on Ravi Shankar

I only met Ravi Shankar once or twice, but I got to know him through two decades of studying his style of sitar playing with someone who had been a student of his since the late 1950s. His understanding of time (in the musical sense) and melody easily made him one of the best musician of the last century. John Coltrane didn't name his son Ravi for nothing.

Shankar was revered as a primitive rock god in the West, but in India he was regarded (with mixed feelings) as a classical musician and part of an ancient tradition. No one doubted his talent, but it was often said that he watered his music in order to make it palatable to occidental tastes. These accusations made him the subject of many public and catty feuds with other musicians and critics, most notably the great (and also now deceased) Vilayat Khan.

I assume that all this will be over now and people will think well of Ravi Shankar and his legacy. Even if they don't, he did live to 92, and pleased crowds, and fathered all kinds of fantastic children (some more legitimate than others). What more can anyone ask for?

Harperland

In the movies, and you see this quite a lot, the person in charge of the city or the country or whatever is often brought down at the end by an incriminating video tape in which he himself (and it’s usually a he) admits to his own crimes.  The tape is played before an audience of stunned and silent citizens in the streets, in their homes, etc., and it is clear that, from this point on, the dear leader’s career is over.  He can either flee or kill himself, but that’s it.  The moral compass of the people will not allow a corrupt leader, or a murderer, to continue in office. 

I am thinking particularly of Minority Report when I write this, or maybe Robocop, but there are plenty of examples of recorded hubris acting as the downfall of the mighty.  I mention it, though, because in reality this kind of thing doesn’t ever happen.  Particularly in the case of our present government, we are provided with blatant examples of wrongdoing across every aspect of the reach of their governance, yet there is never a moment at which it is clear that they have no choice but to resign (or drop dead).

This is where Spielberg got it wrong: as long as the basic comfort of the people is unthreatened, they will never revolt, no matter how flagrantly their governments are disregarding the law.  If there would be a movie about Canada, the plot would centre around a lone hero who procured an incriminating tape at least once a week and made it public only to find that the public was, as usual, completely apathetic about the news.

People across the country would look up at their televisions for a moment, like a rabbits standing up out of the prairie grass, and then settle back down into their bowls of cereal as though nothing had happened.  The heat would still be on and the kids would still be playing in the next room and that would be enough.

blashphemous expressions

Religious or spiritual expression seems to always start from the same logical fallacy:  If it is impossible to provide an answer to a certain question, therefore the answer must be God.  For example, we do not know precisely how the universe (as we perceive it) came to be.  There are a number of ways to approach this lack of knowledge.

One way is to say that we don't know, and don't want to provide a definite answer right now, but that--using what science we have--we are working on finding out.  Maybe we will find out, maybe we won't.  Chances are that in looking for such an answer, we will find out a whole lot of other stuff along the way.  This is a good answer because it allows us to keep exploring the world with an open mind and never allowing our sense of what is real to become concrete.  Honest scientific inquiry ought to be free of any historical or cultural bias and, if an experiment happens to conclusively disprove everything we've believed for the last 2000 years, then such a realization ought to be celebrated as an opportunity for humanity to step forward and mature.

Another way is to say that, since we don't have an answer, and since the question seems unfathomable, that therefore God must be responsible.  This is a good answer because it means that one doesn't have to do any more thinking about the subject.  The universe and all its doings crank, confusingly, but reassuringly around and around in a beautiful Ptolemaic model of the stars.  The most confusing and unpredictable events can be attributed to the caprices of our invisible keeper.  The notion, moreover, that we might question such caprices, or that such caprices might be tied to greater principles of existence; graspable if we put our best minds to it--as we did with gravity, relativity, music, continental drift, evolution, and many others--is a blasphemous expression of those foolish enough to question the will of God.

insomnia, act 5.

the strings that lift my hands haven't quite frayed through
i can still flop them over the keyboard
a couple of times before they snap
and i flop down into the bed
like a useless jumble of painted wood

i still have the fist of consciousness
jammed up my behind,
propping me yet on the knee of wretched wakèdness
to play, beyond all reason, to an empty theatre

i'm a spectre, bathed in blue limelight
for the early to rise set to remark upon with a grimace
as they pass the window, huddled in their coats,
against the icy rain

and the sky is only just now getting light.

