There's something quite mesmerizing about the shifting photos on the CCAC home page. I've let it run on for quite some time now, and new faces keep appearing.
LINK | 3:40 AM |
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I need recommendations of good science fiction! New stuff, preferably, that I haven't heard of. But good! I am reading Maureen McHugh's Mission Child right now, which is, so far, only fair-to-middling, but getting better. I'll write up a blurb for the books page when I'm done. I've got some James Tiptree lined up, one of my old favorites, but whose books are largely and inexplicably out of print, and I'm also planning on reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ. Derek lent me Permutation City by Greg Egan, which several people have raved about, as well as The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman. I'm looking forward to Cory's new book too.
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There appears to be some kind of denim disease going around that removes the top three inches from everyone's pants and causes spots to appear on the upper thighs and buttocks of certain jeans. If you think your jeans may be susceptible, or have had recent contact with jeans exhibiting these symptoms, you should contact the CDC immediately.
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My grandmother's house is filled with objects from another age: a mirrored tray with a matching silver comb, brush and mirror; an elaborate make-up kit made of leather that folds in half and zips shut, inside a miniature Aladdin's cave of tiny scissors, tiny tweezers, implements and brushes of all descriptions; bottles of L'air du Temps and Je Reviens on another small tray on a vanity, a thing whose time has come and gone. In every bathroom, tissues are hidden in painted boxes, toilet paper peeks shyly out out from under a hinged lid, the toilet seat is dressed in a fluffy cover, aspiring to be a porcelain chair. Powder puffs are trapped in round boxes from which I release them, small, fluffy animals. The perfumed talc fills the air like Fuller's earth in the film's climactic scene, and I sneeze a season's allergies. Tiny perfumed soaps in the shape of seashells come and go, disappearing once they've lost their sharp seams -- conch, clamshell, nautilus. Once, a daisy. And once, a rose!

In the closets, shoes nestle in boxes wrapped in tissue paper, dyed to match dresses not worn for thirty years. There are scary teeth in minted water, pastel candies in dishes, a picture of The Last Supper carved in wood, a stereo cabinet, novena cards and rosaries stuck in the corner, hung on the corner of every mirror. All over the house, eight granddaughters look out from behind framed glass.

Later, a wheelchair, a hospital bed, a tray of full of medicine. Things that weren't objects before fill the rooms: sickness, silence, sleep, sorrow. Love.

There is a clock in a bell jar on the mantel whose revolving feet swing around and around, but the clock never advances, it is always the past there. And now that my grandmother is gone and the house is gone, all that remains is the memory that lives in this glance into a mirrored tray, this trace smell, that old woman hunched over her walker, edging slowly up the street, away from the breaking day.
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Balasubas. "Ingrate" and "scoundrel" are the translations that I have found for this Filipino word, but it seems different to me. Are there any Filipinos out there who care to venture a definition?
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I am in the middle of transcribing a two hour intervew, and I'm still typing, after an hour and a half (not that I am being particularly efficient) and I'm only, say, 20 minutes into the tape. And I was marvelling at the multiplicity of forms that this single two hour event is taking:

First there is the singular experience of Reality. Listening to the interviewee, understanding what he means, seeing how he looks, what he's wearing. The physical experience of sitting in a wooden booth in a Japanese restaurant, picking at my Vegetarian Combo, focusing on his words, and yet aware of the baseball game playing on the TV behind me, the table staff moving here, moving there.

Then this compression of the experience onto a tape, solely an auditory experience.

Then the memory of the interview, memory being a notoriously unreliable, impressionistic recording medium.

Then the transcription of the spoken words into a word file on my computer.

Then it will be cut up and rearranged and framed by my words, my memory, in the written interview and

Then it will be printed and eventually read in magazine format by other people, who will have a reading experience of it.
LINK | 8:10 PM |
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Do you have a Tivo? Do you like it? Don't like it? Why?

What about Wink Television?
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Some nice things people are saying about The Game Neverending:

• Ferra Darling
• Geegaw (and here and here)
• Kottke
• Axodys
• Ned Richards
• Leuschke
• Latenightpool

And Pixelkitty's Tips for The Game Neverending

Apologies if you're still waiting for your password. We're letting people in a chunk at a time, making various improvements for increased traffic. And, we're making the game better.
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I've been playing The Game Neverending all weekend with Geegaw, David, Judith and dozens of others. Come on down!
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The Game Neverending!!!. Gag order removed! Extra! Extra! There is a prototype of The Game Neverending, the game that Stewart and Eric and Ben and Jason and Alice and Corey have been working on for the past couple of months (I even worked on it a little myself!) It's not the final game -- that won't be ready until next spring -- but it is a pared down version to test out some of the functionality and ideas. The final game will have an economy, politics...you will be able to buy a house, get a job, make things, sell things, agitate for various changes, start a movement, run for office, make your own peculiar gizmos, design your character, and change the rules of the game. (Cf. Matt Webb)

Go to The Game Neverending Prototype's site and sign up to be an alpha tester. You'll get a password sent to you when it's ready to go, probably in the next two days or so. It's still being worked on, so it will be buggy and sometimes down, and there is a form you can use to report bugs. On Macs it only works on Netscape 7, and Mozilla -- IE's a total bust. If you use IE on Windows it has to be 5.5 or higher.

