The art of the hand.

1: The Massage Parlour… if, indeed, that is its name.

For the last little while I have been playing sitar now and then at Studio B. during their Friday night yoga classes. I’ve been playing yoga classes for years at different studios and I enjoy it in a couple of ways: first it’s great to see highly flexible women in skin tight clothing twisting their bodies into unusual positions. Second, because people are not listening that closely but at the same time are picking up on my vibe, I can kind of experiment and practice without too much concern. I rarely stick to any particular raga (and I avoid ones that it would be disrespectful to play in those circumstances) and mostly I just mess around. It is what it is and in exchange for my services the people at B. have been giving me vouchers for one hour massages from their massage parlour downstairs.

Do they call places like this massage parlours? I have no idea. The first thing people always ask me about this whole deal is whether the massage is one of those massages; you know, the ones that happen behind poorly lit storefronts with dusty windows covered over by drab curtains. They want to know if disaffected topless women from mysterious Eastern block countries are working the cum out of my shaft with rough fisted strokes of the right hand while meanwhile the left hand is relentlessly lifting and dropping a cigarette from the curving lipsticked lips. B. isn’t like this at all, though.

Or at least I always assumed B. wasn’t like this because the truth is that until yesterday I had never bothered to use any of the vouchers. It’s not that I was against the massage concept or anything; although I often do have issues with personal space and I don’t always love people getting close to me or touching me; much to the consternation of certain people who became frustrated by the fact that I didn’t want to hold their hands every single second that we were out in public. It’s not that I hate you or that I’m embarrassed to be seen with you in public, it’s just that sometimes I want to not have anyone touching me while I walk… anyhow I digress, as usual.

I had all these massage vouchers and I didn’t know what to do with them and I was thinking about it over the summer and I realised that each one represented a value of almost $100 and that maybe I could barter them for something useful if I put an imaginative ad up on Craigslist.

2: The Slight of Hand… or, getting a lot from a light hand.

Craigslist has been a marvellous venue through which to sell for $100s of dollars various items of furniture that I have found in the street on garbage days. It never ceases to amaze me that people will walk by a thing and refuse to touch it just because it is in the trash and yet if the same item is listed on Craigslist along with a bit of sexy description these same people will come banging on my door with handfuls of cash that they can’t wait to shove into my paws. Well ok, I’m not exactly ready to retire from this business (I’m pretty fucking broke, actually) but I think it’s more because I’m not willing to put in the hours then because it is a bad business venture.

Not only this, but one time I posted an ad on Craigslist in the pets section saying that I was a filmmaker making a movie and that I needed a whole lot of animals for the movie and that if anyone had any unwanted pets they could give them to me and I would “use” them in my film production. I then said that I was sorry but the pets would not be returned, due to the nature of the film. I said, also, that, since I was pressed for time, I was planning to try and pick up all the animals in one day and drive them out in the back of my cube van to my warehouse and so I needed to make pickup arrangements with everyone in advance, and I was looking for suggestions for how to transport horses and cats and gerbils all in the back of the same truck without damaging any too badly before the filming began…etc, etc, etc…I tried to make it all sound a little sketchy, anyhow. So after this I started getting all these e-mails informing me that what I was doing was illegal, and that I was a sick fuck, and that I was going to burn in hell, etc, etc, etc…people were especially vexed by the whole cube van thing. It was quite a laugh…ok if you don’t have a sense of humour you probably hate me right now….but back to the point…

The thing that I really wanted to get during the summer was a sofa, but not just any sofa; I wanted especially one of those old 70s style sofas with the wooden rectangular arm rests and the bad rough woven cloth covering them. I wanted the kind of sofas that sat in every waiting room in every dentist’s office and outside of every school principal’s office in Christendom. This kind of thing, you see, I believed would fit in best with my particular decoration scheme.

Thus, I began searching online for photos of these kinds of sofas by typing in such terms as “waiting room sofa” and “dentist’s office”. The amazing thing I discovered during this process was that most of the photos of sofas I did locate were on pages that resolved back to the government of Canada. I began to browse the government’s websites and I found that there were often pictures there advertising the waiting rooms in different governmental offices. “Just look at our fabulous waiting room” these sites said. This really blows my mind. I mean, who gives a goddamn what the waiting room looks like? It’s not like they call you and then you go up to the desk and say, no actually I don’t want to get my passport renewed/ drivers licence ratified/ parole papers signed/ Canada Council grant reviewed, I actually just came to enjoy your waiting room because I love sitting on these ratty fucking sofas that you haven’t replaced since before I was born!

