Leap In The Dark

The great thing about the Internet is the fact that you can look up information on almost any subject you wish. The only problem is that if you don't know anything about the subject you are researching you have no means of judging the accuracy of the information that a particular page is supplying.

While some sites may have a better reputation for reliability, Wikipedia for example, they are still only as accurate as the people supplying the information. The only review process that most sites have is from other users, and when dealing with subjects of an obscure or esoteric nature that's not the most reliable form of editorial control.

I was running into this problem when I started writing the review for the Allegro Music disc Turkey, Whirling Dervishes from their Voyager Series. The amount of questionable material seems to increase with the spiritual quality of the subject, and it wasn't until a stroke of luck brought me to Mevlana.Net, the official web site of the descendants of the great Persian poet and thinker Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi that I found anything I felt comfortable with.

While Hollywood and other mass entertainment outlets may have given us the idea that Whirling Dervishes were isolated crazies who were out in the middle of nowhere never stoping their relentless spinning, nothing could be further form the truth. "Sema", the name given to the ritual, which Whirling Dervishes or Semazen take part in, is practiced by followers of the Suffi Muslim sect who take their name, Mevlevi (the sons of Mev) and inspiration from Rumi.

The sect was founded in the late 1200's following the death of Rumi under the leadership of his son Sultan Veled Celebi. As they believe that everything in the world is continually whiling including the stuff that we humans are made of, the best way to offer prayer is to become one with that motion. So the dance of the Whirling Dervish is their way of being one with the universe and praying to Allah.

Music of course plays an integeral part in these proceedings and has a specific role and place in the ritual. After the initial opening enterance and prayer of the "Semazen" ("Sema" litterally means Human being in the Universal Movement) who will be doing the dance, finihes the second part is taken by a solo drum symbolizing God's voice ordering creation to "be". It is the third and fourth parts – still prior to the dancing – where the music plays it's most important role and where the recording Turkey: Whirling Dervishes takes its inspiration from.

The third part is called a "Taksim" and is played on a type of flute called a "ney" made from reed. This piece of music is improvised each time by the player of the ney as he attempts to find the right combination of notes to communicate its meaning. This piece represents the breath of Allah, more specifically the first breath which gave life to everything – the Divine Breath.

The fourth segment, which is the music that's primarly represented on the disc Turkey – Whirling Dervishes is called "Peshrev". Durring this time the Dervishes walk three circles around the space greeting each other. This is to symbolize the souls greeting each other through the physical boundaries of their bodies.

What I find most interesting is that Rumi site makes no mention of any music during the four stages of the actual Whirling. There was another site I went to where they mentioned music being played, but I'm not that confident in its authenticity because of it being North American and some of the attitudes expressed and the inaccuracy in terminoligy.

The key instrumentalists on Whirling Dervishes are Kudsi and Suleyman Erguner who have been playing and promoting appreciation for, Sufi music in North America and Europe for twenty years. Kudsi has in fact played with European performers like Peter Gabriel in his attempts to get the music out to the rest of the world.

At first the music is deceptively simple and appears to be nothing more than drum and flute playing a straightforward pattern. But as you listen you begin to hear more of what the music is doing and the patterns appear to be getting more and more complicated. Of course those patterns could have been there all along without you knowing it and as the music slowly seeps into your awareness you gradually start to hear more and more of the subtle distinctions.

At all of the sites I went to regarding the performance of the Sema ritual they stress that at no time is the purpose to induce a loss of awareness or to fall into a trance. However at the official Mevlana site their description of the process does state that during one aspect of the dance the salute to Allah takes the form of the transformation of rapture into love and requires the sacrifice of the mind and a complete submission of self to the state of loving the creator.

Somehow or other you're supposed to be able to do that with out slipping into a trance or a permanent state of ecstasy. All I can say is that the dancers must undergo some pretty amazing training when it comes to their ability to focus the mind. Just listening to the music, without performing any of the dances, was enough to induce a light trance state.

As I said earlier the more attention you pay to the music the more intricate it starts to become. The more you listen to the intricate patterns the deeper you are pulled into the music and the more you begin to notice about it. The next thing you know the CD is ending and you are sitting there feeling awfully bemused because you can't remember what had happened except that the music was some of the most beautifully patterned you had ever listened too.

In some ways it puts me in mind of the interior design of some of the Mosques still standing in Spain as leftovers from the days of the Ottoman Empire. Huge swaths of checked geometric patterns that swirl along the floors and walls in black and white tiles as far as the eye can see. I'm sure if you were to stand in there for any length of time and let your focus go soft you would find yourself starting to drift into the same sort of trance like state that the music induced.

It's not a dangerous thing or anything malicious, and if you learned how to train yourself it could very well bring about a state of mind which approaches the highest rank of ecstasy as described on the web site. But since that state in Islam is reserved only for the prophet, and even he is still only a servant of God and can never become one with him, normal supplicants aren't allowed to either. There is no striving towards this as other religions say is possible through trance in order to reach that ultimate state of ecstasy, Nirvana.

Through this CD I came to have a deeper appreciation for the beauty that is inherit in the worship of Allah by the practitioners of Islam who follow the Sufi path. I'm not about to run out and convert or anything, but simply by listening to the music and coming to understand the principals behind it I understand the Muslims who talk about theirs being a religion of love, not of hate, just a little more. Salaam

Posted by Richard Marcus at 12:40 PM | Permalink

I guess it shouldn't come as to much of a surprise the number of similarities between North America, more specifically Canada, and Australia. While the United States was British founded originally, the mother country has had much more of an impact on the other two countries.

Of course British rule of law dominated both countries and they applied the same practices in both countries to the indigenous peoples they found. Once they were properly cowed with military might, the practice of forced assimilation became the accepted wisdom. Stealing children and cramming them into schools where they were forced to unlearn their heathen savagery was one step.

Taking away their land and putting them on reservations was the final piece of the equation. Not only did it remove their ability to be self-sufficient, but by removing their connection to the land they cut them off from their source of spiritual strength. Without either of those they became a hollow shell of their former selves. Destined for a life of dependency they turned to the solace that was given freely by their new maters –alcohol.

If you're wondering what this all has to do with Xavier Rudd and his newest release White Moth the answer lies in the content of the album, the issues that concern Mr. Rudd, and the internal journey that he appears to be on. Xavier Rudd is an Australian, married to a Canadian and he divides his time between the two countries and his connections to the First people of both lands runs deep and true.

The most obvious connection is his use of the Yirdaki (didgeridoo) as an integral part of his music. While it's use has become more prominent among various folk groups and performers looking for something to sound "cool", to seamlessly incorporate it, as Mr. Rudd does, into the music so that it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb or a novelty item, takes a sensitivity to the instrument that borders on the spiritual.

It is always a delicate issue using an item of spiritual significance to another culture in what they might consider secular conditions. But anyone listening to Mr. Rudd play his didgeridoos with those concerns would quickly have them alleviated by the fact the focus stays on the instrument not his ability to play them. He is not feeding his ego with them; he is feeding his music by letting their spiritual strength infuse a song.

Canada and Australia are countries where it is still possible to experience the land unchanged from its state thousands of years ago. There might be fewer and fewer pockets remaining as "civilization" advances, but they are still there in all their pristine harshness and beauty. It's almost impossible to see these places and not understand the spiritual connection the First peoples had with their respective lands.

In his lyrics, and the emotion and passion that he puts into them when singing, it is obvious that Mr. Rudd not only understands that connection but also feels it himself. When he sings about the earth he doesn't pretend to have any special insights to offer, he just wants to say "hey did you see that – isn't it amazing?" and make sure none of us are missing out on just what a wonderful gift it is we have been given with this planet.

He's not one for hiding his meaning behind reams of obscure poetry, and he speaks directly from his heart no matter what the subject. When he wants us to know something he wants to make sure we get the message. His most direct song on the album, "Footprint" is a perfect example of that.

First it’s the hardest rocking song on the album with driving electric guitars and pounding drums and second the lyrics are direct and to the point: "There are leaders who lead/our leaders prefer to deceive/As our oceans they rise, they rise/still they choose to deny". Well you can't get more direct than that can you?

Just when you think the song is ending though, he catches us off guard. The guitars are screaming, the drums pounding and as they fade we hear the sound of a rain stick – which in turn becomes the sound of the Native heartbeat drum. What began in anger ends in prayer as Kennetch Charlette of the Cree nation in Canada sings a closing invocation to Gitchie Manitou – roughly translated as Great Spirit.

The prayer is short and sweet and does not seem to have any specific purpose beyond serving as a means of making sure the song is closed. It's as if Xaiver Rudd doesn't want the anger of the song to permeate the rest of the disc or to escape into the world. It's very easy to get trapped and wrapped up in anger at things and forget what's important, and by closing the song off with the prayer he lets us move on to the remainder of the disc without any hangover.

That in itself tells you all you need to know about Xaiver Rudd: he considers the implications of everything he does. It is said that some Native nations won't make important decisions without considering the implications for the next seven generations. It's that philosophy of considering the effects of your actions upon the world that runs throughout Mr. Rudd's songs.

It may not be anything overt, but behind all the lyrics and the music there's a mind that considers what it is saying and the effect that it will have on the person listening. He has something important to say, but what's even more important to him is how he says it. What's the point of talking about how sacred the land is if you can't express it with love in your heart?

What message are you delivering to people if you continually barrage them with anger and unhappiness? In the first song on the album "Better People" he says "…our children keep growing up with/what they know from what we teach/and what they see…" I've never heard any other popular singer whose lyrics and musical attitude reflects that concern as much as Xavier Rudd.

In White Moth Xavier Rudd draws upon the resources available to him from both the land of his birth and Canada to learn about the sacredness of the land. In his songs he talks not only about how important the planet is, but also how important it is that we act in a manner that we would like our children to emulate.

That's pretty heavy stuff for a pop musician, but he does it without preaching or without any of the holier than thou attitude that you get from to often these days. He sings from his heart without pretence about who he is and what he wants from life and is never sentimental or sappy. White Moth is a great CD by a very gifted individual who actually makes me feel hope for the future.

Thank You Xavier Rudd for this wonderful gift that you've offered us.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:15 PM | Permalink

Down south by the Gulf of Mexico they call the fall by a different name than most of us of do, they refer to it as Hurricane season. Most years if one of those storms comes inland they usually run into Florida that sticks out into the ocean like a safety net for the rest of the Gulf. But on occasion the winds will be just right that they'll carry them around the panhandle and they'll sweep down onto Louisiana and Mississippi.

It's happened before, and really bad back in the twenties wiping out whole villages of poor black people and anybody else who was in close to the shore line. There's only so much that a man made structure like a levee or a dike can hold back before they give up the fight.

I guess they must have figured that the storm in the twenties was one of a kind and could never happen again, or maybe it was just negligence that not enough was done to prepare the coastal towns and cities for another big storm. So when Hurricane Katrina showed up on the weather satellites and could be seen to be heading towards New Orleans there was a lot of collective breath holding about whether the levees would hold.

For three days the winds and the rains battered the coast and it looked like they had come through it relatively all right. But then the disaster struck, the levees protecting New Orleans broke under the strain of so much pounding, and the water flooded in submerging houses, streets and neighbourhood. People climbed up onto the roofs of their houses to await rescue that might never come.

We've all heard all the horror stories from 2005, and the fact that to this day little or nothing has been done along the lines of rebuilding: The major of New Orleans says if people come back they'll rebuild, but when you've got no home to come back to it makes it kind of difficult to come back.

Blues singer Marva Wright was one of those people who evacuated themselves out of danger and then watched on television in horror as their homes and lives were swept away. Now two years later she is finally able to release an album of songs that relate to the experience of Katrina.

After The Levees Broke on AIM Records was recorded in Australia when Peter Nobel, the head of the label, shipped everyone down from America to make this album. He even went so far as to bring recording engineer Marc Hewitt in, Marva's regular engineer, who lost his whole studio to the flooding. One track on this CD, "That's The Way It Is", was salvaged from the wreckage of Sound Services Recording Studio. It was originally supposed to have been on another AIM release, but now was given a place of honour on this disc.

Marva's long time bass player and producer, Benny Turner wrote the opening two tracks on the CD, "The Levee Is Breaking Down" and "Katrina Blues", for Marva. She openly admits that the wound was still too fresh for her to write about the experience. So Benny tried to create the song as she would have; trying to see the experience through her eyes.

When Marva sings "The Levee Is Breaking Down" and "Katrina Blues" they sound like so much like a piece of her soul on display that if you didn't know you'd swear she had written them. She has a voice that works equally well in the church as it does in the tavern and when she reaches out with her voice you can feel the spirit behind it.

That the third song on the disc is a gospel number called "God's Good Hands" only seems to make sense with what she had described happening to the people of New Orleans in the first two songs. When all else deserts you faith and hope are what will keep you going. If you are able to believe in an entity or group of entities that offer that solace, it seems only fitting to sing a song in praise after singing about a disaster of the magnitude of Katrina.

Marva then works her way through a series of standards turning them into songs that are uniquely her own. Not since Brian Ferry's version of "You Are My Sunshine" have I heard anyone interpret it and make it their own as Marva has on her version. But while Ferry sounded like a lounge lizard on downers, Marva's Blues version is heartfelt and poignant.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that a person with as big a voice as Marva's can do more than proclaim songs loudly enough to fill a cathedral. But on both "Your Are My Sunshine" and the old classic Willie Nelson tune "Crazy" she shows that she can also pick her way delicately through a song when it's called for.

Closing out the disk with the old Civil Rights tune "Change Is Going To Come" can be taken in quite a few ways. One is judging by the government reaction to people's loss in New Orleans not much has changed in the treatment of poor black people since the hurricane of the 1920's when people were just left to die with no medical relief, emergency shelter (anybody who thinks the Super Dome was adequate as an emergency shelter couldn't have been there) or post disaster recovery plan.

But the other is all the kindness and generosity Marva is so quick to point from The Blues societies of Maryland and vicinity who took her and her family in, found her gigs, and finally a temporary apartment.

Events like Katrina are a proving ground for the survivors, for those who are responsible for dealing with their aftermath, and those who observed from afar. Two out of three in most cases isn't to bad a ratio, but in the case of something the size of Katrina when the one who fell down on the job were the ones in charge of the recovery, it's a disaster of the first order.

The people from all over the world volunteered their services to help people whose own government seemed incapable of doing so. No change has come for poor black people; they are still marginalized and swept under the carpet. No change has come for the working poor of any colour; they have no voice that can be heard by those in power.

"Change Is Going To Come" is both a plea and a demand in this version of the song for change. Please Marva seems to be saying don't make us go through this again while saying at the same time that we won't go through it again.

After The Levees Broke is an album that shows off the diversity of the talent of Marva Wright. It is also one the best musical responses to Katrina by an individual artist yet. It's beautiful and heartfelt, haunting and life affirming all at the same time. If more voices like Marva Wright's could be heard perhaps New Orleans can be saved for the people who live there, and not just the tourists. After all if it weren't for their music there wouldn't be any tourists

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:38 AM | Permalink

Joey Harker isn't like other boys his age. It's not just the fact that he has absolutely no sense of direction, put him down on a street in the town where he's lived all his life and he'll walk a block and he'll be completely lost. In fact he's so lacking in a normal sense of direction that he once got lost traveling from his bedroom at the top of his house to the kitchen when he tried to make his way down for supper.

Okay, sure the house had just been renovated, and the new addition for his baby brother was another corridor that he could turn the wrong way onto, but getting lost in your own house, what a loser. That's pretty much what everyone in school though of him too. Oh they liked him well enough and he didn't get beaten up more then average, but he could be guaranteed merciless abuse anytime he discovered a new way to lose himself.

