Clouds continue to hang around here in the wake of our first Pineapple Express storm of the season. The Music By The Sea Festival wrapped up late last night (I was home again after midnight) after three full days of community music-making, with a few professional ringers thrown into our midst. It was a multi-generational event which sprang out of a group of local Bowen Island families who were long time regulars at the Nimblefingers Festival in Sorrento, BC. As a result there was a strong core of bluegrass and Americana music-making at MBTS, which suits me fine. Bluegrass is like folk jazz. Simple chord progressions and beautiful melodies and harmony singing, but incredible virtuosity on the instrumental side, including a strong value on improvised breaks and solos. It is massively accessible music, but for the performer the sky is the limit in terms of technique and creative possibilities.
Importantly, the gathering brought together many Bowen Islander, including several who left the island years ago. The music scene when I moved here was rich and vibrant and diverse and it withered a little as we made the transition between the 1970s-1990s nearly intentional community of interesting characters to a place where property became a financial investment. Since COVID, our demographics have radically shifted and there is more of a feeling of intentional community again. People are moving here for something other than what might be a decent return on a real estate investment. Make no mistake, this is still a massively unaffordable place to live, and our best efforts to address it are swallowed in a context of general inaction and apathy about structural policy solutions. But. There is a revival of community going on here, and I met many people this weekend who are my neighbours and with whom I know I will be making music this year and into the future.
I love short forms of writing. Poetry, short stories, short novels. And aphorisms. There is something about the pithy wisdom contained in a single sentence that can make it powerful. A well crafted aphorism has a rhythm to it as well. It swings, like a jazz lick. And like a lick, it evokes something timeless and connected to an ecosystem of meaning. Peter Limberger lives aphorisms too and here he writes about two medieval aphorists, Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658), a Jesuit priest who wrote The Art of Worldly Wisdom and Duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), a French nobleman who wrote a collection of Maxims, while also pointing to his favourite, Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
Sometimes questions are like aphorisms. One has to be careful asking questions that are beautiful in their own right. Questions occasionally try too hard to impress. They aim too much for a response that is in awe of the question itself. Mary Oliver’s “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” is one of those. But asking “What time is it?” Is a question that dances ever so lightly on the fence between genuine curiosity and profound insight in its own right. Tenneson writes “I used to see people more often resist these kind of questions. It was resistance that saw some fluff and said, “let’s get to the real work.” These days, oh gosh, so many more people recognize these questions are the real work. Or are the real contexting that helps us get to the real work.” Amen.
Life is just a long conversation that we drop into for a bit. Patti Digh:
Life, then, is less about owning the discussion and more about showing up to it. Listening well. Speaking honestly. Departing graciously. And trusting that the conversation—like life itself—will carry on.
Perhaps the real measure is not how loudly or how often we speak, but how we change in the process. We arrive thinking we understand the argument; we leave having been shaped by the voices around us. We are participants, yes, but also apprentices to the human story—learning from those who came before, influencing those who come after, even in ways we’ll never know.
Some day, someone else will walk into the same parlor after we’ve gone. They’ll hear the echoes of our words, softened by time, folded into the larger chorus. They may not know our name, but they will inherit a conversation made—if we’ve done our part—slightly kinder, richer, and more open than when we found it.
A decent start to the Premier League season for Tottenham. After an early goal from Richarlison, Spurs were a bit disjointed for the rest of the first half. They came out ganagbusters in the second though and Richarlison scored his second from a beautiful scissor kick off a Kudus delivery. Kudus impressed with his flair and quickness. Brennan Johnson scored the third for an emphatic win in the end.
The latest TSS Rover to turn pro is Aislin Streicek, who played for us in 2022 and 2023 and who was signed by Celtic FC to a two year contract. She made her first appearance yesterday coming off the bench in a 2-1 win over Hearts. Watching and helping young players turn professional is why we do what we do at our little second division Canadian club.
Lund harbour, taken last year, when the skies were clear of smoke and rain.
