If you support the Occupy movement, relish discovering new music, and are gainfully employed, then you seriously need to plunk down ten bucks and purchase Occupy This Album.

An autonomous project designed to support Occupy, Music For Occupy has produced this epic compilation album to raise both funds and awareness for the global social movement tackling social and economic inequality. The compilation features 99 tracks by 99 artists, including heavy hitters such as Tom Morello, Yo La Tengo, Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco, Yoko Ono, Thievery Corporation, Willie Nelson, Girls Against Boys, and Debbie Harry. Michael Moore even makes an appearance, with a … how shall I say it .. unique take on a Bob Dylan anthem.

You can purchase the digital download through Amazon (US only), iTunes, or order a 4-disc CD version, or listen to a sampler below.

From the project organizers:

Our Mission is to inspire and celebrate through music the Occupy Wall Street movement and the 99% who’ve been adversely affected by the economic corruption that has permeated our Democracy, created a near insurmountable disparity in wealth, and hindered life, liberty, justice and the pursuit of an honest living for all. Music For Occupy is in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street, and all proceeds above board attained through the production and distribution of Occupy This Album … will go directly towards the needs of sustaining this growing movement.

Video games have permeated so deep into mainstream culture that they are now places of social activism and protest. Phone Story, a game designed by the Molleindustria collective in Italy, does just this. It turns the fancy screen and sleek design of a smart phone into the engineered system of slavery, inhumanity, and oppression that produced it. And it does it so well, that within hours of its release last Fall, iTunes had banned it from its catalogue.

The Molleindustria collective, founded by Paolo Perdercini, is taking advantage of the popularity of video games and using them to reach mass audiences with critical and political analysis of real-world issues. The Phone Story game acts as an interactive brochure — self-critical of it’s own platform and educating the player about the inhumane practices behind the endless spiral of consumerism & obsolescence foisted on humanity by high tech corporations for decades, made manifest by our wonderous pocket computers.

Despite being banned by iTunes, the game is still available on the Android Marketplace for $0.99.  All proceeds are donated to grassroots organizations fighting corporate abuses and the victims of this vicious cycle.

You can play the game in your browser for free — here.

For more info about the game and the politics of mobile devices, read more here.

The deeply political, community-committed, and talented LAL from Toronto, sing about surveillance with images from the Toronto G20 manifestations from two summers ago. LAL was formed in 1998 and is comprised of poet, singer & Bengali-rooted Rosina Kazi, producer, sound designer, philosopher, aphorismist and Barbados-born king of chill, Murr, and last but not least bassist Uganda-born Ian de Souza. Video by Wandering Eye Productions.

It is the year 2040. China is the world’s dominant economic power, while North America’s decline has forced most of its citizens into degrading and menial jobs. In Toronto, two “silk-gatherers” collect and sell “spiz,” the remnants of secretions from giant arachnoids. Other jobs of the future include “digital janitor,” “baby-maker” and “human spam.” Such is the premise of a new Canadian film, Ghosts With Shit Jobs, premiered this week in London, England, and produced for only $4,000.

Is this “lo-fi sci-fi” the future of Canadian filmmaking? If the Harper government gets its way, corporate entertainment or art-on-a-shoestring budget are likely to be the only options left to Canadians. The 2012 federal budget delivered biting cuts to agencies that have supported Canadian film. The CBC, the National Film Board (NFB) and Telefilm Canada will each shed 10% from their funding with a loss of 650 jobs at CBC, 73 at the NFB and 16 at Telefilm.

I talked to one of the co-directors and the editor of Ghosts, Tate Young, as well as its writer, Jim Munroe, to get an idea of what it’s like making a feature-length film with zero public or private funding whatsoever.

Silk Gatherers are one of several new jobs in the film.

To see the light of day, Ghosts relied on equal parts enthusiasm and altruism. Nobody earned a penny working on it. Outside of his day job at Global Television, Young devoted 1,500 hours to the project, and Munroe put in a similar investment of time.

Given the main focus of Ghosts is work, there is an eerie but unintended parallel between its dystopian vision of the future and the current reality for filmmakers. Ghosts is actually Munroe’s second feature; his first was Infest Wisely. He has also self-published, marketed and sold numerous books after publishing his first book with Harper-Collins. For Ghosts, an appeal through the “crowd-sourcing” website, Kickstarter, raised over $5,000 in three days that will now be used to take the finished film on tour to select cities.

On the phone from Toronto, Munroe summed up his vision for North America’s economic future, which might just as well apply to Canadian filmmaking: “No matter how bad it gets, people are going to be able to cope.”

One of those filmmakers still doing an admirable job of “coping” is Mark Slutsky, a long-time friend of Munroe. Slutsky provides a very different perspective on the state of Canadian film. While he enjoys doing the kind of “guerrilla-style” represented by Ghosts, a project he applauds from the sidelines, his own film successes have come with the help of public agencies. The full-length feature Slutsky co-wrote, Peepers, stared Jessica Paré (now famous to an even bigger audience since joining the hit TV show, Mad Men). Peepers was funded by Telefilm.

Slutsky is blunt about the federal budget cuts. “It was a smack in the face. They really are targeting areas like documentary film, which are Canadian traditions and for which we’re known around the world… Every cut that’s been announced has affected something that helped my career. You can really feel the axe swing close.”

Slutsky is enthusiastic about the zeal and volunteer spirit that made Ghosts possible, but he sounded a note of caution. “That kind of filmmaking is great,” he said. “But what you can’t do is provide jobs.”

Ghosts With Shit Jobs premiered at Sci-Fi London, the London International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film, on Monday May 7, 2012 and will play in Toronto at The Royal on May 30. The film will play in other selected North American cities at dates to be announced soon. For more info visit ghostswithshitjobs.com.

The aged faces of men of many nations look into Jonathan Alpeyrie’s lens for his collection of 210 photographic portraits of men who fought in WWII. The goal behind his project, World War II Veterans, on display until May 12, 2012 at Anastasia Photo in New York City, was to reunite as many veterans as possible from most nationalities involved in WWII, and he managed to capture veterans from 61 nations in total. They sit placated, wearing kilts or big Russian hats, holding medals and photos of their wedding days. They represent the countries that fought on opposing sides during the war.

More than 50 million soldiers and civilians died, making WWII one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.

“The 1921/22 generation is today often known as the sacrificed generation,” explains Alpeyrie about the project, which he hopes to turn into a book. “[they] fought for a various array of beliefs all intertwined in self-sacrifice and honor.”

Alpeyrie highlights the significance of the war using numbers: 5.5 million German soldiers killed, 2.5 million Japanese lost in combat, while 406 thousand Americans died, the highest mortality rate goes to Russia with more than 10 million killed.

Of his project, Alpeyrie says “the stories of each of these men interviewed and photographed is a treasure of human perseverance. The project contains no pretense to judge or criticize the actions or decisions taken by these men, but it is rather a recollection of a period drastically different from ours. Their testimony is relevant in a historical sense, which should not be lost in time, as the next generations to come can and should learn from this generation. The photography project will deal with as many nationalities as possible, for the simple reason that many nations were involved in the fighting. So far I have photographed Germans, Russians, Armenians, Karabastis, French, Belgium, Poles, Americans, Nepalese, Croatian, Czechs, Latvians, Japanese Americans, Pilipino, Hungarians and more…”

Parisian born Alpeyrie’s career as a photojournalist stretches over a decade and has brought him to over 25 countries, covering 11 conflict zones, mostly in East Africa, the South Caucasus, central Asia, and most recently Syria.

Take a peek at Anastasia Photo’s website and you’ll also see Jonathan Alpeyrie’s most recent work of conflict in Syria.

All images courtesy of Jonathan Alpeyrie / Anastasia Photo

When you go to the website for Berlin’s 7th Biennale, you encounter a stream of changing photographs from occupy and protest movements from around the world — Venezia, Toronto, Florence, Malacky, Athens and on and on. It is emblematic of curator Artur Zmijewski’s approach the largest art exhibition in Germany, which opened on April 27.

In the forward to Forget Fear, the accompanying publication of the Berlin’s 7th Biennale, Zmijewski explains that “Art needs to be reinvented, but not as some crafty option to aesthecize human problems of the impoverished majority. What we need is more art that offers its tools, time and resources to solve the economic problems of the impoverished majority. For the actual limit to the possibilities of left-meaning art is effective engagement with material issues: unemployment, impoverishment, poverty.”

Zmijewski wants to transform the art of impotence and individualist survival, which is how he describes contemporary art markets and the institutionalized art world of galleries and curatorial careers, into art that is “genuinely transformative and formative”, art that “practices politics”, and art that is “real action in the real world and [that bids] a final farewell to the illusion of artistic immunity”.

Over the coming weeks, Art Threat will be profiling some of the artists and their contributions to the 7th Berlin Biennale (which runs until July 1), and some of the events that will be happening in Berlin in the coming months. In today’s report, quick look at two upcoming events: a workshop for using art in political protest, and a performance installation that features interviews with 16 economists, historians, thinkers from around the world speaking on viable economic alternatives to capitalism.

Workshop with Anna Jermolaewa and Srđa Popovič

On May 19 at the at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), artist/activist Anna Jermolaewa and activist/scholar Srđa Popovič will be leading a workshop on the role of creativity, art, design and music in nonviolent conflict. Participants are encouraged to design and perform a nonviolent action addressing issues that women are facing in their society. Videos or photographs of this action and a short report indicating basic information about your campaign should be sent to the following address until 15.5.2012: norevolutionwithoutinnovation@gmail.com.

Srđa Popovič is the founder of the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies in Belgrade (CANVAS), a non-profit educational institution researching and sharing knowledge on nonviolent strategies and tactics to be used in nondemocratic countries. His book, Nonviolent Struggle 50 Crucial Points, co-authored with Andrej Milivojevic and Slobodan Djinovic, is a widely circulating manual on public mobilization for human rights and democracy activists worldwide.

Anna Jermolaewa is a Russian artist and activist who has been organizing demonstrations critical of the USSR since the 1980s. She uses traditional methods of protest and also demonstrations and events intended to ridicule the regime.

Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies

Every Tuesday from 3 pm – 6pm, during the Biennale, Austrian artist Oliver Ressler will be presenting interviews with 16 economists, political scientists, authors, and historians speaking about diverse concepts and models for alternative economies and societies, all of which share a rejection of the capitalist system of rule.

Oliver Ressler‘s work has exhibited extensively around the world.  His art and practice analyzes and criticizes power relations but seeks to go beyond a simple analysis and criticism. His films are available for presentations by activists. He produces posters, billboards, billboard-objects, and magazines.

It’s hard to make a house without materials, and even harder if you are in solitary confinement in a US prison and have been there for forty years. What is required in that situation is imagination and perseverance, mixed with a healthy dose of love and anger — all of which the wonderful new documentary Herman’s House deliver.

Directed by Angad Singh Bhalla and produced by the keepin-it-real folks at Storyline, Herman’s House was deservedly very well-received at Hot Docs this year. The film follows New York artist Jackie Sumell who forges a relationship with former Black Panther Herman Wallace, who is locked up at Louisiana’s Angola prison since accused and convicted (with little evidence) of killing a security guard in 1972. Sumell becomes close with Wallace and provoked by her passion for social justice and art, eventually asks and Wallace what kind of house he would live in, setting on a journey to implement his dreams.

Anyone expecting a biography of Wallace, or even much in the way of images of the unjustly kept man will be disappointed, for that is not this film. We only learn small tidbits about his case and history and we really never see him.

That’s not to say he isn’t a driving force in the film — his voice, recorded from telephone conversations, is a steady and sure keel that not only keeps Sumell focused on her impossible mission to build Herman’s house in New Orleans (which is intended to be a community centre for youth), but keeps the whole film centred and focused as well.

Conceptually inventive, poetic and original, Herman’s House achieves a great feat in constructing a compelling narrative about a man we never meet and goals that aren’t quite reached. But looking closer at the film, as one is want to do with this slow-paced and extremely thoughtful doc, one realizes that the film isn’t just about Wallace, it’s about the relationship between him and Sumell and its about the profound sense of social justice and creativity that give meaning to and shape that relationship.

Sumell’s dedication to and at times seemingly obsessive approach to Wallace’s imaginative wishes is difficult to fully understand, but Bhalla’s film gently pulls us along, revealing just the right moments so that this complicated union unfolds much the way a house is first conceived in the mind, plans are drawn, the foundation poured, and the walls and roof built.

There are many houses being built here, and much like a Matryoshka doll, they fit inside eachother, beginning with the house in Wallace’s imagination, to the houses of Sumell, to the house that is the film, and to the houses that all of us imagine for ourselves and for those suffering injustice in the world. In the end, none can contain this unique and moving story, and we are left with our own imaginations, completely activated by this magnificent film.

Yesterday we caught three political docs at Hot Docs, and before I race off to The Law In These Parts, here is the first of more micro-reviews.

We Are Wisconsin, directed by Aimee Williams, is the first film I’ve seen at the festival that champions activism and calls on the audience to join in the fight, while offering a jumping-in point that so few other docs this year have been able to provide. The doc follows the Madison, Wisconsin uprising against Scott Walker and the legislature, after pro-labour and social-political activists learn of a bill that would eliminate collective bargaining powers and cut union pensions in the state. A trickle of peaceful student protestors at the Capitol soon turns into a tidal wave of popular support as all factions (even some Republican supporters!) of society turn up to have their voices heard.

At the forefront of the ensuing one-month occupation of the Capitol are students, teachers and service worker employees, and the subjects in the film represent this spread, and through their convictions, passion to resist, and transformations from voters to active members of their community, an inspiring direct action narrative unfolds. Of particular interest, to me at least, was the police officer subject who chooses, with 250 other police members of his union, to join the protests, despite the fact that their union has been exempted from the proposed legislation.

For a film that is almost entirely made up visuals of protest and occupation, WAW has more moments of levity than it does moments of despondency, and dare I say it is more inflected with hope than hopelessness, even while the movement fails in quashing the bill (which is pushed through by cynical, self-interested rightwing politicians at the last moment). It is ultimately a positive film because it celebrates and promotes direct action activism and protest, and shows that it’s not the scary kids you see misrepresented on the corporate news channels that are out on the streets fighting for progressive social change — it’s every demographic of society.

WAW captures a moment of community spirit that is so infectious I almost wanted to occupy the cinema when the film ended, but succumbed instead to a very enthusiastic standing ovation inside Toronto’s Isabelle Bader Theatre. The film is magnificently shot and doesn’t miss a beat with building the narrative to a crescendo and keeping the active pulse alive even after the initial defeat in the Capitol.

Ultimately WAW is a film for both committed activists and on-the-fence mainstream audience members, and if it doesn’t reaffirm your convictions to get out and challenge corporate and state oppressive powers, it will surely convince you that testing the protest waters and meeting other members of your community can’t be a bad thing to do at all.

With the release of the 2012 federal budget one month behind us you’ve likely captured the gist of the budget – cuts to the CBC and none to the Canada Council for the Arts. Here’s a full breakdown of how the cuts (and non cuts) affect arts and culture in Canada over the next three years, including an amalgamation of quotes and information from press releases and articles from cultural organizations over the last month. While some people indicated with a mix of relief and skepticism that the cuts were not as deep as they had anticipated, others called the cuts “draconian”.

The Overview

The budget saw no cuts to national museums, local museums or galleries, direct funding for artists, or Canada Council for the Arts. However Canadian Heritage will experience significant cuts resulting in a 10% (or $115 million) cut to the CBC, $9.6 million in cuts to Libraries and Archives of Canada, a $10.6 million cut to Telefilm Canada, and a $6.7 million cut to the National Film Board. The Heritage department itself will see 7.6% ($46.2 million) in cuts.

Cuts to CBC, Telefilm Canada, and the National Film Board will take place over three years.

What Was Saved

“The Canada Council for the Arts is enormously heartened by the positive message sent by the 2012 budget and the support of the government in recognizing the Council’s leadership role,” said Canada Council Board Chair Joseph L. Rotman in response to the 2012 budget. “This vote of confidence in the Council is a clear signal of support for the arts as the creative heart of the nation. This government and the Minister of Canadian Heritage, the Hon. James Moore, clearly appreciate the sector’s positive contribution to the economy and identity of this country. It makes it all the more important that we continue to demonstrate the highest possible standard in our investment of public funds.”

While the Canada Council is greatful, they are also using the opportunity with this funding to take actions that will generate savings and that can be reinvested back into the professional arts sector. “Over the next three years we will implement a number of changes that are already in development, including reducing the cost of our office space, streamlining operational processes, and adjusting programs,” says Director and CEO Robert Sirman. The Council will also review options that address its traditional commitment to the core of creative arts practice while reflecting areas of increasing priority, including equity, public engagement, and national and international market access, according to a press release issued after the budget landed.

Arts and Culture Industries Association (ACI) Manitoba, an organization working for a strong arts and culture sector in that prairie province, reports that groups receiving Canada Council funding have been asked to plan for scenarios of 5% and 10% reductions. ACI Executive Director, Thom Sparling, has indicated that it may take a few months before we figure out what the cuts really mean.

“No one is safe right now,” said Sparling in an ACI release. “There are all kinds of players who could be impacted. The question is when and by how much.”

National museums will also be spared cuts this round, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Canadian Museum of Nature, National Gallery of Canada, Canadian Science and Technology Museum, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

The government is adding additional support to the Canada Travelling Exhibitions Idemnification Program to help the largest museums and galleries in the country to reduce their insurance costs when they host major exhibitions. The Canadian Conference of the Arts has said “we can celebrate the fact that the budget has never contained such laudatory comments in regards to the heritage community.”

In the words of the budget:

“Canadians are proud of their museums. Taken together, national and local museums in communities all across Canada are some of the best in the world. The Government created two new national museums: the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg. Canadians value museums, the stories they tell, the collections they house, and the role they play in preserving culture. Because of this, Economic Action Plan 2012 will maintain funding for Canada’s national museums.”

In a recent interview with George Strombolopoulous, Heritage Canada Minister James Moore emphasized the importance of arts and culture to the Canadian economy. “Arts and culture is $46 billion in Canadian economy. The arts sector in Canada is 640,000 jobs in Canada. Three times the size of the insurance industry, twice Canada’s forest industry. And any government that says they want to build a strong economy without building a strong arts sector doesn’t have a plan for a strong economy.”

It’s this belief in the importance of the arts that kept the government from slashing funding to the Canada Council for the Arts, indicates Moore. Cuts, on the other hand, went to organizations that he felt had a strong enough coping mechanism to handle them. “The idea,” says Moore, “is to find savings that are responsible that don’t impact the core capacity of those organizations to deliver what those Canadians have come to expect.”

Cuts to Telefilm, NFB, CBC

While Moore believes that Telefilm, the NFB, and the CBC have the means to survive the cuts while still meeting their mandates, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists says that the budget has “mixed messages for culture.”

“It’s unfortunate to see the government take a hard line on cutting services when the economy is showing significant signs of recovery,” said Stephen Waddell, ACTRA National Director. “Culture isn’t just a feel good frill, it’s a creative industry that contributes more than $85 billion [Art Threat is aware of the discretion between Moore and Waddell’s estimates on arts impact on the economy] and hundreds of thousands of jobs to the economy. Clearly, we need to work harder to make sure that the officials presiding over these decisions understand that cultural industries are a key driver in Canada’s digital economy, generating much needed jobs and billions of dollars in revenue.”

Local Heritage critic Scott Simms see cause for concern in the pattern of the cuts. “I’ll be watching very carefully what happens with the Canadian Media Fund,” he said in an interview with the CBC, noting that the private sector is continuing to pressure Conservatives to cut funds which support Canadian programming.

The CBC’s annual funding will be cut by $115 million over three years. It represents 10% of the CBC’s annual $1.1 billion support from the federal government. With cuts starting this year, at a $27.8 million reduction in federal government funding, significant job losses and programming cuts are expected. In 2013-14 cuts will increase to $69.6 million, and will reach the $115 million savings mark in 2014-15.

The cuts “pale in comparison to the Cretien-Martin cuts,” (which ended in 2,400 layoffs at CBC in the 1990s), said Gregory Thomas from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in an interview with the National Post.

The cuts to the CBC represent, by far, the largest portion of the cuts to the heritage program over the next three years, and the deep cuts are a concern for CBC, who worry about the future viability of the broadcaster should cuts run deeper, forcing it to adjust its long-term strategic plan.

