Snow day!

Les jardins du Luxembourg, today in a rare Paris snowstorm.admittedly, i work at home, so technically the weather shouldn't impact my ability to sit at my desk...
but i couldn't resist going for a walk.

Deserting Detroit

i have a whole new outlook on the life & death of American cities now, after spending 4 days in downtown Detroit. so much has been written about the ruined core of this once-great city, and i knew i would be impressed by the grand, though largely abandoned, architecture.

i didn't realize HOW deserted Detroit really is...notice the empty street...this is a normal weekday morning downtown! i expected the vast empty buildings to be colonized by squats, by artists, by anyone needing room to breathe and work.

but strangely, in Detroit, that isn't the case. nearly half a century after the worst riots occurred, long after the manufacturing & auto jobs were packed up and shipped overseas, the city of Detroit remains a ghost-town, seemingly incapable of a new start. maybe it's the violence (but New Orleans is violent, yet its soul somehow survives tragedy after tragedy.) maybe Detroit's soul left sometime in the 70s, leaving beautiful empty skyscrapers behind, like this one below, where one mysterious light glowed in a room beneath the roof, night after night...

i spoke with some great people in Detroit. bartenders and arts workers and academics who are fighting the good fight to make Detroit honour its heritage. they told me stories of two heritage skyscrapers--one now demolished, the other well on its way to collapse--where the landlords consciously forced out their successful tenants by refusing to heat & maintain their buildings. an empty lot is worth more in this city--or at least, the empty lot might be worth something in the future, and the real estate mavens are simply going to dig in their heels and wait. meanwhile, the streets seem empty even of ghosts, most nights.

where other cities have found that artists are a powerful positive force in urban renewal, Detroit's powers-that-be don't seem to be interested in that route.

But there is a bit of good news, slim but shining. Detroit has forward-looking people, inspired by its intense history, with a peculiar potential to reimagine what a city should look like. one of the most interesting thinkers on this prospect is John Gallagher, who quotes the Japanese poet Masahide: "Barn's burnt down / now / I can see the moon."

the time is long overdue for politicians & planners to see that moon, and put their backs to the wheel in Detroit. they should spend some time at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, in front of Diego Rivera's inspiring mural about labour: Detroit Industry.

Maize

and so i finally found myself near the amazing, the absurd, the astonishing GREAT VERMONT CORN MAZE, which is exactly what it sounds like: a lot of very tall corn, arranged in an intricate pattern.

i first read about this place five years ago, while living in Paris. seemed like a perfect example of old-fashioned American weirdness, and i immediately added it to my "must-see" list. there are in fact all kinds of corn mazes in the U.S.--who knew--but this one caught my imagination. last week, we managed to get there on a perfect day...after stopping to ask for directions at this wonderful gas station. (note their nice Canadian flag)

now, you would imagine that finding a giant corn maze with 2 miles of labyrinthian passages would be fairly easy. mais non. in fact, we drove in circles for about an hour, up small dirt roads, down small gravel roads, through lovely Vermont farm mud & around forests, looking for the maze.

but eventually we found it, paid the very reasonable admission, and spent 90 wonderful minutes walking around in the corn fields. for you non-farm types (uh, like me), corn at this time of year is well over 8 feet, up to 12 feet in places, rustles dry in the wind, and it's really difficult to see over. if you stand on a ladder in the middle of the maze, you can't make out the pattern or even figure out which way to go. it's only in the aerial photo that you get a proper vision of the maze (and they don't post this year's photo until after the maze has been turned into silage for the cows at the end of October.)

this particular maze is the inspired creation of one obsessed guy who married into a farming family, and decided he needed to save the family farm. so now he spends his summers standing on a small bridge, giving people advice on how to get out of the corn. it's a strange job, but he seems truly delighted by it. and he got me thinking about the nature of creative inspiration...whether it's writing a story or planting a field of corn...planning, plotting, imagining how it will intrigue & delight people...

nuit blanche Toronto-style

finally catching up with my blog. i'm still impressed with the latest Toronto version of Nuit Blanche. i don't know how the numbers compare, for this year versus earlier incarnations, but i think the work this time round was so much better than prior years! i was lucky to drop into some especially great musical pieces for the 'white night' project.

first up was Daniel Lanois' Later That Night at the Drive-In in front of City Hall

we got a bit cold, so we didn't stay for the full performance. instead, for something completely different, we went down Bay Street to check out the performance of Erik Satie's -hour piece, Vexations, written in 1893. i'm a big Satie fan (and in Paris, i live five minutes from his old tiny Montmartre apartment) so i was thrilled to hear and see this installation.


as the pianists finished playing a page of the score (which repeats 840 times, each page being identical), a folder retrieved the page and the people seated at this enormous table turned each page into a careful origami section. by the end of the night, that whole table must have been filled with jagged blue pages. it was a spectacular way to visualize the progression of the piece.

ideal cities

"On trash night in ideal cities your other neighbors
swap stories in the alleys. Ideal cities

have margins that aren't pretty or bleak
and are without proper representation

but have no grievances. My ideal city
has a wish list written on the back

of an envelope scrap, an ATM slip.
My ideal city is peripheral and claims

uneven sidewalks."

- Erika Meitner

for the complete poem, go here to Poetry Daily

the fishing (aka writing) shack

quiet enough to hear the dragonflies.

Vegas in Victoria

must be the end of the tour...arriving on the far western edge of Canada! (photo taken through the windshield as we drove in)

first thing, arriving here, i unpacked my lucky metal rat (the cat where i'm staying didn't seem too bothered.)

we opened "Breakfast in Vegas" yesterday at the Victoria Fringe--I was the very first show at the fest. i'm lucky to have a fantastic venue, Cabin12...it's a diner, and it's perfect for the "Breakfast" show concept. Victoria itself is so beautiful, i had to really force myself to stay inside for two days, working on the show. but now it's the weekend & i can explore...

steampunk computer lust

have recently spent too much time in big box stores looking at ugly computers, as my current laptop limps towards purgatory. but even the most design-sensitive laptop in these stores really lacks aesthetic interest. i spend so much time doing creative work on these ugly shiny things, it would be nice to find inspiration in the physical manifestation of the wires (ok, you Mac-phreaks out there, don't let me keep you from enjoying your perfectly smooth iThings. they don't do it for me but i'm glad you're all so delightfully happy.) i'd rather have something along the lines of William Gibson's descriptions in his novel Idoru, laptops remodelled into artworks of turquoise, recycled aluminum, and glass. which almost nearly exists...the laptop that i would REALLY like to buy next looks more like this...or this...

(this photo from computer re-Maker Jake Von Slatt)