Tag: neighbourhood

For Jessica: Sexy Ladies Let Me Talk To You

Sexy Ladies Let Me Talk To You by Justin Timberlake

  • In the course of spending some quality time with myself over my 32nd birthday, I found myself cleaning the bath and having a 5pm dance party.
  • Jessica Yarish if you named a Justin Timberlake song you would name it this, I think?
  • I am trying to post gifts for people over here instead of on Facebook.

Embodiment and drifting.

Old half-baked draft from 11 December 2008. I kind of want that asterisk question on a t-shirt. I think I was really asking **** How do I want to talk about this on the internet after such a long break??? ****

Talking to Heather about embodiment, being in your body. She had an idea that maybe when teenagers are focussed on having sex even when it is pretty “rape-y” and risky and not beneficial or pleasurable, it has partly to do with their lack of other ways to feel their physicality and be in their bodies. No access to nature, nowhere to safely walk, not allowed to play outside unsupervised, even encouraged to eliminate or replace all body odours, etc. That’s a lot of pressure on sex for being physical.

It got me thinking about how I relate to the internet. I’m on here a LOT, in this disembodied place.

Anyway. I’ve been realizing that one of my big ways to be in my body for the last year or so has been looking at things. Sensing with my eyes, and sensing the reactions my body has to colours and shapes (and letters, boy howdy). When I got to go to the UK with my mum last fall, and we spent so much time in art galleries because it was rainy, that was the most physically altered I’ve felt since I stopped eating psychedelic drugs. High on modern art— physically dizzy and speedy and sometimes getting auras like before a migraine, from seeing enough art nouveau in one room to really experience and understand the concept of biomorphic whiplash. I made this website these colours because they do similar things to me— they are stimulating and encouraging and they make me want to write. I remember using music that way in the past. Galen would come home sometimes and be able to tell when I was working on something important, because I’d be blasting some or other personal power music. In high school— I just remembered this— I did a lot with smells. Other people’s sweaters, specific incense, open window when it rained.

*** where does fucking fit in?? ***

So, notably, none of this involves movement or muscles. It’s all sensing and processing and information. It’s physical to me, but it’s what a lot of people would identify as being in your head.

My forays into physical activity are marked by a lot of head time, too. Office bike— the exercise bike I can pedal while I make websites. Wing chun— if I have to punch and kick to learn which way shoulders bend and how momentum works, I guess that’s alright. Fucking— “erotics is the process through which sex acquires meaning.” I think I get bored, otherwise.

I’ve been casting around for some more physical motion in my life, to make me stronger.

I have high hopes for a bastardized version of this pretentious French art thing, the dérive, or drift. Walking to nowhere. OK. I do not like walking for the sake of walking, even though I love walking. Growing up, my parents were all about taking a walk, but not so much about negotiating where to walk or talking about what they feel like on the walks or whatever, so I have a lot of stored up experience being deeply bored with walks.

Walking to nowhere: ok. Just paying attention to see where you want to walk the most: ok. Also, paying attention to local geography and how it feels, that can go on forever. I think this could be useful in trying to figure out more of how I relate to being a settler on colonized land.

So yeah, I’m glad I’ve practiced walking by myself, home alone from various locations. I’m glad Victoria is a mostly non-threatening place for me to walk around.

Survivalism as if self-sufficiency is an illusion.


How do I protect [my disaster supplies] from the unprepared and desperate have-nots if I don’t already have a fort-knox style bunker?

Obviously the first priority will be to avoid conflict in the first place, if possible. The cause of conflict in your question was a shortage of supplies, and the potential aggressors are disorganized. So the easiest way to avoid conflict in that case is to make sure that there are enough essential supplies to go around for your neighbours. . . . That’s why I think that community sufficiency is much more important than just self-sufficiency.

