VARIOUS POSITIONS - Ira Nadel

Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen by Ira B. Nadel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I am finally getting around to reading this biography which I was asked to review when it first came out in 1996. At the time I was distracted by several factual errors that jumped out at me when I started reading it -- and which caused me to doubt the value of the whole book. I felt it was a staid rehashing of the already well-known (at least to me) facts of Leonard's career and life, by someone who didn't really "get" him, i.e. Nadel did a workmanly job of presenting the material, often without comment, as if he neither particularly liked nor disliked his subject. This time around, I'm impressed mainly by the quantity of his research, e.g. his quoting from Cohen's letters during his the early part of his career when he was struggling to make a name for himself and carve out a position in Canadian literature. In retrospect, his efforts to be taken seriously as a novelist and poet seem almost futile, given the hidden background, and what he was up against. I still see Cohen as a serious writer, whose novels and poems can be read as a multi-faceted assault on the society he had grown up in - but were marred by a kind of narcissistic self-obsession that was probably a cover for some real wounds that few could have fathomed back then.

I've written my own memoir of Cohen: The Man Next Door (available at Lulu.com). It deals with some of my own experiences with Cohen, on the streets of Montreal as I was coming of age, and later on Hydra and Mount Baldy as I got drawn deeper into the mystery religion that he seemed to embody. Since it ends on a bizarre note, I'm now the process of adding more chapters that are based on later realizations, some of which I've been posting at my blog (http://lunamoth1.blogspot.ca) since Leonard's death last November.

Re: Various Positions: one thing that makes it stand out is the raw objectivity some readers complain about. In particular, the chapters about life on Hydra, and Cohen's letters to friends and publishers, reveal sides of him that would shock a lot of his current fans and devotees. I think they probably shocked even Ira Nadel, who serves them up without comment. In fact, the young Cohen was often an obnoxious, self-obsessed megalomaniac who took drugs to deal with his frustrated ambitions. Nadel's biography at least makes it clear why Cohen was both envied and disliked in Canada: he was a braggart addicted to self-aggrandizing hyperbole. Somehow, Europeans were able to overlook this and focus on his songs, some of which were major works of art.

A whole fetishistic cult has lately grown up around him that is often based on trivia, and borders on sanctification -- especially at sites like Cohencentric.com where you can waste hours browsing through old photos, napkins and witty remarks to visited journalists. No singer has ever been more interviewed in his lifetime, and since his death no detail about Cohen's life is too boring to share with his legions of would-be lovers who never had the opportunity in real life to get to know him. But the real Cohen was a puzzle.

He also left behind an unfinished career as a writer -- choosing to reinvent himself in New York, London and Paris, where he could hide behind his image as a sophisticated, likeable iconoclast.

It's the Canadian chapters that are painful to read. I believe Cohen had a message for Canada that he found too overwhelming - which is one reason he had to write Beautiful Losers while high on amphetamines. I don't think anyone ever really penetrated to the core of his fiction, what it was actually about, what it was a screen for - not even Cohen himself. Canadian critics like Northrop Frye liked to suppress the ugly truths in the early poems and novels, calling them 'mythopeic' when in fact they were often closer to straight reportage about a country that was harbouring Nazis and engaging in secret genocide. Those were the real, deep reasons Leonard Cohen felt driven to write -- but Canada didn't really want that kind of writer.

I have to thank Ira Nadel for bringing some of the guck to the surface. In a few years, Cohen's handlers will probably have managed to bury most of it - and with it, the true story of Canada.





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So Long, Marianne: A Love Story by Kari Hesthamar
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For all its studied naivete, Marianne Ihlen's book could be a cautionary tale about the dangers of swimming in unknown waters.

Follow the money, and the CIA-MKULTRA connection. It's 1961 and Leonard's true whereabouts -- the Bay of Pigs invasion -- is not even mentioned even though it's well documented elsewhere and Marianne had to know, even if only in retrospect. Fall of 1961: six months later, payment has materialized and she leaves her mother's house in Oslo to live with Leonard in Montreal, a short walk from the Allan Memorial Institute -- she doesn't mention Dr Cameron, just that the couple lived for a time in spacious luxury, along with baby Axel, son of Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen.

No explanation for where the money supporting this lifestyle came from, only that it wasn't from poetry, or even the alleged "television series" that Leonard was working on with Irving Layton. Also it didnt last long because soon they were back on Hydra scrounging for cast off clothes and furniture. So I think this 1961 windfall came courtesy of Allen Dulles and his ragtag Cuban brigade that took Leonard to Havana and probably served as the inspiration for one of his very first songs, "A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes."

Because I knew these people, years later, I find the artsy cover story trite - why do people buy the "flowers on the table" nonsense? It was not a stable or happy relationship even in 1960, before Leonard took off for America, and Marianne sent her 6 month old son to her mother in Norway on a SAS plane after meeting some pilots in the port of Hydra. After her baby departs for the north, Marianne stays on Hydra with Leonard, who was perfectly capable of putting his own flowers on the table. Maybe he needed a cook and bedmate -- although we're told that most of the housework was done by a neighbour, Kiria Sophia. What kept her and Leonard so occupied in their new life together, before their long drive up to Norway? As someone else has noted, everything about 1960 seems slightly iffy and dreamlike, at times cringe-worthy, as writing can be when it's avoiding some unmentionable truth. My guess is that Leonard was getting ready to go to America on a mission, which entailed a period of training before the CIA invasion brigade reached Cuba in the spring of 1961.

Significantly that same year, Marianne's estranged husband was spending much time with his new American girlfriend Patricia whose life revolved around the US base in Athens. Later he would write that he felt "banished" from Hydra (he had wrecked their house in a fit of rage one night, propelling Marianne into the arms of her Canadian poet admirer who lived up the hill.) We learn of Jensen mainly through his letters, usually angry in tone and content, however he never seems to have a bad word to say about the man who took his wife and child. "Leonard has the gift of making himself admired," writes Jensen, "which is why I will keep myself lurking in the background." It almost sounds, at times, as if the two men were cronies instead of rivals. Although broke (like Leonard, he never made real money from writing) the elder Jensen flies off to Mexico to be with his mysterious American friend (handler?) John Starr Cooke, over the winter of 1960- 1961. Cooke feeds him LSD and later Axel and Leonard get their novels reviewed and become famous writers overnight although reviews are just mixed--

(That same year LIFE magazine puts together a feature on the artists of Hydra, showcasing Leonard in particular, as a guitar-playing entertainer although at the time he had not yet written any song. The article is never published and Marianne doesn't mention it in her memoir, but many of her Hydra circle appear in the photos. LIFE Magazine was heavily CIA-controlled, of course, and Hydra writer, George Johnston, was one of its stringers, although by 1960 he was ill with tuberculosis.S0 1960 was some sort of turning point, not just for Leonard and Marianne, but for the island -- stars were rising, powerful people were taking notice -- or perhaps all this was being orchestrated from elsewhere? )

LSD played a bigger role on the island than one would expect in 1960 and also later on. Marianne notes that the wife of Hydra resident John Cassipides was the daughter of LSD guru Aldous Huxley. For anyone familiar with the history of the Tavistock Institute, and its role in promoting the "counter-culture", it should be clear that all this was happening a little early. Either these future cultural icons were amazingly prescient in their drug-taking habits, or someone was the handing them the blueprint for what would become Flower Power and the sixties "revolution". Like her fellow island-dwellers who were busy breaking up their marriages in an endless cycle of drinking and partying, Marianne went along with the trends before they were really trendy.

Later (ca 1967) the same "John Starr Cooke" character invites Marianne to his Oaxaca estate where he feeds her more LSD -- apparently the only form of therapy available at the time. You have to wonder about the presence of so many well-funded gurus whose only job is to encourage people to turn in, tune in and drop out. A daughter of Aldous Huxley marries into the Hydra art community - how could all this not be, somehow, outside the realm of coincidence? Rather it seems that Hydra was chosen as a floating human laboratory, a place to bring together a flock of "unstables" - a social engineering term for change-bringers, the kind of people who influence others to accept new ideas and ways of life.

Maybe what Leonard saw in Marianne, was not just a Muse -- I'm sure she was one -- but also a borrowed wife and child to serve as a foil for his secret activities? Am I being cynical for suspecting his motives in living with a woman he repeatedly cheated on and eventually abandoned?

In one letter he refers to Axel Jensen's son, baby Axel, as "Barnet" (?) What were they all thinking? Apparently nobody including Marianne really wanted this little boy. Not mentioned: When he was 11 baby Axel took LSD provided by wealthy Hydra resident and self-appointed guru George Lialios. The story of little Axel is one of the saddest chapters in the history of this famous couple - today he remains a casuality, permanently residing in a mental institution in Norway. How could Marianne not have realized their magical mystery tour would end tragically as she packed the boy off to private schools in Switzerland, then to Summerhill in the UK, ignoring his pleas to be rescued from this experiment? In the end Axel joined a lost generation that included Lilly Mack's son Sergei and Magda ' s Alexander, both drug takers and drug dealers. Although Sergei has survived, Alexander died young of complications from a sponge diving accident - I was on Hydra in 1981 when the accident happened.

