engine failure

after listening to the new kate bush album nearly every day, sometimes twice a day for two weeks now, i've finally determined the climax. it's the bit at about 8min into nocturn, when she says
LOOK AT THE LIGHT
ALL THE TIME IT'S A CHANGING
LOOK AT THE LIGHT
CLIMBING UP THE AERIAL

i've also been listening to a lot of solo guitar pieces. bruce cockburn, michael hedges, pat metheny, and tony rice. i think i will ask my father for advice on some pierre bensusan albums soon. the michael hedges song bensusan is incredible. listen: bensusan. i'm finally getting into jane siberry's the walking too, after three years.

there are 100 senators in the united states. just 100. i cannot imagine the compromises that those 100 senators have had to make just tobecome and remain senators.

andrea, my professor is into post-modern history, but most of the class isn't, it seems. today's lecture was about myths, and the undoubtable fact that myths are their own truth! what is true and what is myth becomes intertwined, because myth informs reality! and reality informs myth! it is a constant dialogue. when i tell history, i am reading my own time into it. i am glad that i am still getting so much enjoyment out of history. we got a great story about kit carson today. also, the creation of indian identity by eastern photograhers who wanted to document the 'real indian' before they all died... they would only photograph those indians that looked indian enough for them. oh, the layers! i really can't wait to see the cultural theorists tear into da vinci's inquest/da vinci's city hall one day!

boat ride to skidegate

i had a lot to say earlier about the civic elections, but my browser crashed and it all disappeared. to summarize, though, i was fairly accurate about the races in vancouver and surrey. some names were surprising, but i got the overall ratios correct. i've also been quite sad about what a mised opportunity the last three years were, also i wonder what this whole crazy COPE thing means, in general, and what lessons we can draw. ultimately, it was a dull, dull election. our friend john-henry was elected in chilliwack as a school trustee, though, so it was all worthwhile! i'm proud of not lifting a finger, expect to vote. if i don't believe in a candidate, i'm not going to help them out, and that's why i'm not a hack.

i start work on the federal thursday afternoon, with ian. i'm waiting until my term paper is done. i did a fair amount of work on it today, and i think i've got a strong grasp on the american side of the equation now, which was holding me back before. the key now will be to make sure that the two are balanced, with enough pages left to do a proper comparison, as well as elucidation of some novel points, such as george melnyk's caudillo complex. i expect that andrea won't like the paper, as i sense that she dislikes political histories, but i'm going forward nonetheless.

easter weekend in april 2005, following the first several days of the ballot count, was an exciting time. we went to port alberni and ate out a lot. at this point i knew that elinor, garett, apaak and i had won, dave had lost, and that amanda and kevin were still up in the air. i knew all weekend that i had a place for the next year, but the nature of it would not be determined until those latter races had been concluded. i read a lot that weekend, four books of northwest coast lit.
sheila peters, tending the remnant damage
zsuzsi gartner, all the anxious girls on earth
eden robinson, monkey beach, and
amanda hale, sounding the blood
the latter i finished on the ferry back from duke point, late monday night. it was all escape, cedar forests and lots of green. the way that veda hille's album for emily carr sounds. the way emily carr's paintings look. dense, rich, green. the trip we took to the island over new year was memorable too, driving to long beach to see my poor unhappy parents in uclulet. the foliage changes, somewhere around kennedy lake. trees get stunted. i imagine the yukon to be similar, small foliage, hardy, thick tough leaves. i'll need to do a similar trip this year, even if just for a few days. i need to read more for my own enjoyment.

in april, that weekend, we just hid out and read books, going out for meals, driving out to tofino and back.

i'll learn to drive, and we'll head out through the province. i'd like to see the kootenays, the cariboo, the north coast, the peace river. i love the fraser canyon, boston bar, lytton, yale. i love the city, but i've been in it too long, just now.

electric eyes

this is a patchwork of several recent posts that i saved as drafts recently but never returned to, in point form.

