US Soldiers

“Soldier”, a series of photos by Suzanne Opton:

Suzanne Opton, a photographer based in New York, has created a series of intimate and disturbing portraits of young American soldiers who had recently returned from wars in Iraq or Afghanistan (or both), and who were scheduled to return again to war after a brief stint of more training at an Army base in the United States.

The soldiers, who had volunteered to join the Army, also volunteered to be part of Opton’s project without really knowing what it was about.

The portraits were made at an Army base, using a very unconventional pose, in a close-up manner. Opton asked each soldier to put his or her head down on a hard table, facing sideways toward the camera. She asked them to remain still while she made the photograph. No further words or directions were exchanged between photographer and subject. As the photographer silently fiddled with her large 4 x 5 camera, adjusting the focus, moving the lights, taking her time, the soldiers tended to let down their guard and get lost in the noise of their own thoughts and memories. She waited for that kind of unguarded moment to capture her picture.

The portraits are stripped down, raw, and revealing. Except for the haircuts, there is nothing in the photographs to suggest that these people are soldiers. We see no uniforms or medals or guns or camouflage. Instead we see large disembodied heads, and the intimate details of faces of very young people who look stunned or numb.

“Some of them look serene and some of them look shell-shocked,” says Opton. “They’re all terribly vulnerable.”

Another thing that is disquieting about these portraits is that we rarely personally see people in positions like these, close up, unless we are in bed with them, side by side, heads resting on a pillow. So, we are forced into an uncomfortably intimate proximity with someone who appears to be traumatized. It is hard to shake that feeling.

Opton embarked on other approaches, as well, for her Soldier series. The follow-up approach continues to focus on the heads and faces of soldiers close-up, but instead of alone, the heads are being held by a wife, a girlfriend, or even another soldier. There is an unspoken attempt to comfort and protect in these poses, but more often than not, the faces of the soldiers seem distant and faraway.

The caption for each portrait is spare and open to interpretation: we learn only the soldier’s last name, and the number of days he or she had spent in action at the time of the photograph.

An exhibition of this work has begun touring the United States and beyond. In conjunction with an exhibition in New York, a non-profit organization decided to place the images on billboards along highways and in towns. The headlines of the billboards said simply: Soldier.

Opton was amazed at how powerful the resulting images were. She said, “When they were printed big, they looked like the heads of  fallen statues.”

- Jim Casper

Suzanne Opton has completed a companion project to Soldier called Citizen. For that project she has made portraits of another group of people whose lives are deeply affected by war: Iraqi citizens who have been forced into exile with little hope of a normal future. You can see more of that work at her web site.

lens culture

Birkholz

Obama Quits

From NYT:

Senator Barack Obama is ending his membership at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a congregation he has belonged to for about two decades and one that had become a lightning rod in his Democratic presidential bid.

First Rev. Wright, then Father Pfleger.  Too much for Barack Obama it appears.  I guess he figures if he dumps his church now, people will have forgotten about it by the time November rolls around.  Not I.

I’m not into religion myself and I wish people would pretty much keep their religious views to themselves unless asked.  I find the ways that fundamentalist Christianity has influenced American politics particularly odious.  Nevertheless, dumping a community and a set of beliefs for reasons of political expediency is a less than impressive testament to character.  Obama belonged to this church for twenty years.  He was married in this church, by Rev. Wright.  His children were baptized in this church.  In his book, “The Audacity of Hope”, Obama cited Rev. Wright as a mentor.  In fact, the name of the book came from Rev. Wright.

It seems unlikely that Trinity United Church of Christ has changed a great deal in the last six months.  It’s difficult to see Obama’s choice to quit the church as anything other than rather cynical political expediency.  That should surprise no one.  Obama is a consummate politician.  And no different than many others.  What pisses me off is his constant claim to be something new and better.  But it doesn’t surprise me.

Audacious Depression

From “The Audacity of Depression” by Joe Bageant:

[...]

Lately though, I don’t hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called “rage fatigue.” Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it’s true.

