Tuesday September 20th 2011, 2:09 pm
Filed under: events,news
As part of the global initiative 100 Thousand Poets for Change, I’ll be doing a short reading for the Montreal event at Hurley’s pub this Saturday afternoon. From the 100TPC website:
The first order of change is for poets, writers, artists, anybody, to actually get together to create and perform, educate and demonstrate, simultaneously, with other communities around the world. This will change how we see our local community and the global community. We have all become incredibly alienated in recent years. We hardly know our neighbors down the street let alone our creative allies who live and share our concerns in other countries. We need to feel this kind of global solidarity.
I’m very excited to be participating in this important event, where I’ll be reading an excerpt from the latest fugue, which in itself brought together the words of many disparate writers from across the world. Hope to see you there.
From the epigraph ‘stolen’ from John Berger:
Every form of contestation against this tyranny is comprehensible. Dialogue with it is impossible. For us to live and die properly, things have to be named properly. Let us reclaim our words.
This is written in the night. In war the dark is on nobody’s side; in love the dark confirms that we are together.
We’re very excited to announce the third edition of the Howl concert series, Thursday September 15th at Sala Rossa, featuring Kaie Kellough (spoken word), Matana Roberts (saxophone) and Matthew Shipp (piano). These unique, uncompromising artists will perform solo sets that will expand our understanding of contemporary music while paying tribute to the historic, spiritual, and liberation roots of American jazz.
The Howl concert series has gained a lot of momentum since our first performance at l’Envers last December. We aim to continually highlight fiercely independent art and culture, and draw strong links between it and the important social justice work being done in Montréal and beyond.
I’m currently computerless in London right now (my apologies for the lack of images and brevity of this post), but I thought it would be worthwhile to share the news of the BA & FDA Roundabout show at my Alma mater, the London College of Communication. I was at the private view last night, and it was truly overwhelming (as is London in general, I’m finding) with the sheer scale, diversity and spectacle of the event. Not to mention the incredible talent involved!
The Oddstream festival in Nijmegen brought together an eclectic mix of music, art and education under the loose theme of love and conflict. I’m honoured to have been invited to participate in the festival, helping out with the Memefest workshop and the International Media Training. I met many people during a very intensive week, and have made many new friends. So, first off, many thanks to all those that helped to bring me there, specifically Oliver Vodeb, Doeko Pinxt, and Carola Stahl.
Taking off the rose-tinted glasses for a bit (which is not an easy thing to do considering how much fun I had), it was very unfortunate that more people didn’t turn out. Over the course of the weekend, in front of the stages and on the festival grounds, there was a palpable sense of emptiness. In part this can be attributed to the massive scale of the site, or the electronic music festival that was happening at the same time in Arnhem. As a first festival, this is to be expected I suppose, but it also raises some critical questions, as Sandy Kaltenborn brought up during the Inspiration day. What does this area of “cultural transformation” mean to the city, and what is the festival’s relationship to city marketing and gentrification more generally. Who stays and who goes? It will be an interesting question to ask a few years down the line, if the bills get payed.
Produced by the international media crew here at Oddstream, including remixes of my work. I’m very honoured. Paulo and I pushed the idea of abstract documentary and holding the shot too long, and I think the end result works really well!
I’ve been in the beautiful city of Nijmegen for four days now, and the Oddstream festival is getting underway. It’s been an exciting and busy time as I’ve been jumping between mentoring an amazing group of international media students and activists while also participating in Memefest‘s Mapping Socially Responsive Communication workshop. The evenings have been spent reaquainting myself (ie. drinking and drinking some more) with some old friends and collaborators (from declarations days!) and meeting many new ones. My head is swimming, and though genuine insight has yet to set in, I wanted to get some words and images out nonetheless.
After the festival, I’ll be heading to Slovenia with the Memefest crew to celebrate Oliver and Vida’s wedding!!! (and stalk Slavoj Žižek) I’ll then be heading to Berlin for a few days before rounding off my trip in London to see dear old friends from LCP. If you’re around these parts, and want to see me, hit me up!
I’d been waiting to see my favourite band in the world, Godspeed You! Black Emperor for well over ten years. I had given up hope when the hiatus that began in 2003 seemed to spell the end of the band until they announced last spring they were reforming. I was ecstatic then, and I am ecstatic now. I finally got the opportunity to see them, not once, but twice this past week and was completely and utterly blown away.
