Interiors

The men's bathroom at the Kerrisdale Community Centre looks exactly as it did when I first started going there in 1972, as a ten year old, for Saturday afternoon ceramics. I remember the first day, when our young instructor swanned into our basement classroom, grabbed a piece of chalk and said, "My name is ...," then wrote V-I-C-T-O-R on the blackboard. I immediately raised my hand. "Yes!" said V-I-C-T-O-R. "Victor!" I said, pleased with myself for knowing how to read. "Yes?" he said again, as if I had something specific to ask. "Your name is Victor," I said, now embarrassed for thinking that him writing his name, and not saying it, was something he wanted said.

St. Mayr (1925) 2

Lou is from Louisianna. New Orleans. She and her fifty year old mother Mrs. Witt live in England, on mommy's money. 

Rico is originally from Australia, the son of a titled diplomat and Lou's husband. Rico is a catch, but something is lacking, besides his modest allowance.

St. Mawr is an magnificent orange horse who plays poorly with others but nonetheless has Lou captivated.

Here is Lou on her mother, presupposition and psychology:

"Always the same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen. Always this air of alertness for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives.  If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presupposes a whole world-laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology." (30)

What's the Story Morning Glory?

Back in the mid-1990s I began a three year war against a legion of morning glory stationed amongst the backyard laurel. I recall pulling out basketball-sized clumps of the stuff, which I tossed into a dedicated garbage bin, occasionally spraying it with some long-banned product. In the last year of my war I noticed my neighbour had a beautiful blue flower emerging from one of her front porch pots. It looked like a morning glory, but it was blue.

Ipomoea tricolour, commonly known as Mexican morning glory, is an annual (and sometimes perennial) that, like the California Lilac or the Forget-Me-Not, contributes a blue like no other. I have over the years grown this flower, always from seed, never started from inside the house, always outside. This year's pot was prepared in early-April, with every seed in my clock face planting sprouting, twining together and climbing the pillar as planned. Only it never flowered, until now.

Tissue Issue

Back in January 2017 I came down with a cold that turned my nose into a tap. Tired of walking around with a roll of toilet paper under my arm, I purchased a pack of tissue boxes and placed them accordingly. Eventually I developed a thing for the sensation (sonic, haptic) that comes with removing a tissue, especially the last one.

Save-On Foods' Western Family brand made a very bland box that I favoured over the bolder name brand boxes that interfered with my home aesthetic. Around six months ago Save On replaced their very light green, very light blue and very light lavender boxes with busier patterns and darker colours, mostly blues. I don't like these new designs and now find myself in bed and bath shops looking for those stainless steel devices designed to go over them.

A couple days ago I pulled on a tissue, and whoosh -- last one. I took the box from my bathroom shelf and sat with it a while.

Lucio Fontana's cut paintings come in a range of styles, of which my box approximates the centred vertical slash, albeit on a transparent surface that appears after the perforated cardboard centre of the box is removed. As for the remainder of the box, shades of Frank Stella's Protractor series in line and form, but not in colour. To my knowledge, Stella never did a Protractor painting that didn't feature anything less than two colours. 

Autumn Near Beaupré (1898)

An image caught quickly (online) that excites for what it isn't: a farmhouse on fire. I look at the title and find it to be otherwise -- Autumn Near Beaupré. Autumn where once there were flames, smoke as the trees on the hill in behind. 

For the rooted, autumn is a change of clothes, a donning of sunset colours; the fallen, the detachment of that which is of a different intelligence -- to leave, curl up, rot ...

A burn, this rot. (Auburn?) Though faster, with a higher degree of carbon. Material breaks down, sinks into the earth, a fertilization of what's to come -- the conditions for its coming.

"A seed eats it," I told my niece when she was young "-- that's how." My lying to connect two things so that she could understand the system -- and when she's a couple years older, replace the verbs accordingly. 

St Mawr (1925)

I've read a lot of D. H. Lawrence at various times in my life, the best part of that writing made better for the times I'd read it. St Mawr is a book -- a long short story -- about a woman and a fiery stallion that often came up after finishing one of his novels or stories and poking into what scholars had to say about it. I always intended to pick up a copy. Recently I found one.

