I Dream to Honor Our Greek-Jewish Ancestors

(Visit My Sweet Canary YouTube Channel)

It was a dream of mine to share the unique heritage of Jewish-Greek culture in my city. I saw a great opportunity when the film "My Sweet Canary" began their North America tour. An event which links the history with our very own Greek Rembetika band, The Rembetika Hipsters. 

After extensive correspondence with Roy Sher, filmmaker of "My Sweet Canary" and the Greek Community and Hellenic Society of Calgary, I finally contacted the Rembetika Hipsters band, our local Rembetika music.

Here's what bandleader Allan Baekeland had to say:

"This is a fantastic idea...I'm not sure you're going to get a lot of help from the Greek community. There is a degree of ambivalence and even hostility towards rembetiko music amongst the local Greeks...unsavoury lyrics about drugs and criminal behavior, its Turkish origins, etc...I think we can get a good size audience for such an event in the fall."

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I am sitting around a table at the Kehila Kedosha Greek Synagogue in Lower East Side Manhattan. This is the last remnants of Greek Jewish culture in the area. I am with my extended Greek Jewish family, dining upon some traditional delights. There is some argument at play. My grandfather stands out among the crowd, somehow dissatisfied. In my reflection, I see the argument revolves around the ancestral name. Did our name change upon immigration? In order to find the answer I travel outside of the synagogue, outside of the city limits to a small hut, in which an American hermit, living out in nature in a small, ramshackle hut often recurs as a returning dream-character. When I arrive to his hut, he greets me graciously. I ask about how to attain filtered water without a filter, after which he points me in the direction of a stream. Unaware, I lead the way and find that his once-densely forested nature hermitage is now interspersed with half-destroyed concrete buildings and functioning industrial office rooms. I enter one of the offices to let people know we are here to understand how to filter water without a filter, they look at me ignorantly and distractedly brush me off. The hermit then leads me to a stream, where the water is rushing clear as a cloudless sky through a gorgeous array of stones. I feel I’ve found what I’ve been after, but there is more, now faded into the forgetfulness of day.  

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fire light  

widening, the open mountain 

crevasse of grandfather's memory

"God's country west" 

Mt. Rainier

Washington is there 

"is he in you?"

- excerpt from "on the importance of clothes..."

Pasolini Dreams of Oedipus Rex

Narrator

“That is the thing that inspired Pasolini the most in Sophocles, the contrast between total innocence and the quest for knowledge.

Pasolini

“It isn’t so much the cruelty that produces crimes but the fact that crimes are committed because people don’t understand history, life or reality…if Oedipus had not been so fatally innocent and unconscious, if he had been an intellectual and had first sought out the truth, he might have been able to alter reality. The only hope is a cultural one, to be an intellectual.”

Narrator

“Pasolini wanted the central part, which is the main part of the film, to resemble a dream. This explains the settings and the choice of costumes, and in a sense, the general rhythm of the film.” 

Pasolini as Poet

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Immediately, I fall into a field, transformed into a beast with qualities of a saber-toothed tiger, a large prehistoric dog and massive reptile. I fly, as with vestigial wings, across the golden, low-lying field on foot, beside me are other beasts of similar quality. Above us, a helicopter hovers menacingly. We race towards a cliff side and plummet off its edge.

In mid-air, we become human, though prehistoric humans. We wear rough animal hides. The others become topless women with faces resembling famous actresses and a friendly girl who used to live on the same property as me in the Western Massachusetts countryside. She had spiky dreadlocks and was an inveterate marijuana user, yet a tough spirit at heart. I watch as she glides effortlessly down the daring tree trunks, only just evading a branch with spikes sharp enough to impale straight through the bone. We finally reach the bottom, and this reality transforms to me running with my golden retriever through the paved neighborhoods in the suburban coastal woodlands of modern day Massachusetts.

I enter the woods. My dog has since left my side. I find my way onto the property of another identical suburban home as the rest. I find a choice between a kayak and a canoe to flee down a nearby stream. At first I choose the canoe, and then return for the kayak for greater stability and smaller, lighter body. I begin to flow down the stream, and suddenly it turns into a great river. I am on this river, which I call Shaganappi River. I feel safe, as this is a great and mighty river, and it will lead me along its course for days through the gorgeous riverine banks of forest, cliff-side and freshwater island scenery. This river slightly resembles the St. Lawrence, where I once kayaked solo for hours under a deafening thunder of sky and empty spiritual witnessing.

As soon as I sense that I am beyond the sights and feelers of my past, I enter a mucky, narrow zone that I am unable to penetrate through. I feel someone has followed me here, and I am at risk of being sent back to my former life in paved neighborhoods. Yet, I manage to sneak past this murky undergrowth violating the surface of the river with vegetable muck and mire and continue on unnoticed.

I continue on the river as before, for days and nights, sleeping under the floating watery stars, as my subjective eye pierces the veil of Earth’s atmosphere with a unity of being in tune with the flow of the great being below my nightly watercraft and bed. Ultimately, I find a small stand, perched against the unsteady shore. Inside is an on old friend from Calgary, who has since fled this city eagerly for the brilliance of Brazil. She is friendly an offers me a cold drink and an ice slush, which she is selling to passersby. I look ahead and see the river mysteriously turned into highway, a crooked bend of road packed with cars in rush hour. I tell her that I think I will turn back and go upstream against the flow of the great river, back where I came rather than face this void impasse of humanity ahead. She agrees, however she brings up that it would be easier for my friend, an ultra-marathon runner than I, however she wishes me good luck and offers me her plutonic friendship, which, for me, is the greatest gift from her.

I begin upstream, although it may seem difficulty, I see no challenge, and simply row along swiftly until the beginning road. My dream cycle fades, and next I am rising up in an elevator. I meet a local Greek restaurant owner who I’ve been trying to contact and he offers me the funding to organize an event for Greek Heritage and Culture, highlighting the music of Roza Eskenazi. I am delighted. There is a man there who’s working for my betterment, on my behalf, he resembles Poet Tree and I am glad to know his physical dream presence as he is kind and encouraging in life.

I descend in the elevator and next find myself waiting for my wife outside a cinema. The movie house lobby is packed with kids who appear to be nearing the end of their high school, they are a beat group. One walks up to me, noticing me from a music venue, and begins talking to me about how he rides waterfalls. He literally uses a board or foot-born craft of some kind and traverses the verticality of some of the world’s most formidable waterfalls. It is a death-defying sport, yet he is keen to show me.

I walk along a damp dirt pathway. This is Athabaska territory. We are at the largest waterfall in the region. I feel the presence of snakes and other venomous creatures about. They say there is a snake who dwells here that is especially aggressive. As we near the edge of the waterfall cliff where the man dips down into the abyss beyond, I see one of these snakes challenging one guy in our party. The guy is playful, trying to disarm the snake with his experience, however he is bitten, which in my mind is fatal, however no one is panicking. Afraid, I dart back, tracing my steps along the path, meeting many snakes along the way, I manage to avoid their wicked advances. Coming to an outcrop, I look out and see this new extreme sportsman riding the waterfall with prowess. It is a sight to behold.    

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Man towards Mule

ghost of the stalking whispers of human division blind my inside vision as I stir with personal betrayal over the family history in spirit, the moment's occurrence on this very land, quiet peacemaking, mobility tightly screws the factions of an embittered mind each hour, dying to the painful alcoholic grimace of glum infamy

our brewed, wide, drunken grave stammers, laughing to the holy fix and we are reduced to a liar, crying on man towards a mule

- Calgary Winter 09’