May 2

found on a telephone pole, good friday 2010:

because
i need to express myself to stay sane i'm shy this is where i live i don't see my history written on the body of this city sometimes i am so sad sometimes i am so lonely seeing something i've made, outside, in my neighborhood helps and so this is where i am making my home i have responsibility for this place this city needs more color this city needs more vibrancy this city needs more creativity this city needs more spontaneity, this city needs less bureaucracy i sometimes can't sleep at night my heart hurts i can't just leave the past behind i can never finish things but i create all the time and can't throw them out i have lots of doodles around my house i taught myself to draw and think i mostly suck but some people like it i have things to say that i don't want my name attached to i love seeing other people's creations i am inspired by other people's creations i am inspired by art galleries art galleries too often only show Art art galleries make me sad this city is too gray this city needs histories written on its walls this city is a place this place has histories these histories are neither simple nor just i don't know them well enough i want people to tell me theirs i want to learn this place is not easy i don't want to be sad i don't want this city to be so cold it will be fun to...are all artists people say "we are all artists" but don't often enough ask what that means there is a lot of amazing stuff being created by you and me all of the time i want to experience it there doesn't have to be a "middle man" i have staples i have tape i have thumb tacks i have flour and water i have ideas i have dreams i have a future i find inspiration in so many things i would probably find inspiration in you lots of people would probably find inspiration in you if you wanted to let everyone else know what this place, this life is like for you. if you wanted to share.

may2may2may2may2maysmay2may2maysmay2may2may2may2may2may2may2may2may2

AGA: that went well

i'll admit that when my sister sent out an APB earlier this week begging for volunteers to staff the AGA's opening days, i put myself forward for the love of my sister rather than the love of standing around all day checking coats.

i was wrong. the reason to do it is just to be there.

i've rhapsodized about the space before - more than once - but let me say it again: the building is stunning. i love looking at it from the outside. i love looking at it from the inside. i love being in it. i love the way it feels and i love the way it makes me feel. i love the way it moves people, literally and figuratively. the looks on people's faces! edmontonians own it already, some of them because they built it. one guy said, as he made his way up the stairs, "i had something to do with this railing": wonder in his hands. another woman couldn't wait to tell me that her girlfriend was one of the metalworkers.

if you have to be stuck in the eternal present of standing and waiting (milton), then you'd want your here to be the AGA and the now to be its grand unveiling.

another thing to like about the gallery - and this riffs on jo-ann's comment to friday's post: the AGA takes its audience seriously. the first stop on the tour was the janet cardiff and george bures miller installation the murder of crows, a challenging piece in every sense. stereotypical middlebrow audiences probably do not expect to walk into an installation of 97 stereo speakers and one gramophone conveying a 30-minute soundscape lamenting the horrors of war and the terrifying seductiveness/seductive terror of dreams. but they were gamers, curious and open-minded, taking it all in. (the best part about working that gallery was seeing how the sound of a single human voice, even a sleepy slurry one, refocuses a room. the dream brought everybody back from the perimeter.)

and speaking of that - being part of something bigger than yourself - it's always cool to be part of the inner circle, and volunteers get treated well. for the day you're working, you're the heart and soul of the gallery, the without whom, fed and watered and thanked profusely, given access to the secret volunteers' entrance. even though the work itself is a lot like retail, the day is actually nothing like it, since you don't have to do this job, you're doing this job because you're a good person. ok, so it's not the grand dame of edmonton volunteer gigs - it's not folkfest - but it takes the edge off not being rich enough for friday night's gala and not being artsy enough for saturday's.

people dressed up! women wore skirts and suits and dresses, tall boots, heels. many men wore jackets, some ties, one, a tux. a precocious seven-year-old walked through the galleries with her notebook and pen at the ready. a suave long-haired high-school boy pronounced the AGA "sweet." churchy-looking people approved. in spite of the hurry-up-and-wait, nobody wanted to miss a thing, or at least that's what they told me when i offered to fast-track them past the line-up for the storm room directly into karsh.

i know where they're coming from: if you're really going to be here, you shouldn't miss a thing.

