Sunday, October 31, 2021

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)


My favourite Bond film is On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I saw the film first as a seven-year-old, one of the half dozen or so films my father took me to because he wanted to see them.

I recognized the Countessa (Diana Rigg) from television's The Avengers (1961-1969), and I think that was the moment I learned that people in movies are not their characters, only the jobs they take, like the job that took my father from our house at 5:30am weekday mornings because the New York and Toronto stock exchanges opened at 6am Pacific time.

Since that first screening (at the Dunbar Theatre, where I recently saw the latest Bond film, No Time to Die) I have seen OHMSS a half dozen times, and this time what struck me most was how badly it was dubbed, Bond's parts in particular. A leading reason why might relate to how badly one-time-only Bond George Lazenby was alleged to have behaved on set. Bond's post-production voice carries equal parts condescension, diffidence, frustration and disdain.

Bond franchise holder Albert R. Broccoli once said that Lazenby, at his best, was the ideal Bond, and I thought so too as a seven-year-old. But what did I know? I had never seen a Bond film before. Nor did I have any desire to see the next one (Diamonds Are Forever, 1971) after learning that Diana Rigg would not be in it. "Her character was killed," said my father, to which I replied, "Yes, but not the person who played her!"

Saturday, October 30, 2021

Made/Unmade


A couple weeks ago Monte Clark Gallery opened an eight picture exhibition by the lens-based artist Stephen Waddell, entitled Made/Unmade.

Given the design of the gallery's main display room, viewers are encouraged to move counter-clockwise, and so it is that we experience on the east and north walls a pair of delaminated circular tables, the hollow insides of figurative statuary (front and back?) and a forgotten graveyard featuring a more solid form of (granite) statuary -- in this instance, a kneeling, grieving figure, head bowed. 

Moving to the west wall, a picture of an art school hallway, where against its high walls lean paintings, presumably made over the course of an academic year. On the same west wall, a young worker untangling a piece of rope at what looks like Vancouver's Jericho Sailing Club. On the south wall is a single picture, this one of a dead-faced figure, mid-40s, alone on a chain carousel as it swings clockwise towards us.

Both the exhibition title and its counter-clockwise orientation suggest an undoing. The tables were made, and functioned as such (socially circular) until something (a flood?) brought about their decay. As for the two hollow statues, are they halves of a single statue (halved for what reason?), or were they designed to stand "proud" from a wall, their hollowness or incompletion hidden? As for the monumental grave marker, it is categorically less the subject of its picture than its signifier: a graveyard, yes, but a landscape first and foremost.  

That the first two walls carry the petit genre troika of still-life (tables), portraiture (hollow statues) and landscape (graveyard) has bearing on how I process Waddell's art school hallway. If not of the petit genres, does this art school scene, then, belong to something grand -- like a history painting? And if so, the history of what? The past school year? The past year of COVID? Or because the work is double dated (2012-2021), the past nine years, a decade that has seen a shift not only in political economy, but in technology, ethics and aesthetics? Is this decade the knot our young worker is trying disentangle, unmake, make sense of, or is it something this worker has unconsciously succumbed to? Is this decade what haunts the eyes of the figure on the chain carousel, someone insanely conscious of what has transpired, to the point where this figure can no longer go on in any direction, but in circles?

Made/Unmade closes November 13th. Please see it.

Friday, October 29, 2021

Finding Nothing


Gregory Betts's Finding Nothing: the Vangardes, 1959-1975 (Toronto: U of T, 2021) arrived last month. I have just finished the 110 page "Introduction" (roughly 34.5% of the book) and am stimulated enough to review it. Not here, but for Ormsby

Michael Morris's The Problem of Nothing (1966, in gouache; 1967, in acrylic) makes a nice cover, no? I thought so when I chose it for the cover of my SFU Gallery exhibition pamphlet in 2010. Ray Johnson thought enough of it (reproduced in a 1968 issue of Artforum) that he cut it up, collaged it and sent it back to Morris, with an invitation to participate in his correspondence art project. I expect someone will see fit to use it again at some point. A problem that keeps on giving.

