Combine

On Sunday I drove to North Vancouver to attend the second day of Combine, an art fair organized by four Vancouver-based private art galleries (Franc, Monica Reyes, Unit 17 and Wil Aballe) and housed at Griffin Art Projects, a flexible space whose mandate includes the exhibition and discussion of artworks held in private collections, in addition to artist residencies, talks and whatever else can be imagined in the name of contemporary art.

After viewing the exhibition I returned home to listen-in on a ZOOM discussion involving the galleries' principals. During the discussion someone brought up the example of the Seattle Art Fair, which began robustly in 2015, due in large part to a Seattle-based collector who used his influence to pull in some of the U.S.'s leading contemporary galleries.

The first Seattle fair was impressive in terms of participating galleries, artists, curators and the many events and activities they took part in, and one wondered how much this commissioning collector was willing to spend to keep it that way. Turns out not enough, because the fair lost steam after a couple of years, and once COVID hit, it went on hiatus, though it intends to return in July 2022.

Vancouver's cultural ecology is not immune to the kind of top-down development that gave us the Seattle Art Fair. An example can be found in the city's leading cultural institution -- the Vancouver Art Gallery -- and its twenty-year mission to move to a new location and build a purpose-built structure that, as it turns out, is no longer the stand alone edifice its former director insisted on, but an anchor in a Centre named after one of its donors. The VAG's latest donor, who recently donated 2.5 times what the naming donor provided, is the author of the VAG's top-down approach, a philosophy that begins with politicians, not the people who vote them into office. 

For me, Combine is taking the right approach to developing an art fair, one built by its participating galleries from the ground-up. Granted, this way takes longer, but it is to my mind the only way to make anything anymore -- allowing people of all walks to have a hand in the placement of its bricks and mortar, feel part of that which is growing, as one feels when one sprouts a seed on a window sill in February and replants it in the garden in April, enjoying it throughout May and June, before picking one of its flowers in July and pressing it in a book until November, when it is taken out and twirled by its stem, put in an envelope and sent to a friend. 

*Untitled poster by Robert Kleyn courtesy of Monica Reyes Gallery

I Just Gotta Have More Theramin

Last month I took a chance on a Naxos CD of Leoš Janáček's Choruses for Male Voices recorded in 1995-96 by the Moravian Teachers Choir in the Minorite Church in Uničov. Pleased with my purchase (I have become partial to choral music), I picked up last week at the Burnaby Value Village an Altos CD (first released by PYE in 1960) that included Janáček's Sinfonietta (1926), whose opening bars and ground bass sounded familiar.

It was only after humming those bars on my way to the grocery store that a lyric snuck in -- "take a look down at the madman" -- which I recognized as belonging to those great song pirates, Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Yes, but which song?

After entering the band's name and lyric fragment into a search engine I was led to "Knife-Edge", from ELP's 1970 self-titled debut album. In this period-era "live" recording, keyboardist Keith Emerson is so moved by his band's performance that at 3:56 he takes from atop his Wurlitzer a theremin-strip (like the one used by the Beach Boys in "Good Vibrations", 1966) and anticipates an out-take from This is Spinal Tap (1984).

Roma People

The word gypsy derives from what was once thought to be the origin of the Romany-speaking people, though we know from the film Latcho Drom (1993) and books like George Borrow's The Gypsies of Spain (1841) that "gypsies" came not from Egypt but from northern India. A subsequent derivation of gypsy -- the word gypped, as in cheated --is now banned (as a pejorative) by the CBC.

On that note, the little boy at the Hungarian train station who offers to pay a band of Roma to make music so he can dance away his mother's sadness gets full value for his gesture, his money refunded. This is a scene that never fails to turn me into a blubbering mess, and while passing through Basildon, England one autumn I visited a fortune teller to tell me why.

"Show me your palm," was the first thing she asked after her mother took my ten pound note and tucked it into a cigar box. As she studied my palm, I asked if she had seen the film Latcho Drom, and without looking up she said, "Yes, yes, and you think you are the little boy at the train station."

