Celtic Shipyards

Celtic Shipyards had a storage and repair shop located at the southernmost end of Blenheim Street, overlooking the Fraser River. One of my first jobs was as a helper there, where I learned from Japanese fisher/carpenters how to caulk, sand and paint wooden-hulled gillnet boats. I never thought the land it sat on would be as valuable as it is, that a developer would one day turn it into a mini Marina del Rey, but that's what happened. 

After a productive morning, I drove to Southlands Nursery looking for some annuals to patch a couple of holes in my garden. Because I can never remember which road to turn onto (from Marine Drive), I turned onto Blenheim (not Balaclava, where the original Celtc Cannery was located) and for the heck of it drove to the end of it. Sure enough, a string of mansions whose back stairs led not to fishing boats but to pleasure craft. (And who should be standing their waiting as the lettercarrier delivered the mail to the community mail boxes, but one of Deering Island's developers -- Michael Geller!) 

On the actual footprint of the shipyard is a municipal park, no doubt part of an amenity deal struck between the City and the developer. I set out on its trail thinking it would take me to at least the eastern edge of the Musqueam reserve, but no, it stops about fifty metres away, at the edge of the Point Grey Golf & Country Club. 

Ark and Architecture

I was downtown yesterday for Show Canada's gathering of Canadian exhibitors. The Bayshore Hotel is the convention's base camp, but VIFF kindly put on a meet and greet for indies in its lobby. The event was originally charging a $20 entrance fee, which included a drink and a snack, but Telefilm's Barbara Chirinos stepped in and covered the cost on behalf of the agency.

On the way to VIFF I noticed some of what I've been hearing more about concerning homelessness, as well as public drug use, notably outside  the "overdose prevention site" at Seymour and Helmcken. Just before that, I happened to look over my shoulder after crossing Granville Street and saw a building I had never noticed before: The Victoria.

Built in 1994, The Victoria appears to me like an even scratchier version of the drawing it began as, the kind that excites developers looking for something more than what they say they want, but are afraid to admit to; in this case, another riff-off of the Hotel Vancouver.

Like Paul Merrick's 1990 Canadian Craft Museum (oddly enough, now the Bill Reid Museum), The Victoria is too much about itself to be occupied. We have people living on the streets and architects designing condo towers not even the rich can fit into. 

A Melancholy Tinge

Thomas Mann's Aschenbach, travelling alone, had no feeling for Istra, so he moved on to Venice, which he entered from the sea, and from there to the Hotel des Bains. Looking out the window of his suite, at the direction from whence he came. Not at what he sees, but his thoughts. 

"A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of the gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty familiar and perilous -- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd." (29)

Dispensary

A table near the Dickens Annex.

A fork spoons a spoon and a glass whose design suggests a crack -- all of it free. Except the table.

Look any harder and you might see a face, whose smile says: "Free stuff NOT Table."

Vancouver Art & Artists

Gene has gone through a couple of ownership changes since Gideon took over the old Bain's Chocolates site and brought a better cup of coffee to Main Street. New ownership has seen fit to keep Gideon's mother's geraniums going as well.

Gene is where I like to meet and have coffee. Every Friday, Glenn and Lawrence (pictured below), Ahmad, Neil, Krista -- the many who gather, share stories, bargain, plead, play the fool. Gene is always good for a belly laugh or two. Who doesn't love to laugh?

I love what Glenn had on today. As soon as he showed up I had to take a picture. The Ukrainian flag -- with a "ketchup" stain. Red, yellow, blue. 

Death in Sentence

Like I said (yesterday), I read Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912) as a teenager. But what does a late-1970s teenager know about life that might allow them to appreciate this story of yearning and regret? Thankfully I can remember how I felt about books I'd read as a teenager that are known not for what I remember of them but as stories of yearning and regret. Imagine how I felt as an adult in the late-1990s when an editor told me, "Your writing reminds me of Gide." Next to Herman Hesse and Erma Bombeck, I read more Andre Gide in my teenage years than any other writer.

