Sam Shepard

You know how you get kind of obsessed with a writer and try to read as much as you can in one fell swoop?

Lately, for me that writer has been Sam Shepard.

I've read him before and in the spring, I had some very interesting conversations with fans of his work that I met at a few work functions. Over the summer, I picked up a play here, a collection of stories there until I had quite a nice collection which I started reading through in the last couple of months.

I am just blown away. Funny how when you read something in your early 20s, things can just fly by you. Something about re-reading him now in my early 40s has opened up a whole new world for me. The distances between us all, the ways we disconnect, the ways we try to reach out, the pain of isolation.

Also, since I am originally from the Western US, perhaps his setting felt too close to me when I first approached Shepard years ago. Now that time and distance fall in between, the west is almost exotic, like a song that's vaguely familiar but whose melody and words I've long forgotten.

His collection Great Dream of Heaven is one of those books I intentionally have been reading bit by bit because I don't want it to end. Some of the pieces are short, some just two pages, none more than 10, but they are incredibly self-contained with complex snippets of characters that stay with you for days afterwards.

It strikes me, too, that his writing has fallen out of fashion in certain ways because we no longer find it fashionable to explore issues of class in our art. Or at least not in the dominant culture. And it's not done in any overtly political way: but his stories contains lives of those on the margins, living hand to mouth in small towns and cities in the west.

The premise he starts with is often simple: a woman driving through the midwest with her mother's ashes in an urn in the passenger seat, encountering an injured hawk along the highway. A conversation between a woman being evicted for having too many cats and someone trying to help her. A young boy interviewing his father about the 1980s for a school project. A customer in a fast-food restaurant inquiring about the simple yet complex philosophy behind a painted sign at the counter.

Yet despite the simple settings and lives, he richly creates these complex series of thoughts, never pretentiously, somehow putting on the page things we've all felt or thought or pondered.

His plays, too: Buried Child is moving, mysterious, deeply symbolic, painful.

New comics series: Manifest Destiny

Been loving this new series by Chris Dingess, called Manifest Destiny.

Based on the travels of Lewis & Clark, the first one in the series hints at supernatural beings and creatures that lived out in the wild west, creatures that Lewis & Clark secretly described and notated in a classified journal only for the eyes of Jefferson.

There's also intrigue and "bad guys" that have infiltrated the Louis & Clark group.

I look forward to seeing how this one develops.

Surveyor's Notebook, Summer 1969

I'm crossing a field that doesn't belong to me, measuring out clumps of condemned trees and tracing heart-breaking outlines as yet unseen by those who live here. When, a surgeon without a scalpel, at five o'clock I walk away through the long leafy shadows, with the light itself stretched tight enough to strum the nerve chords, down my back I sense the looks that kill. I've hiked down into the shelter of a valley and I pause, uncertain, among sandy hillocks, listening under the evening clouds to hear where the first distress calls will come from. Silent and small as a star, a plane passes over and I watch its vapour trail striping the sky, chalky like a child's drawing. Up there, strangers are travelling. One day, my friends, their hordes will descend amongst you. I'm still alone as I tramp towards the motel that awaits me for the night, an unknown traveller prepared to leave his sadness on the doorstep, dreaming of the dry quiet of barns filled with hay and flies.
                                                                                         
                                              -- Pierre Nepveau (translated by Judith Cowan). From Mirabel, Signal 2004

Blue Met and I Musici: The Transfigured Night

In our constant attempt to try new things, we've partnered with I Musici Montreal to present a concert tonight on the work of Benjamin Britten and Rimbaud. Preceded by a talk between I Musici Director, Jean-Marie Zeitouni, and our own Marie-AndréeLamontagne, the evening will present works of the night:

Rimbaud in La nuit transfigurée

Captured in four masterpieces! The first, one of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's most amusing serenades, was composed as a conversation of sorts between two small orchestras. Courtesy of Dominique Labelle, the music of Benjamin Britten then meets the poetry of Rimbaud. In the third work, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, the flight of the lark that heralds the dawn is magnificently rendered by violinist Julie Triquet. And finally, love carries the day in Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, from the groudbreaking composer's tonal period.

We're thrilled to have this chance to work together to bring Montreal the power of words through music.

La nuit transfigurée shows tonight at the Beaux Arts Museum at 8pm. The causerie starts at 7pm and will be in French.

Check out I Musici's website for all their events this seasons and to find out more about tonight's concert.

Taiwan #3: the work of Chang Chao-tang

In Taipei over the weekend, I saw one of the most interesting exhibitions I have seen in many years. It was a retrospective of the work of Taiwanese photographer, Chang Chao-tang.

Born in 1943, Chang is one of Taiwan's best-known photographers and his career spans some of the island's most tumultuous historical periods: from the early 1960s when the island was still agricultural and rural to the dizzying heights of the 2000s when Taipei became one of the Asian Tigers and became highly urbanized and developed.

What strikes me about his body of work is how it reflects the cultural and artistic changes in both Asia and the Western world. His youthful work is bold and realist, almost naturalistic, and I kept thinking while viewing his photos from this period, that he was a 17 year old kid, walking through the neighborhoods of Taipei, asking strangers (workers, farmers, children) if he could take their photos. The images are bold, arresting and even shocking. They show us, as one critic noted, "his innate character when viewing the world - engaged yet observant, extremely calm, not removed yet not intrusive, with a faint atmosphere of doubt and questioning, behind which loomed a potent love for everything that exists."

