red rover

complex hotel bonaventure

2008-06-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-16T04:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-13T06:48:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-12T06:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-24T12:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-24T11:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-29T17:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

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..

house that didn't happen

2008-04-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

[The Gerald Godin House in Carré Saint Louis]

the trees are old and gnarled but not from time and struggle
they are what they’re suppose to look like
the students on a school tour are looking at what they’re told to see but they don’t know
the pigeons feed but they don’t care
its all suppose to mean something
but it never was really true anyhow
house that didn’t happen
love that didn’t happen
ambitions plans
the impossible
utopia in our time
Quebec debout debout..debout

now an inscription on a fading wall
of an empty house
soon to be declared officially empty
soon to be a museum
censored by its own history

‘But no,my militancy fizzles to avowal
is false and lying like a dame
and tearful too but with a truth in there somewhere
I swear to godalmighty
and to my land to my Quebec
my song is false,my song’s not truthful
but the anger is,the anger is’
-Godin 1965

nothing to lose

2008-04-07T07:39:00.000-07:00

me in a down mood out of tone and tune with myself from making same old pattern of mistakes but getting myself out on sunny warmish day pushing my walker down Wellington east of Hickson where I see a guy with loud drunken voice in ripped t-shirt and jail tattoos suddenly staggering out of oldtime hotdog place past a young girl pushing baby carriage with stunned look in eyes that will later change into a hard gleam that goes with a bitter pull to the mouth that comes with second and third kid in same old pattern of poverty but more squeezed and constrained into lesser space with gentrification narrowing what little choice there already was in the same old same old passing along thinking about when I was living just down the street from my old pal Jackie who was often getting loud and out of order in drunken broad daylight back in ripped t-shirts of the 70’s when I was just getting newly famous for writing about Jackie in plays like ‘On The Job’ and ‘Nothing To Lose’ celebrating what turned out to be his utter and terrible defeat
what would have happened to dave fennario of thirty years ago if I’d have been trapped into some deadend awful common fate shared with those who shared these streets with me back then instead of miraculously ascending into fame too strange so strange...i don’t know and really don’t spend much time thinking about it maybe because but my focus now is the same focus I had then that still makes my voice snarl and my eyes shine
Revolution

je me souviens

2008-04-03T13:42:00.000-07:00

When the Patriotes were hung outside the City prison in February of 1838 they strangled more than just twelve men.A whole nation was shut down for generations long after the echo of the trap door on the gallows slamming open had died out of memory.I was witness to the power of that terrible defeat even before I learnt about the crushing of the Rebellion of 1837
In 1962 in the Verdun City Hall library there were books under censor by the Catholic Church officially stamped as unsuitable reading material.
Only in Quebec did any religious organization hold such power over public education.It was the Catholic Church’s reward for sanctioning the execution of the Patriotes by the British.
In 1963 they stopped the religious censoring of books
In 1968 they stopped flying the Union Jack over public buildings in downtown Montreal.
One hundred and thirty years later

famous playwright sitting on his walker waiting for the Verdun 107 in the rain

2008-04-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Charlie that remembers me from Verdun High School says hi and usually he just nods cause he’s very shy and lived alone with his Ma til she died and he was always too skinny and too tall but now looking skeletal skinny with shoulders hunched from maybe AIDS or could be lung cancer cause there he is coughing on a cigarette asking me if ‘Balconville’ is out on a DVD cause his VCR version is getting scratchy and well no I said I don’t even have a copy myself and oh he says and then says he watched it again the other night with Shane who’s standing there next to Charlie in the busline and maybe that’s why Charlies in a talkative mood cause Shane talks to everybody and says he’d stand on his head if somebody would pay him
‘Life is a shit sandwich but I just eat the bread'

dead names

2008-03-31T07:09:00.000-07:00

At the Second Cup on Greene Avenue I get a takeout petit corsé coffee balanced on a cardboard tray on the seat of my walker for tottering trip over to the Westmount Memorial triangle of a park in front of castle turret Westmount City Hall with no park bench now that most parks are meant to be decorative rather than actually utilized so its not easy for me to maneuver knapsack walker and coffee up close enough to the Memorial statue of a marching WWI soldier with hovering guardian angel to read in glint of sun the names on the ‘Honor Roll’ plinth expecting to find myself meditating on what those names might have meant or who they could have been had they lived but obviously they didn’t learn a fucking thing or else put it out of their memory
’Their Names Liveth Forever’ reads the brass inscription but the flag they once saluted is not flying

corporate decor

2008-03-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

La boulevard rene levesque by any name just another drive-by now and there facing me the monumental Hydro Quebec building with its political aura and glint of Mousseau’s famous mural a bright gleam even seen behind dark glass but not to be viewed except under scrutiny of lobby security and hidden cameras all locked in with me locked out because I look like who I am and who I am is somebody that gets questioned when entering lobbies of public buildings that are now being privatized by people who never worry about being challenged by the security that smiles for them
This is the manifest legacy of the refus global they are trying to sell sixty years later
Nothing more than corporate decor

emile nelligan in these post modern times

2008-03-29T03:33:00.000-07:00

The trees in heartbreaking bloom with husks from the buds falling down on me sitting on a park bench in Carré Saint Louis nearby the Emile Nelligan statue in the clear light of noon looking up at the face of the statue.
It doesn’t faintly resemble the face of a boy driven insane at the age of 19.
Theres nothing of the spirit of a tormented visionary in the sculpturer’s dis-interpretation.
He simply produced a conventional mask of convention as required by a committee of municipal functionaires.
Nelligan as an idealized arts administrator pondering another career decision in public

what are they here for

2008-03-25T04:16:00.000-07:00

Somehow suddenly I feel more confident than I have in years that we will see a resurgence of the kind of class struggle we saw back in the 60’s.I think it came from something that my partner Liz said the other day.She said that that one of the nurses who works on her floor in Saint Mary’s Hospital had asked for time off cause her brother had been killed in an accident.But the hospital administrator,one of the Charest government new appointees,bluntly refused her request.When the nurse asked for some sympathetic support and understanding the administrator said ”I’m not here for that”
How often are workers all over this country hearing a variation of the same words from other administrators
“I’m not here for that”
Now that nurse,by no means a militant,is asking herself
“Then what are they here for?”

easter uprising

2008-03-23T04:17:00.000-07:00

Every Easter Sunday I read Yeats poem on the Dublin Uprising of 1916..‘A terrible beauty is born’

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

My hope is that stone in the stream

it won't be pretty

2008-03-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

Strange floating dreams last night like having or experiencing unfocusable senility with no logic or control in the flow of thoughts.We’re in the Mont Royal cemetery to visit Gary’s grave and its been dug up.We can see the white bones of skeletons lying there exposed like water pipes about to be reburied with no one knowing why or barely bothering to even question what we were seeing
People just doing what they’re told
Somebody must know what they’re doing
An overweight and medicated middle-aged working class set up for the slaughter
Not with a bang but a burp

George W. live at the Economic Club in New York

2008-03-14T10:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday IMF first deputy managing director John Lipsky warned authorities worldwide yesterday to ‘think the unthinkable’ and called for ‘decisive policy action’ amidst a credit crunch stemming from US real-estate meltdown to ‘put the global financial system and economy on a firmer footing’.
Lipsky didn’t say what decisive action but obviously it’s a challenge to the hardline free trade policies favored by the Economic Club members so they decided to let the world know that they were going to stand firm by having George W. do a press conference that would be broadcasted around the world.
I had to grin seeing George W. doing his phoney folksy act for the camera saying that like others he can remember worrying about having to pay off his house-as if the son of a son of a millionaire ever had to seriously worry about his mortgage-and yes he could feel for those people-a hundred thousand of them so far- who lost their houses but the market must be allowed to correct itself without interference-as in you’re going to lose your house cause we don’t want to lose any money so just quit your whining and go borrow some more money somewhere..don’t know where..not from us..see you in the mall..
I had to grin when I heard the warm(as warm as a banker can ever get) applause from the members assembled in the richest most powerful city in the richest most powerful country soon to lose its own credit rating.
The Chinese must be grinning too.
Time to cash in those American dollars.

what I am really thinking about the response to 'What I Was Really Thinking On The Night I Went To See Toni Nardi's 'Letter Two' Show

2008-03-11T16:55:00.000-07:00

Ray
I polished up the "What I Was Really Thinking On The Night I Went To See Toni Nardi's 'Letter Two' Show" and it reads out well as a poem I didn't mean to write and usually my best poems are the ones I didn't mean to write-read it out loud for full effect
Got the impression from lack of general response that most readers thought I've become unhinged not realizing that me being unhinged goes back too far and deep to even bother to explain to those who couldn't understand what I just said if I got stupid enough to try to explain what they could never understand-but it was stupid of me to send it out to certain well hinged people
Dave

what I was really thinking on the night I went to see Toni Nardi's 'Letter Two' show

