Barbie (2023) and Kin

Dolls were in the house and in the neighbourhood when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s, and I played with them as a way to play with other kids my age, and sometimes with older people too. I never thought the doll in my hand talking to the doll in Laura Holmes's hand (or her mother's) was me but a friend who must have come to me in a dream and given me permission to speak for him or her.

I saw the doll like Adorno did of the (modern) art object -- as autonomous. Barbie was an autonomous creation whose figure was exaggerated for a reason. Even as an eight-year-old I knew that in order for Barbie to go strapless she needed her double-Es to keep her gown up. Same applied to her tip-toed feet: to fit the same high-heeled shoes my mother's fashion forward feminist friends wore when arguing with their boards in favour of equal pay for equal work.

Just how and where it got into kids' heads that dolls can only be avatars whose bodies are the kind you aspire to is worthy of greater study. The only evidence we have of it in the current Barbie (2023) film is through the world of Weird Barbie and Margot Robbie's Existential Barbie's dream/discovery of a mother and daughter at odds (and not) with Barbie in their own way.

Like the dolls I held and helped to interact, it is the relationship between mother and daughter that is the better part of the Barbie movie -- the idea that a doll is not something we want to be but, in our relational moment, something to be in conversation with. Except for one thing: the rehabilitation of the rebellious Weird Barbie-making daughter has that daughter dropping her G.I. Jane action wear for a skirt, combed hair, etc. Not only that, as the movie moves forward, she grows quieter and quieter, has less and less to say. What is she thinking? What happened to her critique? Has it been staunched altogether? Or is she simply content with the way things are turning out?

Notes on Asteroid City (2023)

I saw Wes Anderson's latest last week. It was turquoise and gold and set in the desert. Not a city like its title suggests; more like a truck stop, one "made" from an asteroid and its impact crater, later visited by an alien who takes the asteroid, only to return it a couple days later.

The Roswell myth, 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) ... If great American directors like Kubrick and Spielberg can make a science fiction film, so can Anderson.

Five families arrive in Asteroid City, each with a child who is a finalist for a science prize. When alone, the children compete with each other to see who is smartest, though the measure of intelligence is based not on thinking but on memory. No luck. They can't come up with anything. So: Are they equally as smart or equally as stupid? Neither. They are children! declares Anderson. Leave them alone! You've forsaken the right to understand them!

(Oscar Wilde's It's not enough that I should succeed, but all my friends must fail. Not sure anyone outside Asteroid City -- and this film has an outside meta-layer -- is ever attributed. Like fairy tales, Anderson's films exist independent of the world as we know it.)

Also in Anderson's films: there is a family or five and they are broken. The leads are always tightly-wound eccentrics whose idea of intimacy is tied to distance. Up top is a father of one of the finalists and the mother of another falling for each other from the windows of opposing huts. 

I forget what happens in the end, but we are led out of the film with a ripping tune whose name also escapes me. Oh, and the lighting. The play of shadow and light, when most everything else is flat.

Nous Sommes le Nécro-Garde

Some’s Seventh Issue

everyone’s so old

and white

 

a problem for some

one I’ve come to know

as my own

 

getting older

greyer

 

[a spaced saved here]

 

the launch of some’s first issue 

Steve’s allofvancouversavantgardeishere!

made a genre of it, not to mention

 

a mess of my stanza pattern

 

I collect myself

gather my lapels

and pull

Under Cover of Harvest

Only liberals appreciate the United Nations. No despot, no radical of any stripe, wants to be told what to do by an organization whose councils are dominated by liberal democracies.

Liberal democratic nations who have cheerfully adopted the United Nations Declaration On the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as a guide to the interpretation of the laws of their countries with respect to Indigenous Peoples whose land they stole tend to feel pretty good about themselves when sitting across the table from hater nations like China and Russia.

