Tomorrow marks the first evening of Swarm: a Festival of Artist Run Culture. An initiative of the Pacific Association of Artist Run Centres (PAARC), Swarm has, over the past twelve years, grown to include university galleries (UBC’s Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery), former artist run centres (the Contemporary Art Gallery), independent sites (Blim, The Gam Gallery, Shudder Gallery), hotels (New Forms at the Waldorf), parks (Vancouver Chinese Garden) and magazines (Fillip).

For my part I have curated Vancouver/Vancouver, a two-part exhibition drawn from the art collection of longtime Vancouver resident Rick Erickson, which opens tomorrow at Gallery 1965, in the same building as VIVO (1965 Main Street). Accompanying this exhibition is a short essay that mentions past trends in local collecting; the formal patterning found in Erickson’s collection; before concluding with a few words on the collector and his collection, how it provides us less a portrait of the collector than a spatial and temporal map of the city's cultural ecology. At the close of the second exhibition (“socially”-oriented works displayed in formal patterns, as opposed to the first show, where “formally”-oriented works are displayed expressively), I will post the essay here, at websit.

Also this week I begin at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Expanded Literary Practices is a Special Topics humanities course, hosted by the Department of Critical Studies. The course is based on my own research interests; specifically, the convergence of written and visual practices. Though focused on the 20th century, the course will reach as far back to 19th century France, where we will read and discuss Baudelaire’s innovative prose poem, “Anywhere Out of this World” (1869), before immersing ourselves in Symbolism, beginning with the visual poetry of Stephane Mallarme, who, in an effort to cherish life’s mysteries, implored us to “move that lamp away” (ecarte la lamp), something U.S. writer Jack Kerouac may or may not have taken seriously (see below).

With summer two weeks from autumn, our warmest weather yet. But not all-round warm. Not warm coming out of the morning shower warm, or standing in the shadow of a building warm. Warm at bedtime warm, yes, but those coldnesses!

When was it, 1976? Sitting in Mrs Winters’s English 9/10 CanLit class on the third floor facing south, cooking in the wools our mothers bought us (with January in mind, not a hot September), the room damp with hormones, and Mrs Winters reading aloud “significant bits” from Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

Whither Mrs Winters? I remember how angry you looked when we goofed around, how you shook -- and that thing you did with your neck! Yet I also remember the glimmer in your eye that told us you had seen our kind before, that you knew us, and that you knew what we were going through.

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The line from my house to the café is roughly three blocks long, an “L” shape that has me travelling east for one-half block and south for two-and-a-bit.

This morning’s conversation ranged from the recent report on our city’s 2011 hockey riot to what some suggest will be a much larger riot south of the border during the next U.S. Presidential election. My own feeling about the hockey riot is that the youth who came into downtown from Delta, Kerrisdale, Ladner, PoCo, Richmond, Surrey and West Vancouver have little respect for the downtown culture. They resent the money they pay to shops that sell phones and clothes, and they resent those living the cosmopolitan lifestyle. Had they felt otherwise, they might have behaved differently.

Predictions of an upcoming U.S. Presidential election riot took me by surprise, though the more that was said on the topic, the more I was reminded of my time in the southern states, where a range of people, from hotel bellhops to university academics, from those of European descent to those who identify as African-American, spoke with passion and intelligence about the myth of Reconstruction, how the old wounds still bleed. From there, the conversation returned to those who came into downtown Vancouver and rioted.

My return line from the café is longer. Usually I walk west down the lane behind the 1200-block Kingsway, north at Inverness, then east for that same half-block. Sometimes I walk to the café that way, but when I do, I always take the other route home.