Vibrant Matter

It was always my belief (assumption) that Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio (1882) began with Geppetto making a wooden puppet of a boy because he wanted a son. Little did I know that it was the carpenter Mastro Antonio (aka Mastro Ciliegia, trans. as Cherry) who had a piece of wood drying out in his workshop and one day decided to make from it a table leg. But just as he raised his axe to shape it, a voice called out, "Don't strike me too hard!" Mayhem ensues, with Antonio at one point beating the wood against a wall. More mayhem, and the next thing Antonio knows he is waking up on the floor, "He was so changed you could hardly have recognized him." Geppetto shows up at the beginning of Chapter Two and takes the wood home with him. The rest is puppetry.

Illustrations: Gioia Fiammenghi

The Sound of Music (1965)

Feeling restless last night, so I walked the ten blocks north to the Rio Theatre for the 8:30 p.m. screening of The Sound of Music (1965). Thought it would be me and a handful of local nuns, but the Rio being more than a picture house (ah, how the Cahier du Cinema gang would have loved the Rio!), it was a singalong, with words on the screen, grab bag party favours and a prize for Best Costume. Hosting the event was a pancaked nun, who went by the the name of Dandy. 

The man in the suit above went as an Alpine Meadow. He was my pick to win, but he didn't even make the short-list.

Finally the movie.

Minority Report (2002)

The picture above is a detail from the final scene/shot of Spielberg's 2002 film version of Philip K. Dick's short story "Minority Report" (1956), which I began watching (for the second time) last night with the exhilaration the comes with forgetting what happens at the end.

The woman pictured is Agatha (Samantha Morton), a "Precog" who, with male twins, was the product of a genetic experiment on the children of drug addicts. Though many of these children died, Agatha and the twins survived to become empathetic instruments in a localized Precrime test project that had, over the past six years, eliminated murders in the Washington, DC area.

In this final scene we see the three liberated Precogs living in a farmhouse amongst a series of small near-Arctic islands. As to where exactly these islands are, a clue lies on the spine of an upside-down book. The spine reads: "Distant Country", with the name "Scott" at what would be its bottom end.

A google search shows nothing but a quote from Sir Walter Scott: "... a distant country from which I now live." Pushing on, I discover this: The Distant and Unsurveyed Country: a Woman's Winter at Baffin Island, 1857-1858 (1997-2014) by William Gillies Ross. Yes, that's where these Precogs could be living -- on Baffin Island.

West Dyke

A friend with a place beside Richmond's West Dyke. Twelve feet high, and from there a prairie of brown wavy grasses.

My picture looks north, to the North Shore Mountains, and those on the Sunshine Coast. Maybe all of Richmond was like this once. Those parts that weren't underwater.

King Tide

At 9:30 a.m. we achieved maximum king tide. I expect this evening's news will have video of logs on paths, and maybe an earth scientist telling us that rising sea levels (brought on by climate change) are not the cause of king tides, only the damage they inflict. Hence the Stanley Park Sea Wall (officially completed September 21, 1980), which our king tides now surpass.  

Boxing Day Eve

 

Boxing Day is my least favourite day of the year, a double Sunday of messes that add yet another statutory holiday between now and garbage pick-up. This was the Sunday of ere, when everything but the corner stores were closed.

The Sunday of today (since 1986, as I recall) is a day of mass consumption for those who still work MF95, a day when people excuse themselves from the Xmas dinner table to wait overnight in a lineup to save $200 on a new phone.

Yesterday I put together my box of charitable items, and then another because I was feeling either detached or generous. At some point the rains let up, enough for a walk; a route so familiar I was halfway through it before I realized what I was doing.

Stairs & Ladders 2

Christmas, of course. The rains have taken away most of the Lucifer snows and the spear-like icicles have fallen in the easement between my place and the neighbours' (west). Brunch just now at those same neighbours, and that's always been the best part of Christmas for me.

I watched the King of England's Address before that. Thought for a second I was watching Alistair Cooke introducing an episode of Masterpiece Theatre, but Cooke would never travel to Bethlehem to stand on the spot where Christ's mother broke water, and Christ was born. To the side, respectfully, but never on top. Even Ms Markle knows that.

Stairs & Ladders

The past few Xmas Eve's I've posted retired VAG librarian Cheryl Siegel's seasonal tree. As this year feels different, I thought I'd post different: a picture that speaks to my state of mind of late. I'll leave it to you to interpret that, though I will say that the rains are here now, "washing" away the ice and snow from the trees and shrubs; some of them bending back, others still bowed.

