The Eternal Other

A marked-up, post-it-flagged copy of Marian Engel's Bear (1976) in the neighbourhood library box. Not so marked up to distract me from its great writing and wry wit, especially after I removed its multicoloured flags. As for the marked passages (underlines, in blue ball-point), some references to "Indian" or "Indians", though most of them focused on the protagonist's feelings, what it is to be a woman in a mid-1970s Canadian novel.

I enjoyed Engel's Monodromos (1973, re-released a few years later as One-Way Street), which I have learned over the years is the book Engel lovers (or Bear lovers) never get through. Bear is shorter and more contained than Monodromos, and more symbolic, if not more hallucinatory. Once Engel describes the island estate that her protagonist, Lou, is there to catalogue, it's pretty much the bear and the woman who wants him.

Lucy Leroy is the "old Indian woman" who appears on the island (suddenly out of nowhere, we are led to believe?) and whom Lou discovers "babbling" to the bear, who is half inside and half outside his shed.

"Lucy's face crinkled with some inconceivable merriment. She did not look one hundred years old, only eternal. 'Shit with the bear,' she said. 'He like you, then. Morning, you shit, he shit. Bear lives by smell. He like you.'" (35)

The "eternal" other, right? Recall Ethel Wilson's description, via her Swamp Angel (1954) protagonist Maggie Vardoe (née Lloyd), of the Chinese in Vancouver's Chinatown: "... nearly all of them had the immemorial look which distinguishes their race." (18) 

Kingsway & Clark

There seems to be some life to the hole that was once the Cedar Cottage Pub at Kingsway and Clark Drive. The Aquilinis have strengthened the fencing, and an office on wheels has been tucked inside it. Any month now and they'll be sculpting rebar.

Cover to Cover

Two recent gifts from a couple weeks ago. The first (above), contributor copies of subTerrain #93; the second (below), a CD given to me by another publisher, Rolf at New Star Books, because he thought I might like the composer, Claude Vivier (1948-1983). Funny how similar these covers feel to me.

Garden Suite

Yesterday morning's crosstown bike ride to my accountant's justified all kinds of snacking and slacking off. Strangely, rather than act on that I happily, if not unconsciously, took on and avoided that which I often feel guilty about doing or not doing. Was it the exercise, or was it getting last year's and this year's taxes off my back? A bit of both? None of the above? No matter. It was a gorgeous day. Today's supposed to be a gorgeous day too.

The Tipper

The Tipper is a greasy spoon located on Kingsway, a couple of shops east of Victoria on the south side. Its interior is darkly-lit (an oxymoron?), and is made up of black-padded booths and chocolate-coloured wainscoting. If you're sitting near the window you can see the mountains of the Sechelt Peninsula.

Breakfasts at the Tipper are traditional meals, reasonably-priced, but I wouldn't want to eat there too often. No more than once a month.

Decorating the Tipper's small waiting area are drawings that at first look like they were made by children, but occasionally include those made by grown ups. The best of these drawings (not sure how that's decided, though I doubt it's a peer-review process) are tucked into the restaurant's clear plastic menu sleeves.

A menu that caught my eye last Saturday featured a drawing by Bob. I asked our server, the wry-smiling Slavic-eyed one, if she knows Bob, and she said, "Oh yeah, he just started taking lessons. Oh yeah, I know Bob."

Double Bill

Two recent acquisitions, both from AA Furniture & Appliance. In the Bedroom (2001), because Sissy Spacek is a great actor, and Birdman or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance (2014), a film whose first reviews intrigued me, but I never got around to seeing because some forty-something Creative Writing MFA in a clown suit dismissed the film on Twitter because its lead, Michael Keaton, "seems creepy to me." Not sure how this "seems" stayed with me all these years, but it did, and like syphilis, it can make you crazy. 

The picture up top is Emma Stone's best scene, where she lays into Keaton (her story father) for sublimating his failures by taking her to task on her own. The picture at bottom is a video that went viral only an hour after Keaton's character got locked outside of the theatre's rear exit in his underwear while the play he wrote and was starring in was on a scene break.

Now a social media sensation (his daughter set up a Twitter account in his name that already has 80K hits), the play is no longer in financial jeopardy because the critic who vowed to "kill" it is, as the kids say today, irrelevant. "Believe it or not," says the daughter to the father, "this is power." And indeed it is. But what wasn't power by then was a newspaper critic who could kill a play. That reality was long gone. Especially a play starring a Hollywood celebrity.

