The Radio Forest

On the other side

2011-12-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

When people talk resolutions, they often talk about things they want to cut out of their lives: smoking, fatty foods, bad habits.

I haven’t been one to make resolutions at the end of the year so much as goals.

I’ve been thinking back to last December a lot lately. This time last year, I felt that things were really slowing down. In the final month of 2010, I was on the tail-end of promoting my first book, and things had really started to feel like they were quieting down. It had been a busy year. I had to do a lot of things I’d never done before, which can be fun and exciting but also stressful. The year was filled with a lot of good moments but also a lot emotional ones.

When things felt like they were slowing down, I wasn’t sad. It didn't feel like things were over, just naturally moving on. And I was ready: ready for a change of pace, for a new project, for a new routine. I started working on a novel, thinking that it would be my main focus in 2011, especially since I had lots of time before the launch of my next book, Amphetamine Heart, which wasn’t slated to come out until October of this year.

In the hustle of 2010, I hadn’t always given myself the time to go out to readings and shows as much as I’d wanted to, so at the start of 2011, instead of a list of resolutions, I committed to going to at least one reading and one show a month. (For all of you who go to shows all the time, I can hear you moaning that a show a month isn’t very much. There was a time I went to one a week. It wasn’t worth it. This minimum is my happy medium.)

I also wanted to table at zine and small press fairs out of town, and go to Hamilton Art Crawls more often. I was going to redecorate a bit, learn tarot cards, work on a new zine, and get a dog. (Yes, a dog!)

And then January hit. I got invited to do a talk about Toronto punk rock. Because my standing policy is to say yes as often as possible, I said yes. Then I got an invite to do something in February, and then March, and then April, and, well, it went on. And on.

I didn't get a dog and I didn't redecorate and I didn't learn tarot cards. But I did get out to shows and readings and I did set time aside to write, regularly.

But the only month this year that I didn’t have any major commitments was July, when I had no readings, no freelance deadlines, no talks - nothing that required paying attention to the calendar.

Now, don’t take it that I’m complaining. I’m not. I was, and continue to be, grateful for every opportunity that came my way this year. It was a lot of work, but a lot of it led to good things: new experiences, new people, new learnings. Even the projects that didn’t go anywhere were still positive in their own ways. There is always something to learn.

There is also something in stretching yourself – your time, your schedule, your mind – beyond what you think you’re capable of. You find that, once you think you’ve stretched to your breaking point, you’ve actually grown. You can never again feel as overwhelmed at that same level again because you’ve surpassed it and reached a new threshold.

I worked on my novel through it all, because that’s what writing does to you: it doesn’t let you leave it alone for very long, unless you can learn to live with the pile of anxiety that balls up in your chest, and I did some of the things I wanted to, like table at zine fairs outside of Toronto. I also did my first out-of-town poetry performances this year.

I also tried, as hard as I could, to balance the rest of my life with my writing life. I threw a surprise party for my parents when they turned 75. I eased into a new job. I went to Las Vegas with friends. I made my own Halloween costume.

And between everything I wanted to do, I did a lot of things I never expected, like write some lyrics for D-Sisive’s new album Run with the Creeps.

I read at the re-launch of Daniel Jones’ 1978 and The Brave Never Write Poetry, which was one of those full-circle moments that only come around every few years, if you’re lucky. For me being such a major Jones fan, and for having been so influenced by his work, I felt really lucky that day.

But for all the days this year I felt lucky – and there were days I felt I could be truly, deeply, forever-happy – there were also days I felt sad. And worried. And so, so anxious.

There were stretches of exhaustion that went on for weeks. There were times when I questioned whether I was putting what little time and energy I had left over into the places: was I writing the right book at the right time? Was I wasting my time? Was I pursuing the right ideas? Was I working hard enough?

Was I doing everything I should be doing?

It's funny: you think you're going to reach a certain goal, or get to a certain point in your life, and then you'll have it all figured out. You'll trust yourself more, or you'll trust the universe more, and worry less about how things work out.

If such a place exists, I am not there yet.
The launch of Amphetamine Heart this fall was very exciting, but was also the start of a new wave of work, and one that’s still continuing. When December rolled around, I had a reading booked in Kingston the first weekend, and a book fair the second. After that, I knew I would have a few weeks of downtime, but the end of the year didn’t feel the same to me this time around.

I started to think back on the year and realized it was far busier than 2010. So busy that I can honestly say 2011 has been the longest year of my life. Everything that happened this year could have been stretched out over two years, but it wasn’t. It was all piled high and there were times I felt like I was drowning. I even said so, to some people, hoping for help, but at the end of the day, a lot of it was on me to stay above the surface. It’s hard to remember all the details because there were so many.

I also think the end of 2011 feels different because it doesn’t really feel like things are winding down. In January, I’m heading back out for more performances, and I know the start to 2012 is going to be a busy one. I’m trying to be excited about it, but it’s also a little scary. It’s always scary when you’re going into new territory and trying new things, but there’s no growth without risk, right?

A couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even think I could come up with an idea of what I want out of 2012 because I was feeling so tired, so uninspired. After having a bit of a break now, I feel a little better about it, but I still don't have the kind of clarity I'm used to.
So often this year I’ve talked to people who were feeling the way I have been lately: tired, unsure, worried. I’ve been the one to tell people to just push through: what’s one more challenge, one more week or month, one more deadline? You’ve done it before, you can do it again.

Won’t it be worth it to see what’s on the other side of it all?

--

Seven suppliers of my soundtrack for 2011:

1. D-Sisive, Run with the Creeps
2. The Bloody Five, for their rendition of the Demics' "New York City"
3. The Weirdies, for playing the Amphetamine Heart launch
4. Author Dani Couture's "playlists," because they come from some very cool authors, and because I had the chance to meet some of them this year.
5. Peter Murphy, because his was my favourite show of 2011
6. Kenda Legaspi and the Orphans for this cover of Roxy Roller, performed at This Ain't Hollywood in Hamilton at the Blackbird Studios' Fall launch
7. Kosmograd, one of my favourite new musical finds this year

Mary and Nelson meet Twilight

2011-12-13T07:31:00.000-08:00

I don’t have what anyone would call “cool parents.”

You might think of them as cute, but not cool.

When I was a kid, this was quite embarrassing. I secretly wished my parents could be cool.

But they weren’t. They were much, much older than my friends’ parents, and perpetually out of the loop when it came to the latest music, movies, and TV shows. I remember a friend’s dad coming over once to pick up his daughter from my house. He stood in the doorway for a minute chatting to my mom while my friend put on her shoes. The topic of conversation turned to a recent Seinfeld episode about double-dipping party snacks.

It was a pretty funny episode. My friend’s comedic timing was pretty good. It would have been a pretty funny moment in the conversation, all around, if my mom knew what he was talking about. She laughed and nodded like she did, pretending to go along with it, but I knew she had no idea what Seinfeld even was, despite the fact that the show was at its prime time peak at the time this conversation occurred.

When I was a kid, I was only taken to the movies three times by my parents. I’d begged and begged to see All Dogs go to Heaven but had to wait for my uncle to bootleg it on VHS for me because my parents remembered the theatre it was playing at as a place that “smelled funny” last time they were there. So I missed out on that but did see Home Alone and its sequel, as well as the Lion King.

The rest of the movies I saw in theatres happened with friends.

As I got older, I grew out of my parental embarrassment, as kids do, but the embarrassment was replaced with a sense of protection. Not because I don’t think they can’t get around – at 75, they are still really active. They go out a lot, have solid routines, and friends they see regularly.

But because they remain people who refer to made-for-TV-movies as “stories,” and remain removed from anything remotely resembling popular culture, with the exception of Dancing with the Stars and American Idol (although, I must qualify that they don’t always know who the dancing “stars” are), I sometimes wonder what they might be exposed to.

Is this how parents feel about their young kids when they worry about what they’re looking at on the internet?

My mom hates anything gory, scary, or gross. Last night, I was watching Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, which has a lot of dry, normal moments: a nice couple, a guy trying to write at his laptop, a guy in a cabin in the woods. There are flashes of scary things, but if my flipped to the channel at the right moment, I could imagine her saying to my dad, “is that a Christmas story? Let’s leave it there and see what it’s about.”

This weird picture was taken over drinks at a party this past summer.

Which brings me to a recent conversation I had with my parents that helped me intercept what surely would have been a huge disappointment for them.

Last Christmas, they were given a gift card for a movie theatre. Since they don’t go to many movies, though, it’s sat unused all this time.

The other day, they told me they’d wanted to see The Help, but had waited too long to go. By the time they were ready to get to the theatre, its run was already over.

“But we’re going to use it this week,” my mom said. “We want to go see this one movie, but we aren’t sure if it’s still playing. So if it’s not on this week then we’re going to see Twilight.”

“Twilight?” I said.

Twilight? Really?! My dad thinks vampires are stupid and my mom would think it’s too scary (she’s pretty tame, remember). I like real vampire movies and so couldn’t live with myself if I recommend Twilight to anyone.

“You can’t go see Twilight,” I said. “You haven’t even seen the first movies in the series.”

“But it says it’s 'part one' in the paper,” my dad said, pointing to the movie listings.

What he was seeing was Breaking Dawn: Part One. How was I going to explain this?

“It’s still a continued series, though,” I said. “So if you haven’t seen the first ones you won’t understand this one. Besides, you know it’s a vampire movie, right?”

Doesn’t everyone know Twilight is a vampire movie?

“Oh, is it?” My dad said.

And so I had to explain:

“It’s a really stupid movie about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire,” I said. “There are werewolves in it, too. And the werewolves and the vampires are feuding. And in this new movie, the girl’s pregnant with the vampire’s baby.”

“Oh, well we’re not going to see THAT,” my mom said.

I took the paper and underlined some options I thought would be safer bets for them.

Later, as I was getting my coat on to say goodbye, I said, “so you’re going to see one of the other movies I told you to go to, right? Not Twilight, right?”

“No,” my mom said. “We probably would have had to walk out if we went to that.”

Disappointment averted. For now. My mom told me she’d update me about which movie they ended up going to see.

Here’s hoping they get it right.

Name my jackalope and win!

2011-12-09T08:55:00.000-08:00

This little guy came home with me from Las Vegas in November. I picked it up at a huge souvenir store. The woman who sold it to me had actually lived in Toronto on Spadina Avenue several years earlier. Small world. I took this as a good omen and gave her my money.

She said the jackalope had been hanging on the wall behind her cash register for a while and she wanted to name it before she said goodbye. She said it looked like an Emma, which might mean this makes it an Emma-lope instead of a Jackalope.

I want to give little Emma-lope a proper first name. It is a jack rabbit with antlers, afterall, so I feel like it should it have some kind of badass name but I also want to honour the former Torontonian I got it from.

Can you help me out here? Submit your name ideas in the comments below, or email them to me if you've got some really juicy idea: lizworth [at] gmail dot com.

Whoever gives me the winning name will receive a copy of my new book, Amphetamine Heart, and my three chapbooks, Eleven: Eleven, Manifestations, and Arik's Dream.

Remember, if you leave your idea in the comments section, be sure to include your website or email address so I can contact you if you end up being the winner.

Contest closes Friday, December 16. Good luck!

Forever:

2011-11-18T12:55:00.000-08:00

Being born in the early `80s meant the prime time television I grew up on consisted of Roseanne, Degrassi (a must), Unsolved Mysteries (my favourite for years), Rescue 911 (with William Shatner!), Family Matters, Blossom and Full House.

When I was a kid, television was part of my household structure. I wasn’t raised in a family that held any kind of traditional rituals. We didn’t go to church and we didn’t say grace. We didn’t have days where we didn’t eat meat and we didn’t fast or give anything up. We celebrated major holidays and events with presents and candy, and our day to day lives consisted around what was for dinner, and what was on TV. I religiously watched the same shows every week.

I once turned down an invitation to go swimming on a beautiful summer night because I needed to watch a new episode of Unsolved Mysteries that promised stories about UFOs and Stonehenge.

I still love and watch TV, but if I miss an episode of something I don’t get bummed out about it like I did when I was a kid.

Except this year I’ve surprised myself by watching Full House reruns on a daily basis.

Even though I regularly watched the show growing up, I can’t say I ever a huge fan of the Tanner family. They were different from my family in so many ways: we were into nothing, while they were into everything: sports, broadcasting, music, horses, comedy. We had big fights, and they never had real fights, at least not the screaming, running, red-faced, sobbing, fist clenching, temper tantrums that I knew.

Michelle, the youngest kid on the show, never cried, and when she was sad or mad or did something stupid everyone reasoned with her like an adult. They all reasoned with each other, which is cute and nice and all but hard to relate to.

As the sappy music near the end of each episode cued and cast members prepared to hug out whatever conflict they’d run throughout the show’s first 20 minutes, my dad would sit there and sneer at the television and say, disgusted, “Oh, so touching. Very, very touching.”

When I was a kid the show made me wish things were as easy as the Tanners’ lives seemed to be and when I watch it now there are still moments too saccharine that I can’t stand.

But there was something that show had that no one else did, and if Full House had anything going for it, it was The Beach Boys.

When I was a kid, the Beach Boys were the first band I ever truly loved. I didn’t go for the popular stuff of the times: Madonna was off my radar. Guns N’ Roses scared the shit out of me (though I of course came to love them as I got a bit older). The chilly `80s synth stuff like Soft Cell seemed too cheesy and any pop princesses like Tiffany were too girlie for my taste.

Even though they were way out of style for the times (at least based on a survey of other kids in my Grade 4 class) the Beach Boys were what I liked.

I’ve been trying to remember where I first them. I don’t think it was through my parents, who preferred to listen to talk radio in the mornings and watch television more than anything. But when they did play music it was Elvis or Frank Sinatra or country, of my Alvin and the Chipmunks record.

It's quite likely that I first became a Beach Boys fan through Full House. Was it the episode when Mike Love came on and sang “Be True to Your School” on a telethon Danny Tanner was hosting? Or when they did a concert version of “Kokomo” for the show?

It must have been within the same year of seeing one of those episodes when I started seeing Beach Boys cassette tapes at garage sales, which was what my mom and I did together most weekends every spring and summer.
My dad would let me play the tapes whenever we were in the car. I liked the simultaneous warmth and sadness of the Beach Boys’ songs. I didn’t know anything about Brian Wilson at the time. I didn’t know about Mike Love’s questionable temperament. I didn’t know that the Beach Boys didn’t really live on a sunny beach in California. And even though I knew they were an older band I liked to study the photographs on the cassette sleeves and picture the songs being sung by the young men pictured there.

Those songs made me think of cars and cut-off shorts and pretty girls – pretty much what the Beach Boys’ music was supposed to do. Even though I was still years away from being a teenager, living in a half-industrial suburban neighbourhood, I had the clearest, cleanest views of beautiful beaches and golden summer days when those tapes were on.

I felt like I was Kevin-fucking-Arnold from the Wonder Years, okay?

I fell so hard for the Beach Boys that I used to ride my bike around my neighbourhood replaying an elaborate fantasy in my head.

It went like this: the Beach Boys were playing a show in Toronto, and were driving through my neighbourhood on their way downtown. (This would be a ridiculous, implausible route for them to take, but whatever.) They had all of their lyrics written down on a magic scroll, tied with red ribbon. Somehow the scroll fell out of their limo, without them noticing.

I, of course, was the one who found it at the side of the road. I chased them down on my bike and of course caught up with them. They were so grateful to have their magic scroll of lyrics back that they invited me to get in their limo, ride down to the show with them, and hang out backstage and be their friend forever, because they a) felt so indebted to me, and b) thought I was so instantly cool that they couldn’t imagine not having me in their life.

I eventually grew out of this fantasy but never out of the Beach Boys, who remain one of my all-time favourite bands.

This week, after settling in at home after spending a week away, I tuned into Full House and caught an episode I’d completely forgotten about: the one where John Stamos’ character Uncle Jessie gets famous when Jessie and the Rippers’ “Forever” becomes a hit – in Japan. He opens the concert by singing the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” in Japanese but flubs the lines, so the song’s cut short. Bummer.

Even though the Beach Boys’ and their songs (“Forever” is a Beach Boys song, just in case anyone out there thought it came from some mutant Full House dream team) made repeated appearances throughout Full House’s run, I never learned until years after it had gone off the air just how closely linked the two were, with John Stamos even playing for later versions of the band, long, long after the Beach Boys’ original lineup had been shaken up one too many times, wholly and individually.

If it wasn’t for Full House, would I have become such a big Beach Boys fan?

I like to think that their music would have found me somehow, some other way. Maybe I would have taken a chance on those cassette tapes anyway.

But do the Beach Boys keep me coming back to Full House? Not sure about that one, but I do know that when their songs come on those reruns, the nostalgia gets turned all the way up to 10.

"Nice boots..."

2011-10-13T09:07:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I blogged but my new book, Amphetamine Heart, is about to launch and the build up to it all has been taking up a lot of my time.

When I have had downtime I've been working steadily at PostApoc, the novel that's been my major project all year so far. I am writing and editing it as I go, which is a longer approach. Some days it's not about reaching a specific word count so much as improving on what's already on the page.

This week, though, I've been able to get a lot of new content into it and I'm starting to see different sides to the book's characters. Last time I blogged an excerpt from PostApoc it included a character named Jessie.

This excerpt references an boozecan that was on Portland, south of Queen. I'm not exactly sure if it was closer to Richmond like it is in PostApoc, but it's a place that I often reference or draw influence from in my writing. It was someone's basement apartment and it was filthy and disgusting and kind of creepy. At least that's how I remember it, and of course those memories are pretty hazy.

Here, Jessie gets to bring her perspective on her earliest experiences and reactions to the beginning of the end of the world:

--

Jessie:
I chased the flames because they were taking from me; the fire had been stealing my sleep, cutting crescent moons under my eyes. I chased the flames until they became the same colour as the sky.

Black, curls of orange could have filled me in seconds.

Instead: a finger caught in the dip of my throat. Pressed. You have something that used to be mine, he said. Breath on my cheek.

I didn’t have anything anymore.

Pressure on my chest plate. What’s mine is inside you, he said. A brick wall was at my back but I couldn’t tell if we’d stopped walking. The city was only him and the throbbing trail he’d left down the front of me.

An inch of hair covered his head in velvet. You’ve got be able to tell me something, he said. Face close, a crowding of desperation and the colourless apathy of vodka. His finger then, looping through my jeans. Pulling hard enough to almost rip the denim.

Come, he said. You can think of it on the way.

What he showed me: kids living in the old boozecan at Richmond and Portland, mold growing on the baseboards and stained snot greet carpet. The kids had painted their nails with scum and wore striped knee socks and pigtails, tarnished glitter from old parties still hanging onto crevices below their eyes, in their ears.

They were living off their old prescriptions and said their bodies were reacting in neon expulsions.

They greeted me with palms up, skittered offerings. I pinched something hard and white out of one of their hands and swallowed.

Stories, they said.

What? I asked.

Stories. That’s why she’s here, right? They asked, looking to the guy.

I didn’t even know his name.

Think so, he said, and raised his eyebrows at me.

We’re already forgetting, one of them said. It might have been a girl.

Forgetting what? I asked.

Everything. What everything was like.

I told them:

Everything started to SOUND LIKE THIS from behind doors, telephone wires and trees. Everything with its dark air and it had all gone cold, like the city was breathing out from the basement. Temperature misplaced against the heat and the heat and the heat. Something swung shut behind me and I let myself be swallowed because I knew I’d be pulled back up with the string of a song, an old scent. Something. But when there was nothing to follow I made something up. Soon I couldn’t even feel my feet, wasn’t touching the ground anymore. I thought, once, maybe, that a song was finally getting any closer. It was all louder in my head just LIKE THIS, but even after following it for what must have been days it wasn’t closer to being real.

I didn’t know what to say after that, so I put my tongue on the roof of each of their mouths and waited for someone to kiss me back.

When I opened my eyes again the first thing they said to me was NICE BOOTS WANNA FUCK?

I didn’t even know if I still had feet to put boots on. All I could do was find the slope of the floor, headfirst, and stare. Into someone’s eyes.

We waited to be hit by light through a window.

Perfect Youth: Journalist Sam Sutherland documents Canadian punk from coast to coast

2011-09-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

A few years back, Sam Sutherland, Toronto-based music journalist and Junior Battles vocalist and guitarist, set out on what might possibly be one of the toughest passion projects you could imagine: to uncover and document Canada's '77 punk history from coast to coast.

There's no doubt that punk fans are hungry for a book like this. Just wondering about the story of lone punk bands behind the pine curtain is enough to peak any music geek's curiosity. But when you start to wonder about the logistics behind pulling it altogether - tracking people down in cities throughout each province, finding story threads, structuring it all from beginning to middle to end - the process behind it becomes hard to imagine.

Lucky for us, Sutherland's resiliency and dedication has helped see the project through. Even though we'll have to wait until 2012 for ECW Press to publish the finished product, Sutherland let me ask him some questions about the process behind Perfect Youth.

--

Liz Worth: What’s your experience been with interviewing people outside of Toronto for this? Did you find a difference between talking to people here, who were part of one of the country's most major punk scenes, to talking to people from smaller scenes and smaller communities?

Sam Sutherland: People outside of Toronto are totally different, totally different. The people outside of Toronto, there was never any expectation that they might make it and I think as much as the people in Toronto claim that they were doing it just to do it, they were still in a major city and a major entertainment centre at that time, and in the back of their heads they thought they were gonna be rock stars. I don’t think it matters what anybody says, if you start a band you want somebody to like your band.

But if you are making experimental noise punk in Cape Breton, you are only making music because this is how you need to express yourself. So there’s a lot less bitterness and nobody really has their back up about anything. There are more people being shocked that you tracked them down. If you’re trying to find people in Regina to talk to about punk rock, they would be shocked, but then they would also be really happy to talk about it.

For a lot of people outside of those [Toronto and Vancouver] scenes, there’s a real innocence to the way they talk about it. Nobody expected anything and nobody can believe anyone would still give a shit.

And a lot of them, because of the internet, what’s fuckin’ crazy is they now see their singles, that they thought nobody gave a shit about, being sold online for a few hundred bucks because anything from ’77 has been super fetishized. It doesn’t matter if it’s good, it doesn’t matter where it’s from, people want it.

The Extroverts, a band from Regina, only toured in the Prairies and now you see their stuff online and it goes for a couple hundred bucks. Those people see that and they don’t feel like that reverence is owed to them. They’re mostly shocked and so it makes the interviews, in some ways, more difficult, because they haven’t thought about it in so long. You have to coax stuff out or do a couple of interviews. It’s literally night and day between Toronto and everyone else.

It also totally depends on the person. Like there’s that movie, Bloodied but Unbowed, and there were people in Vancouver who were like, "I already did an interview for this movie." And I’d be like, "but that movie’s not even out yet."

“It doesn’t matter, I said everything I wanted to say in that movie.” And I was like, "but what if that movie doesn’t cover it? A book is not the same thing as a movie."

LW: And you don’t know how they’re going to cut it. Your interview might not even make it.

SS: Right. And that movie is primarily about D.O.A., which makes sense. D.O.A., Subhumans, Pointed Sticks, those are the bigger bands out there. It’s an hour and a half long movie and you think everything you want to say in the world is going to be in that movie? You should probably consider doing another interview.

LW: How has it been finding people in places you don’t live in?

SS: It was awesome because I never went to journalism school, so my journalism experience is having a zine in high school and writing for Exclaim!, so I felt like I was a fuckin’ film noir gumshoe where I would have to go through eight people to finally get someone’s number. I was just jumping from person to person to person and I would have to extrapolate.

There’s this band called the Slime who were a punk band in ’77. They actually have a website but the website hasn’t been updated in, like, 18 years. The email was bouncing or I wasn’t hearing back from them, so I found an article someone had about them written for some newspaper in St. John’s, so I contacted that person.

I had to trace a weird line of people sometimes to get to where I wanted to get to. That was the fun part. I hate the serious mechanics of writing – like I don’t mind sitting down and writing, but I really just like talking to people and finding people. If I could just think about the book and it would just appear that would be cool.

You’re not only getting in touch with people, but finding out who the popular bands were. You can objectively look at Toronto and you can say pretty easily, "these are the top three or four bands that defined that era." But you can’t do that in Saskatoon. It takes four years of researching until you’re like, "oh, sweet, the only punk band in Saskatoon is actually only the Northern Pikes." So that’s really cool when you make those connections, just trying to figure out who the notable punk bands were. Like, in Edmonton, who were the notable bands before SNFU? It’s sort of like working backwards and finding out what was happening before that. I have notebooks of insane diagrams of like this band is this band and then turned into this band.

I seriously felt like a fuckin’ private eye.

LW: Did you have to make a decision to draw lines around which bands you were going to focus on more than others? How did you determine the criteria?

SS: If other people were talking about them, they were important. In some cities I’d develop trust and rapport with someone and I’d be like, "who mattered in Calgary?" Then I might do the same with someone else and they might contradict the other person’s answer, but over time you could piece together sort of what is a reasonable picture of that city.

The bottom line is that if a band went through the trouble of recording, they were probably kind of serious and probably important in some ways. It’s not that it’s easy. It’s really hard when you start talking to someone you like that and then you realize their band isn’t really a part of the story you’re trying to tell.

My book’s divided into some band chapters, if the band was big enough. There’s a Viletones chapter, there’s a Subhumans chapter, but then the other chapters focus on whole cities, like there’s a Montreal chapter.

It’s also arbitrary and some people are going to be really pissed about it, I’m sure, which I only came to terms with about six months ago. I was sitting with my girlfriend and we were talking about it and I was like, "there’s a chance people aren’t going to like the book, and it just hit me."

LW: But the responsibility of a writer is to tell a story. It’s not to indulge in people’s feelings, and the reader can’t be expected to do that, either.

SS: I started to think about how what I publish is going to be the history of Montreal punk until someone writes a book specifically about it. That’s fucking scary, and so having to make those decisions is scary. It’s tough.

It’s weird, too, because my book has about 20 chapters, so the average number of interviews per chapter is less than 10. I wish it could be more, but I can’t do 100 interviews for Calgary and then have it just be a chapter in a book.

I just really hope that someone can come in and provide more details on these stories because there are amazing stories that I can’t tell, because it’s not a book about Calgary or Montreal one specific place, so I hope other people will do books about these cities alone.

LW: Why did you even want to do a coast-to-coast punk book? The structure must have been really tough.

SS: Canada is its own weird beast and I think there’s no unifying factor between Victoria and St. John’s but there is this element of otherness and outsider-ness that was completely lacking from any other punk scene in the world at that time.

What I think is so crazy is that there were kids in all of these places – there are kids in Winnipeg and kids in Saskatoon and kids in St. John’s – who heard punk records at the same time as the people who would go on to form the Dead Kennedys and TSOL in L.A. or second wave punk bands in New York or whatever, but who couldn’t connect, and they couldn’t leave.

And that’s the same across the board, so in that way the music has this similar weirdness. They grew up going to weird hall shows to see weird bands that didn’t really come together. These people would pick up Rock Scene magazine or a new record and feel like they had to be like the people they saw in there, but they never could be because they were in Canada.

And so even though there is no common thread between Newfoundland and Saskatchewan, there is this similarity of spirit. If you’re in England, even if you’re in different cities, the country’s not that big. But when you think of the cultural isolation of being in Winnipeg, looking down at Toronto, you can’t even fathom it.

See you in September

2011-08-09T12:42:00.000-07:00

Hello!!

If you're wondering where I am this month, you can find me at Open Book Toronto. They've invited me to be their Writer in Residence until the end of August, and I'll be blogging over there all month long.

Come check it out.

xoxoxo

"No matter what, no matter where": an interview with Bob Bryden

2011-07-28T12:21:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen Almost Famous? In it, Cameron Crowe's character is told to never make friends with the band he's interviewing.

I can't say it's advice I've put into practice in my own life, and Bob Bryden is one example. I first met him when I interviewed him about his experiences in the Hamilton music scene, but that's only one layer of his life story. Bob's history includes psych-prog cult bands Christmas and Reign Ghost; work helping youth and families; and performing gospel tunes in jails, coffee shops, and old folks homes, and much, much more.

One of the great things about becoming friends with people you already see as interesting is that the conversation can just keep going. It doesn't end when you hit the "stop" button on the tape recorder. Bob's the kind of person that always leaves me with something to think about after we've talked. During our most recent hangout, the seed he planted was from a sign he found in a walkway garden New York City: "Keep it wild. Keep on the path."

For some reason, it got me to thinking about an interview I did with Bob back in 2007 for Hamilton's H Magazine. The article I was working on was to support Bob's solo album Polaroid Verite, a record that heavily references everyone's favourite Steel City, Hamilton, and one street in particular, James Street North. The conversation skewed a lot towards the influence our geography has on us personally, and creatively.

When I started reading through the interview, it synched up with a lot of other things I've recently been thinking about and talking about. A big one is that everyday life is part of the creative process. So often we talk about creative process as if it's something separate from the rest of our time, something to schedule and set aside and turn on and off. When you start to do that you forget that just getting out there and living your life is the most important thing you can do. That's what will help you shape your projects the most.

When I re-read the interview, I found that it not only taps into a tough but fascinating time in one musician's life, but I also found it to read like a live-off-floor creative manifesto.

I wanted to share it all with you. Hopefully Bob won't mind.

--

Liz Worth: Can you ever truly leave a place that you’ve lived in?

Bob Bryden: I was born in Ottawa, lived in Ottawa till I was twelve, then spent ten years in Oshawa, then a few years in Toronto and traveling around. I spent a year in Vancouver, ten years in Hamilton, ten years in Burlington. I’ve done Ontario – can I please leave now?

It’s convoluted. It’s conflicted because it’s love/hate with the places you’re from – in my case it’s places. I mean, I think it produces – I would never recommend people be transient when they have children, really, because I don’t know where I’m from, which has worked for me and against me all my life. I feel like there are times when I love all of these places and there are times when I say, "I hate all of these places, get me out of here."

But I think it’s limitation, and I’m really trying to break out of some limiations. With the new CD and with everything I plan to do from this point, I really do want to be a citizen of the world. I think I’ve made a world-class product so I want to take it there. I don’t want to be negative or diss the places that have been supportive, obviously not. What was the question again?

LW: Can you ever leave a place?

BB: No – my answer would be no, never. And the people who say they can or do are in denial, because wherever they are, someone’s going to walk down the street from wherever they are. I do think it’s very important to be reconciled with your past, but escape it? Never.

I mean, that’s part of what I’m doing and why I’m doing everything I’m doing right now is because there was a time when I denied it, a time when I denied whole sections of it.

I’m back, and I feel really good about that.

Those periods of denying who you are is really, really complex because I think most of us struggle with who we are. And I think if we’re healthy we come up with some definitions and then we try to live those definitions out.

"It’s one thing to romanticize hell, to live in a rock n’ roll fantasy of hell. It’s another thing to feel like you're really there."

LW: So why did you choose to go back to James Street in Hamilton for Polaroid Verite?

BB: I had originally chosen two images for the album's front and back cover. They were very light.

I submitted these images to my production team. These guys say no – and to qualify their position, these are people who have put in as much time on the project as I have. They have a vested interest on many levels – creatively and even financially, let alone the time. So they said no.

I said, "okay, fine, but there’s some light stuff on this album, isn’t there?" And they’re saying, and this is another quote – "even when you’re light, you’re intense," which is a complete contradiction in terms. Even when I’m light, I’m intense – okay.

I said, "okay, you want intense, let’s go for intense." So then I rounded up Kyle Weir. I just love this guy. He’s just wonderful. He’s the darling of the Hamilton scene photography-wise. Everything he does is for love. He’s a maniacal photographer.

Anyway, I tell Kyle, "you know what we’ll do? We’ll go to James Street North." Just over half the album is written about and inspired by James Street North. Well, it turns out that we get there on a cold winter night – really cold. It was in December. We’re under duress technically because his camera can’t stay out very long. He’s got to get his camera back in the car. We do this commando raid on James Street North from Wilson Street up to Barton, which is right where I used to live.

So we get out and we only have about three or four minutes at a time. So we choose our targets, we choose where we’re going to be and what we’re going to do, and we get out there in the darkness of James Street, in the alleys and then right out in front, just right outside the door of the place where I used to live above a store. It used to be a stereo store. I don’t know what it is now, a pool hall and something else.

