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). 

As Seen from a Reading Chair

Back from the grocer, the compartments (fridge, cupboard) stocked, tea made, a book before me, a light behind. The window that is also a door frames the first flakes, wet and heavy, eventually putting the book down to pull on my boots and gloves and coat to go outside and shake the trees and shrubs.

Back in my chair, refreshed, the book in my lap not yet open, it's characters where I left them: Rhoda leading Hurtle outside, to see her garden ("my garden"), like Harris led Ann to the rock garden in the book before it, a make-out session that stayed with her all her life, lighting up her dying days.

Oh, the world. Its worlds. Shoes, socks, pants and shirts.

I like your ring.

Do you? Thank you. It was my mother's. Where'd you get your belt?

My belt? Nordstrom's I think. Or Winners. They're right across from each other.

Yes they are. Hard to keep things apart.

Some things, yes. But I know what you mean.

The Vivisector (1970)

With thrift stores supplying me with most of my reading material of late, I find myself lonely for bookshops and make a point of visiting them, often leaving with something I would never find elsewhere (I still don't buy books online). Paperhound is one such shop, Massy Books another, the People's Co-op another. Yet another is the Momma Bear of the under-60-run shops, and that is Pulp Fiction on Main Street. All four shops balance "new" and "used" titles.

Pulp Fiction is a grounding presence in my life. Like the former Granville Book Company, where Chris and Paperhound's Rodney learned their trade, the staff are very near the entrance and stand behind the counter like bartenders. Nothing fills me with excitement like walking into Pulp Fiction and seeing Chris and J.P. on duty, with Chris using lighter fluid to clean a book's cover and J.P. stealing a puff off his e-cig, if that's what he's doing when he brings his fist to his mouth like that.

Sometimes my excitement is out of control and, if no one is at the consumer side of the counter, I launch into commentary related to a book J.P. had recommended during a previous visit or an exhibition I had seen that made me think of Chris. Mine is cringeworthy behaviour for those who treat bookshops like monasteries, but I make no apologies, as cringing is the result of a conversation that exists entirely within the cringer. Plus at my present age I no longer care what people think of me, as I am no longer who I never was in the first place (at least not to me).

Last week I entered the store and there was J.P. alone with no one at the counter. I sipped from my excitement rather than douse him in it, offering a brief but smiled greeting and went to the STAFF PICKS shelf where I saw below J.P.'s name Patrick White's The Vivisector. Interesting, I thought. I'd always wanted to read something by Patrick White. But I'd also used the concept of vivisection in my spoof of Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), where I mined the many epigrams that set off her chapters as the basis for my 1997 twelve poem Survivial: A Strobic Guide chapbook I produced on my one-off CanLit Classics in Transition imprint.

"What was White's great book, J.P.?"

"Voss," he said into his fist.

"You enjoyed The Vivisector?"

"Yes, have you read it?"

I hadn't.

"It's about an abstract painter."

Sold.

Last night, just before turning off the light, I turned down the corner of Page 85, a few pages after the sale of the precocious six year old Hurtle to Alfreda and Harry Courtenay, who'd met him earlier (as the laundress's son) and found him charming. Their similarly aged humpback daughter Rhoda is charmed by him too, and at this moment the two are circling each other, filled with that mixture of attraction and disgust that makes desire what it is. But it is Hurtle and Harry's first meeting that produced the line that blew my mind and spoke directly to the book's title. Here it is (in bold), beginning with Mr Courtenay speaking to Hurtle, and Hurtle referring to himself (on occasion) in the second person:

"'Round about your age I remember going on a long drive. In the country. At night. With my father and Archdeacon Rutherford.' He broke up his sentence with short puffs at is cigar, his lips glossy and contented.

"It was strange, though comforting, to hear Mr Courtenay's voice mention his father's friend by name, as though taking it for granted that you too had known Archdeacon Rutherford.

