Wyoming is Still Haunted

Late in 2006 I spent six weeks in residence at the Ucross Foundation in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. I was supposed to be working on a collection of short stories set mostly in rural Nova Scotia, but in no time Wyoming's big sky and high plains were demanding most of my writing attention. It didn't help that the deeply funny Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves, was in the studio down the hall from mine. Every few days we'd go for a walk, which sounds harmless enough, but all of our walks turned into epic adventures. Whenever something happened to us out there in the wild Karen would say: Man, I can't wait to read about this tomorrow on your blog! I've never had such a dedicated audience before.

Now, finally, at long last, the Amazing But True Real Life Wild West Adventures of J. R. Carpenter and Karen Russell have been published for all the world to read. Published somewhere other than on my blog, that is. Carte Blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers' Federation, has included a condensed version of our adventures in their latest issue: Wyoming is Haunted.


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birthday flowers

Half the year has whizzed by already. I've never been so busy in all my life. For a while there I was officially doing a few too many big things at once. Now I'm only doing one big thing at once. What a relief! Well, relatively speaking. My summer writing schedule is insane. I handed in a manuscript draft on July 15th. The editor’s comments are due back July 21st. That leaves six days in between for dental procedures, doctor’s appointments, grant applications and various other overdue paperwork, banking, random socializing and oh I don’t know maybe a bit of summer vacation.

Our friend Adriana has been visiting Montreal from Mexico for four months now and we have barely seen her. She has to leave soon. We made plans to get together. We would have loved to have taken her out of the city to see a bit of countryside but alas we had no time or money or car. But surely there was something somewhere in the city that she hadn't done yet? She said what she really wanted to do was to go see Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, but she thought I'd probably done that a hundred times already. Nope, I'd never done that in all the 18 years I've lived in Montreal!



Pre-excursion research indicated that Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12th 1895. I was not surprised at all to hear that he was kicked out of Harvard twice. We summer birthday folks have a hard time with conventional thinking. Adriana and I went to see the geodesic dome he built for Epxo 67 on July 17th 2008, 113 years and five days after his birthday. My birthday is July 18th. Adriana is leaving town on July 22nd. It all worked out very well, mathematically speaking.

I've seen the dome from a distance of course, but never up close and personal. We got so inside the thing as to be able to see how the joints are made. Now we know how to make a geodesic dome of our own. Why I waited 18 years to do this I don’t know. Not only is Bucky's dome amazing, but it's also on an island. This means that when you go see it you are magically transported to another world. Parc Jean-Drapeau is quiet and cool. A secret garden, a real marvel, replete with waterfalls and lily ponds traversed with curved footbridges a la Monet and everything. I took dozens of pictures. If Monet had had a digital camera everything would have turned out differently.



Adriana was a marvellous companion. We picnicked under the dome and took whichever footbridges came our way and spent ages peering into the murky shallows of one lily pond after another, admiring the fish and ferns and spiders and red winged blackbirds each with equal wonder. There’s a gigantic Alexander Calder sculpture in Parc Jean-Drapeau. Who knew? There are tree-lined paths along the river that – in the hot and humid haze of summer – look like works of the impressionist pointillist painter Seurat.

It’s great to get out of the city. Even for a few hours. From across the mighty Saint Laurence River Montreal looks far far away. For the price of a metro ticket you can hear the river lapping on the shore and hear the birds in the trees and feel free as one of them. And then, for the price of another metro ticket you can scoot back into town again and go to an art opening. We went to see Reverse Engineering - a first ever exhibition of works on paper by installation and intermedia artist, jake moore. Our Buckminster Fuller research perfectly prepared us for jake’s work.

Tree branches have been central objects in her practice for several years where they stand in for antennae and antlers representing both communication devices of the natural world and a metaphor for a kind of hierarchical learning strategy, “arboreal” referred to negatively by Deleuze and Guattari. Here, the same branches used in earlier installations have been measured, mapped and charted using the tools available in Hexagram Concordia’s rapid prototyping lab. In a somewhat perverse twist, the tools were not used to develop a new 3 dimensional iteration as they are intended but instead the wireframe models have been printed as the final works. They are indexical measures, or a cartography of the skin of these trees. Quite imperfect, as it is impossible to measure every surface of the tree - Shockingly complex, as the delicate linear quality of trees is revealed as a fractal and crystalline surface. They are abstractions made with rational means. jake moore

Even if you don’t have time to go see the geodesic dome first, check out jake more, Reverse Engineering at the fofa gallery at Concordia: http://fofagallery.concordia.ca/

I slept late the next morning, after all that fresh air. I woke up and thought I heard the doorbell downstairs ringing. Then a few minutes later I heard our doorbell, and figured out that the first doorbell had actually been our doorbell only I was asleep and just dreaming that I was a wake. It was Adrian at the door, bringing me birthday flowers. One was shaped exactly like a geodesic dome.



