sustainability is so last year 13:54

Meet Rob Hopkins, the Englishman who's bringing the paradigm of resilience (which is very two-point-oh) to the human-environmental zeitgeist via the interweb and the power of wiki.

About bloody time.

Watch the TEDtalk.

Tell me what you think.

This isn't a drill, people.

I'm actively recruiting for a KW Transition initiative.

Sabbaticalistic 11:25

I can't tell if I'm on sabbatical already or in desperate need of one.

I think that technically, a sabbatical is an extended leave from your job with the understanding that when you return your job will still be there. If that's the case, I'm not on one because my 'job' was never a real job and there's no guarantee that I'll ever be able to return to it.

I want to though, some day. I miss academe. I miss feeling like I belonged somewhere and was part of something larger. I miss having elders to look up to. I miss wandering hallways, drinking way too much coffee, arriving just in time to lead seminars of eager undergrads. I miss getting excited about ideas. I miss believing I could make a difference with words.

But that's not what I'm doing now.

What am I doing now?

I'm not really sure. I don't think anyone is. But that doesn't stop them from being blindly supportive of it which, to be honest, is getting a little old. Someone who hasn't given me a second thought in months said to me the other day that it seemed like what I was doing was a great opportunity and that it seemed to be going well and that they hoped I continued to be happy. Oh for three. Well, not entirely - things aren't awful; but I find it strange that someone who doesn't know anything about anything and doesn't really like me anyways would bother to even pretend to care or lend support.

I'm just complaining now.

So, sabbaticals are actually terrifically useful experiences and can help a person learn skills and gain experience they wouldn't otherwise, meet people they'd never have met and live another life for a limited amount of time. If I'm not on one now, maybe I should plan one. It might be cool to just move from sabbatical to sabbatical for the rest of my days: like a working holiday, except less holiday more working. But who wants time off anyway?

Rilo Kiley - It's a Hit



more about "Sabbaticalistic", posted with vodpod

and I quote 16:10

"Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...

"You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "maybe we should just be friends" or "how very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."

Rose Walker in Sandman: The Kindly Ones by Neil Gaiman

*thanks to Sonya for reminding me

how much I love Gaiman

Father McKenzie 23:59

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone, yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

-Emily Carr

An afterthought:

Loneliness is something we don't talk about because of the shame associated with it. It's hard to talk about and often, if you're lonely, you have no one to talk to about it in the first place. I spent a good two hours looking for art, images, music, and literature about loneliness and, sadly, I knew more about it than google seemed to. The ATAT (the Imperial Walker from Star Wars, for the uninitiated) scratching at the door, though, was a search engine score.

Why would I post this? Not a vote for sympathy (thanks anyway though), no; it's because I want to draw attention to the way popular culture deals with loneliness. Or rather, doesn't.

High culture (whatever that is) seems to talk about it with a little more veracity. Consider Ingmar Bergman, the man the New York Times called "the master filmmaker who found bleakness and despair as well as comedy and hope in his indelible explorations of the human condition":

People tell me I'm transparent... 14:30

I don't think they mean I'm invisible, but once you hear it enough, you have to wonder.

So I've been thinking about transparency. What is it to be see-through? We pay a lot of lip-service to transparency as a good quality in our organizations, like governments because we like to think that if we can see everything we'll be... safer? happier? better informed? what?

What do we mean when we say something is transparent? Depending on the context, I think it alludes to the ease with which we can perceive the inner workings of a process or system; that is to say, the insides of a transparent thing are visible. For some reason people equate seeing with understanding. It may have something to do with epistemology and etymology (insofar as language forms the very way we think): the French voir "to see" is the root verb for both avoir "to be" and savoir "to know", and while we speak English for the mostpart in North America, our ideas about governance and democracy - not to mention psychology - are heavily influenced by French thinkers. But I digress....

I generally don't like the assertion that I, personally, am transparent: it has an air of derision about it and I don't think anyone likes to feel invisible. It's more than that, I guess. It implies that my motives are  simple and obvious, that I lack mystery or depth, that I'm overly candid. Which is strange, because those should all be really great qualities... or would be in a culture that values sincerity.

Is it fair to assume that the standards to which we hold our institutions should follow from those to which we hold one another? We want others to be honest and forthright, but criticize those qualities as poor strategy or carelessness for matters that may have consequences of personal cost.

