Shopping Carts in Ravines

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!

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.

The City Of Toronto™ has this idea of how bridges are supposed to look. They’re supposed to be grey, minimalistic, empty and sterile. Not too sure why, the CN Tower isn’t even that way any more, but you know me, I’m not exactly one to rock the paradigm.

Anyhow, apparently things like graffiti, poverty and homelessness can all be grouped together as “dirt” and eradicated as a whole. All you have to do is have enough money to pay people to erase all the things in reality that you can’t come to terms with!

Enough wallets got together and agreed that bridges are grey and sterile, and put all their money into aggressively reconstructing reality to fit their worldview… not caring one lick whether that meant destroying not only the culture but the entire lives of those who fell outside the model.

On June 28th, the literally poor and unfortunate souls who had made their homes under the Bathurst bridge were evicted by the City™, and their last remaining bits of worldly possessions were bulldozed.

Along with trying to erase these people’s lives so as to not cause discomfort to the working masses passing by on their commuter trains, the City™ also felt that it was important, nay, probably vital that they cover all the cement columns’ graffiti with grey paint. Rich people like grey for some reason, I think it’s something to do with being too old.

Unfortunately for The City Of Toronto™, the city of Toronto has a powerful, thriving culture.

After two days of “work” painting the bridge’s underside a nice shade of blank, the City™ workers went home to sleep, and the city’s life came out to play.

All the stuff pictured here appeared in the span of one bridge party night. Paint cans were limited in number, but the blank slate encouraged people of all sorts to try their hand.

Even though the majority wasn’t necessarily the most mind-blowing, visually-appealing work I’d ever seen, I was brimming with joy just to see so many people trying to create at all.

Random scribblings appeared alongside stylistic tags and developed pieces.

The most elaborate piece was left unfinished, at least for the time being, as someone had run off with the necessary black paint:

However, my favourites of all weren’t the visually complex pieces, but the messages scrawled in red in different places…

You know, I’m starting to see a pattern established here…

Just like in the cases of the Perrier / GRL projection battle and the totally pirate tagging of Coca-Cola’s giant inflatable adver-bottle (installed on a rooftop at a major downtown Toronto intersection), here The City Of Toronto™ has decided to lock horns with the actual city of Toronto, and wound up with its pathetic little committee being absolutely hung out to dry.

This note was left for the city workers:

This just in: You lose, we win.

Care for a rematch? We could play at this ’til the end of time.
We invented the game and we still write all the rules.

This past Saturday, I ventured down to what we in Toronto call - with the most ironic and acidic of tongues - the Spit. This post-apocalyptic wasteland of a beachhead is a rusted, shining example of Toronto’s beautiful waterfront.

That’s a swan in between those two atrocious, ungodly mounds of twisted iron and broken concrete.

Here’s Seamus enjoying the water, though he eventually decided that after having soothed his feet it was really best to just leave his socks to decompose in the lake. A pineapple was also thrown in by the partygoers present, and frankly I’d have to say it improved the lake a slight bit.

Oh, that’s right, we were there for a party:

There was a pretty simple soundsystem setup, and beats blasted out at the lake over the course of the day. It didn’t seem to bother the people passing through, busy trying to convince themselves that they were exercising in the great outdoors.

Well, a couple of them were pretty bothered already, actually, as they wailed and screamed at me and Read when they went by on their bikes. We hadn’t slept a wink, yet the grouchy ones were the baby boomers out enjoying the sunny day.

It was really beyond obnoxious, to the point of pathetic, and made me feel pretty sorry for them for being so clearly unhappy with their lives that they had to shout abuse at random strangers while being forced by their doctors, nutritionists or personal trainers to get out and “enjoy” the hellish “parklands”.

You may be familiar with rock balancing, these seemingly gravity-defying sculptures that some artists produce around the city:

I can’t claim to be that good, but I decided to give it a try while surrounded by all this broken concrete, and it turns out it’s actually not that hard.

Okay, that looks more like an inukshuk, but that’s only one of the things I made. I made a few, but kept knocking them over and starting again without getting photos. It was a pretty fun hobby to suddenly develop…

I really enjoyed focussing my attention on the rock to find its centre of balance and to figure out how to properly orient it on the one below, then carefully shift it back and forth until I could gently move away and have it just float there. Nearly any rock I picked up could be balanced on any other arbitrarily-selected rock, given enough work.

If you get a chance, I do recommend giving it a try. I certainly don’t have the most stable hands, my blurry Flickr photostream can attest to that, and I had no problem getting going.

The rest of my photos can be found here.

I’m off to Om now, be back early next week. Happy solstice!

Here’s one for the history books: The Perrier battle.
No casualties, but definitely a new level in culture conflict.

Now that’s subvertisement… if it came down to an all-out media war, the corporations would definitely lose. They move and think slower than individuals, and by the time a memo about new technology bubbles up to top, something even better is already being tested underground.

