On Guard!
“A Class 1 hurricane-strength windstorm is expected to slam into the entire B.C. coast Wednesday morning.
Environment Canada issued a severe weather alert Tuesday for the coast and immediate inland sections, including Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley”
CBC News
Mrsokana or Mrs Oskana as she’s occasionally renamed, your trusty literary weather forecaster, will obviously be in residence keeping an eye out and providing reports, gust par gust.
Hold onto your bonnets, boil the kettle & tie down anything that rattles…
Insomnia fog
One of the good things about insomnia is, occasionally, during a bout, a weather event is glimpse-able
I am able to report at 2.14am there is a significant fog event underway in Vancouver.
It has already settled in around the lamp posts and coddled its way over the light, lessening the orange from it significantly.
Would I rather be asleep than making these observations? Perhaps and yet no. I’d rather be asleep with these observations.
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)
Vancouver is place where it is not easy to find work. I constantly meet people from other places in Canada (and the world and Vancouver for that matter) who report this experience of Vancouver. I was in a bookshop recently in Victoria, where there was a very helpful woman working who told me how she’d recently moved to Vancouver for a period of time, tried to find work and encountered not just a difficult time, but rudeness and attitude in her job search. She had returned to Victoria and her job. Last week it was a woman from Ontario, who said she’d had enough and was going home, where she could find opportunities. She had gone to school for graphic design and graduated and worked in domestic service type work.
Concurrent to the difficulty of finding work is a pious attitude towards unemployment and the unemployed. The system that exists EI freezes a great number of people out, and you can only access certain training programs if you’ve been on EI. Welfare rates are inhumane and you must undertake what can only be described as some kind of cattle trial before you can even consider applying. The idea being to shake any scrap of dignity you may have to dust and hope you’ll go home destroyed and live under a bush rather than return to face more of it.
Where does it leave people?
It leaves people bearing an unnecessary and additional sense of shame and failure, when the fact of the matter is this is a difficult place to find work! You watch people unwind on facebook as their job search produces nothing for sometimes months, years even. The pious attitude surrounding unemployment certainly does little to help these bright, capable people. This sense of piety also produces a risk averse work force, so people may tend to stay put.
It’s easy to forget how brutal unemployment can be when you haven’t been touched by it in a very long time. It’s easy to feel smug and satisfied and fuel the piety.
But hark we are living in the midst of a property bubble here that will eventually burst and we never think that’s going to happen do we? The other strange thing about the sense of isolation that exists around the unemployed is the history of this city shows difficult recessions, so it’s odd that this has not informed a more healthy attitude. Except in this province there’s always such a sense of fracture and distance and disinterest. If it’s not happening on my doorstep … seems to be a prevalent attitude.
My recent reading of strike pamphlets from the 1930’s supports this. There was incredible isolation in the relief camps. The particular book I was reading the writer constantly referred to the “stiffs” coming from the city to face an awful labour, and that word did not seem to be travelling back of how brutal their experience was. It was anguishing to read the young man’s descriptions.
I should note that yesterday at 9am was one of my favourite varieties of weather. A bit of bluster, a pause in the rain, but still the threat of more. I call it the smell of washing that’s been out on the line weather. Freshen the eyebrows weather.
Today, tho’ we’re now in the middle of the same weather system and it’s moved to a damnit I left the washing out and now it’s completely sopping wet weather. My fringe is in my eyes weather.
er where can I post a letter?
OK Enough is enough. I am now collating the information about where the postboxes (mail box?) in Vancouver once were and are no more. I will record and ultimately google map ’em.
You can visit my new er where can I post a letter in Vancouver? blog at wherehaveallourmailboxesgone.wordpress.com
Nobody eats or wants zucchini.
Today I collected a bunch of hearty geraniums from a woman in a house out West who offered them on a recycling site to plant in my garden plot. Unfortunately my arms got all scratched up by the vicious zucchini plant, droves of people in red tee shirts entered the garden unable to spell the word marjoram as part of some city wide quiz day, they were scarpering about sweating with blackberrys/ipone’s and by the 25th plus person asking me I told them the solution to the clue was mint. The sun was baking me up, the red tee shirt brigade (I visit the garden for peace and gardening talk not demented joggers on a spelling-bee quest) so I had to abandon ship.
Another tragedy our trolley has been removed from the garden, alas this means it is now three times as difficult to bring the water across to the plots.
Mayor Gregor Robertson PLEASE tell those watery engineers types to turn on the feckin’ water in our garden and stop acting the bollix over a gang of citizens trying to grow flowers and vegetables ensemble.
We are challenged botanically.