Geles

So there it is, how to tie a gele.  The material is either aso-oke – a Yoruba hand woven cloth, silk or printed cotton, but heavily starched.  How starched is subject to fashion, evidently they don't make them so stiff these days, but I found that on a Nigerian website so not sure how straight or cool that comment is.  Many of the commericial sites show them in rayon and quite floppy.

They are outstandingly beautiful when you see them on new Canadians parading down the horrible strip that is 17th Avenue SE in Calgary.  The women are like tall flowers, and I'm not being patronising here, they really are stunning.  The dresses and matching or contrasting geles are stately, calm, solid and absolutely individual.  I'm sure there are nuances in how one pulls out the top of the wrapped material, invisible to many of us, but again, subtle indications of class, wealth and self-worth. 

One does wonder how long it takes for such subtleties to disappear when there are so few people to take account of them.  Or do they become frozen, unable to develop with fashion trends in the original culture.  I remember hearing of people who had emigrated to Canada and, on going back to England, found that the England they had known was completely gone, and they appeared as relics from a bygone era.  It does happen. 

Fascinators

A Fascinator, ready to wear.

There is a kind of English hat called a fascinator, generally worn on the side of the head.  There is no hat part, usually just a little disc or a comb with strange feathers attached.  
Camilla wore one for her wedding to Prince Charles. By Philip Treacy, it was an aureole of feathers trimmed close to the quill so it looked like a halo of wheat.  A mystical sort of crown to say 'take that!' to everyone who doesn't want her to be Queen Camilla.
I find this kind of hat as bizarre as the makaraba, but not as much fun.  It really does smack of 'society' and general uselessness, part of an ethnic dress code that means much to those who wear them.   Sarah Ferguson wore one to Diana's funeral – black, gay, defiant; Sarah the renegade princess who escaped. Her fascinator was a little black box with thin black feathers shooting out of it, worn over her ear.

It is all seriously  frivolous, and as we here generally only wear hats when it is freezing out — thick, woolly things – I do wonder where it is that Canadian society allows frivolity.  Certainly not in its dress.  Hats have traditionally been indicators of social status, the best hat being the crown.  Indeed, the top of a hat is still called the crown.  In Canada, and in the US, supposedly we do not have a rigid social hierarchy revealed through sartorial codes so perhaps the hat as a defining moment is no longer readable.   Something must have replaced it, I don't believe there is such a thing as a non-hierarchical society.   Just can't think what it would be right now.

Makarabas

Makoya Makaraba. design 3: Look at the Score. The Makoya Mararaba website is subtitled 'the genuine south african hand painted fan helmet'.   Makarapas are plastic hardhats usually worn by miners, cut, bent and painted to make soccer fan headgear.  The original makarapa was produced in 1979 by Alfred Baloyi at Evendale as protection against flying bottles during a match.  He has parlayed this into Baloyi Makarapa, which also produces well-decorated vuvuzelas, the football trumpets.  He seems to have a trademark on 'makarapa' with a 'p'.

Michael Souter, a Cape Town graphic designer started Makoya Makaraba (with a 'b'), a township community project near Cape Town at Diep River that trains unemployed people in makarapa production.   
One senses a lawsuit in the offing, as Baloyi's story on his website ends with 'Baloyi's authentic Makarapas will now be marketed under the name Baloyi Makarapas (TM) ensuring that not only is his role as the originator of these unique creations recognised, but that his hard work is rewarded and his intellectual property protected'.
But, but, Makoya Mararaba is a community project, and its website states, heroically, 'We are a small company that train and help uplift the people from the Township communities on the Cape Peninsula ... We strive to create permanent and meaningful employment for individuals from previously disadvantaged backgrounds'.

