Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 262: Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems — with Michael Turner
Speakers: Samantha Walters, Am Johal, Michael Turner
[theme music]
Samantha Walters 0:04
Hello listeners! I’m Sam with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal is joined by Michael Turner, a Vancouver-based writer and musician. Am and Michael discuss the release of his latest book Playlist: A Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems. They also talk about his journey with music and the Hard Rock Miners, programming work at the Candahar Bar during the 2010 olympics, and Michael shares some poems. Enjoy the episode!
[theme music fades]
Am Johal 0:44
Hello. Welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We have a very special guest, Vancouver legend, Michael Turner is with us. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Turner 0:56
Thank you, Am.
Am Johal 0:57
Michael, wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Michael Turner 1:02
Ok, I think I'll just stay in the first person and say that I am a writer. I was born and raised in Vancouver, unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil Waututh people. I was fortunate to go to school with many Musqueam people. Grew up on the west side. I was born in North van, but most of my time was spent in Kerrisdale. And my mother grew up in Kerrisdale. My father came from distant lands.
Am Johal 1:27
So, you have a book launch happening in a couple of weeks. By the time the episode airs, the book will already be out in the world. Playlist: A Profligacy of your Least-Expected Poems. Wondering if you could maybe just share a little bit about where the idea for the book came from.
Michael Turner 1:47
Well, the book came out of practice. Part of what I do as a writer is, I do workshops, poetry workshops. And a problem I was having with the poetry work workshops of late—Well, that was probably about five or seven years ago—Was people were coming and they wanted to write poems, but they weren't writing in the workshops, and they weren't really doing any writing afterwards. And I was trying to find a way to excite people into writing, and I came up with this idea where they actually bring some writing in with them that isn't their own. So I had it in my head that I would ask people to bring in song lyrics from songs that kind of drove them crazy, that they didn't like or were politically averse to, or whatever, generally having a negative relationship to the poem, a negative, critical relationship to the poem or the song, rather the song lyrics. And from that we would make poems. So we would make a kind of poem that, through my method, would eliminate the source, or any trace of the source, and as such kind of act as a critique of the lyric that finds itself as a poem. It cannibalizes and completely consumes the source and exists as what would be a, for many, a new piece of work. It would be up to a reader to go in and uncover the source. Perhaps through a close reading, you might be able to turn the poem back into the source. Now that was one element of it. Were these poems. And I had been developing poems this way for a while, and I thought I might like to do a book with these poems. And I realized what I need is a... because a lot of poetry books now, they're about things. It used to be, you know, you could put out a book as a poet, and in the mid 50s, uh, new poems, or 20 poems, or something like that. But now people want a little bit more of a frame. And I got to thinking about growing up in a musical household and being a touring musician for a number of years after I finished university, I was very interested in these mid— this mid century folk music revival in North America. And, you know, they gave us that Greenwich Village scene, and people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and I love those song books, and I love them in part because they carried the song and the music, but they also carried these introductions. And Pete Seeger did a number of these folk music books too. So there would be these introductions to these songs. And this all came out of that civil rights moment too, where people being educated about what they were singing about. And there's a dialectic there. And then, of course, singing about something to educate. So I thought what I would do is I would use that dual writing system to make a book with these poems. I would introduce them, in effect, not literal introductions, but oblique introductions. And it was basically coming out of my life, growing up in a musical household, becoming a musician. And then later retiring from music in the early 90s and doing programming in nightclubs, curating at the cultural olympiad, a number of things related to music, as you would find if you were to read through this book. So that became the book from its sources.
Am Johal 5:21
So one thing, you know, as a reader and knowing you as well, one of the things I found in going through it a couple of times is this kind of joy as a reader, because it's, in a way, it's an unconventional memoir because of its form. And at the same time, I kind of get a feeling of this joy that you're doing what you want, like you don't really care what the traditional form of a memoir is, and so it takes you along as a reader, and there's a confidence kind of built into it. So that was really interesting in seeing those those pieces. Were there other books that you were sort of inspired by in working in this type of form?
