Banditi

Like everyone whose name stands for havoc (Trumpism), there's a prototype. Before Hitler, there was Mussolini, and before Trump, another Italian -- Silvio Berlusconi.

Something about the passage from real estate into media. While Berlusconi made his fortune as a developer, Trump muscled his siblings out of their father's inheritance and lost more in bad developments than he would have made had he banked that inheritance and collected the interest. 

Like Berlusconi, Trump moved into media. This time he succeeded. Not as a cable television tycoon, like Berlusconi, but as talent, a performer who played his cartoon self. While Trump was still concluding episodes with "You're fired!", Berlusconi was forming a political party -- Forza Italia, or Go, Italy!

Prime Minister Berlusconi's time in office is a well-documented clown show that had him charged and convicted of fraud and corruption. Trump will suffer a similar fate. But like Berlusconi, his convictions will be overturned. The question is, will there be such a thing as Politics by then? Or a Law that upholds basic human rights and freedoms? If not, those who "Let Trump Be Trump" will have accomplished their mission. Just like U.S. President Roosevelt and General Eisenhower accomplished their mission when they Let the Mafia Be the Mafia during World War II, and the British during the Great War before them, when they Let Lawrence Be Lawrence.

He Did Not Attend

E. B. White (1899-1985) was in his fiftieth year when he returned to New York City from Brooklin, Maine, to write a 7500 word piece on the town that did as much for him as he did for it. The commissioning magazine was Holiday (1946-1977), which catered to Americans whose postwar dollars were suddenly worth more in Paris than the trouble it took to get there. But no point in travelling to Paris if you can't tell your cute but condescending waiter, "Oui, j'ai visitée New York et j'ai vu votre statue surdimensionnée." 

From the sounds of it, White spent more time in his hotel room reading the papers than swinging it outdoors during one of NYC's (read: Manhattan's) hottest Julys on record. Below is a passage that foreshadows both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and the 9/11 WTC attack:

"Since I have been sitting in this miasmic airshaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest airshow ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn't attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn't even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this airshaft to fly over. " (22)

An American Immigrant

He left Powell River, B.C for San Francisco twenty years ago, to take up the truth in the wake of 9/11.

With irony dying, and fiction not far behind, a growing interweb presented itself as one book, and he read into its fictions a truth that suited him and those he messaged with. 

Home was a storage container, and he worked with hemp to make his living: bracelets for students, to be sold on the sidewalks of Berkeley, an imaginarium their Boomer parents still sigh over, as in, Oh, for me? How sweet.

"He was very shy," people said. "He had a hard time making eye contact." And one wonders what those who found him shy made of him saying so -- how "hard" it was -- if he had.

If he were a Black man we might not have the information we have on him, framed instead as a violent attacker, not an eccentric in a village (Berkeley) of eccentrics, the only one clothed at a nudist wedding.

If he were anything but a white man there is a very good chance he'd be dead by now.

"Transition/ Transmission"

Our new NDP provincial premier David Eby has announced his transition team, which is a strange way of putting it because its members will be sticking around long after Eby settles into his new chair -- or until he sees fit to replace one or more of them, or they leave on their own accord.

Eby is the first lawyer to hold the premiership since the short-lived reign of NDP Ujjal Dosanjh (2000-2001), who was nominated at a party leadership convention after he replaced the short-lived reign of NDP Dan Miller (1999-2000), who was selected by party caucus members after NDP Glen Clark's sudden resignation in the face of accusations that he rubber stamped a casino application in exchange for a deck on his house.

Of this four person team, the person I am most curious about is Shannon Salter, a former litigator and deputy attorney general whose new duties include deputy minister and head of the public service. Expect some buyouts and amalgamations, some dyeing of the red tape pink as this newer and younger NDP leadership group seeks to bring our provincial bureaucracy up to speed with a world that has given up the consistency of jogging for the whip-snap of wind sprints.

A Peace of the Pie

This morning I awoke to news of Israel and Lebanon signing a deal to recognize each other's borders on the Mediterranean Sea. Quite an accomplishment for two countries that have been at war with each other since the 1948 implementation of the state of Israel.

Terms of the deal are focused on two gas fields: parts of Karish, which is a confirmed field, and Qana, which is a prospective field. Israel gets full rights to Karish, while Lebanon gets the rights to Qana, with some potential revenues from that part of Qana in Israeli waters going to Israel.