— Aric McBay on Strategies for shortages, from In The Wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization

I often feel self-conscious reading (and liking!) a certain type of anti-civilization literature. I’m trying to come up with a concise way to explain the appeal without just making a joke out of it (crazy survivalists!). Part of it is this struggle to take care of oneself in a cooperative way. The whole anti-civilization argument, at least from the people I’ve been checking out, comes from the premise that civilization makes cooperative self-care impossible, because the civilized are always destroying and overshooting their (our) landbase and depending on imperialism to survive. It’s that situation where one competitive person can ruin a whole group’s attempt to use cooperation and consensus.

So there are a whole lot of ideas in there about resisting a hierarchical, destructive culture without creating a new hierarchical culture in its place.

I’m noticing how gardening books can be colonial.


Edible gardens have been part of human culture for thousands of years. Along with harnessing fire, developing the wheel and domesticating animals, cultivating food is one of the benchmarks of human advancement. Growing plants that provide food and learning to store it for times of scarcity were advancements that allowed humans to develop civilizations.

— First paragraph of the introduction to The Canadian Edible Garden: Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits & Seeds by Alison Beck.

It’s been awhile since something like “the benchmarks of human advancement” would have slipped by me as a neutral measurement (when you define everyone’s progress by how similar they are to you, you can assume have problems with privilege), but I think I am noticing more assumptions now about the value of civilization and technology. I’m also noticing that the author’s list of “advancements” that allow humans to create civilizations skipped over colonization, slavery, militarism, genocide and all that.

I recently read Endgame: The Problem of Civilization & Resistance (thanks for the tip, Sarah), which is a thorough take-down of the assumption that civilization is an advanced way of living (vs. unsustainable and terrorist), that the point of technology is to become advanced (vs. to maintain a relationship with your landbase), that agriculture is an efficient way to gather food (vs. temporary and destructive). I think that was the book that got me reading about destroying agriculture. I’ve been reading a lot of books at once; it’s hard to keep track.

I am seeing this garden book as much more oppressive than I would have before, with a Eurocentric, anti-indigenous, environmentally unconscious position.

This is good, it gets me thinking about my love of gardening. I’m realizing that what I care about is getting to know plants and soil and living systems, resisting consumerism and capitalism by gathering my own food, and taking time to physically experience and love a patch of the outdoors. None of that actually requires a garden. I could be wildcrafting, or working more with local plant permaculture and forest gardens. Those are difficult when land is privately owned and violently policed, and wilderness is mostly destroyed and constantly under threat. Wild forests don’t need me in there taking all my food right now. And it’s hard to conceive of perennial ecosystems on temporarily rented space.

So… how could I be talking with my neighbours about guerrilla permaculture and land reclamation?

I hope this ends well.

I posted this on Craigslist today (personals > strictly platonic?).

Can I poop in your composting toilet?

Date: 2009-03-25, 12:34PM PDT

Or even just see it and ask you a couple of questions?

They seem so cool in theory, but I would like to try one out in person before I get too excited about the “convenience” and “lack of smell.”

Thanks in advance for sharing your humanure revolution.

  • Location: victoria
  • it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Nighttime, trees, rocky beaches…

She moves only by night and on a south wind, by Pamela Phatsiimo Sunstrum

She moves only by night and on a south wind, by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.

I’ve been going through some old photos that my mum brought me. They show a lot of crouching at the beach. This collage looked familiar in two ways then: the beach crouching from when I was small, and the nighttime trees from my neighbourhood now. I think this new combination will add something to my night walks.

Curling, graininess suitably expressing surreality.

Uh, me curling.

I went curling after hours at a rink owned by some friends of my cousin, out near Sidney.

