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.
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
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.
2.The International Space Station and the newsworthiness of Rex Harrington
by Timothy Comeau
Apparently Bushy down south is going to soon announce a return to the moon. Like the weapons of mass destruction, I’ll believe this big-election-next year-bribe when I see it. For the past while I’ve been content to make do with watching the space station fly overhead every once and awhile. Now, it’s not that big of a deal, but it is one of those things that most resemble art while making no pretense to be so. Like a conceptual masterpiece, it is rather banal and boring, but it can inspire much thought. Nothing else so reminds me of what Heidegger was talking about when he was going on about Greek temples. But I mean really, Greek temples…when we’ve been to the moon for god’s sakes. Why should any of that classicism make sense to us when we have a space station orbiting the earth, and visible according to a schedule worked out using good old fashioned Newtonian physics and viewable using good old java applets and contemporary telecommunication technology (links below).
Nothing so makes one so aware of how pathetic our attempts to go to space have been, then seeing this fragile light cross the sky. Rating: 9/10
Rex Harrington’s Retirement on CFTO News, Wed 19 Novembe 2003 11.20pm
You can’t buy arts coverage on the TV 11 o’clock news and yet they think we care about the ballet? I mean, at least I understand the economics of celebrity and why they think anyone should care about Ben and J’Lo and the ultimate downfall of American civilization that was Ryan and Trista’s wedding. But Rex Harrington…. does CTV news even know who Brian Jungen is? Are they even aware that Sobey’s is shelling out 50 grand to artists who usually get in the news for “wasting tax payer money”? And yet they think the public cares about an anachronistic fey sport like ballet? Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been to a ballet and I probably would not turn down the chance – I tend to be open minded about fey things – but I honestly can’t see what they were thinking in imagining anyone cares. I don’t understand how Rex Harrington is a household name. Hockey, curling, and ballet? The Karen Kaine days are ovah. Bye bye Rex, I so don’t care. Rating: 2/10
Sat. Sept 20 | I catch the midnight Go Train home. Transferring to the bus to take me to Ajax, I notice this one guy picking on another. When we get off the bus in Ajax, the person being picked on confronts the person, and this quickly escalates. The fella is hit and knocked unconscious. At this point, I see someone run up from behind me, who I thought was running in to break up the fight, but instead, upon reaching the scene, kicks the unconscious person in the head. A crowd gathers and administers first aid, the ambulance comes, people on cell phones have called 911 and reported the license plate number of the car that was waiting to pick up the person who was being picked on (and who hit the guy).
Sun. Sept 21 | I get my passport photos taken at Costco. The pictures remind me that I need a haircut.
Jade comes over and I help her with some stuff. We buy groceries and eat a wonderful meal. I miss seeing The Gathering Storm on CBC.
Mon. Sept 23 | In town for a YYZ Board Meeting, I rent The Gathering Storm from Queen St video.
In a daze after a contentious Board Meeting, I neglect to pay attention to the traffic lights and am almost hit by a white SUV while crossing the street by Union Station. A caught in the headlights moment is followed by a little dance anticipating dodging this environmentally insulting several ton behemoth, which nevertheless has a good set of brakes, and does a little dance of its own as it skids to a halt. Chalk that one up to luck, and catch the train.
I watched The Gathering Storm and enjoyed it.
Tues. Sept 24 | A police officer shows up at the door wanting to speak to me. He delivers a subpoena for me to testify in court on Thur. Oct 2, regarding a motorcylce accident I witnessed in March.
I tried to watch Tarkovsky’s Solaris but halfway through I was bored and stopped it.
Wed. Sept 25 | While ridding the Go Train into work, an older man got on with bags and banged on the overhead thinking there was storage up there. I pointed to the empty seats across from me, and he accepted. This prompted an handshake and he asked my what I was reading (The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier). He drops a God booklet on the table in front of me. I say thank you, and go back to my book. He sits down and talks with the straightlaced freaks he got on with (why do these people who identify with christianity have such a creepy fashion sense?) Then he returns for the sunglasses and hat he left at my table. Sitting down he asks me where I’m from, and then asks my name. “Timothy” I say. “Timothy, like in the Bible!?” I nod . “Tell me, is Timothy a born again Christian?” I say no. He asks me what I believe, and I mumble something about following Catholicism. He starts that this isn’t enough, I need to be born again, I need the salvation of Jesus. I ask, “How do you know?” and he says it says so in the Bible. “But that’s just a book like this one,” I say, holding up the novel. Of course he doesn’t agree, and starts to reply, when I lose my cool. I bang on the table with my right hand and say, “Listen sir, I’m on the train here going to work, trying to read my book, and I don’t want to talk about this Christian shit. If I’m going to Hell it’s my business, not yours, so you go sit over there”, pointing to seat from which he’s come. He raises his hands are raised in submission, and says, I respect you for saying that, I’ll leave you alone. With regard to religion there’s commentary and interpretation and the history – that I find fascinating. But proselytizing I find insulting to one’s intelligence.
I tried to finish watching Solaris but it put me to sleep as all Tarkovsky movies tend to do to me.
Thu. Sept 26 | This day was safely conventional.
Fri. Sept 27 | I go downtown to meet with Jin and Jon to go to Kitchener, which is a total waste of our time. We then return to the city to party all night.
Sat. Sept 28 | Returning to Ajax on the train, I have a conversation with an 18 year old girl who is studying journalism, since she would one day like to either start a magazine or a bookstore. The conversation is pleasant until she begins to describe her fascination with vampires, martial arts, weaponry, and being the witness to shootings and decapitations (“when I was 7, a man was working on his van when it suddenly fell on him and his head popped off, and I asked my mother, ‘is that going to go back on?’ ‘uh, no, let’s go in the house'”) in addition to the story of a friend’s father who had worked as a correspondent in “the west bank or somewhere in the middle east” who, following a hot tip, went to a certain location at a certain time, heard a dumptruck appear, do it’s business and leave, and upon investigation found a mound of freshly decapitated heads. “He’s been in therapy ever since, he can’t sleep well; every time he closes his eyes, he sees the open eyes of the heads staring up at him”.
Marriage as a long conversation. When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation. (Fredrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human # 406)
I was reminded of the above quote by Hillary Clinton last spring, who was on TV doing promo for her memoir, reading an excerpt from the back of the book. In her bedtime story voice, she tells us that she began a conversation with Bill Clinton in the spring of 1971 and they’re still talking. Could not one consider text a conversation, held between the writer and the reader? If so, then last spring, I began a conversation with AS Byatt, through her text Possession, and the film adapted from it.
–The Book–
Having gotten over the repulsion I’d felt for years at seeing it’s pre-Raphaelite cover in the bookstore and thinking it was something entirely feminine and not at all of interest to a boy steeped in science fiction and the cynicism of contemporary art, I picked up this thick paperback at the local library, my interest piqued by last year’s film. Based on the trailer, I thought the story was one of reincarnation – two lovers in the 19th century rediscover each other through academic research and fall in love all over again. The story is more banal and far more intriguing.
Published in 1990, and set in 1986, this story takes place in the dying days of typewriters; computers do make their appearance here and there, but all in all, this is a tale for the last generation of academics who fell in love with words and the tales of deconstructed meta-narratives before the computer and internet came along to put it all together again. It is essentially two love stories, the first of which begins with a conversation which has not had a chance to complete itself. The 20th Century character Roland finds drafts of a letter which begins a search for an undisclosed portion of a 19th Century poet’s life – that of Mr Ash. Mr Ash is a complete fiction, but in this alternative reality he is perhaps akin to William Morris, a poet obscure, but not too obscure.
I think I have to stop pretending to claim any profound understanding of postmodernist issues, because every time I feel I have a grip on the theories I read something which throws me off balance – and I write this because Possession seems to have been written as a critique of postmodernist theory. AS Byatt had definitely mastered her craft, and the excessiveness of her skill is overbearing. Her recreation of 19th Century writing would be impossible for me, because the tone and formality of the language I find so inhumane as to be repellent, and I had to skip these portions of the text to simply to be able to breath. Byatt’s appropriation of academic jargon, and the 1986 setting, seem to posit that love is beyond discourse and that at the end of the day, all of our theories are nothing more than a pastime for the bored and over educated. That deconstructed meta-narratives and post-something-or-other critique are there only to fill our lives in the absence of that which all mammals such as us seek – food, shelter, love or a bathroom.
Whole chapters of text written in a 19th Century style are not necessary to convey the one idea which anchors the plot line for that section – something which the film makers picked up on. This novel was really written for a generation who like Byatt were raised in a pre-televisual time, where a big fat book was all the more required to stave off the boredom of an evening next to a fireplace, a generation raised with Latin and Greek meta-narratives.
–The movie–
Neil LaBute drinks mocca choca supercalifragiclicoala espresso while the sun rises above the Los Angeles horizon. Because he’s a famous Hollywood 2-bit schlep, he lives in one of those beach homes, where he sits and ponders the scripts of his magnum opiate. Should he be faithful to the text of this highbrow English hottie-tottie snob? Or should he find a way to blow something up near the end of the film, delivering a signature line which has been in his head since he overheard it at the restaurant – “That’ll be all.”
No, he has to focus; he has to get this project done, since it’s already been in limbo for years. He’s the director triumphant, he got the script, and he’s got his friend already lined up to play the lead. That fact that he’s American, and the character he’s supposed to play is British is irrelevant – this will be changed, so that the female character will have a reason to be snarky to him. Such a long book – and he has to get it down to a couple of hours! He thinks, “Oh this is just a chick flick, no need to satisfy the male urge to classify, and strategise by giving us a plot that makes sense”.
The movie becomes an exercise in summary. Talk about cutting to the chase, this film cuts out the chase, and replaces it with scenes that seem incongruous. This movie becomes the definition of a film swissed-cheesed with plot holes. In the novel, one sees how the characters arrive at their positions and decisions – in the film, its as if everything pops out of thin air, as if being directed from above … which it is … as if to say that internal narrative consistency and apparent irrationality of the characters do not matter since we all know this make believe anyway, and that you’re only here because you had nothing else to do – an attitude that is so disrespectful of the audience’s intelligence that director Neil LaBute should go into something else.
Why the hell do they dig up a grave at the end? This does not make sense! It’s the Chewbacca defense applied to a plotline.
The film adaptation makes up the unconscious identity of any text; for any song their exists the possibility of the remix, for the text, the possibility of a film. And while there are ‘definitive’ versions which try to create a faithful reproduction of events, there is the possibility for any number of modifications – this movie version chose to dumb down, to simplify, to become an exercise is brevity. Telling only what needed to be told, it is almost unfair to watch this film after reading the text. It is full of plot holes which are there only because they chose to exclude so much. A novel like Possession should be a 3 hour movie – that is not unreasonable, especially when one compares the two English Patients where the text is smaller but the film is large; instead here you have the reverse, a large text and a small film. It is only an hour and half long! Its so light and breezy it could blow away on late night television, you’d end up watching infomercials or the girls on the beach having forgotten the story over on channel 6. The film has disposed of much of the nuance and its sense of reality is compromised because it has paired down a complex story into something too simple to be believable.
Hollywood Inferno | Part of the Images Festival 2003, Toronto
“Loosely based on Dante’s Inferno” as the teaser reads, we find a Virgil who is a scriptwriter and a Dante who is an 18 year old girl named Sandy, “which rhymes with candy”. At Easter in 1300, Dante found himself in a dark wood – 701 years later, Sandy finds herself a bored cashier in a candy store. The ending of this film is not for the weak stomached, as it is rather disturbing, (but then again, so is a web search on Indymedia for pictures from the war). The fact that this dual projection video does make the skin crawl is an achievement in itself, and I was completely enthralled with its postmodernist hall of mirrors. Much of the film’s dialogue is lifted from various sources (dialogue from films such as The Last Temptation of Christ, The Last Tango in Paris, George Lucas in conversation with Bill Moyers, and, my favorite, “various art dealers and collectors” from New York’s art scene) and the credit list serves as an indictment of our flash-and-glam culture, with teenagers who seem victimized by the failed dreams of the adults left to mutter on pretentiously. In the end, our culture is a hell as real as that which Dante depicted 700 years ago.
Videograms of a Revolution | Part of the Images Festival 2003, Toronto
Don’t ever take voting for granted, since these people had to take over their TV station to get that right. The North American self-absorption (which is even reflected in the fact that most people don’t consider Mexico a part of NA) means that many will never see this great compilation by Harun Farocki. The Romanian Revolution of December 1989 was a TV revolution – the people established their base in the TV station, took over the airwaves, and broadcast their proclamations and revolutionary announcements. While watching it I could almost imagine that the year was 2189, and that I was in some History class – since once something’s on video, framed by the edges of the monitor, it is as visually timeless as any painting that has been gathering dust for a few hundred years. As fascinated as I am with the French Revolution of 1789, which also resulted in the execution of a king, I was also fascinated to see a similar uprising and the applause of ordinary people as images of the dead Ceaucescus was broadcast on the evening news. “Imagine, all these years we were afraid of an idiot,” a woman says as she drives in her car, surrounded by people galvanized in the streets. That line and the film in general are a reminder that we quite often chose our misery through lack of political conviction and action.
Tamala 2010 | Part of the Images Festival 2003, Toronto As the opening night film, this received much Images Festival hype. What was really intriguing about this movie was how it was an analogy for Japan’s postwar economy as manifested through the Hello Kitty product line. The majority opinion towards it was lukewarm. I can see why, since it was rather wacky – but having recently begun to wonder what films might look like in a 100 years (example: Matrix Reloaded vs. The Great Train Robbery) I found the wackiness of this film illuminating. It should be said that its exotica is not so much the result of 22nd Century foresight on the part of the production team, but rather is because it is a film from Japan, and is thoroughly Japanese. As anime, it deals with their aesthetic obsession with cuteness, and successfully uses computer graphics rendering to enhance the visuals. The highlight of the movie was a scene depicting a mediaeval almost Bosch-like painting of slaughtered cats.
Unbalancing Act by Jo Cook | Site 19, C-21 Quadrant, Mayne Island BC, VON 2J0 10$ | zine
This is an elegant little book, printed on heavy paper in colour, with a nice juxtaposition of printed text (computer) and handwriting (human touch). I appreciate the fact that the narrative is oblique as much as I appreciate its physicality. The title could refer to a psychological condition, the unbalancing that occurs through trauma. The narrative and loose drawing only hint at this however, and wide latitude is given to the viewer to imagine their own interpretations.
Afield by Florentine Perro |f_perro@hotmail.com | Site 19, C-21 Quadrant, Mayne Island BC, VON 2JO 10$
Produced with cardstock and color copying, the strength of this zine is in its craftsmanship. It tells an abstract story, the plot of which “could be summarized as the search (eventually succesful) for someone who is having trouble making a fluid appear”. This peice of text is juxatposed with a statement regarding the orgasms of molluscs; that, and a recuring theme of ducks, makes one think that this is an exploration of the emotional life of beings, beyond the usual mamalian limits we put on our ideas. If it walks and talks like a duck, chances are it’s a duck the old saying goes. Combined with Decartes’ “I think therefore I am”, this booklet would suggest that ducks are ducks because they are.
2. September 11th’s Week in Review | Timothy Comeau
Last weekend hearing the words “September 11th” as part of a documentary made me realize how it has become an integral part of our vocabulary, used almost unconsciously. The following is an account of my hearing in conversation or radio, and seeing in print, the words “9/11” or “September 11th”. I have tried to record the time and the context as accurately as and as agreeably as possible, without extraneous detail.
sun 26 jan
on Catholic.net, in an article headlined, “The Day they begged for priests”
12:29 AM | in a Trektoday.com BBS posting about two particular episodes of DS9
mon 27 jan
12.10am | heard on BBC radio report on the impending Hans Blix report
3pm | “stories from 911” as a subtitle to a book seen at Pages
5pm | completely unrelated paragraph in the book Citizens by Simon Schama, refering to September 11 1792
8.08pm | David Frum speaking in an interview on TVO
9.20pm | In an article by Christopher Hitchens on Slate.com
tues 28 jan
12.30pm | Walter Mead, writing in the Globe and Mail, includes “Sept 11.” three times in his commentary article by Walter Mead in the Globe and Mail with the headline “How Bush grasps the world”.
1.55pm | “9/11” seen in a graphic from a CNN screencapture of the memorial service in a Google.com image search for the Ground Zero architectural proposals (prompted by an article headline in artsjournal.com).
2.36pm | David Collenete, Minister of Transport, speaking during Question Period broadcast live on CPAC, said “September 11th 2001”
8.13-14 PM | “September 11th” was said three times in the space of two minutes during the Newshour special on the 108th Congress on PBS
wed 29 jan
1.14 am | “9/11” heard in an interview on the State of the Union address with Alexie Simingtiger (not sure if that’s spelled right) broadcast on the BBC World Service.
1.44-46pm | Isabelle Devos, speaking about her “Insecurities Project” in a CBC Newsworld interview said, “September 11th” twice in two minutes.
thu 30 jan
3.14 am | “September 11th” was said in a voice over and in print on CBC News. The story involved the Privacy Commissioner’s report on the Federal Government’s proposed security legislation.
1.31pm | From Google.news: “September 11 relatives relive trauma > Expatica > 1 hour ago > 30 January 2003 HAMBURG > Five relatives of victims of the September 11 attacks offered tearful testimony at the al Qaeda terrorism trial in Germany”
1.34m | Headline on CBC.ca: “Witness > Tonight’s documentary, “Security Threat” shows how far security demands have threatened our privacy and curtailed our civil liberties since Sept. 11th”.
2.33pm | Headline on GlobeandMail.ca “Privacy under ‘unprecedented assault’ Radwanski accuses Ottawa of ‘using’ Sept. 11 to become Big Brother”.
4.40pm | Google.news “Ridge Touts Border Security Plan > Washington Post – 2 hours ago > New homeland security chief Tom Ridge, telling America’s enemies: “We are coming after you,” set out his plans on Thursday for tightening security at US borders and preventing further Sept. 11-style attacks. “
4.46 | Headline on CNN.com ” 9/11 families confront terror suspect in German court”fri 31 jan
Rick Groen’s review of the movie “The Recruit” in the Globe and Mail: “Certainly, there can be no doubt that the setting here is post-Sept 11”.
4.12pm | George W. Bush, speaking at his press conference with Tony Blair, “After September 11th 2001 the world changed…” Tony Blair, speaking a minute after, said, “…his leadership since September 11th…”sat 1 feb
This week’s issue of the Economist, in an article envisioning the world in 2033 mentions “September 11th”.
Shuttle Accident: CNN reporter in front of the White House mentions “September 11th”
I visited Sasha at Mercer Union and told her about Shuttle Disaster II. We went on the internet to watch videos on CBC.ca; Sasha and I began to talk about how it was like September 11th, the news coverage being on all channels. Notable comment by Sasha regarding our use of the net to follow the story, “…the internet wasn’t very good during 9/11…”.
Later I was browsing in Pages and my eye caught Noam Chomsky’s “9/11” book.
What is it about creativity that turns some of us into Shakespeare and others into designers of porno sites? I am really rather enthralled by the diversity of expression available to us both as creators and “consumers of creative products” to put it in a contemporary way. The old boring debate about low-brow and high-brow has a new dimension now that people are actually spending a considerable amount of time producing animated gifs and other photoshop kitsch.
Last fall I was added to the mailing list of Caroline Mosby, who would appear to be a node in the network of forwards and replies. Since September I have been occasionally receiving sexually suggestive animated gif’s and jpegs, which I often don’t find that har-har funny, since my sense-of-humour is more attuned to Kids in The Hall type absurdity and deadpan understatement. However, I still really like seeing what’s out there, and some of them have been worth noting.
The highlights:
Email with the subject line, “Nice Art” featuring various examples of body painting. The nipple of a breast becomes the nose of a cartoony mouse, female pubic hair becomes the beard of a man and the nest of a bird, a penis painted gray becomes the trunk of an elephant.
Email with the subject line, “You named it what!?” featuring photographs of restaurants, tackle shops, and road signs with improbable but real names, most from the website, http://www.geetrish.com. Buy fish and tackle gear at “Master-Baiter” ; Eat at “Lick-a-chick Restaurant” or at “Fuk-Mi Sushi and Seafood Buffet”. Also featured, a gravestone for a couple with the last name “Kaput”, a restaurant or high-end store named “Cocks”, and a road sign for a place named “Dick Lick Springs”.
