Rereading the Riot Act (April 23, 1935/2011)
Thanks a million to all the people who came out and participated in yesterday’s event in the DTES. We had a great turn out and a wonderful, rousing event, marking and reinscribing. I was very touched by the enthusiasm and collective nature of what took place.
Process-orientated work is fascinating because there are all these hidden layers that become apparent once the event is underway. You offer a departure point, something of a framework but where the participants and viewers take it and where it decides it wants to go is brand new and immediate.
I am still pondering what took place but essentially we remarked or reclaimed the Mayor’s route with a fictional protest based on an actual historical protest that also interfaced with another recreation of an actual protest — Stan Douglas piece at Woodwards — and then headed to Victory Square for more responses some of which interfaced with actual events and others which created new versions of it.
I have more to say about it, but one of the most fascinating aspects was also the response and interaction at street level, and the various forms of protest and inquiry towards what was taking place. Within the responses we had a diverse array of voices, times, history, language, song, objects, the yesterday, today (now) and the tomorrow.
The Solidarity Notes Labour choir were amazing, raising the hoops at Woodwards and rocking the skies at Victory Square and participating with heckles and laughter. What a vital bunch of individuals and wonderful singers they are. I hope you have the chance to sing with them or listen to them.
Trying to think of something to do to mark turning 40. Not having much success, I think because I am really very happy to be 40.
1. Boil the kettle.
2. Read The Arcades Project
3. Reboil the kettle.
4. Read The Arcades Project.
5. Turn on the hoover.
6. Imagine having a superior hoover.
7. Marvel at the fact I have not quite killed Helen’s lettuces and they still have not been planted.
8. Reboil the kettle.
9. Watch compelling documentary on something compelling that I can’t conceive of in this list right now.
10. Disco bowling to legendary arm ache.
11. Plan, ten year one, to get very worked up about being 50.
A woman today was walking across a traffic lighted intersection when her knee gave out. Is she alright? I shouted to the oatmeal bar wrapper in my hand.
She righted herself without hitting the tarmac and I was reassured that other knees do misbehave and impressed that she didn’t hit the decks. Recently I wasn’t so graceful when it happened to me, in descent, on a concrete set of stairs. Not long after it tho a man who said his hip was broken climbed over the railway tracks railing and lifted his bike over. Are you okay? Yes I am fine I just have a broken hip, he replied, jumped on his bike and pedalled off.
The eccentricities of knees and hips.
Filled with cats and sadness
I have two thoughts when I read stories like this one. The first is how isolated people are becoming and how unbeknownst to us they can fall so far off any radar and matter to nobody. It reminds me of Charlie LeDuff’s story about the person who froze to death. Recently we had a situation where someone seriously unravelled in our building. Certain images remain with me, one in particular just broke my heart. You’re left with all sorts of questions and wondering of what and why and if and how which settle to a calmer version of what and why and if and how. But you never quite attain clarity on the how.
The second thought when I read these saddening stories is that of collections and the collector. What Walter Benjamin referred to in The Arcades Project as “taking up the struggle against dispersion”.
Neil Smith gave a talk tonight at VIVO. Clint Burnham tweeted the gist of what he talked about, so you can find that on twitter if you search #neilsmith. Essentially he talked about the revolutionary imperative and described the five knives that went into the corpse of neo-liberalism. He also talked about Foucault and post -structuralism with some contradictions. All of that Foucault, post-structuralism and whether there were contradictions were completely lost on me, as the chair was very uncomfortable by that point in the talk and my mind had gone off to another place related to Iceland. (which related to his neo-liberalism bent)
I had previously read some of Neil Smith’s work on class, which I found very compelling and the reading of it prompted me to instigate my own interrogations loosely related to what he posited. One such interrogation has resulted in the current Rereading the Riot Act project I am fortunate to be curating with the Helen Pitt Gallery. I am very much enjoying and inspired by the group of collaborators who’ve agreed to engage with the project. Their willingness to respond and appetite for response is uplifting. It’s one thing to ponder something alone in the recesses of your mind but it’s quite the privilege to unveil some of those considerings and questions and find people responsive to them. The responses and people’s chosen departure points blow me away. I love to learn where they go.
I talked with Neil Smith afterwards about the history of the Catholic Worker movement and the gentrification of The Bowery. He reported one restaurant supply place left there, I have photos from the early and mid 200o’s which show at least a dozen or more such storefronts. Smith also told me about an group of artists who spray stencilled text around John Thompkins Park that detailed what had taken place there historically in one succinct phrase (something like police riots happen here (have to look this up for accuracy may not be correct). We talked about the act of reinscribing history into spaces where it’s been erased or absented. Jeff Derksen bought a copy of Taxi! for Smith from me. Then a few others bought copies. I had copies because of last week’s intervention.
VIVO is located on Main Street. I always think of Helen’s novel Sometimes They Sang and the jazz club in it as taking place in that area. That is where my imagination located it.
The book I am reading The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin has more than a thousand pages, yet I have opened it randomly to the identical page that last 3 times and read the same section. The title of the section is The Collector, strangely it’s page 210 every time, then I reverse to the start of the section and read forward. Yet one entry that mentions dispersion I must have read more than 10 times.
It’s a book I’ll spend years with, I’m certain.
More on the sleeping air traffic controllers, the headline on this piece read
Odd Work Schedules Pose Health Risk. (note the employment of the word odd, which seems an odd choice of word to describe a nightshift, since there’s relatively little that’s “odd” about working nights, it’s standard for many jobs. Cities could not function without night workers.)
“Reports of sleeping air traffic controllers highlight a long-known and often ignored hazard: Workers on night shifts can have trouble concentrating and even staying awake.” Read rest here
The 17th symptom of Ken Lum’s mirror maze piece (currently at the VAG) is profound dizziness, followed by the person behind you rolling you out of there back into the daylight. Utterly discombobulated, gallery s-waves til exit, accompanied by feelings of up da chuck, which settle to fever. Glad I saw the signage first.
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Civic Boosterism, a survey cont’d
Noted features employed in civic boosterism, especially in matter of literary reckoning.
Lists.
Numbers. (esp. 1, 2, and 5)
Verbs like explain, understand.
Adjectives such as awesome, great, best. (It is rare to hear the adjective “middling” or “piddling”)
Titles that include the name of the city or the telephone area code.
Appointing individual authors as ambassadors based on book titles and, often, meritless books.
A high proportion of male self-appointed ambassadors.
Anything other than opening the front door, putting your feet down on the pavement and walking about and talking to the people who actually live here. (such as the extreme example of having a chat to the person next door and the underpaid person selling you a cup of coffee). Current modes of boostering by boosters do not include the flaneur rather the “spouter” is more prevelant. Because Boosterism does not encourage uncovering, nor does it address the troughs (just the peaks).
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Impending civic boosterism forecast includes an avalanche of sporting regalia and flags on car windows that will inevitably snap and block the drains!
I have been listening to a series of neuroscience telecasts each week and find them informative and pleasing. Had I endless cash I would invest in a scan of the brain during the churning out of lists supplied during present wave of civic boosterism.
It may be time to look up the Expo era and trawl newspaper archives to see whether language was employed as blindly then as it is currently.
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The Rereading the Riot Act project is coming along very well. Inspired conversations and exchange with my generous and thoughtful collaborators. Quelle treat.
This week I was fortunate to acquire a copy of a book from the Sound Heritage series on labour history. Soon I will return to the boxy stacks of rare books at UBC and recommence the trawl — which is ever a delight. I could grow old happily at that table.