Tomorrow's the first slam of 2009, but that's not the only reason you should go. I can't - prior commitments - but I wish I could. Go because there's a bus strike. Go because it's winter. Most of all, go because they'll also be raising money to help support Steve Sauve - "the joker king of poetry" to quote Danielle Gregoire - who's in the hospital for some major emergency surgery. Steve's already kicked death's ass once, and he's a survivor, but things are going to be hard for him and those who love him. They'll be collecting donations at the door to help them with some of the costs.

Mercury Lounge, tomorrow, doors at 6:30.

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 1:18 PM EST

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I got this from The Gladstone's mailing list and thought it worth reposting here...

The Gladstone's Top 10 Reasons to attend Opening Night of "Lieutenant of Inishmore"

10.  If you like cats, it has a cat.
  9.  If you don't like cats, it has a dead one!
  8.  You haven't seen this much blood splattered since "300".
  7. Could be considered 'Offensive' - Opening Night could be Closing Night!
  6.  It makes Quentin Tarantino movies look like good old, fashioned, family entertainment.
  5.  Listen to director John P. Kelly's post show lecture:
'F-e-c-k', It's Not a Swear Word, People in Ireland use it all the time!
  4.  Cheaper than a hockey game, just as much violence, but no humans really get hurt.  (Just the cats)
  3.  If you don't faint during the performance it may confirm for you that you DO have a future as a trauma surgeon.
  2.  If you don't wince during the performance it does confirm for you that you must seek immediate help (and stay away from me!).

...And the number one reason for attending Opening Night of "Lieutenant of Inishmore"  Thursday January 8, 2009 ....

1.  Running a theatre is not cheap, buy a 'fecking' ticket!  Please!

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 9:01 PM EST

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I sincerely hope other people are having less trouble getting out to see things than I am. I'm trapped in the South End without a car, so it's kind of tough to plan to get downtown for any of the shows and readings that are happening.

If you can make it, on December 21st (the solstice, no less!) Dusty Owl will be hosting guitarist Dave Lauzon for the fifth annual Chocolate House for the Food Bank. Dave (formerly of local jam band Nero) is a one-man guitar armada.

Chances are, due to the mutually assured assholery going on with the strike, there won't be buses by then. But there will be hot chocolate, great music, a friendly room, and a food collection box to help out those far less fortunate than ourselves (we may not have public transit, but we have warm places to sleep at night and food in the cupboards - at least most of us, I assume.)

All of the events going on these days are going to be suffering audience loss because of the bus strike. So, check out Bywords.ca or the Ottawa Arts Newsletter for an event near you, break out the sturdy winter boots, and make an effort to go if you're close enough. You might meet someone new, and your attendance will definitely be appreciated as never before.

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 10:54 AM EST

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In what sort of looks like ... a mutiny? ... City Council has voted no, 14-9, to the cuts to services, social support, housing, and the arts! It feels like a slap-down of the Mayor for his blind promises of zero tax hikes to me. They chose to chuck out the line-by line excising of everything that makes a city worthwhile ("everything that brings a city joy," to quote one councillor,) throw out the cuts, and stop wasting everyone's time quibbling over whether seniors, or the poor, or the artists, deserve to be supported more. The Mayor shouldn't have promised a four-year tax freeze, they said, and they backed it up.

They're not cutting investment in the arts. And not only are the arts not being cut, but the city is actually honouring the Arts Investment Strategy promises that were aimed to increase arts funding over the next few years, to bring Ottawa's spending on the arts into line with other major Canadian cities (i.e., to make its per capita arts investment less, shall we say, humiliating.)

Larry "doesn't think there'll be a lot of happy people when they wake up this morning?" Sorry, Larry, I woke up to CBC announcing this decision, and I have to say, I'm a very happy person. So is everyone else I've spoken to about this.

This is a good day. 

Too bad it's marred by the impending (in fifteen minutes as of this writing) OC Transpo strike, which is going to cripple a lot of the artists, arts workers and arts fans that rely on public transit to get anywhere. Lord knows the Writers Festival office will be operating on intermittent hours for the foreseeable future (as in, we'll be there when we can beg, steal or borrow rides)... and I feel a little as though I'm under house arrest, from my home in the South Keys area. I hope it's over quickly, I hope Transpo management can see reason, and I hope it doesn't prove too hard to figure out how to bike in several inches of snow. 

At least it hit after our final event for December - Gwynne Dyer, who spoke at Saint Brigid's this evening on his latest book Climate Wars. I think I kind of gushed a little when I got to talk to him. What a smart guy. Saying terrfying things. At least, he did get to the good news (some really interesting technologies that might cool the earth, and buy us some time to get the carbon emissions down, and a reassurance that we are a pretty damn smart species who can probably get most anything done once we wrench the politicians around to it.) Getting the politicians around to it... that's a tougher call.