The National Post vs the Globe and Mail

I quit reading the Globe and Mail because I couldn't stand the obsequious puff pieces on Stephen Harper written by John Ibbitson anymore, and I couldn't manage the condescending and ignorant (to say nothing for plagiarized) work of Margaret Wente, and I couldn't stand the erection of the pay wall, and, in general, I felt as though the Globe was commenting on the world and its doings like a well sheltered downtown condo dweller peeing round fancy their fancy curtains into the busy street below.

So, observing that a bunch of writers had jumped ship from the Globe and gone to the National Post, I decided to take up the Post and see if I could live with it. Yes the National Post is extremely right-wing and also elitist, but I can live with that sort of thing as long as the people writing are thoughtful about their positions; as long as I feel like they are trying to start conversations as opposed to simply spewing mindless and unconsidered propaganda (e.g., Ibbitson).

Maybe I was being overly optimistic. Anyhow, any hope I had went out the window when the National Post handed a typewriter back to Conrad Black and began publishing his ill-considered opt-ed pieces again. Black is so insufferably pompous and biased that I am not even able to make it through his articles for the sake of humour. Not only this, but (unlike most stories, which remain on the front page for a single day) the Post insists on letting each of Black's missives linger at the head of their webpage for days upon days, irritating me every time I open their website.

I don't know where else to turn; the CBC I suppose...but I also get bothered by their folksy patriotism. Bah.

rant rant rant.

Being good at something is not necessarily a reason to be revered.  For example, a person might be an extremely talented serial killer, or pedophile, or some such thing, but this does not mean that this person deserves our respect.  It is possible, I mean, to become proficient in things that are amoral and also detrimental to human society.

I mention this because I want to speak out again the reverence for wealth-culture that pervades our world today.  There are certainly some people who are very good at making money.  There are business schools dedicated to teaching people how to make money, and the media is saturated with images of people making and enjoying their wealth. 

Being good at making money isn’t something to admire any more than being a good serial killer is something to admire.  People who get rich generally do so by exploiting and hurting people.  The wealth that they keep to themselves creates terrible social imbalances and suffering in the world.  Rather than looking up to the rich, we should be identifying people who want to make unusually large amounts of money and treating their condition as a pathological disorder.

Certainly being rich creates a life that is easier and more pleasurable for the people who have the money.  Being a serial killer or a pedophile also makes life more pleasurable for the people who commit those acts, but this doesn’t mean we need to enable them in their quest for fulfilment.  Their happiness makes other people suffer.

I recognized that a lot of people have been seduced by the desire for more money and more things and that this is what the rhetoric is all about these days.   I consider this position to be anti-human.  It is a wilful decision to let others suffer for one’s own pleasure.  I wish that people would get excited about collective projects that would add to the comfort of everyone.  Instead of wanting a bigger pool and a fancy Ferrari car that one could use to speed noisily between stoplights all over the city, one could take pride in the betterment of education and health and other things like that.  One could take pride in the continuance of the human project; science, space exploration, medicine, etc., etc., how great would it be if we just funnelled all our resources into making everything better for everyone, as opposed to trying to fuck each other up?

The problems with what I say, of course, are multitudinous.  Every person’s vision of what is a worthwhile collective project is different.  There are factions.  Also, people who are power and wealth hungry, despite their degenerate mental state, are often highly charismatic and can easily convince others to abandon the collective good and embark on crusades of unbridled greed and butchery.  It happens all the time.

Jurgen Habermas writes about this kind of thing all the time.  I don’t believe he’s reached any conclusions yet, though.

ant hero

the most heroic feats in history have gone unobserved
along the muddy leaf tangled floors
of the speckled woods

over the mossy logs
and the twisted twigs
dead dried worms
were lugged by hook and crook
home to the nest
by a solitary unrelenting ant

her mandibles locked
her legs straining
to pull the old worm
up over the next damp root

was there ticker tape
when she got home to the nest?
was she given a rare audience with the queen?
did the other workers speak of her along the back passages of the nest
in hushed tones?

there goes the hero.
there she is.
look at her go.
the worm puller.

did the young larvae squirm after her
wishing her to squirt formic acid on their faces by way of an autograph?
did posters of her hang on the walls of their egg holes?

did the stern and industrious workers of the colony
chasten their lazy colleagues,
the ones who could barely bring themselves to carry one single grain of sand
up out of the hole every day?

look at that hero.
there she is.
look how she works.
the worm puller.

