Zen Bones

At a Zen Buddhist temple in southern Japan, even the dog prays.

Mimicking his master, priest Joei Yoshikuni, a 1 1/2-year-old black-and-white Chihuahua named Conan joins in the daily prayers at Naha’s Shuri Kannondo temple, sitting up on his hind legs and putting his front paws together before the altar.

It took him only a few days to learn the motions, and now he is the talk of the town.

“Word has spread, and we are getting a lot more tourists,” Yoshikuni said Monday.

Yoshikuni said Conan generally goes through his prayer routine at the temple in the capital of Japan’s southern Okinawa prefecture without prompting before his morning and evening meals.

“I think he saw me doing it all the time and got the idea to do it, too,” Yoshikuni said.

The priest is now trying to teach him how to meditate.

Well, sort of.

“Basically, I am just trying to get him to sit still while I meditate.”

Failing Grades for Ontario Roadside Zoos

Ontario has the weakest zoo regulations and animal protection laws in Canada.

There are more than 45 zoos in Ontario – more than any other province – and approximately 60% of all Canadian zoos are in Ontario.

The majority of zoos in Ontario are “roadside zoos”—small, substandard facilities that typically house animals in poor, barren conditions, and lack trained professional animal care staff and the financial resources necessary to ensure proper animal care and housing.

Ontario does not regulate the keeping of exotic wildlife in captivity. One doesn’t even need a licence to keep a lion or tiger in their backyard. 2/3 of the animals kept in Ontario zoos are exotic species.

A licence is only required to keep native wildlife in captivity and the conditions are minimal, vague and poorly enforced.

To open a zoo, no training or education is necessary and no business plan or base level of funding required.

There are no public health and safety regulations or inspections to protect zoo staff, volunteers, visitors and neighbours.

It is not a provincial offence to abuse a zoo animal.

WSPA review

Ontario is expected to introduce legislation shortly, aimed at overhauling the sadly outdated 90-year-old law that regulates these misery camps. The updated legislation is intended to set standards of care for small zoos and give the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals the right to inspect the operations. The bill, if passed, will also likely ensure there are tougher consequences for people who abuse animals by making it a provincial offence to hurt an animal.

Newfoundland and Labrador spells out how specific species should be housed and treated, and Alberta recently brought in tougher zoo regulations. In other provinces, the SPCA can go into zoos and inspect the animals.

While some are worried about how the bill might impact rural animal-owners, the plan is being hailed by animal welfare groups who say the overhaul is long overdue.

“There are some pretty sad cases out there,” said Bill Peters, national director of the Canadian Association of Zoos and Aquariums, who made recommendations to the Liberals about the new legislation. “Their standards are pretty deplorable. Some of the animals are being kept in conditions that you simply don’t want to see continue.”

Ontario’s small zoos are considered to be among the worst in the world. Investigators say they have found animals living in filthy conditions, without clean drinking water or adequate stimulation. Animals that are social and used to living in groups are kept in isolation while other more dangerous animals – like tigers and lions – are kept in flimsy cages that allow children to stick their hands right in.

In June, 2006, WSPA surveyed three of Ontario’s roadside zoos. The worst, it says, was Lickety Split Zoo in London, where footage was captured of a kangaroo unable to stand on its hind legs, a horse with cracked hoofs and several unlocked animal cages.

Some Ontario zoos won’t have much difficulty upgrading to meet new standards, Peters said. The ones who can’t should be shut down, he added. They don’t have the facilities or the educated staff to house exotic animals humanely, Peters said. “They’re simply not taking care, in any adequate sense, of the animals that they’re responsible for.”

Kristin Williams, with the Ontario SPCA, said the Liberals have given the organization cash for a voluntary inspection program but there is nothing the SPCA can do if a zoo refuses to allow an inspection. “Unfortunately, the current Ontario SPCA Act is woefully inadequate,” said Williams, who made recommendations to the Liberals on the new legislation. “It’s also very antiquated. The way people feel about their companion animals has evolved. The province wants to address those concerns and is “interested in giving the Ontario SPCA greater powers to resolve the issues that are suspected with animals in captivity.”

The new legislation comes after backbencher Liberal David Zimmer introduced a private members’ bill to regulate roadside zoos, a bill which died on the order paper when his government prorogued the legislature last year.