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 11:22 PM EST

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... which might explain the smallish crowd at Dusty Owl yesterday. The first day of -18 or -20 temperatures will do that. I know I felt, on the way to the bus afterwards, as though the wind had an actual malicious intelligence. It hated me personally, I'm sure of it.

But the folks that were there got to hear Adrian de Hoog reading from his two previous novels and a snatch of the upcoming one. Although he had a slightly weird reading style (a little like having a novel read to you by the earnest host of a midafternoon children's show,) the reading itself was fun, and the questions afterward were interesting. Adrian's a retired diplomat - he claims that the 'diplomatic thriller' is a genre he's trying to get off the ground - and this being Ottawa, the questions tended to get into government scuttlebutt. The guilty pleasure of so many in this town. 

The best thing about the afternoon, for me, was having one of the bar's regulars, who hadn't known it was a Dusty Owl day, show up part way through the reading, and then stop Steve and me to tell us how cool it was. "Not like I'll do it every week or something, but you know, that was pretty fuckin cool," he said. "Really interesting. I got right into it. You know, some of the guys told me about these and I thought it didn't sound like something I'd want to do, but I've had my eyes opened a little, learned something."

Ah, I live for that. 

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 10:47 AM EST

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The Metropolitan Opera has recently started making its operas available in movie theatres across the continent. You pay about $25, settle into your seat in the movie theatre, and the show is broadcast live in HD. I'd heard about the idea, and I'd heard that it was surprisingly satisfying, if a little weird that it makes you feel like you should be applauding in a movie theatre. 

Now, I'm not an opera connoisseur, or even an opera fan for that matter. But I've heard far too much about John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic not to be really intrigued by it. I'd read a couple of reviews of different productions, and even gone out on YouTube to find some arias. What I found was strange and edgy and gorgeous. It’s an opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb: sort of an analogue of Faust, in which a brilliant scientist sells his soul to the devil for knowledge.

Anyway, a friend of mine noticed a couple of days ago that two theatres in town were going to be showing encore presentations of Doctor Atomic. So he and I and a third friend headed off to Silver City yesterday to go to the opera. It was a little strange; we were probably the three youngest people in the room, with the exception of two children there with their parents. The three of us are certainly not your stereotypical opera crowd - more like fans of comic books, SF, anime and videogames. But this is opera about physicists and the technology and tactics of war. And the Manhattan Project.  Right up our alley, really.

It’s interesting how you have to get your mind into the space to listen to a new art form. At the start, you’re off balance a little, not sure how you’re supposed to relate to this story. It’s stylized, staged, and everyone’s singing their lines. Including lines about “blisters on the hemispheres of the plutonium core” (the dialogue lines were apparently taken from reports and memos from the Manhattan Project, and really didn't sound like the kind of thing that could be easily sung.) But eventually you get into it - especially with Gerald Finley’s gorgeous performance. He has a stunning voice, and the perfect face to portray Oppenheimer … all he has to do is close his eyes slowly to project that sensitivity and conflict.

I have one problem with the HD broadcast. (I was even okay with the fact that the cameras were so close a lot of the time that you could see spit on the singers’ chins, and a little less okay with not being able to see the full stage when it was clear other things were happening with the massive set.) My problem was that it didn’t really know that it didn’t want to be TV. The whole thing was hosted by a blonde with a mike, who walked around backstage introducing the story before the performance. I’d love to be able to walk around backstage at the Met, but not when I’m about to watch an opera. I don’t want to see the levers and strings, I want to see the illusion on stage. Let me see the levers and strings when I’m not there as the audience, waiting to suspend my disbelief.

And when Finley closed out the first act with the best aria in the whole opera, a setting of Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” and the orchestra’s crashed to the apocalyptic chord the act ends on… I wanted to have a moment of silence. I wanted to be able to rest for a minute and reflect. It’s a very powerful piece of music, and I wanted to take a deep breath and say, “Wow.” Instead, the camera cut straight to the blonde, backstage, cornering Finley as he came off stage (still wiping his forehead) and yammering on about how he gets inside Oppenheimer’s character and what’s it like to be able to sing this gorgeous music. It completely killed the buzz. Even if the little mini-documentary they put together about what happened to Oppenheimer after the Manhattan Project was kind of interesting, and the interview with John Adams might have explained some things about the libretto that I knew my two friends wouldn’t have known. Still. I didn’t want to have the illusions broken.I didn't want to see Finley when he wasn't being Oppenheimer. I wasn’t even, at that point, concerned with who Oppenheimer really was: he was the tragic hero of an opera. For that purpose, it was almost better for me to forget he was a real person and focus on the grandiose themes of sin and redemption and science and knowledge that the opera’s about. Let him be a myth for three hours or so.

