“The Reader” is fiction. John Pembrey Lee did publish a wonderful chapbook called Resonance to Reference (I reversed the title in my story) in the 1980s and it’s true that I did travel to Prince George to meet the man. Lee doesn’t, however, live in the woods in a tent, nor does he burn his writing as a matter of course. He lives in a house in PG with his wife. He’s not really a recluse either, though he likes his privacy. My story’s origins are hard to describe, but to give you an idea, a couple days after I met John we ended up doing hallucinogenic mushrooms together, at his urging. He kept saying to me that he did writing workshops, and he wanted me to participate, so we did this thing. He made psilocybin tea, and I paid him eighty bucks to take me through a series of actions I can only describe as psychodrama. This was off in the woods in a camp similar to the one I describe in the story. Inspired by this “workshop,” I drafted out what eventually became “The Reader” when I got back to Vancouver.
Compton leaves off saying, “If I had to put a number to it, I would say it’s four-fifths fictional.” Note that the payment of money to Lee for his workshop seems out of step with the anti-consumerist theme suggested in the story itself. In response to this discrepancy, Compton wrote, “Oh, I paid him the money. That part is definitely true.” And when I asked him if Lee was aware of Rentalism itself, Compton said it never came up during their conversations, but then Compton himself was unaware of it at the time, and so did not ask Lee about it. For further clarification, I’ve repeatedly asked Compton to put me in touch with Lee directly, either by phone, mail, or email, but he so far has ignored my requests. None of the conventional ways of looking for Lee have turned up anything either. Whether or not Lee is a recluse, it’s easy to see how that interpretation has been applied to the blank space he cuts in the public realm.
Susini, Teresa. “But Is It Commerce? Down the Rabbit Hole with Vancouver’s Maverick Art Collective ‘Everything Must Go.’” Cascadia Subduction Zone 17.8 (August 2009): 9–10. [Interview]
This is the only print interview with the EMG. Susini asks them about their latest front, which turned out to be their last. There is some detailed description of the logic behind the location site, 906 Main Street. Most intriguingly, however, Susini spends a good amount of time discussing the collective’s very first front, the one that started the Rentalist phenomenon, and gets them to comment on how it expanded from their own private joke into an actual movement. Emma G. suggests that when they created the Gastown Front (on Water Street), they worked by feel rather than plan, using Lee’s short story as a kind of sketch. She says that when the SFLF appeared a few months after with their own front (on East Hastings), the EMG was delighted and encouraging, and that they soon realized they ran in similar social circles, were friends of friends. What’s curious about this interview, though, is that Vice Versa and Lou Leir get several details about the front wrong. For example, I personally recall the furniture as being almost all fold-out chairs rather than a mix of chairs and couches, as they imply here, and the water cooler trip (which un-muted a vibraphone-type track, if I remember right) was indeed functioning, though they say it was not—I pulled myself a cup of water from it, so I know I’m right about this point. What Susini does elicit from the EMG is their sense of nostalgia for the early days of the form. They confirm that it was Versa and Leir themselves who sat as proprietors at all hours, one or the other. I remember Versa hunched over the desk, doodling, her dark hair sweeping the page while her arm worked to create ephemera. She wouldn’t look up, most of the time, answering all my mystified queries with the now-famous (and used to the point of cliché) statement: “Nothing’s for sale, but you’re free to browse.” I spent most of a morning there, and then came back every day of the next week, examining this and that—a lamp, the hard cover books on a shelf, the calendar hanging on the wall, each of which would or would not trip a device causing another layer of the sound track to come spilling out of the hidden speakers, a song we would later learn was called “Against Summer.”
