Summer Reading and Movies Too

I have officially begun my summer reading. The first book was A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley. It's part of a mystery series with a girl detective that is set somewhere in England. Since it revolves around a family of gypsies, I was hooked from the start since I just performed as one last week. Lots of lovely twists and turns, memorable quotes, quirky humor and chemistry. Woot! There's a new one coming out for Christmas and did I mention the author is Canadian? Tres bon.

The novel also captures that particularly viciously playful nature of girls in the strange relationships among the three sisters.

ETA: This afternoon I watched a movie called Turn Left at the End of the World directed by Avi Nesher. It's a comedy and a tear jerker that I thoroughly enjoyed and the relationships among the women are passionate and engaging. The movie is set in the 1960's in the Negev dessert where a girl who is Jewish Moroccan makes friends with a girl from India. I highly recommend it for summer viewing.

I Love this Book!

So I waded through tourists today at Granville Island and bought Eco Colour by India Flint at Maiwa. I love the book and feel such an affinity for the processes she uses. I am itching to try her techniques!

Twilight Wishes

Thanks to all who came out to the tea party tonight. It's been a longtime dream of mine to have an outdoor event like this on a long summer's eve and I was so pleased the weather co-operated. It's an important thing to witness twilight as a collective. The garden becomes mysterious and enchanted. I hope people enjoyed themselves. Now that I've done one moth cape, I'd like to do a series of them, maybe playing with dyeing, batik, and stenciling. It would be fun to be able to give them out to people to wear at an event.

Tomorrow we tackle the bamboo fence and Tuesday I am going to Granville Island to buy myself a treat. All will be revealed.

Life Skills, I mean Real Life Skills

So I have been under a great deal of pressure this last week. I went and overbooked myself into a tight spot. I wake up at night with the anxiety. Today something shifted. I woke up at five and heard heavy rain, which relaxed me because it means I don't have three gardens to water today. I shifted some bamboo we'll be working with and the guy who helped me was a mensch. I stepped into his van and the smell brought me right back into childhood, riding in my dad's three quarter ton. We used to head in at five am to get groceries, over an hour away in North Battleford, Sask. On the way in we'd listen to CBC radio. We'd have breakfast at a greasy spoon. I'd wander around the shops on my own until dad had loaded up the truck. Sometimes we'd visit the museum where my grandpa donated artifacts. Sometimes we'd make a detail to Cutknife to see the World's Biggest Tomahawk. Mostly we'd just travel in silence watching the prairies roll by. We didn't talk much and we liked it that way. I learned that is a good and comfortable way to be with a person.

At the school I had some of the older boys help me clean and prep the bamboo. I loved watching them explore the bamboo and enjoy its simple beauty. They compared the young and the old bamboo. They learned how to saw it. They learned about the nodes and diaphrams. One guy had to try to saw through a node and he did it with determination and patience. They had their silly fooling around moments and I curbed their enthusiasm only when I felt they were playing dangerously. They cleaned and scrubbed and got bored. They sang and joked and pranced around. We had fun. Ironically, the students in the classroom next to us were watching a Disney Cartoon: Hercules. I watched that show SO MANY TIMES with my son. There's a motivational song "I can go the distance." It's cheezy and I love it. I sang along and hummed it all day.

As the clouds lifted and the sun came out the weather also cleared in my interior landscape. I felt lighter and I saw a way into the future, past the stress and deadlines. It was a spiritual experience that came at an unexpected time in an unexpected way.

I will not let the bastards get me down.

I will learn to monetize my life's work.

I will continue to teach life skills and be inspired in turn by my students.

It's gonna be all right.

