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So it begins. The Occupy Movement rolls into Toronto. I couldn’t get to the kick off in the financial district, but went to St. James Park in the early afternoon. Below are a few photos and comments. You can view more photos on my flickr space. Early on, I saw a sign I liked:  “Let the conversation begin.” No demands. No message. Just an invitation to converse.I found people who took this invitation seriously, like Roy and his friends shown below. When I took their photo, I asked what their schtick was, their point-of-view, their cause, whatever, but they didn’t say; they were just sitting on the grass having a chat and anyone was welcome to join them. So I did for a while.

Toronto had a dry run for the Occupy Movement. It was called the G20 Summit. There’s the same feel to things now as last year.  Frustration. Disbelief. Anger. Overwhelm. A confrontational rhetoric that threatens to explode. A painfully disengaged middle class more inclined to sidle up to power than trouble itself with issues or long-term consequences. For me, there is the same taste of disgust I swallowed last time around – disgust at the sheer pig-headedness of capital and the readiness of paramilitary types to fall into lockstep. More than anything, I am struck by what might best be described as a collective failure of historical imagination. We wouldn’t be engaging one another in this way if we remembered.

As the Occupy movement creeps ever closer to Toronto, we who support it brace ourselves for the inevitable backlash, not only from voices of power, but also from an eerily complacent middle class. Toronto had a foretaste of this more than a year ago when the G20 leaders came to town and those who spoke out against this presence and what it signifies were rounded up and thrown into holding pens. This week we hear the echo of criticisms that were leveled against protesters more than a year ago:

After being away for a month, I returned home to Toronto with a question burning on my lips: So how’s Rob Ford’s War on Graffiti going? On Friday, I went downtown to get some answers.  I can’t speak for the city at large because I sampled only a narrow sliver of streets downtown.  The reason I sampled only a narrow sliver is that there was so much to see.  I didn’t have time to go anywhere else.  I fell down the rabbit hole. The short answer is: not well; there’s graffiti everywhere. In fact, Rob Ford’s declaration of war may be the best thing that ever happened to Toronto’s graffiti scene.

I took this photo at the petting zoo in Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park. This is one ugly creature. Personally, I don’t see the appeal of slaughtering, plucking and skinning one them, letting it simmer in its own juices for five hours, then serving it up on a platter of bread crumbs and whatnot that have cooked inside its own body cavity, worrying all the time that you’ve cooked it long enough to kill all the bacteria that would otherwise give you food poisoning. In popular usage, we use the word “turkey” to imply losers and failures. Yet we still delight in eating them. Is the ritual of devouring these ugly beasts a symbolic re-enactment of our colonial past? The way we respond to losers and failures? I’m a descendant of the Puritan settlers who invented this ritual; it’s kind of important to me that I think this one through. It eats at me.

When people go on holidays, they like to see the sights, or shop, or lie on a beach, or dine in nice restaurants. Me? I like to hunt for graffiti. While I was in Victoria, I did a lot of walking and found graffiti everywhere. Tags. Bombs. Walls. Stencils. Even dust on bus shelters. Some of it was commercial graffiti–commissioned by the owners of the walls. Some of it wasn’t. It’s usually easy to tell the difference. See my flickr account for a large selection of things I found, mostly in Victoria, except for the auto racks which I found in a marshaling yard in New Westminster. The HYPE piece featured here (click the image to download a larger version) is a composite of four photos I took in a parking lot off Fisgard Street in downtown Victoria. You can see a tag for the KWOTA crew which I also saw this morning on a wall in downtown Toronto. I guess they get around.One morning, while I was photographing along Esquimalt Road, a man said to me: “They should bring back the lash for graffiti artists.” I have difficulty understanding the hostility many people bear for people who decorate walls. The lash? For spray paint? There doesn’t seem to be any proportionality between the punishment and the crime. In Toronto, Rob Ford appealed to this general hostility during his mayoralty campaign by promising to clean up the streets. Now, months after Ford launched his war on graffiti, citizens and community organizations are scrabbling after a dwindling pot of city funding. The arts in Toronto are acutely vulnerable. I see a connection between Rob Ford’s hostility towards graffiti and what is quickly revealing itself as his rabid philistinism. He just doesn’t like art of any sort. And that’s the curious thing about the man who would bring back the lash for graffiti artists. He still called them artists.

