Last night I dreamt I was in a gallery looking at particularly bad art, and there were two girls there – one was P-, and they were glowering at me; I was feeling defensive, and when we got to talking the subject came up, they acknowledging visible discomfort, I saying in return, ‘Yes you look like you’re ready to attack me,’ but then the conversation shifted as to how they were discussing my writing, and that while they liked the show, they couldn’t help but agree with my ideas, and were curious as to what I thought. Perhaps —– —– was one of these people (talked to her and P- last night at the openings) but then a curator was giving a tour of the work, saying that some of the work was based on memories of their childhoods, and I interrupted at this point to say, ‘I question whether work based on childhood isn’t in effect childish, and I’d prefer adult work for adults’. This silenced the curator. Later, she told me that she couldn’t think of a rebuttal, and I felt bad, as I’d humiliated her.
Thursday 15 April 2004
Christian Boltanski walks along the street, waiting and watching for the streetcar, which has failed to arrive. Caught in the backward glances every couple of minutes, he fails to notice Leanna, who walks out of the corner store, having just purchased bubble gum and a bottle of water. He walks into her, and after the shuffling has completed itself, they both engage in apologies. Then he asks, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ and she replies, ‘I don’t think so.’ He squints and turns and walks away. The streetcar has still not come. The buildings frame a scene consisting almost solely of headlights.
Some guy walked into me today, she says, when she tells him about it later. He in turn tells her of the time a woman in an electric wheelchair ran over his foot. ‘I was waiting for the streetcar, ‘ he says, ‘and it was cold, I had my hood up, so I had no peripheral vision and I was reading the newspapers in the boxes, when suddenly I feel this pressure on my foot. The woman mumbles ‘shume’ and I look down to see that my right foot is pinned under her wheel. I can’t budge. I say, ‘Can you back up, my foot is stuck’. She complies. She takes off, and I’m left with a sore foot. I figured I’d at least have a bruise but I didn’t.
‘You’re lucky you didn’t lose any toes,’ she says.
With the acquisition of the old photo album today: As I was looking at it, weighing the idea of spending ten dollars for it, I noticed that a large number of its pages were unused. The idea occurred to me, to fill this book with contemporary photographs, to have 1910 faded black and white at the beginning, and 2001 at the end. As well, the person selling the book had Carte de Visite for sale. I had browsed through them earlier, and had a strange feeling, of looking at 19th century faces, and of course, the image of William Gibson’s imagined art work, Read us the books and the Names of the Dead.
When I got this book home, I scanned in the images of the carte de visite I had bought, and glued them into the book. I had made a sign, which read, Prelude, the 19th Century, and then, those faces, those beards, how strange they were! It is a very different world we live in. As I placed those images on the glass of the scanner, especially the one that is dated and signed, 27th August 1866, I thought of the long journey they had made, and what a strange resting place that image had found on glass between plastic and electricity. The images appear on the screen, a technology unimagined when they represented the earliest days of reproduction.
Using my Palm, I was able to determine the dates of three photographs. The first two are in the album, and are obviously taken at around the same time, since they are meant to echo one another. A picture preceding these was of a grave stone, clearly marked with a date of death of 27 May 1910. The grave is fresh, and there are flowers placed around it. I thus knew that these images were around 1910. I also noticed that the last day was a Saturday the 30th. Using my Palm, I was able to determine that it was either April 1910, September 1911, or November 1912, since those are the only months containing 30 days upon which the 30th fell on a Saturday. Closer inspection of the calendar showed that the weekends were colored differently than the weekdays, and that the first Monday was coloured differently as well. Aha! Labour day! It is September 1911. Just to make sure, I checked on the net to see when Labour Day came about, and it was established in the 1880s, so I am thus reasonably sure that these two photographs were taken that September.
