Anodyne
Friday, September 30, 2005
 

Companions for the evening.
 
One disadvantage of working at a retail job is that everyone wants to talk to you.

Aspiring Screenwriter A finds it inconceivable that I'm not going to Neil Gaiman's public reading, the one with the $10 tickets, attending which would mean closing the store an hour and a half early. Curator B wants to tell me all about his summer trip to Europe. Didn't I go? No, I was working at the store. Artists D, E and F would like studio visits. How's this afternoon? No? Maybe tomorrow? Customer G wonders why I don't have a used copy of Kurt Vonnegut's new book, which was just released last Friday. Saleswoman H wants to sell me display advertising in a local newspaper. Angry crank I volunteers to report me to the Better Business Bureau when I decline to buy her collection of "valuable LP records...Boston...Arthur Murray...Fleetwood Mac." Book scout J arrives on rent day with a bulging backpack, two suitcases, and a pressing need for cash. Hagglers K, L, M & N want to argue about the price of the twenty-five cent books on the bargain table. Staff member O has another job, family pressures, and professional sports tickets. Traffic Manager P wants to disrupt the flow of traffic around the block. Retailers Q and R want me to listen as they describe their business' slow decline. Thief S tries to boost some new books. Browser T brings her little Paris Hilton "accessory dog" shopping with her.

& etc.

To paraphrase a favorite poet, I love my life, but I don't love you guys, and today I would rather nail both hands to the floor than ever argue over a discount on a table book with anyone ever again.
 
And for the record, one old completely unrequited flame's assessment of my emotional stability, or more accurately lack thereof: "You're like a screen door."
 
Change of the light, and a corresponding slump in my mood. A review for Doppelganger magazine composed overnight. Everything good about the Evan Lee text completely absent, every cliche of bad, unimaginative, diagrammatic art criticism imaginable right back up on the surface of the text where it sits, grinning at me like the wind-up monkey in that Stephen King story.

I find myself thinking, you looked at the work yesterday, looked carefully, in fact; sat in darkness for fifteen or twenty minutes and focused, really focused, in order to see what was actually there and not just what you thought was there, or what you hoped would be there. Yet the criticism you created from this experience is flat, overwritten, a collection of loose ideas largely borrowed, quoted or otherwise derived from other people's (better) writing.

I find myself thinking, what the fuck happened?
Thursday, September 29, 2005
 

Maneki Neko, x a whole bunch. A perfectly competent Steven Shearer knockoff could undoubtedly be built by plagarising -- sorry, appropriating -- this site's fractally dense content.

(Lil' blue porcelain maneki neko courtesy flickr community member Rakka, site link courtesy dru)
 
More on Mr./Ms. Squid
 

Larrabee State Park, Bellingham, WA (also see 11/1/4)
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
 
Corrections Dept.

dru writes, "That giant squid is not the first time a live one has been 'captured on film.' It's the first time a movie has been taken of one, but a live (but dying) one was shot with still photos on the surface near Japan 4 years ago."

Pretty amazing, regardless!
 

Day off. Location scouting for 100 Views of Mount Baker with a new 1GB flash card and the Subaru.
 
Zev Love X

"What's most appealing than this release, though, is that it provides the opportunity to hear a more helium-voiced Doom as a young and hungry MC, less deluded by death and drugs and more driven by racism and poverty. His evolution into a gruff rapper's rapper would have been hard to envision given some of his goofier appearances here."
 

A giant (26 foot long) squid, captured live on film for the first time in history by a team of Japanese researchers 3000 feet down. Biology's equivalent of Neil Armstrong slowly descending the lander's ladder.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
 
#8 Fraser through Chinatown. Rush hour.

A native woman boards, slinging her bags and boxes onto the courtesy seat in front of me. A Braun electric shaver, a Barbie Think Pink Learning Notebook ($99.95, the price tag still prominently displayed on the side of the open cardboard box cradling the toy).

