When I first noticed Lisa Rezansoff, it took about half a six-pack of Pils to realize I was at the table of a born artist.
Fish also wrote about Lisa Rezansoff’s show in more detail for GigCity.ca. They spoke about her work, her residency at SNAP and more. Go read it
If you love getting this kind of inside information, you should come to our upcoming artist talks. Mathieu Valade will be in the gallery this afternoon at 2, and Lisa Rezansoff will be giving one later this month on the 24th.
It’s late January, and Amy Goodman is in a small bookstore in Utah, glowing with enthusiasm over the digitally-assisted revolt in Egypt. One of the resident cats chooses this moment to start churn-barfing on the floor in front of the journalist: Hrf. Hrf. Hrf. “Maybe he’s a Mubarek ally,” she jokes. “No, not my cat!” sings his owner sadly.
Everyone here to meet the woman at the centre of Democracy Now! is humbled by and concerned about the events unfolding in Egypt (and other elder lands). But at the same time we’re also impressed with our fortune that Goodman’s visiting during Sundance to discuss the implications of these global events. I’m not meaning to slight the sprawling film festival saying this, but at that moment Egypt wasn’t the first people were talking about on the streets of Park City, dressed for the slopes. Goodman, in front of a small crowd and two cats, one barfing, was like an island of simple, delicious consciousness. And consciousness and communication are everything when it comes to helping each other make the world better.
“The corporations working with (Mubarek) in this,” she begins, “the British company Vodaphone, shut down all the communication systems in Egypt. They say they had to do that because of the Egyptian government. Thank God not everyone says, ‘Only following orders.’
“You never know when the magic moment will come. But if you’re involved with social change you are building a foundation for when that moment comes. You all help to determine history. And that’s what’s happening with the people of Egypt. That’s what happened with the people of Tunisia. In one sense you could call Tunisia’s uprising that led to the uprising of Ben Ali – who’d been there for 23 years – the first WikiLeaks Revolution. Before the documents, the cables released by WikiLeaks, certainly there was great unrest. But people were afraid to speak out. This broke the dam when they read the internal U.S. Government cables that talked about tremendous corruption, with all the information to prove it.
“And you think about what that launched. What transparency launches, because that’s what WikiLeaks is all about – getting this information out.”
Even today, a month later, as the resilient Col. Gadhaffi appeals to a crowd to dance in the streets and defend Libya from its own democratic will, the revolutionary changes in Africa and the Middle East have the potential to be (a few already are) some of the most important events in modern history. What Gadhaffi cannot undo is the fact he fired on and killed hundreds of protestors. His own people know it. I believe this information will destroy him where American assassination attempts failed.
Goodman: “I was talking to Noam Chomsky as Julian Assange was getting assailed and worse here in the U.S. I mean, he’s being dealt with very differently in other countries. People are just looking at the documents. I don’t think the story is Assange. If he had written the documents, he would be the story. You’d have to say, ‘Is this man someone you can believe?’ But he didn’t. These are U.S. government documents, first the Iraq war logs, then the Afghan war logs. These are written by the military themselves. It’s fascinating to read them because often they are what grassroots activists say about a country. What these documents show us is what is the U.S. Government’s real view of what’s going on around the world.”
Goodman pauses now and then to collect her thoughts, speaking expressively, using her hands a lot. Her voice is more soothing than the intellect and stories behind them. When she speaks at the U of A tomorrow night I’m sure we can expect the same.
“What Chomsky said, interviewing him, he said what it shows is the disdain the U.S. government has for democracy. Because it’s the way they intervene in governments, not to represent the people.”
Goodman, whose mind terrifies me with the number of details she can keep straight, asks, “How has Mubarek remained in power for so long – 30 years? The second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, something like $2 billion – more like $4 billion if you counted everything? Tunisia, Ben Ali? Hillary Clinton was, to say the least, severely criticised when she said they support the Egyptian government for its ‘stability.’ What does stability mean?
“Stabilty for business. From ATT to the spice companies like McCormick to Nike to Reebok. Stability for business. Because the same guns that gunned down the Timorese in this occupied country until they were able to vote for their own independence, making them the newest nation in the world, those same guns were pointed at the workers in the plants that provide the stability for these multinational corporations so the people don’t rise up and they don’t unionize.”
