Pióro

I didn’t mean to dis The Agenda. Well, I did, but not to that extent.

I was jumping between three live blogs of Obama’s visit today, including The Agenda’s. (Holy. Lots of love for Cover It Live.) It seemed Mr. Paikin’s Web event was relying mostly on the #obamawa hash-tag feed. Disappointing I thought. I was so impressed with their AgendaCamp broadcast from Thunder Bay. They combined television and Web much better than CBC ever had. So I called The Agenda on rehashing a hash.

They replied, letting me know that they did have someone in Ottawa covering the event. Fair enough. But then I felt a twinge (twinger of guilt?) for having written the dis-tweet into the #obamawa feed, and thus into The Agenda’s live blog.

I do assuage the guilt a bit with the idea that there is no bad publicity. I did present all 23 of my followers with a link to The Agenda page.

Really Mr. Paikin, there’s no need to thank me.

I fear the following observations will sound as if they are coming from an insecure backpacker with a maple leaf on his luggage. But really, The New Yorker has been picking on Canucks as of late. Last week’s issue featured a profile of Naomi Klein by Larissa MacFarquhar, who portrays the Toronto-based activist as a naive lefty Sisyphus. Canadian officers in Afghanistan don’t realize the post-colonial nitroglycerin they’re mixing in the form of Hazara police units based around Kandahar, according to Graeme Wood. Well, Wood does say it’s NATO that doesn’t realize that playing different ethnicities off each other could lead to problems down the road, but the Canadian Forces are in a lead role. On the issue of Klein, any close reader of The Shock Doctrine knows she is by no means above criticism. But these two articles make one a little protective. I can criticize a family member, but you, you might want to tone that down a bit.

But then we come to the words of Elmira, Ont.’s favourite son and US college football fan: “…and the last [of five quarterbacks drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles in 1999] was so awful that after failing out of the N.F.L. he ended up failing out of the Canadian Football League as well.” Whoa, three-down-football burn! Now, I’m pretty sure that Gladwell has watched more football than me, but I know the Bills/Dolphins game I saw from a Rogers Centre box was way more boring than any of the Ottawa Rough Riders games I used to see from the cheap seats at Lansdowne Park. The level of play was about the same in all cases.

Take that, bro.

A Music Gallery show in the summer means a lot of sweat. Last night, the four fans on the vaulted ceiling of St. George the Martyr Church couldn’t do much against the humidity, the heat of roughly 130 people and myriad electronic gear of two Baltimore-based groups.

Leprechaun Catering played a three-song set of their transistor fist-fight musique concrète. Tom, the group’s theremin player, announced that they didn’t have songs, but they did have song titles. The night’s titles were acronyms of Toronto: Therefore Our Rap Opera Needs Tighter Oratorios and Thirty Odd Romulans On Nitrous Terrified Ohura [sic]— “that one is an inside joke.”

The bonus song—which Tom wasn’t sure if they should play as he feared it would offend the audience of Canadians—was a leftfield version of Rush’s Tom Sawyer on theremin, bass and some single-string or rubber-band instrument. Supposedly they had the Can-con classic well rehearsed months ago, but their latest performance was pretty raw.

Matmos’s set was indeed “a placid, psychedelic sit-down affair,” but sublimely so, with hints of their newer Norman McLaren-inspired work, their porn soundtrack material and Civil War-based tracks. Their final song started with Martin Schmidt of Matmos and Tom from Leprechaun Catering on two grand pianos and culminated with both bands working a dissonant freak-out.

With the show over, everyone could head out too cool off in the night air.

What’s this? Stereolab with a new album on the way. Sloan, too. And the nerds are into Robyn. (OK, me too, a bit.) I guess this means I should be tree planting.

When 500 ducks landed in a tailings pond near Fort McMurray, Ed Stelmach was on a tour of the United States.

The Stelmach government—which was selling itself in Washington as environmentally responsible when the incident occurred—is facing accusations of a coverup for refusing to release photos of the ducks.
The provincial government is also being skewered for summarizing its U.S. junket as “Mission Accomplished.”

I can’t imagine why Stelmach and friends are catching flak for hyping their tour as “Mission Accomplished.” The dead ducks in the oilsands wastewater show that the premier and his crew appreciate the phrase in a way similar to George W. Bush, as the president spoke on an aircraft carrier in 2003.

The backlash to the Baltimore scene’s flagship collective Wham City, which consists of Dan Deacon, OCDJ, Videohippos, Ecstatic Sunshine, Ponytail et al, has hit Wikipedia.

