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Hardt Times

A good turn-out at Michael Hardt, et al.'s talk and panel at SFU yesterday afternoon, the morning after Hardt's longtime collaborator Antonio Negri passed away. I had read his and Negri's Empire (2000) when it came out, and it was one of those books that many of us reached for again after the events of 9/11, in the way that many of us do when we think it was in Empire that we first heard that something like that is possible.

Warehouse Wall

Walking east on East 1st Avenue, past Main, a long wall, and a few panels in, evidence of the Vancouver Mural Infestival. But the wall itself -- its materials, its design. It's enough that it's a wall and not a support for more visual information. Why can't we leave it at that, allow our eyes a rest? Allow our ears and nose to occupy us?

The False Creek Flats

A picture taken on my way to a studio visit. I knew the picture would look better in black and white, but there is no Black and White setting on my device, only related options, which led me to choose Noir because it offered the highest contrast. I was hoping the photo would capture some of that Lee Friedlander energy, but all I got was a whisper of Laurence Oliver introducing another episode of The World at War (1973).

Woke Up It Was a Chelsea Tower

The Chelsea Tower on 6th Avenue just east of Main. Not sure when the ribbed concrete look came about (early 1970s?), but I like it.

The Art of Darkness

Rereading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902), with special attention to the section that begins with Marlowe travelling to France to interview for a job as a steamer captain, then south for miles and miles and miles to the "Big River," which we all know is The Congo.

This is nice:

"Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you -- smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out."

And the line that follows -- typical of the Eurowestern gaze (my italics):

"This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness."

A Received Face Fits Its Gifted Nose

Walking home after a studio visit yesterday I noticed another example of the Vancouver Mural Infestivalization, this time along 1st Avenue. Only what's this? An intervention? A received face fits its gifted nose!

Two Books

I was fortunate to get the last copy of Maru Aponte's artist book Palm Readings at the Combine Art Fair this weekend. Something about the cover reminded me of another book cover, not so much what is pictured on that other cover, but the colours they shared and the middle presence of a yellow circle. That "other" book is an old favourite of mine: Maxine Gadd's Lost Language: Selected Poems (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982).

A Poem by Robyn Schelenz from Touch the Donkey #39

WILDLIFE

Animals move in the trees
I don't know

Which trees

Or which animals

We trundle on

I laugh and say

Trees are better

Than a groundful

Of snakes

No the guide says

Snakes leap

From the trees

Oh I say

I wish my whole body

Was a shoe

Maru Aponte

Combine mounted its third art fair at Griffin Art Projects this weekend, with participation from seven galleries this year, including the Griffin.

Pale Fire Projects contributed work from two artists, one of whom, a newer artist, is Maru Aponte, who lives between Vancouver and her native Puerto Rico.

Up top is one of Aponte's smaller en plein air paintings. At bottom, a limited edition artist book, of which there were fifty, and now there are none.

Mountain View

A picture taken at Main and 27th, looking north, 4pm. The clouds that brought rains these past couple days had lifted -- just in time for sunset. I love how the winter mountains look. Sunset's pink icing.

Fiddlehead Farm

The Schreiber Farm in the 1970s, when it was a teaching medium for students of Total Education, a Vancouver-based alternative school. This is the same Powell Lake farm that Eden Express (1975) author Mark Vonnegut and his Swathmore pals purchased from the children of the Gagliardi Farm (1914-1968) in the late-1960s and, in the 1980s, was renamed Fiddlehead Farm by Linda Schreiber. The site became a hostel after the Schreibers moved on. In 2002 it was sold and logged.

Urban Landscapes

Windows to past landscapes can be found in the strangest places. The above is a section of a frame taken from a 1977 American film dubbed in German and renamed Die Hasen von San Francisco. What attracted me to this frame were the two cars in the intersection: the economical (German-made) Volkswagen and the gas-guzzling (American-made) Cadillac(?). But what stays with me is the sky. All North American west coast cities have their own version of the sky. They even write songs about them. Like this one, about Seattle.

