to midnight thought about placing a tattoo like that, or ruining my boots this way.” So I like the mash-up that seems to happen, and I see it as a percolating froth. All these bubbles — imagine a total multidirectional field of translucent bubbles meshing, interconnecting and affecting each other, touching each other. It’s effervescent. vince I think that even in small towns now, people are picking up on this sort of DIY aesthetic. Whether it’s visual arts or whether its music, it’s implicitly political the way that it goes about its business, by being cooperative, by being non-hierarchical. Sappyfest, for instance, which is in Sackville, New Brunswick. It’s a town of six thousand. So it’s like you say, this culture seems to be just about anywhere you go, now. billy Yeah. Canada’s interesting, because a lot of the artists that do well here — visual artists — they’ve hopped around different cities in Canada. Any artist visiting another city is going to go to the comparable neighbourhood and leave their mark somehow, make friends. You go to school in Vancouver, you bump into somebody in Halifax, and on and on it goes. And then you could buy property in Bruno, Saskatchewan, like some people did recently, and they created a little shop — All Citizens — a little zine shop, with their mango juice and their tea. I don’t know if it’s still running, but what happens then is that, well, a band is going through — it’s only a couple of hours from Saskatoon — and they’ll stop and do a concert on the roof. And then — “What’s going on here?” Maybe somebody else will move there. This is what I’m hoping. Where’s the next little town to move in? I’m kind of tired of Mile End. Can we move to the country altogether, guys, and make a scene? So Sappyfest happens, and it’s Arcade Fire’s pleasure to play at Sappyfest. Why wouldn’t they want to do that? That’s their community. They’re still people that wave to you on the street if you see them, it’s not like they’ve got their ‘people’ all around them pushing you away as if they were Eminem. Or Madonna.
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