Hey! Want to watch a bunch of cool feminist folks rock out and play some original material from the first feminists’ rock camp in Victoria? Want to watch them jam with some cool musicians?
Then come to the Fort Cafe, Sunday August 22nd. Doors open at 6. Also, look for the fabulous Galen Hartley, Athena Holmes from Montreal and Victoria, Tina Pearson, Anne Schaefer, and some Reverend Owl goodness!
Look forward to seeing you there! Download the flier if you’d like to put one up on your fridge, or your work fridge, or anywhere you fancy.
Tickets at door and in advance; contact Feminists.Rock.Camp(at)gmail(dot)comma
UN figures show close to 10 million people die a year in India, where 85 percent of the billion-plus population are Hindus who practice cremation. That leads to the felling of an estimated 50 million trees, leaves behind half a million tonnes of ash and produces eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, according to research by Agarwals Mokshda environmental group.
The solution is to design a much more efficient wood burning stove hence satisfying religious sentiments (have to use wood to burn your body) and save lots of wood.
Agarwal built his first pyre, a raised human-sized brazier under a roof with slats that could be lowered to maintain heat. The elevation allowed air to circulate and feed the fire.
It gets even better…
Mokshda hopes its projects will eventually be registered under the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism, which encourages green projects in developing countries.
It allows industrialised countries that have committed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to count reductions achieved through investments in projects in developing countries towards their undertakings.
Really, we can get carbon credits by improving cremation practices?? That’s creative! Going all electric on the crematorium would obviously be the best thing, but Hindu religious sentiment being what it is, this is an improvement.
The interior of the Tower of Silence is built in three concentric circles, one each for men, women, and children. The corpses are exposed there naked. The vultures do not take long—an hour or two at the most—to strip the flesh off the bones, and these, dried by the sun, are later swept into the central well
Are you interested in helping the Lekwungen and WSANEC Nation remove invasive plants? Here’s a press release about the event.
You and your family are welcome to join us for an orientation to removing invasive plants in Chekonein family territories, facilitated by Cheryl Bryce, this Saturday January 22nd. We’re meeting at 1pm at Camas Point (Cattle Point — at the higher side, on Scenic Drive where there’s a few parking spots by the entrance, just in from Beach Drive).
Please bring a water bottle and wear sturdy shoes and weather-appropriate clothing.
If you have some extra tools handy (like clippers, gloves, shovels), please bring them with some sort of label so you get the correct ones back. Many thanks!
Bus tickets available; the 2A bus goes fairly close:
For the past 150 years Lekwungen and WSANEC families have been responding to the impacts of colonization in their homelands. This project creates more spaces for local and visiting peoples to collaborate on long-term decolonizing of the land. Through the community tool shed project, local Indigenous families are providing guidance on priorities and the where, when, and how for visitors to join in this work collectively and respectfully.
The Community Tool Shed & Mapping Project is associated with the Xaxe Tenew Sacred Land Society. Currently we are fundraising so that we can buy tools for invasive species removal and reinstating native plants, including GPS equipment for mapping invasive plants in local “parks” to help plan removal and track effectiveness of different methods over time.
Invasive plants are a big problem in BC, and one that requires labours of love to remove, no carpet bombing with herbicides, no industrial solution here, just lots of hands needed!
Oak Bay has found the vehicles that fit its green policy and low speed limits — electric cars that top out at a maximum speed of 50 km/h.The municipality is drafting a bylaw that would allow electric cars on its public streets, making it possibly the first municipality in B.C. to take advantage of new provincial legislation that expands where the innovative vehicles can be driven.”I don’t think we’ll see any speed differences in Oak Bay just because we have slower-moving vehicles like electric cars,” Coun. Nils Jensen said yesterday of the impact on traffic movement in the notoriously slower-moving community.
For those not in the know, Oak Bay is a municipality that is part of the Greater Victoria area. We have 11 separate municipalities, which makes for some serious inefficiencies and redundancy in administration, but does tend to preserve local character. Oak Bay, in my humble opinion, is insufferably British and proper, very wealthy and quite beautiful. And yes, it is a slow moving town, perfect for 50 kmph vehicles.
