powell less

Their world never coagulated again after the war. They were interned and then scattered, losing all that they once had in a vibrant community that was 50 years in the making across the wide ocean from their island home. They came to log and fish and cultivate and build, and within a few tumultuous months in 1942, they were all gone.

Walking along Powell Street today, there is not much to indicate that this was the main street of a once bustling Japanese community. A few buildings with Japanese names of long forgotten owners leave a faded memory of more enterprising and prosperous days. The Japanese Hall on Alexander Street was the only property redeemed by the few Japanese who returned in the 1950's and it still operates as a language school and cultural centre to this day.

The Maikawa family built their dream department store with an au courant art deco facade to house the newest and the latest - it was the largest and most modern department store in Japantown when it opened in 1936, but would all too soon be forfeited to the government. Now it sits neglected and slightly decrepit in silent resignation to its fate.

These buildings bearing the weathered and damaged signs of "Lion Hotel" and  "King Rooms" were once rooming houses above storefronts that included a traditional Japanese bath house, an archery club, an athletic club, a restaurant and even a rifle gallery. The name of "MORIMOTO" set in tiles in front of the main door has remained as a humble legacy of the mysterious namesake now long gone.

*****

The header image for savage states above is a detail of the entrance wall to the "Hotel World" built in 1912 by S. Tamura, a merchant and speculator.

floating states

 on a night like this

when you bring me

the full aurora realm

from ether streaming

 softly, softly the glass

dissolves to dry floatage

above the jetting sky

all the birds unleashed

but on these other nights

we will hang heavy within

the cool flocculus steam

of unintended savior states

sun muun

 the door may be closed

defensive syntax on guard

above cold foreign soil

invested chinese swamp

 or blank as a renouncement

barring prejudicial flames

the colour lines were drawn

and yet they are re-crossed

 a single character marks

a half number retreated

to consolations unknown

behind the multilocked door

 perhaps they soon shall pass

more inscrutable as always

but never going very far

from portals so hard won

for all the ancient societies

of the persistent secret orders

will leak a welcome of sorts

to those who can open doors

the fenestration of an empty building

when all the glass has been smashed in, the invitations go out -
edifying hosts, no bar -
the front door may be missing, but climb through the windows anyway
the lights will not come on, so
feel your way along the soggy floors, the walls still standing 
through the south facing windows, the rising moon beams into large empty rooms
negative spaces between absent furniture
when maximum capacity is reached, cast your phobic angst from the glassless openings
the cold night air is neither rational nor engaging
wait for water/drink, water/rain, water/blast
if none is forthcoming, turn inward again, away from the window arrangement to the damp warmth of a hundred bodies

avoiding all wet corners

will the morning light bring a forced surrender, flapping from a penetrating edict of sorts
interlocation is designed to draw out all those who withstood and still standing
soon they will surround the tense will compounded and block the joyless gape of a sentenced building
the political abstract to be waylaid by a loud compendium of passion
but such wholesome infestation is always assailable

beware the dangling buckets
 

fallen states

 an understatement of disrepair

hammers home the sordid truth

more will fall in exiled state

preponderances null and void

marking my clark park:: near the end of the year

 "...that is an indigence of the light,

a stellar pallor that hangs on the threads."*

and so it snows...for a few hours on a december day...near the end of another year...

may the new one be full of Lebensweisheitspielerei!

[*from the poem "Lebensweisheitspielerei" by Wallace Stevens, 1954]

princess house

it is snowing leaves of gold the wind shaking them loose as they flutter down in front of the pale pink house full of slow shadows and faded doubts
the mesh-veil framed around the porch held up by dark pink columns muffles the light and mutes inconsequential secrets pulled back into the dark hallway
a hand quivers behind the drapes blinded by the inaction of certain grey days running damp and dirty down princess avenue of the unroyal house and home
continues up the warped stairs to sit in dusky rooms and lie a while on the saddled bed of mechanical emotions rolling over onto the final broken sacrament

a mud-slinging screamfest

a clay orifice upon flesh -

fill the dark hollow with a howl...

sonic containment within,

psychical release without -
mouth to mouth resurrect.

If you feel the need to unleash the mother of all screams without disturbing the peaceful setting of West Vancouver, go and pick up one of these clay pots at the West Vancouver Museum and expand your lungs for a major howl into it. Your muffled bellow will barely ruffle the feathers of any sedate West Van matrons around!

These "scream pots" are the objets d'artifice of an exhibition conceived by the not so vociferous Babak Golkar whose magic persian carpet mushroomed a miniature city of intricate buildings at the Charles H. Scott Gallery last year. The terracotta pots are hand-crafted into varied shapes and sizes to affect the tenor of the screams emitted into them. Even if one does not feel the need to cry out, the tactile nature of the clay invites one to touch, hold, caress...

*****

The second part of the exhibit includes a digital projection of blobs of clay being hurled at a wall with the accompanying plopping sound effects - the aptly scatological visual [and audio] is somewhat mesmerizing to watch and presents another release of sorts in the physical force of flinging mud...
[Gabriel Orozco also once pitched clay balls in one of his projects, but at the pots themselves as they were being turned on the wheel...[Cazuelas (Beginnings), 2002]

The "turds" dried and fell off with the resultant staining still manifest on the wall, creating a monochrome messy dot "painting" a la the Japanese eccentric Yayoi Kusama - with the baked pieces scattered on the floor below their previous elevated surface like so many dropped and inedible crumbs...

in the end, a lumpen being of baked clay

lies dejected, hardened, unused -

and failing to rise again,

sinks to the floorboards of life...

Dialectic of Failure
New Work by Babak Golkar
October 11 to December 7, 2013
West Vancouver Museum 

lost in the woods...

the waterlily pond stasis of a clogged giverny
with artful conventions in a wet coastal setting,

and hidden within this pedicured city garden
lurks the overgrown portal to an interior forest...

the tree trunks reconfigured and reassembled

to hold up the rainproof canopy and glass curtains -

all trying to keep the forest sliver within safe 

from being quite lost to the deep dark woods...

The Forest Education Centre in the VanDusen Botanical Garden was built in 1976 by Vancouver architect Paul Merrick.  Originally underwritten by MacMillan Bloedel and featured as "A Walk in the Forest", it was donated to the Park Board in 1986, which continued to offer educational programs until 2011.
This relatively unknown diminutive glassed "babylon" of westcoast modernism is now considered for demolition, or repurposed into a glorified outhouse!

For more information... awalkintheforest2013.blogspot.ca

a horse did whinny...*

"a horse did whinny in the afternoon -

he had no pity for the old buffoon...

a horse did whinny in the pale sunlight -

he had no eyes, he had no insight...

 

a horse did whinny in the middle of the day,

a horse did whinny as if to say...

go away... go away... go away...... go away..."* 

[* the selected lines are lyrics from a song by Enzio Verster of Half-Chinese, a too-cool Vancouver band on the move to Montreal...]

["Horse did whinny" is the first song on their album We were pretending to be released by Sad Game Records, 2012]