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moving?

i think i'm moving this site over to wordpress. been kicking the tires for a couple days now. so i'll be over here until futher notice:

http://imperfectoffering.wordpress.com/

social urban art play etc etc

I'm having one of those convergence moments- you know, when everything you read, see, talk about, dream connects in some serendipitous way? what's truly exciting about this is that it means that my brain has been freed up to play a bit. it was rusty at first, but i'm warming up, baby! and god, it feels good.

that's not to say i've got any grand announcements to make. just excited pointing gestures. like reading the interview on avant gaming iowa review web's latest issue on "space and place in new media writing,"just before picking up darren o' donnell's (2 r's, 2 n's, 2 l's) social acupuncture (1 c, 1 p), and then going out and watching beloved ex-rheo dave clark extend his improvised drum solo into and onto thesocial space of the audience. need to throw in lisa robertson's value village essay into the mix, except I don't have it. wasn't able to get one at the launch, for reasons to tedious to explain here, and have struck out at 2 bookstores now. and coach house seems to have abandoned? restricted? their tip the author policy. no potlatch for you!

also finding a lot to think about in darren's book re: the politics of discomfort. i've been circling around the pedagogy of discomfort for a while now, and after skooled, i've got a fresh perspective on it. jury's still out, though.

saw a lot of very pretty books yesterday at art metropole. recorded a lot of "ooh and ahhh" sounds emanating from our excited selves. took home postcard reproductions of a work by heidi neilson, which was conceptually like this, but looks more like this, and reminds me of this, which I heard about from him.

noodling

what i'm up to these days

the flaming shitbag icon:

the language of inquiry: community

I didn't go home from This Ain't The Rosedale Library empty handed. I picked up The Language of Inquiry, a collection of meditations by Lyn Hejinian on potery and poetics, mostly previously published pieces. A LOT to digest here. A lot on and about and around and beside stein. And a lot of helpful stuff about issues that never seem to go away. Wish I'd read the piece called "Who's speaking?" a few months ago, as it raises questions about the formation of communities, the power of speech and silence and silencing within those communities. The text is based on a talk she'd given at a panel in 1983; Johanna Drucker was one of the other participants. Some ideas that got me excited:

"To the extent that humans know about humans, community occurs. A community consists of any or all of those persons who have the capaqcity to acknowledge what others among them are doing."

"The question 'Who is speaking?' implies, then, yet another question: 'Who is listening?' Consideration of how speaking is being heard and what is being heard in and of it involves another address ti power. Listening accords power to speech. It grants it its logic by discovering logic in it. In listening as in speaking, both meaningfulness and meaning are at stake. To trace the lines of reciprocity through which they are established is to map a social space, a community."

the jag & the staggers

fabulous chat with a.raw yesterday about podcast possibilities, made even more fabulous by sitting at Kalendar, lazily sipping a concoction dreamt up by one of their bartenders called, "the Jag." The main ingredients were chartreuse and a mysterious entity known as "lemon myrtle," which the interner tells me is a herb indigenous to australia, and which i predict will be the new lemon grass. We're going to see this thing everywhere- tea, essential oils, soaps, shampoos, soups and salads. But trendspotting aside, this drink knocks the mojito out of the park for summer drinking pleasure. and as i meandered my way home with a pleasant, heady buzz, I reflected, for about the gazillionth time this summer, how much I miss life during the year, all the little incidental pleasures. Having a second drink when I go out (IF i go out) during the year is a calculated affair: "do I have work to do when I get home?" "do I have an early morning meeting?" etc. A third drink is a pricey transgression. But it's not just having the freedom to kil a few brain cells now and then. Even my weekly day off during the year is parcelled out and portioned off, and planned to get the most out of it.

