what should i know about you I refuse to buy into the mystery machine. where is Planet 103400.1653? For all I know that could just be next door. Or the house across from me, I see through the window. And you’re watching me through binoculars. Creeping me out.

i tell you I was surprised to hear that you still wanted to become a writer. confident air is a scam. scam yourself: you feel better. I keep shivering. I get the impression that somewhere behind this screen, there's a jocular sneer.

of course, you’re hiding something. No surprise. (I know more than you think.) But the minute you're ready to let Someone Else read your Files will be when you let your skin breathe. Freedom day.

and /crypto buddy:
you are completely right about computers. I find myself writing long-hand to avoid distractions. I'm also noticing how my style has changed. no room to light a candle/burn incense. Impossible to do these things in a space capsule!

I remember you now: in the driver's seat of the station wagon. Dusk in New Jersey. And we pull up to the driveway of my manifest destiny. You grab your camera and take a picture of me with the setting on bulb. You say you'd been bulbing it a lot lately. The blinds in the front window of the house show an outline of a man (or is it a woman?) I wave to you. Next, I wave to the outline. Before I know it, you're gone.

I'm tempted to take a vow of digital silence. Not check my email so that I could concentrate on concentrating. The passport came in the mail yesterday. Further evidence that everything happened as it did.

heart/emotionals, notes: check pockets
the way the sun glints on the pavement
I own this road / uncomfortable CUTAWAYS
imagine never feeling sympathy

like observing a clan of gorillas the humans slink away,
wince uncomfortable under the glare. SPYcam
going places/who is...

write what happened today, create a back-up file
for your memory

today, BIG EVENT, the mustard yellow garbage truck roars by and a Heavy Layered Man picks up the garbage placed on the corner of the pock-marked lawn. It takes half a minute and roars away again. A silence ensues. The view through the venetian blinds becomes a still picture once again. Bird chirps in the background. Somewhere, the distant clamor of the garbage truck's Stop and Go routine.

Welcome to Better Living Subdivision.

Mental clarity peaks in the morning. The silence. The solitude helps my mind sift through the undigested dreams and errands of the day still to come, left still to unwind. I scramble to write things down. Reminders. Notes. Small pieces of paper. This will form the material for tonight. Writing is like jumping out of the way of a train at the last minute.

Full Metal Booty
By Lester Alfonso

Strange sounds coming out of Artspace on a Friday night. I walk in and encounter Full Metal Booty, the Artspace “house band” hosting the weekly open jam. Lead Terrorist David LaRiviere (aka Sky Low Low – named after the Canadian midget wrestling champion of 1925) is slowly screaming “Oh. My. God.” over and over again as the sonic wash from various “modified” instruments reach their crescendo. The small crowd gathered here tonight are not dancing; they either smile or sit slack-jaw stunned. Others walk away. The “music” is decidely not for everybody. None of the “songs” are pre-written and often degenerate into chaos. Since improvised music can’t be rehearsed, each show becomes a unique performance. LaRiviere, in addition to his arsenal of noise making gadgets, repeatedly picks up a microphone and voices his slogans or mantras so many times that they begin lose their meaning or take on strange new ones.

The band also boasts Michael Waterman (as Porter Hall), Brian Wagner (as Pilot K-9), Hans Finkledey (as Sensehertz) with David Morris, Hartley, Stewart Chamberlain and Wayne “Webmadman” Elliott. Inventing musical instruments (like the electric water jug) or taking existing instruments and modifying them (Wagner has fashioned a three-record turntable with multiple needles on each record) or approaching a conventional instrument in an unconventional way, Full Metal Booty manages to confront, exhilirate and make the faithful audience laugh with their free form sound experiments. It’s an incongruous mix of musicians coming from varied musical traditions. They are the Silver Hearts of the art / noise music set.

