Frank Black and Carl Wilson: A Conversation About Modern Music and Taste
Thursday, February 25, 2010
7:00pm - 8:30pm
Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th Ave.
Portland, OR

Frank Black (Black Francis aka Charles Thompson III) writes and plays music as a solo artist and as a member of Grand Duchy and The Pixies. Carl Wilson is the Toronto-based author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, about class, taste, cultural conflict and Celine Dion (part of the 33 1/3 Series).

They’ll have a dynamic, irreverent discussion about the changing meanings of “alternative” and “underground,” the relationship of indie to mainstream, emotion in music, and how what we like defines, creates and possibly distorts who we are.

Brought to you by the Portland Center for Public Humanities.

See the Facebook event page.

So, yes, Wavelength 500 ended Sunday night with a set of tributes to the Torontopian Age that left many of us misty-eyed (and/or hungover, as it actually went on until well past the legally appointed closing time, thanks to the Garrison’s generosity). Steve Kado flew in from California bringing with him a poster he’d made for the occasion - the full calendar for 2003.

“Dinosaurs of Rock” Barcelona Pavilion reunited, saying, “We will have to tell you the truth because we are old now and our faces aren’t capable of deception. When we were young we deceived people constantly and now we’re being punished.” They revised the words in How Are You People Going To Have Fun If None Of You People Ever Participate? (a rare actual living specimen of a Song That Changed The World, of Poetry That Made Something Happen) from “How’s your hangover? How are your bedsores?” to “How’s your mortgage? How are your children?” They conceded their long-running beef with Rockets Red Glare - quoth Steve Kado, “Those guys are doing philosophy in grad school now. I’m a visual artist. Obviously they win.”

The BP played almost all its songs, with almost-but-not-quite the fluidity of their peak, including a song I thought only 12 people who saw their first show in a living room had ever heard, based on a dream bassist Kat Gligorijevic had in which she was participating in some sort of race in which the aim was to stay in constant view of semiotician Raymond Monelle. It includes a kind of whispered-shout chant that I have seldom heard in song. There was a mosh pit in which people got playfully violent to songs about cleaning up your room. And then for an encore the band played a song I’d never heard before, which was not one of their songs, and by played I mean they played it on their iPod and sang along with the chorus, “Capital in ruins/Thousands dead, thousands dead” (when BP sings this you assume they mean financial and/or cultural capital in ruins) until there were no words to sing along to, and during that instrumental section Steve wrapped cables, Maggie danced exuberantly, Kat drank a beer and Ben did absolutely nothing, and I thought, “Ladies and gentlemen, that was the Barcelona Pavilion.”

After that happened, Kids on TV played, and Thomas played, and then Owen Pallett played (as was announced just hours before the show) and God looked upon it and said that it was good. And then the 2003 lineup of The Hidden Cameras - Steve Kado, Owen Pallett, Maggie MacDonald, Mathias Rozenberg, Magali Meagher, Gentleman Reg, Dave Meslin and Joel Gibb - reunited and played I Believe in the Good of Life, which certainly describes the collective sentiment in the room. Apparently this took place at Owen’s instigation, when he realized everyone would be in town. Amazingly, everyone agreed, though I have it on confidential authority that a few of them felt they were violating sacred oaths. But they did it for us. And for Wavelength. Sentimental and nostalgic? Only if honoring your parents is also mere sentimental nostalgia. No, this was just being put in mind of the things that matter.

In his lecture at Trampoline Hall - also at the Garrison - last night, my friend Michael McManus expressed the view that in Canada, especially in Ontario, and in Toronto particularly, we are ashamed of the things that we should be proud of and proud of the things that we should be ashamed of. It’s a general human problem - ever met someone with hangups about sex but proud of his offshore bank account? - but it does also seem a particular local one. Wavelength, and the people who were there Sunday night, stood up to point that out and lead by example in how to see what really deserves celebration - and how overwhelmingly much of it there really is. You’re soaking in it. Don’t worry, drink up, drink up, drink up.

I found this CitySonic interview which includes Brian Borcherdt drawing a handy flowchart on a wall for understanding Wavelength and Toronto indie-cestuousness at History Jen’s wonderful Narratives site, which also presents her personal reminiscences about the series and a whole bunch of other videos.

I have a full article coming out in The Globe and Mail on Friday about the Wavelength 500 festival, which marks the 10th anniversary of the weekly Toronto indie/experimental music series known for kickstarting the local scene as we know it today, and also (as was announced last year) marks the end of its weekly incarnation and the beginning of something new (some details below). But only a few bits of my long conversation with Wavelength co-founder and stalwart programmer Jonny Dovercourt will make it to print, so in honour of the festival’s launch tonight at the Music Gallery (where Dovercourt, a.k.a. Jonathan Bunce, is also the artistic director - a development that, as well, can be credited to his experience with Wavelength), here is the nearly-full transcript for your edification and enjoyment. Happy birthday Wavelength, and here’s toasting to a long future.

Carl Wilson: How are things coming together for Wavelength 500?

Jonny Dovercourt: Surprisingly smoothly. That’s the advantage of super-long lead time. We started planning it almost as soon as we were done Wavelength 450: We had a list of people we wanted, and started putting feelers out in the spring.
 
There was a period when we were kind of disappointed because we realized we weren’t going to get all the big names we had hoped for. But then it was better in a way, because then the idea of band reunions came up and we had way more success with that than we expected. I didn’t really think that all these people would go for it. From Fiction originally turned us down and then called back a week later saying they’d practised and wanted to do it. So that way it didn’t have to be all about “here are these gigantic bands that played Wavelength when they started out” - because we’re not trying to overstate the case, or to take too much credit for their success.
 
