A friendly butcher:
As I type now, I am nostalgically reminded of ‘the friendly butcher’ – the name of a zine I made with my girl posse when we lived in Toronto as teenagers. We produced two issues of this obscure thing whose name we stole off an actual butcher shop in the east end, to serve as an anonymous moniker for us gang of four. It included all manners of diverse, idiotic cultural observations in the form of text and image couplings, an embarrassing reflection of my grunge stoner DIY beginnings, not so dissimilar to the paintings I make now actually. I do miss my old typewriter with the really tough keys, and earnestly stapling stacks of photocopies together.
On the opposite spectrum of nostalgia, was my visit to the PowerPlant a few weeks back to check out the Michael Snow exhibition, showing a new body of work by the Canadian fave at 81 years old, still going strong. Rock on man. It was nothing near the sort of ‘greatest hits retirement album’ that I was expecting. Instead, it was a display of fresh work based on his good old, concrete foundation, and it was dare I say, very cute. I was particularly captured by the language piece that interchanged English, French and Flemish. Since I have lived both in Montreal and Amsterdam but am not much with either of their languages (Dutch and Flemish are very close), it made me very happy to be realize I could ‘read’ most of the words in Snow’s piece, and a hoot to have the ones I didn’t know taught to me by disorienting video screens.
(Image caption: Michael Snow, Piano Sculpture (detail), 2009. Photo by Steve Payne)