Last November, I received an image of a school project that involved growing cacti, only the school decided to use clown pots, where the plant was supposed to grow from the clown’s baggy pants. Some months later, after these children had planted and watered their little cacti, the clowns all appeared to have massive erections. I appreciated getting a glimpse into utter stupidity. Shouldn’t this have been forseen – what were they thinking? But the colours are really nice.
Before Christmas I received an animated gif of a snowman who popped a boner when a snowwomen with breasts scooted on by. Unbalanced by the weight of his erection, he toppled over. I appreciated this one for its simplicity and skillful rendering.
Recently I was sent a picture of an obese orgy, with the subject line, “What really goes on at Jenny Craig.” I don’t think making fun of fat people is funny, for reasons both obvious and not, but no matter – I found the composition engaging and liked seeing the exaggeration of the human form. I began a drawing of it, and working on the drawing I began to think Jenny Saville, Lucien Freud, and Rubens enjoy painting fat because of the sensuality of mixing caucasian flesh-tone paint. Obesity produces such a rich quality of tones – from browns to blues to white and orange, contained within the template upon which we have based so much of our aesthetics – the human body – but it is the human body baroque, the template exaggerated.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of receiving a compilations of brain-teasers and optical illusions that have being going around the net for years. I was familiar with some of them, and others were new to me. It was really a nice way to start the day, to be hypnotized by the spinning op-art gifs and the “stare at this for 30 seconds then look away” picture tricks.All in all, it has made the past few months more interesting than it would have been otherwise, and I look forward to see what will be coming up next. If you would like to be added to Caroline’s email list, send a message to car_o_line009@hotmail.com.
2. The New Sobey’s in Ajax | by Sobeys Club Member 8549376081
As part of Andrew Patterson’s timeline running through the YYZ Publication of Money Value Art, we find on page 220 the following:
“1994-An anonymous Halifax artist place homemade cookies in a local Sobey’s grocery store. The cookies were shaped like letters, spelling out “WORDS”. The packages included Sobey’s style bar code stickers. Sobey’s engaged the RCMP, but no avail”.
A new oppurtunity for such interventions (and a chance to get onto their Art Award radar) has opened in the sleepy little car heaven of Ajax Ontario. Ajax is like the battle ground of a Japanese Anime or Godzilla movie. Two giants go head to head in lumbering combat – in this case, it’s big box retail outlets engaged in capitalistic competition. Sobey’s opens up a new 24 hour store, at the corner of Westney and Hwy 2 – while up the street, there’s a 24hr Dominion, and down the street, a Lobelaws. It’ll be a good christmas for the plastic bag manufacturers. The colour scheme is a bit depressing, a coca-and-cream motif with beige and Sobey’s green. Gastrointestinal propaganda is everywhere, “This way to great meal ideas” “Great meal ideas await you” “May your next meal be a great one” etc etc, although, those are paraphrases since I don’t want to remember such sillyness verbatim. The ceiling reveals the girders and ventilation pipes covered with clumpy foam insulation , painted that terrible brown, which I find distasteful.
The layout is awkward. My first impression, with low fruit stalls and bakery at the entrance, is that it resembled the Dominion up the street. I wanted to buy bath supplies and looked all over nearest the entrance, where such things usually are grocery stores, but it was way in the back where one would expect to find frozen food. I had a hard time finding everything I was looking for. This happens whenever I go into any new g-store, so that’s not really a surprise, but it is still annoying. Why is it they flirt with standardization (putting fruit at the entrance) and then do something unique (like putting the bath supplies in the far corner)?
Just as we know that the foam monster with flailing arms in a Tokyo studio is just some guy in a suit making some easy money, we also know that Sobey’s doesn’t give a shit about it’s customers as long as they keep choosing their store over the kilometre away competition, so they too can make some easy bucks to give away at cheesy award ceremonies. Everyone is complaining about the staff – they’re undertrained and are making mistakes. At checkout, the girl had to cancel one input three times before she got it right. The other day, my mother was charged 21.95 instead of 12.95, which she was lucky to catch a couple of days later and get corrected. The staff all look young, the majority seem to be under 25, and “in store procedure” takes precedence over “customer service”.
I think I’m going to stick to buying my food at Lobelaws. Rating: 5/10
To the editor:
I simply to express my support for the Kyoto Accord, and hope Pickering-Ajax-Uxbridge MPP Dan McTeague will vote in favour of it when it comes up later this year.
I am a young person, 27 years old, who is very concerned about the world I am in the process of inheriting. While I understand Kyoto will have economic consequences, I believe scaremongering on this basis is both irresponsible and representative of a parochial view. It would seem to me that those so heavily invested in a fossil fuel-based economy are refusing to see the economic benefits (and I would think, great opportunities) of a Green-based on.
The jobs that will be lost are — like an ‘executioner’ — jobs that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place, since they are detrimental to the long-term survival of the biosphere.
Members of parliament are from a generation older than mine. They have experienced and enjoyed an ecosystem that will probably not exist for my children or grandchildren. This is something new for us a human beings and as citizens or Canada; the rural generations of a century ago did not imagine their descendants not enjoying clean rivers and clean air.
Why should we make the future pay for our selfishness?
Kyoto may be considered a small and almost insignificant step, but we have to start somewhere.
A. Letter to Google News
From: news-feedback@google.com
To: Timothy Comeau
Subject: Re: Google Arts News [#930186]
Date: Thursday 26 September 2002 2:46 PM
Dear Timothy,
Thanks for your helpful email about Google News. We’re considering a number of improvements based on feedback from our users, and we will certainly pass your comments on to our engineers. Given that we’re still fine-tuning this service, it’s too early for us to know which of the many great ideas we’ve received will be implemented. Thanks again for taking the time to write us and please visit Google News in the coming weeks to see our additions and improvements.
For the latest on Google News and other Google innovations, you may want to sign up for our Google Friends newsletter at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/google-friends/
Regards, The Google Team
—–Original Message—–
From: Timothy Comeau
Subject: Google Arts News
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 02:41:43 -0400
I really like the Google news so far, but think you definitely need an arts page. I don’t give a shit about sports so your algorithms are wasting processing power on that one when it comes to people like me – and you know there are a lot of us out there! The lack of arts coverage in the media in general is depressing. With Google News which is new and hot, why shouldn’t you add to your hipness by making sure arts gets covered just as thoroughly as sports?
Thanks,
Timothy Comeau
Toronto
B. Letter to CBC Newsworld Program CounterSpin
From: “counterSpin”
To: “Timothy Comeau”
Subject: Re: not that pleased
Date: Friday 18 October 2002 10:25 AM
Timothy:
Thanks for your comments. CounterSpin is an independent co-production and all decisions regarding scheduling, broadcast frequency and commercials are made by the CBC management. I encourage you to forward your comments directly to the CBC through cbcinput@toronto.cbc.ca, or by contacting CBC President Robert Rabinovitch.
Brent Preston
Senior Producer
At 01:11 AM 10/18/02 -0400, you wrote:
>Eeeewwww….
>
>….it seems that whenever the higherups take a great show and make it
>once a week, than it’s on its way to being cancelled….
>
>Counterspin is such a great and important show (though you too often have
>the same right-wing windbags on -Jonathan Kay from the National Post and
>Jason Kenny from the Alliance Party / please find more intelligent people
>to articulate the views of the right -who with them as their spokespersons-
>often seem like the Wrong Wing, which can’t be true given that they’re so
>popular out west….) that I would hate to see it made irrelevant by being
>on only once a week. Please say that it’ll be on for at least an hour and
>half, or failing that, commercial free. Last season you were lucky to have
>any conversations at all, since you kept going to commercials (which is
>actually quite insulting to the demographic who is watching the show,
>young people like myself who are concerned about contemporary
>politics/state of the world, and not McCain’s french fries).
>
>Regardless, I’m looking forward to the new season.
>
>yrs,
>
>Timothy Comeau
>
>ps. I’d nominate Mark Kingwell from U of T to be the new host (if his
>schedule permits of course. I also realized it’s far fetched, but hey,
>wouldn’t that he great?) or Daniel Richler (god Big Life was a great show)
C. Letter to his MP
From: Timothy Comeau
To: McTeague.D@parl.gc.ca
Cc: email@danmcteague.net
Subject: Please support the Kyoto Accord
Date: Monday 21 October 2002 8:11 PM
—————————————————————————–
To: Right Honorable Dan McTeague
Member of Parliment for Pickering, Ajax & Uxbridge
Room 302 Justice Building
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada
K1A 0A6
Mon. 21 October 2002
I simply want to express my support for the Kyoto Accord, and hope that you will be voting in favour of it when it comes up later this year.
I am a young person (27) who is very concerned about the world I am in the process of inheriting. While I understand that Kyoto will have economic consequences, I believe that scaremongering on this basis is both irresponsible and representative of a narrow minded parochial view. It would seem to me that those so heavily invested in a fossil-fuel based economy are refusing to see the economic benefits (and I would think, great opportunities) of a Green based one. The jobs that will be lost are – like an “executioner”- jobs that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place, since they are detrimental to the long-term survival of the biosphere.
You are from a generation older than mine. You have experienced and enjoyed an ecosystem that will probably not exist for my children or grandchildren. This is something new for us as human beings and as citizens of Canada; the rural generations of a century ago did not imagine their descendants not enjoying clean rivers and clean air. Why should we make the future pay for our selfishness? Kyoto may be considered a small and almost insignificant step, but we have to start somewhere.
Please vote in favor of Kyoto. You can count on my vote in the next election if you do.
Review – The covers of the books nominated for the Booker Prize (British Editions) | Timothy Comeau Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The cover features an aerial shot of a tiger at one end of a boat, while a figure in the fetal position is at the other end. The view is from directly overhead, and one sees a school of sharks with a couple of turtles swimming beneath. The colours are muted, and it almost has the feel of a medieval fresco.
This cover would not make me want to pick up the book, let alone read it. The art is somewhat crude. The fetal position silhouette screams some kind of philosophical sentimentality, and the presence of the tiger makes no sense. The fact that these are details that the text takes care of seems beside the point. I wouldn’t want to read a story about a tiger lost at sea, but that’s just me. Rating: 5/10
Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry
I find this to be a very attractive cover. The title text is in a purple or a blue (scanning usually distorts colours right?) and the author’s name is in red. It is a photograph of someone looking out over the sea; the allusions to Freidrich’s paintings are obvious. The fellow is wearing a gray hat and a matching coat, and is holding an umbrella. We see him from behind. He is also wearing white pants that are short and we can see his bare ankles. The details of his shoes are lost in the darkness at the bottom of the photo. Overall, you have a composition divided into three: the sky/water, the top of the concrete, and its side. The man straddles all three and dominates.
With the hat and the umbrella combo, an anachronism today, the picture is evoking a 20th Century romance and the aesthetics of Beckett, with his tramps in bowler hats. Beckett had said that Freidrich’s paintings helped inspire his work, especially “Waiting for Godot”. This image brings the 19th Century romantic and the 20th Century existentialist together under Mistry’s theme of emigration (Mistry emigrated to Canada from India when he was 20) which seems to embody the existentialist doctrine of determining one’s fate while at the same time alluding to the romance of travel and adventure. Freidrich’s characters confront nature with their independence, while Beckett’s are crushed by nature’s indifference. The 20th Century wrestled with those two concepts in wars that proved man could control nature, but which also showed that nature couldn’t care less about our pettiness. In uniting these two disparate philosophies, this cover is excellent. I’d pick up the book and want to read it. Rating: 10/10
Unless by Carol Shields
This image at first glance evokes nothing of what the potential contents could be. It is a black & white photograph of mostly tree, but then you notice a girl in the lower right, stooping to pick up (?) or push (?) a ball. She has a bag at her waist, but it looks old as if it could be made of leather. You can also see that her hair is tied in a pony tail, and that she is wearing a white shirt with a skirt. The message conveyed is that she is either on her way or coming from school. Has she found this ball? Is she picking it up to toss it back to an afterschool soccer game?
The tree is an oak, and by it’s size one can see that it is very old. A creature of endless centuries next to one so delicately young. A picture from the 1930’s or something. I wouldn’t be inclined to pick up this book. The image is a sentimental evocation, and the author’s name is bigger than the title. At the bottom one reads that she won the Pulitzer Prize: obviously now the author is a literary Midas and if she wants to bore us with some sentimental memoir cast as fiction, than the publishing industry isn’t going to stop her, because, hey, it might get nominated for the Booker Prize or something.
The fact that the novel isn’t a sentimental memoir set in the 30s is why this cover ultimately fails semiotically. The image is a nice enough photograph and it would look nice in a hallway I guess (the hallway of some dreary bourgeois). In the way it freezes the dynamics of the scene it leaves me uncomfortable, which creates a dynamic nonetheless. Rating: 7/10
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
For some reason, amazon.co.uk doesn’t have a “see larger photo” for this title, so I have to work from the unclear image provided on it’s sales page. At first glance it looks like the stone markers of some prehistoric Stonehenge-like ring, though through squinty eyes, one can make out the ripples of sand on a beach. This image then is perhaps the weathered and eroded wooden stumps of on old pier at low tide. Both the initialy percieved image and the one actually present convey age, and the handwritten title, white against the gray-blue sky, also implies a story set in an era before typing was so common.
The sea sure is popular with these cover designers. The use of handwriting points to an historical story. The book begins in the 1920s, so this is effective. But the use of the sea image is so generic, and in the context of the other nominated books, clich? (it’s clich? anyway but worse when next to 3 other books with the same subject matter) but the designer cannot be faulted for that. I’m bored by this cover and wouldn’t pick it up off the shelf. Rating: 4/10
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Is the text set in the 19th Century, or are these the gloves of an archivist? They have buttons, so I doubt it. Perhaps these are servant’s gloves? The title’s font features an elaborate “f” and the rest of the word is a little shaky, like something that came from an oldschool press with a metal typeface.
This cover would entice me to pick up the text, though, I must say at this point, reviews always reflect the bias and predilections of the reviewer, and just because I have a thing for old documents and the dust of archives can’t necessarily translate into your wanting to pick it up too. I’m just sayin’…that because of my interests, this text featuring an image of white gloves on an old table top lying next to a patterned something or other which looks like some book from the 19th Century, would pique my interest.
The online review at amazon.co.uk describes the text as “engrossing lesbian Victoriana”. In communicating the era, this image is effective semiotically, though it still looks a little prissy, and the author’s name is printed too large and with too much kerning. Rating: 8/10
Dirt Music by Tim Winton
This image conveys a youthfulness that comes across in somehow framing another sentimental sea image (it’s like a rule in book design or something: all novels must have sentimental covers to tug at the heart strings of nostalgia…but then again, I shouldn’t talk, considering the covers of some of my bookworks…). It conveys this youthfulness through the use of the title fonts and the framing. If they’d used a more standard “Times New Roman”-esque serif font, this would have been sentimental. But the use of a sans-serif font speaks to younger folk, and in the way the title is italicized gives it sarcasm. The youth, afterall, are dripping with sarcasm and irony.
Ugh. I thought post 9-11 irony was dead. I was thankful for that, but no, it’s like aspirin, (a cheap and simple miracle drug): there is no better defense against the bewildering stupidity of the status quo than the roll of the eyes. The humor-irony formula is what gets us through the CNN days. That, and turning off the TV to read books with covers of beached boats, seen from the front, with waves gently in the background, the text hovering above the horizon line sans serif, simply conveying author’s name and title.
I’m attracted to the subversion of what could have been another sentimental image. But gawd, another fucking sea cover. I’m in the bookstore browsing and I’m getting seasick. This is absurd… Rating: 7/10
Winner: You can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but you can judge the cover. This year’s winner of the Booker Prize was Life of Pi but my winner is Family Matters.
untitled zine, James Whitman 536 E20th Ave Vancouver BC V5V 1M8 jameswhitman@hotmail.com
There’s not much to say beyond the fact that I really liked this zine. One: I appreciated the use of cardstock rather than paper, to give the book a secure feeling in the hands. Second: I liked the drawings, simple squiggly abstract line drawings in elegant black and white; no text and no title allows one to make what one wants to out of them. In my case, they reminded me of the work of the design firm M/M from Paris, whose work I am currently interested in (check out the album packaging of Bjork’s “Vespertine”). Summary: staple bound cardstock booklets printed with black and white squiggly drawings are hot. (Timothy Comeau)
Passenger & Tour Guides Exhibition catalogue, Kevin Rodgers, Derek Sullivan, published by ArtSpeak Gallery, Vancouver.
As the intro says best, “Rodgers and Sullivan explore the construct if the West Coast as it is seen from the outside, with its attendant romanticization and associations with the ‘frontier'”. The package overtook the content, consisting of a beautiful card envelope printed with wild flowers which opens up to photographs of the exhibition of the same name. Other standard tourist images are printed on the envelope sleeves, in such a way that they could be used as postcards if one so wished. The envelope contains sheets of folded paper; most are cream, one is white. The cream sheets, evocative of elegant stationary, contains random handwritten fragments from something like a journal or personal letters. The white sheet unfolds to gorgeous hand drawn map of an imaginary coastal city. This one gets a grade of Z because A+ seems low. (Timothy Comeau)
Losercore Issue 1 and Older Man Younger Woman zines, 2$ each. c/o Pleasure Point RR 2 Barry’s Bay ON KOJ 1BO weetzie@webhart.net
There seems to be a need in our narrative culture to tell our stories no matter how banal; Maureen MacMillian has shown her ID card at the gate of humanity with these humble publications: unlucky in love alternated by luck with love. The first, “Losercore”, tells the story of self-pity (“being the girl you leave behind when someone better comes along (usually better means bigger boobs, better figure, longer hair)… “) and regrets (…”regret # 43 I never told you how I felt and now you’re gone…”and 44 “…you were the coolest most magical soul and when I had you I let you go…”). A crueler reviewer would say that this is all cliché crap, but that would show a lack of respect for the universal experiences that allow such things as love and regret to exist in the first place. I’m sympathetic to this type of expression, whereas the other need we have to proclaim love from the rooftops I find more alienating. One gal’s prince charming is another’s sleaze; in “Older Man Younger Woman,” she’s found love with someone who’s thirty years older and has an ex-wife. He sounds great, she sounds happy, but the strength’s of this zine isn’t the exposition of her subjectivity, but rather it’s pleasant design, using standard 1950s nuclear family imagery with typewriter font and headlines done up in ransom-note-cutup style. Nothing groundbreaking here, this stuff feels like the literary equivalent of a chocolate chip cookie – sweet trivia. (Timothy Comeau)
small dead woman Exhibition catalogue, Kevin Yates, Diana George and Charles Maude, published by ArtSpeak Gallery, Vancouver
I recently saw Kevin Yates’ “small dead woman” at Toronto’s YYZ gallery, where its art world charm seemed rather forced, since in essence it just looks like some child’s forgotten doll. This catalogue is part of Artspeak’s series of matching up a text with a piece that has been exhibited in the gallery – in this case the accompanying text is by Diana George and Charles Maude, and entitled “Last Seen”. It expounds upon the unfortunate habit prostitutes have of getting murdered, and their bodies being found in public wilderness. The attempt is made to create meaning in this arc of being “last seen” in urbia and “found” in nature, ignoring the rather obvious fact that brush is good for hiding large things like bodies. I for one don’t believe there is a need to generate metaphorical significance out of the pragmatic practices of psychopaths. This book came in the unusual format of a file folder, which was aesthetically attractive, but makes for an awkward read. Given the binding is one of those slidy bar things I suppose the idea would be that I as the reader could disassemble it. However like all art in galleries which we are invited to touch and decline (due to tradition of not touching anything) I didn’t want to take it apart. Summary: food for thought with poor ergonomics. (Timothy Comeau)
4. Letter to Timothy
Ed Deary Sometimes when I read Instant Coffee I think about how much of a “affliction” living in a small town in the middle of nowhere is. So here is a short list of events:
This weekend:
Star Belly Jam, a music festival featuring “hippie” bands.