Melissa Tkachyk, campaigns officer with the World Society for the Protection of Animals, said she’s thrilled the province has finally decided to revamp the 1919 law. It’s time the province took a more proactive approach to the protection of animals, she said. “Of course, we always want to see things happen quicker but there has been a huge break and they haven’t got back to the legislature yet so we’ve got to be patient.”

Opposition Leader Bob Runciman is also eagerly awaiting the bill. The Conservative veteran – who has spearheaded bills to increase the penalties for people who abuse cats and dogs – said the devil will be in the small print of the legislation. The Liberals could run into trouble if they make the law too broad and subjective, allowing it to be applied to rural residents and their farm animals.

Well, that’s assuming McGuinty and his crew pass the bill this time.  Last year, McGuinty decided to end the legislative session 3-1/2 weeks ahead of schedule. Runciman’s bill took a back seat to the McGuinty crew’s overwhelming desire to get the hell out of Dodge and go blow some of that swag snagged the previous Christmas when they awarded themselves salary, RRSP and severance hikes totalling 31 per cent.

Source: Zoocheck
According to the WSPA report on zoo failures (2006), passing zoos in Ontario are the Toronto Zoo, Jungle Cat World, Muskoka Wildlife Centre and Zooz Nature Park in Stevensville, Ontario.

The 12 failing zoos are the Bear Creek Exotic Wildlife Sanctuary, Bergerons Exotic Animal Sanctuary, Bowmanville Zoo, Colasanti’s Tropical Gardens, Elmvale Jungle Zoo, Greenview Aviaries Park and Zoo, Killman Zoo, Lickety-Split Ranch and Zoo, Northwood Buffalo and Exotic Animal Ranch, Papanack Park Zoo, Pineridge Zoo and Twin Valley Zoo.

WSPA 2006 report

Zoocheck documents abysmal conditions at Killman Zoo, Twin Valley Zoo, and Lickety-Split Ranch and Zoo:

Ontario Zoocheck Report #1 (2006)

An older Zoocheck report from 1995 documents Ontario zoo investigations, and includes extensive information on recommended standards.

Report on Ontario Zoos, 1995

Just Before the Unpleasantness Began

This week’s Darwin Awards go to Desi Life (“yes, pink and turquoise do go well together”), an offshoot of the Toronto Star catering to the growing GTA South Asian population, which arranged an ill-managed photo-shoot at the Bowmanville Zoo, to build readership by showing how exotic ancient Indian martial arts can be. And that there are no limits to human stupidity.

A dancer knocked over by a lion during a photo shoot at Bowmanville Zoo says she is happy to have come away with four broken ribs and a bloodied lung.

“To be honest, the sensation I have is a great deal of gratitude to be alive,” Gitanjali Kolanad said yesterday.

From the beginning, the 180 kilogram beast proved playful and not entirely under the control of its two minders.

Kolanad, 54, practices the ancient, and obviously ineffectual, Indian martial art of Kalaripayat, fashioned after the movements of such animals as the lion, elephant, wild boar and peacock. The magazine suggested she pose with a lion. Next time, she might just tell them where to get off, and choose a peacock instead…

A video of the session shows Leo first knocking over editor Sonia Verma. She picks herself up and smiles. He next paws the legs of photographer Richard Lautens. Off-camera, he also took a swipe at the legs of art director Spencer Wynn.

Video

The 3-year-old lion was lying nearby when an oblivious Kolanad was getting into her movements. Still wanting to frolic, the animal jumped up and fell on her, knocking the wind out of her, bruising her left lung and breaking four left ribs.

It was not an attack, the witnesses said. The lion’s mouth was not open and Kolanad was not scratched. The Bowmanville Zoo had no comment on the incident.

Focus is key in Kalaripayat, which bases its movements on the effortless power of animals. It’s a constant lesson in focus. When you lose your focus, you immediately get hit.

In the video, one minder kicks the otherwise docile beast in the neck (nice work, Tarzan) while the other pulls on Leo’s chain. The lion takes a second, unsuccessful lunge at Kolanad as she lies gasping, before he is escorted out the door.

Although unable to work for the past month and still in pain, Kolanad said she feels on the mend.

Kalari masters are experts in the use of herbs, oils and massage. They also treat broken bones and sprains, all without X-rays or anesthetics.

