The Adventures of Isaac and Auntie V

The following is a third-hand account of some of the adventures Isaac the Wonder Dog had during his week with Auntie V. Much of this narrative was compiled from the WD’s own notes. Note that throughout this document, we are referred to as m+d. It took us a while to figure out, but that means mom and dad. Purely for comparison purposes we provide you here with a before photo of Auntie V and Isaac the Wonder Dog:



First night: Isaac stands out on Auntie V’s balcony watching m+d disappear down the street. Auntie V lets him sleep in her bedroom, even though he snores. The next morning m+d take the train to Toronto.

Second night: Isaac sends m+d a text message: auntie v ruined her sandals playin ball w me in the alley – shes so cool. 8 my dinner, now im napping.

Third night: Isaac texts again: went w auntie v 2 visit Milo, taught him to play ball. Note that Milo is a boy of approximately seven.

Fourth night: Isaac almost drops dead from the heat. Auntie V almost drops dead from the heat too. But as far as m+d know, everything is fine.

Fifth night: 10:14 PM m+d get a text message from Auntie V that reads: guess who just got skunked. fuck. fuckin fuck fuck. fk. A flurry of text messaging ensues. Isaac gets a tomato juice bath but he still stinks. Auntie V gets stinking drunk and at 4AM she punches her friend Dan.

Sixth night: Auntie V texts: has pooch had rabies shot? got it in the mouth – still bugging him a bit. tomato juice better not fucking count as people food. m+d had sternly warned Auntie V against giving people food to the WD, but she went ahead and wash Isaac’s mouth out with tomato juice anyway. And it did the trick! m+d text: u r our hero.

Seventh night: m+d text: has skunk stench abated? are you and Isaac still fiends? Auntie V replies: we r much better. back to scaring hassidic kids in the alley. m+d: u 2 r bonded 4 life now! auntie v: 4 life 2 long. till wed ok.

On Wednesday m+d are reunited with Isaac the Wonder Dog. By then Auntie V’s apartment doesn’t smell like skunk at all, though m+d had tacitly agreed that even if it did they would swear it didn’t. Auntie V would like to interject at this point to say: don't forget the part about m+d not taking the skunks too seriously until... It’s true. She warned us that there were skunks in her hood. And we didn’t take her seriously at all.

As the after photo clearly indicates, Isaac and Auntie V came out of the skunk stench scandal smelling like roses and yes, they’re still friends.


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The NorMill

Whenever I’m in Toronto I try to get out to visit my dear friend Norman T. White, who lives a two-and-a-half hour drive northwest of the city (in summer… much further away in winter) in a converted grain mill known as the NorMill. The first time heard about The Mill was the first time I met Norman, in Halifax in 2000. We were in a show together at the Dalhousie Art Gallery – Engaging the Virtual, curated by Doug Porter – along with Doug back, Juan Geuer, Liwan, Jacques Perron, Catherine Richards, Bob Rogers and David Rokeby.

Here is a brief biography of Norman T. White: Norman is an artist. He builds robots, and he’s been at it for a long time. He had a chemistry set as a kid, that sort of thing. He built his first major electronic work, First Tighten Up on the Drums (1967-68) for a show called Some More Beginnings (Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY – 1969). And then – I’m skipping lots of stuff here – in 1978 he started teaching at the Ontario College of Art & Design. His courses in Digital Electronics, Computer Programming, and Mechanics for Real-Time Sculpture have had a massive impact on two or three generations of electronic artists; he and his students have shaped the landscape of new Media art in Canada today. Norman retired from OCAD in 2003. He still teaches similar courses at Ryerson and he still builds robots at The Mill.



