zoetrope

  • here
  • who
  • prologue
  • galleries
    • data ditties
    • i'm. here. now.
    • reality - the making of it
    • iamMIA
    • kindness
    • le coin
    • word works | words work
    • Hatzic Prairie
    • colour
  • writing
  • love
  • here
  • who
  • prologue
  • galleries
    • data ditties
    • i'm. here. now.
    • reality - the making of it
    • iamMIA
    • kindness
    • le coin
    • word works | words work
    • Hatzic Prairie
    • colour
  • writing
  • love

in the details

11/27/2022

0 Comments

 
I have to confess to feeling pretty crushed. Maybe I should turn off the news, close the virtual pages of my online newspapers, close the curtains, close my eyes, tune out completely. Tuning out seems to be the direction I've taken to greater and lesser degrees in most dimensions of my life since returning to Montreal. So when I encounter warmth in something I take comfort.

I recently encountered warmth in details surely selected by their presenters for the quiet impact they offer to anyone attuned to detail — like me. Here are three little things that have recently heartened me:
  1. the pendant worn by the EU Home Affairs Commissioner, Ylva Johansson, as she discusses sex trafficking of Ukraine women fleeing to Poland for safety
  2. Tracy Chapman’s eponymous 1988 album set on prominent display behind soccer commentator of Men in Blazers fame, Roger Bennet, discussing the horrendous context of the World Cup
  3. new UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk’s desk plaque: the future is non-binary

​I don’t know why the adage says, the devil’s in the details. I think I’m going to look for the angels in the details.
0 Comments

the fastest way to find myself is to ....

10/23/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
Fourteen months into the pandemic, I was waylaid by a lassitude I couldn’t kick. I had it bad — I couldn't even stay inside a novel because my capacity for deep and sustained focus was gone. Then I read Adam Grant’s 4/19/21 NYT opinion piece, There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing.

Yup. That’s it. That’s me, I thought.
  • trouble concentrating
  • somewhat joyless
  • somewhat aimless
  • stagnation
  • dulled motivation
  • dulled delight
  • dwindled drive
  • indifferent to my indifference

Grant outlined some antidote action against languishing which I took to heart, and still do — bring yourself to things that offer:
  • a sense of mastery — so, think: making progress on something
  • a sense of mindfulness — so, something that harnesses your full attention to focus on a single task
  • a sense of mattering — (I love this one) do something that makes a difference to others

To get myself there, I went over to my work bench and fiddled with some paper, sticks, pens, glue, thread, and whatever else was laying around that day. Eventually, this is what I made. It has a lot of different names — fortune teller; chatterbox; coin-coin (in French) — whatever it’s called, here's the one I made as my gateway to getting out of languishing. 
Picture
It says: 
              the fast way to
                                          find myself is to
Then I answered my own question:
​              the fast way to

                                          find myself is to
Picture
For me, making something is a sure way out of a slump; to get myself out of languishing.

It might be different for you.

Try it out. Give it a whirl!

Make one for yourself. And then answer the question:
​              the fast way to

                                          find myself is to
Here's how it works.
Picture

​Take a square piece of paper and follow these folding instructions.

Once folded, word by word, write on each of the 8 triangular tabs pointing down:

     1 • the
     2 • 
fastest
     3 • way
     4 • to
     5 • find
     6 • myself
     7 • is
     8 • to


* you can use the photo below as a guide because the 8 words don't run in sequence

Picture
Next, give some thought to how you would complete the statement. What does lead you back to yourself?

When you have your answer, open up the flaps and write it down on the inside.

You can make as many as you like. You might find that your answer changes. Mine do. Yet each one is true. I save mine. I set them atop tables and windowsills around my apartment as friendly reminders.

I’ve really taken this to heart. I keep this one – make something – on prominent view as a mindfulness touchpoint, to remind myself to notice how I’m feeling, and then, super helpfully, what I can do next. And you know what? It works every time.

0 Comments

In anticipation of more Better Things.

4/20/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
​Its final season (S05) is soon ... well, soon for me. I'm waiting for the last episode to air April 25 and then I'm binging the whole thing. Till then, in no particular order, what I would ask Pamela Adlon, and Sam Fox. Wouldn't that be divine? A chat with Pamela Adlon.
 
This piece contains spoilers ...
Hello Pamela Aldon,
 
Let's start by talking about food.
Sam is a provider, but not just that. Sam is a nurturer, some of which she expresses through her cooking (she’s often in the kitchen making the most amazing meals and snacks). Does Sam see it that way? Does Sam see herself as a nurturer? Or is she just into cooking?
 
And, Sam cooks a lot (a lot), and what she makes looks deliriously delicious. But, we almost never see her or anyone else eating all those meals she makes. What’s up with that? Dramatically-speaking, is there a difference between showing a cooking scene and an eating scene?
 
 
 
Let's talk about music.
The soundtrack across all 4 seasons is stellar, and often the lyrics replace dialogue—how does that come about? Do you discuss the script and intentions for dialogue with the music supervisor? Is there already dialogue in the script that gets replaced with song lyrics?
 
The soundtrack is all over the map in terms of eras and genres, but there’s a through line—a consistent feeling. What is that for you? What’s the mood, the space, that you’re going for? Is it aligned with that the mood/space that the Fox family lives within? It all feels nostalgic and contemporary at the same time—or there’s a strain—again, a vibe, a feeling—that transcends time. This continuity seems to anchor to and through Sam: she is a woman of her time—whatever that time is.
Picture
Let's talk about Sam
Before what reads as a denouement in S04 E10, “Listen to the Roosters”, Sam seems to us to be experiencing some of the symptoms of peri-menopause, like her patchy pubic hair. As a middle-aged woman myself, I found this incredibly reassuring. It reminds me of a scene in Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener, 2013) when Julia Louis Dreyfus’ character discovers that her boyfriend, played by James Gandolfini, is missing a tooth—which she notices when they’re kissing. As she’s telling a friend about it she says she finds it sexy. Twenty years after a bike accident, I had to have a tooth pulled, and have since walked around with a gap in my mouth—Holofcener’s scene reassured me in the same way as yours did.
 
Some would probably characterize this disclosure about Sam—patchy pubic hair loss, discussing this facet of (female) middle-aging—as brave. Is it? And who is it, at the end of the day, who’s brave? Sam? Or, Pamela?
 
Does Sam has boundary issues, or has she chosen radical transparency?
 
 
 
Let's talk about being a Woman
Who is Sam as a woman? Particularly in this culture, and even more particularly in the context of LA. How does she perceive herself on the femininity continuum and within the social strictures that dominate how we define and perceive woman along that measurement.
 
It strikes me that the two filmic storylines that helped me feel comfortable about intimate (sort of female) “frailties” “losses” “shortcomings”—yours about pubic hair and Holofcener’s about a missing tooth—are both told by woman. Do you think, ultimately, women are more forgiving, more accepting, of our bodily foibles, if not achieving equanimity then at least acquiescence? (Even though women are more relentlessly put upon to perform beauty and perfection in a particular way.)
 
 
 
OK. Now let's talk about Motherhood.
Is Sam a good mother? Does she think she is? Do her kids think she is? In S02E04 Max exclaims to her mother “you didn’t do anything that a mother does”, and after some back-and-forth about the issue Sam exclaims back, “you’re right, I’m a shitty mother”. But Sam is holding back so much in that scene. Sam holds back so much from Max (and all her daughters) about their father’s shortcomings and the complicated strings that push and pull outside the view of children. And that is what a mother does. Including not rescuing her own reputation in the eyes of her children at the expense of the father’s. Do the girls really know this deep down?
 
What about Phil? Was she a good mother to Sam when Sam was a girl? These days Phil is somewhere between a bit “off” and totally unhinged, and Sam (appropriately) has a bit of a short fuse with her. So what about in their past? Sam seems to have achieved remarkable equanimity vis-à-vis her mother Phil. How did she get there?
 
Will Sam go through empty-nest syndrome (big time)? She is so centered in her place of motherhood—in the first seasons wearing the “maman” nameplate necklace—it seems like the departure of all three girls from the house will bring about an enormous emptiness. Will it?
 
In S02E02, “Rising", Sam leaves for the weekend—off for a girlfriends’ get-away to splash around at the home her friend Sunny’s uber rich boyfriend. Off in a private plane no less. Off to where a hired mariachi band greets the women when they arrive at Mark’s villa from the airport. Barely arrived though, Sam leaves. She gets Sanjay, one of the servants, to drive her away in a golf-cart escape and she goes to a modest seaside motel. Then Sam leaves again. We see her driving a black Dodge Challenger as picks up her girls, one by one, from their weekend babysitting places, and they all go the beach. A different get-away with her own girls (all of which we witness to the anthemic totem tune, Rising, by Corrina Repp.) But. Sam is still alone at the seaside motel. It’s been a fantasy. Where does Sam want to be?
Let's talk about the acting
Of all the girls, Max and Sam seem to have the most arch dynamic together. Is it because Max is full-on in hormonal teen time, or is there something in their relationship? Is all the tetchy stuff with the girls scripted or is any of it improvised? It sometimes sounds improvised, or seems so—especially with Max. Sometimes it looks like, Mikey Madison, the actor playing Max, is about to crack up.
 
What were you looking for in the actors who auditioned for the roles of the three daughters? Where you looking for discrete traits as well as a traits that operated within the three as sisters and daughters together?
Picture

Let's talk about the men

How is Sam feeling about men? She says she’s sworn off them. Has she? Is she angry about men? Relatedly, was Sam negligent or a push-over in the separation settlement with her ex-husband Zander? Was she a push-over in the marriage? In fact, how did Sam even marry a guy like Zander in the first place? He seems so louche and flaccid and Sam is so full of fire and power. It’s very hard to imagine how that relationship ever happened.
 
Relatedly, everyone in Sam’s immediate family—all female—have what our culture would deem to be male names: Sam, Max, Phil, Duke, Frankie. And Sam’s brother’s name is Marion, a name more conventionally thought of as female. What’s up with that?
​

Ghosts
What are your thoughts on ghosts? They make appearances across the seasons. And, more generally, what about energy? In Get Lit, S03E11, the episode starts with Duke and Phil clearing / smudging the house. In this same episode Sam’s father’s ghost appears. And in other episodes other ghosts appear too. There's S02E09, White Rock, where Duke sees the ghost of the dead woman. And in S04E10, Listen to the Roosters, Duke has a conversation with an old woman while seated on a bench near a food cart. At one point the woman proclaims to Duke that she can see the future. In the same conversation, and after Duke has said that she never wants to get married and have children, the old woman, who herself never married and never had children, talks to Duke about the role men played in her life, noting that they’d given her music, love, danger, ideas, adventure, all of which shaped her. But, as the woman says next, she’s preferred being alone and feeling good about being alone with herself. So, are men a distraction? Taking away from women who they are capable of being?
 
The woman on the bench vanishes—another ghost? Or is Duke actually talking to her future self?
 
It seems to be Duke who most intersects with otherworldly phenomenon. How did that come about in her life?
Picture
And, Sam. A bit more on Sam.
In S04E03, Sam walks in on Frankie who is in bed with a boy. Sam goes to talk to Max about it. Part of the conundrum for Sam is that Frankie is with a boy, and says so to Max, plaintively pointing out to Max that she said once that Frankie is a boy (S01E10), to which Max replies, “mom, I never said that”. It’s not true. But Sam doesn’t confront Max with that lie. How come?
 
