Leap In The Dark

Back in the old days when the governments of North America were still negotiating the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) one of the major concerns raised by opponents of the deal was its environmental impact. The primary concern was that companies in one country might be forced to bend their environmental standards in order to compete with businesses working in an area with less stringent rules.

At the time, in these pre Kyoto accord days and greenhouse emission targets, it was primarily Canada and the United States concerned about whether Mexico's standards would be so slovenly that they would be able to produce products far cheaper than corporations in either of the two biggest players.

Environmentalists were concerned that there long, hard fought battles to regulate aspects of manufacturing that dealt with environmental impact would be for nought as companies slashed budgets in these "non-essential" areas, leading to a return of the bad old days. In an effort to appease both the business communities and the environmentalists a side deal was struck allowing for the creation of the Commission for Environmental Co-operation (CEC) to monitor how well environmental standards were being maintained.

It interesting to note how some things never change for business people, it doesn't matter whether they are dumping Mercury poisoning in the English River system in Northern Ontario as the Reed Paper mills did in the seventies, if it ensures they can compete with polluters elsewhere. The same arguments are being use against the reduction of smokestack emissions and other poisonous wastes into the air we breath, as a reason by the Bush government for not signing the Kyoto accord and the Harper government for reneging of Canada's signature.

We can't compete, they bleat like lost little sheep, we can't compete. What about all those countries that don't sign they say, we can't compete. That argument is as spurious as it selfish. First of all for any country outside of North America who doesn't sign on the dotted line to abide by the Kyoto accord, slap them with such huge tariffs that our borders would be effectively closed to them. Watch how quickly they'd sign on and fall into line.

Within North America the means for ensuring that all countries and companies are complying with the aims of the accord, and that everyone is suffering equally from having to pay for the one time retooling of their equipment exists. That's what the CEC was created for in the first place, right?

Well in theory yes, but in practice it seems not to be the case. First of all there is the matter of their budget. With the money they receive they are supposed to conduct investigations, hire staff, perform research, etc. etc. Activities that are going to run in double digit millions per annum are still being covered by the same $9million dollar budget they were given in the year they were established.

Although they were officially designated as an independent body, in reality they are very much controlled by the three countries party to the treaty. Aside from the 40% reduction in real spending power they have had to endure because of inflation and zero increases in budgets, they are dependant on the respective governments for the data they use in formulating their reports.

As an example, The Globe and Mail newspaper cites the instance of the report on environmental impact of the concrete industry. The information they used to compile their comparison between the American and Canadian industries was supplied by the respective governments, who in turn had been supplied by the industry in question.

So the governments, and everybody involved, are counting on the industry people to step up and say, "oh by the way we went way over the top last year and polluted like crazy – sorry about that". Even the CEC realizes that this makes their findings a little suspect and added an addendum to the report saying that it doesn't fall within there mandate to investigate the provenance or integrity of the information supplied for the report and findings should be judged accordingly. In other words take this side of fries with lots of salt.

It's conditions like this that have environmental specialist and University of Ottawa professor Stewart Elgie thinking the committee is next to useless because they are hamstrung by the governments they are supposed to be checking up on. Instead of being a watchdog he says they have become a house pet, implying they work only to the limits their masters allow.

The outgoing chair of the committee, with only a month left on the job, William Kennedy freely admits there are problems that make their job next to impossible. The primary reason for their inadequacy he says is down to the fact that they were created as window dressing to allay the fears of the public, not because any of the governments actually supported the idea of their creation.

They dare not open their mouths on greenhouse gasses, because the Bush administration would block them issuing the report because it doesn't follow their line of thinking. It's probably safe to say given Steven Harper's decision to ignore parliament ratifying the Kyoto accord that the current administration in Canada would be of the same mindset.

The CEC already ran into hot water when they were able to commission a report on the dangers to Mexico of genetically modified corn. Although the report was written by some of the world's leading agricultural scientists, it's recommendation that a cautious approach be taken so as to preserve wild strains of corn in Mexico, was denounced as fundamentally flawed and scientifically unsound by the Bush administration.

That the American food industry is anxiously trying to sell genetically altered products in markets all over the world wouldn't have anything to do with that reaction would it? With most of the world's markets already resistant to the idea, a bunch of disagreeable scientists could only make matters worse by clouding the issue with facts that seem to offer support for their position.

NAFTA was designed to allow the businesses and people of all three countries freer and greater access to each other's markets. In theory this was supposed to allow the manufacturing and resource industries of each country to flourish, but in practice has fallen far short of that objective.

Never has it been harder for people from Mexico and Canada to cross the border into the United States, especially if they are looking for employment. Canada and America have been locked in a bitter dispute over duty that the Americans have been collecting on softwood lumber being sold by Canadian companies in the U.S. for close to five years now.

Instead of the intended result of countries thinking in terms of one big happy business community working together to strengthen the economy of North America as a whole, more then ten years after the signing of the pact everybody is still as protectionist as before. Is it any wonder that their environmental watchdog pretty much reflects that outlook?

It just wouldn't do, now would it, for one country to admit that they are actually polluting more then their counterparts in another country or that one of their businesses practice's could be detrimental to another county's welfare. The environmental business of our businesses is nobody's business but ours has become the official environmental policy of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

In the meantime instead of studying the impact of 145,100 tonnes (metric) of cancer causing materials into the atmosphere on the health of children, the CEC concentrates on providing reports that their sponsoring governments can really support: energy-efficient buildings. According to Mr. Kennedy there's a lot of support for it and that the agency has got a real winner with it.

If that's the winner, whose the loser?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:10 AM | Permalink

It seems only appropriate that Rory Block makes mention of John Hammond in the liner notes of her latest release The Lady and Mr. Johnson. As I was listening to her singing and playing the music of Robert Johnson for the first time, the thought flashed through my head that I've never had anyone but John Hammond hold my attention for so long playing solo acoustic blues.

I recently wrote of Hammond that he had the unique ability to climb up on stage and mesmerize an audience with guitar, voice, and harmonica, and I couldn't think of anyone else that could accomplish that feat. Well I can now add the name Rory Block to that list, and she does it with just guitar and voice.

I had heard Rory before on a couple of compilation discs, and been impressed with her acoustic Blues. But it's hard to make a judgement on someone's ability when you hear only one track, and one that is surrounded by other people's music at that. I find on compilation albums that it usually takes me about a minute into a song to shed the previous performance and just as I'm getting into the new groove, it's over and done with and I'm on to the next.

On The Lady and Mr. Johnson the Mr. Johnson of the title is Robert Johnson the man considered the father of Mississippi Delta Blues. He was the one who went down to the "Crossroads" and sold his soul for the Blues and set the standard against which everyone is measured. Rory Block tells in the liner notes how it was in 1964 when she was fourteen that she picked up her copy of Mr. Johnson's album and her life changed forever.

While that might sound trite coming from the mouth of someone else, it has an air of authenticity from her. She left home when she was fifteen to begin her long Odyssey to the point where she felt comfortable and confidant enough to make this tribute to her inspiration.

And pay tribute she does. This is an extraordinary recording, not least for the remarkable amount of bravery that was involved for one person, let alone a woman, to have the nerve to go into a studio armed only with voice, slide, and guitar and record. No other musicians to hide behind or blame; while the spotlight can be good for the ego, it also leaves you alone and naked with no margin for error.

From the opening bars of the aforementioned "Crossroads" to the final resonations of her Martin guitar on "Kind Hearted Woman Blues" the only thing the spotlight reveals on this album is the fact that Ms. Block is one of the best Delta Blues slide guitar players I've ever heard. Only John Hammond can match, or surpass her sometimes, in dexterity, precision and most of all passion.

It's one thing to be technically proficient at what you're doing, which she is, and another all together to communicate the emotional strength of the music as well. After listening to Rory Block and Mr. Hammond I've realized what places them a cut above so many others is the emotional honesty that imbues their music at all times.

You can't pull yourself away from their music even if you tried, let alone have your attention wander while listening to one of their recordings. Ms. Block doesn't have the harmonica of Mr. Hammond to throw into the mix, so in some ways she faces even a greater challenge in holding our attention. But hold it she does.

Song after song she pulls us in and holds us in the palm of her hand; we listen captivated as her fingers dance along the strings and her slide floats down the frets to coax notes that pierce the heart. Over top, her voice, whisky poured over gravel never sounded so good before, sings lyrics that snake their way into your brain where they trigger emotional resonance via the so called reasoning centre.

The Lady and Mr. Johnson is the culmination of years of playing and preaching the gospel according to Robert Johnson and the Mississippi Delta for Rory Block. In her liner notes she talks about his music being an obsession for her since that day she picked up that album in 1964 and how people have questioned her about why she would be so focused on music from before she was born.

The only answer she had is that it's a matter of spirit, when the spirit moves you like it moved her you almost have no choice in the matter. Whatever the reasons for her deciding to persevere we owe her a debt of gratitude for the amazing gift she has given us with The Lady and Mr. Johnson. The players out there who can bring this music to life with such authenticity and originality simultaneously are few and far between, but Rory Block does just that.

In her hands the music of Robert Johnson is not dusty museum pieces to be seen and not touched, but music that's alive and vibrant with as much to say to people today as when it was first written. Rory Block has to be one of the finest acoustic slid Blues players alive today and this album is a perfect showcase for that talent. Back when she started out people used to tell her to find something else to do for a living, maybe they'll stop now.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:01 AM | Permalink

I have a couple of tattoos that circumvent my forearms. On each arm are two stylized dragonheads accompanied by leafs of a specific tree; the left arm has Holly leaves while the right acorns and a solitary Oak leaf. In the old beliefs of the British Isles, long before the Romans came, it is thought that the year was divided up amongst the reigns of two kings: The Oak King and The Holly King.

One king represented the period of growth and fertility and the other the period when the land was cold and sterile. Symbolically they can be interpreted, in probably a million ways, but I like to think of them as representing the two halves of the creative process: a period of dormancy for introspection and a period of fertile creativity.

While the Holy tree has been retained in our modern celebration of Christmas as a nod to the pagan past, the Oak was not granted the same leniency. Since so many of the pre-Christian rituals involved sacred groves of Oak trees, the church had many groves of Oak destroyed in an attempt to eradicate the practices of its predecessor.

While the Oak may not have the ritual significance it once did, its effect on people cannot be denied. Who can truthfully say that they have not been moved by the sight of an Oak standing solitary sentinel in some farmer's field? Why is it that even to this day we are moved by stories of Oak trees, and that some individuals have even grown to have mythic status beyond what would normally be associated with a tree.

In England, just outside the town of Nottingham lies arguably one of the most famous forests in the English-speaking world, Sherwood. Within Sherwood Forest is a venerable old tree that is referred to as "Robin's Oak", in reference to the forest's most infamous inhabitant.

That both Robin Hood and the tree existed is true enough, but the tree's reputation for being his hideout in the woods unfortunately does not stand up to close examination. Although the tree is currently hollow enough for people to move around inside and even take shelter, it is at most only a thousand years old.

So even if "Robin's Oak" was around at the same time as the outlaw, it would have been a mere hundred year old sapling, living and vibrant. Remember, hollowness is a sign of age and death in a tree, not a convenience for human's to take shelter. If the tree had been dying in the 1100's, it would long ago have turned to mulch on the floor of Sherwood Forest.

In the grounds surrounding Windsor Castle, Windsor Park, in the Thames Valley outside of London, stands a solitary Oak tree of equal if not more years than its counterpart in the North. It is known simply as Herne's Oak, although there is nothing simple about Herne The Hunter and the Wild Hunt that he leads across the skies on the eve of the Twelfth Night of midwinter. Herne has the body of a man, the beak, of an owl, the antlers of a stag and the ears of a wolf and he rides on the back of a white horse accompanied by his pack of white skinned, and red eyed Yell Hounds.

Twelfth night used to mark the turning of the year for the peoples of England. Twelve days prior had been Midwinter, marking the return of the Sun after the longest period of darkness in the running of the year, December 21st. On the eve of Twelfth Night The Wild Hunt was said to ride the skies looking for prey, which was anyone foolish enough to be out on that evening. Farmers would make sure that all livestock was safely in on that night or they could awake the next morning and find themselves short a few head of cattle or sheep.

Herne was a force of nature, answerable to no one save himself, and was said to reside in the Oak tree in Windsor park. He would serve as a reminder to the people that nature is impartial to them, their needs and desires, doing what it must when it must. Although the longest night of the year may have passed, the worst of winter could still be yet to come.

I was reminded of Oak trees again today when reading through the morning paper full of war and horror I came across this one article in The Globe and Mail about one an older Oak tree in Canada and what steps were being taken to preserve it.
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About one hundred kilometres (80 miles) outside of Montreal in Montebello Quebec is the former residence of Louis –Joseph Papineau. Papineau was the leader of an uprising in 1837 in Lower Canada (Quebec) that demanded representational government for the colonies. Upper (Ontario) and Lower Canada were ruled by an appointed Governor General and a few wealthy individuals. Due to their nepotistic nature they were known derisively as The Family Compact.

Papineau's attempt at change was a failure and he and other leaders were forced to flee to the Untied States where they spent ten or so year in exile. When he returned to Quebec in 1845 he set to establishing his home in Montebello and it was while having the lands cleared for it's building he preserved this solitary Oak to give his home a sense of history.

Today, 170 years later, the tree is beginning to suffer from symptoms of old age and is need of assistance. Parks Canada (The supervisors of all national parks and historical sites in Canada) sought out the help of an arborist to try and devise a means of preserving the three hundred plus year old tree.

Today, just like some of its older relatives in Europe the Papineau Oak is on crutches. Three props, one ten meters and two six meters, are now being used to help support the weight of the lower branches. Parks Canada is hopeful that this will be sufficient to ensure that the tree outlives the rest of us.

Near the beginning of this post I wondered what it is about Oak trees that makes them appeal to so many people. While some, like me have specific reasons for being attracted to Oak trees; I think the fact that they are so old gives them a certain romantic appeal. You can stand in Sherwood Forest and say Robin Hood walked by that tree. Or you can visit The Chapel Oak of Allouville-Bellefosse in Normandy, France that is two chapels built inside the hollow core of a nearly 800-year-old tree and think of the pilgrims over the years who have worshiped in the shrine.

In this highly impermanent world that we are living in now, the Oak tree is a sign of strength and endurance in the face of all that the world and nature has to throw against it. Perhaps we look to it as an example to help us carry on in the face of so much strife. Or maybe it's just because they make such nice places to have picnics under, with lots of shade.

Either way Oak trees have endured over the centuries, and continue to fascinate and amaze us. They may not be part of any organized religion, but that doesn't seem to have stopped us from doing them honour.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:14 AM | Permalink

Since the last instalment of the "Notes" I've kept up my rather fruitless efforts to score free publicity for it (better known as NaNoWriMo Notes: an exercise in creative insanity) in its brand spanking new book form. Now I hadn't expected it to be easy to find free listings for the book, or places willing to post my press release out of the kindness of their hearts, but I had not expected the amount of duplicity I would run into.

How many ways did you think free could be modified? In my mind it's sort of like being pregnant; either you are or you're not. Well the same applies to the word free, either something is or it isn't free. Imagine my surprise than upon finding out that I'd been serving under a misapprehension all these years.

It turns out there are various degrees of freeness that are applicable on the Internet. After doing my requisite Google search for sites that offered free listings for press releases, I picked out five of the more likely looking ones (based on quick visits to each of their home pages) and prepared myself for the tedium of registering at each of them.

It was the usual drill of filling in information that each site considered essential to its well being to know about you. Once that was done, and the level of registration checked, you could kick back and wait for your email telling you that you had successfully filled in all the little boxes about you. At least that's the way I've been used to doing things like that.

The first email I received from one company was an apology telling me that they no longer offered a free service, would I like to upgrade to the next level? This was of course after they had hooked me in through Google claiming to be free, and saying all over their website that reduced service was available for free: Such lovely people.

It was actually quite special the number of sites that would somehow or other manage to get a listing in Google with the word FREE trumpeted in loud letters. It got to be less and less of a surprise when I would get to the site and discover the only thing free was going to their site. On others the free bit was what the fact that people were allowed to read through their database of press releases for free, or just be a member and not do anything.

I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised about that, seeing as how that's normal for when you look for anything free on the Internet. There is not always a catch, like attaching ad ware to the free product that cripples your computer; it's just that the sites that yell free the loudest usually charge the most for whatever service they are offering.

Then there are the sites that do have a genuinely free service, which they explain right up front does less than the service that you pay for. Which is cool and makes sense, if you are willing to pay money you should be entitled to better service. What I started to get bored with really fast was their insistence on telling me how lousy their free service is.

As soon as I had finished filling in their registration form, they opened a new window telling me how little they were going to do for me. When they sent out the obligatory, verify your account email, they reiterated that I might as well not even have bothered registering with them based on the fact their free service is useless.

Now I understand offering a free service as an enticement to upgrade to something that does more, I can even understand pushing the free service in your keywords to act as an inducement for people searching for your service. Those are both standard business practices and the former can be seen as a way to provide the client an opportunity to test what's on offer.

But if you use free as your hook and as your test package, what kind of impression are you going to make on potential clients if you keep degenerating the offer. Saying you could do be doing more faster for ten dollars is a lot different from saying we're not going to do squat for you. What kind of confidence is the client going to develop if the company tells them that the service is shit after inducing you to sign up because they offered it for free?

I do know that if I decide to spend money on some online publicity it won't be through any of the services that acted like that. So far from what research I've conducted even if you have money to spend on publicity you are more likely better off conducting the campaign yourself.

Create some banner ads that you can place on web sites that utilize your cover art from the book and have some eye-catching text. Lather your own website with stuff, don't overdue it on each page, but make sure each page has at least some mention of the book and a link to where it can be purchased even if it's only a button.

Create a special page for your book and put a fancy ad on it that links to where it can be sold. If, unlike me you can figure out how to turn the jpegs of your books artwork into gifs than you could even have an animated banner. (Are they supposed to be transparent or not? Why does background colour keep leaching into the new layers? Why did they turn greyish-green when the ad's base colour is orange-brown?)

Make stationary with your banner ad on it if you have that capability, if Outlook Express does I'm sure that everybody does, so that everyone you mail knows that you have a book for sale. Include a link to your storefront in your signature, making it obvious where the link is going.

Word of mouth on the Internet is a far more powerful tool than it ever was in the real world, because now instead of everybody maybe telling one or two people, they have the potential to reach hundreds and each one of the hundreds they reach has the same potential. Each time I've had a post, or a page from my blog mentioned on a forum somewhere my traffic has increased.

Not just the one time blip as people descend to see the mentioned article or photos, but a real increase in numbers. That happens all the time, it's how publicity really works on the Internet, not through any of these formal sites that charge you x amount of dollars so your press release can be posted to the wire service, or one of their listings.

When I used to do publicity for my theatre company, back in the bad old days of snail mailed press releases and flyers mailed out to the world at large through mass postal mailings, statistics showed that we could expect between a 1% and 3% return on all material sent out. I wonder if anyone has done that sort of statistical analysis on these sites that post releases for you.

I've seen some of the listings these companies use, and you have to want to read them to notice anything. No causal eye is going to be attracted to anything they list. The best publicity you can get will be whatever you can generate on your own. At least that's the case if you are a publishing company of one like me with a zero budget.

I've sold one copy of the book since I offered it for sale, and that was through me telling somebody about it. He didn't have to buy it, but he decided to for which I'm grateful, but than again nobody else has to buy it either but I hope they do. He lives in Virginia and I will probably never meet him, but we correspond by email. I fully expect that's how whatever sales I make will occur, either me telling somebody, or somebody who read it and liked it telling somebody else and so on.

I spent a couple of weeks searching around, and now it's become obvious, the best way I have of telling people about NaNoWriMo Notes is on my own, via my web site and other word of mouth vehicles. Unless you have the money to place banner ads on high traffic sites, and see little or no return on them, there's not much point in using any of the web services available. Free or otherwise, they just don't seem to offer much that I can't do as well and offers no better guarantee or returns.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:31 AM | Permalink

For the past twenty years or more, a special working group of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights has been working on a draft resolution for a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to be presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations. The working group was comprised of forty-seven member countries, including Canada, India, Cuba, Japan, and Security Council Members, United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China, plus representatives of over 200 hundred Indigenous organizations from around the world.

The final draft resolution was approved on June 29th by an overwhelming majority of thirty in favour, two against, twelve abstentions, and three absenteeism's. Aside from affirming that Indigenous peoples deserve the same treatment as other people under the Charter of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and international human rights law, the resolution also allows for them to maintain and strengthen their culture and traditional ways of being, while at the same time actively participate in the life of the state.

What's most telling, and probably the biggest bone of contention, is that it also guarantees the right of self determination. In the eyes of most people self-determination implies at least some degree of autonomy or self-governance; decision-making powers over education, and other state within the state authorities. Already countries like the United Kingdom which voted in favour of the resolution are qualifying their support by saying things like it has no legal standing, and that it shouldn’t interfere with individual state law.

There is also a certain amount of irony, or even cynicism, in seeing countries like Mexico and Guatemala publicly endorsing and voting in favour of the declaration. Both countries have abysmal records when it comes to the treatment of their native population with the latter being particularly notorious for its policies of persecution and oppression. In fact across Latin America the treatment of indigenous people is so bad that it makes North American efforts look exemplary in comparison.

The fact that countries like Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Uruguay joined their fellow Latin states above in adopting the resolution despite their records of indifference makes it all the more incomprehensible that Canada would be one of the two nations along with Russia to vote it against it entirely. (The United States was not part of the working group, but they have declared their opposition to the declaration and intent of opposing its passage in the General Assembly) What makes Canada's refusal to adopt the resolution so frustrating for native and human rights groups in Canada and elsewhere is the key role the country has played in the last eleven years in its drafting.

