Had my monthly chat in the window of the uterine caff about DM Fraser.  All my chats about that writer take place in the same spot. I have 2 people who I alight on every time I see them! I really would like to find more folks to talk about his work with. If you’ve read him, or have any thoughts on his work, please post a comment or send an email: [email protected]

Cultural Olympiad, the pimped to collapse lung

Cultural Olympiad is akin to a blinding orgy.  Excess of everything, nothing can really be taken in and then bang two weeks or two months will give way to a famine.

It reminds me of the celtic tiger. He only visited certain people in the country and they jumped on him (for who wouldn’t/doesn’t jump when the tigre comes to town) and people jumped with little regard for those who couldn’t reach his tail. Then like all tigres, bored, he moved on.

The BC government surreptitiously closing down arts funding: they make their move when they lights are bright. They’ll encounter little resistance because the artists are too busy glad ragging. Even some of the projects are all about pointless excess. Or excess with a point that’s really unremarkable. Or in the worst case a point we can absolutely do without or a point that we can do without and says nothing about the place we live.  Some of these single projects could fund an artist run centre like the displaced Helen Pitt for a year!

Another thing with bonanza is the tip top usual suspects get wheeled out … the new, the quiet, the invigorating will not be included or even invited to join in because hierarchy and connection and approval rue the day. Amidst it all there will be treats and those treats will be poorly attended the same way the more interesting stuff is usually barren. And there will be ambitious events that are rewarding, that go beyond ostentation and “because I can” and “because x person who made the funding application said I can” that may stay with viewers and listeners, but the rest, the brash clanging will give way to a silence afterwards, perhaps a detrimental one, but one that reminds us that blind conceit trips us all up and we should be careful who we get into bed with.

If the pimp’s waving dollars at you: he usually has a strong conviction of what he expects in return.

A collapsed lung comes to mind.

A collapsed lung that will not reinflate with gentle, nudging aspirating.

Self interest was the punch maybe?

In and out

Increasingly I find if go to a talk or a reading and it doesn’t engage me I experience a kind of claustrophobia, which results in a desire to both get out and stay put and suffer, lest it might improve. This is a relatively recent experience. Age, bhfeidir?

The trouble with this, is it’s an acutely uncomfortable and vexing experience. The vexation I don’t mind. I find it quite beneficial creatively to be vexed (as playwright Tom Murphy would say ‘what gets me mad gets me going’) .  Sometimes, like any traffic, the discussion will give way to something curious and then I am glad to have endured the discomfort, but if it doesn’t it’s essentially like being trapped down a mine and when you surface you’ve the feeling you lost two weeks in a pointless pursuit.  It can take hours to recover from the discombobulation that ensues and then you’ve to excavate the vexation.

At today’s talk, (hosted by Artspeak) which I was attracted to by a bunch of sentences, that offered an idea that I longed to learn more about, and  I wanted to be possible.  (Along the lines of overthrowing the editing process) However reading about something can sometimes be more compelling than listening to people rambling about the thing because in reading you’ve something tangible — text — but in the arch of ramble — the text, the entity disappears and it’s dilutes into “what we’re (creators) about,” and concepts floating about the room like a bunch of poorly flung paper airplanes.

I sought further clarification from one of the speakers. What I thought was happening in this work (it’s creation) based on the sentences I read, may not be actually happening, so it’s safe to say the thing that attracted me may not have happened yet. From my understanding – or misunderstanding –I thought they were pioneering a kind of spontaneous literature that did not engage in any editing process. I was excited by this idea that what was produced in a moment, was of that moment and could stand for it with no requirement beyond being of that moment and would be accepted as that, without ambition to be “completed” in a whole external process (editing, spell checking, clipping, clopping, chipping, chopping).

Perhaps it was the spirit that drove the enterprise that attracted me. Or perhaps in my excitement that such a thing might exist and work … I constructed its fictional existence and then when I sat in the room was disappointed I couldn’t recognize it.

I nipped in.

