulated yet aurally rich cluster of voices, situating the listener as chief conductor.

Several critical responses quickly elicit themselves. Am I supposed to understand what these robots are telling me? Do they themselves understand, or are their utterances the robot equivalent of a nervous tick? While the installation might suggest movement and progression akin to a narrative, when examined in more detail the piece becomes much more abstract and schizophrenic as the individual sound sources become supra-liminal. In some circles this aesthetic is named microsound: audio, when listened to under the microscope as it were, reveals increasing amounts of information. It is the impossibility to properly locate sounds that gives Robochorus its semantic resilience. Robochorus wishes to engage at both the macroscopic and the microscopic level, and yet this very process of "straining to hear" brings the listener back full-circle, (sitting "alone") in a darkened room, illuminated by the robotic extensions of humanity. The point, dear listener, is yourself, listening.

Michael Waterman's Robochorus runs from May 5 until July 9 at the Hamilton Artists Inc.

here we go again, or: how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

2006-04-12T12:01:00.002-04:00

MP3: Sun Ra Arkestra - Nuclear War

There has been quite a lot of talk about Iran in the North American media these days. We hear many things: that they are bellicose fundamentalists intent on destroying the west; that they have nuclear ambitions which threaten every nation on earth; that they harbour terrorists and train them for future activities. The new mantra down south seems to be one of preemption, a get 'em before they get us attitude.

It might seem dreadfully obvious, but such talk in the media would likely convey to Iran an idea that the only way to defend itself against American aggression would be a strong nuclear arsenal. You really do have to love catch-22 situations, especially in regard to lobbing nukes around. The seeming inevitability of the situation evokes an almost religious fatalism, and that is precisely what hardline American and Iranian officials are exploiting in their separate camps. According to an article published in the New Yorker, President Bush is absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped, and that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do ... saving Iran is going to be his legacy." Since it is highly unlikely that George Bush was actually elected in either 2000 or 2004, this statement is perhaps the most disturbing bit of information ever to emerge from the White House.

The U.N. Security Council is also concerned with Iran, as it is concerned with any member nation which seems to be pursuing nuclear ambitions (except the US of course, which has had free reign to develop weapons of mass destruction; will we one day see America sanctioned for its militarism?). President Bush has repeatedly stated that his administration is pursuing every diplomatic means at its disposal (importantly, the CIA describes this as "inaccurate", but doesn't elaborate). It should here be noted that currently the US military is staging a continual series of military training exercises - such as strategic nuclear bombing simulations - within arms' reach of Iran. Of course, then there's that grand military exercise which is the occupation of Iraq.

Interestingly enough, Iraq seems as a quasi-ironic precursor to a more open form of regime change, ie nuclear war. Talk about Saddam Hussein and his government has adequately diluted the debate surrounding American involvement in the Middle East. No longer is the Palestinian-Israeli issue at the forefront; similarly pushed aside is the influence of American foreign policy on Lebanon and Syria, among others. We now have the great and secret show which is the trial of Saddam Hussein to occupy the foreign correspondent sections of our newshours and RSS feeds. What we are in fact getting is the classic bluff-and-swap manoeuvre. The White House is not filled with idiots, despite the child-king who is their leader. It was known for a long time that Hussein posed little threat to world peace. After all, it was America which sold Iraq much of its military arsenal. It seems much more likely that Iraq was invaded to secure a large oil deposit while simultaneously granting a second strategic foothold (after Israel) in the Middle East.

Seymore Hersh stated that in conversation with several high-ranking civilian staffers at the Pentagon, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was repeatedly described as "the next Adolph Hitler". Here's the switch after the bluff. Public debate concerning tyrants and monsters such as Hussein and Hitler, when breathed in the same utterance as Ahmadinejad, serves the purpose of rhetorical contingency that most listeners find captivating. Of course Ahmadinejad is bad, the public will say, lacking all proof to that effect other than I don't like Hitler.

According to several Pentagon-affiliated sources, America is quite advanced in the planning stages for military operations in Iran. We should not assume this operation to be as 'bloodless' as Iraq (to the 50,000 dead Iraqis, please pardon the use of this term). After all, after wiping out Iraq's army in 1991, military strategists knew full well the extent of Iraq's military capacity - none. In regard to Iran, the question is a lot more open. Iran does indeed have a standing army which is decently equipped. As well, there can be no denying that Iran has the potential for nuclear deployment.

In light of this, Pentagon strategists have come up with an all-or-nothing solution. Conventional and chemical weapons, such as those currently in use in Iraq, will not be able to decisively annihilate Iran's geographically dispersed nuclear processing facilities, nor will they be able to penetrate Iran's purported underground uranium enrichment facilities. Some estimates posit that more than five hundred distinct sites would have to be rapidly destroyed to ensure Iran's submission to American nuclear authority. Consequently, only the nuclear option remains to ensure that Iran doesn't respond to a military strike with a nuclear counter-attack.

In light of this might we surmise about a statement in the Project for a New American Century - that wonderful and terrifying in situ holocost museum - released a little more than a week after the 9/11 attacks. To ensure American hegemony over key material resources, namely oil, water, and uranium, and continue the war on terrorism, the country would have to escalate warfare considerably. Winning the war on terrorism would likely "require the United States to engage a well-armed foe". Just to remind you, the signatories and principal architects of PNAC are currently members of George W. Bush's administration.

Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is quoted in the New Yorker as saying that "we have to be ready to deal with Iran if the crisis escalates....This is not like planning to invade Quebec." So the waters of an invasion into Iran don't get diluted by another bluff-and-switch potential, I'll leave that last somewhat ominous Freudian slip for a future article.

power down

2006-03-20T12:01:00.001-05:00

When Canada became a signatory to the Kyoto protocol, many Canadians held their heads a little higher thanks to an increased sense of moral virtue. After all, we just had to look to the ‘ignorant’ south, who didn’t sign Kyoto, to feel better about ourselves. It’s now a few years later and sadly little has changed in terms of our emissions, despite the Kyoto requirements. Certainly there’s a greater amount of media awareness surrounding the issue, and many Canadians have begun to think about the ramifications of climate change. Indeed, the exceptionally warm winter that we are all experiencing this year should prove that the times they are a changin’. In case you assume this to be a momentary blip in weather statistics, it should be noted that of the ten warmest years in recorded history, eight have occurred since 1990.

We all know that transportation is a big part of the problem, but electricity consumption is also a climate change issue. At it’s heart it all boils down to this: we are going to be using a lot of electricity for the foreseeable future. As more items become electrified and more people (ie: China, India, etc) can purchase and use them, electricity use will skyrocket over the coming decades. There’s just one problem: it can’t, at least with our current methods of production.

Most of North America’s electricity comes from burning coal and oil. This has two fairly severe consequences. Firstly, both are finite resources that will not sustain our current usage profiles let alone adapt to the ever-increasing population. Secondly, there’s that pesky business about air pollution, as emissions from generators are the biggest single contributors to climate change and smog.

It is likely that nuclear power will have to fill the deficit when oil use becomes more prohibitive. Don’t believe me? How about some math on this issue. 65% of North American electricity comes from oil, coal, and natural gas. These technologies will never be clean. Either we accept dirty air which warms our planet, or we reduce demand to 35% of our current usage. Given how much we all like our televisions and fridges, the latter seems unlikely. Renewable technologies cannot currently match this level of production. Once every building is fitted with solar panel roofs and wind generators are almost household items, maybe then we can start talking about sustainable growth. Until then, our growth will be always-already unsustainable. More than likely however, over the next few decades we will see the proliferation of nuclear generation, with all the environmental, social, and safety issues that it entails.

