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
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.
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.