But Oak Bay is not an island, it is flanked by Victoria and Saanich, and the boundaries are not always clearly demarcated. What’s going to happen when someone randomly wanders into Saanich?
Except for the stretch of 17 going up to Sidney and the stretch of 1 going West and North out of the area, 50kmph ought to cover most of the area. I suspect Victoria will follow suit soon.
I am what I call a practising feminist. I identify as one and try to act as one. I have never taken a class in feminist theory, or for that matter, more than two social studies classes post secondary school (No, I am not proud of this, ignorance is never good, have the rest of my life to change that). Much of everything I know about feminism, I owe to my intelligent and incisive partner. So when I go to lectures by feminist theory giants like Cynthia Enloe, I never know what to expect, or what I will learn. I am glad I went to the University of Victoria last night for their Landsdowne lecture because Prof. Enloe’s talk – “How Can You Tell if We Are Living in a ‘Post-war’ Era? Some Feminist Warnings” gave me quite a bit to think about. Her books, especially Bananas, Peaches and Bases, and The Curious Feminist are widely read and quoted, and the reverence and respect the audience had for her was apparent. The idea that gender roles are very distinct in war time is not revolutionary. Enloe was very particular to emphasise that a government’s successful conduct of a war depends very heavily on all the unpaid work done by the mothers and wives of the “warriors” (my word). Women’s patriotism is invoked in this endeavour to keep the war going. In that sense, the two most common genders remember war very differently.
Enloe had some interesting things to say about how wars never end in people’s minds, how “post-war” is a gross simplification, and that this memory is sometimes a problem. Enloe talked extensively about what happens when women push past their assigned war gender roles and start to organise and advocate. Cindy Sheehan came up frequently. Widowhood, a powerful war symbol which is supposed to be suffered in silence, can be a powerful unifying influence for collective organizing. Enloe talked about how ‘war widows’ in Iraq had organised to try and make conditions better for them after huge income and job losses in addition to partner loss (link is her book about it). Enloe talked quite a bit about how army systems actively discourage this kind of organising and public advocacy by the women of war, even using the spouses of army superiors and the army’s natural hierarchy to keep women in place. Enloe also, in the middle of telling the audience how army “spouses” are now discouraged from writing break-up letters to their active army mates, broke into an impromptu rendition of Dear John, gotta love that!
I had an issue that was half forming in my head during questions, so I did not ask it, and chatting with my lecture-mate on our walk back clarified my thoughts a little better. It is clear that war’s effects on people vary widely by nation, gender and class (three big ones, I’m sure there are many). So, it would have been interesting to hear a bit more about why gender identity and class identity rarely cross national boundaries to affect the conduct of wars, let alone end them quickly. Yes, people routinely bring up the suffering of fellow identity groups, whether they be women, or poor, or professor, or journalist, but gender is a really big deal as far as raw numbers go. Wars could not be waged successfully without the participation of many parts of a population that may have more in common with their identity groups across the “border” than with their fellow citizens. It is really important to think about the primacy of nationalism, and nation-state identity in actively subsuming other identities in a war’s cause. This is part, and design of the patriarchy of a war-based nation state. Few words are more incendiary than “traitor”. Of course, I am sure whole books have been written about this (side effect of knowing no theory, the tendency to assume that your thoughts are original and unique), that I might have to hunt down.
While Enloe exhorted the audience to think beyond borders at the beginning of her talk, describing the “Vietnam” war as the US-Vietnam war and how war casualties of the other war participants are rarely mentioned, she still could not shake her nationhood and American centricity off during the talk as successfully as she may have done in her books and theory. She had this interesting and useful device of writing some numbers on the board at the beginning of the talk and repeatedly referred to them through the talk. Most of these numbers were North American war casualties, which I found to be a bit limiting, considering her talk was delivering the opposite message on casualties. She exhorted us to refer to war titles by more location-neutral descriptors, like the US-Vietnam war instead of the Vietnam war, but she did not take the next step of habituating her audience to do that, repeatedly referring to the Iraq War (which one?), or the Gulf War (Which gulf, which war?). As she said, war titling is political, I would not be happy to go to a lecture and have to listen constantly to “the Indian mutiny” (or worse, the Sepoy Mutiny).
