Download A4 | US Letter PDF 880Kb Read Online

About : Created by Hamilton (Canada) artist and musician Tor Lukasik-Foss as part of DodoLab’s New Worker’s Songbook project, this publication is a simple graphic guide to writing and performing your own work song. The project was first developed in collaboration with the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (Hamilton) followed by collaborations with The Print Studio (Hamilton) and SACY (Sudbury Action Centre for Youth).

Published June 2011

Tor Lukasik-Foss (Tiny Bill Cody) is an artist, writer, musician and performer interested in the ways in which art becomes a public language or a publicly shared experience. His visual work employs the idioms of conventional sign making, and is frequently designed for site-specific purposes. His performance work explores the notion of the public concert, and tries to deliberately tamper with the relationship between the performer, the stage, and the audience.

DodoLab is an art and design based program that employs experimental and adaptive processes to spark positive change and resiliency. We work collaboratively with a diversity of emergent thinkers/doers to imaginatively and critically repurpose familiar tools of the social sciences, marketing and activism to engage with the public in public. Our focus is the complex relationships between people and their surroundings and how communities define, and are defined by, their environment. DodoLab puts the creative process at the heart of confronting social and environmental challenges.

Made with *** bookleteer.com ***

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 970Mb Read Online

About : DodoLab has collaborated with the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada) on the creation of A New Workers Songbook. The project is based on WAHC’s collection of books and recordings of songs that reflect Hamilton’s history of industry and organized labour. The goal of this project is to create songs about current realities for working people in Hamilton. Reflecting on the shifts in jobs and work, this participatory and process-based project explores current perceptions from both an individual and collective perspective. Artist/curator Caitlin Sutherland has worked with DodoLab on the design of the installation and the various surveys and has also been the lead on statistical research. Hamilton artist, performer and musician Tor Lukasik-Foss is the lead on the songwriting component of the project he has designed this workbook to help aspiring songwriters to create their own worker’s songs.

Published December 2010

Tiny Bill Cody (Tor Lukasik-Foss) is an artist, performer and musician based in Hamilton, Ontario.

DodoLab is an art and design based program that employs experimental and adaptive processes to spark positive change and resiliency. We work collaboratively with a diversity of emergent thinkers/doers to imaginatively and critically repurpose familiar tools of the social sciences, marketing and activism to engage with the public in public. Our focus is the complex relationships between people and their surroundings and how communities define, and are defined by, their environment. DodoLab puts the creative process at the heart of confronting social and environmental challenges.

Made with *** bookleteer.com ***

Download
Sea Shanties Volume 1 A4 | US Letter PDF 360kb
Sea Shanties Volume 2 A4 | US Letter PDF 395kb

Selected and Introduced for Short Work by Francis McKee, director of Glasgow International (2004-08), CCA Glasgow and Research Fellow at Glasgow School of Art.

Beyond society’s canons of literature there are the outlaws – songs and stories that survive in the wild. Sea shanties are among the hardiest of these forms and all the more remarkable for having their roots in a vanished world of sailing ships. There is a raw surrealism in sea shanties that is bred from endless nights in the belly of tomb-like wooden hulks floating on deep swelling oceans. The wild ramblings (‘Cape Cod kids ain’t got no sleds/They slide down the hills on codfish heads’) are tempered by the disciplined, rope burned, rhythms of the nautical work song. It is this emphasis on hard manual labour, combined with a sailor’s wicked word play, which gives these songs their enduring appeal. You can sense their influence behind Shakespeare’s sea song in The Tempest:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

And you can hear them lurking in the sailors’ song in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon – ‘Sumatra, where the girls all look like Cleopatra, and when you’re done you’ll simply barter…’ Sea shanties move with a swagger. They tempt purple prose and have given birth to long rambling movies from Moby Dick to Pirates of the Caribbean. They’re proof that not all our genetic code is in the marrow – some of it is in songs like these.

This selection is taken from the collection of Andrew Draskóy on his website Shanties and Sea Songs. As he suggests these lyrics are best heard sung and three good albums provide a starting point:

• Sailor’s Songs and Sea Shanties (Highpoint, 2004)
• Blow the Man Down: a Collection of Sea Songs & Shanties (Topic, 1995)
• Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys (Epitaph, 2006)