Wednesday, December 30, 2009

FIGHT FOR FREEDOM IN IRAN dec 30 09

Brought to you via GREENUNITY4IRAN Students protest against the government of Iran and basiji militia

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The Fight For Freedom continues

A Shura Protest song ***Team TEHRAANN Thanks X-ELEMENTZ For This Beautiful Video!***


Tehran (Location: Vali Asr)

Monday, December 28, 2009

What the FIGHT FOR FREEDOM looks like

UNITY4IRAN is a youtube portal where many videos of the current unrest in Iran can be seen. The video below is one from their channel.




This is from GREENUNITY4IRAN

Friday, December 4, 2009

Protected Free Speech -- Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta

(bolded emphasis mine)

Homosexual Agenda Wicked

The following is not intended for those who are suffering from an unwanted sexual identity crisis. For you, I have understanding, care, compassion and tolerance. I sympathize with you and offer you my love and fellowship. I prayerfully beseech you to seek help, and I assure you that your present enslavement to homosexuality can be remedied. Many outspoken, former homosexuals are free today.

Instead, this is aimed precisely at every individual that in any way supports the homosexual machine that has been mercilessly gaining ground in our society since the 1960s. I cannot pity you any longer and remain inactive. You have caused far too much damage.
My banner has now been raised and war has been declared so as to defend the precious sanctity of our innocent children and youth, that you so eagerly toil, day and night, to consume. With me stand the greatest weapons that you have encountered to date - God and the "Moral Majority." Know this, we will defeat you, then heal the damage that you have caused. Modern society has become dispassionate to the cause of righteousness. Many people are so apathetic and desensitized today that they cannot even accurately define the term "morality."

The masses have dug in and continue to excuse their failure to stand against horrendous atrocities such as the aggressive propagation of homo- and bisexuality. Inexcusable justifications such as, "I'm just not sure where the truth lies," or "If they don't affect me then I don't care what they do," abound from the lips of the quantifiable majority.

Face the facts, it is affecting you. Like it or not, every professing heterosexual is have their future aggressively chopped at the roots.

Edmund Burke's observation that, "All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," has been confirmed time and time again. From kindergarten class on, our children, your grandchildren are being strategically targeted, psychologically abused and brainwashed by homosexual and pro-homosexual educators.

Our children are being victimized by repugnant and premeditated strategies, aimed at desensitizing and eventually recruiting our young into their camps. Think about it, children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.

Your children are being warped into believing that same-sex families are acceptable; that men kissing men is appropriate.

Your teenagers are being instructed on how to perform so-called safe same gender oral and anal sex and at the same time being told that it is normal, natural and even productive. Will your child be the next victim that tests homosexuality positive?

Come on people, wake up! It's time to stand together and take whatever steps are necessary to reverse the wickedness that our lethargy has authorized to spawn. Where homosexuality flourishes, all manner of wickedness abounds.

Regardless of what you hear, the militant homosexual agenda isn't rooted in protecting homosexuals from "gay bashing." The agenda is clearly about homosexual activists that include, teachers, politicians, lawyers, Supreme Court judges, and God forbid, even so-called ministers, who are all determined to gain complete equality in our nation and even worse, our world.

Don't allow yourself to be deceived any longer. These activists are not morally upright citizens, concerned about the best interests of our society. They are perverse, self-centered and morally deprived individuals who are spreading their psychological disease into every area of our lives. Homosexual rights activists and those that defend them, are just as immoral as the pedophiles, drug dealers and pimps that plague our communities.

The homosexual agenda is not gaining ground because it is morally backed. It is gaining ground simply because you, Mr. and Mrs. Heterosexual, do nothing to stop it. It is only a matter of time before some of these morally bankrupt individuals such as those involved with NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Lovers Association, will achieve their goal to have sexual relations with children and assert that it is a matter of free choice and claim that we are intolerant bigots not to accept it.

If you are reading this and think that this is alarmist, then I simply ask you this: how bad do things have to become before you will get involved? It's time to start taking back what the enemy has taken from you. The safety and future of our children is at stake.

Rev. Stephen Boissoin

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Your Imagine Nation or Your Life

Click on image to enlarge

This young frightened poet

is denying some serious issues.

Not all poets make it through their difficult formative years with lyrical agility or arrogant aplomb. The worst find themselves abandoned, slouching towards bedlam on the streets of the Dominion of Bland Gland, stripped of metaphors and verbs, unable to articulate their presence.

Poet Polls released a 5-year study last spring, revealing that those poets with only one chapbook to their name, remain the most vulnerable demographic of Poetry. “The first five years after a first chapbook are the most dangerous for poets,” declared the report. "It's a culling of the wordsmiths, removing strains of pulp friction."

Watch for these signs: unrelenting melancholy punctuated with exclamation points of elation, delusions of editorial whitelisting and blackwashing, carries an equine feedbag stuffed with reject letters, clothes smell of mimeograph alcohol, and gross gregariousmess.

If you see a troubled poet, key THE-911-POET. At the sound of the beep, press the GPS key. That's all it takes to rescue a vulnerable poet from a fate worse than mediocrity.

Monday, September 28, 2009

Sunday, September 6, 2009

THE BLONDE BITCHES OF BLAKE

Click on image to enlarge
THE BLONDE BITCHES OF BLAKE

Ten years ago, a ménage a trois of bitches became renown throughout the imagine nation of the Peoples Republic of Poetry for saving 20,000 annotated anthologies of William Blake’s Collected Poetry from a fate worse than mediocrity.

In the heat of Word War 738, the main library of Poempeii had suffered a major airstrike from Bland Land and collapsed. Bills of lading indicated that the platinum-printed Blake anthologies had been delivered the day prior to the strike. The anthologies were nowhere to be found in the lightly-damaged shipping & receiving depot of the library. No other evidence was available to indicate the location of the books in the vast complex of the library, so Ginger, Honey and Sugar were called in.
The collapsed library was fragile and perilous. This fine family of bitches consisting of a mother and two daughters, were undeterred and sniffed out the precise location amid the rubble. Their sense of scent was so highly developed that the bitches needed only a single line of “Tyger, tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night” to trace the whereabouts of Blake’s glorious illuminations. A brigade of Virility Verb Volunteers from the National Bard excavated the area and rescued the buried anthologies not ten minutes before the ground gave in, swallowing high literature in a single belch of banality.