But he figures this one is going to make the rest of them look like nothing. He and two others in his Social Studies class had been dropped off downtown and told to find their way back to school, on foot without phoning, taking a cab, or taking a bus. Of course he happens to be with the one girl in the school he has a crush on, and who barely knows he exists, and the guy in school who seems to have been designed to be put on the face of the earth to make him miserable.

But in about a half hour's time he's going to be looking back on those worries and concerns with fondness as he's about to find out just why he can't ever find his way from point A to B. What he finds out about himself makes Interworld one of the strangest, interesting, and slightly bizarre fantasy/science fiction books you're going to read in a long time.

Of course there's a very good reason for the book's qualities. Interworld is the result of melding the fantastical mind of Neil Gaiman, responsible for books like Stardust, American Gods, and the movie MirrorMask with the science fiction brain of Michael Reaves who's written television scripts for everything from Star Trek: The Next Generation to The Twilight Zone and instalments of the Star Wars series of novels.

When this type of meeting of minds is attempted the universe just may not recover. Who knows what those two hyper active imaginations could get up to and what long-term effects it could have on life as we know it. It could become so bent out of shape as to look like everybody's been living in a fun house mirror. Little things will be out of place on people's bodies, or they will be shaped in ways that aren't the same as we're used to. Either too wide and square or too tall and straight or other equally strange appearance shifts like fur all over the body, and feathers instead of hair.

Interestingly enough that's just the sort of thing that Joey encounters after the day he takes his first Walk. You see Joey may not be able to find his way to corner store, but he can slip between the different versions of the earth at will, as well as into the couple of other places in between. He's what turns out to be called a Walker, and a particularly powerful one at that. But before he finds that out and other surprises there's the certain matter of him having to be rescued from one of the bad guys – in this case the forces of magic.

What Joey finds out, and even eventually comes to understand, is there are millions upon million of alternate earth realities that for all intents in purpose are stretched out in an arc. On some versions of earth they developed magic as their primary means of technology and on others science became the dominant force. At each end of the arc are worlds which are completely dominated by one or the other and each have their hearts set on conquering everything and making them all in their own image.

As you get closer to the centre of the arc worlds are much more in balance so of course they are targets for the forces of either the HEX (magic) Empire or the Binary (science) Empire. The job of protecting the worlds that are still in balance falls to people like Joey who can walk between the different worlds – the Walkers.

The other thing they all have in common is that they are all Joey. Each and every Walker is Joey as he/she is in a separate reality or world. He might be a little older there, he might be descended from people who evolved from wolves, been born with wings, or have grown up on a version of earth with twenty times the gravitational pull of his own. But no matter what, they are all variations on the theme of Joey.

Talk about a lesson in getting to know yourself? Especially when you've started off on the wrong foot and all 500 versions of you want nothing to do with you and you don't blame them. For it was through your carelessness while being rescued that another version of you was killed, the version of you who had rescued all the people at the training facility you end up in.

Sometimes it’s a really great relief to read a book that is simply enjoyable. Well written, interesting characters, easy plotline to follow, good guys to cheer for, and bad guys to boo. It's even better if the book is smart, witty, and doesn't just spoon-feed you. Interworld does all that and more. From the first page we are drawn into the life of Joey as we watch him stumble for the first time from his world into another to eventually meeting himself five hundred times over.

How often are there books written for a young audience where the idea of self-awareness is even broached? It may not be said in so many words, but Joey is continually evaluating himself, and coming up short each time, in comparison to the character of himself as it was formed on the other worlds. Eventually he learns to stop comparing and recognize his own gifts instead of wishing to be more like the others.

The truly amazing thing about Interworld are the incredible number of variations on the name Joseph that exist. The authors don't call all five hundred of them by name – but I know they could if they had to. Reading a book by one mind with a great imagination is wonderful; to read one written by two great imaginations is wonderful squared. Interworld and a place to sit where you won't be interrupted is the ideal formulae for enjoyment.

Interworld is published by Harper Collins and is available at retailers everywhere, no matter which version of earth you live in.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 11:22 PM | Permalink

Two elderly men are strolling along St. Catharine St. in Montreal Quebec, Canada. They turn into the doors of Ben's and take the same two stools at the counter they've been sitting at everyday for the last, who knows how many years. They each wear suits that were in style fifty years ago with pork-pie fedora hats of the same era perched on their heads.

After placing their orders, coffee for one seltzer for the other, two smoked meats on rye, one with and the other without mustard, they get down to the serious work of talking. After the usual exchange of medical information –"the doctor says my blood pressure is through the roof again and wants that I should change what I eat", people who have died. "Pftt just like that his heart stopped, no warning, nothing", the subject of grandchildren sits down to stay for a while.

"So what's this I hear about your girl's boy, Joshua, the Socalled musician type with his funny ideas about music, he's put out another record of loud noise to make our heads hurt?

"I have two words for you; Theodore Bikel"
"Theodore Bikel – Theodore Bikel the singer?
"No Theodore Bikel the baker. Of course Theodore Bikel the singer, what other Theodore Bikel is there?
"Okay, Okay, don't get so excited your blood pressure remember – you look a little puce- what about Theodore Bikel, not the baker, but the singer?"
"He's on Joshua's new album."
"What's Theodore Bikel doing on an album like that?"
"Singing, what else would Theodore Bikel be doing on a record, fitting people for suits"?

"But I thought Joshua did that knock, knock music that those young meshugena's play so loud in their cars. What's Theodore Bikel doing on that type of record?"
"It's rap music, don't you know from nothing anymore? Anyway my Joshua doesn't play that type of rap music, there aren't big booms or noisy bangs on one of his records he has real people singing, real people like Theodore Bikel. And you know, you know what Theodore Bikel is singing on little grandson's record?
"How should I know, but I'm sure you're going to tell me, so get on with it already – the suspense is killing me"
"If I Were A Rich Man"
"If what were you a rich man, and what's that got to do with what Theodore Bikel was doing on this so called record"
"What, did you think God said trains instead of brains and went off looking for the line for the plane? That's the song he sings, "If I Were A Rich Man", on the record. Of course you have to know the song, because all he sings is the 'La de da de da' bit."
"That's my favourite bit of that song – remember in the movie when he's dancing around the barn doing that bit – that was my favourite bit. Of course that wasn't Theodore Bikel in the movie was it, that was that Topaz or something, in the movie. But still Theodore Bikel singing the 'La de da de da' bit on young Joshua's record, that's a good thing."

The waitress brings them their sandwiches and they begin the serious business of trying to open their mouths wide enough to eat the stack of meat and bread without their partials falling out. They're chewing away contentedly for a while, when the second (with mustard) says. "But that's only one"

"Only one what?"
"Only one song. What's the rest of this Socalled record like, can you tell me that? Or is all you know Theodore Bikel?
"Is all I know Theodore Bikel? This is my grandson we're talking about, of course I know more than just Theodore Bikel!"
"Well"
"Well what?"
"Well are you going to show me you know more than Theodore Bikel and this Socalled record?'
"Why do you keep calling it a so-called record? It's a record, there's nothing so-called about it."
"See how little you know about your own grandson, he says so himself it's a Socalled record". He fishes in the side pocket of his suit jacket and pulls out a CD. Holding it up towards his face, he reads out carefully. "Socalled, Ghettoblaster" and hands it over to his friend triumphantly. "That's what little Joshua calls himself on these records "Socalled". So all his records are Socalled records. It's a sad day when a grandfather knows so little about his grandson that he doesn't even know his stage name"
"And how long were you going to sit there yanking my chain?" He shook his head and looked at his grandson's CD. He turned to his friend and holding it up in one hand he shot him a questioning look.

"Nu" he said through raised eyebrows "Did you listen or are you just carrying it around to show off with? Don't you be lying to me now, cause I'll know"

"Well, I tell you, it's like this. I was in up at Jacob's place just off St. Laurent. I had just come from looking at the stone for my Sylvia ("May she rest in peace" his friend muttered under his breath) and I was walking, just remembering things from our life together, and out one of those modern music stores I hear Klezmar like I've never heard Klezmar."

"There was the banjo and the fiddle, the clarinet and the squeeze box, and some beautiful young women singing. Don't ask me how I know they were beautiful, with voices like that they have to be angels. But also somebody was talking, at first I thought it was rude, talking like that when people are playing so beautiful. Then I heard the words and they were in rhyme and somehow they seemed right."

"So I stood there and listened to the next song and some children started to sing and they sang with another man talking and he talked about liking each other more and understanding between Gods and religions. I thought that's a good thing to be talking about today when everybody seems to get angry about God all the time – which is something I don't understand because I was always taught that the love of God is a beautiful thing that should bring light and happiness."

When the third song was more Klezmar with more beautiful voices of the angels singing about love, I saw I was crying, silly old man standing on a sidewalk listening to young people's music and crying, I said to myself. But it made me think of Sylvia and how much she would have liked it and I couldn't remember when I had told her last before she died if I loved her."

He paused to blow his nose for a second, and his friend reached out and patted him on the arm, leaving his hand there for a second and giving a gentle squeeze. He took a sip of his seltzer; it helped calm his stomach and continued.

"So I went into the store because I thought I should buy this music so I can listen at home when I want. I don't know if the young girl behind the counter was more shocked by me or if I was shocked by her – she had more pieces of metal sticking out of her then a porcupine has quills. Anyway I asked her who it was that was making that beautiful music playing outside their store and she smiled a big smile – it would have been a lovely smile too if not for what looked like a swizzle stick in her lip – and said it was by Socalled and was called Ghettoblaster"

I said I didn't care if it was by What-ch-ma-call-it and called Gunpowder I wanted to buy a copy. She thought that was funny and went and got me a copy. Of course that's when I remembered I didn't have anything to play CD's with and asked her if they sold something like what the kids use to play music when they walk and she sold me one of those too. I've been listening to it all day, since yesterday.

You're grandson Joshua is a very intelligent young man. Who knew you could take our old music and make it new again. Calling it Ghettoblaster is a good thing too, breaking down the walls and getting us all out of our ghettos is important. He also has other people talking about their people on here and not just him talking about himself.

It's also good that he uses his own culture instead of pretending to be somebody he's not. More people should learn not to be ashamed of where they come from, but also that where they come from doesn't make them better than anybody else either"

The two old friends sat in silence and finished their sandwiches. They pretended to fight each other for the other's bill as usual and ended up paying each for their own again. Before they left the second man reached into his other jacket pocket and lovingly took out a portable CD player. Removing his hearing aid he put the earpieces in and turned the machine on. He picked up the empty CD case from the counter top and eased himself to his feet.

With a smile the first old man reached into his pocket and repeated the same process. When they left the restaurant their feet no longer shuffled but moved ever so gently to the beat of the music rising from their pockets into their memories and walked out into the present day.

The people mentioned in this review are fictional characters with exception of Joshua "Socalled" Dolgin and Theodore Bikel, and any resemblance to actual people living or dead is strictly accidental. Ghettoblaster by Socalled is produced by JDUB Records and available everywhere quality music is sold.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 12:58 PM | Permalink

Do you remember when you were young and there were certain short story writers whose tales always made you feel good. They could be scary, they could be funny, or they could just be about things that made you think. But whenever you read a book of their stories you felt as comfortable as is you were tucked into bed in a warm comforter on the coldest night of the year.

It might be a howling blizzard of whatever outside but inside the comfort of those pages you were long gone and safe. You could be staring down the biggest, ugliest, and hairiest monster known to all human and non-human kind and feel right at home. These worlds of the imagination kept away the reality of the test you hadn't studied for tomorrow, or that you had made a fool of yourself at school (again) today and were going to suffer for it for at least the next week.

You wished that you too could really climb aboard that rocket ship to go off and encounter strange places and even stranger beings. In my opinion Ray Bradbury was the past master of these stories, and it appears I'm not alone in that thought. Neil Gaiman's latest collection of short stories isn't titled M Is For Magic by accident. He says in his forward that he phoned Ray Bradbury and asked his permission to tip his hat to Ray's wonderful collection of short stories R Is For Rocket.

Neil Gaiman is of course the author of an incredible body of work ranging from graphic novels, The Sandman series, movie scripts (MirrorMask), to a multitude of books and short stories for adults and children. His books can scare you half to death and leave you delighted and smiling. But mainly, just like the man he admires so much, opening a book of his short stories is the surest way to forget yourself and the troubles of your day for as long as you're able to keep the book open.

Nominally for young people M Is For Magic is like Bradbury's collection before, a compilation of stories culled from previous works that Mr. Gaiman felt younger readers would like. The book appeals to the place inside of us that yearns for stories of less then earth-shattering importance. Somewhere inside us are still those kids who loved to listen to ghost stories around the camp fire, to look up at the night sky and wonder who might be living up there, and who knew there were stranger things living in the woods than foxes and rabbits no matter what our parents said.

True to the spirit of their predecessors the stories of M Is For Magic stand ready to whisk you away into the arms of the mysterious and wonderful worlds they contain. Although each story is a gem in it's own right, there are a couple whose sparkle really caught my eye.

To adolescent boys girls seem to be from another planet. So when Enn and his friend Vic crash a party full of girls it seems only natural to him that they are incomprehensible. But gradually it dawns on him that even for girls they are remarkably different in their manners and ways of being. "How To Talk To Girls At Parties" takes the fear all young men experience when dealing with the opposite sex and turns it on its head. It's all right that you don't understand them – they really are from another planet.

"Troll Bridge" does a different type of headstand, as it plays a strange twist on the evil troll under the bridge story. Oh it's still big, ugly, hairy, scary, and waiting to eat the life out of you, but he's also willing to make bargains. But sometimes it's hard to tell with bargaining who is getting the better side of the deal. Besides once you get away from the troll, who would really keep their side of the deal and come back later? Would you?

Gaiman's wonderful humour, cracked and bent like an old willow tree, comes to the fore in "Chivalry", a very strange and modern take on the Holy Grail quest. Galaad, of King Arthur's court in Camelot, at least that's what his I.D. says, and his horse drop by unexpectedly for tea at Mrs.Whitaker's to try and trade her for the Grail. She had picked it up for forty pence at the Thrift store just down the block from the butcher's.

She's awfully loath to part with it though, because it looks so good up there on the mantle piece between the photo of her late husband and the little porcelain dog. But Galaad is such a nice young man and keeps offering such nice gifts in exchange. The famed Philosopher's Stone that will turn lead into gold, a Phoenix Egg, and an apple of Hesperides with the power to make one young again.

While the last isn't proper for an old lady now is it, causing her to think such thoughts and at her age, so she sternly admonishes him to put it away. But the other two, well two for one, you can't say fairer than that, now can you. And Galaad rides off on his horse happy with his grail, and Mrs Whitaker is quite content with her stone and her egg. Even though the egg does have to lean on the porcelain dog to stand up they still fill the space on the mantelpiece nicely.

There's an old fashioned quality to the way Gaiman writes his stories, but not such that it makes them dated. Perhaps it's an air of nostalgia to them, a reminder of something that seems to have gone missing from our lives in recent years. We can't quite put our finger on what it is exactly, but reading his stories seems to fill an emptiness that you didn't even know you had.

Part of it is the sense of whimsy that drifts though each story; the wistful air of knowing that the innocence that allows these stories to exist is quite alien to our world. Galaad is no more likely to ride up and park his horse in one of our kitchen gardens then Superman is of dropping by for coffee. The balance I'd say lies in the title of the collection, M Is For Magic.

Just as in Bradbury's day, when he compiled R Is For Rocket, space seemed remote and inaccessible, today magic has all but vanished and doesn't exist outside of books and movies. In movies we know that it's all special effects so magic has been reduced to technology, taking away the mystery and the whiff of danger.

