Global Logistics for Carefree Consumption

It was produced in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, and on April 26 it began its journey towards its end-user, travelling 215 kilometres to CNE Express’s East China Sorting Facility in Pinghu. There, it underwent various sorting processes and re-scans until April 28, when it was trucked to Shanghai's Pudong Airport, a distance of 123 km. Overnight it was loaded on a plane. In the morning it began its 11,407 km air voyage to me, arriving at YYZ, via an intermediate airport, three days later. It travelled with methodical precision, like a moonshot, and today I can’t even remember what “it” was.

Inspired by Tussöy and a shipment routing summary received from CNE. Distances cited are derived from Google Maps. Image from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

A Statement by the Artists Collectively Known as Barksy

I’ve come to consider what Duke and I do as performance art. Duke produces the initial piece; I handle installation. Duke is singular of purpose; I’m the one who thinks outside the bin. Our typical work (Panel 1) is conventional, though its street placement is controversial. Panel 2 showcases some of Duke’s solo work. Panel 3 is one of my favourites; I call it “Why knot?“ (And why indeed, when there’s so much open space in the neighbourhood?) Sometimes (Panel 4) we’re just two artists trying to collaborate, and the end result doesn’t come together. Allow us our artistic freedom. 

Libertarian pooformance art images captured by Ron Thompson. Inspired by Steamed Buns and stuff on my shoe.

Two Boys Missing

Artie told me he’d never even heard of the ghosts at the bottom of Grenadier Pond. You know, all those soldiers who went marching through Howard’s Park on their way to fight the Americans, and that they broke through the ice, and they drowned? He said it was bunk, that the battle was in April and the ice today would be a foot thick if it was an inch, and that he didn’t care anyway, because he and Roy were skipping the rest of the day to go skating, and that I couldn’t come.
     That’s all I know, sir.
     Honest.

Based on this front page story from the late edition of The Toronto Daily Star. January 9, 1908. Image based on this one by Dawn Hudson.

So, maybe it is the thought that counts.

I get little pleasure these days just shopping for gifts, but I’m not so far gone I can’t still get a kick from making an otherwise pedestrian present just a little bit awesome.
     And so, the young science-fiction fan gets his copy of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but it comes wrapped in a towel. The wife gets that matching set of mugs, but they come filled with Hershey’s kisses and gummi-bear hugs.
     And the neighbour who voted Rob Ford for mayor gets his Robbie Bobbie bobblehead, but it comes with the cutest little hammer you ever did see.

Seasons in the Sun

To this day, I have trouble getting all the way through Seasons in the Sun. It started in 1974, and although I am pretty sure Terry Jacks was singing of cancer or suicide or something like that, his song enjoyed a perversely high rotation at our classroom parties, probably because it was so perfect for rocking back and forth slowly and hanging onto a girl as tightly as you dared, amazed at the heat two bodies could generate, and telling her so, saying anything that came into your head, just to draw attention from this strange thing you were doing.

These weren’t the parties we’d had in Grade Six. Something new had taken over, pulled close the curtains, and turned out the lights. There was music, but no one dared dance, and so the girls at the record player would conspire to set up the most unlikely couples in what they called a “snowball.” They’d announce the names, and I’d have to slow-dance with Karen Carstairs for an excruciating three minutes and twenty-four seconds, then Beth Parker, and finally Brenda Duffy, except the joke’s on them because Brenda was probably the only girl in class at all interested in me.

π recalled

Her point:
a ring,
a token declaring my ardent fancy,
may apply unwanted pressures
(unusual urgencies, too)
on our liaisons;

that jewels
or golden band can
not persuade her to
abandon ingrained fears.

Nothing so precious relieves even a dithering,
however I insist.

Meanwhile her perimeter prohibits the efforts forth,
a nothing there fastened
so nothing unwelcome happens
that satisfies this keen craze,

expanding so
the nothing becomes unwieldy,
a vessel that nothing pricks,
no yearning breaks,
no . . .
nothing.

Unending squabbles,
incessant pleading,
limits to remember . . .
nothing.

And more promises
to prove our love is a . . .

I suspect
nothing,
really.



Wait! Now, go back to the beginning
and touch each word in turn.

Image from ClassicGeek.com.

 

Universal Embrocation

So, I ride up slowly to one of those girls that work the corner at King and Wilson Park. It’s a cold night and already she’s sizing me up . . . like she usually takes her dates down to the parking lot at Sunnyside or maybe one of the alleys off Queen, but how in the world are we going to get anywhere on a fucking bicycle? But there she has me all wrong, because I’m really a lot more lonely than I look.
     “Would you give me a kiss for ten dollars?” I ask. “Just on the cheek.”
     “Twenty,” she says.

