Wasting Your Time.

I sometimes wonder if when I'm typing the acronym for the Bureau of Meteorology into Google a little warning light doesn't go off at the Defence Signals Directorate under the big sign that says "Illiterate Terrorists".

The Time It Takes To Make A Cup Of Tea.

I gotta confess, the first time I saw Cuz Bro I didn't think a whole lot of him. There's a lot of kids getting into riding fixies these days, and when I saw him rolling around the meeting point for the Wednesday night ride I wrote him off as just another newbie. He was wearing short stripey shorts and a V-necked t-shirt that screamed the wrong side of the river, and had a bike that looked like it'd been cobbled together five minutes ago. But he was a mate of Matt's, so I gave him a go. It wasn't til the ride ventured up the Punt Road Hill that I realised how wrong I'd been. The kid didn't just beat me up that hill. He fucking destroyed me.

I've ridden around with him a bunch of times since then, including in his first alleycat, this Halloween just passed. He was dressed up as Spiderman and had no idea where he was going. I was dressed up as a rapper and was lugging a five kilo boombox in my messenger bag. I sucked his wheel and yelled directions at him over the hip hop blasting from my back. Matt was in the mix, dressed as Superman, and we both latched on. We thread our way through the traffic, weaving impossible lines and creating space from nothing, and eventually took first, second and third place.

This last Sunday, racing again, he got away from me a little bit, and I was able to watch him in amidst the chaos. Smashing it down the Collins Street Hill he didn't stop at Russell, didn't slow down, didn't even pause. He just thread the eye of the needle between two cars, with about five centimetres either side. I was keeping pace with Andy White at the time. The bloke has ridden - and won - alleycats on three continents, including a handful in New York. He knows his shit. So when he turned around and gave the international sign for 'crazy', index finger circling his ear, it was obvious that he'd seen something impressive.

And Cuz is impressive to watch. Thinking about the ride later on that evening I felt like Kerouac thinking about Neil Cassady, who later appeared in On The Road in the guise of Dean Moriarty. One bit in particular sprang to mind - when Kerouac is talking about Dean's driving, and how the gaps he found were so small, so non-existent, that he must have somehow factored in the moment of hesitation on the part of the other driver. As if he has made every possible calculation in a fraction of a second, and somehow come up with the precise answer. Remembering Cuz in the traffic that Sunday afternoon is to remember so many factors at play, and all of them coming together at once. Even if he did get lost and come in pretty close to last. Even if he did bin it. He may not have won, but fuck, either did Cassady.

You Can't Feel The Hunger.

I had a night off a while back and so dragged Casey along to the Nova to see Hunger. I'm a sucker for movies about the IRA, and there are few stories as compelling as that of Bobby Sands. I did, however, feel a trifle guilty about scoffing a whole packet of raspberry shortcakes while we watched him waste away.

And In The Meantime.

So, I'm taking a little time out. Mostly in order to let the Our Anatomy controversy die down a little bit, but also because it's sunny out and I'm hoping to remove some bodgy tattoos through a process of constant peeling. So, with this avenue of procrastination lost for the time being, I can only suggest you try wasting your employer's valuable time here.

Set Your Body On Fire.

A while ago I was talking to education commentator, Shakespeare fanatic, father to the cutest kid ever and occasional teacher Tony Thomson. He was telling me about how they used to calculate numbers when he used to do a radio show back in the 80s. The formula was simple: one caller equaled ten listeners. The same formula could well be applied to blogs: one comment equals ten readers. So check this out! 110 readers! And counting! Thanks, Our Anatomy!

Put The Past Away.

Man, am I the only one not particularly excited about the Bicycle Film Festival? Don't get me wrong. As both this blog and my dramatically oversized calves will attest, I love bikes, and am of the opinion that anything that encourages more biking is generally a good thing. I also love films, especially this one. But the organizers of the BFF (an acronym which I often confuse with Best Friends Forever, resulting in much blushing on my part) really don't seem to have tried too hard. Some very average movies, a few of which have been readily available on DVD - and in some cases VHS - for some time, and a majority of which boast minute counts barely into the double figures. Perhaps this reflects the average attention span of the projected BFF audience, whose brains have obviously been firing off electrons at unnatural rates due to their compulsive consumption of energy drinks. As well as the movies there's an art show, a My Disco show and a bunch of bike-themed parties. I think there's also a Bike Polo tourney and the Abbotsford Cycles swap meet, but they were probably happening regardless, so they don't count. It all seems a bit like a token effort from this vantage point. Sure, the smaller things, like valet bike parking, may pull in the commuter cyclists, but I can scratch the crap out of my own bike, thank you very much. Seriously, BFF.com.au, you're going to have to pull your finger out.

