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.

VAG Announcement

The Vancouver Art Gallery announced another announcement about its new site inside the Chan Centre for the Visual Arts after its "ground awakening" ceremony at Larwill Park last week. Because I didn't go to the "awakening" I thought I should go to the next announcement -- this one under the VAG's canopied patio and hosted by the new Deputy Director and Director of Curatorial Programs, who, for five minutes, spoke as if what she was scheduled to announce was pulled by the development office at the last minute.

The announcement was at 10.00 a.m. and of course I was early. Never too early for a sunny day, I thought as I wandered Granville and Robson, shocked at how far the downtown shops have fallen, yet at the same time not surprised given that people are doing without "new" clothes and books and jewelry. Sad to see the souvenier shops go. Everything in them was a meeting between someone insisting the buyer could sell it and the buyer settling on a price that balanced the risk.

On the way back I visited the Holt Renfrew portion of the Pacific Centre Mall. What's Prada going with this fall? Ah, black and brown.

Spanish Banks, 9:28 p.m. PDT

Last night was the fifth time I've seen Godard's Pierrot le fou (1965), and again a revelation. Ce temps: A melancholic(?) young man more or less admits to an old love that he would be happier living in a novel while writing one, and she does what she can to help him. To the point of leaving him. Happily.

The woman is more than a muse, more than his construction. Or at least the auteur attempts to make her so. All of which was on my mind while walking towards last night's sunset at Spanish Banks; the two in the picture coming ashore, their voices carrying, in love with the water and how warm it is, oblivious to the dying of the light.

The Refrigerator of Modern Art

The refrigerator supplies homes with a large metal surface for shopping lists, messages, invoices and two dimensional works of art, sometimes attached by three dimension works of art, in the form of magnets. The refrigerator up top is included in the UBC Belkin's The Wilful Plot exhibition, and as such asks that it be seen not as a refrigerator with stuff on it, but with art eyes.

The work is called Freon (2015 - ongoing) and is attributed to artists Derya Akay and Vivienne Bessette. Freon is a registered trademark that speaks to the arrangement of halocarbon products that function in the refrigeration system. Freon sounds like an element in the Periodic Table, but like napalm, it isn't.

Akay and Bessette's refrigerator is okay with us adding to it, as people have and continue to add to it while visiting the garden behind Unit 17, where Akay and Bissette are also ongoing. I added my business card (printed for me by an editor/publisher I work with) because that business is concerned with the exhibition and promotion of visual art. Not sure if I took the picture up top before or after I added my card, but if you see the show (up until mid-April), you'll see it.

Below is what I've mounted on the side of my refrigerator. A permutating arrangement of postcards sent to me and photos I've found in stores and shops in Vancouver, Glasgow, Paris and Berlin.

Schools and Prisons

A mostly middle income retail store in the middle of the city will close mid-month. I'm beginning to think the building bordered by Georgia, Robson, Howe and Granville is haunted, that there's a spectre haunting downtown Vancouver (after Karl Marx), a spectre that acts as if there is no use in a centre (after Gertrude Stein).

Eaton's erected César Pelli's dry ice cube design in 1973, a move that impeded the downtown's east-west pedestrian flow. Did this design, this impediment, explain why the incoming 1972 provincial NDP government ditched the former Social Credit-era design of the new provincial law courts' vertical tower in favour of Arthur Erickson's horizontal plaza? People on both sides of the political binary say it was simply a political decision, but I disagree. There are occasionally people on the Left who know something about art and design, just as there are those on the Right who are humanists.

The retail store is Nordstrom's, of course. Opened in the former Eaton's building in 2014 (the building was a Sears for a few years after Eaton's moved on), the building's re-design includes windows, which in summer gorgeously reflect the evening sun, not to mention allow those inside to look at something other than what is for sale. Turns out what is for sale is not so much what consumers are not buying, but where they are buying it. Which is to say online. Rich people love shopping at Holt Renfrew because shopping is a performance. Lower income people shop at discount stores because that's all they can afford. Middle income people shop online because they're struggling to keep up, and time is money.

