what goes in must come out

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

What is the practise of art?

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.

Orphx CD Release

Hamilton has long been associated with the industrial processes that lie at the economic heart of the city. A simple drive along Burlington street at night will illuminate the aesthetic grounding for many local performers. The beat of industrial machinery and Hamilton’s newfound desire to be the world’s biggest drive-thru shopping mall are the twin complements to the aural life of Steeltown. Standing outside many buildings in the city’s north end provides a listener with natural soundtrack of pulses, scrapings, and sonic detritus. The fortuitously found and the callously disregarded becomes an interesting dynamic to the incessant beat of industry. Noise and rhythm coincide and support each other at the intersection of production.

MP3: Orphx - Insurgent Flows

Interestingly enough, most Hamilton residents who seek such aural pleasures in a more formal setting quickly learn to visit the Toronto music scene, as few local venues cater to the tastes of the beat aesthetes. It might be for this reason that local performers who have earned a degree of recognition in foreign lands have a harder time being acknowledged closer to home. As a consequence, many local producers seeking wider recognition have moved to cities which more fully support their music. This exodus has tended to leave techno on the fringes of the local music underground.

Orphx have enough experience with Hamilton that they can see the waxing and waning of the scene. “Ten years ago it was better,” muses Richard Oddie, the producer at the heart of Orphx. “There were a couple venues for good industrial and techno back then. Fifteen years ago there were great warehouse parties. Now there’s no techno in the area.” It was for this reason that Orphx followed the electronic scene as its centre of gravity shifted to continental Europe. Germany has had a particular connection to the band. In addition to performing at the recent Maschinenfest in that country last month, many of Orphx’s recordings have been with the German Hands Productions and Hymen labels.

“The scene’s more widespread there. It’s in a lot of cities, whereas in North America it only exists on a small scale in a few cities. And instead of the fetish people and things that you tend to get here, the European scene attracts a more diverse crowd.” That being said, Oddie has witnessed a substantial rise in interest for experimental music in the local scene. “I think there’s a lot of Mac students who are into this sort of thing but just assume there’s nothing for it in Hamilton. That’s really a part of the general disconnection that they feel for the downtown core. It’s time for Hamilton to get a regular night for experimental and electronic music. We could support a monthly event just with the people who are already out there. There’s plenty of people in the city who want to dance to good music but don’t want to travel to Toronto, and others who want to listen to good DJs. Let’s get DJs out to the growing Jamesville gallery scene.”

This Sunday, Orphx is celebrating the release of the new Hands CD Insurgent Flows with a rare local live performance. The CD implies Oddie’s continued fascination with the mechanics and consequences of social change. The album title signals both the pleasant excess of its kick-heavy industrial rhythms, and the layers of noise and samples which continually insist themselves onto the rhythmic soundfloor. Oddie has used a number of protest recordings as samples which provide a loosely cinematic undertone to the proceedings.

Asked to what extent his activist proclivities infiltrate his music, Oddie questions the authenticity of messages that any artist might wish to highlight in their music. “Whether political or not, you don’t want to force yourself down listener’s throats. ‘Where’s the globalization here, or where’s the ironic media quote?’ You want to be more subtle so you don’t stifle any other meanings in the work. Obviously, it’s hard to resist talking about things when something’s going on. But think of a band like Stereolab. Nice, sweet pop music. But look at the lyrics, which are pretty subversive. It’s not that they’re Marxist, but that they’re catchy. I think it’s important to try different strategies. It’s more challenging to be legitimately ambiguous.”

Elements of previous compositional strategies – such as the use of location recordings centred upon the Hamilton region, exemplified by 2001's The Living Tissue – further complicate the aural landscape that Orphx creates. Other inputs, such as the video work that has highlighted many an Orphx performance, serve as secondary complements to the audio. Oddie harkens back to the early phase of industrial music, when bands like Throbbing Gristle would show things such as autopsy videos during their live performances. “We see that stuff in Marilyn Manson videos now. We’re desensitized to it. You have to almost do the opposite of that kind of shock industrial. Let people determine what they want from your music themselves.” Oddie stresses that the video work that backgrounds the Orphx live show is not meant to distract listeners from the music. “I want to interest them more than the nodding of heads and the twiddling of knobs that we’re actually doing. It’s about patterns of light and is not really narrative or referential.”

Oddie is confident that the propulsive strength of this CD will renew the faith of both chin-strokers and dancefloor enthusiasts alike as to the viability of Hamilton’s electronic community. The Casbah will host Orphx on Sunday, October 30. In a live setting, Orphx performs as a duo incorporating the interplay of Oddie and his wife Christie Sealey with a host of modern and vintage sound equipment. That night will also feature a live performance by local producer Huren – whose dirty, noisy electronic sounds have similarly found a stable of fans worldwide – as well as a DJ set by Matt Didemus of Junior Boys.

Check out those Aviators!

Not to get too personal with this post (I'm trying to keep this website a little left of the ordinary journal experience) but my pops made the news. CBC interviewed him for twenty minutes about laboratory testing in the country, and this is the edited version of what he had to say lasting maybe fifteen seconds.

Check it out here (video is in the right corner of the webpage).

Please note that his name is actually Bryan Hewlett. And no, he is not a doctor.

Deerhoof - The Runners Four

Deerhoof
The Runners Four
[Kill Rock Stars, 2005]

What was once discordant, manic art-rock has now become... discordant, manic art-rock with a heavier beat. While not quite a complete break with their previous seven full-lengths, The Runners Four definitely has more of a rock and roll bite to it. Bass-heavy melodies, like that found in ‘Midnight Bicycle Mystery’, and single string smash riffs like “Rrrrrrright’ and ‘Scream Team’ signal Deerhoof’s usual tricks. On The Runners Four, however, the band’s typically angular nature is softened a bit. Gone are the weird noise poems of last year’s Milkman, replaced by the more straight-up drum-and-guitar rock anthems of ‘You Can See’, ‘Wrong Time Capsule’, and ‘Twin Killers’. Bassist/vocalist Satomi Matsuzaki keeps her melodic instincts on the cute side – ‘Spy on You’ is akin to the second grade singalongs ‘Dog on the Sidewalk’ and “Come See The Duck’ from previous releases. The Runners Four maintains the mysterious beauty of Deerhoof’s previous work, but with a longer tracklisting and more easily digested material, the album might signal their entry into the indie mainstream.

MP3: Deerhoof , "Twin Killers"

Black Dice - Broken Ear Record

Black Dice
Broken Ear Record
[DFA, 2005]

Sometimes the pristine order that emerges from an area of tumultuous chaos proves to be a pacifying experience. This is not to imply a sense of calm before the storm, but rather the calm that comes from overexposure to the storm’s most violent fury. Over the course of their last three full-lengths for DFA, Brooklyn’s Black Dice have emerged as masters of this zen-like craft. Noise-core spasms and power electronic washes fuse with the tribalism of rock and the audacity of improv. This music requires a degree of intelligent patience to sift through the morass of its hedonism, but the rewards are well worth the bacchanalian journey.

At its most basic, Broken Ear Record is about texture and punctuation. The dirty mechanical percussion of album opener ‘Snarley Yow’ invites the listener ever closer to the caustic high pitched loops and chirps that constitute its harmonic subject. Vocal samples in both ‘Smiling Off’ and ‘Street Dude’ are chopped and quantized to the point of a painful, ear-shredding melodicism. ‘Motorcycle’ ends the album with perhaps BD’s most accessible recorded track, as guitar loops and vocal yelps playfully dance over an industrial beat. With Broken Ear Record, Black Dice has provided a long overdue soundtrack to the blackout of August 2003, when the mechanical rattles of the city fell silent to the tunes of urban campfire songs.

MP3: Black Dice - Smile Off

Let`s fix this mess.. Chicoutimi style

Saarbrücken transit system, April 2003;
timed cross-platform interchange


Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 7:26 PM
Subject: Let`s fix this mess.. Chicoutimi style (Nov11)


Yo guys,
I thought I'd call on you for your knowledge far and wide.

