Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
when is an inukshuk not an inukshuk?
now – as people know – i’m no fan of the fact bc was awarded the winter olympics in 2010 and i’m sure that as the years tick down, i will find many more things to complain about… but i am honestly appalled by the ioc’s choice in an official logo for the games. the cbc article linked to above contains many good first nations criticisms of it, including some outrage from the inuit culture who actually use the inukshuk as a survival device and for whom it holds great significance…. not to mention bc first nations who wonder why none of their art styles were not incorporated into the design (since these olympics are being held in their territory after all).
rather than being a celebration of aboriginal artworks and social contributions, this symbol is one more example of the cultural appropriation of aboriginal symbols in a way that is insulting, assimilationist and inappropriate. unfortunately, this is something canada likes to do a lot, as if choosing native symbols to represent government departments and events will somehow ammeliorate the damage of genocide and colonialism that has all but destroyed the way of indigenous life in this country.
besides the general cultural comments – there is no doubt that is one *ugly* piece of design work and it’s too bad we’re going to have to live with it for the next 5 years. yuck.
on top of it….
photo taken of the sky at dusk from my front porch in roberts creek, sunday night
have been dreaming like crazy this week – last night about being a shop stewart and having a steady stream of people coming for help…. all who had the same manager (a director who i actually like in real life) who was indiscriminately firing people and being a really awful boss. it wasn’t an unpleasant dream – because i had good suggestions for every person – but there were definitely some odd characteristics to it.
besides that – tomorrow is moving day – and i have been slowly getting the bits and pieces tied up over the course of the last week. i have a lot going on through the month of may, and i feel once i get the moving day over with i can start progressing through the rest of my to-do list which includes finishing the talk for the coloquium next friday, and playing my fiddle more regularly in anticipation of our show may 28th.
after a few days of feeling unsure of myself and thus antisocial , i have turned it around (with the help of my friend otter with whom i spent sunday at the beach getting silly on marijuana and enjoying other people and the sun) and am generally feeling pretty on top of my game this week. i had a brain flash yesterday at work which i hope will solve a problem and make both my bosses here happy and the big bosses in ottawa happy at the same time, and am feeling emotionally under control despite the fact i am moving tomorrow.
now – the next few days – challenging yes… but i am up for it 🙂
dreaming about the collapse
photo from northern california trip, an altar or something, in the wreckage of the landslide my friends live on…
i dreamed last night that the days of the collapse were upon us, that over time there were less and less products on the shelves of the supermarket, that new supplies stopped coming into rural communities from other places, that the power blacked out intermittently for increasingly extended periods each time though still managed to sputter back on long enough to make us wonder just how much longer?
in the dream, i was on a populated island, or at least a place that only afforded access by water. sometimes i thought it was the sunshine coast, but at other times it was cuba – this changed throughout but it made sense to be a place somewhat cut-off from the “mainland” because it was there the failure of transportation (and thus the shortage of goods) would be noticed first. there were people with me who i knew, mostly from the union movement, that i would periodically run into on the streets as i walked them – trying to find out what exactly was going on in the cities, running in my mind ideas about gardens and sustainable food sources close by.
the overwhelming sense i had was not fear, but profound frustration – for each person i encountered professed no knowledge of what was happening and denied we might be in the midst of a structural collapse. they told me the lack of food coming into the community was just a temporary shortage, and that the electricity had *always* been intermittent in that area – that it was nothing to worry about. i was frustrated in that i felt i knew what was happening but it appeared no one else could… and not unlike periods of my real life – i started to suspect i was going mad since i believed things no one else around me did.
i have *got* to stop reading the news right before bed…..
vicarious travels in iraq and the future of blog-journalism
this is jake, having managed to convince some us soldiers in iraq to allow him to try on some body-armour for a photo. i guess if you are an american you have less of a chance that they will shoot you on approach.
