Ms. Poiesis

After a ride along the Carrall Street almost-completed bikeway, and a stop at Chill Winston`s in Gastown for brunch, we were up and over the viaduct to Crab Park on the water near Canada Place. There Ty, Brubin and I took in part of the Bicycle Music Festival, a day-long mobile music festival on Saturday that featured local music and a pedal-powered sound system. Started in San Francisco, the Bicycle Music Festival is a community created event to celebrate self-propelled motion, music and community, and the performers’ sound systems were powered by bicycle.

We saw the Carnival Band and the B:C:Clettes, an 8 women and their bicycles performance group. Many of Vancouver’s latter-day hippies were there and varieties of bikes abounded, all the way from very long bikes with various trailers containing sound system components, to bikes with trailers holding dogs, big and small, to tiny trick bikes, to bicycles built for two.

The weather was great, the sky was cloudless blue, and a gigantic cruise ship docked at Canada Place formed part of the backdrop.

We were going to cycle with them to the Vancouver Museum, but technical problems with the bike powered sound system prevented them from leaving in a timely fashion, so the three of us rolled under Canada Place and onto the sea wall to the Marine Pub at the Coal Harbour waterpark for drinks and snacks.

See more pictures here.

My friend Peter has a studio down on Granville Island, outside which are many marvellous plants. Last time I was there visiting, I spied some fabulous large onion, garlic and thistle seed pods, of which he was kind enough to give me some. These, along with a peculiarly-shaped pink gladiolas plant I acquired from a local street vendor and an antique wooden puppet found in Thailand, I installed in the computer room and photographed at dusk. I really enjoyed the shadows created on the wall behind from these objects, as well as the variety of colours achieved by different lighting.

See more here.

And here is one more Duck Whisperer photo, this one with her cockatiel as well.

By JOE QUEENAN (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574356541209342218.html)

One superb innovation of recent times is the readers’ review section on Amazon.com. Here ordinary people get to voice their opinions, acting as cultural watchdogs to shield their fellow book lovers from duds. Certain individuals have built quite a reputation for themselves online, their aperçus vying with the phoned-in ruminations of the snooty, burned-out hacks who masquerade as professionals at our top magazines and papers.

Of course, some reviewers can get a bit coarse and personal in the rough-and-tumble world of Internet interfacials, but for the most part these gifted amateurs inject a much-needed breath of fresh air into the reviewing process. Most appealing is their absolute fearlessness when it comes to trashing high-profile authors that mainstream reviewers would hesitate to mix it up with.

Beholden to no man, cloaked in anonymity, they do not hesitate to take even the brightest stars —Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Auster, Dan Brown—to task. This is what makes citizen reviewers such a welcome addition to the body politic: Their courageous sniping from behind the bushes, emulating Ethan Allen and the Swamp Fox back in 1776, reaffirms that democracy functions best when you fire your musket and then run away.

It is always fun to go back in time and speculate on what might have happened had Anne Boleyn been on Facebook, or had Pharaoh’s army included amphibious equipment. This is why I cannot help wondering what a typical Amazon.com review might have looked like had the Internet existed centuries ago:

• ”King Lear”—Average reader rating: Two stars. The author tells us: “As like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.” Oh, right, like I didn’t know that? Like I didn’t know that to be or not to be is the question? Like I didn’t know that the fault lies not in us but in the stars? Tell me something I don’t know, Mr. Bard of Whatever.

• ”The 120 Days of Sodom”—Average Reader’s Rating: Five stars. OK, so I like totally pre-ordered this book based on the author’s name, which just happens to be the same as my maiden name—Marquis de. Yeah, a sketchy reason to buy a book, but I was pumped. But when it got here I didn’t understand it at all. It just didn’t go anywhere. It just kept repeating itself. I went through it a few times more, searching for some deeper, awesome meaning, but just ended up totally bummed. Actually, some parts of it were kind of gross.

• ”Oedipus Rex”—Average reader rating: Four stars. Sophocles is a satisfying author who writes in clear, snappy prose. Youngsters in particular could learn a lot by imitating Mr. Rex, until he goes a bit off the rails toward the end. Nothing earth-shattering here, but zippy stuff. Have to admit I’m still puzzled by the weird subplot involving Mr. Rex’s mother.

