Writings from the Carnegie

Todd Coyne

Thursdays 2: Writings from the Carnegie Centre is a brand new chap­book of poetry and prose from writ­ers liv­ing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. All nine­teen con­trib­u­tors to the book – the sec­ond in a series from the Carnegie Centre – honed their craft in cre­ative writ­ing ses­sions along­side Otter Press founder and SFU Writers Studio poetry adjunct Elee Kraljii Gardiner and renowned Montreal poet John Asfour, both of whom co-edited and con­tributed their own pieces to Thursdays 2.

At the recent book launch in a well-attended Eastside bar, Thursdays authors read their pieces to the pub­lic, told anec­dotes of Eastside life, and solid­i­fied them­selves as the biggest, bold­est, and by far the most vital con­spir­acy of writ­ers oper­at­ing in Vancouver at present. Their man­i­festo decrees “Let us aban­don pre­tense and hypocrisy to be who we really are,” and the result is brac­ing. Every line in Thursdays 2 is a mea­sured sinew of raw nerve, sub­ver­sively snaking its way east through the cor­ri­dors of Hastings, north on Main, twist­ing up the spi­ral stair­case of the Carnegie’s old stone tur­ret, and explod­ing aloud from an upstairs room.

Get your copy of Thursdays 2 here.

Teen Angst Poetry Night!

Todd Coyne

If you ever wrote poetry or kept a diary as a teenager and are still for some rea­son hang­ing on to it, there is a good rea­son why. It’s not because your ado­les­cent oeu­vre was so far ahead of its time that you have to while away in obscu­rity until the fickle tastes of the lit­er­ary world finally exca­vate the gold­mine still buried under your bed after all these years. For though you felt your lyrics rivaled any­thing Queensrÿche ever knocked out, and your har­row­ing jour­nals would have given Anne Frank a pity­ing pause, you have grown old and hard­ened, and the writer in you has been in his or her reclu­sive wilder­ness cabin ever since. No, you’ve been keep­ing all that embar­rass­ing tripe, let­ting it fer­ment away in the back of your closet so that you might finally air it out in all its pun­gent glory dur­ing Teen Angst Poetry Night at Vancouver’s Railway Club.

On the sec­ond Tuesday of each month, read­ers line up with tat­tered jour­nals and unlocked diaries in hand to re-inhabit their for­mer selves before a bar­room full of laugh­ter and ridicule. This week played host to more diarists than poets so the sure­fire gut-busting rhyming cou­plet was in short sup­ply. Regardless, I found no short­age of mem­o­rable lines to take away with me, and a few read­ers I talked with after­wards gra­ciously gave their per­mis­sion to share with you some choice quotes:

I wish I could kill peo­ple with my thoughts. No one would know it was me. There would just be a slew of dead peo­ple around me … AT ALL TIMES.

My par­ents grounded me. They don’t own me! Fuck them, I’m gonna sneak out. I’m going to Teen Swim!

I watched Top Gun today … but it wasn’t as good as the book.

And finally, to those for whom the rhyme is still king, I offer this punchy lit­tle hat-trick, which leapt unex­pect­edly from a much longer epic piece:

show me your junk
and feel the funk
in my trunk.

Gursky at the VAG

Todd Coyne

Most artist ret­ro­spec­tives look and feel a bit like taxi­dermy. Not the art­works them­selves, but the cer­e­mo­nial eulo­giz­ing of the artist’s career and the mount­ing of his body of work as it last stood, frozen in some museum curator’s sights. Lucky for us, the Vancouver Art Gallery and pho­tog­ra­pher Andreas Gursky con­spired to sub­vert these expec­ta­tions and, instead of just dust­ing off a few prints from the base­ment archives, the gallery has invited the world-renowned pho­tog­ra­pher to curate his own liv­ing, breath­ing ret­ro­spec­tive here in Vancouver. The only one of its kind in North America, Gursky’s Werke/Works 80–08 show­cases 130 of his best-known and some never-before-shown pho­tographs, each hand­picked, printed and hung by the artist for the Vancouver exhi­bi­tion.

Known today as the world’s high­est gross­ing pho­tog­ra­pher — his 99 Cent II Diptychon, (2001), sold at auc­tion in 2007 for a record US$3.34 mil­lion — Gursky got his start as a stu­dent in the pho­tog­ra­phy hotbed of Düsseldorf, Germany. From fairly early on, Gursky began mak­ing a name for him­self with his large-scale photo explo­rations of how, as humans, we orga­nize our envi­ron­ment and our selves in both work and leisure. Gursky is best known for cap­tur­ing human mass spec­ta­cles that char­ac­ter­ize a mod­ern glob­al­ized soci­ety. Whether in his images of swarm­ing traders on a stock-exchange floor, the teem­ing throngs at a German rave or the metic­u­lous chore­og­ra­phy of a polit­i­cal rally in Pyongyang, Gursky presents a com­plete archi­tec­ture of con­tem­po­rary human expe­ri­ence from a dead­pan — almost omni­scient — point of view, and always with impec­ca­ble atten­tion to detail. Gursky wields his large-format cam­era like a rolling pin — flat­ten­ing the visual field and squeez­ing out all sub­jec­tiv­ity and sen­ti­men­tal­ity from his peo­pled land­scapes — pro­duc­ing richly coloured, tightly focused two-by-five-metre mas­ter­works of exis­ten­tial uncer­tainty.

