How to Spend Your First Two Weeks at a New Job

On the Saturday before I started my new job I read an article in the Globe and Mail that had as its theme the counter message to that which is among the foundational concepts of the new organization I work for.

On my second day on the job, I mentioned the article and suggested our reaction should be a response from the president, floated some messages such a response should hold and received in return some indication that the Globe article had been seen and found damaging and it was on the agenda of things about which my input should be sought. It took another 4 working days to get into the president's office to confirm my approach, another day to write the article, another to have it signed off (with nary an edit and a single comment -- "love it") and another couple days for the Globe to, yes, published the article. Not sure if my timeline adds up, but the article appeared today, my two week anniversary at the new gig.

Not a complete home run for an old-school newshound like me as the article was published as the feature online comment and "all" we got in the ink and newsprint edition of the paper was a teaser box with graphic along with the president's name leading people to the article on the paper's webpage.

But I'll take it, thank you very much. The president is delighted and my boss is delighted. Not bad for two weeks on the job -- very important in the school of rest on one's laurels :)

Won't link to the article as I believe firmly that ghost writers should remain so.

Strength. Industry. Commerce. A Good Grope?

Build in 1938-39 O'Keefe House housed E.P. Taylor's Canadian Breweries Ltd. The building WAS one of the last examples of an art deco stone building of its type in downtown Toronto. Was, that is, until it succumbed to what I heard once an architect describe, not so nicely, as Toronto's penchant for facadism -- the destruction of buildings under the impression of saving them by keeping a front wall and incorporating it into a modern structure. Ah, see Ernst & Young Tower, TD Centre (stuck into the face of the building is the old TSE facade); whatever grand bank facade that is now INSIDE BCE place, the new apartment complex on church south of Queen with some grand old buildings as entranceways to a highrise, AND this the O'Keefe House facade which is now part of a (admittedly a pretty nice looking new) structure housing Ryerson's Chang school of Con Ed.

The carvings in the building are by the famed architectural carver, Frances Loring. I've admired this particular carving for years, but it was just a few weeks ago that I realized with a bit of a hoot of laughter that it's also a fine example of two men grabbing each other's crotches -- ahem, sandstone hard crotches at that.

"I'll hold your cone, if you stroke my sheaf."

Seamus Heaney --

-- has a new collection of poetry -- "District and Circle."

Sure, but the man can write (and think).

The description of the tone of the work, or its craft, or its seeming simplistic smash about one's emotional self I'll leave to the literary critics, but I will say most every line leaves a fellow aching with the beauty an artist can render with words.

Then there are the small delights of language in the hands of a master. In the title poem -- about a ride on the underground -- he describes one of those handles one holds onto, that hang from ceiling of the subway car, as a "roof-wort."

Or how about the pristine use of detail as in a poem about a blacksmith friend of Heaney's (or the poem's narrator, at least) in Ireland who banged hammer to anvil 12 times to mark the new millennium and a nephew in Edmonton hearing it over a cellphone "Held high as a horse's ear,/"

It's there a lad could start to believe god exists...

Glorious blurrrrrr

Sometimes when the wind is blowing the end tip of a pine branch as it stretches new inches onto the height and width of the tree, and the camera's long lens demands, but doesn't receive, the steady, shakeless grip of a surgeon (or a rapid shutter speed the available light won't allow), the crispness in the focus of the end result is not what's important at all...

Weather Editorial

Pretty much sums up the weather for this weekend... As tagged on a wall of the pottery works building in the Rosedale Valley.

Journal Discovered

Cleaning out my old office last week I came across one of my writer's journals -- clearly taken to work when I was still in the creative writing program and working contract at Mega-Accountancy LLP. Had a look through it this evening.

Lots of stuff that if I was still so inclined might become poems.

Three of my favourites (I'm reading the journal as if someone else wrote it!) among the list of shorter entries (you note I didn't say pithy):

"My balcony is a place where diseased plants and captured mice go to die."