"She kept it utterly a secret, to herself. Because Rico would just have lifted his long upper lip, in his bare face, in a condescending sort of "understanding." And her mother would, as usual, have suspected her of side-stepping. People, all the people she knew, seemed so entirely contained with their cardboard let's-be-happy world. Their wills were fixed like machines on happiness, or fun, or the best-ever. This ghastly cheery-o! touch, that made all her blood go numb." (27)

Equinoxes

Less than a week left in September and it's already starting to feel Octobery. A couple weeks from now and I may say the same of November. The month after that is the holiday season, which is nice and slow, but only if you're snug and warm, and from there the long month of January, followed by a cumulative month so dismal that it had to be shortened. Then March, when everything's green and fresh again. 

How humbling to think that at my age and medical history I'll be lucky to have twenty such paragraphs left. 

Synecdoche New York (2009)

The gaps in my knowledge are vast and fill me with surprises. For example, I thought I'd seen or heard of everything Charlie Kaufman wrote and/or directed, but there was a copy of his directorial debut Synecdoche New York (2009) at the VGH Thrift Store on East Hastings, so of course I bought it. Last night I watched it. 

Synecdoche is the story of a physically deteriorating theatre director in Schenectady, New York who receives a MacArthur Genius Award and, in an effort to escape a life that is escaping him, proceeds to write, build and stage a theatrical production that is ultimately about its own creation, where every actor is a lead in his or her (or their) own life, to the point where actors are brought in to play them, leading to meta moments that transition seamlessly, if not brilliantly. 

Something Kaufman does particularly well in Synecdoche is play with time. The film opens with a radio alarm kicking in at 7:45 a.m., the announcer's voice reminding us that today is September 22nd, the first day of spring (coincidence!). In the breakfast scene that follows, our hero steps past his wife and daughter, opens the fridge, sniffs the milk and declares it sour. The date on the carton is October 20th -- 28 days later. The implication here is that breakfast is the same day, everyday, yet time is accelerating, and suddenly we are chasing it.

Another temporal announcement comes in the last third of the film when our hero is muttering to the assembled cast and crew, when one of them yells, "When are we gonna get an audience in here?" Our hero yells something back, and the yeller yells back at him, "It's been seventeen years!"

There are great moments of humour and sadness in this film, and if I had a critique, it might concern the ebb and flow and placement of these feelings, particularly as we near its end, where once again we have a director trying to squeeze too much in. Other than that, Synecdoche is a finely structured film that, despite popular culture's impatience with anything postmodern (fair to say that postmodern film and literature waned in 2009, with the advent of Twitter?), is in tune with the anxieties of the day. 

Saintpaulia

Two years ago I purchased this African Violet (Saintpaulia) thinking I might finally get one to flower. My first African Violet I inherited in the early-1980s, while attending university in Victoria. It wasn't until I saw one at a friend's house that I realized mine was almost entirely covered in dust. I thought they came that way, that what turned out to be dust was plant matter.

After some research I realized that the only chance I had of getting my African Violet to flower was through drugs, or supplements as they are called at the nursery. The product is from Schultz and is comprised mostly of phosphoric acid (14%), potash (9%) and nitrogen (8%); the remaining 59% includes microdoses of iron, magnesium, zinc and something called EDTA.

Flowering began with a single flower, under which were five tiny buds, the second of which opened four days ago. I am amazed that something uncomfortable with direct sunlight should produce a purple as lively as this one.

Imaginary Letters (1928)

It was Scott who first alerted me to Mary Butts.

"You don't know who Mary Butts is? Mary Butts was a disciple of Aleister Crowley. She worked with him on his Magick (Book 4)."

A couple days ago I was in Paper Hound decompressing after a visit to the triage that is MacLeod's. To the Poetry section, which, at least for me, always has something unattainable. Ah, what's this -- a mint condition copy of Mary Butts's Imaginary Letters (1928), re-published by Talonbooks in 1979, with an Afterword by Robin Blaser. (And yes, drawings by Cocteau!)

I had bookstores on my list of to-do's that day, so I took public transit. There is nothing I like more after a day downtown than to pick through a book on the trip back home.

Here is the opening of the first of Butts's letters:

Chère Madame,

I do not know what you think about being a mother; it's an odd department of one's existence, but I suspect that you love your son. And you are more than naturally cut off from the very little a mother can know. And I expect your curiosity has not weakened. While mine has been gratified, so that without knowing enough, I may even know too much.

