Line-up Confusion

            I guess the fact that there were fewer smokers the first few times that I went to the food bank on Saturdays was a fluke. On my last three visits I’ve encountered as many fumes as on any other day the food bank is open. My Saturday November 19^th visit to the food bank was as choke worthy as any other day when the place is open.

            I found out whom I was behind and then just after me the big Jamaican woman arrived. She found out she was behind me and then went to sit with the other Caribbean ladies over by the door. After that the woman with the cane and her partner or friend came, and I told them they were behind the lady by the door. After that I started to lose track because people were getting there at the same time. Clients that bring carts or boxes mark their places in line and then go elsewhere because there’s no place to sit in line and because it’s boring to be stuck in one place. The problem is that some of us do not bring carts or boxes and so we have nothing with which to mark our places. That’s why I just keep in mind the person ahead of me. But it creates confusion because one may find one’s place in line based on standing behind a certain cart, even though several people without carts may be in front of you and then there are inevitably disputes.

            I think they should have a clipboard hooked to the door that holds sheets of paper with numbered lines. The first person in line would put their name beside number one and so on. Then there wouldn’t need to be a line-up and so there would be no way for someone to butt in. When they are calling people in to get an actual food bank number they can just call the numbers or the names beside them.

            The tree at the northwest corner of the driveway was almost totally bare except for a tiny cluster of dead leaves being held out like an offered bouquet at the end of one branch. The leaves in the driveway that were bright and yellow the week before were now brown and dirty.

            At about 10:20 the line started forming but there were still people directly behind my position in line that were smoking, so I stayed away. After the cigarettes had been crushed I took my place. There was a tall guy with a cane and a black beard standing almost right beside me to my right. I asked him if he knew who was in front of him and he told me he was behind the guy in front of me. I said, “No you’re not.” and then I explained to him the positioning of four people behind that guy. He said, “I’m fuckin tired of this!” and though he fell behind me he told me he wasn’t going to budge from where he was. As we got closer to the door, I reminded the big woman that she was behind me. The guy with the cane insisted that she was behind him. I’m pretty sure I recall when he arrived and it was much further back in line. He had positioned himself in relation to someone’s cart but hadn’t taken into account that there were people in line without carts. I also think that he’d gotten the big woman mixed up with another Black woman who came later, even though they looked nothing alike.

            Desmond was watching the door. I told him that they should put up a number dispensing machine, because I hadn’t yet thought of the clipboard and sign in list idea. He told me that people would fight over the numbers. I told him that in the two years I’d been coming to the food bank, I’d yet to see a fight. He said there have been fights. Someone else agreed that they’d seen a fight in the driveway between two old men. Desmond said that he’d seen a fight over a loaf at the bread station inside the food bank.

            There was only one receptionist giving out numbers this time, so it took twice as long to get one as usual. I got number 26 and went home for a few minutes.

            When I came back I overheard a guy talking to the guy with the cane and saying that he makes $1100 a week (I think he mentioned being a machinist), so he has no problem blowing $300 a week at the casino. I don’t know if he meant “when” he’s making that much money, that he used to or that he really does.

            At the inside far end of the driveway, where guys sometimes go to urinate, I heard the sound of wood being broken. After I’d heard it a few more times I got curious, so I went back to see what was going on. A couple of guys were drinking beer they’d also ripped enough of the boards down from a fence at the back of the building next to the food bank. I don’t know if they were trying to break into the building or not.

            Once I was inside, Joe the manager came up to one of the volunteers and told him to scratch number 45 off the list and to make sure he didn’t call it. He did so and then he called my number.

            I took a small bottle of Frank’s Red Hot General Tso’s style sauce; a 71 gram bag of Van Houtte coffee; a bag of salt and vinegar Crispers; and several little bags of Air Canada pretzels (I assume it’s something they hand out in flight on planes). I skipped the pasta, rice and sauce. I almost turned down the little bag of flour they offer but then I decided to take it. He only think I use flour for lately is to make gravy but I remembered that I was almost out. I skipped the canned beans, though they seemed to have lots. I think I’m all stocked up on beans till the next low-work period when I’ll start opening cans again. I would have taken some tuna but I didn’t see any. I did notice a jar of applesauce that hadn’t been offered to me way up on the top of the shelf. I asked for it and got it. All that was left for me in that section were a few individual servings of Fibre-1 cereal that I took. I find two of them equal one serving though.

            In the cold section, Angie had a half-liter of milk and a choice between cream cheese and sour cream. I said I’d take the cream cheese, but she gave me the sour cream too, though it was 14% when I would tend to pick 0% at the supermarket. The cream cheese turned out to be “cream cheese style” fruit dip. It was very sweet. Angie passed me on to a guy I’d never seen before named Hayden, who was there with a little boy of about nine. The boy gave me two Minute Maid juice bars and (I assume) his father gave me a one-kilogram tube of ground chicken. Hayden had kind of a churchy look about him.

            There was a lot more bread available than usual. I took a bag of sliced multi-grain artisan bread with apples. I saw the end of another non-sliced dark loaf on the next shelf down and asked for that, but I was surprised when she pulled it out to put it in my bag that it was double the length of a normal loaf of bread.

