20 Polaroids
(10 Ft Sask/10 Toronto)
Artist Statement (2nd draft)


Toronto has enough variety to stay forever interesting. Fort Saskatchewan has smaller, more vernacular intimacies: the library, the post office, the Brant hotel, the Fort Hotel, the houses in the old part of town, near Ross and Lowe Drive.

All of those places mentioned are downtown. I am not sure how long downtown will last. Westpark works in symbiotic relationship with the highway strip. Those in Westpark, work in the plants, shop at Wal-Mart, and do not have to interact with the downtown---imagine their presence as slowly, but surely cutting off oxygen to our body politic. There is little effort to preserve the slightness of these places.

(I have one picture taken in Wal-Mart, the weirdest part, with the dead animals, smallest as well—I’m not a good enough photographer to take photos of anything else in that store.)

What doesn’t exist anymore, from the 24 years I have lived here: The White Clapboard United Church, the burnished maple and pebbled linoleum from the post office, the Saan Store, which used to be a signifier of prairie populism (Our Fields is also in jeopardy.)

Every time I come back home, Westpark, and the big box businesses near the highway, grows. The faster Wal-Mart grows, the faster down town dies. It is a race to the bottom. The charm and the preserving values of small places work in delightful opposition to the variety and strangeness of large places. Losing the balance is losing small towns. Toronto is not going anywhere.

The 10 photos of Fort Saskatchewan are what I would show Toronto folks, to indicate what is worth preserving, they are the small slippages of place and time that make Alberta towns so different and so consistent They are the Alberta that my mother’s father in Harmattan and my father’s mother in Galahad saw.

They also act as a ritual of remembrance. I do not think I can stay here, and sooner rather then later, when I am in some bedsit on College and Lawrence or Jane and Finch, I want to remind myself of the Fort, and I want to tell other people why this town is in me.

I took the Toronto pictures from my trip there between mid- September and early October, they also act as rituals of remembrance—that I want to live in Toronto. This is not a popular opinion. The west hates the east. My personal history is littered with slogans about the eastern bastards freezing in the dark, and discussions about the Globe and Mail being for eastern elitists or phone conversations about how those in Toronto, never understand our literature.

(That said, the photo I have shown in Toronto, and my writing career there and in American centers, has been about Country, the music and the landscape—there is something exotic and marketable about being from the west—some remaining, cowboy ethos that is rewarded)

The photos here are about the tensions about place, nostalgia, ambition, and seeing what is in front of you. They are about personal history and social history, in a place. I am glad that my first solo show will be in that place.

TOM DELAYS MUGSHOT.

any one know why colourfield is making a remergerence, and morris louis esp. ? (cf the harvard symposium last year, the ago show, his solo retro at hirshorn, etc)

in the history of comics nothing is as good, as beautiful, as strange, as dangerous, as surreal, as gorgeous, as fucking wonderfully orgasmically wonderfull as windsor mckay

more links:

avian flu in greece which means its pushing two contients, but mostly by agricultural practice, if we can view this as good news

the catholic church talks about treating scripture as symbolic; it sounds like good news, the problem of course being that who chooses to interpert the scripture rests top down, so its symbolism is papal. (that & this is an anglo talking point--the church of england,scotland and wales is much more liberal then almost anywhere else on earth)



the i have pop collective places plaster casts of spray cans where graffiti has been painted off, as a memorial for the death of street art, moving, funnny and poltically active (via wooster)


Jason Salvon consalidates the sunday real estate sections in major american city, into an averaged blur, the best thing is that you can tell the location almost by the colour (az is sandy beige; tacoma is green) the houses all look the same.

Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered.
story here

how bush controls information is v. savvy and plays to his strength, i wont call it stalinist, yet
here is the VV story abou flaks and media professionals playing soliders

professinal football players fuck and drink

i have no idea what to think about this one, i mean part of me believes that the CIA must have used and continues to use american missionaries to spread the american message, esp, in SA, esp., b/c of american religion conflates god and patrotism so much and for so long but that said, Chavez is so paranoid, that this might be something else (frankly if i was a socialist in an oil rich south american country, paranoia is the only reaction i could possibly have towards america...there is something else going on here. (RAYMOND, HELP)

NY Times connects the whigs to the present neo-cons, and talks about how little the rpeublicans know their history, thinking it starts with buckley, nyc, the new republic in the 50s.

republican operative Abramhoff is being indicted for various corruption charges, which makes 4.

v. impt and v. strange article about harriet meiers and her sexuality, tying her to a best friend of more then 30 years. what might sink miers is the fear of socons against general sexuality outside marriage.

