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kootenaygoon · 4 years

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So,

Chris was asleep in my passenger seat, wearing a leprechaun dress.

We’d connected on the last day of Kamp Festival, the pair of us haggard and semi-conscious in my fold-out chairs. Chris was monologuing about her festival experience. She told me she jumped off a cliff, she overcame her fear of heights, she was proud of herself. She told me that these grown-ups playing in the colour games had legitimately reverted to their childhood bullying ways, making things all ultra-competitive instead of fun. Of course.

“But I’ve met some amazing people here,” she said. “Like I think I’m going to remember these people for a long time.”

I could tell by how long-winded and earnest Chris was being that she was on something strong, maybe acid. She was about to crash hard, and everyone was packing up camp to leave. Becca had left for the coast with a Victoria DJ she knew, so I was all by my lonesome when it came to paying for gas. Chris offered to pay $40 for a ride home, but I didn’t accept it. I just wanted to make sure she got home safe, because she wasn’t going to be sober any time soon. I couldn’t imagine leaving her with a stranger.

Once we pulled out of the Kamp venue on to the highway, we were pretty much immediately stuck in a line-up. Chris put down the window and stuck her bare feet out into the wind. A minute or two later she’d slumped into herself, snoring gently, her head lolling slightly from side to side. I knew it wasn’t a big deal, that people did drugs like this all the time and woke up fine, that she wasn’t necessarily going to overdose in my passenger seat. My legs vibrated along with the music as I ground my teeth in concern. What if she had taken fentanyl or something? What if I arrived backed in Nelson with a corpse for a passenger?

“Hey,” I said, taking her arm. “You’re feeling okay? You’ll let me know if you need to puke or anything?”

She nodded. “I’m good. I’ve got some water here. I think I’m just going to sleep, if that’s all right. You can keep the music up, if you want. I like it when there’s music playing while I sleep. It fucks with my dreams.”

Did she she say that, I asked myself, or did I?

Aussie Chris lived with Chelsea up in Rosemont, and knew Blayne from before. She was a server at Vienna Cafe, a night club kid in her early 20s. She was biracial, half-asian, with a smattering of freckles under her eyes and shoulder-length brown mermaid hair. She was on a one-year visa and was looking to hit every music festival she could while she was in the country. When it came to partying, she was a professional. I liked her style a lot. She had a busy intellect.

As we sat idle during the ferry crossing, I reflected on the last few days. The thing with Becca had ended on a bad note. We’d never spent this many days together in a row, and she was starting to realize what a drag I was. She was also less than thrilled to hear me talk about Paisley non-stop, whining that I would never get over her or that I was still processing things.

“I don’t mean this to be patronizing, because I do think you’re awesome, but I think you should consider therapy very seriously. It seems like you’re in a dark place, and I don’t know how to help you.”

“I never said I needed help.”

She laughed. “It’s like you have this giant sign over you that reads: NEEDS HELP. In an adorable way, but it’s alarming too. That you’re living in this constant state of desperation. Honestly, I think Nelson might be bad for you.”

While I pulled off the ferry and back on to the highway, I nudged Chris to pull her legs back into the cab. We needed the windows up. I thought about my job at the Star, and how repetitive the work was becoming. We’d hit all the available topics when it came to your typical small town goings-on, but we lacked depth. The real story was all these fucking overdoses, but they seemed to be outside our reach. There was a shroud of silence over these deaths, so they didn’t end up having a public record. I wondered how much was being kept from me, what angle I’d been missing. Why all this secrecy?

I wanted to help.

The reason I named my UBC thesis manuscript “Whatever you’re on, I want some” was because I was despairing about a friend lost to heroin addiction, also named Chris. We had grown up together, gone to the same youth group and camp together, but somehow he’d ended up trapped on the Downtown Eastside, en route to becoming a derelict soul. I gave up on him. That’s what made me feel guiltiest, was that I abandoned him. At a certain point I realized it just wasn’t healthy for me to know him anymore, no matter how close we’d been as teens. Addiction had defined our relationship, had ended it, and I wanted to understand why.

“I’ve been really into the paintings you’ve been posting,” Chris said, stretching out her arms as we slalomed through the woods. Slocan Lake looked just as infinite as ever. I turned down the music. “All the self portraits.”

I nodded, pretended to be embarrassed. “Yeah, I’ve just done a few now. I was inspired by this painter John Cooper, who I interviewed for the Star. He’s this guy in his 70s with like hundreds of students in the Kootenays and he’s a fucking legend. He knows Tom Robbins,” I said.

“His colour choices are really trippy, like lots of purple and crazy bursts of the whole rainbow for mundane things. Like he’ll do a rusted out car but suddenly it’s neon green with purple highlights, you know?”

She nodded, looking out the window. “I like paintings that have psychedelic elements like that. Paintings that take you somewhere beyond natural.”

I lit a joint. “And the guy’s crazy. You can just feel it in his work, this extra electricity. When I interviewed him he kept me on the phone for like 45 minutes talking. He tells all these crazy stories about the 60s and he’s just fucking hilarious. He’s known as the Toad Road painter because he’s painted the same rock like a hundred times.”