But within the last year Canada had started to be obstructionist to the proceedings. Not only did they call this vote in an attempt to defeat the resolution, (the agreement was supposed to have been by consensus) but also they had previously failed to pass a counter resolution to have a decision delayed so further discussion could take place. The only reasons the new Canadian government have given for the sudden policy change from previous administrations is that some of the provisions of the Declaration are incompatible with Canadian law.

This is an argument without any basis. Remember what the United Kingdom's delegate said about it not being legally binding on any state? Well if it's not legally binding how can it be incompatible with any laws in Canada. The only law it's in contravention of is the law of the Conservative Party of Canada to gut the work started by the previous governments on advancing the rights of indigenous people in Canada.

There still has been no announcement of any new policy to replace the Kelowna accord that Steven Harper and his boys blew out of the water with their budget by not providing the funding agreed upon by the provinces and the previous federal government. At the time they said they would put forward their own policy because they had hesitations about accountability measures.

It's funny how they only have those concerns when it comes to Natives. Why don't they just come out and say: "They're only going to drink it all anyway", or "they're so corrupt that the leadership will pocket it and nothing will get done and we will be right back where we started from."

You can almost see them tipping the wink to the audience when they say shit like "wasting taxpayer's money" and talk about the poor or Natives in the same breath. Remember this is still the same folk who were the Reform party years back whose Native policy was "they lost the war, what do they want?" They don't word it quite that way anymore, now it's just through winks and innuendo.

Obviously Native leadership in Canada is feeling a little blindsided by their country's complete about face on the Declaration. Phil Fontaine, Assembly of Firs Nations National Chief was obviously thrilled with the passage of the resolution of support, but less enamoured of the Canadian government's role in the proceedings.

"It is very unfortunate that in trying to stand in the way of the Declaration, Canada has done so much harm to its credibility and influence…" sums up the feeling of most Canadian natives who participated in the process. Kenneth Deer, who represents Mohawks at Kahnawake and the United Nations Council of Chiefs, took it even further by saying he felt betrayed and found it ironic that " that for 11 years they (Canada) carried the resolution and at the end they voted against the declaration and against their own work." He also warned of strained relations between the Canadian government and Indigenous people's in the future.

It doesn't take much of a crystal ball to see that coming. Phil Fontaine had staked his personal reputation on the Kelowna accord. He has preached patience for the entire length of his term in office to his constituents, promising them great results in return. For the space of about four months it looked like their faith in him had paid off. Not only did he succeed in negotiating a great deal for his people, but he also accomplished something that had been rare in the past; Native people of Canada were unified in their support of their leadership.

If I were the paranoid type I'd say that one of the government's main reasons for letting the Kelowna deal fall by the wayside was to sow discontent among Native Canadians for their leadership. Divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book, it's much easier to pick off your enemy one small unit at a time, then having to deal with a large scale opposition.

Individual flare-ups like the occupation of the housing development in Caledonia Ontario by members of the Six Nations Reserve can be easily ignored and or stomped out when necessary. If the people start to lose patience with Mr. Fontaine and start working against him, the coalition he has put together will fall apart.

Confrontations like Oka and Caledonia are made to order for this government. They can start spouting off about criminals and not being held hostage by the demands of a few armed fanatics. They can easily turn sympathies against the natives behind the barricades through announcements expressing their concern for the public's safety, implying that the public is in danger whether or not any exists.

The Conservative Party of Canada under Steven Harper is looking to turn back the clock in anyway and anywhere they can. Whether social issues like daycare, same sex marriage, and the decriminalization of marijuana, or political issues like the rights of Indigenous peoples.

There was no way they could have signed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Doing so would have admitted that Canada's First Nation's people have rights and our government has a responsibility to ensure they are fulfilled. Judging by their actions so far I wouldn't be surprised if the Conservative Party of Canada was considering bringing back Residential Schools and assimilation as Canada's new Indian Act.

Whatever they do end up doing, you can rest assured they are not going to have anyone's but their own best interests at heart. Or at the very least, it sure won't be the people of the First Nations who will be their primary concern when they finally replace the Kelowna Accord.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:55 AM | Permalink

There's a certain amount of serenity that can be found sitting in a darkened room. Where the only light is what the window allows of the streetlight outside to spill across the floor and walls, so that everything is comfortably shadowed, and the only sound the muted sound of tires grinding over snow and asphalt. But there is also a certain amount of fear.

Looking around the room see the pale mirror that your television screen has become; depending on the angle of your approach different bits and pieces of your world make themselves seen in the screen behind your ghost. Probably the most realistic show appearing all week: welcome to The Shadow World.

There's no turning on lights or lighting candles when you sit at this hour of the morning, long after midnight and long before dawn, trying to look into the parts of your life lurking just beyond sight. They won't offer anything in the way of true illumination; that will have to come from somewhere else. Turn the lights on now and you'll be left with a flat, two-dimensional world that lacks substance and your ability to see will be diminished.

Books, records, curios, and furniture blur together as indistinguishable lumps until you stand right on top of them. Even than their colour remains leached from them as the pallet is reduced to the variety offered by combinations of black and white, although even those distinctions are absent.

No, there is nothing clear-cut in your world when you have woken to be drawn into this place surely only a step removed from dreams. A part of you briefly wonders if you were to go back to the bedroom if you'd find your body asleep in your bed, curled up in a foetal position where you left it. Perhaps you don't check because you are afraid of what you might find there, or is it that you aren't sure what you want to find there?

Wander around for a bit, unsure if you want to commit yourself to this faded reproduction of your life, pick up bits and pieces and see that they are indeed solid in spite of appearances. You feel some little bit of fear right now and retreat to the couch in an effort to regroup. There is something comfortably familiar about how rough it is against the skin of your thighs through where your bathrobe has ridden up.

That and your feet rubbing the worn, low pile carpet or slapping on the cold tile are all that make you feel like you are present physically. You know that you are here because you can see the shadows and hear the various noises of the apartment settling into itself.

You sit on the couch hunched forward, curled up protectively around yourself while lighting cigarette after cigarette. But instead of providing the comfort you seek in the nicotine and habit their smoke only serves to add another layer of texture to the shadows and deepen the mystery.

Unable to pierce the gloom and sitting alone in the dark that little bit of fear you felt when wandering through the shadows returns. It settles in the pit of your stomach like an unwanted houseguest, but familiar all the same. But, you say to yourself, I've never been afraid of the dark.

A voice whispers, what about the shadows that come out of the dark? The shadows from where your father appears to stand beside your bed in the middle of the night when he comes for you; the shadows that the memories of those events rise up out of; and the shadows where the feelings of abandonment grow ever stronger each time he leaves you behind in your room

The anger wells up in your throat; at yourself and at him. Abandonment; I want to hate him not feel like a jilted lover. But it's right there for all to see who want to see and hear at this moment that you feel like that. He was always there telling you how much he loved you and how you two had a special relationship – different from the one he and your brother had, different from the one you and your mother had.

You were the only one willing to show him how much you loved him. You are such a good boy because of that, a special boy. But, he'd always warn you, if you were ever to tell anyone about us, well he'd never love you again and he would stop coming to you. You wouldn't be special anymore, just a bad boy who he wouldn't be able to love at all.

Do you remember how guilty you felt the time when you tried to tell somebody? How scared you were that he would find out and stop loving you. You had only told because he had hurt you that first time he put you on your stomach. You didn't want to feel pain.

It still hurts now when you think about it or close your eyes and have it come to life again within you. He had said he didn't want to hurt you, but that sometimes you had to be hurt to show how much you loved somebody in the special way that you two loved each other.

Oh the heat of your guilt when he came the next night and asked if you had told anyone. It was so bad that you almost told him yes, but said nothing afraid he would stop loving you. Why did he stop loving me anyway you wonder? What did you do wrong? Hadn't you been a good enough boy doing everything that he asked you to do even when it hurt or made you feel sick?

You sit on the couch in tears and angry as the shadows swirl around you whispering the past into your ears. You hate him, you hate yourself for the feelings you are still having, the feeling of being abandoned. How can you feel abandoned by your rapist? What kind of sick fuck were you, and are you to miss that?

And you sit on the couch smoking a cigarette with tears running down your face staring, looking for answers to your questions and nothing is there but the shadows. Everybody tells you it is in the past, he can't hurt you anymore. Hell you saw the casket going into the crypt they say, what is there to be afraid of? It's in the past.

But the past is still alive for you isn't it? It hasn't gone anywhere when it comes to your head and your heart during those hours before the sun comes up and after midnight when the shadows rule. You've tried to avoid the truth but you can't, not here, not now, not anymore.

You know the truth of the matter it was all a lie. He didn't love you, not one single little bit. You were a tool for his vengeance against the world. He took out his anger, his frustration and his feelings of inadequacy on you who couldn't fight back; you who could be made to believe that you should be doing this. You are not to blame for anything, he's at fault for everything – you know all that and yet still…

Still you find yourself on this couch, every once in a while, fighting with the demons he left planted in the shadows of your mind. You tried ignoring them, once upon a time, but that ended up in a disaster worse than dealing with them.

Shadows are only as substantial as you believe them to be and they are most believable when they stay in the shadows. You have to be willing to walk among them in order to see them for what they are: nothing but the insubstantial cast-offs of reality. Confront the shadows of your past and find the reality they have buried and the pain will start to diminish and the past will start to retreat.

Your present is a lot different from your past, and it's up to you to write a future and decide on what it will and won't include. Everyday in the present is a day you can use for giving yourself a better future with fewer shadows for doubts and fears to hide in. Use the days well and the past will become just a memory.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:47 AM | Permalink

I'm sure most of us have heard of the fascinating new industry that's sprung up like a weed as an offshoot of our advances in technology: Data mining. In a nutshell it involves the collection and dissemination of information about individuals for any use that anybody can think of.

From governments conducting censuses to businesses trying to develop profiles of the people most likely to buy their product, raw information about you concerning everything from your preference in toilet paper to how many sheets you use when you wipe is all grist for their mills. If you use three sheets now, Procter and Gamble want to know if you'd be more willing to by a product if you could do the same job with only two sheets, or would you be willing to use four if it were softer?

While most of us don't even think like that, it's those types of questions that plague the minds of the product development folk at big corporations and their marketing departments. Anything and everything they can find out about you will help them build a better picture of how they can get you to buy their products.

Information has become the hottest commodity on the market these days, and it's not just being put to so called innocent use by the corporations and advertising firms Everybody from private insurance companies, mortgage brokers, and credit agencies has ways they can make use of that data.

Do you order a large amount of pizza on your credit card, or buy a lot of groceries with a high fat content? Well don't be surprised if the next time your health insurance premiums come up for renewal that they either increase or you are turned down because you represent too great a risk because of possible cardiac problems.

You think I'm exaggerating, well I wish I were but according to this article in the Globe and Mail newspaper it's already happening in the United States. A chain of grocery stores in New England has developed software that generates a dietary profile of each of its shoppers based on their grocery purchases. In order to help cover the costs of developing the programme they have sold these profiles to organizations wanting to know which of their clients has brought their ill health on themselves through bad diet so they can cut them off from coverage.

The villain behind all this is something that's actually been around for quite a while but is only just being utilized to maximum effect. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is small, silent and can be utilized everywhere. Procter and Gamble want to install a chip in your fridge so they can monitor what foods you buy, NCR is installing small screens in shopping carts in grocery stores that will run ads complementing the product you just tossed in the cart, BellSouth has applied for the patent to rummage through your garbage so they can see which chips you threw out so they can sell that list to marketing firms, and finally Pfizer is keeping track on how many Viagra you take and when, through chips in the packaging.

Of course the larger implications for RFID use lie in security issues. I.B.M. currently holds the patent for building RFID peephole in walls and ceilings of public places where they will be able to peek into your purse, pocket and wallet. The chip is being installed in ID cards, like the new American national ID card currently on order and passports that are tagged at the borders.

The fact that data is being collected in ways we can't even imagine is scary enough as it is, but what's even scarier are the implications of what that data could be utilized for. Like the example of the New England grocery chain selling its client information to insurance companies, what's to stop any and all information changing hands from supposedly innocent users like marketing companies, to those who will use it to create some sort of profile of you for insurance reasons or establishing credit.

Finally, it comes down to what gives them the right to gather this information in the first place. This is information akin to that gathered by a wiretap as far as I'm concerned and should be subject to the same rules and regulations. What gives any business the right to know about my eating habits, just on the off chance that they might be able to sell me a product?

A government wants to spy on a person, fine, ask the courts permission like you would in the case of a wire tap and you can than plant RFID devices all over their body. If you're going to have RFID devices in public places monitoring people's activity; which is understandable in these strange times, make damn sure you draw up really tight regulations governing how the information it produces is used and who has access to it.

There is also the question of disposal of the information gathered. What will happen to the literally miles and miles of data that is accumulated? Is it going to be stored somewhere or will it be deleted as soon as it's found to be of no use to anyone?

Radio frequencies can be monitored by anybody, and this technology is highly susceptible to being hacked according to engineers at John Hopkins University, with it only becoming even more vulnerable when they enable the tags to be read from a distance. What kind of guarantees are there that personal information like medical records aren't being lifted and then sold to the highest bidder. Maybe it's naïve to believe that sort of activity doesn't occur already, but this will make it even easier for people to access that information in the future.

A few years back when Benetton found out that consumers don't like being spied on they were forced to recall millions of garments that had RFID chips installed in them. Other companies in Europe have been forced to back down in the face of consumer outrage, so you can make a difference. In the above cases people simply refused to buy products from Gillette and the other companies involved with making use of the chip until they said they had removed them.

But it seems like North Americans, in spite of all our claims to be freedom loving, have no problems giving up their freedom of privacy at the drop of the hat. The governments have plenty of means of collecting information about all of us already, all of which are regulated by laws to protect you from them. RFID is no different from things like wiretaps, telephoto lenses and long-range microphones that are employed to infringe on your privacy now.

I see little or no justification for corporations like Proctor and Gamble to be accumulating personal information on individuals in the name of making sure we see the right commercial at the right time. As these new information technologies get more and more sophisticated it's up to the public to decide whether or not they are willing to allow their personal habits to be public knowledge.

The industry claims that regulations will develop and the technology use expands. To me that is akin to closing the barn door after the animals have escaped. Now's the time to tell them what we will and will not allow them to collect and what we will allow them to do with that information. You have the right to privacy, demand that it is respected.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:38 AM | Permalink

People say that being the son of a famous man is particularly difficult. Often times he reacts badly to being in his father's shadow and wilts under the pressures on him to succeed. It's bad enough when your father happens to be well known, but it must a hundred times worse if you decide to follow in his footsteps in your choice of career.

The only way this can work out is if both men involved are sure enough of themselves and their abilities to not feel any threat from the other. The father is going to have to be able to teach his son without telling him to do it "my way" and the son is going to have to be willing to understand that he can learn something from his father no matter how talented he either is or thinks he might be.

I'm sure it's hard when the son and the father are both professionals like lawyers or doctors and the son is always being compared to the dad to see if he matches up. But when you start venturing into the arts, where egos are notoriously fragile, it would seem like collisions are only inevitable.

This only makes the case of Luther Allison and his son Bernard Allison all that much more remarkable for the way things turned out. Even when his father was alive Bernard was spreading his wings on his own and putting his own stamp on the Blues. In fact his first CD, released in 1990 when he was twenty-five, was called The Next Generation.

Being born in the early sixties, Bernard was not only exposed to the music of his father and his contemporaries in the Chicago Blues scene, he was listening to the modern interpreters of the Blues and rock players. There's no question that the father would have influenced the son, but if he wanted to be Bernard Allison and not Luther Allison's son he was going to have develop his own ways of playing and interpreting the blues.

It's just a big pleasure for me to continue my father's legacy, but you know I don't go out and try to be Luther Allison. I just go and do what I've learned from my Dad and the likes of Koko Taylor, or Stevie Ray Vaughan or Albert King. So, I'm trying to keep the Blues alive Bernard Allison style. (Bernard Allison)

Those just aren't idle words, spoken to deflect any possible suspicion of Bernard riding on his father's coat tails. All one needs do is listen to him for any length of time to dispel that notion and to realise he's his own player. No Mercy is a packaging of two live concerts onto one disc, and it give a really good indication of not only Bernard's talent but his diversity and passion as well.

Not having heard much of his music before I wasn't sure of what to expect, and when the opening track, a cover of B.B King's "Rock Me Baby", sounded like it owed more to Hendrix then anyone else I was a little concerned. Not that I don't like Hendrix, but even he never did an album without slowing down occasionally and there are far too many blues guys who equate speed with emotion and passion.

Slowing down does not mean stop playing and do a token power ballad like so many rock bands have done in the past, it means learning how to play the incredible variety of Blues styles out there and making them sound like your own. The Blues, like Jazz and Orchestral music, has always lent itself to interpreters; people who can take an older piece of music, put a fresh coat of paint on it, and make it sound brand new.

Not only is Bernard Allison fully capable of that, but he can also maintain the original integrity of a piece. Listening to his version of "Break'in Up Somebody' Home", the third track on the disc. He comes down off the boil of the first two songs, and pulls the listener in with guitar restraint instead of excess. It's an example of how a good player can make less have more emotional power then more.

Whether it's the almost boogie feel of "Driven Wheel" or the more solid fare of Chicago blues that he serves up on his father's "Change Your Way of Living" Bernard proves that's he's more than just a speed merchant looking to tear his way through songs like tissue paper. He can lovingly coax out of a piece of music the subtle nuances that can elevate the Blues from simplicity to complexity, no matter the song or the style.

When you are interpreting someone else's work, be it as a musician playing in a style far older than you, or an actor performing another's words, the biggest barrier between success and failure is the size of your ego. The more the performance becomes about the music and/or the words, and the less it is about you, the better it is. The problem is that it takes a certain amount of ego to even just get up on stage and believe that you have something to offer in the first place.

The great performers are able to find a balance between being aware of their talent and knowing that they aren't God's gift to anything. You can usually tell by their unwillingness to let anything speak for itself, be it song or soliloquy, but the biggest clue is how they feel about sharing the spotlight. In the case of Bernard Allison he understands that being surrounded by good musicians won’t make him look less talented, but will make him look better.

His band for the concerts recorded on No Mercy are amazing. Keyboards have replaced rhythm guitar to good effect, especially when doing some of the older, honky-tonk type songs where nothing can replace a barrel house organ sound. They also offer a nice counterpoint to the staccato nature of the blues guitar solo; a wash of sound underneath that supports the melody, much like the bass and drums support the rhythm.

Although Bernard Allison is most definitely the leader of the band, they are still a band, and they work together on making the songs work. Unlike a power trio where the bass and drums sole purpose in life is to support the work of the lead player, here everyone contributes a key element to the song that enhances the experience for the listener.

Bernard Allison probably knows more about Blues music then any of his contemporaries just because of who he is and who his father was. But instead of being happy, or lazy enough to rest on those laurels, he has pushed himself into developing a style of his own that reflects all the influences on his musical life.

If you are not overly familiar with his work, than No Mercy offers a great introduction to an amazingly diversely talented blues musician. Not only is he keeping a tradition alive, but he definitely is blowing new life into it.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:56 AM | Permalink

I freely admit that when it comes to music I'm an old fart. I don't listen to much new music, preferring to stay nice and safe with the stuff I've liked since God knows when. I started to give up on popular music in the mid eighties when keyboards and synths began replacing guitars, and band names changed from Stranglers to Flock of Seagulls.

It just didn't do it for me anymore. I completely missed out on the whole grunge/ Seattle/Nirvana/ thing and since most people I knew already wore plaid lumberjack jackets and toques (I'm from Canada eh?) the fashion statement meant squat to me. Even since I've started reviewing music on a regular basis, the stuff that attracts me is either by people who have been dead for years, or people playing that style of music.

The pity of that is that I've got a feeling that I've been missing out on a lot of good music. But how do you know what's going to be good and what's going to be crap if you have no idea who the players are, and never heard them do anything else before? Well you've got to take a chance every so often and hope that at least you're interested by what the band does.

Such was the case with new album Isabelle by the band Snakes and Music. Although this is the only the second disc from this collection of musicians, they are all veteran's of the current alternative music scene with plenty of performance and studio time under their belts.

What struck me first about this CD is the intelligence of the lyrics. These are not simplistic pop tunes crafted to fit into some top forty formulae that will guarantee them air time on cross country radio stations. Prose poetry has never been the most popular of formats on the AM dial and I don't even think FM stations aside from college and some public radio are overtly interested.

Musically the first thing that I notice is the guitars, slightly discordant, they chug along under the lyrics. Almost, but not quite drowning out the vocals, the guitar on tracks like "Isabella" and "Shut Up That's Why" help to express the anger and confusion felt by the protagonist. They serve as almost a vocal harmony, but emotionally not musically.

Sometimes listening to the music on Isabelle I received the impression that a group of people were sneaking through enemy territory and having to avoid detection. Obviously I don't mean that literally, but there is a quality of subversiveness and of being on the outside looking in that makes it feel like your part of something being done in spite of obstacles arrayed against you.

Rock and roll, especially the blues based stuff, has always been considered a threat by some of the more conservative elements of society. It was the aggressive music that questioned traditional figures of authority and pushed what was considered the boundaries of good taste.

In other words it was new and exciting and gave people something different to listen to then what their parents were listening too. Isabelle by Snakes and Music recaptures that sense of danger that makes Rock music such an adrenalin rush. Even on the songs that some people might consider country there is an urgency to the vocals and the music that removes them from the safety of the country radio sound.

Whether they've put up a wall of sound; guitars, keyboards, drums, and percussion; or crafted a simpler almost folk/country song, there is no escaping the fact that Snakes and Music are not interested in holding your hand and telling you things are doing just fine. Read the lyrics of their songs, try and hear what they're saying, and you find the meaning slides away, but listen to the song and you understand.