In fact, Sam demonstrates enormous largesse towards those who have fallen short. Sunny’s ex, Jeff, is a really great case in point—Sam extends and huge “OK, we mess up in certain realms” to Jeff post-divorce, and even when he messes up again (S02E07, Blackout). But Sam is still is pretty ballast about it—she’s not thrown. She simply see Jeff’s utter mess, which seems to liberate Sam even further. How has Sam achieved such balance? Such compassion? Is that what she has?
 
Would Sam move to New Orleans? Is Sam a beast of LA? It seems very much her ecosystem. Could she live anywhere else? (Although, having been in New Orleans myself, and being someone chatty in the way that Sam is, it’s a great city for chatting people up, which is most definitely central to Sam’s ecosystem.)

Episodes
Do you have a favorite episode?
 
In re-watching the series, S02E09, White Rock, really struck me. It seems to be about legacy. Family legacy: those lost, those stolen (the Indigenous man in the museum exclaiming his family belongings should be returned); even legacies that linger at the edge of our lives—the ghost the Duke sees and then makes peace with.
  • What was on your mind when you wrote this episode?
  • What is about for you?
  • Duke is especially firm and fierce in this episode (and Max seems more fragile than usual—she has that crying jag when leaving White Rock).
    • Who is Duke?
    • Who is she in her family lineage, and who is she on her own?
 
 
What’s with all the rain in S04?
 
 
Lastly. What are better things?

0 Comments

The Lost Daughter

3/27/2022

0 Comments

 
Tonight, it's the Oscar's. I'm rooting for a few things, a few people. In anticipation of the night, I share the conversation points I would love to get into with Maggie Gyllenhaal, the writer and director of The Lost Daughter and whose film is nominated in three categories. (I'm rooting for her.)

I found the film mesmerizing and as soon as I'd finished it I wrote down what most struck me. It came out in bullet-points, as questions I'd want to ask Gyllenhaal. I tidied that list up a bit, but it's still a bit elliptical, like someone snuck a list of questions into some paragraphs.

This piece contains spoilers ... 
The Lost Daughter
Leda is 48 and within her we still see her firm and fiery younger self—a self that surfaces full force in the flashbacks to Leda as a young woman, a mother, married, with two young daughters. Now Leda’s traveling alone and settled into an island village for an extended stay.
 
Within the first minutes of the film, Gyllenhaal gives us Leda’s body above the surface and below as she floats in the sea, paddles and stands in the water, watching what's around her; all 48 years of her in a bathing suit. In this way we understand two things about Leda: she has a body (which mothers distinctly understand from conception onwards) that engages with the world around her (swimming, dancing); and, she is a woman who is unapologetic in her solitude—at the beach, going to dinner, having drinks, at the cinema, alone.
 
We also learn, more gradually, that Leda sets boundaries: she won't move from her beach chair when asked by the matriarch of a boisterous family overtaking the beach and wanting more room; she confronts the disruptive drunks at the theater; she asks Lyle to leave her to her meal at the restaurant; she won't let Will up to her flat to discuss the tryst plans he has with Nina; she leaves her husband and children.
 
Leda wants things and pursues them in ways we’re conditioned to allow men to do, but not women. Maybe the most striking example is when, in flashback, we see Leda’s thesis advisor come to her dorm door at the academic conference they’re attending after her work was discussed in awed terms by another scholar in his address earlier that day. Now at her door, this advisor appears, humbled and a little bewildered, to ask Leda to join an invite-only dinner reserved for the conference rock-stars. Seated beside her stuffy advisor at the large table, Leda is bidden to join the more flamboyant academic who referenced her work earlier, and she re-seats herself with him and his rowdy pals at some distance from her advisor, relocating to the cutting edge, where all the fun is. Brazenly and unapologetically, Leda grabs onto the praise, going to where the high bar of new challenges and achievement reside. Women don't do this. Men do. Leda did.
 
Leda is also complicated. And weird, and maybe even a little nuts. Is she? As a younger woman, there was a slightly unhinged vibe to her in that what-ignites-me-extinguishes-me kind of way. Now, older, Leda seems slightly more driven by grief than the drive that propelled her toward the independence she grabbed onto earlier in her life. Now, on this island, in a gesture she can’t explain and we may find hard to understand too, Leda surreptitiously steals from a little girl at the beach a doll like her own long ago—a doll that she gave to her young spirited daughter Bianca who marred it and that Leda then chucked out the window where it broke apart on the road below. Now Leda tends to this stolen doll, mothering the doll, cleaning her, preening her, buying her a new outfit; sleeping with her. This looks like grief to me. This looks like the crazy that grief can coax out of us.
 
What is Nina’s attraction to Leda? Of course there's the defiance—Leda stands up to Nina's clan, that band of thugs she's married into. Is there more? Nina had to have trusted Leda an awful lot to openly acknowledge her sexual affair with Will, a betrayal that her husband, whacked on machismo, would surely punish brutally; in fact, Nina goes so far as to want Leda to collude in the orchestration of the next sexual betrayal by way of lending her and Will Leda’s apartment for a few afternoon hours.
 
But Leda’s betrayal of Nina's daughter, stealing Elena's doll, is what crosses the line for Nina: it's okay for a woman to betray her husband, but not her child. Did Leda break the code of motherhood? After all, Leda found and returned Elena to her mother at the beach when the little girl had wandered off and no one could find her. Now Leda’s just stolen the girl’s doll. How did Leda think Nina would react when she confessed to stealing the doll? Any differently? And why didn't she lie? Why didn't she say she found the doll and cleaned her up to return to Elena?
 
Who’s the lost daughter? As a mother myself, I think a lot about my own mother (from whom I surely learned some of how I mother) and what I feel most acutely is being a daughter who’s lost her mother (she died when I was barely a mother myself)—ultimately, leaving me the lost daughter. Is Leda a lost daughter?
 
And we haven’t yet talked about the cinematography, which is sublime. Nor have we talked about the acting, particularly that of Olivia Coleman, which is equally sublime. Coleman’s performance strikes a remarkable balance of depth and levity, giving us a woman who is confident, capable, and possibly a little cuckoo too. Someone both clipped and compassionate, self-actualized and encumbered.
 
Above all, Leda is defiant, and so is Maggie Gyllenhaal. When and where in contemporary culture is the silent consensus so blatantly broken open for us to watch a woman, a rotund one at that, eat an ice cream treat out in the open, lounging on a beach chair, her bathing suit visible though a gauzy beach dress, alone.
0 Comments

perspective

2/24/2022

0 Comments

 
I sometimes have restless nights and so stream CBC Radio One Vancouver because the time change lands me in the middle of excellent overnight programming. Last night was like that. As I slept and woke, and work and slept, I caught multiple hourly news reports broadcasting in real time the invasion of Ukraine. As the hours progressed, I listened to Margaret Evans reporting first from her downtown Kyiv hotel room to eventually reporting from an underground subway station that folks were using as improvised bunkers to evade the bombs exploding above them outside.

Listening to Evans’ steady voice, I kept thinking about the trucker-protesters here in Canada (and their inspired “compatriots” in New Zealand, Belgium, France, Finland, and the US), some of whom we heard in downtown Ottawa call for the execution of journalists because, they claimed without substantiation, journalists are in bed with government and are propagandists misleading the public with deliberate lies, etc. I didn’t hear a peep from any of the other protesters, nor their exuberant boosters, condemning such vile and violent calls to action. Nor did I hear a peep from them when journalists were spat at and screamed at with expletives, though not executed. This gaping silence was accompanied, in equal measure, with colossal hubris, otherwise known as a total lack of humility — the disingenuous swagger of self-righteousness.

Journalists like Margaret Evans, and thousands more, go to work with helmets and flak jackets on. They wade into raging crowds to ask questions and discuss what’s happening. They don’t have body guards. They don’t arrive in armored vehicles – not in downtown Ottawa anyway. (Margaret Evens, though, might be climbing into one when she emerges from that subway station-turned bomb shelter).

Part of a journalist’s job can involve putting themselves in harm’s way, even on domestic stories like the current one in Canada's capital city, a county that enjoys an international reputation of being “nice”. The least these protesters, their boosters, and their spectators at home can do is call out and unequivocally condemn the rallying cries to kill journalists, and condemn all other manner of violence visited upon them as they simply try to do their job. A job that might get them killed, even in Ottawa where bombs aren’t raining from the sky.

So while Margaret Evens reports to us from a makeshift bomb shelter, the trucker freedom-fighters in Ottawa have installed a hot tub in the downtown of the nation's capital where some cavort in the hot frothy water while knocking back a few cold ones
 — it looks a lot less like they're fighting for their freedom a lot more like rocking their freedom to me. 
0 Comments

30 years on

2/14/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
​            February 14, 2022
​Thirty years ago today I was blowing the smoke from my contraband Marlboro into the frigid night through the narrow opening between the window frame and its window, the cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. I was visiting L in Charlottetown and we’d gone out to the country house that a friend of hers had lent us for a few days. I was on the mend from a recent break up, and still lingered in the territory we occupy after a loved one takes their life, in my case my father ten months earlier.
 
Two days later I was back in Montreal and a day after that my son was at a sleep-over I’d planned so I could go see Primal Scream at Club Soda. But in the grips of loss I’d changed my mind and I was lying on my couch watching Thelma and Louise instead, letting my concert ticket go to waste. Part way through the movie, two police officers were at my door with the news. I let them in and they sat across from me, not far from the frozen movie frame that was paused on the tv screen. I didn’t want them to think I was shallow for watching it. It was before the internet and cell phones, so who knows how they found me. Police work. They were there to tell me that my mother had been found dead in her Vancouver apartment. Suicide. Valentine’s Day. I apologized to them for having to come out on a cold night to deliver such news to someone.

Picture
A decade later I was married for a time and Valentine’s Day was fraught for him, on behalf of me. Somewhere in the mid 2010s he thought we ought to embrace the day, in my Mom’s honour. And so started the tradition of going to a big hotel bar for a drink on each Valentine’s. Which is what I’m doing today. The 30th anniversary of her death.
 
My mom lived with mental illness. Both my parents did. She raised me on her own, living on social assistance with the support of an exceptionally kind social worker. We lived in tiny one-bedroom apartments near Vancouver’s Kitsilano Beach (a fiscal impossibility now), me with the bedroom because she believed I needed privacy. She slept in the living room, first on a hideaway bed, and later, in a place a bit bigger, on a single bed pushed into a corner in the living room. When I moved out at 17 she moved into a bachelor apartment in a building for out-patients. There, we found another corner for her single bed, positioning it in such a way as to create a living area that felt separate from where she slept.
 
On her birthdays I would offer to either clean her apartment (though she was pretty tidy) and make dinner, or take her out. She always chose out. Who wouldn’t. Sometimes we went to Vancouver’s Four Seasons Hotel lobby bar, or the one at Hotel Georgia. Of course we were way out of our price range, which was part of the fun.

Picture
The husband is long gone, but not my Valentine’s Day hotel bar tradition. My mom would love it. So would my father. (I eat a donut on his birthday because he loved going to his local Krispy Kreme in Miami where he chatted up everyone seated at the counter with their snacks.) I love this tradition. I feel so much closeness with my mom on this day, doing this thing. I can feel our silly thrill as I sit amidst the tonier well-to-do. Since 2011 when I became single again, I often invite a friend or two to join me on my tab. Until 2016 that was in Vancouver. From 2017-2021 I was in Miami for it. Today I’m in Montreal for it—a first—and I’m on my own.
 
