Small is Beautiful Art Exhibit

Saturday, 21 November 2009
at 15:00 to
Friday, 27 November 2009
at 17:00
Ben Navaee Gallery
1111 Queen St. East
Toronto, ON

featuring the one and only
Jennifer A. Marr

Classic Film Theory Volume 1.

If you want to understand montage, in a classical sense, then there is really no better clip to watch than this one because it encompasses both the central concept of Soviet montage theory, whereby, as Sergei Eisenstein says: “each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other”, and the (originally American) style that creates a sense of the passage a greater length of time that the sequence itself by jumping from one image to the next. 

Also, the now ubiquitous sports/kung-fu training sequence is elevated to a high art in this montage, allowing us to see not only both athletes at work, but at the same time showing the romantic and ideological motivations that drive each to perfection. 

The Soviet athlete, aided by the most advanced technological machinery known to humanity in the 1980s (and thus bejewelled by all sorts of colourful fun lights) typifies the inhuman mechanics of the bureaucratic state.  He is tooled to perfection, but there is a distance to it; it represents the logical end of the socialist experiment: a complete disconnection from the people.  Even the potentially very hot to watch love scenes between Dolf Lungren and Bridget Nielson, his uberperfect girlfriend-scientist would probably be lifeless, despite the quivering muscles and perfectly toned flesh.  Their love would be technically perfect, but it would lack the cuddly warm-meatballs affection of Rocky and his ever-patient homebody wife, Adrien (depicted here only once, poking her head through the barn door where Rocky trains with a sweet smile on her face; all the while probably wondering about the Lasagne she has in the oven baking for him when his day is finally done).

Rocky, meanwhile, is all about the simplicity of the countryside. Like Thoreau reborn, he betakes himself to the wilderness and is assisted only by the perpetually snowbound  serfs of outer Russia in his quest to transform his body into a weapon of democracy.  He drags around old horse-drawn carts and flings logs about in the snow and does all sorts of complicated sit-ups in an old barn and all in all personifies the myth of rural simplicity that pervades the strange core of the American Dream.

That the montage takes place in Russia is clearly a nod to Eisenstein and the other early Soviet filmmakers and theorists, and the fact that the two training sequences are laid over top of each other, to give a sense of all sorts of simultaneous actions occurring, which are related but not directly effected by each other, makes for powerful film making.  Note, for example, the shot of the Russian field with the mountains in the backdrop at the very beginning of the sequence; clearly this is a short visual reference to with work of Tarkovsky; who was well known for his delight in long static shots of majestic natural vistas that seamlessly integrated into the larger narrative structures of the plot.  As in Tarkovsky’s films, nature, here, is one of the main characters. 

At the same time, however, (in a fittingly American style) the montage moves us forward through time, watching each of the boxers develop, while at the same time giving us in a nutshell (as is fitting for Soviet style montage) an entire symbolic history of the Cold War.

Model Villages

Back when I was studying rural development projects in places a million miles from where I lived, one of the most popular things people discussed was sustainable development—this is to say that if a project is initiated someplace it has to make sense to, be useful to, and be manageable by, the people for whom the project has been initiated after the people who initiated the project have left the area. This seems straightforward now, but it hasn't always been. The past is littered with ambitious projects carried in on the backs of egotistical development workers and the young and arrogant college age adventurers whom they had conscripted as their field mercenaries.

Try to imagine legions of Peace Corps workers in the 1960s and 1970s marching into village after village and telling people just how bad and outmoded everything they did was. The mercenaries would go home, swelled up with pride over how they had made the world a better place, and the tractors and toilets they had left behind would rust into oblivion and the high tech wells they had dug would stop pumping and turn to mosquito infested swamp areas or, worse yet, dust dry pits all because the available spare parts could only be ordered especially from Omaha and who the fuck had the money for that?

Kind of like: if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you feed him for life… but if you teach him how to fish with a high tech rod that he can't replace then he's going to starve to death once that rod gets broken.

Plus, the other question that they never talked about in development school (and I'm thinking especially of the training I got with CIDA—although things have no doubt changed by now) is: who the fuck are we to be teaching other people how to fish anyhow? It's terribly condescending to march into a village and start telling people that they ought to be getting all the fish up out of the river when they haven't been doing that. Perhaps there's a good reason why people in such and such a village and not fishing…well I'm either being too metaphorical or too literal here, but I can't decide which so I'm going to get to the point…

Doesn't it seem to you like the democratic projects in Afghanistan and Iraq are a lot of the same bunk all over again? You can't go into a country, change the whole political system from whatever it was before to democracy and then leave after five years and expect democracy to flourish. The only reason European/American countries are democratic (if you even want to lie to yourself and believer they are) is because of a centuries long process of struggle and misery; a struggle that continues to be waged every single day.

The democratic process isn’t just naturally going to take root in Afghanistan in five years and all the shit-eating supercilious "Model Villages" built by the Canadian armed forces are not going to change that fact one iota. These dreams are all going to rust like high tech tractors at the edges of farmers fields throughout Asia in places where nobody can afford the parts.

I’m trying to say this without any value judgement, because I don’t really understand the Afghani political system… but I have to think that any solution that is going to work for that country is going to come from some model based on their own system and way of doing things, rather than Western style democracy.

***

p.s. this sort of thing doesn’t only happen in Asia.  Remember the Toronto Blue Jays and the Montreal Expos?  Someone thought that baseball would be a hit in Canada and for a while Canadians kind of got excited about it, but sooner or later we (Canadians) got bored of it—it just doesn’t suit our temperament culturally speaking, and now baseball (as a professional sport) is all but dead here in Canada.

Batman is an idiot.

Thinking about Montreal and about how the same mob friendly mayor just got elected once again by a city that simply doesn’t care about crumbing infrastructure and shitty health care and rampant corruption in every single area of the public sector, I came to the conclusion that Batman is an idiot.

See, Gotham city is a lot like Montreal only not quite as dirty, squalid, and infested with criminality. Batman's solution, however, is always to treat the symptoms, not the cause of these problems. He shouldn't be out there on the streets dealing with crime on a case by case basis, what he should be doing is trying to eliminate the major players who are moving in the drugs and moving out the money. If he started from the top and worked his way down then he would be preventing more crimes more efficiently.

See, if he just slinks around at night, waiting for opportunity to strike, which is what he mostly seems to be doing when he can't think of anything else to do with his time (which is often), he can maybe save one rape victim and one or two victims of a robbery, mugging, or what-have-you, over the course of a single night's work. This leaves the possibility that, since his rescues are mostly by circumstance, he misses most crimes and could potentially spend a night or a lot of nights just missing lots of crimes and not having anything to do but sit around picking his ass and looking nasty.

Even when he's fighting super-villains, it's not like he ever has any plan of attack or special idea what he's doing. He mostly just waits around until they try something idiotic and then responds to it, allowing them to make the mistakes that will get them caught. If he actually bothered to come up with a plan in advance one time maybe he would save Gotham City yet another insane clean-up bill. I mean, how much do you think it cost the taxpayers to rebuild their entire transit system after he trashed it in the second last movie just so he could kill his old master, Raz-al-Gul? Hey Batman, maybe your plan should have been to also rescue the monorail so people could get to work the next day, asshole.

Batman is so powerful and sneaky, and he gets this amazing power from operating outside the law. He should use this power to go into corporate offices and governmental offices and so on and straighten out the corrupt with out the fear of repercussion that (for example) plagues the people who work in municipal politics in Montreal.

$1.68

Today, while I was cutting back up through the very same park as yesterday, extending the scope of the treasure hunt I’ve been participating in for the last couple of weeks, just as I passed by the statue of Etienne Cartier, looking down from the high ground, I spotted two drug dealers just as they spotted me.  At the very instant I was espied they both began to scramble up the hill toward me, one running a block on the other like I was the end zone at the Grey Cup.  The other one pushed the first one back, trying to pitch him sideways into the bushes.

I waved my hands outward as they approached, utilizing the international gesture for “I don’t want to buy your narcotics, thank you”.  They both let up, laughing, and went back to sit on the statue and look miserable in the mellow fruitfulness of the afternoon.

Do I look like I wanna buy drugs that fucking bad?  Because I’m really not interested.

I went to the post office and tried to mail a letter.  I asked for one stamp and then, as the guy was pasting it on my envelope, I realised that I didn’t have enough change.

Will you take interac?  I asked, flashing my big time bank card.

It’s 61 cents, he said, and gave me a dirty look.  I looked around his store for more things I could buy in order to make my consumer transaction more worthy.  I couldn't find anything than I didn’t already have or that I thought I wanted.  Finally I settled on a chocolate bar.  $1.68.  Take that interac.

A Terrible Business Plan.

I was walking up into Mont Royal Park today, actually following a clue for a treasure hunt that a new friend set me on, and just as I crossed over Avenue du Parc a guy approached me and asked me if I wanted any weed. No thank you, I don't want any, I said. About twenty steps later another guy started approaching me and at the same time another guy, spotting me, came literally running over the hill toward me. They both arrived at the same time, declaring forcefully that they had weed to sell me. One even pulled out a baggie and waggled it in my face.

Oh, I said, a double dose.