Next time, Desi Life, save Leo a whole lot of grief and go Photoshop your bumptious drivel. Force of Nature, indeed.

Hope these folks don’t tell their kids to go play outside and annoy the dog in the backyard. And that the Liberals don’t start banning lions and any cats that are substantially similar…

Bowmanville Zoo is one of the largest suppliers of trained animals for the feature film and television industry. Maintaining the largest stable of trained movie and television animals in Canada, the Bowmanville Zoo bring cutting edge operant conditioning techniques and behavioural modification to the animals under its stewardship. While concentrating upon the large feline predators and elephants, the zoo has enjoyed great success with a wide array of mammalian, reptilian and avian species.

Marion Cotillard is La Môme Piaf

Non, rien de rien.
Non, je ne regrette rien.
Car ma vie, car mes joies
Aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi !

‘The first time I heard Edith Piaf sing, I cried,” says 31-year-old Oscar winner Marion Cotillard, who plays the legendary French singer in a heartbreaking new biopic, La Vie en Rose. “I was so moved – and so impressed that in only three or four minutes she could tell a whole story that would make me cry.”

Piaf certainly had a handle on misery. During the 47 years of her short life, she lost almost everyone who mattered to her: her parents ran off to the circus when she was a baby, leaving her to grow up in her grandmother’s brothel; her only child died of meningitis; and the love of her life, boxer Marcel Cerdan, was killed in a plane crash only two years after they’d met.

Yet somehow, despite all this, she soared from the filthy Parisian streets of Belleville to the glitzy heights of stardom, touring the world with a clutch of show-stopping tunes delivered always in that miraculous, seismic voice: it shook her birdlike frame, held audiences spellbound, and transmuted the gloom that enshrouded her life into musical gold.

Cotillard, as Piaf, gives the most remarkable performance you’ll see on film this year.

Whether portraying the scruffy teenage ingénue – spotted singing on a street corner and ushered on to the stage of his nightclub by Louis Leplée (played by an avuncular Gérard Depardieu) – or the aging diva, crippled by arthritis and addicted to morphine, Cotillard’s extraordinary turn seduces the eye and assaults the heart.

Although Cotillard is a talented chanteuse, and already knew Piaf’s music back-to-front having long ago acquired the habit of listening to it in her trailer whenever preparing to act a particularly emotional scene, Piaf’s own recordings were used for the soundtrack.

Cotillard insists that she was undaunted by the prospect of taking on the mantle of a French national treasure, an iconic figure whose funeral, attended by 40,000 fans, brought central Paris to a standstill.

“I was inspired by a great uncle who used to live at home with us,” she says. “I still remember him perfectly, all the movements of the person he was just before he died: the way he walked, the way he behaved, and that horrible life you lead when you are ill inside. For the old Piaf, I took all of that.”

The result, a striking combination of physical frailty with emotional volatility, makes Cotillard’s Piaf a far from straightforwardly sympathetic character. The flip side of her contagious joie de vivre is a selfish capriciousness: she casts off lovers like dirty stockings and, as her fame grows, neglects her old friends, or humiliates them in front of her starrier new acquaintances.

“When I started reading about her life I discovered a bright side and a dark side,” says Cotillard. “Some aspects of that dark side I initially found very hard to accept – like the tyranny that she could use over people. But then I realised that her selfish behaviour was motivated by her desire to keep people around her. She was so scared to be alone. And once you understand that, you stop judging her.”

In preparing for the role, Cotillard read and heard many stories about Piaf – few figures in French popular culture have generated quite so much myth and rumour -but one source she grew to trust more than any other was the singer’s old friend, Ginou Richet, who offered her a surprising insight into Piaf’s character. “Ginou shared with me many things that she thought would help me to understand Piaf,” says Cotillard.

“But above all she described her as a happy person. Yes happy. Even though she lived such crazy tragedy, such huge tragedy, Piaf loved to have fun. She loved life.”

Telegraph UK review

La Vie en Rose is the English-given title for the Academy Award-winning film La Môme, a 2007 French movie directed by Olivier Dahan about singer Édith Piaf, starring Marion Cotillard in her Academy Award, BAFTA, César Award, Czech Lion, and Golden Globe winning performance as Piaf.