2008-03-09T08:02:00.000-07:00

Do I dare not to go out on this evening of impending storm blowing in a forecast of freezing rain and snow and sidewalks potentially a slip and slide down into a cracked hip or broken arm-all this in mind as I head out for the Verdun 107 to take in Toni Nardi's show at the Moyse haunted hall up the hill at McGill telling myself I'll see myself when I get off at Sherbrooke stop if the campus is too iced and snowed for me to navigate my walker with trick wheel that now twists awkwardly up the middle of the street past McGill bookstore on this dark but not yet stormy night chill of frost and the weight of the past with my only last candle flickering still alive although no longer sure how much longer I can keep the focus required to keep myself from just one slip and slide away from utter catastrophe inching up an icy incline to the side door of the Leacock building dream on design made by New Age architects when they still had cutting edge glint in their eyes of a utopian future but how dim the future broods now in heavy concrete shade of neon with my memories no longer there on the bulletin boards of socialist meetings grim in unsmiling classrooms of going nowhere 1980's and 1990's in strange don't want to remember dead ending corners and how come I never noticed yes up there the decorative mobiles that have been hanging for decades of Icarus in disattachment from his wings falling with bland impassive face in predicted predestined part of the curriculum falling on schedule while I maneuver whats left of me hunched over to 1st floor marbled sanctum of Art's building with doors open to the Moyse Hall doomlike with sweetening scent of mouldering deceits where lingering students escorted the crippling me tottering up and down fall-of-the-house-of-usher auditorium stairs katunk-katunk with walker making an ungraceful and unwarranted and totally unacknowledged entry of yes we know its you the artist formerly known as Dave Fennario taking a back seat facing the closed curtain and podium and small audience of proven prerequisites waiting to be told what they already know with smug set lips and indistinguishable non gendered eyes wide shut there not to see a show rumoured to be a secret shocking exposee on Canadian theatre by the artist known as Toni Nardi who holds out a hand to me like I'm suppose to be in a rear view mirror but now there in his way clothed in the truth of what I'm hoping he will say behind that pornographic curtain on the snickering stage in words that do slash and flash but alack and alas for the wrong people in the wrong place for reasons beyond reason..
But that's how it starts I tell myself tee-tottering back out into a storm not yet blowing in my face a wild whirl of ill wind that blows nobody but the nobodies any good

Good on you Toni

road runner

2008-03-05T10:37:00.000-08:00

A video seen on CNN of a US marine in Iraq in full helmet gear on a mountain road holding up a whimpering puppy by the shruff,grinning at the camera as if to say-it’s cute eh-and then still grinning suddenly flips the puppy up in the air where it does a comical cartoon spin and turn before plunging over a cliff to its death..oops...want me to do it again?..

the Portrait of Barack Obama

2008-03-04T13:17:00.000-08:00

Despite myself I find myself like a lot of other people wanting to believe that Obama will live up to his promises for radical change if he makes it into the White House.Despite myself I find myself rooting for him against Hilary Clinton in the primary elections hoping that Obama does get the Democratic Party nomination as candidate for President.
Obama is by far the most progressive sounding mainstream American politician and looks perfect for the part.Not like Hilary Clinton who looks and sounds like a CEO with a smile from the teeth out.Not like the Republican candidate John McCain who looks and sounds so utterly falsehearted-Obama looks and sound like a decent well intentioned individual ready to lend a helping hand to all in need.
So the temptation to accept Obama at his word is strong because it would make it all so much easier to believe that there are nice people like him in power who are going to take care of us just like they said they would and save us the trouble and risk and worry of doing something ourselves that might get us all in trouble.
But when I hear Obama talk about shutting down the war in Iraq so we can deploy more troops in Afghanistan,when I hear him hedge on granting full universal health care,when he backs off from shutting down NAFTA,then the same old suspicions creep back into my mind that like Dorion Gray there is a portrait hidden in a closet somewhere that shows the true face of Barack Obama.
The face we’ll get to see if he is elected president

chip off the old block

2008-03-04T05:20:00.000-08:00

Another dramatized version of 'Goodbye Mr.Chips' was recently featured on Masterpiece Theatre,one of many versions done over the years.But,unlike the other versions this one does attempt to place the characters in the context of social issues affecting Great Britain in the Late Victorian period.
Professor Chip argues for a kinder gentler social system based on individual decency and honor.He is seen struggling to humanize an elite institution designed to brutalized the children of the ruling elite,so that they in turn will be qualified to brutalize others in the course of their future careers as masters of the British Empire.
He does his personal best to impress on the young male students the principles of fair play then sends them out into a world where fair play is a platitude used to cover up what's really going down.
A good book to read if you want to find out what Mr.Chips boys were up to after graduating from Eton or Harrow ,is 'Late Victorian Holocausts' by Mike Davis

"Queen Victoria's favorite poet Lord Lytton,as Viceroy of India,on the occasion of the proclamation of Victoria as Queen Empress of India organized a week-long feast for 68,000 officials,satraps and maharajas:the most colossal and expensive meal in world history.An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 subjects of the Queen-Empress starved to death in Madras and Mysore in the course of Lytton's spectacular ceremonial"
-Mike Davis

the Clinton hug

2008-02-28T05:25:00.000-08:00

‘You can have your cake and eat it too’ is a line from a Dylan song that perfectly describes the attitude of the New Middle Class in the late 70’s when they were already becoming part of the privileged elite but weren’t quite ready to give up on their appetites.A few years later they were telling us sorry we’re out of cake but don’t worry its bad for you anyhow.

metro bethune

2008-02-27T16:00:00.000-08:00

There’s a move reported in the Montreal Gazette to change the name of Metro Lionel Groulx in Little Burgundy to Metro Oscar Peterson after the famous jazz pianist.The argument being that it’s disgraceful to have a metro station honoring the racist Lionel Groulx.I have no objection to this but there’s other metro names we should change,like Metro McGill named after the racist slaveowner James McGill.
How about changing Metro McGill to Metro Bethune after Norman Bethune,the doctor who fought for public healthcare?

february thaws

2008-02-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

The first rough raw edges of a February thaw
that always have me thinking of my life
being the first and out of season

The Times they are achanging

2008-02-24T02:37:00.000-08:00

The New York Times exposé on Senator McCain details his questionable relationship with a female Washington lobbyist.Now the Republican Party might have to drop McCain as their potential Presidential candidate.
But there’s no way the Republicans can win the presidency no matter who they nominate because they’re identified too closely with a failing war and a failing economy.
The Democratic Party could nominate Daffy Duck for president and still win.
But why did the NY Times decide to do a critique on Senator McCain?
No doubt a lot of people out there will credit the NY Times reputed liberal stance for publishing the exposé on McCain’s unethical behavior.
But I doubt whether the NY Times would have published this exposé on their front page without the pressure put on them by the ground swell of popular dissent in the US.
After all the NY Times along with every other major newspaper in North America supported the neo-liberal economic and political policies that have turned the majority of ordinary Americans people against the establishment.
That’s what firing up the long defunct and bankrupt pretence of a free press in the US.
The shift to the left of the American people

what they really think of us

2008-02-21T03:32:00.000-08:00

Odi Profanum Vulgus

“Millions of people”she said”swarming like rats,chattering like apes,smelling like all hell…monkeys..or lice I suppose.For one really exquisite palace.. on Long Island,say,or even in Greenwich..for one palace full of pictures from the Old World and exquisite things-with avenues of trees and green lawns and a view of the blue sea,and lovely people about in slick dresses..I’d sacrifice a hundred thousand of them,a million of them”..I care nothing for them-understand me?

-‘The Beautiful And The Damned’ by F.Scott Fitzgerald

catch me if you can

2008-02-16T12:28:00.000-08:00

The Inquiry

Dear David
Hope your workshop went well and was inspiring.Would you be able to send along a bio and a short synopsis(1 or 2 sentences) of ‘Bolseviki’ for us to publicize you on our Montreal Theatre Workshop web site?
Jana

My Response

Canada's oldest fourteen year old runaway currently working illegally under false identity as David Fennario.He describes 'Bolsheviki' as an uplifting heart warming play about a Canadian soldier who decides that Peackeeping means shooting his officers.
Fennario would not give his address

its National Flag Day today

2008-02-15T06:21:00.000-08:00

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
his wellbelovéd colonel
(trigwestpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand; but-
-though an host of overjoyed noncoms
(first knocking on the head him)
do through icy waters roll that helplessness
which others strokewith brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke allegiance
per blunt instruments-Olaf-
(being to all intentsa corpse and wanting any rag upon what God unto him gave) responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"
straightway the silver bird looked grave(departing hurriedly to shave)
but--though all kinds of officers (a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curseuntil
for wear their clarion voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates onhis rectum wickedly to tease by means of skilfully appliedbayonets roasted hot with heat-Olaf
(upon what were once knees)does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"
our president,being of whichassertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitchinto a dungeon,
where he diedChrist(of His mercy infinite)i pray to see;
and Olaf,toopreponderatingly becauseunless statistics lie
he wasmore brave than me:
more blond than you.

