serendipityoucity

Go Penny go!

I love it! Apparently 19 people climbed up to the roof and a banner was dropped!

at the santa claus parade last night! These guys are wonderfully hilarious!

Human Powered Vehicle Operators of Ottawa

Seems like the tar barons are hard at work dividing the meeting and thwarting resolutions that would make major industrials accountable.

The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

The Urgent Threat to World Peace is … Canada

by George Monbiot

The harm this country could do in the next two weeks will outweigh all the good it has done in a century.

Somebody stole my country while I was sleeping!

And here is a great photo of Stephen Harper in old age apologizing for Climate change courtesy of a great Greenpeace campaign.

via: BoingBoing

Imagine paying construction workers fair wages and providing them with good working conditions and their country folk not colluding with foreign construction companies and taking care of their own. Perhaps I should start appreciating the mediocre architecture of Ottawa, because at least workers are paid fairly, their work sites safe. I recall walking through the pyramids in Mexico a couple of years back and commenting on how slavery left behind such great monuments, and it has all over the world. But are they that great…

What if architecture was both an aesthetic and material delight and a socially good while being created and of course maintained. Otherwise, these are but mirages or modernity.

Slaves and skyscrapers: The workforce feeling the heat (excerpt from UK Independent article: Sacked by Text the Indian workers who built Dubai).

The UAE’s huge construction boom of recent years has been fuelled largely by south Asian migrant construction workers, who work in the grimmest of circumstances. Human Rights Watch estimated in 2006 that at least half a million migrants are paid a little over £100 a month for their work in a country where the average per capita monthly income is close to £1,300. There is no indication that their circumstances have improved since. Migrants can end up working 12 hours a day or longer, six days a week, in fierce heat. In 2005, the Indian Consulate registered 971 deaths of its own nationals, at which point it was told to stop counting. Suicide among the men is rife, with 100 or more of them dying by their own hands in 2007. Such conditions come as a grim surprise for newcomers lured by agencies with promises of lavish pay, only to find their passports confiscated, wages slashed and huge debts owed. And they form a sharp contrast to the lives of the wealthy western ex-pats in finance, IT and tourism – 50,000 to 150,000 of them, on vast tax-free salaries.

As the taming of chance goes, today I am youtubing music come across one of my favorite artists Laurie Anderson, who I loved listening to in my late teens. I had a thing for science, technology, industry and technology before i recognized that that was the case. I spent time wandering the contemporary/modern art section of the national gallery looking at mechanical artists, and listening to Plilip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Kraftwerk, Bauhaus, dressing in geometrically shaped cloting that was somewhere between avant garde and punk styles, crazy black hair, powdered white face, Russian red lipstick and a fascination with Japan. Today, recovering slowly from Mike Gifford’s party, it is an interview by Amy Goodman of Laurie Anderson, discussing her work Homeland, did I realize a personal pattern, I have been gravitating toward an aesthetic, a form, a genre, an art, a way of looking at the world, the source of this fascination still evades me, that is inherently mechanical and about story telling. Archives, libraries, data, maps, modern art during the period when Fordism was evolving, factories, assemblies, moving parts, Diego Rivera mixing industry, metaphor and pre-hispanic content symbolism, and industrial electronic music. I am learning to think about these things now, and it is so very interesting to realize that it was always around, dangling somewhere in my subconscious, and now I am acquiring labels, words that are forming into ideas, models, frameworks, and assemblage of art, technology, materials, concepts, histories… and the politics thereof.