So what can be done by the average person? While not everyone has the money to dump $15,000 into a personal solar or wind generation system, there are many other steps that can be taken to ensure that your energy use is minimized. Of course, if you can afford to install a small wind generator or add solar panels to your property, then please do so. In fact, give me a ring and I’ll help you install your system. Check out Energy Alternatives for more details. If you are building a new house, why not add a renewable energy source? It will pay for itself in about a decade, and then your electricity will be free. Not a bad price, considering the increasing rates that power companies are charging.

One much smaller step that can be taken is to pay attention to those objects in your life that consume electricity. I know this sounds rather pedantic, but little things like changing all of the light fixtures in your house from incandescents to compact fluorescent will be a great step (and since these efficient bulbs last ten times longer than “normal” ones, you will be less of a burden on our landfills), Obviously, I am not suggesting that you ditch your high-tech gear and move into an earth-warmed cave in the woods. Electronic toys can be great fun, and definitely enhance many aspect of our lives. The easiest way to save on power use is to turn things off when you are done using them.

This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people leave appliances running when they are not in use. Televisions, stereo equipment, kitchen appliances – if they aren’t in use, turn the damn things off. Fans, heaters, lights, and such don’t really need to be on when you aren’t actually in the room. Here’s a fun idea: put all your lights and fans on motion sensors and timers so that they only operate when they are needed, then forget about them.

Computer equipment is another culprit. Monitors do not need to be on when the computer is not in use, and you can set up Windows to put the whole computer into a low power mode using the screensaver settings. Don’t leave the machine running overnight unless it’s actually performing a function. In this capacity I am looking straight at Hamilton’s business community. Just walk past a place of business at night and you can see that most of them leave their computers and cash registers on all the time. There’s no need for those monitors to be on all the time guys; turn ‘em off, save some cash. Even better, if you see that a business is wasting power, why not walk in and tell them? It’s usually out of ignorance rather than apathy that waste occurs. Also, when you go away on vacation, don’t leave on lights or appliances as a means to deter thieves. My cop buddies tell me that robbers tend to “case the joint” before doing anything. Most thieves are smart enough to notice things to suggest that you aren’t actually home, such as lights which never turn on or off, cars which never appear or leave the house, and people who don’t come and go. If you want to play this game with them, at least get a timer to control the lights. Otherwise, your little counter-insurgency strategy is entirely laughable.

Perhaps most importantly, if everyone were to upgrade their house to ensure maximum efficiency, a great deal of electricity would be saved. The federal government is actually providing grants for this very purpose. You do have to invest some money yourself to have an energy audit performed and retrofit your house to maximize efficiency. There is serious money available to those who truly wish to lower their household power use. Find out more at the website for the Office of Energy Efficiency.

Reducing our energy consumption isn’t a leftist agenda. In the long run, saving money is something from which we can all benefit. That our air will be more breathable and our climate more liveable is icing on the cake.

the body politik

2006-03-05T12:01:00.001-05:00

These past few weeks, I’ve been oscillating between a decision to stop paying attention to the “political” issues that get brought forth in the popular media, and the opposite position of wanting to attack much of what gets talked about in public discourse as so much horseshit. It continually amazes me that a citizenry will so patently avoid dealing with issues of such importance as health care in a more aggressive fashion.

You really do have to love media “debates”. Once again we’re being told by conservative pundits about the virtues of privatizing healthcare while at the same time the horrors of a for-profit health system are being expounded by the left. It pains me to no end to continually hear the same bullet points from both camps while any debate about the issue is perpetually stifled. I don’t want to get into the issue of why there is no space for such discussions in the public sphere (an issue of both corporate hegemony over broadcast sources and public apathy to that which is not immediate to them).

More importantly, I think it’s key to look at precisely that which is not being said, falling to the margins of public discourse. Health Canada is reminding us of the economic burdens of particular lifestyle choices. One wonders why government does not take a more active stance against things are known to be harmful to our health. Prevention should be the mantra of our health system, and yet all of the public discourse surrounding healthcare involves funding various treatment issues.

Every time you turn go to the Canadian news media these days, you hear about the various failures of the health care system. From wait times to bed shortages, it’s all a big love-in of negative punditry. And yet solutions are rarely, if ever, given. Except the mantra of privatization, which gets held aloft as a white knight leading us to the promised land. The only manner to improve the system according to the proponents of privatization is to allow private capital to be invested in the system. We need more beds, more doctors and nurses, more equipment, and more physical space in hospitals.

According to such thinking, the health system needs an injection of capital to expand and meet the needs of Canadians. If we were to allow doctors to set up private clinics, those doctors will be able to secure loans to expand health infrastructure in this country. They would then pass on the expense of these (privately accrued) loans along to their customers along with some conception of a profit margin to thus provide what Conservative thinkers like to call “adequate service”. That profit would then be used to further invest in the system and find ever more opportunities for “market expansion”. So that is the grand strategy on the part of proponents of privatization. According to these people, systems only work when somebody is making a profit. Of course, isn’t the system then more expensive, when in addition to health services it has to pay for mansions and cars and such for its investors? I’ll get to that math in a second.

Some of us are currently asking why, if Canadians have so much money that they wish to put to health care, there is no further injection of money into the public system. If all we need is investment, why are we not investing? After all, it’s far more efficient and less expensive for the government to secure loans for investment on a system-wide level than it is for thousands of small investors. As well, governments can accommodate losses in one sector of the budget (let’s say healthcare, as a continual expense) with gains in another (energy stocks, anyone?). Furthermore, the federal as well as a few provincial governments are enjoying surpluses that could easily be used to further investment in health care. All of these things would keep the overall price of health care lower than if the private sector were to be in charge.

So why are such investments not forthcoming? Well, let’s just say there’s a whole hell of a lot of money in the health system, and the financial sector is chewing at the bit to gain access to these public funds. When profit comes from people being sick, corruption is quick to follow.

There’s one aspect unique to health care that makes it impossible to marry profitability to a sense of human compassion and what we might call “good governance”. Every time somebody gets sick or has an accident, a cost in incurred. By its very nature, taken as a whole health is a depreciating economy. There is simply no manner to make a profit without either isolating access to only those who can pay for the continually-increasing profit margins of all the middlepeople in the health services chain, or to downgrade services when they are universally accessible and cut costs to the bare minimum.

A great example of this kind of health care is provided to the south where HMOs, which are America’s attempt at universal coverage, do not cover a vast majority of health services and more importantly are not accepted by a majority of hospitals or doctors. Since profitability is the raison d’être of the system, patients who are not profitable are perishable. They will remain externalities to a system which chooses not to account for their existence.

So yes, health care is expensive and will continue to burden governments who choose to socialize its access. Health care spending in this country was pegged at about $121 billion for 2003, which represents nearly 10% of our GDP. Shouldn't the healthy lives of a citizenry be worth ten percent of what the country is worth? By the way, America spends 14.6% of its GDP on medical care. While all that money is footed by taxpayers, many Americans lack the quality of care that every single Canadian receives. Interestingly enough, the OECD found that while the USA spends nearly twice as much per person on health care, Canadians live on average two years longer (I realize this might have to do with crime statistics and environmental protections, and might not reflect wholly on health policy).