Alright, I'm trying to get a campaign together at the University for bus passes. There are a small number of students(over 3000) and a large number of parking spaces (1600). Not only that the transit system for the community at large is slim. They neeeeeed this deal, and it just so happens I snaked my way into the environmental commitee at the university and I will try to propose it as a staple campaign.

Ok, number one do you know any info about both campaigns in your schools (guelph and Mac, dunno about queens)?

Number two: did you have a referendum?

Number three: how much was the payment for one semester versus the payment for a bus pass for a month?

Number four: if you got any suggestions let me know.

cheers
aj

hi andy and friends,

i think the HSR got in touch with mcmaster and made the proposal -- they were very short on funds at the time, and were looking for a cash injection, which 15,000 students could easily supply. there was indeed a referendum at the school, but only after the bus pass program had been in place for a year. students who were paying for parking passes felt that it was unfair that they should pay for a bus pass they "wouldn't use", and so they organized a referendum. i imagine that you want to approach the issue from the other side, ie: have a referendum to get the program in place. as for the cost, i think it was $57 for an 8 month pass through the school, which at the time was the price of a monthly adult HSR pass. it's probably up around $70 or something now. i think the graduate student pass was closer to $90 ($101 now), as grad students get a 12 month bus pass instead of the undergrad 8.

the issue i'm wondering about is whether students will support the program if they know that chicoutimi bus service is bad, they will not support paying for the pass. if somehow you can convince the bus line to improve service along "student" routes, then the students might be convinced to back the plan.

i'm going to post this stuff on my web site, which maybe we can use as a forum for this project.

ps: the picture link above takes you to a McGill website to which you might want to extend this project. maybe you could see if they have any experience with the (admittedly different) situation in montréal.

Q x

Random Telephone Conversation # 354b-98

QZH: "Afternoon, Hamilton Artists Inc. Quintin speaking."

Female caller: "Are you a towing company?"

QZH "No, we're an artist-run centre."

Female caller: "Can i get a tow?"

QZH: "No, but I might be able to show you what that looks like."

Female caller: "What?"

QZH: "Towing. One car, preferably a truck, pulling another one to someplace it wasn't located initially."

Female caller: "Do I have to pay to have that done?"

QZH: "You have to pay to have anything done, unless it's an emergency."

Female caller: "Aren't you guys CAA?"

QZH: "No. We are an artist-run centre, which isn't currently specializing in towing."

Female caller: "So you can't tow. Can you change tires?"

QZH: "Umm, we do a different kind of work."

Female caller: "Well, this number was given to me by the phone directory."

QZH: "Well, then it looks like you need a tow. Hold on a second, let me write some of this down."

Female caller: "Thank you."

QZH: "Where are you located?"

Female caller: "Flamborough."

QZH: "That is within our jurisdiction."

Female caller: "Can you get here soon?"

QZH: "No."

Female caller: "You can't hurry up? It's raining and we're pretty cold."

QZH: "Well, I'd have to bike to Flamborough, and that might take a half-hour or so. Maybe more, because it's raining and I'll probably also get a little cold. Maybe not though, as biking warms you up quite a bit."

Female caller: "Why can't you get here sooner?"

QZH: "Because I'm on a bike. Maybe a bus goes out there, I don't know."

Female caller: "I pay good money to you people every year! Why the fuck can't you help?"

QZH: "Hamilton Artists Inc has a limited mandate, even though we do service Flamborough and much of the area surrounding Hamilton."

Female caller: "What do you mean?"

QZH: "Well, I'd like to help. But I don't think our membership accords."

Female caller: "But we just paid you guys like a month ago."

QZH: "I don't think so. Did you pay the CAA? Maybe you should call them."

Female caller: "Well somebody cashed our cheque!"

QZH: "I wish it had been us, then I could get on my bike and help you out with towing your vehicle. From Flamborough. On my bike."

Female caller: "You should be able to help."

QZH: "With a bike?"

Female caller: "Are all your trucks on other calls?"

QZH: "No, Mme. We have no trucks of any sort. Well, none that I know of anyway."

Female caller: "What kind of a fucking towing company are you???"

QZH: "None."

Female caller: "So why can't you help?"

QZH: "Maybe I'll start again. Good afternoon. Hamilton Artists Inc, Quintin speaking."

Female caller: "Yeah, you said that already."

QZH: "Really? I forgot. It was so long ago now."

Female caller: "So you plan on just leaving us out here?"

QZH: "There's only so much one person at an artist-run centre can do."

Female caller: "Nothing, right? Nothing at all."

QZH: "Apparently not, no. Have you tried calling anybody else? CAA perhaps."

Female caller: "No. You're supposed to be able to help. That's why your number came up."

QZH: "It looks like we haven't been updated in the directory."

...

QZH: "Mme, have you tried calling somebody who actually tows trucks? The CAA perhaps."

Female caller: "You already said you don't have our membership."

QZH: "We don't, no. I can send you an application package if you give me your address though. We have an opening coming up in a few weeks."

Female caller: "No thanks. I'm not paying twice."

QZH: "..."

Female caller: "You should be ashamed for not helping. I'm going to get a lawyer."

QZH: "I'm not sure if he or she can tow your vehicle either. Try the CAA."

Female caller: "Thanks for nothing."

QZH: "You aren't the first to say that about our organization, you know."

Female caller: [hangs up]

peaceful resolution

Go Car Free, even for one Day

There has been a rising awareness of the impact that our transportation choices are having on ourselves and the world in which we live. Over the twentieth century, we got quite a bit of an addiction to the combustion engine. The speed, power, and comfort (read: laziness) which cars promote have allowed modern civilization to become almost hopelessly addicted to this little marvel of engineering. A lot has come as a result: increased productivity, a much higher degree of personal and collective mobility, long commutes to work which keep parents away from their kids, roadrage-inducing traffic jams, air pollution which kills thousands of Canadians every year, dwindling oil supplies which might be required for more important purposes (ie: food production; everything plastic in your life; electricity), and a vast increase in climate change caused by human activities.

With this in mind, we should celebrate September 22nd for what it really means. International Car Free Day was started in France in 1998, and like a stalled SUV going downhill has been growing in momentum ever since. It’s not a difficult concept to follow. Bus, ride, walk, blade – do whatever it takes to get around without resorting to the family car. If you work in an outlying or suburban area, organize a car pool for the day, which hopefully you can make permanent.

This week will see a wealth of car free activities in the city. Following in the popularity of Toronto’s "Open Your Streets" festivals, today should see a number of street parties throughout the city. Throughout in the week, numerous trips were held in which historians and local politicians led tours of the harbour, Webster’s Falls, and the city’s historic sites. If you missed it, join Ward One Councillor Brian McHattie on Sunday for a guided walking tour of Cootes Paradise, which is Hamilton’s best urban-rural area. There’s also the monthly Critical Mass, starting at Hess and George around 5:30. Check out Transportation for Liveable Communities for more details. More importantly, you could pretend that more and more of your days are International Car Free Day.

I know what you’re thinking: my job and my family are important and I can’t change my behaviour. It really isn’t as hard as it sounds. Bogota, a city of seven million people in Columbia, has been having yearly car free days in April, during which all private automobiles are outright banned. Families there haven’t suffered as a result. Alternately, the emphasis on the city’s bike and bus network has created a more liveable and sustainable community that is accessible to everyone.

More importantly, those freedoms that we have gotten used to are highly dependent on cheap oil, which is quite obviously no longer something we can enjoy. The price of gasoline will go exponentially higher – and this is from industry experts such as Matthew Simmons, CEO of the world’s biggest energy investor Simmons & Company, and Dick Cheney, current VP of the United States and ex-CEO of evil devil's reject Haliburton. When the price of oil jumps from $66 per barrel to $200, and then jumps to $500 a barrel, people will be forced to understand what their freedoms relied upon. It wasn't ideology or economic growth which gave us "freedom", but rather finite material resources which are currently being wasted by bad planning, greed, and human apathy.