Throughout the imagine nation, the poetariet celebrated; units of verse of the unitverse gathered in a Million Muse March to pressure the Poetburo to designate the trio as the Blonde Bitches of Blake. The following year later the bitches were promoted to the honoured poetsition of providing escort services for visiting artist dignitaries from other creative sectors of the imagine nation. The bitches began their careers in Poettsburgh, Poemsylvania distinguishing the distinctive scents of ubiquitous free verse, the boozy breath of limericks, the delicate fragrances of rhyme schemantras and the brittle odour of aging sonnets. Their tight familial bond provides a visceral collaboration that transcends all previous pack conjunctives.

They achieved the highest level of success for the Lost and Profound Dep’t of the Poetection Agency of Poempeii where they had been employed for the first half of their career. There are numerous instances each year of poetry and portions of poetry being windnapped out of a child’s careless hands. Random breezes will swipe a first draft rhyme, as easily as a fully developed sonnet.

Poettsburgh authorities released incident reports for 2008 revealing that 16 limericks, 4 quatrains, 2 rhyming couplets, and an entire sonnet had been swept away by wind. The Blonde Bitches of Blake were known to be able to follow the traces of imagination regardless of where the poems had been flung by intransigent gusts.

The bitches also served in the Sub-verse Dept for a handful of years. This is an odious but necessary service for the imagine nation – the search and seizure of doggerel from the pulp friction industry.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

JENNIFER LYNCH TEXTUAL PREDATOR


The Poetburo of the imagine nation of the Peoples Republic of Poetry announced that Mz Jennifer Lynch, head honcho of the bureacrazy of bloated bland glands known as the Canadian Human Rights Commission has been convicted on several counts of textual assault without a Poetic Licence. It must be understood that the imagine nation is the ultimate State of Diversity and it will defend its turf against the textual predators of political correctness.

PREVENT MEDIOCRITY, BE POETICALLY CORRECT.

The state has no right to be in the bedrooms or mouths of the imagine nation.

SANDING IN ART

Saturday, July 25, 2009

BELIEVE IN IT

Click on image to enlarge

Saturday, July 18, 2009

KATE MARSHALL-FLAHERTY READS "TAKE NOTICE"

July 16, 2009 Kate Marshall-Flaherty arrived in Cobourg with a trunk full of poetry and charm. She warmed the audience a Meet @ 66 King Street, the monthly venue of poetry readngs, third Thursday of each month.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

TREE OF LIFE, BUDAPEST

Click on image to enlarge
I took this snapshot in 1985 of a work of art in the courtyard of the main synagogue in Budapest. It was financed by American actor Tony Curtis, who has Jewish Hungarian roots. Aside from the aesthetics of this silver weeping willow, there are thousands upon thousands of silver leaves, each one bearing the engraved name of a Hungarian Jew who had been murdered in the holocaust. A far better photo of the sculture can be seen here. I have returned several times to Budapest over the years, and often to go to this memorial.

Friday, May 1, 2009

FREEDOM SONNET

Click on image to enlarge

A sonnet to live by. It follows the rhyme schemantra of a Shakespearian Sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG). Each word means freedom; from top to bottom (Czech, Russian, French, Polish, German, Hungarian, English)

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

ROLLING STONES 1965 ticket stub

For Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, Canada. Note the price $4.00.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Ezra Levant: Not a Nerd from the Herd

So this is the man who is a menace to the fabric of Canada’s society. Yes, yes, he’s holding his book upsidedown like a salt shaker, a clever graphic device. And don’t let the happenstance of “& Hot” in the background over his head mislead you – unless it was put up there by his wife. But it is the face. Look at it. He’s got that nerdy, somewhat clownish/mischievous look on his face. And the complexion, sheesh, it’s so well-bred white-bread baby’s bottom cheeks – if only he had ears. He’s just too damn cute to be a hero; it’s incongruous. One would expect a free speech crusader to be gruff, ill-mannered, much like Bukowski, or Hitchens or Choamsky, but not a nice lad from law school. And if you ran a big bad bold bureaucrazy, wouldn't your take on this guy be that he is a pansy pushover.

Ezra Levant embodies the truism that FREE SPEECH fits all.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

BLAND LAND BLASTS POETRY

Click on image to enlarge

Late last night, Poet Jim Johnstone, was arrested at a poetry reading on charges of conspiracy to commit chemical catastrophe.

Mundane Intelligence 5 arrested Poet Johnstone on an outstanding warrant issued by the Banality Boner Bureaucrazy of Bland Land. The whereabouts of his detention remain a matter of speculative fiction at this time.

In a Declaration of Dreck & Droll issued this morning by the Prosaic Parliament of Bland Land, Poet Johnstone has been charged with
“conspiracy to smuggle and distribute chemicals with the purpose of disabling the production of mediocrity."

“The aggressively expansionary policies of the United Imagine Nations must halt. The Imagine Nations are constantly overthrowing the peaceful complacency of the established order with new ideas, new concepts, new precepts, new thisism and neo thatism. Give it a post-retro rest!”
declared the Dreck & Droll Declaration.

“We have arrested development of any further sub-verse cursive activity from the Peoples Republic of Poetry, a particularly odious state of mind renown to infect the deepest recesses of human sensibility, inspiring people to rebel against the “status quota.” Poets are always defaming mediocrity, preventing it from entering their precious anthologies and literary journals. They are a Discrimi Nation. This blatant blandophobia must stop.”

Poet Johnstone, second place winner of the 2008 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s annual literary awards, was reading material from his recent book, The Velocity of Escape, at Yawning Heights, an austere cafeteria in the community centre of Mediocrity Mall when agents from MI5 took him into custody.