On April 11, the CBC announced the following cost cutting measures

• The TV show Connect with Mark Kelly will be eliminated
• The radio show Dispatches will be eliminated
• There will be six fewer series on the CBC television network, meaning 175 fewer hours produced.
• 650 positions in total will be cut throughout English and French language programming over the next three years.
• $10 million will be cut from the budget and 88 jobs eliminated from CBC news
• Documentaries will be reduced
• South American and Africa bureaus will be closed
• Live music recordings and drama programming on Radio One will be reduced
• CBC Sports will take a $4 million hit, with Sports Weekend becoming seasonal and amateur sports programming reduced
• Kids CBC will be reduced by four hours per week

Over at the National Film Board, Lily Robert, spokesperson for the NFB, indicated that the NFB stuck close to its mandate when choosing to make its cuts. “The job of the NFB is to produce innovative and distinctive films,” says Robert. “Though we made big cuts, we only reduced production budgets by 1%.”

Other cuts made by the NFB include:

• Three to four fewer major projects per year, each with a budget of between $500,000 to $600,000
• 73 jobs eliminated
• Closure of Cinerobotheque in Montreal and Mediatheque in Toronto by September

“We’ve been in the process of shifting our business plan,” explained Cindy Witten, director-general of the NFB’s English program in an interview with the Globe and Mail. “Traditional models for one-off documentaries have been going down. And there never really was a business model for auteur animation.” The NFB will be aggressively pursuing new types of revenue to put back towards filmmaking.

Regardless of where the cuts have and haven’t happened this time around, a consistent message from the government has been that regardless of what funding has been previously received by an organization, there is no guarantee that they will continue to receive funding in the future. It also remains to be seen how the budget will affect self-employed workers and charitable organizations.

Photo of the National Gallery by Peter Blomert

Today is day five of Hot Docs 2012 and unlike last year, a lethal combination of meetings, movies and meanderings have kept me from a daily tally here at Art Threat. No mind, I intend to make up for it in the remaining five days of the fest, beginning with this round-up post. At some point I will also publish my suggestions for an improved festival – improvements that would contribute to a better more fulfilled experience for the documentary genre and community, and are very easy to implement. For now, the goods on the films I’ve seen so far.

From nearly twenty screened films I’ve been truly only blown away by two documentaries half way through the festival (later in the post). A handful of others are, however, certainly solid works deserving of mention. Svetla Turnin and I are here at Hot Docs looking for political docs for Cinema Politica, so we tend to only seek out that kind of programming, but we also stumble upon other works. Of the “non-political” variety that we’ve seen big props must go to the intense and nearly flawless El Huaso (pictured at left) by Carlo Guillermo Proto. An exquisitely shot (kudos to cinematographer Benjamin R. Taylor), and skilfully directed & edited story of a Chilean-Canadian coming to terms with his father’s unwavering wish to end his own life, El Huaso pulls us in so close to a family grappling with potential loss we feel the dual intensity of familial love and anxiety like a long tight hug that won’t let go. But let’s get to the political stuff.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry opened the festival and impressed on all levels, especially considering this is a feature doc by a first time director. The film follows the trials, tribulations and general muckraking by the now famous Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Director Alison Klayman managed to strike gold by accessing this marvellous artist and activist early on in 2007, and as such we get to peek behind the headlines and the art installations, and witness the creative process as it combines and collides with the political. In terms of form, the film is very standard, and although I was hoping for an art film in the lines of Breaking the Frame (directed by Marielle Nitoslawska), it’s a solid documentary that anyone familiar with Weiwei or interested in the intersection of art and activism will want to pursue.

Shadows of Liberty, a UK production directed by Quebec-born filmmaker Jean-Phillippe Tremblay is a slick, masterful political essay on the degradation of contemporary journalism. This topic has indeed been covered umpteen times in so many docs before (including the classic Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media) but SoL rises above its contemporary counterparts by concentrating on convincing and compelling evidence. The film, with its outstanding cinematography and top-notch animation, argues that American media has been usurped by capitalism, and a once-diverse system has been distilled into the corporate-pleasing, superficial output of five multinational conglomerates. This might not be news to you or your neighbour, but SoL takes time to walk through such irrefutable and fascinating case studies of corporate media malfeasance that any shred of uncertainty around big business and big government interference in information and truth dissemination will be quickly quashed. One criticism of the film is that the documentary rests its hope on net neutrality and misses sharing with audiences the vast and incredibly rich universe of alternative media currently in production and distribution. Let’s hope they make up for it on the website.

The Invisible War is a hard-hitting, emotionally devastating new doc from American filmmaker Kirby Dick. This time the “outing” director exposes the disgusting and criminal acceptance of an ongoing rape epidemic in the US military, interviewing victims, military spokespeople and experts. The film is in fact, almost entirely talking heads, and the fact that I didn’t notice that while watching is a testament to the compelling content but also to the impressive editing and direction. Rape in the military is at astronomically higher rates than among the civilian population, and goes overwhelmingly unexamined and unpunished, thanks to a crony system that is internal, non-transparent, and controlled by rapists and friends of rapists themselves.

Shocking, disturbing and revealing, this film really has the chance to effect positive change in the US, especially if it is shown to politicians. The one aspect that I did find missing, however, was the sociopolitical perspective: the doc relies mostly on understandably emotional testimony combined with explanatory commentary of experts, but doesn’t dig beneath the surface of the DNA of a society that lives with and among such a massive military culture. For every subject that told us she joined the military to “give back to my country” or for other patriotic reasons, I wondered if they weren’t keeping something back, such as the power dynamic in the US that sees lower and working class people serve, but not the rich.

Documentary photographer Don McCullin

One Fine Day could be a pretty great political documentary, but it needs, desperately, to make one major change: kill the narration. A Dutch doc by Klaas Bense, OFD is an assemblage of six uneven vignettes about six individuals who have, through their individual political acts, effected positive change in the world. I say uneven because we spend considerable time with some subjects (John Carlos who bravely and boldly gave the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics) and hardly any time with others (Nic from China who defies the government by putting classified and socially important information back on line after it’s been removed).

Finely shot and edited, the unevenness of these interesting and sometimes inspiring vignettes is forgivable, but the narration that bookends and interrupts the segments is not. A Voice of God British man telling us how to feel and think about the images we are about to see or have seen is offensive in a documentary in 2012 and my esteemed partner in crime thinks that this creative and structural wreckage might have something to do with one of the film’s funders, National Geographic. It is unneeded, unwarranted and intermittently rips an otherwise intriguing and inspired narrative out from under the audience.

The two best political docs at Hot Docs so far

For films with a really strong political backbone, the kind that don’t gaze into the deep pools of their subjects for so long that the politics are lost, and the kind that show a deep commitment to exposing and fighting oppression in the world, have been in short supply so far at this year’s Hot Docs (clearly there’s more to be seen still in the program, so I’ll reserve final judgement for my festival autopsy).

That said, two documentaries have stood out above the rest as incredibly inspiring works that combine the personal with the political, that explore the emotional while connecting the intricate points of socio-cultural context, and that unflinchingly take a stand when so many stay seated in the middle aisle.

Five Broken Cameras follows the incredibly awe-inspiring and altogether difficult to believe story of Emad Bernat, a Palestinian journalist in the small village of Bil’in. The title refers to the fate of Bernat’s video cameras, as they are, over time, destroyed as a result of his efforts to document the brutal tactics by fanatic settlers and confused, violent and young IDF soldiers. Bernat survives many tear gas canisters, bullets, a terrible car accident and humiliation at the hands of occupying forces, but many of his closest friends do not.

The film is co-directed by Israeli filmmaker and activist Guy Davidi, and the collaborative efforts between the unstoppable journalist and an experienced filmmaker result in a gripping, devastating, and inspiring film that is equal parts brutality and bravery, courage and candour, creativity and commitment.

The ways in which Davidi and Bernat weave together the personal-political narrative of Bernat and his village’s struggle to stop the occupation and destruction of their land (and the assault on their people), as well as the many more humble moments of courage and positivity in the face of death, harm and destruction, make for a film that yanks at one’s soul while provoking one’s politics.

Five Broken Cameras is one of the strongest, most stirring films I have seen on non-violent resistance, on perseverance against tyranny, and on the resistance to the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine. The fact that the film screening was co-sponsored by the Israeli consulate, will of course, be the subject of a later Art Threat Hot Docs article on the perils of PR, festival funding, and the cultural politics of documentary.

Last but certainly not least is Anand Patwardhan’s newest Magnus Opus, Jai Bhim Comrade (image at top), a fantastic film of vast breadth and dizzying depth. A three hour sociopolitical and cultural exploration of the caste struggles in India, JBC stitches together, over fourteen years, the political struggle of the Dalits, India’s lowest Caste, to overcome oppression, to organize for their rights, and to resist higher caste groups’ and the government’s brutalities.

Intensely dense with dozens and dozens of subjects, organizations, movements, histories and narratives (followed by Patwardhan for decades) this film is best viewed twice. For those embracing McLuhan’s edict that the future of the book will be the blurb, fear not, this film’s three hours sail by thanks to the brilliant combination of Patwardhan’s skillful storytelling, explanatory talents, wisdom in seeking out the obfuscated details, and his commitment to resistance and progressive change.

A powerhouse of a documentary, this film has been and is likely to be criminally overlooked by critics and reviewers. Don’t fall into the liberal log jam of contemporary documentary, and do yourself a favour (at Hot Docs or later when the film is released on DVD) and see an incredibly important and illuminating documentary made by one of the world’s masters of the form and genre.

From our activist and filmmaker friends in the UK:

Constellation and Occupy.com present A FREE 24-hour ONLINE SCREENING of Just Do It – a tale of modern-day outlaws, in celebration of May Day and in honour of the direct action being taken by thousands of people. The film will be offered online for free streaming from 5:30pm EST Monday 30th April to 5:30pm EST Tuesday 1st May. Plus a live Q&A with director Emily James at 7pm EST, directly after the first showing. More details after the jump.

Occupy.com presents, in collaboration with Constellation, a FREE 24-hour online screening of Just Do It. Just released in the US, the film is not yet available online. But in honour of the many direct actions being planned for May Day on Tuesday 1st May, we are delighted to offer an exclusive opportunity to watch Just Do It – the direct action documentary from the UK, just released in the US – as a mark of our solidarity.

How to watch the film
Simply head over to occupy.com/watch/, sign up for your free ticket courtesy of Constellation, and get watching! OH, and of course, make sure you spread the word before time runs out!

Just Do It is currently on release in the US with screenings sprouting up all over the country. To organise your very own screening for your community, simply head over here. Want to set up your own online screening and watch the film with friends from the comfort of your own screens? Drop us a line at info@justdoitfilm.com to find out more.

Natalia Estemirova

Twelve women. Twelve stories of political courage. Twelve portraits. The Roots to Resistance project is spreading word about the groundbreaking work of twelve women who have dedicated their lives to fighting for social justice.

Denise Beaudet is the artist behind the portraits. Postcards of these images and small posters are available free for the asking and are being sent around the world. The goal of the project is to inspire by sharing these women’s heroic struggles against corruption, exploitation and oppression.

The portraits include Aung San Suu Kyi, Wangari Maathai, Vandana Shiva, Rebecca Gomperts, Natalia Estemirova, Malalai Joya, Chouchou Namegabe, Zapatista Women, Maria Gunnoe, Yvonne Margarula, Dita Indah Sari, Marina Silva.

The Roots projects is raising money through Kickstarter for the next phase of the project. The fundraising campaign runs to May 5th.

I caught up with Beaudet to ask her a few questions about her work and about the project …

After ordering the postcards, local groups send them to political and corporate leaders — national and regional heads of state, elected officials, corporate executives. The black and white posters are put up locally in schools, on the street, etc. More than 70 community groups and schools are participating including groups from Kenya, Russia, Guatemala, Australia, South Africa, Afghanistan, New Zealand and across Europe and the United States.

I sense that in doing this project you have discovered a global community of educators, students and youth, artists … tell me a little about what that experience has been like ..

The experience has been amazing. To be connected to women, activists and communities in Serbia, South Africa, New Zealand, Chechnya, Mexico, Fiji lifts my spirits and makes me profoundly hopeful. The work being done across the globe, well it is happening and it is happening everywhere. When I feel myself getting discouraged about politics here and in the world I just remind myself that it is people I believe in, not politics.

Tell me a little about your background – how important was formal training? 

Lets see my formal training…. Well my Mom was actually very creative and did a lot of Arts/Crafts things with us. I think she recognized that I needed a creative outlet for my very fertile imagination and so she put me in lots of Arts/Painting and drawing classes. I went to College in my early 20’s, a tiny two year school called Greenfield Community College where I became a Printmaking major(though I am now mostly a painter). It was there that all of the magic happened, the roots of who I am today. It wasn’t so much the formal training though that was important as well. It was learning the skill of pulling my insides out and transforming them into Art. It was gaining the confidence and support to know that there were no limits. I could create from my thoughts, feelings, imagination and this was brand new to me. It was really much like the religious experiences that I have heard people describe except I had found Art instead of God.

Have you always been interested in social justice?

No I have not always been interested in Social Justice. My family was not at all political and I was not introduced to ideas of politics and social justice until I hit my 30’s. Before that time my art was really a reflection and purge of some earlier and more difficult times, therapy so to speak. I began to become close to people who were activists and I was completely blown out of the water by these new ideas, completely hooked, enraptured and amazed by how deeply pushed into the sand my head was.  So as things often are with my art, I am painting what is on my mind and what is charging and propelling me in my life.

Up until very recently my Art has really mostly been about my experience really more than anything else. There was a turning point though, about four years ago. I had an open studio and the amazing and radical muralist Mike Alewitz walked in and struck up a conversation with me about art. I was a huge fan, loved his work and was really thrilled that he was appreciating mine. When he left he said simply “ Your art should be in the streets, but I guess you can stay here and keep doing therapy if you want.” It made me do a lot of thinking and in the end it has pulled me completely away from the mainstream Art scene. Instead I focus on art for people and communities.  Art that is propelling radical ideas and radical voices, art that connects people intimately with the natural world, art that connects us to each other.

How would you describe the relationship between politics and art? There are many in the art world who condemn explicitly political art …

Well, I am not on much of a soapbox with this issue. I think as artists we choose what to make our art about, it is a personal choice and I don’t think anyone out there is in a position to condemn whether an artist chooses to express politically. I think that art, music, film, writing have this ability to create profoundly powerful feelings inside of us as human beings. I think that it is the presence of these kinds of explosive, inspired, joyful, connected, angry feelings that create change and I think that being informed of course is so critical but it is our feelings that often drive us and inspire us to action.

Tell me a little about why you chose portraiture …

I think really I chose portraiture because to a certain extent on at least one level the work has always been autobiographical. So the people in the work are always partially expressing what is happening for me.

Can you describe the Global Postering and Postcard Campaign, and how people can get involved …

Yes! The Global Postcard and Street Postering campaigns are a way that we take each of the 12 women activists and bring their stories and voices to the wider global community. So for example we painted the 8 foot high portrait of Afghan peace and women’s rights activist Malalai Joya, and it lives for now in the Western Massachusetts community, but is not experienced by a wider audience. So we created postcards and street posters with the message of Malalai Joya countering the Western claims of bringing peace and freedom to Afghan women and stating instead that the U.S is in fact responsible for bringing more violence to women and girls in Afghanistan. The postcards are addressed to President Obama and they ask him to end this war now and save the lives of untold amounts of Afghan civilians and American soldiers. The Postcards are shipped to our more than 75 partner organizations across the planet, and are then brought to local communities where people are encouraged to use their own voices by signing and mailing them on to their final destinations. The street posters are sent with a different intention. They are meant to be put up in homes, schools and communities and to connect the voices of the women activists to those putting up the posters and encountering them. The postcards and posters are meant to engage people in the world and not the virtual world but the real world that they work in, their homes and the streets they are walking in. Their purpose is to share the amazing voices and work of the 12 activists and more importantly to give a voice to global communities who support their work and their message.

To be involved in this Global Postcard and Street Postering Campaign,  just contact Roots To Resistance at invisible_earth[at]yahoo.com.   The materials are sent for free and we just ask that you bring them to your Community. Join Us Today!

What will happen to the large portraits after the project is over?

When the project is completed the portraits, postcards and posters will be heading out on a national and hopefully international tour. We will bring the project to public and community spaces, handing out postcards and putting up Posters far and wide to all who will receive them. The vision at the moment is to have the project installed in a large vehicle that can serve as a traveling public gallery. When the tour is completed the portraits will be sold, with 50% of the proceeds going to the women activists and their organizations.

What’s next?

Well this project will take a great deal of my time, the next 3 years probably at least. After that I will resume the project that I have been slowly working on for some time. “The History Of Evolution In Pictures” a history that intimately ties and connects we human to all of our non human ancestors. Essentially it will be an exploration and celebration of the magic of the natural world without limits.

For more information about the Roots to Resistance project, go to Denise Beaudet’e website.

Al Jazeera’s Artscape presents a wonderful short documentary on Abeer Soliman, an Egyptian storyteller and performance artist whose work changed after the uprising.

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas ‘Abundance Fenced’

Bryan Newson is the Manager of the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program. He and his staff have been responsible for bringing you everything from Ken Lum’s Monument for East Vancouver to Rodney Graham’s Aerodynamic Forms in Space, and hundreds more. I met with Bryan a few weeks ago to discuss how he got involved in the creation of the program, what it does, and where it’s headed in the face of budget cutbacks.

Can you tell me about what the Public Art Program does for the City of Vancouver?

The Public Art Program is designed to bring artists forward in planning and development processes that are in this city’s jurisdiction. This includes finding ways to incorporate artists, their artwork and contemporary art practices, into new facilities such as libraries or community centres. It also provides a mechanism for requiring major private developments such as the larger of the new condos and things coming into the city, to commission new artworks in association with their new developments.

Additionally, it looks after things like what do you do when the government of the Northwest Territories wants to donate an Inukshuk for English Bay. What’s the process for handling that, who needs to be consulted? That’s actually a gift of state… you just accept those. But if somebody just wants to donate an artwork, and we spend quite a bit of time wrestling with this issue, we go through a few things: What is the artwork? What is its artistic provenance? Is it a good artwork (by which we simply mean does this work merit long-term placement on city land)?

The real issue being, there is nothing more valuable than public space or public land. There’s tremendous pressure on that land, all sorts of agendas for it. I like to think of this part of the Public Art Program (the part that’s not dealing with commissions either for the city or for the private sector, but the part that’s figuring out what to do with donations), I see that as a way of protecting public space, or at least bringing some rigor to the discussion about what should go up on public space.

Do you get a lot of art by donation or is most of it by commission?

We used to. When the program started there was a whole tradition, and most of the artwork that was out in the city was donated by somebody.

The Vancouver Biennale (which is, I believe, three non-profit entities working in some relation to each other), bring in some major artworks and site them around the city. They have approached us seeking permission to site the works on a long-term basis. Up to 30 years was the original request, but I think we’re talking about 20 years now. We’re coming to an agreement with the Biennale about that.

The downside is it means we would take a piece of public space, there would be an artwork there for up to 20 years that people would become familiar with, and then it would disappear. Or it could actually disappear at any point if the Biennale decides to take it elsewhere. The good side is that we’ll go through a process of determining the appropriateness of the work and whether it merits the space it’s in (and I think in most cases we’ll be determining yes it does), and the public gets, at no cost to the city, an artwork for 15-20 years to look at.

At no cost to the city other than the upkeep of the land I’m assuming?

The upkeep of the artwork will be at the cost of the Biennale, because it is selling and fundraising work. They’re fundraising right now to try to raise $1.5 million for a piece. If we owned the work, we would be responsible, but if they own the work they are responsible for its upkeep and maintenance and its insurance. Most of these works would be surrounded by a mowing strip. Some of these works are so popular that the grass does not grow! So it is easy for the Parks people to continue to maintain the space around them.

Inges Idée ‘Drop’

How does the process differ for approving non-city public art for private developments?

Private developers have three options: they can cash out, which means they give us some money and we can go away and put some art at a site of our choosing; they can take a 60/40 option, whereby they give us 40% of their public art reserve for our use, and with their 60% they just go out and pick an artist, provided the art is in the public realm so that the public can have a free and uninhibited experience of the work.

The final option and by far the one that most developers use, is called our A option whereby they go out and they hire a consultant who has experience with public art and development. The consultant reviews the opportunities for art that are generated as a result of the development, prepares a plan and brings that into the public art committee and myself for review. We review the plan and sign off.

The plan includes a procedure by which they will select the artist. Typically they would say they’re going to do an invitational call to artists, this is the nature of the opportunity, and the good consultants will have identified 7 or 8 artists whose practices would really lend themselves to the opportunity. It might be sculpture outside, it might be an opportunity to work on glass, it might be two-dimensional, it might be kinetic, it might be light.

They’ll identify those artists, and then the developer will assemble a selection panel, which must be at arm’s length from them. The majority of the persons on that panel will be art-expert in some way — they’ll be artists themselves, or curators, or have a real history of art, a prolonged experience of art I like to say. They’ll know art. They will make a recommendation or two or three. Typically the list would go from ten down to three.

