serendipityoucity

More on the strike!

I did! And she taught me many things about the strike at the Museum of civilization!

I have been really busy lately. Since September I have had a big birthday, had many parties, travelled to Montreal to sail with Hugo and Alex and to Toronto twice, once to present the Pilot Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness I helped create at Queens Park. During that trip I also went to Burlington and had a conducted a great interview with a friend and colleague at the Rude Native, also conducted and interview with the oldest living data librarian in Canada and had a great bday dinner with really old friends. The second trip was to spend Thanksgiving with Su and Mark. I have also submitted a major collaborative research proposal and am in the process of submitting a second one that if successful, will support research on homelessness for 5 years for an awesome team of researchers. I also survived a bicycle accident, got my bike fixed up and now wear a helmet all the time. In the meantime I am trying to read for my Phd and can’t wait to start following up on the great interviews I conducted as part of the research. I have also helped a couple of Judo Olympic team members get a foothold in the region and will assist their dad in building a judo club at the university. Finally, I am getting prepared for my judo black belt exam coming up in the spring of 2010 and trying to find ways to keep fit for the winter. My hair is getting long and shaggy, friends tell me it makes me look softer, I think I look like I did when I did in the 70s when I was 12, I feel a little tired but I am quite inspired to do something creative. I would like to begin to sew again, and today in between waiting for responses to the research proposal documents, I am sewing some curtains. The biggest project however, is to learn to be patient with my teenager. I am turning into a monster and wonder why it is we can leave our boyfriends when we do not like them any-more, but we are forced to live with our kids when they are mean and still somehow I have to roster up the love and will to provide for the selfish critter. Perhaps, this is the reason I am very happy to escape into work! I am also looking forward to walking to walk and to share some time with close friends, one in Montreal that I miss dearly, a few close by and cashing in my ‘tea for two’ birthday present.

Australian police have launched a war crimes investigation into the deaths in East Timor in 1975 of the “Balibo Five” group of journalists.

I always find interesting stories in the UK Independent. Today there were a bunch, two hot ones on women’s issues, one on over the top wealth and one on Mussolini’s crazy sounding right wing granddaughter. I am never going to get anything done at this rate!

1) the story of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, a 24 year old male journalist escapes and Afghan prison. He was sentenced to death for distributing literature about the right of women. His death sentence was eventually reduced to 20 years in prison, this was after he was given a death sentence in a 4 minute court appearance.

2) The story about the rampant sexism in the UK financial sector, where women’s bonuses are 40% those of men, starting wages are much lower for women, pregnancy means redundancy, work segregation, customer parties with lap dancers, strippers, golf and billiards, combined with harassing sexist comments on manner of dress or reducing pay because these women are expected to have babies so why pay them if they are going to leave. It seems like the British banking system is run by a bunch of spoiled frat boys! The study was done by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). I have heard of this kind of behaviour in engineering firms, the military, and other baby blue collar occupations such as fire-fighters, and to a lesser extent in legal firms, but not this outrageous! The EHRC acquires its data via the Equality Act 2006 which require firms to provide information on their working practices and policies.

3) An Article about the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit of objects owned by today’s Indian Maharajas. These folks are supremely rich. The Maharajas no longer rule the north, but they maintain their incredible wealth, this in a country that does not believe in universal education, has a deeply entrenched cast system and does not provide clean drinking water to its people - but hey - Bangalore here we come. Neverland move over, as these folks have been tackier and wing nuttier for longer than stars in the US:

a vast banqueting table with a diamond-studded train set on it for ferrying the port and wine to diners.

A silver-encrusted bed. The design was sent to Christofle in Paris calling for a bed of “dark wood decorated with applied sterling with gilded parts, monograms and arms, ornamented with four life-size bronze figures (of naked females) painted in flesh colour with natural hair, movable eyes and arms, holding fans and horse tails”. Some 290kg of silver was needed to decorate the bed. The four naked figures were European, representing women of France, Spain, Italy and Greece, each with a different skin-tone and hair colour. Through ingenious mechanics linked to the mattress, the Nawab was able to set the figures in motion so that they fanned him while winking at him, against a 30-minute cycle of music from Gounod’s Faust generated by a music box built into the bed.

