Discourse of Elements is an installation on loan to the National Gallery. At first I didn’t know if it was art, or if I’d stumbled into a storage area, so I asked a guard.

“It’s art,” he said, “It was created by a collective of three Quebec artists known by the initials BGL.”

So art it is.

It’s set up like a garage, with all the stuff you’d expect to find in a garage, plus a few things you wouldn’t expect to find, like the artist’s euthanized dog. If art is supposed to be evocative, I’d say he nailed it with that one. Anyone who has ever had a pet euthanized probably experiences their own personal vivid-inner-art-show upon seeing that.

There are two doorways going off the garage which we would have missed if the guard hadn’t pointed them out to us. One goes into a room with a sparkly ball travelling up and down a moving ramp. The other goes into a room with a car, and inside the car is Something Unexpected.

The whole installation is peculiar and fascinating. All those ephemeral layers of life, stuffed into leftover space. I like it.

Like much of the stuff in the Contemporary galleries, it left me wondering how stuff becomes art. Is it the deliberate creation of it by an artist that makes it art? Does calling it art somehow transform it into art? Because honestly, that same kind of accumulation just sort of happens in people’s extra spaces…if it just happens, is it not art?

And how does it end up being considered the calibre of art that belongs in the National Gallery? Who decides, and how? I have a feeling – and I’m a bit of a cynic, so I’m probably wrong – that the name of the artist plays a huge role in determining this. A well-known artist could probably create some half-assed crap and get it into the gallery, whereas a talented but unknown artist wouldn’t have a chance of getting his or her best works in there.

David Scrimshaw has a piece of art hanging in his house which he created from an old typewriter. It’s striking and original and clever and I think it’s Gallery-worthy.

This pile of shredded felt, on the other hand, is not so Gallery-worthy in my humble and artistically uneducated opinion. I’m pretty sure nobody could make their artistic debut with the shredded felt…they’d have to have already earned their place in the art world before the Gallery would consider this pile of art gallery-worthy.

But someone decided the shredded felt was Gallery-calibre art. And nobody has decided that about David’s typewriter mobile yet. (Maybe David will post a photo of it on his blog so you can all see how amazing it is and then maybe it will come to the attention of the Gallery’s acquisitions people. That’s probably how the pile of shredded felt got its start.)

What happens in Ugly Club stays in Ugly Club.

Bluesfest was a blast yesterday, despite the rain and a serious case of Bluesfest Fatigue. A lot of people I talked to are happy today’s the last day. We love Bluesfest, but we’re burning out.

The best performance of the day was Danny Michel. I’ve never seen him before, and he’s terrific, definitely worth standing in the rain for. His songs are wonderful, he’s got a great rapport with his audience, and I loved how he slipped in a bit of the Spiderman theme song.

A1-Great suggested I’ve perhaps devoted a bit too much space to the Porta-Potties, but I’m not quite done yet. I finally used one of my P-Mates at the special P-Mate Porta-Potty with the incense and candles, and it was every bit as nice as it sounds.

Laurie, the P-Mate Demo Woman, introduced me to Larry, who is apparently the REAL North American P-Mate Distributor. According to them, Karen Diamond, the woman who left a comment on this blog identifying herself as the North American P-Mate Distributor, is an imposter!

Anyway, in my brief five-minute conversation with Larry, we managed to get into an argument about Monsanto and the evil Terminator Seeds. He sees Monsanto as a good corporate citizen, feeding starving third-world countries. I don’t. We also found time to argue about activists and whether they are bandwagon-jumpers or researchers. We agreed to disagree on both those items.

I’m still not done with the Porta-Potty coverage. The other day I remembered this hilarious story that a female singer told at the Tulip Festival a few years ago, about losing her prescription sunglasses in a Porta-Potty hole, and making a roadie retrieve them for her. I thought maybe it was Lynn Miles, but I wasn’t sure. So last night I spotted Lynn Miles at the Jim Bryson concert. It was too loud for conversation, so I slipped her a note identifying myself as the unoffficial porta-potty blogger of bluesfest 07, and asking if she was the teller of that story. She said no, if that had happened to her she would have retrieved her own sunglasses, but she did have a pretty good Mariposa Porta-Potty story.

I also ran into Miss Vicky and her nine-month-old son Gordon, a real charmer with his magnetic blue eyes and toothy smile. I was charmed.

It rained pretty hard at Bluesfest last night. I didn’t realize just how hard, even though I was standing in it, until I saw the rain on the big screen at the DJ Champion and his G-Strings concert. It was coming down in sheets. Once you’re soaking wet you can’t get any wetter, so it doesn’t matter anymore.