• ”The Aeneid”—Average reader’s rating: Two stars. Whine, whine, whine! Okay, so your hometown burnt to the ground and your family got wiped out, but do you have to keep bellyaching about it? Where’s that gonna get you, Mr. Grumpy? Basically, Virgil is a poor man’s Tacitus. He goes on and on about Priam and Dido and Zeus, when all the reader wants is to get to the good part when the Trojans defile the Vestal Virgins. And talk about a rip-off: He doesn’t even include the story about the one-eyed giant who can turn pigs into Greeks!

• ”On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres”—Average Reader Rating: Three stars. Those who have read my countless reviews elsewhere know that I am a mathematician, astronomer, polyglot and philosopher in my own right, and therefore uniquely qualified to discuss everything from Zeno’s Paradox to Gordian’s Knot. Mostly, I think my fellow polymath Copernicus has done a pretty solid job here. The thing most laymen don’t realize—unlike mathematicians/ philosophers/astronomers/polymaths like me (as those familiar with my numerous other reviews can tell you)—is that people like Copernicus are really good with numbers. Just as I am. Really, really good. (Me, that is.) Readers seeking more of my unique insights can reach me at Igor@mymommysbasement.com.

• ”Deuteronomy”—Average Reader’s Rating: Three stars. I don’t get it. I’ve read most of the books in this series, and they totally kick butt, but this one leaves me scratching my head. Is there a story here? Am I missing something? Why so much talk about clean and unclean beasts? The author really got on a roll with Genesis and Exodus, and I was on the edge of my seat when I read The Book of Numbers. But this one runs out of gas early. Now I’m glad I skipped Leviticus!

• ”Mein Kampf”—Average reader’s rating: One star. Lively writing, but just too, too depressing. Why does he keep using big words that normal people can’t understand, like lebensraum and oberkommandant? Hey! I own a thesaurus, too! And what’s up with the Jewish thing?

Christine had suggested a skate along the skytrain trail on Sunday and Ty and I, along with John G, John W and Lori, all thought it was a great idea. We met at Science World, Christine, John W and I on our skates, and the others on bikes, and headed off down the road at 10. The weather turned out to be great, sunny off and on with large fluffy cumulous clouds and not too hot. We rolled along a walking path parallel to Terminal Drive, up the First Avenue bridge, along Clarke briefly, then uphill once again past Commerical Drive, through Trout Lake Park (where a Chinese Athletic club and a Celtic drumming group were practicing their skills) and back onto the 7-11 trail near Nanaimo Street. Rolling along beneath the skytrain we passed through a multi-cultural festival with stilt walkers and then, some blocks further along, were up and over the Telus overpass, through Central Park and onto a new stretch of bike path into Burnaby.

At some point along this part of the trail we ran into our skating friend Gerry, riding his bike from New West down to the Fraser River, who told us about a new pathway into New West which he’d marked with small white sprayed signage. As we approached the 22^nd Street skytrain station, someone spotted one of Gerry’s markers on the road and we followed the signs down and around a new pedestrian overpass over Marine Drive and the Surrey/Delta Bridge on-ramp. At this point my feet were really starting to hurt and I began to suspect that part of the problem with my skates is that the foam insole orthotics have become so flattened that they are essentially useless. Nevertheless, we carried on off the trail and down and around the road leading to the New West Quay, finally rolling along the riverside promenade towards the Paddlewheeler Pub, the end of the line and our lunch destination. There we enjoyed some melon margaritas, pitchers of wheat beer, and fish and chips in the warm sun. Later, having been refuelled and now ready for a nap, we walked and carried the bikes up and over the pedestrian overpass leading to the New West skytrain station and our return journey. The six of us, and the three bikes, piled onto one train car and, within half an hour, were whisked back downtown once again, tired but happy – another great rollin’ time had by all.

See more pictures here.

Make your voice heard … supporting culture makes economic sense.

By Eric Gibson, Wall Street Journal

This week the world’s eyes were on the extraordinary photograph of former President Bill Clinton seated next to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il—an official picture taken at the end of talks that led to the freeing of two imprisoned American journalists. Mine, I confess, were elsewhere, continually diverted to the photo’s dramatic backdrop, an enormous mural of crashing seas and fluttering birds rendered in lurid greens and brilliant whites.

