Archive for 2004
Sally McKay, who’s run an excellent Toronto arts-related blog over the past year, sent out an email last week asking for 2004 top-tens. Here is my list, which you can see on her blog here, although it’s no different there than here.
1. David Hoffos at TPW in September
2. The Fuck New York video and it’s followup
3. Hive party in June at Studio 99
4. Niagara Falls Artist Program at Mercer Union in December
5. Alyson Mitchell’s show at Paul Petro in March
6. Fastwurms with Michael Barker at Zsa Zsa at the end of August (the canon blew smoke!)
7. French bookstores in Montreal
8. Diane Landry at YYZ
9. Instant Coffee’s make out party in March
10. Realizing that the new OCAD building was great when I wanted to show it off to a visiting friend from out of town.
As the sunlight rises on the rooftops on Queen West on January 1st, few will remember K-Os’ stroll through the hood late last spring when he filmed his Crab Bucket video. Unlike Jan 1 2004, which opened on a scene unchanged from Jan 1 2003, this year will have a few more ‘for rent’ signs in gallery windows. Luft gallery has closed, The Burston Gallery is moving, and Sis Boom Bah moved at the end of the Springtime. For the most part these changes have happened without any concern, since knowing the people involved, I know that tragic stories are not part of the picture. But, what’s new here is the presence of The Drake.
My highly biased year in review – please forgive memory lapses and generalizations…
February
The Drake has gone from crack whores to those of fashion. The year began when the Drake finally opened in February. In the works throughout 2003, the opening was supposed to be in October of that year, and was continually pushed back. There was a robbery of all the computer equipment in the middle of renovations, but given the wealth of Jeff Stober, it was water off a duck’s back, and they were soon back on their behind schedule. It’s all a memory now, and K-Os advertised it’s charming bar throughout the summer with his video. There’s a love/hate thing with the Drake among the artists in the area. It’s attracted the pseudo-posh to bohemia, and artists speak of the hotel with disdain, because it’s phony for them. I myself have a fond memory of being obnoxious to the crowd trying to get in during the film festival.
Personally, I like their coffee. I used to buy coffee at Friendly’s, and while their club sandwich is decadently delicious, their coffee is awful.
The Drake staff are great. I’ve been told that the Drake’s policy is to hire folk with an arts background, which I really appreciate as a chronically underemployed art person.
The TAAFI Festival, held at the beginning of October, was wonderful for the hotel – people got to “see the rooms” and the hotel’s management have lived up to their mandate to support the arts. But I don’t want to hang out with people who have money, so I socialize elsewhere. Although I hear Misha Glouberman’s Room 101 nights are wonderful, but being a sycophantic fan of Glouberman’s I pass that on without ever having attended.
Word on the street now is that Stober has bought surrounding buildings so that they can expand up. An 8 story addition is supposedly in the works, but it’s an unsubstantiated rumour that I’m passing on. Pretty remarkable though, given that they never expected to make much money from renting rooms, everything was supposed to be about the cult-shah.
March
Instant Coffee’s makes it to Second Base – Instant Coffee, the collective I used to be a part of, held a now legendary make-out party at the Gladstone. This isn’t self promotion on my part since it was around this time that we parted ways. Now, the make-out parties began in November of last year in conjunction with the Quadrasonic party at Revival. That night, Emily Hogg built a make-out fort, people dry-humped in the darkness, and spin the bottle challenged our sexual preferences. On this night in March, it was more of the same in a bigger venue. Emily Hogg built another make out fort, Darren O’Donnell MC’d spin-the-bottle, there was a big inflatable thing, and it co-incided with the University of Toronto’s art student’s ‘Room Service’ exhibition in the rooms upstairs, which meant lots of people met for the first time with kisses before names, kind of like this video.
April
Hive Magazine launched an issue with an all-night bash, and with the presence of Instant Coffee’s Urban Disco Trailer, the party turned into another make-out venue. Or, so I hear, since I wasn’t there. I was grumpy and cat-sitting at York University, but that’s another story.
May
The Calgary Flames playing for the cup meant that even sports-phobic artists were getting drunk watching hockey. There were some Canadian themed shows happening in New York, so a bunch of scenesters went down to do what they do here, only because they’re doing in New York, they called it “a vacation” and the implication was that they were cool.
June
In June, Sis Boom Bah left its location on Queen St, and moved to McCaul St. Matt Crookshank, whom everyone knows as the proprietor of S.B.B, even though he inherited the gallery from Jenny San Martin and entrusted it to Claire Greenshaw in November of ’03, made a good go of it on McCaul, but for various reasons the gallery closed it’s doors for good at the end of August. One less venue for artists in this city. I’m not going to say it was because of the Drake, but the reason it and The Burston Gallery removed themselves from the neighborhood is because landlords are raising rents.
The Splice This! 8mm film festival moved from its usual location at the Tranzac club and used the Gladstone Hotel as a venue for its weekend of screenings.
Also in June, Hive Magazine held another all-night bash and again, with the presence of Instant Coffee’s Urban Disco Trailer featuring the Bass Bed, it became another make-out party. I myself have fond memories of slow kisses at 4 in the morning with pretty girls.
July
Jenifer Papararo, who had been co-director at Mercer Union, left town to take a job as curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Mercer Union replaces her with Dave Dyment, who had worked at Art Metropole.
August
YYZ Artists’ Outlet replaces departing co-director Justin Waddell, who moved to Calgary, with Gregory Elgstrand, who moved from Calgary.
October
The Toronto International Art Fair faces competition from the Toronto Alternative Art Fair International (TAAFI). Chris Hand of Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal suggests a name change, and Andrew Harwood writes a great letter of response, outlining why Toronto needed an alternative art fair. The Queen West Scene’s two party hotels, the Drake and the Gladstone, are used as venues, and people get to see what art looks like in a real room, and not a booth.
Also in October, Atom Egoyan opened his Camera bar/cinemateque. No one I know has gone there yet. Maybe it’s the uninviting curtain, and the fact that I’d rather hobknob with people who I’ve never heard of rather than some celebrity who’s accomplished far more than I. (It is still so much more easier to relate to people who are on their way up).
December
Selena Christo puts the ‘for rent’ sign in Luft gallery, which had moved a couple of blocks up the street so that the space at 13 Ossington could be converted into a bar. Sweaty Beaty’s opened in November. Because she and partner Pol Williams want to concentrate on this new business, and because Selena has fulfilled her ‘five year plan’, it is with little sadness that she is letting it go. However, it is another lost venue for artists in the city. Selena had done a great job promoting artists from within and outside of Toronto, supporting emerging artists , and giving Toronto audiences a chance to see work from Quebec.
Also in 2004, Mind Control continued to host what I hear are the best parties but whenever I drop in it’s too early and they aren’t crazy yet. But check out the photos on the website to see what you’ve been missing.
The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA) has sort of moved to its new location. There have been some parties (a Halloween bash) and some shows (Royal Bank’s Painting Competition) but I don’t think they’re officially happening yet. However, a check on their website shows they have an opening on January 13, so, yeah, MOCCA are open now.
Spin Gallery opened in their new location (that was this year right?) but they have lots of bad karma.
Clint Roenisch Gallery continued to have lots of great shows, but the thing is there is that you don’t have to go into the gallery to see the art – you can size it up from the windows. If your hooked, than you’ll find Clint friendly when you go in. He opened late in 2003, and he still has the scratched out name misspelled in the window, a down to earth affectation that I find absolutely charming. The Jack Berman show in May that consisted of photos of dead bodies was awesome.
From yesterday’s journal entry:
According to the records, it occurred at 7.58pm our time last night, which was a little after midnight local time. They keep saying it????s the largest earthquake in the world in 40 years – Susan Mernit’s blog quotes somebody saying that it even disrupted the earth????s rotation. I am typing this on Michelle????s laptop in the kitchen, with the tv on Newsworld, which is broadcasting BBC World, which is reporting on the earthquake…scenes of devastation, mud, ruin, ect. More than 11,000 people dead.Earlier this week, I was reading Goethe????s autobiography, and he talked about the Lisbon Quake of 1755, and how it made him question the reality of God. Whenever you read about the development of deism and atheism in the 18th Century Enlightenment, they speak of that earthquake. Here, in 2004 is our version. The difference is though, that without our communications tech, we would only hear about this disaster months from now, and by then with inaccuracy and embellishment.
This Earthquake follows exactly a year after the one that levelled Bam in Iran. From Wikipedia:
In December 26, 2003 at 1:56 AM UTC (5:26 AM local time) Bam Citadel — ‘the biggest adobe structure of the world’ — and most of the city of Bam proper were devastated by an earthquake. The USGS estimated its magnitude as 6.6 on the Richter scale. The BBC reported that ‘70% of the modern city of Bam’ was destroyed. The total death toll was given as 41,000 on January 17 but the latest estimate from Teheran has halved previous estimates to 26,271 deaths. An additional 10,000 – 50,000 were reported injured (this number is very uncertain, the morst appairing number is 30,000, which may have originated from an early Reuters report. The Iranian authorities does not seem to have given any injured quote). According to the Iranian news agency IRNA, the old Bam Citadel was ‘leveled to the ground’.”
For a while I subscribed to the USGS’ earthquake alerts, which taught me that earthquakes occur everyday somewhere in the world. So far today, there have been 139 earthquakes. Many of these are aftershocks from yesterday’s mega.
There was posting this morning on Slashdot, which got picked up by Metafilter proposing a static calendar, one in which every day of the year falls on the same day of the week in perpetuity. Instead of leap days we have leap weeks called ‘Newtons’.
This reminded me of my interest in a universal world chronology, to replace the Christian calendar for academic historical reaserch. For one thing, the Christian calendar is unfairly dominant across global multi-ethnic culture. The other thing, all those negative numbers in BC land. I began thinking about this in 1998, and today I worked out a new system. Details here, where you will find some email I posted on a mailing list in 2001, where I wrote this:
I am fond of [the Christian chronology] myself, and can’t imagine using anything else in my daily life, but when it comes to historical research, to reading history, I hate BC. It cuts us off from a line of events in an unnatural way. I simply would like it if historians, anthropologists, and sociologists could get together and figure out a new system to date historical events with that eliminates BC. […]What I’m proposing is rather simple isn’t it? Just find a day in the past which academics can use as a starting point for an international chronology, that incorporates ancient history in a positive, rather than negative, scale of values. There is a time before civilization, and perhaps this pre-history belongs in a negative scale for simple psychological value, and to keep our date numbers low (no point in adopting a system where we’d have to write 13 Feb 6,987,089,976).
