Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Clarifying what you want

I got to meet blogger Victoria Klassen through Twitter at several local tweetups, but I feel I really get to know her through her writing. Today she published a wonderful post, A Forrest Gump kinda interview…, based on customized interview questions sent to her by Raul Pacheco (aka Hummingbird604).

I was really impressed by the clarity of Victoria’s – or Tori’s – responses. Jealous, actually, since I seem to be in a hazy sort of funk where clarity stands no chance against the shadows. In particular, I thought her answer to question #2 (”Which element of communications is the one that makes you most passionate?”) was awesome:

Same thing that excited me most about being a journalist: the opportunity to explain difficult subjects to a lay person with accuracy.

She then goes on to describe the various topics she deals with in her professional life as a public servant …and, well, wow. Just go read her post.

And as if that isn’t enough, there’s her personal history, into which she gives readers some glimpses. It sounds like quite a life, with plenty of ups and downs. But as her blog’s name Samothrace indicates, she’s a marathoner who’s in the race for the long haul: clear-headed, authentic, role-modeling, and having fun. A winner, for sure.

Oz, BC

Oh my.

I got my hair cut at a new place today, and it turned out the two stylists working there knew all my old places (and faces): more or less my age, they had attended the same schools and we knew all the same fools. Good fools, fun fools: places to hang out, to dance, and the right foolish people to do it with.

Turns out some of us grew up to become rather interesting people.

I got my hair cut by Michael Farrell, who also writes and directs films. You can see a trailer of his latest “short” (17 minutes), Lions, Tigers, Bears (shot entirely in Victoria) on YouTube here.

It’s an action-suspense thriller about the organized crime underworld and one man’s quest for power. The film was produced by Coast to Coast Films, directed by Michael Farrell and written by Michael Farrell and Teri Robinson. Michael and Teri are recent award winners for best dramatic writing at the 2008 Action on Film Festival International in Los Angeles. (source)

The star, Christopher Mackie, played the “bad cop” in Theatre Inconnu’s The Pillowman last March – he was fantastic.

There’s an interesting Behind-the-scenes video that chronicles the making of the film. The all-white stark-ish bar scene was, I bet, filmed in the Jelly Fish Lounge, which used to be a grungy biker and stoner and poet bar called The Churchill: another favorite haunt from old skool days…

Speaking of schools, Michael Farrell’s Lions, Tigers, Bears will be showing at St. Ann’s Academy on Thursday night, part of a festival of shorts: Special one-time only Victoria, BC screening of shorts on March 19! 7:30 PM at St. Ann’s Academy Auditorium, 835 Humboldt St., admission $5.

Quick note on Victoria politics and level playing fields

If I were perfect – and perfectly unencumbered by domestic and other obligations – I would write at length about two city of Victoria-related political events I attended in the last 24 hours.

Since I’m not perfectly unencumbered, however, that’ll have to wait.

But here’s foretaste (which serves also as a reminder to myself, in case I never get to the long version): the events were (A) a meeting called by the Victoria West Community Associaton and Victoria Member of Parliament Denise Savoie to gather public input regarding the proposed “mega yacht marina” project at the Songhees, 2/17; and (B) an Urban Development Institute luncheon featuring Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin who spoke to the assembled crowd about his – and his council’s – “vision” for Victoria’s development, 2/18.

Re. (A): I think this might be another case of putting all of one’s eggs into one basket – a large basket, but still a single, non-diversified basket. Not a good idea at the best of times, and since these are not the best of times, it’s even less of a good idea. I’m not worried about the alleged environmental impacts of dredging that section of the harbor (it’s even likely that dredging the harbor of its industrial and lumber gunk will restore seabed health), but I worry about the wisdom of asking multi-millionaires to fork over many thousands of dollars for the privilege of mooring their multi-multi-million dollar yachts at a marina where summer float plane traffic from the Harbour Airport proceeds to dump huge amounts of jet fuel residue and odor on patrons who are likely not to appreciate it. Bottom line: the Songhees condo dwellers already spend enough time kvetching about the working harbor (which includes a real airport with hundreds of flights from 7am to 10pm in the summer, not just a convenient water surface for occasional take-offs and landings), so what’s the benefit of adding a second constituency that will doubtlessly complain as loudly if not more so? Further, the condo dwellers are a captive audience and will continue to pay their property taxes to the city, while the second constituency is mobile (on luxury, aka “mega” yachts) and can just leave. Then what? A purpose-built facility built for just one purpose and for a very narrow niche market (admittedly lucrative) doesn’t seem like the best idea, given the scale of the project, the required investment, and the undeniable impact on the harbor and its current users …and the fact that the patrons can just sail away.

