June 27, 2011
John Sparks reports from Xintang for Channel 4 on the recent story of 4 days of riots and unrest among workers.
June 26, 2011
Rereading the Riot Act II. Vancouver June 15, 2011
Signage installation by Jeremy Isao Speier.
Rereading the Riot Act II. Vancouver June 15, 2011
Unit/Pitt residency project.
June 26, 2011
Rereading the Riot Act II. Vancouver, June 15, 2011
Lori Weidenhammer performing one of two of her responses at the Performance Art Cabaret @ The Waldorf.
My Unit/Pitt residency project: Rereading the Riot Act. Vancouver 2011.
June 25, 2011
In other compelling news, my garden plot and I are engaged in a whole new tension. The polyamorous slug community are eating the living daylights out of everything. 200 have been removed by hand, but they morph new recruits before my very eyes. The lack of sun is doing little to charm the slithers of green up out of the ground, even if the predators weren’t swooping on them.
But the nastursium (sp?) has a flower! My first. Yellow. And the geraniums are purple.
It’s an ongoing cycle of disappointment my garden. And yet it sustains me … there’s something of the chronic reoffender in it, that endeavouring to find hope in it and yet it is such a bruiser!
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Summer is here. Myself and the small male are singing Green Day songs and the odd mashed up attempt at opera. Tonight a ukelele player serenaded us at the bus stop. She had a lovely voice and sang You and I for us. Aaah. Dotey. She said she’d been playing ukelele for only 2 days.
June 25, 2011
I find it sinister that the Business Improvement Association were early on the riot scene, commenting alongside the Mayor and Premier (both of whom spoke in comic book “bad guy” terminology which shed no light on the situation beyond “gasp, this is bad, and we gotta put the bad guys in jail). Yesterday I saw Mr Business Improvement Association on the news commenting on being consulted on appropriate punishment through the community court system (which is likely to be employed as a route for dealing with people who were charged with the disturbances).
How did the Business Approvement Association manage to inject themselves into the justice system? Why are they being consulted? Why are they giving comments? They are not elected by anyone. They’re self appointed one assumes and their knowledge if they have any is utterly irrelevant in this context.
If the Mayor is rolling out anyone for insight should it not be sociologists or social scientists or community leaders or youth workers? I find the sinsister presence of “business interests” so consistently represented in community affairs disturbing. If the business interests should be meeting with anyone it is with their fellow business interested at Rogers Arena, the owners of the hockey team who should be offering some financial reparation from their profits towards the repairs and who likewise should have had to fork out a contribution towards the security costs.
Since when is a privately owned sports franchise and the expenses incurred related to securing an income of $112 million dollars for it, the responsibility of the tax payers? If we look at cultural funding and the return on it we see a dollar invested brings triple to the economy in return and there’s little to no security costs incurred through the hosting of cultural events.
This leads me to another question: why did the rioters not inflict havoc on the very thing that is understood to have angered them? Why did they not vandalize the stadium where the match took place?
June 24, 2011
Rereading the Riot Act @ London Review of Books
Unit/Pitt and Rereading the Riot Act II makes the London Review of Books. Move over Elvis impersonators & gardening hour, our event got no local coverage at all. Grateful to the “incomparably lively and thoughtful” LRB for embracing it.
I’ll be writing more about the Cabaret (consumed with my novel edit) on this blog and am touched by the messages I’ve received from the small population who came out and supported it. Thanks also to the performance/visual artists Leannej, Carol Sawyer, My Name Is Scot, Jeremy Isao Speier and Lori Weidenhammer for engaging with my project and for their thoughtful, robust responses. And for the writers/artists/performers/activists and the Solidarity Notes Labour Choir who participated in the first Rereading the Riot Act event on April 23, 2011 at Victory Square & Woodwards.
We are instigating a panel discussion in conjunction with SFU Humanities I hope and there will be a publication from the project published this Fall by Publication Studio.
June 23, 2011
I’m still coming across people who insist the riot was orchestrated by anarchists. I find this a very odd premise that I thought had already been debunked. My curiousity about gauging people’s thoughts has led me to solicit young people’s opinions and hear their interpretations on what took place and on the question of rage and the urge to participate overall in the entire hockey playoffs. I also had an interesting chat with a friend who teaches in a High School who had a neurological perspective that in such a circumstance the brain of such young men especially needs a shock and instruction to divert them. I found his thinking plausible and asked him to explain to me how he deals with this in his teaching practice. He gave me examples on involving individuals and diverting them and tasking them with things to do.
I’ve also been reading on violence and how it can relate to being “visible” without necessarily having anything further to say beyond I am here. I noted the other night in the video footage a certain repetition, not only was there definate I am here, but sometimes I am back. Or I am here again.
June 23, 2011
I’ve been dipping into a book I borrowed sometime ago from a friend who is a psycho-analytic historian and who introduced me to the work and thinking of Jean LaPlanche. The book is a collection of interview with LaPlanche called Seduction, Translation, Drives. The other day I was trying to read it while running and drew some quizzical looks from the man beside me. There are certain kinds of fonts I can manage to read while moving, but not this one.
Since I’ve moved slowly through this book previously and am back re-simmering with it, I decided to seek my own copy of it, so I can return it to my friend. I just looked and discovered only one copy available priced $624.00 !
June 22, 2011
A hyperfocus on who has and who has not read the report, a report, the only report.
I find this fascinating in relation to the reading of the Riot Act. That again the act of reading is in the dock of consideration.
If he or he or she had read the report there wouldn’t have been a riot or there would have been a different riot or was there a riot because he or he or she did not read the report?
Answers on a postcard to the men fixating on reading reports. Have those men read the report? Which report would you insist they read?