Look, I’m not making this shit up:

This is the waiting room at the Kingston Penitentiary
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Ontario/kingston_1_e.htm

This is the waiting room at Collins Bay (this blue sofa is really a nice one!)
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Ontario/collinsb_1_e.htm

This is the waiting room at the Kwìkwèxwelhp Institution (nice sofas here too)
http://www.npb-cnlc.gc.ca/victims/Victims_Project_2006/Pacific/kwik_1_e.htm

Here’s a great shot of the cloak room at Libraries and Archives Canada
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/the-public/005-4020-e.html

Here’s a shot from the Frontenac Officer’s Mess in Kingston
http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/ffom/Owl_room_e.asp

Here’re some not too comfy benches at the Supreme court:
http://www.scc-csc.gc.ca/details/gal2-eng.asp

So up went my ad on Craigslist, basically saying that I was looking for a particular kind of sofa and that, if anyone happened to know where one was, I would be willing to exchange some massage vouchers for one (especially of they delivered the sofa to my door). A few responses came back: there is a sofa on the corner of Madison and Sherbrooke in NDG, maybe if you go over there you can pick it up… no thanks. Perhaps the government of Canada has old ones in a warehouse someplace; apparently there is an auction once a year on Montreal and you can buy all kinds of stuff dirt cheap… more useful, but I don’t think the government will accept my massages as payment.

Finally I got the king of all responses: this guy wrote to tell me that a few years back he had been a guest of the Canadian penal system and had been doing his time in New Brunswick. Apparently, he told me, the reason that Canada has all its waiting rooms (especially the prison ones) done up with these sofas is that they are actually manufactured in house (so to speak) by prisoners and then shipped all over the country to government offices. Well, continued this fellow, I used to be a quality control overseer for the manufacture of these sofas and therefore, if you like, I can make you one from scratch but unfortunately the 2-300 dollars worth of massages is not going to cover the cost of even a fraction of the material I will need… never mind labour, but if you give me thirteen massages I will do it for you.

I decided to decline his offer, partially because I didn’t have thirteen vouchers and I didn’t want to have to give him the massages myself (although I believe this was an option). I mean, ok maybe I could have given him the massages… but you just know that if you gave someone thirteen massages it’s going to get to sex eventually and I’m not prepared to whore myself out for a custom made sofa that is going to end up looking like something I found hanging out of a dumpster. Also, I’m not actually gay, despite what I wrote about Superman and also about the chests of teenage boys in skateboard movies and also about the movie 300.

But by all accounts, I should have been gay since both my mother (a former ballerina) has (and my grandmother had) a lifelong association with the National Ballet (Rudolf Nureyev once drank all my grandmother’s vodka and then attempted to have sex with my uncle…but this is a tale for another day) and also my mother forced me to watch musicals as a child and taught me all about interior design and brought me with her countless times on her wedding planning excursions. Lets face it, I could have been the greatest homo of all time… but I just like women too much… plus I look fat in pink.

3: Thinking about Gay Porn… or, how to kill time and have fun doing it.

I will confess to you, though, that I saw a gay porn film the other day and I thought it was pretty hot. I was killing some time before I went to visit my friend Andrea downtown and so I decided to wander around downtown to see what kind of mischief I could get into for a couple of hours.

I went first into the Queen Elizabeth Hotel and mingled my way into a conference, a meeting of people who provide essential services to educational institutions or something like that. I crash conferences whenever I get the chance because, the way I figure it, no one there will be certain that you should not be there because everyone is a stranger to everyone else, thus is it extremely difficult to get kicked out. I ate some strawberry tarts and drank some tea and I had a really nice conversation with someone named Tiffany who gave me all kinds of free stuff (swag, if you’ll forgive me using the term again so soon). She and I will be lovers in our next life.

I went up to the Concordia complex and started to wander around in there for a while. It’s pretty amazing how deep into a building you can get if you locate the right door or elevator. I came back down and slipped into the main lecture hall. There was a film class going and I sat down to watch the movies:

1: It Wasn’t Love, by Sadie Benning

My first impression, while I was watching this movie was that it was a typical example of what happens when you combine a complete lack of talent with a utter lack of imagination. It seemed like the kind of thing the filmmaker’s friends would laugh at hilariously and sycophantically just because their girl made it. Ok I know it problematized gender in all kinds of ways and it used fractured interpretations of popular culture in order to reconstruct concepts of gender and selfhood and all these things are really interesting to talk about, but just because a movie is theoretically rich and just because it is a historical curiosity, this doesn’t make it good. The thumb sucking scene was hot, though.

