Shannon Bramer (The Refrigerator Memory), Stephen Cain (American Standard / Canada Dry) and Sherwin Tjia (The World is a Heartbreaker) read at Pharmacie Esperanza with Corey Frost, author of The Worthwhile Flux (Conundrum Press) and Genevieve McClean. Music by Amber Goodwyn.

The World Is a Heartbreaker inaugurates a new subgenre: imposter poetry. This collection is a set of 1600 pseudohaikus, bite-sized chunks of poetic goodness shotgunned at the distracted masses. What’s a pseudohaiku? It’s the poetry of pure indulgence, a three-liner without the constraint, the pretension or the 5–7–5 syllable form. The subject matter? Relationships, cats, insecurities – themes recur and build into a kind of non-linear narrative. These micropoems are easily digestible yet remarkably acute, a catalogue of scattered thoughts and pointed observations that go down like potato chips – betcha can’t read just one. Sometimes sexy, sometimes scandalous, sometimes sentimental, but always three lines long, these pseudohaikus are the future of poetry in a world awash with sound bites, news clips, catchphrases. There are no pleasures like the guilty ones.

Sherwin Tjia is a Montreal-based poet and painter. He has exhibited widely and works as a medical illustrator for McGill University. He is the author of “Pedigree Girls” (comic strips) and “Gentle Fictions” (poetry), both from Insomniac. Recently, he illustrated JonArno Lawson’s “The Man in the Moon-Fixer’s Mask” (Pedlar). A second “Pedigree Girls” collection will be published by UK-based Saqi Books in spring 2005.

“Quand il ne tournait pas, Gilles Carle peignait, dessinait, que ce soit dans sa maison du square Saint-Louis ou de l’île Verte. Des créations thématiques, des autoportraits, mais également des portraits de ses amis et de sa muse, Chloé Sainte-Marie. On peut voir ces oeuvres depuis le 16 dans une salle aménagée au rez-de-chaussée du siège social de Loto-Québec.”

Gilles Carle, le cinéaste, le peintre et l’homme…* est présenté jusqu’au 26 juin à Espace Création Loto-Québec, rue Sherbrooke Ouest. Les portes sont ouvertes de 11h à 18h, du mercredi au vendredi, et de midi à 17h, les samedis et dimanches. L’entrée est gratuite.

L’International du Cinéma Hip Hop is a collective seeking to encourage and exalt positive and inclusive Hip Hop culture, while cultivating the understanding of Hip Hop cinema and its connection to perception. We intend to create a safe and open environment for personal expression though films and docs that examine the diversities of modern Hip Hop culture: Music, Dance, Visual Arts and Scholarship.

The success of Canada’s first International Hip Hop Film Festival in Vancouver last September 1st-5th 2004 has given way to renewed enthusiasm amongst the Festival’s organizers. The diverse and unified collective, composed of young professionals, has cooked up a grandiose curriculum for the Montréal version. In addition to films & documentaries, the Festival will also host Art exhibits, book launches, panels, cocktails, spoken-word night and soirées with some of the City’s best Hip Hop acts, performers, emcees and deejays.

All movies and documentaries, unless indicated otherwise, will be showed at the JA de Sève Cinéma,located in the Library Building (Ground floor) of Concordia University. 1400, de Maisonneuve Boulevard West, Montréal. Tickets will be sold in the foyer of JA de Sève Cinema prior to each showing, at $6.00 per ticket. Tickets will be available as early as one hour prior to projections.

The full schedule is available on their website.

Early 70’s US-based Video Collectives presented by Dara Greenwald

A talk about the early decentralized television movement in the US and a screening of rare, recently preserved clips of videos documenting political and cultural movements – including Fred Hampton’s last interview, the first Women’s Liberation March, and a pirate TV station. The discussion will also explore the challenges of archiving and preserving video – a quickly degrading medium. Including Fred Hampton’s (Black Panthers) last interview!

Dara Greenwald has worked at the Video Data Bank since 1998 (http://www.vdb.org). She is an educator, artist, and engaged cultural worker. She has been working on preserving a large collection of obsolete format videos from the early 70’s. You can see her other projects at http://www.daragreenwald.com and http://www.pinkbloque.org.

Stencil Pirates: A History of Street Stenciling

An in-depth slide presentation on the 15,000 year history of street stenciling. From caves in France to 1930’s Spain to 1970’s South Africa to 1980’s New York City to the present, this presentation delves deep into the uses, motivations and practices of hundreds
of years of stencil artists and activist. Josh MacPhee is a street artist, designer, curator, author and activist. His first book, Stencil Pirates: A Global Survey of Street Stenciling, was published in July 2004 by Soft Skull Press. He is currently working on a number of other books, including a book about political street art to be published in 2006 on AK Press. He also runs a radical art distribution project, justseeds.org and organizes the Celebrate People’s History Poster Project.

See his work at http://www.justseeds.org, http://www.stencilpirates.org and http://www.counterproductiveindustries.com.