a few reviews

Oh webstats. You’re so informative! Thanks for letting me know that a quite possibly Australian fellow named Bill Bly wrote a lovely blog post about The Cape, which he discovered in the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. From The Cape he followed links to Entre Ville, which he describes so vivdly in his post that if I didn’t live here I’d move. Thanks Mr. Bly. http://infomonger.com/bbly/blog/2007/05/between-city.html

Webstats also informs me that CIAC’s Electronic Magazine #27/2007 is dedicated to Net Art: heir, aujourd’hui, demain and that it includes a well-written review by Patrick Ellis of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. He mentions The Cape and Entre Ville. Thanks Mr. Ellis. http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/en/compterendu.htm

There are links to other reviews of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1 on the Electronic Literature Organization web site, including an interesting one by Edward Picot in the Hyperliterature Exchange. Also of note, N. Katherine Hayles’s book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007) will include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. The first chapter, Electronic Literature: What Is It? is also now available on the Electronic Literature Organization’s website. Thanks ELO.


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just when you think you know a place

Just when we thought summer would never come, we got slammed with a mini May heat wave. Over thirty degrees out, smog, and a holiday long weekend. All the windows open and everyone outside in the streets, in the lanes, in their yards, on their decks and back balconies, smoking, yakking, playing music, building things with power tools and generally getting on my nerves. I, for one, couldn’t wait for the neighbours to get back to work.

Just when the workweek rolled around again, we got slammed with a transit strike. On the first day of which, I had to attend a meeting downtown. Which never happens any more. I have become far too used to keeping my schedule. The one day that I really have to be somewhere I don’t want to be I wind up having to walk and hour and twenty minutes to get there. In the heat, and the wind – my hair blowing into my lip-gloss, and then strafing glasses with sticky pink streaks. I arrived at the meeting sweaty, parched and half blind, but only four minutes late.

Just when all my meetings were done for the week, and I thought there was nothing more in store to remind me of stress and such, we went to the last OBORO vernissage of the season and half a dozen friends from my old life in the corporate world were there. When worlds collide: Concordia meets OBORO meets Discreet. It was a lot to take in at once. Plus, the show was packed. And me, so bad with names!

In the main space, Cynthia Girard's The Sect of the Flying Mouse was especially popular with the under four-foot tall crowd. A guy in a golden mask played live piano. At one of the loudest most frenetic moments in the evening, Girard stood on a stool silenced the crowd and asked for four minutes to read from her most recent collection of poems: The Sect of the Flying Mouse. This was a gutsy move, especially as she then proceeded to read in English – with a very French accent, with very Egyptian eyeliner – a story about a beetle that had crawled inside her head on a branch that she had inserted in a hole that she had drilled inside her skull. Just when I thought it couldn’t get darker it got so funny that I fell in love with it. All in all a courageous girl, our Cynthia Girard.

PDF Press Release: Cynthia Girard, The Sect of the Flying Mouse

A park bench had been installed in the small room, the perfect theatre seat for viewing Josephine Mackay’s beautiful film 100 Views of Mount Royal. The title is an allusion to 100 Views of Mount Fuji, the famous series of prints by renowned 19th century Japanese artist Hokusai. In her poetic depiction of Montreal's Mount Royal through the seasons of the year Mackay included – completely unwittingly – scenes from the front covers of every OBORO brochure ever printed. One emerges from 100 Views of Mount Royal and views the Mont Royal through OBORO’s office window. The piece and the place and the space – a perfect match all around.

PDF Press Release: Josephine Mackay, 100 Views of Mount Royal

Just when I thought I spend the rest of my life bumbling around the gallery saying hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye, hello and goodbye to the same thirty people or so – Stéphane whisked us out of there and we were suddenly out on the street in the very late afternoon sun. And just when I thought I’d walked to and from OBORO in every which way possible over these past eleven years, we found a new route home. We walked on a street one block long that neither of us had ever walked on before and – just as our mini May heat wave is coming to a close – we stumbled upon this scene right out of Cuba, or someplace hot, where they paint everything bright colours.