I was going to put up my hand after the screening and talk but then before I got the chance this other lady in the audience put up her hand and started going on about how she could see why Sadie Benning became the darling of the lesbian community and blah blah blah young genius at work gush gush gush. So I kept my hand down. I’m not even in the class anyhow so it seemed better not to pour a bag of ants into the keener’s picnic basket.

2: Positiv, by Mike Hoolboom.

At first I wasn’t sure about this one. The way that the narrator was reading the text in that halting way that people read when they are trying to represent the natural cadence of spontaneous speech but are instead only serving to highlight just how textual and self conscious their performance is was a thing that was very distracting to me. And I thought a lot (as I did during the first movie) about Ann Cvetkovich’s book An Archive of Feeling…all those disjointed images and mediated realities combining to create a fractured sense of self. What a lovely book that was. I also thought about Susan Sontag’s Aids and its Metaphors. Another book that influenced me a lot. By the end of the film, when the narrator was talking about watching his friends change as he drifted away from them into death I was sold on this move, though. It was very good.

3: A Phone Comes to Jammu, by Nila Gupta.

Once again we are talking about mediated realities. In this case it is a desire to discover oneself and one’s history through old photographs and the narrative is cut with stock footage of childhood days. I think this is part of what Cvetkovich was talking about when she said that the experience of being gay often feels like (or gets treated like) a subversion of the normative narrative of a human life; this is to say that one is made to feel as if one is not acting according to the script. Certain aspects of the script: love, the desire for happiness, the relationship (or lack thereof) to one’s family remain, but all these things become fractured and disjointed and must be reassembled in new ways. These three films can not tell linear narratives or linger on single images because they are aspects of lives that are defined by a constant push against the stream of normality.

So, for example, do you remember when I was talking about how all biopic movies about rock stars all follow the same pattern? Well in the case of a biopic about someone who is somehow forced to the fringes of polite society because the way that desire manifests itself in their heart, they can’t simply just slip their life into the expect narrative; it won’t fit. They can look at photos or film clips that are signifiers for this narrative and then they can try to make sense of their fractured relationship to these signifiers… but this makes the movie complex, non-linear. It doesn’t make the movie good necessarily, but it does make it theoretically rich.

4: Loads, by Curt McDowell

See, now this one was really interesting because it wasn’t all hung up on the confusion and angst and fractured sense of identity that the other three were. I mean, it does come from a slightly earlier (pre-realisation of AIDS) era but it also comes from an era when homosexuality was a lot less normal than it is now (although I guess this was counterbalanced by the fact that it was made in San Francisco, which is, you know, a pretty gay city). Anyhow there is still a sense of mediated reality in this film because the narrator doesn’t just pick up men off the street and suck their cocks. Rather, he picks them up with the pretext that he wants to film them or photograph them and then while he’s doing that he sucks their cocks on camera. Also, the narrative is not linear, and, as the film progresses, the sex scenes with the different men turn into an increasingly confusing montage of cuts and angles and butts glistening with afternoon light streaming through dusty windows and muscle bound pelvises with thick veiny pricks stabbing outward toward the audience, swallowed up my the moustachioed lips of the narrator. Indeed, at a certain point it is almost impossible to tell which cock is which and which body is which and, in the end, at the climax, with the great streams of seamen spurting out over the narrator’s hairy beard, with a single glowing string of ejaculate stretching down the dark furry chest of a body builder from his nipple to his hips, over his gorgeous belly while he reclines on a loft mattress, completely satisfied by what has passed, with the tattooed and bearded man arching his pelvis into the narrator’s mouth and gripping at the very point of explosion into the narrator’s hair, jamming his engorged member further and further down the narrator’s throat, it probably doesn’t even matter which cock is which.

The salient comment from the crowd was that if the film would have been made with women instead of men, if it would have been a shameless and completely self-confident exploration of heterosexual lust from a male perspective instead, then maybe all kinds of power issues that didn’t feel like they were there with the men would have been painfully present. This is a shame because, as turned on as I was by seeing all those frankly gorgeous men blowing each other, I would have much rather seen something close to what I see when I go to play for those yoga classes but with a lot less spandex covering the good bits

Anyhow, even if the yoga gig isn’t the kind of celebration of lust that I pine for, I do get the free massages and, thinking that I had best take advantages of what few advantages I have in this life, I decided to forget about ever finding a good sofa and go in and get my first massage yesterday.

4: Palmistry and Palm Artistry, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the balm.

