A Concert for Canada

It’d be fun to turn this list into a concert line-up, and then stay the fuck home and eat chips. These are the signatories to a letter in support of “trans rights” composed by whatever machine controls Tegan & Sara, both of whom suffer from soul death, sadly, and then distributed among the stupidest people in the Canadian entertainment industry. No offence or anything. I know some of the folks who agreed to this, and I said they’re stupid, not bad.

Some of them are bad. Or at least very dishonest and calculating. When Danny Masterson finally lost the protection of his handlers and was sent down last year after decades as a serial rapist at large in LA and elsewhere, like in Toronto, some people remembered the unsettling rumours that wafted from his close association with an extremely fashionable indie-rock collective sucking up all the bandwidth in Canada at the time, back in the late ‘90s, early 2000s. It was quite the scene.

The names of its most prominent members appear here. Which is hardly surprising since “trans rights”—meaning, let’s be clear, the surgical and pharmacological mutilation of children under the guise of “gender affirming care”—is the issue that any Canadian artist or sex pest must embrace to retain industry access, protection, or their tiny share of diminishing public interest. If he was still a free man, rest assured that Jacob Hoggard would have signed this open letter. It’s amazing how consistently an extreme establishment-sanctioned ideology will provide cover for someone’s dangerous pathology, or how often an artist will say absolutely anything to stay relevant. But if there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that history has taught us nothing.

Still—while it’s unlikely that any of these Libs of CanCon will ever encounter the WPATH files or even just acknowledge naked reality with their own eyes, the list will come to haunt some of them, one day, and a few might even feel shame. Others will pretend it never happened. Which reminds me, Neil Young is back on Spotify.

Postscript: How many of these 300-plus jackasses defended “unvaccinated” Canadians when the entire government and media establishment released the hounds? How many cheered when the truckers’ bank accounts were frozen while cops-on-horseback beat on the heads of peaceful protestors? Who among these drooling narcissists said a word about the trashing of rights, the abandonment of medical ethics, the destruction of businesses, families, and lives, the upward transfer of trillions, and—most of all—the profound harm done by COVID-lockdown to a generation of children? Not a single one. What bunch of fucking maroons.

April 4, 2024

A Peruvian grievance at the Legion

Ostentatious displays of privilege will be punished. Today in the horrorscopic device called Twitter somebody made the mistake of composing a thread about a small pop-up “general store” in Vancouver’s Chinatown. She was immediately strafed by the progressive mob, who are always ready to swarm any traveller hapless enough to stumble into their zone of derangement.

Sermons about the “aesthetics of colonization” will surely correct the poor lady’s wrongthink, if not the intense shaming, snark, and vitriol. Vancouver’s last election was such a resounding repudiation of the Dumbass Left that the city is now stuck with a municipal government vile even by Vancouver’s hopeless standards. These folks are nothing if not champs at hurting their own causes.

Working as a bartender at the Royal Canadian Legion on Saltspring Island keeps me sane and busy. I’m very fond of our customers, many of them real and practising dissidents, authentic fighters with serious material concerns, not machine activists who scream “Colonizer!” at anyone who upsets their delusions. People whose quote-unquote lived experience has no value inside the prevailing hierarchy of oppressed fetish dolls and asinine jargon, even if they’re poor and their lives full of tragedy.

On Saturdays the Legion hosts live music and recently we presented a superb local Latin American dance band. Load-in and soundcheck often happens mid-afternoon when the bar is occupied almost entirely by old regulars, some upwards of their 70s, who play pool or sit around shooting the shit and drinking Lucky lager at what we call the Table of Wisdom. It’s also a more peaceful time for the weird senior loners who quietly transform into unexploded bombs when the bar starts to fill later in the day.

For instance Russ, a tall and skinny former US Marine who worked as a cop and then a PI in the Bay Area during the late ‘50s and ‘60s. Russ is frail but you still wouldn’t fuck with him. He has the stare. He alludes to the things he’s done and seen, and I imagine his old American underworld like a scroll of Weegee images. I was warned that Russ could be “cantankerous”, but he likes me, and I always have his Jack Daniels and ginger with a twist of lemon ready to go. Sometimes he “forgets” to pay.

Russ arrived as the Latin band wrapped its brief soundcheck, walked to the bar and asked about the music. “Peruvian?” he began. “My first wife was Peruvian. Beautiful woman. Perfect body. Perfect tits. Didn’t need to make an effort. The other women hated her. Until a little later in life when she started to put on the weight.”

