HaikuBoxer

twelve days of occupy

2012-01-05T13:08:00.003-05:00

I posted this before Christmas at Rover, but am only getting around to putting it up here today. You can go back to Rover to check out the whole series. I'm pretty happy with it, though I have to say I expected a little more grit. Instead, people seemed to get sentimental and refer back only to their own lives. I guess that's what you get at Christmas.

A little over a year ago, a 26 year old street seller in Tunisia set himself on fire. The breadwinner for a family of six siblings, Mohammed Bouazizi worked so his sisters could go to university. Harassed daily by police and the municipality, on December 17th he had reached his limit. With his produce and scales confiscated yet again, he stood outside the governor’s office shouting, “how do you expect me to make a living?” Then he doused himself with gasoline and lit a match.

The fire spread around the world, beginning with the fleeing of the Tunisian president, to the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square, the resignation of the Yemeni prime minister, on to the Occupy Wall Street in the US and the thousands of other occupy movements worldwide, including Montreal.

But now it is Christmas. With only a few exceptions, tents across Canada have been cleared out of city parks and squares. The global movement that once looked like a political tsunami has leveled out. For many, it is back to business. Or, more precisely, back to shopping.

I am always torn at Christmas, now more than ever. The nostalgic pull of lights, carols and stuffed turkey can barely hold their own against harsher economic, social and political realities. Maybe the multiple train wrecks in slow motion – the climate, the economy, our democratic rights – are trying to tell us something. You think? Are we listening? Or are we too busy maxing out our credit cards at Walmart or Future Shop. Because really, what’s global collapse when you got a Sony Bravia to watch it on?

Christmas occupies us. We are pre-occupied by it, our attention hijacked by the bright shiny baubles and the tinkling music. For many, our childhood enchantment with Santa Claus will remain the greatest spiritual connection of our lives. As adults, the last minute visits to the shopping mall will be the closest we’ll come to a pilgrimage. But like a huge cardboard box that holds a tiny present, the Christmas joke is on us.

The thing about the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements were their attempts to bring us back to basics. To remind us that life is better if we cooperate, share wealth, challenge hierarchies. To encourage us to trust in the integrity of our own histories and futures of our own making. To wipe away the obfuscating barriers of middle men, dictators, and the false gods of rampant consumerism.

What is Christmas, then? How can we occupy it? Over the next two weeks, Rover writers will be taking a moment to reflect on Christmas and the concept of “occupy.” For Martyn Bryant, that means taking a closer look at the many myths with which it shares its history. For Gina Roitman, Eric Hamovitch and Sujata Dey, the central narrative is one of being an outsider. For Catherine Averback, it is a return to family. For Ehab Lotayef and Mark Paterson, angry poems and poignant stories must be told. And read on, there are more.

For me, Christmas is an opportunity for change and rebirth. A gift is not something we tick off a list, but that which we give of ourselves. A little boy drumming. An offer of help. Forgiveness. And it’s a reminder of the sacrifices we are sometimes called upon to make in order to realize a greater potential. Because sometimes the simple flick of a match or a single star in the sky really can change the world. If you let it, that is.

This piece was originally posted on The Rover.

art for art's sake

2011-12-06T23:57:00.008-05:00

Rover held its third annual Art Fair this past weekend, this time in the Van Horne Iron Works Terminal building on Van Horne and Waverly. It was a blast: ran into a childhood friend, hung out with my big kid (now a young adult _!!), checked out some awesome art.

I shot this short video for Rover. Thanks to Fleet Foxes for their inadverdent lending of the music.

PHOTO credit: Boletus, by Isa Dawson

breaking badly

2011-11-26T09:15:00.003-05:00

I mistakenly watched Breaking Bad last night. I say mistakenly because “hilarious” it is not and “hilarious” I need if I am going to watch something late at night alone in the country. So I was forced to follow four episodes of Breaking Bad with a bunch of I Love Lucy clips. Lucy tried but she couldn’t quite cover up the horrendous image of 150 pounds of flesh and hydrochloric acid falling through a ceiling.

Breaking Bad is the younger brother of Weeds, another show completely predicated on the moral black hole of its characters’ universe. Also like Weeds, it omits that one character/voice/Greek chorus that appears in classic tragedies to remind the hero – and therefore counterpoint the tragedy – of the gargantuan error of their ways. Instead, in both shows, you have the misguided character grappling with, basically, logistics and greed.

In each of these shows there is no community. Community does not exist. What we get is the tight nuclear family; the annoying extended family; and outside forces/characters who either aid or obstruct. Right or wrong can simply be declared by whoever is either the strongest or the most righteous in any given moment.

And then, most importantly, in each show we have the suburbs. That black pit of emptiness we dress up as normal. The suburbs are the villain in each case but while the writers are able to explore the moral grappling of their characters, it feels to me that they consistently miss the elephant in the room. Nancy Botwin kicks off Weeds because, now widowed, she needed money to keep her (huge) house in the suburbs. This motivation, in my memory, is never questioned or set up as misguided. You can pretend it was satire, but I don't believe satire works when it is truly not questioning the premise. It is this big house in the suburbs, in fact, that signals to us that she is a good character who is simply thrust into bad circumstances. Her desire to hold on to her suburban house for herself and her children is an admirable thing. So no, there is no suburban satire here.

Similarly, Walter White is de facto good. How do we know? He teaches high school in the suburbs. He owns a big house in the suburbs. He has a wife and son in the suburbs. It is the location of his residence that telegraphs his normalcy. If he was a downtowner or lived in the country right off the bat we’d know he was a little bit off.

So really what we have in Breaking Bad and Weeds, intelligent and compelling they may be, are two shows about white suburban people dilly dallying on the moral and criminal frontiers of the American culture. What is at stake in each show is How are they going to get back home?

But what I want to see is: How are they going to break free of the suburban mentality and discover that they can live in another fringe universe, one that won’t kill them or send them to jail?

That’s what I want to see.

république of change

2011-10-30T22:04:00.005-04:00

Every now and then a film comes along that is a game changer. Michael Moore’s Roger and Me was that in 1989. His guerrilla filmmaking anticipated the collapse of industrial America as well as the rise of the next wave of people power. Last night I sat in a packed Cinéma du Parc and thought, this is it. Hugo Latulippe’s République: Un abécédaire populaire.

Over the period of a few weeks in April, 2011, Latulippe brought together over 50 of Quebecers from various sectors of society: unions, politics, health care, theatre, film, academia, community activism, and so on. Interviewed in stark black and white, the subjects, including Claude Béland, Francine Pelletier, Julius Grey, Nancy Neamtan, Lorraine Pagé, Steven Guilbeault, Pierre Curzi, Dominic Champagne, Françoise David, and more, speak to various themes and concerns. The bottom line question for them all is, where are we going as a society?

The answers are deeply disturbing. “Just look at Laval!” says one, disgusted. “That says it all.”

The consensus is, we’ve lost our way. We’ve contracted from the socially rich post Quiet Revolution years – years that brought us Cégeps, Hydro Québec, CLSCs, the richest arts and culture scene in Canada – to the vast parking lots of Walmart.

“To be rich is not to have more things,” says another. “To be rich is to live a deeper life. We must destroy Dollarama.”

Luc Ferrandez, Projet Montréal mayor of the Plateau, speaks stirringly: “We focused so long on language but in the process we’ve lost the country. We became American. We need to look at the land and remember who we are.” Comedian Christian Vanasse says, “We’re a northern country, we should know better how to live here. We could lead the world in solar, wind and geothermal power. Instead, we have a complete lack of imagination. We’re digging for shale gas, crisse"

Poetically paced and with a subtle soundtrack, the film is framed by a grave entreaty to wake up before we destroy everything, including our souls. République brings to mind another game changing work, Speak White. Michèle Lalonde’s great rage-filled 1968 poem, and the NFB film that followed, channelled the national aspirations of that era. Forty years later, it’s a very different kind of nationalism and very different kind of rage. Quebecers are facing challenges much larger than language and cultural identity; we are now confronted with the survival and stewardship of the entire planet.

Originally posted in The Rover.

hockey night in newfoundland

2011-10-25T10:35:00.002-04:00

Inside the Mile One Centre in downtown St John’s, the sight lines are great no matter where you sit. The pregame entertainment is simple – two grown men grinning like 6 year olds bounce onto the ice and take their place at a row of pucks as an MC in a sweatshirt encourages them to aim for the net. Their success rate is about 2%. The crowd roars.

I started resenting the NHL when my kid came of hockey-going age. Not only did I desperately want her to play hockey, I wanted to share the supposedly quintessential hockey experience with her: going to a Habs game. But time and again I couldn’t justify the ridiculously high ticket prices. As for the tickets I could afford, not only would I have to buy them in July, I don’t own a telescope. Might as well watch it on TV. And I’m sorry, but that is just wrong. And on this I will come out of the closet: I am the 99% who can not afford to actively participate in our national game.

If hockey really is about ponds and kids lacing up on frosty mornings and working class families cheering on their city’s team and players whose salaries don’t put them in league with Donald Trump, then I am in the right place. I am watching the St John’s IceCaps.

The AHL affiliate for the newly returned Winnipeg Jets, the IceCaps were brought to Newfoundland by former premier Danny Williams. This is the man who, as Tory leader of Newfoundland, removed Canadian flags from government buildings to protest Ottawa and then launched the Anything But Conservative campaign.

When it was confirmed that Atlanta was giving up its Thrashers and sending them back home, Williams swooped in with a proposal to relocate the minor league team, the Manitoba Moose, to St John’s. Six months and one name contest later, the IceCaps are squaring off against Maine’s Bridgeport Sound Tigers.

Glenn Stanford, partner and COO of the IceCaps, says that it’s about time. He was around in 1991 and helped put together the AHL Maple Leaf’s for St John’s. After that run he went to the US. “When I was in Idaho, hockey was behind football. Behind even high school football. It’s just not an American passion. But it’s our passion.”

Almost overnight, that passion turned into a done deal. “There are already 5000 season ticket holders in a building that only holds 5800. All of our suites are sold,” Stanford says.

Meanwhile, down behind the penalty box two guys are wearing body suits in the colour of the unofficial but popular flag of Newfoundland, the “pink, white and green.” You see it flying around the city here and there, a reminder of a golden era when Newfoundland wasn’t just somebody’s have-not province. Whether than golden era ever existed is, of course, another matter.

But for Mark Hoskins, watching his first pro hockey game ever, “there’s a sense of optimism that hasn’t been here in this province in a long, long time. The return of hockey to St John’s is the most obvious sign yet of our changing place in Canada. It’s a great time to be a Newfoundlander.” Lace up, me by’s.

Originally posted in The Rover.

mRb: canadian idols

2011-10-25T10:28:00.003-04:00

There are very few iterations of the word “service” today that carry with them a positive con- notation. The terms “service industry,” “public service,” “servitude,” “customer service,” denote pools of inertia, if not outright personal or professional failure. But it wasn’t always thus, as we are reminded in Mary Frances Coady’s Georges and Pauline Vanier: Portrait of a Couple.

The original power couple, Georges and Pauline partook in – or were close observers of – many of the great events of the early twentieth century. “I ask only to serve,” was their personal as well as public maxim.

Born to a Francophone father and Irish mother in Montreal, George (he was to Gallicize his name later, adding the “s”) Vanier was studious and serious. Not long out of law school, he joined the Canadian army at the outbreak of World War I and was instrumental in founding Canada’s first French Canadian battalion – the famed 22nd Regiment, better known as the Van Doos.

This war experience, including the loss of a leg, served Vanier well his entire life, helping to forge his not-exaggerated reputation as stalwart, intelligent, and courageous. Appointed to a series of increasingly distinguished positions – aide-de-camp to Governor General Lord Byng; member of the Canadian military delegation to the League of Nations; secretary to the High Commission in London; Envoy Extraordinaire to France – Vanier’s rise through the ranks of Canadian diplo- macy was never without merit.

Nor was it ever without Pauline. A woman of little formal education, Pauline Vanier (née Archer) was unani- mously regarded as critical to her husband’s success. A relationship founded in their shared spirituality and dedication, it was also, over time, a very real partnership: “We work as a team,” Vanier reiterated to External Affairs at the end of World War II. For his part, Lester B. Pearson, then ambassador to Washington, communicated to Georges the high praises “which I hear about you and your mission, and, more par- ticularly, about your wife.”

Through early hardships, frequent trans-Atlantic moves, tumultuous events, and five children, the Vaniers forged a complimentary relationship out of radically different temperaments. Drawing from their diaries and copious letters to each other, Coady has ready access to very personal struggles, fears, and ambitions. The author’s real strength, however, is in perceiving how these struggles intersect and reflect the world around them. From the distinct differences in their Catholic faiths, to the battlefields of World War I, to the fall of France to Nazi occupation, to the post-war years of shuttle diplomacy, to Vanier’s appointment as Canada’s first French Canadian Governor General, Georges and Pauline Vanier is also a compelling history of the first half of the twentieth century.

Along with the Vaniers, secondary characters come vividly to life. Julian Byng, the British diplomat who led the Canadian charge at Vimy but who is best remembered for the “King-Byng Affair,” is jovial, opinionated, and loyal. Loathing “pomp and ceremony and pretension,” he remains the cou- ple’s closest friend until his death.

Charles de Gaulle, on the other hand, in spite of the fact that Vanier was the only foreign diplomat during World War II to recognize (and lobby for) de Gaulle’s leadership and the role of the French resistance, consistently repaid the debt in diplomatic snubs. This culminated in 1967, when he sent a low-level minister to Vanier’s funeral. Three months later he managed to express a national rift for generations to come with his “Vive le Québec libre!” from the balcony of Montreal’s city hall.

In refreshingly clear prose built upon tremendous research, Coady has writ- ten the story of a couple who served Canada not only in their lifetime, but through future generations. To wit, the Vanier Institute of the Family as well as the humanitarian work of their children: Jean Vanier (l’Arche), daughter Thérèse (pioneering female physician), Georges (Trappist monk at Oka).

It’s tempting to assume that a very modern and preoccupied Canada has lost that mid-century sense of service and public good. But the words of Jack Layton, as relayed by Reverend Hawkes, cannot help but sound slightly familiar: “How I live my life every day is an act of worship.” Georges Vanier couldn’t have said it any better.

Originally published in the Montreal Review of Books.

gone down the road

2011-10-20T08:59:00.004-04:00

In 1970, when the term “Canadian cinema” was very much an oxymoron, Don Shebib made a film called Goin’ Down the Road. About two hard scrabble Maritimers who seek their fortune – well, minimum wage jobs – in Toronto, it doesn’t end well. Dreams are dashed and Joey and Peter, two fish out of water, turn to desperate measures.

A decade or two later just about my entire cohort of Anglophone filmmakers, artists, writers, and musicians left Montreal for their own goin’ down the road moment: fleeing the PQ and Bill 101 for the media and money in Toronto, Vancouver and LA.

But now, hanging around at the screenings of the St John’s International Women’s Film Festival I can’t help but marvel at the turn of affairs. Familiar faces are everywhere: Newfoundland filmmakers who had settled in Montreal in the 90s and 2000′s to practice their craft have now returned home to a stronger economy, a vibrant community, and a flourishing film scene. To top it off, sprinkled among them are former Montrealers and Torontonians who now live here, drawn to another kind of richness.

Noreen Golfman, founder and Executive Director of the St John’s International Women’s Film Festival, is originally from Ville St Laurent. Offered a job at Memorial University in the late 80s, she figured she’d stay a year and then return to Montreal. “But I fell in love with St John’s and Newfoundland and have been here ever since.”

Clearly appreciated in her milieu, Golfman’s influence in St John’s cannot be underestimated. “We love her,” I heard time and again. And especially, “we love her aerobics classes!” Yes, the English professor also wants you to shake your booty.

“I feel the love of this community,” says Golfman. “I grew up in a so-called distinct society in a crazy province with complex social relations between various tribes. Well, this is just on a smaller scale. I got it right away. I felt really at home uncannily quickly. If you don’t have this experience you end up leaving. If you get it, you dig in.”

And dig in she did, founding the SJIWFF in 1989. Since then, it has established itself as one of the longest running women’s film festivals in the world. This year, like all years, audiences are out in full force to watch a rich array of international, Canadian and local films. Attending the screenings and enjoying the scene as much as anyone are the various corporate and government sponsors.

“Our politicians and bureaucrats get the arts,” says Golfman, “They understand and support everyone. Not just financial, it’s moral support too. I sometimes say it’s like living in a feudal kingdom but we like the king.”

Now that the glittering kingdoms we’ve been attracted to all these years are losing their allure and moxy, it won’t be surprising if more than a few Torontonians and Montrealers set out up the road to seek fame and fortune on the rock. A different kind of fame, the respect of your peers rather than adulation of the anonymous, and fortunes measured not in dollars but in sense. But all of it rich nonetheless.

“It’s been a kind of joke of the festival that filmmakers come here, buy a house, and stay,” Golfman says. “So we tell our government funders that we’re also really good for immigration and population growth too. Look around, it’s true.”

Originally posted in The Rover.

the quick red fox jumps over the lazy film

2011-10-14T19:46:00.005-04:00

Within 24 hours of each other I saw a fox and watched The Fantastic Mr Fox.

First, the real wild animal. We were on a country road about an hour west of Montreal. It was late and, unlike every other driver with his unnecessary high beams on, I like to take that road at 60 km/h rather than the posted 80 km/h. I might not be able to personally reduce the amount of McDonald’s and Tim Hortons litter by the side of the road, but I can at least ensure I don’t contribute to roadkill.

And sure enough, just as we came around a bend a fox crossed the road. After a quick check in the rear view mirror I hit the brakes. We sat there in the middle of the empty road, our windows rolled down in the ridiculously warm October night, watching this fox jump in and out of a ditch. He seemed to be tracking an animal and our presence was having no bearing on his concern for its capture. He didn’t even look at us.

I’ve seen foxes once or twice before, but to watch one like this for such an extended period of time was humbling. It was hard to get the full measure of him as he moved in and out of the glare of the headlights, now dimmed to parking. But we listened to his every movement, followed his every footstep, and could almost hear him breathing. Eventually he moved on to other targets and trotted away deeper into the field, his bushy red tail behind him like a flag.

Watching a wild animal is a gift, its very wildness making us insignificant. I think it is the feeling of that that is the gift. The awe-inspiring divineness of feeling insignificant.

And speaking of insignificant, the night before we – two adults and one 12 year old – popped in The Fantastic Mr Fox. An hour or so later, twenty minutes from the end in fact, we stopped the machine and moved on to better things.

This film, like so many American movies inexplicably injected with truckloads of money and fashioned together by a parade of man-boys, is at its heart empty, impoverished and dull. Dull, dull, dull.

In a nutshell, the story is: Male lead is naughty. Female lead makes him go straight. But life is boring and he wants to be bad again. Female lead finds that infuriating but sexy. In any case, turns out that being bad is oh so good. Oh, and the male lead is a little richer in the end.

Mr Fox says a couple of times, once as a revelation, once as a confession, I’m a wild animal. Intriguing! So laden with inference, so oozing with significance. If nothing else, that statement brought me full on into the world of Mr Fox. But that world turned out to be as textureless as suburbia, as challenging as a game of checkers.

