SHORTCUT (VANCOUVER LAW COURTS) — MAY 2009
BY LEE BACCHUS

MAPLE AND ELM SEEDS — MAY 2009
(EPSON SCAN BY LEE BACCHUS)

CLASSIC
When I first learned about Turner Classic Movies it seemed too good to be true. Great old movies, surely many of them in black and white, commercial-free and around the clock — classics, as the title says. Bergman, Antonioni, Buñuel, Cocteau ... finally I might get to see Il Posto.
Two years went by and I avoided contemporary TV all but completely. I fell into the habit of not even watching the news. Gradually I sensed that "classic" was just another word that the Turner people were confusing with "old." Who would ever describe a Doris Day movie as a classic? They like "themes" at TCM and it seems she was one, for a whole wretched month. Read Dwight Macdonald on her if you want a great laugh — it's better than John Simon on Barbra Streisand because it's less acidically personal. But I owe my Il Posto fixation to Simon, who wrote about it unforgettably.
1930s shorts with dogs standing in for human scenarios. Double Indemnity twice within two weeks, Yuk-shorts featuring Robert Benchley, Giant with Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor: so static and "epic" in a near-Kabuki way that I turned it off. I should have made notes on my TCM experience. There were many times I thought, how low can you go in the name of greatness? Of course, running 24/7 the pantheon would have to run dry eventually, but maybe pick a new name.
But then you see Rules of the Game or Rashomon and suddenly you forget how suddenly "refreshing" you found Corner Gas or The Office.
Maybe old movies are best appreciated as seen through the eyes of an expert who was there. Like Graham Greene's immensely witty The Pleasure Dome, reviews of films from 1935 to 1940.
I've hated Shirley Temple, or her studio, ever since they shut him down. Shirley was only 9 at the time but as sexually knowing as Mae West, which is more or less what he said. Wasn't it true?
— Lloyd Dykk

FOOT OF BLENHEIM CALLS — MAY 2009
BY BERNIE LYON

ASTOR HOTEL (BURNABY) — CIRCA 1950.
POSTCARD

SIWASH ROCK — 2005
BY LEE BACCHUS & BRIAN GRAHAM

38TH , OAK TO WILLOW (THE DREAMS OF 1949) — MAY 2008
BY BERNIE LYON

MOUNTAIN VIEW CEMETERY — 2008
BY LEE BACCHUS

SIDEWALK IRRITANTS — MAY 2009
BY BERNIE LYON

TILTED WINDMILL (RICHMOND) — MAY 2009
BY LEE BACCHUS
(click to enlarge)

KERRISDALE ARENA — 2008
BY BERNIE LYON

STAINSBURY AVENUE (AT VICTORIA DRIVE) — MAY 2009
BY LEE BACCHUS

TEXT MESSAGING UNDER CAMBIE BRIDGE — APRIL 2009
BY BERNIE LYON

GRAFTED TREE (FLOWERING ASH), RIVERVIEW HOSPITAL GROUNDS — 2007
BY LEE BACCHUS & BRIAN GRAHAM

PERSONAL REFORESTATION PROJECT (BROADWAY & LAKEWOOD) — APRIL 2009
BY BERNIE LYON

By now even Zaire must be rapt over Susan Boyle, the 47-year-old Scottish matron who'd never been kissed until the day she tramped into view of a huge Britain's Got Talent audience and made out big time, stunning the judges and making many automatically cynical assholes in the audience rethink their positions on what it might take to be a star. In her appropriately-chosen I Had a Dream from Les Mis, the vibrato may have been a little uncertain but otherwise it was like asking a man in the street to do a quadruple axel and then seeing it pulled off almost flawlessly.

Suddenly the world had a new idol. It may be true, as a friend said, that the world's tears were explainable to "reverse sexism." Mega-offers poured in almost instantaneously, and just as surely, the grooming sharks sensed something in the water, something that could surely spell the end for Susan Boyle, if she acted on it.

Let's hope Susan hangs onto the unibrow, the dumpy if decent style of dress, the touching humility about herself. Isn't the usual stardom glamour routine a little boring by now? A little done? Remember, she's almost 48. It was the argument that naked talent needs.
— Lloyd Dykk

PUSHING — 2008 (SONY-ERIKSSON CELLPHONE)
BY LEE BACCHUS

CROSSING GEORGIA — APRIL 16, 2009.
BY BERNIE LYON

CORDOVA STREET RESIDENT — 2001
BY LEE BACCHUS

KEEP DOGS OFF GRASS
CHILDREN PLAY HERE
(BEATTY & NELSON) — APRIL 2009
BY BERNIE LYON

GRAIN FREIGHTER, DIGBY ISLAND — 2008
BY EDWARD EPP

Edward Epp — Mystic North
Paintings from Northern British Columbia
Until April 28 at Marion Scott Gallery (308 Water Street)
Conversation with Epp, Saturday, April 18 at 4 pm at the gallery.

CORDOVA STREET (1910 POSTCARD/PHOTO COLLAGE) — 2009
BY LEE BACCHUS

WEST 37TH AVENUE — APRIL 2009
BY LEE BACCHUS

BROCKTON POINT — 2008
BY BERNIE LYON

TRAIL #4 (TOWER BEACH), PACIFIC SPIRIT REGIONAL PARK — APRIL 2009
BY LEE BACCHUS

SPRING ARRIVES AT GARLANE — APRIL 2009
BY BERNIE LYON

100 BLOCK WEST HASTINGS (FOR BRITTA) — APRIL 2009
BY LEE BACCHUS

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRITTA

PLANESPOTTERS — 2008
BY BERNIE LYON

The work by Emmanuelle Renard is very modern but in temperament, classically Greek and strikingly beautiful. Her show, at Alliance Francaise until April 20, is called Erosions, and quite fittingly. There is something undeniably erosive about it, cutting as it does through time as well as all the cliches about abstraction.
It can leave you mysteriously in tears from its Attic potency, which is yet a potency resolved in calm. For some reason I thought of Gabriel Fauré, probably the most elegant of French composers and one who sums up the maxim of calme, luxe et volupté. Another name that might come to your head is Jean Dubuffet, though this work is unique. Renard is, incidentally, French, and now lives in Vancouver.
Even pulled up from her website, on a medium notorious for flattening images and reducing their tactical detail (another erosion), Renard's work is stunning. But this view is only an approximation of what it is to see it live.
A brief statement about her work on the website has two particularly apt words. One is Ovid, and the sometimes bipartite images do suggest elegiac couplets. The other word is "paroxysmic", which could help explain the urge for your eyes to well up with purely aesthetic emotion. Only look at Vache. It could come from a paleolithic cave wall at Lascaux, or it could be an image from Greek myth. Yet it has a perfect bovine quiddity.
The work, with its palette of mostly organic colours which are restrained, yet exquisite, is a testament to quiet resolved passion. There is a feeling of sadness here but it is well submerged, perhaps sublimated. As the Arab proverb says, "Sad are only those who understand."
— Lloyd Dykk

Exhibit "EROSIONS"
April 3-20 2009
Alliance Française de Vancouver
6161 Cambie Street
Vancouver, BC
Opening Night April 3
from 6 to 9 pm
Meet the artist April 4
from 2 to 6 pm