Blade Trinity

Blade Trinity.  Blade Trinity.  The problem with most movies now is that they don't exactly suck and they aren't exactly good either.  They are like corporate cheeseburgers.  You need something to eat and so you go and get a cheeseburger.  It's fast, it's simple, it isn't something you think about--you just put it in your body as fast as you can and get on with life.   Corporate cheeseburgers are nothing more than mechanical sustenance.  They aren’t even meant to be savoured.  They just taste good enough to keep you from retching, and then after 10 minutes you get up and some other person slides into your plastic seat and consumes their cheeseburger.

I feel that the movie making machine has convinced us that we need movies in the same way we need cheeseburgers.  We just go, consume one and then think little about it after the fact.  Case in point: Blade Trinity.  There was absolutely nothing there that I hadn't seen before.  I even thought that Blade fought a tougher bad guy in Blade II.

Anyhow, how stupid can you get?  Blade vs. Dracula?  I mean, come on!  But for the special effects, Ed Wood Jr. could have made this movie.  I would certainly highlight the acting talents of Parker Posey as evidence of Ed Wood's legacy.  This girl delivers lines will all the emotion of a speak and spell.  At least they wrote a character for the other girl, Jessical Biel, that cast her as an introvert who doesn't like to talk much and who listens to her walkman all the time--this way she can remain blissfully monosyllabic and spreads her lone utterances between almost utopian gaps of up to ten minutes.

Jessica Biel is yet another one of those sultry young actresses who looks great in skimpy clothing and whose acting is so awful that she probably couldn’t play dead convincingly.  I know that it’s important to put these girls into movies to get all teenage boys between 13 and 75 to come in and coo, but does anyone honestly want a woman like that? 

Jessica Biel in Blade Trinity, Megan Fox in every film she has ever been in, That Russian girl with the freckles in the last James Bond movie.  They look as enticing as Burger King cheeseburgers when you see them on TV—the lettuce and tomatoes falling in slow sultry motion onto the bun—the flames licking up over the meat…wouldn’t you just love to take a bit of them? …but they lack the kind of nutrition that a heart needs.  There’s no personality apparent behind the looks.  I suppose these kinds fo roles have been around as long as movies have, but now and then its nice where there’s a female character who is gorgeous (because I’m not oblivious to beauty) and at the same time complex; difficult to fathom. Aren’t there any roles for girl actors out there like that?  Aren’t there any girl actors who can play those roles.

You know which one was interesting?  Monster with Charlize Theron—by all accounts, she’s a highly attractive lady (although she made up to be less pretty in the film), and the character she played in that film was full of complicated and at sometimes contradictory motivations—still they had to make her ugly to do it.  Well, I’d better get back to Blade.

The violence is predictable in Blade Trinity and, as usual, it’s a Hollywood production  that has no concept whatsoever of how to shoot a martial arts scene.  Because American actors often lack the grace and flexibility to participate in an acrobatic fight scene, the sense of the fight is conveyed by a series of rapid cuts that make it look like a lot is happening when actually the actors are barely moving at all.  Jean Claude Van Damme grunts/cut/ he kicks up his leg/cut there is a scene of a foot in the air/cut/ there is a scene of a foot hitting a face/ cut/ we see Van Damme again growling in slow motion/cut/ we see the enemy fall slowly through a table.  The same thing is done in Jennifer Lopez videos, incidentally, to mask the fact that she can't dance worth a damn.  Cut cut cut.  It looks like she's busting moves.

What makes real martial arts movies so breathtaking is the fact that they cut in a way that highlights the acrobatics as opposed to masking them. You can actually see that these people are doing the movies.  Watch the last fight in Drunken Master II, the one in the Iron Foundry.  When I saw that I was like--holy shit did Jackie Chan just do that shit I thought he did?  No cutting there.