Smiley's People (1982)

Recent events (the killing of the General) move Smiley to visit retired Circus operative Toby Esterhase, now running an (Islamic) art gallery in London. The distance Smiley keeps from the gallery until the last possible moment is an English thing and intended to convey his suspicion of art, its ambiguities and its pretensions. It should not be confused with a) a spymaster's effort to absorb all exterior details of the gallery; b) an ignorance of art (once inside and visiting with Toby, Smiley rightly identifies a fake Degas sculpture); or c) antipathy toward the Islamic world.

Smiley presses the buzzer and is buzzed in by a secretary who can see him through the full-length glass walls that encase this corner business. She hands him a sheet with the artworks listed on it and adds that the "round red dots" represent sales. Smiley knows this because he rolls his eyes upon turning away from her. The eye roll is followed by another eye roll once he passes by a wall work we cannot see in full but appears to be an abstraction. 

The next artwork Smiley visits (bottom) is an abstracted desert landscape that looks like something you might find in the collection of Uday Hussein. I wondered if it was "real" or if it was made for this mini-series. If the latter, then to what end? How was it directed? We need a contemporary painting and it should be a desert with a strange red object elongating its way through it? The mother of those round red dots?

Unseeable

Tamsin,

Thanks for reminding me of the CJG opening. I swung by afterwards and apparently just missed you. Abbas felt like the hinge linking the more minimal works of Geoffrey and Kapwani Kiwanga to and from the more expressive works of Duane and Rochelle. Some nice associative shaping with KK's (Pasquart 2) and Duane's colonial anxieties. KK's (Pasquart 3), with the blue sky breaking through the clouds outside, was/is sublime. 

A nicely installed show, though I have problems with the opening paragraph of the exhibition text; namely, how the "our" and "we" seem to subsume and suffocate the other. In our current moment, "we" sometimes feels more like a reckless extension of the egoceptive "I" than anything that might have time for its critique. But the show demonstrates otherwise. The re-arrangement of Geoffrey's brass 2x4s from his Venice Biennale exhibition is a reforming/conforming gesture; not a closing of ranks but a listening on his part, a willingness to do the proverbial work.

I remember at the opening of Brian and Melanie's Maps and Dreams Treaty 8 show when Elle-Maija Tailfeathers confronted Geoffrey about his use of the term "intergenerational trauma" when speaking to the media of his maternal grandfather's accident, the one that spilled his lumber, the implication being that the term's current association is with Indigenous folks (residential school survivors and their descendents), while for Geoffrey his family's injury, passed down silently? from his grandfather, was no less real, and who are you to tell me how I feel? The better part of Geoffrey has always been open to a critique of his work, but when E-M insisted he publicly address his (insensitive) use of the term, as later conveyed to me by Geoffrey, it seemed to be about something else for him.

There's a lot of "something else" going on these days, where the implied completion that comes with a response is less an end than a next step in "our" ongoing recovery of past and present (remember what Mauss says in The Gift: it is not the giving and the receiving of the gift, but the obligation to give again). This show feels in tune with our current anxieties, and, like KK's window piece, is hopeful!

All That Jazz (1979)

Above is Roy Schieder as Joe Gideon, a character based on the film's director and co-writer, Bob Fosse, in conversation with Jessica Lange, who plays Angelique, an afterlife figure who wants Joe so badly he can only be flattered -- eventually to death.

Billed as a "musical drama," the film focuses on Gideon's last months as he struggles to edit his over-time and -budget film (based on Fosse's Lenny, 1974) while at the same time choreograph a new Broadway musical, entitled NY/LA. Like Fellini's Guido (81/2, 1963), Fosse's Joe works hard, plays hard, and soon enough is hospitalized for exhaustion (angina). While there, he has the heart attack that takes him to heaven -- the "Bye Bye Life" sequence. 

I first saw All That Jazz on VHS cassette in the early-1980s. Back then, I was accustomed, if not indifferent, to men like Joe and their domains. But now, in our age of personal accountability, it is hard to watch films like All That Jazz for their composition and treatment of certain themes and not be distracted by/alerted to their characters' social transgressions. I forget how many times I frowned at the screen and thought, There. Right there. Today this guy/this gal would go down for that.