“Noise-making is a formal quest for sound,” says LaRiviere, “while changing the parameters of what sound or music might be.” Inspired by seeing Canada’s own legendary noise band the Nihilist Spasm Band perform at the Gordon Best Theatre, they started jamming every week about a year ago for “fun and catharsis.” LaRiviere says “We might find ourselves wanking up there. Then, comes a point when all the sounds come together. It’s a magical moment. And makes the wanking worth it.”

There is, in fact, a great tradition of noise music worldwide. A quick search on Google reveals thousands of entries. The Nihilist Spasm Band, has toured the world, inspired the creation of the “No Music Festival” in London, Ontario and has signed with Alchemy Records (founded by legendary Japanese noise artist Jojo Hiroshige). Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth is a big fan. Noise can be heard from Paris to New York City. “Noise,” says Hiroshige, “transcends language and culture. It's about images and the beauty of conveying them mentally through sound.”

Their billing with punk bands at the Trasheteria last August reveals a common misconception that their music is “punk.” The noise band rejects the rules to which punk music rigidly adheres. The noise musicians inevitably find themselves sabotaging the structures that the other musicians might play. It’s no coincidence that the members of Full Metal Booty have found themselves relating to each other. Band member Michael Waterman comes from another noise ensemble called Manlicher Carcanno. Each bring their unique personality into the mix. David Morris even writes his own digital sampling software for use with the group. Together, the members of Full Metal Booty present an organic, kinetic and of-the-moment musical stream of consciousness that is at once ironic, absurd and political. “There is no way to predict what kind of sound will come out at any given gig,” says band member Hartley. “There is no way to calculate those moments of beautiful unrestrained beauty.”

Full Metal Booty performs on stage at the Trasheteria Thursday Oct. 3, 2002; they host an open jam every Friday night at Artspace and are also planning to perform a live improvised score for a movie screening in the tradition of the old silent films. “But we actually want to use a recent movie and just turn the volume down,” says David LaRiviere. The movie they’re thinking about: James Cameron’s Titanic.

Last Train to Lewisham
by Lester Alfonso

Boom. I’m in London, England. I’m not quite sure how it happened. I got a phone call. I got on a plane. And now, I’m here. Working on a project so secret the computer hard drives have to be locked up in a safe at the end of each day. I’m in Soho. Led by hand to "strictly members-only salons for the carefully segregated strata of high-income hipsters." I’m here because I know someone here. Aside from her, nothing is familiar. I’m the character from Memento with no Polaroids in my hand to explain anything anyone faces traces or names. I smile. Raise my pint of Stella Artois. Sip. No time to think about how far I am from the Only Café just now.

I’m walking through Leicester Square. A mob has gathered to watch celebrities get out of limousines at the premier of an American film. I manage to squeeze myself through. Squeals from teenaged girls. Then, scores of different languages are overheard. Tourists are teeming out of every cobblestone alleyway. The streets are filthy in their wake. There are no public garbage bins in London anymore because terrorists keep putting bombs in them. Central London is so busy it reminds me of New Orleans during Mardis Gras. Hop on a quick cab to Hampstead. I ask the driver if this is some special night, some kind of holiday or something? "It’s just a regular Saturday night, mate." SLAM. Two aspirins later, my head is on a pillow.

Newspaper headlines show, like thought balloons, what commuters have on their minds the next morning in the Underground express to London. SHOCKED PARENTS NUMBED BY GRIEF provides the tragic punctuation to the biggest news story this summer in England. In the quiet little village of Soham, two 10 year old girls, close friends, went to the corner shop to get some candy and never came home. In an otherwise uneventful summer, the details of the search, the discovery of the bodies, and the hunt for the perpetrator, have provided much needed news copy for local print and television. Suddenly, Peterborough is in the news. They find some evidence in the school caretaker’s home. Arrests are made, court dates announced and statements for the ravenous media are carefully orated on the steps of the High Court in Peterborough, England. Every time I hear the blonde news anchor say the word "Peterborough" I look up from my cappuccino.

