Pastries From the Control System

While I'm into poetry, here's a poem written by my then 16 year-old youngest son. I knew nothing of it till he won the city-wide award for Gr.10 poetry and it was printed in the 1989 Toronto Board of Ed. anthology Writing/Ecrits'89.

Marc is now a full-time musician and performer in the Toronto area.

Pastries From the Control System

General revenues is the best euphemism
I've ever heard.

Revenues of these people divided into pies.

Odd pieces of pie.

Who gets the big one?
Who wants the small one?
And where did they all come from?
Who made them?

How much came from Margaret?
Her face like a work sock,
Dyed red and stuffed with snow.

How much of that pie came from her?

Not much this year, she preferred Lysol to finer spirits.

And my friends aren't part of it at all. They are the
Lines between this piece and that.

Marc F. Walker
1989

September 11

A moving poem placing the events of 9/11 in perspective. Emmanuel Ortiz is a third generation Chicano/Puerto Rican/Irish-American community organizer and sometimes spoken-word artist. He is currently the coordinator of Guerrilla Wordfare, a Twin Cities–based grassroots project bringing together artists of color to address socio-political issues and raise funds for progressive organizing in communities of color, through art as a tool of social change. He is a staff member of the Resource Center of the Americas, of which americas.org is a program.

Moment of Silence

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honour of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you To offer up a moment of silence For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared,
tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the US

And if I could just add one more thing...

A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of US-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation. Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year US embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,

Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people, not a war - for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war .... ssssshhhhh.... Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.

An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...

For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be.
Not like it always has been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.

This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.

This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all... Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing...
For our dead.


by EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002

Goodness in a Dark World

It's not that strange any more to see cultural cross-overs
and interracial marriages. Interacial and interreligious
weddings, have become commonplace. But this was not
the case in the 50's and 60's. Society placed large
barriers in the way of such unions. My wife and I were
married in a civil ceremony in Boston, and the hostile
registrar insisted listing myself as a caucasian and my
bride as negro, as stipulated by state law. In many
states we were not recognized as being legally married.

But many of our more spiritual friends had to be married
by one of the few religious communities that accepted
these liasons, the Unitarian Church. At that time, they
and the Quakers were among the few religious
organizations who seemed to have a social conscience
and who also opposed the Viet-Nam War.

I remember too in the early 80's, as part of a delegation
of the Toronto Union of Unemployed Workers, meeting
with Bishop Remi Paul of the Canadian Council of Bishops
which had taken many progressive stands against the
reigning government policies depriving the poor of their
rights. But, as I reminded father Paul, why should the
impoverished, trust the very people who are the author
of their hardships, by the same church with a long
history of supporting the wealthy few and which had in
Toronto, one of the most reactionary cardinals in
Canadian Catholic church history.

He didn't respond to my question and it reaffirmed for
me the moral cowardice of most supposed religious
leaders, by whose actions or words support the social
order and it's attendant social injustice.

It's like the moral divide is so immense that those who
should be providing guidance are overwhelmed by it,
and have an interest in it's continuance. A contradiction
that turns their ethics into liquid, which cannot be
held in their hands nor be a belief they can stand on.

It isn't that these timid few are evil. But that over time
they have accomodated themselves to evil's intent. And
that, except for a few brave theologians, they are part
of the problem. They facilitate the system's oppression
of their flock. And accrue status with their acquiessence
to the propounded status-quo of their masters. A status-
quo usually totally opposite to their supposed beliefs.

Is it any wonder that the old churches no longer have
any relevancy among the youth? That the few pews
occupied are by a dwindling number of the elderly
trying to find some sort of moral affirmation for the
values they knew in their youth, before they die ?

The fundamentalist religions thrive however, east and
west, equally viscious, as people seek a black and white
sureity in an unstable world, a substitute to fill a
spiritual void they sense in themselves, or turn to
esoterica and a vagueness that passes for spiritualism
or offers "Masters" who efface any necessity for real
contemplation or moral choices.

