Il faut epater le bourgeois.
-- Charles Baudelaire

Rebellion isn't what it used to be.

At the beginning of the previous century, becoming an artist was a relatively straightforward process. All you had to do was figure out what everyone living in or near the centre of your culture -- people that, for reasons which have become unclear over time, even the non-French call "the bourgeoisie" -- was doing, and then simply not do that, as actively and aggressively as possible.

If you and some of your friends decided to not do something that everyone else was doing in the same way, you could start an ism, and plenty of people did. Before too long, the zone that ringed the cultural centre was thriving with new isms. It was a heady time, with throngs of people running around epater-ing the bourgeoisie with all of the things that they weren't doing in the same way as everyone else.

low highlights on a musical timeline

March 1935: "I got nipples on my titties big as the end of my thumb / I got something 'tween my legs'll make a dead man come" – Lucille Bogan's definitive version of "Shave 'em Dry".

October 1956: In-between teaching Jerry Lee Lewis to play piano and co-writing Elvis' first number one hit, Charlie Feathers releases "Can't Hardly Stand It," the blueprint for greasy, deceptively sloppy-sounding rockabilly songs about gettin' drunk and cheatin' from here until the Cramps. Thom Jurek on Feathers: "like a flood on a suburban street – the sewer blocks up and all sorts of crazy shit pours out into the gutter".

"Get your dancing partner and take her over to Four Apostles."

Those are the first words that I hear most mornings from Arnold the foreman during the summer of 1988. I’m working at the Chapel Lawn Memorial Gardens Cemetery Crematorium & Funeral Home, just outside Winnipeg. Four Apostles is one of half-a-dozen football field-sized burial gardens, almost all with bland, inoffensive Biblical names: Good Samaritan, Last Supper, Resurrection. (Almost all. Right inside the gates, always, inexplicably, there’s Babyland.)

Star Trek was born in the same year that I was. Some time in the past thirty-nine years, I believe, it replaced Christianity as the major religion of North America.

My theories about the intricacies of this transformation are fairly convoluted, but to keep this article rolling along, I have thoughtfully prepared a concise little chart:

• Star Trek: The Original Series = Roman Catholic (moribund, baroque, and hokey, but nevertheless inspires worldwide fanaticism)

We all have our price. What's yours?

Bill Drummond knows. And he ought to: on August 23, 1994, he burned a million pounds of the hard-earned money that you paid for the albums he produced as one half of the KLF, aka The Jamms, aka The Timelords, aka The Justified Ancients of Muu Muu. It took about an hour, and, by all accounts (okay, only one: that of journalist Jim Reid, the sole witness), it was kind of boring.

Back alley, Dundas West at Golden, 9-10-06. Taken with a 1 megapixel Motorola Razr v3 ... not bad for low-fi digital.

In 1912, a young journalist for the New York Evening Sun named Don Marquis began writing his own daily column, "The Sun Dial". Producing a daily column is arduous work that requires patience and discipline. Though he was a creative and prolific individual, Marquis was neither patient nor disciplined, and, as a result often found himself pressed for material.[1] In 1916, he hit upon a brilliant solution: get an insect to do it. Or (more abject still) a poet insect.

Marquis comes into his office early one morning only to find, to his considerable surprise, "a giant cockroach jumping about on the keys":

WOTWU is a five-point digital publishing antifesto that originally appeared in the September/October 2003 issue of THIS magazine. It was published under a Creative Commons Canada license, and, thanks to THIS, is available here as a PDF of its original layout.

The writer commences: “There was a time when the earth was to all appearance utterly destitute both of animal and vegetable life, and when according to the opinion of our best philosophers it was simply a hot round ball with a crust gradually cooling. Now if a human being had existed while the earth was in this state and had been allowed to see it as though it were some other world with which he had no concern, and if at the same time he were entirely ignorant of all physical science, would he not have pronounced it impossible that creatures possessed of anything like consciousness should be evolved from the seeming cinder which he was beholding? Would he not have denied that it contained any potentiality of consciousness? Yet in the course of time consciousness came. Is it not possible then that there may be even yet new channels dug out for consciousness, though we can detect no signs of them at present?