A bench too meaningful to commit to simple paragraphs.

…and honestly, the outline I started a couple of months ago was just spiraling out of control. The story of the Vancouver Granville Street Bridge Benches really isn’t that fabulous, but I have a tendency to start everything with a massive preamble, then elaborate on details that seem highly important to me, then finally get to the point, then take pages and pages to talk about that point; and from start to finish, one blog post can take me many hours in one sitting (and I can only do them in one sitting). Then there’s adding links, taking and uploading my own photos, editing, going back and editing some more after I’ve already published it, adding tags, going back yet again to make even more changes…and I already have enough to do, and other writing projects to focus on.

Besides, I basically lost interest in writing about this topic. The benches were installed in July, and a few months later, the city’s amusement and bewilderment have turned to characteristic Vancouver apathy and indifference; since I’m a resident of Vancouver, you can count me in on that. So in a very first for my blog, I have decided to just do a one-take video to sum it all up in a much more satisfying, condensed, and less time-wasting way, and be done with the topic altogether (a better link is also at the end of this page). Yet I still can’t just wrap up this blog entry here, can I? Of course not. In fact, it’s taking me a great deal of effort not to write page after page about this quick video I did for the entire purpose of not having to write about any of it.

Enjoy it, or something. To be honest, I would still like to make videos that complement this blog, and this was some kind of first experiment. Actually, that’s not true: I took loads of footage to accompany my highly-read Brutalist essay, and was horrified by the end results (mainly to do with nightmarish, unflattering camera angles and ridiculously long-winded, irrelevant tangents), so I scrapped the idea immediately upon reviewing my recordings.

However, I’d like to hang onto the idea of uploading stuff that pairs with my blog, or stuff about entirely different topics and issues altogether. I just have to wrap my brain around how I will locate the immense patience and wherewithal I’ll need to understand video-editing software, because I can’t even put a search function into the header of this blog. Yet, that is not entirely my fault: I have gone back-and-forth with WordPress about the near-impossibility of adding this feature (you’d figure there’d simply be a basic “add search bar” option in the settings–or “add archive” option, because I’d like that, too–right? WRONG) and the method for doing this is so involved, so convoluted, so complicated and involving so many, many steps and clicks and pages and weird-looking icons, that after several frustrated and pleading emails on my end, a tech (they call themselves “Happiness Engineers,” which makes me want to go outside and murder fire hydrants with my bare hands) actually sent me a video showing me how to do it. The best part is, not only was the video absolutely at warp speed and required several pauses, squints, and shakes of the head trying to comprehend it, the video was personalized; he showed me how to do it on this precise blog of mine, yet he didn’t leave the search bar here. My Happiness Engineer at WordPress actually made a video of himself adding the search bar up top, then, incredibly, deleted the search bar, essentially smirking and saying, “Fuck you. I can do it. Now you do it.”

Whoops, did I just rant about WordPress again? Looks like I did.

UPDATE: Looks like my stern, squeaky-wheel e-mail haranguing got the job done, because my Happiness Engineer mopped his forehead and went ahead and installed the search bar up top. Very nice.

Anyway, if you wish, watch the video and the story of the benches that nobody cares much about anymore. The essay itself was past its sell-by date; I just couldn’t make myself work any further on it, but I had to get the original draft and idea out of my life somehow, so I made this video. Keep in mind that I was sped up on strong caffeine–I mean, I am so unimaginably wired for the speed of light, I barely pause to pant–there’s background noise, and it’s all completely spontaneous. Very cinema verite. And no funhouse-mirror camera angles, either; in fact, you won’t see me once!

(You will, however, once or twice, hear me mention the many pictures I took in the summer of my bridge bench crawl, and how they would be posted here. Not so. I mean, I might at some point, but that would just mean writing the entire thing, and the point of this video was not to do that)

I’ll be back, I promise, when I get some time to toil away on one of my other planned topics.

Here’s the actual video in case the link way above didn’t work for you:

(I also feel that, in our eternally-looking-for-something-to-be-offended-by galaxy, I have to add the disclaimer that I meant no offense to anyone or anything. Especially not to benches.)

Love

Nadya