I usually agonize over what to do for my birthday for months in advance and then no matter what I plan it never works out because everyone is always out of town. This year I thought I had that problem solved. Some friends from New York were going to come up and visit us for my birthday but then their travel plans got high jacked by their work schedules. They’re still coming, but not till next weekend. This weekend I had no plans. A few evolved organically. Basically, friends came over for drinks. The 2boys were in town for my birthday for the first time ever! jake moore arrived in a polka dot dress bringing me yet more flowers and an artist’s book as a present. Alexis O’Hara also arrived in a polka dot dress and brought me an art book present. I attribute this coincidence to the full moon, the biggest polka dot of them all.



I’ve known jake moore for at least fifteen years now and have only just discovered that she knows the names of all the flowers. How delightful. How very clever. One of the flowers she brought for my birthday now arches elegantly over a statuette of Michelangelo's David perched on a stack of books on the shelf above my desk. It truly is a gift to have something so lovely to look at. Even after these flowers fade I'll have their after-image. Which will come in handy. Any day now the latest manuscript revisions will make their way back to me. I’ll spend the rest of the summer sitting right here staring at this spot.
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in absentia launch party under the Van Horne Viaduct

When Dare-Dare first accepted in absentia for their 2008 season, I was hoping it would launch sometime very late in the season. I had already committed to launching Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams in the spring and Words the Dog Knows in the fall so already 2008 was looking like a crazy year. But, as fate would have it, just as Dare-Dare was sending out notification that they’d accepted my project on gentrification in the Mile End, they received notification of their own eviction from the parc sans nom that has been their home in Mile End for the past few years. They had to be out by July 1st so it made sense to launch my project at the end of June as a farewell to the neighbourhood. When Dare-Dare proposed launching “in absentia” on June 24th, Saint-Jean Baptiste Day, I thought: What the hell – the national holiday thing will distract everyone if the work isn’t quite done.

Stéphane came home from work on Saturday and said: Hey, there are posters with your name on them all over the neighbourhood. Posters, I said. What a good idea. I had proofed a draft of a poster, but it hadn’t quite occurred to me that someone would then post the posters and that people would see them. Dare-Dare has been great to work with. By tacit mutual agreement, we don’t pester each other with details. They do their part and I do my part and somehow it all gets done. Stéphane said: Your event is being billed as the neighbourhood Saint-Jean Baptiste Day party. That’s a big deal, he assured me. One poster was in the exact location of one of the stories in absentia. Many dear friends of mine have lived in the building directly across the street over the years, and all have been evicted now.



Monday afternoon I took the long metro ride east to Pix IV for an interview on CIBL’s 4á6 show. CIBL is also a big deal, according to Stéphane – the last word in community radio in this town. Not only had I never heard of it, somehow I’d managed to live in Montréal for nearly 18 years without ever doing a live radio interview in French. How embarrassing. How terrifying. How did it go? Well, fine I think… but then how would I know? It was fun, at least. And there was a Village des Valeurs next door. After the interview went shopping for an outfit to wear to the launch party and with thrilled to find this four-dollar skirt.



Tuesday’s forecast called for 40% chance of showers. There were showers for 40% of the day. As I was leaving the apartment for tech set up at 2PM I said: It had better rain now and get it over with. It started to rain within seconds. After about twenty minutes it was over with and we had clear skies for the rest of the night.



Arriving at the sans nom the first thing I noticed was that a porto-pottie had been set up next to the Dare-Dare trailer. I was glad that they’d thought of it, I certainly hadn’t. I’ve never had a launch event large enough to require the procurement of a porto-pottie before. This career high was mediated somewhat by the realization that in absentia would be displayed throughout the launch event on two antique iMac computers. “They’re are already in the museum of 20th century design,” Dare-Dare director Jean-Pierre assured me as we set them up on a picnic table outside the Dare-Dare trailer. We had to run network cables out to them, because they were built before wireless networks existed. But the piece ran amazingly well on them, and really, what better computers to withstand nearly 12 hours outdoors in sun, wind, blowing grit and hundreds of beery users?



