the art of nothing

February 24, 2015February 24, 2015 ~ carin ~ 23 Comments

I was googling the title to see if there were already a hundred things called this and it seems there are not. In the process I found a short film made by an actor posing as one Hans Freeberling, an artist installing a show about nothing. The gallery is empty. People come. They think it’s real, that the artist is real, and so they try not to scratch their wee wannabecultured noggins until, eventually, they make up Their Own Point for the point of the nothingness. Because there must be one, right??

As a satire, it’s gorgeous. Says so much about us. Most of which is questionable, but there’s this too: that faced with a blank canvas, real or metaphoric, we can choose to impose our own thoughts. This is a kind of art form in itself. Getting People To Think From Ground Zero, we might call it.

The lack of ‘something’ might also be compared to a one word poem. Or a single toilet cemented to a wall. I mean, we can have real discussions about these things. (I recently had a strangely satisfying time discussing the ‘poem’ balloon. One word. Discussion went along the lines of who says it has to have only two L’s and where’s the law about the emphasis remaining on the second syllable… and so on.)

There’s always the chance these chats will lead to… oh, something interesting or important even. Possibilities are always endless where conversation is concerned and, really, anything at all can be a prompt.

But because something serves as a prompt, or because it causes us to think in possibly new ways… is it art? And who gets to say?

And what isn’t art?

And who gets to say?

I’m not looking for a definition. Or even an answer. Is there even an answer? Tons of opinions. And all manner of conversation and argument and (most sadly of all) very little light-heartedness about things, including toilets, so I’ve decided to stop asking. In fact this whole ramble is a digression.

What I meant to write about is nothing, the art of it.

Which leads me directly to my dad, a chap who would not have called himself an artist though he played with paint, on both canvas and walls. He built our first house then spent decades renovating the second. The garden too. Rockeries and rose beds. Our hedge was almost a topiary. If he wanted a fence, he’d go down to the beach, find some driftwood and make one. Then he’d make a driftwood coffee table, an end table, a floor lamp. He made bookshelves. A fireplace, a BBQ and a bird bath out of stone and in the rec room he painted a wall to wall, floor to ceiling mural of a favourite spot under a tree on a beach in Barbados. He included my mother’s striped beach bag hanging from a branch. (The people who bought the house after my parents died, said the mural was a selling point.) He built two patios and a car port, refashioned our front door, and the back one too, to look more Spanish, a style he liked. And then he began making the inside look more Spanish too. To his mind anyway.

He did all this after his day job, and on weekends. Mostly in Hawaiian shirts, paint splattered pants and shoes with no laces.

This was his thing, this making.

I used to wonder how he thought up all this stuff. How could a wall that looked perfectly fine to me in its bareness or with a few holiday pennants hammered on, to him scream: paint a beach scene!!! don’t forget the bag.

He did a lot of sitting in-between the making. This was all before busy-ness was invented, when people really were busy, doing real things without an abundance of appliances and before nannies and dog-walkers. These ancient busy people, it seems, made time to sit, have a coffee, light a pipe, and if you were to join them, say, at the picnic table on the handmade patio, they wouldn’t talk about being busy, they would say something about squirrels or sedimentary rocks or have you noticed how many buds are on the apricot tree this year? You might be wearing pedal pushers and drinking Koolaid when you ask if there’s such as thing as UFOs and they might draw a few times on their pipe, think for a minute, let the smoke out nice and slow as they say could be, who the hell knows…

My dad would be surprised to learn that the most important thing he taught me was not to make sure the vice on my workbench was closed at night or how properly to wash a car, but how to love what you do, to do it as well as you can and, most importantly, to take time for the nothing. In fact, he’d be surprised to know he even did it.

Some of my favourite moments, those nothing ones. Still are. I realize in my own nothings that that’s where we re-fuel, where we find our next mural.

A whole different kind of art.

today’s colour

January 26, 2015January 27, 2015 ~ carin ~ 9 Comments

I haven’t posted any Today’s Colour for a while. Just haven’t been seeing things that way recently, but the other day, walking downtown for some breakfast, I notice freshly painted yellow lines in a parking lot. And in between those lines, a bright yellow car.

