Patrick Swann, Slam Poet

If you've never been initiated into the world of slam poetry, your reaction to being dragged to a show might be - “A poetry show. Huh?”

That's what Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan native Patrick Swan overcomes when he tries to break the stigma of the stuffy, academic side of poetry. Swan lives in a world where cunning words aren't housed in mouldy, leather-bound, 5th editions of Oxford Companions and Norton Anthologies. Rather, he takes to the stage to get political - and often controversial - about pop culture icons like Michael Jackson.

He isn't the least worried about being heckled by a crowd of boisterous ball cap wearing drinkers whose last encounter with a poem could easily have been Grade 12 English.

Swan is used to people not understanding what he does which is why when he opened for a band in Regina one of the members said:

“'Yo, dude, I'm not going to lie, when we came in and they told us a poet was going to open for us we were like, 'Ah...that's really fucking weird,” he said.

His poems live off the page, infecting those watching enough to give up their loud boozy chats to simply listen.

“When I first started doing it, it was all about making the world a better place and all that crap that everybody was talking about. But now I'm more jaded and I write about being hungover and heartbreak and pop culture,” he said.

Swan first started slamming in Vancouver in 2003 when he made it to that year's semi-finals, nearly earning the winning title. He then found his way back to Regina where he was recruited by a friend's band to go on a Canadian tour.

“At the beginning of shows I'd jump up and do one or two poems and go back to selling t-shirts for them,” Swan said.

Touring gave him a taste of what people want to see and hear and he then set about separating the wheat – his good poems –from the chaff – everything else. Then he headed back out West to give the Vancouver slam scene a run for its money, performing in more slam competitions. He later found he began to outgrow the competition aspect of it and started headlining as the feature poet at shows.

“When I was slamming I found myself at that point where I was just like writing three-minute poems that sounded good but I wasn't necessarily completely satisfied with. I wanted to try writing different styles so I started moving away from it,” he said.

Swan claims he isn't really a book man, so not surprising that he doesn't make it his aim to appear in literary journals or get a masters degree in creative writing. Instead, he produces his own books. His first, Texas Hot Talk, was a collection of poems he had printed at Staples and his second, Aesthetically Absurd Young Drunk Monuments was a collaboration with a friend who is both fan and graphic designer.

He also isn't one to fill pages and pages of notebooks on a constant basis but instead takes his creative cue like a Saskatchewan farmer reads the weather – working with what you've got and realizing you can't do much about it when it works against you.

“I don't write a lot. I don't force myself to write. I take notes here and there and then write when I've got something. I write when I'm happy and when I'm bummed out. But most of my better stuff comes out when I'm angry or feeling shitty. That's where the funny stuff comes from,” he said.

The funny – and often tragic – stuff also comes from Swan's Tourette Syndrome, a neurological condition which is typically misrepresented in mainstream culture by television shows that parody the symptom of uncontrollable swearing.

Diagnosed when he was 18 – he is now 28 – Swan said he didn't really develop a complex about it and as a result, isn't hindered by the psychological label.

“I didn't have a clue what was going on until way later. After I first got diagnosed it was a little bit of,“Oh, this sucks” and then I got over it pretty quick and now it's just something I live with. When I'm on stage I'm very focused so it never really interferes. Sometimes, just before I start I feel like I'm going to twitch a bunch but then as soon as I focus on what I'm doing I'm good to go,” he said.

It has certainly provided food for creative fodder. He has written a piece called Tourettes that, if you are the sensitive type, will make you weep harder than a late 80's Bell Long Distance commercial.

What results from his maelstrom artistic process varies. He hit a creative drought and didn't write or perform for a year, brought on by the fact his latest material was not well-received and everyone wanted to hear popular favourites that he was tired of doing.

“I was presenting some of my new ones that I thought were some of my best work that I've written and people were saying, 'Let's hear Michael Jackson' (a humourous poem he wrote about the icon) and I thought, 'F#$% this',” he said.

It was a friend who pulled him out of his slump.

“My friend Owen said, 'Okay, so you're going to start writing again and we're going to book you some shows' and I said, 'Okay, I guess that's what we're going to do'.”

It doesn't come as a surprise to Swan that reactions to his work have been run the gamut from positive to negative.

