Found this at Deviant Art. Liked it, so I’m sharing it.

via Deviant Art

Thanks, Naren, for the link.

There’s just something about drawing attention to what it is to live a human life by using the house as a canvas that I find deeply evocative. Of what I am not sure, except – as I said – what it means to live a human life. Compare this to an earlier post. Which house would best represent who you are?

via Wooster Collective

Now it may just be me, but I can’t help wonder if these movie makers are Pharyngula fans.

via Bioephemera (great, great site)

And this:

How cool is this stuff!

The creator: Matthew Gordon Long, if you want to check him out. Do have a look at his new blog.

My daughter and I braved the Canadian Olympic Hockey victory celebrations to go see María Pagés. I was in a lot of pain (not from the hockey win or its subsequent crazy Canucks yelling all along Granville). And there was a sold out show at the Commodore next door (Steel Panther). What a crazy walk from the skytrain station to the Orpheum. I made it through the performance and home again before I crashed — it was worth it. What that woman can do with her arms has got to be some sort of art/genetic mutation.

This, below, is her in a Riverdance production. Cultural cross pollination. Cool.

And as much as her dancing (and her company’s), the musicians and two singers left me astounded.

That bit with the shawl was really reminiscent of some of the best fancy dancers I have seen, and the voices sounded so very tribal that I felt right at home despite never having seen flamenco performed at this level.

During the Games there is also a cultural olympiad. There are some amazing events and since I am not a sports fan, it will be (along with the experience of trying to work downtown during these weeks, the sights, and resulting pictures) my olympic experience.

The first event I went to was a contemporary dance held at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. The evening was a presentation of three pieces performed by The National Ballet of Canada and The Royal Winnipeg Ballet. The pieces were 24 Preludes by Chopin (Chouinard), As Above, So Below (Godden) and Hikarizatto (Galili).

This clip is from Chouinard’s company, and although not from 24 Preludes, it does give you a feel for her intensity and the kinds of movements and themes she presents. This bit, the first of the three, was definitely my favourite, in part because of the feel of it (see video), but also because it seems to me to a bit like a lyrical poem, presenting a world that really doesn’t have a narrative stream. I’ve never felt the world had a teleology so I’ve always felt more comfortable with world-pictures like this. I’m not sure I agree with the content of her sense of the world but I do very much feel at home with the style in which she presents what she understands. And she has women doing lifts. When I went to the ballet as a child, the fact that the boys got to do all the heavy duty stuff always annoyed the crap out of me.

As Above, So Below was much more what I expect from contemporary dance.  It was most definitely a story, one about the relationship between a man and a woman. I couldn’t find a video but this picture will give you a sense of the story.

The last piece was my second favourite. Hikarizatto – the name alone was worth the cost of the tickets. Choreographed by Itzik Galili, the sense of the world that came from the dance was most definitely different – wonderful, but odd. In the last half of this very short video ( starting at about 1:15) you can see a clip for Galili’s piece. I have to say that I felt every anthropological bone in my body for the entirety of the performance. Kind of distracted from the sheer enjoyment unfortunately.

I live in an older (ugly) house in Vancouver. It’s a rental, and the landlords are really good about keeping the interior functional but not at all good about making it look nice. Apart from sending someone round to cut down the grass up front during the summer, nothing else is done. So the house (a grey clapboard looking narrow 3-story perched up on a little hill) presents a bland face to the world.

What I’d like to do is set someone I know free with some paints. I have no idea what ideas she’d come up with but I think I’d like a combination of the modes below.  The idea that a house should present a face to the world that says something about its dwellers seems deeply right to me. I wonder if I just paid for the supplies whether the landlords would get all huffy or they’d be like “wow, that’s cool.”  I mean really, the house is of less value than the land it sits on and I suspect that someday the house will get torn down and rebuilt for someone who is upwardly mobile in an deeply economic sense. And it occurs to me to wonder, if they painted their home with iconic representations of personhood, what would it look like?

I like what’s known as ledger art. It represents a period of American Indian history, specifically on the plains and primarily between the years of 1860 and 1930. What they mostly document is the large scale arrival of Europeans, their soldiers, the life ways of those tribes who produced the artists, and the contact between the two. Probably the most famous ledger books come from the Indian prisoners that were held at Fort Marion in St Augustine, Florida. Captain Pratt, their supervisor, gave them the paper, colored pencils and paints and presumably, retained at least some of the completed books. The Indians, having time on their hands, used their own experience with art (tanned hide, mineral and fat based paints, representational topics of note in Indian Country) and translated them into the new medium made available by Pratt.

There’s a contemporary collectors market for ledger books and some of them are available to the public through places like the Smithsonian and the Nebraska State Historical Society. I came across this picture on the net, which had an attached provenance.

The provenance reads:

Keeling Ledger Book, Nebraska State Historical Society (11310-55), is from the collection of William Henry Keeling of Falls City, NE. Major Keeling served with the Army in Montana in the 1860s. It is likely that the ledger book was collected at Camp Cooke, Montana in 1866-67. The William H. Keeling was received by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission staff at Arbor Lodge in 1925. The inventory entry appears as “Book of Indian Drawings, history of the Nez Perces Indians”.

“collected at Camp Cooke, Montana in 1866-67…”

“collected…”

Sort of like Lord Elgin “collected” the loose stones at the Parthenon?

Camp Cooke was the first permanent military base in Montana.  It was deemed necessary because in 1862 gold was discovered at Bannack in what was then Idaho territory but is now Montana. By 1863 President Lincoln had appointed Sidney Edgerton as the Chief Justice of the Territory. He arrived with his wife and kids. She and her husband’s niece set up a school.  He tried to deal with the increasing violence that sudden wealth so often seems to inspire.