Peter Doig: Painting the Margins

When you drive through Toronto’s northeastern suburbs on the Don Valley Parkway, your eye is momentarily caught by a marginal flash of garish colour in the grass beside the six-lane highway. Someone, long ago, has painted a crude rainbow on the entrance of a lonely pedestrian underpass, a sad and fading trace of desperate humanity on this unwelcoming slab of nature.

For the past several weeks, this most tellingly Canadian scene, entitled Country Rock, has been a source of fascination to hundreds of thousands of people across the pond in London, England. That suburban Toronto touchstone, glimpsed from a passing truck in 1994 and rendered across a huge canvas in watery stripes of lurid oil, is visible everywhere in London these days: on posters and lamp-post banners, on catalogue covers, in big spreads published in every newspaper.

It serves as an invitation to step inside a vision of man and nature that can only have been forged in the Canadian experience, in which the weight of wilderness overwhelms the viewer.

Just as Turner was dazzled a century and a half ago by the industrial-gas sunsets on the banks of the Thames, today’s Europeans are experiencing a similar shock of painterly discovery in the ravine behind the high school, in the police car pulling up to the lake behind the cottage, on that awful stretch of Highway 401 between Montreal and Toronto.

Peter Doig has turned these slush-encrusted visions of the Canadian periphery into the continent’s biggest art sensation. The Tate’s current 25-year retrospective of his works has become the most talked-about exhibition in London, receiving pure adulation from the art press and the mass media.

What are people seeing here? Why are the British critics calling him the 21st-century Turner, the Winslow Homer of the postwar years? On one level, you realize, it is simply great painting, not just technically but as pure, exciting narrative: Doig has an uncanny skill in grabbing you by the shoulders and pointing you at a scene of almost cinematic intensity; his canvases give you the sense that something is about to happen just beyond the edge, just below that weird smear of pink paint in the snowstorm, just as soon as the slouched-over guy finishes walking across the half-frozen pond.

You can talk about his influences – there is, in his dazzling oils, a lot of the stripped-down ponds and pathways of David Milne, the sky explosions of Paterson Ewen and a good swath of the jazzed-up nature of Monet and Lawren Harris, and, since he moved to Trinidad in 2002, some sunnier vibes of Paul Gauguin’s mystery visitors, who populate the edges of tropical lakes that seem every bit as alienating as the Canadian ones of the 1990s.

But you cannot get away from the very singular set of things that he is painting. There are many canoes on many lakes here, but these are not the transcendent, welcoming lakes of Tom Thomson. The boats seem lost, the lakes cruel. There are a lot of people standing on frozen ponds, examining the ground below them, leaving you unsure where they start and it ends. There are buildings that always seem to be in the process of being devoured, the scary banality of nature exposing the futility of architecture.

Sadness, Doig once said, is “a pervasive mood in the work,” and this is the sadness of the median strip, the sadness of the need to hitchhike in the snow. “A lot of the work deals with peripheral or marginal sites, places where the urban world meets the natural world,” he told one interviewer. “Where the urban elements almost become, literally, abstract devices … a lot of the paintings portray a sense of optimism that can often be read as being a little desperate, like the image of a rainbow painted around the entrance to an underpass.”

Many of us had believed, until now, that these were very private sort of things experienced by a small clan of people living north of the 49th parallel, incomprehensible to outsiders. For Europeans, Canada was represented by those Emily Carr visions of a benign and spiritually engaging nature, or perhaps by Harris’ rows of simple shacks against a big forest – nature that wanted you in it.

It took someone like Scottish-born Doig, to tell the world something far truer about the Canadian relationship with nature. It is always there on the edge, threatening to overthrow us.

Without that rainbow-stencilled underpass, it would all be leafy hell.

Peter Doig runs at Tate Britain in London until April 27, after which the exhibition travels to Paris and Frankfurt, Germany.

Globe and Mail review

Images: Country Rock, Reflection (What Does Your Soul Look Like?), White Canoe

Cows with Guns

A half-century after the Hart of London got taken down, something was in the water of Mississauga, a bedroom suburb of Toronto, this morning.

Police shot and killed a steer that escaped from an overturned truck, saying they had no choice because the animal was charging at people. “It charged at one of the officers, right at him, and he had no choice.”