Somewhere in the middle of all this is the practice of discretion. The idea that we can and should choose when to be transparent, however, undermines the integrity of sincerity as a social mode, does it not? I'm not suggesting we should wear our hearts on our sleeves at all times, but I am wondering why, as a rule, we don't.

What would happen if we did?

It's not the same as advertising our deepest emotions or making a spectacle of our inner monologue, exactly; what I'm curious about is what would happen to us if we acted and spoke without the blades of sarcasm? Would we eventually shuck off the armour of cynicism we wear around our family, friends and coworkers?

I'm speaking of this as a hypothetical way of being. Having tried from time to time to engage the people in my life from a place of utter sincerity, I've found that it's often met with confusion or discomfort; and what you get in return - because the way we approach the world is, inevitably, our expectation of its response - is wounded pride, a deflated ego, and nothing to do on a Friday night.

I'm including what I believe to be the only score from Chicago worth hearing (John C. Reilly - Mr Cellophane) as a musical accompaniment to the trouble with transparency. Enjoy.


Please post a comment with you thoughts, sarcastic or sincere (just tell us which it is).

if I'm a dog... 11:16

Rivers Cuomo is a fascinating person. Had he been born about a hundred years earlier, he'd likely be regarded as a tortured genius of an artist; but in contemporary terms he's a messed up rockstar. Funny how that works.

The song posted above is Butterfly from the 1997 release, Pinkerton, which is unarguably (you could try to argue that the blue album was, but you'd just sound like a dummy) their best album. This record was received quite poorly by Weezer's populist audience, but was so personally important to Rivers that he gave up music for several years and pursued a degree in literature from Harvard. After that, he lived in house with blacked-out windows and dark walls for a year before returning with the green album, which, though well-received and very commercial, lacked the intensity and depth of Pinkerton. Hard to reproduce, but I'm still holding out.

Three albums later (Raditude just came out), Weezer is still one of the most successful blends of commercial pop and angsty grunge since the 1990s.

blurg. 18:00

Below is a video I've pilfered from youtube (like you need a link...) that I'm posting as mindless entertainment to offset the dreary post from earlier today.



Liz Lemon makes me smile. I should've been fictional.

take us higher 11:37

gravity's a problem.

I had a conversation a little while back with Greg about imprisonment: the prisons we live in, the walls we build around ourselves, and the structures that limit and confound us. Suffice it to say, they're everywhere.

Modern theories of imprisonment stem largely from the French philosopher (as do most things I think about) Michel Foucault's seminal work Surveiller et punir [1975] (Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Pantheon, 1977) in which he discusses the phenomenon of Panopticism, using Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (in brief: a prison wherein the prisoners monitor one another...) to illustrate the social dynamics of surveillance as psychic bondage (not the sexy kind).


So what, if anything, does it mean to live in a world dominated by surveillance? Digital optics (cameras) are everywhere, social media allow us to "share" every detail we wish (though the politics of self-construction trouble those representations), and the private sphere has acquired the aspect of concealment rather than being taken for granted as the norm for our daily lives. We're all celebrities: Warhol was right and we're all getting our 15 minutes - and with a culture so accelerated as to tempt us away from ever sitting still (unless we're in the act of surveillance), those 15 minutes are all we may have left.

There's an interesting confluence between Foucault's work on surveillance and The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1972) which suggests that  the media industry over the last 60 years or so has systematically altered the West's social structure to champion the culture of luck. 


My assertion here (yes, I'm finally getting to my thesis) is that watching - as well as being watched - is part of the dialectic of a visual culture which values admonishment, shame, and ostracization as tools for perpetuating conformity. I think we're living in a techno-panopticon.

But there's good news too: there are still plenty of spaces in which we can escape from the gaze of peers and strangers: those dark, secret corners and places to hide in plain sight where we can recede into ourselves to connect with the things we think we truly feel. It's just too bad that that kind of reflexivity is such a solitary pursuit in our cultural milieu. Not all observation is imprisonment: maybe there's still something out there that allows us to be seen and still be different and valid at the same time.