A double dose, said one of the dealers; the one who hadn't been running, I like that.

Anyhow, I said, I'm not looking, thanks.

I headed up past the statue and into the area where people dress up on Sundays like medieval characters and hit each other with big foam swords. Another dealer approached me from out of the woods. No thanks, I said, as he was walking up, looking hopeful. After that, as I was crossing over to the place where the clue ended up being buried I encountered yet another dealer. No, no thank you, no.

After, when I had the clue; wrapped up in three layers of plastic baggie to protect it from the elements, while I was walking back down to the road, I saw that the park was full of suspicious looking characters milling about in the damp fall atmosphere. Their hoodies pulled up over their heads or their baseball caps pulled low over their eyes, they were kicking up the scattered fallen leaves and generally looking sullen about things. Can it possibly be that all these people were drug dealers and that the only person in the park who was not a drug dealer was I? After all, it was three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon; how can that many people possibly expect to garner any sort of clientèle when they are all following such a ridiculous business plan? I suppose they think that the next middle-aged housewife who jogs by with her dog is going to interrupt her run to buy an 1/8 from some sketchy guy she's never met who's just accosted her from out of the forest.

I came down the hill like Maria in the Sound of Music and passed through the rusty old gates of McGill. I had chocolate on my tongue. I felt good.

song titles I don't get.

"More than a woman" by the Bee Gees

"You're more than a woman, more than a woman to me."

What the fuck does "more than a woman" mean? What more than a woman does the guy want? Maybe it's like that supermarket in Panama (El Rey) where they used to move stock by wrapping two items together in duct tape and selling them as a cut rate package deal. The thing that was great about El Rey, though, was that they didn't ever care what things they taped together, they would just be two random things. I swear to god there used to be stuff like a carving knife taped to a pack of maxi-pads. Anyhow, what more than a woman does this guy want…oh yeah, I married her because she came taped to a can of tuna. You know, the woman herself was kind of meh…I was sitting on the fence…but then, you know, with the tuna, I was like well it's like a relationship and lunch.

"Even the nights are better" by Air Supply

"Even the nights are better, now that we're here together"

This song was obviously written by virgins because the night is the easy part of the relationship. Oh yeah, you know I was totally enjoying all that watching TV and going to boring cocktail parties and all that, but lets face it, all the nights in bed together having crazy sexual intercourse or, you know, just being naked and hugging and all that, I mean that stuff is totally boring. I'm so used to being by myself all night long and being sexually unfulfilled and I was concerned that, now that I have a girlfriend, I would have to give up those long precious hours of misery.

Those are the only ones I can think of right now. If you have more tell me.

Nothing comes from Nothing

I write this, clearly, after having seen the Rip Remix Manifesto and absorbing one of its core message; a message that was painfully obvious at every time throughout human history and up until twenty years ago or thirty years ago or whatever it was: nothing comes from nothing. Borrowing or even stealing completely the melodic lines and lyrics from one song and putting them in another is perfectly natural and is the way that new good songs are created and the way that traditions and inspirations stay alive and at the same time replenish themselves. That anyone has been tricked into thinking otherwise is a tragedy for human creativity and a victory for talentless people who only seek to claw raw dollars out of the souls of honest artists.

Look here at what I am saying:

Bob Dylan dedicates this song to Woody Guthrie. Not only does he refer directly to Guthrie's song, Hard Travelling, but he lifts the melody directly from The 1913 Massacre. This doesn't diminish either song.

The complication here is, of course, that the time when people borrowed liberally from each other and sang each other's songs predates the present condition of the market and the music industry. The problem now is that certain groups and musicians can prosper from songs that other people wrote because they have an unequal access to moneyed consumers. In this particular way, one might level a criticism at Led Zeppelin for borrowing so much from so many different people, becoming millionaires by it and then never remunerating those people whose songs they took.

Led Zeppelin is awesome, and my teen years wouldn't have been complete without them blasting and a pair of butter knives wedged under the burning elements of my stove, but I wonder how rich Bert Jansch got from Jimmy Page's uncredited arrangement of his song?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkX7Q2J7k48&feature=channel_page

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUMGuvmVmxI&feature=related

John Hutnyk writes quite extensively about this in some book or another of his that I read a couple of years ago. Essentially, while going out of his way to disparage Madonna's Ray of Light album and everything ever produced by Kula Shaker (and quite deservingly in the latter case), Hutnyk says that it's all very well and good for big time artists to say that they are being inspired by India (for example) and that this is all part of a growing global consciousness, but the fact is that while the big artists are borrowing all this stuff, the Indian artists, with no real access to the pathways of the global market, are not making anything for the music that they developed and practiced for years.

And then again, Paul Simon did open the door for a lot of world music acts back in the 1980s with his Graceland album. Would music is in many respects a stupid, probably racist, label for an extremely diverse range of recordings and traditions that have more or less been squashed into a horrible collage of exotic sounds suitable for the background at swanky cafes selling soy chai lattes and CDs from the Buddha bar. I have nightmare visions of Japanese hippies in the Metro playing sitar accompanied by Australian backpackers with didgeridoos and I have visions of people in Lulu Lemon tights sweating and bending to the sound of Persian flute music …fuck, I have to go, my kitchen smells like sour milk and I can't stand it anymore!

The Science of Shortbread

1:

I took the batch of cultured butter I made yesterday and turned it into shortbread cookies. I wanted to make the ones that have two layers and a little dollop of jam in the middle, but a lack of ambition took me over so I made plain ones. Shortbread is easy, though: it's just 1 part butter to ½ part sugar, mixed and then you add 2 parts flour (in my case a 50/50 mix of white flour and oats). Mix it all up by hand, flatten it on a board with a pin, and then cut out shapes with your cookie cutters. bake the shapes on an ungreased pan at low heat (maybe 300 or 325) for about 20 minutes or until the cookies are just slightly brown.

The thing about shortbread is that it shouldn’t get too cooked. The cookies turned out really nicely. The oats (a traditional ingredient in these cookies) make them feel like they are going to crumble, but they don't because of all the butter.

Then, because I wanted a sandwich and I realised I didn't have any bread, I baked a loaf, and that took three hours. The bread: 2.5 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of yeast, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, two eggs (I wanted fluffy bread), some olive oil, a pinch or two of salt, the rest of the oats (the bag was almost empty), and all the buttermilk I made yesterday when I was making butter.

2:

I was talking to my friend Andrea about something called the Gaia theory, which is the theory that the entire earth and all the organisms and bodies of water and weather systems and everything all constitute a single organism which is (either consciously or unconsciously) colluding to regulate the general quality of living on the planet. I don't know anything else about the theory than this because she just told me about it today.

The one thing I noted, however, as I was reading about it was that one of the chief critics of the theory is the seemingly ubiquitous grand inquisitor of the atheist movement, Richard Dawkins. I have to say that I agree with Dawkins that taking the magical and historical claims of any religion seriously is tantamount to severe delusion and possibly madness, but at the same time I've noted a paradox in what he is saying that troubles me.

As a champion of evolutionary theory, I'm sure he would agree with me that one of the chief flaws in the Creationist platform is that, while there may be some questions still to be answered about how evolution works and there may be some particulars about it that force us to still refer to it as a theory as opposed to a fact, the doubts about evolution do not ever nor should they ever imply that by extension Creationism is correct. The two concepts are unrelated and, while the evidence for evolution does discredit Creationism by showing that the story in the Bible is impossible and untenable, it is not the case that the evidence against evolution proves by any standard that a ridiculous Semitic desert God created the world six thousand years ago. The biggest victory that the that the religious fanatics of the Christian world have scored of late is to establish in the public discourse the idea that there is a binary opposition between evolution and creationism. There is none.

However, when I see interviews with Dawkins (particularly in that show he did where he tried to make a whole lot of different religious and new age practitioners look bad), he had a disturbing tendency to sell science as a flawless and infallible alternative to religion. This is simply not the case. While one could argue that the scientific method is flawless and infallible, the way that the method has been used, and the conclusions that have been reached via the method, and a lot of the highly questionably motivated decisions made in the name of science and research are highly fallible and deeply flawed.

Science isn't always right, and science doesn't always do the right thing. A lot of scientists seem to be in denial about this (believe me, I meet people like this every day at the McGill squash courts). Another difficulty with scientific thinking is that it opens up the possibility of a means of thought that is without morality. It is action based on logic and (so called) reason, rather than on compassion.

For example, Dawkins champions Darwinism (and rightly so) but at the same time, one of the more unfortunate extensions of Darwinism was the Social-Darwinist idea that some races are better evolved than others and therefore superior. At the time, the science seemed sound and the scientists who defended the theory said quite pompously that there was no point in arguing things that had been proven by the scientific method. What these scientists failed to take into account, however, were the social and cultural climates and conditions that made one group different from another and made one group respond to its environment and situation differently from another.

Franz Fanon put it most artfully, when he explained that the French used their science to prove that the Algerians must be inferior to the French because they simply weren't able to do the things the French did nearly as well as the French did them. Dawkins defennce of his vision of the world as a scientific marvel from a position of insular privilege is what makes his vision of science as the only thing worth following so very unappealing to me.

