As the sun disappears and the shadows decend from the mountaintop

"Truth to material" is a term attributed to Henry Moore that speaks to the use of materials best-suited to the construction of its object, but especially the effort taken to make that material available to the viewer, as opposed to hiding it, either with paint or placing something in front of it. I would say the same might be said of accidents "made" in the name of its installation, a chip or a tear, most recently at the CAG, where one of Kathy Slade's charcoal rubbings from her As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop exhibition (the work closest to the right, above) bears the effort it took to install it (at bottom). Or if not accidents or efforts, then the decision to "live with it"?

Setting It Bent

In Geography and Plays (1922) Gertrude Stein writes of "the landscape not moving but always being in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail, the story is only of importance if you like to tell or hear a story but the relation is there anyway" (125).

And this from Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable (1953), with no page citation given because I have long committed it to memory: "No need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas as life alone is enough." 

Concrete Delivery System

Auto Repairs are "Wee" was my mechanic for many years. In 2021, the site was razed, a hole dug, and now that hole is filled and at grade.

A couple days ago a heavily weighted truck pulled up, and from its trunk the long arm of concrete. At the end of that arm, a finger, guided by a figure in a hard plastic hat.

The Age of Adaline (2015)

The title of this film is a statement that leads to the question, What age? What is the age of this person named Adaline -- assuming Adaline is a person and not a pharmaceutical.

Adaline was born in San Francisco in 1909. In 1937, she is involved in a car accident that, as she finds out in the years that follow (as we do too, with the help of a mysterious male narrator), results in her not aging. When suspicions arise, Adaline moves on, changing identities. Most of the film takes place in the present, making Adaline 106 years old.

For a time, Adaline lived in England. It was in England that she began a five-week romance with an American student who also happens to be from San Francisco. At one point in the film, a flashback, we see Adaline in a taxi pulling up beside San Francisco's Alamo Square Park, where a young man sits on a bench with his back to her, a velvet box in his hand. "Keep driving," she tells the driver. It's another half hour before we learn that the young man in the park is the father of her current suitor, a young man who, like his father, she is trying hard not to fall for.

Most of this film was shot in Vancouver. Adaline works as a museum archivist at what is IRL the Vancouver Art Gallery. In fact, the area where she works was, until a couple years ago, the VAG's Library and Archives, until it was converted into what? a VIP lounge for donors? Also working with her is Kenneth (played by actor Hiro Kanagawa) and two other (nameless) colleagues, one of whom is the equally ageless former VAG librarian Cheryl Siegel, who retired from the gallery in 2015 after thirty years of service. That's Cheryl in the picture up top, sitting in the background, far right.

Parting Words

Earlier this week Melanie Mark announced in the legislature that she is leaving her job as a provincial NDP MLA, but she did not officially resign. Resignation of sitting MLAs is effective immediately and requires a particular wording, or protocol, if you will, and like NDP Premier John Horgan, who departed similarly, it was likely planned that way. In fact, I'm sure it was planned that way. As in the corporate world, politics is entirely planned, lest someone say something wrong and the opposition pounce on you, rip you to shreds for the benefit of the media, who convey such horrors in the name of news.

Before this latest announcement, Melanie Mark resigned from her position as the Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport shortly after the NDP's announcement of a $789M redevelopment of the Royal B.C Museum was attacked by the opposition Liberal government for being "tone deaf." Never mind that maintaining an existing museum that has for years promoted the reduction if not the erasure of Indigenous peoples is in itself a tone deaf gesture, the Liberals' version of tone deafness applies not to the symbolic but to the economic (housing, health care, disaster relief, etc.), that aspect of civilization that those on the "right" claim they know more about than those they dismiss as "socialists".

The new Royal B.C. Museum was to be outgoing Premier Horgan's legacy monument, with Mark its inaugural greeter. Yet what was an understandably welcome idea in the years between the Truth & Reconciliation Call to Action and COVID was off the mark in 2022, and the way it was handled by the Horgan era NDP government left Mark unprotected. In that sense, her most recent description of the legislature as a "torture chamber" is apt.