It's been amazing to me how much time doing nothing takes. Since coming back from skooled, aside from the cottage adventure, I haven't done much. And yet my days have been full. I can go to every reading/music show I want to see, and then sleep in the next day should I need to. I can actually read the book I buy at the reading- not just shelve it for some mythical day when I have time. I can read every post on every blog should i want to. I can reply to every e-mail. I can visit with friends. I can wash the floor. I can get things fixed. I can cook a great meal AND do the dishes afterwards. I can take a walk. I can read the paper. and that's a day. I haven't even had time to play video games.

is this just the cost of any professional life? or is it particular to teaching and other jobs that follow you home when you leave the office? i just about bit the head off a taxi driver yesterday who told me that I had THREE months off in the summer. This is the most relaxed I've been in years, and yet I still had a teacher dream last week. And I know august will bring more, and I'll start my planning then. (though I have extended my self-imposed ban on planning to include the 1st week of august.)

I *have* scaled down my commitments for next year. There is a pressure towards martyrdom in the profession that's easy to fall victim to, if you're not careful. Maybe I'll be able to live in a less frenetic way.

girl rock

one of the highlights of skooled for me was rock school, where i got to strap on a bass for the first time and kick it old school. (best compliment ever: one of the crew said there were shades of iggy pop in my performance.) part of our transformation from teachers into rockers was accomplished by our lovely stylists, Ditsy and M*ily from Mittens. The picture of them at top right was taken at skooled, just after their own performance. Ditsy and M*ily were such a delight- pure, unabashed enthusiasm of the kind you can only find in a 16 year old girl. They reminded me of a line from a PK Page poem, "Nothing, not even the threate of punishment, can suppress the giggle of a girl." They just bubbled over at everything. I was even more impressed when I came across this line in their bio on another page: "we are probably the girls you laugh at and make fun of, but we don't give a sh*t. It just gives us more to write about."

more girl rock last weekend at Metric's Dog Day Afternoon, which was stinkin hot, so it was hard to truly relax and enjoy the earlier parts of the show. I'd definitely go to see land of talk and holy fuck again. but metric's performance was worth the price of admission alone. They played a track from Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" before appearing on stage, which set me up just right. Watching Emily Haines rock out, I felt eased out of twinge the regret I'd always felt after Sarah Harmer put Weeping Tile to bed in favour of the singer-songwriter mode of the solo female artist. Don't get me wrong- nobody does it better. I just want a little less Lilith Fair. A little more Patti Smith. Got warm all over at the sight of a 12 year old girl in a sun-protective hat, stepping back and forth, completely out of time to the music, a quiet, almost meditative adoration of Haines, while her father ( i presume) stood a few protective rows back.

and then there's girl's rock summer camp.

rock star

I adore Eileen Myles. I suspect that most people who hear her for the first time are likewise smitten. She read from a long prose work, not yet published, anecdotal musings about a life of poetry, and the opening chapter told of her hard crush on an English professor in college, one of those profs who makes you feel smart just by looking at you, you makes you feel as though you're truly seen when they look at you, and I thought, this must be exactly what your students feel about you, Eileen Myles.. Hell, it's what I was feeling, sitting not even a foot away from her in the small performance space. A completely engaging story teller. She made us feel as though she was so glad to be there among friends, though I can't imagine she had personal connections with many people there. and she had another quality that's extremely rare. she possessed a deep level of cool that isn't predicated on making everyone else around her feel uncool. sitting there in front of her, you sort of felt that you too could have done a poetry reading at CBGB's.

oh, i could go on and on. by the time i pounced on the book counter, every last copy of everything had been snatched up. i do wish she'd read some poetry. would have just loved to hear how she read. yes, i know there are mp3s. will have to do.

Lisa Foad and Zoe Whitall were perfect openers. just a delightful evening from beginning to end.

and it's always being now

Planet AUTHORity - AUTHOR INTERVIEWS: "Myles: I bumped into a little zen in high school. It was in the air then, J.D. Salinger, etc. It's such a part of '60s non-academic poetry. And I began some sitting about two years ago--I haven't been doing it all lately, but that really gave me a sense of poetry as a practice as one might have a zen practice. Something one returns to continually. There's a Buddhist saying: try, try, try one thousand times. I like the notion of continuing things. I can hardly do anything that I don't think I can continue. Especially if I can pick it up and put it down and still be doing it. Something I can return to. Gertrude Stein is very zen to me.

