Magic in Loss

 

Hard to read Stan Persky's Wrestling the Angel (1978) without thinking of Jean Genet, and then suddenly (why so sudden if he's already on my mind?) -- there he is! "(Genet whispers to me./ 'It is not enough to watch one's heroes & pity them. We have to take/ on their sins & submit to their consequences &) '..."

The Genet quote appears in"Soldier/Sailor", one of a number of works from (the chapbook?) Journal of a Mexican Boy, which Persky writes was written (or published, too?) in 1959, five years before Genet's Journal de voleur (1949) was published (by Grove) in English-- if indeed Journal de voleur was the source of the quote (Genet first appeared in English in 1949), which is beside the point if Genet did "whisper" those words to Persky, for Genet was alive in '59.

Say what you want about Millennial writers -- they cite everything (relations being what they are). Persky's generation -- his "kind" (after Isherwood) -- take (took?) a more singular approach. Poet Be Like God (1998) is a book about the San Francisco Renaissance set -- Duncan, Blaser, and in particular, Spicer -- with whom Persky was aligned and, being younger, fed grapes to.

Years ago Persky told me he wrote poetry, but stopped (or, like the late Brian Fawcett, stopped publishing it, I can't recall). The poems in Wrestling the Angel (the title is derived from the tension -- dialectic? -- between the Muse of "humanism" and that of "historical materialism") are rhetorically buoyant but lack fissure, frisson. They are simply balanced and as such lack tension, traction. I'm fine with that, but many aren't. There's just too much magic in loss these days.

Where Every Day's a Holiday

We’ll have a blue room

A new room for two room

Where every day’s a holiday

Because you’re married to me

-- from "Blue Room" (1926), Rodgers & Hart

This March, the Western Front turns fifty (its building will be a hundred-and-one!). Hard to believe -- if you haven't already forgotten.

Covid took our taste and smell, a number of lives and some memories too. Western Front co-founder Michael Morris had a pretty good memory. He didn't die of Covid, but his loss is felt amongst those who, if in doubt about a past event, could always count on him to at least set us on the right track.

In many ways the Western Front that began in 1973 ended when Morris and Vincent Trasov moved out of the building in the 1980s, eventually to Berlin. 

The current exhibition -- The Apparition Room -- is the first in a four-part series that "brings to life digitized artworks from the Western Front archives." The works included -- from Paul Wong & Kenneth Fletcher's 60 Unit Bruise (1976) to ceramics by Laura Wee Lay Laq -- were selected by guest curator Lee Plested, while Nile Koetting supplied the design.

This design, we are told in the press materials, "evokes the cool aesthetics of the waiting room to welcome visitors to slow down, stay awhile and engage in contemplation." But for this viewer, the experience was anything but.

Try as I might, I couldn't get past the Tron-like atmosphere. Where was I, really? Amidst the blue screen that awaits its superimposed context (the narrative context I am asked to imagine)? Or less malevolently, a room where I awake to the glow of the monitor long after the video has stopped playing? Either way, I did not feel welcome. More like imprisoned. 

Blue spark

He waits in the beach apartment

Blue spark

Thousands of lights, thousands of people

She’s forgotten him for the bodies around her

-- "Blue Spark" (1982), X

West Dyke

Richmond's West Dyke is a popular walkway built to keep the tides at bay. But if Richmond should flood, it is more likely that these waters will come from underneath the land this dyke was designed to protect, through liquefaction.

The view from the West Dyke is greater than anything I've seen from Vancouver's beaches, my favourite being West Vancouver's Ambleside, which faces southwest and has an immediate view of Stanley Park, followed by Point Grey, the Southern Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island

What distinguishes the West Dyke view is the absence of foregrounding features, allowing for an abundance of sky -- a vast mural painted with clouds and sun (see atop this post).

The most dramatic view of islands, to my mind, is northwest up the Straight of Georgia/Salish Sea, the southern tips of Lasqueti and Texada (see bottom). At some point this year, the sun will set directly behind them.

The Cedar Cottage Liquor Store and Its Door of Douglas Fir

Is there a glass-breaking equivalent of pyromania? A name for someone who, for whatever reason, is driven to break glass? Attaching a name to something can attract interest in it. Scientific interest, aesthetic interest. The recognition of a name allows us to say, "Yeah, it's a thing," and now the thing has a name.