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life is a cabaret my friends

Way back in February I was sitting in an East Village bar with a fiction writer and an ex-Marine. Now he’s a history major. What did you do for New Year’s Eve, they asked. Went to a party some cabaret friends, I said. You have cabaret friends? Yeah. They perform at our friendly neighbourhood cabaret. We have cabaret friends too, don’t we honey? The ex-Marine is a regular comedian. Yes, that’s right, of course we do, the fiction writer picked up the thread. You know, those cabaret friends we hired to be our cabaret friends so we could say we have cabaret friends. Sure, we hang out at the cabaret all the time.

Our friendly neighbourhood cabaret is, of course, Kiss My Cabaret, hosted by Danette MacKay. And it’s on tonight!

On the bill, the crème de la crème of Montréal performers: Alexis O’Hara, Skidmore, Désirée D’Amour, Madame et Matante, Church of Harvey Christ – and very special SURPRISE out-of-town guests! By request, Gigi et Pipi will close the show with their stirring Battle Hymn – lollipops all around!

Speaking of Gigi et Pipi, the other night we dined with half the afore mentioned cabaret crème de la crème and then swooped downtown descending en masse upon the École Bourget for the opening of La Biennale de Montréal. We went to see Gigi and Pipi, and wound up running into everyone else we’d ever known in our lives along the way. We wove through the crowd on the lawn, squeezed up the front steps, and were pleased for once to have to pass the absurd bullet-proof security cubicle. Inside, Carol Pope slouched - all skinny, shiny-baddged and sinister in navy. Performing the squinty eyes of suspicious security guard boredom, she stared all the art hounds down.

Working our way through a social obstacle course of countless quick waves, big hugs, awkward exits, emotional reunions, forgotten names and about-time introductions we found and lost each other repeatedly in the hot and sweaty hallways, eventually all making our way to the hidden wonders of the easy-to-miss but not-to-be-missed tiny closed-door closet space allotted to, taken over and utterly transformed by our 2byoys, Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard, Gigi L'Amour and Pipi Douleur. We waited – the most fun I’ve ever had on a line up - with old and new and long-lost out-of-town friends, co-workers, colleagues and random art-world hangers-on and heavy-hitters. Of the later, I’d be hard pressed to say which was which. We passed the time drinking beer, taking photos of our selves and text messaging each other like a bunch of twelve year olds. And just when we were on the verge of becoming unruly, Pipi Douleur ushered into Phobophilia.

It’s a closet, a cloakroom. It’s a theatre, it’s a play, a spectacle, and a stage; it’s a dressing room, a powder room, a vanity, a secret. It’s a cramped space behind-the-scenes to be alone in when you’ve got your guard-down after-the-show. Gigi et Pipi invite us into the part of the performance we’re not supposed to see. We enter, all drab in our sweat and street clothes, and Gigi L’Amour starts in on us. With chatter and wink, flatter and suggestion, Gigi starts convincing us that we’re somewhere else, a place where disbelief is suspended, where the mundane is upended, where her eyelashes are real. Only then are we invited to climb up into the theatre in the rear. We perch on steep step seats – a jumbled audience of heads, legs and breath. We are a miniature audience; we are gigantic. And in an instant we are lost. Wandered off from the cramped attic theatre crawl space, into the fantasies of film-noir. We are specks on snowy landscapes; we chase our own ghosts, we leap and plié into the spotlight – alone at last – on our very own silver-screen-in-a-suitcase stage.



La Biennale de Montréal: http://www.ciac.ca/

Kiss My Cabaret: http://kissmycabaret.com
La Sala Rossa, 4848 boul. St. Laurent, tonight at 8PM
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empty in mind

The Greyhound from Montreal to Boston passes through Montpellier. On the way down to MiT5 I was tempted to get off the bus there. I’d ditch the conference; hitch an after-work ride with a friend up to the plains. And just hide out. That’s how tired I was.

Who needs conferences? Well, I do. I work at home. And online. A virtual vacuum. Have to check in once and a while, meet actual people. I’m still in touch with at least four people met at MiT4. Conferences remind me of why I’m not an academic. And that it’s okay that I’m not. Because I know where they hang out.

And besides, I’d worked so hard on my paper. Oh pride. I quite liked Entre Ville: this city between us, and was looking forward to presenting it.

The knowledge that the Greyhound from Boston to Montreal also passes through Montpellier is what got me through hectic April. A carrot / stick type situation. What a cruel month. Early on I caught the worst-head-cold-ever and never quite shook it. And then there was all that snow. I know snow is to be expected in Montreal in mid-April, but this storm was demoralizing all the same.



