I Hear They're Building Some New Atrocity at 337 W. Pender

Seven and a half years ago it travelled from ballroom to parking lot and I got to learn about how the inside of a wall smells when you burn off the outside.

I liked that it stayed a parking lot. Haven't seen the new building, but my hopes aren't "up".
But my having rented something for a few years doesn't license me to speak on it eternally....but maybe I'm just wishing in that sentence.

Maybe the greatest gift was a solid point in a narrative. That rings cynical, but I am really thankful for it.
Here's a new interview done with Ryan Quast for Beatroute Magazine in Vancouver - Wil Murray : Picking Up The Polka Dots

5 years on

It's pretty hot in this bus shelter.
Not quite as hot in my studio since I bought two six dollar sheets, one pink and one the colour of sand, and made curtains. The trailing edges are knotted so they don't blow into the wet paint.
The studio is a constant wake for nothing. As if nothing were something by virtue of being named.
I can't bear to just post the photo above wordless and watch the comments roll in. 364 days a year that building is a biographical curiosity to be exploited, but today(or was it tomorrow) I'll try to concentrate.
Not a wake for more than nothing, like the dark. Or less than nothing, like porno when you're hungover(thanks Jim).
More a wake for when there was nothing, nothing to fill nothing with, and no pressing need to fill it.
Not agony or tears in the bath or boredom.
More like it makes me nostalgic in the worst way. Like an old man getting riled up about people who hurt him in the past, or all the places he can't go because they don't exist anymore and all that's a real shame because it's mostly about desire and all the books aren't quite right when they describe characters who are free in their dreams to visit everything that's all gone.
Maybe free, but not pleased.
I never dreamt of it when it still stood*

*I wrote this on the first page of "Other People" by Martin Amis, under his biography.
I didn't mean to like his books so much, but I couldn't help it. These things happen.You know all about that.

4 Years Ago Today

337 W. Pender Street, Vancouver. July 3rd, 2003. Mine and Ingrid Petro's studio and Ms. T's Cabaret and many others' spaces, burning.