Over the last week, some sulky editorializing has made its way onto the collaborative online encycopedia’s Wham City entry.

On May 22, an anonymous user wrote, “This page was written by the same art school losers that run “whamcity”. Because, really, if we didn’t act like what we were doing was a big deal, no one else would either.” This passage was deleted later that day with the note, “Someone’s a crybaby.”

On May 23, an anonymous user with a different IP address posted, “Now, [Wham City] is comprised of mostly boring suburban art students who have gentrified Baltimore City. They are lame and pretentious.” This bit came down on May 28.

Dan Deacon, Wham City’s main attention getter of late, added new tour dates around the same time the sulk hit the wiki. Someone’s definitely feeling left out.

Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścinski, who died in January at the age of 74, is the latest public figure to be “outed” as a communist-area spy. The Polish version of Newsweek ran a cover story this week on the late writer revealing that his ability to travel to Africa, Asia and Central America throughout the ’60s and ’70s was the result of a deal he made with the secret police. During that time, Kapuścinski was the only foreign correspondant for PAP, Poland’s official news agency. He covered over 25 revolutions in what he called the “liberation of Africa” from its colonial past. Many readers detect allegories of his communist-controlled country in his writings on other political struggles he witnessed abroad.

“No U.S reporter had to work with the CIA in order to be allowed to leave the country,” said Ernest Skalski in the Globe and Mail.

Skalski, a long-time friend and fellow reporter, also added, “Kapuścinski had to. … If he didn’t agree, he wouldn’t have written his books. There would be no Kapuścinski.”

Evaluators of Kapuścinski’s files say his reports did not provide significant information and did not seem to hurt anyone.

The journalist’s “outing” is the latest in a processes started in February by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland’s Prime Minister, and his twin brother Lech, the President to cleanse Poland of its communist past. Lech Kaczynski signed a law banning people who collaborated with the secret police from working as judges or high-level civil servants. Poland’s former president, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, was a minister during the communist era. He also worked to bring his country into the EU in 2004.

Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

The Kaczynski brothers wrote ‘lustracja’ — that is lustration, or illumination of the secret police past of their politically unpopular contemporaries — on their flag. However this whole movement of plundering the files has now reached the limit of people’s tolerance. This is made clear by the predominant reaction of rejection and outrage at the rampant scandal-mongering that you see these days in the discussion forums of the major newspapers on the Kapuścinski case.

Today, our own Naomi Klein writes on the Guardian website about Shawn Brant and the Mohawks who blockaded the Kingston/Toronto CN line two weeks ago. In an act that seems designed to suppress the growing militancy of native groups, the OPP arrested Brant despite an agreement between police and demonstrators that gave the latter immunity if they ended their blockade peacefully. Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine should work on a strategy to counter such tactics during the national day of action, proposed for June 29 of this year.

The American Food and Drug Administration approved a pill that minnows may find worrisome.

On Tuesday, the FDA passed a drug called Lybrel, which stops a woman from menstruating. The Washington Post reported that it is designed “for women who find their periods too painful, unpleasant or inconvenient and want to be free of them.” While the FDA said the risks of this pill are the same as any contraceptive, an endocrinology researcher at UBC said the menstrual cycle is not understood well enough and the consequences of suppressing it are unknown. Others feel this pill reinforces negative attitudes and taboos surrounding menstruation.

Also on Tuesday, a team of Canadian and American researchers revealed that spiking a Northwestern Ontario lake with synthetic estrogen really messed up the minnows. The male fish started developing eggs instead of sperm. The level of estrogen was the same as that found in water discharged from sewage treatment plants in Canada and other countries.

While I don’t know how the dosage of estrogen in the menstruation-suppressing pill compares with current contraceptives, aquatic life near sewage treatment plants should probably start lobbying for better filtration.

When I arrived at Lee’s Palace just after midnight on the night of the 19th, three hours after the doors had opened, the bouncer checked my ID, but strangely no one on the inside asked me to pay cover. That’s what happens when you’re so late that you miss the whole event.

I mulled around by the stage for a bit wondering how I could find out who won, when I recognized Glen-airy Glen Rock, the winner of the Toronto Open Air Guitar competition.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“Good. I won,” said Mr. Glen Rock.

For this event, he aired to The Cult’s Love Removal Machine. The win means he’ll be representing Toronto at the national competition, which I believe will be held right here in Toronto. If he wins that, it’s off to Finland.