complex hotel bonaventure

on a wet day I make and take the effort to visit the long ago roof gardens of Hotel Bonaventure
the ducks still paddling there but the dripping trees have gotten thick and large aggressively out of proportion and downstairs all the shopping concourse of upscale boutiques have been carefully renovated out of existence a vanished mall of a ‘Leisure Society’ that never happened
only the escalators leading to the Metro remain in place for those passing under arches of ribbed concrete of an architectural design that seems now oddly on the side on a slant of a once upon a time avant-garde delusion.
no credits or honors remembered

titanic inventory

The trailer pronouncements for the A&E documentary on the latest ‘Titanic’ diving expedition are dramatic and exciting but the crew of technical experts all have the cautious calculating eyes and flat tone voices of corporate executives.Once in awhile there are attempts to simulate excitement for the sake of dramatization but theres hardly a single moment of spontaneity in this self promoting ego trip disguised as a scientific mission.
Interesting that the expedition’s organizer,retired corporate lawyer Davcid Concornat, chose to examine the technical question how the Titanic sunk but not why it sunk
Not why the people drowned but how they drowned
That’s because people only count as inventory from a CEO’s point of view

dialectics of defiance

The artist Pierre Gauvreau in “Les Trois Temps D’Une Paix”gives an illustration of the level of repression during the period in Quecbec known as ‘la grande noirceur’.
Gauvreau tells about the director of the Ecole des Beaux Arts correcting a student’s charcoal sketch by arbitrarily rubbing out a perceived flaw.The student,Adrien Villandré reacted by grabbing the director by the collar and shaking him.
Gauvreau said you’d would think that the other students would have joined in and help Villandré give the director a well deserved shake-up for his arrogance.But instead a bunch of students grabbed Villandré and pushed and shoved him out of the classroom.
A public defence of authority is often the first response to a individual reaction to injustice and one to be expected by whoever dares to be the first to defy an unjust but accepted practice.But now the injustice has been publicly challenged and the question has been raised.Does the director have the arbitrary right to commit such actions?
And some of those students who watched passively as Villandre got bounced and even some of the students who did the bouncing will themselves reconsider whether they would allow the director to alter their work in the future.
Individual gut defiance is often the first step leading to a collective action.

media meditations

theres so much I can’t stand to watch on TV any more.
the news all centering on the theme that the world is crazy but theres nothing we can do about it so go shopping.
the regular programming top heavy with cop shows based on the premise that cops are not oppressive by form and nature they're actually quite sensitive and intelligent
here and there shows like ‘Deadwood’ have emerged(submerged) with a deadly critique of the capitalist system in its poisonous reality.
but theres so much shit out there,so much of it stinking up the world.
marshall mcLuhan got it wrong
the message is the media

dr. strangelove comes to town

MONTREAL, April 9 - Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Prize
Laureate and U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford,will be one of the keynote speakers at the 14th edition of the International Economic Forum of the Americas/Conference of Montréal, taking place this June 9 to 12 at Montréal's Hilton Bonaventure Hotel.


Evil enthroned and justified by international law
Its spokesperson a mass murderer with an ironic smile
The black limousine sheen of malignant power
We can kill you and its legal

jingle django

The gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt is often recommended to me by musician friends,but somehow there’s something sinister about the upbeat tone of the love songs Django chose to play in Parisian cafes in Nazi occupied France,while hundreds of thousands of his people were being put to death in concentration camps
What he didn’t or couldn’t or wouldn’t say colors the chords he picks with an intense inner anxiety that gives me a chill
I can taste the terror of his choice to live only for the moment in his music.
How do you play love songs for people who just cut your mother’s throat?

paradox

One day
if we get it right
I’ll be famous
for not being famous
if we get it wrong
the jokes on me

mother and child

they got on the 107 just a few stops from metro lasalle on first warm day of april
mother with a strained smile and child of maybe ten years old holding onto her hand with idiot face of spastic joy dragging heavy foot of deformity behind him happy cause he doesn’t know any better
he’ll be lost without her

dawn over second avenue

I get up out of bed on my birthday and walk over to where I was born with just a tinge of blue edging the rooflines as I bang my walker down my front stairs into my memories with slight chill of wind as I sit down on a bench near public phone booth corner of Second Avenue glancing over at 633 sitting dark and silent where my mother brought me home a new baby boy first born son in her arms in a blue hospital blanket up those long outside stairs that later made her groan about what could have been should have been but smiling on this day sixty two years ago..when.. flashing cop car pulls up with cop asking me what an odd fellow is doing out at an odd time sitting cornerwise..and I just nod and stare and stare and nod until finally he asks where I live..633 second avenue..