indifference

-tonight i've been reading up on the issue of illegal migrant workers in the u.s., and various political responses and plans. it's a big deal. here's a great take from a political angle: The impetus for addressing this issue is not coming from the political strategists, who see it as too problematic to make a good wedge issue. The pressure is coming up from the grassroots. That makes it really interesting. US politics always gets intriguing when it escapes the management of the professionals and reflects the actual concerns of regular citizens. i like that a lot. this is actually happening. In Los Angeles, an estimated 500,000 protesters objected to a U.S. House bill that would make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally, impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants and erect fences along one-third of the U.S.-Mexican border.

-the question of xenophobia is an interesting one, and is also something that i grappled with a lot this spring while arguing about internationalization at sfu.

-i live in the official neighbourhood of kensington-cedar cottage. i sent an e.mail to the city yesterday, asking to be kept informed of futrure planning meetings of the future of the broadway/commercial transit village. i use that corner almost every day of my life.

-leonid brezhnev spent the last five years as leader of the soviet union completely doped up on tranquillizers. he would do business from his hospital bed. politburo meetings would last for 20 minutes at most. the word of the year: gerontocracy. i means "rule by old people".

-a joke: "in america, you can always find a party. in soviet russia, the party always finds you". apparently that's from a 1980's beer commercial.

sound dust

a note:
- i know that it will be summer time soon, because i want to drink beer. i don't drink a lot of beer during the winter. i prefer wine, or gin. last weekend i bought a box of pale ale. today gin and choice was on special, but i had a pint of keith's instead. the buzz from cold beer on a warm day is better than red wine. it feels good.

songs from my iTunes on shuffle(4478 songs, over 12 days straight), with stories

1. bruce cockburn, call it democracy, live 1997: i can't recall ever not listening to bruce cockburn. i was mildly interested until 1997, when i got the charity of night, which is still a favourite album of mine. i listened to it continuously for several months. this song is a didactic, as one can guess from the title. i like this version for the guitar sound. it's his electric resonator guitar, heavily distorted.
   
2. crash vegas, linoleum, 1995: a long defunct canadian band. again, a favourite album of mine in 1999. i listened to this album a lot. fern gave me two songs on a mix tape when we worked at purdys, and then lent me the album. i think it is out of print now.
   
3. mark eitzel, can you see, 2001: in 1998, i was determined to collect anything and everything produced by mitchell froom and tchad blake. to that end, i bought an american music club album that they'd made(mercury, 1993) and soon began collecting mark eitzel albums. a boring story. this is one of the few songs i like on this album, which is overproduced and dull. the booklet has a photo of a space shuttle launching, which i like a lot.
   
4. elvis costello and burt bacharach, toledo, 1998: i bought this for burt bacharach, not elvis costello, who i find irritating. this is a very 'adult' album. what does that even mean? i love burt bacharach. my dad got a free ticket to see him at the orpheum last month and reported that it was 'cheesy'. well, yeah, obviously. oh well. i like to song a lot. a trumpet line!
   
5. david bowie, big brother, 1974: my friend rich LOVES bowie, and made me listen to bowie. now i love bowie. well, some bowie. i like diamond dogs and hunky dory especially. the only album i own, however is reality, from 2003. odd.
   
6. veda hille, wrong, 1999: on an absolute whim in 2001, i went down to the east van cultural centre to the release show for field study. since then, i have seen maybe 5 more shows. to be honest, i first listened to bowie because veda hille did life on mars as an encore at that first show, and i loved the melody. i remembered the lyrics and looked up the song. it was bowie!
   
7. new york city, take my hand, 1974: from saint etienne's songs for mario's cafe. while i have listened to this a lot, i associate it with coming back from kamloops, october 2004. it also ended up on my 'my hotel year' album at the end of the year, collecting songs that i listened to a lot while staying at the delta hotel for the citizen's assembly.
   
8. fairport convention, one sure thing, 1968: fairport are part of the richard thompson extended network. this is the worst of their first four albums, an awfully amateur debut. po-faced psychedelia.
   
9. joe jackson, it's different for girls, live 2003: an incredible song! the best live show i've seen was joe jackson at the commodore in 2003. one of my favourite songs.
   
10. dusty springfield, in the land of make believe, 1969: my most played song to date: 6 times! all this when i still have 2000+ songs that i have not heard even once. this song is the key to the album and as a result is very special.
    
11. paul simon, hearts and bones, 1984: this album is a confluence of cold war paranoia, rumination on belonging, and nostalgia. it is also another hit from my dad's record collection that i've picked up myself. one of my favourite records.
    