The massage itself was just what I suspected it would be (and I mean this in a good way). I lay down on the table and the masseuse worked at my muscles for an hour and after I felt better and more loose. There were some things that I was a little dubious about, for example, she told me that for the most part she was going to give me a Swedish massage, which is working the muscles and doing different things to them with her hands. This was good. But, she said, I’m also going to do something called an inter-cranial-something-or-another, which is a more unusual method and not everyone appreciates it right away. It turns out that this was the part right in the middle of my massage when she stopped massaging me and just held my head in her hands and didn’t move at all for about ten minutes. Inter-cranial-something-or-another my butt! I figured she was just taking a break on the job, but she insisted after that it was actually a real technique and that it would have positive benefits for me. Anyhow, I often find people’s bullshit charming and what the hell it was a free massage so how can I complain?

The one part that really interested me, though, was that while I was being massaged (for real massaged, not during the fake part) was that I suddenly had a flashback to something that happened to me years ago. I believe this kind of thing is normal with good massages because certain tensions get released when the muscles open up and, when these tensions go out, the body reverts to a prior state of being or something…I can’t really explain it right now but trust me I think this kind of thing is normal.

Anyhow, what I remembered was this:

When I was twenty years old I was living in Andhra Pradesh, India and working there on a rural development project. One day, one of the project workers, an interesting fellow who was almost always in sunglasses and open silk shirts and who went on endlessly about this or that lady that he was planning to “enjoy with” and who buzzed around the dusty rural roads on his old Yezdi 250 Classic sounding like a bumblebee with a Marshall amp tied to its back, came to me and told me that he wanted to take me to see something.

I sat myself on the back of his bike and we rode for probably three hours away from the project through the low rocky hills and the long dry plains and scattered roadside villages of the area. Finally we arrived at a place called Thimmamma Marrimanu… well it’s not a place so much as it is one single tree; the world’s largest tree, in fact, a single banyan that covers more than five square acres of land. This tree, which is hundreds of years old, is actually a forest unto itself and within the forest is a small temple and people go there and worship. The project worker and I went to the temple and made a puja and then sat down in the forest and ate lunch.

After lunch, on the way back, we stopped in to look at some small agricultural projects that the NGO I was working with had set up and it was sitting here, under the small shade of some saplings, with a massive hillock studded with great brown boulders brilliantly illuminated in the afternoon sunlight, that he began to interrogate me.

Have you ever been with a woman? he asked. Yes, I have, I told him. He looked into my eyes. You’re telling me bullshit, he said. What do you want me to say? I can’t prove if I have or not. He took out a piece of paper and a pen and he handed it to me. Draw me a picture of the lady’s sexual organs, he said. I took the paper and I carefully sketched out a vagina, first making an elongated almond shape and then filling out its sides with an elegant labia that fluttered away from the inner slit like a slender butterfly. After this, I worked my way up from the bottom, drawing the butthole just below the almond and then filling in the vaginal opening, then the urethra and then making a little clitoris at the top of the almond. I thought it was not a bad rendition, all in all, but when I handed back the picture to the project worker he examined it for a moment and then looked up and me and said: you are bullshit.

Next he took my hand and gave me a palm reading. He ran his fingers over the lines of my hands and he explained to me what each line meant.

You are a very interesting fellow, he said. No matter what you are doing you will always think about it too much and be stressed about it. If we were climbing that hill over there, for example, you would worry that the rocks were going to collapse on you, and when you are on the bike you always worry that you are going to fall off the bike. You spend too much time in your own mind worrying.

Also, he said, you will have whatever you want in this world but you are going to have to work for it and you are going to have to suffer for it and nothing will ever come easily to you. And you are going to have a lot of lovers, he said, because ladies will fall in love with you, but you will find it hard to be settled because you think too much. I’ve already had some lovers, I told him...

He looked me in the eyes. You are bullshit, he said.

Review of every part of Superman Returns other than the first 19.01 minutes.

I know I have to start being more social and so on and so forth. I mean I don’t have to be more social and so on and so forth, but I want to be more social and so on and so forth and so I paused Superman Returns and I went over to see someone I know dancing in a belly dancing cabaret earlier this evening. Anyhow, it was only three blocks away from my house and so on the making-a-big-effort-to-be-social scale this one was going to be nearly swag for me.