Are all the founders of Wavelength still in the scene, or have some dropped out of music?

There were six bands that were the original crew: Neck, and all those guys are still playing music (Soft Copy, Ghostlight); Mean Red Spiders (Ghostlight); Parts Unknown (Creeping Nobodies until recently, and Derek Westerholm’s new project Karaoke is fucking great, shockingly good), Alex Durlak (ICPMABOYC, and now Boars); Nicholas Kennedy stopped playing music but is still involved through doing letterpress. Everybody’s still active.

It’s funny that none of those bands became the big international touring bands, or got Junos, or got nominated for the Polaris Prize. It’s an irony about it. Not that none of them had those aspirations, but I don’t think any of them were really wired for that level of “going for it.” That group of people were always going to be focused on playing music locally because they were rooted locally.
 
Maybe that’s what enabled them to start WL, in a sense - if their attention had been elsewhere, it wouldn’t have clicked.

A lot of them had through the ’90s tried to tour and had mixed success and kept coming back to Toronto. So we said, “I guess this is where we are, so let’s try to make it the best place to live and play music. Let’s not be ashamed of being a local band. We’re not any less valid as artists because of it. So let’s embrace that.” Then again, the initial crew didn’t go on to be that actively involved. They all supported it, and attended, but most of them were too busy to make it a full-time commitment.
 
What’s changed about being a musician here from then to now?

The main difference is that it’s just easier to organize your own shows and get people out to them. There’s a bigger group of promoters who will take notice of what you’re doing and invite you to play. The Internet obviously makes a big difference for spreading the word.
 
But in some ways it feels the same. [continues]

There’s still about the same number of clubs. There are still the big promoters (Against the Grain, Root Mean Square) whose circles you have to get into if you want to open for your out-of-town heroes. And despite the Internet, things like postering are as important as they ever have been. It’s just that things happen faster.
 
What’s really changed is the enthusiasm you get, that’s expressed more physically [at live shows]. Back then it was everyone sitting at tables and you had to wait till you were finished and people came up to you to get a clue if you were reaching anyone.
 
Do you feel that Wavelength and the bands associated it helped re-orient audiences’ perspectives on local music and even how to behave at shows?

The zine was a big part of that educational outreach of Wavelenght. It was providing the context for what people were coming to see. Which was a big thing to open things up - when you felt like you were reaching people in the 90s you were often just reaching the hard-core music nerds, who’d say, “You remind me of this band and that band and I can see where you fit into…” So the zine provided more context in those terms but also in the broader sense of social context, how they relate to the Toronto scene, what inspired them in their environment. When we stopped doing it in print we tried to carry it into the online realm. And also trying to explain as much as possible our curatorial impulse with any show we did. That’s always been just as important as the show itself. When we got together the zine was a higher priority for me than the live series. I just wanted to do something to make people more aware and more excited about the Toronto music scene.
 
What challenges did you face along the way, aside from obviously a certain amount of burnout in the later years?

It wasn’t even burnout so much as that we’d set ourselves such a ridiculous precedent to follow up. No one can keep that kind of workload up without serious funding and we couldn’t even stop to figure out how to fund it because we were doing it. So it just was obviously unsustainable.
 
Part of the reason it was successful was that it was such airtight formula from the beginning. The audiences were up and down - we didn’t get consistently packed houses till 2002 or ’03. But we put so much thought into the original concept, and we were so dogmatically set on it. The format was two bands and a DJ. … We eventually loosened the grip and let it evolve a bit more naturally. We agreed to officially institute three bands as the formula only a few years ago only at the request of Sneaky Dee’s, who wanted to keep the bar open. But anytime we’ve let there be four bands - on a Sunday night - it gets pretty terrible.
 
Where did the DJ part of the concept come in? Was that just to allow social time?

Yes, it was that. But also when we started it was more of a novelty to have non-DJs deejaying - it was part of the involvement of the community, that anyone who wanted to could DJ at Wavelength. It didn’t have to be some jerk with expensive equipment. And also we could have a chance to … share all our cool new shit. That aspect of it has really fallen off, only in the last year or so. Recruiting DJs was one of the tasks that fell off the map, because no one really took it up and, recently, the Garrison doesn’t have a DJ booth. It’s easy enough to program an iPod playlist - ten years ago there were no iPods!
 
But were there problems you had to adjust, things you had to figure out in the early years?

To be honest, most of the successes confirmed things I already suspected. The format was that there’d be a headlining band that was established on the local scene, and an opening band that was almost brand new, playing their first show or their first handful of shows. Almost every time we stayed true to that and didn’t deviate from it, it worked. Because the established band brings out their following and a new band brings out their friends. And it’s exciting - you’re watching something be born before your eyes, and bands play better because they’ve got something to prove. So with all the other programmers I’ve tried to reinforce that. So we did have this really clear idea of how it would work.

There was one moment, actually, in the first few months where we had to ask ourselves, “Is this series just for our circle of bands or is it something we’re going to open to a bigger community?” I had a few days of struggling with that, because part of me felt that I wanted the world to know about our bands - and I didn’t want to become a ‘booker.’ But we made the selfless decision to open it to a wider community. And if we hadn’t done that, it would have failed.
 
How did you define the limits of the styles of music presented, what belonged and what didn’t?