In my new system, Year 0 is 3340 BC, which was the year an eclispe occured that was recorded by neolithic Irishmen, as detailed here. I chose this arbitrarily as a year with a datable event which was sufficiently far back to encompass most of recorded history in positive values. This year also has the advantage that it ends in 0, thus making an effective year 0.
I’m on the board of YYZ Artists’ Outlet, and last night I got an advance copy of our latest publication, Caught in the Act which documents through essays and interviews, the history of Canadian women in performance art from the 70s and 80s. Sally McKay, who used to work at YYZ, writes about the book here. I’ll admit that I’m not that interested in performance art for lots of different reasons, but this book is really welcome.
As Tanya Mars writes in her preface,
“It occurred to me that I was teaching myself right out of art history, which was ironic given that I had been actively engaged in both feminist and artist-run movements of the 70s and 80s, doing my utmost to ensure that women artists were not omitted from that history. As artists women were addressing the lack of representation, but as teachers it was clear that we had been lax.I asked myself, why, despite Canada’s very rich contemporary art activity, were our images absent from the existing literature? We were prolific, our work was strong, we were vocal. Where were we?
I decided that it was time to fill the void. The concept of self-determination that had fueled my resolve as a woman artist to be a woman artist in a male-dominated arena, would now fuel my passion to give Canadian women artists the attention and profile they deserve.
It became clear that others shared my frustration with the lack of resources on Canadian artists. It became clear that writing a book would be an enormous undertaking, and that I did not want to do it alone”.
Hence, a 444 page anthology, which launches tomorrow night at YYZ, in the 401 Richmond building. Here’s the PR:
—————————
Please join us for the launch of this important new title from YYZ Books:
Caught in the Act
An anthology of performance art by Canadian women
Edited by Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder
Thursday, December 16, 7 – 10 p.m.
YYZ Artists’ Outlet
401 Richmond Street, Suite 140, 416.598.4546
Canada’s definitive book on Canadian women in performance art, this indispensible anthology gives readers access to an important and under-recognized subject in recent Canadian art history. Edited by two seminal Canadian peformance artists, Tanya Mars and Johanna Householder, this book focuses on the 70s and 80s; a time when women made a big and noisy impact, and provides readers with insight into the profound effects that feminism and women’s work have had on the current alternative scene. Full of sass and insight, this essential collection is part survey, part critical discourse, and part reference book, containing five critical essays, thirty-four profiles on individual artists, hundreds of images, and an extensive bibliography.
444 pp. , 219 b/w photos, 19 colour plates
ISBN: 0-920397- 84-0 (softcover) $39.95
YYZ Books is online at www.yyzartistsoutlet.org
YYZ Books is distributed by ABC Art Books Canada www.abcartbookscanada.com
The support of the Canada Council for the Arts in making this book possible
is gratefully acknowledged.
— YYZ Books 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 140 Toronto, ON M5V 3A8 tel. 416.598.4546 fax 416.598.2282 www.yyzartistsoutlet.org
image courtesy of YYZ Artists’ Outlet
Earlier this year, I ran into Alissa Firth-Eagland and Gareth Long on Queen St, and I witnessed an handover. She had just given him a video tape, which he in turn was to give to Jeremy Drummond. The ultimate result was seen on Saturday night at the Latvian House (491 College St), the Pleasure Dome screening of a 640480 production called Vs.
The 640480 collective (whose members are Jeremy Bailey, Patrick Borjal, Shanan Kurtz, Phil Lee, Jillian Locke, and Gareth Long) had a great idea, have one video-art-star shoot something, and have another edit it. The screening consisted the pairings between
Benny Nemerofsky-Ramsay vs. Copper Batersby,
Vollrath (Conan Romanyk) vs. Daniel Borins
Steve Reinke vs. Jubal Brown
Emily vey Duke vs. Daniel Cockburn
Tom Sherman vs. Tasman Richardson
Will Munro & Jeremy Laing vs. Aleesa Cohene
Alissa Firth Eagland vs. Jeremy Drummond
Steve Kado vs. Kika Thorne
I think it’s fair to say that the match up between Alissa Firth Eagland and Jeremy Drummond was the night’s worst video because Jeremy inserted text from a torture manual, which seemed to make everyone uncomfortable. From reading some of his previous artist statements, and from seeing other pieces of his work, I understand that Jeremy is interested in the vile aspects of masculinity – the capacity to be brutal and cruel, but all it ends up doing is rehashing the worst of pop-culture, as if we didn’t get how awful it was the first time. The torture manual thing seemed to get under everybody’s skin, and one person beside me actually stopped watching, which seems pretty counter-productive as a video artist. I’m no fan of Drummond’s work – it ends up just being assaulting.
Another artist who’s work lends itself to assault is Jubal Brown – a friend of mind got a little motion sick watching his edit of Steve Reinke’s apparently 45 minute video of him walking around downtown which he improved using fast forward. From Scott Sorli’s essay in the catalogue, I am told that originally Reinke sung along to Patti Smith’s “recent anti-war albulm Trampin’.” With Jubal’s edits in place, we are left with Reinke saying, “I’m pretty much pro-war. Um, not politically, of course, but aesthetically”.
Jubal’s partner in the Famefame collective, Tasman Richardson, edited a Tom Sherman video, which almost didn’t get screened. Apparently Sherman hadn’t been happy with Richardson’s edits and had wanted it pulled, but in the end let it go ahead. In this case, a man in the forest wearing an mosquito-net yells insults into the camera and had some people laughing because the anger was so out of context, its ridiculousness was apparent.
My favorite was Cooper Batersby’s edit of Benny Nemerofsky-Ramsay’s video, a still of which is pictured above. All of these works were really worth seeing, and they were also very much about the editing power of computers. This show was a tribute to Final Cut Pro.
The Q & A afterward brought out some of the ego-clashing that must have been going on behind the scenes, but I was surprised by how many people split the place as soon as they could (because of Drummond’s edit?). All in all though, it’s another score for 640480 who already wowed us earlier this year with their video embroidery project at Zsa Zsa. I for one am totally looking forward to whatever they come up with next.
Cable Project interview conducted by Louis Marrone.
[audio:http://timothycomeau.com.s3.amazonaws.com/audio/20041202_cp_timothy.mp3]
You can go to agriculture school for years, but in the end it all depends on the rain. IE KNOWLEDGE ONLY GETS YOU SO FAR.
There is the authority of tradition, whihch sometimes amounts to the testimony of a complacent history. The sort of thing passes itself off as a type of authority based on experience, which is more legitimate kind of authority.
From: shayla.morreau@canadacouncil.ca
To: tim@goodreads.ca
Date: Tue, 30 Nov 2004 17:38:21 -0500
Subject: RE: feedback on the proposed changes
Dear Colleague,
Thank you very much for your letter, which articulates your opinions about the proposed changes to the Grants to Professional Artists: Creation/Production program. We welcome your views, and will take them into consideration before any new program receives final approval.
Let me explain why the Canada Council must review its program of assistance to visual artists. Considering the current situation, in which the success rate is one in ten, the peer assessment committees have repeatedly noted that they cannot recommend grants to all of the artists deemed excellent in a given competition. Of 2,400 requests, the Council was able last year to offer only 220 grants. The Council has lost its capacity to be generous and is therefore less able to support the “development of the practice”, the purpose of the current program as stated 40 years ago. Even the largest grants barely cover production costs. It has become clear that the Visual Arts Section’s resources are not adequate to support all excellent individual artists on a regular basis at anything approaching adequate grant levels. We decided some time ago that it was essential to determine how Council’s current funding can be made most useful to artists at key moments in their practice and career, and we are reviewing our program accordingly. Of course the Council is also seeking all opportunities to increase its parliamentary appropriation and thus its overall support to artists.
Recently, incorrect information has been circulating, and I would like to correct three major points. First, this revision does not impact the program budget; it will remain the same. Furthermore, if the overall Section budget is increased, this new program will be given a high priority to receive additional funds. Second, the revised Grants to Professional Artists program is not being implemented in January 2005. The final version of the new program, once it is approved by the Board of Council, will be implemented gradually, likely beginning in September 2005. Last, in the revised program, you will notice that assistance to creation is maintained. The purpose of the new program is to determine those key moments in a visual artist’s practice and career at which Council funding may be the most opportune. We believe that this is the case when there is an upcoming exhibition. This has created concerns in the community, and we will take great care to ensure that different points of view on this issue are considered before finalizing the new program.
We also feel that it is important to provide you with some background as to the process of this revision. As you may be aware, the Visual Arts Section began a formal review of the Creation/Production program in 2003. Last winter, we organized discussion groups with over 250 visual artists in 12 cities across Canada and also received feedback through our web consultation. This was Phase I of the process. After these group discussions, we drafted a proposed new program for the Grants to Professional Visual Artists program. This fall, we presented the revised program to groups in 13 cities across the country, as Phase II of the consultation. The purpose of the consultation was to present the draft, as a starting point for community feedback. For details concerning Phases I and II and an overview of the proposed program, please refer to our website: www.canadacouncil.ca/visualarts/ under the link entitled, “National Consultations with the Visual Arts Community”.
Our next step is to bring together all responses from the meetings as well as the comments submitted through e-mail, letters or the web. After reviewing the reactions from the community, we will be engaged in a process of in-depth, Council-wide discussion and reflection over the next few months. In addition, we will be holding a special advisory committee composed of visual arts professionals which will have a mandate to make recommendations to the Visual Arts Section.
In Phase II of the consultation, it became obvious that we needed more time to discuss this program revision. Therefore, the April 2005 deadline for the current Grants to Professional Artists: Creation/Production program will be maintained.
Again, I would like to thank you for taking the time to write; it is important and appreciated. We want to proceed with the proposed changes carefully, considering all the views of the community we serve.
Sincerely,
Fran????ois Lachapelle
Head, Visual Arts Section
The following is a response to Jennifer McMackon’s question, “What do you mean when you say ‘…in today’s world, artists can’t afford the luxury of being insignificant…’ ? What makes art significant? What hampers the significance of art? And also why is it (insignificance) a luxury – what makes insignificance so expensive we can’t afford it?” Those questions were to earlier comments I left on the Zeke’s Gallery website regarding the posting Is the Horse Dead Yet? – Timothy
——————-
Luxury, in the sense that I meant it, is that which is not required, but is something that comes about when the basics are in place. I was reading Hume last night on how luxury is a dependable motivator – at least it was so from his 18th Century Scottish perspective. But culture – our work as artists – has always been a bit of a luxury. Once you got the food and shelter thing down, you can afford to use your time to think and create pretty things to trade later.
