Shopping Carts in Ravines

any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,

(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:

(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq

It’s funny (well, it would’ve been funny, back when irony was all the rage and people didn’t take reality seriously) that Bush can issue an executive order such as the one he just did, which I’ve quoted above, that gives the government the ability to confiscate property and goods belonging to anyone who threatens the peace and stability of Iraq (actually, anyone who opposes the war, check the second link for a full explanation).

Uhm, citizen’s arrest anyone? Mr. Bush, you haven’t exactly been Iraq’s calm, guiding Buddha.

If anyone confiscates his stuff, I call dibs on his cowboy hat.

You know post-irony isn’t just some piece of recreational cultural pseudodevelopment… it’s impossible to see the irony in this sort of doublethink and find it funny.

I couldn’t laugh at this stuff now even if I wanted to.

Sooooooooooo… anyone wanna renew my Flickr account and then e-mail me the code, then post a comment here without the code to tell ppl that it’s already done?

Okay, wait, hold on, I don’t like to really ask anything of people through this site, I try to present it more as an offering and I cover the webhosting costs.

I would be such an extreme hypocrite that I’m not sure the word even still applies if I were to have banner ads on this site, and though I used to have an ‘ad free blog’ owl in the sidebar, it just seemed redundant. I think that it’s clear from the content that I’m not going to be putting ads on this website or selling you coffee mugs and baseball caps through it.

The thing is, I’m currently in between an expensive scouting mission to try to find a site for Northtek (that nearly got us stranded in the woods) and helping put together at least one stage / doing a workshop at Northtek next weekend, then trying to get to BC following that. I have next to no money.

Now, the webhosting costs consist of the webspace, bandwidth, and domains related to this and connected sites. Part of the storage and traffic costs are attributed to 1&1, my hosting provider, but images (aside from the Shopping Cart gallery) are hosted on Flickr.

Flickr also wants money for a sufficient amount of storage space and bandwidth. The problem is that, unlike the 1&1 account which I’ve covered, my Flickr account is expiring August 6th and I could really use a donation from someone ’cause otherwise, I dunno, I hope you really like reading plain text.

I’m also just curious as to whether this will work.

Sooooooooooo… anyone wanna renew my Flickr account and then e-mail me the code, then post a comment here without the code to tell ppl that it’s already done?

It’s US$24.95 for 1 year, incidentally.

So, I’m in Waterloo now. Our (Me, Thresh, Paranoize) scouting mission was not just a failure, but an abject one. The van we borrowed from Cowboy decided it wouldn’t start while we were in cottage country, and we were delayed until the next day when we could get a boost… then we couldn’t find the site we went looking for and were afraid of the van dying on us down a random back road in the middle of the night, so we gave up and came back to Toronto…

…where we drove to Spadina, at which point we discovered a sulphur smell coming from the battery. We popped the hood to find it smoking, leaking battery acid and burning its own labels off. After finding someone who could lend us money to buy a battery, we had to use the good battery to boost the bad one and then drive around the city trying to find someone who was awake and had a wrench.

Once the batteries were switched, we headed to the anti-WEMF party (”Corporate Ravers Fuck Off!”) on the Scarborough bluffs beachfront. A chill site with a sound tent and a pirate flag flying a bit out into the water, with a lovely view of Pickering’s nuclear power plant and wind turbine.

Sa texted me from WEMF to say she wanted badly to get out, and when we (Me, Thresh) left the beach to return the van (to Waterloo) we were working on a plan to scoop her up on the way, then all bus back to Toronto and return to CRFO. Would’ve been a good beach story, unfortunately things didn’t work that way…

Cowboy wanted his van back ASAP and phoned to yell about it before we’d left Toronto. I was in the middle of getting a falafel (though they were closed, my King David review was blown up and put on a big corrugated plastic sign and posted in their window… it was neat feeling like I’d left a mark on the place/area, now that I don’t live nearby any more) from Yakamoz when I found out one of my old school friends just got engaged… The first serious engagement of any of my personal friends.

Anyway, we couldn’t get Sa, rushed back to Waterloo, and Cowboy zoomed off to leave us to discover that the last bus had already left. So me and Thresh stayed the night. Sa showed up, Thresh left today, but me and Sa just missed the last bus again while buying food and so I’m still here.

I think our trip served as a lightning rod for the scouting bad luck, though, because apparently Talixzen went up to the same area and found a new and better site than the one we’d gone looking for… so, 73KN1V4L!!!

Well, it’s been nearly a month since the Om Re:union Project’s Re:treat festival took place (around the summer solstice) and it’s about due time I come back down to Earth and put into words what I experienced.

Well, actually, if you know me, you know I tend to compile things… so here’s what I actually wrote by hand at the festival, bearing in mind that I haven’t actually hand-written anything in literally years:

One day after the solstice, 2007

I’m sitting on a cliff’s edge overlooking a rocky pair of ponds.