January despair

WILL THIS GODFORSAKEN MONTH NEVER END??? i am starved for sunshine, desperate for color, chilled to the bone, and it's not even that friggin' cold. my retinas can't take it anymore, this grey on white on grey, this wintry dim. my optic nerves have atrophied.

in addition:
january entices EVERY GROUCH IN THE WORLD out from the woodwork, and they all have my email address. apparently it is my job to assuage hurt egos, smooth over disagreements, and make nice with people i don't even like that much.

and:
i can't stop eating.
i can't stop sleeping.
i can't find a thing to write.

i have Routine Fatigue. each day is a monumental struggle as i think: no, i simply cannot [brush my teeth/check my email/make a meal/say hello] one more time. every morning i drag myself to the bathroom and wonder, "do i really have to wash my face again?" i mope down to the kitchen and bemoan the human addiction to food, to coffee. i am a january robot. sammy-juice-yogurt-fruit for mo: check! sammy-water-veggies-fruit for heather: check! diet food for madge. kitten food for fidget. shoes and boots and coats and keys and gloves. set the house alarm. open the garage door close the garage door. drive the same roads to the same job for the same meetings. monday tuesday wednesday thursday migraine. saturday errands. jo. sunday short. repeat.

i have been doing this for my whole life and it is STILL JANUARY. how is this possible? i'm getting older; time should be flying; i should be dragging my feet to slow these painted ponies down. have i fallen through a crack in the space-time continuum? has the earth itself got stuck? is this - the here, the now, the endless endless winter - all we've got and all we'll ever have?

january, you are not for the faint of heart. and you are not for me.

Urban saturday

ever since listening to randall stout talk about the AGA, i've been jonesing to get inside the building. this morning, shannon set it up.

the AGA is as photogenic indoors as it is from outside, even on a dull day. i hadn't expected to see art, but two of the opening shows are mounted. the goya drawings were hard to focus on, given my excitement, but the karsh photographs blew me away. karsh canadians was the first art book i ever remember seeing in our house; karsh was the first photographer i knew by name. and here he was, along with everyone who mattered to the twentieth century. "who's that girl?," asked morgan (5). "that's queen elizabeth," i answered, "but it was taken when she was still a princess, nearly 60 years ago." "what about this girl?" "audrey hepburn. and look, morgan, that's pierre elliott trudeau, canada's most famous prime minister. here, let me show you this one." i knelt down and put my arm around her. "this is one of the most important people who's ever lived. he was in prison for 27 years, but when he got out, he ended racism in south africa." morgan's eyes widened in seriousness, and then she and her friend were off for another look at HRII's tiara.

as for me, i turned around the gallery slowly, gobsmacked. there was glenn gould, concentrating so hard you could hear him humming. fidel castro. helen keller. rene levesque. mies van der rohe. pablo casals, forever playing to that expectant stone yard. these images are so iconic you actually forget they're also somebody's photographs - that is alfred hitchcock, not a portrait of him. behind me someone said, "oh, man, i remember that one. that's levesque!" after a seeming lifetime of annie leibovitz's pictures of l'il kim and courtney love, it was really moving to stand face to face with nehru.

the building is complex enough that everybody could have their own favorite vantage point. "they should call this the eva peron balcony," said ted. mo wandered off to be alone with the northwest corner of the fourth floor. i like the juxtaposition of sharp angles with the whispery borealis. the scupture garden faces east, so unusual and interesting. i ran into people i've met through work, people i've met through shannon, people i've met through exposure. we got taken up to the fourth floor (not part of the official tour); we got to walk through the restaurant. the elevators are so new the stainless walls are still wrapped in plastic.

when we'd had our fill - who knows what time it was? - we repaired to the duchess bake shop for cappuccino and scones. (not mo, because a perfect saturday for mo always includes the laundry.) the sun was out, and it was nudging toward zero. ted and i got caught up at one table for two, while nat and susanne sat at another; when a table for four opened up, we reconvened there to talk about how to plan a good vacation. after ted left, the three of us headed across the street to thread hill, my favorite boutique. because today was a magical day, everything was 25-70% off. once nat and sus headed back to their puppy, i made my own way home, stopping at don antonio's for hot salsa and corn chips ("buenas tardes a usted," etc) and at hellas greek food for feta and olives, the sun still echoing gently off the 124th street walkups.

It's a dry cold

i woke up in the middle of the night, puzzled as to why i couldn't sleep - god knows, the 16-hour trip home was tiring enough.

turns out it wasn't the middle of the night, it was 7:44 AM and still pitch-black. the wind was howling around the northeast corner of the house.

i wondered, not for the first time, whether we should have come home at all. it was minus 28 when we landed. our plane was the lucky one; the next two couldn't disembark right away because their doors were frozen shut. the head cold that was a mild annoyance in the tropics (the tropics!) is turning into something of an ordeal, what with all my mucus membranes having dried to wafers. i have already scratched off a full-body tan. how can your heels, knees and elbows turn to leather in under 9 hours?

i'm not whining. i'm from here, albertan enough to know that only people from ontario whine. YEG is full of true albertans. you know them by their hoodies and, when it gets super cold, the oilers jersey on top. these guys prepare for the cold by hunching their shoulders and shoving their hands deeper into their pockets. i see their can-do moms, too, stoic in sorels and ski jackets, their skin wrecked. i admire the spirit of these true albertans, if not their judgment. for they do not convince me that human beings are meant to live in a climate this inhospitable, a climate where you might, oh, die if your bus runs late.

we know all of this but, living here, we forget it sometimes. things get normalized - shoveling, chapped lips, cars you have to plug in, static electricity, socks in bed, danger pay for jobs like newspaper delivery - and we get on with it. i know i will adapt to that again, that sometime later this afternoon i'll shrug my shoulders and keep 'em up there until i'm back indoors again. but right now, before i have acclimatized, i want to offer the heretical opinion that we were not meant to live in such inhospitable circumstances.

or, to be more specific, i was not meant to live in such a place. mom, dad: start 'splaining!

