We were protesting the $11 million investment by the CIBC in a company called Metallica Mining, which was (and unfortunately still is) using bribes to local officials to gut the central mountain in their village and destroy their way of life for the sake of profits.

Here’s a video of the performance (courtesy of Jay Lemieux and Guerilla Video Productions):

I’m well aware that Obama’s nothing close to the revolutionary or socialist (if only the republicans were right about that one) that is needed right now, but he’s a hell of a lot better than what the US had for eight years and may even prove to better than Clinton, who in my opinion was just a corporate exec who was good at making progressive-sounding speeches.

Obama may have been headed down the Clinton road, but maybe, just maybe, with another depression looming and people scratching their heads over how they had allowed someone like Bush to steal two elections and visibly set the country back a few decades, progressive voices might be able to convince Obama to make a left turn and bring about the change he promises. Now that’s a pile of hope if there ever was one.

No matter how he turns out or what he does, at least he’ll sound intelligent explaining it. I recommend watching or reading his speech from last night, at one point it even brought a tear to my eye. Also, if you haven’t already, I suggest taking a listen to his speech on race relations, it’s one of the smartest and most honest speeches from a major North American politician I’ve heard in a while.

Meanwhile in Canada, $300 million dollars later, we’ve got a Conservative minority government with the Liberals in opposition followed by the Bloc and the NDP. Essentially, Canadians paid $300 million to have something we had before for free, a Bush wannabee in office. At least in two months, there will be no Bush for him to take orders from.

It might seem off the bat that we’ve fallen behind, but if you look closer, it becomes apparent that Canada is just as progressive as it ever was and in some ways more so. First off, at least smaller parties do get noticed and our debates are not limited to two competing corporate candidates. If that was the case in the states, then things would be quite different.

There were also some truly great things that happened in the last Canadian election, namely Thomas Mulcair of the NDP holding onto the Outremont riding, a riding that up until last year had been in the hands of the Liberals for pretty much ever. This is also a personal victory as I live in the riding and for the second time in as many years, the candidate I voted for actually won, which is something that doesn’t happen that often these days on the left.

The NDP picked up seats overall, too, largely at the expense of the Liberals, which is fine by me. Maybe now people on the left or center-left will start seeing that they have a chance and the Liberals will stop splitting the progressive vote.

Stéphane Dion is probably a nice guy and a way better choice than Ignatief, and is probably a nice guy, but his party seems hell-bent on shifting away from the left (even though they were only there socially to begin with), which makes Harper seem normal and center, instead of the ultra right-wing western separatist Reform Party joke that he is.

Looks like the states may have finally gotten their joke and realized it wasn’t funny. Next time, it’s Canada’s turn.

And in Quebec, looks like we’re going to have our second election in as many years…keep ‘em coming!

I was at the anti-RNC protest in 2004 covering the theatrical jamming aspect for the Montreal Mirror. Though my gig (and my personal budget) kept me in New York City only long enough to witness the official march and not much else, I did feel a foreboding air when I wandered away from the sanctioned area.

I heard the horror stories (remember the yellow mesh) through the independent press when I got back and heard from friends who were detained by the FBI and Homeland Security for an hour for being curious about a building with no windows. They were released when the powers that be realized they had stopped a couple of actors.

I wasn’t that surprised to hear that the cops were at it once again in St-Paul a few weeks ago at this year’s Republican National Convention. What was different, or at least what seemed different, this time was that they targeted the press.

They started with pre-emptive raids (Iraq, anyone?) on activist film group I-Witness Video and others, continued with the arrest of two Democracy Now! producers as they covered a protest and the show’s host Amy Goodman as she tried to get them out of custody:

They carried on throughout the week with similar incidents, including shutting down a concert by Rage Against the Machine.

All of this makes you wonder why they would go after people who could turn around and make them “famous.” Maybe they think that soon the internet will be back in their hands (“net neutrality my ass”). Maybe they just don’t realize the extent evidence of their negative actions can be spread virally. Maybe they just don’t care what a few million activists or activist sympathizers watching think.