Zorba the Greek (1964)

ZORBA: We make a bargain or I cannot come. In work, I am your man; but in things, like playing and singing, I am my own.

BASIL: How do you mean?

ZORBA: I mean free.

What a strange film. Strange to my expectations, that is. I always thought Zorba the Greek was a goofy musical, like Fiddler on the Roof (1971) but without the pogroms. Au contraire. Zorba is hilarious and terrifying, less a dialogue-driven Hollywood narrative than a hand of loosely dealt episodes.

Some of these episodes are stories unto themselves, stories that communicate silently through the movement of bodies, but also those we associated with camera and film (angles, zooms, cuts, etc.) -- like the killing of the widow, which seems classical. The author of the source novel, Nikos Kazantzakis, is a Cretan who I'm sure tucked into his book (Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas,1946) some of his island's myths and legends.

Tonight I will watch another recently-purchased DVD that does wonderful things with camera, editing and movement -- Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979).

Wealth Management

A lot of talk these days about the over-production of textiles, an industry that has grown by 4% each year since the establishment of the first cotton mills. Second-hand clothing sales have likely surpassed that number, and are growing steadily. Why? Because second-hand clothing is cheaper (though not as cheap as it used to be); it is also ethical (a smaller carbon footprint).

Given the growth of this second-hand clothing market, how best to encourage it, capitalize on it? I'm no Morton Friedman, nor am I a Jonathan Swift, for that matter, but I see enormous entrepreneurial potential in hiring people to wear new clothes and have those clothes bundled for re-sale.

It might work like this. Workers are paid minimum wage to wear new clothes for an hour at a time, but in a controlled environment to keep them from getting soiled. An ideal re-purposed production site could be the many public school that are soon to be closed by municipal governments, now that it is cheaper to keep children at home for their schooling.

The canny entrepreneur will take this further by hiring slender workers to wear not one outfit of clothes at a time, but up to four complete outfits (S, M, L, XL), thereby quadrupling production. For employers concerned about discriminating against plus-sized workers, you merely tell the courts that they are, by virtue of their "formal" capacities, unqualified. 

Trinity

My first trip to Dublin was in 1980. It was about the pubs then, and in one of them I ended up in a nook with three rugby playing freshmen and an aging professor of theirs from Trinity, a London-born Joyce scholar who took us back to his campus flat and plied us with Jameson's.

The flat was part of a pension-like complex, with the toilets and washrooms located outside the apartment at either ends of a lumpy carpet-wrinkled hall. Because it was after hours, the professor forbade us from using the toilets. "If you need to whiz, use the sink."

The sink was the centrepiece of his sitting room. Surrounding it were mirrors that came alive when the professor turned on the lights, giving the sink a shrine-like appearance. But rather than take its waters, as you would at Lourdes, in this one you left your own.

A first round of shots, then the loudest of the lads stood up, unzipped his fly and announced it was time for his "reverse baptism."

"Ah, the bull's up first, leading the way," said the professor, and I watched the professor watch the lad steady himself to the right of the sink and piss into it.

"Have you read Joyce's Ulysses?" the professor asked me, his eyes on the pisser.

"Only Molly's soliloquy," I replied.

"Then you'll remember this," he said: "... he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst through his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters ..." 

Later that night, while helping the professor assemble a plate of cheese and pickles in the alcove that passed for his kitchen, he leaned towards me and whispered. "They don't know. You do. You're from North America, you're wise to these things. If they knew, it would be bad for me. Very bad. You mustn't let on. Promise me you won't. Please promise me. Do I have your promise?" 

And I promised.

"Papers, please"

I grew up in front of a television set. There wasn't a lot to choose from, but there was a lot of it. 

Every third movie was a war movie, where the un-uniformed were constantly being asked for their papers, usually by a Gestapo agent. "Papers, please," and the suspect would reach into his or her coat and produce a small booklet, other times what looked like a handful of tourist pamphlets, Nazi bureaucracy being what it was. 

As of yesterday we will be asked for our "papers" every time we go into a sit-down restaurant, a movie theatre, an art gallery or a sporting event. Proof of vaccination (against the current enemy -- Covid), but also of our compliance. And by that I don't mean getting vaccinated (which I am in favour of; same with the "passport"), but returning home every time we forget our phone.

