See, this is why I need a laptop. So I don’t have to snarf the last half of my meal and RUN home, desperately trying not to jostle my brain and let all the golden eavesdrops fall out.
More or less verbatim, heard from my perch on the highly prestigious “booth side” of the Ovaltine, coming from the less-prestigious but more collegial Stud Row otherwise known as the “counter side” where all the old men sit.
In an unmistakably Black American voice:
Seventy-three years old. SEVENTY-THREE YEARS OLD! Know what they told me? They told me I have Diabetes. DIABETES! I need diabetes at seventy-three. I need it like I need a hole in the head. I’m gonna die anyway, hell, I’ve been dead for years. Been through four wars, got two bullets in my back. I died twice! Saw the lights and everything. A white South African brought me back last time, which just goes to show.
What? It shows you!
I was in four wars. I was in Vietnam. I was in Vietnam twice. It started back in the 1800’s. The south part of Vietnam is 98% Buddhist. 2% Catholic. The Catholics tried to take over the country.
God? God didn’t have nuthing to do with it. God? What’s God? I’ll tell you. I’ll TELL you what God is.
God is a crazy old white woman!
What wars was I in? I was in Vietnam. I was a Canadian sergeant in Vietnam, I knew who my friends were. I’ll tell you that. I knew. I was in the dirty war in the Congo in… what? … 66. In 66 I was in the dirty war in the Congo. Died there. And I was in the dirty war in Brazil.
I’m a career soldier. Seventy-three years old. I got one foot in the grave and diabetes.
Halifax? Hey, no – why would I want to go to Halifax? My people were black Loyalists, we came to this country in 1776. We’ve never been slaves. My mother was a Jew. If your mother’s a Jew, you’re a Jew. It don’t matter who your daddy is. Everyone knows who mama is. Nobody knows for sure who Papa is. It’s smart. I was born in Labrador City. Moved to Montreal when I was eight. I was a bad boy, so my mother sent me off to Chicago to live with my uncle. I was so bad, they gave me a choice of join the army or go to prison, so I joined the army.
I’m the worst kind. A career soldier. Seventy-three years old.
Montreal? MontREAL? No Halifax, I’ve never been to Halifax. Why would I go there? Why would anyone want to go to Halifax. No jobs, no people, no nothing. No, I’m from Montreal.
Ever seen the Fleur de Lis? You know what that is? It’s got six points. It’s the Star of David! I’m telling you, it’s the Star of David. Six points. Count ’em. Three up and three down. Star of David.
Cuz the first kings of France, they were Mary Magdalene’s people. A Tribe of Israel. They were Jews. So that’s the Fleur de Lis. The Star of David.
Wouldn’t it be something if the coalition government was headed up by the head of the Bloc? That would be something!
Seventy-three years old! I’ve been dead for years.
cross-posted from FearlessCity, just so you know what I’ve been doing with all my copious spare time recently. And a damn good thing, too, because with all the extra exposure that site is up and down like a toilet seat.
As most of our readers know, Fearless City Mobile was all over the Heart of the City Festival this past weekend, streaming live video interviews and interacting with people all over the Downtown Eastside, incorporating their texted questions into the interviews as they came in.
As some of you also know, interest in our coverage of the closing gala was so intense that it temporarily overwhelmed our servers and our site had to go for a little “time out.” While that’s flattering, it’s also a bit of a problem.
Fortunately, because the internet IS, in fact, a web and not just a series of straight lines, we were able to work around it.
I was at home on Twitter, bouncing between the FearlessCity account and my own (because I have no life) and Irwin was in Ottawa and on Facebook when the site went down.
Irwin had used his phone to take a video of OUR streaming videos on his laptop, and he posted it to Facebook and put that news out on his Twitter stream.
I saw that and immediately emailed him, telling him to put it on YouTube (yes, I know the quality sucks, but at least YouTube is wide open to the public, whereas Facebook is restricted). He did, and once it was posted I put the news out on the Fearless City Twitter stream. Then I signed out, signed into my raincoaster Twitter stream, and re-tweeted it (don’t laugh, that’s what it’s called!) and Irwin put the news out on his stream as well. That makes a total of about 400 people who got the news within a half-hour of the whole thing happening.
The video became, if memory serves, the 68th most viewed Canadian video in the Arts & Activism category, but it only has two comments, so what are you waiting for?
And here it is:
Three scenes captured with Nokia N77 mobile devices streaming to the Mobile Muse 3 platform and projected on a live screen at the Closing Gala of the Heart of the City Festival in the Downtown Eastside. Also streamed to http://live.fearlessmedia.ca/ and archived on fearlesscity.ca.
At the live screen people were able to send txt msgs to the 3 interviewed subjects.