Though Mark did thank Horgan (twice) for her time in office, it's who she didn't thank that leads one to wonder about the extent of her ordeal. It's always easy to blame the opposition in these situations, and she did, but surely there are those in her own party who let her down, not to mention those in the civil service, some of whom have been holding power longer than any sitting MLA. Will Mark, like former Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Reybould, write a book about her life and her time in public office? I expect so. Mark's story is not uncommon. Book buyers today consume grief like they once did Horror and Romance.

For more on the Royal B.C. Museum, click here for a February 9, 2023 "Future of the Royal B.C. Museum Dialogue".

Madeleine Is (1970)

When I interviewed the legendary film exhibitor Leonard Schein a few months back I was able to thank him for the great films he programmed at the Ridge, after he took it over in 1978. The Ridge was 24 blocks north of where I lived then (I was sixteen in 1978) and I would see mostly foreign films there. The Ridge was a huge part of my education. About 90% of the films I saw at the Ridge I saw on my own.

I was alone last night for the Cinematheque's screening of Sylvia Spring's Madeleine Is (see the movie here). Madeleine Is is the story of a kindly young French-Canadian woman, an artist living in Vancouver and working in fashion. She lives and works in her studio, which she shares with her activist/male chauvinist boyfriend "Toro", who is either trying to start a cult or overthrow the The Establishment. Maybe both.

Madeleine has a recurring dream about her joyful encounters with a clown. One day she meets a straight-laced young man on Granville Street who looks like him (we take her word for it). After visiting his apartment she realizes he is not her clown, and is disappointed. Toro meanwhile has disappointed her for the last time: he has allowed her studio to become a crash pad for hippies, and is fucking one of them. He suggests a "menage a trois," then a foursome with a mutual male friend, and Madeleine is repulsed.

Upset, Madeleine flees into the night -- through the flashing neon of Granville Street (accompanied by a free jazz score) -- only to catch a chill and be taken in by some of Toro's older friends: a hippie couple, one of whom is a former physician. A recovery period follows, which includes a visit from an "old bum" who Madeleine often talks to at Victory Square Park, and an in-group session with a psychologist who, from the sounds of it, has merged Jung with Lacan. 

The final scene is chilling, but concludes happily with Madeleine learning that she is her own clown, and that the fellow she thought was her clown is in fact his own person -- by then less "straight" than he was when she first met him.

There are many Vancouver locations in this film. Stanley Park, English Bay, Coal Harbour, a pre-beautification Gastown. Back in 1970, city councillors were doing everything they could to get neon off Granville Street. Now it's back -- the most incongruous example being the Backpackers Hostel sign (at bottom). When I was a teen, neon was the last thing I expected to see when I set out with a pack on my back.

Night and Day (after C.B.)

Oh, what to do, what to do? The paralyzing month of February. Worse at the end of the month than it is at the beginning. Which tells you. Which tells you it gets worse as it gets shorter.

That's the line. That's the line sitting down and writing can give you: Which tells you it gets worse as it gets shorter. Not all of it, just this: it gets worse as it gets shorter. But only when applied to a month that can't end fast enough, where the longer that month goes on, the worse you feel (about it).

The line runs counter to optimism. There's no mention of "the bright side". The days are getting brighter longer, and with each passing day, fewer days remain. But each day as I am living it -- in the present, because that's what the happiest among us claim is the best way -- each day is a slog, and I go to sleep earlier every night to escape it. 

The Former Yugoslavia

Our high school History 12 class was a modern history course taught in two parts: 1871-1918, then 1919-present (1980). Though the focus was on Europe, we learned a few things about Africa, Asia and the Americas through the concepts of empire, capitalism, communism, imperialism, colonialism, neocolonialism, theories of modernization and dependency, and cultural relativism. Mr. Bowman was our instructor, and his lectures were riveting. He'd outline a situation, then colour it in. Not all of it, but enough to anchor you, inspire you to dig deeper on your own time.

