January 22, 2016
Old version of the World Passport, from 1979
The website of the organization that issues this passport, the World Government of World Citizens and its associated World Service Authority (WSA), has a quote from Einstein:
So long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.
January 18, 2016
I made this fur lifejacket partly in homage to Meret Oppenheim, one of the founders of surrealism and most famous for her “Object in Fur,” a fur teacup and spoon. Oppenheim is yet another woman artist who did not receive the credit or status she was due.
January 15, 2016
“Haste doesn’t live here,” says one sign on the door. Another inside says “Nothing in this room is for sale.” An Italian woman named Chiara Vigo is the last living master of the ancient textile tradition of spinning “baysuss” or silk produced from the fibres exuded by a giant mediterranean mollusc.
January 2, 2016
I can’t get this article out of my mind, more than all the ones I read on terrorism and violence in 2015. I’m not sure why. It’s by Vijay Prashad, educated in the US and working out of New Delhi.
December 29, 2015
Trees on Boxing Day 2015, Vancouver Island. Our new summer droughts haven’t killed the rainforest yet! Happy New Year, everyone.
December 5, 2015
This is a “flicker light” from my childhood. The green lacquer coating on the bulb is coming off, but amazingly it still works. It makes a soft tinking sound as the filaments hit the glass on either side.
November 20, 2015
The urban planning disasters of the 1960s in Britain. We think we have learned from them, but have we?
Start watching the video at 14:00 if you don’t want to watch the whole documentary, which is a sort of myth-busting look at the 60s in England.
November 19, 2015
A friend and I arrived in Paris in 2005 at the tail end of a an anti-Bush, anti-war protest in the Bastille. This poster had been left behind and I kept it.
November 12, 2015
Sociologist Harvey Molotch
“A city and, more generally, any locality, is conceived as the areal expression of the interests of some land-based elite.”
Harvey Molotch‘s seminal 1976 article “The City as Growth Machine”—which is equally applicable today—just happened to be published the same year of the UN Habitat Conference on Settlements that took place in Vancouver (and is the subject of my upcoming book).
Just breathe, your life means nothing and your children’s lives are worth nothing and the only thing that matters is the almighty dollar
Yoga instructor:
“OK good, now hinge at the hips but don’t flip the tailbone and feel that stretch right from the heels to the tips of the fingers and come into the present moment, and dog stretch, and don’t think about this town, and if I see one more man with a bun, not a ponytail but an honest to god bun with an honest-to-god SCRUNCHIE and those birkenstocks like he’s some kind of homeless samurai… And he’s the one turning me down!