"'I would have given anything to stop that buggy. But didn't know how. In front of the Archdeacon. He was a very thin old man. I used to picture his guts resting flat against his backbone.'" (57)

Call for Pitches: Gossip

Earlier this fall, C Magazine, one of Canada's last remaining visual art magazines, had a notice out for a new ED/Publisher and another for pitches to an upcoming issue on gossip. The invitation to pitch expired on November 2, but I archived it because I thought I might have something to say about it in a post. Turns out I don't. At least nothing fresh. But if pressed, I would say that I have always been curious about the word's origin. Here's what Merriam-Webster says about gossip:

Old English sibb, meaning “relative” or “kinsman,” came from the adjective sibb,“related by blood” (the ancestor of modern English sibling). Old English godsibbwas a person spiritually related to another, specifically by being a sponsor at baptism. Today we call such a person a godparent. Over the centuries, godsibb changed both in form and in meaning. Middle English gossib came to be used for a close friend or crony as well as for a godparent. From there it was only a short step to the gossip of today, a person no longer necessarily friend, relative, or sponsor, but someone filled with irresistible tidbits of rumour.

The last time I contributed to C Magazine was at the urging of guest editor Merray Gerges, who asked me to write about some gossip I'd gathered, collated and shared in a post about a local art collector and his war with the director of the city's largest art gallery. The post had consequences, and I guess that's what Merray was interested in hearing about -- the consequences of my post and I how I felt about them. The article, entitled "Pastoral Fail: Reflections On an Art World Call-Out", can be read here.

Here is C Magazine's call for pitches:

Call for Pitches GOSSIP C154­—Spring 2023 Accepted until: November 2, 2022 What’s your gossip? As unofficial murmurings, gossip speaks to a misaligned oral tradition. Associated with matriarchal and feminist passing of information—think of auntie types gathering across different cultures—gossip is history, unarchived. What is deemed worth noting down and what is to remain as gossip? Through which processes of confirmation do certain belief systems (e.g. the stock market) become legitimized over others as rational, and who decides this? Does some knowledge remain more useful as gossip, sneaking past dominant structures? How does gossip help us protect each other? How does it protect our labour in the contemporary art world? This issue invites engagements with gossip through artistic practices and creative criticism. Gossip may encompass wishful future-making in the vein of speculative fiction. It may blur what is considered low or high art-making through the spaces that it can inhabit, such as internet/meme culture and mass media. There are the dark sides of gossip, too, and its nebulous anxieties, when it’s wielded to maintain dominance in gendered, racialized, and classed ways. Possible engagements with gossip can include: oral and counter-histories; superstition; secret languages as survival; how information is circulated; parody and humour; art practices focused on sound and listening; privacy, risk, and surveillance. What can gossip tell us about power, and can either exist without the other? Thematic feature, artist project, and column pitches accepted until November 2, 2022. We suggest pitching early to avoid disappointment. Review pitches, which are not required to be thematic, are accepted on a rolling basis. Send pitches to pitch@cmagazine.com, with a subject line that starts with the word PITCH and goes on to indicate the submission type (review, essay, interview, One Thing, for example).  Please include ~150 words about your subject and how you’ll approach it, including hyperlinks wherever relevant. An estimated word count is appreciated. If you have not written for us recently, include a link to your website—or a copy of your CV—and one or two writing samples (ideally ones written in a style similar to your pitched piece). Submitted work must be original; we do not publish reprints nor adaptations of any kind. Thank you for understanding that we are unable to reply to unsuccessful pitches. Please see our submission and writer’s guidelines for more information. Note: we do not accept pitches from platforms regarding their own programming.

Lost and Found

Khan Lee's Lost and Found exhibition opened at Equinox yesterday afternoon. A great turn out, with gallery artists and those much younger (some as young as forty!).

In 1998 Lee and a couple of fellow Emily Carr University students began a relational artist collective called Intermission, whose project in part was the inverse of the conceptual project that had arrived in Vancouver in the late-Sixties and later "posted-" itself to photography and, in some cases, sculpture. Instead of artists who thought up ideas and had others make the work, Intermission advertised itself as makers available to those willing to contribute ideas. At least that's how I interpret it.

Though Intermission was an early example of the more recent social practice that has come to characterize 21st century contemporary art (so far), Lee was always a formalist, and this bears out in his current exhibition (one work, entitled Intermission, 2022, is comprised of 144 4.5x8" water colour "backgrounds" derived from de-peopled Zoom grids). But the crowd pleaser -- the work that, in the words of The Big Lebowski's "The Dude", "really tied the room together" -- is Fifty Feet (2002/2022) -- a 50ft. stretch of super-8 reversal film placed before an LED light strip inset into the gallery's south wall.

