Livin' Thing

You, and your sweet desire...

Paul Heaton's Beautiful South covers ELO. Working hard on art criticism tonight, evidently!


- posted by cjb @ 9:34 PM

 

Still Ill

Moz. & Co. live on BBC TV, 2006. Crack band, much better sung than those Marr-era rarities floating round cyberspace.

Does the body rule the mind
Or does the mind rule the body ?
I don´t know.
Ask me why, and I'll die
Oh, ask me why, and I'll die
And if you must, go to work tomorrow
Well, if I were you I really wouldn't bother
For there are brighter sides to life
And I should know, because I've seen them
But not very often....

- posted by cjb @ 11:02 PM

 

Several folks email or drop into the shop to ask why I'm "not writing art criticism any more." So here's a few paragraphs from the Rebecca Dart essay which pertain less to Rebecca specifically and more to that slippery package called aesthetics:

"I personally believe that 'formalism' doesn’t exist in art as such, and that this term doesn’t really have any meaning, outside of being handy to throw around as a diss or a put-down. But I also believe, as did Clement Greenberg, who for all his failings still remains for me the single most important art critic of the 20th century, that only form (called 'convention' in his late Seminars (short, philosophical essays which he published in publications like Arts magazine and Studio International) provides specific, verifiable means of describing art.

As Greenberg says at the beginning of Seminar 6, 'Formalizing art means making aesthetic experience communicable: objectifying it, making it public, instead of keeping it private or solipsistic as happens with most aesthetic experience. For aesthetic experience to be communicated it has to be submitted to conventions – or "forms" if you like – just as language does if it’s to be understood by more than one person.'

So, in place of private, and necessarily subjective statements, good criticism offers descriptions of specific, verifiable aspects of art objects. This painting is mostly blue. This sculpture consists of a stuffed goat, and a rubber tire, and oil paint, and some other stuff. There are nine panels on this page. And the specificity of this language, given plainly and directly and consequently available to almost everyone in ways in which the more specialized, technical languages of the applied sciences -- electrical engineering, say, or medicine, or quantum physics -- aren’t, is a way of gesturing toward, pointing at or otherwise denoting aspects of artworks which convince us, individually, of their 'quality.'

The point of so-called 'formal' analysis isn’t to smother artworks under a blanket of language or theory, but to concretize those aspects of them that appeal to us or move us, so that we can use these features as the basis for discussing why they move us in the ways that they do, or to argue that one thing is better than another. I once heard this process described as 'complicating love with judgement,' a phrase that still appeals to me."
- posted by cjb @ 10:24 PM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Black Books

It's all true, folks!
- posted by cjb @ 10:55 PM

 
Q: Where's all the art criticism? Since when does mindlessly linking to YouTube constitute a successful blog entry?

A: 4000 words on Ms. Dart and still typing. Stay tuned.
- posted by cjb @ 10:15 PM

 

Living With War -- streaming audio of Neil Young's best album in years, my early favorite #4, "Shock & Awe."

(photo courtesy Craig Abaya and the Bridge School)
- posted by cjb @ 9:56 PM

 
The Statue of Liberty

Lots of love for Mr. Andy Partridge, seen here pre-meltdown live in 1978 on BBC TV.
- posted by cjb @ 9:40 AM

 

We were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end...

Mr. Neil Tennant and Mr. Chris Lowe on the office deck. Rainy April, mist and cherry blossoms mingling out on the sidewalk.

New album out in May!

- posted by cjb @ 9:47 AM

 

Long and thoughtful appreciation of Doug Wright by great Toronto cartoonist Seth

"Earlier I used the term 'sense of exactness' to describe Wright's drawings. That sense was never more acute than in his drawings of the post-war suburban environment. They evoke the very experience of being there. I can think of nothing else, not even photographs, that brings that world of my childhood back to me with such deeply felt longing. As I peer into his strips I see the essence of an era that no longer exists. The last breath of the early 20th century mixing with the new world that is to come.

