Shopping Carts in Ravines

Update: and on the braindead horde side of the issue… Long Island Wal-Mart worker trampled to death by bargain-hunters.

Indian Rd north of Bloor St W, outside the eastern exit of Keele subway station, Oct 11, Toronto

July 27, 28 and 29 I was in the backwoods of Ontario’s Kawarthas region, near the small but friendly and more-progressive-than-you-might-expect town of Bancroft & its surrounding communities, for Northtek teknival 2007.

This is the 6th consecutive year of this festival (here’s my post on last year), which is a free, open, mandatory-DIY event held on crown land and comprised wholly and solely of the coming-together of whatever number of autonomous groups show up to take part in the temporary decentralized community.

Absolutely every aspect of the organization and occurrence is handled by whoever gets together and picks up the slack, including date planning (don’t get me started), location scouting and selection, and promotions / information dissemination.

That flyer up top was just one person’s artistic interpretation, and this one’s my own:

The only rules are: no vending allowed whatsoever (dually enforced by Canadian crown land law and anti-capitalist mob rule), leave no trace (same dual theoretical/practical enforcement situation), and don’t be “that guy,” i.e. don’t be obnoxious, unable to take care of yourself, or stepping on anyone’s toes… or find out what genuine response means in an essentially lawless scenario. (The answer: we kinda freestyle it, but power in numbers is always key.)

Introductory info on the festival is at Northtek.net and more detailed stuff is on the wiki at free23.net, however both of those are dynamic sites and if you’re reading this post too long after its post date, the content of the sites might have changed dramatically.

I could be said to have been some part of three of the soundsystems that set up, while also being little to no part of them at the same time. The one I was most involved with in the lead-up to the festival was the Slutek stage, a collaboration between Chicken Sluts (Toronto, ON) and Abitek (Abitibi, QC).

The Slutek, ahem, ‘teamwork’ banner

I contributed no gear or decor to the stage, nor did I in any way help set it up (I would’ve, but I was coming up on the bus and we only got there late Friday night when everything was already kicking).

Chicken Sluts banner, produced by a collective painting at the previous week’s Toronto drum circle

Lots of helping hands were pitched our way, however, and the stage came together pretty awesomely. Here’s the two main organizers, though:

  
Abitibi’s #FF and Toronto’s Wizard As Fuk, primary Slutek organizers

Of all the stages, Slutek had the most classical teknival soundsystem construction, although we’re sadly unable to put together speaker walls like this in Ontario.

Chicken Sluts vs Abitek ‘Slutek’ stage

I think of everything I heard, Ghost Television’s mosh pit-inducing set was my favourite. I did play a Sunday-morning set at the Slutek stage (starting off with an obnoxious happy hardcore smack across everyone’s 10 am… while wearing a Hanson shirt at that) but the stage I played the most at was the Operators of Overload stage, brought up by my friends from Waterloo, ON. In the lineup pictured below, I was right before the first set listed. I also played again later, and later again still.

Assembling Friday night’s O of O lineup as a doggy wanders by

My computer had been out of commission for two months leading up to the festival and I turned it on for the first time actually in the woods after getting the parts I needed the same day we came up… so I went all over the place and had lots of fun with the music collection I’d been locked off from in that time, playing from grime and dubstep to acid jazz, soulful house, Swedish hip hop and all sorts of other stuff.

Marta sleep-styling at her Decoration Station

Here’s Marta from Waterloo, who came up with the O of O crew. She set up a Decoration Station area for people to create pretty things to wear on their hair, clothes, etc. Once people were done with that, we converted the Station location to the Free Market that me and Mintjellie set up, where things could be donated or taken on a gifting-based (rather than trading-based) system.

Though the lack of a central message board (and the fact that no one had any clue what time it was at any point) prevented some planned workshops from coming together, those two spaces were successes, as was Icecream’s Northtek Cafe.

Relaxing and chatting over tea and soup at the Northtek Cafe

One other thing that I wanted to have people work on communally was creating a piece of art on the back of a confiscated Toronto advertisement, which was then going to be replaced backwards into an adframe when we got back to Toronto in order to display the art instead of an ad. We brought two up, one broke (they’re rather fragile plastic) and the other was needed to make this sign.

This bit of signage was painted on the back of a common Toronto “public service” advert-order…

…putting it to a much more constructive use.

I was satisfied with that use, though, and when we all got back to the city it wound up in front of an ad-bearing garbage can. (Expect to be hearing more about this sort of project.)

