Emerging Local Creativity: Literature, Music and Art Create Community

Matt Hanson, Calgary Working Group (photo: Drew Anderson)

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down."

“All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together.”

Kerouac

How did you get involved in trying to start a local media co-op?

I was corresponding with Montreal Media Co-op founder Dru Oja Jay and he expressed a kind of interest in the idea of a local in Calgary. I had been a member of the media co-op for about two years, the national. As I was more active, I was just more interested in what that means to be local. How they operate in Montreal, Halifax, Vancouver and Toronto — how they operate and what that might mean for Calgary. I started to put the word out there and it was very well received by Dru. He basically encouraged me to get together with others and talk about the idea and consider what is independent media in Calgary. Basically what I found is that many people are interested in their own projects, in terms of starting their own papers, but the difference here was that I was interested in connecting that kind of activity with a national co-operative site.

So, what’s set up right now?

Basically right now there is a Calgary Working Group as part of the Media Co-op and that has about 130 members, since 2009. All different kinds of stories have come from that. But in the past two years since I was writing with the Media Co-op, I found not many people contributing to the Calgary Working Group. I was just wondering about where is that understanding in Calgary in terms of this great engine of independent media and this source for people to get involved in media activity. So I went to different people who were involved in co-ops, like co-operative housing, and I talked about the idea and started to get it out there and I posted flyers and things about meeting with people. Initially I got three people that were very actively engaged in promoting and organizing the idea. Those were Melissa Manzone, she’s from Montreal but she lives in Calgary and she has a masters in journalism. Then a journalism student at MRU who has a certificate from SAIT in journalism and he’s still a student, and then another young woman named Chelsea Pratchett, who has done a lot of multimedia work — she has alternativemediayyc.com. Basically the next step was I applied for a small grant through the Arusha Centre, a Take Action Grant, that I received. I just started, DIY, working with Melissa who was editing articles with me, and also doing video interviews with people, and then through Alternative Media YYC I was organizing podcasts as weekly contributions. This small amount of funding is just an encouragement to the people here that might consider the idea of a local media co-op in Calgary.

How so? Would you use that money to pay them?

Yeah. The money has been used to pay contributors. Encouraging people with honorariums. To pay editors. To pay people organizing even. If they’re putting dedication into that, we consider that and we want to value their efforts. It’s a very free grant that I received.

How are decisions made? I come from more traditional media where decisions are made by editors. Who makes decisions in a co-op?

I’m really learning myself because I’m new to the co-operative sphere. But I’ve been really trying to figure out in terms of how the application of the co-operative organization works in relation to this. How we want to organize it is in a way that everybody has a share of the company, the collective. For me, this is really a learning process, in terms of how a co-operative organization works. Part of the funding I received, I’m putting into going to a conference to learn about worker co-operatives in Edmonton. Part of the forward process of this idea is really generating that structure. Right now, we’re at a very initial stage.

Why do it? A response to the media that exists? Do you think the media isn’t doing its job?

I think, to me, there’s that. I don’t want to be too reactive. I think it’s more about having a sense of imagination and taking things into your own hands, and really learning by doing in a way where the kind of media that I want to see is one that doesn’t just tell you about something, but incites you to action. The page is not the end of the matter.

So more of an activist slant.

Yeah, more of a fact that this is part of being more involved. Journalism should be about being involved.


This piece, also published for The Media Co-op, is an excerpt from this week's Your Face Here interview featured in Fast Forward Weekly on October 31

________________

War zone. Huddled under protection of stone, the dusty clamour of steaming trucks file past, carrying explosives, ammunition; the all-potent death of armed men. The sky burns under a 40 degree desert sun, magnifying the light of illusion with the bitter disbelief of guts strewn in the angry heat. The moonlit fox scatters beyond the floodlit path, and I sit, knowing I'm under the eye of a flagrant bomb pattern, patiently scanning the sky for my fate. 