  • It was surprisingly fun, in the way that bocci, billiards and croquet are fun. Minimally-confrontational exercises in physics.
  • So far I’ve never once been a fan of flattening large areas of land (parking lots, malls, golf courses…), especially land where I understand something about it having been colonized and occupied. It’s extra absurd when the flattening is done for sports. Non-cooperation overload.
  • If I were actually into playing sports, I would set up a beautiful place to play for once. Rinks, fields, courses and courts are all so ugly! Wow. I wonder if spending time in artificially lit, flattened out, weirdly-proportioned, echo-y, energy sinkhole type spaces might be damaging on its own, even without the formalized competition and violence and the addiction to contrived adrenaline rushes. (Hi, I have fun ideas about sports!) Certainly people say that about office cubicles, that the ugliness is demoralizing, even without the bureaucratic hierarchy crap.
  • And, curling was really fun. Pushing heavy things across ice with measurement marks is basically sensory play. Balance, momentum, angles, stretching, muscles. I bet curling kink parties would be fun.

Persepolis, surprises, posting to the future

This year’s Mystery Movie surprise screening at Cinecenta was Persepolis! I’d never been before, but the idea is that they screen something anticipated that hasn’t been released over here yet. Our only guess was that it might be that crazy Bob Dylan movie with multiple people trading the lead role… and then as soon as we had any kind of guess, I was worried that when we were wrong it would be disappointing. Surprises are fragile.

Seeing the film come up in black and white animation was so optimal that it felt sort of charming. This was the only upcoming movie I’ve been looking forward to, and almost the only one I even knew anything about. It’s hard to be more fun than anticipation, but I don’t think that accomplishment was the charming part. A guy from the Cinecenta staff had come out and introduced the screening beforehand, so already it was feeling like a human social event rather than a commercial transaction, and then it turned out to be a movie made by people I could picture in my head from watching the little making of feature on the movie website. Lots of people involved, rather than only vague forces of fame and culture and money. I think that was what felt so warm and fuzzy. (Maybe especially after considering a movie about Bob Dylan as a sort of opaque, unknowable icon?)

I don’t understand why more cinemas don’t put an effort into spectacles and gimmicks like this on a regular basis. Surprise movies (old or new) are going on my local cinema wishlist, along with having a human introduce each screening, offering table seating, downloadable mp3 commentary tracks, loveseat-style seating in more places than just the back row of The Roxy, and beer in non-plastic containers.

I’m not much for movie reviews, but I suppose I should mention that I liked Persepolis. Funny parts, sad parts, angry parts, cute parts, and a lot of characters processing ethics out loud, and integrating external wars and politics with internal, personal feelings. The animation was very beautiful. (And boy do I like the various Arabic Persian nose shapes that Satrapi draws.) I think you could check out the books and the movie in any order without wrecking anything.

This whole episode has been a curious test of my 7-day posting lag. When I realized which film was showing, I felt like I’d been hoarding information because none of my companions could read the future archives of my blog, where I’d stashed links and details about the movie. That’s exactly counter to my anti-exclusive motives for posting to the future. And then I felt disappointed that I wanted to write a follow-up post when the first thing I wrote about Persepolis might be due to publish less than a week in the future— my follow-up was at risk of being weirdly late. It turned out to be pretty well-timed after all, but it is hilarious the way media influences real life reactions. This is more disconcerting than the “I wish I’d brought my camera / Kodak moment” feeling.

Our town

Last night I found more people who have independently created a fantasy about choosing a small town and moving there with all their friends. This makes… five times, I think, in the last few months, that I’ve run into this daydream.

It’s straightforward enough: pick a small town with cheap real estate, move there with all your friends. All of you make some contribution like growing organic vegetables or opening an indie cinema. Get enough people on board to make the town really cool. Optional bonus features include buying a huge statue for the center of town— say, one of the Lenins that periodically gets offloaded by former Eastern block countries— or hiring a promising architecture student to design a whole street or subdivision, like a mini version of Gaudi’s Barcelona.

I’ve heard different opinions on the ethics of taking over a town, and how to be respectful of the existing townsfolk, but the main idea doesn’t seem to surprise anybody.

So now I’m curious. Why is this such a common fantasy right now? What is it about?