When will these Hydra cover stories stop dipping into the same barrel of clichés? Yes, the expatriates who flocked to the island were talented and young and ready to do anything to make it - but let's not pretend all this is only about the artistic life. Some were artists but others were mercenaries and intelligence operatives in search of a safe haven to do business. Art was present but - especially after the Greek junta (timed to coincide with the Flower Power revolution) -- the real money came from inherited fortunes, as well as drugs and weapons. When Leonard and Marianne arrived on Hydra, Operation Gladio was in full swing -- and western governments and their intelligence arms were intent on taking control of culture in order to engineer future generations. All this was part of the agenda that aimed to profit the wealthy - and Greece was a magnet for all kinds of offshore investments. Ambitious young writers seeking quick fame and fortune soon learned they needed to moonlight to get by - and the rewards for secret work in the service of the CIA could be impressive.

**********************************
TWO DAYS LATER
Now that I've finished, I'm giving it 3 stars instead of 2. Later chapters had more to offer - including inadvertent insights into the 'hidden hand' operating behind the curtain of Leonard and Marianne's lives, but I can't list them all right now. It seems more than odd that Axel Jensen just happened to check into R.D. Laing's private clinic in London for more LSD and therapy. There is a colourful chapter set in Mexico where Marianne goes seeking solace with Axel's American guru "John Smith" - whose teachings come straight out of Esalen and sensitivity training. A strange and compelling chapter about New York in the Chelsea Hotel days as Leonard was starting to make a career in music - while Marianne struggles with poverty and abandonment on Clinton Street -- reveals much sadness and desperation between the lines.

Marianne at times comes across as a lost creature -- not at all how I had imagined her. I met her once, on Hydra, in 1981 - she had recently remarried and seemed solid, sane, and matronly if shy and withdrawn. As she looks back, in her seventies, at her life as one half of a legendary couple, she seems incapable of seeing through the myths, the amazing deceptions, that made up the legend. But this is true of all the characters, even the hyper-critical novelist Axel Jensen whom she married, and his poetry-spewing rival Leonard Cohen who never really noticed other people.

So Long, Marianne is peopled by ghosts who gave themselves up to the poisoned zeitgeist, sacrificing heir own, ant others', lives in pursuit of fame and momentary 'enlightenment' --

When I closed the book last night, my overwhelming feeling was of pity for the players in this tragedy -- but I'll probably have more to say later. For another account of what Hydra and Leonard were like in the early 80s, read my self-published memoir The Man Next Door. There was more going on than Marianne Ihlen's ghost-written book merely hints at.


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A ROOM ON THE MOUNTAIN, by Anne Cimon

Room on the Mountain, A by Anne Cimon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this beautifully written, deeply felt exploration of a woman coping with the loss of her husband and her own mortality. The narration pulls you in, laying bare all the little details that we use to distract ourselves from pain and grief. Anne Cimon is an impressive writer with a gift for revealing characters caught in vulnerable, awkward moments in ordinary settings: hospital corridors and waiting rooms, restaurants and public washrooms, empty apartments inhabited by missing loved ones. It's a sensitive page-turner, driven by a sense of relentless searching for answers: how to live in the aftermath of illness, how to face loneliness and fear of death, how to rebuild a broken life and find reasons to go on? Her heroine, Catherine Sauve, is a compelling mixture of practicality and eccentricity, as she fantasizes about the surgeon who saved her life. Cimon achieves the delicate balance between hope, kindness, synchronicity and the near-magical romantic feelings that they stir up. Although I felt it ended too quickly, I found this novel very touching and cinematic in its close-ups and also in the way it sustained dramatic tension to the end. Highly recommended!

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Seen and Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist by Jasun Horsley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm nearly finished this now. I took a break after the chapter which is really a brilliant review of The Counsellor, another film I haven't seen (directed by Ridley Scott) that did badly at the box office. Now I want to see it, if only to find out if I can sit through it. Evidently it ends horrifically with the suggested torture-murder of Penelope Cruz, just another victim of Mexican drug wars and the cross-border snuff film trade. I stopped reading because all the violence was beginning to seem too 'personal' -- it seems Jasun Horsley has no other subject or obsession, and I'm grateful in way, that he has made it his mission to view and write about films which depict extreme violence, often sexualized and directed against women. I thank him for that because it means I can go on skipping those films, or just read about them through Horsley's eyes.

I took a breather from SEEN & NOT SEEN to read The Story of O. over Valentine's Day -- the timing was unintentional. The Story of O. also shocked me, in a different way (I wrote a brief review of it at Goodreads but I've since had afterthoughts that I'd like to explore some other time). Usually I don't like to be shocked, but I'm deciding i could get used to it. I thought Story of O. would allow me to consider the subject of sexualized violence against women from a female perspective, and it did but I wasn't prepared for Pauline Reage's detached, poetic style -- so much the opposite of Horsley's. I've nearly concluded Story of O. is a feminist novel -- at least, in a backhanded way it is, as it depicts men as monsters and women as utter dupes and victims, and cold-bloodedly moves toward some inevitable climax that never really arrives. Same subject, but a totally opposite approach since Reage leaves herself out of the narrative whereas Horsley inserts himself everywhere.

For example in SEEN & NOT SEEN we learn that while watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre he sustained an erection throughout. That's amazing -- I mean, it's a detail but it tends to stick in your mind. You wonder why, and you read on to find out. That little detail comes up again in the penultimate chapters about Jasun's brother, the famous English suicide-artist Sebastian Horsley who died of an overdose in 2010. I had never heard of Sebastian although he was famous enough to be interviewed on Q by Jian Gomeshi. I watched five minutes of that interview before I had to shut it down -- it reminded me of things I can't quite name or put my finger on, and five minutes was all I could take of that video.

The same is not true of Jasun's writing which is fluid, self-aware, and revealing of nuances that usually get left out of film criticism. I don't know why, but I keep thinking of Pico Iyer -- whom I can't seem to bring myself to read -- as the possible antithesis of Jasun Horsley -- I'll have to get back to you on that.

Horsley is smooth, but he's not slick. He's cool, but not cold. His prose is weirdly naked, and that could be why it's hard to put down. You think "this boy really needs an editor" but you don't have time to care, since he keeps dragging you down a path that always circles back to some personal trauma. I think that's the hook. You want to know what happened to him, back in childhood, that made him like this. And also, what was it that destroyed his whole family, the nuclear one, the father-mother-brother trio with Jasun the sole survivor who ran away and lived to tell the tale. That's the crazy subtext to all this, I think, but I'm having trouble being objective because for the last six months I've got immersed in Jasun's online world.

Come to think of it, it's unlike any other world I've ever been immersed in. I don't often get immersed in anything because deep down I don't like getting lost -- but in this case, it's like reading Alice in Wonderland at age 8 all over again. It's so farflung. Obviously, Jasun Horsley has had nothing better to do for most of his life than explore. Near as I can figure, he grew up rich and neglected. First he explored comic books and movies, the more violent the better. Then he ran away and explored America through the lens of Clint Eastwood, Pauline Kael and spaghetti westerns. Then he nearly died of love and ran to Morocco where he met Paul Bowles. After that, he tried to reconnect with his famous-notorious brother, friend of criminals, darling of the London degenerate art scene,, before leaving for Guatemala to become a shaman. I'm sure I'm leaving out a lot -- at some point he even tries to make in Hollywood as he's writing scripts along with film criticism. He goes into all this in SEEN & NOT SEEN -- obviously he can't get away from it -- it's his life story and it's fascinating -- not in the way that old Hollywood movies are, with a causal structure that unfolds inevitably like an old-fashioned sentence -- but more like a Batman movie with special effects, or like BRAZIL (which I found hard to sit through) --

And yet, you can't help feeling he's searching for an ending, almost in the classical sense of a finale that will tie all this together for better or worse or a bit of both.

Which reminds me, I still need to read the final chapter. Maybe it really will end.

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MURDER OF TIME - Manufacturing Terror

For deeper insights into how the War on Terror really works –and how governments fake terrorist threats to justify repressive anti-terrorist laws and technology-- I highly recommend Matthew Pauly's disturbing (and quirky) memoir THE MURDER OF TIME.

An unforgettable account of an unwitting Canadian's forced recruitment into the bizarre world of cross-border black ops -- first as a victim, targeted by a team of rogue intelligence agents operating in his own neighbourhood, and later as a helplessly drugged, programmed assassin forced to kill a stranger on the streets of an American city.

Matthew, a software designer, has just started a new job at Toronto's Pearson Airport when two freak events at work - a plane crash and a tornado – trigger his untreated PTSD and put him on stress leave. Memories flood back of being kidnapped and programmed in a van on the streets of Toronto by a shadowy agency using military mind control technology to manufacture "domestic terror' suspects.