"I printed mine and had it laminated," said an elderly neighbour, proudly, before adding, "I have a hole punch, so I ran a string through it and wear it around my neck. See --" and he reached inside his coat and held it up, the string pulling tight against his collar. 

"Under the Garden" (1963)

I was attracted to the title -- a slim collection of stories by Graham Greene called A Sense of Reality (1963). I forget where I got it. All I do anymore -- besides reading, writing, gardening, cooking and walking -- is poke around in thrift stores. Maybe it's time to add the name of the shop where I buy a book to its colophon. But why? Is it so important that I know where something is from? (To which I shiver "Yes" from the parenthesis.)

The first story is a long one, over sixty pages. "Under the Garden" is a work of automythology that opens with Wilditch, a middle-aged man disposed to travel, having a typically upper class British conversation where what is intended (a doctor's diagnosis) is merely implied. Faced with the prospect of an early death, Wilditch returns to his deceased uncle's estate where he'd spent parts of his childhood to dance around the topic of why he is there with the estate's current occupant, his older brother, and soon enough consider the source of a story Wilditch wrote for his boarding school's yearbook, based on a dream he had, but also on the trauma Greene himself experienced as a boarder at a similar school.

Here's a passage I underlined:

"Absolute reality belongs to dreams and not to life. The gold of dreams is not the diluted gold of even the best goldsmith, there are no diamonds of dreams made of paste -- what seems is. "Who seems most kingly is the king.'" (55)

Identity's First Cycle of Signifiers from Truman Lee Rich's "Brunch at the Kennedy Compound" (n.d.)

"I am a woman," the woman says to the man, "so you can't understand."

"Ah, I am a woman too," says the woman the man arrived with, "but you are a white woman and I am a Black woman."

"Yes," says an eavesdropping Black woman to the first Black woman, "but you are a wealthy Black woman and I am, as you can see, serving hors d'oeuvres for the company catering this event."

"Ah," says a third Black woman descending from the Heavens of History, "but I am a poor blind Black woman, so you can't possibly see what I have seen."

9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine x and Eleven (2018)

Three years ago today New Star Books and I launched 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven at Massy Books in Vancouver's Chinatown. Both the book and the bookstore are still "in print".

West-Facing Kitchen Window

For years the window was hidden behind a piece of what amounted to drywall in the 1970s. We knew it was there because we could see it from the easement between our house and the house three feet to the west of it, the inverse of our house (and vice versa), the two houses built together, in 1912.

Five years after our window was reopened (2014) the eventual new owners of the neighbouring house covered theirs to accommodate their new kitchen design. For years I'm sure the two windows were open to each other and neighbours whispered to each other after their children were put to bed.

Rather than a view to the neighbour's window, Judy decided to frost the new one and put up some glass shelves towards its animation (the window receives no direct sunlight). It is my fault the shelves are so high (they should be six inches lower).

The knitted hens on the top shelf are egg warmers purchased at a Rutland thrift store during my stint in Kelowna, when I was living at Woodhaven and doing a Masters at UBC Okanagan (2016-18). The hen on the left fits perfectly over a tiger cowrie and presents a strange sight when looked at from below. At the centre is a rolled up piece of birch bark and a four-inch length of quartz. The photograph at the far-right was purchased at a Berlin street market in 2012 and features a proud man taken at some point during the Weimer era.

The second shelf is busier. At the far-left is a second generation spider plant birthed from a spiderette produced from Brian Jungen's plant that miraculously survived the 2021 White Rock Lake Fire. Moving right: a small ceramic dish of unknown origin, its hidden side chipped; an African wood carving of a gazelle; a store-bought asparagus; two free-standing candle drips I snapped off a candle that Dan lit and abandoned; and a 2013(?) pot by Glenn Lewis.

On the ledge below: a plant I purchased for the garden that turned out to be an indoor plant; a small wooden bowl carved by a Port Clements, Haida Gwaii-based settler; and a vase I did not put there, that I am still unsure belongs there.

Laneway Housing

On a walk I take: east on 19th through Tyee School up the hill, right on Fleming, left on 20th past Commercial Street, past the next street east, then a right up the lane to 21st, cross at the light to the lane just east of Victoria, then a right up the lane to where it bends left at the McDonald's, the lane just north of Kingsway, in the block before Gladstone.

