The Last Pogo Jumps Again

Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.”
The Dadaists in the 1920′s turned the artworld on its head by doing stuff like turning urinals on their end and calling it Art.

The Velvet Underground 1966; John Cale in the foreground.
“And there would go the secret plot, the piss had missed the hole in the pot, like that ancient teenage dream, from soul to poisoned soul to poisoned soul,” so sang John Cale post Velvet Underground, pre-CBGBs.

In Toronto, Viletones‘ lead singer Steven Leckie promised to kill himself on stage at Club Davids on Hallowe’en 1977. Pogo director Colin Brunton captured much of the performance (as well as The Ugly, Wayne Brown pretending to hang himself, and the infamous Mr. Shit eating a goober off of a friend’s hand) for the short film Bollocks that he made with Elizabeth Aikenhead and Patrick Lee; said footage to be recycled for the new movie. “I’ll be dead by the time you see this film,” Leckie said directly to the camera when we interviewed him last summer for The Last Pogo Jumps Again. “When the Viletones played CBGBs in 1977, he promised to kill himself then too, but he didn’t follow through,” said Punk Magazine co-founder John Holmstrom.

Hugo Ball; 1916.
“Dada represented the least inhibited challenge one could imagine to the ideology underlying bourgeois culture and art: it was anti-patriotic, anti-aesthetic, and anti-conventional in the extreme. It was also, in principle, against permanence, yet, paradoxically, it left a legacy of enduring works.” Ooh la la! That’s what something called the French Literature Companion said.

“All I got out of it was a headache,” said CBC personality Hana Gartner in 1977 when she listened to Teenage Head. Lead singer Frankie Venom could only shrug and grin. Thirty years later kids were still going to Teenage Head shows, and Gartner continued her long slog towards a comfortable CBC pension .

Man Ray 1922

All the Kinks have been worked out, and the site is as safe as milk. The Spaniards in the works that were making it an ass-pain have been vanquished to cyber-space. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Photo by Rainypete; if anyone knows Rainypete, please let us know
In between brutal sixteen-hour days shooting a TV series in The Hammer, Pogo director/producer Colin Brunton has learned to appreciate the beauty of Hamilton (or as Toronto film-workers call it, “Fucking Hamilton.”) Yup, there’s lots of empty warehouse and storefronts, big unemployment, and an almost surreal number of Tim Horton’s donut shops — but The Hammer also has a shit-load of terrific musicians and artists, a certain pride and an awesome steam-punk skyline at night. It looks like a Nicola Tesla wet-dream. But the most striking thing is this: Hamilton has character, something Toronto seems to have lost a long time ago.

We continue to send notes to more people we’d love to interview, and we still get the odd phone call from people we might’ve first contacted a couple of years ago and are only now checking in. Today we despatched notes via the Internet Machine to Richard Hell in NYC and filmmaker Amos Poe in Florence, Italy, and got a call from a Blake Street Boy (who wants to set the record straight.) We’re gonna take one more crack at novelist William Gibson and David Byrne, who called Hamilton his home for part of his childhood.

Well that sucked. Some sort of robot managed to hack into our website and plant a virus. We were down but not out for a few days, but everything is almost there. Almost. It’s perfectly safe: we won’t be stealing your identity or anything, but it seems to be a little wonky trying to create a new post. Ben! Help!

We spent some of the web’s downtime filling out applications for assistance from Arts Councils.

The Pogo IT Department have enlisted Ben Linus of “Lost” fame (or at least, someone called Ben) for his cyberspace detective and intelligence work, and in the next day or two, this site will be deleted, given a computer colonic, and replaced by a duplicate. The Last Pogo Jumps Again version 2.0.