my brother, the artist

For all you Toronto residents, my very talented brother has an exhibition opening in Leslieville on Thursday evening. There isn't really anything about it on the gallery's website, but it opens Thursday, Nov. 1, 2007 at 7 p.m., and I believe it's running for the month of November. I won't be able to make it to the opening, but will likely check it out on the weekend. Check it out if you can!

Egad! ANOTHER Interview?

Edited to add the people who answered my questions.

Why yes, it IS another interview. I cannot get enough of this meme. So I asked Sage to interview me this time.

The woman responsible for putting together the Breast of Canada fundraising calendar lives in G-town. Would you ever pose for it?

Ooh, that’s a doozy.

Wow.

I’m really quite stymied by it. It’s never occurred to me that anyone would want me to pose in a calendar.

My first thought is no. But perhaps if someone did a really good pitch and had a really good reason for wanting ME in the calendar then maybe I would. But I’ve never been an artist’s model, so I’m just not that comfortable with putting myself OUT THERE in quite that way.

True or false? Redheads can most definitely get away with wearing pink.

True. Redheads can wear anything they damn well please and just you try to stop us. I‘ve heard people say that about pink AND red, and it’s all bullshit. Like anyone, you just have to choose the right shade. I wear a lot of red, and only recently began to allow pink, starting with a pink v on brown Vans shoes, into my wardrobe.

Why do people feel they can comment about what colours or clothes a person with a particular characteristic can wear? (Not that I’m suggesting that’s what you’ve done here, Sage, but other people – strangers, not even in clothes or shoe stores, just passing by randomly – have said things like that quite sincerely and it pisses me off.) I mean who gives a shit if I wear a colour that looks awful on me?

Have you ever started a rumour?

Well, I don't know about STARTING a rumour, but I have certainly passed them on. I remember in grade 8, my friend's mom got pregnant, and I found it quite scandalous because that meant they'd had sex -- recently! My friend had asked me not to tell anyone, I think because it was still quite early and maybe they weren't sure what they were going to do with the surprise, but I couldn't resist sharing the scandal that someone's parents had HAD SEX!

My friend got really upset with me, and her mom found out and everything, and I felt really bad. That was really when I learned that it's important to keep people's secrets.

Bellydance is rumoured to be a birthing ritual. Did you belly dance through part of your labour?

Well, as I mentioned here, I did until they strapped me to the monitors and we discovered that any time I spent upright caused the baby’s heartrate to plummet (I still can’t really refer to that baby, that baby who I feared might die, as Swee'pea). The shimmies were especially useful through a contraction, though I was only 2 cm when I had to stop moving. My belly dance instructor, who has four kids, said that belly dance doesn’t help at all in very late labour.

I’ve had it explained to me that belly dance was a way of showing girls how to be women, and I guess that would include all of our sexuality and reproduction, including conception and birth.

I started reading Kitzinger’s Ourselves as Mothers, but I stopped because it seems like in just about every culture she writes about that women are seen as inherently dirty who must follow strict codes to avoid infecting men with their dirtiness. This isn’t related to the question but I asked Sugar Daddy why this would be, why women would be seen as so awful, everywhere. And we both came to the realization that women’s sexuality is threatening in the sense that you can never REALLY be sure of paternity. Unless you very strictly control women’s sexuality. And what better way than to make women scared of it, to feel inherently dirty and evil?

Anyways, I like to think of belly dance going on behind closed doors and under veils, a secret celebration of our bodies and power and beauty.

If you had the power to make one Canadian artist (other than yourself), from any discipline, known to everyone in the world at large, who would you choose and why?

Ha! This fits right into my nefarious plan to blog about my brother ever since I discovered this weekend that he is a blogger. His blogs aren’t like mine, in that they’re all images, but still… he’s a blogger.

But first and foremost he’s an artist. He has incredible talent and drive, and I would love to see him able to support his family with his talent alone. He’s also the most well-read person I know, and he didn’t even finish university. He’s read all of Joyce and Pound and Eliot AND I’m pretty sure he even understood them all.

