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.

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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.

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.

Dude, il bop

for christmas mo and i prefer to buy my sister's kids experiences rather than things by getting tickets to an art event of some sort. last year darien caught the sierra leone refugee all-stars, for instance, and we took laura to a (tepid, it turns out) production of robin hood. this year we took the older girls to stomp.

tonight, it was morgan's turn, as the doodlebops rocked the winspear.

i wasn't sure what to expect, but it was ... well ... it was a rock show for the under-fives. remember your first rock show: supertramp's breakfast in america, maybe, or loverboy? stacey's stashed a joint in her bra and you're packing a mickey of southern comfort. you're wearing your rainbow jeans with the big fat comb in the ass pocket so you can feather your hair as the night goes on. it's totally awesome but also kinda scary as the contact high hits you at the door.

well, morgan's peer group just does it all a little earlier, sans the drugs. the crowd -- hundreds of children in thirty dollar seats (recession, what recession?) -- was crazy for deedee, rooney and moe. they screamed "doo-dul-bops! doo-dul-bops! doo-dul-bops!" for a full five minutes before the colorful trio took the stage, saying "hello, edmonton! are you havin' a good night, edmonton?" there was a backdrop video, and lasers. there was signature merchandise (t-shirts and glow sticks and cell phones and guitars) for sale in the lobby. there were bouncers, grandmotherly ushers reassigned to keep the mosh pit of kindergarteners off the stage. the kids knew all the words -- forget the kids, the parents knew all the words. a weary-looking mother of toddlers heaved herself into the seat next to us and said, "i'm warning you right now, i know all the lyrics and i intend to sing along. i've earned this night."

as for the kids, they absolutely loved it. even when the three-year-old in front of us got so wrapped up in her airplane arms that she propelled herself right off her seat, she just did some bum-dancing there in the aisle until she could pick herself back up again.

it was like eating fettuccine alfredo: all those carbs go down so smoothly, and while it's not exactly wholesome, it's not the worst thing you could eat, either. it's full of real cheese.

Suffused with calm

i am still thinking about shawna lemay's reading at factory west on tuesday. her husband robert lemay is an artist who's recently been studying and painting still lifes. shawna read a marvelous essay from her forthcoming book calm things (palimpsest press). the piece was about many things: art, generosity, giving/gifts/giftedness, robins and crows, fragility, permanence, and that astonishing, agonizing shuttle between them called creation.

it was the kind of essay that keeps resonating for a long time, and one of the things it made me think is how wonderful it would be to live with a still life artist. the most commonplace things would be imbued with possibility -- the supermarket, for instance. you might wonder, as you heft the lemon, what it would look like with sunlight falling on it just so. you might rethink your aversion to eggplant dishes once you see them as gorgeous aubergine. who cares if you can't eat a dozen granny smith apples: their green against your dark brown table makes you swoon.

and yes, i think, it's better to live with a still life artist than to be one. free from the responsibility of decision, composition, execution, you would just get to revel in possibility. the banana, spotted and browned, might not be compost, but a study in degeneration. the unwashed cup, the china pot, the milk jug on the counter are all redolent with painterly possibility. and who would iron after you've seen RL's drapery?

it may be too late for me to procure an artist-husband; ron the skylights guy is looking pretty permanent at this point. (you'd think that might be a vocation with poetic possibility, but i'm here to tell you there is more mud than sky in roofing.) there must be a way to live like this -- what emily dickinson calls "dwell in possibility" -- without the man. i'm going to start by lying on the day bed on this perfect first day of summer, reading rebecca solnit and listening to the birds torment the black cat by my side.

Angela gladue is my hero

even when my new anna sui tights arrived in today's mail i didn't understand what a fantastic night we were in for. i'm just back from the mayor's celebration of the arts. a combination awards ceremony and olio performance, the event does exactly what it says it's going to: it's a real celebration.