I realize that the present grant system the protests are trying to maintain is partially there so rent and food can be taken care of allowing the acquisition of the luxury of time. Here, ‘luxury of time’ can be defined as “useful through emptiness” – free time, empty of needing to be used otherwise (for survival), allowing it to be used to think and create.
Art has for most of its history had a certain practical significance but its uselessness (empty of meaning which would define it as necessary for survival) has made it luxurious. The wealthy collector spending a few million for an object or wall hanging today when the money (which should be understood as nothing more than a quantification of the planet’s material resources) could have been put to better use, signals status, and by definition makes the object a luxury.
The statement in question was in part my way of agreeing with Chris [Hand, of Zeke’s Gallery]’s point that collectors are willing to spend big bucks for American works – as Nicolas Bourriaud (a fave of mine) has said nicely – ‘they’re buying a signature’ and not much else – while Canadian artists continue to be overlooked by both the international and internal markets. Of course, as AA Bronson has pointed out above [in previous comments to the post this is a reponse to], there are exceptions which can make the thought of being ignored seem ridiculous. However, I don’t think it is a far-fetched thing to say. The Ken Danby show which opened earlier this month got coverage on the CTV 11.30 news and the show itself on CBC evening news a few days later. (Bronson’s show last year at the Power Plant got neither). And while Danby may seem to be an example of interest in a contemporary Canadian artist by the internal market, the point I’m trying to make is of all the openings held week after week, month after month – how often to do you see television news cameras, except at those openings by those few who have managed through luck and circumstance, to rise to the top of the hierarchy, those whose names are known, so that collectors would want to buy their signature for top dollar?
Please spare me counter-arguments based on the idea that television and the media in general shouldn’t mater. They do matter, and our absence from being represented on it means something. [2004.11.28 7.05pm – Of course, there’s always Zed, but I think the point still stands – Tim].
In saying that artists can’t afford the luxury of being insignificant, the idea is that the Canadian art scene, as I know it, doesn’t seem to care about success, as it’s traditionally understood. Instead it is actively pursuing the development of a theory of failure, which seems to be both misguided and self-destructive by design. Artists are choosing to be insignificant because they have the luxury of doing so. They have the luxury of doing so because of their perceived dependency on the granting agencies, and they are full of socialist ideologies preventing them from wanting to participate within the capitalist system.
I used to be as decidedly ideological about socialism as the rest, but we have to face the fact the capitalism is here for a long haul. There’s simply too much momentum behind it that without a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions the system won’t change soon. At best, we can use the system to accomplish socialist objectives, but we can’t replace it. The Canadian system of socialized programs and free market capitalism works, but it isn’t perfect, as recent obsessions over health care show. The Council’s effort to embrace the market as the real arbiter of value and to encourage artists to put more consideration into their career by concentrating on shows doesn’t strike me as such a bad idea. It seems like it’s worth a try.
We need to ask, why is capitalism, a system whose faults are glaringly obvious to those who can think, so popular? I’ve just said that the market is the arbiter of value, and it is. Now, I’m not a neo-con by any means, I don’t believe in talk of invisible forces, but before artschool I studied anthropology, so I understand the market as the space by which we trade our objects, our goods. Nicholas Bourriaud is the co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; a centre modeled on the idea of the market in Marrakech. The idea being that you have lots of exhibitions where you chose to show interest in, and interact with artists as you would a merchant – communicating in a way so that you are ‘sold’ on the work, or you tell them their price is too high and move on to something else. In art, in luxury, in anything, it’s only worth something if somebody wants it. Hume’s line of thinking was that because people usually want luxurious items, they will work to obtain them. I mean, we’re living in North America because four centuries ago, Europe had an unhealthy obsession with gold, which I consider worthless because I have no particular desire to own any.
The debate over artist-run centres and funding changes are focusing on the idea that artists and artist-run centres are engaged in research and publication, as if they were scientific – AA’s example above. I guess this means they are supposed to be creating the language of a future market – creating the interest so that people will want to own either this work, or work like it, in the future. AA’s definition of success above is that his work is the collections of various big-name institutions. The market of the international institutions bought the work. And that was only made possible through the combined efforts of many people, critics and artist-run centres who were operating in a different time. I think it’s fair to say that if AA were 25 today, he wouldn’t get anywhere.
People don’t want our shit, they want Manzoni’s, because he had critics who were ready to embrace the possibility his ideas represented and communicated that, so that he made it into art history and we take his work seriously. Critics in the traditional media rarely review artist-run centres. When they do, they are usually uncritical, but instead are full of praise because they don’t want hurt any feelings. Friends review friends. We always want to be able to look someone in the eye so we don’t tell them when they suck. In science – peer reviewed journals keep the crap out. They aren’t afraid to tell others when they suck. Scientists develop enough self-critical awareness to know when to avoid wasting someone’s time, which I consider the worst thing you can do as an artist. Of course, that itself is a can of worms – I’d like to think that it’s the critics job to help us know when our time is being wasted or not, and while highly subjective, criticism is based on the idea that subjective response is predictable. If you want to adopt the idea that artist-run centres are presentations of zeitgeist and trend research, then you have to be happy when someone dismisses the work.
As Churchill said about democracy, capitalism may seem to be the worst system except for the others that have been tried. As intelligent citizens, we must accept the capitalist system and work within it to make it work for us. We must be engaged with our society, or society will screw us over, as it is doing. We’re all supposed to be upset about the CC changes -we’re having these debates -but it has merited only a brief mention on the CBC website. Again, another example of traditional media’s obsolescence. But also an example of how the editors of the nation’s news don’t consider what we’re doing newsworthy. We are insignificant. We will continue to be insignificant – the fantasy that we might be able to live off our work as artists elsewhere, (or further up the ladder, by those who began climbing in different times), will continue to be a fantasy as long as we continue to alienate ourselves.
Believing the status quo is fine is a sign of conservatism. I want to be recognized by this society as valuable for what I am as a cultural worker, and not be forced into the humiliating economic position that three-grand grants are supposed to be worth pursuing. How about 50 grand a year grants? How about treating artists like doctors, and giving them a salary so they aren’t forced into the nonsense of academia, if they are so valuable to society, and if socialism is really worth pursuing in this case? What clerk in any corporation is asked to work for free and support themselves with a menial, or infrequent part-time job on the side? I know, there are interns, but interns usually have some money behind them allowing them to do that, with the expectation they will be fully employed one day. And the money supporting interns is usually inherited, is from a livable grant, or is a student loan which they’re supposed to pay off later. A system of perpetual internship, as the art world seems to be, is broken and needs fixing.
The expectation that as cultural workers-and-thinkers we have to work a paying job as well as pursue our careers as cultural workers-and-thinkers, and go through the grant-lottery so that we might be able to take some ‘time-off’ is unfair, and is only perpetuated by the myth of the starving artist and the fact that artists through behavior and attitude have alienated themselves from public sympathy, so what’s news for ‘us’ is not ‘for them’. Do you really want to live the rest of your life this way?
So, I’m torn between wanting to have money in the bank because a collector is willing to give me some in return for something I made, or because s/he was taxed so that the government can give it to an agency, so that my peers (who I can’t criticize lest they develop a negative bias) can in turn deem me worthy. And even if they do deem me worthy, the funds being limited may mean that the process of filling out forms was pointless. The Right hate taxes because they would prefer the first model – the collector choosing to support me – is better than the second, where the government gives ‘their’ money to things which they don’t agree with. Obviously we need a better understanding of taxes, but this current animosity, and the reasons the CC has limited funds, is partially because artists have adopted a position where they believe being offensive is a measure of success.
Artists may have the right to offend the Right Wing but we need more sincere effort of explanation and less intellectual posturing which assumes attitudes of superiority. Lets also consider the following: how many of us got into the arts because it was cool – going along with that concept’s fifty year history of pissing off the establishment? How many of us, in turn, got into the arts because we wanted to bring beauty to the lives of ourselves and others? Even within the art world, it seems, people are motivated by selfishness (the cool right) and by compassion (the beautiful left).
Ultimately, I think, I’d like to see artists embrace the 21st Century rather than continue to romanticize the late 20th. It is not fair to think that the Canada Council’s programs, nor our whole artworld infrastructure, as sustainable as anything else within the current system manifested by its bureaucracies. By all accounts, today’s world system is not sustainable. We can’t count on our future being the same as it has been. The world ten years from now will be in the process of cleaning up the mess of the past 40 including the Republican disaster of our present.
Within any bureaucracy, change only comes in response to problems. The happy-go lucky vagueness of a system gets increasingly tied down until policy is so rigid it becomes inhuman. That describes a process where the present emerges out of shortsighted decisions, rather than envisioning a future and making decisions based on its goal. I assume that the current petition is based on the idea that the CC is being shortsighted, which is a lot to assume since the Council engaged in a process of consultation, and tried to engage the Canadian art community. But it is shortsighted of artists to assume things are fine as they are.
Envisioning a future is a process that on the one hand can give our country a patriated constitution, Bill of Rights, and Universal Health Care, but it can also create fascism. The fascist history of the last century seems to have created a fear that ‘vision’ is the same as ‘ideology’, and prompts talk, as John Ralston Saul points out, of ‘inevitability’. The current fashion of equating vision with ideology has encouraged our infamous shortsightedness, as we’re afraid to look past the horizon, and continue with band-aid solutions to larger systemic problems. Since artists are the ones this society trains and educates to envision, we should at least be trying to fulfill that role instead of poeticizing failure and the abject, considering offense a success, and only mobilizing when the Canada Council wants to modify its bureaucracy. The envisioning I see in contemporary art seems to be more or less based on “look at me” than inspiring people that life is worth living and that a better future is worth working for. The best art wakes people up to what is possible, not the brilliance of your ego.
So, what I meant by that statement is this: artists are ignorable because they are ignoring society. Ignoring society is a luxurious position. It’s what the whole idea of the ivory tower is about. But in order to demand more respect for ourselves, we need to be respectful to begin with. By being insignificant, the government can screw us over with ‘chump change’. By becoming significant, collectors will want to buy our work, and we can have better lives. We can become significant by producing work that people actually like, and not by asking for their continual indulgence. Collectors will be more responsive to work people like, because as eBay has shown, people will buy any crap touched by celebrity. Take Canadian literature – anybody ever heard of a girl named Atwood? It’s not like she sold out; my copy of The Handmaid’s Tale has study questions appended to it.