For thirty years, I’ve been pretty quiet about my parents’ health, and even more so about their deaths. Close friends know. It’s a big thing to grapple with and I don’t want to freak anyone out. I’m fine (now), but strangers might not be. I’ve been especially quiet in my work environments. People are judgey. Even if we're not supposed to be anymore--let's face it, diversity, equity, inclusion, and access hasn't exactly landed yet. This kind of disclosure carries a lot of heft and can carry even more innuendo. And so it concerns me that people will make assumptions and draw even worse conclusions. Not so much about my parents, but about me. I worry that people might ascribe to me whatever stereotypes they’ve acquiesced to—you know, shadowy, shameful stuff that can be weaponized to tank a career—taking away from me what they imagine my parents lacked. I worry that they can’t see past what characterized my parents’ deaths to see the resilience that characterized their lives. And mine.
 
This was my mother’s greatest wariness. It dogged her. And so today, on this 30th anniversary, I honor my mother’s life, and her death. And, I honor every minute in-between. In public.

Picture

I wrote an ode to my Mom on another Mother's Day. You can read that one here.
0 Comments

A Love Letter to Longhand

7/17/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
                            
                           (For E. a letter-writer.)
​

Don’t you want to pick that up? Turn the sheet over in your hands, hold it up to the light and see the glow through the page, feel the texture of the ink on the paper, sense the sender and the sendee, feel yourself carried through time to where this was, almost becoming the script, the scribe, and the go-between. I want to.

Picture
It looks like it's written on onionskin paper—a virtually sheer sheet, its lightness important during the days when airmail (called Par Avion at its inception in London in 1929) was costly and people economized on postage by using lightweight paper.
 
I don’t know if I would be as inclined to want to handle and explore this letter if it were typewritten, to let it linger in my hands, its physicality the thing transmitting the fullness of its metaphysical dimensions. I might still want to read it as eagerly, but with so much sensorial promise gone, much of the personal would be too.

Letter-writing gets short shrift these days, considered a relic at best, a waste of time at worst; it’s gone from something quintessential to something antiquated, something once consequential to something now condescended to—mostly. Retro is currently cool in culture – vinyl records (even reel-to-reel); 35mm cameras and Polaroids; rock band t-shirts; high-waisted pants; cocktails and shaker kits; even IG filtres – but letter-writing hasn’t made the cut. There’s not much to package and sell to the practitioners of longhand. Maybe that’s why.
 
Lives are recorded in letters. And the life around those lives laces the written lines, forming cultural records that capture and reflect for us the more intimate portions of collective life as they play out in private spaces. Why else would letters like the one above join collections in public archives, libraries, and museums? Letters contribute to our public history. If you type “letters” into Harvard library’s special collections search engine, and then “image”, you get 9,655 hits. If you do the same for the New York Public Library you get 18,038.

What will happen 20 years from now, and 50, and beyond that? Will we publish emails? Not likely. Most of us delete our emails, and few of us turn to the mode with the tenderness, time, and tenacity it takes to correspond by letter. And we’d have to pass along our passwords to someone so that our emails could eventually be retrieved. Who do you share your passwords with? In any case, when’s the last time you lingered over an email—made a pot of tea, and settled into a comfy chair to read, and reread an email? Some don’t even use email anymore, or never really have, it too relegated to a generational joke. You know what I mean. I recently described to a millennial the functional hiccup I encountered on a website, and she suggested that it was probably because I’m “old” (she used air quotes), rather than considering for a moment that the platform and its navigation might be poorly designed and/or have had a glitch. It took everything in me to not roll my eyes and tell her that I’ve been using computers for longer than she’s been alive; that, apparently, though the web may be wide, her use of it as a conduit to the world seems to be pretty narrow, and narrowing.
 
Ask Nick Cave about the power of a letter. No, wait, don’t—instead, listen to his 2001 ballad, Love Letter, an incarnation of the plaintive ache his composition is meant to remedy: Love Letter, love letter / Go get her, go get her / Love Letter, love letter / Go tell her, go tell her. What more is there to know about the potency of a letter? For the curious, the kindred, and the quixotic, letters also come bound and published as collections. I’ve read the collected correspondence between Al Purdy and Margaret Laurence, and between Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; next on my list is the published collection between Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark as well as the letters of Earnest Hemingway.
 
I’m a letter-writer, which you’ve probably already figured out. I have a long history with letter-writing as well. My practice has always been the long letter, long in time to write which yields a letter long in pages. I’ll write over the course of a month or so. By the time I wrap it up, my sendee has accompanied me along multiple storylines in my life, the letter taking on narrative momentum a bit like a script might, but without the formal constraints of the three-act structure, resembling something more akin to Richard Linklater’s 2014 film, Boyhood, another manifestation of the filmmaker’s question: how do we cope with time passing? (Some letters help track what might offer answers to that question, or at least shed some light.) A storyline of mine, in a letter, might come to its conclusion within the span of the letter, or in the next one. Andrei Tarkovsky, another filmmaker whose work has expanded filmic language, wrote about his work and his aims as an artist in Sculpting in Time, describing film’s particular capacity to express the course of time within the frame. Letters do that too.
 
I’m also into stamps, though I’m not a stamp collector. I always look forward to renewing my stash of stamps, making my selection based on the artistry and the message, little pieces of art I then send across the world. Right now I have round ones with chrysanthemums for international postage (there’s not a wide selection for international), a set of Voices of the Harlem Renaissance for domestic, and a set of coral reefs for postcards. It’s amazing how much there is to choose from—something to suit a range of tastes and interests. Do you remember Fargo? (The Coen brothers' film, not the series.) In it, running on a very minor plotline, Police Chief Marge Gunderson’s husband, Norm, is working on a painting for his submission to the federal duck stamp contest. It’s a thing. (Norm’s mallard earns him second place on the 3-cent stamp, a disappointment to be sure. No one uses the 3-cent stamp, he tells Marge. Of course they do, she replies, ever the pragmatic optimist and loving wife, whenever they raise the postage, people need the little stamps.) The duck stamp contest was started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 as part of a conservation effort to protect wetlands and wildlife habitat, and it continues today. Conservationists buy duck stamps, knowing that 98% of the cost goes directly to protection work. Stamp collectors buy them to help increase their value, thereby increasing the returns to the intended conservation work.
 
My first letters were written to my parents. To my father who lived far away from me as I grew up, and then to my mom, once I moved away from home. I love my father’s handwriting. It carries the same verve as the poems he wrote. I love my mother’s handwriting too. Once we began corresponding regularly I noticed that the W of my signature was very much like hers—a graceful line elongating the arc of the final curve. Over time I noticed how the way I wrote all of my last name had almost completely taken on the shape of hers—the looping lines drawing out the direct link of my lineage. To this day, I think of her each time I sign something by hand. And whenever I open the box where I keep the collection of our letters and cards to each other, our bond is illustrated in the assemblage of envelopes addressed to and from the same name, in the same script.
 
After each of my parents died, I travelled to their cities to handle arrangements. This included going through their belongings, a strange and singular experience that mixes the past with the present, leading us to sometimes stumble onto secrets that might make sense of partial memories, and of family lore, helping to solidify one’s place and history, or at least to help illuminate it. My parents separated when I was an infant, yet I found letters between them dating from their separation to the time of their deaths. They wrote to each other as my parents, discussing me as I was growing through the stages of my life; and they wrote to each other as friends, across so much time and distance, and the troubles they each had. I found letters other people had written to them. And I found letters I’d written them. They’d each kept the letters.

Picture
Piecing everything together, I pieced together parts of my life I’d forgotten, with others I’d never known—some telling about me, some telling about the times. In it all, I learned more about myself, about them, and about their worlds. My mom wrote about the founding of Greenpeace, which was around the corner from us on W. 4th in Vancouver, and was where she volunteered. My father wrote about  Mickey Munday, Miami’s Cocaine Cowboy pilot who lived down the street. And in a letter from my father to his, written when he 16 and in his first months of pilot training, I see in my father's maturing script hints of a

Picture
sterner man in my grandfather than any family story has ever told. It was the early 40s at the Randolph airfield in Texas and my father's attempt to fly for the air force an act of love on the part of a son for his father, an esteemed WWI pilot. The letter is written before my father failed pilot training.

When I returned to Montreal from Miami where I’d gone to attend my father’s memorial, a postcard from him arrived in the mail. Postcards are often slower to make their way through the postal system, so it’s hard to know how close to his death he was when he wrote that card and mailed it to me. Included in the things I brought back with me from Miami was his suicide note, it in the same handwriting that swept across the postcard. I still have both.

Picture
Right now, I owe E. a letter. We’ve maintained our friendship through letters for longer than we’ve been friends in the same city. Occasionally we intersperse our correspondence with phone calls, and the rare text message, but it’s mostly our letters that hold us close. We send all kinds of things to each other in our letters. My last letter included several How-To Haiku zines I made so that E. and her Glaswegian pals could have a haiku-writing party together. Her most recent letter to me included a page torn from a small Muscat de Rivesaltes notepad, which I use as a bookmark (yes, I read physical books too ) and which I know she sent because she knows I love Muscat—it’s her promise to me that when we’re together next, we’ll go to her house in France where we’ll drink Muscat in the garden. Her letter also contained a little drawing illustrating something she was trying to describe to me about the nature of time. The illustration depicts E.’s woven Kabyle tray on the table beside her, it illustrating her point about time. There’s also the envelope, with its acknowledgement of Captain Sir Thomas Moore, the centenarian who started walking laps in his garden on April 6 to raise money for the UK’s National Health Service efforts to confront COVID (by the end of the day on April 30 – his birthday – his efforts yielded £32.79 million). And, finally, the Par Avion sticker there to remind us that this thing is not travelling to me by boat.

Since the COVID lockdown, I also received a thank-you card from Our Community Bikes, one of my favorite not-for-profits in Vancouver. Working under the pressures this lockdown has caused so many, they held a fundraising campaign to which I contributed. They sent me this handwritten
Picture
thank-you card, mailed inside a hand-addressed envelope. No Avery type-printed address stickers for Our Community Bikes, and so none for me.

For a while I was pen-pals with a woman in a Los Angeles maximum security prison. She was the mother of three, and was in under the 1994 three-strikes-you’re-out law. Her infractions were minor drug-related charges and traffic stops gone wrong. She was doing life.

Picture
For a few years in my early 20s I had a PO box at the main post office in downtown Vancouver, even though I had home addresses everywhere I lived at the time. (I once gave my PO Box address to a guy who asked for my phone number, telling him, cryptically, it was the best way to reach me, no matter what.) I loved picking up mail late at night, entering the quiet alcove of the post office, eyeing the others doing the same. Did they too have street addresses like me?

 I fell in love once through letters. We met at a conference in Banff, and then discovered that we lived 2,300 miles apart. And so when we each returned to where we lived, he to his small house on the Anzac reserve in northern Alberta and me to my brownstone walkup on the Montreal plateau, our courtship began by letter. He wrote in pencil, he explained in his first letter, because it’s more forgiving. And with that I was hooked. I once wrote a letter to my sister in New Zealand, and was so keen to be close to her that I photographed the pages and emailed them to her. And once, I wrote a letter to E. in Scotland, and photographed the pages to keep for myself, printing them out and pasting them into my writing journal to mine for ideas later. Years ago, in the wake of my parents’ deaths, I wrote often to L., my closest friend far away, who later told me and tells me still: I have all your letters. When you’re ready, they’re yours. I haven’t asked for them yet.
 
