Decision Making

Hey fuckers,

I was reading some Herodotus and was struck by his report of decision making as practiced by the "Persians".

H says,

"If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk."

Whether or not this was true, I think it' sounds like a fabulous process. 

I propose that we should adapt all our juries and think tank exercises to include the above mechanisation!  The results could not be any more compromised than they already are, all that sober silence, shrewd ass coverage and friendly empty banter.  

Uncork the wine and let the libidinous conversation flow!

... then we can reconsider later...

Now I am an administrator

Over here at the office, there have been a few changes. 
I have moved myself from one column to another
and Now I am an administrator.

I used to think there were not enough arts administrators
then I thought there were far too many,
“There is far too much management in the arts - seriously”, I said,
but now that I am an administrator,
my very own personal Sherrie Johnson clone,
I fear I may be too much for myself.

Will I be two times as desperate for validation from an uncaring world?
Will I hate myself for making difficult to explain, hard to sell art?
Things that my mother hates?

Will I start talking about legacies so that I can justify ‘what I do’ with tawdry half-assed structures instead of working under the loathed corpse of the artist who is supposed to be inhabiting my imagined future with Outstanding Extraordinary Excellence?
Let him fuck himself! He is obviously unworthy of my supportive efforts so let’s forget the art and turn our attentions to legacies and the community. Community. You know? The clique. Then I think, “fuck that shit, creativity is it’s own legacy!”.

If I fired the artist, I’d be out of a sector and a job. If the sector vanished, that little fucker artist would still keep making shit.

Now I am an administrator
It’s hard to sleep with myself.

On the street outside the office a group of architects were looking at the architectural panel screens that are being erected on the exterior of the new Woodwards high rise. They are rust red metal and have identical lacy, organic-ish, designs. Like scabs.
I said, “It looks like your building has a sexually transmitted disease.”

It must have picked it up at the olympic corporate cluster fuck.

Hey Everybody! Invite me to your arts administrator/managers meetings!

I’m a barrel of laughs.

I’m changing the office motto to "Do What You Want To Do" .

It may seem less worldly than "BE PATIENT,THE WORLD IS STUPID" (motto#1), or "TAKE RISKS,THE WORLD IS CHANGING" (motto#2)- but it feels right for me, for now.

Max and I arrived at the Banff Arts Centre full of optimism and looking forward to delving into a week of creation for Bob's Lounge's new project "Motel" .

 We were fortunate enough to meet some other exciting artists performing work at the centre (see below). We felt so proud to be Canadian!
Max immediately got down to work , composing.
We met some old friends at the Art Centre's Cafe, The Pink Taco. Good times!
Then we went down to the basement and shot off some automatic weapons in the Banff Art Centres underground shooting range.
Here's our friend Rosa with an Uzi. And thanks for the photos Rosa!

The centre is quite multicultural these days. You can select any number of race war scenarios to pump your automatic lead into. There were the Asian punks with spiky hair, a Black 'Brotha' in overalls, a White "Man" in a truckers cap, good ol'Osama, some palestinians, a couple Latinos, and some Russian looking guy with a knife to a woman's throat in a subway. That last one was hard to hit without riddling the lady too, but hey collateral damage and art making, they do go hand in hand. Don't they?

Mr MacGoo seems to have a thing for the Latinos.

I jammed out and went for the nonrepresentational target. Must be because of all my time in the 'abstract dance' world. That, and my white sense of privilege!

We spent a good deal of our time (when not working hard on the art making) driving Mr. MacGoo around in a convertible looking for a pair of shorts. His  zipper was broken, and what with the largeness of his penis and the still somewhat conservative nature of the work presented in Banff, we all felt a little uneasy.
Fortunately , we were eventually able to find the right strip mall, and no problems arose from this situation.
We also went to the Liberace museum in nearby Jasper. Wow!
You know, the funny thing about being in Alberta is that even though you can drink and whore and gamble at a Provincially tax free rate, it's just not that sexy. I mean, if everyone is sinning or encouraged to sin through the democracies of capitalist strip malls, well, where is the transgression? I hate to be a snob, but it's just so cow like. mooooo... . But anyway, like all the other times I've been to Alberta, I may not have enjoyed it but I sure got a lot of work done. Thanks Banff Art Centre! Keep checking in on the batteryopera website for more updates on "Motel" as it develops!  

batteryopera.com/works/bobs-lounge/
Love, David.

Max had bit of a problem with the security at the border, and had to stay an extra day.

Sometimes,

I hate going to festivals in which I feel I have stakes in the art form being canibalised. Festivites swarming over the poorly, skinny carcasses of art, like treasure-seeking maggots. “Where’s the Zeitgeist!” Desperately burrowing through the competing comestibles. Craving sustenance that might staunch the hollow feeling we’ve had since losing our belief in the validity of the form, or perhaps the lifestyle, we’ve found ourselves, at this late stage of our lives, entombed in. The sensation that if a savior doesn’t arise to elevate the whole vessel of the form, slowly sinking on the indifferent wash of the larger cultural miasma, it might be time to gnaw off a limb or two of our own and get the hell out, or at least to an upper deck, become a presenter, an agent, an officer. The panic. The shitty feeling of never being “the one”. The gluttony and disgust with myself and all my wee people. Wee the petit petit bourgeoisie of Arty town.

I just find the context of festivals to be not amenable to the experience of engaging with an art.