Anyway, we get out, we start snapping away, taking pictures, runnig here, running there, back in the car, run in, run out. A little while into this process Kyle says to me, "I don’t know what came over you. I just don’t know what came over you. Once you got into the flow of being there, something just took over. You just seemed to have a whole different persona or something." So I said, "oh, I know what came over me – James Street came over me and I was remembering."

I was feeling it again.

See, now it’s Jamesville. They’ve cleaned it up. They’ve literally done a renovation of the street. It’s all very pretty now. There are art galleries. Well, back when I was doing my James Street crawl it was not from one art exhibit to another. It was from one degradation to another. It was awaful there in a sense. I mean and I was doing the whole Bohemian thing.

I wasn’t totally morose about it, because there was the bohemian element, but it was a rough neighbourhood, a seriously rough neighbourhood. Cut to the chase – the pictures are a reflection of what the street was to me and the epxeirence there, and that’s why it looked so severe. It was a severe time. You just listen to "Leopard Skin Cadillac" and there you have it. That's one of those songs that writes itself in the morning.

"My standard rap at the time was, 'I don’t know how I got from the pinnacle to here, but here I am'."

All of the lyrics [on Polaroid Verite] relate to events. Three doors down from me, on the other side of the street, somebody barricaded someone into their apartment above a store and set it on fire and the person inside died. That was in the headlines.

If I kept my window open in the summer - you know there’s those lines "about girl shuffles, moanin’, drunks on her heels, wheezin’ and groanin’, that’s how it feels." People were being chased down the street. And this is probably like every day on Broadview or every day on the Danforth [weird aside: this interview was done in 2007, the year I moved to Kensington Market and was still a die-hard westender. I now live in the east end neighbourhood Bob mentions in this interview] but for me at the time, I was a middle class kid and the whole thing was, how did I get to this place? How did I get from the stage at Massey Hall and having Jazz and Pop magazine – this was a really high profile magazine – saying my band was the next Led Zeppelin to being where I am?

So my standard rap at the time was, "I don’t know how I got from the pinnacle to here, but here I am." It was pretty rough. I don’t have romantic things to say about James Street.

And then rumour was that it had the highest homicide rate in Canada at the time I lived here. Rough neighbourhood, rough times, rough song for me.

Ironically there is a lighter song on the album that’s also a James Street Song that’s called "Say Sleep Tight To Me." If you look at the words there’s some deep stuff in there, conceptually. It talks about parents who eat their children before they get old, that’s pretty heavy. There’s a lot of stuff about abuse and things in there, but it’s also from a real life experience. There was a friend, a girl, who would call me and literally say "sleep tight" to me. She knew what I was going through and she’d call me.

It’s one thing to romanctize hell, to live in a rock n’ roll fantasy of hell. It’s another thing to feel like you're really there. Anyway, "Say Sleep Tight to Me" is a real experience because it used to cheer me up.

LW: Did you come out of James Street a different person?

BB: Most definitely. It’s easy to be brave from a distance. I still don’t consider myself street savvy, to be honest with you. I still consider myself a displaced middle class kid going "life sure is messed up – when you get downtown." (Laughs)

Anything you do in your life that wakes you up, smartens you up, makes you a little tougher...I’ve found out in the last few years that I’m nowhere near as tough as I thought I would be. Next to James Street the hardest thing I’ve had to do is a have normal job – semi-normal.

Changed me, yeah. You know, thank you for your first question – can you ever leave. Definitely not. The more I go on, the more I realize you can’t leave. You can never leave. I just believe you can build upon, you can add upon. But I do believe you can restore foundations. If you’ve been damaged and the foundation’s faulty, I think you can go back and restore it. But leave? No. It’s always there. James Street is always there.

It seems to me other people can move on. I don’t. It’s all there, all the time, but it’s right here. It’s that close to the surface, whatever it was.

Mind you, I don’t go out of my way to forget it, either.

LW: So how much would you say geography influences art?

BB: That’s really cool – how does geography influence art?

Everything is about where you’re located and how that interacts with your sensitivity. So what is an artist? A person who notices things.

I always qualify that because I deal with a lot of people who aren’t artists and don’t get any of it. It’s not always fun to be the one who notices things. It’s no fun being the one who notices things, and then the biggie is that people around you definitely don’t like it when somebody notices things. They don’t like it when somebody’s noticing the ills of a situation, the toxic ills in a situation or a person or a family or whatever.

So yeah, people don’t like what you’re noticing and then you’re anathema, you’re outcast. What was the whole `60s about? Noticing things. What was the `70s about? Noticing things. Every revolution is about somebody notices something and doesn’t like what they see and decides they’re gonna do something about it, no matter how shallow or how deep. When I say shallow that’s the fashion realm. When I say deep it’s the sociological and spiritual change that’s affected. It’s a war. You tend to go to war with your environment.

Art reacts against and interacts with its geography. The geography of James Street, it is a phase to me, ’83 to’87, so it wasn’t my whole life, although I'm not exaggerating when I say I probably had 50 songs from that street. There are songs that aren’t on this new album that I would love to do someday.

"An artist is going to produce no matter what, no matter where."

LW: Would you do the whole thing over again?

Now you bring up a heavy concept. It’s a concept I’m labouring over these days, and that’s the concept of regret. I saw another album by another artist somewhere that was called No Regrets and I just look at that and I go, "you gotta be kidding."

I think anyone without regret is either an absolute jerk with no feelings or totally in denial. Your conscience is this functioning, flowing mechanism within you that somehow operates within your brain and your emotions that tells you right and wrong and all that kind of stuff.

I am riddled with regrets. I don’t let them destroy my life. I don’t let them cripple me from moving forward. That would be stupid. I have tons of regrets. I regret tons of choices I made, decisions I made: "that was stupid, what was I thinking?"

It’s not so much would I – it’s completely hypothetical because I can’t. I can’t change any of that.

You talk about geography, the artist. If he or she is a real artist, he or she is going to produce no matter what, no matter where. So I’m really glad for what I produced on James Street. I think it was probably one of the dumbest decisions of my life to go live there, and I was probably living in a poverty mentality.

Now that’s a whole other issue, to have a poverty mentality. It’s one thing to be born into poverty, it’s another to be dragged into it. I was dragged into it. What person doesn’t look at some choices and say, "I wish I hadn’t done that?" Well, yeah. I think if Polaroid Verite were to become a hit album and pave the way for five more albums like it, I would say, "I loved James Street. Let’s go back to James Street and live it again and this time bring the entourage."

No, it doesn’t happen. I don’t regret any of the art. To me life is a songwriting lesson, so anything that helps that is good.

And it’s there, I can’t deny that. I was glad to get out of James Street. I was glad when that phase ended, and you know what? I don’t really know.

"A real artist is going to produce no matter what, no matter where."

If being an artist is partially about geography but probably more so about your sensitivity level, you can create anywhere. You can create anything anywhere. I can get as much inspiration out of a look on the street. A fleeting image on the street can create a whole song. I don’t have to live there. I’m glad I did, though. I can’t change it and I’m glad for what I created out of it, but I think I can write songs about those kinds of things without experiencing them to the same extent.

LW: What do you think of the gentrification happening in the James Street neighbourhood?

BB: A big part of me rests in Hamilton, but I don’t know. I have a song called "Bow Tie Charlie" and Bow Tie Charlie was an actual person who lived in the dumpster in the lane beside my house.

There was an alley beside my apartment and then right beside the alley was Christ Church Cathedral, this massive Anglican cathedral where the rich people would come on Sunday mornings. I don’t think anybody in the neighbourhood went to the church, which is insane. This church would fill up on Sunday mornings and I’d just go, "where do you people come from? You’re not from the neighbourhood."

Meanwhile, right in the alley, next to the church Bow Tie Charlie lives in the dumpster. There’s the rub. There’s the problem.

I think I gave Bow Tie Charlie some money sometimes. So dichotomy, schism, conflict, conflicted, paradox, Hamilton – very, very strange place.

In a good way.

Bob Bryden can be found at http://www.bobbryden.com/

Doing the unstuck

2011-07-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

Luckily, I'd been in this headspace before and I knew what to do.

For anyone who checks in with me here on a regular basis, you'll know that I've been working on my first novel throughout the year, which I'm just calling PostApoc for now.

Even though I've done a lot of writing, among it all two books, it doesn't mean I know how to write anything or everything, and it doesn't mean it always gets easier.

I've always compared long-term projects to relationships: you have days where you're totally in love. It all feels right. It feels like it's "the one." And then the next day, out of nowhere, hard questions creep up: is it just a phase? Hormonal? Naive? Wrong?

Earlier this week, I had one of those bad days. A day where I felt stuck. Just a few days before, I'd felt like my novel was going exactly where I wanted it to, thrilled that I'd started it in the first place.

And then, when I sat down to write, nothing happened. I had no thoughts. I looked over my notes of where I wanted it to go next and couldn't imagine any of those threads coming together.

I looked at the words on the page and felt sad.

1. Trust that it will pass.

The doubt and insecurity will go away. The trick is to not encourage them to linger. Convince yourself that your project sucks and eventually you will start to believe it. Convince yourself that your project still rocks, as much as you believed it did when you first started, and it will.

2. Get it back on track

Sometimes, doubt comes up because there's a flaw or snag in your work that you don't like. Don't continue to build on a weak foundation. Go back, fix it up, and then move on. You'll feel better when you aren't distracted by something that you know could be better, and you will also feel more confident knowing that any other imperfections that come along the way (and they certainly will show up) aren't anything you can't handle.

3. Go back to the beginning

Before you started your project, you probably made some notes or sketches with early ideas. Use these notes as a guide to keep you motivated and inspired. They will remind you of how excited you were when you first came up with your idea, and when you first decided to commit yourself to it.

Sometimes, after you've looked at something for an extended period of time, it's hard to remember how it all started. These early notes will also remind you of your initial vision and help get you back on track.

4. Spend time with your influences

Where do you draw your influences from? Did the project you're working on now spring from any specific insipirations?

Re-read a novel or listen to an album or a lecture that moves you. Don't do anything else while you delve back into earlier inspirations, like watch TV. Just let yourself focus on that one book or movie or whatever it is and refamiliarize yourself with everything about it that once gave you a spark.

What about that piece of work, or its creator, made you want to push yourself in the first place?

You might find it hard to give yourself permission to take the time out to re-read or re-watch or re-listen to something you've already digested. Ignore that feeling. That's just the sound of a society that has confused consumerism for efficiency, making us feel like we always have to move on to something new.

This is studying. It is reflecting.

5. Don't worry

Okay, easier said than done, I know. Remember at the beginning of this post how I talked about projects being like relationships?

Every relationship has its blah moments, even the strongest ones.

Still, no matter how many times you've been there, it can be hard not to worry. Instead of forcing progress, look back at a different project, something you completed in the past that you are proud of. It's good to remind yourself that you are capable of pulling off a nice piece of work.

And if you don't have anything that makes you feel that way, look back again to the beginnings of your current project. Take a look at how far you've come, and then, just for a day or two, leave it alone.

It will come back to you. Sometimes all you need is a little time apart.

The art of regret

2011-06-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

In Toronto you can always tell summer's arrived when you start noticing what a heavily tattooed city this is. It doesn't seem like you see much skin anymore without it leading to a sprawling script across someone's chest or a bright, solid sleeve down an arm.

But while it's obvious that tattoos are gaining popularity and acceptance with every year that goes by, there are plenty of reminders throughout the warmer months that tattoos still have a ways to go before they're barely noticed at all, if we ever truly reach that point.

I've heard stories of boldly brutal comments made about people's tattoos. Back in May, I had an exchange with a girl in who'd pretty much been told, by a total stranger, that she'd ruined her life by getting tattoos. Recently, I read an article in Bizarre's all-tattoo issue about a woman who'd been told she looks "grotesque," also by a total stranger.

Given that it takes time and energy and emotion to walk up to a total stranger, or to anyone, really, and say what you really think, I always believe that you must really, truly mean what you're saying in that moment to carry out that action.

And after hearing stories like those, I always think I've been pretty lucky that the most I usually get will be questions about my tattoos: "Can I see them? What do they mean? What do they say? Where did you get them?"

And then a couple weeks ago I was out grocery shopping when I got a different question. An employee who was busy stocking shelves stopped to ask, "So, you like tattoos, huh?"

"Yeah," I said. I was in a hurry, and I was getting my period, and it was hot outside. Not a good combination for talking to strangers. I just wanted to get in and out and back home, so I avoided eye contact and kept grabbing what I needed out of the dairy aisle.

"So, you're going to have those tattoos forever? Those are forever?" He asked.

"Yup," I said, still avoiding eye contact, a plan that I was quickly realizing wasn't working.

"I thought about getting a tattoo for a while, but then I decided not to. You always hear stories about people who get tattoos and then they get surgery later on to remove them, because they don't want them anymore," he said.

At this point I had what I needed in my cart and started to walk away. I didn't answer his question or follow up on his statement in anyway. I just wasn't in the mood for it, and didn't feel the need to justify anything to him.

But of course, as soon as I got out of there I couldn't stop thinking of all the things I would have/should have said to him.

It's true that people regret tattoos they get. But people regret a lot of things, and out of all the big decisions you might make along the way - buying a house, getting married, having kids, changing careers, putting your parents in a home, putting a kid up for adoption, having an abortion, quitting a job, breaking a law, getting divorced, breaking up, making up - tattoos, to me at least, aren't really all that big of a decision in the grand scheme of things. It's not the same as making a life or sharing a life or taking a make or break risk.

It's only skin, and skin is not forever: it's only until you die.

I tried to think of what bothered me the most about what this guy had said. Was he implying, or assuming, that I couldn't commit?

Was he saying that tattoos will naturally lead to regret? That inevitably we all change our minds?

Or was it that he was talking about my body itself? That I'd modified it, and now he was sizing it up, seeing the tattoos more as an accessory rather than something that has been forever absorbed into me, and that is now just me and not something separate.

I was, and probably still am, overthinking this guy's questions and comments. Maybe he just wanted to have a conversation. Maybe I should have taken the five or ten minutes and just talked to him about it.

If I had, I would have explained to him that I do have regrets, but that my regrets aren't in the physical, but in the emotional. I can't say what will happen down the road - we all change, many, many times throughout our lives - but I hope that my regrets are only ever in my head and heart.

I try not to regret too much, but it's hard. I regret my relationship with D.

I regret blowing off a trip to London with my mom when I was 18 because I'd gotten the chance to go with a friend instead, and was too self-absorbed at the time to care that she felt hurt about it, or to think of the excitement she'd felt towards it, the money she'd saved, the vacation time she'd set aside. (This, 11 years later, is still one thing I have trouble even talking about.)

I regret that I was so impatient in my early 20s to get a writing career off the ground that I lost perspective a lot of the time on the importance of personal experience and relationship maintenance. It's a balance that now, approaching 30, I still struggle to understand.

These are the types of regrets I hope will always carry more weight than anything physical. I got my first tattoo when I was 17 - a black spider on my shoulder - and while it's not something I would choose for myself now, I am still okay with it 12 years later.

If I've already committed myself to tattoos - many people talk about getting tattooed as making a commitment to it as a lifestyle - for 12 years and counting (I just got a new one this week), then I think I'll be okay for a while yet.

Not that the grocery store guy would know any of this about me. But maybe that was part of the reason why his comments struck such a chord. Just like the women I mentioned earlier in this story must have been caught off guard as well: how do you know someone's made a mistake if you don't know anything abou them?

Of course, this guy also wouldn't have known that I have had a tattoo removed before. Understanding all too well the lengthy process, and amounts of pain, time and money required to laser off a big ol' black and gray piece off of a very delicate forearm, I'm very careful about the tattoo choices I make.

Whenever people learn I had a tattoo removed they most often ask if it was someone's name. As if no one gets any other kind of tattoo removed.

It wasn't someone's name, but I will decline saying what it was because the tattoo itself wasn't what bothered me about it. The reason I got it removed was right after I got it done, about 11 years ago, a whole bunch of bad shit went down and I entered into what I'd considered at the time to be the second-worst time in my life.

When I started to get myself out of that time I felt the tattoo only reminded me of negativity and bad luck and bad people and bad everything. It had bad vibes and I wanted it off. I wanted to start clean and go back to the way I was. And even though I could never totally go back to the way I was (we never can, can we?), removing the tattoo was something I thought would help me at least get close to it.

And so I know about regret, and about mistakes. We all do. Whether they take the form of tattoos is up to each of us, but I know one thing for sure: the person I am now would be very disappointed to look back at this life and say they went through it completely unscathed and unmarked.

PostApoc: Chapter 4 flashback

2011-06-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

About a month ago I was coming out of a brutally busy stretch of time and decided I needed to take a step back from working on my novel, still called PostApoc for now, and just hang out and relax a bit.

But then what happened was my break got hijacked with more stuff to do, and for a few weeks I was sidetracked yet again, taking way more time away from my writing (and my blog, and other things...) than I'd originally planned.

This week I'll be back at it again, but to make up for some lost time on this I thought I'd share another little excerpt from PostApoc, in the hopes of giving it some added momentum this week by getting a bit of feedback on how it's feeling.

If you missed the first round, you can take a look here.

This piece here is from the same character's perspective, Ang. It's alternating between different voices, but so far Ang's feels the most ready to be heard.

Chapter 4. Ang

Jessie showed up here two nights ago. She’s looked at me but hasn’t seen me yet, her eyes swimming for focus, face all grin. The rest of her is legless, muscles tenderized as if someone’s kneaded powdered valium right into the meat of her.

The last time we made out was a while ago, back when we still got winter, snow. It was eight in the morning on a Sunday. We’d spent the night at a friend’s place, tripping on acid and then crashing out in the bottom bunk on a twin mattress. I’d woken up with sweat coming through my clothes, Jessie’s body tight against mine and practically unconscious.

I’d crawled over her to get to the bathroom. Waiting for the tap water to run cold I lit a cigarette and felt a trickle of acid still working its way through the back of my neck, running up to my brain. The shit we used to get back then would stick around in your system for days sometimes. It was dirty but it was cheap and that’s all that mattered.

I needed an extra breath when the cold water got against my face. I leaned over the sink, elbows propped on the porcelain, and breathed once, twice, three times. My cigarette was making me sick but I was almost down to my last and nothing would be open for another three hours. I sucked back the smoke and swallowed against the nausea. Not like I hadn’t started a hundred other mornings with a little puke climbing through my chest.

Back in the room Jessie was digging through someone else’s jeans, looking for a lighter. I handed her my smoke to get hers going.

A quarter of the party from the night before was crashed out in the living room, on the kitchen table. We were the only ones up.

“Wanna get out of here?” I asked. Jessie nodded. “Just give me a minute to get my shoes, k?”

I’d slept with my boots on, again. Jessie draped my jacket across my shoulders and I eased backwards into it. “Ready?” she asked.

It had snowed all night but the sun was out that morning and the streets were a glaring neon wash that spilled into every vein in my eyes, fractured my vision.

“FUCK,” Jessie said, and then laughed. “It’s actually kind of pretty. Like there’s no one else but us.”

There was not one boot print or drag of a leg in the snow that morning, just stark white streets and the lazy roll of a slow wind. I’d wanted to walk with my jacket open but my shirt was so damp from sleep-sweat that I kept it shut.

Jessie lit another cigarette, took a few drags, offered to split it. The outside air was clean enough to take the feeling of sick away and I accepted the smoke, took it deep as if the cold that came with it could clean me out.

I was still staying with my parents then. Jessie had just gotten kicked out of her place a month before. She’d been staying with her grandmother’s. She’d be in shit when she got there; the old lady didn’t like it when Jessie stayed out all night.

“You wanna come to my place for a bit?” I’d asked at the top of my street. “You can take a shower, eat or something.”

“S’alright,” she’d said. “I’m not worried.”

Jessie held the cigarette between her fingers, filter towards my mouth. “Want one more puff?” I stepped forward and sucked while she held it for me.

We exhaled at the same time, stood between the hiss of the cigarette’s heater as it hit the snow.

“Too bad this won’t last,” Jessie said. “Everyone’ll be out walking their dogs soon, going to the store, shoveling their driveways. They won’t see that it’s actually supposed to be like this. That this is perfect right now.”

I kissed her then. We’d done it before, drunk in a bathroom stall and another time when some guy at a show offered us five bucks if we’d make out for one minute. The top of her lip was a vinegar sting and her mouth was full of the spice of fresh smoke. Her lips relaxed and breathed out a soft promise of heat when her tongue pushed through.

My eyes were closed my eyes and everything had gone green, sun on snow inverted and trapped inside my head. I had holes in both of my socks and the cold was coming through to the inside of the steel toe of my boots. I curled my toes while my tongue curved against Jessie’s cheek.

We pulled and Jessie took a small step back. The snow might have started to soak through my boots by then. “Don’t you have a boyfriend?” she asked.

I did, a week before. “It was casual,” I told her. So casual I’d already started forgetting about him, losing the features of his face in exchange for the soft melt of a girl’s mouth.

It’s kind of funny now, though, how all the people I’d forgotten are all rushing back to me along with every detail of every minute, even things I’d thought I’d let loose forever are back in my head now.

Funny how a year ago I didn’t even try to remember anyone’s name most of the time but now, everyone’s rushing back to me, their names and faces, every boy that ever crossed my hips and every word that left my lips and every look I gave and every one I got back.

And you might not expect that it would matter as much now, all those little things, but the thing is there are just so many people who aren’t around anymore that you try to hold on to every memory that surfaces because it might be all that’s left.

Jennifer Morton's "Dirty, Drunk and Punk" Part Three

2011-05-31T11:41:00.000-07:00

Today brings the final installment of a three-part interview with Jennifer Morton, author of an awesome new book about Toronto punks the Bunchofuckingoofs. The book is Dirty, Drunk and Punk and it's published by Insomniac Press. It's part history lesson, part art book, and it's entirely recommended.

--

LW: Were you afraid of backlash at all? Were you worried about whether anybody from the scene would be mad?

JM: Oh definitely. Maybe I should preface this: the Goofs, although they ran a boozecan, they were not involved with bikers and they were very, very adamant against becoming part of that underground, criminal world.

That said, some of their original members joined the Hell’s Angels and probably don’t really want to be known as a Goof. I didn’t want to offend anybody on that level, and being an outsider I wasn’t sure how tough these guys actually can be towards something they disapprove of.

So yeah, it’s a bit of a fine line, and you don’t know, right? They believe in what they believe in and they’re rough and tumble. They do things differently.

There were a few moments where I was like, “this could be really bad. Why am I doing this book?”

LW: Were there times when you questioned whether you could actually pull this book off?

JM: Oh yes, ha ha ha. I missed the first deadline. For some reason I thought I could get it done in eight months, which was impossible. There were all sorts of things that came up along the way.

With the story, Steve kept leaving town. I had 5,000 photographs to go through. The organizational part of making the book was huge.

But ultimately, if I had lost Steve’s confidence along the way I would have lost the book. And there were one or two episodes of that where he lost confidence, and it was like, oh, how do we get back on board again? Because it was all good – I wasn’t out to get anybody. It was supposed to be a tribute to the legacy of the Goofs, a coffee table book of the Goofs. They don’t have any coffee tables, but…

LW: So who do you think this book is most for – is it for Goofs fans?

JM: I hope it’s not. My idea is it’s for people who are interested in subcultures.

You know, I often think, "why didn’t I ever get on a plane when I was 19 and try to get into Andy Warhol’s factory?"

I’m sort of mad at myself for that. I’m always interested in reading about how other people live, and how they choose to live, and when it’s in your backyard it’s really fascinating that the Goofs have actually managed to last for 25 years – more than most marriages.

My friends who have read the book find it fascinating because it’s a story. A crazy story. Ultimately I hope it reaches other crowds, beyond just the Goofs.

I’m excited about selling it. I think it’s a beautifully designed book. I think it’s gorgeous. You can find little messages in it. Hopefully book lovers will love it: it’s got a nice feel, nice paper, nice weight, nice photographs.

LW: I think that’s another thing that people – that even though it's a very chaotic story, there is this contrast of beauty.

JM: I didn’t want to make it like a cheap collage. The goal was to have a beautiful book to juxtapose the insanity. Too collage-y would have been tiring.

LW: Cliché?

JM: Yeah. The script and stuff is really great. To have those photos, that’s what made a huge part of the book. It’s not full of punk performance shots; there are a couple of amazing ones, but there are a lot of photos of dogs and people just hanging around.

LW: Sometimes when you just give that sense of homemade fashion and candid shots of people hanging around, it really captures the history of the scene.

JM: Even the guys were making their own clothes. The girls were always out there doing their thing, but the guys were, too. It’s great. Punk girls are really great. And brave.

LW: Especially back then, when people would beat you up if you walked down the street like that. You wouldn’t think that would ever happen in downtown Toronto, but it did.

JM: Yeah, they were seen as sluts and freaks. I think it’s interesting that this next generation would never even imagine that it would be like that.

LW: Is there anyone you tried to track down for the book that has come out of the woodwork since?

JM: No, the only guy – Steve left to go out to Asia recently – and I’d been trying to find Johnny the Greek for a year. I asked every butcher, every fish person, everybody. I went up and down the Danforth to find him.

And then Steve goes, the other day, “ahahaha, I woke up the other day and I found Johnny the Greek’s phone number in my pocket.” So that was disappointing. I would have really liked to have spoken to him.

And then there was another guy, Cisco, who they all adored but he was just too hard to find. But I think I got enough.

And then there was a few I didn’t want to find, that I really tried to find and then I got the serious shut down, like “oh my god, I think I’m going to throw up.” I’d say there were two in that category that I’m very happy I never found.

LW: When you finished the manuscript, did you go through a mourning period for it?

JM: Oh yeah, it’s like the high after any project. I’d think, “did I rush the end?” And then when I got the finished product, I thought I was going to throw up. I was shaking.

And then I thought, “what’s next?”

This book took a lot of time and focus and organization. It’s a lot harder than it looks.

But I think these guys, I’m close to them now. They aren’t going to go away. They’re going to be in my life, and I hope that if they ever need anything they call me.

If you want to check out Jennifer Morton's Dirty, Drunk and Punk you can get it here.

Jennifer Morton's "Dirty, Drunk and Punk" Part Two

2011-05-30T09:55:00.000-07:00

Last week, I posted Part One of an interview with Jennifer Morton, author of a new book called Dirty, Drunk and Punk about notorious Toronto punks the Bunchofuckingoofs and the people around them.

A couple days after I posted the first part of this interview I saw Steve Goof riding his bike north on Sherbourne. He came around the corner, on the sidewalk, and cut pretty close to some guy who was on his way into Tim Horton's. The guy's face was bleeding; he'd either just gotten into a huge fight or had some kind of major wipeout.

The guy, who was maybe around 50 years old, flipped out on Steve Goof: "You think you're special? You fucking special? Are you special?"

Steve just kept riding onto Bloor Street, stuck to the sidewalk without much more than a couple glances back.

I think anyone who's spent any time in Toronto's punk scene, hung out in Kensington Market, or who used to go to all ages punk shows at the Big Bop or Planet Kensington has likely had some kind of Bunchofuckingoofs experience or sighting. What's your story?

While you think about it, here's the continuation of my conversation with Jennifer Morton, talking Dirty, Drunk and Punk.

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LW: At the launch of your book, you had a lot of personality happening on stage. I often feel like journalists aren’t encouraged to show who they are, that they should always be neutral.

JM: Yeah, I think that’s true, that objective thing.

It was important for me that the book reflected the Goofs. That, I think, is where the personality came in, since the book is largely told by the Goofs and not by me, because it’s their story, and that would have been a pretty dangerous thing to editorialize on.

So the personality had to come through by understand the Goofs and playing with that, and being a little punk and a little radical. That’s where I thought, too, that the launch would be the last place you’d have to play any sort of journalistic rules, you could just throw them out the window, ha ha ha.

LW: Were you ever tempted to write a straight narrative and editorialize this story?

JM: Not so much. There were points where I thought of putting it more in context of the punk scene in general, but I didn’t feel like I was enough of an authority on that or educated well enough on that, and I didn’t live it. That seemed too enormous and too huge, and what initially had attracted me was their lifestlye more than the music. That’s why that angle’s not in there. And really, to editorialize would have brought in an element of judgment that would spoil the flavour of the book.

They are a bunch of fucking goofs. They are. They wear their name well, but they’re also really great guys and really good guys, and really loyal to each other. They never picked on anybody that was not part of their scene.
LW: There are a lot of nasty rumours around the Goofs, though. I’m not sure how often you encountered those things.

JM: Oh yeah. The women did talk, and a lot of women said it [the Fort] was another home to them, it was a great time, they were there on their own initiative, they were there as much as the guys were. There was sexual freedom and they were completely in control of the choices they made.

However, there are a number of women who have very successful careers and who have changed their lives completely from when they were 16, 17, 18, whatever age they were when they were there, and didn’t want to be associated with the book. And I completely understand that. It’s just disappointing because as a woman I wanted to feature more women and that point of view could have been stronger.

But in the end, it’s a boys’ story, and it’s a great story. The women that did stand up were fantastic and a lot of them showed up at the launch and a lot of them are still really good friends.

I wouldn’t want my daughters to be hanging out in the Fort, not to be a prude, ha ha ha.

There was never any privacy there. Sex was going on right out in the open, and unfortunately they were celebrities within their own circle and that attracted some young girls. Also, the idea of rebelling attracted some young girls, so they came and kind of experimented before they went back to their more mainstream lives.

Steve’s got a lot of women who are crazy about him and loyal to him. He’s very charismatic. There are still women who go, “Oooh, Steve said hi to me today!” Ha ha ha. It’s a weird thing.

LW: While you were working on this, did you end up being inspired by the Goofs in any way in your personal life?

JM: Yes. I love dogs, and I love the way that the Goofs take care of their dogs.

I love that Steve rides his bike everywhere. It’s made me ride my bike more. I rode my bike today and I’ve been on bike rides with him around the city and hanging out, and I always love going into alleyways and exploring and he knows all that.

I’ve been inspired by their non-materialistic side; it’s easy to get caught up in this big buying machine. They live on very little and have a really good time.

And they look after each other, which is really inspiring. Some of htem have had bad health issues or mental issues or money issues, and they don’t walk away or turn their backs. You’re a Goof for life.

That’s really good to see, that the punk pride thing isn’t just about a strut: there’s some good, real deal stuff going on. They all do.

LW: People really idolize Steve, but there seems to be a lot of mystery around him even though he has so many people around him all the time. There’s a big question mark over where he’s from. Were you at all interested in talking to his family? Did you try to track down his mom at all?

JM: In the book, there’s a questionnaire with Steve and his birth name had been in there and he made me remove it. It wasn’t an option to put it in print. The book would’ve blown up in my face if I’d touched his past. He will not share it and does not want it to be shared and guards it. It’s a no-go zone. I probably would’ve been beaten up for that, ha ha ha. Not worth it, not worth it.

He became somebody else. He became Crazy Steve Goof and that’s who is.

LW: Another thing you talk about in your book is that the Goofs really took care of the Market and kept an eye out for anything that looked like trouble. I think some people would be surprised to hear that.

JM: There were two sides to that. One side was like, "well who hired them as the police for the Market?" They took so much pride living in Kensington. If they broke a fruit stand hanging out at the Greeks, they would be back repairing it before the shop opened the next day. They were so anti-coke and anti-crack that they chased out all the drug dealers. I think the shop owners appreciated it.

LW: If people are from Toronto and they know the Market, then people will have seen the Goofs around, even if they don’t know Toronto. I think this book shows a lot the chaos around the Goofs, but it shows a lot of interesting ideas, as well.

JM: Yeah. There’s community: looking after the Market, running for Alderman, their anti-drug campaign. They created a lot of stuff on their own.

LW: Do you think it’s easy for people to write the Goofs off?

JM: I think it’s totally easy for people to write them off. I think it’s hard for a lot of people to see beyond the name, and some of it is incredibly shocking.

There’s all this great, creative stuff, and then I’m sitting there listening to a guy saying, “well, we had this guy over at the Fort and he wanted to kill himself and we thought, we don’t want to hear this whining anymore, so we hung him until he turned blue and then cut him down.”