I noticed an increase in storefront broken glass during the first years of the pandemic. Because some businesses were "pausing", they never bothered to replace their broken glass, boarding it over instead. The cumulative effect was most noticeable on the downtown portion of Granville Street, a stretch that has struggled since 1973 when that modernist egg known as the Eaton's building was laid, the Pacific Centre Mall was built and car traffic was re-routed. The 2020 stretch boasted full occupancy (construction and renovations aside), yet these boarded up shops suggested otherwise.

So is it the sound of breaking glass that attracts the thrymmatizo-maniac? The visual effect? Both? Could it also be political? An attack on the capitalist mode of production? More research is needed.

Angela Grossmann: With Themselves

I was able to see Angela's show on Tuesday. At Equinox. A good place for her to be showing. She's a better artist than where she's been showing over the years. (The pictures included here were taken prior to the hanging of the paintings.)

Angela was a star in the mid-1980s. A star among us. Of the walk-to-the-head-of-the-line-up-and-get-in-the-door variety. The VAG's 1985 Young Romantics show featured the Futura Bold group that formed at ECUAD (when it was an art school), combined with four slightly older not unrelated artists (in their thirties). It was a show that had to happen. And because it could, it did.

The paintings at Equinox are all oil paintings, with no photographic interfaces (hence the exhibition title "With Themselves"?), which has been Angela's style since it was rumoured she once found or was gifted a steamer trunk full of photographs and made paintings with them. Her former teacher Ian Wallace has for years combined photography and paint, but he takes his cues from Mondrian. Angela's mode is decidedly expressive, preferring to paint her figures, likely because she can, and because she derives some pleasure from it.

So yes, oil paintings on mylar. Some in earthier and metallic colours, others in day-glo pinks and blues; some as high as 8', others as low as 3'. All the figures are women, some in whispy late-Victorian/Classical positions, others reflective of Munch, perhaps in a nod to fellow Vancouverite Stephen Shearer, who, if he were five years older, could or would have been a Young Romantic too.

Pussywillows

Every year at this time the first pussy willows appear outside AA Furniture & Appliance at 1368 Kingsway. The plants have been carefully clipped, are reasonably priced and sit in water that is replaced daily.

The Lead and How to Swing It

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim gave his first Greater Vancouver Board of Trade State of the City address to a crowd of 700 and CBC's Municipal Affairs Reporter Justin McElroy was there to parse the quotes.

McElroy's article focuses on tone and attitude, which Sim likely opened with, and concludes not with policy initiatives but topics ranging from housing (increased density, skyscrapers) to infrastructure (a co-operative approach to a Lower Mainland sewage treatment plant).

According to Sim:

"I envision a Vancouver in the not so distant future, that is super exciting. A mayor with a renewed swagger."

"Make no mistake about it, it is a new day in Vancouver."

"The most significant legacies that emerged from both Expo 86 and the Olympic Games were not just about infrastructure, buildings, or sports, it was about the energy and spirit that permeated our city. And this is the same energy we need as we build the future of our city."

I was 23 in the spring of 1986, a couple months shy of returning to the city after completing my schooling and my not unrelated wanderings. Expo 86 was a tourist hut/party house built by a Social Credit provincial government who rightly, though belatedly, saw the end of the province's violent resource extraction era and sought to make the best of it for themselves and their kind. A shame the SoCreds applied those same violent extractive methods to public sector workers and their families, channeling federal transfer payments earmarked for health and education into Expo-related infrastructure. Nothing to swagger over here. Not that the SoCreds and their sycophants noticed.

I was 47 in February, 2010, fully amidst the city and established in whatever it is that I do: a writer who braids lies into truths, an urban subject with a knee-jerk understanding of crowds and crowd behaviour. This was the month Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics and I was working for a Cultural Olympiad that, when confronted, smiled its Cheshire smile and said, "But Michael, you must understand -- the Olympics is a peace movement." No swagger in these druids; that was for our politicians and realtors to take up. Indeed, housing prices spiked in the years after the Olympics, making home ownership a problem only for those looking to buy within +/-5% of the asking price. Not much to swagger over here, either.

If the quarter-century mark is the difference between an exposition and the Olympics, what might we expect in 2034? Whatever it is, plans are likely under way and, as with Expo 86 and the Olympics, will include of course permanent elements. Not simply public buildings and commuter trains, but something more foreboding, a city within a city, with walls, a gate and parapets. A fort. A place for those to swagger. In safety.