The point here is that science, needs social science and science needs humanities and science (sorry to say) needs religion to help it act as a moral compass. At the same time, religion very badly needs science because the religious wingnuts are hurting the world immensely.

Twnety-eight bales of Longford hay.

1:

If you add a little yogurt with a high bacterial content to the open bowl of 35% cream you've left on your counter for six or seven hours then you can actually reverse the pasteurization process to some degree. The reason for doing this is that when you finally get around to churning the cream (at 12:30 on a Saturday night) what you will end up with is cultured butter, as opposed to just regular butter. What is the difference between cultured butter and regular butter?

Cultured butter tastes better. It tastes like butter, but it has more subtle rich flavours because of all the extra bacterial goodness in it. It is common in Europe but not common (and consequently difficult to find) in North America. Cultured butter also churns a lot faster and reliably, which is nice for me because my last few attempts with uncultured butter turned into disasters and I couldn't get the buttermilk to separate from the butter and it was annoying.

I think what I was making before was clotted cream, not butter…or that is to say I was only making butter successfully 50% of the times I tired. But now it's all good. Good and delicious. Clotted cream is also delicious, but it rots faster than I can eat it, whereas properly made butter can keep quite a while in the fridge.

I'm writing this even though most everyone I tell that I make my own butter thinks it's weird or gross. Like I said, I've also made my own cheese. This year I've also made strawberry, blackberry and blueberry jam, a red pepper chutney that is technically a pepper jelly with spices, a batch of pickled asparagus, pickled radish, pickled carrots (two batches, one last winter and one this summer) and, most recently, a batch of dill pickles.

Dill pickles are, as you know, the holy grail of the pickling arts and I'm excited to see how these ones turn out. Update in a couple of months!

2:

My cat ate two bowls of cat food today and playfully captured a large moth and then killed it on the carpet. This was surprising because my cat is very old and can hardly walk and hasn't appeared playful, or eaten an entire bowl of food in ages...like more than a year or two. She mostly sleeps and when she's awake she makes this kind of deathly meowling sound that has become famous among my visitors and house guests. L dR M has even taken to locking the cat out of the bedroom at night (and I can't say I blame her) because the deathly meowling isn't conducive to sleep.

According to my sister, my grandmother used to be the same way. When my grandmother came to visit, she would always sleep in my sister's room and my sister would hear her in the night saying stuff like: "I'm dying. I'm dying. This is it, I can feel it coming now!" But she didn't die, of course, on any of those nights and so, instead she would start ordering my sister to go downstairs and get a pack of cigarettes so she (my grandmother, that is) could have a smoke in bed. Apparently this was mortifying to my sister, but I was in the next room and slept through the whole thing.

3:

One thing I realised when I was at burningman a few years back (and I'm sure I've mentioned this before somewhere) is that if you practise really hard at playing bongos and if the stars align for you in just the right way, you may one day end up in a drum circle in the middle of the desert beside a fire that's like two hundred feet high and that is creating crazy dust tornados everywhere and you may be surrounded by a whole lot of naked people who are dancing and gyrating to the beat you are paying while a whole lot of other sympathetic souls are putting burning plants in your lips and pouring unknown glasses of mysterious liquid down your throat so that you don't have to take your hands off the drum.

To a lesser degree, but for some reason just as rewarding, are the strides I've made recently in my banjo playing. For example, I was walking down the street with my banjo a couple of days ago and this guy stopped and asked for a song and then after I played one he stuffed 10$ in my pocked and walked off.

Plus, I sat in on an oldtime music circle for the first time this week (is was stressful and fast and crazy, but totally fun) and I learned that, as long as you keep sitting on the stage and playing the songs, the bartender will keep bringing you pints of beer.

And, tonight, there I was sitting on my stoop playing cluck ol hen and a guy came by, listened to me, then went to the store and bought me a can of (Bitburger) beer. See, everybody and their mother can play the guitar, but the banjo is

Incipit Nunc Futurum.

…or so read an impression stamped in the cement of the school yard we had wandered into one moony night a few evenings back. And then, on a sun dial, perched up on the school's wall, the ever popular rosebud gathering caveat "carpe diem".

It must be a Catholic School, I remarked, to be throwing all this Latin out at the children.

I wonder what Horace would have thought of the legacy of his most famous phrase; now nearly ubiquitous among the high school set? As a man who wrote far too much poetry about how nice it was to wake up early and at least a couple too many poems about how right it is to die in the bellicose service of the state, the modern educational system would probably have pleased Horace; at least in so far as he was probably a sadistic prick who would have enjoyed, evil principal-like, making teenagers suffer needlessly while at the same time convincing himself that he was doing them a long-term favour.

He would be just the kind of person who would stamp something as condescending as "the future begins now" in Latin under the feet of the children as they played. There is no time to idle in the directionless follies of childhood; one must be considering at all times how one can personally improve and how one can become an effectively functioning cog in the whirling tines of civilization.

That's one reading, anyhow. Incipit Nunc Futurum could be a call to any kind of personal improvement, not just one that leads to soul-killing labour for the sake of the continuance of the economy. And, also, Horace was very fond of screwing young boys and wrote plenty of poetry about it (which rarely gets mentioned during high school graduations) and so it's not likely he'd get a job teaching young children…but then again it was a Catholic school.

I refer you to Horace's ode 1.5, in which he begins by describing how, in a perfumed grotto he is dreaming of pressing his engorged loins up against the lithe body of a slender lad, stretched out upon a bed of roses. If ever you are at a high school graduation, or you are entering a caption in a year book, or you are doing any such thing, I encourage you to think upon this poem, rather than boring old "carpe diem"…for, teaching ways to avoid being fucked and robbed of one's innocence by dirty old men is a far better lesson to impart to the young than an offering of the vain hope that they will be able to carve out any kind of living that is both highly individualistic and at the same time over-brimming with happiness and contentment.

Moonstone Party.

1: Flashback.

Moonstone: I'd never slept in that tent without you and when I set it up and crawled inside all the intense energy that had radiated out from us the summer before, up and down the Atlantic coast, still hung there and the stains on the tent walls from the mud and the spattering rain and the dried grass and old crushed insects and spattered wax on the tent floor brought everything back to vividly.

2: A Perfect Setup.

Moonstone: Around nine-thirty in the morning, Al and I sawed up logs for the bonfire and then carried them down to the firepit. I started to build up the bonfire, to get the coals ready for the cookout that evening. One large log, that Al's father, Frazer, helped me heave onto the fire, turned out to be filled with some sort of ant and as the flames began to curl up over one side of the log the ants began to pour out the other, teeming madly over the wood looking for ways to escape from the heat. Frazer and I, wanting to do what we could, began to put long branches up against the ant's end of the log, in order to give the ants a highway down the grass. About the half the ants didn't ever get the point about the escape route and they fell into the flames, the other half escaped into the grass…but who knows where they would go without a home.





A few minutes after this, I opened my first beer; with the intention of getting as drunk as I possibly could before the night was through. It was a brilliant day, and (after two months of hard practice) I sat in with a bluegrass band, playing banjo, and was able to keep up with them and (after a lot more drinking and a lot later in the night) I apparently sang lead vocals and played lead guitar during a rock and roll set. I do remember doing the set and I remember some of the songs I sang, but there are things that come to me now and then as flashes from that forty-five minutes up on stage and I'm like "Oh god, how awful!"

Later still, back at the bonfire: there is another jam going on. I'm so drunk by this point that I fall off the bench I'm on and lie down in the grass. The rest of the people there leave me alone until they go to bed, but then, half awake I hear them debating whether they should move me. Some think I will be fine. Some think I might catch fire. Some try to divvy up my limbs and drag me back to my tent. They carry me a ways from the fire and ask me if I can get back to my tent. I assure them, from my position face down in the grass, that I can.

I know where my tent is and I am slowly crawling toward it. Often I am unable to get myself propped up on my elbows and knees because the world is spinning and any position other than face down makes me want to vomit. I've been mixing wine and beer and gin and I start to think maybe I ought to have just stuck with one. The long grass is still wet from the afternoon storm and I can feel it soaking into my clothes. I lie down and decided to rest a bit before my next push. My tent is still a good 500 metres away, but I can feel its aura glowing like a beacon, guiding me in from the stormy ocean.

A while later, a straggler from the bonfire finds me in the grass. "That's how far you've made it so far?" she says incredulously. "I'm fine," I insist, "I just like to do things at my own pace." Nevertheless, she picks me up and shoulders me to my tent. I sleep on top of the blankets with my still shoe covered feet hanging out the door of the tent.

In the morning, when I wake up, I discover that my arms and face are covered with stinging, very itchy ant bites. I must have gotten them during the long stretch that I was stretched out by the fire. What were all those pissed off ants doing hanging around the bonfire? Don't they have a home to go to?

3: A Chance Encounter.

Toronto: I went out with Barbara to get some Chinese food and along the way ended up hanging out with her roommate, W., and going for a beer with him and having a long talk with him; largely because Barbara claimed she was sick with the famous sore throat of 2009 and wanted to go home. This wouldn't be so unusual in and of itself except for the fact that W and I have been blood enemies for the last five years and have not spoken at all. Still, we hung out and it was pretty gentle and pleasant because after all we used to be friends and one only has so many friends in this world or people who we can tolerate so maybe this is a good thing. Along the way, walking on College street we had a curious chance encounter…but I think I don't want to talk about it.