I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I’m no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing. Obama may yet be borne through the White House portico by a Democratic host of seraphim, but he cannot do much without the consent of a bought and paid for Congress. Only George Bush can do that, and we can only hope God broke the mold after he made George. And like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the “American lifestyle,” is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely “the entertainment branch of industry.”

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned “Hope” of course — that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition — will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

Compounding everything is the fact that it is quite human and even pragmatic to passively accept reality as it is. Until it’s too late to do anything. As my late friend Virgil the philosophical backhoe operator summed it up: “If we fucked everything up so bad tryin’ to do our best, maybe we oughtta just leave’er be for a while. Quit thinking about it so much.”

More Band-Aids for the trained chickens, please!

Virgil may be popping open a Keystone Light lager somewhere in heaven, or in maybe a much warmer venue. I dunno. But people are thinking about it more than ever. Among sentient people everywhere there is a deep, visceral unease, and among those most aware there is genuinely acute suffering. I hear this expressed quite articulately not only in places such as this Omni Hotel “writers’ lounge,” but in working and middle class living rooms and in emails from Americans and around the world.

Naturally, the bunny and cupcake set of Americans are still oblivious, or at least pretend to be, but even at the more inchoate and private level, there is a growing awareness that things are going very wrong, and doing so on an incomprehensively massive and complex scale. There is the feeling that even if what is happening could be made comprehensible to the majority of humanity, to all those people just trying to keep afloat on the planet, from Zimbabwe to Flint, Michigan, overall it is unstoppable. Unfixable except in the fleeting media/politics Band-Aid sense, and then only in locales rich enough to afford the illusionary Band-Aid fixes politicians dream up when they write their campaign “plans for change.” 

All of which is horseshit, of course, since real change would entail undoing most of the machinery of planetary destruction and extreme pressure to standardize humanity that we have come to know as modern civilization and mass society — halting, then reversing the momentum this monolith has achieved.

We now live as the technoculture’s subjects, not its masters and will from here on out as viral technology mediates, homogenizes and monetizes human experience worldwide, in ever more remote corners. I watch it regularly in the Third World, where the power of gadgets such as cell phones is wiping out the core foundations of indigenous or longstanding cultures within a decade or two. The global machine’s technological nervous system and production musculature, the techno grid now embedded in the world, grows in quantum fashion to control every aspect of our lives deeper and more thoroughly than is imaginable by the folks living those lives. It’s so pervasive we don’t feel it at all. 

[...]

… we are left to play out the game day by day. That being the case, we should elect to play it out with the best among us, the ones on humanity’s side, that hidden and unheralded aristocracy — those quiet lamp lighters making their way through the deepening dusk of American civilization.

E. M. Forster described them as,

“Not an aristocracy of power, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes and through the ages, and they know each other when they meet. … Authority, seeing their value, tries to net them and to utilize them. … But they slip through the net and are gone; when the door is shut they are no longer in the room; Their temple is the Holiness of the Heart’s Imagination, and their kingdom, though they never possess it, is the wide open world.”

In this they are deathless.

  more here

Bowering on McFadden

George Bowering:

One Saturday night, I sat with David McFadden in Maple Leaf Gardens, watching Toronto beat Detroit 6-0.  At game’s end, when sixteen thousand people began to rise and file out, McFadden opened his book bag and shouted, “Wait, wait, I have some poems to read to you!” He was joking but he was not kidding.  All his writing life he has acted as if the poet has a real function in the social life of his country and world, as if poems are composed by a human being intent on taking his part in the building of a place to live in.  The poet is perhaps not the unacknowledged legislator of the world, but if the citizens could have their ears unstopped they would at least recognize him as a functionary.  McFadden does not want to replace the famous athletes in the workaday dream machine; he just wants to take his turn with them. 