- E. E. Cummings

valentine greetings

2008-02-14T06:52:00.000-08:00

Cupid with a raised fist on a card that reads:

SMASH
THE STATE

DECLARE
THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

(and be mine tonight)

veltpolitik

2008-02-13T04:50:00.000-08:00

Obama wins big in last night’s primaries with the glow of power shining in his eyes
Slick Willie’s best move?
Get Hilary to sign on as vice-president on the good chance that Obama will get shot.

freudian slip historicalized

2008-02-10T06:38:00.000-08:00

"..the so-called accidental is the form which necessity hides itself.."
-Frederick Engels

what is to be done

2008-02-05T04:04:00.000-08:00

two thirty in the morning reading the final chapters of ‘Anna Karenina’ leading into Anna’s suicide by throwing herself in front of a train.
I thought of the contrast between the victimized Anna Karenina and the radicalized women of that period,like freedom fighter Vera Figner who spent two decades in Czarist prisons.
They did not throw themselves in front of trains.
They threw bombs at the czar.

we don't need no education

2008-02-04T05:15:00.000-08:00

Hamas cuts a deal with the Egyptian government and they put up the barrier again dividing the Gaza Strip.That’s positive in the sense that a compromise had to be worked out with Hamas,in defiance of Israel and the US,but it cuts against the autonomous mass movement of the Palestinian people.I doubt whether the majority of the Palestinians want that wall back up again.I also doubt whether they’ll put up with the Hamas decision although that remains to be seen.
The way forward for the Palestinians is to link up with the mass movement in Egypt that came out in support of the Palestinians when the Gaza Strip wall was punched through.
It was the mass demonstrations of workers and students organized by a coalition of the Muslim Brotherhood and Socialist Alliance that that stopped the Egyptian dictator Mubarak from calling out the army.
This form of mass movement is the social force that has the potential to overthrow the present corrupt regimes in the middle East and create a humane alternative.
While saying this I understand that this sounds abstract or naïve or like antiquated rhetoric to most of my correspondents.
But I’ve experienced and remember well the last time the masses rose up world wide and shocked the shit out of all the experts and pundits who based their analysis on the assumption that change only comes from the top.
And the punching through of the Gaza Strip wall into Egypt by the Palestinian people,starved out of food and fuel,has the feeling of those first inarticulated riots of the early 60’s here in Quebec.
Soon we could be seeing the organized expression of that inarticulated rage and it’ll be far to the left of Hamas

fame

2008-02-03T05:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve been feeling lately that I will be remembered like a brand name
They will say it’s like a Fennario
Not that I give a shit for all that although yeah I suppose I was hungry for fame when I was young and still impressed by the people who decide who gets famous
Now I would be honored to be forgotten by them

one for the road

2008-02-02T06:11:00.000-08:00

The cold dark street corner lonesome sound of a late night jazz saxophone
Mountain street & Saint Antoine 1966
Rockhead’s Paradise
Rufus Rockhead himself serving me draft beer with his best social behavior smile
midnight hour last call
what are you doing here white boy?

caliban

2008-02-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

My relationship to books unusual because of the lasting impression made on me that they were written by middle class people who did not like me
I am still that boy they tried to keep out of libraries
I am the enemy of those who taught me to read and write

blowin' in the wind

2008-01-28T05:43:00.000-08:00

Are You Listening?

A media observer quote on the Palestinians punching a hole through the wall in Gaza
”I suppose it means the Israeli strategy of starving the Palestinian people has failed”
An obituary page quote in the Gazette on the death of Indonesian dictator Suharto
“Ruled For 32 Years:Slaughtered thousands but helped country grow”
A quote from Obama in a televised speech after winning the South Carolina primary..
“Its not a war between the rich and poor..”

So..
Starving people is a government option in a democracy
Killing thousands of people can be an economic asset
None of the above is happening

better than I remember

2008-01-27T07:01:00.000-08:00

Frowning my way through yet another revision of a text when a poem bty Dylan Thomas came to mind

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart

its nothing personal

2008-01-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

Human beings in an inhuman system based on profit not people.Those that benefit from the system are usually more inhuman than those that suffer from it.A routine systematic insensitivity that is a class characteristic.
Take a number and get in line

shakespeare he's in the alley

2008-01-23T17:52:00.000-08:00

Shakespeare wrote his plays because he believed that the world was not a good enough place for his magnificent people.Yet he offered no solutions to their problems.
‘Romeo & Juliet’.
When the lovers die the businessmen are shamed or moved into reconciliation.But the peace between the Montagues and the Capulets will not survive the next business crisis..
‘Titus Andronicus’.
The excesses of Titus are a small town scandal compared to the Nazi death camps.How much trouble it costs Lear to learn the simple lesson that those who try to leap over the grave fall into it.All the victims of Shakespeare’s play would not fill one of your death pits.How small his world.How unambitious his villains.King Richard the Third with his little princes,his brother,a few officers and a little army-for one crown and a few years in office to protect his life in office.Yet to protect their way of life,to make it possible for them to go about their business and enjoy their pleasure, millions have been slaughtered in this century.
Compared to the vast multitude of dead they make to protect their way of life,Richard was a child sitting on the floor playing with a doll.
‘Macbeth’
Is this a dagger that I see before me?I look up and above me screams a jet armed with nuclear weapons-one of them on practice alert.
-Edward Bond

I wish the woodcutter would wake up

2008-01-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

This poem by Pablo Neruda comes to mind as the American casualty rate in the Iraqi War nears 4,000.

I WISH THE WOODCUTTER WOULD WAKE UP
West of the Colorado River there's a place I love. I take refuge there with everything alive in me, with everything that I have been, that I am, that I believe in.Some high red rocks are there, the wild air with its thousand hands has turned them into human buildings. The blind scarlet rose from the depthsand changed in these rocks to copper, fire, and energy. America spread out like a buffalo skin, light and transparent night of galloping, near your high places covered with stars through acrid Arizona and Wisconsin full of knots, as far as Milwaukee, raised to keep back the wind and the snow or in the burning swamps of West Palm, near the pine trees of Tacoma, in the thick odor of your forests which is like steel, I walked weighing down the mother earth, blue leaves, waterfalls of stones, hurricanes vibrating as all music does, rivers that muttered prayers like monasteries, geese and apples, territories and waters, infinite silence in which the wheat could be born.
I was able there, in my deep stony core, to stretch my eyes, ears, hands,far out into the air until I heard books, locomotives, snow, battles, factories, cemeteries, footsteps, plants, and the moon on a ship from Manhattan, the song of the machine that is weaving, the iron spoon that eats the earth, the drill that strikes like a condor, and everything that cuts, presses, sews: creatures and wheels repeating themselves and being born.
I love the farmer's small house. New mothers are asleep with a good smell like the sap of the tamarind, clothes just ironed. Fires are burning in a thousand homes, with drying onions hanging around the fireplace. (When they are singing near the river the men's voices are deep as the stones at the river bottom; and tobacco rose from its wide leaves and entered these houses like a spirit of the fire.)
Come deeper into Missouri, look at the cheese and the flour, the boards aromatic and red as violins, the man moving like a ship among the barley, the blue-black colt just home from a ride smells the odor of bread and alfalfa: bells, poppies, blacksmith shops, and in the rundown movies in the small towns love opens its mouth full of teeth in a dream born of the earth.
What we love is your peace, not your mask. Your warrior's face is not handsome. North America, you are handsome and spacious. You come, like a washerwoman, from a simple cradle, near your rivers, pale. Built up from the unknown, what is sweet in you is your hivelike peace.
We love the man with his hands red from the Oregon clay, your Negro boy who brought you the music born in his country of tusks: we love your city, your substance, your light, your machines, the energy of the West, the harmless honey from hives and little towns, the huge farmboy on his tractor, the oats which you inherited from Jefferson, the noisy wheel that measures your oceanic earth, the factory smoke and the kiss, the thousandth, of a new colony: what we love is your workingman's blood: your unpretentious hand covered with oil.
For years now under the prairie night in a heavy silence on the buffalo skin syllables have been asleep, poems about what I was before I was born, what we were.
Melville is a sea fir, the curve of the keel springs from his branches, an arm of timber and ship. Whitman impossible to count as grain, Poe in his mathematical darkness, Dreiser, Wolfe, fresh wounds of our own absence all bound to the depths, how many others, bound to the darkness: over them the same dawn of the hemisphere burns, and out of them what we are has come. Powerful foot soldiers, blind captains, frightened at times among actions and leaves,checked in their work by joy and by mourning, under the plains crossed by traffic, how many dead men in the fields never visited before: innocent ones tortured, prophets only now published, on the buffalo skin of the prairies.
From France, and Okinawa, and the atolls of Leyte (Norman Mailer has written it out) and the infuriated air and the waves, almost all the men have come back now, almost all . . . The history of mud and sweat was green and sour; they did not hear the singing of the reefs long enough and perhaps never touched the islands, those wreaths of brilliance and perfume, except to ddung and blood hounded them, the filth and the rats, and a fatigued and ruined heart that went on fighting. But they have come back, you have received them into the immensity of the open lands and they have closed (those who came back) like a flower with thousands of nameless petals to be reborn and forget.
(1948)

children have to learn how to lie

2008-01-19T06:25:00.000-08:00

The people I feel closest to are those who never learnt to lie
My mother never lied
My father never lied
Maybe that’s why I dislike most middle class people I meet
Middle class relationships are based on lies
Everyone must lie if they want to get ahead
But we tell the truth down on the Avenues
We have to be truthful to each other or we won’t survive
Solidarity is our security
Of course we all lie to the landlords and the bosses
Telling the truth to them would be a form of lying

my first metaphor

2008-01-18T05:58:00.000-08:00

I remember when I was a very young boy being taken to see an oldtime western film by my older sister Peggy Ann at the Fifth Avenue church basement.
I forget everything about the film except for one scene where a little boy that died was buried out on the lone prairie with the covered wagons moving in a trail of dust.
Sad,I knew that was the word for what I was feeling,sad
But there was something else I was feeling but I couldn’t find the word for it.
Finally after being poked and prodded by my older sister now curious to know what I was feeling, I said”Uh..its like..like..dumpling stew”
She frowned and snorted
“Dumping stew?..that’s..that’s just stupid!”
Dumpling stew was what my Ma used to serve on a Wednesday night in the wintertime.
It was a watery mush of everything left over that we couldn’t even pretend to like.
But my Ma would insist that we should like it cause she spend a lot of time making it.
And that’s the way I felt about the film I saw
I was suppose to like it but I didn’t.

