serendipityoucity

I grew up with the Clash.  I just loved their raw honesty and that wicked ska punk sound and restless energy.  And hell!  Who could resist skin tight hip hugging black jeans, those crazy belts, and razored shirts! 

I however did not know much about them as people but got an inkling of their politics.  I was far to busy with the shallow end of the punk affair, unavoidable really when you are a kid growing up in clean safe ole sanitized Ottawa recovering from a suburban love of Led Zeppelin and Blue Oyster Cult.  My first punk experience was overwhelming.  I was 16, downtown with my boyfriend John at the time.  We went to this party, and women had b-52 haircuts and crazy retro dresses, leather heather was staffing the bedroom with her whip, skinny boys with makeup and that sound, noise, dirt and just plain ole eccentricness bit me!  For me, us, it was the outfits, the black eyeliner, the dyed hair, ripped t-shirts and the rebellious scene along with the right to collective debaucherous misbehaviour!

I just read some bits about Joe Strummer, and well, he is my hero.  According to my pal Tim Devries, Joe Strummer was as honest and as vulnerable as it gets, he wanted to stay honest and fame tempered with his honesty.  Or as I paraphrase Iggy Pop from a scene in a punk documentary I was watched - fame is perilous and a killer.

According to U2’s Bono

"There was a moment where the world stopped," "1976, 1977. Suddenly ideas became more important than guitar solos. And a certain integrity became more important than driving a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool."

Bono recounts how at an early Clash gig he attended, the stage’s backdrop photo of London bobbies with truncheons looked like Belfast to an Irish audience. "It was a very, very, very tense moment as this backdrop opened up. And there was a real sense of jeopardy, there was a violence in the air. I was terrified. I was excited. And rock ‘n’ roll was not entertainment in that moment. It was not a matter of life and death, [but] something much more serious."

Later in a TV interview with Jeanne Beker.

The Clash are hellcats at this point, showing signs of wear but still bigger than big and touring America. "We give it all we got, that’s all," he says. "It’s as simple as that. Everybody’s used to paying $8 and getting half measures, and going home satisfied. Well, in England, they gave up being satisfied four years ago. You gotta give it all you got or forget it."

I like that!  I think that is how mediocrity seeps into culture, suddenly we are mortgaged to the hilt, we settle, we are comfortable, we have stuff to pay, we are investing in pensionable time, and so we are satisfied with less than great, good, or honest. We seek perfection in the wrong places, looks, status, marriage, our kids, but we miss the subtle imperfections that make us weak,  lead us to making mistakes to going off course when perhaps, that is right where we need to be going.  Goodness and integrity starts to make us uncomfortable, we label it as self righteousness, we avoid those people, as they just threaten the surreality of what we have given into - instead of embracing some inconsistencies we label them has hypocrisy and strive for universal nothingness.

After emerging from the miasma of fame, Joe discovered or re-discovered his roots. 

Many refer to the post-Clash years as Strummer’s wilderness period, his lost years. But by the 1990s, he was formulating a kind of practical philosophy, symbolized by endless talks around campfires. For Strummer, the campfires like those you might find on the fringes of the U.K.’s Glastonbury Festival were a common ground for exchanging ideas, allowing the punk ethos to mature for him into warm humanism.

"The campfire for him was a fantastic emblem of people being equal in the firelight. No one is more important than other people. He refused to be a prisoner of fame, in a practical way … He went out and really wanted to meet and mix and have a normal life as a human being. It wasn’t just talking it, but living what you believed in," Temple says.

Now! My 13 year old discored the Clash when he was 11 and fortunately i get to re-listen to the whole thing again, and he just grew out of those same exact outfits!  Eh oui!  Le plus que sa change le plus que c’est la meme chose. 

I participated in a cool conference call meeting this morning which mentioned the Robin Hood Index and Ted was wonderful enough to send some info along.

The Robin Hood index is typically used in applications related to socio-economic class (SES) and health. It is conceptually the simplest inequality index used in econometrics.

It is based on the Lorenz Curve

Every point on the Lorenz curve represents a statement like "the bottom 20% of all households have 10% of the total income". A perfectly equal income distribution would be one in which every person has the same income. In this case, the bottom N% of society would always have N% of the income. This can be depicted by the straight line y = x; called the line of perfect equality or the 45° line.

By contrast, a perfectly unequal distribution would be one in which one person has all the income and everyone else has none. In that case, the curve would be at y = 0 for all x < 100%, and y = 100% when x = 100%. This curve is called the line of perfect inequality.

The Gini coefficient is the area between the line of perfect equality and the observed Lorenz curve, as a percentage of the area between the line of perfect equality and the line of perfect inequality. This equals two times the area between the line of perfect equality and the observed Lorenz curve.