The only place we really find any magic at all is in the minds of a few writers who remember what it was like to pretend and imagine what if… What if you could buy the Holy Grail in a thrift shop? Wouldn't it follow that Sir Galaad of the Knights of the Round Table would show up at your door looking for it?

M Is For Magic is published by Harper Collins and is available at various on line and regular retailers around the world. A little magic in a life never hurt anyone, and M Is For Magic is one of the best sources your likely to find for a while. Buy it for a child you love; better yet buy two copies, one of them just for you.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:28 PM | Permalink

It seems that like I had only just started to hear about this magnificent bass player doing absolutely incredible things with the instrument, and then he was dead. Jaco Pastorius released his first solo album in 1976, Jaco Pastorius, and was dead by 1987. During those nine years he didn't just redefine the role of the electric bass in popular music, he destroyed it and then rebuilt it from the ground up again until it was unrecognizable.

From his tenure in Weather Report; his collaborations with individuals as diverse as Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock, and Jonnie Mitchell; and to his own too few solo albums he never stopped looking for new ways of expressing himself through his instrument of choice. Until that time no one had thought of the bass as anything more than a means of playing a song's rhythm, and hardly any music was created with it in mind specifically.

Jaco pulled the bass out of the background where it was buried in the mix alongside the kick drum and placed it out front with the guitars, horns, and keyboards. Well you say, so what, look at funk were the bass line was front and centre from its earliest days, pushing the beat and the song ahead of it. True but it never led, Jaco wasn't just out front slapping out the beat for the big boys. In his hands the bass became a melodic instrument playing everything from leads to harmonies for vocals.

I don't know if it's a coincidence, but probably not, that in this the twentieth year anniversary of Jaco Patorius' death, Sony/BMG Legacy has released a two disc package that traces his whole mercurial career. The Essential Jaco Pastorius being released on the 26th of June contains excerpts from his major collaborations, his years with Weather Report, and his incredible solo career.

From the start of disc one to the end of disc two they lovingly record his progress almost every inch of the way. It still takes my breath away that a young bass player not only would have the audacity and the bravery to release a solo album, but that it would feature his own compositions as well as standards. From the very first cut on his first album, he let the world know what was coming.

"Donna Lee" was an old Charlie Parker be-bop standard that Jaco took on accompanied only by Don Alias on congas. I can imagine old Jazz guys looking at this and thinking to themselves, "Who the hell does this kid think he is?", and then listening and finding out exactly who he was. To hear a song played on solo bass that had previously been played on tenor saxophone is still astonishing today so to have it heard an unheralded kid playing it back in the seventies must have been mind blowing.

The song that impressed me the most from this album was his solo composition "Portrait Of Tracy" written for his first wife. It's here that he shows the true potential, in my mind, for a bass to be melodic instrument. At times he sounded like a keyboard, with fat, fuzzy notes, and other times he created harmonic chords that resonated with a harp sound reminiscent more of Ireland than Jazz.

As we move down the years with him through the two discs of this collection we hear every single bit of the potential demonstrated on his first album realized and expanded upon in each of collaborations. From playing in the Pat Metheny trio exchanging licks and leads, pummelling out funk lines with Herbie Hancock, laying down ethereal counterpoint to Joni Mitchell's vocals, leading Weather Report into places in Jazz fusion that nobody could have imagined, to heading up his own small orchestra on his penultimate album Word Of Mouth.

Just when you think you can't be amazed anymore, he pushes the envelope a little further. Dropping an homage to Jimi Hendrix into the middle of a song by riffing on the lead from "Third Stone From The Sun", complete with feedback and distortion, and not taking anything away from the song or sounding like he's showing off. The seamless blending of songs and styles into one harmonious moment is indicative of a mind and a talent that can recognise potential and act upon it simultaneously.

By the end of his career Jaco Pastorius's feel and instinct for the music was to the point where he was capable of doing things other musicians wouldn't even dream of trying. Playing an instrument normally associated with keeping the rhythm and nothing else, he was able to innovate and accomplish more in nine years of recordings then many so called lead players did in careers three times as long.

In this era of mega basses that can break a sternum at twenty paces it seems like nobody remembers that a bass can be subtle instrument; an instrument of delicate harmony and precision that doesn't have to be loud to be effective. Listening to half the music produced today it's as if the work Jaco accomplished exists in a vacuum, and nobody outside of that bubble heard anything he did. Perhaps it's just a matter of the rest of the world still being so far behind him that they have yet to catch up to where he was when he left us.

There is a wonderful booklet that accompanies the two discs with a great appreciation and history of Jaco's music written by his biographer Bill Milkowski. There are full credits for each song, right down to who is playing second violin in the string section. But the part I liked the most was a forward written by Carlos Santana, and I'm going to give him the last word.

I can say without hesitation that Jaco changed the music world that we live in, and he changed it for the better. Is there any better or more significant legacy a musician could hope for than that? Carlos Santana

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:15 AM | Permalink

The first time I heard African popular music was back in the early 1980's when Peter Gabriel put out the first World Of Music And Dance (WOMAD) album. It was a double album featuring musicians from the mainstream like Talking Heads, Madness, The English Beat, and Gabriel himself, who all displayed world influences in their music. In the case of all those groups this meant Africa.

Each of the above groups had prepared a special re-mix of a song to represent them on the albums emphasising the rhythm. In those days that didn't mean just turning up the bass in the mix; they actually recorded extra tracks, or even re did the song in some cases, in order to put more focus on the percussion and to release some of the tension from the beat that normally propelled the tune.

The overall sound of the song changed into some sort of weird hybrid of hyper urban-based music and relaxed rural African beats. Although it was rather odd sounding especially as compared to what these bands normally sounded like, it made a lot more sense when the first track from an African group was played. King Sunny Ade was a revelation with his guitar-dominated sound that was wonderfully infused with the rhythms of what seemed a virtual army of percussionists.

There was something so totally infectious about the music that it was probably the first time most of understood that hips did more than just connect your legs to the rest of your body. From that time onward I've always associated African music with that call it exerts on your body to get on your feet and dance. No other musicians from any country, no matter what their nationality, (not even the best Reggae performers) seem to have mastered the seemingly effortless way the music flows in a river of sound.

Nearly thirty years and a generation later it was the first thing I noticed about Na Afriki, the newest release by Dobet Gnahoré on the Cumbancha label, the river has new pilots and captains who, while still sailing the same waters, have started to chart new territories. Of course I still can't imagine listening to this music and not being compelled to move, just sitting and listening to my player I was unconsciously moving my head and shoulders in time with the music. In fact sitting here typing this is enough to bring back sufficient memory of the music to compel me to repeat those movements and to hear the rhythm in the sound of my keyboard typing.

But Dobet Gnahoré is doing so much more with her music than just giving us a means to unlock our pelvises. Since the age of twelve when she convinced her father that her real schooling was to be found at home in the artist's colony he lived in, she has immersed herself in the culture of Africa. Music, dance, and theatre have all been studied and incorporated and it shows in her broadened sensitivities to what can be accomplished with music.

In the traditional world of male, African storytelling singers, who know the histories of people and communities and are able to compose songs about them as required, there was little place for a woman to find inspiration. Dobet took as her example the woman who formed the artistic collective she grew up in. Wérewére Liking of the Cameroon teaches her charges to be cultural entrepreneurs who fan out across the globe carrying the heart of Africa with them

On Na Afriki (To Africa) Dobet sings in eight different languages or dialects representing countries from the extreme North, Egypt, to the Southern most tip, South Africa. She is truly pan-African not just in her choice of language but her subject matter. Along with her husband and musical collaborator, Colin Laroche de Féline, she has composed fifteen tracks that examine all aspects of contemporary African life.

A voice that is full of passion is hard to ignore no matter whether you understand the language that it's singing in or not. Dobet Gnahoré's voice is strong with the power of her belief in herself and the people of Africa. This is not the strident voice of politics, although politics are part of the mix, shouting hate and anger. Nor is it the naïve voice of a child singing about some never-never land of universal love and peace.

She is the voice of compassion for ears that have never heard anything but disdain and abuse and she is the sound of pride for people who have been bowed down by the indignity of poverty and bleak futures. She gives voice to the anger of people who have for too long seen their countries pillaged by the first opportunist who comes along and sees a way of milking them even drier. But most of all she is a voice of hope to spirits who have suffered drought as surely as the land.

She points her finger at the false Gods of money and commerce that have been raised at the expense of humanity, and rips back the veil on taboo subjects like incest. In a voice filled with anguish and so much pain you don't want to listen she mourns all those who have departed, and remembers those who have been massacred by calling for a war without weapons. Evoking memories of Martin Luther King jr. she sings about the road to freedom and a rebellion of the black man without weapons because too many people have died already.

Obviously without the translations of the lyrics in the booklet enclosed with the CD I wouldn't have been able to tell you the exact details of her song's contents. So how much does a person who doesn't speak the language of the song get out of the experience if they don't sit with the lyrics in front of them? The combination of music and her ability to express emotion with her voice, no matter what the language, is sufficient to communicate the primary feeling behind the lyrics of a song to an audience.

Na Afriki by Dobet Gnahoré breaks new ground for African popular music as for the first time an artist reaches beyond the borders of her own country to speak directly to the rest of the continent. Bob Marley might have sung about Africa uniting, but Dobet sings to the Africa that will unite. With her in the vanguard that doesn't seem quite as impossible as it used to.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:38 PM | Permalink

When you've worked in around the arts for most of your adult life you get used to the occasional odd glance from people when you tell them what you do for a living. There's still a great deal of suspicion on the part of the general public as to the legitimacy of the arts. Not just as a career choice either, the whole idea of creative expression unsettles a good many people.

Now I can't really blame them, especially here in North America where we don't have the cultural traditions of Europe. Sure we have art galleries that display some of the finest work in the world, and North America has produced and continues to produce artists of the highest calibre in all media. But those people, for the most part, have succeeded in spite of their environment, instead of because of it.

Our antipathy to the arts is deep-seated; it's not something that just sprang up over night. It is an ingrained aspect of North American society; deeply rooted and firmly embedded since the first Puritan set foot upon our shores.

The story we're told is they came here seeking freedom from religious persecution. What's probably closer to the truth is not that many people were thrilled with their brand of austere Christianity. Puritans were probably the originators of every cliché you'd want to hear about the merits of hard work from sun up to sun down until you died (except on Sundays of course) and went to heaven to receive your eternal reward.

Life on earth was not meant for pleasure or for fun. We're here to repent for the sin of Adam and Eve so we could pass muster to get into heaven. The idea of doing something for purely aesthetic reasons wouldn't even have occurred to the Puritan and they would have thought anyone who did so misguided at best, an evil sinner at worst. People who genuinely believed that "idle hands were the devil's playground" the idea of taking the time needed to think about writing a poem or contemplating the play of light and shadow in preparation for a drawing would have been as foreign as cannibalism is to you and me.

This belief system is core of North American society to this day. Why else would people work themselves into early graves by slaving long hours at jobs they hate or don't really care about? Sure now they don't have to wait until going to heaven for some of their reward and there are all sorts of material gains they can accumulate. So doing something just for the sake of doing it, with no guarantee of a tangible pay off, is just as strange and alien to them as their Puritan forefathers.

Of course suspicion of the arts has gone beyond that by now and has become so deep seated that most people don't even have a rational explanation for their not being interested. "Only fags do that shit", "It's stupid", "What's the point", and "It's boring" are more likely to be the response these days. Which, although far preferable to being burned at the stake for being a witch, means that the arts still have a way to go before they get a measure of general acceptance.

L'art pour l'art, the art for the art; or as we have transliterated it, art for art's sake is a motto that even a good many artists have trouble accepting in our society. They still feel they have to justify the fact that they are creating something unique by applying a symbolic meaning to it for people to hold on to. Even if it is something ridiculous and inane: "The white on white is indicative of the stark realities and choices we face in everyday life – look at the texture of the brush strokes – their agitation reflects the anxiety we feel…" well you get the idea.

Certainly artists create pieces of work to evoke an emotional or intellectual reaction from the reader, the listener, or the observer. But no one can predict how different people will react to the same object. Everyone will have a different reaction based on their own life experiences and backgrounds. That's the beauty of art – it's innate ability to evoke spontaneous, nearly instinctive, reactions from people.

It's also what people fear the most about art, its ability to speak directly with anybody and everybody who comes in contact with it. Whether it's an entire audience being moved by a stirring anthem like Beethoven's Ninth Sympathy, or a single person reading a line of poetry that moves him or her, their understanding of humanity's potential will grow.

Art makes a lie out of the expression the sky is the limit. It has the capability to expand and extend our horizons to the furthest limits of our imaginations and beyond even that. Is it any wonder that in totalitarian states artists are tightly controlled if not forbidden to produce work? Books are burned and paintings banned because they are said to be a corrupting influence on the minds of the populace, as if people can't decide for themselves what they like.

Art needs to be a communal experience, with the artist offering up his or her vision to the audience for them to appreciate and interpret on their terms. Together they define not just a particular piece, but the premise of artistic creation. Because for each of us the experience will be different, the totality of the community is maintained. Removing our right to reach our own decision on what a piece of art means takes away one of the key elements of the experience, trivializes the process, and ends the life of art.

"The art for the art" is already an alien enough concept as it is in North America. If we remove the area that involves the observer from the process it becomes just another static form of entertainment that does nothing for us aside from providing a distraction.

For an environment that has not been the kindest to the arts, North America has produced some brilliantly talented geniuses in all media. By simply allowing them to be and continue what they've started, by allowing the nascent community of art to continue to take root within our cultural soil, we will ensure, at the least, that we always have artists, art, and people wanting to view it.

Any moves that curtail any aspect of it will surely cut it off at the roots or worse. We've already got enough to answer for as it is, lets not also have the death of art laid at our door.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:11 AM | Permalink

I love you. Isn't it amazing how three little words can have such an impact? What other words in the English language do you know that can bring a conversation to a complete standstill in quite the way those three single syllable words can? I hate you delivered in just the right tone comes close, but even they don't have the bone jarring, hitting the brakes hard effect of I love you.

A couple, for arguments sake let us say a man and a woman, have been seeing each other for some time. They've discovered they have a lot in common and really enjoy each other's company. They've gone to bed a couple of times and the sex has been good. All in all things are, as the books say, developing.

Yet the first time one says I love you to the other – and no matter what guys like to think it's as likely to be the man as the woman – almost inevitably it will be followed by a long pause. Of course a lot depends on the timing, there's a big difference in saying I love you in the heat of passion from blurting it out while doing dishes.

While you can sort of gloss over it in the former circumstances as being caught up in the moment, in the latter there's no escaping the consequences of truly meaning what you are saying. Saying I love in the middle of doing something as prosaic as the dishes has infinite more depth of meaning than when in the midst of sex. It's a definitive declaration of devotion not coloured by passion or lust.

Which is of course what brings about the aforementioned sudden stoppage in conversation. Sometimes it will end quickly and be followed by hugs and joyful tears. Other times it will be followed by a pause that you can drive a truck through, stop and unload it, refill the gas tank, and climb back into the cabin before a vocalized reaction is forthcoming. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it sure is unnerving to sit through before the other party bursts into a big grin or at least says "I love you" in return.

Of course if the silence stretches just that little bit too long, and then continues for a little more after that, it's usually a sign that the other party isn't as ready to make that declaration with the same amount of feeling. An "I love you too" might eventually be forthcoming but it there is a conditional quality to it that is inescapable.