There's too much writing in Thomas Mann's writing. Three times now I've tried to read his greatest book The Magic Mountain (1924), at three different points in my life, and it got harder each time -- because of the volume of writing. I'm getting that too-much-writing feeling again with Death in Venice, a feeling I never had when I first read it because I bathed in the writing. Yes, this is something that happens to writers when they are younger and drawn not to story but to the mechanics of writing. My teenage reading experiences are rooted not in the stories I read but in the experience of the language, as writing.

Below is Mann's von Aschenbach, closer to my age now than I was when I first read (of) him:

"True, what he felt was no more than a longing to travel: yet coming upon him with such suddenness and passion as to resemble a seizure, almost a hallucination. Desire projected itself visually: his fancy, not quite yet lulled since morning, imaged the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth. He saw. He beheld a landscape, a tropical marshland, beneath a reeking sky, steaming, monstrous, rank -- a kind of primeval wilderness of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels ..." (9)

Recent Acquisitions

The VGH Thrift Store on East Hastings near Slocan remains my favourite place for used books. I was there Tuesday and saw three books I'd been meaning to read, all of them side by side. The first was the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912), which I had read as a teen (with his two shorter novellas, Tristan, 1903, and Tonio Kröger, 1901, included); an almost impossible book to find these days in Matthew Derby's language-writing-to-the-point-of-science fiction, Super Flat Times (2003); and a book I had been meaning to read -- the kind of book you only buy if you see it before you -- Mary Gaitskill's  Bad Behaviour (1988).

I "met" Mary Gaitskill during those Ryberg curated YouTube presentations back in the late-2000s. After my presentation text was published, Mary wrote me a note, which was very nice, and I made a point of adding her to my To-Read list. I'd made a similar point some years before when writer Evelyn Lau told me she preferred Mary Gaitskill's short stories to her novels, an unexplained preference apart from the context of our conversation, which, now that I think about it, concerned Evelyn being done with prose. "Bad Behaviour," said Evelyn nodding. "Yeah, Bad Behaviour's the one you want to read first."

Yesterday I read the first story in Bad Behaviour, "Daisy's Valentine". This is a story that would never be published today because Evil goes unpunished and no one triumphs. Nor is mental health treated with care. Nor is drug dependency explained. Nor is there any evil.

Joey works in the clerical division of a giant used bookstore in Manhattan, where he stumbles upon(?) an attraction to Daisy, who, like Joey, is in a relationship. Joey pursues Daisy, who warns him she's only attracted to those who treat her poorly, and Joey seems fine with that. In fact, as things move along one gets the sense that no matter how bleak their lives are each has met their match. Upon completion of the story I thought of a grittier Raymond Carver, who anyone with any interest in writing stories was reading at that time, and another story collection that wouldn't be published for another four years, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son (1992).

Life & Times

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) is a film that keeps coming up in my readings, yet one I had never seen until last night. 

There were a number of westerns made in Hollywood in the late-1960s/early-1970s, many of them as unconventional as the time in which they were made (and as unconventional as the times in which they were set?). The westerns of the John Wayne era (1950s) are, by contrast, as conventional as the time in which they were made, though we would never confuse a film like The Searchers (1956) with the "wild west" that preceded it. 

The Searchers is a a story of a Union soldier (John Wayne) returning to his frontier home after the U.S. Civil War to find members of his family killed by Comanche people. It is a film that uses restraint to excuse racism. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) is the very opposite, using racism (sexism, patriarchy, theft, pandering, murder ...) to obliterate restraint.

If McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971) is about the end of 1960s idealism, Roy Bean anticipates the deregulated 1980s and that kleptocracies that followed. The wildness of McCabe's west is quietly and comically malevolent. The wildness of Roy Bean is Paint Your Wagon (1965) goofy, but without the Technicolour.

Ici Radio-Canada

The CBC has two book shows: The Next Chapter, hosted by Shelagh Rogers, and Writers & Company, hosted by Eleanor Wachtel. Why two, you ask, when the CBC only needs one of everything? Elementary, my Dear Reader, in the case of Roger's kindergartenesque show, where the cancer that allowed an author the time to write a book takes precedence over whatever the author is or isn't doing to advance the literature, while in the case Wachtel's show, something akin to an honours thesis supervisor asking questions of an undergrad while picking at a salade niçoise.

