POSTcards from the Folk Festival #3 - Porta Potty Acumen

Dan Post

Porta Potty Acumen

Some­times at really friendly fes­ti­vals, peo­ple in front of you  in the Porta Potty lineup will stand there and wait for an empty stall for the longest  time even though you can see that while 8 of the 10 are red:occu­pied, one of them is green:vacant and one of them is ¼ green:vacant and ¾ red:occu­pied. But you don’t point either of them out to the per­son in front of you and you don’t go for the fully-green:vacant. Instead you leave the fully-green:vacant to them, for when­ever they clue in, and you go for the  green:vacant/red:occu­pied mix. 

You knock on the door and nobody answers so you pull on the han­dle and the door opens. You are not ready for what’s next. Inside, it smells like cin­na­mon and not shit. There are no toi­let paper wads in the hole, no urine streaks on the floor, or the seat, or even the back of the uri­nal. It’s an oasis. A Hilton amongst Motel 6’s. A first class upgrade from coach. It seems the polite­ness of the festival-goers has left this sin­gle unit untouched, untested, and unfath­omable for the entire week­end fes­ti­val up until the moment you walk in at 3 o’clock in the after­noon on the last day.

Before you walk out, you squirt the first-ever pumps of san­i­tizer from the full dis­penser and while you rub it in, it dawns on you that after you exit, and some­one else walks in behind you, this secret delight will sur­prise at least the next two peo­ple, and then it will suc­cumb to the overuse and begin it’s decline into decimation. 

You’re not ready to share it, are you? You turn the han­dle and make the out­side go green:vacant, and then you turn it back ¾ of a rota­tion and step out. The first guy to see you come out will make a move towards it, see the mixed colours and hes­i­tate, then get back in line. Turn back and count in from the right side. 1,2,3,4! Now go back to your blan­ket and decide which of your friends you like best.

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Hydrostone Village, Halifax, NS

One-Minute Movies

Hydrostone Village, Halifax, NS
June 8, 2010 @ 1:00 pm
Filmmaker: Patty Osborne

Another in Geist’s series of One-Minute Movies, part of the One-Minute Movie Map of Canada. You can con­tribute to the Geist One-​Minute Movie Mapping Project here.

Summer of Bowering: June

Daniel Zomparelli

In the Summer of Bowering, Geist blog­ger and Poetry Is Dead mag­a­zine Editor-in-Chief Daniel Zomparelli will be review­ing George Bowering’s lat­est poetry col­lec­tion, My Darling Nellie Grey. The col­lec­tion is divided into twelve chap­ters, named for each month of the year, and Zomparelli will review one chap­ter a week all sum­mer long.  

This week has been hec­tic to say the least. With Geist’s move, Poetry Is Dead’s dead­line, and my con­stant need to name the drops of sweat on my fore­head, I decided to let you enjoy the visu­als of Bowering accord­ing to my book­shelf. Taking a look at the books and his poetry from thirty years ago, there are large style changes from then to now. This chap­ter was his response to famous ques­tions posed by famous writ­ers. Notable poems are “T.S. Eliot” in which he tells him to “shove it” and the poem “Sappho” in which his reply to “To what, O beloved bride­groom, may I com­pare you?” and his response being “If you sug­gest a summer’s day/I’ll walk off this island.” Overall the chap­ter is fun and humor­ous. A light chap­ter for a siz­zling hot sum­mer week.

Enjoy the photo essay.

You can fol­low along with Summer of Bowering by buy­ing My Darling Nellie Grey at Talon Books. If you have a review for this chap­ter, please post it in the com­ment section.

The Vancouver Folk Music Festival—in 140 characters or less

Patty Osborne

Twittering from the VFMF turned out to be an inter­est­ing writ­ing exer­cise:  lit­tle time for analy­sis and you have to express your­self in 140 char­ac­ters or less. Here’s my collection:

Opening act on the main stage (the tough­est one of the week­end): Gadelle. They’re great! Acadian fid­dle, step dance etc.

Why did 2 out of 4 peo­ple leave our blan­ket when Shane Koyczan went on and on with his mediocre poetry? Backup singers were the best part.

Bassekou Kouyate: Mesmerizing. Featuring the “Tina Turner of Mali” plus out­stand­ing instru­men­tals.

Po’ girl: You go girl(s) (and boys). Original music, great stage pres­ence, good work­shop­pers.

Carlos del Junco: This string bean has a voice like choco­late, plays fab har­mon­ica, but took his CDs home before I could buy one.

