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

_____________

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.

Post-Hypnotic Return

“Ever heard of post-hypnotic suggestion? You suggest something during hypnosis, which is planted in your subconscious and you act it out when you are awake. Still haven’t figured it out?”

- Antagonist in OldBoy, a wealthy revenge artist and suicidal incestuous jailer

________

It’s the day of the old small town American road race, 4th of July. Moving out from the shoreline vista, the stubbly green grass shades my periphery in a comforting hold, a grounded reason to be. As I continue on, I’m almost ahead, winning. Then, I lose my direction. I go my own way.

Now, I race against myself. Do I try winning, or simply enjoy the home forest surroundings, the dense thicket, a tragic green wintering my eyes with the loss of childhood, riddled with the muscular pain of defeat, swallowed in the haste of my own speed? 

I meet others on the way running towards me, however, I deliberately go my own way now. The forest welcomes, I run with abandon, at my own pace, towards my own need. The road meanders welcomingly. 

I know the end is near, though I entertain the seaside heat, met with proud ocean and a longing for unity with the open sound, struggling to hear my lofty footsteps, touched upon the gravelly now. The escalating tide shows me a path back to face the finish line.

________

Road

"Traveling over a rough, unknown road in a dream, signifies new undertakings, which will bring little else than grief and loss of time. If the road is bordered with trees and flowers, there will be some pleasant and unexpected fortune for you...To lose the road, foretells that you will make a mistake in deciding some question of trade, and suffer loss in consequence. To see a road in your dreams indicates your sense of direction and the pursuit of goals." (iDream)

________

Sunday moans,
voicing the rhythmic confusion
in darkened & cultured blocks

...

with smoky tears wrung dry
the lover's bedroom clothes

- excerpt from "sick in a sick society: western addiction" 

Improviser & Dreamer on Holistic Music

Keith Jarrett

"There's never been a time when improvisation was given the respect it deserved. By virtue of the holistic quality of it, it takes everything to do it, it takes real-time, no editing possible, it takes your nervous system to be on alert for every possible thing in a way that can not be said for any other kind of music."

Interviewer

"How important are other things in influencing the way you think?"

Keith Jarrett

"More important than music!"

Interviewer

"Like writing, philosophy?

Keith Jarrett

"More important than music...One of the biggest fallacies I think, in art circles and in music circles maybe when people talk about it is that music comes from music...music is the result of a process the musician's going through, especially if he's creating it on the spot."

- from "Keith Jarrett - The Art of Improvisation"

_______

With family in Israel, a live drum and bass duo explode the stage in a spark plug of sonic smithereens. The audience is drowned out in a hemp haze of blistering monitors which fuss and blow like a spiked gourd of grog. I am reminded of music by OM. This isn’t the right crowd. The auditorium audience begins to split as a punk metal doom bit hits incendiary in the mathematical freeze of anti-traditional musical formulae. As people begin to clear out, I take up a clarinet I had recently played on in the upper tiers of my consciousness on Earth. The subconscious knows the notes. Explorative and experimental I dash the family reunion and mystifying context of concert for my own harmonious bout with sound, bleeding through the fire of an impassioned reed. I stimulate the Earth with sounds of disbelief freed.  

______

Guitar

"Upon hearing the weird music of a guitar, the dreamer should fortify herself against flattery and soft persuasion, for she is in danger of being tempted by a fascinating evil. If the dreamer be a man, he will be courted, and will be likely to lose his judgement under the wiles of seductive women. If you play on a guitar, your family affairs will be harmonious." (iDream)

______

Astral Chamber

meeting completely rapt
& immersed
with clear exacting light
(without bright glare)

miraculous breath of spirit
allowing greater sight
drowning one inward
there      apparent
she        ghosts ever near
to wrap and envelop me
in the Act

March 9, 2011

Chinatown Calgary. Bedside.

A Long Sleep in Fellini's Most Vivid Dream

"I can't come down.

I can't land.