Prof. Enloe’s take away message on war was “Ask feminist questions, be realistic”. Yes I will, and not just for war.
I was lucky enough to win two fantastic tickets to a show by Suzanne Vega at the McPherson Playhouse on Sunday, the 30th of January. Thanks CFUV for holding the draw and picking my number 🙂 It was not a show I would have gone to otherwise Also on the billet were finalists from the Victoria Idol competition (music as a competitive sport, my favourite kind) and Jon Baglo.
I have not listened to much of Suzanne Vega’s music before, except of course, Luka and Tom’s Diner, which I guess everyone has heard (yes, she did play those songs, thanks for asking). I also have 99.9F somewhere in my digital music collection, it’s good! Her current incarnation as an artist involves her recording and touring behind stripped down and reinvented versions of her back catalogue. Why?
“I don’t own those other recordings,” she told the (Wall Street) Journal. “I don’t own the masters. Those are owned by A&M Records and Blue Note, and I’m not with them anymore. I wanted to own a physical copy of my own back catalogue. In this economy, it’s important to own what you make. If I tour for the next 20 years, I have recordings I can sell at concerts and people can buy them directly.
She has released Parts 1 and 2 of Close-Up, a four part set of recordings. Victoria was her only gig in Canada, and am I glad I was there, twitterific enough to enter CFUV’s draw for free tickets, and lucky enough to actually win, thanks @CFUV! Vega has a down to earth style of singing that brings out the essential emotions of whatever she is singing about. Her lyrics are smart, witty, self referential and always engaging. Her voice sounded natural, her singing seemingly effortless, yet soulful, funny when she needed to be, sad when she needed to be, it was a very good performance. I have not listened to her music much, so I don’t know how different these productions are from the way she’s done them in the past. It worked very well in a live setting and now, I would love to listen to the new studio versions! As an assured performer, her storytelling between songs was quite funny, she rambled for quite a bit about a song she wrote when she was 16 about a brief fling at summer camp, a story that involved the secret society of Leonard Cohen listeners, the differences between Canadians, Americans and Brits, and lots of other asides! She poked a bit of fun at herself for only writing sad songs about depressing places (Liverpool, Newark, NJ) and not about beautiful places like Victoria, she very easily laughed off a glitch on her second song.
Vega was on stage with an acoustic guitar, and Gerry Leonard (aka Spookyghost) on electric guitar. Though to just call it electric guitar is a bit limiting. He had a whole set of floor pedals, and a stack of rack mounted effects to his right as well. He was playing a beautiful pearly white double cutaway semi-hollowbody with stereo output (Paul Reed Smith?). The production was sophisticated, restrained, thoughtful, and really fleshed out Suzanne Vega’s voice and skilled finger pick acoustic style guitar. It was great accompaniment, always complementary, never overwhelming, but capable of quickly breaking out of the restraint for an excellent solo or three. He was able to produce a wall of sound at times with the effective use of looping and tonal layering. He’s also geeky enough to detail his gear setup, check it out! Anyway, a lot of music was produced by two people and you did not miss the lack of percussion one bit
She came back for an encore and did a very funny song about writers from her upcoming off-Broadway musical Carson McKellars sings about love, makes me want to see it.
If she is ever in your neighbourhood, do go and catch her show, you’ll definitely enjoy it a lot. I was not a big fan before the show, I will listen to more of her music for sure after the show, which I guess is the best compliment for a live performance!
The Side
Jon Baglo rounded out the opening set with a virtuoso guitar performance. He, held me (and I suspect the rest of the audience) with an indescribable technique, a mixture of percussion and touch play/tapping on acoustic guitar. The right hand keeps moving, sometimes playing a beat, sometimes strumming very close to the left hand, sometimes just tapping the strings, it was quite a show, a pity he only played one song. He’s a skilled musician.