The little town of Lund sits pretty much at the end of the road near the northern tip of the Sunshine Coast. It was established by two Swedish brothers who opened a store in 1889 right on top of the historical village of Tla’Amin, from which the surrounding First Nation derives its name. It is a town that now sits surrounded by Tla’Amin treaty settlement land, and which is still very much a working port. There are a few fish boats, but mostly it caters to marine services and adventure tourism for people living on and visiting the outlying islands and nearby Desolation Sound.
It was rainy and smoky yesterday so instead of a planned hike into the mountains we canned blackberry jam in the morning and walked around Lund in the afternoon. Along the way we visited Ron Robb and Jan Lovewell at Rare Earth Pottery. We met these two about four years ago, and we have mutual friends. Over the years we have bought a piece or two from them, and today left with a tea bowl and mug. Ron makes tea bowls using the Japanese method of kurinuki rather than throwing clay on the wheel or building pots from coils. Kurinuki means “hollowing out” in Japanese. The potter begins with the shaping of a solid block of clay and then scoops out the centre and takes away clay until the final item is produced. The result is a unique piece that has arisen from stillness, rather than the motion of the wheel, and is shaped from emptying out, and that very much resonates with me.
It’s worth a visit to their gallery if you are ever in Lund, and perhaps you will even find them in one of the twice-annual kiln firings. But if not, there is a wonderful video of them firing a wood kiln in Earl’s Cove with two other potters.
From Ron and Jan’s place we wandered down to Finn Bay where the Tidal Art Centre sits in an old forestry station. The gallery is currently hosting a beautiful solo exhibit of the work of Donna Huber. Huber’s work is inspired by everything from Chagall to Inuit printmaking and it shows in her use of space and perspective.
To cap off our afternoon, I had a stroke of good luck. While shopping for a lemon at The Stock Pile, I spied a copy of Phil Thomas’s Songs of the Pacific Northwest on a display carousel. Copies of this book used to be very hard to come by, but it seems it has now been reprinted by Hancock House. There is a playlist on YouTube with all of these songs, many of them sung by Jon Bartlett and Rika Ruebsaat, of whom I wrote last week.
Cool stuff from François Lavallé. I don’t think I can ever tire from hear Goodhart’s Law expressed in a multitude of different ways, and it’s especially nice hearing it from someone who has run his own business and fell into the trap of running it to achieve KPIs rather than use KPIs to evaluate, well, key performance indicators. Head over to his post to learn more with a bonus history about about Lord Kelvin.
Another great quote in François’ post comes from Mario Bagioli, if Wikipedia is correct, and it states: “when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it.” I was reminded of this when I read this piece by Simon Enoch in Policy Alternatives about why the Saskatchewan government won’t adopt rent controls despite rent affordability being a massive issue. The post debunks the typical talking points about rent control: that it doesn’t work, that it suppresses affordability and so on. Those talking points often hinge on this very point, that features of the economy are picked as indicators of activity, and worse, as evidence of policy failure. What it doesn’t do is answer its own question, but then expecting the Saskatchewan Party to have a sensible set of evidence-based social policies that benefit poor and marginalized folks is, let’s say, optimistic.
Data matters, both as a portal to the unknown and as a marker of what has been. So two links today to wrap up on, which activate my heart. Patti Digh gets some test results that put her in a liminal space, and Peter Rukavina muses on the scars he carries. Wishing the best for both and for all of us who are discovering that the gap between what we want our bodies to do and what they are actually doing grows a little more every year.
The view across to Ahgykson and looking over towards Comox which is completely shrouded by smoke.
It is smoky here as we enjoy our last day of holiday on the Tla’Amin lands north of Powell River. A big wildfire at Mount Underwood is burning along the Alberni Inlet on Vancouver Island. It is feeding smoke into the south-easterly breeze and funnelling it up Vancouver Island and across the Strait of Georgia, smack into the northern Sunshine Coast. This fire is dangerous and fast growing and I’m worried for my friends at Huu-ay-aht and Tseshaht and in Port Alberni and Bamfield. So far there are no dangers to structures, but power is out, the smoke is terrible and local governments and First Nations in the area have declared states of emergency. We’re expecting a few days of rain starting this afternoon which may help a little. We’ve been relatively free of smoke this summer, unlike a lot of Canada. But here we are.
My friend Tenneson Woolf shares some of his go-to questions for getting started today:
- what is the simple story here?