Ha!  However, FIFA's website ignores these two projects and presents Newtown Projects in Johannesburg, part of an urban regeneration project.  Newtown Projects is going into high production for FIFA 2010.  They 'stumbled' upon a robotic arm from the automobile industry.  Paul Wygers, an architect who started Newtown Projects makarapas says, ingenuously, 'there are two pinch points in the process; cutting them and painting them.  If you can get rid of the pinch point of cutting them, which is the most labour intensive part of the whole process, you can up the numbers'.  They can do 1000 makarapas a day: huge employment opportunities for painters.  They too employ the underemployed, about 35 painters on a production line, some of whom just do the base, some brushes, some airbrush.  
Baloyi started by doing 2 a day, who knows how many Makoya does in a day, maybe they too have a robotic arm but somehow I doubt it.  Makoya's makarabas start at R270 (CAD36).   Baloyi's basic makarapa is R99 going up to R299.  (CAD13-40).

There is such an exuberant graphic sensibility at work here, hardhats become fantastic, towering sculptures absolutely integral to South African soccer culture.  FIFA 2010 is a powerful endorsement of South Africa's survival, its culture and its future —attention will be diverted away from corruption, poverty and South Africa's support of Mugabe.  These enormous sporting events, like the Vancouver Olympics, really seem to propel both cities and their regions into some other stratosphere for the duration and when it is all over, so many things have changed. 

rooftop gardens

Montreal's blue roofs

Owen Rose of Montreal wrote about extensively gardened roofs in On Site 17: Water.  These Montreal rooftops are more than container gardens, and not as heavy as green roofs with their .5-2m of earth (generally known as green roofs or intensive gardens) which required quite massive structural support.  New, highly efficient substrate of 3-15cm allows garden plots on almost all kinds of construction.  Rose calls them blue roofs, perhaps because of their water retention: they collect rainwater up to a point and release the rest into city storm drains, lessening the load on infrastructure during intense storms.

We had an article by Helmuth Sonntag in On Site 2: Houses on a rolling rooftop garden in Weisbaden, planted with rows of lavender and rosemary. It is a bylaw requirement there and in much of Germany that the roof collect water and that the water be stored.  

The sense that the rooftop is the displaced ground plane is part of Le Corbusier's 1923 Vers une Architecture: that development should not take away access to land.  He saw land as a source of leisure, but land is land, and if you want to grow kale on it, so should you be able to.  

When I got my small Inglewood house in Calgary the neighbourhood was mostly old Saskatchewan farmers who had come off the land in the 1930s and 40s and gone to work for the CPR.  Inglewood is next to CPR's Alyth Yards in southeast Calgary. Flat land, Bow River, sandy soil substrate with good drainage, a warm micro-climate, and, in the 1980s hardly a tree to block the sun on all the huge gardens in the back yards.  Leafy neighbourhoods were a sign of wealth, poorer neighbourhoods were quite bleak.  Well, with gentrification, trees now flourish and my yard is completely shaded and I can't grow a thing.  The roof gets more sun than the ground.  I would like a flat platform over it that I could put a garden on.  I think I'd rather this than photovoltaic cells even - lower technology, a parasol for the roof, lots of food.

Dachas

a namelss photographer from Belarus. Dachas in Minsk - small cottages in the countryside where city dwellers come to party and grow their food

Back to Cuba.  Before 1989 57% of Cuba's daily caloric intake was imported and using gardens to grow food was seen to be a sign of poverty and underdevelopment.  The response of the government was to launch the urban agriculture movement as a contribution to food security.  Out of necessity, gardening was no longer just for the poor, but has been integrated into daily urban life.
 
Other kinds of informal food production include the dacha on the outskirts of Russian cities.  Originally summer houses for the wealthy, they were nationalised after the revolution and after WWII gardens were started on unused land by squatters.  Squatters' rights led to the formalisation of gardeners' partnerships – permanent use of the land for agriculture, access to power and water and the right to build a small house on the now-leased land.  There were also plots allocated to mixed gardening at the edges of the fields of collective farms.  
Since 1989 most dachas have been privatised, the house, cabin, cottage more important than the garden function.  However, Russian agri-business, like all industrial farming, uses pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilisers, etc., and the chance to grow one's own fruit and vegetables is both part of the dacha tradition and an opportunity to grow clean food. However, much of the land around European cities has toxic and historic levels of metals in the topsoil, so the cleanliness of the dacha crops, depending where they are located, is only relative. 
For the wealthy the dacha is their country estate, for the modest it is their allotment garden, for the poor it is affordable food, if they have access to a bit of land.

