God is Afoot, Magic is Alive

Yesterday I gave my end-of-residency presentation along with all the other members of the In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. I showed a bit of work from the past (eros/ion, with mIEKAL aND), more recent past (Flaxen for Jen Bervin and Raw Power/Kill City for James Williamson); then I showed my blog (this blog) and read a bit of it, as well as the Aleph Mem Shin x-stitch, which is almost finished by now. It was a headlong rush through the material and I was winging it on a very pleasant adrenaline high that was part informality and partly exhilarated nervousness. It was the last of a series of resident presentations, all of which were both brilliant and piquantly in-process and there was a good feeling of artistic community.

Afterwards, at dinner, Paul Seesequasis, a gracious and generous human being, gave me an amazing gift: a first pressing copy of Raw Power in mint condition. I needed to lean on J. R. Carpenter in order to not have my knees completely buckle under me. I was still on the adrenaline rush and that gave me another wave of it.

Stay tuned for further musings on how the Iggy and the Stooges fit into this saga, this yarn of text and textile, this intermeshing of tactile praxis and cerebral spinnings. As I wrote on my FB page, there is no end to Stooge Magic. James Williamson noted that it (the receipt of the Raw Power gift as somehow karmically appropriate to this creative journey) was poetry! and it was indeed poetic justice. It seems to happen when I simply go towards the doors that are opening. Stooge Magic, I'm calling it for now, though it's got lots of names. God is afoot, magic is alive, as Leonard Cohen wrote (in Beautiful Losers) and Buffy St. Marie sang.