Bob Brozman: A stompin’ thumpin’ strum­min’ sin­gin’ hunk of burnin’ love — all on one gui­tar.

Connie Caldor: Still has her chops!

Playing for Change: Channeling Marvin gay: awe­some!

Tao Seeger: Channeling Joe Cocker — with a banjo!

Nathan Rogers: Channeling his dad, Tuvan throat singers and YouTube, with a dose of “why are we here.” Good stuff.

Toilet paper in the porta pot­tys: ROUGH.

Madison Violet: Smokin’ blue­grass, small town Ontario & David Suzuki for PM.

Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens: Oh lordy, that singer in the red hat is a pow­er­ful woman.

Best food lineup: TNT Wraps. You can lis­ten to the main stage show from there.

Steelworkers Union of Montreal: Most words per line of any group at the fes­ti­val. Please don’t let the devil take you home — you’re too good.

The earth moved (did you feel it?) when New Orleans street musi­cian Grampa Elliott per­fomed with Playing for Change. Indescribably mov­ing.

Canadian youn­gins: The Gertrudes, Deep Dark Woods & Ladies of the Canyon: Goodnight Irene & (even) Four Strong Winds sound new!

Catherine MacLellan tells us that Elvis recorded her dad’s song Snowbird and then she sings it her­self — bet­ter than even our famous Anne did!

It ain’t true, rhythm and blues queen Bettye LeVette, that nobody loves you — we do!

Raoul & the Big Time: Love the voice, the har­mon­ica, the gui­tar — and the suit! Hey, the blues are fun!

Alvin Youngblood-Hart: keep doin’ what you do to me — it feels goooood. Although it’s sup­posed to be the blues…

Let’s hear it for gui­tar crazy­man Daniel Champagne from Australia. And he can song too.

Colin Hay: Your songs are so mel­low that I went right off to sleep. Sorry, but I was in a lovely patch of shade too. Feel bet­ter now.

It’s not often that boys from Victoria make us feel like danc­ing but Jon & Roy are doing just that: great rhythms & vocals.

Dance party, stage 3 with Oka (Australia). Get over here.

Paid $10 to renew my mem­ber­ship, might win a prize, got a sticker: I’M IN!

The Super Slide at Playland

Jill M

I like old-fashioned amuse­ment parks, as opposed to con­tem­po­rary high-tech ones.  I guess it’s impos­si­ble to find an “old-fashioned amuse­ment park” that is intact (in other words, that didn’t long ago meet with the wreck­ing ball):  But you can still find “pock­ets” of authen­tic, unchanged rides that res­onate with an early 60’s vibe.  At Playland I came across the orig­i­nal Bumper Cars, the House of Mirrors and the Super Slide.

The Super Slide, also known as the Giant Slide, Fun Slide or Sky Slide, didn’t actu­ally show up at Playland till the late 60’s.  However, my ear­li­est rec­ol­lec­tions of a colos­sal slide go back to 1962, in a place called The Fun House at Santa Cruz Beach.  These orig­i­nal giant slides were made of pol­ished hard­wood; not the cor­ru­gated plas­tic of the newer ones (which don’t give you that same momen­tum of a snow­ball rolling down a hill).  You still have to descend on a burlap sack, though, to avoid fric­tion burns.

A giant slide was fea­tured in the 1962 cult clas­sic hor­ror film Carnival of Souls, in a chill­ing scene where a gunny sack silently trav­els down the Fun House Slide at the Saltair Pavilion.  But there’s nobody on that sack; it was sent down to scare the heck out of Candace Hilligoss!

As for me, I can no longer ride on swings, slides or rotat­ing objects with­out feel­ing sick.  I was cap­tured on film this month, sail­ing down the Super Slide at Playland, and I barely man­aged to keep my mini-donuts down.

Tiny Replicas debuts at The Cultch

Dan Post

Earlier this week, in pink bus stops up and down Davie St in Vancouver, ads appeared that said “Proud sup­port­ers of Pride Day” and showed two gay men sit­ting in TD Canada Trust’s sig­na­ture green leather chair: one sits in the seat with his legs crossed and his face alight with laugh­ter while his jazz-hand is spread out across his partner’s stom­ach who sits on the arm­rest, his face also lit up with raised eye brows and huge open-mouthed exu­ber­ance. The same day, Tiny Replicas, a Thirty Below the­atre pro­duc­tion, opened at The Cultch and for most of the play, two gay men sat in a brown leather chair and sweated, and wor­ried and cried as they wres­tled with the idea of becom­ing gay parents.