Free camping, the all-day ticket price is 20$ a day.
(note- I don’t think the bands are the reason to attend this: the lackey crowd, laced up should provide anybody with a reason to go. This is the equivalent to a trade show on drugs. I won’t go, but I look forward to the inevitable stories that will flow out. Really, some of the things that I have heard have been quiet re-tellable).
So much should have been written down. My memory is not what it should be, and I am so afraid my weakness will keep me away from what I want.
What are you doing now? Are you working out of the house and with your “instant coffee”? Do you still fight with your sister?
I have to leave this place, move in with my mother in North Vancouver, and put my stuff in storage. You did this, how was it?
Sometimes I think that I should get more student loan money and go to UBC’s English department. Other times I think that I should keep going with what I’m doing, (the relentless studio practice).
At the Khyber, your stairway show blurred the separation between studio practice and the contemplative act. Sometimes I think of that show, the way you were able to weave idea and thing together. Sara’s art of cooking pulled me so far from school. Now I’m sewing trousers. Happy to run away from the institutions, learn to cook, and name it badly with the feminist quip; the private is political. God, some days I actually believed that I was doing art- staying home making myself dinner. Black on Black paintings have the same effect as picking one’s nose. So what the f–k, I want to leave the house now – engage with this public society. I live alone and plan to move home. Maybe that’s o.k?
1. Pope Mass Sunday 28 July 2002, Downsview Park
by Timothy Comeau I got up at the time that I usually go to bed and took the TTC with people who were all dressed in their Sears best. I arrived at the grounds at 7am and walk into the crowd. It rains. Umbrellas go up. The boys choir begins to sing, and I shiver hearing Vivaldi’s “Gloria” which of course reminds me of the intro to the Frontline Pope documentary that was one of the reasons I wanted to see him in person. They also sang Handel’s Hallelujah, and this was entertaining while we waited. Then Elvis entered the building.
The Pope’s helicopter flew over the crowd and people got excited. The Pope is like a Santa Claus who dresses in white and doesn’t have a beard. I guess this was the adult version of the Santa Clause parade. People were yelling, “close the umbrellas so we can see!” Enough people did this, so that I caught a good glimpse of him. When he drove by I saw him from his bad side (cause with his illness he leans to one side, so I saw him from the side he leans away from) so I didn’t really see his face, but it was more than a little awe inspiring. I got caught up in the moment, with people yelling; “wave!” and I waved. The excitement was intense. I was awed and joy filled to see him, which felt a little embarrassing, but then again, that’s why I was there, to see in person this man who I feel has had a influence on my life.
I had faith that the rain would stop for the Mass, and it did. Throughout, I would follow those who were trying to get closer. For the most part the Pope was a green dot on the stage, and I watched the screens, but by the end I did get close enough to see the white of his hair. People were busy chatting and looking for lost members of their group and taking photographs, so it had this odd mix of solemnity and rock concert. With all the mud I thought of Woodstock, and one of the papers had described it as Popestock earlier in the week, and that seemed really appropriate that day. I felt bad when I had to squeeze past a couple of girl’s who praying during the benediction of the host, and I realized that I interrupted them in their moment. The Australians were on their knees at that point, which reminded me of the passage in the Bible where Jesus says, dont pray in public because then you’re just showing off and not honoring God, rendering the act sacrilege.
Rating: 8 out of ten
My rating for this is 8, cuz it was a once in lifetime experience and it was memorable. But that’s being totally subjective. If I wanted to pretend to be objective, I’d give it and the week surrounding it a 4 or even a 3, because the Catholics were weirdos, they trampled the grounds into mud, clogged up the drains so that business got flooded with sewage; preached their usual bullshit about how sex is bad and that all men had a duty to fatherhood, “whether spiritual or physical”, protested in front of the abortion clinic, clogged up the TTC, sang sing-alongs on the Go Trains, (especially that abysmal theme song, ugh) and generally drove me nuts with their fairy tales and “spontaneous discussion groups” on whether or not it was ok to marry Jews or Protestants. What an embarrassment to 2000 years of history and thought. (Timothy Comeau)
TC: Because Joseph Beuys is an interesting artist whose work I want to be able to see more of. I made a painting of that blackboard in art school but I’ve never been able to see it in person. I went to the AGO in the summer of 97 looking for it and it wasn’t there. That was five years ago. As far as I know, it hasn’t been displayed during this time. Meanwhile, you have that fucking rotting foam hamburger, kitchen sink and mediocre Andy Warhol hanging around boring me and I’m sure many other people. I asked people I knew who worked there if they could get the Beuys blackboard out of storage but they didn’t have any luck. So I started the petition.
RD: What kind of response has it gotten?
TC: Well, it’s been a little disappointing. Only got about 65 signatures in two months. Well, no, now that I think of it, that’s pretty good. I got some interesting responses. One person just wrote instead of their name “Poor Joseph Beuys (not like any of us undiscovered starving artists without representation at the AGO, my heart bleeds)” which I thought is a good point about that institution’s relationship to the city. One girl emailed me to say that she wouldn’t sign it because Beuys sucked. Well, you know that’s not the point. Maybe he did suck, but the question is, shouldn’t we get the chance to decide that for ourselves? I mean, at this point, I know Claes Oldenburg sucks. When I first started this and was spreading the word, a lot of discussion was generated on just how much stuff they have in storage that we never get to see, and it could get a little passionate. It’s a can of worms. Or, if you prefer another metaphor to that tired one, “you know you shouldn’t touch toads cuz they give you warts”. I heard that in a French movie that was set in my old hometown during the 19th Century.
RD: That’s an old wive’s tale and the source of your quote is irrelevant to Beuys.
TC: I know, but when you think about it, maybe not – we know today that toads don’t give you warts, but it’s still funny to hear and it reflects what people thought 150 years ago. And in some ways, I think that’s what Beuys was about, making work that was sometimes humorous, indulging it with this mythical bullshit that had roots in the past, and reminding us that art should not be seen as separate from life. Every time you make dinner you’re creating something, and every time you write a grocery list you’re drawing. This past summer I got into a conversation with a couple of the Catholic kids and after learning that I was an artist asked me to draw for them. So I did, and because I was put on the spot it was a really bad drawing. So I apologized, and they say, ” Oh, it’s really good, I can’t draw at all”. The correct answer for that, although it always escapes me in the awkwardness of the occasion, is “if you can write you can draw, since learning the alphabet is a matter of learning to draw shapes.” I found an old notebook from Grade 1 a couple of years ago I used while learning the alphabet and I could see that I was struggling with it. Now it’s unconscious. Anyone can do it if they want to take the time.
RD: I’m not sure I agree with you that Beuys is relevant in uniting art and life, since, as you say, his work was infused with “mythical bullshit”. That type of thing seems to emphasize artificial hierarchical divisions.
TC: That’s true, but that’s what his work means to *me*. I like the fact that this blackboard is essentially his lecture notes. I watched the video of the lecture he gave when he drew it while I was in art school, and that’s what impressed me. If his lecture notes can be considered a drawing, and fund a scholarship, why weren’t all the other lecture notes I’d seen scrawled across the blackboards of gradeschool and university given the same aesthetic status? I really took to that idea of markmaking. I started to look into his drawing more, and I like his drawings precisely because they’re so bad: I’ve tried and it’s impossible to draw as badly as that. (Even my drawing for the Catholic still retained some skill). In all of this, there’s an attraction, I guess because of his celebrity, because of his notoriety, and the point of the petition is that the public in Toronto deserves to experience that, and be given the opportunity to let his work mean something to *them*, instead of a contemplating a sink in a canvas, or seeing in person an Andy Warhol they’ve already seen a million times on tv.
RD: I heard that one person thought your write up stank and so even though they agreed with you, they couldn’t put their name to it.
TC: Yeah, I did write it in haste, and had to bite my tongue about the resentment I feel for their boring shows (except the David Hoffos one this summer was pretty good). I tried to flatter them instead. It’s an awkward write up, I agree, but I’d like to thank you Rza, for giving me the opportunity to better explain myself.
RD: Why, you’re welcome. So where should people go to sign this if they agree with you?
4. Interview Review
A month ago, the Inuit production, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) opened at select big city theaters. Having read excellent reviews, but still having not seen it, Timothy Comeau asked Jon Sasaki and Sasha Havlik (who both work at Mercer Union) some questions.
Does it have subtitles? S: Yes it has subtitles with great translation and you don’t feel like you’re missing the visuals and expressions to read.
Is it the greatest movie ever made? S: No, but the best Canadian action film. J: You think? Doesn’t beat “Goin’ down the road.” If the Fast Runner had a bowling pin-jockey scene, we’d talk.
Is it the Inuit Citizen Kane? S: Considering there’s never been a three hour epic film with an all Inuit cast – I guess your question has merit. J: Yeah.. it was like the whole film took place inside that little snowglobe. Lots of sled references too. Is that what you mean?
Is the cinematography supercalafraglisticexpialadoscious? J: Dogma and dogsleds are a good match. Lars Von Trier would be proud.
Does looking at all that white hurt your eyes? S: I was more concerned about the so-called three-hour running scene. But that was all hype. The landscape scenes through the seasons did get a lot of ooo’s and ahh’s from the audience.
The production company, Igloolik Isuma Productions, is going to be part of this summer’s Documenta XI. Does this make sense? J: no comment here.
One of the producers, Norman Cohn, began his film making career as a video artist. If this movie played in Mercer’s back gallery, instead of theaters across the world, would that enhance or diminish it? J: The film is, like, three hours long. If Mercer screened it, we’d have to offer snacks and stuff. S: I think the gallery would be a great location for an all-night movie screening. Would you be available to sit the gallery Timothy?
Is the story good or boring? S: Even though it’s based on a traditional fable, it’s filmed a contemporary way without special effects.
Do you feel myths are important in our cynical, technocratic age, or is that a question “pre-Sept 11”? J: I dig films that “update” familiar stories. i.e.. Steppenwolf became Rob Schneider’s “the Animal”, Faust was remade with a devilish Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid, and Billy Madison was a thinly veiled Hamlet. Myths are comforting.
Would you be willing to watch another movie filmed completely in the Inuit language if it were a Hollywood blow-em-up? Is their a liberal minded PC thing going on it’s favor? S: This film has enough family saga to be a daily soap but why ruin a good thing by making a Hollywood version? J: What would they blow up, an ice floe?
Cremaster 1 & 4
directed by Matthew Barney
at The Bloor Cinema, April 19 as part of the Images Festival
by Timothy Comeau
There was a time, almost ten years ago, when Cremaster, like MS Windows 3.2, was cutting edge. Yet, by now, mainstream video media as caught up with it. For example, the checkerboard dream sequence in the Big Liebowski, which came out two years later. It is slick and straightforward, easy to recognize as a dream sequence vignette, and in the use of chorus line girls, reminding me of Cremaster 1. But Barney’s work remains famously ambiguous, rather lushly endowed with production values that make his narcissistic narrative intriguing. While these films seemed a little Windows 3.2, they still benefit from its non-linear artiness.
Cremaster 1 (1995)
This one seemed like an apocryphal segment of a the 1986 James Bond film, “A view to a Kill”. The Sexually Suggestive Named Female Lead (SSNFL), is an Aryan goddess, part of a world wide conspiratorial enlist Nazi movement, who despise the more conventional white supremacist punk skin heads as being too proletariat. Trapped aboard one of Zoran’s blimps, one of two which hovers over the football field in Boise Idaho where Barney played college football (while he studied pre-med with ambitions to be a plastic surgeon) SSNFL considers escape, and stretches to keep her muscles from seizing up. In typical James Bond fashion, she’s absurdly trapped under a fruit laden table. Evil stewardess’ smoke and look out the windows, mindlessly obedient to Christopher Walken’s character, who is busy with Grace Jones and the planned flooding of Silicon Valley. SSNFL remembers radio grapes that are planted amongst the cornucopia, and gets a hold of them while the stewardess’ aren’t looking. Activating them by passing them through her shoes, they fall to the floor, and she begins arranging them, signaling choreography to the elite Nazi chorus line below. I think the plan must have been to entertain the world to death, or put everyone to sleep with the waltz music. This was certainly evident in the theatre, for when intermission came, everyone awoke from their daze, yawning and stretching.
As she communicates with the chorus line, she daydreams of taming Roger Moore’s cheatin’ ways. She imagines herself as the ultimate controller of his testicles, which are symbolized by the blimps. They are helium filled balloons to her, and she holds them by the leash.
Cremaster 4 (1994)
This was the first Cremaster film, made way back when OJ Simpson went from being and ex NFL player to becoming the scandal of the decade. Filmed on the Isle of Man, which is famous for its motorcycle racing, this one featured Barney as a tap dancing satyr dressed in white. He lives out on a pier. He tap dances around a white plastic tile. He wears a hole in the tile and falls through to the ocean below. Meanwhile, two motorcycles equipped with sidecars, race around the island.
Having fallen through to the ocean, he makes it back to the shore, boroughs under the beach, until he reaches the rocky cliff. He finds a tunnel through which he can make it up to the cliff top. This tunnel is shaped like the contour of a daisy. Squirming up the tunnel, he encounters vast amounts of Vaseline, which Barney has stated is a metaphor, a way of lubricating between concepts and scenes. He considers his films to be sculpture, something which must be viewed in many directions, and which moves slowly. I kept thinking of how long it would have taken to wash all of it off, yet Jon Sasaki, whom I saw the film with, more astutely summarized it as, “Matthew Barney as a giant sperm”.
In the meantime, the racing motorcycles converge as a ram. Their testicles, which had moved away from their bodies, and become characters of emotion and thought (like Sesame Street????s orange and black striped Wormy), remind us adults of spending our early lives watching and empathizing with puppets. The racers converge on and are replaced by the figure of a ram. The satyr emerges unto the grass of the cliff top, greeted by his smiling attendants. At the end, the satyr is enthroned triumphant at the pier, his attendants are as happy as always, and bag pipe music swells to a painful level as the credits roll.
I feel that Barney’s films benefit from their exclusivity, by the fact that we’ve all read about them, but not all had the chance to see them. Like the dream sequence in the Big Liebowski, they would become trivial rather quickly if Barney exposed their ambiguous symbolism and made them available at Blockbuster. Movies with line-ups rule, cause at that point they’re an event. These two had quite a lineup, and participating in this must see aspect I found more enjoyable than the films, which were mediocre.
I like b-ball caps cause they keep the sun out my eyes. That’s the biggest reason I wear them, since I don’t own a pair of sunglasses. I also wear baseball caps cause it’s a habit, a personal tradition. This developed in the early 90s. In my high school graduation group photo, I’m the only one wearing a hat (cause it was blue cordroy and it rocked -and it was sunny out that day). While reaching for a hat I’m often reminded of my days in university residence, when I was scolded by a patriarchal figure for going to class with bedhead. “At least put a hat on for god’s sakes!” he said. Because of the good times I had then, and the fact that we all wore baseball hats in residence, the tradition that began as a teenager was nurtured. I remember at the time being fond of the Tragically Hip song, “50 Mission Cap”, whose main lyric “I worked it in to look like that” seemed to exemplify the relationship one has with ones hat – as you work it in as it accompanies you through these experiences that live on in memory.
Sometimes I feel more comfortable with something on my head. I’ve worn other hat styles, but because of the ubiquity of baseball hats, wearing other styles usually draws for more attention than I’d like. You end up talking about the stupid hat you’re wearing. That quality of anonymous ubiquity I find appealing. You can do the whole “something on your head” thing without being too warm in a toque, keep the sun out of your eyes, and not draw undue attention to yourself.
I’m glad that there are no photographs of me from the 1980s wearing acid wash. As well, I managed to make it through the 90s without getting a tattoo. But the one area fashion area where I don’t mind following the crowd is to wear the baseball hat, since they are the contemporary tricorn. An example of this is how last summer during the previews for the new Star Trek show, they had scenes with the mid 22nd Century characters wearing baseball hats, which was meant to convey that they were more contemporary then the 23rd and 24th Century characters known from the previous series.
I’ve never been that much of a fashion conscious person, having known far more fashion victims than actual fashionable people, but I did become concerned a few years back that I wouldn’t date photographs correctly. It’s an interesting feature of fashion that one can date a photograph by what people are wearing; to within a decade when you’re dealing with obviously 20th Century photos. This is something I like about fashion in general, how it corresponds to that which we know by those two German words: the Kunstwollen and the Zeitgeist. It reveals something intrinsic about the human character’s need to belong to some group. As the anthropologists say, we are social animals and we wear clothes that reflect our tribal allegiances. Besides keeping the sun out of my eyes, and my hair in place, they help me date future photographs, and I can feel like I’m participating in a fashion sense particular to now.
1. Trudeau, CBC television, March 31-April 1 2002, 8-10pm
By Timothy Comeau
I didn’t like the look of the commercials I saw for this show, but I knew I would watch it regardless since Trudeau was such a mensch. He was a man who was so widely admired that his death was a national patriotic event for some, but was also so reviled by the western provinces and in Quebec that they’re reluctant to put him on the money just yet.
A. The Ubercanadian Colm Feore played Canada’s most famous international musician, Glenn Gould, and now he’s played Canada’s most famous politician, Mister Margaret. It made sense that he was cast as Trudeau, even though he looks nothing like him, a condition that almost seems expected after so many productions that strive to cast similar features. Because of these two roles, from such opposite ends of the white male canadian spectrum, I’ve now come to think of him as the ubercanadian, a role previously occupied by Trudeau himself as socialist-peacemaker-intellectual-world-traveler who loved Canada (and who Nixon hated!)
B. Halifax Having lived in Halifax, I was distracted in the first episode by recognizing so much scenery. I found the Beatlemania allusion filmed at the AGNS particularly laughable, because it’s the only time in my life that I’ll see that many people running out of the AGNS in joy. I wonder how John Greer feels about having his statue used as a prop during that somewhat awkward sequence (however, I thought was an interesting way to present Trudeaumania by referencing the way Beatlemanina was portrayed on film by the Beatles themselves). Couldn’t they have found another location that wasn’t so obvious, and one in which didn’t trivialize the location by assuming that “no one’s going to know where this is, so we’ll use this as an urban campaign headquarters”? For the most part they disguised Halifax well. I must say that I saw a clip of the program on the Mike Bullard show the week before, wherein the silent little girl give Trudeau a rose, while he overlooks the scenery from some balcony. seeing the clip I thought that scene had been filmed in Montreal – only while watching the show on Sunday night, with the Haligonian teleology in place, did I recognize the location as being the top of the Westin Nova Scotian or thereabouts.
C. Stylization Despite the fact that I’ve recently developed an allergy to stylization that exists only to prettify weak or boring ideas, I like the way it was used in Trudeau to enhance a weak budget and by-default nature of the casting. I thought this was a fair and legitimate use of stylization, which I’m defending agaisnt those who hated this obvious example of “cbc canadiana” – that usually wacky and poorly produced quality of broadcasts that makes CBC’s recent American marketing campaign futile. For example, my sister’s friend, who watched it with us, scoffed at when one of the dates fell from the top of the screen and then became unsynchronized. Such unexpected effects, in a biopic, was a surprise and kept my interest, whereas a slick and over-expensive American production would have bored me with it’s earnestness and had me channel surfing. Considering they wrote some of the script from cabinet minutes only realeased last year, the content was earnest enough without needing to be visually slick. Life in reality is not slick, and this after all, was a re-presentation of a reality.
D. The Best for Last I’ve long wished that a biopic would acknowledge the reality of the subject matter by using original footage here and there. My simple reason is so that I could be reminded of what the original looked like, or what the reality was like against the recreation. So, at the very end of the film, here was THE REAL Trudeau, who wasn’t as handsome as Colm Feore, nor as tall, delivering an early version of his “Just Society” speech at the 1968 Liberal Candidate Convention. As a whole, “Trudeau” was better served by using archival material, because I was reminded of the reality of this story, and got a feel for the marked difference between then and now.
E. Completely Gratuitous It was also nice to see Knowlton Nash again via the archival footage, since he was such a presence in my pre-cable childhood.