And the world flounders in a spiritual and moral morass.

Go not Gently

I've just been thru an experience which all of us experience in our lives. It entails the death of a loved one, whether a parent, a sibling, lover, or friend. In my case, an exwife, the mother of my children and companion of many years of struggle.

Perhaps the immanent aproach of my own demise evokes more response than when I was younger. Then, I would sorrow but it would indeed fade as life went on. Somewhat like the passing of a love affair that went wrong.

Closure seems to be a byword of most psychologists, whether it is in reference to an unpunished crime committed or a disappeared loved one. This supposedly allows the memories to fade without obsessive dwelling upon them.

Funerary services are generally regarded as part of the closure process and they are conducted within the local culture by the priests of those involved. This also serves to authenticise theauthority of the priesthood and the religion they represent.

Whether it is being assured of the ascent to Valhalla, the ellysian fields, a life of ease with houri, or a heaven attended by angels, we are promised that our loved ones "go to a better world'. In modern marketing it is suggested that this includes bagels with Philadelphian Cream cheese served by a "hunk" while floating on clouds.

But what of those of us who believe that religion has been the handmaiden of an oppressive ruling elite ? Those of us who reject the "opium of the people" and sing along with the Joe Hill parody of the church's social passivism, "We will Eat By and By".

Our release has been to see the winning of a struggle for social justice despite the pain and loss of lives. The tributes given to your fellows for their sacrifices. The dedication to their memories that it hasn't been in vain and we will seek our closure by continuing the struggle.

But I show my age. The young new warriors are many and their numbers rise. They fight against many demons of injustice. Against neoliberalism,(a moniker for an vicious old foe; imperialism) against racism ( a necessary adjunct to sell their lies), against oppression and it's justifications, against new neo-fascist nationalisms like Zionism. Against war. They are Heroes all and the martyrs are innumerable. They make closure.

And so I am enflamed. Because the religious arbitors of the rituals of death somehow captured the burial process of my companion of long ago struggles and used her goodness to advance the designs of "the old grey men" and dishonor her vibrant life.

"Do not go gentle into the dawning of the night
Rage, rage at the fading of the light."
Dylan Thomas

Our World is Not For Sale

I think even more important in my view, is the fact that across the world, no matter where you are, you can be in Canada, you can be in India, citizens are coming to the same common conclusion. Everywhere people are saying our world is ours to shape and make.

Our world is not for sale.

We will not have five companies controlling water.
We will not have three gene giants controlling seeds
and pharmaceuticals and medicine and killing us for
their profits. We will not have two or three grain
traders destroying the rightful livelihood and earnings
of hard working farmers around the world and selling
junk food and hazardous food to the consumers.

Dr. Vandana Shiva


After many years of living in cities, I've retired to my natal area in central Manitoba. My father was a grain elevator agent for the now-conglomerated United Grain Growers and I remembered a somewhat bucolic place where people lived a simpler and healthier life. Game and fresh farm produce were cheap and plentiful, and people were helpfull and friendly.

What I returned to after more than 50 years was sadly, and perhaps understandably, a different world. Like the outports of Newfoundland and the Gaspesian settlements so promoted by the church and Duplessis in Quebec, the western prairies are abandoned cultures. Dying towns struggle to survive while the rural populace is more and more forced into city ghettos.

The young leave to find jobs which are unavailable locally and the older people remain in houses that have lost their value but which they are loathe to abandon. Half-way from my village and the regional center is a town that 40 years ago was a thriving community with 5 implement dealers and the usual complement of stores and services. It is now reduced to 30 people and no stores. They must drive 20km to buy a loaf of bread or a bottle of aspirin.

During the depression years of the 30s rural people fought back against the banks, grain cartels and large corporations, and they established institutions like the Cooperative movement, Pool elevators, credit unions, marketing boards, and political parties like the Progressive Farmers, and the CCF (social democrats).