He has a normal website but I don't think he's updated it in a long time, though it shows his landscapes. He said he started the blogs so he had a place to put new work without having to depend on someone else. This blog shows his recent studio pieces, this blog shows a group of invented landscapes, and THIS BLOG showcases a great collaborative project. It's something to do with some guy named Rauschenberg, who I've never heard of. Anyways, anyone can participate: you download a photo, print it, then take a picture of it somewhere else and email it in to be posted. This one is one of my faves, and so is this one. Anyways, if you like to take pictures (Em and Denguy, I'm lookin' at you), check it out and participate.

AND if you have money and want to buy some art, his rocks, in my totally unbiased opinion.

PS I got the chance to interview some seriously kick-ass people:

aliki2006
notsosage
sewfunky
k-girl
denguy

Check out their interviews if you haven't already.

It's Official

It seems that my obsession with blogging is under threat. We have decided to go to South Africa in January to visit Sugar Daddy's family and introduce them to Swee'pea. So this means a new online obsession: searching for accommodation (although Sugar Daddy's dad has very kindly invited us to stay with them, we may feel more comfortable stretching our baby clutter out in a space of our own), figuring out when and what we want to do, how to travel from Cape Town to Joburg and back again to visit the aunts and uncles in that thriving metropolis, and more. Oh yeah - and I still need to figure out daycare; I'm due to return to work in February.

Yesterday, I started searching for advice on how to survive a crazy long flight (20 hours of flying plus at least a few hours' stopover in Europe) with a baby. This search led me to a forum at bootsnall, specifically for travellers with children. And sure enough someone was even posting for advice about a trip to South Africa. But the resulting posts were disappointing. People said it was a bad idea to go to Johannesburg with children. Now, I know that Sugar Daddy and I are rather sheltered travellers in SA because we have so much family to provide a roof, rides and information about things to see and do. But I don't believe a trip to South Africa would be complete without a visit to Johannesburg. For one thing, much of the struggle for freedom from apartheid was fought in and around Johannesburg. And the history lessons available there are essential. The Apartheid Museum is a must-see, as is a tour of Soweto with a stop at the Hector Pieterson Memorial. We also had the good fortune to see an exhibit of Dumile Feni's haunting artwork at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

These images are pen and ink drawings on different sides of the same paper, which are exhibited permanently at the Constitutional Court.

Thinking about this has reminded me that I never wrote about our last day in South Africa. On our last day, Sugar Daddy's cousin, the Rhodes Scholar, took us to the Johannesburg Art Gallery to see a fabulous exhibition of Dumile Feni. Dumile's life is pretty tragic: he lived in exile until he died, impoverished in New York, in 1991, and never got to return to the new South Africa. The Dumile Feni Foundation has a beautiful website and great information about the artist. I can't link to specific pages, like Dumile's bio, because the site uses frames and doesn't have discreet url's. I definitely want to try to get some prints of his work. The gallery is in a pretty dangerous part of the city; I think it's next to Hillbrow, but totally worth going to. The parking lot and gallery itself were totally safe.

This is the other side of the paper, from the same website.

Dumile's artwork is arresting and disturbing. I'm no art critic, but I love the way he uses lines. So back to our last day in Jozi.

After the art gallery, we went to the Apartheid Museum, which I seem to remember is bizarrely juxtaposed next to an amusement park. The museum itself is a sombre, grey building, which has pretty much no facade, if that makes any sense. I don't remember seeing any windows or architectural details, just grey concrete. If you aren't planning a trip to SA any time soon, the museum's website provides a great virtual experience. We were given a token or something, which represented the old apartheid passbooks and dictated through which door we were to enter the musuem. Once inside, thousands of passbooks filled the walls. Apparently there were thousands of racial designations under apartheid, and one person's race could change from year to year depending on who was filling out the paperwork. Obviously, one's race is a tricky thing to identify and define. The rest of the museum is filled with photos and video footage of the struggle for freedom and all things apartheid.

I find I get information overloaded at museums and galleries; I can only take in so much. At the Apartheid Museum, my threshold was even lower because of the horrible emotional content. But it is a necessary visit. Learning about apartheid enhanced my trip immensely.

I fell in love with South Africa for many reasons: because Sugar Daddy's family was so warm and intelligent, after my worries that I wouldn't like them; because the landscapes, the few that I saw anyways, are absolutely, take your breath away, stunning; but mostly because I never once experienced any kind of bitterness from the people. Being a white traveller, I expected to be received rudely at least once. But it never happened. It is truly amazing that people can survive such tremendous oppression and poverty and come through with their capacity for joy intact.