The first time I visited The Mill it was deep winter. It’s massive brick and stone building, pretty damn hard to heat. But the kitchen’s warm. And Norman’s one of my favourite people in the world to stay up late sitting at the kitchen table with, talking bottom-up thinking, telling tall tales, trading travel stories and pondering behaviours, human or otherwise. In Norman’s kitchen, hanging high up on one three-foot-thick brick wall is a neon sign, that I’ve never seen lit, that says: WE FIX TOASTERS. On Norman’s web site he explains:

I don't really fix toasters, although I'd be proud if I could. Almost nobody fixes toasters. This is because a modern toaster is nearly impossible to fix, held together with little bendy tabs, which break off if you bend them more than twice. The toaster manufacturer naturally expects that you do the Right Thing -- toss that dysfunctional item in the dump and buy a new one! All in all, the working toaster is a perfect symbol for modern utility in general... glamorous and efficient! Nevertheless, staring at this glamorous efficient high-resolution computer screen for hours at a time, you and I are both wrecking our eyes, not to mention our social lives. But, hey, I don't mind... do you?

The first time Norman came and stayed with us in Montreal I was in the throes of a massive head cold and pretty pissed off about it. Barely able to carry on a conversation, I stumbled off to bed after dinner leaving Norman and Stéphane to fend for themselves. Many hours later I wandered out to use the bathroom and there they were, still at the table, deep into a conversation that I couldn’t have followed even if I didn’t have a fever – something about harmonic resonance and tonal frequencies or maybe it was harmonic frequencies and tonal resonance. Really, I have no idea.

Ever since we’ve been working to get Stéphane out to The Mill. Took us a few years, but finally we did it! We spent two days with Norm, talking our heads off about everything under the sun while sitting under the sun on the loading dock, on the dock by the river, at the kitchen table, up on the roof and all through the cavernous NorMill.



Norman’s a self-professed pack rat. The Mill’s on it’s way to becoming a museum of sorts. As it is it’s preferable to a Museum in the way a field of wild flowers is to a garden. Norm says:

Being attracted to obsolete tech, I collect computers which people have thrown out. Last time I counted, there were fifty-one vintage personal computers lying around, of various brands and working states. But that was a long time ago and I've stopped counting. Anyway, someday I hope to bring them all back to life in my NorMill Personal Computer Museum. For now I'll just keep them in a big unheated room out back.

Norman T. White, Stéphane Vermette pose with Low Life (2003).

Special thanks to Sandor, a friend and former student of Norman’s, who overcame sudden car troubles to drive us to The Mill. Once we were there he jumped in the river with his clothes on four or five times, for reason’s that escape us, and then after dinner he explained how the dictionary works, which really was very helpful. Thanks Sandor!



On the way home we detoured us through Norman’s favourite wind farm. This is old farming country. But the windmills seem to fit right in. Makes sense to me. Aside from through horses and guns, windmills and waterwheels are pretty much how the west was won. Finally! We make it back to square one. Don’t get me started on the Don Quixote theme. Let’s talk instead about reverse engineering. Yes, let’s. The next time we’re at the kitchen table at the NorMill.



Visit The NorMill online: http://www.normill.ca/
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A Magical Mystery Tour of the Coach House Press

On our last day in Toronto we finally found our way to the Coach House Press. I say finally because though it wasn’t all that hard to find once we were actually looking for it, it had been pretty hard to find when we weren’t looking and weren’t even in the neighbourhood.

A huge fan and consumer of Coach House Books, I would have been happy to just stand around bpNichol Lane looking at the Coach House they come from. Coach House founder Stan Bevington found us doing just that and invited us in. Turns out droppers-by can take a self-guided tour - Coach House publishes a Magical Mystery Tour pamphlet to this end. We consulted the hell out of that pamphlet, read fascinating facts aloud to each other such as, did you know that a sheet-fed one-colour Heidelberg offset printing press can go through six miles of paper a day, or that the bathroom at Coach House used to be a greenhouse?





We were so obviously intent on taking every step of the tour that after a while Nick Drumbolis took over from the pamphlet and then things got really interesting. The pamphlet describes Nick as “irascible.” He was lovely to us, demonstrating presses and folders, gluers and cutters with great finesse and filling in gaps in the pamphlet’s knowledge. We were somewhat dismayed to learn that after a book is printed its films are stored in a giant shelving unit known as the morgue and we developed an unhealthy fascination with the perfect bind gluer, in part because we just loved it’s name: AUTO-MINABINDA. Also, we still had Sean Dixon’s recent run-in with that machine fresh in our minds.