Goodman defines a less aggressive policy of stopping terrorism. “We have to really analyse what stability is. Because I do think we should be concerned about national security. We should be concerned about how we are viewed in the world. There’s a very straightforward way to be. And it’s to support democracy.”
Then, this. Goodman reminds us of one of the most horrifying things we’ve ever seen. “In Iraq, there was this attack on a group of people on July 12, 2007. There was a videotape released by WikiLeaks. A group of men are walking around, showing around two Reuters employees, Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, up-and-coming videographer, and Saeed Chmagh – he was the driver for the Reuters crew. He had four kids. And the videotape is so chilling of what took place. The Apache military gunship overhead, they see these men and you hear them cursing, laughing: the callousness. They are constantly calling back to base, asking for permission to open fire. They are not doing this on their own. And they blast this group of men. The videotape is taken by the military, not peace activists you could accuse of editing it to make it look worse than it was. You can’t make something look worse when 12 people are gunned down.
“And they are laughing and cursing as they kill them. I think it was Saeed, who wasn’t yet dead, who’s dragging himself away from the bodies. A van pulls up - and this is an international war crime - when people come to help those who have been injured – and they get out to help the survivor. And the helicopter gunship explodes the van. Amazingly, two children survived. Saeed Chmagh was just disintegrated. Reuters demanded the videotape and they could not get it for years.
“A little while later, we interviewed a young man, a U.S. soldier who had come home from Iraq. He was engaged in a protest. He was demanding of President Obama that he stop sending soldiers with PTSD back to Iraq and Afghanistan. I asked him about his experiences and he clearly was suffering terribly. And he said there was this attack on a group of people on July 12, 2007. He was on the ground with the military group that came up on the van that had been exploded. And he ran and he saved the two children. And he said, I’m holding these kids, their intestines are all cut up and he went back to the base and told his commanding officer. ‘I need help.’ He could not get their faces out of his head. His commanding officer told him to suck it up.”
“We talked to another soldier. He wasn’t in the gunship, but only by chance, he had a cold. But when all the guys came back he was there and they were laughing and cursing and he knew what had happened. We played him the videotape and he said, ‘I don’t get why you are making such a big deal of this.’ And I said, you don’t think it’s a big deal when you blow up a group of people? ‘No, it’s not that.
By the time you read this post, Premier Ed Stelmach’s farewell budget may have already impacted the surface; the words “hopeful” and “fearful” replaced in headlines by “angry” and “AAAAAAAAA!” Whether this meant another round of cuts to the arts – five to ten per cent being the common rumour - was still an unknown I wanted to freeze and examine in the last seconds before anything else happened. The still before the storm.
As you know, last year’s 16% “haircut” went deep into the scalp of arts organizations like Film and Video Arts Society Alberta, here at Latitude 53 and over at the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, just to name a few local spaces.
“SNAP was hit by the usual 16%,” executive director Anna Szul explained. “We didn’t cut any one particular program but trimmed expenses everywhere. Although in retrospect, for public perception, it would have been more effective to cut all from one area to show what a drastic effect such extreme financial cuts have on the arts.”
Objective note: we are at the point of talking about strategically placing cuts so people notice.
Rather than SNAP’s even approach, this was how Latitude handled the cuts – dropping one major show and a catalogue, both interrupted possibilities in the middle of the gallery’s financial year. Executive director Todd Janes and I sat down for some time talking about last year’s cuts, which he described as useless and mean-spirited, especially as Alberta allocates only .1% of its budget to the arts. Point one per cent. He compared it to your household trying to balance its finances and pretending not going to a movie is going to save the children.
Janes, who should write a book on the subject, thinks there are bigger issues to talk about than how much the Tories fund farming, big oil and horseracing. “There’s been 40 years of Tory rule and, let’s be generous, the past 25 years of Tory rule haven’t managed anything. One of the main reasons they survived is because a bunch of prehistoric life died in one area and for the past four decades they’ve had a large horseshoe made of petrochemicals up their ass.
“It’s not because they have a vision, or a plan.” This last item is increasingly felt in the province, regardless of your political stripe. “What has Lindsay Blackett done?” Janes asked. “Great, we have a Department of Culture and Community Spirit. But the bigger story is Minister Blackett has mismanaged his portfolio beyond belief. Arts and culture are clearly not even on the radar for this government … or they’re just malicious. It’s probably a mix.