3. Review – Canada vs. USA Gold Medal Game, Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, Sun 24 Feb 2002
by Timothy Comeau
As much as I hate hockey I was jumping around at the end of this game, and even did a little dance of joy. I never thought I’d jump off a couch in excitement over a goal, but my arms pulled me up and up after the Sakic goal in the 3rd period that made it 5-2. I was also charmed by the idea that a loonie had been embedded in center ice the whole time, which somehow brought us the incredible luck of winning the gold with both the women’s and men’s teams.
Rating: eight out of ten (ten of ten if I’d been drunk in a bar downtown and then wandered around with a flag in the streets saying wuhu).
2. Lecture Review – Takashi Murakami, Harbourfront Centre’s Brigatine Room, 14 February 2002 7pm
by Timothy Comeau
Intro
I’ve tried to be a regular at the Power Plant lectures for the past while, though this doesn’t mean I’ve managed to see them all. What I’ve noticed is that of the ones I have attended, there is almost always a video component. Either the artist shows excerpts (Atom Egoyan; Arnout Mik) or – the one that really sticks out in my mind – the actual lecture itself (Phillip Monk interviewing Douglas Gordon in the Fall of 2000), is presented on a screen.
Takashi Murakami’s presentation, on Valentine’s Day, also featured video. While the audience gathered, scenes from a documentary on him and his work (japanese version) played in a loop, which was effective in giving the crowd something to do while they waited.
When the lecture did begin, he sat at a table to the left of the stage with his interpreter, who he didn’t really rely on. Having seen lectures by foreigners before, I expected what we usually see when foreign leaders visit foreign lands – speak in sentences, or small paragraphs, and then pause to allow the translation. In this case, Murakami simply read from a prepared document, in a halting broken way, but I nonetheless appreciated the effort. His prepared essay went into the history of anime, the uniquely Japanese method of animation, which is an obvious influence on his work, and concluded with the presentation of two videos.
Something notable about anime
Since his work involves sculpted mushrooms, he pointed out something that I have never noticed before; in almost every anime film, no matter what the story line, a mushroom cloud is depicted. His sculpted mushrooms appear howvever to be of the more magical variety.
The videos
One was a short documentary showing the process at his Hiropon Factory, and the preparations for his show at the Museum of Contempoary Art Tokyo last spring. (Both the show and the video were entitled “summon monsters? open the door? heal? or die?”). The other video was part of a larger work that will be debuting in Paris this summer.
I think it would be overly presumptuous to say that because he didn’t speak English so well he decided to just show videos, however, I thought it worked out beautifully. Usually in the middle of lectures my mind wanders, and I barely remember anything, but being a TV baby I hardly ever forget videos. I felt I learned more and was able to appreciate his practice more because of the presentation of these two works.
With regard to the second video, which was a critique of American culture.
Murakami introduced it by saying that the theme he is working with for the upcoming Paris show is a question: is it the case that America provides the line drawings and asks other cultures to fill in the colours? The video featured scenes from American films, opening with the scene from “Patton” (1970) where he denounces losers, and then moving on to the famous line in “Apocalypse Now” (1979), “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”. These scenes highlighting the American glorification of violence than move into the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor from last summer’s movie of the same name. The film concluded with scenes of Japanese girls singing a song on some TV show, overlaid with news footage scenes of the World Trade Centers being hit (from every angle available) and collapsing. An audience member asked what song it was the girls were singing. His interpreter explained that it was from a Japanese festival called girl day. The tradition is that dolls are collected on this day, being given to the girls by boys, and are displayed in a hierarchy, the top dolls comparable to the figurines of a wedding cake – boy and girl together. The song expressed the girl’s wish to be on the top shelf with the boy. Murakami explained that he feels that since their defeat in WW II, there has been a tendency to avoid confrontation, and to focus on the good things in life when confronted with a crisis. Thus the song juxtaposed with WTC was evocative of this.
Art Star
On a more general note, in some interviews and reviews of Murakami, a similarity with Andy Warhol is mentioned. His use of pop culture (for him, otaku rather than soup cans) and in the fact that he calls his studio practice a factory (and runs it as a small business manufacturing marketable goods). The aspect that connects this to celebrity was evident at the end, when a small crowd gathered around the table to get autographs. And not only did he indulge the whims of these young admirers (they all looked like art students) with a signature, he also indulged them with drawings, that will probably end up on e-bay someday.
sat (jan 19): I overslept. I should have gotten up at noon, when I woke, but due to the usual lazy fantasies, ended up catching a couple more hours of winks, and got up around 2. At 4.30, I went to the main branch of the library to borrow Jorge Luis Borges’ “Collected Fictions”, which at first I almost was unable to borrow, since I had 8 bucks in fines from October. I gave them five and they let me borrow it. This was a minor annoyance, but given that they let me take it, I put it out of my mind quickly. So I spent the evening immersed in these stories that I should have read long ago, reflecting on the fact that I hate so much fiction because so much of it is uninteresting, but these Borges stories, full of mysterious books and characters, are right up my alley. Watched Jack Black on SNL, which was also a reminder of how good brilliant things are. The week before, Cat Power’s songs expanded the richness of my world beyond measure, and finally made me understand viscerally the limits of corporate culture. Listening to those songs, I felt there was no longer any need to watch TV again. This is the power of human creativity. Cat Power, Borges, and Jack Black, all seem to be examples of how sad, tired, and limiting homogenous culture is, and how amazing it can be to let people be exceptional.
sun: Dad made a turkey in his big cast iron pot. It was good but a little overcooked. Worked on some of my essays, read Borges stories.
mon: Finally did my laundry.
Found a website (www.lcarscom.net) which reproduces the trek interfaces. Downloaded some animations, and deleted some. I went through the computer and tried to clean it up – deleted all of Michelle’s stuff (with her permission) which freed up 16megs.
The turkey leftovers were turned into a good turkey soup.
tues: Got up around 1.45p / up late watching TV then listening to Cat Power. Did some more laundry. Sent off a Halifax IC announcement in the afternoon. Michelle is gone for two weeks on a cross Canada business trip.
wed: Got up around 1.30. I replied to Steve’s letter, and as well to another letter I got from C in the evening. I also went to the grocery store, where I bought a new toothbrush and my own toothpaste, since I’m sick of Crest.
Had a good supper that consisted of mushrooms, green onions, onions, garlic and spinach heated with olive oil, some poultry seasoning, pepper, and the addition of curry sauce. Let simmer until water boiled off and sauce thickens. Yum. Ate this and triscuits while watching one of the best episodes of Enterprise yet – “Dear Doctor”. Memorable moment – The crew is watching “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943) which is interesting enough, that it would be over 200 years old at that point (imagine if we had video from 1794!) Ensign Cutler asks Dr. Phlox, “They don’t have movies where you come from do they?” He replies, “We had something similar a few hundred years ago, but they lost their appeal when people discoverd their real lives were more interesting”. I’ve said similar about the appeal of politics over reality tv shows.
thurs: I woke up at 1.30p, after being up for about an hour and half around 7am, cause Michelle was calling from Calgary to chat with Mom.
I woke up in the afternoon after dreaming of watching a big ass news story on TV, the details of which were hard to follow since I was watching it in the kitchen, and the extended family (including my maternal grandmother) was there chatting and making a lot of noise. (I remember Nanny bending over to sweep something from underneath the kitchen table). The subject of the news was that they thought a nuclear weapon had gone off… images from India and Pakistan were flashing across the screen intercut with the pundits. A menacing looking mushroom cloud ala Hiroshima (but in DV colour) was featured prominently, in addtion to a scene of it being on the front page of the Globe and Mail.
There was video of the event taking place. A dirty cloud fireball shooting up into the sky from the right of the camera frame, reaching a specfic point in the distance, where it became invisible, then a briallant fireball expanding and creating the nasty brown m-cloud. I watched this with my father and said it had to be nuclear, at least a small one, to create that much energy that fast.
The details emerged – an american war plane had bee hit with a missile as it flew over india/pakistan. The war plane carried two small nuclear weapons / and thus, the missile ignited them, and hence this event.
I was all gung ho to go downtown, about to leave the house actually, when I checked my email – good thing, cause Jenny had written to postpone our planned meeting that night. I still wanted to go downtown, so I tried to make plans with Sasha, but alas she wasm’t up to it.
Applied for some jobs online / Peter Gzowski died / Ordred pizza for supper / spent the evening reformating resume and cv.
fri: Aimed to take the 11.55 train – got to the station at 11.50, but was still able to buy a coffee and get my ticket validated (since it was frayed it wouldn’t cancel so I had to go to the booth) and jog up to the platform just as the green go arrived.
Once I got downtown, I walked up to Queen St, browsed in Pages, then went over to Bak Imaging on Spadina to drop off some slides for duplication. Then went back over to Queen to catch a streetcar. Dropped into the magazine store right there at Queen and Sp and saw Rosemary, so we exchanged some friendly whats-new chat.
Arriving at Mercer at 1.45, I met the new intern, Samm, and we began stuffing the enevelopes with the brochures for the next show, opening on Thursday.
I was there until about 5, and I was in the mood for walking, so I strolled along Queen St, slowly making my way back to Union Station. Arriving home around 7.30, I made fish and french fries (‘cept the potatoes aren’t very good for frying, so it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped) and worked on the computer. Went to bed around 3, after watching some TV (the usual: Politically Incorect; Conan O’brien; Star Trek).
1. Excerpts from letters describing gallery going in Toronto 2001
Timothy Comeau
From a letter to Ed Deary, (14 Sept 2000)
Finding inspirational treasures on the Radiohead website. This from there:
this will take a long time to load up.
think of it as walking through a gallery.
imagine your glass of warm cheap wine. the sweat under
your jumper. the hooray north oxford wife-swapping types
with cash. the snidey critics. the billowing woman with
the uncomfortably loud mundane monologue. your old
tutor the one who told you couldn’t paint for shit. the
pristine white walls. the young dot com couple worrying
about whether it will clash with the carpet. the discreet
cocktail drum and bass noise…
thom.
From a letter to Nick Eley (14 May 2001)
I go to openings, introduce myself, shake hands, meet artists whose work I’ve seen around, and generally, I feel like I’m performing a piece called “Being Ingratiating”. I must admit to a certain fascination with my ability to win people over with a touch of flattery and “oh, I’ve seen your show!” I guess this is why I describe it as seeming like a performance, because I don’t really know how I do it. I guess hanging out with B—- all those years taught me something.
From an MSN Messenger chat, (11 October 2001)
Timothy says:
christ, art is beginning to drive me crazy again
Timothy says:
stupid crowds and stupid parties
Timothy says:
it’s always the same
Timothy says:
how many parties can you have in a year? gee
T-Co says:
you’re art boy insanito
Timothy says:
am I?
T-Co says:
sure, why not
Timothy says:
why not what? party or be an art boy
T-Co says:
you said you were going to art parties all the time and it was making your *crazy*
Timothy says:
oh yes. I’m not planning on going to the gladstone / that’s mostly why / but at the same time it’s crazy because…
Timothy says:
…volunteering at Mercer and at C magazine, you get all of these invites in the mail, and it makes you realize just how much is out there, and it’s like top 40 radio….this stuff that people pour their passion into and it just gets lost between the selections. It’s depressing
T-Co says:
i understand what you’re saying…
T-Co says:
what’s that expression same shit, different smell.
Timothy says:
yup. That’s it exactly
T-Co says:
eventually you realize that you are going to these things outta habit/ or because you*should*/or because you kinda don’t wanna miss it – just in case its intriguing for a change
Timothy says:
yes. That’s it, it’s mostly habit…don’t have anything else to do. I guess I’m just noticing how many of these things involve alcohol…and I like to drink, it’s just I dont like to drink every bloody week…it’s no fun if it’s regular…
Timothy says:
It just seems tedious right now. There’s a glut of social activity. Come January I’ll be desperate for something social
T-Co says:
plus there’s a level of pretension i could do without
Lights On Lights Off Sucks and Ain’t Afraid to Say So
“Work No. 127, Lights Going On and Off” (2001), Martin Creed
I wanted to write about Martin Creed’s piece, which won the Turner Prize this year. It consists of an empty room where the lights go on and off every 30 seconds. A version of it is currently showing at the Art Gallery of Hamilton as part of their Contemporary Projects Series.
I want to say that I hate this piece, and I don’t feel any responsibility to defend it – I say that because that’s what I feel is going on. Too many critics are talkin’ about how good it is, which it seems they have to do to justify their education and the establishment represented by the Tate Gallery. I also want to say that just because I hate this work, doesn’t mean I have anything against Mr. Creed personally. I can well imagine us bonding over the inside joke nature of this controversy. The work does have its merits. The part of me taught to be politically correct and open-minded can find some reasons to like it. I’m especially drawn to Creed’s statement about how he didn’t want to clutter up the world with more stuff.
However, that being said, I resent being in the position where because I’m supposed to be an artist with a modicum of intelligence, I am supposed to line up and defend the committee’s decision to give the prize to what I think is an insignificant work, to fulfil my duty in educating a misguided public. While I have no problem with Creed’s right to express his idea, what I really have a problem with is that it was awarded the Turner Prize and that it was part of the Turner exhibition. It’s a minor work that doesn’t deserve to be given hierarchical status by the Tate gallery. They could have gone with his “Half the Air in a Given Space” (2000) which consists of balloons filled up with just that. A better work it seems to me, mostly because it involves something and requires some effort of execution.
Now if only they had The Clapper installed in the room where they gave out the award, so that the applause would recreate the piece, then I would be ecstatic. That would have been great. It would have been dependent on the audience’s participation and presumably the lights would have flashed on and off much more rapidly. It would also have echoed the original work, and made it instantly more complex.
The Turner Prize has become associated with rewarding shock art, to such an extant that the Channel 4 website (co-sponsors of the Prize) list a chronology of Shock Art in order to make the point that “the shock of the new” is old school. What we/they/whoever accept as the banal establishment, was once controversial. So the agenda seems to be set: the award goes to what pisses off the “ignorant” and media jaded public.
It seems so glaringly obvious that he won only because his work was the most controversial. Before Creed was announced the winner, people were already complaining about it. The works by the other artists, Richard Billingham, Isaac Julien, and Mike Nelson, had more going for them aesthetically, if not conceptually. (Personally, I like Billingham’s photos, so I was rooting for him).
But my discomfort is not merely the disappointment of my fave losing. It’s because the winner is so literally vacuous. This work is too easy. It’s too easy to explain as something wonderful. This is a pure bullshit piece. It is too easy to defend using bullshit. It is too easy to say stuff like ‘it represents the dialectic of good and evil ‘ (Christ is often metaphorically referred to in relation to Light, right?) too easy to say that it encapsulates in a silent (and therefore poetic) way the relationship between life and death. And extending this life vs. death concept, is it too much to say that “Work No. 127, Lights Going On and Off ” reminds me of Buddhist teachings of what happens in death – the question being where does the soul go when we die? The answer: do we ask where a flame goes when we extinguish it? F-off I want something more substantial!
The National Post stated in its Commentary page “Mr. Creed literally made nothing. He has achieved the logical end of art, for if anything and everything may be regarded as art – even a room devoid of anything except a light bulb – then nothing is art. This is obviously all to the good. The practitioners of contemporary art can all go home – and we can all ignore them”.
“For if anything and everything may be regarded as art – than nothing is art.” Isn’t the Post the very paper run by capitalists that want anything and everything to have a price? I suppose then, in the end, nothing will have a price? If I pulled this argument on them they’d shake their heads and call me a stupid artist. I could say that this twisted argument is thus far the most convincing in favor of neo-liberal economic theories. Open markets will make everything in the end free, for if an empty room is not art because it is art, than Winnona Ryder is not guilty of shoplifting, since she already owned those clothes.
Not so far fetched actually. One of the Buddhist mailing lists I’m on had a quote by Zen master, in which he stated that the whole world belonged to us. His glasses for example – we let him wear them because we knew his eyes were bad. They didn’t belong to him, and they didn’t belong to us. They represent an act of mutual agreement, rather than of ownership.
I appreciate this piece in the sense that it is able to inspire someone like me to consider what I feel is valuable in art, but “Work No. 127” is like a naked Osama streaking through Time Square – an obvious and glaring target. In this case, x marks the spot for this kind of cynical and nihilistic criticism lobbied by people who don’t care about art to begin with. Instead of going with the “everything can be art” and suddenly digging Fluxus and Yoko Ono, and appreciating the wonderful variety of life (that’s what it does for me anyway) they have to go with “…therefore nothing is art and we can ignore artists”. Nothing is art anyway, just like nothing has a price – these are just constructions we cherish for whatever stupid reasons we humans have. These jerks have been ignoring artists all along, and are seizing this masterpiece as the proof that they were right – just like I seize on the fact that that free trade is rotten if it requires CSIS investigations of the Ragging Granies and Jaggi Singh (while Montreal terrorists plan to blow up the Los Angeles airport) to be implemented on a hemispheric scale. Does that mean I get to ignore evils of capitalism?
My attitude may suggest he should have censored himself, to know better than to provoke the right wing. To me, it’s no so much about censorship as it is deciding what’s worth one’s time. It’s not worth the time of the right wing because they’ve got their golf business meetings. Golf isn’t worth my time since I’ve got openings to go to. But I hope that the opening is going to be rewarding in some way. If I thought about making a piece consisting of lights going on and off, I’d think I could do better than that. I don’t want to waste the gallery’s time, or the audience’s, with something so vacuous. And I don’t feel that driving down to Hamilton to see this work is worth my time or the gas. The context that the gallery provides doesn’t do enough for this piece – I still feel that if I want to experience it I can just play with a light switch.
There’s no reason that Creed need censor himself, but I thought the whole jury process involved in getting an exhibition helps guard against works that waste our time. Unfortunately, given that I haven’t heard a lot of glowing reviews of much of anything in the art world lately, it seems the juries aren’t doing their job – leading to an attitude that says “we might as well have lights going on and of in a room, and might as well give it a prize”.
This type of thing was done much better 40 years ago by the Fluxus crew – and their legacy set the stage for this work. As the headline for the artnewspaper.com article, (link below) says, it’s “as exciting as hearing old jokes retold”. As such then, it’s the perfect artwork to end this stupid year, full of foot and mouth disease, kamikaze terrorism, and a war, crises that haven’t been examples of the best thinking. From now on, I’d like the Powers That Be to have more brains, which would include awarding the Turner Prize to something more deserving and not necessarily controversial. In the meantime, I have to make a salad.
– Timothy Comeau
Josh: I am so sorry! I will try very hard ok! I’m sorry.
Dina: You have nothing to be sorry about. I’m sorry. I’m pushy. I want to be your friend and your girlfriend.
J: This has absolutely nothing to do with being your fault. I’m not very self confident oh. I just don’t see much in myself but so much more in others. I’m really sorry, I feel so stupid like I am ruining our relationship by doing this.
D: Josh, please stop. I love you for who you are. I don’t care about anyone else! Please believe me. Don’t feel stupid, you aren’t ruining our relationship. Just trust me.
Lecture Reviews by Timothy Comeau
(Wherein the reviewer reveals his bias):I didn’t know who Mik was and am still unsure how to say his name. Aernout Mik, Harbourfront Centre’s Brigatine Room, 20 September 2001 7pm
Normally for Power Plant lectures in the Brigantine Room, the room is full of chairs, but this evening, a week and three days after the proverbial shit hit the fan, there were half as many, and of that, barely half were filled. The works presented by Mik were oddly au courant given the circumstances. The first video he showed, depicted stunned stockbrokers sitting around a trading room, their computers off and papers scattered everywhere. Even though the video was made much earlier, was this not the scene experienced the previous week’s Tuesday?
And that weighed on the lecture. Aernout Mik gave a subdued performance. He chose not to stand on the stage, but to walk around the front of it. He wore a lapel mike, which made him appear less like a celebrity at a genre-convention (which is exactly what he was–wasn’t he?) and more like a member of the audience. Mik sat at the edge of the stage while showing examples of his video works, which depicted fictive scenes that caricatured disaster. He remarked that he was uncomfortable and was not sure how he felt about the works. His uncertain nature diminished his authoritarian role, erasing the relationship of dictator and dictated to. It was as if he was also experiencing his own work for the first time.