The question of gender domestication, wild vs tamed, animal vs people, goes no where. It’s like making a film about adultery and remaining chaste. Mr Fox could have been made in 1955, the same year the gratingly difficult to watch Seven Year Itch was made. (Is there an actor, by the way, more unattractive than Tom Ewell?) One wonders what kind of Hayes Code colonized Wes Anderson’s mind, preventing him from having anything to say about anything?

It just takes my breath away that something like The Fantastic Mr Fox can be satisfying to anybody. Other than being impressed at the thought of all those tweezers pulling all those little fox hairs, what is great about this film?

Meryl Streep plays a whining wife who’s sole presence is to prop up, nudge, berate, kiss the lead. That’s a best actress FAIL.
I guess Orwell set the bar a little high when he used animals to stand in for social injustice. Here, however, any animal who is not Mr Fox is really there just to aid and abet Mr Fox. Another kind of social injustice I suppose.
The triumvirate of Boggis, Bunce and Bean are about as symbolically interesting as dépanneur owners. Mr Fox just wants their goodies, that’s it that’s all. Not a word about habitat destruction, man vs animal, ownership, corruption, materialism, cannibalism. Not. One. Word. Glance. Or Hint.
The pacing is flat. The irony is deadpan, that is to say, has no teeth. Its wit is equivalent to a hipster wearing a “Pron” tshirt. Next.
Finally, I am so done with shoot-em-up chase-em-down endings and this one is no different. An entire storyline boils down to who has the faster car, the toughest fist or, in this case, who can dig the more elaborate tunnel. And the winner is…. the box office.

This film managed to be both empty-headed and bloated at the same time. It did have a couple of things going for it. One, George Clooney’s voice. Two, the sad tension between Kristofferson the golden boy, and Ash the unloved loser. But Mr Fox has the privilege of putting them both in harm's way. Great

Kathryn watched the last twenty minutes the following morning and so I joined her, postponing my shower, making me late for the rest of the day, which led to my car being on the country road 12 hours later not a minute too soon to let a quick red fox cross the road.

it was a dark and stormy tweet

2011-10-07T10:37:00.002-04:00

In 2000 I was working for a wireless applications company. While we were busy retrofitting 80s-style games to accommodate the limited capability of cell phones, another technology was migrating from Europe and Asia: SMS messaging. The ability to send short messages over a data line seemed to have limitless possibilities. Then again, it seemed to have none; what the heck could you say of value in 140 characters? Even we, an office full of geeks, agreed: it would go nowhere.

Fast forward ten years and a hundred gajillion text messages, Twitter, using a self-imposed 140-character limit, is now the fastest-growing, most ubiquitous communications tool on the planet. Created in 2006 as simply a conduit to exchange “short bursts of inconsequential information,” Twitter is at the centre of celebrity feuds, social trends, and bloody revolutions.

It is also a fiction publishing phenomenon. While not as popular as keitai shosetsu (literally, cellphone novel) in Japan, it is increasingly being taken on by serious writers, serious wannabe writers, and seriously get-on-the-bandwagon publishers.

So the ADD generation (the average Twitter user is between 25 and 34, so you can’t really blame the kids) is squeezing their fiction ya-ya’s into 140 character bursts. Some examples:

At eye level, the herring gull floated on thermals, searching the white-capped waves. Its call, sharp, echoing, jolted me. I stepped out. Proving that Twitter really is an impressionist’s delight.

After the rockfall they crawled blindly, holding each other’s heels. At some point they realised there was no beginning or end to the line. This one comes with its own cliffhanger.

I said that the winding flight of stairs would take you to the princess. I never said there weren’t poisoned arrows. It never hurts to borrow from the classics.

While serialized fiction hasn’t really captured the imagination since Charles Dickens, there’s no reason to hold your breath. Even James Joyce can get in on the action: at two sentences per burst, it took booktwo.org eight months to tweet all 24,765 lines of Ulysses. Then again, I started the book when I was 15 and still haven’t finished it.

More recently, Reif Larsen captivated his followers with dozens of “mysterious package” tweets (I am at box #54, with still no sign of the center. At least the boxes are getting smaller. #54 was the size of a woman’s fist) that narrated the opening of a matryoshka box that showed up at his doorstep one day.

If you are on your way to the great twit novel (probably an apt description in more ways than one) you might want to stop by twitip for a few encouragements (What’s great about a Twitter novel is that your content is no longer static) as well some warnings (More than five Twitter posts on any given day can be dangerous).

Hard to say what’s gimmick and what’s the beginning of something transformative or game-changing. I’m certainly no expert, having poo-poohed cell phone applications from the get-go (all the while designing them). But inasmuch as technological advancements freak me out with their echoes of EM Forster’s The Machine Stops (be careful of what you finish at age 15, it stays with you forever), it seems to me that Twitter fiction does one thing well: it takes the writer directly to her readership.

With its horizontally expansive platform, identifiable followers, daily freshness, and built in feedback loop, the writer is instantly part of a community of sorts. Communication goes both ways and conversations are begun.

But be careful what you wish for: in Forster’s 1909 story, the world is an underground maze of individual living pods where people are connected only via large screen internet-style monitors. But disaster strikes when the machine eventually crumbles and stops, forcing inhabitants out into long abandoned corridors and passageways. Repulsed by the actual sight of each other they are unable to save themselves from destruction.

So, tweet away writers. Go wild with 140 characters. Pile on the hashtags and rack up the followers. Just remember to leave the house every now and then. Oh, and learn how to grow a vegetable or two. It’s a practical skill for when the machine stops.

Originally published in carte-blanche.

rover: loving jack

2011-08-25T22:36:00.001-04:00

Everyone’s saying Jack Layton was a warrior. But while war metaphors make good homage and headlines, they feel paltry and rote in the wake of his death. Okay, he fought the good fight, he fought cancer, he fought for a better country. But what endeared Layton to Canadians, especially Quebecers, was not that he was a warrior. Maybe we’ve had enough of warriors and tough talkers in this province. Maybe what people saw was that Jack was a lover.

He was a man who smiled warmly, laughed genuinely, and gave great big bear hugs. He loved his wife passionately. When he said he loved the planet and wanted to protect it, you believed him. How many politicians, when they say they want to sit down with Canadians, you not only believe it but can imagine it?

While Harper was out war mongering and playing dirty, Jack was reminding Canadians that we actually like each other. That, in spite of politics and grudges, we could pull together. His played his one note – “we all stick together and no one is left behind” – until it became music. He cared about working families, seniors, young people, the sick, the unemployed, the homeless. His rhetoric didn’t draw from battle, but from community.

Nor did he appeal to Quebecers by playing up the faults and weaknesses of the Bloc. Instead, Bon Jack made politics look fun, like something you could be proud of. Oh, you want the best for Quebec? You want to build more than you want to destroy? Well, why don’t you just run for a seat in my party and we can go to Ottawa together and make a better world!

Easy as pie, as it turned out. While we railed a little against the mass of unknown and untested young people (young people!) we sent to Parliament, it also kind of took our breath away. In Jack’s world there was no question too stupid, no player too inexperienced, no hope too unrealistic. He somehow believed that if you met people where they lived, around their kitchen tables, you could build a party. This is not warrior politics, but friendship politics.

Why else would we turn out in droves, wearing our hearts on our sleeves, to publicly mourn the leader of the opposition? Why else would people ask on facebook “Where were you when you first heard of Jack’s death?” or tweet “I can’t bear it,” or form groups such as “Let’s get the CN Tower orange on Saturday night to remember Jack Layton.” Why else, for crying out loud, would Quebecers turn out to sing This Land is Your Land on Park avenue? As a commentator wrote in l’Actualité, “He was not the first Canadian politician to tell us he loved us, but he was sincere.”

Finally, Jack Layton didn’t just die of cancer, he died with cancer. He let the illness render him down to an essential: pure love. “I experienced this incredible sense of joy,” he’s quoted in the Gazette saying back in April. “Where is that coming from? … The next morning we had all these emails, people saying they had been praying for me and that I was in their thoughts.”

That love, that glow, was evident throughout the campaign. Jack was enjoying himself, he was enjoying every encounter, every debate, every handshake, every new face. He was loving every minute of it. Politics wasn’t a zero-sum game for Jack Layton, but an opportunity to spread joy, hope, and a vision for the country.

We have lost a great man. But more precisely, we have lost a man who became great because he let himself embody love. Let’s remember what that looks like. At the very least, we’ll know when it’s not there.

“The rock solid belief that by working together there is no challenge that we cannot overcome. That is the core of what it means to be Canadian. In a country as fortunate as ours, nobody should be left behind. These are core Canadian values.” Jack Layton, Vancouver, June 2010

Originally published in The Rover.

rover: the lady is a tramp

2011-08-17T20:50:00.005-04:00

I pretty much came of age in the Empress Theatre. It was Cinema V in the 1980s, one of many busy repertory cinemas in the city, and I sold popcorn while putting myself through university. I also – working alone I swear – undercounted popcorn cups, let friends in for free, watched the audience through the screen, and was introduced to more drugs than you can find at Jean Coutu. Oh, and caught a few movies too.

Built in 1927, the Art Deco theatre was the only one in Canada to sport the Egyptian motif – having been inspired by the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922. First a vaudeville then a dinner theatre, it was Cinema V from the 1970s to the early 90s. Stripped down, cemented over, and split in two, its original idiosyncratic beauty had been all but obliterated.

Abandoned since 1992, the Empress has almost risen many times, only to fall again. Consortiums, restoration projects, and architectural plans have come and gone and it seemed to live only in the addled memories of former hangers on and its NDG neighbours.

Who knows what’s next for the old Empress, whose destiny is once again up for grabs. The NDG council votes tonight to seize it from the non-profit Empress Cultural Centre board. Meanwhile a group Save the Empress is calling on supporters of the theatre to attend tonight’s meeting and oppose the takeover.

Emmanuel Hessler of BisFilms shot the short film, The Empress, earlier this year. It is part of a larger community project, Imagining NDG.

Update: The borough of NDG did indeed vote Monday night, August 15th, to wrest the Empress back from the Board. What next is anybody's guess. Peggy Curran gives a pretty good rundown of the theatre's history and how it got to where it is.

Originally published in The Rover.

rover: correct spelling of hoe

2011-08-17T20:45:00.005-04:00

“Cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, mesclin, green peas…. and corn!” Laurence Chediak of Le Zigoto Café on ave du Parc buys her fixings twice a week at the Marché Fermier on St Dominique and St Joseph. Originally an initiative of the Maison de l’Amitié on Duluth, the Marché Fermier is now just one of the many city-wide outdoor markets, some of them thanks to the efforts of Projet Montréal.

Montreal used to be ahead of the game with just the Atwater and Jean Talon markets. But the past couple of years have seen an explosion in local food awareness and food health and safety. Not to mention, with all the food scares and recalls, we seem to have reached a tipping point with regards to big agro business. Next step soylent green?

But with over 50 outdoor farmer markets dotting the island, chances are there is a local market in your neighbourhood. These are men and women from Chateauguay, Ormstown, Mirabel, Hemmingford, Île Perrot, Rigaud, Mont St-Grégoire, Mercier, and anywhere else you can scrape together an acre and handful of seeds. Or not. Santropol Roulant’s Pocket Market features a cornucopia (how nice to use that word unmetaphorically) of products cultivated on their rooftop gardens.

If dividing your attention between farmers is not your thing, you can get up close and personal with just one. With over 100 farms participating in Quebec’s network of Community Supported Agriculture (here or here), subscribing to a weekly year round food basket beats the zombie fluorescence of Provigo any day.

Aside from the obvious health benefits, these initiatives support the local agricultural economy and help ensure that the rural land surrounding Montreal and other urban centres remains not only agricultural but in the hands of small farmers. With developers, speculators, and industry increasingly targeting some of the most nutrient-rich tracts of land in the province – and subsequently poisoning it – our local farmers need our business more than ever.

Originally published in The Rover.

into canada's wild

2011-08-09T21:56:00.004-04:00

I grew up camping. Two weeks every summer, rain or shine, we’d pack the trunk, pile the roof, and cram four carsick kids and two overwhelmed parents determined to “be Canadian.” We’d hit the road until we found a campsite that offered a wilderness experience -- plus above ground pool, electrical outlets, laundry service, and bingo hall. If I had known the word “skanky” then, I might have used it.

Still, there’s something about the musky smell of tents and the night sky magnetic with stars that stays with you forever. By the time I had my own kid, camping included portaging, off-road sites, moose sightings, and fishing for your dinner. We haven't exactly visited every one of Canada’s 13 National Parks, but after discovering the National Parks Project, I wish we had. And then I think, oh, it’s still August, maybe there’s time.

In 1911, the Canadian government created the world’s first national parks service and gave it an agency, Parks Canada. Today, it oversees 41 parks and reserves in every province and territory in the country. To celebrate its centennial, Parks Canada partnered with FilmCAN, Primitive Entertainment, and Discovery Canada to create a unique multimedia project.

From May to October of 2010, small groups of filmmakers and musicians scattered throughout the parks. Their mandate was to collaborate on short films and soundtracks that reflected their experience of the landscape. The results are currently being broadcast on Discovery channel, one film per week over many weeks.

I don’t have a TV, but I’ve been hooked on the film and sonic collaborations online. A compass on the home page spins through the parks. Once “inside” a park, you can choose to see the resulting film or photos. The music is available to download and the artists and their bios are featured.

The music and the films are, in a word, mesmerizing. The collaboration between filmmaker Catherine Martin and musicians Jennifer Castle, Sebastien Grainger, and Dan Werb in the Mingan Archipelego, for example, captures the islands on the lower north shore in a kind of slow ecstasy. Titled “Quand j’aurais vu les îles,” it’s a ghostly approach to a landscape almost out of reach.

Other collaborations are equally captivating. Sarah Harmer, Bry Webb and Jim Guthrie provide the soundtrack for Scott Smith’s “Looking Around Without Blinking,” shot in BC’s Gwaii Haanas park. The Kouchibouguac project features the efforts of filmmaker Jamie Travis and musicians Casey Mecija, Don Kerr, and Ohad Benchetrit. Melissa Auf der Mar turns up in Newfoundland’s Gros Morne, Old Man Luedecke gets down and twangy in Cape Breton, and Rollie Pemberton (rapper Cadence Weapon) remembers the buffalo in Alberta’s Waterton Lakes National Park.

Funded entirely from the public purse and intended for the “public good,” there is something almost old fashioned about this project. Certainly, it can’t have very much to do with the Harper Administration (is that what we’re supposed to call it?). I can only imagine this project was given the green light before anyone had a chance to pencil in a "no."

Instead, this project is all about "yes." Yes to art and interpretation. Yes to spending our public monies on ourselves and the beauty of the land around us. Yes to doing it just because. Yes to letting the musicians and filmmakers, for once, be our spokespeople. I don't give a shit what John Baird thinks about our forests. But I am better off for knowing what Olge Goreas & Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes have to say about the Yukon's Kluane National Park.

Grab it for ourselves, that's what I'm left thinking. Grab our little corner of drop dead gorgeous wilderness and protect it, sanctify it, immerse ourselves in it. We might still recognize it - and ourselves - a little longer if we do.

National Parks Project - Trailer from Ryan J. Noth on Vimeo.

Originally published in The Rover.

are YOU roundup ready?

2011-07-30T11:20:00.006-04:00

Under normal circumstances, morning runs through a farmer’s field is a kind of heaven. Knee-high crops vibrating with grasshoppers and butterflies. Crows caw-cawing in nearby trees. The morning dew brushing off on my legs, cooling me down under a cloudless sky. And indeed, this sustains me all the way up the field.

But on the way back, I don’t know if it’s seeing our house vaguely in view, hearing the odd car, or what, but the beauty of it all starts to crack. The odd corn poking up through the platoon of soya looks like a lonely dissident. The scorched earth between the rows smells, literally, of pesticide. And the rows – what is it with rows? I know nature abhors a vacuum. But I am pretty sure it also abhors the straight line.

We insist on imposing order where there should be natural chaos. And we create self-sustaining, circular systems where we would be better off relying a little more on our own instincts and nature’s tidal bounty.

These soya seeds, for example, were most certainly genetically-modified to be Roundup Ready. Then, a month after sowing, the farmer passed by and scorched the field with Roundup, killing the weeds but sparing the crop.

Roundup, the pesticide, and Roundup Ready seeds are the stuff of warfare. Warfare on the earth, and warfare on our health. Monsanto even touts one of the benefits being “reduced tillage.” Never mind that tilling a soil is one of the best things you can do for it. No, raping it with fertilizer, pesticides, and genetically-modified seeds is a little more efficient and oh so satisfying.

The farmer’s field you see on your drive through the country is the history of war and colonization writ small. We raze a forest down to its topsoil. Then we implant it with foreign seeds. We stealth bomb “enemy” growth while target feeding only our own colonizing seeds. And the seeds themselves? Implanted and botoxed beyond recognition.

As for farmers, instead of being stewards of the earth and feeders of the people, they are forced into a cycle of production where their market goal is to consistently undersell themselves. They are not able to charge what the product is worth or even set their own prices. Their relationship is not with the community or their customers, but with corporate buyers and suppliers, who in turn force them into long-term contractual obligations and relationships. They are modern day serfs. Once a farmer is a Monsanto boy, he is forever a Monsanto boy.

As a system, the modern farmer’s field is mad brilliant. And this kind of thinking is replicated throughout our lives, in every sector and endeavour. We impose systems, we seek solutions from within boxes of systems, and we fear and repell “chaos.”

Think of Hosni Mubarak, a few weeks into the Egyptian protests, promising to name a new Vice President, hold elections, and reform the legislature. The good army general that he is, he naturally thought that he could appease the populace and quell the dissent with an appeal to the system. Thank goodness, however, anarchy and chaos (I’m using these words in their best possible sense) prevailed. The system went down and Egypt, whatever happens, is better for it.

I think that’s what these democratic movement this year have shown us. Along with, yes, the obvious struggle for sufferage and democracy, they have also shown us the weakness of relying on closed systems. The corruption of artificial environments. And the poison of sustaining ourselves on lies and illusions.

I don’t care how short you are for cash, or how much you crave Tim Horton’s or Wonder Bread, do yourself, your country, your entire generation a favour and buy organic produce directly from a farmer. There are enough markets cropping up in cities and neighbourhoods that this is increasingly possible.

Go to the source. Don't let yourself be Roundup Ready.

Photo: Kathryn drinking Kefir from Pinehedge Farms, in front of the cows who made it. Far in the fields behind, you can't see it in this pic, the rest of the herd is grazing.

rover: the tree of life

2011-07-28T22:03:00.004-04:00

How are we to watch this film? Where were we before the theatre darkened? Did you know it would be like this? Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life is so over the top, so grandiose, so keen, stretched and expansive that if I didn’t absolutely love it I would hate it. Or sleep through it, as my companion did.

Origin of the universe? Got it. Dinosaurs at play? You betcha. Bullying father with a 1950s brush cut? Of course. The ice age? Modern skyscrapers? Heavenly afterlife? Sibling rivalry? Yes! The only other artists I can think of with such a range are the authors of the books of Genesis and Revelations.