- What is the simple intent here?
- what is the outrageous intent here?
Simple and easy ways to begin an engagement with a new client and to find the top of mind necessity and purpose for the work. It’s hard for me to know how other consultants work, but he and I share a love of asking questions and letting the other speak. The stuff I hear in first few minutes with a new client is key to understanding how they see their situation coming into a new engagement.
A while ago I wrote about social media sites as enclosures, and that brought to mind the idea that it is a kind of feudal structure. Doc Searls names that today and proposes a way out with the release of a new kind of privacy contract for users and large entities called “MyTerms.” From his post this quote stood out for me:
“Freedom of contract enables enterprisers to legislate by contract and, what is even more important, to legislate in a substantially authoritarian manner without using the appearance of authoritarian forms. Standard contracts in particular could thus become effective instruments in the hands of powerful industrial and commercial overlords enabling them to impose a new feudal order of their own making upon a vast host of vassals.”
That quote is from Freidrich Kessler, a contract law scholar who wrote it in 1943.
Tottenham bottled a 2-0 lead against Paris St. Germain last night in the European Super Cup. We looked really good against the best team in the world for most of the match, but conceded two late goals and lost on penalties. Had we won I would have declared Spurs as champions of the world. Because we lost it’s just a pre-season friendly. I’m unabashedly partisan in these matters.
At any rate, it was good to see the new look that Tottenham will be employing this season under new manager Thomas Franck. A focus on set pieces, including long thrown from Kevin Danso (I love a long throw), a more balanced shape in defence, with a low block of five defenders which made it frustratingly hard for PSG to score. There was excellent communication on the backline, with the full backs not being afraid to mark their men out wide because there was always someone to slide into the inside channel behind them. This frustrated crosses, a number of which drifted into the centre of the box and were headed away by Christian Romero who had only one job. Palinha also looked good.
Going forward Kudus offers some lovely creative play, but we are going to need another decent attacking midfielder as James Maddison recovers from ACL surgery. I love watching this team, and hope they continue to look renewed and confident as they climb back into the upper echelons of the Premier League and make good account for themselves with the Champions League spot they won last year.
From my friend Kavana Tree Bressen comes this story of 120 Indigenous youth who kayaked down the Klamath River. It sounds impressive on its own merits, but it is amazing becasue these were the first people ever to do so. Until whitewater kayaks were invented, the river wasn’t suited to long journeys. And those boats weren’t invented until after that river had been blocked, initially in 1903, with four hydro-electric dams that destroyed salmon runs and radically disrupted the lives of the Nations who depended upon them. This is an amazing story.
Rick Scott has died. Scott was a legendary BC folk music and children’s music performer and provided the soundtrack to my kids lives when they were young. The Wild Bunnies of Kitsilano was on repeat in our house. His work with Pied Pumpkin was legendary.
A scathing critique of a neo-liberal criticism of a classically liberal university, the European University Institute at Crooked Timber. Far from just a spat between two political points of view in the stratosphere of reason, I think this particular conversation captures where we are right now in democratic states. These two paragraphs in particular stood out to me because in the absence of true conversations and commitments to social welfare and democracy, this is where the state of play is in the world in terms of the practice of state-level justice, equality and social services:
Liberalism involves a bundle of commitments: to individual freedom, minority rights, toleration, rule of law, private property, civil liberties, academic freedom, constitutionalism, human equality and the promotion of opportunity. Liberals tend to view these commitments as mutually reinforcing rather than dimensions on which tradeoffs are possible.
Neoliberals, like The Economist, tend to put the economic freedom bits first and assume that the other dimensions will take care of themselves. Populists are opposed to pretty much everything in that list other than those economic dimensions. As the latter rise in power, the former seem more and more willing to let their social and political commitments fade into the background.
If this is where the conversation is right now, I feel it’s important to join that movement on liberalism while it is still backed by institutions – troublesome as they may be – because they still have the ability to influence policy and keep space open for participation against the rise of populism, fascism and the rapacious demand of the market privatizing everything. Join it and push it to a place of leveraging state and institutional resources to alleviate poverty, and meet basic human needs in a spectacular and generational fashion. I’d be interested on your thoughts on this one.