Month: November 2016

By Jim Hagarty
1990

As the controversy swirls around the National Gallery of Canada’s $1.8 million purchase of a painting called Voice Of Fire – a large canvas painted blue with a big red stripe running up the middle – this week a culture critic in another newspaper helpfully tells lowlifes such as I who might be inclined to criticize the painting what our proper attitude toward the “work” should be.

To begin with, the critic tells her readers, Voice Of Fire is unique among the five “large scale works” American artist Barnett Newman did because of its “horizontal orientation.”

And then she describes it for us:

“The work is a panel with three horizontal bands of color – two of ultramarine blue and one of cadmium red burning up the middle. Because the stripes are horizontal, of equal width and palindromic (the same in both directions), there are no hierarchical connotations. The stripes are equal but different.”

For those of us who’d been reading all sorts of hierarchical connotations into the painting, it was a relief to find out there aren’t any.

And to further help us understand Voice Of Fire, the newspaper critic advises us to ask ourselves these questions about it.

“Is the red holding the blue together or pushing it apart?”

Now that I think about it, this painting may not be just a big red stripe on a big blue canvas. Maybe it’s two big blue stripes on a big red canvas.

“What do the issues of togetherness and separateness, of being distinct yet equal, mean to me, to my relationships, to the Canadian experience?”

Being together and separate, to me, means having a fight with a friend then riding with that person in a car to Toronto.

“What associations do the colours red and blue bring to mind?”

Red makes me think of apples, Montreal Canadiens, and the soil in Prince Edward Island. Blue makes me think recycling boxes, my livingroom furniture and the colour my finger turned when I hit it with a hammer last week.

“Does this painting make me want to stand tall and take a stand or does it make me feel like I’m already there, with a sense of belonging, of place and of power?”

Yes. Oh yes. Voice Of Fire gives me a sense of belonging like I’ve never had before. And power? Why, I can do anything now. Anything.

Thank you Barnett Newman.

“Does the size of the work frighten me or make me feel sheltered and protected?”

No, it doesn’t frighten me at all. In fact, it’s so big, if a thunderstorm came up, I could tear it apart and make a shelter out of it.

“Do I feel proud to share ownership in this valuable investment?”

Proud doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m fairly bursting with pride. The next time some guy puts down Canadians, he’ll have me to deal with.

“Back off, buddy!” I’ll say. “I own Barnett Newman’s Voice Of Fire.”

That’ll shut him – and his hierarchical connotations – up.

By Jim Hagarty
2011

Yes, it’s true. I really am Jed Clampett in disguise, without the $25 million, of course.

I went to a one-room schoolhouse near a crossroads called Bornholm, population 50, the same school my father went to and the one my grandmother attended in the late 1800s. I started there in 1957 and left in 1964.

The school closed a few years later and has since been torn down. It was practically my whole world for a long time and I grew to love it despite its deficiencies, the chief one being the fact that it had no running water. Hence, no sinks with taps and no flush toilets. Instead, in the washrooms, a lovely toilet seat sat perched above a deep hole. One young lad, in a fit of anger, once threw a football down one of those holes. Caught and convicted, he was lowered down by the feet to retrieve the ball, which he did. Had the boys who carried out the punishment lost their grip and let him go, he would have no doubt died.

For a few years until an oil furnace was installed in a crawl space under the school, the building was heated by a big woodstove at the back. I loved the heat that came from that thing.

Fifteen minutes before each recess and lunch, someone would be chosen to take a steel pail out to the handpump over the well in the schoolyard and load it up with fresh water. It was quite an honour to be chosen to do that but you didn’t want the honour too often or you’d get a beating later from some jealous classmate for being the teacher’s pet.

In any case, the pail of water was brought back into the school and set on a shelf at the back by an exit door. The students all lined up and took turns taking a drink from a tin ladle submersed in the pail. Not the most sanitary perhaps but maybe it toughened us up. To this day, I am rarely sick.

Speaking of tough, I have a picture of my father taken in front of the school with his classmates and teacher in 1920 when he was eight years old. Most of the kids in the school wore no shoes or socks, though my Dad did. The school was located on a gravel road. Ouch. I don’t know why they had no shoes. Maybe it was a preference, maybe a necessity.

This summer, my son and I were touring a back road north of our hometown Stratford in Mennonite country when we saw some farm girls in their pioneer dresses and bonnets walking down a gravel road – barefoot. For those girls, who still attend a one-room school, times haven’t changed at all.

Beautiful music is medicine for the soul, to be taken many times per day in copious quantities with no possibilities of overdose and best administered intravenously through small speakers attached to the head. If anxiety and sadness persist, double the dosage. JH

My friend and fellow blogger Al Bossence (thebayfieldbunch.com) is spending part of his winter with his family at their ranch house in Arizona. Wherever Al goes, he’s is always able to find cattle it seems, like the ones he came across today in his travels.