I'm very excited about it. It's fun! Look for me there, I'll be logged in under "caterina" . Make me your "acquaintance"!
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From Andrew by way of Eric, which confirms something I've always suspected:

Woobaby, my beloved computer, (which was named by Derek when it was his computer at Pyra because Woo Baby! it was so fast!!), poor old Woobaby has given up the ghost! It was reeling under the OS X.2.1 update, and suddenly stopped doing anything. After several hours of work by my beleaguered and reluctant household sysadmin (Thank you Stewart!) we finally gave up and brought Woobaby down to the shop. I hope it's not time for a new computer yet! I hadn't backed up in a while...(kicks self).
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Last Thursday, Judith and I went to see Louis Menand at City Arts and Lectures. He writes for the New Yorker, and wrote a book that I haven't read called The Metaphysical Club, a club that existed for only a few months in Cambridge, MA, and whose members and their associates, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, founded the first (only?) homegrown American philosophy, pragmatism. During his talk he said something that I have been mulling over ever since:

Dewey (or was it Peirce?) arrived in Chicago during the great Pullman Railroad worker's strike, which had successfully stopped all rail travel, and thus all interstate commerce, effectively paralyzing the US economy. It was a tremendously important event at the time. Dewey/Peirce received a letter from Jane Addams in which she said that the strikers and the captains of industry that they were striking against were on the same side -- that they wanted essentially the same thing. Dewey/Peirce vehemently disagreed with this, and wrote back saying as much. But a day or so later he recanted, and said that Addams was indeed right, both sides wanted essentially the same thing.

Menand's interviewer and most of the audience were nonplussed by this, including me. Later, it all became clear when Menand talked about an article he'd written on the famous People vs. Larry Flynt case, spearheaded by Jerry Falwell. Playboy, Menand said, was the first big porno magazine, which had pictures of women with no clothes on alongside articles about Buckminster Fuller, ads for expensive stereo equipment, and interviews with John Updike. What Playboy was trying to do was make sex respectable, bring it out of hiding, elevate its status with proximity to high culture. Flynt's genius was realizing that there were thousands of people out there who didn't give a damn what Buckminster Fuller thought, couldn't afford the expensive stereo equipment, but wanted to see the dirty pictures. Moreover, they wanted the pictures dirtier. Hustler was sleazy. Flynt was putting the guilt and shame back into sex. Jerry Falwell, his arch enemy, also wanted to put the guilt and shame back into sex, just from the sacred end of things rather than profane. His flock wasn't interested in John Updike, nor could they afford the stereo. As it turned out, Flynt and Falwell were, girlie mag on the one hand and holy book on the other, on the same page, and fighting for the same audience.
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Wizards Of Waste, Rulers Of Rubbish, Sultans Of Scrap... My favorite new reality TV show is Junkyard Wars which I saw for the first time at Corey's house in San Francisco. I saw the episode where the two teams built a boat with a paddle-wheel, like the old riverboats on the Mississippi. I really want to see Wenches with Wrenches, so I'll have to dust off my never-used TV and call the cable company. TV is better than the last time I watched it 10 years ago. While at Corey's I watched the book channels and the educational channels and even some of the Spanish language channels to improve my comprehension. The fragmentation of TV into more and more channels is a good thing.
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Things I still haven't forgiven my mother for department: Melting most of my crayons to make some kind of batik fabric. Not only did she melt my crayons without asking, she melted all the Crayolas, leaving behind the cheap crayons, you know the kind -- the ones with more wax than pigment. She left all the crappy ones! I just found a box full of Nat's Jumbo 3-and-under size Crayolas, thought, hm, these would be ideal for.....and suddenly recalled this terrible injustice, its sting undiminished by the intervening 25 years. My Crayolas!

I remember all kinds of terrible injustices -- there was no other kind -- from when I was a kid. I remember saying It's not fair! over and over and over, mostly over trivialities such as ice cream apportioning, bed time, and how come Randy got candy bars in her lunch bag? Children have a terrible time with things not being fair. Maybe it is difficult to understand striving for fairness without ever being able to realize fairness, and the stunning realization that your parents, who were always insisting that you be fair, were capable of grossly unfair behavior.

