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

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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.

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.     

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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"

Tarkovsky and the Living Dream of Cinema

"Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." - from Wikipedia

"Thinks he’s a writer, too, by the way. He just can’t understand that a book’s a deed, not a paycheck. A poet must stir the soul, not nurture idolaters.

I keep having my dream. When I dream of the log walls and dark pantry, I sense that it’s only a dream. Then my joy is clouded, for I know I’ll wake up. Sometimes something happens, I stop dreaming of the house and the pines by the house of my childhood. Then I grieve and wait for the dream, that will make me a child again, and I’ll be happy again knowing that all still lies ahead and nothing is impossible…"

- from Tarkovsky's film, "Mirror"

Read "Dream Come True" an essay on Tarkovsky's film "Ivan's Childhood"

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I plunge headlong into the rocky ledge, a violent overfull valley, spilling into a mountainous void. I roll with the water amid the fixed stones, at the lip of a great waterfall. The pristine water is translucent. I am enwrapped in its confident downward pressure, to another world below.

At an Iranian friend’s house, I gaze at his wall of historical Persian metal wares, ancient pitchers and serving plates. They are bedecked with vibrant floral patterns, subdued with aging pigments amid a host of cultural décor. I notice one plate, standing against the wall behind most with an unusual patterning and coloration. “That one is Iraqi,” my friend confirms. A mysterious air breathes into our space as I gaze wearily into the Iraqi plate. 

The house opens into a full party, with laser neon club lights and steam flashing in a cacophony of mixed emotion and volatile potency from a youth desiring some greater fame than their abundant cultural upbringing. Tired of their unmatched indecision, wallowing in a spiritual squalor of heady daze, I shrink back outside into the unseen fold.

As I exit, I am at the entrance of the Amazon River basin as it snakes through the city of Iquitos. Looking forward through the dense canopy horizon, spindly serpent branches reach with emerald fire into the painstaking honesty of life and death. The humidity, secreted as from the pores of a mythic dragon, interchanges with the burly clouds shading the triumphant waterways. A diamond white streak of light, a perpetual lightning strike, an unwavering sunbeam, steals a path in the river, filling its surface with a radiant sheen from bank to bank. A path is lit toward the horizon beyond, where the river snakes into the pure touch of jungle, a celestial calling, a way out.

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Valley
"If the valley is barren, the reverse is predicted. If marshy, illness or vexations may follow. Vistas of green valleys with pleasant streams running through them show that you are embarking on a wonderful change that will bring you only happiness and much peace." (iDream)

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to catapult mind's range beyond all unknowing

further than the outermost reaches where our love, once was gone,
and now with her,
returned

- excerpt from "She with graying hair"