joels' 40th birthday

2008-01-16T04:15:00.000-08:00

Liz was 17
I was 21 when he were born
Liz in contractions on the rooming house bed with Babette the downstairs janitor phoning for help and a cop showed up looking down at Liz moaning from the doorway and said nothing not to her or to me
just walked away
can’t remember how we got to the hospital but there a doctor eyeing my shoulder length hair said what are you doing here and security came and asked for ID of the father to be
I remember him in a blue blanket with red wrinkled face of a new born and my skinny long fingers
I thought it was the last time I’d ever see him

what Jane said

2008-01-14T05:35:00.000-08:00

"It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity:they must have action and they will make it if they cannot find it.Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine,and millions are in silent revolt against their lot.Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth" -"Jane Eyre'

what did I want

2008-01-13T08:06:00.000-08:00

A twenty minute memorial walk over to the apartment house at no. 5 Third Avenue forty five years later with little change to four story building of rotting window sashes with same closed smell in foyer entry of dead end air with the storage garage more rusted but still there on the side in the back where I flamboyantly climbed up from clothesline pole to the slant of the roof because I wanted to show I could be over and above what was supposed to be happening
But nobody cared nobody looked nobody even remembers a memory of me sitting up there in searing hot sunlight feeling permanently misplaced
Look at the determination on my face in family photo taken a few weeks later totally ignoring the focus of the camera as if I was already gone and anyhow knowing it didn’t matter not really to anyone whether I was there or here or anywhere and knowing this liberated me from caring
I was going to get what I wanted
What did I want?
Not to be alone
Not to be alone
Not to be alone

hilary with a heart

2008-01-09T07:24:00.000-08:00

Hilary Rodham Clinton wins with a smile full of teeth beating Obama in the New Hampshire primaries.They’re calling her the new born again Hilary with a heart,”now speaking in her own voice”,according to the media pundits who long ago forgot what that means themselves.
When’s the last time any of them exactly ever knew whether they were being real or not when their whole existence depends on denying whats really happening
Obama is not into pretending to be real because he’s fooled himself and a lot of other people into thinking he’s not just another corporate hologram,he really is real
But he’s way way out there
Its a film about a film about a film about a guy in a film who thinks he's real

the american way

2008-01-08T15:38:00.000-08:00

We cab it up to the Treatment Centre cause of my sore back and ask our black taxi driver en français if he thinks Obama will win in New Hampshire where the second primaries are happening.Yes he says but he’s not sure if Obama will win the presidency.He agrees that in the States politicians who say that they have a dream,even if its only a little one,usually end up shot.

Un Noel

2007-12-30T13:51:00.000-08:00

Un Noël
David Fennario
Traduit par J.H.

On était déjà allé au salon funéraire pour rendre hommage à Sue Tyseck, morte d’une overdose, mais on a quand même décidé de se rendre pour la messe à l’église Willibrord, malgré le froid de chien. On marchait le long de l’avenue Verdun en s’attendant à voir une quantité industrielle de lumières de Noël, mais c’est à croire qu’il y en a moins, moins qu’avant, les rues sont beaucoup moins illuminées, ces rues qui étaient célèbres pour leurs décorations de Noëls éclatantes.
À l’entrée du métro Verdun il y a du monde - une cinquantaine de personnes- qui fait la file devant la van d’urgence de l’armée du salut où des aliments de chez IGA sont distribués dans des sacs de plastique.
Liz, qui voit ça pour la première fois, est pas mal surprise.
« C’est devenu si pire? »
Un peu plus tard, ces mêmes gens se pointent à l’église avec leurs sacs IGA entre les mains, l’air un peu confus, pas très allumé pour ne pas dire éteint.
« Ce sont les dopés qui habitaient dans le même édifice que Sue » Nous dit Elsie qui est à la porte pour nous accueillir, la première à arriver pour la messe et suivie, ensuite, de Kelley avec son bébé en habit de neige usagé, son mari qui bégaie et à qui il manque des dents d’en avant.
Assis sur un des bancs d’église, on salue d’un hochement de tête tout en en écoutant l’écho de la voix du père Joseph Cameron qui cite le prophète Elijah d’un ton morne. Soudainement, le prêtre dit : « ceci va vous paraître étrange, mais les toilettes sont en bas, à votre droite. » Puis il reprend son sermon sur un ton de rituel aplati.
Les dopés, eux, ils ont compris et se faufilent clopin-clopant dans l’allée, s’arrêtant pour saluer Kelley et sa petite tout en s’agrippant à leurs sacs de chez IGA et c’est là que ça finit par ressembler à une scène de noël avec trois Rois Mages pas très sages qui bénissent l’enfant.
« Dans l’étable, pas de berceau de pour le bébé. »

Le nom de Sue Tyseck est cité par le père Joseph Cameron, un nom parmi une longue liste d’âmes perdues en écho alors que les paroissiens habituels font la file pour communier. Les visages demeurent les mêmes, avant et après la dégustation de l’hostie, qui, miraculeusement, s’est transformée en corps du Christ.
Il est certain que les dopés seraient restés plus longtemps, si ce miracle avait produit des frites – sauces au lieu d’une gaufre assez mince pour voir au travers.

camouflage colors

2007-12-30T09:44:00.000-08:00

I saw it happening before my eyes the other day when sitting on the Verdun 107 bus passing under the CNR viaduct with a freight train passing over head and on each freight rail flat an armoured truck in camouflage colors,dozens of armoured trucks heading east to Halifax and from there most likely to Afghanistan.
Do you know how much those thousand ton suckers cost?
About half a million each plus cost of transport plus cost of fueling plus cost of maintenance plus cost of soldier’s salaries plus the profit the manufacturers make and the cut the Afghanistan warlords get and all to protect the pipeline they want to put through from the new Caspian Sea oil deposits through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian ocean,so the American corporate elite and their junior associates in Canada Britain,France,Germany,Italy and all, can have an alternative oil source to the dangerously unstable Middle East.

Is that what we want them to do with the billions of dollars they cut from our social services?

Time to vote for somebody who doesn’t wear a suit and tie
Time to vote for somebody who really wants what we want

Healthcare not Warfare
Books Not Bombs
No Blood for Oil
Troops out Now

The Haves The Have Nots and Dogs

2007-12-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

There’s an excellent article in today’s Washington Post by Ellen Knickmeyer,about some of her experiences in Iraq as a foreign correspondent.‘The Haves,the Have Nots and Dogs’ is a breathing living critique of American imperialism by someone living on its cutting edge.A critique that feels like the work of a first rate writer,even though Knickmeyer probably has no pretences about being one.
I’m convinced some of the best writing,the writing that will become literature,is being written by journalists who are trying to tell us whats really happening out there,as it happens.
What passes for literature elsewhere is just the same tired old shit.

xmas story

2007-12-24T09:28:00.000-08:00

On my way with Liz out to get my biweekly treatment up at the Vic plowing through the snowdrifts with my walker when Don our Mohawk neighbor-the guy who always yells ‘Joe Beef’ at me-stops his car and says get in.He’s on his way to the “K’ as he calls Kanawake and says he’ll drop us off at the Atwater Terminus where we plan to catch the 144.
So we’re pulling up at the bus terminus when the 144 pulls out into Atwater-no problem says Don-and swerves in front of the bus,gets out of the car and waves his arms above his Mohawk haircut at the bus driver.
Later sitting on the bus I said to Liz:
“Well I guess when you’ve shut a whole bridge down,stopping a bus in the middle of the street is nothing”

No Sympathy for the Devil

2007-08-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

Back in the 60’s there was a lot of talk and pretence of community and solidarity amongst flower power hippies in the mass media that in reality did not exist.Matter of fact there was less sense of community or solidarity in the East Village,Haight-Asbury or Yorkville districts than there was in the suburbs.It was devil take the hindmost on the streets and quite often it was the same devil that had the most beatified smile for the media,talking about love but meanwhile practicing rape.
Love for me became just another four letter word

Regime change in Disneyland

2007-08-08T12:43:00.000-07:00

3,680 American soldiers now officially dead in Iraq four years after George Bush declared ‘Mission Accomplished’

The mainstream media in the US has been going out of its way not to connect the dots but the dots are being connected anyhow.
The solution to the problem is coming into focus.
A protest sign,held up for tv cameras when Bush visited the disaster site of Twin City Minnisota bridge collapse,read:
‘Support the Bridge.Stop the War.’
According to a US federal government survey,it would only take 12 billion to repair the aging infrastructure in the US
The Iraqi war is costing a billion dollars a week,so if Washington declared a three month vacation for the US army in Iraq and brought the troops back home,it would have enough to repair its highways and bridges.

The same thing applies to the war in Afghanistan.
I’m not sure of the exact cost of that butcher bill but for sure we're spending billions of dollars to keep Canadian troops over there in support of a repressive and corrupt government so bad,
it makes the Taliban look good.
Time for the Canadian army to take a three months paid vacation in Disneyland and then use the money we save to totally restore the funding to Education.