I wonder if one could calibrate the eagerness to engage in permaculture, transitional food production or urban agriculture depends first of all on the level of threat to food security, and secondly on the particular social attitudes to farming in each society.  New wealth is notorious for trying to put a great distance between it and anything to do with labour.  Stable wealth realises that it is dependent on labour, somewhere, and perhaps does not feel that holding a shovel or a rake indicates a loss of status.  The transition town movement in Britain is huge, for example. 

No matter where one lives there is always a segment of the population which carves out an alternative life of growing food, keeping chickens, knitting and sewing and making their own houses, and heaven knows, Vancouver Island, the Kootenays and the Gulf Islands are epicentral alternative societies.  Where it starts to matter is when local food production is shot through all levels of society from top to bottom, from the homeless to the CEOs; from itinerant peasant to oligarch; from old to young; from urbanite to rural farmer; from hippie to hummer driver.

Then, and only then, will Kyoto and Copenhagen strategies start to work.

Permaculture

Kootenay Permaculture Institute, Winlaw, BC.Permaculture is an observation-based land use system that echoes the principles of centuries-old systems of sustained agriculture.  In the 1970s it hit Australia with Mollison and Holmgren's Permaculture One (1978) and Mollison's subsequent Permaculture Design Course.  
We had an article in On Site 7 by Sam Smith, from Australia, who had taken the course and then took permaculture concepts to the rebuilding of rural community buildings in Bosnia after the war.  
Permaculture is more than just the ecological use of land, it aims for stable agricultural use that is able to sustain itself for generations involving human agency and products, animals both domestic and wild, and the specifics of geology, climate, weather and culture.  
Underneath the principles of permaculture is the idea that an environment will reach maturity and all will be in harmony at that point.  Anyone who has lived in a forest might realise that maturity is perhaps a euphemism for old and that is not an end point, as forests are in a constant state of renewal.  However, permaculture's value is in healing monocultural agricultural land, abused for several generations with chemicals and such.
 
Transition towns - big in Britain.  Urban agriculture - big in Cuba.  Permaculture - huge in Australia.  Islands all, and islands missing at least one key ingredient we in the large continents take for granted: space, water, money.
I wonder if a city such as Calgary in a country such as Canada will ever feel any sort of a pinch that leads to cultural change.  The recent recession glanced off it.  The agricultural land it keeps expanding into are either grain crops or cattle, neither of which are particularly intensively farmed and so are considered, in the public mind, as pretty much empty.  There is a distinct lack of urgency: we have space, water and a lot of money – why would anything need to change.  There is a kind of meanness of spirit in this, especially when one knows that in other places in the world, including in Canada, real social, cultural and agricultural revolutions are happening, out of necessity. 

Urban Agriculture, Cuba

Kristina Taboulchanas. Organoponico La Calsada

The Transition Town network started after a transport strike in Britain when the country was allegedly within 2 days of running out of food, so dependent are western countries on imports. 
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the further tightening of the US embargo, Cuba's intensive chemically-dependent agriculture sector also collapsed. We toy with visions of a world without oil, but Cuba was an island with hardly any oil: no transportation, little energy for food storage, freezing or refrigeration, no more fertiliser or pesticides and farmland largely given over to a cash crop: sugar for export.  The USSR took Cuba's sugar crop in support of the Socialist Revolution: once it was gone, so was Cuba's export sector. 