They forgot to teach their children that the wolves are always there.

I returned to a desperate countryside where farms had been reduced to 1/3 of their former number, implement manufacturers and grain buyers had been onglomerated, and the protective organizations had been institutionalized(castrated). Aid to farmers was a cash cow to the agricutural corporations who receive millions while the struggling small farmers receive a pittance.
Similarly in the recent BSE crisis the ones that benefited were the few large packing plants still remaining, while ranchers received a fraction of the prices beef was sold for in the supermarkets.

Ranchers had been convinced by large corporations that sending beef on the hoof to the US for processing was more cost-efficient and Canadian packers and Slaughter facilities dwindled to a few large corporations. The largest being US-owned Tyson and Cargill who control about 75% of US and Canadian beef production.

Meat processing has become more or less continentalized. Many eastern canadian consumers and fast food outlets were using US beef while canadian ranchers were in crisis. Politicians and other public figures like Alberta's Ralph Klein (who's never seen a corporation he didn't like)urged the populace to support the ranchers and Canadians rallied to their beef producers. Unlike other countries who had a BSE crisis, consumption of beef was largely not affected. Prices in the supermarkets remained fairly stable. The ranchers on the other hand had excess cattle and the packers made out like bandits, buying low and selling high. An auditor-general report, forced out of the corporate-friendly Alberta government showed their profits burgeoning almost 300%. They made $79 a head before to $219 after BSE. To add insult to injury they also received massive government financial aid since they own extensive cattle herds.

Meanwhile farmers have been forced into specialized crops and production, and their one-time independence from market vagaries by mixed farming has been compromised. This also means that their self-sufficiency has become a memory and they have neither the home garden, the dairy-cow, chickens, nor other food production to take them thru difficult times.

Their frustration has resulted in an increasing number of suicides and family breakdowns.
A recent study found most family farmers earning a negative farm income, which could only be augumented by outside labor.

Just casualties of progress and a changing world ?

NO !!

These were deliberate policies initiated by all levels of government in the 60's and continued to this day by governments of all stripes. Policies of "efficiency" promoted by large corporations with their own agenda. Their victory will leave a bleary landscape interrupted only by an occasional urban center.

This has, like most macro-economists dreams, proven to be a hell visited upon local economies. Profit and Loss doesn't include the quality of life inflicted by their one-sided accounting, nor the social costs attendant upon them.

A mythology about the benefits of scale has infused agriculture since the sixties.
Mindlessly transferring the efficiency of mass-production to farming practices, economists and their corporate mentors convinced the various levels of government to acquiess to the dismantling of the family farm economy causing devastation to rural communities though-out North America. Canada followed suit and a blind eye was turned to the plight of the small farmer. Various methods were put in place to mitigate the effects but the overall policies were codified by the 1969 "Federal Task Force on Agriculture report, Canadian Agriculture in the Seventies" and all political parties accepted the wisdom of this new reality.
It propounded a 2/3 reduction of farmers and a move to mass agricultural production.

Like video lottery machines, mass agriculture was the solution to provincial short-falls. The farmers would adjust or leave the land and eventually a new balance would emerge. We are now seeing the effects of this misguided policy as evidenced in the "crisis in agriculture".

It has only grown worse since then and western Canada is filled with dead or dying towns where real estate values have plummetted or evaporated, and in the villages that still survive the population is aged and dying. The children that remain can only impatiently wait to be of age to depart to the cities where they join the ranks of the urban poor. They express their rage and boredom with vandalism and ape the urban dress and customs of what they see on TV.

"Yo", "bro", and "ho" as well as wearing backward caps and baggy pants are part of their culture. It would be amusing if it wasn't so sad and so self-destuctive as they graduate from "booze" to "crack", to show how "cool" they are, like their urban counter-parts.