I watched a documentary last night that had a video of Marshall McLuhan saying that children don't understand when they are told that they cannot participate in the things they see on TV, that they have to wait -- because on TV they are inside bars, bordellos, police departments, offices. They are earning money, wearing make-up, buying cars, killing bad guys. When you ask how old children are they always answer as old as possible: I am four and a half. I am six and three-quarters. I am almost 10.

In the beginning of Immortality by Milan Kundera, he writes of seeing a woman in her sixties smiling like a sixteen-year-old-girl, and realizes that once we are adults, only very rarely are we our ages. We have to be reminded that we are the age we are -- inside ourselves we forget, it is not so important to us, only to other people, only apparent when we see ourselves in photographs, or in the mirror. I never read the rest of the book, but that part stuck with me, because I often have to ask myself How old am I?
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Rogerio taught me a a lovely Dutch phrase in March when we were in Amsterdam: Plaats vervangende schaamte, which means "place-replacing shame", or being ashamed on someone else's behalf.
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A poem from this morning's email. I know nothing about it or its poet. But I love its cryptic scriptural parable style, seeming to mean something, but the meaning elusive as a rope of sand.
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Headed back to 17 reasons why-less San Francisco.
LINK | 5:18 AM |
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From American Magus:

Someone had asked me to post these; so far, these are the Vancouver public lectures I've found:

UBC Computer Science lectures
Museum of Anthropology lectures
Green College Science and Technology lectures
UBC Fine Arts lectures (not updated for this year)
SFU city program lectures (There may be other events on the SFU site, but it is a dreadful, dreadful, unusable and broken site.)
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You too should try to Save Internet Radio.
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S.W.A.R.M. was a terrific amount of fun. A bunch of us started out at Lisa's pad-in-the-sky (where one of those party-wide silences fell just as I was saying, "Weren't piss, shit, cock, fuck and cunt just the regular words for those things in Angle and Saxon?" Everyone turned and stared, and I finished, feebly "...until everyone found Jesus and Latinate words like urine, penis, vagina and excrement became the official language...?") All nine or ten or twelve of us left the West End, walked on down to Homer Street where I met Elizabeth McGrath, whose painting we'd bought at the Emily Carr graduate show last spring. She was very nice.

We went here, went there. The art we saw was OK, nothing stood out. Though we didn't see all of it by any means, and heard that Or was good and Western Front. One image that sticks in my mind was when we were at Centre A, I caught a glimpse of a woman walking though the narrow viewspace between my two interlocutors. She had her finger jabbed two knuckles deep into her nostril. Our eyes locked for a second, she froze, then vanished into the crowd. Reminded me of the moment I opened an unlocked bathroom door in a San Francisco cafe and this young Asian girl lurch-waddled frantically toward the door, grabbing at the doorknob, her pants around her ankles. Two people who recognized me from this web site stopped to say hi, though I don't think it was me they recognized, I think it was Dos Pesos. (If you want to make new friends, bring a pocket-sized dog to art openings). Pizza, a couple more stops, then back to the studio where I manhandled glue, wood and beads until Stewart called, saying he'd run into the Inter-mission kids. We joined them for martinis at Wild Rice, while Dos chilled and listened to Boards of Canada. Khan has a bunch of upcoming public performances (which I'll post as soon as I find the flyer again...) We didn't get back til late late.

Last night at Samurai, Derek divulged that he had a copy of American Magus, which he lent me, and which I have been epoxied to ever since. What a freakin weirdo! I mean, genius! (I'm referring to Harry Smith here, though Derek's a genius too. If only the guy would start a weblog. Hey, Derek, would ya start a weblog already?!)
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The fact that I now need an alarm clock to wake up at a reasonable hour should be taken as a sign that my overall health and happiness has improved on a grand scale. I used to be so anxious and high strung that alarm clocks were completely superfluous; they were those things that buzzed in my empty apartment while I was already out on the fire escape chain-smoking, or pacing up and down Broadway with the delivery trucks, or glaring at the coffee machine, importuning it to hurry up while I held my coffee cup under the spout where the pot should be. Once, in San Francisco, I came home to a disemboweled alarm clock, which lay in pieces on my bed, while the wall above it had a new, alarm-clock-shaped dent. The culprit apparently my landlady. I wonder how many hours it took for her to crack?