Howdy Partner

Such a rich red. And all these signs to look at. A painting of an Indigenous man from the neck up, a story of drawings between him and the door. Who's behind this invitation to "partner up"? 

Demystify Chinatown

Banners are usually there to promote tourism, or a sense of place. These are different. As citizens we are asked to participate in the relaxation of what we think we know. Chinatown is not what we think it is. But what is it? And what does it want to be?

Pour Lore

Time is slippery. The best measure of time is the optical lattice clock, a faceless monstrosity that is useless to anyone who doesn't know how to use it. An archive is another kind of clock, though less precise, given that microseconds aren't important in the overall scheme of things.

Up top is a grab from when I Googled "glue pour." Note the disparity in the date of Robert Smithson's Glue Pour. Marian Goodman, one of the world's leading modern/contemporary art gallerists, lists the Glue Pour performance (document) as 1970, when the person who took the picture (Christos Dikeakos) says it happened in 1969. Who do we believe? Ah, it's the 21st century, so they're both right.

Pandora's Locks

Pandora's Locks feels like where New West's British store was located. If so, it's hard to imagine a locked room adventure in its place.

The British store was small and narrow. Seems these locked room games require a succession of spaces? I can't imagine it otherwise. Just thinking about it is giving me claustrophobia. 

"... the exploitation of the elegiac ..."

"One of the most interesting things about Edith Sitwell's art is the way in which all aspects of it seem to be present at every stage of her development, while at each stage one particular aspect becomes dominant. At the next stage, in the The Sleeping Beauty (1924), she turned away from satirical inventions of Façade, and devoted herself to the exploitation of the elegiac, romantic vein which she had already begun to work in Bucolic Comedies. The contrast at first sight between the world of Don Pasquito and Mr Belaker, 'the allegro, negro cocktail-shaker,' and The Soldan's Song, with its Elizabethan and Keatsian echoes, could scarcely be sharper ..." (19)

Tipperary Park

Yesterday's trip to New Westminster. Fog only added to Columbia Street's ghost town vibe.

I climbed 4th Street, stopping at Tipperary Park because of the care taken to design it. The picture I am posting here is a "better" one of the same setting I posted on the Instagram account.

Sunnyside Park

I'm never sure if this is an ash or an elm. Maybe it's neither, but I'd like to know one way or the other. 

Tomorrow I'll write a letter to the City, asking that a legend be posted, with info on these trees. There are so many different kinds. It seems intentional. Let's carry intention to its logical conclusion.

"... hard work and first class ethics ..."

It's not the insistence that Justin Trudeau is the biological son of Fidel Castro that bothers me but the belief that the biological son of a revolutionary socialist dictator is a revolutionary socialist dictator himself, which, as we know, is difficult when you're working within a bought-off liberal democracy like Canada. Also bothersome, the parenthetic annotation beside Justin's mother Margaret that reads: "(Known to have been unfaithful to Pierre Trudeau)." Women tend to be considered "unfaithful" by those in support of a patriarchy, liberated by those who aren't.

The shop where this letter-sized pamphlet hangs is the North Shore Pawn Shop on Lonsdale, near First. Here is the shop in its own words:

History

Established in 2000.

The North Shore Pawn Shop first opened its doors in April 2000, a small business in a heritage building on 1st Street and Lonsdale Avenue in North Vancouver, BC. The area was perfect for a fun shop filled with lots of trinkets and great deals, and it slowly grew into a wonderful addition to the community. Over the years, hard work and first class ethics began to pay off as the little shop began to grow in popularity as a great place to find a little bit of everything!

Fog

I love the fog. I love it for what it is, and that it will lift.

Kingsway & Clark

The former Cedar Cottage Pub site at the NE corner of Kingsway and Clark. An odd lot because its southwest corner (from where I took the picture) is about fifty feet higher than its northeast corner. Either way, the project is at grade now. Another six (or is it eight?) storeys to go.

