Hacer Memoria

At some point during Polygon Art Gallery's public conversation between visiting curator Candice Hopkins and artist Rebecca Belmore an image was screened of seven boys from a Sioux Lookout residential school watching their white teacher fish.

The photograph was taken in 1948, and the boys are dressed in blue denim, while the teacher in the distance is wearing a tailored white shirt.

This is a photograph Belmore said she has had with her a long time, and returns to often. More recently it inspired a work she made of a young boy in the water -- not watching it.

Seasonal Films

With the Holiday Season about to give way to the Lunar New Year, I find myself putting away the cards I received and the stack of movies (DVDs) I watch between Xmas Eve and the day after Russian Xmas.

The movies I watch during this time are not Xmas-themed, per se, but those I associate with the season, films that were on TV when I was little and my parents were partying in the living room.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) is one of these films, as are David Lean's 1960s films. A more recent "Xmas film" is Die Hard (1988), which I never saw when it was released, but, like many of us, have come to appreciate as a seasonal film.

Die Hard has a scene in it that only this year brought to mind the monolith scenes in Kubrick's 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968). As one of the German terrorists enters a room looking for the Bruce Willis character, we see a low horizontal form; maybe a table or a storage unit or a packing crate, but a form nonetheless. Wills is hiding in this form, but we don't know for sure that he is. The uncertainty is of interest to me. It allows me to concentrate on the structure of this form. 

Wrestling the Angel (1977)

"What does Immigration want from me?" writes the author of this early collected selected, Stan Persky, in his short essay "Reasonable Beings" (122).

Persky (b. 1941, Chicago) has always struck me as someone who needs to be wanted in order to make what he has to say that much harder to take.

A Marxist, Persky is first and foremost an American exceptionalist, an attitude which, more than any other amongst United Staters, is the first thing you feel when an American walks into a Canadian room. I have even met U.S.-born Indigenous artists who, despite their stated connection to their land, language and people, carry that attitude. It is something that can't be shaken. Like the party voice, it's just there.

I saw a copy of Wrestling the Angel in the People's Co-op Bookstore Poetry Section a couple days ago and bought it for eight dollars. I'd flipped through it first and found all sorts of mentions of Vancouver and San Francisco from the 1960s and early 70s, so a necessary addition to my exceptional library of "Vancouver" books, writings, drawings and photographs.

At his least self-conscious, Persky is a pleasure to read. "A Portrait of Angela Bowering" tells at the outset how "the land under the highway suddenly collapsed and fell into a pit 75 feet deep ... we're eating lunch there -- Brian and I -- before that Robin and I -- smoking hell, with our sun-burnt or hell-burnt faces and at night in the open pit the moonlight gleaming ... "(150). Genet!

On Reflection

When not in service, the truck is parked in back, where, for a few minutes a day, the sun hits its rear window and projects its beam south, where it is interrupted by some lathe fencing, casting a shadow through my glass door onto the outer fake doors of my Murphy bed. I would say this shadow looks like film stock, if the sprocket holes weren't so distorted.

Kozak Ukrainian Eatery & Mill

After our Golden Bowls at Chau Veggie Express last night we returned to the sidewalk and there across the street was Kozak.

Yes, we had no idea. What looks vacant during the day is lit up like a palace at night. So there we went, to take in the cakes.

"For you, Nice Man," she said pointing her tongs at me, "two for one. But please, stop saying spasiba. For us, it's dyakuyu tobi."

B.C. Pears

Hard to get a sense of scale here. Taking this pic from further back would have allowed diners to provide that scale -- but then you wouldn't be able to see it in the way it needs to be seen. Plus there's always someone not wanting to be seen with someone other than their spouse.

The work (an ad for the old fruit growers co-op in Kelowna) now hangs on the wall of the former Primo's (now known as Heirloom) at Granville and West 12th. Not sure why it was sectioned into sixths. Maybe that was the only way to save it. Or maybe the owner thought it looked better.

Spare Me

I have been reading leaked pages (in Spanish) of the soon-to-be-released English version of the second born son of Princess Diana and maybe King Charles III's autobiography the past couple days, and of course I'm floored by the candour -- who wouldn't be?

But when I say candour, maybe it's more than that. Maybe it's revanche. For it's the son's story, after all, or his effort to take control of it, establish it -- for the record, as they say in legal proceedings. 

The son is Prince Henry, or Harry, as he likes to be branded, the Duke of Sussex, and the Spanish language version of his autobiography translates as In the Shadows, not El Segundo, which would seem more apropos given that the English title is Spare. (Living in Southern California is hardly living in a shadow.)

So far I have read about Harry's military deployment in Afghanistan and the number he bandies about (25) that applies to his "confirmed kills"; how he is not ashamed of these killings (he refers to his targets as "pawns"), that it was a case of the "goodies versus baddies," and he was a "goody."

Equally disturbing is the story of a costume he wore to a society ball. Most of us have heard that he went dressed in a Nazi uniform, but in his book, Harry supplies the excuse: that he came home with two uniforms, and when he asked his brother Prince William and his brother's wife Kate if he should go as a pilot or a Nazi, both said (in unison?), Nazi.

So of course it's not Harry's fault the world press slammed him for dressing as a Nazi, but his mean older brother and his wife, who had clearly set him up (check, as they say in chess). If that's the case, then it explains his vulnerability, something his mother, the Princess Diana, suffered from and was likely to her advantage when the then-Prince Charles proposed to her.

Harry loved his mother very much, he writes, and was too young to lose her. I would also suspect that he sensed her vulnerability, and how it was used against her. Does that explain in part why Harry married the scrappy Meghan Markle? I would think so. 

From a distance, I liked Harry and thought his weird status (he is clearly no spawn of King Charles but of Major James Hewitt, with whom his mother had an affair two years before her divorce from Charles) made him interesting. Like his brother William -- and indeed their official father -- Harry never grew up. I never felt much for Meghan, but I do now, particularly the way Harry, in marrying her, deployed her. His own form of revanche, inadvertent or otherwise.