❤ ❛ J▲H G∅INK'S BLUΞS ❜ ❤

Em Mix Part 'B'

2011-12-09T21:54:00.001-08:00

1 Improvisation Leonard Cohen (live)
2 A Childrens' Crusade On Acid Margot & The Nuclear So And So's
3 Thunder Road Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Tortoise
4 Big Love Kevin Drew
5 Lightweight Apollo Ghosts
6 One Dove Antony and The Johnsons
7 The Dress Looks Nice On You Sufjan Stevens
8 The Only Living Boy In New York Simon & Garfunkel
9 We Need Love Johnny Osbourne
10 Like A Rolling Stone Bob Dylan
11 Victory Is In My Clutches Jay Electronica
12 California Soul Marlena Shaw
13 Holm Fredrik
14 New Instructions Broken Social Scene
15 Sangre Gitana y Mora Lole y Manuel
16 The Art Of Kissing The Long Lost
17 The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker Prince
18 Inside My Love Minnie Ripperton
19 Baby Gal Costa y Caetana Veloso (Tropicalia ou Panis Et Circensis)
20 Summer's Lost Heart Dirty Three
21 Snow On Mount Benson Apollo Ghosts
22 K-Stars Stereolab

Em Mix (Part 'A')

2011-12-09T20:45:00.001-08:00

1 Riptide Beirut
2 On Tour Kurt Vile
3 Surrender Ólöf Arnalds
4 Fletta Antony and The Johnsons (with Björk)
5 Caught A Long Wind Feist
6 I Make Windows Forest Fire
7 Something On Your Mind Karen Dalton
8 Jimmy Randal John Jacob Niles
9 Lagrimas Negras Gal Costa
10 I Told Jesus Roberta Flack
11 M'Bifo Rokia Traoré
12 Volver Estrella Morente
13 Library Card Amulet Apollo Ghosts
14 La Javanaise Serge Gainsbourg
15 Soul Rebel Bob Marley & The Wailers
16 If You Think It The Emotions
17 It Hurts To Be Alone The Wailers (with Beverly Kelso)
18 Going Up Yonder The Edwin Hawkins Singers
19 My Lady Story Antony and The Johnsons
20 Strike Destroyer

Gabor Mate Lecture - "Hold On To Your Kids"

2011-12-08T02:20:00.001-08:00

Alight Birching

2011-11-23T00:29:00.001-08:00

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://slightbirching.bandcamp.com/album/apostrophe"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Apostrophe by Slight Birching&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

Who ARE You and What Are You 'Spinging'? / secneF + sraC dekraP ☚ / Towers of COPE / A Sweep Of Grasses / EYES / 21/11/11

2011-11-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

'Sp/inging' = a conflation of: to Speak + Sing ☛☚ Sing + Speak

♥

Starts Carrying No Bird in Hand but ‘Ends’ Eavesdropping 1 (in the Bush…)

The sequence as follows:

Intro With Grass ("auratic") 0.00 / Foray Into Bush 'Anatomy' 0.05 / de-focused Bird (dialogue?) 0.29 / Cold Berries 3.00 / 'Departure' 4.55 / The Colour Of 'Rust' 5.21 / sraC dekraP ☟ 5.30 / A 'Bar' of Crows 5.48 / Gutter Delta (Mirror) 5.58 / Soggy (Cereal Sounding) Leaves 6.15 / Pickets 6.44 / JANE BOUEY ✓* 6.57 / DONALDA GREENWELL-BAKER 7.07 / AL BLAKEY 7.09 / BRENT GANBY 7.12 / JANE BOUEY ✓* 7.17 / TIM LOUIS ✓* 7.23 / Paper Moon Saucer 7.32 / Shadow Candelabras + Wires 7.40 / 'Reid Fleming' 7.47 / Tree Pirouettes 7.54 / 'Ghosted' Vine Silhouette (Trace) 8.00 / Traffic Belch 8.15 / Vegetal Vomit + Wicker Chair 8.22 / Shooting Tilted Hoops (Through Wabbit Whole) 8.39 / Combing Motion ('What's The SOund of Multiple Sheaves Smacking?') 8.47 / Repeat 'Rinse' 9.09 / Street-sweep 9.25 / 'Dude' 9.36 / Un-seen Tire Treads Peeling Wet Tarmac 9.42 / "cock tales" 9.51 / Fuzzy Zawa 9.53 / Four Ninety-Nine Five Ninety-Nine 9.57 / Unidentified 'Muse-ic' 9.59 / The Entrance Is The Exit 10.12 / "Honk Honk" 10.15 / "What a different at-most-fear" – The Story Of Fraser's Life 10.31 / "Can I get a CLOSE-UP of your hair?" – Sweeping Azzy's Lustrous Red Spill 10.47 / "Fabulous" "Fabulous!" 11.00 / Fraser's Thermodynamic Art 11.05 / "Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-Chika-CHICK" 11.23 / "Ooo-ah" (+ Approach) 11.27 / Cups Gleam 11.29 / "Two Years" 11.34 / "Pssssssswwwtttt" 11.36 / Red Figure Holding A Dis-Embodied Head (Between Two Barren Trees) 11.40 / I Am Turning Into Brent 11.47 / EMILY 12.00 / "How Are You Today Kajin?" 12.03 / Um I'm Really Hungover, Really Happy 12.04 / "You Hung Out With Amanda Last Night" 12.08 / Yes I Did 12.10 / OH GEEZ 12.11 / A Lot Of Alcohol (They Had) 12.12 / "…Next Couple Of Hours" 12.17 / Reflection 12.17 / CUT 12.18

* = voted for (didn't win :( http://vancouver.ca/electionresults2011/ )

WHO I’M VOTING FOR IN THIS YEAR’S 2011 CIVIC ELECTION

2011-11-19T17:47:00.001-08:00

Met with Becca and went through the candidates list. Here're my choices. Now I'm off to cast my ballot…

☝K

ps. Some useful links provided, plus cursory contextual articles at the end :) K

Let's change this place to someplace we can live (& live with) ☝

____________________________

Where and How To Vote info (City of Vancouver Page):

http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/elections/2011election/howto.htm

What’s on your ballot:

The alphabetized names of the mayor, council, park commissioner and school trustee candidates are found on one side of the ballot.

If a candidate is endorsed by an elector organization, the name of the organization appears beside the candidate’s name. Candidates who run as independents can choose to have either the word “independent” or nothing at all beside their name on the ballot.

In Vancouver elections, voters choose:

One Mayor and ten Councillors for Vancouver City Council
Seven Park Commissioners for the Vancouver Board of Parks & Recreation
Nine School Trustees for the Vancouver School Board

You will also vote yes/no for the allocation of the city budget for projects. Choose wisely and think of where your money is going, and where you want it to go. Is it going to help you individually, or you AND your society?

____________________________

KAJIN'S CHOICES ☛

A.) MAYOR

City of Vancouver Mayoral Candidate Profiles:

http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/elections/2011election/profiles/Profile_mayor.htm

*DUBGEE FOR MAYOR*

http://dubgeeformayor.blogspot.com/

Dubgee’s Civic Platform

Mission Statement : To get people engaged in civic politics and raise awareness about municipal issues. To prove that no matter what your disposition is, if you choose to make a change you can. Raise awareness about the importance of arts and culture on a civic level. Implement an open, honest government that actually listens to it’s citizens.

HOUSING

Review all current developments in the west end and the Downtown eastside
Work with local residents and developers to ensure developments work within the context of the local community (Grandview, Marpole, Soma, the DTES and Cambie)
Work to improve services in the downtown eastside
Restore the amount of units of social housing in the Olympic Village to 252. We will rent the suites out until they are sold.
Work with citizens to make sure the little mountain site is developed in accordance with citizens input
Create stricter rules for owners of SRO’s.
Review the business relationship between BC housing and Altira Property Management

POLICING

I will create a civilian led group to oversee police complaints

Complete ban on Tasers by the Vancouver Police Department

Creation of a civilian board to oversee police complaints and conducts

Work hard to improve the policing strategies in the DTES
I will take all responsibilty for the Stanley Cup Riots
Creation of more Community Courts
Re-evaluate our Liquor laws and improve them to at least allow liquor in movie theatres
Education about the four pillars and how preventative costs are less than reactionary costs
Criminalize the drug dealers of the DTES instead of the drug addicts
Decriminalization of marijuana
Decriminilation of Prostitution

CITY FINANCES

Trim the fat of off municipal businesses such as the PNE

Encourage tourism based business in the city to offer a discount to residents
Taxing Fast Food and using the revenue to help fund food security education and options including providing healthy food in the DTES
Limit the price of gasoline in Vancouver to a percent of the cost per barrel
Freeze the mayors spending budget for three years while in office
Stop the vehicle allowance for city councillors
Reduce the salaries of the mayor, city councillors directly or indirectly

By indirectly I mean that the salary will stay the same but a portion would have to be donated to a cause.

