Highway Death; Cast Adrift and the Bosco Verticale: a review of the Plastiscene Reading Series for Sunday, February 21st

           

            By Sunday it had been two days since my cat Daffodil had been away. Hopefully she’s all right and she’ll find her way home. She’s sixteen years old and has been out on that roof a considerable amount of times over the years so she should know how to find shelter out there or to come home.

            I read for a second time “Good and Evil, Good and Bad”, the first essay from Friedrich Nietzsche’s “A Genealogy of Morals”. It seems to be mostly about how weak the members of our society have become since Christianity has had control over it.

            On Sunday evening I was riding east along Bloor on my way to the Plastiscene Reading Series when a young man passed me. That was fine because he probably had a lighter bike than mind, but when a few seconds later his girlfriend passed me in her effort to keep up with her beau’s bike, I wasn’t going to stand for that. If a guy’s girlfriend passes me it makes me feel old, which is something I don’t want to feel till I AM old. So far women rarely pass me unless they are either athletes; obsessively gung ho girls on super light bikes; putting on the steam just to pass me and then slow down (I assume because they want to show me their asses); or if they are keeping up with a boyfriend. I suspect that when the latter are riding alone they don’t care about keeping up. I charged ahead of them between Dovercourt and Ossington.

            When I got to the Victory Café I wasn’t surprised to find the door to the second floor locked, so I went back downstairs to wait in the entryway. A woman I vaguely recognized from a previous night at Plastiscene came out of the main bar. She asked if the door upstairs was open yet and I told her they never open it right away. I asked her name and she told me it was Sophie, then I introduced myself. I asked if she was from South Africa because that’s what I picked up from her accent but she informed me she was English but that she was raised in East Africa and went to boarding school there, so her accent was a mix. I was about to say that there are boarding schools in Canada that seem to give their students British accents, but before I had a chance, Cad came out from the main bar, saying that Plastiscene had already happened in the late afternoon. He said Margaret was in the main bar and she’d gotten an email that it was happening at 16:30. I accused Cad of always having the wrong information, since last time he’d come out and declared that someone had told him that Plastiscene wasn’t happening that night at all, though it did. A guy came out from the main bar that seemed to be attached to Sophie, and they went upstairs to wait for the door to be opened.

Cad was cold standing by the entrance so he suggested we go into the main bar. Margaret Code had a table to herself by the window and so we joined her. She said she had gotten an email from someone earlier that day informing her that Plastiscene would be happening at 16:30. She told us she’d been there since that time. I suggested that whoever sent the email might have misunderstood the 24-hour clock, thinking that 16:30 was the same as 6:30 p.m. instead of 18:30.

I’d gotten a message from Nick Cushing before leaving home, saying that he might come to Plastiscene for a while, since he was in town from Hamilton. Cad confirmed that Nick had called him to tell him he would be there.

Cad said, “Nick dropped Bruce March off at …”

“At Sunday school” I said.

“Sunday school?”

“Yeah”, he goes to the Depressedbyterian Church. You didn’t know that?”

I said, “That’d be a good name for a band!”

“Depressedbyterian?”

“Reverend Beverage and the Depressedbyterians.”

Nick arrived and sat with us.

Cad was talking about a friend of his whose wife doesn’t like him. I asked if any of his married friends’ wives like him. He answered that none of them like him.

Nick explained that women become the gatekeepers of their husbands’ social lives, especially when they have friends like Cad.

Nicki Ward, the hostess of Plastiscene, hooked her phone up to the amplifier and played some choral music by Mozart.

Nick went downstairs to buy a beer and Cad went out in the hall to use the washroom. The Victory Café has a very inconvenient set-up. Although there is a bar upstairs they do not always have a bartender working there and so people have to go down to get their drinks. The waitperson will bring them ordered food though. As for the washroom, I’ve seen women climb the stairs from the main floor to use the washroom, so I don’t know if it’s just a way to avoid a line-up or if there is no washroom on the main floor. 

Nicki began playing Middle Eastern music from her phone.

Nick returned with a beer, commenting that the stairs was really going to cut down on his drinking.

Cad told me that JewsNews pays him to post their articles on Facebook. I said, “Then since ISIS is paying JewsNews, ISIS is paying you!”

“ISIS doesn’t pay JewsNews!”