On occasion Wright would focus his great rendering skills on a small poetic moment of everyday life such as a snowy winter morning or a dusky evening of fireworks or a sudden sun shower. These images never drew undue attention to themselves. They never slowed the strips down. Still, if you stopped and took the time to take them in you would feel their subtle beauty. This brings up another of Wright's gifts-his wonderful ability to draw weather. He's one of the very few cartoonists who can actually make you feel the temperature in a comic strip. His sensitivity to weather was as integral to his work as his interest in detail."

- posted by cjb @ 7:58 PM

 


Canadian cartoonist Doug Wright -- his gentle weekly strip Doug Wright's Family (in the Canadian Magazine, which came along with the Saturday Vancouver Sun c. 1970-1980), an enormous influence on me as a child, even to the point of mailing off a money order to obtain the second book-length collection of black and white cartoons, which I then ruined by promptly and ineptly coloring in with felt-tip markers. A few strips available at the link above, "February 18, 1967" and "Christmas" the best of these.
- posted by cjb @ 7:46 PM

 

Scarceish here for the next few days -- preparing a presentation on Vancouver comics artist Rebecca Dart (her excellent Rabbithead depicted above) for a May symposium at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta. I'll post the text here when it's complete. I usually prefer to speak from notes, or entirely from memory, when addressing an audience, but that's not possible here; WPG has requested the presentation text in advance. So, in the sort of "conceptual gesture" that has pretty much ensured my ongoing self-marginalization from the Canadian visual arts mainstream, I'm writing a 3500-word paper that simulates the appearance of total improvisational delivery, a la Robert Morris' early performance, 2.13.
- posted by cjb @ 11:11 AM

 

Q: Would you be interested in purchasing a collection of hard and softcover "Star Trek" books? PS: I have inherited these books; I am not a Trekkie.

A: As you are not a Trekkie, I know you will not be offended if I say that I would rather cut off all my arms and legs than purchase a "Star Trek" collection of any size, shape, or form. We have never had any luck selling these "Harlequin Romances" of the SF world.
- posted by cjb @ 9:10 PM

 

Magnolia & Cuttings, Burnaby, B.C., 2006

Soundtrack: a very loud, very aggressive guard dog barking and lunging and bouncing -- clunk, clunk! -- off the glass railing at upper left.
- posted by cjb @ 7:01 PM

 
Back from the credit union and off the bus at Main & Broadway.

Pink snow, the wind knocking down petals swirling and shivering in gusts against my face.
- posted by cjb @ 3:03 PM

 

Saturday's scouting trip to Seattle yields the useful metaphor embodied in Canadian "artist-in-general" Euan MacDonald's 3 Trucks (2001).
- posted by cjb @ 1:54 PM

 
Tolagson forwards an enormous 3.5 meg attachment: the wide-open symphonic soul ("yacht rock"?) of Michael McDonald's lovely (& eminently samplable) I Keep Forgettin'.
- posted by cjb @ 1:49 PM

 

Ding!, goes my inbox.

Breaking all previous speed records for replies, Occasional Toronto Correspondent draws my attention to the following lines of Becker/Fagen's Cousin Dupree:

She turned my life into a living hell
In those little tops and tight capris...

Least anyone think I've unexpectedly morphed into Creepy Prematurely Middle Aged Bald Guy, some subsequent lines are worth noting for context (particularly a propos stuff in bold):

I said babe with my boyish charm and good looks
How can you stand it for one more day
She said maybe it's the skeevy look in your eyes
Or that your mind has turned to applesauce
The dreary architecture of your soul
I said - But what is it exactly turns you off?

- posted by cjb @ 1:36 PM

 
The first really warm day of spring, cherry trees ablaze with pink buds.

That deep blue of Saturday's T. rex's backdrop extended and intensified, as if some polarizing filter had been stretched across the sky.