12. the lilac time, in iverna gardens, 1993: a crazy story. my dad lent me a tape of rickie lee jones' pop pop in 1996 or so. i was uninterested; covers of old pop songs, whatever. on the other side was something called 'the lilac time - astronauts'. not knowing which was the band and which was the album, i tried listening. i loved it, and listened to the tape for a good four years before i found out who the band were, where they were from, or whether they still existed. it is a story of faith! the album is pastoral. gorgeous production.
    
13. beck, the golden age, 2002: the only beck album i've ever liked. supposedly a 'morose and dull' album. i bought this used on a whim. i like it, but not enough to try anything else.
    

the box above my head

it feels good to campaign again. it's a good feeling. time moves differently. the endorphins and adrenaline are kicking in. on two hours of sleep, i managed a fairly solid day of campaigning.

everyone that i've worked closely with this year has either encouraged me to run for re-election or un-reservedly endorsed my candidacy for senate. the few administrators that are also students are voting for me. even if i don't win, i will take this support as a strong indication of a successful year. even those that i have argued against at times are supporting me. my name and face recognition is still high, too. i feel respected, and i am grateful. i am still glad that i'm not running for re-election to the executive. it's a mantra now: work with good people; all else will follow.

i am eager for the next set of american presidential primaries to begin. it is a unique and intensely surreal electoral process. i was nervous for several months before the 2004 election, kerry v. bush because i was so unsure of what the deciding issues in the race would end up being. i'm still not sure what happened. i think this was the crux: when someone offers you a cheesehead, don't ask for wine, just put it on your head and take a seat at lambeau field!. remember that? wow. THAT was what mattered in 2004. i've been reading up in anticipation of november '08, and the midterms in '06. look at this: forward together. i think that pop-up is going to lose him support.

news from the front

new records today!

• belle and sebastian, the life pursuit, 2006
  
• leonard cohen, the future, 1992
  
• destroyer, destroyer's rubies, 2006
  
• donald fagen, morph the cat, 2006
  
• his name is alive, detrola, 2005
  

the real canadian superstore

i was having a BAD DAY until i got to commercial and broadway this morning, when i began to have a GOOD DAY. three reasons for that:
+ an ad for long distance phone plans in a bus shelter, which was a big map of north america, divided by states and provinces, on which each name was 'vancouver'. there was north vancouver and lake vancouver and new vancouver and many, many, vancouvers. every state, lake, province, and island was called VANCOUVER. it made me so happy!

+ humming leonard cohen, 'democracy'. from the brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet. Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

+ my coffee was already there for me when i got to the till at blenz, because i get a double espresso from them every day and they know me.

other points.
+ i made a new friend today! how lovely!

+ we will be moving may 1 into a townhouse in the coop. the interior work will likely be finished in april, so we will be able to move gradually, over the span of several weeks. how relaxing!

+ i won an election w/o any effort at all. i can only assume that i won on people's faith that i would do a good job, despite my lack of previous experience in the job. i'll be working for a semester with several people that i know to be really good, and others that i don't know well yet. work with good people. all else will follow.

+ i am sitting on two search committees for the university right now, and am learning an incredible amount about the way the world works. i am also feeling especially competent about my knowledge of the university's recent history. i know more about the department of student services than many people in very senior positions within the broader university. we have engaged an executive search firm: korn ferry. crazy! shortlisting is a strange process, and one in which i am torn between the hive mind and anxiety of influence. the skill to effectively shortlist candidates and defend selections is one i am glad to develop. also, watching some very professional people and others less-so going though the same process is invaluable in and of itself.

+ thinking about iPods and politics and the effects of absenting oneself from daily conversation. i wish i could avoid the chatter on buses to and from school. there is always awkwardly strained conversation as people who barely know each other and do not, in fact, want to talk, feel forced to chat after bumping into each other on the bus. witnessing awkward moments of this nature stresses me out. this is why i avoid stand-up comedy. i have had, for several months now, a very difficult time focusing on anything but these incredibly banal conversations when i am within earshot. i want a portable personal music player again, to block it all out!

i saved an article from the globe about '(i)pod-people', suggesting that our collective fixation with developing our own intensely personal playlists, rather than listening to, for example, radio stations has led to a vacuum of collective culture. this impacts politics, where, after not finding a candidate to exactly match our personal 'playlist' of criteria, we turn off of politics altogether. as we absent ourselves from mass cultural phenomena, do we also enter an age of personal politics? not individualism, but simply an aversion to any collective expression of politics that would dilute personal 'playlists'? gasp, the end of democracy! these are fun things to think about.