Ignorance is said to be bliss. But is it a virtue, a quality? Is there such a thing as an "unexpected virtue"? Forrest Gump (1994) suggests as much, and since the release of that film, we've come to expect it. Donald Trump has made a career off the ignorance of others. The less U.S. Americans know about themselves, the more they will covet ignorance.  

The Artist Paul Wong

Paul commutes from 20th & Main to his studio in Chinatown. He slows for certain stretches because he knows who has coffee where and when. The Gene klatchers -- Glenn, Lawrence, Neil and Krista -- meet out front at 10:15am everyday. Friday's the day I join them. 

"Hello Paul."

"Well hello Misterturnerrrrr." 

Misha Glenny: Political Analyst and Music Critic

"The event took place against a background of spectacular fireworks, while the music was provided by one of the many Macedonian rock bands who, since the collapse of communism, have devoted themselves almost exclusively to the cult of Alexander the Great. Alexander lived before the Slavs had settled in Macedonia, but he remains an important foundation stone upon which Macedonian nationalists build their myths. Despite the significance with which the musicians invest in their songs, it is impossible not to giggle at these ridiculous ensembles who look like the mutant children of an unholy union between Jethro Tull and Deep Purple and sound even worse as they offer their cacophonic homage of Alexander up to the bright, summery Macedonian skies. Their performance is worthy of the Balkans' endemic passion for nonsense." -- Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, 1992, pp. 73-74

"... however much she tried, she could not become stronger than herself"

"And death, as the sole means of reviving love for herself in his heart, of punishing him, and of the ongoing victory in that contest which an evil spirit in her heart was waging against him, presented itself clearly and vividly to her." -- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877)

And so it goes, or went, for Anna. As for those who like these 1950s and 60s Signet Edition covers, the People's Co-op Bookstore on Commercial has a good thirty or so left, bunched together in the store's Fiction Section.

21st Century Art: Context and Intent

An angle on the garden not often photographed. At least not this early in the year. I took its picture because I thought I saw something (grief? vengeance? recuperation?). Turns out what I thought I saw, wasn't. But all is not lost. I am satisfied with the composition, and have chosen to share it.

Psychic or Psychics

The 1500-block of East Broadway is long and starts quietly at Woodland, at the west end, and ends busily at Commercial, to the east. Closer to Woodland (on the south side of the street) is a small apartment building likely built in the same decade as the Rio Theatre (est. 1938), which everyone knows is also on East Broadway, and a bank length from Commercial.

The apartment at 1530 East Broadway advertises the services of a "Chinese Male Psychic" and a "Lady Chinese Psychic". For the longest time I thought one was above the other; but it wasn't until I paid attention that I discovered there is no below, only a small pair of double-doors suited (sooted?) to prehistoric coal deliveries.

Safe to say that both services are available in the apartment above. Unsafe to assume that the "Male Psychic" does men only and the "Lady" the same, but for women.

Working 5 to 9

All I knew of Todd Field's Tár (2022) was what I saw of its intense, Cate Blanchett-driven trailer; that Zadie Smith wrote about it; and that if I ever saw the film, I would make a point of reading Smith's review.

Yesterday I finally saw Tár and was delighted with myself for knowing enough of Mahler's life and his symphonies to despair that everything I'd read about the film (except for Zadie Smith's review, so far), missed the fact that it could be read through the "Funeral March" that opens Mahler's 5th with Leonard Bernstein's morbidly slow "Adagio" that closes his 9th (morbidly slow in the way Franz Kafka's killing machine from "In the Penal Colony" is morbidly slow).

Of course Lydia Tár (nee Lynda) would appreciate that, just as her diffident Juilliard student and her equally Millennial cellist wouldn't give a toss. On that note, who would self-identify as BIPOC ("As a BIPOC pangender person ..." -- is he saying he is Black, Indigenous and a Person of Colour?), and what Millennial cellist could be expected to have heard -- or more to the point, have seen -- Jacqueline du Pré's performance of Elgar's Cello Concerto from any other source but YouTube?

As for Blanchett's "death", why is it set in a "developing" nation like Thailand, if not to suggest that a death in Thailand is more tortuous for being set there -- as opposed to Venice, where Mahler's 5th provided Visconti's film version of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice its score?

Lydia Tár is just as narcissistic and, to use her own term, "robotic" as her students and her symphony orchestra's young ("fresh meat") cellist. But Western classical music is a personality too, no? So what's all the fuss? This film is so not "about" what people keep saying it is. It just isn't, is it?

Property Management

A camelia was tried in this spot but was shaded by a small fir I trimmed to look like a ball on a stick. After moving the camellia closer to the house (where it thrives to this day), I planted a spiky conifer in its place.