No Cause For Alarm.

You know what? I told some girl the other day that I was vegan, and she didn't even care. Not impressed in the slightest. Sure, anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise, but maybe being vegan just isn't cool any more. Maybe hipsters don't even have to pretend to be concerned about what their fries are cooked in these days. I mean, I'm a long way from having my finger on the pulse of the cultural zeitgeist, but the sheer number of former vegans and vegetarians in my immediate circle who are now just totally down with killing and torturing animals seems to be growing daily. In a way it kind of makes sense. I mean, if you're ok with showing that much underwear or wearing that much fluorescent headgear or inflicting your shitty art on the world, then you must be ok with increasing suffering.

Why, Lord?

In these days of text messaging, internet forums and strangely accurate set times, it's not often that I'm forced to endure a band that is really, truly awful in order to get to the band I want to see. But last night I was tired and kind of in a funny mood, so I wandered down to Pony around ten, even though the Diamond Sea weren't playing until eleven. This turned out to be a very bad decision, as it meant that I was forced to sit through possibly the worst band I have seen this year: Our Anatomy (lest you think that I bestow this title lightly, I was forced to do some quick mental arithmetic as the band played. Fortunately their songs are longish and boring as all fuck, so I was able to spend some time figuring out if I'd seen Luca Brasi this year. I haven't, so congratulations, Our Anatomy. You've won the only prize you ever will). Seriously the worst kind of late-90s Coldplay-inspired jangly-guitar crescendo-building dross, the band were so bad that they drove me to abuse as early as the first song. "Hey Harriet!" I said to the poor girl next to me, whose name, fortunately, was Harriet, "Do you like Radiohead? I like Radiohead! I bet these guys like Radiohead a lot!" It seems I had said it louder than I thought. One of the band members uttered "Harsh," into the mic. "Harsh but fair," I countered. Another band members wondered aloud how they could go on with any confidence after a call like that, to which I could only think to myself, "Well son, perhaps you should just stop." But I didn't say it. Harriet kindly pointed out that abuse like that is best written on the internet and captured for posterity. So here we are.

The saddest thing about this band is not that the lead singer / guitarist was wearing boat shoes (I looked around outside to see where he had parked his yacht, to no avail) or that I'm willing to bet that he spent a long time perfectly positioning his neckerchief. No, the saddest thing here was that this band has one of the best drummers going around in Scotty from the Diamond Sea. To see such talent going to waste is always a tearjerker. Give that boy a grind band asap.

Other than Scotty, Our Anatomy has now nicely come to represent a scene that I seriously cannot fucking tolerate. For some reason it, like almost every other scene, is dominated by boys, but the reason here can't be testosterone, as there's simply none to be found. Nope, this scene is the aural equivalent of a poetry zine: self-indulgent, wanky, made by uni students who don't hate Triple J, often influenced by Pink Floyd, overly concerned with fashion and constantly talking about feelings. But for some reason, a dodgy trade or a show that starts late, it occasionally falls into your hands. And that's when, my friend, you will suffer.

We Got A Relationship.

Everybody Wants To Be Our DJ.

There are three other guys in the Noodle Hut on Sydney Rd, all of them ordering dinners for one, the same as me. Singular little paper boxes of starch, vegetable matter and what I like to think is strictly tofu. The other guys are clad in varying degrees of leisure wear - trackie dacks and nikes - but are all a bit portly. There's a lot of noodles in those white boxes. They all sport their own interpretations of three day growth and have let a few months go since their last haircuts. I pick up my Mi Goreng and walk back to my house, where I watch Lockie Leonard share his first kiss with Vicky Streeton on dvd. Perhaps I'll see if Casey wants to come around later.

This Orchestra Aborted.