Really, it’s more of a wet rockbed than a pond or lake.
It’s quite nice though.

I’m here for the Om Festival Re:Union Project.

I haven’t been to an Om since 2004, which was the final year for the broadly-publicized festival, open to the public.
In the years since, Om has transitioned into being a closed community, though it remains open to applications.

The moon’s exactly half-full.

I’ve been picking up cigarette butts, as for some reason smokers don’t realize butts are litter. Just an aspect of a whole habit of denial, I guess.

The joints, on the other hand, are rolled with birch bark filters… they’ll decompose, unlike the synthetics and carbon of the cigarettes.

It’s getting dark and the bass just kicked in. Time to go party.

We talk pure Earth but sleep in plastic tents.

At least at Om, the stages are powered by solar panels (very impressive) while teknival’s 15 radical stages require 15 radical gas generators.

Understand that we’re trying our best, though, genuinely.

We’ve been born into a horrid plastic system and at this point in our history it’s literally almost impossible for people to break free, in psychological, cultural or lifestyle activity terms.

I wonder what life will be like for Haven, the 6-year-old boy here who volunteered to be a model for a Mark Jenkins-style tape sculpture body cast. It was pretty funny watching him be wrapped in saran wrap and tape.

Again, people even commented on the waste, but decided it was alright based on its artistic value.

It’s the same thing with computers. They’re disposable, deliberately obfuscated toxic contraptions that consume ever-increasing amounts of electricity.

But they’re helping us break free.

It’s literally impossible to be separate from the system when born into where we are. But we know that and are fighting it… Unfortunately every move we make, at least initially, does damage.

Eventually, we may own land, grow crops, use solar and be thoroughly self-sufficient, and we are trying…

The Om people have long had the plan of buying a piece of land.

It’s also something I’ve thought of alot. Two of my friends have family farms and could conceivably be down, Cowboy in particular, given his description of his lifeplan.

Several quick notes:

• The food (made from the random array of donations everyone brings in and prepared by continuously-changing volunteer groups, then served out freely at regular meal intervals and with snacks out at all hours of the day and night in between) is fucking incredible.

  So much larger servings than 2004 and even more than I can eat… which is a limit that barely even exists. Sushi, salad, rice, soup, chili, lentil stew, bread with pesto, tortillas, and oh my god melted vegan chocolate with granola and mixed fresh berries. One of the best vegan desserts I’ve ever had. The guy making the soup threw some of my ginseng in to energize and revitalize everyone. Very cool.

• I had a wicked conversation with Solomon who gave the hugging workshop and 2 other people about free parties, free culture and the post-society waste niche it exists in, as well as the oft-ignored fungi kingdom, the decomposers with incredible and unique properties that exist in an overlooked niche gap.

  I was telling Solomon that animals are actually closer to fungi than plants, and while I only meant taxonomically/genetically in an evolutionary sense, I just realized that we free radicals behave quite like the fungi, especially the ones that had colonized a tree stump up amongst the camps on the ridge and were glowing bioluminescently in the dark.

  I told Solomon, “You can build a kingdom from the things Toronto throws away.” Free culture, like fungal culture, is often disregarded from outside and thrives on that which is discarded.

• Paranoize came on late and then dropped the best set I’ve ever heard him play. He’s actually like one of Toronto’s best DJs. Given that he knows so many Guv people, it’s very respectable that he isn’t a big sell-out.

I’m very impressed with how much ORP has developed on Om, which felt special but also seemed like a hippie-leaning yuppie commercial weekend escape. This is so much more of a genuine community of this type than I’ve ever seen.

It makes Petra’s assertion that Teknival is a DIY party, not festival, (at least as it exists now) ring true.

I really like the announcements system here. A combination of a walkie-talkie network, message boards + signage, and group-hollering to make good use of word of mouth.

I also really like how much new technology has been integrated. Steve Mann has brought up his hydraulophone, which I’ve only seen at Nuit Blanche 2006 and the Ontario Science Centre. Also, the solar panels (though there definitely is a gennie down at the Home Bass stage now) and geodesic dome tents all over the place.

What with my mom giving me this ‘hippie gothic’ article about a commune that’s still around from the ’60s (not to mention free everything-important-in-life!) and my dad taking me to the cottages with Chris Brown back in the day and other things……. You know, I think I might be a bit like Haven after all.

This genuinely seems like a sustainable (or at least headed in that direction) model for an alternative lifestyle that is neither urban nor rural, but naturalistic.

If the Baby Boomers have infused their children with the energy and ability to divorce ourselves from the suicidal global machine and I’m experiencing this junction in history out of which evolves a synergistic, co-dependent sustainable lifestyle framework, then infinite blessings upon them.

If not, they fucked us all over for SUVs.

I’ve got faith in my mom + pop, though. I think they’re owed some karma.