            The vegetable lady didn’t have much this time around. She gave me a few potatoes, a couple of carrots and a choice between half a red cabbage or a bunch kale. I didn’t fancy eating any kale, so I took the cabbage.

Martin Landau

            On Friday, November 18^th, on my way to class along College Street, near Bathurst, a guy wearing a black and white United States flag t-shirt and carrying a yellow construction helmet was talking on his phone. He said, “I’d like to help you out, but you’ve got to get rid of all of those charges first!”

            At Spadina, at the corner of my right eye, a woman walking alone said loudly into her phone, “Because he doesn’t have any super HEROES! Hah HAH!”

            It was like an oven in the lecture hall, so I opened the door and propped it open with a blue garbage bin. When Professor Russell arrived, he was about to close it when I told him that I’m the one that opened it because it was so hot. He agreed that it was extreme and commented that it’s always like that on Fridays because someone before our class cranks up the thermostat for some reason. He left the door open during class.

            Our lecture was on the topic of video games.

            The first question, as usual was, “Can video games be art?” And the first response, as usual, was that it’s better to ask if video games can be high art. Adorno says that film is too practical to be art and some say the same about video games.

Roger Ebert was the return of Adorno, but for video games. He declared that video games can’t be art because they have the objective of winning. The game, is masterless because it and even its aesthetic properties are not controlled by the artist, but rather each player.

We had an iclicker poll and found that 51% disagree with Ebert.

You don’t have to try to win a video game. You could interact with it as a piece of art.

He showed us a still from a video game. I’d thought he’d called it “Brade Brave” but maybe it’s just “Braid”. Devlin declared that he thinks it’s a masterpiece. He said it draws on the tradition of Mario, but the art is better and it looks better. When you die you can rewind time by clicking on the “X”. The story is about a boy that made a mistake in a relationship and wishes that he could rewind.  He said it’s a metaphor for how we feel about our big regrets.

What makes video games unique? Interactivity can give rise to unique aesthetic properties determined by the actions of consumers.

But suppose one reads a novel backwards. That also changes aesthetic properties. This would make every form of art interactive.

The solution is that a work is only interactive if manipulation is proscribed and if you make those changes.

After class I had a long conversation with Professor Russell about interactivity in art. It seemed to me that all art is interactive, so video games are actually not unique in that sense. A song like Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” is taken by Jimi Hendrix and transformed into something that most people associate with Hendrix even though they at the same time know that it’s still Bob Dylan’s composition. It seemed to me that because of that the song is interactive, just as any piece of music can be improvised            upon. He argued that the difference is that you cannot play a videogame without interacting with it while a song can be played or sung without making changes. I told him the story about how John Lennon met Yoko Ono. She had an avant-garde gallery show of various installments, one of which was a board with nails partially driven into it. It was hanging on a wall with a sign above it that read, “Hit me”. Beneath it on a table was a hammer. John Lennon came into the gallery, saw the sign, then picked up the hammer and began pounding the shit out of the nails. He was the first visitor that had done exactly what she wanted people to do, so she went over to talk to him. Devlin said that is exactly what he means by “interactive” and that video games are like that in a way that songs are not. I told him about the group poem, “The Gumby Bible” that I’d started, to which hundreds of people had contributed by adding lines. He argued that it would not be interactive in the sense that he meant the word because one can only add a line, whereas interaction would mean one could change the lines that ha been written before. I really didn’t get it. When you play a video game it only changes while you play it and if you don’t save the game it starts all over again. I guess that Hamlet though has been performed millions of times over the centuries in millions of different ways, even though it is still the same play. He said that for a work of art to be interactive like video games the invitation has to be there at the beginning, as was the case with Yoko’s hammer and nails, to interact with it,

            At Spadina, a pleasant and elderly Chinese lady approached me, smiling, with a petition while holding a little sign that read, “Stop persecution of Falun Gong”. I don’t normally sign petitions, but her silence seemed more compelling than an argument, so I put my name and address down. I think that the only English she knew was, “Thank you very much!”

            In the evening, after I got up from a siesta, a couple of middle-aged guys were arguing in front of the Dollarama. One of them, the larger one was panhandling by the door and demanding that the other one, a bald guy with a grey beard, “Go!” He repeated it several times and then made a fist and asked, “Do you really want this? Do you really want this? Do you really want this?” until the other hesitatingly walked away.

            That night I watched the second episode of the short lived late fifties, early sixties series, “Johnny Staccato”. John Cassavetes plays the lead character and he directed this episode about a famous hack songwriter songwriter who is murdered after finally writing a masterpiece. It turns out though that the victim stole the song from an alcoholic piano player played by Martin Landau. Landau’s performance was great and Cassavettes’s direction was good, but the story was kind of lame because it had no depth in the writing. The first episode suffered from that same inadequacy. Compared to some of the writing on 77 Sunset Strip at around the same time it just doesn’t stand up.

Johnny Staccato

            My apartment was stifling hot when I got up on Thursday, November 17^th because the heat was on full blast. I had to open every window just to not be overwhelmed.