Book Not Bombs
Healthcare not Warfare
No Blood For Oil

rage

2007-07-30T06:36:00.000-07:00

‘I do not get angry.I rage.Anger is between individuals.Rage is against the order in which things are.The order that enables the evil to appear as good and which condemns much that is good as evil’
-Edward Bond

seize the moment

2007-04-04T14:18:00.000-07:00

Lots of people use the expression'where did the time go' because time sort of flattens out for a lot of them as they get older.But I think if you don’t just accept reality as a given that can’t be changed,then time slows down because you are there in the moment trying to determine what happens next.
It may kill you before your time but it keep you alive

dejas vu

2007-04-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

Its the twenty fifth anniversary of the British declaration of war on Argentina over possession of the miniscule and remote Falkland Islands.Millions of people could not believe what they were seeingon TV...British warships actually steaming towards the Cape of Good Hope just north of the Arctic Ocean for a do or die showdown in the year of our Lord 1982?
It seem like an abberate throwback to some less civilized time because these kind of open imperialist aggressions just didn’t happen any more. But more than five hundred people died in combat so that Margaret Thatcher's proto neo- Conservative government,could retain control over these utterly insignificant islands.
We couldn’t know it at the time but the Falklands War was no accidental abberation.
The Falklands War turned out to be the first modern deliberate use of military aggression as a routine foreign policy.
It was the real beginning of the 21st century

good morning message for George W. Bush

2007-03-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

The Grand Palace of Versailles

“An elephant made out of cotton..
towers of lace under which satin-heeled
gentlemen sit playing with the bustles
of slightly dessicated Grandes Damns
Good Morning Louis,it’s a fine day
in the mirror

A chaise longue carved
out of the living body of a white leopard
spools of silk placed in buckets
of gilt milk..A three-headed dancer
prancing to the music of a little bell
languidly swung by a Negro with a harelip
Two visiting kings having their canes reheaded
while a painter to the court tints their eyebrows
with the juice of mildly sickening berries
What does Salvador Ernst Matta,Louis?
It’s a fine day in the mirror”
-Patchen

Kenneth Patchen

2007-03-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Patchen died in 1972 at the age of 61 after being bedridden for 20 years with crippling rheumatism of the spine
His poems,at least the ones he wrote back in the 30’s& 40's,are often dialectical explorations of issues seen,like Brecht,from the perspective of a revolutionary
He can be obscure but never literary
His righteous anger liberating
Its like he understood that language has to be used in a different way to counter how words have been misused by bourgeois poets
He’s described on the Patchen webpage as a ‘minor American poet’ by a bourgeois academic
I’d take that as a compliment.

Letter to the Old Men
“What have you left for us to say to you?
What have you done that we can praise?
You stand on the ice of our hatred
Your faces are turned to the wall
You have not long
It is quite late for anger
We have not time to forgive you…”
-Patchen

slapstick

2007-03-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

Charlie Chaplin’s impassive face
the universal mask
that orphans learn to show to the world
Revolutionaries too
Its nothing personal
First comes food,then morality

whatsyournamewhatsyour namewhatsyourname

2007-03-22T11:24:00.000-07:00

Its been years since I had a lost in New York City with my pants falling down dream but here I am confounded again in complicities impossible to sustain in public streets of Manhattan with Joey and Tom who don’t understand
In search for clothes I arrive at building tenement lower east side of legends where celebrity Andy Warhol has media pad away away away up and up flights of flights of littered cluttered stairwell stink into crowded room where the blank eyes of his hipster entourage dead and indifferent remind me why I hate the 60’s
These people only see themselves
I steal a jacket and go down into the street where Joey and Tom stand puzzled by my concerns.
Can’t they see I’ve been exposing myself?

interchangable

2007-03-22T11:13:00.000-07:00

The dead doll eyes of the young professional class,the ones who sit in Starbucks working on their lap tops
They seem to be a growing element
Their eyes interchanagable,a class characteristic
Real estate agents arts administrators military officers Phd professors prime ministers artistic directors doctors lawyers senior reporters newscasters media celebrities security consultants political consultants serial killers
All one and the same person

‘The moon shines with so blue a light
over the city
where a decaying generation
lives cold and evil
a dark future prepared
for the pale grandchild’

miller lite

2007-03-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

Decided this morning to check out Henry Miller again but I don’t like his reactionary undertone nor am I impressed by the realms of boring abstractions that he presents as profound insights.
Miller is usually viewed as an iconoclast but really his political message is tailored made for a whole layer of tenured intellectuals who don’t want to be bothered.
A fashionable pessimism that rationalizes an abstention from participating in the struggles against the masters of the universe.

Ciao Manhattan

2007-03-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

There it is sitting on the shelf of the cd film collection in Verdun library who knows why or how it ever got there
Its a cult classic cinematic look back from 1972 at Edie Sedgwick’s fifteen minute flash of fame just weeks away from her death by overdose
Its like watching the take-outs of a bad home movie I don’t want to remember
The indulgent antics of utterly flatulent people
How glib and trivial they are
How glib and trivial they were
Edie with disconnected eyes and silicone implanted breasts grotesque floundering about
Her voice dragging as she tells in a dead tone how happy and well adjusted she is
Smoking smoking smoking

It’s not meant to be an exposée of the 60’s ’Counter Culture’ but it is

Saint Jacqueline des bins

2007-03-01T09:47:00.000-08:00

A clipping I took from the Gazette in 2004 and placed in my Duplessis Orphans file. An obituary on Jacqueline St.Urbain who was abandoned as a child,left on a doorstep on St.Urbain street down in the redlight district. She was given the name of the street by the nuns who used and abused her as a domestic in an orphanage under conditions of enforced servitude. Finally at the age of thirty seven in 1967 she made her break and became a street activist who participate in occupations and other media profiled protests organized by the Duplessis Orphans A newsprint photo of a tiny old lady with wizened face grasping one of her beloved stuffed animals as well as a picket sign at a demo in support of the homeless. 'Des Bins' thats what they used to call the orphanage where Jacqueline was placed because it always smelt of beans .

Saint Jacqueline des bins

look on the brighter side

2007-03-01T09:11:00.000-08:00

Death even death has its good points
.I mean if it wasn’t for death we’d still have Bob Hope doing those televised traveling roadshows for the American Marines and the ‘Big Mouth’Martha Raye doing those fucking Fixadent commercials
Not to mention Lorne Greene in that forever gone Shakespearian basso doing those Alpo dog food commercials.
Will the real Eddie Murphy please drop dead?

Rainbow for sale

2007-02-24T17:59:00.000-08:00

'Rainbow' is my favorite film on Judy Garland because it doesn’t show the usual cliché image of Judy as the sensitive genius driven by self destructive insecurities,but as an exploited entertainer driven by the real insecurities of being a contract player for MGM Studios in the 1930’s.
It’s a Judy being treated as a commodity to be bought sold or traded on terms determined by businessmen who care for nothing but profits
It’s a Judy being told what to do what to sing and what to say
At one point she is offered the magic shoes she wore in ‘Wizard of Oz’ as keepsakes by an MGM studio official.
“What for?”she says”its just another pair of shoes”

dead books

2007-02-17T14:24:00.000-08:00

Ryerson Room Notes

Havn’t been up on the second floor of Atwater Library since I did a drama course there in 2002 and got too weak to make it up the stairs
Up there at the tip top of the marbled staircase a pillared landing circling around a ceiling skylight that only lets in a milky ghost white light doom of gloom
old old darkbrown decayed left behinds of Anglo Ascendancy Montreal that are for me sinister reminders of the past
Framed illuminated prints of King George V in 1931 and another of Queen Elizabeth 11 in 1953 with a plaque stating “Donated by the Members”
Another framed sepia photograph print of the library staff in 1937 when the library was still called the Mechanic’s Institute
I take a closer look at the faces and sure enough recognize the hard glint in the eyes of the young assistant librarian,Estelle Bentley,who was Head Librarian when I drifted into the place in 1961 looking too obviously like a kid off the Avenues with my DA haircut and collar up like Elvis so obviously I could not be allowed into the bookstacks

Today I had one of the younger volunteer librarians help me up the steps to the Ryerson Research Center Room,housing the personal library of one of Canada’s best known Marxist historians,with large sections on political economy,history of the labor movement and Marxism
Two volunteer librarians were setting up when I entered and during the whole time I was there setting was all they talked about
Not the contents of the books or papers but where they properly belonged on the shelves
The Ryerson Collection itself is interesting but selective in a way that comments only too clearly on the Communist Party’s distorting and deflective take on working class history
Example:
There is a booksize study on the wrecking of the militant Canadian Seaman’s Union by the Canadian government but no mention of one of the CSU’s key organizers Dan Daniels who later quit the CP in protest
Dan told me that when he handed in his membership card,shortly after the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet troops, he ended up yelling at the end of an argument
“Trotsky was right”
Its to Stanley Ryerson’s credit,I suppose,that he did not end up right of center like so many disillusioned ex-CPers but the complete collection of Stalin’s works lined up on the shelf still tells the tale
Dead books in a dying library

cannon fodder a la carte

2007-02-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

3,131 Americans,2 Australians, 132 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, 6 Danes,2 Dutch,Estonians,1 Fijian,1 Hungarian,32 Italians, 1 Kazakh,3 Latvian,18 Poles,2 Romanians,5 Salvadoran,4 Slovaks,11 Spaniards,2 Thai and 18 Ukrainians have died in the war in Iraq as of February 15, 2007, according to a CNN count.
Sort of sounds like a take out order,doesn’t it?..
“Uh,gimme two Danes,two Thais,one Hungarian,twenty six Italians..oh?..no Canadian?.. but you think you’ll have some soon?..

