All the leaves were gone and the sky was grey. Faces were illuminated by the bluish glow emanating from the televisions in the suburban windows. Rows of discarded and dying pumpkins lined the road as I drove through the island’s rain forest on the way to my office at the university. Manu Chao’s anthem song, “Clandestino”, sparked my soul and my thoughts wandered to Buenos Aires and the magical words of Borges who continues to teach me how to read and write, awake and dream. “What can I hold you with? I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of jagged suburbs.” These are the words and images that stir my imagination when the first of the winter rains begin to fall and the only sun to be found is resting in my ever-expanding library. I’ve been collecting books like firewood throughout the long hot summer and their pages will keep me warm and dry as the wet winds of the Pineapple Express change everything I think and do. 

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

This last week I lectured on Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky, La Notte by Michelangelo Antonioni, Contempt by Jean-Luc Godard, The Matrix by The Wachowski’s and Children of Men by Alfonso Cuarón. All films that have left an indelible impression, and in some cases, their mark. I had a student film festival at Lucky Bar on Wednesday, wherein their collaborations with local indie bands summoned fifteen new music videos entering the public realm. I was also invited to lecture on the subject of creativity for a large Fine Arts class and in the spirit of the subject, decided to talk spontaneously, without a lot of conscious preparation, and tried to weave my way through the two hour exercise without mentioning the word, creativity, itself. How do you commodify or objectify something that is the very essence of who we are and everything we do? Art, thoughts, dreams, directions, excuses, breakfast, my words, what the students choose to hear; everything that has ever been done and seen, are all acts of creation and creativity. Can we ever truly define love, or beauty or inspiration, et al? Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed myself and departed knowing that some will have agreed with my observations, and some will have left feeling cheated by my deliberations. I wouldn’t want or expect any other result. Talking about creativity is not dissimilar to talking about talking and disagreements are both inevitable and necessary.

What happened is not to be put into words, since words, after all, stand for a shared experience.

I’m writing this now on the other side of Georgia Strait at the Hobo office in Vancouver. The November rains beat an urgent pattern against the floor to ceiling windows that overlook the city skyline and sheltering mountains. Misty and dreamy and as beautiful as the legends have told. The core Hobo team gathered at The Cellar on Granville St. last night to appreciate and support the music of our good friend and Hobo collaborator, Kuba Oms. A packed house including some friends and contributors: Michael Belgue, Val Litwin, Jeff Petry, K-OS, and many others. Kuba laid the soul and rhythm down and created a brilliant hour of inspiring music and performance for both him and us. We continued on to sample Korean BBQ at Jang Mo Jibs on Robson St. where we talked about the fact that all we have accomplished has created a firestorm of things that now need to be addressed. Always arriving at designated end points to discover a new starting line, an endless corridor of revolving doors and open windows. The ongoing realization that creative plans and designs are never finished but only abandoned. The persistent rains plummeted from the night sky as we reentered the urban streets on our way back to headquarters. Issue #11 is arriving in the world as I write this now and I continue to dream of us all walking the historic boulevards of Buenos Aires with #12 under our arm, and Borges in our court.

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.