Sometimes It Tiks, Mostly It Toks a Lot

A bunch of teenage girls swarm a man and kill him. A bunch of teenage girls, some as young as 13, swarm a man and kill him. Swarm a man and kill him. A man and kill him. Man and kill him. And kill him. Kill him. Him kill. Him kill and. Him kill and man. Him kill and man a. Him kill and man a swarm. 

No amount of backwards can bring this man back to life. That's the "Why bother?" and accounts for the courtroom yawns and smirks -- all of which can be argued away.

There are those who take such cases to argue just that. I'm not a lawyer and I do it all the time, for free. But there's something sick in that, it is said, arguing for free. At least working for money absolves us, explains the motivation, which has nothing to do with us and everything to do with our instrumentalization by an employer.

We've all gotta work, right? Take the job if you need a reason. Taking the job gives you the right to rage against your oppressor. Taking the job says, I have some skin in this game.

Courtroom Drawing: Pam Davis

Health of an Artist

News is re-circulating of the artist-subject's status. To review: he was struck from within, hospitalized, and now that he appears physically capable, the other part, which is manifesting in bad behaviour. At present he is in a public hospital's geriatric psych ward. Because he is disruptive (rude to patients and staff, a flight risk, etc.), he has his own room and is costing the Province upwards of $1000 a day as they concoct a "stable drug regime" for this most unstable of patients. 

The line "a stable drug regime that would allow him to make better choices" sounds like something Nurse Ratched would say in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). It should be noted that Nurse Ratched never favoured the frontal lobotomy, believing that psychotic behaviour could be modified through in-group social interaction and meds. It is Nurse Ratched, not Randall Patrick McMurphy, who is the greater character in Cuckoo's Nest, a novel that walks the line between (ludic) genius (McMurphy) and (evil) madness (Ratched). 

What the artist-subject is displaying is consistent with a past self that has been cosseted and indulged since 1968, when his then future former in-laws settled on him as an escort for their daughter's grand tour of Europe, and after that assist her in her quest to realize herself, become an artist like him. The artist-subject's is a life that has never been challenged nor negatively sanctioned. Who will trust the artist-subject to take his meds? Who will enforce it? Is the underwriter retained by the Society where the artist-subject has lived for almost fifty years betting on or against him when it comes to fire insurance.

It is clear from what I am hearing that the artist-subject has been diagnosed with psychosis and as such it has been suggested that he take an anti-psychotic whose side-effect only makes him unfamiliar with himself, and therefore reactive. In short, a pickle. Shorter still, any takers?

Painting: Maxwell Bates, Yellow Reception (1972)

Children's Literature

Illustrated children's books continue to be published in great numbers. There is interest in these books, in the same way there has always been interest in poets who write greeting cards.

New children's books that speak with greater detail to empathy-building means older books are moved along from libraries or publishers' inventories in equally great numbers. It is believed there is no historical imagination in children under 6, so no point in children's books set in anything but the never-ending present.

A friend who teaches elementary school told me about a library sale of children's books last week. Some of these books were published as recently as 2016, and were being sold at 25-cents a pop. Recently, I picked up a children's book by Helen Diehl Olds (1896-1981) that had been "discarded" by Prince Rupert's Westview Elementary. The book is called Miss Hattie and the Monkey (1958) and is a racist attempt at anti-racism.

Looking is Not Watching

Time being what it is, looking fails to retrieve clues to what we are looking for. So we take pictures of what we believe is a truth, as a truth, and study them, believing that pictures neither lie nor change. My question for this sunrise (taken at 7:56 a.m.) is, Are you carrying signs of spring? 

Portrait in Felt-Tipped Marker on Melamine

A friend texted an image of a drawing with this question: “Guess how old the student is who drew this?” Knowing that my friend teaches elementary school, the answer could only be under twelve. Because the question had an aura of excitement to it, closer to kindergarten than to Grade Seven. But I’m a good sport, so I took a second look. 