I spy a street performer in Piccadilly Circus wearing a space helmet with his body wrapped in tin foil doing tired robotic moves to some tinny electronic music. He’s attracted a small crowd of expressionless onlookers. On his donation receptacle, I notice he’d written "In memory of those two Soham girls…" The story becomes just another ingredient to put into the strange mix. The picture of the missing girls, the one everyone has seen on TV and the papers, taken just before they disappeared, shows them both wearing the crimson uniform of their favourite football team. (Incidentally, the name of largest mobile phone company in the UK is also in large type across their chests.) I’ve seen this image so many times that a chill runs through me when I see a girl about the same age wearing the exact same uniform walking with her parents in the park.

Fast train to Lewisham. Another fine sample of Filipino cuisine is waiting for me on the kitchen table. Staying at my Aunt’s house has its advantages. But food in general has been quite good in London. To rescue England from its reputation for gastronomic indecency, the world has come to town with a stack of menus. Apparently, if I had gone 10 years ago, it would have been a different story. I hear this while eating in a completely vegetarian pub in Brighton. The laid back seaside town is about 50 miles south of London. It is the Londoner’s quick city-getaway. And it comes closest to the Peterborough, Ontario vibe that London could never manage. Still, there’s no real point in comparing the two.

Witness: London. The way it has sampled and re-sampled itself beyond recognition. The impression from the street is a super-pixelized society whose overall image can only be seen from a great distance. Then, see: Peterborough. And find: you can still grasp it, enjoy it with both feet set firmly on the ground.

There's No Place Like Home
by Lester Alfonso

I knew about No Place since we had recorded Tammy Foreman's Ontario Arts Council demo recording with Ian Osborn there in 1998. It had a radical art space feel to it even then. Now, four years later, we've moved into the cleaned up "residential" version of No Place with Stephanie & Raphaelle. According to them, it took 4 months to make No Place habitable: graffiti was painted over, the beer fridge was hauled out and enough "junk" was carted out of the place to fill two dumpsters. Fortunately, the radical art space feel remained. And now, No Place as a space for performances and art is on the brink of a revival.

When a group of artists moved into 393 Water St. (Third Floor, Red Door) in 1996, a high-end theatre called Showplace was just opening in Peterborough and was being tauted as a sign of a healthy arts community. Meanwhile, the Union Theater had just closed down leaving most of Peterborough's most promising young playwrights and actors without a home. Showplace was seen by them as inaccessible. The stage at Showplace required the kinds of acts that would bring in the people from the suburbs (like Beatlemania for example.) "We needed an artists' centre at the time," says artist and former No Place resident Patrick Walsh. "And we had just moved into a place with huge rooms and a wide hallway. So we decided to turn our apartment into a public space." As it happened to coincide with the opening of Showplace they dubbed their space No Place as a reactionary gesture.

The first public event at No Place was a poetry reading that got so rambunctious cops and firefighters came to bang on the door. Some radical poets had gotten so fired up that they decided to shoot fireworks off the roof. The legend status of No Place was sealed that night. Art events continued there at a steady pace for four years. A few albums where recorded there. (Like: the Bernie Martin collection.) For the 24hr. Project, playwrights took rooms at No Place and did a manic all-nighter writing stint from 8pm to 6am; delivered the finished plays to the PAU at 6am where the directors looked over the results and started casting the plays at 8am; production and rehearsals progressed for the next 12hrs. to open the show at 8pm at the Gordon Best Theatre a mere 24hrs. after the playwrights took their pens to the blank page.

Walsh fondly remembers the "crazy environment" that fostered the creation of 12 of his plays. "It wasn't unusual for me to come home and find someone setting up a drum kit in my room." Chaos births a dancing star. No Place alumni include Peterborough legends Tim Etherington, Brian Sanderson and scooter to name a few. The Silver Hearts have played there and subsequently named their album after the place. Everyone has a story about No Place. I tell people I've moved to 393 Water St. but there is no glimmer in their eye until I tell them I've moved into No Place.

