Tributes and tributaries: Lillian Allen @ the AGO Oct 28th

A story of contacts with dub culture
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> > > > My father came home one day to discover me loudly recording a guitar track in my upstairs room of his prairie house by the railroad tracks. I was trying out something I'd learned from Glenn Branca by way of Sonic Youth, playing my strings in double unisons to a breakbeat I'd vocalised myself earlier, all this driven through my girlfriend's father's old stereo amp and onto the wide tape of an old reel to reel out of  which the voice of my dead great uncle Abe served as the scratched sample for this most peculiar and quite totally lost production of mine.
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> > I'd have to say that stumbling upon Glenn Gould's polyphonic radio plays and my time working with Dimitri Brunelle-Derome on his Garlic project were critical contacts with european angles on tasteful and textured dub productions. I called my experiments in my mid-twenties schizophonics and spirals, before I folded in on myself and began collaging with composition, seeking the spirals in hypnotic, pulsing partials. Their method seemed to involve  a lot of late night brooding and inspired madness. At any rate, I began smoking as soon as my apprenticeship started.
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> > > > > > A dub poet is sleeping on my couch, in a basement of the gorge view apartments, just past the inner harbour of victoria BC, dreaming of things that may happen at our show tonight. This will be the day that she first buys menthols, the only live performance by a band called garlic flavour, a singular gathering of the island's curious and unoccupied. The poet in question is klyde broox, and he is crashing at mine because of mcgilligan books, my granny's name, uncle's impetus, Aunt's job, a generation and sustenance of memories, stacks of books in boxes, a family gathering at McNally Robinson, the circuit of book releases, cafés, and open mics that brings klyde to Victoria, my losenge of solace on the western edge of turtle island, my three year's playpen. His Facebook presence is a treasure. The deftness of his lyricism, and the incise ostinato of his social conscience, hallmarks all of the dubs presence in Toronto throughout my lifetime.

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> > > > > >memories of Lillian allen and the dub poets collective begin with being invited over for dinner an hour early, because my family is often quite late. I remember being surrounded by stylish, eloquent, laid-back blackness, an unfamiliar comfort, an urban delight. Maybe it was Clifton I heard there, reciting a piece pared into my own story now, jump high gazelle imagery and presence,  The page on the stage, political rage on page, poetry as a means to an ends.

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> > > > > I remember the house on Lauder out of which McGilligan books was run, with a basement full of books, stories of the underrepresented, of the Arab spring, of dub poetry, mommy-daddy, monday. A basement that held part of Lillian's archives: tapes, dats, and compacts discs spanning three decades of recording sessions, when she moved out of her home nearby, above the spring mount Creek that flows down bull to the Garrison. I remember Allen's Juno award winning albums: revolution tea party and conditions critical. They were part of my early afrocentric musical education, along with Gil Scott heron, and public enemy's Fear of a black planet. I had ambitions of making drum and bass versions of one track, but never made it past the demo stage.

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> > > > > > > I remember performing rub a dub style with Allen and the parachute club in 2008 at the luminato stage on the street outside of ocad. The drummer was Billy Bryans, who had produced Allen's two heavyweight eighties albums. I got to rap a verse on that song, even though I'm sure I missed every rehearsal. And in consulting video footage available on YouTube, it seems I also recited an italian rhyme amidst the performance of Rise Up. What a ham. I made it to soundcheck tho, chilled with Mischa and my vintage 80s vogues and chatelaine collection, culled from roadside recycling. The best things in life are always eventually free. "oh, look at this porn" he purred. After my turn on the mic, I pogo'd and danced backup to Lillians tune The Subversives, played tambourine and danced through the crowd in the street in a lime green dress shirt that Tia Brazda gave me. Exciting times.
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> > > > > > > After that I got to host a poetry night at Ellington's raggae café and record shop (rip) on st Clair for Allen's ocad writing class, goofed around with d'bi anitafrika. You see, I know now how lucky and how privileged I've been to
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> > > > > > > For she is the canadian queen of dub, laying out politics in poetics, putting pages on the stage since back when queen west was rough warehouses and punk venues.
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> > > > > > > In 2013 I was asked to join the online promo team for Allen's last release, Anxiety, and seized upon the opportunity to gain permission to remix her work, blending classic dub, mash K-pop and jazz piano, and spin my own beats and collage production styles in loose spirals around her accapellas. A collaboration fifteen years in the making.