A body politik must be healthy to be wealthy and productive. You might hear about wait times in Canada, which many espouse as representative of an "ailing" health care system. That's not during life-threatening situations, except when organ donations are required. The wait is for elective surgeries, like hip replacements and such. Health care needs to prioritize. It's more important to save a person's life than it is for one to get a new hip. Sorry, that's just the way it is. Conservatives in Canada complain because they can't access health care the way they can access the mall. They want service they can pay for, and because many of them are wealthy they think they "deserve" it. Tough. Despite some elements to the contrary, the wealthy do not represent the centre of human rights in Canada.

This whole ideology of profit, which leaves everyone to their own devices in terms of fending for themselves when they are sick, is an abject failure. You will not see the results of that failure if you concentrate your studies on affluent Americans who don't seem to have any problem buying into adequate health coverage. You will see it in the disenfranchised who do not have any coverage at all (the US Census for 2003 states this to be 15.2% of the total US population, or about 43.6 million Americans -- ten million more than the entire population of Canada!). You will see that failure in the low-to-mid of the middle class (about 100 million), who do not have coverage which equals the coverage every single Canadian is assured by our constitution. You see it in the record number of bankruptcies that are filed every year when families have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical treatments out of their own pockets.

Most reasonable Americans have had enough of these beliefs. They are sick of paying ridiculous prices for medicine. They are sick of getting turned away from hospitals which do not recognize their insurance. And most especially, they are sick of insurance companies who do everything they can to get out of paying for medical treatments. In this capacity, America represents a travesty. The USA has enough wealth that every citizen should have the best treatment in the world. Instead, you get a reality where a family must seriously consider the consequences of paying $200,000 for heart surgery and possibly face bankruptcy or instead allowing a family member to die. That is unacceptable in the modern world. Now is not the time to bring such hideous complaints to Canada, when our national wealth is rising substantially and our population is expanding.

My New York Diary

2006-03-03T12:01:00.001-05:00

It's not that often that I choose to review older material, but this time I feel the need to promote the work of an artist pro bono. Thanks to my typical mid-winter hibernation, there has been a lot more time lately for the anti-social things that I love, one of which being graphic novels. I've been continually putting off an attempt to read the entire Cerebus series in one go thanks to certain, er, "responsibilities" that have come my way recently. Then comes a wee little snow day, and already I've gorged myself on several books.

This is what I would consider the best of the bunch -- mainly as the others included Spiderman and Batman ephemera. Montreal artist Julie Doucet has gained a good deal of publicity for her books, which combine domestic scenes with a particular sense of poetic realism in terms of narration and visual design. She rarely appeals to what I like to call "grand design" narrative, which, broadly speaking, is a means of attempting to melodramatize a story beyond itself. By this, I mean to suggest stories which appeal to their ontology in a rather banal and obvious way. Think of a story in which all of the actions and events which occur conveniently underline the themes or characterizations of the story without any other sense of logic behind their existence. This appeal is one of the author to him- or herself, and the last thing that I want masturbatory writing to attempt is structural realism. It does not aid a reader's uptake (at least not this reader), but rather grand design narratives serve to show themselves as stories which could be nothing but what the author has presented, a hermeneutic seal of self-legitimization. We've all seen and/or read bad deus ex machina stories. I am of the opinion that such is a failed aesthetic, and one which frequently lets authors off the hook without them doing too much work to understand the world around them.

Moving on...

My New York Diary is a brief autobiography of the author during a time in her mid-twenties when, seeking a career in cartooning, she moves from Montreal to New York. Now I'm sure that the artist-trying-to-make-it-in-New-York is perhaps the biggest cliché in modern culture. And yes, the art does indeed owe a hell of a lot to Art Spiegelman. Doucet has a great ear for dialogue however, or more specifically for what remains almost-spoken in relationships. Some of this comes across through her inner thoughts. For the most part however, she leaves the important aspects of characterization to small graphic details such as the manner in which her cat responds to her New York boyfriend in the background of several panels.

It is precisely these little details that bring joy with every page. Doucet's bobbly-headed figures are irrepressibly endearing, especially when they get high and start cursing at each other in the nude. Perhaps it is the fighting which I find most appealing. Maybe it’s the sheer helplessness and uselessness of Doucet’s male characters, who seem entirely burdened by the weight of their bad decisions and yet do not seem to be conscious of this fact. Or perhaps it’s Doucet’s somewhat casual attitudes toward the valuation of meaning and the attribution of significance which stands out the most for me. Her characters are entirely believable as they exist almost entirely within prisons of their own derivation. They act akin to Foucault's interned within the panopticon: ever guilty, they either self-police or are eternally condemned. Doucet herself realizes this fact by the end of the novel, during a period of a few weeks when she comes to the realization that life for her cannot continue with her New York boyfriend in the picture. This breakup is not sentimental, but rather entirely realistic in the sense that both actors are engaging in a mutual process of misfiring, with each mistake reinforcing the mistaken emotions of the other person. It is a tragedy that thankfully is played entirely without melodrama (a taste if which we were given at the beginning of the novel during a boyfriend's feeble attempt at suicide).

With events such as these, Doucet seems to be advocating a certain laissez-faire approach to empirial significance. Sure, things such as breakups and such are milemarkers in our respective lives. But if all we suffer is the other person, or the lack thereof, then should we not be examining people and not events for meaning? Events are given significance by relations created through nostalgic reverie. With the simple, random, and even casual manner in which even the most meaningful relationships in our lives come and go, we are kidding ourselves with all of the melodrama of significance. Doucet serves us the reminder that such things are daily banalities, meaning little except to ourselves. Meaning comes at precisely the moment when the story of such things gets told and retold. Then again, such is the purpose of diaries: simultaneously private and public, singular yet universal, they are the material form of the nostalgic gesture, the means by which we attribute meaning to those little banal narratives that we call ourselves. This wake, this breathing of life into otherwise ancient memories, is the true sense of self that we can give to other people when they lack our immediate presence. It is for this reason that Doucet ends her book simply and abruptly with a three-page winter exodus of the city that involves her, her apartment, and her cat. Oh, and the not-so-subtle irony of an amateur marching band. Story over. She's come and gone. And we never really were in Julie's presence anyway!

Some of us like to engage ourselves with art that reinforces and legitimates our sense of self. When we find characters and stories that are as dysfunctional as we, a certain sense of homecoming washes over us. I now feel less isolated from society by the various manners in which I miseducate myself and those around me. Thanks to the ever-increasing circulation of Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly imprint, you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding yourself a copy for the next snow day.

Bonnie Prince Billy and Tortoise - The Brave and The Bold

2006-02-19T12:01:00.003-05:00

Bonny Prince Billy and Tortoise
The Brave and The Bold
[Overcoat/Domino, 2006]

When two of your musical heroes decide to get together, it can be a mixed blessing. Surely, the complex arrangements and instrumental dexterity of Chicago’s Tortoise could provide nothing but solid support for our bonnie Will Oldham. At first you might assume the band’s muscular tone to be somewhat antithetical to Oldham’s skeletally strained vocal delivery, and yet each serves to emphasize the strengths of the other. Plus, the dynamic of a strong band and a barely-there voice serves as an ironic undertext to the proceedings. The Brave and The Bold collects ten covers from such diverse acts as Elton John, the Minutemen, Devo, Bruce Springsteen, and Don Williams. Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’ is transformed from the agit-anthem of the original to a 70s-style prog masterpiece lifted from a long-lost rock opera. The group’s take on Elton’s ‘Daniel’ is equally revelatory, as the classic saccharine end-of-the-night torchsong loses the sing-songiness of Elton’s version in favour of an aural depiction of the drink and smoke-filled atmosphere which must have constituted the reality of the song’s lyrics – all this while still retaining the objective humour of the original. While not a groundbreaking album by any means, The Brave and The Bold is a perfect meeting of indie minds who were smart enough not to try and perfect a masterpiece. They just got together and played the songs which appealed to them, and we’re the better for it.