So I could see how people could turn around and say okay, that’s insane and I don’t need to know anymore. Which is too bad, because it is a really fascinating story. You don’t have to live it.

Okay, I lied! This will be a three-parter. Jennifer and I covered a lot ground. Vodka sodas will do that for you. Part Three will be up this week!

Jennifer Morton's "Dirty, Drunk and Punk" Part One

2011-05-26T10:53:00.000-07:00

In late April, Toronto author Jennifer Morton launched the much-anticipated history of local punk band and clan Bunchofuckingoofs. It was a packed house at the launch party of Dirty, Drunk and Punk, and looked like Kensington Market had invaded Dundas West venue The Garrison.

The great turnout was really no surprise. The Bunchofuckingoofs have a reputation that goes well beyond their music, and are a key piece to Canada's punk history, which Morton first documented in 1989 while working for the NewMusic.

Dirty, Drunk and Punk is light on editorializing and heavy on quotes from the major players in the Goofs' cirlce. Beautifully laid out and full of photographs, it's part coffee table book, part contained chaos.

I had the chance to sit down and talk to Morton about the making of Dirty, Drunk and Punk. There was so much to talk about that I'm making this one a two-parter.

Liz Worth: Let’s start with the obvious: why do a book on the Bunchofuckingoofs?

Jennifer Morton: The Goofs are just a great, great story, like a great Toronto story. It’s almost ficition. You can look through the book and go, "this can’t be real. This is unbelievable. This is outrageous."

And I love that they actually ended up by being outside of society and rejecting mainstream society, they ended up creating their own world, their own sense of family and their own rules and their own way of living, which most of them are pretty loyal to to this day.

And also, what initially really attracted me back in 1989 for NewMusic, was that they were such a creative group. They did t-shirt printing, they did their own tattoos, they had the band. And they were political.

And the other thing about how creative they were is how they lived. They actually built forts that you couldn’t get into. The cops couldn’t get into, skinheads couldn’t get into. Booby-trapped, you know? So you’d get electficied if you came late at night.

And they’d decided to live in these lofts, before loft living, where they built their beds so high so their dogs could sleep underneath and the shock grates that went around and locked the beds at night, so that they could have a bed whenever they felt like it. It wouldn’t be clean but it would be theirs.

Kensington Market was the most ethnic mix in the city to live, and they were accepted here and protected it, it was their home and they were safe and no one came here to threaten them, really, and they could do their own thing. Back in the day the cops weren’t on bicycles going up and down the street patrolling it, so it was really their thing, like Fort Knox.

It’s kind of cool. It’s cool that they ever got a place to live. Today, I don’t think you could be a Goof.

LW: I’ve never thought about that, whether you could duplicate it now.

JM: First of all, rent in Kensington is too expensive, and I don’t think you’d find a landlord who would rent to 20 guys, ha ha ha. If you want to run a boozecan 24-hours a day your chances would be pretty slim.

LW: At your launch, and also in the introduction of your book, you used the word “infiltrated” in talking about getting into the Goofs circle to document their story. That word makes me think of being on the outside – did you feel like an outsider when you first started interviewing them?

JM: Well, yeah. I didn’t go to a ton of punk shows growing up. I’m not mainly a follower of music. I’m older. I’m not older than Steve – Steve’s older than me, ha ha ha –

LW: - We’ll make sure we get that on tape –

JM: So I do feel like an outsider. I felt like media scum, sort of, in 1989, and really found that having a camera was tricky, especially in terms of how much they would let me in.

Doing the book, I thought I’d be able to get a different story that I wasn’t able to get in 1989 and actually have them talk openly to me, which I think I got, and I think obviously it’s a different time for them and they wanted to tell their story.

But I definitely feel like I am an outsider. I didn’t hang at the Fort. I didn’t go to the boozecan; even after meeting them they wouldn’t let me in at night.

LW: Oh really?

JM: Yeah. I didn’t have anybody really in that scene to say I could tag along behind. It’s funny, I have four brothers and one of my brothers said, “I went to the Fort and I was scared,” ha ha ha.

And most people, like Rick McGinnis, who hung around the Goofs all the time and is in the book a lot, he said the other day he never went to the Fort after 7pm, and that’s a guy who was in the scene.

So yes, I was definitely an outsider, but they’re my friends now.

LW: So how did you gain their trust in the beginning?

JM: In the beginning I was always doing the underground beat. I started slowly and hung around.

LW: So you didn’t just show up one day with a camera, then.

JM: No, and I’m pretty aggressive on that front, usually, but I approached Steve [Goof] first and once I got his approval I was pretty much in.

And for the book, it worked out really well because I came to the Market to look for him. It took me about a week to find him; I hadn’t seen him in years, 10 years, and I thought I’d do a photographic essay on him, to follow up.

And then he said he wasn’t really sure what was going on his life. In hanging out with him, he started showing me he’d kept everything; Steve is an archivist. He has everything. When I realized everything was so well-preserved, these incredible photographs, I started thinking okay, there’s a book here.

LW: Did you feel like you were rebuilding trust, and gaining new trust?

JM: The question about trust is interesting because it was gained by giving me the next guy’s phone number, that kind of thing. I even called a couple people who lived at home and their mothers even said, “Does Steve approve?” and they wouldn’t pass the message on if he hadn’t.

Everyone’s always concerned about Steve’s approval: did he know I was doing this, was he on board.

Once the thing was really rolling and really happening then people felt comfortable and started providing me with phone numbers, but it was a little bit of information at a time.

Stay tuned for Part Two of my interview with Jennifer Morton when we talk more about the process behind her new book, and whether she would ever let her daughters hang out at Fort Goof. In the meantime, you can learn more about Dirty, Drunk and Punk at http://www.dirtydrunkandpunk.com/

Bruce LaBruce on zines

2011-05-23T12:52:00.000-07:00

Filmmaker, writer, and photographer Bruce LaBruce starts in final post in my series of interviews about zines, with this one being mostly focused on what was happening in the `80s.

LaBruce co-edited the punk fanzine J.D.s with GB Jones and, like Jones, jumped right into things when we started chatting. Here it goes...

BLB: My involvement in it was all about the punk scene. Zines started out initially in the music world as fan publications for bands and singers and stuff. That kind of transmogrified in the punk world into a more political version of that original fan publication.

Friends of mine in Toronto, like GB Jones who was doing an amazing fanzine called Hide, came out of that music culture. Some had some homosexual content but it was kind of more subtle and subtextual.

When GB Jones and I started an actual queer punk fanzine it was our way of reminding punk rockers that the roots of punk were actually quite queer.

LW: Where did you see zine culture heading as the `80s were ending?

BLB: We were doing it before the internet, so everything was done by mail. It came out of more of an art practice as well and collage and cutting and pasting and doing something very hands on with glue and glue sticks, appropriating images from other sources, like mainstream magazines and porn magazines and fashion magazines and jumbling it up with our own material that we shot. So it had that whole collage aesthetic, but it was very tactile.

With the rise of the web in the `90s, in a way zines became obsolete and everybody had a webpage and it became more popularized. The internet just made that kind of self-expression accessible to everybody, so it became less specialized and more widespread.

LW: Zines also seemed more accessible, though. A lot of stores carried them on consignment. There was a lot of support.

BLB: There were also distribution networks that were more independent as well that don’t exist anymore.

I was in New York recently and somebody was promoting a Butt-style gay publication which is kind of the new thing. Butt caught the tail-end of the fanzine era and now they’re more web-based, but they kind of launched hundreds of these small format alternative queer publications of all kinds.

And this one was from Australia and this guy was in New York looking for distribution and he was shocked that there were no more gay bookstores or independently run retail and distribution stores.

When I would go to New York in the `80s and `90s there was a place called See Hear and it was this incredible small store on 7th Street and it was all alternative publications, but also rare art publications, imprints and really early punk publications. Of course they closed down at least 10 years ago I think, but yeah, those kinds of independent distribution networks are less common now. It’s all corporate.

LW: When you and GB Jones published your zine manifesto in MRR, what kind of influence did it have on zine culture ?

BLB: That was the great thing about punk. Despite the fact that we ran into certain homophobic elements in the secne, it was still a pretty wide open community and they were pretty inclusive of all alternative and non-conformist expression.

But at the same time, something like MRR or Flipside, they didn’t have so much queer material. That was always our thing, that the early roots of punk were strongly queer and sexually diverse, and by the end of the `80s, because of hardcore music and thrash and metalcore and all these macho movements, it had become somewhat homophobic.

So the fact that we were being published in MRR and Flipside and being distributed by Fact Sheet Five and distributed by alternative distributors made quite a big impact. It was sort of a watershed moment and we launched a whole slew of queer fanzines.

I think we were kind of acknowledged as spearheading this explosion of work.

Liisa Ladouceur on zines

2011-05-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

Liisa Ladouceur, music journalist, poet, and author of the upcoming Encyclopedia Gothica (ECW, 2011)also, once upon a time, published a so-called "girlie goth zine" out of Toronto called The Ninth Wave.

I interviewed her for this Broken Pencil article and am featuring the full interview here as part of my current series, which started here, focusing on conversations that I had for the above-mentioned story.

Q: What did you see was the zine's role when you were putting out The Ninth Wave?

A: It was a half-vehicle for personal expression and part vehicle for information dissemination about underground music and ideas. It was also to hopefully meet other people who were interested in those things.

Q: Would you say that that need to connect was mostly on a subcultural level?

A: It felt like it. My zine was a goth zine, so I was in a network of people who did goth zines. Pre-Nine Inch Nails you wouldn’t have read about any of the artists that we were writing about in pretty much any mainstream media. Maybe Alternative Press magazine, but there were very few people covering that stuff, so that’s what it felt like, sure.

And then the other zines I was reading that were outside of goth weren’t writing about things that you wouldn’t have read about in the Toronto Star. This was not just pre-internet; it was also pre-Lollapalooza, before alternative culture got taken to the masses.

Q: Did you have a sense that there was any kind of zine explosion happening in the ‘90s?
A: There was a period of time where you went from being happy just distributing your zine through mail order, one by one, to having this ambition that yeah, you were gonna get your stuff in Tower Records.

I sold my stuff here at Tower Records but I would also mail them to other locations of Tower Records, as if I was some kind of magazine distribution company all of a sudden. And it was exciting to do that, to feel that your stuff was getting out there.

Whether that meant there was an explosion, I don’t know. They were still racked at the very bottom and most of them probably got returned.

Q: Did you feel that there were any key moments that might have led up to zines being that much more accepted? I remember as we got out of the `90s, all that support disappeared.

A: I stopped doing my zine when the internet came around, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Also, there were new independent magazines, like Bust, that came up that started covering those things that were widely available for the same price.

Magazines like that would be writing about some of the same artists I would be writing about. For me, I got joy out of the cut and paste mail order aspect of zines. And then as computers and desktop publishing became more popular and peole were laying out their zines more like magazines and selling them in stores, I lost interest in that, and I think there was a change. And I think people lost interest in buying them.

For goths, for example, when I was doing my zine it was one of many goth zines, and there was one glossy magazine out called Propaganda, which came out intermittently and was difficult to find. You had to mail order it.

By the end of my zine run, in the mid `90s, there were probably half a dozen full size glossy goth magazines, like Permission, Ghastly, and Carpe Noctem. So if you were going to spend six dollars you were probably going to buy one of those. They had beautiful photos.

But they had horrible publishing schedules. These were not coming out every month. They were totally unreliable. You would place an ad – if you were a record company you’d buy an ad for a record that was coming out and the ad would come out eight months later when the guy finally had enough money to put it out.

The writing was still terrible, but they looked like a real magazine. And so there was a certain validation there, I think, for people when they bougth them. And I think that contributed to the actual one-on-one zines dropping off. I think the rise of DIY culture in North America probably had an affect on zines.

So people had these ambitions of running big magazines, but they didn’t have the resources. They were still just indie zine people trying to make these magazines.

It was kind of crazy.

And it’s true. I stopped mail ordering some guy’s hand made cartoons, yeah. I sort of lost interest in that.

I wish I hadn’t gotten rid of all my zines. Over the years that I moved I would purge them and I only have a small handful now of other ones that were done by friends of mine. I had such a huge collection of goth zines, and now I’m buying them up on eBay for, like, four times what I paid for them.

I wish that more people would put them on the internet. I should probably do that. Because otherwise they don’t exist anymore. They’ve disappeared. I know that they do have some at the Toronto Reference Library, but a lot of stuff’s been lost.

I would be mortified to put the poetry I wrote in my zine on the internet today. I would black those pages out. But the other stuff’s kind of neat.

You can see where it changed. I would lettraset the covers, and then my friends started wanting to do the covers and stuff. There was this total fight between my friends who wanted to help me. They’d be like, "why do you want it to be crooked?"

"Because I did it myself."

They didn’t get it.

GB Jones on zines

2011-05-19T18:49:00.000-07:00

The next installment in my series of interviews about the zine's past and present comes courtesy of G.B. Jones of Fifth Column, a beloved Toronto post-punk band. On top of making cool music, Jones is also known for her art, films, and, of course, zines.

When I talked to Jones on the phone for this interview, she just kind of dived into it and we went from there.

G.B. Jones: I guess I started working on zines in the 1980s. I was helping my friend Caroline Azar [also of Fifth Column]. She was doing a zine called Hide with her friend Candy and they would put out a paper issue and it would always be accompanied by a cassette tape.

So we were working on that and what was really exciting about that was, because we were in Fifth Column at the same time, when we would tour all around Ontario to London and Peterborough and Ottawa and Guelph – I think we did the same five towns – and we would meet a lot of interesting bands and we would end up writing back to them and asking them to send a recording to put on the cassette tape. So it was a great way to be able to stay in touch wtih people that you’d met, especially for us as a group.

We started meeting bands who would come to Toronto to play. It just became this way to put out this document of a scene that existed at that time of groups that were playing together and other people that were doing things together, like filmmakers and photographers who Hide also interviewed.

We were talking to people who were outside mainstream culture at the time. You coudln’t go to Hot Topic and pick up your punk t-shirts. Green Day weren’t on top of the charts. Punk was really underground.

And we were also not really a quote-unquote punk band; we were a post-punk band doing weird experimental stuff and we were interested in other people who were doign something unusual.

There was no internet then, as hard as it is for people to imagine what it was like at that point. You really had to write to people and write letters and wait to hear back from them. But it kind of made it more meaningful because if somebody is taking the time to write to you, and vice versa you were investing a certain amount of energy.

Now, if you write an email and someone writes you back ten minutes later, it’s not the same investment of energy. You don’t have to go to the post office.

Fanzines were incredibly important. They were truly a source of information. They had actual addresses and information on msuicans and photographers and other fanzines you might not have heard about. You can’t really even estimate how important that was. It was really one of the few sources of information to find out what was going on in this world that you would not read about in mainstream magazines or, god forbid, on TV, unless it was some misrepresentation of how evil and horrible these kids were.

It was filling a role of artistic and musical expression, and information and companionship. Oftentimes you’d be living in an area where you couldn’t really connect with people who were like-minded. So it really filled so many different functions.

That’s really where the scene existed for lot of people. It didn’t exist in their town. They wouldn’t be going to shows in their town; oftentimes the scene would be happening in the mail.

In a sense that has a lot of similarities in the virtual world that we have now.

LW: I'm really interested in asking about your zine manifesto, the one you wrote in the '80s with Bruce La Bruce. It's often cited as an important piece of writing for zine culture.

G.B. J: I think in a lot of ways the punk scene by that point had become more, how can I say this? I think at the beginning punk was really challenging and wildly non-conformist in so many ways: socially, sexually, in terms of gender roles and women doing an incredible amount of creative work.

Then, at the point that we wrote that manifesto, things had returned to a more traditional, more conservative kind of scene, especially with the advent of the hardcore scene.

It was very much becoming about the days of having four boys in the band and worshipping them and you saw less women in bands and less alternative sexualities or lifestyles.

I think it was kind of a big shocking for people to read that manifesto and realize that there were all these people out there who didn’t think that the present state of punk was all that great, and that it really wasn’t as threatening to the mainstream as it prided itself on being.

I would say it was basically just a mirror of the mainstream world except it had different music and different hairstyle. And then of course we got tons and tons of letters from that, so obviously there was a certain significance.

Although I should say there were groups then that were challenging things, that didn’t conform to stereotypes, but I think the fact that we were wrote a manifesto was very challenging for a lot of people who wanted to think they were very progressive but who’d managed to exclude a lot of people from their scene, like queer people and people who were outside of established gender roles.

So it was like were presenting that as a challenge to them.

LW: As the ‘80s were coming to an end, did you have any observations or feelings on where zine culture was headed?

G.B. J: It seemed like one really useful function of zines is to be able to question all of the complacency and all of the things that mainstream society and also so-called alternative culture really take for granted. I think it’s really good to have these voices that come out of nowhere, basically, to really challenge things, and I think there’s always room for people to do that.

Their voices don’t always necessarily get heard in MRR or even mainstream publications, so I think that’s a role zines will always be able to fill because there will always be a need to challenge the status quo.

And it’s really interesting because kids I’ve been talking to recently are tlaking about how much the riot grrl scene and the queercore scene meant to them, and how that’s kind of vanished.

Obviosuly there are people still doing stuff and there’s a certain amount of activity on the internet, but it’s not really quite the same thing.

I guess they still feel a real need for that kind of thing.

As much as there was a whole bunch of activity at that point in time in the `80s and `90s and things during that period of time changed a lot and created a scene where all these different kinds of people could participate, I think a lot of kids nowadays don’t feel like there is that kind of scene nowadays, and I think they feel a need to recreate that kind of scene.

Tara Bursey on zines

2011-05-16T07:15:00.000-07:00

Continuing with my current zine theme here to build off of this Broken Pencil article about the zine's survival, here are some thoughtful and passionate perspectives from Tara Bursey, a Toronto zinester and artist.

A: I make zines because I always have made them. I never questioned whether I should stop making them. I suspect zine-making was part of the youth culture of a certain time, or a fad for many people, but for me zines have always held a great deal of importance.

I made my first zine when I was 12. After drawing, zine-making was the first creative practice I ever engaged in, and definitely the first creative practice I took seriously enough to work at and put the product of out into the world.

In some ways, I think zine-making really paved the way for my art practice as an adult. I still make zines today. When I was a teenager, I had a zine that went on to do thirteen issues, but now I generally make one-off zines a few times a year, on a variety of topics. I make little recipe zines on Japanese paper, zines of sketchbook excerpts, and I recently made a limited-edition zine on creative practice within the context of the punk community.

My zines now feel tied to my art practice, as opposed to when I was a teenager, they were more tied to punk rock and feeling my way through radical politics.

A huge reason I still make zines is my relationship to the physical act of making them. Making them can be a very long, persnickety process of cutting, pasting, measuring margins by hand, adjusting contrast until you get it just right...it's a very tactile process and the result is very personal. T

here's a level of intimacy and personalization in making a printed zine that you just can't achieve with blogs. This sort of thing applies to reading and the reception of zines, too. There's an intimacy and tactility in experiencing a zine physically that is not common within internet-oriented contemporary culture.

I know that the tactile and tangible quality of zines and the yearning for something physical is what draws a lot of people to them.

Q: What did you see as the zine's role in the '90s? What do you think that role has become in the '00s?

A: In the mid-90s, the internet wasn't nearly as widespread as it is today, so the role of print media in general was one of greater importance then than it is now. Zines were definitely an alternative voice in print at that time.

I remember as a teenager, it seemed like a revelation that you could make your own little books and for twenty bucks you could make 15 of them and put them in two or three shops on consignment, or trade them with your friends, or trade ad space with another zine and sell your zines through the mail that way.

The zine community was very much an in-person and through-the-mail phenomenon back then. People were actively forging relationships and community this way, and in retrospect, while it took a lot of time and effort, I never thought of that part of it.

It just felt like I was part of something bigger than myself and my suburban, teenage life...it was exciting!

Of course, the internet has really changed this sort of thing. What constitutes as an alternative voice in this day and age? Everyone has a voice on the internet. The internet has made it incredibly easy for people to self-publish at the push of a button, and people do. They talk and talk...about their cute cat and their breakfast and their favourite bands and clothing labels and their night at the bar or their day at the park and it never ends.

The cacophany of voices on the internet is insane: how do we navigate through it all? What does it all mean? Is it meaningless?

I struggle with these questions a lot.

Perhaps the role of the zine today is exactly the same as what it used to be. Maybe zines are still an alternative voice, or more of an alternative voice than they ever were. In an incredibly fast-paced world where we are inundated with facts, pseudo-facts, images, and useless information transmitted digitally, zines are something refreshing and different.

Q: In the past 10 years, have you noticed any key moments or changes within the zine community that show how the culture has changed compared to what was happening in the '90s?

A: Definitely. The one key thing that I've noticed about zine cuture in the past 10 years is that a certain amount of focus and energy has come off of the production of zines and more focus has been put on the preservation of the zines and zine "history" through archival pursuits such as zine libraries, websites, larger distros and the publication of books that are collections of particular zine titles.

Some examples of this include Cometbus, Scam, Doris and Absolutely Zippo. This is not to say that there aren't still people making zines, because of course there are many.

In a way, zine culture is healthier than ever because there are individuals out there working hard to ensure that zines stand the test of time and are firmly imbedded in our cultural history.

In the 90's, I'm not sure that these sorts of things were thought about nearly as much. I think at that time, people really embraced the ephemeral nature of zines, to the point that many of them from that time haven't survived. The archivist in me is so happy that there are a few hardcore zine collectors in every city that have ensured that their zines from the 70s, 80s and 90s have stood the test of time, tidily sealed in boxes and Ziploc bags in cool, dark rooms!

Over the past few years, more and more zine libraries have popped up, which is really great. In the GTA, we have three, and I'm pretty sure the Toronto Zine Library at this point has the largest public collection of zines in Canada, numbering in at about 5,000 pieces.

The Anchor Archive Zine Library is a library in Halifax run out of a house. The house, Roberts Street Social Centre, is home to other fantastic programming such as a screen-printing collective, a books beyond bars program, a seasonal artists residency program and a slew of skillshares, workshops and events.

On the other hand, public collections of zines and related ephemera are starting to find their way into large public and university libraries. An well-known example of this is Kathleen Hanna's zine and letter collection, which she recently donated to NYU's Fales Library for their new riot grrrl collection.

In a similar vein, collections of zines in book format have allowed more people access to the work of zine makers, which is essentially a good thing. Though they are very different in feel from the more intimate zine format, they allow the work of zine makers to have a wider reach. Zines that no longer exist are often collected in book format, which is great for people who would have otherwise missed the boat.

"If it weren't for punk and zine-making becoming mainstream phenomena in the `90s, I probably wouldn't be a zine-maker of 15 years right now."

Q: In the '90s, I remember buying zines at Chapters and Tower Records. They never actually seemed to enter mainstream culture, but they were available through mainstream outlets, but as the '00s crept along that distribution all fell away, and zines have gone back to the underground. Do you see this as an evolution, devolution, or anything at all? I guess I'm wondering with this last question is: are zines meant to be something of a secret underground? Are they where they should be right now?

A: I don't know that I see that shift that you're describing as an evolution or de-evolution. I started buying zines like Cometbus, MRR and Rollerderby at Tower Records in the mid-90s too, and I feel like retailers like Tower Records carrying zines at that time was most likely a hold-over from the just-dead grunge and riot grrrl movements of the early `90s.

It makes sense that Tower jumped on the bandwagon of those movements a little late, and quickly dropped the idea of stocking zines as the mainstream completely lost interest in such things. Hilariously, I used to put my zines on consignment at Tower Records in '95 or '96. In retrospect it strikes me as rather surprising that a multi-national corporation would go through the pains of keeping paper files for consignment not unlike small punk record shops and anarchist infoshops.

I am divided as to whether or not I think zines are meant to be underground. If it weren't for punk and zine-making becoming mainstream phenomena in the `90s, I probably wouldn't be a zine-maker of 15 years right now. Punk and zine culture reached kids at high schools in Scarborough in the `90s, and I'm grateful for that.

In the years that zines were making the news, I think youth outside of urban centres realized that they could become media producers and form their own creative communities that encompassed not just music-making, but the production of related art and written output.

Regardless, I kind of like where zines are right now. They're not nearly as huge as they were at the apex of their fame in the `90s, the zine community that exists now, both locally and internationally, seems very healthy to me. Now, as opposed to the `90s, everyone can use the internet to it's fullest capacity as a tool to promote and distribute zines, which is really great.

Zine fairs happen every year, and attendance is always incredible. I have a friend who travels across Canada and the US with her zine distro - it's amazing! It goes to show that there is still an interest and enthusiasm for zines which perhaps transcends notions of "underground" and "mainstream."

Maybe this is indicative of the fact that zines have reached a point where they are imbedded in our culture for good, for the ages.

Louis Rastelli on zines

2011-05-13T10:24:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the week I posted an interview with Jonathan Culp of Satan Macnuggit Popular Arts, talking about zines. The interview was done for an article I recently wrote for Broken Pencil magazine about the enduring appeal of zines.

That article gave me the opportunity to talk to a lot of interesting people and I wanted to share the perspectives and opinions that came out of those talks in full, so I'm giving them life here in the Radio Forest.

Here's a Q&A I did with Louis Rastelli, founder of one of the greatest zines ever, Fish Piss.

Q: What did you see was the role of zines in the '90s?

A: Some of them sort of went along with a mature 2nd or 3rd wave of the DIY, indie record label scene. The most popular zines benefited from ads from labels like Dischord which by the mid-`90s had matured into stable companies, and would get wide distribution through record distributors and independent record stores.
In a way, the internet has brought a lot of the zine world back to the pre-`90s days of connecting through the mail, ordering through monthly lists or catalogs, more person to person distribution than the mass distribution that some zines enjoyed in the `90s. I say “some zines” because the majority of zines then and now are probably still just made for friends or trades through the mail.

Q: I remember buying Fish Piss at Chapters. I also remember when Tower Records would distribute zines in all their stores. In the '90s and early '00s, it seemed like zine makers had a lot of options when it came to getting their publications out there. Why do you think support for zines was so strong then, especially from bigger chain stores?

A: Tower had a long tradition of being cool with consignments, both for labels and publications, going back to the `80s. It was a smart move commercially. Even if consignment sales barely cover the costs of managing them, they got a lot of people saying "go to Tower to buy my thing."

Chapters was another story. I had to fight through their system to get them to stock Fish Piss. I was young and determined to have them carry my zine. I started on consignment in the downtown Montreal locations, which would sell over 50 copies of each issue per store. That helped convince them to carry it throughout the chain.

A few years later I lost a ton of money when Chapters went bankrupt and got bought by Indigo. Only publishers with lawyers got paid in that bankruptcy. Sadly, Tower Records went bankrupt around 2006 but in keeping with their coolness, they paid every cent they owed during bankruptcy.

The Chapters experience led me to start the Distroboto vending machine network. I was really excited about cutting out the middleman. I could go on about chains like Indigo and the publishing and printing business and how it was strangling itself long before the web took off, but I won't.

Q: I also remember that, in the '90s, it really seemed like zines exploded. I can't remember which show it was, but one Canadian talk show even interviewed a panel of zinesters, and at the end of the segment they told you were you could write in to order copies of each zine. Are there any key moments that you would identify as contributing factors to the zine's rise in popularity in the '90s?

A: I never bought into that theory. It was more like every few years the mainstream media decided it would be cute to write about the zine world. In the mid-`90s before the web really took off, I remember being asked questions like, “But isn’t it a fact that young people don’t read anymore?”

Later coverage would be like, "with the World Wide Web so popular, how come you guys are still here?" Now it's usually, "with blogs and iPads you must be CRAZY to still be here!"

My background is more from the punk and underground side of the zine world. Maybe young people always feel like their era is special. When I discovered punk zines in the early `80s it felt like a golden age to me then. I think the ups and downs of zine activity are more local, like when a popular zine stops coming out and there's a lull until others take up the slack. The early `90s in Montreal felt like the death of zines. Most of the `80s ones had fizzled out, nothing was happening.

There was a spotlight period in the `90s when the popularity of Factsheet Five, the emergence of Broken Pencil and other zine-review magazines, and a few very well known zines like Dishwasher, Thrift Score, Answer Me!, Murder Can Be Fun and others. As often happens in the underground, the spotlight moved on to other things but the underground scene just went back underground.

"Expressing yourself on your own, when no other media around you is reflecting your reality, will always be pertinent."

Q: What do you see as the role of zines in the '00s? Why do you think people still make them?

I’m baffled at any notion that people should stop making them or that it’s weird that they still make them.

It's hard to think of the "role" outside of a context, like a role in youth culture, or music scenes, etc. I visited the Fanzinothèque in France last spring, probably the largest zine library in the world. They've been getting more and more zines in the mail from around the world in recent years, something like 100 per month.

They're particularly proud of zines they get from countries like Cuba or China where just trying to mail a copy to France could put the zine maker in jail. Zines are super important in such countries because the internet is 100% monitored, it isn’t a medium of free expression at all. The world of political zines like what I see at the Anarchist Bookfair in Montreal each year views the Internet in a similar way, seeing how many activists have been followed through the web.

Expressing yourself on your own, when no other media around you is reflecting your reality, will always be pertinent. This isn’t being replaced by Facebook or Twitter or blogs, because those are very fleeting, ephemeral expressions, and rarely involve the care one takes when deciding what to write down for posterity in a zine. If you want to leave a trace of your experiences, you still need to put it down on paper or in some other physical art form.

I could spend months browsing through the past 25 years of the underground scenes of the world in the archives of the Fanzinothèque, but half the bookmarks of cool sites and blogs on my web browser are dead links, those "pages" are long gone and will only be harder to find in the future. All the text files from my Fish Piss issues of the `90s are on floppy disks, for example. Thank god I still have paper copies of those!

I find that the democratization of access to information through the internet has overshadowed the democratization of the means of production. In printing, and filmmaking, sound recording etc., almost anyone can now afford or procure what would have been in the `90s very expensive and powerful tools to create stuff with. That’s partly why I’m not surprised that people are still creating stuff. There's a mistaken notion out there that information and artifacts are interchangeable, but they just aren't.

Personally, I never accepted the notion that the internet, or any other form of media, would completely replace all the others. The media landscape always changes, some parts expand and contract, but as long as the need for expressing ourselves exists, people will do so in all sorts of ways, including through zines. The internet probably helps promote more obscure and underground culture, including zines and music.

A recent study showed that most Kindle owners are buying more physical books now than they did before they got a Kindle. Both the music and publishing industries have had serious problems of their own making for decades, and this hasn’t helped them deal very well with the changing media landscape with the internet, but the very DIY nature of zines insulates them from a lot of those problems, the internet only helps zines get more readers, sales and collaborators, from what I can tell.

I think the internet has also helped push the overall quality of zines. At Expozine there are almost no crookedly copied black and white, cut and paste zines anymore. Young people are mixing various forms of printing, silkscreening, new formats, binding methods. The fact that just plain information or rants can be found all over the web might be pushing people to make their zines a lot more unique, more innovative, to underline the fact that you can never experience such a thing as a beautiful zine online.

It's a form of expression, of art, and just like with vinyl LPs or books, when someone loves a work of art enough, they're going to want a copy of the real artifact, not a download or a PDF.

Jonathan Culp on zines

2011-05-10T19:11:00.000-07:00

In a recent Broken Pencil article, I had the chance to take a look at the zine's survival and found that, perhaps surprisingly, they're more important than ever.

It's always tough to take on assignment like this, not only because you don't always know where, or how, the story will end up, but also because there are so many potential people who could be intereviewed.

And then, after you collect the answers, you're left sorting through reams of wonderful insights and quotes, and you can't possibly squeeze them all into a preset word count.

So, to give life to those full interviews, I'm going to post them here. Hopefully, they'll also act as some additional notes and thoughts to the final version of the article that published. (If you'd like to read that first, you can find it here.)

The first interview in the series is with Jonathan Culp of Satan Macnuggit Popular Arts.

Q: It seems that a lot of people have the impression that no one makes zines anymore, that we have the internet now and blogs and websites are the new zines. But we know that's not true, because people still make zines. Why do you still make zines, and why do you think other people still do, too?