So back to Blade, the worst part of it all for me was this idea that the vampires have a future plan for us (that is to say we, the human race) that includes vacuum sealing us like deli meat in plastic bags and hanging us up in a big warehouse to harvest our blood while we slip away in chemically induced comas--this concept that the human being will eventually be overmastered and harvested by a superior race that we ourselves have created is getting to be pretty common now.

You will remember that this was pretty much the concept in the almost unwatchably bad
Matrix trilogy (I actually didn't watch the third, and I watched the second as a download onto my computer and to be honest I fast-forwarded through most of it because it was just
garbage...but I was forced to sit through the whole first one by Anthony who seems to find some redeeming quality in the Matrix that I must admit was never obvious to me)...machines harvesting human beings.  Here in Blade the concept is a little closer to what might actually happen.

There certainly is hybridity in our future.  Through the wonders of xenotechnology animal and human organs are already being interchanged, and this begins to beg the question of when does a creature stop being the animal it was and start being a human animal?  Will such an animal have rights at that time?  How much human, I mean, does a creature have to have within it to be considered for human rights?  You can say it is a question of consciousness and thinking in the abstract and all of that stuff, but this then excludes people in comas and retards and stuff, all of whom are afforded human rights.

As one person pointed out to me, when I was talking about this a few months ago, we have to remember that even a human being is not purely human, that we have all sorts of things in our bodies which are not of us, per se.  One has to question when a human is purely human.  It's too much of a question to tackle in a review of a Wesley Snipes movie, but let me say this: In the same way that humans are making animals into something slightly sub-human genetically--ostensibly for the purposes of harvesting usable parts, so humans are also altering themselves to become more like the computer technology they are developing.  At the same time that we become more like the computers, efforts are being made to make the computers more like us--to give them biological functions, and to make them function biologically.

Thus I don ´t believe in the conquest theory of the human future; this is to say one kind of
technology and one kind of sentience taking over the other and enslaving it (á  la
Terminator, etc)...rather, I see a gradual (though not that gradual) convergence of the
human into the machine...it becomes more like us and we more like it, until we are one
indivisible new race.  There may well be animal hybrids, but what I think is more likely is that the technology will be developed to simply grow new parts without the use of living animals--a new liver in a dish, that sort of thing.

The first human hybrid with another living species visible in this movie seems to be Kris
Kristofferson who looks like he has had his DNA fused with a dried out apple.  Still I give him a lot of credit for not having any shit done to his body.  He should be happy that he is a crusty horrible looking old man and not some fucking plastic nightmare like Dick Clark or whoever else had had millions of dollars of work done to their bodies.  They killed him off in this one though (although he seems to die in every Blade movie and somehow just keeps coming back again and again in slightly worse shape, so maybe by the time they make Blade 4 he ´s be alive again---or maybe they can clone him or something like they always did with Duncan Idaho in the Dune books).

Speaking of Blade 4, though, what a bad idea that would be.  Now that they have introduced a virus that wipes out all vampires and also killed Dracula I wonder if there are any more mountains that can be crossed?  I suppose there is all that stuff about the thirst eventually taking over blade, so he could be a baddie in the next one, or maybe now that he is doing versus movies he could fight Batman or Predator...we´ll see I guess.

Blocking Out the Sun, or Canadian Political Philosophy of the 21st Century...made easy!

When I was a little kid, the teachers at our school didn’t make us special kits for looking at solar eclipses like some kids got, they didn’t key us into the wonders of science and the universe, and they didn’t try to explain to us what it meant for the moon to pass between the sun and the earth.  Instead, knowing that it was dangerous to look directly at the flash of the eclipse, they took us all out of class 30 minutes before the event—they marched out everyone in the school, class by class—and locked us in the windowless gym until the moon had passed and our eyes were safe again. 

When I was a kid, our grade six teacher used to wheel in a TV on one of those rolling stands (this was before people even had VCRs, really; we used to watch movies in class on super 8 and the film would always melt half way through because the projectors were so shitty.  The films were held together by enough scotch tape to keep Christmas going for half a year) …our grade six teacher rolled in a TV and put on the Phil Donahue show.