“I got every little thing from people telling me they liked what I was doing to dudes throwing ice cubes at me,” he said.

At any moment, Swan has 16-or-so poems memorized with a lot of new stuff waiting to be committed to memory. He gauges what the crowd will like like a meteorologist assesses the weather patterns during Mother Nature's climate change-induced hot flashes.

“I'm at a weird point in my life where I actually have to select the poems instead of doing all the poems I have,” he said.

He goes with his gut and just rolls with it, depending on how he's feeling on the day. He hopes to eventually carve out a niche for himself outside of North America. But for now, he is content to march the untrodden ground of the modern poet across Canada and the U.S. The good thing is that he doesn't have to contend with getting stopped at border crossings like many other artists on tour.

“They'll ask, 'What are you doing?' and I'll say, 'I'm going to a poetry show in Seattle' and they don't really ask a lot of questions. They just say, 'Okay. Poetry show. How harmless is that?'” he said.

Jon & Roy on the Up & Up

The surefire ticket to every great Canadian musician's success is securing grants and getting backed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This was the way with folk-reggae-rock band Jon and Roy who have risen to musical recognition to be the season openers for the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts yearly Live Sessions program September 23. CBC Radio 2 is co-sponsoring the event and recording the performance for its Canada Live Series.

They will be playing songs from their album Homes released April 2010 which they promoted over their summer festival tour, with stops at all the major Central and Western Canadian folk festivals.

The Centre is also where Vizer played at his high school graduation over ten years ago before leaving for the University of Victoria where he would meet his musical match in band mate Jon Middleton.

“I think Homes is kind of like a natural revolution of our music the first two albums were pretty sparse in terms of what we would add to our songs from performing them live so we were somewhat hesitant to add a bunch of stuff and on this album we felt a little more freer and got some really great musicians to play some solos and just sort of layer it more,” Vizer said about the recording, which they took much longer to produce than their previous albums Sitting Back and Another Noon. They also added more instrumentation and collaborated with guest artists who added fiddle, keys and mandolin to the mix.

“CBC has been incredibly supportive since about two years ago so it's been really great. This is about the third or fourth CBC-sponsored show that we've had and they always have a very high level of production and they've really got good people working on the sound,” said Roy Vizer, the drummer and percussionist who makes up the latter half of the band's simple, unpretentious moniker.

But this year the Victoria-based band completed their tour without the help of sponsors, getting by instead on the strength of their reputation and their booking agent. Rounding out their exposure with lots of radio time in Vancouver and Victoria and being chosen by Starbucks for their Pick of The Week download card featuring new artists gave them the added leg up. Between these marketing avenues, publicity has taken care of itself, allowing Vizer to sit back and enjoy the scenery of the changing terrain of the Canadian landscape from the window of the car as they travel between gigs.

Throughout his journey as a musician, Vizer said he owes a debt to the Vancouver Jewish community for their support and expects to play to a sold out crowd.

“Early on, we've had good support from the Jewish community. I have a good network of friends in Vancouver and the Jewish community is pretty strong there so in that sense it has been good. A lot of our Vancouver shows have ended up being Jewish reunions almost,” Vizer said.

Although Vizer's current musical tastes are not Jewish, he said his drumming is definitely influenced by Middle Eastern style. However, he said he open to the possibility of getting into new types of music beyond the scope of what he is creating with Middleton.

“I always thought of doing a Klezmer reggae mash-up at one point but I really don't really know where I'm going to go with it yet,” he said.

For now, the musical fusion he experiences with Middleton is where he is setting his sights.

“When I met Jon it worked really well in a musical sense so we just kind of started playing music together and it felt pretty natural so we just kept it going,” he said.

Tickets are available through Ticketmaster. Jon and Roy perform at 7pm in the Telus Studio Theatre.

Betty Krawcyk: Raging Granny

Widely-known in activist circles as the Raging Granny, 82-year-old Betty Krawczyk shows no signs of slowing down in her later years. She might just outlive her 97-year-old mother who, as she put it, dropped dead while cooking catfish for her son-in-law.

That her halcyon salad days of youth are far behind her doesn't hamper Krawczyk in her efforts to protect the environment to leave a low-carbon legacy for her grandchildren.