There’s been a lot of community spirit in the last few weeks, which is at least one silver lining in the cloud of paper and ash — a scene Hollywood has depicted a thousand times, but still fails to give the lasting impressions of handicam images of a doctor hiding behind cars saying, “I hope I live, I hope I live.” Fade to black.
Rating: Eight out of Ten
I have admired Kingwell for some time. Mark Kingwell, Aesthetics PHL 285, University of Toronto, 27 September 2001 12-3pm.
What is beauty anyway, especially now? Kingwell’s subject of the day was Kant’s views on beauty, that elusive something that supposedly gives us a glimpse of higher forms of being. Kingwell displayed his intellect with logical diagrams, that may have lacked Beuysian beauty, but displayed Cartesian design. (I thought that overhead displays would have been great, but then again maybe they would have just been distracting and in bad taste).
Kingwell is so good, I wish all my teachers were as great. He knows his subject matter as if he made it all up himself. And, most importantly, he knows his audience. Instead of boring us with the stupid old “What if a demon were deceiving me” bullshit that is the usual when explaining Decartes, he used a contemporary example: “The Matrix”. (An aside if you will – I hated The Matrix because I feel it is too amateurish. It is such high school stoner philosophy. What if reality is all in our heads? Gee, not that sophisticated. But until then, I hadn’t connected Decartes to what has become amateur in our time).
The mastery of the performance was not matched by the set design. Like a good wine served in a paper cup, the architecture of a cement block room can suck the life out of any good material. I was left feeling like a stressed out student rather than an enriched human being, though the mastery of Kingwell as a teacher did leave me feeling somewhat more able to understand the relevance of this stuff.
Last word: It is so nice to be in a group where one can say the word “canonical” and not have to stop and explain it. Instead, that privilege was saved for the word, “belletristic”.
>From: “Timothy Comeau”
>To: “Stephen MacEachern”
>Subject: Catch Phrases
>Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 20:06:59 -0400
>
>Hi Steve,
>
>I need your help with something
>
>I’m trying to compile a list of my catch phrases, including the famous, “What the fuck do you care” and “Helloh”. These spring to my mind since you always teased me with them. Can you remember any others besides “Auf de Mauer”? (Recently I have been saying “Oy vey”).
>
>I’m sure there are some that I’m missing. Can you think of any?
>
>Timothy
So far then:
1. What the fuck do you care?
2. Helloh
3. Auf du Mauer
4. Super x from the Seventies
5. Dude!
6. Okay
7. I don’t care
8. Oy Vey
9. yeah, un-uh, anyhoo
From: Steven MacEachern
To: Timothy Comeau
Date: September 30, 2001 9:32 PM
Subject: Re: Catch Phrases
I know a couple….
“dude!” – very recent
“okay” – your answer to almost anything
“I don’t care” – another answer to almost anything
That’s the one’s that spring to mind. What are you going to do, put them on a t-shirt?
Anyway….talk to ya soon.
Steve-o
How did I begin to think about what an idyllic landscape was? I am fond of springtime mud, since it reminds me of good times in the springs of my childhood. But I’m thinking of how cool it would have been to play in some of the landscapes of Ajax…that stream, that hill, seem perfect for imagined scenarios, playing soldier, playing castle, and yet, they are so unsuitable because of the pollution, because of the highways. They are fragments of a greater ideal
Where 22nd Century characters walk, and say,
“My, look at that stream, these lovely trees, this beautiful park”.
For my adult mind, where sci-fi has taken over the role once occupied by castles and forts, there is something “utopian” in the ways these parks are designed, and I think about how things like this, parks, the landscaping, in residential areas are built to last. (Although, unfortunately, it is conceivable, that they too could be plowed over one day for another high-rise).
These parks are beautiful, in the same way that Chinese social realist art is beautiful – well designed and executed, but undermined by a disturbing ideology. The parks are like IKEA furniture made with grass and trees. Here, it’s a human imposition upon nature, which is something that needs no human presence to function correctly.
The stream is now clear,
in this constructed geography.
The streams are now filthy. Every time I walk to the train down the street, I pass over a portion of the main stream that flows around here. Last September I saw a heron standing in it, which seemed out of place considering how polluted the stream is. Usually when I cross that bridge, I admire the slope of its hills and the flow of its water which reflect the perfect stage from which to play mediaeval scenes.
It too once had walls, but these have been absorbed by its own red-brick urban development. Could it be that in 500 years, historians will look back and talk about our time in a similar way?
It’s a comforting thought, to see the all of our creative energies, to look at all of the resources we use to construct art objects, like films, and TV shows, which future historians would look at without the hierarchies of High and Low that we use today, and they would marvel at this time period, when computers and cars and robots are new.
But at the same time, what are the chances that civilization has at least 500 more years to go, what with the way we are squandering our resources (for example, plastic comes from oil, oil is non renewable, and look at the waste plastic grocery bags represent)? In addition to the stockpile of nuclear weapons and the shortsightedness of the business and the political elite?
At least, if we go out, it’ll be on a high note, eh?
The technonaissance, or The Late Age of Capital.
The Late Age of Capital – I borrowed this term from an historian, who wrote a book called A Short History of the Future(1). The book is many things – a sci-fi novel, a projection of current trends, and an academic exploration of our current utopian ideas. In the book, the mid 21st Century is marked by the third world war. Nukes destroy the Northern Hemisphere. From the ashes of this capitalist civilization, a new socialist world government arises [Utopia # 2] whose economic philosophy is anti-capitalist along the lines of: Never again will we allow the world to become so crappy by allowing short sighted profiteers to override human concerns.
The early days of plastics
I was going to the Royal Ontario Museum a lot last year. I had seen the movie Gladiator and was struck by certain aspects of it that clashed with the world as I knew it today. Especially the line where Maximus tells the Emperor about how his child plays with wild ponies. I certainly wasn’t able to play with wild ponies as a child. This reminded me of our relentless desire to “tame” nature and the fact that we are driving so many animals to extinction, which is an immeasurable loss.
“Not: Don Boudria. Liberal House Leader slams the MP pay raise through in record time, the endangered-species bill still waiting four years after it was first introduced.”
–The Globe and Mail, Saturday 9 June 2001, page A5, Political Notebook Who’s Hot Who’s Not
One of the things that struck me going through the rooms, was the lack of colour in the ancient world. We forget today the power of purple, and how expensive blue was for most of our collective human history. I’m standing there looking at clay pots and jars, everything is coloured in browns, and other earth-tones, and I think about growing up with coloured Tupperware, inexpensive and mass produced.
With a Nova Scotia Tuscany and an Ontario Rome.
Let’s not kid ourselves. New York is the place to be an artist in North America. It is the “capital of the world” as many have said. But I was struck while living in Halifax with how vibrant the artistic culture was, and how so many things my fellow art students were doing seemed to me to be just as cool as the stuff I was reading about it Artforum. But the media structures are set up in such a way so that only when you read about something or see it on TV, only when it is reproduced in the media, does it become “legitimized”.
While I was growing up in southwestern Nova Scotia, I developed an interest in Leonardo da Vinci, and subsequently, an interest in the Renaissance. You could say that I am guilty of wanting to live during that time, sentenced to a desire to at least visit it (using the latest in time machine technology), how I’d love to meet Da Vinci and Michalanglo. I am also fascinated by how they have ceased to be human and are now characters in a greater metanarrative told by our Western Civilization, examples of the “artistic genius” as well as the “great dead white European male”.
But growing in up Nova Scotia, one is confronted with hype at an early age. “Nova Scotia, Canada’s Ocean Playground”. We’re all sailors, we all love sailboats and all of our ancestors smoked pipes, wore yellow sou’westers and said “argh”. I am frustrated that the contemporary artistic culture in Halifax is ignored in favor of folk art. I came to think of Nova Scotia as being somewhat like Tuscany in the 15th Century and Halifax as it Florence – the common rurality, the milky light vs. the Tuscan haze, and how people now as then, and all over the world for that matter, come to the city to do business and to be part of culture as a whole. They come to Halifax to study and live out the university student lifestyle. But then, they leave. During the Renaissance, Florentine artists like Michealangelo left to go to Rome, where there was opportunity to work for Pope Julius II.
I probably should have written, New York Rome…
Red brick homes
Part of the fascination with the suburban landscape began while walking, especially the walk up the hill when I wanted to browse in Chapters. These subdivisions are homogenized by style and by substance, a reddish brick that reminded me of photographs of Tuscany and Florence.
Behind walls – made of wood, designed to keep out the highway noise, like cellular walls bordering the capillaries and the arteries.
In addition, they are surrounded by fences, which exist for a variety of purposes – to demarcate territory, for security, but also, in some cases, to help baffle the noise of the traffic. And the traffic in itself is fascinating.
It’s a fractal – the microcosm of an organism in the macro scale. Blood cells carry oxygen to the cells and the organs, and here on the 401, cars carry information, in the form of people, to the organizations – corporations, libraries, art galleries, museums, sporting events. They rest in homes, which are like individual cells. One day, the city as organism will say, “Within each home is a computer, containing the codes that make us up….”
II. Parks Canada –
For a long time now I have been interested in how the future would look upon the present. Perhaps this is because of my upbringing, my education, having gone on field trips to Port Royal and visiting Louisberg on family vacations, as well as coming to art through the study of the Renaissance. My education taught me the connection between history and the objects people leave behind. This was further developed while at university, when I studied some archaeology, before going to art school.
I remember walking through the streets of Halifax early in the morning, especially one time in June of 1998, when I was coming home from Tim Horton’s and walking along Birmingham Street. It was around 5.30am and I was struck then by the silence, the emptiness, the cars parked and still, and yet, because of the time of year, it was daylight. It felt like our historical villages, like Louisberg, Fort Anne, Port Royal, and Citadel Hill; these so called “authentic” re-creations, which are distinctly underpopulated and underdeveloped. The animators dress in “period costume” and yet, I imagine that no clothing from that time was so clean or so well made. But it doesn’t matter – it’s all engineered to suggest, to awaken a spark of imagination that will ignite a fuse which in turn, will violate the laws of time and allow one to experience the only form of time travel we know. It’s about helping us conceive of a time when soft drinks and automobiles did not exist.
But what about using that spark to travel forward in time?
“In this year of 1999, we have essentially arrived in the future that writers and films have dreamed of since the birth of science fiction, and so our science fiction is now turning its eye either inwardly to the present or to new visions of the 21st century built upon what we know now.” (2)
I have always been interested in the future as it has been depicted in the media. While growing up I regularly became a fan of whatever TV show had some basis in the future, which usually involved the 21st Century. (3) In moving to Toronto, I was partially interested in living in a world that William Gibson described in his novels, a world where ecocide has been pursued until concrete and technology are all that humanity seems to ever have known.(4) I wanted to ride its trains – trains are so sci-fi – and I wanted to look at “urbanity”, in a context that was different from what I had known in Halifax. But my fascination with seeing a fiction as a reality soon disappeared as the illness of it all became apparent – the fact that it is ecocidal, which is turn, translates eventually into being suicidal.
And so, as I drove around Ajax, loathing its car friendly design over the pedestrian, the seeming insane joy at development, and the confirmation of certain suburb stereotypes (the popularity of SUV’s for instance) I began to think, this is all an historicism. These things will not last.
Pretending then, to see this area as a Parks Canada historical recreation of what we call urban sprawl today, and my neighbors as actors of “what life was like in a consumerist capitalist culture”. But also seeing it as a moment in time, the turn of the 21st Century, the time when our technology is still fresh on the scene, the period of the “birth of technology” and thus, the technonaissance. Such a time has its own aesthetic characteristics, which I am interested in.
III. The Present, The Technonaissance
What are today’s aesthetic characteristics? On some of the invites the words were cut off at the edge. At first, this kind of bothered me, but then I remembered when I used to do that on purpose, inspired by Raygun magazine’s notorious layouts…it’s what Heidegger pointed out with the nature of being, that only when something is broken does its being reveal itself. Broken text reminds you that you’re reading – that you’re only looking at symbols.
The text broken by the deckled edge, a roughness we plow under, a weed we spray Roundup on. Why I am bothered that some of the text is imperfect? Because it doesn’t correspond to manicured lawns?
I remember thinking that Raygun expressed well the chaos of today, how everything is dissolving into subgenera and fractals of everything else, cohesion provided only by the media, the frame of the TV or the computer screen. But I don’t think about that so much anymore. I just see it now as a celebrity obsessed childish culture, an idiot’s paradise where thoughts and ideas are rejected in favor of the new and the shiny, and we are taught to consume like fat friars in medieval parodies, taking one bite out of the chicken leg before tossing it behind their shoulder, moving one to take one bite out of the apple before it too gets thrown away. This food, that the peasants worked so hard to produce…
And where do fat friars live today?
A park for tourists, to experience an idiot’s paradise in an enlightened future?
“It’s everywhere. Canadian politicians buy trendy eyewear. Al Gore is advised by Naomi Wolf to wear earth tones. BBC World runs a segment on Brazilian show salesmen having their buttocks enlarged with silicone. Men’s Health instructs their readers to wear, in this order: leather, stiff collars, turtlenecks, unvented jackets, untucked shirts, non-pastels, layers, colour combinations, monochromes, contrasting collars and clothes that are too big. The underlying message is ‘You’re just not good enough.’ Fixing your flawed self will cost money. That’s the whole point of articles like that: They damage self worth and then rebuild it by means of expensive accoutrements urged on by the magazines advertisers’.” (5)- The Globe and Mail, Saturday 23 June 2001
That the whole point of the constructed geography. Nature by itself just isn’t good enough. We have to damage its intrinsic value, destroy what’s there, to rebuild it in the image that suits the bourgeois demographic. And given that such a suburban environment typifies so well this day and age, is it not conceivable that in two hundred years, Parks Canada (if it still exists) will reconstruct one and fill it with animators having back yard barbecues, wearing flip flops and drinking beer? They’ll make a big show about going to the grocery store in an SUV.
These reconstructed parks, what are they other than the commodification of the landscape? What then is tourism other than the commodification of geography? These parks are about rebuilding, recreating, using “authentic” techniques, in order to make the illusion as real as possible. But of course, some things are not reproduced, like having the animators toss chamber pots out the windows in the morning. The smell of these parks is our smell. Side rooms that would have originally been storage closets or the like now contain porcelain toilets and sinks. The modern bathroom is a convenience that none want to do without, even for the sake of the past.
And these subdivisions, so uniform in appearance, aren’t they not the result of a plan, of a developer plowing under a farmer’s field, once used to grow food, so that they can build crescents and cul-de-sacs, commodify the landscape by turning it into real estate? And this real estate, with its parks that exist pragmatically as soccer fields and baseball diamonds – what does that say about the demographic that they imagine want to live in a suburb? They don’t preserve grasslands for young artists to wander through and daydream, where they can find wildflowers or what-nots. No, they impose the order of the sporting event; “this field exists so that boys can learn patriarchal games” – so that they learn the value of cooperating in order to compete, rather than to make the world a more livable place.
“In 2019, at a special closed high-level session in its Zurich world headquarters, the GTC approved a high-priority project to design the “perfect” man and woman. Shielded from public discussion, the GTC directors decided that perfection included not only lofty intelligence but also a ruthless competitive instinct and a dollop of energizing paranoia”. (Wagar 1999:93)
The only possibility for hope in such a world is to play the time travelling historian. The works in this show, photographs and drawings, are evidence, are explorations and illustrations of ideas, and they are an attempt to route out the fascinating sci-fi elements of this environment, hoping that one day, it will be a part of history.
What has caused humanity to be so successful? Why, it is not the exploitation of resources, the treatment of our surroundings as a room full of tools? Whereas we have reserved certain elements of our environment for reverence, for the most part, we have treated our environment, and fellow creatures, both human and nonhuman, as a means towards an end. Our religious philosophies have created a reverence for certain aspects of existence, however, in this time and place, such reverence is more of a tradition, or even, a delusion, since it is rarely respected in “the everyday world”.
It is my ever-growing belief, (if I may borrow from Judeo-Christian theology) that far from being a species favored and created by God, it would almost seem that humans were created by the Devil, to thwart God’s majesty. For, wherever humans go, destruction and death follow. The ancient creatures of the Ice Age, are extinct, and it makes sense to assume that it was by over hunting. (That in itself is revealing, that we can assume over hunting as a cause of extinction). Of course, science would like to find some other cause, to deflect the guilt that suggests human-causation. As well, of all the other hominid species, we are the only one left. There is the suggestion of wars in our ancient past, a possilbility that the Neanderthals were killed off by Homo sapiens sapiens, (I even harbour the pet theory that our stories of ogres and trolls are nothing more than a diluted form of oral history of interactions with the Neanderthals and the other species of our common hominid past) and then the centuries, no, millennia, of empire building and life that was “nasty, brutish, and short”. It seems easy to see Humans as fundamentally evil creatures, due to a defect of consciousness, or perhaps due to our ability to rationalize any absurdity.
The Nazis were able to rationalize the murder of the Jews by thinking of them as vermin. There is the famous example the Auschitz commandant’s wife who had a lampshade made of the tattooed skin of one of the victims. How is this any different from a fur coat? Isn’t it harder today to see life, especially human life, in terms of Reverence and the Sacred? Is it not true that what we object to is not the killing of a human being, rather, we object to the killing of the human form. If a life form is a quadruped, its life is meaningless, and its death is given meaning by the use we, as bipeds, will put it too. We deny the emotions and intelligence of animals, while we assume that any animal of the human form has the potential for a meaningful life. Some of us oppose abortions and capital punishment, while treating our children to Macdonald’s hamburgers. Evidence for the intelligence of animals is treated with skepticism, while the intelligence of humans is always seen as a given. If you could measure the IQ of a an cow, and it was found to be the equivalent of that of a 12 year old human, would we still be so comfortable wearing it’s skin or eating it’s muscle, or would we suddenly allow for the consumption of children? Of course, we all know the answer. We continue to spoil our kids and deny that animals have consciousness. There would be some other group brought in, funded by the meat industry or the government, who would search through the procedure of measurement with a fine toothcomb in order to disprove the result. The animal must remain a tool for our use. We must continue to eat and experiment on the flesh of those who do not share our form.
How can we not witness the bulldozers and the pits, the carcasses of “livestock” in Europe, massacred for having sores on their mouths and feet, burned and buried en masse, and not think of those black and white films from the liberated concentration camps? Why is one seen with shame and horror and the other, these films of burning cattle, are seen only as unfortunate? What I am saying is that it is as wrong to murder cows for having blisters as it is to murder humans for being jewish. And the fact that no one cares, that the PETA folk aren’t in the news and in the streets raising hell and chastising us for our complancey, is revealing of the human character, to dismiss the value of life as irrelevant. They have said repeatedly, that the “foot and mouth disease” is not contagious to humans, and that the animals are murdered as a trade measure, since being sick, they cannot put on weight as easily, and their market value declines.
In little under a month, protestors will gather in Quebec City to protest the Free Trade of the Americas proposition. One of their fundamental claims is that market values ignore human values. Is this horror in Europe not an example? We kill them because their market value has become worthless. And when we think of one of the most famous example of the despicable genre of Holocaust film, Schindler’s List, how was it that the Jews were saved? By being a cheap form of human capital. By using Jews in his factory, Schindler was able to cut costs and – most importantly for the film and for his place in history – keep them alive. One of the early scenes in the film shows the Jews exchanging market information – where to find a shirt and what not. Here is an abominable message, tres au courant for our age. That the value of a human life is only concurrent with what they can create for a market. That whole monstrous concept of “human capital” is the only measure of a life’s value.
In another Speilberg film, Saving Private Ryan, there was a revealing line, to the effect that “this fella better find the cure for cancer or something…”. At the end of the movie, we learn that no, he didn’t find the cure for cancer, he apparently led an average life, had a wife and kids and grandkids, and he asks with tears, was their sacrifice worth it? Of course his wife answers yes, and his proud kids and grandkids hug him, and the American flag flies proudly, but sadly, bleached out into transparency to evoke that emotional semiotic. In God they trust. Life has value in and of itself. Of course, such lesson is learned only after watching male bodies blown to pieces for two hours. Human life, we are taught through these media messages, is only valuable in terms of “human capital”, and that killing is fine, as long as you are not killing animals that are shaped in the human form, but even that’s okay if they are wearing the wrong uniform and live in the wrong country.