“Hilarious.”

“Oh, and naked ladies. He paints lots of naked chicks.”

Chris had heard about my photo shoot with Blayne, and had talked to Chelsea about appearing as a model in one of my shoots. She had experience, so she would be completely comfortable in front of the camera. I’d been amassing subjects over my years in the Kootenays, shooting every kind of woman I met every way that I knew how.

I loved them all.

From there we continued to weave and dip, the RAV humming along like a space ship, as we worked our way through the joint. Chris told me about how she’d watched Joe Nillo live-paint at Kamp and how incredible it was to see him channel the festival’s energy into his canvas. She was roommates with the subject, Kylie, so she could see through all the goddess window dressing.

“It’s hard to tell whether he’s in love with her, or the painting.”

I laughed. “Why can’t it be both? He can channel his love for her into the work, even if they’re not together, right? He can remember the good things about her, the things he fell in love with. Those things don’t become irrelevant the moment you break up. There’s still meaning there.”

Chris looked at me, bemused. She knew I was talking about Paisley. “Listen, man, I’m just saying Joe’s got this way of channeling whole narratives into these images. They’re the sort of paintings you can sit down and read them like a book.”

“Like they have little details you have to look for?”

“Exactly. And that one you’ve seen isn’t his trippiest painting by far. We’ve got a bunch of his pieces still back at our house, I’ll show you. His paintings sing.”

Eventually Chris fell back asleep, as I was passing through Winlaw. From there I hurtled through South Slocan with my music back up, and back on the highway to Nelson. I thought about Joe Nillo and John Cooper, how they each embodied an approach to art that I could try to emulate. Like Joe I could produce work that was spiritually-infused, so that engaging with it feels like a religious experience. And like John I could gleefully go mad, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all while revelling in the universe’s exquisite beauty. I was sick of being just a journalist, of being constrained to reporting facts. I wanted to be a painter, an artist. I wanted to tap into the magic of the Kootenays and shoot it into my veins.

“I’m so full of love I feel like I’m going to paint the walls with my gore,” Chris said, but by then she wasn’t Chris anymore. It was the other Chris, from my childhood. He stared straight ahead from his passenger seat, angry.

“You remember that time we had a contest to see who could stay in that freezing lake longer, up my cabin. Do you remember that?”

“Yeah, I won. But you hogged the warm shower for like half an hour.”

“So who was the real winner?”

“I don’t even know what to feel about you, man. Like at least you’ve found a clean supply so I don’t need to read your headline yet.”

He laughed. “You act like you know how this is going to end, but you don’t.”

“This ends with me punching you in the head as hard as I can.”

“The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.”

I turned back in my seat, and rubbed my forehead with a knuckle. It was Bob Dylan playing, so I stuck with that for a moment. It was a song I associated with my high school drama teacher, Mr. Van Camp, who sang this drunkenly on the last night of our provincial theatre festival: People are crazy and times are strange. I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range. I used to care, but things have changed.

“If you were a character in The Wire,” I said to Chris. “You would be Wallace.”

“And what would that make you? Poot?”

I smiled and glanced over my shoulder to where Andrew Stevenson was sitting surly, his muscled arms crossed as he looked out the window. Beside him was Ryan Tapp, listening to an iPod with his sunglasses on. If things got bad, these two were always nearby to step in. I had more power than people realized, than even I realized, but I was still figuring out how to harness it properly. If my life was The Wire, I wanted to control which character I was going to be.

“Are you, kidding?” I said, reaching behind my seat to grab my grey shotgun. I felt the cold barrel in my palm as I pulled it into my lap, pointing it in Chris’ direction. I brought the barrel to his lips, and then his chest, and finally to his groin. I snickered with sinister pleasure.

“Bitch, I’m Omar.”

The Kootenay Goon

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holytheoristtastemaker · 4 years

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Nobody could have guessed at the beginning of the year that within a few months our entire lives would have been turned upside-down by a global pandemic. Companies all around the world have had to quickly figure out how to operate on a remote working basis, and it hasn't always been easy.

While the mechanics of running a business during this lockdown are straightforward – ensuring everyone has the hardware and software they need, and nailing down video conferencing, chatrooms and systems to send large files, for example – keeping things running smoothly and ensuring staff are coping in isolation is a whole other matter.

For design agencies, often based around small, close-knit teams in regular communication, this can be especially challenging. It's a whole new working world, and often we're having to make the rules up as we go along, but the creative industries are rising to the challenge. We spoke to five studios to find out how they're coping with the lockdown; here's what they had to say.

7 design exercises to keep your skills sharp

01. dn&co

dn&co has been able to improve its workflow during the lockdown

"This is hard," says Joy Nazzari, founder at dn&co, "and the first step is accepting we need to ease anxiety in order to make room for good thinking.