It's your fault.

It's up to you."

"A long sleep."

- From the penultimate scene of Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits" when the main character receives a barrage of visions and the spirits haunt her as no other time in her life, consequences of the "long sleep"

In my experience, a longer, fuller sleep induces more vivid, more frequent and more discernible dream narratives. What the penultimate scene from "Juliet of the Spirits" and indeed the entire film points to, in my mind, is the idea that Juliet, the protagonist, has been submerged in subconscious urges and preoccupations for too long, that their inescapable manifestations begin to peek out into her waking consciousness as in the stupor of sleep. The gorge and slew of both inanimate and living tempests swarm about, as a march of assailants in the form of multiple kinds of attractions and diversions. Has she simply been subject to her own delusions for too long? Or has she been too unable to realize that her very surroundings are incontrovertibly diluted by the anxiety of an unremembered dream or a lingering past, whose burden weighs on her as a traumatic background in her now semi-formed consciousness.

[Dr. Ernst] Bernhard’s focus on Jungian depth psychology proved to be the single greatest influence on Fellini’s mature style and marked the turning point in his work from neorealism to filmmaking that was “primarily oneiric”.[31] As a consequence, Jung's seminal ideas on the anima and the animus, the role of archetypes and the collective unconscious directly influenced such films as 8½ (1963),Juliet of the Spirits (1965), Satyricon (1969), Casanova (1976), and City of Women (1980).[32]

31 - Kezich, Fellini: His Life and Work, 227

32 - Bondanella, Cinema of Federico Fellini, 151-54

- from Wikipedia 

_______

A frenetic blur of imagery sparks like lightning through an overcast sky in my subconscious as I travel through unknown whereabouts and experience fragments of lived time with indiscernible rhythms and consensual mysteries evacuating from my internal realizations as soon as they are actualized. Upon waking, there is an absolute fading of dream memory at once overcome through cleansing the doorways to my dreaming with pristine internal perception inspired by listening to John McLaughlin’s composition “Lotus Feet.”

I walk through the volatile lighting of an American department store. Above, through the radio speakers latched against the top of the high-rise shelving reaching to the visible reinforcements in the ceiling, a couple having passionate sex is emitted very audibly throughout the air of the building. As I pass by the cash register, I notice people are mostly trying to ignore this obvious audio incursion. Looking through an entrance to the back warehouse behind the cash register, I see a half-naked woman and her lover. I continue on, ever more rapidly in pace to the back of the department store, which then is suddenly converted into a movie house.

I am seated with my wife and a woman who very much resembles an acquaintance I made in Cairo. She was a nice young lady and very tall, who used to give me rides in her dilapidated Volkswagen bug through the atrociously busy streets of Cairo, driving with an ease and confidence unlike even the most seasoned taxi cab drivers. Here she was sitting next to me and my wife. I could tell we were watching an experimental video installation by the artist John Cage. All of the monitors are three different sizes, placed in different areas of the room, with exchanging audio frequencies, but mostly silent. Two of the monitors screen the same video, while the one behind us is a totally different screening. This experimental cinema is fascinating, however I am distracted by the two women beside me, one who is coaxing me to stay, trying to seduce me, the other is leading me away, trying to get me out of this confrontational presence. My wife soon leaves, and the Cairene lady sits in the theatre ever welcoming, however I soon exit.    

The street is cold, it is night and your breath exhales as thick as a cream-based soup out into the freezing air. The weather is dry, and so the breath evaporates and disperses as quickly as my wife’s gone and disappeared. I cross through the low-lying wintry brush of a coastal woodland environment. I can feel the salt of the sea on my skin and on the felled trunks and trees. At a clearing, I stop, inhale the glorious freshness of the seaside air and lean against a massive horizontal tree, lying upon the ground with its majestic, silvery gray icing.