If we don’t want to be dependent on collectors, we need the government to take us more seriously. But that won’t happen unless the public in general takes us more seriously. And that won’t happen until we stop being assholes be treating everyone who disagrees with us as simply conservative, instead of trying to be convincing. The real conservatives are the ones who won’t let themselves be convinced, who prefer ‘golden age’ scenarios to the reality of an ever changing world.
“What century lies before us? The passing of Bloomsday this week made evident that while significant things happened in June 1904, it wasn’t until the 1920s that they were made known. Yesterday the prospect of a 22nd Century with coastal cities underwater as depicted in A.I. seemed all too probable. The prospect of a Conservative Government next month, and the ad on the radio for “free gas” shows how dangerously disengaged people are. Historians can call this period The Democratic Crisis. Last century showed us that times would change after a great war, that society before 1914 was still very much that of the 19th Century; we have no marker to delimitate the actual context for our time. Terrorist attacks are nothing more than spectacular fireworks, but they have not yet led to a conference to develop new treaties and new territories.”
My friend Izida and I were born 20 days apart on opposite sides of the world. She in Riga and I in Toronto. The circumstances of time have given her dual citizenship in three countries, one of which no longer exists. In January we’ll both be turning 30, and over the past month, as our friendship cemented itself outside of the vagueness of merely being acquainted, we’ve often described our ages to one another as being 30 although we are 29, and talked about what this means to us, how this chronological fact is modifying our perceptions of ourselves, how it is changing our lives.
We’ve been breathing air on our own for 29 years, but it is not entirely inaccurate to call ourselves 30 since three decades ago we were floating in our mother’s amniotic fluid, experiencing in an unconscious way this thing we later learned to call a body, or in Izida’s case, ??. Izida tells me she doesn’t remember Russia, from which she immigrated in 1980 at age 5. Her earliest recollections are of kindergarten in a synagogue basement in Winnipeg, sitting on the floor listening to people speak a language she didn’t understand and picking sparkles out of shag carpeting. These sparkles were her first Canadian treasures. She would bring them home, wet from the sweat in her hand, and hide them in her bedroom. My earliest memories go back to 1976, when my mother was pregnant for my sister. In 1981, I moved from Toronto’s west end borough Etobicoke to Clare, an area of Nova Scotia where my forefathers had lived since the late 18th Century.
A memory that works well means you begin to be dumbfounded one day, once those memories begin to pile up. Things that happened ten years ago can seem like something that happened last month. But this also confirms what adults tell you as you’re growing, that although their chronological age may be one thing, they feel like they’re another, an age quite young. My mother tells me she feels 19 although she is in fact 61. I escape this by being clever; I say that I’ve continued to grow and mature as I learn and experience new things, so I don’t feel like I did a year before and so on. But this is merely qualifying the fact that I recognize myself as an approximation of the person I was at 17, only with the issues that plagued me then resolved and new issues developing as I approach this 3rd decade.
It would be a fantasy if I tried to ignore the fact that I’ve grown up in a world enthralled by it’s extended nervous system, as McLuhan called our media technology. Approaching 30 means that I’ve become an adult without pretense toward being one, as one can be accused at 20. When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was a popular TV show called “Thirty-Something”. It was popular because it offered those boomers born in the 1950s a theatre by which they could explore the meanings and responsibilities of that age. They could articulate their anxieties and deal with their issues, issues of having survived the 1960s and 1970s, and the threat of the Cold War which caused them to question their future and perhaps encouraged their “live for today” irresponsibility and selfishness. Not that I ever watched it, after all, it was for ‘grown-ups’ and I was much more interested at that point in the new Star Trek show, but this is the understanding I bring to it today, being aware through osmosis of its popularity. I was perhaps a bit more aware of it than I would have been because it had more resonance on me, since one of the characters was played by an actor who shared my name, Timothy Busfield. Born in 1957 he is now approaching 50. (Some Google-fact checking reveals to me that this show ran from 1987-1991, although I would have guessed before that it had ran around 1983/84. While memory may contextualize one’s life, how often are those memories inaccurate?)
So what being 30 means to me is that I am now the subject of “grown-up” shows. And this is something which is a bit hard to accept about oneself in our culture as youth-obsessed as it is. It is so difficult to conceptualize that one feels the need to type out thoughts about it. What it means is that after spending three decades experiencing the world for the first time in a variety of ways, one has never been taken seriously by older folk. “Oh you’re just a kid” is heard over and over again. I am not expected to contribute anything significant – which is precisely why youthful stars and those called genius are considered so remarkable. I feel like many of my peers have never had the opportunity to experience themselves as anything other than someone youthful and not to be taken seriously and so they embrace that, feeling adulthood to be boring and limiting to their sense of fun, a sense which can make them as devilishly selfish as those boomers who have earned our loathing for leaving us a legacy of improvishment.
There is something else happening to us though, those of us 30-something both present and new. It is the fact that many of us feel that our age expectancy is not the official 70 something years, but having witnessed our grandparents live into their 80s and 90s, and those many that have lived past 100 have given us the idea that we too shall probably live at least as long. I myself think I’ll have an 80th birthday one day, and hope for the 100th as well. But perhaps we’re the first generation that will make living past 110 normal, in which case, being 30 means we are still as young and adolescent as many of us feel. An example I once came across illustrates this: if the age span was extended toward 250 years, meaning one at 247 was biologically equivalent to a contemporary 97 year old, then it would follow logically that for a given individual, puberty would only occur in their 30s. They wouldn’t reach their adult equivalent of our present 30 until their mid 70s. Over and over again in my journals, throughout my 20s, I’ve hoped that I’ll have a life span that makes my present concerns and problems as irrelevant to who I will be in old age as the misery of needing to have my diaper changed is to me now – a problem I’m sure I experienced but have no memory of and completely irrelevant to my problems today.
Turning 30 means that as an adult, I can no longer expect the sympathy bestowed on the naive. I am expected to be worldly and knowledgeable; to have confidence and not have to rely on others. The fact that my bank account is perpetually empty and I currently live on credit cards, dependent on my parents for meals and a roof, is not evidence of some youthful misadventure and indiscretion. It only reflects that I made a bad choice when figuring out a career – I decided to be an artist, a field which expects much without offering a guaranteed salary. I find myself in the ironic position of being extremely well educated and intelligent, believing that knowledge and powers of mind to be a form of wealth in which I am well stocked yet I have been unable to find a market of exchange where I can trade portions of this commodity for cash, to be able to become financially independent and secure. My issues today centre on trying to become concsious of whatever unconscious behavior I engage in which allows me to be free to read and work on my art projects while beating myself up for not having a regular 9-5 job which would provide for a healthy bank account and the sense of financial freedom while killing my soul by not allowing me to flower in the particular sunlight I need, that of learning and expression. My issues today centre on acquiring the independence expected of my age.
My peers, bruised by their experiences of family, do not understand how I can still live at home with my increasingly aging parents, nor can they understand why my sister would chose this as well. The sad truth is that so many of us, children of the 1970s, have found themselves in situations where it is difficult for them to get a foothold in the job-place and to be paid a salary sufficient for them to lead independent lives. This is true throughout the Western world. The issues that hovered over my psychology as a man in his early 20s have been replaced by “when can I move out? When can I get a full time job?” to say nothing of what I’m supposed to feel as a graduate of an art school: “when to I get that big solo show?” which I’ve come to see as not worth desiring anymore. Art has proven itself a mistress and now it’s time to find a wife.
One wants to contribute to society in a way that allows at least a salary, and at most, a contribution to the betterment of the planet. The world as it is in 2004, when I find myself less than 6 months from my 30th birthday, is so fucked up. However, that has been true for generations of 29 year olds. A Frenchmen born in 1759 would have written the same thing as someone from Massachusetts born in 1746, to say nothing of those who were born in 1910. The revolutions of history have given us a perpetual beta world in which change is commonplace and the displeased seek to rectify out of boredom and anger with their circumstance.
I for one am confident that the problems of the world today are constructed out of the idiocy of gray men with gray ideas. The War on Terror is as artificial as the War on Drugs and will not be won by a generation who’s mindset was formed during the Cold War; Israel and the conflicts of the Middle East will not be pacified by a government born in the 1920s, nor a generation who considers democracy optional. A generation which came of age at a time when the introduction of environmental legislation was considered controversial is not equipped to deal with the issues of global warming.
The habit of declaring “War” on our societal inconveniences and problems which have everything to do with a economic inequality and insufficient education will not solve these perpetuated problems which have nothing to do with simply being criminal behavior. A generation of men who have done a bad job of integrating women’s perspectives and who find glory in combative approaches are doomed to be the thought of as pathetic leaders for the rest of time, enshrined in the embarrassed conversations that will go like this: “How could they?” “I know I know…”. We are left waiting for them to remove themselves from the scene so that we can begin to clean up their mess.
Television and print news perpetuate certain world problems as being relevant, while doing a bad job of informing us on other more devastating conditions (such as the economic development of the Third World, or Africa’s devastating plague which represents an cruel economic inhumanity on the part of the west) means that yes, today’s “problems” are solvable because they are artificially important. The biggest problems, such as the economic inequalities which have led to the chaos of Africa and the Middle East, require new paradigms and perspectives that at this point can only be offered by the young. The future belongs to those of us for whom women in the workplace, environmental concern, and social critique are ambient and as such we have never known a world without them. Those of us who are presently 30 something, will be leaders and mentors to the true inheritors of the future, that mass of young people outnumbering 30 and 40 something Gen X and known as Generation Y, who I am told, are confident of their ability to change the world for the better.
Rick Groen opens his review of King Arthur with a lament:
“May the gods protect us from modernists messing with our myths. First it was Troy, recasting Homer as a humanist and leaching all those annoying divinities right out of The Iliad. And now we have another gang of contemporaries performing a legend-ectomy on poor King Arthur. So what was fodder for everyone from Malory to Monty Python is thin gruel here. Sorry, but expect no power in the sword and no magic in the sorcerer — goodbye Excalibur, adieu Merlin. As for courtly romance, or chivalrous knights, or jagged love triangles, or even a certain place called Camelot, they apparently didn’t exist. Heavens, it’s almost enough to make you thank the Lord for Mel Gibson — at least he had a passion for The Passion, and treated his hero as more than just another frail man nailed to a workaday cross”. (The Globe and Mail 2004.07.07)
And once again, I am stunned by the zeitgeist which has stripped scripts of myth to begin with. As he said, first there was Troy, and to a certain extant The Passion, but even it strove to be realistic, using dialogue that was supposed to be Latin and Aramaic, although tongues not used to hearing it everyday didn’t do a good job pronouncing it (I mean, I don’t know Latin, but know enough phrases from here and there to know that it wasn’t pronounced properly).
