January 19, 2011
Winter gardening has proved an abject disaster. This is a disappointing, but one must accept the limits of 2nd floor minimal space horticulture. I saw one of my favourite gardeners today out on the road ‘The Flower Man’ I call him. He’s besotted with les fleurs and he only grows flowers. I asked after his seedling plans and we had a brief exchange on the prospect of recommencing at the garden.
Now I’ve to turn my attention to building some kind of raised platform-ish seedling table, so that my seeds do not meet the same misfortune, as the late season batch did last year. This means I have to raise the greenhouse up, above the level of the balcony, which will probably draw attention and may lead to a “letter of chastisement”. The space is very limited out there but I do have this wild notion of raising the plastic and height to about 5’0ft.
After the sign making, which involved brackets (gasp) and the shelf building — how difficult can a table be!
The other day at the supermarche I was reading a magazine called Wood or Woodworking. Note there was only one copy remaining so it’s more popular than the gossip ones it is housed with. The front cover showed an elaborate buffet board with drawers and doors and shelves and cupboards beneath. “If you can build a box you can build this unit” the text boasted. I folded it up and replaced it, since I cannot build a box … yet.
I will say that woodworking magazines and knitting magazines have something in common, a kind of unfathomable code, not unlike Lacan that it takes sustained effort to comprehend and I am not sure I have the necessary application for.
January 18, 2011
Vancouver parks & pools 1940 footage
A few days ago someone pointed me towards a wonderful silent film of various Vancouver parks in 1940. It’s fascinating to watch this footage and has a feel of the 1970’s to my eye. What intrigued me was the relationship of the body within it against the back drop of the rather prim looking tidy horticulture of some of the parks and intertwined with the garrulous bursts of spirit at some of the playgrounds.
The Vancouver Sun newspaper used to sponsor free public swimming lessons, would that it might do something this useful today? These days it appears to ignore the geography in its title. It could be the Nowhere in particular Sun.
This morning at the swimming pool I noticed an advert for a free swimming program: you needed to be able to swim 25 m continuously in order to qualify. Like many aspects of living in this city, the expectations just go up and up and up and away. The facilities, however, continue to improve and be a central part of peoples’ civic interaction and this is something to be grateful for.
(Thanks to Sandy for introducing me to this piece)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYdllbJyeyM&fs=1&hl=en_US]
January 18, 2011
Taxi! intervention (not hailed cabs) @ Not Sent Letters
On Friday evening I, alongside my generous and esteemed collaborator Lori Weidenhammer, undertook my first experiment in what will be a series of experiments and ongoing interventions (“Transactions”) around Helen Potrebenko’s 1975 novel Taxi!
Thank you to everyone who engaged with both Lori and I. Lori was deployed as Security Guard (Insecurity) and as you’ll see from the photo documentation (again thanks to a varied bunch of snappers) I was installed in the Taxi! rank. It was an embodiment piece that sought to recontextualize the experience of reading and being read to. It also was an inquiry into the conditions by which we read and how might we read a forgotten text over an available and advertised text.
I have more to write about this intervention. I was grateful to Helen Potrebenko and her husband Earl for turning out and supporting the piece. Also a huge thank you to Charlene Vickers for hosting the event at her studio space and Jeremy Todd for creating space for it. It was a fascinating experience to have such an engagement with readers. And as usual within performance art offered surprise, learning and took me in directions I could not have conceived of. For now I offer some photos of what took place.
(Also thank you to Jeremy Isao Speier for his precise, diligent work on the sign)
January 18, 2011
Circa Issue 131 on art criticism
I was curious to see that Circa Issue 131 is entirely devoted to the question of art criticism.
I was even more curious to recognize something in the first paragraph of Declan Delong’s piece that I’d never contemplated before. (To be honest I’d have employed a red pen and scrubbed parts of this sentence, but it’s the latter bit that interested me)
December 1987, and for perhaps the twentieth or thirtieth time in one long, languorous, teenage afternoon, I am again eagerly poring over the latest issue of what is, without question, the most important journal of cultural criticism in the world: the weekly music magazine Melody Maker.