"talent" and "diversity" were the watchwords, and they were there in spades. the talent is obvious: kita no taiko drummers, the bewitching samantha schultz (but how does a 17-year-old sing songs about driving at twilight? did she do it on a learner's permit?), stewart lemoine, renee brad, le fuzz ("for those of you who don't know, that's french for 'the fuzz'") -- but the stars of the show were undoubtedly red power squad, an inner-city first nations hip hop troupe. wow. i work out at the kinsmen next to the 11-year-old rhythmic gymnasts whose backs are made of rubber, and they can't move like RPS, with their one-armed handstands and their shocking ability to turn their bodies inside out. they rapped about racism and alcoholism, the perils of foster care, dysfunctional families and the importance of hope -- "peace, love, unity and having fun," as they put it: hip hop pith.

angela gladue, who's been with RPS and "freshly squeezed" for a few years now, won the emerging artist award. (here's to mile zero for nominating her!) angela is the only woman in the RPS crew; her baggy jeans and baseball cap mean you don't necessarily read her as 'girl' at first -- or maybe that's just from the second balcony. when she came on stage to claim her award, she did a cartwheel, faced her audience to give the big victory salute, and then hugged the guy from edmonton northlands who was giving out the award -- and we're not talking a polite arm-over-the-shoulder photo-op stance, or a mannered european kiss-kiss. i mean, angela threw both arms around him and gave him a big ole hug. before leaving the stage, she stopped by the mayor's box and thanked him, too.

angela gladue is my hero for the way she just puts her thing out there in the world. it is such a foolhardy, dangerous way to live, making art. it takes my breath away.

so, talent in spades. the diversity of the event is more puzzling, and kind of weird and embarassing, and -- as i suppose diversity always is -- more challenging, yet ultimately more moving. there's the obvious cultural diversity: japanese drummers, european opera, the teutonic poet laureate ted blodgett, etc. then there's the second most obvious diversity: age. i've noticed that the arts community is particularly attentive to emerging artists, youth artists, and so on. mo and i were sitting in the second balcony with all the high school students whose tickets were sponsored by a corporation -- epcor, i think, and probably others -- and let me tell you, you didn't want to be anywhere else when RPS took the stage. the mayor made a point of welcoming the kids, saying things like, "we want you to stay here in edmonton, we want you to be artists, we want you to make a life here." it was a pointed variation on the usual "you are our future" speech, and it was great to see 15, 16, 17 and 18 year-olds hobnobbing with the city's barbara pooles.

but the really puzzling, weird diversity? arts and corps. the mayor's celebration developed out of what used to be the mayor's luncheon for business and the arts, and all the awards handed out were sponsored by companies like stantec, atco, telus and molson. now, don't get me wrong, the northlands guy was deadly, and i got the giggles when the molson rep talked about his company's "long-standing commitment to canadian culture." it was hard not to feel a bit creeped out by artists doing command performances for corporate patrons and moneyed citizens.

but that analysis -- even if it's correct, and it's hard to see that it wouldn't be -- that analysis betrays the spirit of the event. it's far too chary to capture the feeling of shared joy, celebration, and goodwill that ran throughout the winspear. over and against my sardonic, eye-rolling hard left analytical all-knowingness, i kept seeing angela gladue bear-hugging the northlands lackey. what made that such a great moment was angela's total self-confidence and unself-conscious glee. in that moment, corporations and their disproportionate social power, their tax-deductible donations and their gratis self-promotions were beside the point, 'cause a little money and a little fame went to an artist, and that's cause enough for celebration.

the event ended with le fuzz, and on their last number the audience poured up onto the stage and started dancing. within five minutes there was a huge conga line of high school students, award nominees, MLAs and society ladies, the mayor himself and a bunch of ordinary folks from the audience. there's something about that -- and about the whole evening, the emerging artist award going to a first nations b-girl, the mutual goodwill between artists and their patrons, the pragmatic, fun-loving way people turned the stage into a dance floor -- that is quintessentially edmonton.

what a foolhardy, dangerous way to be a city.