I guess 'permanence' is an ironic answer, zines have always been kind of fragile, ephemeral. But as the cliche goes, they're also tactile: you can hold them in your hand and put them on your shelf, and unlike the internet they can't crash or be hacked. There's a different kind of comfort to be had in that.

Also, as someone who spends way too much time on the internet, I think the opportunities for social connectivity that zines present are still strong and important - often the internet is its own, finite community, but zines are still, potentially, a gateway to something more.

Q: That being said, there were a whole lot more zines being produced 15 years ago than there are now. Why was it important for Satan Macnuggit to step in and act as a zine distro earlier in the decade?

As far as print zines go, Satan Macnuggit always mainly distributed the work of its organizers; our main focus was video zines, which is even more of an endangered species. There was a real sense of a unique, shared zine aesthetic to those videos (by Meesoo Lee, Toronto Video Activist Collective, myself and others), which is very different from what you'd see in other artist-culture video then or on Youtube now. Obviously the interwebs struck again in this department; but honestly, things were slowing down already, for the simple
reason that most of the people we distributed were getting bloody sick of sitting in front of their VCR making dubs.

Q: What did you see was the zine's role in the '90s? What do you think that role has become in the '00s?

One thing that's changed is that zinesters who used to be young are now (shockingly!) older. I wonder how much that effects a key change I've noticed which is a kind of dualism that I see more of now.

Back in the day zines were usually chaotic, often bracingly so; in one zine you'd find politics, art, angst, everything, all exploding every which way. The zine seemed to embody the personality of the author in a more or less unmediated way. Those are still out there of course, but I feel like more and more the zines I read are, on the one hand, very thematically focused and information-based, or on the other hand, mainly concerned with aesthetic, technique, design.

I'm no angel in that respect either; my Cinertia zine is pretty rigid formally compared to Stupid Journey which I started a decade earlier. But I think it suggests that the zine community is maybe now more subjugated to other, parallel community dynamics (activism, arts, academe, web) rather than the equal and self-reliant force unto itself that used to interact with these other communities.

It reminds me a bit of the high/low split in Canadian filmmaking, which has always driven me fucking nuts! I don't think the answer is to demand a return to 'real' zines, that approach didn't work so good for punk rock; but when I write my next zine, I will definitely be thinking about why this shift seems to have happened and what it means.

The rumblings of a creative manifesto

2011-05-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

Last year, I read a piece by author Justine Musk (pictured) about writing a creative manifesta. Immediately, I loved the idea, especially since I was in the process of mentally committing to another long-term project (or two), and also because, in my early 20s, I often scoured through various manifestos, from anarchic, punk rock ideations written in zines to Situationist archives.

A manifesto’s statements tend to be so bold, so strong, filled with affirmative language and immovable statements.

I wanted to take up Musk’s exercise, but every time I’d start to write something down it would turn into a to-do list more than a belief system. This past weekend, while laying on my couch half-watching some bad (in a good way) television, every point here just jumped from my head into a notebook. I

Sometimes, these things just can’t be forced. These came out as the rules I live by, but also as things I constantly work to keep in mind. I consider this a work-in-progress, because, like the creative process tends to evolve and change, so do our outlooks.
If anyone else starts on a creative manifesto, I’d love to see it. Share blog links, please!

1. Creating is the ultimate act, the first and last reason to keep get up every day. It is the most important thing you can do, and you must treat it that way.

2. Do what you love, not what you think you’re supposed to do. Write the story you want to write, make the noise you want to hear.

3. No matter how tired, busy, sick, sad, stressed, or overwhelmed you might feel, creating will always remain a priority. You will make the most of this life, use all of it that you can, push it and pull it and stretch it to make it into whatever you want it to be, to make it bend to all of your best ideas.

You will find a way to make art happen, even if all you can squeeze out is twenty minutes worth of work some days, or a few ideas scribbled into a notebook. You will always make up for lost time.

4. Keep your intentions based in the outcome of the work itself, not in the outcome the work will produce. Don’t make something because you think it might make you rich. Don’t go into a life of writing or music of any other art form because you don’t want to work.

This is not a forum for the lazy. If you don’t produce, you don’t have creative output. And if you don’t have output, you don’t exist as an artist. This is all about hard work. Be ready to hustle, every minute of every day. Even when you’re not writing, playing, painting, drawing – whatever – your projects will be burning a hole in the middle of your chest. They will be worming through the back of your mind. You will never again feel like you have enough time, because you won’t have enough time.

You will have to find ways to work around your friends, family, relationships. Around your job, your bills, your basic survival. You will have to do whatever works for you, even if whatever solutions you come up with never feel as comfortable as you’d like them to be.

The only thing that will get you through the pressure, the anxiety, the endlessly bending schedules will be your intent. Keep it true, and you won’t question whether you’re doing what’s right for you.

“Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page.” – Zadie Smith

5. Don’t ever believe that you are above a day job, night job, any job. Just because you can write a great story doesn’t mean you’re entitled to a life of leisure. Nurses, doctors, social workers save lives, all the, and are expected to come back to work the very next day. Don’t think that just because you create something – even if it’s taken as a stroke of genius – you can expect a free ride from there on in. And don’t believe that there is a model for building a life off of art, because there isn’t. If you want a salary, get a job, and keep creating. Again,

As soon as you start to believe that the world owes you something is the day your ego starts to overshadow creative achievement. There are too many failures out there who believe art is about ego. What makes them failures is not that their work doesn’t hold up, that it doesn’t have the capability of moving someone, of connecting. It’s that they have let their egos increase their expectations to the point where they will never be happy with any outcome outside of the impossible, any outcome outside of blockbuster hits, bestselling novels, millions of dollars and heaps of praise.

Andy Warhol got away with combining art and ego, but he got away with it because he was famous. But Andy Warhol’s dead now and you’re not, you’re still here, and you’ve got to appreciate that, and appreciate what you have created, not go chasing after what you think you’re owed. Love your work and you won’t need others to love it for you.

6. In not getting caught up in the idea of a creative “lifestyle,” don’t get caught up in image, either. Who cares if you spend your nights writing, late, late, and it shows on your face all day? If you are aiming for subversion in your art then why conform to society’s standards of beauty? If writing, painting, music, etcetera are really all about what you leave behind, don’t let your head get clogged with whether you “look the part.” Fuck it.

Don’t waste your energy on projecting an image. Just do what makes your comfortable, what comes naturally, and save your focus for what really matters: your work.

7. Learn from other artists. Read about their processes, their struggles. Go to their workshops, their readings, their shows. Talk to each other. Everything is about connecting. Instead of walking into a room thinking you’re alone, wonder who you might meet instead.

Don’t think of short encounters as trivial, but instead see that small talk as something you might build off of later. Even big cities can be small places, and you never know you might run into again, or you might make an impression on. See every encounter as an opportunity, not as a polite obligation. If creating is about connecting then you must be willing to connect yourself socially, too.

8. Don’t hold back. Creating is not about you and your insecurities. It’s about the work itself; you are only a vehicle for it. When you hold back, when you stop things from coming out the way you feel they want to, you’re stifling the project rather than bringing it fully to life.

9. Go where your fear takes you. This might sound like the opposite of doing what you love, but when you really start to let go and lose yourself in a process, or draw an imaginary line to mark that, today, you are ready to go over the edge, you have to trust that you will come to love this process, that you will come to love whatever is looking so ugly right now.

When you go where your fear takes you, it brings you closer to yourself. It helps you grow past your boundaries and turns your work into something you always hoped it would be, but were always too afraid to aim for it.

"I initially made the album - like I do all of them - to quiet some nagging compulsion inside of me. Though that is the main motivation, the next stage requires an appreciative audience so I can be sure what I've done really means something. If none of it means anything to anyone other than me, does it even really exist? Do I?" – Juliana Hatfield

10. Put your work out there. Show it to someone. Publish it, release it, exhibit it. So many people never have any creative inclinations. They don’t know what it’s like to think about making something, let alone executing a project.

Creative people take this for granted. It’s easy to believe that everyone has an inherent level of creativity, and it’s easy to assume that people who don’t create are simply dismissing this drive inside of themselves, writing it off in pursuit of other priorities.

Yes, there are people who do ignore their creative impulses. But there are also many who never have any such impulses at all.

Consider yourself lucky that you do, and then show the world what you’ve got. It’s the only way to give maximum life to your work.

11. Once your work has gone public, be careful not to dismiss it. Don’t criticize it, don’t write it off. Remember that at one time, you must have loved it, at least part of it, otherwise you wouldn’t have followed through with it.

12. Don’t stop as long as the ideas are still coming, as long as the fire still burns. No matter what failures come along the way, be they creative, commercial, or personal, just keep going.

The great thing about art is that you can keep producing. If you write a shitty story, you can always write another one. Did you get a bad review? Oh well. It shouldn’t stop you from coming back with something else.

Again, focus on your intent, and on what you love, and don’t worry about what others think. And remember, too, that just because you hear something negative doesn’t mean that nothing positive is being said. It just might not be a comment that’s made its way to you.

13. Believe that this is all going somewhere, that every idea, every connection you make, every fuck up and victory and experience and opportunity is bringing you to where you need to be.

I’ve heard that in your lifetime, you will meet everyone you need to know. You could extrapolate from there and believe that you will also create everything you need to give life to.

But in both instances, you have to put yourself out there. You have to get out and connect and make an effort. You have be ready to be rejected, to be hurt, but also to be accepted, to get excited, to be vulnerable and be inspired and be touched and, in turn, to touch others.

You have to be ready to turn all these feelings onto yourself, too, and trust that you’ll be able to get yourself, and your work, through all these same phases and emotions as they come. And you have to trust that it’s all going to take you somewhere, and that no matter where it all leads, it will be to the right place.

The Hate and Ignorance

2011-04-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, May 4, I'll be helping punk photographer Don Pyle (also a founding member of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet)launch his new book, Trouble in the Camera Club, a stunning collection summed up as "a photographic Narrative of Toronto’s punk history 1976-1980."

I'll be doing a live Q&A with Don at the launch, getting all the details on the work that went into his book, and to get ready I've been going through some of my own punk archives.

I've also been thinking a lot about some FAQs that get thrown my way about my own book, Treat Me Like Dirt, one them being whether there are stories I wasn't able to find a home for in the book's narrative. Of course, there were some I had to leave out, for various reasons. Sometimes, no matter how interesting a tangent or anecdote is, it can actually take away from the narrative rather than add to it.

So, to get in the mood for the launch of Trouble in the Camera Club, I wanted to share one of my favourite pieces from Treat Me Like Dirt that ended up having to be dropped from the final manuscript, but that I'm excited to be able to share here, about a character on the scene known as Angie Ignorance.

---

Who's who:

James Bredin: Fan.

Suzanne Naughton: Filmmaker. Credits include punk films Afternoon at New Rose and Mondo Punk. Screenplay writer and photographer.

Don Pyle: Fan. Photographer. Vocalist for Crash Kills Five. Drummer for Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. Record producer.

Mr. Shit: Fan.

---

Suzanne Naughton: Our first gig at the Turning Point, we’re playing, we’re nervous, it’s our first gig. And at the back of the room this voice says, “I want a date with the organ player” – me. After the gig this guy comes up and he says to Bruce, “I’ve got something you’d like to see.” He gives him a pile of Polaroids of his spread butt cheeks.

That was our introduction to Angie Ignorance. We were terrified of him because apparently his band met in a mental institution.

Mr. Shit: He was in my second band, the Hate. Well, it wasn’t my band, it was Larry Saunders’ band. Yeah, Angelo Ignorant. He scared me sometimes, actually, that guy. He was always nice to me but you never knew when he might, just for the hell of it, pull your arms out of their sockets. I think he came from an abusive home or something, but I’m not sure. I heard that he attacked a cop once with an axe, but I don’t know if the story’s true or not. I wasn’t there.

James Bredin: The Hate – I don’t know what this guy’s problem was, I think it was a clinical thing. That was something to see. They were totally into it. One of their big songs I was “I Want to Rape a Retarded Girl” and something like “Fuck Jesus Dead” and that kind of stuff. They spray painted their name not on alley walls, they went to Holt Renfrew and spray painted the Hate on fuckin’ Holt Renfrew. That caused the cops to show up at the Turning Point looking for the Hate.

This guy Mike, who ended up in the band, saw them one night and Angie pissed on him and thought he had to be part of this. It was very GG Allin before GG Allin. He was a really weird guy. I can’t remember what he said to Suzanne, he wanted to marry her or some weird stuff. He was obviously unhinged.

Don Pyle: Because it was anything goes, there was a lot of crazy trash there. Mr. Shit had a band called the Hate and the singer of the band, his name was Angie, was crazy. He would just do anything. I remember Angie coming on the stage and had a picture of Pierre Trudeau or some politician and he cut a hole in Pierre Trudeau’s mouth, came out on stage with his cock sticking through it, and started pissing on everybody in the front. And people were sitting there like, “Oh, what’s that?” He used to share these stories that he was a cook at some restaurant and that he would spit in the food and that he would piss in the food.

Suzanne Naughton: They had these posters all over Bloor Street that said “I Want to Rape a Retarded Girl.” Of course people were up in arms about this. The other poster was a crucified Christ with green genitalia that said either, “Fuck Jesus Christ,” or “Fuck Jesus to Death,” or something like that.

We were hanging out at the Turning Point one night and Bruce had on a Death or Glory badge. He went to the washroom, and he’s standing there taking a leak when Angie Ignorance comes in and stands behind him. We were terrified of Angie.

Bruce said his pee just froze in mid-air. There was a mirror and Angie’s staring at him in the mirror. Bruce said he didn’t know if he was going to kill him, grab him by the dick, he didn’t know what he was going to do. So he froze and Angie said, “I like that. I’m gonna get that tattooed on my head.” He was talking about the Death or Glory badge.

Then he turns around and says, “What do you think?” Bruce is like, “That would look really nice,” and he zips up and runs out. We were so terrified of him.

There used to be a bookstore at the corner of Charles and Yonge. They were open late, one of the few things that was. We were in there and who do we see? Angie Ignorance.

He corners us, we couldn’t get away from him and he’s going, “Oh we have a new song. It’s called ‘Fuck Me Up the Asshole and Kill Me.’”

“Nice Angie, see you later.”

“No, I want to talk to you.”

We were so scared of him. But every single gig they advertised, we always went. We had to see them. And not one of them ever happened. I think the only time they ever played, they got half a song into their gig I think and they pulled the plug on them because they were just so deranged. Seriously deranged. Not like fooling around, pretending to be crazy, no, the real deal.

Apparently they went into an Italian church on a Sunday at high mass with a boom box and played that song and got chased out of the church by the parishioners. We used to bump into this guy everywhere.

James Bredin: Their posters said, “Angie Ignorance is the new Jesus Christ, come and pray to him.” And “pray to him” was crossed out and “suck his cock” was written in underneath, so they were putting them up and slathering them over Bay Street buildings and stuff. And there was a story that they actually took their recording of “I Want To Rape a Retarded” girl and went into a church on Sunday with a blaster and turned it on and played it and got thrown out.

I don’t know if that’s true or not.

---

Don Pyle'sTrouble at the Camera Club launches Wednesday, May 4, at
The Garrison, 1197 Dundas Street West. Doors open at 7:00; Event starts at 8:00pm. Admission is $8.00 or FREE with a book purchase. Buy it because it's cool.

http://www.troubleinthecameraclub.com/

For your eyes...

2011-04-10T16:17:00.000-07:00

Last year, whenever someone asked me, "what are you working on now?" I told them I was working on a rock n' roll horror novel. For most of 2010, I was determined to let the project consume me.

I was also determined that I could complete a first draft within a year. Along the way, I tried some new approaches. Actually, all of it was new to me. Although I'm not new to fiction (you can check out my three chapbooks, Eleven: Eleven, Manifestations and Arik's Dream if you're curious), I've never written a full-length novel before. I like to think of my chapbooks as micro-novels - not quite long enough to be novellas but too long to be short stories - but tackling a novel is something that's been a struggle for me for most of the past ten years.

In 2004, I wrote a short story called "Trash(ed)" that won second place in a contest. I often had my head in the works of Christy Ann Conlin, Daniel Jones and Chris Walters at the time, wanted to use that story as the foundation for my own punk rock novel.

"Trash(ed)" had come easily as a 1,500 word story: it was written by hand in about an hour and a half, all in one shot, on a Saturday afternoon on the floor in my parents' basement. I'd been out drinking the night before, had gotten up somewhere around noon that day, and after taking a shower and smoking several cigarettes the whole thing just came to me, like that.

But a couple months later, when I sat down to stretch the story out, I kept getting freaked out. I was thinking too much about structure, and about what was "believable." I also didn't know my characters at all.

Last year, when I was working on my rock 'n' roll horror thing, it started with the same flash of inspiration: I was sitting in a coffee shop one morning and mapped the whole thing out in an hour: characters, plots, subplots, conflicts.

I loved it instantly. It was based on an idea that had come to me five years earlier and I thought it was the right time to move on it. But after tearing up and starting again throughout 2010, I was starting to wonder if the timing was actually wrong.

Again, I found I didn't know my main character as well as I needed to, and when I tried to sketch him out I couldn't get any clarity. I even tried NaNoWriMo in November, thinking I just needed to build a writing schedule to stay focused, but instead I found myself exhausted halfway through.

The biggest lesson I took from that experiment was that I don't want to write everyday, and that having a little bit of distance from each writing session really works to keep me on track.

Another problem I had with my horror project throughout 2010 was that, even though several of the characters were talking to me (which characters do with many of their authors, you know), there were other characters that were talking much, much louder.

Except they didn't belong in the story I was trying to write; instead, they lived in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic version of Toronto. Some of them reminded me a lot of the punk rock kids I was writing about back in 2004; if this was real life, they'd probably have mutual friends and go to all the same shows. And, unfortunately for my spooky rock 'n' rollers, these new punks were really good at making themselves heard. I started making notes about them.

I would walk down the street and whole lines would come to me. At the end of 2010, I started working on something I've only been able to call PostApoc so far.

Since December, the story's taken on the momentum I was looking for with my previous attempts at a novel. I think about it all the time. I get anxious when I haven't spent enough time working on it. I make a point to schedule time to give it attention.

And now, I want to put it out there for some feedback. Here's a little taste of what I've been up to.

I'd love to hear what you think.

xo

1. Ang

Outside, the dogs have all gone wild. Can you hear them? Can you feel them down there, voices shaking through their loose skin? At night their jowls fill with thunder.

The howling, the howling is like the wind is wringing out hollow moan from the peaks of their spines, a chill that crawls through all the cracks in the windows.

The first time I heard it, I thought I’d never heard anything worse, until I heard the chimes of dog tags. Some of those dogs down there have still got their collars on even though they’ve got no homes, no owners anymore because those places, those people, they’re all gone now. So the dogs have all gone wild, reverted back to beasts that run on instinct instead of obedience.

They can smell us from all the way up here, they’re so hungry. They’ve marked all the buildings around here as their territory, bricks soaked so many times the smell’s strong enough to climb up the walls.

But those dogs, they don’t know we’re all starving, too. Tara, she’s always saying we should do something to get rid of the dogs. Poison or trap them. Wait till they starve and drive knives right between their ribs. Eat them before they eat us. But Cam keeps telling her no, says we need to keep the dogs around, that they’re actually protecting us, that as long as they’re hanging around no one’s going to try to come up here. He says that right now, the dogs are all we have.

I heard something once, heard that once a dog’s tasted blood he can never be the same again, that the hot copper touch on his tongue takes away the taste for anything else.

Tonight, those words are cutting right through me.

--

Before this all happened, I thought the sky was going to open up and start spitting out animals. I thought the world would end in blood and hail, in bones and tiny bodies hitting the pavement until everything was pulp and fur.

But it started with the earth sucking all the moisture back into the ground and replacing it with slow, quiet dread that hung over the city like a dead slug.

The day the drought finally broke, the sky brought down splotches of red breaking loose from the heavy velvet of clouds gone gray, drops drying to rust on the sidewalks everywhere, like old gum. Anyone caught in the chemical storm melted, just disappeared except for small puddles of sludge and sinew here and there.

Then there was that day when all those people’s chests imploded. It was in the thick of summer and all us girls had to keep our hair pulled up into big ponytails, and tucked into bandanas or thrift store scarves. It was just too hot to have anything shading your neck. That whole year was just so hot.

I knew one person with air conditioning, so we all went to her place every day to get blasted with cold and blasted in every other way, too. And that’s where I was that day that a neighbour from upstairs hopped down the fire escape and told us she’d just seen it herself, men and women with chests caved in, blood soaking through thin summer fabrics and eyes filmy and red.

And I’m pretty sure the taste of my beer changed then, got mixed up with the sweat bubbling up on my lip and I chugged back everything I could swallow, tried to focus on the sound of liquid working behind my ears, pounded it back as hard as I could to keep anymore words from getting into me. It didn’t work, though.

I heard way more than I wanted to.

But if anyone thought it was hard in those days to block any sounds out, it’s nothing compared to how quiet it can get now.

Nothing.

Words on 34

2011-03-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

The year I turned 27, I started seeing the number 34 everywhere. Whole days would go by where I'd rarely catch any other time than when the hour was in the 34th minute. There was no more 2:06 or 1:15 or 6:53; I always happened to check the time right at 9:34, 10:34, 11:34, etc.

When I was a kid I had a strong fascination towards anything to do with astrology, numerology, and the occult. If I could've chosen I would've picked to learn numerology over math.

When I was 12 I spent hours one summer trying to memorize the meanings of different numbers. I'd bought a book at the mall that gave the basics on numerology, which is similar to astrology, where I read that we have birth numbers and name numbers.

I figured out that my birth number makes me a 7, and my name number makes me a 5. My birth number means I have a strong interest in the occult (seriously!), poetry (seriously!), and other arts (seriously!). My name number means that I can seem young or sometimes even immature, and that my interests and abilities can be all over the place, and if they aren't focused there's a risk of being spread too thin and not accomplishing anything at all. (Good advice no matter what.)

So when I started seeing the number 34 everywhere, I didn't know whether I should be freaked out or excited. Excited because I'm also very interested in synchronicity; there are lines of thinking that believe seeing recurring patterns, like numbers, are little nods to let you know you're on the right track, or that things are coming together as they should.

But I also got freaked out because in numerology, most numbers are reduced to a single digit, with 11, 12, and 22 being main exceptions. So that would mean that 34 would actually be pulled out as 3 + 4, equaling 7 - my birth number. When I started seeing 34, or my birth number, everywhere, I had seven years to go until I was 34.

Two years later, I still see 34 everywhere. Sometimes it even flashes at me from LED signs.

The other day, one of my friends said I should turn to page 34 of my favourite book to see what it says. I instantly loved that idea and couldn't get it out of my head. Of course, I don't have a narrow list of favourite books but after pulling a pile of them off my bookshelves I did narrow down a list of cool lines I found on their 34th pages. I was actually hoping to find some words that would make a nice tattoo.

While not everything I found would work, I did find some lines - even really simple ones - that I did like quite a bit. Are they tattoo material? Not sure, but thought I'd share them anyway.

From The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, Laurel-Leaf Contemporary Fiction 1989 edition: "I know better now." - Ponyboy Oh, Ponyboy. So simple but so true no matter what you're going through. If you were a real person, you'd be so hot.

From The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, Del Rey 1984 edition: "There is magic on me." - the unicorn "It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is." - Schmendrick, the magician

From Obsessions by Daniel Jones, Mercury Press 1992: "The sound of your voice screaming." "They will do this to you. The quiet murmuring of their voices..."

From Adulterers Anonymous by Lydia Lunch and Exene Cervenka: "the truth was here and i killed it." - Exene Cervenka

Do you have any literary tattoos? Or recurring numbers? Have you ever combined the two?

What do your books say on page 34?

Wish me luck

2011-03-20T07:18:00.000-07:00

In my last post I mentioned that I was getting ready to do an on-camera interview for CBC about my experiences with self-harm.

The interview was first scheduled for Friday, March 11, but was rescheduled because the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, so the CBC crew ended up coming by my place earlier this past week.

When I was going to therapy I'd have a lot of days, especially in my earlier sessions, where I wouldn't want to go to my appointment at all. I was nervous that I might feel like backing out of this interview, afraid I might start thinking it was a mistake, but I didn't. There was no nervousness, no fear, no second-guessing.

But as I was answering my questions and telling my story, I started to realize that when my parents see this, there's a possibility they're going to have to deal with several factors:

1. That my problems were much bigger than my parents thought. They don't know that I kept cutting for years and years after they first found out about it.

2. That because my parents found out I was cutting myself through my school's intervention, there was always a level of denial happening between me and them. My school made the decision about how my self-harm was going to be dealt with, not me or my parents. Because I wasn't comfortable with how it all happened, and I was scared and vulnerable, I never came out to my parents and said, "yes, I need this help." Instead, I made it out like the school was making a huge deal out of something that was actually nothing, and I always got the impression that my parents liked to believe that, too.

3. That I do believe my parents' fucked up in the way they reacted, and in the way they dealt with the situation. That being said, I don't believe they fucked up 100 per cent: it was something they'd never dealt with before, and something that made them scared, nervous, and ashamed. They come from a time when problems were never talked about and believe it's more important for your neighbours to believe your family is perfect than it is to actually deal with your problems, to do whatever it takes to keep your problems out of sight for the benefit of making a good impression.

Me and my parents walk through this world in very different ways. It's only over the last few years that I started to better understand why they do what they do. I don't agree with it, but I've had to learn to accept it.

I don't think they did enough to protect me when I was self-harming, and I don't think they did enough to control the situation. I also had a lot of hurt towards them for never actually asking me what I wanted, or what was going to actually help me get through this. I don't remember them asking if I was okay. I definitely felt like I was on my own with my feelings, and my actions, and even though I've let go of that resentment and don't want to make my parents feel guilty about anything, it's very likely that they will feel guilty all the same. I've accepted the past and moved on from those feelings, and now they're going to have to do the same. Hopefully they can.

4. My parents never, ever told anyone about what was going on. When this airs, there is a chance that their friends and family could see it. They might be asked why they never talked about it. I wonder if anyone they're close to will feel hurt that they kept it a secret. I also wonder if anyone else they're close to will come out and say their kids went through something similar.

And of course, for the first couple days after I did that interview I kept running through all the questions and answers and thinking of things I should have said, or could have said differently.

It's hard to talk about self-harm in a sensitive, accurate way. That's in part because it's something that we, as a society, still don't talk about all that much. We're still learning about it and still coming out about it and still defining language around it. It's also a very personal thing; the reasons people do it and how they do it and what they feel towards it all vary.

I think it's important that we do talk about these things, that we don't censor them or circle around them. I think it's important to be direct and open and honest. But I also think that because self-harm is still so misunderstood and still so unaccepted in many ways that we have to be careful about how we represent self-harm. There's a lot of responsibility that goes along with talking about it, but it's hard because when you're getting personal there's no right way or wrong way for your own story. It's a very gray area. It was also a harder interview for me to do because even though it's a story I've gotten used to talking about on a personal level, it was my first time putting it into context for a journalist, and in front of a camera.

Out of everything I said, one thing I'm not sure I adequately expressed was why the help I was offered actually did more harm than good. There are a lot of kids, and adults, who are waiting for mental health care, or who need support in navigating their access to it. I was offered help at a renowned children's hospital. Of course, I was only 13 at the time, and very angry and again, scared and vulnerable. I had no concept of wait times or health care costs and, like a lot of kids, was too self-absorbed to even think about any of that.

So I'm not saying that getting help is a bad thing, and I'm certainly aware of the opportunity that I had. What I'm saying is I felt like I wasn't in a position to truly appreciate or take advantage of that opportunity because I felt like it was being forced on me. I was also in a position where I felt like I had to hide the depth of my problems from my parents, and so in protecting myself from their feelings and their reactions I didn't cooperate with the doctors I had sessions with.

My point in all of it, which I'm not sure I articulated, was that we have to be careful in how we offer help to kids who are self-harming. The help I got had nothing to do with what I really wanted. It wasn't soft or sensitive. Instead it scared me and made me feel like I was in trouble.

And when I was in front of the doctors, I was asked questions - by two men I'd never met before - about my period (humiliating for a 13 year old - I didn't even talk to my mom about that shit), about whether I was lonely because I was an only child. The doctors assumed a lot of my feelings for me, told me how I should feel, and they made me feel things I'd never thought about before.

When they asked if I spent a lot of time alone and I told them I did, they made me question why I didn't have friends around me all the time. Did that mean I was unpopular? Was I missing out on things other kids were doing? Was there something wrong with what I'd been doing?

It all just spiralled, of course, but I'm not sure if I got that all across in my interview. And of course, there's always editing, so I don't know what will make the cut, and what won't.

And because I don't know that, I can't say for sure what my parents can expect, and I can only guess about how they might feel.

But I'm hoping that today we can work it out a bit more, because today I'm heading over to their house, where I'm going to interview my mom about everything that happened back then. I'm hoping it will go all right. I'm hoping we won't have a huge blowout like we used to, and that instead we can just talk about everything and understand each other a little better.

Wish me luck.

xoxo

Before I had you, I thought...

2011-03-10T18:53:00.000-08:00

I'm having one of those weeks where every day feels like it's had two or three more days jammed into it.

Actually, almost every week has felt like this since mid-January, but that's all right. Things are happening, things are getting done.

There's a theme happening this week involving open honesty and public confession. At the beginning of the week, I got up in front of a room full of strangers and told them why my relationship with my ex, D, is the biggest regret of my life so far. It went pretty well, actually. I was nervous, like always, but people laughed as soon as I told them my biggest mistake was a boyfriend and everything went fine from there.

The next day, I spent some time with my parents. I hadn't seen them in about a month and needed to talk to my mom about something.

It's never been easy for me to talk to my parents. When I was younger my mom was often unpredictable and tended to overreact; if I failed a math test (which happened, like, all the time), I'd get yelled at before I'd get help.

Because I never knew what direction a conversation might take if I needed to talk, there were a lot of times that I didn't. Instead, my mom and I would fight. A lot. I remember once, when I was around 11 or 12, she turned to me, in the laundry room, and said, "before I had you I thought we were going to be best friends." It was a hard place to get to when I felt like anything I said might explode in my face.

So when I started feeling depressed when I was 13, and then started cutting myself around the same time, I definitely wasn't feeling like I was at a point where I could tell my parents. But when a series of not-so-random events led to my parents finding out that I'd been cutting, courtesy of my school's guidance counsellor and principal, well, then things got really heavy.

The story of how my school's staff reacted is enough on its own.

My mom thought I was doing it to hurt her and my dad. When they were asked to come to the school to pick me up the day they got the phone call, one of the first things my mom told me was how worried she was about explaining the time off to her boss.

It's a story I've wanted to write for a long time, and one I wanted to talk to my parents about, because we never really did talk about it, even though, since 1995, we've had a lot of opportunities to.

So a current project of mine is getting that story together. I've got a whole list of questions for my mom to use towards a story. I just had to ask her if she'd be up for it.

Tomorrow, a crew from CBC's Connect with Mark Kelley is coming over to my place to interview me about a story they're doing on self-harm. I'm at a point where I'm not nervous about talking about it anymore; I don't keep it hidden, and I don't think anyone should be made to feel like it has to be. I don't know when the interview will go to air but since it'll be on TV I figured I should give my mom's a heads up. It also worked as a nice segue into this article I want to interview her for.

We were sitting in a coffee shop in my old neighbourhood when I brought it up. I told her about the CBC, and then I told her I wanted to do a story, too. At first she was confused. "Will I be on TV, too?"

"No, the interview I do with you won't be for TV. It'll just be online."

"Oh, so will my video be on the internet?"

"No, there won't be a video. Just an article. Just your words, typed up."

"Oh, okay. Yeah, we could do that. So, what do you want to do for your birthday this year?"

And that was it.

I'm not sure if the concept totally sank in, but I'm going to go ahead with it anyway and see what happens. It will probably be the hardest interview I've ever done.

It will probably be the hardest conversation I've ever had.

I guess I'll find out if my mom really gets where it's all headed when I sit down with her in another week or two and start asking questions.

