Maneki Neko -- Japanese "lucky cats," equally well-known to Bruce Sterling devotees and desperate local retailers.
- posted by cjb @ 11:50 PM

 
There's a Germaine Koh review over at the Straight this week, but you won't find it posted here until I can download the text and carry out some kind of wall-to-wall rewrite.

- posted by cjb @ 10:39 PM

 

Mr. Daniel Bejar, a.k.a. Destroyer, possessor of a falsetto warble, tuner of fuzzy warm-toned guitars, and builder of synthesizer walls. In high repeat most days at the shop.

"I would never write something down just to confess it. Usually it's a pretty conscious effort to create something of aesthetic value. You know what I mean? I mean, my approach to language is not super conscious in that I sit down and have some over-arching idea that the language has to fit into. It's actually really instinctual. But the aesthetic is one of using language that just works. You write it down, and somehow it's just working for you. It's not what the words mean, but what they do, I guess. How the phrasing interacts with melody, and how meaning can change once you throw that in there. That being said, you could probably comb through my lyrics and find a handful of threads that would piece it all together."
- posted by cjb @ 10:34 PM

 
Yet another art review -- from this week's Terminal City

Difficult "Beauty"
Christopher Williams' daunting complexities
by Christopher Brayshaw

Christopher Williams
For Example: Dix-Huit Leçons sur la Société Industrielle
Contemporary Art Gallery, 555 Nelson
To March 6

Los Angeles-based artist Christopher Williams doesn't identify himself as a photographer, though almost all of his works are photographs, images mostly made by assistants or commercial photographers. "Sometimes I press the shutter release, just as a joke," he says in an interview with artist/curator John Miller. While many of the photographs in Williams' current exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery are undeniably beautiful—specifically, three "still life" studies of a Kiev 88, a Russian medium format camera (and unabashed Hasselblad knock-off), and the industrial study Lodz—Williams' practice puts the word beauty into quotation marks, thereby inspiring a certain uneasiness in the critic who wants to use it in a discussion of Williams' pictures.

Indeed, there is a sense of rigor to this exhibition that begins with the plastic display case across from the gallery attendant's desk, in which scripts of a performance, receipts, letters, memos from David Zwirner Gallery (Williams' New York dealer) and so forth are gathered and exhibited without any kind of interpretive apparatus, or "help" for the audience.

Williams has been fortunate enough to generate a substantial and generous body of criticism on his work, including several essays by the Los Angeles-based art historian Thomas Crow and Vancouver's Claudia Beck. So I came to Williams' exhibition intellectually forearmed, as it were, and yet I still found myself walking from picture to picture, shaking my head and feeling somehow inadequate, while simultaneously suspecting that that sense of inadequacy, of not getting it, was an important aspect of the exhibition, one that Williams hopes to generate.

A group of photographs typically represents many localized elaborations of a larger theme. In this respect, most photographic series are like poems in which similar themes or symbols are repeated from line to line. Williams’ photographs, however, seem at first to have nothing in common. They are mostly still lifes or studies (of a modernist apartment block, all grey concrete; three views of the Kiev 88; a prefabricated German mailing box which I at first mistook for a box of Kodak photo paper; ears of corn stacked in neat little pile; a Los Angeles dance performance by three Balinese dancers; a pencil diagram on the back of an index card, etc.) They are not like poems, in which meanings spark off in a dozen different directions, but like prose, in which whatever significance an individual word might have is always subordinated to the meaning of the sentence. A Williams series is like an electrical wire that passes a current along. It would be a mistake to ask what the wire "means." Similarly, it is a mistake to ask the meaning of individual pictures, at least at first.

The photographs are made with outmoded techniques. The specific techniques—dye transfer (the Kiev camera, the corn) and platinum prints (Balinese dancers) will be obvious to anyone who has spent time studying or handling photographs. Platinum printing is associated with a fine tonal range, and, consequently, with artisanal or craft techniques, and dye transfer is associated with a certain richness of color (for example, William Eggleston's groundbreaking color works, among the first color photographs to be exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art.)