The Gini coefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion most prominently used as a measure of inequality of income distribution or inequality of wealth distribution. It is defined as a ratio with values between 0 and 1: the numerator is the area between the Lorenz curve of the distribution and the uniform distribution line; the denominator is the area under the uniform distribution line. Thus, a low Gini coefficient indicates more equal income or wealth distribution, while a high Gini coefficient indicates more unequal distribution. 0 corresponds to perfect equality (everyone having exactly the same income) and 1 corresponds to perfect inequality (where one person has all the income, while everyone else has zero income). The Gini coefficient requires that no one have a negative net income or wealth.

While most developed European nations tend to have Gini coefficients between 0.24 and 0.36, the United States Gini coefficient is above 0.4, indicating that the United States has greater inequality. 

It is however not easy to fini GINI indicator maps! There is a good one on wikipedia but surely it must be part of most international indicator programs! 

As a person who appreciates archival documents and dislikes the U.S. Missile testing, I am torn, but alas, you gotta give the guy credit for bringing the issue right to the heart of the matter! This was done in 1983.

Peter Greyson entered Ottawa’s National Archives and poured red paint over the Constitution. Today, the art student is sentenced to 89 days in jail. Displeased with the federal government’s decision to allow U.S. cruise missile testing in Canada, Greyson had wanted to "graphically illustrate to Canadians" how wrong the government was. After sentencing him, the presiding judge concedes that Greyson is "an excellent student, with a possibly brilliant artistic future."

• During the trial, Greyson said, "the most important part of the Constitution is the Charter of Rights. One of the most basic rights is to be alive. The Trudeau Government has violated that right."
• Greyson was charged with public mischief. He was sentenced to 89 days in prison (to be served on weekends), 100 hours of community work, and two years of probation.
• Police initially thought that Greyson was acting on behalf of an anti-cruise protest group called Against Cruise Testing and were planning to serve summonses on two members of the group until the group publicly denied any connection to the event, or Greyson. "He’s not associated with any anti-nuclear group," said Angela Browning, a spokesperson for the group. "We understand and sympathize with the motivation for the action. We just don’t feel that kind of thing accomplishes anything."
• On July 15, 1983, the federal government confirmed American cruise missile testing would be performed in remote areas of Canada.
• In 1985, the anti-nuclear organization Operation Dismantle argued that the Canadian government was violating section seven of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which guarantees the right to life, liberty and security of the person. The Federal Court of Appeal rejected this argument because it said the claim was based upon assumptions and hypotheses instead of actual fact. (CBC Archives)

Alright!  I always seem to be at the tail end of all these cool genres, or at least, I discover there are names associated with phenomena I observe/d and only later do I get the label!  Steampunk is one of them! Before i looked it up i thought it might be connected with the Difference Engine which i thought was lots of fun, and this was the case along with lots of other alternative history and science fiction novels. It also seems to be a new genre in kids fantasy movies (e.g. Golden Compass), where you get to see neo victorian characters developing and using technologies that seem out of sych with their period yet with absolutely faboulous costumes and delightful supertecky yet ancient looking devices such as compasses, scales, sextets, and engines.

I came across the term today in the Globe & Mail:Zen and the art of scrapyard archeology
about Kaden Harris who is considered to be a steampunk artist that creates antiques from a parallel universe and earns a living at it via his company called Eccentric Genius. It looks like tons of fun, the guy is hilarious and his stuff is just awesome! There is even a book! 

La Sfera Di Confuscione is a faithful recreation of Emilio Lizardo’s personal mindwarping machine from his undergraduate years at the University of Milan, c. 1938. You *did* watch the Buckaroo Banzai movie, didn’t you?

hmm! I wonder if; that guy that made me peel his clothes off at a bar, soz, well i could take pictures of his tatoos, was one of those!  He most certainly had a victorian curved moustache, and great old school glasses that most certainly a savant scientist from the middle ages would wear; was referencing this genre?  Hmm! I also wonder about that conversation I had outside the Aloha Room with a DJ about full bodied tattoes being a neo renaissance reference.  Well the party at a speakeasy full of sweaty dancing full body tattoed people sure was interesting!

Obviously my research in bars is proving very insightfull indeed as is my morning ritual of reading random news as a procrastination technique and my latest form of escapism, science fiction! I wonder if there is a book club i could joing?

This was a horrible man, who tortured, raped, disapeared and killed thousands and to add insult to injury then robbed the nation of an estimated 35 Billion dollars - one of the most populated nations where millions live in abject poverty and complete squallor.