And like those chroniclers, Malick is sincerely concerned with our place in the universe and our relationship with a higher power. The film opens with a female voice (Mrs O’Brian/Mother) musing about Grace and Nature. “The nuns taught us there were two ways through life – the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.”

The core of the film is inhabited by a 1950s suburban family. Brad Pitt, as the bullying Father, and Jessica Chastain as a rather idealized Mother, are the emotional centres around which their three young sons orbit. Jack, played as an adult by Sean Penn, is the child most victimized by his father. His struggles with his own nature, and with finding grace, are exquisitely portrayed.

The dramatic narrative section of the film takes about an hour – easily vying with some of the best films I’ve seen. Ever. I am not sure if Malick, along with everything else, is given enough credit for his work with actors. The delicacy with which Pitt, Chastain, Hunter McCracken (Jack) and Laramie Eppler (second son, RL) play out their struggles is fierce and resonating. There are no gestures, words, or camera angles wasted.

Malick’s distinctive use of stream-of-consciousness voice-overs goes back to his first film Badlands. While it kind of gummed up the works of The New World, it brought a deeper resonance to his depiction of migrant workers and war, respectively, in Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line.

The voices in The Tree of Life belong, at various times, to each of the main characters. While they do not add to our understanding of the story – which, admittedly, is opaque – they echo familiar Malickian concerns: “I will be true to you. Whatever comes.” “How do I get back to where they are?” “I didn’t know how to name You then.” The whispers seem to be a reminder that life exists above, behind and beyond the merely visible.

To underscore that point – Malick’s driving operandi since his first film – the film is stretched out to include the origin of the universe, the reign of the dinosaurs, and visions of the afterlife – and the final bestowing of grace. Shot using classic FX techniques as opposed to CGI, Malick collaborated with Douglas Trumbull, who had helped Kubrick design and imagine 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumbull retired in 1983, but returned to work with Malick.

The (long!) coda at the end of The Tree of Life required a fair bit of suspension of this reviewer’s critical faculties. Sean Penn on his knees on a beach where his entire – otherwise dead and departed – family and a few angels frolic is a bit much. But it also put me in mind of the early months after 9/11 where, in the wake of the tragedy, more than one person declared “the end of irony.” Big real life had trumped facile irony and cynicism.

Maybe that’s what Malick is demanding: that we suspend urbane criticism and sophistication and let life in all its enormity wash over us. Whether or not all the parts of the film cohere or even make cogent sense is irrelevant in the face of such ambition. Worked for me. My companion, however, exacted a few drinks to make up for all the mud, volcanoes, and velociraptors.

Originally published in The Rover.

feed the soil, not the plant

2011-07-17T13:03:00.005-04:00

A basic tenet of organic farming is feed the soil, not the plant. I was thinking about that this morning as I took a run in the soya fields next door to our little farmhouse.

The deep green plants are about a foot high now, which means the space between the rows is wide and flat enough to run in. It is also dead. A few weeks ago it was sprayed with some very effective chemical, scorching the flat spaces between the rows and anything that grew there to a flinty grey. The contrast is rather surreal. It is also seen as “normal.”

It just so happens that “our farmer,” as we like to call him, consistently sows the mangiest looking fields in the region. Whether it’s because he’s young, overly ambitious (buying up fields here and there), or over worked, I can’t say. But one thing for sure, he knows nothing about soil.

Like a bad politician, he visits his fields two or three times a season, not more. Once to plow, once to sow, once to harvest. Okay four: another time to spray. He shows up in his tractor, does his business, then is gone. His father I’ve seen walking the fields and touching the soil, rubbing it between his hands, but the son? Never. There is nothing organic, natural, instinctive, or connected about the way this guy farms. Nor does he, in the few conversations I’ve had with him, appear interested in anything otherwise.

Don’t let the gorgeous soya (or corn, or hay) fool you. This field behind our old house is dead, dead, dead. Only massive doses of chemicals and GMO seeds keeps it functioning year after year.

Isn’t it clear that as we farm, we make our communities? A feed the soil society is one where the social and cultural infrastructures are maintained and nurtured: education, health care, recreation, culture, public spaces, mass transportation, art, etc. All are well funded and freely available to all citizens. They are part of the public good. The more any one of us has access to these things, the more society as a whole benefits. This is our soil.

In a feed the soil society business would be deemed “successful” inasmuch as it benefits the public good. Just as no one individual would want a drilling rig in their backyard, all business and corporate endeavours are measured against a kind of liveability index. Can we as a group live with this? Does this benefit or do harm to the group? Who will this hurt or make suffer? With these kind of questions there is no way such things as sweatshops, exploited labour, or polluting enterprises can find a foothold. They become untenable.

Likewise, taxes are freely given as they are seen as the way each of us as individuals help maintain our society as a whole. I rarely hear childless adults complain about paying school taxes (at least, not in Canada). Well, that attitude would encompass tax paying as a whole. Taxes ensure we share.

Conversely, enabling individual wealth, reducing tax burdens, or relying soley on user fees does not create shared usage of anything. For example, Harper can mail out individual cheques to Canadians, or give them tax breaks, in order to help pay for daycare. But this is not the equivalent of a daycare policy. So, in the absence of a policy wherein support for daycare is enshrined, funded, overseen, and monitored, we get a free-for-all smattering of daycares and a mad scramble to the waiting list. (Luckily I live in Québec, which holds on to our social contract a little tighter, and daycare is $7 a day for everybody.)

Throwing money – or chemicals – at a need does not create a nurturing environment for growth. It does not feed the soil. Rather, it robs it, using it as merely a repository for ambitious plants.

The feed the plant model, if we look to the US, is destroying us. This is a model where individual “rights” trump time and again the social good. The right to bear arms (or, in Canada, to not register them); the right to siphon billions out of society for personal use; the right ignore – not to mention exploit – the needs of others; the right to exploit and pollute the planet, and so on.

In a feed the plant society we each strive to be the tallest, strongest, most robust plant. We each work hard to suck what we can out of the soil, spreading our leaves wide and far in order to catch as much sun and rain as possible. We couldn’t care less if the plants around us wither or die. In fact, the more they wither the more we grow stronger.

Everything about a feed the plant society is predicated on creating a perfect environment to grow that one perfect plant: ourselves. If we are unlucky enough to be the plant that withers, well tough luck. Either we find some grace in our circumstance or we numb it with, guess what, chemicals and other self-medicating substances. Or we lash out in fugues of bitterness and violence.

A feed the plant family, if you want to reduce it to a more imaginable metaphor, is unbearably cruel. Imagine a family of two children where one child is used to feed the other. Not literally, but figuratively: one child is golden while the other is rotten; one child is educated while the other must work to support the education; one child is given every opportunity and all the praise while the other child is exploited and used as the low end of the measuring stick. A horrible family.

There are families like that. There are countries like that (the USA). And there are farmers like that. But that’s not how I want to live anymore.

Canada has a grand history of being a feed the soil society. I want to remember "feed the soil" as a way of measuring what I do, how I live, and what I support. Am I feeding the soil? Are we all?

rover: walking away

2011-07-13T16:05:00.003-04:00

There’s a short story by Ursula K LeGuin called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” In it, the citizens of Omelas enjoy utopian happiness. But the price they pay is that each generation a single child is chosen and kept in unbelievable misery and isolation for its entire life. Citizens are told this fact around the age of 12.

This shocking news is accepted as necessary to the harmonious society. At the very least, citizens resolve to live their lives in such a way that the child’s suffering is “worth it.”

But every now and then, someone leaves. Unable to reconcile the condemned child’s misery with their own happiness, they simply, eventually, walk away.

I’m reminded of this story when I read “Why I quit my job,” a blog post by Kai Nagata that’s currently making the facebook rounds and trending on Twitter. The former CTV Quebec City Bureau Chief, “master and commander of my own little outpost,” had it all. But, disillusioned with television news in particular and the media in general, he decided that the “ends no longer justified the means.”

And those means? The media is an insatiable beast, Nagata discovers, whose MO is increasingly to “tell less truth and make more money.” Newsrooms hire their broadcasters “using a skewed, unspoken ratio of talent to attractiveness.” Even the CBC, instead of holding the private networks to higher journalistic standards, is forced to compete for “the lowest hanging fruit” in a “race to the bottom.”

This vicious cycle “creates things like the Kate and Will show.” In a week where real news happened around the world, Canadians were treated to “wall-to-wall, breaking-news coverage of a stage-managed, spoon-fed celebrity visit… to a former colony.”

Along with the profit motive, the context for all this is “the near-paralysis of progressive voices in broadcasting.” While the US may have Jon Stewart, Rachel Maddow, or Keith Olbermann to “unravel (right-wing) ideology and act as a counterweight,” Canadian satirists are either non-existent or “toothless and boring.”

But wait – what’s a 24 year old, fresh out of school and suddenly “making good money, with comprehensive benefits and retirement options,” gonna do? In the 1960s the disenchanted may have “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out,” but these days facebook pages and petitions seem to suffice. After all, how’re you going to afford that G4 iPhone if you quit your job?

But Nagata is choosing to walk away. He’s walking away from his opportunity to profit from “the direction taken by Canadian policy and politics in the last five years;” walking away from the “war going on against science in Canada;” walking away from a Canada whose values are “increasingly unrecognizable from an international standpoint;” and walking away from Harper’s "dogmatic refusal" to do anything about climate change.

Finally, he’s walking away from the journalist’s new role to broadcast “useless tripe, or worse, stories that actively distract from the massive projects we need to be tackling instead of watching TV.”

It is inevitable that Nagata’s rejection of the hand that fed him has become in itself a media story – some of it deliciously bitter. At the very least, it proves that “people will still read a 3,000 word essay.”

Maybe walking away is the Canadian way. I can’t see us massing in huge numbers at Parliament Hill to dethrone Harper, or threatening his increasingly heavy security detail. But I would like to imagine us, one by one, grappling with our conscience to better “effect meaningful change in the world.” And if that means walking away from the stains of our privilege, so be it.

If the citizens of Omelas all left, after all, they might be a little less happy. But a child would be a little less miserable. A kind of Canadian reasoning that, unfortunately, seems to be going the way of the dodo.

Originally published in The Rover.

rover: rather laugh than cry

2011-07-06T15:51:00.006-04:00

Great literature engages the world, challenges preconceptions, and is often created at some risk – whether external or emotional – to the author. It often arrives at my doorstep in a manila envelope, complete with press release, praise from well-known personalities, and boasting of a shortlists or two.

But it’s never come wrapped in a ribbon in the hands of a shy 12-yr old girl who announces, “This is from my mother.” The mother, in turn, says a little while later, “The author was kind enough to sign it for you. She lives just up the street, you know.”

Recently, a Mile End/Outremont referendum revealed a deep chasm of misunderstanding and intolerance in the hood. On the one side, an energetic group of people whose long-standing oppositionto the various “infractions” of their Hassidic neighbours culminated in an opportunity to finally send a message: NO to the enlargement (by 400 sq ft) plans of a certain dilapidated synagogue.

On the other side, a Hassidic community whose very insularity made it a visible target, and the few of us who woke up – though not in time – to the serious frivolousness of the charges.

Rapprochements between the Hassidic community and their neighbours may be few and far between, but they are not unprecedented. First published in 2005 in French (translated by Pierre Anctil) as Lekhaim! Chroniques de la vie hassidique à Montréal, the short stories were subsequently published in their original English as Rather Laugh Than Cry.

The pseudonymous Malka Zipora, mother of twelve, has been living in Outremont for over 30 years. The 25 stories, with titles such as “Challah for the Sabbath,” “Grit Your Teeth – and Smile,” and “My Kreplach Don’t Leak Anymore,” are whimsical sketches of a busy – and to the rest of us, mysterious – life.

Not surprisingly, many of the tales centre on the foibles of raising a house full of children. “It starts when Sheindl’s friend Raizy buys a goldfish,” writes the author in “A Fishy Story.” From there little Sheindl schemes until her parents cave in. But not before Zipora shares a tip: “Now here is some simple advice for all you parents: Get a lawyer.”

The advice goes a little broader in “Chicken Soup for America.” Here, Mrs Kluger, “a short, frail woman who has managed a family of fourteen” is the perfect foil to Bill Clinton – if he can get a word in edgewise.

“As I was saying,” he interrupts, “about nuclear energy…” “Yes! Yes,” nods Mrs K with enthusiasm. “I use that new clear spray for the bathroom!”

Annoyed, the President of the United States begs her understanding for the nuances of politics and the many lobby groups he must contend with. But she cuts him short: “Listen boychik. If anyone knows about lobbying, it’s me. I’ve been lobbied for the past forty years. Yitzak wants a bike. Sara wants a pyjama party…”

Others, such as “Summing up a Story” frame tiny moments, in this case a young son learning how to multiply, with almost Tolstoyan gravitas. But rather than weave out 500 pages of generations and their come-uppances, she simply concludes with: “This story reminds me how delicately parents must tread, and how fragile we are.”

While she doesn’t answer some of the more prurient questions readers may have – What is Hassidism? Why those clothes? Is it true that you (insert just about anything here)? – her understated elegance goes a long way (not to mention an 8-page glossary). In “Memories, Memorials and Shavuot,” she has this to say about the community’s elders: “This aged and bent generation is a living reminder that the attitudes and philosophies of mankind are frail at best or dangerous and destructive at worst. It was civilization’s leaders who applied the noble concept of cleansing and purity to kill the sick, the elderly, the mentally incapacitated, and the sub-human races. This purification could have continued until only evil remained.”

So, for some Hassidim, the particular practices of their faith represent a bulwark against the untrustworthy affairs of “civilized” societies. In which case, it can be argued, it’s a positively enlightened and progressive response to potential annihilation. Sounds good to me.

Through some risk to her own reputation and standing in the community – she has never revealed her true identity – Malka Zipora opens a door and engages with the world. And I think that’s pretty great.

Originally published in The Rover.

rover: who's your neighbour?

2011-06-24T15:39:00.007-04:00

This was originally published in The Rover on June 21. Out of 1400 eligible residents, 450 showed up on a hot, sunny Sunday afternoon to cast their vote for or against a renovation project of the Gate David synagogue on Hutchison street. Mayer Feig was counting on approximately 190 Hassidic votes. Until we showed up a week earlier, he wasn't expecting to get one single non-Hassidic vote.

But we went up and down the three eligible blocks every day for 7 days; wrote and distributed pamphlets; designed and put up little posters; got in a hundreds of arguments; and got invited into dozens of Hassidic homes. It was among the most intense, painful, exhilarating weeks of my life. We lost the vote but we did something the "no" people never even thought possible: we created a community. Since Sunday, we have met (a small group of Hassidic and non-Hassidic neighbours, men and women) to plan events and activities for the coming months. I'm not sure, but I think this is unprecedented. Out of conflict grows peace, out of strife grows understanding, and out of hate is found love.

The votes were counted and we now officially have more tolerance for the sex shop down the street than for an insular well-meaning community in our midst. Not to pit one against the other (talk about dirty fight), but at what point do we stop measuring “progress” by metres of fabric?

Unlike a few hundred years ago, when Europeans scoffed at the “naked savage,” today the impetus to cover up is equated with prudery, oppression, backwardness, lack of choice, or ignorance. Making, of course, the urban twelve year old girl the epitome of enlightenment. With her tween-size thong, padded bra, short shorts and skimpy camisole, she clearly speaks for the entire history of western liberal values.

I say this because the way the Hassidim dress came up a number of times as I went door to door campaigning for their right to add a 10-ft extension to a small synagogue. But the women are over-dressed! Did you see the mens’ hats! Why don’t they let their children wear “regular” clothes! People wondered why they were “allowed” to live in our midst with such antiquated habits, customs and choices.

It’s not my place to defend their choice of dress. But would we even notice them, let alone be “offended,” let alone hold them accountable to the voting whim of their neighbours, if they dressed like “us”? Their very visibility made them the lightening rod for a rather smug group of people (including an Outremont borough councilor, whose daily presence on our street has me wondering about her orphaned constituency back in Outremont) who catalogued and publicized every possible infraction.

The damage was done. Even though the renovation plans were perfectly within all City norms, the repeated use of the word “illegal” (illegal parking! illegal air conditioners! illegal music!) succeeded in creating an impression of an illegal people. And when you do that, I don’t need to tell you, bad things happen.

But in the losing of a referendum, we gained a community. In one short week of going door to door, talking on the sidewalk and spreading the word, we got to know each other as neighbours, as regular people, as friends. This was so beyond the scope of Mr Lacerte’s imagination that he continues to accuse us of being funded by Cossette. But in his five years of slipping explosive tracts in people’s mailboxes and ringing their doorbells, one Hassidic woman told me, he never once rang their doorbells or gave them his propaganda.

To most people, no doubt, this little struggle of ours on Hutchison street between Fairmount and St Viateur, to quote Bogart, “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Fair enough. But the thing about communities is they grow. You start with a tiny hill of beans and the next thing you know you have seeds for acres of gardens.

Les Amis de la rue Hutchison (Friends of Hutchison Street) was born one afternoon just over a week ago because Kathryn Harvey and I needed a name to go on our flyer. Now, it’s the beginning of a new rapprochement between the Hassidic and non-Hassidic communities.

In this era of frenzied social media and globalization, I hope it’s a reminder that real community is also just the person next door, who ever they may be.

rover: downside to democracy?

2011-06-24T15:11:00.006-04:00

This was originally published in The Rover on June 14, a couple of days after we, Kathryn and I, "woke up" to what was going on. While an anti-Hassidic campaign had been waging on our street for years, it was pretty much under the radar and among a small but vociferous group of people. Then, all of a sudden, a referendum was around the corner. We rallied, created a flyer, contacted the media, and went door to door. In all the years that Pierre Lacerte et al had been raging against the community (for such unbelievably petty things as double parking, music, and so on) he never once rang a Hassidic doorbell. Well, we rang them all.

A Swiss friend of mine participates in referendums a few times every year, responding sometimes to up to 50 separate questions. Deciding everything from the price of butter to revising employment insurance to membership in the UN, these votes call upon its citizens to partake in defining the shape of the country. When I asked her if there are ever referendums like the one taking place this coming Sunday in Mile End, she said “Never!”

On Sunday, June 19th, a referendum will be held for a group of residents to determine whether or not a small synagogue will be “allowed” to proceed with its renovations. That this vote must take place is the result of a concerted lobby on the part of a handful of people. In the fracas, the city administration has thrown its hands up in the air, “leaving it up to the citizens to decide.” I’m not much of a Catholic, but I know I’ve read those words before.

We know well in this province how referendums can whip up emotions, encourage us vs them mentalities, and spell disaster for the “losing” side. But it is one thing to vote on the future of a province – it’s a big girl, it can take it – but it is quite another to let individual citizens decide the fate of their neighbours.

The Gate David synagogue is a small, old building that serves about 50 Hassidic families. They first drew up plans to renovate in 2004. Many revisions later, the city approved the plans in 2010. However, if it weren’t for the barrage of petitions, flyers and demonstrations, I would be hard pressed to even tell you where the synagogue is.

Much of the opposition has been spearheaded by Pierre Lacerte, whose blog is so replete with sarcasm, innuendos, and lies that it can almost be called hate literature. Yet, he is quoted at face value by the media and allowed to determine the tone of the “conflict.”

