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

Stars of the Lid @ The Music Gallery

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


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

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

Gas High

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cursed @ Cashbah

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

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

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

Soundboard audio courtesy of Donny Cooper.

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

Orphx @ New Harbours Music Series

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

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting

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

Polmo Polpo @ New Harbours

Christ's Church Cathedral, April 11, 2008

handheld camera, ambient sound + lighting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which got me to thinking.

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

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

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

ldiianni@cogeco.ca

-----

Mr. Hewlett,

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

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

Regards,

Daniel Lauzon

Directeur adjoint des communications / Deputy Director of Communications

Parti libéral du Canada / Liberal Party of Canada

-----

Quintin,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larry Di Ianni, HESC Candidate

-----

Mr. Di Ianni,

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

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

Poetic exaggeration is key to satire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

q x

-----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

Larry Di Ianni, HESC Candidate

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

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

Overcoming Disciplinary Decadence: A Pedagogical Imperative

Dr. Atif Kubursi - Is Economics Relevant?

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

Is Economics Relevant?

new harbours music series 1 - Polmo Polpo / Orphx

now with myspace goodness:

www.myspace.com/newharbours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

another bullshit night in suck city

Justice Yeldham @ Casbah Lounge

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

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

Steve Mazza - Future Tense, transit gallery

March 4 to March 30, 2008

Exploding Star Orchestra - We Are All From Somewhere Else

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Synonyms: answer, tend, oblige.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.
Of course none of these definitions -- with the possible exception of a loose interpretation of numbers 3. and 6. -- apply to John Baird in relation to the environment.


bairdj@parl.gc.ca>

Honourable John Baird
Minister of the Environment


Dear Minister Baird,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,

Quintin Hewlett

Spectrum @ Virgin Festival

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

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









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

kerosene daydream

MP3: Kerosene Daydream @ PJC, 24.7.07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fuck it. photographs.

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

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

fuck it. photographs.


Nora Hutchinson, 2005


Water Only, 2006


Indeterminacy, 2004


lonely_fixed, 2005


inside is outside, 2005


under the weight of judgement, 2004


in case there's extra, 2006


untitled but female, 2005


untitled, 2004


butterfly wings can change the Earth's
climate, 2004


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

[note: click image for larger resolution version]

forward to the future

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

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

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

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

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

Fossils + Boughner @ Loose Cannon

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





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

You have been warned / invited to listen.

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

Deerhoof - Friend Opportunity

Deerhoof
Friend Opportunity
[Kill Rock Stars, 2007]

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

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

MP3: Deerhoof - The Perfect Me

Boris with Michio Kurihara - Rainbow

Rainbow
Boris with Michio Kurihara
[Inoxia, 2007]

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

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

MP3: Boris with Michio Kurihara - Starship Narrator

Hamilton Harlots fundraiser

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

Hon. Stockwell Day,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2006: The Year of “You”

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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