Canada was very complicit in his regime, which had me sit out on many national anthems at sports events.  There was no way I was going to blindly demonstrate nationalistic rituals when my country was supporting the illegal occupation of East Timor.  To add insult to injury the Chretien government did one of its Team Canada trade meetings in Indonesia during the Suharto regime and invited Surhato to visit for the APEC meetings BC in 1997.  In a most undemocratic move, Chretien cut a deal with Suharto that he would violate Canadian’s right to protest his visit.  Canadian activists you see wanted to arrest him for war crimes.  Sure enough, Canadian protesters were holled off to jail and pepper sprayed for holding up signs along the Suharto limo route. 

Gen. Suharto agreed to come only on the condition that he not face protesters and that he could bring a large armed security detail, a privilege seldom allowed a visiting foreign leader.

As it turned out, the whole thing was a public-relations and civil-rights disaster that served only to embarrass the Liberal government.

Staff-Sergeant Peter Montague, who served as RCMP liaison to the Indonesian delegation, later told an internal-affairs investigation that the jittery Indonesians were prepared to shield Gen. Suharto from any sort of protest. If students had approached the dictator’s limo or swarmed the summit site, "I am absolutely convinced … that somebody would have probably ended up dead … Indonesian security forces would shoot them without any question, with great impunity. I mean, it would have been an honour for them."

As it later became clear, the RCMP seized two Indonesian guards at UBC who were stealthily communicating via walkie-talkies, and then arrested three more at gunpoint in the Hotel Vancouver where Gen. Suharto was staying. The guards had gate-crashed a private party on the top floor of the Hotel Vancouver and frantically demanded to know how to reach the roof. (Globe & Mail)

52 Canadian protesters were arrested and finally it was disclosed that the RCMP were out of line and overeacted.  A full report of the RCMPs Final Report of the Public Hearings on the matter is available for full reading. 

Note that this was the pre-cursor event to the battle of Seattle and all of the Anti-Globalization rallies to come.

Amazing how the Canada had become Indonesia’s fourth largest trading partner under the Suharto regime, and how that bought us a twarting of civil rights at home and put blood on our hands.  The mission in Aghanistan is far more honourable than what the country did with Indonesia yet most Canadians are unaware of it.

We also let the Embassy officials here in Ottawa harrass Bella Galhos, the only East Timorese Refugee living in Canada and one of the officials visited Bella’s mother in East Timor with the armed military guards.  They suggested to her mother that she keep her daughter in Canada quiet or else…The Canadian Government finally sent a diplomatic letter to condone the harrassement of the family of a Canadian, a teeny tiny slap on the diplomatic wrist.  Indonesian officials would infiltrate ETAN Ottawa meetings, gatherings, public lectures and rallies.  We retaliated by filming them and having Bella surrounded by very big bearded marshals from CUPW.  Indonesian students were continuously watched and told to not participate in any of these events.  The reach of the Kleptocratic dog was far and wide but now it is finally over.

Hmm! Theis Reuters article discusses the expansion of the Xstrata plc smelter which

processes scrap from discarded electronic equipment to recover copper and precious metals that are then refined and used in new products.

There is growing demand for electronic scrap smelting capacity as the number of devices grows and electronic waste becomes an increasing environmental concern, the company said.

Xstrata Copper said it is the world’s No. 4 copper producer and its recycling business is the world’s biggest consumer of copper and precious metal-bearing electronic scrap.

It is a chemically intensive process.  Recycling should not be the only part of the production cycle, in fact, designing products that are durable physically, technologically, aesthetically and emotionally overtime is the first part.  Making them extensible would also be an asset.  But hey!  I wonder what the folks in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec think of the smelters plans to double its electronic scrap recycling capacity to 100,000 tonnes a year by January 2010.  I’d check the water!  Also, it is amazing how a chemically intensive waste recycling process markets itself with very cutsey love the earth type of cartoonish charactered reports.

Cute is starting to make me squeamish!

I just finished reading Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace v1.0.  Brilliant - I will write more about it later.  I also bought the Future of Ideas which I lent out and do not expect it back anytime soon if history plays itself out again.  I went looking for other Lessig books and happily found Code v2.0 in pdf format & Wiki format, the Future of Ideas in pdf format and Free Culture. All under a Creative Commons license of course.  Normally I would buy the books before I download a free copy as I like to support the authors when I can.  In this case I have purchased the two former, one of them twice and feel quite content to try and read the three pdfs on a screen.  Lessig was also kind enough to allow for the pdfs to be highlighted and annotated.  Unfortunately my Unbuntu pdf reader does not provide me with such tools which makes reading in bed or on the sofa that much harder!

