As the sun disappears and the shadows decend from the mountaintop

"Truth to material" is a term attributed to Henry Moore that speaks to the use of materials best-suited to the construction of its object, but especially the effort taken to make that material available to the viewer, as opposed to hiding it, either with paint or placing something in front of it. I would say the same might be said of accidents "made" in the name of its installation, a chip or a tear, most recently at the CAG, where one of Kathy Slade's charcoal rubbings from her As the sun disappears and the shadows descend from the mountaintop exhibition (the work closest to the right, above) bears the effort it took to install it (at bottom). Or if not accidents or efforts, then the decision to "live with it"?

Setting It Bent

In Geography and Plays (1922) Gertrude Stein writes of "the landscape not moving but always being in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail, the story is only of importance if you like to tell or hear a story but the relation is there anyway" (125).

And this from Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable (1953), with no page citation given because I have long committed it to memory: "No need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas as life alone is enough." 

Concrete Delivery System

Auto Repairs are "Wee" was my mechanic for many years. In 2021, the site was razed, a hole dug, and now that hole is filled and at grade.

A couple days ago a heavily weighted truck pulled up, and from its trunk the long arm of concrete. At the end of that arm, a finger, guided by a figure in a hard plastic hat.

The Age of Adaline (2015)

The title of this film is a statement that leads to the question, What age? What is the age of this person named Adaline -- assuming Adaline is a person and not a pharmaceutical.

Adaline was born in San Francisco in 1909. In 1937, she is involved in a car accident that, as she finds out in the years that follow (as we do too, with the help of a mysterious male narrator), results in her not aging. When suspicions arise, Adaline moves on, changing identities. Most of the film takes place in the present, making Adaline 106 years old.

For a time, Adaline lived in England. It was in England that she began a five-week romance with an American student who also happens to be from San Francisco. At one point in the film, a flashback, we see Adaline in a taxi pulling up beside San Francisco's Alamo Square Park, where a young man sits on a bench with his back to her, a velvet box in his hand. "Keep driving," she tells the driver. It's another half hour before we learn that the young man in the park is the father of her current suitor, a young man who, like his father, she is trying hard not to fall for.

Most of this film was shot in Vancouver. Adaline works as a museum archivist at what is IRL the Vancouver Art Gallery. In fact, the area where she works was, until a couple years ago, the VAG's Library and Archives, until it was converted into what? a VIP lounge for donors? Also working with her is Kenneth (played by actor Hiro Kanagawa) and two other (nameless) colleagues, one of whom is the equally ageless former VAG librarian Cheryl Siegel, who retired from the gallery in 2015 after thirty years of service. That's Cheryl in the picture up top, sitting in the background, far right.

Parting Words

Earlier this week Melanie Mark announced in the legislature that she is leaving her job as a provincial NDP MLA, but she did not officially resign. Resignation of sitting MLAs is effective immediately and requires a particular wording, or protocol, if you will, and like NDP Premier John Horgan, who departed similarly, it was likely planned that way. In fact, I'm sure it was planned that way. As in the corporate world, politics is entirely planned, lest someone say something wrong and the opposition pounce on you, rip you to shreds for the benefit of the media, who convey such horrors in the name of news.

Before this latest announcement, Melanie Mark resigned from her position as the Minister of Tourism, Arts, Culture and Sport shortly after the NDP's announcement of a $789M redevelopment of the Royal B.C Museum was attacked by the opposition Liberal government for being "tone deaf." Never mind that maintaining an existing museum that has for years promoted the reduction if not the erasure of Indigenous peoples is in itself a tone deaf gesture, the Liberals' version of tone deafness applies not to the symbolic but to the economic (housing, health care, disaster relief, etc.), that aspect of civilization that those on the "right" claim they know more about than those they dismiss as "socialists".

The new Royal B.C. Museum was to be outgoing Premier Horgan's legacy monument, with Mark its inaugural greeter. Yet what was an understandably welcome idea in the years between the Truth & Reconciliation Call to Action and COVID was off the mark in 2022, and the way it was handled by the Horgan era NDP government left Mark unprotected. In that sense, her most recent description of the legislature as a "torture chamber" is apt.

Though Mark did thank Horgan (twice) for her time in office, it's who she didn't thank that leads one to wonder about the extent of her ordeal. It's always easy to blame the opposition in these situations, and she did, but surely there are those in her own party who let her down, not to mention those in the civil service, some of whom have been holding power longer than any sitting MLA. Will Mark, like former Liberal MP Jody Wilson-Reybould, write a book about her life and her time in public office? I expect so. Mark's story is not uncommon. Book buyers today consume grief like they once did Horror and Romance.

For more on the Royal B.C. Museum, click here for a February 9, 2023 "Future of the Royal B.C. Museum Dialogue".

Madeleine Is (1970)

When I interviewed the legendary film exhibitor Leonard Schein a few months back I was able to thank him for the great films he programmed at the Ridge, after he took it over in 1978. The Ridge was 24 blocks north of where I lived then (I was sixteen in 1978) and I would see mostly foreign films there. The Ridge was a huge part of my education. About 90% of the films I saw at the Ridge I saw on my own.

I was alone last night for the Cinematheque's screening of Sylvia Spring's Madeleine Is (see the movie here). Madeleine Is is the story of a kindly young French-Canadian woman, an artist living in Vancouver and working in fashion. She lives and works in her studio, which she shares with her activist/male chauvinist boyfriend "Toro", who is either trying to start a cult or overthrow the The Establishment. Maybe both.

Madeleine has a recurring dream about her joyful encounters with a clown. One day she meets a straight-laced young man on Granville Street who looks like him (we take her word for it). After visiting his apartment she realizes he is not her clown, and is disappointed. Toro meanwhile has disappointed her for the last time: he has allowed her studio to become a crash pad for hippies, and is fucking one of them. He suggests a "menage a trois," then a foursome with a mutual male friend, and Madeleine is repulsed.

Upset, Madeleine flees into the night -- through the flashing neon of Granville Street (accompanied by a free jazz score) -- only to catch a chill and be taken in by some of Toro's older friends: a hippie couple, one of whom is a former physician. A recovery period follows, which includes a visit from an "old bum" who Madeleine often talks to at Victory Square Park, and an in-group session with a psychologist who, from the sounds of it, has merged Jung with Lacan. 

The final scene is chilling, but concludes happily with Madeleine learning that she is her own clown, and that the fellow she thought was her clown is in fact his own person -- by then less "straight" than he was when she first met him.

There are many Vancouver locations in this film. Stanley Park, English Bay, Coal Harbour, a pre-beautification Gastown. Back in 1970, city councillors were doing everything they could to get neon off Granville Street. Now it's back -- the most incongruous example being the Backpackers Hostel sign (at bottom). When I was a teen, neon was the last thing I expected to see when I set out with a pack on my back.

Night and Day (after C.B.)

Oh, what to do, what to do? The paralyzing month of February. Worse at the end of the month than it is at the beginning. Which tells you. Which tells you it gets worse as it gets shorter.

That's the line. That's the line sitting down and writing can give you: Which tells you it gets worse as it gets shorter. Not all of it, just this: it gets worse as it gets shorter. But only when applied to a month that can't end fast enough, where the longer that month goes on, the worse you feel (about it).

The line runs counter to optimism. There's no mention of "the bright side". The days are getting brighter longer, and with each passing day, fewer days remain. But each day as I am living it -- in the present, because that's what the happiest among us claim is the best way -- each day is a slog, and I go to sleep earlier every night to escape it.