The Patiala Necklace, part of the largest single commission that the Paris jeweller Cartier has ever executed. Completed in 1928, this piece of ceremonial jewellery originally contained 2930 diamonds and weighed almost a thousand carats.

4) a story about Mussolini’s granddaughter blocking a movie that labels her a ‘whore’, meanwhile she has some great one liners such as when she responded to claims by the transgender Italian politician, Vladimir Luxuria, that she was a “fascist” by reportedly saying: “Meglio fascista che frocio” – it is better to be a fascist than a faggot.

5) How Catholic Church holds a candle and a prayer for the internet generation, just go to the Santa Maria Regina Pacis di Ostia website and light your cyber candle! And of course lets not forget the Vatican launched YouTube channel.

Dam! I am only half way through the paper & Boing Boing may want to RSS feed this paper!

I just can’t control my inexplicable love for Pee Wee Herman!  I just can’t!  It was the last film I saw with my pal Tony before I left for the Philippines on a one way ticket.  No one else really wanted to go nor shared my passion for the zany fellah! Bottoms up to Pee Wee today!. Last I heard Tony was selling Joico hair products in Toronto - it was the 80s after all - and well I like data now, I do not think I could have predicted then what I do now!

Saint Brigid’s a church come Centre for the Arts and Humanities is such a great venue for the writers festival. I saw Eduardo Galleano there year this summer and it was delightful.

tuesDAY, September 22

• GLOBAL ENCOUNTERS:
  The Year of the Flood with Margaret Atwood
  
  Tickets: $20 /$15 Student or Senior
  Free for Festival Members and Carleton Students
  
  In an effort to break away from the traditional book tour, Atwood has penned a semi-dramatic theatrical performance based on her new novel The Year of the Flood. Complete with three actors, and a choir which will perform the original score by Los Angeles composer, Orville Stoeber, this one-hour innovative performance promises to be highly entertaining and unlike anything done before. Commissioned by Atwood to create a score for the original hymns that appear in her novel, Stoeber has produced rich, melodic and stirring interpretation, and the resulting CD is destined to become popular in its own right.
  
  In order to reduce the carbon footprint of a traveling cast, the tour will utilize local actors and choirs. In Ottawa, director Janet Irwin will lead Atwood and the cast, and Laurence Ewashko and the Calixa Lavallee Ensenble, conducted by Mark Wilkinson, will perform the music. Atwood will act as narrator in each city. This will be a fundraiser for Nature Canada.

MonDAY, September 28

• LITTLE BROTHER: ONE ON ONE WITH CORY DOCTOROW
  Hosted by Kate Heartfield
  
  Tickets: $15 /$10 Student or Senior
  Free for Festival Members and Carleton Students
  
  Marcus (AKA w1n5t0n) is taking back the world, one hacked game console at a time … Have you ever felt like the technology you love could be used against you? Or that the government is watching you .. a little too closely? Have you ever felt like you just had to skip school? Do you hate bullies? Have you ever felt the call to fight back- and that the fight was waaaay bigger than just you?
  
  Join Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, for a look at what could happen when security and individual freedom clash, and how one tech-savvy teenager fights back.