The green arm extending across the site is a concrete supply line. The vertical red form at the left edge of the picture is a crane. A shame to see all that beautifully arranged rebar covered, but at least we'll know it's there. Those standing where I was will be saying the same of Mt. Seymour soon, once that first floor is in place, though I'm happy for those who'll be moving in. Such a beautiful view of Mt. Seymour. And on the morning of the summer solstice, the sun rising behind it.

The Instagram Museum of Art

I love this reproduction of Sammi Lynch's pastel and oil bar on paper Rolling Hills (2022). I look at it at least once a day. The energy, the racing pull of its yellow field, held together by expanding harrows.

The painting came to me via @rossiter 's August Noon account. From there, a visit to the Lynch's own account and her exploration of the Munch palette.

A Lane Just Off Commercial

The easternmost end of the lane between East 10th and 11th, just before Commercial. Not sure what this wall and razor-wire is protecting, but there's a pawn shop on that block, and pawn shops are where the desperate exchange what is dear toward what is needed.

Decline and Fall (1928)

I read a lotta Waugh when I was a schoolboy. I forget which book I started with, but I read enough of them. Decline and Fall* was his first.

Throughout his novels, Waugh demonstrates a good natured cruelty toward the Welsh, whose language and temperament he takes delight in teasing out, advancing for another fifty years various stereotypes associated with Welsh grammar and temperament.

Waugh's Paul has been made a scapegoat and sent down from Oxford a year short of completing his degree. He is hired as a master at a boy's school that, a few weeks after his arrival, hosts a sports day. A "silver band" made up of Welsh locals is booked to play on that day by the school's principal, also known as The Doctor.

"The Welsh," said the Doctor, "are the only nation in the world that has produced no graphic or plastic art, no architecture, no drama. They just sing," he said with disgust, "sing and blow down wind instruments of plated silver. They are deceitful because they cannot discern truth from falsehood, depraved because they cannot discern the consequences of their indulgence. Let us consider," he continued, "the etymological derivations of the Welsh language ..." (66)

Here's an example of that language, as spoken by Waugh's band leader:

"All the afternoon the band I have led of Men of Harlach and the sacred music too look you and they will not give me a penny more than themselves whatever. The college gentlemen whatever if it is right I ask me with a sister-in-law to support look you." (87)

* I have linked the book to its BBC radio reading. I have not listened to all of the reading, but it should be noted that the novel contains use of the "N-word" with respect to Mrs Beste-Chetwynde's companion Mr Cholmondley. My hunch is that Mr Cholmondley and any reference to him was likely left out of the audio version.

November Sunrise

Stepping out into yesterday's morning, just after seven, looking east. The leafless trees and the dying cherry, each year another limb removed and lying there. We look at it, poke it with our foot. The sunrise and the neighbour's lights.

Recover an America that no longer exits

A new cache of DVDs from the Kensington branch of the VPL. I watched two last night. The first was Journey's End (2017), a lyric poem with language game annotations concerning a British regiment on the front lines during the last six months of WWI, when more than a million young men died. Following that, another lyric poem, and maybe the last Terrence Malick film I'll ever see, called A Hidden Life (2019), a story of honour and love, both of which are writ large, with beatings (by Nazis) in the face of honour, and the usual beautifully-shot collision of lovers' bodies weaving through open fields.

Prior to Journey's End was a trailer for American Folk (2017), one of the (many) films that no one sees in theatres, at least not in my circles. From the trailer we can infer that the film is about a young man and a young woman (both folk singers) on a plane -- when suddenly the pilot announces the plane will be turning back. The reason -- 9/11. The couple are given a van by what looks like a good witch, and together they drive across an America that, according to the quote pictured up top (from Variety), "no longer exists." True enough. But whether that refers to pre- or post-contact America remains to be seen. 

Transfers

This is what a CLOSE-UP of a plate of early-1970s San Francisco brunch food looks like when shot on 8mm black-and white-film and grabbed using the SHIFT-COMMAND-4 function. 

Can You Judge a Writers Festival By Its Poster?