The other photo, once again, a family, posed in front of a calendar. This wasn’t clear, so I scanned it in, and zoomed it up to a legible size. Manipulating the brightness and the contrast, I was able to see a clear date emerge: 1920. And, once again using the Palm, I scanned through the months for the number combination as it existed in the image: that is primarily, a Monday the 2nd, a Sunday the 8th, Sunday the 15th and a Sunday the 22nd. The Sunday the 1st wasn’t visible, so I thought that it must have been washed out by the flash. I found that August 1920 fits that description, and thus I wrote that on the back of the photo. Now regarding that grave: I want to find this grave, I want to stand where they stood and take the same photograph, only in 21st Century terms: that is, a colour snapshot, 35mm. I want to paste this in the back of the book, at roughly the same place, to provide a symmetry, and to show what 90 years does to the trees and to graves. The grave is that of a Charles Hayne, who died on “27 May 1910, at the age of 55 years 7 months”. I tried to use the net to find some records of him – this of course yielded no results and frustrated me. I now want to go to the archives downtown, and look up his death record, to find where he is buried. I think the person who sold me the book said that it came from Bridgeport, which is down around Kitchener. If I can find this information, this summer, it would be a project to accomplish.
Just before waking the other morning, I dreamt I was in a club, it was someone’s birthday party, and I think it coincided with my own. Selena and Pol were the MC’s, so it had the feeling, revelry, and crowd of a Hive party, and people were coming on stage to read poems to the birthday person. I had a poem in my pocket and was looking forward to being called onstage. Something happened, and that didn’t actually take place … I went to the bathroom, and the stalls were divided so that one faced the other. There was a tall blonde girl in the stall in front of me … the wall that usually divided the space was missing, but I still peed nonchalantly. Then the girl punches me in the forehead, but in such a way that the effect was nothing more than a loud smack, and I was like, “What the fuck you do that for?” She then got really aggressive, and I caught her hands, and she began pushing me back. So here we are tussling and she basically saying that I was going to go on a date with her …. it wasn’t a sexual assault as much as it was a ‘dating’ assault. I’m like, sure, but calm down and can’t we talk about this without you trying to rip my hair out? Our fingers continually intertwining and mixing, hands squeezing, as I try to control her arms which want to grab me … and all the while I’m thinking, couldn’t we stop for a minute to wash our hands? I woke up thinking that my dreams are too fucked lately to write down.
I sat in her kitchen
I laid on her floor
Beneath the blanket that her brother bought.
Of course I heard that story
And many others that night in November
when longing was silence, and longing was unsaid
We walked to the corner store
Up the street from where C used to live
And there we saw a dancing Santa
which she found hilarious
And I found dumb
but said nothing
Finally, told her in a moment of appropriateness
that I was annoyed that she kissed me and acted like it was a mistake
I went home, she called and was crying
Confessions begged themselves
She apologized that I knew her
“I’m so sorry that you know me”
She had fed me fish and potatoes. It was very good.
And she had fed me dried fish bits and Clare orange pop
like I used to have at Grandmère’s house.
The streets were wet, I was biking home once again
feeling bad. I was reading Heidegger when she called.
The problems of being.
I have problems being. I thought of manifestos to write.
Statements to make. Thing I must tell people.
Spent the early afternoon reading, thinking, writing, in Nanny’s bedroom. It’s too bright though, and the inside of my eyeballs are lit up like lamps, and the floaters are really distracting. Around 2 ATL I put on my new red hat and go for a walk – up the treacherous hill, past the Catholic church, and turn left into town. Go to Tim Hortons, have a double double (the second for the day, since Michelle delivered some to us earlier) and sat and thought. Two memories came to mind. First, as I sat at T.H., was the dream I had as a child in the 80s. At that time I dreamt I was in Campbellton, and bombs were falling from the sky. Soviet planes flew overhead. The explosions caused the sidewalks to come apart in their square sections. This had been a nightmare, not terrifying as I recall, but anxiety causing. I told my Dad about it the next day and he told me not to worry, we wouldn’t be bombed (this was equally true of Clare as it was of Campbellton). My thought sitting at Tim Hortons and looking over the town was that it would survive a nuclear war. There’s no reason to bomb it at all. This also means it would be a good place to hide a war criminal (though in a town like this, one would have to be careful about rumours).
As I walked back, approaching the playground by the school, I remembered the time (again in the 80s) that the plow had created a great mound of snow in the front of the school (Jean Marie-Gay) we played on that mound at recess until in melted. I lost my mitten playing on it. We would climb to the top and then jump down, and also slide on our bums, since we were all wearing snow suits.