On the one hand, a run-of-the-mill seascape, the kind of visual elevator music one finds in public spaces the world over, where the aim is to decorate but not offend. Yet there was something about the picture that wasn’t quite right and that kept drawing me back to it. For one thing, there was its vast internal scale. The waves were bigger, even, than the figures posing for the photograph, and they so dominated the foreground as if ready to break out and drown the assembled dignitaries.

Then there was the picture’s bizarre disunity. Two opposing visions of nature are combined, a benign one (the luminosity and fluttering birds), and an angry, violent one (the heaving seas and crashing waves). Just as strange, the painting’s various elements seem at war with each other. For instance, the rhythm of the breaking waves leads our eye from left to right, yet at the bottom right-hand corner—just to the right of the woman in the official party wearing a white jacket—a flock of birds, facing to the left, abruptly halts and reverses that momentum. A more accomplished artist would have found a way to integrate the various elements more harmoniously and lead our eye around the canvas more smoothly.

Then I realized: This is no ordinary painting but art with a purpose. What seem to our eye as limitations are the result of deliberate intent. It’s a piece of political propaganda. As such it belongs to a subspecies of kitsch known as totalitarian kitsch, where art’s sole raison d’etre is to bolster a dictatorial regime and glorify its leader.

Read the rest here.

Vladimir Putin: action man at play

By James Sturcke

Up a tree in camouflage green, bare chested on horseback and one can only guess at his state of undress as he carves his way through wild water – the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, has once again starred in a series of macho poses, this time on holiday in Siberia.

While many international counterparts will be hoping to escape the long lenses of the paparazzi at their holiday villas, and Gordon Brown tries hard to look at ease in front of the cameras while doing community service in his Scottish constituency, Putin has positively sought out the photographers and invited them to reinforce his muscleman image.

The latest snaps come after the judo black belt spent part of last weekend in a submarine exploring the bottom of Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, where he descended 1,400m below the surface to inspect potentially valuable gas crystals. He resurfaced after the four-hour dive to extol the virtue of Russian submersible technology and question whether any other country could match it.

Read the rest here.

See a gallery of pictures here.

By Jack Shenker, The Guardian Friday August 21, 2009

A farmer ploughs his rice paddy in the Delta. Photograph: Jason Larkin

Maged Shamdy’s ancestors arrived on the shores of Lake Burrulus in the mid-19th century. In the dusty heat of Cairo at the time, French industrialists were rounding up forced labour squads to help build the Suez Canal, back-breaking labour from which thousands did not return. Like countless other Egyptians, the Shamdys abandoned their family home and fled north into the Nile Delta, where they could hide within the marshy swamplands that fanned out from the great river’s edge.

As the years passed, colonial rulers came and went. But the Shamdys stayed, carving out a new life as farmers and fishermen on one of the most fertile tracts of land in the world. A century and a half later, Maged is still farming his family’s fields. In between taking up the rice harvest and dredging his irrigation canals, however, he must contemplate a new threat to his family and livelihood, one that may well prove more deadly than any of Egypt‘s previous invaders. “We are going underwater,” the 34-year-old says simply. “It’s like an occupation: the rising sea will conquer our lands.”

Maged understands better than most the menace of coastal erosion, which is steadily ingesting the edge of Egypt in some places at an astonishing rate of almost 100m a year. Just a few miles from his home lies Lake Burrulus itself, where Nile flower spreads all the way out to trees on the horizon. Those trunks used to be on land; now they stand knee-deep in water.

Maged’s imperial imagery may sound overblown, but travel around Egypt’s vast, overcrowded Delta region and you hear the same terms used time and again to describe the impact climate change is having on these ancient lands. Egypt’s breadbasket is littered with the remnants of old colonisers, from the Romans to the Germans, and today its 50 million inhabitants jostle for space among the crumbling forts and cemeteries of those who sought to subjugate them in the past.