In North America, we’ve gotten so dependent on cars that we feel driving to be one of the most important rights and freedoms that we have. George Bush has gone so far as to call this lifestyle "non-negotiable", and with the recent Doctrine of Joint Nuclear Operations (Google it, it’s fun!) which specifies a pre-emptive nuclear strategy for those who disagree with America’s strategy for oil domination, we might in fact learn what it means to be truly free. This right of driving is so important that any attempts to get bad drivers off the road by screening more strictly for those who don’t in fact have the propers skills to drive – perhaps with driving tests every five years -- are routinely laughed away. Again as a cyclist who routinely uses every major street in the city, I can tell you how many Hamiltonians are still under the mistaken impression that bikes do not belong on the road and riders should remain out of "their" way by using sidewalks. Time for traffic school guys. We just accept road deaths as the cost of modern civilization, and to some extent we are correct in that assumption. At the same time, luck-of-the-draw circumstance should not overule proper urban planning.

I myself do not drive, but I can understand the dependence that it fosters. When you’re young, it’s pretty fucking sweet to be able to suddenly go where you want, when you want to make the trip. I know what that feels like. I felt the same when I was twelve and got my first bike which had gears. Suddenly the whole city belonged to me. The dual feelings of speed and mobility are very addictive. Those luxuries – let’s not kid ourselves by calling these characteristics "freedoms" – I found very stimulating, and consequently I remain an avid cyclist to this day.

The thing about youth, especially around the age when you first start driving, is that your lifestyle and recreational habits tend to solidify. By your mid-twenties, you are probably acting as you will when you are in your forties and fifties in terms of habitual behaviour. For this reason alone it is important to show kids that there are indeed alternatives to automobile transit. I can’t stress enough the importance of letting children ride their bikes, scooters, and skateboards around. Please parents, stop driving to school to pick them up. Let them take public transit or find their own ways home. Nobody wants to steal your kids, you've been conned by fear.
It’s also important to let them develop their culture around these activities. The Art Gallery of Hamilton – while doing good work otherwise – should be ashamed that it’s renovation has alienated skateboarders who used the Irving Zucker plaza by fencing off half the area and enforcing "trespassing" laws when boarders do show up. These kids got exposed to the art that was visible from the outside and which might have given them ideas about their own expressive abilities. Fascist ideas about how spaces should be utilized remove a use of public space by a community, which is the whole meaning of a downtown core. Boarders aren’t the problem with the downtown core; Hamilton’s Aerotropical desire to be the longest highway stripmall in existence is what keeps the core from achieving its potential.

We’ve gotten used to accepting roads as belonging to cars; it is time for pedestrians and human-powered vehicles to take back the streets. Keep your car at home, get some exercise, and learn what a living community really and truly can feel like. It’s nice that at this point in time, we have the freedom to choose whether to drive or not. That luxury is rapidly going to disappear over the next decade and a half.

hamilton, inside and out

leaves



fallout



a bar, after the fallout, with a bit extra kicked in



we were both younger once

George Bush hates people

There’s something pointedly touching about the notion of an otherwise cocky popular musician at the top of their game twitching nervously before their first ‘political’ statement. When Kanye West went off script during an NBC telethon a week and a half ago, the American media presented the first authentic emotional response to Katrina. The second came the following week when, during a live interview on CNN, a passerby told Dick Chaney to go fuck himself. This earnestness spoke volumes about the power and influence of traditional media. It was almost as though the media outlets had opened themselves to become the voice of the people. Almost.

Let’s not blame the Bush administration wholly for this little debacle, even though his evil policies are destroying the country. I’ll be the first to point out that this may sound a little hypocritical coming from a person who published an article with the title George Bush Isn’t Evil. And I stand by this comment to this very day. Once again, he is merely a figurehead, a symbol of the collective ideologies that are driving America into the void. There was little public outcry as the White House slashed the budget of the Army Engineer Corps – you know, those guys who keep the levees operational in New Orleans. Neither did anyone complain when the Environmental Protection Agency had its mandate changed, as private companies decimated thousands of square kilometres of Louisiana’s wetlands, which would have served to absorb a great deal of the flooding (Google “Mr Bill + wetlands”...). Few Americans seem to be questioning the environmental repercussions of their consumptive lifestyles, which serve to promote climate change and increase the likelihood of extreme weather effects like hurricanes. And nobody questioned the intelligence of cutting governmental programs like disaster management. People enjoyed their tax cuts and their ability to buy bigger cars and more stuff.

In retrospect, all that so called ‘conservative’ fiscal policy smells of so much shit from a dying bull. The public as a political concept is indeed an important thing. Cities get built by people in unison, however randomly and sporadically that may occur. Contrary to the current political zeitgeist of much of North America, they do not get built by corporate strategic policy. On the contrary, corporate policies of late have centred upon raiding the public purse as the last exit strategy for profit margins.

Of course natural disasters can and do happen and are largely outside of our control, and the suffering that precipitates can indeed be tragic and long-lasting. Since civilization tends to operate akin to an archive of information, it seems appropriate to use the wealth of such knowledge and productivity to mitigate against the consequences of such disasters when they do happen.

There has been much talk in the press about why state and federal authorities did not adequately prepare for Katrina, a storm which had been well tracked by meteorological officials for several days. It was widely known that an exceptionally massive category 5 hurricane would hit the Gulf coast and make landfall. And yet no preparations were made. No sandbags or national guardsmen were deployed. No emergency food or medical supplies were stockpiled for rapid dissemination. Instead, the citizens of Louisiana were given the gold ol’ American spirit of independence. Official strategy: good luck and god bless, but to each their own.

When that strategy of independence, ie: brute survival, turned on the American dream of law and due process, adherents were called “looters” and criminals, and were immediately placed under martial law. How dare they take what is not their’s, we were told by the news media. The consequence of this action was not solely the deaths of several looters – ie black people, white looters being called ‘scavengers’ and ‘finders’ – but also Kanye West’s vitriolic response. Hey, desperate people do desperate things; that’s the reason why public institutions are needed. If funded properly, they serve to keep people from being as desperate as they might be on their own.

Ah, looting; there’s the rub. Remembering the joyful operations in Iraq, Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco – hey, Blanco likes black people, right? – issued the following warning to ‘looters’: “These troops are fresh back from Iraq. They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary.” That’s right. While every public service that citizens depend on has been cut back to the gristle, Americans should feel secure in the knowledge that their National Guard will protect them.

After the political fallout of governmental inaction, the horrors that the Bush administration has in store for Louisiana are becoming ever more clear. First volley: the biggest reconstruction contracts are going to the Shaw Group and Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. The companies who are “reconstructing” war-torn Iraq are also going to make millions of dollars reconstructing Louisiana and Mississippi. Nobody should second-guess the priorities of this administration when it was announced that the first projects of reconstruction are naval bases and corporate properties.

Second volley: Bush suspended a Depression-era bill which protects worker wages for governmental contracts. This would allow the companies mentioned above to pay their workers minimum wage for their services, rather than the market rates for construction and related projects.

So to summarize: the Bush admin thinks that the free market is the best solution to governmental projects and consequently guts public institutions, then uses its power of legislation to alter the free market to ameliorate the profit potential of the companies involved. Can you guess who are the winners in this strategy?

Maybe I’m woefully amateur to be saying so, but how about a program which provides the people of Louisiana the resources to build their own communities back up. If they are being fed and sheltered, they would probably jump all over the employment opportunity. Obviously not everyone can help, but I’m sure that many among the hundreds of thousands of newly dispossessed would be willing to help reconstruct their cities as best as they could.

Instead, a few private companies get to gain; their commission is the misery of half a million people. The enormous costs of reconstruction are being added directly to the deficit, already bloated beyond belief by the cost of military operations in the Middle East. My own cynical armchair interpretation of the economic situation in the States is that the Bush administration wants to force the country into a recession. As the economic situation worsens in America, fewer people might be in opposition to the possibility of conscription into military theatres.

But again, that’s me flying off the handle. Bush is doing the best job that he can, which is to be the mirror-as-leader for America. People don’t want to pay taxes. They distrust governmental programmes and want the best opportunities to improve their own economic situations, community spirit be damned. That spirit of America was shown in full force with the preparedness and response to Hurricane Katrina, which the day after the hurricane saw the President strumming his guitar like Nero while Rome burned.