JewsNews is the most reprehensible online news service that I have ever come across. There’s nothing wrong with being right wing or even extremely right wing as long as one is posting arguably factual information. But what JewsNews often does is to post photographs they’ve stolen from other sources and then they make up a story around it that attacks Muslims. One example is when they posted a ten-year-old picture of a little girl that had been mauled in the face by a pit bull terrier and claimed it was the photo of a little European girl that had been sexually molested by a Muslim refugee. Cad consistently posts these JewsNews articles on his Facebook Timeline and since it’s time consuming to disprove the claims the headlines are making, I don’t often bother. But almost every time I do, I find that the real source of the photograph has nothing to do with the anti-Muslim slander of the headline. For instance, one photo showed a pretty young well-dressed blonde woman being spat upon by a dark haired young man, while some other men were looking on. The claim was that this took place in Sweden and that these were Muslim refugees having their way with Swedish hospitality. I tracked the photo down to Austria, a few years before. What really happened was that there was a Communist protest taking place outside of a highly upscale annual ball. The blonde woman was on her way into the dance when one of the protesters spat at her. I’m only half joking when I suggest that ISIS pays JewsNews to make these kinds of posts. The thing is that when people see a photograph accompanied by a headline that looks like it is describing what’s going on in the picture, most of the people that read these posts think that it’s real news. Hence there are thousands of people that believe that Syrian refugees are at this minute storming through the cities of Sweden like hordes of Vikings, raping and burning as they go. It seems to me that encouraging non-Muslims to hate Muslims plays right into the hands of ISIS, since an alienated Muslim may be ripe for the picking by radical Islamic groups.

Cad told me that ISIS exists because there are too many homosexuals in the world. He explained that Gay sex used to cause “tseptsumis” but now it causes Islamic terrorism. “Tseptsumis?” I asked. He said, “Whatever they’re called.” “Do you mean tsunamis?” I asked. “That’s it!”

Nicki was playing Moe Koffman’s “The Swingin Shepherd” when she announced that the open stage list was ready for sign-ups. I approached Nicki and she said she’d write my name down. Cad got up to sign up and came back complaining that he’d had to write his own name. “Ya have ta do everything around here!” he grumbled, “Ya have ta write yer own name on the list and ya have ta read yer own poetry!”

Nicki played “Changes” by David Bowie.

We started a little after 18:30.

Nicki described the Plastiscene Reading Series as being, “eclectic, in a mainstream kind of way. We’re accessible! One of the things we do” she continued, as she looked directly at a small group that were chatting loudly about five tables back, “We listen!”

With Susie Berg’s help, Nicki went through a list of the art councils that are currently supporting Plastiscene.
            “Ontario?”

“Check!”

“Toronto?”

“Check!”

“Canada?”

“No comment!”

The guy sitting with Sophie declared, “Stephen’s left, so it’s all gone to hell!” He had to explain to Nicki that he meant Stephen Harper. And I’m pretty sure he was also being sarcastic about Harper’s patronage of the arts.

As she usually does, Nicki called me to the open stage first. I’d brought my guitar this time and I performed my translation of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Jeunes Femmes et Vieux Messieurs” – “ … Before there’s a chance to put a wrinkle in her lace by laying her down upon your bed, first of all you might have to lay down her name on your last will and testament. Young women and older men! If she’s flat broke, well, it’s not important! Young women and older men! Cause he’s got enough dough for both of them …” I fumbled my guitar chords on the same transition twice. It’s funny, because I’ve played that song flawlessly at home more than a hundred times each in French and English, and if I screw up it’s occasionally on the words and not the chords. It just goes to show how different the context of playing live is in comparison to practising at home. I admit that I do get nervous just enough to push Murphy’s Law into effect. I would probably need to put in a lot more live playing before I can play as confidently in front of an audience as I do at home, and I really only get that kind of practice during the summer.

After me, Nicki invited Cad to read. I had planned on getting out my camera and trying to shoot a video of him but he was too ready and started reading from his phone right away – “What are you livin for? You’re nothin till your dead! … You have to be somebody to be here …”

Next was a poem from the hat, brought in by one of the featured readers and read by an audience member. This one was Carolyn Smart’s “Clyde at Buster’s Party” – “ … when she walked in the air itself just turned to somethin new, blonde hair flyin firecracker eyes explorin everythin & when she seen me, her face it just blossomed with clear intentions …  she was quick as a hiccup …”

Then, Nicki asked Margaret how she was feeling and Margaret, getting ready to get up, said, “Fine!” “Good!” replied Nickie, “Could you ask Sophie to come down please?”