Three would be asked to prepare a model with a provided fee for a more refined proposal, and then a final selection is often made on that basis. Sometimes the selection panel decides before the model stage that one artist is it, and start working directly with that artist. We like them to take a little bit of time to review what’s out there and see what’s going on, to make a considered and informed decision about what they want to do with their development.

I should also say that on the civic public art program, nobody at the staff level picks the art. We always pull together a panel of persons typically combining art expertise with neighbourhood representation when that’s appropriate.

Is that the Committee, or is that something separate?

It’s not the Committee, no. The Public Art Committee provides public oversight and gives general advice and guidance to myself, city council, the development community and to artists, specifically on public art and the implementation of the Public Art Program, and also on public art matters generally. They would themselves not select the art, but they would oversee the process and approve the process by which that art is to be chosen. They’ll want to make sure we’re doing our job.

How did you get involved with the Public Art Program?

It has been my great privilege to be involved since its beginning. When I started at the city a long time ago in the late 80s, Expo 86 had just been through the city. There were a number of iconic artwork cum pavilion pieces, these big gestures. There was the Inukshuk from the Northwest Territories, the Korean Pavilion (which is now at Van Dusen Gardens), and a whole bunch of other really interesting artworks.

All of those pavilions said look, we’d really like to just donate them to the city. It made no sense for them to take them home. The City had no means and no procedures or criteria in place to say do we want this? How do we make those decisions? Who do we consult? So I was lucky enough to be in the city at the time when it was formulating all those ideas. That really led to our donations policy: What donations would we accept, what would be the criteria, what would we do? That led logically to a discussion.

Once Expo was over and gone, I got to looking around the country and elsewhere, and Seattle, Portland and Toronto, among other cities had pro-active programs. They would set funds aside to actually commission artwork. Which seemed like a better way to go overall. I was very lucky in getting support to develop the public art program.

Ken Lum ‘Monument for East Vancouver’

Were you involved in art before or were you primarily working in government?

My degree was from UBC in English. I also did a Political Science degree so I had some notion of government and how it works, though not much at the municipal level. I started out in publishing and went to Toronto, where most the publishing at that time was happening. I eventually got a job at an arts magazine and started to get very interested. I started out in the circulation department and then moved up to a minor editorial position. I started to pay attention to art and got very interested in it.

When I came back to Vancouver in 1984 I needed a job and did various things. The city advertised for a cultural planning assistant; I applied and was lucky to get the job. The relationship between my background and public art — this is my stretch; to publish means to make public. So okay, how do we get this art out of the indoors? How do we get it to the public, where we can hopefully have a broader discussion about art, what it’s doing and what it might be doing? I can’t think of anything it shouldn’t be doing except boring us.

How do you feel that public art fits into the overall cultural fabric of the city?

There’s a movement afoot around the world, in some cities more manifest than others, to conceive of cities as creative places. There’s this notion of the idea of the ‘Creative City’ and there’s been a lot of talk by Richard Florida and other people that you need to attract creatives. I’ve never actually seen myself as a terribly creative person!

I think the public art program is a way of making manifest some of the creative forces within the city. And I like to think that the process we have of selecting artists, which is a competitive one, or certainly one that works with those people in the city who are the most informed about art, I really think it’s a way of bringing our strongest artistic voices forward. Creating works that contribute to a cultural signature, a cultural identity, that bring distinction, difference and identity to the city, in a way that architecture can and other things can.

But providing a place for artists to do that, I think you’ve drawn on the best and the greatest strengths in your culture and made them manifest. That’s my very grand and somewhat pretentious view of some of what the Public Art Program does.

Can you tell me a bit about a couple different existing projects?

I have to say that after we got Ken Lum’s Monument for East Vancouver installed, I thought you know, at this point I can leave this program and die happy. It was a work that I knew Ken had been thinking about for a long time. I think Ken is one of the great artists of the world, and he’s certainly one of the great Canadian artists. His work, which is so particular to its place, raises all sorts of issues.

Monument for East Vancouver is the representation of a symbol that was mostly a graffiti symbol that was all over the city and has been at least since the 1940s in various manifestations. The one you most typically see is ‘East Van Rulz’. Ken and I have kind of differing opinions of the piece, but I think it’s a tribute to the work that it can have a whole range of meanings to a number of different people. As a proud East-sider, where Ken grew up, he in fact sees this not as a symbol of pride, but as he calls it a gesture of defiance. People who live on the East Side refer to it as the Least Side, the Worst Side, all sorts of affectionate nicknames.

In putting this piece out, despite what Ken thinks, it became a hugely important source of pride for almost everybody I know who lives on the East Side. Almost everyone loves the piece. There were a few people who were concerned that we were putting up a symbol that had been co-opted by gangs. It’s always had sort of a graffiti, slightly underground, slightly unsavory connotation. Ken took all that negative stuff and just put it up as big and as bright and as bold as you could. It has become, through that very process, a symbol of great pride in the city.

It does a number of other things that public art should do: It’s hugely accessible, it’s visible from many places in the city, it has ignited thousands of conversations, it means a number of different things to many different people. It seems to speak to something very important to the whole community on the East Side, in my experience. The word iconic is tremendously overused, but it’s the most iconic artwork in the city, I think.

When we got a good budget during the Olympics, we ran a program that we called Artist Initiatives. Public art programs typically have a new community centre or some other infrastructure that they need to place art on. We tell the artist we have a new community centre and this is the history of the area and the building. So you usually get work that has some relationship to the area or the building that necessitated creation of the work.

With the Artist Initiatives program, the only one of its kind in Canada, we went to the artists and said we have some money. Rather than have you do a work for a library or a police station that has to have some associated meaning in that context, bring us proposals based on your ideas, your art practices, something that is consistent with what you do best, at a site that you choose, and for those that get selected we’ll try to make the site work. Site is everything in public art. Finding the place is the hard part.

Out of that we got all sorts of interesting pieces. The selection panel, which consisted of about five people, including an artist from San Francisco, it [Monument for East Vancouver] was their universal top pick. And this is not the kind of piece that we would have in the city if all we did was say, well we’ve got a new skating rink and we want a piece there. I’m not simply tremendously proud to be around when this piece got done, I’m really proud that our program provides opportunities for artists that are free of a lot of constraints, they’re as open and unrestricted as we can make them for the artist community.

Myfanwy Macleod ‘The Birds’

Let’s talk now a bit about Myfanwy Macleod’s work The Birds.

Myfanwy is a terrific artist, as are all of the artists we’ve worked with. This was a piece to go down not just in association with birds, not just in association with the False Creek Community Centre, but actually with the whole of the Olympic Village. This piece is about a number of things but it was really addressing a sustainability issue, or at least an environmental issue.

These are 17 feet high (obviously over-scale) replicas of the common English house sparrow, which was an invasive species that came in and displaced the local species of birds. It has been very successful in that. It was actually the first wildlife to come down and re-colonize the area once construction was completed.

Myfanwy is a huge movie buff so there is also a relationship to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’. Everyone thinks the sparrow is small and innocent and friendly, but there is actually a slightly menacing element to the fact that you suddenly have birds that are 17 feet high, even though they’re not eagles or threatening. There’s a slightly ambiguous quality about them that I think a lot of good public art has. The good stuff has a number of stories embedded within it.

What would you like to see for the future of public art in Vancouver? Are there things that other cities have done that you’d like to incorporate here?

I would like the restoration of the public art budget that was fundamentally removed for the years 2012, 2013 and 2014. The $250,000 we got for new projects is less money that the city used to spend in the years (late ’80s – early ’90s) before there was a Public Art Program.

Wow. Are you going to be primarily donation-based then?

We’re going to be donation-based. We’ll be drawing on some reserves that we have and completing projects that will carry over from 2011. That’s my job before I retire, to get our budget back. The city had a capital spending problem and everybody was looked at to give up funds.

When we first got official civic funding in 1994 we got one million dollars for the three-year capital plan. After many years we had gotten that up to two million per capital plan. We were anticipating three, not unreasonably as the program is widely-respected and talked about, and we got $250,000 for the next three years. It literally won’t cover the staff or the salaries, so I’m scrambling to keep a fabulous group of people.

I should say that it really broke faith with the artist community, because any success this program has had has come directly out of the arts community. Not just those who’ve done work, but also out of the many arts people who have worked hard on the Public Art Committee, on getting the whole thing going, and on keeping a very rich conversation about public art going. All of that was just basically thrown over the side for 2012, 2013 and 2014.

That’s awful. So what exactly does that mean, other than you won’t obviously be acquiring any art?

There will be some significant donations coming in. There’s the private sector program which is still producing a lot of work. The job is to overcome the perception that the program can get by on no money, because of course it can’t. Everybody knows that the city had to curtail, and this is really important, had to curtail its capital funding because of the amount we’re paying on debt servicing.

Capital funds, which is what funds public art, is largely borrowed money, so you’ve got different debt servicing costs. A lot of city services are run on revenue, operations and etc, but the capital stuff isn’t. So we’re certainly pleased to do our part but I would hate to see the program disappear because I think we’re missing a tremendous opportunity at no huge cost comparatively — the city has a billion dollar budget now.

I’m confident this council will restore it. They’re very keen on the arts. It was just this anomaly where the public art gets funded through capital and the city management had to cut the capital budget. Some of that funding is discretionary and some is not, and yeah we took a hit this time but I’m hoping we can restore funding for 2015, 2016, 2017.

You mentioned you were working on a couple of things from 2011 — what are they?

We’re going to do something at the new Trout Lake Community Centre, still to be determined. We have a really cool project by two young artists, Erica Stocking and Vanessa Kwan, scheduled to start soon at Hillcrest Community Centre. We’ve got a project going in at a little mini park at 3333 Main Street, that will probably be going in the Fall.

We’re going to be doing a lot of maintenance as well. Council said look, you haven’t got money to do new work, but go into your maintenance reserve and do a bit of work there. So we’ll certainly focus on that, including restorations to a number of pieces, like the Chinatown Gate. That’s not really a public artwork but it’s in the nature of a public art work and we agreed to maintain that.

And we will be finally installing a donated piece from the city of Olympia in Greece, which is a Nike statue. It was donated as a result of us having held Olympics, there were just no staff available to get it up during the Olympics. It took quite a while to find a site that was acceptable to everybody. That will be going up downtown, up Cordova Street. It’s an abstract. The example image we’ve got is from China and it’s on a base, which we’re not going to do. It’s by a Greek sculptor, and the city of Olympia is where the Olympic torch relay began. It will have a relationship to the Olympic plaza, there was just no more room to actually put it on the plaza.

Pavlos Kougioummtzis ‘Nike’ installed in Beijing

For more information about the City of Vancouver’s Public Art Program, please visit their website.

All images courtesy the City of Vancouver Public Art Program. Article originally published on Vancouver is Awesome and republished with permission.

The 19th edition of North America’s largest documentary showcase and one of the world’s largest film festivals begins this week, running from April 26 to May 6 in Toronto. With Charlotte Cook replacing Sean Farnel as head programmer, new directions (fewer films, more focus is the official line), new initiatives (Hot Docs’s very own Kickstarter, Doc Ignite), new sponsors (Nescafé, Dundee Wealth and Sun Life Financial, to name a few of the more spurious corporate inductees) and a gorgeously renovated, and reinvigorated, venue (The Bloor / Hot Docs Cinema), Canada’s non-fiction champ continues their tradition of perennial renewal, improvement and growth.

It’s all very promising and exciting and I’m sure this year will signal another hit in the festival’s two decade history. So to get things warmed up, I thought I’d take a look at the programming, which promises a mixed bag of goodies, baddies and proverbial head-scratchers.

The Good: International Titles

As many Canadian producers have, in recent years, lamented: “international” programming at Hot Docs is often a euphemism for “American,” and this year the fest indeed has its share of Yanqui fare (at 52 titles this year’s US offerings add up to a record 28% of programming).

Among the cache from that prolific country are the following promising political notables: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about the Chinese political artist and activist who has captured liberal and progressive hearts alike; Detropia (pictured at top of post): from the unstoppable dynamic duo of Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing comes another icy observational piece, this time focusing in on a beleaguered Detroit; Call Me Kuchu, a timely documentary about the recently murdered Ugandan queer activist David Kato; The Invisible War, about the US military’s despicable and largely unexamined unwritten policy of protecting rapists in the ranks; The Revisionaries follows fanatic creationists retooling educational curricula in Texas; Where Heaven Meets Hell looks at Indonesian labourers who mine sulfur at an active volcano site, risking their lives in order to stay in poverty; and finally Wildness is a study of place and identity that looks at the LA Latino transgendered community and their refuge, the Silver Platter Bar.

In the non-American international camp look for: Big Boys Gone Bananas, a (it has to be said, technically low-fi) tale of free speech and corporate bullying, with some revealing scenes of how the Los Angeles International Film Festival rises to the support…of the corporate bullies; Crayons of Askalan, about a Palestinian prisoner who “escapes” by illustrating his experience; Meet the Fokkens, a marvelous and upbeat doc about 70-year-old sex worker twins in the Netherlands; Price of Gold is yet another doc about one of the worst industries on the planet, mining, this time the place is Mongolia; Scarlet Road, about sex work with clients who have disabilities; Wadim, about the consequences of regressive immigration policy in Germany; and Krisis — GR2011 — The Prism goes behind the scenes during Greece’s economic turmoil in 2011.

Indian documentarian and activist Anand Patwardhan

Special mention goes to Jai Bhim Comrade, the newest installment from the brilliant activist filmmaker Anand Patwardhan (who will attend the festival), this time his focus is on the oppression and resistance of India’s low caste Dalits.

Lastly, check out the whole “Rise Against” section in the Hot Docs program, which is apparently partitioned off into its own space (ghetto?) to indicate a raft of documentaries that follow in the spirit of the Occupy Movement, and that pack a little more punch? I’m not sure, but the ten films look lively, political, and one or two might even be a progressive intervention against a dull, liberal and suffocating mainstream.

The Bad: Doc Ghettos

Categories in film festivals are, ostensibly, meant to assist audience members navigating formidable avalanches of programming, condensed impossibly into a week or so of mad-dash exhibitions. But they also have a ghettoizing effect, where categories play second and third fiddle to value-added programming found in larger, star-studded sections like “Special Presentations,” and in other festivals, within competition components.

The National Film Board of Canada: Hit hard by the Conservative's 10% budget cut, has two special sections in the Hot Docs program, but had many films (including two mentioned below) rejected this year

As Trihn T. Minh-hah has provocatively noted, once a category for “experimental film” was created and accepted there ceased to be experimental film. Naming, labeling and sorting content into recognizable and digestible holding tanks can and does help audiences find what they’re looking for, but does it actually help or hinder, say, Canadian documentary?

If a program booklet has space for a mere 29 Canadian titles (features and shorts, and not including the two NFB special sections, which are not beholden to submissions) than perhaps the bulk of those titles will fit neatly into a bite-sized section devoted to Canadian fare. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that just might prevent expanded Canadian programming, where contained space is allotted and that space is filled. And if this year’s program is any indication, it might be time to demolish the ghetto and renovate the neighbourhood.

Since Hot Docs is located in Canada, perhaps there should be an “American Spectrum” where all the US docs are corralled, and the “Canadian Spectrum” should be dismantled and its children allowed to roam the program freely and in various degrees of visibility and obscurity. Lest Trihn T. Minh-hah’s observation should come true for Canadian documentary, this is one program-cruiser that thinks Canadian docs do not need their own section in a Canadian documentary film festival.

I’m sure there are legions who disagree, and points to the opposite are welcome, but at 15% of overall programming this year (21% if you include the two NFB components — which reminds me, check out John Kastner’s dark and haunting work in the NFB-sponsored retrospective), some creative expansion of structural barriers might just let a few more solid — and deserving — Canadian titles squeak through the gates.

The Incomprehensible: MIA Political Canadian Docs

Herman's House is among just 29 Canadian docs chosen for regular programming at this year's festival

Word on doc street is it was a bad year for Canadian documentary (political or otherwise), and so Hot Docs must have had its hands tied in terms of robust Canadian representation. They did manage to find a few, and some that pique interest include: The Frog Princes, a tight and moving doc about a group of developmentally challenged actors overcoming all kinds of odds to act in a play at Concordia University; Herman’s House, a rich social justice imaginary that wonders what kind of house imprisoned Black Panther Herman Wallace might live in; Peace Out is a resplendent and smart contribution to the energy debates around Canada’s pristine Peace River (but unfortunately gives an inordinate amount of screen time to corporate yes men and liberals, showing the film’s disconnect with progressive eco-activists); and Smoke Traderslooks at the “contraband” cigarette trade from the perspective of the Mohawk people and is one of only three documentaries at this year’s edition to put aboriginal voices front and center.

Which brings me to the incomprehensible. Let’s say there really weren’t a hell of a lot of quality political Canadian submissions among the 2085 titles sent to this year’s Hot Docs programmers — that doesn’t explain a Canadian MIA list that seems set to grow as I discover more great political films that were rejected. I’d like to highlight three that are among the finest political documentaries that I, as a programmer of political documentary, have come across in the last year, and therefore find it perplexing Canada’s premiere non-fiction film event took a pass on each one.

United States of Africa
After a packed Montreal screening of USoA during this year’s RIDM festival, an enthusiastic audience member commented “It’s so refreshing to see a documentary about Africa that is positive instead of negative…or worse, colonial.” I couldn’t agree more.

Chosen by other festivals but not Hot Docs, this documentary by Yanick Létrouneau follows West African hip-hop performer Didier Awadi as he embarks on an odyssey to combine the politics of anti-colonial African leaders (who, unfortunately, are all male) with contemporary hip-hop both inside and outside Africa.

The result is a fantastically shot and edited film about the importance of political participation, realized in civil society but also articulated through art. Through an ambitious musical project, Awadi travels Africa and North America to rediscover the politics of his home continent, and to hone a message of progressive change through the power of hip-hop. The film itself becomes its own vehicle for art and politics, and pulses along with exquisite imagery and superb music.

United States of Africa is a reviving and enlivening work that refuses to fall into the stereotypical Western-produced “African doc” category: it is full of life, positivity, voice, hope, and an explosion of expression that promises to live well outside of the discerning frames of this exceptional cinematic ballad.

Bone Wind Fire
Rightly chosen by programmers to close Montreal’s FIFA festival and recently the recipient of the Best Documentary Short Award at the Sonoma International Film Festival, the new 30-minute documentary from Jill Sharpe is astoundingly beautiful, conceptually flawless and politically subtle in a way that makes one arrive at the discrimination endured by three incredibly talented female artists in a slow, circuitous and wondrous way. A film of colour, movement, emotion, dreams and discovery, Sharpe’s documentary on three painters — Emily Carr, Frida Khalo and Georgia O’Keefe — is a synecdoche for all the stories yet to be told about women who fight for artistic, cultural and political expression in regimes of patriarchy.

Bone Wind Fire should be, and undoubtedly will be, used as an inspirational teaching tool in every redeeming art school in the world. This film should be seen by anyone interested in art, in human expression, and in the ways established and encrusted lines of a genre can be broken into a thousand beautiful, colourful fragments, then reassembled as abstract and material beauty. It is documentary imagination and provocation at its ultimate finest.

The Carbon Rush
Amy Miller, an emergent Canadian filmmaker with an independent journalist background, has built on the experience and success of her first film, Myths for Profit: Canada’s Role in Industries of War and Peace, with one of the finest, most carefully researched and executed political exposés of the year.

As a programmer one quickly grows tired of every second documentary starting with someone, usually a white guy, saying “So I decided to grab a camera and … blah blah blah.” Miller’s new documentary, about the seriously flawed economic projects underway and under the auspices of carbon trading, turns that tired trope on its head. This film is deeply personal for Miller, having spent months and months in communities affected by these devastating projects, but she wisely removes herself from the picture.

The voice we hear, the people we see, and the struggles we bear witness to, are instead those of the world’s poor, indigenous and marginalized. Whether it is hydroelectric dams in Panama or incinerators burning garbage in India, The Carbon Rush champions the voices of those most impacted by Western economic schemes designed to put band-aids on climate change while destroying communities and lives.

It is an incredibly moving, empathetic and measured film that sticks inside you like a thorn that you want to do something about, that you must do something about. Politically muscular, incredibly timely, and totally under-represented and original, The Carbon Rush is exactly the kind of film that should be projected to a sold-out audience at this year’s Hot Docs.

Political Documentary in Canada: Support Needed

Programming is complicated, and anyone who tells you it doesn’t have its share of politics is fooling themselves and should watch Big Boys Gone Bananas. Good films get turned down and crap gets in for a myriad of complicated equations — I know this is the reality of every festival on the planet, with some specializing more in the latter than the former, especially certain giant glitzy fiction-focused festivals.