I find my way into a house resembling a wood-floored home of my upbringing. I am at a computer, as I used to sit at one when I first began to use a computer. I feel an intense anxiety. My mother walks in the room with my tropical biology professor from Peru. This is an odd sight however I am completely pre-occupied with an overwhelming nervousness, as I feel that I have missed my final exams to complete high school. I become extremely angry and frustrated with disbelief at having to continue on into my pre-mature schooling. I wake relieved.   

________

she exits

diminished to bodiless spirit 

or soul wordslip 

(meaning)

at the door

he crumbles 

grandfather cookie 

a humility that knows only human end 

laugh

after the show 

before coffee

- excerpt from "Soul Wordslip"

Changing the Subtle Body of Dreams

“Visualization is like a language that you can use to talk to your subconscious. Your subconscious is the part of your brain that’s in charge of a lot of things, but one of the things it’s in charge of is your body’s unconscious processes. How much oxygen you need is not a conscious thought…how much your heart beats is unconscious…We’re being run by a brain that we can’t talk to, but what I’ve realized is visualization is like a language that you can use to talk to your unconscious…Visualization is the universal, or symbols, is the universal language for people that don’t speak your language, your body doesn’t speak your language…look at the picture…look through it, let your subconscious absorb it for just thirty seconds, and then close your eyes…and you do it when your mind is calm and powerful and relaxed, your subconscious understands…”

- Jon Gabriel, Author and Weight Loss Expert


“The #1 best way to digest stress hormones is sleep, and deep sleep will metabolize excess cortizol and epinephrine [stress hormones] better than anything else…sleep as long as you need to and whenever you can.”

- Dr. Christiane Northrup, Best-Selling Women’s Health Author

From “Hungry For Change” ONLY 7 DAYS LEFT TO WATCH FOR FREE


"Rest During the Day, So You Can Sleep Well" - Shirazian Proverb

_____________

I am at the dinner table of my grandmothers in Upstate New York, it is a large table where all the extended family eats for holiday celebrations. I am sitting next to my Father, who is curiously interrogative as to why I am not eating. I begin to tell him about vegetarianism. I say to him that since I can’t eat what’s on the table, which appears to be a meat-based, carnivore’s delight as usual, I am not only handicapped that I can’t eat, but as a vegetarian I must eat more frequently than meat-eaters. This puts me at an increasing disadvantage for when there are solidified times when eating becomes an event and there is not much to eat, so not only am I extra famished because I haven’t eaten, but because I need to eat at a different frequency. I go on to add conversational topics on the experience of being vegetarian. After which I am shown to a mouse cage. The cage is covered in glass walls, almost resembling a reptile or spider pet’s home. All at the table seem to be watching, as I reach into the mouse cage, though there is no mouse, I am reaching for something to close the cage, though as I do, the cage gets bigger and I become smaller. As soon as I am aware, I am in the cage, lying over the pine shavings.  

____________

in a relationship that hovers above

our felt dreaming 

days that drift perfectly

to reflect the pain that grows in scams

of conversed soliloquy heights,

and merging, thoughtless to a secondary grin

she mumbles across the thin lips

a fan of starved off love 

in the dry heat of shocked suburbia 

20 rooms

holding the fact of disassociated family praise

and social malaise

ruining the worst trial

into a gross and thick tide

sucking back the curling emotional stupidity

- excerpt from "Lotus Feed" 

Dreaming is a Choice between Fear and Love

"ARE YOU THE NEW PERSON DRAWN TOWARD ME?"
By Walt Whitman

Are you the new person drawn toward me?

To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;

Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?

Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction?

Do you think I am trusty and faithful?

Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?

Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?

Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion? 

_________

I am in a dimly lit college dormitory. Occupying a strange room with my new wife, I await an old acquaintance. I’m being enticed to be a part of an international marijuana trade. The benefits will by high and the peer pressure mounts however I turn my back on the offers and listen to the silent wishes of my new wife, whose dear presence reminds me that trafficking only leads to indirect violence, and all the filth that follows in the wake of easy money. We stand in the smoked out room, where dusty, creaking lights sway as above a reptile’s glass cage. The old life of chronic marijuana use wafts in my subconscious as a strong, deep inhalation, and I clear the smoke of self-conscious perception through a mind and body purified by love. 