The Secret Garden (1909)

A couple weeks now since I finished Burnett's The Secret Garden. Rather different from the 1993 film version, which had the manor's housekeeper Mrs. Medlock a somewhat adversarial figure in the lives of children Mary and Colin, and in making her that way trimmed the edges of a story to enhance both the magic that is wonder and the unification of parent (Colin's estranged father) and child (Colin). A second layer of the novel is ever-present today, and that of course is grief. Yet another is allegory: Mary's "return" from an ailing British colony (India), where she revives the hereditary Brit that is Colin (and thus -- patriarchy being what it is -- herself). At the untrimmed edges of this allegory is the fantasy we call Brexit.  

Canadian Art

Are we going to hear news soon about the status of Canadian Art magazine -- "the pre-eminent platform for journalism and criticism about art and culture in Canada"?

The magazine's last posting -- its fourth "Statement" in a row since its April "pause" of operations -- came on June 15, when readers were reminded once more of the magazine's financial shortfalls (which it links to Covid, though we know from a former editor that fundraising was a pre-Covid problem) and its ongoing attempts to address structural racism towards a more equitable, decolonial model.

To achieve this latter goal, all but three Canadian Art Board of Directors/Members of the Foundation's charity -- Dori Tunstall, Lee Matheson and Gabe Gonda -- have resigned. The hope here is that new Directors? Members? Director/Members? would join the Board? Foundation? both? and, once gathered, embody the kinds of changes the three remaining Director/Members are seeking to implement.

The response to this last hope was met with skepticism on social media, and perhaps rightly so. For it is likely, at least to this reader, that the Board's final report has already been submitted to the magazine's insolvency trustee: that every effort was made to keep the magazine (and the Foundation?) solvent, but as there is no one willing to join the board and take on its financial (if not cultural) liabilities, it would have no choice but to file for bankruptcy.

So now what?

As long as there is a Canadian government cultural policy, a visual art market and a Canadian financial centre there will always be room for a "pre-eminent" Canadian visual art magazine (hard copy, digital, or both). Canadian Art has come and gone under a number names over the years (its official "History" can be found here) and I have every reason to believe it will come again, but under a new name, an organ of an established foundation, not the other way around, as was the case in the mid-2010s when the Canadian Art Foundation was suddenly bigger than the magazine it grew from, thus organ-izing it.

Reading through Canadian Art's "History", one can't help but notice the prominence of Sarah Milroy, who is now, among other duties, a Board Director at the Art Canada Institute, an organization formed in 2013 that claims to be "the only national institute whose mandate is to promote the study of an inclusive multi-vocal Canadian art history to as broad an audience as possible, in English and French, within Canada and internationally." Reading down the Institute's sidebar, I see no mention of a magazine, but it's only a matter of time before it grows one. Not in the wild, of course, but under the strictest of laboratory conditions. 

Madness and Civilization (1961)

If there is a beginning of the end of our world as feature film, an acceleration of the apocalyptic narrative (Oh my god, this is it -- we are finally coming unhinged!), it might be last week's large-scale protests outside our province's bigger general hospitals. Though I knew at once the motivation behind these protests, it wasn't until a beat later that I considered how those inside these hospitals might be affected by the inconsideration of the protesters. That protesters were treating hospitals not as places of quiet, sometimes palliative care, but as government administrative centres, is wholly Foucauldian.

How might Michel Foucault have felt as he lay in a Paris hospital in 1984 if he knew that those outside were protesting against a mandatory vaccination that might save them from the virus he was dying of? Surely he would understand -- and perhaps take some ironic pride in -- how the public have come to see hospitals not as places where one goes to get better but as institutions tasked with hiding that which is socially deviant. Foucault died before North America began to close down its "madhouses" -- not because they are "inhuman," as U.S. President Reagan infamously claimed, but because the State (federal government) was tired of supporting them.   

Treme (2010-2013)

Last night I finished watching Season One of Treme. Created by David Simon and Eric Overmeyer (Simon created The Wire, where Overmeyer was a contributing writer), Treme focuses on a post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans neighbourhood (Faubourg Tremé) as residents struggle to regain/retain their city both in body and in soul. At the heart of Treme is the eccentric city, the improvisitory city, with many of its characters musicians, chefs, writers and impresarios.