The homo­sex­ual par­ent is invis­i­ble. This is the dri­ving force behind Tiny Replicas, as char­ac­ters bicker con­stantly not only about their own anx­ieities and per­sonal doubt sur­round­ing con­ven­tional par­ent­hood, but also about the fal­lac­ies of sex­ual rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Canadian cul­ture. It is the over-the top exu­ber­ance of the green couch that keeps peo­ple feel­ing good about sup­port­ing the Pride parade, but makes it harder for Canadians to see gay men as respon­si­ble, thought­ful par­ents on the brown couch.

Tiny Replicas chal­lenges these ide­olo­gies and han­dles the idea of empow­er­ing gay men very respon­si­bly.  We are shown a side of the great debate that is too often kept supressed. However, a crack in the play’s foun­da­tion creeps up after the comic relief char­ac­ter of Jude deliv­ers the line “It’s only char­ity if you have to beg for it.” In this instance they were talk­ing about a gin and tonic, but in many ways this is what Tiny Replicas is about. 

Throughout the play the men do beg, but they don’t beg the gov­ern­ment to allow their par­ent­hood, they beg their female friends to help them con­ceive, and although the women agree that the government’s hoop-jumping is wrong, and that there actions will some­how empower the gay com­mu­nity, they bestow their eggs and wombs, by def­i­n­i­tion, only as char­ity and not as equal part­ners. And so while the women who sup­port and ulti­mately enable the whole thing to hap­pen, have openly done so in many ways just to ‘stick it to the man’ and to try to help empower the homo­sex­ual com­mu­nity, ulti­mately they make the men beg for their charity.

You will laugh and worry along with the char­ac­ters, and you will under­stand how Tiny Replicas suc­ceeds as an impor­tant cul­tural arti­fact intro­duc­ing us to the invis­i­ble gay par­ent and the hard­ships they must endure in order to live a life they are enti­tled to. They put the green couch out in the back alley and set up the brown couch, where there is still laugh­ter and joy, but there is also worry, and fear, and sav­ing for a child’s education.

See Tiny Replicas this week­end at the Cultch: Friday July 23 @7 pm, Saturday July 24 @ 4:30 pm, and Sunday @7 pm. 

Roncesvalles & Garden, Toronto, ON

One-Minute Movies

Roncesvalles & Garden, Toronto, ON
June 4, 2010 @ 12:30 PM
Filmmaker: Patty Osborne

Another in Geist’s series of One-Minute Movies, part of the One-Minute Movie Map of Canada. You can con­tribute to the Geist One-​Minute Movie Mapping Project here.

Tupperware: Memory Storage

Becky McEachern

Twenty-five cents on a recent trip to the Vancouver Flea Market bought me this gem of a 1984 Tupperware Coupon Organizer. Every word is con­ve­niently in both offi­cial languages.

The Table of Contents is handy. After all, one does not want one’s “Meat and Alternatives/Viande et Substituts” coupons min­gling with one’s “Children/Enfants” coupons. 

I’m not actu­ally all that keen on the Tupperware Home Party cul­ture; I can’t jug­gle the social­iz­ing and sales envi­ron­ment simul­ta­ne­ously. However, I do love Tupperware. In fact, it has had a greater pres­ence in my life than I real­ized until see­ing this book. Looking through the lit­tle draw­ings, I see a lot of things from Grandma’s house. 

I played with all of the toys on page 10, for exam­ple. That ball with the dif­fer­ent shaped holes and cor­re­spond­ing blocks that fit through them was like magic. (Apparently it’s called the Shape-O Toy.) You get to pull it apart to empty it out once you’ve man­aged to get all the blocks inside; noth­ing is  more empow­er­ing than dump­ing things out when you’re a kid.

The ele­phant, giraffe and dog toys were pretty stel­lar, too. You could dis­con­nect the head, body and butt pieces from each other, so some inter­est­ing rearrange­ments of body parts came about. I remem­ber how much fun I had putting the ele­phant head on the giraffe neck with the dog butt and tail. 

I don’t think I’ll be using my coupon orga­nizer to store coupons with; I’m not much of a coupon girl, and it’s already a pretty full lit­tle book any­how, with the mem­o­ries n’ all.

