Archive for Arts
Live-Action Shorts
Yesterday I got to see the five films nominated for Oscars in the Live Action Shorts category this year. It was a terrific experience! Two of my favourites are available on You Tube.
The “Jane Austen’s Period Drama” is a truly funny spoof for which Emma Thompson was “the Menstrual Producer.” “Two People Exchanging Saliva” astonished and moved me.
Judith Viorst
When my mother died, I kept just a few of her things, including her manual typewriter and some books by Susan Sontag, Anne Sexton, and Judith Viorst. Here’s a wonderful interview with the 94-year-old Viorst.
‘Paint It Black’
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions very often, but I really do need to listen to more big band jazz.
Deborah Silver is a marvellous singer.
Hard to know what to write and publish these days …
This clip is still getting through: “The Siege of AR-558” – written by Ira Behr and Hans Beimler. The late actor Aron Eisenberg plays the young cadet. Armin Shimerman is Quark.
.Quark tells his nephew something about humans.
Don’t hide.
Before I taught my class this afternoon, I visited The Pendulum Gallery downtown to view my friend Lincoln Clarkes‘ marvellous photo exhibition again (it closes tonight). The gallery is a terrific space, which I had *almost* to myself. The two women there, from England, came up to me and started a conversation – a few minutes into which the older of the two asked me whether anyone had ever told me how quite odd I seemed.
Many polite people have asked me that question, and my answer’s typically something like this: “It’s amazing that I’m even allowed outside.” (It is.)
Today, however, I was still trying to find the words when the younger companion said, “Just take the hit and go on.” I did, we all did.
I had the best morning!
Marilyn Suriani
From 2016 (a post called “Big Art”):
“What gets installed in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” My friend photographer Marilyn Suriani is preparing a huge installation there – the largest piece is 54-feet wide. It’s beautiful, a continuation of this remarkable phase in her career, which sees Suriani creating nature- and waterscapes in shimmering, rhapsodic colours. This work feels both abstract and earthly.
—
I learned a couple of weeks ago that Marilyn had passed away, in Atlanta, where she had lived and worked for decades. Marilyn was a Sicilian live-wire originally from Philly whom I truly really loved. I had acquired her photo-book Dancing Naked in the Material World in 1991 or so, in my Buffalo, New York publishing days. We got to know each other over the phone; listening to her voice made the sun shine; and she taught me a ton. At my desk right now, I face seven photographs by Marilyn on the wall.
Hers was the first photogallery published in my old e-zine Ellavon, in 1998 or so. You can find a wider array of her work (scanned and printed at a much higher res) on SurianiPhoto.com.
Certain Days
I admire and have supported this publishing project for many years, as many dear friends who have found the calendar in their Christmas stockings know. To start the year, I go through each page day by day.
Phil Lesh
One of my dearest friends saw well over a hundred Grateful Dead shows (and remembers the set list from every single one). A few years ago he saw nine (!) Phil Lesh and Friends shows in Port Chester, New York, in one month. He sent me this marvellous archive from the Port Chester shows.
Phil Lesh was a musical genius who increased the musical vocabulary and swelled the listening sensoriums of everyone who paid attention, bringing worlds into us.
“The root of beauty is boldness. That is what’s brought us to one another.”— Boris Pasternak
“Grief Casseroles”
That is the name of Danielle Raymond’s new writing project (on Substack). Danielle is a dear friend of mine whom I met when she was a psychology student taking one of my technical report-writing classes at Kwantlen. Her memory and artistry fashion an exacting lens that renders pain and love with surpassing vividness.
“Since I Been Down”
The woman who sat next to me on the train from Olympia to Seattle this weekend directed this terrific documentary.
Simplicity is beautiful*
Filling out the customs form before crossing the border north into Canada this Sunday, I noted that I was bringing some food back. When the customs officer asked me what food I got, I explained that I had a carton of instant mashed potatoes and two boxes of Grape Nuts breakfast cereal. He said, what the heck are Grape Nuts? So I showed him the boxes. Then I added: “I am so pathetic that my girlfriend had to buy them for me!” and got a laugh. (I think I’ll quit while I am ahead – not gonna try to make a custom officer laugh again!)
A few months back it dawned on me that one could no longer purchase plain “potato flakes” in Vancouver. Each variation of instant mashed potatoes was “flavoured” and was filled with everything from soy, milk, citric acid, and wheat to pyrophosphates and silicon dioxide. I wanted hardcore *plain*. It felt ridiculous that I couldn’t find any! I found out about “Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods” on Amazon, but it would cost an arm and a leg to ship their potato flakes to my place north of the border. That is where my partner stepped in.
