Haiti’s aid: caught in a bottleneck
Channel 4 news report on aid hold up. Field hospital across the street from the airport has no medical supplies.
Waste incineration
Prime Time report on issues around new waste incinerator plan for Dublin. Vancouver debating similar plans. Power and waste management big topics for 2010. How to deal with feckin’ soft plastics? No strategy can come fast enough.
Strikers in saris
One sweltering summer afternoon in August 1976, Jayaben Desai decided she wasn’t going to take it anymore.
Whole story here
An overnighter at the Emergency Room with a misbehaving kidney and mother morphine. What an intransigent organ! Was just talking to a friend about how we form relationships with these organs when they make their presence known in inconvenient ways.
If I hadn’t been blinded with pain, I would have looked more closely for the relationships that sit in the plastic chairs. Grown up children who wait with parent/parents who are looking for answers. Instead I was acutely grateful for the invention of i/v, for antibiotics, for access to such things and the eventual pain relief. Was trying to contemplate where the mind would go if such relief never came, which for many with no access, is the case. But was in too much pain to reach any conclusion.
Good old Canadian Healthcare. I won’t have a bad word said against it. It’s been good to me. Helped me let that kidney know whose in charge!
I was talking to a man today about fragments and he exclaimed in the most colourful tones, great excitement, at my novel and declared it something like “fucking rad, exactly what this century needs, fragment, fragment up 2010.” Then he raised his arms and took off in a cloud of enthusiasm to play the bass guitar very loudly. Bless, bless.
A woman, a stranger at the same gathering, told me “I love to watch your relationship with your son. I’ve noticed it and I love to watch it. ”
Another lovely fragment.
2 in a day.
Orwell and eggs
Love how Orwell commences his diary each day with an accurate recording of the precise weather.
Each day on Twitter the corresponding day is tweeted from his diary. I love it when the weather precisely corresponds to our weather.
But the thing that makes me chuckle is his egg count. A comfort to me, his egg count is.
Had my monthly chat in the window of the uterine caff about DM Fraser. All my chats about that writer take place in the same spot. I have 2 people who I alight on every time I see them! I really would like to find more folks to talk about his work with. If you’ve read him, or have any thoughts on his work, please post a comment or send an email: mrsokana@gmail.com
Cultural Olympiad, the pimped to collapse lung
Cultural Olympiad is akin to a blinding orgy. Excess of everything, nothing can really be taken in and then bang two weeks or two months will give way to a famine.
It reminds me of the celtic tiger. He only visited certain people in the country and they jumped on him (for who wouldn’t/doesn’t jump when the tigre comes to town) and people jumped with little regard for those who couldn’t reach his tail. Then like all tigres, bored, he moved on.
The BC government surreptitiously closing down arts funding: they make their move when they lights are bright. They’ll encounter little resistance because the artists are too busy glad ragging. Even some of the projects are all about pointless excess. Or excess with a point that’s really unremarkable. Or in the worst case a point we can absolutely do without or a point that we can do without and says nothing about the place we live. Some of these single projects could fund an artist run centre like the displaced Helen Pitt for a year!
Another thing with bonanza is the tip top usual suspects get wheeled out … the new, the quiet, the invigorating will not be included or even invited to join in because hierarchy and connection and approval rue the day. Amidst it all there will be treats and those treats will be poorly attended the same way the more interesting stuff is usually barren. And there will be ambitious events that are rewarding, that go beyond ostentation and “because I can” and “because x person who made the funding application said I can” that may stay with viewers and listeners, but the rest, the brash clanging will give way to a silence afterwards, perhaps a detrimental one, but one that reminds us that blind conceit trips us all up and we should be careful who we get into bed with.
If the pimp’s waving dollars at you: he usually has a strong conviction of what he expects in return.
A collapsed lung comes to mind.
A collapsed lung that will not reinflate with gentle, nudging aspirating.
Self interest was the punch maybe?
In and out
Increasingly I find if go to a talk or a reading and it doesn’t engage me I experience a kind of claustrophobia, which results in a desire to both get out and stay put and suffer, lest it might improve. This is a relatively recent experience. Age, bhfeidir?
The trouble with this, is it’s an acutely uncomfortable and vexing experience. The vexation I don’t mind. I find it quite beneficial creatively to be vexed (as playwright Tom Murphy would say ‘what gets me mad gets me going’) . Sometimes, like any traffic, the discussion will give way to something curious and then I am glad to have endured the discomfort, but if it doesn’t it’s essentially like being trapped down a mine and when you surface you’ve the feeling you lost two weeks in a pointless pursuit. It can take hours to recover from the discombobulation that ensues and then you’ve to excavate the vexation.
At today’s talk, (hosted by Artspeak) which I was attracted to by a bunch of sentences, that offered an idea that I longed to learn more about, and I wanted to be possible. (Along the lines of overthrowing the editing process) However reading about something can sometimes be more compelling than listening to people rambling about the thing because in reading you’ve something tangible — text — but in the arch of ramble — the text, the entity disappears and it’s dilutes into “what we’re (creators) about,” and concepts floating about the room like a bunch of poorly flung paper airplanes.
I sought further clarification from one of the speakers. What I thought was happening in this work (it’s creation) based on the sentences I read, may not be actually happening, so it’s safe to say the thing that attracted me may not have happened yet. From my understanding – or misunderstanding –I thought they were pioneering a kind of spontaneous literature that did not engage in any editing process. I was excited by this idea that what was produced in a moment, was of that moment and could stand for it with no requirement beyond being of that moment and would be accepted as that, without ambition to be “completed” in a whole external process (editing, spell checking, clipping, clopping, chipping, chopping).
Perhaps it was the spirit that drove the enterprise that attracted me. Or perhaps in my excitement that such a thing might exist and work … I constructed its fictional existence and then when I sat in the room was disappointed I couldn’t recognize it.
I nipped in.
Very different watching the same piece a second time, in a completely empty gallery. Last time I’d to share the couch with two strangers, today I was the only body in the two rooms. Not unlike having the swimming pool to yourself, or sitting at the back of an empty bus, your mind relaxes just a bit more and sound is experienced differently. Somehow it’s as if the documentary is just a live piece to camera, there’s an added Brechtian directness because you alone are the only person absorbing it.
It’s curious I never have that experience watching the telly! Maybe it was influenced by my head being freshly scrambled at a talk at another artist run centre and needing an urgent cup of tea, but wanted to get back to Bata before Bata came down from the wall.
I am glad I went back to Bata. My notes when I type them up will explain why. All day I’ve been thinking about how if there’s a biscuit (cookie) factory in a town, how the smell pervades the air. The factory would draw the workers in, the way the biscuits go into the oven and when the workers go home the aroma escapes with them. If you don’t work in the factory, you still live somewhat in the factory.
In the Colony piece (correct description it’s an experimental social documentary according to the blurb) you hear how the owners experienced their company and how in turn the workers did. Like a venn diagram there’s a minor crescent of agreement, mostly it’s starkly different. The owners constructed what the experience of the workers must have been to suit a certain nostalgia, while in turn there was nostalgia in hindsight from the former workers. The workers nostalgia all held the theme of change, how everything had changed since and they could not recognize it. The owners p.o.v. was entirely static ie. what the workers were given.
Notes to follow. I have to figure out what it was I went back to look for.