From Silence Comes

Yesterday's early morning rain cancelled out the creek roar for a silence that turned what sounded like a blues harmonica into the honk of passing geese.

BBQ Sauce

Scott's picture of the pot outside Naomi's sauce.

Spring Waters

The sound of the creek -- like a World Cup match!

900-Block Kingsway, Tuesday, April 3, 2018 1:15 p.m.

Today is a travel day.

April 2016

This time two years ago.

Kingsway

Looking west on Kingsway at Fraser, 8:30 p.m. The sun looked nowhere as vibrant as it does in the picture, but I had a feeling it might, so I took it.

la nuit américaine

On Page 100 Godard tells Losique (and the audience) that he and Truffaut have "completely, definitely fallen out...in part over money." One Page 101, Godard says:

We no longer have any contact. But it's not by chance that Day for Night won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, because it's a typical American film. "Day for night" is a technical term, it's an effect, the Americans often shoot night scenes during the day with a filter that makes the sky look dark blue. They call that day for night [la nuit américaine] rather than really filming at night. At the same time, I think this film won the award because it did a good job of concealing, at the same time as it made people believe it was revealing what cinema can be. Something magic about which nobody understands a thing but which at the same time attracts a kind of wizardry, luminosity, people moving about in every direction, a world both very pleasant and not. This makes people happy both not to be a part of it but also to pay five dollars to regularly see a film.

Here is another history, not of cinema but of warfare.

People's Co-op Bookstore

A book launch last month for George Stanley's West Broadway and George Bowering's Some End. Both published by New Star, both in the same book -- a flip-book bound by an image from a painting by Jack Shadbolt entitled Encounter (1995).

The picture up top was taken by Renee Rodin.

Stanley read first, and for a brief second it looked like this:

Then Bowering read, and something similar happened, except the picture I took was tilted, so I had to re-frame it, making Bowering bigger, which is true -- he is. Bigger than Stanley. But now he is way bigger than Stanley and getting in the way of the event!

But this event -- it was something. Renee to my left, Jill to my right, with Fred and Pauline in front. Peter and Meredith were there. Daphne. Maria was there, not Gladys. (No one's been called Gladys for how many years now?) Scott was there, and as I watched him listen I thought of that picture of him and Stanley in San Francisco, 1970, when Scott was twenty.

There were others there, but in poems. Jamie was there. Gerry. Phyllis. Al. Peter. These were names Bowering brought with him, including James, who he claims not to know of, but he knows. He didn't read the poem "Please write a poem about James Franco", but I was hoping someone might call out: "Please read a poem about James Franco!"

Stanley brought names, but his entered the room quietly, like he does.

Rolf was there, our host. Jean was there. Someone said Jean was the youngest person in the room, and Jean protested, "No way, Michael's younger than I am. Not by much -- but he is younger!"

There were other younger people there, much younger than me, but I didn't know them. Grad students, I think, which warmed me, made me look at them in ways motivated by a desire to see these Georges read into the next century.

Will these youngers encourage that? I kept looking at them, imagining them lecturing to us, telling us something we are excited to know, asking us how our essays are coming, and no, none of these poems will be on the test.

Capture Photography Festival

Vancouver's Capture Photography Festival runs from April 1-28. I have seen none of it thus far, which is a difficult thing to do, given that it is everywhere.

The picture up top is Adad Hannah's An Arrangement (Polka Dots) (2018). The picture is reminiscent of Herb Gilbert's Ditto performance (below), which was part of the Vancouver Art Gallery/Intermedia co-produced Electrical Connection exhibition of April, 1969, except Hannah's "performance" is a picture that highlights objects (pottery) as still-life over authorship (performer) as portraiture?

Xmas 2016

Two Xmases ago, while flipping through a New Yorker magazine at the old Shadbolt house on Hornby Island, I found this AT&T ad from the early 1970s. I showed the ad to Hassan, who works in what was once called telecom, and he laughed, took its picture and returned to the kitchen to help Scott with the pasta.

Voice of Fire (1967)

Only when a painting speaks to me can I tell for sure if it talks.

Headline Writing

American Precedent Trumps Republic; Land Return Awaits Zymr App 

A Day at the VAG

With my yearly membership about to expire, and a couple hours to kill before the 6:50 screening of The Black Panther, I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery to tour its shows.

On the third floor, John O'Brian's Bombhead -- a nice and spare and fitting companion to the ecstatic vomitorium that is the Murakami exhibition below it.

