Donald doesn’t move. Am I supposed to be scared of you? Dad’s gonna be here any minute, and we’re doing this interview, so step the fuck off.
But Albert shoves his way past Donald, slamming the door behind him. He marches into the centre of the living room, to where the camera is set up on its tripod, reaches for it.
Donald dashes to intercept his brother. Body checks him before Albert can put his hands on the machine and sends him crashing into the bookshelf, but they both manage to stay on their feet. Donald has Albert by the shoulders, has him pinned against the books, which are falling to the floor as they fight.
You’re not going to put him on screen, Albert shouts. You either agree to quit or I will fuck up your camera. Either way, you’re done.
Donald’s weight is pressed into his brother to keep him from moving. All I’m doing is letting him talk. Letting you and Mom talk, too. Asking some questions. That’s all.
Albert rakes at Donald’s hands, trying to release their grip on his jacket, but there’s no budging him.
You’re exploiting him. Disrespecting him. It’s bullshit. He’s fucking mentally ill and you’re using that to make a film.
Do you ever listen to what he says? There’s something there. Something I’ve never heard anywhere else.
I don’t give a shit! And you know what? I looked it up. I know what’s going on.
Donald scowls, keeps pressing in. What are you talking about?
The money you got, Albert says. I looked it up, the fucking grant you got. That’s a David Lloyd charity. Lloyd is bankrolling you to make a film about Dad. What the hell is that?
Donald lets go of Albert. He takes a step back. He just looks at his brother.
Albert steps away from the shelf. Straightens his jacket. Breathes heavily. Spits on the floor. Says, That’s right. Got nothing to say about that, do you?
He’s a fan. So what? He takes Dad’s work seriously. Takes his life seriously. Donald gestures at the camera. And who better to make this film than me? I’m not ashamed of him. You’re the one who’s disrespecting him by trying to hide him away.
Lloyd has no business fucking around with our lives. Who does this, following some random family around? Who constantly intervenes in people’s lives like this? It’s bizarre. And you know what? The show is over. Albert swats at the camera, sends it to the floor. A crash. Pieces skitter across the hardwood.
Donald reaches over Albert’s shoulder and tries to pull him down into a headlock, but Albert squirms free. Hunched low, Albert goes at Donald’s legs, throws his arms around them, and takes him down hard. Donald tries to get up and over Albert, tries to get his weight above his brother, but Albert has splayed his legs out, his toes to the floor, while he hugs Donald’s thighs. Donald brings his knees up and breaks Albert’s clinch, then takes him by the lapels and tries to flip him over, his hands wound into the cloth of his brother’s jacket.
They are holding each other, pulling and pushing, grabbing, shoving. The same weight, the same reach. Breathing heavily. One gets a burst of energy, moves the other a little, tires. The other does the same, loses strength, stalls. Isometric. Trench warfare. They embrace each other angrily, panting, on the floor. An anatomical echo. The familiar proximity.
Then out there, on the other side of the door, a snap. A creak. A creaking.
They both look at the closed door. It stays closed. They listen.
A squeak. A complaint of wood against wood. A shuffle. Another shuffle. A wail and a pop. A squeaking glissando. The pressure of someone’s weight shifting on the floor in the hall.
They look at the shadow of two feet in the gap between the door and floor. They hold on. Sit there while he performs on the other side.
A creak. A creaking. A slow cracking. Then his feet on the floor walking away. And his muffled voice. We gave it up. It gave us up. You had a path of cosmic heights between you. Through the artery. That’s the tunnel where the thinking would flow. One man dreams of swimming and the other man kicks his feet. One man floats on water and another man prays to God. This is the way it is, the two of you, together. To suture. In tune. To the—
Unintelligible. The sound of the stairwell door opening. The closing of it.
They sit there for a while, entwined, quiet. They listen and listen. But their father is gone.
They look at each other. Stare. Their breath is caught.
They both think, See?
