Midwife Support Site for Joanne Daviau

The situation I blogged about here concerning Joanne Daviau’s Supreme Court appeal is still in process, now preparing for the Hospital Appeal Board. If you wish to support Joanne, you can find more info and a way to send a letter on her behalf here at the Support Joanne website, that some of her supporters have put together.

It’s been really gratifying to see the positive and sincere responses in the comments to my original post about this situation. With this kind of support I firmly believe that Joanne deserves a concerted turn-around when the Hospital Appeal Board hears her case.

Find more info on the situation from my additional post here, that I put out after the Comox local paper covered the case.

All Murakami, All the Times!

All Murakami, all the time. I first saw Murakami in the Superflat show at the Henry in Seattle several years ago. We got the big Murakami book and now I see there is wonderful coverage of the Murakami show in NY – including a feature in the Times Magazine. For a taste, here’s the slide show from the NYTimes, and their video of the opening.

Bridging Media – Coming Soon

I’m really looking forward to the Bridging Media event this Saturday, where I’ll be moderating one of the panels – and taking in the rest. I’ve been helping out a bit with this and its a great example of a free community event that shows how quickly and directly a good event idea can become a reality. Here’s a posting from the Alphablogs site:

Looks like this will be one of those “mark your calendar” events in Vancouver.

Bridging Media: Addressing the Challenges - this Saturday, March 29, 2008, 9:45 am – 3pm
Aimed to provide a bridge between the two communities of film/television and interactive/social media, I think this event comes just at the right time. The expertise we have here in Vancouver is remarkable, leading in the field. The panelists  assembled for this event have a lot to share in the short time they have available, so it looks like the whole day will be power-packed.

The tools are here and easier to use than ever, and the panelists are articulate and experienced in the slippery ever-shifting world of web/mobile/social media. Its free, its informative and it can change what you think you might know about social media, and more. Plus there is a door prize: a free pass to nextMEDIA, just before the Banff Television Festival.

Want to know who’ll be there? Go to the registration site and take a peek.
And did I mention that lunch is sponsored? Yes it is a free lunch!

Brainchild of Megan Cole and Erica Hargreave, the event now has a terrific team putting this together, with good will and sharp skills: Cinci Csere, Monique Trottier and Monica Hamburg. I’m really glad to help out with this event and be in their company!

Digitalis Digital Art Returns (but not really)

So glad to see that the DDAS material has been rebuilt and posted – if nothing else just to have a record of the international exhibitions that were put up over the past 5 years of the society’s operations.

From Digitalis 5, BCDL by Francesco Schiavon and Tris by James K-M

In the Spiritual in Digital Art show (Feb -March 2003), one component didn’t make it to this archive site. It was a web radio broadcast we did including music from submissions worldwide, programmed to self-run for the duration of the exhibition. At the same time, audio interviews with the artists were in rotation along with the music, so it made for a very complete presentation. I did the interviews, and Francesco programmed the radio. We also had text interviews by email, which were posted along with the exhibition on the DDAS site. At any rate, you can go here to see the archive.

(Surprise: Link here to see a random post from my blog.)

Some Photos of Nanoose

Here I am reading on the deck at Nanoose

Steps to the dock

James on the deck

Roses and Sky

Indoors, escaping mosquitos

September days

English flower garden

Clear water in the bay

(Link here for a random post from my blog.)

Not so fast there, Carol

Now house-sitting in beautiful Nanoose Bay I wake to the birds and we sit on the deck overlooking the water, the houses across the bay, the mountain beyond. Views of Mount Fuji make sense to me now as this mountain is everchanging and each time I look the light the sky the time of day the mountain itself seems to change. My cousin’s place is exquisite and personal, lovingly made by hand – a new gazebo sitting place with wicker (plastic weatherproof wicker that is) furniture set, and the play of light on the cedar is so great to see.

The internet connection is so slow here, and we have to use their PC with dialup – my laptop languishes upstairs, waiting for me to take her to a wifi cafe in the nearest city, Nanaimo, which looks like it has only one, or maybe two? Vancouver has spoiled me for connectivity and I made some assumptions about the access that others have – wrong again.

But communication by bird and by dream seems just fine, and this is only day 3!

(Surprise: Link here to see a random post from my blog.)

Listening to Stefan Tischler on Six Degrees Traveler

Right now I’m listening to the music of our friend Stefan Tischler, played every two hours on the iTunes radio station Six Degrees Traveler, for one week. Sounds great!

Here’s a link to the video I did of Stefan before he left to go back to New York for a while.

(Surprise: Link here to see a random post from my blog.)

What’s Happening in Vancouver?

Here’s a great new site from the prolific Rosie! Check out her new listing of free and near-free Vancouver events here at her new VanCal site. Updates, reviews, upcoming event listings, its all there!