I had hoped to get started on my two term essays. My Aesthetics paper was due in one week but I hadn’t even made any notes towards it. For my Canadian Poetry essay I’ve at least jotted down a few ideas but that paper’s deadline isn’t until the beginning of December. I’ve really got to get started on the second one for Philosophy. I may have gotten an A on the first one, but that’s no guarantee for the last.

            I watched a Jackie Gleason special from 1973 that featured a return of the Honeymooners, with Art Carney back as Ed Norton but with Sheila MacRae as Alice and Jane Kean as Trixie. Gleason was based in Miami Beach at the time and it was weird to see Jackie Gleason in colour with such a deep brown tan playing a New York City bus driver. MacRae and her hairstyle looked surprising a lot like Katey Sagal would look fourteen years later on Married With Children. The episode was entitled “Women’s Lib” and Alice told Ralph she wanted her rights. Ralph said, “I’ll give you your rights …” then he made a fist and said, “I’ll give you couple of lefts too!”

            Then I watched the first episode of a late 50s detective show called “Johnny Staccato” in which John Cassavettes played a jazz pianist that moonlighted as a private investigator. The cinematography was great, with a lot of film noire style shots. The guest star was Michael Landon, but I didn’t recognize him at first, as he was so young and had a pompadour. He played an Elvis type rock star that was being blackmailed.

Tarkovsky

            On the Wednesday November 16^th I woke up at around 4:30 because I had to take a pee. I would normally go back to sleep for another half an hour, but when I got back to bed I felt wide-awake. I think that I felt un-sleepy because I knew I had to work early at OCADU and so I felt the compulsion in the back of my mind to make the front of my mind awake, and so I got up at 4:45 to start doing my yoga.

            Since I had to leave for work at the uncivilized hour of 7:45 that meant that I had to start getting ready to leave at 7:15. On mornings like this when I’m rushed I only sing and play one verse each of several of the songs I practice daily. I managed to get through them all and then I made coffee, but had to leave three-quarters of a cup to go cold when I rushed out the door.

            I worked for Terry Shoffner in the Design department. He’s a very nice guy and he’s always interested to know what I’m currently taking at U of T. and always tells me how impressed he is.

            Since Terry is from Arkansas, I was very interested to know what his thoughts were on what had gone down the week before in the U.S. election and whether or not he’d been surprised by the outcome. He told me that he was totally surprised at how it turned out.

            He said he’d gone back to his hometown for a visit during the campaign and had seen no Trump posters anywhere. He knew that a lot of people that he knew would be voting for Trump but they certainly weren’t making it obvious. He told me that his brother is a hardcore gun toting second amendment shouting redneck. Terry said he always sets aside an hour to visit with his brother when he goes there, but he makes sure that he has a backup plan as well. He related to me a story from the last time he saw his brother. They went to a food court and he had to use the washroom while they were there. His brother asked if it was a transgender washroom and then went on a rant about Obama having just introduced transgender washrooms to distract people from his horrible economic decisions. Terry told me that Obama had nothing to do with state legislature relating to transgender washrooms but that he hadn’t bothered to argue with his brother about it. Terry said that Donald Trump is a criminal and that his vice president-elect is an ultra right wing religious nut that believes that the world is only 6,000 years old.

            I posed for a portrait but I think I should have lain down for a few minutes before class started. I kept dozing off for a split second every few minutes. I hope it didn’t make things so difficult for the people trying to paint me that they complained about it.

Terry bought me a coffee at break time but I still felt droopy after drinking it.

            Before I left work I had to stop and make a bowel movement. That might have been why I’d been feeling sleepy. I don’t know why it is but I often feel sleepy when I have to take a crap.

            On y way out of the building I ran into Mikaela Ryder, who just happened to be passing by. I hadn’t seen her for at least half a year. She told me that she lives in the area around OCADU now and has a one-bedroom apartment sponsored by the same organization from which she rented a room for several years at the Eden Community House on Beverly.

            I told her that I’ve been living in the same place where I raised my daughter, for nineteen years. That reminded her of the Gladstone days when she used to come to read poetry at my open stage, the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy. She said she had great memories of that time.

            She mentioned that she was on her way home to do somatics. She declared that yoga is only good for 50% of people because yoga tears the muscles. I didn’t argue with her because she gets fixed on things, but I it’s very important, especially in middle age to do strength building exercises and the very nature of any strength building exercise is that they tear your muscles and then larger muscles form. That’s what muscle building means.

            When Nancy arrived in the classroom, said hi to me and asked me how the end of the term was going. We talked about essays. Her area of study is Bio Ethics and she likes the analytical approach and enjoys being creative within imposed limitations. I suggested she has a very different kind of mind from mine. She said she took a Hebrew studies course, though she doesn’t have a strong interest in Judaism, and had a hard time with the essay. She said History papers have similar style requirements to English essays and prefers Philosophy. She told me that she’s decided this year to start sending essays out to publications. So far no one has accepted the ones she’s sent.

            We started Aesthetics class with a review.

            Arnheim says that film can be high art because, like painting, it’s all about framing and uses light and colour to create a delightful picture.

            Adorno says film cannot be high art.

            Eisenstein says that painting cannot do what film montage can do.

            Bazin thought that film can be high art because it connects us to reality. When we watched part of “Don’t Look Back” we were literally connected to Bob Dylan.