I went over to this place, this Moroccan place, or whatever it is with its pictures of Morocco on the walls and those brass tables held up by those fold up table stands that look like they would collapse with a great clang into a pile of shattered glass and spilled candle wax and scattered foodstuffs if even my foot were to gently graze against one of the legs as I shifted my weight as I was dining and there were fake what I assumed to be typical Moroccan doors on the wall with little coloured lanterns hanging beside them, just as though we were all sitting around in Morocco waiting for a belly dancing show to start and there was a kind of dance-beated up music blaring on the stereo and all kinds of lyrics in Arabic about love and heartbreak (or so I assumed since that’s what every song in every language is pretty much about, although I don’t speak a lick of Arabic) and they brought me a little dish with some yummy olives in it that I ate with a toothpick while I was trying to decide what to order.

Finally I ordered a vegetarian couscous and a vegetarian salad, but I never did get my salad which was good because the couscous was enough by itself and I ordered a kind of tea made with mint leaves and lime essence and orange flowers and something else I’d never heard of and the lady poured it in a long cascading pour down into my little glass cup like the ones at the lime green Iranian restaurant in Halifax that I ate in with Laura that day in the pouring rain before maybe we went out to Lunenburg with everything we owned soaking wet and I don’t remember what order things happened in back in those days but I thought again of those little glass cups anyhow.

This tea that she poured me was maybe the best thing I had ever tasted because before I put my mouth on the rim of the glass I had never imagined that there could be a tea that tasted like this one and after I couldn’t imagine going a long time without drinking this tea again and all in all I was happy that the place was only three blocks from my house.

Still, as my tea was dwindling, and as the belly dancing aficionados began to shuffle in, tossing their heavy coats and scarves and mitts and hats behind them on the sofas and settling into the menus and into their merry conversations, I began to realise that I didn’t like this restaurant at all and actually I didn’t feel much like watching belly dancing, so I got up, paid, and walked out into the night.

I walked down Beaubien for a while and finally I bought some bagels at the Beaubien Bagel factory. There was one miserable man shovelling bagels into the ovens and he scowled at me as I came in and then sold me a six-bag of sesame bagels. This is just where I wanted to be. I went to the IGA in the St. Hubert plaza. I bought cheese and cream cheese and smoked trout and green beans then I thought about what I wanted to do with my life and settled on a few bottles of booze. I walked home in the cold, picking up an old cabinet door, ripped free from its rusty hinges, that was painted a strange colour and nearly rotted on the bottom. You will be my next canvas, I said to it.

I never did watch the end of Superman Returns, but I’m sure that the good guys triumph in the end. I’m sure that a lot of things explode and that Superman earns his keep by catching heavy objects in mid air before they fall on crowds of terrified civilians. I’m sure superman poses in mid-air, muscles bulging and straining, the crowds below him cheering his name.

Unlike most men who are forced to pretend to be boring wankers in order to keep down jobs they don’t really care about, all the while fantasising about flying around the city in red capes and crotch revealing tights looking for action, Superman is living the dream. He doesn’t need my support. Unlike Batman, however, Superman still seems to feel the need to pretend things are not what they seem by courting (and ultimately never being able to satisfy) Lois Lane. At least the caped crusader has the courage of conviction to go out in public with his boyfriend.

Review of the first 19.01 minutes of Superman Returns.

Superman returns to Earth, in Superman Returns, after a long hiatus; both in the fictional and the actual world. Where has superman been all this time? He’s been in outer space indulging himself with personal introspection while the world he has sworn to protect has been smouldering, always that much closer to consuming itself in a ferocious fist of crackling fire.

Consider this image: Superman’s iconic burning pod lands again on the idyllic Midwestern farmstead where he was raised. He surrogate mother, who has been busy baking apple pies for the union since Superman left, sees the fireball streak over her house and land in the distant field. She goes out to greet her child and there he is, sitting, as buff and delicious as ever, beneath this sculpted mass of burning mud and grain. How very much the tripartite erection resembles the charred remains of the World Trade Centre.

While Superman has been gone the world has never needed him more. He has come home for no more significant reason than to save the world from its exhaustion with postmodernist disaffection. We need grand narratives to believe in because we need to believe in ourselves if we are going to fight something as unflagging and unambiguous as evil. There can be no shades of grey at the tips of our bullets, men. Superman is back.

I haven’t watched the whole movie yet (it’s the kind of thing that is only manageable in small doses) but I have been struck already by the power of the pure country versus the impure urban imagery that pervades the film; and is in effect the entire underpinning of the superman mythology. Superman, after all, (following his arrival on the planet) becomes an American where it counts: out on the prairies under the big sky, raised with simple traditional values of goodness and morality and it is with this psychological equipment that he makes his journey into the urban centres of the world. It is always the city that needs saving, mind you; it is always the city that dabbles with sin by indulging the whims of the evil, industrially minded, money hungry Lex Luthor.