_______

Love without Music

Is there love without music? 

And why does music spark love?

Music provides the innocent

backdrop for the play to unfold,

and become sweet

as the spring in a mid-winter sun

fading against the whisky iris of my lover’s cat

scratching the butchered skin of L.A.

deranged toxicity, madness of memory

from beyond the grips of fatigue

and into the failure to be,

true and awake, light with the speed of thought,

a slight wink on the riverside blue,

and what's new from another lazy, sick waiting?

she sits transfixed

and I ignore the heart

that beats quicker inside

with every finger drop

word flatness

I rinse myself blindly in an alcoholic fight

through perfect humanity,

knowing the loveless embrace of non-feeling,

and her lust

and her lust again,

a secretive tear at the loss of an eyelid

dimming in the thick listening

of night fallen

anew

with shared melancholic delight…

March 01. 217am 2010

Butler mansion. (N.W. Calgary). My love sleeps smiling, I sober up, listening to music of nostalgic kisses

Dream Interrogations and Literal Family Torture from Montego Bay

Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor by Georges Seurat

Why are waking notions of the word dream a synonym for something to attain…where as in the notion of a subconscious dreaming, the word dream connotes a separate reality. Where is the relationship between these two associations? Is the difference between waking and subconscious perspective or in the idea of dream itself?

I am sitting at my grandmother’s couch in coastal Massachusetts. She shows me a pop can with Chinese characters on it, and mentions something about Hawaii. Next, my mother offers my wife and I a trip to the Caribbean. Through a song of my uncle about Montego Bay, I imagine I am in Montego Bay. The hotel resort is as one would typically imagine an upscale hotel resort in the Caribbean to appear. In my hotel room, however, my toes and fingers and parts of my chest and head are being wired to a torture device that my stepfather is operating. I attempt an escape from the hotel resort, but it turns into a kind of Cretan Labyrinth, where the Taurus is my own family. 

Respect for Other Dreams

Codex Aureus of St. Emmeran by Adalpertus

Recognizing the dreams of others is to recognize their whole being, 

beyond sensual affirmation, 

subject-object reasoning, 

no, 

to prepare intuition 

and heart-to-heart communing 

with the natural creative vibrancy of mind 

to speak in a language before tongues, 

to re-create lifetimes of unknowable voyaging 

across depthless oceans, 

the interpersonal subconscious 

moved 

to collective reflection, 

to see the moment as new 

miracle of Earth's divine creation 

and transcend precise memorization of thought 

habit extinguished 

in piecing together a gorgeous message 

of interpretive ingenuity in 

the experience 

of earthly 

self-

awareness...

(((awareness)))

(((((infinite)))))

(((awareness)))

Death of a Beloved Feline

Women with the Cat by Renato Rodyner

1^st Dream

A cold, dark wintry night. I look out my screen window out to a ground level balcony. Consciously, I wanted to see a cat because, as memory would have it, it resembled the balcony of my first apartment. There were a couple of cats around that would visit. I open the window, there is snow all over. There is a shadow of a cat bouncing around. I let the cat in. It huddled next to the heater with its back facing me. I realized right away it was Max, my cat who had passed away a couple of weeks already. As I went down to pet him, he hopped away. I wake.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

