POST pacific POST.COM

Winding down to Lucy Lippard lectures is how I've been researching lately.

prairieartsters — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:31:59 -0700

Lucy Lippard: 04/07/2011 from MFA Art Crit on Vimeo.

Trans/National Roundtable, May 22, 2013, SFU Harbourfront Centre

prairieartsters — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:04:00 -0700

Here is the marketing blurb I read at 12:30 p.m. today:

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON WRITING, REPRESENTING, RESEARCHING, TEACHING IN THE TRANS/NATIONAL FLOWS BETWEEN

Asia and Canada / Asia hyphen Canada / Asia space Canada / Asian Canadian / Canadian Asian / Canada and Asia / Canada hyphen Asia / Canada space Asia /

Helen Leung (sfu), Kirsten E. McAllister (sfu) and Roy Miki (sfu, emeritus) in dialogue with Huamei Han (sfu), Christine Kim (sfu), Larissa Lai (ubc), Chris Lee (ubc), Ashok Mathur (tru), Miu Chung Yan (ubc) Davina Bhandar (trent), Mike Ma (kwantlen)

Wed. May 22, 2013
2:00-6:00 PM
Room HC 7000
(take the elevator)
Harbour Centre
Simon Fraser University
515 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

The terms, “Asian and Canadian,” are far from stable, and even less so in these times of rapid social and economic transformations brought on by the shifting demographics of transnational flows especially in Canada where the so-called Asianization of social and cultural spaces is producing new forms of cultural anxiety and racialized conflicts.” (Miki 2011).The Centre for Policy Studies on Culture and Communities has invited a panel of academics working across “Asia – Canada” to start a discussion to explore the paradoxical movements and containments of researching and writing between these two terms as they float as signifiers / metonyms / traces / tenuously held together with a hyphen, a tissue of possibility beyond how they are each discursively constituted in particular area studies.

Sponsored by the Centre For Policy Studies on Culture and Communities (SFU), the Department of English (SFU), the Dean’s Office, Faculty for Communication, Art and Technology (SFU) and the Asian Canadian Study Society. The event was organized by the CPCC Working Group on Asia – Canada, which includes Davina Bhandar, Christine Kim, Helen Leung, Roy Miki and Kirsten E. McAllister.

Here are the notes/quotes I took between 2 - 4 p.m.:

- What kind of Asian conference is this? It’s starting late and there’s only bran muffins?

- What is “Asian-Canadian” studies suppose to study?

- Investor limits to immigration in Canada have been raised to what?

- No limit to invest in Canada (businesses, properties), only limits if you want to live in Canada (fact check).

- Canada is a stable market to invest in, with low tax breaks.

- When we invoke “Asian-Canadian” what are we including/excluding? Asia is a big place.

- Language has political functions. In America, Asian-Americans was an assumed identity to mobilize. In Canada, language does not hold the same history, same utility.

- The umbrella of Asian-Canadian studies makes sense in the institution, but in reality/embodied experience of the everyday, is it useful?

- How do we understand the pluralities within language? Tempered by geopolitics, generational shifts and gaps, Asian-Canadian is incredibly diverse. (You mean, Not white-Canadian?)

- How do we do away with the nation state if we are trying to re-imagine it? Categories obscure diversity, branding Asian-Canadian as an object of study.

- The need to locate yourself (generation, origin, occupation) was done by the first generations. I am first generation, but I don’t relate.

- Asia is geography, situated as a place (not a body), influencing language and identity, loaded with social, economical, historical baggage.

- “Squarely situated particularity is the most universal.”

- “Globalization comes from above and from below.”

- “Sino Situated Schizophrenia”

- Subjection of otherness mirrored by self-identification of otherness

- Apology forthcoming for BC Head Tax (how do relate this to ethnic vote scandal? Invocation of race. Wielding the notion of racism as a tool.

- Anxiety of being other, anxiety in being a professional, anxiety in being a professional of otherness

- Writing Through Race symposium was when?

- How do we investigate ourselves and remain critical, de-privileging ourselves to understand ourselves differently.

- Professionalization of Asian-Canadian Studies is a conundrum. Professionalization is xenophobic (to the white imaginary standards) by default, so rather self-effacing here.