Here are those first few feet:

Go Ask Alice B. Toklas

As the 20th century was drawing to a close, there was a lot of talk about the century's greatest contribution to visual art. Many were quick to say collage, while some felt it was the readymade. I slow down when it comes to the past -- I like to sleep on it, allow my dreams their say -- but eventually I too came around to collage, though for a time I was routing for its buttoned-down cousin: montage.

Montage is something that came not from filmmaking but painting. For me, Cubism is the antecedent, from Cézanne to Picasso, and then Eisenstein, Heartfield -- Jeff Wall is part of this lineage. Ah, but is montage not just collage with an idea in front of it? Hmmm. Okay, we can leave it at that. Surely there are more important things to dream about.

My reading of Susan Minot's Evening (1998) ended this week. One of Ann's last unpunctuated fever dreams (the critic Manhola Dargis likens these states to the soliloquies of Joyce's Molly Bloom) has her moving through the country on a train, where at one point "the Mississippi River had withdrawn and white farm houses sat like sugar cubes in the distance." (259) Why did that sound familiar?

A couple hours later, while tidying the books by my bed, I saw my copy of Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and remembered Toklas's early days in Paris, "based upon the rue de Fleures and the Saturday evenings and it was like a kaleidoscope slowly turning." (89)

Stein's Toklas tells us of the Picassos (Pablo and Fenande) who lived on that street and of their return to it after time spent in Spain. Pablo brought wth him some canvases he'd done, and Stein's Toklas says of them: 

"... the treatment of the houses was essentially spanish and therefore essentially Picasso. In those pictures he emphasized the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape but cutting across and into the landscape, becoming undistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of the camouflage of the guns and of the ships in war." (90)

And from there, the anecdote of seeing those guns moving through Paris en route to the front:

"C'est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that. His foresight was justified."

Whistler's Other

Meeka contacted me a couple weeks back to ask if I would review the "Skateboarding" show at the Audain Art Museum at Whistler, and I said yes. The due date for copy is February. the issue scheduled for early summer.

The exhibition will have been down six months by then, but reviews have a way of living on, showing up years later at art school studios after someone drops off a parent's old art magazines for students to flip through. When they're not on their phones, that is.

This might have been my first trip out of town in over year. A shameful feeling for me, though there is nothing about Whistler today that makes me think I've missed anything. How it went from an improvised community rooted in skiing to an expensive back alley stop for the international jet-set is a story that belongs as much to its present as it does to its past.

Palomar

It's been a few days now since the passing of Michael Morris. Curious to see if the art press has posted anything, I went looking and, near the bottom of the bowl, found mention of the Palomar exhibition Michael did at the now-defunct Satellite Gallery.

Palomar was a show organized by Presentation House Gallery and mounted in conjunction with the Belkin Art Gallery's Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry exhibition. Pictured above is one of the Palomar sculptures, as photographed by Stella Hsu. Amidst it, yours truly.

Bye Bye Love

Throughout All That Jazz (1979), director Bob Fosse's fictive stand-in   -- the weak-hearted pill-popping philandering workaholic Joe Gideon   -- converses with Angelique, whose name speaks for itself. Angelique is typically constructed: she is always there and awaits him at the end.

Anyone who has seen the film knows the amazing song-and-dance finale (a comp on "Bye Bye Love"), the spectacular death of the artist who appears on-stage in a hospital bed surrounded by staff and loved ones as his able-bodied self spins and twirls and kisses his audience goodbye.

His final passage is comforting, with Gideon moving along a cat walk high above the stage. A visually and sonically perfect shot-reverse-shot sequence. At the end of his "walk": Angelique.

Open Cage Feeder

Thirty-six days today since this picture was taken. Much has changed. Rains, for one. And frosts. The second day of frost slayed my begonias.

The chickadees still come a couple hours before sunset for their feeding, though more finches than chickadees of late. Finches mate for life and always come in pairs.