Pale white vampiric hipsters bopping along in the sunshine, all trucker hats and rolled-up cuffs.

Capris: the most welcome resurgent fashion trend of the early 21st century. Mrrrow!
- posted by cjb @ 1:28 PM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Inflatable T. rex, Mount Vernon, WA
- posted by cjb @ 11:35 PM

 

Snag, 2006
- posted by cjb @ 9:46 AM

 

What a Fool Believes

She musters a smile
For his nostalgic tale
Never coming near what he wanted to say
Only to realize
It never really was
She had a place in his life
He never made her think twice
As he rises to her apology
Anybody else would surely know
He’s watching her go

But what a fool believes he sees
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to be
Is always better than nothing
And nothing at all keeps sending him...
- posted by cjb @ 12:17 AM

 
Into the Forest

Black and white digital photographs of unidentified deep woods, taken in and around the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island. Spurred by a Takao Tanabe charcoal drawing of a forest interior in the artist's recent VAG retrospective, which Adam Harrison and I admired for its "photographic" framing. Also in the back of my mind: Emily Carr's charcoals, the silvery grey light of Jack Shadbolt's Hornby Suite, and the springtime walk Culley and I took last March along the E&N rail tracks south of Nanaimo.

Criteria:

"All-overness"

No domination of any single part of the picture plane. (De-emphasis of figure/ground).

No readily visible horizon line.

Inversion of traditional black and white print quality. Even "neutral" grey tones.

A graphite rubbing of a landscape.
- posted by cjb @ 11:38 PM

 

Floor, 2006
- posted by cjb @ 11:36 PM

 

Thicket, 2006
- posted by cjb @ 10:54 AM

 
To one Internet mega-seller and a procession of small paperback exchanges, in an undisclosed Pacific Northwest location.

Seller A has shrink-wrapped banana boxes of bargain books stacked fourteen feet high in his suburban industrial warehouse. Several have toppled, spilling out an avalanche of Book Club hardcovers, diet books, and Lawrence Sanders thrillers: a three foot deep wave of pulp. Other pallets of boxes have, after fourteen-plus months of inattention, crushed the pallets beneath them, and these deformed, shrink-wrapped masses protrude from the sides of the towers like giant termite pupae.

No heat in the warehouse, and no lights, either. Seller A's employees navigate by mountaineering headlamp, like dwarves emerging from the Mines of Moria.

No heat in Seller B's shop, either. Seller B sits, swaddled up in coats and blankets like some low-rent Dickensian villain, beside his till. Seller B hates all other dealers, so my unnamed dealer pal and I conduct some disinformational chat back and forth as we go about assembling stacks of underpriced paperback originals. I feel no particular shame about this, as Seller B was once aggressively rude to fourteen year old me in a different shop in a different city.

Dealer C is loading banana boxes of books into his car out the side door of a Salvation Army store. Nothing special -- Johanna Lindsey, Martin Cruz Smith, Berenstain Bears. Dealer C has never met a book he doesn't like.

Seller D, a formerly prosperous local realtor, sits in his small shop dressed in shirt and tie, turning the pages of a paperback thriller and glancing up occasionally into the weak spring sun. No customers in the half an hour we browse, just the hum of the fluorescents and the sound of dust settling on Piers Anthony, on Nora Roberts, on Faye Kellerman and the Canadian Handbook of Actuarial Science.
- posted by cjb @ 6:30 PM

 

Interior of a Wood, 2006
- posted by cjb @ 1:29 AM

 
ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): My Dark Star
- posted by cjb @ 1:17 AM

 

Science homework, Grandview Cut
- posted by cjb @ 10:58 AM

 

Untitled (Wait), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 10:56 AM

 

Alien wildlife, Grandview Cut
- posted by cjb @ 10:50 AM

 

