Ms. Poiesis

On what might have been the last sunny day of 2009 Ty and I hopped on our bikes for a cruise around the see wall to see what was happening at the Olympic Athletes Village. On the way over we stopped to examine the small forest of inukshuks that have been erected on the sea wall across from Science World.

The sun is so low in the sky this time of year at the 49th parallel that most of the area on the south side of False Creek remains in shadow even at the height of noon. The Athletes Village looks to be almost completed now, ready for the hordes to come in February.

Even though it was cold and crisp, the Creek looked beautiful in the sun.

After a visit to Granville Island, and a ride across the Creek on the cyquabus, we stopped to admire a large heron perched on an apartment balcony, sunning itself.

A few days later, Ty, Lorraine, John and I ventured up into the mountains for a snowshoeing trip to the Dog Mountain summit on Mount Seymour.

I was pleased to note, as we geared up to enter the trails, that the avalanche risk was “low”.

We tromped through the trees for an hour or so, passing frozen lakes and icicle strewn streams, on our way to the summit.

From the summit we had a beautiful view out over Vancouver to the south and Georgia Strait and Vancouver Island to the west. With a break in the cloud cover, the sun shone golden on the waters down towards the San Juan Islands in Washington State.

Two huge ravens, obviously with no fear of humans, joined us for lunch.

It was an excellent hike, not too strenuous, but enough to work off the shortbread, chocolates and scotch consumed over the holidays.

See more here.

None of us need be empty. All can give the greatest gift.

By Crawford Kilian, 25 Dec 2009, TheTyee.ca

Even when Rome ruled the world, and Judea was one of its backwater provinces, the Romans had need of a terrible word: vanitas.

We know it today as “vanity,” but to the Romans it didn’t mean trivial self-admiration. It meant emptiness, an existential sense that life is futile and without meaning.

The Romans ruled their world and dragged enemy kings in chains through the streets of their capital. Their statesmen, soldiers, engineers and writers set the standards for the next 2,000 years. They fell in part because millions of barbarians swarmed into the empire for a share of its safety and prosperity. Yet they also fell because their triumphs seemed empty to them, not worth defending.

Today we still dread that emptiness. We live in a world of language, of symbolic meaning; we want to be symbols ourselves, to feel that our lives have meaning and purpose beyond the simple living of them. But in the darkness at the end of the year, all the carols and presents and chestnuts roasting on an open fire can seem like the same emptiness, the same vanitas, the Romans dreaded.

The greatest vanitas of all

Vanitas: Over seven decades of war and oppression, scores of millions died to defend or to oppose the Soviet Union. Their sacrifices were in vain. The USSR collapsed, killed by its own inner flaws. The present Russian regime of billionaires and gangsters is unlikely to last as long.

Vanitas: To combat the Soviet threat, America turned itself into the world’s policeman. To justify its military spending and its strategy of nuclear genocide, it terrified its own people with Red scares and then Terrorist scares. Having legitimized communism’s cultish politics as a serious alternative to capitalism, the U.S. crushed, subverted or punished Third World nations that chose (or even flirted with) that alternative. Their puppet states turned against them in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Ninety years after the October Revolution, Canadians and Americans are dying in Central Asia for the sins of Josef Stalin and Woodrow Wilson.

Vanitas: After 70 years of hot and cold war, we seem as addicted to violence as the Romans watching gladiators die in the Colosseum. We entertain our children with movies and cartoons showing violence as the best means to safety, happiness and a meaningful life. First-person shooter video games are a bigger industry than Hollywood. Then, when a psychiatrist at Fort Hood opens fire on his fellow soldiers, we express shock and horror.

Vanitas: Drenched in this culture of violence, some men try to find meaning in their lives by acts of personal violence — and pervert even that meaning by killing their own wives and children.

The greatest vanitas of all is the belief that the getting and spending of wealth, and the rule of the weak by the strong, give meaning to our lives. We build shopping malls that are true Vanity Fairs, temples of emptiness. Our children drift through them, waiting for something meaningful to happen. Nothing does. Nothing can. The Rolling Stones’ I Can’t Get No Satisfaction literally means: I can’t get anything to make me full.

Whether in ancient Rome or modern North America, vanitas dominates rulers and ruled alike. So we turn our politics into soap opera, and amuse ourselves with the sexual embarrassments of people who have become millionaires by playing hockey or football or golf, or by playing politics in our government.

