At the risk of creating uproar I have been enjoying the weather that has the city so sunken in the glooms. There are several reasons for this, firstly everyone is discussing it and noticing it and I’m a firm advocate for paying attention to the weather. (& mortality, unfortunately no one is discussing that) There’s plenty to notice about it.
I’ve observed that the rain, being the intermittent variety, means it’s perfectly feasible to work in the garden and have managed to do some excavating of my booming strawberry patch. However, I’ve also been engaged in the close scrutiny and spying and entrapment by my two not so fat fingers of the burgeoning slug increase. Ha! I’m onto these fellas finally. I’m getting crafty with them and scooping them out to a salty finale.
Second reason I’ve been enjoying the weather is how it reminds me of November and winter. I also appreciate the audacity of it that it will do what it wishes and that the population demands what has come before, what they know to be summer and for the latter few days it’s on its own drive and direction.
The third reason I’ve been enjoying it is the terrible news stories that are being written around it that contain the most unimaginative language and invocations. It’s a firm reminder that the weather is linguistically unchartered territory except for the brief literature we have and Gerry Gilbert’s weathery poems come to mind. I must resurrect the literary weather forecasts and make some more.
The weather has in fact been good clothes drying weather if you are attempting to dry them on an apartment balcony. Friday was a faceful of fresh blustery wind that reminded me of the most blustery spot on the planet, which I am deeply familiar with. But if you can isolate these single elements within the weather system it will enhance your neurological weather noticing and then when those very blue skies come, which they have done this summer, well ditto you notice them.
A footnote on the aforemention three brothers house with the former hatchy looking garden I used to so delight in. Passed it again the other soiree and noted that the new lottery looking house, with the overindulgence in gravel in the front garden, also wrapped the entire place in a tall fence so you can actually see nowt whatsoever of the back garden.
What an odd conclusion to a home whose garden was, for so many years (if not generations?) a place to feast one’s eyes on. I can recall small children standing there pointing at the objects poking up out of it, foaming with begonias instead of bathwater.
Does wealth really need to be this unimaginative?! I wonder what the patterns are on fencing and whether as house prices have soared there is any difference in the height of fences people border their properties with? It would be great to examine and record how gardens have changed in relation to other historical changes in the city. My friend Lori Weidenhammer recently did some workshops around garden memories and bookmaking. Blogs are also forming excellent records and documentation in this area.
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.
In 1935 the weather forecast was given a regal column and divided into three parts. (Or it sat above these other two sections this scan is v hard to read)
Weather
Coastwise Movements
The Tides (including graphics that epxlained the moon?)
It was a 36 hour forecast that was given including barometric pressure predictions. On this particular Monday in April maybe the 27th date is missing) Vancouver and vincinity — Strong winds or gales, mostly East with South, mild with rain.
The weather forecast also included a section entitled Synopsis. Tomorrow I will share the synopsis with you.
Working Class and Labour History Walking Tour
For those interested tomorrow (Sunday) there is a Working Class and Labour History Walking Tour taking place as part of La Commune de Vancouver.
Join SFU Instructor John-Henry Harter and others for PART I of this walking tour of the city’s working past.
Meet at 2pm outside Burrard Skytrain Station. The event is due to last til 4pm, dress appropriately to our variable weather of late.
This event is part of a series:
La Commune de Vancouver
Paris 1871/Vancouver 2011
March 18-May 28
FOR MORE INFORMATION, GO TO:
www.sfu.ca/history/commune
Civic Boosterism, a survey cont’d
Noted features employed in civic boosterism, especially in matter of literary reckoning.
Lists.
Numbers. (esp. 1, 2, and 5)
Verbs like explain, understand.
Adjectives such as awesome, great, best. (It is rare to hear the adjective “middling” or “piddling”)
Titles that include the name of the city or the telephone area code.
Appointing individual authors as ambassadors based on book titles and, often, meritless books.
A high proportion of male self-appointed ambassadors.
Anything other than opening the front door, putting your feet down on the pavement and walking about and talking to the people who actually live here. (such as the extreme example of having a chat to the person next door and the underpaid person selling you a cup of coffee). Current modes of boostering by boosters do not include the flaneur rather the “spouter” is more prevelant. Because Boosterism does not encourage uncovering, nor does it address the troughs (just the peaks).
*
Impending civic boosterism forecast includes an avalanche of sporting regalia and flags on car windows that will inevitably snap and block the drains!
Just noted the following weather numbers in the newspaper (accuracy is always debatable since they draw their forecast only from one source and I believe in consulting 3 sources and making my calculations somewhere between them)
Yesterday’s low = 2.4 (not according to my arctic reading weather device, but…)
Last year’s low same day was 8.2
Normal daytime low = 5.4
Record low for this date was in 1982.
In conclusion yesterday was quilt, thermos and legwarmer weather.
School report cards increasingly remind me of real estate appraisals in their contractual language and measurement. No leak, nor tweak, nor inconvenience, the categorizations of both insist.
And yet how people flock and click to watch TED Talks. Let it be know the TED talkers are often mighty uneven and celebrated for it.