The Life Aquatic (2004)

Last month I picked up the DVD of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic. The clincher was the price ($5) relative to the distributer (Criterion).

Back in the early 2000s, I paid $70 for the Criterion edition of David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945), so mine was an act of revenge. Like it was revenge for Captain Steve Zissou in his mission to destroy the Jaguar Shark who ate his first-mate, only Steve learns his lesson by film's end. With the Jaguar Shark located, he leaves it to its beauty, though Steve's work on the patriarchy continues (unconsciously).

I first saw Life Aquatic when it was in the theatres. On second viewing, I was shocked to learn how little I remembered of it. Seu Jorge singing Bowie songs in Portuguese was memorable, as was Willem Dafoe running with a spear gun and Owen Wilson's first scenes, which stand as a masterclass in understatement. Other than that, this children's tale for grown-ups was a new movie for me.

The picture up top is from the scene where Team Zissou attacks the pirate fort on Ping Island and recovers their stolen possessions, which includes Ned's inheritance, locked in Zissou's safe. Zissou declares Ned's inheritance saved, then, after a few turns of the lock, opens the door, where we see that the back of the safe has been torched out. You could drive a truck through that metaphor. A toy truck, of course.

The Websit Review

Dear K.O.,

Thank you for sending me your poems. Not sure where you heard websit (Websit?) is a literary review, but now that I think about it, I suppose I could thread one into it. 

Of the five poems you submitted, "Caulk" and "Bawl" from your "Home Reno Divorce" series show great promise. As for the three poems from your "BDSM" series, I want to feel more tortured by them, which is to say you could take them further -- by revealing less.

A writer you might be interested in, someone with whom you share stylistic tendencies, is Hamish Ballantyne, whose new book Blue Knight (Auric: Durham, N.C.) can be found in limited editions at Vancouver's People's Co-op Bookstore.

Sincerely,

M.T.

Where Bread Is Broken

T. lives in the neighbourhood with her parents, who moved here in 2001. She is the family's third and final child, born sixteen years ago last spring, a home-birth I was invited to, so I can say I have known T. since she was a moment old.

Yesterday, while raking leaves, I saw T. coming down the block, all bottom lip and kicking a pebble. 

"What's up T.?"

"They're gonna close the cafeteria."

"They?"

"The school," she said. "They fired two of the staff, including Ms. L. who everybody likes."

"I'm sorry to hear that. School cafeterias can be more than a place for soup and a sandwich. I learned a lot at my high school caf--"

"Yes, but the principal says she's fed up with bullying. But then D.'s mom said that's just an excuse to cut staff, so it's not about bullying; they're lying."

"So you never saw any bullying in the cafeteria?" 

"Well, I mean, there's mean people everywhere, right? So why should the cafeteria be singled out? It's not fair." 

And with that, T. held her gaze at me. As if for the first time. Hers were pleading eyes, glassy with tears. 

I felt my hands tighten on the rake. I did not want those tears to fall. "I'm sorry T."

"You have no idea how important that place is to us! And now they're gonna take it away! It's just not fair!" 

Michael Morris (1942-2022)

I am fortunate to have met most of the original Western Front founders. I was close to Kate Craig (1947-2002) in the years before her passing, and some of her plants continue to thrive in my garden. This morning I received news that Michael Morris passed away. He was 80.

This writing will not be an attempt at a remembrance or an obituary but an announcement of a day to be spent with Michael, someone I was happy to know, learn from and work with; someone who devoted his life to art, its concerns and relations.

The picture up top is a relatively small ink and gouache work I found on the Heffel site. The work is dated 1965 (likely done while Michael was at the Slade, UK) and is untitled.

Of the three sections, it is the middle passage that is closer to a style Michael would become known for, particularly his The Problem of Nothing (1966), an acrylic on canvas painting that Ray Johnson saw reproduced (in black-and-white) in Artforum. Johnson collaged the reproduction and sent it to Michael (c/o the VAG?) under the auspices of the New York Correspondence School. Michael replied, and the rest is art history.

The Art of Parking

I could have scooted around this truck as it was about to back into an entrance no more than a foot wider than itself, but no, my physics nerd was alerted and I stopped to watch. A five point turn as it turned out. Once aligned, down the ramp like a sinking ship.