That’s something that did evolve as it went along. If you look at the first year of WL it was probably pretty heavy on space-rock, drone stuff, some electronic music, some math-rock obviously. But there were improvisers in from almost the beginning. Wavelength 5 had Wrist Error and Eric Chenaux, Michael Snow and John Oswald, and a screening of [Snow’s film] Wavelength - that was number 5 or 6! … I’d been going to see CCMC at the Music Gallery and Mike Genarro’s Ulterior series at the Victory and I wanted to bring some of that spirit into the indie scene - that spirit of musical freedom and experimentation. I was starting already to get sick of the Belle-and-Sebastianization of the indie scene, everything starting to seem safe and pretty and whatever. There was an element of danger I was missing … I thought, how cool it would be to have a free-jazz duo playing before a math rock band - there was a connection there, it’s what I would do on a mixed tape - and maybe I was consciously trying to freak people out.
 
Whenever we did anything weirder and more experimental there was a divisive reaction, but we kind of reveled in it. It wasn’t exactly revolutionary but it caused people to think. And that was part of the excitement about WL. It wasn’t just another indie-rock night. It wasn’t a band showcase, for ‘new bands trying to make it, trying to generate buzz.’ We were so sick of that cheap commodification of indie music. And I’ll admit I was kind of a jerk about it in the first year. There were people who approached me to play and I turned them down and told them they were “too mainstream.” There’s one person who still hasn’t forgiven me for that.

Now I’d be way more polite about it. But I was very dogmatic about what we were going to book and what we weren’t. To me this was an experimental music series, even though a lot of what we were booking was still very song-based, and by actual experimental-music standards it’d be very conventional.
 
Obviously sharing the booking helps diversify it. When you’re just booking a month at a time - or booking one show a month now - there’s a ton of stuff you want to book and it’s a matter of who you whittle it down to. When it comes to listening to solutions, if there’s any hesitation, just don’t book it. Though sometimes a submission will bring you back to it and you’ll realize that there’s something to it.

What are the furthest-out things you’ve booked, at least from a Wavelength-crowd point of view?
 
Early on, Martin Arnold’s band Marmots was the weirdest thing to hear in Ted’s Wrecking Yard. And there were people, even though it was quiet music, it was so atonal or microtonal that there were people covering their ears: “What is this? it’s awful.” And others were swooning for it.

Any time we booked something more hardcore or metal, because we did it so infrequently, like Cursed, there’d be a divisive reaction. Bands like Dance Electric or Oh the Humanity got great response at Wavelength. But it became the occasional palette cleanser. …

Then there are [“classical”-world] new-music things, Toca Loca or Continuum or Contact, having them in a bar environment, though those things in themselves aren’t that far out to me.
 
What are the things you think of most fondly that grew out of, developed through Wavelength?

Lullaby Arkestra: They met at the first WL anniversary; seeing their love grow and their band grow and evolve. They became almost our house band - they played nine WLs, and five or six of those were anniversaries.

And then obviously being ground zero for the whole Torontopia thing, beginning in 02, and exploded 03 to 05. I’m not sure quite what role WL played, other than to popularize it - someone came up with the word, Steve Kado picked it up and spread it. I was probably the first to write about it in the WL zine.

But we helped birth this thing - it was a second wave of Wavelength people making it happen but for me that was exciting. I stay in contact with my old friends but I’m excited by new blood and new things, these younger people who got the mission we were going for and really were going for it. And then as a result of that, WL getting noticed by more institutional things like Coach House Books’ Toronto books - allowing us not to feel self-conscious about taking ourselves seriously, which allowed us to do things like put on panel discussions and apply for arts-council grants.

Those are things that within the context of indie rock, there’s a preciousness about not being too serious or being pretentious, and we got to the point where we could say, “Oh fuck you guys, we don’t care what you think of us. We want to take this further.” And that gave us the confidence to go ahead and incorporate, start applying for grants and create this plan for the future that’s allowing us to evolve at this point.
 
So what is on the agenda for Wavelength version 2.0?

We’re going to have more of a concert season - we’re going to be a bit more like a new-music organization, funnily enough. When I first started at the Music Gallery I was confused by that: “What’s a season? We just do shows all year round.” And we’ll still do shows year-round, but it makes sense for us to have a yearly planning cycle, because that’s how the grants work, but also because it’s good, because it forces us to go beyond thinking two months ahead to thinking a year or two ahead.

We actually have most of the rest of 2010 planned out - WL 501 is our Images Festival show on April 3, then we’re doing a show at the Kazoo Festival in Guelph, we’re going to do bimonthly shows at the Garrison, in the summer we’ll do a show in the MG courtyard, in August our Toronto Island show… These are the things we’ve been doing the past few years - we’re just expanding the focus on it and letting everyone know that this is Wavelength now. It’s not Sundays at wherever anymore.

There are things we still want to figure out - we want to make sure that we’re still relevant to new and emerging bands. And then our online presence and what we’re offering the community in terms of coverage. As you know, every thing’s changed so fast with social media - what can a local website offer that Facebook can’t? It’s a big question.
 
Obviously we still want to build on the connections we made - recently with the African community, for example. We’re hoping to have more time to do proper outreach to them, and for us to go out and hear more and be exposed to more things. It’ll be more central rather than piecemeal. I know we got a lot of credibility in the Ethiopian community for Getachew Mekuria [this summer with the Ex], and that’s really cool, but …
 
We may be stepping away from the role of giving bands a showcase - that may be where we disappoint a lot of people, for those bands who’ve looked at WL as a career stepping stone, we’re not going to fulfill that role. We’re going to be engaging with people artistically, get them to engage with different disciplines. We want to do more cross-disciplinary programming.

