Red Cedar

things you should watch

Posted on October 26, 2004 by Megan

two things came across my desktop today that are worth a watch.

mosh – eminem
by no means am i a fan of eminem, but when his new song is set to a video encouraging people to don black hoodies and march in the streets (confronting riot police no doubt) i have to at least wonder at it (if not be secretly pleased that this is getting mass airplay). other than the fact that this seems to be about voting, the rest of the imagery in this video is pretty cool.

pierre burton rolls a joint
no kidding, on rick mercer’s monday night show the celebrity tip this week was by pierre burton and includes a step by step on rolling a proper joint. for those us readers who don’t know – pierre burton is *the* author of popular canadian history and a bit of a secret leftist – at 84 years old he’s one of the best known icons in the country. anyhow – this video is gut-busting funny and you have to check it out.

maybe, just maybe we’re going to get it before it’s too late?

starlight

Posted on October 21, 2004 by Megan

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this morning i awoke to a cloudless and pitch-dark sky – with dawn still more than an hour away, the stars robust and unfettered against the inky black. still a miracle to me, these skies are unheard of within city limits where the neverending neurons beam from streetlights, cars and automobiles – bouncing against the finite atmospheric roof and encasing every living thing in an orange dome 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

i had an experience about two weeks ago, driving out of the ferry terminal in langdale at 8 pm one night. my car was one of the last off the ferry, and so there was no one behind me on the highway winding up the hill. for the first hundred metres or so the road is bathed in the orange light emanating from the ferry complex, a pool of artificial colouring on an otherwise unlit passage. as i drove, i was not conscious of this division between artifical lightness and authentic dark, but as my car slipped out of the pooling light, the release in tension from my shoulders was unmistakable. i felt suddenly released, and the force of the relief that washed over me was so great i almost started to cry.

it is no secret that one of the reasons i left the city was because of the destructive air quality which was threatening to weaken my health over time – but besides air pollution which is obviously miasmic – i wonder how other environmental contaminants such as sound and light disrupt our central nervous systems? not only would this appear to be physically damaging to us as natural animals, but preliminary studies in mental health have shown a correlation between intense urban environments and what is termed mental illness. this is some of what i am interested in studying as a master’s in counselling psychology (my primary interest is ecopsychology which flows from these and other observations made working as an activist in a highly urbanized environment for the past 10 years).

in any case, the stars this morning were brilliant and as i got out the door, i spied a shooting star streaking across the early morning sky, engaging me to make a wish best left unsaid. although our society’s “quality of life” is tied to dollars, i’m pretty sure there are better measures of such things – such as stars in the sky unobscured by artificial light, and quiet places where cedar drinks from clear rivers.

an excerpt

Posted on October 20, 2004 by Megan

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On a planet of water the land has to end, and here in the West of North America it ends in prodigal beauty. It ends in mountains plunging to sounds and fjords, in the thunder of calving glaciers, in still forests of the tallest trees on Earth. It ends in rocky stacks haunted by sea lions and gulls, in great waves of sand flowing slowly inland, in heights and dark headlands looming in mist. It ends in covers and strands and bare desert hills, in warm lagoons where gray whales sport and birth their young. And always the land ends in ceaseless barter with wind and waves, in the surge and boom of one of the first musics the planet learned how to make.

…………………………………………..John Daniel from The Limits of Paradise

castles and coal towns

Posted on October 20, 2004 by Megan

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on the weekend, nathan and i met up in princeton and stayed at a place called the “princeton castle” (tag-line: “escape to history in log luxury”). you can see from the photograph above the ruins which do look decidedly medieval-castle-like but interestingly, this is a crumbling cement factory circa early 1900s. what is odd about the place is the lack of history that has survived other than building itself which is falling rock by mortar into the ground. what follows is the only information the resort provides:

In 1910 there began a gigantic industrial dream to build a “Great Cement City” called East Princeton, with an enormous cement plant and a complete powerhouse. The dream was to cost over a million dollars. It also cost a number of workers their lives. Four years and hundreds of thousands of man-hours by skilled craftsmen, stone masons, carpenters and engineers, resulted in a colossal architectural achievement known as The Portland Cement Plant. But, nine short months later, the dream fell into silence: the plant was closed down. Some say they ran out of limestone from the on-site mountains; some say the coal they needed for the operation failed to appear because of conflicts with the needs of the First World War, and some say it was never meant to succeed. Now, some 80 years later, people are again returning to experience the magic of what has become known as PRINCETON CASTLE.