“There’s a few points that need to be conveyed here. One, the arts are still not funded in Alberta from taxpayer money, but lotteries money. The allocation is very clear. The second thing is, under the leadership or the vision or the impetus of Lindsay Blackett, I would argue almost everything he’s done has eroded professional artists and arts organizations in this province. And while the AFA budget has been going down almost every year since he’s been minister, his personal departmental expenses have gone up over 22%. His ministerial budget has inflated in a opposite direction. I find that really interesting.”
Janes cited the government’s partial matching of private donations to non-profits as positive, “but at the same time Blackett totally got rid of Wild Rose funding and decimated and consolidated a lot of the non-profits that just as a general citizen I’m curious about. And what does the Premier’s Council on Arts and Culture do again? It’s a panel of people from all over the province that meets and advises the minister, but there’s no accountability - no one really knows what they do. And the AFA went for over a year without a chair. Finally we have Mark Phipps, and we’re eager to see what happens under his governance …”
Alberta, believes Janes, has an odd psychology when it comes to advocacy and funding. “There’s a large ribbon of fear. We don’t want to rock the boat for fear of repercussion. I find that scary. It’s a fallacy, too. In this province a squeaky wheel gets oil.
“I don’t know where (the fear) comes from.”
I brought up a beholden’s attitude of not wanting to snap at the hand that feeds it, but he believes that doesn’t apply. Organizations work for their supper, after all. “If we look at arts and culture relative to social services - with a larger portion of the budget - what’s happened over the last ten years is it’s moved from, ‘We (the Tories) are going to help (social services) do work,’ to where they’ve removed the middleman and most social service agencies and non-profits do a bunch of fee-for-services. So they actually provide the day-to-day operations services the government doesn’t provide any more, at a much reduced cost. So it’s not about biting the hand that feeds you, it’s about a hand helping the government do what it should be doing.
“Now look at arts organizations. Arts organizers have to be really good managers. We can take a loaf of bread and some water and feed the multitudes. I fear we’re our own downfall because we’ve done so well for so long with so little that maybe it looks easy. Arts organizations provide facilities and services and common gathering places … a lot of what arts organizations and to some degree artists do is a fee-for-service in terms of this devolved government. ”
This “service” aspect is especially true when it comes to bragging time at elections, when cultural patriotism flies at its peak as politicians boast about the borders they hope to keep working within. But Janes notes: “Why shouldn’t we be calling governments to task? We elect them. We pay their salaries. If they’re not doing what we want shouldn’t we be able to have a mechanism for saying, hey, what’s with this?
“Everyone is affected by the arts whether they agree it should be funded or not. The statistics show 98% of people think the arts are important and 92% think they should be supported. Those a pretty strong numbers. Harper would love to have those numbers, I’m sure. For every dollar that’s invested by governments into artistic activities in Canada, it generates about $8.
“For governments that are concerned with financially conservative policies, the arts work. They are a success story. And the majority of Albertans do not see art as an add-on frivolity, they engage in it.”
All this, we knew before the budget dropped. So, uh, how did it turn out incidentally?
When we explored Sundance a couple weeks back, a welcome distraction from the positioning and peacocking was their multispace art installation, New Frontier. Although the entire festival affair is intended to be independent, nuances such as $6500 for a place to stay being considered on the cheap side tells its own story. One can certainly argue if you can’t pull together the kind of resources to attend you have no chance in hell of making an actual film (where it takes several minutes at the end to credit the presumably-paid cast and crew). But let’s leave the discussion of what “indie” means for now and talk about some of the art that made me excited about structural boundaries being pushed beyond what you might imagine in such a context.
All That is Solid Melts Into Air has more kinds of tension than I can easily count. Filmed by Mark Boulos of sometimes-London, sometimes-Amsterdam, opposite walls of a boxy room are both projected on, the volume cranked. On the left, a wide, continuous shot of Chicago stock market traders screaming and waving their arms about imaginary money. Each of them bears a number and most have some sort of future-now communication apparatus attached to his head, giving impression of a tireless mechanical organism affecting the lives of the rest of us without concern.