Luthor, the anti-Superman, espouses a kind of evil that is insidious not only because of the fact that it is self-motivated and indifferent to the suffering of others, but because it is a rejection of the rural simulacrum from which Superman’s morality emanates. The city is a tangle of capitalist desires and complex emotional entanglements, the way forward in the city is never clear; for every route is blocked by buildings and hidden from the sun. How easy it is for urban dwellers to become lost in the jumble of towers and alleys and dead-ends and noise and madness. Superman, raised in the clear air and able to see for miles, swoops easily between the buildings and keeps his attention on everything. Superman reminds people, after they have been appropriately spanked for worshipping yet again at Luthor’s golden calf, what really matters in this world.

How different Superman is from Batman (who is by far the more popular of the two characters, I believe). Batman is a product of the city, a product of wealth, a product of the very system which he wishes to cleanse. This makes Batman complex and troubled, it makes him essentially a character who can only do good by doing evil to himself; and this kind of thing is the basis of every great identity crisis. With Superman, though, there is no identity crisis. Superman is as alien to the city as he is to the planet itself. Superman’s citizens to be saved are like sheep who have strayed from the path of righteousness, they are like the citizens of Sarah Palin’s true America who have nevertheless ended up in the city of the Sirens and forgotten the way their lives used to be. Superman, country boy, brings them home again. For Batman, though, there is no home, there is only another night of unresolved darkness.

Of lovers spurned and goodly ghosts.

My goodly ghost; and I’m always surprised how nice he is to me, given the animosity that we shared before they dropped him in the mud, visited me two nights ago and provided me yet again with a little bit of useful guidance …but you know it’s hard for me to follow his advice because I’m not good at saying no to things. I’m not good at saying no to things and so I always end up doing all this shit that I’d really rather not do.

My goodly ghost blew the fog off a couple of affairs that I ought to have divested myself of months ago …but somehow I can’t let go and they just keep on lingering and lingering and growing more and more dysfunctional and perverse. Of course I tell myself that I don’t mind the perversity because, after all, the most fucked up emotional states usually lead me to some sort of inspirational thing or another in the long run; after all the requisite boozing and months of lost productivity and probably a few bouts of insufferable madness to exasperate those around whose stable and enviable lives I seem to orbit.

But I apologize for nothing, fuck. I apologize for nothing at five twelve am with my body drained completely of its juices and my back rifted with claw marks and my lips swollen from kisses and my bed reeking of lust. I apologize for no moments wasted yet again on desolate highway sides in the pouring rain hitching my way into oblivion and I apologize not at all for banging on your door drunkenly in the middle of the night and telling you that I loved you or that I hated you.

How can I apologize for telling my heart to you? How can I apologize for hurting you so badly and then winning you over again knowing full well that I was just going to hurt you again? How can I apologize for telling you I wanted you to be mine, knowing full well it would drive you away? I cannot stop myself. I am intoxicated by the prospect of tragedy.

I am a devil and I have a heart made of stone …or so someone told me today.

I am tender and the heartache is too much for me sometimes.

My goodly ghost, in this dream I had, did me an interesting service. He showed me one lover; one for whom I would have given everything if only she would have wanted anything. This one, he told me, is no good for you. He took her by the hand and he led her away, leaving me standing along. He then showed me another lover; one from whom I tried to run more than once, but somehow I always seemed to circle back into her arms. He took her by the hand and he led her away from me. This one, he said, is no good for you. He left me standing alone.

These two figures in my dream, symbols of two directions, physically divided, and yet winding round each other, are inseparable to me. When one bends one way I bend with her and the other then bends with me. Then when the other bends I bend back and the first then bends with me. And though they have never met they bend each other. It is madness, my ghost told me, get away from it.

I reflected as I lay in the early daylight on how some days I was the weak one, constantly pedalling my silly heart as quickly as I could toward each hopeless climb that one lover threw before me …and each time that I barely made it to the top, gasping and wondering at my own stamina, I would suddenly espy with dismay another, steeper, hill rising up before me in the distance. Other days, though, I was the puissant one, throwing up mountains with an effete flick of my wrist and watching my other lover bounding up each climb, never seeming to tire of the labours I set before her. And as I witnessed her suffering and breathless at the crown of each miserable ascent, I looked upon myself and saw myself reflected in my lover. I was as her but only when I was not with her. I wish I could understand how all of this worked, how we seem to magnify our desire in inverse proportion to the seeming retreat of desire in the object of our affection.