What interested me most about the course was that region known as the Balkans, those pebbly kingdoms and principalities made up of the bottom end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and onwards from there to Greece. Yes, Luxembourg and Switzerland remain tiny, somewhat plural northern European countries (banks?), but the Balkans were baroque, with Judeo-Christianity and Islam overlapping with Roman and Cyrillic script. Nothing was simple in the Balkans, and because the course moved quickly, we left the region as one might leave a knot in the middle of a laced up shoe.

A couple weeks ago, while looking through the Books Section at the East 12th Avenue Salvation Army store, I found former BBC reporter and polyglot Misha Glenny's first edition of The Fall of Yugoslavia: the Third Balkan War (1992). Two things attracted me to the book. The first was the date of publication (was the war not yet over in 1992?), the second was the lack of review quotes on the book's jacket and first pages. I looked for reviews on my phone and saw nothing written on the first edition. It was then that I learned that Glenny was barely in his thirties when he was travelling through the former Yugoslavia, interviewing local officials and townsfolk.

I am only on Page 37 of this 195 page book, but am hooked on what we merely touched on in that History 12 class. From the Serbs' historic relationship to 17th century Hapsburg Vienna (in their wars against the Ottoman Empire) to the Croats mid-20th century allegiance to Italian and later German Fascism. But as this book is about Yugoslavia, I am learning more about Marshall Tito's pre-1980 efforts to maintain its unity, but also Slobodan Milošević's post-Communist unravelling of it. As to where Glenny sits in all this, he is not so much journalistically objective/neutral but revolted by all sides. Or maybe facets is a better word, given that this former country was comprised of many dimensions, a refracting jewel that, once tilted, allowed for the horrors that await me.

Bodies in the Audience

Attended an event at the Lido last night. Three pints of lager and two of those doughy pretzels they heat up at the bar for you. Kellarissa, Jaye, then Sook-Yin. Walked there and back. Started at 8pm, home by midnight. 

And Your Bird Can Sing: Computational Theatre & the After-Image of Social Media

Saturday morning was the start of our "Twitter Cinema" symposium, And Your Bird Can Sing: Computational Theatre & the After-Image of Social Media", hosted by the New Centre for Practice (NCP) and featuring the first of our six presenters, Julieta Aranda, who appeared almost anti-gravitational before a screen grab from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Julieta said from the outset that she is not on, nor ever took to, Twitter, though she does participate in other social media platforms. Like most of us gathered (on Zoom), she has an uneasy relationship with the digital computational algorithmic world of the Internet and its bachelors.

What Julieta presented was an autoethnographic account of her life as it began at the adult age of eighteen (1993), when she went to school to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a filmmaker. Godard was immediately mentioned (his "on-set mechanics") and I appreciated this because at our end we chose Omar Blondin Diop's seminar scene in Godard's La Chinoise (1967) as our backdrop.

Julieta went on to say that the appearance of the internet in the 1990s disrupted her dream: "What I wanted to do with film is not possible." Somewhat later, in response to the progressive modern question of one medium supplanting another, Julieta stated that all media can co-exist, that supplantation is a "Silicon Valley idea." I waited for someone to mention how old technologies return to us as art, but our audience, it seemed to me, was more Frankfurt School than McLuhan.

For those interested, here is Diop as he appeared in La Chinoise as carried in the trailer to Just a Movement (2021).

Wood From the People

This Thursday's forecast shows an overnight low of minus-six, so we're not totally done with winter. That said, the truck that picks up our unused firewood was at Kingsway and East 16th last Wednesday, with a couple of cords in tow. Some of this wood will be turned into paper. Some of this paper will hold printed images.

Old School Heater

Noticed this outside AA Furniture & Appliances on Monday. An old school electric heater, the kind whose coils are exposed and glow orange. The tag says "WORKING -- $30" and there's no reason to think otherwise.

Ly saw me looking and came outside. "You buy, is working." 

"Like the tag says."

"Never mind what tag says -- is working."

An antique fake fireplace, from a time (1930s?) when things weren't fake. It works, yes, but can I trust it to not create a hazard? Do I even have room for it?

My favourite part is the painted insert, the illusion of live coals. If it's still out front today, I'll put an offer on it.