HEALTH AND WELL BEING

Leave St. Pauls Hospital where it is and establish a complimentary hospital site close to the downtown core.
Encourage more gardeners to host gardening workshops through community centers
Encourage more late night activites for teens and children in community centers and schools
Taxing Corporate fast food (not small business)

GENDER EQUITY

Women

More women only shelters
Work with local community groups as well as police to ensure the fair treatment of Downtown Eastside women

Greater acknowledgment in civic instituitons of IWD
Create more media awareness programming for young girls
Launch an inquiry into the business dealings of Atira, BC housing and it’s ownership of SRO’s in the downtown eastside.

Men

increase funding for mens service’s such as

Community programming for dads and men
Legal Advocacy
Health Education
Single Dad Activities

TRANSPORTATION

Begin express service from Broadway station to U.B.C. with no in between stops.
Run extra buses between Powell and Broadway along Commercial Drive
Halt the construction of “Fare Gates” at Skytrain Stations
Put pressure on Translink to use more revenue from advertising and commercial spaces to subsidize transit prices
Bring the streetcar back to the Olympic line for easier access to Granville Island/Emily Carr University (Not extending it until it proves it’s worth
Pressure Translink to reinstate the B-line on Granville to Marine Drive Canada Line Station

OTHER CAMPAIGN COMMITMENTS AND IDEAS

Complete tranparency from City Hall.

Implement a live broadcast of city hall meetings.

Encourage citizens to volunteer more and spend money locally and less corporately
Improve the cities relationship with the aboriginal community

Change the school board curriculum to acknowledge the attempted genocide of aboriginals and the residential effect

Modify or Create a new volunteer service within the city that will connect local small business’ and volunteers
Will allow the peaceful protest by Falun Gong practitioners to continue demonstrating on Granville st. and in Chinatown
Pressure the Provincial and Federal Governments to end the labour disputes within the Municipality
Work hard to end all labour disputes within the city including

PNE workers (CUPE)
Rocky Mountaineer
BC Place workers

ARTS AND CULTURE

Encourage more murals around the city.
More open spaces for performances
Better planning of city events
More affordable artist studio’s

I hope you have enjoyed reading about the changes I would like to be a part of in our city. Please, please and pretty please, leave some comments and let me know what you think about the ideas.

____________________________

B.) CITY COUNCILLOR

http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/elections/2011election/profiles/Profile_Councillor.htm

1. AQUINO, RJ - COPE

2. DEAL, Heather - Vision

3. FOX, Amy “Evil Genius” - Independent

4. GAROSSINO, Sandy - Independent

5. GILL, Lauren - R.I.C.H.

6. JANG, Kerry - Vision

7. LOUIS, Tim - COPE

8. REIMER, Andrea - Vision

9. WENDYTHIRTEEN - Independent

10. WOODSWORTH, Ellen - COPE

____________________________

C.) SCHOOL TRUSTEE

http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/elections/2011election/profiles/Profile_SchoolTrustee.htm

1. BACCHUS, Patti - Vision

2. BLAKEY, Al - COPE

3. BOUEY, Jane - COPE

4. BOUTIN, Louise - Green

5. CLEMENT, Ken - Vision

6. PAYNE, Cherie - Vision

7. SHARMA, Sandy - NPA

8. WONG, Allan - COPE

9. WOO, Sophia - NPA

____________________________

D.) PARK COMMISSIONER

http://vancouver.ca/ctyclerk/elections/2011election/profiles/ParkCommissioner.htm

1. ANDALIS, Juliet Victoria - Independent

2. BARNES, Constance - Vision

3. BLYTH, Sarah - Vision

4. HADLEY, Eleanor - Independent

5. HAMILTON, Jamie Lee - IDEA

6. HASKELL, Peter Raymond - Independent

7. SHARMA, Niki - Vision

____________________________

E.) RELEVANT LINKS:

Vancouver Observer coverage:

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/

The Mainlander: #OccupyVancouver? Look to Hong Kong housing activists for inspiration

http://themainlander.com/2011/10/05/occupyvancouver-look-to-hong-kong-housing-activists-for-inspiration/

Artifice of Law: Information on the Structures By-Law

http://themainlander.com/2011/10/23/artifice-of-law-information-on-the-structures-by-law/

1. Robertson’s Taxes, Fees & Red Tape

http://takebackvancouver.ca/category/housing-affordability-taxes/

2. Vancouver civic election “compass”

http://themainlander.com/2011/11/18/vancouver-civic-election-compass/

3. Vancouver Civic Election Endorsements - The Mainlander

http://themainlander.com/2011/11/17/mainlander-endorsements/?mid=52

4. Neighbourhoods For A Sustainable Vancouver (NSV)

http://nsvancouver.ca/

5. Leading realtor calls Vancouver's housing market "unhealthy"

http://www.vancouverobserver.com/city/2011/05/20/leading-realtor-calls-vancouvers-housing-market-unhealthy

Ken, Alaia and Kajin Make a Film

2011-11-19T01:31:00.001-08:00

I met Ken and his daughter Alaia last year and since then we have become very close (that sounds like such an understatement). Our very first conversation was about society and documentaries…interestingly enough, for what else has changed?

Much.

Last month we started talking about story-telling, and the act of discovering one's life. Meanwhile, throughout all the time we've spent together – having coffee, random excursions, dinner at my place, sessions at his, and driving (lots!) we have been telling our stories. Maybe I do more listening sometimes, or maybe Ken opens his ears alternately to receive the spoken stream of my life. And often we talk while Alaia listens in the back-seat or in our homes, asking Ken questions about his past, and Ken will sift through what he remembers and tries to understand in a way that Alaia will understand. I have never known him to hide anything from his child.

In this way we came to start on this project, filming our conversations and lives. It's become apparent that there's an immense investment in getting to know oneself…and the process of trust and honest disclosure to the mirror of oneself (of 'I' to 'You', or 'You' to 'I' – in a way, that begins to happen the deeper one opens into friendship: the moment I see Myself in You). Our own lives are just so curious, strange, often troubling, but luminous as well, and illuminating.

This is an honest accounting. Not a single lie passes our lips in communion and dialogue with each other. I consider this a rare gift.

Ken, Alaia and Kajin Make A Film is an on-going process that may stretch to the end of our lives, whoever passes first, and may well continue beyond us. Because Alaia is making this film too, not only by participation, but by shooting with Ken's iPhone at times. And who knows, perhaps she will continue with this when we are gone.

This is the first clip I'm posting, witnessed this past Tuesday, November 15, 2011. There are others, to be shared as 'open' documents, without edits. Eventually whatever we record will one day be compiled into a series of 'films' or what they call 'documentaries', but I myself think of this as more of an ongoing, open-ended family portrait, or simultaneous autobiography-biography at the same time. It's also a voyage of discovery (like life itself).

I'm thinking lots these days of the lens of the camera (at this point, a humble $99 Kodak Zi8) as an instrument of truth and healing, of honest accounting, of 'effortless' witness, and of activating transformation.

I think, perhaps, I'm beginning to reveal or discover myself to be more of a Daoist than formally considered. The 'artist' as good Daoist – I like embracing that practice!

