Nomadic Tribe Soup

  I'm at the corner of Victoria and south side of Dundas Square when I hear the Soulman sing Rick Ashley's "Never gonna give you up".  He sets the mood. Gonna to stick around for a while. Right in front of me is O'Keefe Lane, a back alley that ends in an architectural gem of a cul-de-sac. If I needed a snapshot to fondle the love part of my love/hate relationship with Toronto, the memory of this would suffice. This and the Soulman. http://vimeo.com/23830661 http://vimeo.com/23827881

Saturday morning I wake up to the sound of drilling (brought to me by drill machines, drillers, dig&destroys, concrete-fighters?) in the backyard and it is not even 9am yet. My headache stalks me to the Portuguese bakery across the street where one short espresso shot does not do the trick. I don't have change for the second one. I suggest to the gentleman behind the counter he write my name and the amount owing on a piece of paper, like his wife always does. He waves his hand mid-air, palm down, to the right and left. 'No need to write, you give it to her next time'. God forbid I ever live in a place where the concept of 'veresiye' (Turkish for give away, based on trust that compensation will come along, eventually) does not exist. I'm too lazy to go out and join the HotDocs crowd to watch documentaries. Too uninspired to go to the editing suites at the university to cut some slack. To cut some footage. To cut a lean slice of video. Too weary to read the ...

I can't sleep. First I see the headlines on TV: Osama Bin Ladin's 'recovery' by the US 'authorities', the US in 'possession of' Bin Ladin's body. The wording of such news flashes works on me like car alarms that go off in the middle of the night. Shortly after, Obama makes a speech involving America as a united family, past killings leaving empty seats at the dinner tables nation-wide, why it is necessary to kill those embodying a threat to the global control the military and intelligence worked so hard for. Traditionally these 'kill next-in-line' dictators, dissidents, shady men belong to oppression stricken nations in possession of white substances on the surface or black substances underground. I was at the airport when I first saw images of a wild man whose body had been traced, tracked and captured by the US eight years ago. Saddam Hussein had an abused and reality-defying look in his eyes. His physical disarray was projected on the sc...