No Place epitomized the unspoken promise of Peterborough as established by free thinkers who came here to go to Trent and just never left. It is a fertile ground for artists to do it themselves and preview their work for a nurturing audience before taking their work elsewhere. Fueled in part by the No Place crew, Peterborough had become a lab of sorts where even the craziest ideas were allowed to germinate. But now that the Gordon Best is closed there is a sense that the once happening arts community has been crippled. The lack of an affordable venue in Peterborough has had a devastating effect. Last summer so many things were happening. There was a lot of energy to write plays and do shows; new plays opened almost every week. This year, people are moving away or have taken full time jobs. Maybe these artists got burnt out by the very freedom that nurtured them in the first place.

Freedom can sometimes have that effect on people. We are living in an age where we can step outside our door and have a choice of beers from around the world. We now also have the freedom to redefine or re-design ourselves to our own particular liking by moving someplace new. Sometimes this kind of freedom can have a paralyzing effect. But one still can't just live anyplace as though all places are the same. Here in Peterborough, people seem to have found a comfortable Way of Being. Accused at times for being too accepting, Peterborough still shines because it is a full stop away from the cynicism of bigger towns. I have heard it uttered: in Peterborough, people still make eye contact when you pass someone on the street. This kind of philosophy has given urban living some meaning. Peterborough is a place like no other. And for a lot of people there's no place they'd rather be.

Patrick Walsh shares with me a final story about No Place. "There was a rack at that place just filled with books. Most of them weren't any good. But there was one book of poetry that I liked enough to read all the way through. To my surprise, the last poem in the book had a reference to Morrie's greasy spoon diner. And I looked out the window where I was sitting reading the book and I could see Morrie's right across the street! And then it dawned on me... That book was probably written exactly where I happened to be reading it!"

As artists we inevitably leave a trail of history for our future selves to discover. Since moving to No Place I have found a stack of old zines written and published by the previous occupants. Reading their words is an education in Peterborough culture. So much diverse work was produced in such a short time that I started to ask myself if Peterborough has already had its heyday. This was inspiration for me to investigate the history of this place further. I am sitting here now making history myself writing this at the kitchen table in No Place and wondering if someone sometime will ever read these words and wonder, as I have wondered, What Now? And: Where do we go from here?

The Story of Hurt
review by Lester Alfonso

After only a couple of listenings, the songs featured in Josh Rifkin’s newest album “Green Lights” have firmly established themselves in the internal radio of my mind. My head plays the hooks and the choruses constantly and often at completely inappropriate times that my only recourse is to play the album yet again. In other words, this album is addictive. That said, this is also the saddest album Rifkin has created to date. Outside of the giddy innocence of the Bob Dylan-esque title track “Green Lights,” it offers no redemption for the listener from the intense plaintive melancholia of the songs. The opening track “Nothing Lasts Long” sets up the story of hurt: “She calls to say she’s moving far away / Where she can be herself and be okay.” This track establishes the dynamic of the whole album; the words chronicle the process of recovery while it makes you want to dance. And Rifkin’s voice has never sounded so good. The closing track, the brilliant “I Doubt It” is his perfect take on a Chet Baker croon. These might have been songs borne out of intense periods of pain and longing but without sounding like Elliot Smith’s manic depressive rock. Naming the album “Green Lights” gives me a clue (or hope) that Rifkin has emerged from a grueling bout of broken heart and these songs are the result of the pain long left behind.

The production is grand: horns, pianos and electronic sounds that speak the language of popular radio but twists the saccharine sensibility around and manages to have a chorus like “I’m not ready to love...” in track 7 that denies love if it is insincere. It probably would have been easy to change some words around and have the chorus say “I am ready to love!” but that wouldn’t have been wholly honest. The sincerity of the words revealing the artist’s innermost feelings are essential to Rifkin’s process on the road to recovery. A stand out in this collection, “Alamo (the ballad of Angie and Billy Bob)” is the only other song in the album not longing for love. Instead, the lovers here have found themselves together in one room with “300 reporters outside.” In the cosmology of this album, the implied message is that love can only exist in the movies. In this case, starring the tabloid lives of actors Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton. Their love is so precious that they want to move into a fortress like the Alamo to fight off the marauding invaders intent on ruining their time. “The world hates two people in love / Why should that be?”