Then my ghost led me to another figure, an unexpected one. This third figure leaned into me and delivered me a message that I have been thinking about ever since. There was sense in it.

My annual remembrance day rant

The last television I owned ended up being tossed off the roof of my house (by me) during a complicated spring during which my roommate at the time agreed (for reasons that I can still not entirely fathom) to allow the woman I had just broken up with to undertake an extremely large and complex installation art project in his room. This project involved her constructing a giant frame out of wood (inside his room) and then affixing numerous buttons that she had cast herself onto springs and levers and all sorts of other things and then attaching them to the frame. The project was massive and required her to be in my home every day hammering and drilling and just basically being around, which was highly annoying because we had already agreed to stay the fuck away from each other until our fucked up and embittered hearts were mended and as far as I was concerned she was doing a crappy job of respecting my space and need for time. Not only this, but I was trying to complete my master’s degree and the time and the combination of someone I was still in love with but who didn’t want to be with me being in the same house but ignoring me and at the same time making continuous hammering noises was a little too much for my sanity to take. A lot of dramatic exchanges happened and during one of them I threw my television off the roof. I don’t miss those times at all and I don’t miss my television, either.

In the end, things got much more fucked up because I ended up falling in love with my ex-roommate’s ex-girlfriend and she and I started dating, we became lovers, even while my ex-roommate was still in the same house. He didn’t like this at all. She and I (his ex-girlfriend that is) ended up traveling together, moving in together, sharing a TV, being together for almost four years, breaking up, and then over a period of a year or so becoming dear friends and we still talk every day more or less. When she moved out, though, the took her television with her and that’s the last time there was a television in my home. My ex-roommate, meanwhile, ended up moving in with my ex-lover the artist and they are still living together and I have no idea what the they do with their lives and I really don’t give a damn.

Back to the television, though, I used to watch a lot of hockey on the television but over the last little while I’ve almost completely lost interest in the sport. It’s not just not having a TV has precipitated this loss of interest, though; I can certainly watch as much as I like on the internet with streaming TV and the nature of the internet is to give the consumer more of the product than ever before, thus enflaming addictions rather than cooling them, but all the same my interest has waned.

I think the main problem for me is the increasing notice I have been taking of the interconnection between the culture of hockey and the culture of militaristic nationalism that seems to dominate a lot of the rhetoric that occurs off the ice. In the first place, as with every sport, I don’t understand why it is that fans and players are required to stand for the national anthem at the beginning of every game. There is as far as I can ascertain no tangible connection between the sport of hockey and love for one’s nation and so it seems to me that the efforts made to create connections in the minds of fans between the great swell of collective energy they are feeling and the swell of energy that the drum banging patriots tell us we ought to be feeling for our nation (whichever nation it is) are at best disingenuous and at worst sinister acts of brainwashing.

Hockey, of course, is a celebration of youthful masculinity (yes, I know there’s a women’s game, too) channelled through a collective team effort against a hated foe (who is ironically not at all different from one’s own team except for the colours of the jersey). It is, in this respect, a fine metaphor for the jolly good wars of yesteryear where everyone gave it their sporting best and everybody killed everybody else by the gentlemanly rules. There is no asymmetrical warfare in hockey and, while certain strategies may change, there is always a higher paradigm to which all participants must adhere.

I realise that my above statement in and of itself is a false parallel when taken on its own. Just because young men play hockey in uniforms on teams and just because young men fight in wars in uniforms on teams this does not mean that one is a symbol for the other. Yet the parallel becomes stronger when the element of national pride and all of the rhetoric of sacrifice for the nation attached to anthems is attached to the excitement of the game. Not only this, but the broadcast culture surrounding hockey (and here I have chosen to pick particularly on the CBC) adds greatly to the dulce et decorum est pro patria mori mentality that we see in hockey.

I’m reflecting on all this because it is November 11th today and this is the day we are supposed to remember WWI; and, particularly in Canada, to remember the battle Vimy Ridge when we ostensibly became a nation. Vimy Ridge is in and of itself a big nothing. A bunch of Canadian teenagers ran up a muddy hill during WWI and when they got to the top they murdered a bunch of German teenagers. Some people like to say that it was a big strategic victory for the allies but it really wasn’t. A few days later the Germans attacked again in another spot a few miles down and killed a lot of French teenagers and the war went on.

The entire war, in the long run, was really a big nothing. The was all kinds of imperial bluster and militarism at the time and it can’t really be said that any one nation was any better or worse than any other. They all sucked and they all were responsible for a lot of needless death and suffering.