Michael Turner 6:07
Well, that's a very high compliment, Am, I really appreciate you saying that, because I did feel that joy as I was working through the book, once it established itself, once its terms were set, and I was working with and around them, I did feel a kind of a joy, a freedom and joy from that experience, a delight in just writing what I felt like, and really writing out of linear time, writing out of chronology. Like a true Chronicle, just things here and there. So I really appreciate that that comes through in the book. Now, I mentioned earlier that some of the things that influenced me were those song books, those important song books that Pete Seeger did a lot of them. These were books that came out of, some of them were put out by the Smithsonian that were based on the field recordings that Lomax, Alan Lomax and family were collecting and providing as much as possible proper attribution, whereas, say, AP Carter, you know, who go around and lift stuff and make it his own and run through pure, pure music publishing and... But there was just this earnestness, you know, towards collecting the music, and situating it in geographic and historical space that was really influential to me. So related literary books for me would be books like, say, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. Another one being Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, which is, you know, Annie Dillard retires to tTinker Creek, as it were. Bruce Chatwin goes to Patagonia apparently, and wanders through it and has adventures. And I think even Terese Marie Mailhot's Heart Berries, a memoir, was very— A book I was really quite moved by, just that lyric touch. This is a book that came out maybe five or seven years ago. Beautiful book. She's a Sto:lo First Nations, and I think she's teaching down at AIA. And, you know, I can't think offhand like, what other books that were moving me. But the idea of the memoir for me is never memoir first, it's always carrying my life. And maybe focusing on something else. So in this instance, it's my life in music. And it— through these, you know, and then these poems kind of are very oblique. And they are, you know, they're attached to this, sort of, these realist elements. I think the introductory elements overtake the book. I think it was meant to be that, because I realized in my joy, that I was writing a memoir, and I was very happy to do it in this way.
Am Johal 8:49
The music part of it's really interesting, just in terms of you being a child, picking up your first instruments, taking piano lessons, all of that. Wondering if you can speak a little bit to kind of your journey into music and eventually joining with the Hard Rock Miners.
Michael Turner 9:06
Okay, yeah, like I say, it was a musical household. My father sang and played piano and ukulele, and mom was very, very good at remembering the words and whispering them in my father's ear. You know, there were xylophones and hand percussion in the house as well, and we as a family were able to develop party pieces as it were. And as I grew older, my family split up when I was about 10, and mom put me in piano lessons to unlearn some of the piano that my father had taught me. He did his eccentric barrel house style. Mom wanted to bring it down a bit, so I had lessons with Mrs. Sather, who lived across the park for a while, and then I kind of drifted from that, and I started just my friends in school were playing guitar. And I saw a mandolin at a junk store that my father used to like to go to, and I bought that, and I taught myself to play that and, you know, so growing up in high school, it was, as I mentioned in the book, you know, my friends are generally rocking out on Zappa fragments and, you know, basement jams and never playing entire songs. And I'm sort of sitting at the end of my bed, you know, learning bluegrass tab solos on the mandolin, or, by then, playing guitar. And, you know, learning songs like Joni Mitchell songs and Joan Armatrading songs, songs that women would sing, because I loved women's voices, and I talk about that in the book too. Um, I, you know, so I've always had this sort of romance about folkier, wooden acoustic music. And, yes, there was a punk rock moment in my life. I was in real time with punk. I never liked the music so much as the attitude. I could understand it as an inheritor of a, you know, of a boomer world, you know, being at the end of the baby boom and kind of having to endure all that and ask questions of my moment and the world as I was seeing it. Hard Rock Miners was a band that came out of, basically, came out of art school. I didn't go to art school. I studied anthropology, but my friends went to art school, and my friends were who I formed the band with. The original iteration in January 1987 and we played on the street. And we took, like old time songs and made them fresh, and we took dance music and disco songs and made them sound old, and we were able to create these medleys. And we were interested in things like, I think I brought a bit of this to the band, was agitprop, and just sort of reading the newspaper and writing a song from something in the news that day, and then playing for people on the street. And we did this on Robson Street post Expo 86 when Robson was starting to come up, as it were. And, you know, it was, it was a great life, and the band evolved, and we were playing festivals and universities and, of course, touring. And we did that, as you know, more or less the original group, for seven years. And I mean, I just after a point, I was just, couldn't get in the van anymore. I was done, I was baked, and I retired to spend more time writing music and then I opened the Malcolm Lowry room. So suddenly, because my brother in law was managing the NBI, and I'm suddenly okay, I'm booking the bands I used to tour with and stuff. And that was an adventure, and it really, it just never left me. And again, the Cultural Olympiad. I was hired to do programming at the Candahar bar through the Presentation House Gallery then and again, working with musicians, writing a theme song using like Rodney Graham, a line from 12 Rodney Graham songs, very much a kind of conceptual project. Was doing a lot of art writing, writing novels, but music was always staying with me.
