The Dominion - Jane Henderson

February Books

hillarybain — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:52:09 +0000

New works by MacArthur, Armstrong, McPherson and Glenn

Take Us Quietly
Tammy Armstrong
Goose Lane Editions,
Fredericton, 2006.

The poems in this book meander: geographically they cover Canada from coast to coast, as well as foreign locales like Spain, Guatemala, and Indonesia. While the range of content may be admirable, there’s a sense of something missing in this collection, and in the individual poems themselves—a lack of common purpose and cohesion. Take these two stanzas from “Mathematics:” “A cigarette mark/ burnt through a twenty-dollar bill/ into your forearm/ is my logarithmic reminder./ I’ve memorized them all./ When my sight is faulty tungsten,/ my fingers will read polysyllabic.// This rock and scald of absence blisters/ into Saturday morning:/ coffee, samosas, Globe and Mail,/ my feet tucked beneath the angles of your leg.” While the thread connecting mathematics, the number twenty, and logarithms is clear, the movement to chemistry (tungsten) and literature (polysyllabic) feels strange, not to mention the tangle of other images and allusions which are in no way accessible to the reader. Throughout the collection the poems seem to skim the surface of something beautiful, but never take the plunge into real depth or meaning. Take Us Quietly leaves the reader wanting more matter and more art.

--Matthew J. Trafford

Six Ways to Sunday
Christian McPherson
Nightwood, Gibsons, BC, 2007.

In his debut collection, McPherson conjures a gritty and colourful Ottawa, populated by addicts and losers, obsessives and gawky teens. In “The Plastic Garden,” the first and best story of the collection, a retired model-maker named Rumford feuds with skateboarders menacing a little girl’s garden. Rumford’s rage after the first failed confrontation is touching in its excess, and McPherson's other hapless characters are equally sympathetic: jazz-playing Two Seconds and Elvis-haired Squid seem to scrape by mostly on luck and pure gall. Occasionally, the plots beggar belief, or coast along the edge of an easy pathos. The intentionally silly “Chilidog Love” is playful enough to escape standards of believability, but it feels out of place among the darker stories. Where the collection falters is in the saggy dialogue, and also where the writing dips into weak similes, like Johnny’s father in “Autograph,” “scribbling away with the intensity of an accountant.” But McPherson’s endings, like the pool hustles, drug deals and long afternoon shags of these stories, have a nice way of leaving things open to the unexpected.

--Saleema Nawaz

Combustion
Lorri Neilsen Glenn
Brick Books: Toronto, 2007.

Glenn's second poetry collection considers the big abstractions of connection, cyclicity, and death. Glenn's background is in ethnography, and her removed evenness of tone, which could have seemed clinical, here reassures the reader with its empathic solidity. Her first and second person narration feel both intimate and cautious, considering some of her explosive subject matter, like the true story of FBI investigators severing the hands of murdered M'ikm'aq woman Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. Glenn shifts lightly and cleanly from physical and emotional detail to broader images and ideas. Addressing the title object in "Smooth Rock on Laurencetown Beach," she muses "memory / like you, is shucked from mystery, / rests snug in my hand." The changing moon is one of Glenn's recurrent images, her nod to a vaster perspective of time. Glenn's own perspective occasionally takes a wry turn into gallows humour, as in "Birthday in Middle Age," where she harrumphs, "So, each lacy card a shovel." Combustion is a surprising title for so steady and compassionate an exploration of what it means to watch and be watched. "The heart is a hymnal," writes Glenn, and indeed her collection is also something brave, to be read and sung.

--Jane Henderson

Isolated: Two Plays
Greg MacArthur
Coach House: Toronto, 2007.

Get Away and Recovery, the two plays contained in this collection, have a lot in common. Both storylines feature a nebulous epidemic—in Get Away, it's apathy and discontentment, in Recovery it's a vague, nameless drug— that engulfs society and leaves MacArthur's characters huddled on the outskirts, in outposts they like to imagine they've chosen themselves. Macarthur's characters, despite their slightly surreal surroundings, feel real, as do their interactions with each other. Garbo and Henry are a pair of teenage vagabonds; Leroy is a snotty Dutch teenager; David is a hopeful middle-aged man whose loneliness leads him to desperate acts. “What do they say?” is a recurrent line in both plays, an appeal to old adages and folk wisdom, neither of which can be marshaled to offer the characters much more than temporary comfort. Both stories play with the idea of numbness, and while both storylines unspool towards events that should provoke an emotional reaction, these stories occur in a kind of frozenness that makes them difficult to connect to. It's hard for readers to feel invested in characters who don't seem invested in themselves.

--Linda Besner

Hot Politics

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 21:45:37 +0000

Women are leading Burlesque's international revivial

photo: Vancouver International Burlesque Festival

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Guys and Dolls, Chicks with Dicks…. Welcome to the show!"