Never one to displease, Rogers, 67, has supplied every answer imaginable when asked why she is leaving the CBC after 43 years, one of which is to make way for someone new, while Wachtel, 76, is, as one might expect, openly vague about her future, seeing it not as an end but as a change of pace.

Query: Will the CBC maintain these shows and bring in new hosts? Not likely. Nor will it combine them into one book show, as medium-specific-anything (see the demise of every major Canadian city newspaper's "Book Section") has been suffocated by that weighted blanket of connoisseurship known as the Pop Culture Panel (PCP). Whither books? Yes, they'll continue to be written, sometimes purchased, even read, while shows about books will have left their detached homes for yardless condos and single-paver patios.

"No regrets Coyote ..."

Coyote patrolling the intertidal zone west of West Dyke.

You hear them at night, but rarely see them during the day.

The coyote is near impossible to see when she looks away.

The English Proust

Curious to know more about Anthony Powell's contribution to English Lit, I came upon Charles McGrath's 2018 New York Times article -- his review of a bio that McGrath describes as a "fond portrayal of a man sometimes called 'the English Proust'."

For a comment described as "both flattering and misleading," McGrath gets out his paring knife, noting Powell's "Proustian credentials mostly consist in writing an immensely long, multi-volume novel with the word 'time' in the title." Moreover, unlike Proust's Marcel, Powell's Nick is "the least ... introspective of narrators, revealing next to nothing of himself," which is certainly the English way, particularly for those who preferred life before the war (WWI), not after it, if you please.

Personally I have no problem with narrators who prefer to reveal themselves through their observations of others. Powell provides a clue that he/his narrator, Nick, is inclined this way too, when, in The Acceptance World (1955), he writes of his friend, the painter Barnby: "Like most men of his temperament, he held, on the whole, rather strict views regarding other people's morals." (156)

But the character who currently has me in his thrall is, like Peter Templar before him, Dicky Umfraville, who "seemed still young, as a person like oneself; and yet at the same time his appearance and manner proclaimed that he had had time to live at least a few years of his grown-up life before the outbreak of the war in 1914. Once I had thought of those who had known the epoch of my own childhood as 'older people.' Then I found there existed people like Umfraville who seemed somehow to span the gap." (160)

Escape from Vancouver

A couple months ago Nordstrom's announced it would be closing its Canadian stores, including its most successful Canadian store at Granville and Robson in Vancouver. People were shocked, saddened, outraged. I was among the saddened because I love the original Seattle store, and though Vancouver's store never matched it (mine was a 1970s and 80s love affair, for what it's worth), it drew from other influences, like Berlin's KaDaWe, mostly notably in the presentation of its second floor lounge.

I hadn't been in Nordstrom's Vancouver store since the start of its "everything must go" sale, but there I was last week after my visit to the VAG across the street. Saw lots of $1500 shoes for $750 -- a much larger reduction than the initial 10% discounts that were originally being offered. Of course a number of items were things that were never intended for sale, but were too valuable to send to Habitat for Humanity or the landfill. My beloved lounge housed some of these items, which included armatures and mini plinths, devices in the service of sales.

So is this the future? No more quasi-glamorous department stores in our downtowns? No more movie theatres but cafeteria style multi-screen feeding rooms? No more bookstores carrying dead authors like Hannah Arendt or bell hooks but cases for the devices you're expected to read them on? No more record stores, bowling alleys, penny arcades? Yes, yes -- no more 1970s, 80s, 90s, 00s -- I get that; times change. But what of cities? A glue trap for the homeless? A penitentiary? Something to escape from? Like that movie from the 1970s? Or is it the 1980s?

Forget it Jake, it's Disneyland

Disney is the largest media and entertainment company in the world, a measurement based on a Forbesian equation of assets, profits, workforce population and (positive) visibility.

When Disney executives met with Florida state officials in the mid-1960s, they did so in the hope of getting "special purpose district" status for their Disneyland follow up, Disney World, in Orlando.