A line of poetry can be changed by a word, and a chord of music can alter a song and that's what happens when they blend the music and lyrics together. The lyrics on the page in the booklet seem ambiguous, accompanied by the music the emotion underpinning the words is magnified and the meaning becomes clear.

Isabelle by Snakes and Music is something different from the norm of the majority of pop music that you're liable to hear on the radio for the simple reason that it is a reminder of what rock and roll music should be. It's not safe and reassuring, but challenging and disturbing.

You'll never hear this music on an "adult radio show" or "classic (corporate) rock" station. This is the music they want you to forget about because it will remind you of the true potential popular music has for intelligence and thoughtfulness. Isabella and Snakes and Music recapture the spirit of what a rock song should be; not a formula, not a corporate package, but a breath of independence and freedom; something people older than you can blame the troubles of the world on.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:32 AM | Permalink

Well this is just mean; what I'm about to do is highly unfair, taunting, and in some circles might even be considered legitimate cause for disembowelment. I'm going to offer you a tantalizing glimpse at a book that won't be available to be purchased until November of 2006. Two days ago the unbound proofs of Lessek's Key, book two of The Eldarn Sequence by Robert Scott and the late Jay Gordon, showed up at my door.

(Jay Gordon died in November of 2005 from Lou Ghering's Disease after he and his son-in-law Robert had completed work on most of what will be the trilogy known as The Eldarn Sequence. Jay had always wanted to write a fantasy series and when he was diagnosed he and Robert began work on the project. As Jay's physical health failed Robert took over more of the manual labour, but it is still Jay's inspiration and ideas that remain the core of these books. Jay lived to see the first book The Hickory Staff published and knowing that the entire series would see the light of day)

Last fall I was lucky enough to stumble across book one of the sequence The Hickory Staff while wandering through the book store. As everyone who has become ensnared in the adventures of Steven Taylor, Mark Jenkins, and Hannah Sorenson of Colorado, who fell through a hole in the universe to end up in Eldarn, knows it is the work of imaginative and gifted storytellers.

In the first book they breathed new life into the old "stranger in a strange land" scenario with the ingenuity of their plot development and the believability of their characters. Taking an old idea and making it fresh again can require just as much creativity as coming up with something brand new. A major difference was that as much attention was paid to the characters of the "strange land" as those from back home. Our heroes remain as a focal point, but are in a world populated by real people whose lives are every bit as important.

Equally refreshing was the lack of advantage the people from our world had despite being from a more technologically advanced world. Far too often these types of stories become the stranger arrives just in time to use his superior knowledge to save the brave but backward people from their evil overlord. While the latter does exist in this world, evil personified has taken over the world; it's Steven, Mark, and later Hannah who all need to be rescued by the people they meet.

At one time Eldarn was five separate kingdoms, four of which were ruled by members of an extended family and the fifth by a collective of wizards known as the Larion Senate. It was through the latter that evil came into the world, when one of their number, Nerek, went too far in his search for power and opened himself up for possession in exchange.

After wiping out all but two of his colleagues he proceeded to eliminate everyone with any legitimate claim to a throne anywhere in Eldarn, (he believed) save for the one he possessed, thus always preserving the illusion of proper succession. Once his control was complete, he took the key to his power, an inconsequential looking piece of rock called Lessek's Key which controlled the spell table built by Lessek founder of the Senate, and one of two portals for crossing the boundaries between worlds, to Colorado of the 1800s where he secreted them in a safety deposit bank. The very bank that Steven Taylor would work at in during the 21st century.

In Lessek's Key we pick up the action where we left off at the end of The Hickory Staff. Stephen has headed back to Colorado to retrieve the portal and key which had been left in his and Mark's apartment, Mark and the rest of their companions, Garec and Gilmour (one of the surviving Larion Senators), attempt to recover from their fight with Nerek and place themselves in position to open the second portal to allow Steven a point of return. (To ensure you end up where you want to, both portals have to be open otherwise you end up in a random spot, which is how Hannah ended up in a separate part of the world from Steven and Mark)

For her part Hannah, through the two men, Hoyt and Churn who rescued her in book one, had managed to meet up with other survivor of Nerek's destruction of the Larion Senate, Kantu. (Something to keep in mind, there are no coincidences in Eldarn) Kantu has agreed to try and help Hannah get back to Colorado, but in order to do so he thinks they have to break into Nerek's palace to retrieve the one portal remaining on Eldarn.

While the two groups of comrades are pursuing their goals, Brexan, the former soldier in Nerek's army, is on her own with only thoughts of vengeance to comfort and keep her going. With Versan dead and her heart broken, killing the man responsible for his death, is all she can focus on. Once she establishes his whereabouts the hunt is on.

It's hard enough for an author to split the focus of a book into two parts, let alone three, but to attempt four major ones, as well as some splinters off of Brexan's adventures, for the first third of the book as is the case in Lessek's Key is apparent literary suicide. How can they expect us to keep track of what's going on, and who's doing what?

By making each part so memorable that you can't forget it even if you try is a good starting place. Not once did I even have to pause to remind myself of who was who, and what had been happening to them when I last saw them, let alone flip pages back to where they had been seen last. It wasn't even a matter of ending every chapter with a cliff-hanger either, although there were those as well, it's the fact that the authors have an uncanny ability to be make scenes distinct and memorable enough that they linger long after you've done reading them.

Whenever I laid the book down, which I admit was with great reluctance and infrequently, I found myself dwelling on the circumstances that I had last seen the characters in. There was always one strong note generated by at least one of the characters depicted in a scene that would stick with me and allowed for instant recall when their story continued.

The real secret of course is great character development. What the authors had started to build in The Hickory Staff is elaborated and expanded on in Lessek's Key when it comes to those who populate the world they've created. Events change them, circumstances cause them to grow in ways they didn't think possible, and fears are faced and conquered. Convictions are tested and like in reality are found wanting, forcing the forging of new ones which are stronger for their annealing by the fire of coming to terms with oneself.

It seems in this book that each character has a personal journey they must undergo while completing the physical one towards what they hope is their ultimate destination. Watching them struggle with the extraordinary circumstances that they find themselves in and dealing with the effect events have on their personalities and behaviour, makes them one of the most realistic groups of characters I have read about in ages.

Of course characters need things to do, and these people have plenty, considering the amount of territory they have to cover for them each to reach their goals. Of course there are also any number of left hooks and plot twists that the authors include to keep both the reader and the characters honest. Nothing and no one is sacred and it is a war where people die and get injured so you have to be prepared for anything.

There have been so many times when I've been reading a trilogy and been sorely disappointed by the second book. It’s as if the author was just in a hurry to get through it so that he could finish and get on with the conclusion. Lessek's Key the second instalment in Robert Scott and Jay Gordon's Eldarn Sequence doesn't suffer from any sophomore jinx.

They have taken a fine introductory book, The Hickory Staff and expanded on what they started, making the sequel equal, if not better, then its predecessor. Lessek's Key is not due for release in North America until November 2006. (In Great Britain it will be released on August 17th) That gives you plenty of time to read The Hickory Staff if you haven't already, so you don't miss out on anything.

These are two well written, exciting, and intelligent books with only one problem, they end, well at least there is still book three to look forward to.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:42 AM | Permalink

The English language can be a royal pain in the butt sometimes, with its weird spellings and how the same word can be both a verb and a noun. At the same time that is also part of its charm. Turning a noun into a verb can sometimes provide an immediate mental picture and comprehension because of the previous associations.

This may seem like an odd opening paragraph for a political article, but I thought a word of explanation was needed prior to utilizing one such word to describe not only the most recent week of Mr. Harper's term, but his performance overall. Grandstand. My Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary has the following two definitions for that word: "n. a raised series of seats for spectators at a racetrack, sports stadium, etc. – To act in a way so as to impress others or win applause. adj."

Now all politics involves grandstanding to some extent or another, it just goes with the territory of trying to impress people enough to get elected. That's a given and pretty much expected behaviour from those folk. Systems where the office of the leader is elected independent of the rest of the government, as in republics like the United States, seem more inclined to accept the fact that their leader will be playing to the crowds as part of his duties.

But in the parliamentary system of Canada where the Prime Minister is the head of the party that wins the most seats and is not elected separately, there is significantly less power associated with the position then that of head of state. In theory the Prime Minister is simply the most important minister in a cabinet of people formulating and implementing policy to conduct the affairs of the nation.

In practice of course the amount of input individual ministers has is dependent on the willingness of the Prime Minister to delegate responsibility or share the spotlight. In the case of Mr. Harper he seems very hesitant to let the majority of his cabinet out in public. One of the first things he did upon taking office was forbid anybody to say anything to the press without clearing it with his office, then he cancelled the impromptu press conferences that used to happen in the hallways of parliament after caucus meetings and sessions in the House ended.

In the last election no party won sufficient seats to have complete control of the House of Commons. Steven Harper's Conservative Party of Canada won the most seats, but he is outnumbered in the House by a combined vote of the opposition. Under normal circumstances this would make the governing party a little circumspect with their agenda, and send them searching for allies in the house to prop up their government.

They would make concessions to other parties, with the result that the policies implemented would bear a more accurate reflection of the country as a whole instead of just one party's politics. But that's not happening this time for two reasons: the largest opposition party, the Liberals, are choosing a new leader, and the Conservatives are acting like they have a majority government.

The only reason they are able to get away with that type of behaviour is because they know the Liberals dare not vote against them and go into an election with a temporary leader. If the Conservative want to pass a piece of legislation, all they need do is make it a confidence motion, meaning if they lose they have to call an election, and the Liberals are forced to either vote with them or abstain.

They have also done their best to bypass parliament whenever possible, and have to be brought kicking and screaming into the legislature for votes on issues even though they've know they won't lose the vote. Steven Harper much prefers to stand up and make pronouncements to the country than have to deal with the messy business of actually letting other opinions be heard on a subject.

The first major example of this came when it was decided to go along with the previous Liberal government's plan to extend and expand upon Canada's role in Afghanistan. In polls taken across the country it turned out that most people were against the idea and wanted a clearer understanding of what would be involved with this commitment.

When the opposition cited these polls as reasons for recalling the legislature for a debate on the matter, the response was that Canadians didn't understand the complexity of the reasons for our troops being in Afghanistan. Finally the Conservatives were forced into allowing two days of debate on the issue. It was voted on and passed without Canadians feeling anymore comfortable about the issue.

Then there was the whole softwood lumber accord fiasco. For the past few years Canada and the United States have been locked in a trade dispute over the amount of softwood lumber Canada has been exporting to the United States. In spite of their being a Free Trade agreement between the two countries, the United States had charged $5 billion dollars in tariffs on softwood lumber.

Negotiations have been ongoing since before the election and this April Mr. Harper stood up in Parliament and with same degree of accuracy of Neville Chamberlin declaring "We have peace in our time" after allowing Hitler to walk into Czechoslovakia, said, "We have a deal". Two weeks ago, just before his first official visit to Washington, he proudly told the newspapers the same thing again.

It turned out that last April there wasn't a deal so it was made abundantly clear that something needed to be ready for signing on July 6th/06 when Harper was scheduled to meet with George Bush. This way Mr. Harper could look like his policy of toeing the line on American foreign policy, instead of the independent course charted by the previous governments was paying off.

Of course when the Canadian lumber industry started pointing out all the holes in deal, and why they didn't want to sign it, and the opposition parties started to demand that it be voted on in parliament Mr. Harper got in right huff. He told the lumber people to like it or lump it, and that if the opposition dared defeat it in parliament he would make it an issue of confidence and force an election on them.

Which brings us to the events of the past week and a half. Mr Harper went off to his first major international event, the G8 summit in France where supposedly energy was going to be prime on the agenda. That all blew up everybody's faces of course with the way things have been playing out in Israel and Lebanon. The leaders of the eight plus one (Russia) spent the days agreeing on the wording of a release about the situation.

But unlike the rest of the leaders, who know better than to say anything of consequence as a situation continues to develop, Mr Harper proved he couldn't resist the opportunity to be in the spotlight and made a statement where he said that he thought Israel has the right to defend herself and that her response was "measured" in other words appropriate. The next day eight Canadian citizens visiting Lebanon were killed by Israeli gunfire.

Now you can't blame Mr. Harper for Canadians being killed in Lebanon when the country is invaded by a foreign power, and I don't even think you can blame him for the fact that it takes time to get Canadian nationals out of the country, and anybody who does is being a jerk. In fact considering the resources available to Canada I think he's done the best we can hope for in the circumstances. Nobody else could have a done a better job.

His mistake wasn't even in saying that Israel has a right to defend herself, because that's almost a universally held believe in Canada. It was his eagerness to make the big statement of support for the American position in the Middle East, before even finding out the true nature of the situation that grated on people's nerves.

While Canada has always supported Israel, most of our governments have also been able to maintain the respect of the Muslim and Arab world as fair and impartial because we have had a foreign policy distinct from the Americans and British. With the exception of the first Gulf War, we have always been seen as the one to be used as the peacekeepers in these situations. From the Suez crises in the fifties to the Golan Heights in the seventies, Canadian troops have worn the blue helmets in the Middle East and earned the respect of most countries.

But Mr. Harper seems so eager to impress the American's that he went even further then they did in their reaction to the invasion of Lebanon by Israel. By saying this was a measured response on their part was pretty much condoning the shelling of civilian populations in Lebanon, which is bound to occur when going after groups like Hezbollah.

It's not the fact that Canadians were killed; it's the fact that he did not consider the possibility of Canadian civilians being at risk because of the Israeli actions that's the real problem. By condoning their actions one day it appeared he was condoning the killing of anybody who was in the way of their assault, including his own citizens.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not placing a higher value on the lives of those eight people just because they happened to be people who lived in the same country I do. That attitude is even more reprehensible then supporting the assault in the first place. Israel issued an apology to Canada for the killing of those eight people, have they issued one to Lebanon yet for the killing of God knows how many innocents?

Instead of trying to rectify his mistake and helping to search for a solution to the crises or to repair the damage he might have done to our reputation as peacekeepers and a country with an independent foreign policy, Mr. Harper has decided to play to the crowds. He's flying to Cyprus to meet with Canadian citizens who have been evacuated from Lebanon.

You can almost visualize him and his advisors meeting and trying to figure out the best thing to do that will play well for the crowds. What flamboyant gesture can he make that will compensate for looking like he didn't care about the lives of Canadians? Fly to Cyprus and look all compassionate and worried, maybe even get his picture taken with a group of evacuees looking paternal and statesman all at the same time.

Just like his "surprise" visit to Canadian troops in Afghanistan before their tour of duty was extended by two years and they became involved in a more direct combat situation, he's playing for the larger audience then those who are in attendance. While it's understood that politicians will do that on occasion Mr. Harper seems to be making it a permanent fixture of his government.

Steven Harper seems to have forgotten that we are a constitutional monarchy where the Prime Minister does not rule unilaterally. He has done his best to not only cut the opposition parties out of their role in government by avoiding parliament as much as possible, but he has made himself into the sole face of his own party.

While grandstanding to the converted might keep the party faithful in line, it's not doing anything to strengthen his support elsewhere. Not only will he not win his coveted majority in the House of Commons he could very well lose the next election entirely if he's not careful. As the last Conservative Prime Minister of Canada discovered, Canadians don't like being ignored or being drawn too close into the sphere of American influence. That's a lesson Steven Harper would due well to remember.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:54 AM | Permalink

That creaking sound you hear in the background as you start reading this post is the sound made by the runners of my Hobby Horse rubbing along bad kitchen tiles as I climb into the saddle and prepare to ride one of my favourite pet theories into the ground. The fact that this theory springs from my view of the world should be warning enough that it will be one sided and completely biased, unlike the even handed and rational approach that everyone has grown to expect from opinion pieces on the Internet.

Those of you who have read my writing with anything approaching regularity will know that I make no secret of the fact that I'm a survivor of incest – sexual abuse by my father and a recovered substance and alcohol abuser. Thankfully, while I may have emotionally abused some people along the way, the majority of my abuse was self-directed.

Unlike my father, or his father before him my self-loathing and fear never found focus on an external target. What damage I inflicted on others was caused by the inevitable backwash of somebody hitting bottom; imagine a the whirlpool created by a boat sinking and the damage caused to those craft at the periphery of the vortex and you'll get a general idea of what I'm talking about.

I've done my best to make my peace with myself about that by understanding why it happened. Not using the abuse as an excuse, but finding in it for myself the explanation for abhorrent behaviour that I was never able to understand, was a huge relief. There can be no feeling worse than not knowing where a compulsion comes from, or doing something in spite of the voice in your head yelling "It's wrong"

As to what causes somebody to abuse another person, either sexually or otherwise, there are certain generalizations about the character of abusers that that I think are safe to take as givens. One is that the chances are that the abuser had him or herself been abused without ever having been treated for it.

This would create a person so full of resentment, anger, and the need to exert power over someone else, that at the first signs of things going wrong in their life they would find a target, or object of blame, who would become the outlet for all those emotions. This goes a long way towards explaining why men, who are conditioned to repress their emotions, are most often the abusers, and children, the most vulnerable people in society, are most often victims.

Sexual orientation has nothing to do with sexual abuse. It's about exerting control and power over something in your life because you have no control over how the world makes you feel. Resentment at having been treated badly and what you perceive as repeated slights against you gives you the justification for your actions.

If they can do this I can do that is taken to extremes a rational mind wouldn't even consider. Think about any time you have felt resentment towards another person, or about something that had been done to you, and magnify those feelings by the largest number you can imagine and you might get an inkling as to what goes on in the mind of an abuser.

Having experienced those feelings myself whenever I used to justify doing the things I knew would hurt another I can vouch for their seductive qualities. Even now it can take some effort on my part to overcome the path of least resistance that it allows. You never have to worry about standing up for yourself, fear being rejected, or have the validity of your feelings questioned. You just wallow in feeling hard done by until you find a means of venting that repression on someone else.

After I was well into my recovery process and was able to start talking about my father the person, beyond just his role as abuser in my life, I began to remember things that happened to my father as a child, and what his father (my grandfather) had experienced as a young man. I started to formulate a theory about the interrelationship of abuse with the last 150 years of history.

The world my grandfather was born into in Europe of 1898 (Family history note: my father's family name was Chalmers and his father was born in Scotland, my last name is different as I legally changed it to my mother's last name of Marcus) bore eerie similarities to our current world situations both socially and politically. Nationalism had been on the rise for the previous fifty years as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was beginning to come apart at the seams.

Italy and Germany both had become unified countries, instead of a collection of independent city-states and regions. Russia was a seething mass of discontent as the many were becoming tired of the few controlling their lives. The Balkan states were in their usual state of unrest as the myriad ethnic groups all had their own nationalistic desires.

While this was happening politically the world was also trying to come to grips with what at that point was the most accelerated rate of progress ever experienced. The Industrial Revolution was the birth pangs of our free enterprise system of capitalism and although it increased the fortunes of some individuals, and solidified the middle class, it created a vast underclass of working poor.

With coal providing fuel for everything from home cook fires to factory furnaces the air quality in major cities like London was worse than any contemporary circumstances one can consider. Most of the working class lived in a squalor of raw sewage, unsafe drinking water, and violence that we can't even begin to imagine.

For a society that had been mainly agrarian based previously the rapid shift to industry and commerce was far more traumatic than our current progression into the automated computer age. I can't even begin to imagine the levels of stress this must have induced in people and the long-term implications it must have had on family life.

In 1914 the first Great War began and at 19 my grandfather was a medic at the Battle of the Somme in 1917 when he was wounded in a gas attack that cost him a lung. In those days the closest term they had for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome due to war was shell shock. Even that was so suspect that people suffering from it were on occasion shot for treason as deserters because they were unable to fight anymore. They were able to do a decent enough job of patching people up physically from their wounds, but nobody received any mental medical treatment for the trauma of seeing destruction on such a wide scale.

My grandfather was one of those who could have used treatment, because after my father was born in 1929 he never worked another day in his life. I don't know the extent of the abuse my father suffered at the hands of his parents. At one point he did let slip to my brother that the only memories he had of his childhood were being beaten by his father.

My father's abuse of me was only the continuation of the abuse that had begun back in the 19th century where the conditions that made abusers possible were fermented. Treatment for women who suffered from sexual abuse only really began in the 1970's while it's probably still not commonplace with men.

We are the first generation of people who are dealing with the fallout from the birth of contemporary Western Society. The mantra that is common to all of us is "The Abuse Ends Here". Instead of continuing on the legacy of our sick families, we are seeking to change that inheritance. Not only are we willing to deal with these circumstances, but there are also people and facilities available to treat us, as never before.

Unfortunately that won't make much of a difference for the rest of the world, aside from our immediate families and friend. Conditions in the world haven't changed all that much in the last 150 years, except for on the scale of how things are done and the increase in numbers of people affected. Are we planting the seeds of abuse in the mind of some child that will germinate over generations like so many others before him? Think of the young men and women who detonate their bodies as bombs, the children being turned into soldiers, and the ones surviving the bombings everywhere from North America to Indonesia.

We would never dream of allowing conditions to exist that allows the fermentation of disease, but that's exactly what we are doing with the current path our world is following. If we had set up a petrie dish in a laboratory we couldn't have created conditions any more ideal to create abusers.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:05 AM | Permalink

Being held captive by the past through your own memories is a horrible existence. Whether you are constantly reliving events through flashbacks, or simply haunted by occurrences from long ago, they can impede your health and happiness. Memories can repeatedly traumatise a survivor of a horrendous event and are a cause of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

Psychiatrists, therapists, and councillors work to help patients suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome by reducing the amount of influence memories have on their current situation. If the memories can be put into their proper context so that they are simply reminders of the past, than a survivor is able to accept that the events remembered aren't happening today and increases their sense of well being.

Conventional means of doing this currently involve varying methods of processing the memories and desensitizing the survivor to the depicted events. One of the newer and more successful means employed is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, better known as E.M.D.R..