MI5 rubber-stamped Poet Johnstone, releasing a greyscale mugshot displaying a piece of ‘compromising evidence’ which appears to be the formula for the velocity of escape written on a napkin that had been “secreted inside the empty barrel of a ballpoint pen” in Poet Johnstone’s lab jacket.

The Poemland Security Department of the Peoples Republic of Poetry immediately issued a purple prose alert to the poetariet, advising of the current danger of travel into the vast arid flatlines of Bland Land.

Poet Edward Nixon, raconteur and host of the Livewords poetry reading series said, “I’ ve collaborated with Poet Johnstone many times in recent years. The charge reeks of set-up. It is stanza operating procedure for Poet Johnstone to have a few nerdy behavioural manifestations. After all, he molests intestinal tracts like a sushi salad in pursuit of his educational ambitions.”

“The Bland Glands have bloated themselves to an explosive extreme.” declared Poet Wally Keeler at a hastily called impress conference. “Their Banality Boners need to stanza down and release Poet Johnstone immediately! There is no need to take their current crisis out on Poetry.”

Poet Keeler was referring to the outbreak of writer’s blockade that has spread through all genres of Bland Land in recent months. This unique drought of mediocrity was especially pernicious in the pulp friction industry, with the closing of several publishers of romance yarns, grocery store tabloids and other sources of crap.

Poet Lionel Kearns reported last week that the vast Clone & Cliché recycling industry had been experiencing a precipitous drop in supplies and was “unable to meet the heavy demand of the bored and brainless.”

Poet Joe Rosenblatt threatened to swarm Bland Land with delirious dithyrambs of business bees. “There are billions of them all over, ready to serve Poetry at the drop of a grain of pollen. Their business is the promiscuous distribution of fertility, and god knows, Bland Land is in need of that.”

Poet Keeler added,
“The social sedation of The Bland with a balanced and regular supply of medicinal mediocrity appears to be breaking down in our troublesome neighbour, Stag Nation.”
Poet Keeler continued,“The insufferable boredom caused by chronic reprints, reruns & recycling is causing textonic shifts in the flatline of their general somnambulence. Totalitarian torpor is losing its power. They’ve no creative class providing fresh ideas. They’re fucked.”


A dimmed wit who works for the Band of Bland Glands said Poet Johnstone is accused of leading a team of Pharmaceutical Performance Poets and post-retro deconstructivistas to develop an antithesis-elixer to Write Away, the renown decongestant of writer’s blockade. Poet Johnstone was a member of the team developing the decongestant. The warrant application accused Poet Johnstone of acting in concert with other emerging poets and polluting the River of Rhyme with this antithesis-elixer. The river flows through Limerick Land into Bland Land.

Technical documents released by MI5 assert that the filtration devices installed up stream to retain the most nutritious rhymes from the river had been:

(1) tampered by the installation of typewriter ribbons from Poet Joe Rosenblatt’s early typewriters and that the said ribbons had been

(2) dipped into the nectar of fragrant yellow flowers plucked from the Quinte Hotel poems of Poet Al Purdy and

(3) infected with the in verse ingredients of Write Away

(4) with the purpose of congesting the output of mediocrity from The Bland who rely on the River of Rhyme as a supplementary nutrient to their generally impoverished diet.

The Peoples Republic of Poetry has denied any program exists to contaminate Bland Land with the purpose of shutting down mediocrity. “We are fed up with their scurrilous blanders against Poetry. In an ideal world mediocrity would not exist. Our policy is one of Mutual Cold Exist Stance” declared the Minister With Poetfolio.

The Peoples Republic of Poetry is preparing to review the viability of its outreach programs. The ten-year outreach program sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Inspiration of the Peoples Republic of Poetry is expiring later this year.

The outreach programs of the PRP are meant to attract and identify those with underdeveloped bland glands and to offer them assistance to immigrate to the United Imagine Nation of their choice.

Last spring, the PRP announced the fast-tracking of refugees from Grief and defectors from Despair to become full members of the Creative Class. This provoked a brief dipoematic spat with Bland Land at the time, but nothing more came of it.

“We are cognizant that emerging poets sometimes supplement their income with the export of doggeral to the existing glut in Bland Land. The importation of mediocrity into the Peoples Republic of Poetry is restricted for research purposes and exploitation by collagistas. The trade imbalance with Bland Land will continue,” declared the 366th Interim Report of the Commission On the Causes & Manifestations of Divergent Think Procedure Concerning Dipoematic Relations With The Menace of Mediocrity.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

SHAKEDOWN by EZRA LEVANT: a Book Review

SHAKEDOWN,
How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy In the Name of Human Rights McClelland & Stewart Ltd
216 pages, $28.99
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4618-6

Ezra Levant’s recently released book, “SHAKEDOWN, How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights” is necessary reading for every Canadian with concerns about the most fundamental human right of all -- Free Speech. It should be required reading in every one of Canada’s secondary schools.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. Levant mentions me by name in the book and lauds my “biting graphics and posters” that serve the cause of free speech. There is no conflict of interest; quite the opposite.

Levant‘s book is a highly readable compendium of the corruption and abuse of fundamental human rights committed by the political appointees to the Human Rights Commissions across Canada. Levant is composed of the holy trinity of being a lawyer, political activist and journalist. Oh, did I mention that he’s a Jew?

Does that matter? Yep. It affords him some minimal protection against the full-force wrath of the Human Rights Commissions because he is a born member of a “protected minority” whereas a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant like myself, is a born-target for an apology-flogging and as an easily-milked compensation cash cow. The HRC’s do not exact justice for individuals, but for groups. Individuals are mere representatives of groups.

Levant’s research reveals that the evil perps of human rights crimes consist almost to a person of white skinned, Christian, heterosexual people. Meanwhile Tamil extremists, Sikh extremists, Islamic extremists, just to name a few, who have been recorded in the public domain espousing hateful things against other groups, notably white-skinned Christian straights, get a free walk.