But the above three films are impeccable in form, unique in content, timely in issue, and incredibly, audaciously, under-represented in the mediascape. Which begs the question…

PM Stephen Harper and the Conservative government of Canada: Money for fighter jets but no money for docs about fighter jets

With so few Canadian titles in this year’s American-dominated Hot Docs edition, one has to wonder, how did these three titles (and others not mentioned here) end up on the outside looking in?

As documentary in Canada faces new challenges after a particularly vicious Conservative budgetary hack and attack, it is doubtless we need to support all documentary. But works that face the greatest threat of being marginalized and rejected into obscurity (at least in relation to the mainstream), that have more difficulty finding audiences simply because of their “fringe” politics and sometimes (refreshingly) radical and/or progressive POVs— these docs really need support.

These are the works that highlight powerful voices on an all-too-often negatively-represented African continent, feminist artists violated by the mainstream art world, and indigenous and local poor activists resisting unjust and cynical Western economic schemes. These are films that thankfully contain no privileged (male) Western “experts” talking to, around, or in place of, those most impacted and those on the ground enacting change. These are films that are indeed “outstanding” and “outspoken” as well.

Their occlusion in this year’s program is disappointing and difficult to understand, but I hope the filmmakers behind these inspired gems remain undeterred and keep pushing for their gorgeous, timely and crucial works to be shown, seen and discussed.

In the meantime, I’ll see you in the rush lines for all the other promising titles mentioned above.

Stef Lang takes the uprising of women internationally against the pressure that consumer culture creates for young women (and undoubtedly for young men as well) to the pop scene with this great, dancable song that could easily contend with the same hits that push the “look” she’s speaking out against. She gives the mainstream a tongue lashing in Paper Doll’s quick lyrics: “Living on a treadmill, skip my dinner / Work my body till I get thinner / Running with the girls  across the nation / Caught up in a world of thin-spiration.”

Originally from the tiny town of Ladysmith, BC, Stef moved to Vancouver six years ago to pursue music. Currently, she’s on tour across Canada to support the release of her new EP, “Fighting Mirrors” which can be downloaded free from her website, and which has other songs speaking to the high stress, high speed consequences of modern consumer life.

It is a postage stamp for a nation that exists somewhere between memory’s twilight, international conflict and the aurora of hope. Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar has designed a postage stamp for Palestine for the Berlin Biennale (which opens April 27). The stamp pictures the Palestinian Sun Bird and the words “State of Palestine” in Arabic, Hebrew and English. The stamp has been issued as official postage by the German postal service, Deutsche Post. More than 20,000 have been sold.

In an interview with Reuters, Jarrar said that his stamps are party in response to a law that forbids the Palestinian postal service from printing the words “State of Palestine”.

Jarrar, 36, is one of rising stars of the Palestinian art world. Last year, he began stamping the passports of visitors to the Palestinian territories using a stamp of his own design. Jarrar works with photography, video, and performance.

Recently the Swedish Minister of Culture, Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth, was presented a cake at an event that many have decried as racist – understandably when one takes a first glance at the thing. The story and ensuing outrage has gone viral, with accusations of racism flying faster than homophobic comments from Rick Santorum.

The whole thing is reminiscent of the recent Kony 2012 viral video and of the ways in which we engage with social media in general. More than once I’ve clicked a link, sometimes even adding my own disgust to a public outcry over something that seems terribly unjust or wrong, only to discover later that I should have actually looked just a little bit further to discover the true nature of the situation.

So is the case with the now infamous “racist Swedish cake,” made as a political statement by a black Swedish artist, Makode Linde, wishing to draw attention to Western conceptions of blackness whose message has been lost in social-media fueled frenzy of racist accusations. It turns out it’s more complicated than it looks, as Makode Linde explains in this video on the Afro Europe site (after the jump).

Portrait of artist Shahrzad Arshadi by Thien V (Montreal, March 2012).

It Is Only Sound That Remains is a sound theatre performance by artist Shahrzad Arshadi, meditating on the life and death of Ziba Kazemi, also known as Zahra Kazemi.

The story of Kazemi’s 2003 death in Iran, the ensuing Canada-Iran diplomatic fallout and the ongoing struggle for justice in the case, led by Kazemi’s son Stephan Hachemi, is relatively well known in Canada.

Kazemi was arrested for taking photographs at a student protest outside Evin Prison in Tehran, a major jail for political prisoners in Iran.

Students were protesting for political change in the country, highlighting issues such as freedom of the press, access to education and youth unemployment, and demanding the release of political prisoners. Protesters in Iran were facing serious state repression at the time; many were arrested without charge, often disappearing for days after being apprehended by state security forces.

Remembering the 2003 student protests in Iran is important because of the role they played in creating the political ground work for major protests against the presidential election in 2009, an election that many both inside and outside of Iran, including Amnesty International, criticize as undemocratic.

Visiting Iran at the time Kazemi was documenting the 2003 protests and was arrested on June, 23, 2003 after refusing to turn over camera films to prison security forces. On July 11, 2003, nineteen days after being arrested, Kazemi died in Iranian custody in Baghiyyatollah al-Azam Military Hospital after being severely beaten by Iranian police and intelligence forces.

Today, advocates for Kazemi, including Arshadi, continue to campaign for justice, working to hold the Iranian government responsible for her death.

Although often identified as a photojournalist in media reports, the details of Kazemi as an artist, working both in photography and film, has received much less focus in the mainstream press.

Over the past year, It Is Only Sound That Remains has been presented Montreal audiences, deepening popular understanding of Kazemi’s life beyond the headlines. Paying artistic tribute to Kazemi, the moving performance mixes live poetry, Iranian music and personal audio recordings taped by the late artist.

As an artist and community activist, Arshadi has been centrally involved in the Kazemi case on a political level, and through this artistic work she celebrates Kazemi’s life beyond the media coverage.

Arshadi has long explored issues relating to loss and exile, having arrived in Canada from Iran in 1983 as a political refugee, and has since developed various artistic projects involving photography, painting, sound and video.

This beautiful multidisciplinary work moves to illustrate Kazemi’s life and humanity not as a victim but as an Iranian artist, a mother and a Montrealer.

Named after a poem by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, It Is Only Sound That Remains mixes various elements together for a powerful portrait of a woman in struggle.

I had an opportunity to interview Arshadi at Bistro Araucaria café in Montreal.

Art Threat: It Is Only Sound that Remains explores the life of Ziba Kazemi, the Montreal photographer killed in Iran, a story you are very closely connected to. Can you describe the project and what inspired you to create the work?

Shahrzad Arshadi: It Is Only Sound that Remains is a play based only on sound, no images — a sound theatre piece. It’s a project inspired by old audio recordings Ziba left behind, including many recordings with her son, sounds of eating soup, of talking together. I heard these recordings first through Ziba’s son, Stephan, and after listening for the first time I immediately knew it would be great to work with this audio artistically.

Two very nice artists, Moe Clark and Caroline Kunzle, helped to develop It Is Only Sound the Remains. Kunzle encouraged me to work on a creative radio piece after I read a text on Ziba for a the Montreal Life Stories project.

I love the radio — it is a very important medium. First thing in morning I run to turn on my radio to listen to news on what is happening in the world, to hear new music. So the project is inspired, in ways, by my love of radio.

I started creating the project based on the old audio recordings and also included beautiful poetry from Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, a great woman artist who was very outspoken in Iran and died very young. Farrokhzad wrote a poem called It Is Only Sound that Remains.

In the performance Farrokhzad’s poetry is interpreted beautifully by Montreal poet Moe Clark.

Also the piece includes actors who read from Ziba’s diary and letters, while I also reflect on my relationship to Ziba through narration.

For readers who are not aware, can you highlight the important points of Ziba Kazemi’s story and also your relationship to Ziba’s story?

I first heard about Ziba on July 8, 2003. It was early morning. I opened the radio and the news was reporting that an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist was arrested in Iran and was in a coma at a military hospital in Iran. I was very shocked.

At the time I didn’t know Ziba but immediately started trying to figure out who was Zahra Kazemi. I was surprised that I didn’t know an Iranian photographer living in Montreal.

It was a very sad week, because again the news coming from Iran, a country I love so much, is often so horrible. So I started searching in Montreal for Zahra, asking friends who might know her and quickly I connected with a friend who knew Zahra, known to friends and family as Ziba.

At the time I was contacting many people and finally a friend writing at La Presse found Stephan, Ziba’s son. Eventually I helped Stephan interpret a conversation with Ziba’s mother in Iran, Stephan’s grandmother, connecting me directly with the story and the family.

As a human rights activist this case became very important for me. Every day I was learning more and more about Ziba’s story and I couldn’t put the story aside. It wouldn’t be a story of injustice that I would forget.

Ziba’s son generously began sharing Ziba’s personal documents and after reading these papers I became very connected emotionally. Reading the dairies was very touching.

At that time we started getting more details on Most media reports focused only on Ziba’s death in Iran, on being tortured, Ziba as a victim. I wanted to remember Ziba differently, to illustrate her life fully, the life of a very important woman, someone who became very important to me, someone who I wanted to remember thought art, through beauty.

How do you feel It Is Only Sound That Remains illustrates a fuller picture of Ziba Kazemi’s story?

Its difficult to present Ziba’s full character in one performance piece, but we present parts of Ziba’s life that are lost in the mainstream media reports.

Every time we perform the piece, we hold a discussion with the audience after the performance. The ideas and questions expressed by the audience are always very interesting and touching. Many people explained that the performance gave them another perspective on Ziba, another way of connecting to Ziba’s story. This was very important for me — it was almost a gift to know so many people were connecting more personally.

It Is Only Sound That Remains tries to illustrate Ziba as a woman who was beautiful, who was brave; as a mother struggling to raise a child in this world; as someone who had the courage to travel all the way to Palestine, to Israel, to African countries, to Iraq and Afghanistan during very dangerous periods. Ziba travelled to Afghanistan when the Taliban was in power and worked to document life in Afghanistan as a female photographer.

Also in Montreal there were many exhibitions showing Ziba’s photography both before and after Ziba’s death.

All these details on Ziba’s life are never talked about in the mainstream media coverage, all we hear about is that a photojournalist got killed, with no details on Ziba’s very full life. It Is Only Sound That Remains is focused on some small details of Ziba’s life and character, also the way that Ziba was a wonderful mother for Stephan, who is now doing so much to remember and fight for Ziba.

It Is Only Sound That Remains has been presented in Montreal, a city celebrated for being a centre for the arts. I’m wondering why it was important for you to present this artistic piece on Ziba in Montreal specifically?

Montreal is my city. I left my country Iran a long time ago and came to Montreal, a city that is now home in a way. I guess for Ziba, who left Iran eventually arriving in Montreal, it was the same thing in a way.

Montreal is a city with so many beautiful artists, so I felt It Is Only Sound that Remains would be a way to connect with the artistic spirit of Montreal, that people would understand and connect more with Ziba’s story through the arts.

Art is often a great way to connect and raise issues in Montreal.

Today in Canada, with a Conservative government that is moving to cut everything, including public funds for the arts, now it’s more and more important to express our progressive ideas through the arts.

Now It Is Only Sound that Remains involves multiple artists, relies heavily on sound and has no visuals. Can you reflect on the artistic process behind this work?

When starting to work on the project, I honestly didn’t have a clear idea as to what would come out of it. I was worried that the sound theatre concept wouldn’t interest people — how do you convince people to come to sit in a dark room, to sit and listen in the dark for over one hour? As the project developed, becoming more and more beautiful, I lost my fears.

The piece includes poetry, but there is also beautiful music by santur player Amir Amiri, and by Iranian musicians Ardalan Kamkar, who lives in Iran, and Sheida Gharachedaghi, who is now living in Montreal, a composer and pianist.

All these different elements mixed together, creating a work that is also collective and collaborative. The essence of the piece is Ziba Kazemi, who left all these old audio cassettes behind. Sometimes in the process I was wondering what Ziba was thinking when recording those audio cassettes, tapes that are now featuring in a performance.

Can you describe those cassettes that Kazemi was recording at home?

Ziba was turning on the cassette recorder when they were eating lunch at home. In one recording they are eating soup. You can hear the sound of the spoons, them talking when Stephan was a little boy, around four years old, asking for more soup, little details of life in sound.

It was very emotional for me to create this work, to listen and re-listen to all the recordings. Many times I cried when working on the sound for It Is Only Sound that Remains.

Also I think that the live aspect to the performance makes it more powerful. I narrate live, Moe Clark reads poetry live and there is also a live feeling to the way the audio recordings from Ziba are presented and mixed.

Although the audience doesn’t see us during the performance — we perform behind a black curtain — our stage becomes the entire space that is beautifully decorated with Iranian carpets and pillows where people can sit to listen.

After the first performance, I got hope in the idea that people could still listen. Today we are losing our ability to listen, with so many images bombarding us every day as the world becomes louder and louder all the time. It Is Only Sound that Remains proved to me that we can still listen.

Can you talk about challenges you faced communicating the story of Kazemi, given you both had very difficult relationships with Iran?

Yes, the relationship with Iran is very complicated. In exile we have different homes, both Montreal and Iran.

Ziba’s story speaks to the experiences of many other Iranian women, of Iranian refugees. I was also communicating or reflecting on my own story and feelings about Iran through telling Ziba’s story.

It Is Only Sound that Remains asks people to listen to Ziba’s story and it’s through that story someone can come to understand why we, as Iranians, are here in Canada, why we are living in exile.

Although all our stories are different they are also similar, all our lives are connected.

This performance was an opportunity to communicate to people, for people to listen to our stories as Iranian women. To listen to our stories not in pity but as courageous women, as artists, as activists. I do not want people to feel pity with our experiences, with Ziba’s experience, with my experience. I want people to feel solidarity.

I want people to understand these Iranian stories in the same way I feel people in Canada need to understand and address the injustices happening to First Nations people here on these lands.

Today we need to share our stories, to learn from each other, this was one of the main points of It Is Only sound that Remains.

All my art is about trying to bridge gaps between people, between cultures, about trying to encourage everyone to take responsibility for injustices taking place all around the world, in Iran and in Canada.

Listening to headlines about injustices, about Ziba Kazemi, is not enough. We need to act, we need to create responses to these injustices.

For more information on artist Shahrzad Arshadi and It is Only Sound that Remains visit shahrzadarshadi.com.

When I found Zina Saunders’ [pronounced Zai-nah] animations on Mothers Jones a couple weeks ago I knew I’d have to ask her for a chat. We got on the phone last week and by the time I was off I was texting my friends that she was one of the best interviews I’d had. Firey, bold, and straight-forward, Zina’s personality emboldens not just her animations, but her gorgeous portraits as well. Her work is straight-to-the-point, no-bullshit humour dripping with sarcasm.

To her, humour isn’t just a tool for spreading a message, it’s also the best way to pull the rug out from someone and reduce their credibility. She’s a fantastic testament to artists who have created a way to speak out while still being known for great, technically sound work.

Tell me about the difference in your art styles?

I do quite a few portraits for the Wall Street Journal. When they have interviews with musicians and opera stars and sometimes business people they like to have a painting of the person to go with the interview, and so they often ask me to do them. You know what’s funny about it, I do a lot of political stuff and it isn’t the kind of work that you would associate with the Wall Street Journal, which is a much more conservative publication. On occasion I’ve done a portrait for the Wall Street Journal of the very same person that I’ve done a satire of for Mother Jones, the very same week. I’ve done a portrait of Paul Ryan for the Wall Street Journal and the same week I tear him limb from limb for Mother Jones.

A testament to your diversity of styles.

It’s kind of neat that the Wall Street Journal doesn’t mind. In other words, they are hiring me just because of the art. Obviously I never do editorial cartooning for them, but a straight portrait is fun. Sometimes it’s a little hard if I really really hate the person with every molecule of my being, then it’s very hard to paint for them. But somehow I manage because, what the heck, I’m an artist.

I was just looking through the pieces you have from the last presidential election, where you have John McCain as Frankenstein’s monster and Sarah Palin looking rather malicious.

She looks maniacally insane. Which she seems to be! Don’t you think? I always think of her as having a meat eating grin. I can never tell if she’s smiling at me or about to bite me. You know, she’s got a crazy gleam in my eye all the time, she’s a vicious looking character so she’s very very fun to paint. And real fun to lampoon.

Did you do that series for something in particular?

I just did it for me. The reason I did all of those paintings is that there was a gallery exhibit here in New York in the fall of 2008 within the society of illustrators that was all political art. It was a curated exhibit, meaning there were a couple of guys who were members of the society of illustrators who decided who would be in the show. At the time I was doing painted portraits of politicians but they were not political in so far as a concept, they weren’t satire, they didn’t have editorial content, they were portraits, so I didn’t expect to be included in the show. But I think there were 20 or 21 painters/illustrators in that show, and only one of them was a woman. That really really dismayed me.

There is another woman who’s a very wonderful illustrator and a close friend, her name is Nancy Stahl, and she too was really dismayed. She decided to create an online gallery of women’s conceptual artwork. And because she was much nicer than me about it, she wondered whether it was possibly that women were not getting the assignments because they were woman, or that women were not encouraged to try their hand. She was thinking, what’s behind this? I, being the character I am, immediately got furious and wanted to attack, I assumed the worst – that they were a bunch of sexist bastards.

So anyway, she asked me if I wanted to do a piece for this online gallery and I said yeah, of course. Well the very same week John McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate. As soon as I started reading up on her I was completely appalled. Those two things really fired me up. So I did one painting for Nancy’s online gallery of Palin. I made her a librarian and the bookshelf behind her was full of bibles, and she’s going “shh!” at us. I did it because she was the mayor of that little town in Alaska and she was looking into banning books in the local library.

So that started it, then the next painting was the painting of her with the Statue of Liberty as though she was a deer hunter. I used to get up at three in the morning every day and I would paint two or three a week before I would get to work on my regular assignments for actual publication. I would do them just for myself every morning and then put them online on my blog, they got a lot of attention and it was through that, within one or two weeks, The Nation asked to buy one of them for their pages, and the San Francisco Chronicles wanted one of them as a stand-alone op-ed, and it began the ball rolling for me in becoming really involved in doing political satire.

Is that when you started doing the animations as well?

That only began about a year and a half ago. I had at that point been doing political editorial illustrations for assignments. For Mother Jones or the Nation or the New Republic. They would contact and give me an article to illustrate, so I’d be given the text and then have to come up with something interesting and hopefully clever to enhance the text, not just a straight portrait.

Well, was asked by Mother Jones to do an illustration to go along with an article about Dan Savage’s Google bombing of Rick Santorum. They asked me because I’m known for having very in your face cartoons. They figured this was right up my alley, and of course it was. I did about 15 different sketch ideas for it and they were all, I have to admit, pretty good, and I sent them all to Mother Jones and they chose 1 to run in the magazine, and then they said they had a lot of trouble choosing, so would it be ok if they put a slide show of all 15 sketches on the website. And I said yeah, sure!

Over that weekend I started thinking, you know what would be cool? A slideshow is a lot like an animation, why don’t I animate a couple of my sketches. I didn’t know anything about animation, I knew how to do a very simple little gif animation. I did two different very simple but pretty funny animations based on two of my sketches. I sent them to Mother Jones and they loved them and put them up. They got a lot of attention and that started me doing an animation every week that shows up on their front page.

I get to write it, animate it, act it, sing it, do the whole thing all myself, and I get the freedom to do it. If you go back and look at some of the early ones, they’re terrible. They’re so bad. I didn’t know my ass from my elbow about how to do these things. I hadn’t a clue. And I’d never really thought that way, I had always thought in still images, not in moving stories – but it was really exciting. In between my regular jobs I would be teaching myself after affects and getting better (hopefully) in doing that. Now I feel good. They’re way better than they used to be, but would still really like to get a whole lot better. Doing one of these things every week is hard, you have to think up an idea and see what makes you the maddest in the world of politics.

It’s obvious in your work that you’re very out there in terms of content… I think you say what you really think, and what most people wish they’d say. What do you think the importance of humour is to the political discourse?

Ok, you know what I really think? I think that the most vicious way to attack a person is by making fun of them. I think that if you hated my guts and you really wanted to torture me, I think you could do it best by making fun of me. I think that when I read or see arguments with politicians or people with a certain political perspective, where they’re treated with respect, then I think you give them too much power.

First off, I just make jokes to myself, I actually dream in jokes and wake myself up laughing. I don’t know whether the whole world thinks I’m so hilarious, but I tend to think in terms of humour. I just love to make fun of people who make me angry. I love to poke fun at them, disempower them, and point out what idiots they are. I think they deserve to be laughed at and scorned and mocked. With the humour, almost without fail, it has to be something that really makes me angry, and it’s a great way to try to attack what makes you angry and what you think is unfair.