In what was known as The Special Period, the Ministry of Agriculture formed an urban agriculture unit which supports organic gardening methods for gardens on public and unused land:  27,000 such gardens in Havana alone.  Depending on the size, huertos populares employ individuals to community groups.  Old methods are used: manure, compost, worms, weeding, crop rotation and inter-cropping (crops under, on and above the same piece of ground).
With huertos populares and the state-owned organoponicos (raised beds full of compost on paved or infertile land), produce stays in its own neighbourhood, obviating transportation costs.  The Ministry of Public Health supports herbal medicine, so the production of medicinal herbs is an important sector.  Schools have gardens, hospitals grow their own food, individuals have chickens, gardens and fruit trees in their own yards.  The large collective farms still operate and supply staples particularly to Havana and Santiago de Cuba, which together have 3.2 million people and not enough urban space for total garden self-sufficiency.  However, no longer are Cubans dependent on state distribution of food.  The huertos populares and privados and the marketing of the produce are independent, once they are established and supported in their start-up by the Ministry of Agriculture. 

I think one could look to present Cuban agricultural policy to see what a world without oil might look like: traditional, co-operative, better food, a closer relationship to the land, even if it is a back yard stuffed with vegetables and fruit trees, less packaging, less transport of green tomatoes and rock-hard avocados, bananas that are ripened chemically in shipping containers. 

Of course Cuba has an unemployment problem, again because of the embargo which prevents a good many things, but also provides many hands to work these gardens. In 2003, the agricultural sector provided 22% of all new Cuban jobs.
 
There's the irony: the 'unemployed' are busy sustaining life, feeding people, cultivating the soil, making it all better, improving their communities, culture and bodies.  We have unemployed people, we even have homeless people: might we give them something valuable to do, making them valuable members of our towns and cities?

Transition Towns

Gardening Course, Totnes, Devon.

BBC's One Planet visited Totnes where the Transition Town concept was formed in 2006.  It is now a huge network with 150 towns in England, a dozen in Scotland and in Wales, 30 in Australia, 60 or so in the US, including Reno, 13 in Canada and a scattering throughout the rest of the world.
 
Totnes began by thinking about how they wanted the town to look and to be in 2030 and from that formed a plan which is now being implemented.  This goes beyond watching An Inconvenient Truth and worrying about peak oil, it actually raises money, installs photo-voltaic panels on roofs, has a garden plot exchange as part of a food and land reform initiative so that food starts to be produced locally again.  Transition towns aim for carbon neutrality—they are everything that one would hope for in an intelligent civilisation.  Places apply to become a Transition Town and the city councils have to be on board.

Portobello in Scotland started with a victory over a superstore coming into the community; Armidale NSW in Australia has a local food initiative with workshops, sowing guides, accessible fields for gleaners, farms for manure, a permaculture design course, a perennial food garden (nut and fruit trees) in public spaces.   

The Canadian list of Transition Towns includes obvious places – Salt Spring Island, Vancouver and Nelson, BC, but also Victoria, Ottawa, London and Barrie.  
Peterborough wants to set up two land trusts, fund the necessary access and service costs and ensure that it is used for food production.  Community Garden Land Trusts are 'a way to equalise some of the social inequity built into the 20th century economic growth model'.  

Powell River's transition group is newer and perhaps representative of what really goes on in setting up as a Transition Town. Its website shows a lot of hard slog to raise awareness, get people out to meetings, to films, to workshops and protests.  

However, it is a very large network, clearly made up of people who are not going to wait for their governments to do something about the environmental crisis.  They access whatever government resources are going however, and then just get on with it, bringing in local industry where they can.  Looking at the well established transition towns in England and the ambitious projects underway one realises that the movement there has control and power.  It is not a fringe activity, it appears to be in the centre of the collective community.  

I think it is the brilliant front edge of a paradigm shift starting from below, not from the top.

Philip Beesley

programming Hylozoic Soil: Méduse Field, 2010. studio d’Essai of the Coopérative Méduse

Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Ground is at studio d’Essai of the Coopérative Méduse in Québec City as part of Mois Multi, a multidisciplinary and electronic arts festival that runs until February 28.

Hylozoic Soil: Méduse Field, a biomimetic installation, includes a first generation of protocell chemistry systems developed with the University of Southern Denmark and integrated sound and light devices developed with Quebec’s Productions Recto-Verso. Dense arrays of sensors, mechanisms and digitally fabricated elements shiver  when someone walks by and then generates movement of geo-textile structures which withdraw, release and open up again.