hot Summer

2007-02-14T15:26:00.000-08:00

The following is an analysis on the iraqi war by american historian Mike Davis
He says,amongst other things, that he expects strikes or mutinies in the American army by the end of the summer,a prediction based on fact that a third of the American troops over there are against the war
That would explain why the majority of top officers in Iraq themselves called for withdrawal
They are old enough to remember what happened in vietnam when the American troops starting in 1968,refused to go out on combat duty
The inability of the Washington elite to appreciate whats happening stems from their elitist perspective
They cannot imagine foot soldiers or any of the lower ranks of the lower class actually thinking for themselves and acting in their own interests
Gonna be a hot summer

Socialist Worker 2038, 14 February 2007
Features
Mike Davis on US politics

Not since 1949 has the US foreign policy establishment been so theoretically unified as it is today around the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton plan and the “realist” strategy of multilateral imperialism.
All the leading figures from the George Bush senior and Bill Clinton years are singing in unison – a dramatic contrast to 1968, during the Vietnam War, when open civil war raged in the ranks of the Cold War mandarins.
The neo-conservatives are politically discredited and intellectually marginalised.
Yet their ultimate goal – a military attack on Iran – looks highly likely.
Despite the midterm election victory of the Democratic Party, US policy, for the moment at least, is still being dictated from the bunker.
George Bush junior (the puppet of Dick Cheney) is no more willing to concede defeat or personal error than was Hitler in early 1945.
But what would the victory of the “realist” consensus bring us?
Possibly a phased withdrawal (if that is possible) from the wreckage of Iraq,but an intensified emphasis on collaborative military interventions with Europe and possibly Japan.
Afghanistan – another wrecked country governed by druglords and mass murderers – is the realist utopia,the “good war” that needs to be waged everywhere.
Imperialism
The debate over Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s forced at least temporary reflection on the underlying dogmas of Cold War anti-Communism. Today’s debates are simply about “smart” versus “dumb” imperialism.
The Democrats’ critique of Bush’s policy in Iraq is about reinforcing the larger logic of the phoney “war on terror”,including interventions in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, the oppression of the Palestinians,and so on.
There is another paradox – the vote that gave Congress back to the Democrats was an overwhelmingly anti-war vote, yet – unlike during the Vietnam War – there is no national anti-war movement to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.
The broad grassroots movement that so dramatically contested the march to war in 2002-3 was absorbed into the Howard Dean campaign during the Democratic primaries in 2004 and then liquidated altogether during John Kerry’s presidential candidacy.
If organised anti-war forces have continued to exist in New York,Washington DC and the Bay area,the movement has also lost its national presence and identity.
Hopefully the large and very grave demonstration in Washington at the end of last month – I have never seen American protestors so sober or conscious of the darkness of the hour – is the beginning of the rebirth of a national movement.
Otherwise, the Democrats – the Black Caucus and a few genuine progressives aside – have no more real interest in ending the war than Bush has had in killing or capturing Osama Bin Laden.
Moreover, there is a shrinking and small difference between the Democrats and the Bush regime over Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, etc.
According to one poll, only one third of GIs support the US strategy in Iraq.
Nothing is more unpopular than the extensive deployment of the National Guard in Iraq and the high casualties these “dad’s army” units have suffered.
I live in San Diego, one of the most militarised cities in the country.
I have been convinced by conversations with young sailors and Marines that unless there is some movement toward withdrawal, you will see strikes or de facto mutinies by the end of this summer.
More immediately, there is the defiant symbol of Lieutenant Ehren Watada, the first regular US army officer to refuse to serve in Iraq.
He has refused to serve on the grounds that the war is “immoral and unlawful… and would compel complicity in war crimes”.
His court martial began last week in Fort Lewis, Washington.
It has become the rallying point for anti-war resistance within the military.

Further reading
Mike Davis’s latest book,'Buda’s Wagon: A brief history of the car bomb'is published this month.
Also by Mike Davis:
• Planet of Slums',looks at the growth,development and political implications of the huge slum cities of the Global South.
• 'Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the Third World',charts the role of imperialism and colonialism in the creation of so-called natural disasters in the Global South.
• 'The Monster at our Door: the Global Threat of Avian Flu',is a timely examination of the role of big business and neoliberal governments in the creation of the avian flu crisis.
These are all available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE, phone 020 7637 1848 or go to www.bookmarks.uk.com

contortions of history

2007-02-12T05:14:00.000-08:00

An episode on the History Channel from the ‘Peoples’s History of Canada’series produced by Mark Starowitz,former radical student at McGill.It covers the same historical period of the 1860’s that I examine from a very different perspective in my play “Joe Beef:A History of Pointe Saint Charles”
Starowitz profiles some of the Fathers of Confederation,Thomas D’Arcy McGee,Sir John A. Macdonald,Sir Georges Etienne Cartier,focusing on their private and personal pains.He lingers with soft background music on the sorrow that Sir John A. felt when he lost his first wife and son
No mention of the impersonal and massive suffering of ordinary working class people due to the economic and political policies Macdonald championed in parliament,
policies that lead to the premature deaths of one out of every four kids born in the Pointe
Starowitz presents McGee and Cartier as pristine champions of a united Canada based on equal opportunity
No mention of the fact that both McGee and Cartier were paid promoters of the Grand Trunk Railway,the same company that used the militia to shoot down workers in the Grand Trunk yards in the Pointe when they went on strike for a living wage
He does mention that there was extreme poverty in the 1860's in cities like Montreal but fails to make the connection that this poverty was largely the result of the same people eulogized as Canadian heros
Its no surprise that Starowitz didn't make that connection because if he did,he wouldn't be a television producer.

new york city 1965

2007-02-11T10:23:00.000-08:00

My experience in New York City in 1965?
I swam right into the barricuda’s mouth surprising him into spitting me back out

blue surprise

2007-02-11T09:11:00.000-08:00

Not many people in the EMC theatre last night maybe because ‘Factory Girl’ the story of 60's Superstar Fashion Queen,Edie Sedgwick,got a bad review in the Globe&Mail.
But the director of the film cared about what happened to poor little rich girl Edie and that’s what mattered to me
He took a side
He took her side
Edie was in New York in the Village in 1965 around the same time as me but I wasn’t able to connect
I took my name from one of Dylan’s songs but she went to bed with him
Dylan its seems warned Edie that Andy Warhol was a bloodsucker
She became part of Warhol’s reinvention of Art as a Spectacle
Used up and discarded like an empty Campbell’s soup can
Dead at 28
Nobody in that small audience could know like me what it was like to be lost in New York City
Nobody else remained seated listening to Tim Hardin’s song when the lights went back on
“Hidden in a red balloon
Got a blue surprise
Took the lovelight from my eyes
blue,blue surprise”

class enemies

2007-01-27T11:31:00.000-08:00

I recently checked into the Verdun Library and it seems they’ve cleared out a lot of their old fiction,although some of the collection of Dostoyeski’s works,the Garnett translation,are still there
I probably read through most of that collection in 1962 when I turned sixteen and was finally permitted-officially permitted-to take out books designated for Adult Reading only
But despite being a ‘big reader’ as they say down on the Avenues,I flunked just about everything in school except History and Literature and had to repeat a couple of grades
I remember when I got the required Aptitude Test in grade seven that determined what scholastic level I was to be placed in high school,the teacher remarked,almost if talking to herself,that it seemed strange that my test points for literacy were amongst the highest in the school,because otherwise all other indications had me placed,where I eventually was placed,in one of the lower levels amongst those that would not go onto university
Her remark,made while handing me back the test result,was more a comment on the test result rather than a comment meant for me
“Oh..well..”she said and walked away
Maybe she didn’t have time to be human because of the size of the student load but that didn’t make her behavior any less belittling to me or to herself.
Public humiliation that’s what public education is when you’re working class

Planted Poison

2007-01-23T06:17:00.000-08:00

“Western Fastidiousness Doomed Iraq Mission:
Liberal democracies reluctant to engage in ruthless tactics needed to put down insurgencies”

That’s the headline of yet another poisonous article by McGill Professor of Economics William Watson in the Gazoo on the American mishandling of the Iraqi insurgency.
The Romans knew how to crush popular insurgencies,Professor Watson writes,they simply terrorized the governing elite of the insurgent nations responsible into terrorizing their own population into submission

“The Nazis also”he says ”had relatively little trouble with national undergrounds in the countries they occupied during World War Two.Those thought to harbour resistors were sent to concentration camps or shot outright.Saddam Hussein himself was very good at counter-insurgency.Defy my rule?I will gas you or drain the marshes that provide your food”

Professor Watson goes further to write that of course democracies like the US can’t contemplate such tactics,however tempting,because it would violate their democratic principles.
But didn’t the American ruling elite apply similar tactics around the world against insurgents in Chili,Indonesia,El Salvador,Somalia,the Congo and Vietnam?
Didn’t the American ruling elite supported General Pinochet in Chili during the 70’s when hundreds of thousands of progressive people were shot down,imprisoned and forced into exile?
Wasn’t it the same American ruling elite that financed Saddam Hussein for ten years during the time when he was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis?
And wasn’t Doctor Henry Kissinger charged and condemned as a war criminal for the illegal and unconstitutional carpet bombing of Cambodia?

