climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Posts about Canada’s capital city, and the experience of living there
A friend took me to a concert yesterday, with Wilderness of Manitoba opening for Bastia Bulat. I am always nervous about asserting what musical genre something is, but both had distinctly folky elements.
I would recommend giving both a listen, if you get the opportunity.
My photos from VERSeFest are now on Flickr. They are from two events: Urban Legends, on Friday night, and Capital Slam, on Saturday night.
I wrote about the festival previously.
I went to a slam poetry event at Ottawa’s VERSeFest tonight, and it was extremely good. The speakers were very talented, and the crowd was duly appreciative.
For the most part, the poets were very critical of government policy and society in general. I suppose that is normal at these events, which have a certain idealistic revolutionary flavour. At the end, I wished I had a chance to respond to some of the speakers and say that, for the most part, problems persist because they are difficult to solve, not because people are malevolent. More often, they are just focused on other priorities, or blocked by structural constraints and the inherent difficulty of solving enduring problems. All that said, a lack of compassion is definitely one reason why problems like homelessness endure, and poetry is a medium that seems capable of encouraging greater compassion.
This is the first time this particular festival is being held, and it seems to involve a tonne of different events. Tomorrow (Saturday, March 13th) is the last day, with a bilingual poetry event at 1:30pm, Japanese form poetry at 3:00pm, a Dusty Owl Reading Series event at 5:00pm, and a closing ceremony at 7:00pm.
Passes for the day are $10, and available at Arts Court (2 Daly Avenue), The Manx (370 Elgin Street), and Collected Works (1242 Wellington Street).
I have about eight gigabytes of RAW image files from the event to process, but I will definitely put up a link to the Flickr set once I have dealt with them.
My friend Ann had an essay on parenting published in The Globe and Mail today: “My kid isn’t special, and neither is yours“.
She raises some interesting points about the expectations of parents, as well as the ways in which it is challenging to think objectively about your own child.
I mentioned before how my friend Andrea Simms-Karp is producing a new album. This past weekend, I got some photos of her in the studio working on it.
This is pretty neat: the City of Ottawa has created an iPhone app with information on events and activities ongoing in the city. Versions for Android and BlackBerry are forthcoming, later this year.
Having a lot of this kind of information centralized in one place seems useful, particularly in a form tailored to be accessible from smartphones.
On Tuesday, I was in the Ottawa Hospital for what turned out to be the final x-ray for my broken clavicle (there comes a point when checking on progress isn’t worth the time and radiation exposure). I brought along my camera to photograph the x-ray on screen. While I was going from station to station with paperwork, it occurred to me that photographing a hospital with official permission would be fascinating and would have artistic and historical importance.
People assume that there is no need to document how things are now, since they will always basically be this way. But that simply isn’t true. Photos of hospitals from the 1950s are interesting today, and they have historical importance. They show how we treated people who were injured, sick, or dying at that point in time – which is an important reflection on a society or civilization as a whole.
If you had official permission, you could get amazing access. Of course, you would also need to get releases from any patients, visitors, and staff you photographed. In the end, though, you would have some solid information on the state of Ontario’s medical system at this juncture in time.
I don’t have time for such a project at the moment, but it is something for my ‘someday/maybe’ to do list.
While blogs like Apt 613 are a great way to get information on Ottawa happenings, there is a case to be made for going out and buying a book once in a while. That is particularly true when it comes to a well-researched, informative, and up-to-date offering like Cheap Eats Ottawa. For anyone who feels like this town is a bit small, this book is a way of discovering some of the places between the places you’ve already visited a million times. There are options for just about every part of town and just about every cuisine, and useful lists like places that are open exceptionally late and places that are good for dates.
Cheap Eats Ottawa is on sale at Perfect Books (258A Elgin Street). The authors also run a blog.
If you like fountain pens, or are curious about them, consider picking up Pelikan’s inexpensive pen designed for European schoolchildren. It costs less than $30 and has a good writing and ink delivery mechanism. It is very bright and simple in its design (they come in primary colours), but there is nothing wrong with that. A lot of fountain pens are designed for people who want to pretend they are General Douglas MacArthur signing a peace treaty aboard a battleship. If you just want something that is fun to write with and a little bit unusual in this age of ubiquitous ballpoint and gel pens, this simple and inexpensive offering is one to consider.
Ottawans can find these pens on sale at Wallack’s (231 Bank Street).
(Note: Make sure to use these pens with cartridges or converters appropriately shaped for Pelikan pens. Cramming in the more commonly available refills available for other brands can lead to inconsistent ink flow and the risk of pen-splosions.)
As part of Black History Month, I attended a speech by Adrian Harewood, a journalist with the CBC. One of the things he spoke about was the importance of interrogating received versions of history – going back and uncovering the more complex story that has usually been streamlined into a simpler narrative. He gave the example of Viola Desmond, from Nova Scotia, who has arrested and tried for sitting in the portion of a movie theatre in New Glasgow designated for white people in 1946. People like to think such segregation was something that happened in the southern United States, but it seems it was something that happened in Nova Scotia too. He also talked about the two teenaged black women who did exactly what Rosa Parks later did in Montgomery, Alabama but who were deemed unappealing test cases by the black community, given that they seemed radical and unsavoury, in comparison with Rosa Parks herself.
There are a number of lessons to draw from all of this. It reinforces the important point that history serves a purpose, and that dominant narratives can be highlighted while more awkward counter-narratives are suppressed. For instance, the second world war is often presented as a response to the Holocaust, whereas the historical evidence for that claim is weak. Indeed, Canada refused to accept at least some Jewish refugees during WWII. Similarly, while people are quick to point out the war crimes committed by the Axis powers, they are much more hesitant to consider whether the indiscriminate bombing of German civilians was a war crime. Similarly, embarrassments like the 1967 Klippert decision of the Supreme Court of Canada are not much mentioned.
We should not allow ourselves to get too comfortable with official histories that only tell the stories that flatter us. It is only be recognizing the grave errors in our own histories that we can really appreciate our own potential for error. When we recognize that people who we admire were dead wrong about critical moral issues in the past, we also open our own minds to the possibility that we are passively accommodating – or even facilitating – grave injustice today.