Someone broke into my family's cabin in Transylvania and stole all of my grandfather's hand cut statuettes. It happened this winter sometime. Apparently, now that the borders are open, it's common in Eastern Europe for degenerates and ingrates to drive around remote villages and clean them out. My parents tell me that usually they steal electrical equipment like generators, but this time they decided to take my grandfather's beautiful works...and for what? They won't make much money off of them. Regardless, they're priceless to me...I think a part of me died when I was told the news.



The only good that can come of this is that they get hocked off in markets and someone at least gets to have his work in their house. His name is carved into every piece he made, so at least they'll no who the artist was.

I shudder to think of the wost case scenario, in which these peasant criminals realize they won't get any money for them, and dump them in the river.

This week at the radio station, we're in fundraising, and I've been manning the phone room from time to time at nights. In past years I've met some bizarre people during fundraising, randoms who just kind of show up and talk shit to me for hours on end.

During a reggae program, a middle-aged lady at the phone desk expressed such genuine sadness and surprise when it was announced on air that Bob Marley's mother had just died. In tribute, they played "No Woman No Cry", and predictably, the lady started singing shamelessly to every word. Normally I wouldn't give a shit, but she revealed herself to be the biggest prick I'd ever met in my life.

"I saw him live at Maple Leaf Gardens!" she started, excitedly swaying to the music and closing her eyes as she described what it was like to see him in person.

"Who opened for him?" I asked.

"Oh Jeez, I dunno, I was really stoned at the time. I can't remember, but wow, Marley was incredible!"

Minutes passed awkwardly, until my friend Pete and I began talking about some stuff. There was a newspaper on the table, with a headline about Tibetan protests and the Olympic Torch.

"I don't know what to make of this," Pete said. "It just seems to be in the news because of the Olympics."

"Yeah," I said, "I mean, Darfur is still happening, and Iraq and all that other stuff...Tibet's a cause celebre, but you could argue that it's about something larger. It's not just the Beastie Boys throwing a concert, it's a part of a wider criticism of the Chinese government, who treat not just Tibetans but a billion of their own people like shit."

"Ok, fair enough," he replied. He was worried, though, that he might sound racist at what he was about to say. Keep in mind that my friend is a Sri Lankan who says "nigga" in public like it aint no thang. Call him a product of diversity, if you will...Anyway, he continued: "Haven't the Chinese people always had a shitty government? And even if there's a revolution, don't you think they'll always have a government like that?"

Here's where the hippie lady interjected with her own disclaimer. "Can I just say something?" she said. "I just see the Chinese people like ants, they just move all over the place in these neat little lines and they consume. They consume everything...like little ants!"

I think Pete was no longer worried about being called a racist.

She told us about how the Chinese had even consumed her neighbourhood bank machine. "I was taking out some cash in the Beaches, and I could see the instructions in three languages. English, French and Chinese! I mean, c'mon, I don't see why my yuppie white neighbourhood needs Chinese all over the place!"

I wondered if she'd at all have a problem with her bank machine giving her instructions in Jamaican patois. Would she mind if instead of "Welcome", the teller screen said something like "Big Up Mi Bredrin Most High, I and I...Selassie Rastafariaiieeeee!" She'd probably be ok with that happening, especially if the transaction record came out as a pack of gold-red-and-green rolling papers.




She finished with her least subtle point: "If you think about it, a lot of negative things originate from China. Like SARS."

"AIDS began in Africa," I pointed out. "But we don't assign it to blacks, do we?"

"That's different!" she said. "Look at the way the Chinese consume things!" She had to hammer that point home again.

I reminded her that Canadians, per capita, consume more energy and resources than any other nation of people on earth. She shrugged it off by saying she didn't have a computer, a cell phone, or even a toaster, and that she actually didn't miss hot dried out bread at all.

I went to Churchill Park today with Alex. Some perverted man was trying to sell puppies to children on the hill. My camera was morally opposed to taking a photo of him. It was like "Um, no, this man doesn't deserve anything but faceless discrimination." So I was like, "Ok, cool, the people shall remain ignorant. We can tell them where the park is, and when they see a strange alpen fellow with a huge zoom lens enticing 12 year old boys with puppies and taking photos of them remorselessly, you'll know who it is."

So we focused on the puppies instead.



Churchill Park is the best place in the universe. It's open, and massive, always bright. It's built atop a reservoir, and slopes sharply into a massive rivine. It's quiet, and gives you a view of the city that isn't as accessible in other places.



The park calls for makeouts, frolicks, and general retarditry, plus it's just as effective for jogging as it is for partying. It's a one stop shop for everything you need to keep it together in this massive city.




Also, check this out: the New Shreddies are exciting!

ON THE GROUND IN PARIS

I collapsed in a kebab shop. We were stopping for some food on the way to the club. I hadn't ordered anything, and wasn't going to. I stood by the wall, and suddenly became a bit faint. Then, it was pins and needles across my body, and mild hallucinatory breakups in my field of vision, like television interference in the shape of stars. I needed to sit down.

Two Brits came in and started hassling my friend, for whatever reason. I was told later they wanted a sip of his drink. At first, they made their demands in perect French, but before they realized we were Anglophones, I had apparently passed out.