Am Johal 13:02
The Hard Rock Miners, besides playing on Robson Street, what kind of bars and other places were you playing out in Vancouver at that time?
Michael Turner 13:10
Oh, the clubs at that time. I mean, the— Well, I mean, some are still there, the Commodore's still there. And we got to a point where we could sell out the Commodore, which was a gas to be there. You know, we came in as opening acts, and then suddenly we were headlining, and then suddenly we were filling the place. That was its own thing. On a very small scale, was the Railway Club, which was in some ways just as exciting.
Am Johal 13:37
They continued doing the sing along there at the Railway Club for many years.
Michael Turner 13:41
Yeah, and that went, that— I mean, I think the band in name continues on to this day, and they've developed something amazing, which is a kind of reverse karaoke project. And, you know, and it's very true to the old folks spirit of just, you know, being in the bars and the sing alongs. And, you know, our relational turn has us, you know, doing these things theoretically and also recreationally and easily. So the band, and the idea of the band, and the joy, once again, the joy of the band, you know, endures, carries on.
Am Johal 14:13
So you describe somewhat this exhaustion of the touring life with the band, and then moving into serendipitously public cultural programming at the North Burnaby Inn at the Malcolm Lowry Room, and also at the Railway Club as well. But wondering if you can sort of take us back to the kind of zeitgeist of that moment, it was a particular place, this hotel bar. You even lived in it for a period of time as well. But take us into what was the Malcolm Lowry Room for people who didn't go.
Michael Turner 14:48
Okay, well, the Malcolm Lowry room, I opened that in '90... Oh, is it '90? I think it was like September '93 and it went until March '97. Now that happened when I left the band in June of '93 and my brother in law said, who was the manager at the NBI, said, hey, this is great. You know, you're not touring anymore. Do you want to come and put some bands in, in the lounge on the weekend? It's a 99 seat lounge. And that lounge is actually one quarter of what was the 400 seat Sting Cabaret at the, you know, at the NBI. And that was an infamous room. And at any rate, for various reasons, they had to cut it up, and it was left with this lounge. And no one was going in the lounge until 1pm when the pub, as it was called, where the exotic dancers were, the pub would close at 1pm but the lounge was licensed till two, and everybody would run over to the lounge and drink their faces off for an hour. And my brother in law was like, why don't you put some entertainment in there leading up to that, maybe get something going? And of course, I was like, well, I've retired, you know, I don't want to do that anymore. But then I thought about and I thought, no, this makes sense to me to do that. This will help me come down off of that life. Because as difficult as it was for me in some ways, I knew I just couldn't chop it off. So I started doing this on weekends, and then I started a jazz night on Thursdays, an open mic on Wednesday, a film Night on Tuesday, and then eventually I had a house band. People who lived in the neighborhood will come in. And I would also do poetry reading, special events there. I worked with Scratch Records. They would bring the bands in whose records they were selling. Had some great times, working with Keith Perry on that, and Mint Records, of course. And so right away, you're also working with various elements in the community, small record labels, artist co ops, musician co ops, all sorts of things. The name Malcolm Lowry Room was a bit of a fib. Malcolm LorLowryi lived in Dollarton across the Seymour narrows there, I made up a story where he, in a drunken rage, or a sober rage, because he needed a drink, swam across the Narrows, climbed the mountain and went into the old Admiral hotel and, and heroically, you know, demanded a drink, and, of course, never had to pay for another one there. No one knew who he was in my fib. But this, this exotic person who kind of came in and, you know, wet and asking questions in strange, poetic phrase-ologies. So anyway, I made up this whole thing about Malcolm Lowry. Then I had a bunch of pictures done up from the Special Collections out at UBC. I think I was paying artists at one point to make volcanoes that I would, you know, decorate the place with and it just developed this kind of crowd. I knew I couldn't charge a cover because it was out of the way. So it was no cover ever. And then a motto, sometimes you want to go where nobody knows your name. So it was a hide away. And it just kind of worked. And in some ways, it didn't have to work for various reasons, but it was a thing and a memory builder. I still hear from people, you know, telling me about it. I still get the odd picture sent to me, and unfortunately, I have no pictures. I have one picture from opening night when Cub played. Cub opened. That was a great night. It's a very full part of my life. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it. And it's the same with the Candahar bar, like I was so... I get so involved in these things, as I do them. My existential self takes over, and I kind of move on to the next thing. It's my nature.