In E.M.D.R. a client is asked to visualize a memory and place themselves in it. On a scale of one to ten they then define how upset this memory makes them feel, what emotions they are experiencing, and where do the emotions physically manifest in their body. A light hypnotic type trance is then induced either utilizing rapid eye movement, an alternating pulse in the palms of the hands, or an alternating tone in the ears.

It usually depends on the individual client as to what is the most effective method as different people respond better to different stimuli. Once the patient has settled into the memory the doctor than talks them through the memory, having them tell the story as it is happening to them.

The theory is that instead of simply reliving the event and re experiencing the trauma, this controlled situation allows them to step away from participating and begin to deal with the emotions that were generated by the circumstances. For example people who have survived a situation where other's have died, will often feel guilt because of that and not be able to break free from those moments until they have dealt with that emotion.

The trauma won't be forgotten, but it won't be constantly relieved either, the person can get on with their life and live without the dominant negative emotions that the flashbacks invoked. While E.M.D.R. does involve working directly with the memory it does not utilize desensitization to the extent of other forms of therapy. Some literally have the patient relive the moment over and over again until they no longer feel the same initial intensity of reaction

The client will make a tape recording of their voice recounting what happened, and this will be utilized for the desensitizing process. This tape will be played repeatedly to the client during their sessions with the doctor until it loses all meaning to them. It is hoped that on some level or another the client will cease to be affected by the trauma because it will no longer have the same level of impact when thought about.

The human memory is an amazingly complex system that serves more than just the obvious purpose of letting us remember what to pick up at the grocery store. Memory and pain receptors share the same neurological paths in our brain, allowing the body to learn how to keep itself safe.

One of the more obvious examples of this is of course the child and the hot burner on a stove. A child touches the hot element of the stove, his hand tells him it hurts, his brain remembers the pain, and the next time the child goes to do the same thing he remembers the pain and will stop herself.

This connection between memory and pain is also responsible for the condition known as phantom limb. A person who has had a limb amputated will swear they can still feel either their toes or their fingers even though it may have been years after the surgery or accident that saw them lose that limb. The memory of it being there is imbedded so deeply that the mind is unable to forget its former presence.

Memory plays a role in other learned, but unconscious behaviours like breathing and other involuntary body systems. Some Alzheimer patients, or dementia sufferers of one kind or another, have died because they have literally forgotten how to breathe or swallow. (My father chocked to death on his saliva in his sleep because he forgot how to use those muscles)

With memory affecting so many different aspects of the body and its functions you'd think it would be the last place you'd want to start messing with. But somebody has come up with the bright idea of utilizing a pill to do the same work on flashbacks that existing therapies already do.

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal Canada have begun human trials utilizing the beta blocker propranolol, currently in use for treating high blood pressure, as a means of dampening an emotional reaction to an event. Patients were asked to write out their stories of trauma and were then given either the propranolol or a placebo.

It had already been discovered that administering the drug to patients who have recently experienced a trauma interferes with the transfer of memories from the part of the brain where they are experienced, the hippocampus, to that area where they are stored to come back as flashbacks, the cerebral cortex. What wasn't known was whether patients who had experienced a trauma years ago would receive the same benefits as those newly traumatised.

Since people who suffer from flashbacks relive the memory completely, the test cases who wrote their experiences out began to re–experience the emotional traumas all over again. In other words they had recreated a circumstance within themselves that closely matched those of a recently traumatised patient and should therefore be able to benefit from an immediate administration of the drug.

A week later the patients were called back to listen to a reading of their scripts. They were all monitored for anxiety symptoms, and an overall twenty percent reduction was noted and their trauma level was less elevated then the group who taken the placebo. This group is considered too small a sampling to provide an indication of how successful the treatment is, but the doctors involved feel that it is sufficient evidence to encourage them to keep investigating.

The doctors freely admit they have no idea what amount of risk the patients face in the dampening of other memories. Will happy memories be affected, or will it just be the memory that is foremost in the mind at the time the script is being written. It's obvious a person just can't take the drug and the emotional impact of their bad memories will decrease. They have to be in a controlled situation where they are administered the drug while at the height of the emotional experience for it to have any effect at all.

Now at first blush this sounds like it might be something useful. It's not doing anything like erasing memories, just easing their emotional impact. But I can see two problems, one obvious and one that has more to do with long term treatment implications for a patient.

The obvious hesitation is nobody can have any idea what other affects this drug utilized in this manner could be having on the memory. If a patient only experiences minor improvement the first time and elects to continue the drug therapy, what will the cumulative effect on the memory be?

Everybody is so different when it comes to our emotional and psychological makeup that it could be almost impossible to make a generalized prediction on how people will react to it. There would be no way to guarantee there won't be contradictions for those taking the drug.

Aside from those concerns there is the problem of the steps it omits from a patients recovery process. Especially for those patients whose trauma was such that it has caused deep-seated emotional problems and behavioural abnormalities an essential part of dealing with these memories is coming to an understanding on how they have impacted on our present day behaviour.

I have been undergoing E.M.D.R. therapy for the past year or so in an effort to mitigate the damages of extensive childhood sexual abuse. Each time my therapist and I have dealt with a specific memory or flashback, the process of working through it has uncovered clues to why I am a certain way, or where behaviours come from.

By understanding these ways of being are reactions to events in the past I have learnt to recognize that they are no longer appropriate to my situation and can safely discard them. As long as I was experiencing the memories of being raped, part of me would still believe that I still needed to act like those were my circumstances. It has only been by working through the memories that I have been able to change that mindset.

If at some point a patient is just given this drug to diminish the memories but does nothing to process the information, they are only doing half the work required for a full recovery. You won't know how these memories have affected your day-to-day existence if you just walk away from them. You are still the same person who was experiencing the flashbacks and really no further ahead then before you took the drug.

There are no shortcuts to mental and emotional health, and I worry that a pill like this will tempt people into believing that they will be able to solve all the problems caused by traumas in their past just by taking it once or twice. That is an unrealistic and false expectation (and hope) to be giving people.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:25 AM | Permalink

There is absolutely no progress to report on the publication of my labour of love that I sweated blood over all winter, The Paths Life Takes. As I had mentioned in the last instalment of this series, as an attempt to prevent myself from dwelling on the inertia of the publishing industry, I had decided to take another stab at self-publishing by binding together instalments of NaNoWriMo Notes into book form and trying to flog some copies through Lulu.com.

Due to the surprising fact that I lack the financial resources of even the smallest of publishing houses, part of this process is to see how much of a response I can get spending as little money as possible. The Internet is a big place and I figured if you hunt long enough you're bound to find places where you can access free advertising and information distribution.

Of course the first thing I needed to do was come up with a snappy press release, thankfully I'm luckier than most in that I spent a good deal of time doing publicity in a previous incarnation (about twenty years ago) and can still knock off a press release easily enough. The first thing to remember is that hardly anyone reads more then the first two or three paragraphs and the bottom for the contact information. So you really need to top load it.

Richard Marcus, Contributing Editor at Blogcritics.org, contributor to Desicritics.org, and the iconoclastic mind behind the Blog "Leap In The Dark", is pleased to announce the publication of "NaNoWriMo Notes".

Subtitled an exercise in creative insanity, "Notes" details Mr. Marcus' participation in the annual National Novel Writing Month competition where participants are challenged to write 50,000 words in a month. As that didn't seem a sufficient challenge on its own, Mr. Marcus decided he should also attempt to continue his pace of writing an article a day for blog publication as well, including keeping a record of his attempt to complete the contest: Hence "NaNoWriMo Notes".

Ashok K. Banker, author of the new "Ramayana" has this to say about Leap In The Dark and it's author: "Take my word for it, Leap In The Dark is the most refreshing and invigorating blog you're likely to read today--or any other day." (Press release NaNoWriMo Notes 2006 Richard Marcus)

In my opening three short paragraphs (bet you didn't know I could be pithy did you?) I've told them my credentials as a writer, what the thing is about, and snuck in an endorsement. If I had worked on it a little more I could probably have tightened up the second paragraph, but it's good enough. Once you have a press release you have to figure out what the hell to do with it.

Not to worry, it seems that press release distribution has become a thriving web business with companies offering you packages that include a variety of different distribution levels and even writing the damn thing for you. Of course none of these services are free or really designed for the individual, or more accurately the individual author.
The one place that did offer some form of free distribution and then very reasonable progressions up the pay scale, (they start off at ten dollars) was PRWeb.com. For now I've only signed up for the free service, I'm not sure if it gets me anything more than a listing in their on site press release listings, but it's a start.

I soon began to realize that I wasn't going to be able to make use of any of the conventional approaches that I had years ago. I'll mail out a couple press releases to the local media up here, although I'm not even sure they know what self-publishing is, and see if I get any bites. But creating my own press seems to be the most promising way of getting results.

For that to work you need people to be able to find you. Somehow or other I've managed to develop a pretty good ranking with Google, probably through my association with Blogcritics and the fact that I've published every day for over a year now. I'm getting about 800 real visits and 1,100 hits a week now at my blog, so that's not too bad a base to start building on.

One of the things I'm doing is trying out the Google Books listings to try and increase my visibility. I had a momentary bit of panic when I applied because I had to get an ISBN and I wasn't sure how much they would cost. Thankfully in Canada they are free, all you have to do is, dependant on the number of books you're printing, give them up to three copies of your publication for deposit in the National Library and Archives.

It will end up costing me about $25.00 Cdn. what with printing and mailing costs, but that's a lot cheaper than I had anticipated. The benefit of being listed as a published book outweighs that cost by a long shot anyway and will help with marketing.

I was looking into getting an Amazon listing, but that's beyond my means for a while. It would cost me well over a hundred dollars of money that I don't have to supply them with copies, mail them and pay the space rental. Even just buying a listing as a third market seller is beyond my means, and only items already listed are eligible for that anyway.

My best bet is to utilize what resources I have available already. I've already dropped little buttons that Lulu offers on the most visited pages of my blog. They come pre-loaded with a link to the page selling your item, but are generic in appearance so you have to put them in tandem with something that lets people know what it is they're buying.

What I'm hoping will work is a separate page that I'm creating at my blog just for NaNoWriMo Notes (it's still under construction – just some text). If I can draw traffic there it might generate interest and I can utilize some of Lulu's bigger banner ads without worrying about any descriptive phrases.

I'll do the usual stuff for it, generate a feed to be listed at Feed burner, find as many places as possible to list it (I'm sure there are numerous places you can list books for sale pages without paying – it's just a matter of finding them all.)

I'm not expecting any miracles, it's not as if I'm pouring a huge amount of resources into this after all, but it will be interesting to see what if any results this minimal effort produces. I've already had thirteen hits checking out NaNoWriMo Notes since I published it last week, and that's been with little or no publicity. Who knows, I may even sell a copy.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:05 AM | Permalink

I was at my usual ringside seat watching one of the girls have her way with a brass pole, drinking my beer and trying to figure things out. It just didn't make sense; where could the opposition parties have vanished to since that day in January when Steven Harper and his boys took power?

Maybe the Liberals have the excuse of trying to keep a low profile, they've just lost power for the first time in thirteen years, their leader resigned, and they need time to regroup. But what about Jack Layton and the New Democratic Party (N.D.P.) He's no shrinking violet to back down from a fight or to go turtle when the times get tough. Anyway he'd just led his party to their best result in over twenty years so he's got to be feeling good; but there's barely been a peep out of him.

I know people think that Harper has worked out some sort of deal with the Bloc Quebecois, but I can't see them under normal circumstances letting any Federal Leader jump on a provincial jurisdiction like Harper did with Day Care and let them get away with it. Normally Gilles Duceppe would be all over that like a guy's hands on a lap dancer's assets, but now he's acting like a Puritan; pursing his lips and keeping his eyes closed.

It's one of those cases you sometimes wish you'd never taken on. Where do you go looking for opposition parties that seem to have vanished? None of them have been heard from up on Parliament Hill in months so checking the House of Commons is out of the question. The last time I can remember everybody being up there was when the Liberals agreed with the Tories implementing their policy of extending the and expanding the tour of duty of Canadian forces in Afghanistan.

The Voice of Concerned Canada has mentioned that's when the first questions started to come up about the opposition's whereabouts. Public opinion polls were showing that a solid majority of Canadians were opposed to any such arrangement; nobody wanted to start seeing young Canadians coming home in boxes from a country halfway around the world.

You'd have thought the opposition would have made some noise about remarks that oozed out of Harper's people saying Canadians "didn't understand" the importance of what was being done over there in Afghanistan. Nothing, not even a tiny little squeak like a mouse would make when trod on by an elephant.

I let my eye trail around the room, watching the girls going up and down the posts like pistons in a steam engine can be pretty relaxing in a mesmerizing sort of way. Civil servants trying to look nonchalant fondled their mobile phones and pagers as they watched the amazing muscle control required to climb a brass poll using only the inner thighs.

It used to be everybody would be smoking a cigarette or something, but ever since the day of infamy when smoking was banned in bars both sides of the border, mobile phones have replaced packs of smokes on bars as the toy of choice. Even I had one of the damn things in front of me on the bar. You felt naked without at least something square to put beside your keys on the bar. (There's a mystery for you, why do men always put their car keys on the bar in front of them? Half of them aren't going to be driving home from there that night anyway)

Half of the phones were in use right now, but who they were phoning at this time of night on a Friday in Ottawa is anyone's guess, unless of course it was to make excuses to their wives about work keeping them late. There was no one else they could be phoning without getting one of them damn voice mails with their insistent instructions on how to get in touch with whoever it is you're trying to get in touch with.

A fleeting though chased its tail in my head for a second then turned around and came back for a second look. Well why not, I had nothing else to go on and I might just get some lead or another. I opened the cell's top with a flip of the wrist and punched in the first series of numbers.

"Hello, bonjour. You have reached Liberal Party Headquarters" I immediately pressed one to get service in English and the voice continued "There's nobody here to answer your call right now, our normal office hours are Monday to Friday 9:00 – 5:00, but currently I wouldn't count on finding anyone in the office at they are all busy with sharpening knives in preparation for the leadership convention.

If this is an emergency situation and you need to talk to a liberal party member the janitor will be occasionally checking messages. Speak slowly and clearly and spell any words of more than one syllable if you desire any accuracy, as his English isn't the best.

Hopefully somebody will back in the office after the leadership convention next December and will attempt to get back to you at that time. Until then thank you for calling the National Headquarters of the Liberal Party of Canada, your thoughts and opinion are important to us."

I disengaged that call and took another kick at the can. "Bonjour, Vous avez atteint le bureau du Bloc Quebecois, pour le service en anglais, partez" Well that was as nice a "piss off" as I've received in a long time. Well I guess if you don't expect anyone from outside Quebec to vote for you, you're not going to provide service in English.

I was getting nowhere fast with this, but I figured I might as well give it one more shot and call the N.D.P. "Hi there you have reached national party headquarters for the New Democratic Party of Canada, the home of Social Democracy in Canada. We're the folk you never vote for but whom the Liberals steal all their ideas from and take the credit. We try not to get bitter about that but it really hurts our feelings you know that you never vote for us. Don't you like us? We gave you Medicare you ungrateful bastards yet you never give us more then a few measly seats.

We are not a tool of the unions or other special interest groups. Most union members have a higher annual income than us now for God's sake and vote for the damn Conservatives. What's with you guys anyway, you keep voting in these right wing bastards who promise to cut social spending and when they do you all whine about it. We warned you, but you wouldn't listen to us, oh no we're just fear mongers out of touch with the new economic reality of globalization. Well you voted for them so stop bitching at us about it.

Have a nice day and thank you for phoning N.D.P. national headquarters"

I closed the phone and laid it back on the bar in front of me, it might as well have been a pack of smokes for all the good it did me making those calls. The only call that went as I expected was the Bloc Quebecois, telling people to go away if they want service in English is about right for them, but even so they used to at least do it in English.

The other two sounded like petty little children who weren’t getting their way. The N.D.P.'s "nobody like's me everybody hates me" line, and the Liberals not giving a shit attitude ranked right up there in maturity with teenagers and …politicians. It hit me like the sidewalk hitting the face of anyone stupid enough to grab a boob in a place like this without paying extra, our politicians were actually becoming politicians.

It used to be in Canada people had a career, like doctors, lawyers, loan sharks, whatever, and they became a member of parliament on the side, or did it for a bit and then went back to being what they had been before they had decided to run in an election. Unlike other countries we didn’t' have people who wanted to be a politician when they grew up, or it wasn't a career goal in school.

If they wanted to serve the people they became social workers if the were liberals, or cops if the were conservative, but you didn't become a politician. You either did corporate law or worked as a defence attorney handling Legal Aid cases only and that's how you expressed your philosophy, through work not by becoming a politician.

If you really want to see the difference look at the leaders of the parties. In the past the N.D.P. have had civil rights lawyers, ministers and academics as leaders, but now in Jack Layton, they have a guy who's been a politician for most of his adult life. Starting off as an alderman in Toronto and working his way up the ladder until he's leader of the federal N.D.P. In fact both he and his wife are professional politicians, having both been at City Council together in Toronto before moving on up the social scale.

I was getting excited; this had to be the answer. Paul Martin, the last Liberal leader and former Prime Minister, may have owned a steam ship company, but he was the son of a politician. Paul Martin Sr. had been a minister in the cabinets of both Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, and his kid had been grooming himself for Prime Minister since the day he reached adulthood I'm willing to bet.

Bob Rae, the guy who appears to be the front-runner in the Liberal campaign went to work in the government straight from completing his schooling, as a member of Pierre Trudeau's Privy Council. He then became a federal member of parliament for the N.D.P. and went on to become the first socialist premier of Ontario. After that he served on various advisory boards and wrote studies for governments on things like the cost of post secondary education. He's enough of a politician that he's been able to switch parties three times now and not realize how strange that might look to other people.

Gilles Duceppe and all the others over at the Bloc have been political animals all their lives, breathing and bleeding sovereignty for Quebec since they were in University. None of them are high-school teachers or former football players who decided to run for public office.

Everything fit together as snug and tight as that g-string in front of me. The opposition parties had turned into politicians, and as politicians the only thing they cared about was getting re-elected in the next election. Who cared about what the country expected from them, they needed to be able guarantee they would be around after the next election was called.

They know if they push the Conservative government too hard they could end up having an election on their hands, and the voters could end up blaming their party for the fall of the government. In spite of Bob Rae's brave words about changing the date of the leadership convention if an election was necessary, there's no way in hell they'd want one called before the New Year.

The N.D.P. know that without the Liberal party they can't do anything to affect the vote in the House of Commons, even if they wanted to risk an election being called they're stuck, and they're royally pissed about it. They also have learnt from bitter experience that they are the ones most likely to be blamed if an election is called for something that the majority of Canadians don't care about – like softwood lumber.

The opposition parties of Canada haven’t been kidnapped or gone missing; something far worse has happened. They've become parties of politicians that may give lip service to the idea of speaking for Canadians, but were really only interested in one thing – their own political hides.

It seemed I did have one more phone call to make. The voice of Concerned Canada wasn't going to be too happy with my report, but there wasn't anything I could do about that. Flipping open my phone with one hand, I caught the eye of the girl on the post opposite me and she gave me a big smile. It looked like it might be a pretty good evening after all.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:38 AM | Permalink

For me there has always been a huge flaw in the arguments condemning Natural Selection, the fact that it works. You can talk all you want about Creationism, or Intelligent Design, but Natural Selection is based on plain and simple observation of nature at work.

So many times the argument you hear from people is that "I'm not descended from some monkey, God made me." which has little or nothing to do with Natural Selection. Even if it turns out that a Creator was involved with the design of the human species millions of years ago, it has nothing to do with whether Natural Selection as a process works or not.

For those of you who missed grade ten biology I'll give you a little summary of how evolution works, okay. The first thing you have to realize is that it's all about genetics and errors in genetic code called mutations. Now don't go confusing mutation with the Marval comic's title The X-Men version of mutants, because in nature a mutation can be something as subtle as a colour change in feathers or fur.

Mutations occur all the time in all species, usually they have little or no impact on that species and the strain dies out because the carrier of that new genetic code doesn't survive, doesn't mate, or its progeny don't make it. But once in a while a genetic variation comes along that is able to do better in the environment it finds itself in than other members of its species.

Whether collecting food or hiding from predators its deviation or mutation gives it a better shot at surviving and when it breeds that gene is passed along to some of its offspring who in turn… well you get the picture. As this happens the members of the species who lack the mutation that either keeps them safer or allows them to eat different foods, start to die out because they can't compete and gradually that gene pool is effectively eliminated as the dominate one; hence the saying Survival of the Fittest.

More or less that was the theory Darwin put forward after his infamous voyage on the HMS Beagle took him to the Galapagos Islands. Darwin's wasn't the only theory of evolution to come out of the 19th century. Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarc proposed that animals would evolve because of their surroundings and that genetic changes would occur as they attempted to adapt to what was around them.

Unfortunately this theory doesn't stand up to close examination; what it implies is that a species notes a more efficient way of surviving and is able to change its genetic code at will. If this were the case don't you think humans would have grown an extra set of hands by now? How many times have you needed that in a multitude of situations.

As anybody who has studied evolution knows Darwin came up with his ideas based upon his observations of the different species of Finch on the Galapagos Islands. As he travelled from island to island he made note of the different styles of beak that individual species had, and how they were particularly suited to the food source available to them. As the concept of evolution wasn't a new thing, ancient Greeks and Indian scholars had written on the subject, he had a body of knowledge upon which he could base his theroms.

It's interesting to note that the big dispute about evolution in the 19th and early 20th century did not revolve around whether it existed or not, but whether it was caused by, as Darwin postualted hereditary means, or as Lemark said, adaptive means. As research into genetics grow more sophisticated, including discovery of D.N.A. it's become more and more obvious that Darwin's theory of inheritated characteristics caused by mutations is the correct explanation for evolution.

In the last little while there have been renewed attacks on the theory of evolution by religious people who don't want to accept that anything but the hand of God could have gone into the making of the world. They call themselves Creationists for the obvious reason that they believe everything was created by God.