"At dn&co, we've been able to find small opportunities from the lockdown challenge. We've improved our workshop process and they have been surprisingly effective by way of repurposed interactive conference-polling apps. The necessary structure of video conferencing has resulted in ordered, thoughtful and democratic feedback from our clients that has propelled many projects.

"With new technology has come more presentation practice, making us feel and look sharper, coherent and professional. Yes we're doing Zoom workouts, quizzes and drinks like everyone is, but maybe it's actually the 1-1 calls without the noise of the studio that's giving us closeness with colleagues — and you hear the quieter voices more clearly.

"But the most striking difference has been at an industry level, where it's really heartening to see how many studios have banded together in private Slack channels to share strategies for survival. The way it has brought agencies together will be, I hope, a lasting legacy of this terrible pandemic."

02. Superunion

For Superunion, fostering a studio feel for remote staff has been essential

For a global agency the size of Superunion, adapting to the lockdown is a much bigger challenge than for smaller studios. Executive creative director Stuart Radford notes that isolation and collaboration are two opposing forces; however the agency has learned three useful lessons to help keep things moving.

Build a virtual studio

"We've started using Milanote, an online platform that enables us to share ideas/images and comment and add content in real-time, so we can review projects in one place, just as you would on a studio wall – let the collective chin-scratching continue!"

Keep up the 'What do you think of this?' chats

"Structured reviews are important but they're no substitute for ad-hoc studio chats. A random 'How about this?' starts a conversation that makes a massive difference to the work and is one of the most rewarding parts of the process. So, we're encouraging 'What do you think of this?' calls – randomly and regularly."

You can't isolate a strong culture

"Lockdown is a real test for agency culture. It's been heart-warming to see 'Superunioners' finding any excuse to hang out: quiz nights, birthdays, team and Friday night drinks. Unexpectedly, some great memories have been made in this weird and difficult time – full credit to our people!"

03. Noughts & Ones

Noughts & Ones, which recently won awards for its site for Fevered Sleep, has found plenty of ways to keep staff and clients engaged

Like many agencies, Bristol-based Noughts & Ones is relying on Slack and Zoom to keep its team talking, but also making sure to inject a little levity into the process. So its Monday morning kick-off call includes a 'Show & Tell' segment where everyone shares a project they've been working on over the weekend. "The first couple of weeks have been very plant-focused," says founding director, Tom Locke. "Who knew we were such a green-fingered team!"

Optional beers for the end-of-day team call are a welcome way to close off the working day; Noughts and Ones also organises a game every Friday, and its sent a care package of coffee and snacks to every team member, something it plans to do regularly.

"Overall," says Locke, "I feel that the experience has been really quite positive for us as an agency, as it has got us focused on our own (and each other's) workload and communicating super clearly. We're also having to really thinking outside the box in terms of how we can 'add value' to our clients.

"In terms of working with clients that are struggling, it's all about supporting them however we can in term of positioning – we're also exploring how we can facilitate collaboration and partnerships between some of our e-commerce clients that fall into the non-essential category with others that fall into the essential category. We're starting to see some really exciting and innovative conversations happen!"

04. Rose

Like so many agencies, the team at Rose has found the adjustment to lockdown life to be disorienting and dislocating. Studio partner Simon Elliott tells us that the team have been brilliant in how they're coping and responding, and explains that one way they've found to cope with their newfound circumstances has been to create a daily 'Cultural Coffee Break'.

"Many of our clients (past and present) are in the cultural and visitor attraction sector (including English National Opera, Bletchley Park, National Portrait Gallery, V&A, Tate, The Photographers' Gallery, Natural History Museum, Science Museum, The Old Vic etc)," says Elliott. "And in light of them all having had to close their doors indefinitely, we thought it would be nice to create a series of mini virtual tours on Instagram to share some of the many shows, exhibitions and events for theatres, galleries and museums we've been involved in over the past two decades, for our followers to enjoy during the lockdown.

"We also hoped it might ensure the many amazing arts organisations and cultural institutions out there remain in people's thoughts throughout this difficult time, and can still be supported somehow, if not in person.

"For our team, it's provided some welcome respite from the crisis, to keep them mentally active and agile, and given them an excuse to delve into our archive and discover some of the many projects we worked on before their time at Rose."

Rose's Cultural Coffee Break happens every weekday morning on its Instagram account.

05. Magpie Studio

Another agency turning to Instagram to keep team spirits up is Magpie Studio. "A strong studio culture has always been a priority for us," says creative partner Ben Christie, "so it was certainly a challenge to adapt to an entirely new way of working overnight.

"Once we'd found our feet, we wanted to put a message out on our Instagram and LinkedIn to say that we're still here, still strong and still working together successfully as team.

"For us, happiness fuels creativity – it's great for general wellbeing and contributes to a positive team spirit which, in turn, produces better work. So, amongst the hard graft, we also have a lot of fun in the studio.

"It made sense that our post reflected this by being upbeat and making people smile. We also wanted it to have a family-like feel, so the Brady Bunch reference seemed to hit the spot.

"It was great fun to make and a perfect excuse to get the whole team involved. We're already thinking about the next one!"

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