Art Openings and Kitchen Ceilidhs
Topic: art events

Last night I decided to hit the opening for Cristian S. Aluas's show/sale at Rasputin's Cafe. I first met Cristian through the span-o small press fair, back when he was doing a lot of handmade, self-published art books - really lovely stuff - and then later got to talk to him when we were both interviewed at CHUO about span-o. He's largely moved out of the bookmaking field now, and has been doing art full time for a few years. The pieces on display at Rasputin's are mostly small acrylics and oils, largely in very cool colours, with some pen-and-ink and spraypaint (and occasional scraps of clothing, I found out.) There's something appealingly straightforward about them: I liked the simplicity in a lot of them - although I also enjoyed the frenetic lines and detail in some of the pen-and-ink pieces. 

It was a pretty relaxed sort of night - Rasputin's lends itself to that, with its kitcheny feel. It really does feel like someone's house - the tables are spread with mismatched tablecloths, the long bench on one wall is dotted with patchwork cushions. If you want a drink you get up and go to the back and rouse Dean. Or just get it out of the fridge yourself and let him know later. The debit machine is in the kitchen. And as we were sitting around talking, a collection of fiddlers, a guitarist or two, a recorder player and a keyboardist trickled in, set down, tuned up, and started jamming on classic Celtic folk tunes. The rest of the night was set to a great backdrop of music - really felt like a kitchen ceilidh that we just got to sit in on.

Incoming, upcoming, what have you

I picked up Kissing the Damned, by Mark Foss, at the Dusty Owl on Sunday, and it's a quick read (plus, I have a pretty flexible schedule these days.) Finished it this morning. The question I of course failed to ask when he said, at the end of the reading, "Are there any questions?" was, why did he choose to write this book as a collection of linked stories rather than as a novel? His answer, when I asked him after the reading when I finally thought to ask it, was pretty simple: it was less overwhelming. I can relate. 

These stories flow together enough to feel like a novel, though, even with the changes from first to third person that occasionally happen - and now my question would have been, why did he choose third person for some of the stories and third for others? Having done much the same thing with short stories I've written, though, I can almost predict the answer would be, "because that's how it came out."

It's nice to see a longer story told in short stories, too. I can absolutely sympathize - that's how I write most of my fiction (when I write it) too. In this case, it also works effectively with the story. The story centers on the main character and his moments of communication and miscommunication. In following a crumbling relationship (or three,) it does something very similar to what memory does; it doesn't give you a continuous narrative, just a handful of moments where things might have gone differently or where something important was said or understood. 

I may still ask Mark, when I see him next, about the perspective changes. If he's figured out why he does it, maybe he can tell me why I do.  

The Long Weekend of Lit

It's been a fairly busy weekend. . . Saturday I got to hit both "Fired...On Yo' Day Off!" at the Bronson Centre, and OutSpoken at Mother Tongue, and Sunday was, of course, Mark Foss at Dusty Owl. I also had Steve Curtis and a couple of his friends staying with me for the weekend - Steve came down from Peterborough to read at OutSpoken. 

"Fired...On Yo' Day Off!" was an interesting theatre experience - rattling along on its own enthusiasm for the most part. The actors were almost all novices, and a lot of the dialogue was ad libbed, occasionally directed at the audience and occasionally not. I think that the ad lib helped the actors move more naturally on the stage, since they weren't trying to remember how to move as well as what their next lines were, and the slapstick and overlapping dialogue carried the scenes along.

The show could have used a sound and light director; the house lights were up through the show, which was disconcerting, and the curtains closed between scenes, which sort of interrupted the action (and posed a problem a couple of times when the actors got caught on the wrong side of the curtains as they were drawing closed.)

Having Q come out to do some of her poetry before the show was a nice surprise, and the poems she did were really quite beautiful, slipping between speech and song.  In the show she played an entertaining ghetto mom, waif-like child in tow, and was really quite funny. I also enjoyed Pearl James' Tourette's Syndrome-afflicted character - she was so big-eyed and soft-spoken and sweet - interspersed with bouts of bizarre shouting. The audience loved her. 

After the show we had to book to get to Mother Tongue Books for OutSpoken - a great reading, intimate and really warm, hosted by the Capital Poetry Collective and Agitate. The readers ranged from prose to poetry, and from quiet and introspective to screaming out loud. Really; Steve Curtis got at least some of the audience to scream along with him in one section of his long poem "Storm." The space is small enough that no mike is really needed, and the atmosphere was wonderful. It took a while for the shop to clear out afterwards: everyone was still standing around talking. In fact, a lot of us wound up going off to the Elgin Street Diner afterwards to keep the conversation going (without keeping Michelle Desbarats from closing up shop.) 