A third alternative, Intelligent Design has been offered up to explain evolution and other "unexplainalbe" natural occurances. Proponants of this theory claim that certain things are just to sophisticated to have occurred all on their lonsome and that there has have been some sort of intelligence behind those events.

Since they are deliberatly vague about the nature of the intelligence – mainly because they want to keep religion out of it so that it will be accepted as science – it could lead sceptics like myself to wonder what they mean by intelligence. To me these sound like people who aren't honest enough to admit they are Creationists, or embaressed by believing in God and are trying to make up science to justify their faith.

I have more respect for a Creationist because they are honest about who they are and what they believe in. Besides if you have to justify or prove faith, doesn't that contradict the whole idea of faith? Oh well I'll leave that for the theologists to fight over.

But just as all these theories are coming back into vogue at the expence of poor old Darwin, it looks like he's about to be rescued by his old buddies the finchs of the Galapagos Islands. It seems the little rascals went ahead and evolved again, while somebody was watching.

Peter Grant of Princeton Universtiy has been studying the Darwin Finches of the Galapagos Islands for decades and had recorded the effects on drought and other environmental changes on the populations.

From 1982 until the present he was able to watch a smaller species of ground finch evolve to cope with the intrustion of a larger species that was in direct competition for its food supply. The larger bird was able to consume the shared food supply at three times the speed of the original inhabitant of this particular island. When a drought hit in 2003 and 2004 further reducing food stocks and increasing competition, the only birds that survived form the island's original population were ones with a smaller beak that could eat a different seed.

They are now the dominant strain of that species because of the mutation that caused them to be born with a different beak. If that second, larger species of finch had never shown up on their island, that mutation would either have made no difference and died out because they could not eat the large seeds easily. Instead they were in a position to survive rather than die out because of their genetic difference.

Natural Selection at work, nature chose which was the version of the smaller bird that was more suitable for survival based on the circumstances at the time. A few years from now things may change again and a new mutation might be the one that becomes dominant. There is nothing evil or mysterious about evolution, Darwin, or Natural Selection. It's happening all the time all around you in many different species.

Most of the time it's far too subtle to make any difference, but sometimes, as in the case of the finchs of the Galapagos Islands, it ensures the survival of a species, in one form or another.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:38 AM | Permalink

How do you know there is nothing going on in a country's political life? Well there are a couple of clues to look for; the country's so – called national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, is running as it's top political news story something about the travel expenses of the Minister of Veteran's Affairs and his chief of staff. In the normal course of events that probably wouldn't even make it on to the front page of the paper, unless an opposition party member made a stink about it. (But since most of them are still a missing person's report under investigation, that's not about to happen.)

After that there's a toss up between the ongoing softwood lumber discord, (nobody except the Conservative Part of Canada and the American Lumber Industry like the deal), and whether or not George Bush was being too familiar in calling Prime Minister Steven Harper Steve or not. Of course there's a bunch of trivial stuff that nobody is making a big deal about; another case of Mad Cow disease out in Alberta, another native blockade has been thrown up in Ontario – this one in the north, and finally results of a survey on domestic violence showed some disturbing trends.

I know that as a good Canadian I should be up in arms about the softwood lumber deal and how our poor brave lumber industry are getting shafted, but quite frankly I couldn't care less about them, I'm rooting for the trees and hoping the idiots dig themselves a deep enough grave that they can't get out again. It's really hard to sympathise with people whose sole ambition in life is to cut down old growth forest that pre-dates most of Europe, and replace it with efficient logging trees.

Do I really care what George Bush and Steven Harper call each other in public or behind closed doors? Nope. George won't be around after 2008, and if little Steve keeps going on like he has been he'll be gone as soon as the Liberal party gets a new leader and organises a non-confidence vote.

As for Veteran's Affairs Minister Greg Thompson spending $18,000 on charter flights in and out of New Brunswick for work related duties, who cares. You try and get a commercial air flight out of New Brunswick when your on a tight schedule, and anyway senior politicians really shouldn't be taking the risk of travelling commercial flights anyway. Do you have any idea what kind of hell that would represent for security people?

In the long run it would probably cost more money for him to use commercial flights, what will all the security arrangements that would have to be made, the car travel to airports, and the juggling of schedules so that meetings can get off without a hitch. So he spends $18,000 getting to and from meetings, at least it shows he's working and trying to get things done. Just look on it as proof that he's actually doing the job he was elected to do and let him go about his business.

The interesting thing about Canadian politics is how some of the stories below major headline level can sometimes give you a more accurate picture of what's going on in the country. They can tell you what areas of need are being let slide, offer examples of what the government considers important or not, and give clues as to what we might expect in the future.

Crystal ball gazing is next to futile at the best of times, and political issues are anything but predictable. Political expediency usually plays a bigger role in the decision making process of a government than any policy they may or may not have on an issue. But sometimes when activities are in response to government inaction you can be fairly safe in drawing some conclusions and postulate some scenarios.

The blockade near Kenora Ontario of the Trans Canada Highway near the Grassy Narrows reserve is the second such attempt by Native Canadians this summer to attract attention to their causes. While the blockade in Caledonia earlier this year was about land treaty rights, in Grassy Narrows the issue is the clear cutting of forest within what has been traditionally defined as hunting territory

Although, very rarely reported in this manner, blockades erected by Natives at a site only represents the fact that negotiations have produced no results. Native Canadians are tired of being offered a lollipop instead of a full meal in response to their complaints about reneging on treaty promises.

When they see the culmination of years of negotiation being shot down casually as the Conservative's did with the Kelowna accord and nothing else changing all around you, drastic action starts to appear to be your only alternative. I said earlier this year when writing about the blockade in Caledonia, that we could be in for a repeat of the actions that took place during the summer of 1990 in Oka Quebec. For a couple years after, frustrated Naïve Canadians began occupying lands they claimed belonged to them, or blockading territory for the same reason.

We seem to be fast approaching that same level of impasse again, and tempers are starting to get stretched. Living conditions on most reserves in the north haven't improved any great deal, with whole communities having to be evacuated because their water supply has been polluted, and suicide rates among young people still haven't dropped. If your people were being forced to live like that year after year you might have reached the end of your rope by now as well.

Along similar political lines, in other words quality of life and social issues, a study on domestic violence statistics released had some disturbing news about victims of spousal abuse. Most distressing for people who work with survivors of abuse is the fact that still less then 30% of the victims will report the abuse to the authorities and that nearly 60% say when they do their situation doesn't change after the fact.

The demographics of abuse victims have changed too the report said, with the heaviest hit age group being young women within the age range of 15-24. What victim's rights groups and the Children's aid society worry about is how little the situation has actually changed in the last twenty years.

According to these same people what's needed to combat this is not more shelters for the victims, but more protection needs to be offered the women so they won't be afraid to testify against their abusers, studies need to be conducted to root out the causes of domestic violence, and those findings need to be followed up on, not just left to sit and moulder on a shelf somewhere.

Unfortunately the government of Stephen Harper has shown a reluctance to act upon social needs and requirements, and I wouldn't make too large a bet on anything happening anytime soon on that front. In fact as the Reform Party, and then the Alliance Party of Canada, the Conservative Part of Canada has a history of being reluctant to take any action on spousal abuse. It been more important to uphold the traditional definition of the family then protecting one half of that definition from abuse.

But they are also letting things slide out west where they receive most of their support. For the second time in one week a Canadian beef cow has died of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (B.S.E.) more commonly known as mad cow disease. This time it was a pregnant four-year-old cow in Alberta while earlier in the week it was a cow in Manitoba. These were the sixth and seventh cases of positive test results in Canada of B. S. E.

In 1997 Canada took the preventative measure of banning all feeds that contained cattle parts susceptible to B. S. E., and just last month extended the ban to include fertilizers, pet foods, and all other animal feeds. Any cows that are now coming down with the illness has somehow or other come into contact with it from a source other than feed.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (C.F.I.A.) seems to think that offering that bit of information is a comfort to us, knowing that the feed is no longer an issue. But if the feed is not longer an issue what exactly is causing individual cows to come down with the disease? Is there another cow in the herd with mad cow that's passing it along for all to enjoy? Is there no test they can run that could indicate which cow in the herd is the carrier and destroy it before it spreads the disease any further?

For the sake of appearances and probably in an attempt to appease the American authorities and keep the border open for Canadian Beef they have invited the Americans to participate in the search for answers. Further confusing the issue is a statement released by the C.F.I.A. that makes the bizarre statement that the cow in question was never part of the food chain. Well that makes sense since when it was alive it couldn't have been butchered, and it was sent for testing immediately upon it's death so no one was about to do anything with it until after the tests came back. But how was that supposed to have been reassuring to anyone?

For years now they keep saying that we've got the problem licked, on both sides of the border, but mad cow is just not going away. They don't seem to have any answers either on how the disease keeps showing up in "healthy" herds. Is there a chance that the disease can be passed down through the generations?

This is another area that the government needs to desperately start throwing some money at if they don't want to risk losing another major source of export revenue. A little extensive research now could go a long way to making a better future for the ranchers of Alberta and the other Prairie Provinces who are supposedly the Conservative Party's constituents.

Canadian politics is a funny thing; sometimes it's not the splashy headlines that tell the story of what's going on in the country, or what the future holds. Judging by what was considered important news in the past week and what wasn't, this week certainly bears that out.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 06:16 AM | Permalink

In the early 1970's Toronto was home to the beginnings of one of Canada's most vital periods of artistic growth. It may not have seen like much compared to larger countries with a more distinct cultural identity wouldn't, but for the first time a native theatre community was born. George Luscomb's Toronto Workshop Productions led the way, and hard on his heels was Theatre Passe Muraille, The Toronto Free Theatre, and The Factory Theatre.

While the Living Theatre of New York City had long been working with the idea of collective creation, this was a new concept for theatre in Canada. Theatre Passe Muraille especially established itself as the home of this artist run creative process. Instead of the actors being presented with a script at the beginning of the rehearsal process, they would gather to develop and workshop scenes that built around a central theme and the playwright would develop the script out of this process which would then be rehearsed for performance.

But as money dried up and budgets tightened it has become less and less common for artistic companies to attempt the commitment required for a collective creation. It's far easier and safer for companies to present their casts with the fait accompli of a script then have to worry about them coming up with something marketable. But further out on the fringes of artistic creation, collective works are still being attempted; perhaps not for theatrical presentations but with a performance still in mind as the final result.

Poem de Terre was formed in the summer of 1993 in Kingston Ontario as a musical collective. Over the years it's membership has fluctuated as performers move on and others rise up to take their places in a continual evolution of sound and style. No matter the composition though, it continues to focus on the bringing together of diverse interests, talents, and artistic sensibilities to achieve the goal of presenting compelling stories and ideas through words and music via live performances.

Under the leadership and direction of Canadian poet, broadcaster, writer, and photographer Bob MacKenzie Poem de Terre entered the studio for the first time in February 2006. War And Love is not their first release, but first deliberate studio album as opposed to recordings of live performances. The move into the studio environment seems to have been an attempt to further enhance the experience they offer during a live performance, by using technology that can't be accessed or utilized readily on stage.

The almost 80 minutes of music performed on the 18 tracks of War And Love have been drawn from Mr. MacKenzie's own creations over the years and combined with covers of two classic tunes from the sixties, "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream" by Ed McCurdy and "Lay Down" by Melanie Safka (Who was better known simply by her first name Melanie).

I have to admit that my first reaction on seeing the total amount of music being presented on this one disc was to say that's too much. Especially for an album that's going to be dealing with the themes of "War" and "Love" nobody is going to be able to sit through this and not feel like they've been hammered in the head.

But I hadn't counted on the subtlety of the minds at work behind this disc. War And Love is not just some pop album with a theme, or the simplistic message of War is bad and Love is good. It is a carefully crafted collection of contemporary music and words that explores the irrevocable interrelationship between war and love in our personal lives as well as on a global scale.

War can be between two people as easily as it can be between two nations and love is not limited to the affections we show the people we care for and the people of Poem de Terre know that. Like in real life ambiguity abounds on this disc as each track represents a different facet of the diamond that is humankind's struggle to find a means to co-exist, if not in harmony, at least without tearing each other's throat out.

From the innocent naivety and hope of "Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream" to the searing indictment of the way we deny any possibility of culpability on our part in "Innocent (I Wasn't There) " Bob MacKenzie and Poem de Terre explore the dichotomy of human behaviour in regards to our reactions to war. How can the same race that dreams of ending war also be the one to shirk its responsibility to the people we share the planet with by simply shrugging our shoulders?

Is love really the flipside of war, or is it just another battlefield itself? Emotions run as high in times of love as they do in times of war leaving us as drained and spent as a full-scale fight in armour. Is it any safer to have your heart pierced by an arrow of love than by one shot at you by an archer? Well you will probably survive the first attack while the result of the second is usually a foregone conclusion resulting in your death.

But anytime passions are elevated humans are at risk of loss of some kind or another. Whether the death of a dear friend or family member, betrayal of the trust that is so important to love, or even unrequited love, all can leave scars upon your heart and psyche.

On War And Love pieces like "Rain", " Barb, Because You Were", "A Man Came By Today", and "North" love and what we will do to achieve it and what it can do to us is touched on. No one song, poem or probably anything made can do complete justice to the complexity of love and our reactions to it.

The conventional love song is blind to that reality and relies more often than not on cheap sentiment over emotion to grab a listener's attention. Everything is reduced down to either getting the other person in the sack or having your heart broken with none of the middle ground of reality entering into the picture.

War And Love is an example of the whole being the sum of its parts. By that I mean while each song has something to say individually what the whole makes you feel at the end is equally important. It doesn't paint a particularly rosy picture, of the world we live in and stirred up a strong emotional reaction within me when I had finished listening.

It wasn't anything particular like sadness, anger or hope that was triggered, it felt more like I had gone on a journey that travelled through the current state of the human psyche and that's not a happy place to be. In spite of that though this is not a disc without hope, or one that induces despair.

The musicianship, singing, and arrangements are so exuberant that it offsets some of the intensity of the message. How can one despair when you listen to the efforts of so many people working together to accomplish a project. There is an energy captured on War And Love that in spite of its thematic heaviness manages to convey spirit and hope.

The music is alive and vibrant, the skill level is simply astonishing without a weak link anywhere and the production has been designed to ensure that the listener gets as much of an impact from each note as possible. On some songs, like their version of Melanie's "Lay Down" there is a close to gospel feel that brings a celebratory note to the proceedings.

War And Love by Poem de Terre is not going to be everybody's taste. It's difficult and confusing in places and brings up emotions and thoughts you might not want to experience. Those who are not afraid to look into the mirror every so often however will be rewarded with an intelligent, provocative and inspired creation. As of now you can purchase the CD for download by track or complete disc at ClickBands and it will soon be available at most major download sites including C.D. Baby, iTunes, and Amazon.com.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:34 AM | Permalink

Quick, name me a women folk duo. What did you come up with, The Indigo Girls; no one else? Well let me add another name to that very short list Wishing Chair. What you've never heard of them? Well guess what, until I'd heard their latest CD Underdog neither had I. And if this disc is anything to go by they've been doing just fine without us and we've been missing out on something great.

Who and what are Wishing Chair? Well in the simplest terms they are a folk-roots partnership made up of Miriam Davidson and Kiya Heartwood based out of Kentucky but seemingly touring all the time. Since 1995 they have produced seven CD's including this one, Underdog which was released in 2005.

It's easy to fall into the trap of seeing the names of two women in a folk band and steeling yourself for oh so serious songs, that young intellectual university womyn will sit around and listen to and discuss seriously deep into the night. It's perfectly possible that this could happen to Wishing Chair, but the rest of us can also enjoy their music and their songs.

It's not that I'm dissing the Indigo Girls here, it’s just that sometimes you feel like you have to belong to some sort of club or society before you're allowed to "really understand" them. It's like they've been claimed, as the exclusive preserve of one group of people while the rest of us are too insensitive to get the message.

No one is going to claim Wishing Chair as their own because this music is far too independent and frees spirited to allow it to be tied down that way. Sure Miriam and Kiya sing about political issues, and pour emotions into their material, but it feels like underneath it there is a huge amount of laughter waiting to escape.

Unlike so many issues oriented groups you never get the impression the Miriam and Kiya have an axe to grind or making any claims to moral superiority because of their opinions. They sing about the things they believe in and what they care about true enough, but what makes Country and Folk music interesting is when the performers can put their hearts into the song and music.

On "One Real Song" they sing about what keeps them going, on the road, in the studio, and in music. They're singing about things that anybody who has ever tried to create something that make it all worthwhile can identify with. It's about the search for the perfect written word, or the perfect picture as much as it is the search for the perfect song.

It's not often that a song about a wedding can be termed a political song, although I'm sure incidences will continue in the near future where songs about two people loving each other and being joined together, like "Outlaw Wedding" will become the norm. But I think they are going to have a hard time living up to the standards established by it. Not only does it deal with issue of same sex marriages in a subtle manner but it's also a wonderful endorsement of marriage and family.

For those of you who are supportive of the war in Afghanistan and the current administration's foreign policy, the song you are least likely to enjoy is "Bully Circus" What I found particularly appealing about this song aside from the lyrics, which are far more intelligent then usual, is the wonderful feel they have created with the music in this song.

Circus music has a very particular style, and if who ever is performing starts to distort it even slightly it begins to sound awfully sinister and makes what ever one is singing about dangerous and evil. What truly separates "Bully Circus" from other protest songs, is the singer does more then just whines about how bad the government is, but offers some idea that they can and will do something, where they are able, to make a difference.

Social responsibility shouldn't be a novelty coming from people who sing about it, but so many of them are of the 'do as I say not as I do' attitude that finding a sincere voice that just wants to do something positive is a refreshing change. There's also something about a country music protest song that is that much more effective than other genres. Maybe it's because I associate country music so much with pseudo patriotic stuff that anytime we hear someone using that genre for a protest song it becomes all the more potent for it's familiarity of style but difference of content.

Miriam Davidson and Kiya Heartwood as Wishing Chair are a revelation of both style and content. For those who like their folk music with a country twang, and their country music to be about more than cars, truck drivers, and pain Wishing Chair's new disc, Underdog is the answer to your search. Not since Holly Near, Ronnie Gilbert, and Ferron joined together have I heard as powerful and intelligent music from a woman's folk/country group.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:22 AM | Permalink

It was typical Friday night in the nation's capital, Ottawa was getting ready for the weekend which meant that the civil servants were loosening their ties and packing their red tape away. The options for entertainment in Ottawa had improved since the days of Government funded strip clubs in Hull Quebec being the only show in town, but not by much.

The line up of cars heading to Hull from Ottawa on a Friday night, as those who serve by stamping avoided home and family for the warm embrace of the fleshy delights, could be seen snaking across the bridge in the early evening rain from my office window. I wouldn't call it dark and stormy, maybe grey and damp; pretty much an accurate description of Ottawa even when the sun is shining.

What is it about nation's capitals that stifle all other forms of life except for those who are willing to be sucked dry by their strict adherence to the rule that unless it's in triplicate and countersigned it doesn't exist? Perhaps that's why the strip clubs in Hull are the favoured destination for either male or female staff.

All of them had been vetted and funded through loans and grants via the Business Development Bank of Canada. This meant they had all to submit to the rigours of meeting with the approval of the Civil Service. Anywhere that had to file receipts for everything from toilet paper to "servicing fees" warmed the cockles of a paper pusher's heart. They could feel at home in a place where they knew that the government signed the checks that paid that girl to lap dance and climb a pole using her thigh muscles.

Watching the rows upon rows of sensible cars obeying the speed limit and all traffic rules made me pine for wilder more exotic locales – Prince Albert Saskatchewan where you could at least watch the wheat growing sprang to mind – when the ringing of the red phone on my desk demanding my attention shattered my reverie. Not only did the sound startle me like waking up and finding myself in the middle of the gay women's caucus of the Conservative Party of Canada (I'd be startled if they existed let alone finding myself at one of their meetings), the fact that it was ringing at all set off alarm bells in my head that made a sound eerily similar to the balls on the brass monkeys outside of parliament hill clanging together on a mid February night freeze.

The last time that phone had rung had precipitated a national crises on a scale that hadn't been seen since Wayne Gretzky had been traded to Los Angeles. I didn't know if I could handle another situation like that again. We had all been feeling a little stretched thin since the men's hockey team had failed to even place in the medals at the last Olympics; another blow to the national psyche might just end up crushing what last shreds of identity we had as a people.

I picked up the phone with all the trepidation of a man picking up a box of feminine napkins for his wife, and even before I placed it to my ear I could hear the panic stricken voice, calling hello.

"Hello, Hello – are you there? Is there anybody there?" Rose faintly from the receiver as I stood there staring at it, holding it halfway to my ear still undecided about did I really want to take this call. It would be just as easy to softly lay the phone back down in its cradle and walk away, and I have to say that the thought fleetingly passed through my mind.

But with a deep sigh, and against my better instincts I completed the journey and replied with toughness that I didn't feel. "Yeah, I'm here. Who is this and what do you want calling on this line? Talk and talk fast. I'm a busy man who can't waste his time on trivial matters," I said thinking longingly of wheat growing in Prince Albert.

"This is the voice of Concerned Canada"

I sat down with a thud that rattled every bone in my body. It was worse than I thought; something was badly amiss when the voice of Concerned Canada calls on a Friday night. Instead of being out drinking beer with the boys here it was on the phone with me sounding like somebody had just told them their hockey team had moved to some American city in the deep south where the only ice they'd seen before now was in their drinks.

