A Glass Definitely Half-Full

As the Big Smoke moves into day 5 of a garbage strike – well, actually, a strike of city workers in general but garbage is big in the eye of the media – there’s some good news, and a word to the Wise…

Torontonians are purportedly in a whiny mood over the first garbage strike in some great number of years. Beleaguered taxpayers line up for hours in the summer heat to drop off bags filled with plastic waste at transfer stations where union members hold sway, and clubbers are offended that there’s more stench than usual at their dining patios.

Now, it is rather annoying that the it’s-all-about-me-I’ll-show-everyone clods are dumping trash where they shouldn’t, but it sure doesn’t help that the city has cordoned off additional dumping areas in parking lots and outdoor arenas in NIMBY neighbourhoods. No threat to public health, just a threat to already cloudy optics.

Meanwhile, some businesses, notably in the Greektown restaurant district, have just gone ahead and hired private haulers to remove their garbage. Good on them.

In the east end, one of  the residents is spearheading a daily litter cleanup at Kew Beach, noting that a few pieces of trash can lead to a mountain, unless people take pride in their community.

“This is our beach, If we all help out 15, 20 minutes a day, or half an hour, we’ll keep it under control, if we don’t, it’ll go real bad real fast.”

This evening, the leafy west-end High Park area was blessed by the visit of two earnest, clean-cut and entrepreneurial young men who were going door to door, offering to take garbage to the dump for $5 a bag.

Ryan, who showed up at my door, first apologized for setting my dogs off into their usual they’re coming to kill us barking frenzy. His friend has a relative who lives in this neighbourhood, so they came to help out. In a smart way.

Ryan admitted that it was probably a little premature for  our neighbourhood. I throw out maybe one tiny bag of trash a month; the rest goes to recycling, and most of the green bin stuff is zoo poo. Our mayor lives out this way, and between cycling to work or taking the Red Rocket, he and his family probably compost everything and waste nothing (at home, anyway).

Long story short, Ryan’s initiative is a small but significant step towards turning this place around, as is the Beach resident’s invitation to his neighbours. It’s a no-brainer that the morons that think their effluent is someone else’s problem and the brilliant entrepreneurs and citizens who take pride in their communities who create great wins have very different world-views. More guys like Ryan, his buddy and the gentleman in the Beach in the gene pool, please.

Valentina Tereschkova

On the morning of June 16 1963, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova was dressed in a spacesuit. After completing her communication and life support checks, Valentina was sealed inside the Vostok 6 spacecraft. With a flawless countdown, Vostok 6 launched faultlessly, Tereshkova became the first woman to fly into space. Her call sign in this flight was Chaika – the Russian word for Seagull.

On this mission, lasting almost three days in space, she performed various tests on herself to collect data on the female body’s reaction to spaceflight. Although Tereshkova experienced nausea and physical discomfort for much of the flight, she orbited the earth 48 times and spent almost three days in space. With a single flight, she logged more flight time than the combined times of all American astronauts who had flown before that date.

Valentina was a textile-factory assembly worker before she entered the Russian cosmonaut program. She began her journey to outer space at a young age when she became interested in parachuting and trained in parachuting at the local Aeroclub, making her first jump at age 22 in 1959. It was her expertise in parachute jumping that led to her selection as a cosmonaut.

After the female cosmonaut group was dissolved in 1969,
she became a prominent member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, holding various political offices. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she retired from politics but remains revered as a hero in Russia.

Flock and Fable

Flock & Fable: Animals and Identity in Contemporary Art, curated by Amie Robinson, runs at New York’s Chelsea Art Museum to July 31.

The exhibit presents the works of eleven artists who use animal imagery to investigate forms of identity: racial, sexual, spiritual, social, political, psychological, and moral. In identifying with the animal, the artists create modern day fables. Traditionally, fables seek to instruct, to inform and bestow on their audience a “moral maxim, social duty, or political truth.” They aim at the improvement of human conduct, at revealing personal and social identities, and do so by concealing their agenda in the guise of fictitious characters—animals.