Cpl. Alicia R. Giron

Down the gravelly road, an older man, built strong and lean, walking assuredly through hell's gate. In this valley, the shadow of death casts invisibly, as the omnipotent fear, that cutting vibration that pierces as it electrifies. Every last medieval hell of our wildest imagining is child's play in comparison. The daytime moon fills my mind, obscuring the passion of escape into the dizzying architecture of mythology, roasting in this Middle Eastern world fire.

Collateral Damage by James Miller

The black fly of fire-bomb death squeals past overhead, and I run, sliding my fingers along the desert rock, the stone crumbles into rough sand. My fingers, mysteriously blackened, feel into the stone. A black liquid seethes. Viscous, thick, it's oil. I realize I can't leave. The desert spring overpowers my body in a storm of evil lust. I treasure the root of all fleshly worship in this age of fire as the swarm of madness overcomes, and in a blinding instant, the stone implodes, my hand flits to dust, the Earth gives way to pools of ash, and I sink in the quicksand of eternal war, condemned to modern night. 

On the Impacts of the Iraq War, Read COMMON DREAMS

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For an ecstatic and mesmerizing experience, listen to this album while watching SAMSARA. There are new waves of sound yet to break on the open mind who might stand to listen on these ancient shores.

Delighting Destiny: Selections of our best during a live performance with audience. All proceeds from this album sales will go towards producing future performances and future recordings. Thank you for your continued support.

Atheist Tomb of a Truth-Seeking American: A Plea for Disarmament

Tomb of D.M. Bennett in Brooklyn by Cory Doctorow

"I have learned to modify my prejudices. I am ready to believe Hamlet was right when he assured his friend Horatio that there was in Heaven and Earth many things not dreamed of in his philosophy." D.M. Bennett, as orated in The Truth Seeker 

It is at times like these that we Americans look to our history. Who are we? Where do we come from? How did we get here? What could have led to this? What is happening? 

Those among us strong enough to ask such questions are motivated to seek truth. As the president weeps for the children of the nation, so we must all begin to weep with minds full of emotion, burning with an intelligent self-awareness towards post-political change. We don't need rhetoric. We need new laws on guns. We need free thought to embellish the minds of such substance as founded free press in America. Disarmament is the new abolition, and as long as guns are indiscriminately accessible to immature minds and wounded hearts, we are all slaves to this mortal era.  

__________

The last thing I remembered was the initial feeling of impalement. Careening off a flight of concrete steps, I flew from my bike onto a metal pole. My back cracked in shards. When I came to, the city was dark. A Rastafarian man burned down a hand-rolled cigarette in the shadows. I knew from his countenance, to walk outside would be a bad move. I did anyways.

The Customs Cabin by Ferdinand du Puigaudeau

The street lamps glowed over empty streets. The absence was chilling, yet I could feel a human presence both alarming and alluring. As I made my way down to the riverbanks, the icy shoreline stared at me with two riveting eyes. The male stance was formidable and intimidating. Fear struck. The air breathed of danger. I needed to know why.

Night on the Southern Shore by Nikolay Dubovsky

As I hurried further on down the shoreline, a group of men whispered in the dark. I quickly smelled the entrenched anger, the mortal struggle at hand. I fled. On my way back, I met a friend from before the accident. He recounted his story, how he had broken his back in an accident that mirrored my own. I didn't question the curious coincidence as he went on to explain the unthinkable, we were now living in a world so hostile to mankind that people were literally killing each other for the last crusts of bread, the last drops of water, the last feet to walk, the last fresh air to breathe, the last day to live.

__________

"towed current
            pulled slow,
            drifted away

hand,
            fingers following new lines
...

virgin thorn brush
            frame lilting strong above the careless face
of artistic madness
in the jokester’s foam and rust
...

the pulse breaking off the tops of widow’s peak waves,
            blushing high over the coastal horizon,

a piercing thought
that boiled in the mind’s own brain,
an intuitive question
            with an answer as certain as death in the next step"

excerpts from "empty Blown mind"

Remembrance in the Real Imagination of James Nachtwey

"This man was in an NGO feeding center, being helped as much as he could be helped. He literally had nothing. He was a virtual skeleton, yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move. He had not given up, and if he didn't give up, how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope?" James Nachtwey, speaking about famine as genocide in Sudan