The roots of ‘charity’

The Romans had another word: Caritas. It meant “costliness,” but the early Christians changed its meaning to “love”– a costly love indeed, that sets the value of a human being, any human, far above gold or power or even life itself. We have corrupted its meaning into “charity,” the support of the poor in ways that keep them poor.

And we have corrupted Christmas, a celebration of caritas, into something more like a Roman holiday of gluttony and gladiators. We patronize the poor with a taste of the gluttony by briefly and sentimentally contributing to our local food banks. We cheer on the gladiators in the New Year’s Day bowl games.

Christ called the Romans’ bluff, just as he calls ours. We may not accept his answer, but we cannot escape his terrifying, exhilarating question: What do you mean?

Simply to ask it implies a response: That we may indeed mean something to ourselves and to others, that we can both give caritas and receive it. But if we are to love others as we love ourselves, we must first, indeed, love ourselves.

Vanitas makes us despise ourselves. It tells us we are worthless, undeserving of love, without some transient possession — youth, beauty, wealth, power.

Caritas says we are each of us precious in ourselves, and therefore entitled to all the love, respect, and care we need. That we are capable as well of giving such love, respect, and care to others.

And that life without them is indeed vain and meaningless.

Christine, Barb and I – superfast at the Richmond Speedskating Oval. Watch out, Cindy Klassen – here we come!

The Richmond Speedskating oval is fabulous and it’s a real shame that it will not be kept after the olympics. I say that there are enough hockey rinks here and the least the powers that be could do would be to keep this one speedskating rink intact for us speed aficionados.

From the sublime skating to the ridiculous … after the large expanse of the Richmond Oval the tiny Robson Square rink is a bit laughable. But the multitudes travelling at a stately pace around its small compass seemed to be enjoying themselves notwithstanding the lack of space.

Barb and I enjoyed watching the world’s smallest zamboni, disguised as a killer whale, motoring slowly around the rink.

Later on, Ty, Marsha, Carol, Arlene and I savoured the fabulous colours of the Van Dusen Garden’s Festival of Lights.

For some reason I am fascinated with the beautiful array of colours, especially against the black backdrop of the sky and the silouhetted figures of people wandering here and there.

See more here.

From the Montreal Gazette Dec 26, 2009. By Jack Todd

Tiger’s downfall is a fitting end to a decadent decade in which lies were used to start wars, make the rich richer and ensnare people like the parents of Balloon Boy – who wanted only to get on reality TV

MONTREAL – Richard and Mayumi Heene were sentenced to jail this week. Ninety days for the husband, 20 days for the wife.

Our news cycle being what it is, you have probably already forgotten that the heinous Heenes are parents of the Balloon Boy, the 6-year-old who touched off an international story while safely hidden away in his attic.

Fitting that while the first decade of this century was dribbling away, the mendacious Eldrick “The Weasel” Woods (The Golfer Formerly Known as Tiger) was watching his marriage and his endorsement deals fall apart, the Heenes were preparing for jail, Bernie Madoff was already in jail and George W. Bush was as invisible as it is possible to be for a man who was president of the United States only 11 months ago.

Such is the unravelling of the Decade of Deception. Of fabrication, mendacity and untruth. Of Enron and Bernie Madoff, Earl Jones and Vincent Lacroix. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. And the filthy rich bankers of Wall St., who came up with a filthy lie – renamed toxic assets as “derivatives” and very nearly brought the global economy to its knees.

Richard Heene, small-time schemer, thought he had it figured out. The rationale was mind-bending: Come up with a sufficiently large hoax and he could get his family onto “reality” TV, which is a whopper of a lie in the first place.

Heene’s problem? Too small a lie. To profit from this mendacious decade, you had to tell lies so large that the rest of the world had no choice but to swallow them. Fibs so all-encompassing that when your phony investment scheme begins to crumble, you are deemed too big to fail.

Like the lies told by Woods and his team of spin artists. When I wrote a column about Woods a week ago, I was stunned by the response – more than 300 emails and they’re still trickling in.

Very few disagreed with my take on Woods as the sham of the decade, the man who was a huckster first and everything else second. Some condemned his womanizing, although, in truth, the women who have come forward so far don’t constitute an unusual total for a professional athlete.