MP3: Bonnie Prince Billy and Tortoise, "Cravo É Canela"

Audion - Suckfish

2006-02-19T12:01:00.002-05:00

Audion
Suckfish
[Spectral Sound, 2005]

Sometimes, all you want to do is dance it all away. Detroit’s Matthew Dear greatly understands this desire, and over the past few years and under a variety of aliases he has appealed to the masses with his take on tech-house beats. Unlike the patient and endearingly produced techno that permeates his namesake vocal work, under alias Audion Dear spins a very dirty and hormone-fuelled sixty minutes. Album opener ‘Vegetables’ sets the tone for Suckfish with an insistent and dirty mechanical crunk that permeates the track, giving it a feel that’s half 1990 Detroit and half 2005 Berlin back alley. ‘Your Place or Mine’ lays down funky, sex-dripping disco beats over its course (for some reason this song screams Rainer Werner Fassbinder to me).

Dear ably leads to the first album highlight ‘Titty Fuck’, which layers electro-style synth stabs over a rampant microhouse soundfloor. Several tracks like ‘T.B.’ and ‘Uvular’ provide more subtle ass-grooving experiences, maybe akin to the cross-room flirtations that precede any overt bumps in the night. Each leads straight into a barn-burner of a track, proving that a slow, tantric rise will beat fireworks every time. And that climax does come with the bass-sweep march of ‘Kisses’, the solid disco thump of ‘The Pong’, and the two-step squelch of ‘Just Fucking’ which will ensure that your party will indeed be started. It all makes you want to drop ecstasy and dance it up like 1997 all over again, this time with the carnal knowledge that comes with full-on adulthood.

MP3: Audion, "Just Fucking"

feeling my way around itaewon

2006-02-08T12:01:00.005-05:00

our first full day off after the esl camp in korea, and we had celebrated the previous night by, of course, drinking excessively. i was wearing contacts, and the exceptionally dry atmosphere left them decently attached to my eyeballs, despite my regular use of drops -- regular up to the point where i stopped caring / noticing the problem. regardless, fun was had and by the end of the night my eyes ended up in their proper sockets, so to speak.

i woke up the next day completely blind and in an exceptional amount of pain. i couldn't keep my eyes either closed or shut. after three hours of trying to sleep it off into the afternoon, i decided to venture out to the clinic and see (now that there is a certain distance of then and now, it's easy to use such a terrible pun) what was what. since i was completely blind, i had to make the trek by feel. somehow i managed to cross the street, touching brick, stone, and other inhabitants of this dismal American borough of Seoul. when i got the other side, some US military police stopped me and asked why i was so drunk at such an early part of the day ("you must be a fucking Canadian" one said!). i explained my situation and they pointed out that the clinic on my side of the street was closed for renovations, so i had to make my way up the street a half kilometre to another one. fun times.

feeling one's way up the main street in Itaewon is in fact the only way to travel this strip, even if you are graced with vision. every small street vendor that you pass grabs you and brings you closer to their somewhat stunted paychecks. i now know what calvin klein socks feel like. how each item in a line of gucci purses supplely enters your palm only to slip into the next design, arresting you for a second of desire amassed and rejected. the fact that almost everything you see is a bootleg, a facsimile made by hands other than armani's. all of the luggage and tourist items are displayed in order to trip up any passer-by who doesn't give even a second to evaluate their worth, which under my fingers seemed for the most part quite adequate. there is a certain presence of tactile response, a knowledge of where you came from and where you are going, atom by atom from birth unto death. above anything else i learned that the body only knows time within relative immanence. everything is given time by bodily experience, and from this sense of "everything" taken altogether comes the gesture toward transcendence. meaning is precisely this interception of sense into consciousness while trying to avoid the scars of time: an impossible procedure. the blind-for-a-day are given meaning in a pure sense, without referent. no, it says, immortality does not come that cheap; welcome back to present day reality. at this instant the body returns upon itself, and either you allow the non-corporeal to maintain its distance like a prayer, or you let it fold in upon both itself and you.

with this manifest realization, i was able to pick up what was, when i was finally able to see it two days later, a pretty sweet shirt by feeling the design on the front. aesthetics are an interesting consideration when you lose a sense. by what criteria should we really judge things? referentiality is our only recourse. so what then of aesthetics and universality? what then is beautiful beyond that which simply brings relief to the suffering of a particular individual? it was precisely at this moment of purchase that i decided true happiness would only come about if i created something back at my hotel. with such limited options as i had available to myself, i knew that such a creation would be me and a camera, solitary in solidarity. hopefully the resultant video doesn't linger too long as anything of importance, as in my mind it was merely a distraction and one which served it's fitful purpose. if i learned anything from this birthing, it is that isolation -- true isolation -- breeds incontinence. truth be told, i like this space of incontinence. it is one of freedom despite harsh criticism from both within and without; minima moralia.

i made it to the clinic only to find out that many of Itaewon's public services -- in the sense that i have come to understand the meaning of public -- close for random three-hour sessions, sporadically throughout the day. presently i was out of luck, so i decided to try and get back home and knock myself out with soju after fucking around with my attempts at an important visual. on the way, i'm not sure how, i managed to get to the atm in the subway (thank you random australian man who read to me my atm info. up to that point, i was thinking that i might get fucked over by someone stealing cash or my pin). a quick mission of happiness, and some food for my sojourn at the love motel.

being vegetarian and blind in korea is a double misunderstanding. multiply by ten when you add a certain lack of ability with the korean language. obviously i was not allowed to touch the food which interested me. as a consequence, i had to trust my limited korean vocabulary for this pursuit of culinary justice. at one kitchen, i tasted crab and got sick immediately. this led to the exchange of some verbal abuse on the part of those serving me my food. weird. it seemed pretty straight-forward to me. annio golgi, annio mul golgi: no meat, no seafood. then i try to explain no dairy and no eggs. all good, despite my hang'-'glish barbarisms. good, except for the fact that many korean kitchens do not assume things like crab, pork, chicken, etc, to be meat in the traditional sense, and sometimes after explaining that you will not eat a single animal product you still get random animal legs sticking out of your meal in a "decorative" fashion.

nightmare.

the only thing i knew with confidence that i could consume was bi bim bap, a multi-disciplinary salad with rice that sometimes comes with an egg or meat on top but is traditionally vegan. cooking your own food in korea is my recommendation though, unless you really really like bi bim bap, as in three times a day like-alicious.

on this day i had to resort to pictographs in order to get my meal requirements across. this process led me into seven different kitchens, after six different arguments. when fighting blind, the fury of presence is removed from you, as is the hatred which comes from knowing your opposition. it is at once the most heartless and unsatisfying thing you can do. provocation requires a willingness to stare into the eyes of an opponent and convince them of the absolute assurity of your position by strength of metabolism alone. when you go blind, your body language changes, becomes unpredictable. in the end i starved a fair amount, as there was no way for me to express my desires to korean chefs without staring them in the face. blind, fidgety, and half-drunk, i was looked upon as a miser and a cheat, and was given little respect from any food vendor that i found.

at this point, i was so blinded by pain and fuzzy-wrecked-eyedness that i was getting myself around my touch and touch alone -- with occasional barely-peeled eyes telling me of unfocussed shapes and hazy occurences. i now know what most buildings in Itaewon feel like, and some of the people as well. this could have quite easily led me down dark paths, and every bar in my vicinity catered to such a lack of willpower against vice.