Are people talking already about what might "take over" the soon-to-be-former Nordstrom's site? I still like it as the new Vancouver Art Gallery. Granted, the land is privately owned, but if a land trade could be arranged between Cadillac Fairview and the City of Vancouver, with CF getting Larwill Park, we'd get a new, perfectly positioned VAG at a fraction of the building cost, with enough left over to fund public programs and add to the collection.

But will people still be going to art galleries in ten years, to see art and partake in public programs? I wonder. Art galleries are not what they used to be, particularly for those under forty. Someone messaged CBC Radio this morning to suggest an art school; I messaged a prison, but that wasn't mentioned. That could be all there is in ten years: schools and prisons.

12th Avenue

Those familiar with 12th Avenue's east-west bi-section of Vancouver (from Boundary Road to the extraterritoriality of UBC) will have noticed the gauntlet of trees between Kingsway and Fraser, how they have grown so big that some of them are now over the curb and onto the road.

On Friday CoV engineers closed off the stretch between Kingsway and Fraser to remove a fallen tree, not as a result of high winds but because our dry summer and fall had weakened its base, making it even more susceptible to car and truck vibration. 

I happened upon this removal while walking back from the Kingsgate Mall on Friday afternoon. The fallen tree had already been cut up and loaded onto a truck, but the road remained closed because CoV workers were taking down another. I assumed it was a preventative measure, but asked why nonetheless.

"It's full metals. From all the sideswiping. That one's trunk is encrusted with mirror fragments."

What a beautiful image. 

"After a while the trees absorb the metals and get sick."

"Is that what felled the other tree? Sickness?"

"It's all related."

dramatic music/gentle music

The day after the election I watched the documentary released a week before it by those eager to oust the now previous regime for their own step-and-fetch-its (for the same-named Seattle documentary released three years ago, click here). Had I the choice of watching it or a documentary on how municipalities are handcuffed by provincial and federal governments, not to mention Supreme Court rulings, I would have watched the latter. But since no such documentary exists, there's always the hope one will. A good place to begin such a documentary would be the ongoing saga of Surrey, whose incoming mayor was elected for promising to abandon -- midstream -- the establishment of its own municipal force and return to a federal constabulary (RCMP) that takes its orders not from local citizens, but from Ottawa.

On My Way to Being Early

Prior to killing time at the VAG I walked south from the Granville Street Skytrain Station (the original one -- I can never remember the Line names) to see what's changed and what hasn't. The answer? Not much, and a lot.

The only difference between Granville Street from West Georgia to Drake, and Hastings Street from Cambie to Dunlevy is people, which the latter has and the former doesn't. Access to social services accounts for part of that presence, just as City Council policing directives (tax-base protection) accounts for the absence. You can see why Yaletown residents were so worried about a proposed Overdose Prevention Site, despite the fact that the opiate crisis is everywhere, not just in the downtown eastside. 

Walking back along Howe Street I saw a sign that read B.C. ALLIANCE FOR THE ARTS, a non-profit that was once on Davie Street, but in a more modest, less corporate form. At the northwest end of its diagonally recessed storefront, a glass-protected closet featuring thirteen wall works, with the intriguing exhibition title "Outsiders and Others" below. And below that, in fine print, an orienting definition: "OUTSIDER | NAIVE | SELF-TAUGHT | INTUITIVE | FOLK | PRIMITIVE". 

I was under the impression that the "Outsider" was the "Other" (indeed, it's mentioned a second time in the definition below). If the sign is suggesting there are other Others, should't it read as such -- Outsiders and Other Others? Or rather than get all Rumsfeldian about it, why not risk the dreaded negative conception and call it (a la Roland Barthes?) No Insiders. Either way, the centre-ing of the Outsider is of interest to me, as it speaks to our age old mistrust of anything that is found inside a museum that could be done by one's child, and called Art.

As mentioned in yesterday's post, I visited the VAG's Uninvited show and, amongst some strong or charming paintings, noticed that the curator, Sarah Milroy, didn't use any of the Main Floor's corner spaces for any of her selections, and that the only occupation of a corner space was the lower case "young activist reading room" which, the more I stared at it, the more I thought of Godard's La Chinoise (1967), expecting Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Paul Léaud to plop down on it's ottoman for Omar Diop's seminar.

