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 12th 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?