I found out about the exhibit (and that it was by Banksy, as it exists anonymously and is staffed by randoms) from Wooster Collective, whose RSS feed I really need to stay up on because I just missed them speaking in Toronto by a day. I’m really glad they were careful about spoilers and left out some of my favourite things, like the leopard. (The exhibit is closed now.)
Many people who lined up did so only because they were walking down the rather busy street it was on and saw a line of people waiting to get into what appeared to be a pet store with a leopard in the window. I heard a lot of “Uh, I think it’s an art thing?”
Some things you had to see online though, like the record of the view from the mother CCTV camera’s lens:
Unlike his first North American exhibit in LA where Banksy painted an elephant to match a magenta-and-gold wallpaper print, officially decreed illegally animal abuse, much of this exhibit had strong anti-animal exploitation themes. Banksy not only said that this was a concious flip, but that much of the money from the elephant exhibit went into funding this one.
A woman outside was handing out Go Veg For Thanksgiving pamphlets but I rejected them because I’m already vegan, I already have good Thanksgiving recipes, and our Thanksgiving had already passed anyway. I don’t think she was officially associated with the exhibit, just using the opportunity.
This spring in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood, I photographed this very attractive and friendly piece of artwork that had been donated illegally to the city by an artist who clearly worked hard and wanted to make something worthwhile.
My man in the MidEast IdiotTheWise has taken up a particularly charming bit of anti-anti-graffiti lately as part of his very diverse set of street artistry.
Every person in any city around the world touched by street art has also been touched by the ugly grey-square-leaving smear/buff “clean up” jobs the city spends our money on afterwards. Not only is this unappealing aesthetically, but (as demonstrated here last summer) it’s totally futile, and is really just about creating an image of control over the populace.
ITW, writing around Tel-Aviv under the name Inspire, has started framing up these sorts of urban scars, decorating them with the simplest power of street art (to beautify the dull and mundane) as well as having the potential to directly engage passersby by tempting them to create themselves, perhaps one of the strongest things about street art.
Now if only the city crews would start covering up graffiti with that instant-blackboard chalkable paint…
These double-ad garbage/recycling bins are ubiquitous in Toronto, and in the lead-up to Buy Nothing Day 2007 an advertisement was switched out for a BND poster.
The poster originally included the Nov 23rd date, but this photo was taken a couple days after BND and someone had decided to wipe the date off once it had passed, leaving the rest intact.
It started when we were little kids.
Free spirits, but already tormented by our own hands
given to us by our parents.
We got together and wrote on desks
and slept in laundry rooms near snowy mountains
and slipped through whatever cracks we could find,
minds altered, we didn’t falter
in portraving hysterical and tragic characters in a smog filled universe.
we loved the dirty city
and the journeys away from it.
We had not yet been or seen our friends, selves,
chase tails round and round in downward spirals,
leaving trail of irretrievable vital life juice behind.
Still, the brothersbloodcomradespartnerfamilycuzz was impenetrable
and we lived inside it
laughing with no clothes, and everything experimental ’till death was upon us.
In our face, mortality.
And lots of things seemed futile then, but love and music can save us,
and did, while the giant grey monster grew
more poisoned and volatile around us,
jaws clamping down and spewing ugly shit around.
Nothing is the same.
So we keep moving.
So we keep moving.
Went off and got some hair cuts
Lookin wild and got all drugged up
Hopped a train into the night
Got a ride with a transvestite
Two boys in San Francisco
Two boys in San Francisco
Blasted off in a Bart bathroom
Those coppers woke us up
Motherfuckers woke us up
Two young brothers on a hover craft
Telepathetic love and bellylaughs
Storm the stage of Universal
Slim shine talk boy go subversal
Papa’s proud and so he sent us
Pounding hearts full and relentless
Two boys in London, England
Two boys in London, England
Climbing out of hostel windows
Wearing gear so out but in though
Come on kind and do the no no
Two young brothers on a hovercraft
Telepathics love and belly laughs
We went to Fairfax High School
Jumped off buildings into their pools
We’d sit down and grease at Canters
Run like hell they can’t catch us
Two boys in L.A. proper
Two boys in L.A. proper
Stealin’ anything that we could
Gotta sneak into the Starwood
Gotta peak into the deep good
I remember…
10 years ago in Hollywood
We did some good
and we did some real bad stuff
but the Butthole Surfers said
It’s better to regret something you did
Than something you didn’t do
We were young
And we were looking
looki-i-ing
looking for that deep kick…
Seen ‘em come, seen ‘em go…
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 Northtekteknival 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.
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!
Footage from the 10000 Creatures sound / film stage
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).
An Australian scrambles to make it from Toronto to Northtek
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.
Sa found the Free Spirit Spheres website about these beautiful little loft spaces that have been assembled by Tom Chudleigh and placed up in trees near Qualicum, BC on Vancouver Island. They look like an incredibly peaceful place to, well, hang out.
More photos and info, along with contact/rental information, is available on the site.
Phone/PDA? Mobile version!