Meanwhile distress help lines are set up in most communities to deal with the mounting pressure on farm families. Suicide, marriage breakdowns, and child delinquency problems are endemic in the heartland. Seemingly prosperous farmyards hide a massive debt-load and declining income. A recent report shows farmers in a negative-income return situation. But the agricultural mega-corporations are making out like bandits. The move to privatization and the "new agriculture", dovetailed with the increasing mergers in the corporate world, has been very profitable to a few wealthy investors and corporations.

While drought and the BSE crisis have had an major impact, the problems go much deeper than that. Even without these setbacks most small to medium-sized farmers would still be struggling. As one local farmer expressed it "Even if you get more land you still can't make a decent living." Most survive by having a secondary job or business to cover the negative income part of farm life.

At one time farmers were an example in self-sufficiency. They grew different crops according to demand, they had fall-backs and supplied their own needs and sold the surplus products, from dairy to poultry; beef, pork and sheep; hay and feedgrains. But the demands and government regulations of modern farming have changed all that. Now they specialize, and most buy their milk and eggs at the nearest supermarket as well as most all the other foodstuff they used to grow or rear themselves. One of the largest dairy-farms in Manitoba is just 17 km away but the milk sold in my town is supplied by Parmalait and Dairyland, and shipped here from 200 km away. Poultry is twice the price it is in major cities. Beef can only be obtained reasonably if you buy bootlegged cattle. Quotas and packing regulations rule. 80% of pork production in Manitoba and Saskatchewan is controlled by the McCains subsiduary Maple Leaf Foods. Corn in my local store 'on sale" was shipped from Ste Catherines, Ontario. Vegetable prices are double or more that of the city.

The National Farmers Union is an organization which supports family farms and sustainable agriculture. They produced a recent study showing the fallacy of the big is better myth and also the static prices paid to farmers as compared to the return to the food conglomerates.

While farmers retained (in net income) about one dollar out of every two that they generated in the late 1940s, today farmers retain just one dollar in ten. While new technologies and inputs have helped farmers increase production by about $18 billion (from about $17 billion in the 1940s to about $35 billion today), the corporations that sold those inputs and technologies to farmers swallowed up not only the entire $18 billion in increased production revenue, but an additional $8 billion as well driving farmers’ net income down. Farmers increased their output and gross revenue, but input and technology makers captured 144% of that additional revenue. Over the past fifty years, for every dollar that new technologies and inputs have contributed to farmers’ revenues, farmers have been made to pay $1.44.

There is a apocolyptic war going on. I'm not talking of the aggressive war on mid-eastern people to control oil reserves nor the actions to maintain US hegemony over latin america. It is not centered in any area like traditional wars. It is a war for global control of the very basic lifestock of our existence. Our foods. The main protagonists are USA/Euro supported multi-national corporations, and traditional family farms.

It is usually characterized by the macro-economists as resistance to "better" farming practices. Irrational resistance to the productive "bottom line".

The problem is that the bottom line in finance has little
revelance to the "bottom line" in human social relations
and existence. It ignores culture, conditions of living, and
the very existence of societies and human life. It ignores
the penalties suffered by the very people it is a subset of.

I need not invoke the many farmers in areas of India who were forced to use Monsanto products after thousands of years of traditional farmimg only to find they could not afford all the cojunct chemicals needed. When they lost their family properties, over 300 committed suicide in protest in one district and the shame of losing the family lands. And now international corporations are also patenting seeds that peasants took 1000s of years to produce.

The shameful effects of the policies of Nestles and other neoliberal supported corporations are bankrupting 3rd world countries and driving their people into desperate poverty. The policies of the WTO, IMF, and other neo-liberal organisations policing agricultural policy in the third world ignore the heavily subsidised agricultural policies of the main powers. This puts the 3rd world at a disadvantage in competing for market.

So what has that to do with us? Why should I worry about what is happening in the 3rd world?