It's the final evening of the first Vancouver International Burlesque Festival (Feb. 9-11, 2006), and two young men in suits and straw boaters are opening the night with a catchy, cheesy, antiquated song about loving scores of girls.

The theatre is filled with couples and friend groups of all varieties. Slender, spangled young women catcall each other, sip cocktails through straws between red-painted lips, and eat brownies. Tattoos are peeking out from under those frilly panties and camisoles. One woman has lollipops sticking out of – not pin curls, but a fantastic set of dreads. Tonight is a nexus of the neo-burlesque and proof of the accelerating comeback of this metamorphic genre.

The newer style of burlesque, situated in the 21st century and hence exhibiting a different set of concerns about the body – including feminism, AIDS, body types, transgender and queer community politics, and plain old desire – self-consciously uses sexualized play and the act of witnessing as the basis of empowerment for messages about sexual or sexualized issues. Some of these issues are progressive, and some are less so. Progressive politics are mixed with old-fashioned heterosexist versions of desire. The two have ample space to feed off of and reform one another.

A hundred and sixty years ago, the burlesque form took root in the low-class variety show culture of Great Britain and America. "Burlesquing" meant lampooning the operas and affectations of the upper classes. Audience attention was held by ribald parody and shapely underdressed dancers in an era when all proper women (not to mention tables) kept their legs well covered. By the 1960s though, shock value was redefined as full-nudity stripping. Performers joined the trend, by choice or just to survive professionally. Bump 'n' grind overtook campy comedy.

photo: Vancouver International Burlesque Festival

Over the last decade, an international, women-led revival has taken place. There's a whole variety of variety shows out there, with wide-ranging ratios of strip to tease. Styles are as divergent as the women who participate. Some set out to recreate, others to wholly reinvent, vintage aesthetics of glamour. Using a retro aesthetic in costumes, props, or music automatically puts the performers in dialogue with that era. They may be teasing its values or meshing it with contemporary concerns (exemplified by a performer peeling off satin evening gloves and clumsily putting on latex ones instead).

The performer who goes by Your Little Pony, 29, says that burlesque performers share, "the experience of pushing the boundaries of self-presentation," with the added thrill of being watched while doing so. In comparing onstage and offstage sexualities, she explains, "The biggest thing is the witnessing. Both can be messy, erotic, personal. But on stage you're witnessed without a lot of touch. Offstage you're witnessed mostly by touch. Then there's how you witness yourself: offstage is slower and less influenced by adrenalin; onstage is a whirlwind and often more planned."

Witnessing oneself is central to burlesque yoga, an inventive practice that its creator and instructor, Little Woo, describes as "low-brow art meets sacred spirituality." Moves expressing archetypes such as mermaids, belly dancers, and kung fu fighters are taught as yoga postures, with emphasis on meditative breathing, inner connection, and refreshing hilarity.

Not everyone agrees with the powerful intentions behind some performers' playfulness. One producer declared that the variety skits are just work for theatre people who can't get into real theatre or for women doing it "just for the strip." Another scornful dancer commented, "Burlesque is stripping for fat people – you can quote me – and that's why I've moved on from it." (California's Big Bottom troupe, on the other hand, revels in reviving burlesque's historical preference for shapely dancers.)

photo: Vancouver International Burlesque Festival

"Oh, some people want to see slick polished girls. But some just want to laugh," says Maz, 29, a member of BYO (Bring Your Own) troupe. The troupe formed after Maz's roommate walked out of a burlesque performance one night, tired of repetitive body types and hetero plots, determined to bring a more gender-transformative, DIY-attitude to their own productions. Maz adds, "What I learned from burlesque class is you don't need to take a class. You can just do it."

"I always say amateurs are the new professionals," laughs fellow performer Coral, 33. "We're empowered as amateurs, more hot, edgy, raw. Everyone's got a repertoire. Just get those moves together!"

"It's not even about nakedness. If you have humour, you don't need nakedness," Coral continues. "Not that we'd want to impose limits or rule out full nudity!" Verotica143, Seattle's erotic mime, comes to mind as someone who can pretend to take her clothes off more sexily and more wittily than most people would imagine possible.

Your Little Pony explains a key point: "Dancers choose how they are portrayed, so you have the power over the dialogue, and the audience meets you in the middle with feedback." Burlesque gives women (and the less-numerous men and intergender folks who also participate) a chance to laugh, redefine gender archetypes and body type ideals, to form communities of sexual solidarity through interaction, and to just plain be sexy within a wider horizon of repercussions and contexts.

People love a little saucy sass, after all. Turns out that with the right music, female empowerment can look like pulling green onions out of a sequined corset. Or dressing up like a skunk. Or twirling pasties on your bum while, as Your Little Pony wrote, "a crowd of people FREAK OUT!"

