Another year is drawing to a close and I’m feeling very tired and very excited about what the year has been like. Taking a cue from Viv, here is my end of year post. In general 2008 was a year of teaching and travel. For the first half of the year I was on the road for 120 days, visiting places throughout British Columbia as well as Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Nova Scotia and southwards to Washington, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, New York, Michigan and Georgia. Most of the teaching I did was with my mates in the Art of …
Van Jones – my inspiration for 2009 Photo by luxomedia I’ve blogged about Van Jones before, but last night I listened to a podcast of a talk he gave at a Social Change Forum at Hollyhock on Cortes Island earlier this year. With a powerful mix of humour and truth telling, he describes the confluence of social justice and environmental justice and calls for a new politics that transcends dualities, us vs, them thinking and win/lose outcomes. He also make a powerful point about how our absolute reliance on deliverables, outcomes and achievables makes us liars, as we …
Play, movement, beauty, and grace – this is why I love juggling. It uses a hard constraint (the predictable inevitability of gravity) as a resource to create beauty. Thanks to Thomas for the link, who is my own master at this aesthetic.
I have noticed over the years that much public discourse is informed but what we see on television. Whether it is the cross-examination of the courtroom drama, or the witty one liners of sitcoms, or the over extended drama of soap operas, the way we talk to each other is heavily influenced by what is screened around us. This clip is interesting: interviews with screenwriters who point out the function of dialogue in a television show. One of the high points of writing dialogue, it turns out, is that it will never be effective if people are actually …