- There is no home anymore. Transnationalism is not a free flow. Those on top benefit, and those on the bottom suffer. Mimicking older colonial tactics into era of neoliberalism.

- The loudest man in the room is old and white.

- American Imperialism in critical thinking (Did Puar do this to Morgensen?)

- First Sinologist at Oxford was Scottish. James Legge came from Huntly, Aberdeenshire, where it was really racist.

- Hyphenation of Asian-Canadian leaves Canadian too static. How do we complicate both sides?

- “No matter how much tax I pay, I may never be the Canadian others feel they are and unable to see me as.”

- Specialization is a blackhole.

- Terms can disappear if the power of knowledge can still exist.

Some lingering questions I had between 4 - 4:15 p.m:

- How do we create solidarities with other “minorities” especially with Indigenous groups?

- Why was this conversation not more widely shared? The room booked could maybe fit 40 people.

- Too many big conversations are happening in small corners. How do we overlap them?

May 22, 2013

prairieartsters — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:18:00 -0700

The news is very dramatic. A car exploding is very dramatic, sometimes. I walk around the block and yellow tape and flashing motorcycles block off the roads between here and there. Walking up Haro, shards of windshield were way down here. A firetruck and an ambulance, but for the most part, people were just walking their dogs and going to work with their earphones in, and I wonder if they heard anything at all.

What I heard: It didn’t sound like fireworks. I didn’t hear any screams. With a south facing window I thought something had crashed or exploded in English Bay. What was that? was all I heard from outside my window between neighbours maybe strangers. It looks like seven a.m. but I never know at this time of day. It’s real quiet and my mind wanders from where to what. It was a compact boom and it was near. I’m still in bed when the birds started chirping again and then the sirens and then the helicopters. In those first few moments, there was no news, not yet, and now it’s all over the place if you search west end car explodes.

As Seen Here, UBC MFA Grad Exhibition, May 3 - June 2, 2013

prairieartsters — Thu, 16 May 2013 17:07:24 -0700

What a remarkable difference. Between here and there. I missed the third one. Not that difference means better. Just different in personality. That’s fine, I think.

I made the mistake of reading the catalogue essays before starting to write. I should know better. Now I am stunted, wanting to engage with the words rather than what I just saw. But I had nothing else to read on the bus.

I won’t try to find common themes, even if it is a small group and themes can be teased out. The smaller the group, the less I want to lump them together. I will just talk about the lumps, namely, Chris Howison’s unreachable lumps.

Rarely do I go on tippy toe for anything. Pedestals upon high, curved even at their plateau. Vanishing out of sight the closer I approach. And what is it that draws me in? The promise of lumps with hair sticking out of it? This could be a metaphor if I liked metaphors for the state of our daily encounters.

But as a quick address: the pressure of words is creeping in. There appears to be this forever gaping hole between past and present, viewer and audience, analogue and digital, but seriously, I don’t find this binary trap remotely stimulating.

A better point is the context, but so what if each era of technology is inextricably tied to that era’s socio-historical ideologies and aspirations? What does it say to fetishize the past while arguing against its own limitations? This understanding is far more difficult to translate into a work of art if you are looking at one stream of its history. I guess I just wish better for the conversations on media-related contemporary art in this city, conversations that have equal grasp on film studies and critical theory, because in praxis, these two categories are not mutually exclusive.

The Show, Emily Carr University, May 6 - 19, 2013

prairieartsters — Wed, 15 May 2013 23:08:14 -0700

The Show at Emily Carr University 2013 from Emily Carr University on Vimeo.

This took a really long time to walk through, but it felt like a real year-end show. Sprawling, uneven, celebratory; this is the beginning of something rather than a finite end.

I started off real slow at Charles H. Scott, my eyes adjusting from the sun to the dark spaces that predominate most exhibitions these days. I made some note about the evolving nature of text in art. I was probably talking about Leo Stafansson’s Thingogram and Liz Knox’s 12 minute Synopses. Knox’s use of text has crossed my path twice in a week now, first with the Tri-University art show at Access, and now with this looping narrative that has no arc or lull, just line after line of meat and content, sex and violence. If this was shot and edited, the screen would be on fire. Instead, a simple presentation of words, and words are sometimes enough.