The appetizer
It takes a combination of courage, skill, presence and experience to open successfully for a famous performer at the McPherson Playhouse with just an acoustic guitar in your hand, let alone a capella. The Victoria Idol performers all showed courage in spades, vocal skills, some presence, and some even hinted at emerging individuality in instrument playing. They also mostly featured original compositions. But, they are currently not capable of holding an audience with such a minimalist production. This is not an open mic, or an intimate coffee shop, it’s a big hall that needs to be filled. In fact, some of the better performances featured more accompaniment, like an upright bass and violin, and some very nicely done harmonies on backing vocals. Overall, the production was too stripped down and they could not quite pull it off.
What I would have done is brought together a few experienced musicians to back them and bulk their sound up, so their yet growing skills on instruments and vocals could melt into the music and enable us to pay more attention to the songs they had written. It would also have given them some experience with building songs, production, etc. Their performances lacked punch (hard to sound punchy without percussion!), and their singing sounded a bit strained and derivative, their natural singing voices did not come through. I don’t fault them, it’s the enormity of the task they were faced with, having to open for Suzanne Vega with just a guitar in your hand. One performer actually sang a song a capella, which I found a bit ambitious. Yes, you have a decent singing voice, but no, it is not yet good enough to carry a room bigger than a coffee shop, sorry! There’s no reason it needs to be, music is about collaboration, music is about making the whole more than the sum of the parts.
The story of a Chinese company in BC hiring Chinese workers has received a lot of attention. Much of the attention has focused on the company’s decision to game the temporary worker system in order to avoid hiring “Canadian” workers. Many of the objections are made on nationalistic grounds, “OMG, THEY”RE TAKING CANADIAN JOBS”, which then leads down the path of racist anti-Chinese sentiment. This Tyee article (disclaimer: I am a Tyee monthly funder, but obviously have no editorial input!) summarizes the issues involved very well. Recent changes to Canada’s immigration laws make this kind of hiring logical, because it is now okay to pay temporary workers with little/no bargaining power 15% less than you would pay locals. Of course you have to document that there were no qualified locals, but as this particular incident indicates, there’s little/no actual enforcement unless a fuss is made.
I find temporary worker programs to be problematic because they provide no path to citizenship, no permanence for the people who want it, and cause ugly divisions in the community. If you think there are not enough “workers” in your community, open your borders, let them in and pay well, you’d be surprised.
I wanted to highlight two obvious issues that to my mind are as important:
Carbon Bomb. It’s a coal mine! How many people in BC, which preens gloriously on its carbon tax, are aware that coal is BC’s Number One export? What is the point of having a carbon tax for consumers when producers get to make money off that carbon for free? Whether the coal is burned in BC, or in China, it causes the same damage. Whether the coal is used to generate power, or to make steel, it puts out the same amount of carbon dioxide. Whether the mine uses Chinese workers or locals, it produces the same climate changing emissions. So, why instead of making coal producers pay the real costs of their product, are we enabling them to evade carbon taxes, royalties, and save even more money by reducing wages? Also, coal mining is not employment intensive, as countless other people have pointed out. So it’s not really about the jobs either. Kevin Washbrook of StopCoal made this point as well in the Tyee article I linked to earlier.
Does this mine have right to be there? The West Moberley First Nation, part of a Treaty 8 band is opposed to the project on its land. That should be the end of the story. The state of Canada has responsibilities as a settler entity to obtain free, prior and informed consent on development from the people it colonized. The US is a bit more honest in this regard as it regards the colonization as a thing of the past and gives its indigenous peoples little/no rights. Canada’s different, the indigenous here have specific standing because of Canada’s existing colonial links and Canadian governments and courts routinely confirm this standing. The BC government is currently negotiating treaties with many First Nations communities including the West Moberley First Nation.
We’re trying to set up a climate and environment disturbing, cost and tax evading coal mine on land that belongs to someone else using easily exploited temporary workers we can be racist towards.