Seasonal Still Life

Pot, logs, bark souvenirs.

Kidnapped

A poster in my neighbourhood. KIDNAPPED, as opposed to MISSING. An old man (75), not a child. In the Middle East, not East Vancouver. As for the kidnappers, a militant, fundamentalist community-based group whose work is informed by religious law and is funded by those who seek to hold regional power, or at least wrestle it from those who take their "cues" from the West.

Would we be having this problem now had the CIA and MI6 not ousted Iran's democratically-elected poet Mosaddegh in 1953? Or was that ousting a condition laid out by the family that has the country named after them -- and a good part of the world's oil?

As for Israel, what was Mosaddegh's position on this newly-created U.N.-sanctioned state that took up roughly half of Palestine? Israel was way more socialist then than it is now. Same with Iran. Oh, what do I know? Well, I do know that the Jewish diaspora is thousands of years old, that it began roughly in the area where Israel is today, and not in some of NYC's non-Manhattan boroughs in the 1950s.

David Shalev has had a rotten October and his family and friends want him home. I hope that happens, just as I hope Palestinians can shake off the fundamentalists who insist on fighting in their name. For thousands of years Palestinians have been trod on, used, blamed. Why? Why is that? Maybe that's the basis of my poster. And yet who would my figurehead be? 

La Grande Bellezza (2013) aka The Great Beauty

Getting laughs at the expense of performance artists is low hanging fruit in popular film. In order to establish early on the wit and lovability of our well-groomed slacker hero Jep, we have to see what he sees too   -- the performance before the interview. But the interview! Mama mia.

Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza is a funny movie for someone like me, someone approaching Jep's age. The last movie I saw where I felt a similar connection to the lead was Alex Payne's Sideways (2004), though the better double-feature would be LGB and The Big Lebowski (1998), which also features a performance artist.

I mentioned to my friend Christine, a veteran film and TV producer, that I had just started watching LGB while recovering from the flu, and that it was not making me forget Fellini. She texted to say that LGB was among her all-time Top-10, and that she watches it at least once a year. Twenty minutes later I texted back that this is indeed a very funny film, verging on wise, and that despite certain reservations, it is growing on me.

One of those reservations, shared with her at the 1hr 50 min mark of this 2hr 22 min film, is Jep's relationship with women -- that the only women spared his acid tongue are a dwarf and an exotic dancer. That the dwarf supplies him his income (his editor) and the dancer companionship (a platonic love interest) is telling, but of course subject to change in these final 32 minutes, which I intend to get to  -- tonight!

A Fragment of the Juilliard Scene from Tár (2022)

TÁR: Have you read the Schweitzer text?

MAX: No.

TÁR: We’ll, you should; it’s an important text.

Rear Garden

Yesterday morning, 10:43 a.m. Getting ready for Hallowe'en.

Testing, Testing

Last time I had a bug was January 2017.

Concrete Poetry Delivery

It took ages trying to get this right. Then I just gave up.

Cold War (2018)

Last night I watched Pawlikowski's incompletely titled Cold War , one of the finer black-and-white films I've seen of late. Basically a love story that moves from 1949 Poland to 1952 East Germany, 1954 France, 1955 Yugoslavia, and eventually to 1964 Poland, where the couple, Viktor and Zula, realize the futility of their lives under Communism, then Capitalism, and do the only thing possible and move on one last time, where "the view is better from the other side."

The shot up top comes after he's defected to Paris. A car comes around the corner, Wiktor gets in it and the car goes down the hill. Those who know Vancouver well enough would not be mistaken for mistaking this landscape as the Homer Street hill that runs down to Cordova north of Hastings, a view I saw enough of when, in the mid-1990s, I had an office above The Block at the SE corner.

Scene from a Movie

From Kings of the Road (1976), the final film in Wim Wenders's "Road Trilogy" (1974-1976), a film that could be shown today under the banner Why Do Pre-Millennial Men Have Such a Hard Time Discussing Their Feelings?

The man outside the kino ticket/concession booth travels about in a rig outfitted with cinema repair equipment; the woman on the other side of those miniature parlour doors is the owner's granddaughter, and is subbing for the person who usually sits there.

