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.