This Week's Model

A new feature was added to the tabulation panel attached to your tweets this week. A "View counts" tab shares how often your tweets have been seen -- unless that is a number you don't want to share, in which case the curious party is shown the above. To return, simply click "Dismiss". These clicks will be tabulated too.

I am among those who believe Captain Musk's game with Twitter is a long one, and that passive aggressive inclusions of "View counts" are designed to torment those who are content to be replied to, retweeted, liked and shared, but not seen. As in, The fuck you looking at! Or, How come you have way more followers than people viewing your tweets?

Are we approaching the "a la carte" era of Twitter, where you have to pay the platform to not provide what you don't want them to? Like negative billing? I recall a time back in the 1970s when B.C. Tel charged you more for "unlisting" your number than listing it.

East Window, Looking Northeast

There it is. The moment of solstice, looking northeast. Winter. Officially. According to scientific principles, instruments -- be they stone, metal or plastic. Some sing, some dance, some tap at keys.

Solstice Bells

The moment in Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) when a rehabilitated Scrooge awakes from his nightmare, asks the boy in the street if the prize goose is still hanging in the butcher's window and tosses down a crown with instructions that he buy the goose and take it to his clerk's house, Bob Cratchet's. Because this is Victorian England, the boy does as he's told, Mrs Cratchit cooks it and Scrooge shows up later that day, unannounced, to eat from it.

Hanging in the window of New Sam PO are barbecued duck, and they are delicious. Half a duck is $20 and will feed three to four people. To accompany the duck I would roast some potatoes and Brussels sprouts, and on the stovetop a rotkhol. As for guests, I would include Mrs Cratchit and her Maori lover, because we never hear much about her in Dicken's tale, and the boy who purchased the goose for Scrooge, who, as advised, kept the change, invested it in a printing press and produced some of Matthew Arnold's first screeds against the "Barbarian" aristocracy and the "Philistine" commercial middle class.

Snow Day

The height of the snow! But you can't see the cold. Minus-7. We used to say of temps like this, It's too cold to snow!

The reflection of the table lamp in the window -- I'm never sure how that happens. The last incandescent bulb in the world versus the LEDs outside.

The time on the clock is the a.m. time -- 5:43. A countdown time. Like 6:54, 4:32, 3:21, 2:10. There are five such times and they happen twice a day.

Gene's Remaining Geranium

I've posted on Gene's geraniums before, so I won't get into how Gideon, the first owner, opened with his mother's geraniums in the cafe's many windows; how one day the many had become the one, and for a while it wasn't looking so good. Amazing what a new pot and some fortified soil can do.

Hanukkah

Hanukkah begins this evening. I know this because I looked it up. I would have done so anyway because the spelling of Hanukkah seems to change every few years, and respect means spelling it right.

The image up top is a tag from a purchase I made at the dollar store located in the mall at the SE corner of Oak and King Edward. The next block south is G.F. Strong, where a friend is rehabbing.

My friend is in need of constant stimulation, so I purchased for him an Israeli dice game he can play by himself. South of King Edward is the Beth Israel Synagogue, where I attended the bar mitzvah of Avery Krisman in 1975.

Sketches of Pain

I can never walk into Pulp Fiction and not leave without something. But the store gives as good as it sells, and yesterday Chris came out with what I thought was a tray of Xmas goodies. Laying it down on the counter, he pulls back the protective leaves and my oh my if it isn't Jeff Wall's preliminary drawing (with horizon!) for Dead Troops Talk (1992). As for my purchase (from Chris's "Recommended" shelf): Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book (1940).

The Lowering Autumn Sun

The walk to Commercial Drive proceeds north along Woodland before turning east (right) when my cravings for market life can no longer be abated. Once touched, it's hard to leave, and I stick to it on the way back, turning west at Clark Park.

The house pictured is at the NE corner of 10th and Woodland, an example of what the lowering autumn sun does to chestnut trees and hydrangea bushes. Paint too, for the white is so nicely thought out, so shadow-supportive, that I might one day discuss it at length.

Shadowed Tree's Cast Shadow

Walking home from the market, through Clark Park, the Grade Ones playing. How we used to chase after each other, run from each other, in bodies we were barely used to.

The Vivisector (1970) 2

I am now at Page 322 of Patrick White's The Vivisector. If the preceding chapter was the inverse of Maugham's Of Human Bondage (1915), then Chapter 6 is Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945).

Mrs Trotter bit into her theme with conviction. "Poor people only hate the rich politically -- in the abstract, as it were." Here she lowered her artistic eyelids. "They adore to see them in their clothes and cars."

