Sunday 15 March 2015

(Poem) What's that sound?



This poem was written for the Jen Mesch Dance Conspiracy performance at the Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science (CCIS) building at the University of Alberta on March 12, 2015. The poem was inspired by radio-telescopic recordings of the sounds made by the planets in our solar system.

All the celestial bodies referenced here are in the video linked above. Enjoy!


What’s that sound?
Yes, that one
The ringing echoes
of the orb that wears the crown
This is Radio Free Jupiter!
Pugnacious punk ambient radiophonic red-spot rock ‘n’ roll
ringing through the solar system
like it was hers to begin with
Big sexy gas giant, switched-on solar circuitry with storms to burn

What’s that sound?
No, that one
That rumbling in the shadows
that frosty splash of sulphur ash aside the colossus
Hadal contrabass counterpoint
Volcanic blasts splattering at the swirling gaseous canvas
spread across its sky
Ionic artspace, Jackson Pollock studio, Jovian circuitry, silver and gold pockmarks
with guttural undulating undertones

What’s that sound?
No, that one
That swirling urgency
that plaintive pulse
from the dark side of the ringed one
singing and sobbing
Miranda is bleeding, scratched and forlorn
Saturnine by nature and temperament
forever howling at the canopy of night

What’s that sound?
Not that one, that one
For whom does that bell toll?
Ringing like arctic blasts
through a hundred haunted bell towers
Is this the solemn chill that calmed the waters to somnolent Sri Lanka?
The dissonant chimes that calls the Milky Way to prayer?
Váruna, Ouranos, sawing sideways through cosmic currents
buzzsaw of the beyond, slicing space with morbid grace

What’s that sound?
Yes, that one
That splash of blue ocean
amid the black beyond
delicately orchestrated typhoons
of silver strings
rhapsody in cobalt and ultramarine
Holst never stopped to listen to the blue voice
The Mystic, it turns out, was also the romantic

What’s that sound?
The slow hiss
Hubble’s dilemma
That pulsing spectral omnipresence
the gears of the cosmic wheelhouse
locking and grinding
forever stretching the perimeter
of the Eridanus Supervoid
Hello darkness, my old friend

In space everybody can year you scream
hear you scratch and rage against the void
skip along the stone paths of the Kuiper Belt
and sing along with mournful Sedna’s
Skeleton Woman blues
pausing at Señor Gomez’s burger bar
before a night swim in the gently lapping magenta lagoon nebula
Sounds like a nothingth of an eternity in the universe
where superlatives reign supreme and dark matter matters

What’s that sound?
Which one?

Friday 6 March 2015

I looked in the mirror, Jim. And this is what I saw.

First of all, can somebody smarter than me please explain to me what the hell is going on in this province?? First we were suddenly broke and hemorrhaging money left, right, and centre thanks to sagging global oil prices. Then, somehow, inexplicably, the province was running a surplus. And now gas prices are back up to nearly a buck a litre. And wasn't the whole gas price slide a punitive measure by the OPEC bigwigs against the psycho KGB cowboy in Moscow and his pals in Tehran and Damascus? I don't get it.

Whatever the case, our boom-and-bust economy is now, apparently, bust again, and our esteemed crown prince now tells us, in a nutshell, that it's our own fault. According to Jim Prentice, we all have to “look in the mirror” and take responsibility for the province’s precarious financial situation. OK Jim, I take responsibility. But what I want to know at this juncture is how much responsibility I, personally, should take. After all, I'm not from Alberta originally and have only been taking advantage of government programs and opportunities here since mid-2008. Does that mean I'm less responsible for our present mess than someone who's lived here all their life, while at the same time more so than someone who just arrived?

If we were to portion out blame equally, among all Albertans, we would technically be looking at about 7.6 seconds of penance per Albertan per year. Given that there are now 4,146,000 of us in this province, and 365 days in a year, that's literally how our wages of guilt would be monetized. You know, like the flat tax our esteemed leaders still stubbornly stand by.