Like all deals between enemies, this one is brokered by a third-party: the U.S. So if something goes wrong, the U.S. will be blamed. But the real dealmaker here is Russia, whose threat to cut off its gas supply to Europe has created a situation where enemies can be partners -- if the stakes are high enough. That the source of these stakes should come from that which is killing the planet (fossil fuels) is somehow beside the point.

So my question now is, does Hezbollah have a climate policy? If not, why not? They have policies on most things concerning political economy and civil society. A quick search ("Hezbollah climate policy") revealed nothing on Google Scholar.

Confessional Approval

In Psychopoltics (2017), Byung-Chul Han writes:

“Every dispositive – every technology or technique of domination – brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects materialize and stabilize dominion. Devotion and related words mean ‘submission’, or ‘obedience’. Smartphones represent digital devotion – indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital, period. As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary – which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital.”

In "Missionary Positions" (1995), Gina Dent devotes much of her essay to a "missionary feminist" who presented at a Minnesota conference on feminism. Here is the concluding paragraph:

"My Minnesota missionary attempted to gain the authority to take control of our collective stories simply because she was speaking from personal pain. When these gestures are legitimated by an audience of converts, they create the appearance of putting oneself on the line. They may well come from the good intentions of promoting another way of being in the world, but confession is less about changing positions than converting souls. There is no purity in that."

Rodney Graham (1949-2022)

Like most of the world, I learned yesterday of the passing of the artist Rodney Graham after a relatively brief illness. Relatively brief compared to the rest of his life, thankfully, though 73 is too young for someone as youthful and curious as Rodney. 

I first met Rodney in the late-1980s, when I busked with Hard Rock Miners on Robson Street and he worked around the corner at the Alberni Street liquor store. The designer Dean Allen lived above a shop on Robson, and it was at one of Dean's parties that I was formally introduced to Rodney and Shannon Oksanen. I arrived after an evening of busking, and Rodney, who often walked past us lost in thought, asked me about the Miner's repertoire -- questions that implied he was listening and indeed knew more about jug band music than we did. So my first introduction to Rodney was as a teacher of sorts.

As my writing life came to replace my musical life, I began to spend more time looking at visual art and, when not writing poetry and fiction, accepted invitations to write catalogue essays and exhibition reviews. It was through artists like Stan Douglas, Mina Totino, Judy Radul and Ken Lum that I came to know Rodney and the local art scene that linked them, a supportive scene that valued the ways in which an artwork is conceived and realized more than the commercial success by which "success" is often measured. At that time Rodney was a critical success -- an artist's artist whose work was as thoughtful as it was fun. It wasn't until the late-1990s that he achieved success at both levels.

During the oughts and early-teens I would see Rodney almost every Wednesday night at a South Granville salon hosted by artists Neil Wedman and David Wisdom at a now-defunct New Orleans themed bistro called Ouisi. Even if you weren't interested in obscure psychedelic bands, early Popeye lore or anything made by Roger Corman's American International Pictures, these sessions were magical, and the breadth of Rodney's wit and insight was often on display (to say nothing of his generosity, for on many occasions he quietly picked up the tab). Along with artists and writers, the salon was equally populated by those from other walks, many of whom came and went. One semi-regular was the hypnotherapist Sarah Lightbody, whose VHS copy of Seasons in the Sun (1987) was passed on to me by Rodney, with the promise that I return it to Sarah after I'm done with it. So Sarah, if you're reading this ...

I have many fond memories of Rodney, both the person and his remarkable body of work (from the early films, sculptures and writings to the later Walter Mitty works and abstract paintings), but I'll sign off with a memory that, in a way, bookends my busking days on Robson, when I'd see Rodney walk past us. It was at a downtown restaurant, during the restaurant explosion of the early-2000s. Judy and I were being led to our table by the maitre'd, and as we turned a corner, there was Rodney reading a paperback and poking at something in a bowl. We waved but he didn't see us, and we turned another corner and let it be. An hour later, after our server cleared our dinner plates, another server arrived with two magnificent tiramisus. "Nice! But we didn't order dessert." At which point the maitre'd swooped in and whispered, "Compliments of Mr. Graham."

photo: Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

To Be Real (1995)

Tyee Elementary has one of those book-bin-on-a-stick jobs beside its playground and last week I found a dozen recently delivered books on feminism from the 1980s to mid-1990s. Familiar faces include Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia (the latter gaining a re-appreciation in non-student circles of late, the former carrying on as she had started), and those new to me, like Rebecca Walker (b.1969), a "third wave" feminist whose anthology, To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism (1995), contains writings that would have some of its contributors digitally tarred-and-feather by today's standards (Donna Minkowtiz's "Orgasm, Fear, and Femaleness" begins with her arousal on reading a description of a prison rape), while others, such as Gina Dent's "Missionary Position", takes on "missionary feminism" through a Black woman's perspective, an account that zeroes in on ...