During my visit she also guided me to a local Safeway so that I could stock up on Grape Nuts, that weird and crunchy cereal that was discontinued during Our Time of Covid. It has reappeared in parts of Canada – allegedly! – but certainly nowhere near me. I have long truly treasured Grape Nuts. During times of real poverty, I used to eat them with warm water instead of milk – and felt like I had just won something.
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* The title of this post comes from Juliana Hatfield’s very fine song of the same name. Love these lyrics:
Blues soul rock country
Red green blue yellow
Morning laughing talking walking
Bread rice water fruit
It’s a simple feeling
Hold feel save me
Baby brother sister parent
Buffalo’s “Old Pink” is gone …
… having gone up in flames this morning. In the days when I used to swing by (between, say, 1985 and 1993), this legendary dive bar was called “The Pink Flamingo.” There was a glorious ferment there, of artists and musicians and writers and editors and significant others and copious incarnations of riffraff. Made real friends in that place.
Click on the photo below to see a lovely panorama of photographs of the bar published in “The Scoundrel’s Field Guide“:
“La forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas ! que le cœur d’un mortel.”
Certain Days …
And apropos:
I admire and have supported this project for many years, as many dear friends who have found the calendar in their Christmas stockings know:
The Certain Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar collective will be releasing our 24th calendar this coming autumn. We are doing an open call for abolition-related art and article submissions to feature in the calendar, which hangs in more than 6,000 homes, workplaces, prison cells, and community spaces around the world. We encourage contributors to submit both new and existing work. We especially seek submissions from people in prison or jail, so please forward this call to any prison-based artists and writers. Deadline: Friday, May 31, 2024. Send your submissions and brief bio by May 31 to info@certaindays.org.
“A big swing, and it works.”
My friend Kristi Coulter‘s second book, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, gets some love in this week’s New Yorker. Anna Wiener writes,
The jacket copy for “Exit Interview” describes it as “an intimate, surprisingly relatable” story of “a driven woman in a world that loves the idea of female ambition but balks at the reality.” True enough, and Coulter is particularly attuned to sexism in the workplace, including the way women can internalize corporate logic: when she learns, from an exposé in the ‘Times,’ that a colleague was put on probation after having a stillbirth, Coulter finds herself wondering if there was more to the story. “Well, how long post-stillbirth was she off her game? Are we talking three weeks, or three months?” she thinks. When it comes to her own experiences of sexism, she doesn’t spin off into polemics, or belabor the point. For the most part, the microaggressions—and macroaggressions—speak for themselves. …
The book is mostly written in the present tense, adding momentum to workplace conversations about “the checkout pipeline in China,” or the appropriate Web copy for a DVD promotion. One chapter, loosely structured as a travel itinerary, is written in the second person: “Bienvenue à Amazon France, and prepare to be barely tolerated!” Footnotes are sprinkled throughout, adding meta-commentary: “The Leadership Principles are basically Amazon Commandments . . . in the middle of the night I once told my dawdling puppy to show some Bias for Action and pee already so we could go back to bed.” These notes are unobtrusive and clever, but they are also strange: isn’t memoir already a form of meta-commentary? In the final pages, the writing gets cinematic and a little experimental, as Coulter entertains a fantasy while on a run. A big swing, and it works.
I am thrilled by Kristi’s success. I don’t know a better writer.
“Consistent Joy”
Talia Lavin’s Substack blog, The Sword and the Sandwich, is a marvel of multiple focus: the arts (mostly movies and literature), the American “far right,” and … “notable sandwiches.” In my dreams I cannot write as whimsically as she can (and, even when wide awake, rarely as intelligently). This is from her 75th installment on sandwiches, The Grilled Cheese:
In writing about the grilled cheese sandwich, I find myself with little to offer but praise. It is difficult to encounter such a thing and not overrun the page with the fervency of my gladness.
This is not a column where I will carp and complain—about air-fryer grilled cheeses, or fancy gourmet grilled cheeses, or Kraft-single grilled cheeses, or the proper application of butter, or the appropriate pan, or the degree and nature of the condiments. To me, each grilled cheese is enough, and more than enough. In this world so full of slaughter and fire, where doubt and monstrosity abound, this much is clear to me: the grilled cheese is a small and perfect thing. And how many of those are there?