Sometimes when I say this to people (especially in hockey chat rooms where the patriotic fervour runs high) they get angry and tell me I don’t understand the sacrifices that those kids made in WWI and that I’m enjoying the life I have today because of these brave soldiers. I personally don’t believe this. Because of the way that WWII went, with the Nazis and everything, and also because of the massive dose of guilt administered by the winning side to the losing side after WWI in the treaty of Versailles, it may seem like the Germans were villains in WWI, but they were not any more evil than the French, Italians, British, Russians, Turks, or anyone else participating, and I personally believe that had Germany won WWI, things would not be much different for Canada now. Well, actually, maybe things would have been better if Germany won WWI because there would have been no opening for Hitler to get in power…but there just would have been some other asshole, I guess.

So anyhow, Vimy Ridge. Those kids didn’t die to defend democracy or freedom or anything like that. If they died for anything it was for guts and glory and the Empire. This is shit that I don’t happen to believe in. I’m also pretty leery of claims that democracy and freedom are being defended in today’s wars, but this is a story for another time.

There was a big push by the Harper government last year (and it was echoed continuously on CBC and on Hockey Night in Canada) to contextualize the Vimy Ridge battle and what it meant to Canada. The thing that trouble me most about all of this was that the perfectly reasonable claims that war was senseless and should be avoided and that way too many people had already been killed by war already and all the other perfectly reasonable claims that made me used to want to wear a poppy were being conflated with stories about individual glory on the battle field and great patriotic sacrifice for the nation and so on. The latter sentiments do not make me want to wear a poppy because the message suddenly becomes, yes war is senseless, but we do it well and we’re braver than anyone when it happens. This isn’t talking people out of war, it’s talking people into war.

Since Harper was (and still is) pushing his own government’s completely pointless and misdirected war in Afghanistan at the same time as the Vimy celebrations were going on the emphasis on a continuing tradition of great bravery on the battlefield made me just a little sick to my stomach.

The CBC meanwhile, has been completely complicit in this regard by mixing in stories of war heroes (as if there is such a thing) of today and yesterday with stories of heroism on and off the ice. I’m running out of energy here and hitting too scattered a target, but I’m glad I don’t have a goddamn TV (youtube is great, though!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM7rwvjoQw0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6373IRqSeU

les enfants

.

Hello say I
to the tangle of hair
and then face
that emerges from the knots of coverings
by way of a good morning
how are you feeling?
I am fine how are you feeling?
Stretching kissing sleep is rubbed out from the eyes lazily
in the squinted at late morning light.

I am feeling ok
but at moments like this I can not help thinking of the children
and this makes me sad.
What children do you mean?
I mean the children;
les enfants, if you prefer to hear me say so in your own tongue.

The children of the world.
I can not but think of them at these times
in all their darling sufferings, those poor little orphans.

The poor little street urchins with their faces covered in soot,
lowered down chimneys
and suffocating on the collected ash,
then beaten soundly by their sweep keepers
and send off to sleep in the draughty attic
with not more supper than a crust of bread,

and little dears marched off in their thread bare coats,
barely keeping out the cold winter wind
and the snow coming in damp
through the cracked leather of their boots

while they file in long lines up to the doorways
of the blacking factories
and brick works
that still run today despite the long distance we have travelled
since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

How many of these sweet angels have been accidentally tangled up
in the works of the giant throbbing roaring machines
and shredded like plates of pork
between the gargantuan tines of the threshers
then left in fleshy bloody ribbons
for the horror of all to see
along the floorways of the factory?
Just think of those terrible ribbons of gore,
still punctuated with the darling buttons that once decorated the child’s duffel coat,
just think of those rosy cheeks
and golden curls
flattened and mixed in with sizzling brain matter
beneath the fallen and shattered
but still molten red iron core
that dropped so suddenly
and so wretchedly
from the upper galleries of the foundry.

Nay, imagine (why I shudder to even say such things)
all of the little ones burning down into piles of ash
as a radioactive bomb detonates over their city,
the wild flowers they had just gathered
bursting suddenly into little plumes of flame
in the instant before
their tiny hands and their precious fingers melt away.

Imagine, if you will, a bomb blast,
and then among the rubble
and the wafting smoke you discover a single miniature hand,
severed by the explosion from its owner,
the body indeed completely vaporized,
but still those fingers are wrapped round the wrist of a tiny
now utterly charred doll.

And a tongue runs playfully from my exposed hipbone up to the base of my neck
and then scattered kisses make their way back down to my hips.
Do you want me to shut up about this?