Current Events

Seriously? What isn't current these days? Everything that is seen or heard or touched or tasted for the first time is happening right now. Over breakfast the wise child sings along to a song on the Bose ("You've paid the tax, he's the queer of the shore"), and her mother corrects her.

"A what?" she says.

"A mondegreen," says the mother. 

A kid in my neighbourhood has discovered the Beatles. She thinks they're the same age as Arijit Singh. Because her ear is a microphone, and her hands are huge and flexible, she can play whatever she hears. 

This is a problem for her mother, who channeled her daughter into expensive piano lessons with a teacher who quit on them because all she wanted to play one day was the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds", and when she started to sing along he barked at her and she responded with Rachmaninoff's "Allegro Agitato" and "wiped his ass with it," the father keeps saying, proudly, and the "real reason" why his daughter's teacher quit.

"Time Has Come Today" (1967)

The rules have changed today

I have no place to stay

Thinking about the subway

Love has flown away

-- "Time Has Come Today," The Chamber Brothers

Time. We trust Time because we know what's coming next. At a time of great uncertainty -- during these unprecedented times -- Time is there to comfort us.

As sure as the sun will rise, Time is there to catch it. Throughout the year, a different number every day. But a number all the same. Like money comes in numbers.

Money is time. Nevermind that it sounds better the other way around, first, and then what I wrote. Nevermind that.

I was five when a visitor came to our house, drank too much and I saw him in the morning, sitting in the living room buttoning up his white shirt, his pale winter feet poking out from the legs of his grey flannel slacks. The sun was coming up and he said, "C'mere, I wanna show you something."

He opened the doors to the patio and took from his pocket a nine ounce gold bar, which he held up high, to where it came alive, as if from the inside.

"You know what this?" he asked me, and I said "Sunshine."

I had no memory of this until my mother told me about it years later, when I was in my thirties. The man had told her the story, and as she told me, I was back in time, recalling details that she corroborated. When I told her the story a couple months ago, she had no recollection of it. "Do you know who this man could have been?" I asked, and without hesitation she said, "He sounds a lot like your father."

"Melody"

Lisa Moore is a born-and-based Newfoundland writer who emerged in the early 1990s, around the same time as I did. I first knew (of) her as a member of the Burning Rock Collective, whom I hosted at the Malcolm Lowry Room in the mid-1990s. The BRC were a group of younger Newfoundland writers who wrote with a decidedly urban inflection, in contrast to prevailing stereotypes that, despite the best efforts of the CBC, have almost been forgotten. The BRC were touring the country powered by a Canada Council Explorations grant.

In 1998 Moore and I had pieces in Hal Niedzviecki's Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada, which came out with M&S and is prolly no longer in print. I enjoyed Moore's "Purgatory's Wild Kingdom" and vowed to read more -- more Moore -- but my memory being what it is, I can no longer be certain that I did. My memory, yes, but I have read so many books over the years -- great books that I have no recollection of to not-so-great books that continue to haunt me. Indeed, what does that say about me and my maker -- that I am cursed to remember the least of my reading? Is she, my maker, asking me to look deeper into my pain? In an effort to erase it? Refocus its energies? (These are the kinds of questions I have been asking myself of late.)

Yesterday, while returning from coffee with another Newfie (Cornerbrook's Glenn Alteen) I noticed a community book dispensary near the field house at Robson Park, and there inside it was a copy of Lisa Moore's Open (Anansi, 2002). I remember when this book came out, and I thought, yes, I'll read it. But after purchasing it, the book sat on my desk for two years until a house sitter told me she read the Concrete Forest anthology while I was away, and had I ever met Lisa Moore? because she loved "Purgatory's Wild Kingdom" and wanted to read more -- more Moore. As a thank you gift I gave her my unread copy of Open.