Because it is happening here and the "bottom line" is that you are going to be held ransom to massive corporate food-suppliers like ADM, Cargill, Tyson, the canadian potato megalith McCains (who own Maple Leaf Packers, the primary pork suppliers in Canada) and others that control all your foodstuff and determine the prices that you pay in your markets. They are closely allied to Monsanto and other corporations that control the seedstock , "enhance" our foods, and sell the final product to us. A monopoly of our foodstuff and their prices will have a greater effect on our lives than housing costs, mininum wage, or health-care.

The incidence of the increase of cancer, which is overwhelming if one looks at the statistics and which has been linked irrefutably to food additives and chemically-enhanced products, is part of this, but if one looks seriously at the influence and control of the "bottom line" multinational food corporations it is enough to make an ordinary paranoid catatonic.

Virtually all your cooking oil is controlled by agribusiness. That means that whether you use the "healthful" non-saturated oils like corn, soya, or canola, they are grown from genetically-patented seeds from the major suppliers like Cargill and Monsanto. Control of virtually all our food, from meat and fish, to fruit and vegetables, and grains and flour is in the hands of a rapidly diminishing, through mergers, corporate few.

Coupled with the corporate-friendly policies of the Bush administration you are a target for world-wide control even if EU anti-gm seed initiatives should escape US sanctions. All large western nations have instituted neo-liberal policies.

Factory farming is bad for your health. That hasn't escaped the conjecture of most thinking persons. Just like humans, too many animals in congested areas contribute to easier transferrence of disease. Like the rapid infection of vast numbers of chickens in the Fraser Valley crowded into enclosed areas, or the effect of disease on salmon farms and the transfer to wild stocks, not to mention the feed cannibalism causing BSE infected beefstocks.

Pig-farms have sparked many fights over thier pollution of local water resources and the unsustainability of the practice, so that the multi-national producers now have problems finding areas which will accept them. Not so in Canada, where the Manitoba government welcomed a huge pork-producing operation in the Brandon area, claiming that the plant would be a plus for the community in jobs and economic fall-out. When the plant had problems retaining workers due to low pay and oppressive working conditions, they received permission to import workers from latin america, holding forth citizenship status for those workers who stayed on the job a certain length of time. A released worker would be deported. No unions there. An old form of slavery. The city council of Brandon, Manitoba lauded the development and welcomed the latinos as contributers to the local economy and a tribute to multi-culturalism.

All of this has an effect on our country. All of this has an
effect on our health. The urban dweller can no longer
ignore the crucial issues which will determine much
more than the lack of daycare, gender rights, equal
housing, or racism.
We are in a fight for survival against the rapacious
conglomerates who want to control the very source of
our being, what we eat and drink.

Our food, our water, the very air we breathe, are under
attack, and we no longer have the luxury of being
disengaged if we care about our children, our families,
our country, our world.

A Chomski, Suzuki, Nader, Sting, or Bono can not save
our ass without a massive entry of ourselves into the
social equation.

Or we could simply "be cool" and watch reality shows
or film clips as it all winds down.



Some links:

John Ikerd

Stop the Hogs

Beyond Factory Farming

New Farm

Needed; A Rural Strategy

The Meatrix

I strongly recommend :
Studs Turkel the great American social commentator who wrote movingly in 1988 about the plight of the farmer in his book "the Great Divide" . He chronicled the hardships and betrayals that had befallen the "heartland of America" and the people who remained. It has only grown worse.

Reflections From Sam Delaney's Dhalgren

One of my favorite Sci-fi novels is "Dhalgren" by Sam Delany.
A brilliant novel that much surpasses IMHO the touchstone
novel by the dean of S-F Robert Heinlien, "Stanger in a
Strange Land". This paragraph by the main character
sticks in my mind and I'm not really sure I understand
what it means, or the conclusions to be drawn. But I do
know it strikes a chord in me.

