Tea Light Holder

We were at IKEA on Sunday looking for kitchen utensils when we saw a tea light holder whose design includes a miniature Polygon Gallery and an out-sized version of Brian Jungen's Upside Down Flagpole (2018).

Two Line [Concrete] Poem

Literally, right?

I agree with Adorno: Popular culture (PC) infects -- and destroys -- everything it touches. Angela Carter alluded to this in The Sadeian Woman (1978), where she discourses on that popular (cultural) genre known as Pornography -- how it performs a burlesque of all it rubs up against (namely, the Mainstream). The Trump presidency is similar. As an emblem of popular culture (television personality), Trump is another nail in what is for some that coffin called Politics.

For years, popular culture maintained an embassy in my brain. At some point in my early-30s I came to my senses and gave its ambassador 24 hours to leave my body. The results took awhile to measure. Then measurement became a distraction, a market tool.

Just when did finance trump politics? That took awhile too. The 1970s? The Carter Administration's Transportation Deregulation Act? The 1980s? The Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk?

Ugh, it's early. How come I can't sleep at night?

Leaf Guard? Grate Protector?

It's not hard to figure out. Leaves fall, rains come, and our sewer grates get covered. As if that's not enough -- water pools, cars race through them, and people get splashed!

On Friday I noticed the City of North Vancouver is using the same device I saw the day before on Vancouver's Commercial Street (above), making this a provincial issue.

Is there something we don't know? Are rains coming? And if so, how hard?

Susan Hiller: Altered States

Finally made it to to the Polygon Gallery to see Susan Hiller: Altered States. A highlight of the exhibition is Hiller's Psi Girls (1999), which is described neatly here, compliments of Tate Modern.

Yesterday's visit was followed by a talk by LAXART director Hamza Walker, who used Psi Girls as a point of departure for a journey that took us from Raymond Petition to Miles Davis to his daughter's interest in a particular book that took them to Barnes & Noble's "Teen Paranormal Romance" section -- hence the name of his 2014 Renaissance Centre exhibition.

"That's what makes me sad: Life is so different from books."

The conversation begins with small talk before Marianne acknowledges their past. “Funny, our meeting like this again,” she says. In response, Ferdinand gets the years wrong since the last time they were together -- not “four years,” as he says, but “five-and-a-half,” according to Marianne. After that, Marianne asks if he is married, and Ferdinand says he is, but that he has “lost interest” in his wife. When Marianne asks why he doesn’t get a divorce, he replies that he is “too lazy.” Then Ferdinand utters the hinge line: “Like you pointed out once: To want something, you have to be alive.” More small talk, with Marianne providing a couple of lackluster responses, after which Ferdinand says, “You don’t feel like talking about yourself,” and Marianne says, “No.” Once Ferdinand establishes that Marianne is single, he shifts the conversation. “Mysterious as ever, I see,” and Marianne, though she never said it (Ferdinand did), replies, “Like I said, I just don’t like talking about myself.” Ferdinand says “Very well. Silence, then,” and Marianne turns on the radio.

I turn on the radio and, as in Pierre le fou, what comes out is a news report. But instead of a Viet Cong attack on a French garrison, it is a rolled over camper van on the Coquihalla.

“Awful, isn’t it? It’s so anonymous,” I say, like Marianne says to Ferdinand of the Viet Cong attack.

“What is?” says the hitcher, as Ferdinand says to Marianne.

“They say four passengers, and it means nothing to us,” I say, paraphrasing Marianne. “But each is a human being, and we don’t even know who they are. If it is parents and children, grandparents and children, a touring band or a carpool of cowboys. If they prefer books or video games. We know nothing about them. All they say is four people pulled from the wreckage.”

In Pierre le fou, Marianne follows her commentary with a discussion of photographs. “You see this frozen image of a guy with a caption underneath. Maybe he was a coward. Maybe he was a nice guy. But at the moment it was taken, no one can say who he really was, what he was thinking about. His wife? His mistress? The past? The future? Basketball? No one will ever know.”

“That’s life for you,” says Ferdinand.

(It is here that we see Ferdinand coming to life again. Just as Mona came back to life when she stepped from the ocean and said to the truck driver who picked her up -- “I am”) 

“That’s what makes me sad: Life is so different from books,” says Marianne. “I wish it were the same: clear, logical, organized. Only it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. Much more than people think.”

“No, Pierrot.”

“For the last time, my name’s Ferdinand.”

“I know, but you can’t sing ‘My Friend Ferdinand’,” sings Marianne.

“Yes, you can. You just have to want to, Marianne.”

At this point we hear the first notes of the song that introduces the transition to the next scene -- the daylight on Marianne’s face, and then her and Ferdinand/Pierrot’s lives as impoverished apartment-dwelling revolutionaries. But in the meantime, Ferdinand/Pierrot and Marianne remain in the car...

“I want to,” says Marianne in response to Ferdinand/Pierrot.

Like the song, Marianne’s “I want to” indicates the verbal transition, with Ferdinand/Pierrot’s return to life, replying “Me too, Marianne” to everything Marianne desires. Not Ferdinand/Pierrot’s return to life in the singular sense, but a life in relation (to another).

Of course no such transition is available to the hitcher and me. And it is in this recognition that my reference is no longer toPierre le fou, nor Vagabond, but the “No” that periodically punctuates Sophie Calle’s commentary in Double Blind (No Sex Last Night) (1992): the story of another driving trip, this time across the United States, with Calle seeking her own relational transition, which her younger travelling companion, Greg Shephard, continually denies her -- until one night he doesn’t, and the tone of the work, like the car’s transmission, shifts.

I want a similar shift with the hitcher, but without the eros of Pierre le fou and Double Blind, and without the existential exasperation of Vagabond. Something closer to two artists moving through an art gallery, looking at the world through Art’s eyes, but who happen to be in a car driving up an old country road. “To want something, you have to be alive,” says Ferdinand, and I want to be alive right now, too, only it appears that in wanting to be alive I have to want something else, first, and that is a condition to which I have no control over, a condition that I alone cannot change.

"Prelude and Fugue No. 20 in A Minor"

On Tuesday night Mark and I attended an on-stage talk and performance at the Chan Centre by pianist Angela Hewitt (who turned 60 last week!). I had never seen Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Book One) performed "live" before, so this was a treat.

"Most of Bach's music is 'dance music'," says Hewitt. Here she is performing the "Prelude and Fugue No. 20 in A Minor":

"Where you from, man?"

We pass a farm house. In the driveway a middle-aged woman and a teenager play catch with a soft ball, while a middle-aged man and another teenager unload groceries from a red Ford pick-up.

The hitcher sees this too. She turns to me and I feel her stare. “Where are you from?” she asks, and I am reminded of that scene in Easy Rider when Luke Askew, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are sitting around a campfire smoking pot and Hopper asks Askew, whom Fonda and Hopper had picked up hitch-hiking earlier that day, where he is from. 

“It’s hard to say,” I tell her, like Askew told Hopper. Because it is true -- I am still trying to figure that out. Not so much where I am from but what I am from.

“What do you mean ‘It’s hard to say’?” she says patiently.

“It’s hard to say because,” as Askew told Hopper, “it’s a very long word.”

Still staring.

“A city,” I tell her.

“Which one?”

 “All cities are alike,” I tell her, as Askew told Hopper.

Unlike Hopper, she says, “No they’re not.”

And like Askew I tell her: “I’m from the city. A long way from the city. And that’s where I wanna be right now.”

She returns to the window. “Next left.”