{"id":867,"date":"2010-11-24T03:38:22","date_gmt":"2010-11-24T03:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.org\/weblog\/?p=867"},"modified":"2011-05-16T05:02:16","modified_gmt":"2011-05-16T05:02:16","slug":"monument-to-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/?p=867","title":{"rendered":"monument to nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

monument to nothing<\/p><\/div>\n

I wanted to bring to your attention Vancouver\u2019s lovely, lonely \u2018Monument to Nothing,\u2019 whose emptiness is free for all to adore and onto which, in the eye of our minds, we can project the objects of our deepest adulation. I\u2019m standing in its sunken piazza, watching an empty shopping cart rattle against the circular steps with the tail wind of every passing transport truck. The pavement shudders and the diesel soot billows in the tormented air like the thought bubbles of demons. Around me, a ring of <\/a>brutalist<\/a> concrete tees that stand astride stymied balls of topiary. A nod perhaps to the Roman colosseum or the classical amphitheater? But then again, maybe not.<\/p>\n

I love this place. I came here on a pilgrimage to remember the things I never knew. Like the silverfish, which can live for a year without eating but prefer instead a diet of dandruff and carpet fibers. I remember a bronze head that was never here. I\u2019d thought I\u2019d seen it years ago, out of the corner of my eye, a jowly visage in medieval headgear. I even took it for granted. But no, it wasn\u2019t. Not ever. Here.<\/p>\n

\"Karl<\/a><\/p>\n

Karl Marx’s head was never here<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"Lincoln's<\/a><\/p>\n

Lincoln’s head was never here either<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"the<\/a><\/p>\n

he was here for a while<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

What was here, though? I felt the need for research, which always feel like the man rolling up his sleeve about to slide his wrist into the cheesecloth cage of hungry mosquitoes. \u201cThey don\u2019t bite – they don\u2019t even light!\u201d Only sometimes they do. And then you die. Of malaria. Or dengue fever. Or any of the other assorted little ills that, if you are famous enough in life, might get a monument to you erected after you kick the bucket. Take Christopher Columbus<\/a> – Admiral of the Ocean Sea; Viceroy and Governor of the Indies. We don\u2019t know how he died. Maybe it was syphilis<\/a>, the vexing stowaway that snuck its way to Europe in the pants of his sailors.\u00a0 It was this Columbus who, once upon a much later time, sat for a while<\/a>, perched on a lonely plinth, gazing out wistfully over Clark Drive\u2019s seething traffic, a continent away from the sea he once crossed, his back turned to another ocean \u2013 the one he never imagined in his lifetime. And not just his disembodied head, the way I\u2019d misremembered it, but his entire gangling body too, as it appeared, or was thought to have appeared in the days of his callow youth, when he was just a proto-Columbus, who hadn\u2019t yet sailed the ocean blue, or even likely thought about it. Is that nothing? It\u2019s not nothing, but it\u2019s barely something. Soon barely something became nothing again, when the sculpture disappeared, seconded by a cadre of mysterious Italian-Canadian aesthetes who kept the bronze boy wonder sequestered for several months before relocating him to the more commodious environs of Hastings Park. So Clark Drive\u2019s monument to nothing remains as such, free from any distracting somethings, empty and beautiful for all of us to think about that which once was but is no longer or maybe, never was at all.<\/p>\n

\"nothing<\/a>

nothing is as beautiful as this...<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wanted to bring to your attention Vancouver\u2019s lovely, lonely \u2018Monument to Nothing,\u2019 whose emptiness is free for all to adore and onto which, in the eye of our minds, we can project the objects of our deepest adulation. I\u2019m standing in its sunken piazza, watching an empty shopping cart rattle against the circular steps […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,22,20],"tags":[124,123],"class_list":["post-867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-cities","category-vancouver","tag-art","tag-vancouver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=867"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1096,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions\/1096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}