If it’s a party we want, that would be one thing, but to ask a form and a “community” to support a presenter’s party, seems a little screwy to me. If your cock is that big, just it lay out on the table and celebrate! Why the communal vortex? All those pricks muddying the water. And vaginas too, I just can’t find an image at the moment- I’ve been sick you see.

One show at a time. What’s wrong with that? You want it? Back it.

I go to festivals.
O.K.
I’ve seen good work at festivals.
I am dependent upon festivals, to a large degree, to get gigs.
I want gigs, but I don’t think festivals are good for art.

Heritage tells me they are good for building communities. Don’t we inevitably live in community? Who the fuck do we think we are? Building a community. What a lot of gall to digest.

What are we trying to build with an arts festival?

A context for the work?

Which work?

I’ve heard we need festivals to present edgier “work”, to create an environment where the interface with this sort of edgy art thing is made little less…. edgy. Safe and enjoyable for the masses and masses of rich and supportive people who will come to a festival and then be converted into enlightened art patrons. Attending all my shows from then on! Oh, poppycock! Edgy festivals present entertainingly audience friendly edginess… all fun and avant-, in it’s packaging, but not difficult, cause that might ruin the new golden age of community for us all.

That’s so depressing- pardon the art everybody- we don’t believe in it either…..but isn’t this, this festival thing, cool.

It sure seems to make all the shareholders happy. The sponsors, the governments, the presenters, the big agents, the mini movers and shakers, (we get out our martini shakers – you bet!), the administrators, and the fabulous audiences, all commended over and over again for making it all happen. It’s fabulous, but what’s missing?

Oh, the art.

Crap.

I’m too sick to pretend I know a better way. But something feels hollow.

Yours truly

DMc

p.s. of course I don't mean you, or your festival.

What it's really like at the office...

We've recently engaged Amy Pelletier to be our new Communications and Administrative Assistant, Joyce Rosario having left us to become empress of her own office at "Made in BC". During the process of moving on I thought it best to issue a disclosure of sorts to prospective colleagues. I share with all, in the hopes that through honesty, we can make the world better. For me, anyway.

DMc

We would like to interview you for the position of Communications and Production Assistant that you applied for. In the interests of full disclosure, please read the info below. Having done so, you may find that you are no longer interested in applying for this position. If that is the case I thank you for your efforts in applying and wish you luck.

Allright then, I will begin:
The Office is small. Just Su-Feh and I, and you. Su-Feh and I both use a lot of profanity in our daily inter-personal communications. “Fuck” is ubiquitous, and “cunt” is not uncommon. When discussing mid and long term planning, shouting can occur between us. Argumentative and offensive shorthand are sometimes employed to speed resolutions. Although our belief in love and the spiritual wonder of existence is strong, we often find ourselves audibly despising the human sphere and the stupid, stupid people in it. Su-Feh comes from Hokkien pirate whores and fishermen and I from dissolute colonial enforcers and misanthropes who ran out of road. Our World-view is so affected. I often exaggerate.

As a Communications and Production assistant you may have to navigate conflicting agendas. Such as:

I despise the idea of a cultural Olympics. What art associated with Olympics past can you remember? For me only two come to mind. The one where Philippe Decouflé did some cute shit with people in eggs on a ski run, and I was nonplussed as to what Su-Feh actually saw in him – his cute ass I suspect. The other would be the one with Hitler and Leni Refeinstal. So, I conclude that all Olympic connected art events and “show cases” will be ART ABATTOIRS whose only goal is to destroy individuality and discourse to salve the insecurities of the majority of idiots who call this vain little hidy-hole of a city home (Vancouver, I mean). Now couple my beliefs with the fact that the funding we need for our projects has been entangled into the Olympic machine, and that we believe it is our job as artist to initiate coherent dialogue about issues, and you have a complex task at hand. How and where can the dialogue be best initiated, in ways that people will actually engage in it, and how can we secure funding in ways that doesn’t make us hate ourselves?

Lastly,
I am a terrible boss. Therefore I do not want an employee. I want someone who can use the company structure to further their own goals in a way that is also of benefit to the company. We offer a fee for an artist- not a salary for an employee. Part of being an artist is making sure that certain structural tasks are done to maintain the non profit company infrastructure. How you use that structure as an artist is up to you.

At our interview, I will ask you what you want to achieve over the next three years, and how working with battery opera is connected to this.

Thanks,
I look forward to meeting you
David McIntosh

Su-Feh's Seattle Review

Last week, Su-Feh taught her class, Unifying Body, Breath & Imagination, at the Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance & Improvisation (SFADI).

She also performed an excerpt of her new solo, The Whole Beast, and here's what Sandra Kurtz at the Seattle Weekly had to say:

"Lee Su-Feh, in an exquisite excerpt from her solo, The Whole Beast, tackled multiple issues of meaning and translation, cultural displacement, the relationship between practice and skill, and the economic uncertainty of a dance career, all the time linking these ideas to dancing. As she slid through a long sequence of poses that seemed to combine martial arts and ballet, she murmured simple greetings in French and English. As her tempo increased, the words fractured into syllables and the shapes became erratic until the increased tension and density exploded with a "Fuck!" This led to a discussion of translation (she needed to know the French equivalent of "fuck" for an upcoming performance in France); she batted the options back and forth, like a solo game of Ping-Pong, which in turn morphed into a lament over the high cost of physical therapy and the ironic disconnect between the freedom of dancing and its physical toll ("Joy is the source of all my pain"). Su-Feh is small and fierce, and though it wasn't clear on a single viewing how much of her work was set and how much improvised, she was clearly in charge of the entirety, and of us, as we were swept up in her stories."