The Tourist Trade

I've said before I love helping tourists and today I helped a couple from New Zealand to get to Queen E Park. (I told them they MUST see Van Dusen Gardens.) They somewhat reluctantly told me they were from Christ Church, and their eyes filled with tears as they described the destruction in their city. Of course they come here to escape the trauma and I want to know all about their experiences. As gently as I could, I asked them about it. One quake happened at 4 am when everyone was in bed and it was dark. Another happened on a weekday when everyone was at work. They described liquification of land, raising of the river bed and that uneasy feeling of never knowing when another quake will hit. They were describing a form of post traumatic stress. They said every building in the city will eventually be inspected and rated for damage. Somehow I find that detail very poignant--the idea that everyone is waiting for a man or woman to bear witness to how well their dwelling bore the stress of the quakes and after shocks. Blessings to them on their journeys.

Neurotic Ramblings

We just had another neighborhood earthquake meeting. I am always poised between hysteria and neurosis when I start thinking about "the big one." Whenever I go somewhere new, I think about what it would be like to be in that spot when there is an earthquake. Like, what happens if I am in the basement of the Waldorf Hotel eating baba ganouj beneath bamboo and concrete and there is a quake? Tonight my neighbors were talking about how safe we'll be because we're on bedrock up here on "Mount Pleasant." Yeh, but what if you're not here, what if you're in the basement of the high-rise building downtown getting a crown on a tooth? What if that building is like 17 or more storeys high? What if you're in the lower level of a sky train tunnel in between stations? What if the ground just opens and swallows you up? See, this is why I hate thrillers.

I hate being without my family at those moments when I feel vulnerable because being separated from them in an earthquake is a horror I can't bear to think about. But one of the big themes at our meeting tonight is how we have to commit to take care of one another. I think learning to care for our neighbors is a really good goal--just on a daily basis. There is a man in our neighborhood who is blind and today I watched him carry a bucket around his yard. I think he was feeling the leaves of his plants to see how dry they were. I would love to meet him. My immediate response was to head over there and help him, but it would have been an insult really, as he is so self-contained and independent. Still, I would like to meet him, selfishly mostly for what he could teach me.

I am thinking about Terry Fox's mom today. She was an amazing woman. She knew how to care for people.

I have a bad taste in my mouth today after hearing people on the radio feeling sorry for the disenchanted young men who rioted downtown last week. Certainly, I don't think they should be lynched by social media, but feel sorry for them? "Young men just don't feel valued by society," one phone-in caller says. Uh what about all the young women, especially those who don't lash out at property and authority, but instead harm themselves. Give me a f-ing break. And what about the weird fetishizing of the hoarding that people have written messages on? What kind of vomit-tinted nostalgia fuels the impulse to save that graffiti in its hard copy form for posterity? Take a photo. Duh. All this typical Vancouver glossing over and airbrushing its image makes me tired and frustrated. Typical navel gazing waste of time. Let's move on and hear some real news now, like about people with real problems.

So M wanted to know what I performed in the cabaret. I don't know. The problem is cabaret doesn't read well off the page. I am thinking of doing some U-Tube adaptations of some pieces this summer, so stay tuned for that.

I have been doing hours of sewing and I really want to take this moment to thank my little old Singer machine for going the distance with me on this one. I may buy her chocolates--and eat them because she can't. The good thing about sewing is that I have been able to listen to hours of CBC radio in between chugging down seams. I have heard some great interviews. The one that stands out the most for me is Michael Enright's interview with and Australian novelist named Geraldine Brooks who was absolutely hilarious. She had me the first time she giggled. His interview with Amira Hass was also pure gold. Today Shelagh Rogers talked to another very funny author--Ann Patchett. Her adventures in the Amazon were well told. She is another writer who does well with an audience.

So I am almost ready to hang my piece, perform my persona on Sunday, but I do need to put on the finishing touches. It's not as well-rounded a piece as I'd hoped to create, but the extra layers will have to be added if I perform/install in another time. Sometimes you just have to call it a day. I will be fighting to use whatever creative energy I have left between now and then to tease/tear more depth out of it.

Salad Days

Let the floral salads begin! Viola and nasturtiums grown from seed are now blooming so we can pop them into our daily salads. The more you pick them, the more they bloom, so it's a win-win situation.

I am sewing all weekend. Not my favorite activity, but it's raining, so it's a cozy indoor day at the Singer.

