Hi & hello.
Encountering this hose-nozzle meme during a particularly dark time spent online has filled my head with nonsense. I am a lover of nonsense, so you’re welcome and I’m sorry, AMA. Shower is for show, and the jet setting is straight-up violent. Mist, while unremarkable, is just a kind choice. You may have noticed mist tents punctuating festival grounds this summer — clusters of people enduring it’s light sprinkling effects, or cooling rooms where one could be misted without the festival ticket. We needed the sentimentality of mist this summer — while taking in the festival season, or coughing alone in our rooms. Discorder has covered the festival season before, but this year just feels tender. It reads like we’ve hung on to every note. Looking at my camera roll now, the primary story it tells about This Vancouver Summer™ is that I’d been terrified of forgetting it. And that was true. I was also terrified of not having the best time of my entire life, which is a destructive hegemony that distorts reality by totally expunging the shit-side of things. YOLO-ethics. The greatest counter argument to all this, is that I think we all just want to experience the saccharine again, and that should be OK. For as long as I’ve paid attention, sentimentality has been a cardinal cultural sin — to say an album is sentimental is perforce to damn it. To align it with the generic — at it’s most charitable — or inflated Hallmark-ism at worst. Mastering one’s emotions, being ‘rational’’ is a time-honored neo-liberal imperative, there’s a reason cool is called “cool.” But when we relax our constant vigil against looking or feeling ridiculous in order to feel the thing deep in our gut, great songs are written. Art feels cathartic. In other words, get in the mister-tent, loser. Occasionally it pays off.
In a review of the JAM studios exhibition, What Is Love, Sophia Ohler writes, “Treating the intimate as sacred, Vee explores the power of love to transform the everyday into art. I was confronted with the private, yet universal nature of the sort of revelation Vee was getting at: although I may not understand the emotional significance of a lamp for the artist, we’ve all experienced a moment caught in time, when the banal is magnified, and given meaning through love, or grief. ” There is no ambiguity here, what was good about the work was that it was not just life exaggerated, but life uninhibited. It reminded me what it feels like to love something uncontrived. To be intrigued by something unusual on a personal, almost private level. This issue also welcomes new writer, Coraline Thomas who interviews Flower Bomb collective — allowing them to radiate outward from the personal and the near at hand.
Fuck it — this is a love song,
~T