The steer escaped from a cattle truck, along with two cows and a bull. The truck overturned at about 6:40 a.m., snarling traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way near Highway 427. (For you out-of-towners, this is a conjunction of two major rush-hour routes into the Big Smoke on Canada’s south shore, right at the corner of Sherway Gardens mega-mall).

Two of the animals ended up in the backyard of a home on idyllic Brentano Boulevard. Initially, the animals were peaceful, calmly munching away at the shrubs in the garden.

“They were rubbing up against my father’s shed. They were fine in the backyard. I guess when they tried to get them out of the backyard, that’s when they got really restless,” said a resident of the normally bucolic suburb.

The steer got spooked when handlers tried to corral it and force it into a truck. One of a number of portable iron gates used to guide the animals into the truck fell, scaring the steer. This blogger notes that the horde of residents and police might not have been helpful either; just watch the Toronto Star video and draw your own conclusions.

The officer in question then fired something like 30 rounds into the animal after which a second officer helped finish it off with a few more shots.

“He was using a handgun because we weren’t planning on taking the animal down,” noted a constable. “It was a last-minute call by the officer. Most of the streets were closed off. He was not going to endanger anyone’s life.”

Nice job, Dudley Do-Right.

Toronto Star

Dana Lyons’ Cows With Guns website

The Hart of London

Jack Chambers’ 80-minute The Hart of London (1970) is a sprawling, ambitious experimental film that combines newsreel footage of disasters, urban and nature imagery, and footage evoking the cycles of life and death. It is one of those rare films that succeeds precisely because of its sprawl; raw and open-ended almost to the point of anticipating the postmodern rejection of “master narratives,” it cannot be reduced to a simple summary, and changes on you from one viewing to the next.

Through the crushing banality of local television news images, we learn that a deer has wandered into downtown London, Ontario during the winter of 1954. After jumping the fences separating the city’s backyards, the deer is captured by local police. It is bound and placed in a cage made of storm fencing. A policeman pats it on the head. Then a man dressed as a hunter balances his rifle through the wires of the fence. We don’t actually see him pull the trigger.

We see it first in woods, then streaking through backyards and leaping a fence. There is a tension between the subdivided yards and the deer’s graceful movements: this animal was not made for rectilinear housing plots. Townspeople, not sure how to react, point to it, and the footage seems to be displaying the deer as some sort of spectacle, almost like an animal in a zoo. Officials chase, capture, and finally kill it, and its corpse is displayed too, for the camera.

The imagery seems inviting, but as one realizes it is created with the hart as spectacle, alive and dead, in mind, one is also repulsed. The hart is seen as a fleetingly-observed other; even mainstream nature documentaries do a better job of capturing the way animals look and move. The viewer feels at once attracted and pushed away.

The Hart of London combines archival newsreels with original footage while adding an undercurrent of simmering violence to the mix. Superimposing found images of a deer being trapped and killed in downtown London with antiquated images of the city in industrial transition (trolleys and automobiles share the street with horse-drawn carriages), Chambers re-creates an urban history that is original, expansive, and severe.

As a parallel to the thematic motif of the persecuted deer, Chambers introduces chilling colour footage of lambs being slaughtered (photographed on a return visit to Spain) at the film’s midway point. Chambers writes, “In the second part of the film [these slaughterhouse] images become symbolic of the pursuit and death of the deer. This theme is repeated again and again in the real images of everyday life.” These “real images” include several staged, mechanical spectacles (a teenager diving into an icy river, crowds gathering to observe a brush fire), as well as repetitive, banal daily activities (a man trimming his hedges, Chambers cutting his lawn).

The consistent tension generated and sustained over the course of its demanding length, without the aid of musical cues or voice-over exposition, demonstrates why The Hart of London is considered Chambers’ greatest cinematic achievement. Fred Camper, for instance, identifies The Hart of London as “one of those rare films that succeeds precisely because of its sprawl.”

Through the course of the film, man encroaches on nature from every angle. People emerge from underground transport, parachutes fall from the sky and bridges cross water. Even children make sand castles on the beach preparing for the next image of concrete buildings. In the final analysis, nature seems to confront London’s inhabitants as an enigma or threat. At the film’s very end, children (Jack Chamber’s own) approach a hart with food, and their mother whispers warnings; the animal as object, filmed from afar, suffers from a perceptual uncertainty. In the case of a dead wolf, its hunters turn it into their image and have it wave and greet their woman at home, like a man returned from the woods.