That good feeling was tested in British Columbia recently when the Lilwat and N'Quatqua First Nations, after repeated attempts to negotiate with the provincial government about a harvest celebration at Joffre Lakes Provincial Park, announced that the Lakes would be closed until September 30, leaving B.C. Parks to cancel over a month of camping reservations (a not insignificant revenue loss), lay off staff hired to clean up after those campers (a not insignificant wage loss) and of course the inevitable scramble to get the drones out to see what the Lilwat and N'Quatqua will be getting up to under cover of harvest.

Though I fully expect the Lilwat and N'Quatqua to stay true to their intentions and celebrate the harvest, I am hoping they take repossession further and leave some sustaining mark on the park in the way some think they are doing with public art, which is often determined not by those who live and work in an area, who have a deeper understanding of it, but who abide by that happiest of monsters: majority rule.

Exodus

MRS FREEMONT: Karen, would you like to go to America.

KAREN: Of course, everybody wants to go to America.

MRS FREEMONT: Then you will go. I'll cancel the rest of my trip and I'll take you with me. And you can go to school there, and later on to the university. And if you like it and want to you can become an American citizen.

I read a few Leon Uris novels growing up, both of them huge and focused on religious conflicts (Jews in the Middle East, Irish Catholics under Anglo Protestant rule). A couple of them were made into mini-series. The most famous Uris novel inspired a film by Otto Preminger, and that was Exodus (1960).

Like David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr Zhivago (1964), Exodus was shot in 70mm and as much as possible included visuals that could only be conveyed on that scale. Unlike Lean's films, Exodus takes the months leading up to the creation of the state of Israel as its historical arc, with anecdotal/conextual set pieces tucked in.

I am only two-thirds through Preminger's film, and am curious to see what happens with the recently widowed Mrs Freemont, an American whose husband was a wire service photographer, and Karen Larsen, a 14-year-old Danish Jew (the film strives to correct our expectations of who, what, when, where and why is a Jew) who may or may not be orphaned, something Mrs Freemont is eager to discover as well, because she wants to adopt Karen, take her home with with her. Will she? Or will she stay with Ari, take up weapons with him and grow oranges in a valley near Jerusalem?

The Mirror at Midnight (1990; 2007)

I found Hochschild's book in a neighbourhood book box. I'm always keen to know more about the histories of the southern part of Africa, particularly its colonization, the creation of states named after people (Cecil Rhodes-ia), or those states that speak strictly to their geography (South Africa, for example), which is a very Dutch thing to do -- to speak practically. And a very white thing of me to say, given that I benefit from that privilege.

It was not lost on me that the cover of Hochschild's book echoes James Earle Fraser's sculpture End of the Trail (1894), which features an American Indian slumped over his horse, spear pointed downwards. For years, white people of all stars and stripes have looked at this image with sympathy, but more recently, as an image perpetrated by an Anglo-European colonial power whose intent is to melt the American Indian in its pot. With that in mind, how are we to look at this image of the young Afrikaner on the cover of Hochschild's book? With sympathy? Or with a counter-narrative towards the revitalization of the Sunny South Afrikaan way of life? 

Bouquet Morte

Has it happened to you -- plucking the dead or dying leaves, and suddenly on the table behind you, a figure, if not a bouquet? Move a stalk this way, a leaf that way? Hmmm.

Time spent on what is gone, what is doing a disservice to that which remains, what we absently compost to make health more resonant?

Death laid out before us, beautiful, a landscaped graveyard. A tweak here, a tweak there: a still-life.

"Fire, I'll take you to learn"

I am the god of hellfire and I bring you

Fire, I'll take you to burn

Fire, I'll take you to learn

I'll see you burn

                                                                         -- Arthur Brown

The news coming out of the Okanagan and Shuswap regions is predictable, though no less disturbing: area residents fighting government officials over who gets to fight the fire.

