In September of 1975 we rented the Pender Ballroom at 337 Pender Street Vancouver. The ballroom was 6000 square feet 50 by 120 feet, with a stage at one end. There was a 90 foot mural of the industries of BC on one wall painted by Fraser Wilson. The ballroom once held sway to people giving lectures like Rudyard Kipling, then the Boilermakers hall, and then the Maritime union took it over and it became the Pender auditorium and then when we took it over in 1975 it became
“ The Hemispheres “
Previously from November 1973 to April of 1975 we had rented most of the second floor of the St Francis hotel across from the Canadian Pacific train station at Seymour and Cordova streets where we began to plunge into what was then called Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology, the Tarot, Mcluhan, Levi-strauss, Science, Art and Entertainment and any and all exoteric and esoteric delights that took our fancy.
On the turntable were Dylan, also the Rolling Stones , Leonard Cohen, the Beatles, Stockhausen and Silver Apples of the Moon among others but repetition was definitely a motif.
At the same time we started roaming the downtown alleys of Vancouver rescuing discards and playing with the detritus of civilization, from putting casters on empty piano boxes to wheel back to the St Francis to discarded business machines, to doors, windows, fishing gear, paper and anything else we could we might rollick with as we juggled uncertainty and attempted in our own McLuhanesque way to transform clichés into archetypes while we donned the mantle of Scientific Bricoleurs.
When we rented The Hemispheres there were over 200 wooden gang chairs along with dozens of wooden so called banquet tables. We bought the lot of them with perhaps an intuitive sense that they might come in handy.
Upstairs a painter named Harold Klunder had a studio and he and his partner Barbara and young child were on their way back to Ontario He had two 4 X 8 plywood tables on wheels that he had built so we purchased them to be able to display our Alley Artefacts and to visualize how they might be reconfigured.
Reading the Founders of Neurology book out loud on the stage we named Olympus along with Levi-Strauss and McLuhan, the alley artefacts continued and would there be a crescendo or a John Cage silence? I vote for both. Towards the end of 1976 we used the wooden gang chairs to represent an outline of the physical image of a brain. Right and left hemispheres with a player piano as the corpus callosum.As most brains are not empty we then began to create 22 areas of interest with the hemipheres (11 and 11) using the banquet tables and a selection from our alley artefacts to represent each area. Common motifs for all areas were doors, windows, tea chest lids, boxes and then unique items for degrees of differentiation.
The 22 areas were also based on a series of writings that we had created called THE RAG for Romany Ancient Greek which was a hybrid vocabulary that we invented for writing the 22. (distillation delights) By placing the hemispheres in the usual audience area we attempted to shift the dichotomy of performer/audience by making our 22 Hemisphere structures the performers and those of us on what called the Olympian stage(We called it Olympus because it was surrounded by 13 wooden gunboxes full of writings but thats a story for another time)
We photographed and disassembled everything and eventually shifted all to Penny BC from 1977 to 1979 in 40 foot train box cars, 24 foot trucks across the frozen Fraser river, a 1952 air force ambulance named Ambhul Mogul and a 50s army jeep named Silverwitch and our 1960s Italian bakery truck called Siva
Meanwhile still back at the Hemispheres we built a representation of what we called PCSB’s or Portable Cybernetic Systems Boxes (Wiener and McCulloch must have been hovering) using those empty piano boxes that we cut up and reassembled anew using sheepskin fabric as hinge to keep them from bleating.
Much more to unpack from that 16 months that covered millenia and by January 6, 1977 we were rolling the last remnant in the form of a wheeled cart back to our abode at 856 Rchards street. Epiphanies indeed!
All of the above is just an attempt to leave open the possibility that whoever buys our property in Penny will have an opportunity to feel not only the energy that we have manifested there and before there but will also have lots of material objects to let their creativity swirl that scoops up where they have been and allows new finite forms to emerge.These words can also have an effect.
The 21st century needs rebels with hearts and brains
Unique at play.
NEXT!
R & Y (A.I. Persofsky & B.R. Emmons)
“ The Hemispheres “
Previously from November 1973 to April of 1975 we had rented most of the second floor of the St Francis hotel across from the Canadian Pacific train station at Seymour and Cordova streets where we began to plunge into what was then called Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology, the Tarot, Mcluhan, Levi-strauss, Science, Art and Entertainment and any and all exoteric and esoteric delights that took our fancy.
On the turntable were Dylan, also the Rolling Stones , Leonard Cohen, the Beatles, Stockhausen and Silver Apples of the Moon among others but repetition was definitely a motif.
At the same time we started roaming the downtown alleys of Vancouver rescuing discards and playing with the detritus of civilization, from putting casters on empty piano boxes to wheel back to the St Francis to discarded business machines, to doors, windows, fishing gear, paper and anything else we could we might rollick with as we juggled uncertainty and attempted in our own McLuhanesque way to transform clichés into archetypes while we donned the mantle of Scientific Bricoleurs.
When we rented The Hemispheres there were over 200 wooden gang chairs along with dozens of wooden so called banquet tables. We bought the lot of them with perhaps an intuitive sense that they might come in handy.
Upstairs a painter named Harold Klunder had a studio and he and his partner Barbara and young child were on their way back to Ontario He had two 4 X 8 plywood tables on wheels that he had built so we purchased them to be able to display our Alley Artefacts and to visualize how they might be reconfigured.
Reading the Founders of Neurology book out loud on the stage we named Olympus along with Levi-Strauss and McLuhan, the alley artefacts continued and would there be a crescendo or a John Cage silence? I vote for both. Towards the end of 1976 we used the wooden gang chairs to represent an outline of the physical image of a brain. Right and left hemispheres with a player piano as the corpus callosum.As most brains are not empty we then began to create 22 areas of interest with the hemipheres (11 and 11) using the banquet tables and a selection from our alley artefacts to represent each area. Common motifs for all areas were doors, windows, tea chest lids, boxes and then unique items for degrees of differentiation.
The 22 areas were also based on a series of writings that we had created called THE RAG for Romany Ancient Greek which was a hybrid vocabulary that we invented for writing the 22. (distillation delights) By placing the hemispheres in the usual audience area we attempted to shift the dichotomy of performer/audience by making our 22 Hemisphere structures the performers and those of us on what called the Olympian stage(We called it Olympus because it was surrounded by 13 wooden gunboxes full of writings but thats a story for another time)
We photographed and disassembled everything and eventually shifted all to Penny BC from 1977 to 1979 in 40 foot train box cars, 24 foot trucks across the frozen Fraser river, a 1952 air force ambulance named Ambhul Mogul and a 50s army jeep named Silverwitch and our 1960s Italian bakery truck called Siva
Meanwhile still back at the Hemispheres we built a representation of what we called PCSB’s or Portable Cybernetic Systems Boxes (Wiener and McCulloch must have been hovering) using those empty piano boxes that we cut up and reassembled anew using sheepskin fabric as hinge to keep them from bleating.
Much more to unpack from that 16 months that covered millenia and by January 6, 1977 we were rolling the last remnant in the form of a wheeled cart back to our abode at 856 Rchards street. Epiphanies indeed!
All of the above is just an attempt to leave open the possibility that whoever buys our property in Penny will have an opportunity to feel not only the energy that we have manifested there and before there but will also have lots of material objects to let their creativity swirl that scoops up where they have been and allows new finite forms to emerge.These words can also have an effect.
The 21st century needs rebels with hearts and brains
Unique at play.
NEXT!
R & Y (A.I. Persofsky & B.R. Emmons)
Some words from R & Y...
2.1 Acres in Penny, BC Canada
$88,000
$88,000