Thursday, October 28, 2021

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)


"The world is changing," intones Saruman before his crystal ball. The scene is from The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, released on December 19, 2001, soon to be twenty years ago, though it feels like it has been around forever.

The change Saruman announces is not an observation but a desire, a product of his own unrelenting will. For those unfamiliar with Tolkien's books, we don't know why Saruman wants the world to change, only that change is not good but evil -- an evil designed to wipe out Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits and Men. Only Orks are welcome in this changed world, and one wonders why?

I have never read the Tolkien trilogy (I read The Hobbit when I was eleven), so I wonder how much attention Tolkien gives to Orks and Ork culture in his books. Presumably a lot, given his interest in history. But what are these Orks if not workers and soldiers, mostly male-like (the one instance where a female-like Ork appears is on the battlefield, and is of a higher rank). As for Ork ambitions, they seem limited to following orders -- mining metals, making mega-Orks, going to battle. In the two or three scenes where Orks are amongst themselves, they sip gruel, bicker, fight each other -- over stuff.

The first Lord of the Rings book was published in the summer of 1954, a year-and-a-half after the death of Joseph Stalin. Did Tolkien have Stalin and his alleged dictatorship of the proletariat in my mind when he thought up Saruman and his Orks? As for his Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits and Men, all belong to a feudal mode of production. Somewhere between the two, in the evolutionary middle, is a liberal democracy that had yet to be invented, implemented.

Among the changes in my lifetime is a liberal democracy that has lost the ability to present itself as the antithesis of evil while at the same time doing evil things under the guise of freedom and liberty (neoliberalism), usually in the service of that one-percent who control most of the world's wealth. People are wise to call bullshit on it, but what is the alternative? Trumpism? Putinism? Chinese state capitalism? In the Black Panther franchise, subjects are happy under a king. Same too of Tolkien's subjects. Is there a middle anymore? In anything? A Middle Earth, as it were?

Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Fall Titles


I don't know where to begin (and wonder if I should begin at all) with this Publisher's Weekly ad. Curious, I went to the Simon & Schuster website, and found this: 

Poop is a normal kid, with normal problems— you know, parents, homework, bullies. He used to have a normal name, too. But then he moved to a new school, and everything went down the toilet. That’s the bad news. The good news: Turns out some names are special. Some names come with powers. Turns out those bullies really stepped in it.

SOMETIMES BEING A KID CAN REALLY STINK.

Will Poupé becomes the new target of bullies at his middle school. All day long, they call him Poop. However, when Icky the Janitor reveals himself to be a wizard in disguise, Will learns that there are Names of Power – if you are given one of these names, you gain certain abilities. Poop is one of those names. He now has powers that he could use to get back at the bullies! But power – even poop power – is exactly what can turn someone into a bully. With some help from his friends, Will must find a way to use his fantastic farting magic for good.

An original graphic novel.

Okay, I get it. Turning what's imposed on you into a super power. But as with any power comes negative consequences, potentially turning the avenger into an oppressor -- or in this case, a well-intentioned book into a loaded weapon. 

Poop is an allegory, but unlike the word it alludes to, its word is in general use and is accepted when describing a certain bodily function, whereas the allusive word has a hateful history and can only be used by those it is hurled at.

Would I give this book to a child, as a tool of antiracism? No. Would I give it to a child in an effort to help them understand why it might have the opposite effect? God no! (Talk about digging an even deeper hole!) Does Poop come with a teaching guide? I would hope so. And if so, that's the book I'd like to read. 

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Semiotic Weapons: the "Nerf or Nothing" Ultimatum


The Toys R Us catalogue arrived yesterday. As usual, it is filled with models -- kids playing with toys in an effort to excite interest in them. Only this time it is exclusively BIPOC kids pointing the guns ("blasters"), and never at each other. Who or what is their out-of-frame target? And why are these kids always smiling. It's all so -- hopeful? 

Check out the ad copy:

The satisfying "ka-chunk" of re-loading. The "pop" of foam darts. And the belly-deep shouts and laughs that come from ducking, dodging, and chasing after opponents. You don't have to be a kid to enjoy blowing off some steam with this fast-paced indoor or outdoor blaster battle -- you just have to join in the fray.