2^nd Dream

An open field, prairie setting. Windy, tall grass. Tall fields of wheat, as it appeared, being blown by the wind. Very warm, windy prairie day. No rolling hills, all flat. In some bungalow, rickety, wood house, my mother is there. I speak a lot of Cantonese with her in the dream. I felt something brushing at my ankle and shin, something that I instantly thought was a cat. To my pleasant surprise, I look down and it was exactly the image of Max, his coloration, his distinctive markings on his forehead…his chest. I actually went down and interacted, he let me pet him, and he leaned into my leg very firmly. He went on his back, exposing his white stomach. He is emphatically friendly, in life he was temperamental, though in the dream he is the opposite. There is no voice, I can’t hear his voice. I think he opens his mouth, but I couldn’t hear a meow, I only felt his warmth and the way he feels in my arms; his size and weight. I have his face in my arms, and spoke to my mother in Cantonese that my cat had come back to life. Then I looked at Max, then I told him I would call his Daddy, and have him come out and visit. His Dad would be so pleased to have his best friend back. I kissed Max between the nose and forehead and woke. When I woke up, I looked outside and it was a really windy day. It turned out to be a very warm day too.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

3^rd Dream

Unknown, hazy location. Cloudy, foggy, blurry, with a glow. It was quite quick. I’ve always been thinking about Max in my waking days these past few weeks. I think my consciousness sinks into my dreams, and works with my subconscious in creating Max right away. So Max was in my dreams, but he appeared to be more silvery, more angelic with a glow around him. He is really animated, but in the most friendly way. In life, he was very animated but in a somewhat aggressive way. So, in the dream, his Dad was in the dream, squatted on the ground. Max crawled and stretched up to his right thigh, and I was kneeling behind the Dad on his left shoulder, admiring Max and wondering why he was so wise, glowing and silver, I reached out to Max and he put his right paw on me and his left paw on his Dad’s knee. I picked Max up and I whispered to him “how wise and angel-like you are.” I woke.

Monday, October 3, 2011

These dreams make me question a lot about conscious versus subconscious. What is dream and what is lucid, and what is passive observation within your sleep state. Having these dreams of Max solidifies my own personal insight into the subconscious as being a data-bank which stores our so-called real-life experiences and in the dreams, our subconscious supplies us with the tools to be lucid because it is a reference point. Sometimes, our dreams are random and chaotic and it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s some part of the brain working that I don’t know how to call. When I find in my “lucid” dreams, I find when I wake up that “it makes sense” that my subconscious is a memory bank and of course I would be lucid in those situations when those situations have to do with my cat. I like to entertain the mystery that Max is somehow still with me communicating to me through my lucid dreams of him. I can move on with that. I can never accept his death, but I can move on because I am dreaming of him.

Dream to Dream

The writing herein identifies dream as not the opposite of waking.

The word "dream" has many meanings, as does "art." Both are words fastened tightly to the hip of creation at its deepest root, and most inlaid core.

Dream can be identified as a phenomenon which overlaps between waking and sleep. What we normally refer to as "dream" or the subconscious activity of mind while asleep, is broadened in this sense to include the imagination, aspiration, desire, and all forms of creativity suspended in mind's eye whether awake or sleeping or somewhere in between, outside of both or nowhere near!

To explore the meaning and place of dreamt expression, we must explore "dream" seamlessly.

In purity, dreamless
Still, mystery pervades

Leaving sleep
And wakefulness

Leaving conscious
And subconscious,

Inverting our self
into the role of one Dream,
united with all the dreaming.

The seamless expression of dream occurs when the verbal/symbolic/metaphoric aspect of dreaming animated by subconscious and involuntary psychic, phenomenal mystery are interfused with the fully conscious and unmistakable urge of a dreamer to create, do, and be a fulfillment of one Dream.

Each entry which falls under dream description will be an anonymous purveyance of an experienced dream, and in keeping an anonymity, begin to draw connections to a single, unified dream of all humankind.

Intentions for this space (2)

I will relay the imagistic and emotional planes as they are present in my dreams along with any research into dream psychology or my daily interactions with art in my local environment as they collide and sometimes resonate with my own opinions about dreams and their inner nature.

As an artist/musician/writer full-time I can take time as I wish to become embedded in “flexing the subconscious” or practicing dream. Added to that fact, I live in Canada which gets DARK during winter, perfect time to start delving deep into dream. My bedroom has no windows.