At the Coach House spring launch in Montréal, Dixon told a story about how he’d stopped in at the CHP and they’d offered him the opportunity I’m sure every author dreams of, to catch a copy of his own book – The Girls Who Saw Everything – coming literally hot off the presses. Well, hot off the binder. "The Girls" were already collated and all glued up when all involved except Dixon realized that they’d forgotten to put a cover in place. They were yelling NO! STOP! But the author wound up catching the coverless "Girls" by their hot glue spine. The glue is not made of horse-hooves and is heated to 300 degrees F, according to the pamphlet. Fortunately the author had heavily calloused hands, presumably from some activity other than writing, and no harm was done. We were only slightly disappointed that when Nick demo-ed the AUTO-MINABINDA for us the cover of the book in question was well in place.



Our self- and Nick-guided tour of the Coach House Press was one of the highlights of our trip to Toronto. It was almost a week ago already but we’re still trying to slip words like Heidelberg and AUTO-MINABINDA into casual conversation.
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art for pedestrians

While we were in Toronto everyone kept asking us what we were doing in Toronto, which seemed like a funny question. We quickly realized that we weren’t doing in Toronto was going to galleries. We didn’t make it to a single one. Everyone kept asking us if we’d we seen the new addition to the ROM yet. Nope, we didn’t see that either. We did see lots of art though.



On Friday we had a studio visit with Toronto-based electronic artist Sandor Ajzenstat. Sandor let us play with several of his machines, none of which we broke, and then he showed us their insides, and then he made us lunch. What a great way to see art. Galleries hardly ever serve lunch. Here’s an article about one of the works we dined with, the Convergence Machine.

Besides this studio visit, we amused ourselves in quite pedestrian ways. We walked around a lot. And took pictures of pleasing things. We made two separate trips to Little India to buy bangles, acquiring seven-dozen in total. That’s eighty-four bangles! Four-dozen we gave away. The rest were for keeps.



We bought three kinds of tea in a shop in Kensington Market with an ocean-blue ceiling adorned with dozens of globes of the world. The idea being, I guess, that tea comes from all over the world. Both the globes and the teas pleased us very much.



Maybe next time we’ll get to the galleries. Maybe next time we’ll see the new addition to the ROM. We’re certainly not opposed to the idea. Just distracted. There are so many interesting things to see along the way to art.
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secret garden

Before we left town last week we asked one of our neighbours if she would water our window-box geraniums while we were away. She said sure, and asked where we were going. Toronto, we said. For vacation? The look on her face… made her thoughts on that city quite clear. To visit friends, we explained. Montrealers love to bad-mouth Toronto and vice-versa I’m sure. But even the most consummate Montrealer will admit that there’s fun to be had in Toronto. And good shopping. And good friends.

We said good-bye to our dog and our geraniums and went to stay for a week with our dear sweet friends. Fibre artists, food artists, garden artists and all around wonderful hosts, they surrounded us with food and wine, art and opera, made us laugh and spoiled us rotten.



We spent the better part of the week in their garden. When I say better I mean better. We did lots of walking shopping visiting strolling wining dining and wondering besides, but the better part of the week was spent in lush hush listening to the cool breeze leaves and fishpond waterfall. We sipped flutes of bubbly, tasted wine after wine and each night a different late night whiskey from turned jade cups. We learned how to crack open green lychees with our teeth. We flung our olive pits into the peonies at our hosts’ behest. We dined on many delights including: cooked-on-one-side salmon, wild leeks, grilled asparagus, baby bok-choy, black mushrooms, spicy Chinese aubergine, creamy soft tofu, white fish and turnip soup, peanuts cook in star anise, rice cooked in saffron and crayfish fried in a cast-iron skillet hot hot hot. The day after the crayfish we kept finding their antenna all over the kitchen.