:) K

Here's a description of the clip above:

Ken and Kajin go to Port Moody - November 15 2011

We went to PoCo so Ken could meet with Angelo at Coquitlam Mall. Kajin met Angelo for the first time, and they really hit it off. We had a great, long, involved discussion in the food court, talking about the public school system, society and children. Ken ate from the salad bar, then Kajin got super-hungry and ordered a lemon grass chicken to go from the Vietnamese. We bid adieu to Angelo, then Kajin ate his lunch in the parking lot. We now had money (because before we were broke) so we drove to an off-license and spent some time choosing a bottle of red. We opted for the Cono Sur from Chilé, Pinot Noir, an organic grape, vintage '09. We thought of buying plastic cups, but the lovely cashiers gave us each green-sleeve glasses from the Rolling Rock Extra Pale Ale Company. We got back in the car and Ken talked about being a dad, Alaia, her school, his concerns about the way her teacher was treating her. We then drove to the Salmon Hatchery at PoMo, got a little lost, but back-tracked and entered. Kajin forgot his smokes so we went back to the parking lot and then into the park, on the trail, at which point Kajin switched his camera on. The light captured seemed wrong so they tried a new trick filtering the lens with Kajin's sunglasses. It worked better, and now the screen looked closer to the light cast by the day onto the forest and trail. We went to the bridge, and talked about our fathers, the wine we were drinking, Ken's mother, and watched the sun leave.

This film is dedicated to the spirits of Ken Andrew Hopkins and Goh Poh Seng, and to Ken's mom Linda (Hopkins, Gibson or Durkey). If anyone watching knows who or where she is please let us know.

kakfilms@gmail.com

kakfilms.blogspot.com/

Love, K, A and K, 2011

The Lips Are Alright ♥

2011-11-18T03:02:00.000-08:00

This 'happened'.

More accurately: Something happened last night, @ the lovely and beautiful Little Mountain Gallery at 26th and Main in Vancouver.

We played ZAIREEKA, the mind-melting Flaming Lips' 4-CD album constructed to be played simultaneously on 4 playback systems.

Becca and Amanda helped me with this, the inaugural event for the just-birthed Greater Vancouver Music Appreciation Society.

Event description following. More reflections on the experience to come…

:) K

_________________

Hand-drawn poster by Amanda Cassidy
Click to Enlarge

ZAIREEKA LISTENING PARTY

November 17

6pm - 10-ish

Little Mountain Gallery

195 East 26th Avenue (and Main)

http://www.littlemountaingallery.com/

by Donation (suggestion $5…no one turned away)

All Ages

http://g-v-m-a-s.blogspot.com/

The Greater Vancouver Music Appreciation Society (GVMAS) presents a music listening session for the Flaming Lips' seminal 1997 album, Zaireeka.

A (brief) description from Wikipedia:

Zaireeka is the eighth studio album by the alternative rock band The Flaming Lips. Released on October 28, 1997, the experimental rock album consists of four compact discs. Each of its eight songs consists of four stereo tracks, one from each CD. The album was designed so that when played simultaneously on four separate audio systems, the four CDs would produce a harmonic or juxtaposed sound. The discs can also be played in different combinations, omitting one, two or three discs.

We are currently arranging to bring in FOUR awesome stereo playback systems, translating into EIGHT channels of beautiful audio, for the purposes of playing this 'record' for your pleasure. We also need: 4 portable CD players, or 4 mp3 players/iPods. Please contact if you're interested in lending a hand or volunteering the power of your stereo/mp3 player/iPod for this exercise.

We are also encouraging everyone with an iPhone/Smartphone/iPad/Laptop to participate in the experimental audio-visual playback of the Lips’ more recent ‘Two Blobs Fucking’. TWELVE devices are needed for the full range experience. Volunteers will be asked to pre-load the youtube clip on arrival at LMG.

We also need a projector.

The evening, beginning at 6pm, will go as follows:

6 pm: ARRIVAL

Listeners assemble @ Little Mountain Gallery. Intro to GVMAS.

6.30 - 7 pm: BLASTULA screening

A special screening of the short doc ‘Blastula’ (2009, 21.00 mins), on the making of the Lips’ 2009 album ‘Embronic’.

7 - 7.30 pm: ‘TWO BLOBS FUCKING’

First experiment in playback/listening: ‘Two Blobs Fucking’. Playback time: Aprox 4.00 mins.

Available here:

http://youtu.be/RYT_t5y_9Qg

Full list of clips:

Track 000 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iHIXaVKQfA

Track 001 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYT_t5y_9Qg

Track 002 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naz5dPvVxcA

Track 003 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0QJ6aoHQcA

Track 004 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiOR4N9LBRU

Track 005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlBmaCJUHCg

Track 006 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Sbmh9Fz-v8

Track 007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAFI0F7qPzg

Track 008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syt-sSc4LoQ

Track 009 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ63Gf10x5g

Track 010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n0qCVF-U7k

Track 011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnKvDRAxkeA

Track 012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENHXvtn1d1M

Before Zaireeka begins, the listeners and participants will be encouraged to take a breather and ‘refresh’ themselves and their ears, minds and souls in whatever desired fashion (without breaking the sound-law barrier exterior to the Gallery…IMPORTANT).

7.30 - 8.30 pm: ZAIREEKA BEGINS

A short intro by Wayne Coyne and GVMAS on Zaireeka, followed by: ZAIREEKA! (aprox. 60 mins with intro - album length 45 mins)

8.30 - 9.00 pm: BREAK-TIME!

Breather of silence to process Zaireeka, followed by observations and discussions (if desired) on the experience of Zaireeka. Self-’refreshment’ and ear-mind-heart-soul enhancement if desired or necessary

9.00 - 10.30 pm: WE CONTINUE…

We will vote to begin the playing of either the Lips’ JUST-released (meaning, as of TODAY, October 31st 2011) ‘Twenty-Four Hour Song’ (that’s right…TWENTY FOUR FUCKING HOURS OF MUSIC in one continuous stream) or the incredibly EPIC six-hour ‘I Found This Star On The Ground’ included on their September release Strobo Trip ‘E.P.’ (or V.E.P., as in ‘VERY Extended Player’). We can begin the vote NOW on this page.

Link to Twenty Four Hour Song:

http://www.flaminglipstwentyfourhoursong.com/

Link to ‘I Found This Star On The Ground’:

http://soundcloud.com/slowonerveoaction-3/the-flaming-lips-i-found-a

Here’s a description (sourced from Rolling Stone magazine) of the six-hour song by Wayne of the Lips.

“This is one song that goes on for six hours, yeah. Now I’ve realized, it’s insane. When we started doing it, it didn’t seem like it was that big of a deal. So we were like, “Yeah, we’ll do a song that is six hours long – it will be fun.” But then you get into it and your like ‘Fuck, what the fuck were we thinking?”

The song will be released in conjunction with a strobe light toy that the band are putting out. The Strobe will come with animations that ‘come to life’ when you shine the strobe on them. Coyne explains that once you have the song and the strobe going, acid is the 3rd ingredient needed to experience I Found This Star on the Ground in full:

“Part of my reasoning is that I wanted there to be some type of music that you could play while you played with this toy – you spin this little disc, and it has these little animations on it that kind of come to life when you put this strobe light on it. And you could play with it for hours. I mean, I don’t know if you could play with it for six hours, but it’s kind of meant so that kids can like, take LSD and play with it.”

When asked how the listening experience will be for people who are not using the strobe light toy and who are not on acid Coyne stated:

“Well, I think a lot of people would probably do what I would do: They might go through it and listen to it a couple of minutes at a time and think, "Okay, that sounds cool." You could take a certain section of it every night if you wanted to, and you know, just listen to it. I don’t think you would find it easy to just have six hours where you’re completely listening to music, unless you were kind of doing it the way that it’s intended. It’s not intended for intense listening. It’s intended to be, while you’re fucking your girlfriend, this on in the background. I mean, you’re supposed to be doing something cool while this plays.”

More here:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/flaming-lips-six-hour-song-sounds-like-velvet-underground-meets-super-mario-brothers-20110914

If anyone already owns or plans to purchase the Lips’ Strobo Trip E.P. with its accompanying ‘toy’, please let us know.

We encourage you to engage in some ‘activity’ in this process. There will be drawing materials and other amusements but you are free to bring materials of your own choosing to preoccupy yourselves with during the experience. Or you can choose to do nothing at all.

Sadly, we will not probably have the opportunity to play these tracks in their entirety, as LMG is curfewed to 10.30 pm out of respect for the neighbourhood. If anyone should so care to host a 24-hour long song party in the near future please don’t hesitate to contact, join or become part of GVMAS.