There's more than semantics involved in the differences between being in love with someone and loving someone. The general consensus seems to be that to be in love implies a singularity of devotion while loving implies nothing more than a general affection. Friends can love friends, but that doesn't mean they are in love with each other anymore than a sister and brother are in love.

It all sounds pretty darn confusing doesn't it for such a simple little phrase like I love you but that's just the beginning. It's absolutely astounding the many uses that simple phrase can be put to. While it may sound like a simple avowal of affection it seems to get utilized for other, less savoury purposes, quite often.

The use of "I love you" in emotional blackmail is one of the more common occurrences of this phenomenon. Not to be confused with guilt, emotional blackmail is used by nasty, manipulative people in order to ensure that world revolves around them continually. In order to successfully utilize emotional blackmail one must be completely without scruples and selfish beyond belief.

A petulant "I love you" that implies there is no possible way the other person can actually care for you as deeply as you do for them is a wonderful tool to use for emotional blackmail. It infers that if the other person really meant their "I love you" they would hasten to oblige you with whatever you wanted as proof of their devotion.

Not quite as subtle as emotional blackmail the ever-popular guilt trip is nearly as insidious. What it lacks in nastiness is more then compensated for by its pervasiveness. Used in situations where you need to get the emotional upper hand on the other person. Your use of "I love you" should imply a "but" preceding the phrase in order to create the proper "how could you do this to me" effect required to induce or accentuate guilt.

We human beings are complicated creatures, creating ties that bind us together. While ostensibly claiming they are based on love, a great many are based on expectations and obligations. These in turn create roles for us to play and duties to be fulfilled in order to be able to say, "I love you". The dutiful wife who shows love by preparing supper for husband who shows love by bringing home money are two obvious examples of this.

Even though those two roles have fallen pretty much out of favour there are many others that still exist. It's these constructs that create the means for three simple words to be used as weapons. We all have some preconceived notions of what "love" is supposed to be and what is supposed to happen when we are in love. The majority of those ideas have been formed by observing what's around us.

Failure to deliver on that promise of ideal romantic bliss, or whatever it is we are looking for, will result in resentment and jealousy. In turn that will result in the games I've described above as people try to make their roles work. Somehow we have construed love to mean that a person owes you something in return for you loving them. Do this for me because I love you is emotional blackmail and a direct result of that belief..

Instead of acting as though loving somebody entitles you to demand things of them shouldn't it be the exact opposite. If you truly love somebody you are grateful to them for being in your life and demand of yourself what you can do for them. In turn they will do the same for you. A loving relationship shouldn't be about coercion, it should be a reciprocal arrangement with equal amounts of give and take flowing both ways.

I love you are three of the most potent word in the English language. It's only unfortunate that too often it is for the wrong reasons. Isn't it about time that we leave behind the idea that saying I love entitles you to something in return? I thought only prostitutes were paid for love.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:49 AM | Permalink

In the dark of the night,
when I'm alone in my room
I remember you Father of mine.

When I'm alone in my head,
and the fear comes along
I remember you Father of mine.

The hand that should
have brought comfort,
the touch that should
have been love,

The voice that should
have been gentle,
the words that should
have been kind.

The face that should
have brought calming,
the eyes that should
have been gentle.

You came and you took
what didn't belong,
You left behind
fear, shame and hate.

Fathers and sons,
play games by the light
of the day, but yours
were in the blackness of night.

Our love, it was special,
it had to hide,
under covers and
behind blinds.

I wasn't to tell,
not a word, not a sound
not even to mom,
was it allowed.

So for years I was silent
even to me,
but now that is over,
I will say it out loud.

In the dark of the night,
when I'm alone in my room,
I remember you Father of mine.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 01:36 AM | Permalink

Four hundred years ago you welcomed some strangers into your homes. You showed them how to survive, where to find food, how to build shelter, and what plants were good for fighting off sickness. At first they seemed pretty grateful and appreciated the help. But when their extended families began to show up and instead of being polite and asking for help they began demanding you give them what they wanted.

At first you went along with it but eventually you said enough is enough, you guys are your own. Unfortunately by that time they were pretty well established and were able to start pushing you around. They forced you to leave your homes so they could use the land they were built on for themselves.

Well that was okay you had cousins on the other side of the mountains you could go and live with. But it seemed they're were a lot more of those strangers than you first thought and they had lots of friends and family who wanted places to live as well. Eventually there were just too many of them and they took all the land for themselves leaving little pieces for you to try and scratch out a living on.

If that wasn't bad enough they decided that what you believed in and the language you spoke wasn't what they wanted you to teach your children so they took them away from you too. When and if they came home they didn't know who they were anymore. The strangers didn't want them and they didn't know how to live with you.

Finally, and only in the past little while, your people have begun to figure out who they are again and to try and reconcile that with the world as it is today. Some of you have started learning the ways of the new people and using that knowledge to help your people get back some of what they had lost.

Children are learning the language of their grandfathers, and singing the old songs again. The stories that you used to tell each other to help you understand the world and teach you how to live a good life are being told again and the dances and songs that celebrated your way of life are being sung at gatherings of the people. Some tongues have been stilled forever and some stories will never be told again, but a lot has been saved.

When you consider that history, and the many attempts that have been made to eradicate you and your way of being from the face of the earth, recent events are even more disquieting. There has always been the occasional one of them who has appreciated your way of life and emulated it. Some of them have even been stupid enough to pretend to be one of you like that English guy who called himself Grey Owl.

But now things are getting really out of hand. First of all the same people who had tried so hard to summarily obliterate all that you stood for have taken to setting you up on pedestals as the epitome of harmony with nature. You have become a bizarre mixture of Rousseau's Noble Savage, St. Francis of Assisi, and pagan environmentalist.

Your women are being treated like they are some sort of Earth Mother/Goddess creatures who know all the secrets of creation. Your men are all depicted as deep thinkers and brave warrior types who are stoical in the face of any danger or pain. Being merely human and alive don't seem like sufficient justification for your existence.

If your grandparents had wondered about Grey Owl's sanity in choosing to portray himself as one of you, what would they think of the crop of folk who are either passing themselves off as being descended from your blood or as having been taught your "secrets" to a better life by people unnamed.

What makes all this especially nauseating is that these people are doing this all in the name of their twin Gods Money and Ego. They write books and teach and turn a quick buck and make themselves out to be something special. Who knows what kind of misleading ideas they are filling people's heads with about you and your people while raking in the dough and looking great in tailored deerskins.

Some of the things you read are so incredible that if you hadn't read them you wouldn't believe then. That anybody would make claims such as they are direct conduits for people who lived hundred's of years ago is astounding. They call it "channelling" but you can think of quite a few words that are far more descriptive than that to describe what you think of it.

The irony of the situation hasn't been lost on you. All that you've struggled so hard to reclaim from the times that nobody approved of you is now being stolen from you again. A culture that evolved over thousands of years has been reduced to being packaged as Enlightenment: It's Yours In Twelve Easy Steps or variations on that theme.

Those doing the selling all have impressive sounding names that mean nothing to anyone but themselves and their publishers. But they can call themselves "Where The Sun Don't Shine" and still not come close to understanding anything about who you are and what your experiences have been.

Isn't it bad enough that they tried to destroy your culture by tearing it out of the hearts and minds of your children for three generations? But now they want to claim it for their own selfish uses and diminish you and it in the process. Some people say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and that maybe so in terms of some things. But when you imitate a people's belief system it's nothing but disrespect and theft.

They can talk about being "gifted" with special abilities all they want, but under normal circumstances gifts are given not stolen. That's not something any of them seemed to have grasped yet.

Not much has changed in the past five hundred some years of them taking from you and giving nothing in return has it?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:42 AM | Permalink

Through out history Western civilization has looked back upon itself and named certain eras. There was the Hellenistic Period, (which has nothing to do with Helen of Troy but a lot to do with Alexander the Great who was a Macedonian) followed of course by the Roman Empire. We went down hill for a while after that with the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, but started to perk up with the Renaissance.

Almost every major European power had a "Golden Age" somewhere between the 1500's and the 1700's, although never simultaneously. There was the Age of Reason, which by our standards probably wasn't very reasonable, but relatively speaking it was the best the West had achieved to that point. After that things got a little confusing as we started going in quite a few directions at once so it was hard to give a title that would encompass everybody at once.

There was the age of Nationalism which began with Napoleon and pretty much has been ongoing since, but really peaked at the end of the 19th century when Germany united for the first time and Italy threw off the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War one of course we had a lot of the small countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans being carved out of various former Empires: Latvia, Estonia, Poland, what was then Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia.

Of course the 19th century also marked the beginning of the end of us being a mainly rural, agrarian based society with the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the need for a large labour force to work in the factories. Although never recognized with the honorific of an age, nothing has had more influence on making us in the West what we are today, for better and worse, than the Industrial Revolution.

It allowed for the rise of a merchant class, Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, the stock market, free markets, and any of the other isms we all love to label things with. But there has been a dearth of Ages in that time. The only one that caught on at all was the so-called Age of Aquarius that was being preached about in the 1960's by folk who had serious hallucinogen habits.

But I think that we here in North America have finally done what no others have been able to accomplish in almost a century; establish a way of life that is so ubiquities as to deserve the title of Age. Ladies and Gentleman I would like to welcome you to the Age of Avoidance.

No age before us has proven so adept at turning a blind eye to the realities of life as we have. No matter how glaringly obvious an issue is we have perfected the ability to not see what is right in front of our faces. From our governments on down to individuals we have devised more and more ingenious methods of not dealing with our own shit.

Can you think of anything else that would explain the proliferation of New Age religions? What better thing to offer people if their lives are going down a sewer than a guarantee of peace and harmony? Come to the light and avoid the reality of what is causing you to have nervous breakdowns and to chew anti depressants like Smarties.

You can buy books on how to get your own personal Guardian Angel who will watch your back as you go through life. There are ones that will bring you abundance, and others who will help you get lucky; in fact there is probably a Guardian Angel for every aspect of your life that you're willing to dish out money to protect.

This way you can avoid dealing with any nasty personal issues you may have. Who needs to confront their demons when they have a Guardian Angel? They take care of everything for you and you can on with your blissful existence and just wait for the abundance to roll in.

Of course we all have avoidance techniques; anyone who lives in a big city has long ago learned how to not notice the folk that line the streets with their hands stuck out for spare change. If it gets too bad you can be sure that city council will create a bylaw outlawing homelessness so that anybody without a permanent address will be either thrown in jail or shipped out of town. Homeless problem, what homeless problem?

Of course there are some problems that can't be avoided like how much its costing you to fill your forty gallon gas tank on your all terrain pick up truck that you use to drive to work every day. You sit and fume about it every morning in the traffic jam on the way to work and watch the sky turn brown as the sun comes up. Two cents more a gallon today, what's a person going to do.

Oh well American Idol is on tonight and the competition has been intense this time. At least there aren't any scandals about judges sleeping with contestants. Boy that Simon Callow really gets you steamed though, he's such a prick. But the music is surprisingly good for amateurs. You used to sing back in high school with a band and were pretty good…better then that guy who won last week anyway. Shit maybe you should enter next time.

Television is full of reality shows about unreal situations because no one wants to deal with reality. Hell the government doesn't want to deal with reality why should the population? Everything is great they say, the economy is booming. Then why are less people earning more and more people earning less money then ten years ago? What's so great about that?

As a continent we don't deal well with reality and when the real world comes knocking it finds us woefully unprepared. We have technology that allows us to do miraculous things but we use it primarily for mindless entertainment that keeps us from thinking about the world beyond our living room. If reality ever shows up on our 52" high definition television screen with surround sound all we have to do is find the right button on our remote to change our perception

Tim Leary suggested society should "Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out". Somehow or other what we've done instead is to simply Tune Out. Welcome to the Age of Avoidance, where the credo is no longer it's who you know that matters, but, what you don't know can't hurt you.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:24 AM | Permalink

Some images stay in your memory forever. Sometimes you just need a reminder and they come pouring back again, just as potent and gut wrenching as when you first saw them. So when I first read about Jean-Euphèle Milcé's Alphabet Of The Night set in Haiti a film reel started up in my brain.

Decrepit boats in choppy seas of the coast of Florida overflowing with humanity being turned away from the sanctuary of the United States by the Coast Guard, bigotry and Ronald Regan's paranoia; mobs running down streets waving machetes, houses burning in the background; and most gruesome of all smoking corpses with their garlands of burnt tire laid out on streets and sidewalks.

It was the end of Papa Doc and Baby Doc's rule in the poor set upon island community. A descent into anarchy would have been a relief compared to what happened in the days that followed. For years afterwards coup followed upon coup leaving the people destitute and the land scarred with blood and fire.

It's into this atmosphere of fear and unrest that we are dropped in Milcé's novel. Told through the eyes of his main character, Jewish storeowner Jeremy Assael, we watch and listen as both the history of Jews in the island nation is told, and the contemporary hell is played out.

As if being Jewish in a nominally Catholic country isn't enough of a minority, Jeremy is also gay. Although no one seems to make too much of an issue out of that fact, it may be because he's been very discreet. When your past includes a family forced to convert to Catholicism in order not to be expelled from the island, you grow up learning the meaning of the word surreptitious.

When we enter Jeremy's life he is trying to find out what happened to his long time friend and lover who had "been disappeared" some time ago. For the longest time Jeremy has stayed in the shelter of his store, not venturing far from its premises. All that changes when his current lover, who acts as store security guard, is gunned down by an off police officer who had taken offence to something the man had said or done.

Lucien's body left draped over the doorstep of the shop and the cop walking away completely immune propels Jeremy out the door to travel around the island to search for news of his vanished friend Fresnel. Setting out on the search also sets him onto a trip inside himself as he revisits some of their own old haunts which triggers memories and thought processes.

I don't think that I have read a book before that deals with material this potentially dark in a manner as poetic as Milcé has managed. His use of language is evocative and compelling without being flamboyant or distracting. He has managed to find that delicate balance that separates art from indulgence in his creation of what is virtually a prose poem.

From his description of the home and headquarters of the American Protestant missionary to his detailing of Jeremy's participation in a Voodoo rite he uses language that conveys both the characters feelings about what is being described as well as its physical characteristics. This economy of words, having them serve double duty as it were, is not just an amazing technical achievement it also increases their emotional impact.

With each new description Milcé is able to continue to add to the atmosphere of the book and expose new facets of his character. As a place reminds Jeremy of the past he details more of the history of his people in Haiti. As this process continues he begins to realize how much of an outsider he really is in this place he has called home.

Even more important is the understanding that through no fault of anything but birth he is a constant reminder to the black majority of those who have over the years been the ruling elite. First the Spanish, then the French, and now America have picked over the bones of Haiti and have kept what few choice morsels there are to be had for themselves.

Part of Jeremy's journey takes him to an area where the location's history illustrates this in only too damning fashion. When the government allowed the river flowing through the Artibonite valley to be dammed, the valley began to flood on an annual basis. At first the farmers of the valley were almost wiped out, but then it was discovered that conditions were ideal for the growing of rice. The government encouraged the farmers and helped them by setting up co-operatives to market and sell rice overseas and at home, and if the farmers weren't exactly prosperous at least they enjoyed a level of comfort that their parents hadn't.

Then the government sold the land out from under them to an American business along with the licence to export all the rice. Those farmers who did not flee to the slums of the cities became tenants who surrendered three quarters of their crop as rent. If the harvest is not good they are evicted. If they protest they are branded as communist agitators and hunted down.

Is it any wonder that Haiti is a hot bed of anger and resentment against anything that reminds them of the ruling class? Even though Jews were the outcasts among the Europeans, thrown out of Europe only to see the same Europeans get them expelled from their supposed safe haven, and still a pariah in society to this day, Jeremy still wore the emblem of the oppressor – white skin.