Every now and then the neighbour dogs erupted in informative barks interrupting this bliss; backyard traffic police patrolling passing squirrels skunks cats and racoons. Missing our own dog we tried to bond with the fishpond goldfish but they ignored us and even the indoor fish tank fish were camera shy. How is it that their tank décor is so much more glamorous than anything in our apartment?



We came home inspired. We’re going to paint at least one wall bright pink. We’re going to walk to the market every week, rain or shine. And we’re going to save our pennies for our own art-filled house and goldfish-filled garden.

Our neighbour did indeed water our window-box geraniums and our spindly front-step rosemary plant. We don’t have the heart to tell our Montreal plants about our Toronto friends' garden. As far as our houseplants know we went Toronto for the shopping, yeah, that’s right, shopping. If you happen to be walking down our street and you spot our window box feel free to wave – the geraniums love that – but please keep this secret garden story to yourself.
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before & after

After photos are easy. Something dramatic happens and of course you take a picture of it. Just like that. But before photos are a little harder to come by. They require premeditation, or at least fair warning. I don’t know how many times I’ve wished I had a photo of the street just before a major snowfall or the pasta salad just before dropping it all over the floor or my knee just before falling off my bike onto it.

Last week Stéphane and I went away on vacation. I can’t remember the last time we went anywhere alone together to a different city without our dog or our computers for a whole week. It’s a pretty complicated endeavour. The gargantuan feat of coordinating our schedules with those of our hosts, our various jobs, our dog-sitter, the train and the changing seasons made us so thoroughly organized that it actually occurred to us to take before photos of our great escape.

What we were before was tired. And, as our before photo indicates, quite blurry. When we booked our train tickets – the prerequisite three weeks in advance in order to get a good fare – we had this fantasy of sleeping our way to Toronto. Sadly, our particular comfort class car was full of screaming babies. Literally. Full of them. Screaming. One in particular. Non-fucking-stop for four hours and twenty minutes plus twenty minutes of excruciating lateness in which we got a whole a year’s worth of birth control right there. We coped by sharing iPod headphones, pretending we were twelve-year-old Japanese girls. Fortunately I’d prepared a Summer Vacation playlist for just such an eventuality.



We’ve all seen before and after photos where before looks better than after or there is no difference whatsoever or after is clearly airbrushed or a stunt double or much younger sister. Our after photo may not say “after” to anyone but us, but to us it really does. We had a wonderful vacation. Our friends spoiled us rotten. Future blog posts will explain how it is that on our train ride home we were just as tired as our there. Of course we were a completely different kind tired, a sunburnt, foot-sore, fatter and gleefully poorer, late-night talking and laughing non-stop kind of tired. At the very least our after photo indicates that we are now lighter, smiling and much more focused.



Stay tuned. Future blog posts will feature before and after photos of our dog, our dog sitter, our various hosts and before photos of the meals they made us before we devoured them (because after they weren’t there).
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS

This list was complied in advance of a series of concurrent vacations. Isaac the Wonder Dog is going to visit his Auntie V for a week. While he’s away, we, the Isaac the Wonder Dog Support Staff, are going to visit some friends in Toronto. Auntie V stated in a press release issued late last week that she intends to spoil the Wonder Dog rotten. Auntie V has never had a dog before, as far as we know, so, in addition to a nine page document detailing the WD’s top seven emergency phone numbers, his food and walking schedule, tips on how best to play ball, as well as disciplinary guidelines and various strategies for keeping one step ahead of the dog, we’ve also issued this list of Words the Dog Knows in a pre-emptive effort to preserve Auntie V’s sanity.



It should be noted that Isaac the Wonder Dog knows more words than these, but we do not wish Auntie V to think us either to be bragging or to be crazy. So let it be amended that these are the most important words the dog knows, and on a final note, “you” for the purposes of this document, refers to Auntie V.