Back in 1980, as a young man fresh out of high school drifting through Europe and North Africa, I met a New Zealander twice my age who had done as I was doing, and never stopped. He had been everywhere -- as everywhere as you can get after 18 years of drifting -- and he told me my country, Canada, had one "un-Canadian" city -- Montréal -- while the U.S. had two "un-Amercan" cities -- New Orleans and San Francisco.

I had never been to New Orleans, but I had family in San Francisco and came to know it both before and after its October, 1989 earthquake -- an "after" that paved the way for the dot.com madness of the late-1990s, when the city, through a self-conscious civic and commercial re-design, found itself beholden to the 25-year-old heterosexual male IT professional it had sought to attract.

During a 1999 visit to Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy's Minna Street apartment (obtained, Kevin told me, because the earthquake set off a "mini-exodus") it occurred to me that New Orleans was now the only un-American city left in the U.S. But after watching Treme, you can see in fine and subtle detail how there are (neoliberal) forces at work to ensure that this will not be so. The current "state of exception" is Covid, which, as we all know, is everywhere.

Cameron Kerr

I was out front watering yesterday when I noticed my friend and neighbour talking to someone behind an SUV. The hatch was up, and it looked like they were doing business. I waved, he waved, and the guy he was talking to waved as well. "Is that Cameron?" I asked. "Yes, it is," he said. "Do you want some fish?"

Cameron had just returned from boating off Cape Scott, at the north end of Vancouver Island. He and a friend had been hand jigging, and he showed me a short video of the two of them rolling around in twenty foot swells. I handed him back his phone, still in disbelief.

"Here," he said, handing me a five pound bag of halibut and red snapper. Wow! "How much do I owe you, Cameron?" and Cameron said, "Nothing." I insisted on something, and Cameron said shyly, "Some gas money?" The easiest thing I have done this week was to give Cameron Kerr a twenty dollar bill for some of the freshest fish I have had in years.

Last night it was halibut (above), today I'll bake a strip of snapper and enter the rest into a chowder. 

As for Cameron, he truly is one of the most remarkable people I have ever met. Have a look at his recent Trapp Projects Beyond Thought Forms exhibition. An amazing artist who, in part because of his shyness, is chronically under-appreciated.

Bulbs

Dropped by Southland's Nursery on a whim the other day and sure enough their bulbs had just arrived -- narcissus, crocuses (an amber variety) and snowdrops. I will plant them at the end of September, forget about them by the beginning of December, and wonder where they came from in February.

News

Anti-vaccination "passport" protesters in Prince George yesterday, one of a number of groups who gathered outside B.C. hospitals to heckle healthcare providers, some of whom are working to save the lives of those just like them -- the Great Unvaccinated. Note the sign: MY BODY/ MY CHOICE/ PERIOD!

I remember seeing signs like this on TV leading up to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states the U.S. Constitution protects a woman's right to abort her fetus without government interference (Roe vs Wade). But to see that sign today, when the State of Texas has enacted laws that prohibit the majority of abortions, and when the "choice" to get vaccinated will save not only your life but the lives of others. To which some will respond, as one did years ago when I accompanied a friend to a Victoria Drive abortion clinic: My son committed suicide because his ex-girlfriend aborted their child without telling him! Or, as someone from the neighbourhood told me last night: It's not the vaccine so much as the vaccine passport they want us to carry. Why? So they can track us! To which I asked, Do you use a credit card? (They do.) Are you on FaceBook? (They are.) Do you go to concerts, movie theatres, sporting events or gyms? (They don't.) So it's out of concern for others that you are protesting vaccine passports? No, they told me, it's because of government interference. To which I added, The same Canadian government that covered/interfered in the cost of the surgery you had a couple years ago, the one you would have had to re-mortgage your house for if you were living in -- Texas?

And so it goes, these conversations, excited by an internet of world events, many more of them available to us as soon as they are happening, and our wiring being what it is, short-circuiting, smoke coming out our ears. Some will adapt, and we will evolve to be either more tolerant of others or more aggressive in our passions. Or both. Thus furthering the extremes that have come to characterize our time and place.

The Pit (2021)

A lot of new poetry is confessional. Unrepentantly so. How refreshing, then, to read a book "about" a bar that is rich in Judeo-Christian symbolism, yet whose bartender is neither priest nor shrink but a poet with anthropological tendencies. For more on Tara Borin's The Pit, see my review here.