Another interesting phenomenon of HRCs is the 100% conviction rate. There is not a judicial court in the land with a perfect rate of 100%. Not even the Supreme Court of Canada has issued 100% unanimous findings of law. No other government agency has ever achieved such perfection. You’d have to visit North Korea, or any other totalitarian regime to find such 100% perfection.

We take pride in Canada’s checks and balances of our police and judicial systems, especially search warrants. These are not needed for HRCs. Newfoundland’s HRC has the power to “enter a building, factory, workshop or other premises or place in the province a) to inspect, audit and examine books of account, records and documents; or b) to inspect and view a work, material, machinery, an appliance or article found there. The person occupying or in charge of the (inspected) building, workshop, premises or place shall c) answer all questions concerning those matters put to them; and d) produce for inspection the books of account, record, documents, material, machinery, appliance or article requested.”

The offices of the local newspaper can be entered by any HRC officer to search and obtain all letters that have been written to them over the years, including unpublished ones. The editor and staff would be required, under penalty of contempt, to answer all questions about their personal knowledge of the seized letters. The HRC could go to their homes for material that may have been taken there. No warrant necessary. Unlike the police, there is no independent civilian oversight, nor internal monitoring to admonish an officer who overstepped an ethical boundary.

Unlike other government departments, HRCs have no ethical guidelines in place whatsoever.

This has led to considerable corruption of HRCs. An officer of the Cdn HRC became a member of several neo-Nazi internet groups and under various pseudonyms, posted anti-gay, anti-semitic and racist comments in order to heat up the hate of other homophobes, anti-semites, and racists to make their own hateful remarks. These same HRC officers think nothing of hijacking an innocent citizen’s internet account to make these hateful postings, and to do so while on payroll and the premises of the CHRC. They even hired a disgraced police officer who had been dismissed from her job for just cause -- just the kind of person that fit’s the needs of a Human Rights Commission.

Raja Khouri, former president of the Canadian Arab Federation complained about Canada putting Hezbollah on the terrorist list, then later wrote in the Globe & Mail, that it was “shameful” that Canada put Hamas on the terrorist list. Three months later he was rewarded with an appointment to the Ontario Human Rights Commission where he can pass judgement on the case of an Ontario Jew accused of Islamophobia. Partiality anyone? The OHRC is run by the same Barbara Hall, who, when she was Toronto’s mayor, had banned the Bare Naked Ladies from playing in Nathan Phillips Square because of the sexist name of their rock group.

Levant delineates numerous outrages of these HRCs, which came about, in part, because a complicit and complacent news media failed to do their job as scrutinizer of the state. They were mesmerized by the magic words, “human rights”. It’s secular church.

Ezra Levant, was the only publisher in North America to take the courageous responsibility of publishing the Danish Mohammed cartoons for the very simple reason that they were a major international news story, and his readers deserved the right to see the primary documents of the news story. He became the only publisher in the world forced before a government agency to answer for his publishing “crimes” on this issue. The rest of Canada’s news media saw no problem, nor did they care a wink about the erosion of democracy’s most fundamental right -- free speech. They irresponsibly aided and abetted the implementation of sharia law on blasphemy throughout the Western world.

The news media ignored HRCs because only right-wing nutbars were having their rights trampled, so yawn, ho hum. It was true, of course, that the overwhelming targets of HRCs were marginal basement apartment neo-Nazi wing-nuts with double-digit followings. The HRCs noticed the complacency, and after decades of accumulated media fawning, they became a law unto themselves, bloated with the disease of political correctness and mediocrity, which has also contaminated the editorial offices of news media across the land.

While hundreds of thousands of newcomers arrived in Alberta, its HRC experienced a 15% drop in complaints in a year. Its own stats found that it took 7% longer to resolve a complaint. What would happen to a business that lost 15% of its customers and provided poorer service? It would have to drum up business fast. So Alberta’s HRC published 60,000 easy-to-read booklets encouraging new immigrants studying English as a second language to learn how to file complaints. The illustrated examples in the booklet demonstrated that no matter how trivial or speculative the problem, the newcomer “should always assume the culprit is racism” and that the HRC is there to fix it.

Levant asks, “why new Albertans are being conditioned to expect the worst of their fellow human beings. Do they (HRC) think its good for national morale when taxpayer funded agencies portray Canada as a country full of racists and teach newcomers that bigotry lurks in every coffee shop?”

Rev Boissoin was busted for authoring a letter which was published in the Red Deer Advocate. His letter contained his Christian religious belief that homosexuality is an abomination, as clearly stated in the Bible. After finding Boissoin guilty, the HRC wrote, “In this case, there is no specific individual who can be compensated as there is no direct victim who has come forward.” There was only a theoretical victim, and that was good enough to punish Boissoin with a life sentence of censorship.

Boissoin was ordered to “cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the Internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals.” The lifetime ban wasn’t on hateful or discriminatory speech, but on “disparaging remarks.” He could not indulge in the same kind of disparaging remarks that gays are free to make about themselves in their own publications.

If anyone knows the tyranny of state censorship, it is the gay community. Egale, Canada’s largest gay advocacy lobby, stood in favour of Boissoin’s free speech, and told the Alberta HRC where they could shove the cash that they extorted from Boissoin. Egale “argued that a government that punishes a Christian for his views is no different and no better than one that punishes gays on the same basis.”

On of Canada’s most renown civil rights activists, Alan Borovoy, general counsel to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, was once an advocate of HRC’s, he has since become repelled by them. His most notable observation is this: “while abusers of civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s came from the right, today, they’re more likely to come from the left.” Borovoy’s book, The New Anti-Liberals, documents that pathetic transformation.