            “Sooner or later you kids are going to have to learn about what it’s like in the real world.” He would say.  Then, as we sat watching Donahue interviewing pimps and serial killers and pregnant fathers from the Philippines, our teacher would sit at the back of the class and  read the Toronto Sun.

            “It’s the only paper that tells the truth about what’s going on.”  He would say.

Maybe the Sun did tell the truth about what was going on in those days.  After all, that was the time when this country still had such a thing as independent media and also journalistic integrity.  Those concepts are long gone.  The Sun, which used to be a left leaning, pro-labour rag, is now owned by a giant corporation and works as hard as it can to sell a hard-core right wing agenda to working people.  It tries hard to convince people that the corporate agenda is the only thing that can protect them from the decay of the land.  I’m not sure if this effort is successful or not because I blocked out the Sun from my life a long time ago.

One thing the Sun Media group (a subsidiary of Quebecor) did this week was shut down the Montreal Mirror.  They shut it down with no notice.  They stopped running the paper and they vanished the website.  All the archives and everything written for this paper were gone in a flash.  There was very little reason given other than it was economically untenable to continue. 

The Mirror was a place where independent journalism happened.  It was a place where artists, thinkers, radicals, and people with alternative ideas about how life should be lived all had a voice and a listing of the cool under-the-radar events that were happening in town.  The disappearance this week of the Mirror creates a vacuum that Quebecor couldn’t possibly care about because none of the people effected represent any kind of potential business or profit for the corporation.

Part of the agenda—and I do believe it is an agenda, no matter how badly planned it has been—is to sever the conduits by which smart and thoughtful people in this country think and share their ideas.  Scientists have been muzzled, funding for arts programs has been cut, the cost of education is becoming increasingly prohibitive.  The death of the Mirror is yet another element of this.  It just makes it that little bit harder for people of like minds to find each other.

People like to talk about George Orwell and his assessment of how totalitarian societies operate.  It’s almost a cliché now to talk about something being “like 1984”.  In a sense, the accusation is so overused that it approaches the same degree of speciousness as accusing someone of being like Adolph Hitler.  All the same, a girl who was quietly reading 1984 on the Metro during the Grand Prix a few weeks ago (and during the police clampdown on the Metro that accompanied it) was forcefully ejected from the Metro as an agitator for having the book in her hand.

I’m mentioning Orwell with this apology (although, really I shouldn’t have to apologize for what I’m saying here, regardless of what you think of George Orwell being used as an example), because I want to mention something about the principle of Newspeak that is described in 1984.

The idea of Newspeak (this is to say the reduction and simplification of the language, and the eradication of words that could reflect negatively on the actions of the state) is that if people do not possess the vocabulary with which to describe what they think is wrong with a situation then they lack the tools to fight against that wrong.  The key to resistance is communication and the expression through sharing of ideas.  The Conservative government of Canada is not actually shrinking the language (as of yet—although they are restricting severely what government employed scientists, employees, and even journalists at the CBC are permitted to say), but they are attacking the key areas that we use to share information and ideas that may conflict with their policies.

The Mirror is gone.  At the same time Canada’s international broadcasts and shortwave radio programming is gone.  Employees at the CBC are now being asked to pledge an oath of allegiance to the government and to not say anything that will make the government look bad.  When we lose our capacity to talk to each other, then we lose our capacity to discuss what is going wrong.  People may feel that things are bad for them in their area, or in their own life, but they risk losing the broad national sense of discontent that is everywhere right now.  This makes the problem seem a lot smaller and less significant than it actually is.  The situation is bad.

There have been hundreds of thousands of people in the streets in Montreal for the last few months.  There have been many marches.  There was a march that filled the downtown up last week—if you were to see an aerial photo you would see an entire main street of the city filled with a procession of people that stretched for miles—yet no paper reported this, no news truck from a major network was on hand with a camera.  It was though all this discontent passed by and was gone.  It makes it seem like it is nothing, but it is not.

The media takes us all out of our classrooms and locks us up in the proverbial gym because they don’t think it’s safe for us to view these events.  The possibilities of motivated human masses is too dangerous a prospect for young eyes—even with the proper optics provided.

