Having had enough of the soporific poetry recitals which he’d attended or participated in, the American poet found inspiration in the folk music nights of his youth. "Those are my roots – Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and all those artists who came to the YMCA, schools and community centres to sing and to tackle social issues. In my neighbourhood, it’s those artists who have broadened our horizons more than ever before."

Constantly invited to events around the world, the founder of the poetry slam movement has observed that his brainchild has shown the same strengths and weaknesses everywhere. "The positive side is that slam ends up by creating a community of people from various backgrounds. Slam has given back to a lot of people a place that they missed, sometimes unwittingly – a place where they felt they belonged." And if this "democratic" aspect sometimes pushes slam towards amateurism, Smith doesn’t worry about it. To him, the idea was always to put together a public literary event that could attract anyone. "My ambition was more social than political. From the get-go, I wanted slam to remain totally open to all influences, from Texas cowboy poets to New York rappers. Slam doesn’t exclude anyone."

When asked about the distinction he makes between slam and so-called literary poetry, which is essentially intended for publishing, Slam Papi answers without any difficulty. "Two basic things: first, the notion of performance, of a union between literary writing and public speaking; secondly, the obligation to know how to captivate the audience, and to interact with it. If we expect of a theatre or film actor that he be able to touch viewers, why should it be any different in the case of someone who goes up on stage to read his poetry?"

Much has been made, sometimes in a derogatory manner, about the competitive nature of poetry slams, which amuses Marc Smith. "We developed the whole competition thing as a bit of a lark. But this formula was picked up by others, probably because it was the easiest to recreate. And because journalists have insisted on that aspect of slam, a part of the audience and even some slam poets have started to take this competition seriously. Which mainly showed their total lack of humour."

Slam Papi, who’ll give a conference/workshop at Lion D’Or on September 19, recently celebrated the slam movement’s 25th anniversary. "As years went by, I learned that art was a sacred thing, destined to change the life of people exposed to it. At our 25th anniversary event, I was moved to see folks from several generations who had been affected by the movement."

Grand Slam 2011
Hosted by Ivy
At Lion D’Or
September 18-19

Through his various contacts in the United States, particularly his cousin Peter White, Ryan soon established business relationships with hashish suppliers in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as with several Colombian cartel suppliers of cocaine. Deals and shipment schedules were set up, money paid up front, and drugs delivered, usually in large quantities, which Dunie’s henchmen would cut up, repackage and distribute. More often than not, the middlemen that he sold to were motorcycle gangs, such as the Rock Machine and its archrival, the Montreal chapter of the Hells Angels. Ryan cared not to whom he sold, as long as their money was green. He was, after all, a businessman. And the cash was rolling in like never before.

It didn’t take long for the local Italian mafia to begrudge the fact that an upstart Irishman was competing in what they considered to be both their business and their long-held territory. The message was sent out to him, along with veiled threats. But Ryan shrugged it off. As he once commented to a colleague, "Mafia, shmafia. If there’s gonna be a war, we’ve got the IRA." Indeed, although it was never proven, Ryan was known to be a financial supporter of the Irish Republican Army via its American Irish affiliates in Boston. And that support was sometimes repaid with arms smuggled into Montreal from Northern Ireland. Dunie did, after all, proudly wear a gold Claddagh ring on the third finger of his right hand, as did many other members of Montreal’s West End Gang.

The Italians never carried out their implied threats against Ryan. Instead they began using him and his organization, such as the Irish Matticks family who controlled the Port of Montreal, to provide them with imported hashish and cocaine, which they in turn could distribute on the street at a profit through their own network. Ryan also set up similar cooperative deals with the Hells Angels and other local biker gangs. But he stubbornly made it clear that he was not interested in forming any sort of importation partnership with them. He was simply the conduit through which they could obtain drugs for resale, take it or leave it. By 1982, he was being hailed as Montreal’s "King of Coke" by fellow mobsters, the media and the police. "If you wanted blow back then," today says one of his former major buyers and distributors, "Dunie was the man to see."

Excerpted from Montreal’s Irish Mafia: The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang. Copyright (c) 2011 by D’Arcy O’Connor. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd.

I’ve seen them live again many times over the years, in places as varied as the defunct Spectrum, Club Lambi, the Masonic Memorial Temple (!), Mission Santa Cruz and La Sala Rossa, and every time I fell in love again with their music, which might be best described by borrowing the title of one of their EPs, Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique, then throwing in a lot of soul, a touch of prog and some indie rock vibes for good measure.

Critics haven’t always been kind to their post-No Cities Left releases, but Gang of Losers (2006), Missiles (2008) and the recent Degeneration Street (2011) have all been in heavy rotation in my household, filled as they are with anthemic songs that often seem to speak directly to me.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that when I heard that Invisible Publishing was putting out a book about them as part of their new Bibliophonic series, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy. Especially since on top of being so enamoured with The Dears, I’m also crazy about rock biographies (in the past year alone I’ve read about the exploits of Led Zeppelin, Prince and The Rolling Stones, amongst others).