When my neighbour wanted to get rid of the false cypress between our properties, I took it with the idea that I would plant it where the conifer stood. I moved the conifer to a spot amidst the heather, which it looked good with but, because it was on a slope and never held the water I gave it (transplanted during the heat dome summer of 2021), it failed. To help the false cypress, I cut down the fir, eventually feeding its pieces to the pizza oven (built during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic).

In the fall after the heat dome I planted the snowdrops and crocuses you see pictured up top, and some narcissus. That's where things stand today.

Unpicked Nosegay

These light purple crocuses come up with the snowdrops and move about from year to year, always in bunches.

Magic Ingredients

Of all the trades working on the new building at Kingsway and Glen, it is the ironworkers who look like they're having the most fun. A diverse group, most of them appear to be in their twenties and are the only onsite trade with a woman in their group. And yes, she is a force. A leader among them.

Not sure if it was the onsite Indigenous presence that had my view of the rebar (above) as a wingless Thunderbird, but that's what it looked like (to me). Would a building be any stronger if its columns were supported by Thunderbird? You would think.

Land, Language and Affinal Relations

SHE'D

A First Draft

A friend took this picture. Someone I have known for a very long time, and hadn't seen for a very long time, too. She is in Paris, visiting her cousin, and next week she will visit her daughter, who is studying in England. She shared with me some questions the picture brought to mind, and I asked if she could send a higher-resolution version, toward its poem. And so it was.

FENÊTRE

for Tarek

 

 

there was rest in the rising

their breakfast made, his lunch

packed and him with it

 

the dishes waiting until

he’d made his way up the hill

out of sight

 

from the window she’d watch him

her hands clasped, her chin

atop them

 

the waddle of his body

she thinks, tired already

too early, too soon

 

now she waits

until she knows he’s gone

as if he were still working

 

still walking to work

still “with us,” as his sister says

of those who are no longer

 

this is the rest, she thinks

the better part of resting

when everything else is waiting

Just the Thought of Taking This Guy In At the End of Summer

Some of us take in our statuary at the end of summer. Not me. Think I'm up to a quarter century with this guy in the garden full-time. Whatever's leaching out of him is good for the lilac.

Trauma Fantasy

The United States is reporting a run on one of its banks. Not since the 2008 collapse of Washington Mutual (then the country's largest savings and loan association) has there been a run like this.

Today's run is on the Silicon Valley Bank, and the current POTUS is doing everything he can to restore confidence, assuring depositors that their savings are safe, and that the federal government guarantees it.

If we get a running chance at the end of the world (as we know it), it will include line-ups at the bank. Line-ups at the bank and cars driving past with all sorts of stuff tied to their roofs.

Suddenly we'll see more than the usual amount of police cars on the road. Most of them will be moving faster, though some of them slower, their drivers looking us in the eye as they pass.

Soon enough, the three or four scruffily-dressed men who gather at the corner at 5pm will turn into eight or nine men, and then one day, if not the next day, twenty of them, half of whom will walk into the liquor store, disarm the owner (U.S. version), and take what they want.

From that day on, no more police cars, only military vehicles. And just when we're getting used to the uniforms, a change. No more insignias, no more flag, just scruffy soldiers, like the men on the corner, who sit around drinking all day, getting angrier, polishing the guns they took from the liquor store.

I'm Sorry, I Can't Be Any More Specific Than This

Conspiracy theories are presented in the same way as any other theory that isn't an opinion. The benefit of a theory is that it can turn opinions into arguments. But times have changed. A value has been placed on the persuasiveness of opinions. Having your way without trying too hard is its own reward.

Diffidence is a kite-shaped emoticon with a tail of HA HA HAs. The neighbourhood park is looking like a platform. The park was the closing stretch of my afternoon walk, until parents stopped playing with their toddlers to stare at the creepy dandy. It is convenient to agree with those who have children in common.

Research begins with a question: Is a D-Day-style gesture necessary to keep those with money online? A yes from Sales. What if we created a condition ...? and someone wrote on the board, PANDEMIC. Who and Where? and CHINA was chosen. We need an epicentre, and someone wrote WET MARKET.

A contact was contracted, a contact who had a contact, and another who had access to a lab and a sound stage where the evidence was filmed and released darkly. The tape, as it will be known, begins with myself walking through a park. Kids are playing, their parents and grandparents making movies with their phones.

