April 24, 2014

Whither Church Going?

I've had a long semester and blog entries have been sporadic at best. Apart from a few album reviews, I've had little time to give to writing and I'm hoping to change that. Schoolwork is responsible for sucking up most of my days and nights. Whatever time was leftover I gave to job/internship applications, and I'm happy to report that I have a graphic design job for the summer that will likely switch part-time when the Fall semester begins.

But despite my inactivity on the blog, there's been plenty going over the past month.

  • The second issue of Guts Canadian Feminist Magazine has been published.
  • The Truth and Reconciliation Commission ended here in Edmonton.
  • I stupidly jumped down a flight of stairs in a Toronto subway and fractured my ankle. Yeah, really proud of that one.
  • I won an award for some posters I designed.
  • My gf entered the debate over unpaid internships at the Walrus.
  • I've been doing a lot of freelance work, some of which is featured on my tumblr page.

I'm off to Toronto tomorrow morning for a brief visit before I start my job. I'm also looking forward to a summer full of personal projects. Some of these probably won't happen but listing them here might help.

  • a month of studio time at SNAP (which hopefully results in a chapbook)
  • working through John Ruskin's Elements of Drawing and Walter Crane's history of illustration
  • conference design for the Marxist Literary Group's annual Institute on Culture and Society
  • a couple zines, comics strips, etc.
  • a series of musician portraits to build up my illustration portfolio and as well as some concert posters for local venues
  • several book reviews on art and aesthetics (I've been meaning to write on Jacques Ranciere's The Future of the Image and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Ground of the Image)
  • condensing the final chapters of my thesis into an article
  • more focused writing on music

April 1, 2014

"Why I Am Not a Painter"

“Why I Am Not a Painter” by Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.