I think it also helps to make it accessible to people, so that it encourages people who may not already be on your side, to consider what you’re saying. I’ve gotten many emails from people who have seen my cartoons who are very angry about them, but many times they’ll say like “I hate your cartoons, but I have to admit they’re really pretty funny.” When you get someone who’s a Palin supporter and who is really mad about the way you portrayed her but will admit to you that they’re funny or nice to look at, then I think you’ve made a human connection across a divide, and that’s important.

I know I’m preaching to the choir, when you’re doing political cartoons you’re preaching to your own side, but there’s always the distant hope in my heart that someone who isn’t entirely convinced one way or the other will be amused enough and have their curiosity peaked enough to see whether it’s really true. Hopefully maybe it’s doing some good, otherwise it’s just fun and entertaining and it’s a blast.

Your work is really fun to look at and it’s neat to see how any styles you use. You have a painting style, the silk screened look, and then the cartoons. So there’s a lot of different ways to draw people in depending on their aesthetic.

Yeah, I always like to experiment. Once I find something that I like, expressing myself in a particular way, after awhile I get a little bored with it and I want to try something else. It keeps me interested, and I do like to learn a lot, so each new avenue I go down I learn something new. Which is important to developing and evolving as an artist and a person.

At the very top of the spiral marble staircase in the Carnegie Centre, past the century-old stained glass windows depicting Milton, Shakespeare, Spencer, Burns, Scott and Moore, there’s a small, light-filled classroom. Inside, ten people sit around a table holding pens, scraps of paper in front of them. This is the Thursdays Writing Collective, a weekly workshop run by SFU Writer’s Studio alumnus Elee Kraljii Gardiner. But this isn’t your typical week at Thursdays, because today Kraljii Gardiner’s handing out contributor copies of V6A.

V6A, coedited by Kraljii Gardiner with poet John Mikhail Asfour and published this April by Arsenal Pulp Press, is an anthology with a bold goal: to unmask the multifaceted personality of the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood so often (and so dully) reduced to the one-dimensional catchphrase “Canada’s poorest postal code”. The collection flaunts a varied roster of 32 contributors who range from emerging to well-known, all of whom share a history with the neighbourhood. The fiction, non-fiction and poetry cover a lot of ground when it comes to subject matter, creating a pastiche reflecting the neighbourhood’s hyper-varied inhabitants.

Many of the writers in V6A are affiliated with Thursdays in some way, whether they found their writing voice here in the Carnegie or they visited once as a guest speaker. When the writers get the copies of the book in their hands on this day, there’s a palpable sense of excitement for what’s been achieved. And that’s a lot.

Thursdays started in 2008 and has since grown to become a small-but-mighty cultural force within the city, a semi-secret literary club where experienced writers like Michael Turner and Fred Wah mingle with aspiring writers, many of whom live in the Downtown Eastside. Taking part in a Thursdays session is an immersive experience, and an eye-opening one, too. This room is bursting with talent.

“I really wanted to have a platform for the excellent writing I was experiencing [at Thursdays]. It’s heartbreaking to see writing suffer just because of barriers of poverty or access issues,” says Kraljii Gardiner of V6A. “And from having guest speakers come into Thursdays, and insisting that they write with us, I saw that it collapses the distance between experienced writer and emerging writer. And that does something really powerful when it comes to modeling with your own writing, and realizing that the page is … a place where everybody can meet on equal footing if they really want to.”

Emerging poet Henry Doyle’s work is a testament to Thursdays’ success in drawing out the talent from members of the community. A longtime resident of the Downtown Eastside and a Thursdays regular for four years, Doyle’s work recalls the gall and vigor of Bukowski. Since attending Thursdays, he’s been published in Megaphone, in local arts magazine Geist and, now, in V6A. 

“I think my poetry about the neighbourhood is almost like being an activist of some kind,” he tells me quietly across the table in the Carnegie classroom. “Because it’s another voice for the neighbourhood. It’s somebody who’s screaming out for the neighbourhood.” He adds, of V6A, “It’s almost like a declaration of war. And I think the best ammunition that we can shoot back at society is our poetry.”

For Vancouver’s multimedia savant Michael Turner, who’s famous for both his novels (Hard Core Logo, 8×10) and his former band, the Hard Rock Miners, contributing to V6A was an obvious choice. “I do have a relationship to the area,” he tells me later, over the phone. “I used to volunteer at the Lookout in the fall of ’83, I lived at 441 Powell from ’87 to ’94, and I used to play [with my band] in a lot of the clubs down there. So when Elee asked me if I was interested in contributing I thought it would be a good way to recollect that time, through writing.” His story, “441 Powell”, is deeply autobiographical, focusing on a former life and love in an apartment by Oppenheimer Park. It’s also a reminder of the Downtown Eastiside’s oft-forgotten role as an incubator for local artists.

Madeleine Thien, the award-winning author of novels such as Dogs at the Perimeter, shares Turner’s desire to reconnect with youthful roots through contributing to V6A. “One day, I was sitting with John and Elee in Montreal, and they mentioned they were working on this anthology. I told them that I had gone to school in Strathcona when I was a child and then, as we continued talking, I realized that I wanted to contribute. This was a part of my life that, even after three books, I had never written about,” she admits via email from Germany. Her story, “The Fire Before”, describes how she found her spiritual core while growing up in Strathcona. “As a child, I was never scared there, never felt that it was a poor or degraded place; it simply was what it was. I wanted to write about a child’s acceptance of it, and an adult’s questioning,” she says.

Another V6A writer, Cathleen With, whose daring 2006 collection, Skids, also featured stories of kids in the Downtown Eastside, knows a different side of the neighbourhood. “I used to go down there with my parents; I just love the area. My dad would go to the pub at the same time as my mom and I went to the Army and Navy, and he’d chat up people who were probably down on their luck. At the time we called them rubbies, or something,” she laughs in recollection. “But I had my own problems with addiction, and I went into recovery houses when I was 21 … Some of the friends I made at the time who didn’t make it, they said, ‘You gotta get the stories out there that we weren’t just these throwaway kids.’”

With her wildly inventive, Geek Love-esque tale of a Downtown Eastside hermaphrodite endowed with a bit of real magic, “Super Phat Angel Baby,” she’s intent on revealing that life in the neighbourhood isn’t as simple as people think. “I wanted to show, there’s this happiness there, too … These people have dreams.”

A signal of V6A’s success is how all the stories and poems fit together, like puzzle pieces, to form a colourful, chaotic picture of the neighbourhood.

“For me it’s always about the total composition … There’s always the excitement around a new voice, and always the assurance of a familiar one. Sometimes when you put things together, you get a sound that you don’t often hear,” observes Turner.

It turns out that harmony was crafted, quite intentionally, by the collection’s skilled anthologists. “We took into account not just if the pieces we accepted were succeeding on their own terms, but if they spoke to a human quality that was interesting to us and if they worked in concert with the rest of the pieces,” says Kraljii Gardiner. “So, we didn’t tick off, like, we have nine men and nine women… but all the pieces kind of surged up, and it became very evident which needed to be included.”

Back at Thursdays, the writers aren’t allowing themselves much time to bask in the achievement of V6A. Already, they’re working on a new creative collaboration: the Stanza Project, in concert with Dutch architect Mark Proosten. The group is using Proosten’s designs, blueprints, and models as writing prompts—all tying in to the ongoing housing concerns of the Downtown Eastside. Gardiner enthuses: “Mark and I are hoping to present a paper at Oxford, which everybody at Thursdays is going to read and contribute to. And we’re going to have an art exhibit at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC. We’re going to do a reading there, and a social writing thing, and then we’re going to produce a chapbook.”

Ambitious? Definitely. But if you ever had any doubts, Thursdays’ output offers pretty conclusive evidence that our city’s historical heart is home to a thrumming, creative core.

Originally published in Megaphone Magazine, a publication sold on the streets of Vancouver by homeless and low-income vendors. Experience more beautiful writing from Vancouver’s downtown eastside at Megaphone’s annual Voices of the Street event at the Waldorf Hotel (1489 E Hastings St, Vancouver) on Thursday, April 19.

The United States is doing it’s best to feed the world … or at least that’s what they’d like you to believe. US Food Aid may be more effective as a subsidy to domestic producers, agribusiness and shipping companies than it is at alleviating hunger in the poorest parts of the world.

Oxfam America staffers Jessica Erickson and Anna Kramer have put together the below infographic illustrating where all that money goes, and how it could go much, much further with a few changes to policy and operational procedures.

Samuel Beckett, line drawing by Guillermo Contreras

The brilliant Irish playwright, novelist and poet would have been 106, today. Known widely for his absurdist plays and novels, Beckett received the Nobel prize for literature in 1969. Later in life, he wrote for radio and television. He is remembered today for his sustained attack on realist drama and literature, a rejection of plot conventions and unities of time and place in favour of self-consciously bizarre meditations of the difficulties of the human condition.

He died in 1989.

Bibliography

Fiction
Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932)
Murphy (1938)
Written in English and later translated by Beckett into French.
Mercier and Camier (1946)
Watt (1953)
Written circa 1943, published 1953, and translated into French in 1968.
Molloy (1951)
Malone Meurt (1951: translated as Malone Dies, 1956)
L’Innomable (The Unnameable, 1953)
Comment C’est (1961: translated as How It Is, 19–)
Company (1980)
Ill Seen Ill Said (1982)
Worstward Ho (1983)

Short Stories & Short Prose
Assumption (1929)
Sedendo et Quiescendo (1932)
Text (1932)
A Case in a Thousand (1934)
More Pricks Than Kicks (1934)
Includes the stories: Dante and the Lobster, Fingal, Ding-Dong, A Wet Night, Love and Lethe, Walking Out, What a Misfortune, The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux, Yellow & Draff.
Nouvelles et Textes pour rien (1945-50: translated as Stories and Texts for Nothing)
Includes the stories: L’Expulsé (The Expelled), Le Calamant (The Calmative), Le Fin (the End), and Textes pour rien I-XIII (Texts for Nothing I-XIII).
Premier Amour (1945: translated as First Love, 1973)
From an Abandoned Work (1954-55)
L’Image (1958: translated as The Image)
All Strange Away (1963-64)
Imagination Morte Imaginez (1965: translated as Imagination Dead Imagine, 1966)
Assez (1966: translated as Enough, 1974)
Bing (1966: translated as Ping, 1974)
Sans (1969: translated as Lessness, 1969)
Le dépeupleue (1966: translated as The Lost Ones, 1970)
Fizzles (1973-75)
Heard in the Dark 1
Heard in the Dark 2
One Evening
As the story was told (1973)
La falaise (1975; translated as The Cliff)
Stirrings Still (1988)

Plays for the Stage
En attendant Godot (1952: translated as Waiting for Godot, 1953)
Fin de partie (1957: translated as Endgame, 1958)
Acte sans Paroles (Act Without Words I, 1957)
Acte sans Paroles II (Act Without Words II, 1957)
Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)
Happy Days (1961: translated as Oh les beaux jours)
Play (1963)
Play has one of the most confusing linguistic histories of any of Beckett’s works. Although it was first written in English in late1962 and early 1963, Play was first published in German as Spiel in the journal Theater Heute in July 1963, and even its first performance was German, in 1963, at the Ulmer Theater, Ulm-Donau. Faber and Faber published Play in English for the first time in 1964.
Come and Go (1966)
Breath (1968)
Not I (1973)
Written in English in 1972.
Footfalls (1976)
That Time (1976)
Written in English in 1974-75.
Rough for Theatre I (1976)
Rough for Theatre II (1976)
Ohio Impromptu (1981)
Rockaby (1981)
Written in English in 1980, commissioned by the State University of New York at Buffalo.
What Where (1984)
Catastrophe (1984)
Dedicated to Vaclav Havel.

Plays for Radio
All That Fall (1957)
Embers (1959)
Rough for Radio I (1961: published in English as Sketch for Radio Play, 1976)
Rough for Radio II (1961: published in English as Rough for Radio in 1976)
Words and Music (1961)
Cascando (1963)
The Old Tune (1963)

Plays for Film and Television
Film (1967)
Written in 1963 and filmed in the summer of 1964 in New York.
Eh Joe (1967)
Ghost Trio (1976)
Written in English in 1975.
…but the clouds… (1977)
Written in English in 1976.
Nacht und Träume (1982)
Quad (1984)

Poetry
Collected Poems 1930-1978 (1999)

Critical Writings
Proust (1931)
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (1983)

The cast from InSecurity. The TV show will no longer be produced in Saskatchewan.

With the announcement of the axing of the Saskatchewan Film Employment Tax Credit, we are effectively telling the rest of the film-producing world that Saskatchewan is closed for business. It’s a commonly known fact that film productions will not so much as consider a location that doesn’t have a tax credit program in place. In fact, even the ubiquitous Hollywood movie The Hunger Games, which made $155 million in its opening weekend, utilized a tax credit from North Carolina.

Being a movie lover, and writer / broadcaster in the province who is often identified with film, this makes me want to vomit with rage. I’d probably be working at 7-11 if not for the Saskatchewan film industry, which gave me my start and taught me how both the art and the business of how films work. This, in turn, helped my writing appear in places like The National Post.

In the early 2000s, I was green, but the industry itself was a fledgling infant. I remember shooting more than one music video where we ran into scheduling issues because the ‘good crew’ was working in Regina the week we needed them in Saskatoon. But over the last decade, I’ve watched this industry blossom to heights beyond my wildest imagination; Saskatchewan film producers recognized how special life in Saskatchewan is, so rather than moving to Toronto or Vancouver, they did what Saskies do: they dug in and pioneered a strong infrastructure right here at home.

Personally, I was most fortunate to write and co-produce the nationally aired Global TV documentary Stolen Sisters, directed by longtime Saskatchewan filmmaker Tony Hrynchuk (Fahrenheit Films). The film was about missing and murdered Aboriginal women in Canada. Stolen Sisters has aired nationally countless times, brought awareness to the struggle against violence, and it can be found in libraries around the world. The Saskatchewan Film Tax Credit was one of the reasons we were able to make this movie, able to tell this Canadian story.

And beyond the paltry body of work that is my resume, we are also talking about a ton of other productions that have put the province on the map internationally. You ever hear of a little show called Corner Gas? Productions like Corner Gas brought thousands of jobs to the province that we can kiss goodbye. A lot of talented people built their lives and their businesses here because they believed in Saskatchewan, and now we’re telling them that Saskatchewan doesn’t believe in them.

It’s easy to politick this into an arts cut, which is a tidy piece of misdirection, because everyone, regardless of their political affiliation, expects arts cuts, and you can easily get lost in that larger argument. But the fact is, this also a business cut. In my mind, the film industry should be the place where the left and right meet — because film is art that makes money. It’s estimated that every dollar of tax incentive has brought in six dollars in economic spinoff in the province. We are set to drive away an industry that has brought over $600,000,000 into the province in the last 14 years. That’s a lot of goddamn zeroes, folks.

Premier Brad Wall tweeted, “If an industry cannot survive at all without a permanent taxpayer subsidy, should the taxpayers subsidize indefinitely?”

First of all, though the credit is suddenly being sold to you as a ‘grant,’ it’s not a grant. It’s a tax rebate. There’s a universe of difference.

But to answer Mr. Wall’s question (and I’m surprised that the leader of the government doesn’t know this), pretty much all the other important industries in the province enjoy some kind of ongoing subsidization in one form or another; oil and gas, potash, manufacturing, small business, even fishing. (For a boatload of very specific examples, see behindthenumbers.ca).

I’m finding it hard to believe that this is the same government that wisely said it would be foolish for us to take a bigger bite out of the potash royalty pie, or we’d drive business away. So why are we walking a $600,000,000 industry into the woods and shooting it in the back of the head?

The film industry it has made Saskatchewan a smarter, more cosmopolitan place. People don’t flock to hubs like New York because the business is there. They (and the businesses) head to NYC because of the culture. Film is a sexy medium, and a strong industry in Saskatchewan has made us that much more attractive to both our local young as well as outsiders looking for a place to put down roots. Losing this takes us back to a dark hillbilly era, where we’re content to be a bunch of illiterate racists, homophobes, and closed-minded troglodytes.

Corner Gas creator Brent Butt has publicly pontificated that it’s a political thing. Maybe it’s the sour grapes of getting rid of something the NDP put in place. Some whisper that it’s a great way to drive those left-voting commie filmmakers out of the province. I hope that’s not so. I hope it was just an unfortunate oversight and that the government won’t be obstinate about it.

There’s still time to reinstate this tax credit. If they won’t do it, then I hope that anyone who supports this cut won’t need to make any commercials or promotional videos in the province to promote their government or those elusive subsidy-proof industries — because in Saskatchewan’s future, it’ll be impossible to get the good crew to town to shoot anything.

Wiebo Ludwig, Canada’s controversial anti-oil patch activist died of esophageal cancer yesterday, leaving behind a legacy of resistance against this country’s dirtiest industry and greediest corporations. The Albertan had his share of scuffles with the law (and a shamefully demonizing mainstream media), and was accused (and charged once) of eco-terrosim in several pipeline and oil/gas site bombings. At stake for Ludwig and his prodigious Christian clan was, and still is, their way of life, their community, their health and the surrounding environment around their now toxic land.

The incredibly sensitive and thoughtful documentary, Wiebo’s War, about him and his family’s struggle can be downloaded here.Ludwig’s last interview can be found here at Canada’s grassroots newspaper, the Dominion. Read an Art Threat article about the film here.

Canada has lost a tenacious crusader against the seemingly unstoppable polluting and profiting forces of Big Oil and Gas, but many continue to fight. RIP Weibo Ludwig, December 19, 1941 – April 9, 2012.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is calling for contributions for a “digital book” to focus on historical and contemporary Mayan strategies of resistance and their impact on the work of artists and activists in Mexico and beyond.

The publication will be edited by Diana Taylor and developed using Scalar, an authoring and publishing platform designed to facilitate work that engages visual materials. Scalar enables users to assemble media clips and images from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways. The digital volume will be published by Duke University Press.

From the call:

“Resistant Strategies will explore how strategies of resistance that date back at least five hundred years in the Americas continue to retain their power to contest, persuade, and energize. Some strategies travel—they extend beyond the time and place of their emergence. They are taken up by others and transformed to address new issues. They form their own genealogy of performance, visual, and discursive practice. The book will unfold like a caracol, the shell of a snail, an icon of resistance in its own right that has been sacred from the time of the ancient Mayas to the contemporary Zapatistas. It will illustrate various resistant acts that have deep historical and artistic roots in Chiapas, the current capital of indigenous resistance in the Americas, and will trace how these acts and traditions expand outwards, operating in other moments and spaces. The innermost layer examines some of the cultural and historical reasons that Chiapas, “tierra de Indios” as Jesusa Rodríguez calls it, proves such a draw for both local Mayan and international artists and activists. The next layer explores the works of Mayan theatre artists, photographers, hip-hop, and graffiti artists who seek social justice through their interventions. The spiral then expands to the work of intellectuals and artists who work in solidarity with these Mayan activist communities and finally extends further to include the work of those who have been inspired by the work of contemporary Mayans—the Zapatistas most specifically. How has the masked figure of Sub Comandante Marcos spread to such prominence in the world? How have Mayan resistant practices become models for activists as diverse as Ricardo Dominguez and Reverend Billy? This book will engage and examine these persuasive, powerful resistant strategies.”

The publishers are asking for essays, photo essays, interviews, video and multimedia presentations that respond to these themes. Proposals should include a brief description of the work (150-250 words) and the author’s approach to it; samples of digital media, and a short author bio (150 words). Contributions may be in Spanish, English or Portuguese.

Proposals should be sent via email to hemi.scalar@nyu.edu no later than Friday, May 18, 2012, and include “Resistant Strategies” in the subject line. Accepted contributors will be notified within 30 days of submission and final contributions will be due Friday, October 12, 2012.

The 22nd Montreal First Peoples Festival has extended its entry deadline to Friday the 13th of April 2012. The Festival is looking for audiovisual works for this years’ showcase, taking place July 31st to August 8th. As always, the showcase features works by native directors and films by non-native directors about aboriginal topics.

Complete details can be found on their website: http://www.nativelynx.qc.ca.

Artist Ai Wei Wei has installed live webcams in his home so that authorities – and worried supporters – can keep track of his day-to-day whereabouts and welfare. Feeling hemmed in by increasingly invasive state surveillance – being followed day-to-day, round-the-clock surveillance on his home, searches of his studio, phone taps, opening his mail — Wei Wei decided to go the extra step and demonstrate that he has no secrets, despite the Chinese government’s persistent paranoia.

Wei Wei was detained last April for 81 days amid Chinese fears of political dissidence in the wake of Arab Spring uprisings. He was charged with tax evasion, a charge supporters say was politically motivated. His fines were paid by friends and supporters. Perhaps most controversially, he questioned the government’s role in poor construction standards after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed more than 5,000 schoolchildren because buildings collapsed. In November last year, officials demolished his studio in Shanghai.