Sophie read two poems. The first was called “Thoughts on a Parallel” – “This time … this immediate living … kaleidoscope … where we live our bliss … Open arms that are each other … Which unspent fury? … Which lives are ours? All … The parallels right here … What unbound possible? …”

Sophie’s second poem was entitled “Nightingale: after John Keats” – “The night wanders as if … itself bewitched … the sky breaks in great darkling dreams … as if I cannot live without this beautiful … there rises … a flighting joy … this song bliss … brings a dream … When I take this last breath softly … what joy to think … in death I will fly at night …”

Perhaps as an apology for the tease, Nicki asked Margaret Code to the stage after Sophie. She read two poems as well. The first was based on a writing challenge on the theme of “I never saw it coming” – “I’m going for a walk … Where’s my key? … What will you do at the traffic lights? … I want to go alone … Alzheimer’s, I never saw it coming, I don’t see it now.”

Margaret’s second poem was called “Chemistry” – “You walk with my long lost lover’s gorilla gait … spotted your doorknob knees … don’t know your name, but I love you.”

For the next reading we returned to the hat. Someone read a poem with the name “Signs #1”, but I don’t think that the reader gave the author’s name. I thought about asking him when he was finished, but it seemed to me that would have been a good thing for the hostess to do – “When stuck to a lamppost, lift plough blade … we long to lift the purple from the plums … we are not standing at any time … have you considered the gravity of holes … we can only stand unumbilicaled … so we await the violence of ploughs …”

Back to the open stage, we had Lisa Richter reading two poems. The first was called “Inscriptions” – “At your father’s beach house near Shediac … slivers of bottle glass … the words from blacked out text the wind redacts. Lisa’s second poem was “Blinded Date” – “The treadmill of talk begins its grateful decline … I search for artefacts … concert t-shirt of a band I’ve never heard of … and just like that we’re back to the weather …”

The final poem from the hat was “Graduation Notes” by Sonia Sanchez – “ … Tired of tiny noises your eyes hum a large vibration … At this moment your skins living your eighteen years suspend all noises …”

This was the end of the open stage. Before introducing the first feature, Christine Fischer Guy, Nicki gave us her own reading of “Clyde at Buster’s Party”, which was the poem that Christine had selected for the hat. She read it in a cartoon southern drawl as only someone from Great Britain can.

In her introduction, Nicki continued on her roll and joked that Christine is a southern belle, fresh from a cotillion. But then Nicki went off on a rant, which may or may not have been serious, about how annoyed she is when people pronounce Austin, as in Austin, Texas and Austen, as in Jane Austen the same way.

Christine introduced the short story, “Salt”, which was the only piece she would be reading, by telling us that she had read it in Austin, Texas, but had o explain to people who the Habs were. She was glad to be reading someplace where the explanation was unnecessary. “Salt” is a short story centred on a couple driving through the night. Michael, who works for Doctors Without Borders, is driving. He is distant and mostly the subject of his passenger’s thoughts. Their journey is showing elements of a recurring dream she’d been having. The Beastie Boys were blaring on the car’s sound system. He would be leaving for Darfur soon. The story flashes back to one of his missions – “He’d driven as fast as conscience allowed … The patient died a mile from fresh saline …” Michael is driving above the speed limit and so they are stopped by a highway patrolman. She lies to the officer that he is on the way to the airport to go on a mission right away and so he lets them go, telling him that they need more people like him. As they drive on she remembers the spontaneous sex she used to initiate with him and wants to do it then and there. “Why waste conversational currency on banal exchanges … The steady, gradual climb of the speedometer … I think I’m exothermic … A deer crossing sign whizzed by …” She remembers an incident where a car hit a doe and the driver was killed instantly – “A dream posing as memory … Reaching into the swollen belly … she swallowed as Michael laid the baby on her belly …” Then a doe steps out on the road – “ … there was a curious lack of echo.”

Christine Fischer Guy tells a story well and makes effective use of shifts from present to past; dream and reality; and internal and outer dialogue. Her prose however is not dazzling and her descriptions are not particularly creative.