Today, I’m a museum educator and I work a lot with senior high school students. No matter the project, I ask them to explore their ideas with a pen and paper because the brain behaves differently that way. When writing longhand, neural activity is triggered in particular ways—all good for cognition and creating. The field of research known as “haptics,” which includes the interactions of touch, hand movements, and brain function, tells us that cursive writing helps train the brain to integrate visual and tactile information, and fine motor dexterity. So, it’s spatial, cognitive, and kinetic. Other research highlights the hand's unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas: a material activity, and slower than typing, handwriting forces us to rephrase ideas and concepts in our own words. So when I ask students to write by hand, they’re making sense of their learning, and their world, in their own voice. Additionally, the process of production that handwriting involves, each letter formed component stroke by component stroke, recruits neural pathways in the brain that go near and through parts that manage emotion. All this making learning both stickier and more holistic.
 
These benefits are aren’t just for young brains. Neuroplasticity belongs to us all. We each have the capacity to continually change our brain’s architecture and operating system (neurons that fire together wire together). And it’s not just writing longhand that enhances positive neural rewiring—reading longhand does too. When we read handwriting, we activate the same neurological instructions required to write those same letters and words, something keyboard-written type doesn’t demand of us. So, basically, to read handwriting is to be empathetic.
 
There’s also a heap of research on attention: how much, how long, and how deep our attention is when we read online versus reading something in our hands. It turns out that deep reading – the process of thoughtful and deliberate reading through which we actively work to critically contemplate, understand, and ultimately enjoy a text – is compromised when we read on a screen. When we skim and scan a lot, and surf from hyperlink to hyperlink, our brains get good at skimming and scanning and surfing – to the brain, all shallow activities – and less good at neurological deep diving, the kind of brain capacity required for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. So, as we reroute our neural pathways online, we are remaking ourselves in the image of the internet—the medium is indeed the message.
Picture
I remember a day in 1996 when I gazed for a long time at one of the first advertisements for a wireless phone. The billboard presented the image of a pristine conifer forest, sunrays filtering through the grove of trees, with the words finally free plastered across the tree tops and reaching into the sky--two little words redefining the concept of being untethered (just two of the many that have grown into the barrage of lexiconic gaslighting we have today). Alternate facts, indeed. These days, more than 20 years since that ad came out, in an attempt to simultaneously unplug and reconnect, people now pay to attend forest bathing workshops in groups that are led by somebody who asks that phones be turned off.
 
There are tangible costs and consequences to those today who choose to opt out or who limit their participation in the online world. From being mocked and called a Luddite (go read about the Luddites, they’re pretty interesting), because, apparently, it’s unchill to step away from monolithic click-bait corporations instead of capitulating to the transactional interests of their opaque business models (like FB [uber uncool] and its millennial-pacification do-over, IG); to more culturally ubiquitous and coercive expectations, silent and tacit, that you must migrate your life online to work in today’s economy
(think LinkedIn), even if your work takes place off-line. It’s not called the attention economy for nothing.
 
I don’t want to go fast and break things. I don’t want to lean in. I don't want to curate my life, and pin it. I don't want to follow influencers. I don’t want to read Toni Morrison on a backlit screen. I don’t want to use performative platforms to maintain my powerful friendships, especially when a long stretch of Earth keeps from us being together in person. I don’t want market-driven algorithms driving my information, my attention, and me. I’m not a consumer of content, I’m a sentient being, animated by caring, curiosity, and concerns of all kinds. I’m not a content creator (a stunning piece of language that so baldly reveals the vacuity of the enterprise), cranking out filler for the spaces between the ads. I’m an artist. I’m an agent. A citizen. I choose analogue channels. I choose digital channels. I choose.
 
I wonder about those who don’t write by hand anymore, and those who don’t correspond by letter. In a world absent of handwriting, and where no one writes letters anymore, there’s an empty mailbox, an empty archive, and what more? It would seem there’s a lot to lose when we put down the pen. We lose connection, we lose our unique dimensionality, it looks like we're going to lose pieces of our histories both personal and public, and, apparently, we’re losing our minds. Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. Maybe experiencing forests by paying someone who first tells you to turn off your phone while you’re there is a good sign that there’s a system glitch, a big one.
 
I’ll check the mail later. I always know when it arrives. The postman on this route talks on the phone all the time. He has on a headset but he’s loud. I can even hear him when he’s driving up and down the street, his cheerful holler blasting from the open truck doors. But for the moment, I’m going to go inside and type this up. (You knew I was writing this by hand, didn’t you?) I wish there was a way for your read it as it is. Not this time.
 
PS: I was prompted to write this essay for work. While the museum remains closed, we’re all pitching in to produce virtual experiences, including writing pieces for the blog. With the threat to the US Postal Service on my mind, I offered to write something about letters. Writing on commission is unusual for me. I loved working with a gifted editor, and was interested to see how and where my personal voice had to conform to an identity other than my own. Here's the version of this piece that went up on the museum’s blog. It’s pretty different. (And, no surprise, the blog version is a lot shorter—I was told that people just don’t want to read anything too long. So, the dictates of the medium do indeed dictate the message.)
0 Comments

resolve • verb // noun

12/31/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
​resolve
 
That’s my word for 2020.
 
For over a decade, on December 31 I’ve made it a practice to choose word for the coming year. I’ve lapsed a few times, “life” derailing things. But, I have a word for 2020 and it’s RESOLVE.

I came upon the word this way:

Yesterday morning, I was doing some writing, the freeform kind that always settles my brain, the kind where I feel my neurotransmitters settling as they organize into something probably akin to what is called a meditative state, where I feel enter something I know I can trust. I know this thing. It has no name.

As I wrote I found my way back to a story Laura (an artist, friend, and former business partner) told me some years ago. When in art school, Laura had a professor, she recounted, who remarked on a piece she was working on—he told her it was unresolved. She explained, and the concept stayed with me.

Unresolved. Resolved. Something that has brought itself to its conclusion. That has tied up the loose ends. That has achieved its intended outcome. That has achieved perhaps not what it set out to do, but what it was intended to do.

This implies a tension between what we set out to do and what is set out for us to do. And I’m uncomfortable with the implications. I’m not exactly certain what “it“ is that would have us “do” something this way and really not that way; yet, I’ve lived long enough now, and jumped into enough unknowns—deciding this to do and not that, to go there and not stay here—that I have to acknowledge something resembling a grander sense enjoins itself, in ways unbidden, to endeavours. I probably wouldn’t ever be caught asserting that it’s something as grandiose as a path—there are just too many paths out there for there to be only one—but I would definitely bank on there being something that introduces meaning, or at least invites meaning to the table.

And so, as I enter and embrace 2020, I invite meaning to the table. A cross between an artist, an adventurer, and a detective, I embrace boring into what is before me, pulling on what’s passed, on intentions both lagging and wagging, to achieve work through catch and release.

Because as any artist worth their salt can attest to, creating is an alchemy. It’s a tug, a tension, a balance. It’s holding on and letting go. We hold on to what we mean, to what we set out to achieve, to what we intend for ourselves and for our work, while also realizing, and (importantly, whether we know it or not) relying upon our letting go and allowing another force to enter into the process. And when we do, as any artist must confess, the work is better. It finds its purpose. It achieves resolve. We have worked with what we know and what we want and what we want to do, and we have acquiesced and danced with the unknown, understanding and cultivating all that the unknown brings with a kind of faith that is uncanny, and indispensable.

So, for 2020, I declare for myself resolve. Which is to say, I embrace this year, this life I have, so that I bring to it a state that brings it to its outcome, honouring my intentions with those that make themselves known along the way.

It’s not for the faint of heart. It is the work of an artist. And it just so happens, as I’ve come to understand it in these past days nesting alone, that my work in 2020 is both the tableau and the table.
​
May I achieve resolve. May you join where you can.


 
0 Comments

Remembering Cy Twombly, Remembering My Mom

11/17/2019

0 Comments

 
When my mom was still alive and when I hadn't yet left Vancouver—a very, very long time ago—we saw the Cy Twombly show at the VAG when it was still in its location further down Georgia Street. My mom with mental illness roiling around inside of her looked at the works and said, this makes me feel anxious. We left.

It was completely liberating for me.

All these years later, I allow my instincts to animate me: I either breeze by pieces or, riveted, I root in front of them, moving in so close to see their inner workings that security often thinks I’m touching and edges closer to me to keep on eye on my activity.


Every time I’m in an art space, just like today as I wend my way through this sprawling survey of Sterling Ruby, I think of that day with my mom so long ago.
0 Comments

Code Red—God and Guns

5/28/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
I've crouched in a corner hiding from an imaginary shooter twice in my life.
 
The first time was when my son was 10. We went to a birthday party for one of his friends that included playing laser tag at a local outfit. There, strapped into a bleeping vest, I ran through the black maze in the dark trying to dodge everyone else in their bleeping vests, and I was terrified. The experience of feeling stalked, even by a 10 year old holding a play gun that emits beams of light, was so traumatizing that I found a corner where I crouched, knees up in front my vest to hide its blinking lights, hoping nobody would find me while I waited for the game to end.
 
The next time I crouched in a corner to hide from a shooter was not voluntary.
 
I lead a museum program that takes me into ten senior high schools in Miami-Dade County each year. I'm currently winding things down for this edition and am visiting the classrooms for our feedback sessions. This afternoon, I happened to be in a school when a Code Red drill started. This is when students and teachers put into action the training they've been given in the case of an active shooter at their school. From one instant to the next, a calm conversation with the kids was blasted by a loud buzzer and suddenly the teacher was up and crossing the classroom floor to turn off the lights, lock the classroom door, and close the blinds that give onto the hallway. Simultaneously the students moved en masse into a corner of the classroom away from the door and windows where they crouched under desks. I had no idea what was going on so I did the same thing: I hunched under a desk alongside 20 students and their teacher. I asked the 17-year old girl beside me what was happening and she whispered back, a Code Red practice, and then had to explain to me what that meant. (I moved to Miami from Canada and am still learning about this place.)

​Glancing around me from there under that desk, I noticed several of the juniors were wearing what were clearly school-issued t-shirts with the caption, Graduation Class 2020. And there,
hiding in a dark corner with all these kids, as I stared at their shirts in the long shadow of the Parkland school shooting just a year ago, all I could think to myself was, not at this rate.
 
0 Comments

After the Fire

4/19/2019

0 Comments

 
(Started just over two years ago and then put away until a few weeks ago, I finished this today.
For my witnesses.)