Tortured to make him scream phony terror threats in Arabic, Matthew (who knows no Arabic) confesses on video to a non-existent plot to blow up the CN tower in downtown Toronto.

Sound familiar?

I met Matthew Pauly last winter while passing through Toronto. I'd got in touch with him after reading a comment he posted at the McGill Daily website, in response to an article detailing McGill's involvement in CIA research to create Manchurian candidates or mind-controlled assassins. He had written a book for which he needed editorial assistance. I'm the author of a memoir describing my childhood growing up in (and out of) the MKULTRA program based at McGill. I've also researched and written extensively on how several generations have been impacted by trauma-based mind control.

When we met for the first time in the Toronto bus terminal, Matthew was wearing a bullet proof vest. He took me across the street to Starbucks where we talked for an hour and he gave me a print copy of his book, MURDER OF TIME. I read the first half after reboarding my bus heading west on the 403. I have no doubt that Matthew is what he claims to be: the victim of a secretive program that has been operating in Canada (and across North America) since the 1950s. How he was selected to be part of this strange universe and a pawn of powerful forces, is a story worth rereading (and sharing). MURDER OF TIME reads like an action movie, which is likely why it caught the attention of Sean Stone who interviewed him before the book was finished.

Matthew is quintessentially Canadian - polite to a fault, ever conscious of the niceties, constantly trying to play by the rules even when he's face to face with the hair-raising evil of a cross-border "Joint Task Force" that kidnaps and tortures him one night inside a white van parked on a bland Toronto street.

Do read MURDER OF TIME, recommend it to everyone you know - not just because it's the strangest and most terrifying book to come out in Canada this year -- but most of all because it's true. Then, prepare yourself for the sequel.

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Common Ground by Justin Trudeau
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Someone recently compared Justin Trudeau's mind to a teenager's bedroom. This autobiography shows he's been busy lately cleaning it up. Almost believable in its persistent tone of sincerity, it made me forget for a while that the Trudeau era was a time of massive deception.

First there was Trudeau-mania. After It subsided came a wave of national depression and cynicism. In its aftermath, COMMON GROUND – which Trudeau ends with a long, boring blast of Liberal feel-good rhetoric -- left me depressed, cynical and in need of a good stiff drink or dose of lithium.

Definitely the boy, or his publicist, can tell a story. There's no denying Justin's life has been marked by tragedy: his parents' very public divorce, his mother's descent into mental illness, the death of his younger brother in an avalanche. These candid moments are genuinely moving and the book's greatest strength. Justin has lived through many of the challenges of his generation and his team understands he can draw on the youth vote in the next election if he can just get them off their cell phones and drugs.

Judging by how many people seem to like it, Team Trudeau has scored a coup with this book, remaking Justin's image from pampered Golden Boy into a roll-up-your-sleeves, school-of-hard-knocks underdog, ready to bare his chest and rebound from every overhand punch in the televised charity bout of Canadian politics.

Maybe that’s why in this pre-election scrum, the son treats his late father with kid gloves, never implying Pierre was anything but a kind, involved parent. It's the best we can expect but it does make me wonder how much the writer has repressed.

The opening lines to his eulogy at Pierre Trudeau's funeral were more ambivalent and ironic: "Friends, Romans, Countrymen --" and a pause just long enough for the audience to fill in the unspoken: "I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." Canadians have got used to saying that Justin is "not Pierre" or even a close second. In COMMON GROUND, he almost manages to turn this lifelong failure into an asset. Throughout, he never stops praising the father he could never please when he was alive.

Notwithstanding the roses, pirouettes and wide-ranging sexual appetite, Pierre was deeply committed to bringing up his three sons. Still, many found him distant, cold, and detached from the lives of ordinary people -- whereas Justin, an average student, supposedly has the popular touch. Closer to his jet-setting mother, he occasionally flirted with politics. At McGill, he loyally campaigned against the Meech Lake Accord and, perhaps more tellingly, volunteered with the Sexual Assault Centre. Gravitating to youth work, he kept a low profile as a teacher in British Columbia, rooming for a while with a now-convicted pedophile and also sitting on the board of the Katimavik Centre founded by his father's friend Senator Jacques Hebert.

His eulogy at Pierre's funeral in September 2000 catapulted him into the public eye at 30. The Trudeaus are used to displaying emotion in public, from "Just watch me" during the October Crisis to the one-finger salute in Salmon Arm, but even by their standards Justin's performance by his father's coffin was an embarrassing cliff-hanger: a rambling 9-minute speech that began, almost surreally, with a trip to the North Pole and ended with "Papa, je t'aime" and a handkerchief moment.

There is a lot in the family history to suggest their charisma is rehearsed in secret to distract from those old rumours that Pierre and Margaret came together in the 1960s under the auspices of the Air Force and programmed with LSD at a farm out in BC. During her recent breakdown, Margaret was hospitalized at McGill's notorious Allan Memorial Institute under the care of Dr. Dimitri Pivnicky, father of Mila Mulroney.

Canada's elite is so small, perhaps it was inevitable that Justin would end up as Liberal leader. This book goes far in dispelling any notions that his ascent was automatic or effortless. On the way up, Justin spent time pounding the pavement of his Papineau riding, the poorest in Canada, standing around grocery store parking lots handing out leaflets and introducing himself to locals, many of whom were still hostile to the memory of Pierre. Justin -- or his staff of writers -- would have us believe that he sweated his way up slowly up from the bottom of the political heap to become our Future Prime Minister, the only leader capable of coaxing alienated and apathetic youth back to the ballot boxes and bring in a whole new era of tolerance, prosperity and national unity.

I was touched and impressed to read of Justin's struggles in a down-and-out Montreal neighbourhood I know well, until I realized his handlers have found a perfect way to repackage his image. Much as the Katimavik kids he once mentored spend time in community service en route to high-paying careers elsewhere, Justin emerged from his short season in Hell to grab the leadership, champion pipelines and more Draconian surveillance laws. Pierre, who gave us the War Measures Act, would be proud to welcome his prodigal son back to the club.

Maybe Justin plans to harness the energies of his own generation that has lived through lots of divorce, psychiatry, drugs, and sexual experimentation. Maybe the secret violence that marked Pierre’s career has kept Justin out of politics until now.

So what draws him into the political mainstream at this time? Could it be a sense of civic responsibility? The obligations in which children of the elite so often find themselves entangled? The Trudeau family curse?

The strong undertow of tragedy makes COMMON GROUND a compelling read. The younger Trudeau navigates dark waters with some of the same aplomb his dad displayed shooting the Canadian rapids, while lesser men opted to portage.

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The Man Next Door by Ann Diamond


Ann Diamond's The Man Next Door (Bootleg edition)

"A wonderful memoir of life with Leonard Cohen in Montreal and Greece through the heady 60s, spiritual 70s and cynical 80s - the music - the lyrics - the drugs - the government's mind control experiments - brilliant table talk by a woman who knew him well. Cover art by Tigana."

"I'm still recovering! And I mean that in the best way possible…All my favourite texts knock the ground out from beneath my feet. Not only did it topple me, it might be the most engaging memoir I've read. You make subtle gestures towards the devil in the details with a very sharp labrys…pure artistry.>> -- Andrew Roberts

That was one great read. More gentle on our hero and maybe less paranoid than stuff written in the past. The story really does hang together and connects with my own memories of Montreal. But what I really want to know is, where can I see a picture of the Chinese man flipping through the air?-- Tom Hochmann

"It is a most unique book , from a most unique perspective , and shines a light in the dark - there is nothing like it. I found it all compelling, never bored, no urge to skip, held by the words on every page. Things I have wondered about LC, from the things dropped in his songs, things he has said fell into place ." -- JIM FRIESON, Japan

"Well done. And timely. "Manufacturing the Dead Head" over at Gnostic Media and Dave McGowan's work and now your work are all meshing like a perfectly synchronized Rolex Submariner wrist watch. --- Agent Rooster Cogburn

"Fascinating insight from that period from Ann Diamond, as usual." --- Kitty Hundal

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." --- Anonymous .......

"The ending will shock you." -- Ellen Atkin

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Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Man Next Door

by Ann Diamond

Giveaway ends January 21, 2015.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This biography, like the earlier one by Ira Nadel, is the next instalment in the fairytale of Leonard Cohen's "life," and repeats some of the same errors, omissions and obfuscations. I hate to be unfan-like, but some of us read biographies to find out, err, the "truth" about famous people, not to wallow in their personal myth or worship in their cult of personality.

Leonard Cohen is one of those 20th century singers who made it to idol status after a long, sometimes bitter struggle.  It would be nice if someone, someday, actually peeked behind the curtain of stardom and exposed some of the more transparent fables.