While man thrusts himself on the environment, containing it and turning it into his image, Chambers treatment of the filmed image creates a fracture between the filmed and the ‘film’. His jarring superimposition of positive and negative creates particularly interesting deployments of light. In the case of newsreel footage of a horse and cart ploughing the field, he overlays a positive and negative of the same image, and only a small time displacement between the images makes the superimposition readable.Whilst light in cinema creates image and thus life, here Chambers acknowledges this but pushes further asking what it is interpret and recognize, unlike the objective view as propagated by the newsreels he uses and subverts to this end.

Jack Chambers was born in 1931 and began work on The Hart of London in 1969, having been diagnosed with leukemia only shortly before. He died in 1978, struggling with his own care for nine years. He was a Catholic and a poet, and as an artist he secured a reputation as a critically acclaimed and financially successful painter. He began making films in 1966. The Hart of London was the last of five films made by Chambers, and despite the support for experimental film within Canada at the time of its making, remains sorely under-screened in both Britain and North America.

More reviews and footage at Shooting Down Pictures

Lux review

Fred Camper review

Senses of Cinema

The Films of Jack Chambers

Balance: Art and Nature

Environmental art is a catch phrase that includes land art, earth-sensitive art and artists working with natural materials. Land art is a phenomenon of the ’60s and ’70s, with artists like Robert Smithson who made his Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Utah, one of those grandiose environmentally insensitive works that transformed the landscape.

Earth-sensitive art is smaller in scale, integrating an assemblage or sculpture in a natural setting, and there is art made with natural materials, which is usually exposed indoors.

~~ John Grande

Art critic John Grande writes about environmental art in his book, Balance: Art and Nature

Believing that artistic expression can and does play an important role in changing the way we perceive our relation to the world we live in, art critic John Grande takes an in-depth look at the work of some very unusual environmental artists in the United States, Canada, and -Europe.

Grande contends that the egocentricity of modern western society and its infatuation with technology and consumerism have increasingly separated us from the natural world. That separation has an impact on the way our art is conceived, formed, marketed and even displayed. Grande proposes that art return to being more “ecocentric,” reminding us that we are derivative and essentially dependent on natural processes. “In developing a nature-specific dialogue that is interactive, rooted in actual experience in a given place and time, and giving these elements an equal voice in the creative process,” he writes, “we are ultimately respecting our integral connectedness to the environment.” Holding such a vision, we will come to see that “nature is the art of which we are a part.”

To develop a dialogue more in touch with nature, Grande argues that artists should favour their specific culture and the diversity of the ecological communities in which they live rather than the homogenizing pressures of internationalism. He asserts that contemporary artists’ preoccupation with international “market recognition,” often reinforced by museums and funders, promotes a “product standardization” that takes precedence over any desire to represent one’s own culture and bioregion. In such a horizontal milieu, artists and their works consequently become easily interchangeable. The attendant appropriation of Third World, tribal and extranational art styles not only mirrors acts of economic expropriation but also often ensures the commercial success of the collusive artists. Such appropriation barely pauses to appreciate the source culture’s context and meaning.

As an alternative, Grande proposes that we celebrate the cultural diversity naturally intrinsic to each ecological community or bioregion. Such a preference would nourish the artistic expression of the cultural symbolism and spiritual values unique to that region. It would enhance an intuitive dialogue with nature in the creation of art, encouraging a healthier relationship with the local environment.

John Grande website

I think, a lot of art has as much to do with fashion and the look of things as it has to do with a kind of search for breakthroughs or a higher meaning. In a way we almost have an over-production situation where art is fine and society is in bad shape. It is one of my main concerns right now, The programs are working. Artists are producing. But the actual society is breaking down in many ways as a collectivity and becoming sort of digitalized. We have become digitalized producers and consumers.

Nature is the house that supports us all. We sometimes forget that. The same thing can be said for the world of art. What really nourishes art, more than ideas, is the physical world, and it is the main sustaining feature of any kind of aesthetic, even so-called immaterial ones.