But that's based on the assumption that everybody currently living in Alberta is equally culpable for getting us in the pickle that we're in. Which, as I previously mentioned, strikes me as unfair given our current rate of population growth. Alberta's population grew by 3.8 per cent in 2014, which means that of the aforementioned 4,146,000 people, about 150,000 just arrived from elsewhere, and frankly it would be unfair to saddle them with this burden of economic shame. Especially given our provincial leaders' heretofore urgent tone with regards to impending labour shortages here.

This reduces our pool of culpable Albertans to around 3,996,000. That raises our individual burden of guilt to around 7.9 seconds. Still totally manageable. That said, I don't think our dear leader would see it that way. Clearly Alberta's urban centres bear more of the blame than rural areas, given their pesky demands for better roads, better transit, more schools, more . . . everything, frankly. As of 2011 (the most recent statistics available), 83 per cent of Albertans resided in urban areas. That takes us down to roughly 3,316,000 people who are really blameworthy. So if you've lived in an urban area in Alberta for more than one full year, you now officially have to feel bad for 9.5 seconds a year.

Not so fast. At least 20 per cent of the remaining population is 18 years old or under, and clearly they can't be held responsible for the mess we're in - much as we'd like to blame them. So that takes us down to about 2,652,800 culpable individuals, or about 11.9 annual seconds of penance. And that's more substantial - more time than most of us stand with our heads bowed and our eyes closed on Remembrance Day.

And of course we haven't even begun to talk about the province's urban Aboriginal population, from whose ancestors the land now called Alberta was stolen in the first place, or the province's ethnic Japanese, Chinese, Ukrainian (that's at least 10 per cent of Edmonton), and Afro-Canadian populations, who at various times have faced fierce discrimination. Or women, who, it turns out, earn less than 65 per cent of their male counterparts in this province, putting Alberta nearly on par with South Korea, the OECD country with the worst gender wage parity. And while we're at it, LGBTQ Albertans, who still suffer from de-facto top-down discrimination through the provincial government's refusal to mandate gay-straight alliances in schools, get a pass as well.

So who are we left with? Basically a coterie of overpaid straight white men who live in urban centres and occupy positions of power. In other words, people like you, Jim. Perhaps you need to, ahem, take a look in the mirror.

Monday 2 March 2015

Home is where the food is (a 107 Ave serenade)

Source: Faces of 107 Avenue
Adobo creative suites
Masala motion pictures
Mad about saffron
And high on wild rosewater nocturnes and the sweet Rumi-nations of old Tehran
Footsteps springy like fresh injera
With a fire-roasted coffee and frankincence chasers at my heels
Striding sing-song down the Avenue of Nations
Calibrating my olfactory GPS; new-world coordinates in old-country code
The dhows of Gwadar, Suquṭra, Muqdisho
Safely moored on a verdant bend in the North Saskatchewan
Bringing sustenance and satiety to shivering winter citizenry
Cracked cardamom pods, frim-fram shawarma sauce
Weaponized wild rice and a backup bottle of chili sauce for that extra zing
Here on the Ave this is kind of our thing

Some say home is where the heart is
But the heart falters when the stomach lies empty
Others say home is where the money is
But money for nothing? Have these chickpeas for free!
Home is where the food is
Where continents and condiments collide in cast-iron kitchen pots
With fierce chillies, midnight meat sweats, and moose nose stew with bannock sliders
Treaty 6 treats with Tagalog tagalongs
And palak paneer amid the backdrop of a bigos and kubasonic boomtown
It’s everything that’s good to eat
Right out there on the street
Yeggs benedict for breakfast
E-town empanadas for lunch
Prairie chicken Kiev with a side of doro. Wot?
It’s all here. It’s all us.

Give me a home where the free-range buffalo roam (out at Elk Island)
Where the kheer and the cantaloupe come out to play for dessert
Where seldom is heard a discouraging Urban Spoon word
And the skies are as wide open as our doors, as big as our portion sizes
And as vivid and alive as our spicecraft and foodscape
Welcome home


Friday 27 February 2015

After the Artery - 6 ways Edmonton's arts community can continue to survive and thrive

Source: John Lucas, Edmonton Journal
If you're a member of Edmonton's arts community, you're probably ready to slouch down on the nearest park bench for a good long cry right now. That's assuming you haven't already done this. We're not even two months into 2015, and the year has thus far, for a lack of a better term, sucked balls. It all started with the heartbreaking demise of the venerable Roxy Theatre in an early morning fire on January 13. And now artistically inclined Edmontonians are reeling from the loss of yet another iconic art space, The Artery, which yesterday announced it would be closing its doors for the last time at the end of March.