On the facing wall, meanwhile, flicker closeup interviews of Nigerian guerrillas talking about how America is colonizing their land for petroleum. And how they – or at least their children – might escape being killed in the incumbent struggle. There is frank and shocking talk of murder amid energized dancing in the dust with automatic weapons. The simultaneous noise of these men on both walls fighting for their goals is a simple enough idea, but beautifully unnerving. You can’t help walking away thinking, “Welp, we’re all screwed.” For while you can argue a certain segment of society is benefiting from capitalism, including the relative Western “us,” any deep analysis on the subject shows us that no one is actually in control. I wonder how many people felt more unconscious empathy for the focused Nigerians, despite the fact their started aim to kill the chubbier fellows opposite them?
Last month Fish told us his story of going to Sundance for the film he shot with writer, director and narrator Trevor Anderson. This week, Trevor broke the news that the film—watch it above on YouTube—is also going to SXSW.
SUNDANCE DISPATCH 1. Situated in a multi-level rental in the Utah mountains twice paid for by unrequited love, our team of semiprofessionals (as a body) is clicking into Sundance reality, vibrating with possibility and unexpected enthusiasm from without. Over 70,000 people have online-viewed The High Level Bridge (52,000 in just one day) which, as writer-director Trevor Anderson put it, is almost the population of Red Deer where he grew up, “and the comments are just as mean.”
Despite the fact someone out there thinks Anderson sounds like a gay, black, chain-smoking garden gnome – three out of four ain’t bad - someone else that our film was a “waste of a good camera” (defenders have pointed out the $100 Webbie survived being dropped), I’m still in a dreamlike bottle of absolute grateful. A few days ago, Coun. Don Iveson act-of-protocol hosted Anderson and I in front of City Council’s first chamber-huddle of the year, which was certainly the most adult moment of my entire life in Edmonton. Iveson identified me as columnist, artist and “troublemaker,” which made me undownably happy.
On Wednesday, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council banned “Money for Nothing” from Canadian airwaves because of its use of the word “faggot.” This made a lot of us recophiles immediately hissy, but is the discussion perhaps more nuanced than any classically libertarian gut instinct? Imagine, for a second, the song instead of “faggot” used the word “nigger” and you’ll probably understand what I mean. Now replace that with “Newfie,” a common enough Canadian slur which we seem to generally accept as good-natured fun, and the whole discussion gets really interesting. Down to arguments of intent, then, or more often, “Do we really have to talk about this?”
Yet each of these words in quotes, originally meant as both punchline and slur, operates on a sliding scale of acceptance. They’re linked to the marrow of context. Imagine a cop walking up to you patting his baton saying, “Hey, little faggot.” You’d probably take special note of his badge number. Or be terrified.
No doubt “nigga” (or any other word an artist might throw into a song) is fair play within the deservedly monolithic freedom-of-speech argument. But we still don’t broadcast Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” uncensored on the radio where little old ladies can hear him. Instead we’re served the rather lame redo - “Forget You.” Poor radio, like anything trying to compete with the internet – the free-for-all greatest amplifier of all time – it’s economically suffering for the standards it chooses and by rules with which it’s forced to comply. There’s an irony here. [See Footnote 1]
Back to “Money for Nothing” itself. Once upon a time, it was actually shocking to hear “the little faggot, he’s a millionaire.” I remember it well, and the quick realization of the song’s intent which, like “Born in the U.S.A.”, is apparently still missed by some. I can’t find any photos of Mark Knopfler with an earring, but it’s pretty safe to assume that as a successful rock musician who’d already reached No. 2 on the UK charts before “Money for Nothing” was released in 1985, the singer-songwriter was co-writing from an inside-out perspective, a griping listener’s-eye-view. Having already released several albums with Dire Straits as a touring band, the song is clearly a defense of his own gruelling work ethic via satire of those who might write it all off with “Maybe get a blister on your thumb.” Sting, incidentally, co-wrote the song, the Police having been around for years.
Sting’s ghostly singing of “We got to install microwave ovens” and “I want my MTV” are further brush strokes of this character singing the song. I see them as an illumination of audience hypocrisy. To me, “Money for Nothing” is a stance against fans who want it all – to be entertained by mass media, but also to be able to complain about the unfair rewards of entertainers. The song’s intended context, in other words, is to brush off the diss of its narrator.