     David McFadden was born (1940) in Hamilton, Ont. , and lived there until 1978.  Canada’s biggest steel-producing city, Hamilton, half-way between Buffalo and Toronto, is the country’s emblem for postwar working-class life.  People who live there, one fancies, participate without choice in the life of hourly wage, producing the element of national “growth,” and accept with no question of will the attendant despoliation of the ecosphere, and the avid leisure hour invasion of the American trash culture.  Under cast-iron clouds, Hamiltonians in Dacron slacks go bowling, eat brown-coated chicken parts, and watch game shows on Buffalo TV stations. 

     But David McFadden’s bungalow was on “Hamilton Mountain,” a petion of the great Niagara Escarpment, a precambrian survivor of God’s geography that almost joins Fenimore Cooper country to the Canadian Shield, that huge rock backbone of Canada, a symbol vastly important to our literary mythologists.  Hamilton Mountain does not rear itself above the smog, but it insists on its priority; it tells the imagination that this part of the continent was all this high once, that the Niagara Peninsula and the Great Lakes were not always a flat stage for coke furnaces and Pepsi shacks. 

     The Escarpment is an important symbol for McFadden, but no more important as a base for his poetic than as a foundation for his house.  McFadden did not go to university, but neither did he choose the idle life of most Canadian “working-class” poets.  He was for a decade a proofreader for the Hamilton Spectator, and for several more years a reporter, chiefly on the police beat.  Thus he was a wage-earner with words, and an artist raising a lower-middle-class family.  Each night he drove down off the Escarpment into the dark of the mills, and in the daytime he wrote poems that took for their subject the lives of regular human beings, divine in origin but compelled to enact their lives in the midst of the trash era.  As Frank Davey put it in From There To Here: “the message of McFadden’s poems is that individual man in evitably is forced to participate in both the lumpen culture and global political forces of his time. “¹ 

     One does not have to read far in McFadden’s verse to find out that he has chosen to be a romantic poet in the line or company of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, and Kerouse.  That choice implies a vision relentlessly connecting metaphysical belief and detailed concern for the quotidian fate of the least powerful people in his society. 

You would see him bobbing proudly along Kenilworth Avenue
dressed in ill-fitting pin-striped suit & flowery tie
bought in a second-hand store,
his right hand bent in a perpetual wave,
two paper bags in his left hand. 

McFadden’s poems abound with the crippled and ill-used, but the word that shows up most often when desire or appreciation is signalled is “perfect. “   more here

Bowering on Curnoe

George Bowering on The Moustache: Memories of Greg Curnoe:

The model for this book is The Orchard, Flint, MI: Bamberger Books, 1988 by Harry Mathews. In his foreword to that short book Mathews wrote: ‘In the early seventies I had told Georges Perec about Joe Brainard’s I Remember series, in which the American writer, already distinguished as an artist, had demonstrated a new and altogether seductive approach to autobiography. My account proved somewhat inexact: my inaccuracy can be forgiven in that it led Perec to begin his own Je me souviens (published in 1978), a less intimate but no less enthralling work than Brainard’s.’ Mathews went on to say that shortly after his friend Perec’s early death he adopted the ‘I remember’ mode to write about him, not as homage but as a way of getting words down in front of him to help him face the dismay caused by Perec’s departure. The day after Greg’s funeral, sitting in Frank Davey’s house in London, Ont., before I knew what I was doing, I wrote the first entry in this ‘I Remember’ book. I needed the words there and here. It was a hard book to write, but writing this kind of book is in another sense quite easy. More than anything else, I wanted to keep it simple. I wanted to keep away from the twelve?cylinder language that made Greg shake his head. I took as my other model Greg’s very important work Drawer Full of Stuff.GEORGE BOWERING

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I remember the night before Greg Curnoe’s funeral. We were over at his house, and Angela was sitting on the couch with Sheila for about six hours. Late in the evening I noticed that they were wearing similar sweaters. High necks, thick glossy material, cable knitting in connected diamond shapes on the front. Angela’s was grey, and of course Sheila’s was orange. I said to these two blonde women, look, you’re wearing just about identical sweaters. Sheila said that just attests to Angela’s good taste in clothing. Angela said but George bought this for me last Christmas. Sheila’s daughter said Greg bought that sweater for Sheila last Christmas. We all rolled our eyes for the hundredth time.