Saying this, however, I imagine that many will ask about those humans who are not of the form, the deformed and disabled. What I mean by human form is what is self-evident. We never confuse a member of our species with any other. We know what the template is. The fact that we describe some people as deformed or disabled reveals our acknowledgement of a template. And this template is what I am referring to. This template we are taught, is sacred, or at least, is illegal to mess with. The fact that our genetic research threatens that taboo, is a cause for “ethical” concern. This ethical concern could quite easily be maneuvered around – one way is to rationalize the human in terms of the animal. It is amazing to me that such a thing as ethics still exists within the context of the discourse, that there is even such a field as bioethics, given the ease at which we justify the moral violations which are narrated for us everyday on television and in popular songs.
One of the easiest ways to get around these ethical concerns is to throw in the concept of art. This always raises the amoral shield that is the freedom of expression. Let us express ourselves through genetic manipulation, stem cell research, abortions and capital punishment. I will draw upon my education at an art school, point to the wall where the document which says I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine arts degree, and say, I am artist because this is so. Will any body challenge me? Will anybody say, “graduating from an art school doesn’t automatically make you an artist”? Will anybody say, “what makes you an artist is seeing the world is a different, enlightening way, than others”? No. I will go unchallenged, pointing to the paper, and use the authority that I supposedly have, to arrange for an execution as a means of expression. I could perhaps rely on the tradition of the readymade, and sign my name to the acts that Texas seems to love so much. Art critics will compare my work with the prints of Warhol, and judge me accordingly. But, under the freedom of expression, my murders will be constitutionally guaranteed.
Imagine. Such an act has already been imagined and described by David Bowie. In is 1995 album Outside, he published a short story describing a detective’s investigation of a millennial murder of an adolescent girl and the task of determining whether or not it was art. In his story, he brings up examples from post war art practices which incorporate violence, the most revealing, (and perhaps the most famous), being the Viennese Actionists. In 1966, Herman Nitch killed a sheep, crucified it, and rolled around in its organs. This was supposed to be an expression of some sort. But the questions that Bowie’s story raised, and which I have pondered ever since first reading that story in 1997, was, what is the difference between a sheep and a human? Why is it that the killing of this sheep goes unpunished by the law, whereas such an act, as described by Bowie, performed on human, would not only by prosecuted, but would most likely be the most famous murder case in the world? Growing up in a rural area, I remember witnessing my friend’s father “getting rid” of the family cat with his revolver, and years later, while I was hunting in the forest, finding the skeletal remains, poking through a plastic bag, of a dog which had been similarly disposed of. Here I was, with a shotgun in my hands, engaging in an activity of sanctioned murder, finding the body of a victim that had no rights to medicare or an old age home, but was simply “disposed” of.
And I have to admit that I am no saint. My shoes are made of a cow’s skin. I eat meat. And no one is going to persecute me for it. Of course, I am open to the accusation of being a hypocrite. Yes, that’s true. Here I am, rationalizing that it is wrong to live this way, to eat meat knowing full well it is a form of murder, to watch the bodies of cows and sheep burning in the English country side, and yet, feeling as guiltless as anyone else. And in that, I am a fully contemporary human being well brought up and indoctrinated into the values of my society. In acknowledging the wrongs, while being complacent, to view those who eliminate animal products from their lifestyles and diets as some kind of “fringe” group, I am as monstrous and despicable as everybody else, and yet, I can see no great change coming to humanity anytime soon. As piece of human capital, as employees, to rebel against this fundamental societal philosophy would destroy our market value, and then perhaps, we might end up burning in piles on the countryside.
Timothy Comeau‘s The Book of Marks is about the grandeur of mark-making and the hubris inherent in our conviction that anyone else will ever understand them. The Book itself is a 192 page graph paper notebook, each square of which the artist has “filled in with a mark”. The process, Comeau says, began in 1998. For Comeau, the indeterminate shapes with which he gradually fills his pages are similar to the runic shapes making up the alphabet of a language you do not understand. “The Book of Marks appears to contain a script”, writes Comeau. But if so, it is a script anterior to his ability to read it back. In a Borges story, Comeau’s exotic script would, in fact, turn out to be crystal clear-to someone.
Gary Michael Dault
Toronto, February 6, 2001
published in Artery Summer 2001
Vol. 7 Issue 4 p.8
From: timothy comeau To: arts_online@scotsman.com Subject: Plagiarism or Appropriation? Date: Thursday 30 November 2000 6:02 PM
Plagiarism or Appropriation? I smirk at this case, because I see it from both sides of the argument. One the one hand, it appears to be flagrant plagiarism. One could not reproduce a text changing a few words here, and the punctuation, and make a claim to be original.
But Duchamp brought in the readymade. In *choosing* an object, he exercised artistic decision making – the process being defined as such: 1. I’m an artist, that is, I have been trained to see the world in a special way, I have “heightened aesthetic sensibility”. 2.I see a shovel, I think, wow, that looks pretty cool, we don’t have anything like over in France 3. I think the art world is too stuffy, all those boring glossy paintings, I’ll exhibit this in a gallery 4.I’ll give it an ironic, humorous title, “In advance of the broken arm”.
When I was in art school, I wanted to produce cinematic picture books, but because I was in a small town at the edge of the ocean, and because I was only a poor art student, the only way I could get access to certain pictures was to borrow them. I took photographs from the TV, from movies etc, in order to get photographs that would have been impossible for me to get otherwise. For example, I could never schedule a photo shoot with Albert Einstein, since he’s been dead for forty-five years.
I would present these books to my studio group, and I asked my studio advisor about this act of appropriation. He pointed out that there are thousands of images in a film, and to choose one or two is an artistic act in line with the history of the readymade. (One should ask, why did I the creator of this piece choose these images when I had thousands of frames to choose from)?
I also argued, that we live in a landscape dominated by created images. There was a time in the past when an image was expensive to produce, and this kept the presence of media down, but in this day and age, the cost of producing media is inconsequential. I argued that representing images from the media is similar to painting a landscape. Does God own the copyright to that view? Do all the Sunday painters of the past who have also painted that area have a say? We think nothing of looking at paintings of landscape, we think it’s interesting for example, to compare the photographs of Atget from 100 years ago to photographs taken from the same vantage point today, in order to see the changes that a century brings.
Since there seems to be an image wherever you look today, whether it be golden arches or blank faced models or sci-fi book covers, it seems almost impossible to represent contemporary reality without including what some would consider a copyright violation.
In the case of Glen Brown, its unfortunate that he wasn’t more upfront about the source, that it wasn’t clear from the beginning that this painting was his remix of that 70s song.
An email to Janna, Fri. 22 September 2000 at 11.24 pm
Now I’m back from my little trip.
I need a new notebook…and for notebooks I only buy Clairefontaine notebooks. I have been getting them at a place on Queen St west, but I am not happy with the selection they offer, despite my attempts to get them to order me what I want. Now the first store that I ever found a Clairfontaine notebook at was the University of Toronto bookstore and this was in 1993. So I decided that this time I would try the U of T.
Walking along College St, there are all of these students, with backpacks and youth, and I thought O I miss Academia! Rumpled old white bearded professors and leaves blowing on sidewalks…and I realized that is what I miss so much about Halifax, its the fact that Hali is a university town, and you are surrounded by this atmosphere. So, needless to say, that walk along College St was big time refreshing. The U of T did not have what I was looking for, their selection is even more disappointing then the place on Queen. So it was down to Queen after all, to get the book that has to do….
And then the opening. Tonight they were not serving Keiths. I had to settle with some Belgian import called Selma or something like that. At these events I always expect to see someone I know, because there is supposed to be all of these Nascaders up here, but I have never seen them yet. But there are familiar faces in the crowd, people who go to all of these events that I go to, there’s this one guy, he’s really tall and skinny and wears a jean jacket. He has thick sideburns and glasses…and the other regular is this girl that I find alluring because she’s so anti bourgeois. This evening, like the last time I saw her in June, she was wearing gray. I tried to memorize her features so that I could draw her picture later and write odes to her and stuff, because I probably wont see her again until the next opening in December. And this all stems from the fact that she asked me if I was sitting alone at this movie – Cremaster 2– that I went to see in March, my first Toronto art event, and I said yes and she asked if I could move over because her group was 3, and I said sure…but she had all these interesting things about her so now she’s a character in my mental world and pops up in my writings.
But she only showed up about ten minutes before I left. I had made a phone call to my friend Nick in Ottawa. Yes I too have a friend named Nick who is central to my travel plans. Perhaps we all have nicks in our lives, but I hear that girls have allot on their legs, wink wink, and so I am going to buy a ticket tomorrow to go up to Ottawa on the third of October, and I’ll be there until the seventh, which is a Friday. I hope that it’ll rule.
The art itself was much too resonant…it hums with its grandiosity, and because of this, the presence of middle aged wankers dressed in black only makes it seem cheap. But the middle aged wankers, that’s our future, and they always seem to be well off financially, and you know they must be more than tolerable to listen to considering they’re there, so I don’t hate them for being beautiful even though I think they’re losers for not having enough originality to wear something other than fucking black….
A large room, a large screen. A conductor, close up. We see his hands moving through space. We catch occasional glimpses of his face. The orchestration…cinematic music. In the corner, Hitchcock’s Vertigo is playing. It is right on the floor, projected into the corner. The image must be about 2.5 feet by 1 foot….but that’s a really rough estimate. Anyway, its small, compared to the screen hanging in the middle of the room where the conductor is. There is this synchronization see, the conductor is conducting the background music that corresponds to Vertigo playing in the corner, in silence. I think the artist DG said last night that it isn’t THE score for the film, but nevertheless, they interact with each other.
24 Hour Psycho. A smaller screen this time. Silence….large still photographs, immaculate black and white. The type of black and white cinematography that makes colour obsolete. Hovering above the ground, on the hanging screen, shuddering through their stunted animation. It is great to see a two hour movie slowed down to this extant, so that each frame is visible, so that it becomes a progression of still photographs rather than a movie house sequence. And there is no sound…which I love, I hate sound in film, I mean its obviously necessary but sometimes it’s just redundant and annoying and unnecessary. Did you see the video I made for my video class? Did you ever see the video Ed and I made? Both are silent.
Needless to say, I’m a sucker for this artist already, when I learn that his films are silent.
The beauty is the installation entitled, Through the Looking Glass. You turn a corner. Large black bare room. Concrete floor, no light, a mirror. You see a light in the corner, you glimpse a larger video projection. You walk toward it, seeing your self in the mirror that covers the entire wall.
The other room then. Deniro in Taxi Driver. “You talking to me? You talking to me? I dont see anyone else standing here….fucker….faster than you.”
But the thing is, on the wall to the left, the sequence is playing, on the wall to the right the same thing, only the image is reversed so that one is the mirror image of the other, and the sound is off by a fraction of a second, so the dialogue echoes around the room. The luscious beauty of half a wall covered by a video projection….you talking to me…the two Deniros squaring off. The army jacket, the shelf behind his shoulder displaying 1970s plastic food clutter. Over and over again, this sequence, which the wall card says is 71 minutes long.
I wandered through each room three times, well no four times. I wandered had a beer wandered had another beer. Half looking for someone I might know. But no…
And on the way home I was listening to the radio, Ideas, and this time its dialogue from a conference on the current internationalization of culture and art. One voice says how art is trivialized in the contemporary, it is commodified and become another something we consume and then forget. And I cant help but think of the stuff I have just seen, and the fact that it is wow but it isn’t sticking, and I have to write it all out like this in order to see for myself if I remember anything of it, if it meant anything to me….and you see the crowds there drinking and chatting and you know no one really cares about the art, I mean its all just novelty, that it, its just an excuse to get together and talk and get drunk and get interviewed. I cant help but think that our mental habit for consuming and forgetting, satiating ourselves briefly and then tossing it over the shoulder like the medieval dinner party caricatures, that it defines our art and that it is an historicism, and that in the future this will all seem incomprehensible, because future people will not be defined by consumption. And with me, art that last centuries rather than decades is where its at, I really like feeling that I’m part of an historical moment, and I like art that has that staying power around it. So I don’t know, overall, I mean the whole thing is so au courant that I don’t know if it was awesome….but it was definitely a decent Friday night out, a lot better than watching the latest Hollywood disaster. (You see consumption entering into my thinking…) They have re-released the Exorcist you know. With 11 more minutes of footage that was “too scary to see the first time around”. Perhaps I will go see that one day in the next few weeks. Maybe when I’m in Ottawa.
Why did you paint the timeline?
I had found this website, artandculture.com, and there amongst the
other flashy graphics was a timeline. Under each artist’s name, there
was this timeline and two lines: lived and worked. I thought it was one
of the best graphics describing that information that I had ever seen.
Everything, its coloring and the font, made it very elegant.
I was also at the time reading a book called A Short History of the
Future, by W. Warren Wagar. This was a book that in a way I had
wanted to read for ten years. It had originally been published in 1989,
but I only fond it in the winter of 2000. I have always been interested
in the future as it has been depicted in the media. While growing up I
regularly became a fan of whatever TV show had some basis in the
future, which usually revolved around the year 2000.
Anyway, here was this book, presenting possible future scenarios for
the next two hundred years. I wanted to make a graphic displaying this
information, and that line on the artandculture site “showed me how” as
it were. So I drew it up one night on the computer. Aliens was on TV.
Here I was, one future scenario on TV to my left, the ones in the book
in my head, and then the Timeline on the screen in front of me. So
simple, the centuries that we are dealing with, that some of us will live
through. It’s quite possible that many of us born in the late 20th Century
will die in the 22nd Century. That’s what they keep telling us anyway.
So here was the field in which our being would play out.
And I also liked the fact that the Timeline, as a painting, had a lifespan
in terms of centuries. That it would exist for all of these years that it
depicts. That at the time of its creation, we can only fill in the details up
to the year 2000. But each block represents a decade, in which major
news stories occur. In the 90s there was the Oklahoma city bombing,
which I always think about, since it sort of came out of nowhere and
splashed itself across the mindscape of the time. And then there were
all the high school massacres. These weren’t predictable occurrences
based on trends at the time – no one could have forecast that in 1989.
But now, we say, they could happen again. Wager’s book is about
following contemporary trends to their logical conclusions. But time is
fluid, that ‘s one thing that keeps getting taught in time travel stories:
hat nothing is set in stone except the past, and even that can become
malleable through deconstruction. What fascinates me is what will we
fill those blocks with, those things that we can’t imagine happening
today.
And during that time, while we are busy creating crazy and memorable
history, that painting will be there, witnessing them, its oil paint
continually solidifying and gelling. Perhaps cracks will appear on its
surface. Its not immune to the effects of time, even though its place
within it is as a witness.
Why did you paint the postcard?
Initially it was because it looked so luscious that I wanted to put it into
paint. It cried out for the buttery texture of oil paint. But the thin is that
it too has been a witness. When I first found these postcards in the
store, I began to look for everyday images of the past. It was interesting
to see ones that had been sent by soldiers during the world wars. As
such, they were historical documents that were being ignored because
they were so common. But I grew up anticipating the future. I grew up
surrounded by old things, and knew that as I got older, their status as
historical objects rose.
The postcards are rich little semiotic fragments. The handwriting, the
imagery, they are documents of a time that was once common, but is
now gone. Yet these things survive. I have one that is really sweet…a
young girl wrote to her father and asked him to send her toothbrush.
But you know, this is a hog bristle toothbrush, and what they called
toothpaste none of us would recognize. Perhaps this girl is still alive,
she’d be in her 90s now. I’, more inclined to think that she’s dead, one
of the reasons her old postcards would end up in a used bookstore. But
the thought is that she lived out her life, gotten married and had
children – all the things that we are familiar with from award winning
novels. And here is a fragment from one of that story’s earliest chapters,
when the book was new and crisp.
To: Blake Gopnik
From: “Timothy Comeau” at Internet
Subject: please consider the following
Date: 3/22/2000 8:32 PM
Dear Mr. Gopnik,
I hope that you are not to busy so that you can take time to read my letter. I wrote the following excerpt as part of a letter to a friend of mine in BC, last night. After reading your article this morning, I thought this is something I’d like to submit for your consideration. (I am a recent NSCAD graduate and attended the presentation you gave there last spring).
I remember an article you wrote in December 1998 after you visited Art Metropole, and the theme of consumerism entering the realm of art appeared again in this morning’s article. It is for this reason that I would like your thoughts regarding this excerpt.
In the letter I basically expressed how buying certain art supplies, for computer based art, seems like an extravagance, because graphics software is so expensive:
*** “….I’ve never been competitive because basically I’m a sore loser and I decided early to avoid competition to avoid disappointment and frustration.
Unfortunately I did not realize how competitive life is in general. I’ve also been reflecting how I’ve patted myself on the back and called myself noble for certain qualities – which were no more than coping strategies. Now that I have employment and a descent wage, I feel greed and the consumerist impulse to define myself through acquisitions blossoming. Because now I have the means. To desire things when you are art-student poor is self-torture, but now…
and I don’t like this, but I wonder why should I deny myself things? How come everybody else gets to waste money on junk, and what I want is stuff that I actually feel I need, tools for my art practice.
Perhaps this questioning about buying art supplies is due to my uncertain commitment to being an artist. The art world system seems so wasteful and set for a toppling, so set for a fundamental paradigm shift, that I don’t want to begin swimming only to have to pool drained when I’m in the middle.
This feeling perhaps is a reflection of our changing times. There is an ad that I pass on my way to work that says basically, “just when i was ready to make the next move in my career, the industry has changed”.
And art seems so faddish and cultish and so much about identifying cliches and either associating yourself with them or moving away from them (either way the cliche is the center and source of your action, and we should link the word cliche with the word style) that it seems like certain death to get serious about art. I see so many of our colleagues out there and to me they’re like the Salon painters of 100 years ago. Which makes me think who is going to be the 21st Century’s Duchamp and exhibit a pisser? Does the 21st Century even have room for another art movement? Does art have a future?
I really would like to do webdesign. I’m thinking of taking a course. But the web seems faddish too. Sure, its here to stay, but right now its hot hot hot. How boring will it become? Like network television? But the remedy for boring network TV is the art video. So where are the art websites? I ask this rhetorically because such things are supposed to exist. How about this for an advant-garde site: you go to the url and your system crashes. Is that the equivalent of a pisser? Which to me raises two questions: are computer viruses the most eloquent form of computer art? And, to put a wall between you and your tool, is that what art does? Any thoughts?”
***
I would appreciate any feedback you might have.
Sincerely, Timothy Comeau
——————————————— From: bgopnik@globeandmail.ca
To: tcomeau45@hotmail.com Subject: Re: please consider the following
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 11:14:19 -0500
Thanks for your note.
Just one thought: DO we have to buy in to the basically Romantic, avant-gardist view of the artist-as-rebel. I’m afraid that artists are inevitably closer to shoemakers or other craftspeople than to revolutionaries, and that we all might want to accept that, and go back to an older, Medieval view of the artist as purveyor of sensory and intellectual pleasures — since I think that probably is the inevitable reality.
Yrs, Blake Gopnik
———————————————
Subject: No subject given
Author: “Timothy Comeau”
Date: 3/23/2000 11:30 PM
Thank you for taking the time to respond. Regarding your comments: I entirely agree. Yet it seems simple to say in the forum of internet correspondence, yet when I am interacting with my artist peers and gallery going, it doesn’t seem that I am browsing shoes. To stretch that metaphor, I inevitably end up examining the stitching. If everybody is employing a standard stitch, isn’t the craftsman who uses a new design going against the flow, and thus acting revolutionary?
I find your response intriguing in many ways. I am especially intrigued by the notion of the return to a medievalist view. I mean, there’s the talk of the collapse of the nation state and the rise of the neo-city state to replace it, and what seems to be a decline in standards of education, leaving a large, tasteless populace (do you agree, or is this a crutched form of snobish thinking which seems to be the refuge of all the Bach lovers that have to listen to Nsync being piped in from somewhere?) contrasted by a minority of educated and “cultured” elites, and the rise of footnotes (by this I mean that the act of sourcing everything reminds me of the mediaeval scholastics who always assumed that some ancient source was a reliable authority).