As a fun non-sequitur, Katrina is serving as a nice media diversion from the fact that a little piece of paper entitled “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” is reaching final approval from Donald Rumsfeld. It would allow a preemptive nuclear strike against whoever the White House deems a threat, and “revises the discussion of nuclear weapons use across the range of military operations.” Maybe they’re thinking that the use of nuclear arms would deter further hurricanes from stupidly and arrogantly threatening the U.S. Take that, Hurricane Iraq!

Xiu Xiu - La Forêt

Xiu Xiu
La Forêt
[5 Rue Christine, 2005]

Jamie Stewart is perhaps the most casually adept musician to ever sing delightfully sad songs. His albums usually sound best soon after feeling the consequences of chance unknowns that destroy the best of intentions. Many of his songs veer into gestures of melancholic self-immolation. Stewart's voice is frequently the only melodic anchor which retains any of the sentimental fetishism typical of pop. Bursts of noise bloom and open chromatically as the chorus enters throughout "Muppet Face" while, near the three minute mark, Stewart is milking doo-wop bliss for all its subconscious cabaret. "Ale" is chamber pop recontextualized as hazy and melodramatic.

Many of the songs on this album sound fragile. "Dangerous You Shouldn't Be Her" is as delicate and partial as a memory, underscored with bright and subtle instrumental undertones. You do have to work a bit to discover the many pleasures of this music, but if you stay with La Forêt you can really begin to enjoy Stewart's labyrinthian melodrama.

MP3: Xiu Xiu - Ale

all you have to do to make a map is walk around and draw what you see

Folding myself into what I wanted to be had gone wonderfully.

I had come to the bar seeking solace in a new woman, and as with everything else I did I had arrived too late. Far too late, even considering my usual standards. There was neither bartender nor bar available. I looked at my phone for the time. 3:12, long after last call. My spit came course and vitriolic. There was no way I was going to ever see her again, I thought. I walked back home. The sun came up before I went to bed.

* * * * * *

A slight and hazy buzz opened in my ears, and my eyes stayed shut. A hell of a tragic consequence, it screamed in multiphonic valency. I muttered a short prayer for the dismissal of this sound and pulled what was left of my jacket over my face. I tried to sleep for another two hours and failed miserably. The buzz kept growing insistent, so I decided to get out of my apartment as quickly as possible.

There was method to this. Putting water on my face was my absolution; staring into my pores in the mirror over the sink my penance. Coffee always left me wanting and jittery. Such is the body of Our Lord.

The walk to the studio was always my favourite part of the day. Certainly it was better than the work itself, which covered me inside and out with plaster dust and left my hands rough and a little withered.

There was never a way to pass the food stands in the Chinese district without talking to Xien. Most of the time he was waiting outside his store, watching his employees shuffle produce from basket to bin, watching it all happen. It was like he knew the streets were full of flesh but empty of skeletons – maybe he thought that conversations restored bodies whole.

“Mr. Handel, I want you to try my kiwis today. Sweetest of the year! This load will be here three days, until Wednesday. They bring back energy like sleeping. You want to try?” He handed me a slice from the fruit in his left hand while cursing the blade in his other. I was beginning to understand Mandarin, but would never be able to have anything but an uncivil conversation with anybody.

I ate the slice and thanked Xien.

“So how’s your ladyfriend? What was her name, Sarah?” Somehow without paying any attention to what he was doing, every kiwi and apple sitting in the bins in front of him became perfectly organized in under thirty seconds. I thought for a second that maybe I should hire him for the studio. A man with such a meticulous unconscious would be a good moulder or detailer. Too bad the studio wasn’t really making money from our current labours.

“She’s doing ok, Xien. We’re not together anymore.” I picked up two kiwis and an apple and motioned that I wanted to pay.

“So sorry to hear! Maybe it’s for the best. You look happier.” He didn’t smile at all when he said that. In truth I was happier.

“I don’t know about that. We had a good thing. Then I started working again.”

“Keep working hard, Mr. Handel. Good way to keep a mind together. My grandpa was in the war, eh? They worked him like dogs, and here I am!” Xien looked me straight in the eye while I handed him the coins for the fruit. I opened my backpack and put the kiwis next to some bananas that I had picked up two days before. They weren’t really edible anymore, but still brought a good weight to my bag. Health by osmosis, I guess.

“I’m going to get a new tattoo for my back.” I thought he was going to take off his shirt, but he patted his right shoulder blade instead. “A poem by Li Po, in characters. ‘We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains.’ What do you think?”

“I think that joy and suffering are all that remains. But a mountain will do. That’s pretty, Xien. How big are you going to get it?” I begin to spin the small apple that I had purchased over my knuckles, failed after two attempts, and watched it bruise on the pavement.

“Oh, you want another one? It’s ok, I have lots to give!” Xien handed me another and I thanked him. “Keep dropping them and I’ll sell you more!” He laughed. I thanked him again and continued walking.

There was no way I would get much done at work today, I thought. It was a good thing I owned the place, although I was getting ready to fire myself for gross incompetence. Both Neil and Jodie were there to greet my arrival. They were working on the mantel for the wall of the fake castle that was our commission. It was almost finished – maybe another two or three days – and I knew that I had done little to help.

“Hey Jordan, where the fuck have you been all afternoon? It’s already after three!” Neil was painting rock details and had to remove the breather from his face to speak. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw that it was twelve minutes after three. Nothing clicked.

“Rough night, thanks for asking.” I grabbed my own mask and set to the other side of the wall, which was still rough, undetailed plaster. It looked like I had a good nine hours in front of me.

After three hours, I broke down to let the plaster dry. Neil joined me out back, and after a few minutes of useless small talk, he produced a spinner. We smoked in silence, then returned to work. An hour passed before anybody spoke.

“So how was your date with Becky last night? I don’t want the bullet points, but from the look of your tired face it was a good one.” Neil’s face was twisted smiley like any well-stoned bastard.

“I fucked it up. Don’t want to talk about it.”

“C’mon. I’m not going to let this go! It’s been what, three months since Sarah? Time for some movin’ and groovin’ buddy.”

“Look, she wasn’t there. I fucked up. Let’s forget about it.” I put my breather back on.

“What, you were handed the prettiest girl in Kensington and you didn’t even get there on time?”

I looked over at Jodie, who seemed oblivious to the fact that she was the only one working. I took the pretense of a breather from off my face. “Don’t worry about it. Sinking ships are better forgotten.”

“Whatever.”

We sat in silence for almost a minute before I got up to use the washroom.

* * * * * *

The walk home was brisk that night. August sometimes did that to you. There was a street parade of drunken students enjoying their last week of freedom. I didn’t mind the pyjamas they wore, but the noise of their joyful tantrums averted my gaze too much. I took a back alley to get away from it all.

One thing about alleys that I have always loved is their containment. Escape without an exit. Garbage kept you on path, but the buildings seemed to want to deny you passage, even when you could see the street ahead. Then there were the unexpectedly frequent and random encounters with people who, unlike when they are in the street, never seemed to want anything from you. I liked that purity. It was contagious, and like a disease there was no way to turn it off.

I wanted certain memories to come back to me, the ones that I had used periodically to restrain myself. I could afford them that night, being spent from the day. All of Sarah was present, every inch and every movement. I wanted to reach out to her, to force that immanence into my pores. I fell asleep with the gratification of the flesh rendered mortal.

* * * * * *

Waking from such dreams without a hangover was always tragic. It was comforting to be pained when you had spent the night in grace. A headache gave you something to accomplish, something to hope for, something to remember your time with. Once she had been gloriously Sarah, and now there was a glorious absence. What a glorious morning. All of my dirty mantras had remained intact. Waking up sober was the least healthy thing to do at that point, and I was resolved to never let it happen again.

The bed stand was covered in wasps. They had swarmed around the backpack which I had left there the night before. There must have been a few dozen, coagulating on the bag filled rotten. It was for moments like this that they worked to elevate a queen. I sat on the edge of my bed and counted. Some were inside the bag, some hovered peacefully. I felt like all my lovers were coming out of me simultaneously to walk on my grave.

I got up and went to work not forgetting my morning mass. This time, it was extended with the additional cleansing of a sacrament made holy by the applications of thirty insects.