No, it's not like that at all, says the chippiest of residents imaginable; it's about my right to defend my property from elected officials (Bowinn Ma) and government bureaucrats (Forrest Tower) who don't know anything but numbers, and who take their donut breaks while my house burns.

And the government response?

A unified system that has gear available when needed and crews that can focus on the fire, not rescuing those who, in defiance of a government order, have insisted on staying behind to protect their home and assets.

More recently, talk of a fire fighting agency and, at the grassroots level, a registry that gathers those in the area with firefighting and engineering skills who could be deputized in the event of emergency.

Could a similar registry be developed and applied to those who have a knee-jerk hate-on for liberal democratic governments and would like nothing better than to storm their capitols and behead their heads of state?

Yes, an interdisciplinary agency that would invest more in education, community centres and interfaith organizations. The culture is stoopid. And nothing hates the culture more than stoopid people.

East Window

The red object is plastic and receives direct sunlight for two months of the year. The blue object, never.

The blue object is glass, and when the sun is on it, it comes alive in ways the red plastic can't. I'd keep it that way, but the taller glass object never looks as good when it isn't to the right of the plastic one. 

Works from Paper

At one of the few produce stores left in Little Saigon (1100 block Kingsway) I saw a joss paper collection in a format I hadn't seen before, yet one that looked familiar. Ah, that was it -- an element from Liz Magor's Being This (2012).

 

Here's a portion of a Montreal Gazette review from the 2016 exhibition Magor had at Montreal's MAC:

"The wall-mounted installation Being This (2012) consists of 24 boxes (0f a total of 78 she made in the series) displaying found garments 'that have been meticulously snipped, stitched, and embellished.' Of the clothing she searches out, Magor said: 'I look for objects trying too hard.' The people who bought the garments initially wanted to project a certain image to the world, she suggested. 'We use the material world as props or mask — to augment or disguise ourselves,' she said."

Toy Section

Spent a few extra seconds staring at this box at Save On last Friday. Tried to imagine the Saturday morning ad for it. Would a "game" like this have piqued my interest in the late-1960s/early-1970s, when I was up early watching cartoons? The girl running towards the fellow looks like his mom, the fellow a young man. "I told you you'd like Head Splat! I win again!"

An Afternoon at the Motor Vehicles Branch

Not much to report, apart from a People's Theatre moment at the Motor Vehicle Branch, where I went on Thursday to get my driver's license renewed. Made an appointment for 1pm, as if that made a difference. One woman ("I have been waiting half an hour!") lost it because the online appointment interface said it would only take ten minutes if you made an appointment, "and I have my dog in the car!" At which point three people, all from different corners of the waiting room, rose up and got in her face about it, with one of them announcing he was going to call the SPCA and the woman knocking the phone out of his hand. The elderly security guard moved towards the melee and tripped, twisted his knee, and eventually had to be taken out by ambulance. The cops arrived before that, and were more "interested" in the man who threatened to gouge the eyes out of the woman with the dog than the woman or her dog. 

Okanagan Shoulder Mount

Five years ago this week I left the Okanagan after defending my Masters thesis (Course Language: How the Reader Is Encouraged to Collaborate On Our Seminar and Pass Me). It wasn't like I vowed never to return, but I knew it would be a good long time before I drove those highways again. If not the floods, then the fires. If not either, then unrepentant Albertans insisting it wasn't their bitumen that created the conditions for these weather extremes, no sir, it was Pierre Elliott Trudeau -- or his son. 

Much of yesterday was spent listening to the CBC for reports on what is now called the McDougall Lake Fire, a more ferocious fire, we are told, than the devastating 2003 fire that tore through parts of Kelowna proper. Not sure if it was a caller or a guest, but a UBCO sociologist reported on "acute anxiety": a situational condition that occurs when people are asked to grab what's important and leave their house immediately -- and they grab only practical things, like can openers, not family heirlooms, or their children's favourite toys.