I was able to swallow my own panic and put on what passed for my calming voice in an attempt to ease their fears. "So what's the matter, Tim Horton's run out of Canadian Maple donuts?"
"Bite your tongue. Heaven forbid that we face a crisis of such a magnitude."
"Well if it's not that what is it, you sound like your world is about to end?"
"You promise not to laugh?"
"Why would I laugh at the voice of Concerned Canada? Unless you guys have been at the medical pot again you usually make some sort of sense."
"Well it’s funny you should mention that, pot anyway, because it's got to do with what's going on in up in your city. In fact we almost went to the police, but we know you specialize in this sort of sensitive work, so we decided to approach you."

"Lucky me" I whispered to myself before urging the voice to go on. That's the problem with taking on conceptualizations as clients; they tend to wander around never getting to the point as they figure out how to say something that best represents all of them. I was all prepared to listen to some vague generalities about unease and qualms, so was taken aback when:

"It's a missing persons case"
"What"
"A missing persons case. We want you to track down and find out what happened to the opposition parties in the House of Parliament. They appear to have vanished without a trace, placing the country in a dangerous position. When we gave Harper and his folk a minority government we had counted on the opposition to keep an eye on him. That way we could take him for a test drive, see if we liked him or not, but not to let him do that much or whatever he wanted.

As it stands now he seems to be doing whatever he wants and nobody's doing anything about it. What's happened to the opposition? Where have they vanished too? Why is someone with a minority government getting away with acting like he has a majority?"

Voice kept talking, but I stopped listening to the litany of complaints as they washed over me, and started thinking about what had been said. There was something odd happening in Ottawa these days. Where had the opposition been when Harper's gang pushed through their day care plan instead of the one the country and the provinces preferred? Where were they when he let the Kelowna accord lapse? Where were they when he refused to consider lessening the penalties for simple marijuana possession like the previous government had planned?

Who was speaking for Canada when the majority of people were against extending and expanding the armed forces role in Afghanistan or asking why he couldn't find money for health care, housing and job creation programs? Why wasn't anybody asking how the money was found to buy the military all sorts of toys, but couldn't be found to increase the armed forces annual budget to allow soldiers to be paid a decent wage?

No the voice of Concerned Canada was right. The opposition parties had gone missing and that was no laughing matter. When the shoe had been on the other foot and the Conservative Party of Canada had been in opposition they had done their job as leaders to question the policies of the Liberal minority. You might not have agreed with their ideas and opinions, but they, along with the New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois had done their best to keep the Liberal honest.

I turned my attention back to Concerned Canada who was still holding forth in the earpiece and spoke over the voice, "I'm on the case". There was a pause at the other end of the line as those three words and a contraction were absorbed, and then I heard a collective sigh of relief. Canada was going to sleep easier knowing I was taking the case of the missing opposition parties.

It's till too early to rule out foul play; perhaps they've been kidnapped and replaced with life like replicas. The only way to know for sure is to start checking into it. I'll probably end up stepping on some toes, sticking my nose in where it doesn't belong, and just generally being a pain in the ass to people who won't appreciate it.

I'll have to watch my back carefully, Ottawa is a small town and word travels fast. I expect to be up to my knees in trouble soon but that just goes with the territory. Politics is a tough and dirty business to get involved in at the best of times, but when political parties are trying to consolidate power, well things can get out of hand real fast.

I've got to go now; there's a warm woman, a cold beer, and a seat by the pole waiting for me in a bar in Hull. One thing I have learned from living in Ottawa is to take your enjoyment whenever the opportunity presents self. You never know when you just might go missing.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:50 AM | Permalink

There's a disturbing trend that's taking over the entertainment business, specifically film and television, which is having a direct effect on how movies and television shows are chosen for production. With production costs escalating out of control and box office returns ever diminishing, the question of how much money a movie will recoup through retail licensing fees is becoming an important factor in the decision making process of what does and does not get produced.

The industry has a long history of retail spin offs dating back to the early days of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse when in 1933 the mouse's image started to appear on Lionel trains and Ingersoll-Waterbury watches and clocks. This reciprocal deal gave Disney the slush fund to fund his empire and it probably saved the other two companies' butts during the depression.

As the years have passed it's become a common enough sight to see plastic figurines and other mementos of children's movies showing up as part of fast food meals or on the shelves of stores. Some movies or television shows have even been blatant attempts to advertise a toy or a game, instead of the other way round.

But in recent years we've seen the trend spreading to adult movies as well. The biggest and best example has to be the Lord Of The Rings trilogy where New Line cinema licensed expensive reproductions of items from the film. Ranging from broaches costing $70.00 to statuettes at around $6,500.00, over $1.5 billion in sales have been generated since the movies' release.

In an article in Globe and Mail David Imhoff New Line's vice president of worldwide licensing and marketing is quoted as saying that twenty years ago when he first started there was no adult market, but now everything they do has an adult component. From reproductions of Jason's goalie mask, life like Freddy Kreuger masks, to replica's of the fleur-de-lis cross key used in the film The De Vinci Code (steel, platinum, and gold, for only $4,599.00) the film fanatic can purchase almost anything they want, if they have the money, from their favourite movie.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:34 AM | Permalink

There's a new trend happening on the Internet that is worrying doctors who treat patients who suffer from eating disorders. Sites are popping up on-line for people suffering from either anorexia or bulimia that are encouraging them in their behaviour by calling it a lifestyle choice rather than recognising it as an illness.

Visitors to the site are encouraged to write about their accomplishments in losing weight, eating little or no food of caloric substance, and generally exhorting them to be thin. Features include what products; laxatives, diet pills, enemas and purgatives, work best in what situations and list heroines of the cause like Kate Moss and Mary-Kate Olsen twin.

Being thin is a legitimated aspiration for life, and anything you can do to accomplish this goal is well worth the effort. What has the doctor's so worried is not that it's just sending the wrong message, but that it encourages thinking that makes it even more difficult to treat the victims of the disease. The biggest obstacle that doctors claim they have to overcome when treating sufferers of anorexia is convincing the client that there is anything wrong with them; that starving yourself to death is not a lifestyle choice but an illness.

A preliminary study of these websites by four doctors who work with clients with eating disorders has resulted in the rather lame warning that doctors shouldn't discount the negative impact these sites have on their ability to treat clients. The primary reasons for the danger is that they provide sufferers of eating disorders with a community, a sense of belonging.

In talking with one young woman about her former "pro-ana" (ana being a pet name for anorexia) site she spoke about the feeling of control it gave her to be able to write down how little she had eaten each day. She also made the comment that she didn't believe her site encouraged anybody to continue on with an eating disorder because "I know I would have done what I've done even if there weren't websites out there encouraging people to have a pro-ana lifestyle.”

Despite claiming to have given up her "pro-ana lifestyle", it's interesting to see her refer to eating disorders as a lifestyle choice still and not a disease. As I mentioned earlier this is the attitude that has doctors so worried; how do you treat someone who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with them?

The trouble with anorexia nervosa is that it is more than just an eating disorder. The starving oneself to death is a symptom of even deeper underlying problems. Look at what the young woman said about how dieting made her feel she had control of her life. Think about what the doctors have said about these sites giving visitors a sense of community. The other thing that the doctors have found that these sites have in common is how much they focus on the feelings of self-hate that the visitors harbour.

When my wife and I got together she had long ago defeated the eating disorder aspect of her anorexia. As a teenager she had starved herself so much that she had stopped menstruating and was close to death. The only thing that saved her was guilt and her belief that others were more important than her. She had to stay alive to make sure her mother continued to receive mother's allowance checks. In a sense the disease saved her from herself; because she thought so little of herself she sacrificed her plan of starvation for somebody else's desires.

The problem she had was that even though she had managed to overcome starving herself, all the mental/emotional baggage that had caused the eating disorder in the first place still existed. The primary root being she did not believe herself worthy of anything positive; love, affection, and nurturing. When you don't believe you deserve anything good in your life, or that even thinking of yourself and what's good for you is wrong, guilt becomes a constant companion.

Feeling guilty of course only deepens your self-hatred and you spiral downwards to the place where you no longer even believe you are deserving of nutrition, so you stop eating. You will do anything to win the acceptance of your peers, whether it's people you know, or people who you haven't met yet but know there is no way they will want to have anything to do with a loser like you.

In his wonderful book The Deadly Diet Dr. Terence J. Sandbek Phd. talks about what he calls "The Voice". This is what he calls the continual negative reinforcement that happens in the mind of a person suffering from an eating disorder, a one sided dialogue that whispers things like how can you expect anyone to like you? .

Dr. Sandbek outlines in his book the ways in which a sufferer can combat these voices by learning to identify them and recognising their ridiculous nature. Of course this is a lot harder than it sounds, and he recommends that patients create two lists: one that itemizes all the negative beliefs the voice reinforces, and the other positives and proofs that the situations the negative beliefs arose from no longer exist.

There's a catch to doing the work that Dr. Sandbek recommends, you have to be in circumstances where none of your negative beliefs about yourself are being triggered. If you are in an abusive relationship, be it either emotional or physical, your chances of recovery are limited. Every time you're either hit or made to suffer in other ways your self worth takes as much a beating as anything else.

Anorexics are looking for acceptance and are going to take it where they can find it. For those who don't have it at anywhere else, the type of web site described earlier in this article is going to be heaven sent. Not only do these sites accept them, but they are also confirming everything that the voice in their head says.

What my wife and I discovered is that because I was willing to accept her unconditionally she was able to deal with all the underlying feelings that caused her to stop eating in the first place. Now that she had somewhere safe to belong she had the strength to challenge those beliefs.

If a young woman (or man, although rare there have been cases of men with eating disorders) has sufficient cause to start having the eating disorder symptom of anorexia nervosa than it doesn’t' surprise me they will look for some sort of acceptance, no matter what the source.

What mystifies me is that the doctors still do not understand that basic truth about the disease. Instead of panicking about these sites they should be looking at them for clues as to how they might be able to counter the mindset that creates the conditions that fosters the eating disorder. Worrying about whether these sites are causing eating disorders is a pointless exercise because the only people they will appeal to are those who are so inclined already.

In the article linked to above it is reported that across Canada incidences of eating disorders are on the rise, and as that is only the number of people who are actively seeking treatment the numbers are probably quite a bit higher. These "ana-sites" are giving sufferers a place where they feel accepted and know they won't be judged. For what maybe the first time in their lives for some, they feel like they belong.

Without being able to provide an alternative means of feeling good about themselves, or overcoming their sense of not belonging, doctors are not going to have much of a success rate amongst people with eating disorders. Just getting them to eat again is only half the battle, getting them to change their minds is even harder.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:38 AM | Permalink

I have a hard time getting interested in professional sports anymore. I don't know whether it's because of the hypocrisy of the owners and league officials who have instilled the win at all cost attitude in their players, and then are the first ones to crucify the guy caught for using steroids, or the cynicism of the players who mouth platitudes about the fans being important, but will ditch his former team for some extra money.

More than likely it's probably a combination of both. It doesn't matter which league or which sport, all the big ones seem the same. To make matters worse the American college system shows symptoms of the same sort of illness; young men and women being encouraged to sacrifice their bodies at a young age with no thought of what's going to happen to them in the future.

I don't mind that it's run like a business, that makes sense to a degree, but due to the astronomical amounts of money required to run a professional sports team a lot of them end up being the personal playthings of wealthy men who don't necessarily have the interests of the fan base at heart. Even worse, as is the case with the Toronto Raptors and The Toronto Maple Leafs, is having ownership to which the bottom line is more important than winning.

They expect their players to play at almost any cost, but aren't willing to make the same commitment where it matters most for ownership. What should a fan that fills the seats for game after game feel if he knows that the hundreds of dollars he shelled out for tickets are being considered the return on an investment for a pension fund instead of a means to upgrade the team in the hopes of winning a championship?

As a typical Canadian boy I played hockey as a kid, and dearly loved the game. I used to live and die with the Montreal Canadians dating back to the days when the winner of the established Eastern division would play the helpless patsy from the West for the Stanley Cup. By the time the 1970's were wearing down and the Canadians were winning their fourth cup in a row before handing the reigns over to the New York Islanders, it had become more a reflex to cheer for them than out of any real interest.

For some reason though, there were still two sporting events at the time that managed to hold my interest and could keep me glued to a television screen: The Winter Olympics and The World Cup of Soccer. But in recent years even the Winter Olympics have begun to lose their appeal as they have become tainted with the same stains of corruption as the Summer games.

I remember reading a George Orwell piece where he argued against the idea of having international sporting events. He said they only served to exasperate any existing nationalist tendencies on the part of the fans, instead of creating the intended goodwill between nations. But in truth that's what lends the World Cup of Soccer so much of its interest to an outsider like myself; the passion that the supporters have for their teams.

Of course sometimes Mr Orwell's fears come true as there have been some horrific riots in the past during international soccer games. Examples of that type of silliness came to foreground this year when downtown Stuttgart became something of a war zone.

But it's that same passion that first got me hooked on the World Cup back in 1982, when the Italians won. I don't think Toronto had ever seen anything quite like it before; tens of thousands of people pouring into the streets and celebrating. With each victory the celebration grew louder and more exuberant until their joy was so infectious that people who had never watched a soccer match in their life were sitting in front of their television screen, desperately trying to figure out what was going on, while cheering for Italy.

Ever since then I was hooked, I have even started following the results of the qualifying matches two years ahead of the Cup. That's the time when every country still believes they have the opportunity to be one of the 32 sides that will qualify to compete for the right to say they won the World Cup.

Maybe that is part of the appeal of this event as well; it is genuinely a World Cup with countries from all around the world competing. Soccer does not require any special expensive equipment, just a ball, shin pads and shoes, so even the poorest of countries has the chance to field a reasonably competitive team.

Look at this year for example where teams from Togo, The Ivory Coast, and Trinidad and Tobago all made it to the round robin. Although there was the occasional blow out most sides offered quality competition for their opponents. In fact African teams have been responsible for some of the bigger upsets in recent history. One has to only look back to the last World Cup where Senegal beat France ensuring they wouldn't be repeat winners, let alone make it out of their own group.

It seems like everybody loves an underdog, except of course if your side has to be playing them, and will cheer them on hopping against hope for a victory. All of us were able to share in the Senegalese joy of defeating their former colonial masters.

Sure the game is beset by problems and scandals; allegations of throwing matches have almost destroyed the Italian league and the tendency of players to "dive" to try and attract penalties at this World Cup have made the games a bit of a joke on occasion. But in spite of those concerns, and in fact because of the former, there is still all the magic I've always associated with a World Cup.

Can Italy rise above the troubles in its home league and win a fourth World Cup? So far they have only allowed one goal to be scored into their own net, and that was one they scored on themselves. In the win against Germany they struck for two very late goals, but showed skill all game, and prevented what had been one of the highest scoring sides of the tournament from scoring.

France was only able to squeak by Portugal on a first half penalty and Portugal's inability to finish off plays. The French were badly outplayed, but still managed to hang on for the victory. Everybody is making the Italians favourites to win the cup now, but underestimating the French squad has already cost Brazil and Portugal their chance at a championship.

This is pretty much the same team that won the World Cup eight years ago, just a little older, and with a lot to prove. They don't want to be remembered as the team that won one year and went out in the first round the next. To sandwich the shame of the 2002 Cup debacle between two championships would take a lot of the sting out that year.

But the Azzuri are still the Azzuri and right now they look unbeatable. They've beaten their old nemesis Germany and look like a team that is starting to peak at just the right time. Perhaps I'm just being influenced by sentiment and memories and am only speaking form my heart and not my mind when it comes to my assessment, but that's the World Cup.

It's always been less about intellect and thought and more about emotion. It is one sporting event that still hasn't lost its soul completely and continues to wear its heart on its sleeve.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:00 AM | Permalink

In the year plus a month or so that I've written for Blogcritics I've been privileged to review a number of wonderful books. Literally they have been from authors all over the globe; India, Spain, Great Britain, and of course North America. Even more special have been the occasions where I've had the opportunity to interview some of them.

This time I was lucky enough that an author appreciated my review of his latest book, The Ascendants Of Estorea: Cry Of The Newborn the first of a new series, enough that instead of having me arrested for stalking he agreed to an interview. My initial introduction to James Barclay came from reading his six part series featuring the mercenaries who made up the group The Raven and they impressed me so much that when his latest book was released I made a point of ensuring I got my hands on a copy.

If anything Cry Of The Newborn was even more enthralling than his previous work, and different enough that they could have been almost written by two separate authors. Those of you who have braved my writing in the past will know that the creative process involved with writing a book fascinates me, and Mr. Barclay's ability to switch gears between the two series increased my eagerness to have an opportunity to talk with him.

I say talk figuratively, as distance and time zones once again made that prohibitive, so I simply emailed him a number of questions that he responded too. What follows is the unedited transcript of our emailed questions and answers. The majority of the questions focus on the two series and his methods. Don't worry if you haven't had the opportunity to read his work, although you should rectify that as soon as possible, it's not necessary to enjoy what Mr. Barclay has to say about writing and his process.

Boring Bio bits: Who what and where did you spring from.

I was born in an English port and seaside town called Felixstowe in 1965, making me a very old and grumpy 41. My parents still live in Felixstowe, I’ve got two sisters and a brother and a huge and sprawling number of nephews and nieces that is growing even now.

I’ve had my fascination with writing since I was seven and wrote my first story that my mother still has. I was always writing something from that day, I think and my ambition to be a published author began at about the age of 11. Same time I developed the ambition to become an actor.

I did pretty well at school, went to college in Sheffield to do Communication Studies and thence to drama school to study a post graduate diploma. After that, I owed plenty of cash so went to work in a variety of places, ending up with a couple of marketing and advertising jobs in the City. I left to write full time in March 2004 and am absolutely loving it.

I’m married to Clare; we have a lovely house in a town near London called Teddington. We have a beautiful little Hungarian Vizsla puppy that is a handful but a joy and we’re expecting our first baby in January 2007. Chaos will truly reign in our house.

I was an actor and worked in theatre for about ten years, and I've found it's impacted on my writing style, the amount of dialogue I use, character development, and I seem to use a sort of improvisational style of writing; knowing which characters are in a chapter, what information I want to get out, and what needs to happen, and than just let it all happen.
Have you noticed any traits that you've carried over from your theatre work into your writing?

Yes absolutely. I act out fight scenes and dialogue. I prefer dialogue to describe scene and story where I can and that’s certainly a stage influence. I’m not a massive planner. I have a broad structure and fill in the details as I go – improvisation is about right. I think it adds life and credibility to characters. One of my favourite playwrights is Mike Leigh and he’s a fine example of how improvisation can really work.

Have you ever considered any script writing, or any sort of return to stage life?

I’m writing a screenplay at the moment (a collaboration with a friend) and have ideas for others just waiting to go. As for acting professionally again, yes I’d love to. Bizarrely but fortunately, I was chatting to the man cutting my hair in the barbers the other day and discovered he is an actor/writer/director (and cuts hair for regular income). To abbreviate a long story, I’m auditioning for him next week for a small part in a feature film he’s written. It’s very good; a hard-hitting, gritty drama set on a south London council estate. I’m in line to be a policeman. Should be fun and whether I get the part or not, I’m going to be involved in the production from a script perspective. I’ll see how much I enjoy the process before deciding whether to pursue it again. Oh and anyone out there looking to finance a small budget Brit pic, please get in touch!

What caused the change, why writing novels, specifically fantasy ones?

Well, it wasn’t really a change. I always felt I could do both acting and writing. What happened was that I got disillusioned with acting. So many knock backs, so few opportunities. I was in work and doing well and my books were starting to get real interest from publishers. It was a simple choice to concentrate on the writing and it’s proved the right one. It’s funny, despite being an actor, it never occurred to me at the time to write plays and screenplays. I wanted to be a novelist.

I wrote, and write, fantasy because that’s what I have read throughout my life. You should always write in the arena in which you are most comfortable. For me it was fantasy and I felt I could do an equivalent if not better job than other authors out there and set out to prove it. It’s not for me to judge whether I have been a success in that.

I also grew up playing role-playing games and that merely cemented the love of fantasy.

Where did the Raven come from??

The role playing. A particularly rich few years of gaming in the Dragon Quest system with a consistent group of friends gave rise to some wonderful characters. I played Hirad Coldheart, by the way. I could see the dynamic in the group and wanted to bring that to the written page. The idea of a band of heroes isn’t necessarily a new one but I think my take was what interested publishers. The Raven were already established as the best and were in fact slightly long in the tooth. The banter, the bond and the method of fighting just worked.

Was it always going to be six books – a sextet?

No. In fact, I didn’t even think of a trilogy at the outset. Dawnthief was written as a stand-alone and it was only when I was in talks with my publisher that I developed ideas for the other two books in the first trilogy. The second trilogy suggested itself as I wrote the first set and because the Chronicles sold well, I was able to write the Legends series.

You've gone from a series of six regular sized books to a duology of massive proportions- I mean Cry Of The Newborn is over 800 pages long – Was there any particular reason for that?

There are a few reasons as it happens. The Ascendants idea had been rolling around in my head for the best part of twenty years and it was only a couple of years ago that I felt able to deliver on the premise and do the idea justice. I always knew it was going to be a big epic. We discussed making it into three or four but I’ve never liked arbitrary breaks in books. Each of my books, while it might read better with prior knowledge, can be read alone. I do beginning, middle and end, I don’t finish a book in the middle of the story.

The Ascendants were born out of an idea I had way back in my college years. But I only really developed structure, character and plot during the writing of Demonstorm. I needed to do that in order to put together a pitch document for my editor and agent. Because it was a big departure from The Raven, Gollancz needed to be sure they were doing the right thing in offering a contract. It was a massive task to get the first book out in just over a year (not something I could have done had I still been at work in the City) and the sequel hasn’t been any easier.

I wanted to prove (to myself as well as to anyone else who cared) that I could write beyond The Raven and deliver an epic fantasy on a large scale. I think I’ve achieved that. The book is 800 pages long because that’s how many pages it took to tell the story. Every book has a natural length, I think. And this is a big one. The sequel is slightly shorter and the next book I write will be half the size or less. I don’t believe in puffing out stories and neither do I believe in editing the life out of a story just to achieve an arbitrary word count. If your story needs to be inflated or hacked so much to fit a target, it’s probably the wrong target or the wrong story. Does that make sense?