Something about this setting brings to mind the work of Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Speaking of which, they just opened a museum of their work at Enderby.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Spank Williams

Among the cavalcade of stars appearing at the 10th anniversary of the East Van Opry last night, Spank Williams came closest to reminding me what fun it was to be on stage, when the audience is wool and your instruments knitting needles. Williams has definitely mastered James Brown's protracted ending as between-song-banter, but not as the Godfather of Soul would do it, more like the Band's Rick Danko. I have no memory of Williams's songs or how they sounded, only his incredible ludic energy. If I was still in show business, I'd package Williams and Shirley Gnome together and send them on the road -- forever!

"So afraid, not alone/ Hear the birds sing"

I'd never seen a Jem Cohen film. Amy was always high on him, and when I told her I borrowed his Museum Hours (2012) from the MOVIES section at the VPL and loved it, she said she'd never seen that one, but for a time (the early 2000s?) everybody loved Jem Cohen.

The film opens with a woman (from Montreal) on the phone relaying some heavy news, then asking to borrow money to fly somewhere. This somewhere turns out to be Vienna, where the woman has never been, nor does she speak German. A cousin she knew from childhood is in hospital there, in a coma, and she is the next of kin. The day after she arrives she meets a museum guard -- a gentle, likeable, philosophical man in his later sixties -- who takes an interest in her and helps her communicate with doctors, nurses and hospital administrators. When not visiting the hospital, they take walks, talk about paintings, go to bars, and even visit the Seegrotte in Hinterbrühl, a day trip that coincides with the cousin's passing. 

The woman in question immediately looked familiar. At first I thought she was Georgina Spelvin, but only if the film was made 20 years earlier. And then she started singing, and of course -- it's Mary Margaret O'Hara! Singing "Never, No"!

If you lie down in a field she will find you there (2023)

Colleen had her book launch at Artspeak on Wednesday. No one from Artspeak was there, which was to be expected, given that the gallery has dropped its art and text mandate, but friends of Colleen were there, and that's what Colleen wanted, because she said so.

I love this book, and I said as much on the back of it, as did friends Liz Magor and Johnny  D. Trinh. I didn't know until looking through it on the bus ride home that Susan Musgrave was its editor. Susan is excellent at helping to put books together, though I have to say, when it comes to grief, grieving and the deceased, both she and Colleen have different ideas.

Susan most recent book is Exculpatory Lilies (2022).

Here's an excerpt from Colleen's book, from Page 27:

"Sometimes, on quiet afternoons, Mom showed me a children's hatbox she saved for Vicky. She let me look through it under supervision: a pink, circular case with a plastic handle and a clasp crammed with Vicky's childhood belongings. I remember a little girl's handkerchief and stuffed dog. The stuffing was sort of hard, maybe foam pellets. The fabric wasn't furry; it was smooth. Totally inferior to my own plush stack. I coveted it anyway."

At Monte's

At the Jonathan Syme opening at Monte's last week, Francesca, Khan and I drifted into the rear production area where sometimes work is up (a nice Jeremy Hof painting, another Syme). I noticed Khan staring at the table, so I wandered over and asked "What do you see, Khan?" and he said that the way the table and its storage underneath is set up, it looks like it's paintings that go on the turntable, not records.

Tom from Eva

On my Instagram account a couple days ago I posted an Eva Hesse drawing from a drawing show mounted from various collections and what might remain of her estate. An unusual drawing for Hesse, given what I know of her 2D and 3D work; maybe more like a doodle started while on the phone and finished later with a pink felt pen or pencil crayon?

A day later the curator Charo Neville left a comment: that Eva Hesse is an important influence on Tom Burrows, and to underline that, she mentioned a recent doc on Tom. So I watched the doc, waiting for Tom to mention Hesse, but soon enough surrendered to the here and now, and what a joy it is to be with Tom at every breath.

I knew enough about Tom's life and work that I could watch this doc with a knowing nod. I'd curated a couple of shows that involved the Maplewood Mudflat squats, where Tom was a builder and a resident, so when the doc focused on Tom's Maplewood days, I braced myself for the inevitable images of the District of North Vancouver burning down the houses. Not that I hadn't seen those images before, but the credits under "TOM BURROW'S HOME, DECEMBER 1971" were new to me. Yes, I knew Jerry Williams took the "PHOTO" (top, dramatically cropped, given Instagram's penchant for the square),  but "COLOUR" by TOM BURROWS? That is ... so Tom!

The 2000-Block Kingsway, South Side

It is called an easement, though there's nothing easy about it.

In New York City, spaces like these are not part of the commons, but considered real estate, and owning the buildings on either side doesn't mean you own it. The technical term for these liminal if not uninhabitable spaces is "odd lots", and you can buy them from the City, as the artist Gordon Matta-Clark did to make a point, as artists are want to do.