The strong smell of beer.

She hitches up her blue track pants, slowly knots her t-shirt just above her navel. Rough hands, nails chipped and broken. The residue of old red polish.

She flips the laptop open.

"Hi, I'm Barbie! Are you ready for some learning fun? First choose your language."

Her fingers tripping carefully across the bright pink keys.
 

Electrical hazard, Chesterfield Avenue, North Vancouver
Monday, September 26, 2005
 

Abandoned chew toy, East 8th Avenue, Vancouver
 

Wedge, 2005
 

Sidewalk, East 8th Avenue, Vancouver
 
Competition for Mr. Mike Kelley

"Gelatin members say the bunny is not just for walking around - they are expecting hikers to climb its 20 foot sides and relax on its belly."
Saturday, September 24, 2005
 
Floating Island Found in Lake Washington

"Early in the morning on Monday, September 19, a Seattle Police Harbor Patrol boat came across a desert island floating in Lake Washington. On the island were foam rocks, a fake palm tree, a plastic crab and starfish, real coconuts, and three men in ripped-up business suits. One of the harbor patrol officers started asking questions: How long are you going to be shipwrecked? What are you doing? Are you trying to raise money? Do you need anything?"
Friday, September 23, 2005
 

I don't really consider myself a modern pop music fan, yet here I was this afternoon, surprising myself by singing this out loud word for word in the car:

Like Brothers on a Hotel Bed
Words and music by Death Cab for Cutie

You may tire of me as our December sun is setting because I'm not who I used to be
No longer easy on the eyes but these wrinkles masterfully disguise
The youthful boy below who turned your way and saw
Something he was not looking for: both a beginning and an end
But now he lives inside someone he does not recognize
When he catches his reflection on accident

On the back of a motor bike
With your arms outstretched trying to take flight
Leaving everything behind
But even at our swiftest speed we couldn't break from the concrete
In the city where we still reside.
And I have learned that even landlocked lovers yearn for the sea like navy men
Cause now we say goodnight from our own separate sides
Like brothers on a hotel bed
Like brothers on a hotel bed
Like brothers on a hotel bed
Like brothers on a hotel bed.
 

Concrete Island, 2005. Public edition: private collection, Vancouver, B.C.
 

To March of the Penguins.

Midway through the 3rd or 4th 70 mile trek across the pack ice the grande Americano I had drunk on the way to the theatre caught up with me, and I got up for a brief excursion.

Just a few steps and my fast-asleep right leg buckled under me. I fell down face-first in the aisle, creating a noisy and unanticipated distraction.

With my right knee now completely trashed, I am doing my own convincing imitation of the penguins' rolling walk.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
 

Construction site, Surrey, B.C. (homage to RA)
 

Mount Sloan, evening
 

Upper Ault Lakes from summit tower, Mount Sloan
 

Little hams on the summit (Scat & Rose T. Cat), Mount Sloan
 

NE Ridge, Mount Sloan, from about halfway up. Lower Ault Lake at right. My clapped-out Subaru is parked at the end of the logging road just below the lake.
 

Ansel Adams/Edward Weston moment, approach ridge, Mount Sloan
 

Mount Sloan – NE Ridge, With Complications
21 September 2005
[trip report posted to clubtread.com]


Dru and I went to climb Mount Sloan’s NE ridge in summer 2000. We did $900 of damage to the rental 4x4’s running board by mistakenly driving it up the Green Mountain spur instead of up the Ault Creek road. Oops! Upon finally arriving in Ault Creek, we were bombarded by mosquitoes and black flies. The bugs were bad enough that we slept in the back of the car. The next morning, Sloan was scarcely visible through the clouds. We crossed Ault Creek, bushwhacked up to the toe of the ridge through the dripping forest, and had just hit the start of the 3rd class climbing when rain, wind and fog all arrived more or less simultaneously. Back to the car!