“For me the environment became an issue of what I am leaving my children, my grandchildren, the world's grandchildren. The environment rather became a culmination of all of the ills in the world,” she said of her desire to stand behind green causes.

Her secret recipe for stamina and vigour while fighting the good fight is in the sauce: eating lots of habanero and jalapeño peppers – a throwback to her upbringing in Louisiana, a daily 15-to-20-minute tap dancing regime and an optimistic attitude.

Her motto for living is simple: “Do something every day to stay connected to people and the environment.”

Krawczyk was made famous, or infamous depending on who's telling the story, for her civil disobedience arrest and subsequent three-and-a-half year jail term for protesting the destruction of Eaglerigde Bluffs to make way for the expansion of the Sea-to-Sky highway. It was because she didn't apologize in court for her actions that she was sentenced to serve time, she said. But she refused to kowtow to corporations when she was justly trying to protect public land from private development.

“Certainly, the prison system is very tough on anybody. The food is poor, the regime is one of deprivation and you're at the mercy of the administration of the prison,” she said. But Krawczyk was more focused on the degradation of the prison system's rehabilitation program under the Campbell government than she was the loss of her own personal liberty. That women are no longer able to raise their babies when inside is one such example.

Once out of jail, Krawcyzk continued to build on her eco mandate, running for the 2008 Vancouver mayoral candidacy on the Workless Party ticket as well as for the federal election in the same year – a far cry from her plan to retire and live out a peaceful life as a writer.

Krawczyk's early political involvement started with motherhood. Her children came home with questions about why African-American kids were not allowed to go to school with Caucasian kids during the U.S. civil rights movement. She later fought against the Vietnam War and spoke out about women's abortion rights before deciding to invest her boundless energy in tackling environmental issues as a full-fledged career.

“Nature in the end, holds all the cards and we have to work with her and acknowledge her and fight against those who want to conquer nature and not let them take all of us down with them, so if we can all get out there young and old and middle aged, whomever, to be part of the awakening, so much the better,” she said.

What she does isn't special, she claims. She is doing it because it has to be done and because she can, recognizing that the world is a much different place than it used to be. She credits the younger generation for being proactive about the state of the world, a realization she was slow to come to until she started a family.

“I have the utmost admiration because the youth have gone straight to the issue rather than having to have an intermediary which was my children. It took me a long long time to see what a lot of young people are just seeing right off the bat. I find it very hopeful,” she said.

The issues the current generation have to contend with are much more serious and many young people slave away “with heavy hearts” to save a piece of forest or a stream, she said.

“Young people sense that there is a gap between older people's lives and the lives they are going to be living. It's a very sad and frightening thing but elders haven't had to face what the world is facing now ever before. It's not as if elders have some special insight into how to deal with what's on our plates here,” she said.

The important thing, she said is for seniors to show support for the cause.

“When older people come out and join a blockade or commit to peaceful civil disobedience it puts a whole new light on it. Older people are generally voters, they are generally well informed,” she said.

Less concerned about the future of her own life as she gets on in years, Krawczyk seems to take aging in stride, devoting herself instead to the life of the earth.

Geothermal energy gets standardized

A new code that standardizes the public reporting of geothermal energy on the Canadian stock market signals a change in investor confidence in the geothermal energy sector.

Brian Toohey is a Canadian reporting code committee member for the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association who initiated the industry regulation practices applauded by the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Canadian Securities Commission in March 2010.

“The Canadian financial industry all the way down to the average investor has been waiting for something like this,” he said.

Before the code was introduced in January of this year, the public was reluctant to invest in geothermal companies listed on the TSX – the resource industry securities hub in North America – because there was a lack of transparency and understanding about the industry. Prior to now, geothermal investors would have needed to be geology or engineering experts to assess stock values and compare companies. This drove profits down because people didn't know what they were getting into if they put their money into geothermal ventures.

“Right now it's kind of the Wild West of the industry in terms of the fact that one person says P90, P50, one person says this many megawatts, sure we can do this, we can do that...,” said Toohey.

In the oil industry, standardization makes it one of the preferred energy stocks to invest in. A barrel extracted in one part of the country is listed as same as a barrel drilled in another part of the country, something that previously couldn't be measured with geothermal power.