I wonder about a couple of things. (Warning: I’m high on coffee and I’m about to dork out.)

Fear of complexity. I might as well put this first; it’s the only thing I seem to talk about these days. Is the desire to move to a small town, where it is easy to be influential, a reaction to overwhelming complexity? Cities are second only to maybe anthills as the most commonly discussed example of systems that are too complex to understand or control without special new theories, and where individual actions have unpredictable impacts on the whole. Could moving to a small town be a way to get away from information overload and find a less confusing, more simplistic cultural life?

The death of indie. I’ve complained before about how the indie/hipster counterculture has become pretty much just a commercial shopping habit. We’ve had what, twenty five years worth of young people moving to the big city to get in the loop with indie culture (meet tastemakers, be creative, go to shows, buy sneakers, etc)? I think of moving to a small town as a hipster fantasy, because that’s who I hear it from and also because having a freelance creative job— the kind of thing you could transplant to a small town— is kind of a hipster ideal. Are hipsters ready to find a new way to be countercultural, now that everything indie is so mainstream and so designer? Seeking cheap rent is, to me, usually a sign that people want more time to work on changing something, or more time to participate in something meaningful. Or, is this like the last gasp of hipster vanity, to get into a pond so small that you can be indie and amateur and still be the biggest fish around?

Displacement. The more obvious factor is just how expensive cities are getting, and this one in particular. This is basic gentrification— a neighbourhood gets expensive and only one kind of people can afford to live there anymore. All the diverse tradespeople, artists, families, students, businesses and various workers who made the neighbourhood awesome go somewhere cheaper. Maybe this desire for everybody to move to the same place is just a survival instinct, trying to preserve the diverse, fun city life by moving it to a sort of cultural nature reserve. Is the idea of moving to a remote, small, undesirable town a protective manoeuver, to get as far away as possible from invasive condo developments, and to avoid ever being displaced again?

OK! No more explainy voice! I keep turning this over in my head to see if it would actually be an awesome thing to do, or whether it would be a weird, defensive, vain thing to do. I can’t decide. (I also can’t imagine getting many people to commit to such a plan… but still I must get to the bottom of it, for some reason.)

I should really go visit my old relatives

Last night Galen and I popped down to Pagliacci’s to pick up a pre-amp from Brooke, who was playing there. Pag’s jazz jam in full effect! It had been awhile since I’d been down for one of those nights. I think it was officially a Marc Atkinson show, but he was out of town, so the rest of the band asked Brooke to come play, and then various musicians came in off the street, and everyone on stage played several instruments so they all took turns switching. A pot pourri.

Of particular note, I finally got to hear Devon sing, and he is not kidding around about singing. I was having major grampa-convergence feelings watching him get settled on stage, though, because he was wearing the same kind of cuddly, old-man cardigan that my grampa always does, and this great plaid cap. Furthermore, Devon started out sitting in a chair on stage with no instrument and no microphone, no obvious reason for being there, just looking contented and watching the other guys play the intro.

My grampa does that kind of thing a lot, since his Alzheimer’s got noticeable. I’ve done a lot of sitting with the old guy, looking around and being contented. It made me think that my grampa should join a band. I think he’d be into it, as long as they played something old timey.

You’d yelp too

Euphorbia in bloom

I awoke to this. Giant flower buds have yet to disappoint!

Galen is away on tour, so I exclaimed several things out loud to no one. Fortunately, Marc dropped by to loan me a book on his way to work, so I got to share the special thrill of outlandish botany with another human.

Two neighbourly humans agree: it’s so hairy.

Euphorbia flower-- it's very hairy

My immediate thought was for the pollinator. What is supposed to rub its body on that flower? Marc surmised that the pollinator should be at least as hairy as the plant.

Hopefully the flower is hard at work summoning this creature, and later this afternoon I’ll find some variety of Ancient Beast knocking against the window screen, trying to achieve its hairy destiny.