Because he and his comrades come door to door at such regular intervals, I have made efforts to understand their opinions. But it’s a hard thing to listen to when such words eventually turn up in the conversations as “those ethnics,” “they are a threat,” “next thing you know it will be a mosque and Muslims,” and “reasonable accommodation has gone too far!”

This Sunday, at the Mile End library on Avenue du Parc, residents of Hutchison street (between Fairmount and St Viateur) and Avenue du Parc (between Fairmount and Bernard) will be asked to decide whether or not the renovations to a decrepit building can go ahead.

I don’t know about you, but as an eligible voter, this doesn’t so much feel like democracy as an excuse for a lynch mob mentality. There are building and zoning laws and regulations to which these reno plans comply to a T. The immediate neighbours have agreed to the plans. Anything else is an excuse for racism.

mRb: bad animals - a father's accidental education in autism

2011-06-24T15:02:00.004-04:00

Joel Yanofsky is a somewhat well-known writer and columnist about town. I never paid him much attention, and I certainly didn't think I'd like this book. The review appeared in the spring issue of the Montreal Review of Books though I'm just getting around to posing it now.

Joel Yanofsky and his wife share an Asshole List – a running tab of fathers who are even worse than he is. When they meet a new one or hear stories, Joel looks so good in comparison that rare marital sex ensues. Hey, I’m only reporting what I read.

Author of the new memoir Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism, Yanofsky – though he portrays himself as not so charming a person – is an endearing and intelligent writer. After years devoted to reading, he finds himself, in his forties, finally ready for “[my] life to have the kind of narrative structure and coherence it had always lacked.” In other words, settle down and have a baby. Read more here.

Gazette: Alaa Al Aswany

2011-04-26T15:35:00.006-04:00

I lived in Egypt for a few years a long time ago: twenty years ago when I was in my twenties. When I think of the letters I wrote, the diaries I kept, the footage I shot, the photos I took - had blogging and digital editing been around I'd have done nothing but that. So it's probably best I actually had time to roam the streets instead.

Since being back in Canada, opportunities for re-immersion in Egypt have been few and far between. The recent revolution sucked untold days out of my life, however, as I could do very little that didn't allow for constant live streaming from Tahrir Square. Catching the 2006 Egyptian film The Yacoubian Building helped as well. I'd seen it when it first came out, but watched it again amidst the uproar coming from Cairo. Alaa Al Aswany wrote the novel on which the film is based. He also pens a weekly column on current affairs. These columns were gathered together by the American University in Cairo and released on the eve of the revolution: On the State of Egypt.

I got the opportunity to read the book when the Montreal Gazette asked me to review it. Written between 2005 and 2010, the columns do better than anything I've ever read to explain the nuances and contradictions of Egyptian life. He boldly predicts revolution time and time again. You can read my review here.

Al Aswany will be in Montreal this weekend for the Blue Metropolis festival to receive the Al Majidi Ibn Daher prize for Arabic literature.

rover: three deaths

2011-04-10T10:22:00.003-04:00

I'm the literary editor of Rover now, so in theory my reviewing days are behind me. But I had this one on the burner - plus, I already had a hole in my schedule. Lovely book. The review begins thusly.....

What does it mean when you go to josipnovakovich.com and you get a financial website written entirely in Japanese? It’s just the weird, random way the world works, I suppose. One minute you’re searching for a Croatian writer, next you’re reading, thanks to Google translate, “refinance your new borrowing – and Thinking!” Read More!

i said follow me

2011-03-10T17:37:00.000-05:00

no one drowns

2011-03-09T12:39:00.000-05:00

one day i just turned around

2011-03-08T15:31:00.000-05:00

rover: the trouble with billionaires

2011-02-21T09:56:00.007-05:00

Linda McQuaig has been in the business of rattling golden cages since uncovering the Patti Starr affair as a Globe and Mail journalist in 1989. Since then, her books have included exposés on Brian Mulroney (The Quick and the Dead), the deficit (Shooting the Hippo), big oil (It's the Crude, Dude) and our questionable relationship with the USA (Holding the Bully's Coat). She's been called Canada's Michael Moore. She's also a regular pundit and columnist in various media.

For all that, it seems to me that she doesn't really get the accolades she deserves. But whistle blowers never do.

I had the great fortune to review The Trouble with Billionaires for Rover. It is at turns mind-blowing, enraging, sardonic, hopeless, inspiring. What to do in a world where, if society were lined up and height reflected wealth, the heads of the richest 1% reached the clouds while the rest of us would be barely high enough to tie their shoelaces? Sometimes I'm with Derek Jensen: only total economic catastrophe can even begin to right these wrongs.

In any case, I love McQuaig's unkempt, hurried look, her urgent beauty, intelligent elegance. Her prose is equally debonaire. You can read my review here.

fi kul il-shara fi biladi...

2011-02-11T13:38:00.003-05:00

This song has come out of the revolution. Blood was not in vain. Beautiful.

I've tried to translate the beginning:

I left and said I won't go back
My blood was written on every street
Those who weren't listening had to hear us
And we broke all the barriers
Dreams were our only weapons
A clear tomorrow is right in front of us
We've been waiting for so long
We've been searching for our place
(chorus)
On all the streets of my country
The voice of freedom is calling me
On all the streets of my country
The voice of freedom is calling me

egypt redux

2011-02-02T08:29:00.002-05:00

Want to know what's going on in Egypt? Ask this young woman.
(The wide screen effect is lost here - you might want to go directly to YouTube for this one.)

redact, retract, redux, redirect, read, edit

2011-01-19T13:34:00.005-05:00

It was the best of books, it was the worst of books. It was the review of our discontent. I take that back: it was definitely NOT the worst of books. The review, now that is another thing. Was it my worst review? Was I just off the mark - or off the wall. Or was I, worst of all, making it all about me?

The point of the matter is, an author is enraged and my review is deemed unfair and uncouth. The Pigeon Wars of Damascus was a very, very difficult book to review. I can say without exaggerating that it is an extremely intelligent, perceptive and beautifully written book. A Western man goes to Syria and looks for signs of life in the oddest of places. What he finds is teeming, brimming, lusting for life. And said author writes about it with wit, lyricism, and reams of well-appreciated research. A fine book. I should have stuck to that, clearly. End of review.

Instead, I tried to identify a nagging displeasure I had while reading. A feeling of something I could barely name. Something in the tone. Something in what was not being said. In doing that, I drained the review of clarity and replaced it instead with vague apprehensions of vague suspicions. Enter author.

A bit of the exchange is captured in the comments of the previous post. But even more is here. An exchange for which I am grateful, by the way.

I really am unsure of how to proceed. Retract some statements? Qualify them? It is not a matter of conceding defeat, if you are wondering. I don't think that is the issue, nor should it be. But, here are my questions:

- When a reviewer has an emotional or indescribable reaction to a book, one based on so-called reading between the lines, how is that to be presented? Perhaps better contextualized than I did?
- Is it "wrong" to make any sort of suppositions about an author's character? Is that like hitting below the belt?
- When an author (or publisher, or reader) objects strongly, even making a good case for themselves, is it then incumbent upon the review to retract or rewrite?

I have to admit that I don't really know what I'm supposed to do -- or what I want to do.

But one last thing: this is the most fun I've had in ages.

rover: pigeon wars of damascus

2011-01-03T11:28:00.003-05:00

To start the year off proper like, my review of The Pigeon Wars of Damascus is up on Rover. It was a struggle to get through the book thanks to the author's high-handed tone. He reminded me immediately of a few overly-educated men I know. The ones who love the sound of their own voice, the ones for whom conversation opportunities immediately morph into monologue. You know the ones. Still, you always learn something in those conversations. And I'm glad I stuck with the book.
Read the review here. Better yet, read the book and tell me what you think.

carte blanche

2010-12-12T17:44:00.006-05:00

We've launched Issue 12 of carte blanche!
Get great writing, photography, graphic fiction here.

because the geese were hungry

2010-11-19T13:36:00.003-05:00

road road road 2010

2010-10-14T11:26:00.020-04:00

This August we drove to and through: New York State, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont. Needless to say, I took lots of crappy, indistinct, nondescript, generic photos. BUT the day before yesterday I upgraded the general software landscape of my life, buying Acrobat Professional, Photoshop Elements, Premier Elements. The former I need for work, the latter I need for my projects, the middle just for fun. I took out some of the vacation pics and had my evil way with them. I used to do this 20 years ago when I lived in Egypt, but used a typewriter and exacto knife. The knife part was fun. I think you might have to click on the pics to read the captions.
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idiots for dummies

2010-10-14T11:21:00.003-04:00

I made new friends over here. They've been profiled on Slate and I rambled on over, falling in love with their books, Tshirts, general creativity. So I bought a slew of things and wrote them a couple of poems, one of which made it to their hallowed hall. Come on, don't you just want to squeeze them?

racoons and religion: circling the garbage cans by night

2010-09-13T11:11:00.008-04:00

We cycled by one dead racoon after another, three in all. Huge they were, each on their side, their short legs stretched out like wooden spindles, their bodies just beginning to bloat. I held my nose as we went by, but I don't think there was any stink. The sun hadn't started beating down on us; they probably had been run over at dawn. Not quite half a day had passed. Their lives were over. I had a good 30 km to go.

There's something about dead bodies that makes one think about religion. I hardly ever see dead bodies so I rarely think about religion, so this time I gave myself over to it. What I thought was this (I make no claims to originality):

The three "great" religions - Judaism, Christianity, Islam - trace their lineage in a shared culture. They arose out of the desert, out of the first recorded attempts at sophisticated social structures, out of long lines of both harsh social interactions and gentle wonderment at the universe. So what really sets them apart? Christianity built upon Judaism, and Islam built upon Christianity. They are related, they grew up and became neighbours, they speak the same essential moral language. What is that one thing that, over time, has really made the difference from one religion to the other? Statehood.

The Jewish religion, because of the social history of its people and the ensuing diaspora, never really had to take the test of statecraft. There is the modern exception of Israel, of course, but aside from its Jewish stamp, it is really a secular state in the Western model. This freedom from the state allowed Judaism to develop as an idea, as a philosophy, as a feeling. As much as it was all written down, adherents could also have a very personal and mystical relationship to the religion and their god. It existed in the heads and hearts of Jews, as much as in the rituals and trappings of the religion. Sometimes the absence of practical application is good for a theory. It allows it to really develop, to take off with imagination and be harnessed to greater ambitions.

Christianity, on the other hand, had a jealous birth. It was the younger siblings to the Roman bullies and so, growing up, always aspired to power. As soon as it could, it bullied in turn. It took on statecraft with a vengeance, ossifying and destroying in the process. We can thank the high heavens that we live in a time where the state power of the Christian churches have waned. I wouldn't wish Christian totalitarianism on my worst enemy. To this day, the church and power are mutually corrupting forces, as the Vatican continues to display. Only, in my opinion, in the context of Latin American liberation theology did the Christian church really reach for something grand and humanitarian. Otherwise, every instance of social power weakened and destroyed the power of the individual faithful spirit. Only late in the past century and this one, now that the Church is out of the way, can there be room for a new discovery of Christianity's humanitarianism. The evangelical churches in the US would like us to believe that this is what they're doing. They are not of course, they are attempting to return to Power. Still, I think the general Western turn towards Buddhism, Yoga and all things Eastern is an honest search for faithful and spiritual essentials. It is a testament to the utter and gross failure of the Church.

Islam. And then there is Islam. I don't know enough about the details of the so-called golden age of Islam, during the European Middle Ages, when the scribes and libraries of the East kept alive the lost philosophies and knowledge of the Greeks and Romans. During this time Arab scholars invented Algebra (Khwarizmi), travelled and reported on the world (Ibn Battista), and wrote some of the most enduringly beautiful verse ever (Hafez). So what happened? Did the Ottoman empire crunch it down into a more manageable bureaucracy? I am not sure, but the bottom line is that the secular caliphates gave way to the ruling clerics. The Middle East went from being a series of eclectic family run sideshows, to an organized pan-Arab monotheological homogonized empire. Big mistake. There've been exceptions and holdouts in the intervening years of course: both colonialism and communism made their mark. But the urge to power was too strong to resist and, eventually, each reigning government had to pledge allegiance to the Koran or risk revolution. Islam, then, with its crude 8th century laws and sensibilities (however enlightened for its time), is now the template for a 21st century populace. Such a tight fit you can almost hear it squeaking with every step. There is no room left in Islam for a personal relationship with Allah, no room left for a mystical swooning, for asking questions, for fashioning new ideas or hammering out new shoes. Islam is now about power, adherence and stasis. This is spiritual suicide, and it's taking us all down with it.

Anyways, that is what I was thinking about. Then we got to Vankleek Hill and had the most delicious blueberry cheesecake in town at Mary's Café. So good it'll make a believer out of you.

mrb: canada and israel: building apartheid

2010-08-27T10:20:00.006-04:00

It took a while for the Montreal Review of Books to update its website for the Summer edition. The hard copy was distributed in the Globe and Mail back in July sometime.

Reviewing books like this is always a tricky matter. There's really very little you can say without enraging half your readership. And while this particular book is refreshing in its just-the-facts approach, the author's association with the controversial Concordia radical student groups doesn't help his case. But it is a great book and I recommend it to anyone who not only wants to a deeper sense of Canada's behind-the-scenes hanky panky, but also a more thorough understanding of the global machinations necessary to the creation of Israel. A little myth-breaking, if you will. You can read my review here.

rover: to love a palestinian woman

2010-07-26T08:46:00.005-04:00

I don't know what publishers are thinking sometimes. Or, they need much better editors than they are working with right now. I'll edit, hire me. I think I'm a pretty good editor. I sure wouldn't let this schlock past me. And I would help Ehab Lotayef become a much better poet. Here's my review of Lotayef's "To Love a Palestinian Woman" currently posted on RoverArts. What a facile title. And, except for a very small handful among the forty poems in the volume, what a collection of facile verse.

I've never met the man, though our paths must surely cross, and he seems to be a keen and honest activist artist, but perhaps we all get a little too caught up in our self-spun spider webs. His is laid with traps and rooms marked "Palestine" and "imperialism" and decorated with mirrors, the better to watch himself as he makes his speeches. I am surely not being either fair nor generous. But it gets me angry. He needs to drop his personas, dispel his mythmaking, and take some risks with his poetry. Or just give it up.

mrs zyma

2010-07-23T07:10:00.004-04:00

Mrs Zyma died in May 2007 and, the day before the funeral, Kathryn asked if I could film it. I didn't know anything about Mrs Zyma, nor the people who attended the funeral. I did my best with a rudimentary camera and mic. It's been sitting since then gathering virtual dust.

Mrs Zyma was a post-WW2 immigrant from Belgium but was, I believe, German. Her husband, Petro, died in the early 90s. They were childless. Kathryn moved in upstairs from them the year before Petro's death. Mrs Zyma was cranky, difficult, and unpleasant. She seemed to own only one or two dresses and had few friends, spending most of her time in her dark and dingy apartment. By the mid to late 90s, Mrs Zyma was starting to lose it and was regularly asking Kathryn to run her errands and do her banking. Some time in the winter of 1997 Mrs Zyma left her apartment and didn't come back. Kathryn, worried, had to call the police. They brought her back much later wearing only a nightdress. Not long after that, Kathryn found an assisted living home for her. Not able to fully hand her over to the state, Kathryn applied to become Mrs Zyma's curator.

For ten years Kathryn handled Mrs Zyma's modest estate and ensured that she was comfortable. She hired a coterie of people to take care of Mrs Zyma in a way she had never enjoyed. Among others, Kathryn hired people to: massage Mrs Zyma, speak German to her, play accordion and fiddle for her (Mrs Zyma played accordion), read to her, supplement the weekly institutional baths, and so on. As her mind went, her body experienced a sensuality she never would have dreamed of. Kathryn thought it was the least she could do. In the last year or two of her life Mrs Zyma started to smile and, sometimes, even laugh.

july 1: happy canada day

2010-07-01T10:25:00.001-04:00

summer wine redux

2010-06-04T13:50:00.004-04:00

THIS is what's wrong with the world today. The gulf between these two versions, these two videos, is the gulf of Mexico slicked over with oil. The sultry take by Andrea Corr is overdone. The posturing by Bono is laughable. Why does that man insist on wearing the guitar? Why, Bono? Everyone knows you can't play two chords in a row. But if the little boy in him wants to strap that thing on, why stop at guitar? He forgot his spurs and his horse. As for the song, their harmonic moaning at the end is a little TMI if you ask me. A little Donna Summer at the rodeo.

I'd been hearing Summer Wine in my head all day and it took me hours to figure out what it was. A snatch of a voice, a word here and there, a melodic note then another. Lee Hazlewood was THE voice. Nancy Sinatra is heartbreakingly sweet. No one is straining. No one is emoting. They are singing. Like adults. Telling a story of their encounter. It's all inside and it's protected, shared only in a whisper of intimacy.

Compare that to the public wanking of the Corrs/Bono version. Neither of them know a thing about responsibility, about taking things on, about sharing and intimacy and authenticity.

So much going on in the world today and this is what got me going enough to post. Not only that, I had already posted this song. Jeez. But everything else is too much right now. I needed this song.

rover: my happiness bears no relation to happiness

2010-06-01T11:45:00.007-04:00

This was one of the more lovely, moving and informative books I've had the pleasure of reading and reviewing for Rover. Written by an American Jewish woman living in Jerusalem for the past twenty years, it is as much a story of her own discovery as it is a biography of an engaging and brilliant poet. She is a humble and persistent narrator, at times spending months in various archives to uncover deeds, family trees, and contradictory truths.

Equally wonderful discovery is the poetry of the subject himself: Taha Muhhamad Ali. Earthy, sensuous, rough, he reminds me of a cross between Gallway Kinnell and Mary Oliver. You can read my review here. In the meantime, here is his poem Revenge.

At times … I wish
I could meet in a duel
the man who killed my father
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country.
And if he killed me,
I’d rest at last,
and if I were ready—
I would take my revenge!

*

But if it came to light,
when my rival appeared,
that he had a mother
waiting for him,
or a father who’d put
his right hand over
the heart’s place in his chest
whenever his son was late
even by just a quarter-hour
for a meeting they’d set—
then I would not kill him,
even if I could.

*

Likewise … I
would not murder him
if it were soon made clear
that he had a brother or sisters
who loved him and constantly longed to see him.
Or if he had a wife to greet him
and children who
couldn’t bear his absence
and whom his gifts would thrill.
Or if he had
friends or companions,
neighbors he knew
or allies from prison
or a hospital room,
or classmates from his school …
asking about him
and sending him regards.

*

But if he turned
out to be on his own—
cut off like a branch from a tree—
without a mother or father,
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions,
then I’d add not a thing to his pain
within that aloneness—
not the torment of death,
and not the sorrow of passing away.
Instead I’d be content
to ignore him when I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

Nazareth
April 15, 2006

Poem copyright 2006 by Taha Muhammad Ali. English translation and copyright 2006 by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin.

rhymes with wednesday: my city is full of flies

2010-05-05T13:05:00.001-04:00

Like an army the flies hit land in springtime,
Popping out of concrete and the melting earth.
In seconds they learn to dart and hover,
Poking needles into petals,
Feasting on shit, congregating in alleys,
Chainsawing the air with adrenalin and hunger.
This sound, all of them together,
Plunges over the city until
The throbbing streets are sticky with blood,
Car stereos thumping thumping
All day long.
All day long, flies.
Meaningless insects to whack away
Chase from my face,
Herd into flames, grind grind grind into the street
Filthy encroachers whose lives I swear I’ll break and batter
Unthinkingly, silently, except when I holler
A song for my murdering.
These flies, what do they care?