The most heart-warming stage had to have been the MiR/ghEttoblAst/subtransit collaboration under the Association of Autonomous Astronauts name. Though the stage was lower-power and more chill than the pounding O of O PA or the squawking Chicken Slut speakers, it was powered by solar-charged batteries and playing through home-built speakers and thus did the best job of capturing the DIY and sustainability aspirations that the festival tries to aim for and align itself with.

The Association of Autonomous Astronauts setup with solar panels and home-built speakers

Though that big metal subwoofer is MiR’s, most of the recent speaker construction work was being done by the Batman, who was working on some while in the forest and showing whomever happened to be interested in learning.

The Batman building speakers

This really is my idea of camping… way crazier, more memorable, more educational and ultimately more environmentally friendly than the way that the average person would handle camping.

Pretty far removed from Boy Scouts, though, and I’m not sure I’d trust these three to take my daughters on any Girl Guides overnights.

Knives and malt liquor on the forest floor

Actually, these girls were pretty cool, though I got the impression they were generally watched with a touch of suspicion as they were, and came off as, ‘teknewbs.’ They held up their end just fine, though, cleaning up their site well without having to be asked and putting in responsible work to ensure that they secured a way out early on as they didn’t have one (as opposed to the freeloaders who crammed into the bus we’d all paid $50 a head for after leaving litter on the ground).

Some folks called The Quanta from the Wasaga Beach area set up another stage for Saturday night, and the fifth and final stage on the list was the 10000 Creatures live band & independent film setup. I didn’t hop on any instruments, although they’re pretty open to people doing exactly that, but I did bring a number of movies for them to screen.

Despite having owned it for three years, I’d never actually watched my copy of Baraka, as it was given to me by a girlfriend who told me to wait to watch it with her and then permanently stopped speaking to me. I waited on it, knowing I needed the right time and environment/social setting to watch it in, and this provided the perfect opportunity. A very good film, to understate it.

I also brought Nothing Shocks Anyone Anymore, One Second Before The Big Bang (an experimental graphic design impression of the timeline of the universe from then to now, put together by this Belgian crew and mailed free of charge all the way to me so that I could show it at things like this - very cool of them!), and a Magic Eye VHS tape containing animated 3D stereograms. You can see some of the Magic Eye video being projected in the two clips below, but good luck getting the 3D thing to work through these!

I didn’t encounter any Californians this year, the majority of the approximately 200 people present were from the Toronto area, with some from Quebec and some from New York / New Jersey, and a few occasionals from further away, like Jacob from the UK and this guy MashyP from Australia (though they weren’t here just for this festival).

Photos: Njjunglist’s, evil9mm’s, rottenvegetable’s, TalixZen’s, #FF’s, Wakka’s

Well, it’s been nearly a month since the Om Re:union Project’s Re:treat festival took place (around the summer solstice) and it’s about due time I come back down to Earth and put into words what I experienced.

Well, actually, if you know me, you know I tend to compile things… so here’s what I actually wrote by hand at the festival, bearing in mind that I haven’t actually hand-written anything in literally years:

One day after the solstice, 2007

I’m sitting on a cliff’s edge overlooking a rocky pair of ponds.

Really, it’s more of a wet rockbed than a pond or lake.
It’s quite nice though.

I’m here for the Om Festival Re:Union Project.

I haven’t been to an Om since 2004, which was the final year for the broadly-publicized festival, open to the public.
In the years since, Om has transitioned into being a closed community, though it remains open to applications.

The moon’s exactly half-full.

I’ve been picking up cigarette butts, as for some reason smokers don’t realize butts are litter. Just an aspect of a whole habit of denial, I guess.

The joints, on the other hand, are rolled with birch bark filters… they’ll decompose, unlike the synthetics and carbon of the cigarettes.

It’s getting dark and the bass just kicked in. Time to go party.

We talk pure Earth but sleep in plastic tents.

At least at Om, the stages are powered by solar panels (very impressive) while teknival’s 15 radical stages require 15 radical gas generators.

Understand that we’re trying our best, though, genuinely.

We’ve been born into a horrid plastic system and at this point in our history it’s literally almost impossible for people to break free, in psychological, cultural or lifestyle activity terms.

I wonder what life will be like for Haven, the 6-year-old boy here who volunteered to be a model for a Mark Jenkins-style tape sculpture body cast. It was pretty funny watching him be wrapped in saran wrap and tape.