I was young when I first watched "War Photographer" a documentary on James Nachtwey. As a teenager with a thirst for truth in filmmaking, I found photography especially endearing, and especially those photographers who followed the photography dictum, "the best shot is often the closest" with unnerving deliberation in foreign countries torn by war. Soon after,  I met Paula Bronstein, a family friend, who urged me to enrol in a school for journalism. I didn't. Though today, I often write for independent media on Media Co-op. Today in Canada, the country where I currently live, the nation remembers its fallen countrymen and women who served in war. A veteran and local author, Dr. Arthur Clark, reminds us that we do not only remember our own, but all who have fought and died in war; men, women, children, and the elderly included in every corner of the globe. This year, I've begun writing a creative non-fiction tract based on my grandfather's epic 20th century life, and his service in WWII. I've found a serious self-investigation into our relationship to war, whether through an ancestor, a friend, or in one's own life, is one of the strongest sources of contemplation in our modern lives. May we remember with a full heart and a stout mind!

________

in a city park, abandoned by wartime foment, I see my grandfather, alone after battle, on the plains of southern France, with friends, he is glad, and as he sits, I notice the loosened clothing spells an ease of the loins for the local tail 

For What? by Frederick Varley

he grooms the horizon with searching eyes, and a local Frenchman arrives with a bounty of breads and cheeses for the sweetened mouths and delighted palette’s of my forefather’s company, happy in the autumn sun of deadening leaves, an old history decomposing at their warming feet

________

“The nation’s economical bosom bleeds with childless milk for the ruffian few who glare amuck into the wild spring of the beatific northeastern kingdom”
...
To bruise the English pace in an overtaking sea
With the magic and force of our forested craftsmen
Dreaming up skyline distances

Across the phantom pages of a medieval Columbian map

...

Our aristocratic exoticism
Bearing down on mountainous floods
To drown the ghastly past and its African boats
Full with the god-forsaken ash of a new America
Burning up with the Phoenix of old Mexico

...

Our human plague and its genocidal awareness
In the 21st century of medicated madness
When poverty turned to poetry in the music of her glory

excerpt from "Phantom Page of a Medieval Columbian Map"

The Future of Sharks = The Future of Our Oceans = The Future of Us

Watson and the Shark by J.S. Copley 

The stigma of sharks has been with me since I can remember, having my first memories only a driveway away from the Atlantic coast. I lived under the shadow of Martha's Vineyard and Spielberg's Jaws. The above painting shows the old, now antiquated, adage that sharks are killers and need to be killed. As shown in my previous post (Reflection on "Save the Humans" lecture by Rob Stewart), sharks are not killers, and indeed their threatened survival on Earth due to illegal shark fin harvesting is as crucial an issue as climate change in the continued survival of the human species.

Read my story of activism for a shark fin free world on Media Co-op

Also see related groups Shark Fin Free Calgary & WildAid

________

Innumerable anemones, dim at the ocean floor, float and dance in the scintillating deep, a whirlwind of ocean currents spinning tendrils in the wondrous underworld of subconscious, inner space. The beauty of the sea is a palpable silence, a prenatal yearning within the sky’s reflective murder of inanimate light, into the shattered eye of a submerged mountain of a seemingly infinite myriad of species, blooming in the breathable space of instinctual lowering.

Samudramantham (Churning of the Ocean of Milk) by Anonymous 

The eye craves the strength of mammalian fear in the world beyond worlds. Octopi, shark and jellyfish sweep the wobbling invertebrate mind with a bodiless air of unlit terror. A shark darts and flees past in a show of wise defense, and the octopi bleed ink in a haze of warring tests far enough to provoke the mirage-lust end of human sight, and jellyfish, unnervingly absent as the mind’s eye sleeps in a soporific atrophy of inhuman might.