Even when these events do get reported, the press is usually negative, and any attempts to correct the fallacies of the story are swamped by the hate mongers in the comment section (are these people employed by the government?).  The hate mongers reduce everything to basic yeses and nos.  This further stultifies debate.  If the only possibility can be that, if you believe in the blue party, everything you say is right and, if you believe in the red party or the orange party, everything is inhumanly wrong, then there can be no room for compromise. 

There can be no way forward when the conversation is full of phrases like “you are a typical ‘dipper’” [ i.e., supporter of the NDP, a.k.a, a “left wing loony”], or “you are just another ‘CON-hack’” [supporter of the CPC], etc.  When one accuses a person of being just a parrot for a particular political party and then refers to the party not by its proper name, but by an insulting moniker, then all possibility for intelligent debate is lost.  This is not political debate, this is systematic dehumanization.  Decisions here are made not with the confidence of logical and reasonable superiority (such as one might find from using facts and statistics to prove points against one’s opponent—our Prime Minister, by the way, has gutted statistics Canada and the environmental protection agency so that he need not be bothered with facts), decisions are made here with the confidence of moral superiority. 

21^st Century Canadian Political philosophy made easy:

1)      I support party X because party X is always right.

2)      Because party X is always right, those with opposing views must be wrong.

3)      Because your views oppose those of party x, you must be wrong

4)      People with such poor judgement should not be allowed to make decision for this country.  Therefore I support an attack on your happiness, comfort and security at ever turn.  It is the only way to stamp out sub-human types like you.

if you can't stand the heat...

After the bombs fell on Japan, there remained, on certain walls, the burned in shadow of people who had been standing there when the flash hit. These shadows remained for years, decades even, after the people who cast them had been disintegrated.

This graffito has been showing up here and there around my neighbourhood. A silhouette of a defiant pot banger, all black but for a red square on the sleeve. These are likely to remain long after the casserole phenomenon is gone. I know the artist was thinking Banksy, but I can't help thinking about the atomic massacres in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--they were the starting gun for the Cold War and for the championship of unfettered capitalism that has nearly choked this planet to death.

I counted nine people passing my house today with their casseroles. Real diehards, I guess, with pots that looked like they'd been dropped out of the airplane along with the A bombs; pots battered for nearly four weeks straight now. Nine pots can still make quite a racket.

The casserole thing was fun. Tactics shift. I notice that Charest's earnest efforts to suppress the corruption probe are making the front page now. Voters will probably be a lot less ambiguous about this than they were about the students. Jean Charest may find the heat so great that he wishes he were back in the kitchen, amid the clattering of the crockery that overshadowed his croockery.

?

How is it that the information age has made us all so fucking ignorant?

Manif 19

Disobedient Villeray, marched past my house tonight, making a b-line for St. Laurent Grand Prix street festival. The street festival is an annual event here in Little Italy. The streets are shut down and a whole lot of girls wearing so much perfume that you can smell them ten blocks away, and a whole lot of guys with a half-bucket of gel in their hair, gather in cafes and restaurants and also spend time leaning into the hoods of the expensive looking cars that are parked all along the closed streets beneath various tents plastered with corporate logos.

As Laura likes to describe it, all we see here are the extremes of the performance of masculinity and femininity. If you are a male then you are an uber-male and you swagger about and discuss how amazing it is that this car or that car is painted orange and has seven gas tanks that all shoot fire at the same time. If you are an uber-woman then you must spend the whole night ignoring this talk and clacking at your cell-phone with your elongated bright nails while trying to balance on your towering heels. You must imagine yourself to be better than everything.

 I would not have missed this non-meeting of the minds for the world. The manifestation de casserole meets the Grand Prix. As Villeray passed down St. Zotique, I jumped into my flip-flops and followed the procession.

This is not the downtown anarchist procession, mind you. There was no silly violence. There were children here, riding on the shoulders of their parents. There were grandmothers. There was even a man in a motorized wheelchair. The police followed, but it was clear they were not planning to act or react. They had smiles on their faces. They moved ahead and blocked the road for the march. Symbiosis. Anyhow, they should be happy; they are all going to get fat new TVs and tropical vacations with all the overtime pay they've gathered.

