"... 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.

Espera Oscar di Corti

Iron Eyes Cody (1904-1999) was born Espera Oscar di Corti in Kaplan or Gueydon, Louisiana. He was an American actor of Sicilian descent who worked at a time when an actor's talent was measured by their ability to play a role other than the one they were born to play.

di Corti's star was born through a role that existed somewhere between himself as a human being and an industry quick to typecast. After years of living in Hollywood, it is alleged that he came to believe he was an Indigenous American, claiming membership in a number of different tribes.

My introduction to the work of Espera Oscar di Corti came on Saturday mornings, when I would sit before the TV and watch cartoons. Not just cartoons, but those somewhat grown up PSAs -- the best-known being the pro-smoking Radio Free Europe PSA and the one that opened with thunderous kettle drums and a militaristic snare: Keep America Beautiful.

Want more of Iron Eyes Cody? Click here.

H. R. Pumpkin Stuff

I was late purchasing my pumpkin this year and had to drive out to Collingwood. Not surprisingly, all the "good" ones were gone. By "good" I mean symmetrical, balanced, smooth -- the same criteria we use to judge human faces. I chose one whose face surface looked like it might support a cleft-palate. While carving, something else occurred to me: that a happy pumpkin is easier to carve than an angry one.

What's New In Books

An early mock-up cover for my hybrid memoir/poetry book, Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems, scheduled for release in Fall, 2024. Anvil Press is the publisher, Rayola the designer,