Delong continues on to describe the editorial policy and reflect on the work of individual writers, but what arrested me was the consideration of Melody Maker as a journal of cultural criticism. I’d never thought of the influence of that devoted weekly or was two weekly read. I remember it came out on a Wednesday. I remember wondering how we’d live waiting for the next copy (as you do at age 15/17 galvanized by what comes out of the radio dial and so on, as if the rest of the world can just go shatter itself). And most importantly, I am struck by why we bought Melody Maker over the NME because I remember it was Melody Maker that was the first choice always. NME followed if you had a bit of extra money. Was there 10p difference in the price?
Further into this Circa issue Matt Packer’s piece Critical Fantasies contains the following parallel in a bracketed paragraph:
(Similar in apprehension is CIRCA’s approach of asking writers to respond to the issue of criticism in the present issue, after its well known financial difficulties. An approach that is simultaneously a dance of death, and a way of shoring-up CIRCA’s performative functions for its own survival)
You can read both essays entirely here The whole magazine is downloadable as a pdf.
January 14, 2011
Plants vs…
It is the time of year when people start to think about and plan their gardens, or garden plots. I love to read about them thumbing through the seed catalogues and visualizing how and where the plants may sit in relation to the weather, light and so on.
In contrast I don’t feel the same buzz when I read the endless articles and interviews with writers on “why or how they write…” What they write concerns me, the ideas around what they write perhaps, the research, in someways what they fail to write or don’t write concerns me more than why they write.
January 14, 2011
Last night I was nursing two injuries at gymnastics. Injuries sustained from going to the dentist and sleeping! I was considering skipping the training session because there was a screening of some archived readings I was curious about, but, after the day that was in it, physical action was the more necessary choice.
Not entirely sure how I thought not being able to lift my arm was going to facilitate flinging my body about the place. I snagged something in the shoulder, all the way up the neck to the ear region. It’s a 72-hour type strain acquired from sitting in the dentist’s chair with my head on an angle, in a state of terror, that caused it.
I find working with the body when it’s injured rewarding. I am interested in the seperation of how muscles work and interact and inter relate with each other: Not unlike the ingredients in a sentence. One’s awareness shifts when you’re denied access to a particular muscle group heavily relied on in a particular sport. I had not bargained how much the upper body is engaged previously. The transfer of weight to and from the shoulder region especially. Bit like losing the wheel on your car.
I figured I could easily spend the session on the trampoline or stretching, but it proved overly-painful. I was chatting, between tramp turns, with a contortionist. Her body arrived in the world equipped for the task it appeared. She’d always been very flexible. So I was asking her whether she discovered this from doing tricks at school or with her friends. She didn’t like that kind of attention, she explained. She’s a shy person. Now she’s an apprentice circus performer. Her connection being with her body over the spectacle of it displayed for an audience. Or perhaps she’s concealed by that spectacle and therefore comfortable. There was something of the ornament about this particular physical activity because a contortionist places the body in a manner and to an extremity nearly all of us cannot and leaves it there for a period of time and then moves to place it into another ‘sculpture’ (?).
I was thinking about the way truth is contorted lately and it’s curious that contorting truth is not an arrival point. It merely continues to ping, and ping, often with unsettling results and listening. What are the conditions neuro-scientifically that allow for truth to be contorted? Does the brain mimic the body in this way? Does it allow sculpture (ideas) to form and remain static, rather than be released to the next move, until their outline becomes so clear they take over ?
January 11, 2011
Not hailing cabs
I have been searching for my copy of The Trial to look up something in it. It has vamoosed. What about that?
*
A big adventure on Kingsway today and some confusion around the 2×2’s and an introduction to a light, ultra thin wood. The sign she cometh to life slowly.