At Vancouver's International Burlesque Festival Jane Henderson and Edie Jackson find both progressive politics and old-fashioned desire.

What's in a Graphic Novel?

Fri, 06 May 2005 20:29:06 +0000

It's fun to ask people to define the phrase "graphic novel." A few people still hate it for giving literary pretensions to an immature preoccupation with the gory and fantastic. Another militant minority hates it for selling out the comix underdog and toadying to the aforementioned literary pretensions.

Most people just find it weird that, under this heading, you find Spiderman and a Holocaust memoir sharing the same shelf.

Fair enough. But I enjoy this loose and baggy category. Simple but true, these books do share something special which sets them apart from the rest of the fiction/non-fiction world. Books with pictures, and books that are pictures, make us read differently and understand story differently, whether they're organized by frame or collage, in sequence or at random. They challenge our vocabulary--should we talk about "viewing" or "reading," "figures" or "characters"? And though comic-strip conventions are often used, there's little formulaic to be found.

Recent works like Chester Brown's Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, Craig Thompson's gigantic novel Blankets, and Marjane Satrapi's Iranian memoirs, Persepolis I and II, have been picking up international attention and awards. Here are introductions to three recent, dissimilar Canadian works which I was happy to discover in that curious collection behind the Tolkien display.

Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea
by John Gallant and Seth
Drawn & Quarterly, Montreal, 2004

Bannock, Beans, and Black Tea is a charming book to hold. Small, dark, clothbound, its endearing presentation is at odds with its stark contents. It's a father-son collaboration; renowned cartoonist Seth spent a decade collecting, sifting, and assembling his dad's reminiscences of childhood in Depression-era Prince Edward Island. Somehow the stories morphed from the adventurous tales Seth remembered his father telling to reveal a reality of "awful desperation… the memories of a neglected starving child." Seth's introduction is told in comic-strip frames, his father's words appear as text, and illustrations and diagrams by both appear throughout. Mixed in between stories like "I Walked All the Way to the Lobster Factory Just to Get Fired" are wry lists like "Night-Time Snacks." (This includes:

"2. Raw turnip. Scoop with spoon and eat.
3. Apple (in summer). Slice and eat.
4. Raw carrot. Eat."

)

This prickly treasure evokes both grief and nostalgia. Its content and presentation capture the conundrum beautifully.

Witness My Shame
by Shary Boyle
Conundrum Press, Montreal, 2004

Insistent, often unpolished, and flecked with humour, Shary Boyle's drawings expose private vice and public embarrassment. Witness My Shame assembles nine "bookworks," one collaborative piece, and assorted drawings. Words are few or absent altogether, and her subjects, like a girl caught masturbating with a birthday cake, surprise and disturb. The minibooks, such as "I Feel Funny Mommy," "Horny" and "Homestead, Scarborough" become chapters in this larger story about longing and vulnerability flayed open. Told almost entirely in pictures, Boyle's characters live in an imaginative world, confused and funny, lusty and driven.

Fatal Distraction
by Sonja Ahlers
Insomniac Press, (Toronto), 2004

Hundreds of clipped images, scribbles, and snippets of text stuff this anarchic compendium. Ahlers' second book is a tribute to obsession which she suggests reading "in a random sort of way or front to back."

Each page of the miscellany can stand alone: "I don't wanna be in the opening band singing about the artist working the art supply store," reads one page; "I've been repeating myself for years," says a cherub perched on a record. When viewed sequentially, different stories appear. Page-numberless, Fatal Distraction offers limitless potential for conversations between its component parts.

Its black-and-white contents appear scattered yet meticulously assembled. Its disorder both mocks and rewards a reader's longing for sequence and story. Ahlers riffs on work, anxiety, shopping, rock and roll, BC pot, sensitivity, and Fatal Attraction, of course.… trying to contain this book in a list is absurd. Just go play with it.

In the wake of the first wave of graphic novels, Jane Henderson looks at some recent, disparate Canadian works.

Captivating Theatre Closes

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 09:23:54 +0000

Due to prison security requirements, there are no images to accompany this article.

Canada has just lost its only behind-bars theatre company that performs for the public. "William Head On Stage," a prisoner-run theatre company at William Head Federal Prison in Metchosin, British Columbia, has recently folded after twenty-three years of production and performance. This is a real loss to the arts community of the region and, more crucially, to the lives of the prisoners involved. Most prisoner participants, who are responsible for every aspect of each production, have never been involved with theatre before.