Alphabet Of The Night is a beautiful, haunting novel about the search for identity and a place in the world. With poor tortured Haiti as the backdrop, and the ultimate alien exile – the wandering Jew – as its principle character, it shows how far people are willing to go to delude themselves they are at home no matter what the circumstances.

Jean-Euphèle Milcé is a masterful writer able to evoke worlds of emotion with a line or even on occasion a word. Without hyperbole or melodrama he opens a door for the rest of the world to walk through and see Haiti as more then just Voodoo and death. It is the home of real people who are just trying to go about their lives like everyone the world over, but with mitigating circumstances that would test anybody's will to survive.

Alphabet Of The Night is available for the first time in English through Pushkin Press. Now celebrating their tenth year in business the small English publisher specializes in translations of European works that otherwise might not come to people's attention. Their intent is to increase the English speaking world's awareness of the way other languages and cultures perceive the world in literature and thought.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:29 AM | Permalink

There's been a lot of talk in Canada recently about the treaty rights of various Native bands across the country. The thing is a lot of people don't really understand what those rights are. They make comments about lazy buggers who get more than they deserve in the first place, or they lost war so screw them.

Well the problem is the treaty rights in some cases were settlements for losing that war. When nations agreed to terms of surrender with the government of Great Britain, who ruled this land in those days, they were ceded control over certain territories in perpetuity. As the saying says: "As long as the grass is green and the water runs," they were promised full sovereignty over those lands under the Kings and Queens of England.

For some other tribes their lands were given them as reward for loyalty to England. During the revolutionary war that brought about the birth of the United States, certain members of the Iroquois Nation sided with the British. Chief among them were the Mohawks and the Oneida.

Both nations were given large tracts of land through out Southern Ontario to resettle in, as they had to leave their home territories in the United States after the war. As with the treaty rights of other nations in other parts of Canada their new territories were guaranteed them forever.

Of course this was in the days long before anyone considered the value of what could be under the ground, or that a golf course would work really well there. In the dark ages of Canadian and Native relations, when the federal government was trying to solve the "Indian Problem" by committing cultural genocide with residential schools, they also ignored governments at the provincial and municipal levels developing and selling treaty lands.

Anyone with ready cash was allowed to do whatever they wanted from building gravel pits to housing developments. Trapped on their reservations and kept ignorant of their past through federal policy, most nations had no idea what was being done to them. Occasionally in attempts to make things look kosher, a government would agree to "lease" the land from the nation affected on condition that it would be returned when they were done with it.

But most times they didn't even bother and would just sell it out from under them. Some nations wised up before others. On the West Coast the Niska nation began fighting in the courts for the return of their treaty lands in the 1950's.

By the time they won their case some forty years later in the 1990's they were the proud owners of large chunks of expensive sub-divisions that had been built on their territory illegally. There was a great hue and cry from the right wing about "Indians" going to throw people out on the street without having to pay for the houses.

What happened instead was that the tribe simply became the new municipal government and collected property taxes, made sure the garbage was collected and basically nobody's lives were affected in the least. Property values might have fallen slightly but that wasn't the Niska's fault, hate and fear mongering can go a long way in making things unsettled and that was the case in this situation.

In the 1970's when the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.) was getting active in the United States and speaking out for the right of Native Americans, Canadian Natives started to come out of their stupor as well. The first thing that meant for a lot of people was recovering the cultural identity that had been stripped away from them by years of government policy.

Along with the rediscovery of self came political awareness and understanding of what had been going on for the past nearly two hundred years. Tribal bands began gathering together evidence of the old treaties and finding out exactly what land had been originally ceded to them by the governments when they were originally awarded their territories.

The Lubicon Cree in Northern Alberta discovered how much land had been sold out from under them by the Alberta government to Oil and Gas companies; in Saskatchewan a tribe woke up to discover the government was diverting a river that ran through their territory without their permission; but it was 1990 and Oka Quebec that woke the country up to the size of the problem.

The mayor of the sleepy little town of Oka Quebec was also chairman of the local golf club. The club wanted to expand from nine holes to eighteen and so the mayor convinced city council to sell some "vacant land" to the golf course. That vacant land was part of the land ceded to the Mohawk nation whose territory boarded the town of Oka.

When the Mohawks blockaded the road leading to the site the Quebec Provincial Police (La Surete de Quebec) charged the barricade – in the resulting exchange of fire one young officer was shot. What had begun as a peaceful protest escalated to the point where the Prime Minister of Canada decided to call out the army to end the blockade.

Thankfully the Canadian Armed Forces are much better disciplined than the Surete de Quebec and the affair wound down peacefully. But the issue remains unresolved with the land claim still on the books and the golf course made on the disputed territories.

In 1995 it was Ontario's turn, and this time a Native was killed. At Iperwash Provincial Park Chippewa were protesting the fact that the land used for the park was treaty territory and a traditional burial ground. The documentation asserting their claim is held by the federal government and nobody denied that the land was legally theirs. But nothing happened except Dudley George of the Chippewa First Nations was shot by an Ontario Provincial Police officer for no apparent reason.

Over the years federal governments of every political persuasion have been dragging their heels on dealing with land claims. The longer they stall the more cases come to light. In the past year alone we've seen the occupation of the site of a housing development in Caledonia Ontario, the blockading of rail lines along the main east-west passenger corridor in the heaviest populated area of Canada, and various other protests across the country about the delays in settling lands claims.

While you can't blame the current government for the backlog, you can blame them for not doing anything about it and for their negative attitude towards Native affairs to begin with. This is the government that cancelled an agreement worked out between all the provinces, the Assembly of First Nations (who represent all the reservation Natives across Canada) and the federal government for financial assistance over ten years to all bands across the country.

They claim they have set up a special committee to deal with land claim settlements, but that they won't do anything as long as barricades are up anywhere across the country. But what guarantees do the Native people of Canada have that this will happen quickly, and why should they trust any government of Canada after what they have experienced in the last two hundred years.

How many times can you lie to, cheat, and deceive a people before they are justified in not believing anything you say anymore? Land claims and treaty rights have reached the stage in Canada where Native Canadians are within their rights to demand some show of good faith on the part of any government if they are to be expected to surrender any means they have of keeping up the pressure to force the issue.

Successive Canadian governments at all levels have not shown themselves to be very good about honouring treaties that were signed by their forefathers, so if Native Canadians are feeling suspicious can you blame them? From there point of view the grass has gotten pretty brown and the running water has slowed to a trickle.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 12:57 AM | Permalink

I've never known any CD whose description began with the phrase "influenced by the music of (insert name of culture here)" to be anything other than some watered down version of the aforementioned culture. This has been the case especially with so many recordings of so called Native American music.

A dead give away, as far as I'm concerned is that the music is invariably filed under "New Age". It can be counted on to be some sort of ethereal nonsense passing itself off as spiritual or authentic even though the primary instrument used is the synthesiser that has as much to do with traditional Native music as I do.

If you're especially fortunate it might actually incorporate some Native flute music, or perhaps even a drum. But they have both been watered down so much that they retain only a shadow of their former potency. One only has to listen to recordings made during a Pow Wow of the large drum and compare them with the pabulum on sale to understand the difference.

You would think that if you were attempting to convince people of the authenticity of your appropriation of someone else's culture that you might actually use traditional Native songs. But no, on most of these discs the songs are all written by the performer and given genuine Native sounding names that reflect his or her "spiritual connection " to the values of Native Americans.

So to come across a CD like Anonymous by the group Tomahawk is like a breath of fresh air in an otherwise polluted atmosphere. They make no spurious claims about authenticity or have the audacity to write material based on another culture's stories. Guitarist Duane Denison became interested in Native material after touring reservations with Hank Williams III. He thought there had to be to Native music than what was currently on offer, so he began to do some searching.

What he found was music books dating back to the time Teddy Roosevelt was President that contained transcribed "Indian Songs". Because there were no credits for the songs they chose to call the album Anonymous to honour the memory of the unknown folk whose music was so tentatively preserved. The titles they have chosen for the songs on their album are the same titles listed for the songs that inspired their interpretations. They also throw in a "Parlour Song", "Long, Long, Weary Day" as an example of other anonymous music from the same period.

What is so very impressive about the music on this album is how they've approached their interpretations, Instead of trying to recreate faithful replicas of the songs, which would have been ridiculous, they have opted to offer modern interpretations using the instruments at their disposal; guitar, bass, drum kit and of course vocals.

If you were expecting something light and fluffy like you would find clogging the arteries of music everywhere, then you've come to the wrong disc. Denison, John Stanier(drums) and vocalist Mike Patton have put together an album of material that attempts to reflect the core feelings of the source music, not accurately recreate them. Songs like "Ghost Dance" (which must have been the actual Ghost Dance judging by the time period of the source material) for instance aims to try and capture the essence of the original song's spirit and the emotions behind it.

Each song is approached in the same manner and defeats any expectations any of us may have had about Native Music. Loud guitars and hard rock arrangements of a couple of the songs took a moment to get used to. But once you understood the intent and figure out what the band is doing with a song, it all made sense.

At no time did any of the arrangements sound anything but respectful of the material they were working with, and is a damn site better than another collection of insipid Native Flute songs. In fact not since Robbie Robertson put together the Red Road Ensemble back in the early 1990's to record a soundtrack for the television special The Native Americans have I heard popular music used so effectively to represent Native music.

Anonymous by Tomahawk is a surprise in many ways, but the best surprise is the CD it self. It may not be to everyone's taste, but I thought it one of the best representations of Native music to have come down the pipe in a long time, if for nothing else then the real emotion displayed by the songs and by the performers.

Tomahawk understands the difference between honouring and appropriating another's culture and that shines through on this disc with every cut. I hope people pay attention to this album for a lot of reasons, but at the very least to learn from the fine example Tomahawk sets by the way they deal with another culture.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:05 AM | Permalink

It was a long time before I realized how fortunate I was in my upbringing. I don't mean my family life, because my father was an abusive prick, but the attitudes that were instilled in by the society of the day. Growing up it was always taken for granted by those I went to school with and myself that we would be continuing on to University after we had finished high school.

Not all of us had career plans, in fact probably most of us didn't, but it was only natural to go on to University to continue our education just for the sake of continuing our education. Most people I knew were aware of what was going on in the world around them, read widely, took an interest in the arts, and wanted to learn more about what the world had to offer and University was the place to do that.

As this was still the end of the 1970's and at the beginning of the 1980's Canadian society was still set up for people like us. University tuition was ridiculously cheap compared to what people paid in the United States, and each province in the country had generous loan and grant programs available for people whose financial situation wasn't the greatest.

It didn't matter whether you wanted to take a four year B.A. in the Humanities or in Computer Science, everyone was treated the same and all departments had budgets equal to their needs for ensuring quality education for their students. Learning for the sake of learning was considered enough of a reason for supporting continuing education.

So it came as quite a shock to me to discover how few people in the world think that way and that even worse how more and more people were being discouraged from perusing the quest of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It's probably not a coincidence that I became aware of the first around the time I started to understand the second.

In 1995 the province in Canada where I live, Ontario, elected its first socially and fiscally conservative government. In policy, attitudes and outlook it was much closer to conservative American policies than any other Canadian government had ever been. The party elected turned out in fact to have hired many of the people who had worked with a governor of New Jersey helping implement the same types of policy.

What they called a "Common Sense Revolution" was a very simple and simplistic idea. Cut funding to all social programs to lower taxes and make a better climate for business. Everything should be run like a business from hospitals to local school boards in that their motivation wasn't to be service to their end users, but to meet some randomly devised bottom line that the government came up with.

For the health care system that meant gutting it of staff and facilities with half the hospitals in the province being closed and nursing staff seeing wages cut or jobs being declared redundant. For schools, from primary to undergraduate University level, that meant funding for fundamentals only. Or in illiterate speak the three "R's": reading, riting, & rithmatic.

In order for an University to continue to receive the level of funding they were used to they had to make their courses compliant with what the government dictated as priorities; degree programs that would result directly in jobs or careers. Instead of being places of higher education and learning they were being turned into sophisticated vocational schools.

As this government was only hitching its bandwagon to an idea that had playing out in the United States for a much longer time, and the rest of Canada has gradually followed suit, government policy in two of the three North American countries has actively discouraged people from learning for the sake of learning.

I remember being appalled that this was happening, but even more perplexed because so few people seemed to care. It wasn't until I met my wife's extended family that I understood how the government was able to get away with destroying the education system.

Going to school was of no value to them unless it resulted in a job at the end. The idea that someone would want to get an education for the sake of learning about new ideas and different peoples was as ridiculous to them as if it was suggested they live on bottom of the ocean or the moon. Heck they would have probably been more open to the latter than the former.

Of course once I became aware that the attitude existed I began to see it everywhere. The worst culprit has always been movies and television where smart people are depicted on the whole as social misfits, geeks, and nerds. Ever notice how many derogatory words there are for smart people and how few there are for just regular folk.

My mother has said on many an occasion that her father always said that the thing he was proudest about was that a poor guy like him from St. Urbain St. in Montreal Quebec (The old immigrant Jewish district) had been able to give all three of his daughters a University education. Not that they got jobs from their degrees or went on to have careers as lawyers or married well, but the fact that they were able to have the opportunity to learn and acquire knowledge.

My mother graduated from University the first time in 1955 and attitudes like my grandfather's were common. Now fifty years later a four-year honours B.A. is almost considered a waste of time by most of the world and intelligence is made fun of at almost every turn.

I'm sure that people could come with a million reasons for that happening, including theories like governments deliberately wanting populations to be less aware so they can pull the wool over their eyes with greater ease, but I think the result is more important. Fewer people are experiencing the joy of learning for the sake of learning and how the acquisition of knowledge is in itself a reward.

Obviously some people would never be interested in education for the sake of education, and there's nothing wrong with that either. What's wrong is far fewer people are being given a choice in the matter anymore. Thousands if not millions have been cut off from knowledge that has been accumulated by the human race over the last few thousand years and have little or no understanding of the world that exists beyond what they see on television or in the movies.

Not only is that potentially dangerous, it's also incredibly sad. It's even sadder when you realize that most people don't even know what they're missing.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:53 AM | Permalink

You know there's nothing quite like finding you've summoned up a demon from hell to ruin your day. Okay so you can exercise some control over it, but still he's not what you'd call the greatest company in the world what with his annoying habit of needing to eat people on a daily basis. Even though you can direct him towards drug pushers, pimps, and other assorted slime, it still doesn't change the fact that you're responsible for ensuring a fellow human being is digested on a regular basis.

For those of you who ever find yourself in that sort of a situation Practical Demonkeeping, Christopher Moore's first novel, might just be the place to turn for a few pointers on what to and not to do. At the very least it will teach you not to mess around with things that you don't understand. For instance, if you ever find scrolls rolled up and sealed inside candle sticks, especially ones that are hidden in a Catholic church, you'll know not to read them out loud just to see what will happen.

Like Travis O'Hearn finds out that even though there might be some satisfaction to be felt from seeing your nemesis getting crunched between the teeth of a demon from the days of Solomon, you're left with a problem you can't escape. Oh he tried when it all started back in 1917. It was when he was in seminary school and was being badly mistreated by one of the priest-teachers that it all started.

After being whipped so badly that he was left with a bleeding back, Travis was ordered by the priest to polish two candlesticks that were a treasure sent from the Vatican. If he returned and found them smudged he promised Travis more of the same. When Travis discovered the crack he was terrified, when he discovered it unscrewed and contained a scrawl he was curious. We all know about curiosity don't we.