Does that matter? Absolutely. When Knopler sings “faggot” he’s successfully illustrating the views and voice of someone else who, we understand, the actual songwriter is opposed to. It’s fiction within an understood context, done to deliver a point across. Tremendously catchy fiction, incidentally, which thanks to a breakthrough computer graphics video truly amazed North America in ‘85, one of the best first-wave MTV shorts.
Losing this old song in its original version from Canadian airwaves is honestly not that big a deal. With this tiny limit on shrinking radio, the CBSC is punishing a decreasingly relevant slice of our society. Without their help, we’ve taken a lot more control of how we listen to music, from iPods to satellite radio, and I’ll certainly DJ the song with more frequency. Still, the idea bureaucrats need to hold our hands over a 26-year-old Dire Straits hit makes me wonder how many well-paid man hours were wasted protecting this single Maritimes listener of CHOZ-FM who, in my opinion, failed to do anything but suck as a thinking person at our expense.
It’s pointless to whitewash where we stand or stood as a culture, reminding me of the recent scrubbing of Huckleberry Finn, as if racial slurs found in a book first published in 1884 are somehow causing tension on the streets today. In this case, as I believe is the case with “Money for Nothing,” we’re hiding something of our history and reality, all to serve people more willing to protect themselves from ideas than to confront or even engage them.
And for that ostriching, as Cee Lo Green says, both fuck and forget you.
[Footnote 1] Regarding radio’s decline: notice all the butt, balls and beaver jokes on drive-time radio billboards. But if they can throw that up in our faces every day, we certainly have the equal right to point out how embarrassing a part of Edmonton it is. Still, someone obviously buys it, even if it offends my sense of what the city might be. That’s the great exchange, and I favour its discussion and illumination over simple, offended repression.
This post is by Latitude 53’s newest Writer In Residence, Fish Griwkowsky. He writes critically about Latitude 53 programming, the community and more on a regular basis over a six month term from November to April. Read more about the Writer In Residence program.
Hanna Rosin recently delivered a fascinating Ted talk called “Men Are the New Ball and Chain.” It’s exciting on its own, but got me tangentially thinking about artist “gender equity,” and if the kind of art I enjoy runs along sexually partisan lines. In other words, do I relate to art by a larger percentage of men than women, or does that even come into it at all? I intend to discuss this as honestly as possible, which I’m not sure is going to go all that well for me, frankly.
But first let’s visit Rosin’s ideas. Via various statistics and some less-scientific analysis of our global cultural hubs, the thesis is basically “party’s over, boys, better help with the cleanup.” Rosin talks about how the makeup of the workforce and education have both changed – young boys are fast falling behind girls in standardized tests these days, for example. Meanwhile, a noticeable number of American college and university graduates – 57% - are now women. In the last 150 years or so, this is an increase of, you guessed it, 57% of total diploma holders. But anyway, a rising majority.
Well, it’s finally begun: the psychological bullying phase of this bullshit Game of Threats that will inevitably push our city into sacrificing HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to “revitalize” a downtown core any of us who actually lives, works and parties in knows is already the best part of the city. An area which includes, of course, Latitude 53, which has survived for decades without the help of wildly imagined crossover traffic during supposedly meaningful and televised statistics-shuffling. By posturing and “talking strategy” with Quebec’s more successful players in the socialized-sports-facility con game including QC’s mayor, members of the Oilers hierarchy talking to the press were doing a specific and not just predictable, but entirely predicted dance, turning the spotlight onto themselves in the midst of a city elite desperate to do anything it can to regain a slice of empty jock glory as part of the NHL fraternity. As important as their royal decree the Oilers will simply NOT play in a refurbished arena as of 2014, what the Oilers and Katz Group want all of us to know is, simply, this: Quebec is willing to shell out $400 million for its arena. So what’s Edmonton’s problem?
Well, besides the fact we have a fully functioning arena (unless you are actually stupid enough to buy arguments like the latest: that recently drummed-up cheerleaders don’t have enough wiggle room to hooker it up properly), it’s an interesting question. Edmonton’s problem, it seems, is that we are still in the majority unwilling to hand complete power of a sports facility its citizens would largely pay for in overt and generally un-advertised ways. This brazen stance despite a trumpeted push poll released recently by the City which didn’t have the fucking balls to ask the central, oozing elephant-in-the-entryway question that everyone who’s paid any attention to this issue would really, really, really like to be asked. Namely, “Should Katz Group ITSELF fund the new arena?”