I am reading Anathem at the moment.  It is a massive tome that is really hard to hold but even harder to put down.  The book keeps reminding me why seemingly ridiculous archaic activities, traditions, and practices are important and relevant - more so than ever. I think this is why I like neo-Victorian moray’s infused with a bit of subversion.  Manners and irreverence steeped in intuition fueled tradition rounded off with an aesthetics I like. I keep thinking of my time working on my Ngondro Practice with a sangha in Tokyo that can be characterized as nothing less than a batch of very funny yogis in development - each requiring a few more life times before becoming anywhere near enlightenment. The knowledge of the impermanence of our lifetime kept us all taking risks, acting on what came along the path and maintaining a rather rambuncous sense of humour irrespective of the dire circumstances that came our way.  Ours is the Karma Kagyu path and at the time the band of merry wild cats would gladly jump into the water to understand its essence - we still do even though some of us practice less than others.  The chanting in Anathem reminds me of Tibetan mantras, which change the essence of your mind and your surroundings.  Reconfiguring conceptual and material matter.  This is the practice of the Avout in the book. The vibrations from the chants emanate into a series of waves which effect into the world.  The practice of spinning prayer wheels and chanting the compassion mantra of Om Mani Peme Hung is the most tangible example of this, as the chant and the act of spinning the wheel that is embossed with these words are thought to propagate just that - compassion.  People spend a significant portion of their lives on long distance journeys not walking but prostrating in steep mountainous terrains to reach an undefined spiritual destination that keeps changing and to spin those wheels.  Crazy, but no less so than commuting to spend the day in a place one does not want to be, doing something one does not want to do in exchange for currency that allows one to purchase stuff to mask the pain of of having spent 60 hours a week repeatedly doing that.

This morning, I read about a Chinese conceptualist artist,  an elderly British conductor who chose to die along side his wive in the presence of his children with the help of Dignitas in Switzerland and the Episcopal debate over the consecration of gay and/or lesbian bishops.  Again, I was reminded about why I love it when people follow their hearts, challenge norms and act in accordance to what is right and change the world I think for the better by doing so.  We collectively change, ever so slowly, the acts ripple across our collective consciousnesses.

The conceptualist art form is idea.

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art (1)(2)(3).

The artist Song Dong has created an homage to his mother called Waste Not.  It is the preservation of her life’s belongings which she hoarded, an effect of the cultural revolution, now carefully attended to by her two children and displayed at the MOMA.  

It is at once a record of a life, a history of a half-century of Chinese vernacular culture and a symbolic archive of impermanence (4). 

His work connected my thinking of the Avout in Anathem, the Tibetans, of seemingly useless practices loaded with meaning and the significance of impermanence and the traces we leave in conceptual conscious space. Some of his work:

keeping a daily diary, writing the entries on a flat stone, using clear water instead of ink so the words disappeared.

On a visit to Tibet he had himself photographed repeatedly striking the surface of the Lhasa River with an archaic Chinese seal, a stamp of authority that left no imprint.

he lay face down in a deserted Tiananmen Square for 40 minutes until his warm breath had created a thin sheet of ice that shimmered on the dark pavement for a few hours before disappearing.

He did the same thing on a frozen lake called the Back Sea in a park in Beijing, only there his breath made no impression: he couldn’t create ice on top of ice.

That two-part piece clearly had a political dimension, though an ambiguous one. It seemed to suggest that in a powerfully antagonistic setting like Tiananmen Square, a single person might effect a change, though it could only be minor and fleeting. In nature, that great source of Taoist art, no change could be made because none was necessary: everything, positive and negative, was absorbed into it.

The Back Sea is near Beijing’s old center, and increasingly the city became the subject of Mr. Song’s work. Both he and his wife, the artist Yin Xiuzhen, watched in dismay as the neighborhoods they had known as children were obliterated. Both artists scavenged fragments from demolished buildings and made public installations from them, treating the fragments, in the Chinese way, as material that retained the vital essence of all the people, dead or relocated, who had once come into contact with it.

Wonderfully loving. In Anathem the material world is a reflection of consciousness, for Tibetans form and formlessness are the same,  in academia materials are social constructions.

Here is part of this heroes story.

This is one of my favorite blogs.  The Kitchen Table is a conversation between 2 black female US professors on a variety of topics.  I learn a bunch here.  Today there is a particularly poignant blogpost called (ir)reconcilable differences which speaks to some of my personal thinking on dialogue.  Sadly it also talks about the cowardly murder of

Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas physician, abortion provider, and reproductive rights activist who was shot in the foyer of his church on Sunday, while he served as an usher and while his wife sang in the choir.