This project has been developed by Philip Beesley Architect with Waterloo's School of Architecture.  It was chosen for the 2010 Venice Biennale next fall, and then it will tour around after.  The Canada Council and the RAIC are collaborating in the presentation of Hylozoic Soil in Venice as, they say in their press release, 'part of a larger project to investigate developing support for the advancement of the presentation and appreciation of contemporary Canadian architectural excellence in Canada and abroad.'

Vancouver colours

Found this on the Canadian Design Resource site with a long list of carping comments from designers, then went to its original posting on YouTube with a long list of enthusiastic comments from everyone else.  The graphic design package for the Vancouver Olympics was launched in 2008; every town and city in Canada has a stretch of banners where the torch was run, and we see it all in action with each Olympic event.

The iron grip of VANOC has ensured that there is no detail and no opportunity missed to implant Vancouver 2010's graphic identity – even the kleenex box handed to the figure skaters last night had a lovely little abstract fir tree on it.  The boards around the ice sheets are blue and green banners rather than clashing sponsor advertisements; if a surface can be blue, it is; the colours of the landscape dominate these Olympics.

A car count in a coffee shop parking lot last week, on the coast, showed 8 blue or green cars, 8 white and grey cars, 2 black or charcoal cars, two red.  Al Donnell did a similar count in Calgary which showed 15 grey, 10 black, 7 white, 5 red and 5 blue. 

Places do have colourways, and while it has been codified in the Vancouver 2010 graphic identity palette, it can also be found in ordinary life.  It is blue, green, white and grey out here, and it is beautiful. 

Marilyn Bowering

Marilyn Bowering. Visible Worlds.  Harper Collins 1997
Paterson Ewen.  Halley's Comet as seen by Giotto, 1979.

Most memorable image of this book is of a woman skiing over the North Pole from Russia to Canada.There are twins, in a Winnipeg immigrant family, one joins the Nazis in Germany, the other is locked in a struggle with something – I'm not sure – but he does think a lot.  And then there is Nathaniel Bone.  This is a book in the wide-ranging tradition of Canadian literature where the story covers an enormously complex world of multiply connected and layered stories.
Bowering is a poet, first, and her writing although prose is a long, beautiful extended poem where time and narrative are endlessly fluid.  Meanwhile Fika checks her bearings and moves on after chipping ice from her skis.  She is the background, her epic journey, to everyone else's complex histories of emigration, loss and displacement.
Richard Bingham, the cover designer, but a Paterson Ewen painting on the cover.  Ewen is a strange fellow, most of his very large paintings are made by grinding lines in sheets of plywood with a router, then painting over the sheet, routing a few more lines, adding some paint.  They are like huge wood blocks after much printing.  The work is passionate and muscular, magical and haunting.  It is a good tough accompaniment to Bowering's poetic, detailed complexity.

small countries

strangemaps: January 17 2010

This postcard from Australia, posted on strangemaps:  If Canadians worry that they are never mentioned in the news, or acknowledged that we are in Afghanistan, or have oil reserves the size of Iran's, or are the second largest country in the world after Russia, think how Australia feels.  All I've heard recently is the problem with tourists climbing Uluru and Kevin Rudd's apologies to Aborigines and the child labourers sent from Britain between 1920 and 1970.  They were sent to Canada too, but we haven't apologised yet.

Australia clearly is very large, yet looms small in the global imagination.  As Patrick Brown said once when someone complained that Canada was never in the news: 'Get down on your knees and thank God that Canada is not in the news.  Places in the news are inevitably about disasters, wars and corruption.'  I paraphrase.  When Canada was proud to be a middle power, we were not particularly well-known for our mediative, behind-the-scenes role between the large powers.  Now we are in the news for our four Fossil Awards. 
It is hard being a large country with a small reputation.