Other than the infomercial for the Met and the annoying host, though, it was actually a cool experience. I got to see an opera, which I normally wouldn't; and it made me think that if I were in New York I might actually drop the $50-$80 to get half decent seats and go see it again. So, a non-opera-goer, and possibly two of her friends, partially converted. I guess the HD broadcast did its job.

Especially since if I went to see it live, I'd be able to sit still with myself and take a long breath during the intermission.

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 12:56 AM EST

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Swizzles is like a box of chocolates, to paraphrase a movie I have staunchly never watched: you never know what you're gonna get.

I went down to Swizzles an hour early for the launch of the Winter Issue of The Moose and Pussy.  I thought I'd just pull up a table, break out the laptop, order a beer, and work on some stuff... but I walked into the middle of the monthly Lesbian Information Exchange (L.I.X.) meeting. They were pretty friendly about it, so I just hung out on the sidelines, listened with half an ear, and had a beer anyway. 

The Carleton crowd, though, had to wait outside till the meeting was over at 8 (I got in ahead of time, and I was, um, a woman, so a bit less disruptive to the meeting) ... so, the reading started a little late but no one seemed to care. The Moose and Pussy has a pretty solid following so far - headed up by some of the active writers and editors at Carleton. These people have energy, talent, and skill, and I've been increasingly impressed with their growing network of activities, magazines, and readings. And I have been impressed, twice now, with the variety and quality of the work in The Moose and Pussy. Most of the work that was read last night was stylish, thoughtful, smart, sometimes funny erotica - not just fantasy, fluids, and body parts. On the surreal and funny side there was a bizarre piece by the inimitable Kane X. Faucher about a pretentious scenester and a chorus of dildoes: on the touching side there was a short story about an empty hookup at a party. And although I've heard Marcus McCann's poem "watching my boyfriend get fucked" a couple of times, I still enjoy it.

It was a strangely nostalgic evening for me, as well. Steve Zytveld from Dusty Owl was hosting, and there was a weird full-circle feeling about the night: Dusty Owl started out at Carleton, and interestingly we were the first to put Kane Faucher on the mike, back when he was but a young thing ... Cathy and I even did a rendition, from the sidelines, of his performance from back then. "The wheels on the bus are made of cheese, made of cheese, made of cheese....The driver on the bus is made of foam, made of foam, made of foam..." Okay, so the current batch of Carleton students had no idea what we were referring to, and Kane now holds a Ph.D.

But it really did feel like a revisiting of Dusty Owl's origins (except this batch of Carleton students produce MUCH slicker and more sophisticated magazines than we did... ah, desktop publishing.) The best thing about the evening, for me, though, was that at 9:30 or so (they had the start time wrong) who should walk into Swizzles but Wim and Iris ten Holder. 

Wim and Iris were the owners of Cafe Wim, the "touch of Dutch" coffee shop on Sussex that has now been replaced by Social, and where Steve and Cathy first held the reading series that became the Dusty Owl Series. More importantly, they're a large part of the reason the Dusty Owl series even exists: it was their encouragement and enthusiasm that let Steve and Cathy build the series. They had missed the show, but stayed to have a glass of wine (while the Thursday evening cabaret show started up behind us) and catch up. Wim is writing a book, apparently, about Cafe Wim and its history. And the fun part was that they didn't bat an eye at the tipsy students and gorgeous drag queens, or the pounding music. I wound up at the back table with Wim and Iris - who are an extremely distinguished older couple - Steve and Cathy, and Jeff Blackman and Kate Maxfield from the Moose and Pussy, and Wim told us that when they walked in, the first thing they thought was, "it's the same scene and the same kids! They haven't changed!"

Last night had a strange buoyant sense of continuity about it.  Yeah, the faces are different but the scene - the university reading series crowd - is still there. Still kicking. Still fun.

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 10:45 AM EST

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...but things might actually be looking up. The first day of the Committee of the Whole on Dec. 1st. was encouraging. It looked to me, from my seat in the audience, as though many of the city councillors were as sick of this go-round as we are. Clive Doucet's offer to move, right then and there, to strike the arts cuts off the budget and make some priorities so that we didn't have to go through all this again this time next year was particularly welcome.

Still, no one talking about actually adhering to the Investment Strategy and - gasp - bringing Ottawa into line with all the other major cities in the country in terms of per capita arts funding, but ... baby steps, right? 