So my position on the grilled cheese is unabashedly boosterish, and moreover, it is agnostic towards ingredients and provenance. To your grilled cheese you may add caramelized onions or avocado; bacon, turkey or ham; chutney or cornichons. Make it with Wonderbread or a freshly-baked eighteen-grain country loaf sourced from fields you cultivated yourself in a cantilevered sky-farm with the finest hydroponics. Add goat cheese or smoked gouda or aged cheddar or unidentified plasticine processed cheese product; heat it in a pan or over a flame, under a broiler, in a dutch oven, or with an acetylene torch. I do not care. You have composed something perfect with your own hands. You have made something that will warm and satisfy you. You have, for a small moment, partaken of the act of creation that grants the human animal its sliver of divinity. You have done so by means of the grilled cheese sandwich.
From two perfect things—bread and cheese—arises a more perfect union. …
I am hungry for joy lately. Perhaps you are too. The grilled cheese sandwich for me is an object of consistent joy, which is different in kind than the transcendent ray-through-the-clouds joy that graces any life too rarely. Perhaps that makes it more valuable; reliable pleasure, ordinary pleasure, is as common as light and as necessary. It is only in the consideration of it that I come to appreciate how this mundane thing can be an object of desire and delight. With effort and after much contemplation I think myself toward joy, and welcome its arrival. Life must be leavened by joy to rise; stand and let it in; it approaches with soft footfalls and is easy to miss, or to begrudge in petulance or fervor. …
“Farewell to a Poor Bastard”
This 1995 photograph is from the book Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-Five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels. It depicts five comics artists who founded a new era and style of autobiographical narrative: Adrian Tomine, Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Seth, and Joe Matt. After I purchased this wonderful book and first saw this photograph, I could have fainted. I have just about everything each of them has ever published. Each of these artists has altered how I regard literature, art, and life.
Joe Matt is the fellow on the right. He seemed to disappear a few years ago, to the point that his books were no longer available from Drawn & Quarterly. I asked one of the owners of Olympia, Washington’s Danger Room Comics (you must go there!) what was going on with Joe Matt, and he told me that Seth (second from right, above) stays in touch with him; this seemed to me a courteous and circumspect way to indicate that Matt was not doing well.
It was impossible to love Joe Matt without also being intensely exasperated by him. The love and exasperation weren’t in tension but fed off each other: Caring for him was inextricable from irritation at the myriad ways he exercised his gift for self-sabotage. …
The cartoon Joe Matt was a cheapskate, lazy, shallow, and, worst of all, a swinish boyfriend who neglected his flesh-and-blood partners in preference to chronic masturbation to pornography and fantasizing about other women.
This self-portrait of the artist as a young jerkoff earned Joe an intense cult following who marveled at his gift for self-revelation as well as his impeccable comic timing. The real Joe shared many traits with his cartoon alter ego—but also a warmth that won him many friends. …
I got to know Joe Matt while I was working as a journalist in Toronto in the 1990s. I would occasionally write about Joe’s work and also that of his two cartoonist friends Chester Brown and Seth (who sometimes showed up as comic foils in Joe’s work). I had shown my wife, Robin Ganev, Joe’s just published graphic novel, The Poor Bastard. Robin delighted in the book as an accurate portrayal of the dating scene among young Toronto bohemians in the 1990s. Joe’s portrait of himself as a heel impressed her as an essentially accurate rendering of an all-too-common male type. As my friend the journalist Nathalie Atkinson notes, “Many women love Joe Matt’s comics—in part because he confirms everything we suspected.” Despite enjoying the work, Robin wasn’t quite sure she wanted to meet Joe in the flesh. Like Jacqueline Susann after reading Philip Roth’s masturbatory masterpiece Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Robin admired the work but was reluctant to shake the hand.
As it happened, when she met him, Robin took to Joe immediately. He was witty, self-deprecating, a responsive listener, and disarmingly willing to share personal information.
—
September 27: The Comics Journal has published a series of reminiscences by Joe Matt’s cartoonist colleagues. They are all really good, but the piece by Seth had me in tears by the time I got to the end of it, so rich is it with memory and conflicting emotions, admiration and love side by side with disdain and disapproval. It’s art.
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Kristi Coulter
My friend Kristi Coulter and I go back a ways – to the old Usenet newsgroup days of the early 90s, particularly the newsgroup alt.music.alternative.female, where her insights enlightened me and her prose style thrilled me. In 1997 I asked her to write for a project I was starting called Ellavon: An ezine of basic culture. My editor’s input into her work consisted of never having a single thing to change in her submissions – nothing, literally nothing, not even a comma (something that had never happened before or since in my career as a professional editor) – and then asking her for another piece.
Kristi’s career as a published writer went quiet for awhile after Ellavon was put on hiatus, but she was very busy professionally otherwise, editing AllMusic.com and then working in a variety of roles at Amazon, which is the topic of her second book, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career.
The book received a very laudatory prepublication review in the New York Times:
And here’s a very fun interview in The Stranger, Seattle’s famous alternative weekly:
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