* * * * * *

We finished the wall as well as the roof of the castle. Neon Lit Holes would get their masterpiece after all. I called the store to let them know the good news. They promised a cheque by Monday. I promised to pay Neil and Jodie on Tuesday, and they left for the weekend. I sat in the studio and thought about Sarah. She was gossamer in front of me for three hours, then I woke to find it was early into the next day. I wiped sweat from my face and got out of the windowless incandescence of the studio.

It was sunny, so I bought a watermelon from Xien’s stall. Xien wasn’t there, so I also bought some pears and bread from a stall across the street. I talked to another customer about why my clothes were covered in various substances before I decided to hit the bar.

The Bishop Ryan was one of those bars that made you want to look under the floorboards. I drank five pints in silence. Nobody except the waitress bothered me. She was pretty. At the end of the last pint, I realized what had happened. Over the four hours of my stay, I had come to observe about thirty people whose lives seemed unaffected by each other. As sudden as a decade that passes under your feet, I realized that I had begun to seek the same thing as they did. I was a complainer whose silence was liquor. But in a way I had beaten the system. This kind of loneliness had a habit of not turning on a person until it was far too late to do anything about it. Time was irrelevant when you wanted to age like wine in a dingy bar. Conversations, if they occurred, were always villainous, and you felt yourself entertained by the misery of it all. It was this vicarious joy that really oppressed me. It felt like a curtain obscuring your view of the sea. I knew that was what I had been after, this isolation from immensities that made one whole, and that thought offended me.

I paid my tab and left to go back to the studio.

* * * * * *

New project. What would keep me sane, otherwise?

I started a few ideas, and I was pretty sure that their failure was that I wasn’t restricting myself to paint. There were too many obstructions in other media. Paint fell under your control very quickly, and I felt pleased by my progress. I worked quickly through the weekend, taking breaks periodically at the Bishop to let the thing dry a bit while working feverishly on my alcoholism. I finally went to bed shortly before six Tuesday morning.

The rest of the day almost never happened. I woke shortly before eleven in the evening, confessed, and went into the studio. There was a short delay in my clarity as I fumbled the keys on the lock. I cursed my headache and finally got the door open. Neil’s shoes were on the floor. It hadn’t rained in three weeks, but I noticed that he had covered them in mud. Fuck, I thought. I had forgotten to get money for him and Jodie.

“So I rounded up the shit you left around.” Neil walked casually into the front hallway, where I was stumbling to get myself together. He was eating from a tub of ice cream, and seemed to be enjoying the fact that he didn’t plan on offering any of it.

“Neil, I’ll admit right now I can’t pay you guys until tomorrow. There was a burst of activity that kept me here, and I didn’t get to the bank.”

“It’s ok. I saw your piece. It’s cool. Your reds are fantastic.” He wiped something from his hands onto his apron.

“I can’t remember much except the face, which is blue. Ok, if you think that it works.”

“I don’t see anything figurative there. Changing schools a bit? That’s cool.”

“I dunno. Things are pretty clear to me right now, and I think portraits without people being depicted immediately there is what I want, you know. I’m sick of looking at people.” I took off my glasses and wiped my face. I had spent the weekend in a bar, and now I was expected to hold a conversation. “Listen, I’m going to work on a few more, like for a set or something. Can I just come over to your place tomorrow and pay you. Maybe we can go out with Jodie for a coffee or something.”

I pushed past him and went into the workspace.

“Whatever, I’ll get out of here in a minute.” Apparently I had stretched more canvas than I remembered, so that saved me a night’s work. Neil was coming in and out of the workspace. I saw him grab a few of his pieces and put them into a basket. He said goodnight, then left in his truck.

* * * * * *

It took me only a few days to finish two more pieces. It was cool that I finished them in the first week of the month, because that meant that I could still do some real work for the rest and not lose too much cash when the bills hit. I had a few backlogged to July, so we could finish those up and get paid again. The work was pedestrian, but it paid well enough that I didn’t really have to worry about anything from thanksgiving until the end of the year. Then Sarah called. She wished me happy holidays, and told me that she had breast cancer.

* * * * * *

We cried together for a few minutes, and then she told me which hospital was looking after her. I didn’t sleep at all that night, and finally they let me into the hospital in the morning. Sarah wasn’t sleeping either.

“You look well,” she said as she tried to sit up. Her breathing was forced. There was a cross around her neck. I wasn’t sure, but I think it belonged to her mother.

“So do you.” Already it was a sinking ship, and we both knew that we could always find the joys of firing canons at each other. I sat beside her bed.

“Thanks for coming over. You were an ass to me, but I wanted you to be here.” She smiled as much as she could. I tried to laugh, but couldn’t find the breath to do it properly.

“You were never any good at being anywhere, and here you are.”

“Well, I really did want it to work, Sarah.”

She laughed quietly for a second, then turned. “Nothing works anymore, Jordan.”

“Sarah...”

“No I mean it. Nothing. Everything’s malignant. My bones are weak, my lungs are dying. I don’t really eat anything.” I had nothing to say, so I just held her hand and looked out the window. Flames from the industrial part of town made the early morning sky radiant in red and blue.

“I love you”

“You know there’s no way I can talk about that now.”

“Jordan...” Her voice grew course, and she started coughing. “They told me that no matter what, I won’t be able to have kids anymore.”

I started to cry. I knew then that I would be with her always.

* * * * * *

Money extra than my bills never really appealed to me, so I took time off work and concentrated on my paintings. I quickly learned that it didn’t take that much longer to work on five paintings at once as it did fifteen, so I decided to take the whole workspace to myself and work as quickly as possible. Neil and Jodie came into the studio to work, but were usually unable to find space. We talked sometimes, but for the most part I could ignore them. Then they stopped coming altogether.

It was late December. Susan's funeral had passed, and the snows had come.

I finished almost three hundred paintings before the sudden disappearance of wasps from my apartment left me naked and confused.

* * * * * *

There was no other way to deal with the situation. I took all three hundred of my paintings and chaotically piled them in the middle of the workspace. They stacked almost all the way to the roof. Fifteen feet of canvas, oil, random objects, and wood was enough to demonstrate my intentions. The weight of it all tore into the canvas on the pieces near the bottom. One of the frames broke and pulled the torn canvas with it.

You really couldn’t see much except the randomness of it all, so I walked over to the front of the space and wrote Erasure in black marker over the inside of the doorway and Portraits over the outside.

I called Neil and told him to come over with a bunch of friends. “We’re having an opening,” I said.

Then I sat on the floor in silence outside of the workspace, and looked in. Sarah was sitting cross-legged and in thought on the pile of paintings, as beautiful and gossamer as always. It was exactly the way we met, smiling and ready for each other.

George Bush sure does like to party, southern-style

George W. Bush enjoys a tune, the day after Hurricane Katrina did it's thang.

Hey, just because tens of thousands of people are currently living under stressful times, that doesn't mean that the President should alter his schedule any. Plus, aren't those people still stuck in New Orleans mostly poor and non-caucasian?

All I Want is a better DVD than this one, Rufus Wainwright

Rufus Wainwright
All I Want
[Universal, 2005]

I have to get this bias of mine out of the way right now: I hate singer-songwriters, especially sensitive ones. They piss me off beyond belief. That being said, I do understand the power that they have over most music fans, especially ones who don’t actually listen to anything beyond lyrics.

With All I Want, fans get access to the Wainwright ‘legend’ through interviews with friends and family – some of whom are other contractually-bound musicians like Elton John, Sting, and the Scissor Sisters – home videos from Rufus’s childhood in Montreal, and lots and lots of discussion about sex. Wainwright freely admits to a rabidly licentious sex life, particularly during the period of his life when crystal meth dominated his party life. There’s a lot of talk about Rufus’s music, but we don’t actually get much beyond the occasional album track and 30-second performance clip that serves to tie interviews together.

That last note should prove the direction that this DVD has taken in presenting its subject. All I Want is a biopic and not a performance piece. There is almost the bare minimum of live performances as required on a DVD about a musician. As well, despite the superficially contentious issues that are raised – homosexuality, drug addiction, sexual decadence, and emotionally distant family members – there is absolutely nothing to analyse or dissect, no ‘story-behind-the-story’. With no critical insight, all we are left with is a self-congratulatory group-hug of Universal artists. All I want is a better DVD than this one.