My first thought was, I’ve got a secret, and I wondered how old I was when the sensation first occurred to me. No answers. I returned to the image and saw not a withholding figure but a coy one: a woman as young as fourteen, no longer before a neutral (white) background but entering a schoolyard, on her way to homeroom, or walking down the halls between classes, or maybe stepping from the bathroom at a house party …

 

Embarrassed by my imagination, I turned away from the image, only to return to it sheepishly, to take in its lines. The dominant lines are those that form the sides and jaw of the figure’s face, her cocked grin, her eyes. Indeed, it is the eyes that allow the other lines their contribution, empowering them, enlisting them as co-conspirators. But wait, these are not the heavy-lidded downcast eyes I thought they were; these eyes contain vertical lines, what I see now as colourless irises, making them wide-eyed and looking to our left. Suddenly, this is no longer the drawing I thought it was, but the drawing I want it to be. 

 

“10,” I text my friend.

 

“Try 5,” was her reply.

 

It is said that only children are innocent enough to convey the truth through their art, and this is taken as a virtue. By the same token, it is also said (by art critics like me) that anybody can accidentally take a resonant photograph or make a great drawing; the question is, Was it intended? Was it composed with deliberation? Here’s a few more: Is there another truth that exists between Innocence and Accidents? Is the truth not what goes on in the mind of the beholder? A truth that results not from the narrative conveyed by the image under review, but the narratives society has embedded within us? 

 

My response to the image is this writing -- my acknowledgement of where it came from, my encounter with it and my incorrect guess at the age of its artist. In reading back on what I have written, I realize I would have had a better chance at being right about the age of the artist had I not looked at the image, studied it, drawn my own conclusions. The person who drew this drawing is five; the critic, twelve times that. Five times twelve is sixty: old enough to know that I would rather be wrong in guessing, than right about what I think I am missing.

INT. RESTAURANT -- DAY (A Green Solution)

MAÎTRE D'HÔTEL: Mr Turner has an unusual request.

OWNER: Which Mr Turner?

MDH: A Michael Turner. Someone in Dishwashing knows him as a gossip columnist.

OWNER: What does the 'A' stand for?

MDH: Singular, sir. As in one. The article 'A'. 

OWNER: Get on with it.

MDH: He will be dining alone and would like to be seated with others.

OWNER: Ugh, riddles. Translation?

MDH: He has asked to be seated at a table of three diners. Presumably to take up the fourth chair.

OWNER: I would consider that an intrusion. No.

MDH: With all due respect, sir, Mr Turner considers it a [holding up hands to make air quotes] "green gesture," and we have spent a great deal of money of late in our effort to prove that we are indeed a [holding up hands to make air quotes] "green solution."

OWNER: Has this been tried before?

MDH: Not to my knowledge, sir. 

OWNER (bending down to look at the reservation map): There [pointing with a pencil]. Seat him with the Pynchons.

Gule Wamkulu: Dancing Indigenous Governance

Every couple of months I contribute between six and nine 275-word articles to a regional visual arts magazine. Research materials come from the magazine, who in turn receive them from the contributing museum or gallery.

Most times this is a fluid process. We receive images of the exhibited works (author, title, medium and date), an artist statement and/or a curatorial text within the imposed deadline. But on some occasions the source is chasing a deadline of its own. When that source is a university, well, it's no excuse, given their resources, certainly when compared to artist-run centres and some smaller commercial galleries, who run on shoestrings.

Below is an article I wrote (twice), but we chose not to run because we were not supplied with the necessary materials in time. I am posting the article at websit rather than trashing it because I think it is worth preserving -- at the very least for Simone Blais's Dance Like Everyone is Watching (2020) video, which needs to be seen for its teeter-tottering of attitude versus ideas, but also for an important conversation between her and curator Dr. Diva Muncia, who is also the Director of the Indigenous Governance Program in the Faculty of Human and Social Development at the University of Victoria.

*

Gule Wamkulu: Dancing Indigenous Governance

Simone Blais: Dance Like Everyone is Watching

University of Victoria Legacy Galleries (downtown)

January 14 - April 18, 2023

 

Located on unceded Coast Salish land, Victoria, British Columbia is an overwhelmingly white city. White in its population; white in its abundance of Edwardian architecture. Simone Blais addresses this in her video Dance Like Everyone is Watching (2020), an intertwining portrait of three Black dancers who express what it means to be where they are, and where they are without. Issues raised include racism, tokenism, stereotyping and, most compellingly, cultural appropriation.

