This September 26th marks my first foray back into campus-community radio as I join the inimitable Vince Tinguely for a guest spot on his weekly show, The Kitchen Bang Bang Law.
It’s kind of fitting that I should find myself sitting next to Vince once again (this image above was taken when we co-hosted a show some 15 years ago), in part because we share a history of radio together but also because we co-wrote and published a monthly zine in the mid 1990’s with the charming moniker: “Perfect Waste of Time.”
…You can see where I’m going with this…
Already back in 1995, when the zine first appeared, I was (we were, Vince and I) contemplating rampant consumer culture, gentrification, climate change and the role of the artist in all of this… late capitalist… claptrap. We walked everywhere, year-round, taking time to notice our neighbourhood and city; we relished in slow and inefficient. We weren’t in a rush and resisted working too hard (or too much). We were decidedly UN-productive. On purpose.
It was a kind of art-life project that we didn’t name as such although the emergence of the zine sort of did the job for us. It spoke on our behalf as we churned out the little fold-over one-page month after month for about two years… (with a special issue put out in 2005).
Perfect Waste of Time eventually caught some attention and turned into a book (Impure – a whole other story) which took up all of our time, having us work way too hard and then that art-life project came to an end. As all things do. A perfect waste of time (indeed! Harumph).
Jump-cut to the present…
Finding myself on campus at McGill university for the Resting, Walking, Place-Making project (which continues on from the Doing Nothing project), I have come full circle. Sort of. Things definitely got busy somewhere in the interim and now (well, officially since the spring of 2016), I have been actively – and very vocally – trying to reclaim that space/time/attitude and mode of decelerated being and (in my art practice) of immaterial/unproductive making. (As has been studiously documented in the dozens of posts previously published in this blog).
And so now, excitingly, commences my monthly check-in, the last Tuesday of each month on CKUT (McGill’s radio station), when Vince and I will waste time together quite perfectly (and happily) again: Welcome to The Monthly Report About Nothing.
Stay tuned…!
CKUT Radio, 90.3 FM
Sept. 26, 2017, 1 – 2pm
– Listen here –
The Sanctimonious Sect of Nothing Is Sacred 