Here’s what she says about VanCal:

 

We have a young family and full time jobs, student loans and a mortgage. Access to the arts isn’t just the purview of the upper middle class, it’s available to everyone. You just need to know where to look.

VanCal is a calendar for everyone who wants to get out and enjoy arts and culture in Vancouver but can’t afford the Chan Centre. The information is collected from the free publications and wherever I hear about it – the important thing is to get out there and support Vancouver’s vibrant arts community.

(Surprise: Link here to see a random post from my blog.)

Female Empiratement

Here’s a great review Rosie wrote in Facebook – I thought it was definitely worth sharing here:

10:41pm Wednesday, Jul 4
Yes, I saw it. I’m sure you did too. Pirates of The Caribbean, Part Trois. It was a predictably enjoyable romp through Disney’s battery of ethnic stereotypes. However I found the surprise surrealist moments worth their weight in gold bullion – any movie that can roll out that many minutes of Johnny Depp ordering himself around a pirate ship manned entirely by his doubles and make it work gets a bottle of rum and a chain of shrunken heads from me!

Really however I found it to be one of the more effective feminist stories I’ve seen for a while (or perhaps I’m just desperate for positive female storylines after reading Hedda Gabler and the Oresteia – see my blog for those discussions!). Strong females are hard to come by nowadays and weirdly, by not making it an issue at all, Pirates achieves what I had formerly thought of as the unachievable: powerful people who happen to also be beautiful, effective, and self-actualizing women. Very cool. Sure, Keira Knightly doesn’t unclench her jaw/unpout her lips unless she’s screaming about the death of some ex-lover, but if that’s what she has to do to be both tough and sassy at the same, heck, I’ll forgive her. After all, the gal’s fight scenes, military prowess, and milky-white-bare-thigh-at-sunset matches that of any of the men on the show.

The other female in the story is played by Naomie Harris (you’ll remember her tough ass in 28 Days Later), luminescent as the mysteriously powerful Tia Dalma. What? A witch? Played with tender positivity and darkly-sourced strength? This has got to be a dream. Amazing portrayal of a great character.

And sure, you might say “Two Women in the movie?? Come on, that’s no great leap for womenkind”, but you’re ignoring the prominence, self-sufficiency, well-developed, and overall story-wide equality with the men in the script.

(Oh wait, I lied, there’s two Chinese pirate ho’s, 1 Asian-Aged-Geisha Pirate Captain who just screams a lot, and two pasty european prostitutes, to round out the picture, but I blame Disney for all of them!)

(Surprise: Link here to see a random post from my blog.)

Food, the Final Frontier

Last Saturday we went to the Trout Lake Farmer’s Market, and strolled along through the happy people buying organic veggies and lining up for tomatoes, tasting artisan cheeses and feeling very healthy and environmentally good. The trucks parked in the lot were marked with the names of the farms and growers, and the food was bright and sparkling in the sunshine. A beautiful experience, but very expensive. In the world of healthy goodness, this is very high end – to buy direct from the grower who has trucked the newly picked veggies in to the market. It is a charming scene, a theatre of food and choices. Well, after spending over $40 on some lovely basil and mushrooms, a bag of fresh picked peas and some delicious organic cherries – oh and don’t forget the amazing pickled beets, we still needed groceries. So it was goodbye to the theatre, the play of being a certain kind of shopper.

On the way home we stopped at the Sunrise Market on Gore, and we had our Sunrise yellow and red shopping bags at the ready. Who knows who grew these veggies? I pushed into the Saturday crowd at Sunrise. They are not so artisanal – Chinese shoppers mix with East Side residents and a few others. Foodies? I don’t think so. I got red peppers, veggie chicken, tofu, organic oats for oatmeal, free range eggs, romaine, green onions, radishes, zucchini, tomatoes, dark apricots, grapes, and more for under $40. Was this so different from the trendy market? Well, yes. The woman who was yelling in Chinese at the man who was selling her chicken was getting the best she could out of the Sunrise market, not playing at buying, then bringing home a precious potato or a rare hand-selected edible frond.

McLuhan had it right when he said, “Past times become pastimes.” The farmers’ market has become an entertainment. I am somehow reminded of those science fiction stories in which there is a rare plant that yields food and people kill one another for it, the shards of the past life being held as ultra-valuable. The only way to do this right is to grow a garden of your own. Then the sheer wealth of nature reveals itself. You can’t even give away all the zucchini harvest!

But I’ll keep going to the market from time to time. It is, after all, real food, and the taste of some of these fresh veggies can be very intense – compared with the iceberg lettuce versions of irradiated genetically modified commodified food shipped to us in containers from all over the world – grown who knows where by who knows who in who knows what.

And about the iceberg, we’ve seen a fantastic iceberg wedge served as a salad at Joe Fortes – looks elegant, tastes crisp, and it has an ironic fun quality. I think I’ll pick some up at Sunrise next time I’m there!

(Surprise: Link here to see a random post from my blog.)