Kodak no longer produces the film or chemicals the dye transfer process requires, and platinum printing is mainly used today by technically minded amateurs or artists interested in emphasizing characteristics of an image's printing or toning. Both processes have become part of Benjamin's "just passed." Belatedness clings to them like a weak shadow. This belatedness shares parallels with other Williams subjects—the notoriously cranky Kiev; Olivetti's good-looking but practically useless Valentine typewriter; Braun's Snow White's Coffin record player: objects that look good, but are functionally flawed.

By photographing these objects and juxtaposing them, Williams has created an enormous archive of cultural and historical cross-references, an archive of industrial culture's transformation, under modernism, from a "handmade" to a "machine made" aesthetic. The technical processes his photographs are made with imply handmade origins, but Williams' disinterest in any overt signs of authorship or of little touches or flourishes of expression (as shown by his deadpan presentation of objects under neutral lighting, or the farming of the actual work of making the pictures out to commercial photographers or technical assistants) pit his images' form and content against each other in a kind of low ontological comedy or farce.

Williams' works reward detailed thinking, but are hard to love. I admire the rigor of his approach, and the thoughtful criticism his practice regularly attracts, but I don't want to meet his students or, God forbid, any locals who take his work as authorization to create huge baggy photo-archives dedicated to collapsing industrial modernism from within. Williams' most memorable photographs (the Kiev; the pile of corn; the much-reproduced images of the Valentine typewriter) work precisely because of his ability to perceive cultural and historical complexities within apparently artless industrial artefacts. Though his photographs often appear neutral and pedestrian, they in fact are anything but.

- posted by cjb @ 2:24 PM

 

Wayne White, The You Just Don't Get It and You Never Will Look (2004, acrylic on photolithograph)
- posted by cjb @ 11:28 AM

 
Pike Place Bakery -- home of the world's largest maple bars, and the "blueberry buttermilk bar," consumption of which probably rendered all of yesterday's mountain climbing totally irrelevant.

- posted by cjb @ 10:38 PM

 
Disturbing Auctions -- straight from the murky depths of North America's pop-cultural psyche to you! (Courtesy WG Blog)

- posted by cjb @ 10:34 PM

 
100K Club -- cjb & Team Cat

High grey clouds and a little sun creeping through in the morning. Across Burrard Inlet on the Seabus, and by bus to Lynn Valley Mall (140m), then up Mountain Highway, which begins deceptively flatly from the 4-way intersection at the lights, then cranks up the incline (15%+) somewhere around Dempsey Road. Around the locked gate at the beginning of the old service road, and on up the Grouse Mountain Highway, a switchbacking dirt road that runs up Mount Fromme's southern slopes, contours into a pass between Fromme and Grouse, and finally scales Grouse's eastern flanks. Lots of Smithsonian erosion, the ditches full, and various sunken areas where last week's rains took out great chunks of roadbed, depositing them fifty or sixty feet away in lumpy, wood-and-gravel-conglomerate piles. Warm, more like May than January. Salmonberry bushes starting to push little bits of green bud out into the unseasonally moist air.

Dogleg up some nameless mountain bike trail, little cascades of water over polished teak-colored roots.

Water and nuts and a five minute break across from the gravel pit on the upper Grouse Mountain Highway. "I spy, with my shiny black eyes, something that looks like...money," says Rose T. Cat, glad to be sprung from the pack's top pocket. It's just a leaf, says jaded cjb. And then, reflecting: Damned if that leaf doesn't look like a soaking wet $5 bill half-in, half-out of the snow. Sho' nuff! In this way, Team Cat scores a free Skyride download.

Around the head of Mosquito Creek, floundering through knee-deep snow. Up the ploughed road on the Grouse Mountain side of the creek, under the chairlifts. That funny spinning noise the wheels in the towers make, like my Kitsilano grandma's clothesline singing in and out again.

The city spread out below.

Fog on the Fraser.

Sunset over Vancouver Island, grey sky, the last light leaking through.

Across the muddy Cut, lots of Japanese snowboarders and skiiers in evidence on the patchy slope.

Up the BCMC trail to the lodge (1111m), past two totally unconcerned mule deer cropping at the grass along the Cut's western edge.

Coffee in the lodge, a bustle of activity after the silent green forest.

Skyride down at twilight, the light running out of the day above Capilano Lake. Dark shadows under the trees, their green boughs passing silently by under the gondola, almost but not quite close enough to touch.

Traffic on Nancy Greene Way with its lights on.