What attracts me to this Kingsway easement includes its surfaces: the concrete ground, which for years was dirt, some plant life and garbage; the stucco siding on the wall of Mùi Ngò Gai to the right; and the more recent update on wood protection: the vinyl siding on The Tipper to the left.

My interest in this easement is first and foremost formal, but for Matta-Clark, his formal interests always carried a social-historical imperative, and he was known for having a big heart and for opening an inexpensive artist-run restaurant called FOOD. Gallerist David Zwirner, who represents Matta-Clark's artistic estate, told me once that Matta-Clark was the last great modernist, and the more I learn about Matta-Clark, the less I care about modernism.

East 20th, at Bella Vista

Who says retention can't be decorative? And eco-friendly? I love this stone wall. Rare to see walls like this in production today. Maybe down the road we'll see more of them, given cement's 8% carbon dioxide contribution to global warming.

A Day at the Paintings

I thought I'd go down to Catriona's, to see Ron's show. I knew if I went I should see the show at Wil Abale's around the corner, and whatever else is in the area. Monte has an opening. Artspeak still has its summer show up, but Or opened its fall show the night before, so that's four shows. Almost too much.

Ron's show is largely black paintings (text "in" flat finish, "framed" by gloss). The texts are from the American reactionary "right" and their source pictures can be taken away in a limited edition newsprint magazine, or witnessed as a ceiling-high grid on the gallery wall. The grid pictures are easy to photograph, but you have to tilt your phone just right to capture the paintings in full.

Francesca and Khan were there, so we left as a mob for Wil's, what turned out to be the last day of Lise Lemieux's paintings. Wil came out to give us a quick and thoughtful presentation of Lise's work.

From there, we walked west on Hastings, stopping at 881 for a show of Hank Bull's painted boxes, as photographed with very long exposures by Robert Keziere, who at 86 is still taking pictures. But these are Hank's artworks, not Robert's, and as such Hank is responsible for the question: What's to be gained from presenting his painted sculptures as photographic models, apart from entertaining the question? 

Jonathan Syme's's paintings at Monte Clark's were a joy. Such daring use of colour, with many kinds of painting going on in each of them.

A varied day of painting, completed by the KWÍKWI exhibition at Or, where the paintings are portraits and the frames depart from their edges to suggest masks, but also work in concert with what those faces are and are not saying. This is Jenn Jackson's first show as director-curator of Or and she has done her part to make this exhibition a memorable one.

"Dost sometimes counsel take -- and sometimes [T]ea [Swamp]"

A picture taken on East 19th west of Fraser, still in the Tea Swamp, where, as any developer or City engineer will tell you, right-angles have been abolished. Not sure how deep this pot sits, but it would have to be deep enough to keep from tumbling down. Below, a picture of the piles you need to drive into the ground to keep your house from winking.

AA Furniture & Appliance

The fake wartime British bedsit heater is back at AA Furniture & Appliance -- but no, says Li, it's a different one! "Oh, how do you know?" I ask. "You can tell," is her reply.

The Ladder Not the Former

In the second it takes to take a picture I saw the ladder not as a tool on the wall but something menacing, waiting for someone unsuspecting.

Hands and Feet

A detail from Attila Richard Lukacs's wall-long history of Pony Boi's late-1990s adventures in NYC's Meat Packing District, currently on display at the manly BLAH Gallery.

When Attila burst onto the scene in the mid-1980s, his detractors pointed out that "He can't paint hands!" My feeling was that he was too busy doing other things, too busy with other aspects of the painting.

I know I was young then (I'm born the same year as Attila), but I knew that what you choose not to do, or be "good at", or whatever, is a decision -- and besides, the hand up top looks almost as exquisite (to me) as a Warhol shoe.

Assemblage

It doesn't matter what it is, it matters that you stop for it, crouch down for a closer look, pick it up if it's safe to do so, sniff it, put your tongue on it, put it in your bag to take home and, after a while, add it to the other stuff, changing the arrangement, placing it just so.

Thanksgiving Weekend

A Thanksgiving weekend to remember. Those gold-on-green mornings.

The picture up top is of Saturday. Yesterday seemed even warmer.

It's everything I can do to keep my mind off the Middle East.