Stafansson’s work, on the other hand, didn’t appear to be about text, but it was. His use of language in the out-dated monitor was heavily stylized, just like his preference for equipment. Translating algorithms into an aural and visual component, the language is charismatic, revealing each object with sentiment.

Around the corner, Annie Briard did something to me that no one has done since I first saw a David Hoffos. Okay, I had a minor sensation during a Luke Fowler installation, but that one had a great soundtrack by Toshiya Tsunoda that mediated the experience. Briard’s After Image considers the viewing body, human curiosity, and mark making. What more is there?

I think this was the grad show, but to be honest, I am never sure. Little did I know there was still about 300 artists to view after this. I wandered through the atrium. I couldn’t help but take a long, close look at Eddie Hofbauer’s oranges. Following the arrows, I wandered upstairs, but I’ve been led astray before. I cross the street to the South building and pop into the films component. I should stay longer than I do, but I can’t. Beyond the furniture, I see bodies wandering around upstairs, tourists with zoom lenses the size of my arm are taking photos of Polaroids in plastic bags and I wonder what they will do with these photos of photos later.

It starts to get blurry here, but let’s see:

- There was a lot of 3D this year, but their presentations have yet to be worked out.

- There were a lot of maps and arm chairs.

- Jeff Downer made me pay attention.

- I can’t tell anymore when technology like monitors and tablets are simply broken or suppose to be broken.

- Design is really the best department, isn’t it?

- Of the two heavy uses of upcycling pop cans, Jessica Lord’s use of pop cans seems more promising.

- In my books, Aaron Jackson’s Kid Krafting wins.

The Show runs until May 19, 2013

May 11, 2013

prairieartsters — Sat, 11 May 2013 23:48:36 -0700

It’s been over a year since we did this, but a year doesn’t feel that long. We’ve both been busy, she says. We start at Waterfront, crossing the water to Presentation House. I have been meaning to see Slavs and Tatars for weeks now, but Cherie needs to eat lunch first. She is excited to show me the market at Lonsdale Quay when she learns I have never visited. I have never made the time to go anywhere but up and down Chesterfield Avenue. After a fish buttie for me and a tamale for her, we make our way up the hill and up the stairs. Cherie is really into stopping and smelling the flora all along the way and I have only ever done this once, when no one was looking.

I only want to buy the catalogue for the essay on craft, but I know I will not have time to read it until next year, so I will wait for the book sale. I’m into what I’m seeing, but I have to avoid the text on the walls as it loses me rather than bringing me in. I wonder if I am just being difficult, but I have to trust my gut on this one. As we wander down the hill, Cherie echoes that the connections are not clear in the show, and I think back to our earlier lunch conversation about knowing we are not normal.

From seabus to the Canada Line to roadbus, we are walking down Main Street to CSA. Chris has to turn on the projector. Low cost operations and high priced projector bulbs finding common ground. A wall work and another wall work by Angus Ferguson warms up and the perspective of the branches tumble me in. I wonder why he chose to create a moving image over a still one, it couldn’t just be for the fog? Or could it? My favorite part is the frame he uses for his collage and I am glad to see mysticism anytime anywhere.

Coffee break at Gene’s and onwards to Western Front. I had stopped by the opening very briefly last week en route a dog walk with Zoe and Sailor and had not made it past the folding chair. The motion sensor dance party sticks out for me in this arrangement, which looks and feels like a private basement back yard. I have picked up a lot of paper today, but I can’t read any of it yet. I wonder how far off I am.

Down the hill, whereas last time it was up the hill. Getting smart with the flow of urban planning. Do __ Enter welcomes us in and there are other visitors inside grunt gallery. This is always note worthy. I like the backroom with the re-purposed photo enlargers by Emilio Rojas, Guadalupe Martinez, and Igor Santizo. Archive Fever is spreading like wild fire! They have re-created a dark room atmosphere for current times and I like it a lot as a means to communicate new images about old ideas.

A quick jaunt down to Great Northern Way and there’s an opening at Equinox that floods the area with crisp white shirts and white hairs. The walls appear higher in the back and the space overall appears better for viewing works with some semblance of privacy. I found myself drawn to the Ben Reeves after looking at the Jack Shadbolts. I don’t know what this means about me. I thought there was one more gallery down here, but all we find is a giant victrola with a Star of David inside so we move on.