Once Chang is into his mid to late 20s, his work becomes imbibed with Western cultural trends:

Wuchihshan, Sinchu, Taiwan, 1962

existentialism, avant garde conceptual sorts of framing, ghostly images that are experimental, especially in light of his earlier work. These are often blurry images with decapitated figures, indistinct facial features, done in barren landscapes in between rural struggle and idealism and the heady shiny developed cities of more recent times: the landscapes serve to underscore the importance of the body - new images of the body, in fact - and the oppression and political suffocation which the country was experiencing.

His later work strikes one on a very basic level as some Chinese equivalent of Annie Leibovitz since it's so involved with documenting the lives of the country's writers and artists. Chang's work is less conceptual and far be it from me to criticize a well-known artist like Leibovitz, but I'm drawn more to Chang's images. They are edgier, more about the the bone structure of individual faces, more naturalistic with juxtaposed artists and environments; stories seem to hang over each image. Chang's photographs from this time in his career document writers, musicians, puppeteers and other artists of Taiwan. These range from youthful images of poets from the early 1970s to more contemporary images of painters and visual artists from the early 2000s. Nearly every image on display contained a story I wanted to access.

As I was leaving the exhibit on Sunday, a rare treat: Mr. Chang himself just happened to be passing through. I got to shake his hand, briefly tell him how much I appreciated seeing his work (which is always an awkward way to interact with an artist, I believe) and he was on his way, camera around his neck, still out on the street each day, documenting what he sees and experiences. We should all be so involved at 70 years old!

Leonardo Padura coming into his own...

I was so happy to see this Jon Lee Anderson piece on Leonardo Padura in the New Yorker last week. I've been writing about Padura for a while, before he even came to our Festival in 2012. His events didn't get as much buzz as I'd have liked and I was pounding the pavement with his books, trying hard to sell them and sell his events, but his participation lacked the buzz that some other events had.

This is a tricky part of programming a literary festival: of course, my job is to "sell" all the events and writers associated with the festival each year, but the public and the media seem so fickle at times, and it's not always easy to predict which authors will capture the public's imagination or interest. And every year, naturally, I have my favourite books or authors that I try hard to get the public and media interested in. It doesn't always work.

So I thought I'd take this opportunity to sell Padura again: he truly is one of the most interesting writers working today, not only in Cuba but in the Caribbean broadly. He writes these almost 19th century crime novels that present a complex and intricate view of life in modern Havana. Because his characters live in Cuba, there are no smart phones or Internet so the novels recall the past in tone and function. His novel Havana Fever shows his protagonist, Mario Conde, as he adjusts to his retirement. He becomes involved in book selling (which sets up a beautiful metaphor about the role that books play in modern life) and then comes across an article about a mysterious bolero singer who disappeared in the 1950s.

Padura has also written a more political novel (as of yet untranslated into English) as well as a book on Hemingway. As Anderson puts it in his piece, "For Cuba's intellectuals, and for its professional class, a new Padura book is as much a document as a novel, a way of understanding Cuban reality."

Taiwan #2: Country of Artists

I've really been struck on this trip at how much art and culture there is in this country. And how art/culture seem to be going hand in hand with development.

Detail on tea shop door

In Dadaocheng, a very old market neighborhood that has been in steep decline since the mid-century, small entrepreneurs are moving in, taking over old spaces and creating ceramics workshops, cafes, boutiques, bars and bike shops. The patchiness of these shops is evidence of its newness: there are still ramshackle tiled buildings that are grimy and full of junk. But that only underscores the beauty and sheen of the newly done shops.

The city government assists in the renovations and cleaning up of these older buildings. And there are limitations as to what kinds of business are allowed to take advantage of these funds. No office buildings. No factories. Only things which are related to culture.

In other neighborhoods, too, there is an abundance of excellent graphic design, great little boutiques that sell lovely designs by local designers. Much of it is in neighborhoods that are being redeveloped.

Detail on garage door

Of course, this raises other issues such as what happens to the working class when they are priced out of their neighborhoods. In a very expensive city like Taipei, these are not inconsiderable things to keep in mind. And it's a balance that cities throughout the world struggle with between encouraging development and artistic expression while limiting the open faced effects of capitalism on the real estate market.

Near Longshan temple, there is a preserved neighborhood that is intentionally kept empty. There must be enormous pressures on the city government to open the space up to rentals or leases for private companies but they keep the space free for art events and festivals. They manage to keep it looking pristine and beautiful, a preserved section of the past that underscores the importance of national pride in the uniqueness of this small country's story.

Overall, culture seems to be flourishing and both government and business seem to be working hard to promote local art, literature and culture.

As we know and as we have seen in much of the world, art rarely can survive on a local scale without government intervention. And though the costs are not exorbinant, the payoffs are enormous: would there be a thriving Korean cinema scene without the money the Korean government spent 15 years ago to ensure that Korean cinema be made? And in Canada and Quebec, we can thank in part the government for being willing to promote our writers, artists, dancers and designers. Though only a few make it "international" each year, Canadians know their own writers. Quebecois know their own aritsts and musicians. That means a lot.

Renovated old mansion

Preserved area near Longshan Temple