What is the significance of this ad? What does it signify? Inclusion? Or is it as "simple" as a target market -- getting BIPOC parents of BIPOC kids to buy more "blasters"? 

Monday, October 25, 2021

Today's Weather



The coast is windy, says the news. At first it was a local story: record low barometric pressure, a "bomb cyclone" made up of hurricane force winds and rain. A couple hours later it led off the national news. N
ow it is an international story with reports of an "atmospheric river" so powerful that it has turned San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge from a work of transportation infrastructure into the world's largest wind chime.

How many MFA students will be out there today capturing its sounds for future projects -- from those eager to catalogue its tones (the minimalist) to those (expressionists) who need only a three-to-five second clip to abstract into something even further removed from its source? 

Sunday, October 24, 2021

Salt Spring National Art Prize Gala


We drove to Horseshoe Bay for the 7:30 am Nanaimo ferry. After docking, south to Crofton, for the ferry to Vesuvius, Salt Spring Island. Once landed we stopped at Glen's, to drop off a dog, then to Pod to say hi to Helen, get a gift for Danny at a nearby shop, then a quick walk through Mahon Hall to see the SSNAP exhibition before picking up some groceries and heading to Danny's, where we were staying.

Some fine work on display, in addition to Marcel Dumont's remarkable The Mission Indian Day School (2012), which I previewed here and was convinced would take the top prize. Over half the show was devoted to painting, much of it in the realist style. My favourite was another work that didn't get any prize-winning love, Laura Rosengren's 36"x48" oil on wax panel Welder (n.d.).  

The gala that evening was a gently friendly affair, with many of the artists in attendance, some of whom I spoke with alongside the indefatigable organizers and volunteers who have worked hard to raise the profile of this biannual event.

Tired now after our equally circuitous return, via Fulford Harbour (pictured up top) and Swartz Bay. The wind picked up around 1:30 pm, as predicted, though it died down just as quick. Tomorrow the storm will return full force, but I will be home and dry.

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Reflections


I've checked the angles and still don't understand how the lamps inside reflect in the glass door that looks onto the garden.

Friday, October 22, 2021

St. Mawr (1925) 3


As mentioned, I started D.H. Lawrence's St Mawr last month, and am only now reaching its end. That's what reading five pages a night will do. Five pages from a 1953 Vintage paperback, which is like ten pages by today's printings.

After a hundred pages in England, Lou Witt and her mother are now back in their native U.S., having left their ranch in Texas for New Mexico, in an effort to recharge themselves. Like many women in Lawrence's novellas and stories ("The Woman Who Rode Away", "Sun", etc.), malaise gives way to a journey of self-discovery, which in turn gives way to stand alone scenes like the one I read last night, after Lou visits a ranch for sale and, upon first seeing it, decides "This is the place." 

With ten pages left, and the clock about to strike 11pm, I set aside my book and turned on the radio to hear the CBC news. At the top of the news: death on a film set in New Mexico, where a western was being shot. A "prop gun" discharged, killing the cinematographer and wounding the director. On the other side of the gun, the actor Alec Baldwin, who can be seen on this morning's CNN site crying outside a sheriff's office. My god. What a nightmare. Making matters worse, CCN's coverage, where the "entertainment" reporter, in an effort to hitch us to this story, recalls a judge's recent order that Baldwin take an anger management course after punching another man in an argument over a parking spot.

Disgusted, I clicked on another story, any story, which turned out to be coverage of Rudy Giuliani's handmade attack ad on gubernatorial candidate Terry McAulliffe, which has the politician-turned-performance artist appearing through a digital filter as Abraham Lincoln. 

Some years ago I felt as Lou Witt did and left Vancouver for a friend's ranch in the Okanagan, where he allowed me to keep a trailer in exchange for chores. This too was the place. Until it wasn't. Now I'm back in Vancouver, reminded once more of Baudelaire's great conundrum, waiting until bedtime, when I can read how St Mawr turns out. 

Thursday, October 21, 2021

Believe Her


Did I hear the Believer is shutting down? No, I read it on someone's Twitter feed, and a couple days later the "mainstream" media arrived with their fact-checked stories. The L.A. Times carried the first story I read, and honestly, I had no idea -- I thought the magazine was run by Dave Eggers from an apartment on San Francisco's Valencia Street, not by an institute at a Las Vegas university.