On the Delta’s eastern border, in Port Said, an empty stone plinth is all that remains of a statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who built the Suez Canal; somewhere along the Delta’s westernmost reaches, the long-lost tomb of Cleopatra lies buried. With such a rich history of foreign rule, it’s only natural that the latest hostile force knocking at the gates should be couched in the language of occupation.

“Egypt is a graveyard for occupiers,” observes Ramadan el-Atr, a fruit farmer near the antiquated town of Rosetta, where authorities have contracted a Chinese company to build a huge wall of concrete blocks in the ocean to try to save any more land from melting away. “Just like the others, the sea will come and go – but we will always survive.”

Scientists aren’t so sure. Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared Egypt’s Nile Delta to be among the top three areas on the planet most vulnerable to a rise in sea levels, and even the most optimistic predictions of global temperature increase will still displace millions of Egyptians from one of the most densely populated regions on earth.

Read the rest here.

I had been musing about moving my mannequins around the city and photographing them, and today, being a beautiful sunny day (and who knows how many more we`ll have), was the day. First, though, I had to take my camera to the park down the street to photograph the vast white mounds of soap suds someone had generated in the fountain there, so large that they looked like icebergs swaying gently in the breeze. After snapping a few pics, I zoomed down to Stanley Park and carried my green plastic garbage bag of heads and painted sticks and my small white plastic bag of dolls down to Third Beach.

I had planned to set them up in the midst of the many small inukshuk stone sculptures that I had seen there on the weekend but when I got there, those were all gone, either knocked down by the waves or by some passerby. Instead, I pushed the sticks into the sand and photographed the heads and dolls against the backdrop of Georgia Strait and the freighters tied up there.  I enjoyed their bright colours against the deep blue of the morning sky.

My next stop was the area between Second and Third Beaches where Mr Stone Master usually has all his large inukshuk totems; here, too, although there had been many on the weekend, they were all gone except one. I arranged the painted heads and dolls in a configuration next to the stone sculpture and documented them. As I was doing this, several people riding bikes stopped to see what I was doing, apparently enjoying the vibrancy of the painted heads, calling them “Whacked“. Next stop on the head tour was English Bay, where they were arranged in a line along a low stone wall bounding the flower beds and in and around a large driftwood stump, much to the delight of local homeless folks gathered on the benches there.

The final stop on the head tour was Granville Island, where I set them up on a large metal sculpture, a metal staircase and in the Creekhouse pond. Here a passerby asked me what I`d done with the bodies and we both started cackling. Back at the ranch, I saw the Davie Duck Whisperer  in the park sans duck but with a cockatiel on her right shoulder. Just another day in the neighbourhood …

See a few pictures here.

Summer is back here on the west coast, just in time for the new school year to start. It’s always harder to make the transition back when the weather is still good enough to be playing around and going to the beach. Anyway, I have fired up the bike commute once again for this Fall term. The waterproof panniers have come out of storage, the laptop computer is updated, and the bike wheels are pumped up.  Yesterday, I put the bike on the back of the little red machine and, by 7 am, was on the road for Nanaimo. I parked at the top secret location on Marine Drive in West Vancouver, the best deal going being free, and rode down to catch the 8:30 ferry with my bike fully loaded.

I’m not sure why, but the new super ferries have customer service announcements very similar to those used by the airlines (the old boot ferries never had any such announcements giving cheerful messages from the captain about the estimated time of arrival and other such details). Another new feature was a voice asking customers to see someone, can’t remember who, if they had any questions or concerns. I felt like going up and saying, “Yeah, I have a concern that the Ferries CEO David Hahn is making over a million dollars, of which over half a million is bonuses for who knows what. As a taxpayer who is already subsidising BC Ferries to the tune of 170 million last year, I’m concerned” … but I didn’t. GOL.

The ride up the hill was uneventful but sweaty; I was wearing both a fleece and a shell and the combination turned out to be too much for the climate. After a productive day in my office, I rolled down the Parkway highway to Cedar, a trip of about 20 km which took me an hour. This Fall I will be staying with my friend Maggie, who surprised me with a glass of wine and dinner on my arrival. She has a fantastic huge backyard full of lots of bits and pieces which will serve well as components of installations and I`m looking forward to exploring the possibilities of artwork on her premises.

