Ainter

Bored with your excellence? Your tendency to maintain greatness? Call an "Ainter"!

Poem

Snapped Branch

for Craig Paterson

won’t you like my life?

I have lived enough of it

with some to spare

enough to share with you 

that what I have learned

has taught me

I am tempted to leave it at that!

but there is more

and when I am gone

still more 

something to think about

to make something of

I am looking for an editor

a narrative

to begin in the middle

an October afternoon

walking with her and her dog

along a creek

I am listening to a story

of a woman

whose son she treated

kneeling over him

the woman over her 

crying, wailing

she reaches into the wound

and she pauses

still walking 

one, two, three steps

something clicks

a snapped branch

she tells me she has read things

only I would understand

The Johnson Brexit Era

I wonder how those We The North hoodies are playing out in the Republic of Ireland this summer.

Ireland has never wanted a border between it and the UK's Northern Ireland, but the UK will soon require a manned and gated presence if it wants to keep EU goods from flowing freely into its colony, and from there into Scotland, England and Wales.

Of course Scotland may vote to secede from the Kingdom and, like Ireland, join the EU. Then what? A UK reduced to England and Wales? Ever met a Welsh nationalist?

A (gated) wall along the Kingdom-Republic will cost a lot of money. I don't think charging admission into Northern Ireland is going to fund it.

If It Were a Theme Park, What Would Its Theme Be?

Is it becoming clearer? The Trump Administration gets the Supreme Court to allow it 2.5 billion dollars in Defense Department funds to help establish a (gated) wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. According to CNN, the 5-4 vote followed "ideological lines."

With southern turnstiles in place, those hoping to enter the U.S. through Mexico will be charged admission. Whether that payment is made through cash, gold or promised labour will be at the discretion of Fort America and its partners.

As for the hit on Defense spending, that will be recouped through admission fees, which in turn will be re-invested in additional Defense programs, like un-manned combat forces (drones, armed satellites) deployed in areas outside the country where its interests (water, oil, phosphorus, cobalt, tantalum, neodymium) are at stake.

Summer Reading

My novel reading of late has been based on chance encounters. I found Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) at a small thrift store on Kingsway; Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) at the Value Village on Victoria Drive; and Jeannette Armstrong's Slash (1985) in the People's Co-op Bookstore "Loonie Cart" (actually, Kim from Paperhound noticed it first but gave it to me when I said I have always wanted to read it).

Something common to all three novels is a woman in love. In Tess, the woman is Tess, who loves the proud and high-minded Angel Clare; in A Farewell to Arms, it is Catherine, a British army nurse, who loves Frederic, an American lieutenant in the Italian Army Ambulance Corp; and in Slash it is the activist Maeg, whom Slash meets after his (final) return home. All three women pass away by the novel's end: Tess is executed for killing the man who convinced her that her husband (Angel) would never return to her; Catherine dies after a difficult childbirth; and Maeg is killed in a car crash.

Of the three novels, the death of Maeg hit me the hardest. I knew something was coming, but with a third-of-a-page remaining (before the "Epilogue"), I relaxed, thought otherwise. Then, out of nowhere, Slash tells us:

"Two days later, Maeg came home in a box. A car had hit theirs and killed her and her two friends."

Something about the suddenness of Maeg's passing, and the matter-of-fact -- if not harsh -- response by Slash. But Armstrong knows what she is doing and this, now that I think about it, is an instance of a form and tone consistent with the structure of a character and the world this character has made of himself -- in words.

I am sorry Maeg had to die to make it so. But that's life, right? At least it was in the early-1980s, when Armstrong was writing Slash. Had she started writing this book today I wonder if the story might be written from Maeg's perspective.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe"

The passing of Rutger Hauer has seen the Dutch actor reduced to a "Blade Runner co-star." My introduction to Hauer came at a mid-1970s Ridge Theatre screening of Paul Verhoeven's Turkish Delight (1973). For years Dutch people voted Turkish Delight as the Netherland's best film, ever.

Below is my update of Hauer's improvised "Tears in the Rain" speech from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982):

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. An American electorate forsake reason for emotion. I watched their president boast that he could have Afghanistan "wiped off the face of the earth," if he "want[ed] to go that route."

All those moments will can never be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to die rise.

CanImp

Yesterday's Canadian Art post features the National Gallery of Canada's Canada and Impressionism: New Horizons exhibition at the Kunsthalle Munich. In an email to Canadian Art, NGC curator Katarina Atanassova had this to say of an exhibition where "a great number" of the 121 paintings "have never been seen in public":

"If we convince ourselves and the world that 'Canada' and 'Impressionism' must stand together and write a new chapter in the history of global Impressionism, our mission is accomplished."

And if this mission isn't accomplished? Will the NGC try again?

Narrative Art

A slide-show presentation by the curators of the still-under-construction Lucas Museum of Narrative Art at the 2019 Comic-Con.

