I am about to engage with DanceArts Vancouver on a three year global project called the Earth Project. It is an international collaboration that will bring together all kinds of people involved in the arts, sustainability, community development and activism and social justice to look at how the arts can facilitate conversations and dialogue on these issues, especially with youth. I’ll be attending an Open Space meeting on Monday with Bill Cleveland from the Center for the Study of Art and Community in Minneapolis who wrote a fantastic paper called Mapping the Field: Arts-Based Community Development. I will be learning …
Rock Balancing art from Oasis Design, Photo by Art Ludwig Robert Brady, writing in his blog Pure Land Mountain about the lessons learned from working with stones: If you want a wall that is a stone poem in stone syntax, you have to learn the bit-by-bit stones teach until at last you have a stone wall, not a book wall, not a you wall. The finest mortar for a stone wall, therefore, is patience in the builder, blended with integrity. No integrity in the builder, no integrity in the wall. But the bigger lesson comes later, when the wall is …
I’m reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson and it’s totally engroosing. In the middle of the dozen or so stories that swirl around between the covers of the book are gems of writing like these: Randy spent plenty of time chasing and carrying out impromptu experiements on dust devils while walking to and from school, to the point of getting bounced of the grille of a shreiking Buick once when he chased a roughly shopping-cart-sized one into the street in an attempt to climb into the centre of it. He knew they were both fragile and tenacious. You could just stomp …
How not to run a democracy. This article, sarcastically titled Grassroots Democracy in Iraq, American Style tells the story of a local leader in a Baghdad neighbourhood who, despite his gut instincts, decided to stand for local office in a new local council. The military convened the council, supervised the elections and gave the orders – representatives would not be paid, but would receive US military assistance in making local improvements. The first job was to do a detailed assessment of the neighbourhood’s needs. The five member council undertook the assignment diligently and in nine days produced a thick report …