BORING POSTCARDS FROM SWEDEN


misc. stuff
they turned strunk and white into a musical

now thats fucked up, has two parts of its site, a seires of first person photographs from soilders in iraq and afghanistan, and am-porn (wives and girlfriends.)

the photographs from the site are unedited, uploaded and talked about, the discussion tends to be deeply in favour of the war in iraq w/o the usual cynicism that i relate to professional soilders, but w/o the imperalism and racism that is also common.

the conflation of porn and death makes me feel v. uncomfortable, as it always does--and the porn is so (ott, awful, etc) that it has been one of the first to be cracked down in the republican anti porn sqauds.

but there is something stranger here, t he uncensored pictures of the war in iraq are impt, information being much easier to aquire, and it becomes explotive... (the sections are divided b/w gory and not gory--and they gory ones really do have the subtext of we killed those fuckers good, it is v. much about mantaining hte glories of war; this is the thing that i cannot process, seeing photos of limbs and faces blown apart, and instead of thinking, this war thing perhaps should be reconsidered, it is more we kileld those fuckers good..."

here is an article that expresses the ambiguity better

i dont know if this gentleman is making an aesthetic point against the ubquity of billboards or liking them for their massive imposement
the artist statement is really quite cagey, but i found it from the media anarchists stay free.

he is a belgian

hardcore homophobic xians from texas its the usual shit, that you have heard a million times, using the same discredited sources, etc etc. But look at the hair, its amazing... (also note the presence of the bible in most of the photos; the discussion of christians, the making prominet the moral idea of law, etc)

Judy Miller writes about her struggle for the Times, she is also suspended interdemtinely (sp)

more evidence to suggest that patents on prescription drugs result in high profits for drug companies and corpses for everyone else.

MSNBC's Keith Olberiman does some real journalism and ties the rising of the terror levels with the lowering of Bush's approval rating.

yr children can now play middle east terroist or columbian cocaine mule vs american captalist pig

brilliant ny times article on raymond pettibon...i really like his work, from the black flag onwards, i find his work much more measured and meditated then he gives credit for, and i find the articles concentration on parentage and source material impt. i saw a large wall drawing of his at the AGO when i was in TO and i was shocked at how clever it was, how overwhelming the brush work was and also how it managed to merge and reference genuinely 100 years of american culture and not be precious about it at all. it was sinister too, this great bluegreen wave with crimson underto(w)(ne)s, katrina almost.

I am assuming John Banville fucked Boyd Tankin's daughters--because this review of the 2005 booker winner is so viscous, so personal and so angry it cant be about art. (also no one does hard core vitirol better then the british)

It wouldnt matter if JT LeRoy was a fake if he wrote like Rimbaud...


im pro fur and anti peta, but its good to see wintour w/o her sunglasses.

Martha bought one of the best modernist buildings in america, fucked around with it a bit, gave it to her uppity daughter, who let it collpase, and then sold it at profit to some asshole who tore it down. Modernist architechture does not have the same impetous to perservation as anything else, so people just destroy it, willy nilly.




Rebecca Holland makes post minimalist sculptured colour studies, in the tradtion of Truitt and Judd out of melted down jollly ranchers.

i think that the feelings people get surrounding big mammals, giraffes whales elephants, lions center for me around snails, slugs, bugs, lizards.

i find moving holy and beautiful examples of the prolfigacy of nature in things like this:

banana slugs fucking

janet cardiff (800 words)

Thesis:
Janet Cardiff is claimed to be an artist, and is well rewarded in that capacity. Janet Cardiff has much in common with poetry. Examining how Cadiff connects to the (visual) art community and the poetry community will provide a Venn Diagrim, indicating what is similar what is different and what is held in common.

Outline

Art:
Presence in Musuems/Galleries
Conenctions to other performance and tech artists
Visual Discourse(s)
Funding

Poetry
Use of Language
Connection to other Performance tradtions
the distending and extending of found speech.
Funding

Other
Cardiff in her own Words
Cardiff's use of intimate and personal techonology, instead of large and public tecch.
Local issues

latest draft of the queen done, 700 words longer then it should be, and it doesnt correct what she wanted, but fuck it

Month Plan

Janet Cardiff
Research
Write

Harcourt
revise/edit proposal
slide list
consolodiate
redesign package

Stylus
Gogol Bordello

Bitch
edit/rewrite

Book
Up to 200 pages

Pitch
Canada Art (julian)
Xtra (metro)
Pleasuredome (my first film project)

Library
Finish Proposal, meet with Tim.

AISH
reapply

Family Meeting

one in three first nations women is sexually assualted because reservation courts can not by law deal with rape and murder, and because they are rarely shuttled onto courts that can.

bio from the nytimes

and more death--august wilson, the best american play wright writing today, who chronciled the symbolic death and rise and death and rise of his peoples folk lore, 10 plays, one a decade, and died after the revisions of the last one,

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Wilson.html?hp

25 things about spending the night in jail, an annotated list.