The picture up top grabbed my attention for various reasons, one of which entered the absurd when trauma fantasy had me considering the potential practicality of a hunter's trophy, how in our distress we might rationalize it as a hat rack. But it's more than that of course. Someone took the time to kill this stag and presumably butcher it, freeze its meat. Was it mom's kill? Her daughter's? More likely mom's by the way she is holding it. Or her (late?) husband's? Son's? Her father's? Her mother's? Every picture tells a story. But when I see pictures like this, I hear many stories.

Urban Design

Vancouver's McAuley Park is "the smallest fully-named park in the city." It was named after Harvey and Theresa McAuley, who were active in the Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood. Most know the park for its two huge magnolias, or its stand of white flagpoles. A dozen years ago, artist Henry Tsang designed for it a mini-golf course that quickly fell into disrepair, with people tripping over it -- a litigation nightmare until City workers cleaned it up. More recently, a statue was installed commemorating those who fled oppression in South East Asia. 

While walking after dinner last night I came upon an SUV that had jumped Fraser Street (heading south) and crashed into the flagpoles. No one was in the SUV, though standing near it was a woman who appeared in shock, holding her wrist. People tipped-toed up to her, presumably to ask if she was okay. The woman would nod, then turn her back to them, and the askers would retract. Eventually a fire engine arrived, disgorging a half dozen firefighters. One of them had all his gear on except his jacket. A younger woman asked if he would pose with her sister.

Another firefighter led the injured woman into the park, toward a table. I was by that time seated at one of the two benches at the centre of the park and within earshot of what was being said -- most of it a recurrent pattern of questioning designed to determine whether a person is in shock or if they are lying. This went on for as long as I could stand it. By then a cop had shown up, observed, then took over from the firefighter. He worked a tighter loop on the woman. It was then that I had to leave.

"I did not hit her, I did not. Oh hi Mark."

We're almost at the end of our interviews for Rio Brava, our documentary on the Rio Theatre's more recent years and indie theatres in the age of Cineplex. Our penultimate interview (for now) took place on the Rio stage with Greg Sestero, who came to prominence in Tommy Wiseau's The Room (2003), then co-wrote a book about it (The Disaster Artist, 2013) that became a 2017 film (the book option handshake with James Franco took place at the Rio, where Sestero and Franco met). Sestero was at the Rio last night for a screening of The Room and, as is custom now when screening the film, a pre-screening "live" reading from a segment of Wiseau's original screenplay.

(By the way, is it me or does it look like the giant projected image of Wiseau is about to nudge Sestero off the stage with the back of his left arm?)

Kingsway Mural

Jackson's General Store took over the old Y. Franks heating business at the 1490 Kingsway a few years back, after leaving the block between Kingsway and Fraser, along East 15th.

A couple years ago someone kicked in one of the storefront's large windows and, as is the case with many street level businesses in the city, the cost of replacement remains greater than a same-sized piece of plywood.

In response to these anti-social behaviours, Mike Jackson did more than replace his window with a piece of plywood; he commissioned a mural series. 

Yesterday I noticed a new mural going up. The studio behind (and before) the mural is stringcreative, and its principal, Sabrina Anne Modder, is on the right (above); Akira beside her.

As with many painted murals, a grid is used to upscale the source drawing; in this case, a still-life of symbols: a crown (the "king" in Kingsway), fish (after the historic spawning creeks that led up from the False Creek waterway) and a line in red that is the road known today as Kingsway -- what was, prior to European "contact", a Coast Salish subsistence and transportation trail, a trail that, in the 20th century, had a modern grid of streets and avenues imposed upon it, making it that "difficult" and "eccentric" road some of us continue to get lost on, complain about, as if it's the street's fault it's diagonal.

Paul Verhoeven's American Quartet

I peaked in the 1990s. Just as everything in the 20th century happened in the 1970s, everything happened for me in the 1990s.