+ reading margaret atwood's 'dancing girls' again. i read it last in november 2001. i feel blind for several pages of each story, until i get through enough to remember how i visualized the story upon first reading. i visualize stories very intensely, but without details. it's all very impressionist. lots of focus on specific colours, temperatures, weather, furnishings. no focus on people, or facial features. blank, shapeless people moving in intensely structured envorinments. i assume i do this because the stories provide the characterization, and i have to fill in the rest. it beomes frustrating when i remember a specific visual, but cannot recall where it came from.

the road goes no further than before

-i took the dog out two hours ago, and the ground was clear. since then it has snowed considerably! how exciting!

-i've saved an article from last saturday's globe and mail titled the killing machine. it is about the bird flu virus. i want all of you that doubt bird flu to read it. the killing machine.

-i've been in a stump all week. there are several reasons for this.

-tonight i found the diaryland website that i wrote some 250+ entries on between 2000-2003. i will not provide a link yet, as i'm not sure how comfortable i am sending everyone over there. it's autobiography, though, and i am glad it still exists on the internet as the archives i'd made on my old computer are gone. the title of the website: everyday, rock and roll is saving my life. i still appreciate the sentiment!

-i've really been enjoying gar's dream synopses. last night i had a dream too. the other side of 12th avenue was different: there were still houses, but they were on the edge of a long slope, thick with dry grass. there are similar fields in south surrey. i was on a bike ride west across town with my father and sister. i knew they were there, but they never entered the narrative. we got to victoria, where in each direction there were only fields. after commercial, 12th avenue became a dirt lane, with worn rocks. then there were buildings, small buildings, and big elm trees. not afternoon anymore, either, but 11.am on a bright summer day. this was main street. we went south several blocks and turned west into a lane. cobblestones. there was a brass band playing. still west, past the band, across a field with very loose, rocky soil and then into a series of garages, somehow connected underground by plywood passageways. the last one led to a set of stairs that opened into what was definitely the garage of my home in surrey. it was quite different. either were were moving in or someone else was moving in. still a summer day. this was the end of a much longer dream, i am sure, but that is all i can recollect.

-i'd go to bed, but i don't want to miss the snow.

toluene

notes:

• i am happy to be part of the burgeoning trout lake consensus around keeping the new rink and community centre in the same location. this evening, after voting again for option 'a' at this morning's meeting, i saw a sign tacked up in the park urging me to attend and vote for 'a' to preserve the park. excellent! the frustrating aspect of the meeting was the palpable distrust and cynicism with which most residents seem to be approaching the planning process.
  
• i want to know more about british india. this is a time and place about which i know very little, aside from the gandhi myth and vague images of opulence, heat, and the pathos of an empire in its last days.
  
• i have over one week's worth of music on my hard drive now. i have made a 'smart playlist' that lists every song that i have not yet played. once i hear the song, it disappears. i've been listening to new songs all day.
  
• an overdose of quinine can induce abortion.
  
• USDA regulations do not permit the addition of MSG to irradiated products.
  
• on that note, while last night was cultural theory, today has been food information and chemistry. i started reading a wikipedia article about berries, and have been led about through all sorts of food additives and different vegetables and am now reading about cargill foods.
  
• the global supply chains of modern food production are incredible. i read up on cargill initially in the summer of 2003, when we lived on dundas st. we'd take walks along commissioner street and look at the train yards. i saw a boxcar with 'cargill' on the side, and looked it up. cargill.
  
• we'll go for dim sum tomorrow morning, at the golden phoenix. after that, we'll go to superstore to buy a new electric kettle and a 12-can box of tonic water. see, today i got a bottle of plymouth gin and 4 limes. as there was no tonic in the house or at the husky station across the street, i had to drink wild turkey all day. what a shame.
  
• i listened to sarah mclachlan's fumbling towards ecstasy over and over again while re-reading the hobbit in... 1995? 1996? thereabouts. listening to the album now, i remember that i really enjoy it. it also makes me think of re-reading the hobbit
  
• i'd like to spend time getting drunk off of beer in cans at a local park this summer. maybe trout lake, maybe somewhere farther afield. perhaps we'll move by the time it gets hot, and we'll have a large patio for drinking on summer nights.
  
• we went to ubc on bicycles and found the paprican building. we also saw a large group of sheep. i want to go back and explore. it might be hard, as we'll be lacking the natural arrogance of students, and won't be senators of the institution. we won't have any friends in high places to get us out of trouble.
  