1. the strange thing is that you don’t usually expect it
2. failure to appear on 9 month charges !?
3. and I called the cops myself, after this biz owner attacked me (I used his shitter, I didn’t buy a beverage, or a sandwhich cause I was kind of broke and anyways not thirsty)
4. aspie shit is not intended to be dealt with in courts
5. handcuffs behind yr back, in the back of a cruiser, fucking hurts, hurts three days later
6. driving, and not sure where yr going, and you asking questions and the cops just think yr a pain in the ass
7. and they think other things, they think you are crazy and they think you are drunk or on drugs (mental health history, trying to explain aspergers to these fuckers is never going to work, and trying to explain chronic depression vs I want to kill myself now, and trying to explain get the fuck out of my stuff as a general principle as opposed to get the fuck out of my stuff b/c I have something to hide, and trying to explain moving back to alberta cause im sick and cause moms sick and trying to explain this undiagnosed seizure condition and and and)
8. waiting for paper work the first time, and it takes 10 minutes,6 of those (time is fluid, it goes quicker then you think, but no watches and no clocks….) is the jr partner and his buddy making dyke jokes that are both homophobic and tactless, (also not v. funny)
9. they drag you downstairs, and strip search you—which is assumed to be the most humiliating part, b/c what would be more humiliating then a man taking his clothes off in front of another man.
10. the weird thing is that I take my shirt off and I take my pants off, one at a time, only half naked (and I stand forward, don’t turn my back to them, animalistic, cock presenting is more aggressive) naked is never really humiliating
11. humiliating is having my glasses taken away, humiliating is having three large men with guns hover over you in a small room and take yr fucking glasses off, glasses that are never off, glasses that are only ever off for sleeping, glasses that let you see the world,
12. over and over again, when I ask for my glasses back, (5 officers and 19 hours) they say, why do you need to see anyways (they took them b/c I was a danger to myself and other—they took newspapers and bags, and the bracelet I have worn as a talisman, given to me by d, and they took my medic alert bracelet too)
13. not being able to see my accuser, not being able to read they body language (not that I am able to read body langage anyways), not being able to communicate, (not being able to walk, not being able to see the graffiti in holding cells, not being able to see the trip from 14 divison to not being able to see anything, not being in power)
14. they kept asking the same questions, do you have family, do you have kids, do you have a wife—what audre lorde said about compulsory heterosexuality is here in spades, what does it matter if I have a wife and kids, will you treat me kinder, will you tell me the dyke jokes you told to the other officer?
15. the night guard at 14 division, Linda, kept telling me that I was doing okay, that I was doing good, that I was doing okay, keeping chiding me to “keep it together”; like a recalcitrant child, like a dog who for once didn’t shit on the carpets.
16. Linda had other annoying habits, she ignored the guy who was comatose, and then blamed him when he fell of the bunk, thudding and then bleeding. Linda gossiped on the phone. Linda talked in upspeak and sounded like she was twirling her hair when she talked to senior officers, Linda sounded like the girl who fucked her way to the top, Linda was nice but the niceness seemed well not false, but calculated.
17. I slept off and on, how well can you sleep with a toilet tissue roll and a bare steel bench (they called it that, a bench, the cell I was in was 6 foot by 5 feet, dominated by the bench and the toilet)
18. 7:30 am and I am taken out, and chained to 6 other people (the only experience I have with this is in the movies: I was a refuge from a chain gaingl cool hand luke, the defiant ones, the weird one with Stephen Baldwin and Lawrence Fishbourne (which strangely and ironically is the first one that comes into my head. ) The cuffs are too tight, and I still don’t have my fucking glasses (the one and only time I cried throughout the whole thing was trying to get my glasses back—and the cuffs were tight, really hard on my wrists, and im blind, walking forward into a paddy wagon, with no fucking glasses, the front of the line and the only people I had seen for a day now—because I spent the night before I was arrested.
19. the paddy wagon, divided in two, like the inside of a reefer, shrunk down, with thick steel walls, in a tshirt and cold.
20. I learned things in that paddy wagon, I learned about hooping which is sticking contraband up yr ass “a man can get v. rich in prison), I learned about the don between greek town and little India , I learned about food and being a liabetic to get more (when I was offered a sandwhich at 14, and the sandwhich was rancid balogana and American cheese, I called myself a vegetrian.)
21. cause I was on sucide watch, I was put in PC when I got to the courthouse—got in at 8 and out by 2, so it was not as long as I feared—the people who shared my sell with me, the west African who spoke Arabic and Swahili much better then he spoke English, and who was in some weird case featuring giving booze to an 18 yr old, and was in jail for two days b/c of it, (he had no idea of his charges, and they were really pissant and played hard; and the young guy who bragged about his gf and his money and his connections and his fraud and his mafia laden night club life, but was good company, and the guy who took my sandwhich and took the most comfortable place to sleep, and two people called smiley and death, psychotics…smileys shit smelled the worst I’ve smelt and I puked twice b/c of it; and death was 75, and looked like he spent all but the first 3 drunk.
22. smiley and death beat the shit out of each other half way through the day, because of noises death was making.
23. get to the court, the judge thinks the whole thing is a bit silly, the crown wants a 1k bail, this seems ludicrous.
24. I get out with a 100 dollar bail and another court date. Ray and d showed up, spent the day in court, got the wrong house apparently, and offer to pay the 100 dollars, I get out, we all go to frans, I have a bath and go to bed for a few hours.
25. which means tomorrow is filled with the usually beurocratic shit I love

RIP Patrick Caufield.

(the thing i like best about him, aside from this peice, which was done in 1970, was that his work got simpler, more graphic, more direct, less artsy, more illustrative, as time wore on.)

(i think that julian opie stole his career, which is sad, really)