 

A powerful moment in Blais’s video occurs after her visit with a white West African dance instructor in Shawnigan Lake, which she recounts to curator Dr. Devi Mucina. “She was saying everything right, and everything was so perfect, and yet I had this visceral, bodily -- like I was just mad.” To which Mucina responds, “Colonialism was about colonizing lands and bodies,” and a moment later, “So dance, really, if you look at it at its most core, most fundamental level, it is governance,” a point Mucina illustrates in his rousing exhibition Gule Wamkulu: Dancing Indigenous Governance

 

Comprised of photographs, films and objects, Gule Wamkulu takes its name from a dance (the Great Mask Dance of Life from the African Chewa people) performed by the Nyau or mask carriers, who become conduits through which ancestors can commune with the living. Central to this communication, which Mucina describes as a “totalizing governance structure,” is community wellness, and at its heart are questions of gender, where both the masculine and the feminine are embraced in one body. Traditionally, it is men who dance Gulu Wamkulu in public, and it is their feminine self that is shared.

Now Go Home and Get Your Schein Box!

Pictured onstage at the Rio Theatre is retired film exhibitor and VIFF founder Leonard Schein (foreground) and Rio programmer Rachel Fox (facing), in advance of Rachel's questions.

Two of us had had an earlier go at cracking Leonard's pleasant carapace, but it was the steely-eyed Rachel I had my money on.

She began brilliantly, with a glossary: "Leonard, what is the difference between a first-run movie and a second-run movie?" "Leonard, what is a move-through?"Etc.

From there the questions moved to specifics, from Famous Players Theatres' historic hold on film content distributors to upstart Cineplex's complaint of FP's market monopolization to Cineplex's eventual replacement of Famous Players as market monopolizer -- and the amnesia that follows.

Yesterday was our first day of shooting and it went well.

A Picture About a Lens

The third Monday in January is popularly known as Blue Monday, the worst (most "depressing") day of the year. This morning a psychiatrist on the CBC's Early Edition mentioned seasonal affective disorder and how light boxes are used to treat it.

The artist Jeff Wall has used light boxes to make his pictures, but he hasn't used them for a while now. Dana Claxton started using light boxes around the time Wall stopped. She calls them fire boxes. Stan Douglas has never used light boxes to show his gallery pictures. When asked why, he said, "It's screaming."

Here is a recent feature on Wall, in advance of his current exhibition at Vancouver's Canton-Sardine. Seasoned Wall watchers will note the absence of the Prado story in the artist's discussion on light boxes: how he was inspired by the illuminated bus stop ads he saw on his daily commute to the Madrid museum in 1977. Another thing we don't hear is how Vancouver's N.E. Thing Company used light boxes (albeit on a smaller scale) in the 1960s.

Something else Wall says: when the reporter asks why he is showing at a tiny Vancouver gallery, the artist replies, "Probably because they asked me." What we don't hear is the question, Why have you said no to certain other Vancouver galleries who have asked if they can show your work? Sometimes more than once.

Hacer Memoria

At some point during Polygon Art Gallery's public conversation between visiting curator Candice Hopkins and artist Rebecca Belmore an image was screened of seven boys from a Sioux Lookout residential school watching their white teacher fish.

The photograph was taken in 1948, and the boys are dressed in blue denim, while the teacher in the distance is wearing a tailored white shirt.

This is a photograph Belmore said she has had with her a long time, and returns to often. More recently it inspired a work she made of a young boy in the water -- not watching it.

Seasonal Films

With the Holiday Season about to give way to the Lunar New Year, I find myself putting away the cards I received and the stack of movies (DVDs) I watch between Xmas Eve and the day after Russian Xmas.

The movies I watch during this time are not Xmas-themed, per se, but those I associate with the season, films that were on TV when I was little and my parents were partying in the living room.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) is one of these films, as are David Lean's 1960s films. A more recent "Xmas film" is Die Hard (1988), which I never saw when it was released, but, like many of us, have come to appreciate as a seasonal film.

Die Hard has a scene in it that only this year brought to mind the monolith scenes in Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968). As one of the German terrorists enters a room looking for the Bruce Willis character, we see a low horizontal form; maybe a table or a storage unit or a packing crate, but a form nonetheless. Wills is hiding in this form, but we don't know for sure that he is. The uncertainty is of interest to me. It allows me to concentrate on the structure of this form. 

Wrestling the Angel (1977)

"What does Immigration want from me?" writes the author of this early collected selected, Stan Persky, in his short essay "Reasonable Beings" (122).

Persky (b. 1941, Chicago) has always struck me as someone who needs to be wanted in order to make what he has to say that much harder to take.