But the radio is always on
And someone says the lives of flies are full and rich and bursting,
Depositing their loads and investing their labours; an embedded reporter asks,
Are they heroes to each other?
Those who escape the whims of my violence
Those who live to sleep at night, tucking in their wings like folded flags,
Who among them brags of escapes and lucky dodges
Sharing tales of me, that dark swath across the sky
That monstrous apocalypse with no purpose
But to obliterate.
Who among them has seen my face and memorized it
For her children?
Who among them recites prayers over garbage cans
Granting me immortality in the pantheon of evils.
Who among them knows, better than I,
Just how small she really is?

jesus goes both ways

2010-04-11T18:55:00.002-04:00

rover: IOU

2010-04-11T07:59:00.002-04:00

There was this Evil Empire, see. It was so bad it didn’t even believe in capitalism or the free market or democracy. The Evil Empire was, wait for it, communist. Not communist like Canadian-health-care communist, but worse. Communist as in we’re going to pay doctors the same as janitors and if they make a fuss we’ll kill them. Next to them, we looked awesome in our democratic socks, polishing our capitalist shoes until they were really shiny. A robust regulatory system kept us honest while a minimum of social services meant we were always pretty. It drove the Evil Empire crazy. So crazy that in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and, not long after, the entire Soviet Union, uh, Evil Empire, along with it.

Without the Evil Empire to measure our moral high ground against, we started loosening up the regulations and throwing away those tacky social services. Fast-forward to 2008. The stock market cuts loose and everyone from Idaho to Iceland is Insane. Buying houses they can’t afford, investing in funds with acronyms that change every day, and cutting apart the social fabric with a chainsaw. It’s the wild West all over again.

This is British novelist John Lanchester’s central thesis in IOU: Why Everyone Owes and No One Can Pay. Begun at first as simply background research to a novel, he soon ditched the fictional plot for the real-life drama of zombie banks, subprime mortgages and credit default swaps.

The result is easily the most engaging and comprehensible book on the recent financial crisis that you’d want to read. With a novelist’s bravura, he connects dots that financial writers barely see and puts things in a perspective others wouldn’t dare. Who else follows the path from the fall of the Soviet Empire, to postmodern art, to the ban on torture, to the privatization of the banking system? From Lanchester’s point of view, they are directly related. One man’s deconstructionism is another man’s water-board is another man’s hedge fund.

It was the leveraging of risk that tipped the balance. As speculators searched for increasingly creative ways to generate money, risk became a commodity in itself, packaged and traded over and over again. The fact that it was almost completely unintuitive, inorganic and incomprehensible was beside the point. When the American housing market inevitably collapsed – built almost entirely on risk calculation – it took the world’s financial system with it, one country at a time.

The rare bright spot in Lanchester’s financial landscape is Canada. With our regulated financial sector, strong central government, and robust social welfare system, we not only weathered the financial collapse but we stand to come out of the recession on top. Going forward, Lanchester may want to postscript the next edition of IOU with a chapter on how the Harper government turns this around and drives Canada into the ground, beginning with the whittling away of the social services. It’s all connected, see.

moriarty: private lily

2010-03-04T12:43:00.003-05:00

My kid is my best music filter. She has eclectic tastes. She can stop listening if nothing is good. She doesn't horde music but picks it up in bits and pieces like shells on a beach. She showed me Private Lily this morning. This is a French-born band whose members are apparently all born of American parents. They call themselves Moriarty, after Dean Moriarty in On the Road. I don't even know if they speak English. But they have a handle on roots folk/pop. They always use only one microphone. Another song of theirs is Jimmy. Beautiful. Her voice is an airless tunnel leading somewhere. You want to follow.

#15 Moriarty - Private Lily
Uploaded by lecargo. - See the latest featured music videos.

wheels over indian trails

2010-02-04T11:38:00.003-05:00

Sometimes a name just comes to you and you realize that this name has been worming its way out from the deepest squished corners of your brain and that it's been twenty years or maybe more, certainly more, I'm so old it's much much more, and that because now that you live in the future, when the name appears you can grab on to it and wrestle it to the ground and stick your fingers in its throat and make it speak. It's yours.

I give you Stanton Miranda and one of my favourite songs from the 80s.

rover: salvation army

2010-02-04T11:03:00.003-05:00

Memoires are the new black. Like most trends, they are associated with the young and bankrolled by the old. Bypassing decades of wisdom and experience (boring!), we are guaranteed a raw slice of a trembling life.

Of course, this brings its own risks, as the spate of recent recants, lawsuits and scams attest: St Martin’s Press settled a hefty suit with the Turcotte family, thinly disguised but roundly scandalized by Augusten Burroughs’ “Running with Scissors”; Riverhead pulled “Love and Consequences” from the bookshelves when it was revealed that the wealthy young author lied about growing up gangbusters; and of course James Frey gets publicly shredded by Oprah for his exaggerations and fabrications.

Oprah: ...you lied about the length of time you spent in jail. How long were you in jail?
Frey: I was in jail a few hours.
Oprah: Not 87 days?
Frey: That is correct.

France’s current celebrity memoirist is Abdellah Taïa. Author of five books variously described as autobiographies, memoirs, autobiographical novels, and so on, his claim to fame is that he is “Morocco’s first openly gay writer.” Taïa’s most recent book, Salvation Army, has just been translated into English by Semiotext(e), the publisher who has been bringing us that Left Bank je ne sais quoi since 1974.

Salvation Army is an endearing pastiche of the author’s life growing up in Salé, a small city in Morocco, ending with Taïa’s first experiences of European life as a scholarship student to Switzerland (where “every citizen is a policeman”). His older, Swiss lover, who had encouraged this emigration, never shows up. Straddling Morocco and Europe, childhood and independence, Taïa’s heartbreaking discovery is that “every single person pictured me in his own way.”

Writing in a sweet, introspective tone, his account begins in bed — the family bed. The way the eleven members of his family occupy their three-room apartment marks him for life: his father has a bedroom to himself, as does the revered eldest son. His mother sleeps in the common room on the floor with the rest of the children. She is called once a week to join her husband in a ritual that is audible to all.

Situated somewhere between the comforting bosom of his mother and his longing for his older brother, Taïa’s sense of self and sexuality exists in counterpoint to the larger-than-life figures around him. A precocious and lonely child, he experiences life “stretched out and in a state of suspension… Books, books, books and records.” His adoration of his brother, first filial then sexual, keeps him in a constant state of arousal. But maybe it’s just a family thing: “my family’s reality has a strong sexual quality, it is as if we have all been one another’s partners, we blended together ceaselessly, without guilt.”

This absence of guilt and guile rescues Salvation Army from being merely a diary. Taïa, in choosing to listen to the story of a stranger, realizes, “I had given him my full attention. There was nothing else I could do for him.” There is an appealing wisdom there.

Unfortunately, the translation retains none of the music of the original language. Translator Frank Stock’s mid-western flatness, incessant use of “really” and “totally,” and the absence of either Arabic or French contribute to the book’s pedestrian tone. In just one example, Taïa calls home to reassure his mother, “everything’s fine, mom, just fine.” Replacing “mom” with “Om” or “Omi” could have done much to underscore his close relationship to his mother and give the scene the emotional urgency it requires. Elsewhere, errors points to sloppy editing if not a loose grasp of language (using “evidently” when he really means “obviously”). What may well be a finely nuanced story in its original French is a thud-thumping brick in American English.

rover: the thing around your neck

2010-01-18T08:34:00.002-05:00

Here is my latest piece in Rover.

MORE THAN A SINGLE STORY, BUT ONE AT A TIME
African author. Something around the neck. Surely there is a reference here to the South African “necklacing” of the 1980s? Horrific summary executions carried out by “people’s courts,” necklacing consisted of filling a tire with gasoline, securing it around the neck of the victim (collaborators, business rivals, political enemies), and setting it on fire. This grisly image easily encapsulates the violent and divisive history of South African apartheid. A generation later, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is not nearly so brutal.

While the horrors of racism, poverty and war may not be front and centre in The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie traces their legacies in every African – those who stay, lives circumscribed by limited opportunity, and those who leave, ambitions mocked by illusions of opportunity.

Born in Nigeria and living in the US since the age of 19, her concerns are with the African middle class, those who through education, money, marriage, or luck find themselves on the “right” side of history. Split evenly between African and American settings, the stories are finely wrought, unadorned tales of the “abundance of unreasonable hope.” A bright young boy, caught up in a local gang, is lost in the labyrinthine prison system in “Cell One,” his parents frantic for his return. In “A Private Experience,” two women from opposite sides of sectarian strife duck out of a riot together, a shared moment that offers but never quite bestows commonality. In “The American Embassy” a woman whose husband has been detained and son murdered applies for a US visa. But she walks out of the office, refusing to confide her pain to “the face of a person who did not understand her.”

Adichie’s mostly female narrators are often caught between family and exile – sometimes forced into both. Set in Philadelphia, a young bride in Imitation discovers her husband continues his philandering in Lagos. In “On Monday of Last Week,” a woman joins her husband in America, taking a job as a nanny to a mixed race couple. The African-American wife, an artist, emerges rarely from her studio but when she does, the Nigerian woman is bewildered – and besotted. In the title story, a young woman finally gets her much-sought-after American visa and goes to live with her uncle’s family. His nightly visits threaten to destroy everything.

Writing in a spare and lyrical style, Adichie possesses the tone and confidence of a writer twice her age. She neither tries too hard nor wastes her words. In 2007 Adichie won the Orange Prize for her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, followed by a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (the “genius” award). Speaking at the TED talks last year, the 32 year old writer cautioned about the “danger of a single story.” It negates and obfuscates: Africans are more than just poor, Mexicans are more than just immigrants to America, and so on. She herself was chastised for writing stories that were not “authentically African.” Meaning, her characters were middle class, educated and drove cars.

From necklacing to necklaces, it is important to break out of the idea that a person or a place has only one story. To paraphrase the narrator of “Ghosts” when asked if he has lived a good life, “It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is good enough.”

coldest night of the year

2010-01-08T16:17:00.005-05:00

One of the more wonderful winter songs. By the lovely Vashti Bunyan, this was one of her few releases from the late 60s - before she quit the music business for good. Well, almost good. She resurfaced a couple of years ago with the odd and endearing Lookaftering.

Turn off the lights and watch the snow fall.

etc group in copenhagen

2009-12-12T15:13:00.004-05:00

Stephen Harper's going to Copenhagen only because he has to.
Diana, on the other hand, is there to change the world. That's our Di.

rover: the hakawati

2009-11-23T12:00:00.003-05:00

Here is my Rover review of one of the better books I've ever read: The Hakawati, by Rabih Alameddine.

Instead of Once upon a time, Arabic stories begin with Kan ya makan (there was and there was not). The experience of the story is more important than its veracity because, as all good listeners know, the storyteller is a trickster. “Never trust the teller,” advises a character in The Hakawati, “trust the tale.”

And so, against a backdrop of emirs, jinns, the underworld, spurned wives and fortunate slaves, rehashed Bible stories and Beiruti gossip, Alameddine’s third novel begins: “Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.”

Osama al-Kharrat, a Los Angeles software engineer, returns to Beirut to sit by his dying father’s bedside. Surveying Lebanon after many years away, he muses, “I was a tourist in a bizarre land. I was home.” The bizarre and the familiar intermarry (literally) as the hospital room fills with extended family, home-cooked meals, and stories. On his deathbed, Osama’s father wants to make sure his son knows the tales of his grandfather and the origins of the family name, which means the fibber.

Osama is descended from a line of hakawatis, or storytellers. His great-grandfather, the neglected son of an Englishman and his illicit Armenian lover, learned his trade in nearby cafés. He, in turn, passes it on to his son, and so on. The family saga is narrated with much wit and dizzying descents into underworlds, outerworlds and other worlds. No sooner do you get a handle on a character or a generation, the story breaks for intermission and moves on to the next – a sort of cineplex of a novel. Multi-coloured imps help Fatima enter the underworld to retrieve her hand; the stories of Adam and Eve and Orpheus are given a new perspective; two young boys, one “evil” and one “good” can’t keep their hands off each other; the boy next door grooms his dangerous image until a militia man emerges; the girl next door falls in love with him – or rather, his motorcycle.

An air of insouciance colours the book. Clearly Alameddine is having fun. He names two of his main characters Osama and Jihad. Another character gets caught up in the “delightfully dramatic” Palestinian resistance. In one of the fanciful tales an imp uses a swarm of “lesbian mosquitoes” to protect him. In another, when one character says he cannot live with the shame of having a promiscuous wife, she flatly tells him, “practice.”

Interestingly, certainly for the Western reader, while there seems to be a role and a place for the entire kitchen sink in this book, there is little space for Islam. The al-Kharrat family are a Lebanese house blend: English, Druze, Muslim, Christian. The neighbours are equally diverse and include Italian Jews, Orthodox Christians and the odd Frenchman. Discussion of religion is met with scoffs or shrugs. One gets the feeling that those who do concern themselves with piety are only feeding their baser instincts. Alameddine is concerned with the magic of belief itself, not its institutional facades.

A wondrous tour de force full of in-jokes, cultural references and flights of fancy, The Hakawati is also a touching account of one family keeping their heads down during Lebanon’s civil war. Neighbours mysteriously disappear and local boys suddenly sport machine guns. Uncle Jihad, the glittering wit of the family, is also a gay man who never quite finds love. Osama, sent to America to study and save himself, is lost without his family.

Just as we, upon reaching the last page and closing the book, are lost too.

what evil looks / had i from old and young / instead of the cross the albatross / about my neck was hung

2009-11-18T16:30:00.007-05:00

This is an albatross whose carcass was washed up on Midway Attoll, an island in the Pacific Ocean. Chris Jordan photographed it and hundreds more. Birds whose flesh has rotted away to reveal the likely cause of their death: handfuls of bright plastic baubles. Baubles that float in the ocean, litter the beaches, that look like food, that choke the airways, that poison the young, that kill the flocks - tens of thousands a year. Bottle caps. Lighters. String. Bags. Shoelaces. Keys. Erasers. Crayons. Microchips. Jewelery. Batteries. Pens. Vials.

You look at these pictures and you can think one thing only. What we're doing is not enough. Nothing short of overhauling our entire detritus-producing economy will save these birds from choking on our garbage. It won't help that you turn down your thermostat, it won't help that you use a cloth bag instead of plastic, it won't help that you buy a fuel-economy car, it won't help that you install a solar panel to power your television, it won't help that you run a paper-less office. None of it will help because none of it gets to the core issue - which is that it ALL HAS TO GO.

Everything.

I mean, isn't that what these photos say to you? Don't they say that nothing short of total dismantlement of our bauble culture will save these birds? Is there any other way? The oceans are already full of dead zones, coral reefs are dying, the rainforests continue to be encroached upon. It really is out of control. And somewhere on a tiny Pacific island the albatrosses are slowly dying.

Remember the ancient mariner. His ship was lost in the arctic but then an albatross came to lead them home. But the ancient mariner, a man who would be comfortable in today's culture, shot the bird. Bad luck and bad spirits descended upon the ship and the crew died. He is forced to wear the dead bird around his neck. I'm really not doing it justice - read it yourself. But the ancient mariner then survives another shipwreck and spends his life in agonizing psychic and physical pain. Pain that is allayed only when he tells his story, which he does to a passing wedding guest.

I am in psychic pain when I see these dead birds.

lifestyle coaching

2009-11-10T14:48:00.004-05:00

Ranting and naming names is never a good thing. Forget what it does to the other guy, me it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So now I'm going to rant and not name names. Let's talk about Alex K. Is that anonymous enough for you? Kafkaesque enough? It's that letter K.

Pretty, shiny Alex is in his early 30s. He's a lawyer, a conflict mediator, a lifestyle coach, and a jet setter. He advises corporate executives and government departments. He is also, modestly left unmentioned on his website, an all round creep. With those credentials, how could he not be? Because of shared property issues (Montreal shared triplex ownership) we've had some consistent dealings with him in the past few years. He is, in no particular order:

- Lazy. Lets his wife do all the heavy lifting, phone calling, organising.
- Unresponsive. A typical email to him takes 4 to 6 weeks before we get a response.
- Obsequious. Master of the empty smile, the quick handshake, the domineering body language.
- Good looking. In that soft, doughy way that will fall apart in another 10 years.
- Suspicious and tight. Makes us justify and prove every little building expense and maintenance.
- Entitled. Treats us like his personal concierge team, instead of the neighbours that we are.
- Quick to anger. You have to see the emails.

This is an educated and successful guy. This is a guy who moves through the world like an ice-breaker moves through the Arctic. Coldly. The irony that he is a conflict mediator and a negotiation trainer is just too rich to believe. Who the hell is paying him the big bucks?

What is going on with my crappy mood these days? Don't even get me started with Yoga Bitch. I suspect that she thinks an elevated consciousness is a corner office on the 23rd floor. If anyone's going to create a yoga corporate empire, she will. I suppose I don't even have to add that she's not very friendly.

I need a holiday. I need my baby back. What is it with all the uninspiring people?

butterfly boucher

2009-11-10T12:45:00.004-05:00

Everything I know about Butterfly Boucher I learned in the last ten minutes. I've had songs of hers on compilations here and there, but never explored her beyond that. But after this weekend, I now am curious. There is a CD in my car that Little Kid likes. We don't use the car much, but when we do, in goes that particular CD. And we listen to this one song over and over and over again. This weekend, with the driving back and forth and in and out and round about, I figure I heard this ONE song about 75 times. Little Kid is a musical parser. She hears every instrument, listens to every nuance of the voice, notices when it comes in, when it curls around, when it waits. She wonders why this note is here and why that instrument is there. This song has caught her imagination and, now, it is seared into mine.

Butterfly Boucher:
- that is her real name
- from Australia, lives in the UK
- plays almost all the instruments
- her Changes duet with David Bowie is in the Shrek 2 soundtrack
- label snafus resulted in a 2006 album being released only this year
- she looks like a cross between Jennifer Garner and Cate Blanchett

twisted image

2009-11-09T12:48:00.006-05:00

I am going to do somethng not very nice. I'm going to write about somebody I only barely know and then I'm going to say not very nice things about them. It's not because I hate them, or that they are a bad person or even deserve my rancour, nor is it because I have any kind of grudge. No, I'm going to do this because I am thoroughly fascinated by how this person got to where he is. Truly, it's a fairy tale, full of fairy dust and moon sprinkles and little elves making shoes in the middle of the night.