The Firebugs, running October 15-November 6, 2004, turns out to have been WHOS's last performance. Ryan Love, the final president of WHOS, has been at William Head for twelve years. (He will be eligible for day parole in five more.) Love has been predicting problems for WHOS ever since the prison's reclassification from medium to minimum-security prison last year. The institution's reorientation from confinement to pre-release facilities means a far higher turnover of inhabitants, and maintaining a continuing theatre society has become, with reluctance, impossible. Love explained that joining WHOS's Board of Directors used to be a three-year commitment. Today, the average stay at William Head is just six months. Last fall, for example, eighteen of the twenty production participants left the prison, most of them in the week following the show. It's "tough to maintain continuity," said Love. Back in 2001 the company had already cut down from two annual shows to just one.

Unlike most struggling theatre companies, finances were not the reason behind WHOS's disassembly. Budgeting is relevant, yes, but "not the point," says Love. WHOS could "make money every year by doing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" but the hope has always been just to keep afloat and keep exploring. Between 1981-2004, WHOS built up a substantial patron base. About eight hundred regulars could be counted on to attend each production, be it drama or farce. Losing the relationship between fenced-in performers and the surrounding public is disappointing for both. "People love us," Love explains, because "they get to see inside the prison, and they get to see us working hard, without pay, for the benefit of others."

Alienation, entrapment, responsibility, and control have been explored by participants and audiences through famous scripts like "The Elephant Man" and even, in recent years, in dramatic pieces penned by prisoners themselves.

Patrons realize immediately that a ticket to a WHOS production does not mean an ordinary theatre-going experience. William Head Prison occupies a peninsula facing Washington's Olympic Mountains and surrounded on three sides by the murderously cold Pacific. There is a surreal contrast between the prison's astonishingly beautiful natural setting and the barbed wire and security towers that surround it. Upon arrival, guests must empty their pockets, sign waivers, and assemble for the sniffer dogs. Then they are chauffeured by prisoners across William Head's grounds to its temporarily-renovated gym. WHOS has always used this dislocating introduction to its theatre to its best advantage.

Although WHOS's repertoire includes farce and comedy, its most powerful shows have considered themes drawn from its locale and performers. Alienation, entrapment, responsibility, and control have been explored by participants and audiences through famous scripts like "The Elephant Man" and even, in recent years, in dramatic pieces penned by prisoners themselves. Love explains that the performance society itself has always selected the plays, often drawn to compelling dramas which "speak to our condition, and the human condition: as prisoners, in confinement, about class structure, power... the existentialism, all of that."

The Firebugs, WHOS's most recent and now final production, embraced and built from these confines. Max Frisch wrote The Firebugs, "a parable about the dangers of complacency," following the Second World War, wondering how such disaster could come from people with such good intentions. Director Britt Small described their production as "both cruel and strange," and the surreal set and costume design contributed greatly to this sensation. Viewer sympathies meshed with horror as the hapless main characters refused to understand that they were supporting the devilish Firebugs.

This script was also an excellent choice for its range of central and supporting characters. The Firebugs showcased the talents of performers Andy Maxwell (playing Gottlieb Biedermann), Bruce D. Peters (Sepp Schmitz/Beelzebub), and Dustin Taliathan Olson (Willie Eisenring/Lord of the Underworld), each of whom have been involved with WHOS before. At the same time, it offered supporting roles for new performers like the Chorus of Firemen.

The relationship between WHOS and the William Head administration has been a complicated one. The institution's only involvement is for security--for one small example, The Firebugs requires candles, which aren't allowed in the prison, and so had to be officially signed in and out of each rehearsal.

As an entirely extracurricular activity, therefore, WHOS offers powerful personal rewards to prisoners whose lives are otherwise governed by the penal system. On the other hand, because it exists outside the institution's rehabilitation program, WHOS participation does not come up in parole hearings, for example, as something prisoners have achieved. Love spoke with some frustration that "We may as well be the William Head baseball team." Certainly WHOS cited lack of administrative support as a reason for its closure. Some degree of institutional involvement could perhaps lend the necessary continuity to keep WHOS alive.

No studies have assessed the impact of the dramatic society on the lives of its participants. WHOS's members have actually requested that the institution perform studies, believing that WHOS participation greatly reduces the chances of recidivism.

The dramatic society has certainly, over the last two decades, changed some barriers between the prisoners and the public that they are to someday rejoin. One of WHOS's most immediate rewards for both communities has been simply the mingling of the theatre-going public with their convict hosts on performance nights. WHOS's ongoing support from both patrons and community sponsors bespeaks this positive relationship.

The most significant loss, however, is of WHOS's uncalculated effects on its prisoner participants. As one former WHOS member described, life in prison consists of anger and frustration. To be part of such a project and to explore, through drama, the emotional range of ordinary life is invaluable. The loss of this innovative, controversial, means of rehabilitation is a serious one.