i dragged myself home, and was accosted by several prostitutes who i think were balkan. they sounded cute and obviously knew how to endear themselves, but their practised voices were very raspy and tired. i could hear the wheeze of the mattress with every sentence they uttered; articulations seemed determinately cut short by their boredom and the cold wind which passed over their lips. they offered to me everything they didn't really have: presence and a certain emotional tangeability, bought cheaply each half-hour. luckily for them i don't believe in ghosts which i can't see, and so there was no animosity as i left them alone on the street with nothing exchanged between us.

one thing i really liked about my hotel room was the sheer containment it provided. there was no way to excuse the fact that a body needed space. life and breath were taken for granted here in the love motel. this was a region of unforgiven corpses and daily transcience, and my foreign-ness was no exception. time becomes irresolute in such places. the day passed a lot more quickly than i imagined it would upon first waking, in pain and somewhat desperate.

another four hours of listening to music and trying to sleep off my pain. i tried to avoid having my eyes burn when they were either closed OR open. it was a continual and transcendent buzz which elevated my body beyond itself to a relative absolution with the walls, the floor, other people outside my little vacuum. the annihilation of it all was a sweet relief from the immediacy of sensation -- the dry heat from the floor heaters -- pipes under the whole floor which keep the room nice and toasty and also dry the air the fuck out -- made me try another walk into the street. since it was now after supper, the prostitutes were out in full force. no nudity in the public here, unlike North America. the little strip right in front of our love motel is an expanded barracks for GIs picking up hookers and taking them to places like the motel where we have been staying. naked girls left in small dirty rooms after they are used. i thought at first that these little daily mantras of money-then-sex / sex-and-then-money were obscene, a realization of the "love you long time" scene in Full Metal Jacket. i tried everything in my power to save myself from it all. it was crass and i was moralizing, but i took pride in being a judge over these people and their situation. it was liberating, and i wanted the imposition of freedom's distant horizons.

i was starting to see to the horizon, but in fuzzy, half-formed shapes. a young korean girl in a hospital mask came up to me and asked me for a date. she walked in a daze up the street. quick quick quick, then slowly falling to a pause. for a few seconds, my eyes cleared enough that i could make out her face, which was quite beautiful and sad. her english was pretty good, at least the words which weren't drowned out by the blood i saw on the inside of her mask. i asked her why she needed a date from some random guy on the street when she could be winning guys all over the place back at high school or whatever. the only thing which i could see in entire clarity that day -- perhaps the thing which stands out most clearly from the whole trip -- was how her eyes lit up as she pulled her entire mask off her face and told me that she wasn't allowed in school anymore. i could see that she had been beaten up, and was indeed still bleeding from her lip and nose.i wanted to find three hundred thousand won and give it to her just to stay inside for one night. immediately i fell despondent, as this was a malignant thought, one breeding disease. she laughed a little and said, you aren't a GI, you are with a happier face. i realized that my desire to help this girl was precisely her problem. everyone helped her with money, as time was very expensive for her. she was never going to be this young again. she wanted some time back to herself, and that would not come from a foreignor's won. i almost dropped to her feet when she smiled again through the blood around her mouth, then replaced her hospital mask before leaving up the street.

later in my hotel: a camera, a blind photographer, and no subject. i think it was the careless and yet absolute manner in which she placed the mask around her wounds, as though it were not a cover but an interface. i was frozen. precisely because i didn't know her. i could never know her yet could think of nothing else but her immediacy -- she could have founded a temple with that grace. and here i was unable to create even a simple monument of a gesture.

i decided to try some sightless drinking in public to see if i could at least find some conversation. one of the bars next to our love motel was supposedly "Canadian", so i went inside. they did have some presque-canadian whiskey and beer on tap, but i didn't recognize any of it. export only, it seems. regardless of the friendly labels on the beer, my tarsand spirits as well as two British girls who came into the bar soon after i did convinced me to go in the whiskey direction. worst. shit. ever. i only had two drinks, and since the girls weren't exactly masters of conversation except "so are all Canadian boys as funny as you?" and "We are sharing a hostel, want to bring down our rent a bit?" there was nothing but refusal on my mind. i was holding the hand of one of the girls who insisted that it be held, and so i thought: that's right girls. i'm in so much pain that i want to gouge out my retinas with a spoon and fling them down the street, and yet i'd love to go back to your boozy hostel for so much sex and crying. nice try, but that won't get my mind off things. and so it was a terse goodbye as i decided to get the hell out of there.

there's this thing about south korea where public drunkenness is not only completely accepted, but it's thoroughly encouraged if you are a guy. touching every wall and door to find my way back to my room allowed me to bump into five old men who were so thoroughly intoxicated that I had to them get back to their feet and moving in the proper direction. blind leading the blind. one guy even gave me what i later saw was 5,000 won to help him up the stairs to his place. thankfully he asked nothing else. another 45 minutes of walking on my fingers and i was home. it was 9 pm. i drank the last bottle of soju i had in my room in under three minutes and missed a good deal of the remainder of the pain behind my eyeballs.

i tend to like contacts to function as portals to the living world, not as coins allowing passage through the underworld.

some thoughts about the elections in Canada -- Korean dispatch

2006-01-20T12:01:00.001-05:00

1> The conservatives believe in an "each to himself" type of economy, which means you pay for everything yourself. Ultimately, that increases the overall cost to the education, healthcare, and administrative infrastructures. To see the effects of such policies, just look south where people pay low low taxes, but receive no services except (abstract) military protection. This is especially true of health care and education where the rich continue to enjoy the benefits that we in canada all more or less share, and the poor and working poor get NOTHING and are in NO POSITION TO BETTER THEIR SITUATION.

2> Notice i said "each to HIMself" above, as many in the conservative party adhere to ideologies of masculine dominance over the public and domestic sphere. It's not simply about taking away a woman's right to abortion or proper health services specific to their needs. It's also about allowing equal rights in corporate and employment ethics, it's about having a progressive police and legal system, which currently still has a way to go to recognize some issues that women still face everyday.

3> The conservative party wants further economic and legal integration with the US. this would destroy the country at this point in time. America is on the verge of countering almost every civilized country on the planet, who are at this time working together to the greatest extent in human history. America has undermined every international treaty, disregarded international laws when they are against "american" interests, and opposed the formation of internation courts (largely because those courts would find many senior american officials guilty of serious criminal offences). The US is a sinking ship, and i hope they learn to fend for themselves in a positive way, but right now Canada should solidify relations (trade, legal, etc) with Europe, Latin America, and Asia to secure economic growth. America will begin to disregard its trade imbalance with more and more violent and depressive results as it's economy continues to slide over the next few years. If you don't know what that means, i'm sure Mr Andreas Link can be of service.

4> The conservatives seek a domestic social policy that is highly regressive, turning time backward against the positive human rights issues that have been worked out over the past few decades, such as worker rights, ethnic equality issues, homosexual equality, and intelligent (ie sane) drug policy. Many of their members have a fundamentalist christian ideological background that DOES NOT SERVE THE INTEREST OF CANADIANS, and is highly oppositional to a humane and civilized country. We must lead this country with rational and emotionally sensitive policies which look to material consequences on human terms, not abstract sense of "morality" which can in no way be seen as universal or transcendental.

5> Harper has repeatedly said that he wishes to give a lot more power to the provinces. That should be looked at from two sides. there are reasons to do this, such as regional economic issues (maritime vs prairie). At the same, the real reason that he is doing this is to allow Alberta to follow it's own economic and domestic policy, which is decidedly against what Canadians have repeatedly said they would like to see for the country. This is the first stage of what might be referred to as a big fight for Canadian oil reserves (Dick Cheney has already visited...)