Many more were upset by the hypocrisy. This is a man whose billion-dollar earnings were built on endorsements first, with golf a distant second.

Woods was the greatest huckster of the decade because of his squeaky-clean image. It helped that people who play golf are well-heeled, but it was important that Woods seemed so perfect. Good-looking, multiracial, soft-spoken (except for the petulant tantrums), flawless in his personal life. And there was that 1,000-watt smile.

When it all came undone after wife Elin Nordegren took a golf club to his SUV, we discovered that Woods was perfectly in step with the decade of the big lie. He was not what he seemed, not remotely.

Which made him pretty much like everyone else – or at least those with money and power who spent the past 10 years acquiring more money and more power, mostly by piling one lie atop another.

Weapons of mass destruction? There were none – but the Bush administration kept lying about them all the way to Baghdad. Nearly seven years later, President Barack Obama is still trying to disentangle the United States from a mess that has cost the lives of almost 5,000 coalition soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

Enron? To this day, no one knows what it was that Enron really did, other than siphon money into the pockets of its top executives. Yet (as Frank Rich pointed out in the New York Times last weekend) the editors of Fortune Magazine voted Enron the most innovative company in the United States six years running.

Enron was a shell of a company. There was no there there. The company produced nothing, owned nothing, accomplished nothing except to bring the state of California to the brink of bankruptcy.

How many of the biggest names in sports in the past decade were phony as three-dollar bills? Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Manny Ramirez. Now Woods himself has been linked to Anthony Galea, a Canadian physician who uses and dispenses HGH – human growth hormone.

A coincidence? If there is one thing we have learned from the past decade, it’s that where there is smoke, there is fire.

Lies aren’t birthed in a vacuum. Liars thrive because they fill a need, because people want to believe.

Bernie Madoff, the biggest swindler of the decade, did it by feeding people what they want. Investors want to believe they can get a 20-per-cent return on their dollar, year after year. Golf fans wanted to believe that Tiger Woods was perfect. Home-owners wanted to believe that housing prices would go up forever.

And far too many in this country, as well as south of the border, want to believe that a television network that labels itself as a news outlet is really delivering news. But as soon as you say “Fox News,” you have already told the first lie. “Fox Propaganda” would be more accurate.

Like most big-time lying, the distortions at Fox are backed by massive corporate money. Money is where the lies begin and it works in insidious ways. The BlackBerry ad uses the Beatles tune All You Need Is Love to push a message exactly the opposite of the one the Beatles intended. If love is all you need, then why do you need a BlackBerry?

Unfortunately, the lying will go on because the rewards are great, real punishment rare. Just this week,

Peter Hadekel pointed out in these pages the inadequacy of the fines levied on a group of Canadian banks and investment dealers who sold $32 billion worth of toxic asset-backed commercial paper. The fines totalled $138.8 million, a fraction of the worth of “assets” that weren’t assets at all.

At the beginning of this decade, I wondered aloud what we were going to call the first 10 years of the new millennium. The Aughts? Naughts? Zips? Nothings? After 10 years of systematic, percolating, corrosive lies, the appellation is simple. The only name that fits the past decade is the Zeros.

Soon we will face the Teens. And the first thing we can look for is the slick, carefully orchestrated “rehabilitation” of Weasel Woods (including the obligatory weepy appearance on Oprah), a public remake for which his millions of lobotomized fans are audibly panting – to be followed by a brand-new, global Nike campaign.

Coming soon, to a golf course near you.

No word of a lie.

Should-be new words, inspired by the year’s most infamous personalities and events – by Scott Feschuk in Maclean’s Magazine on Thursday, December 17, 2009

As the year winds down, let’s reflect on the pivotal personalities of 2009 and reveal the Fourth Annual List of Words That Ought to be Added to the Dictionary.

ahmadinejad vb. 1. to threaten violence upon one’s neighbour: Once spring arrived, Jason ahmadinejaded the Johnsons until they took down their Christmas lights.

baird n. 1. single-minded hostility. 2. hostile single-mindedness. 3. one who, based on his demeanour, can be assumed to type emails exclusively using CAPITAL LETTERS.

balloon-boy adj. ill-conceived, unwise: The slapdash coalition of opposition parties turned out to be a balloon-boy fiasco.