Day's total, 971m.

Bellingham -- Mount Vernon -- Everett -- Seattle tomorrow. Back Thursday!

- posted by cjb @ 9:58 PM

 

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday off to go tangle with the local mountains and Michelina. Go Team Cat! (photo credit: Lynn Peak trail, December, by clubtread.com regular Hiking_nut)
- posted by cjb @ 10:02 PM

 
Yet Another Art Review -- text and sample images up at Straight.com

Garry Winogrand
Photographs from the portfolio "Women are better than men. Not only have they survived, they do prevail"
At the Monte Clark Gallery until February 6
Reviewed by Christopher Brayshaw

In Garry Winogrand's small black-and-white street photographs, every kind of public human interaction is displayed and parsed. Working with a Leica range-finder camera, and always at close quarters, Winogrand prowled the streets of New York, Los Angeles, and other large American cities, making images of people he did not know, restlessly scrutinizing them as they, in turn, scrutinized and judged each other.

Winogrand's purpose was never cheery, and his work will never win him any fans among the many devotees of lyrical humanist street photography. His images are darker and more pessimistic than those of, say, Henri Cartier-Bresson, even though both artists' pictures are governed by an almost identical set of rules: exposures shot quickly with a handheld camera; small black-and-white prints; compositions centred on the decisive moment--Cartier-Bresson's term--that magic split second when disconnected compositional elements cohere in the viewfinder.

Although Winogrand's work is often compared to Cartier-Bresson's or to André Kertész's, his photographs lack their easy European grace. Winogrand's blunt, apparently artless style is actually derived from his close study of two masters of American realist photography: Swiss-born Robert Frank, and Walker Evans.

The 15 Winogrand photographs on display at Monte Clark Gallery are some of the last works he completed before his death from cancer in the early 1980s, and they're a good introduction to his style. The first thing you notice is how their compositions are almost all skewed to the right or left. Winogrand explained this as the result of the lenses he preferred and his desire for his subjects to fill the frame, but it is equally true that his asymmetrical framing throws his subjects off balance, like people struggling to stay afoot on the deck of a sinking ship. Their physical gestures reveal psychological tics and quirks they'd just as soon suppress or don't realize they're displaying.

When you look closely at Winogrand's pictures, you also notice tiny details whose presence anchors and grounds his compositions. In the best of these images, a black couple, mother and daughter, greet a white mother and daughter on a restaurant's open-air patio. The black daughter is clearly uncomfortable with the scene; her face has frozen into a mask, and her arms are tucked in at her sides, as if she's just waded into cold water. The white daughter's back is to the camera; you can't see her face, but you do see the black button eyes of the stuffed Snoopy doll on the table beside her, which you somehow intuit as being as unwelcoming as her own. This is a terrific picture, but it wouldn't work without Snoopy. You're tempted to say Winogrand got lucky, but he got lucky way too often. All of his pictures are richly packed with this kind of incidental detail, and it's this hectic density that makes his images as memorable as they are.

- posted by cjb @ 9:52 PM

 

Men's XL grey-green Zegna shirt in the wild (eBay), prior to being contained in art critic's closet. 
- posted by cjb @ 9:49 PM

 
A Few Lines at Christmas for Charlie the Cat

This is an excerpt from a longer poem called The Stars at Night by Vija Celmins, work on which was postponed in favor of completing Michelina. Charlie was our West Vancouver neighbors', though he spent most of every day at our house, and we hid him in an upstairs bedroom on the last day before they moved (They didn't seem too concerned when they came over to ask -- none too worriedly -- if we'd seen him, even to the point of politely ignoring the meowing drifting from a nearby window). The first non-authorial voice is Lawrence Weiner's, the second, Bruce Cockburn's, a song that was popular in my first year of university, and often on AM 1040 on the way to or from UBC.

Charlie died of cancer in the summer of 1995. He's buried under a stringy clematis in the back yard in West Vancouver.

– gas clouds hang,
pendant, like balls on the Christ-
mas tree, overturned, “smashed
to pieces in the still of the night” –
the cat went and hid, trembling,
on top of the newspapers stacked
by the fireplace, ornament litter & pine
needles all over the carpet, water
pan skewed, sideways, on the drop
cloth -- soaked through -- dumb
beast shivering, ears back, eyes
wide, string lights in their sockets
still glowing, shattered globes & strewn
tinsel icicles – a silver jelly-
fish spilled on the floor. A beast can
not bear its own weight
out of water, gravity
collapses, holes appear
at the heart of things. “Something
other, busy monster.” Ravening
mouth.

