Timothy Taylor on His Shining Novel 'The Blue Light Project'

1/8 Nine o'clock Alarm Clock, by Cameraman and Emma

. A railway transformer papered over with a clock image, with tiny alarm clocks scattered around in the weeds. They all activated at 9:00 p.m. of the 2008 East Van Culture Crawl. The clock lit up orangey yellow and an amazing sound began, like a million crickets. People came running to see. I was just starting the book and the clock made me see what street art can do really well: animate people, make them start conversations with each other.

2/8 You'll Find It Where You Last Saw It, by Rabbit. Rabbit is a semi-fictional character. This is work I made up for him to do, but which came to life later in the street. Cameraman took this photograph. Interestingly, Cameraman's work has started to get tagged with a Rabbit sign like the one in this photo. Something's going on that may or may not involve the guy who originally inspired Rabbit. It's complicated. Street art has a way of continuing to live after it goes up. Which is part of its charm.

3/8 The Vuitton Dumpster, by Cameraman. Cameraman is a brilliant artist and the Vuitton Dumpster captures his sensibility nicely. I can easily imagine a VAG show of Cameraman dumpsters: Google and Mercedes Benz dumpster. A Gucci dumpster etc. Maybe that'll happen one day, but the moment I saw this one, it was in the street actually being a dumpster. Ironic, but no denying the thing was gorgeous. People were smiling, shaking their heads, posing for pictures in front of it.

4/8 Faith Wall, by unknown. Faith Wall is a sticker campaign by a character named Beyer in the book. Beyer boasts he's distributed 6.4 million of the stickers across North America. It's another example of art from the book bleeding out into reality. This work went up on Main Street, done by artists who don't want to be named. The stickers are showing up elsewhere, a result of other artists who don't want to be named. You can find pictures of them on Flickr. They're in Vancouver and Ontario.

5/8 Dragon, by Ken Foster. In an abandoned basement space somewhere on Hastings Street -- so perhaps not technically street art -- there's this amazing mural by Ken Foster. It's a dragon. It's big and scary and unforgettable. Why is it there? Who knows? It's just there and preserved and if you see it the thought will cross your mind that perhaps one day it will emerge from the basement and fly again. Until then, you have to go visit it.

6/8 Eye, by Rich S. Rich S brought an Orwellian touch to his art, which worked perfectly in the book, where art is in ongoing collision with the harsher events at the heart of the drama: a hostage stand-off involving kids. But for a while there, you could see these eyes all over the DTES. They reminded me that while you might suddenly wake up to street art and start seeing it everywhere, the artist was there all along, watching you.

7/8 @#$%^&* Poster, by Rich S. Rich S has this thing with hands, that I really like. They show up in these posters, as if the street artist had been captured in the middle of mounting the piece, using the urban surface as his notepad. There was another series showing hands turning back a page, as if the street artist were peeling a layer off the urban surface to reveal something beneath. In both cases, the hands suggest the normally invisible artist, and the role they play in shaping the city.

8/8 Cascading Confession, JermIX. JermIX had a profound influence on this book. He's shaped a difficult past into a future of his own design. In this work we see the letters of a rap cascading down over the surface of other words. The rap is a confession, a statement, a claim to personal power. This photograph that he took of the work, looking up to the sky, is the best image I've seen of his work for all that it proves about his ability to seize hope out of dire circumstances.

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I'm in the business of making you look.

Lots of us are: artists, journalists, Charlie Sheen, politicians, web site managers like me.

Some do it guerilla-style -- on city buildings or in anonymous YouTube videos. Some do it professionally -- public image consulting, communications professionals, spin doctoring.

It's a business for some, a compulsion for others (how long did you spend on Facebook today?). Maybe the same for both.

I know, too, that by now you've been reading this page for about 15 seconds. If this story is any good at all, you'll be here on average for about 30 seconds.

We know that because we're watching you.

We're watching what stories first sucked you in, how you discovered us (Twitter? Facebook? Email?), how long you stayed, if you're on a mobile phone, and if you've been here before. In other words, we want to know you're looking, what made you look, and how long you spent looking so that we can make you look again and hold your attention longer next time.

And, no, we don't know exactly who you are. We just see the numbers.