When I worked at a software gaming company for too many years not long ago, we had a communications director for a little while named Mitch Joel. He was a nice enough guy, if a little bland and obsequious. But he was alright, got on well with others in the sandbox, and managed to always look busy. Never mind that he never did any actual work. He blared music all day long, chatted with the shiny boys who looked up to him, talked ad nauseum about what he was going to do, and travelled to every techno and marketing junket available. He was that kind of guy. In a moment of downswing and shake up, he was let go. I can't say he was missed for more than a second. His actual contribution had been, as far as I could tell, nil.

Since then, however, he has fashioned himself, according to his own bio, into a "visionary marketing guru." Hello? He still doesn't seem to have an original thought in his head, nor a talent for real work, but boy can he market his pants off. He has published a book, won some awards, travelled the globe. It all looks so juicy and good on paper. But don't waste your money.

We don't need to hear about global warming any more - stories like Mitch Joel's are enough to let us know that civilisation is doomed. How did it happen that our society became one in which learning to "brand yourself!" was the way to success? How is it that, in the wake of one of the biggest and dirtiest financial collapses ever, we still respect white men in suits who are going to tell us everything we need to know about marketing? Aren't these guys the enablers of disaster, the ones who told the Emperor how cool he looked?

No offense to Mitch Joel, he's just another systems masseur. Guys with no particular talent (or with a hidden talent that they have chosen to ignore) but who have learnt how to massage the system for full benefit. Doesn't matter what the system is. He'd be equally adept in Pharaonic Egypt or Stassi-infected East Germany -- he plays by the rules and gets rich doing it. He's the Great Oz, booming his voice from behind the curtain, pretending that anything more than common sense is his own personal marketing concoction.

I guess Mitch Joel is happy. He's the little lost princess who kissed the right frog and suddenly woke up rich and popular. I bet it's a mystery to him too, how he got to where he is, how it is that anyone really listens to him let alone takes him seriously. Who am I to care that he has his own personal Rumplestiltskin spinning gold somewhere in his dank and lonely tower?

I guess it's every bit as fascinating as learning about those fish who live off the bellies of whales, or parasite viruses, or bed bugs for that matter. Apparently, after 10 years, the weight of a mattress is almost exclusively made up of bed bugs and their husks. How much does the weight of the Earth change if it filled with "gurus and visionaries" like Mitch Joel? If your intellectual environment includes Mitch Joel, just how many different types of environmental disasters are there? I suppose if you put 100 Mitch Joels in a room for 100 years you eventually end up with a Shakespeare play. Titus Andronicus surely.

And on that note, I leave you with my haiku on the matter.

Same old, same old toy
a bald man turns like a top
upside down he spins

la danse

2009-11-04T21:48:00.004-05:00

First Lévi-Strausse dies - at the mûr old age of 100 - and now Frederick Wiseman has a new movie out. Vive les vieux or, as I'm sure the French would have it, vive les vieux cons.

Wiseman began his film career alongside cinema verité filmmakers such as the Maysles brother, Pennebacker, Barbara Kopple, and the NFB greats such as Michel Brault and the Challenge for Change program. This was a direct break from the patronising documentaries of the past, where omniscient narrators reinterpreted images and where formal interviews took the place of raw emotions. These films, often in black and white and about subject matter otherwise overlooked by mainstream producers, exploded with vitality and urgency.

One of my favourite of these filmmakers is Frederick Wiseman. Perhaps more than any other filmmaker of the time, Wiseman approached his subject matter with little preconception, letting his camera be written on as if it were a blank slate, faithfully following the minutae and characters of the institutions and contexts he was exploring. A contemporary example of his method would sort of be Michael Moore - if you removed the bluster, the ego, and the ideology.

We're used to it now, cameras everywhere and reality tv bringing even the most vapid of us out onto centre stage, but back in the 60s and 70s when Wiseman plunged his camera into dark corners, passively watching and waiting, we were shocked. Some of his films anticipated if not actually inspired real social change:

Titicut Folies, 1967, about inmates in an insane asylum.
High School, 1968, student life never looked so bleak.
Hospital, 1970, you don't want to get sick.
Juvenile Court, 1973, you don't want to get arrested.

There's dozens more but those are the only ones I've seen (and all of them in film class). Other titles seem equally evocative: Welfare, Meat, Sinai Field Mission, Model, Near Death, High School 2 (1994), Domestic Violence, etc. Most compelling title of all may be the 1971 film, I Miss Sonia Henie. Now that I'd like to see.

So, glad to see he's still alive and working. Even better, that he's made a film about that hothouse topic, the ballet. And the ballet in France, no less. Oh, la, la. I love dance, but I especially love ballet. It's the posture - I just can't get enough of good posture. He made Ballet in 1995 (according to Wikipedia), so I wonder what he's doing now that he didn't do then. I'll just have to see it to find out.

I'll walk, no run, no jetée to the cinéma!

harmonium

2009-11-01T09:32:00.004-05:00

I love playing Harmonium in the morning, especially early mornings. Celine Dion may be who most people now associate with Quebec, but really the heart and soul of this province lies with Harmonium. And, more specifically, the dulcet, emotional, longing voice of Serge Fiori.

I was too young to appreciate them in the 70s, but I listen to them now and hear the background music of my childhood, the soundtrack of Montreal.

Pour une instant...
Just for a minute, I forgot my name
But that's what let me write this song
Just for a minute, I left behind my mirror
But that's what let me see myself better
Without hesitation, I dove into the dark
Caught like a wolf without hope
I lost time to make up time
I need to find myself, to tell my story

Pour une instant....

summer wine

2009-10-16T13:33:00.003-04:00

The sun is glorious today though few birds are left to trill about it. Children dash back and forth, heavy backpacks not slowing them down one bit. Sidewalks littered with splashes of coloured leaves.
Here's a classic. The always underrated Nancy Sinatra, the too-often forgotten Lee Hazelwood.

sigourney weaver's acid test

2009-10-15T09:45:00.006-04:00

This is fun to watch. Sigourney Weaver narrated a short documentary, Acid Test, about the growing acidification, and ultimate destruction, of our oceans. It is a chilling, if somewhat pedestrian, film. In any case, an important message. You can watch it here.

Here she is, however, on Fox and Friends last week, some American tv show. The two hosts, bolt upright and panting like puppies, try to get her to talk about Avatar, the new James Cameron film coming out in a couple of months. She plays a small role and they contextualize her presence on the show by referencing her role in the Alien series. But she wants to talk about Acid Test. And so she does. The male host is clearly vexed, while the woman is eventually gracious and asks a few questions about the film. It's just too much for the boy dog: "If you're watching at home ... clean up your plankton!"

tundra watch (great canadian websites): rabble.ca

2009-10-10T10:42:00.005-04:00

Without even trying too hard, I find that I spell Canadian, buy Canadian, sing Canadian (I know all the words to the Canadian lyrics of This Land is Your Land. Yes, I even get choked up), watch Canadian, play Canadian (winter!), travel Canadian, eat Canadian.... you get the picture. I don't know if it's so much an articulated patriotism, as just a general warm & fuzzy feeling I have about this country. It certainly has alot to do with being the daughter of an immigrant, especially growing up in the expansive Trudeau multicultural years of the late 1960s and 1970s.

In those days, the story we told ourselves was that Canada was gentle, free-thinking, forward-looking, peace-loving, and open. The landscape was as wide as our hearts. My schools were always a thick mosaic of cultures and religions, my neighbourhoods a cacophony of languages old and new. Being Canadian was about embracing the world and embracing the future.

Flash forward to the new millenium and the story is no longer a fairy tale. In fact, fairy tales have been rejected in favour of committee-driven usability reports. Too many Prime Ministers cosying up to our neighbours to the south, not enough visionaries with either the will or the power to do anything about it. We waste our energies on inter-provincial fractionalism and resentments. And we've lost such huge manufacturing swaths that all that is left is dirty oil and we'll hang on to that even if it kills us. And baby, you know it will.

But we have to remember who we are and define what we want. With that in mind, Tundra Watch is my new weekly profile of great Canadian websites. Some will be small, others will be exhaustive trawlers, but they all will be great. Cause that's just how we do things up here.

The first website is Rabble.ca. They are, as they say, a community-supported non-profit media site. It's also the best source in this country for intelligent writing on domestic and international policy and trends. Pulling in writers from across the board, from both mainstream and off-the-radar press (Naomi Klein, Rick Salutin, Linda McQuaig, Heather Mallick, etc), it is critical, incisive, sometimes hilarious and always awesome. Rabble podcasts and RabbleTV also pull in and conglomerate clips on everything from the latest obscure conference to this week's featured Indie music.

It's all about the filter, it's all about you who trust and whose opinion you're going to give some weight to. If you want to go a little deeper, if you are willing to question the status quo, the party line and some creature comforts in the process, it's time to join the Rabble.

And if you still love turning your face up to catch the snowflakes, stick with me. I got one of those old wooden toboggans that'll kill your ass. But if you break something in the process we'll go to the hospital and fix it for free. Oh yeah. Tundra Watch has "Canadian-style" health insurance.

ban the burka

2009-10-08T14:29:00.005-04:00

The extremely awesome, independant and forward-thinking Muslim Canadian Congress is urging the Canadian government to ban the burka, the full-body face-hiding covering worn by some fundamentalist women. Or, to more correctly state it, the burka that is forced on some women by their fundamentalist husbands.

The MCC has often been a voice in the wilderness, sometimes the only Muslim group to insist that secular democracy is the future not the enemy, to consistently stand up for the rights of women, and to loudly and boldly condemn jihad and terrorism. Time to donate to the MCC.

Also time to read MCC founder Tarek Fatah's book, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State.

At its core and in its proper historical context, Islam was leaps and bounds ahead of its time 1200 years ago. It heralded a new respect and place for women, the concept of impartial law, and a respect for the weak and poor. It is this that people have in mind when they speak of Islam as a religion of peace and compassion, current events notwithstanding. But likewise, while the words of Jesus may have been all about love and tolerance, the churches of America have been nothing if not contemptuous.

The problem is the book. That would be Book with a capital B. Answers, like questions, come and go, reflecting the tenor of the times. But we have cemented some answers into Books and still look to them, thousands of years later, to respond to modern day cultural, social and political questions. We take those answers and shoehorn them into our lives, hobbling around on pious but ill-fitting shoes. Walk too long in the wrong shoes and you eventually fall. Put a whole culture or country in the wrong shoes and you get, at the very least, severe stagnation. At the worse, you get disaster. Muslim countries, take your pick.

As for the Muslim Canadian Congress, I want what they're wearing.

moi!

2009-10-07T17:15:00.005-04:00

Hey, look at me today. I'm blogging, I'm cleaning out old boxes, I'm posting bits from here and there. Here's the first two pages of a very small book that Big Kid started to write in 2001 when she was 8. It begins well, if I do say so myself. I hope it wasn't starting out to be a murder-mystery...

"Leila"
July 7, 2001
Leila! she's the smartest, strongest, and the gentelist you got to admit she's one of the best.

{page 2}
Leila!
she doesn't let go and its tru you got to have them mothers
Leila she's my mom.

Not dictated, I swear. But saved, you betcha.

funny ha ha

2009-10-07T16:31:00.002-04:00

These two guys are lost in the desert.
Just when they think they're going to die of thirst, they chance upon a village where market day is in full swing. They go to the first stall they see and ask if they can buy some water.
"No," replies the Bedouin stall owner. "I only sell fruit."
So off they go to the next stall and again they ask for water.
"Sorry," says the merchant, "but I can only sell custard."
"Custard?" one of the guys says to the other. "What kind of place is this?"
By now desperate, they go to the next stall, only to be told, "Sorry, but I only sell jelly."
Hearing this, one guy turns to the other and says, "This is a trifle bazaar."

THAT is my all time favourite joke. As you might guess, it sits perfectly in the sand-blown, cod-eating crossroads of my life.

dalai lama

2009-10-04T15:17:00.010-04:00

I got to see the Dalai Lama. Big Kid had a couple of tickets and was going to go with K. But then her LOVE group was going, so K got to go with me. The Bell Centre is cavernous. The number I heard in attendance was 15,000. That's alot of hockey fans - I guess. I wouldn't know cause hockey tickets are too fucking expensive. But I shouldn't swear. I'm talking about the Dalai Lama here.

The event was organized by the Tibet-Canada committee (from whom the tickets came and the reason why we were in the second row centre - best seats i've ever had for anything) and you could see the entire Tibetan community was here. And vibrating. The MC was Laure Waridel, founder of Equiterre. She could barely contain herself on stage and more than once broke down.

How does one refer to the Dalai Lama when using third person? His Holiness? Well, His Holiness's entrance was preceded by two Tibetan dance numbers. There weren't always enough boy dancers, so they simply drew moustaches on a couple of girls and presto, faster than you can say transgendered! the male contingent was rounded out.

Then, without much fanfare, the Dalai Lama took to the stage, his hands in prayer and bowing humbly. He sat with his two translators, one Tibetan who helped him sort through the occasional word, and the other a French monk who periodically recapped everything in French. The headset microphones gave them repeated glitches at first, but they joked through it, eliciting hearty laughs and applause from the audience. The Dalai Lama eventually threw his off and made do with a hand-held, and then a standing, microphone.

He began by announcing that he wanted to speak "not as a monk, not as a Tibetan, but as a human being." He went on to talk loosely about what he considered ailed us as people and as a society: we are too self-centred (people who over-use "I" and "me" too much are headed for a heart-attack); we are overly concerned with external beauty; we are greedy bastards, destroying the world because we want more and bigger.

What we need is compassion. Compassion is not just "niceness", it's not just accepting what comes along the way without a fight. Rather, it is recognizing what is good and important and then fighting for it.

He got the greatest round of applause, a spontaneous outburst really, for his mention that parents must "provide maximum affection for your children and spend more time with them."

Questions had been solicited earlier (through a website I think) and they were read out and posed. One of them asked how best do we teach and love our children. He said we must inspire their brain and nurture their heart. He said, "a brain without heart can be disaster. A heart without a brain is nice, but," rolling his eyes in a fine comic beat, "no progress."

His entire presence was laconic, funny, casual, and irreverent. It was refreshing to feel that this was not about his ego, but truly about the message. A simple message. I felt the entire Bell Centre was craving this simplicity. We already knew it, but we like to hear it coming from someone with as much spiritual and international credibility as the Dalai Lama. He said he felt positive about the future. That there was no question that the 20th century was an era of war and bloodshed, but in the hundred years of its span we went from blindly showing up for battle, to gathering in the millions to protest war.

There are many different types of smiles, he said. The diplomatic smile, the artificial smile, the sarcastic and superior smile, the money and power smile. But by practising a secular ethics (for those of us who do not practise an institutionalized religion), and by always travelling in the direction of compassion, we might sometimes remember the real reason to smile. And that is the best smile of all.

on kathryn's batavus

2009-09-23T14:17:00.003-04:00

the sky was drizzling
when i got on your bike
what a great look
for a high-riding dyke!
get to parc jeanne mance
see a cute dog
well emma thinks it's cute
i see a frog
but we keep on going
looking so swell
in the morning traffic
of bikes on rachel
get to the corner
to cross again
i love the paths
of parc lafontaine
they undulate with people
strolling to work
i think of you fondly
writing your shhrc
we get to her school
and emma's not sure
who she'll eat lunch with
oh school is so dur!
i say not to worry
that in spite of the trouble
she'll have a great day
cause i love her double
then back home again
just me and my ride
i miss you today
outdoors and inside

zora howard

2009-09-22T21:47:00.005-04:00

This kid is brilliant. She's 13, apparently. She OWNS the audience.
I'm not talking about that cute-they-met-and-fell-in-love blood.
I'm talking about that slave-raped-six-times-by-the-master-birthing-six-mixed-babies-that-are-hung blood.

Watch her go.

I can't embed the video (disabled on request. why? this girl should be viral) so go here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTnxJdxhU7o

But here's another one of hers. Tell me, how does a 13 year old kid know about being a mother of a son off to war. I mean, she knows it.

oh yeah? the youth in canada are even worse

2009-09-21T14:40:00.002-04:00

james

2009-09-19T13:56:00.004-04:00

My brother, Jimmy, died, and with him an entire lifetime of nothingness. It is this nothingness with which I am grappling. He was born a full year before me but the week I was born, so the story so often told goes, my parents brought him to the first of a handful of institutions in which he would spend the rest of his life.

I have pictures of our visits to see Jimmy. His three younger sisters and younger brother playing outside on the lawn while our parents went inside. Sometimes a nurse would hold him to the window. We weren’t allowed inside until the age of 16 which meant he was little more than a phantom, something else to add to the mysteries that adults attended to. We knew we had a brother, yet it meant something else that was undecipherable. There were no pictures of him next to ours. My parents rarely spoke of him, and none of us never knew what to say when asked the question: “how many children are in your family?” We’d look to each other, we’d look to our parents. Four? Five? Four? Everyone hesitated. We were always at a loss.

But I built up a relationship with him once I returned to Montreal in the 80s to go to university. He was fun. I liked being around him. We picked up his ashes yesterday and they sit on a table waiting for us to figure out what to do. Not a very heavy box, apparently, for an adult man. His bones were small and light. But his hair was thick and jet black, and his skin was a soft and creamy olive. I thought he was beautiful.

a man's a man

2009-08-27T18:51:00.001-04:00

For all that. Size has nothing to do with it.
This one's for Samia.

shock your girlfriend with a bigger brain

2009-08-26T17:53:00.006-04:00

Don't surprise me with a bigger penis. I don't need to add inches or make it bigger. And I really don't think you want to shock my girlfriend. 16-year old Big Kid has gone from offended to amused to - sigh - jaded, but 10 year-old Little Kid is still going "yuuuuuuuuuck, a bigger whaaaaat?"

I am officially fed up with the Vimax ads. They have crept onto every single website I read. From the local newspaper to political aggregators, from dictionaries to sports. They are, uh, popping up everywhere. What is in these supplements anyways? According to their website, they are a "natural herbal enhancement" based on some formula used by Polynesian men who "have sex 3 times a night." Being a South Pacific archipelego of hundreds of islands subsisting on meagre expat remittences and scarce tourist dollars, I wonder why the Polynesian men themselves haven't marketed this secret formula. Probably because they are all doubled over from their over-extended hemorhraging penises. Those very penises whose "appearance will arouse your sex partner." Arouse in which way, I wonder. Let's ask those Polynesian women, the ones who just kicked their sex-crazed partners in the nuts.

But I don't just have a problem with the Vimax makers. After all, they're simply spreading their joy one dick at a time. My problem is with the websites who close their eyes and think of the Bank of England. Every click on the banner or pop-up apparently garners the host website a 50% sales commission (selon Wikipedia). At $200 per order that's not insignificant. Enough money to sell granny up the road. So, my local daily, a truly crappy and sanctimonious newspaper, has no problem blistering its pages with close-ups of young women, eyes a-popping under "shock her!" taglines. There is NO journalistic credibility when that is the commercial environment to which you are beholden.

Then again, why wouldn't the local Montreal crap rag get in with this? It turns out that Vimax is a Montreal company. On Monkland avenue, no less. Not that they can spell Monkland right, but then again who cares about good grammar when you get testimonials like this: "I lasted long enough but I couldn't do it that emotionally tense like I used to when I studied in college." Sounds like exam time to me. Luckily a picture paints a thousand words, cause those Before and After shots do the job just fine. They all look a little needy and forelorn to me, but heck, I don't use one in real life.