Urban duck parenting

Urban ducks in love

Just in case the crows and cherry blossoms didn’t make you think I was a sappy hippie, here is a portrait of two neighbourhood mallards that seem to nest in inappropriate urban locations every year, and raise their ducklings on apartment lawns.

Last spring I saw a business woman in a power suit and sneakers trying to get a fuzzy puddle of ducklings to stop following her down the sidewalk. Who will be their victim this year? And does the football shape of a duck make you want to tuck it under your arm too, or is that only me?

Paging any unicorns in the area…

Snow cover

My favourite local microclimate effect is the pink snow globe that will sometimes develop on single blocks, where one street’s cherry blossoms are just ripe enough and the wind just strong enough to make it snow cherry petals.

As if it isn’t enough to regularly find sidewalks blanketed in pink flowers, or legitimate drifts of blossoms in the gutters, sometimes we can walk around in air full of swirly pink flakes that smell like cherries. But only for one block.

Something about Victoria’s proximity to the ocean or our particular collection of hills results in very pronounced weather differences between neighbourhoods or across streets. It’s pretty normal to get simultaneous hail and bright sunshine over different parts of your own yard, even.

Consequently we have cherry trees in bloom in different parts of the city from January through almost to June, one pink block here and one there, as each climate pocket hits peak cherry breeding conditions.

Walking past a single fragrant cherry tree is enough to cheer up most people for a few minutes (especially by moonlight!). I’ve had such a prolonged, steady dose now, after four months of spring, that I’m almost ready to cry sometimes when I walk around the neighbourhood and pass through a block-sized cloud of cherry perfume. I’m saturated.

The other side of the street

It’s absurd that this tree blossom marathon is even possible, and we’ve got several weeks to go before the Victoria spring season is over. The chestnut trees have barely started, and I just saw my first lilac yesterday. I might as well be on happy drugs.

I went out for coffee with my friend The Hawk today (a real person, not my spirit animal), and the weather was making it clear that this city was built over a coastal rainforest: windy, rainy, gray. I was grumbling a bit on the way home, in the ritualistic way we complain about weather here, and then I turned a corner and there was a snow globe on Southgate Street.

It was raining flowers harder than it was raining water, and the flip side of the rainy climate was suddenly dominant. We get this surreal rainforest light sometimes, where it’s quite bright, but shadowless because of the cloud filter, and it turns kind of green from reflecting off so many plants. The light makes everything look like it is glowing.

It made me feel a little better about the fact that a couple of generations back, somebody paved over the local cedar groves. At least they put up a ridiculous, Dr. Seussian city, where today, for one block, even the vertical surfaces were getting plastered with airborne flowers. On one side of the street, anyway.

Crow snow tunnel

I was just about to formulate some mental joke about how unicorns or winged foxes (maybe a talking spirit bear?) could appear at that moment without surprising me, when a few crows started collecting sprigs of cherry blossoms, presumably for their nests. Close enough! I can’t even process little black birds growing up in a pink nest. It’s sensory overload.

My mum has this old, ceramic mixing bowl that is robin’s egg blue, and when I visit her I just want to put things in the bowl and look at them. Yellow cornmeal, white or brown eggs, red lentils, black olives, buttons, a toad, chocolate milk, anything, as long as it goes in the blue bowl. Today was like that; I wanted to look at these crows poking around in a glowing pink and green lawn forever!

Watching people sketch

We ran into Erik and Leni at the show last night and shared their table. I got distracted, watching Erik draw on the back of a poster he ripped down from the bar window. He’s fast, and starts right in on the details without blocking anything in. I took a dark picture of the poster after he taped it up backwards on the window again, but I forgot to look at it from outside when we left.

After that, and spending a lot of time scribbling on our bar table as a group, I was excited to see a little ““watch people sketch online”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/12/watch_and_rate_peopl.html” game posted on BoingBoing this morning. But it turns out to not be that interesting. Maybe it has to do with texture? Maybe I only like watching people I know.