As I was reading the Preface of Code v2.0 i discovered other titles of interest, Who Controls the Internet (there is also a Lessig Paper with that title as the opening question of Who Owns the Internet) and The Wealth of Networks also freely available online in pdf either as a whole or one chapter at a time and htlm.  Oddly, no one in Ottawa has either of these books in stock.  I will have to read the online versions until which time someone comes to their senses! We are silicon valley north are we not!  Sheesh! 

I head about this Ztohoven art action a while ago and found it to be brilliant.  You also have to love a culture that has a built in sense of humour like the Czechs seemingly do.

To hack into the CT2 broadcast, Ztohoven simply switched cables on an unmanned, remote camera at a limestone quarry in the mountains, which the artists had scouted three years earlier. Then they piped in their video. The name Ztohoven makes a pun in Czech that means both “out of it” and an obscenity. Rightly, the group presumed this would tip off viewers that the explosion was fake, in case they hadn’t already guessed it from the cheesy special effects.

The prank was a broadcast of a nuclear mushroom cloud behind a mountain that was broadcast on television one morning instead of the weather. The prank was

“not meant to be threatening but to land softly on the public consciousness so that people won’t let themselves be brainwashed.”

This form or art in czecholosvakia seems to have a long pedigree

It belongs to a history of Czech literary and artistic mystification and sly, deadpan humor that is the expression of a small, underdog nation dominated for generations by outsiders, one after another.

Actionism is the name attributed to this form of art.  I am having a difficult time to find roots and a good explanation of it, there is a Viennese Actionism formed in the 60s that had a very corporeal form of art where

Vienna actionists were treating body as an artistic "material" as equivalent to canvas, oils or other artistic means of expressions.. (see photos and other material)

There is Russian Actionism that seems unrelated to the Vienna group and seems to have its roots in literary movements, particularly Russian Futurism.  I think there are some very important parallels to hactivism particulary the artististic form found at the computer chaos congress in Germany and culture jamming. I found a PCjacking blog entry and media actionism and a great project called voteauction.  I read about a group of activists/artists who are inserting their art into national art galleries and I have always loved the Guerrilla Girls.

My favorite coffee table books remains The Design of Dissent by Milton Glaser and Mirko ILIC.  The book is a compillation of very controversial graphics that play with deep seated cultural symbolism in sometimes pleasantly aesthetic ways to convey disturbing messages, grotesteque meat art, graphics and visual metaphors, dark humour which most importantly invoke critical visual thinking.  This is also part of the work of graphic artists delivering important social messages. sensibilid(ad) does a great job of assembling these campaings.

I am enjoying this new interest in art.  My last visit to the national gallery awoke a new appreciation for the artistic movements behind some of my favorite art works.  I have loved these pieces but was not ready to absorb what they meant in their context and how they emerged on the scene.  I am also finding connections between industrial, futuristic and voticist art and infrastructure.  Reading Neal Stephenson literary scifi art has also given me some context in understanding technological movements. He also introduced me to the cultural roots of radical and luddite movements, the former the savant’s uncritical love of industry, technology and modernity and the latter a reactionary movement related to the social results of the industrial revolution and the havoc it wreaked on the lower and working class with alienation, pollution, abject poverty, injury, injustice, urbanity and poverty. 

ps-I just remembered something!  There was an Artivistic event in Montreal recently and I would include that as a form actionism.

Artivistic is a multidisciplinary event devoted to the exploration of the interplay between art, information and activism…The principal aim of Artivistic is to celebrate the importance of connection and the interdisciplinary nature of various instruments of social change.

I do not know where this is taking me, but I am most enjoying the journey. 

via: NyTimes Article: That Mushroom Cloud? They’re Just Svejking Around

House of Staples 1275 Wellington St.
Originally uploaded by tlauriau.

This is a one of a kind specialty store, specializing in staples and sales stickers! Go Figure! I picked up a very nice red staple gun here and of course some staples for upholstering some new chairs.

Please shop here! There are not many of these types of privately owned specialty shops left here in Ottawa!

If you need name tags, stickers for craft projects, a stapler repaired, missing staple parts, or want to buy a brand new stapler! This is the place for you!

The Federation of Canadian Municipalities has just released its Quality of Life Reporting System Trends & Issues in Affordable Housing and Homelessness.  Acacia Consulting and Research (ACR)’s Michel Frojmovic worked collaboratively with FCM participating communities to write this report and directed the research.  Jacob Ritchie did most of the number crunching and I did some research and wrote stories about featured issues.  The FCM is one of the few national organizations that consistently reports and shares data on key issues at the city scale and we are lucky to have them!