Readers interested in supporting the creative output of William Head prisoners may appreciate Out of Bounds, a prison-produced quarterly magazine for both occupants and public. Those interested in learning more about William Head On Stage can check out "Criminal Acts--Inside Prison Theatre," a 2003 NFB production.

Canada has just lost its only behind-bars theatre company that performs for the public. Jane Henderson discusses its life and death.

Plunderphonics

Thu, 27 May 2004 22:25:32 +0000

DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album

Mix the Beatles' The White Album with rapper Jay-Z's Black Album and what do you get? DJ Danger Mouse's experimental CD, The Grey Album. You also get a cease-and-desist order from EMI Music. Tracks from the 3000 now-illegal copies of this CD have spawned countless downloads and are just one of hundreds of examples in the current debate over what is art and what is piracy.

Canadian artist John Oswald has made a career out of walking that line. He's been plundering sound archives since the early 1970s, when he began with the recorded works (and sanction) of William S. Burroughs. But Oswald specifies that it must be "blatant ... There's a lot of samplepocketing, parroting, plagiarism and tune thievery going on these days which is not what we're doing." Instead, Oswald plays with "transformed but still recognizable" audio quotations, delighting in their interaction.

Consider the same situation in print. If I wanted to write a book out of a thousand or so fused quotations, as Oswald's Plexure album is made with audioclips, I would put in a big fat bibliography or more footnotes than T.S. Eliot. Readable? Not so much; but legal? Certainly. In sound art, however, Oswald points out that creating such a "scholarly version" of Plexure would require negotiating "over a thousand clearances, and any one that is not obtainable would compromise the project." Is there no other way to create an audio footnote or sidestep sonic quotation marks?

Copyright showed up in the original American constitution, derived from England's 1709 Statute of Anne: for the encouragement of learning. The American exhibit Illegal Art points out the irony that copyright was "originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas, but is now being used to stifle it." Indeed, "if the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed." Canonical greats like Bach or Shakespeare would also have some answering to do.

Importantly, copyright is a commodity. Its tradability means that it is always the copyright holders, who may or may not be the artists, whose rights are protected. Financial and creative protection for artists become just financial interest protection for copyright purchasers.

What is most valued here? The right to make money off your own work? The right to determine who else is making money off your work? The right to have maximum influence over interpretation of your work, or to stave off its subversion?

There are two debates here. One is the question of what requires protection--creative production or the money it can generate. The second is between different conceptions of art. As Martin Cloonan, chair of the anti-censorship group Freemuse and Head of the University of Glasgow's Department of Adult and Continuing Education recently wrote: "One [conception] sees creativity as essentially social in nature and thus asserts that the rights of the public (or collective) are paramount...[T]he public's right to knowledge, to access the thoughts and deeds of others, is highly prized."

That's the belief of media project the DBI, propagators of the No Copyright Seal. Arguing that intellectual property concepts can only restrict the flow of info and ideas, the Department of Behavioural Investigation offers the seal to ensure that what it stamps can't be copyrighted by anyone, ever.

On the other hand, you could see "creation as an individualistic act where the rights of the artist (as vested in the copyright holder) are paramount. Here the right of the original artist is held to be paramount."

Between those polarized versions of art are the vast grey areas in which we find Oswald or DJ Danger Mouse, mucking around in other people's art to create artifacts anew.

So say the plunderers. Could we get a comment from the plundered?

William S. Burroughs, Elektra and The Grateful Dead, for example, have respected or requested that Oswald use their work. For his 1999 "sonic archeology" project Disembodied Voice, rights were not just given but the plundering project was actually commissioned. In this case, Oswald used pianist Glenn Gould's acclaimed recordings of The Goldberg Variations. What he used though, was not the sound of the piano, but of Gould himself, inadvertently humming along. Oswald isolated, enhanced, and in some parts replicated Gould's unconscious vocals and The National Ballet of Canada then danced to the virtuoso's haunting hum instead of his familiar piano performance.

At the other extreme, though, is Oswald's 1990 album Plunderphonic, which the recording industry demanded be destroyed. Because most looted work is represented by record labels, it is difficult to find artist to artist dialogue on the subject, but it is clear in this case that the industry was acting on the request of plundered artist Michael Jackson. No doubt the album's cover, which morphed an image of Jackson's body with that of a naked white woman, caused some offence.

Artistic integrity is certainly up for debate, but it is unfortunate that it takes place mostly in the courts and through sharply worded letters of warning to sound artists. The grey areas of intellectual property law leave room for experimentation and redefinition but the atmosphere is discouraging and it takes a certain amount of audacity to break through.