            Bordwell builds on Arnheim with the idea of estrangement. Film makes the familiar unfamiliar. Familiar objects are recorded and edited to render something quotidian in a way that we don’t normally experience it.

            I asked, “Isn’t all art about estrangement?”

            Devlin admitted that poetry does make ordinary language unfamiliar but Bordwell thinks that film has a particular way of doing it. He’s justifying film along old dimensions.

            He showed us part of a video entitled, “Andrei Tarkovsky: Poetic Harmony”. Professor Russell commented that Bordwell would have liked it. What do Trakovsky’s movies mean? The thing about perception of Tarkovsky is that they try to figure out what they mean. Using a symbol implies a definite meaning. Tarkovsky wanted each member of the audience to create their own symbols from out of the atmosphere he provided. Sometimes a scene is just what it is. He asks us to embrace the emotions that the subject feels. What makes us understand helplessness more than a woman sitting on a well and watching her livelihood die? He opted for the poetic and rejected montage because it interferes with emotion. He wanted narrative nihilism. Devlin encouraged us to watch all of the Tarkovsky films, which show great examples on meditations on everyday images. He used prolonged shots; framed in an extraordinary way for enhancement, like for example, a bush blowing in the wind. This works against the idea that a film is record of reality.

            Devlin took an iclicker poll to see who we prefer now. 41% went with Tarkovsky and 33%, including me, were still with Eisenstein.

            Someone asked what the difference is between Arnheim’s idea of film and that of Eisenstein. The professor said that for Eisenstein, film was a sequence of frames, whereas for Arnheim, film is in the frame.

            I offered that Tarkovsky’s films are more like painting, while Eisenstein’s are more like literature.

            Devlin told us that there is no reason why we can’t accept all of the theories.

            Bazin said that film is high art in an entirely new way, which he called “imprint”. Why is that artistically important? Why is connecting us to reality artistically relevant?

            Geoff declared that imprint has more creative potential.

            The rest of the lecture was about the power of movies.

            Carole builds on Eisenstein, saying that film is not just about editing, but also juxtaposition, framing and sequencing that creates new meaning.

            Cinema was a language for Eisenstein and he thought that every audience had to learn that language before they could understand it.

            Carole thought that new, instinctual meaning was rooted in history and so we don’t need to understand the language of film. Meanings are cross-culturally widespread and so no training is required. Motion picture and video are the most captivating art forms ever. There is an element that gets us instinctively.

            We watched the scene from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” when Marian first decides to take the money and run. The money is stuffed in an open envelope on the middle of the bed while she gets dressed. The camera cuts to a close-up of the envelope. This pointing to and bracketing of the envelope is called Indexing. Scaling makes the object big. There is a low level instinctual meaning to the shot.

The Father of Canadian Nationalism

            Early on the Tuesday morning of November 15th, while I was doing song practice, a woman that I’d seen walking around at that hour before, positioned herself on the street so she could make eye contact with me through my half open window and began to gesture to me. As far as I could tell, her graceful hand movements were indicating that she wanted me to come down to open the front door and let her in. I assumed she knows someone in my building but not well enough to have their phone number. I just looked back at her and kept on singing. I sure wasn’t going to stop in the middle of a song to let a stranger into my building.

            George arrived for class about four minutes late, “Evening! Yes indeed! Holy smokes! After the decision made!”

            He asked who among us had expected Hillary was going to win the US election. He was surprised to see that a few students indicated that they’d expected Trump to win and asked if they were being honest. Patrick responded, “Did you really expect something good would happen?” We discussed the Electoral College. I said it would be like voting for a mayor of Toronto and only each building, including apartment buildings and houses would get one vote each. George said that Trump would be in now for at least two years. I suggested that maybe he’ll get impeached after his fraud trial.

            George’s new book just came out, so he showed us a copy. It’s called “Canticles: Imperialism, Enslavement and Insurrection”. He said it’s about people fighting back and it’s all based on fact. He told us that he’d be launching it that weekend at the Supermarket Restaurant in Kensington Market and that there’d be a second launch on December 4^th. He pointed out that this is only part one of the book, that there’d be another one out next year and that they are 460 pages each. Patrick asked him to read a poem from the book. It took George a while to find one that wasn’t too long, but he settled on “Queen Ana Nzinga Addresses Her Troops” – “Smack down the Portuguese until death gets tired … I prefer having an army to having to having charisma … Bear to me the Portuguese bellies … Mere thunder makes no injury …” Queen Nzinga resisted the Portuguese in 1647 with an army that included women warriors.

            George talked about the death of Leonard Cohen, saying he was in St Catherines when he heard about it. He mentioned the talk he’d given, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, on the night before he died.

            Our first poet of the night was Patrick Lane, and I read his poem, “Albino Pheasants”.

            Every poem offers an argument.

            The narrator of this poem lives in and is connected to a wild place, surrounded by farmers that would shoot the white pheasants. It reminds George of the movie, “Deliverance”. What is wild is lost behind closed eyes. Succubae.

            Connect this poem to some of Margaret Atwood’s poems and Robert Kroetsch’s “Seed Catalogue”

            Our next poet was Dennis Lee, a Toronto poet who resented Canada selling Canada to the United States. He was influenced by George Grant, whose book, “Lament for a Nation” had a huge impact on Canadian nationalism. Only in Canada could a book of philosophy become a best seller.