As the protesters moved up through the Grand Prix crowd, pushing them back to the margins with the street-wide banners they carried, the main reaction I was able to read from the crowd was surprise and disdain. A few kids in the crowd watched with dropped jaws. I hope they ask a lot of questions when they go home and I hope their parents can't answer any of them.


A few people cheered--a lot more gave the march a thumbs down as the clanging pots drowned out the loud techno music that was blasting out of this restaurant and that one. Security guards and nervous car owners stood protectively in front of the hot-rod cars, and the swag vendors scowled.

"You're all a bunch of fucking losers! Losers!!" One man, in a red Ferrari jumpsuit yelled, following along beside us. He put his hand up to his forehead to make the "L" sign (backwards, unfortunately). The girls in the restaurants, meanwhile, looked up from their texting with disaffected disgust and then looked back down. It was honestly a lot of fun.

Manif jour 18.

I had an argument with my friend Andrea today about the disruption of the Grand Prix. She has huge ethical issues with the Grand Prix, but she doesn't think the protesters are disrupting the F1 thing because of ethical issues related to the event itself. They are disrupting it, she thinks, to get back at the government. Are they going to do the same thing to the jazz festival? To other summer events? Mostly, the people who will be hurt by this are the small business owners and the people who rely on these events to survive. Potential investors in Quebec--especially in entertainment and tourism--are going to be hesitant to put dollars here. The city already took two bad hits with the referrenda and it never got back to where it was in the late 1960s as a world class city.

Basically, while she thought the pots and pans were beautiful and represented a peaceful way to bring all kinds of people together, the disruption of the tourist events is just going to sour public opinion and make the future for young Quebeckers even worse than it already is.

Honestly, I'm not arguing with any of that. But I do think that the F1 should be disrupted, both for ethical reasons, and in order to make it clear that all is not right here and that people are spending their dollars in a place that is corrupt and burdened with unjust laws.

There's no winning, either way, but one has to weigh the importance of bringing in tourist dollars to prop up a shitty government that espouses a system that is running economies all around the world into the dirt, in favour of the profits of a few fat cats at the top, against the possibility that a sustained and coordinated resistance of this system might lead to long term sustainability, despite the agonizing transition that such resistance will inevitably entail.

Manifestation of pots and pans.

Manifestation of pots and pans, volume xvi. Were there feet on the pavement tonight? I, down in the old port to play my sitar, saw nothing. Coming home, I heard the distant whistling and shouting of a crowd echoing back from someplace. I heard car horns floating down onto the pavement from a far off street.

The alleyways and side streets where the marches are not to be found are eerily quiet. The noise of protest has inscribed itself on the city--or at least perhaps on my perception of the city--and when I look at the vacant, dark streets, it is as though I have rolled over to look at the empty impression in the bed where a now departed lover once lay.

Maybe you could call this a sonic patina; a sense that there was once a great deal of noise in a now quiet place. The ground still shakes a little under the feet of people who are sensitive enough to detect it. I wonder if this state of jubilant discontent will last long enough to rattle out some of the graft and avarice that has calcified on our province? I'm generally a pessimist and I'm not hopeful.

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pots and pans 15. As usual there is a police car with its lights blaring, speeding down my street to keep pace with a march. It's amazing to me that this has been going on for more than two weeks now. Because I'm always up here in the Petite Patrie, I never get a sense of how much of this is going on in the city. Our marches usually lose steam once they get to St. Joseph street and all the pot bonkers slip away into the side streets and vanish.

Apparently, though, according to some video footage I saw last night, the downtown core is a mess. They have cancelled the first day of the Grand Prix; the open house, whatever it was. I can't say my cheeks are stained with tears.

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 Pots and pans 14: Hello. We gathered, as usual, at Beaubien and St. Denis. The crowds have been a bit smaller of late, but just as boisterous as ever. We went around Villeray for a while, joining with other groups and inventing different beats. It's always exciting when we decide to pass under the railway bridge and into the Plateau. The echo effect under the bridge is nearly deafening...one marcher compared us to the town of Asterix; coming out as a hoard to meet the Romans, every night, without fail.

What the hell was the name of Asterix's town? I'm trying to remember without looking it up, because the internet is actually a memory killer. It makes our brains lazy.