U.S. journalist says she was delayed at border, questioned about speech

An American author and broadcaster claims Canadian border officials questioned her about whether she would discuss the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games at a speaking engagement Wednesday evening in Vancouver. Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now , a radio and television show aired by public and college broadcasters across North America, was entering Canada around 6 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday evening, set to speak at the Vancouver Public Library in an event co-ordinated by a campus radio station at Simon Fraser University. “When I handed our passports over the border guard, they told us to pull over. We had to go over to the border facility. And they started asking me questions about what I was going to be speaking about. I was totally taken aback. They wanted to see my notes,” Ms. Goodman told the Globe Thursday, recalling the encounter. Ms. Goodman, 52, began telling them. In the country to promote her book Breaking the Sound Barrier , a collection of the award-winning journalist’s columns, she planned to discuss the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq, of which she is a critic; Canadian icon Tommy Douglas, a hero of medicare; global warming; and the worldwide economic meltdown. “Well, that pretty much does it. And he said, ‘what about the Olympics? ‘And I said, ‘the Olympics? Do you mean when President Obama went to Copenhagen to try and get the Olympics for Chicago?’ ” Ms. Goodman recalled asking. She claimed the officer persisted in questioning her about Vancouver’s upcoming Games. “I said, ‘no, I wasn’t planning to talk about that,’ ” she said. “He just seemed incredulous. They didn’t believe me.”…

Since when is Canadian Immigration concerned about what someone says about the Olympics? Now, I think there must be something to hide! They searched a journalist’s notes, computer, etc.? Since when? Is critical thinking & writing a new reason to search? What was the probable cause for the search?

Maria’s work is playfully political! I have been waiting to see what she does next and it looks like it will be divine!

Maria Lezon Fernandez-Hontoria

Date: Thursday, December 10, 2009

Time: 5:30pm - 7:30pm

Location: Karsh-Masson Gallery 136 St. Patrick Street Ottawa, Ontario

Throughout the history of art the female form has served as a focus for most of the great classical figurative paintings. Traditionally, this model has been seen as an object that the viewer may manipulate to suit their desires. The Lounging Soap Opera seeks to reinvent this archetype by exploring new contemporary interpretations of the female form that provoke and challenge as well as exhibit the qualities that I admire in women such as strength and intelligence. Furthermore, it’s my intention that the women in my paintings refuse to remain submissive and demonstrate that they are determined to take authorship of their lives. Set in the melodramatic world of soap opera, The Lounging Soap Opera is a collection of painting where each frame will serve as a chapter in an unfolding drama that focuses on different aspects of Western morality. At the core of this work, like in all good stories, there will be the heroine, lounging in poses reminiscent of classical nudes, reminding us that there are many reasons why a woman would lounge other than the obvious…. However, despite her poses, she will remain very much the central character in her story. It’s my hope that through this visual soap opera where humour and beauty are combined that the viewer gain a fresh appreciation for the power of the female form. As a feminist and an artist I am committed to defying society’s narrow view of womanhood in my artwork. For the past ten years, the work in my collections have been concerned with reinventing images of recognisable feminine iconography often appropriated directly from historical paintings or popular culture in order to test society’s boundaries. The Lounging Soap Opera continues asking once more that the viewer enter the domain of women, but this time through the glamorous and often ridiculous world of the television soap opera. In this new series the viewer is asked to participate by becoming the soap opera’s audience as well as addressing the familiar question what is true femininity, the fantastic images of scantily dressed women portrayed in media or the women we see daily in our community? Perhaps a mix of both, perhaps this perhaps that…..

Friday November 27 is buy nothing day! Enjoy dinner at home, bring your lunch, ride your bike etc.

Check out the Adbusters campaign material here.

I am thinking out loud here, about stuff I know little about, but freaks me out a little!

Discrimination based on genetic predispositions to disease? Genetic chauvinism was something I witnessed in Japan, particularly against the hibakusha. People avoid marrying hibakusha because a belief that radiation sickness or genetic defects will be passed through family blood lines. The Japanese are big on blood lines. Hibakusha are also discriminated against by employers, and are socially ostracised.

In the US a new federal law was passed against the discrimination on the basis of genetic background. Is castism and racism not already a form of genetic discrimination? And what of the prejudices we will witness from transhumanists who are proponents of body enhancements who will eventually economically, physically and socially differentiate or favour based on those enhancements?