the combined tendency in the world of public information [what we now call the interweb?] toward what I am loosely calling "confession," about its uses and abuses, and about how it contributes to the problem of doing feminism without saying it [which she attributes to historic Black feminism] and saying feminism without doing it [the theoretical feminism of the white world]. It seems to me that in order to answer the question of why young woman are not claiming feminism [Dent was born in 1966], we have to consider it from the other side -- what is it that feminists are doing that gets labelled Feminism? I think much of what they (we) are doing is making confessions. (63)

In her Introduction, Walker talks of the tightrope she walked as a child of enlightened parents (her mother is the author Alice Walker, her father a white civil rights lawyer), when household feminism had strict boundaries, and to transgress those boundaries brought sanctions, if not shame. For Rebecca Walker, the feminism of today (1995) contains allowances, what for some might amount to guilty pleasures, all part of being real ("being real" is the title of her Introduction). Curious to see how Rebecca Walker has faired over the years, I looked her up and found that she is not only estranged from her mother, but telling tales about her, an example of what Gina Dent calls "making confessions"?

Markers

Walking home from the dentist at 10th and Commercial I took a decidedly different route and the joy of walking down a lane I've never walked before. Spatial oddities, inadvertent monuments and, as evidenced by today's post, strained relationships?

For what else could a marker like this tell us about where one mortgage ends and another begins, even if that marker is useless for keeping pets from escaping, plants protected and a bike from falling over.

I spent enough time looking at the marker to imagine all sorts of nasty encounters between those on either side of it. Now I wonder if it belongs to something independent of that. Maybe a parody of that tension. People play the strangest games. 

Subject to Changes

Twelve year ago Renee Rodin published a collection of personal essays with Talonbooks called Subject to Change (2010). The book covers her early days in Montreal, followed by her young adult passage to hippie Vancouver, where she ran a bookstore and began publishing her writings while raising three kids to young adulthood themselves. Had the book exaggerated its reality, given it a perm, we might be looking back on it as a progenitor of autofiction -- but no, Rodin knows how life works, how readers consciously or otherwise bring their own narratives to what they're reading, and somewhere in-between, as Foucault used to say, is the difference, the potential for all kinds of weird shit. Rodin's Subject to Change is in my collection of important books on and about Vancouver.

A couple days ago another book called Subject to Change was published, this one by visual artist Liz Magor and subtitled Writings and Interviews. Magor's book includes writing in all its genres, short of shopping lists and tweets (she is not on Twitter). Yet while Rodin chronicles the subtle changes in her life, Magor, like Byung-Chul Han, seems at odds with the concept of a subject (Han begins Psycho-Politics, 2017, by reminding us of the subject position: "literally, the 'one who has been cast down'"), a position supported by a book whose own formation is non-conforming, at least in terms of genre. For more on Magor's book, see my review at BCR.

Back Issues: a Conversation About Art Writing and Publishing

Last night I attended a panel talk -- Back Issues: a Conversation About Art Writing and Publishing -- at the Western Front. On the bill, representatives of four visual art-related magazines past, present and intermittent -- Maxine Proctor (BlackFlash), Jacquelyn Zhong-Li Ross (The Capilano Review), Susan Gibb (Front Magazine) and Zool Suleman (Rungh).

There were maybe thirty people in attendance, some of whom were old guarders like former Western Front co-owners and long time residents Hank Bull and Eric Metcalfe (together they represent a combined occupancy of 100 years), and many more students, or likely students, given their youth. I sat alone with what I knew of these magazines, having contributed to all but Rungh, which, when it is up and running, privileges BIPOC and LGBTQ+ contributions, and I'm happy to leave it at that.

Some things I learned: that the opposite of a "thematic" issue is a "fallow" issue (Proctor); that if a magazine mandated to experiment is not publishing experimental writing, it can conduct its business through "social experimentation" (Ross); that a magazine's hard copy archive is not definitive because what is printed in advance of an event does not take into account substitutions, as was the case in an early Rungh reading, when George Elliot Clarke was caught in a snowstorm and Ashok Mathur took his place (Suleman); and that sometimes the building in which a publication is housed is in itself a form of publication, as alluded to by the ED of the centre we were in (Gibb).

