Miss You...

Cellphoto: Shaw & King

Book Review: Night Work, by Thomas Glavinic

One of the nice things about following blogs (certain blogs at least, or at least the few that are still being updated) is the wealth (and depth) of recommendations one can find. In this case, I happened upon Ward Six one day and found a description of an interesting novel, called Night Work. I'd never heard of it before and probably would not have if it weren't for their recommendation. This is the nice thing about the Internet.

Written by Austrian author Thomas Glavinic, Night Work tells the story of Jonas, a young professional living and working in Vienna, who one day while waiting for the morning bus finds that the bus isn't coming. It isn't coming because, as he soon discovers, everyone is gone. Every living soul in Vienna seems to have disappeared and there is no television or radio reception. He calls his girlfriend, Marie, who had just left the day before to visit relatives in England. No answer. Everything is silent.

There is a decided chill to the first half of Night Work, with Jonas dealing with an overwhelming fear that he is not alone, that he is being watched. His unexplained predicament, while extraordinary, is rendered in ways which make it easy to relate to. His fears are human fears: being alone, being permanently separated from those he loves, not knowing what lurks in the dark. There is a pronounced longing for his family; one of the first things Jonas does is move into his father's townhouse. As the novel progresses, his preoccupation with his childhood and family life becomes an evolving theme, particularly - as he explores the city and the remnants of places he knew - the question of what is left when people leave the earth.

The book's title takes its form as Jonas suspects that something may be happening around him - perhaps to him - when he sleeps at night. What begins with a single video camera taping his sleeping patterns evolves into an elaborately orchestrated multi-camera obsession: to solve the haunting clues left behind on the videotapes he watches the next day.

No matter how far the book progresses, Glavinic manages to keep taut the suspense surrounding the question of whether Jonas is truly alone. We share his childlike fears as he attempts to methodically explore his surroundings, eventually to make one last attempt to contact Marie. Obviously, it's a challenge for any writer to keep the reader's interest given a single character, his reminiscences, and a world filled with abandoned artifacts. Glavinic manages to do this without cheating the reader or over-spicing the soup with unnecessary (or illogical) scares. Indeed, Night Work is about atmosphere and memory: these are, after all, the only things Jonas is left with. And, despite its sci-fi/speculative nature, it evolves into a rather touching literary and philosophical tale.

There are some small quibbles: not knowing Vienna (or Austria for that matter), Glavinic's reliance on Viennese street names/neighbourhoods to denote where the story is taking place can be a little confusing (Brigittenaur Lände, anyone?). Also, I wish at times there had been a deeper view into Jonas' emotional realm - that said, not to dwell on Austrian cultural stereotypes, the protagonist is an entirely practical, self-reliant character. This aside, I would recommend this novel for those looking for something different; perhaps for readers who like a little speculative fiction mixed in with their personal journeys.

Night Work, by Thomas Glavinic [ISBN: 978-1847671844] is published in North America through Canongate U.S. and is available at an independent bookseller near you, or readily available online. This edition was translated into (UK) English by John Brownjohn (I mention this in case you don't know what a lorry is, etc..).

Parade!

Cellphoto: 95 Ossington

House

The following tale could be told, all story elements considered, over the course of an hour. I shall, for sake of blog aesthetics, keep it brief.

Ingrid and I decided not too long ago that it was time to look for a house. We went through the movements - contacted a mortgage broker, then contacted a real estate agent - and found ourselves seriously looking at houses. As in, "come to the house for 2pm and have a look".

You learn very quickly what it is that you want, by virtue of what you don't like: suspicious patch jobs, poorly graded foundations, murky unfinished basements. Then, of course, comes price. Finding a house - a good house - in downtown Toronto for a decent price is difficult. All the talk in the media about flailing real estate markets may be correct on the whole, but I can tell you from experience that downtown Toronto prices are still inflated (or, at the very least, stuck at pre-recession-2008 prices).

Ingrid then left for a week's vacation to see a friend (and sometimes-bandmate of mine) in London, England. Two days after she left, I receive a house listing via email from our real estate agent - look at this, she says, it's perfect for you two. I was afraid of this; I lived in terror that this would happen - that, while Ingrid was away, I would find a house and (because the downtown buyers' market is still strong) would need to make a quick decision as to whether or not to put in an offer. I saw the place on Friday (same day I received the email) and needed to have an answer for Sunday. Nice house. Nice owners. Great neighbourhood. Good price, considering house, owners, and neighbourhood.

Long story short, I bought a house that Sunday which Ingrid has never seen, save for photos and descriptions sent via email. I am currently going through a swirling mass of elation, buyer's remorse, stress, and raw, drug-like excitement. I swear, my life mirrors B-movies and 80s TV shows sometimes.