Elementary School Experiments

In my recollection of things, we are somewhere in the middle of elementary school, suddenly huddled together, some of us close enough to the centre to have our elbows on the table, more of us in-behind, on our tip toes, watching as the teacher, a giant by our standards, extracts something from a small black bottle and drops a droplet of it into a large glass bowl of water. And though I know it as a drop of nothing, it comes alive, like one of my babushka's Siamese Fighting Fish, or as they are better known today, bettas, Siam being Thailand.

Experiments in those days were left at the level of awe, and unexplained. Closer to the end of elementary school another teacher opened another small container and poured its contents into the waiting palm of Jaunita Wee, who sat in the front row seat beside the door. Jaunita was instructed to pass it carefully to the next person, etc. As it neared me, it became apparent that what we were passing was liquid mercury, and suddenly Ian Langmann was touching his tongue to it.  

Wishing You Many Eternal Returns

The Pacific Northwest looks familiar, so at least I know where I am. What's coming is another story. 

What looks like the kind of blanket a white person is given at a potlatch is in fact a computer-coloured map of an approaching weather system. Vancouverites have been experiencing atmospheric rivers a while now, but this is new territory for Californians.

Until this year, Southern California was beginning to look like toast. Literally. For a while I couldn't get on with my day without scanning for updates on the withering Colorado River, a main source of H2O for the 40 million or so living between San Luis Obispo and San Diego. Every day dropping water levels revealed something new, be it a stolen car or a headless, handless skeleton. 

And now this floating river system, whose rain will fall on melting snow, and from there god knows whose house will slide down the hill, which cars will be lost until the next drought.

Echolalia

Fifty-minutes all told from my door to the Broadway & Commercial Skytrain station (on foot), where I caught the Millennial Line for eight stops, then transferred to the 145 SFU that took me to the foot of Convocation Mall.

Shockingly early for historian Roxanne Panchasi's 2:00PM screening of Audrey Diwan's L'événement (2021), I visited SFU Galleries' who claims abstraction? Echoes from the SFU Art Collection exhibition. Fourteen historic works, with four insertions by contemporary artist Francisco-Fernando Granados, whose same-named echo-making Teck Gallery exhibition "opens an inquiry into the legacy and implications of Modernist abstraction."

Four years since I'd been to SFU's Burnaby Mountain gallery, and in that time, the exhibition space has been reduced by two-thirds. I mentioned this in my conversation with the exhibition curator, and was told smilingly that because the gallery had hired additional staff, more office space was needed. Isn't that the case with universities in general these days?

In Unwanted Advances (2017), Laura Kipnis supplies statistics on the climbing ratio of administrative hires over faculty hires. Can the same now be said of university gallery and museum administrations, where the ambiguities of art are secondary to the logical certainties of institutional operations? If SFU's new "stand alone" gallery ever gets built (in the works for how may years now?), it will invariably exert itself as a rationalizing apparatus, once more turning art into information.

* image: Meat: New York Steak by Attila Richard Lukács (1986)

Prose Composed After Staring at Maxfield Parrish's Daybreak (1922) at a Doctor's Office

One day you'll wake to me rubbing cream into your feet. You'll speak of the most incredible dream, how you were walking on water, yet your feet stayed dry. And I will say, "They were. That's why I'm rubbing cream into them."

Ways of Seeing

The common truck route between Burrard Inlet and the Fraser River is the Clark/Knight corridor. I live a block and a half west of it, north of Kingsway, but I rarely hear it. Truckers are good about laying off their engine brakes when travelling down this hill.

While waiting to cross at the pedestrian light at Knight and 15th I saw a fragment from one of those trucks in the gutter. Part of a braking system, not that it was anything to do with a braking system staring back at me.

A frog, I thought. Or Frog, capitalized, without the article in front of it, like we learned at school when studying northwest coast myths and legends. You deserve better than this, I said to Frog, putting it in my knapsack.

Upon return I put Frog on top of the backyard pizza oven and, in short order, busied myself with yard work. I cut back the dead parts of my mint, rock rose and barrenwort, and removed some broken branches from my butterfly bush, reducing them for the recycling bin. From there I decided to feed my acid-loving shrubs and bushes.

As I was passing the pizza oven I looked down and saw not Frog but Raven. How did that happen? How was it that by raising the fragment's right half, Frog returns to its Raven form?

The Refrigerator of Modern Art

The refrigerator supplies homes with a large metal surface for shopping lists, messages, invoices and two dimensional works of art, sometimes attached by three dimension works of art, in the form of magnets. The refrigerator up top is included in the UBC Belkin's The Wilful Plot exhibition, and as such asks that it be seen not as a refrigerator with stuff on it, but with art eyes.