Most likely, though, they do care and all this negative exposure they’re getting is completely intentional and designed to create a chilling effect:

“See, protestors, we don’t care if you’re filming us, ’cause we’re busting the press and anyone who gets in our way, too!” That is why it’s important, now more than ever, to keep filming, keep spreading videos and keep vigilant.

It’s also, I feel, more important than ever, to inject a bit more art into actions. If the protests carry an element that appeals to people that may not be fully aware of the political situation, either by entertaining them or catching their attention, then the subsequent police repression will piss off those people too, especially when they can’t see the video because the cops stopped the filming.

Looking like a bunch of thugs to a mass audience that isn’t necessarily politically aware is the kind of negative PR the cops don’t want to deal with.

This piece of scaremongering came “courtesy” of someone named Maurice Vellacott, a Conservative MP from Saskatoon-Wanuskewin in Saskatchewan and was filled with US-style war-on-drugs rhetoric like “junkies and drug pushers don’t belong near children and families, they should be in rehab or behind bars.”

It had all the markings of a cheaply put together neo-con wannabe pamphlet, complete with a picture of someone dressed as a doctor and a smiling Mr. Harper.

So the Tories are trying to sell me on the idea that their thinly-veiled attack on pot is the only way to save kids from needles. Nothing new here. What is interesting is what this pamphlet is.

There’s no election on and my riding’s represented by the NDP, so this amounts to nothing more than junk mail. It’s also a huge waste of money.

True, parts of my riding may respond to the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, but not the part I live in. Since there’s no way this campaign is unique to my neighbourhood, there are probably tens of thousands of people who threw that letter directly into the recycle box.

So the Harper crew will blow money on mail spam and at the same time cut arts funding. Maybe they’re afraid some artists with something critical to say will have a louder voice, or maybe they just don’t care about Canadian culture. As lapdogs to the Bush administration, it makes sense that they would prefer us fully adopt American culture rather than export our own.

Now it looks like they’re putting some of their new loot into the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and in particular the torch relay. So they also don’t care about land being appropriated from the poor and Native peoples, either. They just want a chance to show off to the rest of the G7 how well they can play the game.

If they really cared about athletes, they would invest in community recreation for all, not just those with a chance of doing well in a multi-million dollar international scam like the Olympics.

If they really cared about Canada, they would support artists with something to say, even if that something was critical of the government or corporate influence in the arts. After all, those are the ones that need funding ’cause they won’t get it from corporate sources.

But all hope is not lost. There’s a do-not-call list going into effect on September 30th, complete with hefty fines for those who violate it. Let’s get that extended to the mail and to political parties when there’s no election on.

Then, we can nail Harper on his junk mail campaign and spend the money on critical artists with something to say, so that their voice can be heard and so that they can inspire us and the rest of the world with a new way of doing things.

We arrived on Friday night and started off at The Albion Hotel, a pub/music venue that, I guess, used to be a hotel. The Albion was also the last place in Guelph we visited.

In fact, it was one of only three places I spent a significant amount of time in, the other two being the place I was billeted (with a sign over the door that read “living in style”) and the University of Guelph campus where our show was to take place.

Guelph is a small town, but it felt more like a few sections of a larger city glued together. For those of you familiar with Montreal, imagine part of NDG glued to Outremont glued to Wellington Street in Verdun glued to a sprawling and beautiful university campus, with a couple of streets reminiscent of Mile-End and the West Island thrown into the mix – and that’s it.

For such a small town, it had a very progressive vibe. We were invited by professor Alan Filewod, who’s also a character in our show (as a piece of verbatim theatre, Sinking Neptune uses actual public statements and writings from real people as play text). Filewod’s Political Intervention Theatre Project hosted the show.

The people we met from this group, from the university and in Guelph in general, were supportive and seemed to have a very progressive outlook that accepted challenges to the status quo.