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I remember the time Greg Curnoe brought a care package to his son Galen. Galen was going to Emily Carr art school in Vancouver, the first time he had ever lived away from home. Greg had a great big cardboard carton or maybe two. The carton contained a drum and drumsticks, many packages of Oreo cookies, and numerous other items his parents had figured Galen would need. We carried the box or boxes to Granville Street, where my car was parked. We loaded the stuff and climbed in. A thin Vancouver rain had been happening all day and into the evening, but I had the sunroof open. I started the engine and then just sat there at the curb, feeling the light rain come in. After a while Greg said George, I’m getting wet. I scolded him and gave him a lecture about the pride we west coast people have in our sunroofs. We kept our silence for a while, and then Greg said now I think that’s completely wrong. I closed the sunroof and started the drive to the east end of the city. In the general direction of London, Ont.

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I remember going to Lake Erie with Greg and Sheila. It was a hot day in late August. Sheila took Owen’s diaper off and let him run naked on the beach till a crabby Ontario woman complained from her cottage. Angela dashed into the water and came back out when she spied half a rotted grayling. Greg wore his beach outfit, a pair of long pants, shoes and socks, and a work shirt buttoned at the neck. At the front of the A. Millard George Funeral Home, on a paint?spattered easel, was the last self?portrait Greg did. He is shirtless. Below his neck he is pale, as if he had been wearing his top button done up all through the summer of 1992.

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I remember coming to Toronto to tape a debate about baseball on Daniel Richler’s television show. I flopped in the big USAmerican chain hotel downtown and turned on the television set. There was Greg at a table with several other people on Richler’s show. It was about the language used in art criticism. Greg said he wanted to hear something from the critics but he could not stand their post?French?discourse jargon. The editor of a magazine defended her magazine’s language in some talk that was impenetrable. As the programme went on Greg lapsed into baffled silence. I have always respected Greg’s favourite word about the art?making process: ‘interesting’.

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I remember Greg’s pencil, the one he used when he wrote on his paintings. He usually wore it behind his ear, and sometimes it protruded from his thick hair. When I was a kid you often saw carpenters with pencils behind their ears, but these days hardly anyone does that. I would like to, but I wear glasses. Most people I know wear glasses. The other person I remember wearing a pencil behind his ear, and sometimes sticking out from his hair, was bpNichol. Greg Curnoe and bpNichol both loved comic strips when they were kids and later, when they were adult artists and writers. They both started to be artists and writers by drawing comic strips. They both drew comics till the day they died, and they were both really funny.

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I remember Greg Curnoe’s knuckles. Whenever you posited something he felt he ought to argue with, or at least express hesitation about, he would rub his knuckles back and forth fast in his hair at the side of his head. Sometimes right above the pencil stuck behind his ear.

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I remember when Greg started making the lettered landscapes, really big ones. He got the large rubber stamps handmade by a guy who charged him five dollars each for the letters and the other things, question marks and so on. The guy made a left parenthesis and a right parenthesis. Greg paid five dollars for the ( and another five dollars for
the ) . Really stupid, Greg said. When they were in the box he couldnt tell which was which.

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I remember one night in 1967, in Greg and Sheila Curnoe’s apartment, where everything was painted in bright colours. At about two o’clock in the morning, Greg said oh, Angela, dont be so sensiteeve. Greg always said that was the USAmerican pronunciation.

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I remember one time that Greg and I drove over to Paris, Ont. I was fascinated by Paris, Ont. It was halfway to Hamilton, where David McFadden lived. I had introduced Greg to McFadden. Why not? Several other artists and writers were expressing interest in Paris, Ont. at the time. It had a neat railroad trestle, something like Lethbridge’s, but smaller. Eventually the poet Nelson Ball moved to Paris, Ont. I said whimsically that I would like to live there. It is a pretty little Ontario town. Greg wanted me to move there so we could have the Paris-London Correspondence.