A Marxist, Persky is first and foremost an American exceptionalist, an attitude which, more than any other amongst United Staters, is the first thing you feel when an American walks into a Canadian room. I have even met U.S.-born Indigenous artists who, despite their stated connection to their land, language and people, carry that attitude. It is something that can't be shaken. Like the party voice, it's just there.

I saw a copy of Wrestling the Angel in the People's Co-op Bookstore Poetry Section a couple days ago and bought it for eight dollars. I'd flipped through it first and found all sorts of mentions of Vancouver and San Francisco from the 1960s and early 70s, so a necessary addition to my exceptional library of "Vancouver" books, writings, drawings and photographs.

At his least self-conscious, Persky is a pleasure to read. "A Portrait of Angela Bowering" tells at the outset how "the land under the highway suddenly collapsed and fell into a pit 75 feet deep ... we're eating lunch there -- Brian and I -- before that Robin and I -- smoking hell, with our sun-burnt or hell-burnt faces and at night in the open pit the moonlight gleaming ... "(150). Genet!

On Reflection

When not in service, the truck is parked in back, where, for a few minutes a day, the sun hits its rear window and projects its beam south, where it is interrupted by some lathe fencing, casting a shadow through my glass door onto the outer fake doors of my Murphy bed. I would say this shadow looks like film stock, if the sprocket holes weren't so distorted.

Kozak Ukrainian Eatery & Mill

After our Golden Bowls at Chau Veggie Express last night we returned to the sidewalk and there across the street was Kozak.

Yes, we had no idea. What looks vacant during the day is lit up like a palace at night. So there we went, to take in the cakes.

"For you, Nice Man," she said pointing her tongs at me, "two for one. But please, stop saying spasiba. For us, it's dyakuyu tobi."

B.C. Pears

Hard to get a sense of scale here. Taking this pic from further back would have allowed diners to provide that scale -- but then you wouldn't be able to see it in the way it needs to be seen. Plus there's always someone not wanting to be seen with someone other than their spouse.

The work (an ad for the old fruit growers co-op in Kelowna) now hangs on the wall of the former Primo's (now known as Heirloom) at Granville and West 12th. Not sure why it was sectioned into sixths. Maybe that was the only way to save it. Or maybe the owner thought it looked better.

Spare Me

I have been reading leaked pages (in Spanish) of the soon-to-be-released English version of the second born son of Princess Diana and maybe King Charles III's autobiography the past couple days, and of course I'm floored by the candour -- who wouldn't be?

But when I say candour, maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's revanche. For it's the son's story, after all, or his effort to take control of it, establish it -- for the record, as they say in legal proceedings. 

The son is Prince Henry, or Harry, as he likes to be branded, the Duke of Sussex, and the Spanish language version of his autobiography translates as In the Shadows, not El Segundo, which would seem more apropos given that the English title is Spare. (Living in Southern California is hardly living in a shadow.)

So far I have read about Harry's military deployment in Afghanistan and the number he bandies about (25) that applies to his "confirmed kills"; how he is not ashamed of these killings (he refers to his targets as "pawns"), that it was a case of the "goodies versus baddies," and he was a "goody."

Equally disturbing is the story of a costume he wore to a society ball. Most of us have heard that he went dressed in a Nazi uniform, but in his book, Harry supplies the excuse: that he came home with two uniforms, and when he asked his brother Prince William and his brother's wife Kate if he should go as a pilot or a Nazi, both said (in unison?), Nazi.

So of course it's not Harry's fault the world press slammed him for dressing as a Nazi, but his mean older brother and his wife, who had clearly set him up (check, as they say in chess). If that's the case, then it explains his vulnerability, something his mother, the Princess Diana, suffered from and was likely to her advantage when the then-Prince Charles proposed to her.

Harry loved his mother very much, he writes, and was too young to lose her. I would also suspect that he sensed her vulnerability, and how it was used against her. Does that explain in part why Harry married the scrappy Meghan Markle? I would think so. 

From a distance, I liked Harry and thought his weird status (he is clearly no spawn of King Charles but of Major James Hewitt, with whom his mother had an affair two years before her divorce from Charles) made him interesting. Like his brother William -- and indeed their official father -- Harry never grew up. I never felt much for Meghan, but I do now, particularly the way Harry, in marrying her, deployed her. His own form of revanche, inadvertent or otherwise.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Madame Hummingbird Feeder

A hummingbird feeder from the 1950s. This spring I will find a place for it in my garden. In the meantime, a visit from the future. Not what it is, but a (penlight) projection.