You are that guy now
the one who at Christmas when we came home
late from a family dinner in the valley
had no time to switch on all the Christmas lights--
the ones you insisted on to add festive colour
to the ones already strung along
the eaves that we kept up and lit year-round
You had no time for the ones looped around the Christmas tree
that other pageantry you insisted on when I suggested we forego a few of those frills that year
 
 
Without all the light
the opened gifts beneath the tree loomed
like little spectres of themselves
blocks of darkness throwing slightly darker blocks of darkness
beyond their edges
the ephemera evidence
of the most fugitive kind
that there had been another life
one more placid than this one taking hold
as you were becoming that guy
mute
opaque
rogue
 
 
You had in your pocket your new key
the one you’d been carrying
planned and concealed
(for a while I realized later)
a potent piece of arsenal you released that night in the dark
 
 
That key I couldn’t see and everything it opened
made you powerful across from me in that corner
and then again when your back
faced me at the door
 
 
In the dark no words
would explain, not yours
absent anyway
and no one else’s
later
 
 
In the morning under the flat low winter sky
when the available light is so little at that time of year
I took down all the decorations
packing away what had been mine for years
throwing away those new things
you’d insisted on 
I put the bare tree in the lane
premature seasonal refuse
there was no public infrastructure yet to handle
 
 
Later your best man told me you were of sound mind
and I didn’t think to reply at the time
that he better hope no one of such sound mind
would some day do this same thing to his daughter
 
 
You might say now you didn’t intend on annihilation
claiming because you didn’t mean to do something
means that you didn’t
 
 
You had some war to wage
something you had to kill
something out of sight
you couldn’t see
or wouldn’t
and you set the dogs upon me
killing your foe
taking back what you believed you were owed
 
 
I thought about that other war far away
out there
the one they talked about as shock
and awe            
I thought about how I hadn’t understood
then
what that meant
shock    awe
until the killing comes home
where it works too
 
 
The wound was so obscene
I closed my eyes to it
only to find its darkness fully alive
inside still
boring deep
 
 
Don’t let this define you, C said to me at lunch
as she ate her flatbread while I drank four gins
And I knew I wouldn’t
eventually
(and I was right)
 
 
Though as everything is
I’m reshaped
and my trajectory too
 
 
You may be something else now as well
but time has a way of stopping as it collides in a dark night
with a brutal muteness in a room you fill with the unseen and leave
 
 
So whatever it is that might have changed over there after that dark corner
hasn’t really
it’s still there with you
that dark corner
where there’s nothing left
 

And as I cast this last glance back from the sunshine place
I’ve delivered myself
in all the bright light here
with my back facing you
all that remains
is the door I closed behind you
(and then changed the lock)
way back there

​
so far away from here.


​

0 Comments

crossing bridges

3/27/2019

0 Comments

 
__________________ it unfolded this way.
Tuesday, March 26 @22h, I wrote:
I cross a lot of bridges here. On a regular work day I cross sixteen. Some are fixed spans, some are drawbridges. Sometimes I have to wait while a drawbridge opens for someone else to go by just ahead of me in the water below. The bridge goes up and then comes back down. Soon enough it’s my turn to cross. And I do.
 
I could cross fewer bridges if I took a different route; if I took a large thoroughfare, or the highway. The route I take follows several side roads through neighbourhoods. I prefer this because it’s pretty, and it’s mellow. Some might say it’s safe, or safer. I don’t look at it this way: how can we ever claim that we’re safe? I can be sure the route I choose is pretty and mellow, but I can never be sure it will be safe. That’s the way it goes. I know that.
 
So. I take my time. I agree with myself that I’ll cross bridges. A lot of them. I like this. I think it’s a good thing. Good practice.
Picture
Wednesday, March 27, 20h, I wrote:
So, you know that story I told you yesterday about crossing bridges? About how we can never be certain we're safe?  When I said that, I said it with full sincerity, existential and literary as I was about it yesterday. I was, indeed, serious too when I affirmed: I can be sure the route I choose is pretty and mellow, but I can never be sure it will be safe. That’s the way it goes. I know that.
 
This morning I met my remarks head-on (practically) when the notion of safety went out the window (almost literally). This morning I was in a driving incident like I've never endured. I was past rattled. Yet here I am still whole.
Tonight I know this:
We
are
here
now.

This
is
all
we
know.
 
So, live it well
 
It struck me enough tonight as I stared at the sky outside when I got home and thought about this
day—I really want to tell you this
as a for sure
here
now
tonight
 
I can be sure the route I choose is beautiful in some way, and mellow, but I can never be sure it will be safe. That’s the way it goes. I know that.
 
I really know it.
May we all.
Picture
0 Comments

my shields are naked to the eye

3/22/2019

0 Comments

 
It probably won’t come as a surprise to you that clothing fascinates me—in fact, it animates me, quite literally. With apparel and adornment, we at once cover and decorate ourselves. Clothing might appear to be merely what we don to conceal and reveal ourselves, yet in exactly that, it’s much more. This covering offers quiet ways to resist what’s around us while we resource ourselves at the same time. When well considered, it’s inoffensive to others, yet affirmative, and even preservative, of self. I’ve long made and used my clothing and accoutrements as protection, creating invisible and incantatory cloaks around me. My shields are naked to the eye. Today I’m doing it. For reasons I won't get into, today I have to wear my employer lapel pin—the first time in my life I’ve ever branded myself like this, and something to which I'm profoundly opposed. So, I’ve also surrounded myself with my private power. They’ll never know. But I do.
Picture
0 Comments

Ask Outrageous Questions—Sometimes There’s Enough for Everyone. A True Story.

3/18/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
This is the kind of stuff you see in films. Indies. Often set in L.A. With millennials. You know. And when you see it, you think, Nah, it’s the movies. That shit doesn’t really happen. That’s magic. And this is real life. Well. I’m here to tell you. Yes. It does. This stuff actually really does happen. In fact, it just happened. Today. To me.
 
I went to Good Will a little earlier. A pit stop on my way home. A distraction, really. Something softer to follow the epic journeys that are the highway systems I travel for work when I can’t take sideroads the whole way.
 
When I entered the store I realized they’d changed the whole layout since my last visit, and I wasn’t in the mood for that big a change. Not on this day. On top of having to speed along the turmoil of all the fast traffic, I’ve been out of sorts for reasons I can’t quite explain. I'm still trying to work it out. So I wasn’t in the mood for change. As I wandered the first aisle to the right of the entrance, now women’s sleeveless tops where men’s short sleeved shirts used to be, I was reminded of when I used to joke with my foster mom about her dinner menus written out on a tiny piece of paper, always a reused scrap of paper, that she’d place on the kitchen island in the house in the valley where she moved to so much later in life. Decades before, in summers, us kids used to roam that valley in packs, picking blueberries by the bucket for days and days. Now, decades later, as she made dinner, Mom would consult that piece of paper where she’d written out the night’s dinner items in their cooking order: potatoes, green beans, buns, etc. Teasing, I would move her piece of paper, holding her eyes with a smile, Hey Mom, I’d say, who moved my cheese, quoting the title of a book that deals with change. I knew she knew I was right, but she couldn't help herself
--she wanted that piece of paper back in its place. I got it then, and I still do. So, in Good Will earlier today, I coped with change, remembering Mom.
 
I don’t like carrying things around on hangers, it’s not good for my neck. So I take items off their hangers to drape the garments over my shoulders, and through the straps of the bag that I loop onto my back. Lately, it’s been pretty paltry pickings at my Good Will. I’ve often with left with nothing. But that’s the way it goes. I know that. That’s the deal there. Though, really, that’s the deal anywhere. Everywhere. Sometimes you leave with nothing.
 
I made my way through the new aisles. Not liking it. I told myself it’s change. Only change. I’ll learn the layout. I’ll know it by the time Don gets here in May. He wants to go to thrift stores. The whole layout here will be new to him, not a change, but kind of. It’s all ok. I’ll find my way. I kept moving through the aisles, and I found a few things to stick through my bag straps: a striped mariner top (like I need another), a dress I think would work if I wear it backwards (which I have on now and does work well worn backwards). Then I came upon this long pink sporty thing. A definite find. I loved it. The dress was too long for my taste, but I’d cut it and hem it shorter. I pulled it through my bag strap along with the mariner top and the dress that would work if I wear it backwards. At the back of the store in home goods, I found four little wooden frames, exactly like a bunch I’ve had forever and that I made into an installation of multiples using eye-hooks and jump hoops to present the underwater tale of a kayaking trip I did in Desolation Sound at least twelve years ago. I’ll make another one, I thought, probably for the piece I'm working on right now about trees. I carried the frames in one hand. A little further on, when I finally found the newly located pants aisle, I scored three distinct possibilities, including a pair with a 60s vibe to their style. The pants were heavy so I carried them all in my arm, in the crook of my elbow up from the four wooden frames. I found another mariner top, in the young fashion section, which I grabbed against all better judgement. When do I wear a turtleneck here? Eventually my interest completely waned, and I went to wait at the dressing rooms.
 
Once assigned to a changing room, I organized everything by category on the orange plastic chair in the corner: pants over the backrest; tops on the seat; dresses also on the backrest, off to one side. That’s when I discovered that I had only one dress, the one I’d wear backwards. The excellent dress that I would cut shorter and hem was missing. This trip to the Good Will already a half-hearted one, this little loss knocked all the wind out of my sails. I tried things on. But I really didn’t care. I thought about dumping everything, about foregoing the long wait line for the till with my half-hearted finds. But, I remembered the four frames. I really wanted to make something about trees with the four frames. I already had tree images ready
--noticing them as I whizzed by in my car, I'd been keeping a list by jotting down the location and a quick sketch to remember for later. I've returned to each one early on quiet mornings and have pictures of them. The series is called, provisionally anyway, Learning from their Limbs.
 
I left the dressing room and started hunting the floor for the great dress that had slipped away. Then I saw it. Someone had picked it up. It was draped over the end of a long rack. Before I could get to it, a woman began looking at it. She had a stroller and a little girl who looked about two years old. The woman was in deep concentration, focussed and fiddling. I lurked a few aisles away, watching and waiting, hoping she’d reject the find. She continued handling the dress, engrossed in a way you don’t often see in a Good Will store. I began to feel a little desperate
--not really desperate, not truly; it felt more anxious, more despairing, a mix of urgent and wretched. I’d chafed my way through the day to that point, and I was ready to be lifted from my slump by this pretty dress. Then I’d lost it. I’d dropped it, unaware. And I was still struck numb. The woman finally slipped the dress through the handle of the stroller. She was taking it. I was forlorn.
 
I headed to the cashiers, even though I didn’t feel like doing anything but crawl into bed. The dress I’d wear backwards and the 60s pants weren’t really that enticing, not enough for a wait in line, but the four little wooden frames are hard to come by and I was prepared wait for them. The line wasn’t too long, which is pretty unusual. In fact, the whole store was uncommonly quiet, a small mercy I appreciated. I was so miserable that I didn’t even go to the effort of getting out my earbuds and queuing up a playlist to listen to while I waited. So I waited as is.
 
Soon I noticed the woman with the stroller and child coming up the cordoned maze that herds shoppers toward the cashiers in what is supposed to be one line. The dress was still hanging over the stroller handle. She was dawdling, but she was technically next behind me, even though she was about ten feet away. I continued waiting. I looked at the woman. I looked at the dress, still incredulous. I looked at her child, a little girl who seemed content and playful. I began to wonder if I should plead my case to the woman. I waited. I waited. I decided to try. And I walked those ten feet.
 
Excuse me, I said to her. I’m going to ask you a hard question. And you can totally say no. That dress is yours, fair and square. Then I went on to explain my saga with the dress. She had an open friendly face. But she didn’t say anything and I wondered if I’d just spoken a bunch of English to someone who speaks another language. Then she replied, lifting up all that long drapey pink from the stroller handle as she said to me, there are two. I looked at her hands and saw there was something long and pink in each one. What?, I asked, and she repeated it: there are two dresses. There was one inside the other. They’re the same dress, but one’s a size S and one’s a XS. They don’t have the same price even though they’re the same dress. She went on to explain the different pricing and her size preference, and that she wanted to show both dresses to the cashier to try to get the lower price on the size she wanted, which was the one priced higher, and she said that the other was mine.
 
I understood all the words she was stringing together. I understood what she was saying. I was just having a hard time taking it in. Earlier in the day on the phone with a friend who’s feeling frustrated about a project she’s developing, I listened and told her that sometimes there’s enough for everyone. That’s what I said: sometimes there’s enough for everyone. As I was telling my friend this on the phone, I was slightly uncomfortable with my message, all too aware of how flakey and privileged it sounded. Sometimes there’s enough for everyone. How new-agey and manifesty it sounded. Yet there I was, mere hours later, in the Good Will, confronted with exactly that.
 