Am Johal 18:55
Now, the Candahar bar, so that was purpose built, middle of the Olympics, on Granville Island. Couple of Irish bartenders flown over. And maybe if you could share just a little bit about the kind of, the programming vision and what went into it during that, you know, very monumental time in Vancouver. You know, of course, we had had Expo 86 and all the tumultuous politics, and we had gone through the middle of that, through the Olympics as well. And here it is where it's about to all end after the Olympics. But it was a really special place.
Michael Turner 19:29
It was the second ending. You know, it wasn't the second coming. It was the second ending. The first ending, of course, was Expo 86 and I was a university student through the building of the Expo 86 when all the transfer payments from the feds were coming in, and traditionally, going into health and education were being, you know, moved about. I think we got the new Cambie Street Bridge out of what was probably, you know, the old student grant. So they shifted all of these things. They made the grants something that you would get through, quote excellence, as opposed to just sort of coming to you anyway. That's another whole story. But I, like many, boycotted Expo 86 but when the Olympics came around, I mean, I was reminded, I reminded myself certainly of not wanting anything to do with Expo 86. And I guess this time I had different reasons, certainly for— Well, I mean, I don't know what to say about that. I was older, I was more woven in, and I felt in some ways, I could be more critical within so part of— just jumping ahead, what I came up with, with the program were a series of symposia where people could come in and talk critically about what it was to, you know, do a World's Fair and the rationalization that comes in how local governments and provincial governments are complicit in creating a distraction towards accumulation or whatever. But basically, just to give you the aesthetic description, the Candahar bar was a project of the artist Theo Sims. Theo Sims. And he built a recreation of a Northern Irish, Belfast, I think it was, bar in effect, in a box, in a 20 by 12 foot box that was deposited, in this instance, in the middle of a dance studio, quite large, at Granville Island. We'd received a fair bit of money for this, which involved us going to Cultural Olympiad meetings, including one where I complained about something and with, I think, a j'accuse thrown into it, and was told very softly, Michael, the Olympics is a peace movement. And then it was this, like the scene in Network where you're, you know, Peter Finch is sort of straightened out by Ned Beatty and, any rate. So I was kind of like, okay, this is just surreal. It'll stay surreal. It did. And we had amazing events. So opening night, I hired Rebecca Belmore to do a performance, and her performance was okay. I'm basically going to make the bar in the box, the Candahar bar proper. I'm going to hire a bouncer, and I'm going to have the bouncer stand outside and not let anyone in who doesn't have an Indian status card. And that was amazing and on many levels, and almost created a riot, because there were people showing up, wealthy people in the art world, who were demanding to go in, and, of course, were not led in. And it got quite pushy. This bartender went right into... Or the bouncer went right into the role and, you know, you had to show that status card, and we have a, some videotape of that. It's quite remarkable. We gave it to Rebecca not long ago. She has it now, it's in her possession. It was a remarkable night. We also aired the theme song. And then dancing to the theme song, were a bunch of Irish dancers, young girls between 8 and 10 with these giant like spring wigs, these... And dancing to the song. Meanwhile, the bar, you know, has a bouncer in front of it, and no one's going in. There's people upset, there's stage mothers screaming. There's... It was kind of bananas. And it never really, it never really went off that level of intensity, the comical, the tragic. There was some amazing nights. There's some nights I didn't expect much of that were incredible. Some nights I expected a lot of that were underwhelming. And it was very, it was very charged. People were coming in from all over the world, the relatives of the athletes. I was having some amazing conversations with people, remarkable conversations. New York Times even wrote a nice piece for us.