Open opens with a story called "Melody" that is dreamy lyrical yet lifelong epic, like the opening of Johnson's 1992 Jesus' Son, and I wonder if the stories that follow are, or will be, related. The story, if I had to present it, is open enough that it requires a decision from the reader, or maybe a blindfold and a pin. You don the blindfold and step forward with the pin until you feel it squeeze into something, and that's what you talk about. For me this pin came to rest in Grief. Not today's told-not-shown, runny nose grief-on-the-sleeve, but something more subtle, furtive. Grief not because the narrator's husband died, but because "I had never initiated anything in my life" (23) -- "Melody acted; I was acted upon." (5)

Invisibility Under Threat of Erasure

On January 22th the Vancouver Sun published (online) a 1500 word Page Four article by John Mackie called "Old Kingsway Versus New". The inspiration for the piece appears to be Heritage Vancouver's recent addition of Kingsway (the entire 8-mile stretch of it, from 7th and Main in Vancouver to the Burnaby/New Westminster border) to its Top 10 endangered heritage sites.

Nice to see the word "heritage" extend beyond the Edwardian to include semi-feudal, post-war immigrant working class racialized neighbourhoods like Kingsway. Not so nice to see Kingsway once again defined by what it is not, as evidenced by Mackie's don't-think-of-a-purple-pony lede: "Kingsway will never be confused with the Champs Elysees in Paris or Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles." Also, what happened to the Sun's fact checkers? It's New Sam Po Meat & BBQ, not New Samo Meat & BBQ.

SFU's Andy Yan is quoted at length throughout the article. He talks of "the invisible manufacturing that goes on" along Kingsway, particularly in the food industry and "in terms of  ... production, distribution and repair elements." And later, how that production is "in danger of being systematically erased," how this "erasure is stemming from its invisibility" (great line!).

Mackie's Strathcona neighbour and Vancouver Councillor Pete Fry concludes the article with his amendment to the recent 1265 Kingsway development proposal that has the new building's retail floor plate sectioned into smaller spaces, as opposed to a single unit. Would that discourage private developers from the common practice of writing off the loss of (deliberately) un-leased premium priced ground level retail spaces for the first three years after the completion of what is largely a market housing project? No. That's another article that is not in any rush to be written, one that begins: "Vancouver will never be mistaken for a city that puts public housing before private profit."

Fight Club, Tiger Lily?

VOICE #1: This is Sheppard Wong's home.

VOICE #2: He lives in that piece of paper?

Much ado about state officials from the People's Republic of China changing the ending of Fight Club (1999) -- without touching its beginning and middle!

Back in 1965, Woody Allen purchased the rights to a Japanese film, removed the sound and replaced it with a new sound design, score and English language dialogue.

Here is Allen talking about What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966), along with its trailer.

Turner Creative Artists

Gorgeous Prose is a fictive online musical group of fortysomething incels who were Zooming before the pandemic and are talking about meeting in RL. They are available to novelists and short story writers for passing mentions ($25), dead-end subplots ($100) and activities of your own invention, like the name of a flower shop or a cleaning service ($1000). Those interested in a complete profile, please contact me at this address and you can tell me how much you are willing to spend. All monies raised will go into gardening supplies.  

The World's Most Expensive Camera As a Weapon of Mass Creation

There were over 300 things that could have scuttled the "installation" of the $10-billion (USD) James Webb Space Telescope as it unfurled ("like origami," reporters kept saying) in its L2 orbit of the Sun, roughly 1.5 million kms from Earth.

Launched on Christmas Day (Dec. 25), the telescope is now capable of looking back (and more clearly than Hubble) into the history of our 13.8 billon year old universe. All but the first 100, 000 years will be revealed, presumably because these years, like the best lots in La Jolla, have been held back by investors.

To cover themselves, NASA will concoct a conspiracy theory that suggests the People's Republic of China had already discovered these first years, found that they bore a striking resemblance to the pantings of Ferdinand Leeke (1859-1923), and had a scrambling device installed that has turned them into analogue "static".

For those put out, NASA has suggested that if other signs of life exist in our universe, the JWST will provide conclusive proof. Yet another instance of the camera standing in as an arbiter of truth.