The great poet, John Milton, wrote one of the most important English documents against government censorship, The Areopagitica, 1644, wherein he wrote "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat … Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties ... though all the fields of doctrine were let loose to play on earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Monday, March 23, 2009

Monday, March 16, 2009

I DON'T HATE ALL N-WORDS

I Don’t Hate All N-words, But I Do Discriminate Against These:
(dedicated to the female doggerel, Jennifer Lynch, Cdn Human Rights Commission)

No
Ne
Na
Nu
Nil
Nie
Nay
Nao
Non
Nem
Niet
Nein
Nyet
Neitun
Nijedan
Nihilistic

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Friday, February 27, 2009

POETRY APPLAUDS THE USA FOR NOT SUPPRESSING GEERT WILDERS

Click image to enlarge
"Whatever else, poetry is freedom."
. . . . . -- Irving Layton
"There is no force more subversive than poetry and that is why tyrants always feared it and sought to suppress it. But not only tyrants. Everyone who has a vested interest in preventing the individual from discovering the truth of his own self and his own capacities fears the liberating power that resides in poetry."
. . . . . -- Irving Layton

"In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals to only a handful of people, they remind the Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous members, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens."
. . . . . -- W. H. Auden

Thursday, February 19, 2009

PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF THE HUMAN W/RITES COMMISSION

Protocol XIII(I)

Poets and proseurs:
FEEL FREE
to wipe your boots on WELCOME
before entering this sanctimonium of society:

. . . . . Wiped your nose? . . . . . . Check.
. . . . . Wiped away the tears? . . .Check.
. . . . . Wiped your mouth? . . . . . Check.
. . . . . Wiped your ass? . . . . . . . Check.
. . . . . Cleaned up your act? . . . . Check.

Please line up on the left.

We are not neo-puritan police.
We are the politically correctional officers.
We disinfect discourse.
We continually upgrade nomenclature.
(negro => black => people-of-colour => African-American)
We prophylacticize bad words that hurt feel goods.
(DOWN WITH NO NO NO)
We heighten your social sensitivirtues
(UP WITH YES YES O YES)
We de-escalate discrimination and repair despair
We free your speech of contemptoxins.
We assist your desire for pure free speech
that uplifts the human spirit to soar with all the angels.

(REJECTIONISTAS, LINE UP ON THE RIGHT FOR RECTALFICATION PROTOCOLS)

Those with outstretched tongues
repeat after us:
. . . . . . . . . I swear to speak in n-words
. . . . . . . . . Wholly in n-words
. . . . . . . . . Nothing but n-words
. . . . . . . . . So help me NICE!

NB: NICE is a four letter n-word.
Free-speak is Nice-speak is the new speakeasy.
Spread the glorious massage of your sensitized tongues.
Watch your words work wonderfuls

Conform to the Code for grant continuity
Be nice or be iced
and remember
who has
the last
word.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Friday, January 30, 2009

I SLAM A PHOBIA


The Velocity of Escape by Jim Johnstone, a Review


The Velocity of Escape
Guernica Editions Inc
ISBN 978-1-55071-292-6
52 pages, $15.00


Jim Johnstone’s first book of poetry, The Velocity of Escape, while anorexic to the touch, is full-bodied with muscular visceral verse. The collection exudes the ambience of a florescent-flooded coroner’s o.r. populated with living entities.

Johnstone is peculiarly armed with an M.Sc. in Reproductive Physiology which inhabits his vision and displays itself throughout this volume. He has an uncanny ability to extract and examine our human predicament from his unique residence in the unit verse.

On my first readthru I noticed that Johnstone has a fetish. It’s unclear whether the fetish sent him into lab work, or that it developed from his intimacy with the sushi under our skin. His most popular words were ‘blood' (used 12 times) followed with ‘wrist’ (used five times), which often go hand in hand, a sort of twinning, which also threads through this volume.

In Irving Layton’s forward to The Tightrope Dancer, he wrote, “The poet, either through genes or genius, is poised on a rope stretched tautly between sex and death. The major poet dances on the tightrope; the minor poet walks warily across it.”

Johnstone is a poet who confidently walks a tightrope stretched between the dead and the living, between tissue and tears, between blood, bone, bruises and “you.” Interestingly, he has de-gendered much of his poetry, minimizing the use of she he for the more ubiquitous, more generic you, your, yours.

Aesthetic distance, detachment, conscious or not, Johnstone cleverly depersonalizes a good portion of his poetry, as if his mind goes through the cleansing procedures before wielding the scalpel to cut flesh or pen inkscars on paper. His poems have an austere precision which makes me feel queasy; it happens when truth is adroitly cut to the bone.

I especially enjoyed The Afternoon’s Cadaver, a poem discomfiting as an autopsy report. I can see the glint in his eye gleaming on the blade as it slices into a human was. He makes me vividly aware of my personal destiny which is closer to me than to him, I’m much older. Johnstone makes it clear how I will be tabled, punctured, drained, latexed fingers prophylatically protected against a stew of potential infectiousness indelicately dancing duties on insensitive flesh.

this afternoon’s cadaver can’t shrink away
from the approach of my blade,
destiny clearly outlined in black marker

an instruction to cut here, scissors rifling
the pages of vanity fair
for a collage of heads, neckties, and shoulders.

flesh yields to my first incision like wet sand,
identity receding from your throat
in a tide of cracked bone,

crumpled paper glued above vocal chords,
the beginnings of collapse
in a sound proof room.

there’s something fierce in your preservation,
the burn of crude formaldehyde
in inadequate skin, the story you tell

when opened up: there were cigarettes after sex,
nights you refused to kiss
saying “i want to leave” again and again.


Johnstone’s poetry brings me to cool places, addresses me in chilling science, reminds me of all the warm things inside my sagging stooping self.

The poem. Grasshopper, describes a night out with ‘you’ in a nearby wood on a calm evening, a bonfire, some smokes, whiskey, laughter and then,

the snap of your ankle
bones releasing along a break
you collapsing to the sober ground


Johnstone is the white-jacketed poet witnessing

your bruises
understand the journey
have travelled beneath
your skin like an unlovely
river

In another poem, Johnstone describes how

the needle plunges down
sleep crawls into his arm
with beads of anaesthetic

his body is weighted
to cement blocks
bound and shoved
overboard

Johnstone inhabits areas of life and death as if they were good neighbours with each other and in the marvellous poem, Conjoined Dreams, he brings it to us in an all too uncomfortably familiar way.

curtain
that divides the room

separating the dead
from the next miracle.