Thankfully, she lands in Toronto tomorrow, so I will not be the only one trying to get a handle on this. I cannot even imagine - on her end - how surreal an experience this must've been.

I also don't want to see my phone bill.

Repeat after me:

there is no such thing

as mind control.

Images

I think images are worth repeating

images repeated from a painting

Images taken from a painting

from a photo worth re-seeing

I love images worth repeating

project them upon the ceiling

Multiply them with silk screening

see them with a different feeling

- from Images, lyrics by Lou Reed

Every May in Toronto there is what is called CONTACT. It is a photography showcase. What makes it unique is that, rather than two or three galleries being the centre of interest, the photographs are integrated into (and across) the city. Storefronts bear photographs, abandoned buildings bear them, you see them inside bars and cafés. Go along the Junction and you can't sit down without seeing signs pointing into stores, saying "Temporary Gallery".

This integration was quite stunning a couple of years ago; someone got permission to have their photographs - printed on clear plastic film - adorn the glass-paned bus shelters along Queen West. Each one responded to each other and the environment. It was thought-out. Choreographed, if you will. It was, photography or no photography, an art installation.

This year I find myself wishing CONTACT would end (if not May). Though I have not seen (what I can only assume is) the A-grade stuff in the chosen galleries, I have to say that I'm going to scream if I have to walk past many more of them. There is no order. Just image, after image, after image. Just images. Rectangular submissions without point, intent, self-awareness.

I am surrounded by photos, everywhere, at a point where I am going through a photographic/existential crisis. The film vs. digital divide has divided me, particularly since my 35mm lens is giving me problems (I sooo don't want to get out the jeweller's screwdriver kit). Meanwhile, I'm having great fun (at low resolution) with my BlackBerry's camera - it allows me to do so much I wish my manual film-camera could do: being spontaneous without lugging a 2lb Soviet brick. Having a preview window is also a great plus. In the end, however, the resolution isn't good and the colour is often skewed blue/cyan (meaning I often have to import the photo onto my laptop and futz w/ Photoshop before I can upload it).

Just before this all came about, things were quite different. I had joined a local, well-respected photography collective and was expecting a medium format camera to be sent from an eBay seller. My photographic future appeared, allow me this, picture-perfect. In short, the camera never worked, the seller was less than useless in helping the situation, and it simply can't be fixed locally. Add to this my affair with a shallow cameraphone, my 35mm lens issue, and said well-respected photography collective annoying me with "bulk" emails (filled with both utterly useless and useful information without care for clear formatting). Add CONTACT and stir, liberally.

In short, it has all forced me to face a philosophical and practical dilemma which I never really thought I'd need to face: why do I take pictures? What am I taking pictures of? What is the eye behind the viewfinder? Is it a diary? Is it journalism? How seriously are you going to take this? Professional-seriously or I'm-just-fucking-around-and-don't-want-to-think-about-it-seriously?

Thus I find myself subconsciously referring to a song from Songs For Drella, a dedication to Andy Warhol by Lou Reed and John Cale. It spins like a mantra, like a whirling dervish, and I stare intently at it hoping that I'll see the meaning in its elusive centre.

I'm no urban idiot savant

spewing paint without any order

I'm no sphinx, no mystery enigma

what I paint is very ordinary

I don't think I'm old or modern

I don't think I think I'm thinking

It doesn't matter what I'm thinking

It's the images that are worth repeating

Ah, repeating, images

Images

Mobile: The Friend Syndrome

Internet-based social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace) provide opportunities for us to connect with those who - for various reasons - used to be friends but are currently out of touch. Of course, if we have to find them (or they us) there would seem a reason why they are not pre-programmed into our mnemonic contact list.

There are many reasons. We go to school - sometimes different schools. We move from rural to urban, from urban to rural - sometimes different cities, different countries. We change careers, we change ourselves. Sometimes fate has more to say about it than we do.

Sometimes we are just different: the difference happened offstage or was always there in us. In some or many instances, we realize that the friendships which brought us from there to here were stepping stones and not great friendships to begin with.

This all becomes abundantly clear when we enter these online portals: invitations appear from high school ghosts and college classmates. We expect the past to remain fixed and when it's different (or more truthful than we are prepared to face) we begin to question these new-old friendships.

The ass who was your begrudged friend is still an ass (perhaps more accomplished). The self-obsessed are still self-obsessed and not magically cured by our precepts of maturity. True: people change. But that is something we often say in the mirror to comfort ourselves.

The truth is that time solidifies most people's characters. And if they leaned towards behaviour and/or beliefs which repelled us, why then do we expect them to be, in a Disney-esque way, "cured"?

Because we hope for the best, even when we suspect the worst.

[Sent via BlackBerry]

Cellphoto: Vineland Drive-By

Mobile: Dispatch #1

Dispatch...