I kept looking at pictures of the NE Ridge. Some day…

In late summer 2005, Denis Blair and Ted Oliver did Sloan as a daytrip and posted a nicely illustrated trip report on clubtread.com. A week or two later, I bought dru’s old rusted-out Subaru wagon, and was suddenly mobile again after 15 years without a car. Time for a rematch with the NE Ridge, I told myself. With good weather in the forecast, I drove up to Railroad Pass late on Tuesday night and camped at the Semaphore Lakes trailhead. Uneventful, save for a guy roller blading down the middle of the Whistler-Pemberton highway at 11:15pm.

It froze hard overnight, and I spent a few minutes scraping the car’s windows in the morning. Off at sunrise to Ault Creek. Midway up the access road, I met a 4x4 coming back down. I pulled over to let it by, and the driver stopped and rolled down his window.

“Where ya headed?”

“Sloan.”

“Me too – but I’m not sure if this is the right road or not.”

“Follow me,” I said, “I’ll get you as far as the parking lot.”

Together we drove up the road and into the Ault Creek valley, where the road has been extended several kms. from where it was in 2000. There’s a bridge across the creek, and the road immediately forks, with the left hand branch going almost to the headwall below Lower Ault Lake, and the right fork climbing up onto the toe of the NE Ridge. Parking at the end of the left hand fork makes sense if you are not reversing the ridge climb, because that way you are saved a several km. walk and the corresponding elevation gain to reunite yourself with your car at the end of the day.

“Hey thanks,” said the 4x4 driver. “I’m Chris; what route are you taking?”

“I’m Chris, too. The NE Ridge.”

Moi aussi. Want some company?”

"Sure, but I’ll probably be a lot slower than you.”

“No worries.”

We packed up and started bushwhacking up toward the NE Ridge overhead. At this point, I had made two mistakes, though I didn’t know it: I hadn’t brought a helmet, which wasn’t the world’s brightest move on a 4th class ridge climb with lots of loose rock, and I left my ice axe in the car, taking only my trekking poles, because only the N face appeared to have snow on it, or so it seemed.

The bushwhack up to the ridge went very smoothly, about an hour of travel through open forest, with lots of mushrooms on the ground. I saw emetic russulas, wooly pine spikes, and some nice looking boletes, as well as lots of others I didn’t recognize. I also threw up several times, and was troubled by a strange ringing sensation in both ears, which I put down to lack of sleep and no coffee.

We reached the ridge and started up toward the start of the technical scrambling. As expected, Chris was anywhere from 20-45 minutes ahead of me all the way to the summit. I threw up again, and was starting to feel pretty dizzy, and concluded that I was coming down with the flu. However, turning back didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense; if Chris didn’t see me turn around, I was sure he’d worry about where I’d gotten to, and I didn’t want to freak him out, or to accidentally initiate a search and rescue callout. So I continued up the ridge.

Obstacle 1 is a large gendarme on the ridge which is passed on its left hand side. The route then climbs steeply up toward two huge distinctive rock towers on the ridge. A combination of a steep, dirty gully and a hidden cleft in the right hand side of the right tower made a nice 3rd-4th class route above these obstacles.

The route grows more difficult after the towers. Above them, there is an exposed walk along the ridge crest. The way was now plastered with ice and snow, and I had serious reservations about continuing on the crest, even though Don Funk’s bivouac.com trip report suggested that this was the way to go. Instead I made some funky low 5th-class moves down off the ridge, scrambled along below the crest on the south face, and then back up again and along.

By now I was also shivering, dizzy, and coughing up chunks of yellow phlegm. Not a great combination, and I paid less attention to the view than I would have under normal circumstances. That said, I was pleased with how confidently I was climbing, and with the rock on the ridge, which, when not rimed with snow and ice, was rough and very textured, with an abundance of holds.

The next obstacle was a steep gap just before the summit tower. There were rap slings here, which didn’t exactly fill me with good feelings. Still, the rock looked sound, so I made some more low 5th class moves down into the gap, only to discover, once down, that an easier route exists on the right hand side of the crest, where a hidden ledge system leads easily down to the same point.