Drive Well, Play Boring

Death Cab For Cutie
Drive Well, Sleep Carefully
[Plexifilm/Sonic Unyon, 2005]

Thanks in part to several well-placed TV gigs and soundtrack appearances, Death Cab have seen their fame rise exponentially since their formation in 1997. Since then, 4 albums and a couple EPs have been released to the rabid consumption of college kids everywhere. As well, the band has followed a pretty relentless international touring schedule. All that work has paid off, as their last full-length Transatlanticism sold well enough to land the band on Atlantic records for their next full-length.

This DVD ably captures the Seattle quartet during their 2004 tour of the States, juxtaposing intimate at-home interviews with live footage. Director Justin Mitchell wisely chose to document the band using a 16-mm Bolex camera, which results in a lush visual artefact of indie music determination. Mitchell’s camerawork is perhaps the strongest point of the disc, and indeed should be essential viewing for anyone wanting to make a documentary interesting.

Fans should note that Death Cab doesn’t really change their songs from show to show, or from album to performance, which doesn’t really lend them to memorable live shows. Not that this point should dissuade anybody from picking up Drive Well, as the DVD does indeed accomplish its purpose. In addition to the doc, 40 minutes of additional performances, interviews, rehearsals, and unreleased songs pad out the extras.

Death Cab prove themselves to be one of the most professional touring bands in music – no drug addictions, no egotrips, no tour-stop girlfriends, no cursing, no fist fights. This positive work ethic does indeed keep the band on track, but will never elevate them from beyond being, well, cute.

Turning Oil into Trees

Last week the U.S. made it clear that it was no longer going to abide by NAFTA. Since the late 1980s, many critics have argued that NAFTA had always been intended as a one-way deal, with the majority of benefits going to American business interests.

The issue at hand is of course Canada’s long-standing complaint concerning the importation duties that United States trade officials imposed on many wood exports. The most recent – which the BC government, who must have a quotient of horror film aficionados on staff ready for every requisite press release, so brilliantly names ‘Lumber IV’, commenced in May of 2002. At the time, it was argued that Canada was illegally subsidizing lumber production. Since then roughly $5 billion in anti-dumping and countervailing tariffs has been collected from the Canadian Forestry Industry.

Canada has made numerous appeals to both the NAFTA legislating body and the World Trade Organization, and so far every single appeal – except, of course, one done by the U.S. in the U.S. – has demonstrated that Canadian lumber is not being dumped at illegal price levels. Each of these legal actions has demonstrated that the States is acting illegally in collecting duties.

So what has changed recently? Well, for starters Canada won another appeal, this time adjudicated by the very cool sounding NAFTA Extraordinary Challenge Committee. U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman’s stated “We are, of course, disappointed with the ECC’s decision, but it will have no impact on the antidumping and countervailing duty orders given the ITC’s November 2004 injury determination. We continue to have concerns about Canadian pricing and forestry practices.”

In my mind, the issue follows a simple supply model. Canada has a lot of space for a lot of trees. Thanks to urban sprawl, industrial growth, and a tenfold higher population, the United States simply cannot compete with Canada on a tree for tree basis. Obviously, any business which has a controlling interest over raw resources will be able to operate more cheaply. Moreover, despite some ecological nightmares that continue to occur in Canadian forestry, the industry up here has more environmental protections in place than do their southern counterparts, largely due to the early realization that the healthy re-growth of forests results in a more profitable industry. The principal issue the U.S. has with Canadian forestry practices is that our Crown land is cheaper than competing tracts of land in the States. This stance ignores the fact that most land in the U.S. is more expensive than in Canada. Again, let me refer you to the tenfold higher population, the smaller country, and the so-called open-market system. Few people live in Northern British Columbia or North-Western Ontario (I don’t meant North Bay, I mean north of Armstrong), and consequently land prices are fairly low in comparison to, say, Washington State.

More importantly than the U.S. reaction – which we should frankly just come to accept as the manner in which they do business – is that of our own government. All of a sudden, the Liberals seem to have a spine in regard to Lumber IV. First they called off trade negotiations for the simple reason that you cannot bargain with people who don’t abide by trade agreements. Furthermore, today Industry Minister David Emerson spoke about efforts to retaliate: “I have a background from my younger days in hockey. When somebody slammed you into the boards with undue force and aggression, you took their number. I think we've got to take their number." So what number is being taken, specifically? Nothing has yet been announced, but Emerson mentioned that Ottawa is seeking to list a number of American exports that will have duties applied “without serious damage to the Canadian economy and, hopefully, with maximum impact in the U.S.”

Sadly, Emerson was quick to rule out the resource with the most pressing potential to the American economy. By imposing exportation duties onto Canadian oil reserves heading for the U.S., as NDP leader Jack Layton had initially proposed, the American population would quickly notice the results at the pumps. This would have a double effect. The duties would cause the average American to begin to think about why the country’s gas prices are so high, and if Canada played the PR game properly, a great deal of pressure could be exerted. Additionally, it would cause many northern U.S. residents to cross the border into Canada to buy gas, much like Canadians were doing in the late 1980s. This would allow gas tourists to see what a nice country it is up here, with all of our pretty trees.

The reasoning behind Canada’s refusal to restrict oil supply to the States is largely provincial, in that the Albertan economy would be “unfairly targeted” (maybe you should tell that sob story to east coasters, oil ranchers…). Realistically speaking however, every country on the planet needs a hell of a lot of oil, and China or India in particular would love to get a piece of Alberta’s black gold. But of course, that means Alberta’s oil industry might have to actually do some work to promote itself, instead of just opening the floodgates to our southern neighbours.

Out of all of this, normal Americans might start to get news reports concerning the vast amounts of oil that are just north of them, and wonder why they can’t get it as cheaply as other nations. As oil supplies continue to restrict towards the end of the decade, Canada’s oil supply could prove to be the biggest bargaining chip that the country has against the We-Set-Our-Own-Rules American government. And anyway, what are they going to do? Invade us to get our oil? Put pressure on Alberta to secede from the country? The U.S. just doesn’t (*cough* Venezuela) ever (*cough* Iraq *cough*) do that sort of thing.





NAFTA ECC ruling on U.S. appeal of previous NAFTA rulings

BC government site concerning the dispute

Montréal, la belle bête

why don't those christians who are crazy learn to read???

I got myself into a little argument the other day. I was sitting outside talking with a friend, and within the confines of our conversation, I said "there's another of those goddamn Hummers" as one passed in front of us. This otherwise intelligent looking young dude comes over to me and asked why I took the "Lord's" name in vain. I responded that I was pissed off that people could pollute the earth with little or no consequence to themselves. That set him off.

"Isn't blasphemy pollution?" he asked.

I agreed that it was, but first of all, I don't believe that there is a god or gods in existence. Second, I asked him why he thought a word had the same power of blasphemy as, say, incest, theft, or murder. Or burning churches or something.

"It's one of the commandments, and we must follow god's law."

I asked if he believed that a god could speak through translation. After all, the "word of God" has come to us from many seperate translations of ancient texts that were lost, recopied, transliterated, mistranslated, or modified to suit the contemporary needs of the translator. Is it not then man's laws that we are talking about? Isn't it vain and overly proud to speak as though one knows "God's" intentions. After all, since this god of the christian tradition is supposed to be beyond human understanding -- hence the need for faith above reason -- then how can a single individual attempt to speak in its stead?

"The word of God is holy," and so he sat down beside us.

Ok, but what is the word of God? I asked. I thought that the word of God is creation, as evidenced by old testament scripture in Genesis. Consequently, to blaspheme is to do damage to creation, as in what the science tells us about the excessive oil consumption demonstrated by the Hummer.

So taking the earth's health in vain is to take the Lord's name in vain, under my reading of Christian doctrine. But hey, I'm no Christian.

"It's pretty clear to me. You can't swear, or it's a sin," he said.