berlusconi n. the inability to keep it in one’s pants: You’ve got chronic berlusconi, the doctor told John Mayer.

boyle vb. 1. to surprise based on physical appearance: His well-oiled abs glistening under the fluorescent lamps, Ridge boyled all present  by sequencing the human genome. 2. to be radically made over by a high-priced team of stylists, hairdressers and makeup artists, the result somehow being an increase in one’s homeliness.

coderre n.1. a persistent droning. 2. one whose every declaration prompts eye-rolling in others. ant. class, dignity, silence.

donolo n. a perceived messiah: The U.S. government stepped in as donolo to the failing General Motors.

gosselin n. the sound of one’s 15 minutes of fame elapsing. vb. (usu. prec. by kate) to wear upon one’s head a porcupine.

gretzky vb. to be grossly overpaid when judged against the results one has achieved: Given box-office returns, Will Ferrell has been gretzkying since the end of 2006.

harper n. a Tim Horton’s employee: Put on two extra harpers to handle the morning rush.

heatley adj. whining, griping, bellyaching: Even a warm bottle of formula could not soothe the heatley baby.

ignatieff n. a bad situation getting worse: After beginning the season with 14 straight losses, the team suffered the ignatieff of an injured starting goalie. syn. dion. vb. to regret a career decision: Anyone who’s seen the trailer suspects The Rock will ignatieff starring in Tooth Fairy.

karlheinz vb. from the German, meaning “to be wished dead by the large-chinned baritone.”

layton vb. to oppose someone or something time and time again, right up until opposing it would actually result in a consequence: Joan opposed premarital sex, but laytoned when Brad Pitt showed up soaking wet at her door.

letterman n. the urge to change the channel during an awkward televised moment: I felt an overwhelming letterman when Sarah Palin couldn’t name a single newspaper or magazine.

macdonnell n. a gaffe of forgetfulness. syn. bernier.

madoff vb. to orchestrate an elaborate scheme designed to conceal the truth: By successfully executing a smile, Stephen Har­per madoffed the existence of his robotic circuitry.

mulroney vb. to explain, unconvincingly: The teenager mulroneyed that the joint found in his pocket belonged, in fact, to Matthew McConaughey. n. a commercial establishment that accepts neither cheques nor credit cards: I want to buy these apples but the vendor’s a mulroney—cash only.

obama vb. to exhaust, usu. in  a short span of time, one’s supply of goodwill. n. a rare medical condition in which one is conjoined to a teleprompter.

oprah vb. to announce you’re going to do something, but then to not do it for two years: Covered in Cheetos dust, Amir oprahed on about losing weight, then heated up a burrito.

polanski vb. to travel to Switzerland, unwisely.

rae vb. to become more attractive as an option in retrospect: The filet mignon raed in Diana’s mind once she’d tasted the salmon.

raitt adj. sexy, hot. syn. radioactive leaks, cancer.

sanford vb. to proffer a highly dubious explanation. My wife smashed in my car windows to rescue me, Tiger Woods sanforded.

sully (also: sullenberger) n. one who need never pay for a drink again.

twitter n. a technological breakthrough that frees one of the need to be physically present in the company of others in order to bore them.

usain vb. to move with blazing speed: The Prime Minister usained dozens of Conservative flunkies to the Senate.

woods n. an abrupt reversal of fortune: I was up $300 at blackjack but since the new dealer arrived, I’ve had a real woods of a time. vb. to commit infidelity exclusively with those significantly less attractive than your spouse.

The commenters’ words are just as good, in some cases better – click here to read them.

I have made a video collage documenting some of my site-specific installations in ruined cave houses in the village of Ibrahimpasa, Cappadocia, Turkey, made in March 2009 while an artist in residence at the Babayan Culture House. For more information on this project, click here.

We are nearing the end of this year;  the days shorten, the shadows lengthen, and it’s cold. On probably my last incline skate of the year, I made my way slowly around Stanley Park one afternoon in early December, trying to avoid slipping and falling on the damp pavement; this time of year the sun doesn’t rise high enough to dry out the path surface on the north and west sides of the park. Luckily, my wheels are soft and so I didn’t slip too much.

In the small park at the foot of Davie Street this sculptural installation made me smile; it’s “Hysterical Laughter” by the Chinese artist Yue Minjun. Read more about the art here.

See a few pictures here.