Then it occurred to me: What if I hadn’t asked? That too was hard to take in.

​Ask outrageous questions, I thought. Sometimes there’s enough for everyone.

0 Comments

Behind the Ritual—Miami in Three Parts

3/8/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Part I
I took the morning off work yesterday to get my car serviced. I like to go to Mickey’s, a one-man operation owned by Keith since 1958. Aunt Nancy recommended him to me when I moved here two and half years ago and had to buy a car. Keith was Aunt Nancy and Uncle Carl’s mechanic since he’d opened for business. I prefer giving my money to small owner-operated joints and so have clocked more miles than I should without an oil change because Keith works Monday-Friday, just like I do. So, yesterday morning I made the time.

Keith is seventy-five and wants to retire next year. I asked him what he’ll do then and he said he’ll go work for someone else. Doesn’t sound much like retirement, I said. He just laughed, but I’m sure it’s not that funny. I told him I’d follow him. How’s business? I asked. Slow, Keith told me. Not too funny either, I thought to myself. Then Keith told me he’s being sued for not having designated handicap parking. I looked at the vast flat empty expanse of asphalt that wraps around Keith’s corner garage. The set of bright lines around a handicap symbol in fresh paint at the edge of the front lot seems operatic in contrast to the fading paint peeling off Keith’s garage facade. I wonder how much that cost to slap on. Some guy’s been going up and down the street looking for businesses without handicap parking, Keith tells me, and now he’s suing all of us, he adds. We both swear – using different words – and then excuse ourselves to each other. 

Nothing about Keith’s story shocks me. I’ve lived in Miami long enough now to know to expect anything, especially graft. Just as Keith was referred to me by my aunt, anyone else I see for assistance or service of any kind has to be vouched for by someone I know. From doctors to haircuts, realtors to tattoos, if I don’t know someone, personally, who can vouch for someone else, I won’t go to them for anything. I learned this the hard way. The way I see it now, people here are either on the make, or on the take. Those in between relentlessly underwhelm me with their indolence, their incompetence, or both. Of course, like everything, there are exceptions, and they’re the ones who’ve been vouched for. Like Keith.

While my car was on the hoist, Keith popped off one of the front tires, checked my brake pad and showed it to me. Then he went into the back and got another one to show me the whole contraption, explaining what it would look like if it were worn down and needed replacing. He checked my tire treads and explained what to look out for. Once the car was back down on the ground, he lifted the hood to check all the fluids and topped up those that needed it. He showed me the fan belt, the A/C hose and valve, the radiator, and he talked about coolant; he explained why synthetic oil is better, and he told me it’s ok to buy 87-octane gasoline rather than the more expensive stuff. He told me about the gas station he uses and the point system they have there that eventually saves him $2 on a tank of gas. I don’t like owning a car and having to keep up with the maintenance it requires, so the time Keith was giving me was enormously appreciated, and relieving. For all that, he charged me $35. 

He released the hoists that were cinched under my car and I climbed in to leave. Standing in front of the vehicle, Keith motioned to me how to turn my wheels to back out, rotating his hand to imitate the steering wheel. I’m sure there are women would take offence at this. I didn’t. Unfazed, I just smiled. I may hate owning a car and looking after one, but I’m a really good driver and very comfortable behind the wheel. I can parallel park like nobody’s business. On South Beach once, where parking is tight and hard to come by, I zipped into a tiny spot lickety-split. When I stepped out of the car and locked the doors to leave, a man across the street started applauding. I took a deep bow. I was wearing a tiny hot pink summer dress and platform flip flops.

Part II
I pulled out of Keith’s lot and headed south on NW 7th Ave, a huge boulevard I prefer to the ugly turbulence of the I-95 right beside it. Where Little Haiti meets Liberty City, I was stopped at a red light, windows down, music blaring. I was listening to a playlist I made and called The Best Of Van Morrison According to Me. Staring up at the sky out my window, awash in Van’s wise wails, I thought I heard something else, and I looked to my right. In the lane beside me was a gleaming bronze truck, boxy and pristine, vintage. The driver was wearing massive aviator sunglasses; he was middle-aged and muscular, and he had super black skin that his black t-shirt hugged tight. I realized he was talking to me. Pardon?, I said. He was rotating his hand slowly, a lot like Keith had, his index finger extended toward my open window, slowly looping round and round. What do you know about the blues?, he asked me. Too much, I told him. You?, I asked. Same, he said, and we both start laughing really hard. His wide smile revealed a full set of gold grillz that flashed in the sun.

I don’t know how we could have appeared more different. I was dressed head-to-toe in white, and, as my friend Juan has observed, I might be the whitest woman in Miami – my blue eyes and my white-blond hair scream Nordic like nothing else. And there I was listening to some old white Irish guy singing the blues, loud. And here we both were, this white-clad white girl and this dark shiny black man, laughing together about our blues.

The light changed and we wished each other a good day. He pulled away fast, and in the blast of metallic shine receding down the long road in front of me I saw the small oasis of his blue antique plate. The perfect touch, I thought to myself. 

Part III
I got to work just in time for my meeting with Yucef. Someday I want Yucef to explain to me, chronologically, everywhere he’s lived, and what he was doing in each place. Yucef is Venezuelan but he hasn’t lived there in decades. He’s a digital artist and his work ranges from sublimely connective and poetic to radically political and very possibly an endangerment to his life. Yucef and I see eye to eye. He’s one of those people we all wish for in our work life, not just a colleague and a peer, but a kindred soul.

At the end of our meeting, Yucef noticed that he’d received a phone call from an unknown number. He showed me his phone: the caller ID said No Se. Yucef hit call-back, not something I would have done. Here in the wilds of the unregulated marketplace all manner of unwanted solicitation runs rampant, all these corporations-are-people throwing around their rights with the swagger of the class brat and the bully, without regard for responsibilities that might accrue to them in return for all those rights to which they are forever laying claim. I never confirm reception of a call from any number I don’t recognize, never; in fact I block every one of them. It’s R_ _ _, Yucef says. I know R_ _ _ _ too. He’s also an artist. Yucef puts the call on speaker and we all chat for a while. Then Yucef and R_ _ _ _ talk together in Spanish and I understand nothing.

When they finish the call, Yucef tells me that he thinks R_ _ _ _ is in Cuba. What makes you think that?, I ask. Because he wouldn’t say where he is and the Havana Biennial is on right now and it’s perfect for his work, Yucef explained. I know R_ _ _ _ is distrustful of the state and he also protects his privacy carefully. I also know that Cuba is out of bounds for Americans and there’s a history in this county of government agencies monitoring private citizens’ telecommunications. So, somewhere sixty minutes away from here by air and a world away is R_ _ _ _,  non grata.

Epilogue
All cities have their particular tinctures, textures and tones that distinguish one place from another in ways that are inimitable. Yesterday morning was quintessential Miami. And it all happened before noon. Behind the ritual indeed. Welcome to Miami.
0 Comments

1 + 1 = 1

11/24/2018

0 Comments

 
Zoe Welch
We girls all wore brown pleated pinafores, the kind with a bib and a belt that cinched at the waist with a metal buckle. Beneath it was a crisp golden­ cotton button-up shirt. It must have been cheap cotton, something poorly woven or starched to hold its structure, because it slightly scratched at my skin below. In the winter we worn brown leotards, and the rest of the year brown knee-high socks. My mom dyed a batch of my underwear to match the colour of my pinafore, completing the uniform and my adherence to it. I wore them over my regular underwear, turning the outer pair into something more akin to tiny pants under my skirt, part of the uniform; so when I hung upside down on the monkey bars with my belt undone and my pinafore falling inside-out over my head toward the ground, I didn’t think I was doing anything improper. I wonder if my mom was required to make that undergarment for me, or if she took the initiative on her own—a small gesture toward ensuring I fit in. Probably.
 
All for a little private school a few blocks away from where I lived at that time. It was actually a three-storey house, a mansion refitted as a school. This was not a school for the elite. There were no preening parents conscientious about our grooming. No chauffeurs gliding up to the curb; no nannies clasping the little hands of their charges. We were the opposite. We were the children of single parents: those separated and possibly divorced, some probably widowed, and some maybe never having been married at all. It was a time when no one spoke about these things. They were connections we would figure out later, looking back.
 
When the school day was over, we stayed, supervised as we played in the large yard until we were each picked up by a parent to go home. It was the only school with such a service then. It was a good school. Small classes. Boys and girls comingling on the playground, something unheard of at the time. We had French lessons and made our own butter, slowing churning cream by turning our mason jars each afternoon, end over end, our little hands clutching carefully so the glass wouldn’t slip and break, destroying our alchemy before the magic took hold. After each churning session we set our jars on the windowsills in the autumn chill outside, our names in childish script identifying whose was whose. Through the pane, there was mine, Elizabeth looping across the label, the contents well on its way to becoming solid.
 
I attended grades one and two at this school, and did very well. I loved school and school loved me back—my marks were good then, and I felt proud of my work. Then came the antonym test: words stacked in one column on the left side of a sheet of paper had to be matched with their antonyms on the right side. It was my job to do the matching. Across from rough, I wrote calm. When my test was returned to me, calm was crossed out in red ink and smooth was inserted in its place. I lost points. All six years of me was incensed. From summers spent with my cousins at their family cottage beside a lake, where all the older kids waterskied and everyone would squint at the water each morning to see if the surface was flat and good for the first spin of the day, I knew for a fact that the opposite of rough was calm. When the water is calm, we waterski; when it’s rough, we don’t. Still too little to ski myself, I was the spotter in the boat. I watched the waterskiers to keep them safe, eyeing the waves for all signs of threat. I knew water and I knew its surface. All us kids did.

 _________________________________
 
Ellen Langer tells a good story, one I wish I’d heard when I was six and I knew that the opposite of rough is calm. Langer is a Harvard social psychologist. Much of her research looks at how our experiences are formed, perceived, received, and understood by the words we attach to them. Langer talks about questioning assumptions, examining common axioms that come to dominate our perceptions and precepts and dictate how we frame knowledge. Make no assumptions, Langer says, or at least be aware of the assumptions with which you operate. Things aren’t always what they seem, nor are they always what we think they are.
 
Langer gives examples. Good ones. Simple. Clear. Effective. Empowering. Examples like this: if you take one piece of gum, put it in your mouth, and start chewing, and then you take one more piece of gum and add it to the one you’re already chewing, you still have one piece of gum in your mouth. If you have one pile of laundry on the floor and you then add one more pile of laundry to it, you still have one pile of laundry. 1 + 1 = 1. The opposite of rough is calm.

 _________________________________
 
At six years old, I was the victim of epistemic injustice, I know that now. Epistemic injustice is the act of wronging someone in their capacity as a knower. The term was coined by Miranda Fricker, Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Epistemic injustice straddles the fields of philosophy (ethics in particular) and epistemology, looking at the construct that is knowledge. In broad terms, it’s concerned with how social power operates and how it’s attributed to individuals and groups, particularly through the many lenses of the official story: empire and post-colonialism; gender; race; economics—basically looking at anything humans get up to—ultimately, examining who gets to define reality. When applied to the operations of education, epistemic injustice looks at the meta: academe and the cannon; and at the macro, in the classroom, concerned with the power dynamics at play between teacher and learner. Epistemic injustice reminds us to consider who gets to decide what’s the opposite of rough.

