Spent the day in Vancouver visiting family and heading to the Bard on the Beach matinee performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Bard is the Vancouver summer Shakespeare festival, and is known for their cheeky mountings of the Bard’s plays. For whatever reason I think we’ve mostly seen comedies over the past number years, so my take on their repertoire may lean more towards “excellent masters of farce.” But I love the ethic of this company and even with well known plays, there is often a twist that sends a message, whether it is the setting, or some topical asides, some clowning, or some casting or editorial decisions. My impression of the production principle here is that Shakespeare is presented faithful to the experience that the original audiences might have had, and that means not sparing the sacred cows of the day. The commentary is cutting and contemporary, and I often leave feeling what I imagine Shakespeare’s original audiences felt in the 16th and 17th centuries watching these plays, entertained by a production that spoke to them, and that spoke a little truth to power.
Today it was The Two Gentlemen of Verona which is a play I have never seen or read. It’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest and weakest plays, and has been performed only sporadically over the centuries. We did some pre-game research on the play, just because these romantic comedies tend to twist and flail and it’s easy to get lost. This one features the foibles of Proteus and Valentine, two buddies from Verona who head to Milan for some adventure. Proteus, true to his namesake, is a shape shifter, falling in and out of love depending on the circumstance. Valentine has more integrity, although that observation has to be tempered by the fact that these two are consummate boneheaded bros The setting of this production was the 1980s and as a result. each of these characters evoked people from my own high school days, which made for an interesting personal experience.
The lead characters are semi-loveable idiots. In this production they occupy a kind of anti-hero character arc. As the play progresses and they twist themselves into more and more ridiculous and narcissistic situations. It gradually dawns on the audience how reprehensible these guys actually are. They treat romantic love as an inferior form of relationship to the bro code and that has been a knock on the play through its history. It has some truly troublesome misogyny in it, not the least of which is how the play ends. Throughout history critics have wrestled with how to interpret the ending of the play. Directors have rewritten it, edited it or just ignored it altogether. I think rather than dancing around the problem of the ending, director Dean Paul Gibson learned into it and SOLVED it. He adds no dialogue to the play, adds nothing to change the ending at all except a shifted perspective that melts the fourth wall. It’s brilliant. It’s very moving. It becomes immensely real for every single person who has aged out of that immature world of superficial high school relationships. You should go and see it, and maybe after the festival is over, I’ll spoil it.
Apart from the ending, there was an added level of brilliance having the play set in the 1980s. To me it made it feel like I was watching a high school play from my own era. The play becomes even more funny when one remembers that these characters are basically all teenagers (in maturity levels if not actual age) and the company play them with a remarkable take. These actors appear to me not to be earnestly occupying the characters, but rather earnestly occupying the character of teenage actors staging this play. You know the way that high school theatre sometimes tends to typecast the actors into characters that resemble them in real life? It felt like that. These are actors playing actors playing Shakespearian characters. The detachment and the 80s setting lends a layer post-modern irony to the whole thing made it even funnier. And it’s probably the best way to handle the fundamental weakness of the play in general: lean into it. I loved it.
One of the things Shakespeare’s characters often do is to reason themselves into tragic or comedic situations. The reasoning itself is such a device of the age. It’s as if Shakespeare, writing on the edges of of modernity, was trying out these new forms of thought: a scientific reasoning of how one’s passions are at work and what it means. His soliloquies are full of this stuff. You see the origin of the characters’ limiting beliefs, you see the mental gymnastics they are doing to justify and rationalize absurd beliefs that give legitimacy to the emotional lives. It’s immensely relatable.
Part of the fun of Two Gentlemen of Verona is watching these dudes try to reason their way into abominably stupid situations and the more they do so the more respect they lose. By the end of the play they are so convinced of their rightness in the world that their triumphant and confident exit is easily turned to a complete mockery. As a former teenage boy, I found myself staring into a pretty brutal mirror at times. Simultaneously guffawing at these idiots and then slapping my brow with uncomfortable recognition.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona runs until September 19.
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Even though this is the season of crickets and blackberries and we have just had our first Pineapple Express of the ecological autumn, the summer heat is t done with us yet. Today gusty winds are chugging down the inlet and they are warm to the face. A hot day is in store and that should last the week.
Sometimes you just want to read a little story about a collective experience of cricket, parties, new love and navigating half way across the Midlands of England by train.
What does it take to thoughtfully read 30 books a month? 2025 Booker Prize judge Chris Power shares his thoughts: read whenever you can and keep notes.
I adore Patti Digh as a smart sassy writer. She blogs nearly every day and almost always has something to offer that makes me say “yes!” Her line “the shortest distance between two people is a story” is basically my entire work life summed up. Today she opens up about her depression and this line landed with me: “shame is not a motivator. It’s a silencer. It makes it harder to ask for help, not easier. It makes you think that telling the truth will only make people turn away.”
Ted Gioia on the difference between circles and lines, the ring shout, holding opposites and why the Tesla Cybertruck is a coffin on wheels.