The Double Life of Writers

2011-02-28T19:43:00.000-08:00

A lot of lines and ideas are always rolling around in my head. Sometimes they come up with a quick rush of excitement, but then I end up letting them go just as fast, realizing they don't have as much substance as I'd first thought.

But then I have other lines and ideas that hang around long enough to end up getting written down, repeated, revisited. Sometimes they turn into articles or poems or titles, or zines or chapbooks or full-length books.

The past few weeks I keep thinking about the idea of the secret lives of writers, because there is a double-life that so many of us lead. People know writers through their bylines and their books' spines. They know writers through spoken word circuits and blogs.

And from those things, particularly after a writer has published a book, there comes an idea that all writers do is write. That they spend every, entire day writing.

A couple weeks ago, when I tweeted that I'm getting tired of explaining to people that getting a book published is not equal to winning Cash for Life, a few fellow tweeps took note. But of course, only a couple hours later, I ended up having to explain, yet again, that yes, I do work: yes, I have a job.

Actually, I consider myself to have two jobs: My day job is one where I do get to write and be creative and do things that I'm good at, so I'm lucky there. My other job is the one I come home to, the one where I spend a lot of my time writing poetry and weird fiction and doing interviews and working on new book projects.

When Toronto author Stacey May Fowles wrote a piece for the National Post about what really happens to writers once they publish a book, it resonated with me immediately. The anxiety, the pressure, the second-guessing, it all takes the shine off the sense of having accomplished something that millions of people would love to do, and that many never will. But when it does happen, things can look great from the outside when a book's launch party turns into a great night and the reviews all comes back glowing and there are invitations to read or speak or sign.

And as Fowles notes in her article, writers smile and agree that yes, it is all wonderful.

And it is. I have to be honest here - as easy as it would be for me to just everything right now and commit to a routine of 9 to 5 work, prime time TV all night, and as much booze as I could handle, I wouldn't trade it in.

But there are factors, internal and external, that can really wear you down. They're things that, if I'd been mentally or emotionally prepared, I might have been able to build up more patience for, or worked at understanding them better before getting to this point.

Not that I entered into a writing career completely naive. I'd freelanced long before I ever published a book. I knew it was a hard, hard hustle. And I knew getting a book published didn't always lead to money, not that that was my intent, which it wasn't.

But of course, anyone with their eyes and mind wide open will soon learn that no matter how much you think you know, you really don't know anything at all.

Here's what I wish I'd known before I published a book:

1. That it would feel like I have to forever dash people's illusions that publishing a book means the end of working. Because it doesn't. Although I can't really fault people for believing otherwise. There was a time, long, long - very long - ago when I thought so, too. On the surface it makes sense: you write a book, get it published, and then when it's out on the shelves it just pulls money to you, like a magnet.

I learned otherwise when I started freelancing, and meeting other, older writers who were smarter and more experienced and more jaded than me. And then I started to learn that, unless you write some kind of blockbuster novel or breakthrough work of non-fiction that sells well in cities all over the continent, or even all over the world, you're not quitting your day job.

Which is fine, as long as a writer's primary intent is to create something that people want to read. It's probably a lot harder to accept for people who think becoming a writer will somehow pave your life with riches.

But you just need to walk into any bookstore (a giant Indigo will do best for this example) and look at the thousands of books they've got on those shelves. Authors aren't put on a salary when they get a publishing deal; some don't even get advances. They get paid through royalties, just like musicians, and they have to sell a lot of books just to get by for a year.

I suck at math but I'm going to give it a try here. Say I get $5 in royalties for every book of mine sold. And say I make $35 thousand a year at a day job.

To be able to quit my day job, and be sustained by book sales alone, I'd have to sell 7,000 books a year, without working in any variables in making lifestyle changes. Pretty tough to sell 7,000 books in Canada, where a bestseller is considered to be a title that hits 5,000 sales. That would mean that for every author to live on book sales alone, each title would have to have a book that surpassed bestseller status.

When you think about it, it doesn't really add up that publishing a book would give you a get-out-of-work-forever card, does it?

2. You will run into a lot of people who think writers just want to write all day, and they’ll think that’s all you want to do, too. .

And there are some writers out there who probably do want to write all day. But there are also writers out there who don’t, who would prefer to put their time and energy to other things, who would prefer that doing something they love doesn’t turn into something they have to do just to get by.

Last year, I was reading a blog post by author Caitlin R. Kiernan, a prolific, award-winning young novelist. Her confession? That if she didn’t have to work for her money by writing new novels, she probably wouldn’t. If she could, she said, she’d prefer to spend her time outdoors, or with her partner.

Strange to some, but true: there are people out there who, although they may like writing, or they may be good at it, don’t want to do it all the time. Their reasons may vary. There can be a lot of pressure when your livelihood or reputation is suddenly riding on every word you write, which can change a writer’s relationship with their craft. Writers also have other interests, other jobs, and never intended to make writing a full-time gig. Others might have only wanted to pursue one story idea, and having done that, don’t feel the need to continue.

Of course, it’s easy to see why people would believe otherwise. It’s romantic to think of writers hanging out in dusty coffee shops all afternoon, scribbling in spiral bound notebooks until sunset and spending the rest of the night getting drunk on red wine. In reality, though, being a full-time writer usually means spending time at home, alone all day, typing.

And I can understand where the perception comes from that writers just write. The double lives of actors has long been in place; it's not uncommon for people to think of actors as restaurant servers or bartenders or ushers, too.

As a writer, I've often had people say, "oh, so you just get to write all day?" Or, after I returned to work from an extended break, one woman asked me, "so is writing what you want to do eventually? Do you want to be a writer?"

"Well, I that is what I do, actually," I told her. She seemed surprised and then said, "oh, yeah, I guess so."

It made me wonder about actors and musicians and painters and other artists, if they ever get these questions, too. Do people think that guitarists in a band just hang out and write music all day, or rehearse 40 hours a week?

And if not, then why do so many people out there tend to think that writing all day is so great, anyway? Or that it has to happen on a conventional work schedule?

3. Then again, I'm probably just a slacker. Because there is a flipside to all those people who think every writer just hangs out and writes all day, and that flipside is that writing isn't work at all.

I first ran into this when I was freelancing full time, working from home. Friends would call me, bored at their desk jobs, just to talk.

As if I wasn't doing anything at all.

This become a particular problem with one person, who used to call me throughout the day, every day, and launch into a one-way conversation without even asking if I had time to talk (which I didn't). We shared a mutual acquaintance who worked during the day, but would sometimes take calls at his work number. So I asked, "Do you call him during the day as much as you call me?"

The answer I got? "No, of course not."

"Why?"

"Because he's busy working."

4. The pressure doesn't go away. Or maybe it does eventually, but for me, it's still as strong as ever.

This might not be an experience that all writers have, because everyone has different motivations and approaches to their work and why they do it. But I've always been the kind of person who likes to stay busy, and stay focused on what's coming up next.

Which works out, because when you publish a book, everyone will ask you, "what are you working on now?"

Would it be weird if I asked a new mother, "when are having another baby?" Or if I wanted to know when you’re going to start looking for a new house after you just moved into one?

Why do we treat conventional major life milestones as if they’re new plateaus to rest on, but we treat major creative accomplishments simply as launching pads to new projects? No wonder it’s hard for writers to keep the pressure off themselves and just enjoy having gotten as far as they have when the question of “what’s next?” can come at you from anywhere, any time.

5. If you're dayjobbing it, it will become especially important to work with people you can relate to. If not, you might want to keep your writing life as much of a secret as possible.

I took this approach a while ago, and it worked for a while, until my book came out and I needed to take some time off to promote it. I had always been really hesitant to talk about it at work before then because, when a book is accepted for publication, it goes in limbo for a while. And because it was a work of non-fiction that about 150 people had been interviewed for, I already had a lot of people asking me, “How’s the book? When’s the book coming out? What’s happening with the book?”

It’s always a good thing when people ask, but when you don’t really have an update to give them, well, it gets a little monotonous when your answer is the same as last time.

To maintain a balance, I needed to keep a separation between my book and my day job. The last thing I wanted was to show up at work and have people ask, “How was your weekend? How’s your book? When’s your book coming out?”

At least when I got those questions outside of work, they mostly came through email, so I had some control over when I dealt with them. At work you’re held captive for eight hours a day, and if you and your colleagues are already struggling for middle ground when it comes to conversation, then you’re really going to feel trapped by questions you’d really rather not answer.

After going through a string of shitty jobs in high school, I’d worked really hard to make sure that I always had a cool job that I didn’t hate. Somehow, I veered off that path for a while and ended up at a job that I really didn’t belong at. A perfect example of the types of interactions I had there happened at lunch one day, in the office kitchen. Someone saw what I was heating up and said, “is that pad thai? Where’d you get it?”

“I brought it from home.”

“Did you make it? Is it homemade?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Wow, you have homemade pad thai?!” My colleague said. She probably wouldn’t have been so excited if she’d known that all my “cooking” amounted to was ketchup and peanut butter melted together with some rice noodles thrown in. But she was excited. So much so that she even shouted out to another colleague, “Hey, you know what Liz has for lunch? Homemade pad thai!”

So yeah, I just didn’t click with that many people there, and didn’t end up connecting enough to establish much common ground that decent conversations could be built on.

In real life, I don’t talk about writing that much. I do send drafts of my work to a few people whose feedback I appreciate and trust, which might spark some talk, but that’s intermittent. Otherwise, my friends and I talk about other things.

Maybe I’d made a mistake in not reaching out to my colleagues more. Maybe I made my life at that job more awkward than it had to be.

Or, maybe, people started to see me more as a writer as their workplace rather than a colleague after my book was published. Because there were some people who never asked me about my weekend, never asked if I’d seen any good movies or asked about the books I was reading. They just asked me about my book, or said things like, "Oh, I worry about you, writing all night like that." Um, thanks for you concern? I'm fine, thanks.

I had another colleague who lived next door to another author, so of course that made him an expert on writing. He'd talk about his neighbour's progress to me, like "oh yeah, she's really struggling with this story she's been working on for a few years now."

This guy would come up to my desk, ask about something work related, and after I'd answer his question he'd go, "so, how's the book? How's it coming?"

I'm not sure what he was looking for in terms of an answer. "Well, I hit a word count of 10 thousand last night." Or, "well, I see this taking on a new narrative." Not really the kind of conversation I'd like to have. I don't even talk about that stuff with my friends.

I chose to move on from that job.

7. Everyone will want to know: how do you have time?

Reality is that a lot of people who are trying to make it, as a freelance writer or novelist or musician or anything that is fun and awesome but rarely lucrative, likely comes home at the end of the day and gets to work.

A lot of people will ask how you have time to write on top of everything else. A lot of people spend a lot of time doing things they don't need to do, or even want to do. Like watching TV or commuting three hours a day.

There are always ways to make it work, just like people find time to raise kids while holding down a job. If you write, you might get up early or stay up late. You might skimp out on cooking a nice dinner and opt for something easy, like a sandwich instead. There are always ways to cut out time, and you will always be explaining them.

Because, in a society where many people tend to only equate productivity with a wage, you will always be explaining why you work as much as you do when there may not always be a paycheque at the end of it all.

How Kat Von D can change your life

2011-02-16T17:22:00.000-08:00

I have no problem admitting that television has shaped my life just as much as music and books have. There are a lot of people out there that might not see TV as the most intellectual medium pop culture has to offer, but they sure can't say it isn't influential, no matter what we choose to tune into.

People who know me are often surprised that I watch as much TV as I do. I grew up in a house that was only quiet when everyone was asleep. Otherwise, the TV and radio were both going, right from the start of the day. I always did my homework in front of the TV. Today, I do work in the quiet sometimes but often have the TV or stereo on in the background when I'm home. Later, in 1997, TV actually saved my life, but that's another story.

As reality shows steadily populated prime time lineups over the past 10 years and counting, I've come to love them just as much as any of the old sitcoms I grew up on. Yeah, sure, reality shows are edited to shit, but it doesn't mean that there isn't still some truth that comes out of them - just like 30-minute family comedies and hour-long dramatic series' reflect real life. Remember, real-life news stories are edited down to tell a major story in only a matter of minutes. Television is mostly made to entertain, and then on a lesser extent to inform.

But no matter what story it's telling, it can always inspire. Ideas and influence can come in many forms, and will often come at you in unexpected ways.

One of my most recent sources of inspiration continues to come from Kat Von D, the star of L.A. Ink. Although she's now being dragged through tabloid pages and gossip blogs for her engagement to Jessie James, I'm really not that interested in all that. Actually, if I thought about it too much the whole thing would probaby bum me out, because it means a lot of people who've never seen L.A. Ink and who never knew anything about Kat Von D pre-Jessie James and who aren't interested in tattoos are now just seeing Von D as just another storyline for Perez Hilton and tacky magazines like Us.

Because for me, when I look at Kat Von D beyond the celebuzz, I get reminded me of a lot of things that I like to do, like draw and make my own clothes. And when I first started getting into L.A. Ink, I realized that those were things I had been doing less and less of as I got older.

For me, Kat Von D has been a very surprising kick in the ass when it comes to not letting some of my favourite things slip away.

And the reason I say this all came at me out of nowhere is because at first, I was never all that into L.A. Ink. But one night, when nothing else was on TV but I didn't feel like doing anything but watch TV, I sat through it and something about it just clicked with me. Like I said, sometimes ideas and inspiration come at you when you're least expecting them to. A lot of people will probably say that it's when you're not expecting to be hit with a wave of creativity that that's when it will get you hardest.

It wasn't long before I started following Kat Von D on Twitter and one of the first tweets of hers that popped up was about a chandelier she was going to be working on after she finished her last tattoo of the day. And I thought, a chandelier!? That's amazing! Because it is. I mean, how many people do you know get off work to go and make a chandelier? How many people do you know would even try to make something like that?

I liked the idea of being excited and committed about a creative project outside of work, something unexpected. For me, it would mean working on something that didn't involve writing. It made me start to think about things I'd like to do with my hands, like making a Ouija board. Or learning taxidermy. Or stringing together beads and charms for a necklace. In a matter of perfect timing, my boyfriend got back from working in Sudbury and brought me back a kit to make a dream catcher.

I kept watching L.A. Ink, and the more episodes I saw, the more inspired I got. I also found inspiration through other Kat Von D fans, like the often-updated How To Look Like Kat Von D blog. A few months after I became an L.A. Ink convert, I read this article called "5 Reasons Why You Need a Muse." Although the article talks about the muse as something intangible, almost esoteric, I think that muses can come in many forms. For me, this time, it came through a TV screen.

Here are five things Kat Von D has me thinking about these days (aside from getting more tattoos):

1. Look at things beyond what they are

Kat Von D's tweet about a chandelier wasn't the only time an elaborate light fixture has been brought up. Later, on an episode of her show, she held up an old phonograph cylinder. Showing it to Nikki Sixx, Kat Von D said she thought it would make a good chandelier. I'd never have seen the potential to tranform something like a gramophone cylinder into a whole new project, but now I'm always working to push my perspectives to see things beyond what they are.

2. Revive DIY or DIE

I used to make my own clothes, purses, and jewelry. Part of the time it was because I didn't always have money to buy the things I wanted. It also wasn't as easy to buy band t-shirts and other things wherever, whenever. And another part of me liked sewing and silk screening.

But I'd also grown up wearing a lot of used clothing and when I finally started making a steady income and realized I didn't have to wear used clothes, or homemade clothes, anymore, I stopped doing all of that.

But then I realized I missed it.

3. Work your ass off

I like to read about other people's stories about how they got to where they are. Like the authors who will tell you about how they wrote their books while working two jobs and raising young kids who'll tell you they did it by getting up really early and staying up really late, finding whatever little time they could to squeeze in a bit of writing.

Or the clothing designers who work office jobs all week and then spend their evenings and weekends drawing and cutting and sizing and sewing, who spend their vacations dreaming up new patterns instead of flying off to a beach.

It's the people who do whatever it takes, whatever works for them at that moment, that really resonate. They give us hope and optimism. They make all the hard work we're putting in seem worth it, because when we hear their stories we know we aren't the only ones who are hustling.

They're also good measuring points, because when you hear stories like that, you might find you're not hustling enough.

Kat Von D is someone who took the hard road to become a tattoo artist. She followed her heart, even when people close to her didn't approve, and that's a hard thing to do. And now, she's not only a tattoo artist, but makes art, draws with kids at a local hospital, has a fashion and makeup line, and has published two books.

Does she sleep? Yeah, she does, but she also hustles, and it pays off for her. Although most of us will never come close to reaching Kat Von D's level of recognition (having your own TV show helps), I do believe that hard work does pay off. The more you put yourself out there, the more people notice.

Besides, doesn't life seem so much more exciting when you're constantly diving into new projects instead of sitting around wishing you had something interesting to do?

4. But don't work too hard

When you're constantly focused on goals, it can be really easy to forget that gratification comes in a lot of different forms, not only from crossing off items on a to-do list.

It's also important to make time for relationships. Okay, so my Twitter obsession is really starting to show here, but Kat Von D once tweeted that even though it's great to have a career, at the end of the day it's not something you can snuggle up to.

5. Be genuine (and genuinely creative)

Kat Von D posted a picture of a little love note she left in a hotel she was staying in. It wasn't the only love note she was leaving behind - there was a series of them, waiting to be found by other hotel guests.

When you do things like this, it leads to the unexpected. It can change someone's day, maybe take them out of their routine or break through a bad mood after a long flight.

It's also the kind of thing you can do anywhere. In December, someone started putting up posters around my neighbourhood that look like yellow lined paper. At the top it says "Public Diary Project," and people started leaving one-line entries on the posters. This reminded me of Kat Von D's hotel love letters.

Little things like this keep us connected, even with people we'll never meet. They also can give us ideas to keep connected to the people we love. An idea like Kat Von D's love letters could lead you think of things you can do for your partner, like leaving love letters for them in their jacket pockets, shoes, or bag. Hearing one person's idea can lead to another to another to another.

And the more ideas someone has that resonate with you, the more they'll inspire you.

Where does your creative muse come from?

Psychic Reading, 2000

2011-02-06T19:12:00.000-08:00

On February 11, 2000, about a year after I had my first psychic reading, I had a session with Michael Telstarr. His business card described him as "North America's leading psychic entertainer" and billed him as a mentalist and hypnotist. I came across his booth at a psychic fair where he was offering palm and card readings.

I remember that, after the reading, I had mixed feelings about it. There were times when I felt we hadn't connected at all. Almost 11 years to the day after I had this reading, I found that giving it a listen again gave me a bit of a different feeling towards it. Some things ended up being true.

Michael Telstarr: What I’d like you to do, I’d like you to choose one of these symbols. These cards represent the ancient symbols that have to do with your birth sign. I’d like you to find the one that matches your sign, but I don’t want you to show or tell me what it is. I want you to place it upside down.

Then I want you to take any one of these crystals and place it in the centre of the star. Each one of these crystals has a different meaning. I’ll tell you what the meaning at the end of the reading. But it’s important you don’t show or tell me what it is. I don’t want to know what it is consciously. While you’re doing that I’ll shuffle these tarot cards.

How is your dream recall ability? Can you remember your dreams pretty good?

Liz Worth: Usually.

MT: Okay, good. We’ll just talk a little bit about that. I’ll let you find your card. Place it upside down, and then place one of these crystals in the centre of the star. Have you looked to see if it matches your sign?

That one, eh? Okay, that’s good. That’s a combination of tiger’s eye and white crystal. I’ll tell you what that means before you go.

I just have to look at your left hand. The left hand is the woman’s hand and it’s connected to the right side, and the right side of your mind has to do with passion, intuition, the abstract and so on. Silver, by the way, retains your energy, so silver is a better colour for you to wear. Silver holds your energy in, and you already have a lot of energy shooting out. You have a lot of light colours – light red, violet, red rose on the right side, and dark red on the left. So that shows strength of will, vitality, passion, it’s very strong. So silver holds your energy in, it prevents people from taking your energy.

Michael is talking about silver because when I was a teenager I wouldn't dare leave the house if I didn't have at least 12 rings on my hands. I also liked to wear a lot of necklaces or piles of rosaries. Sometimes I'd have seven different chains hanging off my neck. I've minimized over the years.

Michael hasn't been the first person to tell me that I give off a lot of energy. I had a part-time job throughout my first two years of college and one of my managers there was very into the paranormal and ESP. She used to tell me I could probably pop lightbulbs with what I give off.

I always wonder when I hear things like this because I feel like my energy swings between something close to high anxiety or adrenaline to day-long exhaustion. Very rarely do I get to an in-between.

MT, cont'd: Gold will shoot your energy out, so then you might find yourself getting on people’s nerves.

You probably – it’s not the way you look – but you probably scare the men and women around you. It’s not because of your appearance, but just because people don’t know whether you’re coming our going because you’re two steps ahead of people.

Your love energy is very strong. It’s very charismatic. You can be very flirtatious; it’s a charming energy you have.

This is me in 1999. You can see why Michael Telstarr prefaced his
comments about people "being afraid" by ensuring it wasn't about
how I looked. You mean looking like a vampire might break people
out? At the time my favourite bands were the Damned, the Cure and the
Smiths. What can I say? The dude behind me is my friend Jason, who
was, and is, rad. Definitely one of my favourite people from high school.

You have the Star of Solomon above your love line here so it shows your emotional development was very fast. Your love energy is very strong. You’ll connect with somebody who’s very good at reading body language because you tend to mean something you don’t say. You’d make a good actress as a result.

Your life line and your destiny line show that you will make more money if you follow your heart.
You have a little bit of chaos here at the end of your lifeline so you might have a little bit of communication problems with your father and mother.

Even today I feel that this is true. It extended beyond my teen years. I guess that happens with a lot of people.

There are a lot of things I want to talk to my parents about but often don't because I'm scared to. Ridiculous, yes? Being scared. I never would have thought those feelings would have lasted so long but that's one thing that has never gotten easier is opening up to them on a deeper emotional level.

MT, con't: You have butterfly or angel wings here. This means your adaptable. You’ll tend to learn from the mistakes of other people. You’re very perceptive like that, so you’ll tend to mimic and pick up very fast. You’d do good in the media field.

I’m going to give you some options on who your ideal soul mate would be, and I’ll also give you some insight on some other type of work I see you doing.

Definitely in your life line and your destiny line, they’re intertwined, so this means feeling that you’re your own boss, or being your own boss. What are you doing? Are you still going to school?
LW: Yeah.

MT: Okay, I’m going to give you some other types of things I could see you doing. But I see that you can do a lot of things and you’re interested in a lot of things.

Very true, even though I didn't feel it at the time. In 2000, I'd limited myself quite a bit. I was trying to stick myself in certain places and I had influences hanging over me that I never should have let get in my head, but was too young to have known better. At the time I was more afraid to just like what I wanted to like. I'd spent too much time with people who thought if you were into one type of scene you couldn't be into any others. I didn't know that the more honest you were with yourself, and with the people around you, the better things could get.

I'd also been put through some situations that had made me feel like I had to repress so much that a lot of things I had liked before I'd pushed away.

So back then, I only wanted to like certain things because I couldn't bring myself to let my old interests into my life again, and I wasn't acknowledging much that existed outside of my box. Within a year of this reading, I'd started changing a lot of that and opening up a lot more.

MT, con't: But if you can do a field or learn a skill where you can be independent and be your own boss, this will make you happier. You don’t like people telling you what to do because it can cause friction in a job. Whatever type of work you do now will only be temporary.

You probably don’t remember your dreams very well because you focus and worry too much on physical reality. It’s hard for you to save money. I see you splashing it.

Wrong and wrong! These are two things I didn't agree with. I've always had good memory recall, and told him so at the beginning of our session. But whatever. Small detail.

I do like to spend money but having been raised by parents who were born during the Depression, I've inherited a lot of fears around being totally irresponsible. Boring, I know. But when you grow up with people who think the sky could fall at any second and who stockpile canned goods and budge every cent they have, it can be hard to just let go.

Besides, I was only making $6.85 an hour at the time, so I didn't have much to splurge.

MT, con't: Are you in Grade 12 or 13?

LW: ’m doing both right now.

MT: Doing both right now? Okay. You have an old soul type of energy. Your energy will tend to have you connect with younger people when you’re older and younger people when you get older. That’s how it will work for you because of the way your energy is.

I remember my mom being so relieved when I told her later that he'd said this. At the time I was hanging out in bars with a bunch of people who were older than me and would buy me drinks on the weekends. Unfortunately for my mom, I never ended up making many friends my own age for a while still.

MT, handing me a deck of tarot cards: Can I get you to shuffle these two or three times and after you’ve shuffled them, put your energy into the cards and then I’d like you to make three piles. Now I’d like you to use your intuition and point to any one pile.

Now I’d like you to take four cards from here and place them face down here, one of top of the other, and these are going to tell us a little bit about your present and future possibilities.

Do you have any brothers or sisters?

LW: No.

MT: That would make it difficult, then. At least if you had a brother or sister… Do you have a girlfriend who’s like a sister to you?

LW: Not that I’m aware of.

MT: No? Not exactly? Did you lose touch? Did you lose a friend? Do you have more male friends than male friends? Okay, well you need to get a few more female friends (laughs). Well I feel you’ll connect with somebody who will be a good influence for you this year.

This was a tough question for me to answer. Even though I'd made some friends at a downtown bar, they were people I only saw on weekends and never really talked to during the week.

I have a strange relationship with loneliness, and lonerdom. I always feel caught between introverted and extroverted. If I don't get enough time to myself I feel claustrophobic and anxious. There are certain things I prefer doing by myself, like going to coffee shops and shopping. I have no problem going to a movie or even a show alone.

But at the same time, no matter how many people I'll see in a weekend, by the time Monday night rolls around I feel like I haven't seen anyone, and I wonder if it'll all fall apart at any minute. I could spend every night out one week and then the next feel like I have no life. It doesn't make any sense, but it's how my brain works.

A lot of it probably goes back to being an only child, and not having many friends then. I had a lot of imaginary friends, though, particularly one named Janet who was a fat girl with glasses. I had a thing for girls with glasses and every time I saw a four-eyed girl I'd think, I want to be friends with her.

I used to go swimming a lot then (by myself, of course). There were free swims at the pool down the street and sometimes I'd go every single day. I saw a girl there one summer who had brown hair and glasses and I wondered if she could be my Janet. I followed her around the pool, swimming a few feet away, dunking my head when she did in case she might open her eyes and see me and somehow connect.

About 20 minutes in I smiled and said hi. She said hi back and then she asked why I was following her. I can't remember what I told her but it must have been okay because we ended up hanging out. She was there by herself, too. She came over to my house after and my mom made us spaghetti.

I never saw her again and spent the rest of the summer swimming by myself.

Anyway, back to Michael Telstarr...I'd broken up with a boyfriend at the end of 1999 and had lost my high school social life in the process - not that it was an ideal social circle, anyway. I'd never been one of those girls with "good girlfriends" or anyone who I considered to be really close. I had some girls who were friends, but we didn't hang out much outside of school. The girls I liked either lived too far away or had crazy parents who would never let them do anything. That, or when I did get invited to hang out with new people I wouldn't, or then my parents would go crazy and not decide I wasn't allowed to do anything.

So I never had that one friend who would come over after school or whatever it is people with real friends do. I realized later that part of that was my fault. I didn't reach out very much, and I found it hard to open up a lot of the time, so people probably saw me as closed off or unapproachable.

But I did have some guy friends, and always found it easier to hang out with them. Unfortunately, a lot of the guys I hung out with also hung out with my ex-boyfriend. Suddenly I wasn't invited to party on Friday night anymore. Even though I'd been friendless before it was different now, because now I was a teenager and I wanted to go out. I wondered if my parents thought anything about me staying in, if they'd figured out I had no friends.

I'd say early 2000 was probably the first time I felt real, hard loneliness. It felt like no one wanted to talk to me anymore, and when I did finally get out - even if it was only to hang out with grown ups in bars - my lack of real, close friends was only underlined as soon as I got home and realized the night was over and that the next day, I'd be back to having no one to talk to.

Michael was right that I would connect with someone that year, though. I did end up making some really good connections in the end with some girls at school who I'm still friends with to this day.

MT, con't: I’d like you to pick another pile of cards. Place them face down here. These are going to be your destiny cards.

So we’re going to put all these down. They’re very powerful cards. The Magician here is a very powerful card, and the Illumination. The Illumination has symbols of other cards, so that’s very creative, spiritual. It tells me a little bit of what you’ll be doing in the future.

Then there’s Rejection and Fear. Okay, so your two destiny cards, in the future, you’re going to have to look back at the last couple of years. This could have to do with a relationship. You have a very strong, independent nature so you would have to connect with a mate who would treat you as a partner, as a best friend and partner but who doesn’t restrict or impose any limitations on you. Spiritually you’re an old soul but physically you’re young, so you still have to do a little more rehearsal before you get to know who you are, and what you want in a relationship.

It's interesting that he said I'd have to look back at the last couple of years n order to learn about what I want in a relationship. At the time, I wasn't phased by this at all, but in the last few years I've spent a lot of time thinking back, working out my past and trying to give it perspective and context so that it wouldn't affect me anymore, or the people I'm with.

It wasn't only the abusive relationship I'd been in during those nearly two years that I had to look back on. It was everything. It was my depression and cutting and the interventions that went along with them. It was my teenage insecurities and my trouble sleeping and my time spent aimlessly drifting and my aspirations to self-destruct. Everything went way back and I've spent a lot of time revising it, trying to get past it. I can't fix it, I know, but I've worked a lot at moving past it.

MT, con't: The Fear could be about your ability. You have very strong, powerful untapped capacities that you possess that you haven’t fully developed yet or turned to your advantage, but you will in the future.

I always wonder what psychics aren't telling you in their readings. I'd love to have someone say, "you're going to fuck this up if you A, B or C." Sometimes I wonder if they try to pump you up when maybe they're seeing a problem coming down the road. Anyway...

MT, con't: Illumination has to do with spirituality. You have strengths and abilities here that you want to focus on amplifying. All of this comes from your feminine energy, which is very, very strong. You might want to look at doing something in the holistic field, in alternative medicine, something to do with spirituality.

You’d make a good teacher. Or a psychologist. I think you’d be a good therapist, hypnotherapist. Something to do with polarity therapy, healing. Medicine, nutrition. Something to do where you’re helping people on the emotional, physical and spiritual levels. All of this indicates the ability to become self-employed, by applying those abilities.

Have you ever thought about any of those options?

No, at the time I hadn't at all, but it's strange to hear this now because lately I've been giving a lot of thought to expanding my options into some of these areas.

LW: I want to be a writer.

Predictable. I wonder sometimes if I really did. Did I want to be a writer? Do I want to be a writer? It's so hard. I feel like it chose me, instead. I feel like I just have to do it, no matter what, and when I don't I feel anxious and awful. Does this go on forever? If it stopped would I mourn it? Would it be like trading one thing for another?

I had a teacher, Mr. Smart, who really encouraged me to write. He was a big influence on me, actually, and was definitely a main reason why I kept going to school when I was ready to just give everything up. But I wonder sometimes how things would have turned out if I had decided to pursue something else. I wonder if a lot of the pressure I put on myself all stems back to high school, if this idea of being a writer has been there for so long that I'm just used to it and don't know how to go back to thinking of anything else.

MT, con't: Writing is great. Writing affects people. Journalism would be good for you. Being a reporter, reporting the whatever.

What kind of stuff do you want to write about? Do you want to write about the spirituality of humanity? The environment? Do you want to do reporting? Do you want to do fiction, fantasy, whatever? What kind of stuff do you like?

LW: I like fiction. I write a lot of poetry.

MT: Has it been published yet?

LW: Yes, I have something coming out in the summer.

Note to young, aspiring writers: get yourselves out there early! I started when I was 17 and it definitely made it easier for me to get my name out there later.

LW, con't: And, I have a CD review that’s being published.

MT: Okay, so you are doing some stuff.

A lot of this Magician here and the Illumination here, this double Magician, this is not coincidental. The synchronicity here is very strong. This shows that what you’re doing now is good practice, what you mentioned, but you will be getting into the spiritual aspect of humanity later on. Maybe environmental, spiritual causes, the mind and psyche. And what you’ll want to do is take courses, learn and experiment.