The album speaks from the heart and will likely find eager listeners to make the journey of “Self-Help” with Josh Rifkin. With his expert production, honest words and catchy hooks, listeners will coast down this road with “green lights all the way down Beverly...”

josh rifkin / green lights

1. nothing lasts long
2. tell me how to win
3. quiet riter
4. tricked by the moon
5. green lights
6. dare you
7. ready to love
8. alamo (the ballad of angie and billy bob)
9. before goodbye
10. i doubt it

produced by Josh Rifkin
recorded at The Dark House, Los Angeles
Mixed by David Stevenson at Five Note Studios, Los Angeles

What?

Unearthed. A blog I never published.

June 20, 2002

Morning pages turn into The Blog. Now that my diary is open to public scrutiny, what kind of responsibility do I have regarding the private lives of the people around me? I can't be so corny as to change the names (to protect the innocent.) But what do I really want to write about anyway? Do I want to write about how so-and-so did this and that to whomever? Whatever. The public version of my journal has to be somewhat different from the private one. What I've always been interested in is the constant discourse about film as art. Certainly doing the kind of show I do with Tammy has made me realize a different aspect of film altogether. All the things that I want to write about escape me right now. The constant hum of construction just outside my window distracts me. The heat. The dust. All the bad side effects of summer in the city. I realized very strongly last night that I just want to make a film out of someone else's script. Do I know anyone who is a screenwriter? Josh. Apparently he called last night and talked to Andy in Middle Earth. That feeling. When I call someone and they're not home. I have a silent image of them laughing and having drinks somewhere. Which is probably seldom the case. Perhaps I can take a Dogma script and produce it right here in Peterborough. I'm surrounded by actors anyway. Om is tomorrow. I wonder what the Killaloe fair site is going to look like.

Open call to all screenwriters. I'd like to realize a contemporary story about the everyday lives of people today. Characters and their lives.


July 15, 2002

5 AM construction starts right outside my windows. Windows that I have lovingly covered with tin foil to deflect the harsh morning sunlight. I'm writing this at 5:30 AM bleary-eyed but awake. It's some kind of cruel joke. I had foolishly set my alarm clock for 8 AM. I thought that was early. I thought briefly about yelling out the window at the group of construction workers below. But I didn't know what to say. "You cruel fucking IDIOTS! You are ruining my time here Peterborough!" The loud hum of the digger has definitely set the tone. I don't do well with lack of sleep. My family life is sufferering. I'm suffering. I hate it here. I wish I could find a solution to this problem. I just want to leave. Spend the least amount of time here as possible. Or walk away and don't turn back.

Ah oui. Air-conditioning and a cafe au lait. Caffeine for inspiration. Air for the perspiration. Last night at the Sangria Party, S. tells me that he read my review of "Minority Report" on this blog. "Really?" I said. "What did I say about it?" He said he didn't remember. So the first thing I do is check out my own blog about the movie. (see below) Not too much detail there. But brings to mind the idea that's been brewing: to make this blog a film review reference for my friends. Since my last blog I've seen 3 films. Here's a quick guide with ratings.

Bridget Jones's Diary (8/10) funny. i laughed.
I hadn't seen this one before and was pleasantly surprised. Rene Z. and Hugh Grant are perfectly cast.

Lilo & Stitch (4/10) violent. stupid. boring.
This new Disney animated feature is real disappointment. Lots of "plasma" gun shoot outs and explosions. It's "Men in Black" meets the "Little Mermaid."

The Score (10/10) really entertaining. great script. highly recommended.
This Robert DeNiro and Edward Norton film (with great supporting roles by Marlon Brando and Angela Basset) is a real surprise. Directed expertly by Frank Oz creating nail-biting tension with very simple set-up and situations.