Bombhead highlights include Adolph Gottlieb's Untitled (1968), Robert Rauschenberg's Pages and Fuses (Page 1) (1974) and David Hockney's Picture of a Landscape (from A Hollywood Collection) (1965) together on one wall, and a series of five Nancy Spero gouache, ink on paper works from 1966-1968 on another

On the ground floor, The Herman Levy Legacy: A Cultivating Journey  -- a portrait-heavy exhibition that features work from the Impressionists to the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s.

Is it me or does Portrait of the Painter Richard X (v.1916-1917) by Chaim Soutine

look a lot like this portrait of the critic Aaron Peck by Stephen Waddell?

McArthur Glen

With Anne and Gareth leaving the west coast for Québec this June I want to spend as much time with them as I can.

On Sunday Gareth and I met in their backyard for tea and garden observation. Following that, we drove to Iona Island for a walk.

Gareth took the wrong turn off the bridge and we ended up at that market town known as McArthur Glen, where well-known brands have shops subtitled "Factory Outlet," and you can get a Japadog that tastes like the bucket it came in.

The picture up top is of the north end of McArthur Glen. In a small gated area you can read in both English and Salish a didactic entitled "Who We Are From."

Below is a 1966 Dan Graham picture of tract housing in Bayonne, New Jersey:

On our walk back Gareth pointed out this oddity:

"What are they trying to protect?" he wondered, and I took its picture in case anyone might know.

Pictures

I was unable to make Tim Lee's Robert Smithson talk at the Polygon Art Gallery yesterday. But Smithson was on my mind this morning after reading Carolina Miranda and Jeffrey Fleishman's Friday L.A. Times article on how images -- "fake" or otherwise -- are "shaping" politics.

Up top is Christos Dikeakos's picture of Smithson's Glue Pour (1970) performance at the UBC Endowment Lands. Below is Sgt. Louis Lowery's 1945 Iwo Jima flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, taken moments before Joe Rosenthal got there to take his own photos -- but with a bigger flag.

"Sugar Plum Fairy, Sugar Plum Fairy"

A neighbour's plum I have eaten from for the past 25 years. Sad to see it come to this. But that's life, from gestation to birth through its slow decay -- like the last registrations of this chord, given to us by the Beatles in 1967.

Poem

before words

what feels you

to even think them

this is what

you are missing

"The lights down there, that's where we land"

There is so much Saskatchewan in the news these days. Seems every time I turn on the CBC I hear Piapot Plains Cree First Nation Reserve-born Buffy Ste. Marie sharing her wisdom and insights with Roseanna Deerchild. The music Buffy is making now, at 77-years-old, is astounding.

Another newsmaker is the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, which looks amazing, but is not without its contradictions, as brought to light by scholar and curator Jen Budney.

But there is devastation, too. The murder of Colton Boushie at Biggar; the botched crime scene investigation, the bogus trial (no indigenous jury members) and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, Gerald Stanley, has resonated beyond provincial boundaries.

More recently, the traffic accident involving the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team bus and a semi-truck. Sixteen dead.

On April 8, 2018  freelance journalist Nora Loreto noted on Twitter the millions of dollars raised through a Broncos GoFundMe campaign, before tweeting this into the grief stream:

The response to Lareto's decontextualized tweet has been intense. Not just tweets from those in search of an outlet for their grief, but from Maclean's magazine, where Loreto has published her writing.

Rather than remind readers that Loreto's tweet was issued within the context of a larger conversation concerning systemic and structural racism in Canada, rather than remind the public that her tweet is consistent with the kinds of emotional and intellectual bloodletting encouraged of all Canadians through the findings of the 2008 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, rather than further encourage those who might be offended by her (decontextualized) tweet to examine and talk about the grief that ails us in the course of our everyday lives as not unrelated to the grief of those whose children were "scooped" and given to the families of another cultural milieu (Buffy Ste. Marie?), or imprisoned in residential schools, Maclean's took the proverbial low road and turned its back on one of its own (a journalist, freelance or otherwise) by treating her as if her comment was off-hand, malicious, when it was anything but.

Should Maclean's have issued a statement in support of Lareto's comments? No, not a statement, per se, but a thoughtful editorial that has the potential to re-direct her comment from the hands of those who only know their anger to the kind of teaching moment that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has asked of all Canadians through its findings.

Back in 2013, Saskatoon-raised Joni Mitchell enraged many Canadians when she told the CBC that "Saskatoon has always been an extremely bigoted community. It's like the Deep South..." The context, in this instance, was her exhaustion with a city that kept trying to honour her, but kept failing to raise the necessary funds.