- by Jane Henderson -

Lessons for an Audience

Tue, 03 Feb 2004 19:09:19 +0000

Kazimi's Shooting Indians explores representations of authenticity

In Ali Kazimi's 1997 documentary Shooting Indians, a whole sequence of studying is going on. Kazimi studies Iroquois photographer Jeff Thomas, who is mining the century-old works of white photographer and filmmaker Edward Curtis. The three are transformed.

It took more than a decade to make this quietly ironic film, which got a rare public screening in Victoria, BC last night. Looking around the filled-to-capacity auditorium, it was obvious that a non-native audience is hungry for the dialogue that this film, and the native speakers who followed its screening, made posible.

Ali Kazimi and Jeff Thomas: "the two indians".

As Kazimi quipped, the documentary is a story of two Indians. As a child in Delhi, Kazimi was introudiced to "cowboys and Indians" in 1961 by the gift of figurines from a visiting English relative. Arriving in Canada some years later to study film, he said he was startled to find a belief that "the red man was doomed to extinction," observing that "these Indians do exist, but they have no India to return to!" In the early 80s, as an idealistic film student from a country with hundreds of living languages, he met and began work with Iroquois Jeff Thomas.

Thomas' photography, now his strategy for approaching alienation issues, began with doubt and hesitation, as captured in Kazimi's footage of Thomas returning with a camera to his childhood reserve near Buffalo, NY. Resident attitudes were formed by the history of anthropologists and ethnographers, the only people taking pictures of natives. "People came, took something, left, and never came back," he said. "Never an exchange."

It is just such photography for which Edward Curtis (1868-1952) is famous.

"Prolific" is an understatement when applied to Curtis' body of work. More than 40,000 photos, transcriptions of hundreds of stories, and wax-cylinder recordings of songs were taken of First Nations throughout southern and northwest North America. "Resented" and "discredited" are just as indequate in expressing most present-day attitudes to his collection. Hailed at the time as tokens of the "vanishing race," in the 1980s people spoke up about how severely his photos were staged, retouched, and essentially falsified.

But Kazimi calls Curtis "the shadow... with whom [Thomas] seems to have made an uneasy peace." After a decade of studying Curtis' photos (he even got a job at the National Gallery for access to their collection) Thomas explains that "I was uncomfortable with his work," but uncomfortable enough, crucially, "to find out why."

An untitled portrait by Jeff Thomas.

One of Shooting Indians' strongest segments is the journey to Alert Bay, the Kwakwala community near northern Vancouver Island where Curtis' feaure-length film was shot around 1913. Originally the incomplete In the Land of the Head-Hunters, its footage was resurrected in the 1960s as In the Land of the War Canoes, a movie I was surprised to recognize from school trips to the Royal BC Museum in the 1980s. But Thomas' interview with Maggie Frank, the movie's 100-year-old protagonist princess, complicates any simple rejection of the film for its blatant inaccuracies. It's a funny, poignant interview which surprises even Maggie's translating daughter, who explains that to Maggie the film is basically "a home movie" of friends and relatives. To many people whose ancestors acted in it, the film was a compromise between what Curtis wanted to make, and the images that the mainstream would buy. He was trying to capture a "pre-contact purity" in a village where whites had intermarried for some 60 years.

Along the same lines, to watch In the Land of the War Canoes as an exploitation of the culture it misrepresents is to deny that participating in it was, as Maggie Frank believes, an expression of choice. And market-tailored as the shooting was, Gloria Cranmore-Webster makes the point that Curtis' arrival in 1913, encouraging the potlatch and its performances, was just the opposite of the intense and increasing government pressure to exterminate such traditions altogether. And so people took part.

And within Curtis' romance and retouching, between those absurd scenes staged for a white, city audience, Thomas found moving and empowering portraits. He went on to curate 150 such photographs into a show at the Ottawa Art Gallery. To cynics wondering how he could make this selection, Thomas offers an explanation that can guide the viewer through Thomas' own body of work. He explains that these pictures are much the same as any portraits of Toronto's aristocrats of the time. They are people dressing up for and looking into the camera. These are not stereotyped Indians, and to assume so (because of the rest of Curtis' work, and the time in which they were taken) is natural but misguided.

The error is in the search for authenticity. This was Curtis' mistaken reason for handing out cedar capes for his models to wear, instead of the bowler hats they were already walking down the street in. This is also the mistake of those who reject Curtis' artifacts today, and the school of thought he represents. It is what Thomas rejects by returning to Curtis' work. Because, as Thomas explained to Kazimi, "To look at my own history I don't think about Indianness." Far more personal insights of compassion and self-analysis arise instead.

For Kazimi, who began the project expecting to see totem poles on Thomas' NY reserve, what disappeared was the mythic Indian image he'd been taught. For Thomas, what appeared was the courage to demand nuance and a determination to return photography's focal point to its subject. And along the way they reinterpreted Curtis as a man whose mission changed from preserving historical curiosities to trying to protect living traditions. Taking a personal, reflective approach to the often-abstracted realities of aboriginal oppression, Shooting Indians practices the very message it carries.