Can this one. Sorry. It’s clunky.

As for (B) – this one is trickier. Can’t sum it up in a few words, but let’s just say that I don’t buy Mayor Fortin’s talk of a “level playing field” for development. Let’s not forget who has the power to decide where the goalposts on this allegedly level field are (the current council). If you control the goalposts, then all talk of level playing fields is just BS.  One of the goalposts, for example, is called “skyline.” Here in Victoria that’s a loaded word, and code for a quite a few sore points. And here’s another thing that jumped out at me: Joe van Belleghem of Dockside Green introduced the Mayor in glowing terms, lauding him for his sense of direction and for being so accessible. Van Belleghem told us how he only managed to get to speak to the previous mayor once (that would be Alan Lowe, who was mayor for 3 terms – 9 years; Joe, you got to talk to Alan just once?, for real? hard to believe), but that he has been able to speak to Mayor Fortin 3 times already (since Nov. 08, i.e., in 3 1/2 months).

Yet here’s the contradiction: when Mayor Fortin spoke, he made a big point about how his new level playing field means that there’s no point in developers calling him to talk their projects over, that he and council work together and there’s no smoothing of paths by the mayor, and that all developers at any rate need to go see the Planning Department first and to get direction from Planning.

So who’s telling it straight, and whose level playing field are we on? Mayor Fortin named some names of people he favors and admires, including architect Franc d’Ambrosio (a personal friend of mine – at least I think he’s a friend, maybe he isn’t if he reads this?) – but Franc is known for preferring a low-rise skyline and as someone who believes that Victoria should emulate Paris with 6 to 7 storey buildings. Hmm. Level playing field, or just “these are my (our) conditions, take them or leave them”? Granted, there could be an advantage to that insofar as often enough one really couldn’t be sure which way the wind was blowing with the previous administration.

Incidentally, the overflow crowd at last night “mega yacht marina” meeting at City Hall had me sitting on the floor of the back corridor behind council chambers, which is normally off limits to the public. At one point Mayor Fortin left the meeting by the door I was crouching at, and he joked, “I see they’ve let the riff-raff in.” Very funny, Dean, and I know you were kidding, but I’m not just any riff-raff. I have a blog, I’m a citizen journalist, and I’m listening carefully.

Victoria BC on Vimeo Videos

While searching for Victoria, BC-based tweeples a little while ago (wondering if MetroCascade should eventually integrate Twitter streams and/or other media) I saw a pointer on Will Wilkinson’s stream to his ~3min. Night Drive video, which he posted to Vimeo. (In a very Victoria “two degrees of separation” scenario, it turns out that Will is in my daughter’s class at school, and that he’s the brother of Andrew Wilkinson, who demo’d his latest venture at our last DemoCamp in October 08. Small world…)

Anyway… Will’s video is a lot of fun to watch if you know the city – it takes you from Oak Bay (the municipality), down Oak Bay Ave., past “the Junction” (that’s where Oak Bay Ave. ceases to exist and meets up with Fort St. and Pandora Ave. – and Johnson St. just a bit further down). He continues down Pandora, past the Johnson St. merge, past the Conservatory, past City Hall and A-Channel, into Old Town, before turning left at Wharf to head to the Inner Harbour area/ Belleville St. I really like the editing (speed) and soundtrack here.

After watching this, I searched for additional Vimeos tagged with “Victoria, BC” (again, thinking ahead to how these might be integrated – eventually – into MetroCascade) and came up with a couple worth mentioning.

(Side note: They mostly feature guys – young guys – in the active roles. Not sure why that is…)

So: check out vicwest by warrenfosterphoto – this one is amazing, it was shot at the skatepark in Vic West, a Victoria neighborhood just on the other side of the Upper Harbour, across the Blue Bridge (Johnson Street Bridge). (Full disclosure: I don’t think I could skateboard to save my life, so I watch the antics with fascination, envy, and …well, horror.)

Also related to the skatepark – which has a bike section, too – there’s Island Jam posted by Brydon Sudds. In this one it’s all guys (again) – they’re on funny little bikes that appear to impart superhuman skills to the riders.

Twenty-three seconds of last year’s gregarious Pride Parade were captured and posted to Vimeo: this one is fun to see because it reminds us of how sunny and just …nice it will be in a few months. (We’ve had an unseasonally cold winter – at least it seems that way – and while the tulips are pushing their way through dirt, and some of the ornamental fruit trees are starting to bloom, it’s still bloody cold, afaic.)

