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Category Archives "Music"

From the Parking Lot

February 3, 2025 By Chris Corrigan Culture, Democracy, Featured, First Nations, Learning, Links, Music, Poetry, Power

The light is returning to the northern hemisphere and we’ve had clear skies for the last 10 days. This is a photo of the twilight with Venus seen from my house looking southwest over Apodaca Ridge. Cloud has since rolled in and a little blast of coastal winter is coming.

Republished. The post I sent out last week had broken links.

My monthly round up of interesting links. These are posted nearly daily at my Mastodon feed.

Democracy & Politics

It has been a full month of politics here in Canada and in the US that has shaken a lot of things up.

  • What Could Citizens’ Assemblies Do for American Politics? | The New Yorker
    Participation and democratic deliberation require time, attention, and intention. It doesn’t solve all problems, but this kind of work is essential.
  • Job One for 2025: Protecting Canada from US Oligarchs | The Tyee
    A benchmark of the current state of US cultural and economic involvement in Canada, against which we can measure the increasingly imperialist tone of leadership in both our countries.
  • Danielle Smith is Undermining Canada: Former Chief Trade Negotiator | Rabble
    Another piece of evidence to support my long-running contention that populists are dangerous in a crisis because they simply don’t know how to govern.
  • A Decent Dive into the United States’ Geopolitical Interest in Greenland and the Arctic | Channel News Asia
    Trump signaling an intent to expand the US’ territory could set off a massive contest for Arctic resources. For the first time in my life, I’m worried that our neighbor to the south will actually invade this country.
  • Please Advise! How Dire and Disgusting Was Trump’s Day One? | The Tyee
    Just bookmarking this one because it kind of captures the spirit of the day.

Climate & Environment

  • We Saved the Planet Once. Can We Do It Again? | The Tyee
    Charlie Angus and I are about the same age and we lived in Toronto at the same time (I remember that hot summer of 1988!). This memoir charts my own recollections too. It’s been a ride.
  • What Are the 2024 Salmon Returns Telling Us? | Alexandra Morton
    Well, they appear to be telling us that closing salmon farms has a positive effect on returns and salmon health. Read the numbers for yourself.

Economics & Social Systems

  • Milton Friedman Blaming Governments for Inflation is One of the Most Pernicious Lies of the Last Half-Century | Dougald Lamont
    Lamont’s writing is new to me and absolutely compelling. A former provincial Liberal leader in Manitoba, he has a strong grasp of economics and governance.
  • How Communism Is Outcompeting Capitalism
    It’s nice to have something to compare the grift of North Atlantic capitalism to. An article not without flaws and blind spots, but a really energetic critique.

Arts & Culture

  • The Secret History of Risotto | The New Yorker
    I love risotto. I love making it and eating it and learning about it, and I love a love letter written to it.
  • Folk Music Legend Got Short Shrift in ‘A Complete Unknown,’ But His Songs Will Live On | PennLive
    A great piece that tries to rescue Pete Seeger’s legacy. Something about his portrayal in the movie didn’t sit well with me. Dylan was an artist who wrote anthems for activists. Pete was an activist who sang. Different. And we need both.
  • Close Reading Bad Poetry | 3 Quarks Daily
    I really enjoyed this article. Learning from the worst possible outcome is a time-honored tradition.

Technology & Innovation

  • I Love a Bushfix. But What’s the Future of ‘Right to Repair’?
    I don’t know much about farming, so this was an interesting article that also made me realize that some of the reasons why food is expensive might have to do with farmers being bilked by their equipment manufacturers.
  • How to Remember Everything You Read | Justin Sung
    As a person with ADHD, these kinds of videos are interesting. I’m currently actively learning two languages (Italian and jazz guitar), continuing to develop my understanding of complexity, and learning how to best teach and share it.

Indigenous Leadership & Legacy

  • Bill Wilson Has Died | He was an incredible voice of leadership from the Central Coast of BC. A history maker, a guy who always spoke his mind with absolute certainty and wasn’t afraid to trigger reactions in the service of blowing a conversation about justice wide open.
  • Listen to My Friend Kameron Perez-Verdia Tell the Story of His First Whale.

Books and music

Links are to publisher or artist sites where you can buy this art directly.