When the demon, Catch, shows up as a result of reading the invocation, Travis decides to take off. He grabs the candlesticks when Catch is distracted – he went off to eat the priest – and grabs a train. Unfortunately he leaves the candlesticks with a young woman he meets as payment for her buying his train ticket. Unfortunately because the second stick holds the invocation to return Catch to the netherworld from which he came.

Travis realizes that he must find the young woman if he is to have any hope of riding himself of Catch's company. So this odd couple travels across the United States looking for a woman named Amanda who had been engaged to be married to a young man whose name started with an E and served in the American army in World War One.

It's this search that brings them to Pine Cove California where they meet a collection of characters almost as eccentric as they are. It's also where Travis's search will come to an end. But will he be able to read the invocation that sends Catch back before Catch can convince somebody else to read the original incantation and replace Travis as his master and rule the world together.
Each character we meet is drawn in loving detail by one of the artists of character creation. Even in his first book Moore shows the affinity he has for those who look at life from a slightly different angle and a compassion for those who have had to rise out of the ashes of a previous existence to recreate themselves as something newer and better.

What I find amazing about re-reading this book again after about ten years, and reading a number of his other books in between, is how sophisticated his dialogue was in his first book. In fact if you were to read Moore's books in no particular order you would be hard pressed to notice anything about this book that would mark it as a first novel.

He does such a complete job on creating everything that it's like the world and his characters already existed, they were just waiting for him to come along and write their story. While you might expect that from an established writer, to find that talent already evident in a first novel is quite extraordinary. It's like Moore came out of the egg ready to write.

Practical Demonkeeping contains all the elements that one has come to expect from a Christopher Moore novel; bizarre characters, twisted humour, moments of side splitting hilarity, and the occasional instance of real pathos. There is no false sentiment in his novels or deep philosophy, and on occasion you may question his sanity, but in the end they are also some of the realest books you'll ever read.

The fact that fifteen years after the publication of his first novel his books are as fresh, funny, and interesting as ever is an indication of his originality of mind and creative ingenuity. Whenever our world gets to be just a little too much for you, I recommend a quick trip into the mind of Christopher Moore; you'll be amazed at how much better you feel.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 01:26 AM | Permalink

The audience that's assembled in the plush auditorium are all a buzz. Who will be this year's is the question on everyone's mind and even some people's lips. Throughout the build-up to this evening, in the weeks proceeding, press agents and media representatives have been hard at work promoting those who they represent, resulting in one of those glorious atmospheres of artificially created anticipation.

But even the most cynical of observers admits to being hard pressed to finding an event within the past week which has generated this much excitement. It's obvious that it has struck a chord with people; people who care and people who matter. Not just the normal star gazing hoi-polloi who turn out in the hopes of catching site of anybody who they think they recognise, but the stars themselves.

Why if the rumours were true humanitarians like Celine, Leonardo, Bono, and maybe even Mel, were tuning in their televisions right now wherever they were in the world to watch the proceedings unfold. Even the politically mighty were said to be interested and would be viewing the results with anticipation. Hadn't George Bush said that he thought events like these were the future for fostering understanding and communication between nations?

Well since the event was sponsored by the State Department it was natural for the American President to throw his weight behind it, but Canadian Prime Minister Harper has also gone on record as being eagerly awaiting this "unique and innovative development in the field of international co-operation and bridge building". "Events like these", he said, "are the future for building foundations of understanding and fostering awareness between nations."

Of course those negative thinkers at Amnesty International and The United Nations have come out with the usual hand wringing. But their mutterings about trivialization and lack of sensitivity were dismissed as sour grapes for not being able to hang out with the celebrities and be in the limelight.

But none of that matters now; as the lights in the auditorium begin to dim the babble of voices from the excited crowd recedes like ebb tide and the music composed specifically for the event by Hollywood's greatest composer swells up underneath the last quiet murmurings. At this moment across the nation and around the world televisions are being turned on and a global community is formed.

The night's host swans to centre stage and his smile catches the spotlights as he approaches the microphone that rises like a cobra to a snake charmer's flute from the stage to greet him. Music and applause intermingle for just long enough for him to wave with studied casualness as he searches out the teleprompter and brings it into focus so he can read his welcoming speech.

"Thank-you, (pause for applause) Thank-you. I'd like to welcome all of you who are here in person, and also extend a welcome to the many I know who have tuned in around the world in anticipation of taking part in what can only be described as an historic undertaking" (pause for applause – smile in appreciation) Knowing that so many eyes from so many places are watching makes you really believe in the words of the song "It's A Small World After All". It also reminds us that we are not alone on this planet; no matter where we live we are only the touch of a button on a remote control away from the rest of humanity. Television is truly the great unifying bond that brings humanity together like the big family we are." (Pause for more applause and beam at audience and into the cameras)

"It's because of our human family of course that we have been brought together tonight. Like all families we sometimes have our disagreements and don't get along as well as we should. The unfortunate result of these fallings out can be seen today in many countries not blessed with the grace of democracy like we in this room. In those countries people are deprived of a voice in how their government works and some are even persecuted by the powers that are supposed to looking out for their best interests."

"Our purpose for gathering here tonight is to show them, those who are right now suffering persecution, that we in care; that we he have a HEART. (Turn to accept statuette from model who is crossing from stage left slightly behind, turn to face audience with statuette held up in both hands to left hand side at shoulder height)

"Ladies and gentlemen and citizens of the world I give you the HEART Award. (Pause for sustained applause and begin to speak before it ends) to be presented annually as a symbol of our compassion to the people who have suffered the most in the year just gone by. Each year countless people suffer the agonies of starvation, dispossession, and even watching loved ones being killed without any recognition given to their pain"

"Now no longer will you go unnoticed, no longer will you suffer and think nobody cares about what happens to you. Each year our select panel of judges will establish just who has suffered the most and they will be commemorated and immortalized forever in our minds and HEARTS by the recognition offered by this beautiful heart shaped statuette. It is our way of saying you're not alone" (pause for what should be sustained applause – use time to pull envelope out of inside jacket pocket)

"For this, the inaugural presentation of the HEART award there have been many deserving people's through out the world making our judges job especially difficult (joke) You'd think people knew there was going to be an award this year there was so much suffering, ha, ha. But our judges sifted through all the available materials and they believe they've come up with a winner who is most deserving of our pity; and the answer is right here in this envelope (hold up envelope so all can see the seal on the back)

" I never thought I'd ever get to say these words, probably four of the most famous in television history: and the winner is…

Posted by Richard Marcus at 11:16 PM | Permalink

There's a point in one of the interviews with a director of Darfur Diaries: Message From Home in the special features section of the DVD where she mentions one of the bitter ironies of the crises in Darfur. A group of dignitaries from the international community had come together to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda and apologise for having allowed it to happen.

As they were all standing up there swearing that they would never let something like that happen again and how they would be supper vigilant to prevent it, the government of Sudan was busy bombing and slaughtering its own people in the province of Darfur.

Darfur Diaries: Message From Home was shot in 2004 by three young film makers who traveled to Darfur on their own and spent time in both Northern and Southern areas of the province, and refugee camps in the neighbouring country of Chad, interviewing the people who had been affected by the attacks. Burnt out houses stand as mute testimony to the bombing raids conducted by the government against its own citizens.

Even as they filmed an Anatolov bomber flew over dropping bombs randomly on the countryside. Parents cried out to children "don't run, sit down under the trees so they can't see you". The pilots of the bombers circle around and target movement and release their bombs killing indiscriminately. Livestock, humans, it doesn't seem to matter as long as the people and their abilities to survive are destroyed.

Just like genocides that have been conducted all over the world, from North America to Asia, the theory goes to completely destroy a people destroy their means of survival. With the natives of North America it was taking away their food supply by exterminating it, with the people of Darfur the policy seems is to destroy their villages and steal their livestock as well as killing them.

After the bombers the strategy of the government was to send in both the Sudanese army and vigilante groups to kill, rape, and steal from the people. Families are exterminated and survivors are forced to flee after watching their loved one killed in front of them. The excuse the government makes for these attacks is the existence of the Sudanese Liberation Army.

They conveniently forget that the rebel army only formed in response to increasing discrimination against Africans in Sudan and to the attacks upon their villages by the government forces. The little that the media has reported on what was happening in Darfur was to ape what the government said; not bothering to find out for themselves what the story was.

What's wonderful about Dafur Diaries is that the only times stuff like politics is mentioned is in the interviews with the filmmakers in the special features. For the people on the ground what matters is what's happened to them and being given opportunity to tell their story. From the young boy who looks into the camera and talks of watching his brother being shot, to the mothers talking about their babies and their injuries.

The filmmakers interview children who draw pictures of men on camels and horses firing guns; of soldiers in jeeps firing guns; and planes dropping bombs on villages and setting them on fire. They draw pictures of people running away with their arms in the air from men with guns and swords who are charging on horses. They draw pictures of dead people laid out on the ground.

Sudan has long been comprised of two distinct Muslim populations, Arab and African. According to the people interviewed it has a long history of the two races co-existing peacefully with intermarriages commonplace. Only since the coup that brought the existing government into power have measures been taken against the majority African population to reduce their means of making a livelihood. There were occasional disputes about grazing rights but the people interviewed in this movie claim they were always settled amicably.

Now however the government has created a racial war, to keep a majority population in check. But not even within the minority Arab population is there unanimity for this war. It appears that aside from the government and it's army – the only people who support the war are the crooks, rapists, and miserable excuses for human beings who raid the villages after the bombing raids.

The government started attacking the Africans by cutting funding to the village schools, until there was no money to pay for teachers and supplies. They also arrested all the teachers on charges of treason and tortured them. One man interviewed showed the scars where he had been beaten with bricks by his guards and told about other teachers still in jail.

What's wondrous is the lack of anger displayed by the Africans towards the Arab population of Sudan in general. As one puts it the government is using the Arab people like a weapon and don't really care about them anymore than they care about us. In fact according to the Sudanese Liberation Army in villages to the north where there is extensive intermingling between the two peoples just as many Arabs are dieing as Africans.

Nobody seems to want to venture as to why this has happened. But in some ways the why is not as important as the fact that it is happening. A government is systematically killing a segment of its own population through without remorse or hesitation. They are destroying whole villages and forcing people to leave their homes for any shelter they can find elsewhere.

To me it seems obvious why the government is doing this – they want the land for the people they would prefer to have it. Just like everywhere else that indigenous people have been inconvenient enough to be living where the government wants to make use of the land, the quickest and easiest way of dealing with the matter is to kill or force them off the land.

Darfur Diaries: Message From Home is wonderful in its simplicity. The people tell the stories of what happened to them, tell you about themselves and their families, and are completely matter of fact. These are the faces of the people we never see in the news stories, and the voices we never hear.

Who better to tell the story of what is happening to them than the people to whom it is happening, and this movie acts as a direct pipeline from them to whoever will listen. Don't you think you owe it to them to listen?

Posted by Richard Marcus at 09:23 PM | Permalink

Early military science fiction was close to the equivalent of watching The Green Berets staring John Wayne or some such equally jingoistic piece of patriotic propaganda. The stories weren't bad and the action was good, but everything was my country right or wrong and you just knew that even the aliens on "our" side were good Christians.

But as the times changed and the Viet Nam war was coming to it's ignoble end the military science fiction novel changed. The books were still filled with good characters, and action packed battle scenes, but the attitudes had changed towards war and blinkered patriotism. The soldiers were more cynical about the reason for fighting and their attitudes to their superior officers.

The prevailing motivation of all the troops when they enter a battle situation now is to win through to the other side in order to survive. Nobody has any visions of glory or desire to be a hero, which doesn't prevent acts of individual heroism or courage from occurring, because individual glory and sought after heroism usually ends up with people dead

Tanya Huff is one of today's most diversified Science Fiction writers. She has written everything from Epic Fantasy, (The Quarter Series), Contemporary Fantasy (The Keeper Series) and Horror (The Blood Debt Series). So it wasn't too much of a surprise when she embarked upon her own version of the Military Science Fiction series with the The Confederation Series

The first two books, Valor's Choice and The Better Part of Valor introduced us to Marine Corp Staff Sergeant Torin Kerr, a typically omniscient Non Commissioned Officer (NCO.), with a wonderful disdain for those she considers inferior species –anybody who is not an NCO, specifically 2nd lieutenants and officers who think they know better than her.

Thankfully for her in Heart Of Valor, the latest instalment of the series, there is only one officer and she's broken him in long ago. In fact her assignment, escorting him to the Marine training planet to test out his new body parts, should be a piece of cake. Her, the officer, (a major), twenty recruits of the three warrior species of the Confederation, the three NCOs assigned to train the platoon of recruits, and the major's civilian doctor will spend the next two weeks going through basic training.

The Marine training planet is designed to test the skills of the recruits without actually putting their lives at risk. So even the recruits know something's wrong when during the first "attack" the drones start firing rounds that can actually kill. Things get especially interesting at that point because the Sergeant in charge of the training picks that moment to go through his species change of life – which immediately sends him into a state of shock.

One of the amazing things about Tanya Huff's writing is her ability to integrate into her books social commentary without it being preachy. First off is the fact that men and women are treated equally without anything being made of it. In fact given the names used by individuals in the two other species in the Armed Forces, it is impossible to tell one gender from the other unless specified.

Huff also makes it quite clear that sexual preferences being a problem is a thing of the past as she never gives any indication as to the gender of the person's partner. In fact, a common joke told about one of the species is that they are considered unique among sentient beings due to having invented massage oil before the wheel such is their love for sex with any other sentient being of any gender.

But I think the way she handles the issue of xenophobia, and here it is much more pertinent then on earth as they are dealing with real alien beings is the best. She doesn't paint a false picture of universal harmony between all species. There are Elder races, non-combatants, who look like they could be giant teddy bears, spiders, or parakeets. While most humans don't have a problem with the giant teddy bears or the parakeets, none of them, no matter how much conditioning they undergo, can look at the spider –like species without getting the willies.

These military action type stories only really work if you can care or like the characters involved. By creating such a realistic atmosphere for her characters to interact in and establishing exactly what is and isn't socially accepted without making a big deal of it, she is able to generate characters who are easy to like and care for.

Even though the opposing forces are referred to only as the "Others" there is no irrational hatred or branding them as evil like is the norm in other books or our world. In fact the only real enemy seems to be the hierarchy of the Marine Corp who tend to make decisions that put lives in danger without considering the consequences or ever having to leave their desks.

I remember once reading somewhere that among professional soldiers there is little real liking for war. It is what they do, and what they do well, but they don't enjoy killing anymore then you or I do. Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr's job is to keep her people alive no matter what it takes. If that involve killing other people before they kill her people than that's what she'll do but if it means doing something else she'll do that too.

In The Heart Of Valor it becomes a matter of trying to figure out how they can regain control of the training planet before it can kill them. Someone or something has tampered with it, and they have to survive eight days of what it can throw at them until their troop carrier comes back to pick them up.

I guess in this day and age military science fiction is probably frowned upon by people who can't separate war from soldiers. They don't seem to have problems with people lopping somebody's head off with a sword, but put them in an army with military style weapons and they get strange. Tanya Huffs books are better written, and have better characters then most of the Sword and Sorcery "acceptable" violence books out there, and are far more socially enlightened then most of what you're going to read on the mass market.

Maybe if you have a problem with military science fiction the problem is yours. There is no crime in being a soldier, and Tanya Huff argues that point very successfully with the books that make up her Confederation Series. For those who still view soldiers as enemies, maybe they should read these books and get over themselves a little.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 07:01 AM | Permalink

The past two decades or so has seen the beginnings of a shift in the power base of the world from the West to the East. Japan has of course been an economic power almost since the end of World War Two and South Korea came on strong in the 1970s. When oil was discovered under the sands of the Arabian Peninsula formerly impoverished sheikdoms became movers and shakers through Petroleum power.

