Balls of Rice

Tag: Art

  • The Village God of Labour

    Pasha, on break from installing new rain gutters, looked down at me as I sweat, shovel in hand, knee-deep in Ukraine’s famous black earth. “Crazy Nic” he said. I didn’t expect him to say something in English so I didn’t catch it. He repeated in his own language: «Шалений Нік» (shaleney Nic). Then I understood.

    Olia and I went for a walk to the forest just to see what the sun and wind felt like from from different angles. Upon return, the neighbour, bent ninety-degrees at the waist hoeing potatoes, couldn’t really understand that we came back without foraged mushrooms. A friend has said that she finds it sad that her parents don’t know how to have fun, that every spare moment is spent processing apples, feeding chickens, digging potatoes, canning tomatoes. They would never go to a movie or concert. This weekend, her and I will go to a bar on Friday, a concert on Saturday, and another concert on Sunday. We are of the generation that must always constantly forever be entertained. There’s not much entertainment in the village since the discobar closed.

    Abandoned disco-bar.

    Maybe I should get a job. Selling bread-flavoured sodapop (kvas), selling honey, bike courier, taxi driver, bus driver, teaching english. My anti-capitalist brain tells me that my desire to get a job is just me being insecure about my worth in a society that values you solely based on your salary. My bank account tells me otherwise. And seeing old people sit on the concrete selling wilted plums makes me feel guilty for being previously paid an hourly wage equal to their monthly pension, as though I had something to do with global wealth inequality and amassing of colonial wealth. So I find solace in incorrectly sewing and then seam-ripping adaptive underwear for veterans with prosthetics. Or carrying a long stick with a hook at the end of it, letting gravity pummel me with apples as I shake branches of 100-year-old trees to collect fruit to sell to the juice man for 10₴/kg (25¢/kg). Each metric tonne we collect eases my insecurities, each apple welt brings me closer to the village god of labour — the permanently bent-over бабуся (babusia).

    It wasn’t clear to me why Pasha thought I was crazy. For digging a 60metre long trench from the well to the garden to provide water to the vegetables in increasingly dry summers? Or for moving to Ukraine, spending time in the village when he was just a few years from conscription-age and wanted nothing more than to leave a place he was not legally allowed to leave, being told by his mom that he had to help out his uncle, the only carpenter in town? His uncle is now in jail, having paid a bribe to avoid military service. Now there’s no one to finish the eavestroughs.

    As I Support The Arts by gently bobbing my head to synthesizers pumping through clouds of haze at a festival in Kyiv (a task I convince myself is more important than ever when a culture is under attack), village labour takes on a different tone in occupied and nearly occupied territory. Demining. Reselling pieces of exploded enemy drones as a fundraiser for new defense drones. Trying not to be killed. There’s an absurdity to art in times of war, says author and soldier Artem Chekh. But also that art is the only thing that allows for a “tolerable existence”. Make art not war, sure, but what do you do if someone makes war on you? (Village) God (of Labour) knows that this blog post or a John Lennon song won’t prevent a train car from exploding. But neither will picking metric tonnes of apples.

    As always, if you’re able, please consider donating below, or reach out if you are interested in donating somewhere else.

    Musicians Defend Ukraine

  • Fuck Art, man

    Sometimes they say that I work in the Arts. Sometimes they call it the industry. I tend to believe I work in the business of happiness; making people happy by selling them Art pressed into wax and Art pressed onto cotton, manufactured by people who are unhappy, someone’s boot pressed in the middle of their back, picking cotton, weaving cotton, sewing cotton, inhaling cotton, shipping cotton. And maybe wax.

    Happiness follows the law of conservation of mass. Happiness cannot be created or destroyed. The total mass of the reactants equals the total mass of the products.

    Ice to water, water to steam.

    Former-happiness to cotton. Cotton to t-shirt. T-shirt to Art. Art to happiness.

    Art doesn’t walk around town handing out twenty-dollar bills or cab vouchers or new rental lease agreements. Art doesn’t have its lifeguard safety—it doesn’t save people who are already drowning. Art is like whiskey, it makes you feel warm even though you’re losing your leg to the cold.

    Where was Art when your friend was evicted by Regina Housing Authority and slept outside for a month and died in his friend’s kitchen? Had we finally convinced him to draw a picture for the Free Press, would Art have saved him?

    Where was Art when your wheelchair-bound friend kept getting his cigarettes stolen by his brother who could have been painting miraculous animal scenes and selling prints but instead stole blind people’s cell phones to sell for crystal meth?

    Art was in an office building, denying grants. Art was at a wine-and-cheese opening wearing a well-fitting shirt.

    Fuck Art, man. Fuck the fact that this piece of prose is (debatably) a piece of Art.

    Rocky sits in the the empty coffee room of a fading drop-in centre drawing portraits of people who may or may not exist, to give away to the first person she knows will praise her for it. Rocky draws because it’s the only thing that can help her cope with the fact that everyone she knows is dying in front of her.
    Fred.
    Her aunt from Cote.
    Hilliard, found frozen outside.
    All in a week. She draws because what the hell else can we do?

    Fuck Art.

    That is, unless it’s used for its one and only true purpose, as with Rocky, as the antidote in a place dripping in poison.