Video Marquee

Christopher Dewdney
From:   Radiant Inventory. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988.

It is a clear cool night in late summer. You are looking across a small creek at an old one-room cabin. The creek is two metres wide and has a small ramshackle wooden bridge across it, consisting merely of a ramp with no hand-railing.

The cabin has light coming through one window and a crooked stovepipe juts from the roof. A cosy sleepy feeling emanates from the cabin, through slightly unfamiliar, as if you were a child on your first night away from home. It is perhaps 2 or 3 A.M. Behind the cabin is a dense coniferous forest. The tops of the trees are silhouetted against the deep-blue sky, in which stars twinkle and a waning moon hangs.

This scene is the video marquee, the illustrated logo of a regional lateshow. It has been on for fifteen minutes without sound. Unattended station difficulties. You are twelve years old, watching a late movie on television at a cottage on the southeast shore of Lake Huron. Your friend has fallen asleep. It is a warm summer night and moths flutter around the light at the porch. You can hear the waves on the beach faintly. It is about 2 or 3 A.M. and a waning moon is suspended over the lake. Far north on the same shore a cabin sits near a small creek running into the lake. It is much cooler in the north and the cabin's windows are closed. Inside, a twelve-year-old boy and a thirteenth-year-old girl are masturbating each other, kneeling face to face on a couch bathed in the light of the television screen.

From Radiant Inventory by Christopher Dewdney, published by McClelland & Stewart, The Canadian Publishers. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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Christopher Dewdney's works copyright © to the author.