Again, people even commented on the waste, but decided it was alright based on its artistic value.

It’s the same thing with computers. They’re disposable, deliberately obfuscated toxic contraptions that consume ever-increasing amounts of electricity.

But they’re helping us break free.

It’s literally impossible to be separate from the system when born into where we are. But we know that and are fighting it… Unfortunately every move we make, at least initially, does damage.

Eventually, we may own land, grow crops, use solar and be thoroughly self-sufficient, and we are trying…

The Om people have long had the plan of buying a piece of land.

It’s also something I’ve thought of alot. Two of my friends have family farms and could conceivably be down, Cowboy in particular, given his description of his lifeplan.

Several quick notes:

• The food (made from the random array of donations everyone brings in and prepared by continuously-changing volunteer groups, then served out freely at regular meal intervals and with snacks out at all hours of the day and night in between) is fucking incredible.

  So much larger servings than 2004 and even more than I can eat… which is a limit that barely even exists. Sushi, salad, rice, soup, chili, lentil stew, bread with pesto, tortillas, and oh my god melted vegan chocolate with granola and mixed fresh berries. One of the best vegan desserts I’ve ever had. The guy making the soup threw some of my ginseng in to energize and revitalize everyone. Very cool.

• I had a wicked conversation with Solomon who gave the hugging workshop and 2 other people about free parties, free culture and the post-society waste niche it exists in, as well as the oft-ignored fungi kingdom, the decomposers with incredible and unique properties that exist in an overlooked niche gap.

  I was telling Solomon that animals are actually closer to fungi than plants, and while I only meant taxonomically/genetically in an evolutionary sense, I just realized that we free radicals behave quite like the fungi, especially the ones that had colonized a tree stump up amongst the camps on the ridge and were glowing bioluminescently in the dark.

  I told Solomon, “You can build a kingdom from the things Toronto throws away.” Free culture, like fungal culture, is often disregarded from outside and thrives on that which is discarded.

• Paranoize came on late and then dropped the best set I’ve ever heard him play. He’s actually like one of Toronto’s best DJs. Given that he knows so many Guv people, it’s very respectable that he isn’t a big sell-out.

I’m very impressed with how much ORP has developed on Om, which felt special but also seemed like a hippie-leaning yuppie commercial weekend escape. This is so much more of a genuine community of this type than I’ve ever seen.

It makes Petra’s assertion that Teknival is a DIY party, not festival, (at least as it exists now) ring true.

I really like the announcements system here. A combination of a walkie-talkie network, message boards + signage, and group-hollering to make good use of word of mouth.

I also really like how much new technology has been integrated. Steve Mann has brought up his hydraulophone, which I’ve only seen at Nuit Blanche 2006 and the Ontario Science Centre. Also, the solar panels (though there definitely is a gennie down at the Home Bass stage now) and geodesic dome tents all over the place.

What with my mom giving me this ‘hippie gothic’ article about a commune that’s still around from the ’60s (not to mention free everything-important-in-life!) and my dad taking me to the cottages with Chris Brown back in the day and other things……. You know, I think I might be a bit like Haven after all.

This genuinely seems like a sustainable (or at least headed in that direction) model for an alternative lifestyle that is neither urban nor rural, but naturalistic.

If the Baby Boomers have infused their children with the energy and ability to divorce ourselves from the suicidal global machine and I’m experiencing this junction in history out of which evolves a synergistic, co-dependent sustainable lifestyle framework, then infinite blessings upon them.

If not, they fucked us all over for SUVs.

I’ve got faith in my mom + pop, though. I think they’re owed some karma.

2 days after the solstice, 2007

I went to Moon Bass to find it littered with shimmery ribbons. I started picking them up to clean them up, then decided to make bracelets from them.

And it turns out Steve, the first person I met at my first genuine party experience, produces and live-PAs some of the best techno I’ve ever heard in my life.

Mike Soma’s set was awesome too, much talked about around the fire while corn roasted.

I feel like I’ve broken through from my individualist hard ghetto sense of social relations and really connected synergistically with alot of people here.

The feeling of operating in a smooth and totally positivity-oriented direction is beyond euphoric.

I think I’ve discovered secular spirituality through this idea of being a part of a greater whole, which is self-aware and consciously synchronized and harmonious with both itself internally and its surrounding environment.

The internet’s a pretty good one for that, too, and really I think it’s an important part of all this.