The Grandview Cut in warm grey overcast. Walked from False Creek Flats to Still Creek yesterday, something I've always wanted to do. When depressed, do something new, & etc. You glimpse the Cut from the windows of the Millenium Line Skytrain (whose elevated track is visible, above, at upper left, receding back into the distance), but what you don't see are the little creeks and streams running along the sides of the Burlington Northern tracks; the mallard couple quacking in a surprisingly clean and healthy-looking pool; the free newspaper boxes dropped or hurled from overpasses; the horsetail ferns pushing up through the mossy banks; and the zillions of TV sets, soaked newspapers, graffitti tags, detergent boxes and ghosts littering the landscape. A vast polyphonic array of cracked and rotting modernity, interspersed with little snippets of 19th-c. pastoral.

The walls of the Cut are pretty good acoustic baffles; what I mostly heard on this hour and a half walk was birdsong and rushing water.
- posted by cjb @ 9:50 AM

 

One Hundred Famous Ghosts (9), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 4:46 PM

 

One Hundred Famous Ghosts (8), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 9:36 AM

 
ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Knockholt's Boys of Summer

Garage Kubrick city, baby. Somehow precisely capturing how I felt for most of the 1980s, and bearing more than passing resemblance to most of my early fiction. Check out the thoughtful intermingling of sound and moving images: those endlessly cycling escalators, those half-blurred deaccelerating trains. The bear ears are a real touch of genius.
- posted by cjb @ 10:14 PM

 

Homeless Couple's Shelter, Vancouver, B.C., 2006

Made while ghost-hunting near Science World. Drawn to my attention by the well-dressed man at rear left, who had just finished screaming at them, and then interrupted my picture-making to loudly lament the "addicts shooting up in front of kids." So I walked over to talk to them.

A couple, man and woman, about my age, with open needle wounds on their forearms and poorly-concealed needles on the sleeping bags drawn up around them. The man reflexively apologized and asked if he was offending me.

No, I said, and asked if I might make a portrait of them.

Both asked if I was interested in them because they were using drugs.

No, I said, I'm interested in how angry the man was who just confronted you.

What do you think?, asked the woman.

I think his anger is misplaced.

Will you pay to take our picture?, asked the man.

No I won't, I said. But I will try to make a good picture.

The man and woman briefly conferred among themselves.

Please don't photograph us, said the man. We just want to be left alone.

Can I photograph your shelter?

If I say no, will you still?

No, I said. I won't. I'll go away.

Go ahead man. That's fine.

This is the best of three exposures, and it is dedicated to Vancouverites Roy Arden and Bob Rennie, for very different reasons.
- posted by cjb @ 9:14 PM

 

Kubrick Snow

BRAYSHAW: ....The North Shore hidden behind successive waves of blowing snow, like those shifting CGI curtains that seal Jack, Wendy and Danny off from the rest of Colorado.

TOLAGSON: CGI curtains?

BRAYSHAW: Ie., fake "curtains" of drifting digital snow. Also seen in that movie with the Statue of Liberty all frozen up in ice.

TOLAGSON: I'm lost. Are you talking about that TV movie of "The Shining?"

BRAYSHAW: Uh, no. Some screen grabs from the Kubrick film, which I saw online a while ago, showing the hotel with mega-snow dumping down all around, visually "isolating" the family from the outside world.

[emails JPEG as evidence]

TOLAGSON: [laughing his ass off] There ain't nothin CGI about that snow you see falling in that still. Kubrick would have had to have been quite the computer effects pioneer to pull something like that off in 1980. It's fake snow alright, but the kind that blows out of wind machines.

BRAYSHAW: You win. I suck.

JACK TORRANCE: It's all Danny's fault. Nothing but trouble, that kid.

- posted by cjb @ 3:02 PM

 
James Taylor on the Legacy's crackly FM radio, blatter of rain and hail off the windshield, the blower working frantically to clear a transparent crescent moon on the foggy glass.