At that first front I had fallen not through a rabbit hole, as Susini puts it, but into a dream. I think it was Orwell who wrote about the first time he ever saw a motion picture at a theatre in London, saying that it was like dreaming while awake, but like dreaming someone else’s dream. A mix of confusion, irritation, and wonderment that gives way to a strange pleasure—that was the feeling. You get there once, inside that sensation, and you seek it out again and again, to go back to that disappearance of the self, that sighing sense of annihilation and dissolution. The first time is a surprise, and you can never completely suspend the anticipation again, but that doesn’t mean it’s ruined. You go there again as though you are new, as though you know nothing, and you believe it, that you’re lost, because the room that looks so normal and banal—like a junk shop or a waiting room—has the power to break and re-make you completely.
___, ___. “Rentalism: The Story of the Front.” 2007. [unpublished essay]
This one’s mine. I tried to get it published at a few different places: the local dailies and weeklies. No bites. I thought of putting it up on the web. Might still do that. But it’s quite out of date now. There were only the three groups working at that point: EMG, YBIYBI, and Out of the Rain, so the more visual aspects were yet to come. Out of the Rain, I am told, paid particular attention to space as image, but I missed their front, for personal reasons, and that turned out to be the only one they ever did (439 West Hastings Street, April 2007).
To summarize: I describe the form, as it was at the time—a reaction against the de-materialization of contemporary popular music. The Manichean split of music completely shorn of any object presence. The new generation, I argue, does not necessarily take this in stride, adapting to the music-as-mere-information-file future without sticking up for the thing-ness of sound. Is it the tenacious longevity of DJ culture that keeps the flag of materiality flying? We are supposed to believe that the young are free of sentimental attachment to obsolete tools, that with the invention of each new media platform there is a Khmer Rouge-like resetting to Year Zero, a cold clear re-education about the trash that is the past. But it ain’t necessarily so. Was the best legacy of hip-hop the adamantine perfection of the Technics SL-1200 model, forever young and forever state-of-the-art in its 1972 design? Perhaps. But whatever it is, maybe we’re not ready for our “consumption” of music to wholly resemble what used to be called “data entry.” (Kraftwerk live was satire, comrades.) Where once you were a kind of magician or midwife or supplicant when you listened to music, laying a needle on top of a spinning and shining circle with utmost care, now what do you do? You catalogue and load and arrange. You used to pan for gold. Now the shit you do to play your music looks exactly like the shit you do to file your taxes. We used to be archeologists rather than technocrats when we went searching for sound. Rentalism represents a new age of the thing versus electronic vapour. (And so on.)
When I read this now, I don’t know if I believe it anymore. A coot, a crank, one of those c words. But the essay explains it simply for the neophyte: It’s about touching and being touched. Cradled. How else to put it? You sit in a chair and lift up a magazine, and it’s a trip—a track unsuppressed starts to play over a PA. The bass line, let’s say. You realize the room is full of objects. Which will release more? You look around, wonder who did this, ask the proprietor, who unaffectedly repeats the slogan, “Nothing’s for sale, but you’re free to browse.” You are it: the stylus, the dial, the tape head, the reel. It’s you.
Like after all the snow has melted, and there’s a landscape you’d forgotten about; after the rain has sprayed it away, and the sun has come out and you see the colour of grass revealed—that’s what this is all about.
Lee, John Pembrey. “Cassette Swan Script.” Bent Borders 4.1 (June 1984): 21–29. [short fiction]
It’s just seven pages long, and the passage that inspired our movement is under a page in length, coming about in the middle of the story. EMG always copied the whole of thi
s scene in longhand and included it somewhere in each of their fronts—framed and hanging above the light switch, silk-screened onto a throw pillow, or scribbled on the bathroom wall.