There was a break, during which time I looked around to notice that there was pretty good-sized crowd at Plastiscene this time around and that they were mostly quite young. Cad called home and found out from Goldie that she’d thrown up. I suggested jokingly that she might be pregnant and asked how he would react if the baby looked like me. Cad told me what I already knew, that Goldie was post-menopausal, but I argued that a Jewish woman in the Bible got pregnant much older than she did. He said that people lived longer and matured differently in Biblical times. I told him that was a myth and that to say that someone lived hundreds of years was just a way of saying how long their immediate family was prominent, because a family was nothing but the product of its patriarch in those days. He said his rabbi told him it was true. I told him his rabbi is a dummy. He described his rabbi as looking like a cross between Tony Soprano and Alan King.

Our conversation shifted to which of our ex-girlfriends were good in bed. There is one former lover that Cad and I have in common. We differed as to how spectacular she had been in the sack though.

Cad said he’d found a big screen TV that works perfectly, which is also a good thing for his deteriorating eyesight.

Nickie was playing Count Basie just before returning us from the break.

Nickie said that one of life’s truest lessons is, “There is no destination. There is only a thing.”

In introducing Phinder Dulai, the second invited reader, Nickie informed us that he’d cycled here all the way from British Columbia and that he now has calf muscles as firm as those of John Keats. While reading Phinder’s prepared bio, she came across, “He is currently touring dream/arteries …” and wondered if “dream slash arteries” was really what he wanted to say. She continued reading until, “ … two previous books of poetry …” and wondered if the grammar was correct. She asked, “What were they before they were books of poetry?” But Phinder quickly answered, “Manuscripts!”

Phinder told us that his book, “dream/arteries” tells the story of the SS Komagata Maru, a ship that one hundred years ago brought 376 Sikh immigrants to Vancouver but they weren’t allowed to disembark. They starved on board while waiting for an official decision and were finally sent back to India. Phinder sees the ship as a metaphor for ideas around the Diaspora after having done extensive research (something that he loves to do) into the SS Komagata Maru’s history. He found that it had carried thousands of immigrants to new homes all around the world over many years.

The first poem Phinder read was called “This Stubborn Bulk” – “ … she was delivered by … we moved backward on the quiet waters … the river swallows me whole into commerce … my guide threads me through this bulbous … my body slowly eases into my transient home … I will carry each burden … anonymous journeys … slip the border … lost in the rip of tide … sisters, brothers, cousins and great ancestors pass in quiet … we curl into the confluence of the Labrador … I transmute and shift my name and become the SS Komagata Maru.”

Phinder told us that sections of manuscripts have an invisible conversation with one another.

His second poem had the line – “ … steeped in a rust filled sunset …”

His third offering, called “Temple of Prayer” was based on the attack on the Sikh temple in Wisconsin back in 2012 – “The mind semi-automatic … and the sun runs high into the day …”

From “The Rivers” – “There was no fifth finger on the baby … the dead carried the young …”

Phinder informed us that the Punjabi community has been in British Columbia since the 1890s.

His next poem had the line – “ … the sleeping basement had the sun above …”

From “Melancholy” – “ … a yoga mat … a double dose of a placebo … two tapering worms … the unrequited and unanswered kiss … a deathly synapse.”

Phinder confessed that he’d written a slam poem – “ … I am a bomb to the dead … my Punjabi nostrils curling out …”

He finished with an anagram that he said was from Cedric the Entertainer – “ … sits here ear … here in sin … s.o.s. soma … I am so sincere …”

Phinder Dulai shows poetic talent and some nice turns of phrase but his creativity becomes limited by research. The more that his imagery is drawn from archival information the less real it becomes and the less he has access to metaphors on which his subconscious can get a grip. Granted that the issues on which he writes are important for people to learn about, but he should realize that he is making a sacrifice of more powerful poetry when he chooses not to write from his own experience.

Nicki was impressed by Phinder’s anagram and tried to take a fumbling crack at reading it before handing it back to him.

She was about to call a break but seemed to either change her mind seamlessly or forgot, because she went right ahead to introduce the final feature. When I saw it was Andrea Thompson, I suddenly realized why the room was packed with twenty year olds. These were probably a lot of the (mostly female) students from her creative writing class at OCADU. Nickie continued with her shtick of making up biographical details for the featured readers. She said that Andrea is also a milliner and that she has a large selection of hats for sale in addition to her books.

