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.
“It wasn’t war, it was butchery”
January 2, 2016
The rainforest, long may it last
December 29, 2015
Trees on Boxing Day 2015, Vancouver Island. Our new summer droughts haven’t killed the rainforest yet! Happy New Year, everyone.
Balafire flicker bulb
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.
Have we learned nothing from the 60s UK demolitions?
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.
Bush: terrorist No. 1
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.
Harvey Molotch’s “The City as Growth Machine”
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).
…release and just feel the weight of the world on your back and it’s crushing you
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!
This is what the 80s were really like: a permanent Rickroll
November 7, 2015
I was there; I should know. As one caption to this video read, very accurately, “this is what it was like 24/7.”
I went looking for clothes the other day but everything was 80s, badly printed shirts and high waisted jeans the colour of skim milk.
Pied Beauty
October 30, 2015
In spite of being completely irreligious and not fond of any of the patriarchal monotheisms with fathery deities, I still love this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins from 1877. We studied it in high school and for some reason I never forgot it.
The Tudor house, colonialism, white gold and toothache
October 20, 2015
“This is why we love the Tudor period so much, because it’s the age of discovery, and there’s a sense that anything was possible.”
“Discovery”?
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