 _________________________________
 
I work with high school kids now. I’m not a teacher. I lead a project that takes me into several high schools each year, involving hundreds of students. I tell the kids in each class about my six year old self knowing that calm is the opposite of rough. I share Langer’s examples of gum and laundry. Because I know about epistemic injustice, I make a point of doing so. I want them to know that 1 + 1 can = 1
 
The last time I did, I noticed a quiet kid at the back of the room. Long and lanky, his body stretched well past what his chair could accommodate. As I was talking, I saw a curl appearing on his lips, his eyes brightening as his eyebrows gradually lifting higher on his forehead; and as he slowly began to speak I saw illumination emanating from all over him. Wow, he said, you’re blowing my mind right now.
 
Yes, I thought to myself, Blow your mind wide open. And please try to keep it that way.

Oh, one last thing, I said as I was getting ready to leave, life can be rough, so try to take it calm and smooth. All the kids smiled.


0 Comments

Surrounded Islands

10/4/2018

0 Comments

 
Zoe Welch Christo Jeanne Claude Surrounded Islands Miami
I’m ready. It never occurred to me that such a day might come, yet here it is. And I’m ready.
 
Decades ago, still in Vancouver in an art history class at community college, when I was still a stunned young woman barely ricocheted out of my teens, I learned about Christo and Jeanne Claude. More importantly, I learned about Surrounded Islands. It was between my many trips to Miami where I frequently traveled to see my father back then. That day in that classroom far away from the bay, with a football coach improbably turned art history teacher, something about Surrounded Islands connected into me deeply, and it’s never left.
 
If you’ve ever been in any one of the places I’ve lived since then, you’ve seen on my walls blown up copies of one or another aerial view of Biscayne Bay dotted with the distinct pink fabric surrounding 11 green tree-ringed islands that scatter in an irregular and elongated arc down the bay. If then I lived where I do now, I would see that pink from my deck, and kitchen and bedroom windows, an astonishing fact this long-lived connection now manifests.
 
​Tonight I’m going to listen to Christo talk about the Surrounded Islands. Jeanne Claude died in 2009, and so Christo now represents their work alone. While I’m over the moon about being in the same room with this artist, surrounded, yes surrounded, with the artifacts of this important work, I will not try to speak to him. Being there is enough.

Zoe Welch Christo Jeanne Claude Surrounded Islands Miami
If I’m honest, though, it’s actually this: four days ago I came into contact with another artist whose work has been important to me, whose work has touched me deeply, too; whose work I experienced a few years ago, at a time when I really needed it. But the exchange I had with this artist four days ago was jarring, and I was shocked by the taught tone they used to share an arrogant point of view. I was put off by a person who utterly lacked in graciousness.
 
Idols fall, I’m told. And though I haven’t idolized Christo and the other – it’s not really my style – I admire their work. In their productions I see propositions for engagement, viewpoints about how we might live amidst each other here on earth. This matters to me. So, intentionally or not, I look for resonance between work and words. It matters to me. And a breach in integrity is telling, too much so, though I can’t quite tell you what it tells me.

Zoe Welch Christo Jeanne Claude Surrounded Islands Miami
So, after a small lesson learned and a disappointment endured, tonight I’m content to hold myself in quiet, hugging close to what remains of Surrounded Islands there on the walls in rooms other than my own, rooms beside Biscayne Bay, right down the way from me. Thick in connection, I will protect.
 
PS: This is the outfit I’ve made for tonight. Mountains on the jacket, for Vancouver. Abstracted islands on water for the skirt. And on the t-shirt, buttons brought to me from France by a colleague, scattered across the front in the pattern of Surrounded Islands.

Zoe Welch Christo Jeanne Claude Surrounded Islands Miami
PPS: I did speak to him. I asked a question, as SO many of us did. He was gracious and warm, and keen to connect with us all. I was not disappointed. He is loved. And he loves back.
0 Comments

Foreign Correspondence

10/6/2017

0 Comments

 
Last night at 10:10pm, Mike Lambrix was executed by the State of Florida on behalf of its citizens. It's the second execution since August, when the practice was reinstated after an eighteen month hiatus.

Until this morning, I have never stood in my kitchen readying for the day, listening to an account of a person being murdered, legally, just down the way.

It makes me wonder how this contributes to the shape and sense of identity of those on whose behalf this murder has been committed; how does this transform, again and again and again, the land on which we walk; how does the collective consciousness makes place for this; how does the personal psyche; what are children told at school?
​
I have never, till now, listened to a news story about state-sanctioned murder. I know there is dissent around this, personal and organized, and probably plenty, but life has still been taken, and we all are now confronted with that fact, and are left with how to live through this day in this place where such things are legislated to happen.
This has diminished me. As a member of this confounding experiment called life on earth, today I'm less of what I aspire to; what I dream is possible is lessened. It will take me a while to recover. This hurts.
0 Comments

iamMIA

12/1/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
I'm here.
     Finally.
          I moved to Miami.
               The move
                  is my practice
                       for now.
                            Because
                                 though I'm here
                                      I'm also
                                           in the in-between place -
                                                landing
                                                     but not landed
                                                          sheltered
                                                          ​     but not settled.
More work
will
come
soon.
1 Comment

Wrapping Shelter

7/22/2016

0 Comments

 
I've been waiting for the official announcement so that I can make my own - "official" might be an overstatement, but public it now is: I have a piece selected to wrap a bus shelter in Seattle!

The City Panorama 2016 competition was hosted last winter by Photographic Center Northwest and King County, and my piece was selected as one of 110 out of 1500 competitors! The announcement was kind of quiet, but the list of finalists is at the bottom of the call itself.

Here's the piece they selected. It's 8' x 2', and I call it Slocan Skipping Stones; it's of Loïc skipping stones on Slocan Lake when we camped there one summer. It's wrapping a bus shelter at 3rd & Union, right in downtown Seattle. So, go take a bus!
Picture
0 Comments

To Get to North Beach She Goes East (a true story)

7/13/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture

It’s early. It’s already poured. She’s on the sand at North Beach, and about to swim. The sun is just now breaking out from behind the yellow and black clouds that have been stacked in the eastern sky since dawn, swollen bruises dissipating into fine pinkening streaks. The air is still thick from the early rain, and now too dissipating in the breeze, that ever-present lift promising something soothing, its soft balm reaching the soul with its merciful cool. So often without cloud cover to temper the heat, something else has to.
 
Two pelicans are fishing, flying fast against the wind and suddenly diving into the sea for its fruit. There are others here too at this early hour—in fact quite a few: solo swimmers; early-bird lovers walking along the watermark where sand is sea; kids who might have slept the night on the beach and who have just woken to this splendor; a granddad tugging lightly at his line in the water, teaching his grandson about fishing; a jogger running backwards; a man standing alone with his hands clasped behind his back as he watches the low lapping tide. One of the kids has walked into the ocean where there’s a sandbar close to shore, and he looks like he’s walking on water.
 
Metaphor is everywhere, she thinks—the grand dramas of life at hand and underfoot in most every gesture, if you look closely. She leaves this afternoon, with no idea what comes next.
 
For now, she’s the solitary woman who sits at the tideline facing the coming day, writing on the dampened pages of her notebook. Six red buoys bob in the surf to her south, and she remembers them from last time; she’s used them in her art, a photo piece about her broken heart and longing. She’s never told anyone how scared she is, probably because the fear is so strange that she can’t find the words. One buoy is much brighter than the others, maybe the oldest and lightened from the sun, or the newest and its colour still fully saturated. They flash against the cyan water, vibrant surprises that reveal themselves as the waves surge and fall.
 
She gets in the water, and with shallow strokes moves over the sandbar, swimming away from shore toward the horizon where she’s been watching the coming of the day. She rolls onto her back, and with her limbs flung wide, floating, she’s half on top of the world and half beneath its surface. She opens her eyes, and past the tips of her toes she sees the darkening skies in the west, large clouds gathering fast in greys from smoke to ash, and she hears the boom and clap of thunder coming from inside them. She keeps an eye fixed on the west, watching for lightening while the eastern sun warms the top of her head as she floats. She flips over and paddles further. She gets out far, far enough to find herself in deep water; but the wonder she thinks, and that no one can see, is that her feet are still touching ground, her toes tucked into the fine soft sand, the rippled ocean floor slightly shifting shape as the waves roll around her above. Since arriving three weeks ago, this gentle exfoliant has removed the rough parts of her soles, healing other cracks and blemishes that have been part of her for so long too.
 
As she comes back toward shore, she stands up and walks through the moving tide. She feels something under foot and reaches down for it. In her hand she holds a piece of oolite, a porous fossil-like thing, smooth and primitive at the same time. Made up of such things as minerals and coral and flint and clay. Some call it terrestrial detritus, which offers her some relief in her decision to claim it as her own, feeling like she’s rescuing something rejected, knowing she’ll love it with the tenderness one can have for the idea of home. She closes her fingers around this strange piece of soluble rock, but its misshapen form is slightly bigger than her palm, and so she can only cup it in an loose hold; and there, between her fingers, she notices two little mollusks nestled together inside a large pore that burrows into the center of this strange orb. They're both open.

She comes back to land with the little piece of sand and sea in her hand
--a solid imperfect globe, a small and perfect world for two.
0 Comments

Abandoned Seat (a true story)

6/16/2016

1 Comment

 
Picture
There’s a squad of exercisers out this morning, six altogether. I can’t yet tell which one is the trainer. They’re all facing the chain link fence down at the baseball diamond, their fingers bent around the wiring to steady themselves as they each swing their right leg back and forth while standing in place. They break formation to make a circle and they start doing jumping jacks, their shape together like an ensemble of sextants, gliding back and forth in unison as though measuring what might lie ahead on the horizon and charting their path forward.
 
I still can’t make out who’s leading, some subtle shift in direction must be transpiring between them, just below the surface, in the way tango dancers lead and follow invisibly to those watching on. They do a lap around the track together, four men and two women, jogging at a slow pace counter-clockwise around the park’s perimeter. Most everyone who uses the track goes counter-clockwise, myself included. And when I think back to ice-skating as a child, and later roller-skating as a teen, I realize in all such places most everyone goes round in that same direction too, an unspoken orderliness understood and observed by all.
 
There’s an empty bucket chair in the centre of the park green; the collapsible kind you see at outdoor music festivals and the beach; the kind with the little mesh well on one armrest where your drink goes. It’s facing the sun, open and upright, so maybe it’s not abandoned forever, and merely set in wait, ready for the occupant’s return to commence their leisure, when they'll position themselves toward the sunny day.
 
The lush and heady song of dove is intermittent around me, breaking through the choppy whir of a lawnmower over at the daycare centre where parent volunteers are tending the yard this morning; the coo is an intoxicant to me, curative, lifting me and liberating me; carrying me away. Of course, where it takes me is to Miami, to the wide open spaces there where I become expansive, at once settled and free; as my cousin there puts it so perfectly: this place unwinds me. That’s my particular place in the sun.
 
On cue for the season, the two little old Chinese ladies are back out for their daily Tai Chi practice. Their movements land somewhere between nonchalant and haphazard, liberal interpretations of the ancient discipline; though I suspect this tradition is less about fidelity to the form itself than to one’s focus and devotion to it.
 
