POST pacific POST.COM

Please turn off your lights tonight, so that I may better see the moon.

There are really big trees all along the way.

Going against my instinct, I ended up in Burnaby.

Striking fenestration, baby.

I am the youngest person at this party.

That hasn’t happened in awhile.

Chicken wings and Born in Flames.

There are a lot of quilts in here.

The painter broke the sculpture, but the poet didn’t seem to mind.

My favorite show is The Gary Tylor show.

At West.

Not that West.

In New West, there is only a moraine left behind.

I’m sitting here listening to Mermaid Avenue, the 1998 album Billy Bragg and Wilco collaborated on using the lyrics of Woody Guthrie and scrolling through the scores of “updates” about the guilty verdict of Pussy Riot handed out earlier today. I use “updates” loosely as I am only reading reiterations of anger and outrage over the two year sentence of hooliganism, which in all reality, cannot be a surprise from the current Russian regime. In fact, it’s quite sparse based on what they could do. I won’t go into why I think Putin went so easy on them, but I do want to address the positives of what have occurred.

Pussy Riot, like the words of Guthrie, have spawned a ripple effect. Three members of the punk outfit have been jailed, but their message has never been louder. This cannot be forgotten. Their verdict may appear unfair, but their persecution reveals everything they were fighting against. And after all, their dissent and the state and church’s intolerance of it is the very point that Pussy Riot were trying to make.

There are still remaining members of Pussy Riot at large (and by the way, has anyone spoken at large about how great their name really is?) Endless “celebrity” endorsements continue to roll in backing Pussy Riot, but we are dealing with a totalitarian government indifferent to Western populist ideals. We only have to look back at Ai Weiwei’s detention for “tax evasion” to see that when a centralized government decides to make an example of an internationally-known public figure, they are doing so as a conscious and lucid gesture for the world to take note of.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Marina Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich have been made examples for the world to see. I would not call them martyrs, and I am hoping the press will not make them so. But rather, they need to be contextualized as the provocateurs that they are, and those believing in their actions should not forget their actions.

Pussy Riot’s performance back in February inside of an Orthodox Church and the consequential backlash and trial have generated an incredible amount of support for free speech and artistic rights to expression. However, I see no goals created beyond fighting for their release. This is a distraction. I believe in their freedom, but their freedom is not the end goal. I also feel it’s important to note the difference in scale. Russia currently has a population of roughly 140 million. Mass dissent is a palpable concern, and so, the oppression of dissent is this strong. This is by no means an excuse, but it is an understanding that I haven’t seen expressed.

As a tangent, Pussy Riot’s intervention inside of the Russian Orthodox church reminded me of ACT UP’s intervention inside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1989. Over 5,000 people protested outside of the church against Cardinal John O’Connor and the Catholic Archdiocese speaking out against lifesaving AIDS prevention information and abortion access by women during the AIDS Crisis. Until that point, the Catholic League’s influence on public affairs had not been challenged in America. They have still not recovered following ACT UP’s actions. It wasn’t just the stunt inside of the church that prompted the change, it was the massive amount of public support standing outside of the church that shifted everything.

There is an undeniable quality to presence and presence in dissent is what matters. How many of us can express concern through clicking an online button, and how many of us will mindfully express concern through lived interactions? Those two realms of experience are collapsing, but not yet.

Concerning an international affair such as this, and perhaps salaciously so, are we living vicariously through Pussy Riot’s oppression or are we distracted from our own degradation of human rights? I leave considering this: If Pussy Riot was based in your city or your town, what would they be doing?

Image credit: Sarah Browne, “How To Use Fool’s Gold”, installation view, 2012. Courtesy of Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. Photo credit: Scott Massey.

This is not on the radio. Scarcity of transmission goes deeper than words. Scarcity has always been about distribution, and distribution is no longer about supply and demand.

The materiality of labour is the same question. Sarah Browne understands metaphor. The metaphor of capitalism in how we relate with each other. But the macro is the micro and micro is where it all happens. Metaphors are gateway drugs. I like it when she asks Eileen Gray. This is a gesture. Letters don’t always need to be sent. Letters just need to be written. The question of the feminine. Of legacy. This is a craft thing. Lineage matters.

The modernist carpet hangs like a flag. The Donegal carpet is an emblem. The Donegal is no longer hand-knotted. Not in Ireland. Except for this one, hand-knotted by the women who used to work at the factory. They now work at the interpretative Heritage Centre. That goes another level. The lens of art is a microscope. Tradition is revived, and not just for a pavilion. I look up and cannot imagine the number of hours that went into this woolly mammoth. My imagination should be more anachronistic. I read her travel stories on the wall, listen to the rhythmic click of the automated slide projector; there is a sense of a journey taken. Her searching is still very visible. This makes the show open and this makes it different.

Image credit: VPL #982, Philip Timms, 1902, Carnegie Library and City Hall

There used to be a mummy inside the Carnegie. John doesn’t know where it went, just that there was one when he was little. The Carnegies gave a bunch of money everywhere to build museums, he said. I thought this was a library. Apparently it was city hall. This section where we’re standing looks like two different buildings joined together. I don’t know how old John is. I’m guessing he’s in his sixties. He sounds younger, but he looks older. All he says is that he’s been HIV positive for over thirty years, had Hep B for about forty, and there used to be a mummy inside the Carnegie when he was a boy.