I take a picture but without a chip as it turns out. And so there’s no proof of anything.

Not of the lines or the car or the bright yellow hydrant nearby. Not even the mysterious metal pole next to it, in exactly the same shade.

Also no picture of the large yellow plastic bin on the porch of what used to be the town’s main library—a lovely Carnegie one—which is now home to a legal firm. Maybe the box is where you deposit gratuities. Or bribes. Or suggestions, delicately, or not so delicately, phrased.

There is no picture of the bag of salt resting in the doorway of a convenience store.

Today’s colour comes, instead, with a story. The Story of Yellow. Which begins in my bedroom when I was about seven or eight years old. Maybe I was four or five. Young enough anyway not to know what my favourite colour was when my dad suddenly appeared at my door hollering What’s your favourite colour??

Um….. um….

Welll??? (veins beginning to pop in his neck)

Yellow? (I have no idea why I said yellow.)

Turns out he was on his way to Canadian Tire.

The next thing I remember is my entire bedroom—four walls AND the ceiling—painted lemon yellow.

After that I was given yellow sweaters as gifts. A yellow sippy cup (so I guess I was younger than eight; we can only hope…), yellow toothbrush, hairbrush, bath towel, bathing suit. My first pair of jeans were yellow.

I grew up hating that colour. When I left home I turned my back on it, refused to be the yellow piece in a board game.

Then one day I came home to visit my mum and dad and my room had been wallpapered with pink and red roses. The ceiling was white. It was hideous and I loved it.

On a weekend in nineteen ninety something I painted the kitchen of my house yellow. The irony of this didn’t even register. The yellow tablecloth my mother had given me years ago, which I’d never used, I suddenly loved. I bought yellow tea towels, yellow bowls. I painted all the bedrooms various shades of pale pale jaune.

I have no idea what changed. I only know that it no longer bothers me to be the yellow piece in a board game.

Though if I had the choice, I’d probably pick orange.

♦

Pick a colour, any colour…

and eric

January 12, 2015January 12, 2015 ~ carin ~ 2 Comments

story of a recipe

January 9, 2015January 14, 2015 ~ carin ~ 6 Comments

Once upon a time there was a folk dance group that required its female dancers to wear a dirdnl’ish costume with a corset over a cotton blouse and sometimes real, sometimes fake, carnations stuffed down the front of said corset. This effectively rendered the girls dancing flower pots. Boy dancers were encouraged to ‘smell’ the carnations while the girl dancers twirled coquettishly from one to the other. When they weren’t sniffing carnations, the boys danced ‘figure’ dances, pretending to chop wood or other acts of physical prowess meant to attract the hapless flower pots.

I was a member of such a folk dance group.

For the record, it wasn’t my idea to join. I was fourteen and shy and my parents thought it would be just the ticket to bring me out of my shell.

I suppose in a way it did. It was also where I learned to drink beer.

And it’s where I met Laura, from whom I received the recipe mentioned in the title. Laura wisely left both the dance group and town at the first opportunity, stuffing everything she owned into a small car and driving west until she got to Calgary.

A few years later I followed. Not to Calgary, but to Edmonton. Close enough. Only 300 km away, it made Alberta a place where I knew someone. We’d visit each other on occasional weekends, mostly me going to her place, the main floor of a big old ramshackle house with no yard but access to a back stoop, room enough for a Hibachi.

The kitchen smelled of meatloaf, coffee and Joy dishwashing liquid.

Laura was the first person I knew (my age) who not only liked to cook but talked about food, grew herbs on windowsills, owned actual cookbooks and shopped for food with all kinds of serious enthusiasm. Even more amazingly to me, almost ten out ten times she preferred inviting people to her place for a meal over meeting at a restaurant. She was interesting in different ways (she once moved into an apartment with a bright red fridge and spaghetti on the ceiling; beyond enviable when the rest of us were still living in bungalows) but this cooking thing struck me as a little over-the-top… remember, this was eons ago, when food as a ‘thing’ hadn’t been invented yet. When only five people in the whole world read Gourmet.

In that ramshackle Calgary kitchen Laura served me my first Caesar salad, and I remember thinking it was pretty groovy that she made the dressing by throwing ingredients into a jar and shaking it like maracas.