Let’s grant that both films were recorded in 2003. By doing this we can say – human nature or what not – we can’t pretend that these are problems that lend themselves to the saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. What we can say is that for the purpose of selling tickets and making lots of money – a vice the even Shakespeare was subject to – writers and producers have concocted costume dramas to explore the problems that face us a human beings at the turn of the 21st Century. And what both Troy, The Passion, and King Arthur show is an attempt to link our problems with a past now dissolved under education, plastic, and the inevitable gains of a thousand years of culture. But to tune it to today’s audience, they have made it atheistic and as realistic as they thought best. What this shows us is that today’s people are historically sophisticated enough to want to experience things as they may have happened, and that for the most part, we’re a secular population. However, this last point also lends itself as to why these films – Bruckheimer’s record – are heavy on battles and violence; because that sells well. A film heavy on dialogue and character development doesn’t translate well, but if you want to open this film in foreign markets – which lend themselves to the idea of an inconsistent education (what they teach kids in France ain’t what they teach kids in the inner city of the United States, to say nothing of what is taught in non-Western markets) you make a movie that strips out the cultural referent of religion and that goes for the ‘wow’ of spectacular violence.
Having gotten that out of the way, I want to address critics who are lamenting the lack of fairy-tale, to something we already well know. (An addition to the above paragraph would be: by creating a new version of a tired tale – something even Shakespeare was subject to as well – you create a new demand by the market to experience it).
What the reviews of King Arthur are failing to acknowledge – for no other reason than the apparent ignorance of the critics (otherwise I feel they should clarify their criticism with this knowledge) is that any one who has looked into this story knows, it was made up in the late Medieval Era, and further, was made up as Kingly Propaganda. It would be as if the President of the United States, seeking to assert a dictatorship, had someone write a story connecting his bloodline to the throne of England, and somehow made it seem that the Revolutionary War ended in a treaty of peace with a country later renamed Airstrip One. Playing loose with the facts, and knowing full well that the public is probably ignorant of those facts to begin with – one could do this and convince many. (Critics of Michael Moore posit this is pretty much what he does to begin with).
We should be aware that the ‘fictionalization’ of history has for most centuries been exactly how that field was conducted. Based on hearsay and rumour, people would write down what they’d heard – and what they heard may have included heavy doses of speculation. An oral history got taken up by Homer and turned into the Illiad; Edward I, wanting to legitimize his reign, took up the oral history of Arthur and began the process that would lead to Malory. Fictional history has for centuries also served as ‘practical history’ that is, what most people are exposed to and use in their lives, to whatever extant that history proves useful. Shakespeare’s History Plays were not going to be cross-referenced and looked into by the 16th Century audiences. They paid their penny and left the theatre knowing more about the past then they had when they’d entered.
Having read these negative reviews, I was surprised by how good the movie actually was. By the end though, I was really sick of hearing the word “freedom” and it made me think that this – as King Arthur always has – was meant as Kingly Propaganda for the American’s war on terrorism, full of the bluster and bullshit that the terrorists are engaged on a war on freedom. But it also serves as a reminder that the Americans in Iraq are the Romans in Britain, and that the Woads are those chopping the heads off of the colonials.
Historians agree that King Arthur as we know him – sword in the stone and all that – was based on an historical figure. They think he was someone who united the Celtic tribes to fight against the colonial Saxons, a English Vergentorix. However, we cannot describe him as English at all, since English is what resulted from the mix of these two peoples – the Celtic inhabitants (represented in the film by the Woads) and the Saxon’s seeking new land and opportunities. Fifteen hundred years later, Northern Europe appears to be a socialist utopia, dreary weather producing a society that takes care of everyone and leaving them free to invent and market cellphones. But before technology came around to make life more bearable (centralized heating in the winter, refrigeration in the summer – you know, all those things that prevent a winter starvation) it was a hard life up there. No wonder the Saxons were later known as the Vikings. But whatever – what matters here is that the historical and archaeological record shows that in the 6th and 7th Centuries, Saxons were ‘invading’ or perhaps we should say, ‘liberating’ what we now call England and Wales, and that it is reasonable to assume that to counter the raping and pillaging the tribes gathered together under a leader to have great battles and what not. That leader most probably died in battle – which would further his memory – and for centuries his story would be told.
We are so used to the technologies of memory and the whims of hearsay we don’t put much thought into what that means. I would say that for one thing, the oral tradition was probably a bit more refined than ours, decimated by our recording devices. But corruption of the account must have slipped in, and the next thing you know you’re dealing with Ring-Around-the-Rosy. We all know how that nursery rhyme goes, but it takes some effort to learn that it’s inherited from the time of the Plague. A pocket full of posy was supposed to help, but in the end, it’s “ashes ashes … we all fall down”.
A population used to experiencing the simulacrum of the time on a screen may be a little taken aback by such a direct connection to a past that really happened. I’m amazed that Hollywood – and Jerry Brukheimer for christ’s sakes – wants to give us a version of the Arthur story as if ‘this is what really happened, what the legend is based on’. That Troy too would strip the gods and ‘the magic’ from the story I think is a good thing. I think that it’s the best thing. I question why anyone would want to watch fairy-tale razzle dazzle. Perhaps this is one of the better things that a twenty-five year investment in deconstructive theories has brought us; a willingness to explore source material, and an impatience with mystical nonsense. What can one learn from watching either film? One, that there are no gods and there is no magic – two important things that every one of us should resign ourselves too. Psychologists are busy trying to figure out why we’d ever believe in such nonsense to begin with, and while each of us perhaps has a personal story to tell on why Faith in whatever exists for them I think it’s much more important if we agree to ignore it in public. (My position is that while I may believe in such-and-such, and while I may attend a church/similar to congregate with other believers, I should acknowledge the strong possibility that such beliefs are delusions, and if I’m unwilling to do that, as is my right, than I should at least agree to disagree with atheists and accept the position that “For all intents and purposes, these things don’t exist”). That being accepted, we have to find solutions and positions based on the dirt of reality, something much more able to accept sculptural forces than ephemeral hocus-pocus. As the transaction goes, ‘You may believe in Shiva, and I may believe in Allah, but neither will help us get this water pump built, so let’s put that aside and focus on our human problems’.
King Arthur balances the role the Church had in education in the Dark Ages with their freakishness. This itself plays into a contemporary bigotry toward practicing Christians, but it is also a fair and historical representation. Arthur goes on about a Palagius, who teaches all people are born free and are imbued with free will. The Bishop sent to the Wall refuses to tell Arthur that Palagius had been deemed a heretic and been killed a year earlier, only concerned with using Arthur’s knights to rescue the Pope’s favorite nephew, born into a Church aristocracy wherein he is meant for the Papacy, rather than having to work for it. The Bishop clearly displays the power politics of the Church at that time. It is the official religion of the Empire, and it has begun it’s relationship with governance and power that will last for the next thousand years until cultural stagnation inspires interest in what will emerge from the territorial battles with Muslims – forgotten knowledge and learning. We live in a time where the Catholic Church has divested itself of political power, but Christianity still pollutes secular governance, especially in the United States.
In one scene, Lancelot tells Arthur that the world he believes in – one without wars – will never exist. This line seems to be there for our ears, in 2004. I’ve come to believe that conflict is inevitable, but we shouldn’t accept that about violence. We could achieve a world without war, but there will always be a need for negotiation. And while there is a certain acrobatic appreciation for this blood and swords stuff, it is far better to watch it knowing it’s fakery, rather than accepting a need for war.
The world as we know as it is human; it is made up of human problems. The war in Iraq is one of the latest manifestation of a human problem, and for many of us, it is only an abstract injustice. If I had to walk kilometres for water in Africa for day to day survival, I don’t think I’d give a shit about the Mid East. Sure, the idiots who brought us this newspaper-CNN-Fox News-CBC Newsworld war have dressed it up in religious rhetoric, but if there is one thing studying the history of the Popes shows, is that God is a convenient lieutenant to the ambition of vain-glory. Achilles resented being such an instrument to Agamemnon, an example which shows how often being human, or specifically, being a male human bent on achieving and maintaining status, involves getting others to the dirty work. Donald Trump may be the king of his castle, but I bet he hasn’t licked a stamp or cleaned a toilet in years.
We need to films like Troy and now King Arthur to remind us that all we have is our humanity, and that the problems humans face are consistent with a human nature which our culture hasn’t dealt with. Some would say that myths were the narrative technology by which certain aspects of our nature were tamed; I would say that such technology is obsolete and now ineffective. We can’t return to anything, we can only acknowledge that each one of us is capable of great good things and great evil things, and being aware of precedents, examples from the past, is perhaps the only safeguard we have. Men will seek status and kill; other men will be the instruments of this action; others will be disgusted by it; a poet will be entranced enough to tell it to others, and as always, children will be eager to hear the stories that add that much more the newness of the world.
Summer 2004 blossomed with memories of the 19th Century. Unlike previous Junes of the past hundred years, this one began with the Transit of Venus, that planet named after the Goddess of Love, one of those unremarkable astronomic phenomenon which seem really interesting but which don’t quite measure up to the thrill of television or internet porn. Writing in 1882, William Harkness stated,
“We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be no other till the twenty-first century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004. When the last transit season occurred the intellectual world was awakening from the slumber of ages, and that wondrous scientific activity which has led to our present advanced knowledge was just beginning. What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows. Not even our children’s children will live to take part in the astronomy of that day. As for ourselves, we have to do with the present …”
That day, June 8th 2004, I did not witness the transit, but saw pictures of it by that science of which God only then knew – television and the internet.
Those words were written in December 1882, the previous February of which brought into the world a baby named James Joyce. Twenty-two years later, on June 10th 1904, he met a girl on the street and asked her out. A normal enough thing for any 22 year old to do. She agreed but stood him up, being unable to get off work that evening. He ran into her again and they rescheduled. Today we go out for dinner and movies; I can’t imagine what they did that night a century ago. But we do know that at some point, down by an abandoned pier, she gave him a handjob that blew his mind and tied him to her for life. It was June 16th, and for this reason, ten years later, Joyce used this date for his ambitious novel Ulysses. I’m taken with the idea that as he came, Joyce had no conception that in a hundred years the English speaking world would not only know about this event, but would celebrate this day in his honour. This may have occurred to him later when he was composing the book, but as he gazed with gratitude and pleasure on the lovely Nora Barnacle, the world of a century from now was most certainly not on his mind.