When I first started dating Kim she told me she was from Hudson, Québec. I didn’t know where that was. “It’s across the Lac des Deux Montagnes from Oka,” she told me, thinking I’d be aware of the popular tourist destination. Instead, I started singing,

“…This song’s not about some romantic account of history,
It’s not about martyrs or myths or heroes or burnings-in-effigy,
It’s about a native kid flipping her lid just trying to keep some self-respect intact.
It’s about an Oka the size of a fist in resistance and a will to fight back.”

It’s perhaps one of my favourite early Propagandhi songs, a song that, like life itself, ignores the arbitrary line between the personal and the political. In a way the Oka Rebellion does the same for me. I ended up living in Hudson for quite some time, a good fifteen years after the crisis had ended. When Kim and I were fighting I’d take my bike across the lake on the ferry and ride through the pine forests of the Kanesatake land. I’d see the Mohawk warrior flags strung up across the roads in the town and admire the anti SQ graffiti covering the walls. I’d cut through the golf course at the centre of the controversy and pedal through streets where, less than a generation ago, there had stood barricades. And, occasionally, some local would tell me to fuck off out of some area I shouldn’t have been biking through. The issue is, for me, so tangled up in all the emotion of that time that it’s difficult to write about.

This article, therefore, is perhaps not the best place to get an overview of the 78-day standoff. There’s an excellent book entitled People of the Pines by Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera that gives a definitive account, and the archives at the CBC have a whole host of news clips from the time, for those of you to lazy to read a whole book. For those of you too lazy to even click on links, however, here’s a brief outline: in early 1990 the mayor of Oka wanted to extend the Oka golf course into Mohawk burial grounds. The Mohawk people protested and were duly ignored. The Mohawks then built barricades and armed themselves. The Sûreté du Québec were called in and shots were fired. A cop was killed. The SQ pulled back and the army was called in. Eventually the Mohawk warriors surrendered. A bunch of them were arrested and taken into SQ custody, but were released after a few days. A fact sheet on everything that the Ministry of Indian and Northern Affairs has done with the people of Kanesatake since is also available.

When she was going to school at McGill Kim wrote a paper on her experience of the Crisis. She wrote of the helicopters swirling around, media packs lining up to board the ferry, the floodlights and the fires burning through the night. She wrote that even with all this going on barely five hundred metres away, in a town that they’d skated across to when the lake froze in the winter, the issue was never mentioned in schools, as if students were too simple to understand the complex issues at stake. At night, she wrote, they sometimes snuck out and headed down to the beach, to watch the lights and try to make sense of what was happening for themselves. Eventually the local Hudson cops would drive by and move them along.

There’s an important distinction to be made there. Hudson had its own local police force. Up until around the time that I arrived in late 2004 they refused to let the SQ have jurisdiction. Eventually the town, under considerably provincial pressure, relented, but not until this singular point had been made: SQ cops are as racist as fuck. They’d even treat me like crap for not being able to speak French, until they found out I was Australian, when they’d begrudgingly let me off the hook. Hudson, as a majority Anglophone town in a majority Francophone province in a majority Anglophone country would have been constantly made victim of this kind of linguistic racism if it hadn’t been for the dual barrels of privilege: money and influence. Oka as a town and Kanesatake as a Mohawk-controlled Indian band had neither, was also majority English-speaking, and had the added stigma of being native. That early negotiations between the Province of Québec and the Mohawk people focussed on keeping the SQ out, and that the initial conflict was between Mohawks and the SQ, should have come as a surprise to no one.

While we’re on the topic of language I should briefly also point out a discrepancy in the nouns used to describe what occurred during those 78 days. The CBC tends to describe it as The Oka Crisis, whereas in York and Pindera’s book it is almost exclusively known as The Oka Rebellion. This deliberate use of language is so cliché that is should be embarrassing. I can understand the CBC not wanting to use descriptors that are romanticizing, but what happened in Oka was almost a dictionary definition of rebellion.