I enjoy this peculiar video and remix of The Cardigans' "Junk of the Hearts" for the tension between proscribed behavioural spaces and human desire... (embedding disabled):

junk of the hearts [Nåid remix]

And this... well, it's a cover of All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan) by Bear McCreary and Katee Sackhoff that was used in Battlestar Galactica as an overture for the themes of the best sci-fi show since... ever. Lyrically and thematically it conveys the idea that we're either prisoners or we're crazy. Or both...

codes and secret longing 12:40

thanks to Rainn Wilson (twitter @rainnwilson) for reminding me of how much I adore this song.



i struggle with live performance videos on youtube. i'm not a huge fan of the Tears for Fears video I posted (though the song, i love) - it was pretty flat. this one though, of Iron & Wine from the Green Man festival in 2008 restores my hope in live music.

I suppose it betrays my reservations about live music in general: i think it needs to be intimate. I mean, if you're really going to make a connection with someone, a performer or perfect stranger or whathaveyou, you have to be close enough to see the cracks in their walls. With some people, Sam Beam for instance, walls seem to be there merely to call attention the cracks in them.

The larger-venue shows I've been to recently (U2, Bob Dylan) left me wanting - not a bad thing, per se, but I get more out of a show at the eBar or Maxwell's because of the immediacy and sense of improvisation or uniqueness to a show there. It's like theatre: anything could happen in a small venue show and it's different every time. The audience of a small show has a different kind of presence than the anonymous crowd at a stadium show: they're real.

Tonight at Maxwell's: Grand River Orchestra and Great Dane. Come out. Be real.

welcome to your life 21:15

there's no substitute for the musical innovations of the 1980s. I'm not sure why, but the world only became a real place for me in the 80s. Maybe it's because I born in 1980; but everything before then seems to be just a story.

That's right: after five beers on a Thursday I assume that anything I didn't personally experience is a fiction.

If we haven't met, I apologize.

YYJ/YYC/YYZ 01:01

I have favourite airports.

how weird is that?

I don't particularly like Pearson: it feels like a mall. A big one, with too much security and no soul.

Should airports have souls? Are they haunted places? I mean, they're sites of memory and reunion, of heartache and desperation, of commerce and, well, diaspora.

I think Calgary airport has a soul. It's stuck out in the middle of Airdrie, which if you know, is a soulless suburb of Texas North that grew up around the airport. But the airport itself is like a map of the province of Alberta (sort of).

I'm here now on a two hour layover between Victoria and Toronto, and I can wander this airport like a kid in a theme-park, recalling the points of interest, finding pleasure in what's changed, laughing aloud at some of the more ridiculous displays. I'm going to refrain from wandering the terminal with my macbook because it's better if you experience it firsthand.

So, here is my invitation to you:

come to the Calgary International Airport at least once.

The only one I prefer is Vancouver International because of the incredible view over the tarmac, plains, to the mountains. Go there too if you get the chance.

harder than you think 11:32

I'm not a hard person. hard to know/stand/love maybe, but not hard in and of myself. at least, I don't regard myself as such.

I can't begin to guess at what anyone else thinks - I'm so terrible at reading most human signs that I usually assume that:
a) no one thinks anything; or,
b) they are just as or more self-conscious than I am

But around family... people who know your history, have memories in common with you, and can never really be expunged from your life (as a continuum of past-present-future) and always have an opinion about what you are doing vs. what you should be doing, I find myself in that weird place of worrying about the judgements of people who may not have seen me in years. a) and b) still apply, but the knowledge that these people will be around for years and years to come changes the stakes. Their hopes and expectations aren't there to hold me up to any arbitrary standard; rather, they ask questions on subjects they know little of because they connect those things to me. My cousins don't care about literature, but they ask because they're curious about me. It's different.

And then there are the tots. All of my cousins have children ranging from ages 1 to 15. There's no telling what they think, really: they don't even know themselves (well, maybe the 15-year-old does). But they certainly are paying attention and they certainly have an opinion. Very immediate, very definite, very affective. I can't help but care deeply about what children are thinking.

Maybe if I were a little harder I could avoid these uncomfortable functions on the coast. Maybe if I were harder I could escape the dysfunction of my modern family unit. Maybe if I were hard I could reinvent myself the way I wish I were: harder than you think.

But to do that would be to lose something that the value of which can't be measured, that is unlike anything else, that is never the same as it was, is fleeting, is genuine, is tender. Families aren't hard organisations: they're flexible and permeable and adaptive. Members come and go. Parts break. Things go missing. And we need to be soft enough to move and fill the gaps or find someone to fill it for you/us.

controlled burn 11:13

time for some reconstitution.