I scrambled up the summit tower with Chris peering curiously down from above. This was pretty hard, because by now there was snow and ice everywhere, and the rock was slippery and dangerous. I tried to ascend the north side of the tower, and got stuck about three quarters of the way up on narrow ice-covered ledges. By this point I was pretty gripped, and not having too great of a time. “Think,” I berated myself. “Don’t be an idiot. Look for the easiest way up.” In this case, the “easiest way” involved downclimbing about thirty feet, then contouring around on a series of ledges to the south face, where a staircase of blocks stretched up to the big summit block.

“Good job there,” said Chris.

We only stayed on the summit about ten minutes, then bailed down the south face into a large gully directly below the summit tower. This gave a quick 3rd class descent, but was very loose, and we travelled a ways apart so as to avoid knocking stones down on each other. There are several nasty short walls in the upper end of the gully; in each case, we traversed east to reach easier ground before continuing down. Soon the snow and ice gave way to scree and a small stream, running easily over water-polished ledges. The stream bed steepens near its base, and we passed these bluffs via a ledge system on the right hand side.

We then hiked easily down a moraine to reach the sandy, pumice-covered shore of the upper Ault Lake. This area, with its sand dunes, huge boulders, and peaceful, fluorescent-blue lake, is one of the prettiest places I’ve seen this year.

We easily traversed the east shore of the lake, then scrambled down beside its outlet stream, eventually crossing to the west bank, where we soon picked up a flagged trail. This trail follows the west bank of the creek all the way to the lower Ault lake. Recent trail work has taken out many small trees and deadfall, but there is still some work to be done to pare back the blueberry bushes and shrubs that lean in from every side. The trail skirts the west bank of the lower lake, first gaining elevation, and then dropping back to shoreline near the lake’s east end.
From there, the by now not terribly well laid out trail inexplicably gains more elevation, before dropping steadily into the Ault Creek valley, eventually entering open forest just opposite the end of the clearcut.

At this point, with both knees about to give out, I bushwhacked down to the creek, scrambled across, and clambered up the opposite bank to reach the car. Chris and I chatted, then climbed into our vehicles and went our separate ways. The drive home was uneventful; dinner was coffee and a terrific green salad from the Pony in Pemberton: greens, peaches, black olives, onions, garlic, raspberry vinagrette and some other stuff. $4.50 with a tasty roll; a great deal, and a nice end to a taxing but enjoyable day out in the mountains.


Tuesday, September 20, 2005
 

Mount Sloan, northwest of Pemberton, about a 4 hour drive from Vancouver. Tomorrow's itinerary: up the right hand (NE) ridge, down a hidden gully behind the left hand skyline, and out the valley in the centre. Probably the hardest climb I'll do this year, and one that I was skunked off of with Dru a few years back to a combination of lack of fitness and blowing rain and clouds. Back Thursday.

(Photo courtesy Don Funk, bivouac.com)
Monday, September 19, 2005
 
#10 -- Granville to 41st Avenue

"Do you go to 49th?"
Sunday, September 18, 2005
 

Copy editing to Cliff Martinez's Solaris soundtrack. I had forgotten how good this was until Chris Clarke burned me a copy a few weeks ago. Definitely a highlight of the largely unremarkable Soderberg remake. The early, very quiet scenes of the space station drifting high above the planet are an exception, and on a par with the first thirty seconds of Scott's Blade Runner: a peep through a window into a fully realized other world.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
 
Handwritten inscriptions on the title page of a used trade paperback copy of Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red:

"Happy Birthday Natasha. Love Marina 2002."

and, on the first free endpaper:

"Happy 30th Birthday Jen. Love Natasha."
 
Former People's Co-op Books manager Binky Marks on customer relations: "Once a year I have to tell some dignified lady or gentleman to go fuck themselves."
 