as i am nearing the end of my packing spree – i have spent a little more time online over the last few days – which has occasioned a couple of online chats with my friend jake who is currently traveling in iraq and documenting his travels with photos, video and writing on his blog – “it’s complicated”. a combination of technical advice (as in “installing a vsat in iraq“), bittorrent video snips, and some beautiful slice of life photos – jake’s blog has attracted the attention of tens of thousands of daily readers and notable internet info sources like as boing boing, gizmodo, and cnet news (article by declan mccullagh).
in short – he has become something short of infamous in the elite geek circles of the internet (unfortunately this doesn’t translate into money or real fame…. but it has its own cachet to be sure) – and will probably get him into trouble with his own government once he returns home.
in the meantime, jake is working to make his iraq-blog experience as interactive as possible. not only is he willing to answer any questions asked by the readers of his blog, but he has also asked people to posit questions for him to ask iraqi and kurdish people during interviews – promising to pick the ten best and use them as a starting point.
and herein lies what i think is the actual power of blogs as journalism (something the pundits have been going on about for ages but is motly crap…. very few blogs by individuals not employed in regular media work do anything approximating journalism, no matter all the hype). jake’s attempts to bridge the (mainly) north american reader’s questions with his momentary access to iraqi and kurdish people are an excellent example of how blogs can foster and build an independent gonzo-news culture involving all the participants in a story-telling circle (rather than a one way directive). one would hope such an experiment would allow for honest lines of inquiry and response as ‘net anonymity frees people up to ask even the “stupid questions”, or the questions that cnn won’t be asking in any case – and the stories of everyday people can come back to put a face and voice to the tragedy which has seen the country stalled in a 15-year nightmare.
although i didn’t mean this to turn out as a site-review – it has turned in to a bit of one…. if you are at all interested in a political tourist’s visit to iraq – i would recommend checking out jake’s traveloque. do, however, beware… like many photobloggers without an internal filter, jake has the tendency to post copious photos behind his “cuts” – know that if you click on the links for more photos you might be waiting a long time for them to load (this is the only near-criticism of the site i have… though it really isn’t much of one for those of us with high-speed).
on a personal note – my favourite thing about jake’s trip to the middle east has been the photos of him on the site – sans goth-suit 🙂 i have never seen jake without a suit on (even at a mid-summer california ruckus camp during a serious drought) – so this brings some sort of perverse pleasure on my part…… i wish my friend safe travels for his time in the middle east in any case and a seamless return home (when, in fact, he decides to come back).
more blah blah blah
there is an end to this packing in sight – and i’m amazed since i still have a week until moving day…. i have yet to tackle the entranceway, the kitchen and the bedroom, but the living area, bathroom, gear closet and basement are pretty much taken care of – so by tomorrow night i should be pretty much finished, save for the last-minute items for thursday night. that means i can focus on cleaning and getting rid of garbage. this evening i have a garbage burning planned for all the stuff that can be easily burned – a small perk to living in the country is open fires.
i finished with my paperwork yesterday, and as of monday it will be filed, making me the legal owner of my house. from start to finish, this whole process will have taken 5 weeks by moving day… hard to believe that these things can happen so fast…
the return key fell off my ibook yesterday, and for the life of me i can’t get it to reattach – it looks like something has got bent which might be the reason why. i guess i must be typing with some ferocity to actually bend the metal bits that hold the keys together – or possibly it really is that i have bad luck with ibooks…..
fortunately it’s still under warranty so i’ll take it in this week to have it looked at… i’ve been meaning to take it in for the wireless antenna (which has always had crappy signal strength) for ages, and get more ram for the damned thing too – so i suppose it will be a combination trip to macstation. word from the wise – if you are buying an ibook, the 3-year applecare is a *must* have. for all the apples i have owned since 1995, the ibooks definitely have the most problems (moreso than the older mac laptops even) – something about their supersonic lightness seems to make them more prone to hardware issues.
really, i’m just posting at the moment as a mechanism for procrastination – apparently my landlady is showing the house again today to some prospective renters – so i really should get on packing a bit more before they get here…..
Red Cedar 