It used to be your town
It used to be my town, too
You never know ’till it all falls down
Somebody loves you
Somebody loves you
Darling, somebody still loves you....

Parking opposite the Western Front, huge trees dripping slush into the street, a few stray half-drowned ghosts.

The panicked matron on her way to Easter Mass who spotted me in the Kingsway crosswalk at the last second and stood on her brakes, bouncing her wizened, shawled mother in the shotgun seat off the windshield.

Fishtail.

Smoking brakes, a long string of Italian profanities.

ART (Aesthetically Rejected Thing): the Help Wanted sign in the neighborhood coffee bar. Verbatim: Geeked on Coffee? Apply Within.

The North Shore hidden behind successive waves of blowing snow, like those shifting CGI curtains that seal Jack, Wendy and Danny off from the rest of Colorado.

Quickbooks. Boxes of dusty basement books full of lost-looking wolf spiders.

The constantly ringing phone.

- posted by cjb @ 11:12 AM

 

One Hundred Famous Ghosts (7), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 11:56 PM

 
Five o'clock, the light slowly slipping away. Steely grey clouds, a cold brisk wind hurrying the cherry blossoms down off the trees. A ghost end-over-ending it high overhead, too fast and too distant to capture.

Fresh snow on the North Shore, white slopes piled one above the other, abruptly disappearing into mist. Snow-blind. How wildly blown flakes collapse sound and distance at less than half a dozen meters.

Lemon tea.

A friend's funny shifting walk.
- posted by cjb @ 5:13 PM

 

Untitled (Bench), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 10:00 AM

 

New paintings by Brad Phillips opening tonight at CSA Space above the bookstore (#5-2414 Main Street, Vancouver). Y'all come! Nice preview of the exhibition today in the Globe's BC arts supplement, Seven, with a text by Kevin Chong.
- posted by cjb @ 3:13 PM

 

A Thicket in a Ravine, 2006
- posted by cjb @ 12:35 PM

 

Charles Marville, View of the Small Grotto toward the Deer Pond, Bois de Boulogne, 1858. Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Sylvia Grace Borda, who knows more of photographic history than I ever will, points me to this image vis-a-vis all those pictures of Still Creek that keep cropping up here.

- posted by cjb @ 10:19 AM

 

This Must Be The Place

Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I'm just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I'm dead
Eyes that light up,
Eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head:
I got you...

Mr. David Byrne and companions, this live performance bringing back poignant memories of the midnight show at the old VanEast Cinema on Commercial Drive, the side window missing from my Honda Civic at 1:47 a.m., and the bits of safety glass I kept picking out of the back seat for weeks thereafter.

- posted by cjb @ 9:59 PM

 

Inverted Magnolia, 2006. Unique print; private collection, Vancouver.

Rodney Graham: "Earlier on I was equally interested in becoming a writer. It was the openness of conceptual art and its incorporation of textual and theoretical elements that emerged during the first years of my university education that opened my eyes to various possibilities. I wanted not only to appropriate...works in an artistic context but to add to them - to interpolate myself into them - as a kind of performance."
- posted by cjb @ 7:55 PM

 

One Hundred Famous Ghosts (6), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 7:46 PM

 

Peter Culley directs me to Alicia Cohen's splendid long essay on Jack Spicer and haunting.

"By seeking to undermine the stable world constructed during the mirror stage, Spicer makes a passageway for the inhabitants of the lost Los Angeles to, like Eurydice, come up into the civic landscape.

America is a democracy where even the common man or woman supposedly has a vote—but what of the voiceless? The 'insane'? The dead? In his work, Jack Spicer troubles the democratic vista by creating virtual spaces where these disembodied Others, these non-coherent, non-unified beings, emerge to trouble and participate in the 'real.'"