Crayons, Staples

The walk from my place west along the alley. Past Inverness, Glen, up the hill after Windsor, past Ste Catherines, eventually to 16th Avenue at Prince Albert, where the thoroughfare that is Kingsway opens like the river it is.

Not much has changed in this alley these past 26 years. A few infill houses and an eight home development on the Ste Catherines to Prince Albert stretch, where to the south of it a recent dumping of crayons and staples, what we once called school supplies.

Worldlings

At the top of the CBC radio news this morning: word that Russia sent some of its so ugly-they're-beautiful bombers over the Bering Sea on Tuesday. Or if not bombers, then video of them taking off, flying around, then returning to base. I just now checked CNN and found no mention of any of it. Conclusion? Even CNN doesn't buy it.

Does it matter if these bombers didn't take off for it to mean something? We are told that Putin wants to make Russia great again, a superpower, and that can never be true, because Russia is its own thing, neither European nor Asian. Like Egypt is to Africa, or the Phoenicians were to the Romans, except Moscow is not Carthage, nor is Putin Dido, the Queen of Carthage, who, though born in Lebanon, was Greek. Like Cleopatra was Greek (Macedonian). 

Dido and Cleopatra were interesting people. Putin was too -- a lover of the arts as much as he was a soldier -- until he got caught up in the kleptocracy. In a recent speech to Russia's Duma, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the future of Russian foreign policy is to end the dominance of the west in international life. I'm all for that, as I'm sure many of North America's indigenous populations are too.

In Alaska today there are a number of distinct indigenous groups. Among them, the Tlingt, the Haida, the Tsimshian, the Inupiats, the Yupiks, the Eyaks, the Aleuts and the Athabascans. The first "westerners" to "visit" what is known today as Alaska and British Columbia were the Russians. In fact, Russia owned Alaska until 1867, when it sold it to the U.S. for $7.2M. A far better deal than what the Dutch East India Company "paid" for Manhattan, in 1626. We never talk about this anymore, and I wonder why. Because it wasn't "ours" to buy or sell?

St Valentine's Face

We have Brazilian scientists to thank for this reconstruction of St Valentine's face. But where was the skull all this time? In Rome, encased in a glass vitrine.

As I understand it, the reconstruction is not from the skull but from over 250 photographs of it. Frankly, I would have been happy if they stopped in the middle; that sweet spot between flesh and bone. 

A Post-Pandemic Fable

No one likes the boss who keeps insisting staff work on site five days a week. Every department has proof that working on site only three days has saved the company between ten- and fifteen-percent in expenses.

In the past, cost saving initiatives were rewarded, and department heads were encouraged to bring them forward at the company's weekly departmental meeting. But the boss remained firm: five days a week. "Cuts," he said with a slow, menacing scan of the room, "can be made elsewhere."

The man whose family operates the concession stand in the building's lobby is happy the company is back to five days. At three days, his revenues were down thirteen-percent, and he could no longer afford to employ his niece, who relieved him from 1pm-2pm so he could meet his friends at the train station for coffee. The loss of employment at her end meant she could not longer leave the house, because she no longer had reason to.

Departmental heads gathered in advance of the most recent weekly meeting to determine who among them would confront the boss with the latest statistical analysis. As usual, the boss was late for this 3pm meeting, though he always arrived happy and refreshed. "A vigorous game of squash," he would announce to those who met his smile as he strode into the room, "is the second best feeling in the world -- above profits, bonuses and employee satisfaction."

Socks

The Hudson's Bay for dress socks. Not anymore though. Even MacGregor is adding polyamide to what was once its cotton and wool 3-paks. What was that about dress socks again? Ceiling lights like pillow slips.

Gallery Visit, Studio Visit

A "fresh eye" from a Michael Drebert canvas peeking through the doors of Pale Fire Projects into the studio of Nicole Ondre. On view is Nicole's extruder, which she uses to make her clay tubes, and from there her knotted and braided forms, like those we saw in her May, 2022 CSA Space exhibition, Pirl.