Am Johal 24:11
So, a couple of parts in the book I wanted to come to as well. You share a little bit about your father's story on that side of the family, from China and Japan and over to Victoria. Wondering if you can speak a little bit more to that as well. And you speak about your babushka in California, and also these lunches you had with this French film director. I want to hear more about these.
Michael Turner 24:36
Okay, well, my father was born in Shanghai in 1936 of a Anglo Japanese father and a Russian mother. And the way it sort of timed out was they ended up in a Japanese Imperial Army, prisoner of war, civilian prisoner of war camp in Shanghai after 1940 Pearl Harbor. So from '42 to '45 they were interned there. And if you've seen the film, or read the Ballard's Empire of the Sun or seen the film, it's very much similar to my father's story. So he endured that, and then was sent, afterwards, sent to a boarding school in Victoria. Which was very hard for him, because he, you know, he looked like an Asian man, and he had a British passport that said he was born in Shanghai and was stamped out of, you know, Hong Kong. And, you know, he had a hard time, but he also, he speaks, you know, of it as a very fine time. His best friend was Ian Tyson, who was also in the boarding school, the country and western singer, folk singer. So dad, you know, had that life. He never had a childhood. So he remained a child in a lot of ways, very charismatic man, sort of like [...] with hair, but really interesting. And loves strangers. I think he loved strangers because they didn't know anything about him. He could be fresh, he could be new. He could create himself in that instance, and that gave him his joy. So that was my father's story, where he came from. His mother, after the Chinese, the Maoists came and remade China, babushka and my grandfather went to Hong Kong, and my grandfather had a heart attack, and babushka moved shortly after that, to Los Angeles and lived in Pacific Palisades with her second husband. And, you know, babushka's story is interesting. I mean, she came out of the revolutionary Russia as a White Russian, fought their way to Harbin, where a lot of Russians ended up, and then aged out of home and was— went into Shanghai and became a paramour with her sister, and aged out of that, and was married off to someone who was in society, but, you know, kind of outside at the same time, sort of Russian, Japanese, English man named Jack Turner. And of course, they got together, had my dad. Babushka's time in Los Angeles was quite amazing. I mean, she continued to run a massage studio with reflexology and became a kind of a masseuse to the stars. And, you know, there was always, you know, shoe boxes with cassette tapes by David Bowie, or, you know, 8 by 10s of Natalie Wood or whatever, whose mother, you know, was my babushka's best friend. Natalie Wood was of a Russian family. And so there was all this excitement there, I would go down and visit babushka. As a child, but then on my own, as I grew older, and you know, you begin to meet up with her milieu. And one of those people was Roger Vadim, the film director who, at that time, had just put out his book on his three great wives, Bardot, Deneuve, and Fonda, and was sort of enjoying some of that. But then also was enjoying my visits. And, you know, it became apparent that I was welcome to lunch with him, as long as I brought company with me. I'll leave it to you to figure that out. So, he lived in the sort of Santa Monica Venice continuum, and eventually went back to France, where he passed away. But he was just part of that LA scene where it's all very fleeting. There's nothing. There's not a lot of depth. Your people are useful on a very thin surface. Yeah, it feels very much like the internet of today, actually, the Los Angeles of the 80s, but I'm being silly there. So those are, those are three proper nouns that you've asked me to expand on, and I just given you some of that.