Finishing a long essay for Evan Lee's Presentation House Gallery catalog, Mr. West's swaggering, overproduced, and furiously catchy Diamonds From Sierra Leone bumping my office speakers:

"Right when magazines wrote Kanye West off
I dropped my new shit sound like the best of
A&R's lookin' like, 'Pssh we messed up'
Grammy night, damn right, we got dressed up
Bottle after bottle till we got messed up
In the studio, where really though, yea he next up
People askin' me if I'm gon' give my chain back
That'll be the day I give the game back
You know the next question dog 'Yo, where Dame at?'
This track the Indian dance to bring our reign back
'What's up with you and Jay, man, are y'all ok man?'
They pray for the death of our dynasty like Amen
R-r-r-right here stands a-man
With the power to make a diamond with his bare hands..."
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
 


Wind out of the east all night, filling the air with Burns Bog smog.

Reassuring the fabric cats at 3:57am.

"No one's setting cats on fire. Go back to sleep."

Dream: running from enclosed, Winnipeg- or Edmonton- style overhead walkway to walkway, while, overhead, some impossibly huge alien vehicle strafes nearby buildings with rose-colored laser fire.

Jeff Wall's Salvation Army canvasser pleading among the crowd.

A thin patina of greyish ash on the car's white hood this morning.

(Photo credit: Don Waite, Vancouver Province)
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
 
Saving Secondhand Bookstores -- thx Pete!

"The world of secondhand books, beginning in the context of my university, made me feel like part of the continuum of material, scholarly culture stretching back at least to the early 19th century. Becoming the custodian of old and rare books cultivates a respect for the past, as well as a sense of perspective regarding the importance of one's own work. To my mind, at least, humanities scholars should engage in the preservation of the past as well as the questioning of received wisdom.

Apart from their importance to the intellectual life of a university, bookshops add charm and character to a community. They are a crucial part of a constellation of cultural institutions that create what we think of as an 'academic village.' Every secondhand bookstore is unique and potentially full of interesting discoveries, while nearly every corporate bookstore is identical, impersonal, and completely redundant in relation to what is available online. And yet the latter proliferate while the former vanish."


Monday, September 12, 2005
 


These guys
and I both get out into the mountains, but they climb at a level I'll never remotely approach in this life. The best trip report I've read this year, and a much better use of your time than that battered copy of Into Thin Air you found down at the Sally Ann.

(Thanks to everyone who wrote concerning this link's sluggish load-up time. Cascadeclimbers.com's servers are in Los Angeles, and have been affected by yesterday's power outage. Check back and it should load up without any problems. In the meantime, here's a G-rated version of the above, courtesy the Bellingham Herald).
Sunday, September 11, 2005
 

Taking Stock of the Forever War -- Mark Danner's exemplary analysis of the slowly unfolding train wreck that passes for the Bush Adminstration's Middle East foreign policy. Highly recommended for the breadth of its historical analysis and remarkably even-handed tone.

"The sun is setting on American dreams in Iraq; what remains now to be worked out are the modalities of withdrawal, which depend on the powers of forbearance in the American body politic. But the dynamic has already been set in place. The United States is running out of troops. By the spring of 2006, nearly every active-duty combat unit is likely to have been deployed twice. The National Guard and Reserves, meanwhile, make up an unprecedented 40 percent of the force, and the Guard is in the 'stage of meltdown,' as Gen. Barry McCaffrey, retired, recently told Congress. Within 24 months, 'the wheels are coming off.' For all the apocalyptic importance President Bush and his administration ascribed to the Iraq war, they made virtually no move to expand the military, no decision to restore the draft. In the end, the president judged his tax cuts more important than his vision of a 'democratic Middle East.' The administration's relentless political style, integral to both its strength and its weakness, left it wholly unable to change course and to add more troops when they might have made a difference. That moment is long past; the widespread unpopularity of the occupation in Iraq and in the Islamic world is now critical to insurgent recruitment and makes it possible for a growing insurgent force numbering in the tens of thousands to conceal itself within the broader population.