There is a thread running through this anthology of poems – twins. They appear often. They have tattooed themselves deeply into Johnstone’s sensibilities. They are the miracle and death is a veil away.

Johnstone brings us into cool rooms, windowless rooms, bright white light, stainless steel, scientific jargon subjected to poetry. He is the cool ghoul that brings us to understand that he works among plumbers and carpenters of flesh, a place where maimed miracles are restored to walk amongst us again.

Johnstone’s poetry brings us to the maternity window where we press our faces all googly-eyed to the glass, then turns our heads to the mortuary window for our destiny.

Not once did I ever imagine that an autopsy report could be poetic, but Johnstone does it with acute aplomb. I’m looking forward to more from this unique voice in poetry. For Jim I dedicate this pinwheel:







Tuesday, January 27, 2009

YESNO by Dennis Lee, A Review


YESNO
By Dennis Lee
Publisher: House of Anansi Press

Price: $18.95
paper ISBN: 978-0-88784-758-5
Page count: 72 pp.

Buckle up. The ride through YESNO is dangenerous; expect side blindswipes. It’s the perilous spinball dropping exhilarhausted into the tilthole of obliviannus horribilus.

My second reading of YESNO provided me a bit of grip on what was happening. The poetry was compact, intense, language wound up tightassed for a wingshot at a velocity in XXXcess of 100 metaphors a moment, words dereformed, deregulated concepts, images plattering on the wingshield of conventilation; Lee’s imagination comes at you like fuckflock of furies.

Duck! Incoming “sonic contusions”, “geodyssey”, “elderlore”, “toxiholic”, “cosmochaos”, “biophobe boogie”, “hearticulate improv”. Impact, umphact, after hairpin swerves every when and where. His poems ricochet off meaning. It’s jabberwonky for uncynicalistas, as in the poem “ave” which is a slobberstew of rubverbish and bilestys.

“How surd a blurward stut. How
peewee thingsong

… borbo of cacohosanna; of smew of
beluga of animavegetal pibroch --
mixmuster of raggedy allsorts, syl
labic in habitat soup

Gumbo of
arkitude flotsam.
Flicker of
legacy toddlers, of
old soul avatar orphans”

Briefly, Lee emerges to do an e e cummings pirouette through meanfields of explosive poetential but he does it in the shade, a dark shade cast by crescent moonlight. The poem “noful” resonates with a gothawful tunetude:

“Sohib, go slow
tread light in the food chain
…the very air stinks of ambush”

And then Lee mugs you with bare-fisted meaning as in the poem “googoo”:

“whacked grammer of terra
cognita. Old lingo
aphasic, nuworldspeak mute
mutant mutandis --
fumbumbling what
aleph? whose googoo? which syllab? Test-living what
Schizoparse of am?”

This book is not for anyone. It is certainly NOT for The People. Actually, it’s hardly for anyone at all, except for the endangered species of cognoscentipedes, illuministas & other bloatbrains who are in the YESKNOW. Lee’s “lingotectonics” are lingotectoxic for The People. Laurie Anderson referred to her own compositions as “difficult music;” So it will go with Lee -- difficult poetency. It is poetry by the few for the few and farout in the twain between.

I have thoroughly enjoyed where Lee took me, and I am sure to visit him again, into the primavisceral to fullflopfrash in the original biodebris of our own evodilutionary imaginations crossing from mallville to swampburb and back.

Lee is indeed the “bupkus quixote” tilting at “corporate mindmills” with spermtaneous “impromptible knots of rebeing” leaving us “wordless in blinker blank.”

I love how Lee detonates nouns into verb debris. The opening line of this book states, “If it walks like apocalypse…” then Lee goes all primal dancing the apoetcalypso of language.

DURBAN II GEARS UP TO OPPRESS FREE SPEECH INTERNATIONALLY

UN Durban II planning committee meeting this week have been receiving good exposure by Eye On The UN.

Here are memorable moments from Day 3 of what the UN considers to be progress in the effort to combat racism:

The European Union agreed to hold a Durban II only if it was limited to assessing the original Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. This EU "red-line" has now been thoroughly trashed. Syria said: "If we repeat the DDPA then there is no point to holding a review conference." The EU is still sitting in their seats, content to eat crow one more time.

Western countries were constantly put on the defensive:
Proposed provision: "one of the principle reasons fomenting the tide of racism is the growing increase in the right wing extremist political discourse, including in some of the most liberal pluralistic societies."

Pakistan: "Wherever people are doing something wrong - whether freedom of expression, counterterrorism policies or abuse of national security policies, the legal action which has not been taken against them amounts to immunity."

Freedom of expression came under attack numerous times:

Iran: "People...say that existing law doesn't allow us to prevent abuse of freedom of expression...Immunity... is there."

Cuba: "Include negative abuse of freedom of expression...Insert "...violence by the media and national security forces."

Syria: "We are not talking about freedom of expression. What we mean is...the abuse of the right to freedom of expression and not the freedom of expression itself. So we distinguish between the two notions. Difference between the right to freedom and freedom of expression itself. We mean abuse of the right."

Pakistan: " We are not talking about freedom of expression, but impunity that has been exercised on the use of these freedoms which creates discriminatory behavior in those societies."

Monday, January 26, 2009

James Dewar -- The Garden In the Machine

Three times I have read this book of poetry, and three times I have felt refreshed, as if a spring shower has rinsed cynicism from my grimaced forehead. Dewar’s poetry reminds me so much of the exquisite simplicity of Carl Sandburg. It reflects an ordinary life lived extraordinarily.

Dewar’s poetry is as accessible as a jar of jam in a pantry; he is a poet with a day job. It is from this life that Dewar has woven poems as rich and beautiful as a silk tie, or as robust as an angler’s bucket of bass destined for the bellies of his children.