This is the business of making you look. In a way, this is also the business of fame, notoriety, attention and celebrity. It's a massive networked structure designed to measure your attention to us.

Or, as Timothy Taylor puts in his latest novel, The Blue Light Project: "Celebrity is a con and you are the mark."

As journalists, of course, we don't want to con you. We want your attention because we think we're helping inform the democratic conversation. Still, the statement resonates.

Taylor authored the acclaimed Stanley Park, a novel that explored food as art, homelessness and murder. The Blue Light Project is ostensibly about a hostage taking in a reality show studio called KiddieFame, an American Idol-style show for children.

It works on a variety of levels: a gripping tale of a tense hostage-taking in an unnamed North American city, a meditation on fame, anti-fame, celebrity and story-telling, a personal journey towards authenticity and artistic expression.

Woven into the text are images of graffiti and street art, many of which you can see if you flip through the pictures at the top of this story.

We at The Tyee sent Taylor a few questions. In return, Taylor gave us thoughtful answers about how Vancouver informs the book's sense of "urban nowhere," how secretive street artists are taking images from the book and quietly painting them onto the city walls you walk past every day, how Taylor might fare in his favourite reality show fantasy, and how Taylor feels about the nature of fame, celebrity, art and "the experience of encountering the uncaused cause. That beautiful thing with no explanation."

Here's what he had to say...

Your previous work has been very much informed by Vancouver as a place and culture. What did your home city contribute to The Blue Light Project?

"Most of what I know about living in cities I owe to Vancouver. I've lived here almost all of my life. But this city has also contributed to my sense that all cities in the West are increasingly linked. They actually make up something like a contiguous urban space where people and cultural ideas flow freely. That's why western cities geographically far apart can still be observed to have similar neighborhoods and high streets and modes of dress, etc. There are regional specifics, obviously, but I'm talking about a general 'saming' between cities and a growing tendency among people to cross-identify with different places because of their mobility.

"With that in mind, Vancouver contributed to my decision to set this story in an unnamed city, an urban everywhere. I wanted the setting of the story to reflect my observations above. And doing so, I wanted to emphasize that the crisis in the novel belongs to all of us. Not just people from Peterborough or Pittsburgh or wherever."

You've rolled out the book to audiences with a slide show of photographs of street art and urban scenes (see slideshow, above). How does photography inform your work as a writer? Do you see text merging into a different role as this hyper-visual literate young generation ages?

"It was more research-driven. I didn't plan photos but they became necessary. I was hanging out with these street artists, watching them work. They're kind of secretive and they weren't necessarily comfortable with me just observing, then disappearing to write their art into my book. They wanted to see what I was doing. So I showed them early pages, before my publisher even knew the book existed. Two things happened. First, the pages of that draft ended up incorporated into street art that went up on the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver. Second, artwork that a character in the book had been working on -- projects that I 'invented' for the story -- started to come to life on the streets. That's when it occurred to me that I needed photos in the book to record that some of the art originated in the 'real' world and some of it originated on the page. I also wanted to capture the sensation of a book coming to life in various places simultaneously: in various artistic imaginations, as well as on the street."

The main action in the book takes place in a reality-show studio. If forced to choose, which reality TV show(s) would you be on and why? Please don't try to tell us you don't watch any.

"I watch Chopped and Top Chef. If they had an amateur version of Chopped, I might give it a try. I could probably take a Twinkie and some lemon grass and a pork tenderloin and produce something relatively edible if the opposition was amateur. Other than that, though, I don't watch reality TV at all. Researching the book, I spent most of that time watching 'reaction videos' on YouTube. These are clips of people reacting to the announcement of winners on various Idol-style shows. It's pretty amazing stuff. When the judges name the winner, these people are screaming, crying, running around, breaking things. It's not reality, it's like super-reality. When's the last time you ran around the room screaming because anything happened?"

In this novel, there are a lot of connections between the concept of "story" and the concept of "God" or "belief" (or that thing in the universe that gives one's life purpose). How do you see "stories" as relating to God?