- posted by cjb @ 8:23 PM

 
Just finished: Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore. The second Murakami novel I've completed, stylishly translated by Philip Gabriel. Much of what has stalled me out on Murakami's other novels, particularly those translated by Jay Rubin, is the affectless prose -- a parade of affiable he-said, she-said dialogue that puts me in mind of Doug Coupland's similarly flat sentences.

I remember Bernadette once criticizing something I'd written in university, saying, your language and symbols tell me this scene means something to you, but I have no clue what that is, because your words presuppose that you and I know exactly what plot elements A and B mean, and I don't. All this stuff does is foreground its own interiority.

A good argument in favor of keeping younger writers away from symbolism all together, and one I probably didn't pay enough attention to at the time.

So, with regard to Murakami, two problems: a strained Oedipus narrative tacked onto the usual parade of eccentics and fantastic occurences, and many purple passages in the main narrative, wherein young Kafka, his mother, and her fifteen year old ghost talk about their feelings like Banyen Books customers. I need, I want, I yearn, yadda yadda yadda.

Highlights? Supernatural beings, much like Twin Peaks' Killer Bob, who prowl between worlds, have no conception of human morality -- being concepts, not people -- and take on temporary forms lifted from contemporary mass culture (Colonel Sanders, Johnnie Walker). A man who talks to cats, and the many cats who talk back to him. A kind of Banff Center for spirits and ghosts, guarded by Japanese WWII soldiers who haven't aged since the war. And an accurate, and very moving account, of what it feels like to be like far away from home, and displaced from your normal routines, and how reading helps to mediate that loss. (A few pages, early on, reminded me very strongly of sitting in Borders Books, right at the western edge of the Las Vegas suburbs, reading and drinking free refills, just waiting for it to be late enough to venture out into the cold and the ten minute drive to the freezing campground over the crest of the hill).

- posted by cjb @ 11:09 AM

 
Insert In My Obituary, Please -- found in a New Yorker profile of Hayao Miyazaki

"The pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will" -- A. Gramsci

- posted by cjb @ 9:53 PM

 
Just finished: Paul Auster, Oracle Night. A prose equivalent of the blended beverages on sale in the health food store: a little New York Trilogy, a little Red Notebook, a pinch of the Music of Chance, & etc. Reading Auster's plain unvarnished prose is a real pleasure -- I spent a whole rainy afternoon on Skytrain, zipping around first in one direction, then the other, paying no attention whatsoever to what was going on outside, totally focused on those graceful sentences, laid one after the other like a tongue-and-groove floor. Not as happy with how the first metafictional, then magic realist novel cops out into straightforward neorealist violence at the end, though. Half a dozen plot threads -- my favorites, natch -- left dangling over the abyss, like the tree roots left behind while the rest of the hillside slid away.

100K Club -- cjb & Team Cat

A yearly challenge on clubtread.com. Cover 100,000 feet of vertical elevation gain in 365 days. Cars, the Skyride, helicopters, etc. don't cut it, just self-propelled access. I started yesterday by hiking all the way up Lonsdale Avenue from the Seabus, continuing up Prospect Road to the Baden-Powell trail bridge across Mosquito Creek. You could hear the creek from blocks away, the dull rumbling of rocks thrown around in the white water. Stood in steadily drizzle gazing down at the churning surface, a little puffed from 1000-odd feet of 15%+ grade. Then back down again, strangely at peace in the quickening rain. 360m total.

- posted by cjb @ 9:34 PM

 
5 Card Nancy -- online exquisite-corpse version of the game below. Check out the Hall of Fame!

- posted by cjb @ 11:41 PM

 
Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy & The Platonic Ideal -- DIY card game & art criticism

"Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip 'Nancy' is a landmark achievement: A comic so simply drawn it can be reduced to the size of a postage stamp and still be legible; an approach so formulaic as to become the very definition of the 'gag-strip'; a sense of humor so obscure, so mute, so without malice as to allow faithful readers to march through whole decades of art and story without ever once cracking a smile.