The 1990s was America's decade and came at the end of the American Century -- but more symbolically, at the end of its rival Russia's "communist" counter-narrative, a program that played out in Eastern Europe, parts of Africa, South-East Asia and an island in the Caribbean. 

If I was asked what filmmaker captured America best in the 1990s, who would I say? Robert Altman? I love Altman, but not on this topic. Martin Scorsese? No. Kubrick? No. The filmmaker who made the most important "American" films of the 1990s is Paul Verhoeven. I would even go so far as to call Robocop (1987), Showgirls (1995) and Starship Troopers (1997) the "American Trilogy" for all these films have to tell us about American domestic policy, late-capitalism and foreign policy, respectively.

The one Hollywood film of Verhoeven's I had never seen until last night is Basic Instinct (1992). Why it took so long is beyond me. Part of it could be Michael Douglas, an actor I don't enjoy looking at (wasn't Bill Pullman available?). But then, I enjoy looking at Sharon Stone, so the question of talent is a wash. Maybe it has to do with how certain images and scenes from the film have come to stand in for the whole film -- in a way that makes me feel like I've seen the film and don't need to see it again, in long-form. But now that I've seen it ...

Basic Instinct has its place in my American Trilogy (American Quartet now) for what it tells us about gender relations, albeit white, middle-class heterosexual gender relations, or the last days of strictly white, middle-class heterosexual gender relations. Could the film be re-made today with BIPOC leads? Basically, but that's beside the point.

Pictured up top is less a grab from a scene than a grab from a view of monitors that show Sharon Stone's character passing a lie detector test. The "scene" comes immediately following the film's infamous interrogation scene, where it is the interrogators who are made to feel uncomfortable, not the murderer's Sharon Stone. Of the five male interrogators, Douglas's character registers lowest on the General Acute Response Continuum of Intimidated-Aroused (GARCIA), while lead interrogator Wayne Knight's character (Knight is best-known for playing Newman on Seinfeld) is, necessarily, a preposterous exaggeration. Taken together, that is America in the 1990s.

The Painter Francis Rose

There is a paragraph I'd planned on posting today from Gertrude Stein's humble brag The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), published in the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. There is mention of an artist -- an englishman, a young one, a painter -- but not his name. Unless it was Francis Rose, who is mentioned three paragraphs earlier.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a book I have read end to end. I have it in a place where I can open it at random and read it. If I read something interesting, I am as likely to read backwards as I am to read forward, though I will do both, depending on what I need to know. Sometimes you can't go forward without going back. It is a fundamental disagreement between people: those who believe it and those who don't.

So: three paragraphs before the post I had planned to post:

"Again just before leaving Paris at this same picture gallery she saw a picture of a poet sitting by a waterfall. Who did that, she said, A young englishman, Francis Rose, was the reply. Oh yes I am not interested in his work. How much is that picture, she said: It cost very little. Gertrude Stein says a picture is worth either three hundred francs or three hundred thousand francs. She bought this for three hundred and we went away for the summer." (230)

The picture up top is Rose's painting of Stein, middle-distance and centred. The light is on her, or she is lit from within. Behind her, unlit, is Alice Babette Toklas. 

F.F.F.F. (2023)

Somehow, amidst the nothingness of everything all-at-once, I missed the opening of Paul Kajander & Isabelle Pauwels's collaborative two-channel HD animation installation at Unit 17 in July. Thankfully shows run for forever, so there's always more time.

Both the exhibition and the artwork are called F.F.F.F., and For Fucking Fuck's sake I won't even begin to spend more than a few minutes on why, because I'll only come up one "F" short. Whatever labour expended on guessing what the "F"s in the title stand for only proves Pauwels's point: that our labour is expected, not valued, and rarely is it remunerated. Everywhere in the world someone owes an artist money. 