Mother Earth

A pic I took of one of Jin-Me Yoon's videos at the VAG a couple weeks back. As this was my first visit to the exhibition, I swooped through it, gathering impressions first, details (like titles) on another visit.

Much has been made of holes in Jeff Wall's pictures, but with Yoon, the hole and its extracted medium (soil, earth) are given equal weight. Equal because they more or less share the picture's centre. 

We don't see the complete interior of Yoon's hole, only its extracted space. From this extraction (can we call it a mound, or does that sound too much like a pubis?) we infer the size of the hole's interior. 

Suddenly everything is gendered. Or maybe it is formal. The mound is, after all, pyramidal -- a triangle if you consider it two-dimensionally. (A half century ago, the adult pubis was pictured, if not clothed, with a triangulation of pubic hair. Not long after that, North American women began burning their bras; a decade later, they began extracting their pubic hair.)

Another video in the exhibition features people (an extended family?) digging on a beach. Here we don't see the hole or the mound so much as the labour, the relations.

I will see this show again, though from first impressions everything seemed to snap into place.

Death's Bouquet

The passage from garden door to back gate. South-north, north-south. The death shapes were getting to me -- the clump of lady ferns by the rear foot of the bench, the peony along the east fence, the Solomon's seal between the fence and the converted concrete washtubs. I put on my gloves, grabbed my clippers and there it was -- death's bouquet.

12th Avenue

Those familiar with 12th Avenue's east-west bi-section of Vancouver (from Boundary Road to the extraterritoriality of UBC) will have noticed the gauntlet of trees between Kingsway and Fraser, how they have grown so big that some of them are now over the curb and onto the road.

On Friday CoV engineers closed off the stretch between Kingsway and Fraser to remove a fallen tree, not as a result of high winds but because our dry summer and fall had weakened its base, making it even more susceptible to car and truck vibration. 

I happened upon this removal while walking back from the Kingsgate Mall on Friday afternoon. The fallen tree had already been cut up and loaded onto a truck, but the road remained closed because CoV workers were taking down another. I assumed it was a preventative measure, but asked why nonetheless.

"It's full metals. From all the sideswiping. That one's trunk is encrusted with mirror fragments."

What a beautiful image. 

"After a while the trees absorb the metals and get sick."

"Is that what felled the other tree? Sickness?"

"It's all related."

A Winter Hat Made of Letters and the Spaces Between Them

nothing

justifies a fallacy

more than anger

Tangible Ax

"We don’t demand that art change the world, only that it reflect it – or perhaps transcend it. Most of the work in this exhibition is a retort to colonialism and it may sway minds or provoke thoughts, but it is unlikely to result in tangible acts of decolonization. So why make it? These artists, so certain of their themes, seem uncertain of the answer." -- Kate Taylor, Globe & Mail, November 10, 2022

The Sobey Art Award has been with us for how long? Do I need to look it up, or has it been long enough? Let's just say it has -- and yet for the first time the Globe has reviewed its exhibition of the five shortlisted artists with a critical eye. Though I agree with the conclusion ("Finer form may yet blossom from a generation that has content all figured out"), it's how its critic arrived there that has me wanting.

Words like "reflect" (e.g. Realism)  and "transcend" (e.g. Minimalism) are quaint expectations, and their elevation only blurs art's ability to carry its own critique, resist its utility. Mirrors reflect; drugs and religion offer transcendent experiences. Art would have so much more going for it if its artists and critics weren't so beholden to terms set for them by that which they claim to be kicking against, where anything that threatens the status quo is given symbolic power, and only rarely political economic power (and even then in benign doses).

Replacing a museum's stolen treasure with a bag of sand, as one nominated artist, Divya Mehra, did, only maintains the relationship, adding value to that bag. Critiquing the museum is tolerated, if not rewarded by the museum and its public and private funders. As long as artists participate in the museum's powers of validation, they are in its service. Divya Mehra will be given the Sobey Art Award this year for reasons that will not have everything to do with her art and practice. The jury, made up of the curators who selected the artists, will consider their selection a tangible act of decolonization.