Paul Sahre

Paul Sahre. cover, Couplings, for Farrer Strauss & Giroux, 1996

Peter Schneider.  Couplings. translated by Philip Boehm.  Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996
Originally published in German as Paarungen, 1992.

I think I bought this book for its cover; amazingly the designer of the cover appears to have read the book– a discursion on divided Berlin written a couple of years after unification.  Nominally about affairs of the heart and the heart's inconstancy, it is also a Bildungsroman, the narrative the metaphor for Berlin's partition, separate development and clumsy re-acquaintance.

Twins: one brother all black leather and jeans, believes in western science (nature), the other in socialist society (nurture).  Everyone in the city is as internally conflicted and divided as the city itself.  The east has all the privacy of a refuge, the west is racked with profligate self-exposure.  Relationships founder on convention; are deflected by desire.  Yes, it's all about love, circumstantial and determined, love in a city and how Berlin maps relationships that crash into walls both physical and emotional. 

If all the characters in the book were merely ciphers for East and West Germany it couldn't sustain itself the way it does, with side conversations about buildings, the city, the compromises made by the aging '68 generation, the omnipresence of surveillance with the Stazi and a kind of inadvertant stazi of the mind.
Paul Sahre did the cover — a NY graphic designer who is often brilliant.  None of the sentimentality of Schneider: a different generation – Schneider born in 1940, Sahre probably in the late 60s.  Where Schneider can be bathetic, Sahre is funny. 

I liked this book when I read it, I kept it for the cover. 

W J Turner's Miss America

W J Turner. Miss America. London: Mandrake Press, 1930About 15 years ago I built twelve feet of glass fronted bookshelves, floor to ceiling, in the back room.  These unfortunately cover the only socket in the room, so I have to pull a handful of books out each time to plug and unplug lamps.  The handful I pulled out yesterday included W J Turner's Miss America from 1930, sandwiched between The Razor's Edge and Reading English Silver Hallmarks.  I don't ever remember seeing it before, which is a problem with libraries – one forgets what one has.

Today if someone wants to rant about something they blog it.  This book is 169 septets about the daughter of an architect who, dismayed at how his skyscrapers last only twenty years before being replaced, travels to Europe and comes up against a kind of decadence that really depresses him.  Meanwhile his daughter glimpses another kind of life, of freedom, gender ambiguity, equality, but returns to the US for a conventional marriage which ends in a Reno divorce.
 
Miss America is a long meditation on the gaucheness of all new world cultures compared to Europe.  Turner was Australian and in the 20s and 30s was on the edge of the Bloomsbury group and Ottoline Morell's Garsington parties.  They loved tall handsome colonials, especially those who wrote poetry.  They were seen as a kind of curiosity – the same attitude they had to Mark Gertler, the painter who was  beautiful, Jewish and from East London. 

Here, the evanescence of the American city and its buildings means that in the US nothing need last, nothing is important enough for any kind of commitment.  There is no longue durée.  Strangely, this is not liberating at all, everything becomes measured and rote, fulfilling functional requirements only. 

...
But Time to his employers was more real
To be amortized duly to a dime—
"In twenty years we pull the damn thing down
Two decades is too long for one old town!"

3
Those words 'the damn thing' sank into his brain,
What a description for each fair creation
With which he laboured to adorn his city!
Upon each site and prospect lay this stain—
Most durable of arts (life can be witty!)
To flourish so conspicuously in a nation
That builds for change and never for duration!

I live in a city which, like 1920s Philadelphia in the long poem, is in a continual process of tearing itself down in response to development pressure, to make room for the bigger and the newer.  In theory this ought to give architects and their clients great scope for innovation and invention, but instead it seems to entrench a conservatism that is unwarranted.  Turner was writing about this in 1930.  

small moments

Derek Jarman. The garden at Prospect Cottage, 1989.I see that I bought this book for $7 at a second-hand bookstore, sometime in the late 1990s.  How could I have missed it the first time round?  My copy is Derek Jarman. Modern Nature. The Overlook Press: Woodstock NY, 1994.

