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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Road Report from Vancouver, BC |
Current rating: 0 |
by Paul Kotheimer
Email: herringb (nospam) prairienet.org (unverified!)
Phone: 217 344 8820
Address: urbana.indymedia.org |
16 Feb 2001
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Roving songster and UC-IMC reporter checks in from the road. |
I'll be able to say where I was when I saw the Ten Years' War publicly re-re-edeclared. I was at a charming little laundromat at MacDonald St. and 16th Avenue West, here in Vancouver.
The border crossing on the way up was relatively easy. I didn't have to declare my guitar or my CD's as business-related items, since I'm not actually getting payed anything he three or four performances I'm putting on in Vancouver.
"Not getting paid?" asked my supportive hosts, "how could that possibly be?"--These are the same great people who refer to me, over dinner, as the "visiting American folk music celebrity," by the way. So, I explained to them that it's a pretty simple matter of supply and demand: When there are two (count 'em, TWO) folky acoustic singer-songwriter-y types coming through town, you'd be lucky to drum up twenty people to hear the show, right? So what happens when two THOUSAND of us converge on one city is a fait accompli, pretty much. Nobody wants to hear us at all.
And I can barely blame them. Who'd want to come hear music, sitting in institutional chairs, surrounded by institutional beige wallpaper and institutional cherry veneer, in a huge downtown hotel that nobody who likes this kind of music can afford, anyway? --And so, for the most part, playing the Folk Alliance Music Fest over there at the Hyatt hotel has been kind of like playing a music showcase in a funeral parlor.
WITH THE EXCEPTION of the "Showcase-Free Zone" hosted by AFM Local 1000--No, it's not a radio station, it's the branch of the American Federation of Musicians which represents travelling performers! Instead of into a pack of music biz hawks and hacks in dangerous haircuts and perfect leather overcoats, I found myself walking into a room full of real people, all of whom sing and write and perform folk music for a living, singing eachother songs. "Affinity at last!" I said to myself.
So that was yesterday.
Today I followed my nose to a great little grocery store/deli down the way from where I'm staying--which is far enough away from the downtown scene to make me feel right at home. And as I stopped in at the laundromat/video rental/quick-mart for a pack of smokes, I saw it on CNN.
The map of Iraq sliced in thirds: No-Fly-Zone to the north. No-Fly-Zone to the south. The proprietor looking on with particular concern. I wonder where he's from. Pakistan? Iran? Suddenly, I'm very apprehensive: About my Chicago accent. The greenbacks in my wallet. The baseball cap I'm wearing.
Simultaneously, I feel that it's all too predicatable: Economic slippage means time to rev up the War Machine. George Bush, Junior, continues his daddy's war. Last month was payback time for the Christian Right and payback time for the Very Wealthy, and now comes payback time for Big Oil.
And, perhaps most chillingly, it occurs to me that the war on Iraq has been going on since 1991, non-stop. It did NOT stop and then start and then stop and then start again, as the American public's consciousness of it might lead us to believe. Also, every time the War on Iraq moved above the horizon, it was BECAUSE the Administration WANTED it there, in the minds of the American People; and every time it was BELOW the media/awareness horizon, similarly, it was part of the Plan.
So those are my thoughts, today, from Vancouver, British Columbia, awaiting a statement from George W., making folk music for music biz moguls, and wishing to be home with my friends and my activist community, so we can DO something against this war. |