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I remember installing Greg Curnoe’s notorious mural at Dorval Airport. Greg Curnoe and Bob Fones and I walked through the airport with photo I.D.s on our chests. It was Canada’s centennial year, and they were decorating Canadian airports with Canadian art. Guido Molinari in Vancouver, Brian Fisher in Montreal. They didnt put London artists in the London airport or Vancouver artists in the Vancouver airport. Expo ‘67 was on in Montreal, and we were putting up the mural in the tunnel for U.S. arrivals. While we worked, many USAmerican tourists made funny faces. The mural was all about aviation, and there was even a working propeller. There was a painting of a zeppelin with Owen Curnoe in the gondola. There was also a painting of a man who looked something like President Johnson getting his hand chopped off by a propeller. We had to use a drill to make holes in very hard Italian marble. Greg kept sending us to the hardware store for more drill bits. It was annoying work but a great painting. They made us put a screen over the propeller. Then some USAmericans complained, and the Department of Transport took the mural down. I think Greg was pissed off and pleased.

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I remember the first time I ever saw Greg Curnoe executing a watercolour. I just wrote ‘execute’ partly because I know how he would laugh and scoff and rub his nose at the word. He had just come back from Victoria, and he had a sketch-pad and a little case of watercolours with him. He showed us a watercolour painting of the old sink in his room at the Empress Hotel. It was wonderful and brightly coloured. Then he sat at the kitchen table and did a watercolour of our garage. Terrific. He liked the word ‘terrific’. I went with him down to his Vancouver dealer’s. We sat in the back room, and then a man arrived. He was a collector. He said I want that one and that one and maybe that one. Greg said hold on, I have to have something to show them back home. I don’t know, but I think that man may have got the sink and our garage.
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I remember Greg Curnoe the Canadian nationalist with a great sense of irony. That’s not irony, George, he would say, that’s just the way I see things. During the 1967 centennial celebrations, Greg entered and won the Great Centennial Cake Contest. He told me he figured no one else entered. Greg’s cake was enormous, and it had orange and blue icing. The flavour was back bacon and maple sugar. For the official presentation with politicians in Ottawa, Greg went and had a suit made. It was yellow with black buttons. He wore pointed-toe black boots. This is what the blue writing on the orange cake said: Canada, I think I love you, but I want to know for sure. Both Greg Curnoe and bpNichol quoted The Troggs.

more here

 

 

 

Remembering Curnoe

Before his tragic death in 1992, Greg Curnoe had submitted to Brick Books a manuscript based on extraordinarily detailed research into the history of 38 Weston, his address in London, Ontario. The result is a journal/collage that traces the occupancy of that one small plot of land hundreds of years back into aboriginal times when land in this country was not plotted according to the laws of geometry. Deeds/Abstracts is an intensely concentrated and particular cross-section of Canadian history, layer upon layer upon layer. Brick Books is proud to offer this exemplary work-in-progress (a 500-year diary can never be complete) assembled by a much-loved and keenly-lamented Canadian artist of the first importance. Greg Curnoe was born in London in 1936. He was a founder of the Nihilist Spasm Band, the Forest City Gallery, and Region magazine.

Front and back covers are after paintings by Greg Curnoe. The text includes 12 colour plates of photographs and Curnoe paintings.

David McFadden

The Death of Greg Curnoe

What a painting that would make
THE DEATH OF GREG CURNOE
huge epic panorama
the size of an airport billboard
the size of a Dorval mural
larger than those billboards along the
Melacón in Havana Cuba saying
Sí por Cuba
(often translated as Sigh for Cuba)
or Esta Tierra Es 100% Cubano
(even Fidel admits that’s a whopper)
large enough in other words to say
without embarrassment here is a death
worth considering worth paying attention to
here is a death to ponder deeply the drastic
end of a life to be inspired by forever 

I knew Greg Curnoe
he was a friend of mine
he was my best friend but many
felt he was their best friend
everybody who knew Greg thinks of himself
as having been Greg’s best friend
which is the way it should be
Greg was like that
he cared for me everyone knew that
when I was suicidal in seventy-nine
(and semi-suicidal in seventy-seven)
he went way out of his way to help me
and now he’s gone
I must have had a premonition
because a month before he died
I spent an afternoon in his studio
embarrassing him by telling him
how much I loved him
how great a human being he was
how magnificent an artist he was
how much I valued our friendship 