SPD status would allow Disney World to be self-governing, paying only for services it uses (water, sewage, etc.) and not contributing taxes in support of the larger state.

Disney World is the state's largest private employer, and its recent removal of racist displays and language has provided current Florida governor Ron DeSantis a platform on which to enter the race for the Republican nomination in the 2024 U.S. election.

Back in April 2022, state Republicans unveiled a bill to turn over control of Disney's SPD tax department to a five-person committee of DeSantis's choosing. It is believed the decision to push back on Disney's SPD status is based not on finance but on ideology: Disney's support of social justice issues that Republicans decry as "woke". In response to the bill, Disney notified its legal department, and the two parties have been at war ever since.

Whether DeSantis gives a shit about Disney is beside the point. He wants to be president, and the only way to do that is to woo those Republicans who held their nose and backed Trump in 2020, of which there are said to be many. How many of that number supported Trump in reaction to woke behaviour is said to be a very white part of the "many."

I am guessing that a much larger number of Republicans who supported Trump in 2020 did so because they loathe the same governments that Walt Disney loathed after having to deal with the City of Anaheim and the State of California concerning the mother of all theme parks, Disneyland. So the real issue here is not the elimination of an extra-territorial corporate city, but one that is helping parents raise their children without the racisms they were exposed to as children themselves.

And if Disney should emerge successful, what would the measurement of that be? A land run by corporate executives whose god is a mouse surrounded by an even larger land run by a child-like narcissist who wants to be a despot like the other kids running world powers? There should be a ride for that. A cartoon character piloting it. Printed on our children's bedsheets.

Letters Spelled

 

A small concrete deposit. Maybe from a patio, pulled out to make way for an in-fill. I don't know -- I didn't look close enough. Too much going on in the garden beds. 

I see a "q" that could also be a "p", "b", or "d". Definitely an "A", but with wings. I see what could be an "x" -- an "x" turning into (or out of?) an "o". If that other "o"-like form is a "c", then "coAx"?

1529 Graveley St

Sometimes a building is built to say hi.

I had peeled off Commercial, walking west down the hill to where my car was parked, when suddenly a hello and my staring back.

Hard to get pink and white just right, but this building does. At a cost, of course. You can see it in its south-facing wall. The pressure! 

Summer Reading

I am reading two books at present, both novels in the first person: Anthony Powell's The Acceptance World (1955) and Robertson Davies's Fifth Business (1970). In the former, the title first appears on Page 51, when we are told the name of a credit broker, leaving us to consider the metaphor. In the latter, the title is supplied up front: a definition following the colophon page: the Fifth Business is "neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement."

Powell's story its great reading, particularly for those who enjoy the portraits of Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) and Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) and are interested in the English middle-class character, something that became apparent when its narrator, Nicholas, goes to the Ritz to meet Mark Members on a literary errand and, while waiting for him, encounters acquaintances (never friends, for the middle-class don't have any) from his public school and undergraduate university days, the most finely-drawn being Peter Templer, who is like so many fathers and sons I knew growing up in the British city of Vancouver. 

Davies's book was a last-second purchase from a shop that escapes me, a book I had known of all my life and assumed was about journalists (I'd conflated it with "fifth estate"). But as is the case with a lot of "memorable" first wave (post-1958) CanLit, Fifth Business is about what all first wave CanLit is about, and that is growing up; not as a boy (as in W. O. Mitchell's Prairie farm community or in Mordecai Richler's big Eastern Canadian city), but in a village somewhere in Southern Ontario. The story of a life that begins at ten with the hastened birth of another -- hastened in the Canadian way, through an "act" of changing weather: a snowball thrown at our protagonist that hits a minister's wife at the back of the neck and drops her, causing the child she is carrying to be born "eighty days" early "and looked so wretched that the doctor and my mother were frightened."

Mass of Passes

S's brother R. is older than her and likes to snowboard. I was talking to their father, A., when R. floated past and I saw something that took me back to when I too rode the slopes: R's mass of passes. 

That's how it worked in those days: you gave the ski hill operator $20 and in return you were given a sticker and a triangular clip to stick it to.