At the news of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ death, I pulled out my very first Mac and held an interment ceremony. This is one of the original 128k RAM Macs. No hard drive. It boots from a 3.5 inch floppy disc. I bought it in 1984 after I saw one at a trade show. I hadn’t even seen the superbowl commercial yet. It still works. What appealed to me was the GUI screen. I had been learning to program in my spare time on a UNIX mainframe at U. of T. and I was sick of command line prompts. Basically, I wanted to play. What I most appreciate about Steve Jobs is that he thought equally well with both sides of his brain. It’s an example I try to emulate in everything I do. (I took this photo with my iPhone 4 and posted this blog on my Mac Pro Quad Core tower.)

After a month of driving to from in and around western Canada, I’m wondering what to do next. While on the road, I did as I intended, writing poems as I went. Maybe not as many poems as I would have liked, but enough that I have the raw material for a chapbook. Maybe that’s what I’ll do next. I’ll sift through my nearly 6,000 photos and blend them with my words. But what should I use for a theme? What organizing principle? I don’t want to collate a bunch of unrelated poems and throw them at the reader with another bunch of pretty pictures. Themes like “travel as metaphor for life’s journey” or a “celebration of a romantic wanderlust” are too obvious and hackneyed. I don’t want to impose something on my month’s output. Something will emerge if I sit patiently with it for a while.

what a fucked up thing
to nail Jesus Is Coming to a tree
beside a highway in north ontario
a via dolorosa which is latin
for road through the middle of nowhere
and prompts an eternal question:
if a soul declares its christ
in a forest and there is no GOD
to hear it…
a tree-spiking evangelist is
no concern of mine no souls
harmed in the posting of this
sign only a narcissism fed
by an imaginary friend on a tree
or what about the lady ahead of me
in line at tim horton’s
who goes on and on about
The Conway Twitty Tribute Show
how she brought the show to town
packed five hundred into the hall
could have booked a second show
only HE wouldn’t let her
more interested in the stampeders
three hundred tickets left unsold
for that one, no wonder HE got
fired from managing the motel
don’t you hate how some people
go on and on as if you should
know what they’re talking about

“As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be thrown down.” – Luke 21:6

as we drive into Lanigan
population next to nothing
a pull out and a sign
and on the sign a map
and above the map in bold-
faced caps the word LEGEND
I’m not thinking cartography
and imagine a bright marquee
flashing The Legend of Lanigan
like The Legend of Zelda
every place has its legend
here we see its traces
here the dusty gravel roads
here the façades like on a wild
west movie set here the rusted
rolling stock by the railside
legend is what archaeology
destroys and I with my hammer
chip away at Lanigan

I hate to drive through the prairies.
It’s boring. It all looks the same.
I love to shop at Wal*Mart.
All across this great country,
Wal*Mart is the place for me.
(if performed, this verse should be repeated at least 300 times, once for each Wal*Mart in the country)

Imagine our world is dying.
Imagine survival depends on journeys
to distant suns settling strange planets
colonists voyaging for generations
whirling in cigar-shaped tubes
tribes of ten thousand adrift between
the stars. Now imagine these crafts
of our salvation are designed by
the Ghermezian brothers: worlds of
endless shopping salted by breaks
in water parks, wall-climbing,
water slides, roller coasters, kiddie
rides, bumper boats, pirate ships,
Omnimax, ice rink, mini-golf.
After a thousand years of play and after
settling into orbit around their prospective
home and after opening the hatch
and after stepping onto terra subpono,
how will our descendants, bloated on fun,
rise to the threats of an alien planet?

1.
You can tell I’m not from here
the way my jaw drops to let out
a gobsmacked wow
the way I pull out my camera
wield it like a geologist’s hammer
try to hack away a piece of beauty
and haul it home with me.
You can tell the ones who are from here
the girl in the grocery store fr’instance
the one with the hunting knife in her belt
the dulled-edged look of her eye
or the boys with the pick-up truck
the ones who strut their ordinariness
and roar away at first light
to fish as a reason for drinking.

What was the wildest thing you saw
in all of wild Canada? Was it
the roaring waters of Rearguard
Falls? Or the black bear swimming
across Mud Lake? Or the pine beetle
chewing its way down the North
Thompson River Valley? Or the protesters
haranguing politicians on the steps
of the Victoria Legislature? Or
the drivers speeding across
Vancouver bridges? Or the junkies
hunched around their pipes
on Upper Johnson Street? Or
the wild style graffiti in
the parking lot off Herald? Or
the puffed up chest of Robson
flaunting his white nipples
to the sun? I nod at each suggestion
but answer with my own. The wildest
thing I saw was Tamiko when she
thought I forgot to pack the gift
we bought for our daughter.