Architecture

this afternoon i spent an hour and a half with 799 other people at the winspear centre listening to randall stout describe the philosophy, technology, materials, intention and process behind the new AGA.

architects, it turns out, are pretty knowledgeable. where did stout start his talk? with freud. freud! (the affective vs the symbolic.) then he showed us pictures of the tobacco sheds he played in as a kid in tennessee: drying racks like monkey bars and light streaming through the ventilation gaps. you understood immediately how he grew up wanting to bend light through buildings and turn space into place.

the big ribbon on the AGA is called the borealis, but it also translates the river. stout talked movingly about the north saskatchewan, the way we protect the river's wildness from the urban grid with a band of green. he showed us aerial pictures that prove it, and he referenced american rivers, cemented in by the army corps of engineers, or commercially developed, or plain dried up. (he's from los angeles.) he said he went for a walk this morning down by the river, and then he described the feeling i've had a million times when you came up the 100th street stairs: a sense of surprise and loss and anticipation that lasts the 100 metres while you leave behind the river and enter the urban core.

stout walked us through the design process, showing paper models ("we're about the biggest consumers of scotch tape in southern california") being translated to computer models ("no," said mo, "you can't have one," referring to the wand that that reads along x, y and z axes to translate three dimensions to two) being realized in the kansas factory ("yeah," in his tennessee twang, "they're pretty big") and finally shipped to edmonton. he paid homage to the steelworkers who worked through the cold winter to assemble the borealis, and he was kind enough not to mention the snowfall was actually in april. he showed us artists' conceptions of the gallery in summer and winter, during the day (the zinc exterior goes from orangey-green to gray-blue as the sun moves from east to west) and during the night (when its brilliance will be irresistible). he mentioned the key-controlled service elevators for catering. he showed us the slatted fir ceilings and the fir veneer walls. he promised that the building would surprise us in the snow.

we fell in love with randall stout, all of us, because of the way he loves his building ("mine for four more months," he said, "and then it's yours") and the way he let us love our city. nobody used the term "world-class." nobody compared us to new york. nobody mentioned potholes. stout talked easily about churchill square, chancery hall, the winspear and the LRT, deftly omitting the library and subtly complimenting gene dub's work. he didn't ever mistake calgary for edmonton. he talked about this one place, this single downtown corner and what you could do by reflecting the sky and quoting the river and making a wall of glass. and in the human figurines that populated the artist's model -- the tiny people walking by, going in, coming out, loitering in churchill square, wearing jason wu, air kissing, doing lunch, speaking french, parkouring, meandering, trysting -- we saw ourselves.

one last thing: half of the folks at this talk were under 30.

Funk city

all of edmonton is in a funk. friends won't return calls. my parents don't want to leave the house. colleagues are absent. nobody knows what to do with all this snow -- and cold! -- in may. while we've often got snow in may, usually it's a literal out-of-the-blue thing, a blip in an otherwise lovely month. this year, it's like winter hasn't ended. as a result, everything is out of kilter. stores are filled with the kind of food you'd normally seek out at this time of year: corn on the cob (such as it is in may), fat portobello mushrooms, cold salads, steaks, and burgers. but my thoughts are tending to roasted squash soup, hearty risotto, spaghetti and meat balls with garlic bread (comin' to your place tonight, jen!). so i wandered around the grocery store yesterday with a cart of ginger, garlic and toilet paper.

it can't last forever. right??

Edmonton archive

the last question on my engl 380 final asked: what would you put in an archive of edmonton?

and this is what they said:

the sign from the garneau theatre; a soccer ball and a muddy boot; my bike; the key to my first apartment; a chunk of asphalt from the 23rd avenue interchange; a lump of coal; the steamer trunk my uncles brought from ireland; the guitar pick i caught at the starlite room; a library card; a bus pass; something i grew in my backyard; the space between the business building and tory; the ticket stub to the first fringe play i ever saw; linda goyette's book; the edmonton grads' basketball; a jar of black gold; my family's porcelain sink; my lister hall identity pass (which i was technically supposed to return); the chuck taylors i'm wearing right now, which look ten years old from all the walking i've done even though i only bought them in the fall; the eagle feather that fell in front of me one day; a copy of treaty six; the suffragists' signs; a bloody truncheon from the hunger march; my human skeleton; an ad for a 99-cent peep show; the first sweater i wore when i moved here from the philippines; several oilers jerseys, "to remind me of watching hockey with my dad"; a metis sash; the board game i used to play with my roommates; my mother's recipe book; my 1994 pontiac grand am; a toy car -- the kind with the doors glued shut; a piece of birch bark; my daughter's pink blanket, "full of mythic power"; a uhaul trailer; anybody's spare car key; a jackrabbit and a magpie; a skate; a casino chip; a snowsuit because it proves we survive our winters; a program from the pantages theatre; a vial of water from the WEM water park; my signed copy of the edmonton queen; a paintbrush; an antique saw; the wreath that adorns the misericordia hospital every christmas in spite of the death and disease inside; a picture of the river valley from the LRT bridge, from the high level bridge, from macdougall hill, from the humanities centre; a poem i haven't written yet; a passport and a return ticket.

Not the only one who thinks my students rock

see todd babiak, edmonton journal, saturday 11 april 2009.

Home again, home again

it's 5:52 am and i am sitting in our living room in edmonton keying this post in the early morning quiet.

there are so many unusual things about that sentence i don't know where to start. perhaps with the quiet. i can't believe how beautifully quiet it is here. though i think of myself as a "city person," i find as i get older that i am less and less tolerant of city noise: the screech of subways, the ubiquity of car horns, buses, jackhammers, backhoes, garbage trucks, yelling. it's still exciting (nothing says new york like four trains screaming through a single stinky station), but i find the thrill wears off faster. bring on the electric car, i say.

it is also unusual to be a living room -- embarassingly, one of two living rooms i could be sitting in right now. after the compact apartment we've been renting, the house feels huge. you could lose a person here. also strange: it's detached on all four sides from its neighbours, perched on its own little patch of green. it feels isolated, not to mention wasteful and unnecessary, anti-social. then again, it has its very own patch of green, and yellow, and purple and orange and white, as the daffodils, dandelions and tulips are blooming. there's the promise of a bleeding heart, the tickseed and peonies are back, and the valiant little rhubarb is plugging along (ours being the only yard i know of not to foster rhubarb as a weed). it's may in edmonton, and everything is on the move.

but, edmonton.... edmonton, why aren't you better? why is it that when we want to go for lunch after our long and tiring travels, we end up at a chain restaurant in a shopping complex? why is your skyline so squat and repetitious? is it because you're built of houses? (but will the condos at railtown change that?) is it because you're so isolated that no one bothered colonizing you (no one til wal-mart and home depot, that is)? is it because we live in rec rooms all winter and patios all summer? (but why not better patios?) is it because we're space pigs? because we don't fund public art? don't have an architecture school? lack historical consciousness? tend to be lower class? worship the automobile? edmonton, edmonton ... i want you to be more enticing, more seductive, more beautiful. if you can't be pretty, be unusual, idiosyncratic. take me aback, make me marvel, strike me.

i'll be looking for something striking all the way to save-on foods.

Meanwhile, back on the home front

the saga of the roof continues. this note from our housesitter:

On Monday night at 11:30 PM we had quite a downpour and that is when
the drips started to come in through the living room ceiling - in the
middle. This means that somehow the water is coming in one place and
pooling between your upper storey floor and the main storey ceiling
and dripping out along the beam in the middle of the living room. As
the rain got worse the little mop buckets were no longer adequate. At
2:30 AM that night I ran out to the alley in the rain, dressed in my
PJs, and grabbed your rubbermaid garbage can and used that and the 2
mop buckets to catch the drops. They remain there today in case the
rain returns.

In the morning on Tuesday I looked around for your roofing company
contact. I called "Martin" the "Vice President of
Installations" at 604-789-9446 in Delta BC and gave him shit for not
fixing your roof and asked that he send a crew immediately to patch
the roof. He relayed the message to "Rodney" in Calgary at
1-866-867-1857 who phoned me back and assured me that "Peter" in
Edmonton at 425-345-4864 would patch the roof that morning (Wednesday)
and he would call when he was "nearby". This he did. I jumped in the
Mobile Urban Planning Command Centre at work and sped over here to let
Peter in and supervise the patch job. The rain stopped around this
time and the jury is out on whether this patch has actually stopped
the leak. Things dried out and the ceiling actually looks quite good
- thank goodness it is cedar and not plaster or gyproc because then it
would be rather unpleasant. The rubbermaid can has a good 5 inches of
water in it. All things being what they are (spring and more rain
coming) I encouraged Peter to come back and put the new roof on. He
was non committal.

i know: you're wondering what on earth is the mobile urban planning command centre and how can i get one? but pull back from your fantasies for just a second a commiserate with us. five inches of rain in our living room!

i'm going out for a walk in the buenos aires sun.