• reading about irradiation reminds me of how fascinated and horrified i was a a child reading about radon gas. it seeps out of cracks in basements. the silent killer.
  

the land of make believe

this evening i read warren zanes' dusty in memphis, a book all about the record. well, rather, it is a book about what the record is about. and, rather than being about the south, dusty in memphis is about a fantasy of the south. it is escapism. the questions of appropriation, authenticity, and appropriation are all germane as well.

i've never been enamored of the southern myth. initially, the book challenged me; why would i ever read an ethnography of the south? the album serves as a hook; i love the record, quite separately from any southern myth it relies upon. (in fact, the album is notable for it's relative lack of reliance on southern tropes) ultimately, the book both named and reinforced what i've always found difficult about the south: its unassailable authenticity within the popular american myth. i've never found 'the blues' aesthetically appealing, and whether that is based on issues of the 'aesthetic emotion' or an aversion to sticky questions of the authentic is hard to say. to what extent jerry wexler is exploiting that sense of 'real' in sending dusty springfield to memphis is a key part of the book. also, to what extent the south represented the 'make believe' that dusty always traded in, as an individual; is it merely more vaudeville, another mask.

remember moby's play album, looping alan lomax's recordings of old bluesmen over techno tracks? this book also clarifies what put me off so much about that enterprise (aside from the fact that i really didn't like the music). 'authenticity' was the word, again. by putting 'authentic' blues recordings in a techno context, moby made techno 'real'. those old blues records had 'feeling', see.

a lot of the current vancouver hipster fascination with 'roots' music is tied in with this as well. exclaim, canada's national indie rock tabloid, has a review section that used to be titled 'moonshine junction' and is now called 'wood, wires, and whiskey'. to make country more 'authentic', i.e. palatable for the hipster, the modifier 'alt-' has to be placed before it. the term 'roots' itself, which has come to refer to bluegras, country, and folk collectively, i guess, is so imbued with notions of authenticity and what is 'real' that it is, to me, a baffling term. rarely does a genre develop that is so overtly and unashamedly concerned with its own realness.

edit/update: to what extent is the south's authenticity reliant on dominant perceptions of its poverty and backwardsness?

here is dusty springfield, in the land of make believe, from dusty in memphis.

between the wars

+ we went to kitsilano for dinner last night, to the vineyard, which is open until 2 am. alright food, large portions, and good drink specials. i had a pint of kilkenny for 3.99, which is quite reasonable. it is the most beautiful beer i know. i could learn to love uberbrew, but why bother when there are any number of other, better beers out there to drink? uberbrew just isn't good.

+ i had a pint of stella artois yesterday. it tasted a bit scummy, and in retrospect i think it was just the first real pint out of the lines that day. it was beautiful, though. all sorts of bubbles.

+ going to kitsilano always reminds me of august 2004, when i tried to go to zulu records on a weekly basis to keep on top of incoming used albums. i read don delillo's underworld on the #9 broadway bus, back and forth. underworld is one of my very favourite books.

+ superman's song just came on shuffle. here it is for amanda: crash test dummies, 'superman's song'.
i have two albums. i listened to these in... 1994? the second, god shuffled his feet, is better overall. lost of songs about getting old and frail. the band flamed out pretty quickly, as i recall. the guy is still putting out oddities from his new home in the maritimes. i bet they'll be re-discovered in 20+ years and rehabilitated.

+ everything is phrased as a 'plus'. i do this deliberately.

the athletics of loss

+ my itunes is now at 2182 songs. that's 6 days 7 hours 18 minutes and 2 seconds. i am staying up far too late, because all of my favourite songs keep coming, one after another, constantly, never stopping. i wanmt to keep on listening all night and all day. i've quelled the urge to skip songs to find out what surprises are next in store. in the first 10 seconds of each song, i say 'i know this song. whatever. what's next!!'. one i get past that,. i'm fine. it's a problem. my sleep patterns are also a problem; i'm staying up too late again, and feeling bad all day as a result. i think i'll take this weekend to get back on track. lots of reading through the day.

+ i listened to the leslie feinberg talk that everyone's buzzing about and got two lessons out of it.

1. it's like this: ()
   
2. class is the root of oppression
   

i learned that from mark leier in 2002-3 in my labour studies 101/301 courses. the intersection of class/race/gender was really key. identity-based oppression as an economic strategy. there are a lot of very successful upper-class queers in the world to back that up. the question is whether communists are queers or whether queers are communists. i trust that people more interested in the topic will get back to me.

+ we won't be snowshoeing after all, so i will spend friday reading at home and listening to my my record collection. i will be reading soviet history, mostly.

+ on inertia, again: i never want to take the dog out to the park, but when i am there i am happy. every single time. tomorrow i will take the dog out in the afternoon.

+ all sorts of courses that i want to take this summer, including the following:

• cmns 130 - explorations in mass communication (distance)
  
• geog 312 - geography of natural hazards
  
• hist 300 - approaches to history
  
• hist 338 - world war two (distance)
  
• hist 339 - the british empire and commonwealth (distance)
  
• hist 436 - british columbia
  
• pol 324 - the canadian constitution
  
• pol 327 - globalization and the canadian state
  
• pol 329 - selected topics in canadian government and politics