Samhain\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Thanksgiving Moon<\/p>\n
If you haven’t read the satirical piece about Canadian immigration posted below, it’s worth a look.\u00a0 I want to tell you here about a true story concerning Canadian immigration, but it comes from an earlier time.<\/p>\n
One cold day in 1968 David McCain and I set out from Muncie, Indiana Toronto bound.\u00a0 Being the 1960’s we were in a drafty Volkswagen Beetle, cranky in the cold and not much help on snow covered road.\u00a0 Our destination was the Toronto Anti-Draft League which distributed pamphlets outlining how to achieve landed immigrancy status in Canada.\u00a0 When sent through the mail, these pamphlets were routinely seized, so David and I decided to go after them ourselves.<\/p>\n
We drove the distance from Muncie to Detroit in one go and headed for the Bluewater Bridge, the entry point at Sarnia, Ontario.\u00a0 We both had long hair and, in our orange Beetle, no doubt looked like exactly what we were.\u00a0 The Canadians turned us away.\u00a0 Regroup.\u00a0 We went into a shopping mall, bought white shirts and winter caps, put them on, stuffing our hair up under the caps and tried again in a different lane.\u00a0 Success!<\/p>\n
After some hours we made Toronto, found the Anti-Draft League and picked up the pamphlets.\u00a0 While there we noticed a store selling Asian presents, so we bought some Hell Notes and some other cheap touristy kind of things.<\/p>\n
We had a night in Toronto and somehow found our way to the a performance called Succession*, or Three Games of Chess.\u00a0 This unusual event featured Marchel Duchamp and John Cage playing three games of chess on stage, the chess board wired for sound.\u00a0 In addition one of those ducks that dips its beak in a water glass, then comes up, goes down and dips again, stood on a card table nearby similarly wired.\u00a0 The other performer was a man sitting on a metal folding chair reading the the classified ads from that days New York Time.\u00a0 Out loud.\u00a0 Into a microphone.\u00a0 The audience was free to come up on stage and watch these two giants of early twentieth century avante garde art.<\/p>\n
We were among a small audience and we stayed well into the early morning, leaving before the three games ended.\u00a0 It was only much later in life that I learned this was a signal moment in Cage’s career, an event for the ages.\u00a0 I was just there accidentally.<\/p>\n
Both Dave and I had developed colds on the way up and stopped in a Canadian pharmacy for cold medicine before we began our drive back to the States.<\/p>\n
At the border we were stopped, marched into the station and given a strip search.\u00a0 Free.\u00a0 No charge.\u00a0 When we put our clothes back on, we found items from the car on the counter in front of the customs office.\u00a0 We had these items:\u00a0 125 pamphlets on landed immigrancy in Canada, several items made in Red China (the gifts) and 2-2-2’s, the Canadian cold medicine which we did not know was 40% codeine.\u00a0 No wonder we felt so confident crossing the border.\u00a0 This all added up to a damning conclusion.<\/p>\n
The Customs folks confiscated everything.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, we had no drugs in the car.\u00a0 The hood and engine compartments were open, with stuff strewn on the ground and the hubcaps were off.\u00a0 \u00a0 The reasons for our trip were gone, never to come back.\u00a0 Except our memories.<\/p>\n
*Actually, Cage hadn’t lost every single match with Duchamp. There was one that he definitely won, after a fashion. It happened in Toronto, in 1968. Cage had invited Duchamp and Teeny to be with him on the stage. All they had to do was play chess as usual, but the chessboard was wired and each move activated or cut off the sound coming live from several musicians (David Tudor was one of them). They played until the room emptied. Without a word said, Cage had managed to turn the chess game (Duchamp’s ostensive refusal to work) into a working performance. And the performance was a musical piece. In pataphysical terms, Cage had provided an imaginary solution to a nonexistent problem: whether life was superior to art. Playing chess that night extended life into art \u2013 or vice versa. All it took was plugging in their brains to a set of instruments, converting nerve signals into sounds. Eyes became ears, moves music. Reunion was the name of the piece. It happened to be their endgame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Samhain\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Thanksgiving Moon If you haven’t read the satirical piece about Canadian immigration posted below, it’s worth a look.\u00a0 I want to tell you here about a true story concerning Canadian immigration, but it comes from an earlier time. One cold day in 1968 David McCain and I set out from Muncie, Indiana Toronto … Continue reading Canadian Immigration circa 1968<\/span>