" I am limited, finite, and fixed. I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good. That is wrestling with what I have been given. Do I rage at what I have not ? (Is infinity some illusion generated by the way in which time is perceived?) I try to end this pride and rage and commend myself to what is there, instead of illusion. But the veil is the juncture of the perceived and perception. And what in life can rip that? Is the only prayer, then, to live steadily and dully, doing and doubting what the mind demands?
I am limited, finite, and fixed. I rage for reasons, cry for pity. Do with me what way you will. "

Samuel R Delany from "Dhalgren"

Lenny Breau: A Tribute From Glenn

"Maybe I'll go down in history as the guy who started
this one style. All the guitarists who come up and ask
how I do it, maybe one day they can say, "Hey, man, I
learned this from Lenny"...you know,as long as I get
some kind of credit, that's all. I might not end up
making a million bucks, but I'd like to be known as the
guy who started this movement ."

-Lenny Breau




Sometime in the mid-90s I ran across an old jazz-player, a multi-reed player, but mainly tenor sax, Glenn McDonald. We hung out and drank in a Portugese bar in Toronto's Kensington Market. We talked jazz talk and traded stories about various musicians.

His primary focus was on getting some tapes issued that he had recorded of the Canadian jazz guitar legend Lenny Breau doodling in some shack they were living in, around Saskatoon or maybe rural Manitoba.

Lenny had just come out of a junkie situation in New York City where Chet Atkins (or one of the many country guitarists who adored him) kept him under wraps in his pad with a good dealer to supply any junkie needs.

So Lenny was drying out in his native prairies.

A bizarre twist to the time when Lenny and Don Franks did a successful show in the early Yorkville days called "The Connection" in which they portayed the junkie sub-culture. They moved on to New York and the NY sub-culture, and it all unravelled and became real.

Sometime after that Franks was taken up by a very influential hollywood producer and cast as the secondary romantic lead in a film version of Fenians Rainbow. It wasn't very successful.

Both of them retreated to different solitudes. Don to a lake in northern Saskatchewan where he reputedly married a native lady and affected native ways. He later returned to Toronto, and became an established canadian actor and performer.

Lenny supposedly went to Spain and studied under some flamenco masters and came back with even more skill and complexity in his playing.

To me, his old coffee house rival the phenominal Sonny Grenich, who many jazz guitarists cite as an influence, displays Lenny's harmonic side while the legendary Montreal guitarist Nelson Symonds (compared by many to the deceased Wes Montgomery) represents his melodic insight. I heard him play with both of them at different times. Lenny learned from both and the whole pantheon of jazz artists he admired. Lenny attained, after Spain, the harmonic/melodic synthesis that all jazz players strive for but very few ever achieve.

So years later Lenny departed the farm-house where he and Glenn were living in 1975, and wound up in L.A. He was found dead in an empty swimming pool there in 1984.

It was considered by most, a drug-related murder.

Glen recounted the tale many times of his recording Lenny's guitar musings and his hopes of getting the tapes produced. He mentioned his contacts with Randy Bachman who was one of the recipients of his efforts. Being a jazz snob I discounted this Rock person as a potential Jazz producer, unaware that Randy was a long-time friend.

I had heard Lenny many times and knew him over the years. In the early coffee-house days in Winnipeg, in Toronto at the old Mink Club, and in Yorkville, Toronto's bohemian center of the time before he left for New York, as well as in Montreal after his return from Spain in the Cafe Boheme on Rue Guy. I knew he was one of the greatest jazz guitar players in the world and Glenn shared my regard.

Glen was a highly respected Tenor sax player in his own right but was very single-minded in this, his greatest quest. He ignored, as many jazz musicians do, his own health and well-being and died an early death.

He passed away in 1998 and had a nice tribute in a Yorkville Annex church. I wasn't there for the funeral, but I was uplifted when less than a year later Randy Backman produced the tapes.

Victories can be hard-won. Thanks Randy. Thanks Glenn.



The album which came out of Glenn's tapes was titled "Cabin Fever"
a state with which I'm now becoming familiar.


Link to Lenny's Tribute Page

Originally published in Montreal Serai