Our show went over very well and during the talkback session, the audience posed some very thought provoking questions and even offered us some ideas (like getting some culture-jams related to the project going in Vancouver, which will soon host the 2010 Olympics, on Aboriginal land). There’s even talk of getting an infringement Festival going in Guelph, where I think it will go over well.

On the deck of the SS Imperialist, part of the Sinking Neptune set at the University of Guelph (photo by Matthias Elsdörfer)

The George Luscombe Theatre, where we performed, is a great, high-tech black box theatre space. For an actor like me, who’s used to performing in alleyways (Car Stories), stores that don’t want us there (various culture-jams) and bars (many other projects, including an earlier run of Sinking Neptune), it’s a nice change of pace and one worth noting.

The last time I performed in an equally high-tech venue was at King’s Theatre in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, again with Sinking Neptune. That time, though, the crowd was anything but progressive and the talkback became a heated attack on our play, prompted by a perceived attack on their tourism industry, which was largely centered on Lescarbot’s play.

Where politically-charged theatre with something to say frequently has to find it’s own space in a city like Montreal (at least on the Anglo side), Guelph seems ready to showcase it front and centre, which is great for a community this size, or any community for that matter.

I wonder what type of reaction we can expect when we eventually perform the show in Quebec City, another beautiful town that seems really progressive, where once again the city’s tourism industry will be centered around celebrating another Eurocentric milestone.

This year, we’re focusing on the 400th anniversary of Quebec City, another celebration that glosses over some of the real and bloody history of the event being celebrated.

If you happen to live in the Guelph area, the show is Saturday, February 9th, at 9pm at the George Luscome Theatre at the University of Guelph and it’s pay-what-you-can.

I’ll try to write a few posts while down there, but for now, here’s a video trailer of the show:

Here’s a recent jam of Chartwells, the company that has monopolized food service at both Concordia and McGill universities…

And here’s one of me playing Brandon You, CEO of PubPartout at the Plateau Borough council meeting last May. The city had been waffling on the issue of banning ad trucks from the streets of Montreal. They had already tried to ban them before, but when the ad truck companies sued, the city’s lawyer dropped the case prematurely.

Our colleague Erik Chevrier had been going to council meetings for over a year to bring up this issue and kept getting the runaround. Council members and borough mayors told him that they supported the cause but couldn’t do anything (despite similar moves working in cities like Vancouver and Toronto) and even suggested that the city streets weren’t their jurisdiction.

We showed up in support by theatrically opposing “Erik Chevrolet” and claiming that ad trucks were our right, and an essential step in the commodification of our culture. We started outside of both the Plateau and Ville Marie council meetings, then decided to go inside and present both Ville Marie borough mayor Benoit Labonte and Plateau Borough Mayor Helen Fotopulos (Foto-op-ulos) with the PubPartout PubD’Or Award for their allowing ad trucks to violate historic sites.

When you see the video, it’s also interesting to note that after our performance, the council voted to allow surveillance cameras on St-Laurent boulevard.

Now entering it’s third year, the Buffalo festival is, without a doubt, the largest in the International infringement circuit (so far). While the Montreal infringement improved audiences and developed the local infringement community this year by pulling itself back and focusing on less shows centered around the Plateau neighborhood, Buffalo’s event keeps getting bigger and better.

With over 140 acts this year (up from last year and almost quadruple the number of acts in the original 2005 Buffalo event), the growth in the festival’s size is matched by it’s growth in intimate community feeling and original, spontaneous ideas.

That’s not to say that the festival doesn’t have it’s critics, or should I say critic. Among all the praise and in-depth coverage found in Buffalo’s media, there was one editorial (um, “survival guide”) in the Artvoice urging the festival to drop it’s claim to support and represent underground artists with something to say by giving them a place to say it.

I’m not sure if anyone took that advice to heart, but it sure didn’t look like it on the streets of Allentown (the festival’s epicenter) during the festival’s opening weekend and the subsequent few days we were in town.

As people were busy completing their “self-infringement” assignments, pulled out of a box at Rust Belt Books, four separate public performances turned Allen Street into a spontaneous artistic celebration. On Monday night alone, three of them co-existed simultaneously.

