Anyone reading this blog in Calgary, please join us at the EMMEDIA gallery for some glitch music by Adam Tindale and friends from the Alberta College of Art and Design, and animations by runran.

I stopped by the Kasbar lounge yesterday for the Raving Poets‘ opening night, dusted off an old cutup from trAce days and gave a reading. Thanks to Gordon McRae and the RP band for making space at the last minute, and thanks to the audience for listening to my awkward delivery. The cutup deserved better. I blame the wine.

Tracings #1

We all have opinions,
affiliations, the next opportunity.
I stay up nights increasingly brutal,
stare at the screen and sigh.
Unpostponable blows multiply openly,
words empty of social consciousness.
How often do writers think?
As the world turns,
turning and burning.
Perhaps we don’t notice
the bodies piling up.
Constructing extravagant barricades,
we deserve Empire,
the disenfranchised
milling on the sidelines.
More than anything, I have failed.
At this point, expect nothing.

How to proceed through words?
So much writing because a person is a writer.
Sputter and write pain: unbearable.
Sunflowers overexposure the ear.
No words can be kind.
Dominate a cafe, perhaps.
Imagine a faraway country,
independent, misguided.
Imagine a piece of ourselves,
rich, varied, green and wet.
I desire. I am ashamed.
I worry in the night.
I worry money.
I consume my worth.
Forget the romantics,
give me heart,
fierce love poems.

Tracings #2

first section

Lend me your commonality,
strictly-speaking and finally.
Robin Hood gave a speech.

My hat is not a pear shape,
or meaning anything.
Grammar isn’t viable

See what I mean?
Degeneration scares me.
I notice the mannequin
in the mental ward.

What of my public struggling
to construct eccentric grace,
catch a nice round experience,
trade knowledge to other clues.

I suspect the universe, a secret plot.
I suspect the hokey-cokey.
Assume my concern,
be prepared to stick around.

For a long time it was just
a few lines exhorting
to totally no avail —
almost anything.
Nostalgically, mangoes.
No wonder I feel so out of it.

Speaking of bad writers
(the vast clique) –
how would I know?
I am a malcontent,
the squeaky wheel.
Don’t pay for the rhythm of words:
Hey-Ho, a bear claw to go.

second section

People backchannel yak-yak.
Everything to everybody –
wearisome devolved individuals
delivering specifications.
Perhaps this is just me
spending too much time
in front of a computer,
pixellated around the edges.
I sense the presence of a person
truly and carefully unremarked upon,
hungry for a login/identity.

Choose any given moment,
you are more than a tool,
a state of mind,
a third party intruder.
Reconsider the system,
inform the membership,
start a new topic,
send a cool gift.

I am writing at the cellular level,
reaction as an explosive.
I’m ripped out of context,
shuffled daily, much used –
currently with extremists
who prefer arguments.

Remixed: torn posters on power pole, 13th Ave, Regina.

See Flickr set

Day two of Pemberton Festival 2008. The last of 3 rogue festivals where merchandise vendors had to be creative to survive. An electrifying and hazardous circuit in Baby Bluega, our 1992 Chevy 3/4 ton van. Baby blue.

There are so many people to thank for Jojo’s Emporium’s good season. Thanks to good neighbours Shea & Charlotte for the above picture of your’s truly, and thanks to the folks at Live Nation for being crazy enough to pull it off, birthing pains aside. A special mention to Chuck for taking the piss out of it all.

There is a certain madness required to be a street and festival vendor. One must embrace a gypsy lifestyle, be prepared for sudden shifts in weather, and accept that lions may enter your tent (Chinese Lion Dance - lions are used to awaken Dragons, and they may also scare away evil spirits).

Now comes the Salt Spring Island Fair and a then a prairie road trip to end all prairie road trips. It seems I hit the road out of the womb and it still stretches ahead over the far horizon.

In my time between times I did manage to create a VJ set, available as a download on the R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX site. There are also some slide scans of images taken years ago on my Flickr site.

It’s summer and Jojo’s is on the road.

My partner JoAnn and I returned from Merritt yesterday, after 4 days on the street during The Merritt Mountain Music Festival. We were part of a street mall. Country music. Cowboys and Indians. Literally.

Our tent was across from the Adelphi hotel and opposite Joseph Blazej, a gypsy knife salesman from Slovakia (though he still calls it Czechoslovakia and told us how he escaped to Austria when he was 18). He is also Joseph the Happy Psychic, reads palms and cards.

There were other worthy characters, including the skank Allie Mckraken who one night took her pants down and pissed beside our tent - Merritt’s worst crackhead. A native man named Lorne aka Bad Boy, a street drunk who tries to pace his consumption. “It keeps me out of jail,” he explained one day after his partner was hauled away by the RCMP - constrained in handcuffs and pushed toward the cruiser, he wailed: “Don’t treat me like a dog.” Apparantly, the police were using a cattle truck as a drunk tank.

And the legendary wind - more on the wind later.

This week we’re off to the Vancouver Folk Festival - we’ll setup outside the festival fence on Jericho Beach. My first outside concert in Vancouver since an Easter Be-in back in the late 60’s, with groups like Papa Bears Medicine Show and The United Empire Loyalists. Back then Robson Street looked like Commercial Drive and groups like the Moby Grape were playing the Cave. The Retinal Circus on Davie Street featured My Indole Ring.

These days I create animated VJ sets for electronic music, quite reminicent of light shows from the 60’s, though most nerds would choke before admitting such a thing. On the other hand, the boys I ocassionally gig with acknowledge the influence up front, in the VJ project’s name: Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable - a digital aberration on the scale of it’s 1960s namesake, this circus of light and sound presents itself for your explicit enjoyment; a glut of technology, an overload of the senses, an immersion in an audiovisualscape.

But that’s an entirely different gig, a complete 180 shift from my gypsy lifestyle, working for Jojo.

Next week we setup in Pemberton for Tom Petty, Coldplay and Nine Inch Nails. We’ll finally land exhausted at home in a couple of weeks.

“It’s all good,” as Joseph the gypsy likes to say, even in the face of iffy sales, nasty weather and nocturnal thieves. Joseph sleeps in his van, on top of his knives.