I remember one of the Brit's last remarks before he switched to English. I recall having a couple of my mate's fries, and thinking that I badly needed a seat, but there weren't any available in the tiny kebab shop. Suddenly, the dizziness churned at motor speed, and my ears started ringing, first in a low shift that pitched upwards rapidly...then everything faded away, and I felt this "whoosh", like the earth tilting, and then a clumsy, weightless collision. It ended in a suspended darkness, as if I were in liquid, and I could hear some mutterings around me. I woke up on the ground.

When I got back on my feet, no one had any idea what had happened. I figured out pretty quickly that I had blacked out (after all, when you're on the floor, and the last thing you remember is being dizzy, it's easy to put two and two together). I smiled at one of the Brits and humoured them with something like, "Uh, yeah, I'm not sure what just happened there but I think I had an acid flashback."

"Roight," said one of them, with a bewliedred look. "You just 'ave a seat, mate."

I turned my head and everyone was looking at me. "I'm just gonna to go sit down outside, yeah?"

I left, and sat on the curb, leaning my back against the shop window. The Brits came screaming out, one of them loudly explaining to his buddy that they were "surrounded by inhospitable people!"

My friend came outside. "Are you ok?" she asked. "Has this ever happened before?"

"Um, a couple times but usually when it does, I sit down and it wears off. I didn't sit this time, so maybe that's why."

"Are you diabetic at all?"

I've never been tested for it, so how could I know? She talked about blood sugar but at that point my brain was mush if I had to think for more than 30 seconds. The feeling lasted for much of the night.



The friend with the food joined us outside. "I thought you were fucking with those British guys," he told me. "Like, 'These guys are being so ridiculous I can't stand up right now.' But then I realized that was maybe too extreme."

He explained that the Brits had stormed in, very persuasively trying to glean a sip from his drink, and then pursuing the cause aggressively. "Then your eyes just kinda closed and you fell."

"How did I fall? Did my legs give out?"

"No," he said. "It was more like you crumpled."

It's difficult to imagine myself doing that. I told him about what it felt like, and what I remembered, but I was pretty cluless after that.



"The kebab guys thought you were on drugs or maybe drunk." I hadn't been.

I don't why it happened, or why I managed to avoid it in more dangerous places, like while walking along the sharp banks of the Seine, or climbing up a spiral staircase in some museum. In fact, I'm not really sure why a kebab shop and two strange Brits might be involved in stimulating my blackout.



I tried to think of some health reasons, but nothing other than some pretty unlikely chronic illnesses came up. I had been walking a lot, outdoors, in the rain, not eating much because of the expenses, and sleeping on a floor at nights for only a few hours at a time. I did get sick later on in the week, but not the kind of sickness that makes you black out.



So perhaps it's for psychological reasons that my feet gave way to kebab shop floor. I woke up with my face on the tiles because things are moving too fast right now. Maybe my brain has had too stable a relationship with my cranium for too long. It's inevitable that something had to disrupt my balance, and whatever it was psychologically seems to find its way into the physical stuff too. It's a safety call, I think, from the ref on the sidlelines. He's blowing his whistle in my brain as I get tackled in my endzone.

It reminds me of something related to me as a kid. My mom used to have the most creative ways of explaining the most complex medical stuff. To demonstrate how the brain reacts to hitting the cranium, she would put a cauliflower in a pot, shake it around for a bit. "See," she'd say, "you can see what happens to your brain when it hits your skull."

I change in very strange and unexplainable increments. I'm not sure what's going on exactly, but for the first time in a long time, I'm discovering a new place in my head, like taking pictures in the darkness and seeing only what the flash exposes.



From there, it was on to Fleche D'Or, and although I felt a bit bizarre, it was a good time.

My people are gone

When I hear their names, I cry their tears
As if their memories were my own

I think of the poets, shot before their pens could strike paper
Or the painters, whose necks were hanged in place of their portraits

Instead of screams, and the sounds of bullets, or the percussve striking of bombs
I try to hear the symphonies that might have been created under different circumstances

I imagine what books they might have written
Without envisioning the burning pyres that evaporated so many words

I account for their lost fortunes, and what they might have funded in a better world
While ignoring the pillagers who fattened themselves from their spoils

When I cry, do the tears come from pride, that they lived as they did?
And not from the immense sorrow that they are dead?

^^^^


Last week, I interviewed author Anna Porter, whose latest book, Kasztner's Train, tells the story of Reszo Kasztner, a Jewish journalist from Transylvania who negotiated a controversial deal with the Nazis that brought a number of Hungarian Jews to safety on a train bound for Switzerland during the Holocaust. The book has been nominated for a Charles Taylor Prize in Literary Non-Fiction, and the winner will be announced next Monday. Just before the prize is given out, my interview, in a shortened form, can be heard on CIUT's Take 5 Morning Show.

My grandmother, her parents, and a cousin were on that train, the only members of that family who survived. Everyone else perished at Auschwitz and

Listen here.

I found a 16mm projector, somewhere in my dreams.





The lamp still worked, and my hands trembled.



But when I opened it up, it was a nightmare. It came from the Dental School, and like an old, neglected mouth, it revealed the tragic dust of corroded metals, rusted rollers and dusty bulbs.









Its days are numbered but perhaps someone can find hapiness with it as memorabilia.