Watching others be great

The weather has been glorious this week on the west coast, warm and sunny with beautiful conditions for walking and bird watching. Since I knew we were travelling this year to Costa Rica, Texas, Europe and eastern Canada this year I decided to see if I could observe or hear 365 species of birds during the year. I’m off to a good start with 151 so far (104 of which we saw in Costa Rica) and the weather has brought about plumage changes in the gulls so it’s getting easier to pick out the Californias from the Glaucous-winged. Yesterday I added the year’s first Black Oystercatcher and Hutton’s vireo (heard but not seen).

This weekend the Men’s Six Nations has started and it is know as rugby’s greatest championship for good reason. France absolutely dismantled Ireland yesterday and I just watched Italy nick a famous victory at home over Scotland in a downpour. England hosts Wales now, and although I would love the Celts to recover some form, I doubt this will be a very close game. Still, rugby delivers fantastic surprises.

Thursday night I finally got to see Tanya Tagaq live at the Chan Centre at UBC, as part of the PuSh Arts Festival. She is one of the most powerful performers I’ve ever seen. She channels and works with power, rage, love, sensuality, joy and the raw, wet, glossy work of life. Her art has always had a @sit down and pay attention” quality to it. I can only listen to albums like “Retribution” maybe once a year, in a dedicated sitting. Her work this week – Split Tooth Saputjiji – contained elements of her “Inuit mythic realism” book Split Tooth and recent to-be-released album Saputjiji. Predictability there were a couple of walk outs but you don’t have to know much about Tagaq’s work to know that the throat singing is not offered as an ethnic curiosity but rather as the vehicle for her to draw the source power from life itself to put hair raising power behind “Fuck War.” She is amazing.