Pearlberg: How so?

Myles: Stein's zenness refers to her loyalty to 'being.' She refers a lot to that lively thing, the animative quality in a human -- it's what she would be seeking in someone she might be making a portrait of. All in all in her explanation of literature she's obsessed with motion, movement, circulation, aliveness. I see her as connected to a particularly American sense of literature in which the expansiveness of now, not a representation of it, but it, itself in literature is the real subject. That's zen to me."


great interview with Eileen Myles over at planet authority, a new site to me.

back from the brink

alejandro escovedo's show at the el mo on wednesday night was so good, it relieved the sting of having to miss both calexico and wilco last week. it felt like old home week at the el mo- everyone from the toronto alt country scene was there. seeing yvonne matsel and ted footman in the room made me feel as though i was back in my happy days at ted's wrecking yard, like nothing had changed. the first and only other time I saw escovedo was there- and as I line my dates up, that must have been a tour for "a man under the influence," cause that was one of the last shows I saw there. i'm glad to see that five years later they still haven't renovated the building. it stands an empty testimony to what was. okay, okay, i know. this is all very melodramatic, but we all have those venues that mean something more to us than just four walls, don't we? and ted's was mine.

aaaanyhow. escovedo is one of the best live performers I've seen. his touring bands are tight as all get out, and he must bring his own sound cause it's always perfect. rich, sweet, and loud. and this night, he played with all the pathos of someone who's fought death and won. the only drawback to the night was the fact that for some reason they'd set up a bunch of chairs and tables at the front, which put a damper on the movement he teased out of a frigid toronto crowd. i'd just come from a poetry event, so for me, the atmosphere felt positively unhinged by comparison. actually, to be fair, the audience was warm. in fact escovedo said it felt like texas. he probably says that to all the crowds, but i felt a little heart-stir all the same, and the thought of moving to austin began to announce itself as a possibility again to me.

mostly, it just felt good to hear good music again. and it felt really good to see the artistry involved in a reallly good performance. there've been a few comments floating around the blogosphere of late that give voice to a distrust of the slick performance, as if, i don't know, it's a smoke and mirrors act to disguise the fact that there's little substance underneath? a kind of snake oil sales pitch? most recently i saw it on stuart's blog, and someone already raised a friendly eyebrow at his remarks in the comments section. I'm still not entirely sure if I've sussed out the basis for these kinds of objections properly, mostly because I don't understand them. A good performance is no substitute for poor content. A truly good performance *IS* good content. And I'm gearing up to calling bullshit on this divide that keeps getting articulated, the divide between people "just reading" their poems and people performing their poems. The conflation of the slick and the artful performance is also deeply suspect for me. With these thoughts in mind, I'm looking forward to hearing Eileen Myles tonight at This Ain't the Rosedale. I first heard about Eileen Myles this spring when I took the course in the New York School poets from Stuart, and he positively raved about her. So I find it fascinating that she's blurbed as "a virtuoso performer" of her work and "the rock star of modern poetry."

it takes a village to raise a poem

quite a substantial crowd gathered at value village on wednesday night to hear lisa even-the-village-voice-thinks-she's-cool robertson read from the office for soft architecture. everyone there was delighted- staff, shoppers, poets... it was hard to tell who came for the shopping and who came for the poetry. everyone i interviewed said they came for both. my favourite part of the event was the fact that robertson read through the PA, er.. what do you call that thing in a store? the store's announcement system. Attention shoppers: here's something profound! a bargain on philosophical reflections on space and the flaneur! my attention drifted in and out of the essay (can't we just call these essays?) much as it does in any reading, but it felt like there was an understood permission to do so here. you could browse the reading as you browsed the shelves- and i mean to use the word "as" here in a double sense: "in the same way", "and at the same time."

an interesting contrast between this reading and the Book Length Dinner reading of/with The Men a few days prior, whose price tag and beautiful people alienated a couple of the people i spoke to, who felt much more comfortable in this setting. still gathering my thoughts about that tension.

you can listen to an audio archive of robertson reading from The Office for Soft Architecture at the recently remodelled coach house web site.