When I asked A. what a daily lift pass goes for today, I was shocked. But then, what I wouldn't pay to have back my mass of passes, which hung from the orange and blue David S. Reid ski jacket I outgrew and was given to another kid in the neighbourhood who promptly cut off the passes because he was too cool to be seen skiing. As if what's lacking says as much. Which, as it turns out, can be true.

Children

I saw S. on my walk to the grocery store yesterday morning. She was manning a sidewalk sale for her friend across the street, whose family moved-in a month ago. I've known S. all her life. She's seven now, almost eight. The kid across the street is roughly her age.

S. was dancing when I turned the corner. Not a dance taught at school, I was told by S's mom, but something learned from YouTube. "Hey, you've got that down, S!" and she stopped, lowered her eyes and said, "Yes, I know." A little more chit-chat and onwards I pressed, the gate across the street clicking and her friend calling out, "Hey! Hey!"

I thought to turn around, introduce myself, but kids have their own lives to catch up on. I'd met S's friend's parents last week, and they were friendly enough, interested enough to ask me how long I'd been in the neighbourhood. There will be other occasions to introduce myself.

"Hey!" said S's friend again, his voice now crossing the street. "Do you know him?" And for a moment S's silence. He asks again, and S. hurries her reply: "I don't know." Another silence. "He doesn't have a kid, right?" says S's friend, and this time, without hesitating, S. says, "No, he doesn't." 

Lesser-Seen Works by Often-Seen Artists

A nice time at the VAG yesterday. I was excited to be seeing Alanis Obomsawin's retrospective, looking forward to the abstract painting show (up top, Douglas Morton's Fractured Black, 1963) and, if I am honest, dreading the Shary Boyle exhibition, which, as it turned out, was elegantly designed, allowing its works to be seen in the best possible light.

The painting show and the Obomsawin shows were even better than expected, with the former filled with works by local artists whose names are mostly familiar to us from the 1960s and early 70s abstraction scene, but whose chosen works aren't. Which is to say curator Richard Hill didn't show us the usual go-to Gordon Smith's and Joan Balzar's, but their lesser seen works.

Below is a lesser-seen, Michael Morris-influenced Smith (Boxed Rainbow, 1970):

And here is a lesser-seen Balzar (Untitled, c. 1960s):

And since we're talking boxes (Smith), here is an exploded view of a lesson-in-a-box from the Obomsawin exhibition:

Railings and Fences

A smaller Vancouver Special on the 1600-block of East 10th Avenue, south side, just west of Commercial Drive.

What drew me to this Special was its balcony railing, which is the feature I like least of the "factory" Specials and their variants -- except this one. 

Something else I like is the fence, which is framed in western materials, but comprised mostly of 3/4" bamboo reeds, those old enough (minimum eight years growth) to withstand a lifetime of wear.

Kitchen Compost Still Life

 

Like many of you, I keep my compost in the freezer. In my case, in a 4"-high 10"x10" Tupperware container. On Monday, while emptying the contents in my City bin for Tuesday's pick-up, I noticed some of its pieces stuck to the lid. A nice composition, I thought, and so I took its picture.

Astoria, Oregon

I have long been fascinated by the story of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River. A few weeks ago, while poking through the shops in Steveston village, I saw a copy of Peter Stark's Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire (2015), so of course I had to buy it.

For those who refuse to believe that smallpox was weaponized against Indigenous populations by fur-seeking settlers, Stark tells the story of Astoria's first head honcho, Duncan McDougall, who, in October 1811, and fearing an attack on the undermanned townsite's supply of trade goods (blankets, kitchen utensils, glass beads, etc.), "invited the local chiefs to Mr. Astor's new emporium on the Columbia. Once they'd gathered, according to an account [Washington] Irving heard from one of the participants, McDougall held up a small glass vial. In this bottle, McDougall told them, hid the deadly smallpox. If the Indians didn't treat the traders well, there would be consequences." (218)

A couple lines later, Stark writes:

"They backed away. The ruse gave him some leverage -- for a while."

Chilling.