"At one point," says the CBC, "there was a museum proposed to recognize her work. Mitchell had suggested it have a first nations component [Mitchell's father. William Anderson, is of Norwegian and Sami descent]. The idea eventually fell through."

In closing, here are some honest and inspiring words from Celeste Leray-Leicht, one of the grieving mothers whose son was a member of the Humboldt Broncos hockey team, as quoted from the April 11 online issue of the Hockey News:

This is the kind of comment that I hope Maclean's and other news agencies pick up on in order to, in the words of Joni Mitchell, "turn this crazy bird around" and publish something generative -- not something inculpatory.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Madeline (1939)

Travelling through my bookshelves yesterday I found a copy of Madeline. Flipping through it I noticed a mistake.

After Madeline's eleven classmates return from their visit to the hospital, where Madeline is convalescing from her appendectomy, they sit down to supper: six on one side of the table, six on the other.

But if Madeline is still in the hospital, who is the twelfth classmate?

The twelfth classmate could be Brigitte Bardot, I think to myself.

I went online to see if I was the only one to notice, and of course there are as many notices as the internet is old.

"and that's all there is --
there isn't anymore."

Note Taking

Yesterday I googled "wrath of affect." Nothing came up, so I guess I'm stuck wth it.

Yesterday, while sitting around reading and waiting, returning to Franz Fanon in order to return again to Glen Coulthard, scribbling notes, checking something in a dusty reference book ("Négritude is, however, a universalist concept, which owes a great deal to its French, or even Parisian, intellectual origins, and it is very different from traditional African tribalism." The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, 2nd. Edition, 1988),

wondering about this "owing", whether the articulation of what I, in my own and equally complicit subject position, "owe" indigenous scholars like Jeannette Armstrong, Marcia Crosby, Shawn Wilson and Leanne Simpson, who have taught me things about about the land and language and social relations, and what I "owe" eurowestern thought through readings

of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Chantal Mouffe, placing over them like decals words like intersectional, how the personal is positional, never truly satisfied, never truly gathering and subtracting, sweating over everything while holding back the tears, something to sing about, like these crackers:

Kinder Morgan Canada Press Release

Kinder Morgan Canada Limited issue a press release yesterday. I have pasted it here (bottom) because texts like these have a way of rearranging, disappearing. Also because texts like these are carefully and collaboratively written, not just with the help of editors, but with public relations people and lawyers, and therefore are worth studying for the information they convey ("content") as well as their rhetoric ("form"). When Franz Kafka was asked why he studied law when he wanted to be writer, he said that of all the professions, law was the closest to writing.

CALGARY, April 8, 2018 /CNW/ - Kinder Morgan Canada Limited (TSX: KML) today announced that it is suspending all non-essential activities and related spending on the Trans Mountain Expansion Project.  KML also announced that under current circumstances, specifically including the continued actions in opposition to the Project by the Province of British Columbia, it will not commit additional shareholder resources to the Project.  However, KML will consult with various stakeholders in an effort to reach agreements by May 31st that may allow the Project to proceed.  The focus in those consultations will be on two principles:  clarity on the path forward, particularly with respect to the ability to construct through BC; and, adequate protection of KML shareholders.

"As KML has repeatedly stated, we will be judicious in our use of shareholder funds.  In keeping with that commitment, we have determined that in the current environment, we will not put KML shareholders at risk on the remaining project spend," said KML Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Steve Kean.  The Project has the support of the Federal Government and the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan but faces continued active opposition from the government of British Columbia. "A company cannot resolve differences between governments.  While we have succeeded in all legal challenges to date, a company cannot litigate its way to an in-service pipeline amidst jurisdictional differences between governments," added Kean.

"Today, KML is a very good midstream energy company, with limited debt.  The uncertainty as to whether we will be able to finish what we start leads us to the conclusion that we should protect the value that KML has, rather than risking billions of dollars on an outcome that is outside of our control," Kean said.  "To date, we have spent considerable resources bringing the Project to this point and recognize the vital economic importance of the Project to Canada.  Therefore, in the coming weeks we will work with stakeholders on potential ways to continue advancing the Project consistent with the two principles previously stated."