There is money in F.F.F.F. A real estate agent, a woman who looks like Marjorie Taylor Greene but is too busy showing houses and harassing those on the sidewalk outside her house to run for public office. The harassed are two lemons -- one voiced by Kajander, the other by Pauwels -- and they happen to be standing near (let's say adjacent to, for Kajander's sake) a bus stop. When the agent suggests it's the bus stop that justifies their being there, the Pauwels Lemon says, "We're not waiting for the bus," and I thought, for fucking fuck's sake, that's Pauwels's genius in a nutshell: when offered an out -- like waiting for a bus --Pauwels's Lemon is like, Why lie? I have every fucking right to be standing in public space, bus stop or not. Fuck you, you fucking fuck. I refuse to "play" "my" "part" in defusing the situation. And in that way, Pauwels's Lemon is not unlike Greene, Trump, or any other American reactionary activated by the likes of Steve Bannon. Yet this Lemon is presented ... sympathetically. Brava! Brava!

But wait, there's more -- 26m15s, to be exact (the video is based on a script by Pauwels, with editorial input from Kajander, Amy Lam and Valérie Pauwels). See this show. It's open through August 27th.

How I Spent the 50th Anniversary of Hip Hop

Epic day at the beach, Third Beach, just north of Second Beach, the family beach, which in turn is north of English Bay, which would be called "First Beach" if it wasn't for the tourists.

Arrived by foot from Helga and Robert's, just north of Davie and a couple blocks east of Denman, where we picked up some chicken kabobs and an eggplant dish at Zeitoon, to go with Helga's Greek salad, humous ...

Walking through the park at Second Beach. In the near-distance, the allowance between the ground and the bottom leaves of the trees that line the seawall, a modernist ribbon window to the water, and above that water, the bluff that runs from Kits to UBC. I point this out to Helga, and she says, "You're noticing things, that's good!"

We'd settled in by 1330hr with a couple of dips into the beach's too warm waters. Hard to concentrate at times with every second person's ass hanging out of their bottoms, if you can call the lower section of a string bikini bottoms. "Helga ...." "I know," she'd say, "I'm here too."

Everything about our work was discussed and, out of nowhere, it was 6pm and the walk back. After parting I continued on another ten blocks to Burrard Station, whose train took me to Commercial and Broadway, then another ten block walk to my place, where it was too warm inside for my overheated body, so a cool glass of wine in the garden, under the solar lights of my butterfly bush, waiting for them to ignite.

Here are the lights at 2050hr:

Here they are at 2051hr:

Face Putting

What does this sign tell you, apart from its invitation? That it's barely three feet high tells me it's for a child, and that a child might have to bow to lend face to space. Or maybe it's for a dog? If so, "PUT YOUR DOG'S FACE IN THIS SPACE"? And no, I'm not being literal, just ethical. See how boring that is? It's a wonder any art gets done. We're in a most artless time. What we once knew as art will go by a different name (Adorno?). Elon Musk has taken it literally, too, when he rid of us of Twitter and gave us the X division of his One App, One Life future. I loathe this place. This time and space.

Napili to West Saugerties

I have memories of visiting my grandmother at Xmas 1974, after she temporarily relocated her massage/reflexology business from Santa Monica to Lahaina. We stayed up the road a half hour, at Napili Beach (pictured above). Occasionally storms would come and wash away the sand, leaving the beach a naked ledge of hardened lava, and it would have to start all over again, a "resanding" that never took more than a few days. The recent Maui fire is another story. The island's beaches have remained, but what was swept away by fire will never return.

Like Santa Monica, grandmother had lots of younger friends dropping by, and they would bring with them their cassette tapes and play them in her player. Most were homemade mixed tapes, but one was store bought and kinda glowed, maybe for that reason. An album by the Band, and I had a hard time remembering that it was Music from Big Pink (1968), a title that didn't make any sense to me until years later when I was told "Big Pink" was the name of the West Saugerties, NY house (pictured below) where Band members Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel lived, and where Bob Dylan and the Band made The Basement Tapes (recorded in 1967, released in 1975). That made it easier to remember.

