Froze-ing by the Pies by Charles Ulrich

Froze-ing by the Pies

Charles Ulrich

Froze-ing by the Pies

When the protean musician/composer/bandleader Frank Zappa burst on the scene in 1966 with his early masterpiece, Freak Out! He appeared seemingly fully formed, demonstrating a mastery of a huge range of musical idioms. By then, Zappa had spent a decade absorbing the influences and knowledge that would characterize the rest of his ~30 year career.

In his new book, Charles Ulrich, author of the seminal The Big Note: A Guide to the Recordings of Frank Zappa, takes a deep dive into the early influences on FZ, from the doo-wop and blues he loved listening to with high school confidant Don Van Vliet a/k/a Captain Beefheart, to his equal love for the modernisms of Stravinsky, Weber and Varese. From visual collage design aesthetics and cheesy horror movies, to the geeky pleasures of mastering the then-new techniques of filk and tape splicing, Froze-ing takes the reader/listener on a voyage of discovery into the secret basement laboratory of one of the 20th century’s distinctive musical geniuses.

Hester in Sunlight

Yes, that Hester — the fallen woman who bore the Scarlet Letter while raising her daughter on her own. She is looking back, across that clearing, and 150 years, at her fateful lover.
Less a re-telling or transposition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic than a re-purposing of the materials to tell a different version, Hester In Sunlight, revolving around the relationships between the (unnamed) narrator; her husband Sonny and gender fluid child Luna; her sister Dani and her two kids; and their parents, is a heady and stimulating riff on contemporary motherhood and parenting.
“The narrator in my novel has OCD,” novelist Hannah Calder says. “The book is an exploration of what OCD thinking can do to a classic, a meditation on what thought — often unwanted — can do in the gaps that naturally occur in literature.”



Monkey Painter

Monkey Painter is a story-in-pictures that follows the evolution of the artist as she progresses from art student, to teacher, to fully functioning artist over a span of thirty years. Written in the mode of a coming-of-age-novel, the artist describes her trajectory as a young person moving through the institutions and social settings of art: the art school classroom, artist run centres, art museums and galleries, as they existed in Canada at the end of the 20th century.

Moving chronologically, she paces through a series of artistic modes–abstraction, portraiture, photography, landscape, the figure, and finally the end game of monochrome painting–as she attempts to adapt to a fickle and competitive art world, along the way articulating the fraught position of women within it.

Monkey Painter is a memoir; the artist’s own ‘ballad of a failed painter’ – or rather, of how painting failed the artist, forcing her re-evaluate her practice one final time, and move on.

The Amorous Comrade

The French anarchist philosopher Emile Armand (1872-1963) wrote extensively in left-anarchist publications throughout the early and middle part of the 20th century, largely concerned with the question of how to live an anarchist life in our present conditions. A declared addressing of violence and the ‘bandit’ tradition in anarchist activism. Armand wrote extensively on the topics of love, sexuality, and their intersection with class-based politics. Though rejecting commercial publishing and remaining largely unknown outside anarchist circles, Armand’s ideas have influenced anarchist sexual politics. In The Amorous Comrade, Roger Farr introduces North American general readership to Armand’s ideas, and some of his crucial texts.

Tomorrow's News

Canada’s news is a mess. A self interested, divisive, and profit-fixated news business has bred a corrosive and deepening distrust not just of the media, but of our democratic institutions themselves. Many see this this crisis of the fourth estate as an existential threat to a bedrock of democratic decision-making.

In Tomorrow’s News, Marc Edge lays out some of the new forms of journalism that are emerging in the post-print, digital-first world. The bad include “dark money” funded non-profits, such as the US news outlet Richmond Standard, which have been rushing into the breech with “pink slime.” The good include worker co-operatives, such as CHEK-TV in Victoria, B.C., the Prince Albert Daily Herald, and CN2i in Quebec. Tomorrow’s News also explores the potential of a voucher system as a financing mechanism for local news organizations.

People will always be news hungry; journalism isn’t going away, Marc Edge argues. The news organizations that thrive in the post-print world will be the ones that are able to shift their support base, and revenues, from advertisers to readers.

When Heroes Become Villains

Reckoning, reconciliation, and reflection are changing our landscapes. In When Heroes Become Villains, Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson bring home the “naming” controversy, telling the stories of three erstwhile heroes, and how our reconsideration of their roles in our collective story is unsettling our maps.

John Sebastian Helmcken, a trained medical doctor and senior colonial politician, bears a singular responsibility for the rampant spread of smallpox that decimated coastal native populations.

Joseph Trutch was B.C.’s first Lieutenant-Governor after Confederation — rewarding his services as Land Commissioner of the Colony, in which role he actively worked to alienate Indigenous peoples from their lands.

He and Helmcken are also memorialized for bringing British Columbia into the Canadian federation. But that same act also meant the illegal displacement and alienation of Indigenous peoples from the lands they had occupied for countless generations.

William Bowser, premier of the province in 1915-16, served as Attorney General in successive Richard McBride cabinets, in which role he was instrumental in forcing the Squamish First Nation off their Kitsilano lands, as well as deploying police forces against striking Vancouver Island coal miners.

Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson argue that this “naming” controversy is simply part and parcel of current generations coming to a deeper understanding of their history and province, and an important part of the process of reconciliation and social justice.