And of course there was the Indian problem. Prior to the discovery of gold there weren’t so many whites as far out as the Idaho Territory. In the two years following the announcement at Bannack there were some 16,000 of the suckers and because of that things began moving along. Montana Territory was created in 1864 out of the eastern part of Idaho Territory. Edgerton was its first governor. By 1866 there were numerous Indian raids against the influx of white settlers. Indians burned white-owned buildings, ran off stock, and occasionally killed people. Edgerton, and then later Thomas Meagher, were tasked with getting up a local response. It didn’t work that well, and to a large degree, the policies, historical accidents, and attitudes generated during those years ended up being the genesis of the militia mindset that still pervades the region.

As winter burned itself out during those years between 1862 and 1866, the rumors of Indian attacks would predictably surface sort of like the black-boogey men stories white parents told their kids in South Africa before the end of apartheid. There’s a particularly funny Indian War of 1867 in which an attack (as it turned out by four or so Indian men) was anticipated and met with a million dollar military response. The thing is that the rumor mill of the time, the conspiracy theorists who predicted an uber-Indian alliance against the whites, had, in their late-winter by-the-fire-stories, 11,000 warriors pounding at white doors come one dark spring night. One of the things that makes this so funny is that the fact that it turned out to be four dudes didn’t stop the rumor mills any more than continual human and societal survival stops apocalyptic religions.

But I get ahead of the story here. The year before this happened this ledger book was “collected” by Major Keeling at Camp Cooke. So now what do you think “collected” means given the tenor of the times?

I don’t know much about Major Keeling. There is a newspaper mention of him in The Washington Critic dated December 3 1885. It describes him as the “post-trader” at Fort Leavenworth. So he survived the 1860s and ended up running the trading post? I wonder, all those years later, if he sold stuff to the Indian from whom he’d collected the ledger?

There’s another mention of Keeling in a text that recounts the history of the churches and schools in Fort Leavenworth. In recounting the somewhat meager situation of Father Kinsella as he tried to minister to a rather large area, the report has him taking up a room (when not otherwise occupied) in the hotel/military residence managed by Major Keeling. This is sometime around or after 1884. Keeling provided the Father board at $15 a month. The room, though, turned out to be a brief reprise from Kinsella’s homelessness because pretty soon there were so many young military trainees on the frontier that there just weren’t empty rooms in which the Father could kip.

Anyway, all these years later, the Keeling Ledger is taken care of by the Nebraska State Historical Society. It looks like Keeling’s family presented it to the Nebraska Parks and Game Commission in 1925, although I could be wrong about that.

You can buy a limited reproduction of ledger pages for between $250 and $5000 a pop.

While I was in the hospital my kids, knowing me rather well, brought me several books to read.  One of them, written by Charles Demers, is called Vancouver Special. It was a good choice since it is filled with really good black and white photographs and short essays that are themselves structured much like images. (For some reason I find images easier on the body than narrative.) The book is organized around different elements that make both a city and an image. For the city these are things like neighborhoods, people and what the author has called culture but is in fact the relationships that bind and make meaningful the first two.  For example, he has a essay on nature in the culture section that, while informative and dryly funny by itself, side-lights and connects the chapters on First Nations and Kitsilano.

Reading it is quite a bit like interacting with a Vasily Kandinsky painting. I was thinking of this one. The blue bits are the essays on people, the green and orange are neighborhoods, the lines and arcs that delineate and connect are the bits on culture.

To get the painting, you have to get the relationships between the elements, which, I suppose is true of all narrative, but with Demers’ book as with art like Kandinsky’s, the way in which those elements are displayed has much more to do with space than with time. And narrative arc is almost always about time. This is, in itself, something deeply “Vancouver.” If Demers did that on purpose, I not only like his book but deeply respect his ability as a writer.

The pictures in the book, black and white photographs by Emmanuel Buenviaje, can be “read” right along beside the text. I mean, if you can imagine text structured as a complex image, then it shouldn’t be so hard to connect the pictures into meaningful series using the rules of narrative. But I’ll leave that up to you. You’d have to spend time with the book, with its elements and its arrangement.

This is not one of his but it (very vaguely) gives you the feel of the ‘graphs. If you want a better idea, you can click on this link and it will take you to his Flickr account. There are a number of black and white Vancouver shots there plus plenty of colour. One that caught my eye is here. I like it for a number of reasons but partly at least because I happen to occasionally catch the bus on that corner.

The book was published last year and opens by talking about the social, historical and political implications of the 1986 Expo and the 2010 Winter Olympics. This is not just a planar tourist book. It has depth: achieved by both political and historical knowledge and awareness. Vancouver, for all its wonders and beauty, suffers from the general North American dis-ease with its history and its past and, therefore, present choices. I was here during Expo and now the Olympics and the same battles for and with the homeless population have occurred both times, as an example. It’s a bit like a woman so obsessed with her aging face that she goes in for a lift and then there, as she turns grinning at herself in front of a mirror, on top of her completely ignored and clearly aging 50 year old neck and shoulders is the face that befits a 25 year old.

The thing about a person (or city) like that is that what this means has everything to do with the eyes of the beholder.  In this case Demers looks on with honesty, but also with love, more like compassion than pity or disrespect. Because of all these things, Vancouver Special really is a very good introduction to what it’s like to live here. If you’re interested.

although noting what what I am not sure, but I like it, I really like it,

by an artist named Pauline Wooley.

This is from a series called “Emergence.” She focuses on the structures of things in the universe (cells and planetary surfaces, for example) and gives a view of them filtered through human experience and by virtue of that makes them meaningful to us in a way that is just at the edge of intelligibility. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.