I always wanted to be a superhero.

“Everybody works and nobody gets paid, because we love it.” That’s the slogan…

I just finished duty as a garbageman…

…which brings to mind the often-hurled attack on anarchism of “who will take out the garbage if everyone does as they please?”

I know plenty of people who are more than happy to do such dirty work, and when I feel like I’m part of something good and positive, I can actually enjoy it myself. I enjoyed scampering through the festival collecting garbage and recycling, assisting people with random things along the way… and when I came home, I enjoyed doing the dishes too, which had been piled high and colonized long enough that I ought to be signing rights agreements with them.

Om showed me, for the first time, what it really meant to be a perfectly-functional part of something…

My entire life to date had been one of ghetto contraryness and cynicism fused with a reductionist education and worldview.

Previously, I’ve always conceived of the world in relation to inner Toronto, my anchor point. Now, I feel much more detached and floating free but as a part of a broader whole, and the bad attitude seems simply stupid to me.

Where I grew up taught me to fight against others to get what I wanted for myself, both in terms of the ghetto childhood and the capitalist system.

Om showed me that, rather than being a bratty cancer cell, I can be a key part in a beautiful and all-encompassing whole.

This is the part where I don’t use the word enlightenment.

Some Om photos, more Om photos.

Now I’m off for a couple days on a site-scouting mission for Northtek!

The Toronto WWF staff and Newmindspace organizers and volunteers put together an installation piece in Metro Square today, filling the area (central to the downtown business and nearby commercial districts) with 3000 black balloons. The biodegradable balloons, taken altogether, visually represent the total CO2 emissions produced by the average Canadian in a single day, the idea being to make the invisible problem of global warming easier to visualize and understand. Since the area is currently a free wireless hotspot, there was live blogging going on all day from on site. I couldn’t stay all day and left after the balloons were set up and I’d handed out a stack of cards promoting the new WWF SaveOurClimate website, but apparently Samba Elegua played while Rick Mercer danced, and Mayor Miller got frisky.

It just occurred to me how foolish it is for people to think that they, as just one person, are powerless to have a positive global impact, since most already have such a significantly detrimental one every day.

On November 2nd, 2006, the black cloud will settle over Toronto. Newmindspace is helping WWF-Canada bring the message home: ignoring global warming won’t make it go away. Come to Metro Hall Square for an installation of massive proportions… before it’s too late.

For Halloween proper (i.e. the 31st) Newmindspace organized a last-minute subway party. Me and my friend Sasha went, myself dressed as a king and Sasha dressed as a Hullabaloo candy kid, complete with an authentic Robin Frolic.

My two primary impressions of the event are that, one, the TTC seems to get increasingly friendly with each party, and two, the dynamic of this party was different from any others that I’ve been to. I’m not sure dynamic is the right word, I’m just talking about how everyone was crammed together to the point of not being able to move an inch in the centre of the car, while there was so much room at the far end that it could be considered a “chill space.”

There were two soundsystems playing music ranging from drum and bass to Aqua and Prozac (accompanied by singalongs). The advertisement in the background of that photo, like the advertisement behind Jesus here, are for the Toronto Heart Health Partnership’s GetInToIt.ca, which funny enough includes a big honkin’ Newmindspace link under its Games section.

This subway party was a little earlier in the night than usual, allowing it to catch a variety of unsuspecting Halloweeners, plus a handful of random middle-aged / business people. It went off largely without any problems, starting from Downsview and looping all the way around to Finch. At first, I was a little concerned when the driver came on the PA system and told us to “keep it down back there” and that the maximum number of people allowed on the car was 225 and that they’d have to shut the party down if we exceeded that. No such thing happened, though, and when everyone was dismantling all the decorations and cleaning up the candy wrappers so we could switch to a different train at Finch, he came on the PA again and told us that to wish everyone a happy Halloween, it was alright if we stayed on the same train and went back, so we just rushed to the other end and started the party back up.

The rest of my photos are up on my Flickr here, everyone else’s on Flickr should be listed here, and if you happen to be the two girls who got on the train not knowing what was going on, you can find out more at newmindspace.com.

First off, I may as well let the wordofmouth speak for itself:

Saturday October 28th, 2006, 11pm –> Dawn
Don Valley Brick Works, Toronto

Practicum:

This event is a large scale multi-media counter insurgency organized by: Bite Your Tongue, FAMEFAME, Full Spectrum Dominance, Kids on TV, Lost Cats, MIR/MNP, and Pin:ksox.