4: Back in the City of my Birth.

Ottawa: 6:00am. No longer to stand my growing awareness of the floor and the ache in my back, I get out of bed and push the nozzle of the electric pump into the air mattress that we are sleeping on and flip on the switch. The room is filled with the roaring vacuum sound and the mattress begins to reinflate.
"What the fuck are you doing?" says LQ, jolted out of her sleep.
"Trust me" I say. She makes a sound that is a lot like "arrgh", but with more suffering infused into it.
"There," I say moments later, climbing back into bed and taking her in my arms again. "Now it is just like you are sleeping gently on a cloud."
"Yeah," says she with annoyance, "an awake cloud."

5: Perseids.

Ottawa: 11:30pm: One hour spent, one meteor seen… "I think," says LQ, "that this whole Perseids thing is just a conspiracy by the mosquitoes to lure victims to the park."

6: Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity Jog.

On the 417 East. She drives and I read to her from a volume of Rilke as we go. We stop in a field to sleep for a while and I go down to a nearby marsh and cut some bulrushes with my pocket knife and the sun is getting low and the light hangs in thick golden tresses over the long fields of corn. I come home and clean the cat shit off the living room floor. I drink water. I play my banjo. Things here in Montreal are the same.

Spleen

Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très-vieux,
Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,
S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.
Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,
Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.
Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade
Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;
Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,
Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,
Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilette
Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.
Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais pu
De son être extirper l'élément corrompu,
Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,
Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,
Il n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété
Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé.

Cross-dressing Conspiracies.

I called my friend, A[flaneur]a, from the dressing room at the value village a couple of days ago because I wanted to ask her if she thought that it would be ok to buy a pair of bell-bottoms if they really made my ass look good. She told me to buy them and cut them into shorts. So I bought them, but I didn't cut them into shorts because a larger consensus of people I polled told me that wearing bell-bottoms would be cool; particularly because no one would ever accuse me of being a hipster in bells (not that anyone ever has accused me of that anyhow). Especially, said HH, if you let the bottoms drag in the mud and get all ratty and tatty.

We were in La Carreta at that time, HH and LQ and I, and as HH began to lay into the hipsters a pair of obvious hipsters at the next table began to giggle about it. Like look at these fucking hipsters here, said HH, berating them. I'm sorry but I just hate people like you. We're not hipsters, they said defiantly, their eyes cringing a little behind their black chunky glasses, their wire thin pasty arms flexing under their skin tight black tee-shirts emblazoned with the names of bands no one has ever heard of ironed on with patches so faint that no one can read the band names anyhow, their skinny jeans tightly caressing the ankles protruding out bonily from their canvas sneakers.

The true measure of one's hipsterdom, LQ said, is how in denial you are about being a hipster. It's a kind of metaphysical trap, I decided. If denying that you are a hipster makes you a hipster then how can you avoid being a hipster? ~ The answer is to buy bell-bottoms and to wear them without any feeling of irony. I got up in the restaurant and started doing a disco dance that involved a lot of sharp pelvic thrusting. The hipsters cringed.

I have my bell-bottoms on now and there's another thing about them I noticed: the button buttons up on the opposite side from usual and also the flap on the fly feels like it is facing the wrong way..it throws me off every time I go to take a piss. Plus, I noticed after I bought the pants that there is a flowery blue and white strip of fabric sewn into the inside rim of the waist. Ergo, these are women's pants that I have bought!

The cut looks like a man's cut to me, but I guess the pockets are kind of shallow, which is annoying. I'm probably going to have to get a matching purse, something in brown suede with lots of tassels and coloured beads on it, if I'm going to carry all my manly shit around.

What I've been thinking about, as I stand there trying to fish my dick out from my underpants to piss, though, while I am forced to reflect for a moment on how I have been pushed out slightly from the usually seamless comfort zone of my masculinity, is that I wonder to what extent having the buttons on opposite sides for men and women is somehow just another way that heteronormativity reinforces itself. I mean, I am used to buttoning and unbuttoning in a certain way. Thus, if I go to unbutton a woman's shirt or pants, or reach round to unclasp her bra, or whatever I'm doing, the motion is always going to be a natural one because I'm unhooking things in the same direction I always do. A woman unhooking something of mine would have the same experience.

However, if I were to be unbuttoning a man then it would be slightly awkward because the buttons would be the reverse of what I was used to…unless he (or I, more likely) was wearing women's cloths, I guess…or unless my girlfriend was wearing one of my shirts…

Well anyhow, practicing undressing someone of the same sex for any extended period of time, like more than a week, would probably be enough to overcome any sort of confusion about the issue, but I can't help wondering what the function of the gender opposite buttons is anyhow.

Undoubtedly some genius someplace has already discussed this at length.

nine lives

I remember thinking it was odd that someone would so suddenly jut the left front corner of their car out from their parallel parking spot and into traffic like that, but before I had a chance to really meditate about it I was flying through the air and tumbling along the asphalt of Beaubien Avenue and I remember clearly the loud ripping noise of metal behind me and I remember thinking that I was going to stop when I hit the ground but I didn't and I kept tumbling, wondering how bad this was going to be, while I rolled and my bike rolled with me.

Maybe it was my bag full of library books (Barthes' critical essays, a collection by Stuart Hall, some writings by Arjun Appadurai and others on circulation and collections) that saved me, or maybe those heavyweight tomes provided the counterweight that kept me spinning; that made me fly so far. Maybe it is my helmet that I owe all the thanks to.

Well, I extracted myself from the mess on the ground and looked back at the car, it's bumper, hanging off like a peeled ear of corn, bobbing as the driver pulled out into the street. There was another cyclist who had come up; she was collecting the bits of my bike for me. "Do you see any blood on me?" I asked; for I was worried that my nose was broken, but there was no blood.

The driver stepped out and embraced me. He said he was so sorry and that he was concerned I was not ok. I apologized about his bumper and he said he didn't care. I felt suddenly like I was in the centre of an arena for all around me a crowd was staring, gasping. There was a whole bar full of people across the street looking at me with slack jaws and dead expressions. When the ambulance came to take me I went over there to lock my bike and not one said a word to me. No "ca va?" and no "are you ok?". Those people are useless jerks.

The police and the paramedics asked me again and again if I knew the date and I did, and felt lucid and alert. I remembered everything clearly. There was no blood on me, just some small scrapes on my legs and an ache in my left hand where I must have softened my fall.

I didn't think I needed an ambulance, but I've seen enough accidents to know that I was probably in shock, and I didn't want to lie on the stretcher because my neck felt fine, but the paramedic told me it would be better to come in on a stretcher at the hospital because I'd get priority. It made sense and I let myself get strapped in.

I made it through triage ten times faster than everyone else, but I still had to spend five dull chilly hours (I was in shorts and a t-shirt) waiting at Jean Talon Hospital on what was, I discovered, Hawaiian shirt day for the staff. They x-rayed my spine and head and did other shit and they let me go. I walked home in the dark feeling hypervigilant and nervous about every street I had to cross.

I came home and lay down on my bed and I dreamed that I was torn into pieces and glued back together like a collage with bits of paper and plastic and glass hands that were full of spider cracks and then as I slept and healed the parts all began to melt into each other and I began to feel like a whole body once more. My parts started to connect and interact as a single unit again. I woke up after a couple of hours, aching all over, but generally feeling alive and happy about it. I hurt all over, though, and I think tomorrow is going to be a long day.

crisis déménagement.

1:

It's July 2nd and this is my fourth night in my new apartment. I've spent two of those nights alone and two of those nights with Llama Suntooth …and I got the sense that she was even more sentimental about the old place, the place I just move out of, than I was.

And in a lot of ways I admit that the old place was pretty cool; I liked the bright orange living room and the dark blue bedroom and the livid yellow kitchen left by the previous tenants and I liked that the landlord hated all those colourful walls and couldn't wait to get his hands on a barrel of white paint to purify the place and I liked the back deck that picked up sunshine for most of the day and made my plants spring up and blossom and I liked that a lot of good artistic and musical projects happened in that space and that I made some good friends while living there and that, of course, Suntooth and I forged something good there in then thousand small ways over countless shared breakfasts and cups of tea and kisses, but in the end the place was mostly crap and I'll tell you why:

Noise. Noise noise noise. The walls at that place were completely uninsulated and every faint crinkle of a plastic corner and every toenail scratching on the bathroom floor carried from one apartment to another, creating a broiling cacophony of sound that continued for the entire day. The lady who lived beside me, you see, loved to listen to Radio France at full volume from the time she arose at seven in the morning until she went out in the evening around seven pm. When her radio was not on she would sing, usually in the late evenings…completely out of key, I might add.

The guy downstairs, meanwhile, while he kept quiet for the entire day, often liked to have loud parties from about eleven pm until four or five in the morning, replete with booming techno music and what I think was probably a karaoke machine. The guy downstairs, was a real macdaddy, too, and he had all kinds of ladies over to his place and their screaming and thumping and headboard banging often carried up through the floor. Now, I would never begrudge anyone their intimate moments—no matter how ruckus—believe me, but the thing that irked me was that he decided to hook up with the lady next door and so there were a few nights when I heard her slaughtering Celine Dion on the karaoke machine and believe me it was fucking ugly.