As I get older I find that I care less about being professional and trying to do the right thing to get my band noticed and so on, and more about creating happenings and satisfying artistic experiences for people. And I think we all feel that. It doesn’t mean we’re giving up on new bands altogether, and we’re not giving up on the formula - something established along with something you haven’t heard before, plus maybe something altogether different - that’ll still be crucial in how we go forward. But we’re not going to be as relevant maybe to the four guys who got together, have their eyes set on Pitchfork and have been told Wavelength is the third gig you should play.

There’s an element of people who approach us who have that, and we’re not really going to be there for them - not that we ever have, but we’ve indulged them a little more. But in terms of a stylistic mandate, we’re never going to give up on indie rock altogether — I’m unashamed of being excited about music that makes me feel the way I felt when I was 20.
 
Our role is, I think, to encourage indie bands to view it as an artistic practice, and break the music-industry, rock-world program, the paradigm of “you get together, you write some songs, you practice, you play a show, you build a following, you make a press kit, you get an agent and then you …” Suddenly the whole discourse becomes around, “How popular are you?” And that’s just really not what it’s supposed to be about. So there’s a sense of breaking that conditioning.

There’s nothing wrong with looking for opportunities but you don’t have to do it that way. It goes back to the whole question of, “Are we losers for being local bands, for not being on that career track?” And you have to answer, what about the work, what about the songwriting, what about the ideas? If you talk to industry people, they’ll say, “You can be an idealistic hippie if you want, but I live in the real world.” But no, we do too.
 
What achievements of Wavelength are you proudest of, and what are you most disappointed it didn’t achieve.

I’m proudest of the fact that it created a [unified] music scene, a music community - it really did go from isolated cliques to a genuine sense of community. It’s like when you see the same person in the cafe every day, and you don’t say hi, and then one day you say, “Hi, I’ve seen you every day, let’s be friends.” It was that sort of sense of breaking down those social walls - and now most people who play music all know each other in a way that they didn’t before, and that’s made it much easier for people who are new to the scene to feel welcome, to make friends and feel that Toronto is not this cold unfriendly place. That’s the thing I’m most excited about.
 
The thing I’m most disappointed about is that for the most part, most talented musicians are still stuck here. The world only opened itself up to a small handful, an elite handful who are still working within the established music-industry parameters of having managers and having agents. Obviously you cant do everything yourself, but this apparatus - in order to take your music internationally, you still need it.

So I’m most disappointed that there wasn’t a whole DIY revolution. I think that’s what still needs to happen in a way, is for artists to really be able to choose their destiny, to figure out what they want and how to get there without … Sometimes I wish WL was just a node on a global network. What if there were WLs in every town, and it made it easy for bands on that network to just travel through it. Obviously touring is expensive and there are various ways to get your music out, but …

So yeah, I’m most disappointed that we didn’t change the whole fucking world. [Laughs] I feel like we did revolutionize Toronto. I just wish it was something that was more exportable.

When I visited Double Double Land a couple of months ago to interview the new cultural space’s curator-inhabitants, the flux was obvious: A comprehensive renovation was far from finished, there were dumpsters full of the previous residents’ junk out back and they still weren’t entirely certain about that name. (Its main rival was “Fourth World,” taken from Heavenly Creatures.) Geographically, though, almost nothing has changed: Go down the stairs from Double Double Land’s second floor, past the bakery below and the punk house across from it, walk south for about a minute, and you’ll reach the address of its predecessor, the makeshift gallery/kitchen/venue/etc. Jamie’s Area, which blinked in and out of existence in 2009.

I’m exaggerating the continuity. Jamie’s Area was founded by Daniel Vila (of Bite Yr Tongue) and Bonny Poon, closing around the time she left to study art at Frankfurt’s Stadelschule in the summer. A few series (such as the Globe and Mail-documented Food evenings) will continue on, but the curators are palpably excited about their new digs, by the fact that they actually live in them, and seem uninterested in bounding the programming with even a rough mandate. DDL’s Jon McCurley is one of several people planning Hello Decade, a long day of performances, art, music, print and loot boxes that’ll be co-anchored by the Kensington space, the White House, DeLeon White Gallery and Everlasting Fortress in late June.

Double Double Land is run by Dan Vila, Jon McCurley (of Life of a Craphead and also author of the play that gave the venue its name), Rob Gordon (formerly of Les Mouches, currently of Pony Da Look) and Steve Thomas (of Steve Thomas). Four of us sat down with an enormous bag of baby carrots to discuss the humble rebirth of Jamie’s Area inside a Kensington roach manger, their plans for the space, and why most relational art is pseudo-political meanderings.

[Proprietor's caveat: Zoilus does not necessarily endorse or agree with various tossed-off bits of vitriol contained in this interview.]

Chris Randle: Did you decide to come in here before or after the 19 Major disaster? [in which the house at said address, where Dan, Jon and Steve all previously lived, caught fire from a neighbouring one]

Jon McCurley: After…I was in Montreal and then I was told that our house was on fire, and somebody sent me a link to the news and there was a video of a firefighter on our roof shooting into one of our bedrooms. [Laughs] Also, you guys got kicked out because the neighbours had a terrible time, right?

Dan Vila: Oh, yeah, the neighbours hated us too.

Jon: Because they’d have bands all the time.

Dan: We didn’t have bands all the time –

Jon: They sometimes had bands.

Dan: [Laughing]

Can you guys talk about what this place was like when you arrived here?