Phallus Dentata

It was the number, not the "thumb" or the words that caught my eye. 102.7 was the home of CFRO, a co-op radio station that is to broadcasting what garden tomatoes are to salads. But this talking phallus dentata "says" otherwise, so I looked it up -- and sure enough! A message from the person who also owns the billboard (Pattison), not to mention stores where tomatoes are sold (Save On Foods).  Just like CFRO moved out of its Pigeon Square studios for Columbia Street, it's done the same on the FM dial --  to 100.5. Below, a longtime show by an Asian-Canadian collective whose members included the late great Jim Wong-Chu.

Killers of the Flower Moon of the Turning Leaves

Sometimes a title lands and you know you're going to have a hard time remembering it. Especially with another "Moon" title on the horizon.

How am I going to keep these two cultural products apart, short of seeing the movie and reading the book?

On the Town

A recent spate of completions has allowed me to feel better about leaving the house and losing myself. Yesterday featured a number of loses, including a visit to BLAH (Brian Lumb Art House) for Attila's recollection of his late-1990s Pony Boi period in NYC's Meat Packing District, followed by a seat at the Western Front's Luxe for The Capilano Review's excellent reading series (and a rather disappointing painting show at the Front Gallery), and finally an 8:30 PM fuel stop at Les Faux Bourgeois (above and below), where I was given the last seat at the bar (by the teacher's desk!) to keep me from acting up.

Vermeer We Go Again

It upsets me watching Dan make hummus.

One forgets it's food he's making.

At times it looks like he's mixing epoxy.

I like more tahini in mine.

Roughing it in the Bush (1852)

It was always around, always referred to. Yes, yes, yes -- a Canadian classic -- I'm reading Duras now; please leave me alone. Then one day, there it is: a rough looking New Canadian Library edition from the 1970s, with an abstract what? below the author's name and title. How does that cover image relate to what's inside? Maybe if I read a few bars ... and suddenly I'm humming its tune.

I always thought Susanna Moodie was a runaway washerwoman who came to Canada from the U.K. with her trapper husband. Far from it. As Anakana might say, She was a right snoot, and we get a bit of that in the first chapters as the boat out of Scotland comes down the St Lawrence Seaway -- after how many weeks at sea? stopping at Grosse Isle to wash bodies, clothes and linens.

Just listen to her:

"I was not a little amused by the extravagant expectations entertained by some of our steerage passengers. The sight of the Canadian shores had changed them into persons of great consequence. The poorest and the worst dressed, the least deserving and the most repulsive in mind and morals exhibited most disgusting traits of self-importance. Vanity and presumption seemed to possess them altogether. They talked loudly of the rank and wealth of their connections at home, and lamented the great sacrifices they had made in order to join their brothers and cousins who had foolishly settled in this beggarly wooden country." (31)

I, Nuligak (1966)

Nuligak tells us of games played during the Polar Night Festivals. One game begins when the game organizer is heard to say, "Tonight the Itkrilit, the Indian, will come." It is mostly the children who hear this, and they are left to wonder.

Nuligak writes:

"The Indian had a knife made of hard wood, and as someone got quite close to him, he drew his knife. He would have struck had not the Chief spoken severely to him. The Indian had strange clothes. His long hair, hiding his face, almost touched the floor as he danced. Whenever the Inuit went to war and killed Indians, they would select those with long hair, tearing it off their heads and scalping them." (19-20)

Puzzle Me This

It was the day's crisp golden leaves and ever lowering sun that pulled me from the house and walked with me to Commercial and 11th, north up the hill and slightly over it to Grandview Park, where a free store was happening, and among its freedoms, a jigsaw puzzle of the now City-owned 2400 Court Motel at 2400 Kingsway of course.

Kits, Kitsilano, Khatsahlano, Khats

On the first day of summer the sun sets on the Sechelt Peninsula. On the last day, UBC. I know this because last week I watched it, and yesterday only confirmed it. The sun sets on UBC.

It wasn't hard to find parking at 4:45 PM. Only a couple of blocks from Kits Beach, which is fine because I like to see what people are doing in their gardens. Kits Point is park-like now, like West of Denman has been for the last fifty years.

A small picnic at the beach, then a visit to our old stomping grounds -- and I'm talking getting "served" (alcohol) at sixteen and thinking we'd stolen the world stomping grounds -- the King's Head. A strange place to return to, the King's Head has the same Jailhouse Rock interior architecture as it did in the 1970s, only now it's designation has gone from minimum to maximum.

A place like the King's Head could not get built today. Go see it for yourself.