I'll conclude with a picture I took on my way to the Broadway and Commercial Skytrain Station, where I boarded the train for Granville. The picture was taken from the alley behind East 10th Avenue, one shovel swing away from the complete demolition of the house that once stood there. What struck me in this moment was the glass design of the house's front door, a gorgeous example of the moderne era, which is all but gone in Vancouver. Why someone chose not to salvage this door speaks to the speed with which things change in this city and our inability to keep up with those changes. A shame to see a work like this as rubble.

"Hot town, summer in the city..."

Another building on Hastings Street caught fire last night: the Vancouver Street Church near Hastings and Main. The week before that it was the Value Village between Commercial and Victoria. Both are places where no or low income people go to get by. Will either be rebuilt as places where people can expect shelter? In a land where Housing is fast becoming the capitol of Impossible? 

The Laurel Is Hardy

Scott told me the winter of 1969 was so cold the laurel lost their leaves. Assuming they were dead, many Vancouverites cut down their hedges in February. Those who didn't found them sprouting leaves in March -- and then, miraculously, flowering in April. Last year I noticed a few instances of flowering laurel. This year, many more.

VAG Notions

Now smothered in money, the Vancouver Art Gallery will do all the right things under its current administration, yet it remains to be seen if it can transcend itself, become more than the sum of its line items. When art galleries set out to build new buildings, it's often less about art (ambiguity) than it is about business (certainty). This will go on for a while.

We are told that if all goes according to plan, the new and recently revised VAG (above) could open as soon as 2026. But by then we might have achieved Adorno's prophecy and find that what once went by the name of Art now goes by a different name -- and as McLuhan suggests, what wasn't considered Art, now is (a historic VAG example could be Paul Wong's Confused: Sexual Views, 1984).

How weird to be living in a city that, according to its boosters, claims to be a world leader in contemporary art, and therefore deserving of a proper building to display it; and yet having this declaration come at a time when Art, as we are beginning to know it through its gestures and relations, has left the building to Art as it was, as objects, once upon a time.

1400 Robson

Upon its completion in 1973, the 42-storey Sheraton Landmark (later renamed the Empire Landmark) was the third tallest building in Vancouver, and its tallest hotel. Located at 1400 Robson, the Sheraton was one of two Vancouver towers topped with revolving restaurants (the other was Harbour Centre on West Hastings).

As a child I remember watching the construction of the Sheraton with my father, who lived at the western end of Nelson. A couple years ago, it was the Empire's piece by piece demolition. Last week I stopped to take in the signage announcing what will be two smaller 31- and 32-storey mixed-use towers containing 237 market units and 63 social housing units.

Lots of fanfare for the market units, yet nothing imagining life in the "social" spectrum.

History Painting

I have seen this street preacher at work, usually in the Davie Village. He says he is doing the Lord's work, but what he really seems to be doing is imposing a literal reading of the Bible on those he has cast as infidels.

The picture above is a screen grab of a baptism the street preacher performed at nearby Sunset Beach last Monday.  Surrounding the preacher are police (there for his protection, apparently), members of the LGBTQ+ community and curious onlookers.

Painting on a Park Bench

For years Vancouverites pushed for memorial benches. Then one day, voila! -- benches with bronze plaques honouring past lives. One of my favourite walks is to read these plaques, then to sit down and take in the view.

Yesterday I heard the story of a memorial bench removed by the City because the partner of the person it is dedicated to had painted it. How sad, I thought. She meant no harm. But when asked if I thought the City was right to remove it, I agreed that it was -- regardless of what I thought of its painting.

The City of Vancouver's memorial benches are nicely designed structures well-situated in public space. For me, it is never the bench so much as the view it affords, what it feels like to lean into one, my back supported by its unvarnished wooden slats.

Vancouver's obsession with painting itself is often justified by the city's grey and rainy weather -- benches that look "dead and forgotten," according to the artist whose partner's bench was removed. I for one see nothing wrong with settling into that which is "dead" to watch a sunset. One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen is a sunrise touching one of these benches -- and bringing it to life!

200 Block Alexander Street, North Side

Photo-based artists Roy Arden and Kelly Wood have made better use of "garbage" than I ever will. (Recall what Stan Douglas once said of the photography of Wolfgang Tillmans -- how he didn't realize how great Tillmans was until he was barraged by Tillmans's imitators.) But if the still-lifes of an art critic only bring to mind the acuity of artists Arden and Wood, so be it! They are among its better exemplars.