Speaking of unconventional dress (of which there’s always a lot in the Pride Parade), Tom Williams (CEO of GiveMeaning) shops for women’s high heeled shoes at Freedman’s, gets a pedicure at Spa Sereine (both on Government St. downtown), and heads up a parade to benefit the Women’s Sexual Assault Centre. See A Mile in Her Shoes by Red Pilot Media. The parade starts at Centennial Square on a weekend morning, and it all looks pretty deserted (except for the participants’ presence), but they raised ~$11K, not bad at all.

Finally, Project GreenScreen posted a cool “how to become a youth volunteer” video, Volunteer Victoria – The YouthCore Virtual Tour, which features some outside footage, although most of it is shot inside the Central Building on View St. between Broad and Government Streets. (In another “two degrees of separation” moment, the cameraman for this video is almost certainly Joseph Boutilier, who I know, and who ran for Victoria City Council last fall. He and Simon Nattrass were the youngest candidates ever, but among the brightest and best. Neither one was elected – maybe next time.)

Ok, I still don’t know how/if the extra media can/will ever be integrated into MetroCascade, but there’s lots of it out there…

Image stealing, but the girl can’t help herself…

Ok, so I’m not supposed to “rip” images from flickr.com directly, but this one is so great, it would be a shame just to point to it:

Isn’t that a beauty? (I mean everything: the cars, the photo, the framing of the shot…)  It’s by  Maple Musketeer, and the shot is from this page.

Note, by the way, that it was taken yesterday (7/26).  It looks old, but it’s simply one (correction: two) of the many vintage cars you’ll see in this climate (they don’t rust, they just eventually fade away…), and the photographer has toned it (sepia?) to suggest age.  Across the street you can make out the sign for “Westbank,” which is the presentation centre for a development corporation.  The building it’s in used to house Ballantyne Florists, the building itself is by John di Castri, a local mid- to late-20th century architect of some (local) renown.

Is “balance” enough?

Just a quick post, as I’m still in catch-up mode. This morning I read an article in the local paper about a man who has 250 charges against him for public drunkenness, causing disturbances, aggressive panhandling, harassing people, and so on. “Red,” as he’s called in the article, is not homeless, according to police, and they do not believe that he has a mental health problem (although that’s debatable, given his behavior). See Persistent panhandler gets summons under a section of community charter.

Now the city will use a new community charter bylaw to haul this individual before court, where they hope the judge will sentence him to stay away from the downtown core. The intent is to ban Red from panhandling and from “socializing” downtown.

One city council member, quoted in the article, says, “There’s always got to be a balanced approach in dealing with all the issues.”

This bothers me, maybe because we hear too much about “balance” these days. The councilor is concerned that Red’s rights to be downtown on the street to panhandle (which isn’t illegal as such) aren’t infringed upon, and that the way to address the problems caused by the behaviors of people like Red is to seek balance. It somehow makes me think that balance is starting to become a sort of mantra which doesn’t allow valuation. And if that’s the case, you have to ask: Is “balance” stasis? If so, it’s death.

What about judgement? Are we (especially in Canada) so afraid of judging (as my daughter pointed out to me a couple of years ago, in Canada judges need to take workshops to learn how to be non-judgemental…) that we opt for balance (stasis), versus embracing quick, nimble, intellectually aware and alert change? And besides, isn’t our supposed balance often enough just an appearance of balance? All sorts of stuff is still out of whack beneath the surface and in other domains, and the fervent wish for balance is …well, just a wish. Perhaps a wish to get out of making judgements and decisions?

It’s ironic that the US should be full of religious evangelists, whose mantra on the Christian side of the register is not to judge, lest ye be judged, and yet it’s we in Canada, supposedly secular, who are holier than thou in being non-judgemental.

So here’s the deal: I have a problem with being non-judgemental, especially since I’m not a Christian or religious. Being non-judgemental might work fine in your spiritual life, but it sucks when it comes to ethics and politics and economics and policy. You know, it’s like that old shibboleth about rendering unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s and onto god what’s god’s.

Which finally makes me wonder if politicians, when they talk about “seeking balance,” are refusing to judge, …which makes me wonder whether focusing on “balance” is replacing decision-making. I also wonder whether balance in the spiritual sense was ever intended to be a sort of placeholder for anything, whether painful or pleasurable.

