Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
an update
it has been days and days since i posted here – and the past four days has seen a move and a trip across the border, and shopping, and unpacking…. so here is the daily chronology for the sake of an update post.
friday – i moved into my new house in gibsons and cleaned up the old place in roberts creek. the move went extremely well, the guys i hired were great and even the clean-up of the old place didn’t take too long. the only casualty in the move was a paper lampshade that was already torn to begin with (it literally disintegrated in the move). i was finished everything by about 6 pm, and got my damage deposit back in cash on the spot. by friday night i had got my bed set up, my shower curtain hung, the food that needed to be cold into the refrigerator, my adsl connected and working, and my stereo hooked up. my real estate agent called me to tell me that she thought i made the right decision and since when i made my offer it had likely already accrued some value (market is hot apparently).
saturday – i got up at 5:30, filled my tank full of gas and hit the ferry to meeting jess and megan in east vancouver at 8. the three of us drove down to bothell washington for a belated earth day event that featured dana lyons and derrick jensen (who i have been wanting to meet in person for awhile). we attended an informal discussion early in the afternoon, met a friend of mine for lunch at a thai restaurant, and then hung around for the evening event which went until 11:00. then we drove home and i crashed on jess’s couch. the border was uneventful going both ways, and the trip was definitely worth it. i will post more on this later.
sunday – i got up early and drove to the ikea in coquitlam where i spent a small fortune on occasional tables, bedding, kitchen gadetry, shelving and bathroom textiles. i still need to get some sort of loveseat or small sofa for the living room since the pillows i had in the last place won’t really work in this new place (at least in that room, i want to use them in one of the downstairs rooms…..). got home around 2 and spent the rest of the day putting together furniture and unpacking.
monday – went to canadian tire in the morning, then london drugs and picked up additional household things, then spent the rest of the day unpacking and moving empty boxes downstairs. i have managed to get the entire kitchen and breakfast nook unpacked at this point, but there is still a *ton* of work to do.
so really the last four days has been a combination of working and driving, with a brief interlude of socializing in bothell. i am well, and really excited to be in my new place despite the fact i can’t even find my shoes at the moment….. i think however, that a housewarming june 11th will be right on schedule for having the majority of my boxes unpacked!
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).
Red Cedar 