I could even have lived with this, all this noise, if it were not for the guy upstairs. This motherfucker was a real piece of work, believe me. He used to come home every day at six pm and turn on his TV and blast the fucking thing so loud that whatever I was doing, if I was watching a movie or listening to music or whatever, whatever I was doing I wouldn't be able to hear my own speakers over his speakers upstairs and through the ceiling. Not only this, but intermittently he would turn of the TV and take out his acoustic guitar and strum these punk rock chords and get so excited while he was strumming that he would stomp his foot on the floor (right over my desk, usually); boom boom boom. Then, around ten pm (just as the guy downstairs was getting ready for his techno party) the guy upstairs would start blasting punk rock music to get himself in the mood to go out and get wasted. He would come home at three am every night, stumble up the stairs, and then play his guitar again and stomp his foot.

I used to wonder, who the fuck blasts punk rock music and strums punk chords on a guitar when they are 40 years old (as I made this guy to be)? Isn't it time he mellowed the fuck out and bought some goddamn Kenny G CDs? I mean his youth was twenty years ago and it's time he let it go.

Anyhow, Suntooth was the one who first suggested that I approach this guy upstairs to tell him how much his noise production was fucking me up. I mean, I was wearing earplugs from six to midnight ever night that he was home (and often later when the guy downstairs was partying) and I was always agitated and complaining and that can just be boring. Suntooth is really good at badgering neighbours and landlords about stuff and making them comply and I tend to be more shy and long-suffering; but I knew she was right and I decided to devise a plan for how to talk to this guy.

The thing was, though, that I didn't want to just go up to him and give him a list of reasons he pissed me off—cause how petty is that? If I went to his door and said: "your TV and also your foot stomping and also your love of punk rock even though you are 40 and also your drunken attempts to climb the stairwell at 3:00am are all totally obnoxious and you need to change your whole life for me" …well I reckon that wouldn't wash so I decided to just pick the one aspect of his being that I thought was the worst and ask him about that. I thought about it for a while and decided his TV was the thing that drove me the most crazy.

Thus, one evening when his TV was particularly loud, I went up the stairs, lingered for a moment outside his door, the summoned my courage and knocked. For a long time there was no response. I mean that for almost five minutes there was no response, then, finally, the door began to open, just a crack, like he was looking out over the chain, and his face appeared.

"Look," I said, "I'm really sorry to bug you but your TV is really loud and …I know I make noise too and everything and if I ever bothered you, you could totally tell me…but I mean could you maybe please turn it down a bit or at least turn down the bass or something because it's really loud…"

The guy stared at me for a moment and then said: "well, if I don't turn it up this loud then I can't hear it when I am in my kitchen." And I stared back at him, somewhat with my jaw agape for I didn’t even know how to respond to such a thing and as I was searching for the words he said: "alright fine." and he closed the door and I went back downstairs and he didn’t turn down the TV and I put in my earplugs and started to search for apartment listings on Craigslist.

After another month or so of listening to his TV and hearing him painfully cover the same three chord pattern in the same order for nights on end I decided to write him a note and tell him my feelings. In this letter I basically evoked the concept of freedom versus licence by saying that while, I respected his desire to live his life as he pleased and not bother anyone, he had to realise that I also wanted to live my life and his sonic assault from six pm to midnight every night was disturbing my chi (but I didn't actually say "chi", I promise). Moreover, I invited him to come and hear how the sound carried through the floor so he could see what I meant and I told him we could have a beer and be friends and I wanted him to tell me if I ever bothered him, etc etc etc. I was really polite and respectful and I left the letter in his mailbox and he read it (I assume since it vanished from the mailbox) and I waited nervously for him to show up and talk to me but he never came and he never acknowledge in any way that he'd gotten the letter and he also didn't change his lifestyle at all and so I decided to move to a new place and here I am.

See, the thing is that there were six units and the only one who ever seemed to be bothered by the noise was me. I was the asshole and they were the ones who were content to blast their TVs and radios and stereos and computer speakers and so on and so in the end it was me who had to leave. But, as an aside, I think the practice of buying big HD TVs and super bass woofer speakers and all that crap when you live in a downtown apartment is just disrespectful and selfish. It's perfectly fine to own that stuff if you live in suburbia and no one can hear any fucking thing you do but that high tech stuff just isn't designed with urban spaces in mind…or urban spaces weren't designed with it in mind. Something has to give.

2:

So I moved. I moved two blocks and I'm happy here so far. This was the only place I looked at, actually, and (despite months of scouring Craigslist and the paper and McGill's classified ads, etc., I just found this place by walking by and seeing the little paper sign in the window. A louer. It's really quiet here and I get a ton of sunlight and these things make me happy. Also Suntooth is now living a half a block away, which I really like because before I had to walk 20 minutes over the tracks to see her (as I told you before) and…well whatever.

The thing was that, because I was only moving two blocks, and also because the landlord here performed the unprecedented in the history of all humanity act of letting me take the place two weeks early, I decided to move everything by hand with my little dolly cart.

It's a very interesting exercise to move everything you own (especially if you are a packrat like me) because you really get a sense of how much crap you have and how much all of it weighs and how difficult it is to move large furniture items down a very tight stairwell by yourself and push them down the street on a dolly over a series of cracks and bumps that become all too familiar and past a series of stoops with the same drunks sitting on them every day in the sun jeering you but it was all worth it. It was worth it just for the fun challenge of trying to move things like a giant bookcase and a six drawer wood dresser down a nearly impossible stairwell and no one will ever know the miracles of spatial dynamics I performed in that stairwell alone with the sweat pouring out from me and pooling on the steps.

Why pay for a truck, and why bother with the hassle of waiting for movers on July 1st in Montreal?

The only thing I needed help with was the fridge (Suntooth tried to talk me into hiring a mover for that one but I refused). "It must be a guy thing." she said after as I proudly showed her my bruised body and the veins bulging out from my forearms. It's pure testosterone. I carried a fucking fridge down a stairwell with my hands straining on an old rope and my feet sliding on the ice water dripping out from the fridge pan and I pushed a fridge down the street on a dolly grunting all the way over the speed bumps and curbs and Y. helped me and to thank him I gave him a jar of strawberry jam I had just potted and some baby spider plants. It's a testosterone thing.

3:

And I left off moving for one day and went with Suntooth up to St Adele to visit her grandfather and her extended family was there and we at barbecue at some strange high security nursing home and then snuck off for a spell and skinny-dipped in a nearby lake in the middle of the afternoon, just missing a thunderstorm that we watched with little concern from the water as the black clouds rolled up over the sun and our pale kicking bodies suddenly grew darker in the water. And just as I exited a boatload of children motored by and they cheered at the sight of my bare ass. And later we sat under a canopy at a tiny beach surrounded by the Laurentians with all their frilly green covering and their luxurious cottages and we carved up some avocado and baked potato as a light dinner while we waited for the rain to pass.

Rebranding the Revolution.

I don't think I am actually a Communist, even though I voted for the Communist Party in the last few elections. Well, to be precise, I voted for the Marxist Leninist party because in my old riding both the Communists and Marxist Leninists were fielding candidates. You'd think that, given the high unlikelihood that either one of these parties was going to win they could put aside any ideological differences they had until after the election and then come up with an amicable way to divide their collective responsibilities as they nationalized all the key industries and reorganized the monetary system and distribution of essential services and foodstuffs, but no, they could not; the ideological gap was just too wide.

Part of the problem is, of course, that small political parties and fringe political parties are almost inevitably going to be peopled by wing-nuts of one stripe or another. Such folk (whether they are realistic about it or not) can afford to stand on the kind of principles that divide Marxist Leninist thought from Communist thought because there is just no goddamn way they are ever going to be elected for anything. It is only when the party begins to gain some kind of traction that compromises have to be made toward the centre and toward the more pragmatic political heavyweights who occupy this centre.

I'm speaking only of Canada here, because obviously very extreme formally fringe parties have done well in other places and at other times, but if you look at the evolution of something like the current Conservative Party you will note that the original party, brought forth under the leadership of Preston Manning (as gentle as their extremism was) never stood a chance of election until they began to abandon many of their principles and move to the centre.

Another problem, and this applies directly to both Communists and Marxist Leninists, is that the centre simply has no interest in embracing any political experiment even remotely associated with the USSR. The rhetoric of the Evil Empire is still thick enough that during the last US election, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republicans were able to scare up more than a few votes by accusing Barack Obama of being (not even a Communist but) a socialist.

So, even if there are a good many salvageable ideas in Communism (or Marxist-Leninism, if you prefer), as long as anybody starts with the word "Communism" people are just going to shut down and refuse to listen and as long as the same damn photo of Che Guevara keeps getting waved around people are going to shut down and so on and so on.

For this reason, I propose that what Communism needs is a rebranding campaign to sex it up a little; to bring it forward into the 21st century. I think that a political party could probably put forward a lot of Communist ideas as long as they adamantly denied that they were Communist ideas whenever anyone asked. They could call themselves the National Conservative Democrats or something and no one would be the wiser.

