Khan Lee, Equinox Gallery, Nov. 26 - Dec. 24, 2022

The Equinox Gallery is on my trapline and sometimes while walking I devise a reason to pop in to see a show everyone knows I'm seeing for the fourth time. Fortunately the staff are well-trained, and for my neediness and the guilt that comes with it, punishment comes once indulged.

"What's up after Devon's show?" I ask, and Sophie tells me it's Khan Lee. "Great!" I follow her around the corner where Khan has installed an outsized wall bracket that turns the second floor of the gallery into a shelf, the gallery into a cupboard, and us -- into silverfish?

"There," Sophie points, and I see that instead of large screws fastening the bracket to the wall (and ceiling?) it is an expressive mess of "normal-sized" screws that returns us to the scale we've grown accustomed to.

Book Launch

Last night at Pyatt Hall Talonbooks launched six of its fall titles. Pictured above is Danielle LaFrance introducing #postdildo, an insertable word she uses to plug us from the predictability of our imaginations?

As she read, we listened. 

Copper Miner

The composer of this sculpture does not consider himself to be a composer or a sculptor but someone who, he tells me, has "a sixth sense for what's coming down," and when it does, "there's always good stuff to be found," like the copper he mined from a nearby demolition bin. 

"Twice people called the cops on me," he said, adjusting his haul to fit a second device (a more-recent version of the Radio Flyer wagon). "They thought I stole this container, but I didn't; it's the one that goes with my house. It's mine."

I asked if the police showed up, and he told me, "They did, but they just laughed." And he laughed too. 

The miner said it would take a couple hours for him to clean up the copper, and that he could get a couple hundred bucks for it. When I asked if his "sixth sense" applied to anything else, he thought for a moment, before shrugging, "No, not so far."

Free Musketeers 2

Thank you to those both pro and con who wrote to me about your relationship to/with Twitter.

To the cons, I hear you, and to a couple of you I hope you overcome your addiction. To those pro, I scrolled through one of your accounts and noted a thread on why it is important to leave an abusive relationship, ideally if you are the abuser. But isn't that what many are engaged in as participants in Twitter? An abusive relationship? And isn't that the modern villain's game (from the Joker to Hannibal Lecter)  -- pointing out our hypocrisies? 

I doubt I'm the first person to assume that Elon Musk has read enough Edgar Allen Poe to know a mean game when he sees one -- to say nothing of the one he is playing with his most recent acquisition. All these people tweeting their goodbyes to Twitter, only to follow them with "I am livid" vituperations against some celebrity or another. It saddens me that people will endure something if it's "free", as if a free service precludes adherence to the conditions that underlie and, of course, infect it.

Terry Southern's The Magic Christian (1959) and its 1968 film version showed us how far people will go for money (recall the swimming pool scene). Twitter has shown us how much people will put up with as long as they are not being seen to be paying for it. But now that they are required to pay? What can it mean to pay to stay on something when everything you've tweeted says otherwise? That you "contain multitudes"? This from the same poet: "Resist much, obey little. "

Skaters

Saturday's sun was irresistible. So I went out in it, walking east before making up my mind. A couple blocks in, a text from a friend: "If you're on one of your 'walks', stop by Britannia's tennis courts. My daughter's in a skateboard competition. Just girls."

Hard to call this a competition when everyone was bent-over-backwards supportive of each other, though I suppose you can have it both ways these days.

South of the courts were tables. Goods and good cheer. A boyfriend was selling his girlfriend's crocheted hats (she was competing). I saw one I liked, and was about to meet his price ($40), when I asked about the yarn, and he told me automatonically: "They're a hundred percent acrylic."

I thought of the wool and cotton hats my mother used to make for me, how quickly they lost their shape, only to be reminded by the young man's mother, who sensed my disappointment, that "Acrylic bounces back." She took the hat from my hands and played it like a concertina. "See?"

Free Musketeers?

Dr. Constantina Katsari is a "comparative historian" and entrepreneur currently living in Leicester, UK. On July 1, 2019 she posted an article on her Linkedin page called "How to monetize your Twitter account and get paid per tweet". In 2019 there were 139 million Twitter account holders; today there are approximately 450 million.

I came upon the article while Googling for evidence of a Twitter pay-per-tweet initiative, where Twitter account-holders pay for each tweet they post, rather than getting paid. I am interested in this in the same way I am interested in families who have a "swear jar" in their homes. For those unfamiliar with swear jars, every time you swear you owe the jar a twoonie.

Katsari tells us that Kim Kardashian is getting paid "significantly more than $10,000 per tweet." This after Katsari tells us that advertisers (in 2019) were willing to pay those with more than 20,000 followers between $2-70 per tweet.

Elon Musk's current $8 fee for Twitter Blue verification is his attempt to both clean up Twitter's "hellscape" (not likely) and monetize the platform for his own gain (more likely). If every current account holder were to pay $8, Musk would be within $100 million of breaking even on the $44B he paid for the company.

As for those who intend to stay-and-pay -- to tweet their grief and anger, to service their dopamine addiction, to promote books that fewer and fewer of us have time to read because we're too busy tweeting -- a per tweet fee (or a tweet plan, like we have with our phones) would most certainly have Musk cleaning up, put Twitter in the black. Hellscape be damned. 

Corydalis

The Corydalis is usually out in April and starts to fade by late-August. Only this year she returned in mid-September and is still present in my back garden's shadier corners.

Funny that I have so much luck with the lutea (yellow), but not with the flexuosa (blue), which is the variety I've attempted numerous times but could never establish. The opposite occurred with the lutea. I've seen colonies in alleys that came from my first plants as far as two blocks away.