Isaac – the dog knows his name because it’s the word he hears most often. that said, he also responds to: peaches, pookie, pumpkin, noodle, sweet pea, poodle, buddy and handsome. basically, he knows when you’re talking to him. and he loves it. feel free to make up your own pet names.

no – the most important word in the dog’s vocabulary. don’t be afraid to use it.

sit – if at first he doesn’t sit, repeat until he sits. pointing at the ground helps.

lie down or lay down – same as above, plus he’s flexible about bad grammar.

go lie down – this isn’t a punishment. it’s more of a suggestion. sometimes he thinks it’s his duty to stick around and entertain you. sometimes he just doesn’t know how tired he is. in either case, once he’s told to do so he’s very happy to go take nap.

up – this can apply to anything. especially useful for couches and stairs. or if he’s lying on something and you want him to get off it. or if he doesn’t believe it’s time to go out.

down – can also apply to anything but is less often used. he’s not a jumper, our dog.

stay – use at intersections, in the alley to get him to wait while you get the leash of him, and in the house when you’re leaving a room but coming right back cause sometimes he’ll follow you from room to room. once again, pointing helps get the point across.

okay – for when the staying is done, and, for example, it’s safe to cross the street.

it’s okay – for when he’s afraid of something, like lightening, or when he thinks you’re mad and him, especially if you were mad at him but now you’re over it.

you want to go out? you want to go for a walk? you ready? – ask him in just the right way and he’ll stick his ears out and cock his head at you. don’t ask if you don’t mean it.

where’s your ball? – useful for getting ready to leave the house. he’ll go find his ball.

not that ball. where’s you other ball? – useful for if he brings you a busted ball.

drop – indispensable in ball play. if you try and pull a ball or a stick from his mouth he thinks you’re playing the pulling game. he always wins the pulling game.

over here – for when he wants to play ball in the kitchen while you’re doing dishes or cooking but he’s pointing at the ball way too far away from you for you to kick it, or for when you’re in the alley and you want him to run around be hind you so you don’t kick the ball directly into him.

come – he loves this one. except when it’s late at night and he’s sniffing in slow-motion.

let’s go – for when you’ve really had it with the slow-motion sniffing on the late walk.

that’s enough – you have to tell him sometimes, because really he doesn’t know.

Okay, that's enough.

Good Luck Auntie V, from the Isaac the Wonder Dog Support Staff.
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a so-called street-party

this morning I had brunch with the lovely lx6 O at Local, a local café on saint-viateur street. we sat on the sidewalk and discussed, among other things, the street party that had transpired on that very street the evening before.

anybody who lives in mile end and many people who don’t know that until a few years ago saint-viateur street used to host the city’s best saint-jean baptiste party, which was shut down eventually on grounds of getting out of control. ironically, the best thing about that party was nothing ever happened at it. it was just the one day of the year that it was possible to run into every one you forgot you ever knew.

last night, only three four years behind the times, our friendly neighbourhood corporate giant ubisoft decided they’d been slumming in our hood for ten years now and it was about time to throw us a bone. I mean a party. this party was not that party, we agreed. it was fun and all, but just not the same. for one thing, it was over-run with baby strollers. thanks a lot, ubisoft, thanks a lot.

while we were brunching out on st.v st, lx6 and I waved to our passing fans. well, most of them were fans of lx6. one morning-after-looking friend noted how eerily free the morning-after street was of litter. not one aluminium beer can rattled in the wind. and let me tell you – an obscene amount of beer in cans in brown paper bags was consumed. anyone dumb enough to drink from a bottle, the cops gave them a plastic cup to decant into. yeah, one passer-by boy said, the cops were super chill. that’s what corporate sponsorship buys you, I said. chill cops and a clean street in the morning.

corporate sponsorship also buys some talent. dj socalled was was seriously impressive. apparently his god’s gonna kick my god’s ass. fine by me. cause I think we’re of the same tribe. he got us all jiving to his hip-hop klezmer vibe then called out for a big up to the corporate sponsorship, instantly creating a brilliant rift in the illusion that this party was just a regular friendly neighbourhood street party. sure it had the same kind of random social pinball effect of st.v parties of old. but it wasn’t the same. and why not? we queried the passing fans. it felt staged, someone said. too set-up. and then it hit me. ubisoft makes video games. do the math.
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