Thursday, December 27, 2012

o cadoiro*



the slippery steps to phantom home,
a block of grey sky, a concrete tub, basement-size
rinsed of sodden bits and charred queries...
falling away

the back garden inviolate 
concurs the temple steps, the dark mounting
wet and dense with winter's mulch...
last fall's fire

"between needs
breath's space"**

[*o cadoiro is the title of a book of poems by Erin MOURE, 2007... in Galician "o cadoiro " means the place where falling is made]
[**selected lines from the end of the book]
[the above two verses are mine]

Friday, December 14, 2012

midnight oil...


arrorogate along the trickety track...

surrenrender into the intrigante trunk...

forever ever deep in the hotshitoil...


Paraverbal Mutterings Paraverbal Muttering
is my first self-published book of poetics and photoimagery selected from this savage states blog...
now available for sale on blurb.ca
www.blurb.ca/bookstore/detail/3865859#promote-pane 

[the title of this collection is appropriated from an anonymous stencil found on a wall in japantown]


Tuesday, December 4, 2012

the modernist past...


there is history to be had beneath the starry dome,
sequestered in elderly cabinets dimly lit...

fading away in the worn wings of concrete lace,
to linger to bury to pass on by and look beyond...

through the teary glass the unreachable growth,
flooding a courtyard of curvilinear silences...

the ancient rain insisting, hidden caverns revealing,
moth-tattered chinese pardons neon flickering meta-nouns...

*****






Museum of Vancouver
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre / Planetarium
Designed by GERALD HAMILTON
Completed 1968
Stainless steel CRAB sculpture by GEORGE NORRIS
1100 Chestnut Street

Saturday, November 17, 2012

prowling the parker...

2012 eastside culture crawl eviscerated at 1000 parker street...

the annualvisual feast commences in the early darkness...

the artbeast awakes, sprawling twisting puffing, just this side of the tracks...

the sainted lights flare ominous signals, the holy rain holds off...

sidle along the scaly walls towards a glowgreen orifice...

slide down to the cavity depths of its devouring mouth...

as the hotbreath of  digested deliverance vaporizes into the night air...

+++withinthebeast+++

blaze the bedrock of creative deposits...

spark the pushbuttons of textual ordinance...

radiate the fulgent rings of truncated perennials...


she arterialized...[arleigh wood]

he flashfaced...[david taewook cho]

they unhung...[artmemes of unit 100]

nonentities in abductive idle...

do believe everything you read...


Eastside Culture Crawl, November 16-18, 2012
1000 Parker Street and 69 other voracious venues

ididiom = my id ++ your idiom
[please visit my new tumblr site for photoimagery of textual art]

Saturday, November 3, 2012

marking my clark park:: part VI


 near the end of day, I walked across the street towards the falling light as it shimmers late through the tall trees...

 there is a lovely old french poem about the dreaming trees at dusk after the rain...
"le long des murs d'un parc ou songent de beaux arbres...
on les suit longtemps.

plus tard, un peu de soleil dore
une feuille, et deux, et puis tout!"

and so it goes, in the pale hour along the parkside walls where old trees dream...

[selected lines from "Au fil de l'heure pale" by Leon-Paul FARGUE, 1878-1947]


Wednesday, October 31, 2012

keep counting...


 he claims that he can't count...
- the children anyways -
but other things like bottles and women and lakes and textbooks
somehow acquired an enigmatic number 
rounded to 500, no more no less...


[hovering high up under the Granville Street Bridge]

Sunday, October 7, 2012

concrete sky


 mere meters away from the millenium line on the eastside are older apartment buildings and houses in which the deafening roar of the skytrain flashing by every few minutes is matched by the looming sightline of a heavy concrete horizon...

a continuous thundering from a solid lightning bolt -
a sedimentary sky that will never soften with rain...

[Stainsbury Avenue near Gladstone Street]

Saturday, September 29, 2012

king of sweets



convivial endings of a no-fly-zone season -
betrayal of a ham-hued tongue slack with crusted sugar...
move on, move on, king of sweets, 
to the cloying call of bloated suburbia -
the overall of the sticky much-too-much...