1.​ to send off or away with speed, as a messenger, telegram, body of troops, etc.

2.​ to dismiss (a person), as after an audience.

3.​ to put to death; kill


Dispatch from the 501 Queen streetcar. Thoughts dispatched, sent like troops via cellphone: instant, unilateral.

This is not a dialogue.

Dispatch. Done with; I am finished incubating this thought. I am done. It has been sent in contravention of MacLuhan, without a message.


Message sent.


[Sent via BlackBerry]

Cellphoto: Self-Portrait in Motion

We All Scream For Lies Green

If you've picked up a newspaper or magazine in the last three or four days, you will have inevitably noticed (if not on the front page then prominently featured inside) the word "green" in the title of the edition/main article/theme of entire issue. As I sit typing this, there is a magazine on the table in front of me (one of those supplemental magazines that the Globe and Mail throws in for free every week or so...you know, the type of magazine - either fashion-oriented, vacation-oriented, guys-who-like-cars-oriented - that you'd be hard pressed to have ever remembered seeing in a retail store, even one which boasts a million magazines). It's called Green Living and the front page trumpets "CANADA'S GREENEST CITIES OF TOMORROW" (with an asterisk at the bottom " * Is yours on the list?"). The Sunday New York Times Magazine was dedicated to this colour also. As were the entrails of most newspapers.

You see, this Wednesday (April 22, 2009) is Earth Day. Get it? Earth Day? Green? Ohhhhh!, I'm sure you're exclaiming, perhaps even tapping your noggin for foolishly neglecting to remember. Not that it's a holiday or anything. No, Earth Day is not a holiday. Not even the banks get it off (though I would've expected them to sneakily insert an Earth Day Eve into their schedules). It is, however, that time of year - like Poetry Month - when, for 5 minutes, we try to give a shit about something we do a much better job of conceptualizing when it's not being shoved down our throats by people who hold diplomas in Event Management.

Expect between now (Monday) and then (Wednesday) to be inundated with the environment, Mother Earth, drowning polar bears and the like. This is not to say that I'm one of those Ayn Rand-ian right-wing troglodytes who thinks climate change is a socialist scheme. That is not my point (and I'm happy it's not my point today because it's extremely convoluted and I did poorly in math). My point is that, in the same breath that these newspapers and magazines (and websites!) roll-out the green, there are hundreds of articles about how to "buy" green. Getting back to Green Living, the sad little magazine in front of me, some other articles listed on the front are "WHERE TO PUT YOUR ECO DOLLARS" and "20 Budget Smart Enviro-Tips" [sic?!]. Even in the otherwise lefty (rather Jeckyll/Hyde lefty, if you ask me) Toronto weekly, NOW Magazine, the emphasis is almost as enthusiastically consumerist as it is on scaring the shit out of the reader about our imminent ecopocalypse^tm.

In other words, legitimate environmental concerns aside, with every Earth Day I feel as if we are facing a new Y2K (i.e. a semi-manufactured crisis that wasn't entirely invented to make money, yet, hey, why should we stop ourselves from making a buck, hell, wouldn't you, let's see how long this lasts). Of course, there are substantial differences between Y2K and Earth Day: the latter is borne from a need to undo and/or mitigate the effects of society's footprint on the earth, the former was borne from a need to undo and/or mitigate the effects of a bit of coding corner-cutting. There are (and were) legitimate concerns in either scenario. There were (and are) also people who would do anything to cash-in on a fear-based trend which increasingly loses its reason due to the insatiable North American need - even in our present economic situation - to commodify e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Basically: isn't getting people to buy a lot of stuff, green or not, counter-intuitive to the philosophy of reduce, re-use, and recycle? Furthermore - and this is me - I worry when a word (outside of religion) gets so stretched, mistook, mythologized, and appropriated that its meaning eventually loses all efficacy (see: sustainability).

I do not argue with the want or wish to use the word green, or to associate it with legitimate environmental concerns (because they are legion). I just wish it - and by virtue, Earth Day - did not seem like a St. Patrick's Day Parade where everyone - Irish or not - wraps themselves in the colour without really caring to know why, so long as there is the remote promise of an unrelated happiness (this goes for Valentine's as well, sad to say). The thing is - and I hope my father isn't reading this - we as a society can afford to misinterpret (or forget) what St. Patrick's Day means, but allowing our concerns over the environment to be cynically co-opted by purely commercial interests - whose concern for the environment is more or less a marketing strategy - is more disconcerting to this writer.

I'll take the Earth. You keep the green.

[P.S. Just as I was about to upload this, I received an email from a local limo company who fancies I am interested in their services. The subject: "Join Us at the Green Living Show". A limo company!]

Cellphoto: Branches and Petals

Master: "May the wind always be behind your back. "

Student: "What, and fuck up my hair?"