Spanning his career from his stu­dent days in 1980, through his adop­tion of dig­i­tal edit­ing tech­niques in the early nineties, to the per­fec­tion of his panoramic, hyper-real per­spec­tive for the twenty-first cen­tury, Works/Werke 80–08 is cur­rently the defin­i­tive ency­clo­pe­dia — but hope­fully not its final edi­tion — on the world’s most col­lectible pho­tog­ra­pher.

Works/Werke 80–08 runs until September 20, 2009 at the VAG.

Stumping for STV

Todd Coyne

Still con­fused about the BC-STV ini­tia­tive on the May 12^th bal­lot? Fine, you’re not alone — which is why there is now an ani­mated YouTube video explain­ing how the Single Transferable Vote would work in B.C. 

But per­haps you are so hard­ened by apa­thy or past dis­ap­point­ment that you can­not imag­ine ever warm­ing up to any MLA can­di­date enough to tick their name on the bal­lot, let alone pick a whole hand­ful of favourites from the can­di­date pool. Well then, some reassurance:

“You don’t have to vote for any­body,” advised Krist Novoselic, for­mer Nirvana bassist, and chair of elec­tion reform orga­ni­za­tion FairVote from his home in Washington State. The overt impli­ca­tion being, of course, that democ­racy is par­tic­i­pa­tory and, should you not care to vote for any can­di­date, you are cer­tainly free to not par­tic­i­pate.

The sub­tler impli­ca­tion here, though, is one that’s often over­looked by those on both sides of the STV debate. It is that under the STV sys­tem you could still vote for only one can­di­date — you do not have to sub­mit a ranked-choice bal­lot for mul­ti­ple can­di­dates. With STV, you could also still vote strate­gi­cally to reward or pun­ish a spe­cific party, and you could tech­ni­cally still “swap” or “pair” votes with some­one in another rid­ing in hopes of play­ing the provin­cial spread to your great­est per­sonal advan­tage. That is, with STV you could still vote as if under the cur­rent first-past-the-post sys­tem, your sin­gu­lar vote would be counted as such, and you need not lose any sleep.

The hope with STV, how­ever, is that we will all be inspired to tran­scend these relics of winner-take-all par­ti­san­ship and engage civil gov­ern­ment from the grass­roots on up. The onus will be on the par­ties to nom­i­nate proac­tive, charis­matic, and con­sis­tent com­mu­nity rep­re­sen­ta­tives with real home­grown sup­port in their rid­ings, as opposed to run­ning a revolv­ing door of toe-the-line career politi­cians.

“British Columbia is an increas­ingly diverse place with peo­ple com­ing from all over, so it ought to have an elec­toral sys­tem that speaks to that,” said Novoselic. “And if British Columbia passes ranked-choice vot­ing, it will be a shot heard across the con­ti­nent.”

Here’s hop­ing.

Krist Novoselic and mem­bers of the Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform will be at UBC–Robson Square in Vancouver on Friday, May 1, using their con­sid­er­able celebrity to help you help your­self. More info here.

André Cormier’s Miniaturist Architecture

Todd Coyne

Some­one once said that “writ­ing about music is like danc­ing about archi­tec­ture.” I’m inclined to agree, but would also want to say that there isn’t nearly enough of the lat­ter hap­pen­ing — not to my knowl­edge, at least. 

Cross-pollination between all types of artis­tic expres­sion, I think, is a nat­ural incli­na­tion in the arts and prob­a­bly lies near the heart of what makes any great aes­thetic idea worth express­ing — i.e., that it can be expressed through abstracts at all. This inter­dis­ci­pli­nary ten­dency of aes­thetic ideas is one of the most excit­ing rev­e­la­tions in any art expe­ri­ence — like a coher­ent rush of synaes­the­sia, which for a fleet­ing moment seems to unite the hemi­spheres of the brain.

Not to get too mired in the psy­chol­ogy of art, but these were the thoughts run­ning through my tem­porar­ily united brain while lis­ten­ing to the Vancouver Miniaturist Ensemble’s inter­pre­ta­tion of André Cormier’s INFECTIONS at the Pacific Cinematheque. Less a tra­di­tional musi­cal com­po­si­tion than an archi­tec­ture in sound, Cormier’s skele­tal explo­ration of sound-forms as build­ing blocks is per­fectly suited to the VME’s man­date of per­form­ing only works that con­sist of a sparse one hun­dred notes or less. The rig­or­ous struc­ture that this lim­i­ta­tion encour­ages ensures that their pieces con­tain no unnec­es­sary notes or tan­gen­tial phrases — no hall­ways lead­ing to nowhere. 