Racial and sexual identities and stereotypes are conveyed in the work of Kara Walker and Marc Swanson. Kara Walker’s provocative silhouettes confront our perceptions of identity in terms of history, culture, gender and race. The wall painting Pastoral portrays the metaphorical “black sheep” as an ambiguous hybrid being that is “part human, part animal, part black and part white.” It exposes stereotypes of ethnic identity, revealing colonialist myths depicting the sexuality of black women as animalistic. Sexual identity is also explored through personal iconography in the work of Marc Swanson. Covering two stag heads—a symbol of maleness—in rhinestones, he confronts coming to terms with his own homosexuality and his politically conservative background.

Religious and spiritual identity is explored in the work of several artists, including Patricia Bellan-Gillen, Graciela Iturbide and Kimowan Mclain. Patricia Bellan-Gillen appropriates animal symbols and icons from various religions. Ideas from doctrine, faith and myth fuel the work and she invites the viewer to instinctually find their own autobiographies in her paintings. The haunting images of Graciela Iturbide portray Mexican cemeteries swarmed by locusts and somber skies with flocks of birds as mythical human spirits: “I testify the poetic dimension of men and magic, and I see a kind of mystic of the every day life.” Filling thin, swaying paper walls with images of moths, biblical metaphors for the ephemeral, Kimowan Mclain’s work reminds us that our existence is temporary. He writes, “I know people like moths. They are not imbalanced by an overly zealous devotion to light, but are equally weighted by the substance of dark. Shall we brush these people aside as if they were dry, brittle wings? Or clean away their dark histories and mournful days?”

Political truths and social identity are evident in the fables of Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, Andrew Johnson, and Rosemary Laing. Cornelia Hesse-Honegger sets her tales in Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and in the shadows of international nuclear power plants and her cast of characters is unfortunately not fictional; it is rather exquisitely illustrated insects suffering numerous mutations from the effects of radiation in their environment. The frog in The Closed Mouth, a large oil painting by artist Andrew Johnson, is far from becoming a fairy tale prince. This enormously bloated creature, isolated in darkness, is an allegory of consumption and a metaphor for America’s foreign policy. The photographs of Rosemary Laing also portray birds in flight; yet among them floats a woman in a wedding dress high above the mountains of Australia. They stir in us our desire to become animal, to fly: “Flight sits in our consciousness as a kind of fantasy or dream. It is a metaphorical notion. Children dream of flying. It is a very escapist notion to be able to fly. Super heroes fly.” Upon closer inspection however, there are bullet holes in the woman’s chest. Like Icarus, she is falling.

Emotional and psychological identities are clear in the work of Helen Altman and Kojo Griffin. The various animals in Helen Altman’s uniquely rendered torch drawings are isolated from their flock, alone, defenseless, floating in a sea of white and consumed by nothingness. The viewer can not help to feel compassion, sympathy, and fear for the animal; and perhaps to remember a similar feeling in their own lives, thus ultimately feeling empathy. In his psychologically charged paintings, Kojo Griffin uses anthropomorphic figures, human bodies with animal heads, to convey the human condition. Placed in an ambiguous space, the characters interact and engage us in an open, and often violent or awkward narrative. He “scratches the surface of societal scabs, making do with the puss or what is often left out of the fictions: shame, impotence, cruelty, hysteria, rage, failure, hostility, anxiety, fear and the abject.”

Do animals lose their identity, however, if we impose upon them our own? In his book The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker writes that, “the representational, symbolic and rhetorical uses of the animal must be understood to carry as much conceptual weight as any idea we may have of the ‘real’ animal, and must be taken just as seriously.” Sue Coe addresses the reduction of the animal in her series Porkopolis. In sketches and drawings created in slaughterhouses (where photography is forbidden) she gives names and honors the identities of the otherwise tagged, numbered masses of the factory farm industry. Her work questions criticism that animal imagery is too sentimental, claiming that these accusations are made only to “prevent an outcry against cruelty, to silence criticism against bad science.”

