For those interested in exhibition catalogues, the V.G.H. Thrift Store on East Hastings has thirty copies of Scott McFarland's Coastal Cabin, from his 2003 show at the Contemporary Art Gallery. How thirty copies of any public art institution's catalogues should end up at a thrift store was a major distraction for me. I had to the leave the store, sit in a park and think about it.
The seasoned patron can tell what a fundraising museum means to the artists it solicits donations from. Judging from the donated work on display at North Vancouver's Polygon Gallery, the Polygon appears to be well-respected (see Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill's Braided Grass, 2013 above). I wish I could say the same of the donated work at the Vancouver Art Gallery, which, for some reason, chose to overlap its silent art auction with Polygon's.
Speaking of the VAG, it is now rumoured that its new building (or location, since it will be housed in a mall) will no longer be built to the scale it was first announced, but to budget. What that budget is remains to be seen.
Just how long the new VAG building remains to be seen is anybody's guess. Will news of the latest version of the VAG be announced in the "preeminent platform for journalism and criticism about art and culture in Canada"? That, too, remains to be seen, as the Canadian Art Foundation has once again hit "pause" after withdrawing its plan to send Canadian Art to a re-education camp (OCADU, for a "10-weeks process of reimagining") due to public protest.
Speaking of visual arts magazines, yesterday evening I received an email from C Magazine publisher Kate Monro announcing that C was named "Best Magazine: Art, Literary and Culture" at the 2021 National Magazine Awards. I am honoured to have a piece in C's "Issue 145", just as I am honoured to have sat on the board of the gallery that moved from Presentation House to become what is known today as the Polygon.
From my dormer window, looking out onto Quilchena Park. An overcast day, late-September. Greys and greens and yellowing trees.
At my desk, elbows on its blotter. A plastic model of a Handley Page beside me, waiting for its paint to dry.
A stain of starlings gathered on the east-west slope. About to lift off, I am hoping, so I can say it, this word told to me the week before when I told my teacher. Lift off so I can say it! The word's letters -- M-U-R-M-U-R-A-T-I-O-N -- joining in, finding their way among them.
This off-the-plinth vase shape (amaryllis not included) comes in red-faced vermillion and oxidized copper green.
A Google search of 411-415 Garden Drive didn't produce anything from the City of Vancouver Archives, nor any secret lore, but it did produce an okay Google Maps pic (below), which I cropped, else you'd see its tools.
I've never looked closely at this building before, always entering its stores and restaurants from the East Hastings Street side. But after parking near it I was slowed by its Mission Revival form. The clay tile awnings are gone, but you can see their outlines. Same goes for the boards that lie behind its chipped stucco. The newest thing on the building is a painting of a Radio Flyer wagon.
The V.G.H of V.G.H. Thrift Store at 2535 East Hastings may or not stand for Vancouver General Hospital. But that's okay; it seems like a nice place to work, and the staff are welcoming.
Yesterday's visit yielded some finds. A DVD of the pilot (movie) and first two episodes of TV's Ironside (1967-1975), a solo piano CD collection (Mendelssohn, Schubert, Listz, Bach and Busoni) by Murray Perahia and a 1955 Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra CD recording of Weber's Der Freischütz.
Further east, Iron Dog Books, which I like to support, had on display John Sturrock's translation of three Marcel Proust essays bound together and called Days of Reading -- Number 53 in the Penguin "Great Ideas" series. The opening piece, entitled "John Ruskin", is riveting.
"We would be more keenly alive to the individual charm of a landscape if we did not have at our disposal those seven-league boots which are the great expresses and were obliged, as in the old days, in order to get to some remote spot, to pass through countrysides more and more like that we are making for, like zones of graduated harmony which, by making it less easily penetrable by what is different from itself, and protecting it gently and mysteriously against brotherly remembrances, not only envelope it in nature but also prepare it in our minds." (19)
Saturday's sun stayed out all day. Around 10:30AM I went for a drive that took me to North Vancouver, where I picked up some CDs at the Lonsdale Sally Anne; older recordings of Rachmaninoff's 2nd and 3rd Piano Concertos, Beethoven's 7th Symphony, a compilation of Portuguese Fado and Mary Margaret O'Hara's Miss America (1988), which I have been looking for since I misplaced my copy in the mid-'10s.
For years I held that Miss America is one of the greatest pop albums, ever, but upon listening to it on the drive home it occurred to me that the song sequence is out of phase with the emotional narrative suggested by those songs. Also, the band backing O'Hara's swooping, shivering and at-times extended vocals seems a poor fit. Yes, the band is tight, but that tightness is no longer a complement to O'Hara's footloose vocal; rather, it feels more like its paid friend, a mercenary accompanying her voice not for love but for food, rent and clothing. There is no emotional connection between voice and instrument. It's as if they they were recorded in different countries.
Normally I am pleased with my insights, the union of thought and feeling that allows me the world I am living in. But in this instance my insights feel more like a devastation, a consequence of -- life in wartime? Having been a touring and recording musician all those years has allowed me to know how music is written, performed and recorded. There is record magic, just as there is movie magic. Right now the best part of Miss America is that it was recorded before Auto-Tune.