I came across the recipe recently—the original paper version I wrote out while she dictated precise instructuions all those decades ago. More than slightly splattered and used (though not for some time now as I’ve since discovered other recipes. Julia Child’s and Ina Garten’s, for two).

But they don’t come with a story.

(Actually, the Julia Child one does… it can be found in the book From Julia Child’s Kitchen — a tradition in this house is to have someone read the passage while someone else makes the salad…)

But that’s another story entirely.

(All recipes with stories welcome. In fact that would be exceedingly groovy…)

in this tiny space was everything

January 4, 2015January 5, 2015 ~ carin ~ 10 Comments

Years ago I lived in a tiny furnished apartment on the second floor of an old Toronto house — and in this tiny space was everything I needed.

A single closet the size of a phone booth in which I managed to hang all my clothes and all my coats, as well as store my shoes and winter boots.

A bathroom in the hall, shared with the woman in the apartment next door.
I heard her come and go but we never once, in all the time I lived there, met face to face.

At the end of the street, a fruit and veggie monger. In winter I would sometimes buy expensive tomatoes from some faraway place where tomatoes were grown to be luscious. I ate them with basil and listened to Joan Armatrading and Van Morrison and had a white cat and a bedroom made almost entirely of windows.

I once called a friend to come and eat tomatoes and basil with me and she came, expecting, I think, a whole lunch but it was just those perfect tomatoes.

Basil.

Oil and salt.

Joan Armatrading, and Van.

And it was enough.

this morning, the smell of chrysanthymums

November 24, 2014November 24, 2014 ~ carin ~ 6 Comments

When they were still fresh, a month or two ago, my single pot of blooms took me directly to a wooden fence made by my dad from driftwood gathered at the beach. Planted alongside was a row of perennial chrysanths. Burgundy. Still the only shade I consider ‘real’ and their smell, decades later, is still about summer winding down, jackets, the grass feeling cooler, street lights coming on sooner.

This morning I notice how they’ve faded, they look more bronze than burgundy.

I lean down, inhale, expecting to be on that fence again but it’s a different smell, earthier, a pile of raked leaves from the pear tree (burgundy and bronze!) and some going brown. Leaves I’d raked myself, a few more every day, the pile growing until my dad said it was time to haul them away. (What did he do with them? Burn them? Bag them? Dig them into the garden?)

I only remember the raking and the leaping and the laying, starfish-like on top, staring up through a canopy of bare branches. I remember tossing handfuls in the air and the dewy wetness of the middle of the pile.

That’s the smell this morning. The middle of that sweet pile.

jungian writing prompt

October 21, 2014October 24, 2014 ~ carin ~ 5 Comments

The instructions were simple. Describe—

My Ideal Dwelling:

Here is where I would not want to live: in a dark narrow tunnel or cave with small windows and doors, the kind you get stuck in in dreams. I would not want to live in a desert or on the side of a very tall mountain, as in the alps. I would not want to live on a distant island or in a place with broadloom wall to wall. I would not want to live where the inside smelled unfresh, stale, dog-like.

A Walk:

I’m on a beach and in the distance a boat has dropped anchor and with binoculars I see the skipper, alone, eating a sandwich made of pumpernickel bread. I sit on the sand and the tide comes in as the boat leaves and then, jeans sandy and feet wet, I stand and leave to find the nearest deli and on my way there is a dog.

A Bear:

No, it’s not a dog, but a bear. I meet a bear. Black. And as usual I can’t remember whether to play dead or run so I decide to do neither. Instead, I engage the bear in conversation. I say Hello. And the bear grunts, shuffles its feet. I say about the boat and the skipper and how I’m off to find a deli and would he or she like to come along? It’s a she I realize and when she agrees I think how safe I feel to have the company of a friendly bear because for all I know the deli may be in a dicey part of town.

A River:

At the river the bear wades across and then turns and stands on its hind legs and one paw reaches out toward me. I start swimming and the bear smiles and I notice that the river isn’t so very deep and this makes me feel at ease with the whole situation. Once on the other side the bear walks through a forest of aspens and into a town and I follow.

A Cup:

On the ground, red and chipped and stained with tea and blueberries.