• an important project for me lately has been listening to an album consistently to understand it, rather than keeping it on the shelf to preserve the mystery. kate bush's aerial has been on constantly since tuesday.
  
• kate bush's never for ever is a patchy album at best. aerial stands with the dreaming, hounds of love, and the sensual world.
  
• i am sleeping better, now. for the first two weeks after we discovered the bedbugs i would wake up every several hours, feeling around for bugs, imagining them everywhere, biting, hiding, nesting in our home. i've been so exhausted this week that i've slept though the night; i think i'm over the bugs, at last. our apartment is still a disaster, however. our clean clothes are in rubbermaid containers piled in the living room. we just want to move. luckily, we are next up on the internal move list for a two-bedroom townhouse, which would be less than $100 more per month.
  
• if i don't have a better job lined up by march, i'll have to run again for my current position. it would be a fun election. oh, the slogans! higher, faster, stronger, HARDER! almost as good as Get MORE... Vote MOORE! and Go With The BEST... Jim BESTER for COUNCIL!, both of which i've seen in surrey this civic election.
  
• i'm still grappling with my civic ballot. i do not know who to vote for.
  
• my mother and i have both put our names in to the surrey civic coalition to help with e-day, but at e-7, there's been no response. they're letting a golden opportunity slip from their grasp through simple lack of organization.
  

three songs:
elvis costello, radio radio - it's been in my head since caelie's post the other day.
rush, subdivisions - i love the synths! horrid lyrics, but a wonderful propulsion.
phoebe snow, poetry man - i think amanda might like this. i love it.

deeper understanding

apparently, france has asked canada for advice on how to make multicultural peace. they're having some trouble, in france, with what it measn to be 'french'. see, immigration happens when you need people in your country. canada made multiculturalism the 'thing to do' because we needed more people, fast, and shipping them in was the easiest. it was convenient, too, because there was no preexisting consensus on what it meant to be 'canadian'. it was very easy for trudeau to say that canada meant multiculturalism, because there were no other handy definitions to hold up in opposition. canada means multiculturalism; why not?

france has a difficult task. there are not enough french people anymore. they're "below replacement rate"; that means that they're not making enough babies. so, easy, ship in people from overseas, make them french too: instant population growth! sustained productivity! also, enough young people to sustain our elderly in their dotage. the french have had a definition for 'french' for ages, though, and it has never included their former colonies, for example. so now, the task is to redefine france to include all of these new people that have never been capital-F-French before. it's a fucking hard project. the benefit to having no agreed upon national identity is being able to avoid the horrible growing pains that we are seeing right now in france.

wait, further, we don't know what this experiment will lead to in canada! we should be waiting for a good hundred years before going into the cultural consulting business. we're only on the second generation of official multiculturalism now; all sorts of things could be lurking in our future. who knows what time bombs my generation has been planted with?

i'm hung up on the creation of national identity in part because we've been reading about louis riel again in class. the metis rebellion represents the first real roadblock to westward expansion in canada. louis riel fancied himself "the prophet of the new world", and studied theology. the dispute is often seen as a 'racial' dispute, but there are major threads of regionalism and class mixed in there too. the rebellion is often seen as a fight to preserve native traditions of stewardship and such, but the land system that the metis were initially protecting was the seignurial system, developed by french settlers along the banks of the st. lawrence:long strips of land, extending out from the river, so that everyone has a bit of riverfront property.
louis riel was hung as a traitor, convicted of treason: what does that mean? to be treasonous is to betray, implying that riel had already declared allegiance. allegiance to what?

wait, what do these words mean? i.e. it is one thing to say 'trans-inclusive', and it is another thing entirely to know why we say it. 'multiculturalism' and the associated racially diverse government advertising campaigns are the same.

i had a good three hour long conversation with a colleague today that i have never really talked to. it was a day full of self-actualization, personal worth from professional work. i do my job well, and it means a lot to me to have the respect of others who also do their jobs well. it's like the valley!