But You Hit My Heart With A Harpoon

A writer from Ricepaper loaned me a couple books by Adrian Tomine. He's a graphic novel/comic writer/illustrator from Berkeley, California. The last time I was this excited about an author was when I read Hemmingway's complete short stories. Sleepwalk and other Short Stories just blows me away, it's sixteen animated stories about the emotional lives of literate twentysomethings. It's eerie how much I identify with some of the characters. It's the rare graphic novelist who is as good a storyteller as he is an illlustrator. Tomine is briliant on both fronts

On my way back from Seattle today I listened to Herman Dune's I Hope that I Can See You Soon maybe five times in a row (thanks Jason). The video for this song is just as amazing.

The CanWest Museum of Human Rights

The Canwest Museum of Human Rights?
from This Magazine's Blog

Philip Gourevitch, in his essential We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, describes the ridiculousness of reading a newspaper article on Rwandan atrocities while waiting in line at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington.

During a speech at the museum's opening ceremonies, Bill Clinton called it "an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead." Gourevitch writes, "Apparently all he meant was that the victims of future exterminations could die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated..."

Gourevitch goes on to chronicle not only the horrors of the Rwandan genocide (a word the Clinton administration was loath to use) but the west's complicity in the act. Not only for acting too late, and acting incorrectly but for a creating the historical circumstances that lead up to it and ultimately for supplying the resources with which to carry out mass murder.

This week we've been hearing a lot (especially if you live in a Canwest owned town) about Gail Asper's coup in securing federal status for the Human Rights Museum to be built in Winnipeg. Stephen Harper, always the intellectual, described the partnership as such, "never before has there been a collaboration of this scale to develop a national museum, but if ever there were a Canadian cultural institution suited for a public-private partnership, it is this one, because human rights can never be the exclusive preserve of the state."

According to Canwest News Services, "It's unclear how much say the Asper family, whose private foundation is putting $20 million into the museum, will have in the running of the museum. However, Harper said major contributors will serve on its board."

Call me an alarmist, but somehow "the Canadian state," in partnership with a right-wing media behemoth, defining human rights in my community doesn't sit right. Even worse, this is all happening in a structure expected to tower over Winnipeg in the form of an ancient Babylonian Ziggurat. Why such an obscure--and ugly--architectural reference, if we're giving homage to the great slave-labour empires of antiquity why no go with something a little more pleasing to the eye, a Pharaonic Pyramid perhaps, or maybe a couple Kremlinesque domes.

Last summer I visited the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. The memorial to one of America's greatest heroes is a small National Park Service red-brick building across the street from his childhood home. The once thriving middle-class black neighbourhoood is now depressed. Only blocks away, I saw hundreds of people encamped underneath massive highway overpasses, many laying on bare concrete, amidst posters that said re-elect Ray Nagin as mayor.

The exhibit chronicling MLK Jr's life and the history of the civil rights movement was moving as was the video presentation that acknowledged the radical path he was on right before his death. In the section of the centre aimed at children I found a booth admonishing us to make ethical purchases. The exhibit gave an overview of sweatshops around the world and listed some organizations fighting child labour. "Great," I thought, but turning around I noticed a large plaque with the words "this exhibit is proudly sponsored by the Coca Cola corporation."

Coca Cola is one of Atlanta's biggest companies and they have a budget with which to sponsor culture, but this is the same brand that many student groups have been trying to kick of campuses world wide for human rights abuses in Colombia, India and other countries. The month before, I had watched a Colombian bottling-plant labour organizer weep as he recounted being tortured at the hands of the paramilitaries hired by Coke to imprison him and harass his family.

I'm not sure if it was the same feeling Gourevitch experienced outside the Holocaust memorial, a combination of shame and frustration, but my visit had been ruined and one of my heroes dirtied.

Cornell West talks about the Santa Clausification of Martin Luther King Jr, the rebranding of a political radical into someone cuddly and safe. I'm not sure if he knows that, like Santa Claus, MLK is now a shill for an authoritarian beverage company. And pretty soon, Canadian school children will have the privilege of learning about "Human Rights" from the number one purveyor of anti-labour, anti-muslim, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-women sentiment in this nation.