The story is about an African-American man—“an untethered Negro,” he calls himself in the beginning—who wanders up the west coast of North America in the 1970s after losing his job in a soap factory. He listens to an Art Blakey album while dropping some biker-crafted LSD known as Rim Rock Crown Snake, and somehow he interprets the “crown” part of the moniker as a secret message that he must travel to London where, according to his delusion, the Queen will make him immortal. But he has no money for such a flight, of course, and instead hitchhikes up the coast to British Columbia—it being considered by the protagonist a “close second” to Britain itself. All this happens in the first paragraph. The rest of the story takes place in Vancouver, where the protagonist enters a rocky relationship with an unnamed woman, who ultimately leaves him for an Afro-Bavarian ex-boyfriend named Fayrer. The excerpt that is important for our purposes comes at a moment when the protagonist is wandering around Gastown after he’s been dumped. Here it is:
And down the knuckle-colored cobblestones, I happened past that shop, the one that sold nothing, its interior a jumble of unfinished musings and scrambled furniture, this was the one that she said was a song in the form of a store, but free, so here I was, without her, and I went in and up to the desk where a man or a woman, I’m not sure, but someone in a crystal-green waistcoat and blue chemise instructed me to take a number, pointing at the roll on the opposite wall, and I went there and pulled one—zero, as was the next; a whole roll of zip, in fact—and as I ripped the strip of paper from its place the place itself lit up with a walking bass line, stand-up, brandished by, I noticed, two ancient phonograph horns in the north and south corners (petals on a cypress vine), and I sat in a velvet chair and felt the fingers of the unseen bassist scale around inside my mind, and it was the kind of chair that has a handle at the side that will flip out a built-in foot stool, so I reached down and yanked it up to ease myself back and <<
I looked around.
I heard there.
I was free to.
Me and Kosei came back to do it all again with a little bit of mescaline three days later, but they’d shut it all up; they’d picked up sticks. Nothing there but a FOR LEASE sign and the reflection of our faces in the storefront’s undulating pane …
Rentalists continue to cite Lee and “Cassette Swan Script”; the EMG tradition of including the text of this scene on site is not universal, but is common. I’m not sure what to say about the story beyond its importance to Rentalism. Maybe some of Lee’s 1960s-era idealism (and its hallucinatory flip side) may link to the underground and communal impulses of our form. Also, while EMG claim they stumbled upon the story purely by chance, considering Lee’s almost total obscurity at that time, one wonders if there’s more to it than that, if there’s some personal connection. One can let one’s mind wander, and imagine other possible layers of depth behind the phenomenon. But that would remain nothing more than speculation.
INTER RIVER PARK
The moment Kurt introduces Allan to his mother, she smiles and keeps it up until after the waiter has come and gone. Her English is better than her son’s, and she speaks it with a vaguely British tint. Allan throws around some gilded vocabulary, but it’s immediately apparent that it’s not going to be enough. He perceives the tension in her face, an inner closure, a barely noticeable withdrawal. Kurt has told him that his mother works in television and Allan wonders if this is her on-screen smile.
Mid-way through the meal, Allan moves to Plan B. He says to Mrs Ma that she has a very fine son, that he knows this for sure because he has noticed that Kurt keeps a picture of her and Mr Ma on his phone, as its “wallpaper.” Allan tells Mrs Ma that Kurt obviously keeps it there so that his family is always with him here in Vancouver, so far from home. A very good kid, Allan says. Kurt stays quiet while Allan goes on to tell Mrs Ma that he was inspired by this, and so also put a picture of his mother and father on his phone. I remember when people carried real photographs in their wallets, Allan says wistfully. And he takes his phone out of his pocket, leans forward, and shows it to Mrs Ma across the table. He watches her examine the picture, watches the furrow of uncertainty form on her brow, and then he says what he has rehearsed: That’s my mother and my stepfather. My father was a student from Africa—like Barack Obama’s father, you know?—but he went back there before I was even born. I never knew him. My mother married later, and they raised me. They are both school teachers.
Mrs Ma looks up at Allan, then back at the picture of the two white strangers that Allan took from the Internet, and he can see that she is working on this, thinking it over. It’s like watching someone doing long division in her head. Then she nods faintly.
THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE, mostly students, are on the streets in Québec protesting against tuition increases, banging on pots to show their anger. Allan owes the government $43,000 for his education—for the diction he in turn sells for a living to international students—and he will gladly beat on pots and pans for whomever wants to change the system that resulted in that sum. So he is planning to go to the rally here in Vancouver, in solidarity.
The English language flows through him and out across the surface of the globe. Allan feels it in his very body, an internal sense of complicity.
Who can I borrow a red pot from? From whom can I borrow a red pot?
Allan fixes his language almost as he thinks it.
DEBRIEFING, KURT TELLS Allan that it seems to have worked—that his mother had some words for him about having a tutor who “isn’t completely Canadian,” as she put it, but she went on to say that Allan seemed studious. Allan waits for more.
And?
Kurt does not look him in the eye, but confesses that his mother also warned him that black people are broken.
Broken?
Broken in the head.
Do you mean “damaged”?
What does “damaged” mean?
Broken.
Yes, I think so. Damaged.
Allan says, Well…
COSTS
•2 hours concocting false story with Kurt ($60 at $30/hour, tutoring rate)
•Suppressing anger, against being accused of irrational anger
•Several silent prayers, asking my parents’ forgiveness
BENEFITS
•5 hours a week at $30/hour x 6.5 students, against $200/ month student loan payment & $600/month shared rent
•Access to Kurt’s classmates: Wei is a maybe for 3 hours a week, plus Haoqian and Edith may also be interested
•Kurt is all right, if a little strange, this kid whose real name I don’t even know, who laughs loudly but seems shy, who was hung-over once during a session after drinking whisky the night before, who owns a reissued Jag-Stang that he keeps on a guitar stand in the corner of his living room with a sticker on the body that says VANDALISM: BEAUTIFUL AS A ROCK IN A COP’S FACE, who says he has no real friends here, who left behind everything just to get a diploma with the name of a foreign university on it, who stares off into space like he isn’t listening but is, who gave me an advanced heads-up about his mom’s racism & then stood by me even though he turns mute in her actual presence—he’s done more than might be expected. Who am I to him?
FIRE HIM, KURT’S mother says to her son over the phone. She’s at the Hotel Georgia. It’s 11:15 p.m. Her flight leaves in the morning.
Kurt stammers, Why? I thought you liked him.
The news! I just saw the news on TV and your teacher was on there with a bunch of people shouting and screaming at the police. He was banging on a pot like a madman. He’s a hoo
ligan. It’s lucky I watched.
Are you sure it was him?
Of course I’m sure!
But maybe it was someone else.
It was him. I can’t believe what I have to put up with from you. We wanted you to come here instead of California to keep you away from things like this, and what do you do? You find the only black teacher in this city, somehow.
My grades are good. They’ve gotten better. He’s helped me. I’ll ask him about the news. There’s probably some mistake.
The only mistake is that we let you live here by yourself! Fire him or we will bring you home. Pei Che is coming next month, and I am going to have to ask him to keep an eye on you if I cannot trust you to act like a normal person.
You don’t have to do that.
We will decide what we have to do. Get rid of this crazy person and get a Canadian who doesn’t cause trouble in the streets. What kind of teacher does such things? What kind of son treats his mother like this?
KURT MAKES HIS way across the quad. It’s the summer intersession so hardly anyone is around. He sees a few students here and there, two workers repairing a door, a groundskeeper. Kurt goes down the stairs, past the library, on toward the bus loop. He walks past the buses, which are lined up against the curb, and heads down the street where the student residences are. He doglegs north, up the incline of the mountain upon which the university is set, and then crosses over to the corner where the equestrian centre is. Kurt walks slowly past the stables, looking at those beautiful animals stuck in their pens. It’s a sunny June morning. He’s alone. The horses whinny and brap.
Beyond the stable is an enormous park, a collection of half a dozen playing fields for different sports, hewn out of the mountain forest into planes of green. Kurt walks out into the middle of the soccer pitch and lies down. The heat blankets him. He listens to the sound of the world until he drifts away.
The Outer Harbour Page 7