I would like to direct your attention back to the gallery. Specifically, Latitude 53’s methodology upon encountering financial obstacles, like an at-the-very-least rude 15% operations-financing reduction in the middle of its budget year by the provincial government. This artist run centre was suddenly short to fulfil its plans and promises, but the strange and very real difference here is how, when facing an economic issue of weight, the importantly not-for-profit art house prepares for the worst, then simply rolls up its sleeves and asks people in its community to voluntarily come to a fundraiser like Schmoozy, pay the entry fee and maybe bid on some tax-deductible art. A straightforward, principled exchange.
The difference between this and how the Oilers are playing the aggressive panhandling game when asking for – at absolute minimum – 27,000 times as much money as Latitude to do nothing more than consolidate the profits of the 721st richest of nearly 7 billion human beings on planet Earth is disturbing. With a proposed scheme of raising the property taxes within a completely arbitrarily-drawn circle around the new rink to fund this domineering new direct competitor, Katz Group amazingly wants full control and especially all profits, period. Everything from new Skyboxes (themselves an endlessly leaking cistern of corporate tax dodges and writeoffs for the rich), concert revenues and surrounding parking, especially that, actually, as it’s something called Non-Hockey Revenue Katz doesn’t have to share with the NHL. It’s the type of information found in ledgers the city has understandably requested access to, yet as possible funders been denied. I could go on about any of these details and a hundred more all day, but suffice it to say the deal stinks. Especially the part where our own mayor says, “I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it another hundred times, we’re not going to raise taxes to pay for this,” then pushes the CRL – community revitalization levy. Which, as my cohort Andy Grabia puts so beautifully, “The City of Edmonton’s proposed Community Revitalization Levy is money that is coming out of the public purse. It is a tax. It is also a tax that will lead to property tax increases for the citizens of Edmonton. To deny this is to deny economic theory so thoroughly established that one might as well be denying that the world is round.”
This beard on my face belongs to the Edmonton Oilers. I began growing it in 2006, so caught up in the excitement of competitive hockey with a pleasant mix of nostalgia and simple, drunken adrenalin you maybe know. Shortly after we didn’t win the Stanley Cup I was briefly detained for playing ring toss on the three horns of those bulls that used to proliferate our streets. I asked one of the cops if he was happy the Oilers lost – no need to handcuff abusive revellers was my thinking – and he just said, slowly and sadly, “No.” They let us go with our 40 of Jack, telling us to be careful out there. Emotions were weird everywhere that night, and the following year when we didn’t make the playoffs I was struck by how much we were getting done instead of drinking our faces off in a bar, dutiful, enjoyable shift work which was nonetheless ruining our livers and productivity by choice. There is something about the Oilers I will always love, and not just that Wayne Gretzky knew my dad by his first name. Like so many now, I believe the team has been all but consumed by its own hype, endlessly advertising a product WE ALL KNOW to be inferior in terms of both its own local history and even within this endlessly insatiable league of overpaid players whose owners conspire with peak enthusiasm only to reap. The financial desperation for advertising dollars of a local media which barely, even then, ran Peter Pocklington out of town is unfortunate and obvious. What ever happened to fighting for the blue collar man? No takers?
The thing Latitude 53 strived for, even before the provincial grant cuts, was financial independence. The less dependent on public funding the arts are, less face it, the better. Unhappily for us, billionaires running for-profit logo cults around here not only don’t feel the same way, they’re well schooled in exactly how to manipulate armies of the micro-patriotic and cajole politicians to give them everything they want, or else. They don’t say or else what specifically at first, which is where we are now. But it’s coming. Remember the refusal to play at Rexall after 2014. I’m not writing this to be smug or indie or even to ruin on anyone’s fandom of the game. But we are in for it, and soon.
And it’s a manipulative waste so selfish, this consolidation of public resources into one already privately-brimming barrel, that I honestly consider it pretty straight-ass evil.
HANNA ROSIN AT TED