Day (2007)

A. L. Kennedy's Day is pretty good. Which means it is better than that, and it is up to me to say why. 

Day is not an easy read. Not because it deals with the trauma of war, but because it doesn't do so in a linear expository fashion, where we follow a subject who, if in the first-person, shows us through a chronological succession of events how difficult it is to cope with post-war life -- or if in the foreboding third-person (Does he die in the end?), is shown to be showing us, with the help of omnipotent narration.

Which this book is. In the third-person. Its hero Alfred Day more or less playing himself as a triggered extra in a late-1940s German war film set in a Nazi prisoner of war camp similar to the one he was held in after the Lancaster bomber he helped to crew (he was a tail-gunner) was shot down.

In her Guardian review, the never-more-popular-than-she-is-today Ursula K Le Guin was less than generous with the interior ("claustrophobic") nature of this book, which swirls around in Day's head between calls of Action! and the inevitable bouts of downtime that attend extra work. At one point Day faints during an outdoor inspection scene, and the director is so inspired he decides to use it in the film, passing over Day for a more experienced extra. Shades of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) here, but also a gyroscopic prose style we don't see much of anymore, and one wonders if we have Le Guin to thank for that too.

So much of what is being published these days is concerned with trauma and its cousin, grief. And since the war in Ukraine has stayed so high in the news cycle, it might be a good time to republish this book in a new edition, perhaps with a Foreword by someone who came back from that war to remind us how trauma affects its own form, and how restorative it is to read it.  

dramatic music/gentle music

The day after the election I watched the documentary released a week before it by those eager to oust the now previous regime for their own step-and-fetch-its (for the same-named Seattle documentary released three years ago, click here). Had I the choice of watching it or a documentary on how municipalities are handcuffed by provincial and federal governments, not to mention Supreme Court rulings, I would have watched the latter. But since no such documentary exists, there's always the hope one will. A good place to begin such a documentary would be the ongoing saga of Surrey, whose incoming mayor was elected for promising to abandon -- midstream -- the establishment of its own municipal force and return to a federal constabulary (RCMP) that takes its orders not from local citizens, but from Ottawa.

This House is Mine (1960)

I thought the expression "This house is mine" was more recent than 1960, the year Bob Thompson painted his same-named 12" x 7" oil on board landscape. I usually associate the expression with something conquered, like an opposing athlete, an art museum or a sex organ. 

The brief career of Bob Thompson (1937-1966) is the subject of a survey of over 50 paintings and works on paper at the Hammer Museum (October 11 - January 8, 2023). Maybe I'll go see it. Or maybe the VAG will sign on and show these works with some Tom Thomsons.

From the Hammer press release (below that, Thompson's Homage to Nina Simone, 1965):

"This House Is Mine examines Thompson’s formal inventiveness and his engagement with universal themes of collectivity, bearing witness, struggle, and justice. Over a mere eight years, he grappled with the exclusionary Western canon, developing a lexicon of enigmatic forms that he threaded through his work. Human and animal figures, often silhouetted and relatively featureless, populate mysterious vignettes set in wooded landscapes or haunt theatrically compressed spaces. Thompson reconfigures well-known compositions by European artists such as Piero della Francesca and Francisco Goya through brilliant acts of formal distortion and elision, recasting the scenes in sumptuous colors. On occasion, fellow contemporaries appear, for instance jazz greats Nina Simone and Ornette Coleman and the writers LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Allen Ginsberg.

The exhibition title borrows its name from a diminutive but exquisite painting created by the artist in 1960. With this title, Thompson declared his ambition to synthesize a new visual language out of elements of historic European painting. This House Is Mine centers Thompson’s work within expansive art historical narratives and ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation, charting his enduring influence."

The Crossbow Incident

Newspaper headlines. Were these tweets before we tweeted? "Man shot with crossbow at Downtown Eastside street market." Or is the tweet the deck, as it is called in the trade? "The man was seriously injured and had to be rushed to the hospital." More recently, the accompanying video.

Thus primed, I clicked on the video. But rather than something out of Game of Thrones -- a large wooden crossbow discharging an arrow from one side of the street to the other -- this weirdly steampunk crossbow pistol shot on "film" so murky it's hard to tell if it is real or if it was put together by the Vancouver Police Union, shortly before Saturday's municipal election.

And yes, the camera that caught this incident. Whose camera? The building owner's? Does the City own the building? CCTV footage isn't always credited in our news stories -- the lack of which suggests something universal, belonging only to God. God's eye. The omnipotent eye.