We Are Close

Close? We've always been close, Open. How many times do you have to be told?

Sorry I dropped the comma. I'll add it to today's sign.

The Quipping Post

The Irish Dream. A couple times every year I have what I call the Irish Dream. The locations are from my 1980 trip there, and are restricted to Dublin.

I am never alone in this dream, nor are the people I am alone with, for we are always swelling -- until I escape and am sucked in by another, who veers off into some new form of electric bullshit, similar to what I do with my fiction.

The main feature of the Irish Dream -- which begins when there are more than two of us and becomes the exclusive mode when we are four -- is quipping. Suddenly everyone is speaking in quips, and I leap from my chair like a man on fire, late for his job at the arsonist's. 

Hard Copy

Writing for hard copy journals can be taxing. Yesterday I completed a first draft of my review of the Audain Art Museum's Out of Control: the Concrete Art of Skateboarding exhibition and found it to be 100 words over. I took off the opening paragraph, and it fit. In fact, it was better without it. But what to do with that paragraph? I worked so hard to get it right!

Skateboarding, like surfing and alpine skiing, is both a recreational activity and a competitive sport. That it was invented by Californian and/or Hawaiian surfers in the 1950s, and de-wheeled three decades later (to become popularly known as snowboarding in the 1990s), places it in an evolutionary middle and invites comparison. All three spawned complex postwar subcultures, though skateboarding maintains a rockier relationship to its elements. Indeed, if surfing occurs smoothly over water, with the ocean’s force behind it, and alpine skiing/snowboarding gravitationally down water’s frozen form (snow), skateboarding is largely body-powered, its horizontal surfaces more often than not a mix of water, sand and cement (i.e. concrete).

In My Day (2022) 2

Above is a picture from the opening of Act Two of In My Day, Rick Waines's remarkable "verbatim drama" drawn from 118 interviews with those who survived the first fifteen years (1981-1996) of HIV/AIDS in Vancouver. My review is now up at the B.C. Review.

photo: Sarah Race

Hair Bar

As a teenager I received a weekly allowance of $5, but every month my mother gave me $10 for a haircut, thinking that was how much one cost. Economy Barbershop (now Kerrisdale Hair Bar) charged only $5 a cut, so of course I went there.

At the time, a gram of Red Lebanese hash cost $5. That's what I would spend the difference on -- chipping away at that gram until the next haircut. These were small chips, just enough for a single toke from a pipe made with a toilet paper tube, a piece of tin foil and a pin to poke holes in it.

There was nothing I liked better than to end the day sitting by my bedroom widow, reading Vonnegut, Hesse or Gide under the influence of Nick Gerwing's Red Leb hash. If you want to know how I got through high school, that's how. RIP Nick!

Get Into Dodge

I wrote, "If you sign up for my workshop, I'll carry your bags and help you pack and unpack them. You can decide where and when you want to stop, but I'll have some suggestions too."

You said your interest is in character, and after preliminary discussions it was decided that you would write portraits, not stories, and you happily accepted my loan of Gertrude Stein's Look At Me Now and Here I Am (1945) and George Bowering's Curious (1973) as examples.

At our next meeting you produced a copy of another Stein book -- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) -- published in the same year the Nazi's came to power, which for Stein might well have been as good a time as any to publish an autobiography.

"Here," you said pointing to the page. "I want to write a portrait of her. My own portrait."

Gertrude Stein having written The Portrait of Mabel Dodge [1912], Mabel Dodge immediately wanted it printed. She had three hundred copies struck off and bound in Florentine paper. Constance Fletcher corrected the proofs and we were all awfully pleased. Mabel Dodge immediately conceived the idea that Gertrude Stein should be invited from one country house to another and do portraits and then end up doing portraits of millionaires which would be a very exciting and lucrative career. Gertrude Stein laughed. A little later we went back to Paris. (132)

I asked if you had heard of Rachel Cusk's book Second Place (2021), which is inspired by Mabel Dodge's 1932 account of hosting D. H. Lawrence in Taos, and you surprised me when you said you'd read it and knew of its source.

"So you want to do what Stein's already done?" I asked, rhetorically.

"Ah, but Stein's is a fiction," you said; "I'm only interested in the truth."