Abrupt shifts
Wednesday delight here, John Adams nudging the old upstairs neurology. Inhale Phrygian Gates (1977). A drown to bounce.
Yahoy water in sight
A great victory has been achieved and I cannot believe it. Indeed I let out a raw bellow at the supermarket on learning the news…. the city has installed the pipe or bit of pipe and turned on the water at our community garden, after years of effort and rabble rousing to the city, we are going to have a metered tap !
I am ecstatic at this news. It is astonishing.
Thanks to the City who when challenged (repeatedly!) have demonstrated true commitment to public gardening.
Gardening Confidential
I’d like to recommend a watch of this Gardening Confidential documentary on doczone at CBC website. You’ll have to scrowl down and select it.
Look out for the 5 foot carrots grown in Manchester. I was particularly revved by the allotments. I think next to a washing machine, an allotment is something I would have true ambitions for.
Last summer I spent some time in a friend’s allotment near Dun Laoghaire and was so impressed by the incredible cultivation and the raised bumps of potatoes and all kinds of stuff growing in there. Powerful looking onions and cabbages and what have you. It was really like being in the presence of the divine, wandering about and admiring what people had cultivated.
One of the great pleasures of age has to be the appeal of other peoples gardens and the appreciation of the wonder of a sturdy carrot and a belly sized beetroot.
For the second of two nights at precisely 10.29pm I am aware that it is raining.
Yesterday’s 10.29pm weather event was immediately apparent to me because I stepped out of a pub, continued a conversation with my companion, dodging under the roofs along the street for shelter. The rain was vicious and had come out of no where. It had been such a mild night when I started out. My coat, of course, the good coat, has no hood on it.
(What kind of a coat is it? You might ask. It is the coat approved by the sister. It is an elegant coat seemingly. Oh the impractical nature of elegance.)
Tonight it’s another variety of rain, darting rain to yesterday’s decisive and impaling rain.
But then the view of the rain differs, even though the time is identical — 24 hours apart. I am looking out at it, not up at it.
I love to look up at the rain, I made a remarkable discovery once looking up at the rain. It’s impact upon me I have never forgotten.
Parataxis: walking the ride
Yesterday I walked Helen’s fine Parataxis map (for our planned May 1st event) and enjoyed the adventure very much. Esp. standing alone in my good black coat, obtained at my sister’s prompting last summer in Dublin, and reading aloud from Taxi! to no one in particular, into the city.
I was able to experience the difference within the past two days of being a flaneur (esse?) vs being an orator. I’ll give you a clue, it is way easier to orate.
I could not be more glad of my current crop of artistic ventures and the experiences and interactions they have given me. All of which would be nothing without the goodwill and generous input of my various collaborators. Thank you to them all!
The art and high of hoovering
There is nothing like the charge of hoovering. God be praised for the vacuum cleaner irregardless of its busted pipe. I am sure great thoughts and whole nations have been formed while doing the hoovering. That is how highly I rate it. It is the Everest of domesticity.
Mapping
The Parataxis map has landed! (Thanks Helen!) The event will take place May 1st on Workers Day.
I must go and walk the route and after yesterday’s adventure, Lord knows where I’ll end up.
This time, however, I will eat eggs before departure.
Yesterday’s events in London with the anti-cuts march bought back memories of the Poll Tax march of March 31, 1990 and era. (Are all bad ideas confronted in March?)
Today I continue my unearthing of the history of protest in Vancouver in the 1930′s.
In 1935 it was the reading of the riot act that was the weapon, today they have given up using reading as a weapon and resort to physical containment, ie. Kettling.
A birthday party for a woman, where a Stanley Kubrick film was projected without sound. At one point, my boys departed I sat and stared and tried to imagine the dialogue of this film I’ve never seen. I found something akin to a human version of Thunderbirds was all I could come up with.
Later and the bid to go elsewhere for dancing, but tired, I decided to press on instead to Rethinking the Human.
My brain has a hard time with swimming and with numbers.
Today I endured an extended bout of confusion searching for 1016 E Hastings which I understood was the first City Hall. I went in search of it, after meeting one of the artists and enjoying a great exchange with him about my approaching Unit/Pitt project Rereading the Riot Act.
How and ever a number of things occurred in trying to find this blessed 1016 address. A woman, Brenda it turned out, in a wheelchair asked a fella to push her up the street to the Balmoral but he was waiting on someone, so I offered to push her. She told me the story of how she was recently hit by a car and the injuries she sustained. We had a lively exchange. At the Balmoral she instructed me on how to get her chair inside and a fella greeted her and held the door for us. Several other people called out to her and then a man who worked in there came over. He’ll take care of me from here, she said. The fella, who had a warm gummy smile, thanked me. I was glad of the chance to see all this, given the pain the woman must have been suffering — there had to be some small comfort in being acknowledged by those around her.
I continued walking and walking and walking until finally I realized I’d be long walking at this rate and was further confused as to how the Mayor in 1935 had skipped so dandily over to read the riot act at Victory Square given the epic trek that I’d succumbed to.
Eventually I gave up and went in search of teeeny bookshop I’d been meaning to visit. No luck. I simply could not find anything today. I decided to drive and search for this 1016 E Hastings, which I did and realized there’s no way this could be the place I was hunting for.
The Waldorf hotel loomed on the corner so I decided to stop in for eggs and a google search. En route however a bunch of men were gathered in the car park opposite so I went to investigate what was happening. That’s another sceal.
Inside navigating a dubious internet connection, it transpired that bloody hell I was supposed to be looking for 16 E Hastings. I reassured myself that 1016 was the Battle of Hastings until about 20 mins later, a friend sent an email saying “mais non that was 1066″
It was a 1016 type of day. Four hours of it. I am coining this phrase. “A complete 1016 situation”.
Broken City Lab
Chanced upon this project and collective:
The Ideas
Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.
I was just at a screening. There was one image that struck me. It was a shot of a park, filmed in Autumn, I think it looked like Robson Park on the Eastside. Is it high definition that makes the leaves that wholesome orange, and the ground that damp. It was remarkable to be able to experience the weather in this way and gave me gusto for the possibilities of more accurate weather depiction.
I should add that this shot was nothing to do with the weather nor the park really and was a spoof on Dr Spook/Star Trek. However I read that particular frame in this way. That one frame then coloured the entire piece.
I am dismayed by the inaccurate tinkering with the weather that takes place in our fiction (read: weather abuse) I don’t understand why the weather must be invoked as a vehicle for all kinds of things other than that of what it is and that if you actually pay attention to what it is, it becomes mighty compelling in its minutae. Where there appears to be no variety if you examine it, you find infinite variety.
All credit for this goes to that Icelandic postwoman who I walked beside way back in 94 in the streets of Reykjavik for research on another matter. She spoke to me about this and awoke me to the weather. Call it my Michael Fish hurricane moment. Takk, takk (except it’s spelt with that funny P shaped letter)
I love the way he lays his head
Alfie-Cyril curls up so poetically x
Gave a lift to a young fella at gymnastics to the skytrain station and en route he described what a hipster looked like. I thought hipster was a mattitude more than a look. As I listened I realized I don’t think I have ever seen one. He offered only a description of the male hipster. I am befuddled.