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Yesterday Tanya and I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery. We missed the Monet meets Dali show by a few days and were a few days early for the Georgia O'Keeffe show, but there were two good shows on, one on Emily Carr and the Group of Seven which really demonstrated not only her influence but, in my opinion, her superiority to the seven. Her paintings are much more vibrant and breathtaking in person rather than from prints. The other show was a solo show from contemporary American artist Andrea Zittel, whom I was previously unfamiliar. She was looking at living environments, bedroom, kitchen, office, and bathroom and sometimes building portable versions of them that would actually work, boxes that would unfold into completely functional living spaces but could be wheeled down a hallway. On the wall she had written some statements that she "things I know for sure" that Tanya and I both found fascinating.

Flew home last night, very pleased to see Margaret and William again. I spent much of today catching up on things, starting to send out email etc. Luckily I made a list of promises I made and can begin hitting that. I've got a screening of "Brown Christmas with Light" at the ROM in Toronto on Oct 5 and 7 as part of a Canadiana series curated by Larissa Fan. It's a short film with music by Jeff Looysen. This is news upon my return so I've been packaging it up for her but my computer is particularly temperamental today. I don't think I have the processing power or the RAM or perhaps both to handle dvd creation, or even copying. I'm going to start shopping for a new machine.

Goin' like ninety

After leaving MediaNet yesterday, Scott toured me around a number of other places. First off was Cinevic, the film co-op here. They had good energy and I had a positive conversation with one of the staff. They have about 100 members, making them 2/3 the size of Filmpool, but they run everything through a space less than half the size! What I've been noticing at the co-ops here in Victoria as well as Seattle is how much less equipment they have. I bet Vancouver has a lot, it probably comes with being around a few more years, and perhaps from starting earlier when film industries across the country were younger. They all say that such equipment is fairly accessible from industry rentals when needed. The Filmpool's equipment room is stuffed with lights, stands, grip gear, etc. Also, all three groups I saw had only a single open office area, no private offices.

Scott also showed me a couple of artist spaces and a used camera shop, none of which I'd have found on my own.

Last night I went to the films at the festival. I talked at length with Bruno from Mexico who is trying to convince me to come down there for a trip. He programs two months of the year at a cinematheque, so this could be promising. I gave him a collection of my work. This morning I mailed the last set I was carrying to Heather in Halifax so I've go no more portfolios with me.

Alex MacKenzie did his new film projection/performance last night. He has disabled the motor of a 16mm projector and has replaced it with a hand crank. Each revolution is equal to 4 frames or 1/6 of a second or normal film. However, he shows the film at varying speeds, or even pausing it or running it backwards, along with a prerecorded soundtrack, running 400 feet of film (usually 10 minutes) as a 40 minute show. Anyways, the idea of hand cranking a projector goes back to the beginning of cinema, so I totally cracked up when the image of a birdcage came on the screen, followed slowly by the image of a bird, then back again, then back and forth faster and faster until, miracle of miracles, the bird appears to be in the cage. This is the same image I use with my optical demonstration with the round disc (the thaumatrope?) in the first day of first year film courses or animation.

Today I went to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and saw fantastic woodblock prints by Kiyoshi Saito and the photographic retrospective of Iain Baxter. I just saw Baxter on news world the other day, they were promoting part of this retrospective, even though this is the smaller version of it, lacking the painted tvs. He's totally epitomizes the boomer generation to me. The work is fairly good, but the hype is great. Also saw two dozen Emily Carr paintings from the gallery collection and bought two cards.

I'm at University of Victoria. Scott has shown me around some of the facilities they have, some nice computer labs but the cameras are a definite shortfall. They have a well designed darkroom but he's trying to dream up ways to insure that it keeps being used and not dismantled. He's been hand processing, mostly super-8 negative.

My legs are tired.