Sunday evening I was at the Dusty Owl (of course) to see Mark Foss read from his new collection of short stories, Kissing the Damned. It was a nice reading - shortish, and I know I was curious enough about what happened next to go buy the book. The open mike afterwards featured a rocking performance by Steve Curtis of one of his poems over Jimi Hendrix's 'Red House' (provided by the Dog of Dog and Pony Sound, who does the karaoke show right after Dusty, and who does our sound.) 

Oh, right, and then there was karaoke after the show. For the sake of general poetry-community interest: rob mclennan has a lovely singing voice.  

Synaesthetic

Synaesthesia last night was a long and mind-stretching event. I think the most discipline-blurring part of the show was the spoken word preformance, "Last Tracks" - the chapbook was available and I'm glad I grabbed a copy because I wanted to go back and reread a lot of the pieces, in particular Marcus McCann's "Nirvana - In Bloom," a really entertaining and complex riff on  the physics and geometry of big death and little death. The readers were a varied bunch, from short fiction writers to poets, with performance poetry, props and drama, and straightforward monologue thrown together over a soundtrack made up of all their choices for the last track they wanted to hear. Except Festrell, of course, who brought a mix of fragments of a dozen songs and integrated the mix tape into her own performances, so that its silences and changes of mood were echoed in her performance.

The readers all stood on the stage for the entire performance in a semicircle, giving each speaker a silent and still audience of other people who were also, by the nature of the subject, standing in the moments of their deaths, waiting to speak from whatever their take on it was. I thought the choice of David Emery's beautiful "Death Cab for Cutie - Transatlanticism" for the final piece was particularly good. "The only thing I know for certain about dying, and I can say this with a degree of expertise now that I've died, is that the music never stops. It's so rampantly present in the air that you feel yourself constantly becoming a part of it . . . Know that there is great peace and understanding. And that it all sounds very familiar." 

The weird thing about shows at Arts Court Theatre, however, is the fact that they seem to usually get everyone to get up and file back out to the reception area between acts. Not that in this case that was such a bad thing, because it gave people a chance to check out the merch table and the visual art which was also a part of the event. Seemed a little odd fishing out my ticket every time we went back into the theatre. 

"Love me.... Now!" was a really funny short play, very well produced and acted. I didn't get much information on the actors, unfortunately. The premise - three women, three men, and a speed-dating service - allows for the playwrights to have a lot of fun creating characters and then mixing and matching. The short scenes, five minutes each, put each couple together and just sat back. When all three couples had been covered, the men changed tables and they did it again. But just when I thought it might get repetitive, the pattern got shaken up when one of the men sat down at another man's table because the woman had left the room. For a minute it seemed that after all this ultra-hetero speed-dating, it'd be the guys that finally hit it off. . .

Check out more work these guys do. 

And then the night was wrapped up with My Dad VS Yours, an instrumental group doing some cool sort-of-ambient post-rock, with a really quite mesmerizing video running behind them. I thought they were just a touch too loud for the space, but it did add to the wall-of-sound effect that they were creating at times. 

Tomorrow I'm going to be catching "Fired...on Yo' Day Off" at the Bronson Centre and the OutSpoken reading at Mother Tongue books. Stay tuned for reviews.

The Yellow Dot-tawa Project

I was at Spins & Needles yesterday (what a wonderful event that is, and still going like gangbusters) and got conscripted, along with everyone else present, for the Yellow Dot-tawa Project. This sounds great. It's inspired by the Yellow Arrow Project, and brings together love of the urban world, and a certain amount of fascination with collective and culture (and possibly chaos theory.) 

So we all got six yellow dots. The assignment is to take your dots and stick them on or near locations that are significant to you. Then, for the next couple of months, be on the lookout for other people's dots, and go back to visit your dots and see if anyone else has put a dot up there. Watch the dots multiply around town. Part of the fun of it, I think, is seeing the dots and knowing you're part of something that other people might totally miss. Those little significant details that are only significant to a particular group, but right out there in the public space. Ooh, that's nifty. 

Then there's part two of the project: Take a picture of your dot. If you have a Flickr account you can upload it there with the tag "yellowdottawaproject," and if you don't have an account, the nice people at Spins & Needles will upload it for you. And then you can go back to Flickr.com and search for the term "yellowdottawaproject" and see what happens! 

If you want to play - office supply stores sell sheets of color coding labels. Just pick some up and have fun! 

 

Tonight I'm going to hit Synaesthesia - overlapping disciplines to see what happens! Right up my alley. Arts Court Theatre, 7:00. 