There were endless other April deadlines to meet even before Entre Ville: this city between us, took over all waking sleeping and dog walking hours. Somewhere in there, there was also a roadtrip, someone’s birthday, an OBORO vernnisage and two days of Concordia MFA reviews. Not necessarily in that order. Through all of that April, though MiT5’s jam packed schedule, through an aggressive mist, and the siren-nights of Roxbury, through yet another interminable stopover in White River Junction, not to mention the generalized aggravation of coach travel itself, the bus-stops-in-Montpellier carrot dangled before me.

Montpellier’s dilapidated bus depot was a sight for sore eyes. As was my friend, waiting there in the drizzle to whisk me out of town along route 2 up into the Vermont Piedmont, up into the mud. Still in the throes of spring frost heaves, the deeply rutted and brown-puddled dirt roads slowed us to a crawl. Sap lines ran along side, pacing us.

The first time I came up here was around this time of year, I said. Maybe a little earlier. It was raining, the sap lines were running and the road looked like this. This is staying inside weather, I said as we walked from the car to the house. Wet, wind, cold and mud. I went to bed early, slept like a whole pile of logs, woke up bright and late with sun streaming in my window, no sign of the head cold I’d been fighting all through MiT5, all through April. Not a cloud in the sky and clear skies ever since.

I’m an easily preoccupied person. I forget names, faces and dates, and generally fail to know what’s going on around town. I work on disparate projects concurrently and generally have lots on my mind. Sometimes I have empty on my mind. The high plain, the close sky, days on end to listen to the wind, to watch the grass green, to squint into distance, a pale view of the hills. The opposite of Entre Ville.


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if the clog fits, put it on hold

It took all day to leave Boston. And that was with help. That was with Lana driving me around and around. I had to buy shoes, see. Couldn’t leave town with out them. Same shoes as she had. Had to have them the minute I saw them. They were the first things I noticed the minute I walked in the door. Clogs. Never thought I’d wind up wanting a pair of clogs bad enough to spend two days shopping for them, two days not including the advanced research we did online.

Pretty much the minute MiT5 was over, Lana picked me up in her gold pick up truck and we set out in search of clogs. The first store had lots of selection. I fell in love with a fuchsia pair, but didn’t try them because Lana insisted we had to go to this other store first, to be fitted: They’re the clog experts over there. Back to the gold pick up. Selection in the second store was limited. No fuchsia, for example. But now we knew what size I was. 39 narrow. All they had in that was Cordoba, which is clog lingo for dark brown. I couldn’t commit. That’s fine, Lana said. Let’s go back to the first place.

Along the way back it started to rain and I started rethinking the Cordoba. By the time we got there, and discovered there was no fuchsia in 39 narrow, plain old black seemed abhorrent to me. Cordoba or bust. But it was too late. Parking is easier on Sunday. But stores close early.

We’ll go tomorrow, on the way to the bus, Lana said. Sorry about all this, I said. You buy shoes exactly the way I buy shoes, Lana said. So I can’t be mad. If you had fallen in love with the first pair you tried on I probably would have talked you out of them.

We set out again the next day. Back to the clog experts, back to the Cordoba. A different person was working. We said: We’d like to see the Cordoba in 39 narrow. He said: You’re in luck, we have a pair. We didn’t say: We know. I tried them on again, just for kicks, and right away I said: I’ll take them! He said: Wow! You’re quick! We laughed. He had no idea.

On the way to South Station Lana put in a call to First Place: Do you have the Marguerite in a 39 in red? You do? Oh great! Can you put them on hold for me?
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MiT5 Endnotes

MiT5 whizzed by in a drizzly blur. As one panellist noted: The weather in New England is a lot like the weather in Old England. Water logged lab rats, we scurried through MIT’s campus maze, almost but not quite able to get where we were going without going outside. The conference theme: “creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age.” There was less talk of ownership than of appropriation. Sadly no amount of creativity or collaboration could rid the digital age of rain.