Am Johal 29:07
Wondering if you'd be willing to read from a part of the book.
Michael Turner 29:11
OK, I'll read from the very beginning, I guess. The beginning's about beginnings. So I'll read from the beginning. Everything I think I am beginning is already in motion and never ends. An infinite middle that begins with my periodic need of origins. This book has its beginnings. One of them came in the fall of 2019 when I was on hold waiting to speak to my cable provider. The song playing was the Beatles' Yesterday. Another came in 1979 when Debbie, Mark, Phil and I began spending after school hours at the Avenue Grill. Each booth had its own juke box, and we fed ours regularly, coloring our world with song. A third came 10 years before that, in 1969, captured in a long-lost Polaroid of my mother, my sister and me standing uncomfortably around our piano while my father led us in a sing along. On top of the piano was a cloth bound book called a treasury of our best loved songs. Tomorrow, after John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Tomorrow. Joy will stare you down until it blinds you to its vacancies. You don't believe in tomorrow. Eventually you were all the gender you needed to be, sunlight under foot. Tomorrow went. Eventually. You had to come, you know, he told you, you heard nothing right until you tired of tomorrow. Tomorrow. Hate is a difficult operation until you forget the time of your arrival. You don't believe in tomorrow. He had to come. You know, he told you. You heard nothing right until you tired of tomorrow. Tomorrow. Hate is a difficult operation, until you forgot the time of your arrival. You don't believe in tomorrow.
Am Johal 31:11
Beautiful. Thank you for that. Wanted to speak with you a little bit about some of your earlier work. I came across one of your poems in that old collection East of Main, which I think is from the late 80s, maybe. And of course, some of your work as well. Kingsway, of course, is a classic in Vancouver, and you live just off of Kingsway. And of course, Hardcore Logo, which was also adapted into a film as well, that you've had a relationship to film, it seems, in various projects and things and so wondering if you can speak just a little bit about how you got into writing. You know, after your anthropology degree, you also did work earlier. Company Town.
Michael Turner 31:55
Yeah. Well, it's... I'm glad you mentioned anthropology in relation to the writing. The writing I kind of found myself interested in was a kind of a hybrid form of the ethnography, which is something anthropologists write, the cross cultural study of a phenomenon. And the poetry book, which I kind of gravitated to, anthologies, but really collections, and... Once I found writers, poets that I was interested in, in these anthologies, I would pursue them and find their books and became interested in how they constructed them. I did like those books. Say like Michael Ondaatje's collected works of Billy the Kid or Kristjana Gunnars' Settlement Poems, David Aranson's Marsh Burning. These felt like ethnographies to me. These felt very much like they carried the information that ethnographies carried. And indeed, I had a couple of profs who were interested in innovation in ethnographic writing, although they had since gone from there into sort of other areas. I always felt that anthropology, you know, suffers for its emphasis on being a science, as opposed to a humanity like Ruth Benedict, who wrote Patterns of Culture, really made reading about cultures sort of more something akin to a novel. So I always felt that there was a place for that kind of combination. And my first two books Company Town about basically the last day in the life of the last Skeena River salmon cannery. A reader is hired into production and taken through, you know, given orientations, job orientations, but also taken through the machinations of a cannery, from the fish coming out of the sea into a can and being shipped out. So I— that became the conceit for a book of spoken voices, very much like Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River anthology, which is not a proper anthology per se, but the voices of a graveyard as collected by and fabricated, made up by a writer that was actually — in the early 1900s — I believe that was one of the first American national school textbooks that kids were reading. They were reading about their history through the voices of the dead in this sort of open verse, blank verse