2 days after the solstice, 2007

I went to Moon Bass to find it littered with shimmery ribbons. I started picking them up to clean them up, then decided to make bracelets from them.

And it turns out Steve, the first person I met at my first genuine party experience, produces and live-PAs some of the best techno I’ve ever heard in my life.

Mike Soma’s set was awesome too, much talked about around the fire while corn roasted.

I feel like I’ve broken through from my individualist hard ghetto sense of social relations and really connected synergistically with alot of people here.

The feeling of operating in a smooth and totally positivity-oriented direction is beyond euphoric.

I think I’ve discovered secular spirituality through this idea of being a part of a greater whole, which is self-aware and consciously synchronized and harmonious with both itself internally and its surrounding environment.

The internet’s a pretty good one for that, too, and really I think it’s an important part of all this.

I always wanted to be a superhero.

“Everybody works and nobody gets paid, because we love it.” That’s the slogan…

I just finished duty as a garbageman…

…which brings to mind the often-hurled attack on anarchism of “who will take out the garbage if everyone does as they please?”

I know plenty of people who are more than happy to do such dirty work, and when I feel like I’m part of something good and positive, I can actually enjoy it myself. I enjoyed scampering through the festival collecting garbage and recycling, assisting people with random things along the way… and when I came home, I enjoyed doing the dishes too, which had been piled high and colonized long enough that I ought to be signing rights agreements with them.

Om showed me, for the first time, what it really meant to be a perfectly-functional part of something…

My entire life to date had been one of ghetto contraryness and cynicism fused with a reductionist education and worldview.

Previously, I’ve always conceived of the world in relation to inner Toronto, my anchor point. Now, I feel much more detached and floating free but as a part of a broader whole, and the bad attitude seems simply stupid to me.

Where I grew up taught me to fight against others to get what I wanted for myself, both in terms of the ghetto childhood and the capitalist system.

Om showed me that, rather than being a bratty cancer cell, I can be a key part in a beautiful and all-encompassing whole.

This is the part where I don’t use the word enlightenment.

Some Om photos, more Om photos.

Now I’m off for a couple days on a site-scouting mission for Northtek!

A new documentary along the End Of Suburbia lines, though more straight-to-the-point and from a somewhat more updated perspective. From freeform23.

Sa found the Free Spirit Spheres website about these beautiful little loft spaces that have been assembled by Tom Chudleigh and placed up in trees near Qualicum, BC on Vancouver Island. They look like an incredibly peaceful place to, well, hang out.

More photos and info, along with contact/rental information, is available on the site.

The City Of Toronto™ has this idea of how bridges are supposed to look. They’re supposed to be grey, minimalistic, empty and sterile. Not too sure why, the CN Tower isn’t even that way any more, but you know me, I’m not exactly one to rock the paradigm.

Anyhow, apparently things like graffiti, poverty and homelessness can all be grouped together as “dirt” and eradicated as a whole. All you have to do is have enough money to pay people to erase all the things in reality that you can’t come to terms with!

Enough wallets got together and agreed that bridges are grey and sterile, and put all their money into aggressively reconstructing reality to fit their worldview… not caring one lick whether that meant destroying not only the culture but the entire lives of those who fell outside the model.

On June 28th, the literally poor and unfortunate souls who had made their homes under the Bathurst bridge were evicted by the City™, and their last remaining bits of worldly possessions were bulldozed.

Along with trying to erase these people’s lives so as to not cause discomfort to the working masses passing by on their commuter trains, the City™ also felt that it was important, nay, probably vital that they cover all the cement columns’ graffiti with grey paint. Rich people like grey for some reason, I think it’s something to do with being too old.

Unfortunately for The City Of Toronto™, the city of Toronto has a powerful, thriving culture.

After two days of “work” painting the bridge’s underside a nice shade of blank, the City™ workers went home to sleep, and the city’s life came out to play.

All the stuff pictured here appeared in the span of one bridge party night. Paint cans were limited in number, but the blank slate encouraged people of all sorts to try their hand.

Even though the majority wasn’t necessarily the most mind-blowing, visually-appealing work I’d ever seen, I was brimming with joy just to see so many people trying to create at all.

Random scribblings appeared alongside stylistic tags and developed pieces.

The most elaborate piece was left unfinished, at least for the time being, as someone had run off with the necessary black paint:

However, my favourites of all weren’t the visually complex pieces, but the messages scrawled in red in different places…

You know, I’m starting to see a pattern established here…

Just like in the cases of the Perrier / GRL projection battle and the totally pirate tagging of Coca-Cola’s giant inflatable adver-bottle (installed on a rooftop at a major downtown Toronto intersection), here The City Of Toronto™ has decided to lock horns with the actual city of Toronto, and wound up with its pathetic little committee being absolutely hung out to dry.

This note was left for the city workers:

This just in: You lose, we win.

Care for a rematch? We could play at this ’til the end of time.
We invented the game and we still write all the rules.