Let's begin with his McGill undergraduate days, when he came close to flunking out with a 56.4 grade average at graduation. "He did much better in math" though, -- yes, perhaps because Leonard was infinitely more calculating than his naive schoolmates who actually studied. At age 17, he began supplementing his income by volunteering for Donald Hebb's notorious, CIA-funded, sensory isolation experiments, for which he got paid a lucrative $20/day. These led to days and weeks spent in flotation tanks on LSD. It's a miracle he managed to remain sane enough to write poetry -- but then, the CIA has long had a soft spot for poets and writers. They often make great spies.

Even in high school, Leonard had shown a tendency to embrace violence. His first short story, published in the Westmount HS yearbook, was titled "Kill or Be Killed."

At least Simmons asks the obvious question -- "How did Leonard get away with it?" -- while glossing over the answers. How does a 21-year-old McGill Law School dropout with barely passing grades get into graduate school at Columbia? Simmons admits "Enrolling at Columbia had really been a cover, something to keep Leonard's family happy."

Cohen friend Mort Rosengarten told Simmons that wealthy Montreal Jewish families did not want their sons becoming artists and intellectuals -- rather they were expected to enter the family business and churn out elegant suits and ties for the elite. Nevertheless, while rebelliously "floundering" in New York, Leonard founded a literary magazine called The Phoenix -- a perfect way to get close to the Greenwich Village poetry scene and its beatniks who ignored his formal, McGill-influenced verse.

Anyone who knows Leonard knows he's a sharp and disciplined thinker, not the kind of unfocussed dreamer who would imagine he could make a living off poetry. How did he survive in New York as he moved from failure to failure? That's the question that never seems to get answered.

We do know that in 1959 he moved to London to work on a novel. During that time, he met Jacob Rothschild -- heir to a banking empire -- who suggested Leonard visit his mother, Barbara Hutchison, on Hydra. Barbara Hutchison had divorced Jacob's father, and was planning to marry the painter Nikos Ghikas, who had a mansion overlooking the village of Kamini. Simmons doesn't say more about that visit, which found its way into Hydra legend. Following in Henry Miller's footsteps, Leonard knocked on Ghikas' door but, unlike Miller, who was welcomed, he was told to go away. As Leonard told it later to friends on Hydra, he shook his fist and shouted "Curse this house!" Soon after, the mansion burned to the ground and remains a spooky ruin to this day.

Maybe the Rothschilds had a bone to pick with Ghikas over Barbara's desertion? Maybe Leonard was their messenger? Simmons does not go there. She repeats the official story of how Leonard met Marianne and settled down on Hydra, in an ex-patriate community of artists that included Marianne's husband, Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen and Australian writers George and Charmian Johnston. (Late in 1959, Hydra's artists somehow figured in a photo-spread in LIFE magazine -- which Simmons doesn't mention, perhaps because the article was not only precious and tacky, it raises the question of why an obscure Canadian folksinger would appear in so many painfully posed photos depicting Bohemian life on a Greek island.)

LIFE magazine was a flagship of the CIA "MOCKINGBIRD" program -- but that's a conspiracy theory so let's move on. Next we come to the famous Cuban Missile Crisis adventure. This story gets more absurd with each repetition. Simmons delivers the standard version of how Leonard returned to Montreal in the fall of 1960, broke and separated from the woman and child he planned to support with the proceeds of his talent. After co-writing two unsuccessful TV scripts with Irving Layton, he learned his first novel had been rejected by McClelland and Stewart. On March 30, when he would normally have been going over the galleys for The Spicebox of Earth, and looking for paying work, the cash-strapped Leonard suddenly boarded a plane in Miami and flew to Cuba, just days ahead of the Bay of Pigs invasion.

"It is no great surprise that Leonard should have wanted to see Cuba," Simmons explains. "Lorca, his favourite poet, spent three months there when the country was America's playground, calling it a 'paradise' and extolling its virtues and vices."

Sure. Of course. She delivers a repeat of Leonard's carefully-honed account of days spent stumbling in and out of bars and hotels, and how he almost gets arrested as a CIA agent by Castro's over-zealous militia. But wait -- what if he really was a CIA agent? What if, in a desperate moment, he volunteered for the notorious failed mission, organized by CIA director Allen Dulles, the evil genius behind the MKULTRA program at McGill?

After all, the young Cohen and spymaster Dulles were only a degree or two of separation from each other. Dulles even employed some of Cohen's mentors and professors -- like Donald Hebb -- albeit covertly. Some of their secret LSD research involved the creation of Manchurian Candidates -- mind controlled agents and couriers who could be sent around the world on various missions in the name of anti-communism.

It stands to reason, in a way, doesn't it? That a hungry young poet with a "fascination for violence" might have signed up to go to Havana ahead of the military invasion with the group of spies who assigned to the hotels and bars. Exactly the kind of operation the MKULTRA program is now famous for.

Ten years later, on New Skin for the Old Ceremony, Cohen decided to spill the beans in a song: "Field Commander Cohen" -- "our most important spy/ wounded in the line of duty/ parachuting acid into diplomatic cocktail parties." However, Simmons dismisses this joking confession as having "no justification whatsoever."

Readers who are not totally brainwashed will gag on this nonsense, but in a way, it's just so interesting -- and there's more.

Like Nadel before her, Simmons doesn't seem to know Leonard was on Hydra from December 1980 through September 1981. How could she, if he didn't tell her? Others -- like me, for example -- could have filled her in on the aftermath of his dismal 1980 European tour, which ended in Tel Aviv on late November. I met Leonard and his musicians as they landed in Tel Aviv airport. I heard the complaints and arguments in the hotel over the next two days. Simmons says Leonard took them all on a jaunt to the Dead Sea -- I think someone is pulling our leg here. I recall Leonard, holed up at the hotel in a string of meetings with Israeli journalists and mysterious officials, ending with a painful meeting where he threatened to fire the band and replace them with "$300-a-week Armenian oud-players." Except for Sharon Robinson, who was cowriting a song with Leonard, Passenger band members seemed angry and demoralized as they boarded the plane back to Texas.

Simmons has him flying straight to New York from Tel Aviv, staying at the Algonquin Hotel, and buying Hannukah candles in preparation for celebrating the holiday with his children -- although Hannukah ended on December 10. (Nadel says he attended a religious ceremony on December 11). Neither biographer mentions John Lennon's assassination, two kilometers away on Central Park, which happened on the night of December 8, 1980. Leonard would have seen the streams of people in the streets, many holding candles and heading for the wake outside the Dakota where Lennon was shot.

In fact, though, Leonard flew Tel Avid -Athens on November 26. I arrived a day or two later and saw him at his house which he was preparing for his children's arrival, and several times over the following week. His Spanish translator, Alberto Manzano, also visited at Christmas for two weeks and took photos of Leonard in his kitchen, with Adam and Lorca, and around the port of Hydra. Those photos are displayed on Leonard's website.

If he was in New York on December 11, it had to have been a quick trip. He never mentioned it to me or anyone else. That's why when I reviewed Nadel's biography in 1995, I said the New York trip was one of many errors.

I have doubts about how biographies are constructed, especially when the subject is still alive and able to alter the facts of his own life. Both Simmons and Nadel shove the events of 1981 -- like Cohen's first meeting with Dominique Isserman -- to 1982. According to their account, which really sounds like Cohen's own summary, he spent 1981 somewhere in a state of creative limbo, penning "If It Be Thy Will" as a sort of prayer to his management.

I wonder why the year on Hydra, where he was ensconced from November 1980 to December, gets vaporized by these biographers? I think i know why. But if I told you, I'd have to kill you.

All right, I'll tell you. But you'll have to buy my memoir first, tentatively titled THE MAN NEXT DOOR, which is bound to get me in trouble but I don't really care anymore. And no, I'm not "objective" -- but neither are Simmons' sources.

I knew Leonard quite well from 1977 to 1983, when a strange coincidence brought me to his neighbourhood where I lived for the next 12 years. I studied with his Roshi during what I think was a decisive period for Cohen at least in terms of his relationship to Zen in America. I witnessed enough to notice the whitewashing (or should I say "chemtrailing"?) of Leonard's past that seems to be intensifying as he nears his 80s and near-sainthood.

I think the truth is way more interesting than the hagiographic PR we have been hearing for the past 30 years. Let's just say there has been more than one holocaust in Leonard's lifetime. There is much more to Leonard Cohen than his fans suspect, and therein lies a tale on the theme of "responsibility."