form. Hardcore Logo was very similarly constructed. It too took the material cultural aspects of life in a punk rock band. In this instance, you know, merchandising in voices and T shirt, you know, receipts for printing, all the kinds of, you know, recording contracts, or rather, performance contracts from AF of M, pictures. And to tell the story of a punk rock band that reunited and realized why they broke up in the first place. So that was sort of my beginning. I didn't quite know what I was doing at the time. Of course, it's easier to look back now and make sense of it, but I was working very intuitively. I think I still work intuitively. Kingsway is a book that just came from living on Kingsway and letting and allowing things as I observed them to just fall into line, literally, as sort of left margin poems in most instances. And then, you know, Hardcore Logo was made into a film. I wrote a book called American Whiskey Bar that very is very much like this story of something being made into a film from a source text. I was working off of Nabokov's Pale Fire, I believe was my reference point there, which contains a poem in its center. Mine contained a screenplay. And so it goes. And my growing up was very much tied to the Pornographers' Poem. 8 x 10 was, you know, a structural play that came up, probably out of the work I'd done, co writing Journey into Fear and Suspiria with Stan Douglas. I don't think I would have written that book that way had it not been for that experience. So I can certainly link everything I've done to something, but it very often, it is an intuitive experience, and it occurs to me later. You know, my rational, you know, voice organizes it and makes it clear. So, something to be said about books not realizing themselves as soon as they're written, they're not like milk on a shelf and they go stale and they're thrown out. They live long lives and they affect people in different ways and, yeah. It's those books that you find 100 years later that no one read, that just seem prescient, that makes a book worth writing and publishing.
Am Johal 36:48
You know, one of the things about work circulating in different ways is, yeah, people discover it in different generations. Time goes by and it, you know, you just picked up a book today about Riverview that you knew existed but hadn't seen it, except in a bookstore. One of the things you talk about in the book is sort of, you know, I guess in some ways, your daily routine as a writer, the walks you go on, shops you go inside, and as you're going through but wondering if you can share just a little bit about kind of the walks that you go on, the routes that you take without, you know, revealing your trade secrets.
Michael Turner 37:29
Well, I think there's a line in the book where, and this is a line that comes purely out of just when you're writing these lines fall, although it almost— rereading it, it felt almost like a contrivance, but I literally don't know where I'm going to walk to until I shut the door, you know, behind me. I just, then I go intuitively, I go north, south, east or west. And I do have different routes, and some take me up to Victoria Drive, which I love. Between 33rd and 49th, I love that, and I have two different ways of getting there. I have a walk I take to Main Street, and there's two different routes, depending on whether I want to be south and up on Main or north and down. And I could say the same for Commercial drive. And I even walk downtown now, and I've got three routes I take to walk downtown, and I just don't know until I shut that door which way I'm going to go. And then I make, you know, obviously, another decision, because I have multiple routes in those directions, for those destinations. And sometimes I can just be turned based on a smell or just a flicker out of the corner of my eye, and I go down a lane that I've never gone down before, which is always exhilarating. There's always something. And I just, it's like an opening. I just feel myself unfolding. And I really get this idea of, you know, certainly experientially through Deleuzian becoming, you know. Unfolding and becoming, I think Deleuze wrote something on the fold too, right?
Am Johal 39:13
Yeah, I think so, yeah. I was gonna ask you about something that a lot of people might not know about you, but you once appeared as a dance MC and announcer in a short film called Elimination Dance. on the Michael Ondaatje poem. Wondering if you can share about that.