I marvel at the privacy issues around heath information. I consider that most sacred of information safe guarding as an indicator of socio-health discrimination. Instead of addressing the social misconceptions around disease, we hide our personal data to avoid the social implications of dealing with the potential results of healthhism or diseaseism. Instead we hide behind the veal of health purity and physical perfection via non-disclosure. Members of the disabled community have lobbied for the cultural acceptance of their physical form, but what of the cultural acceptance of what we cannot see - genetic predispositions. Autism for instance, with manifestations that are not always physically obvious, is the poster ability/disability (I speculate because it is one that affects boys mostly and is associated with savants or genius like qualities which we all like and therefore it gains societal acceptance and even reverence), is being relabelled as a form exceptionalness and therefore desired. We have socially adjusted our acceptance of it as a condition and are beginning to build social structures to facilitate the inclusion of people labelled with autism into a variety of institutions, we help families, exceptionalities are instrumentally being economically harnessed and it is being popularized in television and movies in such a way that we are being inculturated to accept the behavioural bundles of traits of this sub-population as normal and we are adjusting accordingly. Schizophrenia however is not a desired condition along with many others. How do perceptions and labels change? I just finished reading Making Up People by Ian Hacking, who discusses how labelling a condition suddenly makes up groups of people who fit that label and demonstrates how labels and categories are not only made up, they are not static and dynamically. The label of homosexuality as a psychological disorder and a deviance for instance is now a genetic trait which makes the ‘condition’ more socially acceptable. These people cannot help themselves so lets accept them. This is a societal response, and a strong lobby toward redefinition and social acceptance. Now that it is a genetic predisposition, does that mean we could weed it out? Will people be tested for it in-vitro? Just like how ultra-sound is being used to eliminate girl babies in India and China? Is that genetic discrimination - having girl genes? And what of the discussion of gender classification that is physiologically being redefined, particularly with the testing of female athletes that are being labelled male. What of alchohol fetal syndrome that is been passed on between and among generations of entire aboriginal communities? What of the social implications intellectual deficiencies caused by under and mal nutrition of entire populations? How do we know who is who? What does predisposition mean? How do we go from population to individual and back? If we are continuously told we are predisposed to something do we suddenly believe it and become it? Margaret Lock for instance discusses bio-social differences, where culture doesn’t just interpret biology, it also shapes it. We have medical labelling making acceptance of once socially unacceptable traits. But what of medically unacceptable traits?

And what of people who consciously choose to risk passing on illnesses/diseases or the chance thereof to their offspring? Is that merely an individual choice? Are there larger bio-social implications to those choices? Is that eugenics thinking? The will to improve hereditary traits? Weed out the bad ones with genetic testing and improve the gene pool for us all? What are the criteria used to decide? Does this make us go more underground? How do we understand the probabilities, the science, the statistics that inform the odds? Probability can tell us something about the chance of something occurring in a population but cannot predict at the scale of the individual. What are good and bad odds? Societally, in North-America we are pretty much innumerate, so how do we judge probabilities? Are insurance companies the new arbiters? Are health care costs and time lost at work the real reasons behind genetic purification? Is it social ostracization? The fear of being associated with someone physically inferior? Is it the fear of eugenics thinking and the way it was used that thwarts the sharing of our health records? The fear of being judged as inferior or of having unacceptable traits?

What of progeneration? Some individuals and couples want, at all costs, a child of their own bodies. I have met people with incredible urges and consider this a must. Is that genetic chauvanism? is that not already genetic discrimination or differentiation? What of cultural propensities against adoption? Many would rather risk bearing a child with an illness rather than avoid that risk and adopt. Are the risks of adopting a child with an illness greater or lesser than bearing one where there is a high likeliness of passing on a ‘bad’ gene? Do kids on adoption rolls come with DNA certifications?

I do not really know what or how to think about any of these issues. I do know that I have many questions and do believe we are avoiding asking really hard questions and have no mechanisms to discuss them in a free and open way as a society. So we hide our health records because we are afraid of discrimination and judgement, and we create genetic anti-discrimination acts because we have not societally dealt with our inability to understand what is underneath our fears, and so we temper our behaviours with laws, and in the short term that is perhaps the best course of action, we continue to marry within our classes, casts and races, while that is changing somewhat, we remain innumerate which reduces our chance of a fair debate or of making informed personal decisions, we are rightly petrified of eugenics past while not creating a society that can rationally temper itself (just watch the health care debate in the US) and we have this strange belief in physical perfection which, in reality, if we are really lucky, is but a fleeting short period of time either in or teen or adult lives, one we pretend is for ever and we have somehow subconsciously decided it is what we have to all strive for perfection.