Hundreds did indeed show up. They came in waves, so at first I didn’t notice how the scale of the thing kept changing. I just drifted from one conversation to the next. The NT2 polka dot crew represented and team OBORO came out in force. “in absentia” guest authors Daniel Canty and Alexis O’Hara were present as were many other dear friends. Over all I only knew a fraction of the people there. The crowd was mixed: kids, dogs, punks, artists, friends, locals and a few friendly local mentally insane folks. I took their presence as a huge complement. If the local mentally insane know that your party is THE Saint-Jean Baptiste Day party to be at you have really made it in this town. Many people were unaware of what the party was for or about other than that it was about having a party, which was certainly one of the things this party was about. Other people were acutely aware of what the work that prompted the party was all about. Stories of evictions from Mile End abounded. Someone on the Dare-Dare selection committee told me that Dare-Dare hadn’t yet been evicted from the parc sans nom when they accepted “in absentia” but he and a number of the other Dare-Dare members had already been forced to move. One guy came up and told me he’d been at home packing when he’d heard about the project and the party on the radio and decided to come check it out. Wow.



The police came three times on account of noise complaints, which totally eclipsed the on-site porto-potties as my new career high. The bicycle cops have the shapeliest legs. The programming director of Dare-Dare gave "in absentia" postcards and I merrily introduced myself to each and every officer as "the artist" which confused the heck out of them. It’s pretty hard to argue with a Saint-Jean block party, especially considering it would be Dare-Dare’s last party every in the parc sans nom. I mean, what were the police going to do, evict us? Everybody remained peaceful, the police left us in peace and people went on dancing until 2AM.



The official cocktail of the evening was the mojito, which was also the official cocktail of my wedding. This was pure coincidence as I had so little to do with the party planning I didn’t even know there would be an official cocktail. All the bartenders were volunteers, as were all the dj's: Julie d, Tommy T, Rustic, Backdoor, Dirty Boots, papa dans maman, catherine lovecity, alakranx, cristal 45 et FSK1138 & jason j gillingham. FSK1138 & jason j gillingham did some kind of crazy live set using sounds extracted from the blue and red values of photo data taken from images of in absentia. The sound data was extracted using 'BeepMap' a flstudio image synth. A few days later FSK1138 dropped off a CD of these sounds in my mailbox. A few days later FSK1138 popped a CD of these sounds in my mailbox. Thank you guys, so much.

I’m blown away by the generosity of all these volunteers and mightily impressed by the hard work and dedication of the Dare-Dare community. All night the programming director of Dare-Dare worked crowd control with a super grounded zen like calm, negotiating with the police and the locals and the drunks and the crazies and me the artist and picking up empties and taking photos and restocking the bar with beer. At some point I said to someone, “Man, can you imagine being the guy in charge of all this?”



At some other point in the evening I was sitting with a group of friends watching the masses dancing, casting wild elongated shadows on the underside of the Van Horne Viaduct when it hit me that there were more people at this party than there had been in my entire elementary school. I tried to explain how overwhelming this was. Someone said: “What did you go to a Montessori school or something?” No, I just grew up in a place where there were that few people! When I was a kind in rural Nova Scotia most folks scoffed when I said I was going off the big city to study fine arts in university. When I started making art on the Internet most folks scoffed and said: “The Internet’s just a fad, it will never catch on.” So I found it beautiful that a web-based fiction project could bring so many real people together in a physical space.



At some very late point in the evening I was standing on the steps of the Dare-Dare trailer taking night photos each on more surreal than then next yet not quite able to capture the scene when artistic director Jean-Pierre passed by and asked me if I was enjoying my party. My party? “It’s bigger than all of us,” I said. One of the stated aims of in absentia is so “haunt” the neighbourhood with the stories of its former tenants (fictional or otherwise) who have been forced out by gentrification. If my night photos are any indication than yes, I think my plan is working.



in absentia is now online: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia. I will continue to add new stories over the course of the summer until November 2008. It will take at least that long for all of the ramifications of this project to sink in. If you have stories of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End feel free to add them as comments to this post or summit them via the comment box within the piece.
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