A Key:

Also on the ground. Under a clear plastic bag held down with a rock. I pick it up and wait for it to speak to me, to tell me what it unlocks. The bear, I notice, has found the deli, but the sign in the window says closed. Hmm….

A Door:

The key opens the door but inside is another door that says Keep Out. An elk kicks it down and inside that, a storage area where a party is being held. There are balloons and raccoon food. The walls are apple green and a guy—the guy from the boat—is there slicing bologna and rye and a line begins to form…

Written in Susan Musgrave’s workshop at the Kingston Lit Festival last month.
The prompts were given one at a time, with a few minutes for writing, then the next prompt, and so on. According to Jung, done this way, each item represents
a different aspect.

House = how we see ourselves

The Walk = direction in life

The Bear = how you react to trouble

The River = sex

The Cup = love

The Key = knowledge

The Door = death

Gee thanks, Carl.
courtesy of wiki commons

bikeless in ontario

October 14, 2014October 14, 2014 ~ carin ~ 6 Comments

I’ve been thinking about bikes more than usual lately. I haven’t had one in over a year and everywhere I look it seems there are places to cycle or things to gather and bring home in a basket between handlebars. I love my old car and where it takes me that I would never go by pedal power alone but there are just so many places between walkable and driveable that perfectly suit two wheels.

And maybe because I’ve been thinking about them, I happen to see more of them, and not just the usual sort either. The other day I saw a tricycle built for two; this large three-wheeler with two seats and two sets of handle-bars, one behind the other. The couple driving were seniors and it was just the most wonderful thing.

I saw a teen-aged lad on a unicycle a few weeks ago. I wanted so much to stop (my car) and take a picture but I felt it might unsettle him and I didn’t like how that possibility played out in my mind. (How does one even stop a unicycle?)

And there’s a guy, maybe in his fifties, maybe older, who rides/pedals/powers a bike that has steps rather than pedals. Like a step machine in a gym. It’s a standing bike that the rider/pedlar powers by stepping one foot at a time, so that one’s whole body moves up and down. I love this thing. The idea of standing instead of sitting seems vastly more comfortable and, given how much sitting we already do, maybe better for the hip joints.

I think about hip joints more and more every year.

The bikes I’ve had in the past are not the bike I want now. For instance, I do not want the red and white tricycle I loved at age six or seven or eight, which I drove at top speeds, fancying myself the envy of both peers and adults. I’m no longer interested in speed or style.

The one after that was green and huge and originally belonged to my much older and much, much taller sister. I don’t remember ever being able to sit on the seat and pedal at the same time.

Then there was the gift of a brand new golden three speed during my teen years. I rode it but never loved it. I didn’t like the colour and instead of a funky banana seat it had the standard issue kind, seriously uncomfortable. And only three speeds? It served me well though. Spent lots of time riding along country roads looking for places to steal fruit and trees under which to read. It had a utilitarian pack above the rear wheel which I could stuff with peaches and paperbacks.

When I moved to Toronto I bought a rust-coloured bike at Canadian Tire, called it Rusty. When I moved to Edmonton, I took Rusty with me. We had some good times and I wouldn’t have wanted to be there without her. But then I moved to England and left Rusty behind. Sold her, gave her away, I can’t remember and if you don’t mind I’d rather not talk about it… [sniff]

In England I had a big black Oxford bike that I rode through a field to get to Waitrose, and down a cobbled hill to get to the corner shop.

Back in Toronto I had a bike that I can barely remember and when I first moved to the town where I now live I had a ten-speed that was entirely wrong. Ergonomically wrong. For me anyway. For one thing it required me to sit hunched forward, grasping those twisted-under handlebars, which I don’t like. I like normal handlebars and to sit upright like old schoolmarms.

The last bike I had, a hand-me-down from my mother-in-law, was sky blue and had the right kind of handlebars. I got a wicker basket for it and quite liked it, but the dear old thing was ancient and eventually toast.

All of this to say: I’m in the market for an addition to my list.

Suggestions, anyone?