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Vanessa Machado de Oliveira Andreotti is doing some compelling work, which will probably take a whole day for me to dive into and understand. Here is a presentation about her reflections of a year of working with AI to address the collapse of modernity:
Toward the end of my book Outgrowing Modernity, I began a speculative engagement with artificial intelligence guided by a compass rooted in meta-relationality, a stance and praxis grounded in the factuality of entanglement. Meta-relationality challenges the modernist framing of separability and insists that all systems, including AI, are embedded in the relational metabolism of life. From this perspective, AI is not outside nature, but already part of it—co-constituted with human, ecological, historical, and institutional forces.
I recognize that AI is a highly polarizing and often triggering topic. This work does not position AI as inherently good or inherently bad. Nor is it an attempt to defend, romanticize, or condemn AI as a category. Instead, it is based on a wager: that it is possible—and necessary—to hold both the very real harms of AI and its (increasingly narrow) transformative potentials at once. The question becomes: what might emerge if we remain in that tension long enough to learn something we didn’t already know?
She is asking some good questions.
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Today I learned about “kelping.” That’s when orcas or humpbacks tangle themselves up in kelp beds because it feels nice.
Orcas are more than just a charismatic mega fauna on our coast line. They are a population, and for First Nations, they are kin. For the people that live close to them, including researchers, the whales are chosen family. This week, I76 died. Here is the account of his death from OrcaLab. It contains these beautiful words:
At this moment the day shifted. Jared Towers had come out specifically in response to the previous day’s concerns about I76, the oldest son of I4. He was extremely thin and having difficulties. Jared found him on the Vancouver Island side of the Strait opposite to the entrance to Blackney Pass. The rest of his small family were further away. The day was grey, the ocean only slightly agitated. As several dolphins surrounded and overwhelmed I76, his mother came flying across to him. Jared said he had never seen a Northern Resident move so fast and that she was clearly upset. From that time on his family remained close to his side with the dolphins surrounding the entire family who were more or less stationary. This continued until just before 3pm when I76 took his last breath and sank out of sight into the depths. His family lingered near his last position, then began to call..
Ernest Alfred happened to be here and he and a few of us went out into Johnstone Strait. There next to the mountains of Vancouver Island, near to a few dolphins who still seemingly hovered over where I76’s had his last moments and not far from his family now slowly weaving their way east, Ernest sang in Kwakwala reminding us to shed our tears before nightfall, morning would bring another ceremony fitting with the time of day and a chance to say good-bye.
Read the subsequent posts to see how the humans and whales who knew I76 mourned his passing.
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What is going on? My friend Alison shared this story on Mastodon with this intro “Fake news features about things that didn’t happen in places that don’t exist written by people who don’t exist is pretty much what we expect from AI journalism.” Read on about the elusive Margaux Blanchard.”
Dave Pollard shares a thoughtful post on the intelligence of crowds, in which he explores both the wisdom and the incoherence of large groups of people and asks good questions about the characteristics of a crowd that contribute to it’s thoughtfulness in acting. It makes me think of the “intelligence” of crowds, as in the emergent property that creates a set of constraints that directs action in certain ways. This seem to co-arise with the emergence of the quality of a a collection of people that makes it a “group” or a “mob” or an “assembly.” There is intention behind those words – we want a team and not a gang – and it’s worth asking the question how do we create coherence that guides the emergence of the form and intelligence we want froths group, without the pitfalls of too much coherence so that what alos emerges is a cult. This is something I’mexploring in the container book I’mchipping away at.
Back in 2018 a Whitecaps Academy grad and former WFC2 player, Patrick Metcalfe joined TSS Rovers for the season. He appeared in 10 games as a defensive midfielder and helped us on to winning our first piece of silverware as a club, the Juan de Fuca Plate. Following that season he signed a professional contract with the Vancouver Whitecaps where he made 20 appearances in 2020 and 2021. The Whitecaps cut him after 2022 and he went to Norway where he found a job with Staebek and helped them get promoted to the Eliteserien. He was cut again at the end of that year and signed on with Fredrikstadt, who were in the second division. Again he helped a club to promotion and after a great 2023, the club did well in their first season in the top flight and won the Norwegian Cup, meaning they qualified for European play in the Conference League. Patrick played 70 matches over those two seasons and had his contract renewed in March just before the season started. Today he started for Fredrikstad against English FA Cup winners Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park and played the whole match in a defensive masterclass that held the Premier League team to a 1-0 win in the first leg of their two-leg qualification tie.
Patty’s is one of those players, like our former defender Joel Waterman – who just got transferred to Chicago Fire in MLS – who make their own way in the world of professional football. They travel to find a place they are wanted, where they can make a contribution. They know their talent alone is not enough to keep them in the professional game, and so they work hard, stay true to themselves, and give as much as they can wherever the end up. In as much as it’s great to have the flamboyant heroes of the pro game for younger players to look up to, I’m always lifting up the likes of Metcalfe and Waterman and Tynan and Friesen and Haynes, all players who have stopped in with out little club, the TSS Rovers, and seen it as the step they needed on their own journey. When they come through us though, they pick us up as well, so that even 7 years later a small group of people in Vancouver are watching a far flung European tie and can’t take their eyes of the number 11 from the Norwegian underdog.