"Pushed and stretched and squeezed and thumbed..." [I think this was in response to sculpting with clay. I think :) ]

"His nipples rest as quiet blemishes striving into loud buttons that when gently pinched let loose from him a do-that-again moan."

Thought I'd share to encourage myself to start journal writing again and hell maybe fuller writing will follow. I can take any college course now for $20. There is a writing program. Might work, if for nothing else, to prompt me to write more.

Priorities

Some previous occupant of my office at my new job left posted on the almost bare bulletin board above my desk a handwritten note with two contacts and their extension numbers--"bakery" and "tech support."

New Job

Got an office with a window, overlooks the "old Post Office." Can anything else matter?

First day was 8:30 a.m to 9:30 p.m.

Came out to the EA for the President -- figured it to be the fastest way to spread the news. Later a peer manager came out to me by telling me her partner was a she, was mine a he? :) This after she could hear He Who is Here Now on my cell phone ironically SRIIIing that I should "please oh please oh please come home now, honey!!"

President apparently temporarily backburnered a few tardy projects/tasks with the phrase, uttered to my boss, "Now that Steve's starting..." I suggested t-shirts to that affect.

I get to hire for two positions -- empire building :)

Love in the Colour of Orange

Saw on two separate occasions this week two orange tabby cats -- one lounging in a store window, the other narrowly escaping becoming taxi traction. Reminded me of one of my cats, long gone, and then this overly sentimental poem in his memory. But I don't care. I loved that cat more than I can ever reasonably explain.

___________

Simon was an orange cat.

An orange unreal, a colour with a crayon number
faint pale lines of weaker orange traced
a tiger design against his shimmering pumpkin fur – Persian
royalty in his past.

An Individual by choice in a house of cats who shunned
his love-all demeanour, he never tired of trying
to win fellow feline affections –
overtures rebuked once the others grew bored of his
rough-tongue grooming, or attempts to join
the dog pile of cats on the blue-leather chair.

Without choice then Simon became a person. The lone
cat allowed, he slept in my bed, his head lodged beneath my chin.
He would lay on my chest, borrowing the rhythm there.
And only then did Simon twill the purring of a cat’s contentment. Asleep.

It was I, gave the order to end him, although another
wielded the executioner’s hypodermic staff.
Trusting, clinging to my chest as I held him, Simon forced his head
under my chin. And awake, his trilling came. And awake
he went with me, despite his historical alarm
at the scent of veterinarian science.

Steven S. Heipel

Rule of Law

An unfortunate outcome of a system of governance based on the rule of law is that there are lawyers running about. I'm a big fan of the rule of law; a smaller fan of the legal system.

The settlement package arising from the residential schools mess in Canada proposes to pay survivors about $30,000, on average, while the law firms involved will be paid $80 million.

"Hey, we worked hard," say the lawyers. Not the point, says me. Instead of strutting about on the value provided and the rewards earned for their work, the damn law firms should be heralding the inequity of the amounts they're getting paid out of the barrel of money, in comparison to what those who as mere kids were yanked from their parents, generously eviscerated of their culture and buggered and beaten by the salvation crowd will receive.

Here's part of a solution: order the churches to pay the legal and court costs of the victims in the class action (and then those amounts saved by the gov't as a result can be further divied up among the surviors of the abuse). And if that results in a few more church parishes collapsing into bankruptcy, then there's an added bonus bit of justice for the victims.

Now that I think about it, the legal system ain't bad compared to organized religion.

April Showers Bring May Photos

A couple of photos from a walk around town today with He Who Is Here NOw -- a fruit tree blossom and some tulips.

Important to note that I find flower photos a great snore, but the alternative was to blog about teens shooting cops and my curmudgeon is down a quart and thus I'm unable to deal with such a heavy topic. I went smelling the flowers, instead.

A shift to the Left

As of the 15th of this month when I walk south toward the business district and hit King St. I will turn left to arrive at work, rather than right, as has been the case for the past four years. The symbolism of the turn direction delights me.

