Publicity Trumps Journalism

The Sun Wah Centre is now open for business(es). To celebrate, news services are running property manager B.C. Artscape's press release verbatim, as if it were their own.

Here are the opening two paragraphs of the CBC's July 29, 2018 story:

Here are the opening two paragraphs of the Toronto Star Vancouver's July 29, 2018 story, as attributed to Spencer Harwood:

It is not enough that agencies like B.C. Artscape are brokering studio and administration spaces for artists and galleries and related arts organizations, not when news of this venture is being "reported" identically in both public (CBC) and private (Torstar) news agencies.

As usual, it is a disregard for the way things happen in favour of them happening (regardless of the means) that saddens me. Shouldn't it be the way things happen, in the way a snowball rolled over grass and gravel contributes to our cultural experiences? By grass and gravel I mean the conversation that is inextricably part of these experiences, as criticism is to art.

What is B.C. Artscape's Sun Wah Centre, then, if it is going to permit itself to be spoken of in its own words? Where is the community dialogue in that?

Not a good start, B.C. Artscape. As for Sun Wah tenant Centre A, good for you for holding out and cutting your own deal with the landlord.

Firehose

This firehose has been outside Amy and Sylvain's apartment for years, yet it looks brand new, like it was just unwrapped. Every time I leave their apartment I commune with it, count its folds, sometimes touch it. (Does someone dust it?) Amy told me Hannah has a similar response.

Colours of the Day

After how many days, it rains.

Someone texted earlier and described the light as "odd." It is odd. In a camera resistant, Agnes Martin kinda way.

"Sitdown strikers in the Fischer body plant factory number three, Flint, Michigan" (1937)

Came upon this Sheldon Dick photo yesterday.

Phones were so much larger then.

"Leave Heaven Alone" (1989)

A song about Heaven, and leaving it alone, by my old friend Exene.

War Than You Bargained For

Joseph Heller's Catch-22 was published on November 10, 1961.

James Jones's The Thin Red Line was published September 17, 1962.

Both are dreamy books (and movies, too), but Catch-22 is absurdist, while The Thin Red Line, though full of its own circularities, is closer to realism

I wonder if it were the other way around -- if The Thin Red Line was published (and read) first, and Catch-22 was published (and read) second. Realism followed by Absurdism? The realist would say that's not how life works, while the absurdist would say a realist would say that.

Here is a paragraph on Pfc Doll from Page 14 of The Thin Red Line:

Doll had learned something during the last six months of his life. Chiefly what he learned was that everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was as if everybody made up a fiction story about himself, and then he just pretended to everybody that that was what he was. And everybody believed him, or at least accepted his fiction story. Doll did not know if everybody learned this about life when when they reached a certain age, but he suspected that they did. They just didn't tell it to anybody. And rightly so. Obviously, if they told anybody, then their own fiction story about themselves wouldn't be true either. So everybody had to learn it for himself. And then, of course, pretend he hadn't learned it.

Grete Stern

Grete Stern was a German-born Argentinian who studied at the Bauhaus and was partial to photo-montage. The work above recalls Sisyphus; yet unlike Sisyphus, who was condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill (only to have it roll back down upon arrival), Stern's subject has it harder, for she is before her boulder, not behind it -- pulling it, not pushing it. Not only that, her boulder is square!