I am especially fond of his poem, Irving Layton, (my mentor) which I like to imagine ignited Dewar into the wide-open whirled of poetry with lusty abandonment; “When I first met him I was young, a boner with a body attached…” I suspect that has been the case for Dewar ever since.

Dewar is the host of the monthly poetry reading series, Hot-Sauced Words, where he engages the audience with “lusty abandonment” into the saucy wonders of poetry-play. It is transparent to see that poetry arouses Dewar, his own and others when they pass into his enlarged circumference. He is naughtily erotic without succumbing to the precious or pornographic. Dewar reflects a tenderness of spirit sans fragility.

When he writes on any subject, it is from his direct experience, as if his bones, blood and body, all sensitive, the world sensitive -- everything that touches him, he touches. There is no show-off here -- hey look everyone -- look what my imagination can do. One needs only to read him to see what he can do, and it is formidable.

He has that indulgent weakness of poets -- to invent words, but does so appropoetically, submerging them within the poem with such suppleness that it is noticed as a glint in the eye, rather than a glaring spotlight.

Poet, Allan Briesmaster, accurately portrays Dewar’s collection of poetry as a smorgasbord. It is indeed a nutritious read, fat free, yet deliciously spicy and robustly healthy to the spirit. Dewar’s poetry is lush without being extravagant. It is the kind of poetry that I would love to invite to the dinner table of friends and family.

Leaving The Edge is a poem that gave me chills, perhaps because I had a similar experience, the immediate termination of a future, or mutilation thereof, medical machinery, cool rooms, soothing personnel and in Dewar’s case “the pain in my chest like a bus full of everyone I have wounded tipping over on me.” Dewar describes the near-death experience with calmness, not as a movement into The Light as movies portray, but that the paddles exploded him out of the blackness into the floresensual light of our day-to-day existence.

I have carried this book around me in my backpack for several weeks now, showing it to a couple friends who have never bought a book of poetry, nor likely ever will, but it is important that they hear this voice, well, important to me to share something. The book contains an amount of wealth that sharing it doesn’t deplete it, but earns interest.

COLD WAR SHOOTS & SCORES


He shoots! He scores! It’s a shut-out against mediocrity. Art rules!

I am referring to Andrew Pink’s art show at La Galerie Espace, 4484 St Laurent Blvd, Montreal. The show is on until the end of this week. Entitled Cold War, it is a series of paintings depicting hockey players in iconic action postures, the way Canadians have been perceiving them since our Cream of Wheat childhoods.

Big deal, you might say, and you’d be correct to think such based on such a prima facie description. After all, many of know of the iconic image of The Goalie painted by Ken Danby. Pink utilizes this hockey iconography in an entirely direction.

The direction is so seductively and brilliantly simple that it amazing that no one has ever explored this dimension of hockey: cold war propaganda iconography. Pink has rendered the hockey players with generic clothing -- no corporate teams are referenced. There is only the need to depict two opponents, distinguished from each other by the colour of the jersey and five-pointed star on their chest.

They are portrayed as warriors, proud, noble, strong. Pink explained that the faces he utilized were largely an amalgamation of actual hockey players and people he knew. Two paintings did utilize the typical Soviet socialist realism face, the square jaw, jutting chin, uplifted head, bloated pride and they were effective propaganda.

The paintings were contextualized as propaganda posters, each image blazoned with minimal motivational sans serif words. The colours were primary and loud, edged enough to make an effective blend of photo-realism and illustration. Interestingly, Pink portrays the hockey players with less protective gear than what is currently used on the ice today. This adds a touch of nostalgic retro to the paintings.

The NHL seems to have sacrificed the commonality that hockey once had, for the pumped up cash cow that it has become. We are propagandized to believe that (Our City) team is ours and represents (our city) us. It does not. Each team is explicitly a corporation. It is not a game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Boston Bruins. It has become like a game between Pepsi and Coke, or Chrysler and Ford. Rinks are filled with fans of a commercial product.

It is very telling that the only real hockey being played now is during the Winter Olympics, where hockey is played with all that the propaganda asks of us: valour, pride, skill, heart and soul. It produces a victory that an entire nation can rise up and from the pit of their soul, enjoy the ephemerality of being Number 1.

Hockey is a game, a proxy for war. It is far preferable to the lethal thing. It’s rough, fast, dangerous, and exhilarating. Wouldn’t be a better world is we could all turn in our AK47,s, rocket launchers, missiles, stealth bombers, MIGs, etc. and be armed only with hockey sticks.

With this exhibit, Andrew Pink has pulled off an elegant hat-trick. He shot. He scored. Big time.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

THE WAL-MARTYR POETRY PERFORMANCE

Poster for first performance of The Wal-Martyr


The Wal-Martyr was performed last fall at the launch of issue #10 of the literary journal, Misunderstandings Magazine, which had published my poem Apoetcalypse Now, a cleverly altered (poeticized) version of one of the iconic scenes in Francis Ford Coppolla’s movie masterpiece, Apocalypse Now.

Livewords hosted the event at Cervejaria @ 842 College Street West, Toronto. Livewords is a monthly poetry performance venue run by poet Edward Nixon who emcees with unbridled wit. He, and another compatriot poet, James Dewar, who hosts another monthly poetry venue called Hot-Sauced Words, provide a vital platform for young and emerging poets to cut their teeth.

For the Wal-Martyr performance, I first primed the audience, consisting of poets, poetry lovers, poetry sluts, a couple prose-heads and an out-of-town municipal politician by overdosing on FREE SPEECH pharmaceuticals. With a call of “Do it!” from the audience, their unwitting complicity opened the way for the performance of The Wal-Martyr.


They were poets. By their very nature as inspired wordniks who daily thrash and splash in the sparkling fluids of language, they are naturals for the fruit of FREE SPEECH. Poets are not known to be conformists to the dogma du jour, the orthodox zeitgeist, and especially to the coercive confinements enforced by bureaucraps in the name of The State.