So I asked if it was a greater sin to actually wreck the earth, rather than to utter a few frequencies that under a certain linguistic tradition can mean a reference to god (that my statement actually referred to the christian or any other god is itself questionable, but I don't want to get into semiotics here...). Would a being who had the power to create and destroy all of creation really be worried about a few words???

Scientific evidence tells me that our actions are more important in terms of damaging creation. While I certainly could have used any combination of words to parlay my disgust towards wasteful and ecologically damaging decisions that humans make, I still feel justified in damning the Hummer to a god's fury. After all, we do seem to be messing with the earth's biosphere pretty substantially, and in fact seem to be attempting to usurp the power of god or gods in that respect.

So this pious little Christian said he would pray for my soul, and walked away. In passing I asked if he could pick up a few pop cans that he passed and deposit them in the recycle bin at the end of the street. He ignored me.

Good works, Christian saviour. What would Jesus have done in a similar situation? Jesus would have picked up the fucking cans.

Gotta love superstitions, like how they stop people from actually thinking about things. That's great. Goddamn great, in fact.

Wolf Parade EP

Wolf Parade
EP
(Sub Pop, 2005)

Montreal has seen a fair amount of type in the indie music press, and has quickly come into its own as Canada's musical hotspot (sorry T.O.). Wolf Parade are an M-PQ 4-piece who were given opening slots for Modest Mouse and The Arcade Fire, primarily on the strength of their CBC Radio sessions late last year. This teaser 4-track EP presents two songs from the band's forthcoming full-length, to be released in September, along with two more indie-pop friendly anthems. Opener "Shine A Light" is easily the strongest track, with its upbeat keyboards swirling into each other and a hint of Bowie in the vocal delivery. Keep an eye on these kids.

MP3: Wolf Parade - Shine A Light

The Juan Maclean - Less Than Human

The Juan Maclean
Less Than Human
(DFA/EMI, 2005)

Dance music has come a long way since disco, baby. House music grew over the 1980s to become the dominant form. Certainly, 90s rave culture helped popularize house with mainstream audiences, but DJ-mixCD overkill quickly sapped any creative gestures the genre had achieved to that point. At the same time, those were very fun years for all involved. The faux-electro beats and syncopated house rhythms that permeate Less Than Human indicate that Juan Maclean would agree. Non-cheesy synth stabs and slinky, rolling basslines will keep your ass moving in those tight pants, while subdued live instrumentation and drum programming keeps things interesting for home listening. While not a groundbreaking release, this CD will certainly make fans of Berlin and Detroit techno perk up their ears.

MP3: The Juan MacLean - Shining Skinned Friend

Photophobia 7

Film has traditionally been a tough sell in the city. Until the opening of The Movie Palace on Concession last year, the only venues for rep and avant-garde cinema in the city had been the AGH film series and a few screenings at the (now highly missed) Staircase Café. Adding insult to injury, the major theatre chains in the area have tended to avoid Canadian and foreign films, and even refused to exhibit many of the more interesting higher-profile films coming from America. Cinephiles in Hamilton have been relegated to other theatres in other towns, usually springing for Guelph or Toronto for their fix.

Out of this cinematic void sprung the idea for an outdoor screening festival highlighting short-length work by regional film producers, as well as challenging short work from the rest of the country and elsewhere. With the help of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton Artists Inc., and the Hamilton and Region Arts Council, Chris and Paul Shannon launched Photophobia in 1999. Over the years, Photophobia has grown in both audience numbers and national and international visibility.

This year’s outing is a three day event beginning with an August 8 screening of the fascinating documentary In the Realms of the Unreal at The Movie Palace. This richly textured film examines the phantasmagoric work of legendary outsider artist Henry Darger, a reclusive janitor who over the course of his life produced a fantasy world in painting and text that rivals the works of Blake or Bosch for its hallucinatory shamanism.

The short film and video screenings will be done August 11 at Photophobia’s traditional location, the newly-renovated Irving Zucker Sculpture Garden at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Both the open-air concept and the open-admission (pay what you can) policy should appeal to both die hard Photophobes and casual passers-by equally. Fifteen films were selected among 270 submissions from around the world. Open-air venues for cinema tend to encourage a more relaxed and social atmosphere than the darkly incubating confines of the indoor theatre. As a further and somewhat unconscious endeavour, events like Photophobia serve to demystify the downtown core, which has traditionally been seen as a dangerous and drug-filled place at night. Community events and art-driven activity are among the most reliable factors which could dispel that fear and bring Hamilton residents back to the core from their suburban somnambulism.

This year’s musical element has been expanded to encompass its own night on August 12 at Hamilton Artists Inc. Beginning with a screening of video work at 7 pm, local musicians including Battleship Ethel and Cadillac Bill will then integrate their audio explorations with film and video work presented by a number of south-western Ontario artists who work in collaboration with The Factory, Hamilton’s most prominent video and film collective.

Claire Meldrum, artistic co-ordinator at The Factory and member of the selection committee for this year’s festival, talked about how many of this year’s selections concern themselves with the degree to which humanity has interpollinated itself with technology. “Many of the films express a feeling of disconnection felt by individuals living with the challenges of an increasingly technological society. Some of the artists embrace technology, and others deconstruct or critique, say, the environmental or identity issues that come with living with technology.”

Arguably, film and video work signify the interdependence of humans with technology better than most media forms. Not only is the cinematic process highly dependent on technological developments, which frequently dictate not only aesthetic concerns but thematic ones as well, but the process of consuming media is dependent on the technologies of presentation. Ironically, “people can be more comfortable with new media,” Meldrum admits. “New media is an inherently social phenomenon, and watching is almost “easy”, so you can get away with tougher subjects” than you can in painting or sculpture. “I think the public thinks that it’s about time for new venues for this kind of thing in the city. Media arts are quickly reaching a critical mass in this city. There’s more awareness, more festivals and screenings. And I think that Hamilton has a highly educated and interested audience community which is key to the success of things like [Photophobia].”

Ian Jarvis, one of the Factory’s directors as well as a member of the Photophobia selection committee, agrees, adding that film festivals such as this meet the social needs of local residents. “With Photophobia, we’ve focusing on a diverse selection of films, representing different classes, races, orientations, and ages. All of the films are struggling to come to terms with the alienating aspects of technology. Film and video kind of bridges that gap, using high-tech to get people to meet again” to watch the films.

With declining box-office sales, it seems that the avant-garde community is not alone in trying to get people out of the comfort of their home theatres. “I think more and more people are getting bored with the blockbusters,” Jarvis quips. Fewer and fewer filmgoers are finding satisfaction with the traditional theatrical experience, preferring the couch-and-fridge convenience of home viewing. As well, the formulaic nature of such commercial films tends to downplay any sense of authenticity or connection that an audience may feel toward the film or its subjects. Instead, many commercial films attempt to blind the viewer’s senses and discourage active interpretation with an overpowering sense of awe: big explosions, big melodrama, big dialog. Photophobia is an attempt to encourage a different model for community within film audiences. “We’re trying to shop at home, looking at regional artists and local cultural stuff. And that gives you a personal touch that I feel lacking in most commercial films. I mean, it’s always nicer when someone bakes you cookies than when they bring home a fast-food meal.”

Let the technology of the home-baked Photophobic goods seduce you, beginning at dusk in the open-air of downtown Hamilton.

Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

Sufjan Stevens
Illinois
Asthmatic Kitty, 2005

Multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens has released several albums over the past five years, with each getting better than the last. Much like his last foray into his project to musically document all 50 of the US states – 2003’s Michigan – Stevens’s new CD is a wonder of lush arrangements and complex songwriting. There is a massive outpouring of joy on every track, with positive lyrics and intoxicating melodies that will keep your body moving and your heart singing.

A few minutes into “Come on! Feel the Illinoise”, Sufjan follows a decent keyboard solo with a passionate yet subdued cathartic moment about crying himself to sleep. If you do not feel your pulse with “Chicago” or “Jacksonville”, then maybe it’s time to give up on collecting records. His lyrics – serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Bible studies, and a girl with bone cancer – are infused with a poignancy that, while not entirely poetic, are certainly touching. All this may sound a little too syrupy, but consider the notion that maybe it’s time for indie music to drop the irony it wears on its cuff and join the joyous rebellion against mediocre music fuelled by band egos. Put Illinois on your stereo over breakfast and let the day open before you.