Having been watching as this decade unravels, this time without a name (people do not speak of the decade the way they said “the 80s” and “the 90s” since no one knows what to say —> I find this quite odd, since it’ll be another 20 years before it’s truly applicable again, and thus will go out of fashion —> but then again, every century has delt with this haven’t they, and Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot about being the first to climb the Eiffel Tower, “a million years ago, back in the 90s”. That is, the 1890s, which brought a smile to me when I first heard it in the Shakespeare by The Sea production of 1999).
Having been watching the decade unravel, watching the style of the 80s turn to the style of the 90s, and now, the style of the 90s turn into this decade, my feeling is that this time is both more prosperous and stylistically appealing, but that it is also far more vacuous. One could almost compare it to the screen of a laptop (upon which this is being typed at the moment). The liquid crystal display fades in and out depending on the angle, but also presents a rich colour when viewed dead on. But it is only an inch or less thick. The increasing defeat of those who believe there is something more than buying things, and the increasing presence of the “inauthentic” in all ways, creates a shiny mirror of what? A mirror too shows a world without depth, a world reversed from what we’d consider the actual.
At least I have this laptop here —> now with cd in the drive, headphones on, and Fischerspooner singing about hypermediocrity.
You can go to agriculture school for years, but in the end it all depends on the rain. IE KNOWLEDGE ONLY GETS YOU SO FAR.
There is the authority of tradition, whihch sometimes amounts to the testimony of a complacent history. The sort of thing passes itself off as a type of authority based on experience, which is more legitimate kind of authority.
“What century lies before us? The passing of Bloomsday this week made evident that while significant things happened in June 1904, it wasn’t until the 1920s that they were made known. Yesterday the prospect of a 22nd Century with coastal cities underwater as depicted in A.I. seemed all too probable. The prospect of a Conservative Government next month, and the ad on the radio for “free gas” shows how dangerously disengaged people are. Historians can call this period The Democratic Crisis. Last century showed us that times would change after a great war, that society before 1914 was still very much that of the 19th Century; we have no marker to delimitate the actual context for our time. Terrorist attacks are nothing more than spectacular fireworks, but they have not yet led to a conference to develop new treaties and new territories.”
Just now, thinking of how rotten that movie was last night, how entirely forgettable despite being charming and entertaining and at times funny [The Ladykillers]- makes me aware of living in 2004 – the same sick ennui of a decade still figuring itself out, as in 1994, when Forrest Gump came out, and that stupid movie Speed which inspired men’s haircuts. (And the real influence on hair styles for the past ten years, Friends began). It is an utterly miserable time to be alive and intelligent, just as it was then. Only now I am 29 and not 19.
The sickest TV show was on tonight – The Swan – where they give some plain person plastic surgery and a new wardrobe and then humiliate them by keeping their new attractive appearance from them until the dramatic unveiling of the mirror. It’s a nightmare of exploited self-loathing and the propaganda of physical beauty over intellectual development (which almost always leads one to an attractive appearance in spite of physique) … and what I just wrote there can be critiqued by saying that nowadays, one decides to look good not only through grooming and fashion – available to all since time began – but is now accessible through the reshaping available through the surgeon’s knife. So be it … I don’t really have that much of a problem with plastic surgery – but I do have a problem with indulging in people’s self-loathing in order to sell cars and whatever other shit was on between the dramatic scenes.
Glimpsing the end of that show was like seeing the disturbing parodies of television shows that one used to see in dystopian movies set in the 21st Century. This is what we’ve come too … it’s not enough that the graduates of art schools – supposed artists every one – have traded in their talent and vision for useless products and bags of cocaine.
May 2004. These dark years of being lied to and being told over and over what to think and feel are over. People are too busy watching the latest DVD’s now, or playing with the latest PDA. Is this a return to the carefree days of 2000, when the world’s conscience consisted of fucking organic hippies protesting in the streets? They’ve gone back to being irrelevant, since as Buddhism ten years before, the organic thing is hip with the middle class.