Friends,

When I started this in a cabin on a little island back in midsummer, things felt wide open, the days long and generous. Cut to now: I've been railing against the turn in seasons but I'm starting to embrace that cool shift in the air that comes with what I'm insistently referring to as the late, late summer. This transmission is a harvest of things holding my attention over the past few months. Let's get into it.

The Dreamers of Dreams

For periods in my twenties I went out of my way to return from slumber with some kind of dream matter. I implemented alarms to intermittently interrupt sleep through the night, Dalí's key method during daily naps¹ and cracks at lucid dreaming in attempts to get the goods. As I've become marginally older, sleep interruptions are generally unwelcome. I still record what I'm lucky enough to return with and my dreams remain an ongoing source of fascination, inspiration and entertainment. Lately, I'm thinking both about the visions in the night (dreams) and how they relate to a kind of dreaming taking place in my art practice by day.

Most of my still images begin as self-contained scenes. Later, some will interplay with others in the sequence of a zine, a book or a show. It's a slow, ordered way of working: seeing things carefully, as they appear to me. There's a satisfying completion at the moment of recording. There's nothing saying whether the image is good or bad but, in that moment, it's complete.

Outside this work exists a whole body of images I've made and accumulated in parallel which are much more fragmentary in nature. Images I've consciously framed and collected with true attention without knowing where—if anywhere—they were going. In the flat, chronological sorting of my photo archive, they've sat suspended, in no rush to become more than they were: a kind of memory residue of cities and days and material for an unknown something until I began to give them form on paper as collage.

Our dreams form in the unconscious from an astonishing collision of material collected from the conscious world. How that material gets assembled is still largely a mystery. When I work with these archive images, collage starts to feel like a waking version of the same process. It's not so much that the finished pieces are dreamy or dreamlike (though they might be); it's the process—the collision of material into new, surprising forms—that continues to energize me with this body of work.

If you're curious about this one or other available work, send me a note and I'll share a current list.

Vine to Vine

A tangent on the dream thread led me to the work of James A. Reeves (and back to) the work of his partner in life and sometimes art, Candy Chang. I had followed Chang's work in the early days of Twitter but had lost touch with it since. The app they collabed on, Dream Club, along with Reeves' Midnight Radio and his music player app Spite all caught my interest in quick succession. Dream Club, described as "A dignified home for your dreams," has been a welcome addition to my life. I respect its local-first approach by default with the option of sharing dream symbols to a collective index of other dreamers worldwide. It's early days and there are less than 100 dreamers so far but it's fascinating to imagine a much larger index to get a sense of what the world is dreaming, through the seasons and the years². The app also offers the option of dream analysis in Jungian, Lacanian or Deleuzian flavours.

"One of my strategies when I read is I try to find my next book in that book. I read the footnotes. I read the bibliography. I read the acknowledgements. I want to read like a monkey swinging from vine to vine. I want to plan out where I'm going next based on where this subject is taking me."

This little gem from a Ryan Holiday piece on his reading strategies rang out like a thunderclap for me. It's a great way of describing how I approach all kinds of things (music, books, film, visual art and ideas in general). Like a monkey swinging from vine to vine. The metaphor might understate the attention given to each vine but the point is there is a momentum to it all and anything worth giving attention to always offers threads to a multitude of other things which just might be worth checking out if we stop and follow them.

"Maybe that’s why he loves to listen to Bach: there are no surfaces, just crisscrossing storylines. Crossing here, crossing there, moment after moment, and all these crossings join together to make something that in Bach’s world is called music." — Jenny Erpenbeck

Go, Went, Gone was an impromptu family book club this summer. Erpenbeck beautifully balances the macro and the micro—she grapples with the absurd mechanics of global issues while grounding the reader in the most mundane and tender corners of human life. Rich reading leading to great conversations.

"Garbage juice may be the holy water of your baptism. But it’s the swearing that makes you a real garbageman. That’s when you truly become one with your function." — Simon Pare-Poupart

I ripped through Simon Pare-Poupart's Trash so fast it's a bit of a blur. Pare-Poupart truly takes you on a tear through the streets of Montréal and the (under)world of waste management. This is not written by an embedded journalist dropping in for 48 hours for a story; he's a garbageman who worked his way through graduate studies and is still in the game for the rush.

VIFF Theatre recently screened François Girard's 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould. I hadn't seen it since it appeared at the film festival back in 1993 and it stands up well³. I had forgotten how good Colm Feore is as Gould and how masterfully Girard (and co-writer Don McKellar) construct a unique constellation of Gouldness.

So much thinking about consciousness in the air. A pair of longer conversations on the subject between interesting minds, through a very contemporary lens: The Mystery of Consciousness has Krista Tippett of On Being talking to Michael Pollan about his new book A World Appears and many of the ideas that branch out of it.

Stranger, less approachable but fascinating: Is AI Already Conscious? Sam Harris⁴ talks to Cameron Berg whose research is dedicated to "empirically investigating whether frontier AI systems exhibit computational properties associated with subjective experience." i.e., what's actually going on in there?

It's important to note that while these discussions take place in the wider context of AI developments, at their best they force us to focus back on the vast gaps in existing human knowledge. What other forms of non-human intelligence and awareness are we surrounded by, and always have been?

As always, there is music, music, music. I've put together a sampler of stuff that's been on in the studio the last few months. You can find that here.

Soundtrack the Page, a project by Darren Hemmings, is an amazing sidecar resource to nearly 20 books on music so far. He's painstakingly created chapter-by-chapter guides that link the mention of the song in the book to a YouTube search that gets you hearing said song in no time. If you’ve read any of these kinds of books, you know that putting the book down and searching for songs a few times a page is a vibe killer for reading. This isn’t seamless but it's a major upgrade. Clearly a labour of love: Darren Hemmings—I salute you! Check it out.

We'll be opening the studio again during Culture Crawl later in November—more on that soon—but ahead of that, Tristesse will be doing an open studio at the beginning of October. If you'd like a chance to see her latest body of work in person, she'll be in the house Friday, October 2 — 3–7 PM, Saturday, October 3 — 11 AM–4 PM, or by appointment (DM her on IG or email her to set something up!)

Until next time,
✌️D