Nicole recently completed a ceramics residency at Burnaby's Shadbolt Centre. From the work in her studio, it would seem she has mastered the art of glazing. So taken was I with these forms and their finishes that I did not think to take their pictures. Looking forward to seeing these works in exhibition form.

Oh Woke Is Me

The headline reads: "House approves plan to give DeSantis new power over Disney." The "House" is the Florida state assembly; DeSantis is Florida's Governor; and "Disney" is Disney World, home of Tiana's Bayou Adventure, formerly known as that racist joyride Splash Mountain.

DeSantis's power will be used to replace the Reedy Creek Improvement District's pro-Disney Board with five appointees of DeSantis's choosing. DeSantis's war is on "wokeness," and if Walt Disney were alive today, let's hope he would see what most of us no longer want to see when it comes to racist stereotypes. 

Flourishing Cultures

The Weimer Republic (1919-1933) is a period of German history named after a state assembly that met at Weimer, where a constitution was adopted. A short time later, a social democrat declared Germany a republic from the balcony of the Reichstag, and fragments being what they are (in a democracy), a hand was played. Any chance of a constitutional monarchy was quashed.

Historians have had a lot to say about the Weimer Republic in the years that followed the Treaty of Versailles. For military historians, it is a lesson in never humiliating the defeated, something the U.S. understood when it "helped" to "rebuild" Germany and Japan after World War Two. For art historians, it is the boastful claim that the arts flourished under the Weimer Republic, even though some of that art came from unthinkable suffering (the picture up top is not an early work of serial minimalism, but documentation of the economic atomic bomb that was Weimer-era hyperinflation.)

Was Russia humiliated after the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1989? Seems many Russian and former Eastern Bloc people were happy to see it fall. Is Putin's effort to return Russia to the greatness he claims it deserves similar to what Hitler promised when he took power in 1933, when President von Hindenburg, under pressure from a gang of well-healed industrialists, handed him the keys to the country? In the ten years prior to Putin's 1999 election to prime minister, was there a cultural scene in Russia I don't know about?

A week ago I was in a conversation with a Russian friend, a cultural historian, who reminded me that in the 1990s one of the world's leading contemporary artists was a Russian -- Ilya Kabakov. Later that day I looked up Kabakov (who, in the 2000s, began a more explicit collaboration with his wife, Emilia), and learned that he was born not in Russia but in the Ukraine (Dnipro). Is that like saying he was born in Austria, if Putin's Russia was Nazi Germany? Of course not.

Ultimate Disaster Pack

Tanglewood Books on West Broadway has a small but discerning selection of DVDs. Last week I picked up five of them, one of which caught the eye of the droll English clerk. "Ah, smashing. A disaster pack."

Of the four disaster pack films, Rollercoaster (1977) is the only one I haven't seen, so I will save it for a particularly gloomy day and hope that its special effects are hokey enough that I might pause them, watch them frame-by-frame.

On pause below, a scene from Earthquake (1974). Charlton Heston returns to his office to save his boss, played by Lorne Greene, a former CBC newsreader who was nicknamed the "Voice of Doom". That is the Voice of Doom's ass you see, over Heston's shoulder. That or his ass double.

I watched this scene more than once because it occurred to me, having been on sets, that the giddy factor could have been high and the scene required more than a few takes. But try as I might, I found no sign that any of these actors -- not even for a split-second -- broke character.

Roger Vadim (1928-2000)

I am at the tweaking stage of a manuscript that mentions Roger Vadim. Last week I saw a 1986 book by him and purchased it, thinking I might have to answer to his inclusion. That the book is focused on Vadim's wives is something else I might have to answer to. That his wives are better-known than him is unimportant.

Vadim had an interesting life, a life worth sharing. The most lucrative way for him to share that life was through his wives, all of whom, at various times, were "sex symbols", though all have since become known as much for their activism -- Bardot for her "environmentalism", Fonda for her critique of U.S. foreign policy, Deneuve for a woman's right to be hit on by a man.