Here I am. In Victoria (Saanich actually, at the mo'). It's early on the west coast. I'm sharing a room with my sister, Karin in the hojo we usually stay at when we come here. It's the first place we ever got drunk together, so it's kind of a special hojo - very emotionally charged. we hadn't seen each other in a long time and finally had an opportunity to just hang out away from everything.

Currently she's making coffee in the little machine, which is exploding:

"They didn't specify you had to put the lid on. now I got a hot mess. literally... not like britney spears," she says. And later... "Um... it's still doing something bad."

Karin's all about the controlled burn. "burn" as in scathing insult. she knows exactly when and how much to scorch you or I or a celebrity to still be funny without hurting your feelings. I'd like to take full credit for her possession of this surgical skill with verbal jabs because of my overly sensitive nature coupled with appreciation for a good burn.

We're off to breakfast soon with almost the entire Asp clan. Wish you were here (really though, because I'm going to overload on family after about 20 minutes' exposure).

Ohbijou, see me through this troubled breakfast....

the week that earned a photo-essay 10:52

It's been an awful week this week. 

It's also been one of the best I can remember.

I have cried and laughed harder than I had in a while.

I have hardly slept.

I have eaten way too much.

I went out nearly every night because I needed to be around people I love more than usual.

Monday: French class with Bex (that's Guy in the background. He's not our French teacher).

Tuesday: music with Jerry (music not pictured).

Wednesday: Young Galaxy and Malajube with Jo, Cassie, and Eric. Earlier that day I got some very bad news.

Thursday: Most Serene Republic and The Meligrove Band with Jo and les boys (pictured: Mike)

Friday: game night at the Scowcroft residence:

Saturday was a big one: market breakfast, dogwalking, and Bob Dylan at the Aud. Really kind of a perfect day.

Sunday: switch gears. pack. fly to Victoria. The bad news I received on Wednesday is waiting for me there. But I've got a back catalogue of good feelings to bring with me through the deserved and inevitable family grief of losing someone unexpectedly, unfairly, and despite the miracles of modern medicine. 

Dear Brian: you were a harbour.

fibs 23:17

everything I believe is a lie.

well, sort of. I've got this thing about truth. You can have it--my thing about the truth--because I'm not really using it. It goes like this:

we're all born liars. lucky thing too, or we'd all end up in a place like this. we need our lies because they're the things that spare us, prepare us, and endear us. and the best thing about lies, is that they can become true if we follow through on them.

i stopped lying to get out of trouble when i was just a kid because it made me feel like there was something about myself i needed to hide. couldn't stand it. as a result i found that people respect you more for telling the truth and that life is far more interesting when you 'fess up to the things you've done wrong. you get through more doors, i find, when you're humble enough to admit the things you've done wrong.

it's amazing, also, how your choices change when you don't acknowledge lying as an option for covering up your errors in judgement. it's uncomfortable at first, limiting yourself that way, but hey "the truth will set you free."

except that it doesn't. not in the contemporary sense of freedom. in fact, i'd go so far as to say that our culture's concept of freedom is just shy of anarchy and has nothing to do with the notion of liberty that formed the basis of Enlightenment thought and politics. oddly enough, those notions have a lot to do with the pursuit of truth: truth about knowledge, truth about God, truth about justice, truth about whatever. nope, truth nowadays really hinders freedom. it makes it harder to get a job, harder to find a mate, harder to be happy. so, instead we lie.

truth, as i think of it, is tenuous and based on interpretation and reception and our culturally-determined perspective. in short, truth is a lie because it's never the same for any two people; what's true for you isn't necessarily true for me. which is okay really, because most of the lies we tell are the ones that we want to be true, or the things we need to believe just to get through the day.

she loves me.
i'm not fat.
every little thing's going to be all right.

our best lies are stories. they're the lies that we grew up with that help us unpack the baggage we acquire as we move through the world. we use these lies to reconcile things that shouldn't be with the way we want them to be. our stories start out as lies and billow into a white screen on the inside of the back of our heads onto which the world is projected through our eyes. there are plenty of bad stories, to be sure, but we can always learn better ones and we can always choose to tell better stories. if the truth won't set us free, at least we're at liberty to lie.

maybe it's time i started telling lies that could help us all get out of the trouble we're in.

or maybe we just need a little more music...

"all my lies are only wishes"