Times change. In 2004 the Believer reviewed a book of mine, and after reading the L.A. Times story I went looking for it (online). The first thing I noticed was that the person who wrote the review had changed too. Changed names, that is. I won't tell you her dead name, because that's not on. Let's just say that she has always been Garielle (Lutz), but it wasn't until recently that she published under that name.

For those unfamiliar with Garielle Lutz, here is her 2009 essay, "The Sentence is a Lonely Place". Weed it and reap!

Wednesday, October 20, 2021

Le Baiser de l'Hôtel de Ville (1950)


Doisneau's famous picture, cropped. If Doisneau were alive, would he have allowed it -- the focus on what our eyes are drawn to anyway: the kiss? the kissers? Doisneau might not have been the kind of photographer who minds if his work is cropped, or has text laid over it, if it means selling more books.

No one pays attention to the kissers, and this gives the kissers an invisibility that makes them timeless, their passion eternal. That's one explanation. Another has it that those surrounding the kissers are too preoccupied with their own postwar lives to care, and if two people appear to stop in the street to kiss like that, then the country is healing. Indeed, from kisses like this come children, some of whom might have stood on that very spot eighteen years later, not with kisses but with fists, pictures.

photo: Bruno Barbey

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Night's Black Veil


Writing behind night's black veil, knowing that today will be sun-filled, our first glimpse of snow on the North Shore mountains -- Grouse, Seymour, and the one NBC insisted be re-named Cypress Mountain for the 2010 Winter Olympics because Cypress Bowl sounds too much like a toilet, or a stadium where Americans play football. I'm still not over that -- an American media outfit telling us to rename something, and us agreeing to it.

Monday, October 18, 2021

George, the Parasite (2020)


In August JA sent me an email asking for my address so he could send me a copy of S F Ho's George, the Parasite (Montreal: SPEC/FIC, 2020) because he thought of me when he read it. Not what's written, but how. So rare to hear people talk about "how" anymore. Everything is outcome-oriented, writing being the means.

Ho's book begins with means in the form of an "all day" walk, with no mention of a destination. Or maybe I should give you the opening paragraph, so you can read it for yourself:

"Two people go for a walk together and they walk all day. There are so many things to see and these things shift constantly as they [the walkers? these "things"? both?] move through space and time. When they get tired of walking they squat on a curb outside of a gas station. The gas station sells coffee and cups of lukewarm green tea. George orders tea while his companion orders coffee."

Sunday, October 17, 2021

New York Times Crossword


Lovers of the NY Times Crossword know that it begins on Monday and grows more difficult as the week progresses -- until Sunday, when the puzzle is twice as big, yet whose level of difficulty is the same as Thursday's. Recently I've noticed more multiple word answers in the Thursday puzzle, making it closer to Friday and Saturday's puzzles, where two and three word answers are common.

Something else I've noticed is how poorly I fair on clues drawn from popular culture -- from the 1# song of 2006 to secondary characters from recent Netflix series. Answers to these clues are arrived at only through induction, based on what can and cannot happen linguistically between letters supplied by the answers that cross the space provided.

My interest in the puzzle began when I was fifteen, when popular culture was all I knew and my mother, who was addicted to the puzzle, would call out from the den, "Karen of 'Five Easy Pieces'!" or "Soul's Barry, five letters, middle letter 'I"!" and I would shout back "Black" and "White," respectively. Like my mother, I too was addicted to the puzzle until my mid-forties. We have the pandemic to thank for returning us to it.

Saturday, October 16, 2021

Rome (2005-2007)


The lumpy mirrors of Ancient Rome, circa 50 BC, from the nicely written, finely-detailed HBO series Rome. The mirror on the left displays the distorted image of Servilia of the Junii, played by the ravishing Lindsay Duncan; the mirror to the right, the cameraperson? 

I purchased the first season of Rome at the SPCA Thrift Store on Victoria Drive. A few days later, at AA Furniture & Appliance, Anthony Birley's Life in Roman Britain (1964), which begins with Caesar's invasion of England in 55 BC, two years before his legions crushed Gaul, when Rome in fact begins.