Back off East 2nd at Gallery 295, more photo enlargers have been re-purposed, this time by Scott Massey. Lenses have been fitted into an object that is more interesting than its output. The photograph would have served the object better if mounted and arched over rather than forced onto the wall. It’s time photography came off the wall. I like this peacock object a lot, like in a fetishistic way, and the gallery sitter is happy or maybe surprised we get how it works. Cherie gets into a conversation argument debate with him about art and how we talk and write about it. I abstain from comments. We make it out alive and pop briefly into Catriona Jeffries. The dolphins above are definitely my favorite part. The lights are too bright to watch the video all the way through, but the L shape of the benches suggest something more casual so I sit back and try to be casual, but I feel like walking some more.

Walking down the flat part of Main, we run into Justin and he is on his way to Equinox. He is so polite in front of Cherie it’s adorable. We are not going to make it to any of the other galleries today, but I thought for some reason 236 E Pender was partially open. I was wrong. No matter, over a plate of chicken wings, I learn that Deirdre was one of Cherie’s first students and my sense of time and space squeeze together before pulling itself back apart to take a breath. I don’t want to forget where I grew up, but it is strange I don’t miss it. Cherie, along with Ted, are the only two people I ever talk about this with. There’s a lot of us who leave, but it seems so resolved for most.

Note to self, May 10, 2013

prairieartsters — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:32:00 -0700

Listening to the radio has been really productive. I feel really connected to popular culture. I like feeling connected to what the majority of people believe, even if I am ambivalent about it. I am not talking about religion, but the depth of reverence is comparable.

The jam that oozes out of the sandwich is the best part of the sandwich.

Spending three years on something is the most committed I have ever been to anything. That may not be true, but it sure feels true.

Reading through this catalogue from the 80s is a deep throw back to semiotic madness. Was it written with nostalgia, or is that me? Language can bend, like spoons.

I am a slow reader after all.

The Vancouver in Alex Leslie’s People Who Disappear is a Vancouver I do not know, but the sentiments are all too familiar. This is a sign of a good book.

There’s less than one month to go and I just don’t know what is going on anymore.

In this Together, Access Gallery, May 5 - 11, 2013

prairieartsters — Fri, 10 May 2013 21:05:32 -0700

I made sculpture.

Why?

You should write about it.

You fucking write about it.

That note was so nice.

It didn’t sound like you.

Copy writing is a skill.

Appropriation is a trade.

Serious Business.

That should have been the title of this show.

Tri, try again. The three Master Arts programs are so different, but that doesn’t mean they can’t play together. It looks like they played together.

Playing has been underrated, maybe because it’s actually quite hard to play well.

The hardest things in life are usually under-appreciated,

You have to be agreeable and spontaneous,

In other words, you have to be vulnerable.

They’re in this together, and it shows.

Still on an Identity Politics buzz, this recent interview with Nayland Blake at The Brooklyn Rail...

prairieartsters — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:19:00 -0700

Still on an Identity Politics buzz, this recent interview with Nayland Blake at The Brooklyn Rail really dilated my pupils.

I had caught his show at Matthew Marks the day before I read this interview, and while the exhibition did not do much for me, I am the glad the show was scheduled at the same time as The New Museum’s 1993.

From Lee Lozano to Shulamith Firestone

prairieartsters — Fri, 03 May 2013 14:09:00 -0700

A while back, I was given a copy of Art Criticism and Other Short Stories, a collection of fan fiction on contemporary art figures edited by Helen Reed. One story that sticks out in memory was by L.A.-based Onya Hogan-Finlay asking “What would Lee Lozano do?”

Lee Lozano was a NY-based minimalist abstract painter, but has become far more infamous for her two Conceptual boycotts. First boycotting all activities related to the NY Art World, General Strike Piece (1969), she then, at the rise of the American Feminism movement, began boycotting all women, Decide to Boycott Women (1971). What started as a one month experiment eventually lasted until the end of her life in 1999. While how full proof this was, I cannot know, but by accounts, Lozano seemed pretty serious.