KML had previously announced a "primarily permitting" strategy for the first half of 2018, focused on advancing the permitting process, rather than spending at full construction levels, until it obtained greater clarity on outstanding permits, approvals and judicial reviews.  Rather than achieving greater clarity, the Project is now facing unquantifiable risk.  Previously, opposition by the Province of British Columbia was manifesting itself largely through BC's participation in an ongoing judicial review.  Unfortunately BC has now been asserting broad jurisdiction and reiterating its intention to use that jurisdiction to stop the Project.  BC's intention in that regard has been neither validated nor quashed, and the Province has continued to threaten unspecified additional actions to prevent Project success. Those actions have created even greater, and growing, uncertainty with respect to the regulatory landscape facing the Project.  In addition, the parties still await judicial decisions on challenges to the original Order in Council and the BC Environmental Assessment Certificate approving the Project.  These items, combined with the impending approach of critical construction windows, the lead-time required to ramp up spending, and the imperative that the company avoid incurring significant debt while lacking the necessary clarity, have brought KML to a decision point.  

Kean continued:  "We appreciate the support shown by the Federal Government and the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and are grateful for the strong endorsements among the majority of communities along the route and 43 Indigenous communities, as well as customers, contractors and unions. The fact remains that a substantial portion of the Project must be constructed through British Columbia, and since the change in government in June 2017, that government has been clear and public in its intention to use 'every tool in the toolbox' to stop the Project.  The uncertainty created by BC has not been resolved but instead has escalated into an inter-governmental dispute." 

Trans Mountain has spent C$1.1 billion (approximately half of which has been spent since the KML IPO) and made unprecedented efforts to develop the Project since its initial filing with the National Energy Board in 2013.  As a result of extensive engagement, a comprehensive regulatory process and detailed engineering and design, the Project has changed in several, substantive ways during the intervening five years, including: thicker wall pipe in environmentally sensitive areas such as watercourses and aquifers; avoidance of several fish bearing streams; changes to the detailed route of the pipeline in consideration of community needs and concerns and environmental impacts; Burnaby tunnel construction, to avoid neighbourhoods and minimize impacts; changes to Burnaby Terminal tank design in response to risk assessments; and, enhancements to marine safety that will benefit all marine users.

In addition, in an unprecedented negotiated commitment, Trans Mountain agreed to provide financial benefits from the Project, if completed, to British Columbia for a newly-formed BC Clean Communities Program to be accessed by communities for local projects that protect, sustain and restore BC's natural and coastal environments.

"While we are prepared to accept the many risks traditionally presented by large construction projects, extraordinary political risks that are completely outside of our control and that could prevent completion of the project are risks to which we simply cannot expose our shareholders," said Kean.  "However, given the importance of the Project to Canada and Alberta, to Indigenous communities, our shippers, our contractors, and working Canadians, we are committed to trying to find a way forward, working with stakeholders between now and the end of May on measures that may allow us to advance this critical project, but only if it does not subject KML shareholders to undue risk.  If we cannot reach agreement by May 31st, it is difficult to conceive of any scenario in which we would proceed with the Project.  The time period for reaching a potential resolution is short, but necessarily so because of approaching construction windows, the time required to mobilize contractors, and the need to commit materials orders, among many other imperatives associated with such a large project."

Given the current uncertain conditions, KML is not updating its cost and schedule estimate at this time.

Please join KML and Kinder Morgan, Inc. (NYSE: KMI) at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time on MondayApril 9, 2018, at www.kindermorgancanadalimited.com or at www.kindermorgan.com for a LIVE webcast conference call that will include a discussion of the matters described in this news release.  Dial: 1-517-308-9248 Passcode: 2088258

About Kinder Morgan Canada Limited (TSX: KML). KML manages and is the holder of a minority interest in a portfolio of strategic energy infrastructure assets across Western Canada. The Trans Mountain Pipeline system, with connections to 20 incoming pipelines and current transportation capacity of approximately 300,000 barrels per day (based on throughput of 80 percent light oil and refined products and 20 percent heavy oil), is the only Canadian crude oil and refined products export pipeline with North American West Coast tidewater access. In Alberta, KML has one of the largest integrated networks of crude tank storage and rail terminals in Western Canada and the largest merchant terminal storage facility in the Edmonton market. KML also operates the largest origination crude by rail loading facility in North America. In British Columbia, KML controls the largest mineral concentrate export/import facility on the west coast of North America through its Vancouver Wharves Terminal. Through its Puget Sound pipeline system, KML ships crude oil to refineries in Washington state and its Cochin Pipeline system transports light condensate originating from the United States to Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta. For more information please visit www.kindermorgancanadalimited.com. 