Also, GVMAS would like to establish beforehand that this is a LISTENING party, meaning we would like there to be an understanding of the value of attention, listening, and silence during playback. If you wish to exit these listening conditions, you are free to exit the Gallery for as long as you require. But, with the exception of the playback of ‘Two Blobs Fucking’, we ask that mobile phones be switched off or set to silent. Thank you (in advance). These conditions will be re-iterated preceding session playbacks.

A Few (Personal) Words About The Flaming Lips:

The Flaming Lips manifested some thirty years ago in Oklahoma City.

They have gone through a variety of manifestations, with the core (founding) members being Michael Ivins and band ‘leader’ Wayne Coyne, and now, ‘musical genius’ Steven Drozd.

I first heard + saw the Lips in ‘93 or ‘94, or whenever Hit To The Death Future Head came out…I don’t remember. I don’t remember the show much either (at the Commodore) except for Wayne’s Okie accent, for some reason.

I kinda lost track and interest until around the time of The Soft Bulletin, and even then didn’t pay attention til Yoshimi, and then had a sorta lingering interest until Sean ‘Slightly Birch’d’ Ramsay gassed me into ‘Embryonic’ at his place. Their increasingly psychedelically-drenched forays have been in constant rotation in my ears since.

More recently, the Lips have been embarking on stranger and wilder odysseys, and in this particular year of Two Thousand and Eleven, have decided to dispense with the traditional album format altogether, instead issuing their music on USB Thumbdrives in ‘packages’ such as the Gummy Skull ‘EP’ (yes, the songs were ‘packaged’ on a marijuana-flavoured thumbdrive one has to eat through to listen to…).

They also recently (in 2010) released a full-length rendition of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, a record Coyne has had avowed appreciation for since his early teenage days. In tribute to that (shared) appreciation, we are going to ‘mood-induce’ the Gallery with comfortable and felty things, space heaters, lava lamps, candles, blankets, pillows, and possibly an ‘apothecarist’s station.

This is the inaugural event to announce the start of The Greater Vancouver Musical Appreciation Society. This will be just about everyone’s first time (including my own) virgin listening of Zaireeka.

November 15 - McSpadden Walk, Vancouver

2011-11-15T22:53:00.001-08:00

Morning walk over frosted surface - through McSpadden Park, VanTerminal City at approx. a quarter to eight, November Fifteenth Two Thousand And Eleven, on way to a fine cuppa beans @ Prado Café on Commercial Drive. Non-diegetic sounds approximating whatever was porting through my head-phones at the moment (played at a volume which is uh potentially tinnitus-generating). The buzz in 1's ears continues (past the experience delivered) :) ☝K

* "A ©hildren's Crusade on Acid" ☛ Margot and The Nuclear So-&-So's. I don't own any of the rights to this mu$ic so help me God *

Slight Birching Re-Baptizes the Mountain ☛ November 12 2011

2011-11-12T02:25:00.000-08:00

A luminous set by the ever-evolving (barring one) members of Slight Birching before Sean set off for the collapsing (opposite) Euro Zone Tuesday. Can't think of a lovelier way to re-open Little Mountain Gallery to music…the timbers there are drenched with the vibrations of lovely, intimate, and (sometimes) wild concerts past. Thank you Sean, thank you Ehren, thanks Enzio, Chris-a-riffic, Daughter of Khan, Kevin Romain, Chris Ellis & everyone lighting up the stage and off-stage (that includes Amanda, Jeff, Caitlin, Besh, Brent, Christine…you are too many to name and hug from a distance here but I try!)

♥ K

http://www.littlemountaingallery.com

http://slightbirching.bandcamp.com

The Amazing Malian Blues of Bassekou Kouyaté

2011-11-10T02:38:00.000-08:00

The most amazing show of my life! No kidding…Bassekou Kouyaté & Ngoni Ba - live at St. James Hall, Vancouver, November 10, 2011.

Will write more about this soon…

Leaf Film

2011-11-07T22:55:00.000-08:00

November seventh, Two Thousand and Eleven, eight-something in the am. On way to first coffee at Prado, threading down the path at McSpadden Park; caught sight of a lone autumn leaf suspended in the air by the tenderest sliver of spider web. Like a feathery boat borne aloft invisible gusts. 'Dramatic' incident at 3.11 mins. Part 'two' to follow. ☝K

Oh-Eleven Blues – a Meditation on My Dad

2011-01-06T01:40:00.000-08:00

Six days into the New Year…

Been thinking of my dad these past few days, just four days short of the anniversary of his death.

Perhaps explaining why I've been feeling 'blue' since Monday. Woke up with the feeling of something missing…a quiet and unnerving sense of groundless-ness, listless-ness even, which I haven't been visited by for some time.

Writing late into this morning to finally put some thoughts down. And to reflect on what has gone on this past year.

At this time last year I was either sleeping at the Sunset Inn or the Palliative Care Unit of St. Paul's Hospital. That is, if I was able to sleep at all.

At this time last year my father was fighting – and losing – a third round of aspiration pneumonia brought on by complications from Parkinson's Disease.

What this means is at the developed stage of his Parkinson's, it became an increasing challenge for my father to properly swallow many foods, especially fluids. On occasion, matter would descend down the wrong side of his windpipe and lodge in his lungs, bringing about the onset of infection.

He fought – and won – roughly twelve or thirteen bouts before this last, and severe infection overpowered him.

But there's more to that story. Definitely more than I can write here in one sitting – which has to do with all his life up to the point he entered the Geriatric Ward of the hospital in early November of 2009, ostensibly due to a fall, and also for in-care monitoring of his vast battery of prescription drugs.

The story involves fifteen years of living (as bravely as he could) under the sentence of a degenerative condition he was well equipped to grasp the terrible import of, as a medical physician himself. However, the real import, and the struggle, came in the living itself, and the precognition of what would be coming further down the pipe.

But this story also very much involves not only my father – and the gradual as well as increasing loss of his capabilities (and to some degree, faculties) – but the whole warp and woof of his corresponding society…his family, his friends, relative strangers, and the 'professional' 'care' he had to appeal to, depend upon, and sometimes unwillingly be subjected to.

A year ago on this date I knew my father was losing the fight. He'd been slipping, and recovering, for three months. There had been an earlier period of recovery when not only myself, but he too believed he might pull through. And then – a few days before he was gone – came the moment when I knew – and he knew – he was not to be here much longer.

I can't write all of that experience here, though I plan to. Whether to one day be released to the world or extinguished by bic lighter I don't yet know.

What I do know is that I do miss my dad. But also that I can't think of what's 'fair' or not 'fair' in this experience of living anymore.

Last year could be termed a year of losses…my father in January, my grandmother just a few months after. Personally, it's been going on four years of losses of one kind or another – of a major life partner, and then a withering depression that witnessed the loss of not only any semblance of joyful or pleasurable experience, but of a notionally worthy 'self' and even of any sense of meaning. But I don't know either if anything can be properly summarized, described or quantified in those terms either…as if life could be claimed to revolve around 'gains' and 'losses'.

I held my father's hands as he was dying. His system was failing fast. I'd been on the line to my kid brother in Montreal when the nurse alerted me. Looking back at the difficult, irreversible, inevitable, approaching moment of his last breath…is like fading to a gradual burn to white-out on film. Which is not to say I don't remember…it's just that memory, time, everything gets extinguished.

When my father's life ebbed something in me ebbed out too…the end of an illusion. I can't say there's any such thing as a dividing line between 'life' and 'death', in which one is 'alive' on one side and 'not alive' on the other. If I were to think of life/death (which I wouldn't choose to describe as 'not life'…just some'thing' un-knowable, and in-describable) as a shoreline, then whatever it was that was the energy or animating spirit of my father 'alive' in this world, was withdrawn like seawater receding from sand. Even withdrawn quickly (which it wasn't), something remains in the material form as the fluid draws out, but less and less so – almost imperceptibly – til it is indeed apparently 'gone', or without trace.

I'm hesitant even to describe it that way…or to use what seems like a potentially arbitrary and indulgently 'poetic' turn of phrase. What happened was that I held my father's hands and looked into his eyes and spoke to him as he struggled to breathe, and I could see in his eyes that he knew he was going, and moving beyond language, but not beyond love, and I was telling him his wife – my mom – would be there soon, though she never made it on time and I was both the lone witness and alone when the warmth started to slowly, very slowly recede from his hands.