If they wanted to be even more hip, of course, then they could take the revolution online and make up a whole bunch of campaigns with savvy sexy kids in their 20s with wavy hair and colourful clothes talking about how technology is helping everyone to learn to share everything now and that this idea of sharing should be infectious and spread into every sector…because that's the way things work now.

The screen fades to red and the title credits come on in bright yellow: iMarx …the way things work now.

even if that person really isn’t so bad

Last September, I think, I was walking along Avenue de Pins toward the McGill squash courts where I play two or three times a week. As I was crossing Parc a young woman approached me and called to me by name. "Adam," she said, "how are you?" A number of possibilities ran through my mind regarding the identity of this individual, but the answer didn't materialize quickly enough and so I simply stared back at her blankly. "I'm so-and-so; a student in your conference," she then told me, obviously seeing that I needed rescue. "Oh, I'm sorry, there are a lot of students, you know, and it takes me time to get to recognize everyone's face." Well that's fine said she, she understood and that she was looking forward to the class and it looked like a lot of fun an so on and so forth and with this we parted ways and I continued up the hill.

No less than a minute after this, I passed another young woman on the street, this time on who had been in a conference I was doing the year before. I looked right at her as she walked by, expecting at least a smile or something in recognition of the fact that we had spent so many hours and so many weeks locked in the same miserable windowless room together, but there was nothing. She walked right past as though I didn't exist.

Since this time any number of other former students have walked past, and while some do acknowledge me and some even stop to talk and are cheerful and pleasant, the weighted majority has been entirely toward those who can't or don't want to distinguish me from any of the other uninspiring features of the landscape through which they pass.

I realise, as I write this, that I am sounding a little crotchety about the entire thing, but being ignored thus is just a little dehumanizing as though, instead of the process of being in a class and exchanging ideas and knowledge for the sake of our personal betterment, has been no better to a lot of these people than a commercial exchange and they have no more need or desire to concede even my existence after our financial arrangement is completed than they have to acknowledge a bag boy they see outside the supermarket or a waitress they see outside the restaurant.

It's not that I'm putting down bag boys, per se, but I feel like in a classroom what people are trying to do—or I'm trying to do anyhow—is really connect with people and create an atmosphere where people can really try to think shit through and be creative about it and that this kind of thing isn't nothing, it's something. It's something to me anyhow. Incidentally, I have said hello to the bag boy from my supermarket outside the supermarket and it was pretty clear he didn't know who the fuck I was, either.

I suppose I'm making a case for late capitalist disaffection being the cause of this phenomenon, but it's impossible for me to say for certain without being privy to the behaviour of teachers and students throughout the ages. Perhaps the original students at Oxford in the high middle ages were just as likely to aloofly spurn their passing professors and said professors, gathered together in their elegant faculty club, between long draughts of mead, would blame the influence of filthy troubadours and the poisonous whisperings of those damaged individuals who had returned from the crusades glutted with the heretical leanings of the perfumed hordes of the orient.

Of course, one must remember that professors also routinely pass their students in the hallways without any acknowledgement and also students from the same class pass each other without acknowledgement and I remember perfectly well that when I was living in residence I used to pass people who lived in the next room without acknowledging them (sometimes 10 times a day) and there's only so much reaching out that anyone can be expected to do in this world, I guess, and a lot of the time the perception that one might have to stop and talk to a certain somebody seems more like an annoyance than a pleasure—even if that person really isn’t so bad.

To everything there is a season: churn churn churn.

Did you ever read that book by Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire? The whole thing was completely fascinating to me; but one part I keep coming back to in my mind is the story of Heinz's pickles and the early efforts of Heinz's to market processed food. You see, in the 19th century, when people wanted to eat a particular thing they just made it themselves. I'm not talking about making a hero sandwich at 3am, either, I mean people canned their own foods and they churned their own butter and they made their own jam and even if they didn't milk their own cow they probably knew the person and the cow they were getting the cream from.

So Heinz's had a problem: they wanted to sell jars of pickles to people but they didn't know how to do it. For one thing people were making their own pickles and, for another thing, who the hell would want to buy a jar of pickles when they had no idea where the pickles came from or who made them? The damn things could have the cholera in them for all you know.

So, anyhow, you can read Domosh's book yourself if you like, but the main point is that Heinz's decided to sell their pickles by highlighting the purity of their pickling process. In order to do this they began to equate pickle processing with virginal femininity by filling up their factory with pure looking, white clad, ingénues and filling up their advertising campaigns with these well scrubbed lasses, too. Not only is it more convenient to not have to spend the whole day making pickles, mom, but also look at how pure these girls are… pink fingernails and all.

Well the entire thing obviously prompts a number of questions about the representation of gender in the media and also about early forms of marketing (using sex to sell pickles is one of the earlier examples of corporate synergy) but this isn't where I want to go with this…

Rather, what I want to say is that I'm really surprised by responses ranging from disbelief to outright disgust that I get from people when I tell them I have been making my own cheese and butter. I find it odd, I tell them, that you should be so sceptical and put off by this because, were it more than 100 years ago the response would be the opposite:

Case in Point:

Adam of 100 years ago:

Greeting, good sir or madam, do you see that I have returned from the market with this butter so neatly cut into a square and darkened with some yellow dye and wrapped up conveniently in aluminium foil?

Adam's friend of 100 years ago:

Good grief, sirrah, why on earth would you buy butter when you could easily make it yourself at home? Furthermore to the point, how can you trust a thing when you do not know who made it or what process was applied to its making? Any sort of disease could be ensconced in the buttery folds of that butter [my friends of 100 years ago are prone to tautological descriptors] ! Any dimwit with a pair of arms could have turned that churn, and not with nearly the love of our sweet old grandmother at home.

**

Actually the range of responses has been slightly more broad than I say. Some have reacted with outright disgust and then following this they have been so indignant about he fact that I would make my own butter that they have concocted an analysis of the price difference between travelling to the market to buy butter versus the cost of making butter at home in order to determine that I am, indeed, not saving any money by making my own butter.

There has been even more horror at the thought of me making my own cheese. This surprises me, too, because even when I insist that I sterilized everything and made sure only to buy fresh milk from the farmer's market right next door to me (Jean Talon), people still refuse to eat the cheese I made. Yet these same people are willing to put their trust in all sorts of corporate packaged cheeses from the supermarket. I find it so ironic because there have been repeated problems with corporate food processors over the last few years and (so far) I haven't even given anyone a mild case of gas.

Regardless, I feel a great deal of satisfaction for having attempted and succeeded to produce these dairy products. I was particularly proud the first time I tried to make butter and it actually became butter. It was like I didn't believe it was going to happen and it did. Plus, did you know that the process of butter making also produces buttermilk? I mean, where the hell else would buttermilk come from, I know, but I had never thought about it. Buttermilk is amazing for making pancakes and other things and if you make butter you will have your very own buttermilk, as well.

But there's more! If you make cheese you will also end up with whey. What the fuck is whey anyhow? I dunno, but it's great for making bread and I've been doing that too. Apparently, according to Inflight McMagazine's old roommate (to whom I gave a whole jar of fresh whey a couple of weeks ago) whey can be used for all kinds of healthy things, and I think it's what bodybuilder use to bulk up, too…but I don't really know how that all works.

**

I know I'm kind of all over the place today but what I want to say is this: even before the so-called economic crisis started, a big faction in certain quarters was moving toward a more do-it-yourself approach to life. We can compost our waste, and we can cut down on our plastic, and we don't need to consume so much crap, and we can make and bake lots of things at home that are better and more pure than the consumer crap we've been fed for the last century, and appended to this is the fact that we can make our own music and we can make our own films and we can share with each other things that we've done at home and the corporations can't touch it (although they're trying). Probably you know what I'm saying here. I can't type anymore so I hope so...

Economies of Scale.

I notice that there is a new tab in my blog dashboard: "Monetize". Apparently I can now make money simply by having ads appear in my side thingy. It's nice that they ask, anyhow, because I assume at some point they are going to stop asking and just put the ads there whether I want them there or not. I know this might seem overly cynical of me, but there are a few things that have led me to be such a cynic and I will share them with you now:

Do you remember (if you are male, I don't know how it goes for women…even though, according to the gender analyzer, the likelihood that a woman writes this blog is 63%) back when ads first used to appear above the urinals in men's bathrooms? At the time a lot of people got annoyed by it because they felt like one more space that ought to offer a little time for quiet contemplation of whatever we liked was being appropriated by a corporate interest. Can't a fella even have a quick slash without someone trying to pedal him a new kind of aftershave or a beer he isn't likely to switch to?

So, at the time, lost of people, went into the toilets with pen knives or black markers and they fucked up these urinal ads in any way they possibly could. The next day, whatever person was responsible for the ads in the urinals would come back and fix up the ad and there it would be again. The people slashed them and the corps put them back. The problem is that the corps have limitless spending power and limitless patience and they can just keep replacing the ads forever and, conversely, the people who are fucking up the ads only have so much energy and are only in any given bathroom now and then and after a while people got used to the ads anyhow and also there are too many people who are scared of vandalism even if it's something they don't totally agree with…and so anyhow the end of the story is that the ads stayed and now almost never do I see one vandalized.