- posted by cjb @ 9:45 AM

 
Axis of Evil, v.2.0

New long article by the New Yorker's Seymour M. Hersh, the best investigative reporter I know, on the Bush administration's clandestine plans to achieve "regime change" in Iran through a strategic bombing campaign. Anyone harboring doubts as to W.'s status as the most inept and dangerous US president of all time should pay close attention to Hersh's claims, bearing in mind that in the frenzied run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Hersh was repeatedly ridiculed by W.'s administration and the Pentagon's civilian leadership as a crackpot conspiracy theorist. But, as Gordon and Trainor's excellent, recently published Cobra II makes clear, Hersh's reporting was pretty much on the money.

Hersh:

"A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was 'absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb' if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do 'what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,' and 'that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.'

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that 'a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.' He added, 'I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, "What are they smoking?"'"
- posted by cjb @ 9:04 AM

 

My favorite ghosts have always seemed a little cartoonish. Huey, Dewey, Louie, Donald and Scrooge meet some here (actually ravens in cages with white sheets draped over them) in Carl Barks' "Uncle Scrooge and the Ghost Town Railroad," the first comic book I remember reading as a child.
- posted by cjb @ 5:55 PM

 

One Hundred Famous Ghosts (4), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 1:10 PM

 

ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Kay Rosen's Hi

- posted by cjb @ 11:24 PM

 

On Ghosts

Adam Harrison and I were discussing the tendency among younger artists to "specialize," to identify themselves with a signature subject matter, form, or series. This tendency is great for developing and reinforcing a brand identity -- witness the commercial success of "shark guy," "dot guy," and "double-self portrait gal," among numerous other offenders -- but inimical to the thematic range one typically associates with great art. Brueghel, Hokusai, Manet, Richter, Wall, Velasquez, Graham, Sturtevant etc. range freely across subjects and themes. Their lack of thematic or subject-driven consistancy compels our attention.

I have always been drawn to the irrational and the fantastic, and their use (in Henry James; in Philip Dick; in Stanislaw Lem; in Brueghel; in M. John Harrison, Margaret Oliphant, H.P. Lovecraft, Dickens and Terry Gilliam) as a kind of allegorical realism, a way of dissecting and analyzing social conditions and relationships. I love Yoshitoshi's supernatural series -- eg., New Forms of Thirty-Six Ghosts (1889-92), whose surreal or spectacularly violent images exist alongside, and in tension with, his equally detailed studies of modern life. Such a methodology is much less common today, and where it does exist, as in the appalling work of Gregory Crewdson, it typically takes the form of a kind of symbolist kitsch, drained of any real critical use-value.

I think the fantastic's exhaustion in contemporary art is somehow connected to modernity's relentless disenchantment of the world. Photography has played a more than conspicuous role in this process. It's ironic that a medium once used to prop up the supernatural (Victorian fairy pictures; "ghost photography," ectoplasm studies) was soon employed in its liquidation (eg., the photo-based analysis and debunking of UFOs, Bigfoot, Ogopogo, the Loch Ness Monster, etc.).

I like how the photographs of my friend Evan Lee invert the hyper-rational conventions of "straight" photography, finding shy cartoon presences in landscape; in ginseng roots; in cardboard boxes and draftsmen's curves. I'm similarly moved by Yoshitoshi's prints and drawings. My Ghosts are attempts to make images which, while not as dramatic as Yoshitoshi's explosive lines or Evan's complexly arranged compositions, still suggest phantom presences lurking in and around modernity's edges.
- posted by cjb @ 7:18 PM

 

One Hundred Famous Ghosts (3), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 7:16 PM

 

One Hundred Famous Ghosts (1), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 9:46 AM

 

Untitled (Ravine), 2006
- posted by cjb @ 9:51 PM

 

Seattle from the car deck, MV Kitsap.
- posted by cjb @ 10:08 PM

 

I-5 express lanes, north Seattle. Taken while driving -- 70 mph! -- by focusing on the camera's viewscreen, clearly visible (though reversed) in the Legacy's rearview mirror. Left to right: Cat & Rose T. Cat, constant companions. Not depicted: 1400 mass market paperbacks!
- posted by cjb @ 10:01 PM