Do you find that you draw inspiration from anything around you? For instance the whole idea in Raven of mankind's unwillingness to consider the repercussions of our actions as it might affect the future, or another people, or even another species or universe. Do you mean for that to parallel anything in current events, recent or otherwise?

When I began writing The Raven, I was writing adventures pure and simple. I wasn’t consciously paralleling current events. Introducing themes came later and I think you can see as The Raven books go on that the issues of blind politics, religion (positive and negative), authoritarian intransigence, arrogance and the potential consequences of an arms race. I was also keen to develop the Raven’s key themes around love and belief making a group of individuals infinitely greater than the sum of their parts.

How about Cry of the Newborn and it's sequel; any parallels there?

I’m fascinated (morbidly mostly) by the controlling effects of a powerful religion on a society. What the Ascendants did was allow me to investigate what would happen if the central tenets of a faith were challenged by a new reality. Blind faith is a dangerous thing and I sought to demonstrate that. But at the same time I wanted to take a balanced view, showing how moderation and acceptance are far more powerful in the long term than denial, denouncement and violence.

As for the sequel, a central theme there concerns the challenge to authority of a power beyond that authority’s power to control. Whether the power is benevolent or malevolent, many of the issues are actually the same but they are realised in different ways. Because the sequel, A Shout For The Dead, is set a decade after the end of the first book, I’ve been able to go into the longer term effect of the Ascendants on their society, on the core religion and on the attitudes of people in authority. And particularly, as the book unfolds, on the huge uncertainty the Ascendants bring. So many what ifs…

Do you ever find any of yourself creeping into characters, or maybe even traits you wish you had. I have this feeling that your favourite character in the Raven series was Hirad.

Well, you’re right. As I mentioned above, he was my character in my role playing all those years ago. I’m absolutely certain I creep into my characters. I try not to but inevitably, a writer gives themselves in whole or part to their story and the outward demonstration of that is going to be in their characters.

There are traits I wish I had… utter confidence and the ability to say exactly the right thing every time would be damned handy. A lovely thing about writing is that your characters can say those words you wish you’d said in a similar situation. They can talk the tough words and fight the good fight like you cannot.

I thought the whole relationship with the dragons in The Raven series was really nice. The Kaan could have squashed our world flat, but chose not to, because of our obvious use to them, still they regard most humans as a blight upon existence. What was your inspiration for their characters and viewpoint?

I’m not sure about my inspiration for them. I wanted my dragons to be enormously powerful. So powerful that no man could ever kill one. I wanted them to be intelligent and to have their own society with its joys and tragedies, conflicts and needs. The idea of a link between dragon broods and other dimensions grew as I wrote Dawnthief. It makes dragons flawed, it means they are reliant on others for their survival and forces them to be benevolent dictators rather than pure tyrants.

The Kaan, typified by Sha Kaan have no particular love for humans because they believe them to have fatal flaws that could lead to the destruction of themselves and hence the dragons. They fear that and hate the fact humans can be so blind and arrogant. Only a few demonstrate the strength of will that they respect. Hirad and The Raven were such people.

I've read reviews comparing the Raven books to the Magnificent Seven the cowboy movie with Yul Brynner and company. Is there any validity to that? Are you even a fan of the material?

I certainly enjoyed the film when I was young. And I’ve seen Seven Samurai since. While I didn’t consciously mimic the ‘band of people protecting the helpless’ theme, it still happened that way and I think the comparison has credibility. I didn’t base The Raven on the magnificent seven but the parallels make me laugh now (Seven people in The Raven, a bald guy, people who’s skills are just beginning to decline... I can see where it comes from).

In the Ascendancy you have created an empire that is very similar to the Roman Empire in the structure of it's military, and some of their social customs; dress, manner of eating etc. Was there any particular reason for that or is it just a period you like and are comfortable with.

I didn’t want to write a medieval fantasy. I wanted to create a different feel and the Romans were ideal. A fascinating society, quite advanced and very ambitious. A system perfect for expansion of empire. Very organised. Perfect for mucking up by dropping the Ascendants on them. I enjoyed the research and learned heaps. One name check for you – Adrian Goldsworthy. A superb historian and expert on the Romans. I owe him.

You worked for so long with a specific set of characters in the Raven sequence, how difficult was it for you to switch gears so quickly into a completely different world and characters?

Very. And that, as much as anything else made it necessary to do. The comfort zone is a dangerous place for a writer, I feel. No matter how successful you are, you can get stale writing the same characters, world and style. You don’t have to look far for people who exhibit that. Even Terry Pratchett doesn’t write Discworld novels all the time despite their enormous success and I reckon the fact that he steps away from that world from time to time has helped keep the series as fresh as it mainly manages to be even now.

What I found tricky was not writing lines or creating characters that were mirrors of The Raven. I had to fight very hard to stop Paul Jhered being a carbon copy of The Unknown Warrior. I had to examine every line of dialogue, every attitude and gesture to make the men individuals. Again, I think I succeeded and as the drafting went on, it became easier because the new characters found their voices and began to shout for themselves.

You included lots of military details, styles of fighting both on land and at sea, compositions of forces, and the engineering techniques involved in early field artillery. Was this all research you did specific to this book, or was it knowledge you had floating around in your brain beforehand waiting for a chance to be used?

It was research specific to the books. I wanted to get the warfare as accurate as I could without becoming dull. The scale of battles was huge and I needed to have knowledge of how they were fought for real to make my versions anything like credible. Again, it was to distance myself from medieval warfare. Roman techniques were organised and devastatingly effective for the most part. What was particularly interesting to me was having to understand how it worked so that I could understand how it might go wrong. Terrain, enemy tactics, weather, the virus of panic. So much could turn order into chaos. I have assimilated a lot more knowledge than appears in the books. I think that’s the right balance.

When I told an author friend of mine the length of the first Cry Of The Newborn, he said thank goodness for British publishing. Was there any balking at the fact that you had produced an 800 plus page book?

Not really but that’s because I had already written six successful novels and so the risk of it falling flat because of its size was relatively small. Interestingly, my US agent has so far been unable to place it and it’s pretty clear that as a first novel in the US (because The Raven is yet to be published there) it is too big. I can understand that. I suspect that had I rolled up to Gollancz with this as my first novel, I would have received a cooler response. As it is, it has done very well here in the UK.

The concept of the Ascendants, humans who can communicate with natural forces and manipulate them is fascinating. How did you conceive of them? Was it difficult to understand their characters and the experiences they underwent when they began to first come into their power?

It was an idea that came to me in an instant and a theme I have always found interesting. I didn’t want ‘standard’ wizards using mystical force to create spells. I wanted to ground the magic in things we all know. The elements are hugely powerful and the thought that they could be manipulated by individuals is both wonderful and scary. It made the fight with the dominant religion all the more bitter since the faith is very much earth and element based.

The four Ascendants were a tough challenge but one I relished and very much enjoyed. I had to keep in mind that they were just young children coming into their teenage years with all the attendant issues. But on the other hand, they are who they are – they were not normal children who were gifted powers, they were born with them. They don’t know how to feel any other way. What they needed was guidance about how to control their power. But no one could really advise them. They were true pioneers and the knowledge of being unique, of being the first to hold such ability is difficult to handle.

The only trouble with an email interview is you don't get that final couple of moments where you say goodbye and the person on the other end of the line says goodbye and you thank each other. So there's no real way to end these interviews without it sounding abrupt, like it does here. But it does have the advantage of providing an easy way of closing the conversation.

The standard ending question of what do you have forthcoming he already answered earlier on, volume two of The Ascendants Of Estorea that will be released in Canada November followed by a third as of yet unnamed book, so there was no point in asking that one. Since he also mentioned that he and his wife are expecting a child shortly, you can bet he will a little preoccupied with baby stuff. (Can we all guess who is not a parent in this crowd – baby stuff, sheesh)

While people in the United States are able to buy all six books of The Raven series through Amazon.com unfortunately they are not selling The Ascendants Of Estorea: Cry Of The Newborn. Whether or not that will change when the mass-market paperback comes out, I believe in November, I don't know. I do know that you can purchase it online through either Amazon.ca or his Canadian distributor McArthur & Company.

I would just like to thank James Barclay for taking the time out of his busy life to answer my questions, and I hope you found his answers as intriguing as I did. If you were at all fascinated or intrigued by this interview, than be assured you will find his books equally captivating.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 10:50 AM | Permalink

So I had the brilliant idea of taking my laptop out to the living room to work on this review while watching the DVD as it played. The only problem was trying to drag myself away from watching long enough to write anything down. It's hard enough for one man, a guitar, and a harmonica to hold an audience live, but to be able to enthral you enough through a DVD is the sign of someone special.

That's John Hammond (the younger one, his dad being dead now for quite a while) all right, someone special and the new DVD John Hammond: The Paris Concert captures everything about him that's amazing. Normally you're lucky if these concert films have utilized four cameras for a full band, but that's how many they have trained John for this filming at the New Morning club in Paris.

You'd think that listening to one man playing twenty-four solo traditional Blues songs might get a little repetitive, let's face it in the hands of a lesser musician that happens, but with Mr. Hammond that's not going to be the case. First of all he throws in songs that you're not expecting, like Tom Wait's "Get Behind The Mule" sandwiched between more traditional fare.

When you finally get used to the fact that he's pretty near unmatchable playing acoustic guitar blues, he picks up his resonator guitar and demonstrates that you haven't seen anything yet. Most slide players tend to equate speed and flash with substance, not Mr. Hammond. He stretches notes with that round bar of metal (he uses a piece from a sprocket set) like he's playing them on one of his harmonicas.

That doesn't mean he can't uncork a slide run that makes you wonder how he doesn't burn the neck off his guitar he's playing so hard. "Mother In Law Blues" has him running the slide from the bridge up to the head of the neck so fast that you swear you see sparks spraying off the strings.

With his strings howling, his harp crying and his voice growling you begin to understand how the Blues has come to have so many myths about the devil at the crossroads attached to it. You either have to be speaking in tongues in ecstasy during church or possessed by the devil. Since no good Christian is going to be singing about those types of things mentioned in Blues songs, whisky, women, and wild ways…well that leaves only one conclusion to be reached.

John Hammond is a living compendium of the best Blues music sung, written, and performed since the beginning of the twentieth century. From Robert Johnson, Howling Wolf, Muddy Watters, on up to the Blues of the early Rolling Stones, John Hammond: The Paris Concert is a trip through time.

From the Piedmont style of the Carolinas by artists like Blind Boy Fuller, with its roots in the Appalachians and Country Blues, that was popular during the thirties, to the Mississippi Delta, and across the breadth of the United States on up to the streets of Chicago Mr. Hammond can play the Blues in all its variants, shapes and forms. But it's not just the music he knows, the stories he has to tell about the people he's played with and met along the road are equally fascinating.

Introducing a Howling Wolf song he recounts his first meeting with the great artist who was one of his biggest influences. Mr. Hammond had just finished his set on a bill that included Howling Wolf. He had shown up early hoping to meet his idol during the sound check but Howling Wolf hadn't showed by the time John had to perform.

He got backstage after he finished and there standing in front of him was Howling Wolf. The first words out of his mouth to Hammond were "Where did you learn to play like that?" To which Hammond responded by saying "from records". Howling Wolf looked at him for a second and said, "So did I". He then sat Hammond down and talked about those writers who influenced him and how he learned to sing and play.

When your father is the man who produced Billy Holiday, "discovered" Bob Dylan, and worked with most of the great Blues, Folk, and Jazz musicians of his time you either can go in the opposite direction into something like accounting, or do your best to make people forget that there are two John Hammonds in the music business who are related. Of course there are advantages to be had like being able to listen to all that great music at home and absorb it all like a sponge.

But it takes a person with a lot of strength of character to go out and perform on stage with a famous name, playing the music that his father produced. To do it with as much heart and respect as Mr. Hammond is able to imbue his interpretations is a truly amazing accomplishment.

John Hammond: The Paris Concert is a DVD that matches the accomplishments of the man with its capturing of his performance. If like me you've never had the experience of seeing him perform before this production will be a revelation. John Hammond is a bridge that connects our world with the magical world of acoustic blues that he grew up in.

Included along with the concert is an interview with Hammond where he talks about how he got started and his early career. What comes clear from this short little piece of tape is just how much the music means to him. At one point he says that he used to feel compelled to explain himself to people. Now, he says, he just does what he does and if people like it great, if not, well there are enough people out there who do that it doesn't really matter.

What matters it that he loves what he does and it comes through with every song that he plays. With only two guitars, a collection of harmonicas and his voice he doesn't just play the music of the past, he takes it off the shelf and blows the dust of history off it so that it sounds as fresh, alive and relevant as when it was first recorded. That takes love.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:55 AM | Permalink

This should have been a great week for Steven Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada; the hated Goods and Services Tax (G.S.T.) was reduced by one per/cent as a Canada Day present, a deal had been finally reached on the softwood lumber dispute, and he was going to be having his first solo meeting with President George Bush in Washington.

To top it all off his visit will coincide with Mr. Bush's birthday, which will give them a chance to at least present the pretence of a personal friendship between the two leaders. As Mr. Harper is far more of like mind with Mr. Bush then either of the last two Prime Ministers of Canada this is pretty much guaranteed to be a mutual patting of the back, we're doing a great job, type of visit.

The highlight of the forty-minute was to have been the signing of the new trade agreement reached between the two countries around the contentious issue of softwood lumber exports from Canada into the United States. In spite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) the American government has had duties imposed on Canadian softwood imports at the request of the American lumber industry because of what they see as unfair subsidies provided by Canadian governments.

The alleged subsidies have, according to the American industry, given the Canadians an unfair advantage and allowed them to "dump" product on the American market. In other words because the Canadians receive money from their governments they don't have to charge as much as their American counterparts, are able to sell the same product for less money giving them an unfair advantage in competition, thus allowing them to flood the American market with less expensive materials.

The Canadians of course have claimed that everything they have done has fallen within the parameters allowed by NAFTA, and that any duties being charged are unfair. They have fought it out in the various courts and adjudicating processes available for this sort of impasse with inconclusive results. I think decisions now stand at three a piece in favour of both sides, which means the tribunals have been telling them to work it out on their own.

Since 2002 $5 billion dollars has been collected as duty from Canadian companies shipping softwood lumber into the United States and needless to say that's taken a huge bite out of their profits. One of the major reasons this has been so contentious is that Canadian companies want guarantees that they will be getting their money back, and that this won't happen again. There aren't many industries that can afford to take that kind of hit in the wallet, no matter how lucrative they are.

There have been a few false alarms in recent months but finally over the past weekend the Canadian and American negotiators reached a deal. A lot of people suspect pressure was brought to bear on both sides from political masters to have it ready for Thursday's (today's) meeting between the two leaders. Unfortunately signing it and implementing it are going to be two distinct issues.

The first rumbles of disquiet were heard as soon as Canadian industry people started reading through it and found that only an 80% refund of the $5 billion is being offered, and that they must agree to abandon litigating to recover the rest of what's owed them. In order for this agreement to be ratified 95% of of all Canadian lumber companies must agree to that condition.

The President of the British Columbian Lumber Trade Council, John Allen has said that in British Columbia alone there are more than 5% of the companies affected who are refusing to drop litigation until other details of the deal are clarified. They aren't going public with what's bothering them yet, but it appears to focus on not being allowed to make their own decisions on how much they can export at once, and setting provincial timber cutting fees.

However what seems to be making them especially nervous is the fact that after 23 months either country can just walk away from the deal. So the dust could just have settled from the last toss up, a new president takes office and the deal can end. What had originally been promised as peace and quite for up to a decade has now been reduced to less than two years.

It's not just the industry that has problems with the deal British Columbia Minister of Forests Rich Coleman said that his province will have a hard time supporting the agreement unless something is done about the termination clause. Not only does he object to the 23 months, the other major problem is that only if the Americans dissolve the deal will there be a moratorium on actions taken.

If Canada backs out of the deal American industry could have their government immediately start charging duties or take other actions against the Canadian industry, but if the American's walk away from the deal there will be one year where the Canadian industry and government will not be allowed the same leeway. Mr. Coleman says it will be very difficult for his government to support the deal if that is not rectified.

It seems pretty universal among the industry across the country that they are dissatisfied with the length of the agreement. As Guy Chevrette head of the Quebec Forrest Industry Council said: " "We said initially, on April 27, that the price to pay for seven years of peace . . . was $1-billion… Now, it turns out we're stuck with a peace that could be only two years." There aren't many in the industry who consider that a good enough deal.

Now that the opposition parties, Liberals, Bloc Quebecois, and the New Democratic Party (N.D.P.) have had a chance to see which way the wind is blowing from the industry people they have gotten into the act and are calling on the government to reconvene parliament to have a special session to discuss the legislation. Jack Layton, leader of the N.D.P., when making his statement warned Mr. Harper and Mr. Bush that " "Harper's signature won't mean a thing if he doesn't have the backing of Parliament."

One of Mr. Harper's major campaign platforms was that he would cut the hated G.S.T. by seven down to six on any and all goods and services sold in Canada. Ever since its implementation by the former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney it has been one the most universally reviled taxes in Canada. Anti-poverty groups hate it because it hurts their continuants and conservative groups hate it because they dislike taxes on principle.

Previous governments have made noises about either cutting it or abolishing it, but Mr. Harper is the first Prime Minister to follow through on his promise to do something about it. But at is turns out when the cut went into effect this past weekend nobody seemed to really notice.

The only people this tax relief seems to have any effect on our people who can afford to pay for very expensive luxury items. A one-cent on the dollar reduction in taxes hasn't had people actively beating down the doors of most retail stores. In fact for a lot of smaller retailers who use automated cash machines, it's meant a lot of bother to have their tills re programmed for the minor reduction.

Most consumers seem to be of the same mind as the person who said "that if I can afford to spend $2,100 I can afford to spend $2,121" referring to the after and before prices of the G.S.T. cut. Of course not everybody is taking such a blasé view of the matter. Peter Woolford , vice president of the Retail Council of Canada seems to think that it makes $5 billion dollars in cash available for consumers to be spending instead of sending to Ottawa as tax dollars.

Putting it in those terms I guess it sounds attractive to some people, but how he thinks that by someone saving 2 cents on a bottle of pop is going to make that big a contribution to the economy is beyond me. Will they save up all those pennies to make some big time purchase latter on down the road?

More worrisome to me is what's a $5 billion loss in tax revenue going to force a supposed cost conscious government to cut in the way of spending? Especially with their recent announcement of $15 million on military spending they may start looking elsewhere for places to cut budgets, which means that somebody is going to suffer so in order to allow a few people to spend less money on their luxury items.

The muted, almost cynical, reaction that greeted the early days of G.S.T. reduction must have been a disappointment for Mr. Harper and his people. It seems like they can't even buy affection in some places. Of course that won't be a problem with his meeting with George Bush today. The administration in Washington has made it abundantly clear how much happier they are to have Mr. Harper in power than either of his predecessors.

I'm sure that at least today will go well this week for Mr. Harper after the disappointments of it's earlier parts. One thing he does need to worry about is looking too cozy with Mr. Bush. The majority of Canadians are still not sold on his policy in Afghanistan and tend to blame American influence for Mr. Harper's decision to extend Canada's of duty tour and expand upon the role the troops are playing.

Whether that is true or not is irrelevant, and as a politician Mr. Harper has to learn that appearances are very important. Canadians won't mind if he appears friendly with Mr. Bush, America is after all our closest ally physically and every other way in the book, but they will mind if Mr. Harper looks like he forgets which side of the border he lives on.

There's not a lot that can be accomplished in a forty-minute meeting except to allow for some nice photo opportunities. For Mr. Harper this should have been the icing on the cake of a good week; especially being able to symbolically close the door on one of the nastier trade disputes between Canada and the United States. Now the best he can hope for is that he comes off looking statesmen like in the photos taken of him and his new friend George.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:13 AM | Permalink

Sometimes I think we forget what rock and roll music is all about, or even worse we place far too heavy a burden of expectations on it, expecting it to deliver something it's not meant to do. This is not highbrow music folks, it's supposed to be about the simple things in life and a lot of fun, but somehow it's been turned into this thing where the performers are now called artists and everyone takes themselves oh so seriously.

Have you tried listening to some of the lyrics out there? Some of them are so obscure that I don't even think the guy that wrote then knows what they mean. Everybody is trying to be so damn meaningful that they've forgotten how to have fun. It almost seems like they've forgotten who they are supposed to be writing for, the people who listen to the music, and are only trying to feed their over inflated egos.

Thankfully there are still bands playing who remember that rock and roll is good time music to be listened too on a Saturday night when your trying to get as far away from your troubles as possible. There is a fine tradition of roadhouse music in the United States that seems to fall in and out of fashion in the big urban centres, but continues to thrive out in the rest of the world. It's where Graham Parsons and his Grievous Angels, Commander Cody and his Airmen, and countless others used to play and keep people happy.

Carrying on that tradition comes a band out of Pennsylvania, the PovertyNeck Hillbillies. These guys may have all grown up physically in southwestern Pennsylvania, but musically they sound like they grew up in the juke joints and honkytonks a lot further south and west. They play a rollicking version of what a friend of mine used to call "foot stompin', beer drinkin' music", that has no pretensions other than to show you a good time.

While the PovertyNeck Hillbillies are being billed as a country band they owe a greater debt to Elvis then Conway Twitty. Sure they make great use of pedal steel guitar in their self titled album PovertyNeck Hillbillies but a lot of the great roadhouse bands before them have done the same. I don't know, maybe I'm just old, but when people say country band to me I think of the Sons Of The Pioneers not what these guys play.