So what are we to conclude? That 100 more cops will keep incidents like this from happening? Is the street market to blame? Law enforcement might argue that street markets create the conditions for dangerous behaviours, and should be closed. Marxists might argue the same: that competition brings about anxieties that result in armed conflicts, wars. Should all vendors be armed then? If this were the States, the NRA would say, Yes -- in fairness.

East Van Opry

Had I known the outcome of last night's municipal elections I would not have danced as I did at the Rio's East Van Opry. Was shocked to wake up and see that the present version of the NPA party -- the right-of-centre ABC -- had its slate elected -- from less than 40% of Vancouver's eligible voters.

The Ken Sim-led ABC is the first Vancouver municipal party in recent memory to be endorsed by both Vancouver Police and Fire unions. No housing plan to speak of (apart from making development applications "easier" to obtain), only the usual fear campaign that, Sim claims, will be remediated by the hiring of 100 more cops and 100 more nurses. 

"Invest in OUR children NOW. They are the future."

On Thursday B.C.'s provincial government pledged another $50M to the Vancouver Art Gallery's capital campaign, making the combined provincial contribution $100M, matching the federal government's contribution.

The VAG is now $80M short of its $400M target to build a mall five blocks east, to be called the Chan Centre for the Visual Arts, which the Chan Family got for their $40M contribution (the Chan Family also has its name on UBC's Chan Centre for the Performing Arts). Not clear whether the VAG will be the property manager of this mall, or one of its tenants.

Philanthropist Michael Audain, for his part, followed the Chan pledge with $100M. Audain has at least three other galleries named after him (one at UBC, one at SFU and one at Whistler). Naming the mall the Audain Centre for the Visual Arts would only create a Groundhog Day effect for residents and tourists alike, so we have Michael to thank for keeping his name off of it.

The current VAG site was demarcated for cultural use after the B.C. Provincial Courthouse moved across Robson Street in the early 1980s. Once the VAG leaves, a new cultural institution will take its place. It was always assumed by the people who pay attention to these things that the Vancouver Museum would takes its place, given its current cramped quarters at Vanier Park, but that remains to be seen.

What can be seen is a growing installation (now protected by fencing) memorializing the recently discovered unmarked graves at Canada's former residential schools. I expect this inverse-Alamo memorial will continue to grow and a case will be made for it to reside indoors and throughout the building. Either way, the future of this site could well be a contested one, animated by shaking fists and tiptoeing politicians. 

Whose Business Is It?

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond has accomplished a great deal in her life as an advocate for youth, children and families, missing and murdered Indigenous women -- one of the few people in public life who proceeds with modesty, grace and integrity. So imagine my horror when I read yesterday of how that integrity has been called into question. Prior to yesterday, I did not know that Turpel-Lafond is (was?) Indigenous, until inconsistencies in her claim to Cree ancestry were raised in an article posted on the CBC website.

Unlike previous cases where Indigenous ancestry is complicated by family secrets, personal trauma, community dislocations and life-saving detours around the strictures of a genocidal Canadian federal government (the Indian Act), where those whose conditional claims at Indigenous ancestry have been frog-marched to the extreme end of the identitarian binary, Turpel-Lafond has received support from high ranking members of Indigenous governance structures such as the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, a NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, who rightly point out her accomplishments, as if the ends justify the means.

Of course Turpel-Lafond's claim to Indigenous ancestry has attracted critics as well, many of them Indigenous women who, like Turpel-Lafond, have law degrees, and who argue -- I would say correctly, for the most part -- that claims to ancestry are contingent on relations to the communities in which those identities are rooted and formed. Indeed, I have never seen so many Indigenous lawyers speaking on this topic as I have in the case of Turpel-Lafond.

Western law, as I have come to know it, is the last place where the ends wholly justify the means -- an example of this ends-over-means "reasoning" being the 1961 Eichmann Trial, as chronicled by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), a trial that was produced, written and directed by the nascent state of Israel. Given the structure of support for Turpel-Lafond, I expect a similar apparatus will emerge in its attempt to make a case not so much for her absolution but for her consecration, a state of exception that only well-financed lawyers and politicians can construct.

From my recent readings I see Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond as more than a saint-in-the-making. Both she and her husband George Lafond (an advisor at a "diversified" mining company with "long-life assets" operating in North and South America) are a power couple resident in a political-economic dimension far beyond the symbolic arenas of so-called "pretendian" artists and curators, and therefore will have advantages previously unseen to those familiar with the question of who, how, when and why is someone Indigenous. How this plays out will be both fascinating and, to paraphrase UBCIC Grand Chief Stewart Phillip: "None of [my] business." 