Who could ever have imagined a poem
or a painting with the title
THE DEATH OF GREG CURNOE
who could ever have imagined Greg dead
butterflies or belugas going extinct
but Greg dead never
Greg would outlive everybody he’d still
be cycling and painting
well into the twenty-first century
and then at a highly advanced age
with his work behind him
with all his best friends dead
even his grandchildren all grown up
his heart would quietly stop pumping as he
watched Bugs Bunny on TV and saying
Hey Sheila come and look at this
Geez Sheila this is really good 

I would do the painting myself
it would be large of course
of heroic dimensions
I would paint it in the Jack Chambers style
like Chambers’ view of the Macdonald-Cartier Freeway
Even though Greg Curnoe died in early November
I would paint it while listening to Holly Cole singing
I’ll be seeing you in every lovely summer’s day 

You would see the thirteen cyclists
arranged in two ranks
entering stage left across the canvas
riding along a quiet peaceful Southern Ontario
tree-lined two-lane highway
a few yellow leaves on the trees
maple leaves of course because they’re maple trees
and it’s symbolic of Greg’s love of his country 

In the distance far off the side of the road
a barn floats in a lake of early November floodwater
it really isn’t floating it’s an optical illusion
all the cyclists are looking at it they are looking
off to the side as they ride over this little bridge 

Then in the upper left hand corner where the road
crests a little hill
you see a pickup truck and the driver is also
looking off to the left at the magic floating barn
both to the left and the right of the road
the fields are flooded with water 

The driver is transfixed he’s been driving
all the way down from Barrie
it’s ten in the morning
there is a chill in the air
the sky is full of death
Greg has been at the front of the left rank
it is his turn to go to the back
he is falling back
the cyclists at the front are bracing
for a steep hill coming up
the sky is full of death
a few angels have covered their eyes with their wings 

The sky fades away into infinity
floating here and there in the sky dimly
are some of Greg Curnoe’s most famous paintings 

But if I painted the painting myself
it would be a terrible mess I can’t even draw
we couldn’t get Jack Chambers to do it because
although Jack Chambers was Greg Curnoe’s best friend
Jack Chambers has been dead since 1978 and besides
what painter would paint a painting from someone else’s mind 

Maybe we could get John B. Boyle to paint it
because John B. Boyle was also Greg’s best friend
he would be even better than Jack Chambers
because Chambers is dead Boyle is alive
he wouldn’t mind painting a painting out of
somebody else’s mind especially since
it’s probably in his mind too it’s in all our minds
although it might not have occurred to him yet
and he could paint it in the Chambers style or even
in his own style if he thought it more appropriate 

I’m walking around El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
in Havana Cuba and wishing I could remember exactly
(while examining the extensive collection of Greek vases
the Titians the self-portrait of Joshua Reynolds
the paintings showing Negroes in foolish situations)
what Greg had to say about the painters of the Revolution
many look as if they had been more inspired by Greg Curnoe
than he by them or them by anything else and I’m trying to
remember what Greg had to say about the work of 

Eduardo Abela (1889-1965)
Amelia Peláez del Casal (1896-1968
Víctor Manuel García (1897-1969)
María Pepa Lamarque (1893-?)
Mirta Cirra Herrera (1904-1986)
Jorge Arche (1905-1956)
Mariano Rodríguez Alvarez (1912-1990)
René Portocarrero (1912-1985)
Gilberto de la Nuez Iglesias (1913-?)
Servando Cabrera Moreno (1923-1981)
Angel Acosta León (1930-1964)
Manuel Mendive Hoyo (1944-?)
Gustavo Acosta Pérez (1958-?) 