            Successive waves of four Liberal governments sold Canada out, culminating in that of Lester Bowles (George pronounced it “Bowels” with disdainful yet delicious emphasis) Pearson. In 1962 the world came close to thermonuclear war between the United States and Russia. Who was in the middle? Canada. In October, Kennedy asked Canada to go on alert. Diefenbaker said no. Our anti-death penalty prime minister said, “We don’t think it’s a threat to world peace.” But behind is back the Canadian army went on alert anyway. There was a defense crisis in Canada. Pearson, who had earlier thought up UN peacekeeping force, accepted US nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. George Grant left the NDP because they backed the Liberals on this issue. He thought that Canada was by nature a Progressive Conservative country and that it was important for government to help with public utilities. His was kind of a communist conservatism. But the Liberals wanted greater economic integration with the United States. Grant’s book created Canadian nationalism. Courses like “Canadian Poetry” did not exist before 1965.

            George told us that when he started teaching at Queens University, in Kingston, Ontario, he was lecturing about Michael Ondaatje’s “Coming Through Slaughter”, and another professor commented to him that it wasn’t real literature because it was Canadian.

            Because of George Grant, Canada did not go to Vietnam and his influence can also be seen in our Canadian Content Regulations as applied to broadcasting in Canada. Can Con states that, for instance, music played on Canadian radio must be 40% Canadian, though there are four ways that it can meet that criteria: either the writer of the song, the singer, the producer of the record or the recording studio where the record was made must be Canadian for the song to fit with the guidelines. Grant would have hated the music that resulted from the ruling, because he was a classical man. He thought that Canadians should use their own tax dollars to support themselves.

            George said that Loyalism was not just sticking with the king of England. It was a Canadian political choice.

            Dennis Lee is a philosophical poet. He helped found the House of Anansi Press. He wrote the book of poetry for children, “Alligator Pie” and the lyrics for the theme song of the show “Fraggle Rock.

            Lee’s poem “from Civil Elegies / 1” is about Toronto’s New City Hall. George commented that the building was like something out of Star Trek. I pointed out that it was actually featured on Star Trek as representing the architecture of an alien civilization. I was certain that I’d seen it on the original series, but research suggests that it only appeared in the Next Generation, perhaps just representing itself as something seen through a portal. I’m still sure I saw it though, even though everybody says it wasn’t there. George said that it was designed by a Finnish architect who wanted a big public space in front of it to create a sense of community.

            George read the poem. He said the speaker is awaiting the arrival of the muses in the form of dead Torontonians. The ghosts of the original settlers that never felt at home here because they were yearning for Europe. Contemporary English Canadians were no different failures. But English Canadians finally decided to be a country. George said the word, “Nationalist!” and added, “Ohh, it sends chills down my spine! Isn’t Canada unique and prideworthy? The opening of the poem is reminiscent of Dante.

            George said that thousands of Canadians went to fight in the Vietnam War for the United States. Canada manufactured the napalm that was used there.

            Patrick interrupted to say declare that the poem is obviously talking about pigeons rather than ghosts. George said that it’s not about pigeons. It’s about mourning. It’s about the tension between what is native and what is not. The settlers didn’t settle but rather pretended they were still in England. George said they still fly the Union Jack in Kingston, “For cryin out loud! Get over it!”

            Patrick insisted that pigeons are in the poem at least symbolically because the furies are described the way one would talk about birds.

            George said that Toronto is unceded territory. When William Lyon Mackenzie was the first mayor of Toronto we had the Upper Canada rebellion, but in Toronto it consisted of a couple of shots being fired, the rebels retreating to the pub and the soldiers retreating to the fort.

            Both Lee and Atwood were influenced by George Grant.

            George asked, “Will Canada get its groove?”

            In 1966 a French Canadian suicide bomber blew himself up in the parliamentary washroom. History of defeat. George mentioned Jane Jacobs and the craft of neighbourhood. The Spadina extension was blocked. Development is a dangerous verb. From the poem, “But in the city that I long for, the people complete their origins.” And “Men and women live that they may make that life worth dying.” George was trying to remember the Bob Dylan line from “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding” that has a similar line. I told him it was, “He who is not busy being born is busy dying.”

            The poem is anthemic.

            George misquoted an old soft drink slogan, “Come alive with Coke!” and then he called a break.

I asked him about the essay topic of Confessionalism because I could find much in terms of confessionalism in the three poets he’d mentioned in association with it. He said he wants people to dig for it or alternatively to argue that it isn’t there.

            I told George that the correct quote was, “Come alive, you’re in the Pepsi Generation!” He suddenly remembered. We talked about the Coke commercial, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” that became a hit song by the New Christie Minstrels. But on research I see that it was actually the “New Seekers” that did it.