The code makes it easier to analyze geothermal companies' annual and quarterly reports and compare websites like in the oil, gas and mining sectors.

“They want to be able to speak the same language, talk knowledgeably on projects and want to understand the limitations to certain stages of (geothermal) development,” he said.

Now investors are better able to raise money for geothermal companies to get more projects off the ground in Canada, the US and abroad. The hope is that the U.S. will follow suit.

“It would be obviously fantastic if one day the U.S. market was that open to geothermal standardization and offered that sort of treatment to a similar peer geothermal association,” Toohey said.

The code also makes the geothermal industry more environmentally accountable. Although geothermal is by nature a very environmentally-friendly energy resource, companies haven't been uniformly ethical, Toohey said. Projects must now meet the modifying factors set by the code – permission of the government, facilitation with community members, meeting environmental impact standards.

“Beforehand when you get a geologist or an engineer around the table we say, oh well we're pretty confident that it will be this many megawatts subsurface in x place, but no one ever took into consideration social, environmental, first nations issues,” he said,

Already CanGea has seen a marked change.

“We've seen an increase in activity and it's actually been a total buzz around the international community,” said Toohey.

This year it is voluntary for companies to follow the code but next year it will be compulsory for CanGea membership. However, the TSX has yet to make the code a mandatory requirement.

More Graffiti in Deep Cove

The District of North Vancouver reported a “rash of graffiti” in Deep Cove in recent weeks, an area that doesn't usually have a lot of tagging activity.

“It's hitting out in an area we hadn't seen it before,” said Carol Walker of the District bylaw office.

"Graffiti is typically around Pemberton and Marine Drive corridor for us and more so in the city of North Vancouver and the bottom of Lonsdale,” said Walker adding that the extent of graffiti vandalism they have seen in past years in Deep Cove has been the odd post box.

An RCMP-led integrated task force is investigating the situation.

According to Walker, the taggers could be living close to or within the neighbourhoods where the graffiti is found and might be a newcomer to the area. They are also typically a younger age.

“We want to be able to rid graffiti from the North Shore entirely, not just move it around,” said Walker, “Eighty percent of those folks that are doing this sort of damage, it's a precursor to other crime.”

Fines for both graffiti tagging or allowing graffiti to remain on property are $200. But Walker said the bylaw office doesn't like to ticket very often.

“We really want voluntary compliance because we just want people to understand that the faster they remove it off their property the less likely that it's going to return,” she said. Removing graffiti acts as a deterrent. Evidence of this was the Pemberton graffiti that was removed about a month ago and hasn't yet returned.

Walker said the graffiti task force has discussed putting a public art wall around the sea bus area where a lot of graffiti is found. But she said this won't stop graffiti from happening throughout the district.

“From what I understand, you're still going to get these taggers tagging even though you've got these community art walls. It's two different groups of people. The taggers are about the criminal activity and vandalism and of course the artists that just want a space to work their art it doesn't necessarily prevent graffiti from happening where we don't want it to occur,” Walker said.

Walker said of the Deep Cove graffiti incidents: “This is not art. This is staking their territory.”

But this is a common misconception about graffiti taggers, said Adrian Archambault of the Community Policing Centre for Grandview-Woodland in Vancouver. Archambault oversees the RestART program, a Vancouver-based restorative justice project that began a graffiti management initiative with the City of Vancouver to allow graffiti taggers to channel their skills. Graffiti artists work with mentors to design murals on city-approved walls, that has lead to changing public perception around the art form, he said.

“From the criminal perspective graffiti tagging is almost like an addiction. It's not territorial so much as it's a compulsion,” Archambault said, “The way it is perceived is not always the way it was intended.”

Those who suspect graffiti taggers are acting in their neighbourhoods are asked to call 911 to report vandalism. Those who are the victims of graffiti should contact the District to get a 40 per cent off paint voucher.

Drum Mama Studios

“I am woman, hear me roar!” These are the words drummer Sandi Millman uses to describe what it is like to participate in a drum circle.

A long-time musician on the Vancouver scene, Millman operates Drum Mama studio out of her Kerrisdale home. It is here she shares her love of rhythm and the healing properties of hand drumming with her students of all ages and levels.

What you’ll take away from Millman’s classes is a sense of empowerment that comes with being fully free to express yourself.