Release the Kraken

Christened Kingsway in October, 1913, this eight mile thoroughfare came to life as a colonial endeavour after WWII, when most everyone could afford a car. Except Mother Nature, who is now punishing us for having them. Not just cars, but car dealerships, automotive repair shops, drive-thru restaurants, motels. Cars continue along Kingsway, though much of what attends to them is in decline.

Pictured up top is the back end of one of the few repair shops left between Fraser and Nanaimo Streets. We've all seen these stackings of car bumpers before, and if you mention the name of the artist whose work they remind you of, I'll mention a couple more and insist you curate the show. Or at least title the piece.

What to call something like this? We see the figure, but only a portion of it. A sea monster sticking its head out of the water, begging us to slow down?

The Lottery (1948)

Was the 2005 remake of War of the Worlds (1953) inspired by the 9/11 attack on the WTC? In the original War of the Worlds, Earth was invaded by extraterrestrials, while in the remake, an extraterrestrial army embedded in the planet millions of years earlier is activated by a "weather" event. Same with the 9/11 attack: the towers were in place, as was the Law of Gravity, as was the Bush Administration; the "activation" in this instance was not two fuel-laden airplanes piloted into the towers by Arab-speaking hijackers, but a White House that had knowledge of the plot and turned a blind eye because the attack would provide a pretext for a U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, and from there allow the U.S. to "regain" control of the narrative (oil, in 2001; the world economy, in 1941, after the White House learned of a planned attack on Pearl Harbour and allowed it, too, to happen in order to justify its entrance into World War II, a "game" those running the U.S. needed to be in). Same too of the nuclear power plants the Russian army has been shelling in Ukraine -- to cut off the country's power supply, but also to poison its enemy, make it radioactive. 

Everything about us and our world is always already in place. Things we can see, like towers and power plants, and that which we cannot see, like the internet and the beliefs we shroud ourselves in to disguise our ulterior motives. Where once we physically struck each other in anger, now we push each other's buttons, play with each other's circuitry, encourage it to short out, and the cycle repeats, expands. It's no way to live, but in an effort to relieve ourselves of what ails us, we carry on, using the same devices that enable us to do our jobs to do harm to those who remind us of our doubts, interfere with our turn at whoever we choose at the kissing booth. And in many ways it seems like it's never going to change, let alone end. Even the effort to change these patterns and systems and structures can be excruciating. We see this especially in our symbolic forms -- in today's art, music, literature and film. Bad things happen, people grieve, our patterns and structures and systems are blamed and, as the American writer Shirley Jackson reminds us in her critique of Democracy, "The Lottery" (1948), the majority are guilty -- of stoning. 

Old Stockers

The British Ex-Servicemen's Club (1143 Kingsway) closed on the Victoria Day long weekend. Which is fitting for a place with a name like that. Not sure how many members were left by that time. Membership closed in the late-1990s, with surviving members dividing the proceeds of its 2021 sale (they owned the building) before moving on to new adventures.

When I joined the club in 1994 (I failed to renew my membership in 2001 and never heard back on my re-application), every second member was in the trades. Everything about the bar was built by the people who drank there, including the Union Jack light box above the door, which, if I'm not mistaken, was made by a die-cutter who applied coloured tape to a piece of opaque acrylic that was subsequently framed and wired into the wall by an electrician.

The recent run of hot, dry weather has taken its toll on the British Ex's Union Jack. You can see its edges curling, a delimitation that brings to mind Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey, if the UK itself wasn't so far ahead of it.

Holiday Radio

Holidays often mean our local CBC morning host Stephen Quinn takes the day off and we hear from another CBC team in Victoria or Kelowna.

This morning -- Canadian Thanksgiving -- I regained consciousness to CBC Kelowna's Chris Walker, who replayed his 2016 interview with Greil Marcus on the Band's song "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" (1969), a remarkable event because neither Marcus nor the band had a new book or record to promote. (I heard the interview the first time when I was living in Kelowna.)

A few minutes later, Walker cued up another nice tune called "Miles Are Wide" (2022) from Victoria duo Ocie Elliott, a song whose melodic line echoes a figure from U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" (1987).

Commercial Street & 21st

It was the very whiteness of the coil that drew me to it. Then a problem to solve -- What is behind it? As little paint wasted as possible in a painter's attempt to cover up (in black felt pen) STOLEN LAND. 

I've Been Thinking

The corrosiveness of thought: I should have been a dancer. A rain dancer. The secular kind. A modernist rain dancer who dances not for rain, nor as rain, but as someone who is invigorated by it.