Thanks to The Guardian for the original coverage.

Mother Jones’ illustrator Zina Saunders takes on the GOP’s oppressive and backwards stance on women in her illustrated political cartoon this week, in which you are invited to step right up and watch the greatest circus on earth – the 2012 Republican presidential campaign. Watch it over at Mother Jones’.

Canadian filmmaker and activist John Greyson is no stranger to controversy — whether haranguing Justin Bieber to pull concerts scheduled for Israel, supporting queer film festivals in hostile environments, or scuffling with TIFF over the erasure of occupation in special programming, the prolific auteur has seen his share of messy cultural politics.

Yet that didn’t prepare him, or his fans, for an incomprehensible decision made by the Canadian Film Centre this past Sunday when they, at the last minute, cancelled a special Art Gallery of Ontario screening of his short film about anti-gay violence, THE MAKING OF MONSTERS. Citing obscure and unsubstantiated copyright claims by an American company, the CFC did what an alarmingly increasing number of cultural producers and institutions are doing every day — they succumbed to bullying.

At issue is the use of parodied songs such as Mack the Knife by the late composer Kurt Weill. The songs have been in the public domain for over a decade, making them fair game for any artist, but publisher Warner-Chappel is apparently ignoring these facts to police, on behalf of Weill’s estate, the use of the songs as part of a segment that features Weill and Bertolt Brecht as gay fish.

The move to cancel a screening of a film based on baseless copyright claims only serves to bolster the large corporations deploying fear as a tactic for control over public domain culture. Each time a producer or institution like the CFC caves to such aggressive pressure, a precedent is set for the next instance, ultimately amalgamating into an unwritten policy of the censorship of art and culture. The CFC should have stood up to these absurd tactics and screened Greyson’s film. By showing no backbone in the matter they have deprived audiences of an important exhibition of political work and affirmed for the large media corporations that threatening letters written by lawyers actually work.

For our part, we’ve been threatened before by media lawyers, and each time we ignored them and carried on — after all, the only thing they have to stand on is money, not any sense of ethical authority or professional propriety. With that in mind we dug up an online version of the film (above), controversial gay fish songs and all, (password: cfcmonsters). It’s not the best quality, but a viewing should still elicit the naughty sensation of breaking an imaginary law.

The following is the complete April 1st statement from John Greyson:

In what apparently is not an April Fools joke, the Canadian Film Centre has cancelled today’s screening of The Making of Monsters, my 1991 musical about anti-gay violence. It was scheduled to play at the Art Gallery of Ontario at 9pm tonight, as part of my AGO/TIFF/Vtape/Inside Out retrospective. Instead, audiences will join me in scratching their heads, wondering why the screen is blank.

At issue is a 20-year dispute concerning my parodic use of Kurt Weill tunes with original lyrics (e.g. Mac the Knife becomes I Hate Straights). These tunes have been public domain in Canada since 2001 (50 years after the death of Weill), with diverse copyright experts and lawyers, including Laura Murray, Jason Mazzone, Georges Azzaria, Michael Geist and CIPPIC,* confirming this. The CFC likewise agrees (“the compositions are within the public domain within the territory of Canada”), but for reasons that remain unclear, they’re bowing to threats from Warner-Chappell, the US-rights-holder, despite the fact that WC has never explained the basis of it’s Canadian claim, beyond vague worries about international piracy (!)*, something no filmmaker, producer or distributor can 100% safeguard against.

In short, the CFC is being bullied by the world’s third-largest music publisher, who can’t seem to articulate any claim on the tunes in question but who do have deep pockets. (“WC has not relinquished its claim to the songs and they will pursue all legal avenues available to them to protect them. They have a very deep pool of lawyers and limitless funds.”**). In turn, WC and the CFC are bullying me, demanding a signature on a coercive agreement that I received yesterday morning, an agreement which contained many errors (wrong titles for the Weill tunes, wrong claims regarding my lyrics, basic mistakes which made me wonder if they’ve actually watched the film!). Most seriously, the agreement sought to severely limit where the film can be screened in Canada, despite the fact that neither WC nor CFC has rights over the tunes in question — and insists that I personally “indemnify CFC and WC, their directors, officers, employees, agents… against all claims, actions, damages, and costs…” etc. **

Excuse me? I asked a bunch of questions, which weren’t answered (crucially, what’s the basis of WC’s Canadian claims; and why doesn’t the CFC just stand up to the bullying, armed with CIPPIC’s opinion?). Instead, the CFC decided to cancel the screening. (They can do this, as they produced and therefore ‘own’ the film).

When it was released, The Making of Monsters won prizes at the Berlin International Film Festival (Best Short Teddy), TIFF (Best Canadian Short Film), and numerous other international festivals. The rights for international festival screenings had been secured from the Kurt Weill estate — but then, a year later, when the estate found out that Weill and Brecht were portrayed in the film as boyfriends, they hit the roof and WC got involved. (The fact that Brecht and Weill were portrayed as a catfish and goldfish didn’t seem to offend them). Since then, it’s been 20 years of absurdist and often surreal banter back and forth, debating the slippery slopes of parody, fair use and public domain. With this retrospective screening, I thought we could finally get past WC’s unproven corporate claims and watch the film that composer Glenn Schellenberg and I made, a film about anti-gay violence that is sadly as relevant today as it was two decades ago. Instead, the CFC has caved into pressure, and the screen will be blank tonight.

* CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic), a University of Ottawa legal research centre devoted to copyright and intellectual property issues: “We conclude that, based on the information available, the works in question are in the public domain in Canada.”
** from various emails with the CFC, and the WC/CFC agreement sent to me yesterday morning.

****
FURTHER READING: Below is the complete summary and history of the issue, published by Greyson in January, 2012:

The Making of Monsters: Summary of Copyright Issues

John Greyson, January 2, 2012

The Film
In 1990, I wrote and directed a 35-min short film entitled The Making of Monsters (MOM). Shot on 16mm with cast and crew donating their labour and a cash budget of $15,000, it was produced as a student film at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto.
MOM is an experimental musical about the real-life 1985 murder of a gay school teacher by high school students in a Toronto park. The film uses music, humour and parody to address the larger culture of homophobia that is ‘taught’ by our society.

MOM takes the form of a behind-the-scenes documentary promoting a CBC movie-of-the-week dramatizing this real life case. In addition to the ‘actors’ playing the victim and his teenage assailants, the film features the characters of German playwright Bertolt Brecht (played by a talking catfish), composer Kurt Weill (as his goldfish boyfriend), Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs (as a CBC producer), and Lotte Lenya (as a behind-the-scenes narrator/lesbian activist).

The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February, 1991, where it won the Teddy Award for Best Gay Short Film. It subsequently screened at festivals worldwide over the next nine months, including San Francisco’s Frameline Festival, the London LGBT Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the Toronto Festival of Festivals, where it won the NFB’s Best Canadian Short Film Award.

A (super crude) copy of the film can be viewed here: http://vimeo.com/29104440. Password: cfcmonsters

The Songs
MOM includes five parodies of well-known Brecht/Weill tunes (the times indicate their durations in our film):

Mack the Knife (from The Threepenny Opera) — 2 min., 5 sec. Surabaya Johnny (from Happy End) — 2 min., 43 sec.

Alabama (from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny) — 24 sec. Pirate Jenny (from The Threepenny Opera) — 8 sec.

Song About the Futility of Human Endeavor (from The Threepenny Opera) — 22 sec.

Each parody features new lyrics (for instance, ‘Mac the Knife’ becomes ‘I hate Straights’), original vocals by our actors, and distinct synthesizer arrangements by our composer Glenn Schellenberg, who arranged and recorded all the instruments (for instance, our dicso version of ‘Surabaya Johnny’).

Clearance of Copyright
Since we only used the tunes of these songs, not any lyrics, the rights clearance issues involve only the composer (Weill), not the lyricists (Brecht, Hauptman, Blitzstein, et al).

In April, 1991, the producer of the film, the Canadian Film Centre (CFC), requested and secured festival rights for these five excerpts of the Weill tunes from the Kurt Weill estate, negotiating these rights through the CMRRA (The Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights Agency, who represents music publishers doing business in Canada) and Warner-Chappell (the agency representing the publishing rights of the Weill Estate). The clearance request was succinct, describing the tunes used as background music and the film as a drama about violence and masculinity.

In October 1991, a review of MOM in the New York Times triggered outrage from the Weill estate: among other issues, they clearly objected to our parody versions of the Weill songs, and seemed incensed that Weill and Brecht (both notorious heterosexuals) were satirically portrayed as queer boyfriends (the fact that they’d become120-year-old fish sharing a fishbowl didn’t seem to be a problem).

In January 1992, a potential sale to Channel 4 in England, as well as offers from various Canadian and US distributors, necessitated the extension of the festival rights to include broadcast and semi- theatrical distribution. The Weill estate asked for $30,000 (a hugely inflated amount by any standard, and twice the actual cash budget of the film); the CFC counter-offered $10,000 (the amount of the broadcast sale). The Weill estate were sent a copy of the film and the parody lyrics, in the hopes that they’d recognize both the tribute the film pays to the legacy of Weill and Brecht’s cultural activism, and also, the spirit of parody that informs both the work of Brecht/Weill and the film itself. The Weill estate refused to consider our counter-offer, and the CFC withdrew the film from distribution.

In 2001, the Weill tunes became public domain in Canada (50 years after death of author; Weill died in 1951). Over the next ten years, I repeatedly requested that the CFC allow the film to be shown in Canada, given that the tunes were now public domain here. I also argued that the since our new songs are clearly parodies, they should be protected by fair use provisions in US copyright law, and thus MOM could also be shown in the US. The CFC disagreed and wouldn’t permit any screenings.

Greyson Retrospective
In 2011, Vtape (my distributor), TIFF Lightbox, and the Art Gallery of Ontario requested that MOM be included as part of a retrospective of my work, to be presented in late-March, 2012. Again, I requested that the CFC allow MOM to be screened, given that Weill’s tunes have now been public domain in Canada for a decade. After much back-and-forth, the CFC refused, and then suggested I follow up with both the CMRRA and Warner-Chappell directly, to pursue the matter. I did so, and Warner- Chappell claimed that the tunes in fact still are copyright-protected in Canada — but wouldn’t explain why, despite repeated requests for clarification.

The CFC then speculated that the arrangements we used might be a factor. Composer Glenn Schellenberg clarified that he had created the arrangements himself, using instruments (synthesizer) and idioms (disco) that are distinct, original and a central component of the parodic project of MOM. In his composition process in 1990, he had consulted among other sources library copies of the Weill piano- vocal scores for reference; in all five cases, these were (as much as can be determined 20 years later) original arrangements credited to Weill and his collaborators (Gingold etc), at the time of their composition in the early Twenties. However, he stressed that such consultation took the form of background research and that his arrangments were distinct and original, especially for the Mac the Knife and Surabaya Johnny parodies. In the case of the three ‘audition’ songs (Alabama, Jenny, Endeavour, totalling 54 seconds of screen time), he acknowledged that the case for original arrangements is less clear (being piano accompaniment versions), and suggested replacing these three sections of orchestration with original arrangements that he would write and record.

Fair Use in US
The parodic use of Weill tunes in MOM seems to fulfill all the recognized criteria of US fair use lawi (transformation of original; added value to original for benefit of society; original and distinct expression; a new work resulting from the borrowing) including the crucial fact that the film makes direct, critical commentary on the work and legacy of Weill. Recent fair use/parody cases (Campbell v Acuff- Rose Music; Leibovitz v Paramount Pictures; Suntrust v Houghton) upheld these criteria, and in the March 2011 Cariou v Prince decision, Judge Betts ruled that for a work to be transformative it must “in some way comment on, relate to the historical context of, or critically refer back to the original works.”

MOM partakes of a well-established parodic tradition of inserting new lyrics in familiar tunes, from South African protest songs to karaoke tributes to football chants, a tradition that dates back at least to the 13th century, and includes John Gay’s 1728 songs in The Beggar’s Opera, which was the source in turn for Brecht and Weill’s Three Penny Opera, which features Mac the Knife. (Indeed, a cursory hunt on youtube reveals a dozen parody versions of Mac the Knife, including ones by Sigourney Weaver on SNL and the 80′s MacDonalds ad campaign ‘It’s Mac Tonight’.

Warner Chappell claimed that MOM’s parodic use of the tunes didn’t fit the definition of U.S. fair-use protection — without offering any reasons why, and despite the fact that they hadn’t actually watched MOM at that point. (Equally, it is obviously not up to the rights holder to decide what constitutes parody — that would be a bit like telling Tina Fey that she had to ask Sarah’s permission every time she impersonated Palin).

Questions
On Feb 7, 2012, the CFC wrote to Warner-Chappell, asking them to specify their claim of copyright in Canada. There has been no response. To date, no one has answered the following questions:

1. Why would the Weill tunes in MOM (with Schellenberg’s arrangements) NOT be public domain in Canada?

2. Why would MOM’s parodies of the Weill tunes NOT be considered parody in the US, and thus protected under the fair use provisions of US copyright law?

i Pierre N. Leval, Toward a Fair Use Standard,103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105 (1990)

Nairobi graffiti by artists Uhuru B, Swift, Smokilah and Bankslave

Kenyan graffiti artists are painting the walls of Nairobi with reminders of government corruption. Executions are up in the Middle East – in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Yemen – as governments there continue their efforts to quell political turmoil. Malaysia is introducing a minimum wage for the first time, and experts warn that the fight against antibiotic resistant strains of tuberculosis has been lost.

Thousands of indigenous farmers marched in Guatemala City demanding land reform. Cambodian filmmaker Thet Sambath is being harassed and intimidated for claims made in his latest documentary that the Killing Fields were a result of Khmer Rouge party infighting. The Spanish Government has announced large-scale oil drilling near the Canary Islands. The costs of the London 2012 Olympics are now estimated at 450% higher than when the bid was won (including security costs to exceed $1 billion).

Citizen astronomers are helping to map the universe through websites like Galaxy Zoo. The World Bank is urging countries to treat illegal logging like organized crime. Czech officials fear a new wave of extreme-right terrorism from emerging networks linking German, Russian and Czech neo-Nazis groups. Annual global tobacco sales are estimated at close to $500 billion.

The Israeli Civil Administration is threatening to destroy solar panels and wind turbines in six West Bank communities because they lack the proper permits. Police in Angola have raided the offices of outspoken Folha 8, a private newspaper critical of violent crackdowns on protesters. Diesel prices in Sri Lanka went up 36%. And the Indian government has ruled against German pharmaceutical giant Bayer and is allowing a generic drug manufacturer to make and sell the cancer drug Nexavar, which will reduce costs of treatment from $5,500 dollars per month to about $175.

News Remix is a quirky restless glance into the wreckless feckless immediate past. Special thanks to The Guardian Weekly and IPS New Service.

Tipping Barrels (Ben Gulliver, 2012) is one part surfing movie, one part wildlife documentary, one part guy flick and one part political commentary. It’s for parts two and four that I include it as this week’s Friday Film Pick. The short doc, running at 18 minutes, gazes in on British Columbia’s wild west coast and while it spends a little too much time on surfing maneuvers, it’s a gorgeous tribute to a pristine ecosystem threatened by an uncaring government.

Uncaring is probably too nice a word – the Conservative government of Canada is down right belligerent in their disregard for the environment, wildlife and humans that together, cry a green scream: hands off!! Determined to industrialize the area and equip it with the artifice needed for transporting dirty Tar Sands oil from Alberta to Asia, the Great Bear Rainforest and surrounding area is indeed under threat.

Tipping Barrels could use a little more commentary (spoken or otherwise), a little less surfing and beach-playing, and much less soundtrack, but it’s still worth a watch. Impeccably shot with a sensitivity to the wondrous world of BC rain forests and sparingly short, the film ultimately shows those who haven’t seen this part of the world exactly what is set to be lost if we don’t act against the government and corporate lobby machine. Having lived in the area, I can attest to its beauty and unique character, an aspect caught magnificently in this pretty little number. Grab your boards and campfire songs and enjoy! (and if you want to get involved, visit pacificwild.org)

This is the first in a new (ir)regular installment summing up last week’s news headlines using a ‘remix’ style — a quirky restless glance into the wreckless feckless immediate past. (Inspired by Harpers Magazine’s ‘Scientific Summary’.) 

Aerial photo of tsunami debris from Japan

US peacekeeping forces joined with Congolese army troops to attack rebel militants hiding in the northern Congo, including remnant’s of  Joseph Kony’s Lords Resistance Army.  Ethiopia sent troops into Eritrea.  A Goldman Sachs insider says his former employer refers to its clients as “muppets”, and the European court of human rights has declared ‘kettling’ as the “least intrusive and most effective” tactic available to police against protesters.

The Hungarian president compared EU demands for deficit control to Soviet-era tyranny. IKEA in France is spying on the private lives of unhappy customers, and the Nobel prize winning president of Liberia defended the criminalization of homosexuality with the quip: “We like ourselves just the way we are”. One-fifth of young Canadians and Brits admitted taking mystery powders to get high.

The US is resuming its financial support for the Egyptian army.  UK health officials are calling for a ban on all-metal hip replacements. Teens in Thailand are being encouraged to ask friends to play football when they have a sexual urge, and brain scans of former NASA astronauts have revealed long-term eyeball deformities.

Scientists at the University of Hawaii have identified a debris field in the Pacific Ocean 3,200 kilometres long and 1,600 kilometres wide made of 18 million tonnes of floating wreckage from the tsunami that hit Japan. Seventy political groups in Canada are refusing to cooperate with Canada’s national spy agency. Construction workers in Cambridgeshire, UK uncovered a 1,300 year old medieval burial shed while excavating for a new housing development. Oil reserves have been discovered along the coast of Ghana, and some American fraternities are discouraging alcohol during frosh week.

In Montreal, Quebec, 200,000 students shut down the city in protest against tuition increases. The remains of a new species of human were discovered in south-west China. The scientist who discovered the devastating impact of CFCs on the ozone layer, Sherwood Rowland, died.  A full-scale replica of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temple is to be built on the banks of the Ganges river near Patna, India, and the recession along with rising costs of production are making bad plays scarce in the London (UK) theater scene.

This chart shows how the editors 'understand how each writer's article functionalizes distrust/trust of institutionality in relationship to how much mediation they understand is useful in reflecting on the complexity of culture.'

The eighth issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest has just been released in print. While the contents have been available online for a while, it’s definitely worth your while to drop a few bucks on the paper portrayal of this political periodical.

As Occupy Wall Street enters a new phase, this issue of JOAAP reflects the utility of a multiplicity of approaches to political issues. From their opening editorial:

A multiplicity of tactics is sometimes used to pragmatically cover for unsolvable differences in what is to be considered as appropriate action within a single protest. We do not use it as a cover though, instead we suggest (as many others have) that it is rich layers of often antagonistic relationships within generally broad trends that make a movement more successful, not less.

Read more about the Journal or order your copy at joaap.org.

Over the last month and a half, students across Québec have been mobilising against the dramatic tuition hikes being imposed by the Charest government and education minister Line Beauchamp. Emerging out of the 2005 student movement that successfully (if controversially) challenged the Liberal government’s proposed cuts to the loans and bursaries program, an estimated 270,000 students are currently on strike, performing creative direct actions, organising mass rallies and protests, holding community teach-ins, and occupying physical and media space. The iconic red square is visible everywhere in Montreal, appearing on the backpacks and lapels of students and their many supporters, adorning public monuments, and now thanks to a creative solidarity initative by Artung, in over 300 advertising columns across Montréal (facebook gallery here).

Québec artist-run centres have also rallied around the student struggle, recognising the links between the commodification and privatisation of education and that of art and culture. Artist run-centres occupy a unique space within Canadian culture, existing parallel to the larger public institutions and commercial galleries, they provide artists (often emerging artists) with an alternative and independent framework within which to conduct their research and present their work. Stephen Harper’s infamous “ordinary people don’t care about arts funding” election statement has resulted in severe cuts to the funding bodies for these organisations, and created pressure to commercialise their practices, seriously threatening their long-term viability as alternative spaces.

Initiated by an online callout and communiqué issued by the Artivistic collective and Centre des arts actuels Skol, over 30 artist-run centres and affiliated cultural organisations, including the RCAAQ (which represents a network of some 60 centres) have now signed on to a one-day strike mandate to coincide with the mass demonstration planned by students for March 22nd, visibly demonstrating their solidarity with the student movement by posting the red square on their doors and joining students to march in the streets.

Roughly translated from the communiqué:

We are deeply concerned by the tuition fee hikes and the logic of commodification that underlies the transformation of our universities. Much like the university environment, the arts and cultural sectors are facing growing pressure to rely upon private interests and to conform to an “entrepreneurial” business model.