There is a great quote from Tacitus (b. 56 AD) in Birley's book, one reminiscent of the method successful colonizers use when taming those they've invaded:

"In his second winter [Gnaeus Julius] Agricola made a particular point of encouraging the erection of public buildings and the education in the liberal arts of the sons of leading Britons. 'The result,' Tacitus sardonically comments, 'was to create a fashion for porticoes, baths and elegant banquets, which the ignorant provincials called civilization, when it was in fact part of their servitude.'"

Friday, October 15, 2021

Signet Paperbacks


Rolf has an excellent collection of Signet paperbacks he has saved for their gorgeous covers, some of them designed by Milton Glaser, best-known for the 1966 Dylan poster that came tucked inside Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits (1967). Recently, while looking through Rolf's collection, I noticed a title and author I had not heard of before, and then the image, which I misread at first glance.

Without knowing anything of its story, it appears there is something coming between the man and woman who are not the subject of the artist's landscape. What that something is is at first glance what it looks like, and that is a phallus and testes.

Years ago, when the painter's easel was a more common sight than it is today, we would have recognized the easel and thought no more about it (the visible part of the easel is what's referred to as the "front vertical member"). Or if we thought anything, we might have thought about the relationship between the man and the woman facing each other and the artist before them.

A love triangle? Sure. But why is the artist painting a landscape and not the couple? Probably to signify that the couple and the artist, though pictured together, are not literally in the same place at the same time. So rare to see covers back then representing two realities, not one.

Thursday, October 14, 2021

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2014)


Hilary Mantel is one of those names forever afloat in the writersphere, a writer who participates in more than a couple of literary genres and has pet fascinations with the history of her people, most notably the low-born Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII's fixer before Cromwell's own fixing in 1540.

I knew of Mantel's interests before reading her, and I am reading her now -- a 2014 collection of stories I picked up at the East Hastings Value Village, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Yet another instance of the author making something (lethal) of power -- what it does to ye, what ye get for wading into it.

The opening story, "Sorry to Disturb", is set in Saudi Arabia, where the narrator's husband (like Mantel's own? a geologist?) has been sent. Until recently, we would read this story for what transpires between the narrator and the Arabic-speaking "Asian" man who comes to her door for assistance, and from then on makes a succession of return visits (I am reminded of the janitor in Alice Munro's early short story "The Office"), but since 2016 or so many more of us read to see how a white woman writes about a white woman living with her white husband in an autocratic Islamic country.

I have nine pages left in this 36-page story, and so far my marginalia is focused not on Mantel the storyteller but on Mantel the anthropologist. In one instance, while the narrator is sweeping up the street dust that blows against her apartment door, she relates how her "male Saudi neighbour would come down from the first floor on the way out to his car and step over my brushstrokes without looking at me, his head averted." Her explanation? "He was according me invisibility, as a mark of respect to another man's wife."

A couple pages later, when she foreshadows the bad end that comes of her "relationship" with her accidental visitor, she writes: "This is where it began to go wrong -- my feeling that I must bare out the national character he had given me, and that I might not slight him or refuse a friendship, in case he thought it was because he was a Third Country National."

But is the narrator wrong in this respect? Or is she simply an empathetic person who would break from her writing (the narrator is also a writer) to indulge someone who originally called on her out of need? Would it have been "better" for her to remind the caller of the inappropriateness of his visits, given that her husband is always out when he stops by? Or would that have been too scary? Scary for whatever wrath her refusal might incur (more than English condescension) or scary because she would be speaking not as an autonomous human being but as someone else's wife?

Wednesday, October 13, 2021

"Your Family, We Care"


Vincent, Monty and Daniel are agents at Pacific Evergreen Realty, Ltd., the company behind a land assembly designed to attract developers who build within an inch of what's permissible under local bylaws. Whether this build will be market, rental or social housing is to be determined. One thing we do know is that Monty and Daniel have gmail accounts, while Vincent is sticking with yahoo. 

Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Laneway Mission


On the walk I take east on 19th to Fleming, then south one block to 20th and east again to the lane just east of Victoria Drive, then south again, there is a community kitchen (fridge and pantry). Unlike those downtown missions where you have to sit through a sermon before you're allowed to eat their food, this de-peopled operation, consistent with the times we are living in, operates at the level of instant gratification/signification. You know the food is safe because the cops have too much power.

Monday, October 11, 2021

No Time to Die (2021)

The Bond film was dull but symbolically loaded. The biggest threat to Bond was not the usual run of villains (the Dr. No-like Lyutsifer Safin), but the increased presence of Black women (Moneypenny, Nomi as the new Agent 007) and LGBTQ+ (Q) staff at Her Majesty's Secret Service. Bond's death at the end is the (symbolic) end of white heterosexual patriarchy.

Sunday, October 10, 2021

Ironside (1967)


A couple months ago I purchased a stack of dvds from the VGH Thrift Store. Among them was the James Goldstone-directed, made-for-TV movie that kicked off the Ironside series that ran on the NBC network from 1967 to 1975. I grew up watching Ironside, but had never seen how it began, with the gruff San Francisco Chief of Detectives holidaying at a colleague's chicken farm where, after feeding the chickens, he is shot from a great distance and, once discovered by a neighbouring farmer, is taken to a Catholic hospital and told by his doctor that he will be able to do everything he did prior to his injury, "but without the use of your legs."

Upon return to his workplace, Ironside is told by the SFPD Commissioner that his job is no longer his, but that his pension will be adequate. Insistent that he continue his work (we're not clear on what it is that Ironside does, apart from giving rousing speeches and quizzing people), the Commissioner offers him an assistant desk job position, but that he will have to forego his pension to take it. Ironside proposes that he work for the SFPD as a volunteer, a special projects consultant, as it were, and asks for a floor in an underused police building, which he turns into a home office and fills with cans of beef stew, and that he be given an old police truck, repurposed to meet his needs.

He also asks for, and receives, two younger assistants, a man and woman, both of whom he had mentored and, in an interesting turn, convinces a young Black man whom he had put away (and who admits to wanting to see Ironside dead) to drive his truck, push his wheelchair and put him to bed at night "You want me to be your boy," says the young man, and Ironside replies, "No, I want you to by my legs," as if demanding someone's body parts in exchange for room, board and the forgiveness of an $8.35 debt can be rationalized, with Ironside's disability equal to the racialization the young man experiences every minute of his waking life.  

With his office in place, his truck converted and his crew assembled, Ironside sets off to solve his first case: finding the person who shot him.

I have to admit, I found the Ironside character compelling, a polymath contrarian humbled, but not impeded, by injury. I also enjoyed the movie's various locations, one of which is a sculptor's studio, another a beatnik club that features a performance by Tiny Tim, who, for a Sixties moment, was everywhere. When Ironside finally catches up to the shooter, we know him as a 20-year-old former child prodigy who, at 13, published a poem in something called the National Quarterly, but whose father thought that queer and sent him to a military prep school, where whatever mental health issues he had were exacerbated. It was also at this school that he carried on an affair with his art teacher, the aforementioned sculptor, who was bitter the shooter left her for someone his own age and, in response to Ironside reminding her of that, tries to kill him with an acetylene torch.

Still reading? Good. I have one more thing to say about the Ironside movie, and that is the editing (credited to E.C. Williams, though I cannot find hide nor hair of him online). It's rather unconventional for 1967 network television, with all sorts of forward-back metric patterning, similar in style to what Alejandro Jodorowsky employs in his early films, and Dennis Hopper in his film, Easy Rider (1969). 

There is nothing easy about Ironside's ride, wheelchairs being what they were back then. But that began to change with so many young men returning from Vietnam with spinal cord injuries. How many of these young men watched Ironside while recuperating at Walter Reed Hospital? How many of them looked to Ironside for inspiration? 


Saturday, October 9, 2021

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)


Tomorrow I'm going to the matinee screening of the new Bond film at the Dunbar Theatre. The last time I was inside a movie theatre was February 2020. The last time I was in the Dunbar Theatre was in 1972, for a first-run screening of The Legend of Boggy Creek, a film whose TV trailer scared my mother so much she took my ten-year-old self and my eight-year-old sister with her -- for protection!