I also know he didn't want to die, and there was fear, but he couldn't stay. I know that as long as I held on to his hands he would not go in so much fear, or that the fear would be less, and the love would be stronger, even though there was something painful mixed in this light. I know that even with almost all his strength gone from him that the final two tears spilling from his eyes were – oh fuck – both his regret at leaving the world and the welling up of love for those he was leaving behind, and himself too, who would be left behind in the form he had taken here.

At the age of seventy-four, I feel my dad still had a lot of living to do. There were some things that didn't need to happen which led – in one way or another – to his dying there and then, in that room, in that ward, and in that hospital. I don't say this with post-facto rage against any perceived 'senseless-ness' of dying. I say this because of the potentially avoidable circumstances, and practices and behaviours which expose some of the most vulnerable among us to neglect, abuse, manipulation, dis-empowerment, and dis-humanization.

I haven't become angrier since my dad died. Or, I should say I'm 'angry' or roused at times in a different way. There are some things I just don't want to let pass anymore or accept as 'reasonable' and fixed as the 'way things are'. But there are also many more things I'm no longer as bothered by, or recognize as less worthy – even delusional – to agonize over.

So here I am, this 6th of January of the 'baby' year…not having intended when I sat down at the console to move into or relate that experience, but realising how deeply it's been informing my present frame of mind.

I'm feeling a kind of restlessness with myself which I would pin as an inner directive to 'get real' (yeah, Doctor Phil colonized that one…and which 'real', anyhow?)…a term I'm not fond of but by which I mean – to get closer to the wheel of this experience, and to pass through those barriers which lead us to dwell in possibly gilded cages of 'un-examined life'.

And also, I miss my dad.

From the Archives (01): Alleys of Damansara Jaya

2009-01-22T20:52:00.000-08:00

Alleys of Damansara Jaya
Photo and video installation, 2005-2007
Jah Goink & Tessa Wetherill

Shortly after arriving in KL, Tess and I rented a room on Jalan SS 22/29 from Mrs. Tan in the suburbs of Damansara Jaya, in late August, 2005. It was a typically air-tight secure-gated suburban home; by ‘air-tight’ I mean the air hardly moved, the windows more often than not locked shut with all the curtains drawn, so that it wasn’t only stiflingly hot but a yellow, mildewy cast seemed to settle over everything, soaked in an ancient, musky cooking smell which amply testified to the ghosts of meals past.

The other occupants were Mrs. Tan’s brother (sad, troubled Simon, the caretaker and preparer of said meals), his nubile young bride from the mainland (whose sole acknowledgement of our existence would consist of a stabbing upward glance from constant self-regard into her compact mirror as we entered each evening, if only to register us as aliens or ‘other’), and an engineering student from India who sequestered himself in his room with a transistor radio and occasional visitor. Tess and I had a large room opposite plus attached bathroom with a grilled balcony overlooking the front of the street. Rent was 500 RM/month.

We had moved to the neighbourhood ostensibly to be closer to Gudang, Hamir Soib’s studio which was a close 10 minute walk away, where we were working on several pieces to be shown in an ‘Open Studio’ group exhibit in November. So every day we would rouse ourselves from bed (late), head over to the Atrium complex on SS 22/21, linger over kopi or teh tarek and telur kampung, and then head over to Gudang to work as long as we could before the mosquitoes ate us alive. And then we would go makan at SS 22/11 or SS 2 or 19 and either see friends or grab a pirate DVD or simply head home, often staying up till 3 or 5 am or whenever sleep overtook us.

Our general route to and from the house went through the back alley. For me, this was a space vaguely resonant of growing up on Halifax Road (near the Kampung Java Park ) in Singapore, a place I hadn’t set foot into for twenty plus years. For Tess these were places of a more recent, new-found fascination. But compared to my childhood haunts, the alleys were narrower, with 3 foot deep longkangs on either side and stone steps leading to neighbours’ back yards or kitchens beyond padlocked iron gates.

They were also full of life, but not in the usual ‘front-end’ way, the way of facades facing the open street. Every day, scents wafted out from the kitchens at dusk, the drainpipes would gush a foamy liquid into the longkangs as people washed or went about their laundering. The back-facing province of hired help and out-of-view pets, sometimes voices, radio and TV would mix with the pounding of mortar and pestle, knives on the chopping block, dogs barking.

While houses seen from the street often wore a mask of impenetrability, or at least cautionary discreteness, the hidden lives of complete strangers often seeped without filter through back walls because the alleys didn’t seem to matter. That is to say, nobody bothered to pay much attention to these passages which intimately linked so many of their homes together, and they were empty, near derelict, with an air of abandonment. They were a kind of voided space that one imagined should operate as a kind of linking, connective tissue for the neighbourhood, but were instead more simply forgotten and left in general disuse. In months of living there, hardly anyone (we would say less than half a dozen in total) ever negotiated, walked through, much less hung out in the spaces we started exploring with greater frequency and in more expansive outings.

But this apparent human absence was amply offset by another kind of presence, a rich and barely contained ecology of plant and animal life. Fruiting trees (bananas, papayas), creepers, fungus, moss, slime, sewage mould and mildew; plus rats, squirrels, and endless outpourings of insect life, assorted vermin, and cats. One could compile an engaging anthropology (the word feels truer than ‘bestiary’) of the alley by focusing solely on this dense cross section of indigent life, with flora and fauna sifting and interlacing over each other through cycles of dawn to dusk to twilight.

Glimpses of things emerging from or descending into cracks and fissures and cavities; things eating and being eaten or negotiating routes towards eating or being eaten, coming out of the recesses and the dark and then quickly back into the depths and damp. Bats would drop from unseen roosts and blitz the evening sky right above our heads; after dark there’d be the familiar crunch of a cockroach underfoot on our way home, and in the morning we’d find the baked silhouette of a gecko unwittingly flattened between the hinges of our garden gate.

The effect of this was that the alleys began to draw us in; they felt informal, guttural, yet possessed a very rare and intimate quality in allowing us to become somewhat voyeuristically attuned to the subtler pulses of the neighbourhood. We also simply thought they were beautiful.

As our daily habit, the alleys began to exert a stronger influence over how we saw (and saw ourselves within) the place we were living in. It became a form of ritual observance for us to point out to each other the minor shifts and goings-about in the alleys – a pile of rice left rotting on the path, a certain dayglo hue to a section of the sewage that day, or more unexplainable sightings, like dead goldfish for a month at a particular junction on our walk. But we also found ourselves beginning to think about how these places related to the larger physical space around us.

For one thing, despite the richness of all the observable minutae to grosser phenomenon to be discovered within, alleys seem to be defined by a kind of absence…spatially, they are defined by not being something in particular. In a sense, and not just perceptually, they are void spaces, or more accurately, negative spaces supported by the opposing, tactile fact of walls and boundaries.

The best descriptor we could think of was trans-space…trans- as in transitional, because an alley is a conduit, route or passage, purpose-driven in intent (moving people and sewage) and yet in itself defined by a certain lack of concreteness (never still for a moment, so tending to favour process over form). But trans- also in the sense of occupying that space in-between, penetrative, eluding the demands of containment, and thus given to crossing boundaries. And so things happen in there that nobody (except perhaps the alley) sees.

And partly because alleys in Damansara Jaya, and to a certain degree alleys in most of modern-day KL, are so unused, unseen, and unregistered, they seemed to us to be irresistibly romantic. Not in the sense of a projection of an idea or feeling (though as a sensory environment, these spaces are rich to the point of overwhelming), but because something could so pervasively coexist within the physical matrix of shared space and yet remain so invisible within the common social experience seems to give it…enormous potential for a kind of ambulatory expression, even freedom. There are untapped possibilities in spaces beyond the pale which escape direct common attention, perhaps approaching those subconsciously-desired, unbidden, and unscripted zones in which various forms of (even sub-species) self-determination can flower in the absence of a controlling hand or surveilling eye. And the fact of the matter is the alleys are not actually hidden, most people just do not see them. And in Malaysia, this lends them an especial air of reprieve.

We felt this because the initial reactions to showing our early photos registered from surprise to sometimes shock that all this could exist in the midst of a suburb of KL. And these were comments from KL lifers. The other curiosity was that there was a general acceptance or recognition of these pictures as being something beautiful, which is maybe besides or not-besides the fact. This is less a matter of taste or aesthetics than something to be said in the fact of suddenly apprehending beauty in things considered un-beautiful. Something like the ugly-duckling phenomenon, or the narrative of an unloved child. The moment of visual arrest might point us equally inward as outward towards the subject of our contemplation. I think also that the act of recognition, of see-ing, brings to light a certain psychic potentiality in our perceived relationship to the space around us.