(The audio on this video switches between all three channels.)
Nov 9, 2008
Octopus Studios: I’m not exactly sure who they are. I’m not exactly sure what they do. I am, however, 100% certain that they have the coolest logo on the Downtown EastSide, and thoughtful of them it was to put it only a couple of blocks from my house. They must know I’ve been busy lately.
Whoa! You don’t suppose this logo is literal? You don’t suppose they’re building levitating robotic giant octopi behind that bland cinder-block facade? This bears investigating. If you don’t hear from me in a week, send in the Calamari Wrestler!
Here is the live streaming video from Mobile Souls at the Parade of Lost Souls. No idea if this UStream video will work, but what the hell, I’ll give it a shot.
Cross-posted from FearlessCity. I was liveblogging Mobile Souls and the Digital Shrine for Fearless at the Parade of Lost Souls, in cooperation with the Public Dreams Society.
Well, this IS challenging. Thank GOD it’s on the Drive and there is never a moment when a drum circle, official or unofficial, is not playing. I can leech off the energy like a vampire.
Parade of Lost Souls is loosely based on the Mexican Day of the Dead, and in the hands of the Public Dreams Society has morphed into an artistic event combining music, costumes, puppets, performers, light, darkness and art.
The problem with costumed events on The Drive is, how can you tell what’s a costume and what’s just clothing? I once bought a pair of angel wings on the Drive and when they didn’t fit in the bag I just
wore them home. Got lots of compliments.
Walking up The Drive, which has been closed for the event, it was like walking in to the perkiest zombie movie I’ve ever seen. It’s just not natural to see a six lane road with no cars but a thousand people all moving in the same direction, slowly. Crreeeeeeeeepy! Lots of zombie looking people, some intentional, some not. Virtually all the kids are in fur suits as cheetahs or lions or zebras, and very cute they look, too. Amy said there was a baby dressed as a skunk and it was the most adorable thing she’d ever seen. Some of the adults just put on devil horns and called it a day: come on Vancouver, REPRESENT!!!! Jeebus.
The first performance group of dancers, all in white and representing Vasilisa on her journey to find the light, moved off right on time to a drumbeat. A little while later the gargantuan Vasilisa puppet moved off, a camera in her head streaming the video live to Public Dreams Society’s site and our screen with VJ’s remixing the texts, tweets, pix, and music coming in from our roving team throughout the event.
Holy crap, when these guys move out there’s NO question about what’s going on. The drums are so loud I can feel my collarbones vibrating! PS unfortunately for such a visually gorgeous event, I cant share it with you as I’ve got my nose in my laptop. If you want to know what I look like, I’m the one dressed as an animal murderer: fake leopard coat and sheepskin hat, sitting beside the Digital Shrine like a very nerdish acolyte. Come by and say Hi.
The bagpipes started just before the connection went out. Bagpipes are surely one of the eeriest of instruments. Chopin could not have composed for bagpipes. And after the eerie bagpipes came the eerie Sousaphone band. The Sousaphone is the one that wraps right around your chest liike a boa constrictor and then flares out like a monstrous brass flower over your right shoulder and deafens people in a fifteen foot radius. It would be an awesome weapon. But as part of a band as part of a celebration and remembrance of dead things and dead people, it works very, very well indeed, and gets the first audible applause of the night.
I was in the portabiffy (like the pit of hell in there, pitch black and seepage everywhere. There’s a minor waterfall coming out of the men’s room and I HOPE AND PRAY it’s just water. Anyway, there I was, doing what people do in there (not taking coke, not having sex, how can you be a blogger and afford either of those things? I ask you) and the damn thing started rocking back and forth. I thought I was either hallucinating or there was an earthquake. Turned out to be only the drum circle going by.
Now at the second station of the night, behind the big screen on The Drive. The sousaphone band just went past, playing Smells like Teen Spirit. It worked.
And there goes another one. Yes, I’m here behind the big white screen on the Drive with Baba Yaga and little Vasilisa and a bunch of paper bird shadow puppets. Onto the screen we’re projecting all kinds of images from the streaming cameras and the video cameras that Fearless is using all over the parade, remixing it with the texts coming in as well, and projecting it. There are shadow puppets as well. This is truly cool; I can see the parade better from here than I could from standing on the sidelines (I always get stuck behind a bloody basketball team).
Someone went by a couple of minutes after that playing a recorded version of Moby’s James Bond theme, which while a great song worked less well. This event in commemoration of the dead is absolutely LIVE. Prerecorded would be like bringing a LiveDoll as your date.
Things are all out of order on the liveblog, which only makes sense since I started at the start and moved to the end to see the beginning. Which I’ll explain better later. (Or rather, now, as I’m retroactively updating. I started at the starting point of the parade, and did my blogging from the Digital Shrine, then moved up to the VJ station which was actually at the end of the parade route, so that I could catch the whole parade going right by me).