This is partially why I am approaching you with these thoughts, given that as art critic for a national newspaper, I respect your “authority” on these matters. Art for me isn’t a matter of a weekend’s entertainment, but is an important social indicator, a status report on the state of society. Which is why I am so frustrated that art in the public sphere, and within the community, seems dominated by the cliches of the artist founded in the 19thCentury, like you pointed out. No we don’t have to buy into the view, but in my experience many people are wearing that uniform (which Katy Seigel described as “worker drag” in an article on Mathew Barney’s work, in last summer’s Artforum) (there you go, footnotes).
What do you think of that Mike Kelly and MacCarthy show? Doesn’t that show rely on artist as rebel a little? I mean the whole shock art thing as being the presentation of an enlightened view brought forth by artists who are critics of a culture dominated by sugarcoated elements, and thus acting revolutionary? To me it seems a little infantile, in an educated sort of way. I imagine your review will be appearing soon, so I’ll wait and see.
One question that I’d love to have you answer is: Given that I imagine the typical art experience in 2000 to be spending a few hours in a gallery, or browsing through monographs of artist’s work, what would the typical art experience be in 2100, considering that you believe that artist will be by then, “purveying sensory and intellectual pleasures,” as craftsmen?
I suppose you’ll tell me that my job as an artist is to figure that out.
Anyway, I hope this hasn’t been a bother for you, I’d like to know what you think.
Sincerly Timothy Comeau.
——————————————— From: bgopnik@globeandmail.ca
To: Subject: Re: No subject given
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2000 11:38:10 -0500
Thanks for yours, Timothy. Afraid I don’t have time to digest its length and depth right now — deadlines call — but hope to take a closer read soon.
Writer’s & Company (CBC) 9 May 1999; Park Honan discussing his biography Shakespeare: A Life
Eleanor Wachtel You say the Sonnets is the extant that they are autobiographical approach his identity uneasily, as if he were taking the lid off a jar of worms. What do you mean by that? What is revealed in the Sonnets?
Park Honan You know, the Sonnets you could say are divided into two groups, the first – there are over a hundred in the first group – are about a poet who is in love with, or anyway enamoured of, a beautiful young man, probably slightly above him in rank, and when I say ‘in love with’ I don’t necessarily mean a homosexual relationship, I think this is a homo social culture, many a sonnet had been written in praise of Gwyneth Paltrow, as it were, the blue eyed and long blond haired woman, you know, and this is getting rather tiresome. Shakespeare is exploring love, and so he’s having a man praise another man, and this is a very good kind of love. We don’t know that they’re in bed together, the poet loved the young man.
In the later Sonnets, there are fewer in this set, we have a different kind of love, which is a very sensual kind, the poet now is having an affair probably with a married woman, who herself has affairs with various other people, a so called Dark Lady, and is absolutely enslaved and driven mad with this relationship. He wants to detach himself, he cannot, he goes in for more, the disease that agonizes him, he calls the lady at one moment, you know, ‘a bay where all men ride,’ she’s whorish with her cosmetics, but he’s enslaved by sex. So that these two kinds of love, in between as it were, while talking about these, or giving us pictures of these two love affairs as it were, Shakespeare portrays his poet, his speaker, and I think it’s impossible to get away from the idea that Shakespeare is drawing on himself, again and again.
Who is this, what is this poet like? Well, he’s a person who is easily hurt, who cannot get used to the betrayal of a friend, to losing a friend. It’s a person who has a good deal of self doubt about himself, who feels that he’s being inefficient and losing time, that he’s not very interesting himself. That he exists to praise. Also he’s depressed and confused as soon as he gets entangled very closely in a relationship, and I think this probably is true of Shakespeare and you could support it in other ways, that he’s an observer, he’s keeping himself remote from society outside of the actors society, he’d by and large in London although he has some outside friends, chiefly among the immigrant class in London – but basically he is an observer who loves, or feels while observing.
When he becomes too close to someone else, he begins to get terrible doubts about himself, terrible feelings of inadequacy. I think all in all we’re getting a very delicately done and complex picture of a Shakespeare in the Sonnet speaker, in both of these situations. He may be drawing on a number of aspects of his relationships, he undoubtedly has had some experiences of adultery, he seems to know a great deal about it. He’s also horrified by it.
I just must add though about the sonnets: that in the sonnet vogue, the vogue of writing sonnets in the 1590s, you know, you made up characters and made them seem real – none of the poets really are putting real persons into these poems. So you know all the characters I just mentioned, the Dark Lady, the beautiful young man, even the poet himself are conglomerates, you know, they’re made from different sources.
But I still am saying that the voice in the sonnet is so unusual that he’s giving us a picture of this not very socially confident, observing, self-doubting, almost masochistic Shakespeare.
On Monday, 11 January 1999, I fell out of my chair in Temporal Arts Class as a performance. No one believed that I did this on purpose. I repeated the act in February, and still, no one believed it was intentional, or that it was performance art.
This note was taped to the front of The Book of Marks for the Ardeches show:
The Book of Marks [In Progress]
(A poem of data)
This book could be seen as four different things:
1. As a manifestation of an insane obsession;
2. As absurd text;
3. As a book written by aliens with alien text and alien design, or
4. As a book symbolic of the human Quest for Knowledge. This book contains information in sectors, each swiggle and doodle symbolic of “what we know”. Nature is chaos – a backdrop without definition. The grid with all it’s regularity and simplicity is the product of the human mind, and is imposed upon nature in the form of classification. Through our science of classification we create a sense of order out of nature, against its blank white (a mixture of all the colours) backdrop. The book is a linear time based medium, encapsulating a beginning, a middle, and an end. Thus, every drawn in square could symbolize something we know and every blank square could symbolize something we have yet to learn.
Notice how the beginning of the book is full.
Notice how the end of the book is empty.
Notice the holes.
Notice that the book is in progress.
The phrase ‘information overload,’ has become cliché. What we are dealing with is a new type of mysticism, a technological mysticism. The diagram thus becomes a very important symbol. It is a religious aesthetic, a way of offering mystical understanding of data. The data is so abstract, yet so vitally important, so tangible and yet ephemeral that is has obtained the aura of a god. The diagram thus becomes a way to approach this god. This a result of the triumph of positivism, manifested through the scientific-method, which has led to so much information being produced that a mystical understanding, instead of becoming quaint, primitive, and obsolete is actually required in order to see how the parts become whole.
I have been interested in how parts become whole, how meaning is carried by lines in the form of text and drawing in general, and the subsequent, relationship between Meaning vs. Meaninglessness. I am enthralled by the construction of completely absurd things. This is because of a loss of faith in old god-forms, and recognition of our existence that is made meaningful through action. Our existence seems absurd, but we do exist.
Ardeches references the psychological source of art and religion. The title is meant to suggest a metaphor for this contemporary art show in a chamber which is accessed through a hall and a descent down steps, by alluding to the 30 000 year old Chauvet cave, found in 1994 in the Ardeche region of France. Its cave paintings are the world’s oldest known art. There, the painted animals represent the gods of the day. Here, the painted celebrities and diagrams represent the gods of today. The books contrast the television, both mediums of communicating information that have transformed human consciousness.
We recognize that we build structures around the experience of awe. The mind is an anti-entropy machine. It takes a chaotic environment and begins by assigning patterns, at first loose, which possibly become more fixed. The mind is limited by its patterns, that is, its beliefs. It forms an architecture Ð a worldview, based upon initial patterns, which become more and more embedded and fixed with the weight of the new structures above. If these initial patterns are unstable and are revealed to be such by the additional conceptions, then they will be replaced. A cycle occurs and a worldview, a sense of self, and a conception (an idea), is formed.
“Contrary to what we might believe, the experience of ghosts is not tied to a bygone historical period, like the landscape of Scottish manors, ect.., but on the contrary, is accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies like film, television, the telephone. These technologies inhabit, as it were, a phantom structure…When the very first perception of an image is linked to a structure of reproduction, then we are dealing with the realm of phantoms.” -Jacques Derrida: The Ghost Dance. An interview with Jacques Derrida by Mark Lewis and Andreas Payne, trans. Jean-Luc Svoboda, in: Mark Wigely: The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt, Cambridge Mass 1993, p.163.
“The walls of caves were our first screens, a reality virtual as any we’ve derived. The printed page was our first automated medium, replication guaranteed, word without end. Now the word, the printed word, is an interface of quite astonishing depth and complexity – so complex that whole years of training are required before an operator can access anything like the full bandwith of any written language. (Skilled readers, accessing text, alter their inner states at will. This is why dictators still seek to control presses.)” -William Gibson 11/01/96, Forward for Ray Gun, Out of Control, 1997.
From “Luminary” Millennium The Journal of Alex Ventoux:
“There are forces acting upon us with or without our consent. Forces sure of themselves as gravity. I thought knowing myself with the same certainty would keep me safe but surprise! As they say, what a long strange trip this has been.”
“You’ll want to know why it happened, and I can’t say. But I do know when. It was that moment when I turned my back on everything and felt peace.”
“Alaska. I was never quite honest with you why I came back here. I could never quite explain, but I’ll try now while I still can. It happened on the cruise we took through Prince Edward Sound. I was looking at the water and the mountains which were beautiful of course, but for a moment up on the deck of that ship I could swear it wasn’t just an incredibly realistic simulation. Not just the scenery, my whole life, then back home the feeling never left, all junior and senior year while I studied, ran track, filled out college applications. I returned here to find my life again. I had too.
I don’t quite understand what draws me on but that’s ok because God doesn’t move us by telling us the facts, he moves us by pains and contradictions. He’s given me a lack of understanding, not answers, but questions, an invitation to marvel. And here, for the first time, I have. I never thought it would end like this, I never thought it would end at all, but like they say, what a long strange trip this has been.”
“My leg is broken, I’ve lost alot of blood. Starting to rain and I know I’ll never make it home. Someday some kid will tell Ian, “you’re an idiot just like your brother who threw his life away, walked into the woods and DIED.” I’m asking you, as a last favor, to put a better spin on it for him. You two and Ian, you have always been real. Please konw I love you, I’m thinking of you in the end, and I’m looking at the stars.
“We are meant to be here.
We step from one peiece of holy ground to the next under stars that ask, imagine for one second you could drop in on a past life. What would you like to find yourself doing there? What would charm you, make you proud? Then the question of what to do in this life becomes so simple it’s terryfying. Just to do that thning that would charm you, that would make you say, yes, this is the real me. Do that, and you’re alive. Alex Ventoux.”
* * *
“I don’t know where to look for answers anymore.”
“I don’t read my horoscope but I think know exactly where to look: anywhere that makes you conscious of the part you play.”
Today, the art object must compete with television. The medium of television, a reflection of the film, has elevated dialogue to an art form, much more than a play. The conceptual art object developed in the 1960s, the decade when TV began to come into its own, a decade after the medium became popular and widely available, the conceptual art object which embodies the conversation.
Turning on the television is allowing the conservation into your room, you get to overhear the stream, let the flood in. The audience members become an eavesdropper, an overhearer, an angel. (Television reverses the hierarchy of the divine – the audience become like angles knowing everything. The fan is like God who knows EVERYTHING that has been published and broadcast, but the fan is ignorant of their Being).
The art object must be independent but contain ideas. They are stimulants for conversation and personal growth. The art object embodies this because you will stare for hours at the television set, but not a painting. Paintings will only become part of the décor. People are watching TV, ignoring their art work.
Found within the opening pages of the February 1998 WorkbookThe beginnings of my manifesto, what I am doing, what my themes are.I. Doodles
You could say it began with Jerusalem, the drawing I did in 1994 and exhibited at Saint Mary’s. I could say that I was subconsciously aware of the stick figure as being a legitimate art technique, but being subconscious, it was bellow the surface. I was interested in learning to draw like Picasso – I didn’t pursue stick figures then.
I purchased Radiohead’s The Bends in October of that year. It had been released the previous spring. It contained stick figure scrawls of Stanley Donwood and Thom York. I looked with interest at first, but saw only “doodles” and left it. I did not then see it as art.
In December 1996 I was channel surfing and stopped briefly at the New Music, when they were interviewing k.d. lang. She picked up Basquiat Drawings (1990) and said how much she liked a particular drawing, ‘Plaid Plaid Plaid’ and commented that this explained lyrics to her. A few weeks later Dad surprised me by bringing this book home, which he found for $3.99.
This book inspired me as set me trying to incorporate text and imagery. That was in January 1997.
In June 1997, Radiohead released Ok Computer. Again there was the drawings of Stanley Donwood. I admired the design but again, thought little of it.
Then that September, I was walking through the halls of NSCAD when some signage drawn up by Tullis Rose caught my eye. My immediate thought was of OK Computer. Here were the sketches! Here was the same concept. This made me think that there was something more to these mere doodles.
Later, the same month, Randy Laybourne exhibited a collection of his drawings. Some where done spontaneously and shared that doodle quality.
In November, early November, this all coalesced and I collected Tullis’ ads where I could still find them. I copied out the drawings from the Radiohead CD booklets. Jessica Jones, who was a fellow student in Interim Painting, left some sketches laying around, on black paper done with chalk. The stick figures – I asked her for it but she wouldn’t part with them.
I sat out to understand the doodle. I began drawing doodles. And my tag in October which began as simple graffiti, but struck me for being so self-contained. (Five year old draw like that – every man is an artist -who drew this at age 5? Because I was drawing it at age 22).
Melinda gave us an assignment, to paint outdoors. She gave us a list of artists we might want to refer too. Basqiuat came up. I asked he why he was on the list. She said because he was a good urban artist, how he had responded to his city.
I bought two drawings from Randy. I doodled like crazy, trying to understand, and to find that which I liked in other’s in my own. Now, I see connections between Basquiat and Donwood, the other night finally recognizing the symbol from Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook. Basquiat used some symbols from this book and so did Donwood.
Every man an artist – Life as art as being an organizer, a way of creating order in Postmodern fragmentation and disorder.
The importance of influencing others since we are all accumulations.
The appeal of the doodle is represented in the primacy nature of it – it’s simplicity, spontaneity, and what the Beats codified as “first thought best thought” . My own experience has show me that first thought best thought creates art that is inspired and caries that mark. There is no fear of the contrived. However, not all first thoughts are golden, and first thoughts often reside amongst the cultural cliches. First thought with awareness then.
And of course, the fact that anybody can do it.
II. Everyone an artist
Apparently it was Joseph Beuys who came up with that phrasing. But the idea isn’t that new or original. In 1966’s Creative Writer, a series of talks given on CBC’s radio program Ideas, the Canadian poet Earl Birney said:
“Some psychologists say, and I agree with them, that creativity is the sense of the drive to find new things, explore, discover, is basic to the human animal. I think all children who aren’t born into absolute idiocy are artistically creative. With a favorable kind of environment and education, most of them, I suspect, grow up retaining some creative powers as men and women. But there’s a strong urge to conform, to become dependent on others, to accept instruction, guidance, doctrine, to stop really thinking, or even feeling, for one’s self. Artists are people who resist this conforming pressure, at least with part of their energies.”
This is what Joseph Beuys refereed to – this basic factor is creativity, that we all create constantly. Beuys put it this way:Thinking Forms – how we mould our thoughts or Spoken Forms – how we shape our thoughts into words or Social Sculpture – how we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an Artist. Thorsten Scheer, on the website http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~schoenfe/ep/ep963.html expands on this.
“Beuys’ plastic theory is not about plastic/sculpture in the traditional sense. It’s about form. In Beuys’ opinion, the central question of art is the question for the most suitable form. This means that _everything_ is a question of art, because _everything_ has to have a certain form: politics, communication, TV sets, words, e-mails… All you can imagine. But the question for the most suitable form does usually not occur until one has to work with real material. However, at first, there is a thought, an idea. The process to create a sculpture therefore emerges right the moment you get an idea. Ideas have to be shaped, constructed, put into form, just like material works. […] Living on this planet, in a society, _everything_ you do, every idea you have, all the stuff you create, every conversation you have (sending mail to Athena, too) shifts the state of the environment, creates form – therefore is sculpture..! You are responsible – no way out.
So take your life as a work of art with regard to society – the Social Sculpture.” This idea, that we are constantly responsible for everything we do, and that all acts are creative and thus artistic acts, is the beginning of my thoughts on art as an almost religious experience, capable of providing unity to life.
Everyone an artist though – I do not want to see every citizen of the world have a one man show. I believe that every human is a creative creature, as Earle Birney wrote. However, we are not all artists. Some of us are businessmen. Some of us are tradesmen. We are all born with different talents and interests. Artists are born. If you feel yourself to be athlete, then you are. This basic fact that we are all born different assures us that artists will have a place and that their gifts have a place. However, the nature of art changes and the nature of the artist changes. The nature of art must change and is changing.
In this new world I do not know what place the gallery has. This gallery, is a graveyard of ideas, a museum of trends, a sanctuary for ivory tower pansies.
III. Art Itself
Art itself – what is art? Art is the product of the artist. It is the by-product of the creative act. The creative act is an exploration, an attempt to understand. The creative act in the artist arises out of the need to understand something. Some idea ignites curiosity, desire, obsession. You want to wrap your brain around something. To od this, you reach out, explore a medium. Thought goes from ephemeral interior winds to physical manipulations of materials. The art object thus becomes a record of physic energies – a record and report by the artist. It is a hard copy of thought not in the usual word form, but in the form of shapes.
So this is what art is. Art is also that which enriches your experience, it is life affirming, it is beautiful. Much historical thought has gone into trying to define two things – God and Art. What is hard to define in both perhaps is the concept of beauty. It is beauty which is so subjective and which confuses the idea of what art is. Art as the totality of experience. The role of the artist is to affirm life. To show people what they are capable of.
A Comparison Between the Russian Revolution and the Irish Revolution
Name: Timothy Comeau
Course: History 431
Date Due: 22 May 1992
Date Submitted: 22 May 1992
Instructor: Paul-Emile Comeau
80
A Comparison of the Irish Revolution of 1798
and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
By Timothy C. Comeau
12-21 May 1992
In this comparison, I shall first write a summary of both revolutions, in two diferent parts and at the end, in the third and final part, I shall compare the two.
———————
Part I The Irish Revolution
The revolution which occurred in the year 1798 was the result of a deep sense of inferiority and resentment brought on by centuries of abuse by the English. Examples of this abuse are found in the tithes Catholic Irish were forced to pay to support the Protestant church which they regarded as heathen and despised, and the “Godly Slaughter” by Cromwell in 1649.
The uprising can be traced back to the formation of the volunteer militia, which was created to defend Ireland during the American Revolution. However, the militia turned to address their complaints. In turn, the volunteer army was successfully bribed with concessions to shut them up.
The government attempted to ease the grievances of the people with the constitution of 1782, which gave the appearance of freedom. However, the feelings of hurt felt by the Irish people were not healed by the constitution, and they continued to resent the British government. They saw the ministers in the newly formed Irish Protestant Parliament as agents of their oppressors.
Inspired by the American and French Revolutions, the Irish prepared for violent action.
The Irish revolutionaries, calling themselves the United Irishman, and lead by the Protestant idealist Theobald Wolfe Tone, got a promise of French intervention to support an internal rising.
A central organizing body was set up in Dublin, and called itself the Supreme Executive. Throughout 1796 and 1797, the Supreme Executive made plans to contain the British garrison and control all the major communication channels.
All this activity was made forfeit by the simple fact that the British government had an intricate network of spies infiltrated in the Supreme Executive.
The government acted on their knowledge on 11 March 1798 witha sting operation, securing the Directory for the Province of Leinster, and arresting most of the men involved in the Supreme Executive.
The government did not end there. On 30 March 1798 they declared martial law, and began a relentless terror campaign which lasted through April and May, and which yielded large quantities of weapons.
The revolutionary movement suffered with the government crackdown, but also strengthened the outrage. The Irish began to feel they had little to lose by an open revolt.
The outburst finally came on 24 May 1798. The British military heads were not afraid of the Irish., but looked upon them with contempt, due to their previous mayhem, which mostly required no military skill. However, they were shocked to learn that they were outnumbered, and that the Irish peasants would attack with desperate courage with apathy to losses.