Biographies carry social histories, and Vadim's is no different. I enjoyed reading about St-Germain-de-Prés ("a village in the midst of a city") immediately after WW2; how the difference between Vadim's age (20) and Bardot (15) and her friends' made him "a total stranger to their concerns," for they "had never really known the war and ... lived a well-ordered existence, relying on their parents for everything." (21)

Vadim says the media dubbed the St-Germain youth "existentialists," but he says it was more like "a life of peaceful anarchy than a political or intellectual attitude based on Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy." (20) That said, a few sentences later Vadim makes a perfectly existential statement: "I refused a full-time job -- I learned more by doing nothing." (20)

Here's a Vadim insight worth sharing:

"I did not yet realize that women, obsessed with eternal love, are most susceptible to new relationships. 'You will always love me?' really means: 'Please don't allow me to fall in love with someone else.' Most men consider these words proof that they are the one and only. In reality, it is the exact opposite. Romantic women seek the absolute. They don't find it in any man. They talk about forever, but they run from present to present." (30)

On Not Watching

When it was announced a couple weeks ago that video of Tyre Nichols's beating death by Raleigh, North Carolina police would be made public, my first thought was, Will I watch it? When I read moments later that the beating was being compared to the 1991 Rodney King police beating, "but worse," I felt I had no choice but to watch it, comparisons being what they are (and are not).

When I heard a couple days later that the cops who killed Nichols were Black, I wasn't so sure anymore, because what I would be watching was not the beating death of a man by police but the beating death of a Black man by Black men -- a fact that best illustrates the power of white supremacy (in the same way women who act like dicks speaks to the power and persistence of patriarchy).

When influential America filmmaker Tyler Perry was quoted as saying, "I said I wouldn't watch that video," I went to his January 28, 5:32 AM Facebook post to read for myself his reasons, to see if his reasons for not watching were in any way similar to my own. Perry writes:

I said for my own peace of mind, for the sake of my own sanity, for my hope for what’s left of the human race, I would not watch the awful murder of another black man. This time I would refuse. I wanted to have the luxury of many people in the world who can just turn it off with ease. Many people can’t imagine it happening to them because honestly, it never will. I was determined to see what that space felt like for once, I would cover my ears and not let in the outside. I knew it wasn’t possible because when some people hate the outside it doesn’t matter what’s on the inside even if what’s in there looks like them.

So today I will cry, I will be depressed, I will curse, I will be outraged, I will want to burn some shit up, I will be in agony, I will let my heart break for his family, I will moan with his tenor harmony from my own experience that is every black man that’s ever called for the safety of the arms of mamma, I will inaudibly scream.

But somewhere in the wrestling between the moon and the sun for the right to deliver light as if one is good and the other is evil, in that hour, I will get quiet, then I will be still, I will weep, and then I will pray.. and with the morning light, no matter who tried to dim it… I will get up and I will fight on!

Tyler Perry

Eisen the Sky

The Peoples' Republic of China's errant "weather balloon" was shot down yesterday over the waters off South Carolina. We assume it was the U.S. Airforce that did it, since it is those waters it is entrusted to "protect."

Sitting Republican officials insisted the balloon should have been shot down earlier, but the Democratic president felt it unsafe to do so over land, for obvious reasons. Do we know what this balloon was carrying? Surely the president would have known in advance of his decision to "take it out". 

Are we still satisfied that the swastika-bearing Hindenburg that exploded in New Jersey in May 1937 was not an act of subterfuge by the Nazis, their supporters or their enemies?

There is so much we don't know, and never enough of what we suspect. Anything we suspect can be corroborated online by alchemists devoted to turning fiction into reality. That's just the way it is.

Two Shows

On Thursday I visited the Belkin's The Willful Plot exhibition. Nice. The art, the artists, its "relevance" (as the kids say), its thematic, its installation ... Highlights? There are many. Five, in fact. Lots of work from the collection, so you know it didn't break the bank. 

On Friday I stopped by Catriona Jeffries Gallery for Rebecca Brewer's new paintings (14) and fabric drapery (1). Brewer's marks give/leave the impression that they touched down all at once, covering all corners, whimsically, diffidently. Refractory Period (2023, below) is a History painting -- a history of formalism discovered a year from now on a laptop. It is the story of the fold and how it succumbed to the orifice.