Images:

Kara Walker, Pastoral
Patricia Bellan-Gillen, The Speed of Your Tongue
Rosemary Laing, Bulletproofglass #4
Sue Coe,  Factory Farm

From Chelsea Art Museum

The Matrix Redux: Food, Inc.

Earlier we blogged about the state of our food system as prophesied in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. We described Vandana Shiva’s grassroots efforts in India to battle corporate greed, monocultures and genetic engineering. Is it already too late for North America?

That is why Food, Inc., just released, is so important.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on America’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that’s been hidden from consumers with the consent of government regulatory agencies.

The US (and Canadian) food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of e. coli. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

What happened to nutrient-dense food that leaves us satisfied, healthy and safe?

Featuring Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals shocking truths — about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become and where we are going from here.*

The Stone Gardener

On a sultry morning in early August, sculptor Andy Goldsworthy stood in a quarry in Stony Creek, Connecticut, watching the heart being burned out of a ten-ton granite boulder. Eighteen of these tawny-gray brutes, varying between three and fifteen tons, are to be scattered around a space measuring a hundred and twenty feet by thirty-five on the second-story roof terrace of the new extension of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Battery Park City. The hollowed rocks will then be filled with soil, and, on September 16th, Holocaust survivors will plant a dwarf chestnut-oak sapling in each one, creating a memorial Garden of Stones.

The rock surrenders to the fire, Goldsworthy said, because fire created it in the first place. But fire cleans as well as sculpts. Shooting flames at granite not only re-enacts primordial geology but converts the incinerations of genocide into the flames of sanctification.

During a break from the burning, we peered into the opened belly of the rock. The interior was speckled gray, with shreds of stone flaking away from the walls or pulverized into a granular silica, like sand on a beach, some of the grains glassily fused. John Ruskin’s feverishly beautiful passages on “Compact Crystallines,” in “Modern Painters,” came to mind, in which he describes the glitter of granite as looking “somewhat like that of a coarse piece of freshly broken loaf sugar.”

The cavity is conical, a form that much preoccupies Goldsworthy, who often declares a debt to Brancusi. Monti was working from the opened base and down the narrowing funnel. Once hollowed, the rocks are inverted, so that the saplings can sit at the neck of the boulder, atop their bed of earth. The disproportion between the hefty stones and the tiny, six-inch plants may risk looking absurd, but it will at least preclude any possibility of the stones’ resembling the oversized planters commonplace in corporate atriums. Instead, a mysterious hatching will be inaugurated: the sprig from the rock.

The growth process of the sprouting menhirs, standing between the Hudson and Ground Zero, will not, however, be risk-free. Tom Whitlow, a Cornell plant ecologist whom Goldsworthy consulted, warned that if the growing tree should press against its unyielding stone girdle it could crush the living cambium immediately beneath the bark. In that case, the root system would atrophy and die. But unlike many contemporary artists, fretful about their posterity, Goldsworthy incorporates the indeterminate outcomes of natural processes into most of his work. Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.

Goldsworthy relishes the embattled growth of his dwarf chestnut oaks, contending with the jackhammer shaking of downtown construction, the judder of helicopter rotors on the riverbank, sudden gusts of estuarine winds, and the murky air of lower Manhattan. The plants’ fight for survival against the odds is meant as an emblem of the Jewish experience they memorialize. “The trees I wanted couldn’t be decorative,” he says. “They needed to be tough little S.O.B.s.”

On August 22nd, three weeks before the inauguration of the Garden of Stones, the last boulders were hoisted into their positions on the museum roof, and it was already apparent that Goldsworthy’s sculpture would be one of the most powerful monuments in a city still struggling to find visual expressions for the tug between the perishable and the imperishable.

Full story at The New Yorker

Les Chevaliers Cathares

Stone knights for Linda Gordon, who taught me that there are too many haiku about cherry blossoms and too few about stone.

Les chevaliers Cathares
Pleurent doucement,
Au bord de l’autoroute
Quand le soir descend,
Comme une dernière insulte,
Comme un dernier tourment,
Au milieu du tumulte,
En robe de ciment.