[lane behind Fraser Street]

Monday, September 24, 2012

downtown westside:: the sexy sixties [episode two]


 You may not see the rigid concrete forest for the trees, but the impenetrably dense massing of reinforced concrete soars upwards as high as the old growth in the lush forests that MacMillan Bloedel had been sawing through for decades...
The late venerable Arthur Erickson [1924-2009] designed this raw concrete tapering tower back in the still freshly brewed essence of modernistic grinding through the 1960's - and steeped in his immersion of Japanese aesthetics, he applied the dictate of material integrity to his Emily Carr-inspired vision of gargantuan nature dominating the west coast landscape...

the offset halves of the west side facade with slim ribbons of glazing running down like rivulets of rain water...

27 storeys of deeply recessed windows with 7 foot square panes of glass create vertical waffled pools of watery reflections...

the offset halves of the east side facade ascend as tapering trunks of denuded giant firs...

around back, the brutalist effect of a medieval fortification is tempered by the elegant grey smoothness of sandblasted concrete and the bush-hammered texture of a solid elevation...

despite the thickset gridding and massive heaviness of concrete, there is a repetitive grace and a certain meditative quality to the geometrical formation that is the main facade of this stripped down monolith to a once ruthless clearcutter of tall trees in ancient forests...

"I don't think concrete is beautiful per se, but I think if one accepts it as the building stone of our century one find beautiful qualities in it - its earthiness, its mass, its traces of how it's made - I really do like it."
[Arthur Erickson from Seven Stones, a Portrait of Arthur Erickson by Edith IGLAUER]

MacMillan Bloedel Building
1075 West Georgia Street
Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey, 1968-69

Saturday, September 15, 2012

duchampion ready-made jeu de boites...


...and oh so last century...

*"5. Many ready-mades had an intentional, aesthetic quality as their origin and were not mere anti-artistic gestures, as was frequently thought during the 1950s and '60s. It is also necessary here to distinguish between examples. In any case, it seems essential to elucidate in each particular case what is the exact nature of the aesthetic meaning and what is its likely evolution."

[*from 'The Meaning of the Ready-mades', p.29 in Duchamp: Love and Death, even by Juan Antonio RAMIREZ, translated from the spanish by Alexander R. Tulloch, Reaktion Books, 1998]

[corner of East 21st Avenue and Prince Edward Street]

Sunday, September 9, 2012

sleuthing through finn slough...



A few minutes south from the glitzy hustle-bustle of Richmond central flows a murky narrow slough off the Fraser River into a falling-down rustic clump of a fishing village more than a century old...
A few kilometers from the end of the towering concrete pylons of the Canada line skytrain is sited a marshy block of patchwork cabins and rusting boats that is a world and a half away from the big box chains, the asian megamalls, the multi-glut of restaurants, and the monstrous maxi-mansions...


But here, on a sun-drenched late summer's day, the micro community of Finn Slough chills to the ebb and flow of the tide, the soft whirring of swallow wings, the gentle swishing of boats tied up, the creaking of worn boardwalks across muddy stretches...


Here, too, the wary inhabitants tolerate dog walkers, excursion cyclists, curious history buffs, enthusiastic sketching artists, over-excited photographers tired of urban scenes, the odd blackberry picker, and first-time sleuths from the sympathetic republic of East Van...


And here, this picturesque mucky strip of a historical Finnish settlement is now threatened by encroaching development and the "raze the rotting pile" mentality of short-sighted, quick-buck, bottom-line feeders with complete disregard of history or ecology or conservation, and obviously a most insensitive lack of appreciation for its rusticated nordic-riverine splendour...
























This Dyke Road flopdollhouse comes complete with a dirty mattress on the floor, miniature bottles and syringes strewn about, streaky walls, an unused bird's nest in a corner and billowing lace curtains...and also, a proud canadian flag tucked above the front door...

Finn Slough along Dyke Road at the south end of No. 4 Road, Richmond