            He said they featured the song in the last episode of “Mad Men”. I said that I had to stop watching the series after the second season when I stopped having cable. He told me he doesn’t have cable either. I asked if he downloads the show. He answered that he watches it on DVD but he gets his news from the internet. Then he complained about the cost of both the internet and his phone bill. I told him that I don’t pay for the internet and that I have a pretty good deal for my phone with Wind Mobile and I quoted the monthly pre-paid fee. He admitted that’s pretty good but told me he only has a landline. I wondered why and he explained that the area where he lives, which is the east end, near Scarborough, has power outages and so he doesn’t trust having a mobile phone because of its dependence on electricity. I asked why he doesn’t use a generator. He said they are a great thing to have but that they cause pollution.

            This conversation made me curious, because I know that there are very few landlines in developing countries and so anyone that has a phone uses a cell phone. It seemed to me that they must face greater challenges towards recharging their phones than George would if he had one. I found several solutions. First of all, George drives a car, so in an emergency he could easily charge his phone in the car with a charger for that purpose, and they only cost between $8.00 and $50.00, depending on what kind. He could also get a solar powered phone charger for between $25 and $150. There are also bike-powered chargers that give your phone 25 minutes of talk time for every 10 minutes of riding, but I don’t think George rides a bike. I suspect though that even with this information George won’t get a cell phone because his years of being held hostage by Bell has given him Stockholm syndrome.

            Patrick mentioned that he is from Ottawa and he was still living there when the big ice storm hit in 1998 and the power was out for a long time.

            George related that he was in North Carolina in 1996 when Hurricane Fran hit and even though he was a two hours drive from the coast, the storm knocked out the power for five days. But the Canadian embassy provided them with a store of beverages and there were lots of great potluck suppers.

            After the break, we began with bp Nichol, who George told us pronounced the initials before his surname as “beep”. He was inspired by Earle Birney, Bill Bissett and TISH, and connected with Ondaatje. He also wrote several episodes and two songs for the children’s show Fraggle Rock. John Diefenbaker attacked his book, “The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid” as being pornographic.

            Nichol expanded the audience for poetry by making it also visual. He worked in the mediums of concrete poetry and sound poetry. He was also a member of the poetry group, “The Four Horsemen”, that was featured in Ron Mann’s documentary, “Poetry in Motion”. I mentioned that I saw the Four Horsemen perform in Vancouver back in 1979 or 1980. Nichol would have been knowledgeable of John Cage’s experiments with the sounds of words; Kurt Schwitters’s voice compositions and Jerome Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics, such as his transcriptions of so called primitive Native poems; Derek Beaulieu’s “Kern”, which consists of poems that look like mosaics. .

            Nichol tried to make poetry accessible. His book, “Captain Poetry” had that TISH accessibility, with the fun of superheroes. It was clear and colloquial, with simplified spellings and Blakean rhymes.
            Patrick wondered how Nichol could be compared to Blake.

            They were both visual.

            We looked at the poem, “Blues”, which is a visual poem composed only of the letters that make up the word “love”. All of the “e”s are at an angle in a line through the center of the piece. At each end of that run there are two extra “e”s that do not connect with other letters. There are four “o”s running parallel to the line of “e”s on each side of it and each o is between an “l” and a “v”, though sometimes “love” is spelled backwards. There are three “l”s on each side of the poem, on the outside of the “o”s. There are two “v”s on either side of the middle stream of “e”s. George agreed with me that the middle stream of “e”s could be pronounced as a scream. The woman to the far left of my row commented that it looks like there is “love”, but if you read around the corner you get “evolove”, which she read as “evolve”. She interpreted it as “Love evolves into Evol”.

            I said that I find that kind of poetry extremely annoying. I get what it’s saying but I think turning it into a visual moves it away from what the mind really wants to see when it’s reading.

Our next poet was Michael Ondaatje and George said he’s lost track of all the Governor General’s Awards the guy has won. The title of his book, “The Dainty Monsters” riffs on Leonard Cohen’s “Beautiful Losers”, which was a big influence for Ondaatje. He uses a negation of form in which anything goes and so his is a Beat aesthetic, for crying out loud! He finds mythopoeic potential and has a cinematic style. George says that reading Ondaatje is like looking at a Diane Arbus photograph or a Robert Crumb comic. The freaks coming out of the crackerjack box. He compared it to the way that, as a kid, he would bite animal crackers in half and then make new animals by putting halves of one animal together with that of another.

Of the poem, “Elizabeth”, George asked who Elizabeth is. I figured out a few weeks ago that it’s Queen Elizabeth I. The poem renders her both ordinary and unusual. It is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”. Of lines 12-16, that read, “they put a snake around my neck and it crawled down the front of my dress. I felt its flicking tongue dripping into me like a shower. Daddy laughed and said Smart Snake.” Zack commented that it was disturbing to think of a father saying that to his daughter. George said maybe it is a blasphemous treatment of Elizabeth, for the “virgin queen” to be sexualized, but try to keep in mind that her father was Henry VIII.

Narrative is one of Ondaatje’s great strengths. P. K. Page gives us photos but Ondaatje puts them into motion. Aestheticization is a distancing. Thomas Seymour is a Beautiful Loser. Of Ondaatje’s 1968 book, “Pictures from the War”, incidents in Vietnam are aestheticized while horror is made beautiful.