The statue pictured above has endured a number of rainfalls over the years in his role as garden ornament. Not a lot of rain of late. I can't think of the last time it did.

Ironworkers of the World, Ignite!

The Ironworker is adept at taking rebar and entering it into geometries of strength and endurance. For her Fringing the Cube exhibition at the VAG a few years back, Dana Claxton included a photography series (NDN Ironworkers, 2018) that shows us who these workers are and how they prepare their bodies for the job.

To emphasize their identities (beyond what titles do), Claxton shot these workers in a photography studio. Or if not in a photography studio, devoid of a worksite that, as a landscape, might reduce their contribution to ants in the service of the master's anthill.

In the late-70s/early-80s Jeff Wall did a "worker" series of low-angle head shots in the Socialist Realist style (in contrast to the "Employee of the Month" style pics often seen in fast-food restaurants?), presented as back-lit cibachrome transparencies (Young Workers, 1978-1983). The low-angle is a heroic angle that places the viewer below the venerable worker (they are hung to support that angle), as if looking up to them, in admiration.  

Claxton's ironworkers come in a variety of positions (moving towards the viewer at eye level, en masse; or alone, their backs turned). They too are lit. Not as back-lit cibachromes, but what Claxton calls an "LED firebox with transmuted light jet duratrans."

Predator Ridge

Founded in 1968, Hockey Canada is the national governing body for hockey in Canada. It's mission statement -- to "lead, develop and promote positive hockey experiences" -- was called into question recently over the organization's history of covering up sexual assault allegations against its teenage male players.

More recently, news has focused on Hockey Canada's private sponsors, a number of which are pulling their support after the organization's leaders have refused calls for their resignation. One of these sponsors goes by the uncomfortable name of Predator Ridge, a golf resort community between Vernon and Kelowna.

When I was commuting between Vernon and Kelowna to attend classes at UBCO I would drive past the resort, which lay along a ridge high above the highway to the west. The Predator Ridge sign was there, but not the resort. Nothing but a vast, sloping ripple of yellowing grasses, like the body of a sleeping animal -- if I were a mouse and it was a lion. 

"Who lives up there?" I asked a hitch-hiking local I'd picked up outside Vernon Jubilee Hospital one morning.

"Oh, mostly white people, hockey players, their ex-wives," he said, looking past me at the lake.

Lives of Saints

Further evidence that Portraiture has surpassed History Painting as the 21st century's leading picture genre: an exhibition devoted to the singularity of a singular genius.

Uncharacteristically, the visual art exhibition is late to the hagiography game. Scholarly anthologies devoted to the research and writing of academics (e.g. Culture in History: Essays in Honour of Paul Radin, 1960) have been around a while now, as have tribute records (I'm Your Fan: the Songs of Leonard Cohen, 1991, re-popularized tribute records and revived the career of its subject); but now, in our ostensibly one-mind-is-not-enough moment, we get the many (sixty artists, in this instance) paying tribute to the one.

The exhibition in question is divided into four sections that correspond to American author Joan Didion's most significant migrations. Sacramento and Berkeley, where she was born and schooled (1934-1956); NYC, where she did her apprenticeship in the then-glamourous world of magazines (1956-1963); California and Hawaii, where she wrote her greatest books: the essay collections Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (1964-1988); and the scattershot that followed, which accounted for the bulk of her life and her greatest commercial success: that grief pour known as The Year of Magical Thinking (1988-2021).

Prior to this appropriately (coyly?) titled exhibition: Joan Didion: What She Means, writer/curator Hilton Als gave us "portrait exhibitions" inspired by the lives and works of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, which has me wondering if this is a thing now, and might we see more of them. Three days ago Sacheen Littlefeather passed away, and my first thought was, What a life! More should be made of it.

Who We Are/ For Trying

accept that you are never seen

as you like to be seen

but that you are

 

in the way

acknowledged as something

to be avoided

 

the difference, too, is something

-- a golem, or a pet to keep you

company

 

                            a cat

indifferent to our affections

who comes to us for feedings

 

given to us, our affections

to remind us that we cannot

control them

 

that cats will decide

who we are

for trying

It Is Written

I am learning to write again, this time with pencil and paper. Taking care with each letter, each word, each punctuation mark; the space between them; slower than how my mind usually works. But that’s the point. It has nothing to do what with what I am thinking, and everything to do with this writing.

 

The journey I am taking with this writing and the journey the person I have hired to type it will differ. Same with those who have read it in its published form. Some of us will never come together to talk about our experiences with this writing, and I can live with that. What I cannot live with is if we did come together how the conversation might strive towards consensus. This is not writing but democracy.