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NIKO -- by Dimitri Nasrallah

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This award-winning novel opens very powerfully in Lebanon during the civil war years when Niko is a small boy and his mother is expecting a second child. The first two chapters are beautifully written in their drama and shock effect, and raise expectations for the rest of the book that seem almost impossible to meet. The tension and sense of tragedy are nearly unbearable as father and son travel the Greek islands seen through the eyes of these traumatized refugees desperately trying to rebuild their lives after unimaginable loss. Once Niko arrives in Canada, out of harm's way but also severely shaken by the loss of his father who has remained behind in Athens, he is adopted by immigrant relatives and forced to begin his life over in a strange country devoid of warmth, where survival is guaranteed but life has little meaning. With that transition to a safer, greyer world devoid of family values, the story of Niko loses much of its energy and focus as it becomes a tale of adaptation to a strange new environment. You could argue that this is inevitable, given that Montreal and Beirut are as far apart as tragedy and irony -- but I think some of the responsibility for the relative weakness of the final chapters (and particularly the climax, when Niko robs the till at Zeller's to go searching for his father, now a shipwrecked sailor with amnesia who has ended up in Chile after being found at sea, the sole survivor of a vessel that sank off the coast of Brazil...) belongs to the author, for failing to deepen and develop the character of Niko. In fact, from the shipwreck on, I stopped believing in a story that had seemed overwhelmingly real, and incredibly riveting up to that point. The geographic distance between father and son also becomes a distancing from reality, or maybe a literary nod to Gabriel Garcia Marquez rather than an authentic exploration of the refugee experience. The magic begins to feel contrived, as Niko suffers through adolescent exile marooned on Montreal's suburban south shore with an aunt and adoptive uncle who are pursuing their own materialistic dreams as immigrants and 'new Canadians." Both Niko and his father seem detached, in different ways, from their own inner truth. Maybe this is the theme, reflecting the psychic condition of post traumatic stress -- but I couldn't help feeling the novel failed to find a path to a conclusion worthy of its astonishing and unforgettable beginning.



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My little round-up

I did more roofing this year than reading, but looking back these were some of the books that most impressed me...

Dave McGowan, Inside the LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation

McGowan's disturbing revisionist history of Laurel Canyon, birthplace of the Peace and Love Generation, begins with a series of stupefying revelations linking just about every sixties' rock icon to US military intelligence. Had he extended his search to England and investigated the role of MI5 in setting up the EMI recording label, he could have added Mick Jagger et al. to the list of rock stars whose careers were engineered in Cold War laboratories. He goes on to dissect the peculiar influence of mass murderer Charles Manson on key figures of the hippie aristocracy that sprang up overnight like magic mushrooms along Laurel Canyon Boulevard, which had a top secret military laboratory hidden away at the top of it. McGowan is an impeccable researcher and a superb ironist, which makes Inside the LC hard to put down, although it's still missing a final chapter.

I'm not even sure if I liked it more than Wagging the Moondoggie, McGowan's hilarious exposé of the Apollo Space Program, which made me scream with laughter, something I rarely do when reading conspiracy literature. By the end, I could not believe I had actually been fooled into thinking the moon landings were real.This is at least partly due to McGowan's exceptional skills as a satirist, but also to the absurdly faked appearance of the lunar landing module, the mystery of millions of photos gone missing, and other strange anomalies that he brings to light.





Kevin Annett, Unrepentant: Disrobing the Emperor

A young United Church minister, hired to bring the word of God to a remote community on Vancouver Island, startles his white congregation by reaching out to native people in the community. Opening the doors of his church to them, and listening to their stories, he begins to stumble on graves of murdered children. The church officials order him to stop. He follows his conscience, reaps the whirlwind, loses wife, children, reputation, career, prospects.Soon he has nowhere to go but downtown to Vancouver’s Lower East Side, where Canada’s victims gather. Kevin Annett’s UNREPENTANT: DISROBING THE EMPEROR is a sequel to his earlier memoir, LOVE AND DEATH IN THE VALLEY. Both are beautifully written, extremely gripping and unforgettable. Readers may notice haunting echoes of Russell Banks: opening scene of small-town innocence in pristine wilderness/ quick dissolve and deep descent into hell.

My other favourite reads of 2011 were in French:

LA CONSTELLATION DU LYNX, by Louis Hamelin, a partly fictionalized account published on the 40th anniversary of the 1970 October Crisis which revisits the events of that strangely under-investigated drama that led to martial law. Mostly based on interviews with major and minor players, it fills in background and draws links which were hidden at the time, and seem to prove that the FLQ kidnapping and the murder of Pierre Laporte were engineered from high echelons of the Canadian military, and carried out by an assortment of brainwashed punks, petty crooks and police informers, who were helped every step of the way by the authorities. Much more fulfilling than the official story, and also much scarier. Everyone really should make an attempt to read this and digest its stunning implications, although Anglos might have to struggle with the Québécois humour and some of the dialect. I actually read this in November-December 2010, but could not stop thinking about it through most of 2011.


WIERA GRAN, L'ACCUSÉE, by Agata Tuszynska, translated from Polish by Isabelle Jannès-Kalinowski. I went to a reading by the Polish author who came to the Salon du Livre this past November. Wiera Gran was a famous Polish-Jewish singer, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto and after the war found herself accused (by none other than Wladyslaw Szpilman, the pianist of Roman Polanski's award-winning film) of having collaborated with the Gestapo. Well into her 90s, and living in Paris, she was still trying to prove her innocence. Fascinating.

LARA KRAMER: DANCING WITH MEMORY

Lara Kramer’s FRAGMENTS at NAC in June, 2011

Montreal dancer Lara Kramer’s investigation of her mother’s childhood in residential school – and the dance performance that grew out of it – began in 2006 when she was studying Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in Montreal. For a Creative Process class assignment, Lara began documenting her family lineage in an installation exploring her mother’s residential school experience in Manitoba during the 1950s and 60s.

While Lara was growing up in the 1980s, her mother, Ida Baptiste, sometime told stories about her often traumatic seven years when she was torn from her family and forced to attend a Manitoba boarding school from age 4 to 11. Later, Ida lived in a foster home in Manitoba. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

In 1995, Ida suddenly left home. Lara was 14, her younger brother only 4. Losing her mother was Lara’s point of entry into a tragedy that afflicted thousands. Canadian government policy was to break up aboriginal families and force children to give up their language and traditional way of life: an official policy of cultural genocide that left its victims alone to heal the losses and wounds.

One Thanksgiving weekend in 2007, Lara interviewed her mother at her home on the Rama reserve near Barrie, Ontario. “Going to the root of my mother's childhood helped me to understand her as an adult. Prior to dance, in 2001 - 2003 I studied Early Childhood Education. I wanted to understand how early development shaped our lives as adults. I think subconsciously I was trying to understand why my mother was the way she was...and why she left.”

Transcribing the mother’s stories, Lara was able to “see my mother more objectively, as a person that these things had happened to.” The research process led to a script that used her mother’s interview text as voice-over for a solo dance work which Lara found “very difficult to be inside. I wanted to convey, not just my mother’s story, but the emotions of the other young children.”

Ida had attended school in Portage la Prairie (1954-56), Manitoba and was later transferred to Brandon Residential School (1957-61). In 2009, Lara travelled back to Portage La Prairie with her mother, and visited The Indian Residential School Museum of Canada where Lara held a residency to further her research for an eight-month project involving four dancers The end result, Fragments, is a full-length piece exploring themes of Abuse, isolation, fear, authority – using a contemporary dance vocabulary.

“Fragments was very much about my personal history with my mother, spiritually, emotionally, poetically, cyclically . The darker images and emotions of these young children come from my own wounds, from having a mother who abandoned me.”
She had always connected to her mother’s memories “empathetically. I always knew I was lucky to have parents, growing up in London, Ontario, in a housing coop where there were many native families.” Her mother was actively involved in the Native Friendship Centre and Lara’s interest in native politics started when she was young. A childhood friend lost her uncle during the Ipperwash crisis in 1995 in which a London police officer killed native man Dudley George”It was a pivotal time in learning how stereotypes and cultural attitudes contribute to violence against First Nations People,” she recalls.

“My mother was Ojibway/Cree and looked native. She was attacked from both sides because she had fair skin.”” Later, Ida studied Ojibway language and Native Studies at Trent University, reconnecting to her culture. As a dancer, Lara carries on that tradition – making connections through her work.

Being in the contemporary dance community “gives me the leverage to share this history, and have it received by a mainstream audience.”

In powerful scenes, the four dancers push desks, bully one another, and explore the limits of their prison-like world. In one sequence, a girl rises from a twisted posture crammed into her wooden residential school chair and begins to awaken to the truth.

While working with non-native dancers who knew little about the history of residential schools, Lara was able to get them to “embody the spirit of the children, connect to their voices, and touch the depth of it.”

A residency at Theatre Gesû’s Centre de Créativité led to the final crafting and a premiere in June 2009. The three-night run included a nightly artist talk where invited elders Morning Star, Delbert Joseph Sampson and Jean Stevenson spoke with the audience. Sampson, who is a Squamish nation traditional dancer and does ceremonial work with prison inmates, asked to do a ceremony at the studio. “He set up a shrine, brought regalia and did a ceremony for us; a very intimate process and exchange that cannot be put into words. He then danced for us.” Later the dancers danced for Delbert.

