Heinz Laffin Pottery

The mug was purchased eleven years ago at Heinz Laffin Pottery on Hornby Island. Heinz was there to make the sale. He was 85 years old then, and is, by all accounts, alive today. According to his daughter Christina's Twitter feed, he is long retired, but still visits the kiln.

This is the mug I have my morning coffee in, and the second cup I have around 3pm. Recently a friend who was walking down the alley stopped by to visit the garden and his daughter saw what all kids under 10 are prone to notice -- in this case, the lines inside my mug.

"Are these cracks from every time you drop your cup?" she asked, pointing a finger at the inside of my mug.

"Yes they are, Little One. Why, I might have dropped that cup a thousand times since I purchased it from the Mountain Witch fifty years ago."

"The Mountain Witch?"

"Yes, but you might know her by her vacation name."

"What's that?"

"Malibu Barbie."

"A Political Stake in the Ground"

Back in April, while on an unfamiliar East Van walk, I ran into a journalist I knew from my days as an event promoter. He was digging out something rhizomatic on his front lawn and the conversation quickly turned to civic politics.

"As things stand," he began, "there'll be at least four serious contenders for mayor this fall, which means Stewart [our current mayor] will get re-elected with 30% of the vote, with another tenuous coalition council. So yeah, nothing will get done. But on the bright side, nothing will get un-done."

Yesterday I read that one of those contenders, NPA candidate John Coupar, has suddenly dropped out of the race, giving no indication as to why, apart from a short statement that ends with: "As I move on, I am looking forward to spending more time with my family and friends." (Was he pushed?) Concurrent with that, the NPA issued a statement saying that it would be fielding a new candidate by next month's deadline. 

Could Coupar's sudden departure be related to recent revelations that local entrepreneur Chip Wilson is raising money to build a new "pro-business" organization to defeat Vancouver's current "socialist" city council in October, before taking on the current "socialist" pro-business NDP government in 2024? I think I know which way I'll be walking today. There are times when it really matters to me just where our city is headed.

image by Rowan Melling

The Virgin in the Garden (1988)

Novelist A.S. Byatt introduces secondary characters in a way that appears to take delight in the reader's tendency to want to know sooner than later the degree to which this new character is capable of making the main character's life a living hell. This she does almost sadistically, with the slow, hand-over-hand release of Alexander's boss at Blesford Ride School, one Bill Potter, to whom Alexander is about to inform ("not without misgiving') that his play has been acquired and is entering production. 

"Bill was in many ways a reincarnation of the original spirit of Blesford Ride. He proclaimed the weighty agnostic morals of Sidgwick, George Eliot and the first Matthew Crowe. He worked ferociously at his own version of Ruskin's and Morris's popular culture, with a dour respect for real workers and their lives and interests more akin to Tawney's work in the Potteries. The vigour behind what local cultural life existed in 1953 was in large part his. He gave University Extension lectures to which people travelled miles in all weathers, in vans and country buses, from moorland villages and seaside resorts, wool towns and steelworks. He ran a Settlement in Blesford Church Hall, and was a power behind the continuation of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Calverley. He could make people do things, themselves, that were durable and worth doing." (21)

"... and the back of a Valkyrie"

Jutting from a new load of books outside AA Furniture & Appliance is a hard cover U.S. first edition of Sarah Harrison's Bloomsbury-era romance novel An Imperfect Lady (Warner, 1988). From the back jacket copy we are introduced to Adeline Gundry's dress, which is of "black satin velvet, patterned with enormous roses." Never mind the colour of these roses, Adeline's dress is "designed to show off the good points of a tall, dark-haired woman with a long neck, an imposing bust, a fine set of soldiers, and the back of a Valkyrie." If that isn't enough, consider Adeline's make-up: "her reddest lipstick, her most dramatic eye shadow, and her palest, most luminous powder." Shoes? "Her four inch heels took her to well over six feet, but she had towered over people for as long as she could remember, and like many a tall daughter of a tall mother, didn't care."

Not caring was never a luxury among young Edwardians, not if you were born well enough, as Adeline was. Indeed, not caring was an existential necessity, a family-issued armament designed to protect you from your friends, your lovers and your peers, who saw emotional displays as a sign of weakness, the proverbial tipping of the hand. Britain's early 20th century landed class was most brutal when it came to intra-class relations, which I believe was a consequence of boredom and an anxiety brought on by a declining empire, social reforms and boarding schools like Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse and Cheltenham. Oddly enough, variants of boredom and anxiety are equally common today, but instead of playing it cool like the Brits did, it's a screaming match food fight messy bedroom free-for-all rehearsed daily in the ebb and flow of the interweb, its algorithms and its bots. Those who think the world will end with the super rich holed up on some mountaintop should know that that battle is also in its planning stages, with their political dupes the last to go.

Aunt Leah's

Golds and ochres are colours I associate with autumn, while green is a spring colour. There is no winter colour, only its absences. Summer is every colour, and therefore no colour.

Aunt Leah's Thrift Store is now at 17th and Fraser. Prior to that, it might have been south of King Edward, on the west side of Fraser. The difference between then and now is space, which the new Leah's has a lot of, and which gives the store its aura of elegance, like you find at high end boutiques, where space is flaunted, not maximized, giving the impression of discrimination, because there is only so much quality to go around.

The better art galleries and museums take this approach too, allowing room for approaches, multiple and unfettered viewpoints, which I appreciate as a gallery and museum patron. Time is money. So is space.

A Potted Plant

I rarely leave town anymore. Word gets around. You need someone to look after your pets, your plants -- and I hear from you.

A garden I was asked to water. Plants in the ground and plants in pots. The potted plant (top) is robust, with a powerful root structure. It will be a bush one day. And in getting there, it will shatter its container. A case of Nature over Culture. 

Must it be put so -- crudely? A Levi-Straussian binary. Cinema is more than a place where films are shown, just as a pottery is more than a place where pots are made. Both are social spaces, and with that comes discourse, exchange. We leave talking not only of the film or the pots but of other things not unrelated. 

The plant was potted in a pot that will make its transplantation difficult. Like I said, I rarely leave town anymore,

It's the Time of the Season

August came early last year, after the damage done from the June heat dome. This year, spring and summer were later than usual, though the past week or so of hotter days has once again put us ahead of schedule. Amazing what a week's hot weather can do. Far more than a few weeks of cooler, wetter weather when it comes to being "seasonal".