Liking

In the confession booth that is YouTube, Kyle relates how his initial "upset" with Richard Prince's appropriation of other people's Instagram images led to Kyle's conversion. All Prince had to do is "like" Kyle's response for Kyle to admit that he "gained a fair amount of respect for the man."

Practice Makes Prefect

Recent talk of Donald Trump's art practice -- conceptual art, land art, private practice (the "art of the deal"?) -- brings to mind past talk of past-president George W. Bush's paintings.

In Vancouver, we have developers like Westbank and marketing systems managers like Bob Rennie trying to convince the public that they, too, have a cultural practice -- as "city builders."

The question is not where will it stop, but how far will it go?

Everyday Trump tweets out more about himself than he thinks:

Every day the artist Richard Prince does the same:

Both Trump and Prince possess what Artforum co-publisher Charles Guarino describes as prerequisites for participation in Today's Art World: "a really serious case of attention deficit disorder, a little bit of Asperger's, and...what I can only describe as a man-sized ego."

Oh, and by the way, it's "corn mash," not "corn bread." But given Prince's work -- his remarkable art practice -- he likely knows that and is simply adding (as subtracting) to that which is not yet sold.

"Eight Line Poem" (1971)

My friend Dallas Brodie and co-promoter Artie Devlin are hosting the 2nd Annual David Bowie Tribute at the Biltmore next week. For this event I will perform an a cappella version of "Eight Line Poem" from my favourite Bowie album -- Hunky Dory (1971).

Tactful cactus by your window
Surveys the prairie of your room
Mobile spins to its collision
Clara puts her head between her paws
Open shops down the west side
Will all the cacti find a home
But the key to the city
Is in the sun that pins the branches to the sky oh, oh

June 3, 2017

While working through my emails yesterday morning I came upon subject line "June 3, 2017" from the artist Tim Lee. His message reads:

1. Saturday, partly cloudy, high of 17.9°C. A grey morning that got brighter throughout the day.

2. The Champions League final between Real Madrid and Juventus in Cardiff, Wales. Cristiano Ronaldo scored twice as Madrid wins 4-1 and retains the European title in back-to-back seasons. As is our custom, Stephanie and I watched the match at the Three Brits Pub in English Bay. An annual ritual in which Hassan usually takes part. Unfortunately he was ill that morning and could not join us. 

3. Watching the same match in a pub in Borough Market, London is Roy Larner who was among the bystanders in an attack by 3 men who drove a truck into pedestrians leaving 7 dead and 48 wounded. Half-inebriated from game-time drinking, he got up and yelled “Fuck you, I’m Millwall” as he single-handedly took on the knife-wielding attackers armed with nothing more than his fists.

4. On its first Saturday in theatres, Wonder Woman earns 35 million dollars at the box office setting a record for a film directed by a female. The movie features its protagonist, like Roy Larner, going alone through No Man's Land and capturing the enemy trench, allowing the Allied forces to help her liberate the village of Veld. In the climactic battle between the hero and villain, Wonder Woman redirects Ares' lightning onto himself, disintegrating his body and leaving a black crater depressed in the surface of the Earth.

5. At the entranceway to Granville Island, a sinkhole appears.

6. You did not post on your blog. The only day missing that year.

Poem

The More I Read You

the more I read you the more I need to

take care in my use of the pronoun

the “irreducible”

you versus the sharpened stick used

to accuse or shame or both through lists

Maxine Gadd

when asked by Daphne Marlatt* about

her use of you, yu and u what’s the diff

told her

a number of things that include the use

of i and I but of you, yu and u and their

upper case

variants Maxine says “Because it makes

them hard to read. Because most people

read so

efficiently they don’t even know they’re

spelling so there’s a certain few things

--”

and here she tells us about the i and the I

but of the you, yu and u she speaks of

“different tones

of voice and each tone registers on a scale

of familiarity or love to alienation, rage,

confusion --

who am I when I call myself ‘you’ which

is and odd poetic convention, often I’m ‘yu’,

someone I’m

trying to objectify so to analyze or put down...

then there is the great ‘U that art out there, U

that art’”

most important to remember from Maxine is

that yu and u are, as Daphne’s echoes, “tough

and barbaric”

but this other you, quite literally this Other

that Luce Irigaray speaks of in “Approaching

the Other

as Other”** is in “[o]ur culture generally entrusted

...to God-the-Father” but in the relationship of

the I

and the you the tendency is for the you to be

“reduced to an ‘object’ of knowledge or an

‘object’ of

love” and thus smothered instead of “recognizing

the irreducible difference of the other in relation

to me”

* Gadd, Maxine. Lost Language: selected poems by Maxine Gadd. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982
** Irigary, Luce. "Approaching the Other as Other", Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003

Poem

Strange Fruit

could it be that your foul nature has

as much to do with me as your own

self-loathing

or is this stab at humility shared with

the world what you call self-loathing

on Twitter

just another mad outfit you don when

performing in the closet of your phone

a tableau

like the I’m-calling-you-out tableau or

the schadenfreude tableau or the WTF

three-parter

the triptych template that combines

incredulity anger and an emoticon I

had not

seen before a figure that took a while

to figure out but once I had is that
a gallows?

Poem For a Musician and Scholar

In Stationary

 for Jill Bain

on-stage rage awakes to dollar store sadness

a wire cup can’t its contents any more than

a gift its delivery system

held to my ear awaiting its ocean

returned to the shelf no longer itself

but another dumb thing to be stepped from

last night’s mosh pit surfer rising

shirtless ribs a pitchfork into a broom

of ruffled jute its counterfeit effigy a life

returned to the cup but on its side this time

its face-out availability is what I am
getting you