Makes, models, testimonials welcome…

WikiCommons knows bikes.

the hypnotic quality of squirrels

October 10, 2014April 7, 2015 ~ carin ~ 8 Comments

Driving from point A to point B… I pass a body of water that sparkles like a cliché in this autumnal way that can’t be ignored. I turn the car around, park, walk directly to it.

I’ve been here before but never noticed the ‘canoes only’ sign. I wonder if that means kayaks too. I would argue a kayak is a canoe made for people who would rather not tip over…

I’m immediately not sorry I allowed this diversion from point A to point B.

I meet a smiling man and woman with cameras and tripods, they ask if I saw him. Him who, I say and they tell me about an eagle, a baby bald eagle, swooping majestically… just there. They point. I point in the opposite direction and explain I was watching ducks and geese dunk their heads. They continue to smile, but I think a little less sincerely.

On the woodsy trail, a few children with parents. The kids squeal with pleasure at the squirrels, as if they’ve never seen one. A boy’s voice over the others: “These squirrels are mesmerizing…” and even though I agree (I’m a veteran squirrel watcher), I can’t help feel he’s just elevated their watchability cred even more.

I take the road less travelled that leads past open fields on one side and the forest on the other. About twenty or so metres ahead, a white-tailed deer leaps across, from field to woods.

There is no picture to document this, only milkweed and asters.

After that a gang of turkeys shows up.
Fortunately they shuffle off into the woods without incident.

This is tempting. I would only need to install bookshelves and a fridge.

Before I leave I run into a few more people: an older couple on a tricycle built for two. And a very young couple, she, chatty with long fire-hydrant-red hair and he, merely besotted, unassuming in his oh-so-thin-Goth look, walking beside her. They could be spending the day anywhere, but they chose here, and it pleases me when she cries out Oh, look, a chipmunk!

Another young couple, the dad in jeans and a top hat, the toddler being followed by a herd of ducks fresh out of the pond, the mum getting it all on film.

A swimming hole.

And then onward, to point B.

strawberries on my mind

August 26, 2014August 26, 2014 ~ carin ~ 15 Comments

And it’s not even the season… except that I was recently given a pint of freshly-picked ones by someone who informed me that there are new cultivars that grow through summer, or at least through much of it. Huh. News to me. I’ve been walking snootily past strawberry displays at the farmers’ markets for ages, assuming they’re imports from re-sellers. And even if I’d known about the all-summer variety I’m pretty sure I’d have given them a miss, assuming hybrids taste yucky.

But the gift strawberries were in no way yucky. And they went very well with ice-cream, just like the real kind. If anything, these were more flavourful than the early varities, which I’ve noticed in recent years have been losing ‘something’.

But that’s not what’s on my mind, strawberry-wise.

It’s picking them. My first serious job. Aside from babysitting and selling Sarah Coventry Jewellery, Avon and Regal Gift Cards door to door. (Actually, Sarah Coventry was sold at ‘parties’. Of which I had one, my mother being my ‘party host’ and whose responsibility it therefore was to invite a rec room full of friends. The host received a complimentary Sarah Coventry brooch or scarf holder or mood ring… Anyway, can’t remember if/what I sold. It was such a sad, sad thing for a child to experience, it effectively ended my whole Sarah Coventry career.)

My strawberry picking career lasted much longer. Almost a whole strawberry season, as I recall. (Please note the season was much shorter then; the people who invented the hybrids had not yet been born.)

The best part was being picked up in a flat-bed truck at the corner of Bunting and Scott at something like 5:30 in the morning. Not only was it great riding in the back of a truck through the city, but none of my friends were up to see how nerdish I was, grinning madly, wind in my face, the sense of berry-fueled adventure coursing through my veins…

The worst part was the rash I got from eating more strawberries than I picked.

When I got my paycheque (I can’t believe I didn’t owe them money), I thought I’d made it, that it just didn’t get any better than this. I had a paycheque for god’s sake. With my name on it.) A picture exists of me holding this cheque. I’m wearing a tie-dye tee-shirt, cut offs and a blue paisley scarf over my hair (tied almost pirate style, but not quite) the way we did in the 70’s when we weren’t embroidering flowers and peace symbols on our jeans.

There’s a good chance I spent it on a Gordon Lightfoot album, incense and a pair of huaraches.

Thank you, WikiCommons