The summer of 2004 was also when Andrea Fraser exhibited at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. This show rose above the usual apathy to make it into the media because its masterpiece consisted of a sex video. As the press release stated:
“Untitled, 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission were to include a sexual encounter between Fraser and a collector, which would be recorded on videotape, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited, sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting. “
The galleries website shows us a still near the beginning of the video of Fraser in a red dress holding two glasses of white wine. Having not seen the work I cannot judge whether this amateur porn lives up to previous masterpieces of that genre of which I consider myself somewhat a connoisseur. But what drives me crazy is this:
“Untitled is a continuation of Fraser’s twenty-year examination of the relationships between artists and their patrons“.
Ok I understand.
“Known for her performances in the form of gallery tours and analyses of collecting by museums, corporate art institutions, and private collectors, Untitled shifts the focus of this investigation from the social and economic conditions of art to a much more personal terrain“.
I’ve never heard of her before now. Am I bad? But ok, I think understand what her practice consists of.
“The work raises issues regarding the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange.”
What? I mean, she made a fucking sex video. That’s baloney.
Here’s the thing. I’m an artist, so I think I can say I know how the creative process works. I think I’ve had enough dealings with other artists to know that this is usually how it works for most of us. And my feeling is that she thought this guy was hot and wanted to do him; further, she had the wherewithal to frame it within the context of her practice and using a magic spell of theory was able to get her sextape on the wall. She didn’t even give it a title, which is really revealing. Unlike Paris Hilton, who was famous for her green-light blowjobs before her ignorance of Wal-Mart, this from the get-go was meant to be shown off, but it was also an excuse for Fraser to get laid. All well and good and I congratulate her on her cleverness and the originality of her seduction. But the work does not “raise ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships”. It’s a simple porn. It might raise these issues if you were an alien. Let’s ignore for a second how typically pathetic that press release is and just assume that all art galleries are currently engaged in the same bullshit, thinking this is what we – an audience of intelligent people – want and expect.
And that I think that’s what I finally understand – the art-world orients itself to non-humans. The texts that accompany art works are meant to explain them to dolphins, squid, elephants and ravens, or whatever intelligent non-human life is in outer space. To entertain the “questions raised” is to enter a state where we deny our common humanity for the cheap thrill of speaking of a sex video in terms of the sociological, something most likely done with others in a social situation to begin with, and something that has been done to death already to no apparent end.
A conversation is afterall the transfer of things in my head into yours, ephemeral ideas rather than genetic material encased in goop, as is transferred during sex. What Fraser’s video shows, undoubtedly, is the limited repertoire of the sex act itself. I’m guessing here, but I have a feeling that the missionary position features more prominently than it should. If she were really familiar with this genre, it would proceed thus: she gives him head, he gives it to her. They then engage in intercourse, which can begin missionary, but than becomes doggie style and then moves on to butterfly. Anal sex usually occurs at this point, but that’s usually left to the professionals, as amateurs are far more mundane and stick with vaginal. Eventually he comes on her face.
We’re taught that voyeurism is wrong but I don’t really see why, given that it’s put up there for our consumption. Like meat, once it’s dead you might as well eat it. The problem in both cases is in the creation. I think it’s wrong to treat animals as another product, and I’m willing to accept that there are big problems with the creation of pornography, but all the stuff I’ve ever seen as appeared to be harmless to both parties, and further, both sexes appeared to enjoy their job. How many of us can say the same?
The next time I’m down by the pier with a hot girl, who unzips my pants and is about to create 22nd Century literature, I’ll stop her to raise questions about interpersonal exchange. Perhaps this would be entirely appropriate. Should we start treating the theoretical discourse as a form of sex then? The same old same old, going through the same motions and the same arguments, over and over again until the end of time or at least until the next Dark Ages. I mean, is this why such intellectual deceit has survived this long?
For some reason, watching folk going through the same sexual motions isn’t quite as boring as listening to folk go through the same motions with regard to theory. Theory is a magic spell whose power diminishes with overuse. “Abracadabra you are now a rabbit!” is the same as “You’re sex-act questions issues regarding the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange!” The same way a string of words recontextulaizes and object or a situation into magic, another string of words lends something pedestrian an air of respectability and intellectualism. But a duck is still duck, even if we call it Anas platyrhynchos. ‘Abracadabra’ can be a special word to children, but to adults it’s most likely to be associated with the Steve Miller Band.
I would say that because the act of sex is embedded in our genes, we are not programmed to find it or the acts that accompany it boring. Experience shows that there is a predictable payoff of pleasure, and this pop in our minds is that which creates those actions to begin with. We are not engaged in the same thing with a theoretical discourse. We are not driven to say and do things because we know intuitively that there’s a bubble of pleasure at the end, the argument won, the cigarette reached for, the slow squinting sigh. This is true for me at least, but I’ll grant there are probably people out there who get off on intellectualism. Won arguments might be orgasmic for some, but I find it so much fluff, words lost on the wind, no more memorable than any other walk by the pier with a conservative girl.
So, my conclusion is this. Theory is predictably used to recontextualize the banal – including sex acts – to make them seem far more significant than they are. It is written by folk who have no interest in addressing real human beings who have real experiences from which to draw and analyze situations. It assumes an audience ignorant of real life, and thus tries to tell us something we already know in an alternative language, which in the end simply insults our intelligence. But like Magic, where a string of nonsensical gibberish is playfully used to transform something – most often the surrounding context – artspeak attempts to transform the banal into something deserving of intellectual consideration; but fails since, as I said, it appeals only to the intellects of non-human life forms, or, as is the case, those among us willing to suspend that part of our knowledge that comes from the real world. However, I’ll grant that the persistence of this might mean that like a sex act, the limited repertoire of ideas and motions have an intrinsic value which account for the lack of innovation therein, and why enough people are willing to suspend their real-world knowledge to engage in a ‘discourse’ at this level.
Just now, thinking of how rotten that movie was last night, how entirely forgettable despite being charming and entertaining and at times funny [The Ladykillers]- makes me aware of living in 2004 – the same sick ennui of a decade still figuring itself out, as in 1994, when Forrest Gump came out, and that stupid movie Speed which inspired men’s haircuts. (And the real influence on hair styles for the past ten years, Friends began). It is an utterly miserable time to be alive and intelligent, just as it was then. Only now I am 29 and not 19.
The sickest TV show was on tonight – The Swan – where they give some plain person plastic surgery and a new wardrobe and then humiliate them by keeping their new attractive appearance from them until the dramatic unveiling of the mirror. It’s a nightmare of exploited self-loathing and the propaganda of physical beauty over intellectual development (which almost always leads one to an attractive appearance in spite of physique) … and what I just wrote there can be critiqued by saying that nowadays, one decides to look good not only through grooming and fashion – available to all since time began – but is now accessible through the reshaping available through the surgeon’s knife. So be it … I don’t really have that much of a problem with plastic surgery – but I do have a problem with indulging in people’s self-loathing in order to sell cars and whatever other shit was on between the dramatic scenes.
Glimpsing the end of that show was like seeing the disturbing parodies of television shows that one used to see in dystopian movies set in the 21st Century. This is what we’ve come too … it’s not enough that the graduates of art schools – supposed artists every one – have traded in their talent and vision for useless products and bags of cocaine.
Journal Entry, 28 April 2002[…] Watched the animé film
Metropolis last night. The scene in the snow which romanticizes winter. I’m beyond that. I’m going to wake up and it’s going to be May 2004. The war in Afghanistan is over. Saddam Husein has been overthrown by an American assault. The first anniversary of the Sept 11th disaster has been celebrated and memorialized. People no longer refer to it as 9/11 nor to they constantly talk of a “before September 11th…” nor “after September 11th…”. Winter came twice. And now, in the spring of 04, the sun shines, the leaves blossom, and the primaries are under way to get rid of the bonehead president. […]
May 2004. These dark years of being lied to and being told over and over what to think and feel are over. People are too busy watching the latest DVD’s now, or playing with the latest PDA. Is this a return to the carefree days of 2000, when the world’s conscience consisted of fucking organic hippies protesting in the streets? They’ve gone back to being irrelevant, since as Buddhism ten years before, the organic thing is hip with the middle class.
1. Trampoline Hall, Monday 26 April 2004, at Rockit, 120 Church Street Toronto
by Timothy Comeau
I might as well be up front and saw Trampoline Hall (to be written TH in what follows) gets 10 stars, for what are obviously a variety of reasons, but for the purpose of this review I’ll try to cover the basics, or why I at least enjoyed it. As I type this, I’m remembering checking out some of the press they’d archived on their website and I think, ‘they don’t need another glowing review; there’s no need to add to that list with things said or thought before’. But then again, the articles featured therein don’t really review the shows. It’s more about what you missed.
The reviewer tries to turn their experience into a story, and provide photographs for the How-the- People-of-the-Future-Will-Think-We-Looked collection. So this can’t be that type of review…no photos for one, and for another, no point in rubbing your noses is what you missed. You’ve missed many conversations between millions of people, and that never seems to matter, but if you need to know something from such a talk, you get a synopsis, or a accurate retelling, or an expanded book. You missed the conversations Benjamin had with Adorno but you’ve probably got the ultimate result of that sitting unread on a shelf somewhere.
I go on like this since TH had the aspect of a really good conversation. One of the first reviews I ever wrote for the Saturday Edition was about a really awful roundtable talk I saw at Harbourfront Centre featuring uninspired and washed up has-beens. It didn’t make it to screen, which is probably a good thing. Now, the worst part about that talk, which I use as a measure of awfulness in spite of the fact that I’ve since seen worse, is the way the audience is locked out of the ideas being presented, and we get rambling speculation, as opposed to consideration. Really, TV, for all it’s evils, is better than this because at least there’s a script in there somewhere, some evidence of thought however puerile. In such a scenario, one can’t help but feel that the audience is actually more intelligent than the panelists, who are only on stage because of past accomplishments which are now obscure. In the case of Trampoline Hall, there was no sense of that. Perhaps because we were all approximately the same age, one really had the feeling that intellectually it was a level playing field, and our accomplishments so far in life mean that there was no need to look up or down at anyone, beyond the physical aspect of the speakers being on a stage. So let me polish that metaphor a bit more to say, the distance one looked up at them, (or down, if one was in the balconies) was not great and was inconsequential.