The surreal experience started when Subversive Theatre’s fantastic street-theatre version of Berthold Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule (which I had the chance to catch a day earlier) made it’s way down Allen parade-style past MC Vendetta’s Open-Lot (a musical open-mike in a parking lot) to Day’s Park.

We started preparing for Car Stories, while taking in some of what was happening around us. Just before our first showtime of the evening (with a new show every 30 minutes, Car Stories has several), The Exception and the Rule made it’s way back to Allen Street and took over the parking lot next to Nietzsche’s, briefly trapping one of our actors behind the scene. It moved on to the parking lot where Open-Lot was taking place, just as they went on break.

In the middle of their scene, Car Stories started half a block down outside of Mulligan’s Brick Bar. Our actor, who was watching the show, made it to Mulligan’s in time for her cue and brought the audience back, past the now-resumed Open-Lot and into our car parked in the now theatrically vacated lot next to Nietzsche’s as The Exception and The Rule continued up College Street.

Three street theatre productions all happening at the same time in the same two-block stretch of the same street, with no problems. Truly a great example of what infringing is all about.

What I really found refreshing was that the festival didn’t have to compete with corporate reality ads running up and down the street as we do in Montreal.

This probably isn’t the case all the time in Allentown (I was told that there were some other, more commercial festivals), and quite possibly not the case in other Buffalo districts, but for the few days we were there, it was really nice (and possibly hints at why the festival doesn’t have a Ministry of Culture Jamming).

For the past three visits, our troupe has been housed by the good people at the Nickel City Co-Op. They had taken over a four-story turn-of-the-century mansion (with gargoyles!) and turned it into their home.

This reclaiming of the city is evident all over Buffalo. It’s a community breathing new life into the relics of an older, much more financially prosperous time (Buffalo was once a city of millionaires, not so anymore) and celebrating while doing it. It’s one of the most unique, vibrant artistic communities I’ve encountered and it’s the perfect match for both the infringement and Car Stories.

Since Car Stories takes place in streets, alleys, parks and parking lots that already exist, a big part of the show is finding new use for what’s already there which is why, I feel, we had no problem putting together a show with mostly Buffalo actors in hardly any time.

We came up with the theme and worked out characters and scenes that fit it the day of our first performance. We don’t always do things this spur-of-the-moment, but this time we did, and it worked very well.

We even played on the Artvoice article, telling the audience that we had to make more money, so we were going to do musical theatre and were sending them to an audition with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Back in Montreal, I can only hope that what’s happening in Buffalo will rub off on the rest of the circuit, because when it comes to infringing, they get it.

“Please don’t delete this,” it pleaded, “I need lots of money right now.”

The robot in question, some sort of marketing spambot, followed up it’s post with a link to some site where you can get pills. The ones a few month ago offered the same intro plea followed by links to some porn site and some stock site.

Now, maybe there is one real person behind each of these ads and maybe that person does need some cash, but forgive me for not wanting to offer charity to struggling porn or pill vendors who have plenty of opportunity elsewhere on the net to hawk their wares.

While I find it amusing how marketers are trying to give their robots personalities designed to elicit sympathy from bloggers, I spend too much time deleting spam messages from my e-mail and figuring out a way to block spammers from a message board I’m trying to get back up and running to want to devote any more time to deleting their messages here, so, I’m now gonna moderate comments on this blog.

I’ll let (almost) everything that’s written about one of my posts through, and even plugs for stuff I find interesting, but no more robots, unless of course, they make one smart enough to debate this post.

When we got closer, we noticed what all the fuss was about. A small plane was parked in the middle of Avenue du Parc. Apparently, it had experienced engine trouble and was forced to make an emergency landing.

Luckily, most traffic going north on du Parc was held at Rachel by a red light, so no one was injured. Also lucky the pilot didn’t try going the other way down du Parc, right into the construction work.

I guess the best way to sum this experience up is that it’s something you don’t see every day and an interesting, unexpected way to spend a Sunday afternoon.