Artist Visit

Lots of snow in the Okanagan Valley yesterday. But snow was not a problem for flights departing Kelowna Airport, only for those departing for an equally snowy Vancouver.

Geoffrey Farmer, a guest of UBC Okanagan's Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, was scheduled to return to Vancouver yesterday, but his flight was cancelled, so he flew out this morning.

Geoffrey arrived in Kelowna on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday morning we drove to Brian's ranch for lunch. After that, back to Kelowna for Geoffrey's artist talk at the RCA.

Here are the full-length versions of the three videos that Geoffrey showed as an overture to that talk:

Last night Geoffrey and I attended the opening of Fabrications at the Kelowna Art Gallery. Below is a detail from Libby Hague's mural, a quote that I thought was from The Matrix (1999) but, as we found out later from the work's directory, is from an unattributed film by Woody Allen. Could it be this one?

A small room inside 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.

Laid out before me are postcards from yesterday's visit to Pandosy Books. Fifty of them -- at 50 cents apiece. Most are ghastly hand-tinted photos of the craters, geysers and pools at Yellowstone National Park.

Castle Geyser and Crested Pool, Morning Glory Pool, Crater of Mud Volcano, Oblong Geyser, Mammoth Paint Pots, Riverside Geyser, Lone Star Geyser, Orange Geyser, Crater of Grotto Geyser, Sponge Geyser...

I keep playing with them, arranging them in grids of four, nine and twelve, hoping to find something worth framing.

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The Quiet American

According to Immanuel Wallerstein, World War II was the end-stage of a hot war between the United States and Germany to see who would control the capitalist world economy in the wake of an ailing Britain. The U.S. won that war and, as a result, entered into (and instigated) a number of conflicts of variable temperatures -- Korea, Iran, Palestine, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, to name a few.

An American Scholar and Murderer

Indiana Jones is an adventurer, but that is only partially true. He is, first and foremost, a scholar, an archaeologist named Henry Jones who trained at the University of Chicago (presumably under James Henry Breasted at the Oriental Institute) and whose research is supported by Marshall College in Connecticut, where he is employed as a professor.

The above clip takes place in a medina in Dakar, Senegal, where, after causing a ruckus, Jones is confronted by a swordsman (though I suspect the swordsman is more than that, too). Jones's murder of this man received the biggest laugh amongst those in the audience for the film's premiere at Prince Rupert's Capitol Theatre in the summer of 1981, a year that few of us seem to remember.

An American Tourist and Drug Trafficker

An American thinking he could leave Turkey in 1970 with two kilos of hashish strapped to his body.

After the film Midnight Express appeared in 1978 (based on the 1977 book of the same name), no one in middle-class white America could imagine a greater horror than doing time in a Turkish prison.

From a Wikipedia entry, some of the differences between the book ("original story") and the film:

• In the movie, Billy Hayes is in Turkey with his girlfriend when he is arrested, whereas in the original story he is alone.
• Although Billy did spend seventeen days in the prison's psychiatric hospital in 1972, he never bit out anyone's tongue, which in the film led to him being committed to the section for the criminally insane.
• In the book's ending, Hayes was moved to another prison on an island from which he eventually escaped, by stealing a dinghy and rowing 17 miles in a raging storm across the Sea of Marmara, and then traveling by foot as well as on a bus to Istanbul and then crossing the border into Greece.^[6] In the movie, this passage is replaced by a violent scene in which he unwittingly kills the head guard who is preparing to rape him. (In reality, Hamidou, the chief guard, was killed in 1973 by a recently paroled prisoner, who spotted him drinking tea at a café outside the prison and shot him eight times.) The attempted rape scene itself was fictionalized; Billy never claimed to have suffered any sexual violence at the hands of his Turkish wardens. He did engage in consensual sex while in prison, but the film depicts Hayes gently rejecting the advances of a fellow prisoner.
• There is a fleeting reference to The Pudding Shop restaurant in the bazaar. It was/is not there - it is on Divan Yolu.

In 2007, the escaped Turkish convict -- the American Billy Hayes -- returned to Turkey after 32 years on the lam. A guest of the Turkish Institute for Police Studies, Hayes held a press conference where he apologized to the Turkish people. Three years before that, Oliver Stone, who received an Oscar for his Midnight Express screenplay, apologized for "over-dramaticising" the script, which he said was based expressly on interviews with Hayes.

The Voice Imitator (1997)

University of Chicago Press -- the English-language publisher of Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator (1997) -- has made available online five stories from Bernhard's 104 story book. I wonder why UoC Press chose these five?

Warning

A businessman from Koblenz had made his life's dream come true by visiting the pyramids of Giza and was forced, after he had done visiting the pyramids, to describe his visit as the greatest disappointment of his life, which I understand, for I myself was in Egypt last year and was disappointed above all by the pyramids. However, whereas I very quickly overcame my disappointment, the Koblenz businessman took vengeance for his disappointment by placing, for months on end, full-page advertisements in all the major newspapers in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, warning all future visitors to Egypt against the pyramids and especially against the pyramids of Cheops, which had disappointed him most deeply, more than all the others. The Koblenz businessman used up his resources in a very short time by these—as he called them—anti-Egypt and anti-pyramid advertisements and plunged himself into total penury. In the nature of things, his advertisements did not have the influence upon people that he had hoped for; on the contrary, the number of visitors to Egypt this year, as opposed to last year, has doubled.