And in this there is something approaching a kind of fantasy – not the ‘fantasy’ of what doesn’t exist or would willfully be brought upon to exist, but of what life between the interstices can allow to exist – a momentary leeway, which widens the channel for a potential social contract or social imaginary, a proposition to the mind and perhaps whole metabolic organism to give itself over and allow receipt of the uncharted, to know by intuition something can reside beyond the periphery of vision and learning to listen to what it can tell us. It is very much a shift of accent into the here, the now, and engaging with the hidden, internal reality of things.

On reflection, our fascination with the alleys was that they could support so many simultaneous processes at once…trans-species, trans-cultural, trans-economic, and be so many things at once: olfactory (how does one even begin to describe an after-rain smell?), multi-sensorial, even metaphysical (if one wanted to go there), tending to heighten the acuity of ones self-perception. One becomes very aware of being a body and its spatial projection into the moving dark around it.

The alleys are both autonomous and participatory zones, in the intersection between public and private spaces. They are never enclosures, and because of this able to sinuously traverse the urban fabric without eliciting comment. And for us, they were the quietly unassuming alimentary canals that allowed nature to insinuate itself into the concrete heart of the city.

A whole constellation of animal and plant life lives, breeds and feeds off the by-products of human culture in mostly unobserved but daily symbiosis. And Tess and I were simply transitory agents passing through an environment layered with multiple levels of feedback. And we began to notice how the effect of space and time were highly nuanced in this charged space.

This was how Alleys of Damansara Jaya came to be, out of our extended wanderings through the alleys at night, through the alimentary canals.

*

It was a full moon. We were on our way home one night when we noticed how progressively illuminated the passage became as we moved deeper into our alley away from the streetlamps. Every object, every shadow was sharply delineated, and in the way moonlight works upon any exposed surface, our specific world unhinged in an instant from the familiar and was cast into a new and magical light.

Something about the quality of nocturne had always impressed itself upon us since arriving; in this part of the hemisphere, night seemingly grows its dark. The quality of night here is impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t yet experienced it…impenetrable, mysterious, and somehow, dense and full of energy. It was an energy I was familiar with in my earlier upbringing in Singapore and Malaysia, but which I hadn’t been in contact with for almost two decades, and now both Tess and I were living with it, in it, on a nightly basis. We realized later that the dark informed much of the work we made…of the five works we produced together or individually while in Malaysia, three could be properly described as nocturnes.

We grabbed our Nikon and tripod and shot opposing views of the alley outside our home. Long exposures of 2 to 8 seconds each. And as we later brought up the images on our laptop, a whole new aspect of the spaces we had been experiencing was brought into awareness. The first impression was how differently the camera rendered what we saw with the naked eye…the experience of trying to frame the shots in situ was difficult because we couldn’t properly see what we were doing, but in the photographs before us there was a richness of detail we couldn’t access in real time and space. We realized how much the night is ruled by colour. The effect was almost hallucinogenic in its displacement (and by now substitute replacement) of the real. So our photographic memory somehow supplanted or began to merge with our direct experience of the alleys.

The project grew organically from these first few photos, until there was suddenly a scope that was almost systematic in nature. We would document every alley in Damansara Jaya, SS 22, through all the moonlit nights that fell during our tenure there. So there was a temporal, lunar-driven aspect to our journeys as well, taking almost five months through just before the beginning of monsoon to the end of the rain season.

The companion piece (the video) to the photos also grew as an informal experiment, and is a more personal reflection of our experience there. This has more to do with the emotional life of a couple unmoored, and in transit, and in transition, in a relatively foreign place. The fact that this place was once home to one of the partners simply added another layer to the filtering of a shared experience of being somehow in suspension and out of time and our interactions within an environment to which neither partner could lay mutual claim.

So the feeling of not quite touching the ground, despite our being in the groundwork of nurturing quite a number of social and environmental interactions, became a distinct part how we felt about our relationship to things. A couple is something of an emotionally contained unit, filtering their internal experiences through each other against the larger canvas of their (sometimes assumed) society. In other words, we found ourselves becoming a part of things without belonging to them. We didn’t really travel, but instead set up camp in the suburbs, and over time, after the excitement of initial contact had subsided and we had finished our work at Gudang, as well as completed a short film collaboration (with Nazim Esa, and lensed in the very same neighbourhood) a sort of stillness set in, and the journey went inward. Plus we were suddenly broke.

The photos document the exteriority of the experience…observation, wonder, curiosity, investigation, exploration. There was some risk in walking into the dark, of not knowing what we would find, and of transgressing space. The alleys are sometimes so eerily quiet, so intimate, and a bit haunted.

The short video piece (much of which had to be truncated when a hard drive went down, I mean literally, while I was vacuuming around the kitchen chairs in my Vancouver home) reverses the lens and records something closer to the interiority of the experience. The photos show spaces vacated, de-peopled, yet nevertheless full of exterior, vegetative, auratic, sensory presence. The videos become much more about our subjective experience framed against the scenes of our observations, but in these our relationship to the environment becomes licit, and loses its supposed critical detachment (while paradoxically portraying our non-attachment to the physical ground of earth).

There is less to say about this that is rational than subjective and intuitive. We had the distinct feeling of floating through things. There were strange, uncanny incidents which began to manifest themselves in our lives. And then it began to hit us, in ways we couldn’t at first articulate, perhaps because the truth was far too simple and self-evident: that we were not home. This was the Dorothy finding herself and Toto out of Kansas (and in Oz) moment. And this was true in both a figurative and literal sense.

Because implicit for me in that realization was that I had come back seeking a home I had lost (I had spent the ages 12-13 in KL) but the centre had shifted. I could relate to the place but I was not necessarily of it. I had to learn to accept those terms as they had been determined by the way my life had happened. And Tess had left home (in Kelowna, BC, Canada) as an idea years ago and suddenly felt a strong yearning to reconnect with the physical, actual connotation of her place of origin and her people, an experience she had rejected and rebelled against as not hitherto feeling wholly of her place and people. One has to recognize this as a conflict belonging not only to individuals displaced into other, strange localities, but those emotionally trapped, psychically constrained or merely out of sync within their own, respective localities. And we both had to get very far from where we had come in order to realize that.

But beyond that, there are further distinctions in how we worked through this part of the project. One was re-investigating the notion of the nocturne described above. And quite frankly, we were originally scared shitless by the dark, as we initially had to struggle to find our way home blind. But here the accent shifts from deepest dark to approaching dark.

In the east, night doesn’t just grow its dark, it grows it swiftly; the sky bruises by rapid perceptible degrees and suddenly all the night creatures shake off their day sleep and begin to take wing, or amble through the gutters, or reconnoiter outward from their hiding places. There is an almost tensile contraction, a quickening vibration of the air. You feel all of this very keenly in the alleys: the sudden rousing of a collective animal, vegetative, human and possibly even dis-embodied spirit.

The photos were generally taken between the hours of eleven pm to one am. In contrast, we would set up our tripod and borrowed camcorder to shoot the video around dusk, during the period our friend Nani Kahar described as the Forbidden Hour. The restless spirits awaken, bats begin to hunt and sweep their radar, dreams take on new and more volatile meanings. The very exchange of the air shifts, as trees drink in our exhumed breath, and we breathe in theirs. To sleep during this period is to invite risk into your unconscious. The transition from light to dark is a changing of the guard from the order of the day – and the rational business of going about ones daily preoccupations – to the order of the night, and the unconscious, and the spirit realm.

In hindsight, when Tess and I have reviewed the footage, we each sense an intense vulnerability, almost a nakedness, in our collaborative self-portrayal, as well as a sense of risk. There is also a certain humour in portraying our own sense of dis-location (and humour was always our best method of self-protection). By now, as life has moved on, and we are back in Canada, there is also the unavoidably added aspect of biography, fringed by the lengthening passage of time (it is now going past a full year since our return). It is probably, for the both of us, our most personal piece.