And this coalition government idea... maybe we can swing that to lift some of the financial burden that's been laid on the city so the council doesn't even have to think about the painful decision of allocating money to culture, subsidized daycare for poor families, or fixing 125-year-old water mains.

In other news... George Elliott Clarke is in town today, bringing his latest jazz opera, Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path! He'll be at the University of Ottawa's Academic Hall, at 7:00. Admission's free, but get there early if you want to get a seat, this guy packs the room.

I'm sorry to have missed Glen Hirshberg at the Dusty Owl last Sunday - I read his novel The Snowman's Children and am burning my way through his short story collection, American Morons, right now. The Snowman's Children surprised me. On the surface, and structurally, it's a pretty formulaic book. When was the last time the dual-timeline, avoiding-the-central-secret-till-the-second-last-chapter structure was actually new? Stop me if you've read this before: a man leaving his twenties, in a troubled marriage, goes back to his hometown to confront something terrible that happened when he was a kid. The story is told in flashbacks to the childhood, which studiously avoid telling you what the horrible thing is, and a present timeline that traces the adult character's conflictedness about digging up old ghosts. But here's where the book grabbed me - it's set in a throughly unsettling 70's Detroit, in the narrator's bizarre childhood - made more bizarre by the mental illness that's explicit in one character and hinted at in almost everyone else. There's just something slightly more twisted about his Detroit - a city which is already fairly surreal in its emptiness and decay. 

His metaphors, too, are startling and original. Visual in an incongruous way that I associate with poetry. I'd be reading along and I'd suddenly be surprised by a totally original and strangely apt image. 

Anyway, I'm sorry I missed him. But I am looking forward to seeing Adrian de Hoog this coming Sunday. Literary spy novels set in Ottawa? This guy's read my mind. When I visited Washington DC this summer I really, really wanted to write a screenplay where the sort of thing you're used to seeing happen in DC in the movies takes place here in Ottawa. Men in black. Superspies. Conspiracies. Alien invasions. You know. So I gotta see what this guy's done.

And a final plug: I went out last night to Sean Zio's Dusty Owl Play Date, and came out refreshed, encouraged, and wanting to irresponsibly make some coffee and just stay up all night writing. I also came out with the first draft of something that had surprised me as I was writing it: something I didn't expect to write that evening. This is the fun of the Play Date. 

Sean's also organized a one-day, two-workshop session on the 13th of December: "Learning to Repeat Yourself Well," a poetry workshop with Pearl Pirie, and "Getting Comfortable with Creative Writing," a fiction and creative prose workshop with Richard Taylor. There are all kinds of details on the Dusty Owl site. This workshop is crazy cheap at $30 for one and $50 for both. Check out the info, and give Sean a shout if you want to sign up.

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 11:56 AM EST

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Tomorrow at 10:00 the arts community's gathering at City Hall to make their views known about the budget. I'm hoping there won't be a seat in the place. I'm hoping Jean Piggott Hall is crowded. With luck, there'll be people all the way out to the Plaza. For sure, they'll be there for the rally at noon. Wear black, bring your signs and all the old stuff from the last time we had to do this. Conservation!

Today I'm writing from the Christmas craft sale at the RA Centre. 10:00-5:00. If you can tolerate the cheesy Christmas music (ew, R&B versions of "White Christmas") and you want to come by, it looks like there are some pretty cool things for sale. Like my jewelry, along with my friends Carolyn and Robyn's jewelry. I don't have any pictures of my stuff with me, but Carolyn's new site is at http://www.maidenstar.com. (We used to have a business called Gandalf's Granddaughter together but that's sort of gone under.)

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 9:31 AM EST

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... visit the Ottawa Arts Newsletter site and start scrolling through the list of organizations that are facing the loss of their funding.

Okay, maybe the cuts can't possibly go through. I find it hard to believe, myself, really, for all I'm fighting like mad to make sure they don't.

How could they? Look at the list. Everything about this list is the heart and soul of a city. The concerts, shows, riverside breakdance battles, music lessons, afternoons out, history, sudden discoveries, ohmigod moments, opportunities to have a beer on the grass in the sun, places to take your toddler or teenager, corner art galleries, chances to get glue or paint on yourself, matinees, small places you haven't had a chance to explore yet, serendipity, slams, banners on the street on a Sunday, watching movies outside on a warm night, regular rec centre art lessons, stuff to look forward to all week ... reasons to get out of bed.

Better yet, look at that list and think about all the wonderful, creative, diverse people that caused it to be there in the first place. This is what's going on in our city. Go see some of it. 

Posted by Kathryn Hunt at 11:13 PM EST

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