Michael Snow + Matthew Boughner @ New Harbours

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

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

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

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

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

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