"10" (1979)

Blake Edwards's "10" was released in the final weeks of the 1970s, and for a moment the film was everywhere. Back then, everywhere meant billboards, newspapers, magazines and television, where it was a staple of conversation for talk show hosts like Johnny Carson, known in those days as America's sandman. "10" is among a number of Hollywood films that came out in the 1970s and 80s that I never saw and, in an effort to better understand those born just before the Baby Boom, I am trying to catch up on.

By today's standards, "10" would never get past the elevator pitch. Dudley Moore plays George Webber, a suddenly middle-aged, successful playwright/composer with bratty tendencies living alone in Beverley Hills, where he entertains his singer-actor girlfriend Samantha (Julie Andrews, above) when not writing songs at his lyricist's Malibu beach house. George gets everything he wants, and yet he remains unsatisfied -- until he catches a glimpse of a young woman (Bo Derek) on the way to her wedding and, as in classical mythology, he sees in her face an ideal ("An 11," as he tells his shrink).

Through various trickeries, George learns who the woman is (her name is Jenny) and he pursues her on her honeymoon to Mexico (we would call this stalking today), where he saves her husband from drowning and, because Jenny is a thoroughly liberated woman, she invites him into her bed while her husband is recovering in the hospital. It is there in bed (with Ravel's "Bolero" playing) that Moore's old world morality catches up with him and he leaves the situation unconsummated and returns to L.A. to reconcile with a justifiably mistrusting Samantha, eventually winning her back (we presume).

As in many Blake Edwards films (it was Edwards who made The Pink Panther, 1963, and The Party, 1968), there is, like L.A. itself, an expedient yet numbing plot line freeway with off-ramps that lead to vital neighbourhoods rich in mystery and intrigue -- places where life happens. There are also numerous shadings that are timed to stick with the viewer. Samantha's feminism is intelligently articulated, if not embodied; a Mexican hotel guest who fails to seduce George points out to a bartender (a little too whimsically) that men seem to do better as they get older, while women just get older. Another human moment is conveyed in a phone call between George and his lyricist Hugh (Robert Webber), who has decided to end his relationship with his much younger boyfriend and advises George not to do the same with Samantha: "Don't do as I do, George, do as I say ..."

Those who have never seen this film will likely know it through the speechless swim-suited body of Bo Derek. The pairing of that kind of body with the Olympian number 10 is, in these quick-to-signify times, enough to curl our lips and keep us scrolling. But to do so is to miss some insightful vignettery. The freeway, as we know, is no way to see the world, yet the plot of "10", like that "information superhighway" known as the internet, has in some ways liberated us, allowing us to move from one exit to the next. Yes, freeways are unpleasant things to be on, just as the internet too has unpleasant consequences -- both of which need to be addressed. But not here. Not at this exit. At least not today.

"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature"

No more art criticism as we knew it a la Greenberg but a "natural" world sullied to the point of pushback, where the "art" of the "maker" is now critical of its inadvertent editors and conservators.

Advent Calendar

It wasn't that shops weren't selling advent calendars, it was the kind of advent calendar they were selling. Hager Books of Kerrisdale has a variety of calendars that any shop that knows its clientele is forced to carry. Of course I wasn't interested in the Harry Potter advent calendar, so I went with something more traditional, which is to say I went with something that reminded me of my childhood: a painted scene of Mary, Joseph, animals, a manger in the distance, the unseen Magi (presumably on the other side of the hill) ...

No Sleeping After Television

Crazy dream last night. After spending part of the day searching unsuccessfully for an advent calendar, I retired early and recalled the calendars of my childhood, when suddenly I am amongst the crowd of a Christmas-themed episode of Storage Wars. Feeling guilty about missing the first twenty minutes of the show, I start backing out of the crowd when my name is called and I am asked to open the door of that day's unit. With the cameras rolling (of course), I lift the door and find the unit filled with what I learn are Irish refugees. I look behind me: both the crowd and the cameras are gone -- it's just me and the refugees. Only now the refugees are no longer Irish refugees but Iranian border guards, and I am asked for my papers. I swing my satchel around, open it, and what should I find inside but an advent calendar. Without thinking, I pass the calendar to the nearest guard. He opens the December 1st door, then shouts in my face, "No soup for you!"