Not only this, but I don't know anyone's phone number anymore. I just speed dial them on my cell. I still remember the numbers of the friends who lived on my street as a child, but as for my contemporary friends...no idea.

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 Pots and pans XIII: Clanging in the Rain.

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 Pots and pans day 11: When Odysseus was trapped on the island of Kalypso, he used to stand on the beach every day and look out longingly at the wine blue waters of the sea--wishing again to be on the deck of a ship. In the same way, I, trapped here by my thursday promises of music lessons, listen with longing to the endless barrage of clanking pots that is passing my window, and the wailing of sirens, and all of that merriment and I feel like I'm missing out. It sounds like a giant march.

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Pots and Pans 12

Frantz Fanon writes in the Wretched of the Earth that laziness is one of the greatest weapons that the colonized have against their colonizers. The object of colonization is to extract as much as possible, as quickly as possible from the place you are exploiting. If the people you are using as labour refuse to move at the speed you want--and why would they?--then your profits suffer.

A lot of the rage leveled against these protests seems to come from the perception that the protesters are refusing to act as economic bodies, consuming and spending at the proscribed levels that the economy wants. The rage is connected to the occupation of space that has been designated as commercial: roads, shopping areas, etc.; these are the conduits to seamless consumption that are being gummed up.

It must be jarring to see one of these marches of thousands, all clanking and banging on their pots, winding its way carelessly headfirst through downtown traffic, past all the outdoor patios and the shoppers and the people out for a night on the town.  After all, there’s basically nothing to do in the downtown core anymore that isn’t an economic transaction—you even get a ticket if you hang out in the park after a certain hour.  If you don’t have a fresh plastic bag, a beer mug, or a movie ticket in your hand then you lack legitimacy as far as Montreal is concerned (and it’s the same in every city in the world).

The marchers shatter the careful illusion the Montreal cultivates during its crucial tourist season of a city that is fun and artsy and safe, but at the same time cheerfully exotic.  The problem is only made worse by the refusal of the media outside Quebec to report on the issues here.  This makes it seems like boisterous mobs of thousands are suddenly appearing out of nowhere and for no comprehensible purpose.  It makes it seem almost random that police cars are whizzing about trying to figure out which streets to block and which lines of traffic to hold up for twenty or thirty or forty minutes as the marchers pass.

The financial hit the city is going to take if this continues is going to be tremendous.  The hit the city’s reputation will take might even be worse.  At a certain point, as the tourists start to pour in, it will become impossible to ignore what’s happening here and—whether the press is bad or good—people are going to be talking and a lot of questions are going to be asked.  Law 78, already condemned by Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the Quebec Bar Association, is going to be judged on the world stage.  There will be no shortage of vitriol against the so-called entitled Quebeckers but, at the same time, I think a lot of other groups will be inspired to organize and resist the bullshit in their own regions.

The biggest difficulty ahead—and I think this might be how the situation differs from in Fanon’s day—is that capitalist societies are constructed in such a way that everyone is completely dependant on the function of the economic engine for their survival, and if any one part ceases to participate properly, the result is always widespread suffering—at least for the people at the bottom; the rich ones always know when to grab their funds and run.  All the people who are employed in low wage jobs, all the people whose survivals are tied to the tourist industry, etc; all these people are the ones who are going to be the most hurt by this protest.  Because their livelihoods are at stake, they are all the more likely to react badly to all of this and refuse to support the cause.  The government and the medial will happily play on this fear and, in the end, it’s going to be very very difficult to accomplish anything here.

I’ll try to expand more on this latter point sometime when I have a few minutes.

Radical Marxist maxims of condo living, volume 1.

1:  No one can change the world for good, but it is still the work of the righteous to fell the demons of your own generation.

2:  No matter how good your view is when you move in, it will be blocked by another condo within a year.  Don't complain about it, because you deserve what you get for moving into a place that cast a shadow over a stretch of earth that used to grow flowers.

3:  I really don't care what kind of flat screen TV you own. If you mention it again I'm going to punch you in the face.

time for a new wallet?

I always swear to god this is the last time;
picking my scattered change
from the slushy doorway of the bus
with dirty cold fingers
while the driver cringes, patiently,

and behind me a long line of commuters
stamps and growls out in the frosty morning.