After that first performance at Theatre Gesu, Lara felt a huge weight lift from her shoulders. “I was no longer ashamed to be a native woman. Residential school had made my mother hate herself, and that feeling had infected me. But after sharing this work, I had more pride.”

“As a choreographer creating for an audience, I’m very aware of the dark subject matter. It’s all so politically charged, most Canadians just block it out. The challenge was to create dialogue, tell my story in a positive way so people are receptive to it. Native people have no problem understanding it: it’s part of our history. The dance space becomes a ritual space. It’s about dancers and audience living, breathing and connecting to that place and time.”

Often audiences are speechless at the end. “They come up in tears to thank me.”
More recently, in February 2011, Fragments was performed at the Talking Stick Festival, at Roundhouse Theatre in Vancouver. She’ll take it to the NAC on June 17, marking the two year anniversary of the first performance, as part of the Canada Dance Festival.

Fragments will also goes to the Banff Centre in August, where Lara will be part of the Indigenous dance program, and also teaching there for 2 ½ weeks. She and her agent are planning a tour back to Vancouver in spring 2012 and hopefully surrounding areas like Yellowknife and Victoria.

She continues to be amazed at “the way dance is documented in the body. The transferring of material from one Interpreter to another, how it lives and breathes in the entirety of the body, and how it is transformed with every new dancer who enters the work. As a choreographer, I give them a lot of freedom to create. I want to see the fragility of the human spirit, as well as the strength of it.”

Imagining Montreal

In imagining Montreal, we have to consider the hidden history of a city that has experienced wave after wave of immigration – or, if you prefer, successive phases of invasion and colonization. Since the French first arrived and planted a cross on Mount Royal, followed by the English and Scots who built the banks, our little island has existed mainly under successive states of siege. Its original inhabitants, the natives, vanished from our streets long ago, returning occasionally as shadows to beg in Metro stations and sleep on benches. And our imagination has gone the same way as our indigenous people: it’s been displaced, marginalized, and survives on handouts from a society that has lost its memory, aka compass, aka soul.

Each new colonizing gang brought its own new diseases, neuroses and crimes for which each gang needed to create hospitals, schools and prisons. All these developments make up the history of a city we still appreciate for its natural beauty and diversity. As for the institutions that still compete to control the wilderness beneath the pavement – few of us feel very attached to them, or if we do it’s mostly for all the wrong reasons.

We have grown up in the shadow of massive crimes against humanity, which we have successfully forgotten thanks to “modern science.” Our sense of well-being depends on manufactured amnesia. Still, we’re human. So every now and then we remember something that we feel might be important enough to share with other humans. This is why some of us are so professionally concerned about “literature” and “art.”

In Montreal, art is everywhere. So is writing. Lately, certain people have become quite strident in their demand that our art, and particularly our writing, be recognized across Canada. The people making this demand are mainly writers who feel under-estimated, and the arts administrators who live to make writers feel better about being poor and ignored. But lately, there is a sense that Montreal writing is not getting the audience it deserves. When a Montrealer wins a literary prize these days, it’s like the Canadiens winning the Stanley Cup. Except that hockey is such a simple game, compared to writing, where more and more “winning” is the result of promotion. So these days, our arts administrators are doing their part, to promote our city in the world where art and literature really matter.

The trouble is, these winners from Montreal rarely write about Montreal. They write about crossing the ocean in a little boat, or growing up in Maine – themes which are considered suitable for an international audience. As Montreal grows on the literary map, Montreal content seems to be disappearing --

When we write about this place, where we just happen to live, we are trying to make some sense of our lives and experiences here. Like it or not, most art is autobiography. And it’s also political. Anglos would not be so strident in their demand for recognition, if they didn’t feel a sense of opposition to the established order. In Montreal, when you are looking for an establishment to be opposed to, you can choose between two possibilities. One is English, the other French. Some Anglo Montreal writers feel they are drowning in a sea of French.

I never felt that way. I was always grateful to be living in a French speaking environment while enjoying some of the privileges of speaking English. I didn’t mind if Quebec separated. I always knew I could pick up and move someplace else. Looking back, I realize how wishy washy I was – and how lucky. Like anyone with a interest in underdogs, I wanted the French of Quebec to succeed, against all odds, in creating their own future against a backdrop of colonization. I stood around for several decades, and watched them do it. In the meantime, I wrote about my life in this place. I wrote stories, or imagined stories I would one day write …

Some of our stories are necessarily trivial and riddled with kitsch, which is why we need critics, or inner critics, to prevent us from believing in them. Like any city, Montreal is the scene of great dramas, if you can see past the situation comedy, the stereotypic images sold in souvenir shops around town, the maple leaf badges, bagels, Expo hats, hockey sweaters, churches, oratories that make up Montreal’s revolving circus of secular and religious kitsch. If you can deconstruct the testimonies of our talkative drunks, psychiatric patients, street musicians, journalists, poets, and even an internationally-recognized singer who still roams our streets on occasion, granting interviews which all sound pretty much the same – then you have a chance of Imagining the real story of Montreal. Meanwhile we have our festivals, newspapers, literary events, television stars, actors, small and large theatre companies competing for audiences in the Centre de Spectacles. Taken together, Montreal is a fascinating travel package that promises endless entertainment that only visitors can afford -- but never mind. The show goes on, and most of it washes downriver in spring.

Personally I can’t Imagine Montreal without thinking of secrets. And since secrets are usually dark, I can’t Imagine Montreal not floating in copious amounts of darkness, lit by the lamps of gambling and prostitution. Other writers have noticed all this before me.

Secrets make for interesting stories – this is a truism, and our rulers also know this. That’s why in recent years, so much effort and money has gone into colonizing and sanitizing our literary scene, ridding it of its darkness and obscurity. Exposed to the light of day, washed with Sunlight, deprived of its mysterious potential, it resembles every other literary scene on the planet, except that it appears much more self-conscious and provincial than the ones I would really like to be part of.

Why is the end result so predictable? Montreal used to be a good place to hide out and write, in secret. Nobody was looking over your shoulder, ready to snap up your manuscript for the Commonwealth Prize or the Giller Award. What was true then is still true today: to write truthfully about Montreal, you need to go far away from Montreal. And once you’re away, you tend to forget the trauma of having lived there. I believe Mavis Gallant would agree that this was true, even in her day when she was going around exhuming Butter Box Babies and upsetting the authorities by writing about it.

It was only when I left Montreal that I started to see it as a voluntary ghetto with high walls that were built by its own inhabitants –or at least certain inhabitants, who wanted to protect the spoils of conquest. In British Columbia, where I kept my radio constantly tuned to Radio-Canada so I could pretend I was still in Quebec, I rarely missed my freelance life of poverty in Montreal’s expanding literary scene. Montreal is not Quebec. Neither is it a real City State, as Montrealers like to pretend.

Living out West, I suddenly realized the principal reason nobody out there cares about “Montreal writing” is that Montreal writing does not much care about anything outside itself. Montreal writing has existed for decades in its own little ghetto – and much of it was written by men at McGill who secretly worked for British intelligence.

I rarely hear French writers complaining about their lack of outside recognition, certainly not with the sense of bitterness and outrage that rejected Anglo writers seem to feel. French writers expect to be ignored. Another way to put this is: they have learned the lessons of “independence.” Not so, we Anglos.

Complaining about being ignored by the Rest of Canada is now a Montreal Anglo tradition which I helped start it in the 1980s, when I was trying to get published. There were few publishers in Montreal back then, other than a couple of small magazines at McGill. Several Toronto editors told me there was no English writing coming out of Montreal, even though I was in Montreal and had just sent them a manuscript in English! Either I was dealing some deeply-held religious mindset (although it felt more like a longstanding unwritten policy of ignoring Montreal because it wasn’t Toronto.) I happened to have additional advantage of having lived in Southern Ontario in the mid-seventies and worked for Southam, so I knew all about their tendency to paint all Quebecers as criminally insane, in order to create scary headlines and sell their newspapers to an incredibly straight-laced public.

Or was all this part of something more insidious? E.g., a CIA-style operation to divide and rule Canada by forcing Anglo Montrealers to emigrate en masse, and thus reinforce our collective amnesia? Silence and Exile – were they doled out to us as our punishment for having witnessed one of the most bizarre military psy ops in Canadian history – the October Crisis of 1970?

By the early 1980s, there were a few of us losers still hanging around, writing in English in the Plateau. Our local media (which mainly boiled down to the Gazette) owned in Toronto and staffed by up and coming journalists from Saskatchewan, were not supportive. Their deluded mission in those days was to drag Montrealers kicking and screaming out of the Dark Age left behind by the separatists, and any leftover wet dreams we might retain of “independance.” A dirty French word, that independance –because of how it suggests “dance” as opposed to “dence” as in dense, or density, more of an Anglo virtue. Or what about that equally dirty phrase, “Vive le Quebec Libre” –a shocking obscenity that Mordecai Richler never got over, while Norm Webster was still traumatized by it in 2007, four decades later.