THE FRONT: A Reverse-Chronological Annotated Bibliography of the Vancouver Art Movement Known as “Rentalism,” 2011–1984
Mølbach, Henley. “After the Box: Has the Cassette Swan Script Collective Killed Rentalism?” The John Pembrey Lee Appreciation Society Newsletter 2.4 (Summer 2011): 4–9. [article with interview excerpts]
In this piece, Mølbach (who is, apparently, the sole hand behind this irregular newsletter) summarizes the controversy associated with the decision by the Cassette Swan Script Collective (CSSC) to feature a donation box in their 1268 Commercial Drive, February 2011 front. Citing debates on the RentalismVancouver.moc message boards, as well as personal anecdotes, Mølbach traces a potentially factionalizing split in opinion between hard-line purists and those who believe that the growth of the movement depends upon donation collection. Mølbach explains the gist of the former group’s argument—that it evinces a passionate adherence to the original model set by Everything Must Go (EMG) and their maxim, “Nothing’s for sale, but you’re free to browse.” Essentially, the article points out the obvious by saying that a principled anti-commercialism forms the core of the Rentalist concept. The pro-donation-collection voice is, Mølbach asserts, the minority opinion within the movement, and she points out that there is no hope of donation boxes ever turning an actual profit; at best they will make it easier for collectives to run a greater number of fronts.
To expand on this, Mølbach interviews the CSSC themselves. She begins the interview portion of the article by asking the CSSCers (who, in the tradition of Rentalist anonymity, use pseudonyms; in this case, “Aisle Zero” and “Unworker”) if they can verify a story circulating both on the message boards and by word of mouth that a disgruntled Rentalist expropriated the donation box at the 1268 Commercial Drive front and started distributing the contents to patrons as well as passersby on the sidewalk outside. The CSSCers insist that this story is false but say that they don’t mind the development of such urban myths as an extension of the debate. Mølbach then asks them (rather boldly) how much money they made, but the CSSC decline to give it up, describing the take only as “negligible” and “not even close to breaking even.” They do, however, acknowledge that whatever money they made will offset some of the difficulties the members have had in raising funds for future fronts. Unworker’s answer to the question of whether or not the collection of donations was worth it, in light of the controversy and division it has caused in the movement, is worth quoting at length for the position it articulates. He says:
It’s a conversation that has to be had. In a way, it’s not even about the money. It’s about the growth of the form. It’s about whether or not it can continue at all. In a way, for us, it sucks because it’s like when they called Bob Dylan a Judas for playing electric instead of acoustic. I’m not comparing us to Bob Dylan, but what I’m saying is that when that happened to him, people thought going electric was this huge taboo, and that it would kill folk music, it was the end of the world. But he was just evolving as an artist. In retrospect, it isn’t such a big deal. Forms evolve. Things transform. We want Rentalism to be around long enough that we even have a history to speak of. It’s not us who’s killing the movement. It’s people who don’t want it to change who are going to kill it.
Mølbach points out the curiousness of Unworker’s statement, arguing that, from some points of view, the folk music revival was killed by Dylan’s conversion to electrical amplification, or by some larger set of circumstances including it. (She also tries to sort out, to no helpful effect, the comparison of Dylan’s lyric-centr
ed music with the fact that most Rentalist soundtracks are closest to instrumental “post-rock.”) At any rate, Mølbach ends the article by editorializing on the origins of the movement and the speculation that the EMG, the original Rentalists, either had a wealthy patron or were themselves rich enough to fund their projects independently, despite their assertions that they slept on the floors of their fronts and spent the first years of the movement virtually homeless for their art. In the end, Mølbach suggests that whether or not the anti-consumerism of the original concept is undermined by the presence of passive solicitation, the controversy is as much a formal issue as it is political. Ultimately, her argument is that the donation box intrudes upon the dream-logic of the Rentalist form. Its presence is basically a spoiler.