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> > > > > > > Which brings us to today. Ann and Lil both moved out of the old hood where I first put foot to Toronto's Terra firma. They're international now, doing conferences and making speeches. Mcgilligan books is a memory, little Rose is grown and performing music of her own. And Lillians work is being recognized as part of the Tributes an tributaries exhibition at the AGO this month. She's curated four weeks of spoken word, and she'll be performing on October 28th. You got to be there.

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Mack and Babak

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> > > > > The Grecian unity of uninterrupted socio- dramatic space-time gives way to a Beckettesque post- modern wasteland of no TV, no bus fare, no cigarettes no beer money and no tips. Welcome to Nuit Blanche 2016, part three of this week's Sam and Peter show, we'll be here every  evening shift, straight through the black Moon, rosh hoshana, and of course the big art featival downtown. A queen street Nexus of beginning G's and endings. We made it into the Hideout ten minutes before extended last call, and had for about twenty minutes some pure dancefloor fun: Bix Lex, Gabi, and me, our belongings in a heap nearby, classic closing time. Kathleen spotted me on Wednesday night leaving work, and showed me a short vid of myself in a captain's hat singing Barret's Privateers with her bud in the line outside.
> > Things have been getting pretty precious of late as Peter and I spend night after night simultaneously dealing with the pressures of cranking out good food, the mental realms and scattered socio-economic, political, pedagogic and rather war torn, wayward ways of our nowaday world, as well as the worlds of workplace racism patrol, casual misogyny Friday (everyday?!), semantic breakdowns in the world outside the colourblind bubble, dashing in and out of the myths of our inherited false and broken culture, daily undoing the damage of decades of false teachings falling away like scales on the armour of an omnipresent, imaginary toad-god, as the hubbub of poor passionate parkdale lines up as a healthy heart-beat against weekend binges of drink dance and drama available everyday underneath the awnings, into the darkness, and down the bathroom steps of any after hours hang, bang, shame or blame. We have a lot to talk about. Like Mack, same thing. Only to be in such close quarters with her, (what a blessing, a woman in the kitchen!) and from the first so much energy (I say) on her part, that it took me a few tries even to look her directly in the eyes for more than a moment. back to Saturday night. Like eight years ago

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> > > > nuit Blanche 2007
> > > > Rating: silly
> > > > Street performance
with box full of cash
> > > > Highlight: driving to Kensington in a a convertible while listening to Stravinsky's Petruchka on a small portable tape deck.
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> > > > 2008
> > > > Rating: artsy
> > > M&B Yummy blob show:
> > > > Performances by We are French, retro radio, gusto basketcase the dust bunnies, and the Tandooris!
> > Highlight: marching by the Drake parading (as was our fashion at the time) a score strong, with battery fuelled boomboxe, microphones, drumsticks, and dino masques all plugged into the power of a full troupe of human artists moving as one group, recollecting their strength in being able to trust their feelings, fuelling the fires of sensation and creation that hold the only solution to terminal capitalism. nevermind Ennis, what about the meatballs? We lost them. I found em, one of my more useful superpowers.
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> > > 2009
> > > Rating: awkward
> > Lowlight.
> > As happened to me when I first explicitly engaged my psychic abilities: Social spitting, community engagement and personal shame all play a part in the way ones mind is even capable of being extended into the world. So I mean I was gobsmacked in Victoria when the lady who so kindly left on my answering machine such words affirming that i did indeed have the luck of the black irish jew, also happened to know the ex of the man who recorded my previous album,  but naturally in Toronto's dense networks and considering the centralising effect of a public arts all day festival, such encounters, though disorienting, have to be taken as par for the course, like when Nora made a couple cortados for Feist. Or Peggy, for fucks sake.

