NIGHT OF THE LIVING HOTELS

the radio report on the protests in Ottawa was finally broadcast yesterday morning, a very rewarding experience for guy stevos industries which will hopefully turn out to be awarding if I can get my act together and shop it around. we can’t get enough of it over here, we’re throwing files into the air in anticipation of the next scoop.

we headed down the hudson’s bay trail of coolness that is the queen w. strip, a relatively new environment for the stevos crew. it appears that hipness is traveling even further westward these days. I’d heard about it for so long, and finally, i got to see what all this fuss was about surrounding these new hotel-cum-full-club-experience dotting the edge of the strip.

the drake looked too glitzy for my taste, but they didn’t bat half an eyelash at me when I snuck into a private party for some well needed free dinner in the lounge, although I didn’t dare venture upstairs (you must have THIS much money to enter). i retreated to the drake underground (where they let the children make noise) where stephen marshall of the guerilla news network screened a number of clips and shorts from his work as creative director and chief video artist/activist at GNN. we got us a good one hour report in the works, yes sir. he showed some clips from battleground, his on-the-scene documentary from the frontlines of iraq, as of yet unreleased in theatres but selling well on dvd and looking to hit the festival circuit hard real soon, and this revolution, the film that got him and rosario dawson arrested in new york this summer during the republican national convention.

i ran into the infamous and dark peter m, who after letting marshall know how offended he was by his work, dragged me to the gladstone just down the street, which was a rather happenin’ place filled with the 20-40 crowd, but of course, the select few of them who are so bored with their own neighbourhoods that they have to come all the way to queen and landsdowne to grind with each other on a hump night in what was once the lobby of one of toronto’s more hard-up hotels. oh, but of course, they’ll never cross the tracks past gladstone ave, so the frontier has been drawn. finally, an end to dutch elm disease that is queen st.’s western expansion.

oh well, I pity those poor folks at blow up’s new location, where someone just got stabbed on the weekend and now ceases to be alive.

toronto gets really violent over the holiday season. no one really knows why it happens now instead of other times of they year. we’ve seen two family suicides and three stabbing deaths over the past two weeks. I know, it happens all the time around the world everyday, but having all this shit happen too often in your own city around xmastime just makes it so shitty in a more personal way than anyplace else.

PROTEGERAS NOS FOYERS ET NO DROITS

not everday can be a victory day. sometimes, the fact that you're alive and doing your own thing is a victory in itself. when yu know you've done your best at one thing, everything else sits at a notch below, even if it turns out differently than you'd imagined it. nothing is ever a loss if it means that you learned from it.

yes, it's warm outsid in december in toronto. the weather is better now than it's been since october. this is not the toronto i spent my childhood in. and it's fucked up, but some days, you just have to relish the the shining sun.

i'm finall looking forward to a proper good night sleep when this day is over in a few hours.

*****


saw the most BEAUTIFUL girl/woman on the streetcar platform the other day. she was holding a fresh copy of 1984 and reading the early chapters. damn the gurv for having my copy of orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London - read it online if that's your thing here.

i envisioned a situation...

"i see you're reading 1984. if you like orwell, you should read this," i'd say and hand her down and out, "it's our of print."

i'd get up and leave, and when she'd open the front cover and see a note.

yeah, right...

i dug her physique and presence so much in those fifteen minutes that to keep myself from beating off publicly, i had to turn around every so often and look at the guy a wasy behind me who kinda looked like the rev.

someone send me an angel to love me good and lie in bed with me in a time of need.

I GET THE HEAT

The WHO's "Tommy" is one of the great musical works of the 20th century, no question about it. since the age of twelve, i have been criminally in tune with this great collaboration with greatness, which i greatly swear in all sincerity. just play the opening to "acid queen" and i'm yours. i watched a deafening pete townshend on the dvd tube tonight as he explained his logic behind tommy and playin with the who. to roughly and unjustly paraphrase him: "i was unhappy with playing in the band, but what sustained me was something that began with 'can't explain'. with that record, we had a success that reached a lot of people, and i was at a point where i was being paid to do that again, so i felt i had a commission, and therefore a responsibility to do something about this powerful position. with 'tommy', i wanted people to get in touch with their spirit of ritual, their embrace of the abstract. you see roger up there singing 'see me feel me' looking like god with those lights behind him, and we can see for the first time since our club days every face in the crowd, as they've been flooded with this really bright light. so when we start singing 'listening to you' we've got the crowd all there for one purpose,. you hear the words come about, 'listening to YOU right behind YOU i get the HEAT' do they mean anything? no, nothing, they're purposefully abstract. so this idea of sprinkling something spiritual on the audience with something also vaguely religious can be very powerful, and we'd end on a crescendo so we coud feel that the audience had breached a wall and reached another level."