The work is called Freon (2015 - ongoing) and is attributed to artists Derya Akay and Vivienne Bessette. Freon is a registered trademark that speaks to the arrangement of halocarbon products that function in the refrigeration system. Freon sounds like an element in the Periodic Table, but like napalm, it isn't.

Akay and Bessette's refrigerator is okay with us adding to it, as people have and continue to add to it while visiting the garden behind Unit 17, where Akay and Bissette are also ongoing. I added my business card (printed for me by an editor/publisher I work with) because that business is concerned with the exhibition and promotion of visual art. Not sure if I took the picture up top before or after I added my card, but if you see the show (up until mid-April), you'll see it.

Below is what I've mounted on the side of my refrigerator. A permutating arrangement of postcards sent to me and photos I've found in stores and shops in Vancouver, Glasgow, Paris and Berlin.

Printmaking

It might have been while doing studio visits at Powell River a few summers ago that I purchased a card (in Lund?) of a hummingbird printed in ovoids and formlines. I remember thinking how unusual it was to see a hummingbird in that style -- avian subjects being either ferocious (Eagle, Thunderbird) or, perhaps in contrast, irreverent (Raven). And suddenly there was ... this hummingbird? What did I know.

Recently a friend gave me a stamp*, perhaps in recognition of the letters I like to send, letters that often feature drawings and collages on blank recipe cards. A friend who gives me things quietly, without saying what they're for; someone I've known since we were thirteen, but have come to know better these past months. Ours are sometimes telepathic conveyances, for there is something to be said about being in the presence of someone born within three weeks of you.

First impression (on joss paper).

Detail.

Second impression.

* Stamp design by Terry Starr (Tsimshian)

Kitchen

The contents of this windowsill welcome the sea urchin.

Schools and Prisons

A mostly middle income retail store in the middle of the city will close mid-month. I'm beginning to think the building bordered by Georgia, Robson, Howe and Granville is haunted, that there's a spectre haunting downtown Vancouver (after Karl Marx), a spectre that acts as if there is no use in a centre (after Gertrude Stein).

Eaton's erected César Pelli's dry ice cube design in 1973, a move that impeded the downtown's east-west pedestrian flow. Did this design, this impediment, explain why the incoming 1972 provincial NDP government ditched the former Social Credit-era design of the new provincial law courts' vertical tower in favour of Arthur Erickson's horizontal plaza? People on both sides of the political binary say it was simply a political decision, but I disagree. There are occasionally people on the Left who know something about art and design, just as there are those on the Right who are humanists.

The retail store is Nordstrom's, of course. Opened in the former Eaton's building in 2014 (the building was a Sears for a few years after Eaton's moved on), the building's re-design includes windows, which in summer gorgeously reflect the evening sun, not to mention allow those inside to look at something other than what is for sale. Turns out what is for sale is not so much what consumers are not buying, but where they are buying it. Which is to say online. Rich people love shopping at Holt Renfrew because shopping is a performance. Lower income people shop at discount stores because that's all they can afford. Middle income people shop online because they're struggling to keep up, and time is money.

Are people talking already about what might "take over" the soon-to-be-former Nordstrom's site? I still like it as the new Vancouver Art Gallery. Granted, the land is privately owned, but if a land trade could be arranged between Cadillac Fairview and the City of Vancouver, with CF getting Larwill Park, we'd get a new, perfectly positioned VAG at a fraction of the building cost, with enough left over to fund public programs and add to the collection.

But will people still be going to art galleries in ten years, to see art and partake in public programs? I wonder. Art galleries are not what they used to be, particularly for those under forty. Someone messaged CBC Radio this morning to suggest an art school; I messaged a prison, but that wasn't mentioned. That could be all there is in ten years: schools and prisons.

Monster Chetwynd

The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting a location-specific installation by Monster Chetwynd (b. 1973) in its public Rotunda. The artist achieved fame with her exuberant and humorous performances using handmade costumes, props, and settings. Her works are often absurd and full of joie de vivre; they refer to popular culture or iconic works from art history.

The above is from an e-flux mailing. When I first saw the words "Monster" and "Chetwynd" together I had to grimace, because everything I have heard about the resource extractive B.C. town of Chetwynd has been ... monstrous! Most recently, this.

For more on the art of Monster Chetwynd, click here.

"The Whole World Loves a Deal"

The picture is undated, but likely from the mid-1970s, before the new, squarer buses, when the Rio was a Chinese language theatre and the Job Lot stood at the southwest corner, selling labour at rock bottom prices.