Of his poem, “Letters & Other Worlds” we can’t tell if it’s true, but it does take place in Sri Lanka, where he was born and raised. Ondaatje is part Dutch. His family was rich but not part of the British ruling class because of its ethnic mixture, but not entirely divorced from it either.

Exoticism in Ondaatje: the tropes are overseas, comedic and not menacing. It takes the form of an exotic confessional memoir. The father in the poem dies of a stroke, but before that, his deteriorating personality is accompanied by a widening empathy. Ondaatje’s heroes are always creative, destructive and decadent. You cannot produce art unless you have p-p-p-p-p-pain! Making art is about breaking your aching heart. For Miles Davis to make “Blue and Green”, he had to have all kinds of heroin. Even with “On the Corner” and “Birth of the Cool” (George meant “The Birth of Cool”) he was always riding the horse! Miles Davis was middle class. As a kid he rode horses and as an adult he rode horse. George commented that there haven’t been many Canadians that have ended that way. Someone declared, “We can take OUR heroin!”

Eisenstein

            On Monday November 14^th, Nancy was in the classroom when I arrived, but she was busy texting so I didn’t strike up a conversation. Instead I did Wednesday’s reading on the “Power of Movies”, from my expensive textbook. It was another boring essay, but when it was finished I was able to work on ideas for my Canadian Poetry essay.

            Our lecture was on the topic of Film.

            The question was, “Is it art?” But Devlin said we know better now than to think of it like that. It’s better to as whether it is fine art or pop art.

            Roger Scruton says that film is always illusory and it is not art. Besides Scruton though, most of the arguments about film mentioned in Murray Smith’s essay are from he early 20^th Century, and so they refer to black and white, silent films. Theodor Adorno thought that neither film nor photography was art. Film will always be sentimental because it is representational. Everything is there and so you are not given the chance to contribute to it with your imagination.

            Scruton claims that film is a true illusory dimension and that it can’t get past the surface because it has no room to proscribe.

            Adorno said that film is never contemplative because it is stuck in the practical.

            High art is art and aesthetic qualities for their own sake, so why can’t film serve that ideal? It is argued that film is too representational and so there is no room for aesthetics.

            Professor Russell projected again a screen shot from the video about the quadrant system that was used to show that the movie, “Drive” is exceptional.

            Arnheim says that what film is representing can be manipulated to convey deeper meaning and aesthetic qualities and to make reality prettier.

            Remove the colour from film, for example and it forces you to reassess reality. Film can redirect the attention. When this is done, film can possibly be high art.

            One cannot just point a camera to get high art. But some films, if we apply the cluster theory, may show themselves to be high art.

            We talked about the pioneering of the use of montage in filmmaking by Sergei Eisenstein. We were shown part of a video called, “The History of Cutting: the Soviet Theory of Montage”, which talked about Eisenstein and also Kuleshov. Lev Kuleshov demonstrated what came to be known as the Kuleshov Effect, when he made a short film featuring a man’s expressionless face being alternated with various other shots such as a plate of soup and a girl in a coffin. The film was shown to an audience, which perceived that the man’s expression changed with everything that they thought he was looking at.

            Film can transcend space and time through montage. Montage comes from “monter”, meaning to assemble.

            D. W. Griffith developed continuity editing through practice to create a type of film-enhanced theatre. 

            The video showed a segment of Eisenstein’s successful 1925 film, “Battleship Potemkin”. Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the German Nazi party thought that despite its Marxist dialectic it was the greatest propaganda film ever made, presenting history as conflict.

            Thesis meeting antithesis creates synthesis.

            The five methods of montage, from the simplest to the most complex, are:

            Metric – Cutting to the beat.

            Rhythmic – Concerns the rhythm of the action in the shot.

            Tonal – Concerned with the tone of the shot.

            Overtonal – Concerns montage of large sequences.

            Intellectual or Ideological – Concerns ideas.

            There is a shot of someone tapping on a cross, followed by one of a man tapping on a sword. We see the image of a statue of a lion and the rising proletariat.

            Eisenstein’s “October: Ten Days That Shook The World” was ten hours long. Audiences found it too abstract, too manipulative and too totalitarian so they hated it.

            Manipulation by cutting – Manipulating the order of the shots to create a psychological effect.

            Video permeates our lives. If we recognize the possibilities of montage, we can appreciate film as high art. Montage reveals how film can rise to the level of deep truths beyond surface ideas. It can create new, deep and intellectual meanings.

            We then looked at film as Imprint. For Bazin, film is an imprint, so it can be high art but of a completely new dimension. Film brings new terms. What film and photography do is put you in causal contact with a scene. There is a causal connection from you to the actor. You are touching the actor through a long causal chain. Realistic painting does not get to the deeper truth. For Bazin, the difference is that with film you are seeing the real thing because film is literally real.

            We looked at a video that showed a segment of the documentary, “Don’t Look Back” by D. A. Pennebaker. We are taken behind the scenes of Bob Dylan’s tour of England in 1965. We follow a group of people up a stairs. Donovan is in the Bob Dylan’s hotel room. Dylan is demanding to know who threw a glass out of the window that broke on the street. “I’m not taking responsibility for cats I don’t know!” Someone says, “Fuck off! You’re a big nose!” Dylan says, “You say you’re small and I believe you!” “I didn’t throw any fucking glass on the street!”