so all of a sudden, the WHO go from being a macho fuel band to a group interested in at the very least, uniting people in purpose for some common goal. i wonder if the same degree of theatrics and spiritualism have been heavily apparent in the rhetoric and propaganda of revolutionary movements, for better or for worse.

let's remember that in the same year tommy came out, a group out of the anti-war movement in the states called the weathermen would begin to form what was later known as the notorious WEATHER UNDERGROUND.



they were a force to fuck with, that's for sure. they played it nice until the FBI assassinated their good friend FRED HAMPTON, a young activist and speaker with the black panthers who was killed by the pigs in a staged gunfight that should have inflammed americans, but didn't. so they launched a bombing campaign on the crookkked system reponsible for the atrocity of vietnam in the global climate, and the repression of racial equality and the limitations over freedom of political action at home.

my question is: what is going to be the spark that blows everything up in our faces in this climate of bush? it isn't the fraud election of 2000, which could have been averted if americans were more like ukranians. american voters could really take a lesson from yushchenko, a prime minister who took on the president in ukraine's complex and corrupt government. he was poisoned for it, and his face left disfigured. yet he continued to fight for presidency, not because of his ego, but because the people came out and stated quite clearly that they wanted change, and they wanted yushchenko to be fairly appointed the opportunity to be the new face of democracy in the ukraine. but not americans. they rally around a sod like kerry, who, despite his good intentions, can't convince enough people that he's worthy of turning the country around. they abandoned kucinic and nader and the only real politicians in high places for kerry, who despite a hard fight in 1970 against the bullshit in vietnam (he should know, he fought), could not come out against the bullshit in iraq and the myriad of issues that surround its originators in the bush team.

it's tough to blame those poor folks for putting their hard earned energy into kerry. the system is so removed from the american people that they had little say in the matter. it was easy to adopt the anyone or anything but bush rationale with such little power. but it's time america stops waiting for the next michael moore movie or episode of crossfire to tell them what to do. thanks mike, we love ya, but you're never gonna stop this bush guy alone.

will there be an event that carries the magnitude of kent state in its shocking brutality? what will happen here in fortress north america when the resistance really gets pissed off? will the war come home like it did for the weathermen?

wake up america. how many times do you have to hear it? your country is at war and it's under national attention. your president is your problem for the next four years. we arond the world can kick and scream all we want, but it's up to you ultimately to "free the ballot", as jean st.vil told us at the bush protest two weeks ago in ottawa. "to free the ballot," he said, "we must stop the bully and his bullets." it's up to you to jam the machines that make those bullets, just as it is ours in canada to end our complicity in this movement of death that grows more and more accomodating to bush now that chretien is sitting in his ottawa condo retiring to the great political desk in the sky. and it can't just be students anymore leading the charge.

there are many things we in canad can do to "put our bodies on the line as bodies are being eliminated across iraq," to steal a phrase from andrea schmidt of the iraq solidarity project. i would suggest the follwing:

- put pressure on paul martin to take the same stance as jean chretien on the bush issue: strictly business but no buddy-buddy friendship. such a position onyl puts martin, and canada, at risk of being continually coopted by the republican weldpolitik. this means giving him some flack when he comes to visit instead of feeding him our best foods.

- help was resisters like david sanders, brandon hughey and jeremy heinzman. there's going to be a draft, and we need to help lawyers like jeffrey house put pressure on the gov't to treat war resisters like any other refugee in the legal process, but in the meantime, the only system dealing with the coming influx of resisters is the provisionary one we can come up with until the gov't improves its position.

- end security certificates and other spillovers of US homeland security in our country. stop throwing muslims in jail without charges and extraditing them to the states so they can be further deported to places that will torture or murder them.