But you’ll need some kind of position or work that might be more stable or allow you to ground down, so you’ll need to do some kind of work. So you’ll need to do some kind of work that will allow you to pursue the other work. Do you know what I’m saying? You don’t want to be a starving artist, right?

Um, actually, yes. I did want that then and still kind of do now. That's the big fantasy, right? To somehow squeak by on your words alone. But reality is I live in an expensive city and I want to do things, like travel and go to shows and buy books and records and other things that cost money. And I couldn't live my parents forever and so yeah, he was right. In my head I want to be a starving artist but when in real life I want boring, comfortable stability. Especially nearing 30. Let's be honest - being a bum isn't cute once you're past 25, max.

MT, looking at the crystal I picked out at the beginning of the session: Tiger’s eye means power, and the white crystal means purity. You have a tendency to be too critical of yourself, too much of a perfectionist. And that’s good, so long as you don’t let that affect the people around you too much.

I still struggle with this. Not so much for a search of perfection, but a search of productivity, which is my version of perfection. I have a tendency to push people away when I feel like I'm not crossing enough things off my to-do list. I need to find other ways to feel gratified other than through work.

MT, con't: But anyway, you have a good life ahead of you. Obviously you’re not conforming, and that’s good. Be who you want to be it, do whatever you want to do, but have some kind of a master plan.

Do you have any questions for me? Think of anything you want to ask. Relationships? Be careful in relationships, eh?

LW: I’ve been talking to this guy for about a year. I’m just wondering –

MT: Talking? Are you friends? See, friendship has to come first. You have to have the trust and then the passion.

Gone on any official dates? Not really.

LW: No.

We hadn't gone on any dates but I had made a journal entry about
him having run away from Hamilton to come and see me. Apparently
he was walking. Note my brilliance when I realize "that would be really
hard." I don't remember this at all.

MT: You don’t have any problems being assertive, right? You can be if you want to be, right? So then the what is it you’d like to know then? You’ve just been talking on the phone? Does he live around here? Far away?

LW: Hamilton.

MT: Okay. I was picking up about an hour away from Toronto. Have you gone there? Have you slept at his place?

LW: No.

MT: Okay. If you go to his place, you sleep in a separate room. Make sure you sleep in a separate room, if you want to go. Because you want to take it slow. You like the person, obviously?

LW: Yeah.

MT: There’s a rapport there, so you want to take it slow. You’re not going to be the type of girl they’re going to tell what to do. Take it slowly. I think there’s a good rapport there. There’s no reason you can’t take it slowly. Have you done many things together?

LW: No, just talking.

Don’t sleep over, then, but start doing things together. Because it’s hard to know how they’re going to be if you don’t see how they react to other people around you. You’re not testing them, you just want to know where they’re coming from. The rapport is there, but you’ve got to build up on the friendship.

Give it three months. If you like the person and it builds up after three months, and you want it to be long-term, then it will be long-term. But if it’s less than three months, and three months is a short time if you’re going to have a long-term, then it won’t last. That’s what I’m telling you now, from psychic and personal experience, okay?

Michael cut me off before I could finish asking my question, which was "I'm just wondering if we'll ever actually get together." The guy I was wondering about was this kid from Hamilton named Seth. I thought I was totally in love with him. We'd been talking for a while but whenever we made a plan to meet up, something would always fall through on his end. It was a hard thing for me to go through at the time because I did feel so alone at the time. I was definitely hanging a lot of hope on this guy and nothing ever came of it. Even though we never even went on a real date I still wonder about him sometimes and what would have happened if we had gotten together.

I guess it was always meant to be a question left unanswered, even when put to a psychic.

Thor: Canada's Original Rock Warrior

2011-01-24T12:25:00.000-08:00

He's been known for ability to bend steel, take a brick to the head, and built some serious muscle. But Canadian body builder and metal pioneer Jon Mikl Thor is probably best defined as someone whose career has been built on defying convention in everything he does.

And this guy does a lot. Whether you’re taking a look at his past accomplishments or listening to him run down the list of his current projects, you see that there’s a reason they call this guy the Rock Warrior. Although he’s always drawn a lot influence from comic book heroes, Thor can start to seem like a superhero himself.

Along with being a childhood fan of comic books, Thor also cultivated an interest in music, body building and sports. Before releasing his classic 1977 album Keep the Dogs Away, this pioneer of Canadian metal was already in the history books as a professional body builder as Mr. Canada, as well as being the first Canadian to win the Mr. USA title. He's also swept up Mr. Universe, Mr. International, and Mr. North America titles, among others.

Thor is credited as being one of the first heavy metal artists in Canada, and he’s also had an impressively long career. To date, he’s released several full-length records, EPs, and singles, and contributed to numerous compilations and collaborations.

Through his tireless musical output, Thor's cultivated a dedicated international following, has seen two of his earlier records, Keep the Dogs Away, Unchained and Only the Strong reissued, and contributed to the Fubar soundtrack. He’s toured extensively, collaborated with other major Canadian acts like D.O.A. and won the praises of Punk Magazine in the heyday of punk rock.

But Thor is about more than heavy metal. Although music’s been a major part of his life, in the 1980s he branched out into acting, appearing in the cult classics Rock & Roll Nightmare and Zombie Nightmare, among others. He’s also gone on to work as a producer and currently has two documentaries in the works. He teaches, runs a sports apparel line, and is even working on a book.

Given his busy schedule, I felt really lucky to be able to chat with him for a few minutes about his career.

LW: When Keep the Dogs Away was reissued, someone said you deserved more success than you had. Do you think that’s true?

JMT: You know, I’m not in the Hall of Fame in Toronto, although I think I’ve done a lot for Canada. You know, I was a young guy who, as a young boy, defeated some of the biggest body builders in the world in Mr. Universe as a teenager. I went against Lou Ferrigno, who played the Hulk, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. I won 40 titles.

There was always sort of this attitude of, “Oh yeah, he’s the muscle guy,” and it was tough to get recognized as a musician even though I was a musician probably longer than I’d been a body builder. Of course now, things are different because of the superhero craze and all that stuff; there’s a whole new generation discovering us.

See, I had to use my ingenuity. So maybe sometimes the radio stations wouldn’t play Keep the Dogs Away as much, but I still say it’s a great album. I got a lot of notoriety from Keep the Dogs Away. It gave me a lot of success.

There’s the word “success” – it gave me success. I’ve probably gone further with all my albums than a lot of friends I know who are now dead or who never went any further than being one hit wonders, you know? So I kept going with all my different albums over the years. I got into movies. In other words, I used the medium to my advantage, to get into sports and entertainment and to do all different kinds of things.

So yes, to answer the question, Keep the Dogs Away was very successful for me.

LW: I wanted to ask you if there was a big divide between punk fans and metal fans in Canada. Some people say that there were definite divisions between them, but then you were praised in Punk Magazine.

JMT: Yeah, I mean, I always said there was a fine line between punk and metal. There was a period in ’75, ’76, where I was playing what I considered heavy metal type tunes but I was also playing Ramones songs, right? So I liked both, and I think both were equally energetic and driven and we played them in our own way. I say punk is metal, metal is punk. I’ve done shows with D.O.A. and they were very successful. We did a double album together that did very well. Of course there are those that would not accept a metal band and vice versa, but there is a meld between the two.

But as far as my career goes, I left Canada at a young age to seek out fame in other countries, right? I wanted to seek fame and I went right into the source of punk. When I had the album Keep the Dogs Away, I went to go play CBGBs and that’s when I got picked up by Punk Magazine. We were always on the charts.

If you look back to Punk Magazine, which was the bible of punk in New York City and internationally, we were always on the charts. So we were appreciated by the punks and the rockers and the metallers, so I think we were lucky enough to transcend that as far as popularity. We went in there and represented metal and represented punk and represented rock.

LW: Were you ever more passionate about one thing over the other at any time? Did body building or music ever take a priority over the other?

JMT: No, I think I loved them both. I started playing accordion at a very young age, when I was seven. But then I got just as excited about playing guitar when I found out playing accordion wasn’t a very cool instrument to play. But the passion was always there for music, for comic books, superheroes. So it was all there, it was like one big ball of wax, and that’s why I made a career out of it.

LW: Would you say body building and music can influence each other?

JMT: Yeah, I feel I’m the guy who started that symbolization. I have quite a few fans who are body builders and they’re all music fans. When I played Sweden last year at the Sweden Rock Festival, there was an incredible amount of body building metal fans who train, just as I did, to music.

It’s amazing what’s happened. When I was young I was pretty much the only guy who was doing that. Like a body builder in the 1950s or ‘40s probably wouldn’t be into music so much, or they wouldn’t come together. But I’m the purveyor of muscle rock. That’s why they call me the King of Muscle Rock. I have my own festival in Sweden, the Muskle Rock Festival that we do every year, and that’s what it’s all about, music and muscle. So I feel like I’m the guy that made that all really come together.

LW: That’s cool. Was it easier to break into a career as a body builder or a career in the music industry, in Canada?

JMT: Both were really hard. I went internationally. I went out and won the Mr. World title. I was the first Canadian to win Mr. USA. It was all very tough and it was very political, just as music is very political and tough to get into. Same with movies. They’re all hard. You’ve gotta have gumption, you’ve gotta have desire. And you need some luck, too. You’ve gotta have people who believe in you to make anything happen.

LW: Was there ever a time you wanted to give up?

JMT: Yeah, I would say there was. Everybody has that thought in their mind, right? If you’re gonna talk the talk, you’ve gotta walk the walk. There are times when you either do or you don’t. The fact is, if you’re gonna try to make it, you’ve got to push yourself to the next level. They always say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going and yeah, there were many times the going got tough.

LW: What would you say remains your biggest motivation, today?

JMT: After years of being in the business, my motivation is I’m working on two movie projects. The Marvel Thor movie is coming out and we have a lot of Thor fans who are demanding our own Thor movie. I’ve made quite a few movies as a producer, I’ve written movies. We have a lot of fans of Rock & Roll Nightmare and Zombie Nightmare. These movies did really well. And I’ve appeared in a lot of movies, and now I’ve got two movies in production and I find that exciting.

I’m involved with hockey and sports and I have my own clothing line. We have a new line that’s coming out of vintage hockey clothing this year. These are all things I find fun and fascinating. So it’s not just putting out records. A lot of bands want to put out records, but you have to go further. There’s other things to do. I know a lot of guys who just want to stick with one thing, “I wanna keep being that rockstar,” and you deteriorate because you can’t do that forever. You can’t be a Mr. Universe and think that’s going to last forever. You’ve got to do something with it.

I even teach, you know? I teach at the Pacific Audio and Visual Institute because I like to tell my ups and downs of my career, if that can help, to new students. So there’s always some kind of excitement for me that keeps me driven, that keeps me going. As long as I wake up and I leap out of bed and I have fun, I don’t care how long I work on a project, day and night, as long as it’s a fun situation for me. If it gets drab or it’s not fun then it’s not something that drives me.

LW: That sounds really busy. That’s cool. I like that you have a lot of different stuff going on. So when you’re talking to students, what are some of the things you tell them about?

JMT: It all depends on what the subject matter is to be taught that day. It could be the business of marketing, how to take an image and market it. How you see your band, the band name, things like that. I just came off a recent tour where I played Quebec City and Montreal and Toronto, and then I did a lecture about touring.

There’s always something that can happen with touring, an obstacle you have to overcome, but you try to make things smooth as possible. I’ve had everything from all of my equipment going up in flames because some guy burnt up a nightclub. I’ve had the truck turn over in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the desert.

LW: Not that we ever want to believe the best times are behind us, but what would you say have been the best moments in your career so far?

JMT: There have been a lot of great times. I don’t know where to really start. I still believe the best are yet to come, because I’m having such a good time now, but I’d say when I played the Marquee (club in London) in 1984. Nobody knew what to expect of us and we blew them away. We had a great show. That’s one great time.

One of the greatest things was getting involved with sports. We have a whole new line of Thor hockey jerseys coming out. Those things really excite me, because I love hockey. I’m Canadian, right?

I could name hundreds of things that I could name as my greatest moments in life, but I’m looking forward to more things. The best is yet to come.

LW: And if you were debuting as Thor today, do you think you make the same debut album that you did with Keep the Dogs Away, or would you introduce yourself to the world as something different?

JMT: That’s an interesting question. I think maybe something similar, because I think that Thor has been duplicated, or people have attempted to duplicate Thor as a musical entity. There’s a lot of bands out there that have tried do the Thor thing, like Manowar and on and on.

But I think we were ahead of our time. The whole music industry was completely different. How many musclemen are in Hollywood now? How many muscular musicians are there now? If I came out now I’d have a different looking concept as Thor. My muscles at the time were very shocking. People at the time found it very shocking that this glistening muscleman would be on the cover: “How dare he!” I had critics saying I sang like a broken muscle and things like that.

But if you look back at the album, I think the album was well-written, the songs were really good, it was well-produced, and I think my voice was really good. In fact, at one time, there was an article that came out in Florida that said I was Jim Morrison reincarnated, which I thought was a compliment because I liked him as a singer.

But yeah, that’s a very interesting question and I think I would come out with something different in this modern era. But I say it transcends time; it’s still unique enough if it was released for the first time.

LW: Okay, and I just have one more question. Do you still have a book in the works? What’s going on with that project?

JMT: Yes, I am working on a book and the interesting thing that we’re doing is I have two documentaries going on right now. One of them is called Ride from Hell and it’s about the severe ups and downs of my life in the music industry not just as a performer but as an observer. We have some really terrifying footage; I’d say it’s like a real-life horror movie in some ways. It’s like the rise, fall, and attempted rise again of Thor. It looks at my career, when things were great, then some strange things happened, and then I was out of the business for 10 years and I tried to make this comeback.

Usually you do the book first and then you do the documentary based on the book, and then you do the drama. But we’re doing it a little different. We’re doing the film first and then the book after, and then maybe a docudrama after that. That’s our plan, anyhow. I also have a movie coming out called Thor: The Rock Opera. We hope to get a book out sometime next year, based on that, which would be more like a picture book. So I’ve got two books planned, at the moment.

Keep up with Thor over at http://www.thorcentral.com/

Father's Day Tribute 1978

2011-01-18T18:10:00.000-08:00

Back in the day, my mom bought a big ol' cassette recorder and started lugging it around to family parties. She'd plug it in, pop in a blank cassette, hit "record" and let the tape catch whatever conversations happened. She did this throughout the '70s and '80s. How very Andy Warhol of her, huh?

When I was a kid we'd pull them out sometimes and listen to them. Mostly, I remember them being full of competing voices and post-dinner belching.

I still have some of the very first cassettes I ever owned, and even as early as '02 and '03 I started to notice that they just weren't working the way they used to. But what could we expect from the one medium that would self-destruct right in the middle of your favourite song?

So I offered to transcribe my mom's old tapes for her, just in case they ever fall apart on her. Tonight I randomly pulled one of the out the bag and ended up with a tape called "Father's Day Tribute June 18th, 1978."

It all starts off with a letter/poem that my uncle's first wife Sue read out loud as a tribute to my grandpa. I didn't know him that well because he died when I was five but I heard he liked to party.

On the tape it sounds like what Sue's reading was a collaborative effort between my aunts, because she didn't grow up with them as kids even though at times it sounds like she did.

When I was transcribing this I couldn't decide if it was all kind of sweet or kind of terrible and you'll probably wonder if the quality of the tape has anything to do with how weird this all sounded but no, this all happened.

Who’s Who:

Elmer Cherry: Grandpa. Father to Bill, Bobby, Clifford, George, Linda, Margaret, Mary and Shirley.

Aunt Linda: My mom’s sister

Aunt Margaret: My mom’s sister

Aunt Nancy: My uncle Bill’s wife.

Aunt Shirley: My mom’s sister.

Mary: My mom.

George M.: Also my uncle, by marriage to my Aunt Linda.

Sue: My uncle Bobby’s first wife.

Uncle Cliff: My mom’s brother.

Uncle George: My mom’s brother.

Random kid: Either my cousin Darren or Kenny.

--

Aunt Linda: Okay, everybody, now we’re going to toast dad to a happy Father’s Day, and then Sue’s got some literature. So if everybody’s ready we’ll proceed with the day’s festivities, okay?

Aunt Margaret: Well, let’s toast dad. Happy Father’s day, dad!

Collective voices: Happy father’s day!! Happy father’s day!

Unidentifiable woman: Sit with your legs crossed.

Mary: Okay, Sue’s going to talk. Silence.

Sue: This is especially for you, dad.

Elmer: Thank you.

Sue, reading from the letter: Dear dad. In the past few weeks, many words have been written. Even as I write this the thought occurred to me that a roast would have been more appropriate. There was no time to arrange such an event. Highlighted in the next few pages are thoughts and memories of you, dad.
How is your drink? Because this will take a while.

Elmer: Oh, it’s good enough. How’s yours?

(laughter)

Aunt Nancy: Is anybody serving? She’s gone dry.

Sue: Dear father, you gave us life. We’ll always be proud of that fact as remembered today by all of us. Father, you have grown older. In the years since we were young, some of us remember the days the songs were strung.

Elmer: There were days I used to give you all a damn good lickin’.

Sue: On your banjos, you would play familiar tunes and we would sing. On your knee we might climb to finish out our day. You pulled many hours, dad. The strumming times were few.
Memories are cherished, though, as I think of you. Those days of working at the Brassworks, maybe Christie’s, too. Your baking was your first love. You do it all so well.

Aunt Linda: Let’s hear it for the pumpkin pie!

Sue: The odours of the baking spree that made so many things. The table laden at the end of some days of what seemed like a dream. Upon arriving of each day, to the Brassworks you would stray.
For bread and butter, you toiled away. The friends you made will always remember you for your willingness, determination and above all cooperation which you instilled in some of us. We thank you dad for this heritage, for you were our foundation and today we put it to task in our own working life.
Memories of you, dad, like chasing Shirl around the block with a piece of lumber. Or you coming to gram’s and seeing how fat as I was getting. When you ground your cigarettes into your empty dinner plate. Letting us finally go away to Buffalo with our girlfriends.

(laughter)

Uncle George: What happened in Buffalo?

Elmer: They made enough money down there to come back again.

Mom: That’s awful!

Sue, still reading: We remember our first bicycles, and how proud we were of them.
Always at the end of each day it was, “hello dearie, how was your day?” So cheerful, dad, you were.
Oh how tired you must have been. Seeing you and mom at long last on your very first flight and holiday in many a years to witness that happy state in Jamaica.

Elmer: Jesus, that was good too. That girlfriend I got there, I should’a brought her home.

Shirley: You probably did. She’s probably up in the attic.

(laughter)

Sue: This could go on forever, but we must eat, and we must take the wine. We love to have you around so we decided to buy exercise equipment, not too strenuous, to keep you in shape. In addition to this toy for the winter months cough medicine, skirted for your pleasure. Enjoy, enjoy.

Linda: Thank you, Sue. That was very nice.

(Applause)

Elmer: Gee, I really like this here, uh, binder.

Elmer: That’s very nice. Thank you very much, people. Now let’s have another drink. Now what the hell is this?

Mom: Dad, they’re your gifts.

Aunt Linda: Let’s see what grandpa’s got in his presents, kids.

Elmer: Now who’d like a drink of Drambuie?

Uncle Clifford: Give Mary a little.

Uncle George: Shirl, would you please rub my foot?

Aunt Shirley: Are you paying for this service?

Uncle George: No, but it’s all swollen.

Aunt Shirley: Are you kidding?!

(laughter)

Elmer: Who’d like a drink of Drambuie? Would you like a drink of Drambuie, Bill?

Uncle Bill: Maybe.

Sue: You’re not going to open that Drambuie. There’s enough out here to drink as it is.

Aunt Linda: Do you want some peanut brittle?

Random kid: Peanut brittle! Peanut brittle!

(Tape stops, then starts again...)

Kid: We’re not going home! We’re not going home!

George M.: You’re going to through thirteen gallons of gas a week. Thirteen times anything you want.

Uncle Cliff: Okay, times a dollar.

George M.: Okay, 13 dollars a week. For 52 weeks. That’s 660 dollars.

Uncle Cliff: Nowhere near a thousand. I’m talking about the difference between comfort and
saving. How much are you saving? Not a whole hell of a lot. You’re not gaining a lot. That motor
is going to work twice as hard as any other and wear out in any places it has to.

Kid: What a delicious tea! What a tea delicious tea! WHAT A DELICIOUS TEA! (Slurps loudly.) Mmm…that was good.

George M.: Everybody to their own. Everybody to their own.

Uncle Cliff: Yup, everybody to their own.

Sue, entering the room: Why do you always jump down every time I come in here, cat?

Uncle Cliff: It’s gettin’ wild.

Sue: Somebody teases it too much. Someone teases the cats.

Uncle Cliff: Well you know you gotta let them be, eh?

Sue: That’s why they always run and scamper everywhere. They get high strung.

Uncle Cliff: But a kitten’s gotta be active. I mean, we’ve got bells hanging all over the house for them to play with. A kitten’s a nice little thing, George, and you should own one.

George M.: No bloody way.

Uncle Cliff: You’re the meanest person I’ve ever known, not wanting a cat.

George M.: I’ve got one pussy at home and it doesn’t scratch. That’s all I want. Ha ha ha.

How I spent my Christmas vacation

2011-01-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

There's something about the Christmas holidays that gets my inspired. It's not the holiday itself, but the quiet that comes with it. It's like the city goes to sleep for the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve. Things are always a little quieter, a little slower, and I always find it a good time to brainstorm and work out some new writing between sleeping in, reading, and going out.

This year, I found it especially difficult to get creative. Although I did do some writing, I've felt mostly uninspired and didn't have the energy to push through. Instead, I spent most of the holidays reading, watching TV, and hanging out.

After heading to my parents' place on Christmas eve, I ate hors d'oeuvres for dinner and stayed up late reading Danny Sugerman's Appetite for Destruction, which is part Guns N' Roses bio, part manifesto for rock n' roll danger and debauchery. (I recommend it.)

My parents, both 74, said they didn't want to get up too early on Christmas day, but at 7am on the dot I could hear them creeping down the stairs and opening and closing kitchen cupboards, making coffee and tea. Years ago, those were routine morning sounds that I would sleep through. Now, they remind me of sleeping anywhere else: my old apartment, my current apartment, a friend's place, a hotel. Whether I'm in a familiar place or just passing through now, I hear everything, even in the house I used to live. Nothing feels comfortable enough anymore.

I got up a few minutes later and went downstairs. We grabbed our coffees and sat around the tree. I handed my dad a present, part of which was a drug store gift card. When he opened it he yelled out, "Metamucil, here I come!"

My dad had wrapped my mom's presents along with cans of salmon and black beans, to make them feel heavier than they were. An hour later, the living room was filled with wrapping paper and canned food.

After all the presents were unwrapped and it was time to get out of our pajamas and into real clothes, my mom turned the kitchen radio on. And then the bathroom radio on. And then the bedroom radio on. All at the same time. And then my dad went and turned the TV on. I went into the dining room and plugged in my laptop to do some writing, earplugs in. The radios were so loud I could still hear them.

Then I remembered what it was like to live there. There was never silence. On a regular day, the radios and TVs are on right from the start of the morning. The kitchen radio stays on until around 5pm. The TV stays on until my parents are in bed asleep. I couldn't remember how I ever found Christmas to be a quiet time.

Later, after dinner, we all sat around to watch TV together. There wasn't much on so we settled on Meet Joe Black. My mom never sits long enough to watch something all the way through. She missed the beginning, which meant she missed what it was all about: Death (Brad Pitt) wants to experience life, and makes a deal with a dying man (Anthony Hopkins), asking him to be his guide in exchange for a few extra weeks on earth.

My mom came in at a scene where Brad Pitt's in a hospital where another character works. An old woman is brought in on a wheelchair and freaks out when she sees him. She knows who, or what, he really is.

So I tried to give my mom a quick rundown of what the movie's about. My explanation was pretty much the same as how I described it above.

My mom listened to what I said, looked at the TV, and said, "So he's a murderer?"

"Um, no, not exactly. He's Death."

"Oh! He's deaf...I see."

"No, he's DEATH. Now he's telling her he's on vacation."

"He's what?"

It went on like this throughout the rest of the movie. I kept saying, "you kind of have to just listen to the dialogue to catch up..." but like I said, that house is never quiet.

My boyfriend came by on Boxing Day and we all had dinner together. My dad passed a dish of something over to me and I saw how much his hands shake now. My mom's do, too. Is that what happens to us when we get older? I don't remember seeing my parents' hands shake like that before, but maybe I just haven't been around enough to notice before.

For reasons I still can't figure out, I couldn't wait to get out of there. I felt bad feeling that way, too. Maybe I was craving some quieter space. Maybe I'd misremembered the silence of the season, or maybe I've just been out of the house too long to ever be used to its sounds again. Maybe I was just tired, or crashing from all the sugar I'd eaten in a 24 hour period. I don't know what it was, but it only got worse when I got back to my apartment because my apartment isn't home. It's just a place I rent, a place to keep my stuff. I always think of my parents' house as my real home, in my real neighbourhood, but at Christmas all it didn't feel as familiar as I wanted it to.

After spending the first half of the week in restaurants and bars with friends, I met up with my mom on Thursday to go shopping on Roncesvalles. A couple years ago my dad was in the hospital down there for months, and my mom and I would meet up for breakfast on the weekends and walk around a bit between hospital visits, and she'd been wanting to go back for a while.

After we had breakfast on Thursday we went into She Said Boom! There was a record I was looking for. My mom zeroed in on some DVDs that were on sale, three for five bucks, while I flipped through some music on the other side of the store. Then she yelled, "LIZ! Liz, look! A Santa movie...have we seen this?" I turned around and she was holding up that Santa Clause 2 movie with Tim Allen.

"I haven't seen it," I said. "Maybe you and dad have?"

"I don't think we've seen it," she said.

I turned back to the records, and then, "LIZ! They have a Friends DVD." She was holding up a Best Of Friends collection. "If I get this will you come over and watch it?"

"Um, yeah, I guess so," I said. Were there were other people in the store at this point? You bet. The guy at the counter was looking over, smiling. I was thinking about my 15 year old self and how embarrassed I would've been in a past life. I felt grateful I'd grown up enough to at least just go along with it.

We went into a vintage clothing store where the clerk was listening to a radio station. A commercial came on for a local jeweler and my mom immediately ran over to the counter and said, "I hate him. I hate that guy." Right away, I knew she was talking about the guy in the commercial but I didn't know how the clerk would respond to this tiny woman who was suddenly in her face.

(Then again, we were at Queen and Roncesvalles where anything can happen. I was in a convenience store at the corner there once, waiting in line to buy cigarettes, and the guy in front of me pulled out a knife. The dude working the counter looked down at the blade, bunched up his eyebrows, waved his hand like he was shooing a fly and said, "get out of here," like it was no big deal.)

Anyway, luckily the store clerk got my mom right away. "Those ads play constantly," she said.

"It must be a scam," my mom went on, encouraged. "How does that guy sell jewelry for so cheap? And who are the people falling for it?" The clerk let her rant and I checked out some black and white '80s pumps.

My mom also busted out the baby talk. In another conversation with a store clerk, the topic turned to high heels - both of them talked about how they quit wearing heels ages ago but saved one pair, just for fun. "But girls who like to wear heels have been so lucky this winter," the clerk said. "The weather's been great. Not much snow yet."

"Oh, I know," my mom said. "Today I wore my flatsies," meaning flats, of course. Yes, it's true: baby talk never stopped for me and my parents.

It was getting time to head home and my mom wanted to sit and get a coffee before we got on the subway. We went to a bakery/coffee shop and sat by the window. My mom showed me the DVDs she bought at She Said Boom: Seabiscuit, Santa Clause 2, and some other movie I'd never heard of that has Jeff Bridges in it. Jeff Bridges was the selling point for her.

Then an older man came in, ordered half a dozen donuts, and flipped out when it came time to pay for them. "How much did you say it was?" he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Six donuts cost $7.25? You raised the price. Did you raise the price? You must have raised the price."

The girl at the counter said, "They're over $1 each."

The guy pushed the bag of donuts back across the counter and walked out without another word. My mom watched him as he walked down the street.

"He's really arguing over a buck or two," I said.

"It's not Tim Horton's" my mom said. "This is a European bake shop. This is quality food they serve here."

Final words of wisdom, indeed.

The next day, New Year's Eve, she called to say happy new year.

"Yesterday was a good day, right?" she asked. "It was fun, wasn't it?"

"Yeah, mom, it was fun."

And it was.

Don't be a dick, and other things I learned in 2010

2010-12-21T16:42:00.000-08:00

I love this time of year. Yeah, there are a lot of parties and days off and other good things, but the end of the year also brings lists, from the best to the worst.

I always do a personal inventory at the end of the year. I like to think about where I was last December and where I wanted to be, and measure how close I got to that point.

I can't say whether I'm where I wanted to be right now. I don't think I knew for sure last year, although I did accomplish a lot of what I set out to do in 2010, along with many extra things along the way.

What I didn't expect was how transformative this year was for me. I can honestly say that I am coming out of 2010 a different person than when I started. Of course, the more I learn about myself the more work I realize needs to be done, but that's what a new year is for, right?

Here is my list of the Top 5 things I learned in 2010.

1. Don't be a dick

Okay, so I can't say that I've live by this rule 100% ever, not even this year, although the importance of being patient, respectful, and yes, even nice, as hard as that last point can be at times, continues to make itself clear in my life.

As the cliche goes, none of us are perfect, I know. This year, I had a lot of opportunities to be a dick, but it wasn't through passing them up that I learned anything. It was more through watching other people burn bridges and/or act like babies.

I can't say I'm coming out of 2010 completely innocent of any of the above. I can be impatient, aloof, and defensive. But I'm also learning you need to think of the long-term affects of your actions on others. Toronto's a big city with small town potential. Certain circles and industries are small. You never know who you'll end up working with, or who you'll want to work with, or who you might be able to find an ally in rather than an enemy.

Example 1: I had one dude spout off some not-so-nice comments about some of my work. A few months later, that same dude emailed me to ask if I'd help promote his music. Honestly, I'm just not a fan of his sound, rude comments or not. But I might have passed him along to some people I know who might have been interested, or tried to help him in some other way. Instead, I chose not to help at all. If you shit talk someone and then turn around and ask them for a favour, you can't expect to get it.

Example 2: I am recently ended up working with someone from a past job. This person was the frequent recipient of put-downs and shouting matches. (Yes, grown ups actually do things like this. Weird, huh?) It was a very unfortunate situation, but could've been made much worse if I'd participated, too. Thankfully, I didn't. How awkward would that have been?

All of this made me think of instances where I could have been more careful about what I said, or how I acted, and I realized it's important to think of the long-term consequences of your actions. It'll be a hard lesson for me to handle, but the warning signs are nice and strong.

2. Therapy rules

I never, ever thought I would have voluntarily seen a therapist.

The older I get, the more I'm learning you should never say never. (Shit, that is so something old people say, too, isn't it?)

But I needed to. One day I decided I didn't want my past to follow me into the future. Depression and suicide and self-harm and a lot of resentment were all things I'd been holding on to for too long and I was finally ready to let them go, and I did.

I wish I'd known before how much therapy was going to help me. I would have done it much sooner. Even though I had my last session a few months ago, I still think about things my therapist asked me and try to re-frame situations in ways that I never would have before.

3. A little bit of fanmail can go a long way

I can't remember the first letter or email I got where someone said they liked what I was doing. It might have been through my old zine Riot!, or it might have been through an article I wrote when I was still freelancing. Not that I haven't appreciated all of the kind words I've had along the way, but this year I really understood the impact a nice fan letter can have.

There were several times this year when I questioned whether I was doing the right thing with my life, whether I'd put my energy and focus into the right projects. And just as those doubts would start to creep into my day, I'd get an email from someone that confirmed that yes, I was doing something right.

Of course, I also got some fanmail from people who think they're my soul mate, or who want to lick me in certain places, but those messages are for a whole other story.

Point is, fanmail does more than flatter. It keeps people on track and acts as a reminder of the goals and vision for a career or a project. If there's someone out there whose work you admire, let them know. Your message could be the one that keeps their work moving forward.

4. Working all the time sucks

Most people are way ahead of me on this one.

