TOMMY DOUGLAS RIDES AGAIN

the prospect of school tomorrow just seems so banal after yesterday in ottawa. let me tell ya what happened last week at school: i aced a test and most everyone else failed, so the instructor dropped two assignments so that we could "understand the material" better. this was a basic music theory course. peops be gettin 100's on electronics tests and they still get bombed on this shit. so i just have to sit there all the time while this guy explains fucking major chords to people who just don't get it. these kids have a lot to learn. they're the children of urban market consumerism and coca cola.

i have a lot to learn too, but i'm getting closer to figuring it all out, after yesterday, in ottawa. the volume of daily sound is much quieter than it is on a usual day. my ears were overstretched from having been in headphones at high levels with loud sound all around you. the kind of stress that can put on your ears cannot go unchecked, but jesus, there are points at which your hearing shows its strengths. for instance, when you've got earpieces in and you're in a huge crowd, but you know quite accurately what you're getting onto disc.

having eaten nothing but a muffin at 9am, and having drank nothing but water and a glass of wine at 10, i'd trudged several k by the end of the march and daytime congregation. starting on the east end of the bridge at mackenzie/rideau in the morning, i saw a crowd of a 100 people gather as they waited for an early glimpse of bush's cavalcade as it sped towards a meeting with martin. from there, confederation park, where i ran into a lot of familiar faces (a number of them only from news clippings) and got some well known folks on the mic either through speeches or interviews. the march itself was the most orderly i'd ever seen, in no small part to the small group of organizers who managed to keep 10-15,000 people in a tight march for two hours. the main daytime march and hill gathering went on without a single arrest as far as i know.

i'd tell you what i got up to with the marijuana party on parliament hill, but it was too hazy to remember. all i can recall is a gathering after most of the crowd had recessed, a tight huddle of bodies about 80-100 thick with huge pot-leaf banners sticking high above them. i went over and saw an old serbian friend who may or may not have convinced me to do some legal or illegal things. soon, i could hear marc emery's voice through a small loudspeaker. some camera crew interviewed him and it was total amatuer night. you just can't allow your microphone to feedback into his. mabye you want people's ears to bleed, i dunno.

things go strange from there. i wander across the central spine of parliament hill (parliament hill with a spine? hahahahah, that'll be the day) as it readies itself for the vigil in three hours. i record the peace tower bells and drift around for a while. it starts to get cold and it's been over one hour since i've phoned my photographer, with whom i was supposed to be coordinating efforts. apparently, she went over to the conference centre where bush and harper met. i remember watching those people round the bend to cross a bridge and thinking it's not worth the price of someone else's equipment and my footage to go some place where there might be totally unnecessary trouble. kara, once at the barricades, tried to slip behind the riot police phalanx to find a vantage point. one cop came toward her, and she said "i have asthma, if you touch me you're fuckin liable". while one of his buddies continued to threaten her, the one coming towards her did something that probably would saved her ass if some shit went down. he shoved her into a doorway on another side of the building and told her to stay there. of course, she left and didn't get stuck behind police without media credentials.

some time was needed in the cock & lion ale pub, the best name for a bar that i've ever come across in my entire virile life. after some pints and a quick review of my first eighty minutes' worth of footage i headed back to the hill for the vigil, where more familiar media faces spoke (i've discluded the bloc from my documentary for obvious reasons.

called it an end to the recording day but continued to follow the show. i headed to catch the last movement of the piece, the final protest at the museum of civilization all the way over the bridge in hull, quebec. after a piss and a smoke (a right which i allowed myself despite my recently successful quitting) i ran into a kingston ex-pat who'd made it down for the one night only. a long march, and a small showdown, but no tear gass, no real violence to speak of, but plenty of civil disobedience.

by the time i'd made it back to the hotel, i'd had a meal in my stomach, and at least 10k on my body, not to mention several dB on my ears. my photographer had been stood up by her previously arranged internet date, so we went to look for this place a hippie told her about called "the elgin" that we determined never existed after another long bout of walking. we got back to the hotel and, of course, watched the news.

we're at a point in the life of the music industry at which a continually flowing stream of musicians hit a nerve with many on a daily scale. they riptide through the masses and travel far places without even leaving their home countries in many cases. everywhere, someone's heard of them and waiting for them to come to their town. the go! team should not need introduction at this moment, but they have yet to rock north american and therefore must be explained. things are generally taken too seriously in music, but the go! team defy the standard attitudes: neither "we're too bore to care" nor "wow, we're artsy" nor "we sound like this band meets this band while weilding a knife in bowie's dead family's graveyard" need apply to the go! team they're into fun, and that's their thing, so good for them, let's keep it coming.

deep dark united hit the scene from another angle altogether, but occupy the same kind of space. quite a number of bands could take some lessons from them. for one, music can be strange and fun at the same time, nor does it have to be danceable. it simply requires listening ears and seeing eyes. as much as we love to see fashion and culture as a part of music, the end result is how the song makes us feel. without the piece, there's nothing but style.

the fever has caught on for a lot of crowds and all these little "scenes" are popping up in all kindsa places. this, however, can be a slightly dangerous time. this crazy "indie" music will soon see some kind of saturation in the near future that will gnaw at its core (if we haven't already). there's nothing wrong with any of this, as at them moment it's totally containable. the abundance of groups does make for an overall above average health level amongst groups in the world of performed music. influences keep growing. each day is a new achievement in the recognition of culture as a vital form of life. but i can see that sometime soon, this little "indie" thing that blw up so big might have to readjust its course before it falls into the ocean.

my hope is that people like kaki king spearhead the moments of change in the coming years. this woman is gonna put a lot of people in business. she's already appeared on NPR and the cover an acoustic guitar mag you could easily find at the airport or 7-11, so a lot of people have at least glanced a her name.