6> Every time there is a Conservative scandal, it is one of monumental proportions, like making ethnic or gender slurs. There is also a high degree of monetary corruption in most conservative parties throughout history. I am not saying this to get the Liberals off the hook, as they took a lot of conservative policies and made them their own, including huge fiscal kickbacks. Every government has a scandal of some sort. The point is, is it relatively harmless to the citizenry, or is it one akin to the PC government in Ontario saying that it was balancing the books when in fact it was selling off assets. It's kind of like the difference between Bill Clinton lying that he got a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky, which was argued as a cause for impeachment, and George W. Bush lying to congress, the senate, and the entire world about information which has so far led to the murder of nearly 100,000 people. It's a matter of degree. Hey look, I just saw a Conservative MP get arrested for smuggling booze into the country! Hey, didn't another one just accuse a woman of doing useless work? How will justice be able to precipitate from people who think in such superstitious and backward ways?

7> The Liberals are indeed just cruising along, and for that they deserve at best a minority government yet again. I really would like to see them in coalition with the NDP, as such a government would benefit Canada quite well while allowing some progressive trends.

8> That being said, I think that the NDP and the Green Party would be a very viable opposition if they don't quite make it to power. The NDP have already proven that they can get work done while everyone else is just trying to topple the government. Stop wasting our time Conservative party. Those tactics you employed in delaying any action in parliament -- that's childish playground antics that do not have a place in a professional house of representation. Frankly, I hope you do get a minority government so that we can knock you on your ass with a non-confidence motion within a few weeks of gaining office.

Long story short, vote how you want. Just do a little research behind the scenes and don't just get excited by the fact that you think Conservatism means good economic policy. Frankly, if you look over their platforms, it's the NDP and the BLOC that have the most fiscally responsible plans. The Conservative plan is the most expensive. Odd isn't it...

United Airlines makes the skies unfriendly. Fuckers.

2006-01-08T00:01:00.001-05:00

There's a certain kind of joy I feel when certain things fall into my lap. Like, for example, the way you fly on an airline and get a storyline for a horror film crop up into your head. Thanks United. You are great. The way you had nothing working on your flight, including the VCR (it's called DVD technology guys...) my reading lights, or the cooking elements (leaving my already fucked-up non-veg meal cold and lifeless) -- awesome. The way your boarding staff didn't actually check tickets before scanning them ("good luck getting out of tokyo," he said to me) thus leaving several of us with connecting flights at later airports stranded on the phone for hours -- peachy keen. The way you almost lost our luggage thanks to things like checking people into the wrong flights -- like a birthday orgasm.

At least your flight staff was courteous and did their best despite the tragedy of your incompetance. Funny how they ran the fuck away from the plane when we landed...

Please don't kill me on the way home, despite this little bit of bad press I am giving you, which is the following customer satisfaction report card:

some great albums of 2005

2005-12-17T12:01:00.007-05:00

in no particular order...

The Books
Lost and Safe
Tomlab

Somewhere in the cacophony of electro-acoustic layers, voice samples, and electronic manipulation is nice intimate band playing softly on acoustic guitars and singing the most haunting melodies of the year.

MP3: The Books, "Smells Like Content"

Silver Mt. Zion
Horses in the Sky
Constellation

It look me a little while to really get into this record. Sure, it’s the same quality that the Montreal collective has been known for since the first Godspeed album. But then I really started to dig the last track, which takes the now-tired slow-crescendo-build which initially got the band famous, and it just keeps going and going. Give it a chance and this album soars.

MP3: Silver Mt. Zion, "God Bless Our Dead Marines"

Cursed
Two
Goodfellow Records

The hardest hitting album of the year comes from local aggressors Cursed, whose savage vitriol will either unite or crush the masses. Either way, lessons will be learned and next of kin will be notified.

MP3: Cursed, "Head of the Baptist"

Sufjan Stevens
Illinoise
Asthmatic Kitty

This little Christian has been growing on me. His audacious instrumental arrangements and lyrical charm are unmatched in pop music. Some of his songs are so sentimental and saccharine that you want to punch little Sufjan right in the junk, but somehow you end up tearfully singing along. Let’s keep this musical train rolling across the other 48 states...

MP3: Sufjan Stevens, "Come On! Feel the Illinoise"

Alva Noto / Ryuichi Sakamoto
Insen
Raster Norton

With the strength of Sakamoto’s output in 2005, the Japanese composer should be a household name. On this album, he again teams with German producer Carsten Nicolai to fantastic effect. You might assume that software synthesis and an analog piano were not meant to duet in such a contemplative and intimate manner. Before Insen, you would have been right.

MP3: Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto, "Berlin"

Double Leopards
Savage Summer Sun
Hospital

Some of us don’t really like to breathe when we listen to music. We accept the small pieces of air that are given to us by musicians much like a diver who has run out of oxygen before surfacing. We like to get through a piece of music and feel that we’ve been physically and emotionally changed by the process. In this case, two live tracks from the very noisy output of this Brooklyn quartet will forever alter the way you listen to the world outside and your own heartbeat.

MP3: Double Leopards, "Live On KDVS, Davis"

Animal Collective
Feels
FatCat

It’s the second year in a row that the Collective have made my top ten, and for the same reasons as last year. AC create the most life-affirming, sing-song-inclusive, and dynamic music on the indie scene today. This is psychedelia for everyone who has lost hope in the world; see Sunn O))).

MP3: Animal Collective, "Did You See the Words?"

Sunn O)))
Black One
Southern Lord

All hail the end of rational civilization. I think it was the assault and daemonic drone of “Orthodox Caveman” that made me believe in absolving myself of the bullshit, tyranny, and outright barbarism that lies at the heart of our collective project called civilization. This album made me see the end of days and smile.

MP3: Sunn O))), "Orthodox Caveman"

Fennesz/Sakamoto
Sala Santa Cecilia
Touch

This 19-minute EP throws the listener into a bliss of high-frequency drone. There’s so much going on that it’s tough to find orientation other than the simple pulses and loops that click and pulse beneath the aural landscape. With patience however, you’ll discover whole continents of microsound to explore.

MP3: Fennesz/Sakamoto, "Sala Santa Cecilia"

Best Track:

“Smells Like Content”
The Books
Lost and Safe
Tomlab

Apparently all you have to do to make a great song is take a lullaby melody, spoken lyrics, a simple elaboration of instrumentation from rhythm textures to arpeggiated guitar chords, and then end it all with the sample “expectation leads to disappointment. If you don’t expect something big huge and exciting, you usually, um, I don’t know. You just, yeah.” Brilliant.

Best track pt 2:

“Cold Wind”
Arcade Fire
Cold Wind 7"
Merge

This vinyl only release was created for the end of Six Feet Under, and while you can get it on that soundtrack you should slap yourself in the head for not picking up the seven. Haunting pop music for the masses that seems cool again, somehow.

MP3: Arcade Fire, "Cold Wind"

Worst song:

That Eminem song, I don’t know what it’s called but it has Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in the video. It borders on fetishizing little girls – “you make my slinky go boing boing boing.” Holy fucking nightmare. Janet Jackson’s nipple can’t go on tv and this can? Hurry up and get arrested so we don't have to endure this shit anymore.

Worst CDs:

Ashlee Simpson, The whatever’s fucking out now CD
Just cuz it's out, that's enough to make me want to wreck something or someone.

Liz Phair, Somebody’s Miracle. She went from feminism to this??? Pow! Zoom! Straight to the Moon!