Very different watching the same piece a second time, in a completely empty gallery. Last time I’d to share the couch with two strangers, today I was the only body in the two rooms. Not unlike having the swimming pool to yourself, or sitting at the back of an empty bus, your mind relaxes just a bit more and sound is experienced differently. Somehow it’s as if the documentary is just a live piece to camera, there’s an added Brechtian directness because you alone are the only person absorbing it.

It’s curious I never have that experience watching the telly! Maybe it was influenced by my head being freshly scrambled at a talk at another artist run centre and needing an urgent cup of tea, but wanted to get back to Bata before Bata came down from the wall.

I am glad I went back to Bata. My notes when I type them up will explain why. All day I’ve been thinking about how if there’s a biscuit (cookie) factory in a town, how the smell pervades the air. The factory would draw the workers in, the way the biscuits go into the oven and when the workers go home the aroma escapes with them. If you don’t work in the factory, you still live somewhat in the factory.

In the Colony piece (correct description it’s an experimental social documentary according to the blurb) you hear how the owners experienced their company and how in turn the workers did. Like a venn diagram there’s a minor crescent of agreement, mostly it’s starkly different. The owners constructed what the experience of the workers must have been to suit a certain nostalgia, while in turn there was nostalgia in hindsight from the former workers. The workers nostalgia all held the theme of change, how everything had changed since and they could not recognize it. The owners p.o.v. was entirely static ie. what the workers were given.

Notes to follow. I have to figure out what it was I went back to look for.

Hoping to go back and rewatch the documentary/ video installation Colony (2007) by Cinema Suitcase Colony at Western Front about the shoe factory (Bata shoe company) that I wrote about a good few weeks ago (p’haps 2 months). I am revisited by the idea of work and place being interdependent. The way that farming and fishing are. The recent family death prompts it. Considering how interdependent small farmers can be to drive cows and how they need neighbours to come out and help turn them. (Driving and turning the cows= farming vernacular, not poor english) These are changing relationships. There’s some mirroring tho’ in our relationship to technology (telecommuting: place and work co-exist, internet as railway line that brings us to work etc)

There’s one woman, who spoke in the piece from Scotland, she talked about the bell ringing calling them to work.

Show closes today, hope I can still nip in.

To continue along the theme of hypocrisy when it comes to perceptions of middle/aged older women: just watched this documentary on older mothers via CBC and there’s an astonishing amount of interest, hysterical opinion on older women giving birth. It would appear we’re all experts on women, whose medical history and daily lives, we know absolutely nothing about.

“No, no, no, no” one man was yelling on the radio. Was he talking of war, injustice, oppression? Honestly he sounded like a dinosaur was coming through the window heading for his throat. Main non, he was declaring at the prospect of a woman, he does not know, who WANTS to have a child. OK she was 60 or 72, but the operative word in the childbirth experience is wants. Because if you don’t want to have a child, there’s no sense in having one.

It’s common currency now is to indict mothers and motherhood at every bend in the road. Society’s perception is mothers are never doing enough, or they’re doing too much, or their wish to do x must be thwarted, or they are responsible for the worst social problems and on and on. And women are now indicting other women with alarming ease.

Honestly if I reflect on my life from age 5 onwards I have a plethora of stored phrases, summaries, tags, cooked up around me, applied to fallen women en route to motherhood, and mothers. There was the “she’s away Nursing in England” unmarried mother whisked off to give birth to then return slender and childless from this “nursing” (not to be confused with breastfeeding). Then there’s came the pregnant teen, the pregnant teen who gets herself pregnant for a council flat, along with the wanton woman, who tricks her boyfriend into impregnating her so she too can get a council flat, then there’s the young woman (usually) who tricks her boyfriend to impregnate her, who doesn’t want a council flat (phew the run on flats by round tummies !) but wants to “keep” the boyfriend. Then there’s the ticking biological clock suspect (this can begin with a simple look across the street at a changing traffic light around age 25), then there’s the she’s stuck on the shelf and desperate and tick-tock and take pity on her, but hang on a minute she doesn’t want a baby — hell what’s wrong with her?!

Moving along to the she’s left it too late tags. Followed by the burdening what’s she thinking tags…And this is before any of these children actually arrive in the world? Then commences an entirely new theatre of condemnation.

