Thanks to a combination of ignorance, obliviousness, and Other Engagements, I managed to live in Vancouver for six years without ever attending Swarm. Seven is an auspicious number, though, so this seventh annual installment of Vancouver's most popular gallery-crawl found me out a-swarming with the rest of the art throng. Thursday night, I opted to bypass Blim, the Video In, the Western Front, and virtually ever other open venue (thankfully, most of these exhibits will stay up for another couple of weeks) and head straight for Antisocial, where Jacob Gleeson and Jesse Birch were showing new work (sculptures and photos, respectively) in an exhibit entitled Strays.

Jesee Birch's concept was to find public locations where classical music was played to deter loiterers, photograph them, and display them with similar musical accompaniment. A list of the pieces being played was provided (all of them ?Nocturnes?, by the likes of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Satie). The photos were admirably crisp and cinematically lit, most taken at night and devoid of humans (the music was apparently a success), though the scenes were, of necessity, rather banal. In Birch's defense, there's only so many interesting ways to photograph the exterior of a 7-Eleven.

Jacob Gleeson's sculptures, based around the strategic reformation of common objects, were less easily read: a black birdcage, covered by a black cloth, with a stuffed black bird perched on top (a black cord trails from under the shadowed canopy); a crude fabric face, stuffed like an awkward airplane pillow, and mounted on the wall; A single hanging-bulb light fixture modified to accommodate nine extra bulbs. All three exuded a faintly sinister melancholy (the face sadly deformed, the bird escaped, the fixture mutated and bare), but aside from the shared impression of spare, clean minimalism and creeping solitude, I had difficulty finding any larger conceptual connection between the two artists' work. The polite classical ambiance seemed to have worked its magic on the gallery-goers as well, since there seemed to be twice as many people milling about the back entrance as there actually were inside.

Up the block at Dadabase, at an event not officially connected to Swarm, one brave soul (Sean Arden) sat in the front window with a catheter tube snaking out of his shorts, playing Grand Theft Auto on a giant screen. By the time I wandered by, he'd already been there for six or eight hours, and he was committed to sticking it out for a full twenty-four. Judging by the fluorescent shade of the urine in his catheter-jar, the guy could probably have used some water. The small crowd of gawkers, seemingly unable to figure out what to make of the tableau (a comment on how much GTA kids are playing these days?) had mostly resorted to ignoring Sean in favour of sipping beers on the sidewalk and chatting.

At this point, I could have opted to go see more art at proper galleries (including a slew of new venues that I'd never heard of or been to: Defcon5, for instance), but instead, I made my way two blocks over to the Anza Club to see Damo Suzuki's Network. Now, Damo Suzuki was the singer for Can (arguably the greatest avant-rock band of all time) during the best period of their career, but in the mid-70's he quit and became a Jehovah's Witness. Now he travels the world playing shows with local bands backing him up. With a list of total unknowns on the bill (Tio Madre, Johnny Karate, and Ethel the Plastic Cloth), I decided to set my expectations low, which was a good move. Ethel the Plastic Cloth turned out to be a bunch of grunge-looking dudes that must have only recently crawled up from under a rock (a buddy of mine said he couldn't get the phrase ?semen-encrusted? out of his head), with a bassist sporting a flowery skirt and leg warmers on his arms, but they had chops. Heavy with incessant tom rolls, two-hand bass tapping, and excessive ?space-rock? keyboard noise, they aimed for Hawkwind and came off like a poor man's Circle. At the very least, though, they rocked hard, which is more than I can say for Ghost House, who sound more like a poor man's Wolf Parade with tepid post-hardcore vocals.

When Damo finally mounted the stage, Ethel performed back-up duties, which would have been fine if their drummer had any mode of playing other than a Slayer-esque barbarian charge that trampled all over the rest of the band's attempts at subtler grooves. Damo acquitted himself fairly well for a man of his age (I noticed him napping during Ghost House's set ? no doubt you have to get your rest where you can when you're pushing sixty and forever on tour), though his vocals mainly consisted of wordless chant-babbling in two registers. Still, the guy turns it on like faucet, so you have to give him kudos for his energy. Shine on, you drunken hot-dog.

I might add that there was art on display at the Anza, as well, with pieces by Sean Maxey, Brianna Deimert, Tom Briggs, Stephanie Fink and the Dirtbag Collective ? though the only paintings I could actually find were a pair by Andy Dixon.

NIGHT TWO

It would seem that Gastown is the place to be during Swarm. With nearly twice as many shows going on in a concentrated area (where people are used to partying anyway), the turnout was immense. Scattered panhandlers were swamped in a flood of glammed-up scenesters hungry for high culture, and most of the galleries were so full that it was actually kind of difficult to see the art. At the Lobby, Michael Drebert was hanging out front with his car in the glare of a couple mounted halogens.