Actually, now that I think of it, that's not a very serviceable example of what I was trying to talk about…but it is a good example of the power of an economy of scale in action.

A big corporation, because it has so many different subsidiary businesses making money all over the place in all kinds of different markets and all kinds of different sectors of each market, can afford to run one aspect of its business at a loss for whatever reason as long as all the other parts are making money. So just in the same way that a place like Starbucks can afford to open a coffeeshop right next door to a well established local business and run at a loss against the local business is because Starbucks is making profit in so many other cities and countries already. They can undercut the competition for a year, two years, five years, whatever, and they never need worry because they know the competition has no other source of income. Eventually Starbucks will choke them out.

In the same way, the people who run ads in toilets know that eventual the resolve of the vandals will run out if the same ad just goes up again the next day and the day after that and the day after that. Eventually people will just get used to the fact that it's normal to sell advertising space on their own foreheads and no one will complain. Eventually there will be a big Pepsi symbol projected onto the moon and no one will think a thing about it. Sure, people will blow up the Pepsi projector a few times, and they will be arrested, and more people will blow up the projector, but in the end Pepsi will prevail because Pepsi has the billions and they can afford to put the projector up again and again and every time a pair of lovers looks up through an open window, their lithe bodies still drenched in post coital sweat, drying in the gentle breeze that wafts in past the softly waving curtains, every time those lovers look up, basking unclothed in the blue white and red glow of the moon they will say to each other: darling, that was amazing. Let's have a Pepsi to celebrate.

The more that blog writers "monetize" the more that the monetization will seem normal. Soon it will be a regular feature from which one can not opt out. When this happens, then an aspect of the terms of service will be that one can only write one's blog as long as one does not say disparaging things about the corporation sponsoring the blog; as long as one does not say anything about any aspect of the conglomerate of which the media corp. who hosts the blog is but one part. Perhaps my blog is hosted by Google (it is) but, some time down the road, Google is now a division of SONY or SONY is a division of Google. If I say something about a cup of Danone Yogurt that I found tasted especially shitty then I will suddenly have my blog shut down because SONY owns Danone and Google owns SONY. Word got back to the head of the Division of Truth in Omaha Nebraska that I used "Danone" and "shitty" in the same sentence. There are black helicopters hovering outside my apartment window.

You laugh, but think for a moment about the fact that NBC (the national broadcasting corporation in the USA) is owned by General Electric. General Electric, besides making light bulbs and fridges, also is in with the US military for billions of dollars in defence contracts. How likely is it, then, that NBC is going to be able to offer fair and unbiased reports on either US military activities (carried out with GE products) or on fair bidding practices or on GE's atrocious environmental record. Well, you reply, GE is regularly satirized on different NBC shows. This is true, but the satire is a kind of smoke screen. It never assumes a serious watchdog role as to the corporate or environmental practices of GE, but it satirizes just enough to make it seem like there is a degree of distance between the network and its owner. You will note that the comments on GE are limited to light comedy shows and almost never appear as aspects of the so-called serious news reportage.

The flipside, of course, is that I could really use the money because I'm almost broke and the experience of being in graduate school hasn't exactly done wonders for my financial situation. I'm going to move into a slightly cheaper apartment, though, and I'm also going to try and get rid of everything I own so that I can (as I have been considering more and more lately) just pack up most of what I actually care about in one backpack and vanish into the obscurity for a decade or two. But you know, even if I do decide to stick it out, I don't think I can bring myself to have advertising on my blog because the whole project seems so sketchy.

Consider how the financial rewards are framed:

Under a section entitled "how much will I earn", Google informs its users that they will earn by having people click on the ads from their site. The more people who click the more money that will be earned. But then the next paragraph reads like this:

"The best way to find out how much you'll earn is to sign up and start showing
ads on your webpages. There's no cost, no obligation, and getting started is
quick and easy. You can sign up now from the AdSense home page at
https://www.google.com/adsense ."

So, they don't actually ever say anywhere how much money I can make. This is annoying and suspicious. I wouldn't show up for work at a job and work a whole two weeks for my first paycheque without having some idea in advance of how much I stood to earn from my work so why should I sign up for the goddamn monetize program if I don't know how much I can earn? If it were actually worth it to do it then I assume they would tell people it was worth it. If it's not worth it then I think deception is the best way to go. This is all very circular, though, since I'm just debating myself. I believe I will write to these people and ask them for clarification. If I get any then there will be a part two to this.

where is the balance in the universe, I ask you?

For the spring equinox, after a little fruitless tramping about downtown in search of alum, I went uptown on the metro with Lunar Moontooth to hangout at an equinox party. It was ok for a while, you know, when we arrived the party had already just started and there was a small circle on the church basement floor chanting around a candle. When we came they broke up the chant and they invited us in to have some food with them.

There was a miso based soup with extra quinoa in it and a variety of dips made from lentils and there was some flatbread and there was a box of factory stamped cookies all wrapped up in seven layers of different plastic. And after all that we sat down and started playing the drums in a circle and some people played the guitar and some people yelled into the microphones and we just basically played music and let it go wherever it wanted.

And I guess all the riffs being played were these kind of pseudo raga things on the guitar and I guess most of the chanting tended to be this kind of undirected wailing inspired by Native chanting and singing and everybody was riffing and wailing and drumming and the rhythm never really locked itself into a groove and it just got me thinking about the places that we ex-Europeans seem to want to go when we are getting in touch with our spirituality. It just seems like we always feel that we have to appropriate the rituals and riffs of others because of a paucity inspiration that we can draw from our own heritage … or maybe the problem is that when white people get spiritual about their own past it always ends up with everybody putting on a brown shirt and jackboots and marching up and down the town square yelling shit about gassing all the undesirables.

And ok, I admit that I took the guitar for a while and I was playing Indian riffs, too, and plus I play the goddamn sitar anyhow so who am I to talk? Perhaps I should have learned to play the lute instead. But then in another way, and you all know this, the idea of a pure heritage is a joke anyhow. Nobody comes from anywhere and, especially in a place like North America, the cultural influences of the entire world collide and break apart and reform in new ways and some of those ways are awesome and some of those ways are just fucking awful.

Jazz, for all its African influence, would never have been anything without European instrumentation and structure and without Yiddish music mingling with the African rhythms and so on and so on. The equinox jam may have been a flake fest, but I guess it had every right to exist.

Nevertheless, it was too much for Moontooth and she got up and put on her boots and marched out. A few minutes after this, deciding I liked her more than the jam, I got up and went to see where she had gone.

There were all sorts of stairwells escalating in different directions in the building and I followed one up and found myself in a kind of residence full of shared bedrooms with unmade beds and tangled clothes over chairs and a prevailing stench of unwashed socks and then there were and half washed dishes in dark communal kitchens decorated with tack boards filled with brochures for local events and a whiteboard with all sorts of names on a chart lined up with all sorts of domestic duties those names were supposed to be doing that week. It was creepy and ghostly to be there and the odd energy of the missing residents troubled me and I left, stepping over a mountain of shoes and boots left in the doorway.

Another stairwell led me to a long hall with a series of closed apartment doors in it and this hall with brightly lit with florescent tubes and smelled overwhelmingly of spaghetti sauce. There was the noise of TVs coming from behind the doors and a few people talking and I went down the hall, out the fire door, down the rattling fire escape and back in the front door of the building and then there was Moontooth in the front hall, reading up on some jumble of posters taped and tacked up in the front hall.

It's too noisy down there, she told me.

Upstairs, I said, there's a hallway that smells like spaghetti sauce.

We went up and as we did a muscle bound man in a green army tee-shirt with a long ponytail down his back came out and intercepted us in the hall. Could he help us? No, we were just exploring. Well, he began to explain, with a sense of apology that was underlined by the solemn expectation that we should leave, this is a private residence, and it's unnerving for us to have people come up her unexpected. We just like to walk through open doors, we told him. Well, he said, if you want a tour, you can call so-and-so. Do you want her number? No, we don't, we don't care about that, we just want to explore. Well, he said, it's a private residence. Do you smell the spaghetti, we asked. It's not spaghetti, he said, it's popcorn, maybe?

And then we were gone into the night, we went up a few blocks to the chess café and ordered a few hot brown drinks from the girl behind the counter who was only sixteen looking but could have been the star of a Thompson Twins video is only she'd been born in a different era with her dangling chequered shirt and her asymmetrical haircut and her too large broad brimmed hat hanging down askew over her eyes. All sass, too, she was and she joked with us and gave Moontooth a free hot chocolate.

And we set up a game and I lost a bishop almost right away and demanded a restart and was refused under all circumstances and from there it sent ok and I controlled the middle and chipped away a lead and I even think I was steps away from a checkmate with Moontooth's queen toppled and most of her other strong pieces clattering around in the plastic bucket beside us while at other tables intense knots of old beardy men hunched over games, yelling with delight and anger at each moved piece and –you know they actually get into fights with each other over this shit—said miss sass from behind the counter. It's amazing. It's amazing to watch the combatants slamming their hands down on the playclocks…but Moontooth and I play slow games and we like to think things out.