The shadow puppeteers are singing as they work. It’s odd to see the horrible Baba Yaga, who dwells in a house made of human bones, singing in a lovely soprano. But the whole life/death thang depends on the juxtaposition of opposites, as Heraclitus (my favorite philosopher of all time, although Kant can give him a run for his money) knew.
We need more stuff being texted in. Send us some stuff in to 778-320-6673
Talking to a fellow in a knitted balaklava with black face and some fancy coloured tattoo designs on it, apparently it’s Peruvian. Down there they have bands of people wearing them and they carry whips and whip themselves. I said I was glad he’d left that part of the costume out, although it could be popular in certain circles.
Apparently my tweets are not going to the live screen. The Flickr stream is so do tag it Shrine08 when you post pix to get into the VJ show. On Twitter, the tag is #shrine08 and then it can get mixed in.
We only have our shadowdancers for a few more minutes. of all the art forms on Earth, I think I love shadowpuppets best. Silent and mysterious, they exist only in the presence of light, and define themselves by its absence.
Like me.
In other news, the cameras are having a real issue with the low light conditions,
Someone dressed in a Pepper costume (with matching friend as Salt) is singing along to the shadow puppets. They’re doing a bird dive-bombing a human heart and tearing it in half. So the song is…can you guess? Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.
BAM nine o’clock gun! Gotta love a town where you tell time by explosions.
The performers are performing to a backdrop of live drum circle with whistles and recorded birdsong, since the birds are Vasilisa’s friends and messengers. Aaaand they’re done.
Ooooh, I just noticed that the Big Black Box on my power cord is warm. I’d have been sitting on it all this time had I known that!
So, technical and logistical challenges that I have noticed:
Oooh, I get to use the unordered list feature!
I do need light to see the keyboard, more than the screen throws off.
I can’t type and look up at the same time, so it might be a good idea to have two people doing liveblogging, one out gathering impressions, the other typing up her impressions, then relay swapping off.
There’s a huge, raven-like figure passing us now, with pitchforks and torches and dancers, kinda like the end of I’m Afraid of Americans by David Bowie, where Trent Reznor plays Jesus.
or like the Mylene Farmer video Fuck Them All:
Speaking of Jesus, I heard the BEST conversation in line for the portapotty:
A : I saw Jesus
B: You saw Jesus?
A: yeah, over there, he’s part of the parade. He was on stilts.
B: you saw Jesus on stilts?
A: yeah, he was smoking.
B: JESUS WAS SMOKING????
A: not that Jesus. Another one.
Where was I?
I was too low to see the acts. I really need to liveblog from on top of a ladder. I HAVE a ladder, so maybe next time I can build aa like liveblog treehouse or something.
There were many good photo ops and who else has an angle like that? Could have used a camera.
Headlamps would have been really helpful for the videographers. I can see on the screen that the pix look great, but they’re washed out.
Now we’re showing video of the huge Vasilisa puppet walking past the house where the acrobats were performing in the windows. Kinda like being the Chris Crocker of the Olympic gymnastic event.
I , personally, LOVE the distortion and interference on the low light pix. To me it looks fantastic and very edgy.
Oh dear, we’ve given out someone’s personal camera and mixed their memory card in with the rest. Hope it didn’t have any sex pictures.
Somebody else did turn in a phone that had some nekkid pix. I wonder if they were any good?
Somebody says they saw a UFO at 4th and Commercial.
I’ve seen, but managed to avoid, three ex boyfriends. All nice guys, but this is not the time or place. Unless they feel like buying me a slice of pizza. I forgot to have solid food today, but I DID have a litre and a half of half-caf.
Lee says he got some awesome footage of this little kid doing crazy dancing to the drum circle. I say Kids are Great, he says Kids RULE!
The Digital Shrine is starved for content, they need more pictures. We have too many. Somehow there must be a way to connect these dots.
The finale is about to start at the Digital Shrine, a huge choir. The idea is that everyone there will sing. But the audience is made up of Canadians. Very risky.
Where did those two young ladies go who left about three quarters of an hour ago to get us some food? A BLOGGER COULD STARVE!
We’re shutting down in five minutes or so.
Amy says she saw the guy in the albino yeti panda costume swivel his mask around so he could drink a beer through his eye. That would have been a great shot.
Vegan popcorn and tangerines have arrived! And someone just handed me half a beer as well.
See, this is why I need a laptop. So I don’t have to snarf the last half of my meal and RUN home, desperately trying not to jostle my brain and let all the golden eavesdrops fall out.ee down. Star of David.
raincoaster 