Having been engaged in the practice of ?flipping? cars (i.e. buying them cheap, doing a few minor repairs, and reselling them at inflated prices) since high school, he told me that he thought there was a certain amount of aesthetic interest to be mined out of the Buy & Sell and the backyard car sale. He also needs some money, so if you're interested in a 1985 Honda Accord, you can make an offer in the lobby of the Dominion Hotel (210 Abbot St.). Casual and good-natured about the stunt-ish nature of selling his car as an art project, Michael joked that he wasn't sure if prospective buyers would be interested in his vehicle as an artwork or just transportation. If you buy the car, is it art, or was the sale the art? Would it lose value if you drove it? Questions for future generations, no doubt.

Around the corner at Six Acres, Marc Bell was signing copies of the brand-new book he edited, Nog A Dog. It's a collection of ten years of free-associative comics, zine work, and sketchbook doodling (?Prehistoric Canadian Psychedoolia?) featuring the work of Shayne Ehman, Tommy Lacroix, Owen Plummer, Mark Connery, Jason Mclean, Amy Lockhart, Jonathan Petersen, Scott Evans, Dirty Debbie, Keith Jones and others. Praised by Devendra Banhart on the back, and well-worth the twenty-five bucks.

Collin Johanson's show at Access, Cathedral, was probably the most popular of the evening, and certainly the most hip. Drawing on hesher metal imagery (grotty, large-scale drawings of scenes from hell, with KISS as a marching band) and crafty, neo-folk, faux-naive (a giant patchwork cross and a string of quilted pennants draped between two plaster dogs), the show culminated in a video of a performance in which Johanson built a giant, wickedly articulated skull out of discarded wood and urban junk and ceremonially burnt it in on a remote beach with a gang of friends. The process is also documented by some large-scale photos, and a charred piece of the skull is displayed, like a relic, next to the video monitor. In the foyer, there's a handful of meticulous watercolors depicting tourists in front of large trees. The show is a canny amalgam of the different worlds that co-exist in the West Coast hipster unconscious: pseudo-psychedelic, mystical, apocalyptic, and potentially utopian, Johanson links The City to The Natural World via The Party and imagines a uniquely contemporary take on the Sublime.

At Artspeak, Mark Soo has installed a huge, freestanding photoprint of a picturesque English Bay sunset on a translucent surface (plexiglass?), illuminated by two streetlights. If you didn't know (I didn't), Vancouver's downtown streetlights are an unusual yellow-orange sodium that disrupts color perception, apparently used in the hope of discouraging drug use and crime. In Artspeak, the use of these lights washes out the ocean view, making it sickly and uninviting. The room itself, bathed in one-colour light that cancels out everything but yellow, takes on a bizarre aspect that's equally womblike and uncomfortable. Viewers tended to come in, take a look, and leave quickly.

Skipping Centre A, Dynamo, Gallery Gachet, the Interurban, The Or, and the video show at Cathedral Park, I biked over to the Helen Pitt to see David Diviney's sculpture exhibit, Hollow. Diviney's work takes minimalist structures and dresses them in backwoods surrealism and a hardware-store vernacular: geometric wooden forms are adorned with wool toques and socks, a fake hollow log occupies the center of the room, and in what was probably Swarm's most popular piece (after Johanson's flaming skull, anyway), a toque suspended from the ceiling and balanced by a cinderblock provides a portal for a leaping taxidermied coyote. That is, the coyote's front half has disappeared entirely inside the toque. Perhaps in another dimension, the animal's head is bursting out of a snowsuit.

In the back gallery, Kayla Guthrie offers another piece of ?psychedelic? art (it might as well have been Swarm 7's official theme), an environmental diorama of ferns and brightly spray-painted rock and bottles. It might have been the heat, but the room seemed to exude a humid Flintstones prehistory, a fluorescent childhood fantasy enhanced by the abstract poster-art on the walls, a mixture of Lisa Frank colours and kindergarten fingerpaint. It was a kid-brain on drugs that you can walk around in.

My last stop of the night was at 870 E. Cordova, where the resident collective was displaying Variations On Green, a work of slide-projector choreography by Jesse Birch, Jade Boyd, Heidi Nutley, and Sydney Vermont: a stop-motion pas de deux in green, poetic and restrained. It was an appropriate cool-down to a hectic night, and it set a peaceful note for my homeward bike ride.

All in all, my first Swarm experience was a rewarding one, and I'd need another two whole nights to get through all the exhibits I didn't see. There was a sense of fun and excitement that vibrated throughout the community, and as a social event, this was one of the largest, most celebratory gatherings I've seen all year. Like the handmade, flower-shaped lollipops that Tracy Susheki planted all over Gastown and Mount Pleasant in a piece called Bloom, Swarm 7 was surprising, tasty, and too soon gone.