Both of these occurrences would be heartbreaking enough in isolation,  but the sad fact of the matter is that it's nothing new in this town. The list of performance and visual arts spaces that Edmonton has lost, or is on the verge of losing, has begun to resemble a list of names chiselled on a war memorial. Last year saw the demise of the Avenue Theatre. In 2013 the Haven Social Club, a jazz-focussed basement dive much loved by MacEwan University music students, bid the city farewell. Further back in time, the legendary Sidetrack Cafe, which once upon a time played host to the likes of Canadian icons k.d. lang, Colin James, and Blue Rodeo, bid the world adieu in 2007.

The list of dead venues in Alberta's capital city has become so extensive that the Edmonton Heritage Council has recently embarked on a Dead Venues Project as part of its Edmonton City As Museum initiative, an admirable attempt to keep the city's indie/alt-rock heritage alive. While tributes are always welcome, such archival projects are cold comfort to Edmonton's artists who continue to see venues yanked from under their feet. No area of town has been harder hit than Old Strathcona, the once-spirited heart of bohemian Edmonton, which, thanks to skyrocketing commercial real estate prices, has seen much of its arts scene migrate to more economical pastures, with the Catalyst Theatre (soon to be relocating to the Maclab Theatre at the Citadel) being its latest economic refugee.

All this, of course, is happening at a time of great economic uncertainty in the province as a result of plummeting oil prices and a bewildering budgetary Chicken Little sky-is-falling performance on the part of our newly minted Progressive Conservative Pharaoh. (For the hammiest theatre show in town, just pop into the Alberta Legislature when the house is in session.) For people immersed in the arts community, as well as in post-secondary education (and I'm eyeball-deep in both - lucky me), this means cutbacks. Yes, that Alberta speciality. All this in spite of the fact that the government somehow, inexplicably, seems to have come up with a budgetary surplus (because, you know, we're broke) and that cutting funding to the arts to balance the budget makes about as much sense as shaving your head to lose weight.

The irony, of course, is that Edmonton's arts scene has never been more vibrant than it is at present. On any given night in this city there's a bewildering array of performance and visual art on offer in the city, albeit in a slow but steadily contracting constellation of venues. Edmonton is well known for its big-name festivals - FolkFest, NextFest, the Fringe, the Street Performers Festival, the Poetry Festival, and so on, but that scarcely scratches the surface as to what's going on. As a relatively new Edmontonian (a resident here since the fall of 2008), it's taken me quite a few years to fully appreciate the quality and quantity of artistry in my adopted hometown - even in the middle of winter when it's an uphill task to persuade winter-weary residents to trudge through minus-twenty temperatures to check out a poetry slam or a modern dance spectacle.

Yes, Edmonton's arty folk are a stubborn, tenacious bunch who can probably survive anything. But why must their existence always be such a perilous one? The problem is an economic one (as well, let's admit, of economic priorities on the part of the city's mandarins). Regrettably, artists get screwed in both good and bad economic times. In bad times, funding for the arts invariably gets cuts. In good times, real estate prices inflate to the point where theatre companies, club owners, and other artistic stakeholders can no longer stay above water.

So what can be done to support the arts in this city so as to curb the tide of venues going under? I'm no expert, but here are a few ideas.

1) Go see more shows.

This might sound flippant, but seriously, go see something cool. On a random Tuesday evening, even. Edmonton may not have the prestige of Paris or New Orleans, but the flip side to that is that artists in this city are far more accessible than they are in larger centres. There are improbable art galleries run by medical doctors who really love the arts. There's a devoted (and I mean VERY devoted) heavy metal scene. There's typically three nights a week of wild electronic music at Bohemia. And there's no shortage of theatre, dance, and whatnot. Go to yeglive,ca and find something cool - and go to it! C'mon, you're too young to spend every evening crocheting scarves and taking Instagram photos of your cats!