Dude, You Haz a Fan

Michael Kimmelman, Mr. Art Critic with a fresh, vibrant voice, where have you been all my life? I just stumbled on the first of your series of Postcards in the New York Times and I am besotted. I can't wait to read your book and more of your writing. You've lifted me from my post-Vancouver riot blues. Thanks dude!

Which Riot?

So last night I was one of five performers who responded to the events of April 23, 1935 when Mayor Gerry McGeer read the Riot Act to the relief camp protesters, their families and supporters gathered at Victory Square. I count Anakana Schofield as one of the performers because she read some texts from the archives of the original event that helped put the works by the rest of us into context and provide the connective tissue that held the live event together.

The event was at the Waldorf hotel which is an old tiki tiki-style building which I'd heard a lot about but had never visited. Just visiting the Waldorf was a bit of an adventure, but of course with the added edge of performing two pieces it promised to be a curious event. It's been a long time since I performed in a cabaret, I used to do at least three or four a year. It's a genre that I love because of the sense of the potluck and the camaraderie among the performers back stage. I've been back stage with "Colonel Sanders," drag queens, women in fetish gear, naked Butoh dancers painting their bodies white, "Sonny and Cher", and more poets, musicians and feminists than you can shake a stick at. I love the surreal quality of the backstage life, crackling with nervous tension and sometimes a frisson of animosity. However, generally because we're all freaks we tend to pull together and root for each other.

I came to the venue in costume, knowing full well there might not be a green room, and I was ushered back into a small venue called "The Hideaway" with at least one black velvet painting of a woman in the process of losing her grass skirt and a shitload of bamboo. It covers walls, posts, bars, and furnishes the place. The odd thing is that none of the other performers chose to hang out "backstage". I guess it's my theatre background coming through here vs. their visual art/music/writer history. So I sat backstage by myself snacking on crackers and baba ganouj, taking in the rather dreary little tiki tiki room and I examined what was hiding behind all the curtains and screens. The answer is nothing really, but those furnishings do create an air of seedy mystery about the place. I enjoyed the focus I was able to achieve by being alone. This is what the big stars must feel like when they are about to go on, except they'd have assistants to fuss around them. I warmed up, snacked and then I waited. I couldn't see or hear what was going on in the cabaret space so I was in a kind of tiki tiki limbo. What could one do but think about one's life in the cabaret?

I remember reading an artist I admire say that she stopped doing cabaret because the costs and time outweighed the fees you are paid. That is true in most cases, except we were paid appropriately last night, maybe the first and last time that will ever happen, but one can dream. Performing is a ritual that makes you face your body in a real way. I find writing the easy part--it's the vulnerability of using my body as the tool as it is very challenging. However, I think it's important to keep at it. It's a glorious form of human expression--raw, direct, and full of potential. Many of the audience are often performers as well, hungry for a good night out with substance, style, humor, and food for thought. It's the kind of challenge you want to keep doing until you feel you master it, even though that goal is ephemeral.

Performing in a cabaret is very rewarding in other ways than the monetary ones. You have to face yourself as an audience of yourself, creating distance in order to be able to create work for the "other". This develops your third eye and helps you face your aging mind and body as you celebrate it (even if you do so ironically). We don't always like what we come up with, but last night I felt very happy with what I was able to do and I really appreciate being given the opportunity to explore the theme.

I didn't reference the subject matter directly--it is the language of the legal manipulation of people that interests me most right now, so I wanted to focus on that. I studied the new age books and lingo that are espousing non violent communication because I wanted to know how we prevent the build up of injury and frustration that leads to violence. Now the events in April 1935 were very specific to that time--extreme hardship and life-threatening poverty. The words created to stop the crowds in this context seem inadequate and impotent. Similarly, one assumes reading the Riot Act last night would mean SFA to that frenzied group of hardcore rioters.

I am intrigued about that moment when an action turns from being legal to illegal. There's that moment when behavior becomes destabilized and then that sets off a chain reaction of words and events that the law is created to stop and turn back. The language created to push back at the darker impulses humans have has to be very potent.