I wait for him in the lounge, watching the tables of old men playing Chinese chess. I haven’t played in years. I haven’t seen anyone play in years. I can’t help but think of my father. He’s the only opponent I’ve never been able to beat. The one losing is devouring a pastry inside of a plastic bag. He is not paying attention to the trap by the pawns.

There are rooms upon rooms and I pass by a gymnasium and a library. I wander upstairs in case he’s waiting for me in the cafe. Every table is full and I realize I don’t know what John looks like. Everyone in the Carnegie looks vastly different in appearance. No one stands out and everyone fits in. We only spoke briefly on the phone. He wants to screen a film for their annual dinner and a movie the week after World AIDS Day. I’m also screening a film for World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art. So let’s meet at the Carnegie. Everyone knows the Carnegie.

I’ve walked by this corner of Main and Hastings numerous times, but I’ve never looked up. How did I miss this massive historical building? There’s not many left in this city. This is possibly the busiest block in the city and one of the busiest buildings. John and I find each other and he gives me a quick tour around. There’s a band rehearsing in the theatre where the screening will take place in December. The line up is out the door, he says, moving his arm down the long corridor. He’s rigged up a dinner from Kent’s Kitchen and there’s door prizes and cake at the end. He says he puts some tough women at the door to make sure people stay for the movie and not just the food. That’s tried and true logistics right there.

We’ll be showing United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. I’m already bringing it in that week over at Denman Cinema. John Cameron asks me if I’ve talked to John Kosenchenko? The spelling may not be right. He was one of the first ACT UP members in Vancouver. If you want to know more, go talk to Charles at the auction place. He and his partner ran the first hospice just down on Abbott at the old Lotus Hotel. I should also go talk to May, who’s 84. She’s seen it all. She was working as a nurse in the early days of the crisis. John writes down seven names for me. Lanna MacDonald is the first name he writes down. John’s name was on another list I got from Brian. So many people died, that there’s really only a few names left from that time. That time was less than twenty years ago. John’s boisterous voice drops and dries when he talks about the history. There’s one history on record, he says, but that version leaves out all of the insanity.

There’s a scent of post-traumatic stress disorder in most survivors of the AIDS crisis. Sarah Schulman is one of the most lucid voices of that era in America. Someone described how you could have shouted every line from her latest book. Maybe someone should.

John speaks about that time. About coming out in Richmond at the same time as coming out as positive. Friends were dying every day. All you could do was sit around and wait your turn. He wanted the world to know, or maybe he wanted to live in a world that knew. You have to put a face to the story, he says. He does a bit of stand up comedy for me. AIDS humour, he calls it. I tell him about the ACT UP Oral History Project online. Someone shouts his name and we finish the meeting in the courtyard. He’s moving his needle exchange today. It’s been around long before Insite. I have never been to The Washington. I shake his hand again and walk up to Gore. A massive sight seeing bus stops me momentarily from crossing the street.

This time last year, I walked along the Deveron River on a near daily basis. Walking along water is walking along a new path every time.

I walked by myself when the grass was still low. When the grass was my height and the heather in full bloom, I began walking with Moss, the Border Collie I lived with for my last three months in Scotland.

Moss was a direct descendent of active sheep herders, owned and cared for by Maureen, who kindly let me board with her in the town of Huntly. I lived in a room at the top of her house, and every morning Moss would be waiting outside my door, ready to go.

I didn’t walk him every morning, even after I started working from home. Maureen was in recovery mode so I took on dog walking duties. Moss would patiently wait for me and when I had at least an hour, we would take the back trails through the woods, down along the football field and to the base of the Gordon castle. We walked against the current to the pasture before the bridge and circled back pass the travelers camp and cut across the practice fields and back up through the woods that came up onto a clearing.

Moss would be off the lead as soon as we hit the woods, finding the largest throwing stick possible, and our game would begin. He would never bring me the stick, but would leave it at a distance between us as he lay waiting with stealth. I had to race him for the stick, which was often a fallen log, and if successful, I would swing it across the high grass, or into the river, where he would bound and fetch so that we could do this over and over again the whole way around.

At the time, I realized that suddenly with an animal, I was no longer a trespasser in the small close-knit town. People recognized Moss, and as a result they began to recognize me.

During the last few walks we shared, I wondered if he knew this was it, and I wondered if I was going to remember these moments. Significance looks back at you in unpredictable ways. I didn’t write about it then and not a single photograph exists of these walks. Even the boots have long worn out. They were just daily walks with Moss, who bound in and out of the tall grass, looking back at me.

I received an email from Maureen today, recalling the significant details of my time in her home and letting me know that Moss had been hit by a car on the 25th of June. He was six years old and is now buried with his ancestors up in the hills across Tap o Noth. I wouldn’t have thought this, but I find myself mourning this creature unlike any animal I have known.

I actually think about Moss a lot, especially when I’m walking through the park, and how he would struggle being on a lead all the time. He was smart, but wild and reckless, and always ahead of me, if only to look back.

Strange as it seems, I was in fact mourning for the death of an animal on the 24th of June on this side of the Atlantic. I was driving from Banff to Calgary on Highway 1 and following a curve in the road I saw a deer that had been freshly struck. It was lying on its back with its legs kicking in spasms and its head was flailing from side to side in the middle of the road. Cars kept speeding by and a RV was pulled over to the shoulder a little ways up with its driver and passenger assessing the front of their vehicle. The deer was still moving when I looked back through the rear view and tears uncontrollably streamed down my face then, as it did today, to the point where I didn’t even realize what was happening until after.