Sold a war made urgent by the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a dangerous dictator, Americans now see their sons and daughters fighting and dying in a war whose rationale has been lost even as its ending has receded into the indefinite future. A war promised to bring forth the Iraqi people bearing flowers and sweets in exchange for the beneficent gift of democracy has brought instead a kind of relentless terror that seems inexplicable and unending. A war that had a clear purpose and a certain end has now lost its reason and its finish. Americans find themselves fighting and dying in a kind of existential desert of the present. For Americans, the war has lost its narrative."

(Falling man photograph by Richard Drew. The most affecting 9/11 image I know, and one that I consequently reproduce here each year. Anyone claiming a conceptual disconnect between my reproduction of this image and the Mark Danner excerpt should first read Danner's long, finely argued article very carefully).
Thursday, September 08, 2005
 
ACT (Aesthetically Claimed Thing): Amateurism

(courtesy answers.com)

"When Mrs. T.W. Atkinson remarked in her 1863 Recollections of the Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants, 'I am no amateur of these melons,' she used amateur in a sense unfamiliar to us. That sense, 'a lover, an admirer,' is, however, clearly descended from the senses of the word's ultimate Latin source, amātor, 'lover, devoted friend, devotee, enthusiastic pursuer of an objective,' and from its Latin-derived French source, amateur, with a similar range of meanings. First recorded in English in 1784 with the sense in which Mrs. Atkinson used it, amateur is found in 1786 with a meaning more familiar to us, 'a person who engages in an art, for example, as a pastime rather than as a profession,' a sense that had already developed in French."
 

100 Views of Mount Baker

I'm making a large photocollage of found Internet images for a fundraiser exhibition of artworks by art critics next spring. The piece is a tongue-in-cheek mash-up of the work of my friends Stephen Shearer and Robert Linsley, and a way of paying homage to the great Japanese landscapist Ando Hiroshige.

I am currently seeking images of the Cascade volcano. The less "arty" the better; I have lots of topographical images and climbing-trip style pictures, mostly culled from mountaineer friends. What I'm looking for now are plain, even boring photographs with Mount Baker somewhere in the frame -- tourist views; real estate photographs; glimpses out airliner windows, amateur snapshots & etc. Please forward found JPEGs or GIFs to pulpbook@telus.net.

The piece will be produced in two states -- as a large, cut-and-pasted-paper collage, and an editioned digital print. Anyone whose submission is included in the final work will receive an AP of the editioned work, so please send your contact details along with any image(s) you forward. Thanks!

 


On Princess Street


Dream: downtown, in a little park in the West End, I run into a woman I've not seen since university. "We live in East Vancouver now," she says, showing me a snapshot of the little bungalow she and her partner bought together.

The house in the picture is my Kitsilano grandmother's, which was demolished years ago.

"You're living in my grandma's house," I say.

"You can, too, if you like," she says.

Other people crowd around us to look at the picture, and we are pulled apart by the crush of their bodies.

On the B-Line express bus, a tall man with a conjurer's hat and tails turns toward me with a crisp white index card in his gloved hands. "She lives on Princess Street," he says.

On the card, in blue ink, in my friend's familiar hand, is the address 3959 Princess Street.

I wake to the bright red morning sky. Cold air through the balcony door and the seagulls crying, circling above the hospital.

(No Princess Street in Greater Vancouver, according to Google. Photograph of my grandmother's house courtesy Sylvia's project, 3176. Probably the first time in my life that my subconscious has provided a detail like an exact street address; typically, dreams are full of deliberately blurred writing).
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
 

On the office deck: Soul Jazz Records' Sound of Philadelphia: Philadelphia Roots v.2, in awesome counterpoint to the Evan Lee essay currently occupying every waking second of my attention. Early favorite: the swelling strings and killer breaks of The Philadelphia Society's 100 South of Broadway.
Monday, September 05, 2005
 

Putting the final touches on the CSA Space floor, 4 September 2005. Photograph by Adam Harrison. Sylvia's advice, as always, pertains: "Never shoot a bald man from above."
 