What is "narrative art"? William Poundstone asks "whither".

Post-Confession Syndrome

Thank you to those who wrote to me in response to yesterday's documentation and the "Labels" identification ("Post-Confessionalism") beneath it. As far as I know -- and apart from what comes up when googled -- Post-Confessionalism has neither a manifesto nor a "point-person"/editorial nor a dues paying membership.

As for the text's "perspective," no, it's not me, nor is it intended to be me, but a piece of writing whose writer might have discarded it (out of insecurity? for another draft?); sent it to someone who discarded it (in disgust?); or was found by someone who opened it, read it and (in consideration of these questions?) tried to turn it into art.

Note (2019)

Note is made of ink, paper and painted metal, and stands four inches high and three inches wide. Those curious about the crumpled piece of paper can open it and read it.

For those who can't read it, read it here:

when you address me

like I am the worst of those

who look like me

you speak from the worst

of what lurks in you

but we are not three in this instance

for there is another in me too

who is as numb as yours is angry

uniting the four of us

in a condition we agree 

is one of exhaustion and hurt

so when I respond to your address

with silence please know that

it is not a loss of words

nor an inconsideration of yours

but my inability to articulate them

beyond the opening of this note

Slash (1985)

I am reading Syilx Okanagan First Nations writer and scholar Jeannette Armstrong's Slash (Penticton: Theytus Books, 1985). According to Wikipedia, Slash is the first novel by a First Nations woman to be published in Canada.

Slash is, among many things, the story of Tommy (or Slash, as he is nicknamed after his knifing), from his days growing up "traditional" in 1950s and 60s rural Okanagan, to his time in Vancouver, where he works for drug dealers and is eventually jailed, to his travels as a Red Power activist to hotbeds like Washington, DC and Wounded Knee, South Dakota, to his return home, where he puts his knowledge to work.

What I appreciate most about Slash is Armstrong's casual yet careful ability to show the complexities of indigenous life both on and off the reserve -- much like the complexities that existed within the American Indian Movement, which, despite insistence by some members that it was a "spiritual movement," was deemed too radical and violent by members who sought more unifying strategies.

After Slash returns from Wounded Knee, he attends a Band Council meeting, where he gets into a conversation with his cousin Chuck, who tells him:

"You look good, Tommy, I just don't think it's a good idea to feed anger and hate. I think if we are going to be strong and really doing it, it must be done with a lot of planning and strategy and logic. Not a lot of high emotionalism. That can ruin us. That kind of energy demands outlet and sometimes the outlet is just not the right action to take. We may defeat our own purposes that way. We got to be able to act, yes, but what actions we take are critical. We have to be relentless, yes, but we can't allow our leaders to be neutralized through the petty courts system and through assimilationist press that is biased. Anger, when it is uncontrolled and directed towards anything and everything, is dangerous even to itself. You might see that in due time with this. I can't look forward to that happening. I hope there is enough good strong leaders to see that the actions are directed and controlled toward achieving a common good. I wish you well, my brother." (141)

A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

I awoke to a small square patch of sun on the west wall. Within the patch was a thin web of lines that I thought at first was a daddy long legs but turned out to be cracks on a slightly raised bubble of paint.

When was the last time this place was painted? I pressed my finger against the cracks and the bubble broke, revealing a light pink wallpaper. I picked at the paint until a pattern emerged: vertical rows of pink and blue sea horses.

Now it is time to paint again.

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

Cartoon Roused By Its Live-Action Equivalent

Testing the New Pen

Bic 4-Colour Pen

I love this pen. Plus it was time for a new one.

Fifty years old next year!

I did not know that Bic (Société Bic) is a French company, and that my 4-Colour pen was made in France (Clichy). It says so on the white part, below and between the red and black selectors. You can barely see it, but it's there.

Leaders

The culture appears polarized and extreme. While true that its step-and-fetch-it stick has opposing ends, each is bevelled to reflect pride vanity and conviction arrogance, and both are equally off-putting.

Kristallnacht

Today is the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement moves forward on its threat to raid the homes of "undocumented immigrants," a move that brings to mind an earlier action when, in November 1938, Nazi's did the same to Jewish families -- in addition to burning down synagogues and looting businesses, an event that became known as Kristallnacht.

So yes, more evidence of what Kay Higgins was alluding to in her talk at ECUAD yesterday, Revisting Brecht's Five Difficulties (or, how can artists respond to the re-emergence of fascism?), part of READ Books and the Libby Leshgold Gallery's At Least Five Difficulties: A Symposium on Artists' Publishing.

Between and &

There's no way out of it: when you look at Vikky Alexander's Between Dreaming & Living #5 (1985), you are implicated. Whether that means you are "between" "Dreaming" and "Living" or simply its ampersand is a question worth asking. (Neither? That's a question too.)