Batman Begins (2005)

Batman and Spiderman movies keep being made, and I find myself so unencumbered by their comic book back stories that I can only focus on what's before me. Batman Begins (2005) is just that: the beginning of what I had for so long been in the midst of.

We open with a twenty-something Bruce Wayne in a People's Republic of Chinese jail where, having run away from the Gotham City his parents were committed to rehabilitating, yet whose needier element kills them before his eyes, he takes on all comers, eventually coming under the tutelage of someone who, like Morpheus with Neo in The Matrix (1999), trains him to kill better, faster, harder. Unlike The Matrix, Bruce refuses to join this Morpheus's army, and in saying so burns down his training facility and makes his way back to Gotham where, six years removed from when he left it, he applies what he's learned to the betterment of humanity (his version), not to mention to the elimination of special interests endemic to any stratified society.

A memorable moment comes at the funeral of Bruce's parents.

Bruce's father's business manager William Earle approaches Bruce and says:

"You're in excellent hands. We'll be watching the empire. When you grow up, it'll be waiting for you."

The Immoralist (1902)

This was the edition I had of André Gide's The Immoralist, purchased at Oakridge Mall in 1978, the bookstore next to Kelly's Records. My current edition is a recent Penguin with a new translation (David Watson, 2000) and an unattributed image of something red and crushed -- Michel's lungs or something he spat up.

I like this:

"I had forgotten I was alone; I sat there, waiting for nothing, oblivious to the time. Until that day, it seemed to me, I had felt so little and thought so much, and I was astonished to find that my sensations were becoming as strong as thoughts." (34)

The Powell Street Festival

The Powell Street Festival came to my attention in 1988 when I awoke one summer morning and saw through the window of our space at 441 Powell Street a bandstand where the baseball diamond was and before it a semi-circle of little tents. It was the Japanese Festival then -- a celebration of all things Japanese -- which might include me, given that my father's father's mother was Japanese. Too Japanese for her children though, who let it be known, in the English way, that she had put them in a difficult situation. The rest is Madame Butterfly.

We heard a lot last year of the troubles the Vancouver Folk Festival was having, but their problems were largely financial, nothing compared to what has faced the Japanese/Powell Street Festival over the years. After my first Japanese Festival I signed on as a volunteer, which amounted to doing security in the alley between Powell and East Cordova Streets. It wasn't what I saw in that alley but the stories shared with me by those I had assumed I was hired to keep an eye on, people who spoke well of the Festival organizers and their generosity, but ill of certain cops, politicians and gangsters who came into the downtown eastside to prey upon them. Indeed, it is in the spirit of generosity that the problems facing DES residents became the Japanese/Powell Street Festival's problem too.

Yesterday's visit saw the Festival back to pre-pandemic attendance. An active stage, busy kiosks and the usual line-ups for salmon and rice, and a new entry this year: the Potato Tornado. Also familiar was the presence of many biracialized families and their children and now grandchildren, as well as those who live in the immediate area, some of whom live roughly. But what distinguished this year from previous years was a notable bump in transgendered people. Everyone blending comfortably, for the most part, but of course there were exceptions. One came around noon, near the southeast corner of the park. I noticed a young girl of about nine quietly watching a very thin, thinly-dressed woman who could have been nineteen in the throws of drug use -- until out of nowhere came the arm of the father, who grabbed the girl's wrist and yanked her towards him, only to have another very thin, thinly-dressed woman in his face about assaulting her. "I don't give a rat's dick if she's your kid mister my dad did that one too many times to me and look how innocent I turned out." Spontaneous applause. Un-fucken-believeable. 

I, Claudius (1976)

Our recent interview with the VIFF Centre's Tom Charity reminded me of the not-so-early days of television, when Britain had only three stations. But of those stations, programs of exceptional quality, enough that at least one of them, for many of us, would be a favourite today. Taken together, I would not be surprised if all three would be more than enough to live on, especially now, when anything that isn't being done on television should be, because it can be.