The Storefront Liberation Front. Our Manifesto. Vancouver: New Curtain Press, 2011. [pamphlet]
In this essay, the SFLF explain their particular position on the Rentalist movement in the usual, expected ways: They are careful to pay respects to Lee and the EMG, and they root the form in the concept of the flâneur and so forth. Despite the deadpan tone, at least some of this is probably meant to be satirical. For example, the SFLF describe the Situationists as “proto-Rentalists.” But the political orientation that this position paper reveals seems sincere—even, one might say, overly earnest. The collective asserts that their members are a mix of anarchists and libertarian Marxists. And they make much of the idea that Rentalism’s use of commercial space for anti-commercial purposes is subversive, and all the more so for the fact that the movement was born in the most expensive property market in Canada. However, the SFLF also express their hope that the form will spread to the United States in the wake of the global financial crisis. But there’s no analysis of why Rentalism seems unable to budge from its city of origin, half a decade after its birth. At any rate, the Manifesto is typical until it gets to its twenty-one (!) terse and enigmatic appendices. The best of these begins with a quotation from R. Murray Schafer’s Voices of Tyranny: Temples of Silence:
Shattered glass is a trauma everyone is anxious to avoid. “He shall rule them with a rod and shatter them like crockery,” is a potent acoustic image in Revelation (2:27). A keynote of the Middle-Eastern soundscape under normal circumstances, crockery became a violent signal when broken. For us the same is true of glass. And yet one cannot help feeling that the mind-body split of the Western world will only be healed when some of the glass in which we have sheathed our lives is shattered, allowing us again to inhabit a world in which all the senses interact instead of being ranked in opposition.
To this, the SFLF add,
In Vancouver, the so-called City of Glass, how can we not cheer on Schafer and his urge to crack every last antiseptic condo tower window, coating the sidewalks with so much shining rime? Everyone hates the rioters, but we say the only thing hockey is useful for is showing people that they don’t have to submit to life inside a town that resembles a snow globe. And during the anti-Olympics demonstration in 2010, when that masked protestor smashed the Hudson’s Bay Company window, did he not teach us the absurdity of paying billions of dollars in security to protect thousands of dollars worth of glass? But what about you, Gentle Reader? Don’t have the guts to smash shit up? Then do what we do: Make anti-capitalist windows. The SFLF says: Let those who smash, smash. Let those who are not so brave instead hack the very concept of the store, the very concept of shopping. Free the consumer, if only for a moment, from the sociopathy of the work-shop-buy-despair-work-shop-buy-despair chain of behaviour that underpins the neoliberal nightmare. Rentalism is the smash-and-grab turned inside out.
A later appendix compares the function of the Rentalist front to past modes of music audition—to the phonograph and headphones—and, more interestingly, to lesser discussed media, such as the old record store listening booths and the car radio, each in their own ways encased in this reviled-but-ubiquitous glass.
YBIYBI. Liner notes. A Moth in a Bagpipe. Scintillatrix Media Formations, 2009. [booklet with compact disc]
The acronym for this collective almost certainly stands for the old retailer’s warning “You break it, you buy it,” though this is never explicitly stated anywhere in the text. The name of the collective is made more significant by the fact that this document, which accompanied the third front opened by the YBIYBI group (1450 Venables Street, June 2008), was the first to actually distribute a physical product to patrons. Embedded within the various trips that the YBIYBI had set up in this front was the instruction, “Ask for your complimentary CD from the proprietor.” This message was placed in such a way that it could only be accessed after a series of trips had been executed and most of the soundtrack had been un-muted. If patrons asked, they were given a CD of the entire soundtrack, which was packaged in a jewel case and came with this booklet. For the movement, this was a first in two ways: Never before had a hardcopy of the music been given out at a front, and the liner notes eschew the Rentalist convention of anonymity by featuring the names of the musicians, published alongside the instruments they played on the soundtrack (which, more conventionally, has no lyrics, but rather ethereal, non-linguistic vocals, by either a female or falsetto male singer called “P. Hagood”). Because the disc itself is credited to the YBIYBI group, one assumes that the musicians are members of the collective—yet the musicians cited come from a few different local independent bands, which some people on the message boards have suggested means they were merely hired to play and/or write the composition for the YBIYBI, who concentrated fully on the design of the front. YBIYBI itself has not responded to this, to my knowledge, and the email address for the group in the liner notes bounces back. In addition to the accreditation, a very brief statement is printed in the booklet, which I quote in full here:
This disc is not for sale. It exists under anti-copyright and may be distributed, sampled, re-mixed, uploaded, and plagiarized in any non-commercial manner you wish. But if you try to make money off it, the YBIYBI collective will personally hunt you down and kill you. We mean it.