Refusing to participate in the art world as a gesture of resistance against capitalism, her refusal to speak or engage with women was embodied as a gesture of resistance against “patriarchy’s brutal gendering of the world.” (Read more from Helen Molesworth.) Her position of refusal is a powerful gesture, as it implies choice.

Hogan-Finlay’s project was in reference to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s ban on all non cis-gendered women. These actions by the women-only festival and its ban on transgendered women has resulted in calls for boycott of the festival itself from musicians in support of transgendered rights. Hogan-Finlay’s story partly recounts wandering the festival grounds holding a sign that read: What would Lee Lozano do? She has also completed a coinciding video work on the same subject matter that was included in After My Own Heart at Oakville Galleries about the history of feminism’s engagement with utopia.

I didn’t find the answer obvious at first, but I can’t imagine Lozano would do anything at all. If Lozano’s initial impulse of boycotting all women was to improve communication between women, the project has failed if we measure it against Michigan.

It was something in this recent article on Shulamith Firestone , as problematic as its take on mental illness is, that brought me back to thinking about Lozano. Near the end of her life, Firestone, a pioneering revolutionary on radical feminism, refused to engage in any conversation on feminism. While some can read this as an abject failure of feminism, or a result of Firestone battling mental illness, I read Firestone’s position in a different light.

While Lozano was arguably more proactive in her refusal to engage, their collective refusal rumbled something deeper. Women tearing each other down and excluding each other (socially, professionally and otherwise) has not subsided, especially between self-identified feminists of all ages. Firestone was ejected from the movement she founded for having “male ambitions” and other power-related positions that her usurpers eventually took on, but the issues then as they are now are refractions of the gender binary that does not allow for generative overlap.

I didn't spend the past hour learning how to make a GIF or anything. But this is how I feel now that it's done

prairieartsters — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:43:00 -0700

Asleep in the Forest

prairieartsters — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 16:28:00 -0700

Image taken from Asleep in the Forest

A few weeks ago, I went up about 60 storeys above downtown Toronto for an art show. Inside the BMO tower, the tallest office building in the country, sits a major Canadian art collection by the bank, and also a small project room with a new installation by Sarah Anne Johnson.

If you can get over the necessity of making an appointment and having a guided tour, the view itself is worth the ride up. I never realized how flat Toronto was. It made me feel tired. Getting a quick guided tour by their corporate collections curator, Dawn Cain, the vast and growing collection of Canadian contemporary art is bought for each regional head office to reflect each region’s artists. The head office featured artists from across the country, and I did ask aloud if there was any connection to the Oh, Canada show at Mass MoCA. The answer was no.

The project room itself is tiny, or I suspect its tininess as Johnson’s work is viewed through an aperture drilled into the door. Certainly unlike anything I’ve seen of her work before, the first sensation is of peeking into a museum diorama of prehistoric humans gathered around a fire. Only, the two figures are in tailored suits, with wads of cash sitting at their feet in and around the fire. One looks pensive, the other sound asleep, but both kept warm by the fire. We can talk metaphor here and symbolics of the fire, but I remember an analogy passed onto me: that the role of an artist in society is to tend the fire, to keep it burning bright so we do not fall into darkness. Whether you’re into this reading or not, it’s stayed with me, and it’s come back again.

As rich as the scene was, the work was far more subtle than the website and marketing would suggest, which echoes the exact same sentiment expressed by Leah Sandals on Shary Boyle’s 2012 exhibition in the project space. Aggressive marketing is probably needed to get anyone up there, but what’s interesting is how determined the viewing became. Any space naturally determines how a work will be made and seen. As a space, it is neither public nor private, as while an appointment is required and the experience of the work is supervised, the work is made by the artist and not the bank, who funded its production, but does not collect the work afterwards. Given free reign to create a new work and backing its entire production without retaining the work, the BMO project room is supporting an artist to experiment in a way an ARC used to do, but with the financial backing of a major institution. A private space without any privacy, this interaction is possibly only becoming more common, and I don’t know how to feel about this yet.

Slated for 2014 is Vancouver-based Myfanwy MacLeod, and watch out for Johnson this coming Winter and Spring as she does some time out west.