From the A61 motorway at the Pech Loubat rest stop in France, you can see three giant stone Cathar knights brooding over their long lost homeland. Pulling into their often deserted, large last home, you may relax and explore this wild area, and stop off for a quiet pique-nique. You can even climb right up in the hollowed out bodies and look out through the helmets of the lonely giants, east over the vast valleys as they sweep down towards the Mediterranean.

The site seems almost as unloved as the Cathars were by the Church of Rome. But it allows the wildlife to flourish and provides an experience of quiet and the open skies from the rise above the everlasting tarmac ribbon.

“Christianity, without chapels, without statues, Christianity which always refused to encompass anything sacred within visible matter….the heart of man is the true church of God.”
~ Anne Brenon

The word Cathar comes from the Greek word Katheroi meaning pure ones. Cathars believed in a theological dualism with two divine principles, a good one who made all good, unmaterial, things (like the human soul) and a bad one who made the bad, material, things (like the human body). They also believed that the mainstream Catholicism had strayed away from, and had corrupted, the very early Christianist teachings.

The Cathars believed that their soul became trapped in the world, reincarnating over and over until they were once again free from identification with this dimension and could return home to pure Spirit. They saw how our attention becomes easily trapped in this dualistic universe. Snared by the temptations of the outer life, the mind creates an inner thought-based world to match, and by these very thoughts, reinforces the outer world of matter and the senses. Seeing how thoughts and matter became intertwined, creating a net nearly impossible to break, the Cathar Perfects labored to save themselves.

Catharism was a “heresy” that was introduced to the Languedoc in about 1150 and was widespread in this region of France for several centuries. Catharism was so popular that even priests were leaving the Catholic orthodoxy to follow it. The popularity of the Cathars reached it height at the beginning of the 14th century.

In 1209, Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars, when the Catholic Church came down extremely heavily on the heretics, aided by the King of France, keen to grab more land for his idle, spare knights. The eradication of Catharism included the complete slaughter of the town of Toulouse. In all, about half a million people of all ages and rank were killed.

The crusade against Catharism eventually led to the dramatic last stand at the Cathar castle on Montsegur. Here, after an as yet to be explained surrender and terms, the remaining Perfects were burned, ending an era and starting a legend. Stories still abound of the last night of this final siege, and the supposed escape of four Cathars with a treasure, reputed to be anything from gold, to the Holy Grail itself.

The Cathars left us with not just another story of strength in the face of persecution, but also an inspiring call to our intuition that things might not be as they seem. They struggled to escape the bonds of earthly existence and find Heaven and God within.

Lyrics:  Francis Cabrel

Répondez-moi

Francis Cabrel, looking like a chevalier cathare in the video, recorded this in 1981. Mais, c’est au courant, bien entendu.

Je vis dans une maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même pas la nature
C’est même pas une maison

J’ai laissé en passant quelques mots sur le mur
Du couloir qui descend au parking des voitures
Quelques mots pour les grands
Même pas des injures
Si quelqu’un les entend

Répondez-moi
Répondez-moi

Mon coeur a peur d’être emmuré entre vos tours de glace
Condamné au bruit des camions qui passent
Lui qui rêvait de champs d’étoiles, de colliers de jonquilles
Pour accrocher aux épaules des filles

Mais le matin vous entraîne en courant vers vos habitudes
Et le soir, votre forêt d’antennes est branchée sur la solitude
Et que brille la lune pleine
Que souffle le vent du sud
Vous, vous n’entendez pas

Et moi, je vois passer vos chiens superbes aux yeux de glace
Portés sur des coussins que les maîtres embrassent
Pour s’effleurer la main, il faut des mots de passe
Pour s’effleurer la main

Répondez-moi
Répondez-moi

Mon coeur a peur de s’enliser dans aussi peu d’espace
Condamné au bruit des camions qui passent
Lui qui rêvait de champs d’étoiles et de pluie de jonquilles
Pour s’abriter aux épaules des filles

Mais la dernière des fées cherche sa baguette magique
Mon ami, le ruisseau dort dans une bouteille en plastique
Les saisons se sont arrêtées aux pieds des arbres synthétiques
Il n’y a plus que moi

Et moi, je vis dans ma maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même

Et moi, je vis dans ma maison sans balcon, sans toiture
Où y’a même pas d’abeilles sur les pots de confiture
Y’a même pas d’oiseaux, même pas dans la nature
C’est même pas une maison.