The British forces soon discovered that when they did win a battle, the rebels would withdraw and violence would erupt somewhere else. The British strategy was to engage each unit of the United Irishmen in battle and pray for victory. But this required time. And time was one thing not on the side of the English forces.
Captured documents indicated that France was planning an invasion. It was clear: if the revolt could not be quelled by the time the French arrived, Ireland would be lost.
By this time, the rebels had taken the town of Wexford and proclaimed a republic based on the French model. They talked of “We the people associated and united for the purpose of procuring our just rights…”, though it was not clear, and none knew how, these rights were to be achieved.
The revolution was rotting away into provincialism, glued together more by fear of the English then by common goals of revolution.
It was at this time that a new British Viceroy was appointed. His named was Sir William Cornwallis (or Yorktown fame), and his prime objectives were to conserve forces for the French rather than kill them off fighting English peasants. Thus his first task was to capitalize on the divisions among the rebels by allowing the soldiers to surrender with retaliation.
Finally in August 1798, Lord Cornwallis offered general amnesty to the citizens of Ireland, and the revolt, which had been on the decline, finally petered out like the proverbial flame in the wind.
The government believed the revolt was over. It had lasted 3 months and left 25,000 dead (including 2000 loyal to crown Protestants and Catholics). Evidence of the scale confiscated: 48,000 muskets, 70,000 pikes, and 22 canons.
Just as peace was being restored, the French arrived. They landed on 23 August 1798 at Killala in Mayo County. There were 1000 of them, with 7000 more to come. Wolfe Tone arrived with General Hubert, and Napper Tandy, then other Irish leader with the French forces, was to come with the relief forces. Over 7000 Irish rose to support the invasion, and the government in London feared the revolt would be reborn.
But the French were too late. Humbert, without the relief force he had expected, faced 5000 British soldiers with only 850 men at Ballinamuck. He fought for half an hour and then surrendered.
The few remaining rebels near Killala were soon finished off.
The revolt was over, and the aftermath saw hangings, deportations to Australia, and general repression.
———————
Part II The Russian Revolution
The Russian revolution began with the inauguration of Czar Nicholas II in 1894. “Nicholas was as determined to be an autocrat as his father. No man, however, was less fitted for the role. Though he was handsome and charming, he lacked completely the leadership qualities of his father.” 1That coupled with a series of bad harvests in the 1890’s which caused starvation, caused the growth of the revolutionary bacteria.
With the rise of industrialism, discontent and feelings of negativity grew among the city workers and middle class. The discontent fueled the birth of three political organizations, each intent on overthrowing the czarist government.
These were:
(1) THE LIBERAL CONSTITUTIONALISTS, who wanted to replace the czar with a western type government;
(2) THE SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES, who tried to promote a peasant revolution;
(3) THE MARXISTS, who followed the teachings of Karl Marx.
The last party, the Marxists, became the most important of the three. In 1898, they established the Russian Social Democratic Party, which split in 1903 into two sects – the Bolsheviks and the Menesheviks. The leader of the Bolsheviks later became very important. His name was Vladimir I. Ulyanov, and he called himself Lenin.
In 1899, an economic recession crippled the country. The already mounting discontent began to grow exponentially. As a result, student protests, peasant revolts, and worker strikes increased. When the Russo-Japanese war broke out, the discontent and unrest only grew further.
The final blow came when World War I broke out. All was detoured to meet the needs of the soldiers. Trains no longer served the common folk. Food, fuel and housing shortages were prevalent.
The soldiers eventually grew disloyal due to their knowledge that they would be going to the front to face an almost certain death.
By the end of 1916, the majority of the Russian educated opposed Czar Nicholas II. Most had good reason. Rasputin was the unofficial ruler, and he was ruining the country.
Grigori Y. Rasputin was a monk that charmed Nicholas II’s wife. Through her, he influenced the czar’s decisions, so that he would end up appointing incompetent people to important government posts. The result was an inefficient government, full of corrupt ministers, and a government in which the people had no confidence. Finally, Rasputin was assassinated by wealthy nobles, but by that time it was too late.
In March 1917, the revolution began. Riots and strikes over bread shortages grew more violent in Petrograd. Soldiers were called in but instead turned to the Duma for aid. Nicholas II ordered the Duma to dissolve, but parliament ignored the command. Nicholas lost all political support and gave up the throne on 15 March. The royal family was imprisoned and assassinated by the Bolsheviks in July 1918.
In the turmoil after the March revolt, a new soviet of Workers and Soldiers deputies was established in Petrograd. Many similar soviets were set up throughout Russia.
In April, Lenin ordered “all powers to the soviets”, but the soviets were unwilling to take over the government.
Then in July, armed workers and soldiers attempted to seize power in Petrograd, but failed in their objectives. Lenin, in the aftermath, fled to Finland, while his followers either escaped as he had, or were jailed. Later that month, Alexander F. Kerensky, a socialist, became premier.
The next 3 months passed without incident, although in those three months (August, September, October), many powerful Russians grew to blame Kerensky for failures in the war, and opposed his socialist views. General Lavr Kornilov, army commander-in-chief, made plans to seize power.
At the same time Kornilov was making plans for his coup-d’etat, Kerensky freed the jailed Bolsheviks, and let them arm the Petrograd workers against Kornilov.
When the General advanced on Petrograd in September, it did not last long. His group broke up before it reached the capital.
But the Bolsheviks were free, and the workers had arms, and when the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd soviet later that month, Lenin returned from Finland, and convinced his party that they should attempt to seize power.
It all began on 7 November. The armed workers finally revolted, and took over important points in Petrograd, including the Winter Palace, headquarters of the provisional government, and arrested the ministers.
By 15 November, the Bolsheviks also controlled Moscow. The Bolsheviks, headed by Lenin, formed a new Russian government. They spread Bolshevik rule through the local soviets.
For a little while at least, Lenin allowed the peasants to seize farmland for themselves, and let workers control the factories and play roles in the local soviets.
However, it was a false freedom, and the government soon tightened control, and confiscated most, if not all, of the peasant’s land, and their products. But it did not end there. The Bolshevik government took over industries and set up control management bureaus to control them.
Cheka, a secret police organization, was established, Bolshevik control was absolute.
Once this take-over had taken place, Russia withdrew from World War I, and began peace talks with Germany.
In 1918, the Bolsheviks moved the Russian capital back to Moscow, and changed their name to the Russia Communist party. (This name was later changed to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).
Finally, the Bolsheviks organized the Red Army, taking the name from the color of their flag.
The Red Army was first used in 1918, when civil war broke out between the communists and the anti-communists. The communists had large support from the peasants who felt they would lose their government-lent lands to their old landlords (and thus re-become serfs) if the anti-communists won. In the end, the anti-communists lost, due to their poor organization.
At the end of the civil war, the Red Army reconquered Georgia, Ukraine, eastern Armenia, and put down nationalistic independence movements in Byelorussia and Central Asia.
In 1920, the Red Army was again put to the test. “Poland invaded Ukraine in an attempt to expel the communists. The Red Army drove the invaders out and nearly reached Warsaw, Poland’s capital. But the Polish troops, with help from France, finally defeated the Red Army. A treaty signed in 1921 gave Poland the western parts of Byelorussia and the Ukraine.” 2
In the end of 1922, a very important event took place. This was the formation of USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). In 1922, there were only 3 republics, but over the next 18 years, many other republics joined, so that in the end, there were a total of 15.
Also in 1922, the father of the new socialist state, Vladimir Lenin, fell seriously ill and eventually died in 1924.
In the two years prior to his death, an earnest power struggle developed amount the members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee.
In truth, Leon Trotsky ranked after Lenin. He ruled in his absence, but Joseph Stalin was advancing in the ranks.
Joseph Stalin had become General Secretary of the party in 1922, and was chosen as a partner in the opposition of Trotsky by Lev Kamenev and Grigori Zinovev. These three and Trotsky all had different views to where socialism should go:
(1) Trotsky and his followers believed in promoting a socialist world revolution;
(2) A group led by Nicholas Bukharin believed in a socialist world revolution, but also though the USSR should continue with Lenin’s policy of watered down communism, due to the fact Bukharin did not believe some countries were ready for socialism;
(3) Stalin and his followers believed that soviet socialism could succeed without a planetary revolution.
Stalin would eventually go on to defeat his opponents one by one. When Trotsky lost power in 1925, Stalin was already one step closer to heading the communist party. Indeed, at the 15th Communist Party Congress, in December 1927, Stalin won a sweeping victory.
In 1929, Stalin removed Bukharin, by having him sign a bill which Stalin ordered, in which Bukharin admitted Stalin’s views were correct, and this his were wrong. This action placed Stalin as supreme head of the government, or in other words the dictator of the USSR.
It is at this point that the Russian Revolution is considered to have ended.
Part III. Comparison
Comparison means showing what is similar about different thing, or what is different about the said things.
Well, one similarity between the Russian Revolution and the Irish Revolution was that both were preceded by deep senses of grief and discontentment.
Also, another thing which is similar, is that both revolutions were planned. In Ireland, it was the Supreme Executive, and in Russia, it was the Bolsheviks. However, unlike the Supreme Executive, the Bolsheviks were not infiltrated with spies.
Another similarity: when the Irish rebels took the town of Wexford, they proclaimed a republic. When the Bolsheviks too Petrograd and Moscow, they set up their new government.
The Irish Revolution was not truly a revolution, but was closer to a peasant revolt. The Russian Revolution was a true revolution. The Bolsheviks managed to overthrow the czar and establish a new governmental system. This brings about a difference: where the Irish revolt failed to overthrow the government, the Bolsheviks succeeded.
———————
Thus ends this report.
Footnotes:
1. See Ira Peck, The Russian Revolution (Scholastic Book Services; 1967) p.32-33 [back]
2. See The World Book Encyclopedia, 1989ed, sv “USSR”, p54-55 [back]
Bibliography
Books:
Peck, Ira. The Russian Revolution, Richmond Hill, Ontario, Scholastic Book Services, 1967.
Wheatcroft, Andrew. The World Atlas of Revolutions London, Hamish Hamilton, 1983.
Reference:
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1968 Edition, s.v. “Cornwallis, Sir William”.
The World Book Encyclopedia, 1989 Edition, s.v. “USSR”/
The National Geographic Index 1947-1983, Washington D.C., National Geographic Soceity, 1984.
Periodicals:
Judge, Joseph. “The Travail of Ireland.” National Geographic, Vol. 159, No. 4 (April 1981) pp. 432-441. Included: “Ireland and Northern Ireland: A Visitor’s Guide; Historic Ireland” (Pre-Norman, Medieval, Modern), double sided supplement.
The Age of Enlightenment
a summary
by Timothy Comeau
November 18th 1991
The Age of Enlightenment was the period between the 17th and 18th centuries when man’s thoughts became free of many of the chains which had enslaved them for centuries.
Our modern day life began in this age. Today, we all live lives based on technology, the resulting product of science.
The importance of the Age of Enlightenment is that is was in this era that technology was born. The scientific ideas produces during the scientific revolution were for the first time applied to everyday life.
Benjamin Franklin experimented with electricity in the now famous kite experiment, and invented the lightning conductor in 1752 to save homes from the threat of lightning. The Montgolfier brothers went up in the first hot air balloon in 1783. Farmers produced better crops due to the new knowledge, and for the first time, religion faded as never before.
As these “scientific methods” became applied to everyday situations man began to resin that since man’s intellect could change farming and industry so much for the better, why could it not work for economy and religion. Never before has the human population of Europe thought about and questioned such things.
So, religion faded into two major divisions. Some went into a belief that there was no need for a “father-figure” God, to watch over his immature and evil children who wished to destroy each other, that man was a naturally good creature and despite faults, was perfectible. Others renounced God entirely and became atheists. And then there were the deists, who believed that God had created the universe and left it to run its own course. The Age of Enlightenment was a period in which people had “never argued so much about religion and practiced it so little”.
In England, John Locke decreed that every individual had rights. “What Locke had done was to declare that just as surely as Newton’s law of gravity governed the physical universe, so there existed ‘natural rights’ and laws that ruled society.” (page 107).
The Age of Enlightenment was spawned by the unquenched thirst for knowledge. This thirst presented itself in the great demand for reading material across Europe.
As French replaced Latin as the language of education, the views of the philosophes, a group of radical thinkers who exposed all that was outdated and unjust in 18th century society, were made accessible to all. Their enlightened ideas were soon being quoted in the drawing rooms of Paris and the Russian court in St. Petersburg.
The spread of knowledge was greatly helped by the publication of the Encylopedie, a collection of articles summarizing the new enlightened ideas, complied by Denis Diderot between 1751 and 1772.
Among the authors of the many articles in the Encyclopedie were Montesquieu, who believed in division between powers and not absolute monarchs, Voltaire who wished for white bread on the table and clean clothes for the peasants as was such in England, religious tolerance (although he himself was intolerant of Orthodox Christianity), and “enlightened despotism”, as he feared democracy, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who longed for all men to be equal and classless. He wrote The Social Contract, which opens with this sentence: “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau believed that man was a natural creature and was rendered un-natural by evil and corrupt governments.
The Age of Enlightenment did not only revolutionize politics, and create technology, it also manifested itself in economics.
Groups of men called physiocrats, questions the general economic belief of the 18th century, which was mercantilism. They believed that the economy was controlled by natural laws like just about everything else. They wished to free trade and lower the high tariffs and antiquated trading policies. It was at this time that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, stating the belief in the law of supply and demand. He believed that if one country grew rich in trade, somewhere another grew poor.
The enlightened despotism of Voltaire was experimented in many different European countries, beginning after 1740. Among these were Prussia, Austria, and Russia.
In Prussia, Frederick II the Great, was the avatar of Voltaire’s ideal monarch. Frederick gave his country prosperity through various construction contracts and developing industries. He abolished torture as a means of obtaining information, and he had plans for giving children, whether rich or poor, an education, and he enforced religious toleration.
Although he had many good qualities, he would not abandon social classes, and he gave unlimited power over the peasants to the nobles. And he refused to abolish serfdom.
In Austria, Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph II, accepted the idea of enlightened despotism, and reformed the country. He abolished serfdom, and gave equal taxation to all, granted freedom of the press, and toleration for most religions.
Joseph placed many other radical reforms, including giving the state power over the church. He angered many with such drastic and enlightened reforms. Indeed, he was too advanced for his time.
In Russia, Catherine the Great “aspired to be a enlightened monarch, at least during the earlier part of her reign” (page 120-121). She put in place significant reforms, improving the government, and codifying the laws. She limited the use of torture by the courts, and introduced a greater degree of religious toleration. Catherine also founded many schools, upgraded hospital conditions, and introduced vaccination.
None of Catherine’s reforms were as great as those of Joseph II, for she still felt the need to kiss up to certain army officers and aristocrats who had helped her rise to the throne.
However, after a civil uprising in 1773, Catherine dropped the charade of being an “enlightened” despot. She began to yield a sword of repression, backed by the aristocrats and army she had kissed up to all these years.
In return for their support, she allowed the great aristocratic landowners unlimited power over their serfs, and Catherine’s reign became renown not for enlightenment, but for the strengthening of serfdom throughout Russia.
So this was the summary of the Age of Enlightenment. We now see how the foundation stone toward the education and liberation of the peoples of the world was laid during this era, and also how it was knocked down many times by those not willing to let go of the mediaeval past.
En ce moment tu est en train de particpier l’adventure d’un nouveau Robinson Crusoe. Monsieur a trouve ton message, sur la sable de la plage, que tu as envoye avec l’illusion que quelqu’un terrestiaire le trouve et s’iuterese pour l’emisaire.
De Nouvelle-Ecosse le mesage a parcouru beaucoup de km. jusqu’a son arive au Nord de l’Espagne, notre pays, dans la Principaute des Asturies, concretment a une petit localite avec plage qui s’appelle CARAVIA dans laquelle va se promener presque tous les jours et it fait le parcouru de tout la plage. C’est comme ca qu’il la trouve.
Nous t’envoyous lacarte d’Europe avec la situation ou la mer a jette ton message a en asturien que te repond avec cette lettre.
Avec beaucoup d’imagination nous pouvons supposer les grands adventures de ce petit navir si fragile et que avec volaite a fait realite ton desire de communication universel.
La meme chose font d’autre enfants, comme toi, futures hommes, qu’au pourait lui habitent avec des familles eu autres pays, loin de ses parents et de sa patrie mais avec l’espoir d’arriver a bou point meme que ta bouteille.
La personne qui t’ecrit ce lettre n’est pas la memeb qui a trouve ton mesage.
[p.2]
c’est une ami de cette famille qui peu se debrouilles un peu avec le francais et que eu en ce moment, cet annee a un fils en train d’etudier a l’Ecole de Wolf Point et demeure avec Mr. et Mm. Owens 1001 – 3rd Avenue North, 59201 Montana, USA. Il s’appelle Pelayo Palacio Banquo et il a 16 ans. Il parle perfectement le francais, l’anglais et aussi d’allemand et l’espangnol et il serait tres heureux si vous envoye un message. Son telephone c’est 406-65-32244.
La date de ta communication c’est le 17 Avril 1986 et Mr. l’a recu le 28 Fevrier 1988, deux annees pour faire Canada-Espagne. Comme tu peux voir ce moyen est beaucoup plus vite au XX siecle que l’employe par Christophe Colom au XV siecle.
Ecrivez-vous, s’il vous plait. Mr. Maximino Quiros attend ta letter avec impatience. c/ Alfredo Barral, 12-3 – 33180 Norena-Asturias Espana
Avec votres meilleurs veux d’amitie.
Mr R Vila
Maria R.V. Palacio
Constitucion-1
33180 Norena
Principado Asturias
Espana
7 avril 1986
Mon nom est Timothy Comeau.
Je suis en cinquieme anne a l’ecole Jean-Marie
Gay, au comte Digby en Nouvelle-Ecosse (BOW
2Z0) Canada.
Come project pour la semaine d’ Education nous
asayon de faire de nouvelles connaissance a
travers la mer.
Ou et quand as-ti trouve cette lettre? Qui est tu?
Box 68 Saulnierville
Digby Conty Ton nouvelle [ami]
Timothy Comeau
[Translation]
Principado de Asturias, 29 February 1988
Spain.
Dear friend Timothy Comeau:
At this moment you in the process of participating in the adventure of new Robinson Crusoe. Mister found your message, on the sand of the beach, which you sent with the illusion that someone terrestrial finds it and would be interested in its emissary.
From Nova Scotia the message traversed many km until its arrival in the North of Spain, our country, in Principality of Asturias, more exactly in a small locality with a beach called CARAVIA where almost everyday we walk the beach. It is this way that he found it.
We are sending you the map of Europe with the location where the sea threw your message and an Asturian responds with this letter.
With much imagination we can suppose the grand adventures of this little vessel, so fragile and which brought to a reality your desire for universal communication.
The same as other children, like you, future men, who could live with families in other countries, a long way from parents and country, but with the hope of arriving at the same end as your bottle.
The person who writes you now is not the same as who found the message.
[p.2]
It is a friend of the family with a knowledge of a little French and who, at this moment this year, has a son studying at the Wolf Point school and who is living with Mr and Mrs. Owens 1001 – 3rd Avenue North, 59201 Montana USA. He is named Pelayo Palacio Banquo and he is 16. He speaks perfectly French, English, and also German and Spanish, and he would be very happy if you sent him a message. His phone number is 506-65-32344.
The date of your communication is 17 April 1986 and Mr. received it the 28th of February 1988, two years to travel from Canada to Spain. As you can see, this method is much more faster in the 20th Century than that employed by Christopher Columbus in the 15th Century.
Write, please. Mr. Maximino Quiros waits for your letter with impatience. c/o Alfredo Barral, 12-3 – 33180 Norena-Asturias, Spain.
With our warmest wishes,
Mr R Villa
[Translation]
April 7, 1986
My name is Timothy Comeau.
I am in 5th Grade at Jean-Marie Gay School, in the county of Digby in Nova Scotia (BOW 2Z0) Canada. As a project for Education Week we are trying to meet new people through the sea. Where and when have you found this letter? Who are you?
Box 68 Saulnierville
Digby Conty Your new friend,
Timothy Comeau