"It's the whole modern thing"

Santa Barbara's Black Sparrow Press published hundreds of important titles until its founder, John Martin, retired in 2002 and sold the rights to certain works to Harper-Collins and, for a dollar, the remainder of its inventory to David R. Godine, who re-named the press Black Sparrow Books.

In 1978, Black Sparrow published Towards A New American Poetics: Essays & Interviews edited by Ekbert Faas. A fascinating document produced 18 years after the arrival of Donald Allen's sod-busting The New American Poetry (1960) and a good eight years before Ron Sillman's arboresque In the American Tree (1986), the book features essays on -- and interviews with -- Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Robert Bly and Allen Ginsberg. I got the whole kit and caboodle at a garage sale last week for what Godine paid Martin for his inventory.

While it was Snyder's section I went to first, it is Duncan's that produced potential picks to what has, for me, been a largely impenetrable lock. Yes, it is the experience of the poem's writing that is important, and yes, the "co-operation" of elements is integral to any understanding of the composition, but man (and it is only men in this book) have I had a hard time caring about Duncan! Maybe now this will change.

In the meantime, let me say that of all the writers featured, it is Snyder, the proto-eco poet, whose ideas come closest to anything nearing today's social(ly) medi(c)a(ted) literary conversation. As for Duncan, although his interest in magic is consistent with a lot of witchy thinking in the written and visual arts, his elitisms are closer to the 19th century than they are to the 21st. Check out this exchange:

Faas: Do you think that open form is an American phenomenon?

Duncan: Oh, no. It's only of special significance in America.  It's the whole modern thing.

Faas: So it would be something common to the whole Western world?

Duncan: Yes, and then you have Japan, for instance, opening itself up to the West.  In a way, there are no more crucial openings. Everything has been opened up. Nobody is hiding away in a closet today -- some poor Eskimo or something.

Poem

Millennial Guest Chef (Venusberg)

believing in nothing other

than whatever is at your disposal

celery, lemon, shallots, sherry...

settling for nothing less

than optimum potential

a risotto!

anything short of that 

(water, not stock)

a trauma

stirring, a condition

(dinner is improvised)

coffee mugs of mountain water

unseasoned, unreduced

non-pre-heated, pure

arriving boneless over rocks, logs, moss

perfect for drinking, bathing

yet in its absences -- failure!

more sherry -- a cup for the pot

another for you, to soften

the compromise

Trailer Park Management

In an effort to rid her recently-purchased trailer park of "drug dealers, drug users and prostitutes," an Orlando, Florida woman took in convicted sex offenders. The reasoning? Sex offenders bring with them "the news ... the sheriff ... probation." Now, "it's basically a clean property."

"Mind-sticker"

A transcript from an early-1970s TAB ad. Of note is the ad's evocation of the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives (1975), adapted to film three years later.

When you can't be with him

Be in his mind

Be a mind-sticker

When you can't be with him, be in his mind, be a mind-sticker. With a shape he can't forget.

Don't you want to have a good shape?

He wants you with a good shape

Shape with TAB

TAB can help you stay in his mind. It's sugar-free and it tastes better than any diet cola. Because the Coca-Cola Company wouldn't have it any other way.

You know, keeping your shape in shape has its rewards.

Be a mind-sticker

Enjoy TAB, and be a mind-sticker.

Notice

Morning Glory and Gravel

Work continues on the house up the lane. In February a gravel pile appeared. Not long after that, a glaciation of morning glory.

Years ago I remember pulling out basketball-sized clumps of morning glory from the base of the laurel hedge that separates my yard from the neighbour's. It took three years to remove it all. I never want to go through that again.

The Polygon Gallery

Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) is a 24 hour motion picture built from previously tailored film images and sounds that carry each minute of the day -- all 1440 of them. Does one need to see it? Yes. For reasons that will dawn on you once you are in its grips. Not the movie to eat popcorn to -- but the popcorn itself!

Also at Polygon: a witty and thoughtful exhibition of dog pictures and video curated by Diane Evans; a somewhat gangly sculptural intervention by Samuel Roy-Bois (it is difficult to place a form designed to obscure an exterior view inside something as inwardly prepossessed as an art gallery); and, finally Sara Cwynar: Gilded Age II, another pictures and video exhibition where the former felt like dulls pendants to the latter's spiralling, overlapping interrogation/explication of things rose gold.

Share the Fantasy

A story in Space (20 camera shots) and Time (30 seconds) of a Woman (late-20s) who kisses a Man (60s) before driving to the desert, where she talks on the phone while receiving gas from Another Man (late-teens), before driving further into the desert, where she meets and kisses a Third Man (late-30s).