  • The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. A beautiful novel set in 2019-2020 about a haunted book store in Minneapolis during the first year of COVID and the events following George Floyd’s murder. The book is a deep story of identity, history, language and relationship.
  • The Keeper by Kelly Ervick. A graphic memoir about women’s soccer told through the eyes of a woman who comes of age in the 1980s, just as American women’s soccer bursts on to the scene.
  • Benjamin Britten’s Choral Works. Nearly all of Britten’s non-carol choral music collected and performed beautifully. The choir I sing in, Carmena Bowena, is currently adding Hymn to The Virgin to our repertoire.
  • Cassandra Wilson – New Moon Daughter. Her 1995 release explores multiple genres with cover songs and originals and is backed by musicians who have a wide range of fluency across multiple styles. Her voice sounds so much like Joni Mitchell’s voice from the same time. Deep and smokey and full in timbre.
  • Herbie Hancock – The Piano. An album of solo piano music from 1979 recorded direct-to-disc. Showcases Hancock’s improvisational chops and his curiosity about harmony.
  • Peter Hertmens Trio – Akasha. Every month I like to look for a new-to-me jazz guitarist and explore their material. This month I stumbled on the work of Belgian Peter Hertmens. Akasha is a 2018 release with organ and bass that is just a lovely collection of Hertmens’ original compositions.

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Yes, there will be singing

November 1, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Music, Poetry, Power 2 Comments

            Motto by Bertolt Brecht


In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.


                 German; trans. John Willett

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From the Parking Lot

October 31, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Being, Complexity, Democracy, Featured, First Nations, Music, Power 4 Comments

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) appearing in the night sky October 17 over Lake Opinion in Ontario. Shot with my iPhone 13

A collection of interesting links I found and posted at my Mastodon account this month. Happy Hallowe’en!

  • A really nice overview of Edgar Schien’s book “Humble Inquiry” and his approach to working with clients. Please read this if you are a consultant. 
  • This is what happens when you privatize a public service. This is no surprise. We absolutely get what we deserve. Don’t want to pay taxes? No problem. Stick your finger in the wind and see what’s what.
  • I truly believe that Citizens Assemblies are the way to go now. Public hearings are not helpful, not transparent, and not generative enough. Here in BC, we undertook a significant initiative back in 2004 when we looked at changing our provincial electoral system. It produced a remarkably creative and well-supported result. There is currently one beginning work to examine the amalgamation of Saanich and Victoria.
  • The missing people of North Carolina. My heart is constantly breaking for my freinds and colleagues who are mired in disaster that continues. It is nowhere near over, and the trauma and permanent damage to communities, hearts and brains will not abate any time soon
  • Dave Winer is one of the guiding lights in the field of #blogging. I discovered him not long after I started my own Parking Lot blog back in 2002 and followed along with some of the folks that helped inspire him to create RSS and podcasting. RSS should be protected as a treasure of the heritage of humanity. It keeps things open. Scripting News is turning 30. 
  • The Alberta government’s recent legislative actions are deeply troubling. It’s heartbreaking to see a policy based on exclusion rather than inclusion. 
  • Traditional Waters, Modern Threats: The Gitga’at’s Fight for Humpbacks. First Nations asserting jurisdiction over their lands and waters generally result in good things for life within their territories.
  • A nice collection of Complex Systems Frameworks rendered by my friend Sam Bradd for Simon Fraser University .
  • LIstening to Rob Piltch and Lorne Lofsky have an intimate conversation on guitar through Cole Porter’s Everything I Love. These two are absolute masters in very different styles and lions on the Canadian jazz scene.  

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From the Parking Lot

April 2, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Being, Community, Conversation, Culture, Design, Featured, Invitation, Links, Music, Practice 4 Comments

Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world.

Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there.

(PS…the headlines are links! Click for more)

John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.”

I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that Bach created (it is the season of the Passions, after all) and it so perfectly captures Coltrane’s theology and perhaps every artist’s theology. This article is worth a look for how Coltrane thought about the work and the way he used form as prayer.

Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences

An interesting paper about the contrast between The Golden Rule and the idea and practice of what Eric Schweitzgebel calls “extension.” In the paper, Schweitzgebel writes:

“A different approach [to The Golden Rule] treats concern for nearby others as a given and as the seed from which care for more distant others might grow. If you’d care for a nearby child, so also should you care for more distant children. If you’d want something for your sister, so also should you want something similar for other women. This approach to moral expansion differs substantially from others’ shoes / Golden Rule thinking, both in its ethical shape and in its empirical implications.”

This reminds me of the Buddhist practice of Metta, and is food for thought for someone like me who places stock in The Golden Rule.

Every Dr. Johnny Fever DJ break woven into a single show.

If you were a music fan and maybe also if you were involved in radio in the 1970s and 1980s (both of which are true for me), then WKRP in Cincinnati was a must-listen to show. And you had to see the original versions, because the music they played was great but the producers couldn’t afford to syndicate it all, so in re-runs, all the original tracks are just filler tunes and not the originals.

But here is some genius. Someone has taken all of Dr. Johnny Fever’s DJ breaks and announcements and cut them into a three hour show. It contains the live audience laugh track, but it is otherwise a BRILLIANT project and elicits much loving nostalgia for me.

The Implosion of the Retirement Contract

I love a good policy discussion. I admit to being at a loss about how to address inequality and inaccessibility to basics like food, housing and education in a country that thinks of itself as “an advanced economy” and has no political party that is willing or able to make fundamental changes. But policy choices dictate the constraints that create outcomes like unaffordable good food, inaccessible housing and clipping student debt. This paper talks about an interesting underlying assumption that keep property prices high (and therefore also rents).

In nearly all liberal democracies, it is quite normal to treat “property” as “the ideal retirement asset for homeowners, with high house price growth helping downsizers release cash to fund their golden years.”

Cluetrain at 25

The Cluetrain Manifesto was a gamechanger for the early web. Those of us that were blogging back at the beginning of the century all knew about it and if your work extended into the organizational world, reading Cluetrain just laid bare how poorly prepared your company or agency or government was to deal with the oncoming onslaught of conversation, creation and disruption to the ways communications, marketing and organizations worked. Cluetrain is 25 years old now and it’s interesting to think about what is different now. Community is largely gone, for one thing.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ritual

Ted Gioia should be a must-read on everyone’s list. He writes on music and culture, and everything he says is thoughtful, skillfully economical, and insightful. He points you to pieces of music you would have never found. He provides takes on culture that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. This piece is so insightful about what it takes to live with boundaries that make our lives meaningful in an era where our attention has been nearly completely colonized.

The Origin of Last Summer’s Maui Wildfire

It’s hard to overstate the impact of the fire that destroyed Lahaina on Maui last summer. Having been there in February and witnessed the destruction myself, it is profoundly sad. To make matters worse, the fires ripped open a wound on Maui that private interests have rushed in to heal. The community is now in serious danger of being lost to outside owners and investment companies who have predatory designs on the land and property that was destroyed by the fire. Locals are in danger of forever losing their home places because there is no public support that can compete with what the wealthy interests are offering. It’s a shit show. In this article, Cliff Mass undertakes an analysis of the causes of the wildfire.

Raise energy and reduce ‘meeting fatigue’ by making meetings optional

My mate Mark McKergow has a research-supported idea for lowering cognitive fatigue for online meetings. It’s simple enough, but it requires managers to let go of control and let the work speak for itself. And it requires organizations to loosen up on the samara of accountability culture that is killing many of the workplaces I am working with.

Evaluation vs. Monitoring

Evaluation is one of those things that become a massively problematic constraint on a project if one doesn’t understand it, or worse, fears it. My friend Ciaran Camman is offering his course on Evaluation called “Weaving it In” and you should go to that. To get ready for that though, let this whimsical discussion whet your palate.

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Benjamin Zephaniah has died

December 7, 2023 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Music, Poetry

The British poet, musician and performer was an incredible voice over 40 for racial justice and as an advocate for all people taking their place in Britain. His version of the Tam Lyn story, retold above in a stunning performance with the Imagined Village Ensemble, is a brilliant and creative arrangement of the old folk tale but applied to the reality of a refugee living in a 21st century British city and asking that his lover hold on to him as all of the power at play throws itself at him to try to have him deported.

It’s a stunning retelling. Explore Zephaniah’s work and life here.

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