POSTcards from the Folk Festival #2 - Kid with Sword Skills

Dan Post

Kid with Sword Skills

Not really a sword, but a stick that he spun between his fin­gers with great skill. He lunged and thrust and spun the stick like noth­ing I had seen a kid his age do; he had advanced beyond the imi­ta­tions of his tele­vi­sion and movie heros. He chal­lenged me many times to a sword fight but I knew bet­ter than to mess with some­one of that cal­iber. Once, I had seen a pam­phlet out­side a build­ing down­town that was for a sword-fighting class called Acadamie Duello, and on the other side of the pam­phlet was a pic­ture of a girl hold­ing a fal­con on her arm. Later, out­side of a cof­fee shop, I would meet that same girl as she walked around the cor­ner with a bird of prey on her arm that she said was actu­ally a Harris Hawk and not a fal­con. People with these skills are out there and must know some­thing I don’t, like the exis­tence of some back-alley sword fight­ing cul­ture of which I should be wary. The sword kid said he knew of Acadamie Duello but had never gone; he had taught him­self every­thing he knew.

Throughout Saturday and Sunday he chal­lenged sev­eral peo­ple and the first girl to accept did not real­ize what she had got­ten her­self into until he attacked her and spun his stick, “for intim­i­da­tion” as he said, and whacked the sides of her legs. She tried to laugh off the pain because he was smaller and younger than her. 

After each com­peti­tor and each return to chal­lenge me, I told him that he was going to hurt some­one. When I was younger, I was always the one who took things too far, start­ing with good inten­tions and end­ing with trav­esty, so that teach­ers seemed to know who I was before I even got to a new school. It was par­tially why I didn’t sword­fight the kid, because I was more afraid for his safety than my own.

Lauren, another Geist vol­un­teer, showed up to our booth on Saturday after­noon and I told her about the kid, but she accepted his chal­lenge any­ways when he came call­ing. Soon, she caught his stick in her hand and then gave him a seri­ous lec­ture on being respect­ful and not hurt­ing peo­ple no mat­ter if he thought it was just a game. It will be his first of many clashes with women of authority.

On Sunday, when Lauren was away from the booth, he lured in an unsus­pect­ing cou­ple sit­ting on a blan­ket near the pond. The one girl, who had clearly never seen the kid in action, fig­ured it would be fun, but soon she was locked in a very real and vio­lent duel.

The fight ended when he broke her fin­ger, or so it appeared when she called “mercy” and dropped her stick to look at a mas­sive white bump that had formed above the knuckle of her mid­dle fin­ger. She held it by the wrist, limp, and asked her girl­friend if it was bro­ken. She was calm about it. 

The kid sat on his knees beside her and checked out the wound. “Can I touch it?” he asked and she swat­ted his hand away with her good one. The two girls mum­bled some­thing and then got up to find a med­ical tent. The kid watched them go and sunk deeply into his own guilt. He paced  around and kicked at the grass, and went to throw both sticks away and then hes­i­tated and looked back at the girls. He watched them all the way until they were out of sight and then he saun­tered around, quiet. 

When he got close to me I called him over to speak to him as peo­ple much older than me had spo­ken to me when I was bad. 

 “That’s enough.”

 “I know.”

 “You really hurt that girl.”

  “I know.”

  “I told you that was going to happen”

  “I know.” 

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POSTcards from the Folk Festival #1 - Audience Migration

Dan Post

AUDIENCE MIGRATION (Stage 2 to Main Stage)

The lady at the booth next to ours says, ‘That’s noth­ing. You shoulda seen it this morn­ing, before the gates opened. They were all wait­ing in huge groups to get in and the vol­un­teers were hold­ing them back. They all want their space you know, to set up their blankets.” 

I’ve seen that behav­iour before in older peo­ple, at an estate sale which was like a fancy garage sale only at an expen­sive house with gated prop­erty, and out­side the gate peo­ple jock­eyed for posi­tion, elbowed one another and stood on tippy-toes to see past the gate. 

This migra­tion though, was calm, almost tired. They had all just come from Stage 2 where for the past hour, the band had played their last song at least four times, or so it seemed, as long drawn-out gui­tar solos and horn sec­tion crescen­dos sug­gested an epic denoue­ment, and then lead singer would thank the audi­ence with an ol’ honky-tonk accent, and thank his band­mates by name while the audi­ence roared like it was the finale, but then the band would start again, with ban­jos and heavy drums. 

The audi­ence from Stage 2 that now migrated towards Main Stage were exhausted from being strung along emo­tion­ally, time and time again, and I couldn’t blame them for want­ing their own blan­ket spot to return to and sprawl out on before the next show. The lady at the booth next to us says this is the worst time to try and get food.

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