I must commend the cops on taking a non-aggressive approach to the looting and burning that happened last night. It seemed wise to put the values of people's safety over the damage of property. And that seemed to be the main thrust of the action--let's destroy and steal shit.

So I wonder does sport have the potential to provide a safe outlet for pent up energy that can turn aggressive? Maybe we should be spending more money on amateur sport so that instead of being nations of watchers, we are nations of players. Even my son said he researched the last hockey riots in Vancouver and predicted something similar would happen in last night. I had a feeling it would go either way: a bliss-out boostering hooplah or a number from the dark side.

I must say that I will never forget emerging from a dim cabaret and seeing a black plume of smoke against the glow of a June sunset.

Counter Culture Babe

It's official. I am forty-something and still a member of the "counter culture". 99 per cent of people in town will be watching the game tomorrow a and either celebrating or rioting and I will be performing to a fraction of the remaining 1 per cent at a cabaret about reading the riot act. It's surreal. Actually it's quite hilarious.

And tonight I had to attend a PAC meeting which is about as fun as having a root canal. A half of a bottle of wine later I am not feeling the pain. No more PAC meetings for me. They is BAD for ma mental health.

I listened to AMT on The Current this morning--CBC 1 on why so many girls are missing from India and China. It's tragic and fascinating that now that women are being accepted more and more into Asian culture, female girls in these countries are still being aborted at an astounding rate. I highly recommend the podcast.

I am amused at how Ules' tennis instructor's wisdom has infiltrated his brain. Basically he said " You find a sport you like and that's what you spend your time learning and playing." Ullie has commented to me on several walks home from school on how this applies to many things in life. Bless him. Hopefully the protestant martyr complex in my family will skip a generation.

I have had an amazing day of drawing for hours, studies of the leopard moth to morph into a cape. Catherine's studio practice is rubbing off on me in a good way!

Getting it Done

Don't you just love those days when you get way more done than you thought you would? Booya! I've got a start on my moth cape, but found that the ultra suede I chose does fray when I thought it would not. This calls for a change in strategy--probably appliqué rather than reverse-appliqué. I also am closer to resolving the turban but I am stuck on the crystal ball. I brought a cool alternative today, but don't think it will work. It's pink and looks like an internal organ crystal ball but I don't know if I can make it glow brightly enough. I think I have the tent issue resolved in my head, but I just hope and pray the little old Singer keeps on truckin'.

Lovely block party yesterday--pics coming soon. I have sourced a real riot gear helmet for the cabaret at the Waldorf on Wednesday. I hope some people come in spite of the BIG GAME. What are the odds that this would happen?

Blimey, who is having a drumming circle in our neighborhood? Piss off!

Peter's Home!

Peter's back and all is well with the world. We are just about to go out for tea. I love that he always comes back with new ideas and stories from his trips. It's a good injection of inspiration into his art practice. He's intrigued with alternative energy at the moment. I am mothing along, yes moth-ing, working on a cape at the moment. I am also assembling costumes and practising for Wednesday's cabaret. Let's hope the Canucks win on Monday so we have an audience on Wednesday at the Waldorf!

Off to search for a crystal ball, top hat, cravat and cane!

Je Mange le Chocolat

Yes, I am on a bender of the chocolate variety. Good chocolate, bad chocolate. All due to a DVD of "The Closer" with a main character played brilliantly by Kyra Sedgewick. I am so channeling that detective right now, with her sugar-dipped voice and her secret drawer of forbidden treats. Chai chocolate pudding from Shaktea, brownies and cinnamon chocolate walnut meringues from Coco et Olive, homemade chocolate coconut banana smoothies. BRING IT ON. And on the other side of this bipolar diet disorder we have kale and arugula. This is what happens when my man goes off flying to the nation's capital, leaving me unbalanced and off kilter.

Ignore the woman behind the curtain wiping the crumbs from her mouth.