By Jim Hagarty
2015

My wife and I are different in many ways. She loves doing puzzles, I’d rather sit naked in a pot of honey and then go find a bears’ den to moon than do a puzzle. I don’t see the point of sitting for hours flipping over little pieces of cardboard to try to reassemble what was a perfectly good picture till some demented soul with a bunch of goofy cookie cutters blew the whole thing apart.

The same brain that feels satisfaction piecing together a cruelly dismembered depiction of some sort or other also enjoys endless knitting sessions or hours of playing solitaire on a computer. If I ever play solitaire on our computer I sincerely hope the police will come and arrest me and put me to work breaking rocks in a remote rock pile in Siberia.

My point is, how can anyone find joy in sitting down at a table covered by 2,000 randomly shaped puzzle pieces with an eye to reconstructing something that should have been left alone all along?

So when I hear the telltale flip of the puzzle pieces on the table, I go out to my garage and tinker. The thing I love to do most, and it is a very engaging task, is to sort through the chaos out there and try to bring some order.

For example, I was recently given several cardboard boxes and mutliple plastic bags all full of screwnails. Mixed in among the drywall screws, decks screws, fence screws, metal screws, and concrete screws, are assorted nuts and washers. Also, there are dozens of common nails, spikes, ardocs, concrete nails and finishing nails. Also sharing containers with all these screwnails and old-fashioned nails, are various sizes of plastic drywall plugs, plastic electrical wire connectors and hooks of every description.

I love to dump the containers of goodies out on my workbench and I can spend hours isolating items according to type and size and dropping them into empty peanut jars I have collected. When I accumulate new jars, I like to dump all the full ones on the table again and sort them into finer and more specific categories.

I have enough of this inventory to build a space shuttle or at least a really fancy sandbox for kids. But I will never use 95 per cent of all the material I love to sort and I know that going in. Very little is actually accomplished, therefore, by all this activity, but my mind is strangely calm and satisfied at the conclusion of each session.

But you wouldn’t see me put together a puzzle if the executioner said he wouldn’t give the riflemen the signal if I could complete, in three hours, a 200-piece puzzle showing a horse standing in a field. I would look him straight in the eye and yell, defiantly, “FIRE!!!!”

Yes, my wife and I are so different. It’s a wonder we’re still together after all this time.

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I was just saying to my wife the other night that nowadays there is a museum for every darn thing but not a one that I have ever heard of to celebrate the male genitalia.

Why not, I wondered.

And right on cue comes the news that there is such a museum, in a small town in Iceland of all places. It is called the Phallological Museum and it displays everything from gigantic whale penises to speck-sized field mouse testicles and bull scrotums

And recently, the museum put its first human member on display.

There is also part of a Sperm Whale penis that is as thick as a tree trunk and as tall as a man. The entire penis is not on display but if it was, it would be about five metres long, or about as big as my garage. And that is when it is, ahem, in a relaxed state.

I probably will never make it to Iceland but it is tempting to go there just to see the 276 specimens from all of Iceland’s 46 mammals, along with a few foreign contributions. After all, it is the world’s biggest and only penis museum.

On display are the penises of whales, dolphins, walruses, redfish, goats, polar bears and rats, just to mention a few. The walls are decorated with massive dried penises, while several dried bull and reindeer organs have been transformed into whips and walking sticks.

Fifteen silver-coloured casts of different-sized human penises also stand in a glass case below a picture of Iceland’s 2008 silver medal-winning handball team, the members of which were willing models for the casts.

In fact, men from around the world are lining up to donate their penises to the museum when they are done with them.

Foreign visitors to Iceland are flocking to the museum. Uninformed about cultural norms and practices in Iceland as I am, I am intrigued to discover that local people go to the museum as well. A nice Friday night, after work activity to give the mind a rest.

There is just no easy way to get myself out of this story so I guess I will just have to get up from the computer and run away.

So many terrible puns to be written, so little time. And even less courage.

By Jim Hagarty
2013

Okay, so there are better ways to start the day than this.

I just got home from having blood taken from me at the lab after a 12-hour fast, when there was a message on the phone to call my wife at her office. So I called. She answered and then said, “Just a minute.”

The phone sort of went dead and I thought she was putting me on hold. So I said in as charming a way as I could, “Aww, c’mon! I’ve gotta get some f—ing food into me.”

She came back on the line, seemingly flustered.

“I was on speakerphone, wasn’t I?” I asked. Turns out I was. She hadn’t put me on hold; she was preparing for a conference call and she was trying to take me off speakerphone.

At least her bosses and all the other VIPs didn’t hear my sweet nothings.

I’m hoping for joint custody of the kids but that’ll be up to the judge, I guess.