As you may already know, there is a distubing trend towards unfrisk in the accessible swirls of people parades and festival atmosphere on city streets such as far quenn west year by year. In Victoria, they clean up the streets as soon a parade is done, erasing any chance that the lingering positive energy could affect the populace or environs. This mixtape, Monday, rocks. We (myself, BM Forster, Volet, Naomi, Mip, Eddie C, but mostly some qualicum kids revolted, resisted with public activity, traipsed in groups of 4-12 around the highly accessible downtown (a city where junkies and doctors live side by side, or jog, anyways) waving pampas grass, breathing non-proprietary air, and hip to the pompic hills. We weren't the blob. Who or what, were we dog even then? I walkways perceived the catalytic encounter, the opening scene in the big screen version, as being the meeting of green McGoey and Adam  plant, in film school yon etobicoke or something.
> > > > > I had been practicing martial arts on the streets of parkdale for a few days this weekend before a confrontation occurred. Ok, so I did twice scream REPENT! at the crowd out front of the Drake, but that wasnt technically a physical assault, nor in Parkdale proper.
> The last time I was in Mezzrows, a Fellini film was screening as I left. Now, jazz plays and my chef is on an educational tip. It has nothing to do with wheat, Peter is asserting at Malka's birthday party tonight. He explains that every egg we eat is a single-celled structure, that unwashed eggs are designed by nature to be impervious to harm. Your tummy is tired of processing glutens which are insufficiently broken down in mass produced baked goods, he iterates. I fluff up my afro in the bathroom. It's been a rough night on the nerves.

> > > > You send me files, and I am sharing an old picture of Nora and I from when we were chubby little imps, and I know that we were irresistible. Obvi that's where my story starts. But let us drop into the narrative. I'm fifth business, ideally. I play nineties schoolyard trivia games with Rachel and Collette, who were at the Skyline earlier. I believe they coaxed out of me that my sex object on Frasier was in fact, Lilith Crane. Madelyn and Jess and Malka are getting ready to hit the next spot. Paul Simon's Rhythm of the Saints, the south american-flavoured follow up to 1986s hugely successful, African- styled Graceland, is stumbling over the system. The track never really hits its groove until after the bridge. Come on.
> > > > unraveling Nuit Blanche after the Black Moon. Gosh. I have never really blazoned downtown for the big money events. I'm glad Bix and JPKK were at the Rebecca Belmore performance at the AGO, because I also think  it was important. Checknout Lillian Allen Oct 28. On my way back from helping Nic and Nora into their slick new digs, with an unplayable guitar and and a wand made of two violin bows (chillaxus), I work out my first trap rhyme in a few years. On the TTC, a young woman sitting next to me turns out to also be a violinist on her way to Nuit Blanche. She didn't know that Jimmy Page played his guitar with a bow. Her friends have been waiting to order a meal while she slept in. I remove the unwound strings from the guitar so that nobody pokes their eyes out. Stone Chillaxus. I practise my sixties patois when I am alone in the kitchen, walk from Dufferin home, and pass by the Skyline. By then I have got the lower strings tuned ostrich style, and with taps of the bow bounce out a battuto drone, straight gangster say the passer's-by, singing songs of the naive nineties, pausing outside work just long enough for Habi and Judd to spot me, past Malka and a friend to drop the bouzouki at home, couldn't put my wand down, it was a sword I practise swung along queen back east for my shift. hungover and anxious, dirty and disappointed. But...

> > Oh, what's this? it's the return of the Mack! I say, following through on a well established tradition of quoting out of date pop songs to describe the fleeting information overload of reality. Sam, give me a hug, Peter says. By Monday the scatterbrained cross references have woven their way into a familiar skein of synchronicity. The radio begins to respond to us, rather than vice versa. I walk back and forth circling the park with the Captain. Accelerating, despite the shortening days. The performative nature of public behaviour, starring yet another young creep in an altered state, two gals who could have easily whupped him, and creepo trying to tussle when I refuse to be ignored. Casual racism Thursday, casual misogyny Friday, and dropping honkey (henceforth to be referred to as the H bomb) with something approaching the frequency with which N bombs still drop.
> > > > At dawn, my bow broken, guitar gone, I wander through Trinity Bellwoods, promised park of lasers and late night art, a still, sepulchral sequence of empty white tents. I stumble, alone, separated from team Bix and unsure of my surroundings. I reel towards the Indie 88 tent, and nearly knock one of its moorings from the ground. Someone tells me to mellow out. The last texts I send on Saturday all begin with 'im lost'. Bix pulls a free uber out of our phones and whisks first Lex home, then Gabi and us back to the dollhouse.
Sanctuary!
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