And this is perhaps why I feel the events in Oka so deeply, so much so that even now, eighteen years after the crisis took place, and almost two years since I left Hudson, I feel compelled to write this article. I wasn’t there, didn’t even hear about it until years after the fact, and haven’t ever talked to anyone who was directly involved. And yet driving across the lake at Vaudreuil for the last time, on my way to Trudeau airport to depart Quebec forever, I realized that living across the lake from Oka was the closest I had come to a genuine uprising against a government. Governments are universally oppressive, reviled the world over and protested against almost constantly, but rarely does a group of individuals take up arms and demand that their rights be respected. I grew up an hour or so from Ballarat, where the Eureka Rebellion took place, but let’s face it, that was ages ago, and now so broadly accepted by the powers that be that it is taught to students in primary schools. Oka was so new, still so raw, that the names of families involved still adorn houses in the town. This wasn’t privileged white kids exorcising their guilt by throwing some rocks at cops protecting some economic forum from the socialist alternative. This was a minority that has been fighting for their own right to dignity, self-determination and pride for over five hundred years finally telling the world that they were simply not going to take it any more.

The last few clips in the CBC archive show the ridiculous melee that the rebellion descended into as the army advanced and the Mohawks were taken into police custody. The sense of defeat on the faces of the Mohawk women interviewed is palpable – their tears are not merely because they have been kicked or choked by the SQ, but that they have been humiliated by institutions that have proven, once again, that they are more powerful. This always seems to be the case immediately after the barricades have been dismantled and the warriors forced back into acquiescence. It’s easy to see the resolution of the Oka Crisis as a loss to the people of Kanesatake. But that’s not really the case. Uprisings such as Oka irreversibly alter the way we think about our relationship to power, and remind us the forward march of history consists of seemingly spontaneous insurrections of people against the institutions that oppress them. We see the Mohawks of Kanesatake rise up, and begin to believe that maybe for a moment, we too could take an Oka the size of a fist in resistance and, eventually, find the will to fight back.

Extremely Dangerous.

Been a while, and will probably be a while yet. With the warmer weather I'm out biking more often, giving the ipod a workout with the bunch of hip hop records that arrived in the mail the other day. Just quickly, though: anyone who even thinks they might like hip hop should own The Goats 'Tricks of the Shade', and should also consider the self titled Intelligent Hoodlum double cd, that includes both his first records. Underappreciated classics, both of them.

We Are Warriors, Great Exploriors.

Old mate Katie Lansell went and bought herself a new bike the other day. I bumped into her a week or so later. "I rode 34 kilometres today!" she exclaimed, pretty damn proud of herself. Katie's expression at this point perfectly illustrated my favourite thing about biking - that it significantly expands your radius of possible destinations (a phrase I just coined, just then, and may well copyright). Before, when she was getting around on foot, her radius was probably five kilometres, tops. Add PT into the equation and it probably pushed out to ten or fifteen - because let's face it, no one wants to spend that long on the freaking tram. But with her new bike, Katie can go wherever she wants to, and she can go further than ever before. The best factor, however, is this: the radius keeps expanding. As she keeps riding she'll get fitter and fitter, and be capable of rides way beyond her current abilities. There are about a billion good reasons to ride, but this is easily my favourite.

Pink Ribbon Scars.

I was biking in the hills up around Bright the other day, listening to my ipod on shuffle. It was a warm day and I was suffering a little bit. Coming up to the highest peak on my route I wondered if I would be able to make it. And things were looking grim. The cairn atop the summit was in view, but my muscles were burning and I was gulping in air. "Fuck you, hill!" I was saying to myself, "You think you can defeat me? You're nothing, hill!" But really, inside I wasn't so sure. And then, all of a sudden, like a clarion call from the Billy Corgan within, I heard the first few notes from the Smashing Pumpkins' Today. And together we beat that fucking hill down to the ground.

Gravity Rides Everything.

Moral conundrum for the day: is it wrong to benefit off other people's stupidity? I mean, if I can see Public Enemy play with the Jungle Brothers on New Year's Day at a venue with a capacity of only about a thousand, and only pay seventy dollars for it, there must be something immoral going on, right? People are obviously too stupid to create the demand to see two of the best hip hop groups of all time, and part of me feels like it's wrong to take advantage of that. I feel somewhat compelled to mount an education campaign extolling the virtues of these two bona fide legends, especially in contrast to summerdaze or the falls or whatever other shitty festival is going on at that time, to offset the unbelievable bargain that has been bestowed upon me. I mean, I probably won't. But I will feel a little bad.