But the last of the fairies seeks her magic wand
My friend, the stream sleeps in a plastic bottle
The seasons have stopped at the feet of synthetic trees
There’s no one but me

Francis Cabrel

Me, Molly Midnight

Molly Midnight, named for the little cat who was an artist’s model and subject of a children’s book in the 1970s, is quietly taking charge of the dogs and trying to fill Samurai Genji’s paw-prints.

From her first sniff of oil paint and turpentine, Molly Midnight has – as she herself confesses – only one ambition. She is determined to be not only an artist’s cat, but an artist’s model. For she is in love with the artist’s life, and with the artist himself – Herman, whose moustache smells so fragrantly of kippers!

I was not born with paint on my paws. But you might think so, seeing me now and knowing where I was born.

I spent my first days in Provincetown. That is a small town on Cape Cod where many painters live and visit. But as a newborn kitten, I never dreamed that someday the life of an artist’s model would be for me — me, Molly Midnight!

“Well, Molly, I think after I finish this cup of coffee I’m going down to my studio to paint.”
Then it happened – just the way I had always hoped it would!

“Would you like to be my model?”

“Meow,” I said.

Being an artist’s model means posing in one position for long stretches of time. I was already very good at staying in one position, because I could pose and sleep at the same time.

Me, Molly Midnight, by Nadja Maril, with illustrations by her father, Herman. Also, by Nadja, Runaway Molly Midnight.

Angels at the Bridge

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

~ George Eliot

In January, we posted about Penny, a little rescue hound mix who had survived two Louisiana hurricanes and been adopted into a loving home here in Toronto.

At the beginning of December, she had bolted from the High Park off-leash area, and her family has been searching for her ever since. At first, there were numerous sightings, then more recently, nothing.

Finally, her family has closure from the awful not-knowing. Penny had apparently been hit by a car near the park shortly after she escaped, and Toronto Animal Services found her yesterday.

Although it will never be possible to fill Penny’s paw-prints, her folks know of another dog in need. The pup that they save will help them heal, and remember Penny fondly and without the pain.

More here.

Many of us have also been following the story of Bobby, one of two Portuguese Fila pups rescued by TAS after they escaped an abusive home. Bobby and his brother Andy were given names, and TAS hoped to socialize them and adopt them out. This was not an option for Andy, as too much damage had already been done during his short puppyhood.

Bobby showed more promise. Although he was very fearful and could not be handled, he was learning to trust one of the TAS workers and even learning to play with other dogs.

This week, Bobby succumbed to parvo, a nasty killer of puppies.

Bobby was just beginning to learn, in his short life, that there were people that he could trust. He could not know how many of us were following his story, caring that he would learn to be a puppy and find a forever home.

The cherry blossoms, messengers of transition and renewal, are in full bloom on this warm sunny day, as we remember the precious little souls who have left us too soon.

Rest in peace, sweet Penny and Bobby.

Sakura Night

A common symbolic element in Japanese imagery and poetry, falling sakura petals have several interconnected meanings, depending on who they are falling on and the context thereof.

Cherry trees bloom en masse in early spring in Japan, but the white-to-coral petals shed and die very quickly and the peak bloom is only a week or two. There is a celebration called hanami associated with the peak bloom, which often entails picnics and drinking with old friends under the cherry trees.

Sakura season is a highly visible sign of spring, the beauty of nature, renewal of life, and first love…but can also represent the transience and fragility of beauty, life, and love.

Japanese mythology often also connects cherry blossoms with death;  according to legend, the flowers of the tree were originally white; after a body was buried beneath it, the petals turned pink.

Sakura evokes both the new beginning of spring and the transience of passing from one stage of life to another.

Image:  Woodblock print Shidare Sakura 2 by Hajime Namiki, 2005