Maybe I have been out here the requisite number of years (7) to attain the fabled West Coast state of relaxedness, or maybe that relaxedness has fled from LA and San Francisco to Hawaii and Vancouver, and I've just caught up with it here.
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Does any one know of any Vancouver Lecture Series other than Necessary Voices and the Public Library events? I am really missing City Arts & Lectures in San Francisco.
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Ray's broken record on copyright law is music to beat the band with (how does that expression go?). Hear, hear.
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Can't believe I'd never heard about Alice Notley before she was shortlisted for the Griffin this year. Here is an interview with Notley, 2 poems from Disobedience, and a review of Disobedience, all in Jacket, which I also can't believe I've never heard about before. Someone hasn't been tattling loudly enough. Who is it?
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Thinking about:

• The Battle between Carnival and Lent, puritans, work and fun
• Why Bother? and civic motivation. Smith says, provocatively:
  Even that otherwise egregious warlock of Whittier, Richard Nixon, practised domestic affairs in the tradition of social democracy. He was, in fact, our last liberal president, an amazing claim until one considers that he favored a negative income tax; revenue sharing; a guaranteed income for children; supplementary programs for the aged, blind and disabled; uniform application of the food stamp program; better health insurance programs for low income families; aid to community colleges; aid to low-income college students; the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and increased funding for elementary and secondary schools.

  Hm. I don't know about that.

• Television. I watched television yesterday for 2.5 hours in preparation for an interview with a media mogul. It was a strange and disorienting experience. Television has become younger, louder, and more sexualized since the last time I watched it 10 years ago. It has been said that TV is an accurate depiction of how we see ourselves, but it doesn't speak to me. Maybe it is the depiction of how the people actually watching it see themselves whereas the people not watching suffer different illusions. And if the people watching it see themselves there, it is significant that none of the people on TV are watching TV -- that somehow got eliminated in the mimesis. Recently I was sitting around with a group of 8-9 artists trying to figure out who we knew that had a TV because their artist collective had recently been filmed for a segment on CityTV. None of us knew anyone. The people who make TV must watch TV, right? But maybe the people filmed to be on TV don't watch TV?
• Is it still true that the avg. American watches 6 hrs. of TV a day?
• Who are the unsung heroes of our day and age? Samuel Mockbee, now dead of leukemia, is my hero. He introduced an original way of changing the world.

Today on the phone I mentioned that September 11th is coming up, and R. said that I clearly didn't have a TV -- that there have been continuous reminders and events and shows about it, and that's just in Canada! On the Numb Magazine site, there is an article about Steven Earle and his song John Walker's Blues, told from the perspective of John Walker Lindh, captured last year with the Taliban, and widely portrayed by the U.S. media as a traitor:

In a press release, Earle "makes clear that the song is not intended as an endorsement of Lindh or his cause: “I don’t condone what he did. Still, he’s a 20-year-old kid. My son Justin is almost exactly Walker’s age. Would I be upset if he suddenly turned up fighting for the Islamic Jihad? Sure, absolutely. Fundamentalism, as practiced by the Taliban, is the enemy of real thought, and religion too. But there are circumstances.... He didn’t just sit on the couch and watch the box, get depressed and complain. He was a smart kid, he graduated from high school early, the culture here didn’t impress him, so he went out looking for something to believe in.” The article goes on to note that the most successful country song about September 11th is the Toby Keith’s current single “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (the Angry American): The big dog will fight/ When you rattle his cage/ And you’ll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A/ ’Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass/ It’s the American way”)

The album Jerusalem, on which John Walker's Blues can be heard, will be released on September 24. (And who did that great two-tailed snake drawing on the cover?! Looks like it might be a Clayton brothers piece??)
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This coming Friday is the third annual S.W.A.R.M., when all of the artist-run centres in Vancouver will be open in the evening. I'm looking forward to it. There's a party afterwards at The Alibi Room.

Tonight, the Vantasy party at the Contemporary Art Gallery.
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My sister Corey sends me this story about a Bay Area couple being evicted from a treehouse where they lived for 12 years, in one of the most densely populated parts of the West Coast -- San Bruno is on the way from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley, and the park is between 101 and 280, the two major area highways.

I thought that this part was interesting:

I really like to work. I'm happiest when I'm working, and tend to think that fun is most fun after a long stint of labor (one of the best short stories about this is Work by Denis Johnson, in Jesus' Son, one of my all time favorite books). My brother-in-law used to laugh about this tendency in my sister and me. Both Corey and I thought it was a reasonable undertaking to wash the car by hand, but Brian was amused and said washing the car by hand was the perfect expression of our essentially puritan nature. Washing the car, he said, takes a whole lot of time and effort, has barely noticeable results, and can be done for $8.00 in 15 minutes down at the car wash.

I've been thinking about this as I work on a quilt, sewing the entire thing by hand, even though I have my grandmother's sewing machine. It's just more fun to sew it by hand.
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Dinka asked me to recommend some books, and at first I couldn't think of anything good, "Who's the modern Dostoevsky" is what she asked, and that certainly had me stumped. Bret Easton Ellis ain't him. But she and Derek left with Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson, Concrete by Thomas Bernhard, A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Suttree by Cormac McCarthy and The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald.
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