Four Navy Narrators

Hubbard (1911-1986)

Pynchon (1937- )

Persky (1941- )

Bannon (1953- )

We'll Sing In the Sunshine

A quarter century ago there was talk of the interweb as a democratizing force. No curator/gallery gatekeepers for artists; no editor/publisher gatekeepers for writers. Same for film and music. No one in the way of me and my art, said the Libertarian who self-identifies as an Anarchist. 

Ironic, then, that this past quarter-century has seen a decline in democratic freedoms. Yes, you're free to post what you want, if you think the genius of your paintings shines through in reproduction, or that your writings flow perfectly from you to the "page". But postings aren't the point. As Boris Groys says, we are living at a time when everyone is making art, novels, songs and film, but no one has time to look at or listen to it.

If you want people to identify with a strongman-led autocracy, you turn them into their own despotic strongman, at the helm of their own identitarian fiefdom. The interweb with its platforms is perfect for this, promising liberation in the form of democracy. And when this doesn't happen, when the dopamine hits aren't coming fast enough, it's not the interweb's fault but democracy's. It's a fix, people shout, the whole thing is rigged by paedophilic U.S. Democrats trying to take over the country from the basement of a suburban pizzeria. 

Richmond Hospital Auxiliary Thrift Store

The past few times I've passed by the Richmond Hospital Auxiliary Thrift Store in Steveston the line-ups have been at least a dozen people deep -- many of whom look like vacationing families. What does a vacationing family look like in Canada? It's less in what's seen than in what's heard. For example: the southern U.S. drawl. Longer, slower vowels and melismatic diphthongs delivered by faces whose eyes are dead and the mouth does all the work.

"Lum uses his art to express his dissatisfaction with the world"

The Scotiabank Photography Award is a large one and mostly gets it right, awarding the prize to artists of depth and integrity, as opposed to only those who can operate an expensive camera.

This year's recipient is Ken Lum, whose Canadian Press write-up (as seen in the Globe & Mail) has something in common with the artist's own aggressively matter-of-fact style. Rather than hear who the jurors are, we hear from them anonymously, en masse:

"Prize organizers say Lum uses his art to express his dissatisfaction with the world."

That line might please Lum, though it depends on what mood he's in, who's pointing it out to him.

Then there's the cutline below his picture:

"Ken Lum, of Vancouver, is seen in an undated handout photo."

To me, there's something dismissive about the cutline. But Lum, a former student of counter-narrator par eminence Jeff Wall, might see it otherwise: an honest expression using the most basic -- and truthful  -- elements. For it is true: his name is Ken Lum, he is from Vancouver (though he has been living and working in Pennsylvania for over ten years now), he is seen in the photo, which, if it is without a date, should say so, and that it is a publicity photo, though captured with a digital camera, not the old analogue job, so not technically a photograph but a picture, a picture of the artist with one breast button open, the other closed.

The 39 Steps

John Buchan's 39 Steps (1915) began as a serialized adventure story concerning a Canadian civilian in London who gets caught up in espionage and murder during the early days of World War One. Hitchcock's film version was shot in 1935, four years before the start of World War Two, though you could say that World War Two began when the German Nazi Party took power in 1933.

The picture up top comes halfway through the film, with the Canadian on the run in Scotland looking to absolve himself of murder by solving it. He asks a farmer for food and lodgings, and after the two agree on a price, he is shown to a kitchen and left with the farmer's wife, whom the Canadian originally thought was the farmer's daughter.

The farmer's mention of a "box bed" is demoed by the farmer's wife: a sliding door that reveals a three-foot-high bed recessed into the kitchen wall. By now we have a sense that the wife feels something for the Canadian. She is from Glasgow, she tells him, and he asks her if she misses the bustle of what was by then a modern city. She does of course, which only underlines how unhappy Hitchcock needs her to appear. For why else would she help the Canadian escape when the thugs show up to kill him?