2) Get to know your local community league.

Edmonton's outsized artistic scene owes a large debt to the city's longstanding network of local community leagues. While not an exclusively Edmontonian phenomenon, Edmonton's community league system is, as far as I know, unique in its extensiveness and civic clout, thanks in no small part to steady funding from the municipal government. If you're an Edmonton-based artist, volunteering for your local community not only gives you the opportunity to lobby on behalf of your fellow artists at the neighbourhood level (i.e. where it really counts), but also gives you affordable access to community league facilities, whose purpose it is to serve as a local venue for stuff the community wants. Not an opportunity any artist would want to pass up.

3) Think outside the box in terms of venues.

Capital A "Art Venues" may be in full-tilt contraction mode in Edmonton, but with anywhere between 18 and 22 cranes punctuating the city's skyline like boreal giraffes, buildings are most definitely not. Moreover, with more per-capita green space than any other Canadian city and a larger land area than Toronto (with about a third of the population), the city is not lacking in places to perform. They just might not be traditional performance spaces. Edmonton's perennially overachieving modern dance scene has, out of both necessity and ingenuity, turned the city's great outdoors into its venue, with the undisputed masters of this being Mile Zero Dance and its artistic director Gerry Morita, whose venues have ranged from Churchill Square to the river valley park system to the delightfully trashy Aurora Motel in the city's unloved industrial west end.

Others are doing the same thing. I myself have had the honour of being invited to contribute a spoken word component to the latest instalment of Jen Mesch Dance Conspiracy Takes Over The Science Building. Dancer/choreographer/science nerd Jen Mesch is another Edmonton artist with a penchant for improbable locations, ranging from Edmonton's river valley to actual caves. And the University of Alberta, with its picturesque cliffside setting atop the river valley and its motley assortment of fascinating structures, is a cornucopia of potential performance spaces - including some actual performance spaces like the amusingly toilet-shaped Timms Centre.

4) Forge stronger ties with arts communities elsewhere in Alberta.

Edmonton is essentially an island city. At least that's how it feels much of the time. But while it's a relatively isolated city, it's not really that far from other pockets of civilization. Calgary is a three-hour drive to the south, and is no slouch when it comes to the arts. And it's a treasure trove of great venues. Edmonton's once vibrant underground punk scene may be history now, but Calgary's still has quite a bit of life to it thanks in no small part to places like Vern's Tavern, a venue that helped launch the careers of bands like Sheepdogs and Marianas Trench, and continues to provide an open stage to the weirdest, most obnoxious acts around - bands like "witch punk" Riot Grrrl revivalists Hag Face, my current YYC faves.

Even closer to Edmonton is the increasingly energetic live music scene in Red Deer, which, thanks to Alberta's explosive population growth in recent years, now has a population close to that of Reykjavik, Iceland. It's not a scene I know well at all, but reliable sources tell me that it's getting steadily better - at least on the musical front. Even further south in Alberta is the oddball town of Lethbridge, where heavily bearded and headscarf-clad Hutterites and Mennonites rub shoulders with heavily bearded and keffiyeh-clad hipsters from the University of Lethbridge who frequent events like the Lethbridge Electronic Music Festival and more regular arty happenings at Owl Acoustic Lounge.

Anybody who thinks of Alberta as simply Edmonton, Calgary, and a hillbilly hinterland needs a Lonely Planet update. The problem, of course, is that the province of Alberta has a larger land mass than France and a far worse transportation infrastructure, which means that unless you plan on sleeping in your car (which is only a viable option half the year in this province, and even then not a very attractive one), you need lodging in whatever municipality you find yourself in - particularly given that your typical artsy event ends after the last Red Arrow of the night leaves the station for Edmonton. A network of dedicated artist crash pads on either end,in said cities, perhaps modelled on New Orleans' Musicians' Village, would solve this problem.

5) Forge stronger ties with communities within the city.