THE DEARS: LOST IN THE PLOT

Written by Lorraine Carpenter, a local music journalist who’s not only interviewed The Dears a bunch of times throughout their career but who also considers singer-songwriter Murray Lightburn a friend, Lost in the Plot is an unabashedly personal and subjective take on the history of the band, full of juicy anecdotes that a writer with less inside access might not have been privy to.

And even though Carpenter is almost part of the family, her book is hardly a hagiography. In fact, Lightburn and his cohorts sometimes come off like drunken buffoons, prone as they are to getting into epic fights with each other. “I’d never really yelled at anyone until I joined The Dears and then I’d be yelling all the time, and it just made me anxious,” says guitar player Rob Benvie in chapter 4.

“So we lost our shit, which we do very well. And, again, we almost broke up,” says keyboardist Natalia Yanchak a few pages before, setting up what felt to me like the running gag of the band’s story. You see, from their formation in 1995 to the present day, The Dears have had close to 20 musicians go in and out of their ranks. It might be mean to admit to, but reading about the endless shifts in their lineup becomes kind of hilarious, as one bandmate after another quits, is “asked to leave” or gets “an honourable discharge.”

Through it all, the quotes attributed to leader Murray Lightburn make him sound alternately like “a self-hating rock star” (as he’s described by Laura Wills at some point) and a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac. Then again, as Dizzy Dean once said, it ain’t bragging if you can back it up. As such, when Murray points out that The Dears “laid down stone for an entire scene in this country, yet no one ever mentions that we were the band that put this path in place,” he’s pretty much right.

Which brings us to another thing I greatly enjoyed about Lost in the Plot: how, even though it’s about The Dears first and foremost, it’s also a fascinating account of the explosion of the Montreal music scene in the mid-aughts, as experienced by a group that was reportedly stalked by Arcade Fire’s Win Butler the year he arrived in the city, and that somehow broke the urn holding the ashes of Godspeed member Efrim Menuck’s dead dog while recording at Hotel2Tango!

Lorraine Carpenter’s The Dears: Lost in the Plot is available now; a launch party is also planned on April 29 at Casa del Popolo, 5 to 8 p.m.

A few pages later, Niko’s world is torn apart by one of the bombs, and the family are launched out of their boredom and restlessness and onto a life-defining quest. The rest of the novel follows both father and son: the day-to-day practicalities of food, housing, papers and work for a man with no country, and a son with a tenuous future.

Nasrallah painstakingly follows their trajectory as they cross the world as refugees, first together and then separately. They board a ferry to Cyprus, and then Greece, and then finally Niko is sent to grow up with distant relatives in faraway, French Montreal, where there are "too many rules, and no one is happy, but we all have a lot of money to live well and we all complain."

Niko is relevant and engrossing reading, and I daresay that in a month of elections, it’s a particularly alluring read. Nasrallah gives us the space to contemplate his characters, who are refugees and immigrants who struggle towards uncertain futures, uncertain even in the relatively safe haven of Quebec society. What better time than now?

Niko
]]> http://hour.ca/2011/04/07/running-to-somewhere/feed/ 1 http://hour.ca/2011/03/24/from-the-darkness-light/ http://hour.ca/2011/03/24/from-the-darkness-light/#comments Thu, 24 Mar 2011 04:00:00 +0000 Melora Koepke http://hour.ca/blog/2011/03/24/from-the-darkness-light/ Vancouver-based writer Timothy Taylor’s novels are a somewhat rare commodity in Canadian fiction: novels with big ideas, yes, but where things actually happen as well. His Giller Prize-nominated Stanley Park (2001) was a thriller about foodism and homelessness in Vancouver, two themes that seemed twinned, especially at that time, to that city’s sense of itself.

In his third novel, The Blue Light Project, the themes are similar yet distinct: fame, identity, fear and the possibly imminent end of civilization as we know it, or at least the potential for vast change in the way we live, which might already be underway (the latter is less of a theme than a sense that permeates Taylor’s work, not only his fiction but travel magazine pieces in publications such as The Walrus and EnRoute). For that reason, he’s made sure that The Blue Light Project is set nowhere in particular, or rather, in an urban everycity that could be any city at all.

"That choice was deliberate because I think that there are, these days, far more commonalities than there are differences [between cities]," says Taylor. "It’s easy for people living in any city now to lead very similar lives… and this mental topography [of sameness] is true of me too. I live here, but in a lot of different places as well."

The Blue Light Project is an event thriller about a hostage-taking at a taping of an American Idol-style show for kids called KiddieFame. Eva is a gold-medal Olympic athlete seeking a new purpose for her life, and Rabbit is an underground artist whose new project aims to network the city in new ways; there’s also an unnamed hostage-taker and a self-loathing celebrity journalist who is the only person the hostage-taker will talk to.

Taylor’s prose is interested in the spaces between people and how they connect, and ultimately (not to give too much of the plot away) the way they intersect. The hope that is offered in the darkest days comes in the form of the most outsider art form of all: the street art that appears in the streets and alleys of, well, everycity.

"Urban spaces are contiguous everywhere," says Taylor, "and street art in particular is a cultural form that just flies between cities as if there were no differences… I’m not suggesting art can save us, but street art comes, as a friend of mine told me, as a gift."

The Blue Light Project