Field Trip City

I made it out to Future Shop and exchanged the camera my parents gave me for my birthday for a few DVDs and box sets, including Ken Burns' The War, a 15+ hour documentary on the Second World War. I watched the first disc tonight and it's phenomenal. I had no idea how essentially weak the United States military was when they decided to retaliate on the Japanese for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. They only had about 175,000 troops in place, and it was the draft that brought in the millions they had to train quickly for combat. The first two and half hours of the documentary focuses on battles with the Japanese in the Philippines and the first offensive attack by the Americans mounted at Guadalcanal. Burns uses a lot of old footage and dramatic photographs coupled with modern interviews of surviving members of the military reflecting back on the events. You can see in some of the people interviewed that something inside had been switched off during the war and never switched on again.

I also watched a documentary on the poetry scene in Ottawa, which included recitations and interviews with a few people I know or have met. I forget who says it, but at one point a gentleman says that one has to be willing to approach poets with an open mind, to let themselves be willing for just a moment or two to let in the expression put forward by these people in order to ascertain the value in what they're doing. To be completely honest, I can't shake the feeling that a lot of poets are flakes. On some level, all artists are outcasts looking for an outlet of expression that doesn't exactly match that of anyone else, making their entire life an effort to deviate from a perceived norm in order to exist uniquely. We live under a pioneer mentality, after all.

I see beauty in that. It takes courage. People like George Elliott Clarke, Max Middle, Oni, John Akpata, Melissa Upfold, Stephen Brockwell, Danielle Gregoire and Greg Frankson are all talented people who are also all adorably flaky. They're abnormal miscreants with the souls of angels. Sometimes, admittedly, when I watch a poet, I simply don't GET what they're trying to do. They talk too long or too loud about shit that doesn't interest me. They behave in a smarmy way and act as if a microphone upgrades them to some position in a divine intelligentsia. But the people with a good head for what they do are obvious.

All that said, I'm really absolutely fascinated with anyone who can express themselves outside of a conversation about the weather. You speak to me in tongues or choose to ignore words with the letter u for some arbitrary reason, you'll peak my interest for a few seconds. I'll approach you with an open mind. But for the love of Christ, say something. All true artists are really fucking lonely people in one way or another. How we express that, how we come to terms with it, is what raises us above the pain of it most of the time. It's the creation of our own self-worth in the absence of that which is given to us by others.

Maybe. Just a thought.

I did absolutely no work today.