By now Russ was joined at the bar by the band’s pipe-player, a super-hot young guy with long black hair and parachute pants. “It’s the Peruvian diet, you see,” Russ continued. “It’s heavy on the carbs so she was bound to lose her figure.”

“Excuse me,” the pipe-player interrupted, lifting his shirt to parade his flat fuckin’ gorgeous honey-brown abdomen, “but I am Peruvian and do you see a pro-blem with my diet?”

I assumed in the moment that Russ wasn’t used to a sharp rebuke from a Peruvian flautist, because I caught the flash of homicidal desire before he responded: “Oh, Peruvian, are ya’?”

“Yes.”

“Well why don’t you get yourself a llama and be happy,” he snarled, ambling away with his highball while the pride and defiance drained from his young aggressor, who was left looking hurt and confused. It was a strange, hardboiled, oddly effective takedown. Against this, the modern Politics of Grievance do not stand a chance at the Legion.

Bite it and believe it (Grimsby, 1985)

In summer 1985, at the age of 18, following a snap decision made the night before at Willy’s Wine Bar in Cleethorpes, I hopped a National Express coach with my friend Mark, bound for London and whatever might come next.

A few weeks before that, I made this film in downtown Grimsby with Paul and Jane. It was shot on standard 8mm using an old Bell & Howell three-turret camera—already a relic in 1985—and once developed, it sat, forgotten, in various boxes in various homes from the North of England to parts of Canada, finally coming to rest in my brother’s basement in Calgary.

Last year Russ digitized our home movies from the ‘80s and among them, to my astonishment, was this. I threw it into iMovie to make some sort of narrative (lol) out of the three-minutes of raw footage he’d excavated. I put it on YouTube, sent it to Mark—with whom I’d reconnected the year before—and he sent it to Paul, who responded with a lovely message. So, here was a movie almost 40 years in the making. Like Hard to Be a God x 3.

Paul and I played together very briefly in a band called J. Alfred, which did a single show at the Cleethorpes Winter Gardens in support of the Miners during the 1984-85 strike. The headliner was a great act called 96 Tears, led by a local legend named (what else?) Mick Taylor. Also on the bill was a poet, Ranting Sex Dwarf, who was small but not really a dwarf, and the Expanding Wallets, a bunch of arch-lefties whose members included Bill Brewster, author of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life.

Around this time, my friends and I were publishing a zine called Kinky Boots, and Bill, who I admired very much, had praised my adolescent pretend-NME writing, specifically an unkind review of a Spear of Destiny concert—something that surprised and elated me at the time and still on occasion makes a vivid cameo in my head. My wife Annie speaks of “wizards” who enter your life briefly to change its direction, and Bill, at the risk of grandiosity, was one of mine. I wanted to be told that I could write.

I recall that J. Alfred had one original number, “Fatneck”, and that we covered (among other things) “What’s Happening?!?!” by the Byrds, “Father’s Name is Dad” by the Fire, Donovan’s “Season of the Witch”, and the Chocolate Watchband’s version of “Milkcow Blues.” We were drunk on ‘60s pop culture and Paul, who was a little older, was another figure highly regarded by me and my best mate Simon (guitar), largely on account of his pristine collection of paisley shirts and his taste in music. The show was just a few days after my 18th birthday.

I think the movie was related to Paul’s side gig as an “alternative comedian”. We were thinking of the Monkees, Help!, “The Running, Jumping & Standing Still Film”, maybe a little bit of John Waters. We made it up as we went along, such as it is. We spent a morning in and around the outdoor mall known as the Precinct, or Freshney Place, which of course looks very different in 2024. You can see the first McDonalds to arrive in Grimsby on Victoria Street, and the sequence with the puke and the girl and the flower was all done in St. James Square, which looks the same.

Jane was closer to Paul and Mark, but we knew each other inside a small but lively group of people from across Cleethorpes and Grimsby who mingled regularly at a nightclub called Gullivers. Mark’s brother was the deejay on Thursday nights. He’d play Sisters of Mercy, Velvet Underground, the Smiths, the Cramps, and whatever else was exciting in the moment. We were the “alternative” people forming bands, putting on shows, producing zines, making 8mm films and calling ourselves artists. For the rest of the week, “Gullies” was filled with twats with wedge haircuts dancing to Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet. We called these people Dressers, which might be a derivation of Tossers.

