crisis déménagement.

1:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2:

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

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

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

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

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

3:

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

Rebranding the Revolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

even if that person really isn’t so bad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To everything there is a season: churn churn churn.

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

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

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

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

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

Case in Point:

Adam of 100 years ago:

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

Adam's friend of 100 years ago:

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

**

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

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

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

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

**

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

Economies of Scale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider how the financial rewards are framed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss Pacman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I dreamed last night I was on the boat to heaven, and by some chance found a bottle in my fist...

I dreamed last night that I went to see you and I had a camera and I was taking your photo. We were sitting side by side on a bed and you told me you were getting married. You were getting married and you were going to settle there down at the end of a narrow cobblestone street that always seemed to be wet and there was a clock tower looming overhead. I guess, I said, then this is the last time we'll ever be together like this; only just realising at that moment that it was true and this really was the last time. Yes, you said, with a sudden seriousness that locked all the jokes we'd just made and the kisses we'd just shared in an uncrackable safe and flung them down into the sea, this is the last time. With this I woke, dear diary, and set to work instantly uploading my movie.

I never imagined, although I should have known, that the process of editing would take exactly five times longer than the process of filming and that 18 minutes of raw footage can only become 5.4 minutes of raw footage through 10 hours of somewhat stressful (because of the difficulties of working with the editing software) but on the whole generally entertaining work.

And then I came home, just catching a bus, at the end of St. Catherine and Du Fort that took me halfway home at chilly 4am squeezed in against the wall by an old lady who I only gradually realised smelled like dried shit on a cloth and a bus driver who braked so hard that each time the bus stopped I was nearly thrown from my seat. And then at St Laurent and St Catherine, as I lingered a few minutes waiting for the night bus, there was one leggy transvestite wobbling down the street on impossible stilettos with xer legs all but exposed in fishnets and xer ass barely covered by a think slip of black silk.

And then another one came down and cornered a well dressed man and I heard them start to negotiate a price like two seasoned business types and then they turned and the transvestite led the man down into the peepshow booths. And then up by Sherbrooke a man passed with all his worldly things lashed across his spine in a great jangling mess and there were pots and pans and old shoes swinging and grungy on their tattered laces and one of his feet was bound entirely in a nest of white plastic bags and he limped visibly, slowly, dragging himself west with his weight on a twisted walking stick.

My next movie will be better. Next time you will be my wife not someone else's.

click. and wind. and click. et ave, Caesar.

Art by Jennifer Marr

As you know, I host work by my friend Jennifer Marr on my website. Here is some of her recent writing (and she claims she is going to produce more; so if you like it please contact her and encourage her).

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One afternoon, while strolling through the Agora:

1.1 Glaucus: Apparently I am part of a trend that I didn’t even know existed.

Socrates: What trend are you part of that you didn’t know about?

Glaucus: Well, it seems that in reaction to the instantaneous information some people feel compelled to post about themselves on sites like twitter, some people have been doing this thing called slow blogging. Slow blogging is a thing where a person who makes a blog takes their time and really tries to write something long and considered, as opposed to simply blowing out mind farts every twenty minutes or so. The other thing is that these slow bloggers also like to take as long as they possibly can between posts sometimes going so long that their readers are almost ready to give up on the blog and then lo and behold, up comes a new well crafted post that sucks everybody back in.

Socrates: And what is your point?

Glaucus: My point is that this is what *I* do! I must be a slow blogger because I write really long posts and I take way way too much time between each one and everyone who reads my blog always complains that I never write anything! Before I thought I was just lazy, or at best more focused on other matters in my life, but now I realize that I am part of a movement. I belong!

Socrates: I think you are just lazy. Maybe that movement does exist, but you are not a part of it. You are not taking long gaps between your posts because you are trying to make any kind of point; you are doing it because you don’t have the motivation to write anything, or maybe (at best) because you feel like you have something better to do.

1.2. Glaucus: Now look over there, Socrates, do you see those people with the strange hair? Those are Emus, right?

Socrates: No, those aren’t Emus. Those are Floggers. Remember I was telling you about them? They dress up kind just like that and they share photos of themselves dressed up like that.

Glaucus: They look the same as the Emus to me.

Socrates: But the Emus only wear black. They have the same haircut, but they only wear black.

Glaucus: So then how are Emus different from Goths? Don’t Goths just wear black, too?

Socrates: Yeah, but Emus are more emutional then Goths. That’s the difference.

Glaucus: But they have the same hair as these people here.

Socrates: Yeah, kind of. You know what bothers me about these Floggers, though, it’s that they don’t actually have any kind of cause or reason for being. They just dress up that way and then go hang out at malls. At least with some other youth fashions you could say that there was some kind of cause…even Emus, you know, they are like the sensitive kids and they come together because everyone else is beating them up…even Punks, they have some kind of social message they are angry about (however addled it is), but Floggers just have nothing, all they do is use the technology available to them to distribute photos of themselves using the technology available to them while dressing up in stupid clothes. I just wish they were trying to address some social issue, but they really aren’t.

Glaucus: Well they look the same as the goddamn Emus to me.