Kazimi's Shooting Indians questions "authenticity"
In Ali Kazimi's 1997 documentary Shooting Indians, a whole sequence of studying is going on. Kazimi studies Iroquois photographer Jeff Thomas, who is mining the century-old works of white photographer and filmmaker Edward Curtis. The three are transformed.
by Jane Henderson

Satire Under Attack

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 05:02:00 +0000

When looking silly is worse than looking evil

Promotional photo for A New War by Gim Hope.

Webster's Dictionary credits literature as the traditional medium to use "trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm to expose and discredit vice or folly." Yet in today's multimedia world, satire has entered the mainstream via theatre, television, music, newspaper cartoons, radio, and the internet. Satire is an important tool for those frustrated by the corporate, sponsorship, and political agendas mixed up in their media. The Toronto Star notes that "Satire is being used by a hungry young generation as a way around the converged mainstream news media -- which often no longer serve as watchdogs."

In Canada and around the world, playwrights and webmasters are the leaders in providing an international audience with new sources of satire. RealStupidNews.com, PaulMartinTime.ca, and TheSweatShopNews.com are all recent satirical e-media sites. A Weapons Inspector Calls, by Justin Butcher (also playwright of The Madness of George Dubaya), A New War, by Gip Hoppe and Right as Ron by Judd Bloch are brand-new plays hitting theaters around the world. Both mediums are receiving their share of flack.

In the arts and in the growing satirical news genre, lines are being drawn by those whose vice or folly are the subject of unwanted wit: PaulMartinTime.ca received threats of lawsuit; Right as Ron has been denounced by the Smart family, whose family history the play satirizes.

Roy Clarke, a Zambia resident of 40 years and Post newspaper employee, is, as of January 6, awaiting the judicial review of the deportation order issued following one of his recent news columns. The piece used jungle animals to satirize a corrupt government. The Telegraph in Clarke's country of origin, Britain, notes that "charges of racism against him are unconvincing, not least because he has been married to a leading black Zambian women rights campaigner, Sara Longwe, for 35 years."

"I have been writing the column for around seven years now and what puzzles me is that this latest piece does not differ greatly in form, style, or content from what I have written before," Roy Clarke said.

Two weeks ago in Mumbai, India, playwright Kedar Shinde's TV satire prodding Deputy Chief Minister Chhagan Bhujbal's alleged scam role was aired. In indignant solidarity with Bhujbal, a group of workers belonging to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) attacked Zee TV's offices and employees. Although he has previously been pressured to resign for many reasons (such as the very dealings being parodied), it was this act of violence on his behalf which finally prompted his resignation "on moral grounds." The Mid-Day Mumbai is hailing the sketch as the "the TV satire that brought Bhujbal down," and its sequel has already aired.

In Texas, "Stop the Madness" is on trial for the third time, now in the Supreme Court. In this mock article, printed November 11, 1999, by the Dallas Observer, a six-year-old girl is arrested for the "terroristic threat" of her report on the picture book Where The Wild Things Are. Fake quotations were attributed to two genuine public officials, court-at-law judge Darlene Whitten and her husband, district attorney Bruce Isaacks, who have taken the paper to court.

The main problem according to Whitten and Isaacks is that the parody could be confused with reality. But when reality can become so bogus and illogical as to be mistaken for farce (with false quotations like "It's time for you to grow up, young lady, and it's time for us to stop treating kids like children"), the problem isn't copyright or liability. It's the panicked and hypocritically illogical power being parodied in the first place.

When looking silly is worse than looking evil
Webster's Dictionary credits literature as the traditional medium to use "trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm to expose and discredit vice or folly." Yet in today's multimedia world, satire has entered the mainstream via theatre, television, music, newspaper cartoons, radio, and the internet. Satire is an important tool for those frustrated by the corporate, sponsorship, and political agendas mixed up in their media.- by Jane Henderson and Max Liboiron -

Can'tLit

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 21:28:28 +0000

Books Recently Seized or Detained by Canada Customs

The past 20 years have shown Canadian censorship to be legal, durable, and popular. Canadian censors--whether government officials or common citizens-- have shown little confidence of the abilities of other people to think or behave responsibly after reading 'objectionable' books and magazines.
--F. Carter, Editors' Assoc. of Canada/Assoc. Canadienne des Reviseurs

Adams, Carol: The Sexual Politics of Meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory.

Bataille, George: Blue of Noon and Story of the Eye.

Carter, ed.: Outrage: Australian Gay and Lesbian short story anthology.

Delany, Samuel R: The Madman.

The Evil Empire: Globalization's Darker Side, by Paul Hellyer

Fleming, Mickey: About Courage.