Friday, October 8, 2021

A Response

How am I? you ask.

Things are well enough. Yesterday I donned this year's autumn ensemble -- built around a near-mint condition, early-1970s rusty gold Leonardo sports coat I found at the Victoria Drive Value Village last month -- and set off for Main Street, where I purchased four bagels, a couple of indoor succulent plants to befriend through winter and a recording of Bach's Italian Concerto, because I was convinced I wouldn't get through the week without hearing the 1985 Hong Kong recording of its "Andante", on the Naxos label.

I should add that there's been a lot of death in my life of late. This week it was -- to old age -- a good friend's 98-year-old father; to COVID, a well-known architect and art gallerist named Andrew Gruft (he and Claudia Beck opened Nova, the first contempo photo gallery on the west coast, which debuted Jeff Wall's Destroyed Room, 1978); to fentanyl, the 32-year-old daughter of a friend who battled addiction; and to the incompatibility of Millennial rage/Boomer incredulity, Canadian Art, our country's ostensible visual art magazine of record since its inception in 1967, when it went by the name of artscanada

Today's pretty much a full-tilt writing day, where I craft texts for an art magazine that previews upcoming exhibitions based partly on press materials. I choose to write these texts as if I am present at the exhibitions, a fiction known to those who know me as a writer of fiction, criticism and song, which is just how I like it.

Other than that (or in addition to that) I am fine.

Thanks for asking.

Thursday, October 7, 2021

Sophie

Susan emailed last night to tell me of her daughter Sophie's passing and the circumstances that lead to it. Sophie was in her early-thirties, the author of many personal struggles, the kind that add years to the lives of those who carry them, similar to the way scholars carry books, or slaves their masters. 

Sophie made an impression on me during my 2010 visit to the islands of Haida Gwaii, one that has stayed with me long after my return to the mainland. I cannot begin to imagine her life, but I sense her mortal struggle, the energy it required of her and the incredible strength she brought to it.

I felt this strength the moment we met, and it sharpened my perception of the islands as we walked into town from Copper Beech House, taking the beach path back, where we picked sea asparagus, and Sophie spotted agates like an eagle spots a salmon from a hundred feet up.

Some years later, after hearing from Adele that Sophie was having a difficult time, I walked downtown not to look for her, but to be present for her, energetically present, in the same way our energies combined on that walk, and over dinner with the inn's other guests, the Belgians, whom she charmed, of course. At one point I got weepy and leaned against a building. A cop walked up and asked if I was using. I laughed because Sophie would have seen the path in that.

Sophie, like her father Stephen, are closest to that which many of us strive for. Susan fell in love with Stephen's writing in a way that led her to him, for completion. Sophie embodied a completion that is impossible for us to comprehend, let alone endure, because we are unwilling or unable to connect with that which leads to it, burdened as we are by the material world.

As spirits, Sophie and her father have always had it, which is why I speak of their spirits in the present. Sophie's gift is presence, improvisation, generosity and love. I will miss her, mourn her. For the rest of my life I will revel in her energy -- and presence! I can hardly wait to see her again.

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Westin Bayshore Objet d'Art


As far back as I can remember 2352 West 41st Avenue was Oh Brothers!, a craft shop that specialized in handmade ceramic pots. Then a string of used clothing stores until a year ago, when the new owner switched to books, CDs, DVDs and knickknacks.

I was there last week and came upon a 5"-high mass produced ceramic vase(?) -- what looks like Vancouver's Science World but has "The Westin Bayshore Vancouver" impressed on its underside.

The tag said $5, and that seemed reasonable. When I took it to the till the owner said it was donated from Refind (on Main Street) "and," he added, "let's just peel off my tag and see what they were charging. Ah, they wanted twenty for it!"

A funny thing to look at, but I'm sure I'll get bored with it eventually, like the last person who had it. Maybe I'll give it to Neil Wedman for Xmas. Seems up his alley.

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Thanksgiving Week


Nothing says fall for me like the week leading up to (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend, especially the first big rain, when leaves hanging by a thread are brought to the ground. Ask me in spring what I think of when I think of fall and I will tell you golden maple leaves against a cloudless blue sky. If asked this past summer, during June's horrific "heat dome", what I thought I might never see again -- and was craving to see -- I would have said the rain forest, the Vancouver I grew up in. 


