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Urban Iran

                Urban Iran Mark Batty Publisher www.markbattypublisher.com 130 pages, hard cover, $27.95 US/ $32.95 CA/   Urban Iran is a beautiful book. Its eye-catching stark black and white hard cover with embossed lettering […]

Going Home

[Short listed by the CBC-Quebec Writers Federation Literary Competition and first published in In Other Words. New English Writing from Quebec, Edited by Claude Lalumière, Véhicule Press, 2008]    A huge black crow was doing a balancing act on the […]

Podcast: Dimitri Roussopoulos on the Military, Environment and Democracy!

  All militarization has environmental consequences.  All of which have little to do with democracy. The other day, Montreal economist, writer, publisher and social ecologist, Dimitri Roussopoulos, took M/S on an amble through the four categories of militarization and environment, […]

Unembedded. Two Decades of Maverick War Reporting

Unembedded. Two Decades of Maverick War Reporting. By Scott Taylor.  Douglass & McIntyre, 2009.   Review by Maya Khankhoje Unembedded is the mid-life autobiography of a toy-soldier-playing boy turned real soldier, of a soldier  turned journalist, of a fervent admirer […]

A Modest Proposal

     ‘A Modest Proposal’ is from Norman Nawrocki’s anti-war, anti-Empire solo CD, ‘Duck Work’ released in 2004 on the Les Pages Noires label.  [audio:10.mp3]

Black Watch

     Standing on the sidelines of the parade grounds, they are old now, grandmothers, great-grandmothers; women who forfeited their lovers to the bagpipe sirens: the tangled sheets cooled by waving flags.   Penelope knew the secret, the dark unraveling […]

Remember to Forget

    May you die, in a coffin buried with tears, Buried with the youth of my years, Buried with the breadth and depth of your fears, May you die, in my eyes one more night, Buried from my sight, […]

The Pan Scrub Game

  From thickset specky windows   he eye-balls the tough job warp and weft of the launch pad as it floats itself for the copter’s sea-strip.   Then the kitchen’s remodelled –                    Tony bumps the eggbeater off its base buoying […]

The Old Airport

  Look through grandmother’s kitchen window: a concrete airstrip, wheat fields, red poppies, cornflowers. Forsythia, osier willows in bomb craters.   We moved to Halle 7, in 1950, two-story, red-brick house attached to a shed. Windows blasted, front door, missing. […]

Toward a New Urban Movement

  In the rush of city life, it is exceptional for a large gathering of people to get together to discuss, face-to-face, concerns that affect their quality of life in their neighbourhoods and urban environment. In discussing their experiences and […]

Rights! Right!

Rights are hard to locate. One man’s rigorous beliefs in his “cultural” assertion are another woman’s confinement and destitution. The rights of a nation, of a people, run against the path of development chosen by a state. The rights of […]

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Genocide – Stella Pace

The artist would like viewers to profoundly feel her work, to establish a dialogue with what they see, what they know and what they live. Artist bio written by: Rene DetroyeMaterials: concrete, strawSize: Between 3 to 6 feet.

Worker Rights

Rights are won through popular struggles. But once enacted into law, they have to be enforced. Governments are usually reluctant to do that. The rights are then just words on a piece of paper. Workers, however, have found that they […]

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Montreal Shoe-Ting Action Photo Essay

Text by Maria Worton This is a farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq. Here in Montreal, on December 20th, Block the Empire, a local collective working against occupation […]

The International Recognition of Indigenous Rights

[Adapted from an article by Warren Allmand in publication “Ideas, Interests & Issues, by George Maclean and Brenda O’Neill 2008 (Pearson-Prentice Hall).  Adapted from an article originally published by Rights & Democracy.] Throughout the world, it is widely recognized that […]

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Daily Life in Cerro de San Pedro

Canadian multinational New Gold Inc. is operating a heavily-contested open pit gold and silver mine in Cerro de San Pedro, Mexico. For over 10 years, the residents of Cerro de San Pedro and the surrounding area have been fighting the […]

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Persepolis

Persepolis is an Oscar-nominated film that premiered last year and which I regret not having seen on the big screen. Based on a graphic autobiographical novel by Marjane Satrapi, the author and her studio mate Vincent Paronnaud  created a highly […]

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DC Jumps for Obama

The Obama victory was jubilantly celebrated in Washington DC (sometimes referred to as Chocolate City). I was there for the Clinton victory over Bush1, but that was a quaint tea party compared to this wild bumping throw-down. I squeezed myself […]

The Case for Literature by Gao Xingjian

Gao Xingjian, playwright, novelist, essayist and painter born in eastern China and self-exiled in Paris, was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1992. In 2000 he went on to receive the […]

Montreal, Blues Divers II

(suite de «Mtl, blues divers I») encore ce faux printemps en mars comme un attrape-nigaud dans cet hiver de force ducharmien qui m’échappe irrémédiablement et me confine à la déréliction la plus compulsive…) enfin cette ville aux rues sales et […]

Forty Years Later

Cartoon by: Susan Dubrofsky On the 25th of May in 1967 in a remote hamlet, in a district called Darjeeling, in India, in the police station areas of Naxalbari, Phansidewa and Khoribari a minor but significant incident had occurred. A […]