Art and Labour

The last dregs of snowfalls are ruins of what we've made of them. Whether that making is Art (a snowperson) or Labour (piles made from shovelled walks) is inconsequential. The two are not unrelated.

In My Day (2022)

Two heads await a play.

Letters for Santa

 

I applaud the Kitsilano 4th Avenue B.I.A.'s support of a "Letters for Santa" box, stationed a block west of Burrard. Although attracted to the box's colour scheme and lack of look-at-me sponsorship, I am disappointed to see that, once captured, this red on brown, blood-in-the-stools combo lacks contrast, making it difficult to read, maybe even anti-photography.

Could that be deliberate? An inadvertent critique of a street whose legendary Nova Gallery (1978-82) three blocks west gave us the first Jeff Wall lightbox (Destroyed Room, 1978) and ushered in a quarter century of post-conceptual photographic dominance? 

Singer Needles

Some untold horrors occur to get products into our shops. I have all the evidence I need in this Singer needle kit, where three ghosts -- mother, father and child -- sing of their capture and assignment to the Design & Packaging Department, where they work as needle models.

From Five Poems (5)

NOSTALGIA

Still in robe, you texted. Need to be

teaching in 45, a perfectly diagonal number

but as teens with our singles, lining up the hole

a breath held, then the lifting of the needle 

Hail Fire!

Dinner for eight the other night. Duties were assigned. Among them, firing up the bricks-and-pavers pizza oven for the encrustation of the lamb leg.

To say the pizza oven was a COVID-era project would deny the persistence of COVID. Let's just say it was made during the Bring Out Your Dead phase, which I hope is behind us.

Hard not to have thoughts like these while staring at and into a fire. The stories fires tell. Before television, there were fires. 

Autumn Azalea

A couple of Augusts ago Home Despot had a table of azaleas priced to clear. No tags or flowers, so a mystery bag of azaleas. 

This May the azalea I picked out bloomed a red so out of orbit with the rest of my garden (so antisocial, so discourse-indifferent) that I tried to unload it, but no takers.

Then October rolled around, and the leaves turned to a more pleasing red. A system of reds and orange.

In Memoriam

Recent winds allowed for debris I might have otherwise climbed a ladder for. Blue spruce, cedar, fir, holly, which I gathered and saved for Xmas door decorations.

I wanted to have something on the door in time for today's anniversary of the 1989 École Polytechnique Massacre, an event as unbelievable to me as it is horrific, and must never be repeated.

Yesterday morning I composed my decoration, first on a table, adding to it after its hanging. This year's addition was a dried out hydrangea bloom intended to hide the string I used to bind the other elements and to my mind looks as beautiful in death as it does in life.

From Five Poems (4)

ANGELS

 

as if risen under street lamps, this morning’s field

a frozen dough, sodium yellow: We can walk

backwards in the snow, you say, fall and flail

the angels there to save us

From Five Poems (3)

MATRILINY

gently cupped, the Polish dolls

babcia, staruszka -- she can be both

and more: the smallest first, then her mother

her mother’s mother, her mother’s mother’s mother

From Five Poems (2)

IN SCHOOL

 

again, labouring today

the lesson in place, the report drafted

no protection from oblique questions

students birds in search of seed

From Five Poems (1)

FLOWER KISS

you can get closer

don’t stop at your nose

put your lips into it, whisper

stamen, anther, pistil, stigma

Yesterday's Walk to the Dentist

Yesterday's walk to the dentist, all bundled up. Winter's light blue sky, a low sun, more glare than heat.

A reflection of myself in the window of an empty business, careful over a lumpy patch of boulevard. So this is how a penguin does it?

I made it to sixty without a single non-wisdom tooth extraction of my adult teeth, but today it will be the top right rear molar, next to where one of those wisdom teeth was.

My dentist, who I started seeing in 1972, says the vacant area will require some building up before he can even think of suggesting an implant (the answer is already no). In addition to a pellet of bone-growth-promoting collagen, he ordered a side of bone chips, all of it to be dropped down the hole made vacant by my extracted tooth, which now sits in a repurposed Protec case and, though it has a pretty porcelain crown and was my first root canal (of seven), I will not be sharing its picture on websit.

An anti-biotic was prescribed, as was codeine because I always find a way of asking for it. In place of brushing in that area, chlorhexidine gluconate, given to me by the receptionist, to be used until the stitches come out next week. Sweet to see that the label is handwritten. Even sweeter to see that the word swallow is spelled "swollow" (rhymes with hollow).