But in the consideration of that year, another theme quickly began to assert itself. We returned home importing a sense of peril that was borne out in the most difficult of our individual years so far. In short, things fell apart very quickly. There was a sense of foreboding about this. In some aspects, there was a reckoning of our individual histories which had to take place, and in many ways, this particular piece we had worked on seemed to become more resonant and indicative of a very real emotional, psychological and psychic reality and turning point.

There is the real experience and then there is the symbolic, internal transfiguration of that experience. And the symbol that resonated most upon reflection of that experience was of entering the forest. It’s a potent, mythic sort of metaphor, but it’s the one that somehow rings true. One can go to various sources, and there are many – the Anderson and Grimm tales, the legends of the Grail or Graal, numerous permutations of indigenous folklore and rites of passage, the introductory stanzas that point to a spiritual crossroads in the Inferno, or read ‘In Cold Hell, In Thicket’ – to see how this theme manifests itself, but in the end one must interpret the events of ones own life in ones own way.

We entered without knowing which route we would take, and at one point even lost sense of the way we had come, and we saw and wondered and were confronted with fear and beauty, and what we saw and wondered at we couldn’t take with us, but that sight into parts hitherto unseen became part of who and what we are now, part of our experience, part of our pain as well as our pleasure. And for us, the Alleys of Damansara Jaya were our personal forest, one we felt compelled to enter, and one we had to leave, and now – as we pass this on to become part of other people’s experience – the traces of a vicarious journey left recorded in a modest sequence of pictures and moving images, hopefully with none of their charm lost, and all of their power intact.

Jah Goink,
May 4, 2007
Vancouver

Peanuts does Psychology

2008-12-28T17:24:00.000-08:00

2nd Blues – The Autonomic Nervous System

2007-05-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

Opening stills to WR: Mysteries of the Organism – Dušan Makavejev, 1971
Random pixel value: #3F35A4 (R63 G53 B164)

Realised recently that I've been thinking a lot about the parasympathetic or autonomic nervous system...much of this stemming from readings in renegade/unorthodox/mind-body psychiatric therapy, which I was pointed to through watching the utterly engaging (but much under-watched) WR: Mysteries of the Organism several years ago in Montreal. It was Rada who turned me on to Makavejev; she hadn't actually seen WR as it'd been banned in Yugoslavia shortly after its exhibition (and netting of the coveted Luis Bunuel award); it still appears to be under restricted circulation in the West.

Impossible to synopsize and appearing even more radical by today's film standards (and 'standard' is the operational term), WR is ostensibly an exploration of the life and ideas of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, an apprentice of Freud who, like Jung, forked out into independent explorations of the psyche. Once heralded for developing the theory/practice of character analysis, Reich relocated to the US to elude persecution in his native Germany, where he continued exploring the somatic (or in his own, earlier terms, 'vegetotherapeutic') connection to mind, psyche, emotional expression and health.

There Reich continued working on what he called the 'Orgasm Reflex'. This was the sex-fearing, paranoid, communist-scare Eisenhower fifties, and Reich's probing into matters of sex, repression, 'body armoring', social conditioning, and the dynamics between mass vs individual psychology, among other things, brought him under the scrutiny of the State as well as the mainstream institutional psychiatric profession, not least as he began taking patients off the couch and into the uncharted realms of 'body-work'. Treatment involved resolving tensions within the body and the release of 'orgastic potency' in the individual, against the framework of the patient's history of mental/emotional patterning and prior experiences of trauma, disturbance or dis-association.

Reich's notion of 'sex economy' extends beyond the genital focus towards the release of expression of the total organism. Quite radical in distinction to the Cartesian split of mind and body (and even more deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian separation of 'matter' and 'spirit'). But all the same, rumours started circulating that he was 'masturbating his patients'.

Reich's investigations beyond psychiatry and into physics is what finally had him officially branded as a heretic. It was generally assumed that he had flipped his lid when he started publishing independent researches into Orgone Theory. The FBI staked his territory, on occasions mobs surrounded his home, associates were persecuted, and the FDA seized all published material and had them destroyed in an incinerator in New York City. Reich was put on trial, and died in imprisonment two years later.

Even today, the general dispensation on Reich seems to be wreathed in hysteria. The medical community responds with knee-jerk biases to the mere mention of his name, mis-interpretation of his work abounds (often without consulting the sources), perhaps due to his sometimes curious use of terminology (often generated without precedent in the wider fields of science). This is off-set by a burgeoning cult of Reich attracted to his 'underground' reputation and speculative interest in UFO-logy (and accompanying persecution complex) towards the end of his life. One would be hard-pressed to find a self-described Reichian therapist in ones own city anywhere in the world.

Robert Anton Wilson talks about trying to bone up on Reich in the fifties, and having to read one of the last remaining copies of a book which had escaped the oven in a friend's apartment (on pain of not leaving the confines of the residence) in New York. If they were suppressing him that badly, he mused, what were they trying to hide, and what made reading Reich so dangerous? Wilson observes that even the mostly discredited investigations of the Orgone have in recent years seen a resurgence of interest (with some affirmation of its existence asserted by over 100 independent, published papers).

Reich considered himself first and foremost a scientist. For the most part, he had to work with significantly narrow finances to self-fund his studies, and so progress was slow, carried out by a modest and under-nourished research team. But Reich's passions also extended beyond psychiatry and science to a brand of social philosophy and political commentary with an emphatic stress on human individuality, and an underlying belief in freedom (from automatism, State control, the repressive instincts of the family, the ego's self-imprisonment, the denial of the body). And somewhere in that was a profound belief in joy as the essential aspect of man's nature.

I've managed to turn up only a couple of Reich's writings over the past few years, both yellowing (but decently-worn) editions published by Noonday Press in the 60s. The first, The Murder of Christ, is somewhat pedantic and a bit too prescriptive in tone for my tastes. But the other, a Selected Writings, provides a pretty illuminating insight into his ideas from therapy to physics to politics.

Stills from WR: Mysteries of the Organism – Dušan Makavejev, 1971

WR

Which brings us to Makavejev's WR, which follows on Reichian themes, and Reich himself, some fourteen years after his death. There is really no other film I can think of like it – not just radical in content but in the way it breaks with established forms of narrative, structure and delivery. Instead, there's a constant juxtaposition of themes, ideas and modes of expression. Morphing from film essay to journalism, satire, and theatre, you become aware of the film's construction simultaneous to a challenging, paradoxical openness in its deployment of form.

In both English and Serbo-Croatian, WR begins as a biography of Reich – interviews with his widow, son, barber, greengrocer, associates – and then starts weaving together historical montages, demonstrations of bioenergetic therapy, a staged 'social realist'-type satire, advertising jingles, and 'documentary' scenes of a 'mad' poet staging an interventionist mock military performance in downtown NY.

There's much, much more: a transgendered couple provocatively feeding off each others' popsicles and turning heads in Times Square, interviews with Betty Dodson (of The Vagina Coloring Book fame), Cynthia the 'Plaster Caster' (tenderly molding over the prick of Screw magazine editor Al Goldstein), arcane footage of electro-shock therapy (upsettingly played up against the tune of Lili Marlene), clips from a biography of Stalin (in which a heavily made-up actor spills appliquéd tears over the tomb of Lenin, with the Kremlin in spectacular backdrop), mass seizures...you get the idea – delving into the details is pointless.

The film doesn't meander between themes so much as cut off anticipatory responses within the nervous system...and becomes like an engaging game. Meaning, you are engaged in a sense of play within the dialectical framework (I really, really hate to use that phrase, but it seems apposite) of the film.

But it's not always easy to find. Yet to be issued on DVD, you can download a torrent on Demonoid (a fuzzy digital transfer from VHS, the kind where you start going blind reading subtitles on snow) or better yet, if you happen to be living anywhere in the GVRD, the Pacific Cinematheque will be screening a rare print from June 29th to July 1st (mark it, mark it, mark it on your calendar).

What makes the film so seemingly prescient today (as it must have been in its time) is that it mines, unflinchingly, the faultline between sex (as expressive of the individual) against institutional power (as seeking to wrest control of the primary sexual urge). There are multiple explorations of this faultline – the representation of the State (the Soviet Bloc and the US Government) and the burgeoning of Mass Consumerism (of the Madison Ave. suits era) as the controlling forces both outrightly and insidiously staking claims to the body and desire.