Vimax makes it under the radar because they do not sell their product as a drug. It is not tested and they have no liability. As for the ads, they continue to bombard, invade and shape us. We blithely go along, chuckling good-naturedly while others make a quick buck off our lack of judgement. To add to Sartre, hell is not only other people, it is us. We sink further and further into our own crap, not even smelling it any more.

This is a disturbing and mocking world, is it not. Penis enlargement doodads. Breast implants. Tanning beds. Botox. Imported water from Fiji. Red Bull. Pet cemetaries. Zac Efron. Chrysler 300. Four-ply, virgin forest toilet tissue. Ad infinitum.

I know a better way to shock your girlfriend. Enhance your brain, hone your moral compass and learn a thing or two about intimacy. Heck, I'll even throw in a life-time guarantee.

haiku and boxing

2009-08-12T08:09:00.007-04:00

All things converge eventually and life imitates taglines. Big Kid wants to take kick boxing this fall - serious kick boxing, not aerobics, "are you kidding?" She's already done a year of wrestling, but wants to move onto something more combative. Okay!

Me, I will just write a haiku or two.

Composting with Lady Macbeth
My hands deep in worms
they squirm and you ask again,
Can I wash this off?

Country Roads
Motorcycles pass
all day and night, scary gangs
then dismount and oh - fat ladies!

but it's different in canada

2009-08-11T11:47:00.005-04:00

That's what Bob Lefsetz says. He's a great music writer and I've been reading him for a couple of years now. I let his postings fill up my Inbox for a couple of weeks at a time then, when I can, splurge on them in a late night feasting.

He's right about Canada. We haven't sold our souls yet cause there's no one to buy them out. So, lucky us. I'd never heard of Jets Overhead, but they seem to fit his paradigm of making music just for the passion of it. Something he bemoans in the US. Why does all the good music come out of Canada, he asks. (Reason #238: we don't have to worry about making enough money to cover our health care insurance.)
Check out the post.

leisure

2009-08-10T11:11:00.005-04:00

A copper chipmunk perched himself on a knob of a trunk the other day, the perfect vantage point for us to stare into each other's eyes. I was finally in the hammock, only the second time this busy summer, and trying to read but really wanting to nap. But his antics at the squirrel-proof bird feeder were making me laugh. If I made too much noise he'd scramble up the tree, coming down a minute or two later to jump on the feeder. Finally, he settled on the knob and decided to watch me. I couldn't hold the stare. I was the one who always flinched, not he.

One of my first thoughts was, how lucky we both are, settled next to or in a tree for a sunny afternoon of leisure. Birds chirping in the distance, the odd car on the road, bugs buzzing, hay and corn growing, roots digging. This is an afternoon on the farm.

But who am I kidding, little chump of a chipmunk. I am the only one with leisure here. I have reaped the fruits of my labour and now I relax. Who knows why the chipmunk was taking a moment out of his frantic seed-scouring day, but you can likely bet he wasn't dreaming of reruns of Battlestar Nutatika. What leisure does an animal like that have? Leisure can only exist because someone else is continuing to work. In my case, that someone else would be the system. The government, the tax base, the law enforcement, the grocery stores, the imported clothing, the transportation systems, the tapestry of diplomatic relationships, generations-old treaties and conventions, shared memories. All those keep working so, one afternoon in August, I don't have to.

Otherwise, I'd be spending my every waking moment scouring for food and warding off predators. Like the chipmunk, like my ancestors. Perhaps the only animals free from that at moments are those who have built up some semblence of social systems and heirarchies. The full-maned lion who lies about while the rest of the pride chase down food. The queen bee. Perhaps dogs and cats.

Dogs and cats. Those neurotic creatures whose penance for I-don't-know-what is to have been robbed of their wildness and have leisure thrust upon them. They get fat and yappy and stupid. Too much leisure is a rotten thing. Suddenly, the bigger and most frightening of them hurls himself over a fence when you bike by and breaks into a full gallop to catch up with your pumping legs in some kind of prideful yet vicious race (cause you sure don't want to lose). You hear his wide paws thadump thadump thadump beside you. Past the fence, pass the hillock, away from the goats you were slowing to admire.

I yell to Kathryn "go faster, go faster" because she would be the consolation prize once he tires (literally) of me. I hear her low breath as she too struggles to hit stride and outpace him. We go hundreds of metres. His will is strong and he looks straight ahead. If he had any strength left over he'd make mince meat of my ankle. Finally, slowly, in a series of heaves and wheel rotations, we outride him. He pulls off and, too spent even to make a go of Kathryn, he turns around.

Kathryn's silent almost the rest of the way but I can't stop talking. I feel like a ten-year-old boy. Did you see how big he was? Did you hear his paws on the road? Could you hear him breathing! It's the most exitement I've had in ages. Certainly not the leisurely ride we intended.

this is the spider

2009-08-05T08:32:00.003-04:00

This is the spider i saw this morning while drinking a glass of cold coffee on my porch. I love cold coffee, left over from the day before and kept in the fridge, swirled with milk or chocolate milk or, best, vanilla soy. Warm mornings have been few and far between this summer and still, in the sun, I wear a sweater. And so, glinting in the sun, was the spider web. A perfect orb of pathways, all leading to Rome where sits on her throne the spider. Glorious and patient and hungry. There are seven of these webs this morning around the lilac bush. Seven. All spun over night, after the rain stopped I suppose. All hopeful and patient and so very, very hungry. There is so much about life that we don't understand. When can I be like a spider? When can I spin a thin line of waiting and throw it over my shoulder to a nearby branch. Then when can I sit, calm and secure, and wait for whatever the wind brings by. To the other insects spiders must be glorious and awe-inspiring, larger than life, mysterious. Today I will be a spider. Today I will welcome everything.

lay off our health care

2009-07-30T10:17:00.004-04:00

This ad, paid for by some American conservative group, has apparently been running in the US for some time now. I am fit to be tied. It is loaded with falsehoods, idiocies and misrepresentations. To wit:

First of all, this woman apparently had a cyst not a tumour. And certainly not a terminal late-stage cancerous tumour, which is what the ad implies. Therefore, she was put on a waiting list. Not the most comfortable thing in the world but certainly not life-threatening.
It seems it was her vision that the cyst (oh right, tumour) was threatening, not her life.
Her surgery in the US (at the Mayo clinic) was elective and wouldn't have been paid for by private insurance anyways. Then she returns to Canada and tries to get OHIP to pay for it (over $100,000 apparently). Quelle scam.
Health care decisions in Canada are not made by "the government" or faceless "bureaucrats" but by patient and doctor. Actually, considering the bloated role of insurance companies and HMOs in the US, it sounds like they're talking about their system. Not ours.
Most available drugs and treatments ARE available and paid for in Canada. Those that aren't likely will be, it's just a matter of advocacy and time. We have tighter drug safety criteria anyways.
If she mortgaged her house to have the operation in the US, imagine what else she would have had to pay out of pocket had she been living in the US. All her prior and post expenses were, of course, paid for by the Canadian health care system. I say we make her pay it back.
She was paid for appearing in this ad. Perhaps to cover the enormous costs of her American health care?
Her suit against OHIP is being funded by a group called the Canadian Constitution Federation, a right-wing quack racket.
The CCF funds numerous constitutional challenges. This includes defending people who have been charged with hate crimes (homophobia), trespassing (anti-abortionists), discrimination, etc. They are also challenging native treaties. In other words, the CCF is hard at work dismantling our human rights and social contracts. Nice.
National Post columnist Andrew Coyne is on the CCF board of directors.
The right-wing National Post has sympathetically covered the Shona Holmes "story".

Americans are wholly ignorant about our health care system, only referring to it as a bogeyman when it suits them. And this ignorant small-town woman, whoever the hell she is, blithely feeds into stereotypes in the most crass manner possible: for money. I invite her to move south.

barn wood smells forever

2009-07-24T10:56:00.007-04:00

I don't know if I should seal this wood or not. It is riddled with tiny little boring holes made by termites or whatever else bores into old wood. I sanded this wood to hard butter, butter with little lumps of curd every now and then. Note the knot hole that the laptop cable can go through. I need to countersink the screws. And the legs could be better reinforced. But it started to rain and I was working outside and it had been too many days going without a desk and squatting at Kathryn's. But here it is: my table!

It's been a good ten years since I made my last piece of furniture (D left and I had none and couldn't even afford Ikea. Just as well.). The barn is full of more wood like this. Some of it old planks at least 25 feet long that I couldn't be enticed to cut shorter if you paid me. So they lean against the side or lie on the floor. I'll forage for the small pieces and make what I can.

So now I sit here and work, inhaling the lingering smell of the 150 year old barn. "Work" is a euphemism for heaven when sitting at this desk.

summer in honduras

2009-07-07T20:01:00.004-04:00

I have a garden this summer. A fantastically big garden that we planted with, let's see, tomatoes, spinach, cucumbers, zuchini, lettuce, garlic, beets, radishes and various herbs. And, for good measure, strawberries and blueberries. All I want to do is kneel over it and weed. Day in and day out.

The earth is rich here - silty and loamy and shaking with worms. They say it's some of the best earth in the country. This farm - this little farmlette - fell into my lap. But one of the reasons I made the leap of faith and took it, and carved out this garden, was to share it with Big Kid. But she, however, will have none of it.

She only spent a week in Honduras, but it was not enough and too much. Her group stayed in San Matias, a village of mud. They were forced to cut their tour in half because of the coup (and the media circus that followed that panicked parents and pressured the school). And now she feels undone and at loose ends. And too rich and too privileged and too bountiful. She spent almost the entire time drastically ill, but also hiding it, not wanting to complain in front of her hosts. She got up at 4 every morning and helped with whatever work was at hand. She won't do that at home, but I suppose at home it's not real work. Just as life here is not real life. That's how she feels, I think. And that's how I feel sometimes too.

Weeding and dreaming and walking and building and talking and, oh yeah, working every now and then - just enough to pay the bills - then weeding and dreaming and walking and building all over again. It's not real life, is it. It's something but I don't know what it is.

I had a chat with a new neighbour in the city the other day and we found out we were both filmmakers. He, retired and me, never quite. I told the familiar story: when Big Kid was born I abandoned freelancing for stability. And then I found myself segueing into the real truth. I knew it was the truth because it became harder and harder to say and my face turned red and I just wished he'd go back into the house already and stop this yammering. What I told him was that I abandoned it all for comfort. I told him that comfort pulls you down with flattering chatter, and it feels good and you think you're going somewhere and it feels like you're doing something. But you're not. You're sinking and you're mute and you're getting quite, quite still.

But oh, the chair you just bought is so very comfortable. Stay in it. Stay.

My kid is 16 and yearns for the world like all kids her age do. She doesn't want comfort, she wants to explode. I gave her comfort all her life, prided myself on it. But I see now that my job has changed. It's to help her explode without getting burnt. Controled explosion, if you will.

So now, her Honduran family waits to see if the leftist Zelaya wrests back his power from the elites who resented his willingness to challenge them. There's nothing comfortable about their lives. Not one single thing, from when they get up at 4am to when they drop back on their beds at 10pm. And when you're suspended between those two worlds - one of contentment, the other of difficulty - what do you do? What do you do when you're 16, except explode?

Controlled explosions. Sometimes devastation, sometimes just fireworks. We'll have to weed and see.

et si j'ai dit que je t'aime

2009-06-08T16:31:00.001-04:00

What then?

the school bell rings at 9 am

2009-06-04T13:19:00.001-04:00

my little one dissolves into a froth of children
the walk home is long.

sycamore

2009-06-02T17:02:00.004-04:00

I've just deleted HUNDREDS of songs from my hard drive and it gives me a unique thrill. I would not be so happy throwing away vinyl or trashing CDs. But there is something about too much music jamming up your hard drive that is obscene. When did it become more about quantity than quality?

Remember scanning other people's record or CD collections? Long conversations would ensue about this artist or that, and they would haul out all the related titles and you'd talk for hours - or at least long minutes - about other related artists, the true origins of a genre, or why so and so is such a derivative hack.

Now, when you talk music it's all about the hardware and numbers. Where do you store your music? How much music do you have? And unless showing off is your thing, the conversation ends there.

So, I'm sick of all these songs gumming up the works. But one of the unintended consequences of deleting - like going through your wardrobe as you junk all your old clothes - is coming across those bits of archaia you forgot all about. Those unique little gems that you just have to keep cause who knows where or when you'll come across it again.

Sycamore by Bill Callahan is that song today. I don't know who this guy is or how I came across this song, but it's a keeper. The unadorned voice, lyrics that slide from highly personal to slightly metaphoric. The lilting melody. The sweet picking. This is not a great video, and he's riffed slightly from the studio version that I have, but it's a good approximation.

All you want to do is be the fire part of fire...

pro-hypocrite

2009-06-02T15:58:00.003-04:00

In the wake of the murder of George Tiller this week, the American doctor who performed late-term abortions in Kansas, Rachel Maddow goes through the past 20 years of, as she so rightly calls it, violence and terrorism in the name of life. While the issue is not nearly so divisive in Canada, we still have to put up with American-influenced right-wing elements that push against the availability of legal abortions here.

It is important to call this what it is: TERRORISM.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

this one's going to last forever

2009-05-25T10:13:00.003-04:00

This was a tough review to write. I didn't like the book, the author lives in my neighbourhood and we probably know people in common, she's a young author and I didn't want to stomp on her. But I really, really didn't like the book. What are publishers thinking??

THERE WAS A KIDS' SHOW years ago that had a puppet who sang This is the song that never ends, it goes on and on my friends… That singing lamb never shut up. I sing it to myself sometimes, like halfway through Nairne Holtz’s second book, This One’s Going to Last Forever. Maybe because the title paraphrases it. Or maybe because the book reminded me of my brother-in-law who won’t stop talking. While the details of the conversation may occasionally be interesting, the substance is just never there. So my eyes glaze over and I dig in for the long haul.

In this collection of short stories and a novella, Holtz trots out a mangy crew of characters around whom revolve tales of love lost, anaemically fought for, then lost again. Nicky works in a parking garage and has a crush on Nathalie, a supposedly straight chick. She goes for the chase but loses the girl when she comes off too macho. A small-town gay Elvis impersonator performs drive-through marriages, and sleeps with a straight man on the side. Anna has lost her leg because her girlfriend crashed their car, but now the only person who offers her anything close to genuine love is a suburban man with an amputee fetish. Clara is a naive student who finds herself negotiating fault lines between extremes of both love and politics. Kelly and Sonya are lovers for whom boredom and bickering are both resolved by heroin.

Intriguing characters all, but they rattle around in settings that are more bone than flesh. Except for the immediate dilemmas of the plots, characters are described rather than inhabited. Many of them stand in for wincingly facile caricatures: in “Knives and Forks,” the narrator is visiting Lou’s apartment and is surprised to discover that “although Lou was a lesbian, her offerings were not politically-minded: there was nothing local, organic, fair trade, or vegan on display.”

Throughout the stories a code of identity politics is used as shorthand, replacing original description or commentary: apartments are described as either bourgeois or bohemian, hairstyles are markers of social order, and attractiveness is measured against reality TV. While in some hands these would be the tools of a biting social critique, Holtz merely cuts her losses and moves on to the next quick quip.

Perhaps hoping for a bit of gravitas, the Polytechnic killings pop up in the middle of “Are You Committed,” the novella of the collection. Clara, Mike and Bruno, roommates as well as co-workers at the McGill Daily, conduct some predictable soul-searching. Mike is sure he would have come to the women’s rescue, Bruno collapses into self-pity, and Clara retreats from them both, exploring the politics and the lesbians at the Women’s Union. She falls for a woman but the affair sours because neither is willing to truly commit, so she returns to her old roommates and renews the lease for another year.

The era and student politics of that period are nicely captured, and there are some sweet turns of phrase (“The double-peck could not have been gentler, yet Clara felt it like an indent.”), but the overall effect is glib. The killings, for example, serve their purpose and two pages later are dropped and not brought up again.

In interviews Holtz has described her dedication to writing and the discipline it takes to actually produce, criticizing those who have chosen comfort over art. This is her second book, the first being The Skin Beneath, a sort of lesbian mystery novel. She also co-edited the anthology No Margins: Writing Canadian Fiction in Lesbian. Discipline and dedication she has in spades.

But to those two I would suggest adding depth. Without it you’re just another singing lamb.

time precious time

2009-05-06T11:04:00.005-04:00

Fleetwood Mac was popular when I was in high school, though I didn't care for them much. They were top 40 and I was into Lou Reed and Patti Smith and early punk. But just a couple of months ago I was at PAs (can you believe they have a website?) getting some food. This vaguely familiar song started to play and I stopped in my tracks. I listened to the whole thing while pretending to choose between spaghettini and fetucini. It was Gypsy. It stayed in my head for days until bam! I realized it was Stevie Nicks. I looked up everything I could find of hers and downloaded it. It was like a new discovery. Listening to Landslide breaks my heart every time.

I think what I love most about rediscovering older acts is watching them age. Seeing what they bring to lyrics they wrote when they were younger and barely mortal. Time makes you bolder/Children get older/I'm getting older too.

This morning I discovered Time Precious Time by Lindsey Buckingham. Never heard it before. I don't really know him except that he played in Fleetwood Mac and was once partnered with Stevie Nicks. But who is this guy playing gorgeous guitar and crooning about time. There's a video of him on YouTube playing it. He's older. He holds the guitar like it's the only thing keeping him afloat. At the end of the song he is so grateful, so thankful. Would he have been so humble 20 or 30 or even 40 years ago, when he was young and ambitious? I don't think so. But so much time has passed and he's grey and wrinkled and old (60 this year). Time is just so, so, so precious.

The sound quality is not great, but this is the best version I could find.

blogging the blue met 3

2009-04-27T15:47:00.002-04:00

IMPENETRABLE IN TRANSLATION: Nicole Brossard and Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood are conferring with one of the festival organizers. It’s already past the hour and there’s a trickle of people still coming in. They are wondering about what language to use to present the duo. The presenter, it seems, is an anglophone. But Brossard shrugs it off, saying ”tout le monde parle les deux langues.” And so we do. And with that, the anglo presenter introduces a Francophone writer who in turn introduces her bilingual translator. They flip open the book and read.

It’s Fences in Breathing, Brossard’s most recent novel. She’s a Quebec institution, a lesbian icon, a maverick of experimental fiction. I’ve always found her work impenetrable and distracting. I wish there were more people here, more lesbians especially. Don’t those two tell their friends when they have events going on? But just stop right there because Fences in Breathing is the best title ever. I don’t know what it means and I don’t care. It’s one of those titles that’s lived inside some sort of protective carapace since the Mesozoic era until one day along came a brilliant translator who got fed up with the French title, La capture du sombre, and doesn’t care about the stuffy meaning either, just the music, and she conjures it up out of a hat whose bottom reaches through tens of thousands of years of bones.

There are a lot of bones down there, bones of ideas that form into words. Whether they become proper sentences or just run-on curses is a matter of evolution. We forget that everything, even our thoughts and the various shapes they take, have been winnowed through time tunnels, their gangly edges eroded and shaved off. Sometimes a new thought or word bursts through and creates a tunnel of its own, and all the little thoughts scamper after it squealing “me too! me too!”