During a recent thrifting expedition (North Burnaby's Sally Anne) I came upon all 12 episodes of I, Claudius. First broadcast on BBC 2 in September-December 1976, I, Claudius tells the story of the early days of Rome, from Emperor Augustus to his eventual successor, the "idiot" Claudius, who narrates (the series is based on Robert Graves 1934 novel of the same name).

I remember seeing I, Claudius when it was first broadcast on PBS in 1977, and only vaguely remember it being about succession. For me, it was about treachery (pictured above is the scheming Livia and her husband Augustus's granddaughter Livilla) and nudity. The Caligula episode was intense and would not be depicted so gently today. Too suggestive. Too much for the imagination exaggeration.

Flooded Graves

The development at the northeast corner of Kingsway and Clark has finally reached bottom and is now building up -- forty months after its pub was closed because of Covid. We've been told since the site was sold eight years ago that the new six-storey market rental building replacing our pub will include a new one, but I'm not counting on it. This is an Aquilini project, after all, so if leasing to a Sleep Country or a Foot Locker should be more profitable, then I'd expect the usual greaseball shit about it being not my neighbourhood.

Picture Tray

I found this picture tray at the Russian-run thrift store a block west of the Kingsway T&T, north side. The price was nice ($9.99). I need a tray to serve tea in my garden. Also the mystery of what might lie behind it.

Here is the back of the tray:

And behind its backing:

And behind that, bonds issued by the 1917 Kerensky Provisional Government.

When the tray is not in service, it hangs on the wall. But not on my wall.

Our Game (1995)

"So what shall you do with the rest of your life, friend Timothy?" he asks.

"I shall limit it," I reply. "I shall do a Rousseau. I shall turn my back on grand concepts, cultivate my grapes and perform good works in miniature."

"You will build a Berlin Wall around yourself?"

"Unfortunately, Volodya, I already have one. My uncle Bob put his vineyard inside an eighteenth-century walled garden. It's a frost trap and a haven for disease."

Fire in the Whole

John Vaillant's The Golden Spruce (2005) is the story of a fascinating story unfortunately told in a melodramatic style that feels at odds with its "natural" setting (Haida Gwaii) -- not unlike a lot of CBC radio generated true crime podcasts, which have yet to find themselves, that never seem to get beyond the waters they're soaking in. Note to CBC: Maybe leave true crime to those who know it as all they know?

Vaillant's latest book, Fire Weather (2023), is better for its relaxed presentation of the facts. Although it opens with the 2016 Fort McMurray Fire, we are soon enough taken through the larger landscape, from the Montana-Alberta border to the arboreal forest; and once spatially oriented, into a deeper past, one that begins for the most part with colonialism, namely the Hudson's Bay Company, but also Standard Oil, whose leader, John D. Rockefeller, Vaillant describes as "the Jeff Bezos of his day." (39)

There's a lost of "of his day" comparisons in Fire Weather (Suncor or Syncrude appear as the HBC of their day, though more than one doesn't work when talking of near monopolies). For its part, CBC Vancouver's afternoon drive show has been running a contest of late asking listeners to name the so-and-so of their day. So far we have the Bob Dylan of their day, the Prince, the Joni Mitchell. To the CBC's credit, host Gloria Macarenko read out a letter that began with a critique of the "of their day" shtick -- before giving us the writer's pick of Orville Peck as the Dolly Parton of their day.

Birdlandia

am I lucky I was so lucky in the yard today the culmination of a week's bird chirps the appearance this morning of finches and chickadees and this afternoon baby chickadees as if out for the first time since their hatching teenagers full of the newness that makes them their mostess with none of the gaps of their parents and grandparents if they are even alive anymore how long do these birds live? not in age but in generations? more than two generations at a time? three? can I call you my granny if my mother's your daughter?