But the country that has captured the most attention in the past ten years has been India. Always one of the world's most populated countries, it has been lumped into the category of developing nation since the end of British rule in the late 1940s. So for most of the West India's entrance onto the world stage as one of the most vibrant economies in the last few years has been like the emergence of a new popular star from nowhere.

Of course like all supposed "overnight sensations" that have appeared out of "nowhere" India has always been there. But for most outsiders the country has been synonymous with poverty and spiritualism and not much else. It was the country the Beatles went to and where George Harrison learned about the sitar.

It sounds ridiculous now saying that, but such was the chauvinism of people in the West that they were able to distil a culture that was thousands of years older than our own down to those base elements. Now of course that has started to change and we are beginning to learn a little about the people and the country that has become a world player.

One of the happy results of this his been the interest in novels written by Indians about India. The Peacock Throne by Sujit Saraf, just released in the past month in Canada by McArthur & Co is one of the most recent examples of this excellent phenomenon. If you haven't heard his name before now, that will change with the publication of this book.

The Peacock Throne is set in the Indian city of Delhi. Specifically in one street – Chandi Chowk, in the district around the historic Red Fort - the former seat of Power for the Mogul's and the British, and the former home of the Peacock Throne. It was from the walls of the Red Fort that the British hung participants in the uprising of the 1860's and perhaps because of that, the Prime Minister of India makes a speech from the walls every independence day.

But Saraf's story is about modern Indian history and concerned with the people who are the power of the neighbourhood and the street, not the past or the country itself. But even modern history can be violent and chaotic especially in such a divided country as India. The book opens on the day that Indira Gandhi's Sikh bodyguard shot and killed her in retaliation for her sending the Indian army into the Golden Temple, the most sacred of Sikh temples in all India, in an attempt to roust out anti government forces.

For a night the streets of Delhi and the country descended into violence as violent mobs hunted down and attacked Sikhs wherever they could find them; including raiding their houses and killing women and children, and destroying their businesses. But India has long been used to sectarian violence and Delhi picks itself back up and goes back to the business of politics and business.

In Delhi it seems everybody conducts business from the six-year-old living on the street to the richest storeowner with political aspirations and the only difference is the scale. The percentage that the beggar pays to the police constable on the beat is equivalent to the "donations" made by the shopkeeper for blind eyes being turned to a variety of irregularities.

What is history when you live through it but just another day in your life where you try and get by as best as you can? The people who populate Saraf's Delhi are people doing just that. He doesn't judge his people, they are who they are nothing more or less, and their characters are so well written that you never once doubt the veracity of their actions.

He doesn't hold back when it comes to depicting the uglier side of life in India and the continual religious turmoil. Nationalist Hindus and Muslim extremists ally to hunt down Sikhs one moment, then are at each other's throats the next. Politicians can say the words "for the good of the community" with sanctimonious pomposity while plotting for the destruction of other people's livelihoods because they are of a different religion.

Intolerance, greed, and ambition are the only things that all characters seem to have in common, and while that may on occasion make them allies, it can also result in carnage. Caring for the people seems to be code for cynical manipulation for far too many politicians the world over, and the Indian councillors and Members of Parliament are no different. While one hand is extended in a pretence of brotherhood and unity, the other is exhorting crowds to throw rocks and break heads.

The sounds, smells and sights of Delhi come alive through the words of Saraf. As you walk the streets of the neighbourhood with his characters it is impossible not to see, hear, taste, and smell what they are experiencing. On some occasions you may not wish to, but raw sewage is as much a reality as the tantalizing smells of food and spices.

The India of The Peacock Throneis like that, a series of contradictions. Where generosity is tempered by, what will I get in return, and, how will it benefit me, on too many occasions. The only balm Saraf supplies for us comes in the shape of a holy fool type character named Gopal Pandey, who stumbles through the story just trying to find his way through the complications that others create for him.

From his accidental rescue of a Sikh in the aftermath of Gandhi's assassination at the beginning of the book he becomes the one character we can easily care about. He's never quite sure what's going on around him and peers out at the world through glasses through which he can barely see. To everyone around him he is a figure of ridicule and in some cases an embarrassment. But his still continues to doggedly press on because what other choice does he have.

He is the only truly sympathetic character in the book who has no hidden agenda aside from the one we all have which is to try and make do as best we can with what we are given. Perhaps Sujit Saraf is offering him as an example of the confusion that besets most decent people when confronted by horrors beyond their comprehension and events they can't control.

The Peacock Throne is about India and Delhi specifically, but it is also about the human condition. Sujit Saraf has written a wonderful novel full of aptly drawn characters and evocative settings. He is unsparing in his detailing of the seamier side of life in the streets of Delhi and the less savoury side of Indian politics.

But in spite of that he is still able to create a picture of Delhi that is exciting and intriguing. It may be scary in places, but what big city isn't? Up until now I've only read books which have featured Bombay – Mumbai – as it's now known, and known very little about India's other famous city. Like others before him have put Mumbai on the map Saraf has turned a spotlight on Delhi and given her closeup.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 02:06 AM | Permalink

Have you ever wondered what it's like to be traveling all over the world; going where your work takes you? How much would you really see of what each place has to offer away from your workspace? Would the travel become a blur of light, colours, and sound that blends together with other travels of similar nature?

Do you become adept at picking out distinctive patterns in the shifting shapes that whip by you as your body is propelled by one means or another through or past them? Do those fleeting glimpses give any real insight into your new environs or are they just the revelations of illusion?

Tourists are packaged up into buses and shipped through countries spending an hour here and an hour there so they can say they've done France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Holland all in two weeks. What do they see and when they get home and develop the pictures they have taken why don't they recognise what's on the prints in front of them?

Usually it's because they have tried to preserve something static in an ultimately kinetic experience and what is still in the frame in unrecognisable. Nothing but bricks and mortar or wood and plaster captured within the neat frame of a 5 X 7 inch postcard that says nothing about where they were and what it meant to be there passing through.

MoTe Upoko-o-Te-Ika / For Wellington is a collection of reproductions from two exhibits of photography that Viggo Mortensen presented as a gift to the city of Wellington New Zealand in the year 2003 after the completion of filming for the Lord Of The Rings movies. The images that appeared in the exhibition were of the places, including New Zealand, which he had traveled to in the years directly preceding the show.

The pictures that form the first part of the book are abstract representations of the places he has visited. The shutter has been left open allowing it to capture every iota of movement that can paint its way across the lens. Layers of texture and colour are painted on negative, and then given life under the enlarger as Mr. Mortensen brings us a glimpse of how fast the world can be.

In some instances he is the one standing still watching the world zip by, and in others he is travelling at speeds that match or are faster than our poor planet can turn. Is that what we are seeing in these photos, visions of speed blurring everything until all that's left is colours and streaks of light?

Abstract art in any medium presents the conundrum of what we are to attempt to take away from the images. Do we stand in front of it and try to guess what the artist's intellectual motivation was for the work, or do we let the colours and configuration wash over us and feel whatever emotions they generate?

Sometimes the artist doesn't give us any choice in the matter and the images are so powerful we can only stare at them overpowered by colour, light and design. Mr. Mortensen's work in this instance falls into that category as they explode off the page in their vividness. Galaxies swirl in whirlpools of beams of white light etched into blues and blacks. Greens, browns, blues, and whites appear in splotches looking like a satellite image of some mysterious coastline.

Either one of these combinations is enough to be stirring but to turn the page from one to the other is to be aware emotionally of the contrasting environments in the world; feeling the diversity of the planet instead of just knowing it. It's exhilarating, but also tinged with sadness seeing how ethereal it all can be.

At least that's what I felt. Someone else, somewhere else at another time might feel something else, which is one of the beauties of abstract art. They give the viewer the freedom to feel emotions instead of being overtly manipulated by sentimental attachments to figures or real situations.

The second half of Mo Te Upoko-O-Te-Ika/For Wellington is composed of photos that are more easily recognizable. Landscapes, forest groves, trees, and other familiar objects are the subject matter. Judging by the titles in first section of the book and those that are given to the more figurative photos in the second, they are all, if not of the same subject matter, have been at least taken in the same locales.

Some are from other series that have appeared in other books. The "Hindsight" sequence for example has shown up before, and here again offers views in tight circles that appear to be looking backwards, or from a distance at the subject matter even when in a tight close up. There is something distancing about this effect that makes them almost as abstract as if they weren't figurative and removes the photographers influence from the shot as much as it was in the earlier part of the book.

Mr. Mortensen has always described his work as being a means of journaling and recording what he sees around him. Whether it’s a photo, painting, or poem the objective is the same. With that being his goal his work has no ulterior motivation; there is no manipulation of set to make us feel anything in particular.

He looks, he sees something that attracts his attention, and he shoots it with his camera and the result is what you see on the page in front of you or on the gallery wall. In some ways he stands a lot of notions of modern art on their head in that his realistic imagery is far less objective than his abstracts.

With his abstracts he has to "stage" the shot more and aims for a desired affect. But his figurative images are much more "of the moment" in that he is only recording what he sees with no other objective, and leaves it up to us to interpret it to our heart's content.

Mo Te Upoko –O-Te-Ika/For Wellington is an opportunity to see the two sides of Viggo Mortensen's photography, the abstract and the realistic, and reach your own conclusions about which you find more effective emotionally, artistically, and visually. Each has it's own unique perspective to offer on the world and each has something different to offer the viewer.

Like all items from the Perceval Press catalogue Mo Te Upoko –O-Te-Ika/For Wellington is half price until June 17th/07. Take advantage of this unique opportunity to explore the variety of works that Perceval Press has to offer before this deal disappears.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 03:07 AM | Permalink

Throughout the Caribbean and up into the United States slaves shipped over from Africa brought more than just their bodies and music. From the various tribal groups represented a variety of stories and belief systems were also brought over. Most of us have heard of Voodoo and all the misconceptions that accompany it, but other religions assumed some characteristics of the dominant Catholic faith in Latin and South America in order to blend in.

In Cuba one of those religions practiced among the African population was Santeria, or Regla de Ocho – the Kingdom of Ocho. Ocho was the primary deity of the religion, which chose the name Santeria – way of the Saints- in order to disguise their traditional practices of worship By pretending they were worshiping individual Catholic Saints and not the Gods who lived in Ocho's realm they kept the Catholic Church happy.

Of course if the Church had ever shown up at a Santeria ceremony they might have a different reaction; heck if they'd even understood any of the doctrine being taught they would have closed it down pretty quick. They would have been pretty appalled by the fact that Santeria didn't believe in the existence of Evil. All men are capable of performing good actions, some just haven't being able to get it together but don't need to be frightened by threats of hell into doing it.

Jorge Luis Alvarez Pupo is an Afro-Cuban photographer who grew with this religion as the spiritual base of his community. So when he set out to create a record of the ceremonies and the way a belief system can affect a person's way of seeing the world around him or her, he had the advantage over the casual observer of already being in tune with the significance of events.

The images he has recorded and presented in his book Trance, which was released in 2003 by Perceval Press, capture people in moments of either high emotion or on the edge of entering the trance like state that enables them to perform remarkable feats with fire and metal. At first glance some of the photos are quite terrifying.

Faces contorted in what appears to be pain as they brandish flaming rods, swallow fire, hold a sword point to their throat, or exhale huge gouts of flames. But upon looking closer the body language is at odds with the initial interpretation; there is none of the tension that one normally associates with pain or fear knotting the muscles of the participants

What I find remarkable about the pictures of these events is that they were taken at all. They look like highly intense and personal moments that I would not necessarily want recorded for others to see publicly in a book. It's not that there is anything wrong with what they are doing but there is a level of spiritual intimacy that's caught by the camera that makes one feel almost voyeuristic. Then again it's that emotionally charged nature of the photographs that makes them so powerful.

Jorge Luis starts off the series of photos dealing directly with ceremony with pictures of their beginnings; an individual lighting a candle in front of an alter, a woman slipping into a trance state, and a man caught in mid step while dancing and drumming. While not much preparation, they do give us sufficient warning that something unusual is about to ensue.

It's not until the midpoint of the book that explanatory notes are offered. Written by Mabel Llevat Soy they give us an explanation of what we have just experienced and what is to come. The second half of the book features photographs which in some ways are even more potent than those in the first.

While the earlier work has some shock element to them, and their power is genuine enough, the second half's offer an interpretation of how a believer of Santeria sees the world. These works are therefore the creation solely of the artist, not pictures of actual events. In my mind that makes them more powerful.

According to the notes in the book the creation story for the Santeria has men and women being pulled from the shadows and crawling out from the earth to be first brought to life. So there is life in the shadows of their world, lurking just outside of our vision.

Alvarez Pupo has made phenomenal use of light and shadow to give us a taste of what that must feel like in the mind's eye of a believer. One image that especially stands out for me is just a hand pushing up through grains of sand, but somehow he has made it so that the sand is slowly falling away from the hand and fingers slowly exposing them to the light.

Trance is a unique view of a world few of us have ever experienced. Normally the only time we see Afro-Caribbean religions are the twisted exploitive verions used in movies and sensationalistic novels. Jorge Luis Alvarez Pupo is able to make the real thing far less scary and twice as fascinating meaning he's a photographer of some talent through his ability to overcome those rather large preconceptions.

As with all titles available through Perceval Press Trance is half price until June 17th 2007.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 12:35 AM | Permalink

I wonder what it must have felt like for early man to first meet the horse. Did they hunt it to start with? How did they figure out that they could make use of it? Who was that first brave soul that said, "Maybe we should try climbing on and riding" or the intelligent one who thought of hooking it to a plough?

When the native peoples of North America first saw the horses that had escaped the Spanish conquistadors to roam free over the plains they were astounded. They had never seen dogs so big before. They soon became an integral part of their lives, replacing the camp dogs that pulled the travois and facilitating the hunting of the buffalo.

When the American government wanted to destroy the nation of Chief Joseph (Thunder In The Mountains was his real name) they ordered the destruction of all Appaloosa horses, as they were integral to the lives of the Nez Pearce. The rationale went that by destroying their horses the Nez Pearce would have to surrender and live on the reservation the government has so kindly provided for them.

Anywhere horses lived, their lives became integrated into the culture of the people who have lived there. From the Russian Steppes where the Cossacks raided, China where they were immortalized in statues of jade, Arabia where they were bred for speed, and in farmer's fields around the world they tilled the earth.

There's something about a horse that makes it hard to visualize them as static; they need to be in motion or at least animated to capture their essence. For me this has always meant the majority of photo essays, or any type of attempt to capture a moment in time with horses, has been inadequate in expressing who they are. Too much attention is usually paid to the look of the animal, to show jumping and walking it around the ring, and not enough to out where it comes alive on the prairie.

Viggo Mortensen's The Horse Is Good is a horse of a different colour in that it attempts to capture moments of movement and non-traditional times of stasis. Through his involvement in movies where horses were utilized in the couple of years prior to the original 2003 publication date of the book, he had some unique opportunities to both observe and photograph horses in circumstances that showed off their unique qualities.

Instead of mere portraiture Mr. Mortensen's photographs show movement through shutter speed adjustments, point of focus, and perspective. By shooting from atop a horse he allows us to experience the sensation of movement as much as possible in a static format.

I'm sure most of you have seen photographs of car's headlights caught in a timed exposure where they become lazar beams that streak across the night sky. Horses caught in the same fashion in daylight leave pieces of themselves and their riders strewn in lines behind them while the background behind dissolves into a blur of unrecognizable shapes.