Important Information Relating to Forward-Looking Statements 

This news release includes "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities laws (forward-looking statements). Forward-looking statements in this news release include statements, express or implied, concerning, without limitation: consultations with various stakeholders in an effort to reach agreements that may allow the Project to proceed, and the time period over which such consultations would occur; KML's intention not to commit additional shareholder resources to the Project under the current circumstances; the level of uncertainty as to whether the Project could be finished; and the impacts of political risk, governmental and regulatory actions and judicial decisions on the Project. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of performance or certain outcomes, and future actions, conditions or events may differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements provided in this news release. Forward-looking statements involve significant risks, uncertainties and assumptions, many of which are beyond the ability of KML to control or predict.  Among other things, specific factors that could cause actual results to differ from those indicated in the forward-looking statements provided in this news release include, without limitation: the willingness and ability of Project stakeholders to work with KML in a timely manner and reach agreements that would allow the Project to proceed; and judicial decisions as well as changes in the political environment, governmental or third party support and regulatory actions relating to the Project. 

The foregoing list should not be construed to be exhaustive. In addition to the foregoing, important additional information respecting the material assumptions, expectations and risks applicable to the forward-looking statements included in this news release are set out in KML's annual report on Form 10-K dated February 20, 2018 under the headings ""Information Regarding Forward-Looking Statements"  and "Risk Factors,"and in KML's management's discussion and analysis of financial condition and results of operations for the year ended December 31, 2017 under the heading "Outlook,"  each available under KML's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. Shareholders and prospective investors are urged to review and carefully consider such information prior to making any investment decision in respect of KML's restricted voting shares or other securities. The risk factors applicable to KML could cause actual results to vary materially from those contained in any forward-looking statements. KML disclaims any obligation, other than as required by applicable law, to update the forward-looking statements included in this news release.

SOURCE Kinder Morgan Canada Limited

For further information: Media Relations, (604)-908-9734, (855)-908-9734; Investor Relations, (800) 315-0578, KML_IR@kindermorgancanadalimited.com, www.kindermorgancanadalimited.com

Fred Moten at the Or Gallery (Part Two)

In a recent tweet, Canadian Art Associate Editor Yaniya Lee linked to Nasrin Himada's* "For Many Returns" essay. While reading the essay I was reminded of what Fred Moten said at the outset of his October 2017 Or Gallery talk, when he asked, "Why can't I just like an art work?" What I thought was a naive comment was obviously a provocation -- and I missed it.

* Photo above from Himada's This Might Not Work.

Night Music

The mouse you hear in your closet is God running her finger over that which you call your stuff.

Correspondences

Last December I attended a group exhibition opening at Unit 17, a gallery located in a small, single-level building near the corner of Bayswater and 4th Avenue. Behind the exhibition space is a kitchen, and across from it, the studio of artist Derya Akay. In back of that, a large parking lot, where a magnolia grows against a cinder block wall.

I took a picture of the magnolia, lit up by my flash. Looking at it later I thought of Goya's El tres de mayo de 1808 de Madrid (1814), an execution illuminated by its own gunfire.

Yesterday afternoon Derya sent me a picture of the magnolia, now blooming.

Tesekkür Ederim, Derya!

After Pound

IN A BATHROOM OF THE AIRPORT

The separation of these feces on the floor:
Diamonds in a Black Top cab.

CPR "Eastern Core" Landfill Update

A friend requested a look at a piece I wrote a couple weeks back, and I shared it. Friend responded an hour later with comments, and to say that "we are still in this fucking branding meeting that our dean insisted we attend."

The pictures up top and at bottom are vista-blocking image supplements designed for those who insist that the "Flatz" (rhymes with "Platz") is no more than a capitalist accumulation project. Whether ECUAD was involved in this mural/hoarding campaign, or whether PCI Developments used its own people, is unclear.

Renewal

For the past forty-plus years those who own and operate a vehicle in British Columbia have had to bend down between once and four times a year to apply a sticker to their rear licence plate. But for all my time living in this province, not once have I seen anyone do so.

Vanilla and the Vancouver Real Estate Market

Madagascar is home to a variety of floral and faunal oddities -- from lemurs to a periwinkle used in chemotherapy drugs like vinblastine, which, along with cisplatin, saved my life over half my life ago.

How odd, then, to hear that Madagascar is the world's leading supplier of vanilla, and that a "perfect storm" of events has lead to a four-ounce bottle of vanilla bean paste jumping from $5.75 in 2014 to $32 today.

Funeral Coach

Those in the trade refer to hearses as "funeral coaches". For years, the only hearses I saw looked like they were built in the mid-1970s. Last week I saw this one driving south on Knight Street.