The next morning I rode back to work along the alternative Holden Corso route, passing through Cedar farm country and over the Nanaimo River where I had to stop traffic to scoot two young turkeys back off the road where they had been in danger of getting squashed as they tried to navigate across the tarmac. Then along Cedar Road, up Tenth Avenue, along Bruce and up 5^th to the University; the old Harewood Mall, a fixture on 5^th and previously quite a depressing and depressed venue, has been gentrified in the six months that I have been gone from Nanaimo and is now called University Plaza … interesting. And one of the new stores in one of the new pseudo-post-modern-greek-temple-facade components of the mall is a drive-through Starbucks. Since I hadn’t been able to have my usual 3 giant cups of coffee in the morning, I rolled my bike through the drive through and grabbed an extra hot tall cappuccino which I sipped on my way up the hill.

Cruising back to Vancouver again on one of the old ferries sans helpful customer service announcements, I lay on top of a storage unit on the sun deck and enjoyed the beautiful heat and breeze as we made our way across Georgia Strait. Many boats were plying the waters on such a gorgeous day. After having ridden up the deadly hill from Horseshoe Bay, down Marine Drive and into the parking lot, I drove through West Van, famous for being Canada’s richest postal code, and noticed the stark contrast between it and the mid-Island from whence I’d come, Nanaimo not being one of Canada’s richest cities. Interestingly, West Vancouver had what must be one of Canada`s last remaining full service gas stations – I haven`t seen one of those here in many, many years. (As I passed it, I was reminded that all of Turkey`s gas stations are full service, in accord with what my Belgian friend Sophie called their “too many men for the job“ employment policy).

Since the ferry had been late, I arrived at the bridge right in the middle of rush hour and spent a hot half hour inching along Marine Drive onto Lion`s Gate as four lanes of traffic converged into one. While idling in line I looked at the signage trumpeting the BC government`s investment in highway infrastructure, with its oh-so-modest Gordo-driven slogan of “British Columbia: The best place on earth“. Well, what might be the “best place on earth“ for people with wealth and health, like the majority of those in Canada`s richest postal code, might not be so for the poor, drug-addicted, desperate “hungry ghosts“ who populate Vancouver`s cesspit of a downtown Eastside *… (Note: I was reminded recently by a friend who lives in WV that not everyone there is rich; many of the elderly are impoverished as they try to pay the taxes on the homes they`ve lived in their whole lives).

What would have been a horrendous crush of vehicles and noise of horns blaring in Turkey was here a slow, orderly procession onto the bridge. I couldn`t face the traffic on Georgia so I decided on a stately cruise through Stanley Park instead, where I saw the hulk remaining of our beautiful ancient hollow tree stricken in the terrible wind storms of a few years ago. Sitting surrounded with a fence and placards with pleas for donations to restore it, the skeleton of the tree made me very sad. So many old, wonderful trees were destroyed that year and their blasted and chain-sawed stumps and spirits remain in the forest there.

Overall, the bike commute was a success; I really enjoyed the ride into the University from Cedar especially – mostly very peaceful with not too much traffic. So far, so good.

*Note: Dr Gabor Mate, a Vancouver physician, writer and public speaker, has worked in the Downtown Eastside for many years and has recently published a book entitled In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Dr Mate, before he became a doctor, was a teacher of English Literature at my high scool in North Vancouver. See an interview with Dr Mate here.

See a few pictures here.

Last Saturday Amber came up from Seattle so a few of us decided to skate around False Creek. It was a great day for it, sunny with big fluffy cumulous clouds floating by, and not too hot. After a pit stop at the English Bay fine dining establishment, the mobile Hot Dog House, we rolled around Stanley Park, stopping twice to see the many small and large inukshuk stone sculptures that continue to populate the beaches. At Second Beach we watched the stone master work for a bit, admiring his ability to place the rocks just so … then past English Bay again, up Pacific, onto and over the Burrard Bridge, with a stop at the top to enjoy the view, ending up at Granville Island for some always-popular Lee`s donuts, best in town, and java. Christine, Tom, and I left the group there and I hopped on the little ferry across the inlet homeward bound while Winson, Amber and Sylvia, their feet younger and stronger than mine, carried on around the sea wall past the Olympic village and Science World.

See a few more pictures here.