 

And as another note - if you weren't at Cafe Dekcuf last Saturday for Dave Lauzon's show, you can listen to it on the Live Music Archive. His two opening guitarists were also a whole lot of fun and I'm sorry they're not available on this archive. . . 

Check out the events this week - going to be busy! More reasons for me to procrastinate from the job hunt...

In particular -

SYNAESTHESIA
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
Arts Court Theatre and Lounge (2 Daly Ave.)
7:00 PM - 11:00 PM
All Ages

An exercise in overlapping artistic disciplines (music, theatre, word, photography and paint). Featuring performance sets by

My Dad vs Yours, and DECA Playwrights' Fringe comedy "Love Me...Now!"

... and "Last Tracks: Songs to Listen to Before You Die": Spoken word performances by local writers on the last song they'd ever want to hear.
Featuring Cameron Anstee, Amanda Earl, David Emery, Festrell, Peter Gibbon, Ian O. Graham, Marcus McCann, Holly Price, Esther Splett, and Sean Zio.

Tickets are available in advance at the Arts Court Box Office (2 Daly Ave.) for $10. A limited number of tickets will also be sold at the door for $12, so make sure you get yours early.

Visit http://www.capitalsyn.com for more info.

There's also OutSpoken:  The QueerAction Spoken Word Show, happening on the 19th of August from 7-9 at Mother Tongue Books... featuring young queer writers.

Reinforcement of something you already know

This last week, I was on a mission. To buy one book, and one book only - Phil Jenkins's An Acre of Time, a lovely book about the history of Ottawa as seen through an abandoned acre in LeBreton Flats. And I live in the South End, so I took the bus downtown, planning to head down to Collected Works, where I knew it was most likely going to be on the shelves. But it's a long way on the #2, so, despite my better instincts and the whispering of the good consumer citizen on my shoulder - I decided just to zip through the Chapters on Rideau and check to see if it was there. Just to save myself the ride out to Westboro and all. I know, you can smack me later. 

I walked into the Chapters past the smell of the Starbucks, dodging the pyramidal stacks of Books You Should Read Right Now Because Everyone Else Is arranged by theme that try to trip you up at the door. Headed straight for "Local Interest."  Nothing. The store smelled antiseptic - and the sheer size of the place. Stacks and stacks of glossy books. An unpleasant smell. Fluorescent lights, escalators. Employees in vests. You know. This is obvious. I decided to cut it short and check the computer terminal. The book wasn't in stock (although I could order it on line from the service desk and get it sometime around Easter of next year if my past experiences are any guide.) 

I ticked the "yes, I would have bought this book if you'd had it in stock" button on the self-serve computer, walked out, and caught a #2 out to Westboro, where I got out at Holland, and headed into Collected Works. 

Where people were browsing and talking, there was a pot of coffee on a hotplate and some bakery-type stuff for sale, and comfy chairs, space to sit out front in the sun, the light was warm, the ceilings were comfortingly un-monumental, and the small tables and shelves were piled with selected books. I walked into the warm and bright back room, where the children's books are, and was instantly hit with a memory of some of the best children's bookstores in Canada, because my parents religiously sought them out when we were young. I discovered a new Charles de Lint book and suddenly had the perfect birthday gift for my niece as well as the book I'd come for. And when I asked the guy if they had An Acre of Time, he went straight to the shelf and handed me my copy. 

I know, you know all this. I just thought the contrast was striking enough that it bears reminding. It's occasionally easy to decide not to take the extra bus, and to hit the superstore. But every so often, I'm reminded that it's not really worth it. 

Fired on Yo' Day Off

Putting in a plug for this play. I know it's the same day as S. James Curtis' reading at Mother Tongue Books (see below) - but check it out, there are two shows, so you can do both! I know I'm going to.  

Acclaimed Cleveland playwright brings hit stage-play to Ottawa for two performances

When:            Saturday, August 19, 2006

Location:      The Bronson Centre, 211 Bronson Ave.

Time:             Matinee 4:30 pm and 7:00 pm

Tickets:         Advance $15.00, $20 at the door

• A&H Records, 256 Bank St.
• Cell World Canada, Rideau Centre
• Cell World Canada, Bayshore Shopping Centre
• Lucas Nault Hair Studio, 232 Laurier Ave. East

Think you've got problems?  What if you owned a Hair & Nail Salon where one employee yells a barrage of Tourette Syndrome induced insults at you and your customers?  Another employee invents ongoing battles with Beyoncé Knowles while letting the hair of some of your best clients fall out.  Your nail technician is a clairvoyant who delivers messages from God.  The manager and best hair-dresser keeps complaining that the stress is making his ovaries flutter.  And then you have to deal with the clients.  All Quetta Lewis wants to do is run the best salon in the city and find the father who walked out the door of her childhood and never came back.