The woman is wearing a red button-up two-piece ensemble whose skirt stops just above the knee and high heels. Over her right shoulder is a small purse. She has dark hair and grey eyes. She is wearing hoop earrings. On her right wrist are two bracelets: a charm and a cuff. There are no bracelets or rings on her left hand. The earrings and the bracelets are gold-coloured.

The car the woman leaves town in is black. So too is the telephone at the gas station. So too is the shadow of the airplane that passes over her, and that of a desert feature I will get to in a minute.

The first kissed man sits in a spare but expensively furnished high-rise office. The furniture is pseudo-Georgian, and his chair is not meant for business. He is wearing a dark suit and a blue shirt. The kiss he receives is from above and lands on his forehead.

The second man is wearing a yellow sweater and dark-coloured (black) jeans. The third man is wearing a white shirt with the top button undone. Neither the first or the second man have a noticeable part in their hair. The third man parts his in the middle.

The woman's most noticeable forms of expression are a smile and a dead-on, eyes-locked greeting. She looks up when she is thinking and down when she is accelerating, or up and down after the young man at the gas station smiles at her.

The first man could be her father, but he could also be her husband or her sugar daddy. The third man, because of the nature of their kiss, could only be a lover. The role of the second man is to imagine and encourage her.

Behind the woman and the third man is a stone formation that could be a ruin but is more likely something of -- and, paradoxically, resistant to -- nature. It could be a clenched hand, save the middle-finger, but that "finger" could also be a phallus.

Chanel's campaign at the time was "Share the fantasy", and as men we were asked to see this as a woman's fantasy, and to share it with the women we know or want to know. But really, it is a man's fantasy (for a woman), and thus a male fantasy.  Chanel No. 5 sold well during this period, with most of it given as gifts.

Here is another Chanel No. 5 ad from the 1980s:



I am made of blue sky and golden light
and I will feel this way forever

I love these words and quoted them in my thesis. In hearing them I am always reminded of the last two paragraphs of Willa Cather's "Paul's Case" (1905), in particular her line about "the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands," something Paul will never experience. Not that we have any indication that he wanted to.

Protectionistas

A Capp Street board member complains that the program isn't paying enough attention to local (Bay Area) artists and shortly after that the head curator is laid off. The next scheduled artist cancels, as does the current artist.

The late Okwui Enwezor left San Francisco because he, too, couldn't stand the unsolicited input of local "builders".

A look at the Capp Street board reveals three people, one of whom -- the Founder + Chair of the Board of Trustees -- begins her bio like this: "Carlie Wilmans has deep roots in the arts, with ancestors who played an active part in the California art scene dating back to the Gold Rush."

(Note to self: Google "california gold rush art scene")

And what have we here, in Canada?

Noted warmonger/stooge/former U.S. president and artist George W. Bush is offered an exhibition of his soldier portraits at the Canadian War Museum and he accepts. Among the first reports is an "Opinion" piece from Globe journalist Kate Taylor, who concludes her article with this: “If you wanted to witness the work of Canada’s Afghanistan veterans, there are professional Canadian photographers who might rise to the challenge of telling portraiture. An American hobbyist’s mediocre political exercise has no place in the Canadian War Museum.” 

It's About Time

The Clock (2010) is an artwork that could not help but be made. So someone made it. Now here it is, in Vancouver, and of course we have to check-in. But for how long? Nine-to-five? Lunch hour? Recess (20 minutes)? Coffee break (15 minutes)? Smoke break (six minutes)? What part of our lives might we apply to it? Or should we allow it to dictate our interest in it? (Warning: contains hidden religious messages -- like the above.)

Rabbit (1986)

You love it, you hate it, you love what you hate about it. And then one day it matters to you that your hatred is not longer restricted to your critical functions but is present in your metaphysical functions as well. Suddenly, getting out of bed is harder. And when you are up, you are listless, uninspired, achy.

You step outside to get some air and the neighbour tells you how his or her or their eldest is leaving town because he or she or they can no longer afford to live here. Logging on you read about an artwork that has broken an auction record. That the story is in the Arts section and not in the Business section reminds you of what Julian Stallabrass once wrote in Art Incorporated (2004): that the art world doesn't parallel the business world -- it is the business world. ("The art world is bound to the economy as tightly as Ahab to the white whale.")

A message pops up. A magazine wants you to review an exhibition by an artist whose gallery announced the week before that it will be "representing" that artist. You are flattered to be thought of as someone who might add value to that artist's work. You are are disgusted to be thought of as someone would even consider providing that service -- at 10-cents a word.

Days

The Monday that feels like a Sunday. The churches are open but no one is serving; the radio hosts are the weekday people. For all intents and purposes, a Sunday. At some point tonight, when the sky is dark enough, the federal government will paint the sky bright with dynamite and fire. We blanched yesterday when that boat powered its way through an orca pod, but nobody thinks about what fireworks do to the nervous systems of birds and cats. Night time. Sight unseen. The Monday that feels like a Sunday.