Andrea told us that every Black History Month she picks a hero to focus on and this year hers was Sonia Sanchez. Andrea’s first poem was a riff based on Sanchez’s “To Blk/Record Buyers” called “To White Anthology Editors” – “They aint write about nothing … signifyin can’t see the forest monkey gibberish … dark like words you can chew through.”

She then shared a poem about being mixed race – “Who I am depends on which side of my skin you stand on … inside is all flux and flow … the question … not who I am, but what.”

Her third poem was entitled “Being Unmade Human” – “Being artefact means to be dis-played … what doesn’t matter can’t be hurt …”

Andrea called her next two offerings “non-Valentines poems”.

The first was “Frog Medicine” – “He’s got thunder in his bones … tells me he is the last Cheyenne medicine man … fox runs down my street twice in one week … They were there that weekend and later after our big drunken fight about nothing …”

The second non-Valentines poem, she admitted to us beforehand that it was silly. She sang it to the tune of “My Favourite Things” – “Guys with ex-girlfriends who still do their laundry … Credit card criminals who live like kings … Second rate liars with lame cover stories … When it’s Friday night, when it’s Valentines, when I’m feeling bad …”

Her next poem, certain lines of which she sang, was called “The Great History of Soul-Speak” – “Seemingly innocent spirituals … Swing low sweet chariot … But these words were charms … ‘Chariot’ became ‘train’ … Where to board that subterranean? … Crosses burned till dawn … I aint had nothing but bad news … Our history will not be undone … A language deep as the Euphrates …”

Andrea’s last piece, I think she said had the title “The Next Stage of Evolution: Consciousness Revolution” and at the beginning, inside the poem and at the end, she inserted verses of the Bob Thiele and George David Weiss song, “What a Wonderful World” – “ … They’ve invented a bathmat made of moss … In Milan they’re erecting an apartment building made of shrubs and trees … These are not miracles. They’re simply good ideas … We’re trained into passivity … Clicking away our freedom … How many terms and conditions? Just give me the Black Eyed Peas’ latest release! … The word ‘possibility’ teases our lips like a raspberry … The world is a big blue wonder where anything is possible…”

I wonder what kind of bugs a bathmat made of moss would attract.

Of the Bosco Verticale in Milano, to be accurate, it is not made of shrubs and trees. That would be impossible. The trees are planted in big pots, and since these trees will be on the balconies, I assume that there would have to be pretty tall fences between the trees and the abyss so that climbing juniors won’t tumble to their doom. I’m also wondering about what the wind factor during storms will do to the trees higher up if they are not extremely deeply rooted. An analyst has also asked about the extra concrete that would be needed to sustain the weight of all those trees and the soil they would live in, and whether the carbon footprint of the concrete would be offset by the trees. You can also be sure that only the rich will live in this building or any ones like it.

I have heard Andrea Thompson read on a few occasions and though she always reads well (if a little pretentiously), I recall her showcasing at those times better samples of her poetry than she did this time at Plastiscene. It seems like she was trying to contrive her writing to fit a theme and so it mostly came out as sounding clichéd.

Nickie told us that the next Plastiscene would be on March 20^th. Then she said that a cynic is someone that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing, but a poet is someone that knows the cost of nothing and the value of everything.

She closed down the night with the recitation of the first two verses of “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats – “MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains …as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains …  But being too happy in thine happiness … O for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South! … With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stainèd mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, and with thee fade away into the forest dim …”

On the way out, Cad told me that Goldie had vomited again. We discussed what might be the cause. Did she have the flu? Was it food poisoning from one of those free prepared meals they frequent? Cad said that before he left for Plastiscene, when she complained of a stomachache he gave her an over the counter pill that had been kicking around for months. Hmmmm.

At home I watched an episode of Dennis the Menace from 1959 in which the comedy was drawn from the problems of having a party line. I remember those problems well from my childhood. It was annoying and yet fascinating because of the culture of eavesdropping that built up around it because you would know who was being called by the ring combination that sounded on your own phone as well, and you knew that certain people had more interesting or revealing conversations than others. This was reprised years later in Toronto when in 1987 I moved into the Lansdowne and St Clair area, where there were still party lines and an old Italian lady used to occupy the line continuously. Sometimes she would cut in on my conversations with the question, “You finish?”