The last time I saw a bus shelter used for literary purposes (the Poetry in Transit program), you could barely see the poem for the program. It was an awful design, with the poem's left margin butted up against information that, along with the host organization, could have been in much smaller type and at bottom. Why can't we have the poem on a surface with an A4 ratio and nothing else around it, but at bottom?

This year's Vancouver Writer' Fest (formerly the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival) has not benefited from a shortening of its name -- for all the folky illustrations squeezed in and around it. Yes, it's clear the VWF has been tasked with promoting that parking problem known as the Granville Island Public Market, a federal project that, in 1973, marked the closure of a vender-run and probably illegal public market that opened organically around Ballantyne Pier a couple years before it, but the overall design of its poster is so cluttered as to lose any sense of dimension, the "brand" (the festival) rendered in different fonts, with "Writers" in italics no less (ugh).

As depressing as they are, posters like these tend to ignite my imagination, the trauma fantasy that has me a fly on the wall at the non-profit's design meeting, where the design team sits with taped on faces  listening to the sound of falling quarters, everybody getting their two-bits in. This is not a critique of inclusion, but a failure of leadership. The Vancouver Writers Fest would do well to hire the creative team that brought back the PNE all those years ago. It would be funding well spent.

Construction Signage

Work continues at the SW corner of Commercial Drive and East 12th Avenue. It's been so long since the application came down that I forget what the building will look like. Judging from the hole, maybe five storeys?

Curious about the head: a mullet with sideburns. If it were geared at construction workers, the head would be helmeted. So it's for us, not them.

The sticker on the "YOUR" is interesting. It too brings to mind sound levels.

Amazon Studios

The artist collective Slavs & Tatars began as a book club. The online Borg that is Amazon began as a book distributor. Books have given us so much, and continue to give, if not indirectly. Amazon is now a movie "studio", and uses a movie theatre to tell us that.

Trout Lake Townhomes

A Commercial Drive display suite for Trout Lake Townhomes. You don't usually see offices like these so far removed from the site. Could it be that there is nothing standing where these townhomes will be? 

"The Cut" is mentioned -- The Cut being that section of earth and rock blasted away to make way for the railway, with the detritus from those blasts helping to fill-in that part of False Creek from Main Street to Clark Drive, at the western end of which stands Union Station (the "Union" here being that of the Canadian Northern Railway and America's Great Northern Railway).

As for the headline -- "Discover the Nature of the East" -- the play on words is "East" for "Beast", though apart from market developers, there isn't much that is beastly in this part of the city. In fact, I'd be willing to bête on it.

Northeast Corner of St. Catherine's & 19th

Never noticed how grey this house is. 

A Portrait of Self-Censorship

I wanted to make a portrait of self-censorship, so I sidled up to a mirror and used my phone as a censor bar.

Phoenix Rising

It's early August. Just as my sunflower's face is forming, a squirrel or raccoon attacks it, beheads it. I reach for its trunk, to pull it from the ground, then stop myself. "Look at those leaves," Audrey pointed out when I showed her its picture a couple weeks before. "They're huge." That was reason enough to keep it. Two reasons.

Yesterday Audrey's mom asked how the leaves were doing and I took a picture and passed it on. While doing so, I noticed that where once there was a head, now there is -- a bird? Or I don't know, that shrugging emoji made with punctuation? What's that thing called again? That thing, but without a head.

Les Amantes (1958)

We're in France. Dijon, not Paris. Dijon is where Jeanne Tournier lives with her husband, a newspaper publisher. Like Madame Bovary, she craves the centre, and spends every second weekend in Paris with her friend Maggy, a Kardashian type, and the Spanish polo player Maggy has set her up with. 

The scene above takes place after dinner at the Tourniers, back when the bourgeoisie sat in libraries sipping cognac and flipping through books. That's Jeanne whispering in Maggy's ear, and below them, Maggy's words from the previous conversation. Also in the picture: Jeanne's husband, the polo player and the fellow who picked up Jeanne after her car broke down, the one she eventually runs off with -- "Frightened, but with no regrets."