Michael Turner 39:31
That was funny. Yeah, that was at the point, I guess, Bruce Macdonald had made Hardcore Logo. And the way Bruce makes films is he makes families too. So often people, when they're making films, they form companies so they can bankrupt them and be immune from liabilities. So, but Bruce makes families. So when you make a film, or are involved in a film with Bruce, you're friends for life. And part of that friendship extended to him asking me if I wanted to play the caller for a short film that he and Don McKellar and Michael Ondaatje wrote together based on Michael's long poem The Elimination Dance. And so I flew out to Toronto to do that. It's amazing. The people that were in it, Carole Pope was in it, and Clement Virgo was in it. And all sorts of people like in the film industry, music industry and Toronto, say what you want about Toronto. Toronto families in the arts are extensive and fascinating and really comforting. So Bruce's Toronto families and Michael's Toronto families and McKellar's Toronto families were all there amidst this thing. And I had bought this suit for $10. It was a sort of a light green, almost a dark sage suit. It was a Marie Goldman suit, in fact, it had a gold lining, and it was in Vancouver. And I looked it up, and I think it was something that came around 1971 but not really wide lapels, sort of, and thin, thin legs and thin lapels, actually. And I brought this with me, and it fit me perfectly. And I put it on, they said, that's the suit, you have to wear that suit. And I think that suit's now in the Canadian film museum or something like that. So I wore this suit. I was very happy to wear this suit. I looked really good in this suit. I felt good in this suit. And I was up on stage at some old dance hall on Queen Street or past Ossington. And this was before that whole area, CAMH area, sort of had opened up, before the boutique hotels had opened up. And it was, two days it was, and it was a lot of fun. Yeah, we were in there, and Michael was Michael. I had a problem with— I was reading off these recipe cards, and I had a problem saying something. And I said to Michael, I said, can you, can I not say this? And he goes, let me look at this. And he looked at the recipe card. He goes, yeah, oh yeah, your tongue. Your tongue is bending. And he sort of took the pen and he just scribbled it out. And I said, can you initial on that? He goes, gladly, gladly. And I think I gave it to someone. I think I gave it to the friend who was the biggest Michael Ondaatje fan I knew. But I have the rest of the cards. It was a lot of fun. Michael was very nice. He's a real family building person too.
Am Johal 42:34
Yeah, before I ask you to read again, I was gonna say you're the occasional dog sitter for my beautiful dog, Maybe. You two have a very special relationship. And wondering if you can talk about, you know, how you say in the book, you don't have a pet, but you do have a relationship to these animals. And Maybe being one of them.
Michael Turner 42:56
I have had pets. I am at a point in my life where I am still moving around, just enough, that having a pet would make it very difficult. Maybe charmed me right away. I don't— it was kind of, not quite like this, Gene Wilder and the sheep in the Woody Allen film, but it was, an understanding, and I think Maybe came into your life as a pet friend to Bruno. And Bruno was aging, and the incredulous, sort of like, how are these two going to get on? And they did. The magic of Maybe. So Maybe just makes me happy, brings me joy. And I love my time with her. I love the engagement. I love the dervish dance that she does, and she's just a great pal. And I love the way she— I feel proud walking her around the park when I have her. Chest is out, her chin is up. You know what she's like. Yeah? So, so, so I thank you for bringing maybe into my life.
Am Johal 44:09
Yeah, Michael, wondering if you'd be willing to read some more from the book.
Michael Turner 44:12
Ok, let's just open her up here and well, Melanie Safka, Melanie, passed away recently. She was a real 60s person singer, and I'll just read something that I wrote based on what happened when I got my hands on a lyric to a very well known song of hers. So this is called Second Hand Lock after Melanie Safka. You staggered to my door this morning. You waved chains below my window at midnight. I was hoping to see you. You are angry for company and I have nothing you want. So you have a second hand length of chain. I have a second hand lock. You insist on keeping them apart. You stand there staring. I have nothing to share. Yes, you have a second hand length of chain, and I have a second hand lock. You stagger, you wave. You have an AMC Pacer. You race through the neighborhood, a world you have never left, preferring to hold firm to your gender. Ah, me me, ah, me, me, me, me, ah, me, me, me, me, ah, me, me, me. You told my father I was at the community center. He didn't believe you and told me as much. You often tell people I am eager to see you. You are angry for company, and I have nothing you want, so you have a second hand chain, I have a second hand lock. You insist on keeping them apart. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Yes, you have a second hand chain, and I have a second hand lock.
Am Johal 45:56
Michael, thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Michael Turner 46:00
My pleasure.
[theme music]
Samantha Walters 46:04
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Head to the show notes to learn more about Michael’s work, and thanks from all of us at Below the Radar.