The cover of the booklet features a tartan moth against an abstract geometrical background involving multiple circles. The music is composed of emotive guitars, bass, drums, tympanis—and a Hammond organ at the middle eight. The production is well-aerated and sparse, building up to some fine wall-of-sound crescendos. In EMG fashion, the music is looped even here on the disc, and the track repeats three times. Each four-minute cycle has been seamlessly mixed together in post-production.
Compton, Wayde. “The Reader.” 2009. [unpublished short fiction]
The founding myth is well-known: The EMG credit the author John Pembrey Lee’s obscure 1984 short story “Cassette Swan Script” as the origins of the Rentalist concept. In it, Lee features something vaguely like a Rentalist front, though the EMG actually coined the term themselves and iterated the form as an actual art practice. The EMG have claimed that they happened upon the story by chance, and fixated on it because it reflected something they had already been considering, though in a less clearly articulated way. At any rate, because Lee appears only as an enigmatic footnote in the small body of Rentalist writing, I followed the research trail, which led me to Compton, whose academic work has concentrated on black writers in British Columbia. Compton (who knew nothing about the Rentalist connection to Lee’s work) eventually showed me his as-yet unpublished story “The Reader,” and patiently answered my questions about it, insisting that this story (and the story of how it came to be written) encompasses most of what he knows about Lee.
While “The Reader” is ostensibly fiction, important elements of it are provably factual. Compton uses himself as the narrator-character in the story, and Lee also appears as himself in the text. I’ll summarize the plot here.
The narrator (Compton) is given a long-lost chapbook called Reference to Resonance, self-published by Lee thirty years earlier. He’s never heard of Lee before but is so impressed by this long poem that he is compelled to track Lee down, simply to meet the man behin
d the book. Lee is, however, a recluse, and Compton must follow a series of contacts from Lee’s past in order to locate him in his hermit-like bower in rural northern British Columbia. Compton finds Lee’s camp when the man is out and ends up reading a story he finds strewn about the floor of Lee’s tent. When Lee returns, however, it becomes clear that the reclusive writer has renounced all his past work. While Compton implores him to publish the scattered manuscript he’s found there, Lee refuses, explaining that it is part of a project he calls “The Conflagration Files.” Essentially, Lee’s new “practice” is that he immediately destroys whatever writing he completes, casting the pages into the fire as soon as he is satisfied that the work is indeed finished. Lee tells Compton that he has burnt six books this way so far over the past two decades, and that the manuscript Compton holds in his hands throughout this conversation is the next to be torched. Lee senses that Compton is considering taking the manuscript with him, with or without Lee’s consent, but rather than trying to stop him, Lee merely asserts that he wants to burn the pages—he calls the process “immolative publication”—but that he won’t stop Compton from doing whatever he will. Then Lee exits while Compton is distracted. After agonizing over the decision, Compton reluctantly burns the manuscript in the fire and returns to Vancouver. (One notes, however, that a version of the burnt tale appears in the story itself when it is summarized during the scene in which Compton finds it at the camp.)
So how does this touch upon Rentalism? Only obliquely, thematically. In Compton’s story, Lee’s disinterest in publishing subtly suggests the same anti-consumerist impulse captured in “Cassette Swan Script.” But that appears to be the only connection.
Did any of the events of this story actually happen? In my correspondence with Compton in 2011, he provided the following answer:
The Outer Harbour Page 6