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My Corner of Paradise

  The glare from the neon lights bores through my eyelids making them flutter. I fight  back and force them shut. They flutter again and one sleep-crusted edge disengages from its counterpart with a subliminal pop. Re-entering my dream is […]

My Daughter, Marisa

  With nails that curved over toes. Her limbs, limp, her eyes vacant. She took her acoustic guitar to music lessons. She attended art courses at the Douglas Hospital for the mentally disabled. She had lived in shelters and foster […]

Filling a crying need and shaking the myths

 Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy   When long-time Liberal “busboy” and former “rat-packer” Don Boudria was briefly minister for International cooperation and the Francophonie, he invited me to lunch during “Development Month” in 1997 to get […]

Theatre Review: Truth and Treason

 Truth and Treason by Rahul Varma, Directed by Ariana Bardesono, September 8-19, 2009, Studio Hydro Quebec, Monument National, Montreal. There is no denying that Truth and Treason is politically compelling. The shooting of a ten year old Iraqi-Canadian girl at […]

Art and Democracy

In November 2008, I saw a theatrical piece by Dave St. Pierre at Theatre La Chapelle in Montreal.  The piece was entitled “Warning” and it was produced by Mandala Situ.  It was my first exposure to the choreography of Dave […]

Unspoken Words

Artist Biography: Self-taught in traditional photographic practice, dating to the 1960’s, David Duchow switched to the less-polluting digital in the late 1990’s. In 2001 he began to flip images, creating a Rorschach-like mirrored result. Central to his work is the […]

Art IS democracy

Art is Democracy ! Acknowledgements: 1)The Design of Dissent, Milton Glaser and Mirko Ilic, Rockport Publishers Inc. www.rockpub.com 2)Paper, Paper Publishing Company, New York, www.papermag.com 3)Jean-Michel Basquiat, by Richard Marshall, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York I am strolling […]

Interview with Martin Duckworth, documentary filmmaker.

Biography: Montreal-born Martin Duckworth came to filmmaking from a background in history. Duckworth was on staff at the National Film Board of Canada from 1963 – 1970 and since that time, has made films there as a free lancer. He […]

Audioscapes by Mike Wozniewki

  Artist Biography: Mike Wozniewski is a designer and developer of interactive software for the arts. As a freelance researcher, he maintains collaborations with several recognized institutions and works with many creative minds who likewise seek to push the boundaries […]

“The Noise/Silence of Lasting Peace”

  “The Noise/Silence of Lasting Peace” [after seeing Yoko Ono “Imagine” exhibit in the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal] @ 2009 by James Cockcroft   End wars by noise of revolutionary multitudes. Enduring silence.

Fight-Flight-Freeze

  When a person experiences invasion of any kind, one of three phenomena happen: Flight, Fight or Freeze. Any degree of aggression, force, trauma, violence, and post-traumatic stress, triggers the nervous system to react in one of these ways.  Modern […]

Eight Poems for the Wall

  1. At Checkpoint Charlie customs huts   The death strip – scraped earth :wildflowers.   Sepia postcard of the Brandenburg Gate. Organized bus tour. A one-day visit.   2. Windows are bricks instead of glass.   3. A summer […]

The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence.

[From the book The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence, © 2009, by Anne-Marie de Brouwer & Sandra Ka Hon Chu, with photographs by Samer Muscati, published by Douglas & McIntyre: an imprint of D&M Publishers Inc. […]

Norman Bethune – Review

  Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson Penguin Canada hardcover, 200 pp, 2009 At a conference on April 15, 2009 at Concordia University, Adrienne Clarkson, former governor general of Canada and now biographer of Norman Bethune, suggested that one of the […]

Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art – Review

               Vermeer, Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art.  Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. By Ruud Priem and others. Vancouver Art Gallery and D & M Publishers Inc, 2009.                 Art is often likened to a gadfly […]

The Invasion of Gaza

[See English version below]           غزوة غزة    بأكتبلَك من جوه حصار بأكتبلَك من تحت جدار كان يوم شايل سقف الدار بأكتبلك من أرضي الحِبلى بالأحرار بأسمي وبأسم الشهدا والثوار … بأكتبلَك … وفي حلقي مرار […]

Kolkata Dreams

  Kolkata Dreams K. Gandhar Chakravarty 8th House Publishing, Montreal Canada 2009, 75 pages “I wonder what it must be like To fuck with a severed penis.”   Montrealer K. Gandhar ‘Ginsburg’ Chakravarty knows his penis from his elbow.  He […]

There are no borders

We’re not idiots. But as Canadians, we’re told things, contradictory things, things that don’t add up… about Afghanistan, our mission, security, democracy… February 19th, here in Montreal, Robert Fisk, respected Middle East correspondent of 33 years, argued fervently for NATO […]

La Clef – works by Lyne Lapointe

  Artist Biography:  Lyne Lapointe’s career dates back to the early eighties, when she rapidly made a name for herself as one of the most promising artists of her generation. Between 1983 and 1994, Lyne Lapointe created ground-breaking sight specific […]

Fennario’s War – The Poetry of Fennario

Fennario’s War (41 minutes) is a simple film. The Montreal playwright, David Fennario, reads a text in his Verdun apartment about World War One. He has based his drama on an interview he did with a Great War vet in […]

Hanging out with musical revolutionaries

  I’ve known Jason Breckenridge for many years and over that time the two insights I’ve gained about what makes him tick are 1) He concocts the most ridiculously unattainable schemes in an effort to make his working life as […]

Gaza: chipping into the siege

Introduction: When I left Montreal on February 15th I knew that this would not be a predictable trip.  From all that I’d heard, the border crossing from Egypt to Gaza (at Rafah) was unpredictable, at best.  Yet I did not […]

Don’t Join

      Hey kids! Want a career with a dubious future? A job where you get paid to play real life deadly games? Then join the Canadian Armed Forces! Kill innocent people!  People you’ll never know!  People just like […]

Shifting Discourse on Gaza

A cosmic motherly-sounding voice has always told me that even the darkest of clouds have silver linings. The past two weeks have forced me to now wonder if the same idea of a silver lining applies to clouds of white […]

De-construction

  In the following short reconstructed video, De-Construction, I’ve used a home video report from Gaza and extracts from other videos found on Youtube, along side my own recordings, to try to convey something of how development, occupation and destruction […]