For years I've had tons of pressure on myself to be productive. It started sometime around 2002 and brought the end of a roughly two-year stretch that I remember as one of the happiest times of my life.

So if I was happier before, then why did I start to change? Because I didn't like I was doing enough, so I started doing too much.

I'm getting to the point where I want to release the pressure, but I'm so used to thinking of plans and projects that I'm having trouble finding the right balance. I'm not saying I don't want to do anything. I just want to be able to relax a little without feeling guilty. Right now, it's hard for me to go longer than a weekend before the guilt kicks in.

Confession: sometimes I wish that I could be happy punching the clock, coming home to watch TV, and getting drunk or going shopping all weekend. I can't, though. Some of my happiness comes from writing, creating, and working.

But I'm learning that not all of my happiness comes from those things, though. It's making enough time for everything else that I need to work on.

5. I am afraid

Yeah, it's true. I just figured this out, like, yesterday. I always thought I was fine, but for the past couple of weeks I've been having dreams about being pregnant.

Pregnancy is a recurring theme for me in dreams. Most of the time, I dream I'm heavily pregnant, or sometimes in labour. It starts out that I'm excited, but then I start freaking out. I decide I don't want to have the baby, but it's too late. It's happening and I have to go with it.

One of my friends told me this is symbolic of fear over a project, maybe something I don't feel confident about, or ready to take on. I have felt that way about certain projects from time to time, so when I heard that explanation it made sense.

I was trying to figure out why I've been having so many dreams like this again lately, and then I finally realized it's because of all that pressure I was talking about in point #4. I've been working on a novel for most of this year, which is something I've never done before. I've had a lot of mixed feelings towards it. There are days when I've been in love with it, and days when I've wanted to drop the whole thing and do something else.

There are also days when I have other ideas I'd rather pursue altogether.

When I was working on Treat Me Like Dirt, I felt pulled into that project. I felt like it was controlling me, and I let it. There was a momentum, and I feel like now, if I don't find that same momentum with something else, then I'll start to question whether I'm working on the right thing at the right time.

I am afraid of pursuing the wrong idea.

I tell myself it doesn't matter, that it's all experience, and on some level I believe that.

But of course, I'd rather have blind confidence, or creative clarity.

Instead, it looks like I'll have to find a way to get past the fear instead.

Twenty-nine minus eight plus two

2010-12-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

I've always made lists: shopping lists, to-do lists, idea lists. I make lists for work and lists for writing. On tough days I make lists of things I appreciate, and on good days I make a list of all the things I don't ever want to forget.

Just before I turned 18, I made my first Life To-Do list, in which I wrote down 20 things I wanted to do with my life. I thought about what kind of memories I wanted to make, experiences I wanted to have, and things I wanted to accomplish. I've always been acutely aware, probably to the point of melodrama, of how infinite our lives are. With every birthday I think, I only have 52 weeks to be this age. How do I want to remember this year?

Just a few of my key priorities when I was 18 were to go to Stonehenge, party at least once a week, write more poetry, kiss a girl, and go to New Orleans. Within a year, I'd crossed off almost half of my list. When I came across that same list a few years ago, when I was 25, I found that I'd accomplished everything on it, save for a couple of destinations I still haven't traveled to. Even though I'd forgotten all about that list, which was folded away in an old journal, almost everything on it still came into being without any conscious effort on my part to complete it outside of the year I was 18. It's not that my priorities or interests changed, but more that I got busy with new things, and new lists.

There's something about making a to-do list that seems to set everything in motion, like making a wish. Except that somehow, to-do list tasks often come true, even when you're not trying to work on them. And if you actively focusing on those goals, the to-do list steers you towards them and reminds you of how much you want them.

Last December, I made a list of big things I wanted to do with my life. It was right before my book was published and the realization that such a big project was about to move away from me and into the public gave me a sense that there were new freedoms coming in 2010, that it would be time to start new projects and start more projects and learn new things and measure whether my life was what I wanted it to be.

When I wrote my list, it had nothing do with the coming new year, at least consciously (although I do think December is a time when people naturally tend to take inventory of the past year), but more because I was in a job situation that I wasn't happy in and I had a book on the way. The list I wrote wasn't made to be accomplished in 2010; it was just made to keep track of where I wanted to go next.

The list started with 29 things, and a couple months later I upped to 32. With or without a list, this year ended up being unbelievably busy, probably one of the busiest I've had in my entire life. When I look back at the list I made in December '09, I see that I managed to cross off a lot on my to-do list, or at least get a good start on some things.

Since December is always the month of lists, when we like to take a look back at what all the good and back of the past year, I wanted to take a look at my to-do list and see what got done.

1. Publish a poetry collection

This was Number One on my list because it's been Number One in my life since I was 13. I remember sitting in science class one day when I was in middle school. I didn't understand the unit we were working on so I'd been sneaking books in to read during the lessons. (Big time rebel, I know.) I had a copy of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven & Other Poems" that I'd bought somewhere for $1.99 and in science class that day I thought, I don't need to know about how electricity works. I'll just write instead. Later that night I told my mom, all excited, that I'd figured out what I wanted to do with my life: be a poet. She ruined the night by yelling about how poets never make any money, but I didn't let her get to me (even if she was right about that money thing.)

I'd been working at a poetry manuscript on and off for two years, and finally had it all wrapped by December, 2009. I titled it Amphetamine Heart and in January, 2010, I started shopping it around and it got picked up in the spring by Guernica Editions.

2. Write a vampire novel

Okay, before you get all, "Oh, like Twilight?" on me, let me please point out that vampire fiction has always been popular. It's just peaked right now thanks to Stephanie Meyer's PG-rated series. But there are a lot of us out there who've been faithfully reading, and writing, about vampires for much longer so this isn't a Twilight thing. It's just a me thing, and something I always wanted to do. The format and approach I'm taking to this is a little different, and it's a big departure for me. I'm not used to writing fiction, and I've never written a novel. I don't know what I'm doing or if anything I'm doing with this story is right. In the past, that would have totally freaked me out, but for the time ever I'm enjoying not knowing where a project is going. It's just so fun to work on that I don't care if it takes me ten years to write or if no one ever sees it because it feels good to just be doing it.

3. Publish another chapbook

This year, I actually published two, independently: Arik's Dream and Manifestations. I'd finished Manifestations in 2009 and Arik's Dream in the spring of 2010. One is about the claustrophobia I felt in my last apartment in Kensington Market, all written in second person. The other is about spooky forests and inspired by dark things that haunt them.

4. Get more tattoos

I got enough work done this year to do me for a while.

5. Go to Vegas

This is one of those to-do list items that happened without any conscious effort. My boyfriend and I weren't planning on going at all. Instead, we were supposed to take a trip down to Philadephia in for a few days in the summer, but every option we looked into ended up costing more than we expected. For fun we started checking out prices for Vegas instead. It's cheap! You should go. We did, and it was awesome. Philadelphia will have to be added to a new to-do list.

6. Get a job I don't hate

I started working when I was 11, and I had a lot of really shitty jobs along the way. So from early on it was really important to me to make sure I ended up doing something with my life that had meaning, and that made me happy. Like being so preoccupied with time, I am also preoccupied with regret and like to avoid it as much as possible. I've always worked to avoid waking up one day after doing the same things for years and years and thinking, shit, I am so unhappy. But then, I found myself in that exact situation. Except that I knew I was unhappy but I kept at it anyway, hoping it would get better.

It didn't. Luckily, a bad work situation usually leads you to a better one, if you let it.

7. Learn tarot

I'm going to do a dedicated post about this, actually (I bet you can't wait!). I've always wanted to learn tarot cards but this year I finally felt like I had the clarity and patience to sit down and focus on it. There's a lot of memory work involved. Some people will say you can learn the cards in a day but that's so not true. It's been a year since I first did a practice reading on myself and I'm still going through the learning process.

8. Start a blog

I did this, too! And here it is! It's extra work but I'm so glad I did it. My only problem with having a blog is that it further highlights something that continues to creep up on me, which is that there's never enough time.

I know that's everyone's complaint: we're all busy, no matter what kinds of jobs we have or responsibilities. The days are not endless, even if our ambitions are.

For most of my 20s I've struggled with finding a balance between the writing I want to do, the writing and other work I get paid to do, and everything else. There are weeks when I go out every single night and there are weeks when I don't even phone up one friend. There are days when I read DIY articles about things I want to make and I get excited and think, that's awesome! I'm going to make that. And then I stop myself and ask, when will I have the time? Because I'll be working on my novel or an article or something else.

The best advice I ever got about being a writer was this: Go out and live your life. There are days when I have trouble remembering that. In 2011, it's going to have to be Number One on the list. Or at least close to it.

Adding it up

2010-11-12T18:13:00.000-08:00

Last week wasn't the best. But, when I thought about it long enough, I had to admit it wasn't the worst, either. It's hard to keep perspective sometimes, though. I was waiting to hear back about something really important, and I was rebounding from a few things that hadn't quite turned out the way I expected. So, on November 4, I sat down and wrote down a few things that were going well. Sometimes it's important to remind yourself of all the good things that are happening, even when it seems like things aren't happening at all. Here's what I wrote.

Yesterday wasn't one of my best days. It wasn't bad, and my mood probably had a lot to do with waiting for some news that doesn't seem to be coming.

I'm also doing NaNoWriMo to try to get a good chunk of my novel out of the way by pumping 50,000 words into it. My original plan to pull it off was to not make any plans on any weeknights this month. But Halloween weekend wasn't as great as I'd envisioned it would be, which is also probably adding to my mood this week. I was actually kind of sad on the weekend, not because of Halloween but just because, which happens sometimes, and Kire somehow made me feel better, which made me miss him, so I started to re-think my NaNoWriMo plan so that I could hang out with him one night this week.

Kire called me yesterday at around 6 o'clock to see what time he should come over. There is a usual time we meet up - around 7 or 7:30 - so I asked him why he was asking and he said, "Because you have to do some writing first, right?" As if writing for an hour would be enough. And because I get so antsy with my time [mostly over-protective, selfish, and anxious about it] I immediately resented that he said that.

He could tell I was mad. He came over for 7:30 anyway and we started talking about it. He told me I should have just said I wasn't planning on writing that night, instead of expecting him to just know that, and he was right. I was being an asshole. He took me out for cake anyway and when we got back to my place he put up with watching L.A. Ink which I know he doesn't really like but always sits through when I want to see it.

Later, I slept well but dreamt I'd gone back to my Kensington Market apartment. In my dream, I was secretly hanging out there while it was still vacant. I had kept an extra set of keys and had started moving furniture in there, but not because I was moving back. I was only there to hang out. [In real life I lived there for almost three years and felt claustrophobic the whole time. It sounds dramatic but so many nights I thought I was going to die in there, for various, mostly paranoid but sometimes valid reasons, and when I woke up from that dream I was terrified that any part of me, subconscious or not, would want to be back there. I lived through some of the worst times of my 20s there.]

Anyway, this morning I woke up feeling great and decided that the news I was waiting for would come whenever it was ready and, good or bad, I'd be okay with it. I think when you're so used to pushing for your own opportunities all the time, like I have, that when it comes to just waiting something out, it's very, very hard. Freelancing really changed me that way. When you're always trying to make something happen you tend to feel like nothing is ever happening, because even if something good does come along something else falls through, so all victories feel short. Or they don't turn out how you want them to. Or you can't take the time to really appreciate them because you need to keep things moving, and you only have time to think about the next thing that needs to happen.

But I'm not there anymore. That's not my life now and this morning I thought about all the things that are my life, and all the good things that are in it. I heard once that if you write down the things you are grateful for, it can change your whole perspective.

1. Last night after Kire and I had that little fight thing I apologized and he said, "don't get mad at me. I'm your friend," and I said, "I'm sorry. I'm not a very good friend."

His answer? "But you're a better girlfriend."

Enough said.

2. I was asked to write a couple of articles this month, articles that I really want to write, and how awesome is that? There was a time in my life when I used to want to get to the point where people invited me to write for them, and here it is.

3. I'm using this month to write a novel. Yes, it's the same novel I've been working on since February, but I've pretty much revised every single bit of it and am only now considering my current version to be the real version. So using NaNoWriMo as a personal challenge to commit 50,000 words to it is a big deal for me. I finally feel confident enough with the idea to really buckle down and get it down. [Did I really write buckle down? Yeah, shit. I did.] I have been working at it consistently but also questioned it a lot along the way, but I'm glad I've come to admit that I'm strongly attached to it at this point and that that's reason enough to keep going. I've let go of worrying about how it will end up.

4. Going back to what I was saying about opportunities: your confidence and optimism can change when you're always pushing for more, but so can your perspective. You can end up exactly where you wanted to be and not even notice. There was a time when I thought if I published one article, that that would be enough and I would be happy for a while. But when I published one, I wanted to do another. And then, I decided I wanted a really good portfolio for when I came out of journalism school. But then, as my portfolio grew, so did my unhappiness, because I didn't feel that that was enough, either. By the time I was in my third and final year at school, I was working as a freelancer, which I'd never intended to do in the beginning.

Then I thought when I publish a book, that'll be enough and then I'll relax and just hang out all the time. But you know what? That didn't happen either. Authors will tell you that nothing changes when you get a book published. I always thought they meant financially, but I wasn't thinking deep enough.

Yeah, you have this accomplishment behind you, but your ambition and ideas are still there. There's no emotional satisfication because creativity will never be satisfied. If it's satisfied, it dies. For creativity, comfort is suicide. Its survival tactic is to keep ideas coming, and with every idea that's executed, more doors open up. Those doors can be to other ideas, new friendships, connections, or opportunities.

And so I'm grateful for the endurance to keep it all going. There are days, many of them, actually, when all I want to do is watch TV, but there are even more days when I want to accomplish as much as I can in those 24 hours.

5. There's a pair of shoes I've been wanting for so long and today I decided to finally go get them.
Walking into Hell's Belles, "West End Girls" by Pet Shop Boys was playing, a song that seems to follow me everywhere on good days.

I bought the shoes and walked back eastward, past MuchMusic where a million teenage girls were lined up outside and around the block to see Taylor Swift. Some of them were trying to figure out if they could plug in their hair straighteners anywhere outside. (Seriously.) Another girl had a sign she was flashing at passing cars. One side said "HONK 4 TAYLOR" and the other said "I LOVE QUICKIES" which uptight people will probably raise an eyebrow or two at and take too literally. I hope most people will take it for what it is: wonderfully inappropriate teenage humour.

And walking past all those girls reminded me of how funny teenagers can be, and I remembered something I hadn't thought of in a few years, which was this time a while back when I was on a bus in Etobicoke, and these girls were dressed like zombies, but it wasn't Halloween, and it was no later than 7pm. I don't think it was even close. They looked amazing and I asked them about their costumes, and where they were coming from. We started talking and they'd been checking out this guy who was sitting a couple seats over. They had a camera and were trying to take a picture of him, secretly. But none of the girls could actually go through with it because they were so nervous. So I said I'd do it and they gave me their camera and I took this poor kid's picture and we all laughed so loud together I'm sure he knew something was up.

It felt good to have that memory resurface, because thinking about today was just as fun as when it all happened. A couple blocks later I wondered if those girls kept that photo, but it doesn't matter. It won't change the fact that it was a really fun bus ride.

Really just a teenage girl

2010-10-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

“Yeah, you can write my life story, nobody gives a shit.”

This comes from a guy named Trout as we’re sitting on a patio in Toronto’s Kensington Market, with a tape recorder between us.

Months earlier, I’d had my first encounter with him when the now defunct bookstore This Ain’t the Rosedale Library hosted a launch for my book, Treat Me Like Dirt. The room was crowded and the audience quiet, though it was hard to tell whether they were riveted, polite, or just confused by the night’s performers, which included Michael Dent (The Dents), Gerry Smith (Tyranna) and Andy Paterson (The Government).

And then Trout raised the volume, and energy, considerably when he showed up halfway through and called everyone on the panel an asshole.

He got in touch with me this summer to pick my brain about a book of his own he wants to write. In turn, I wanted to do the same with him and find out who this guy was, and why he calls himself Trout.

I also wanted to talk to him a bit about his album, Karen’s Legs, which he’d passed on to me in the summer. I was particularly interested in a song called "Just a Teenage Girl," which references Jem and the Holograms, Archie comics, and Tiger Beat magazine.

He wrote me saying he was up for an interview but, “just give me some notice so I can dress inappropriately and crimp my nose hair.”

Here’s what happened when we got together at one of his current hangouts, an Indian restaurant called the Waterfalls.

Liz Worth: The first time I saw you was at my book launch at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library. What I remember about you is you were yelling at Andy Paterson because he kicked you out of the Cameron House.

Trout: I wasn’t yelling at him because he kicked me out of the Cameron. I was yelling at him because that’s what I do. I went in and made a huge disturbance.

LW: Why?

Trout: I called Mike Dent an asshole because he is an asshole. I’ve known him for, like, 30 years, and Andy Paterson, same thing. Then I noticed there were three cameras on me so I was like oh, this is good. And then I had people coming up to me on the street afterwards saying, “That was great!”

LW: So you never got kicked out of the Cameron House?

Trout: Yeah, I did. I did. More than once. I’ve been kicked out of a lot of places. My friend Madame Hair wanted me to write an album about all the places I’ve been barred from.
LW: Are there that many?

Trout: Yeah, there are. The most memorable time I got kicked out of the Cameron – you know Andy Paterson is a well-known local artist, so he’s pretty hoity-toity about the whole thing. I was fed up with him because I used to go to the Cameron fairly often, and he refused to remember what I drank. I always drank the same thing, I forget what it was now.

He would ask me, “What kind of beer do you want?” And I’d be like, “Well, you know. It’s the same as yesterday.”

But he refused to acknowledge that he did remember. I’m sure he did, so I got mad at him. One night I was down there with these really important literary people and who had published books and they were like above everyone else. They were a big deal. I forget who they were; this was many years ago. Andy was serving us, so I took the opportunity to dress him down in front of them, thinking that I was doing the world a service.

I concluded my little speech by falling backwards over a monitor on the stage, because I was drunk, at which point he threw me out. So I got what I deserved.

LW: So let’s talk about your album.

Trout: Oh god, let’s not! It’s awful.

LW: You made it, you shouldn’t think that.

Trout: I’m a master of under-selling myself.

LW: I wanted to ask you about the song “Just a Teenage Girl.”

Trout: It’s about me. It goes back to the Toad and the Hole, which was a bar that used to be on King Street. It closed down after they barred me, of course; they had no business then. I used to be there a lot. The bartender used to call me a teenage girl, because I used to listen to 45s and all that. It was a joke, but it wasn’t a joke, because it was true. In a lot of ways I think I am a teenage girl.

LW: Really?

Trout: Why not?

It’s funny you’re asking about that song, because it’s not the obvious song on the album, although I always wanted to do a video for it so I could wear a thong bikini.

LW: I think you should do that.

Trout: That would be great. It’s just a silly, cheesy pop song, but it’s a testament, I guess, to my bubble gum roots.

I went to a therapist a long time ago, but he fired me.

LW: Why?

Trout: I was obviously smarter than he was. I think. I’m sorry to sum it like that, but he didn’t understand some of the things I was telling him, and it was like, “Uh, I don’t know about this.” There wasn’t really anything wrong with me, but I was under a lot of stress.

This is a waste of tape. You never know, I might say something absolutely brilliant when I’m not trying to. I’m not trying, okay? [ Trout turns to the server]: Nell, is that you? Honey, can I have a – what do I want?

Nell: What do you want?

Trout: I’m not drunk yet. I don’t interview very well when I’m sober.

Nell: You don’t think I’d like you when you’re sober?

Trout: I don’t know if you like more or not and I don’t really care. No, I said I don’t interview very well when I’m sober. That’s why we have the tape recorder. I’m going to be very famous. Liz is interviewing me for, I don’t know why. I told her she should meet more people. I think she’s out of her fuckin’ mind.

Nell: Lovely. Well, then...

Trout: Well, then. Can I have a Cuba Libre? No, I don’t even know what that is. You don’t either.

Nell: Let me guess. You want a Flying Monkey?

Trout: Can I have a glass of wine? [The server leaves.]

LW: So all of the songs on your album autobiographical?
Trout: There is a lot of me in them. “Don’t Ever Tell a Dog” is about my relationships with women and how they lie and they’re stupid and they should smarten the fuck up, really, to put it briefly.

“Let’s Be Friends” is obvious, it’s about women as well. “Karen’s Legs” is about Karen’s legs, who I saw last night. She was actually following me around the neighbourhood for a while because she’s lost her mind, but that’s okay.

Let’s see, is there anything here that’s not about girls? Yes, “Nogies Creek” is pure fanstasy. I’ve never murdered anyone and thrown them in a river near Bobcaygeon. One day I think we should do a show together, me and the Tragically Hip, and I can play “Nogies Creek” and they can play “Bobcaygeon” and it will be perfect.

“Hello Molly” is about a girl I was in love with in high school. My first great love.

LW: Did you actually have a relationship with her?

Trout: No, but I knew her quite well. No, I never had sex with Molly, okay? I would tell you. I just about lost my mind. I haven’t told a lot of people that, a lot my friends don’t know, but I’m so old it doesn’t matter anymore.

LW: Who was the first girl you had your real first kiss with?

Trout: Oh, my first kiss. You want to know all that shit, do you?

I was thinking about this the other night because I’ve fallen in love with Shannon again. Shannon is a girl who just got off the plane last Sunday from England. She has been Number 3 on my girlfriend list for a long time. She has gone, unfortunately, to Sarnia to see her parents.

I met her for brunch yesterday and said, “Shannon, we have to talk.” I said, “I went to be last night, set my alarm clock for this ridiculously early meeting” – who meets at NOON on a Sunday? – “I woke up at four o’clcok in the morning, couldn’t get back to sleep. Thought about you all night. In the morning I realized I’m in love with you again.”

And that’s what happens. I fall in love with girls all the time.

The first girl I fell in love with that I remember, I was in kindergarten. I was really, totally in love with her, and I was five. We had a toy kitchen set with a stove and table and everything else, and we would pretend to have breakfast together. But after breakfast then it was time for me to get up and pretend to go to work, and I thought, well this is wrong, I just want to hang with her. But there was nowhere to go, really.

I never really went through that phase that boys go through where they don’t really like girls. I’ve always really liked girls and I still do. I’ve had the most successful weekend. I have been surrounded for, like, four days in a row with beautiful women. I sort of collect them. I’m not proud, you know? But I’m not ashamed of it. It’s just what happens. It’s like Shannon told me very early on: “Trout, I don’t get it. You’re so charming and such an asshole at the same time.” She’s the flavour of the month, or the flavour of the week, maybe.

It actually all comes from my mother. I think what happened was, when I was a little kid, I thought I was going to grow up and marry my mother. I didn’t understand what the rules were. I remember this scene, it’s like the end of Snow White or something like that, of the prince carrying this beautiful girl on his horse into the sunset. And I decided that was it. I have always been convinced that the love of a woman is the one thing that can save me from death. That is the key to immortality: romantic love.

Now this is wrong, okay? And it ain’t gonna work ‘cause we’re all gonna die and that’s it. We’re fucked. But I can’t get over that, and that’s the way it’s been, ever since I was three or four years old. It’s all Walt’s fault; it goes back to that Disney thing.

That has nothing to do with anything. I used to glue noses on trolls for a living. I’ve done some weird things.

LW: What exactly is the job description for something like that?

Trout: Well, there wasn’t really a job description, but there was a diagram: “not like this” and “not like that.” I had to get it in the right place.

LW: Was this in a toy factory or something?

Trout: I used to drop them off at the Bay and Simpson’s [department stores] and places like that, but they didn’t sell enough and I lost my job.

LW: Was that when trolls were really popular, in the ‘90s?

Trout: Those little plastic trolls? No. I have different stories about those trolls.

In the ‘60s you used to get a three-pack of trolls for ten cents, so that was cool. My brother and I, when we were, like, kids, we started making troll movies on a Super 8 camera. We called ourselves TPL, Troll Productions Limited, and we made several films which you can still see if you come to my house.

We made one called “Attack of the Giant Turtle,” and we used those little turtles that nobody has anymore because they breed salmonella. A troll comes with a spear and kills the turtle in the movie.

We also made a space one and an international espionage one. They’re quite wonderful – perhaps not perfect – but I’d like to see them again. And if you have a lot of booze or marijuana they’re very entertaining.

Okay, you need a drink, darling.

LW: I’m okay, actually.

Trout: You need a drink. You have to drink, because you’re a writer.

LW: I’m okay. I’m not drinking much these days.

Trout: I respect that. I can’t write anything unless I’m drunk. It’s a right-brain, left-brain thing.

LW: You can still make it happen without drinking.

Trout: It still happens? You might be right. It’s been so hot this summer; if it’s 30 outside it’s 45 in my place. It’s unbearable, so I can’t really do any work. I decided what I’d do this summer is drink so much in the afternoon I can go home and pass out. So I’ve spent this entire summer as a complete alcoholic bum. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not gonna lie about it.

LW: It’s okay. I think a lot of people spend that way.

Trout: Yeah, they do.

LW: So you know people are going to read this and wonder, “Why does this guy call himself Trout?”

Trout: Do we have to go there? All right, I’ll tell you the story.

I’ve never told this before. When I was a young teenager, 14, 15, somewhere around there, I got stuck, of course, on a summer vacation with my family at some isolated cottage. On our way to whatever hell hole cottage we’d rented, we stopped in Bobcaygeon or some place and I saw a bookstore and thought shit, this is gonna be awful, I better get a book. I bought Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.

Well, my father stole the goddamn book and wouldn’t give it back to me. Finally, after several days I get the book back with, like, flies swatted on the pages and everything, and he says, “Here. There’s a character in this that reminds me of you,” which was Kilgore Trout, who also appears in Slaugtherhouse-Five.

I made the mistake of telling this to my friends back at school, and they started calling me Trout. It has nothing to do with fishing, though I have been fishing, and I have eaten trout, but it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with Kurt Vonnegut.
My real name is Michael.

LW: And you have a daughter, right? Does she think of you as Trout?

Trout: She knows me fairly well. I don’t see much of her as she is a 19-year old girl. And when I was 19 I really didn’t want to hang around with my parents. I totally understand where she’s coming from.

It’s too bad, but she has told me a couple of things that are very important in the last couple of years, one of which was, I think she was 18 at the time, she said, “Daddy, you’re cool.”

Now when, at my age, do you hear that from an 18 year old girl? When it’s your own daughter that’s the best you can do. There is no topping that one. And then another time she said, “It’s okay, daddy, you don’t have to grow up.” She’s got me figured out.

What happened was I spent an awful lot of time over the last couple of decades, particularly, in bars, trying to deal. And the problem in bars is they are full of drunks with problems and insecurities which they project back on the other drunks around them, so you have to learn to defend yourself.

I got some of the worst abuse from these people, out of anybody, because I used to be a nice guy. Coping with that environment, I readjusted, so now I’m capable of being a bit of an asshole because I have to be. It’s become a part of my personality because it’s been going on so long. It happens.

Tell that to your therapist. See what she thinks. But she probably doesn’t hang out at the same bars I do.

You don’t get this at the grocery store or the TTC token counter. You get this in low-life, fucked up bar situations and unless you hang around there all the time you won’t get as much of it.

LW: So what kept you going back to those bars in the first place?

Trout: I didn’t want to go home. I think it was my wife at the time, yeah. That’s a big part of it. Uh, yeah, I mean I went through one very ugly divorce. It’s a wonder my daughter still talks to me.

What in the hell kind of interview is this? Why in the hell are we on this topic?

LW: I think we can actually wrap up.

Trout: We’ve covered a lot of personal shit. I’ve already told you all sorts of personal shit.

--
After our interview, Trout sent me an email with an alternate version of our conversation. I thought it was a good way to end off.

“I'm glad you thought my interview went OK, and I'm a little worried about a bunch of pretty personal stuff I told you, but I did, so I guess that's my problem, not yours. Truth is, you are rather more attractive than I had recalled, and very pretty girls always make me tell them everything. So here is my little version of a Q&A blog about our interview at the Waterfalls:

T: You're so cute you may eventually end up on my girlfriend list.

L: I don't want to be on your girlfriend list.

T: I have spaces available due to disagreements with some of the other chicks. Apparently they think I'm an asshole.

L: I don't want to be on your bloody list.

T: It's my fucking list. You don't really have a choice. Once, a long time ago, Vicky asked me to remove her from the list, so I did. Then she regretted it and asked to be put back on.

L: I don't care a tinker's cuss about your fucking list!

T: It's not like you're gonna make the top five right away. You have to work your way up.

L: Are there any benefits to being on this damn list?

T: Well, no, not really.

L: Then why would I want to be on it?

T: To boost my abysmally low self-esteem. Don't you care about me?

L: Trout, I hardly know you at all. Are you just flirting with me?

T: Yes.

OK, I'm not sure if that's writing, but that's what I do.

Matthew Rankin's Negativipeg

2010-10-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

All he wanted was a pizza pop. Instead, Winnipeg's Rory Lepine became the centre of an urban legend that remains key to his city's history.

Filmmaker Matthew Rankin's latest offering, Negativipeg, dissects the legendary incident involving Canadian musician Burton Cummings, a beer bottle, and a 7-Eleven. It resulted in Cummings' condemnation of his hometown.

The story made major news in Winnipeg in 1985, but developed symptoms of a classic urban legend over the years as the details mutated about how, and why Cummings took a beer bottle to the head one night in Winnipeg.

Rankin's Negativipeg captures Lepine's side of the story. The opening scene features Lepine squinting through smoke, speaking between hauls, and right away you know this is going to be good.

When Negativipeg screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, it was one of the most memorable short films of the program. When Rankin took part in a Q&A afterwards, he stood out as one of the most memorable directors on stage.

Here he is on Lepine, Cummings, his hometown of Winnipeg, and the making of Negativipeg.

Liz Worth: I want to start by saying I really love your film.

Matthew Rankin: What did you like about it?

LW: I love characters, and I thought that Rory Lepine was such an interesting character. I didn’t know that story about Burton Cummings and I didn’t know there was this urban legend around it in Winnipeg.

MR: It’s interesting. I’ve had mixed reactions to Lepine...Winnipeggers that saw it really hated Lepine. I couldn’t believe it. What did you think? Did you find him at all likeable, or just repulsive?

LW: A bit of both. He seems aggressive.

MR: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

LW: I could see how people might dislike him but I think he’s also a very real person. I see people and know people who are just like him, and I think he’s probably also an accurate representation of a lot of Canadians, even though some of us would probably rather not admit that.

MR: Winnipeggers can be very defensive. It’s a contradictory sort of place. There’s this bent to propagandize Winnipeg as this very pleasant, nice, charming, bland, soulless place that can integrate mainstream North American models of success and fame and celebrity and prosperity and all these kinds of things. But that ambition is always frustrated and it’s always embarrassed by these contradictory elements in the Winnipeg persona.

But I just think that Lepine is interesting, and anyone who’s interesting I can’t help but like. As much as he is a belligerent and unreasonable guy, and extremely difficult, he’s so interesting; he’s a completely unprocessed image.

LW: How did it come about that you wanted to tell this story from his perspective?

MR: My friend Walter had started this campaign of putting up posters of Burton Cummings’ face all over Winnipeg. These images had very bizarre reactions from Winnipeggers.

For some reason, Burton seemed to provoke a lot of knee-jerk hatred that I can’t really explain, but these posters were systematically defaced. You’d put up Burton’s face and within hours it would be covered with graffiti saying “My music sucks,” or “I fuck goats” and this kind of stuff.

We were perplexed about why people responded to Burton with such violence, whereas on another level he’s this Winnipegger who’s lived the American dream and became famous and rich.

We started following Burton around a little bit. He owns a chain of restaurants in Winnipeg and at one point he was doing a promotional tour to all of the different franchises in Winnipeg. Walter and I were at every single one of these restaurants filming him and talking to people.

The story that kept emerging from people was this beer bottle incident. There were different versions of it, like sometimes Burton is trying to intervene in a robbery or a domestic dispute.