Something shifts when the patios open. Everyone is in shorts and I can’t take anyone seriously...

prairieartsters — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:06:00 -0700

Something shifts when the patios open. Everyone is in shorts and I can’t take anyone seriously anymore.

I haven’t posted anything in two weeks. I have been away. I spent the first few days in New...

prairieartsters — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 23:38:31 -0700

I haven’t posted anything in two weeks. I have been away. I spent the first few days in New York attending this conference. My brain is still fried from it and I have not recovered. I will write about it, but where do I begin?

Every time I have tried to talk about it, I start from the beginning. What is pinkwashing? What is homonationalism? Here are some handy definitions. Once you read these, maybe I can begin. So for now, I will talk about other things, like how I missed Chantal Akerman’s reading at The Kitchen for Jasbir Puar’s keynote. This tears me up, but no regrets. I care about both these things too much. If you care about both these things, too, we should hang out.

Most of the conference will eventually be uploaded for streaming. The impossible conference of impossible communities will be available. I don’t even know how to start unpacking the ideas I heard, especially here in Vancouver. I’ve been continually annoyed by the language here, on all fronts. The latest example is the consolidation of “Chinese” to mean a unified people and a language, both of which don’t exist. The group of people living in Chinatown have nothing in common with the group of real estate investors, yet by press and by well-intentioned do-gooders, they are conflated as a single group that needs protection from racist policies. But have they ever thought that maybe they don’t need your help? Or more clearly, that they are not the ones who are going to need help? Decolonizing our language is the first step to traveling across disruptions.

The first panel I attended was on “rescue narratives” which made me think about how we need to rethink who “we” are saving “them” from. Homogenous thinking of identity groups has been detrimental to actual sovereignty, and until dominant and sub-dominant groups can get over themselves, the production of oppressed identities will only continue to be manufactured within a privatized and specialized understanding of social space and class agency.

Images 2013

prairieartsters — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:56:25 -0700

I eased into Images with a pub chat. Scratch that, I eased into Images with an omelette. We were the ones who opened and then finished the wine. I admit it. I brought a bag of day old apple fritters and ate all your smoked salmon. Then we wandered to The Monarch Tavern for a panel on appropriation. No one took a position, but there were still two sides. I forgot the good points, but I recall James Benning being talked about like the second coming. I was also steamed about someone using “Brakhagey” as an adjective. The same person also quoted Lars Ulrich’s Napster statements and said Joyce Weiland was just “too unique” to be re-appropriated. I would later fall asleep during the screening of his Brakhage knock-off.

But the idea of appropriation, as in when is it appropriate (adjective) to appropriate (verb), would end the festival for me. Following David Wojnarowicz’s recently transferred 30-minute Super 8 film Beautiful People, somebody made the disastrous choice to screen a seven-minute “edit” of the film by the “star” of Beautiful People and host a Q&A that blatantly affirmed how the edit was made to cash in on the renewed interest on Wojnarowicz, who died from AIDS in 1992. I cannot begin to describe what went wrong with the re-edit. Everything was wrong with the re-edit. Lacking all sense of rhythm and tone in what the original held, plus adding a shitty soundtrack and cartoon sound effects, it was the worst gesture of humanity I have possibly ever seen. It was blasphemy to even show this work, let alone show it after the original and invite the person who massacred the original to come speak so poorly. Beautiful People could have easily stood on its own, with a thoughtful Q&A, but as it stands, Wojnarowicz’s fame seemed more important than a deeper understanding of his work, which is the root cause of most faulty appropriations.

Highlights from Images 2013: Waking up to Elizabeth Price’s Woolworth’s Choir and listening to Babette Mangolte.

The last thing I did in Toronto was eat a Swiss Chalet. The second last thing I did was visit the...

prairieartsters — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 22:16:42 -0700

The last thing I did in Toronto was eat a Swiss Chalet. The second last thing I did was visit the Oakville galleries to see After My Own Heart. As a guest of the Feminist Art Gallery’s housing division, I shared some quality time and space with FAG’s matrons, Deirdre Logue and Allyson Mitchell and visiting L.A. based artists Deanna Erdmann and Jimena Sarno. We had spent the last few days discussing what a utopia could be, as a dream, and as a response to news of the Boston bombing. Deandra, Jimena and I were sitting in Deirdre’s office at V-tape when we heard the news. I had no real skill sets to contribute to the Femtopia in discussion, but I am left with the proposition that was echoed in this show, which are the shared values of an active commitment to feminist world-making.