Recent Acquisitions

A remarkable haul from yesterday's thrifting. A 4.5" high ceramic pot by Charles Fergus Binns; a small pink Royal Art Pottery bowl; the DVD set of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Parsifal (1983), which I saw upon its release at the Oak Bay Theatre in Victoria; Rebecca Solnit's Men Explain Things to Me (2014), whose required-reading title essay features that distinctly U.S. elephant in the room known as social class; and Anthony Powell's  The Acceptance World (1955), a novel that begins with Nicholas telling us about his Uncle Giles, a bachelor "nearing sixty" who lives in the Uflord, a once grand "private hotel" comprised of "two corner houses" just west of Queensway, when 25 years later I lived in a similarly eccentric -- if not decrepit -- private hotel just east of Queensway (at Inverness Terrace).

A bit more on the Uflord:

"... that the two houses were an abode of the dead being increased by the fact that no one was ever to be seen about, even at the reception desk. The floors of the formerly separate buildings, constructed at different levels, were now joined by unexpected steps and narrow, steeply slanted passages. The hall was always wrapped in silence..." (8)

Slow News Day

Any minute now India will be the most populous country in the world. But is it still the largest democracy? Apparently not. According to those who measure such things (CBC needs to cite its sources), India's democracy has slipped to 161st out of 180 countries. To put this in perspective, India is now behind Afghanistan when it comes to democratic freedoms.

Napoleon referred to China as a sleeping giant ("Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world"). Mao Tzedong was not a communist but saw a version of it (Maoism) as the only way to organize and control a population as large as China's. Has India reached a population of no return? Is it to late for a communist solution, or will authoritarianism have to do?

On Valentine's Day this year Indian tax officials raided BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai for airing an item critical of prime minister Modi. Did the BBC in turn claim political interference, given that it is Britain's public broadcaster? No, the BBC doesn't seek political support, as it prefers to see itself as separate from the British state. Ah ha! says that rocket launching autocrat-in-waiting. But it's not! Nor is the CBC, NPR ...

The Cultural Ecology

On Friday I attended a gathering hosted by the Ministry of Tourism, Art, Culture and Sport (TACS?). The event was quite literally held in a church basement, if it wasn't for the fact that the church was a wealthy west side church and the basement wasn't raked for live theatre.

Fronting the event was area NDP MLA George Heyman and Saanich NDP MLA Lana Popham, Minister of TACS. Also on stage were Stan Chung (Chair of the B.C. Arts Council), Vancouver City Councillor Christine Boyle and the provincial Parliamentary Secretary for Arts and Film, who Ms Popham failed to introduce during the first go round, but whose name is Bob D'eith.

The purpose of the gathering was to reconnect the Ministry and the B.C. Arts Council with the provincial arts community, after a three year gap due to Covid. The opening remarks concerned provincial government Resilience funding, which some organizations received, and others didn't. The biggest issue from the audience (at least for those who received Resilience funding) was accessibility; specifically, wheelchair access. Apparently those in wheelchairs attending a Firehall Theatre performance have to be carried across the stage in order to be seated. We gasped when we heard that.

With that said, what struck me most about the gathering was the way the individual members of government presented themselves. Ms Popham, who wore gold-sparkled sneakers, kicked things off by identifying herself by height and hair colour, and this was picked up on by others, until Stan Chung spoke of his "boyish charm," even though he is "approaching sixty." We laughed at this because we were supposed to, but maybe too because these introductions were once focused not on what was already apparent (height and hair colour), but more often than not on what wasn't (ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class). A sign of the times? "Does anybody really know what time it is?"

Sick of Myself (2022)

Sick of Myself  is yet another film that came out of the blue for me and my platformless life, a story that only the art world could have written  -- only to write it anyway.

Signe and Thomas are a young Norwegian couple who, though competitive with one another, are 21st century happy. That happiness is threatened when Thomas gets some attention for his art. Signe responds by doing what most platformers do when feeling left out: she presses the SICK button. In this instance, a Russian-made pill with disfiguring consequences. Sure enough, her disfigurations bring with them fashion shoots, and she seems perfectly happy calling out her detractors on their unscathed privilege.

Sick of Myself is not about competitive couples, narcissism, Simone Weil, nor the whiteness of Norway, but a response to the well-intentioned institutional mantra of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. That director Kristopher Borgli, et al. have set this story in the contemporary art milieu should dispel any misconception you might have that artists are romantic loners, but are in fact the most institutionalized of all us.