Those of us who lived here back then, and had even had the bad taste to be born and grow up here, had nowhere to go with our little stories and scribbles. Nobody out there wanted to know what it was like to be electroshocked at the Allan as a child or teenager, or tricked by the RCMP into taking LSD and throwing Molotov cocktails at the Montreal police. If, in fact, we even remembered those strange incidents from our past. Had we been encouraged, back then, to “write what we know” we might have eventually ended up piecing all our memory puzzles together, and arriving at the inevitable conclusion: telling the truth in Montreal can get you in trouble, if not outright killed.

This is something we have had to learn the hard way. It’s also why we have produced so few really great writers who can speak to the ROC. Because collectively, we lost our minds ca. October 1970.

Of course, all that is about to change...

Kevin Annett in Montreal, March 21 2011

Back from his European and UK speaking tour, Canadian author, activist, and whistleblower Kevin Annett is coming to Montreal. An award-winning filmmaker, Kevin Annett will read from his new book, UNREPENTANT: DISROBING THE EMPEROR, in Atwater Library auditorium (second floor), 1200 Atwater, at 6 pm, March 21, 2011.

Come see, hear, and meet the man who first exposed the dark secrets of church-and-state-run residential schools and changed the history of Canada. More information and free download at http://hiddennolonger.com

Joining Kevin at this event will be Montreal dancer/choreographer Lara Kramer, who will show clips from her performance Fragments, inspired by her mother’s stories of the Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

Kevin Annett in Montreal: March 21, 2011

I first heard of Kevin Annett back in 2003 when I was researching the story of Cold War experiments on children. Writer Max Wallace asked me if I knew about the former United Church minister out west, who had compiled affidavits from former residential school inmates who claimed to have witnessed experiments conducted by German doctors on native children.

Three years later, I was in Vancouver and called Kevin Annett. We met in a downtown cafe. Since then we've stayed in touch. Getting to know this heroic man marked a turning point in my life. Kevin Annett is one of those rare Canadians who, when confronted with blatant, systemic evil, absolutely refused to make a deal with the devil, and paid a high price for his integrity. That's why I think his remarkable story needs to be told and retold, and taught to school children, as well as in universities -- because we have so few examples, in our history and literature, of people like Kevin Annett.

Back in 2001, I'd lived in Kamloops, a town of cowboys and Indians - real cowboys and real Indians -- divided by a bridge that, among other things, separates the whiter, south side of town from the reserve on the north shore. I'd had a few First Nations students, a brilliant boy from up north who was hearing-impaired and dropped out of my class. And a girl called Crystal Narcisse. whose brother Bobby was accused of killing a white boy on the bridge in a drug deal. She attended one class, and never returned. This was standard, I was told. “They’ll show up at the beginning of the semester, but most will just disappear by mid-term.” It was a mystery, why they vanished like that – my colleague shrugged – like Mohicans. Perhaps they felt more at home in their own territory, the forests and mountains.

I'd attended a powwow in a high school gym, an amazing event that included a closed-door meeting of residential school survivors who were being encouraged to speak up about their memories of abuse. But my fellow teachers at the college, and my neighbours, who were white, told me not to put too much stake in the "rumours" -- First Nations people were always trying to take advantage of the system. "Why should they always get special treatment?” asked one woman.

There was Harry, the native man whom I met at the home of a student, who once or twice called my office, sounding drunk, wanting to come over and tell me something that he couldn’t bring himself to talk about. I didn't understand why he was prone to weeping on the phone, but the rigidity of the white community shocked me more. Kamloops was redneck city, with stunning scenery and two-stepping couples in cowboy hats and boots whirling around the dance floor at Cactus Jack's bar downtown.

I left when my contract ended, in 2002. Scenes remained frozen in my memory, just below my horizon of understanding.

Looking back, I realize the figure of Kevin Annett hovered in the background of those days. He was the one that broke the silence and took the heat – more than most white men face in a life time.

In 2002, he had just published Hidden From History: the Canadian Holocaust, and copies were circulating around the native communities.

In 2006, I finally met him at Blenz on Davie Street in Vancouver, a rainy afternoon. He walked in and my first impression was that he looked and acted like a hunted fugitive. He wore a long green raincoat and a battered hat. I had some money then. I bought his book for $40. It was filled with documents and photos and testimonies proving that Canada had been the scene of some horrific crimes against humanity.

I’m sure he wondered if I were an agent, but we hit it off. Later, we would meet in public places where he felt comfortable, like the downtown library. He spent part of the week in the downtown east side, where he a radio show at Coop Radio. I learned that some of the most interesting people in Canada hang out in that neighbourhood.

One of them is Kevin Annett.


His story defies commentary. It is so obviously the naked truth told by a naked man, stripped of everything but his story.

There are people who sell horror as entertainment and they work together with the ones who sell advice on how to “quiet the mind” and “become one with God.” This is called “brainwashing” –

Then there are people who tell the horrible truth, not for profit, but to make us aware and capable of resisting. These are called “whistleblowers” – they are often close cousins of “scapegoats.”

Canadians need to pay more attention to what is being done in their name.


The year 1995 seems to have been a critical time for our elite. Across the country, stories of atrocities were starting to surface. Duplessis Orphans in Quebec, residential school survivors in the west, and south of the border, the Clinton Commission had unleashed a flood of testimony from former children who had been tortured in the ultra-top-secret MKULTRA “mind control” program.

Child abuse on a colossal scale was becoming a national obsession.
A huge story was brewing, one that our mainstream media had been ignoring for decades. Our institutions, our faith in our leaders, and the whole structure of our political system would have been shaken by news of hidden crimes against humanity, headquartered in Canada.

That same year, Canada’s newspaper publishing empires began tightening the screws on independent journalists – who would have been the obvious messengers and interpreters of these unprecedented revelations.

That same year, the United Church of Canada began the process that would lead to the defrocking of Kevin Annett, the man who brought the residential schools abuse scandal to light.

It’s a story that speaks volumes and guarantees Annett legendary status – not that it helps him in the short run, but better a living legend than a sacrificial victim. The chain of victimization and human sacrifice does not end with him – his supporters have been targeted, even killed, in recent months in what would seem to be a stepped up effort to crack down on his movement. Kevin has his detractors, but many more supporters – witness the string of birthday messages on his Facebook page recently (and Kevin does not even like Facebook!). His enemies seem to realize that.

Ultimately, Canadian society needs to answer for the deaths and disappearances amounting to decades of genocidal treatment of aboriginal populations. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a step in that direction, does little to heal the wounds of survivors, but it bandages them with rhetoric. Has Canada really changed, and is it capable of delving into its own past and naming the perpetrators? Probably not, because the perpetrators are still in charge.

Ann Diamond Writing Workshop - Lac Selby Writers' Retreat - February 26-28, 2011

Ann Diamond Writing Workshop - Lac Selby Writers' Retreat - February 26-28, 2011



Unforgettable 2-day writing experience in a warm country environment. Regenerate your creativity, connect with other writers, and get fresh perspectives for 2011 -- and beyond. Bring your writing and a sleeping bag.

We offer: comfortable sleeping quarters, vegetarian cuisine, gorgeous lake views, unlimited snow, hot tub, walks in the woods, cozy wood fires, private consultations with a published writer, group sessions.


HOW TO GET THERE:

We'll meet you at the bus stop near Bromont, and drive you to Lac Selby. You will discover a special region of south eastern Quebec, along with its wines and delicious cheeses.

Register now: $200

Ann (workshop leader): 514 974 1116 or Gay (owner): 450 295 2865

MISSING LYNX and Ho Ho Ho...

I get sooo little time to blog, but if I don't write this, my head will explode... and I don't want that to happen right before Christmas.

Those of us who have never depended on the Montreal Gazette to do our thinking for us, have always suspected that the FLQ crisis was not as it appeared -- even though it was forbidden (in polite society) to ask obvious questions.

All that has changed in the past few months, but as usual, English Montreal slumbers on, reading Rover Arts, and waiting for Barney's Version to hit the theatres.

I, too, will be seeing Barney's Version, although I don't expect it to be as revealing as Louis Hamelin's amazing novel -- this season's real literary event, and possibly the most important book by a Quebec writer that I've read in my lifetime.

I know most Montreal anglos will never open, let alone read, this 600-page "brick" (as translator Sheila Fischman calls it) -- couched in dense witty joual, and packed with characters rescued from the freezer chest of news and police reports of 40 years ago.

I can't think of an English publisher that would pay to have it translated, either, or who would attempt to dump it into Canada's shrinking book-buying market, which still prefers reassuring Canadiana -- like How The Scots Invented Canada -- they certainly did -- and coffee table books that foster the Grand Delusion that we really are a great country intrepidly crawling on our hands and knees towards independence from the Queen,

That's a pity, because it shows us up as the nation of card-carrying schizophrenics we really are.