MP3: Sufjan Stevens - Jacksonville

Steve Mazza - Out of Character (inaction figures)

transit gallery, Hamilton ON 07.19 - 08.28

Flying on Fumes: the plan to bring Hamilton into the 1950s

There have been some interesting recent developments in Hamilton's urban development strategy. The city expects a 20% swell in Hamilton’s population by 2030, with most of the new development envisioned to use the land around the airport. In a nod to B-grade sci-fi movies of the early 1950s, the umbrella term for this development is the Aerotropolis. This business technocrat’s nostalgic wet dream will apparently house 150,000 while employing 50,000. Hamilton airport will be the locus for this project, and will serve as the centre of a network of highways that will increase traffic flows between the Buffalo-Niagara region and the GTA.

The impetus for development seems to be the more family-friendly nature of real estate in Hamilton, as well as the city’s central location relative to nearby urban centres. City planners believe that new residents will flock to Hamilton in order to avoid the high cost of living in Toronto and its neighbouring suburbs. This belief is preceded by two other acts of faith: 1. that Hamilton real estate prices will stay low, and 2. that the price of transportation will also stay low.

So what is this about our low real estate costs in Hamilton? It is true that you can purchase a home in Hamilton for about 2/3 what it would cost in Toronto and maybe 4/5 of its cost in Oakville or Mississauga. Yet, these lower costs have everything to do with the fact that Hamilton skilfully avoided the economic boom of the mid to late 1990s that fuelled the real estate markets of those municipalities. Smart development has begun to reverse that trend to some degree. Many analysts have stated that due to extensive condo development, Toronto, for example, has cooled off as a real estate market, and prices for homes in several areas have actually dropped since 2002.

If Hamilton were indeed to become a hotspot for development, doesn’t it follow that housing prices will increase to match the extra money flowing into the city? Furthermore, we should question what increased property values would mean to Hamilton’s many lower-income families. The increase in property values associated with a booming suburban development would likely mean the continued marginalization of the downtown core.

The development requirements associated with sprawl include more infrastructure than just highways – roads and sidewalks, water and sewage, electricity, garbage collection, education, health and law enforcement services, etc. Currently, property taxes remain high downtown despite the relative weakness of the local economy in relation to suburban shopping centres such as the Meadowlands. Subsidies have been maintained to encourage business development in outlying regions of Hamilton. At the same time, the city must realize its operating budget from somewhere, and consequently core residents currently bear a majority of the tax burden.

The second and perhaps more prescient issue to consider in the aerotropolis debate is of course energy consumption. As has been pointed out in much of the local press, the city’s plan for development requires a high degree of cheap and accessible individual transportation. Increasing dependence on automobiles in order to link car corridors to distant jobs while living and shopping in suburban areas, and ultimately make the aerotropolis plan feasible, requires a cheap and increasing supply of fossil fuels. Additionally, the economic locus of the project – the expansion of the airport itself – requires a boom in the airline industry. As for being cheap, anyone can tell you that oil prices are going in only one direction.

What about all this oil talk? Sure, it’s almost de rigour to belittle oil these days, with opinions on oil’s links to war, terror, and economic subservience finding much ink in the press. Many people quickly tire of the discussion. But one thing both sides should be able to agree on is that as a collective, modern countries are exceedingly good at using oil. Better than we have ever been, in fact. We have made the process of extracting and consuming oil so efficient that nearly every human in industrialized countries has access to a decent supply of it whenever they need it (and perhaps more tellingly, even when they don’t). Consequently, we started taking it for granted on the consumer side of things, thus allowing a great deal of waste. Oil producers get rich no matter how much oil is used, and consumers, well, they get to have a socially acceptable substance addiction.

Everyone was winning until that very famous oil crisis of the 1970s, when prices reached a point that rendered cars inaccessible to many North Americans. What was that about anyway? That’s where the concept of peak oil comes into play.

Peak oil refers to the fact that oil production doesn’t "gush" the way that it does in Looney Tunes. Instead, it follows a bell curve, with production starting slowly, quickly accelerating, levelling off, decelerating slowly, then rapidly declining. Naturally, oil is most expensive when you begin or end the process. Peak oil has already occurred in America’s domestic supply: the U.S. was the gold standard for oil production until it peaked at 11 million barrels a day in 1970, and the country has been in rapid decline since, hence its dependence on foreign sources.
Outside of the US Department of Energy, most industry insiders have calculated that the world will reach peak oil production sometime between 2003 (coincidentally enough, that year was the start of the Iraq war) and 2015. From that point onward, there is no way to avoid a vast increase in oil costs.

As a consequence, any process which relies on oil as an energy source is doomed to becoming increasingly and prohibitively expensive. Being the least fuel-efficient form of transportation available to consumers, aeroplanes are simply not the answer to future development. Air travel will likely return to its roots as a hobby for the rich. This is not to suggest that masses of humans will never fly again, just that until we can make flying vehicles using alternative energy sources, reliance on the industry seems to my eyes a logistical nightmare given the world’s declining stocks of oil.

Maybe just for a second I’ll play the devil’s advocate. It is possible to incorporate mass transit into the proposed development plan. Principally, it is now a perfect time for Canada invest in a high-speed rail network in this country. A corridor in southern Ontario would allow commuters to live in Hamilton and work in Windsor, Toronto, or Ottawa without sacrificing the environment to the blight of highways and their resulting air pollution. Canadian companies such as Bombardier could construct the trains and the infrastructure with steel from Hamilton, thus providing some of those proposed 50,000 aerotropolis jobs. Furthermore, to decrease transportation requirements as a whole, it is time to reintegrate work spaces with domestic spaces, which ironically enough is traditionally what city cores have always done. High-density zoning is the key here, so that we do not have to sacrifice our rich local farmlands to treeless suburban driveways and parking lots as suggested by the current aerotropolis plan.

Maybe Aerotropolis really is a nostalgic dream, back to the highway expansions of the 1950s. Let me complete the metaphor. All those little toy spaceships and cars that signify 1950s Americana, well they were made of American metal back then. Their modern counterparts are plastic, manufactured in China, and engineered to be disposable: three characteristics which signal the increased load we have placed upon our oil supplies, and the increased hubris with which urban planners render economic development as a monolithic and unidirectional entity.

Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas

Guardian Unlimited published an interesting article in May which you can find here .

Launch a local awareness campaign by screening the film End of Suburbia .

Even old guard oil producers like Chevron are getting serious about peak oil.

off/end the street

she writes in blank spaces

the walk was surreptitious and silent
and I remembered how it was made:
we had always swept past each other
going to work, or in play resting
intangible and ever volatile
we met looking sideways

once in walking we passed a year
our bigness dwarfed the whole street
i realized then that the way you move
gives title to moments of pleasure
i took your hand and pressed it to my days
marking the calendar on my wall in bald faces

on this Monday we were going to your place
it was a tea that had filled a week, promised
and poured with my cup handed
when i smiled you stopped, then
burning drops went over my hand caressing

i sentenced you to life for that transgression

Keith Fullerton Whitman - Multiples

Keith Fullerton Whitman
Multiples
(Kranky, 2005)

Sometimes nothing makes one feel more absolutely modern than a nod to an obscure antiquity. Best known for the post-drum&bass digital cut-ups of his Hrvatski moniker, KFW has saved much of his more challenging work for his namesake releases. Multiples follows some of the drone-based themes of 2002's Playthroughs, and accordingly requires a bit of patience to be properly digested. Track titles such as ‘Stereo Music for Serge Modular Prototype’ belie Whitman’s dogmatically intellectual approach that appeals to the history of electronic music as a thoroughly academic enterprise. By focussing on the compositional particularities of each instrument afforded by digital editing and processing, Whitman brings the textural beauty of his sounds to the fore. Hypnotic and highly evocative.

MP3: Keith Fullerton Whitman - Stereo Music for Yamaha Disklavier Prototype, Electric Guitar and Computer