Jon [animatedly]: This place was really really full of shit and garbage. Where you’re sitting now was a big pile of children’s toys which seemed to have been rubbed in brown margarine. I went to recycle it – it was full of cat shit and broken glass and art. I cleaned this thing yesterday and it looked like someone had poured Ovaltine into every crack…but it wasn’t Ovaltine, it was probably roach feces. We pulled off sheet metal from there and there was a whole world –

Dan: A whole world of roaches living there.

Jon: When I moved in there was a piece of wood on the floor, and when you picked it up it was completely covered in roaches. It was like…I don’t know, it was like science fiction or something. There were three dumpsters worth of garbage in the back and two – we had to take stuff to the dump twice, so that’s probably four dumpsters worth of garbage, which was all “the ‘90s.” It was mesh hats with graffiti written in marker on it and Adbusters magazines and dried-out magnum markers. And everything was covered with graffiti, and it smelled like – and there’s piss on the floor.

[wave of laughter oscillates around the table]

Steve Thomas: Where Dan’s room is there was a big pile of garbage and a mattress on the floor, with a guy named Tommy sleeping on it.

Dan: Oh yeah, his dog had chewed a hole through the whole mattress. Even to the springs. His dog had gotten through to the other side of the mattress. It’s like digging to China.

Steve: Actually when we first moved in he was just sleeping in the big room, in the middle of a pile of garbage.

Jon: A man still lived here and the landlord was so, uh, unreal that he wanted him to live with us. He asked if the man would live with us forever, with all his garbage.

[everyone laughs again]

What are you thinking for the programming? Is it going to be the same thing that was happening at Jamie’s Area…and with bands again, because the landlord isn’t totally insane about that? Or…

Dan: I think – yeah, some of the programming will continue. We’re gonna continue doing the Food series and the Talking Songs series and then I guess we’ll do things – this is just the stuff I want to do…

Yeah, I meant to ask what you guys [Jon and Steve] wanted to bring in.

Steve: Well, continuing on from Jamie’s Area, we’ll probably do more of those Symposia. Maybe some readings? But we’ve also been talking about different kinds of things, like classes – teaching kids art or writing.

That reminds me of 826 Valencia.

Steve: I want to do that here. I tried to get an internship at this [literary education] program called NOW HEAR THIS!, which is run by Descant, and they liked me but I had a job so I couldn’t do it. But I’m thinking I’ll talk to them and try to work something out.

Jon: Yeah, we’re gonna teach kids how to do their homework. There’s a couple other ideas. We’ve started doing a meeting every Monday morning, which is a Darren O’Donnell idea but it’s different, where people are meeting and talking about ideas they want to do and then try to help them execute them together. … I came up with an idea with Sarah Butterill that for now is called TV Drama, which is a weekly performance that’s a series, with characters, and it goes on forever. There’s different writers and different actors, but it’s like live performance-art theatre with recurring characters that happens every week. I have an idea with Sarah that was – new bands, there’s a new band [playing] two songs every week, one original and one cover. I wanted to start a male-only dance class here because we’re gonna have dance parties too and the room’s really big. This summer I taught myself how to moonwalk using YouTube and then I realized that it’s pretty easy, you just have to think about it. So maybe we’ll start that. Um…what else is there?

Dan: There was a fog machine we found in here, so we’re going to do a fog event…I also need to make a dreamachine for the fog event because I want there to be a lot of three-dimensional light things…

Jon: Sarah had an idea she wants to do that’s a fundraiser, I guess, and it’s a video dance party modeled after MuchMusic –

[crosstalk]

Jon: The video dance party that Sarah Butterill was talking about – there’s much more video now, people dancing on video that’s not music videos…to have VJs pick stuff off [Youtube] I think would be interesting. I want to have a video game night…

Dan: I still want to do the “Starbucks in Kensington” thing, but I think that might have to wait until the summer. And I still want to do Touch But Don’t Look, the blindfolded touching-only art show.

Jon: But we’ve spent most of our time doing cleanup now and we haven’t really had a chance to come up with ideas together, which we will. Our time so far has been entirely spent bothering each other about getting up and moving things. And spending each other’s money. So it’s been a different kind of art experience. [Dan laughs]

I think it’s great that you’re living in the space and also running it at the same time. There aren’t that many – I mean, there’s a bunch artist-run galleries that I can think of, and a smaller number of artist-run music venues, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head where the people actually live there. Is Casa del Popolo in Montreal like that? Do they –

Dan: No, that’s just a regular venue. I think there is a venue in Montreal where people live, though.

Jon: Friendship Cove?

Dan: Friendship Cove. And then there’s a place in New York called Silent Barn as well, but it’s a shithole. It’s not gonna be like one of those places that’s a shithole.

Jon: We’ve lived in a shithole. And then it burned down. I’ve actually lived in three shitholes that burned down. The first shithole – the day it burned down I saw mice running from the building. [Everyone laughs]

[…]

Dan: Speaking of getting sued, another event that we’re gonna have is, uh … my friends Sarah and Courtney, they found a plaster cast from a film of Willem Dafoe’s face…They matched up all the wrinkles and the nose and it’s definitely him. And they’re gonna make, like, 40 plaster casts of it and hang them on the wall and sell them and then we’re going to have a screening of Antichrist. …

[Antichrist spoilers excised]

Dan: And they’re going to write Willem Dafoe and tell him they’re using his face, which I guess is illegal? And they’re gonna…see what happens.

[Jon had to leave here]

Have you thought about what the mandate is for the place? Do you have one? Is there some set of organizational principles?