Unfortunately, the meme war has already been underway for some time as a one-sided battle, and we’re only really catching up now. We have all the tools we need at our disposal to fight the mindfuck head-on, though, and it’s about time things really crack.

Digital street culture combined with politics opens a new door on the other side of the playing field. Well, it’s not super-new, it’s the Black Spot concept of using grassroots power to beat the system on its own terms.

Culture jamming already existed, but if the marketting teams are getting all hyped up about technology the rest of us better be ready to meet them on that level too. Of course, like I said, we’ve already been there and done that… sounds like some fat wallets just walked into a war they can’t win.

Except, of course, through the imposition of political controls carried out by an aggressive police force. But I’m sure they wouldn’t do that.

I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world,
just a lie you’ve got to rise above.

This lesson from the chorus of John Mayer’s Top 40 song “No Such Thing” nicely summed up some stuff I’d been experiencing lately. I mean, I spent last year discovering the incredible life that pulses under the plastic commercial mask of this city, but this year I truly feel like I’m a part of it, rather than just a spectator.

Sure, I might’ve helped build the Dufferin grove cob a little, but it wasn’t until last night when me and Sa dropped by there at 4 am, found an abandoned boombox, plugged it into an outlet and danced around to late-night radio music that I really felt a part of the park. John Mayer’s cheesy lyrics came through at me while I fished through my bag for my phone, and for the first time the song actually seemed to have a meaning.

The night previous, me, Thresh and Jane biked from his place to Trinity-Bellwoods because we caught a last-minute message board post that there was some sort of little concert taking place in the bowl. By the time we got word and got there, only a few stragglers were left, but one had a guitar and another had an incredible jazz singing voice, so that was great anyway.

The really nice part of that night wasn’t so much in Trinity as it was the bike ride. My bike’s been broken for a good while, and being stuck up in the northwest, there’s really nowhere for me to want to bike to anyway… there’s nowhere to go in my neighbourhood, and venturing to major streets and beyond just means heavy traffic and huge hills. I’ve really gotta move downtown.

I felt like I wanted to stay in the north end to be close to school next year, but now that I’ve gotten myself more involved in downtown Toronto life, I’m realizing how much you sacrifice by being stuck up in North York. I’d much rather have to commute every day to get to school than have no life but school… ’cause even though it’s easy to get from York downtown, the lack of proper late-night transit back puts a pretty shite curfew on your return.

Maybe. Maybe in the middle of December that’s no issue anyway, and I’m caught in the heady, humid nights at the moment.

Anyhow, I haven’t been nightbiking in years, not since I moved out of the Bathurst/Sheppard area, where me and my friends would use bikes and skateboards all the time for transportation around the area. It was really awesome feeling, as Thresh put it, “like the city is yours” at 5 am… especially around Dundas, which is mostly shut down for construction anyway. Stupid cars.

Speaking of being a part of city culture, and speaking of the Bathurst/Sheppard area, I’m really liking writing for blogTO (especially with our new site renovations and projects) and I managed to actually wind up having a piece published in the National Post as a result… that piece being this review of King David’s falafels. I’m not quite sure why the Post would include a review of a North York falafel joint in the front section of a nation-wide paper, but hey, I’m not complaining.

Neither was Uri from King David, I missioned over to the old area and stopped in to see if he’d seen it… he had it taped up already, thanked me, made my falafel personally and gave it to my on the house. I didn’t even get a free falafel the time I walked in there with my homemade King David t-shirt.

All awesomeness aside, I’m feeling pretty eager to get some time out of town, and will hopefully be spending a week at the cottage and making the trip to the Om Reunion Project this year. That’d be my first time since the last Om, which was my first time, period. I need a bit of a break from the city to pull myself back together, now that I feel like I’ve overcome the bs that constitutes most people’s lives in this environment.

Now that I’ve figured out how to have a pretty well-rounded life, I just need to get some time away to get myself centred and focussed, and then things will truly be my vegan soy oyster.

Soyster?

In Chicago, old/disused newspaper boxes have been redecorated & repurposed:

The idea has even been expanded to include food for homeless people.

In North Toronto, apparently they buy things that are battery and/or bulb reliant, and then when the replaceable part in question starts to fade they just throw the entire thing out in the trash. Then, sometimes, I take it and find it a new home.

Why would someone put 10 unused perfectly good photo albums in the garbage? Why would someone put functional electrical devices in the garbage? Or perfect-condition office furniture?

Most rich people seem to have the IQs of like a 3 month old baby. That’s not where things go when you’re done with them! Didn’t anybody ever explain that to you?? And in this particular case, this is even a church I’m talking about.

People who think strictly in terms of what is and is not valuable to them personally are sociopaths, are responsible for some of the worst things in the world and the worst things in the entirety of human history, and really need to be held severely accountable.