In one version Burton’s just waiting in line and he doesn’t want to wait in line because he’s Burton Cummings, right? So he starts complaining that he’s Burton Cummings and he shouldn’t have to wait in line and someone smashes him over the head with a beer bottle just to shut him up.
So there’s all these variants on the same story, and eventually you have to say somebody eventually did hit him over the head with this beer bottle because the story always ends with that. So I went into the archives and traced the beer bottle back to Rory Lepine.

LW: So how long did it take you track him down?

MR: A couple months, I guess. I looked around and traced some things to where he might be, and then I hit a dead end and didn’t know where to find him at all.

And then my friend told me that he knew Rory back in high school or something like this and that Rory was known to hang out at this pawn shop in the west end of Winnipeg.

So, we went down to the pawn shop and indeed Rory had just been there five minutes earlier.

We left some notes for Rory and stuff and slowly but surely we met with him.

"You always have a film when someone wants to talk to you."

LW: What was Rory's reaction when you said you wanted to interview him?

MR: He wanted money. That his initial reaction.

LW: I know how that goes. In the film, he comes across as someone who would be suspicious, or cautious. Did it take a lot of convincing to get him to do this?

MR: I guess so. Really, he just wanted money. That was really just about it. He made it very clear that reports in the media had been wrong.

See, this is the thing: you always have a film when someone wants to talk to you. They have to explain themselves. Their life is sort of hinged on something they’ve done and they feel it’s misunderstood and they want to tell you about it. They want to redeem themselves in some way, or just set the record straight. So he had that in him. He wanted to pull some money out of us, but he did actually want to tell this story.

LW: And given that there were some things that were untrue that had been reported, did you have to get him to trust you at all?

MR: We went out drinking with him.

He’s a belligerent guy. He’d be threatening to beat us up and stuff like this, but he’s a good guy. After a while he sort of relaxed.

We shot the interview at his friend’s house, and she sort of became involved in helping us film and stuff. She was totally down. Once we befriended her he kind of warmed up.

But they’re no longer friends. I used to communicate with Rory by her, but I went over there this past summer and she said that Rory wasn’t allowed to come over there anymore and she was pissed off at him. They’d had some permanent falling out, but at the time she was a big help.

LW: What was your first impression of Rory when you met him?

MR: He’s erratic. He’s a really good story teller, and he’s funny. He’s really funny. But he’ll sort of turn on a dime. He can be kind of threatening, but he can be this awesome guy.

But he loves to fight. The last few times I’ve run into him he’s just literally been in a fight. He fights regularly.

"Burton is the iconic Winnipegger and the beer bottle is the iconic Winnipeg weapon."

LW: In the film, at the beginning, he says he’s told this story so many times and it seems like the interview isn’t going to happen.

MR: That’s just the way I structured it in the editing, but it is a story he does tell a lot, and it’s a story he’s forever attached to, right?

And that kind of makes him tragic in a way, or at least fatalistic. This one incident, this one very short sequence of decisions to which the rest of your life is permanently linked –

LW: - It’s his identity now

MR: - Yeah.

A few years after the incident, Burton was complaining about Winnipeg again and there was some effort to immortalize Burton with a statue. There was going to be some kind of Burton Cummings day and the radio would be obliged to only play Burton Cummings music in all of Winnipeg and they were going to name stuff after Burton and have a Burton Cummings parade and that sort of stuff.

A lot of Winnipeggers thought this was complete bullshit. I found this news clip allegedly written by Rory in the Winnipeg Sun that said, “Burton Cummings doesn’t deserve anything. I gave him my own tribute when I threw that beer bottle at his head in 1985.”

But Rory didn’t write that. Someone else wrote in pretending to be Rory, and Rory was pissed off.

Yeah, he has this identity. It’s this iconic incident in Winnipeg. Burton is the iconic Winnipegger and the beer bottle is the iconic Winnipeg weapon.

LW: At TIFF you said Burton hadn’t made any comment about the film. Is that still the case?

MR: Yeah, yeah. I feel like if Burton was pissed off about it or something, the worst thing he could do is talk about it, because it’s like advertising.

But I don’t know what he thinks about it. I feel like Burton doesn’t look bad in the movie or anything but maybe he’d prefer this movie didn’t exist.

LW: I don’t know much about Burton Cummings, but a lot of musicians are so ego-driven. You never know what they’ll perceive as a slight against them.

MR: Burton does have a temper, I think. I read his blog quite regularly. A lot of people comment on what he’s saying and if someone makes a negative comment, he gets his back up very quickly. He’s sensitive.

Burton and I have a friend in common and my friend says that Burton will love this film, but I don’t know. I have no idea. But I don’t think Burton looks ridiculous in it, objectively speaking. Do you think so?

LW: No. And the focus isn’t on him so much, but more on this guy who threw a beer bottle. What about Rory – has he seen the film?

MR: This is the thing – I haven’t been able to find Rory. I don’t know where he is. My former methods of communicating with him have all evaporated.

I went to his friend’s house and she’s not his friend anymore. The pawn shop he hung around has gone bankrupt.

So I have no way of communicating with him. He doesn’t have a phone. I don’t know exactly where he lives. So, really, I just can only hope to run into him.

But he goes to jail sometimes, too, so he might be in jail.

LW: So back to the beginning of our conversation, you were talking about how this film has drawn strong reaction from Winnipeggers. In other interviews, you’ve expressed a lot of love and appreciation for Winnipeg. Are you disappointed that this film hasn’t been as well received by the community?

MR: It’s really only been, like, five Winnipeggers who’ve seen it so far so maybe I’m being hypersensitive to think that they all hate it.

I’m going to show it at the end of October and I guess that will be a better sample of reactions. I would be very disappointed if they all hate it.

Winnipeg is contradictory. The story I like to tell about Winnipeg is the story of Susan Sarandon’s earrings. For me it’s like a great metaphor to the contradictions of Winnipeg.

In 2003, Susan Sarandon was in Winnipeg to shoot this film called Shall We Dance, which is this really lame romantic comedy or whatever.

There are very few celebrities that ever visit Winnipeg, so every day in the Winnipeg Free Press there was an article about Susan Sarandon’s activity: did she enjoy her trip to the zoo? How was Susan Sarandon’s meal at Jack Astor’s? No matter what she did there was some kind of report about what she was up to.

After a few weeks her earrings were stolen from her trailer. And the next day in the Winnipeg Free Press it said, “Shame upon us all! Whoever stole Madame Sarandon’s earrings better return them right away. You’ve brought embarrassment upon an entire city” – that sort of thing.

A few days after that they found Susan Sarandon’s earrings on a severed head in the Royal Albert Arms, which is in this really grim district of Winnipeg, and where I lived at the time. I lived right next door to the Royal Albert. So there was a severed head in this hotel and the head was wearing Susan Sarandon’s earrings.

It’s sort of this example of this Winnipeg that’s trying so hard to affirm its place in the mainstream, and it’s constantly being frustrated by these contradictory elements in its own being.

When Burton says Winnipeg is "Negativipeg," he’s saying that it isn’t Rory that hit him over the head, it’s Winnipeg. So I was exploring that idea, and maybe some people aren’t going to like that.

But maybe that’s good.

--

If you're in Winnipeg, you can catch Negativipeg at Gimme Some Truth - The Winnipeg Documentary Project on Thursday, October 21, 2010, part of the Cinematography in Documentary Series.

Chris "Cutloose" Hillis

2010-09-16T17:39:00.001-07:00

Every week, I pick up Toronto alt-weekly Now Magazine and go through it cover to cover, including the classifieds, even though I'm not looking through the classifieds for anything in particular.

But there have been times, several times, when I've been looking for work and would regularly browse through Now's job listings. The help wanted ads I'd see often featured openings for phone chat operators, dancers, and medical research studies. I never applied for any of them.

There were also a lot of telemarketing ads, and one company's always stood out. R&J Concepts were often looking for people who wanted to listen to heavy metal at work and "headbang all the way to the bank."

When I first watched the 2008 documentary about Toronto metal band Anvil, appropriately titled Anvil! The Story of Anvil, and mega-fan Chris "Cutloose" Hillis made his first appearance in the film at an Anvil show in my old neighbourhood, I liked his style. He seems like a guy who knows how to party. Later in the film, when he hires Anvil frontman Steve "Lips" Kudlow to work in outbound call centre, I started to wonder: is this the same guy who's looking for people to headbang all the way to the bank?

My question was recently answered when I was flipping through Now Magazine and came across a classified ad with the headline "ANVIL, The Story of Anvil." Below, it read, "My name is Chris 'Cutloose' Hillis from the Anvil movie. I need 4 good people who want to headbang all the way to the bank with me. 600-1500/wk."

It was a good selling point but I'd done a short stint as a telemarketer back in high school and after about a month decided I could never, ever do it again. Viletones singer Steven Leckie, on the other hand, had taken up R&J Concepts' offer.

When we met up at an east end restaurant one night after work, Hillis started things off by telling me about this Toronto punk connection.

Chris Hillis: Steven Leckie worked for me for, I don’t know for how long, maybe six months or something. He wasn’t a super salesman but he was a great guy. He was fun to have at work and always smiling and stuff so it was kind of good.

Liz Worth: How long ago was it that he worked for you?

CH: We were down on Yonge and Eglinton, so probably six, seven years ago. I have the sheet he signed, at home, that he signed as an independent agent and it has the exact date that he started for me. It doesn’t have the day he quit, but it has the start on it.

LW: But you were always hanging out in the metal scene, so was there any crossover with what the punks were doing?

CH: I didn’t know him [Leckie] then. I didn’t really know even the Viletones.

When I grew up, basically when I first got into high school, which was ’80, there was a split: the metallers hung out with the metallers. The lumberjack burnouts who were into Zeppelin and Floyd and Hendrix and all that, they hung out in their own group.

And then around ’81, ’82, all of a sudden all these punkers came out: Mohawks, Doc Martens, stuff like that. And for the first couple of years the metal heads and the punkers would always fight. There was total hatred. They hated each other. And then around ’83, I guess, they woke up one summer and realized that, "Hey, I saw you at that concert, and I saw you at my concert," and it was like all of a sudden they’d realized that they liked the same kind of music because the metal is fast and loud, the Anvil and Slayer and Exodus, and there was punk with the Dead Kennedys and Exploited and that.

And I was one of those guys that would never give the punk shit a chance and then I, along with many others, realized, "Hey man, we like the same music," and all of a sudden we were buddies and it was like you’d find the metal heads and the punkers at the same show, having a beer together.

There were good crossover bands, like Motorhead, Exploited, Slayer. Slayer I think was the real crossover for punkers. I think Slayer was, in my opinion, the main band that brought the two sides together. Because if you listen to Slayer it is as fast and as speedy as punk, but I think where they separate themselves is their lyrics are a little more louder and clearer.

"The masses are asses."
- Chris "Cutloose" Hillis

LW: So what was it that attracted you to metal in the first place?

CH: I don’t know. I remember when I was really young I didn’t know any better. I was just into, like, Journey and Fleetwood Mac and shit. I knew I liked music.

It’s a funny story – my first concert was the Bay City Rollers. I was, like, probably 12, and I’ve been going to shows ever since. So I knew I liked music, I dug music.

My dad listened to country and western and I knew I had no time for that bullshit. As I broke into high school I got wind of Black Sabbath and Motorhead and Anvil and Priest and Maiden and I’m like, "Oh yeah, this is it," and it just got heavier and heavier and heavier. And that’s the way I like it still now.

It’s funny. When I was in high school in the `80s everybody would always see me going down the hall, banging my head with a ghetto blaster, and they would say, "Aw, don’t worry, you’ll be over that in a couple years."

And here it is now. I graduated in ’84, they were saying that in ’82, so it’s 28 years later and I’m heavier than ever. And all these guys who said, "Oh it’s just a phase or whatever," these guys were all posers. I don’t see many of them at the shows anymore.

I still go to to shows. I’ve been to more concerts than most people have hormones in their bodies. Where are these people? They’re nowhere. They’re in bars, listening to dance bullshit or house music or country, whatever.

I’m at all the shows. Where are you people? I don’t see many of them, I’ll tell you that.

LW: Do you consider metal a lifestyle?

CH: Oh it’s definitely a lifestyle, for sure. Anywhere you go in the world, a metalhead recognizes a metalhead. You go into Brazil, you into India, you go into Tokyo, Australia, whatever, you walk into a bar, if there’s another metalhead, you pick up one another, easy, bam. You look at one another: "Yeah, right on man." You can tell, for sure.

LW: Why do you think that is? What is it about metal?

CH: I think what it is, is with people that are into metal – I wouldn’t say all, because that would be stereotyping – I would say personally, the general population of metalheads are rebels to begin with, right from the drop of the puck.

Their parents were playing something they weren’t interested in, or whatever…they’re just rebels. And so their look is that of the rebellious, whether it’s tattoos, whether it’s leather, whether it’s their hair long.

Their mom and dad were probably saying, "Cut your hair, cut your hair," and they said, "Just to spite you, not gonna happen."

They have a rebellious attitude and that’s the way it’s always been.

LW: So what were things that were rebelling against when you first got into it?

CH: I don’t know that I was really looking to rebel. I mean, my parents, I had quite a bit of freedom. I would be able to hang out down Yonge Street 'til one, two in the morning when I was 12, 13 years old.

I wasn’t really a rebel. I knew I didn’t like my dad’s shit; I wasn’t really into country and western.

I guess it was about being a rebel against society. Basically anything that society didn’t like, I picked to like just to spite society. It’s like you watch tennis: everybody hated John McEnroe. He was my favourite. Football, sports: everybody hates the Philadelphia Flyers. I love the Philadelphia Flyers. I picked them more out of spite because I got no time for the masses, because the masses wanna dictate everything or whatever, as far as I’m concerned.

There’s a slogan that I like to use and that is, “Masses are asses.”

LW: What about Anvil? What was it about them that you liked so much?

CH: With Anvil I became like a friend. They accepted me as a friend. I knew they were local and I knew I could see these guys, so because they were local I would get to see them a lot. Of course, once you get to see somebody enough times over and over again, you just get accepted. We just became friends.

Then I met Maddog [Anvil fan Colin Brown] at an Anvil show. He was sort of the heavy guy before me and it was Rock & Roll Heaven and Robb Reiner was doing a drum solo and I started smashing my head off the monitor. And [Maddog] looked over, I can remember him saying to "Black Metal" - god rest his soul - Ray Wallace, and saying, "Who is this guy?"

He didn’t know who I was. He was like, "Who’s this guy, snappin’?" That’s just sort of how we met and we rode the Anvil train together. We’ve been buddies ever since.

Stupid as we were we rode in the back of equipment trucks to some gigs, not thinking that if it rolled over we’d be dead by a million pounds of gear. We’d go everywhere. They accepted us and we accepted them, and then in ’87 they wrote songs about both of us, “Cut Loose" and “Mad Dog” on the Strength of Steel album, so that’s how it all came together.

"I knew I wanted to rock, and I knew I wanted to roll."
- Chris "Cutloose" Hillis

LW: Yeah, I wanted to ask you about going out on the road with the band.

CH: Neither of us had cars. Maddog might have been able to use his parents’ once in a while, but I never had a got licence. I didn’t get a licence till I was, like, 30.

But I knew I wanted to rock, and I knew I wanted to roll, and it didn’t matter where there was gigs. If there was a way I could get there, whether it was train, subway, bus, if it was in Mississauga, Oshawa, if there was a way, I’d find my way.

And with Anvil, because they were my buddies, it’d be simple. Maddog was mainly the guy; he had their numbers and whatnot. I’d say to him, "Hey man, they’re going to London this weekend. Why don’t you phone Lips or Robb and say, 'is there room?' We’ll ride in the back or whatever. Hey, tell them we’ll even help out."

So whatever it took, if we wanted to go. Sometimes he’d say there’s no room, so we wouldn’t be able to go. Other times we’d go, "Where is it? Ohm there’s no room for us?" We’d take a Greyhound bus, grab a hotel room and whatever.

LW:What was the vibe in the van like before a show?

CH: I don’t know enough about music in itself, so when they’re tuning the instruments and shit like that, I’d just hang back. They’re professional, they’re doing their thing.

I’d be out in the bar doing my thing: looking for chicks. Me and Maddog would be hanging, we’d be in the parking lot, partying if there were people.

Afterwards was good because in the early days Anvil really, really, really liked to party. Many times we went partying and [guitarist] Dave Allison, who was in the band before, he’s not in the band now, me and him used to get along really well because we both liked to drink and he was the the one that got all the chicks so I was like, "I know if I hang with this guy, I got a better chance." So me and him always hung out together; we were tight.

LW: So were there a lot of women hanging around?

CH: Oh all kinds, all kinds. It was a buffet: help yourself.

Back then, you gotta remember, in the mid `80s Anvil were happening. It was going on.

LW: Where did the name Cutloose come from?

CH: The name Cutloose is, it’s funny because that becomes the name, but it’s not really a name.

It’s what I do: I like to cut loose.

But it became sort of my name, based on what I like to do. And if you look at the song, "Cut Loose," Lips would always lead up saying, "This is about a crazy guy who rides his bike around the city of Toronto, eight hours a day in this crazy city, delivering packages. This one’s for him."

And if you read the lyrics, it’s about just going to the show, hangin’ out and lettin’ loose, havin’ a good time.

LW: Did being in the Anvil documentary change your life in any way?

CH: It hasn’t really changed my life, per se. I have always been a pretty popular figure in Toronto, since the mid `80s. I go to a lot of shows, a lot of people know me. But what the Anvil movie has done has just amplified that by about ten times.

I get people now at shows you wouldn’t think asking me, "Can I get my picture with you? Can I get your autograph? Can you sign my book?" I went to a Wolfmother show, which is not exactly metal, and I had my picture taken about 20 times at Wolfmother. Well, before the movie, if I was wearing an Anvil shirt at Wolfmother, nobody would have a clue. When I go to a KISS show or a Priest show with the Anvil shirt, or even without the Anvil shirt on, I know my share of people to say, "Hey, how’s it going?" But there was no, "Hey! You’re that guy from the movie. Can I buy you a dirnk?” It was crazy.

It all came to a head, I think, when Anvil played in January this year at the Phoenix [in Toronto]. I had the Anvil shirt on. Well, I stood against the bar and I basically couldn’t watch Anvil. Everybody was coming up: "Hey, can I get your picture?"

"Hey, you’re the guy from the movie."

"You’re the guy from the movie."

"You’re the guy from the movie."

I had guys four deep waiting to buy me beers. So in that sense, it’s changed.

Everywhere I go now, like my drugstore, the guy stocking shelves will go, "Hey, you’re the guy from the Anvil movie." I go to Metro to do my grocery shopping and it’s like, "Hey, aren’t you the guy from…?"

It’s kind of neat.

LW: Are you surprised that movie became so popular?

CH: Very, very surprised. When we were shooting it I had no clue that it would ever go to this proportion. If I had any inkling that it might be this big, I would have asked for two per cent of all sales or something, anything for sure. I would have asked for some loot.

I was just like, "Sure, I’ll help a couple buddies. You’re doing what? Shooting?" I’ve never met a camera I didn’t like so I was just like, "Yeah, I’m in."

But it’s just flipped out. It’s huge. I’m totally blown away. I would go watch the movie in a theatre, for example the Bloor Cinema at Bloor and Bathurst. I guess people had spotted me, or recognized me, and there would be like ten people of all different ages and genres – not metalheads – standing there, firing questions. They didn’t have microphones but it was like I was holding a press conference on Bloor Street: "Okay, your question. Yeah, you’re up next."

Yeah, it’s wild. Every time I came out of the theatre after watching it, it was the same scenario outside, 15, 20 people lined up just waiting to shoot the breeze.

LW: So you’ve seen it several times?

CH: I’ve been to the theatre to see it like seven or eight times.

LW: So you like it.

CH: Uh-huh. A couple times it’s been with the Anvil guys, a couple times it’s been with Maddog.

It’s a trip; I love it. When can you go to the theatre and watch yourself on the big screen? It took some getting used to. I had to go a couple times just to make sure it was real. I still pinch myself sometimes.

LW: I used to see ads for your call centre going years and years back. Do you get a lot of people who’ve seen you from the movie and are working with you?

CH: I get some people at shows who’ve said they've seen my ad and have had the odd person calling me who know who I am.

But because of what my ad says, about having seen the Anvil movie, they’re thinking like, "Oh, do you need a singer?" They think we’re making a sequel instead of working for me. The sad part, unfortunately, is for all these people that are out there, unless they all have jobs, I cannot believe that I don’t have more of them working for me.

I’ve got no one from the gigs who’s come to work for me, and I really thought that I could marry up the two because I really believe that not everybody who’s at these gigs could have jobs. That's a lot of people.

LW: How did you end up in the business that you’re in?

CH: Well, I called an ad in April of ’95.

I was actually on my way to court down at Old City Hall. The job was way the hell out at Queensway and Kipling and I thought you know what? I’m dressed, I’m not doing anything else. I was unemployed at the time. I thought, I’ll go check it out.

I went and checked it out and got an interview. All I was shown, really, was this crazy, round retractable ballpoint pen. And I knew that companies did put their names on pens. But what the guy said to me was that they also put the entire Blue Jays schedule on there, the entire Toronto Maple Leafs schedule. And because I’m a sports fan, and the Jays were winning at the time, I thought, okay, well, Jays are winning the World Series, people are gonna buy it anyway.

They were the only business in town that was doing that. And I saw the numbers on the board, I saw the nice cars in the parking lot, and I said, "Well, I don’t know what’s going on here but you know what? Count me in," and I’ve been in it ever since.

LW: So it was a total fluke.

"Hey man, see the VP? He's also a rockstar."
- Chris "Cutloose" Hillis

CH: I used to run an ad that said, "I am a crazy boss who runs a crazy office. I’m looking for crazy people. Just because I have money and a nice house and nice cars and enjoy the finer things in life, I’m looking for people who don’t have time for the man, the boss, the suit and tie, the guys who think they’re all that and more. Come listen to Slayer with me and make $1000-1500 bucks a week."

And it was actually at that time, as tight as I was with Anvil, I didn’t know that Lips was looking for a job. I was putting my ads up on flag poles around the Opera House at Queen and Broadview.

Little beknownst to me, Lips was actually in Jilly’s [strip club] looking for the lead singer of Destruction, because it was a Destruction gig that night. Me and Maddog had actually gone over to look for them when I was posting one of my ads outside Jilly’s when Lips came out and was and went, "What the hell’s this? Who’s this? What are you putting up?"

"Oh, that’s Cutloose’s company." And that’s when Lips went, "Oh fuck, I can do it. Can you get me a gig?" And that’s how it unfolded. You talk about timing; that ended up being a big part of the movie.

LW: Yeah, it’s funny how things seem to fall together with a big project like that. These things take on their own schedule.

CH: They had shot me and Maddog at the beginning of the movie at Heads or Tails. I think it was between that, actually.

Basically, Lips phoned Sasha [Gervasi, director] and said, "I’ve got a job to try and make money for our 13th album and I’m working for Cutloose."

And Sasha said, "Pardon?"

"Yeah, I’m working for Cutloose. He has a company."

And that’s when Sasha went, "You mean that raving lunatic we filmed at Heads or Tails wears a suit and tie and runs a business?" That’s when Sasha told him, "You keep working there, we’re flying from Los Angeles," and they came to shoot me in my office, from Los Angeles.

They flew from L.A. to shoot me in my office. How fuckin’ heavy.

LW: Do the people you work with know about the movie, and your life?

CH: Some of the younger people don’t know, but they get coached very often by the other ones who do know: “Hey man, see the VP? He’s also a rockstar.”

There’s pictures on my desk with me and friend Kid Rock, me and Mario Lemieux, me and Anvil. They hear the music on the way in. If they don’t know who I am when I’m pulling in, the music’s always up full blast, the car’s cookin’, the license plate says Cutloose. All the newbies are like, "Who’s this dude? Who’s this rocker dude?"

So they get coached early if they don’t know who I am. But all the guys who know who I am, they all know, they all hear the stories. I come in from the weekend and tell them I went here, I went there, I was in the front row, I was in the VIP booth, I was snorting lines with so-and-so.

They hear the stories, so they know.

They know.

LW: Let's go back to earlier, when we were talking about subcultures. Some are nihilistic, like punk with its “no future” attitude. A lot of people I've talked to from that scene said they got to be a certain age and realized they'd never expected to live that long. Did metal have the same thing?

CH: I personally don’t think so. I think that my view on it, or the view I took, anyways, was I was a nutcase.

When I was about 30, I realized that I was going nowhere, had gone nowhere. I wanted to keep my hair and the one thing, or one of the points that made me change, was the president of the old company I worked at said this to me: "Who do you think gets laid more? The guy with the short hair and the Porsche, or the guy with the long hair and the TTC?"

And that’s all he had to say to me. I went, "I can still have short hair, that’ll get me a job, plus I can still enjoy my music. I don’t need long hair to be a metalhead. And I'll have dough so that means I’ll get laid. It all adds up. Hey, I’m in, yeah, I’m cutting my hair."

LW: So if your younger self met yourself today, what would their impression be?

CH: Oh, the younger self would be completely boggled at the success I’ve had.

I’m completely boggled at the success I’ve had. For some reason I never envisioned being the success I am. When I was 20, 25, I said to myself, "If I can have a car, go on vacation twice a year and have a nice house, I’ll be happy." And I have all that, plus a little bit more. I’m really happy that I found what I found, and I sort of found it by fluke, and there’s probably not a whole lot else now, especially with the electronic age, that I would be classified to do.

There’s a lot of people that meet me from the old days that are just blown away by the success that I’ve had. They just never expected it. I knew I wanted to succeed but I didn’t have any idea how to.

I think, if I wasn’t doing this now, it’s really hard to say where I’d be. I might be in a dead-end, high paying job, like working for the city as a garbage man.

Adam Gontier from Three Days Grace actually worked at my work for three years.

LW: Really?

CH: Yeah, he’d say, "I won’t be in to work tomorrow." He’d have a gig at Lee’s Palace or whatever, and I’d say, "Yeah, no problem, man. Keep chasing your dream."

Now, when you him, they say, "What’d you do before this?" He says, "Oh, you wouldn’t want to do what I did," ha ha ha.

Chandra Mayor, Part Two: From someplace true

2010-09-12T10:47:00.001-07:00

Last week, Part One of my interview with Winnipeg author Chandra Mayor explored Mayor's feelings about the difficulty of writing, the reality that creeps into her written words, and the city of Winnipeg as a character. In Part Two, Mayor continues on the topic of Winnipeg and delves into defining moments.

"I feel like I have to live in a fairly raw state."

LW: Did you ever think of leaving Winnipeg?

CM: Yeah, I did. Everyone, I think, in Winnipeg between the ages of 17 and 25 entertains some super hardcore fantasies about leaving, ha ha ha.

But I had my daughter when I was 20 and I decided that it was easier to be young and single and broke in a place where I knew lots of people and also knew how everything worked, rather than going to a new city where I didn’t really know anyone and didn’t realy have any support. And now, if I want to find out about anything or do anything, like create some kind of project or event, I know who to call. It becomes very seductive to live in a place where you’re part of its community.

LW: Is there a defining moment that you’ve had that you feel you draw the most inspiration from when you’re writing?

CM: No, not anything singular. I think for me, in order for my writing to feel like something to me, it has to come from someplace true. And in order to come from some place true, it has to come from some kind of defining moment. And the thing is, life is full of defining moments over and over again.

Everything I write comes in some way from something defining or resonant or powerful or transformative or whatever, even if it’s very small.

But there are so many of them all the time. I feel like you have to be open when you’re writing. I feel like you have to claw everything open and dig around in there and let it out. But if you only do that when you’re writing, it’s hard for anything to have gotten in there in the first place.

Do you know what I mean?

I, anyway, feel like I have to live in a fairly raw state. It’s hard to talk about without sounding super hokey, but if you’re open and paying attention and letting yourself feel and experience and be present in your own life, then it’s full of defining moments.

LW: What do you feel to be your first defining moment?

CM: In terms of what? In terms of love, in terms of writing? I don’t know.

Like I said, I think there are defining moments for everything. It’s just too easy, in hindsight, to trace back some kind of straight, linear line and say, "This is where it began." I think it’s not usually that simple. I think it’s usually more complicated than that.

And you know, in some ways, one of the things I was trying to do with Cherry, I got so fucking sick and tired of talking to people either personally or professionally and listening to people, especially women, say, "Oh you know, the first time I ever got hit I’d be out of there." Like it’s that simple, as if it just starts there and you can just walk out and leave. And some people can and great, that’s fantastic, but usually it’s just more complicated than that. It’s just more messy. Even once you dig into it and you try and look back for that moment and you say, "When did this start? How did this happen? Where was the thing that I didn’t see? Where was the thing that I let happen? Where was the thing that I should have changed?"

It’s very hard to find the one place. Is it the first time he said something mean? I don’t know. It’s messy; it’s just messy.

But in the messy, there are all these moments that just shake and reverberate all the way through you in ways that are beautiful and ferocious and terrible all at the same time. And I think those are the important moments. And inevitably they define things, because they’re important, but like I said, it’s just more messy than The Moment.

LW: I just have one more question, which kind of goes back to some of things we were talking about when we first started about writing being hard work. Are there ever times when you wish you didn’t have that drive to do this extra work? It’s so much to add on to everything else, to have these extra projects…

CM: Right, that project that could just sit there and taunt you.

There’s room on the bookshelf for all kinds of books, and there’s room in the world for all kinds of people and I’m happy beng the kind of person that I am. For me, I want to connect and I want to communicate and I want to make things and break things open and shake things around. And I want to find those moments and those pieces of transformation and possibility and then I want to communicate them with other people and see if something shakes a little bit in them, too, in response.

But I don’t write all the time. There was a huge break between Cherry and All the Pretty Girls, which I didn’t mean to write, either.

I got West Nile – I wasn’t in the hospital, but I was sick and exhausted. And my daughter was quite sick – she’s fine, now – but at the time no one could figure out what was going on and it was really frustrating and she was kind of off her head.

And my partner of ten years left me.

And my publisher emailed me in October and said, "I heard you’re working on short stories." And I said, "No, not really, I don’t understand short stories. I barely even read them, I don’t really get how they work, I think it’s a disaster." And he writes back and he was like, "Well, I’ve ended up with a hole in my publishing schedule. If you can get me a manuscript by Christmas I’ll publish it in March."

And I said, "Yeah, okay sure, of course." And then thought, oh my god, I can barely get out of bed in the morning physically or emotionally. So I ended up calling my friend in Toronto and said, "Can I come? Can I stay with you and will you feed me and not talk to me?" Because I can’t talk to peole when I’m writing, that’s the other thing; I become a total bitch.

She was like, "Get on a plane, come to Toronto." So I did, and I stayed with her for a week and I wrote a story a day and that’s basically what All the Pretty Girls is. But in between then I hadn’t done tons of writing.

And certainly this book I thought was going to be a disaster and was totally going to kill any shreds of a career I had left. I was totally pessimistic about the whole thing all the way through.

I just thought, I don’t know what I’m dong. I have no idea what I’m doing.

And afterwards – you’d asked if books changed me – I was really actually happy with it. I read the book through from start to finish the day I proofread it, which was the day before it went to the printers. And reading through it was this really great moment because I realized it isn’t perfect. It’s not a perfect book by any stretch, but some of what I’d wanted to express seemed to come through. I had been able to do more with it than I had feared.

I’d thought the whole thing was such a failure, and then when I read it through I saw little glimpses of the things that I did want to say. And then it won the Lamdba [Literary Award], which again makes no discernible difference in one’s life, but it was lovely and validating regardless, ha ha ha.

But I haven’t written a whole lot since then. I’ve started a little craftivist company called Head in the Oven and I buy vintage aprons and wash them and patch them up and embroider `80s pop lyrics onto them. So I have all these aprons that say "Whip It Good" and stuff.

It was really good. It was really, really important, especially in the last year. I had a difficult, emotional year and I really needed to do something that was not writing, but that was still creating. That was playful.

I don’t write all the time because it is hard and it is awful, and if it’s too hard and it’s too awful and if it’s not going anywhere, and if you don’t have the reserves to put the stuff out there that you want to put out there, it’s important to find other ways to express and create and make and do and play.

To see how much Chandra Mayor rules, you should buy her books. Cherry and All the Pretty Girls are available here through Conundrum Press. August Witch is available here.