Backstreet Boys, Never Gone. We wanted you gone. You came back.

Kalan Porter, 219 Days. That’s how long time felt when I had to listen to one 4 minute song.

a gift from canada

2005-12-13T12:01:00.001-05:00

hello mr Patrick Basham.

I am writing in response to your article in the Washington Times of December 2 entitled "Gift From Canada", found at the link above. I'm happy that you are paying attention to what may indeed be a critical election for Canada-US relations. For some reason, however, I'm having nostalgic flashbacks to the American elections last November when many "conservative" journalists asked Canadians to stop sticking our collective noses into US business.

I disagree. Say what you want. The more opinions available to the masses the merrier. However, I do believe that writers for large imprints such as the Washington Times should at least check some facts before indulging in such ludicrous opinions as demonstrated by your piece.

I like the section where you say that Harper will cut "the regulatory burden on Canada's business sector." Does that mean that we will get to enjoy the corporate standards employed by Enron, Exxon, and Haliburton? Sign me up.

You emphasize the Liberals too much in your article. Simple research (ie: Google) will tell you that there are five (5) official parties which are running candidates in this election. It's not quite as simple as Right versus Left, as exists with the American electoral system. By the way, I will agree with you that Liberal rhetoric is crudely "anti-American". I don't like the Liberals either, and they will not get my vote (neither will Harper's Conservatives). But please remember that like all other Canadians who slander Americans, they mean to vilify the American government and not American citizens. But hey, through their actions in Iraq and against the American population, the US government is vilifying itself. History will view Iraq as a war crime, no matter what you believe about democracy and terrorism.

My favourite part of your otherwise well written article (grammatically speaking, that is; your content was largely fecal matter) is the following: "Canadian taxpayers will continue footing the bill for an expensive welfare state epitomized by its archaic government-run health-care system. Social policy experimentation on issues such as drugs and homosexual rights will continue in an incremental but decidedly progressive direction."

To get the relatively less important part out of the way first, homosexual rights is not in any way "social experimentation". It's called freedom and equality. You might want to look into it, despite all your talk of supporting such beliefs. Was the civil rights movement in the US "social experimentation"? No, it's called not being a complete jerk to people.

Health care spending in this country is pegged at about $121 billion for 2003, which represents nearly 10% of our GDP. I won't deny that is expensive. Shouldn't the healthy lives of a citizenry be worth ten percent of what the country is worth? I mean, if i had $100 i would pay $10 to have access to medicare. By the way, America spends 14.6% of its GDP on medical care. While all that money is footed by taxpayers, many Americans lack the quality of care that EVERY SINGLE CANADIAN RECEIVES. Interestingly enough, the OECD found that while the USA spends nearly twice as much per person on health care, Canadians live on average two years longer. Now, I realize this last fact might have a lot to do with crime statistics and environmental protections, and might not reflect wholly on health policy.

You might hear about wait times in Canada, which many conservatives espouse as representative of an "ailing" health care system. Well, that's not during life-threatening situations, except when organ donations are required. The wait is for elective surgeries, like hip replacements and such. Health care needs to prioritize. It's more important to save a person's life than it is for one to get a new hip. Sorry, that's just the way it is. Conservatives in Canada complain because they can't access health care the way they can access the mall. They want service they can pay for, and because many of them are wealthy they think they "deserve" it. Tough. Despite some elements to the contrary, the wealthy do not represent the centre of human rights in Canada.

This whole ideology that you espouse which leaves everyone to their own devices in terms of fending for themselves when they are sick is an abject failure. You will not see the results of that failure if you concentrate your studies on affluent Americans who don't seem to have any problem buying into adequate health coverage. You will see it in the disenfranchised who do not have any coverage at all (the US Census for 2003 states this to be 15.2% of the total US population, or about 43.6 million Americans -- ten million more than the entire population of Canada!). You will see that failure in the low-to-mid of the middle class, who do not have coverage which equals the coverage every single Canadian is assured by our constitution. You see it in the record number of bankruptcies that are filed every year when families have to pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical treatments out of their own pockets. This is not my brand of patriotism, an us-versus-you type of argument. These are facts, and most reasonable Americans have had enough of your kind of beliefs. They are sick of paying ridiculous prices for medicine. They are sick of getting turned away from hospitals which do not recognize their insurance. And most especially, they are sick of insurance companies who do everything they can to get out of paying for medical treatments.

It's time that people like you begin to realize that in this capacity, America represents a travesty. The USA has enough wealth that every citizen should have the best treatment in the world. Instead, you get a reality where a family must seriously consider the consequences of paying $200,000 for heart surgery and possibly face bankruptcy or allow a family member to die. That is unacceptable in the modern world.

Learn from every other country that has universal health care. Universal health care is more important to the development of the freedoms of individuals than any amount of televisions or cars they might have the opportunity to purchase. Those poor who don't have access to health care? Yeah, they don't really get to participate in consumerism either. Here's a tip for allowing a "welfare state": STOP BUYING EXPENSIVE MILITARY HARDWARE. Do you realize that a dozen stealth bombers and few naval vessels will pay for healthcare for the 43.6 million uninsured Americans? Cut the choppers, not your citizens. That action might also help your country with its war crime problem.

You want to know why universal health care works? Because it is a monopoly owned by the public. Every corporation would dream of such market share. Monopolies keep things cheap when everybody buys in bulk together. They are not corrupt in and of themselves. Corruption only occurs when entities are not held accountable to the public trust (Enron, for example). Along with price controls and a lack of middlemen, a publically held monopoly keeps our medicine cheaper than it is in the US while simultaneously allowing every single citizen access. Did you know that even the desolate poor in Canada have coverage? In an emergency, they can get picked up in an ambulance and receive proper medical treatment in the same hospital as a wealthy person. I think that's what civilization is for.

It's time for your country to join the modern world and get away from the archaic traditions of "fend for yourself or die". The right to freedom includes the right to life. A key component of life is health care.

By the way, I have a friend who can sell you Viagara from Canada at a cheaper rate than can be obtained in the US. By the look of your haircut, it looks like you need an upper or two.

mental real estate

2005-12-02T12:01:00.001-05:00

It seems that companies are vying for memory space at an alarming rate these days. Advertising is beginning to cover nearly every surface imaginable. Storage space is going up at a massive rate. The exponential growth of information capacity is an interesting parallel to the process of restriction that is occurring in material resources. Commercial space -- public advertising, video, music, etc -- expands rapidly as data storage increases, control over these resources is inevitable.

One of the fun side effects of having more powerful tools to archive culture is the increasing amount of inter-relational analogy. The shear amount of data that is added to this cultural database causes anguish in the human mind that can only be relieved by organizing the variety of data that we are presented with into relational nodes.

People are tivoing whole months of televised entertainment and whole years of music, This capacity to encode the now will increase exponentially with storage capacity. And yet, already we are seeing increasing attempts to control digital media content. Media companies are starting to flex the muscle behind their monopolized positions and usurp rights that we have begun to take for granted. Things like being able to record television shows at our discretion. Right now, it is not very tough to record everything you want with a couple of VCRs lying around. The Outfoxed video was constructed in this manner, for example. When the majority of television channels are digital feeds however, digital rights management will be in full effect. We will be limited in our capacity to use what we have consumed with our analog broadcasts.