In every little gallery of the museum
an elderly woman snoozes on a hard-back chair
and as I enter she gets up and keeps standing
sees my camera and without my asking
gives me carta blanca to take all the photos I want
of whatever painting I’d like to photograph 

And as I leave each little gallery
and enter the next one
the woman in the previous one sits down
and resumes her little siesta
and the one in the new one wakes up
and stands up and starts telling me
I should feel free to take pictures
all the pictures I want whatever
and she doesn’t even mind if I use a flash
though I wouldn’t dream of it 

I fall in love with the paintings of Jorge Arche
and take great pains to photograph them
because no reproductions are available
nobody knows anything about Jorge Arche
I wonder if Dulce María Loynaz the poet
who is ninety-two and lives where she always lived
in a beautiful house in the Miramar section of Havana
I wonder if she knew Jorge Arche
and maybe even was in love with him
he is so handsome in his Autorettrato (1935)
or his Mi Mujer y Yo (1939)
or his Primavero Descarso (1940)
and his paintings are so melancholy and simple
and Dulce María Loynaz is so beautiful in the
beautiful photo taken of her in 1947
her poems are so melancholy and simple
after all she knew everyone
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958
Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957)
she must have known Jorge Arche
no info on how Jorge Arche met his end
but he was even younger than Greg when he died
and maybe Dulce María Loynaz
was as bereft at the Death of Jorge Arche
as we all were at the Death of Greg Curnoe 

And so I plan to go to the Canadian Embassy
and ask them to arrange for me to meet
Dulce María Loynaz who is in her nineties
and has beautiful long hands according to the singer
Oderay Ortega Atán who went to her house and sang for her
along with other members of the Cuban National Choir
when Señora Loynaz won the Premio Cervantes in 1992
but I get sick and stay sick
until I have to return to Toronto 

And I feel as if
all the paintings Greg ever did
all the magnificent installations
all the heartbreaking watercolour sketches
all the miraculous pen and ink drawings
all the brilliant rubber-stamp canvasses
all the funny things he made both when he
was a kid and when he was all grown up
all the little rubber-stamp notebooks he made
all the photos he took
all the bicycles painted on plexiglass
so they cast a shadow like real bicycles
all the portraits of his friends
and of Sheila
Owen
Galen
Zoë
the various family dogs cats birds
the views from his studio windows
all the paintings he wanted to paint
but never got around to it 

All this huge collection of stuff
follows me around wherever I go
just outside my field of vision
I can feel it there
stretching out in all directions
away from me
I can’t see any of it
but I can sense it being there like space
surrounding the planet on which we briefly live - 

And then on the way home I remember that Greg
had been in Havana in November 1988
at the invitation of the Cuban government
with a group of poets and artists from London Ontario
including Christopher Dewdney who said Greg seemed
very awkward in the foreign environment of Cuba
(which wasn’t surprising he even seemed a little awkward
on his visits to the foreign environment of Toronto)
Greg’s wife Sheila was there too and she said Greg
filled two fat notebooks with strange observations
mostly about his feeling terribly awkward in Cuba
but somehow the notebooks got lost during the trip
Greg searched everywhere for them but they were gone 

And one day in Cuba Greg recovered from his
awkwardness and took a bicycle
up into the hills overlooking
the beaches east of Havana
Santa Maria del Mar for instance
and did some lovely watercolour sketches
of graceful palm trees by the sea
and these watercolours go very nicely
with his little watercolour sketches painted
along the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Erie
as I’m sure he must have realized
as he stood there painting in the hills
overlooking the beaches east of Havana
being careful not to get sunburned
wearing sunblock and a floppy straw hat
maybe feeling a little homesick
on November 17 1988 four years
minus three days before his death

David W. McFadden

“Stormy Weather” by Martha

The remarkable Martha Wainwright at the Hollywood Bowl

From the Globe and Mail:

Martha Wainwright is about to be interviewed for British TV, so she doesn’t waste time getting to the point. Perhaps also because she is beset by such teenage and twenty-something singer-songwriters as Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash and Lily Allen, there is a general sense of urgency about the Montreal-born musician, who turned 32 on May 8 but is just now releasing her second album, titled, with a similar concern for pressing communication, I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too.