And I was almost winning, did I mention that? And then the lights dimmed and they closed the bar. They closed the bar! I was winning. How often to I actually beat my perennial chess partner in chess? Where is the balance in the universe, I ask you?

Miss Pacman.

We were talking in one of my classes this week about the politics of code on the internet; this is to say that the sites you visit and the way you respond to those sites is always going to be limited by the way that the internet itself is coded. In part this is an aspect of the language in which the pages you visit are programmed and in another way it is an aspect of the infrastructure that supports the internet itself. In the case of the latter, the infrastructure of the internet, there is a big push and pull between a variety of parties:

first, the government has to always decide how much it is going to regulate the internet (striking a balance between the concept that internet access is now an essential service, like water or electricity, and should thus be available to everyone in a reasonably unfettered way, or, that the internet is a dangerous source of material that could harm the rule of law in a given nation and needs to be strictly regulated, and the impulse to stay in bed with big business and support the transformation of the internet from a fairly open source information sharing resource to a giant online mall). The government in Canada, thus far, has done a very good job of capitulating to corporate interests and denying Canadian citizens completely honest access to this potentially useful means of participating in the public sphere. Nevertheless, government intervention or non intervention to a large degree determines the manner in which users will end up doing their surfing.

Second, The corporations that provide internet access (and increasingly the content viewed during that access) also create an infrastructure; particularly in the sense that they want to turn the experience of being on the internet into one that hardwires users into consumers. Every time a person consents to allowing cookies, or consents to sign up (even for free) to view the content of a site, or allow third party software, or anything like that, anytime anyone does one those these things, this individual is consenting to give up personal information to a corporation that will be used to created more targeted marketing and create more lists of things that consumer and all consumers like him or her are into. The object is to sell the use more shit and to keep the user surfing around places that have the potential to sell the user more shit all the time.

The corporate ideal (if you think about a conglomerate like AOL Time Warner) is that all the time a user spends on the internet will be spent surfing sites that are somehow affiliated with AOL Time Warner. Thus, everything the user does from e-mail to checking out online music to checking out vacations to checking out porn or whatever will all be contained within the envelope owned by that corp. and thus will at all times have the potential to funnel profit back into one of the tentacles of the corp.

Thus, the more that a corporation swallows, the more time that a user is forced to spend time on the internet solely for the purpose of conspicuous consumption. Even the idea of having to give up something to get something (i.e., personal information for content) creates a psychological environment where users are bated into the concept that they can’t truly function in a public space unless it is for the purpose of conspicuous consumption.

So, anyhow, from here we obviously went into a discussion of Foucault’s vision of the city as a place that has been structured for both maximum efficiency and at the same time maximum visibility. I leave you to read Discipline and Punish if you don’t follow me here. The point I wanted to make was that it is nearly impossible to visit the downtown core of a city now without raising a great deal of suspicion from all of those who are watching the core (either consciously as security guards or police or unconsciously, with their snap judgments on what is and isn’t proper behavior, as regular fellow citizens) if you do not travel in the guise of the conspicuous consumer.

Consider what would happen, for example, if you decided to go and stand in a mall for a while but you did not buy anything and you did not have any baggage in your hand and you did not appear to be in the mall for any particular purpose. It is quite likely that a security guard would come along at a certain point and ask, probably politely, what it was that you were doing there. If you did not or could not answer, or that you answer was that you were just standing there because you felt like it, it is quite probably that the security guard would ask you to leave the premises (at least this is what always happens to me). If, however, you attempted the same stunt, but holding shopping bags and other items that it was clear that you had just bought, it is likely that it would take you much longer to get thrown out.

The same applies to most downtown spaces. People just seem to have more purpose when they are walking around with bags or they are walking somewhere looking like they are on their way to pick up some bags full of things. In this way the downtown core of the city has been refigured into a space that is commercial and not necessarily a place of leisure. Even public parks (especially in Montreal) now have an anti vagrancy law, thus encouraging people who are out on consumption adventures (like people on dates and tourists) from being troubled by the sight of people who are only in the parks because the like being in parks or they have no other place to sleep.

This is the way that cities can be coded. I then told the class (somewhat more contentiously) that another example of coding is the Lonely Planet Guide. Let’s say, for example, that you decide to go on a trip to India and you buy the Lonely Planet and follow it. You will find that you end up staying in the recommended hotels and eating at the recommended cafes and visiting the recommended sites and along the way you will keep meeting the same people (mostly scruffy looking backpackers from Israel and Austria who look just like you and have the same snooty attitude about how in touch with the local culture as you are and who dislike you as much as you dislike them because of the fact that all of you want to experience something new and feel like you are the first one to experience it, as though each one of you was Dr. Livingstone reborn, but all you find at the end of the day is that you end up back at the same hostel as everyone else listening to a CD of Indian Flute with a trance beat and talking about the best way to get out to the beach) all the time.

It’s a bummer, but it’s because the whole thing has evolved into a kind of code that the visitors fall into and it dominates their whole trip and the locals play into it too and they provide the service that they think the visitors want and then you go home and look at flicker and realize that 75, 000 people have already taken the same photo of the same swami standing in front of the same temple holding the same snake as you did. Om shanty shanty om.

Well, said my class, it’s a code but it’s different from the internet of the city because it’s a voluntary code. If you decide to walk one block past where the Lonely Planet says you should, or you go one café over from where the guide says, then you will end up at a place that is twice as cheap and three times as local and there won’t be a tourist in sight. You really will be Dr. Livingstone…or maybe Lord Clive would be a better example in this case.

Anyhow, I thought of the Lonely Planet Guide because one time I was travelling in India along with my sister, following the guidebook (sort of) and somewhere along the line, sick of travelling on trains and staying in hostels with the same people and the same sort of people, we decided to get off the beaten track to see what sort of adventures we might find.

To this end, we decided to visit a place that the Lonely Planet expressly said was a complete waste of time and a shithole, to boot; a sea coast town in Andhra Pradesh known as Vijayawada. Truly, it’s not such a bad place (if anyone from there is reading this, it’s not such a bad place); although it tends to lack a lot of the glamour or touristy attraction of some of the larger cities in India. It is a flat town but it looks down between two large masses of land along the course of a river’s mouth into the Pacific Ocean. If the same location were located in the south of France or in Italy, I feel sure that it would be the playground for billionaires, but things can only be where they are. I have no idea what industry or trade keeps Vijayawada running and I’m not particularly curious to find out. There sure weren’t any damn tourists there, though, billionaire or otherwise.

To make a long story short, without any guide as to what we could do for fun in Vijayawada, we decided to wander around the streets to see what sort of things were happening. There was one fellow who tried to trick us by telling us he wanted to take us to his favourite restaurant; this involving getting in and out of numerous taxies and going round the city in circles presumably to get us completely lost, but in the end he fails to trick us because we just got bored of his tricks and wandered off while he in the growing distance and dusk grew increasingly abusive about our decision to desert him.

Mostly people in Vijayawada left us alone; and this was a testament to how far off the beaten track this place was. When you travel along the Lonely Planet route there are people trying to take you for your money at every turn. The relationship between the swindling locals and the aggravated tourists becomes a kind of symbiotic dance after a while and they learn how to respond to each other and how to move around each other, but in Vijayawada people just watched us go by with a kind of passing disinterest, like chaw chewing cowboys leaning up against wood rails outside the saloon.

The one exception, though, was when we decided to stop into a local arcade to pass some time by playing video games. This place was really a throwback: they had all these old beaten up videogame machines, the tall ones that look like voting booths that I used to play Jungle Hunt and Galaxian on at the back of the Shop ‘n’ Bag when I was so short that the joystick was parallel to my neck while I played. And before every machine was a wiry teenage kid hammering at the smooth and hand greasy knob of the joystick while his friends crowded ‘round behind him cheering him on. And as we passed each machine, decided where we were going to drop a coin to play we came upon a surprising revelation: every single machine was loaded with Miss Pacman. The entire arcade was devoted to this single game.

I got this said my sister. And indeed she did have it. We had been playing Miss Pacman on our home Atari 2600 for years. It was like picking up a language we had been born with but had not spoken for a few years. It was a thing that would come back to us easily and even the replacement of our old comfy basement, with its scattered cushions and toys, by the dingy light of the arcade and the murmur of Telugu teenagers was not going to be enough to stop us. We knew this game.

My sister got a machine and began to play. Level one flew by, level two flew by, level three flew by. A few other people in the arcade gathered behind her and began to watch. Level four, level five, level six. A murmur was running through the crowd now. This is such bullshit she said. Level seven, level eight. Now there were all there, cheering her. Level nine, level ten. It became clear at a certain point that she was going to play forever. The crowd was going mad. It was like they had never seen a Miss Pacman player like this before. She could have been their queen. They would have toted her high upon a litter, feeding her little white pellets (or maybe rice idlys) at her whim. Finally she got bored and she just walked away from the controls. Anyhow, she said, I’ve played this game before. You do it.

Now it was my turn to take the controls. Another murmur ran through the crowd. Could the brother be as great as the sister? Did the genius gene run through all their blood? Level one. I died twice. Half the people walked away to their own games. Level two: success. Level three, I died again. The rest of the crowd wandered off. You are bullshit, my sister said.