Galen is still considering starting some kind of one-thing-every-day blog. Maybe he should post a little video of himself drawing a picture. Like that landscape painter with the happy little trees, but not educational. Spectator art!

How are we going to get all these bears back in?

Orca In The City

Victoria has a history, and I think a proud history, of shitty public art. Until recently, the scope of debate could be summed up as a war between abstract sculptures that annoy old people and hockey fans, and a teeming horde of orcas.

Orca murals, orca mosaics, orca sidewalk chalk, maybe an eagle or a salmon painted somewhere for good measure, but most prominently, a whole army of mass-produced, fiberglass Orcas In The City sculptures, each decorated by a different local artist.

Orcas In The City were bland and oppressive (seriously— the organizers put ‘Arts’ in quotations in their goal statement), but no one was supposed to complain about them because they were only temporary and they were auctioned for charity. Think of the children.

I flipped the bird on one of the more overtly branded Orcas at least once, but I regret never having ruined a tourist’s Orca family portrait by humping an exposed tail flipper or something. I have a lingering vendetta about the Orcas, with apologies to The Children.

Enter Spirit Bears

Spirit Bear featuring a funky neighbourhood scene

Suddenly, this spring, a new menace. Sir Bartholomew is not alone, and he’s even less distinguishable from the other Spirit Bears In The City than was the typical Orca In The City. A spirit bear is a white grizzly bear, if you’re not familiar with Pacific Northwest variations on junior high unicorn-and-kitten fetishes, and the decoration jobs seem to have been rationed out exclusively to the artists who made their Orca contributions look the most like the inside of a Starbucks. It’s wall to wall funky neighbourhood scenes. I know I’m biased towards neon red and blue as the official colours of 2006, but I don’t think I’m alone in believing that yellow and purple should take a well-deserved break. Let yellow and purple recover from their hard work portraying free spirits and Italian snack foods.

Worst of all, the Spirit Bears have broken free of the tourist containment zone and have been popping up as far from the Inner Harbour as Island Blue printers. I yelled out loud when I spotted the specimen at Fort and Quadra.

What’s a concerned citizen to do? How are we going to get all these bears back in?

Toronto got saddled with Moose In The City, so apparently this ride doesn’t hit bottom until it has dipped deep into Canadiana cliché pap. This aggression must not stand! Besides writing to the organizers at the Lions Club and begging them to at least consider funny animals for future mass-blanding fundraisers (goats are a good standby), what is the fitting response?

Three different people have suggested blowing up the bears somehow, but I’m taken with this Knitta Please textile graffiti. I don’t have the time or the tendon health to knit any quantity of bear shrouds, but I think some sewn hoods secured with zip ties would do the trick. As much as the bears stimulate my gag reflex, I’m a non-destructive kind of person and I wouldn’t want to actually destroy someone’s art.

I favour a sign reading “Out of Order” as the finishing touch.

The A that makes me crazy

A sign: Dolce Vita, coffee Art

The strange capitalization puts a lot of emphasis on that capital letter A, and the A is backwards. It’s across a parking lot from a really nice, gigantic, properly-oriented capital A, so you’d think whoever put up that sign would know better. I’m open to the possibility that this was an intentional, very subtle message about the nature of coffee Art, but that makes me even less inclined to go inside.

Almost the same

Rockridge apartments logo

Rockridge apartments logo

There are a lot of handpainted apartment doors in my neighbourhood. I should take better pictures of them.

1044 doorsign

Two Rs that almost match, two 4s that almost match. Repetition with variation might be the Christopher Alexander design thought that I remember most often. I’ve always been into collections of similar objects, and think the slight variations are the root of my fascination. Add them all together and you can see the spectral range of a Rockridge R, or of 1044’s 4s. They put each other in context. I’ve never thought of handwriting as a collection of similar-but-not-quite-the-same objects, but indeed it is.