Repression versus Expression. And at the same time, Makavajev manages somehow to portray a sense of the approaching fall-out: the Sexual Revolution of the seventies and its potentially mis-directed or co-opted (by consumerism) object-related notion of freedom (hairstyles and fuzzy drinks followed by casual sex); at one point, under query, Reich's widow Eva pointedly remarks in a heartbeat that 'The American Dream is Dead'.

And then there is the Body, so exhaustively present throughout. If you can't read the subtitles, you might miss the import of some of the most powerful scenes in the film. A young revolutionary – sexually and politically intense and in the flower of womanhood – falls for the 'pure' body of a Russian figure skater, an 'artist of the people' whose said body is held in virginal thrall to the State. Denial of his own essential but mis-placed urge leads him to an act of desperate murder at the close of WR.

The. Autonomic. Nervous. System.

But oh, yeah, I think I started by talking about the autonomic nervous system. And so we come to the father of Bioenergetics, Dr. Alexander Lowen:

Dr. Alexander Lowen, MD

Lowen features heavily in WR, in some of the more intense scenes where he demonstrates some of the broader principals of bioenergetic practice.

Lowen was himself a student, then patient, of Reich's in the fifties. I'd first mistaken the techniques in the film as belonging to Primal Therapy (Arthur Janov's 'revolutionary' psychiatric treatment of the same period, often mis-nomered as 'Primal Scream Therapy' due to the popularity of his book, The Primal Scream.)

insert meaningless trivia here > John Lennon's treatment with Janov inspired much of the rawest, nakedest and most emotional cuts off his first record with the Plastic Ono Band (especially heart-stoppers like 'Mother' and 'My Mommy's Dead'), though he later retracted support of Janov and referred to him as 'the one-eyed witch-doctor leading the blind' on Walls and Bridges – ah well, read all about it on Wikipedia...I did.

The principal element that informs both Reich's and Lowen's practice is of energy. And the essential expression of energy is in movement.

And so, the health of the individual is manifested in increased motility as well as increased expression. Reich points out that the literal root meaning of the word emotion (e-motion) is of moving out. The natural flow of all life, even on the cellular level, is towards moving out. And so even an amoeba has expression, motility, emotion.

Reich also identifies pleasure as the natural expansion of the organism...anxiety and displeasure (or repression) is the contraction of the organism. So a depressed organism withdraws from the periphery towards the centre, going inward, and all parasympathetic (unconsciously deployed) impulses also draw inward...blood-flow decreases and has to fight its way through contracted vessels, breath shortens, and the individual begins to develop muscular armouring (expressed through the imposition of conscious, sympathetic control) as a way to fight off psychic disturbance and the prevalence of a mind-body schism. Whereas an organism in pleasure is in a state of flow, moving from the centre to the periphery and out into contact with the world.

Reich and Lowen both emphasize the importance of breath in all this, as essential to maintaining flow in the biophysical organism.

I often wonder if what Reich considered to be the ground-breaking discovery of the Orgone does not at some level resemble the much earlier-discovered Dao of the ancient Chinese, with some marked distinctions. Both practices are based on non-dualistic observations of nature, emphasizing flow as well as the relationship between mind and body. And then there is also the never under-emphasized importance of breath, or pranic, abdominal chi breathing that informs everything in eastern disciplines. Plus, as anyone getting into Mantak Chia knows, true Daoists have been well-acquainted with Orgasm Theory, Microcosmic Orbits and Sex Economy for generations.

The appeal of Lowen, in contrast to Reich, is his accessibility. According to Lowen, you don't 'have a body', you 'are a body'. And that simple trip-wire switch of phrasing (which Lowen excels at) helps one ease into re-considering ones relationship to the corporeal self.

It wasn't until recently that I even thought of looking up Lowen. But one day I emerged from the VPL carrying three of his books – Pleasure, Joy and Bioenergetics.

I started with Pleasure because, well, I'm a sucker for anything with the word pleasure in it. And because we live in a fucked up world (truly fucked up, and yes, also truly beautiful) I've been finding myself haunting a lot of self-help sections of late. (I once described the experience to Tess – of scanning the rows of titles and, like J. Mascis, feeling the 'pain of everyone', and then that line from Parzival leapt into the forebrain: What Ails Thee?)

Lowen's method involves having the subject engage in exercises in which involuntary tremors start to take over, triggering a release that is both intensely physical and emotional at the same time. I've tried a couple of these in the last month, and it's almost startling...a vibratory phenomenon verging on catharsis takes over as it builds to momentum, all from assuming some fairly simple postures for protracted lengths of time.

In WR, you get to see subjects in the full throes of release...surface eruptions of anger, expressions of deeply-ingrained infantile hostility exploding to the fore, often accompanied by a marked vibratory excitation of the body. Almost like religious seizures...but definitely not expressing the same kind of release. These are people whose biographical traumas are beginning to exit through the medium of their bodies. The most striking of these scenes documents a mass group channeling out in a gymnasium filled with quivering, trembling bodies:

To be continued...

1st Blues – Floating vs Falling

2007-05-09T12:33:00.000-07:00

Posting from the always bright-as-nails Prado Cafe on Commercial Drive...had a Palestinian sampusc this morning at the Victoria Cafe, chatting with Tamam, the lovely, half-Chadian cook who moved here with her film-maker husband a year ago. Mostly discussions about food, food culture, how strangely 'quiet' Vancouver is compared to cosmopolitan, downtown Jerusalem...

Just saw two shirts pass by: 'It Wasn't Me (seriously)', and 'Viva la Fraude'...curious...

Last night, caught Photography as Theatre plus Huang Yong Ping and Fred Herzog at the Vancouver Art Gallery...then the art fatigue started coming on (it was mobbed) though I did run into an old friend on exit, Karen, who's been working there the past eight months.

Outside, kids were practicing their B-Boy moves down on the ice rink. Tess called from the Island and we started talking about urban ecologies...initiatives to start seeding gardens (metaphorical and otherwise) in the urban core.

We've been working on our show for 67 Tempinis Satu Gallery in Bangsar Bahru, KL, for the KLip (KL International Photography) Biennale in late August, and I've been writing a possible catalogue entry for Alleys of Damansara Jaya, our photo/video installation which has been in process for the past year and a half. So we've both begun reflecting in our individual ways on that whole experience, of space and time and environment and ecological interactions (as well as personal interactions) within the city complex.

And then this morning I came across this arresting series, La chute, on the 3 Quarks Daily site, by inner city French photographer Denis Darzacq :

...which is somehow resonant with the video we've been working on (self-portraits levitating in alleys), except the notion of a 'fall' is quite distinct from 'suspension'.

Response to the writing has been good so far --- will post it when the show goes up. Sek San, who's hosting the show at his gallery, also gave us a heads up about a new residency at Malihom, in Balik Pulau, Penang. Up to six months paid accommodation with studios and large stamping grounds (on a former durian plantation, I believe). So we're going to start sending apps out for the summer of 2008. Tess is thinking a plant/garden/ecology project, and I'm wondering about extending work on The Heavens (sample attached to the previous post) to a possible video installation.

Which brings me to Jah Goink's Blues and what I'm trying to initiate (very slowly, today) here. An in-process journal of working and thinking and reacting to things. And partly a reflection of how my own working process has changed...less formal rigour, more dialogue, opening up to accidents and random-ness and chance and flow. There's this notion of engaged space that I'm trying to complement with all the other activities of daily life, especially the practice of making work as a form of meditation.

I'm trying to short-circuit the rational process of arriving at product, which I'm not very adept at anyway. A lot of these principals have been showing up in other areas of my life, in particular the idea of open work and open source. There'll be more, much more on this later.

Otherwise, the particular sense of life at this point is of leaning and loafing, a stark, welcome contrast to the experience of the New Year (after a most horrible 2006). Which allows me time to pursue all those non goal-oriented preoccupations which more closely accord with my metabolism (like staring at moss, or farting into a vacuum).

– J.G.

New beginnings...

2007-05-08T18:03:00.000-07:00

The first entry always like cracking eggs...been planning to start this journal for ages, and had to wait till I was gainfully unemployed again to get started.

New beginnings...it's now Spring, mostly grey mornings with sun/wind breaking out by mid-afternoon. Signs of change in the air, transitions, impending births, leafage.

Too late to comment on anything right now. Will see you morningside.

- J.G.