I have resigned my job as media whore, er, media relations manager for one of the world's largest firms of number crunchers. Instead I will become the media whore, er senior manager of communications and media relations for a college.

The physical and metaphorical shift off of Bay St. has me as excited as the reduction in salary has me hyperventilating that I won't be able to pay my rent (after paying for my art collection)!

I'll blog more later about the various happenings arising through the job getting process and the resignation.

Pooey on Art!

The Canadian dollar rose in comparative value to above 90 cents (relative to the $US) today, reaching 90.41 at one glorious moment.

Clearly, this is a great, great country to live in.

The Mirror Called Art

Further to my last blog, and specifically to one of the comments it prompted, I found myself crafting a response within the responses and then thought, hey!, if I move this to the main page I can avoid coming up with a new blog topic. Anyway, Hame's considered response in the previous's blog's comment section got me thinking along the following lines and this is my response to Hame's points:

Hame, want (sexual) does not equal pornography even if one wants to fuck the brains out of the subject of a painting. Even if Joyce suggested so.

As for fucking, I say when it comes to literature or art, we need to fuck into silence the intellectual deconstructionists. It makes for good academics but for the ruination of reading and personal art appreciation.

Australian artist, Cherry Hood, has some interesting things to say (not her original thesis, of course) about what our reaction to any particular piece of art says, not about the work under scrutiny but about we who are viewing the art. (That process itself is surely the measure of art's existence; that engagement we throw back at the work.)

Given she does oversized water colour portraits of adolescent boys (they are not real people, but composites of photographs and people she knows) that mix innocence and hints of violence and dollops of budding sexuality and loads of sensualness, she understands that reaction. Indeed, her graduate thesis was to take works of the European Masters in which naked young girls appeared and to switch the image of the naked female with that of a naked boy. As she predicted the show of the works brought a firestorm of protest that raged to the highest levels of government and included police attempts to shut down her show. She was called a paedophile and worse. What, she wondered, was different in her works than those of the Masters that critics and art lovers adore and praise? Well, the difference was in the viewers themselves, not the works. Naked girls okay. Naked boys bad.

I have one of her portraits ("Bruder 15") and more than one person has been quite troubled by it -- and all it is is a remarkable water colour of a gorgeous and innocent boy's face. To see such a large painting of a stunningly beautiful boy makes some people squirm -- my point, Hood's point, is the squirm is coming from inside the viewer, not from the work.

A woman I work with viewed "St. Michael" (the painting which was the subject of my last blog) with me and she too, as you are Hame, is incredibly attracted to the subject's beauty. "He's hot!," she repeated countless times.

But please, the imediate jumping from attraction to erotic to pornography is a bit problematic. But before I let that derail me, I want to say that what is fascinating is that the painting so engages you Hame that you are afraid it shows, that others will know you (in this case, your desires and wants) by your hanging the painting in your home! (The only alternative decision making process for living with/buying art is to decide whether it goes with your couch or not.)

In a much more straightforward way a gallery owner has pointed out to me on many occassions that nudes don't sell, male nudes less so, and surprisingly gay men are among the most hesitant to buy cock on canvas. What will people think: "This (naked male fom)is what I want" = "I am gay."

Art with cock or not, I think it takes a courage of sorts (an extension of the courage the artists of true artistic output demonstrate) to lay yourself bare through your artistic tastes, to hang it there on the wall next to the Ikea poster -- it says a lot about a person. It's why I ask people what they think of art. I don't give a damn if their response is counter to mine, I want to hear what the work is doing to them. (So often people who see some of the art I own are silent; as if I've asked them what they think so they'll confirm my own tastes in the works I bought and that if they don't like it it will speak poorly of my buying choicer, or something...).

Anyway, I'd amend your suggestion Hame from art reflecting the buyer's "that's what I want" to read, "that's who I am!" when looking for the answer to the question, "what does a person's art collection or taste in art say about them."