Therefore Louis Hamelin's stunning masterpiece of investigation and reflection will probably only be read in Quebec, where its message will only be partially heard. That's not surprising because -- as some may recall -- soon after the October crisis, Pierre Vallières proposed the shocking theory that the events that brought on the War Measures Act and changed our history forever, were really an elaborate police operation designed to devastate and demonize the legitimate nationalist movement in Quebec --

Vallières' theory was naturally ridiculed and demonized in its turn, most loudly in the Montreal Gazette by writers like MNA William Tetley (remember him?) in editorials that claimed the facts of the case absolutely proved otherwise.

Well, it turns out, Tetley was a windbag, all along -- something I somehow sensed at the time even though I didn't read the Gazette. The facts of the case tell a different story, after all, something much closer to Vallières' Version.

Which we will not be seeing in the theatres this Christmas.

So here it is: The expanding case for the RCMP and military being behind the murder of the cabinet minister. Some of these little nuggets (coated in suspicion and ready for deep frying) will give some people indigestion. Many were gathered from reading Louis Hamelin's brilliant novel, LA CONSTELLATION DU LYNX. Others come from my own perusal of timelines and reports, dating back to those days in October, when I was a young woman, fresh from the suburbs, exploring the fleshpots of rue Panet in Montreal's east end where I roomed with a friend whose left-wing Jewish boyfriend only dreamed of getting arrested and locked up in Parthenais Prison. He had spent the previous summer hitching around Quebec, and had ended up at the Maison des Pêcheurs in Gaspésie where the Rose brothers began their exciting adventure. Everyone turned up there that summer -- even nice Jewish boys, along with undercover agents of the SQ, the RCMP and those whose livelihood depended on being able to blend in with the hippies.


Here are the highlights of the case that ought to fire anyone's imagination -- if anyone still has an imagination, that is:

Let's take them one by one, in no particular order (at least for now: this is a blog, after all, and a work in progress):

Try this one:

Canadian troops were already in place in Quebec and on full alert a week before James Cross was kidnapped on October 5, 1970. I want you to think about that for a minute or two before you read the rest of this. An 'invasion' of Quebec was apparently planned -- by at least certain elements in English Canada, or its armed forces -- days before the triggering event, the kidnap of the British Trade Commissioner, had even occurred.

Have you got that? Are you wondering why you didn't know that? So am I --

Do read on. And Happy Holidays to you all!



HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHY:

A news leak during the crisis revealed that the RCMP was aware of the whereabouts of the FLQ kidnappers and was keeping track of them

Mysterious tenants living next door to the hideout where Pierre Laporte was held on Armstrong Street, at St Hubert military base, were likely police informers or others carrying out surveillance of the kidnappers.

The RCMP fumbled the ball, big time, when it failed to pass on the communique from the Liberation cell calling on the Chénier cell to refrain from killing Laporte. These and other strange discrepancies in the official story have festered in the back of our minds since October 1970, and the inquiries that followed, including the one into Organized Crime, and RCMP's use of "dirty tricks" that often blurred the boundaries between it and the criminal underworld.

Many of us have been mystified by the strange suddenness with which the authorities gave into some FLQ cell members request to go into exile -- definitely a win-win solution for b oth sides, since it added to Canadians' rage at Quebec while preventing journalists from accessing them for their version of the events, the true nature of their involvement, past histories -- all of which would have shed light on the secret behaviour of our intelligence agencies...

Some of us also recall the inquiry into RCMP dirty tricks which revealed the extent of police use of a network of informers and agents provocateurs in controlling (and even creating) FLQ cells before and after October 1970

But to me the most telling, bizarre detail of this whole dark mystery was the decision by the Cheney cell to hide out with their captive, Pierre Laporte, in a house they had recently rented right next door to Saint Hubert Air Force base, a few kms south of Montreal. Of course, if I were a kidnapper being sought by the police and armed forces, the first place I'd choose to lay low would be an area patrolled by radar and crawling with soldiers. Not just any military base but one of two NORAD centres for North America, one which had been the site of MKULTRA mind control experiments on children going back to the early 1950s...

Is an imagine beginning to form at the bottom of the sink of chemicals in the dark room of your mind, O Sixties Child?

How about the fact that all three members of the Cheney cell -- Paul and Jacques Rose, and their crony Francis Simard, had grown up in the general neighbourhood of the base, which could perhaps explain why the area they called home seemed like a "safe" place to hide.

Another odd detail that struck me when I read this, is that kidnapper Francis Simard happened to be exactly the right age for the MKULTRA mind control experiments done on children -- at Saint Hubert base.

Francis Simard was 6 years old in 1953, the same age as a friend of mine whose AF father enrolled her in first grade in that special class at Saint Hubert AF base, a few months after MKULTRA came into existence. It was Cameron's friend Allen Dulles who signed it into operation -- Allen Dulles who sometimes summered on Lake Massawippi, in the eastern townships. Allen Dulles, the CIA director who helped mastermind Operation Paperclip, which brought former Nazi scientists to North America and set them to work for the military in projects like the one at Saint Hubert base.

I also find it fascinating that the very first FLQ bombs exploding in Westmount coincided with the collapse of the MKULTRA project at McGill in 1963. Just when a smokescreen was needed to cover up a huge program of criminal research which harmed literally thousands of unwitting Montrealers, and others, BANG! BANG! Bombs start going off in mailboxes and the evil terrorist organization known as the Front de Libération du Québec suddenly grabs all the headlines.

When have we seen this before?

It's also fascinating that the supposed creator of the FLQ, was not even Quebecois - but a Belgian "resistance fighter" and probable police spy...

I find it fascinating that the fledgling FLQ, a ragtag band of confused druggies and longhaired student revolutionaries, some barely out of high school, were able to carry out a series of extremely successful raids on military armouries and other heavily guarded targets -- almost makes you think they had some inside help.

And that years later, such a fuss was made and continues to be made over De Gaulle's famous "Vive le Quebec libre" remark -- although he followed it up with a less audible "Vive le Canada" -- which didn't stop the Anglo establishment from manufacturing a diplomatic incident to justify a crackdown on "separatists" -- but really, who are the real separatists? The people of Quebec who cheered the speech, or the masters of Divide and Rule?

Finally, I am astonished that most of my peers who did not leave Quebec in the stampede to escape a new Nazi Germany controlled by Péquiste madmen (and women), still seem to accept the official story although when you look at it under a microscope it's crawling with bugs.

Given what I know about the MKULTRA program, I see a high likelihood the FLQ was an intelligence creation, a false flag operation modelled on so many others that came out of the fertile minds of military strategists, and that CIA-funded psychiatrists like Dr. Ewen Cameron played a role in getting it up and running.

In a declassified 1956 MKULTRA memo, Dr. Cameron mentions his rewarding work with 'POWS' for the Air Force -- the closest AF base to Cameron was St Hubert, and then there's Plattsburgh, up the road from his residence in Albany.

What are the odds that Cameron was involved in the secret US military electronic warfare experiments on French Canadian children enrolled in classes on the base?

I'd say, quite high.

Especially considering these secret experiments, according to my sources, aimed at scrambling the children's brainwaves and eventually controlling their behaviour.


It amazes me that no one knows this, but it amazes me less that writing a book about it can get one in trouble with the people who run our publishing scene here in Canada, the world's largest human laboratory (after Siberia).

But once you peruse the documents and read the wealth of material available on MKULTRA, the events of our recent history begin to make a whole new, horrible kind of sense.

I really wish it were possible to bring this material into the light of public debate -- while I also realize it would provoke a collective nervous breakdown for many of my colleagues, not unlike the collective shock we all received when Pierre Laporte died.

I don't know a remedy for the shock of realizing your career, relationships, politicial beliefs, and network of social connections is built on a massive fabrication, designed by the military and intelligence services to divide and control us all.

If I were one of the people who have, for decades, found employment and "meaning" by acting as agents of the same Canadian government (and its secretive organizations) that implemented the false flag terrorist event known as the October Crisis -- I would not be reading this blog. I would be trying to rid my mind of the parasitic fear that has fuelled so many of my personal initiatives over the years, as I carried out my functions.

Hey, it happens to the best of us -- right? We can all be unwitting police informers, agents provocateurs -- the financial pressures and ambitions that motivate all of us, not to mention the techniques, have been in use for decades, if not milennia. We can all be mind controlled and inducted into activities that, when you lift up the cover or unfurl the curtain, turn out to be not in the best interests of the majority --

That's putting it mildly.

When you have an entire minority indoctrinated in the belief that the Canadian government and military saved us from French Canadian Nazis, when in reality the provable Nazis take their orders from Ottawa, Washington and London -- you have a recipe for social stagnation and collective incoherence.

And that's what we have, here in Montreal, after four decades of living in the aftermath in one of the great deceptions of modern history.