TV Carnage is a fun examination of what television consumption isn’t quite saying about itself. The DVD runs like a mixtape of television played against itself. What was once the meandering, random, and thoroughly banal sequence of channel flipping at all hours of the day becomes a rhapsody to the absurdity of the entire process of televised entertainment. It contains all your favourite stars such as Gary Coleman, Steven Segal, Alan Thicke, and Charlton Heston. Check it out here.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

what goes in must come out

2005-11-25T12:01:00.003-05:00

Hey kids, it's Buy Nothing Day! Happy Festivus for the Rest of Us.

So, why McDonald's in particular?

Principally, targetting an organization like McDonald's gets us to the heart of the problem with overconsumption. We in North America have quite literally grown fat from our own excess. High-energy yet nutrient-deficient diets, as perhaps best exemplified by the McDonalds nightmare, have tainted what should otherwise be regarded as the healthiest period humans have experienced in our existence. There is no logical or technological reason for modern humans to be malnourished. We create plenty of food for both human and animal consumption, and we certainly have the capacity to distribute that food to wherever it is needed. So what is keeping our nation underfed?

I should probably lay my cards on the table regarding what I consider to be 'underfed'. There's plenty to eat in North America, of course. Stores are full of packaged foods, restaurants are plentiful, and most people earn enough money that they can buy food when they need to. So why the health epidemic, with food-related illness at a high unmatched since the invention of refrigeration? Why are so many children morbidly obese? (This may indeed be far less of an issue in Canada than the USA, but trends here are similar.) Why do so many people who eat three or more meals a day malnourished, lacking nutrients in their bodies that are more widely available now than in any other time in human history?

Several studies have suggested that not only do we eat too much on an individual basis, but also that we waste a huge amount of food in the process. Dumpster divers have taken this little fact to heart, as freeganism has spread by means of ideological urgency and economic necessity. The existence of these groups among the urban poor and not-so-poor has shown that the recovery of food from society's wastefull habits is no simple rejection of social convention. Rooting through garbage containers of restaurants, supermarkets, and food production facilities to recover the tonnes and tonnes of edible food that is allowed to rot is an ideological stance against corporate agribusiness. The locus here is an economic one, in terms of how production is numerically evaluated. If, for example, I grow vegetables to feed people who have no food, the economy is in official terms stagnant. If a grocerystore throws away a truckful of food to make space for some more, the GNP/GDP goes up. In the latter case, the poor are still hungry.

The key for a good food supply is not increasing food production, but rather increasing (or more properly stated, maintaining) the quality of our food sources. It's really just a matter of having a proper infrastructure for food production and delivery. Sadly, that infrastructure has been taken over by corporate agribusiness, which does not gauge success by means of food quality or the health of their clientelle, but rather through crude profitability. Big business does not care about long-term health trends in individuals. BSE (mad cow) symptoms, for example, can take a decade to become manifest in a human. Do we really think that ten years after the fact, McDonals will ever be held accountable for helping spread a disease that can come from a variety of food sources? From the point of view of industrial food producers, if profits are impeded by more thorough food inspections, then those inspections do not occur.

Corporations focus on quarterly profits and stock-market accountability. That is their nature, and we should account for this behaviour when dealing with corporate involvement in matters of life and death (food production, health care, etc). They process food to be tasty (ie: tonnes of sugar and salt), long-lasting (full of cancer-producing preservatives), and cheap (unhealthy pesticide use, for example, to remove production costs).

The end result is food which is processed for maximum shelf-life and transportability and minimum nutritive value. If you don't believe me on this point, check the label of any package of processed vegetables. Canning can be a relatively harmless procedure, so long as vegetables are not cooked at the plant. Freezing, overcooking, and otherwise modifying the veggies is a sure way to lose any or all vitamins and minerals that they may contain. A normal serving of those same vegetables obtained fresh from a grocer maintains the food's nutritional value (assuming that you don't destroy those precious vitamins and anti-oxidants by overcooking your food -- ask Woody Harelson). Some manufacturers get around the fact that they are destroying their food by adding a vitamin or mineral to their product. Vitamin C is a great example, as it is very cheaply produced, can be inserted into most foods, and is absorbed by the body quite easily. Vitamin fortification can be an expensive process however, especially for some vitamins and minerals, and thus you do not see vitamins in every food product that you can buy.

To make a long story short, when you hear from various sources that you should eat 5-8 servings of vegetables per day, it is unlikely that frozen stir-fries, creamed corn, frozen dinners, and V8 vegetable drinks give you any of the actual vitamins that doctors are telling you to consume in order to be healthy, which is the whole goal of the exercise. Parents, you are not doing your kids a favour by including frozen peas or broccoli on their plates. Sadly, instead of opening the microwaving package, you have to actually spend the time it takes to cook fresh veggies, otherwise your kids are eating calories largely empty of nutritional value.

This is where McDonalds comes back into the picture. They basically launched the fast-food revolution that has engulfed North America. Their marketing and production techniques have made it possible to convince hundreds of millions of people that good food can be prepared in about a minute. That people live a 'quick' life these days is a topic that's too broad to properly examine here. It should be enough to state that the McDonalds process is not an evil one in the sense that they are trying to keep people malnourished. Rather, quick and crappy food is a natural adaptation to the manner in which we view production and consumption: addictive, cheap, now.

There are other aspects of McDonalds culture that should keep you the fuck away. There's the anti-union nature of the company, the exploitation of immigrant and poor labour sources, the massive amount of environmental damage that accompanies daily operations at their restaurants, the unsubtle manipulation of our youth to pursue products which are detrimental to their development, and the proliferation of animal cruelty through industrial meat production facilities. Also, by avoiding McDonalds you can join those two kids from out west who are boycotting the company to protest softwood lumber duties.

Buy Nothing Day does not suggest that you need nothing to live on a daily basis. That would be a very naive position. Rather, November 25th should serve as a reminder that we have ritualized certain forms of production to the detriment of others. By blindly accepting our system as 'the best', we are ignoring alternatives that are much more healthy and sustainable, and do not rely on cheap gimmickery to maintain themselves.

Let's Consume Less

2005-11-08T12:01:00.001-05:00

What is the practise of art?

2005-10-26T00:01:00.001-04:00

What is the practise of art? Does it serve a function other than beauty?

My conversations with thirty artists is a pleasant artificiality. From the hundreds of individuals involved in making art in Hamilton during the Inc’s thirty-year tenure in the city, thirty were selected to have their thoughts inscribed. Hamilton is a city which disallows mythology. Coinciding with the pragmatic nature of the subject material, this process was not an explicit one of inclusion and exclusion. Rather, selection fell the chance of availability. I felt that a systematic and archival approach would betray the true history of the Hamilton Artists Inc.

The art community in Hamilton is one which struggles against itself in many ways. Toronto’s shadow looms over the psyche of many local cultural producers. This proximity to the wealth and potential and mainstream cultural interests seems to doom the city’s art community to a degree of provincialism and hermetic insularity. Arguably, it is precisely this inferiority complex which gives the artists of the Hamilton region their strength of co-operative enterprise.

Hamilton has long been a labour town. The spirit of collective endeavour was fundamental to both the formation and the continued success of the Hamilton Artists’s Inc. Tapestries are woven by the determined execution of a simple idea. Likewise, a local institution precipitated by a co-operative of local artists. A frustrated and determined entity came out of their initial attempts to show their work in the mainstream channels, which seemed determined to ignore them. Democracy is always DIY, and in this spirit the Inc has long sought to hybridize the permanence of institutionalization with the flexibility of populism. Work precipitates from personality; to work otherwise is to fully bureaucratize an organization.

The Inc has long served as a resource centre for artists; allow one lesson to be learned from its thirty year history. Art is not a mythical or romantic process, but rather one of doubt subsumed into practical application.