As an atheist, I object to any strategy or philosophy that introduces religion into politics. When people talk about “balance,” they usually mean something quasi-religious (or at least “spiritual,” whatever that horse of a different color means to all the riders out there).  Whether the councilor in question is religious or not is moot for me at this point.  I’m concerned with the discourse of “balance,” which is starting to sound like religion.  I object to religion whenever and wherever it worms its way into places where it doesn’t belong.

Victoria: turning into everywhere else? It’s creativity unleashed

Perhaps Victoria is “turning into everywhere else,” and that’s a good thing? It is when it means that modern creativity is unleashed, on the streets, and in our coffee houses.

This morning I was cataloging my books on LibraryThing while my husband went out for breakfast to meet Rod O. from Magic Kite at the Cook Street Village Starbucks, which is just one of 4 coffee shops (soon to be 5) in this 2-block area.

As they’re drinking their lattes, they’re surrounded by scads of folks from the neighbourhood, who have come in to check out the people or read books or have business meetings or work wirelessly on their laptops. The crowd includes a man working on a Ruby on Rails application, using the Flock browser. Since the husband and Rod had just been talking about building a little business app on Rails, they chat with the other chap for a while. When the spouse returns home (where I’m still busily cataloging away, trying not to sneeze from all the dust), he tells me about the Flockstar fellow on Rails.

Hmm, I think, Can’t be, can it? The world’s not that small?

Was he quite distinctly hairless as regards the scalp?, I ask. Yes, came the answer. Was his name Rick?, I inquired. Yes, again.

Coincidence? Or an element of localized spikiness? I’ve never met Rick, but it so happened that I used a photo of “Rick on Rails” pulled from Flickr (and uploaded by quaelin on Jan.22/07) next to a photo of a Roland Brener work, “Sculpture” (also posted to Flickr, by striatic), for two talks I presented to local Victoria business / community groups this winter.

The slide I made, which juxtaposed “Sculpture” (above) and “Rick on Rails” (below) includes this bit of text:

The Creative City

“…creativity is revolutionizing the global economy…”

- Richard Florida

The juxtaposition was part of my larger point — that creativity needs to be unleashed: it can’t be restricted to areas of fine art, it also has to permeate technology and entrepreneurship. Brener’s Sculpture represented a multi-faceted aspect of “traditional” creativity (and is located where one conventionally expects to find it – in a gallery setting). Rick represents the creativity of technology and entrepreneurship, which you can casually stumble upon at your neighbourhood coffee shop.

(With thanks to “Rick on Rails” for having his picture on Flickr and being a “shining beacon” of technological creativity in Victoria! I hope he doesn’t mind that I’ve reposted this likeness here to make a point!)

And so, let’s hope that Victoria gets spikier and more creative all the time — unleashing creativity is the best way to ensure that it will be “like everywhere else” (that is, one of those places that’s buzzing with goodness & spikiness), while also developing a distinctive, spiky edge of its own. “Becoming like everywhere else” sometimes just means that a place changes for the better and finds its creative groove.

Edit: I’ve added the tags DemoCampVictoria, democampvictoria01, and northernvoice to this entry as it relates directly to DemoCamp Victoria01’s genesis.

How Victoria’s Monday Magazine gets it wrong

Victoria has a weekly tabloid newspaper called Monday Magazine, which, starting as an alternative publication ~35 years ago, has somehow managed to stay mired in the worst sort of “us and them” thinking that feeds into (and off) the roiling Schadenfreude of the perpetually resentful.

Lately, one of their old writers from some many years ago, Sid Tafler, returned to roost. He is riding the resentment wave, in particular with an article published a week ago Wednesday (Jan.23), when the Jan.24-30/08 edition hit the street, with Tafler’s “Faulty Towers; Empty condos a tragedy of urban planning failure.” The article — full of errors and shoddy thinking, was promptly posted to Victoria’s best online forum for urbanism, Vibrant Victoria, where it received both a thread of its own, Monday Article – Faulty Towers – by Sid Tafler, as well as lengthy critiques.

Some Monday Magazine articles are online, while others aren’t. Tafler’s wasn’t, but the forumer who started the thread posted a scanned version to the thread — if anyone wants to read the article, click through to the thread. Note that the columns of text in the scans run vertically, and you have to finish the first column on the first scan in the first column on the second scan, and so on…

In the next issue of Monday, the magazine printed 3 letters strongly in support and 1 conditionally in support of Tafler’s junk analysis, with one by former architect Roger Smeeth taking the prize for suggesting silly and impossible things. (Again, see the forum thread for really incisive critiques of Smeeth’s letter.)