Jane existed above these tribal youth divisions. She floated through the Gullivers scene in an untouchable dimension of her own. Her raven hair was always pulled back, she dressed glamorously, she was rarely seen without bright red lipstick. From a distance I saw her as Audrey Hepburn. And then at some point she took a shine to me and we became, briefly, friends. We went on a big adventure together to see the Long Ryders at Leeds Warehouse in April 1985, Jane largely indulging my interest in the band, and we slept in the freezing train station after the show.

I was intimidated and too immature to sustain a friendship with Jane, I said some stupid things, but she only treated me with patience and affection. I don’t know where exactly the film sits inside this timeline but she looks happy and I know that her enthusiasm was important to us. My clearest memory of the day was instructing Paul to slowly shove the flower into Jane’s face. The very best part of this 39-year-old footage is seeing her crack up when he does it.

In 2022, Mark tracked me down after 20-plus years and I learned that Jane is no longer with us. There’s no way of counting the people from that time who I’ve forgotten, from four decades ago, but I never stopped wondering about Jane. That’s the truth. Putting this little video together quickly became a haunting enterprise. Writing about it too.

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Me v. the Georgia Straight

I started writing for Vancouver's free weekly the Georgia Straight in 2005 when it still had the attention of the city. It was music editor Mike Usinger who championed my work and soon I was contributing on a weekly basis with ever more extravagant assignments. In 2011, I was hired to edit the movies section. By then, the paper had begun a steep decline.

I made some good friends at the Straight and I think I did some good work as a staff member but the dysfunction was shocking and demotivating. Management was remote and unpredictable. In my first few weeks I was slapped down for a blog post criticizing a purported adaptation of the Stephen King novel 11/22/63 by filmmaker Jonathan Demme. I wrote it over breakfast and by the time I got to the office our chief editor had already published a rebuttal. The Straight’s publisher, I was told, considered it an offence that I would go after a “good liberal” like Jonathan Demme.

That was already crazy enough but then I had to join the two of them for lunch at the Cactus Club on some vague mission to save my ass. One is notoriously shy and introverted and the other is a nutcase, but I made some joke about being fat and how my wife didn’t want to fuck me anymore—neither thing was true, thank you—and that raised a laugh out of my autistic superiors. After walking back to the office in silence my editor said, “Well, you dodged a bullet with a free lunch.” Usinger told me he was put through a similar hazing in his first week.

After almost 60-years of family ownership, in 2019, the Vancouver institution known as the Georgia Straight was sold for less than a million dollars to a Toronto-based entity with the promising name Media Central Corporation. By then I was working remotely from an island so I couldn’t attend the meet-and-greets with the new bosses, which sounded dreadful. I was among those who expected to lose my job in some sort of restructure but we limped onward into the “pandemic” in early 2020, at which point everyone was repurposed as an unqualified health reporter, in my case disconsolately pumping out notices of events postponed and theatres closing in-between composing lame-ass articles about diet and immunity.

The hammer finally fell in March 2020 when about a dozen of us woke up to a group email informing us of a “temporary layoff” until the world could rid itself of lung AIDS. We were promised a reassessment of the situation within six weeks or so but that was hard to square with the immediate severing of access to the company network, which cost me years of emails, professional contacts, and work. The “pandemic” dragged on beyond six weeks with only silence from Media Central Corp., except for a single ghastly phonecall from my former editor-in-chief. “Hi Adrian, I suppose you hate me…” is how it started.

I didn't hate this man and I still don’t, although I believe that the Georgia Straight was doomed under his leadership. In any case, I was told that there was no future in film and TV and then was provisionally offered a new position overseeing two sister websites focused on cannabis and e-sports. I answered first that I’d never heard of “e-sports” and second that I was under contract as the movies section editor. That was the last time we spoke.

After six months of silent “temporary layoff” I contacted a lawyer who finally determined that, in the view of Media Central Corp., I had technically “resigned” when I refused to write about marijuana and these mysterious “e-sports”. This was insane nonsense, of course, and about a year later and after a lot of work, I was awarded the severance owed to me upon proving breach of contract through an online civil resolution tribunal (publicly available to peruse here.)

I represented myself through the tribunal because I couldn’t afford a lawyer. Media Central Corp. hired the Toronto law firm of Levitt LLP (now Levitt Sheikh). It cost the company more than I was owed to lose its fight with a drunk amateur, not because I’m especially brilliant, but because the entire case was ass and Levitt’s junior lawyer sucked. At one point she made the argument that termination was justified by my inadequate number of Twitter followers.