Sunday afternoon might be an escorted trip through a new tunnel. At the 1 p.m. panel, The World Around Us, four writers will talk about the impact of evolutionary change: Tijs Goldschmidt (Darwin’s Dreampond - we killed an African lake), Adam Leith Gollner (The Fruit Hunters - dying to eat), Taras Grescoe (Bottomfeeder - the fish are disappearing), Erika Ritter (The Dog by the Cradle, the Serpent Beneath - the dog’s dead).

Each of these writers has gone into that pile of bones and come up with a piece of something huge: one’s got the nose, the other the tail and the others have body parts yet to be identified. Come to the panel and take a look at the elephant in the room.

blogging the blue met 2

2009-04-25T14:02:00.001-04:00

POET AND PROPHET: Tears were shed last year when Mahmoud Darwish died. By those who had only read hundreds of his poems, and by those who had only read one or two. The worst criers were those who’d read none at all but knew he was a great Palestinian poet, a poet of the struggle - a description he grew to dislike.

As the room fills up for an hommage to Mahmoud Darwish, no one is crying but all of us want to. Issa Boulatta, Naim Kattan, Georges Abou-Hsab, John Asfour, and moderator May Telmissany, speak variously of his life (born in 1941 in Palestine; subsequently jailed many times) and death (born in 1941 in Palestine; subsequently jailed many times). But, être palestinien n’est pas un metier, quotes Georges Abou-Hsab, and so Darwish was not really the poet of politics but of dignity. For some, a radical distinction. I have aged, mother, so bring back the childhood stars/so that I/along with the swallows/can chart the path/back to your waiting nest.

Language makes us strangers too. I wonder who are the strangers here. The room is full and eclectic: young, old, Arab, non-Arab, francophone, anglophone. The speakers switch from Arabic and then to either French or English. May Telmissany acquits herself well in all three. She reads his poetry and, for the last one, chokes up. The language is too much. Someone cries for Mahmoud Darwish.

There are no questions afterward and, so, no answers. I go upstairs and check out John Ralston Saul. Now there’s a man I can’t imagine crying, not for long anyways, not when he’s got another book to write. He’s saying that the most important thinking being done in Canada is happening in the Supreme Courts and in the royal commissions. He wonders why the CBC doesn’t interview native leaders for other subjects than native issues. All actions have to be seen through the filter of language and memory, he says. We need a new language to frame the future because the old language is keeping us in the past. Mahmoud Darwish once said that the only modern thing in the Arab world is its literature, especially its poetry.

John Ralston Saul and Mahmoud Darwish would have had a great time together. What if they had co-written a poem, what would it be like? That’s a burning question so I’ll take a stab:

My mother is cold
My lover is snow
The polar bears are closer
than ever before.

blogging the blue met

2009-04-24T12:49:00.002-04:00

I'm mining my own stuff for this blog now - ain't that lazy. The Blue Metropolis literary festival is on now and I'll be blogging it for the next few days. Here's the first entry:

BIG IDEAS, SMALL CONFUSIONS: The lobby, hallways and mezzanine are empty when I get to the Delta Hotel. Airplanes could take off here. An old gentleman wanders by, unsure. I recognize him as Zakaria Tamer, the Syrian author of Breaking Knees, and hold out my hand, mention I reviewed his book for the Rover, and loved it. My bad Arabic deceives him and he switches to it, telling me animated stories of sex and cab drivers and good home-cooked meals. At least that’s what I understood.

Zakaria Tamer is here to receive the second annual Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher prize, named after a 17th century Arab poet from the Gulf region, and sponsored by the serious-sounding Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage. (They’re happy in the Gulf when culture has authority.)

Inside the Versailles room people mingle. Well, all ten of us. Festival director Linda Leith is happy to see Mr Tamer, until he launches into a complaint about being stranded at the airport for an hour with no one to pick him up. She holds her own and smiles big smiles. Crossed e-mails. Busy staff. It’s a big festival, don’tcha know. Two hours, two hours. And he hardly speaks English, let alone French. Then another fellow beside him has a complaint. Another Arab man with a complaint. Leith smiles even more.

By the time Issa Boullata, former McGill professor and scholar, is introducing Tamer there are twenty of us in the room. Why not more? Where is the Syrians community? Why do we show up in droves when there is anger to spew and justices to be righted and enemies to be toppled - but not to listen to a writer speak of ourselves, our dark, untamed and hurting selves. This, we don’t want to hear.

And maybe I don’t want to hear it either, because I only understand the vocabulary and not the meaning. The words are all familiar and I sound them out in my head and I know later, maybe when falling asleep, they’ll come together and weave a kind of sense and only then will I really know what he was saying. But I realize tonight I have a huge capacity to just sit and listen to the Arabic language. I even stop trying to understand and just listen to its music. Someone told me they thought the Arabic language sounded violent and menacing and that just hearing it made her afraid. But for me, it just lulls.

Or maybe that’s just words that lull, that soothe and rock. Because next door Tariq Ali is reading from A Sultan in Palermo, the fourth in his Islam Quintet, and beside him Fred Reed, the presenter, seems to be falling asleep. His closed eyes are settled deep and his head moves in tiny waves back and forth, back and forth. Tariq Ali is a big man, big in the Arabic sense: kibir. Kibir as in grand, wise, important. He is lovely, his London accent is lovely, and his book seems lovely. Is his Islam Quintet a counterpoint nod to Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet? I don’t know. I read Durrell while living in Alexandria years ago and it had nothing to do with the city as I saw it. Durrell was all big ideas and Alexandria is all small confusions. Blue Met, however, has both: big ideas and small confusions.

keep smiling, i'm just breaking your knees

2009-04-20T08:42:00.004-04:00

I’ve been to Syria only once and what I discovered was this: no one talks. They move their lips and you hear about the latest fashions from Europe or the goings-on of the next-door neighbour. But try to engage someone in a conversation about politics, religion or sex, and the talking stops. They look around cautiously. Then: Great weather we’re having.

That’s the environment Zakaria Tamer draws from. Considered one of the most important writers in Arabic today, he has written numerous children’s books, two collections of satirical articles, and eleven collections of short stories. In Montreal this year for Blue Metropolis, he will be awarded the annual Al Majidi Ibn Dhaher Prize during the festival.

In Breaking Knees, only the second of his collections to be translated into English, Tamer writes in short one- or two-page bursts, as if rushing to get it out before being caught. The stories, fables of discontent, hypocrisy and corruption, reveal a malaise at the core of Arab society. Sex runs rampant through Breaking Knees, but less as an expression of love and more as a fearful disorder. Sex manipulates, tarnishes and destroys. Men crumble and commit horrific acts for the want of it, while women lose their honour and perish for being associated with it.

And while the bedroom is no sanctuary, the street is even less of one. It vibrates with repressions that feed greedily upon each other. The man who beats his wife with impunity will find himself at the end of a policeman’s baton, who in turn will lose his job because of a malicious rumour begun by a rival officer, who himself will be condemned by a cleric for his lax piety. And the cleric will turn around and rape the woman he judges amoral.

Writing in a genre that he made popular, the “very, very short story” (al-qissa al-qissa jiddan) Tamer mixes satire, fantasy, humour and the occasional dash of searing realism. In one of the shorter and more pared-down stories, an old woman goes to a park to see the statue of the man responsible for killing her sons and husband. But the statue, “his right hand raised in a gesture that inspired awe and respect,” makes her feel small. She continues to shrink until she and everything around her also shrinks and disappears. Nothing is left but the statue, and the birds “whose pleasure it was to crap on it.”

An Arab critic once compared Tamer with Charles Darwin: one showed how monkeys developed into humans; the other showed how humans could be manipulated into becoming monkeys. Exiled in London since 1980, Zakaria Tamer is like the Arab world’s sad organ grinder. He plays his melancholy songs while the monkey stupidly dances, the crowd laughs, a man beats his wife, the police walk around collecting bribes, and a cleric breaks knees.

(Photo credit)

on and on

2009-04-17T10:13:00.000-04:00

My lover sleeps
on fuzzy sheets
the mornings slow
as mornings go
when dreams and distance
with sad insistance
go on and on
and on and on.

My lover wishes
that dreams were fishes
and she could swim
in waters dim
where dreams and desire
always conspire
to go on and on
and on and on.

fortress mentality

2009-04-12T13:31:00.003-04:00

Ismail Kadare’s The Siege can read like a present-day morality tale: embattled America fighting the war on terror, or paranoid America storming the borders of weaker nations. With its vivid plot and cast of generals, lobbyists and sycophants, you expect Cheney, Bernie Madoff or bin Laden to show up at any moment. Not bad for a book written in 1970.

Until he left his native Albania in 1990, Kadare was one of the country’s more prominent writers, supported by the state and living a comfortable life. His defence, then and now, was that he used allegories of the past to hide otherwise subversive tales. He also wrote communist propaganda, but hey, who are we to criticize.

The Siege opens in a 15th century fortress in Albania. Its inhabitants wait for the marauding army they know is just over the horizon. After a few weeks of preparation the bell sounds: dust kicked up by Ottoman horses can be seen in the distance.

Interestingly for an Albanian, Kadare tells the bulk of the story from the point of view of the Turks. Led by the Pasha and his loyal generals, the Turkish army is a multi-national patchwork of soldiers, cavalry, slaves, and battalions drawn from previously overrun countries. The variety of colours, cultures, religions and, in the case of the Pasha’s travelling harem, sexes, makes for a compelling parade of characters.

At the centre of the story is Mevla Çelebi, the official chronicler. He is there to witness the glories of battle and commit them to verse, but he has no stomach for war and is almost always at a loss for words. Scuttling through the camp in search of quotes and gossip, his main source is the Quartermaster General. The only person in the war council willing to commit to his opinions, most of what the Quartermaster General says makes Çelebi fear for his own head. The Quartermaster is almost always right and the chronicler almost always mortified by the truth.

While the Quartermaster, perhaps like Kadare himself, is loyal to the Pasha and never goes so far as to articulate dissent, it is he who questions the absolute power of their leader, who scoffs at the self-serving stupidity of the religious council members, and who sees through the propaganda that veils the “eternal recycling of defeat.”

The Siege is less an historical war novel than a deft parable of the relationship between idiocy and tragedy. In between the grand gestures of battle are the insignificant actions of small people: the frightened but curious harem girl, the drunken poet, the young janissary who has never known anything but war, the engineer whose famed cannon keeps breaking, the ambitious astrologer thrust into the role of strategist. Translated for the first time into English, The Siege is an exuberant cautionary tale of the science, horrors and buffoonery of war. Kadare has shown, both in his personal life and in his fiction, that there are no clear battle lines. While the Albanians of The Siege manage to repel the Turks for the time being, history tells us that they eventually succumb. The Turks today are a shadow of their former selves. Whoever wins, loses. Whoever loses, writes. Whoever reads The Siege, wins.

ready, aim, can we talk?

2009-04-07T15:12:00.004-04:00

My brother got a lot of flack from my sisters and I twenty-odd years ago when he joined the Navy. It was a way to put himself through University, he protested. Plus, our father had recently died and so we went easy on him, not knowing much about the ways of boys and their fathers, even dastardly bastardly ones like ours.

But we never had to worry much about our Rock, as he's turned out to be the gentlest, loveliest, sweetest man ever there was. And he's just exitedly sent this along to his sisters. Commander Josee Kurtz is the first woman ever to take command of a warship.

I don't really give a hoot about our armed forces, especially as we seem to be morphing from peace-making to war-making. Goddamn that Harper. And if progress means that women can fight and kill just as good as men, then make me a luddite. But I can't help think it's a little bit cool that we got a chick at the helm of a warship. Not only that, her husband retired just so he could stay home with their kid. Take that, Afghan law for assholes.

take another little piece of my heart

2009-04-04T09:49:00.002-04:00

I have a secret admiration for the ugly woman. Not ugly as in not beautiful, though that can always qualify. But ugly as in being free, allowing yourself to truly be in the moment, truly express something. Because when you do that you grimace, you sweat, you contort, you sing off-key and you dance in between beats and, oh horrors, men don't want to look at you. I once saw a beautiful woman, tall, statuesque, dark hair tied back like an aristocrat. So okay, she was beautiful but what made her stunning was that she had a moustache. The hair on her upper lip was dark and cast shadows all over itself. I was stunned. The definition of stunning: she stunned me. And suddenly a moustache on a female upper lip was BEAUTIFUL. Suddenly, I wanted one. Suddenly, I was sad and angry for all the misguided women who bleach and shave and pluck theirs. Apparently, if women didn't shave and pluck and bleach their facial hair we'd see bearded and moustachioed ladies all over the place. How ugly. How BEAUTIFUL.

Then there's Janis Joplin. She drank her ugly demons to death. There she is on stage, greasy hair in her face, fists pumping, mouth twisting, voice roaring with need and anger. She was treated like a curiosity at the beginning of her career but the sheer force of her personality, of her moment, of the beauty of her music forced people to listen. And then to fall in love. I don't know if I remember when she was still alive, I was too young. But one of the first records I ever owned (after The Chairmen of the Board) was Pearl. And I wanted to be like her. I wanted the freedom to be ugly and scream and tear out my heart and my hair.

I never made it to ugly. I obsess about my hair (too curly? not curly enough? and the grey, what about the grey?), I hold back when I could speak up, I acquiesce when I could argue, I sit pretty when I should be fighting ugly. So on this grey, rainy morning I woke up thinking of Janis Joplin. If she's ugly then I want to be ugly too. There'd be a lot more beauty in the world if we learned to live with the ugly.

suheir hammad in montreal

2009-03-27T22:51:00.004-04:00

Suheir Hammad is a rising star in the world of spoken word. Her poetry is highly personal, caustic and political, co-mingling Palestinian anger with American entitlement. Delivered with a heavy Brooklyn accent, it has won her a regular stint on HBO, three published books and CDs, and a busy touring schedule. Montrealers can meet Hammad on the Main, Monday night at eight.

i have always loved
criminals and not only the thugged
out bravado of rap videos and champagne
popping hustlers but my father
born an arab baby boy
on the forced way out
of his homeland his mother exiled
and pregnant gave birth in a camp

Born in Jordan, she emigrated with her family to the US at the age of five. “I grew up with a sense of loss, that you can work generations to build something and suddenly lose it all,” she says. She began writing and publishing in the 1990s and has appeared in dozens of periodicals and anthologies. Her work hit the stratosphere when Russell Simmons heard a piece she had written shortly after 9/11, “First Writing Since,” and signed her on to his Def Poetry Jam. She has appeared with him on the HBO cable network, performed on Broadway and toured for two years.

the world pointed and said
palestinians do not exist palestinians
are roaches palestinians are two legged dogs
and israel built jails and weapons and
a history based on the absence of a people
israel made itself holy and chosen
and my existence a crime

Read more here....

3000 miles is far away but i just want kebab today

2009-03-26T13:37:00.003-04:00

forget mp3s, the world still listens to cassettes

2009-03-24T20:55:00.004-04:00

When I lived in Egypt and travelled around the Middle East I bought music cassettes wherever I went. Hypnotic Ethiopian music, rumbling Nubian beats, music from Eastern Turkey that I still have in my head, a Saudi singer whose cassettes I still guard with my life. Little kiosks or grocery stores would stack the cheap, locally-produced tapes and invariably have one blaring scratchily from a small boom box. I'd ask who was singing and if the store clerk was passionate about music he would easily spend the next two hours with me going through cassette after cassette, turning me on to brilliant and sublime music. I regularly discard old books, get rid of old clothes, put my CDs on the street for someone to pick up. But I still have all these old cassettes.

This site, Awesome Tapes from Africa, is brilliant. Probably what I might have done had I been collecting this music now instead of 15 years ago. Take a listen. Forget about taking your cues from iTunes or XM or American Idol or wherever else we get our prefabricated corporate-approved unimaginative recycled derivative poser verse-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-verse crap. So-called new music. So-called music.

Sometimes I am so sick of music that I can't listen to it anymore. Then I find this site. It's not that I'm a crazy fan of African music per se. But I am a crazy fan of music making, of beautiful noise, of breathing and banging and doing what comes naturally, of just pounding pounding pounding out the joy.

the year of numbers

2009-03-16T16:43:00.005-04:00

I'm writing more and more for Rover Arts. Here's the latest, a review of a small-press novel that I happened to chance upon. I was drawn to its subject-matter - a Canadian in Cairo - and continued to get pulled in by its sense of urgency. Cairo is not an easy place for anyone. But being an African refugee there puts you at the bottom of the donkey heap.

The last time I saw a donkey was in Egypt, 15 years ago. Not many donkeys in Canada, if you don't count this one.

american health care cha-ching style

2009-03-06T13:56:00.005-05:00

Here is a heart-breaking run down of how much health care costs in the US, as told by a woman whose husband recently found out he has cancer. And they're insured.

Unbelievable and barbaric. Is it really like that? Except for the odd prescription (heavily subsidized in the province Quebec) I don't think I've ever paid a cent for health care. Same goes for anyone I know. Private clinics are popping up here and there, but strong political will and citizen expectations continue to ensure that public health care is free, available and excellent.

But countries do have their contradictions don't they: Israel is "democratic" and the US is "civilized."

for the skinny, messy, list-making, chain-smoking Rachel Corrie

2009-03-06T12:25:00.002-05:00

j'adore ma kid

2009-02-25T21:51:00.004-05:00

"Now this is why I love books!"
- Big Kid, now 15, coming home from the library with a copy of Mrs Dalloway in her hands.

"I don't think people realize just how intelligent a Kleenex box is."
- Big Kid, still 15, coming out of the bathroom.

"You're the only one I can talk about this seriously with."
- Big Kid, my baby, after our conversation about the genius of Kleenex boxes.

“to the woman in the white hat”

2009-02-12T09:46:00.004-05:00

I saw this posted the other day on a street lamp in my neighbourhood, at the south-east corner of Park and St Joseph, and returned yesterday late afternoon with my camera. Astonishing, it is an ode to a passing stranger. Some woman in a white hat who walked by and took his heart. What magic to be able to come across this piece of intimate longing, this salute to an impossible love. In this age of confessional autobiographies, reality TV and anonymous internet postings, it is urgently old-fashioned. As is the text itself, well-written and replete with the heavy cliché of the cold woman and the smitten man. How hard and melting at the same time.

Here is the text, banged out on a typewriter, in its entirety:

"To the woman in the white hat,

I saw you walking the other day carrying a baguette and a purse that looked empty. I wanted to say how beautiful you looked – so beautiful and so very cold – but there was a man with you, and he was much bigger than I. It's just as well that you're with him, I think, because I don't want you to see any more in my words than what I mean.

I just want you to be happy and warm, and to know how painfully beautiful you were that day. I'm sure you've been told so before (and likely thought it yourself), but you should hear it from a stranger, someone who doesn't want anything from you.

I don't wish to see you again. I know you couldn't match the same look of wondrous fragility that compelled me to write this. You are perfect in my mind and it would be cruel to expect that standard of anyone, even the pretty girl in the white hat.

It doesn't matter that the man was there with you, I wouldn't have told you anyway. But now you know, or at least some new stranger does, and he can tell you in much choicer words if you're still beautiful. I hope you stay warm.

R."