Vaisakhi Day in Vancouver Photos

Vaisakhi in Vancouver

Greeks, Sex and Alanis

from This Magazine's Blog


Some things have been bugging me a lot lately. I worked a sorority ball the other night and it was by far the most embarassing thing I've ever witnessed. My university didn't allow greek associations and so until now I never quite understood what my friends meant when they admitted to hating these people.

I'm not one to rail against debauchery, I have no problems with people doing silly things and getting wasted, partying, having meaningless sex or whatever, but these people, the "sisters" and their fratboy dates, really bothered me. On the way in, girls already had to be helped into the washrooms to puke, they could barely stand up. The conversation ranged from meaningless to insecure. "There's this brand, kinda edgier than American Eagle, but not, like Abercrombie or anything like that..."

The drunk organizer couldn't understand how to speak into the microphone and even the seniors were basically illiterate. Their "roasts" of the graduating class were the saddest excuses for rhyming couplets I've ever heard, and, even in this hyper-sexual day and age, genuinely shocking, but more for the sheer magnitude of mainstream sex acts described rather than anything subversive.

On the other hand, I saw Alanis Morissette's parody of The Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" video which everyone is talking about. It's brilliant, but wasn't the original song satire to begin with? That's the only way I can explain lyrics that bad. My question, if the original song is a commentary on the commodifying nature of mainstream culture then what is Alanis' version?

Anonymouz & Copasetic: The ILL-Legitimate Crew

The Vancouver Gateway Project

from This Magazine's Blog



I've been spending some time in Seattle lately visiting an ailing grandfather which means I've been stuck, bumper to bumper, on the I-5 for literally hours a day. I'm talking about the commute between my grandfather's house in north Seattle, the hospital and downtown, three places quite close to each other. Just the sheer number of cars that role through Seattle each day, all day, is quite astounding. Rush hour is especially brutal.

The on-ramps have stop lights to space the cars getting on, this can mean waits of up to twenty minutes when busy. Once you're on, it's six/eight/ten lanes of bumper to bumper in both directions. When you finally get off, whether in north Seattle or downtown, you're stuck in even more congestion.

This brings me to the Gateway Project; the BC government's plan to "improve" regional transportation, specifically the plan to twin the PortMann bridge and widen Highway 1 into East Van (aka my back yard). I think it's a horrible idea. Vancouver currently has minor (by North American standards) rush hours, which some think can be solved simply by adding more highway.

It was Jane Jacobs' book Dark Age Ahead that introduced me (I'm young) to the idea of "induced demand" that more freeways mean more cars, hence more congestion especially around major off ramps. My place in East Vancouver already gets plenty of commuter traffic to begin with and would become unbearable.

But don't worry about me, Jacobs' main argument against highways is that urban neighbourhoods, the economic and creative heart of the city, are often destroyed or significantly altered by megaprojects like these. Imagine the harm it could do to the cultural life of Commercial Drive and Strathcona to have thousands more cars per-day inching through the Downtown Eastside. More traffic would then necessitate extending the freeway even further into the city. The last time we allowed something like this to happen, Vancouver's only black neighbourhood was destroyed to create the Georgia Viaduct. I like to think that in this "post car, post racist" age, there are better ways to organize a city.

A vocal movement of people opposed to the project already exists, check out gatewaysucks.org for more info. Similarly, the David Suzuki Foundation's briefing document (highly recommended reading) suggests that highway construction is only a (very) temporary solution to traffic congestion and ends up doing far more harm than good.

The answer to the traffic problem, according to almost everyone who studies the issue, is light rail and more busses. The B-Line experiment--articulated express busses to the university and the airport--has been such an overwhelming success in terms of ridership and affordability, why not replicate it everywhere else?