…

To resist the tuition fee hikes is to resist a logic that reduces everything to the imperative of profitability.

To struggle for accessibility to higher education, is to struggle for a society that values culture in the broadest sense. It is for this reason we are joining the student movement.

On March 22nd, our spaces of creation and dissemination will be closed. The red square will be posted on our doors and windows and we will join the national demonstration against the increase of tuition fees.

Organisations involved include:
Arprim, Articule, Artivistic, Atelier Graff, La Centrale, Eastern Bloc, Perte de Signal, SKOL, Studio XX, Les éditions Écosociété, Optica, Le Groupe Intervention Vidéo, Artificiel.org, DARE-DARE, Galerie Verticale, Péristyle Nomade, Café Touski, VOX image contemporaine, La librairie Formats, Conscience Urbaine, Espace Libre, Praxis Art Actuel, Avatar, OBORO, Dazibao, Centre Clark, Espace Cercle Carré, WWTWO, Espoir et Mensonge, WORK, Exeko and Le Regroupement des Centres d’Artistes Autogérés du Québec.

For those who haven’t seen it, Big Bang Big Boom (2010) is yet another fabulous animated graffiti parable from the Blu art collective. Their work is endlessly fascinating — animated creatures sliding seamlessly from walls, through sand, along pipes and under bridges into stop-motion interaction with beach garbage and industrial debris. A mesmerizing allegory for the stupidity of creatures risen from the mud and muck of earth unable to resist the temptation to destroy each other and the whole planet. It is beautiful, creepy, and dizzyingly inventive. Enjoy.

Last week several newspapers censored the first of a series of Doonesbury comics addressing the current climate and discussion about women’s reproductive rights (specifically, in this case, abortion). The Center for Reproductive Rights has compiled a list of more than 60 newspapers who chose not to publish the strip, as well as a few of their excuses. The excuses, of course, are pretty weak, considering Doonesbury comics are always political, and the series is (as CRR puts it) “simply trying to humanize the struggles of women under Texas’s demeaning law. ”

The comic takes us through a woman’s trip to an abortion clinic following the passing of Texas’ invasive mandatory ultrasound law. The law requires women to have a sonogram before they can undergo an abortion, and requires doctors to describe in detail the sonogram findings such as a heartbeat and developing human features of the fetus.

Portland’s Oregonian was one of the 60 some newspapers who pulled the strips, and explained their decision to pull the comic as follows:

“Doonesbury” is a venerable comic strip, and over the years we have resisted calls to remove it or move it to the editorial page. The reason: It’s a comic strip and even though he delves into political satire, it is still a comic strip.

But in next week’s strip, “Doonesbury” author Garry Trudeau, in our judgment, went over the line of good taste and humor in penning a series on abortion using graphic language and images inappropriate for a comics page.

While we rarely pull strips for taste reasons, this was a clear call for the editors of the paper and for some other papers around the country, which also sent readers online to see the strip. Other papers moved them to other sections of the paper. “

The language they’re referring to is a line in the third strip in which the doctor preceeds the ultra sound by stating “By the power vested in me by the GOP, I thee rape” (Rape: forced, unwanted sexual intercourse. An action innately about power, not sex). Quite frankly, Doonesbury’s author, Garry Trudeau, should be celebrated for calling a spade a spade. As the five day comic comes to a close, the doctor tries to describe the unborn child and offers to try to describe its hopes and dreams, to which the woman (with her ccharacteristic Doonesbury sarcastic expression) responds: “If it wants to be the next Rick Perry, I’ve made up my mind.”

The Oregonian ran a poll asking for their readers “What do you think of our decision to send readers online to read ‘Doonesbury’ this week?”

An astounding 96.31% disagreed with the decision. I’d be interested to know how readers reacted from other States.

I highly recommend entertaining yourself by reading the remainder of the series. If your local paper ran the whole series, give them a major high five. And kudos again for Trudeau for going there.

Dozens of Palestinians have been killed or wounded in Israel’s latest bombing campaign of Gaza, while the Israeli military stubbornly insists the child-killing attacks are necessary to stop “terrorism”.

Such bloody assaults on Gaza are unfortunately common, and those that took place over 2008-2009 may have been the most devastating. Documentary film Tears of Gaza, by director Vibeke Løkkeberg, explores this military campaign with minimal gloss, resulting in a visual document that is both disturbing and devastating.

The full film can now be watched in its entirety on YouTube, and despite the “for promotional use only” watermark, the link has been shared by the filmmakers themselves on Twitter.

[Forward: When I saw that Arsenal Pulp Press had these two books on hand I immediately thought of Tyler. A thoughtful writer, Tyler had the pleasure of meeting Thomas Waugh last summer, and I knew he'd have an interesting perspective on both Out/Lines and Lust Unearthed. He certainly delivered. The following article is definitely worth a read to the end. - Amanda McCuaig, Art Threat Contributing Editor.]

In the summer of 2011, I had the good fortune of working with the organizing team behind We Demand: History/Sex/Activism, a three-day conference exploring the history of gender and sex activism in Canada. Held in the heart of Vancouver’s gay village, the event was the first of its kind since the early 1990s and marked the 40th anniversary of the 1971 We Demand protest, the first major gay and lesbian rights rally to advance on Parliament Hill.

It was a remarkable weekend. A new generation of young scholars, working firmly within (or in response to) the Queer Theory critical oeuvre, confidently shared their research with established academics and Liberation-era activists alike, many of whom had been on Parliament Hill forty years earlier, rallying against the Canadian government’s repressive stance on queer sexualities. It was living memory in dialogue with written history; reflection mingled with vision.

Perhaps it should come as little surprise, then, that the discussions that took place on that sweltering August weekend, diverse and wide-ranging as they were, ultimately seemed to fixate on one theme: queer archiving and the politics of remembrance.

In the wake of the Stonewall riots and the explosion of the gay rights movement at the end of the 1960s, once-clandestine networks of smut, fantasy, and desire were swept up into a densely regulated and eminently capitalist mainstream culture, raising dizzying questions around memory. What got collected in the frenzy of the Liberation era, and what got left behind? With the rupture of queer visual culture into heterosexual society, what kind of self-censorship took place? How did the increasingly deregulated and crisis-riddled economy of the 1970s interface with the secret word of gift, exchange, barter, and trade that dictated life in the collective closet?

After one particularly long day of such discussions, I found myself (mercifully) with a glass of wine in hand, looking out over English Bay, and chatting with one of the towering figures of the Canadian queer cultural landscape, Thomas Waugh. A professor at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Waugh is an accomplished scholar of visual culture and queer film, with an uncommon affinity for early gay graphics; those rare, hand-drawn, worn-at-the-edges depictions of fantasy, lust, and flesh that circulated in the gay underground of the pre-Stonewall era.

His two most recent volumes on the subject, Out/Lines and Lust Unearthed (Arsenal Pulp, 2002 and 2004, respectively) are ravishing, titillating, and theoretically engaged; a pair of joyfully written reflections on the hardcore, the softcore, and everything in between. And while the world of leather daddies, swishy bellhops, and precocious sailors-on-leave might seem a far cry from the lofty theoretical debates that coloured my meeting with Waugh, a careful reading of this wonderfully depraved stash lends it an unexpected and, I think, timely, political gravity.

In Out/Lines, Waugh delves into a collection of 200 graphics (produced roughly between the 1930s and the 1960s) excavated out of the chaotic backrooms of bookshops from Montreal to New York to San Francisco. These are often hazy and poorly reproduced images; copies of copies of unsigned originals that themselves draw upon a kind of ‘common fund’ of cliché erotic tropes. Unlike most visual art collections of this ilk, then, the very concept of authorship is unmoored from the beginning. In kind, both the images and the artists who once stood behind them take on a dream-like, almost spectral quality. In the world of Out/Lines, what’s real, where it came from, and to whom it belongs matters far less than the senses that apprehend it–a nod to the spirit of the early gay underground itself.

The gaps in the book’s historical record, though, are amply filled in by fragments of anecdotal evidence and personal gloss that sketch out a never-quite-finished map of how these images came to be. The whole volume, in turn, drips with Waugh’s wry charm, biting wit, and absolute inability to let a good pun go. The number of plays on “hard,” for instance, is not to be underestimated.

An illustration of naked lumberjacks from Out / Lines

But it is precisely these personal inflections that make Out/Lines so much more than a deliriously funny “coffee table book.” Waugh’s own narrative of collection–of sorting through thousands of yellowing pages in search of forgotten fantasies–resonates closely with the vague biographies and patchy histories that populate the text. In much the same way that the book’s many “wankers” and “lechers” copy and swap bits of sinful pulp away from prying eyes, Waugh wanders back through unkempt webs of lust in pursuit of long-buried erotic treasures.

While Waugh himself continually returns to the language of “the erotic,” this subtle and elegant formal parallel seems to bring the collection more in line with the haptic, a quality that Laura Marks (2002) has described as a kind of synesthetic migration of touch into the visual register. Out/Lines isn’t just an exercise in rediscovering a mode of seeing lost to the meat-and-money-shot fetishism of the post-Stonewall hardcore industry. It’s also about re-inhabiting that pleasure through the sensual work of collection, archiving, and sleuthing; practices best understood (conveniently) as acts of tracing or sketching. This is a metaphor with which Waugh masterfully toys throughout the text, beginning with the title:

Why Out/Lines? The queer revolution has sparked dozens of titles playing on the word ‘out.’ They engage the metaphor of the closet and are predicated on a history of both secrecy and self-un-knowingness…But I couldn’t resist one last time, enchanted with the notions of the lines of a drawing that come out, bring out, move out, that are ‘out.’ Of the outline of an image—often anonymous, incomplete, damaged—that graphically suggests or delineates without filling in faces, textures, or flesh. Of lines that outdo everything else, lines that always threatened back then to ‘out’ the incautious artist or consumer, lines that contour a history that is fragmented and still being shaded in, filled ‘out.’

Lust Unearthed, for its part, dramatically amplifies this fixation on the sensuousness of collection. While of course still outwardly concerned its own delightfully raunchy and often beautiful collection of images, Lust is ultimately a study in archiving. The graphics, gleaned from the enormous and meticulously preserved personal collection of CBS designer and gay bon vivant Ambrose DuBek, are sorted by country of origin, by motif, by trope, and by period. Each recalibration ripples through the collection, forcing particular themes and sensibilities to the surface, while further submerging and dampening others. And so while Lust certainly trumps Out/Lines with respect to information about authorship, this ever-frustrated (masochistic?) project of categorization ensures that the complete fixation of meaning remains impossible; that tantalizing spectral quality, so central to Out/Lines, is never quite extinguished.

Fitting then, that in captioning the images that make up Lust, Waugh moves freely between original commentary and excerpts from a whole range of queer source texts: the poems of W.H. Auden, the angst-ridden prose of Jean Genet, the matter-of fact diary entries of Joe Orton. Working in the eminently queer mode of pastiche, Waugh delights in bringing disparate texts together in a filthy pas de deux.

And so where the archive typically conjures images of dusty shelves and unchanging legacies, nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to Waugh’s titillating collections. To borrow and slightly modify a term attributed to another attendee of the We Demand conference, Ann Cvetkovich: these are archives of feelings and sensations; haptic archives where hands are made to speak and eyes are made to feel.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the great French phenomenologist, once wrote, “the real is a closely woven fabric.” That is, what we perceive as inherently real is in fact an elaborate tapestry, woven by the forces of cultural and social experience. Swaddled in that fabric from the cradle to the grave, we lose the ability to extricate ourselves from it, and so come to perceive it as given. Out/Lines and Lust Unearthed, however, deliberately seek out those strips of fabric worn threadbare by age, use, and poor-quality darning; those are the strips that allow fantasy to drift through.

It is exactly the incompleteness of the narratives, the anonymity of the artists, Waugh’s own frustrated hunts for elusive images, and the physical impossibility of the sexual acrobatics depicted, that allow a slippage to occur between the fantasies of the past and the realities of the present. These are the rips in the fabric of the real that allow us to reach across the boundaries that the real itself establishes: boundaries between generations and political regimes, between ways of seeing and being seen, feeling and being felt.

[Waugh’s obvious reverence for this kind of intimacy becomes all the more pointed in the closing pages of Lust, where we find a small sampling of softcore graphics, dated to just before the Stonewall rupture. These images, which demonstrate a new obsession with the kind of indexical photorealism that would become dominant in post-Stonewall queer visual culture, are mostly dismissed by Waugh as formulaic, predictable, and bland. Given the sumptuousness of his language up to this point in the text, the shift in tone is sudden and jarring, and betrays Waugh’s not-so-subtle resentment of the contemporary pornographic commodity (a theme also developed to some extent in Out/Lines).]

Of course, this is not all meant to suggest that engaging with these graphics is some wholly cerebral, overly serious business of building cross-generational solidarities. Indeed, Waugh goes to pains to stress (channeling that most cultish of gay graphic artists, Tom of Finland) that in the world of smut, the cock is the best, um…measure…of success. Further, he wisely refuses to invest these images with any kind of resistant potential, making frequent mention of how they often reproduce gendered, racialized, classist, and colonialist hierarchies of power. While these images certainly transgress a number of sexual and erotic norms, both past and present, any attempt to interpret them as advancing some cogent and conscious critique of those norms would be, I think, an ill-fated exercise.

That said, there is certainly no doubting their relevance in the broader study of queer visual culture, and as such, no reason to believe that they cannot provoke or engage sweeping political discussion. Indeed, for me, that is just what they have done.

Today, LGBT and queer issues enjoy a measure of visibility likely not seen since the Stonewall rupture. With queers increasingly integrated into the institutions and rituals of ‘mainstream’ culture through the passage of marriage equity bills and the repeal of policies such as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ our public visibility has perhaps never been greater. We are, in many places, equal subjects under the law, our desires are shown on commercial television, Pride is a major civic and corporate event.

With that in mind, though, I am compelled return to the question that began this essay; the very same question raised by Lust Unearthed, Out/Lines, and We Demand alike: In this rush to achieve visibility, what is lost? For Waugh, Stonewall ushered in a new queer visual and pornographic culture obsessed with the centerfold, the money shot, and the documentary function of the photo. Where these graphics, rare and ephemeral as they may have been, provided a “sense of how the underground actually worked, with its layers of visibility and invisibility, minorities within minorities,” the commodified photos of the post-Stonewall porn business sacrificed such nuance to a new regime predicated on a curious mix of hyper-visibility, outright exposure, and strict self-censorship.

And so it is once again in our own time. As we queers win mainstream airtime via schmaltzy romantic subplots on Glee, one has to wonder whether the real specificity of our erotic imagination is being scrubbed out. As we gain legal representation in marriage equity legislation, do we agree to a kind of self-censorship that denies the existence of transgressive erotic practices? What room remains for haptic fantasy in a visual culture where the sitcom industry seems to have decided that queer desire stops with the monogamous couple? Is ‘visibility,’ in this light, not simply a grand game of bait and switch?

Waugh’s witty wordplay and titillating images, then, seem to issue forth a challenge to our communities: to think expansively about our desires and the ways in which they appear to us; to understand them as fields of contestation where the question of who sees what, for what purposes, and to what e/affect should be taken seriously. To explore such questions, after all, is to once again tug at the loose threads of the real, that same playful act of undoing that, in Out/Lines and Lust Unearthed, transforms smut into a “touch across time.”

Tune in, turn on and give a few bucks to one the most fabulous radio stations anywhere. WWOZ New Orleans community radio is having their annual membership fundraising drive, and now is the time to support this treasure in the midst of New Orlean’s cultural renaissance.

WWOZ is home to the New Orleans sound, old and new, including New Orleans jazz, Second Lines, Mardis Gras Indians, Pleasure Clubs, brass bands, gospel, dixieland, blues, calliope and more more more. All from the humble efforts of community volunteers, local musicians and donations from listeners.

WWOZ is a bright light in this beleaguered city, and the sounds they share warm hearts and souls all over the world.

Check it out (you can stream live here), and if you like what you hear, support local independent radio.

Yesterday’s Q show on CBC Radio One had a great interview with the director of REPO MAN and SID AND NANCY, Alex Cox. An outspoken critic of the studio system and of government and corporate efforts to crackdown on “illegal” downloading, Cox argues that the corporate studio system continues to make billions while artists get ripped off, so when someone downloads SID AND NANCY—a film he has not seen a residual dime from—the copyright holder “loses,” not the creator, who is already losing out to the copyright holder.

Cox doesn’t pull any punches, and is a refreshing voice in the debate, adding a dose of good Brit humour with a dose of sharp criticism against a rapacious system that doesn’t care about independent artists, only increasing profits. Hit play on the audio file below (after the jump), and after the intro from guest host Brent Brambury (who has his own interesting take on the Doonsbury comic controversy and Limbaugh the goon), Cox is first up.

Video still from Kony 2012.

I was swamped at work last week, when I took a little Twitter break to see what was going on in the world. My feed was bombarded with what appeared to be a video gone viral, called Kony 2012. Even celebrities like Rihanna, Taylor Swift, and Kim Kardshian, you know, the intellectual heavyweights, were endorsing the campaign to stop Kony.

Not knowing what a Kony was (something to do with ice cream? Who’d want to stop ice cream?), and not having time to look into it, I just threw up a Twitter update: @craigsilliphant says, “what is a Kony? Do I care about this?” I didn’t retweet any of the Kony stuff, because I didn’t know what it was all about. I went back to my work, and when I logged in later, one of my Twitter followers had posted, “Ugandan War Lord. Watch the video.” Well, thanks, duh. She obviously didn’t realize that I’d been too busy (lazy) to watch the video in the first place.

Over the next couple of hours, the Kony video made its rounds. People posted and reposted it on Facebook and Twitter, with some even proclaiming that they’d made their children watch it. Because I still hadn’t watched the video, I decided to remain silent about it and not repost it. I remember what my Mom had said to me as a child when I’d gone and done something stupid because my friends were doing it; “If Kim Kardashian was going to jump off a bridge or forward a Kony video without looking into it, would you?”
Well, no, Mom, now that you put it that way.

The video was made by Invisible Children, which I soon discovered, is not a TLC ghost hunting show. Invisible Children is an organization that seeks to create awareness of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, led by none other than warlord Joseph Kony, whose atrocities have been legendary. He has plundered, raped, and killed many and practices the use of child soldiers in his rebellion against the Ugandan government. (Note: there may be some cynical humour in my ramblings here, as usual — but there’s nothing funny at all about child soldiers.)

The inevitable backlash to the viral video began, still before I’d even had a chance to see it. The Internet has a weird ‘news’ cycle these days. A story breaks and makes the social media rounds, then the cynics stage a backlash movement, only to have the optimists strike back at the cynics, all before the newspaper can even get the original story out.

But who was right?

The detractors were throwing down condescending vitriol, calling Kony-forwarders lazy and self-indulgent, with sarcastic status updates like, “I clicked on a video, and now I’m patting myself on the back for saving the world.”

Slacktivism is the term for the idea that you can register your pleasure/displeasure with something on social media and then wash your hands of it, having done your part. Some detractors even went as far as to chastise ignorant Westerners for their hubris, postulating that we think we can march in there with our ‘white skin’ and our money and dole out reward and punishment Deus ex Machina-style to the ‘lowly’ Africans. While I do think we need to mind our hubris in the West, I totally reject the claim that we shouldn’t do what we can to help.

I’m pretty skeptical about everything (which generally just serves to make me aware of how much I contradict myself), but I thought to myself, ‘Why do we suddenly care about one warlord and ignore what’s going on in Syria?’

Whitney Huston’s funeral got round the clock coverage this year, while people were dying in Syria. We covered our eyes and ears during atrocities in Darfur or Rwanda that we could have actually done something about. Hell, in 1994, Canadian Forces Lt. General Romeo Dallaire waved his arms and cried that the sky was falling as he watched a genocide unfold before his eyes in Rwanda. We couldn’t even be bothered to even pay enough attention to shrug him off. At least until 2004, when they made Hotel Rwanda, starring Don Cheadle. Then we were incensed. Apparently, if you boil something down into a movie, or better yet, an Internet video, you have our undivided attention.

But the past is the past; maybe Kony 2012 can’t go back in time and change Rwanda, but can sharing this video ad nauseum help Uganda? Would stopping Kony do anything to stem the tidal wave of child soldiers? If you had a car that was destroyed and about to be written off, putting one new tire on it isn’t going to make it roadworthy again, right?

Or is that just sour grapes? Why ride someone’s ass for forwarding a video whose point was to make Joseph Kony a household name so he’d be easier to identify and catch? There’s something noble in that, isn’t there? We’re making the world a better place one click at a time, aren’t we?

Those optimists forwarding the video blindly can tell themselves that, but the truth is more complicated, as it usually is.