I did witness some umbrella altercations though. Several of the people I talked to thought umbrellas should be banned from Bluesfest, because they’re a nuisance and a hazard. Most of the complaints were about umbrellas blocking the view. But there were some eye-poking incidents on the way out. I wonder how many eyeballs the volunteers had to sweep up at the end of the night.

Speaking of volunteers, the vast majority of them are terrific again this year. However I did encounter a couple of security volunteers who seemed a bit high on the power of the uniform, even though the uniform is just a blue t-shirt that says security on it.

I was heading into the River Stage area one night, and the security volunteer gruffly ordered me to open my knapsack. Most of them just feel my knapsack from the outside, to see if there are bottles in there, but this one wanted me to open it. It was on my back, so I suggested it would be easier for him to just open it himself.

“No ma’am,” he replied curtly, “It’s a security issue. If I were to poke myself with something in there, it wouldn’t be good.”

So I took my knapsack off, and unzipped it for him. He then plunged both arms up to the elbow into its contents and rifled around in it. If I had had a needle in there, I don’t know how my unzipping the bag would have protected him, but whatever.

On my way home last night I overshot my bus stop on the transitway, and had to wait for another bus in the opposite direction. I met four lovely teenage girls there on their way to the Kanye concert. One of them was looking for a suitable bush to pee in, so I offered her a P-Mate.

“What’s a P-Mate?” they asked.

“It’s like a cardboard penis,” I said, “So you can pee standing up.”

Their eyes widened. I pulled one out and showed it to them. They were enchanted.

And that was Day 11 for me. Today’s the final day, and then we return to our regularly scheduled blogging.

I ran into some of Stu’s BBQ Blues Crew on Day 9, but without Stu. They’ve staked out a nice little spot in the centre of the field between the Main Stage and the Rogers Stage.

It truly is a primo location. They’ve got beer and Porta-Potties and food nearby.

“And the First Aid Station,” said John, “Just in case.”

As the action shifts from one stage to the other, they just swivel their chairs around, and they’re ready for the next show.

Rita pointed out that their chairs aren’t bothering anybody, because they’re not competing with anybody for prime real estate. This is an excellent point.

The Bluesfest Chair Controversy has been raging for years, and frankly Bluesfest wouldn’t be the same without it. I like the controversy.

But I was surprised by an email I received today from the Folk Festival email list. It said, in an aside: “And a final word of commiseration to the “sitters” among you who lost the battle to the “standers”, again, at Bluesfest on the Lebreton Flats; at least you can rest easy that there will be no such hassles, mostly, at the Ottawa Folk Festival.”

I am not a chair person, though I do know and like some of the chair people. Personally, I think there should be designated chair areas, and they should be set well back from the stages, because the chairs take up too much valuable space.

The problem is not really the chairs. The problem is that some of the chair people have an extraordinary sense of entitlement – they think their chairs should be permitted to sit unoccupied, reserving their space, while they’re off doing other things. Worse yet, they think they should be entitled not only to the space their chair occupies, but to the line of sight between it and the stage. They refuse to accept the fluidity of crowds.

I’m short. I’m used to not owning my line of sight in a crowd. I spent a hundred bucks last year on a second-row seat at Cirque du Soleil, and then some guy with massive shoulders and a bulging neck and a freakishly large head took his front-row seat in front of me. Even a normal-sized person would have blocked my view, so I wasn’t surprised or even pissed off. That’s just life when you’re short. It’s also life when you choose to sit down in a crowd.

So I go to Bluesfest without a chair and not expecting to see the stage. I don’t know why so many chair people get upset about not being able to see the stage. I guess they think that if they could see the stage when they first set up their chair, they have a right to keep being able to see it. But crowds are fluid, they seep into all the available spaces, and before long very few people – standers or sitters – can see the stage. (By the way, have you seen that seven-foot-something man at Bluesfest? I bet he can see the stage.)

Last night I did get lucky at the River Stage for Xavier Rudd. Right beside the stage, there’s a small platform holding a sign listing the day’s lineup. I stood on the platform and had a birds-eye view of the huge crowd. I could see the stage too, but not the side Xavier Rudd was on, so it wasn’t perfect. But it was a lot better than what I’m used to. I towered over everybody, including this dancer.

Anyway, I like the Chair Controversy because it’s a time-honoured Bluesfest tradition. I hope it rages on forever.