American Logs: A Photo Essay

An Evening Walk: Photo Essay

The European Hotel, Niagara Falls

Stuck in an Elevator

I spent an hour in the elevator at work today with one of my co-workers. For the first twenty minutes it would jump up three floors and then jerkily drop a couple. Eventually we got in touch with security over the emergency phone and they managed to stop the car inbetween the eleventh and twelfth floors.

It took the Otis repairman fourty five minutes to get there at which point I had taught the girl my foolproof Tic-Tac Toe strategy which she immediately used to defeat me.

In better news, Nick and I pulled off our first catered dinner in grand style. We served four courses and earned all kinds of amazing compliments. Looks like we might be doing a couple more very soon. We started with Nick's very own "pear and butternut squash soup with a blue cheese coulis, grilled pear slices and chopped pecans. Following this was a salad with both white and green asparagus, cherry tomatos and roasted red pepper dressed in garlic parsely oil. The main course was a beef tenderloin steak, on a plate with mascarpone mashed potatoes, bacon wrapped green beans and a veal bone demiglace. The dessert was homemade cheesecake topped with a blueberry wine reduction and organic blueberries that came from Nick's family blueberry farm.

I served and helped plate the food, poured the five different wines, made the coffee and after dinner decanted Courvoisier into the hostess's family heirloom brandy serving tray (or whatever it was), cleaned up and was out of there in five hours. It was unbelievably smooth. The only thing I was worried about was that at the rates we charged the couple, we had no backup ingredients in case something went wrong.

My Reading List

Something which I think needs repeating is that Anarchism is not just some hardline ideological position (although many assholes indeed practice it that way). Charles Demers' interview with SFU professor Mark Leier, author of Bakunin, for The Tyee, is refreshing in that neither man is trying to one up the other which allows for a pretty earnest discussion.

Leier: No, I don't think bowling leagues are the anarchist utopia, but they, like much of our lives outside of the workplace, are organized without hierarchy and oppression; the most meaningful, truly human parts of our lives already work best when organized on anarchist principles. Yet I also believe that in its function as critique and as a vision of the future -- perhaps the only one that doesn't end in our extinction as a species, or, as Orwell put it, as a jackboot smashing a human face, forever -- anarchism is not only desirable but possible and necessary.

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Planet of Slums by Mike Davis is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the major social issues that will define the next century (massive rural-urban migration, the disintegration of the post-colonial state, exploding megalopolis' of absolute poverty). He's also a magnificent writer. In fact, I'm so impressed, I plan on reading his earlier book, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001) as soon as I pay off my library fines.

If you want a taste of the book, you can read Davis' original article for the New Left Review or dig up that New Yorker from a few months ago with George Packer's article on Lagos.

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After informing the world of my love for Faulkner (really anything southern), many suggested that I check out Carson McCullers and so I'm reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Some of her characters thus far are too obviously vehicles for ideas rather than people, and her dialogue can be a bit grating (especially her black characters) but overall this book has won me over (and I'm only half way through).

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So what's your favourite new Neon Bible (Arcade Fire) song? Currently I'm digging The Well and the Lighthouse but that's just because it's the obvious catchy one.

Pictures from an Abandoned School in New Orleans One Year After Katrina

Jesus Loves Me, This I Know

This is an altar in America's oldest house, New Mexico, taken in June of 2006.

The Native American Church is a syncretic religion, formed in the late nineteenth century, combining the practices of psychedelic shamanism with Christianity. The cactus, Peyote, is ingested and allows the participants to talk directly with Jesus.

Jesus Loves Me is a traditional Christian hymn, reworked by Everette Red Bear and Sandor Iron Rope of the Native American Church. It's drum, rattle and a two part harmony and is sung in a mixture of languages.



Chief Quannah Parker, the father of the movement, once said, "The White Man goes into his church and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his Tipi and talks with Jesus" In this sense, the lyrics: "Jesus loves me this I know, because the bible tells me so," when sang by Red Bear and Iron Rope, take on almost satirical meaning. To people who talk directly with Jesus and can experience his love first hand, what use is the bible?

Brick Lane Beigel Shop


photo taken by Elisa in London