            Imprint is direct cinema, with no cutting and long takes with a hand held camera. It gives a sense of being there and for a moment we were transported to an eye level experience of Bob Dylan in his hotel room in 1965.

            But this takes imagination away. There is no narration and no text.

            Devlin took an iclicker poll to determine which theory we prefer. When most of the class picked “montage” over “imprint” he exclaimed, “All right! We’ve got some Eisenstein fans here!”

            When he asked for why we voted the way we did, I said that if montage had been used in the documentary, “Don’t Look Back” it wouldn’t have mattered whether the film had been about Bob Dylan or not. But in Pennebaker’s film all he’s doing is pointing his camera and shooting and so it’s entirely dependent on the subject matter. If the camera had been pointing at Joe Schmo, no one would be interested in the movie. He seemed to like my comment.

            On my way home along Queen, the wide sidewalk on the north side near the Horseshoe Tavern, a chalk artist had made a tribute to Leonard Cohen.

            At Spadina I stopped for the light. Two middle-aged guys with long hair crossed to the north and asked the panhandler at the corner if he was feeling better. He told them gratefully that he’d just had breakfast.

            I went online for an hour and then I took a siesta. When I woke up I had fifteen minutes before I had to get ready to leave for work.

            I worked for Nick Aoki’s class again. One of his students was wearing a set of headphones that had kitty ears on them. Before class started, a young woman said to a guy that was sitting at the other room that McDonalds had a deal on coffee downstairs and she wanted him to go with her. He said, “I don’t even drink coffee.” She insisted that she couldn’t go by herself, but he didn’t budge and she left the room. I don’t know if she managed to dredge up the courage to go to the food court by herself or not.

            Nick had this class do the same work as he had for the class I worked on the previous Wednesday, except that we took a break in the middle rather than leaving early. I got some reading done towards trying to figure out what I’ll be writing my Canadian Poetry term essay on.

            During the break, the woman that had been reluctant to go for coffee by herself asked Nick for advice on whether to change her major to Illustration or Graphic Design. He asked her what she wants to do. She said what she wants to do is to not be broke on the street. He answered that she should go into business administration then. She argued that she couldn’t do math. He countered that she wouldn’t need to because they just work with spreadsheets. He explained that illustrators produce images, while what graphic designers do is organize information. Most graphic designers work for firms, while illustrators are freelance, so when you become a graphic designer, while you are waiting to build a reputation, you will need a part time job, perhaps as a graphic designer.

The Old Revolution

            I woke up around 3:30 on Sunday, November 13^th, thinking about Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Old Revolution”. I’d recently started learning how to play it, although I’ve known the words by heart for decades, but it suddenly occurred to me that Cohen is singing from the point of view of Hitler in the song, even though that only serves as a metaphor for the annihilation of the self in love. From a German perspective, World War I began as a revolution against Austria-Hungary, which Germany swore to protect. Hitler “fought in the old revolution on the side of the ghost and the king”. The ghost would be that of Franz Ferdinand and the King would be Willhelm II. I think that Cohen is comparing the beginnings of Hitler’s love affair with Germany to the beginning of a relationship when he sings, “Into this furnace I ask you now to venture”. Also “furnace” of course refers to the Holocaust and I think he is comparing love itself to those furnaces of Auschwitz and other Nazi camps.

            I laid there a while, but couldn’t sleep, so I got up at 4:30 and went online for a while. I started yoga a few minutes earlier than usual, but I got sleepy and dozed a bit during one of my poses and so I finished yoga a little later than usual.

            On Sundays I usually write and upload my weekly writing assignment in the form of a paragraph about Monday’s reading. I quite often find these essays over my head and so I have to read them three times just to get a handle on them. It tends to be that I don’t get it read, re-read and re-read again until Sunday night. Then I just write the paragraph, mostly in stream of consciousness with a pen on paper, then I sometimes only edit it slightly as I’m typing it into the computer, and immediately post it. After doing that, while I was online I did the related assignment of scoring five other people’s paragraphs. Then I looked at other people’s scores of my previous paragraph and saw that I’d gotten six stars four times and five stars once. Six stars are the highest score you can give but I’ve never given anyone six stars.
            Here’s my paragraph for that night:

            Murray Smith’s essay on film traces the history of philosophical views of film as art or not art. He starts with the period after film’s inception when it was considered to be not much more than a mechanical recording procedure with no artistic merit. He looks at early experiments with film as an artform that treated the medium as photography in motion but that became more and more complex as the art developed. It was already so rich as an artform by the time synchronized sound was introduced, that such technology was resisted as limiting the artistic capacity of film. This can be seen as true in a viewing of the films of Alfred Hitchcock from his work during the silent era and comparing them to his later work. Although he created masterpieces in both forms, the use of shadows cast on walls, expressions on faces that spoke volumes and creating suspense simply by following a hand as it descends along the banister of a spiral staircase, in his classic silent film, “The Lodger”, show that much artistic style was sacrificed when talking films were introduced. Smith also looks at some of the political (often Marxist) views of film, which argued that the introduction of audio and colour, in robbing the audience of the power of engagement with a film, rendered the viewer a victim of authoritarian manipulation.