More damning than any of this was the situation with Toronto’s NOW Magazine, which had been purchased by Media Central Corp. shortly before it bought the Straight. In my submissions to the tribunal I demonstrated that my work as an editor and writer—contra to the assertion that there was “no future in film and TV”—had been assumed by the staff at NOW, chiefly by its contributors Norm Wilner and Radheyan Simonpillai. In other words, I had been shuffled out in a corporate restructure, replaced, and lied to. It was easy enough to prove.

NOW was unionized (under UNIFOR), the Straight was not, so that likely explains in some part who would receive the big ass-fucking from Media Central Corp. But the entire episode was sleazy and sad, and in my view the NOW contributors who acquiesced to the new regime are scabs. Media Central Corp is now dead, NOW Magazine became an online sinkhole that speaks to no one, and the zombie Straight shuffles on under a succession of new owners, although I notice it still hasn’t found anyone to cover e-sports.

March 2024

COVID fundamentalism: seeing and not seeing

This masterpiece of Gordian logic just appeared on my timeline. The username “revival.care” is inflamed by a photograph of an immunologist posing with The Science, both flagrantly breathing all over the place without proper protection for the rest of us. You could also describe it as a picture of a priest with her Cardinal brazenly defying scripture—for they are unmasked—which is what our Tweeter is really seeing and why his brain explodes. From our yonder hillside perch observing the Empire of Falsehood and all its silly business, we see an employee of corrupt institutionalism genuflecting to a psychopath.

Among the denomination of Long COVIDIANS, a popular theory states that the sinister virus has attacked the brain and reduced everybody’s IQ, up to and including these two subjects from the holy credentialed class, but not including anyone tweeting about it with pious outrage to an echo chamber of fundamentalists. Fun stuff, and almost admirable in its commitment to an increasingly beleaguered belief system, but how long can this go on? If we masked and jabbed 100 percent of the global population 100 percent of the time, which is what people like “revival.care” devoutly wish for, what would they expect to see? How would they rationalize an outcome that—in accordance with everything they’ve already seen but not seen—was 100 percent the opposite?

As we near the bottom of the glass of COVID fundamentalism, I wonder how it ends, finally, for these poor broken idiots?

Unconscious predictions regarding Canada, 1991

In recent correspondence with Jasun Horsley I learned that he relocated to Spain, having escaped what he called “Camp Canada” at some point during this country’s metamorphosis into mRNA-totalitarianism. I shivered. “Camp Canada” is right. Horsley displays his tireless wit and precision with this phrase.

Is it coincidental that, only days after my communication with Horsley, I stumbled upon an unsent letter to Andrew Siemen, written in Vancouver in 1991, in which I use the term “Camp Canada”? I was only joking around mind you, dropping the words inside two pages of absurdist riffing meant to amuse a friend. This letter also reminds me that I was missing England and wondering if I’d settled in the wrong country. But the point is that I was moved, at this particular time, for eternally mysterious reasons, to haul an old box out of storage and rifle through papers that have gone untouched for 32 years.

Maybe not so mysterious. Here’s an article I wrote in 2021 for Montecristo magazine on the topic of precognition and retrocausation, which I take to be real phenomena. I’m speculating that I wrote the words “Camp Canada” in 1991 because I unconsciously received a ping from December 2022. Retrocaustion fulfills itself in the future, so I was always going to open that box in December 2022 having recorded its message at some point in 1991, closing a loop in this case of more than three decades.

What cinches it for me is the fraught context of Horsley’s phrase, finally giving meaning to my flip use of the very same words. From 2021 onwards, having resisted the biosecurity state’s new hypodermic membership requirements, “Camp Canada” became a very real and frightening place for me and many others. In the worst moments of summer 2021, I sincerely wondered if I might be hauled off to an internment facility. Why not? I predicted mandates and passports months before they happened. Precognition is often wedded to events with a big emotional payload.

Horsley is also significant since I admire his intellect and advanced (his words) “paranoid awareness.” For equally mysterious reason, he would be part of all this.

Hello RCMP informant

I know of a musician and self-styled “anti-fascist” in Vancouver who’s a paid informant of the RCMP. His collaboration has aided law enforcement operations against environmental and other activist groups. His family has significant establishment ties. This game is older than any of us.