Informed Comment's Juan Cole upbraids unlikely Iraq hawk Christopher Hitchens:

"Hitchens argues that a benefit of the war is the 'training and hardening' of many thousands of American servicemen and women, which he says will be of use in 'future combat.' Large numbers of the servicemen and women in Iraq are in the National Guard or the Reserves, and very large numbers are not going to renew their service when they finally get out of Iraq, so their war experience is unlikely to do anyone much good later on. Many will suffer severe trauma, psychological problems and alcoholism as a result of horrific wartime experiences. Some number will end up on the street begging. Thousands of U.S. troops have been 'hardened' right into wheelchairs, with lost limbs, faces blown away, and little prospect of productive lives. We had a right to ask them to sacrifice themselves to defend our country against aggression. We did not have a right to ask them to give their bloody forearms, tattered eyeballs, shattered tibias, oozing brain mass, and crushed pelvises to achieve the petty foreign-policy aims that Hitchens lists in his article, even if the Iraq war had accomplished most of those aims, which it has not."
Sunday, September 04, 2005
 
ART (Aesthetically Rejected Thing): Ebay Vendor's "Mission Statement"

(verbatim)

"We are a PREMIER seller of fine books, documents and ephemera, Specializing in the 18th through the 21st Century, AND we hold ourselves to the highest standards in integrity and customer service. We individually select each of our items in an effort to offer you the very best in Old and Rare, As well as the most popular and sought after NEW items!! Our mission is to offer you the finest quality books for your investment; books which will enhance your antique book collection and augment its value. In keeping with this mission, we are pleased to offer you this important and distinctive item which was hand selected for its significance and beauty. It will be a wonderful addition to your antique book collection; one that you and future generations will always treasure!"
Friday, September 02, 2005
 

New Orleans, 2 September 2005.

I spent an hour with the NYT this morning, the photographs like stills from a film co-written by Jack Womack and J.G. Ballard. Two in particular stick with me. A nondescript stretch of outlying highway under grey sky, buses lined up along it, the subdued crowds pressing up to board. A thick residue of debris along the median: broken lawn chairs, shattered styrofoam coolers, cast-off clothing and torn green trash bags. Meanwhile, downtown, a white policeman, flanked by two other white men with semiautomatic rifles, speaks through a megaphone to an obviously furious non-white crowd held back by hastily-deployed riot barricades.

Q: How far in advance was the hurricane known?

A: Five days.

Q: Where was the National Guard?

A: In Iraq.

Q: Where were the funds for levee reinforcement, or for buses to transport those poor residents living directly in the flood's path who didn't own cars, couldn't afford a $50 tank of gas, or couldn't chance leaving all of their possessions behind?

A: Enjoy your tax cut!
Thursday, September 01, 2005
 
CSA Space

#5 – 2414 Main Street. Open Sat, Sun 12-5 and by appointment; see Pulpfiction Books, 2422 Main Street, for admission

CSA Space is an independent project space owned and operated by Christopher Brayshaw, Adam Harrison, and Steven Tong. CSA exhibits innovative contemporary artworks of all kinds. Submissions are not accepted; exhibitions are by invitation only and solely based on the curators’ own aesthetic judgements. Some exhibitions are developed between an individual curator and an artist or artists; others will involve the whole curatorial team. CSA supports a vital, non-institutionally administered culture and will regularly organize talks, lectures, and other public events. Under the imprint Editions CSA, the space may also issue booklets, exhibition catalogs, monographs and artists’ editions.

CSA's first exhibition, Mike Grill: New Photographs, opens 8 September from 6-9pm at the gallery. Everyone is welcome to attend.

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