“This is such a wonderful way to connect with each other and we can have so much fun, and it’s not about being a great musician, it’s about enjoying the process,” Millman told the Independent.

Millman isn’t bashful while bashing away on the drums and her infectious energy betrays her South American roots. Originally from Chile, Millman said she thinks what is lacking in Canadian culture is our connection to our bodies. This stifled physicality can be seen in how we respond to music, she suggested.

“When you go to the corner, or there’s a musician on Granville Island, you don’t see people dancing away and totally getting into it,” she said.

“Where I’m from in South America, you see people dancing more. They get into it – they get into the groove. They’re a little more in tune with that energy, with connecting and rhythm, celebrating together, moving and dancing. It’s part of the culture. In our culture, we don’t really express ourselves that way, and I’m all about just bringing back that very organic, natural, primal way through the spirit of the drum,” she said.

To do this, music must be accessible to everyone, she said.

According to Millman, in some cultures, there isn’t one particular word for musician. Everyone is seen as a music maker and relating to the vibration of music is innate to humans.

“In our culture, there’s this idea that music making is for musicians, and a lot of people are left feeling they’re not professional, or they’re not allowed to play or entitled to enjoy music making, and, I think what I do is try to let people know, ‘Hey, wait a minute! We’re all born to make music [and] to make music together.’ It is our birthright to express ourselves with rhythm,” said Millman.

The holistic effects of drumming are manifold, she said. One of these effects is the serenity that inhabits your body, which can be similar to a transcendental meditation exercise or chanting a mantra.

“We’ll repeat the rhythm over and over, and what ends up happening is you feel, in many ways, a brain relaxation or a rest,” she said. “People leave the class feeling rejuvenated and feeling a sense of calm [after having] often come into the class feeling rushed.”

This rushing around manifests itself in an accelerated pulse and, at the start of each class, Millman encourages her students to keep their heart rate steady.

“I try to keep the beat from pushing forward and then, after about five minutes, everybody is relaxed into this beautiful groove together,” she said.

Coming from a classical dance background, Millman approaches drumming kinesthetically, which is obvious when you watch her tiny frame undulate gracefully as she plays. She spent 10 years accompanying modern dance classes at Arts Umbrella before moving onto playing congas at nightclubs around the city. It was when she became a mother that she realized she is most at home when teaching. However, she still manages to balance teaching djembe classes with her love of performing and has taken up the Middle Eastern doumbek as another punctuation on her percussion resumé.

Millman’s belief in the therapeutic aspects of rhythm is evident in her extensive training. She has worked to perfect her art with Cuban and African drum masters, but she has also studied with leading facilitators who use rhythm for personal and health empowerment. This has led her to work with such luminaries as Arthur Hall, grandfather of the Western drum circle, and internationally acclaimed music therapist Christine Stevens, who conducts research on the scientific benefits of drumming.

“Drumming has been such a healing part of my life. It has always been there when I was going through difficult times in my life from a teenager to adult. I want to share that,” Millman said.

There’s no beating around the bush when it comes to the reverence other cultures have for the drum, she stressed. In Africa, the drummer is the high priest. In some tribes, a drummer is equivalent to a psychologist. A book published by Mamady Keita of the Malinke people in West Africa describes which drum beats cure different body ailments and psychological disorders. Millman incorporates these teachings with her university degree in psychology and counseling to better coach students who discover a surge of strong feelings when they play.

“I’m very comfortable with giving space for my students to have their emotional experience to let it be what it is. For some people, I would recommend a private class if I know they’re grieving or having a hard time and then, that way, if something does come up, it’s totally comfortable for them,” she said.

Visit www.drummama.com or contact Millman at 604-873-9495 or sandi@drummama.com.

Fiesta Fever for Vancouver

Entrepreneur Chen Lizra is once again pairing up with restaurateur Mona Chaaban of Mona’s Fine Lebanese Cuisine to bring back spicy nights of dance and Middle Eastern food to Vancouver.

The duo return with the all-ages celebration Arab Latin Fiesta, offering a cultural fusion unlike any other in the city. The first event of the season held on May 14 was packed, a sign that the event is filling a void in the city, said the Israeli-born Lizra. The two had hosted the event for three years before going on hiatus in 2007, when Lizra returned to business school and subsequently launched Latidos Productions, her Cuban dance business.