March

Monday 6

Weeded the back garden, wired over the fennel the rabbits keep cutting back, planted two new irises and montbretsia.  At 5:30 I sat on the old wicker chair facing the setting sun and read the newspaper.  A slight chill descended; a choir of gnats floated by, golden sparks catching the last rays of the sun.  The wind got up, bringing the smell of the sea; a russet kestrel flew by.
  Extraordinary peacefulness.

Sunday 12
Warm overcast day with a sea mist that triggered the foghorn at the lighthouse.  Worked on the front garden, weeding; planted carnations and more sea kale seedlings.  Spent the evening assembling objects from the flotsam and jetsam gathered on the beach.

Tuesday 21
The heavy rain has left sheets of water reflecting the grey sky lying on the sharp green of the spring fields.  All along the rail embankment to Ashford the buds are breaking on the hawthorn bushes.  There are drifts of primroses everywhere. ... Deep in the middle of the woods, in the most secret glade, primroses are blooming, the only ones I have found; but there are carpets of violets almost hidden by their bright green leaves.
   The unobservant could walk by them without noticing, as the leaves and flowers create an almost perfect camouflage, the elusive purple vanishing in the green.

Derek Jarman

Prospect Cottage, Kent.Thinking still of the importance of small things, the best guide is Derek Jarman's Modern Nature, Diaries 1989-1990 (Vintage 1992) which covered the making of a small garden around his cottage at Dungeness on the south coast of Kent, in the shadow of an enormous  nuclear power station.  I went there once as a student; the beach is shingle, small round pebbles, excruciating to walk on in bare feet.  There was, in 1973, a row of tiny cabins, sheds and old railway cars sitting on the beach. One had a path from the laneway to the back door made up of the enamelled parts and panels of a gas stove taken apart and laid on the pebbles.  It was all a fierce, pathetic landscape of small scrapings and savings perched tenously on the edge of the English Channel.

Derek Jarman acquired a small cottage, painted black with creosote, and built a garden of local flowers and plants that could survive the salt spray and general inhospitability of the beach.  Jarman had AIDS in the pre-retro-viral era when it was a death sentence.  His diaries for 1989 and 1990 are staggeringly beautiful, elegiac but never sentimental.  His entry for February 2, 1989:
The gorse is a blaze of golden flowers forced by the wind into an agony of weird shapes, twisted branches wrung out like washing.  It's the only winter flower on the Ness; some of the bushes are six feet high, crowned with tight bunches of spines which creak in the wind.  Other bushes cling to the ground, shaped in neat cones and pyramids which are clipped by the rabbits with the precision of topiary.  'Kissing is out of season when gorse is out of bloom'.  No-one need worry – here it is always in flower.

All the time he was making his garden he was continuing to make films; he had a London life and a Dungeness life – one large, complicated and worldly, the other full of nature and intimate with it: he writes on August 31, 'In front of me a jade sea is running wild.'  and then goes on the next day with the complications of dying, of getting financing for his film, of people and their demands. 

I read this book every few years for the lesson that nature is both solace and indifferent.  It is there if we want it and if we don't it continues nonetheless. 

hardware and robotics

A hardened aircraft shelter at RAF Upper Heyford, near Bicester, in Oxfordshire. Photograph: English Heritage
The Guardian reports that this bunker is 'one of the best preserved Cold War landscapes in Britain' and it is now on the schedule of monuments to be protected from development.  It is a hardened aircraft shelter at RAF Upper Heyford, built in 1967 after the unprotected Egyptian Air Force was destroyed on the ground by Israel.  Decommissioned in 1994, it was a piece of little America with hamburgers and a supermarket.  

As I was considering this, and the rather crouching appearance of a hardened aircraft shelter, part one of Robo Wars by Stephen Sackur came on the radio.  He described a British lieutenant sitting in Nevada controlling drones in Afghanistan, doing his shift then driving home to his wife and kids.  Clearly this beats flying out of Kandahar and living in a dusty FOB. 