So what do they play? After the first song on there new release, "The Night That Changed My Life", I was prepared to say they were like Hank Williams Jr., but more interesting. The further into the disc I got I realised that was a disservice to them (no offence Hank) as their sound shifted gears into that melodic country rock feel perfected by Blue Rodeo.

I don't mean the commercial, Southern California, Eagles type, mellow stuff that so many people seem to think of as country rock, but something with a genuine bite to it. They can hoot and holler with the best of them, but they can also bring that same intensity and emotional strength to a slow song.

When I listen to "She Rides Wild Horses" it evokes an image of an older biker, his long white hair tied back in a ponytail, dancing with his old lady at the end of the night while the bar empties around them. It's tough music and real, not caving in to cheap sentimentality that is the easy out for so many bands these days.

These types of bands usually have a hard time translating onto recordings. Whether it's because the atmosphere of a packed bar full of sweaty, laughing, half drunk people, dancing and having a good time is absent and takes away from their energy, or because it's the type of music that only works under the above conditions I don't know. But in the past I've found unless it's a live recording the disc doesn't live up to expectations.

Now I've never seen the PovertyNeck Hillbillies live, and maybe that's a plus for listening to them on disc, but I have a feeling there isn't going to be much of a let down for those of you who have. It wasn't hard while listening to picture them on stage in a huge old bar room with a throng of people just below the stage filling the dance floor.

Somehow they've managed to capture the feel of playing live while in the studio. That they've done this without sacrificing anything musically or technically is a significant accomplishment. It says a lot about the individual skills of the people in this band that they can be loose enough in the studio to generate a live atmosphere and still be musically tight as a band.

It's that type of playing ability that separartes the PovertyNeck Hillbillies from being just another roadhouse attraction that's a forgettable good time, and a band that you won't be able to forget after listening to. They have that little extra depth and soul to their music that goes a long way towards lifting them out of the crowd and into the spotlight.

Roadhouses and honkytonks have been home to and given birth to some of the best and most genuine pop music in North America. You can add the name of the PovertyNeck Hillbillies to the list of bands keeping that tradition alive.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:08 AM | Permalink

I'm doing an experiment. Well maybe more of what you would call a trial run than an experiment. I'm taking the series of posts that I've written about working on my novel (NaNoWriMo Notes) and am turning it into a book.

It's pretty much a ready made book as it is, with only minor editing needed to remove the html code that was imbedded in the text for web publishing and replace it with either hard copy of images or the formatting required for a text document. Each instalment is a chapter on to itself, and all that needs to be written is perhaps a preface and an afterward as explanatory notes.

Although the preface might be unnecessary, dependant upon what I wrote in the first instalment. It's been a while since I've actually read any of it so I need to do that as well, not just to familiarize myself with the content but to do all the editing I missed the first time.

But the real experiment here has less to do with the content of the book then with my intentions for its distribution. I'm going to make this a test case for my self of the viability of self-publishing a novel, utilizing only those resources that are available to those of limited means. In other words I'm not going to spend a cent on marketing or incur any costs other than some postage that I don't already carry as a result of being on line.

I've had an account at Lulu.com for a couple of years where I've been attempting to sell a few bits and pieces of material that I had written prior to starting my blog, or posting at other sites. To date my total sales have amounted to $10.00 American and have all been of one article; a review of Viggo Mortensen's collection of photos and poetry called Coincidence Of Memory. I have enough humility to realize that these sales have probably been generated more out of people's interest in Viggo than any skills that I may or may not have as a writer.

Aside from posting the pieces there and putting one small link to my storefront on my blog and at my almost completely moribund web site I have made no effort whatsoever to market or attract interest in my work. It hasn't seemed worth the effort involved for what would probably be an only slightly higher return then what I've managed to this point.

Maybe I would have sold a couple more reviews of Mr. Mortensen's work, but that's probably it. Who really is going to be interested in the serialization of a Science Fiction/Fantasy novel that is only partly finished? Is there a market for a collection of poetry from an unknown poet whose work is about as accessible as The Dead Sea Scrolls? Probably not seems applicable as a response to both those questions.

Last November I began working on another novel that I finished a final enough draft of to begin searching for a publisher. I was not willing to consign it to the purgatory of my storefront immediately; I had put too much heart and soul into it just to leave it to languish without giving it a chance to see the light of day in a physical book store.

Concurrent to working on the novel I've also been publishing articles on a daily basis since March of 2005 at my own web log, since June of the same year at Blogcritics.org, and recently Desicritics.org has joined the list. The cumulative total of that output is somewhere around 500 posts of various quality, size, and subject matter.

There are book, CD, DVD, and movie reviews; articles on politics, social issues, and the arts; and some were on even more specific sub-genres of the previous topics. Now I figure there is as much interest in a book of essays about Health Care written by me as there would be for copies of Planned Parent Hood pamphlets at a Catholic League meeting.

When it comes right down to it I can probably eliminate most of what could be loosely deemed social commentary as a marketable commodity, which eliminates a good chunk of the writing. A collection of reviews may generate some interest, but it doesn't really motivate me all that much so that's not a good idea. I'm not going to put much of an effort into marketing if the product doesn't interest me.

That process of elimination left me with not much left to pick from in terms of what could have a viable marketing hook. The NaNoWriMo Notes series seems to have the most going for it in terms of both audience appeal and marketability. It's not perhaps the broadest of audiences, but it's not starting from zero in terms of name recognition.

The National Novel Writing Month competition has become a reasonably well known event world wide with over 42,000 people having participated in 2004, and the number increasing in leaps and bounds every year. At the very least that means the title will maybe attract some attention and may even provide the means for some free publicity via the NaNoWriMo web site and forums.

I'd also like to think that there are enough people out there who have an interest in the process of writing a book that the concept of a record detailing one person's roller coaster ride through that journey would be intriguing enough to at least check it out. One of the great things about Lulu is the options it gives you for selling material. Not only will I be able to sell "Notes" as a complete book, but I can also sell it a chapter at a time. That way people will be able to sample the wares before risking the complete purchase.

What I will do is make individual chapters available for sale as downloads only, and the entire book as a printed copy. I will try and work it so that it is cheaper to buy the entire book than downloading each individual chapter to a browser. Since there are twenty-three chapters that shouldn't prove very difficult; I could almost make the book half the price of downloading all the individual chapters, and still charge $20.00 a copy. (Excluding shipping) But since I won't even be charging anywhere near that amount as I'm only releasing it in a 9"X 6" paperback format, it will be even more of bargain to buy the whole book.

I'm not placing any expectations on this project. If it makes sales that will be great, but my real goal is to see how viable it is to totally self market a product with little or no money utilizing the tools available on the Internet. I have some advantages in that the ranking for my blog site seems to consistently high on Google and that can be of use. The majority of traffic at my blog is still from blind searches at Google and my posts are usually in the top ten of the returned result that sends people to me.

I've even developed a little bit of personal name recognition as people have begun linking to and promoting my work in a variety of locations. (Of course if you do a name search for Richard Marcus at Google the first result is still some guy who claims he can beat the system at Las Vegas. One wonders why he's offering books for sale on the subject at a web site if he was such a proficient gambler) It's not much but every little bit helps.

Having run publicity campaigns the old fashioned way in the past, snail mail press releases and phone follow ups, I am familliar with the process. I know there must be a trillion sites out there that are willing and able to tell you how to best market yourself on the Internet, for a price, but from what I can tell it's the same old story. Hard work and diligence are still the most effective tools at your disposal.

In my past experiences this has usually meant a push for about two weeks while you get the word out, and than it just involves maintenance of your information dissemination. I'm not interested in putting incredible amounts of energy into the project; I have other things I need to do as well. What I'm going to try to do is devote an hour a day to publicity and leave it at that.

I'm not looking to wrack up record-breaking sales, although that would be a nice benefit, nor am I looking to garner instant recognition as an author of repute. First of all the work doesn't merit either of those distinctions, and second of all that's not the purpose of this project.

This is more like a fishing expedition; I'm going to let out some line and see if I get any bites.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:43 AM | Permalink

What are people so damn afraid of hearing that they have to make so much noise all the time? Whether it's having their televisions or radios on all the time, roaring around in cars with special attachments to make them louder, or continually talking at the tops of their voices they always sound like they're trying desperately to drown something out.

They can't go out into their gardens without taking some sort of power tool with them; hedge trimmer, lawnmower, weed whacker, leaf blower, or chain saw. Heaven forbid they should actually sit still and enjoy the restful attributes of a beautiful garden or a secluded yard. It's as if they only created the places as arenas for utilizing the latest in lawn gizmos and excuses to make even more noise.

Gone are the idyllic days when husbands had to be booted out of the hammock, away from their beer and rest, in order to mow maybe trim the lawn. It now seems that nobody can wait to get out there and get at it to make some noise. Did they misunderstand that KISS concert they went to all those years ago when they urged to make some noise? Instead of recognising it for the same old rock star bullshit they have taken it as their personal mantra for middle age and beyond.

You can almost see their lips moving, repeating the magic words "make some noise, make some noise" over and over again. Perhaps they think that by chanting the words in accompaniment to the actions of churning out hundreds if not thousands of decibels they would be able to reclaim some of their lost youth. Who knows?

It's not just men either, women can be just as bad, and they even have more ways of drowning out the world around them at their disposal aside from garden tools and electric saws. Vacuums. Good lord some of them are as loud as power sanders and probably have the same effect on carpets as sanders have on wooden floors. Stripping layers of carpet away and not just lifting the dirt off.

Of course they also have the television on while they are vacuuming. In order to hear over the noise they make while sanding their carpets, they have to crank the volume on the set so high it throws the sonar of passing airplanes out of whack and sends them off course..

I used to wonder why people standing next to each other were shouting loud enough for others two blocks away to hear. It's because they've gone deaf from their damned noisemakers and can't carry on a conversation anymore without shouting.

On more then one occasion I have heard people complaining about the noise of somebody else's machinery and wince when they hear it. But they will think nothing of turning on something of their own that makes an equal if not louder noise. Is somebody else's noise always louder than your own? Or is it that our noise is justified because it accomplishes its task by drowning out whatever thoughts we don't like we might be having at the time?

When I was younger I liked loud music, and I used to go out to bars and stand right under the speaker stacks, but I stopped doing that by the time I was in my mid twenties. But even when I was doing that it was only for a specific instance in time and not on a continuous basis. It was stupid fun to leave a bar with your ears ringing very faintly and feeling like your head was in a fishbowl because of the pressure increase behind your eardrums.

I watch these kids drive around in their little Hondas made to sound like Ferraris, and see the whole car vibrating as it drives down the street because of the massive bass speakers in the trunk. I wonder how loud is it inside that little box of tin if I can hear and feel the bass from over two blocks away?

Even if they were sitting in a basement somewhere shooting crack into their arm they couldn't be doing any more damage to their ability to think and be aware of the world around them. Why are all these people out there desensitizing themselves with noise? What are they so afraid of feeling, or hearing that one way or another people of all ages have turned the volume up past ten?

I know from living next door to noise junkies and experiencing collateral damage that even at a distance it's almost impossible to hold on to coherent thoughts. Trying to write or think up ideas on what to write while that cacophony is proceeding is next to impossible. What must it be like for them?

When I was abusing alcohol and drugs I was doing it to shut my brain down so I wouldn't have to think about things that made me uncomfortable. It desensitized me so that I couldn't feel or remember anything. Now I'm not saying that all these people have personal stuff they're running away from but they sure seem to blocking out something.

Seeing how most of the men in my neighbourhood are on early retirement, perhaps they are trying to avoid thinking about the days to come. But what's going to happen with them when the future arrives and they haven't prepared mentally and emotionally for it? There's no point in obsessing on the future, but that doesn't mean you ignore it.

The young people in their cars are escaping their realities as well. They may have jobs, but what do they pay, and what kind of future do they hold? What do they have to look forward to? When that nihilism is combined with youth's belief in their own immortality, and immunity to danger it goes a long way to explaining the flash and desperation of their lifestyle.

They seem to be attempting to cram danger and excitement into their lives in an attempt to deny the bleakness of their future and the banality of their jobs through their music and vehicles. The voice in their head that is telling them they are being cheated out of something can't be heard when they are crammed into a small tin box that is exploding with sound.

They know it won't last forever, that they will be absorbed into the great maw of society that will devour and turn them into their parents. The louder the music the less chance they have of hearing the voice of doom until it is right in their face.

The trouble with avoidance as a philosophy of life is that when you finally do get around to facing up to stuff, it's become that much harder to deal with. Whether you've deadened emotional pain with narcotics, drowned your heart with alcohol, or blocked out the warning voice of reason with noise it will all come home to roost one day like Turkey Vultures and the shock will be severe.

But so many people seem to not care that what they don't do today will come back to make their life worse in the future. No matter how loud you make your life, you may be able to avoid listening to your problems or thinking about them for a while but not forever.

So why not try to make a little less noise now and than, and hear a little better. Maybe, that way when the future arrives it won't be as bad as the thoughts you've avoided were leading you to believe it would be. You also might find that there are a lot of nice things to listen to in the world. Consider that a bonus.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:28 AM | Permalink

I don't consider myself that well informed, knowledgeable about world events, or a historian. So it always comes as a surprise when I find people don't know information that I think of as common knowledge. It's especially surprising when it's people I know who care about issues, or who try to stay well informed.

The biggest hole in people's awareness is history. Even the aforementioned so-called informed people can be completely unaware of the circumstances that have led up to a current situation. It makes me wonder how they can understand the situation they see playing out on television enough to properly formulate a point of view if they don't know how the situation came into existence.

Questions that are never answered during the modern newscasts like where did the Palestinian refugees first come from is information that I would consider essential to understanding the roots of the conflict and how the situation came about in the first place. I'm only using that as an example because I was asked that very question the other night by a person who I've always considered well informed and who tries to be fair minded when it comes to dealing with issues that are important.

She was quite incensed that she didn't have this knowledge and couldn't understand why this wasn't the kind of history taught in schools either when she was a child or now that her son is in high school. In Canada what used to pass for world history was very Anglo centric and dealt with world events as it pertained to British or Canadian participation. I can only assume the same is true for the United States minus the British.

While it is understandable to want to teach students about the role their country has played in the world, and the history of the country they live in, why is there so very little in terms of a broader view of the world's history taught. It seems to me that now, more than ever, teaching students about the diverse nature of the world is vitally important. There are so many situations, like Israel/Palestine, that require more than the surface knowledge provided by the news to understand the full complexity of the issues facing the people involved.

In only one grade did I have anything approaching a world history, and that was strictly Western history, starting from the Greeks and Romans and working up to contemporary times form there. That type of broad survey course is not designed to give students any insight into events that have impacted upon current situations. Neither are they conducive to real learning as they attempt to cram massive amounts of information down your throat so you can regurgitate it on an exam paper or in an essay.

What needs to be done is to define our purpose when teaching history at the secondary school level. Is it merely a means of glorifying our own countries, or is it to show people the origins of today's events in as impartial manner as possible.

The truth is that we soon may no longer have a choice in the matter. We will all have to change our approach to what we teach as history and its content. The countries that were formally colonies up until times in the 1960's have begun to settle down enough for their cultural pride to resurface. They are not going to be satisfied with textbooks that detail the history of occupation and describes them as the villainous natives while their colonial masters are depicted as brave, erstwhile defenders of honour, duty and the Queen.

One of the more obvious incidences of the archaic nature of the history still being taught is the manner in which the rebellion of 1857 in India is still referred to as the Indian Mutiny. This of course casts those attempting to throw off the mantel of the British East Indian Company as rulers and take back their country in a negative light.

Even though India is a now a sovereign nation and no one disputes their right to independence, those who fought for their country's independence in the early struggles are still considered criminals by history. It's to correct impressions like these that historians, archaeologists, and writers are working to amend what 's written down to more accurately reflect the circumstances.

On February 4th 1944, in his column "As I Please" George Orwell wrote about the aftermath of World War Two and the Spanish Civil war of the decade before and talked about how difficult it would be for historians to ever find out the truth of what happened. It was here that his famous quote "History is written by the winners" first appeared.

But the words in that article that in my mind are more important are these "The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future." People's opinions are going to be shaped by what they are told has happened in the past. It's not even needed to tell outright lies, only to change the perspective the story is told from and it makes it sound like the heroes were villains and vice versa.

This technique was used to great effect in the way history North America has depicted our early relationships with the First Nations. The times where native warriors have gotten the upper hand on either British, French, or American troops are referred to as massacres, but the times when troops wiped out villages of women and children are referred to as glorious victories.

These interpretations appeared in history books for ages colouring the opinions of many a generation of student. It has created historical justification for the manner in which Native Americans have been treated over the years. By calling chiefs who fought for their people's liberty renegades, when the very same actions performed by white men a hundred years ago against the British were considered heroic, the myths of the vicious savage was perpetuated.

Some of these myths have started to be dispelled and the untruths revealed. Almost everyone knows the truth of what happened at Wounded Knee now, but the damage is done and it can never be undone. That's the trouble with lies, they are almost impossible to refute once they have become ingrained for a few generations.

History is a complicated thing; we need it to understand the realities of so many of today's situations, but at the same time how can we trust what has been written down in so many textbooks and other forms of historical record keeping? For me a good rule of thumb has been any history that tends to glorify one side over another is suspect, unless substantial proof is provided.

Trying to find sources that recount the same period from more then one perspective has become easier these days as more countries are taking matters into their own hands and telling their own story. But even those can be problematic for the same reasons as the ones told by the other side. To be honest most of my knowledge of history has come from either novels or books written by people who have no national bias towards the proceedings.

In order for us to better understand the times we live in we need to know what led up to the current circumstances. The hard part is finding the right path that will lead us to the answers we seek without heavily flavouring the results. But it's well worth the effort if it results in a clearer and more accurate depiction of today's events.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:01 AM | Permalink

Those of you who have been following along since the beginning have suffered with me (or suffered me depending on your opinion) the ups and downs taking a novel from the germ of an idea through to a completed manuscript. What was initially supposed to have been a journal of my experiences competing in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo – hence the title NaNoWriMo Notes) evolved into something larger then I expected it to be as it has continued on long past the original competition ending date of November 30th 2005.

Originally supposed to have been a running commentary on the challenges of churning out thousands of words a day and the steps I took to overcome things like writer's block, fatigue, continuity lapses, and tedium the series has turned into an ongoing exposition on the struggles of writing a first novel. On some occasions I have waxed philosophical (or navel gazed; again depending on your point of view) but for the most part I've stuck with descriptions of process, revelations I've had about myself as a writer, and reflections on the business of writing.

I've written about my anxieties, my insecurities and all the other emotional baggage that goes along with any creative process. When I look back on what I've talked about to this point I wonder if I've made it sound like writing is something I do in spite of all the agony if puts me through and that I get no pleasure from the experience.

I was talking on the phone yesterday with one of my colleges from my early days in theatre. We had worked together for five years, he as Artistic Director, and me in various administrative, artistic and managerial capacities with a small company in Toronto. That time was my equivalent of an apprenticeship where I learned the ins and outs of being a professional artist.

Although we both live in the same part of the world we don't get much of an opportunity to talk; he's been teaching at a local college, starting up a freelance graphic design and consulting business, and has started a family late in life. During the school year any free time he manages to squeeze out of his schedule he spends with his family, so we only ever have opportunities to talk during the summer months.

It was while we were catching each other up on the what's been happening with our lives in the eight months or so it has been since we last talked, and I was telling him about the novel and my plans for a second book that I had a realization. This has been a great year for me in so many ways.

In spite of the fact that my health sucks, and I live a precarious life financially due to being on a fixed income, the positives have far out weighed the negatives. I have spent the last nine months, and continue to do so, immersed in doing what I've wanted to do for years, writing and finishing a novel. Everything else pales in comparison beside that.

But it's even more then just that process that's been and continues to be important. For the first time in nearly fourteen years I've been able to focus all my energies on working creatively. For me this has been like coming home to where I belong, where I'm happiest.

How often are any of us given the opportunity to do what makes us the happiest for any length of time, let alone permanently? Not very often would probably be a safe bet. Yet for the past year or so I have, and during this whole series have I ever said anything to that effect?

It's a case of not seeing the book for the words – or forest for the trees if you want to be picky - I've been so busy analysing, poking and prodding, and just generally tearing the shit out of the whole process that I've missed the point. After I had told my friend on the phone the stuff that I had done, my prospects for it, and what my wife has been doing over the past while, (she's had a gallery show of her art, and is about to release her first CD) I paused for a beat and it hit me like a flash. This has been a really good year.

We humans, this one especially, seem to lack the ability to step back and see the overall picture which might, heaven forbid, accentuate the positive aspects of our life. Somehow or other we can be living out our dreams, and still find reasons to complain and pick it apart so all we think about is how torturous everything is..

There is nothing wrong with analysing the process of writing a novel, letting other people understand some of the pitfalls and difficulties that exist, but to not mention how amazing it is to have the opportunity to be creative is negligence bordering on disrespect. It's like being given a gift and instead of saying how wonderful it is, you point out all the little imperfections to the point of sounding ungrateful.

Talk about playing with fire. I write because I feel compelled to do so. Can you imagine what would happen if the compulsion still existed but the opportunity or the ability to do so was taken away? It's my worst fear that a day will come when I'm no longer able to write because of my health, yet I'm cavalier enough about my current opportunity to not even appear grateful.

Sheesh, I'm amazed I haven't been struck dead with a lightening bolt yet. I guess sometimes the Gods and Goddesses can be understanding enough to give us some slack, or they're waiting for a more opportune moment. I'm hoping it's the former of course, but have taken steps to ensure it involving a… well maybe this is not the proper venue to go into such details so lets just say sacrifices have to be made in the name of art.

Seriously though, as I continue on with this series while working on volume two of The Paths Life Takes I will do my best to remember that in spite of whatever so called "trauma" I'm experiencing at the moment, I'm doing what I want. What can be better than that?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 08:10 AM | Permalink