Interview with Mike MacDonald

Interview with John Grande at Green Museum

Earth Art Exhibit at Royal Botanical Gardens

EcoArt Network

Art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer, John Grande’s reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photo-graphy, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum. He is also the author of Balance: Art and Nature (a newly expanded edition by Black Rose Books in, 2004), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998), Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engagé (Lanctot, 2001), and his most recent book, Dialogues in Diversity: Marginal to Mainstream published in Italy in 2007 by Pari Publishing.

Satori in Paris

Although he was born and raised in Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac’s family was French-Canadian, and he was proud of it.

Published in 1967, when Kerouac was at the height of his fame, Satori in Paris tells the story of a ten-day visit to Paris and Brittany in search of his ancestors.

On this hectic odyssey, fascinated by everything and everyone he met, from a faded French beauty in a Montparnasse gangster bar to one of his strange, foppish Breton namesakes, Kerouac experienced a feeling of transcendence, a satori, which was to the Beat generation the culmination of all experience.

Andrew Sarris reviewed Satori in Paris for the New York Times in 1967. Here is his blunt and accurate, in this blogger’s opinion, excerpt.

If the latest spiritual adventures of Jack Kerouac lack the ebullience of earlier explorations, it may be because he is hunting down a pedigree rather than an identity. (“As in an earlier autobiographical book I’ll use my real name hear, full name in this case, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, because this story is about my search for this name in France.”)

By his own admission, Kerouac was 43 years old when he braved Paris and Brittany. That’s a bit old for a Dharma Bum drunk on Dante’s Beatitude, a Rover Boy with a yen for Zen, a traveler of the fifties who managed to bypass Marx and Freud on the road across the American continent.

Kerouac can still write a blued streak, but his skyrocketing prose no longer illuminates the landscape. He now travels alone, out of his time and place, more like a Babbitt than a beatnik.

He now seems to revel in a calculating callousness, particularly in his country-club put-down of “a half dozen eager or worried future writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I’ll prove it with this here manuscript called Silence au Lips all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh'”–Ugh, indeed. No there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-and-Grove-go-I feeling in Kerouac’s credit-card sensibility.

At times, his aggressive religiosity resembles Cassius Clay’s: Methinks women love me and then they realize I’m drunk for all the world and this makes them realize I can’t concentrate on them alone, for long, makes them jealous, and I’m a fool in love With God. Yes.”

As for what a satori actually is, he explicates in quasi-religious terms: “Somewhere during my ten days in Paris (and Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to’ve changed me again, towards what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori: the Japanese word for ‘sudden illumination,’ ‘sudden awakening’ or simply ‘kick in the eye.'”

Unfortunately, the illumination comes at the end of a shaggy dog story by a saloon Sartre who manages to get gushy over the straighforwardness of a Paris cab driver.

New York Times Book Review (sign-in may be required)

Lambs of God: Anniversary of the Pet Food Recall

We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own, live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we still would live no other way. We cherish memory as the only certain immortality, never fully understanding the necessary plan.
~~ Irving Townsend

The anniversary of the 2007 pet food recall is a particularly bittersweet time of remembrance for the thousands who lost their companions to contaminated food, corporate greed and inept oversight. The pet food industry is a sham, dressing up the shabby left-overs from human consumption as nourishment for animals. Its regulation is a gutless farce. Compound this with the cost-cutting efforts of income funds masquerading as pet food purveyors, and the unregulated corruption that allows plastic to pretend to be protein, and you have a recipe for disaster. Our pets were, sadly, the canaries in this coal mine.

At the end of a long, dark year, as the healing sun begins to melt away the ice from our hearts, here is some music from heaven for the small, much loved victims of the recall and those who love them. It is Samuel Barber’s hauntingly beautiful Adagio for Strings. This music is truly touched by God.

Adagio for Strings is a work for string orchestra, and it is Barber’s most popular piece. It originated as the second movement in his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11, composed in 1936.

The piece was played at the funerals of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and JFK. It was also performed in 2001 at a ceremony at the World Trade Center to commemorate the thousands lost there in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

The composer also arranged the piece in 1967 for eight-part choir, as a setting of the Agnus Dei (“Lamb of God”).

Here it is, with conductor Andrzej Kucybala, with the Stanisław Moniuszko School of Music Symphony Orchestra.

Itchmo: In Memory Of

Pet Food Recall

A Dog’s Breakfast

Images: Pebbles the Yorkie, and from the Flickr Photo Gallery: Yeti (malamute) and Ashleigh (cat)