Still Life with Flowers, Shells, a Shark's Head, and Petrifications by Antoine Berjon

Memory entangles my feet with the concrete ingenuity of familial presence. At the opposite stance from my underwater lung, I breathe the damp air of a midsummer day’s stretch aside my grandfather’s elder chair. His sitting comforts me into a warm bottom, a deathless life of generative following, to stare back into the eyes of immortal sight, the human heights of belonging, and I am content, a mind at rest, awake, conscious, and filled with reverberating speech. 

_________

A dripping hunger instills those following to go beyond sleep and be
       In conscious wonderment, in the living dance
Dream today in a new and timeless breath,
       To stave off the mindless, parasitic asp
Climbing inside mind through dreamless eye-shutters
       Blocked by old-fashioned stone, brick and wooden carved hands

Holding my dancer, lover and beauty
      To the song of my dreams
Woman of my life
      Who holds no passion in sleep, and dreams awake
...
On the pedestal of a forlorn warning
      That no shore is safe in this dreamless state without dance,
Yet to sing and become a new dance and dream anew
      Before naked freedom announces song’s ending

excerpt "Impassioned Road to Being"

Do Not Confuse Transparency With Justice, Interview With Julian Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange lays the groundwork for sanity and clarity, two moral imperatives which become severely deluded in our modern economic infrastructure of global monetary exchange and corrupted international hierarchies with regard to law and policy. The transparency is won through the exposure of new facts, and the justice is had in their due measure via civil application on the ground. This is a bottom-up frequency of people intelligence. This is our one and only power in an age where the word, and its unforgivable silence, is one of the most powerfully dominating forces, painting such instances of carnage as the war in Iraq with the "nice" of workaday mindlessness, aloof and yet proverbial. 

Watch, and wonder why human experience has become the greatest challenge to corrupted power. 

"Politically significant leaks will be 'collaboratively analyzed by hundreds of [Wikileaks] editors in a way mainstream media-leaked documents could never dream of...'" Hanna De Jong, Wikileaks spokesperson, "Media/Web site aims to post government secrets"

________

I know this man. The narrowing, shifty corners of his immaculate apartment reek with the anticipated horrors of bachelordom. A homosexual no less, I slither through the tiny, dimly lit space, eyeing the specialty fabrics and delicate cabinetry with suspicion. This man is no frugal spender. He begins to prepare a fish salad. The salmon are now extinct. “Right and fished out all the way down to Caribbean,” he says, as I open a can of tuna.

Adaptation (2004) by César Leal Jiménez

The lights dim to near darkness as I put the last finishing touches on the salad. Lying across from one another on the carpet floor, he asks me how I deal with my oncoming death. I get nervous, as I notice him procuring a crack pipe from the folds of his clothing. I escape into the corridor halls of the apartment complex. Finding a washroom, I clamber downstairs into a basement. A mass of elderly people sits and washes in undivided toilet and shower stalls. Flabbergasted, I am at all odds. “Should I return upstairs?” Blankly, I go anywhere except back.     

________

full with brutish lies
that carefully whispers a song of superiority, stigmatized,
and the random tear, breaking at the seam of the color line
brackets, the argumentative congress
in sparked ruthless struggle

...

in our head and eye
who self-formed, began as a creative laboring
in the strong brush with a peculiar kind of will
that worshipped a diverse issuing of the ten-thousand tongued iris
performing for the blessed worldly guest

...

growing up in the solitary profundity of man, alone with nature,
wherein lies our humane passage
through social obstacles
in desire and the restrictive curse

- excerpts from "None Superior Than No One"

Beloved Cuba: Reflection on "Amada" by Humberto Solas

I chose to watch this film firstly to practice Spanish apprehension, and in turn, out of an enduring captivation with all things Cuban. In 2006, I protested in NYC against the unjust incarceration of the Cuban 5. After an invitation to travel to Cuba illegally for the purpose of providing much needed resources to an isolated people, I developed a lifelong interest in Cuban affairs. Now living in Canada, I may one day be able to legally visit the country. 