"I'm not sure this is an issue of 'God.' It's an issue of the connection between (a) our experience of life, and (b) the seemingly inevitable sources of experience that lie just beyond rational explanation. All this business around us might be pure scientific unfolding, but we frequently do not live it or feel it that way. Specifically, when we talk about what gives our lives meaning we have a hard time staying in the purely physical (or material, to be more accurate). Matter is fine and it conforms with rationality. But when we fall in love, or have a child, or see a rainbow (double rainbows even more, apparently) material explanations of life tend to come apart at the seams. In these moment, something enters the world without cause.

"So yes, in the novel we encounter various people at the rational limit, peering into the realm beyond phenomena. The transcendent. The irrational. Eve, for example, finds the eminently rational packaging of her life for sale by the firm Double Vision -- who does high-end endorsement design -- to be profoundly lacking in meaning, in purpose. Likewise Pegg, the journalist who enters the television studio where the hostage taking has occurred, can no longer explain his own commitment to saving the children hostages in rational terms. So he embraces irrational ones. And of course Rabbit too -- our street artist working on his Blue Light Project -- is acting in a kind of high-irrationalism by erecting art his authorship of which will never be known. Why do it? Rabbit might answer: so that someone can have the experience of encountering the uncaused cause. That beautiful thing with no explanation: irrational and yet hopeful, impossible and yet indispensible."

In a similar vein, is Fame the God we choose in a Godless world?

"Maybe the better approach is to think of fame as a value, not a god. In that light, it's an emergent common value. We might not be able to agree on very much else in contemporary secular culture, but we can agree fame/renown/status, etc. are worth pursuing. That's why social networks are so addictive, because they allow us to pursue and measure our status simultaneously.

"Maybe the bigger point though is that it's the process of winnowing common values down to renown (and money, of course) that give us celebrity and reality television. We need this machinery, make no mistake. We need it because when everybody believes that they can and/or should be famous, and the manifest reality is that not everybody will be, then all adoration of the famous is tinged with resentment. Celebrity and reality television respond to our craving then, but more importantly, they also erect the scaffold from which the famous will on occasion dangle. Celebrity is a quasi-sacrificial system in this way. A love that is resented by all those it infects, celebrity needs victims from time to time to vent the pressure. To give us, in their failure, a moment's relief."

How do consipracy theories/stories play into this spiritual void?

"Well, when you can't trust anyone, conspiracy thrives. Gang-stalking is just suspicion gone omni-directional. It's also starting to generate some pretty interesting mail, let me tell you. I've heard from a fair number of people by this point that this freaky thing is happening to them. A guy I've known for 20 years(!) emailed me and said it was happening to a friend of his. I tend to think of it, as Pegg ultimately does in the book, as a social contagion of sorts. Why are all these thousands of people seeing white vans and guys in black ball caps following them around? Because they are (a) suspicious in the omni-directional way described above, and (b) they are endlessly marinating their brains in an online vat of the same allegations and stories."

More than a few times you mention the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2002. Why is this such an important symbol in the book?

"In Moscow, terror struck people at their leisure. It came out of the stage wings, literally. Survivors describe how the terror itself was briefly indistinguishable from the leisure they'd been enjoying (in that case musical theater). And once underway, the terror put the audience itself onstage, at the center of a terrible new drama viewed by the whole world. There's a scary emblematic power in that, which was no accident I'm sure. The Chechans were in effect saying: your leisure brings about your terror. That is, your staid complacency while Chechnya is under occupation is precisely the crime for which you're being punished.

"My terrorist clearly finds that emblem powerful. And he asks himself, from which piece of leisure entertainment should the torment of this particular public flow? I'd say he didn't think very long before coming up with Kiddiefame. And that of course has a lot to do with his own history, the discovery of which is one of the central surprises of the novel. So I won't say more."

This book is full of imagery, much of it street art and graffiti. There is also a quote from Werner Herzog about creating adequate pictures and language for our current state of civilization. Why is this important?

"Herzog has said that dozens of times and I've taken the liberty of interpreting. If I'm far away from what he intended, maybe I'll hear about it as I just sent Herzog a copy of the book through a mutual friend. In any case, the inspiration of the Herzog quote was, for me, that there is a class of image that can rise above the rest. I came to treat this, through my street artist, as the beautiful and truthful image whose source and motive can't be explained. Street art is a kind of gift, on one level. And while art may not save us, in our troubled day, the impulse to create, to give of ourselves, that just might save us."