Of course freezing them in frame and capturing them as sculpted figures of muscle, sinew, and bone displays the power that fuels that speed. Looking at them from below, their rolling eyes, powerful neck muscles, and broad chests one can only imagine the terror people felt when first meeting mounted soldiers charging down on them.

The warhorses of old were bred for speed and strength – a mixture of a draught horse and a thoroughbred which, even encumbered by the weight of a knight and his armour and encased in metal itself, could obtain gallop speeds. Imagine having that bearing down on you with your only defence being a skinny post with a metal tip on the end?

Mr Mortensen also treats us to some of the more intimate moments between man and animal. The connection that can be forged between the rider and steed where each becomes an extension of the other to the extent that communication is thought and felt rather then indicated or spoken.

The hand that rests on the back of the horse against the bright blue sky and nothing else; one hand reaching out to a head and bridle while the other holds a mouthful to bring to the muzzle as reward; and two foreheads touching, human and horse, sharing something we onlookers can't begin to understand.

Of course not all people have affection for horses and wild Mustangs were almost hunted to extinction for the sake of politics, ranchers, and dog food. Others have treated them like machinery and use them until there's nothing left but to send for the knacker to come haul the carcass away.

But still they continue in their relationship with us in spite of that and we are honoured by it. The horse brings a certain dignity and romance to our life that nothing else can. How many motor carriage rides around Central Park or the Old Town in Quebec City do you think people would be interested in? Look at the pictures of the horses drawn up around a grave and on the march in honour of Big Foot who was wiped out at Wounded Knee in The Horse Is Good and if something doesn't stir in your breast than you should be checked for a pulse.

Mr. Mortensen has managed to capture aspects of the horse's character and our relationship with it that is very rarely depicted anywhere. Without words or descriptive titles I learned more about horses from this book than any encyclopaedia or reference book I've glanced through in the past. There have not been many occasions where I've been fortunate enough to be around horses, but this book brought back memories of those times as effectively as watching a movie. All that was missing was the quick hop to avoid stepping in something you'd rather not, but aside from that it was just like being in the company of horses.

The Horse Is Good has just recently come available again and can be purchased directly from Perceval Press until June 17th 2007 for half its list price as part of the spring sale. Horse lovers everywhere should rejoice.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:39 PM | Permalink

I never read much fiction for young adults, or teens as we used to called when not being called something less savoury. Even when I was technically of the age appropriate for that genre it was never something I was particularly interested in. First of all the topics never seemed that interesting –young love and high-school garbage that seemed to be lived by people from another planet.

Nobody I knew talked like or acted like the people in these books, or even more to the point cared about the things these characters seemed to think mattered. How people could live in our world and be so clueless as to what was going on around them socially and politically was beyond me. Little did I know until I was much older that I was a freak, but that's another story.

At the time as far as I was concerned it just meant that nobody except adults were writing anything that interested me. It was either that or reading fantasy stories written for children like Alan Gardner's or Susan Cooper's books; with nothing in between. Well, thirty years too late I've finally stumbled on a couple of books that would have fit the bill perfectly.

Land Of The Mammoths and Pirates, Bats, and Dragons by Mike Davis published by Perceval Press are giant strides in the right direction of writing books for a youth audience that have more on their minds than what their going to wear to the prom. That they are both subtitled "A Science Adventure" is the first clue that they are not your standard youth fare, and reading them only confirmes it.

Both stories feature three young adults who have exceptional skills, but not outside the realm of reason. In other words while they are intelligent and gifted in their fields of study their abilities don't make them unrecognizable as teenagers. They still have all the characteristics of teenagers; the cock-sure attitude that they know what they are doing and no one else does; convinced of their immortality; and suffering from foot in mouth disease.

Jack and Connor are Irish Americans who live in Ireland while Julia is a New Yorker and proud of it. In both novels the three protagonists travel to parts of the world that are little known to people of any age in our society. Greenland in book one and the Arab island Socotra in the Arabian Sea at the mouth of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Yemen for book two.

The three young people are brought together in the first book through a scientific competition sponsored by the U.N. that sends the winners to Greenland to assist in research being already conducted on the dwindling Reindeer of the island. While it may seem a happy coincidence that brothers Jack and Connor were both selected, it turns out it's their areas of study that brought them to the attention of their team leader.

While Jack's fascination with micro technology has led him to create the worlds lightest manned aircraft – it can be collapsed down to the size of a canoe and weighs about as much, Connor has made a study of Mammoths, and his knowledge is equal to that of any doctorial student. They soon find out that the reindeer are not to be the true focus of their project and it's their unique specializations that are really what are in demand.

Part Lost World, part real lessons in the delicate nature of isolated ecosystems, the common cold can wipe out whole communities of people and animals if they've never been exposed to it, Land Of The Lost Mammoths is a great combination of adventure story, scientific education, and history lesson. Not only do the young heroes and we have an exciting time of it, Mr. Davis does an excellent job of incorporating the legends and history of Greenland into the story.

While both of the books deal with the issue of preserving delicate ecosystems, Pirates, Bats, And Dragons casts a little wider net politically. You can't travel to the Middle East without coming under the watchful glare of people who love to stick their noses into other people's business. The fact that Jack is an expert in micro-radio controlled technology and that he's an avowed pacifist marks him in some minds as suspect from the start. But showing up where the CIA has just made a horrible mess of things makes him look awfully attractive to certain parties as a scapegoat.

Once again they are working under the auspices of the U.N., only this time there is no hidden agenda on the part of their team leader. They are there to use their skills to help explore the extensive cave system on the island of Socotra. Julia's skills as a large animal specialist and zoologist come to the fore, as they have to figure out the truth behind the legends of dragons living in the cave system.

Jack's job is to utilize a new invention of his, radio controlled bats with built in cameras that are solar and battery powered and controlled by microwaves. They can act as scouts for the explorers before they enter into the cave systems themselves. Connor will be leading the way into the caves as he has proven himself to be a cliff climber and spelunker of some skill.

Not only do the trio have to face any dangers that the fauna of the island may have to present, there are also modern day pirates (not cute ones like Johnny Depp either) and the CIA to be contended with. Unlike most books aimed at this market it does not adhere to the party line of my country right or wrong, and in fact the enemy ends up being the policies of the current administration and the lengths they will go to tracking down terrorists and covering their asses when things go wrong.

The three teenagers, their team leader, and their local guides all come within a whisker of being disappeared or declared suspected terrorists because an enemy is needed and they will fit the bill. It doesn't hurt that their team leader, although an American citizen, is of Palestinian birth, and that the Patriot Act lets anybody be locked up without trial or charges being laid. But they are saved by Jack being able to alert the media who show up and make enough fuss that the State Department has to intervene.

As with the first book Mr. Davis does a good job of blending the scientific information, and his jabs at American policy, with the adventure story. Nothing ever seems jarring or out of place and each little piece fits together with the neatness of a jigsaw puzzle. While on occasion both books might drift towards feeling like "Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys Take on the World", those times are too few to distract from the overall quality of the books and the story telling.

It's not often that young people are given a perspective on the world that is different from the one that is presented in the mainstream media. To find it in books that are also well written, entertaining, and informative is a pleasant surprise. Mr. Davis has also gone to the effort of footnoting points of historical and scientific importance through-out the books, so if people are interested they can do further study on their own.

Like everything else at Perceval Press right now Land Of The Lost Mammoths and Pirates, Bats, And Dragons are half price until June 17th/07. They would make great summer reading for people of all ages.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 10:27 PM | Permalink

Not everyone was happy with the direction George Bush was taking the United States in 2003 when he set out on his course of conquest and empire building. Today it has become much more fashionable to be against the conflict in Iraq, just as a generation ago the opposition to the Viet Nam war became stylish as the conflict drew to a close.

But for those lonely voices back in the early stages of the War On Terror it must have felt like they were yelling into a gale for all that anybody seemed to be listening. The noise of patriotism and righteous indignation could be heard emitting from every television and radio; blaring from every headline; and oozing out of every opportunistic mouth.

To those trying to tell the world that perhaps there might be a contrasting opinion to the one that was being touted by the administration it must have been obvious that they needed to make a lot of noise in an original way if they wanted to make their voices heard over the din. Pandemoniumfromamerica was an attempt made by Viggo Mortensen and his companion in sonic disruption, Buckethead, to do just that.

Joined by their friends Henry Mortensen, (Viggo's son) Dominic Monahan, Billy Boyd, and Elijah Wood, they attempted to not just voice their opposition to the war but to describe what it felt like to be caught up in the maelstrom of America at the time. At first blush the tracks may not appear to have anything to do with the subject at hand, but this is not a typical CD of protest music.

For instance what does a distorted version of "Red Rive Valley" have to do with anything at all concerning the war or America? One could make some deep comments about it being symbolic about the loss of naiveté and innocence in America as it is such a sentimental pieces of silliness. But perhaps they are commenting more on the dangers of commercial sentiment as opposed to real emotion and how it can be used to manipulate reactions from people.

What else would you call appeals to the flag, patriotism, family values, the American Way of Life, and God's on our side? They are all manufactured by forces outside of you with the express purpose of triggering a reaction. It's a Pavlov and the dogs type of thing; see how many hoops we can push them through by invoking cheap sentimental imagery.

Real emotion is something you create naturally, not as a response to some man made manipulative imagery. It's no coincidence that Pandemoniumfromamerica is dedicated to Noam Chomsky the media critic and linguist. It was Chomsky in his book Manufacturing Consent who outlined how the American public had been duped by Papa Bush's administration and the media into going along with the first Gulf War through sentimental manipulations and outright lies.

The title track of the CD uses a poem by William Blake, the 19th century British Romantic poet and opium eater, To be honest I'm that big a fan of most Romantic poetry, finding it overblown and lacking in subtlety, but in this instance the poem Viggo selects help to create the mood of what they see happening in America. The mood of the piece suggests the babble of confusion that arose at the time.

Its effect is increased by the fact it falls on the heels of Viggo's response to the war, the poem "Back To Babylon". It can be taken both literally as being the return of American forces to the Middle East or as commentary on the descent into barbarism that accompanies a declaration of war.

Don't come listening to Pandemoniumfromamerica expecting to find it full of pop music or even a collection of Mortensen's poetry. Musically speaking it's not what you'd call incredibly refined either, with Buckethead and Henry being the only legitimate threats as musicians on the recording. But despite this the other contributors have a sensitivity to the moods and emotions of pieces so their contributions fill the space with sound that's appropriate for creating the atmosphere needed for the words being presented.

There is an all-pervasive feeling of anxiety that percolates throughout the recording that reflects the state of mind of America in the days following Sept. 11 2001. Like the homeowner who was told that their gated community was invulnerable to the chaos of the society around them, America found that you couldn't lock the world out. Living lives of conspicuous consumption and self-absorption is no guarantee of immunity from the world's realities anymore.

Violated and afraid, and suffering from mass post-traumatic stress syndrome, the American people were easy prey to the manipulations of those who had their own agendas. More then willing to take advantage of everyone's grief and whip it into a froth of patriotic fervour and hatred to achieve their own ends, the leaders they elected to guide them through moments of crises with compassion and courage betrayed their confidence.

Listening to Pandemoniumfromamerica as an entity instead of as a collection of songs, one hears the anxiety, the betrayal, and the confusion. When an artist shows society its reflection in the mirror of his or her work the picture is not always going to be to everyone's liking. Viggo Mortensen and Buckethead have created a mirror that doesn't pander to anyone's self interest or ego; the sounds of a society in turmoil and confusion are never pleasant.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 04:25 AM | Permalink

To say that I do a fair number of book reviews is probably something of an understatement. The main reason for this is that I love reading; no matter how many books I've read I just can't get jaded. There's always something new and exciting if you know where to look.

Of course I've my preferences in genre and style, who doesn't, but on occasion I like to challenge myself in order to keep intellectually sharp. The brain is like any other muscle I figure, if you don't exercise it, it will grow flabby. I have to admit that I will always prefer a well written story over anything else though, no matter if it's an intellectual challenge or not.

Which explains why J.K Rowling is equally comfortable on my bookshelves as Thomas Pynchon and James Joyce. But if there is anything or anyone I have a soft spot for when it comes to books it's the smaller independent presses. I suppose you could put it down to a type of romanticism; the small press that puts out books because they love it rather than being in pursuit of the next bestseller of the moment like bigger presses are forced to be.

Of course that's not the truth in either situation, but larger imprints do have much more put on the line than the small ones and have to worry more about the bottom line. The small press with only a limited run of far fewer titles can afford to take a few more risks with the style and content of its releases. Whether it is true or not, in my mind's eye I will always associate small presses with work that is more concerned with artistic merits than commercial viability.

I know that is an awful generalization and that there are probably numerous instances of just the opposite, but how often do you find the work of a contemporary Cuban photographer in one of those luxurious coffee table books the large house's produce periodically? How many would risk publishing translations of detective novels by a former officer in the Algerian army?

Trance published by Perceval Press and the early works of Yasmina Khadra published by Toby Press are respectively the two small presses referred to in the paragraph above. Over the past few months I've come to appreciate both of them for the wonderful content they have to offer.

Perceval Press was founded by Viggo Mortensen and is primarily concerned with publishing books of artistic expression that would probably have very little chance of seeing the light of day otherwise. A good percentage of the work is Mr. Mortensen's wonderfully cerebral and emotional poetry and photographs. But this is much more than just the vanity press of a wealthy individual, as they also publish selected works by a variety of other artists.

The majority of their focus is on art for arts sake, but they do publish other work as well. There are the highly strange and brilliant musical collaborations of Mr Mortensen and the mysterious Buckethead (so named for the empty Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket he wears on his head while performing and his penchant for appearing masked at all times) available on CD. There are also a good variety of other photographs and visual arts on sale as well.

In a lot of ways Perceval Press epitomises the nature of the small press in that they publish a very specific type of book. The books they produce are not going to appeal to a mass audience, but they weren't designed to. The books they offer challenge us to see the world in different ways and not all of them are comfortable or pleasant. But than again there is a lot about our world that is not comfortable or pleasant.

Toby Press is a lot more like your traditional publisher in that they offer a variety of fiction and non-fiction work. Where they differ from their more mainstream contemporaries is the nature of their content. Aside from the aforementioned Khadre, they lean heavily towards authors from the Middle East.

Probably Toby press is one of the few places in the world where Jew and Arab are equally at home as they rub shoulders quite happily together in their catalogue. Whether it's an Iranian describing the days just before the overthrow of the Shah or an elderly Orthodox Jew who is devoted to his faith and his live in the city of Jerusalem the gulf that exists between them in our world is bridged in Toby's catalogue.

It is truly an international publisher as stories travel from eastern Africa to the Georgia Steppes, to the Golan Heights, and the street of Damascus and Algiers. Although on some pages the characters speak the polemic of the times, the authors are not endorsing those sentiments just ensuring that we know the reality in which they exist.

Like Perceval Press, Toby Press brings us the voices we don't normally get to hear. While now it seems like almost every publisher has at least one Muslim writer in their stable, to go with their Hindu, the only distinction that seems to have mattered at Toby has been the quality of the writing.

Over the next few days I'll be reviewing some more items from the Perceval Press catalogue, including more work by Mr. Mortensen, some from the forbidden island of Cuba (forbidden at least if you live in the U.S.), and surprisingly a couple of books for young adults. Until June 17th you can buy pretty much any title from their catalogue for half price – including all CDs, books of poetry, and visual art books as long as you purchase directly form the site.

There are numerous other small presses out there who do much the same thing that either one of these two do and you'd be doing yourself a favour if you checked them out. Who knows you might discover a gem of your own.

Posted by Richard Marcus at 05:24 AM | Permalink