Short Takes #2 (with street photos)

This may end up being slightly longer-form than Short Takes #1, but I'll try to stay focused and on point. On the other hand, there will be more photos, but I will try to keep the text shorter.

Last weekend, I went to the opening of the Douglas Coupland show at MOCCA, mostly to see what they had on view.  I reviewed the show pretty extensively here (with lots of photos), so I won't go into great detail now.

It turns out that roughly 2/5th of the exhibit is at MOCCA (where it is free to get in with $5 suggested donation) and the rest is at ROM.  If one saw the show in Vancouver, they have everything up through the Lego installation but reconfigured for a smaller space.  I think that's pretty cool (particularly the free part), particularly as the part I liked the best (Coupland's response to the Group of 7) was at MOCCA. So I will almost certainly go back another time or two, and perhaps once with the kids in tow.  My son did see the show in Vancouver, but my daughter did not.  I'm not terribly likely to pay ROM prices to see the rest of the show, but maybe I will score one of the free family passes from the library.  The next time I am likely to pay ROM prices is to see the Pompeii exhibit this summer.

 

I'm having trouble recalling if this piece, (loosely) inspired by Thomson's Campfire was on view in Vancouver.  At first I thought not (so this would be a Toronto-only showing), but on reflection I think it probably was showing at the VAG.
 

This is a case where I didn't think Coupland's take was as successful, maybe precisely because it is so busy compared to the original, whereas the other ones are intentionally stripped down further.  In both versions of Campfire, the fire is somewhat bizarrely not the focal point but rather it is the tent opening that dominates.

Tom Thomson, Campfire, 1916

At MOCCA, the Coupland exhibit is paired with show on malls.  I thought the photos were ok, and the video (the Mall of America shot through red or blue filters) manipulative but still somewhat interesting.

In another call-back to Short Takes #1, my son was discussing why he would like to be able to plug directly into someone else's brain.  It's for showing pictures to others, he said.  I can make a picture of something but I can't put it into words.

I've now seen two films by Hou Hsiao-Hsien at TIFF as part of their retrospective.  It's a pretty neat achievement, but almost all these films only show a single time, so one really has to pay attention.  I didn't much care for A Time to Live and a Time to Die, but I liked City of Sadness.  I thought the latter film was a bit like a Taiwanese version of The Godfather, though a lot more political.  Most of the film is set in Taipei, though there are a few scenes when one or another of the characters is hiding out with rebels (who support the Communists!) in the foothills outside the city.  I'll be coming back for one last film (Millennium Mambo) in March.

I was just able to snap this photo of the poster for the series from a moving streetcar.  It isn't quite as clear as I would have liked, but you can also see the AGO Basquiat posters (appropriate given his start as a graffiti artist) and a series of posters for Soulpepper.  I actually have tickets for their production of A.R. Gurney's The Dining Room (coming up soon) and am looking forward to that.
 

I've basically settled on what I will write (or try to write) for the March edition of Sing-for-Your-Supper.  It will be a direct follow-up to the scene I submitted for Feb.  Thus, it is also something that will end up in the novel in some form or another.  This may be the best way to finish up the novel, to write it in concrete chunks where there is a tangible deadline.  After all, that's basically the only way I finished up my dissertation.

I think I will wait for the increasingly ill-named Short Takes #3 to discuss my recent reading, including Platonov and von Rezzori.  I did promise another street photo, so I will end with a pretty incredible view of the inside of an apartment building (presumably social housing) that was being dismantled the old fashioned way (with wrecking ball and not dynamite) to put up housing for the Pan Am Games this summer.  I will say they are running a bit late if they think they are going to have the whole space cleared and the housing in place.  There is another part of the site that was cleared over the late fall (and indeed I rode my bike past the demolition site, so I got to see them take it down)  I may post a few shots of the earlier demolition, but this shot is special, as it is like looking into a dollhouse that has been opened up in the back.

To circle back around to Asian cities, I think there are at least some similarities here with Michael Wolf's work photographs of Hong Kong hyper-apartments, though the scale is totally different.  I saw a good show of Wolf's work in Chicago and ended up picking up his book Hong Kong Front Door Back Door.

Now that I have poked around a bit more, my photo looks even more like this one (Barcelona - Parallel n°1) by Stéphane Couturier from his Mutation exhibit.

Intriguingly the Couturier exhibit was at an art gallery in Hong Kong.  I imagine there is more than a little digital manipulation (whereas there isn't any in the first two), but it is still pretty cool.  And with this, I really will close this post.