The Wal-Martyr is undeniably offensive. It was composed with that intent. It was designed to be delivered with profound contempt towards every person within hearing range. The script (below) contained words, phrases and expressions that a reasonable person would regard as hateful. The hatred was directed towards an identifiable group – kuffars,

How could it be otherwise? After all, I was portraying a suicide martyr. For a couple years I had immersed myself in the viewing of many snuff videos of beheadings, videos of last will and testaments of actual suicide martyrs, and audio tapes of their immediate supporters.

None of the above had been sourced from Western capitalist-controlled media. They were sourced from the web sites that islamaniacs set up to proudly display their lethal hatreds and as a recruiting magnet for their cause.

It took me several viewings over several weeks to enure myself to eye-witness and ear-witness videos of beheadings. A lifetime of Hollywood prepping in the horror/Tarentino genre had not vaccinated me against the full repulsivemess of the real thing.

The beheadings were not accomplished with a single swipe of a scimitar. There was considerable sawing before the head was detached and held aloft as a proud John-The-Baptist trophy. Invariably the ubiquitous “Allahu Akbar” was called out during the actual butchering.

All of these deathniks reminded me of the nazi brownshirts of Europe, Pinochet’s death squads, Stalin’s smersh agents. Those regimes were driven by a political totalitarian ideology. Similarly, these suicide martyrs are driven by theological totalitarianism. Their enemy is the profoundly hated kuffar.

I performed The Wal-Martyr with that in mind. The audience was full of kuffars. They got the performance they deserved.

Edward Nixon was graciously diplomatic on Livewords website to describe my performance as “controversial.” It would have been more accurate to have described it as an offensive and lurid expression of hate.

It is one thing to perform The Wal-Martyr in the protective context of a poetry reading venue; it is quite another to do it in the public domain, albeit with a broader and more porous context – Nuit Blanche.

Nuit Blanche, September 29-30, 2007, is a dusk to dawn extravaganza of avante garde art displays throughout the downtown core of Toronto. I had spent several evening hours touring many sites, when it occurred to me to go home, dress up in The Wal-Martyr outfit and go out for a stroll down the very crowded Queen Street West.

The Wal-Martyr holds a beaver hostage in Trinity-Bellwoods Park

Needless to say, this spontaneous, unofficial and highly provocative act was a big surprise to me. After all, I was 60 years old for god’s sake, and here I was upstaging some young upstarts. I went in and out of galleries, gathering a small entourage of curious and paparazzi. I was dared to enter Atom Egoyan’s club, Camera, because they were screening a film about the Gaza strip. I entered, walked up to the screen, faced the surprised audience and did a version of the Gaza strip tease.

When I got to the Drake Hotel, a police car rounded the corner. I dropped the faux detonator from my hand and opened each pocket in my suicide vest to reveal that they contained heavy electrical transformers and that all the wires and cables were attached to a ball point pen “detonator.”

There was a bit of radio chatter. The police said they had been receiving reports about me. Once they were assured that I was a poet doing my thing, I wished well and released. On my own I removed the balaclava, walked home, thinking to myself: “How great is this. I was NOT shot. What a great city! What a great country! Poetry is Poetency indeed.”

I later learned that CBC radio had been talking up my little terrorist excursion and NOW magazine did considerable coverage of my free expression, Night of the Living Bankers, written by the talented poet, Robert Priest.

Will The Wal-Martyr be coming to a neighbourhood near you? Only the muse knows.

The script:

Infidels,
apostates,
fornicators,
blasphemers,
general all purpose unbelievers
I am your terrorist for tonight
I am a weapon of Hamas destruction,
a mani-infestation of Mohammadness of the Ku Klux Koran
I am here to blow you away
with the force of my faith

You Children of Crusaders think you’ve got smart bombs
I am a smart bomb
I can loiter, backtrack, choose my moment
Your smart bombs cost millions
I cost the liberation of my soul
You are a stupid people

You Children of Crusaders think you have stealth bombers invisible to radar
I am a stealth bomber,
an invisible minority
I can penetrate your insecurity systems, enter subways, discos, buses,
Your stealth bombers cost billions
I cost the liberation of my soul
You are a stupid people

Norad cannot detect me
even though I am in your schools, your parks, your malls, your burbs
NATO cannot stop me
though it is the world’s greatest gang with its fly-by bombings & inconsequential collateral
You are a stupid people.

You love to live
We love to die
You love your bonds to the temporal
We love our wings to the eternal
You kill to live & make hell on earth
We kill to earn life in heaven
We kill to purify the earth of infidelity,
the AbomiNations of Western wickedmess & Guantanamo Ghettoes
Your democrazies have liberated licentiousmess
the widespread eagled dishonour of women with their gynecological generosities
with the perversonality of homosexual culture
that you want to shove up our culture with the Uniperversal Declaration of Unhuman Rites

I am of the people of the God Squad
who will avenge your idolatries and idollartries.
We will bring down all your Manhatten man hatin' towering boners of banality.

Your sons say,
“Daddy, I want to be pathetically correct when I grow up.”

Our sons say,
“Father, I want to be a Wal-martyr when I blow up”

Your sons say,
“I want to ejaculate.”

Our sons say,
“I want to detonate.”

I am an apostle of the Universal Declaration of God's Rights
I am a weapon of Hamas destruction
I am here to blow you away with the force of my faith
I am the price of your freedom
And I will make you pay
God is the greatest!
Allahu akbar!
ALLAHU AKBARBARIAN!!!!!


Friday, January 23, 2009

COMING SOON TO A POETRY READING NEAR YOU


Resistance Poetry to Land in Toronto
Organizers have announced that the First International Festival of Poetry of Resistance will take place in Toronto April 24 to 30. The Festival will “promote opposition to a culture of war, violence and greed and to end racism and discrimination.”
===========================================

This event should prove to be very interesting, especially in light of the fact that it will overlap with the expected anti-Semite hate-fest at Durban II to be held in Geneva scheduled for April 20-24.

Wait til the pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Toronto get wind of this Poetry fest. I'm constructing a custom-built cup for my rhyming couplets.