It isn’t fastidiousness that’s stopping Washington from acting like Saddam Hussein,it’s the fear that there will be wide spread protests,strikes and riots not only in the Middle East but also in the US of A,should Washington unlease the same kind of weaponry in Iraq that killed millions of civilians in Vietnam.
It was the American people that shut down the Vietnam War and all signs seem to indicate that they are getting ready to shut down the Iraqi War too,despite attempts by neo-conservatives like Professor Watson to put forward the question of unlimited military aggression,as if it was a legitimate option.

No Blood For Oil
Books not Bombs
Troops out Now

Literati litter

2007-01-21T07:48:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading through "I Love",an account of the Russian poet Mayakovsky’s relationship with Lili Brik by Ann & Sam Charters
Despite having the amazing opportunity of actually interviewing Lili Brik in her old age,the book is a major disappointment for admirers of Mayakovsky’s work.
It is a trivializing account of the avant garde Futurist poet who was one of the few Russian artists to wholeheartedly support the uprising of the “Dark People’ in the Russian Revolution of 1917 But,according to the Charters,Mayakovsky the idealist tragically wasted his talents and his time supporting the attempts by te Russian people to create a more just society .In their eyes this bad career move would eventually lead him to suicide in despair over lost illusions.
They don’t understand that Mayakovsky felt he had no choice but to kill himself in protest against the very regime that later cynically claimed him as a mythical figure in the Soviet Pantheon of the Arts.
They don’t understand because they assume that Leninism and Stalinism are one and the same thing,when in fact there is a river of blood between the two traditions.
Hundreds of thousands of Bolsheviks like Mayakovsky were already being imprisoned and murdered by Stalin when Mayakovsky died in 1930.
Lili Brik could have been a major source of information on this slaughter had the Charters known what questions to ask,but their distorted perspective on Stalinism blocked that possibility.

I try to imagine what I could have written had I the opportunity to interview Lili Brik in the 70’s as a living revolutionary artist from the same political tradition as Mayakovsky.But living revolutionaries do not get to do books on famous dead revolutionaries
It’s the literati like the Charters that get to do biographies like ‘I Love’ because they got the prestige as accredited academics and scholars along with the resources to finance their research.
Like amateur archeologists wrecking a digging site in their crude search for the inconsequential,they only make it more difficult for others to uncover what really happened.

factory boy

2007-01-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

“The time that Charles Dickens spent at Warren’s Blacking factory is unclear and he himself did not seem to be sure.Recent commentators have varied their estimates between six months and a year,but the real point is that the young boy(twelve years old) did not know how long he would remain in employment.He might,as far as he could see,be thrown away forever.There are occasions in his fiction when Dickens seems to be speculating on what it would have been like to have been left in the factory-particularly in his evocations of those children whom nobody notices who slink through the streets.. ”
-‘Dickens’by Peter Ackroyd

A childhood of abuse and neglect did not make Dickens a revolutionary but to the end of his life,he was never able to forget what he experienced as a child
Even as a rich and famous writer he continued to look at bourgeois society,in novels like 'Bleak House' and 'Our Mutual Friend',with the unforgiving eyes of the injured and insulted.
Dickens is the only one who wrote consciously for the masses from the victim's point of view.

Sociology-911

2007-01-15T10:32:00.000-08:00

War On Terrorism
They lock someone up in a cellar and starve and beat him and then if he gets mean and ugly and vindictive,they blame him

Red Cross calendars

2007-01-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

Received this proposal recently in the mail:

"I am a CBC Radio producer and am working to launch a new program early in the New Year.The show is called This I Believe.I think the program gives you the opportunity to have your voice heard,as one of forty prominent Canadians,in a way that will cause fellow Canadians to pause and reflect on the values we hold dearest as individuals and as a nation.

This is what I wrote and will be reading over the radio sometime in 2007

The Red Cross Calendar Story

This happened to me when I was still in my early teens going to high school down on the Avenues where the teachers never bothered to ask us any questions,just stood at the blackboard blabbitty blab-circumference of a circle blabbitty blab-dangling participle-blabbitty blabbitty blabitty -Ringgg-ringgg-ringg goes the bell
But we had one teacher,just one,the only in my four or was it five?-felt like ten years I spent in that place-one teacher who used to talk with us,I mean really talk and that was Mort Bain,young guy who always had something he wanted to talk with us about,asking us what we thought about this or that happening in the world and sir,we’d say sir Joe Pine says this,sir,and Joe Pine says that sir and Joe Pine was the local right wing talk show host of the time,right-always trashing those welfare bums and immigrants and “You guys are too stupid to live”he’d say ..And then one day-it was during Red Cross Calendar Campaign Week when all the students were asked to buy a Red cross calendar cause one dime will feed a kid in India for a month- one day Mort Bain came in and his face,which was always red was really red and holding up a Red Cross calendar he said
“Ya know the same government that’s got you selling these goddamn calendars for a dime just spent a million dollars to buy the gasoline they need to burn millions of bushels of surplus wheat out in Saskatchewan?..All that food they’re burning it.. just burning it ..Eh?.. as in what do we think?..Well ya know,we didn’t know what to think about a government doing something like that when hey,there we were selling Red Cross Calendars for a dime to feed a hungry kid in India in a month when,hey,the million bushels of wheat that they’re burning could just about feed everybody anywhere forever and so,“Well sir”I said,putting up my hand,”Well why don’t they just give the wheat away instead of wasting it ”
And Mort said well no,they couldn’t give the wheat away,no couldn't do that cause then the price of wheat would drop to zero and the economic system would collapse..what?..
“Then I think”I said,sort of thinking out loud,”I think we oughta get rid of that government”
And all these many many years later,I still believe that

riddle of the sphinx

2007-01-03T12:59:00.000-08:00

I’ve lived with cats all my life and have many fond memories of them so it sort of hurt to finally admit that a friend of mine was right,cats are really not that bright.
I’ve known spiders smarter than cats
The riddle of the Sphinx?
There is no riddle
Its just a big cat laying in the sun thinking about absolutely nothing.

Batman re-turns

2007-01-03T06:25:00.000-08:00

Watching ‘Batman Returns’ set in stylistic big city Gotham of the 1930’s in the cold and chilling fear of the Great Depression
The director Tim Burton captures that atmosphere well without romanticizing it
Imagine a third of the work force out of work with no organized social services
Imagine what that statistic means
People twisted by fear into grotesque caricatures of themselves with faces defined by their desperation and despair
Hard times making people hard
Open class struggle in the streets
Revolution or War
Batman a fascistic hero in the sense of the only hope coming from a millionaire superhero

John Kerry in a mask

elvis would have loved it

2006-12-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

Watching the live performances at the James Brown arena on CNN in Augusta,Georgia with James Brown laid out in his gold coffin and Michael Jackson on stage,the only really white entertainer on the stage
And the black tv news commentator reporting the event? ..the Music Critic for the Wall StreetJournal with Princton University pronounciation.
His low key comments on James Brown a condescending insult to a champion in his time of the black ghettos
Not to mention the Reverend Stapleton’s putdown of hiphop,the music of the James Browns on the street corners of today
Bizarre fucked up stuff
Like a family quarrel being viewed by millions of voyeurs around the world
Elvis would have loved it

encore

2006-12-28T08:15:00.000-08:00

Dear Landlord of Memory Lane:
I remember when James Brown did a no-show at Place des Nations during the 70s. Free concerts in those days, all you had to do was get to the Expo islands with your "passport" in hand. Place des Nations was packed,waiting for The Godfather of Soul to arrive and perform "I Feel Good."

Well, to make a long story. . . and a long wait short. . . James Brown failed to attend his own concert. The audience didn't feel too good about that. Papa had probably found a brand new bag of cocaine -- or some new sex machine in his hotel. It started to rain at around midnight, and so I left a deserted Place des Nations to take the night train home before the subway closed.
I won't say it too loud, but the crowd wasn't too proud of James Brown.
Ray

The right thing

2006-12-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

I decided to pull a copy of 'John Brown's School Days' from a dusty back shelf of my collection
It’s a 19th century best seller exposing the exceptional brutality of private school training for boys in elite British institutes like Rugby
In the first part we get the details of Tom Brown’s ordeal as a freshman subject to the bullying of the older students and in the second part his miraculous rescue from the bullies by a new Headmaster,a zealous man of faith,the celebrated Thomas Arnold
The ever earnest Reverend Doctor Arnold believed that the introduction of a new educational system based on a higher morality would soften the bullying behavior of the elite students in schools like Eton,Winchester and Rugby who were expected to take positions of social responsibility The elite must be taught to do ‘the Right Thing’ but how does one do ‘the Right Thing’ when the whole of it is wrong.

Tom Brown and his classmates were born into a privileged class whose power and prestige was based on the brutal exploitation of working class people and the violent oppression of colonialized persons of color.In 1857,the same year ‘Tom Brown’s School Days‘ was published,British officers during the “Indian Mutiny’ tied Hindu rebels to the mouths of cannons and blew them to pieces
The same officers no doubt read the best selling ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’and went to church every Sunday to sing hymns praising the God of Love and Peace and maybe even made it a point to say a prayer for their victims.