Edmonton is distinctly unlike places like Vancouver and Toronto in its relative lack of distinct ethnic enclaves. With the exception of the South Asian community in Mill Woods (an area also replete with new Canadians from elsewhere around the globe) and the East African community on and around 107 Avenue (forever the starting point in the city for whichever immigrant community is the most recent), Edmonton's multicultural population is a true salad bowl. There is nearly as much Ethiopian food in Edmonton's Little Italy than there is Italian, and the city's Chinatown is decidedly more Vietnamese than Chinese. And given China and Italy's past predilections for invading Vietnam and Ethiopia respectively, it's poetic justice in a way.

That said, Edmonton's artistic mainstream (i.e. white people) could all do a better job engaging with the city's many and varied ethno-cultural communities. The spoken word/slam poetry scene is excelling on that front thanks in no small part to Titilope Sonuga and her heir apparent Ahmed Knowmadic of the Breath in Poetry collective - slam poetry at its least obnoxious and most inclusive. Edmonton is also home to what may now be the country's largest urban Aboriginal population, and with it one of Canada's most energetic Aboriginal arts scenes - ranging from Métis country music to raw rez hip hop and stand-up comedy. It's out there. You just need to seek it out.

6) Fight the power.

Yep, put on your best gold Flava Flav teeth, hang a clock around your neck, and fight the power that be. But in all seriousness, the city of Edmonton would have far fewer historic buildings standing were it not for its citizens' willingness to get organized and fight the forces of organized redevelopment. Much of Old Strathcona would have been razed back in the 1970s were it not for the grim determination of its residence to save its innumerable architectural gems. Today the city's venerable McDougall United Church is the latest historic building on the chopping block, and while its future remains very much in doubt, a campaign to save the building has recently shifted into high gear.

Sometimes you just have to be like Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker books and lie in front of the bulldozer. And call it a work of art. Because sometimes it is.

Wednesday 25 February 2015

Skindiving in Tokyo Bay


Photo by Natalie Kelsey (deviantart.com)
The sea wall shoots straight down
Beyond the threshold of the eyes
Beneath the inky evanescence above
And the silky nothingness below
That centrifuge where the mind stops minding
And the extremities embrace the moonless chill
And in the unblinking undertow
Yamashita’s gold glistens, then vanishes
Yet another bioluminescent blur
Beyond the precipice of the abyssal plain
Where spider crabs bide their time
And searchlights dissolve like sugar photophores

The curve of your back
Your pearldiver skin
Freezeframes in front of me as I fumble
Dusktreading and night terrorfoaming
Over angry tectonic ridges, rusted warships
And the barnacled skeletons of young men pressed into death
By imperial dreams and decrees
And yet still you urge me forward through the cross current
Beckoning with a supple serenity to surrender
To the will of the waves and the boundaries of reason
When one climactic zone transitions to another
Do we change our name or simply inch forward as we are

Sure . . . unsure
Shore . . . no shore
Sure . . . unsure
Shore . . . no shore
それ . . . あれ

Why don’t you turn around to face me
As I flail about amidst the black surge
Edo-wan at dusk is lonely beneath the skin
At odds with the detritus below and the neon crescent wrench
That grasps it tight at night
When the denizens of the depths recoil from reach
Why don’t you relight, ignite, send a pulse, a flair
At least make clear
That your crystal tips and grey-eyed equanimity
Were no deep-sea deceit, midwater mindfuck mirage
Minding your own business on the seabed is no trouble at all
When you were there all along and doing it anyway

Skindiving in Tokyo Bay
Past the shored-up satiety of Odaiba
Past the rusted-through remnants of the showy and the Showa
Past the echo-bait of subterranean human mazecraft
Past where the plateau pauses, then drops into the deep beyond
That place where the sawn edges of the Pacific parted ways
Leaving only memories of electric Taisho and the swordsharpeners of the Shitamachi
Blades brandished to keep the merchants at bay
Skindiving through the black machinery of now
Moorings loosened and discarded
Caution fed to the crabs, eyeless in the cold abyss
Reaching out to your lips with ease and understated grace