“They’re probably less autobiographical than the songs on my first album,” she says of her sophomore set (which hits Canadian stores this week) in the bar of west London’s K West, the hotel of choice for rock ‘n’ rollers visiting town. In fact, rising psych-rockers MGMT, neighbours of Wainwright from her hometown of Brooklyn, are in the lobby. Croaky of voice, and wearing a scarf, she sips a cappuccino and rubs her nose during the interview, suffering as she is from a cold despite the unusually hot weather.

“The songs are certainly personal,” she continues, “but they’re a little less navel-gazing than [2005's self-titled debut]. That first set I wrote between the ages of 18 and 24, but things change. There are songs here where I’m looking outside of myself at larger subject matter, whether it’s war or death or suicide” – The George Song, for one, is about a friend who took his life – “but I always try to make my point by illustrating it through personal experience. The difference is, I’ve pulled my head out of my ass a bit. There are far more things to write about than my own personal problems.”   more here

Cruel & Unusual in the US

Lilian Segura at Alternet takes on “America’s Cruel and Unusual Culture”:

“We just executed a man with the IQ of an 11-year-old child,” Virginia defense attorney Timothy M. Richardson announced to reporters after the death of his client at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Va. At 10 p.m. on May 27, state executioners killed 31-year old Kevin Green, who confessed to the murder of a convenience store owner during a robbery in 1998. Green was sent to death row and kept there for 10 years, despite having an IQ of 65, which qualified him as mentally retarded.

Many Americans assume that executing mentally disabled prisoners is a thing of the past. In a landmark ruling involving another Virginia prisoner, Daryl Renard Atkins, in 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that executing the mentally retarded was tantamount to “cruel and unusual punishment.” “It is fair to say that a national consensus has developed against it,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in Atkins v. Virginia, citing the growing number of states that had outlawed it.   more here

To be fair, I’ve not read this judgment.  But the comment excerpted from Justice John Paul Stevens’ judgment is cause for concern, even if just because it is what the writer has focussed upon.   The notion that the law is determined according to national consensus, even where that can truly be accurately determined, rather than according to legal principles and an understanding of justice poses a challenge to the Western idea of judical decisionmaking and is actually profoundly anti-democratic.  It is more than possible that judicial decisions fly in the face of “national consensus” in protecting the rights of vulnerable minorities.  The extent to which the public (and many Courts and justices) seem to have forgetten this is deeply disturbing.

Artful Body

At the International Museum of Women (via words of choice) :

Many contemporary women artists use their body to make a political statement. Artist Ingrid Mwangi is one of them, creating work that is innovative, visually striking and often shocking. She spent the first 15 years of her life in Kenya and has been living in Germany ever since. Through photography, performance, sound, installation and video, she’s created a “body of work” that questions both social and political conventions. Mwangi writes: My body is the only thing that I own… I react, interpret and question the clichés and stereotypes with which I am faced… I use art to awaken consciences.

Body Photographs

Mwangi’s 2001 photo series, “Static Drift” is, literally, body art. Her stomach is her medium. In each photo, Mwangi covered her skin with a stencil, and sat in the sun to let the exposed parts tan.

In the first photo, a pale map of Africa appears onto her tan stomach, with the English words “Bright Dark Continent.” In the second photo, it is the map that is dark, and the surrounding skin, pale. Within the outline of Germany we read the English words: “Burn Out Country.”

Through this series, Mwangi communicates the complexities of being a bi-racial woman in exile. When living in Africa, she says, she is seen as white; but in Germany, she is black.

In her book Your Own Soul, Mwangi’s work is summarized this way:

Ingrid Mwangi experiments with her own body, likening it to an open book upon which her own national and racial lineage is both written and read. … National titles and geographic borders are displaced from their habitual contexts, causing one to contemplate what nationalism, skin color, and ethnic identity mean when physically inscribed on a body-particularly a female body. Within the dichotomy of Mwangi’s personal biography the historical relationship between Germany and Africa, colonizer and colonized, oppressor and the oppressed, is also powerfully evoked.