 

Off to the land of cheap, plentiful pocketbooks with the Legacy, the camera, and the Incredible Talking Cats in tow. Back Friday!
- posted by cjb @ 4:29 PM

 
Sign In, Stranger

Michael Hayward hops on board:

"I've been enjoying Anodyne as one of my regular stops in the blogosphere, and try to drop into one of your stores whenever I'm in either neighborhood. Since you're obviously a magnolia-phile I thought I'd draw your attention to one of the best manolia displays in the city. There's an entire grove of them at the entrance to Cates Park on the North Shore (Dollarton Highway as you're heading towards Deep Cove). They tend to be a bit behind the specimens in the southern parts of the city, so they're not yet at their peak. The North Vancouver District parks people usually plant daffodils or tulips as a roadside border in front of the magnolias, and these make a colourful underline to the trees themselves. Check them out if you can spare a sunny afternoon sometime in the next little while. If you miss them this year you'll have to wait for another twelve months...."
- posted by cjb @ 10:35 AM

 
& just for fun, the same gentlemen in 1973. The more things change...
- posted by cjb @ 1:20 PM

 
Do It Again

Now you swear and kick and beg us
That you’re not a gamblin’ man
Then you find you’re back in Vegas
With a handle in your hand
Your black cards can make you money
So you hide them when you’re able
In the land of milk and honey
You must put them on the table...

Rock 'n Roll Hall Of Fame inductees Becker and Fagen lay it down. Nb. DF's Ray Charles glasses, dry nasal whine, and impeccable nerd-chic juxtaposed with the lushly orchestrated horn section, backup singers, and deep bass beat.

"That's everything punk tried to kill," said John Tweed, briefly poking his head into the office.

Well, yes, exactly.
- posted by cjb @ 1:08 PM

 
ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): The Collegiate Book-Collecting Championship
- posted by cjb @ 12:17 PM

 

Nice long article about the shop, and Main Street retail in general, in the new issue of BC Business magazine.

"Having been an employee at libraries and other bookstores, Brayshaw knew at an early age that he wanted to work for himself. He was drawn to the area because many of his artist friends lived there. 'And the small businesses I already saw in the area were operated by idiosyncratic, individual proprietors.' Pulpfiction stocks a wide selection of fiction as well as more esoteric titles, such as Russian science fiction and books on Vancouver photoconceptualism."
- posted by cjb @ 11:46 AM

 

Magnolia and Worker at Robson Square, 2006
- posted by cjb @ 2:44 PM

 
I Love My Life, But Not You Guys -- special April Fool's Day installment!

Lunchtime. Pad Thai on Broadway.

LOST GUY'S LUNCH DATE: ...and hot-and-sour soup. Thanks.

WAITRESS: And for you?

LOST GUY: What do you guys have to eat?

WAITRESS: The menu's on the table here. $5.95 each lunch special. Pad thai...chicken and eggplant...green curry...yellow curry...[lists numerous other delicious, Anodyne-approved choices].

LOST GUY: I'll just have a hamburger.

[beat]

WAITRESS: We're a Thai restaurant.

LOST GUY: There aren't any fuckin' hamburgers in Thailand?
- posted by cjb @ 10:15 PM

 

Anodyne was 2 years old on March 30th, and of course I forgot to announce it here, being too busy with Vancouver Island poetry readings and hipwaders & etc. So: thanks to everyone who wrote in 2005-6: John Latta, Gywnedd Pickett, Adam Harrison, James Nadiger, Peter Culley, brother dru, Reiko Tagami, Jamie Tolagson, Jessie Caryl, Michael Turner, Sylvia Grace Borda & anyone else I've forgotten. Without whom, & etc. Thanks.
- posted by cjb @ 3:47 PM