Barack, Paper, Scissor . . . or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love BaRonk Hussenglish Obrahama

Todd Coyne

By now the point is moot and any exam­i­na­tion of the much-parroted ‘Obama-as-Lincoln’ vs. ‘the Barack Star’  por­tray­als of the new American pres­i­dent in the pop­u­lar media could hardly be less timely. But you may be pos­i­tively SHOCKED to know that both of these broad and pop­u­lar sen­ti­ments first sprang forth from the imag­i­na­tion of a sin­gle graphic artist, the great Ron English. Yes! Can you even believe that peo­ple still pay atten­tion to graphic artists?

Exhibited as a part of Rock, Paper, Scissor at the Robert Berman Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, English’s weird, bearded-Barack silkscreen in the iconic style of a Warholian pop idol was the cat­a­lyst of both of these lazy media han­dles which I have here sub­jected you to for – hope­fully, mer­ci­fully — the very last time.

None of which is intended to detract from the merit of English’s Abraham Obama (2008), but rather to hypoth­e­size that full credit — how­ever dubi­ous — be given the artist where I believe it’s due.

Other works con­cur­rently exhibit­ing in Rock, Paper, Scissor are all actu­ally by, for, and about actual rock’n’roll stars. Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Brian Eno, the MC5, and the Beatles are all rep­re­sented in the var­i­ous com­po­si­tions of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. Other hugely influ­en­tial musician/graphic artists, notably Raymond Pettibon, Kim Gordon, Daniel Johnston, and Gibby Haynes all show along­side English’s Obama at the Berman Gallery until March 21 — and are then for­got­ten forever.

Morrison Hotel

Todd Coyne

Nestled into the apex of where the Sunset Strip and Santa Monica Blvd. nearly meet in West Hollywood is a  run­down motel called the Alta Cienega whose appear­ance hasn’t changed much since Jim Morrison, poet and singer with the Doors, ended his leg­endary two-year occu­pancy of room #32 in 1970 at the height of his fame. A recur­ring specter in many of Morrison’s later writ­ings (notably, “The Celebration of the Lizard” and in the col­lected poems of Wilderness), the “green hotel” is also the cen­tral set­ting of Morrison’s HWY: An American Pastoral, a largely direc­tion­less foray into filmmaking.

Stumbling acci­den­tally upon this one-time Mecca of my youth, we decided to pay the extra two bucks at the check-in to stay the night in room #32, the “Jim Morrison Memorial Room.” On enter­ing room #32, it became sadly appar­ent from the writ­ing on the walls, ceil­ing, and every other sur­face that might hold ink, that basic lit­er­acy is not a req­ui­site for Jim Morrison fan­dom. And as the night wore on, the nov­elty of going to sleep under a blood-brown ban­ner of “NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE!” wore on us until the early morn­ing when the only elec­tric light in the room sud­denly came on by itself. “WAKE UP!”

John Wayne, International

Todd Coyne

Dear John Wayne … 

They called you the Duke, and some still do. Hunter Thompson called you a ham­mer­head shark, “igno­rant of every­thing except his own fears and appetites … with a preter­nat­ural genius for brain­less vio­lence,” and so on in that tone. But per­haps the Good Doc just needed a bone to pick and you seemed a nat­ural mark. 

You, after all, starred in Girls Demand Excitement and The Green Berets, and Orange County, California, has given you their air­port—entrust­ing you to wel­come its strangers. From these two films (the only ones I’ve seen in full) and from a drug­store Duke biog­ra­phy I once read and now remem­ber only for its immor­tal open­ing line, “John Wayne is one of the super­stars of ALL time,” I’ve been left with lit­tle doubt, how­ever, that in your life as in your “art” you were indeed stu­pid, mean-spirited and a keen bigot. 

But this is con­jec­tural, and you are dead, so I’ll stick to what I know first­hand, which is that the ser­vice at John Wayne International Airport today was effi­cient and gen­er­ally wel­com­ing — except for the fat tarmac-tyrant with the Traffic Enforcement brigade. But you can’t be blamed for his behav­iour. No more than you can be blamed for the air of proud vio­lence sur­round­ing the Latter-Day Saint at Salt Lake City International, guard­ing the home­land with his rifle and German shep­herd. No more, even, than you could be acces­sory to the bru­tal busi­ness of racist cops back home in my own Canadian Wild West who beat and rob on their down­time because they “don’t like brown peo­ple.” You couldn’t be blamed for any of this, could you?