I too sent a letter to Monday Magazine, dated Jan.26, but since I was critical of Tafler’s odious column, the editors perhaps didn’t see fit to publish it. And so I’m publishing it here on my blog — because I want to make sure that a record of the opposition and criticism that Tafler’s cheap shot provoked never fades from the Google record.

Here’s my letter:

Dear Editor:

I sincerely hope that Sid Tafler’s ears started burning on Thursday Jan.24, when he, with “Faulty Towers” freshly published, attended Charles Campbell’s UVic lecture on conglomeration in the Canadian press and heard Campbell specifically and vigorously castigate Canadian journalists for their slovenly habits of retailing untruths. “Faulty Towers” is certainly and thoroughly corrupted by untruth and exaggeration, to the point that one wonders whether Tafler’s exercise in demagoguery veiled another purpose. But maybe he is just being jejune.

It’s difficult to know where to begin setting Mr. Tafler straight, because of course he’s just clever enough to appeal to legitimate concerns around affordability, which breathe enough life into his straw man (or is “Condoria” a woman?) for his article to appeal to the credulous.

But let’s just remember that practically all the condos he so abhors sit on what used to be surface parking lots, and they didn’t displace anybody’s “comfortable single-family home with a back yard.” Really, Mr. Tafler: you appear to be concerned about social and environmental ills, yet advocate a hackneyed suburban vision.

Mr. Tafler writes that “the city of Victoria approved 3,000 condo units in the last five years — 800 in 2007 alone, more than any other year” — as if that were a bad thing. I’d argue it’s a great thing: that’s 3,000 fewer “units” going to suburban sprawl; that’s 3,000 more “units” contributing to the city’s tax base (even if some of the owners are absent some of the time, they’re still paying property taxes, which happen to fund a vast part of the city’s budget); and that’s 3,000 potential “units” of people downtown, shopping, recreating, adding life to those streets.

Believe it or not, there are people living in many of those “units.” Good friends of mine live in Shutters, although, since they travelled for the past 2 months, their “unit” is dark. Likewise, you’ll find many empty-nesters who leave Victoria at this time of year to catch some sun. Their “units,” too, will be dark. In the lower price range, you will find investors buying “units,” but guess what? They rent them out, which helps alleviate Victoria’s rental crunch.

What would Mr. Tafler do instead? Have all these “units” to move to Bear Mountain? Would that be preferable? Incredible as it may seem, some of us cheer every time we can wrest some “units” back to our downtown.

Nor did these projects derail some magical solution to homelessness or affordability. It’s not the case that anyone was willing to step up to donate a building to that cause, nor is it the case that city councils can somehow magically wave a wand and make affordable housing appear.

Which brings me to my last point: you have to love the armchair quarterback, second-guessing all those lazy, incompetent city councilors, don’t you? Really, judging from Mr. Tafler’s grasp of economics (a simultaneously shallow and flaccid grasp it is), I’d hate to see him in a councilor’s seat, because I’m sure he’d go mad at the workload and the demands on his attention by every citizen who knows everything about anything better than he, the councilor, does. Those folks, as Mr. Tafler’s own example shows, are a dime a dozen, and when you’re in that seat, they’ll have you for breakfast. I wonder how Sid Tafler would like being made a meal of.

Sincerely,
Yule Heibel

Tafler was at the Charles Campbell lecture (about which I’ll have more to blog later), and my use of the word “jejune” specifically points to a rather acid comment Campbell was making about Conrad Black v. the Asper family.

Deadlines — mirages for control freaks prior to hitting the caravansarai

I guess I’m happy — in that slightly dazed, exhausted kind of way. I missed my usual deadline for my FOCUS Magazine article, juggled half a dozen balls while writing when my hands were free, and now finished at last. But the article turned out to be about something I hadn’t expected to write about, which somewhat accounts for the deadline extension, and I’m now pretty certain I can’t leave it where it is, and that what I wrote is really just Part One of what has to be a two-part series. I have no idea if the editor will agree, and so I’m not really sure if I’m actually done.

Does this make sense?

On another note: I have a hot new garden! It isn’t finished yet — that’s another deadline that came & went without being met — but it’s so gorgeous already, I can hardly believe it. Our miserably overcast, sometimes rainy summer was a blessing in disguise as it prevented my old garden from dying of drought (drought being the typical pattern here in summer), and now summer seems to be returning in some late guise, ready to drench my new garden with sun.

If I ever get a laptop again, I can take it to that new garden and make my personal caravansarai right there.