Speaking of ownership, last month I lost my travel umbrella. Last week I replaced it with a used and improved one, liberated from the Lost and Found of the bar where a friend works. This semi-ill-gotten umbrella dripping at my feet, I squirmed uneasily through more than one academic paper cavalierly condoning remix culture’s five-fingered appropriation of other people’s images texts structures and ideas. The Colbert report got high marks for opening itself up to user editing. Nice advertising for Colbert. Hip-hop was idealized for it’s sampling and remixing of culture. Great for the producers, great for the moguls, but not so hot if you’re an up and comer being told what to sample so it sells, or if you’re an indi-artist getting your beats ripped, or if you’re a consumer tired of the radio play list mix. MiT5 did not seem to be critical of what was being sampled. No place to say: no more songs about guns, bitches and hos.

Me: What nobody’s talking about here is money. Academic: Oh, there are plenty of other environments to talk about money in. Give me a break. Though this view appeared to be the prevalent one, I don’t buy it (no pun intended). I worked in the software industry for so long, my critique is tinged with scepticism. After sifting through executive staff rhetoric, world wide sales projection optimism and the codified concerns of corporate lawyers, the stated themes of MiT5 sounded naïve at times, trite even, when divorced from any economic consideration.

There are economics at play in who gets to attend a conference. Not every panellist was an academic and not every academic was staying in a hotel paid for by his university. One professor told me that as an educator he felt he had to stay to hear that evening’s plenary, but as a human being he couldn’t bear it, and besides, he had a three-hour drive home. Another didn’t have his laptop with him because he was staying at a youth hostel. Instead he spent his evenings reading poetry and walking the streets of Cambridge. Nice. Yet another professor was staying in Allston. Actually, he was a research fellow. But still. He had my respect. Allston, that’s keeping it real.

I remain impressed by and grateful to MIT for keeping the Media in Transition conference series free of charge and open to an incredibly broad spectrum of presenters. That can’t be easy. I was especially pleased to see how many more artists presented at MiT5 than at MiT4. I wish I’d made it to more presentations. 25 people speak at once. Far too often there are four people to a panel. If even one paper runs long – the height of unprofessional rudeness, but sadly the norm – the rest get squeezed, leaving no time for discussion.

Like most of the artists I spoke to, the only way I could afford to attend this conference was by taking the Greyhound down and staying with a friend. At the end of each day, the #1 Bus shuttled me from the pillars and porticos of MIT to cracked-out Roxbury, where my friend Lana lives in a loft next door to a boarded up drug store. She says people used to smoke crack underneath the DRUGS sign, until someone stole the sign. They still smoke crack there but now it’s less ironic.



One morning, a woman with drug-rotten teeth tried to get me to take her kids on the bus for her, to save her the fare. Just picture me and two crack babies busting in on some gamer theory session broadcast live on Second Life.

Sometimes real life, Second Life and conference life just don’t synch up. I missed some early sessions because my hostess doesn’t sleep. One night we stayed up late rewriting all her artist’s statements – not exactly collaboration, but after all the conference talk about authorship and overwiting, I felt it my duty as a guest to earn my keep by translating her garbled visual art speak into actual English. Another night we stayed up late making a movie. She tried to hold the camera steady, tried not to laugh, while I told a long story about how I happened to have two dramatically different maps in my notebook, drawn by two dramatically different girls, both giving directions to a notorious party spot in Banff known as The House of Sin.





The notebook as interface, the non-linear story as tangent engine. Just like Entre Ville, we realized in the morning. http://luckysoap.com/entreville

I like conferences, despite their occasionally glaring disconnection from real life. And I like real life, despite its occasionally disheartening disconnection from how life ought to work in theory. I especially like the occasional blurring of the two. Most of the breakout sessions were held in classrooms. Artists and academics projected web and PowerPoint presentations onto white screens bracketed by black blackboards covered with mathematical equations surely few if any of us could understand. Conference attendees mingled with students in the hall. I got a student discount on lunch one day!

In the Bartos Media Lab audience members watched the conference unfolding in real-time on stage. Some doubled up on the real by following along on their laptops the plenary sessions broadcast live on Second Life. The sound of typing surged whenever something clever was said. Someone stepped up to the mike to comment on our cultural condition of constant divided attention. A flurry of typing followed. A rainfall of fingers keyboard tapping, I wrote in my notebook.

It rained all weekend, typing and the wet stuff. Thanks MIT, for mixing up art and academics, theory and practice, for offering up so much information to such a broad audience in such a short period of time. A lot to soak up. And only time for tip of the iceburg comments here. I’ll be sorting though my notes for a long time.
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