Edmonton: Summer Recreation
Thursday 6/18/2009
John Berger’s A Seventh Man keeps coming up, I keep seeing and feeling the experience of that book everywhere I go. The temporary, or long-term foreign worker. Eyes are always set on somewhere else. Here, in Alberta for work. Adults speak of their own lives as not as good as when they were at home, but they have moved for their children to have a better life. There is almost a hatred for this place, Edmonton, Fort McMurray, Alberta, all of it, the weather is terrible is what I hear. I was brought to this point of reflection when 2 men from Albania came and painted a room in our house. I wondered at the reactions of my grandparents when they came to Canada. Were they just as mired?
The map - thinking of the imaginary lines. The way that a street will maintain its name even when the line is broken. This was pointed out by a Yogi friend of mine from Toronto.
These two thoughts came together for me when I reflect on my own dissatisfaction with this place. Why here, why these towers on the prairies? What is it about this place that holds people here? Am I simply a product of a deep-seated and deep rooted disdain and discomfort with place? With this place. A flat and ubiquitous grid system designed for maximum productivity.
I need a holiday, a new place? Or do I?
Punk
For a time Punk demanded all of my time, my focus and my energy.
In return ‘Punk’ rewarded me with an open mind and the capacity for unlimited possibility and a DIY ethic.
Tuesday 6/9/2009
Tuesday 5/26/2009
Ex-drummer 2007 (Belgium) -
“why d’you absolutely want to play with that fucking band?”
“I don’t really know. I think I just want to step outside my happy world.
Descend into the depths of stupidity, ugliness, obtuseness, unfaithfulness and fake. Latch onto the life of losers but without belonging to that world and in the knowledge that I can always return to my own world.
And to you.”
saudade
”Either express yourself and die, or remain unexpressed and immortal”.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
“I am lured by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like a light and impalpable fluid. It its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies. I am cheerful and yet so sad that my tears reflect at once both heaven and earth. If only for the joy of my sadness, I wish there were no death on this earth.”
E.M. Coiran 1911-1995
Both of these quotes link to Alfredo Jaar.
Friday 5/8/2009
The Ruined Human…
The ruined human is the struggle for, and or, commitment to excess.
For instance, everything is huge, and impossing and new, and shiney, and basically riddled with the oppulence of excess.
Bodied? Is it bodied.
Living in excess, in the mansions, big trucks.
Suspension of time.
It may not be the somalian cab driver? A different kind of choice.
Also consider Dirial Massey and Bauman on the Wasted Life.
Weber, what does Weber have to say.
Thursday 5/7/2009
Bike - the Smooth ride
On Sunday May 3 I was pretty much exhausted by the 4th Annual Sociology Graduate Student Interdisciplinary Conference which I co-chaired with Barret W.
But this is a post about Biking. The evening was calm, so I tuned up my bike, pumped up the tyres and head off. Intending only to go a little ways the calm weather promted me onwards - roughly 16 km across the city the clareview transit station. I wanted to take the LRT from end to end.
While riding the train I noted the differenece between biking, riding in a car and riding the train. I enjoyed the back lane views that flank the train on either side of the tracks. Green shacks lined up, a junk yard for tractor parts, towels hung todry behind the northlands horse tracks. I considered that I needed to do a photography or perhaps film project that documents the views that are afforded to the LRT goers. There is something of demise, decline, and ruin. Lots for me to sink into.
A different feeling was the one where it seemed like the LRT is somewhat of a sticth across the city, desperately trying to being ends together, closen the gap so to speak. The ride was smooth - and it felt like a mode of transit that delicately premeated the disparate neighborhoods.
Something of slickness and smooth - something quite uncharacteristic for edmonton which I would characterize as offeing and bumby ride for pedestrians, bikes and cars. This ride is different, it is smooth. Something of elegance and priveledge, the cars stop for the train.
When the train goes subterrranian it feels like it blanks out of time, in a liminal zone.
I got home and felt a shift.
Monday 5/4/2009
Ikea: Resignification
Most of us have slept on one of these Ikea futon frames. Call it what you will; resignification, phreaking, hacking, re-appropriating, etc., Built in less that 1 hour, using only a #2 Phillips, a hammer, existing wood, existing hardware and a circular saw. Go on, make something useful with your old, unwanted and disposable (Bauman: Liquid Modernity) accoutrements. Happy Building.
Sunday 4/26/2009
Radical Extremist Organized Anarchism
Tar Sands class today.
Badiou/Guattari/Hardin - Event/Three Ecologies,Transversality/Tragedy.
When asked what the concrete suggestion I would have for making change regarding the Alberta Tar Sands. First I railed on about how the car is but a blip in Humanity? Is Humanity really worth saving? Should be impliment laws and relenquish the freedom to breed. And, And, And…
First, Park our cars, ground our aeroplanes, and dissolve the constitution of Canada - in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Council project.
The man sitting next to me said “well that is a bit extreme.”
I said, “and that was my optimistic opinion.”
Wednesday 3/25/2009
doing nostalgia
Lately I’ve been doing nostalgia, well at least at the moment its not quite long gone, but soon enough, and I only know this because I can see into the future.
First, filling up gas, at the station into the car and feeling, hey, I’m probablyh not going to be doing this for much longer.
Then, with newspapers going bust all across north america, like the seattle post intelligenser - I picked up a Globe and Mail from Starbucks along with my order… As I held the paper in hand, having already read most of the headlines online earlier - I remarked, hey, i probably won’t be doing this for much longer.
Been in bed and couch sick with the flu, from body to head to neck to nose now onto cough.. yuck.
Saturday 3/21/2009