The exercisers have returned from their loops around the track, and they’ve run up the hill before me and are now doing squats, with one of them breaking away to do push-ups against the park bench one down from me. Glancing over to watch, I notice Ken is now here, he too squatting – but he stays down, his torso sunk and slightly swaying between his bent and boney knees, his behind dragging back and forth against the ground beneath him. He seems more gaunt, or maybe it’s just that I can see his upper body bared by the mangy racerback tank he’s wearing to suit the new season. His flesh tone is off, sallow, and almost faded-looking, in the way his tattoos have turned that paler shade of navy, all the vibrance of tone drained away over time, their distinct shapes thinning into the surface that surrounds them. He’s smoking a cigarette, taking long hauls on inhalation and never appearing to release the smoke, or to exhale at all. What else does he hold inside that concave trunk of his, I wonder. What does that rib cage attempt to encase? He’s wearing the usual, aside from the racerback: his camouflage combat pants, stretched and torn and dirty, and the shin pads that protrude beyond his knees caps with the elastics cinching the pant legs tightly in bunches against his scrawny calves. As I see him here, rocking, I wonder if he’s ever lain in a hammock strung between two trees under the sun, somewhere where these are the things that make up a day; I wonder if he’s ever been cradled inside the netting and gently swayed as though floating on air.
 
The last time I saw Ken was a month or so ago, when I began coming out to this bench again, once the weather became more clement to me. That day he was picking up the chunks and shards of a broken 40 of Olde English Malt Liquor, the sharp debris scattered beside the bench where the exercisers are this morning. He was using his bare hands to grab and cart the pieces of broken glass over to the garbage bin that the parks board puts out. He patrolled the length of the pathway where all the park benches are positioned, and he scrutinized the grass and pavement for more trash that needed cleaning away, the waste left behind by the park’s revelers the night before: on that morning it was bits of paper, cigarette butts, a torn pizza box, crushed cans, and all that broken glass; other mornings, it might be different remains, yet really the same thing.
 
He was wearing his keys around his neck, and the shin pads over those same camo pants, with a grimy sweatshirt stretched out of shape and hanging lopsided off his bony shoulders. His cheeks were sunken, though not as much as now it seems; I realized that day it was because he has no teeth, not because he’s emaciated, though he’s that too. It was the first time I saw the scars all over his skull, little jagged tracks of raised tissue, interruptions in the shorn stubble—if they were brail or tactile hieroglyphs, I remember wondering, what would these ropey ridges tell us about this man? At the time, I thought to myself: Ken. My neighbor. This park’s unlikely caretaker. The man with the unlucky crown.
 
That was when I was in the midst of emailing with the city’s parks’ department staff, me asking when the track would be resurfaced with springier material than the sodden mess left after a winter’s worth of weather beating all the loft out of tidied trail laid last summer. There are now unseen holes and bits of exposed root, rendering the track dodgy and uneven, and in need of leveling. Soon, they told me. I finished our exchange by telling the staff about Ken, wanting his contribution to the park, if not seen, or commended, at least known. When I thanked him myself that morning for clearing away the broken bottle, he shrugged off my remarks, not wanting the attention.
 
Suddenly Ken shoots up and walks away, passing through the band of exercisers as they continue to leap vigorously in place together, breathing heavily in their circle and counting out loud as one. Through their huddle, I watch Ken as he heads toward his apartment building; his slow labourious lumber in his ill-fitting protective gear takes him past a foresaken shopping cart, and past another little old Chinese lady, this one having spent the morning collecting empties throughout the park and who is now resting on a shaded bench amidst her stuffed and stretched bags. It doesn’t look like anyone else has seen either of them, or if they have it doesn’t show or seem to register. I watch to the point of staring, seeing more than any of us should—a certain threat to the security of my well-being, I know.
 
The exercisers finish, and in unison they chant “1, 2, 3, hail”, clapping loudly on hail; then they fall into line as the trainer takes a step back and snaps a picture of the group. Now I know who’s in charge. Behind them, below, ball players fan out across the baseball diamond and take their places; and without moving it, they play, unfazed, around that deserted seat, the game unstoppable.
1 Comment

My Mom’s Proof—a Mother’s Day Ode

5/8/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Inside a soft cardboard photo folder, the kind that people prop open on mantels and sideboards to display their loved ones in pictures that were often taken, or were back then, in the photography studio of big department stores, is set behind the 8 x 10 scalloped edge window a portrait of my mother. It’s the option she must have selected from the others taken during the sitting that day, which she wedged, loose, between the folder’s covers. On the back of the folder, in her distinct and sanguine script she’d written: Betty Sharpe 1930 -        
 
That incomplete assertion is devastating. Her eagerness and expectation is in plain view; and what seems to be her bright view of herself, and of her future, is also equally evident: she has resolve; she’s looking forward, to everything it seems. Now, though, looking back, knowing what only the coroner and I know, I see her openness to what lay ahead far more ominous than optimistic.
 
What was she thinking, I wonder? Who did she think would fill in the blank after that dash to complete her sentence? Of course, when that time came, when the end of that statement was upon us to record, she wouldn’t. And no one else did it in her stead either, which, today, obviously means me.
 
I found this folder in a drawer as I went through my mother’s belongings after her death in 1992, when I was 30 and she was 61. I’d never seen the pictures before, I’d never seen the folder open on a mantel in someone’s living room; not in anyone’s, not anywhere, not ever.
 
The set of pictures was taken in 1951, at Hudson’s Bay in downtown Vancouver, 10 years before I was born, before she knew my father, I think, but don’t know for sure. All those details – her life really – is a mystery to me, a story I piece together from snippets she shared offhandedly, where, I later learned, she was sometimes careful to cloak parts, offering a looser interpretation of her past than the truth on its own would convey; I piece in layers from my own memories, vague and few as they are, and also from conjecture; from what I know about things as a woman myself, now middle-aged, as a mother too, and from the kinds of experiences life delivers to some of us. Our life was lived in a perpetual present; there was no discernible past that was talked about, no family over visiting and telling tales, for they’d all but vanished, though not yet in the absolute as they would after everything, later. At that point, in these pictures, she was still a Sharpe, as she declares in her script. She would later become a Welch, and then I would come along and be one too.
 
I prefer one of the proofs of her taken that day, and that’s what I now have on my desk in a frame that's too large for the picture. I love seeing the word proof written in wax pencil across her blouse, and the loose markings drawn around her face so long ago, tentatively seeking out the border that would compose this official portrayal of her, the tracings a kind of divining rod—I like seeing all that extra of her: her hands with their long fingers held delicately, and just so, the slopes of her shoulders, the light line of her pearls barely apparent, details about her not extraneous to me as I want to see more.
 
Knowing her, she probably wouldn’t like my selection from the set, nor that I put the messy proof in an outsized frame on display. Yet, I also know that she would understand why I like it, and she would understand what I’m doing—and she’d be flattered, and pleased, and she’d approve anyway, despite her own opposition. She was generous that way, with a largesse of mind that made room for difference, probably because she knew from experience how much it mattered to give others room to live as they are; probably because she was given so little room herself, or, worse, sometimes finding herself locked inside a few. And I know her face, that placid, flat expanse of pretty features, would shift from feigned consternation into a relaxed form, yielding a slight nod and slighter grin, telling me it’s ok, telling me, in fact, that she likes the transgression. Subtle, yet seen, this look is something we shared between us.
 
I think she always understood what I was doing. And I know she always approved. Though some boundaries were loose, and amorphous, and something that couldn’t always be observed, or enforced, or even noticed from the outside, there were other boundaries, inside, ones more important and enduring, that defined the particular territory we inhabited. It was sometimes random and sometimes raw, and it was sometimes rich in the ways that only those with less seem to know; ours was a singular life of mother and child, she weathered and me wild; it was an entirely original world, one I didn’t really see as unusual, and it’s one that’s lasted.
 
So, after all, after everything, she is now on someone’s mantel. Proof. And I’m not filling in the blank after that dash. I’m keeping her life part of the present, still. I know she’d approve.
0 Comments

clear cut architect

2/1/2016

0 Comments

 
Is it just me, or is it weird that an architect firm has images of clear cuts in their entrance?
zoe welch photography
0 Comments

meeting Harold Budd

1/25/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
Harold Budd
Vancouver
Saturday January 23, 2016
Burrard Arts Foundation / PuSh Festival
 
He doesn’t know it yet, but Harold Budd composed the music for my 1987 Super-8 film, “Call”, an experimental piece, running time all of 5 minutes or so. I’m going to tell him today, almost 30 years later. Budd is in conversation with Alex Varty at *BAF this afternoon, as part of the PuSh Festival.
 
I arrive early, so pick what seems to me like the best seat in the house, a bearing beam at my back that I can lean into, and an unfettered view of the two empty chairs positioned under the soft gallery lighting and amidst the even softer colours of Ed Spence’s paintings currently on exhibit. I’m excited, to understate things.
 
They arrive and take their seats. Harold Budd is a dapper man, diminutive in size, august in dress, elegant in manner. Alex Varty is nervous, or seems so; maybe that’s just his way. Budd is relaxed and offers simple responses to Varty’s questions—he’s not being rude, he’s just modest, with a well-hewn sense of himself. When asked about a particular collaboration, if it was the other’s technique that Budd enjoyed, he said of his collaborator: it was his attitude; that he came at his work, like me, with the view to be alert to what you adapt as real into your own material being.
 
This seems key – Budd’s leitmotif, for living as much as for working; it seems to be about finding what produces harmony in space, both in the one he inhabits within himself and in the one that surrounds him. He seeks out beauty. Long ago, he said, when his son was born, he moved his piano out of the living room, and filled in the space with a Navajo rug where they lay and played. He said he found the piano really ugly, and found the rug very beautiful. By way of further explanation, he said it’s part of his avoidance of confrontation—he’s had too much of it in his life, and so seeks out beauty. I’m a man who loves flowers, he said of himself, in sum.
 
To me, he’s a fluid man. He doesn’t attach to much, but he’s not aloof either, just loose: he doesn’t get attached to things or ideas, nor does he probe much for meaning. He’s ready to be content with what is, though making sure that circumstances are opportune for contentment.
 
Budd started out long ago, he told us, feeling his way towards his own interests through intuition and inspiration. In 1956, he saw a Rothko painting in a book, and in it he saw a way of living, and a way of making a living; he saw where he wanted to be, and then he got himself there. He’s ever since followed his intuition, and says he works on hunches. Today, if a hunch doesn’t pan out, he diverts route. With “too many loose ends in my brain”, he says, he doesn’t try to analyze what he’s doing, he just tries things out; if it’s not good, he moves on to the next thing.

Picture
Varty’s last question to Budd surprised me: he asked about the pink-tinted glasses Budd wears, who then explained: I don’t see well anymore, and I live in the desert where it’s really sunny. The rose tint reduces a large amount of glare, while protecting my eyes from bright sunlight, and they also provide sharper contrasts between objects so that I can see better. I know from glass artists that pink glass is the most expensive because pure gold is used to produce the pink hues; I also know from an anthropology major that the pink glass that was used in old cathedral stained glass windows was considered the highest spiritually, likely because of the cost to produce it, and so, used sparingly, it was tied to the most significant elements, often used to represent Mary.
 
It occurs to me that Harold Budd sees the world, as the saying goes, through rose-coloured glasses. I think it perfectly applies to him, in every way—call it a hunch.
 
PS: After the talk, I introduced myself to Harold and told him the story about my film. He was gracious to me, and amused by the story, and he kindly autographed the S-8 cover. He held my hand the whole time we talked. He's 79.

0 Comments
<<Previous

    author

    zoe welch
                                      

        hacker
    kamikaze
    phoenix

    like life itself,
     and my very person,
     it's all a work in progress

               

       YVR • MIA • YUL

    

    Categories

    All
    Art
    Family
    Film
    Home
    Identity
    Pilgrimage
    Place
    Public Education
    Travel



    Archives

    October 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    July 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    October 2017
    December 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    September 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    November 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.