“It’s not just a coincidence that, after [the] three years we haven’t done them, that they were packed again and people said, ‘Wow, we’re coming back for the next one.’ There is something very magical about the event,” Lizra told the Independent.

Lizra’s goal is to keep the Arab Latin Fiesta nights going so that people can have an experience of cultural immersion that is generally only found in larger metropolitans like New York.

“It’s very hard to find, in Vancouver, nights where you actually enter a culture the way that culture is in its own country. There are maybe two or three cultures where you can do that but there’s a lot of cultures where you cannot,” she said, citing Latin and Arab celebrations as being particularly underrepresented in Vancouver.

Lizra and Chaaban’s fiesta features a set menu dinner, performances and dancing, as well as a hookah smoking room, all at Mona’s restaurant downtown Vancouver on Hornby Street.

When conceptualizing the evening, the two women created guidelines to help those in attendance understand the cultural setting and to encourage them to find their place within it.

“We create certain rules – not to be rude, but to allow for those cultures to exist the way they are and allow people to come into them. The majority of people coming are basically people from these cultures and they [naturally] form that kind of attitude.”

The atmosphere Lizra works hard to maintain is intergenerational and participatory, one in which everyone gets up to dance and join in the fun that typically lasts until the wee hours.

“It’s all about love, it’s a little more aggressive, [but] it’s warm, it’s family-oriented; you’ve got kids running around. You see grandma get up and dance with the belly dancer. It feels like you’re in the Middle East. Mona is an incredible cook and she just brings Lebanon to you,” raved Lizra.

The Arab and Latin cultures compliment each other because of their similar dance styles, suggested Lizra, whose Vancouver-based Latidos Productions offers courses in Latin dance, as well as vacation dance tours to Cuba.

“You’ve got the music from all these cultures mixed and people just love it, because people who love Latin dance love to shake it Arabic style and vice versa,” she said.

The next step for Lizra and Chaaban is to incorporate sponsorship so that they can make the event even bigger and support bringing in more dancers from outside the city.

“I think Vancouver is still limited with what we have here to work with and after awhile we’re going to run out of people we can book without repeating ourselves. It’s also fresh and interesting when people say, ‘Wow, we haven’t seen that,’” said Lizra.

Finding Cuban dance instructors for her academy is another challenge Lizra faces, as there are only a handful of professional Cuban dancers living in Canada. She travels to Cuba to train with professional dancers and then brings back what she’s learned to Vancouver. She has designed programs in reggaeton (Cuban hip hop), salsa, rumba, son, cha-cha-chá, mambo and rueda. Through the different dance styles, Lizra imparts the arts of flirtation, seduction and feeling sexy – things, she said, that get lost in North America.

“Something happens to you when you’re in Cuba where, a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter, you feel completely sexy and attractive because people come on to you all the time and they do it in such a sweet way that you feel gorgeous and that feels good. We just want to feel like that every day.” In North America, Lizra added, these same behaviors can end up being labeled “sexual harassment.”

Lizra fell in love with what she calls the allure of Cuba’s mesmerizing and energetic life force even before she had ever visited the country. When she finally did visit, she found many things that reminded her of her native Israel, from its core socialist values to the afternoon siesta.

Lizra’s Cuba was something she wanted to share beyond what she was able to translate from her regular visits there. This desire led to her facilitating small, two-week tours to the country to enrich people’s impressions beyond guidebook recommendations and popular tourist destinations. The next dance tour of Havana, which has room for seven travelers, is from July 8 to 22.

“A student who has been taking classes with me for about a year just went to Cuba and, as soon as she came back, she was ‘on’ – sexually. She was full of energy and life and she said, ‘I want more of this, bring it on,’” Lizra shared.

In addition to running her business, Lizra is branching out to reach a wider audience with a television series in development about dance around the world. Another idea in the works is a book, called Seducing Your Way to Happiness, that she plans to write after the TV show takes off.

“I think that at this point of my life I have something to say. I think that as you go through the years and you experience life and different cultures something clicks,” she said.

The next Arab Latin Fiesta night is June 18. For information, visit latidosproductions.com.