I liked the location, the upstairs of the Rockit bar, with its balconies (which lived up to hosts Misha Glouberman’s envisioning of the proper TH venue), beer, plastic cups, chairs, tables and cigarettes. I’m not going to use the word community beyond this sentence, a word being both tired and uninspired, to talk about how nice it is to hang out with strangers for a show in a smoky cub to listen to three people’s ideas on things you would not think to talk about otherwise. I’ve come to think that the point of all education and performing in the world, the art shows, the paychecks, the trips to the library and the bathroom, the links to good reads and torture photos on the net, is all so that we can have mutually interesting conversations over bummed cigarettes and a pint. Following the natural process, food for thought becomes shooting the shit. We get to affirm our mutual interest in each other through a common language.
And TH is all about sharing an interesting conversation in such a context with an audience. Instead of listening to some Guinness philosopher’s pet theories at the bar, we instead put them on a stage , and offer them the time to present this idea. And for me this is ultimately what made Trampoline Hall an enjoyable night: that respect was shown to both the audience and the presenters, by giving each time. No interruptions, a question period, and a bathroom break. No squirming and bored panelists there because it’ll look good on the CV. The speakers seem generally invested in presenting their thoughts, and by virtue of being there, the audience is willing to listen.
Oh, and this is what you missed: Tyler Clark Burke, spoke about her grandfather who was a New York supreme court justice; the next speaker was Julian Holland, who spoke of slanted suicide statistics and the capitalistic inhumanity present in their bias, and the last speaker consisted of Lee Henderson, who spoke of freeloading: how to do it and what to avoid. This last talk inspired the most laughter.
Related Links: http://www.trampolinehall.net
Rating: ten out of ten
Last week I picked up Guns N Roses Greatest Hits. When GnR first came out, I was 12, and it was the 1980s. I remember when we were having the garage built in the backyard, my sister’s friends were over and they put Appetite for Destruction in the cassette player, and sang along with Paradise City. These kids were eleven or so.
To any 11 year old today, GnR are what the Beatles were to me then. Rockstars from “twenty years ago”.
A social life in the present turn of the century dismisses the interest I have in the far future of the mid-22nd Century, but a recent conversation on the nature of contemporary art has given me a new perspective to make it that much more tangible. I was saying how when I look at art I’d like to think that it would one-day hang in New York’s Metropolitan or the AGO (though the National Gallery in Ottawa would be more apropos). That is, I’d like to think that anything I make or see will still be around for my great-grandkids’ great grandkids to see. Some quick math estimating a generation to be approximately 30 years and guessing that I might have children within a decade places that generation of lineage in the mid 22nd Century.
Although I didn’t use this generational marker in the conversation, only naming the museums, the reply was that contemporary art is so fashionable: that like clothing, it fades in popularity and disappears. It becomes dated. The effect of being dated is precisely why I find the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia embarrassing. Two many hard edged color field paintings – that medium’s response to 1970s conceptualism. Art now favors the museuological rather than the salon – the presentation of work to be admired or contemplated. We preserve these fashion items for the future bewilderment of folks living in a world not such as ours. The way that we now preserve contemporary fashion for historical curiosity, rather than examples of human achievement, is illustrated by the V & A’s acquisition of Vivian Westwood’s Moc-Croc shoes, which “became world-famous when Naomi Campbell wore them on the runway – and tripped and fell! They remain one of the popular displays at the Victoria and Albert Museum.”
That incident occurred in 1993. Naomi Campbell is now 34 and increasingly disappearing from the spotlights which graced her chocolate features throughout the 1990s.
I’m currently a little tired of overhearing aggressive Scotsman on TV. There is currently an angry Scotsman on commercials for Alexander Keith’s, Kellog’s Nutra-Grain Mini-Bites and Money Mart. What’s horrible about them all is that they all seem based on Mike Myers’ “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!” skit from his SNL days over ten years ago, and expanded upon in his 1993 film, So I Married an Ax Murderer. The angry Scottish father’s rant about his son’s big head is lifted almost verbatim in the Mini-Bites commercial.
These commercials alone tell me that people my age, who were in late teens and early 20s a decade ago are now working for advertisement agencies. The dynamic would appear to be:
“Hi, welcome to a position of power and influence. Let’s see what you’ve got”
“I’ll just check into my limited imagination and rip off something funny from my youth, which wasn’t so long ago. By the way, I’m still young, god forbid I get old and boring. Now, what do I have here? An obscure ethnic stereotype made popular by one of our country’s greatest comics ‘to have made it big in the States since he’d have no career in Canada’ yadda yadda, ‘considering we don’t pay our cultural workers, nor do we support them in any fundamental way through network broadcasting or other media promotion’ yadda yadda.”
“Oh, if it’s not Scottish it’s crap! That’s great! Sounds good! Everyone knows we’re a Scottish company!”
Now, Alex Keith was a Scotsman, and that’s the whole point of this commercial. But the other two?
Consider this a fuck you to said companies and advertising agencies. It’s not funny, it’s irksome, and it inspires my boycott instincts.
3. Louie Louie vs. Smells Like Teen Spirit by Timothy Comeau
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Bring |
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for |
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forget |
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gift |
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2. Captions to pictures in a soap opera magazine six years ago
by Timothy Comeau
1. Much to her family’s objections, Lucinda is hellbent on becoming Mrs. James Steinbeck
2. Josh is in trouble again now that Annie is back it town.
3. After each does some soul-searching, Hayley and Mateo reach an agreement that both of them can live with – but can Raquel?
4. A night of loving for John and Marlena
5. Marley and Cindy collaborate on a plan they hope will get them waht they want.
6. V, disguised as Isabella, and Jax travel to Monte Carlo where she finds herself the center of a very high stakes wager.
7. Caitlin and Cole find themselves trapped in an explosive situation
8. Viki confronts Todd after he leaves Tea at the alter
9. Humor is an important ingredient to get one through the day.
10. Francesca and Cole opened a Pandora’s Box after successfully heisting the Rosario jewels.
11. Coles couldn’t be happier now that she’s settled into her new home.
12. Believing Brenda’s life was in danger because of his mob ties, Sonny left her at the alter, while he stood outside the church in pain and misery.
13. Longtime friends, Sonny and Lois grew up together in Brooklyn and shared many memories.
14. Due to Lily’s pregnancy, Sonny’s farewell to his true love, Brenda, was bitter sweet.
15. Kimberly and Rick go to dinner – but each has something different in mind.
1. Timothy’s Good Reads Mailing List
Tim has started a mailing list of articles he’s found on the net which consitute “good reads,” interesting news, or at the very least, food for thought (it’s not always something easily agreed with). The articles are archived at www.goodreads.ca and to subscribe, email tim@instantcoffee.org
Rating: ten out of ten
TOP
Perhaps one of the more famous passages we refer to in the Collected Texts & Journals (definitive edition, 2138:0968943012) is the sentence, “O dear reader, in a far future, reading this now as history, a school assignment, I ask you, without being able to know the answer, ‘have you ever heard our music’?”
Inspired perhaps by his reading of Eugene Delacroix’s (bio) journal (Phaidon Publishing House, 1995:0714833592) in the early years of the 21st Century -the time separating he from him the same thet separates he from us – he asks the question, “have we heard his music”? Delacroix wrote of attending operas, orchestral and theatrical performances, and of reading popular mid-19th Century books. At a time when the newly formed communications network (known then as the “world wide web”) made most esoterica available, these references were lost to him.
Lost to us then, is Undone (the Sweater Song) by the music collective known as Weezer. Thrue the archives of the United States’ Department of Homeland Security, we are able to trace the names of the members of the Weezer collective, and can estimate the trajectory of their careers based upon tax and medical records (bio). We believe thet Weezer formed in the late 1980s, and that they released three collections (known as ‘albums’ at the time) before their market transferred into the downloading datasphere. Our researchers and Thinkers, having searched the early 21st Century databases and w.w.w. archives, have only been able to find one extant song file, entitled My Name is Jonas which gives us some insight into what this song may have sounded like. Musicologists tell us thet it exhibits the influence of “grunge” a genre thet was popular in the early 1990s and which itself was a form of digested “punk”, an anarchist genre characterized by the more aggressive sounding chords capable of being produced by an electric guitar.
We can only imagine what Undone, (The Sweater Song) sounded like, but we are aided in this thrue a recently recovered text. Found in the basement of a home in Kenya, its provenance only now determined to be genuine (tracing how it escaped inclusion in the Collected Texts), we believe it wrote in the first half of 2004, perhaps March. We present it here using contemporary spelling but have left the old grammar intact, since changes in grammar do not significantly impact a contemporary reading.
Our estimates to the date of the text come thrue his explanation of the song being ten years old, and our knowledge of the years he spent in Upper School. He seems inspired by a quality of timelessness, and how the two ends of his life are fold together to join in one moment on a train. In responding to the lyrics of the song, he performs a literature, which is remarkable for the insight it gives us into the insecurities he was subject to at thet age, and although this time is well documented and has been expanded on by biographers, never before have we had such insight into the depths that the popular music of the time could inspire in him.
Ultimately, this document raises more questions then it answers, and scholars have now been charged with preparing a second edition of the Collected Texts and are seeking the source of some of the more veiled references. Republication is scheduled for the end of next year. -Ed.
[…] Ten years ago, this song burst onto the radio, accompanied by the second video to evidence Spike Jones’ genius. I listened to it on a cassette walkman, popular at that time but not as cool or cutting edge as a portable cd-player, having taped it off the radio. […] Most memorably as I rounded Bedford Basin, seeing the Bridge welcome me back to a second year of classes. I had missed my friends and found my summer awful. This song exemplified the promises of socializing I felt before me.
Now, a decade between me and the boy I was then, I find this song has aged remarkably well. there seems to be nothing dated about it, that melodic guitar proved influential and it still has its place in the musical landscape. the band is still popular. But that decade of memory has woven a new personality, and the song seems all the more poignant and illustrative of a life before 30. Now a blue disc scratched and spinning in a portable cd-player, itself slightly anachronistic compared to an i-pod, whose advertising currently covers the TTC 1.
As I listened to the opening tinkling of Undone (the Sweater Song) I sank beneath its romance and thought of how nothing else describes life at 29. Romance and angst and bored resignation.