Dan: I don’t think the mandate’s going to be – I doubt we’ll have a published mandate like Jamie’s Area did. Also I don’t feel completely like the programming at Jamie’s Area lived up to the mandate…There’s definitely a “no shitty stuff” mandate though. I think it will definitely be a logical continuation of Jamie’s Area, it won’t be a radical departure, it just won’t be stated so specifically.

You also said in one of the articles about Jamie’s Area that “we’re operating outside the system because we’re afraid, because we’re weak.” Do you think that’s still the case, or…

Dan: Yeah, for sure. Uh, for me it is, I don’t know if for Steve it is.

Steve: What’s the alternative? Squatting?

Dan: No no no, legitimately.

Steve: Oh, I thought it was that we’re doing it within the system. Aren’t we?

Dan: Not really. We’re not doing it within the system. I mean, we’re doing it within a system, but I don’t think we’re doing it within – like, I don’t think we’re going to be going after any grants. Maybe we will, I don’t know. Yeah, maybe we will. Jamie’s Area definitely had an explicit no-grants policy, which I think is good but it’s also limiting, in that instead of being pseudo-enslaved by parameters established by arts councils you’re enslaved by capital. And there are ways – even though grant applications are terrible things to write I think there are ways you can pretend to box yourself in but then get around it, or something.

I’m interested in the question of grants and institutionalization because – you know Nicolas Bourriaud, the relational-aesthetics guy who sort of coined the term? I read this brutal essay about him and the newest thing he curated, by Owen Hatherley, in the New Left Review I think.

Dan: Was it the thing he did at Tate Modern?

Yeah. And he sort of – there’s a bunch of vectors [Hatherley] attacks him on but Bourriaud…he has a bunch of curatorial positions but at the Tate he’s funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which was set up by this Armenian oil magnate. And Hatherley goes on to attack what Bourriaud and some other people have done in creating their enclaves and furthering atomization. Trying to create a little micro-utopia temporarily instead of changing the broader world, as I guess was the goal of a lot of modernists and earlier avant-garde people. There’s a specific line that I wrote down here: “The international artists appear able to transcend class, stepping blithely into productive spheres different from their own, entering into factories and immigrant communities without any tension or hostility.” And there’s this hilarious part where he goes after Bourriaud for the language he uses, which is all “negotiating,” “reconfiguring,” “reconstellating.” These artists are “traversing” various issues – a very vague sort of language that stands in for the lack of any actual action or critique on their part. And apparently the catalogue for this Tate exhibition is a bunch of masturbatory letters between him and the various artists.

Dan: Is the author being critical of the way relational aesthetics artists are going into specific communities, like, I don’t know, Santiago Sierra or something?

There was this guy who – I forget his name, I think he’s French, but he went into a Japanese phone factory and started working there, learning how to make phones from the [workers]. But it was presented by Bourriaud as this very touristy thing, they didn’t acknowledge any tensions in doing it.

Dan: I think that’s the problem with Bourriaud’s take on it, it’s this very optimistic take rather than, um…I don’t think I even read the whole book, I read most of it, but it didn’t seem to acknowledge the inherent exclusivity of an artist cooking a meal at a gallery for other artists. And there are people who fall under the…whatever of relational aesthetics who do consciously reveal the tensions inherent in it. Santiago Sierra totally does that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s a Spanish artist who – he’s pretty confrontational and most of his stuff’s about labour. But he does it in a way that’s inhabiting the thing that he’s critiquing. So he paid a bunch of, I think five or six young drug addicts in Mexico or Brazil to get a line tattooed across their backs, so that when they stood together it would all line up, and stand in a gallery for five hours. And I think he paid them in drugs. And then he did another thing where – he does a lot of stuff with labourers, day labourers. … He’ll pay them to hold a huge piece of drywall at a 45-degree angle for four hours or something in a gallery. He’s almost over-the-top with tension.

One thing I love so much about what Darren O’Donnell does is that he’s sort of half-mocking a lot of the relational aesthetics people, what they do, but he’s also doing it in this consciously politicized way. A lot of them throw around vague leftist language but he really goes for it.

Dan: It’s corny. A lot of it’s pretty embarrassing. It’s kind of like [how]…the new internet language is embarrassing, like tweets. It’s embarrassing to say. A lot of the stuff at Nuit Blanche that could fall into that realm, like The Apology Project, it’s just…regardless of the concept, it’s embarrassing. [Laughs]

Steve: I don’t know if we want to talk about – we talked about doing on-brand and off-brand programming…

Dan: Oh yeah. Shit.

Steve: Maybe you should – like, someone gave you the idea of wrap parties…

Dan: Oh yeah. This doesn’t really pertain to Double Double Land as a conceptual space, it’s just…there was the idea of –

Steve: Of capital? Us being enslaved to capital? [Dan chuckles]

Dan: There was just the idea of having…I don’t know, I ran into this girl who works in TV and she said [Monty-Python-level imitation of woman’s voice]: “You should have wrap parties for TV shows when we’re done shooting! Everybody gets wasted!”

Jon: Uh, when you guys take a break you should check out my new rug…

Dan: Okay. Yeah, I don’t know. I had an idea to assign every event a catalogue number, and then off-brand events would not be assigned a catalogue number.

Steve: I mean, I want to try to make this my full-time job. I don’t have a normal job right now, I have a few part-time things. So things like…making a school, I don’t know if that, I don’t know if it’s on-brand or what…

Dan: Depends on the kind of school.