In terms of Invisible Children itself, and their charity funds, concerns have been raised that the money going to them is more often spent on staff salaries and filmmaking, rather than on direct aid. They don’t have an external auditor, so who knows what the truth is? Some are calling Kony 2012 nothing more than fundraising propaganda, wagging the dog, as it were.

It’s the same media argument being made lately with the business of Pink Ribbon campaigns for cancer. People are using the iconic pink ribbon to sell their wares, with little of the money going to charity. Meanwhile, we donators walk away thinking we’ve helped someone, when all we’ve helped is some sleazy business owner build a bigger swimming pool in his or her yard.

“Fine,” the optimists said, after already letting the Kony cat out of the bag. “Share the story, but watch where you send your money.” But that’s still not the whole story.

Invisible Children support military intervention in Uganda. To give you the Reader’s Digest version, Kony was fighting against the Ugandan government, and I wouldn’t call him Luke Skywalker or anything, but the lines of good and evil aren’t as clear cut as you might think. If you’re supporting Kony 2012, you’re inadvertently supporting the Ugandan military and they’re no strangers to crimes against humanity. They enjoy murdering, raping, and looting just as much as Kony.

Add to this another little known fact that the video glosses over; Kony was actually driven from Uganda awhile back — he’s no longer a player there, and his army has dwindled to a few hundred (not the 30,000 people are quoting on Facebook). Meanwhile, the country of Uganda and even the continent of Africa itself have much bigger problems.

See what I mean about those darn contradictions?

Kony 2012 wants Kony caught so he can be tried as a war criminal in the International Criminal Court (ICC). But as Doug Saunders points out in his article for The Globe and Mail, the court already went after the LRA; the problem is that it was just as peace talks were actually starting between the LRA and Uganda, which could have brought an end to at least some of the bloodshed and exploitation.

Putting the LRA on trial pretty much gave the government of Uganda license to continue its own atrocities. Saunders calls it, “one of [the ICC’s] biggest failures.” Noting that things were going to get really bad for him if he were prosecuted, Kony disappeared into the jungle. “If not for the ICC,” says Saunders, “the conflict would have ended years ago.”

Now, you can’t honestly say what would have happened, as Tom Cruise proved in Minority Report, but one could argue that now that Kony will be recognized worldwide, it will drive him deeper underground and serve to ramp the war effort up anew. At the least, it’s safe to say that the situation is much more complex that the Kony video implies.

This information and back and forth just scratches the surface, I’m sure, and by the time you read this, there’ll probably be more facts and discussion points coming to light. One thing is certain; the world wields a complicated butterfly effect that is mightier than what you can solve with the click of a mouse. Did ‘forwarders’ help war children by sharing the Kony video? Probably not. Did they actually make the situation worse? Hard to say for sure, but the short answer is yes. Kony 2012 is probably not a good thing, but the genie is out of the bottle now.

All this being said, I still can’t totally side with the detractors and their condescending take on slacktivism. One thing happened here; people turned off their American Idol for a few seconds to open their eyes and absorb what was going on beyond the titular world of The Bachelor. The detractors may have won several crucial points with when it comes to Kony, but they’re also not seeing the big picture in terms of media dissemination. Instead of being mocked, people should be encouraged to be skeptical and question their universe — and you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

The Internet is still a noisy, bawling infant — but the information age is at an awakening. Where this could take us is staggering to comprehend, and in an optimist’s dream, it could bring about some Gene Roddenberry-approved world, where we all come together to better humanity and vanquish demons like Kony and the Ugandan regime. Slacktivism isn’t anything to champion, of course, but today’s slacktivism could be fueling the total awareness of future generation when they pick up where the slacktivists leave off. Ultimately, knowledge is power.

Go ahead and let your kids see the Kony video, now that the whole world has anyway. But learn about the situation and talk to them about it. Teach them that the world is a complicated place, and that their actions, even social media circles, will all have equal and opposite reactions. And if you can’t be bothered to learn anything beyond the oversimplified argument of a 30-minute propaganda video, then don’t blindly share it. Perhaps the Kony debacle can teach more people make informed decisions about the information they share, rather than blindly doing what social media or Rihanna tell them to do.

Craig Silliphant is a Western Canadian writer, critic, and broadcaster. He has insomnia, more apocalyptic dreams than necessary, and night terrors, often waking his wife up in the dead of night with his screaming.

Back in January I posted an article highlighting a video about Sue Coe’s art that was produced by Our Hen House, a “Multimedia hub for people who want to change the world for animals.” Jasmin Singer, one of the founders of Our Hen House, immediately stood out as someone who was not only passionate about animals, but who was passionate and knowledgable about the artists whose work creates discourse on diet, lifestyle, and, for you yogis out there, the practice of ahimsa (non harming, or the avoidance of violence).

Her work in curating these artworks inspired me to ask her more about her experience, why she does what she does, and how Our Hen House is affecting its audience.

Art Threat: To start, can you tell me a bit about Our Hen House, and what you do?

Jasmin Singer: Our Hen House is a multimedia hub of opportunities for people who want to change the world for animals. Every day, we highlight a story or idea for getting involved with this kind of change, focusing on how everyone can use their own talents and skills to mainstream the movement to end animal exploitation.

The most fun part is our weekly podcast (which is available both on iTunes and on our website). We’ve produced 112 episodes so far – never missing a week – and each episode, which is fun and fast-paced, includes an interview with a different mover and shaker from the world of animal rights (like Peter Singer, who has been on twice, TV personality Jane Velez-Mitchell, and artists, professors, writers, ethicists, activists, students, the list goes on). We also always include a current events section focusing on news items from the world of animal rights, a review of a film, product, or book, and what we call “vegan banter,” which is basically a look into our world in the animal rights and vegan scene in NYC. We also bring the podcast with us on the road when we travel (which is frequent, as we give talks regularly). And we have a daily blog, and a video production arm.

The other founder is my partner, Mariann Sullivan, who is an animal law professor (and is quite fabulous and brilliant – the official brains behind the organization!). Given my own background in the arts, and Mariann’s in law, Our Hen House highlights advocacy opportunities within these worlds – arts and the law – as well as heaps more.

Our style is “indefatigably positive,” because we feel that in a world that is full of so much suffering (including that of animals in factory farms, labs, zoos, puppy mills, etc., etc.), if we focus our energy on creating a positive change, then we can make a strong and everlasting difference in the way animals are seen by society. Hopefully others will follow suit, tap into their own compassion, and also work to change the world. The way we see it, there is no option.

What was the inspiration behind putting together the Art of the Animal series?

Before starting Our Hen House, I was an actor with an AIDS-awareness theatre company, and that ultimately led to connections that opened my eyes to animals. Plus, my mother is an artist, so my entire life has revolved, in one way or another, around the arts.

When I learned about the ugly underbelly of animal agriculture, I could not look away. There I was, devoting my life to speaking up for social justice, with a focus on LGBT activism. It seemed abundantly clear that I needed to extend my own compassion to all animals – not just the human variety. I was already a vegetarian at that point, but when I learned about the true horrors of the dairy and egg industries (the most egregious subsets of animal agriculture), I became a vegan and an animal rights activist.

As I explored the various outlets that I wanted to try on for size regarding my own animal advocacy, the arts seemed like a natural fit. The more I delved into that parallel, the more I discovered how many artists of all kinds were lending their talents and passion to the greater good of animal awareness. Part of the reason we started Our Hen House was to provide an outlet for established artists who have begun to use their art forms to speak up for animals and open people’s eyes, as well as for budding artists who are looking for opportunities to do just that. The arts have an incredibly powerful way of seeping in and changing hearts and minds. With the enormous, unfathomable suffering of animals, the arts is another way to turn on the light and inspire others to act. And it’s an extremely profound way to do that.

How long has the series been ongoing?

The Art of the Animal series is the same age as Our Hen House. It falls within the overarching umbrella of the organization, along with The Gay Animal series (which focuses on activists within the LGBT community who speak up for animals, too).

What type of work are you looking for for the series, and what are some of the most surprising or interesting artists or concepts that you’ve come across so far? (If you have associated images or videos that you could share, that would be great!).

Through the Art of the Animal series, I have been exposed to so many artists of all kinds who are devoting their lives to raising awareness of animal issues by way of their plays, their paintings, their poetry, their photography, and on and on.

Perhaps the most profound story we featured was that of Sue Coe, a British-born activist whose work is as harrowing as it is educational, and as moving as it is gut-wrenching. I am a long fan of Sue’s work, and meeting her was a remarkable experience. I already knew that Sue’s art was mind-blowing (my favorite recent piece of hers is called “Riot of the Fowl” and features a bunch of hens on the streets of London, where they are rioting and getting back at humankind), but what I didn’t expect was how brilliant she would be at telling stories, and sharing her passion. The most difficult edit we’ve ever done was to cut down her interview, since the way Sue communicates the important connections between art and animal rights is extremely articulate, and as far as I’m concerned, something everyone must hear. If you’re not familiar with Sue’s work, that needs to be rectified, because it’s life-changing.

Dan Dunbar's "The Last Thing You'll Ever See."

And let me tell you about another piece of art that moved us to tears. For our blog, we covered NYC’s first vegan art show, which was full of paintings and drawings from the animal rights community, and featured both dark and comical pieces. In the corner, I noticed a life-sized painting of a butcher. The way the painting was hung, the viewer was observing from the point of view of the animal about to be slaughtered. It was like a kick in the stomach, yet, again, I could not look away. Appropriately and hauntingly, the painting was called “The Last Thing You’ll Ever See.” The artist was Dan Dunbar, co-owner of Brooklyn’s new vegan doughnut shop, Dun-Well Doughnuts. When I chatted with Dan about the piece, he said that although we all have perceptions about what it’s like to be a non-human animal, their experiences, like the one in his painting, are something none of us are actually privy to. He told me, “Nobody understands what it’s like to be a pig or a cow or a chicken in these situations, but I think that everyone has empathy, and artwork in particular can be a way of allowing anyone to tap into a certain perception that is not their own.” Dan’s piece, and his words, are in so many ways at the core of Art of the Animal.We’ve also featured theatre, like the one-woman play produced last year in Los Angeles, “I’m Sorry: How a People-Pleasing Apologist Became an Animal-Loving Activist,” written and performed by Katya Lidsky, and “Leakey’s Ladies,” which tells the story of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas. And we’ve featured poetry, such as the video we made about animal rights poet Gretchen Primack. And some more outside-of-the-box type things, like the work of Cynthia King, a dancer in Brooklyn who runs a dancing school, has a line of vegan ballet slippers, and did an incredible choreographed routine with her young students that aimed to imitate various forms of animal confinement and, ultimately, liberation.Our Art of the Animal series also sometimes highlights calls for artists, as well as sheds light on artistically-oriented activism. We recently featured two photographers – one who dresses up shelter animals and photographs them, with the hopes that the snazzy photos will attract adopters, and the other who takes portraits of dogs right before they are euthanized, also trying to raise awareness of their plight. The point is; if you’re artistically-inclined at all, you need to think how you can do something with that talent that is for the greater good.

Tou Yun-fei' s "11:38am, 08/01/2011, Taiwanese public animal shelter, time until merciful death: 29 minutes."

What kinds of reactions are you receiving from your audience? Have you heard feedback from non-vegetarian or non-vegan friends about how the art that you’ve shared has impacted their dietary decisions?

Yes, absolutely. An example is the video we made about Jonathan Horowitz, who had an exhibit called “Go Vegan” which was on display at a former meat-packing plant, La Frieda Meats. It was harrowing multimedia exhibit that included a portrait gallery of more than 200 celebrity vegetarians, a video installation featuring Paul and Linda McCartney, and footage of animal slaughter. We were contacted by people who saw our coverage of the exhibit and who then went to visit it in person. There was something extremely eerie about seeing it live. There were bloodstains on the ground from where the animals were slaughtered, and the facility, which had only recently closed, still smelled like death. That kind of experience is enough to make anyone rethink their dietary and lifestyle decisions, especially when coupled with the extraordinary impact of the multimedia artwork. That exhibit reached well beyond the animal rights community and into the mainstream. No wonder it was called “Go Vegan.” People did.

Generally speaking, people who would be attracted to our Art of the Animal series are people who are already at least somewhat awakened, or at the very least intrigued, by animal issues. It’s so beautiful to see the power that comes when they start connecting the dots between a painting, a drawing, a piece of theatre, a photograph, a story, or a song, with the plight of animals. And we watch as they realize the absolute importance of living a life that is not only free of animal exploitation (as much as humanly possible, that is), but also the responsibility of using our privileges as humans to speak up for them in whatever capacity makes sense for us.

Our Hen House was named the “Indie Media Powerhouse” winner in VegNews Magazine’s 2011 Veggie Awards – can you talk about the other work you’ve done that’s contributed to winning that title?

Thank you! We were extremely thrilled to receive that award. After we got it, Mariann and I kept walking around the apartment saying, “We’re an Indie Media Powerhouse!” Whenever we’d make a decision, we’d say, “Would an Indie Media Powerhouse do A, or would an Indie Media Powerhouse do B?” It was a hoot. It still is. We’re incredibly humbled by that title, and grateful to VegNews for foisting it upon us!

Producing multimedia content on a consistent, regular basis, shedding light on ways to create change, is at Our Hen House’s core. I think our positive style is refreshing to a lot of people. And rather than focus on things like “celebrity culture,” we opt instead to focus on people who are doing what they can in their own communities to work toward ending animal exploitation. On this subject, we’ve written extensively (both for Our Hen House as well as other publications), given talks around the country (and beyond), made videos, and, of course, produced a weekly podcast. We also shed light on ways that every single person who comes to our site can get involved in changing the world, and we break down those categories into everything from the arts, to legal opportunities, grassroots, media, academic, and others. And we review books, movies, products, etc., all from an animal rights bent. The reason we call it “Our Hen House” is because we like to think of it as a community, belonging to all of us. Our tag line is “a place to find our way to change the world for animals”. I also think that the fact that there are really only two of us “behind the curtain” allows for people to relate to us, to get to know our voices and our personalities. So it feels extremely familial. Hopefully and excitingly, that is why we were named the “Indie Media Powerhouse.”

Do you have upcoming projects you’d like to share about?

2012 is poised to be a huge year for us! We are in the process of expanding to an online magazine, taking us a bit away from our current blog format, which has some limitations. Our new online persona will include more in-depth features, editorials, multimedia interviews, and even an optional pay wall – behind which, “our flock” will be able to receive some wonderful incentives, as well as additional content that isn’t available elsewhere. The new site will also include an animal rights-centric news ticker, a “This Animal on This Day” photograph section, and some columnists that will knock your wool-free socks off. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and are always extremely grateful (to say the least) for donations. In fact, we’re reader and listener supported, so we rely on them. And we offer some snazzy thank you gifts for our donors, so you get stuff, too!

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

The horror that is happening to animals behind closed doors is astronomical. It is almost impossible to bear to think about. Every second in the U.S. alone, 267 chickens die. It is a number I actually have tattooed on my left wrist, because it keeps things in perspective for me, and reminds me why it is absolutely vital that I keep going. There is a lot to be horrified about (and I am, I’m horrified), but if you channel that into something positive, something creative, and something that taps into what you’re good at, the power that can come from it can be otherworldly. We will make change, there is no question. We just have to go out there and start chipping away at that massive wall of denial that mainstream society has built to protect itself from the hideous reality, in the best way we know how.

Bryant Park, Manhattan. Photo by Eric Walton

According to organizers, this meeting will be a creation workshop to start imagining, painting & drawing … Artists are encouraged to bring material, art supplies, paint & brushes, etc…. and to think YELLOW.

March 17, 2012 Café l’Artère, 7000 ave. Du Parc (métro Parc). 14h / 2pm

In the two previous meetings, participants engaged in wide-ranging discussions about:

* how creative actions can help promote the Occupy ideas;
* the need for better, bigger, livelier visuals;
* how to make the general public part of performances;
* how to occupy other public space with a critical arts presence;
* reclaiming the commons with bright, colourful, noisy processionals;
* how the arts can be used to raise public awareness of the issues;
* and more.

The Arts Committee says that all theatre artists, allies and creative peeps are welcome. For more information contact either Johanne Chagnon or Norman Nawrocki: rhythm[at]nothingness[dot]org

Last month I posted an interview with Michael D’Antuono. A few days ago he sent me the above video, which is a beautifully narrated piece which outlines the background of his newest portrait series, Corporacy. An excellent watch.

As students wage a massive strike in Quebec, over proposed tuition hikes that will nearly double rates in a few years, and with police responding like violent fascists—blinding the eye of one young student only two days ago—it seems an apt time to reflect on the hierarchy of values, matched by the hierarchy of spending, that the federal and provincial governments of Canada extol.

Federally, the Conservatives want to increase the cost of education through privatization whilst earmarking billions for weapons and machines of war and building scores of unwanted and un-needed prisons. Provincially, war manufacturers have representatives sitting on the Boards of Governors at Quebec universities like Concordia and the Quebec government has done little to stop the commercialization and corporatization of education in the province. The links between education and war run deep – from representation at the decision-making level of higher education governance, to ads for the Forces in washrooms, to recruitment on campus (illegal, but it happens), to research in engineering and the sciences, war benefits every time the value of getting an education for education’s sake goes down. Higher tuition fees are but one aspect of that equation.

This week’s FFP is the excellent documentary WAR MADE EASY, an MEF film that shows how the media spin war and rally the troops for state violence. Who pays? Taxpayers, citizens, students.

And if anyone out there can suggest a great documentary on the corporatization of education or the links between war and education, please let us know.

I know I know, this is sooooooo 2010 – but there is a chance you didn’t catch this snappy little PSA by Rape Crisis Scotland as it was circulating way back when. If that’s the case, watch it now, one day after International Woman’s Day.

Photograph by Glenna Gordon (detail).

By now you’ve heard of the Kony 2012 campaign, and I’ve already expended enough energy discussing it on Facebook to bring anything new and arts-related to the table.

However, the Washington Post has provided a different angle by interviewing Glenna Gordon, the photographer who shot the now infamous image of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons.

While I found it it baffling that three social media-savvy hipsters thought it was a good idea to pick up a couple of Kalashnikovs and a rocket-propelled grenade, I apparently didn’t give them enough credit. It appears that they’re damn proud of their colonial mindset, and the tough guy act depicted in the photograph only serves to reinforce this image.

According to Gordon, “the photo plays into the myth that Invisible Children are very much actively trying to create. [...] I don’t think they think there is a problem with the idea that they are colonial. This photo is the epitome of it, like, we are even going to hold your guns for you.”

She goes on to describe IC’s work as “emotionally manipulative,” and argues that both local aid groups and Ugandans themselves see IC as simply “trying to promote themselves and a version of the narrative.”

Check out the full interview at the Washington Post’s blog.

Also required reading: BoingBoing has compiled a significant list of African voices responding to the Kony 2012 video campaign.

The director of National Treasure responds! Taking a break from making terrible movies, filmmaker Jon Turteltaub argues the Washington Post should apologize to “the kids being killed and raped because you thought it might be smart to bring down the people risking their own lives to save them.” Man, that’s funnier than Cool Runnings.

Sarah Maple — Signs, C-Type Print, 2007

As today is International Women’s Day, I thought it would be worthwhile to dig though our archives and offer up a selection of past content focused on women and feminist issues.

Also, here’s a worthy read from The Guardian a few years back: Why is feminism out of fashion in contemporary art? And we’re wondering whether you agree.

• The challenge of exhibiting feminist art
• Where are the women? Media conference asks why women are still scarce in the industry
• Portraits of a young girl influenced by the mainstream
• Reclaiming the mainstream: Comopolitan magazine gets the alt media treatment
• And the Oscar goes to … another white guy
• The Moon Inside You: a documentary explores one woman’s quest for a happy period
• 12th & Delaware is a window into the American abortion war
• Fact not Fiction: Women Documentary Directors of the Americas
• Islam is the new black: a conversation with Sarah Maple

North America has always been home to one good Rush and one evil Rush, but never have they engaged in battle … until now.

Canadian prog rock legends Rush have demanded that the Rush Limbaugh Show stops using their music. The band’s music was regularly played leading in and out of commercial breaks during Limbaugh’s heavily syndicated program. But acting in the wake of Limbaugh’s extraordinarily sexist (even for him) comments about law student Sandra Flute, Rush’s music publisher sent him a cease and desist letter invoking copyright and civil rights law.

Good Rush isn’t alone in the fight. Peter Gabriel has also asked that his music be withdrawn from Limbaugh’s program, as explained in a post on the musician’s Facebook page.

Dozens of companies have also pulled their ads from the Rush Limbaugh Show, a development which Limbaugh has dismissed, stating that “everything is cool” and, typically, blaming “the left” for the exodus.