"Nancy is Plato's playground. Ernie Bushmiller didn't draw A tree, A house, A car. Oh, no. Ernie Bushmiller drew THE tree, THE house, THE car. Much has been made of the 'three rocks.' Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie's way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn't be 'some rocks.' Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate 'some rocks' BUT IT WOULD BE ONE ROCK MORE THAN WAS NECESSARY TO CONVEY THE IDEA OF 'SOME ROCKS.'"

- posted by cjb @ 11:35 PM

 
Day four of pouring rain. Along Venables this afternoon to a specialty leather cleaner, the Ace Of Suedes, with a neat old Kenneth Cole tan nubuck coat I found yesterday afternoon at Corporate Thrift Store in the Fraser Valley. What really sold me on the coat, outside of the filled-up 25% off card in my wallet, was its buttons -- great thick metal studs that you first fit through equally thick metal eyelets, then lock sideways into place, click click click click, like loading bullets into a handgun.

Down to Hastings, the rain not letting up and even intensifying. Little rivers running downhill, the drain grate at the bottom of the Frances Street hill a slalom course of whitewater. The sight of water leaping a foot or so off the road brought back memories of pre-elementary school days in West Vancouver. It sounds funny now to say this, but in 1970, when I was born, the other side of Marine Drive was forest, all the way up to the highway (The subdivisions documented by Arni Haraldsson in his Caulfeild Plateau pictures didn't arrive until the mid-1980s). Streams now piped and ditched ran free, and I remember being taken on walks by both parents, the highlights of which were miniature rapids and waterfalls at the side of the road, streams working steadily away at the recent roadcut's face. Even as late as the mid-1970s, driving up to Squamish on a rainy Sunday afternoon, after spending the morning with my dad's mom, you still had your pick of literally dozens of streams touching down along the roadside (One Sea to Sky Highway stream, M Creek, later had revenge on the tourist gawkers, taking out the highway bridge, rail bridge, and several motorists on a dark rainy winter night in 1981).

Back to work on Michelina again. Writing a children's story, I naturally find myself excavating my own (admittedly not very substantial) memories of childhood, and what I find there is much the same as now: not many people, but lots of rivers, lakes, mountains, forests, park trails, plants and animals, etc...

- posted by cjb @ 7:25 PM

 
Someone writes to ask, not unreasonably, "Where's the Serpentine River?"

- posted by cjb @ 9:59 AM

 
40 Signs of Rain (apologies to K.S. Robinson & Ezra Pound)

The Serpentine's head-
waters. Dusk. A vast brown
placid inland sea.

- posted by cjb @ 8:53 PM

 
Sy Hersh gets the goods on W.'s Term II plans:

"Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.

It is possible that some of the American officials who talk about the need to eliminate Iran’s nuclear infrastructure are doing so as part of a propaganda campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning. If so, the signals are not always clear. President Bush, who after 9/11 famously depicted Iran as a member of the 'axis of evil,' is now publicly emphasizing the need for diplomacy to run its course. 'We don’t have much leverage with the Iranians right now,' the President said at a news conference late last year. 'Diplomacy must be the first choice, and always the first choice of an administration trying to solve an issue of . . . nuclear armament. And we’ll continue to press on diplomacy.'

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. 'We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here,' the former high-level intelligence official told me. 'They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it.'"

- posted by cjb @ 10:46 PM

 
Received across the counter: Louis Zukofsky, ALL the collected shorter poems

Exhumed from the pile of unread books in the office and actually begun: Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari

- posted by cjb @ 10:43 PM

 

Best science fiction novel of 2005? Hot tip, kids: mid-July! (Anyone complaining about Stross' relatively weak & uninspiring Singularity Sky should remember that that first novel was written a long, long time ago, but only recently published as part of a six-book deal. Besides, I've been able to read this new one month by month in Asimov's, and can consequently vouch for its really being as described. Bruce Sterling on speed, chatty virtual cat, intelligent lobsters from a nearby star system & etc. Also a thoughtful and funny meditation on what happens to conventional economic systems once information gets super-dense. Anyone entertaining a contrary opinion after actually reading the book is, as usual, welcome to post here).
- posted by cjb @ 10:30 PM