Poetry in Transit

It's been 23 years since poetry and Vancouver's buses started hanging out together. In the early days, poems were printed onto 11x17 sized cards and placed alongside commercial advertising above the windows inside the bus. If you squinted, you could read them from your seat.

The buses I ride on these days (mostly the #19 and #22) still have these advertising strips, and occasionally I'll see a Poetry in Transit poem. A step up from poems on buses are poems in bus shelter windows.

The picture above was taken at the northwest corner of Fraser and Knight. One can see that the window of this bus shelter is occupied by Poetry in Transit, and to a lesser extent, its sponsored poem (an excerpt from Pamela Porter's "Moon, owl, stone"). Great to see -- but to see it like this?

Is it right that a space reserved for poetry should have its poem compromised (imprisoned?) by so much additional textual information? Can't this information be made smaller and placed at the bottom of the page? And with the additional space, can't the poem be made a little bigger?

In lines 3 and 4 of Porter's pastoral, she writes:

Each day I try to be grateful
for what is around me. The apple tree

What is around Porter's poem, in this case, is enough informational bramble to fence-in that apple!

Mountain Lore

As a child I knew them as the Lions, two peaks poking up from the North Shore Mountains that (apparently) look like lions in the sunset's orange and yellow glow.

Try as I might, I could never find out who named them. Like a lot of things in the British city of Vancouver, it was just accepted. As in, If you have to ask, you don't deserve to know!

Years later I learned that they are also called the Two Sisters, and that E. Pauline Johnson included their story in her book, Legends of Vancouver (Vancouver: David Spencer, Ltd., 1911).

Yard Work

There is no better return for me than to spend the first morning back doing yard work, noting the passage of time in new growth, trimmed hedges and changing colours.

The Lily-of-the-Valley (Piers japonica) is among the most dramatic garden performers. When I left on my trip, the bush had bright red leaves at its extremities; now those leaves are yellow.

As for the Miss Kim (Syringa pubescens subsp. patula), it blooms later than most lilacs, and is at least a week away.

Gallery Visits

Yesterday I walked to Equinox Gallery to take in its shows. From there to Macaulay & Co. Fine Arts, grunt gallery, finally to CSA. This stretch is among the proposed routes of the new Skytrain extension that would pass through the building that houses Equinox and Monte Clark Gallery, tunnel past the grunt and MFA, before popping up at the southeast corner of Broadway and Main, across the street from CSA.

Moving to and through these spaces I could not help but look at their exhibitions with the Skytrain extension in mind. Perhaps a review is in order, one that uses an infrastructural alteration (the extension is not unlike the Great Northern Railway's filling-in of the east end of False Creek in support of its 1917 railway terminus) as a framing device for a sequence of events that, like boxcars (or Skytrain cars), unite and uncouple, unite and uncouple... I could call the review "Walking the Line", after that lyric from the last line of the last verse of the Louvin Borthers' 1959 song "The Christian Life".




The picture atop this post was taken at the northwest corner of Thornton Street and Great Northern Way -- a creek vignette, like the other creek vignette at the northwest corner of 8th and Scotia Street, across the street from the Western Front. Why a creek motif? Because years ago these creeks were the final leg in the road home for the salmon, whose spawning grounds could be found as far south as 33rd Avenue. With the arrival of settler colonists, these creeks were culverted and, like the east end of False Creek, smothered in land-fill.

Something to think about the next time a condo developer is asked to supply the neighbourhood with a cultural amenity: not a sculpture of a creek -- but the unearthing of a real one! Who knows, maybe it will bring back the salmon? 

The Garden and its Gerund Form

The last week of March, especially when the sun is out.

The earth is soft now, the crabgrass small and thinly rooted. When not weeding I am stripping the beds of dead matter, like the two azaleas I lost to drought. Those and a potted topiary boxwood are my biggest casualties from last summer.

On a healthier note, a daphne I planted ten years ago doubled in size -- this after years of sitting there, shivering. Also, as of noon yesterday, the year's first camellia!