It begins with Weezer groupie Karl Koch; emulating the bored life of a socialite. Too many art openings perhaps? To many after parties? He’s subject to the sociable attentions of someone new to the scene, in a hyper mood, and happy to be there, one Matt Sharp (bass solo):
Matt: Hey Bob, how we doin’, man?
Karl: Alright.
Matt: It’s been awhile, man. Life’s so rad! This band’s my favorite, man. Don’tcha love ’em?
No I don’t love them. Live music’s so lame. Too loud, too crowded, too embarrassing to jump up and down and call that dancing. So one replies…
Karl: Yeah.
And he says,
Matt: Aw, man, do you want beer?
Yes I want a beer. Even better if I don’t have to pay for it. Yes, beer beer beer. the future specter of generational alcoholism calls me to its bosom. Can’t stand the social scene? Don’t want to be friends? Twist of the cap. Enjoy to the end. Pour some for her, with kisses.
Karl: Alright.
Matt: Aw, man. Wow, bra’, this is the best, man. I’m so glad we’re all back together and stuff. This is great, man.
I’ve missed you too. You wrote me no e-mails, there were no phone calls. I spent the time reading articles on the internet, drawing pictures in notebooks, and watching bad television. Occasionally I would awake from sleep, the mind alive with words, and I would type out message to the future, and stock up paragraphs in the warehouse for conversation.
Karl: Yeah.
Matt: Hey, do you know about the party after the show?
Karl: Yeah.
I guess I’m going to go. Afterparties are the best. Most often domesticated, one gets to analyze another’s furniture. these are wonderful when they end at 6am with phone calls and sex.
Matt: Aw, man, it’s gonna be the best. I’m so stoked! Take it easy, bro’.
The conversation is laid on a bed of dandelion notes, the springtime sun shinning overhead a late summer’s scene. Now the wind blows the field, the puffballs break away and scatter to the light of early morning, when one comes to consciousness after a night of dreams, in which one had met the perfect girl, had read the perfect book, and felt blessed. Instead, the horror of mediocrity and entrapment in an imperfect body presents itself….
I’m me – me be
Goddamn, I am
I can sing and
Hear me, know me.
Hear me, know me! Let my voice speak thrue the generations. Let my words survive the apocalypses of the American Empire. I say this with a conviction illustrated by agitated heartbeat guitar:
If you want to destroy my sweater
Pull this thread as I walk away.
Memories flash behind the eyes, of insults and unfairness. the sudden daylight darkness of a May storm. You lift your sleepy eyes and think, fuck you to the girls whose eyes tease, whose nose’s make perfect portraiture. You want to rest in their arms, be the father to their children, make a life worth repeating in the rocking chairs of elder years.
Lethergic resignations like raindrops against the window. Voiced by Weezer fanclub co-director Mykel, she asks
Hi, what’s up?
Karl: Not much.
Mykel: Um… did you hear about the party?
Karl: Yeah.
Mykel: I think I’m going to go, but, um… my friends don’t really wanna go. Could I get a ride?
The field’s horizon reveals itself. A parking lot after the terror of the high-rises.
Oh no, it go
It gone, bye-bye…bye
All they want is a ride. No intimacy. they really don’t want to be there for you when you lose a leg to cancer. they want don’t want to be the great woman behind your great man. Support is left to air soles. the popcorn notes cast failed romance and insecurity. And so you squint your eyes, say, yeah I’ll give you a fucking ride and inside…
Who I ? I think
I sink, and I die.
The resignation usually hides this. But now, anger and passion and the ancient chorus, the crowd of personality subsets within, unite to point and say,
If you want to destroy my sweater…Woah-ah-woah-ah-woah.
Hold this thread as I walk away… As I walk away.
Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked.
Lying on the floor, lying on the floor
I’ve come undone.
Here’s where you’re really pissed off. Your shallow breathing, your forehead tense, anger. Feminist emasculation has made this taboo. We’re all supposed to be sweet and kind and home by 9. No, you can’t be a jerk about this at all! We’re supposed to be friends! I’m sorry, but I can’t help you with your physical needs. Don’t look to be for emotional support.
The pillars of my bridge have been breached. I’m castrated and left in an animal state. Naked on the floor, awaiting the judgments of fashion magazines, men’s health manifest and humiliated. there is the sweater, red and blue, and the thread connecting me to you.
If you want to destroy my sweater…Woah-ah-woah-ah-woah.
Hold this thread as I walk away… As I walk away.
Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked.
Lying on the floor, lying on the floor
I’ve come undone.
The wave swells now, the self-confidence arises from the witness of one’s own mind, and the bruises and insults and disrespect seethe into the sound of empowerment. Rolling with the waves of self-confidence. Now sarcasm is added to the mix. One the one hand, you’re still devastated by indifference, on the other, you taunt:
I don’t want to destroy your tank-top.
As you maintain the chorus
If you want to destroy my sweater.
Hold this thread as I walk away.
While you mock,
Let’s be friends and just walk away.
Let’s be friends, let’s just be fucking friends, its not like Plato was worthless to last 2500 years.
Watch me unravel, I’ll soon be naked.
That which is constant frames that which reacts
Hate to see you lyin’ there in your Superman skivvies.
You hate their childishness. Grow up. Get some real fucking underwear. Fruit of the Loom perhaps? Because it fits.
Lying on the floor, lying on the floor
I’ve come undone!…..
Triumphant, you’ve made an ass of yourself. But you can still look yourself in the mirror, to shave. Lying on the floor, lying on the floor, you get up, take a shower, and go to bed.
Woo-ooo-woo
You are lulled to sleep to dream of the afterparty, where she was nice to you.
Woo-ooo-woo
You awake and find you’re still lonely
Woo-ooo-woo
Woo-ooo-woo
………The music fade, the speakers reply with the last feedback. A new minute has come. You are five minutes and five seconds older.
But not yet 30.
___________
[1] Toronto Transit Commission, the public transportation network
The manner in which the text drops off suddenly after reaching an emotional intensity early on suggests this song too had an abrupt ending. Noting thet he is not yet 30, this echoes the poem Marita by Leonard Cohen, (bio)of whom he was known to admire. Documentation on this text’s provenance can be found thrue the Centre MM, here.
Having returned from The Passion of the Christ I can now understand what the so-called fuss is all about. There is an element of shallowness to it, but it is all the shallowness of Catholic Sunday school. Nothing has so reminded me of the hours spent learning that story as a child. Now, from those days, the only things I can remember learning are mathematics and about Jesus. Whatever else I studied then was built upon and overlaid by more sophisticated knowledge and is part of the archeology of my character, but the Jesus stuff always floated above that, as basic life lessons. I was thinking yesterday of how I’ve always taken the idea of “feeding the spirit” seriously, from the teaching, “Man cannot live on bread alone, but also by the word of God”. It was explained that just as the body needs food, so does the soul. This lesson happened at around the same time as some Participation campaign teaching about “a healthy mind and a healthy body” so the spirit thing became associated with mental health and made a lot of sense.
It seems to me now that Catholicism was something some of my teachers must have had a passion themselves for, since they infused with a certain wonder, and that left an impression. Watching this film brought this all back, because of the way they described his torture, “They did this to him, they did that…” and their imaginations were more vivid that what I imagined in turn. But now watching this movie, I feel I understand it much more. Every other film version has sanitized it. I’m sure it really was that bad in a way. That being said, I felt that by adhering to the Gospels so closely, and by thus making it so Sunday school, it all become suspect. The Aramaic and Latin work but barely …. even I could tell that the Latin pronunciation was execrable.
As for not providing enough context – the context is there, but it’s subtle and easy to miss. But it’s also silly to ask Gibson to do that, since this movie does have a novelization after all. Which raises the other point, that the Gospels are examples of the ancient west’s novel, and so it shouldn’t be assumed that everything is accurate, but it can be assumed that there is embellishment and dramatization. I really doubt Jesus was mobbed that way, although that is based on something … and I don’t remember anything in the Sunday schooling about an earthquake.
There are two things that were running through my mind. No three actually. One was Gibson’s statement in one of the interviews where he said that whether we like it or not, the history of humanity is tied up in this man. And that is true, though it is also true of Achilles, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, Confucius, Christopher Columbus, and any other historical and/or semi-fictional figure you could think of.
The second was the issue of its truth. A scholar of early Christianity once pointed out that some of this stuff might be true, because it would have been too far fetched otherwise. A virgin birth, for example, would have been as absurd then as now, so why repeat it for 2000 years if it wasn’t based on something that could be believed by those who witnessed it, or knew those who had? We know that novel situations create tales, and so the tale of Jesus carrying the whole cross with a scourged body (which scholars are now saying wouldn’t have happened) would have been such to set tongues wagging to such an extent that it could have been written down within 100 years when the Gospels were created.
Now the third was its secular aspect. Jesus talking to the sky is Jesus talking to the sky – in my contemporary secularism, there are times when you think, this poor guy, suffering all this for a delusion. And I think that’s not entirely wrong – not a failure of the movie. You watch this, and you see a nice guy with a philosophy of love in a world of brutality, and a self-conviction that he had a relationship to clouds and he was executed for it. That to me is the story.
The amazement that created in such a brutal and inhumane world was enough to call make him a god and build a religion around it. The success of Christianity is this secular world where we now tolerate and are kind to one another. For all the shit raised by the present day Christians in their bad suits and bad haircuts, at least we aren’t torturing them for it, and at least we know that prosecuting homosexuals, abortionists and dare I say it, jews and muslims, is wrong wrong wrong, because of the foundation of compassion that the institution of the Church built into Western society through 1500 years and without making egregious mistakes of its own along the way. The Church may not have always practiced what it preached, but the secular world does. So thank Jesus for Gay Marriage. (And it should be pointed out that although the United States, the most self-consciously Christian country in the world, appears often to be no better than ancient Rome, with it’s fondness for execution and prosecution of non-conformity, we also know that it is simply a matter of time before a reformation of their society takes place).
This movie inspires nothing in me that makes praying the Rosary make any more sense, or that praying in general is any more worth my time. It????s a story about the furless apes and their funny ideas and their capacity to cruelly torture one another. There are times when you wince. I found my jaw clenched with a tension. It isn’t nice to see someone brutalised, but the reaction is dulled by the knowledge that he’s wearing a slashed flesh-toned suit. So in the end it left me sobered, but not any more moved than usual. Aesthetically it was well done. The opening sequence, from Full Moon to Gethesmane, was masterful. It really is very much an animated painting. However, by the end of the film, there were people in a row behind me crying. I knew this because their sniffling was added to the soundtrack, and made me do a double take.