An Impromptu West End Pub Crawl

prairieartsters — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 13:48:21 -0700

You start at The Sylvia. Everything starts here. Ice cold martinis by the water doesn’t seem to get old.

The Bayside reminds me of another city. I come here the most.

I was hoping The Long Bar was longer. This place reminds me of Woody’s, but without the drag queens, so I left.

Adesso’s used to be Delilah’s Martini Bar. They would shake each martini at the table. Martini’s are still on special most days of the week, but from the bar. They are not as ice cold as I would like them to be.

Further up, way up, it’s not too busy on Cloud 9. Terrible name, but what a view.

Note to self, April 4, 2013

prairieartsters — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:36:54 -0700

Red Toyota Corollas sure remind me of someone.

Last summer, on the day after the Alberta Provincial elections, I crossed back across the border and watched Fred Eaglesmith play a sold out show in the town of Demmitt. The town of Demmitt has a population of about 30 people, but the venue held closer to 300. The venue was also almost entirely built by volunteer effort and used reclaimed beetle-killed pine from the Peace Region. I write about this in April’s issue of Alberta Views. A stack of them have recently arrived in my mailbox and I have already received several e-mails wondering if this means I’ve moved back to Alberta.

I have not. I think I wrote that specific article somewhere between Vancouver and Winnipeg, likely in the air.

In an e-mail to someone I do not know all that well, I asked if she considered herself a poet. It’s a loaded question, like do you consider yourself an artist? I never know how to answer these questions. I don’t even know if it’s a generative position to take. I deleted this paragraph before hitting send.

I have written to two American writers who I wish to begin a correspondence with. They have not written me back.

In thinking about the cinematic, I do recognize that cinema is not contained. Mary Ann Doane suggests it’s beyond the film strip, possibly in the projector, and certainly in physics of light. I would also add that cinema is contained in the multiplicity of subjective realities, where the moving images really come alive as they gyrate against our own moving memories. This needs to be unpacked a whole lot more.

How many times can I forget to pick up shampoo? So far: 2.

In case anyone actually thought we were living in a post-racial world, I present to you: vinyl car decals currently for sale and in use across North America

prairieartsters — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:53:00 -0700

One early sunny morning

prairieartsters — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:48:00 -0700

There’s somebody riding a horse on third beach. It’s a cop. A mirage of policing. As I move through the park, I am aware of a surveyed space. Paved paths are a way of policing. Your path is predetermined and there is nothing too wild about it. Going off trail makes the park even smaller. The park is heavily paved. How you move and where you walk eventually affects how you think and where your mind will let itself go.

I slow down to pass through the gates and a German or Austrian man walks past me towards the middle age blonde woman behind me. She is in a lycra onesie and he asks her if she lives here. Oh yes, she affirms. He asks her why there are so many signs on the beach. He was here not ten years ago, he exasperates, inflection rising. There wasn’t so many many signs telling him which way to go and what he can do. Does she know what happened?

Rounding each corner, I anticipate cyclists riding towards me. There’s always one or two. I’ve cut back through the aquarium parking lot and found myself going against one way traffic. Only certain people feel compelled to tell me I’m going the wrong way. They remind me of people who talk during movies, repeating the dialogue aloud. If everyone can be trusted to watch for themselves, we don’t need the running commentary.

The man’s voice continues in his subdued outrage. Well that’s true, the woman’s voice agrees, there are a lot more visitors now. There are more tourists and a lot more international students.

I understand international not as European, but Asian in this context. My mind wanders to scenes of traffic in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong. Pandemonium doesn’t even begin to describe it. The traffic never stops moving as if each person, car, and cyclist were sharks hunting each and every way. It works, so long as nobody stops and disrupts the overall flow. Once in a while, I would see tourists, often older couples, disrupt the flow and be annoyed and or frightened by it.

I am still watching the cop on his horse as they frolick along the strand. The beach is near empty and the wind is picking up.