A Bit Arch, Doncha Think?

Someone thought an arch was needed. Or wanted. As in, I want one. I want an arch. My house looks like it could have one, so it should have one -- because it looks better that way? A greeter version of my house that says, As soon as you step onto my property, you are in my house? Are these the right questions to ask? I ask them to relax. All too often an arch begets a fence. 

Una Taquería

The Burrow is the new name of the dead-named Banditas, a Vegican restaurant that opened fifteen years ago and was so full of Fuck you, dude energy I couldn't get enough of it. A great place to go and behave.

And then, a couple years ago, the name change. Not the first name change in light of our changing times -- a Toronto literary publisher did the same a few years before it, when it thought BookThug implied exactly what it hoped it implied when it started in 2003 and dropped the "T" for the asterisk. Thus, Book*hug was born.

Of all the associated names Banditas could have chosen (The Donkey, The Mule, The Ass), it chose The Burrow. The Burrow. Like the awning says: THE/ BUR/ ROW.

Try the Mixed Walnut Lentil Enchilada!

Lucky Trio's Lucky Voice (1968)

Some new vinyl at AA Furniture & Appliances. The one above stood out because I've always had a thing for that lighter green, and because the Lucky Trio appears to be a quintet.

Jelly Strainer Set

I was in North Vancouver early for Sunday's panel.

Slowing down helped. I found an SPCA Thrift Store.

Once inside, the usual rush that comes with something new. Unfortunately nothing of interest, apart from a couple of ottomans; neither of them perfect, but if I could take from each of them, toward a new one ...

The weirdest thing was the strainer. Note what it says on the price tag: EATON.

Raindrops at an Exhibition

I was going to write about the event pictured above but can't seem to do so without going on a rant, so I'll leave it as is: a picture for your words, not mine.

de Courcys

His name is Johnny de Courcy and I came to know (of) him through an archived performance of the Rolling Stones' "Dandelion" that I included in a 2015 "e-flux conversations" response piece. 

I met Johnny last night at Pale Fire Projects, where his brother William was playing piano and giving voice to some of The Bible's Psalms. When William wasn't playing, Johnny seamlessly slipped in, took his brother's place. 

What a joy it was to meet these two remarkable brothers, whose sister Anna, a visual artist and designer, I have known for years now, not to mention a father, Michael, who I met briefly while at work on Ruins in Process but know of as a key figure in Vancouver's Intermedia (1967-1973). Michael made an important serial work based on photos of The Lions, or what we more commonly call The Two Sisters today.

“One privately blind writer who wrote keenly through the eyes of others”

Did I post something on Wes Anderson's latest film Asteroid City (2023)? I think I did. It's easy to find out if I did. But who has the time! I know I do. I have the time. Though your time is another matter.

Fair to say that you either like appreciate Wes Anderson's films or you don't? ("There are two responses," says the improvised Anderson narrator, "each of them unacceptable.")

For all its aggravations, Anderson's Asteroid City behaved in a way that made visible its narrative thread oxygen tube. With his previous The French Dispatch (2021), a film only the New Yorker loved because it was modelled after it, attempts at an oxygen tube (voice-over) are secondary to the auteur's interminably long and aimless section portraits. Sadly, these are not portraits as Gertrude Stein would have written them, but as the fictive French Dispatch magazine writers would have posed for them.

What is The French Dispatch but a collection of Joseph Cornell boxes given to Mattel to make from them a Gypsy Barbie Caravan? It contains the usual Anderson fantasy of instant histories, attention-getting idiosyncrasies, because-I-can tableaux and adverbs ("... privately ... keenly ...") ad nauseam -- at times sounding as if Evelyn Waugh, fresh from one of his sleep medication nightmares, had written for Dr. Seuss. Of course the Dispatch is set in the French town of Ennui. Of course it's first section is a teen digest-version of Godard's La Chinoise (1967). Of course I had to stop watching after the first sixty minutes -- despite my crush on Léa Seydoux.

Alors. Eh bien. C'est dommage.