Steve: It’ll be a cool school. Maybe Amy Lam will teach, uh, beekeeping or something.

Does she actually keep bees, or know how to keep bees?

Steve: Uhhhhh…I don’t… [General laughter]

It seems like you’re not sure whether to go for grants or not –

Dan: I’m kind of ambivalent about it. In some ways I definitely do like operating without having to have those kinds of considerations. And maybe it will also depend on – it’ll depend on capital, ultimately. If this space doesn’t, if it’s not able to sustain itself, that might be a route worth considering. I just don’t wanna do it if it…uh, if it would –

Steve: Make us lame? [Dan laughs]

Dan: If it would just affect programming. We just wouldn’t think of the grant first and then adapt the project to the grant.

It sounds that, with things like the school, you’re actively trying not to form this incestuous clique like a lot of the relational art ends up as.

Dan: It has been pretty cliquey thus far. Well, I mean, we’ve only had three events and two of them were kind of cliquey but then we had this reading –

The Eileen Myles one?

Dan: Yeah, the Eileen Myles one. That wasn’t cliquey at all. Or it was a different clique.

I hardly recognized anyone there, but they were all –

Dan: They were all fifty-plus.

Yeah, they were – a lot of people that Charlie [Huissken] knew.

Dan: Yeah. Charlie’s gang. [...]

Steve: But, I mean, what does cliquey even mean? Like, more cliquey than any event where people who know the same –

I don’t think it’s the basis for everything you did at Jamie’s Area or everything you’re gonna do here but when you’re sort of dipping into that…relational-art stream –

Steve: And you’re only relating with your friends?

Yeah, that can completely kill it.

Dan: Yeah, for sure.

Steve: Yeah, that makes sense.

Especially if –

Steve: We were relating to some weird dudes at the end of that party. [Laughs]

I got back around 3 am because I went to see Anagram. Did it get weird before that? Is that when it got weird?

Dan: That’s around when it got weird. Well, a bunch of people showed up at, like, 2:30. I want to avoid stuff like that in the future.

Becoming an unofficial afterhours?

Dan: Yeah. Yeah.

[…]

Dan: Am I having too many carrots?

No, eat as many as you want…But yeah, I guess there’s this danger of becoming really cosy. Taking, y’know, grant money or money that…what’s a good example…the Galen Weston Foundation? Do they fund art? I’m trying to think of a rich Canadian person’s foundation –

Steve: That would be great, if we could take rich people’s money and have parties with our friends. I think it’s less justifiable to take government money and have parties with our friends.

Sure, but there is a danger I think of taking either institutional source of money and…tossing it in the air with your friends, swimming in Scrooge McDuck’s money pit while pretending that it’s Great Art about globalization and neo-liberalism.

Dan: I definitely wouldn’t feel good about – yeah, taking government money and tossing it in the air with my friends. Did you ever see that Adbusters…this is such a stupid Adbusters thing to do…On Buy Nothing Day they would go to malls and throw money at people.

Which is really –

Dan: It’s so patronizing.

Yeah, it’s such an Adbusters thing to do. Just to fuck with people and not actually do anything to change or reform or really even disrupt the system at all.

Dan: No, they were just – I saw video footage of it on their website. This was years ago. And they would toss the money from, like, an upper balcony and videotape people essentially –

Steve: Scrambling for it?

Dan: Yeah, scrambling for it. And be like, Ohhh, look at these idiots! I mean, they didn’t say that, but…I wonder if they got a grant for that.

[…]

Dan: One plan that Rob and I have for a band is to only play here, ever. Never anywhere else.

Steve: That’s a pretty good idea.

Dan: Yeah, I think it’s a good idea.

Steve: As long as the bakery thinks it’s a good idea.

Oh yeah, I should ask about that. How it’s been with – and there’s people working in there when you want to do events, right?

Dan: Initially the one baker complained about my birthday party, and then Rob talked to this other baker, this woman, on Friday before the show. And she was like: “Make as much noise as you want! We love music! Just no dust from the ceiling…” So we need to find out when this woman works and only do loud things then.

[…]

Dan: Kensington’s weird. You know your neighbours immediately.

I think that’s also kind of perfect for what you want to do, though.

Dan: Kind of, yeah. I don’t want to be…I have a lot of problems with Kensington Market. I don’t want to become a Kensington Market person. I’m scared of Kensington Market people in a way [laughs], even though I definitely like aspects of the vibe here…I feel like this space isn’t a continuation of whatever the narrative is around here. But it is kind of in a way, just because it’s somewhat ramshackle and unofficial…

Yeah, I mean, if you’re gonna try and operate a little school and make a bunch of relational meals…

Dan: [laughs]

Steve: …then that’s Kensington?

Yeah, it’s better to do it above a bakery and next to a punk house and across from this sports bar rather than go into an antiseptic room inside the Tate.

Dan: Sure, yeah. But I think you also have to be cautious of your own self-regard. You can’t pretend that you’re some kind of frontiersman. Like, that’s how Mercer Union thinks of itself. “We’re so fucking brave. We’re crossing all these barriers moving to fucking Bloor and Lansdowne.” It’s kind of embarrassing.

I’ve been to events there since they moved, but I don’t really know who runs Mercer Union or is on the board. I think I just read a couple of articles about them moving. Is that how they’ve portrayed it?

Dan: I don’t know if that’s the way they portray themselves publicly, but…that’s in their propaganda or whatever that they submit to the granting bodies they get money from. This border-crossing frontiersman gallery mentality.