I am thinking I don’t know what the state of any of woman’s health — whether she 20 or 72– is going into pregnancy. I think women and men need to want to have a child. Or at least be committed to embracing, adjusting what parenthood hurls at them. I cannot dictate ideal circumstances in which children should be born. Many of the 70 year olds I know have four times the energy I have.

What I am wondering is why the female body remains this bastion of fear. It’s almost becoming militaristic. This wailing fear of what this body is about to dump upon the world. People cowering from it like there are bullets coming from it they need to duck! What we really need to do is get out of security guarding the ovaries because if we are in the ovaries, why aren’t we in the testicles?

ding a ling

Woman phones. You phoned me, she says. I see your # on call display.  I don’t know who she is.

I didn’t phone you.

Yes you did. I can see it on my call display.

Which number phoned you? I don’t know, she says. Hold on I’ll call you back.

Woman phones again. This number she says saying the wrong number aloud. That’s not my number I say.

You phoned me, she repeats.

Is it poss someone is using my number to cover up their number I say.

No that’s not possible, she replies.

I say I did not phone her because I don’t know who she is.

I don’t know who you are either, she says.

Yes well I promise you I did not phone you.

I don’t what your excuse is, she says, but you phoned me

#

Iris

Still pondering the Iris Robinson story out of Belfast this week. There are a few things that confuse me. The first: why because she has a sexuality, she’s mentally ill and second: why wasn’t she cautioned for incite to hatred over her radio interview during which she expressed extremely hateful views towards homosexuals.

According to the details disclosed by BBC Spotlight she was pretty clear headed when it came to inveigling 50 grand from two property developers for investment in her young lover’s business and even more ruthless when she deemed it time for the money to be returned by him.

Initially I objected to the way the media inferred she, by virtue of the age gap, had taken advantage of this man, since it suggests no young man is attracted to a woman in her sixties which I find foolish. The double standard was obvious.

But what’s curious is when a male politician (or president) falls from grace it is never suggested he’s mentally ill. Ever. Yet she’s now pegged as in “acute psychiatric care”, incapacitated to the point where she’s not able to answer the real question around what she did taking money etc.

old faithful

Our faithful, reliable, rain water.

Interesting to watch the Olympic pack leaping the gap over the daily blight. I love this about the weather. No matter how much we control, no matter how much we decide, no matter who we nominate or choose, the weather will not be instructed, she won’t be told what to do.

I enjoy the way she arches her back in this manner. And sometimes when she’s laying into me, or leaving someone with no heat, no water, no roof I wish she was a bit less stubborn. Right now she’s having a laugh…at machines moving piles of snow under tarpaulin for heat. You think she can’t lift that tarpaulin? She can even turn off the power point presentations and its illuminated promises.

Agnes Varda

I have completed my recuperation with Agnes Varda’s work — I am not recuperated but that has nowt to do with Agnes films and everything to do with a poxy set of lungs.

La Pointe Courte invigorated me despite the pleura protest. So much so it’s difficult to know where to begin so I shall simply commence en pointe and jeter around the harbour. The timbre/tone of the voice is exquisite in this film, the sequences between the couple rely on a flat delivery, especially by the male, which is exceptionally effective. If the voice is devoid of emotion, suddenly the visual carries all the more significance. The faces, the movements of the body, the objects they move around all become heightened. And the curious thing is the entire exchange is dialogue, a wandering conversation where the couple try to dissect their relative positions and points of view on their relationship.

The parallel narrative has more of a documentary feel: the story of a fishing village (through which the couple weave, but the two stories are ultimately separate). The actors, who were local people, are sometimes aware they are being filmed and they carry these knowing smiles that add to what they are doing because the viewer is immersed in a documentary sense of these peoples lives, along with a dramatic narrative they are participating in. I think this melding of documentary and fiction is a perfect weave: one enriches the other in both directions.

It’s something that interests me greatly in books: how to incorporate the documentary into fiction. I believe it’s possible. I say this because when I read anthropology and sociology I am as engrossed as when I read fiction. I suspect it’s like tuning instruments together where each retains a distinct sound.

Agnes makes me curious and I love to feel curious. It’s a good, strong feeling.