Battle at Kruger is an 8 minute 24 second long YouTube video with 80,156,648 views. Perhaps one of those views is yours. About 6 or 7 of them are mine, having watched it repeatedly with various friends and family members over the years. Battle at Kruger is one of the most extraordinary nature videos you... Continue Reading →
On April 5th, the great American musician and poet Cecil Taylor passed away at the age of 89. An appropriate lifespan, perhaps, for the legendary free jazz pianist, so willing to push the boundaries of his instrument's 88 keys. During his long and rich life spent trespassing on the outermost frontiers of coherence and... Continue Reading →
In my book Digitopia Blues – Race, Technology and the American Voice, I described Dylan's impact this way: Dylan signaled the triumph of oral poetry for white America, the reconciliation of the word and the body, of the singer and the song, of the poet and the community. From here on in, it was a... Continue Reading →
I turn 50 today. Ta-da! Not such a big deal to me, but hey, it's an excuse to share this little compilation of some 21 recordings from my lifetime as a musician and performing poet that I have recently compiled in a SoundCloud page. The tracks date from 1981 to 2013, and cover some of... Continue Reading →
Thanks Max. Thanks Phil. Max is Max Middle, poetic curator, and Phil is Phil Minton, veteran vocal confabulator from the land beyond the sea and maestro of Ottawa's briefly resplendent Feral Choir, which I was part of, one of 25 growling, howling vocalists in sensible shoes. (Nikes in my case. Phil wore Chinese slippers.) We... Continue Reading →
Hi. This post lists and links to my first 50 posts on this blog, indexing 50 brief critical essays on contemporary media culture. Topics include The Leveson Inquiry, Occupy Wall Street, Privacy, Music, Food, Economics and more. Try one. 1. Happy Birth Day! my blog is born 2. Gifts and Books, Books and Gifts books as... Continue Reading →
Been gigging steadily lately. April gigs included a wedding with my awesome soul band The Funktion, a punk show at Babylon with my rowdy noise-trio Caymans and another gig with The Funktion last Friday at The Rainbow. All were excellent, if exhausting. March gigs included Montreal's Coolfest and Treehouse Talks in Toronto. Next up is... Continue Reading →
One night in the early '80s I found myself at a club in Montreal called Cafe Campus, dancing furiously to the live scratching of a hiphop DJ from New York, Grandmixer DST, and his MC crew, The Infinity Rappers. It was en event I will never forget, my first exposure to live hiphop, and blindingly... Continue Reading →
This has been a busy time, with some long-term artistic projects coming to fruition and others popping up out of the blue. I like to track these on this blog, although it does seem like recently most of my writing here has been about various artistic projects and less about ideas and current events, which... Continue Reading →
LitLive.ca is a website devoted to Canadian poetry in performance. I wrote a review in the latest issue of a new book and CD by an old friend and fine poet named Fortner Anderson, called Solitary Pleasures. There's lots of other good material on this site too... I met Fortner in Montreal back in 1984... Continue Reading →
YOU ARE YOUR MEDIA 