"you stood out like a ruby in a Black man's ear"

The radio spoke of David Crosby's passing. Out of curiosity I went online to see if Graham Nash had anything to say about his ex-friend and -bandmate, but found nothing new.

According to Nash, Crosby destroyed any chance of a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reunion when he insulted Daryl Hannah, Young's girlfriend. After that, another undisclosed action did the same for a Crosby, Stills and Nash reunion, which is a shame because there is little money in song royalties these days, and musicians who once lived on them are back on the road, out of necessity.

Because Crosby's song catalogue is the weakest earner of the four, his loss is smaller than that of Stills and Nash (Young's catalogue is bigger than the other three writers combined). In Crosby terms, he had the least to lose in ruining it for everyone, therefore he wins.

I know too many people like David Crosby.

Nash wrote "Encore" (2016) for Crosby (I'll let Nash tell you why). Joni Mitchell wrote a song for Crosby, too, who she was seeing at the time. "That Song About the Midway" (1969) was first performed at a Laurel Canyon house party filled with Crosby and Mitchell's close friends and other industry professionals. Everyone in the room, including Crosby, knew that the performance of this song was Mitchell breaking up with him.

I know too many people like Joni Mitchell, too.

*

THAT SONG ABOUT THE MIDWAY

I met you on a midway at a fair last year
And you stood out like a ruby in a Black man's ear
You were playin' on the horses, you were playin' on the guitar strings
You were playin' like a devil wearin' wings

Wearin' wings, you looked so grand wearin' wings
Do you tape them to your shoulders just to sing?
Can you fly? I heard you can, can you fly?
Like an eagle doin' your huntin' from the sky

I followed with the sideshows to another town
And I found you in a trailer on the camping grounds
You were betting on some lover, you were shaking up the dice
And I thought I saw you cheatin' once or twice

Once or twice, I heard your bid once or twice
Were you wond'rin' was the gamble worth the price?
Pack it in, I heard you did, pack it in
Was it hard to fold a hand you knew could win?

So lately you've been hidin', it was somewhere in the news
And I'm still at these races with my ticket stubs and my blues
And a voice calls out the numbers and it sometimes mentions mine
And I feel like I've been workin' overtime
Over time, I've lost my fire, over time

Always playin' one more hand for one more dime
Slowin' down, I'm gettin' tired, slowin' down
And I envy you, the valley that you've found
'Cause I'm midway, down the midway
Slowin' down, down, down, down

Escaping Criticism?

To those websit readers who wrote to say that yesterday's post was not a man driving a woman around in a car, but part of a feature on futuristic "boat commuters" -- my apologies for not exploring the full range of TheVisualDome series.

How I came to write what I did is based on a picture I saw online, and from that, what this picture suggested. So much of what we see on the internet is removed from its larger context, but of course that's no excuse for not exploring its origin, its range, something I am quick to despair in others.

The picture up top is of Pere Borrell del Caso's Escaping Criticism (1874), a painting I smile at, but one whose title seems amiss. If we're gonna get all meta about it, is the subject really escaping if the painter is there to capture him? Not just in paint but in the command to "Stay still"? Is that command not subject to criticism? Is the painter not exploiting child labour?

If the frame were not painted, would it mean more or less than it already doesn't? To paraphrase Joni Mitchell, "It's [art's] illusions that I recall/ I really don't know [art] at all."

TheVisualDome: An emporium of ai art couture"

It's the A.I. imaginafactured future, yet it's still human beings who are choosing which algorithm to use and what's thrown into the mix.

Not sure what to make of TheVisualDome's picture (top). In the early-20th century, we had Black men driving Miss Daisys, only now Miss Daisy is in the front seat. Progress? What about the driver? Any chance he isn't Black? (He's certainly dressed like a driver!)

TheVisualDome mentions "futurism" by name in its Batcap series. Look close at the history of Italian Futurism and its alignment with Mussolini's Fascists. (Look close at Mussolini's leisure wear helmut.)

Is it the future where these two are headed? Where we, as a planet, are headed? Today, anything that says "future" (Time) says "planet" (Space).