That aside, the content of the film, "Amada" by Humberto Solas, draws on the old story of the internal breakdown of classist oppression in the wake of international pressure and domestic corruption. Here the domestic is defined both as the country of origin and the aristocratic residence. The aristocracy implodes by the will of incestuous love, from within the adulterous presidential marriage, for the hand of the revolutionary dreamer. A passionate, creative literacy is at stake as the emotionally unstable protagonist must struggle to emerge from the trappings of her own heart and that of the deviance of her husband's oppressive rule. By the end of the film, she walks through the yellow-fever afflicted impoverished hovels of the common people, as the presidential villa is stormed by hunger strikers from the dispossessed farmers of the countryside. Read a comprehensive film review. 

Reflecting on the film, I've become privy to the fact that hunger strike is not an obsolete word in the Cuban political vocabulary, even today. Under the post-Fidel government, there is reason enough for young, passionate dreamers of new literacy to afflict themselves with terminal struggle. Read Yoani Sanchez's blog on Wilman Villar Mendoza. 

________

Downtown, I walk by the library. Usually a place of hoodlums, corner crows spying deep into the drug-addled core of the urbane West, a nightmare seethes through eyes lit with nostalgia and lost reckoning. I’ve come from old wood houses, family life on the water, foundations on grass and neighborly wildlife, the windy pines. Now, I aspire to music.

I see a group of rough young travelers, Quebecers, stealing across the prairie to a destination unknown to them, as unknown to all, a mystifying crowd, escalating with their sounding drums, a cacophony of cans and djembes, they are wildly talented. Two play a doumbek as well as any world-class percussionist. I join in, highly amused, jamming along with intentional spirit, a community of street languor and silly dope-swung dreams. Though my assumptions spit back at me, a gunpoint stares at my face.

“Do you speak French,” he says, threatening to murder me with nonjudgmental, hawkish eyes. “Merci” I respond. Handing a pocketful of change over and into their busking bowl, I stealthily walk away. Outside the city, back at the calm-winded house, cool riverine breezes blanket my siblings in peaceful naps. Before they wake, I exit, towards a nearby field.

An older woman, a family friend watches from the stoop of the front door. Our eyes meet from afar, speaking numbers unheard from our mouths, I continue on, shakily into the lone moonlit night. Soon, as I pass through a wormhole of overgrown, forested road, I am led into a city with the immediate turn of a spotlight; a bright glare prefigures the polluted sky with the damaged gold of human weakness. It is a native city of the hoodlums who I had an altercation with earlier in the day.

Massive television screens display commerce and public failure, an aspiration to woe, and the sickly art of rectitude. A votive triviality burns every wandering eye. A street-side host clamors with frayed tongues over the spillage of an alleyway tomb, unreasonable crowds fish-eye over ledges and stairways, pleading with the entertainment rite to move in its festering abuse to inhumane ends. Unable to get a word in, demeaned with the unsightly pandering, I turn back.

Soon, I realize the family friend who saw me as I was leaving had followed, together we return back to our house. Through the forested womb on the outskirts of the city, the young bandits meet us, hiding in the shade as we approach. With the instantaneous glint of a knife, we are attacked and at once evade with spritely ingenuity. Followed, the reign over a pillaging burst of hollow mongering, as they ransack churches and elderly communities in their attempts to follow us to our rural homeland. At home, alive, I realize she’s not with me. I tell the rest of the family what’s occurred, and as soon as I do, she walks through the doorway, she had overcome, her eyes speak with the wealth of her matured cry, pouring out into the silent comfort of our haven.

_________

Criminal

"To dream of witnessing a crime indicates that others are wasting or taking over your time, energy, and ideas. To see a criminal fleeing from justice, denotes that you will come into the possession of secrets of others, and will therefore be in danger, for they will fear that you will betray them, and consequently will seek your removal." (iDream)

_________

slumbering amid graves
launched astral fleeting,
stone wrought misdirection to be filled

by the plagued European missed fortune,
a drought opening to ice age fruition
in the holy garden

beneath the tree of Good and Evil and its seeds
browned with a madness,
strong, birthed into a woodland street

low, dim face,
burnt with crazed flesh hunger
to consume a poet's lie,
lips all red

excerpt from "ghost!"