 

For some, the previous paragraph has inflected this writing, made it anti-democratic. But it is not anti-democratic, only not democratic. Nor is it a shoe or a Frisbee. It is not many things, and yet the longer I go on, the more likely I am to write about all that it is not, because that is what this writing is -- a way to bring things to mind, project them, have the reader flash on them. In addition to all the things it is not.

 

One of my favourite lines, ever, was said to me by an Artist & Repertoire Vice-President of a major record label. I cannot remember the context but on the topic of bad thoughts and how difficult it is to steer clear of them, he said: "Don't think of a purple pony." And that of course is what I flashed on -- a purple pony. Frank O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter" brings something similar to mind when he writes about Michael Goldberg's painting Sardines, and his own suite of poems, "Oranges".

 

Since starting this writing my pencil is no longer the fine point it once was. You can see evidence of this in the way the writing has changed, the increasing thickness of the letters and the punctuation marks. I want to say you can see this but of course you cannot, because we are no longer in the medium with which this writing began.

 

Does this matter? Do you feel you are losing something by not having this writing as I first wrote it? Imagine then that I am in the lobby of a grand hotel built in the early-1900s, and kept that way. This was a time when someone writing in a notebook with a pencil

September 9, 2015

Readings

An encouraging view outside my glass door this morning: the grass super-dewy, the seasonally low sun more bronze than gold. Hardly a "third-place" day, as this is extraordinary weather we're having.

I was at a reading at the People's Co-op Bookstore last night, the launch of SOME 5, with readings by four of its five contributors (Elee was ailing). Following that, a couple of very refreshing pints at the Portuguese Club across the street, after which I walked home past huge crowds tucked into restaurants and curb-side extensions that look so awkward during the day but like narrowboats at night. Bikinis! There were young women flitting about in bikinis, and young shirtless men screaming as if on fire. Kits pays a visit to Commercial Drive.

Frightening that today's high is projected to be 26C. Frightening because it is coming at such a cost.

On My Way to Being Early

Prior to killing time at the VAG I walked south from the Granville Street Skytrain Station (the original one -- I can never remember the Line names) to see what's changed and what hasn't. The answer? Not much, and a lot.

The only difference between Granville Street from West Georgia to Drake, and Hastings Street from Cambie to Dunlevy is people, which the latter has and the former doesn't. Access to social services accounts for part of that presence, just as City Council policing directives (tax-base protection) accounts for the absence. You can see why Yaletown residents were so worried about a proposed Overdose Prevention Site, despite the fact that the opiate crisis is everywhere, not just in the downtown eastside. 

Walking back along Howe Street I saw a sign that read B.C. ALLIANCE FOR THE ARTS, a non-profit that was once on Davie Street, but in a more modest, less corporate form. At the northwest end of its diagonally recessed storefront, a glass-protected closet featuring thirteen wall works, with the intriguing exhibition title "Outsiders and Others" below. And below that, in fine print, an orienting definition: "OUTSIDER | NAIVE | SELF-TAUGHT | INTUITIVE | FOLK | PRIMITIVE". 

I was under the impression that the "Outsider" was the "Other" (indeed, it's mentioned a second time in the definition below). If the sign is suggesting there are other Others, should't it read as such -- Outsiders and Other Others? Or rather than get all Rumsfeldian about it, why not risk the dreaded negative conception and call it (a la Roland Barthes?) No Insiders. Either way, the centre-ing of the Outsider is of interest to me, as it speaks to our age old mistrust of anything that is found inside a museum that could be done by one's child, and called Art.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, I visited the VAG's Uninvited show and, amongst some strong or charming paintings, noticed that the curator, Sarah Milroy, didn't use any of the Main Floor's corner spaces for any of her selections, and that the only occupation of a corner space was the lower case "young activist reading room" which, the more I stared at it, the more I thought of Godard's La Chinoise (1967), expecting Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Paul Léaud to plop down on it's ottoman for Omar Diop's seminar.

I'll conclude with a picture I took on my way to the Broadway and Commercial Skytrain Station, where I boarded the train for Granville. The picture was taken from the alley behind East 10th Avenue, one shovel swing away from the complete demolition of the house that once stood there. What struck me in this moment was the glass design of the house's front door, a gorgeous example of the moderne era, which is all but gone in Vancouver. Why someone chose not to salvage this door speaks to the speed with which things change in this city and our inability to keep up with those changes. A shame to see a work like this as rubble.