Sackur's investigation is about the nature of combat when it is conducted by robots dependent on satellite systems.  The country with the best hackers will win I suppose, however, all these things still deliver bombs which will still land on civilians who aren't hackers, and who will be the statistics that indicate success or failure.   The ultimate direction of all the handheld electronic toys that keep being launched on our wallets is not literacy with Kindle, or connectivity with the iPad, it is probably their weaponisation.

small tools held in great affection

my all-time favourite tool: little hammer, hatchet, screwdriver, nail puller, wire cutter, pliers and whatever that top bit is called that cuts the heads off nails.  Sturdy, dates from before the 1950s, a novelty item perhaps, but surprisingly useful it has been.  And it is so tiny.
 
Is there a name for tools that combine many functions?  where something can be a hammer and an inch later a wirecutter?  It is the opposite of that other attitude: the proper tool for every job.  That is what Lee Valley is based on.  No, this little handy dandy does not expect anyone to use it with great finesse, its function is to be helpful as one is muttering and banging around in the basement and hey presto! there it is, a tiny hammer to knock out a cottar pin wedged in the handle at the back of a clock, as happened this morning.  

Humour me, I'm on my holidays and such things loom large.

small objects of absolutely no importance at all

There are small objects in the landscape of one's daily life, so small as to be invisible, yet one misses them when gone.  Pen knives are one such item.  I'd always had one in the car, but when my car was broken into last year it disappeared. 

No problem I thought, I'll get another.  Well, they don't exist anymore it seems.  None at the hardware store, and I had to explain to the clerk what they were.  At Canadian Tire I was taken to a locked cabinet of fearsome blades, each capable of skinning a moose.  The Knife Store had Swiss Army knives but nothing with just a simple blade: the basic Swiss Army knife seems to necessarily include scissors.  There was one lovely slim knife but it was $65 and the blade was very thin.  Good for — what?  committing murder?  not a sturdy pocket knife for peeling oranges in the car, cutting cheese at the campsite, whittling bits of wood for some obscure reason.

I found above penknife, two blades, nice pearly handle for $6 in a junk store, which had many.  A bit rusty, but that can be dealt with.  I mention this apparently insignificant and quite mindless expedition into pen knives and their disappearance on the occasion of the iPad -- a lovely thing, I would dearly love one although they won't be in Canada till the summer.  I'm certainly not against new technologies and still have one of the early iPods which has a physical presence that is as smooth and heavy as any hand held artifact in a museum: it is like a chrome pebble in the hand.  As is this penknife, worn absolutely smooth in someone's pocket over many years. 

What I find so interesting about the present is that while we live with mega-technolongical advances, the small sensuous qualities of objects are holding their own.  Although we could live our lives as avatars in cyberspace, it is still important to touch beautiful surfaces.

artists in small towns

Hill Strategies Research sends reports every so often on the status of the arts and artists in Canada: how many are there, where do they live, how much do they make.  Always the results are surprising and seem to confound general expectations. 

The study that came out today is about how many of our artists live in small and rural towns: as many as in Toronto and Montréal combined.  Vancouver, with the highest concentration of artists (2.35%) of the large cities, would rank only 21st among small municipalities.  Previous Hill Strategies studies have pointed out the sub-poverty income levels of Canadian artists, so this might have something to do with where they live.
47% of all Canada's artisans and craftspersons live in small towns, 35% of our visual artists do.  Cape Dorset is the centre of Inuit carving and printmaking.  West Bolton is in the Eastern Townships with 10% of its labour force in arts occupations.  Denman and Hornby Islands off the east coast of Vancouver Island have been intense centres of island crafts, arts and music since the 1960s.

Lou Lynn, of Monday's post, lives in Winlaw, BC in the quite remote Slocan Valley.  The work isn't all rural wood carving and fiddle music, it is as sophisticated as the work seen in urban centres.

Since the Massey Report of 1949-51, the arts have been seen as the way to confirm and support the development of an independent Canadian identity. It is surprising that so much of that identity is still investigated, and developed, in rural Canada.