 Image source: Wikipedia

Another Mouse

A mouse runs from the subway train,
along the rail and down the drain
and wishes he was home again
and that he’d listened to his mom
who warned him that the train might come
and cried out when he stood too near
the edge pretending not to hear
and watched the mice and wondered how
they knew the train was coming now
with screaming wheels, the rails groaned
and left his mother all alone;
and he among the grit and grime
now had to find a place in time
to hide before another train
chased his friends away again.

Original photo by Hamron.

Thomas James Burley

I don’t pretend to understand how things once worked among the Yorkshire gentry, but I’d like to think that all this began at a party, perhaps thrown to honour the accomplished vocalist Thomas James Burley who appeared there in Scarborough in 1872. He’d trained in Italy and sung at La Scala, but his eyes settled that evening on the lovely Priscilla Harris Tindall, heiress to the Tindall shipbuilding fortune, and by June they were married. Two of their children died prematurely, but the third would survive to become my great-grandfather, thus ensuring my children would have music on both sides.

The last I’d looked at my family tree was back in school when we all had to do it for our grade-nine history class. One girl discovered J. M. Barrie, the novelist, among her relations; and another found Mackenzie King, the tenth Prime Minister of Canada, who had actually mentioned seeing her mother as an infant in his famous diaries. I was desperate for a story worth telling, but while my mother and grandmother whispered together of a scandalous divorce long ago among the Tindalls, they’d only tell me those bits of the family history they had first carefully pruned.

It took the great-great-grandson of Thomas Burley’s brother (my fourth cousin, according to those who track such things) to blow the lid off our big family secret. My great-great-grandfather, the opera singer, was a wife-beating drunk, who carried on affairs with the servants, and drove my great-great-grandmother to the exceptional step in 1879 of divorcing the bastard, paying him off, and reclaiming her family name . . . which really could’ve been an empowering story to hear as a teenager were it not clear from the record that I am in fact descended from a long line of unfaithful husbands and failed marriages.

Photo of Thomas James Burley (AKA Senor Burleigh Tesseman)
from A Souvenir of Musical Toronto, 1898. You can read the sad end to his story here.

Do Over

The first stop on my trip back through time found me talking to my younger self as he was leaving for work on October 25, 1996.
     “Stay home today,” I told him. “Or better still, take a trip somewhere nice. They can’t fire you if they can’t find you.”
     February 9, 1980: “Listen, you are going to try to kiss her on the way home tonight, so you might want to practise a little first.”
     June 11, 1974: “When that Grade 8 girl asks you if you’re going to the dance today, it means she wants you to take her.”

Photo by Thomas Leuthard.

Eyes of a Stranger

Last night came the pictures of the cops rounding up protestors en masse at Queen and Spadina. The word was they had identified suspects in the crowd from Saturday’s protests, but it came out today that they were simply arresting everyone in particular areas around the city, running them through a scanner, and using facial-recognition software against the photos they’d taken the day before . . . except that the bad guys, the Black Bloc anarchists they’d spent the entire week warning us about had all worn masks, and I don’t like the odds that I might have the eyes of a stranger.

Photo © 2007 by Sarolta Bán.

Andromeda

How’s this for timing?
     I’m walking off the effects of the last, bad, we-need-to-talk date with the worst girlfriend ever; walking the beach holding my new shiny shoes, all dressed up amongst a crowd of beach rats, watching 110 pounds of sand and fury kicking the crap from the monster of all muscle-beach boyfriends, except he’s just sitting there taking it crying, tears clearing tracks through the dirt down his face.
     And yes, that is sad.
     Except, did I mention she just happens to be the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, and me newly single for maybe 45 minutes?

Image of Cetus the Monster from Urania’s Mirror, engraved by Sidney Hall, circa 1825.

Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille

Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille was a French astronomer noted for his catalogue of nearly 10,000 southern stars. He mapped great swaths of sky and defined the constellations that had once lain hidden from the eyes of the ancient world. He saw them first . . . and he gave them all unbelievably shitty names.
     In chronicalling the drama that played out each night against the celestrial sphere, the Greeks had drawn upon their culture and the world around them: a world of nature, magical creatures, and gods.
     Lacaille looked around his room and gave us . . . The Telescope, The Furnace, and The Clock.

The Invention of Circumcision

Trier-of-Stuff wasn’t bright, but the tribe depended on him. Whenever they encountered something different—a new fruit, another tribe, an inviting pool—Trier was there to dive right in. He liked the attention, certainly; but he loved all the females it brought him.
     “Hey,” said Maker-of-Things. “I’ve been looking for you.”
     “I’m sick,” said Trier. “It hurts when I piss.”
     “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Remember that cutter I made.”
     “Yeah,” said Trier. “That hurt, too.”
     “Well, I have a new idea that might help you.”
     “Huh?”
     “Don’t worry,” said Maker. “Just hand me your cock.”

Image: The Sciolist.