Genet, Jean: Querelle and Prisoner of Love.

hooks, bell: Black Looks: race and representation.

Irving, John: The Hotel New Hampshire.

Kulaszka, Barbara: The Hate Crimes Law in Canada, 1970-1994: Effects and Operation.

Leavitt, David: A Place I've Never Been.

Mitchell, Mark, ed.: The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing.

National Lesbian and Gay Survey: Proust, Cole Porter, Michelangelo, Marc Almond and Me: writings by gay men on their lives and lifestyles.

Our Home or Native Land: What Government's Aboriginal Policy is Doing to Canada, by Melvin Smith

Pierce, William: The Turner Diaries.

Rice, Anne: The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy.

Stern, Phyllis Noerager, ed.: Lesbian Health: what are the issues?.

Tory, Frank (ed.) Panthology I & II (allegedly burned by Customs)

Unity: A Celebration of Gay Games IV and Stonewall.

Vandeford Tripp: Bitter Beauties.

Wojnarowicz: Memories That Smell Like Gasoline.

Xenozoic Tales: Cadillacs and Dinosaurs Collection, from Kitchen Sink.

Yummy Fur #s 16, 18, from Vortex Comics.

Zap Comics #s 2-9, 11, 12, from Last Gasp.

Books Recently Seized or Detained by Canada Customs
"The past 20 years have shown Canadian censorship to be legal, durable, and popular. Canadian censors--whether government officials or common citizens-- have shown little confidence of the abilities of other people to think or behave responsibly after reading 'objectionable' books and magazines."

Paul Martin, Meet Shakespeare

Sat, 27 Sep 2003 20:15:24 +0000

Janet McTeer as Petruchio in an all-female Globe Theatre production of The Taming of the Shrew. photo: John Tramper

Recently a friend suggested I check out Paul Martin's online opinion survey about the Canadian definition of marriage. Also recently I saw an all-female production of The Taming of the Shrew performed in that Shakespearian Mecca, London's Globe Theatre. And perhaps oddly, these two things have quite a lot to say to each other.

The Taming of the Shrew marked the first performance season of the theatre's new women's company, and the latest in a trend of single-sex Shakespearian productions. The play is an interesting option in this phenomenon because the story is actually about the do's and don'ts of gender behaviour (The "shrew" to be "tamed" is Katherina, a woman so irritable as to be "unmarriageable" until the swashbuckling Petruchio arrives to humiliate her into submission.) Gender-bending is hardly new to Shakespeare; many of his plots depend on it, and most audience members know that his original casts were all-male. So what happens when this notoriously chauvinist script is performed without any men on stage?

First, its machismo becomes immediately, inevitably satirized. Probably this is something of a relief to a contemporary audience, uneasily watching such a politically incorrect spectacle. Director Phyllida Lloyd took full advantage of this potential: Kathryn Hunter as Katherina, for example, made her final speech of submission gleefully over-the-top; the women cajoled into extending their palms for their husbands to tread upon did so, but sank to the ground due to laughter more than anything else.

But nowadays such "subversive" staging of the show has really become the norm. It was a surprise, then, that the Globe's same-sex production actually undermined any simple gender-equality message that might have been expected.

The actresses (particularly Janet McTeer, as Petruchio), offered a seriously sexy portrayal of swaggering machismo, to some surprise. The show's mixed messages built a more complex reality of desire than just plain political correctness might allow. Katherina really was smitten with the domineering Petruchio. On top of that, the audience got an additional erotic layer, as it seems two women kissing can still raise a bit of a buzz, even with one in male character.

Seeing women play out the contest for 'domination' or 'submission' made the story much more about power than gender, without any clear judgment on what power roles each gender "should" want. The same-sex casting also allowed another interpretation, in which gender disappeared completely; suddenly the deprivation of fine foods and clothing meant that Katherina might be learning not decorous womanly behaviour, but a little class consciousness instead.

And the relation to www.paulmartin.ca? Well, both art and politics are putting out ideas about the same thing; namely, they are imagining how people could identify and organize their experiences of attraction and devotion. Shakespeare's text is an inherited institution, as is the Canadian federal definition of terms of marriage. Director Phyllida Lloyd has made a centuries-old romantic comedy an articulate participant in any current debate about "defining" roles in marriage. Thankfully, the theatrical space is designed for just such imaginative representations. Creative interpretations of Canada's legal marriage scripts, such as bann-calling or commitment exchange ceremonies by same-sex couples, for example, have been a little less legal, but still enacted, to fit a more complex reality than our legal texts acknowledge. Both acts invite their witnesses to recognize or realize a not-so-straight reality. Which, if enough politicians (not to mention online survey respondents) go to the theatre... they too may be emboldened to produce.