Monday, October 4, 2021

Names and Naming


We love naming more than names, and some of us strive to coin them, as if names suffice, though they can, shedding light on the idea that is said to be represented by the thing that gets said, where once cued we step up the ladder (of false consciousness?). But with every naming comes a death, an edge, a hard line made where once there wasn't; the idea reified, defiled, the remnant tossed and now unrecognizable from its source. There's a word for what gets tossed, and that's dross.

Trump's presidency seemed designed to upend the very system that elected him (the byzantine electoral college process that brought him into power, which he didn't seem to mind, and the one that saw him out, which he did), leading many to argue as if in favour of a liberal democracy we know is contradictory, hypocritical and arrogantly so, rife with Clintons and Bushes. The alternative? A despot, the kind only a confessional poet can reduce: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you."? (Sylvia Plath, "Daddy", 1960). Or a king, like we have in Black Panther.

Alberta premier Jason Kinney appears to have deployed a similar tactic during his current term. After all, what better way to install a private healthcare system than to create an environment where your federally-subsidized public healthcare system is in tatters and requires military intervention. Because that's what Kinney seems to be doing with his ill-timed lifting of restrictions designed to prevent the transmission of COVID-19 and its variants, not to mention his most recent idea: a 3% wage rollback for Alberta nurses.

So a name to describe these actions, more so than a name to describe those who foment and perpetrate them. What word or words can we summon to reduce complexities into manageable rungs? Or is it pointless to try? As another poet once wrote (as prose): "I can't go on, I'll go on." (Beckett, The Unnamable, 1959).

Sunday, October 3, 2021

"The thing to avoid"


The Unnamable (1958) is the third of three novels by Samuel Beckett often published together by Grove as Three Novels, the other two being Malloy (1955) and Malone Dies (1956). My thanks to The Paper Hound for ordering this book for me and, my god, delivering it to my door!

I intended to read (all of) The Unnamable after Vivian Gornick mentions it near the end of The Odd Woman and the City (2015), when an aging actor friend choses to recite a segment of it for his final public performance -- only it wasn't The Unnamable from which Gornick's actor recites an excerpt (my mistake), but Beckett's Texts for Nothing (1959). Here's the line that struck me: "No need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough."

Of course I didn't realize this until now, so there's no going back; why waste the electricity? Instead, a little piece of The Unnamable, a bit near the beginning, from the centre of the second paragraph:

"Where there are people, it is said, there are things. Does this mean that when you admit the former you must admit the latter? Time will tell. The thing to avoid, I don't know why, is the spirit of system." (286).

Saturday, October 2, 2021

Elaine May & Mike Nichols


A couple days ago I submitted my review of Dodie Bellamy's new book Bee Reaved to Duchamp's Socks, where it will be published next week in advance of the book's October 19th release. During my last draft I cut out a couple lines that described Bellamy and her partner Kevin Killian as a cross between two other show business double acts who, at one point, were couples -- Elaine May & Mike Nichols and (Jerry) Stiller & (Anne) Meara -- with Dodie, who can appear uncomfortable under the camera's red glare, as Stiller, and Kevin, whose fascination with show business is legendary, as May. Stiller & May. But I saw no point in situating Bellamy and Killan this way, particularly since no one under 55 would know who these double acts were, despite the fact that all four went on to have successful careers as actors and directors.

While looking for links I came across a fascinating 2006 conversation between May and Nichols, who, at their advanced age, remain fearless, particularly on the topic of how films get made, from the studio heads and their egos to the people who light the sets. Among the films that they discuss are May's Ishtar (1987) and one that Nichol's started but abandoned after the fifth day of shooting, only to be made years later by another director and released to great praise.  

Friday, October 1, 2021

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)


Before she came to Paris with the author of her autobiography (a literary portraitist, among other kinds of writer), Toklas tell us "I myself have no liking for violence and have always enjoyed the pleasure of needlework and gardening. I am fond of painting, furniture, tapestry, houses and flowers and even vegetables and fruit trees. I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it." (3-4)