These seemingly diverse groups will collaborate to create a dynamic unfolding experience in the politics of cultural recreation; to transcend stylistic niche, scene or clique, we aim to create an unclasifiable unity of culture makers, scene breakers, and risk takers.

This night will offer a very wide range of genres, aesthetics, crowds, occupying the same spacial territory from moment to moment.

Manifestations of breakcore, punkrock, disco, noise, conceptual act, performance, installation, intervention, pouvoir à l’imagination, etc. To use the language of art would diminish the potential for impossible surprises. It is our attempt to facilitate an unbelievable manifestation of undeniable spirit.

With your help we will creatively occupy a derelict space to celebrate being alive in the ashes of dreams by doing whatever the fuck we want, a shared moment outside of the boundaries of inhibition and restraint, a Temporary Autonomous Zone if you insist.

Warning:

There is danger, you are responsible for your own life and death, so live it up. But DRESS WARMLY, WEAR SENSIBLE SHOES, and BRING A FLASHLIGHT. And it is Halloween so dress the fuck up.

Presented by:

Bite Your Tongue
FAMEFAME
Full Spectrum Dominance
Kids on TV
Lost Cats
MIR/MNP
Pin:ksox

Audio:

The Blameshifter
Black Market
Blood Ceremony
DJ Hypercolour
Eyeballistic I-Beams
Famine
The First Seed
Gastric Female Reflex
Hank and the Hank Collective
Hinder
Holy Fuck
Kids on TV
Lost Cats
The Marquis
Missle Command
Naw
No Dynamics
Parul
Radiate
Razor Edge
Render
Sincere Trade
Skeeter
Talixzen
Woodhands

Video:

Brenda Goldstien
dissonance
FAMEFAME
Leif Harmsen
R.M. Vaughan and Jared Mitchel
Sabrina Saccoccio
VJ Nokami

Culture:

AA Bronson
Ashley Long
Chad Dembski
Darren O’Donnell
Don Simmons
Dr. Vincent Dawson
Eric A. G. Jackson
Janine Lee Vannatter
Jessica Rose
Jubal Brown
Life of a Craphead
Lucia De L’Amore
Matt Crookshank
Punch Clock
Pyrate
Robyn Germanese
Scott McGovern
Tyler Clark Burke
Ulysses Castellanos
Video Pack
Vlackie O.
and you

Food:

Josh Avery
Mat Brown

Now… I’m not so sure that everything listed there actually went down, but I was calling this unprecedented before it happened and I’m pretty sure it lived up to that.

Certainly, the use of the abandoned Don Valley Brick Works to host an underground party is not unprecedented, but the fusion of genres and scenes was. I’ve spent plenty of time in derelict buildings with pounding soundsystems, but this night was something different.

There were two, uhm, stages, one pounding out digital and vinyl tracks and the other meshing electronics with complete live bands. It occurred to me that the indie rock thing has reached a point where ‘their’ experimental is even noisier than ‘our’ experimental. Well, not really, I think the point is that indie rock and experimental electronic music have found a way to fuse together what had been fairly disparate styles in their roots. I’m sure Ryan would say that Sonic Youth did this in the ’80s. Well, new idea or not, this is a beautiful culture and I’m very happy that I can feel it is genuinely ours. I grew up surrounded by a commodified culture that only interacted with me for commercial purposes and didn’t really represent or define me at all.

It might be 3/4 through the Christian calendar, but some would have it that this is the beginning of a new cycle…

I really like the idea that this might be the birth of a new thing here, both post-rave and post-punk. Personally, I’m definitely all about getting in that boat - a new era of urban art along the lines of the original hip hop movement… that is, making do with what you (don’t) got… 21st century style. I mean, the freetekno crews were already somewhat there, but I think anyone involved could agree that could use a bit of a progressive kick in the pants, provided it’s in a positive direction.

The Brick Works is going to be undergoing renovations beginning very soon - I’m told maybe a month - and I definitely plan to go back to take photos with a better camera in better light. I had what might be a really cool graffiti idea while at this event, but I’m not sure whether it’ll fly or not.

One of the strangest things I saw was when me, my friend Sasha and this fellow Buddy Life headed for some flickering flames we’d seen in search of warmth and found a lamb being roasted in the depths of this old brick factory.

More photos up on my Flickr.