Shore . . . no shore
Sure . . . unsure
Shore . . . no shore
Sure . . . unsure
それ . . . あれ

Shreds of red sky refract through the surface zone
Twilight ignites with new dreams and tender memories
Sexy exits, sleek décolage
Runway lights through the depths signalling a bridge beckoning to the abyssal plain below
Beyond the Minamibōsō boundary and into the open ocean
Where no one will dare follow
Where drunken tengu sharks swim sentinel
Round the rusted hulls of prison ships and drowned memories
That place where chemosynthesis keeps me warm
Where all our junctions jut out to face the spectral surface
The weight of four million square feet of sensory overload
Rolls my eyes back as my back imitates the nautilus, twirling and fading into you

And through the midwater zone
Curviline contours shade in and out of sight
Beyond the convection of currents into the discrete vocabulary of night
Ribbons, cloaks and shields tumble to the depths
As my senses lose all defences
And sea and sky turn black and fiery phosphorescent
I’ve seen you here in the sightless jagged caverns of the hadal zone
Shimmering self, alive as angry weight attacks my eardrums
Sparks flying upwards, depth charges blowing holes through my sense of space and self-imagination
No choice at all but to follow the pinpricks of light and crawling cloudbursts of belief
Maps of the universe splashed across the void
In violent disarray

Sure . . . unsure
Shore . . . no shore
Sure . . . unsure
Shore . . . no shore
それ . . . あれ

The depths breathe and churn
Viperfish stir from their sleep
Shipmarks dissipate in distant darkness
We venture on inch by endless inch
Your tenderness and spark my only beacons
Your sonar my only sight
Nothing left but to face the light
And dive deep through rifts and currents
Ocean sinew unconstrained by mind or pressure
And then the tsubo markers of the ocean floor open outwards
With soft landings in sheets of silt ensured
Alone together enveloped in empty space

Freezeframe, endgame, freeze still, stay the same
There’s no pain in paralysis
Grasping hold of the moment and never letting go
Even as the silt and sediment scratch the membrane, erode the nerve endings
Hollow reeds bending and snapping
Broken on our piece of seabed
All my fibres, all your curves, connected and alive
Safely sheltered from the angry currents above
Beyond the ridges and rift valleys that tear at our senses
Leaving only echoes of their teeth-grinding tension
Growing softer and more distant
As we settle in for the long night

Shore . . . no shore
Sure . . . unsure
Shore . . . no shore
Sure . . . unsure
それ . . . あれ
あれ
あれ
あれ


This poem was written for the Mile Zero Dance's show Without Borders - and specifically for a dance-spoken word collaboration with the amazing dancer/choreographer/human being Jen Mesch. It was performed with Jen at dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton on February 20 and 21, 2015.

Wednesday 4 February 2015

A Poem About Heartbreak



I could couch this poem in any manner of metaphor
Take your pick
How about plate tectonics?
Crust rent asunder – the substrate to your super-narrative
How about butterflies?
Forty-eight hours to live and wreak havoc on everything around you
Or bullet ants
Woven into an Amazonian initiation glove
Temporarily tranquilized by shamanic smoke
Only to wake up in a biting stinging frenzy of self-actualization
But no
You don’t deserve literary devices
Poetic subterfuge will simply edify your ego further
Truth is
You’re your own natural disaster
Unworthy of insect similes or geological symbolism
After all the ant dies when the glove is discarded
The butterfly falters and fades, leaving only melted wings and empty cocoons in its wake
Plates collide with continents
But you get to go on being you, insouciant you
You and your Gospel of Luke and your daddy-issue flotsam
Yahweh, Vader – take your fucking pick
It’s all the same to the plebs left behind
The unseen casualties of your catastrophegraph
Now just another set of muddy footprints
On my weather-worn tatami
Yet another prick through the packing sheets of snap-crackle-pop monogamy
Calculated breakups in the name of destiny fulfillment
No arc, no character development, no shimmering soliloquies
I’m not your plot device – and you don’t get your pick of mine
And if your dreams of love and heroism simply shrivel on the vine
Then this shitty little poem about heartbreak
Has fulfilled its fuction as assigned