The opening of William Gaddis's Carpenter's Gothic (1985):

The bird, a pigeon was it? or a dove? (she'd found there were doves here) flew through the air, its colour lost in what light remained. It might have been the wad of rag she'd taken it for at first glance, flung at the smallest of boys out there wiping mud from his cheek where it hit him...

A small room above a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

This morning I awoke to a crack in the window. I stared at it long enough, wondering what happened.

After breakfast I stepped outside, still in my dressing gown, to see if I could make sense of the crack from another perspective. There between my feet was a dead thrush. A bird did this, I said to myself. As if the window had nothing to do with it.

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An overtime goal!
The hometown crowd takes a breath
Sore throats tomorrow

Less than a hundred metres from the Helen Pitt Gallery is Rogers Arena, site of tonight’s showdown between Vancouver’s National Hockey League team and last year’s playoff champs, Chicago. This will be the final and deciding game in a best-of-seven first round playoff series, with the winner advancing to the second round, with two more rounds after that before the league championship is once again decided.

There are many stories attached to this series, a number of which began when the two teams met in the playoffs in 2009, then last year, with Chicago winning both series four games to two. This year, the league-leading Vancouver team was up three games before losing three in a row, adding a tension to the city as palpable as cream is to a coffee.

Whatever happens tonight I expect some form of public catharsis, be it an overturned car, a smashed storefront, or a cop pushing someone to the ground. Back in 1994, when the Vancouver team lost the final game of the playoffs, Robson Street erupted, an event that found its way into a single-channel video installation by Vancouver artist Roy Arden.

Supernatural (2005) is notable not only for its use of CBC footage, and the content therein, but Arden's decisions on when to enter and exit that content, and how long to hold onto the intervening black spaces he provides between clips. More than a reading, Arden's piece is a compelling mix of redaction, monochrome and collage.

As curious as I am to see what happens tonight, I will not be entering the fray, having made plans to dine with someone for whom hockey is, as he put it, “a game of increasingly high velocity in which death during play is inevitable – and who wants to patronize that?”

The Rolling Stones Trilogy: An Inadvertent Opera in Three Acts, at Once is now down from the Waldorf's Hideaway room and will be remounted (from projections to monitors) this Wednesday through Saturday at the Helen Pitt Gallery, 15 East Pender. Saturday will also mark the launch of two related publications, Free Concert and Rock Lore: Acts of Persuasion and Perversion, co-published with Publication Studio Vancouver.

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