T.Y. Martin is a relentless and prolific talent who has written and directed over 20 of his own plays.  He spent eight years touring as a stand-up comedian, and the past ten years working as an actor in various touring and film productions.  In 2005 his production of the same name was profiled in the documentary "If You Love Me Why Do You Cheat?" as part of the New York Film Festival; where the work was described as "ferocious, fresh and funny."  The cast of "Fired on Yo' Day Off" introduces significant new talents to Ottawa audiences and features Q The Romantic Revolutionary, winner of the 2005 CBC Poetry Face-Off.

Wordplay and Foreplay and a Foreword
Topic: publishing

This is a foreword I just wrote for Storm and Other Poems, a book coming out soon from Dusty Owl. Thought I'd share. The author (Steve Curtis: I covered his launch last fall in Peterborough) will be in town for a reading at Mother Tongue Books on August 19th: stay tuned for more details or ask at Mother Tongue about the QueerAction reading!

Wordplay and foreplay and a foreword

             When I first met S. James Curtis, I thought he wrote gay erotica. Good erotica, where there are personalities, realities, and where the end goal really is, even in this day and age, True Love. But I thought, that's this guy's niche, that's what he does. It didn't take me long to figure out that boy, was I wrong. He's way more than a one trick pony . . . although if you're looking for erotic, don't worry; even the political stuff in this book has its whiff of sweat.

            Curtis has a tendency to surprise you right out of your preconceptions. His porn is tender, his autobiography is psychology, his erudition is foulmouthed, he's looking for a basic hot fuck and a white picket fence at the same time and he knows it, and he's some kind of cyberphilosopher capable of seeing the deeper significance of Super Mario. It's not just that the personal is political here, it's that the personal is public, and in this world everything public becomes political. He's walking firmly in the footsteps of the confessional poets and the Beats, but he's doing it on Myspace with a high-speed connection, a home recording studio and the online sphere of instamatic art.

            He's also a writer who can and does write anywhere, anytime, on the bus, in bars, on scratch pads at work and in the middle of the night. I once watched him paintstakingly scrawling out, letter by letter, the first few paragraphs of a short story on a Palm Pilot in the middle of a karaoke show, because he had an idea. I watched ‘Assembly' get written over bacon and eggs and eight cups of bad coffee in a flyspeck diner.

            There's a show he's putting on - a show where the bars are sordid and he's drunk and horny or drunk and depressed or drunk and sick, where all the decent men are straight or closeted and you get the idea that in his head, hell, they're all closeted, bastards, and the goddamn cabs never stop when you're staggering and just want to get to the poutine stand before you go home.

            But then he turns around and rips right through all that - and straight to your raw guts just when you weren't expecting it - with something like ‘Madeline' or ‘Personal' or ‘Vanilla' or ‘Lower the Flag.' And if you do nothing else, read his stuff out loud, listen to the changes he rings with sound and ideas, something that isn't done enough these days. "I want to make love / I want to build it up from its component parts / Hormones, pheromones / his moans, feral moans / that fill whatever room is / convenient at the time."

Or check this out: "Keep me planted on all fours / You plowing me / and we grow / and grow / and grow / we are human agriculture / animal husbandry / so maybe I am thinking of a kind of marriage..." Not only is this very hot, it's got a half-dozen nifty little wordplays tucked into it.

            And then there's ‘Storm,' the title poem - a grand shout that bows graciously in the direction of its ancestor ‘Howl' and then heads off into the street where the rain becomes a metaphor for connection and inevitability, where the ideas of building storms and power and pressure and release get run through all their connotations - a street that's both messier and more hopeful, in the long run, than Ginsberg's.

            And I think that's one of the things I love about this poetry; it's human, it's hopeful; even at its most despairing, it's exuberant, and it's cold-eyed clear on the complications of wanting love and sex to be the same thing, wanting the world and yourself to wake up and figure out what's important, wanting to be able to change things and yet still wanting the world to leave you alone. "Guess I'm greedy that way," he says in ‘Personal.'

            That, and it's funny and erotic and moving and angry and sonorous and prosaic and poetic, and in this book, it's combined with Curtis's scribbly black-and-white illustrations, which range from doodle-like additions to the page to full-on graphic expressions of the poems (and check out the frowning taxi.) The drawings interact with the poems, helping to convey the rawness that's at the heart of this collection. They work together to bring you an honest book written in barrooms and buses, in diners and lunchrooms, and that's guaranteed to move you, in a lot of different ways, and many times over.