The untamed wilds of Bloor and Lansdowne…

Dan: I don’t mind Mercer Union. I don’t even know if they genuinely believe that about themselves, maybe they’re just bullshitting in order to get money…

Steve: Maybe they’re just being smart about it. Maybe it’s like “this will sound good on a grant.”

Dan: Yeah, that’s true.

[And then we went to check out Jon’s new rug]

My boyhood SF freak seems to have crept out when I was asked to write something for my friends Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker’s great project Significant Objects.

The idea, in case you haven’t run across it before, is to explore how things are invested with meaning, and therefore value, using eBay auctions as a laboratory. Josh & Rob have gone out and bought a bunch of junk, and then assigned each object (in my case, a vintage Charlie’s Angels lunchbox thermos) to a writer, who constructs a story around it. Then bidding is opened on the object at its “actual” value (in my case, $3) to see whether the story makes it more desirable, and by how much.

The result is - get this - I think my only piece of published fiction ever, though I was trying to draw on a little critical meta-thinking in terms of the various modalities of meaning-making that appear in the story. Oh, and the proceeds of the auction go to support 826 National, the non-profit tutoring and creative writing organization started by the McSweeneys/Believer gang.

A lot of people sneer at so-called “NPR rock” for being wimpy or something, but it’s a hoary cliché that underground music has to be loud, fast, and out of control. Once upon a time, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied — look at the Velvet Underground droning about heroin while America tried to paste a fluorescent smiley-face over Vietnam; look at the Sex Pistols railing that “England’s dreaming” in ‘77 while the Queen’s silver jubilee distracted from rampant unemployment and racial unrest. But in 2010, mainstream culture isn’t complacent; it’s stupid and angry. So underground culture has become smart and serene. That’s not wimpy — it’s powerful and constructive, a blueprint for kicking against the pricks.

That’s an interesting thing for the guy who wrote the book about Black Flag and Husker Du to say. He’s right that there’s a basic impulse to make music as much unlike Glenn Beck as possible, and that there’s a philosophical/moral undercurrent to it.

I’m not quite so convinced of the historical myth of complacency - America wasn’t stupid & angry during the McCarthy era? Under Nixon? But I also wonder if the dropout oppositional logic of Animal Collective and others, which I applauded in 2004, isn’t now out-of-date - way less serviceable under Obama, who needs to be held to account, than it was under Bush, who was never going to give a shit what you said.

The mainstream mood now actually seems more a mixture of complacent and shell-shocked, and while that (and the nature of media) means that the stupid-and-angry faction resonates way beyond its proportions (as it did, agonizingly, this week in Massachusetts), it also makes it seem much less “powerful and constructive” for the “underground” to sound so compulsively self-soothing.

(Mike Powell makes an affecting case to the contrary although mainly by focusing on content rather than sound; I’m talking more about the thing his dad brings up at the top - all that reverb, smeared over the music like so much Vaseline on a lens, or Bert’s Bees lipbalm or something.)

how I attempted seduction
with a select and
careful playing of
The McGarrigle Sisters

repartee      the knee

- from “The desire under the Elms Motel,” by Michael Ondaatje


That poem, from Ondaatje’s striking 1984 lyrical suite about marriage and infidelity Secular Love, always seemed to me evidence of the quiet way that Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s music insinuated itself into Canadian lives (or at least some Canadian lives), less as a main focus than as a climate, an atmospheric pressure. By power of understatement, they were able to attain, with remarkable frequency, something like perfection. (Kate’s children Rufus and Martha Wainwright’s songs sacrifice some of that perfection in favour of the sense of drama bestowed/wreaked upon them by their American dad, but it’s always available to them as singers when they reach for it.)

Following Kate’s sad death on Monday, after four years of suffering from liver cancer, many people will speak reverently of their singing voices, and perhaps of how they brought Quebec Acadian folk music for the first time to larger English audiences. But the sisters’ remarkable touch as songwriters is often neglected: so subtle, positively allergic to flash, but so sure and firm, with lines that shift and intensify in repetition and by geographic references and juxtaposed allusions to folk songs that do the emotional work of narrative without many of its explicit trappings - much the way Ondaatje’s poem has it, “ankle, nature, repartee, the knee.” You can hear the deep satisfaction other singers, such as Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur and Emmylou Harris, always took in covering them.

It’s hard not to be saddened by the death of someone whose cherishing of family, place and history were so obvious and so generously shared with her listeners, in concert and on their Radio Hour and family Christmas albums. You couldn’t help but feel a little like one of their cousins (especially for those of us to whom Montreal is also personally dear). Kate was still appearing on stage to sing with her loved ones up to almost the very end, when she must have been very ill, which reinforced the feeling that this was a sustaining activity for them - that sharing a song was as integral to life as sharing a meal, or a drink, or a heartfelt conversation. Some music is interior and some is social but it’s a rare trait for music to be deeply intimate and deeply communal simultaneously (no wonder Ondaatje’s narrator found it erotic). Kate McGarrigle and clan achieved this with liberty, equanimity and sorority.

Talk to me of Mendocino
Closing my eyes I hear the sea
Must I wait? Must I follow?
Won’t you say, “Come with me.”
  - from “Talk to Me of Mendocino,” by Kate McGarrigle


Profound sympathies to Martha, Rufus, Anna, Jane, Sloan, Loudon, Lily, Dane, Chaim and all the other McGarrigles, Wainwrights, Lankens and friends. Donations can be made to the Kate McGarrigle Fund, supporting cancer care and research at the McGill University Cancer Centre and McGill’s teaching hospitals.

Friends,

love,
Win and Regine