Brecht on morality:

Since every man is good and bad at the same time,the question is rather to know in what and for whom he is good or bad.Only in their social consequences can one judge acts.'

lost his soul

2006-12-27T04:39:00.000-08:00

I never saw James Brown live but my old pal Jackie Robinson taught us all how to do the James Brown spin and once I split my jeans trying to do the splits to ‘Poppas Got A Brand New Bag’ at a dance down in the Pointe.
I still cherish my ‘James Brown Live at the Apollo’ album but I lost a big chunk of respect for the ‘Godfather of Soul’ when he came out for George Foreman in the celebrated 1974 ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ boxing match
All the people in the know figured Mohammed Ali was going to lose to Foreman so James Brown went with the smart money and lost his soul
You got to be dumb to be smart

O Ghosts of Spirits Past

2006-12-26T07:14:00.000-08:00

Hotel Queen Elizabeth Lobby notes:
Easy chairs and fireplace with view out of window of Place Ville Marie with its promises of a future that never happened
cosy comfort décor with soft xmas music,a bourgeois celebration of ‘Home Sweet Home’ with a hollow echo and hidden cameras
one old guy asleeping in imitation Victorian easy chair and awaking up eyeing me with questioning frown
another guy nearby on cell phone speaking in cheery dulcet tenor of a deal in process that will probably impact on lives of thousands
“ ..the Swiss or Londoner?..oh..yes..interesting times.. ..complications..he’ll be back..he’s a businessman.. more money on the side for Stephen.. maybe let George in..of course..that’s understood..”
suddenly next week or next month somewhere in the world another famine or another civil war
reported on CNN
O ghosts of spirits past

tell them you're dave fennario

2006-12-24T12:10:00.000-08:00

I tell Liz I want to go uptown on Xmas Eve to take notes on xmas past and present but probably should go on my own because I just want to sit somewhere for a couple hours in some place like the Hotel Queen Elizabeth lobby
We can’t as usual co-ordinate anything and as usual getting in each other’s way on what’s happening or suppose to be happening while escorting me,a take out Second Cup coffee precariously balanced on my walker seat,into the Queen Elizabeth lobby where we’re definitely being checked out by the staff cause we sure don’t look like we got American Express cards.
Liz straightens out the cuffs on my jeans and then after a kiss on the cheek says-she kills me-she says
“If they come over to throw you out,tell them you’re Dave Fennario and you’re taking notes”

you can join the gang if you find this funny

2006-12-22T12:27:00.000-08:00

I tell Liz my spin on the latest non-news event to get main stream saturation coverage-the three climbers lost and assumed dead on Mont Hood
“I hope it doesn’t discourage other yuppies from making stupid mistakes”

Dr.Strangelove

2006-12-22T06:02:00.000-08:00

Next time you see Doctor Henry Kissinger being interviewed on CNN as an expert on American foreign policy,I want you to think of this quote taken from the White House tapes that were released during the Watergate trials.
This conversation took place in the Oval Office,April 25,1972 between President Nixon,Doctor Kissinger,then Secretary of State and a White House aide

President:How many did we kill in Laos?
Ziegler:Maybe ten thousand-fifteen?
Kissinger:In the Laotian thing,we killed about ten,fifteen..
President:See,the attack in the North that we have in mind..power plants,whatevers left..the docks..and I still think we ought to take the dikes out now.Will that drown people?
Kissinger:About two hundred thousand people
President:No,no,no..I'd rather use the nuclear bomb.Have you got that Henry?
Kissinger:That,I think,would be too much
President:The nuclear bomb,does that bother you?..I just want you to think big,Henry,for christsakes.

In a later exchange Nixon observed to Kissinger:
"The only place where you and i disagree..is with regard to the bombing.You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn.I don't care."
Kissinger responded:
"I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.."

NO BLOOD FOR OIL
TROOPS OUT NOW

21st Century

2006-12-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

If you're safe,you're not alive
If you're alive,you're not safe

good old days

2006-12-18T05:09:00.000-08:00

Imagine if a patient from the Allan Memorial in 1959 said,help me please I’m being tortured by the president of the Canadian Foundation of Psychology,Doctor Ewan Cameron,who is conducting brainwashing experiments financed by the CIA because he wants to win the Nobel Prize.
That patient would have telling the truth.

Christmas Story

2006-12-09T08:41:00.000-08:00

We've already been to the funeral parlour to pay respects to Sue Tyseck dead from an overdose but finally decided to go out on a frosty night to Saint Willibrord’s Church for the memorial mass,walking along Verdun Avenue in the dark expecting to see mass displays of xmas lights along the way,but there seems less than there used to be,a lot less on the Avenues once reknown for being ablaze with outdoor xmas displays
Outside the Metro Verdun station a crowd of people-maybe fifty of them-lining up in front of a Sally Ann emergency foodbank van for the discard food being given out in IGA plasticbags
Liz was shocked,seeing this for the first time
“Its getting that bad?”
Later some of the same people showed up in the church still carrying their IGA plastic food sacks looking dazed and not too brightly lit
“They’re the druggies that lived in the same building as Sue”said Elsie who was the first to show for the memorial mass and then Kelley and baby daughter in secondhand snowsuit and husband with stutter and missing front teeth
We nod hello sitting there in one of the pews listening to the echoing microphoned voice of Father Joseph Cameron quoting the prophet Elijah in a ritualistic drone when suddenly he announces-“This is going to sound strange,but the washrooms are downstairs and to your right”
The druggies took the hint and start shuffling out baggetty raggetty down the aisle stopping to say goodbye to Kelley and baby daughter while clutching their IGA food sacks and suddenly it’s a scene from the xmas story with the three not so wisemen blessing the child

“Away in the manger,no crib for a bed”

Sue Tyseck name gets mentioned by Father Joseph Cameron along with a long echoing list of other lost souls and then the regular parishioners line up to take communion with no visible change of expression before or after eating the wafer that’s been transformed miraculously by the mass into the body of Christ
No doubt the druggies might have stayed longer if that miracle had produced frenchfries and gravy instead of a wafer so thin you can see through it

fault in reality

2006-12-07T04:54:00.000-08:00

2,917 American soldiers officially dead in Iraq and 22,000 wounded
Lots of young guys back in the US of A with arms and legs missing and even more with their brains scrambled

UPI reports:
'As many as 1 of every 10 soldiers from the war on terror evacuated to the Army's biggest hospital in Europe was sent there for mental problems.Between 8 and 10 percent of nearly 12,000 soldiers from the war on terror, mostly from Iraq, treated at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany had "psychiatric or behavioral health issues," according to the commander of the hospital, Col. Rhonda Cornum.That means about 1,000 soldiers were evacuated for mental problems.The hospital has treated 11,754 soldiers from the war on terror, with 9,651 from Iraq and the rest from Afghanistan, according to data released by the hospital.'

The 60’s slogan..”Do not adjust your mind,there is a fault in reality”

digging their own grave

2006-11-17T15:50:00.000-08:00

A decision is made by Washington to send more-not less-more American troops into Iraq?..Didn’t a whole shitload of Democrats just get elected on the promise that the reverse would happen?
Obviously the Washington elite think they can appease the growing anti-war sentiment by publicly opposing the war while privately plotting a determined effort to score a military victory in Iraq
But it’s a doomed maneuver that will only further antagonize the 80% of American people who have not benefited and do not stand to benefit from military aggressions designed to make a few more millionaires into billionaires
More and more the Washington governing elite is exposing itself as a malignant alien force defending interests that endanger the lives of ordinary Americans ,especially now when those interests dictate the legimitization of war as a mean of securing markets
Going to pay big time for this one

Awakening

2006-11-12T10:44:00.000-08:00

Awakening
Maybe I’ll retrace my November walk today from Verdun High School to 260 Second Avenue in memory of the day that John F.Kennedy was shot & killed down in Dallas
I will go out and look for me,the young man with nowhere to become or go to
Never was anybody ever so alone
Never was anybody so out of place
wondering how to make his exit
on November 22 1963
The news hit Montreal just before class was dismissed
The other people in the school corridors were already talking but I couldn’t hear what they weren’t saying cause they couldn’t see the one person who wasn’t supposed to be there
And walking into 260 Second Avenue and going up the stairs to my room
to my room to my room
“Did you hear the news?”my mother said
my mother said
“John F.Kennedy is dead”
he's dead
and then and there suddenly they were all looking from the outside at me
I could be seen

"Are you or have you ever been a Comunist?"

2006-11-12T08:21:00.000-08:00

By chance happening on the Lawrence Welk show,watching a re-run from the 70’s on cable tv. Some of the younger musicians have ‘The Dry Look’ hairdos and sideburns in contrast to maestro Lawrence Welk with hair sculptured by Brylcrem-do they still sell that stuff-‘A Little Dab Will Do Ya”?
But otherwise you'd never guess Woodstock ever happened
The women so very very white and clean with aerosol hair buffos and tranquillized smiles dancing wth daring dash of crinolines like it was still 1941 in Perora,Indiana
Reminding me of Ronald Reagan
Reminding me of Bob Hope
Reminding me of Donald Rumsfeld

A TV program you can't turn off