Results tagged “Arts” from Mobilizing Mouse

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From the Georgia Straight, original here:

On a covered sidewalk on West Cordova Street, where the smell of vomit and urine hangs in the air, Ken Foster talked about what it takes to push the boundaries of his art.

A homeless artist whose work is well known on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Foster paints on materials he picks up in alleys, like discarded construction signs.

"I'll sell it for $6, maybe, and with that buy a can of paint," Foster related. "And so I end up doing 10 paintings before I finally get enough supplies to make one painting that is actually pushing a boundary of any sort, or furthering, you know what I mean, like, any sort of importance."

When the Georgia Straight caught up with the 37-year-old street artist, Foster's challenges were a lot greater. A Sharpie pen was all that was left of his possessions because of the recent street sweeps by city crews and the police on the Downtown Eastside.

"The last time, they threw out my wheelchair, $150 worth of paint, my backpack, my ID, and I don't own anything other than what you see right here," he said, showing the pen.

Foster recalled one incident. "They said, 'You have half an hour to get that cleaned up; get somebody to help you move it out of here,' " he said. "So I had gone. I came back 15 minutes later. It wasn't even half an hour. And they had thrown it all, and they're laughing at me."

And the police who accompanied the city crew? "They're laughing at me too," Foster said.

by Kevin Griffin
Vancouver Sun

Saturday, July 12, 2008


Karen Jamieson's Stand Your Ground II, part of Dancing On The Edge 2008.
CREDIT: Handout

Stand Your Ground - Act II
By Karen Jamieson Dance
Part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival

Karen Jamieson's Stand Your Ground - Act II wasn't a traditional dance performance. Performers and audience members often mixed and mingled, most venues were outdoors, and more than half of the performers were dancers with minimal training.

So if you judged Stand Your Ground by the same criteria as a professional dance production at a venue such as Playhouse, you'd have to say it didn't measure up. But that wouldn't be fair to Stand Your Ground. It would be more accurate to say that it was more of a community experience.

Stand Your Ground started with a brief introduction and solo dance on the back patio of the Firehall. Behind the audience, there was a loud metallic rattling sound: the rest of the performers were at the fence waiting to be let in. The 11 performers fanned out and personally invited each of the 20 or so audience members on a journey through the Downtown Eastside.

by Kevin Griffin
Vancouver Sun

Saturday, July 12, 2008


Karen Jamieson's Stand Your Ground II, part of Dancing On The Edge 2008.
CREDIT: Handout

Stand Your Ground - Act II
By Karen Jamieson Dance
Part of the Dancing on the Edge Festival

Karen Jamieson's Stand Your Ground - Act II wasn't a traditional dance performance. Performers and audience members often mixed and mingled, most venues were outdoors, and more than half of the performers were dancers with minimal training.

So if you judged Stand Your Ground by the same criteria as a professional dance production at a venue such as Playhouse, you'd have to say it didn't measure up. But that wouldn't be fair to Stand Your Ground. It would be more accurate to say that it was more of a community experience.

Stand Your Ground started with a brief introduction and solo dance on the back patio of the Firehall. Behind the audience, there was a loud metallic rattling sound: the rest of the performers were at the fence waiting to be let in. The 11 performers fanned out and personally invited each of the 20 or so audience members on a journey through the Downtown Eastside.

The next performance was at the corner of Gore and East Hastings in front of First United Church. Four performers splayed their bodies against a wall as if listening to the stories in the bricks while a dancer pirouetted and danced on the sidewalk.

On the other side of East Hastings, the entrepreneurs who sell second-hand shirts, bracelets and books on the street were honoured with songs and attention.

A few doors west, a first nations woman blessed the audience with pungent burning sweetgrass. In front of the Ovaltine Cafe, a part of the community since 1943, we were served water from handleless ceramic cups used for Chinese tea.

Around the corner on Main, we all stood in a semi-circle in front of The Listening Post on the ground floor of Bruce Eriksen Place, the social housing complex named after the social activist and Downtown Eastside champion who died in 1997. From the mural on the side of the building, likenesses of Eriksen looked down on us standing on the sidewalk. Standing with three other drummers, a first nations woman drummed and sang a song of thanks in her native language, stopped, and asked audience members why they were thankful for being there.

The final venue was in the Carnegie Community Centre. We all marched up the beautiful winding staircase past the stained glass windows depicting Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser to the airy gym where we sat in chairs around the perimeter. What followed was a step dance and follow the leader, all movements originating with the participants who were part of the Carnegie's Dance 101 workshop. At the end, each performer thanked each audience member for being there by shaking hands. Being personally touched and looked at by each dancer was unexpectedly moving. Stand Your Ground created encounters between different classes and backgrounds that would not otherwise have occurred.

That was clear by an experience that happened to me. The day before, I had an hour to spare between performances. From the Firehall, I went on a speed-walk through the neighbourhood. The streets were full of invisible acrid odours, staggering people and loud arguments.

It wasn't so much frightening as extremely unpleasant.

With the Stand Your Ground group passing through much of the same terrain, it was very different. When we stopped at one of the street vendors I spotted the distinctive cover of the first Dark Knight Batman comic book from 1989. I bought it for $2.

Without the artificiality of the performance, I wouldn't have been comfortable enough to pause and find something valuable. Stand Your Ground  allowed me to look at a neighbourhood I'd rather avoid. 

The last performance of Stand Your Ground - Act II takes place today at 5 p.m. at the Firehall, 280 East Cordova.

kevingriffin@png.canwest.com
© Vancouver Sun


Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.

A work in progress - Stephen


An Hour or So With a Mexican Scribe
From The Washington Post

Is this the way ahead?

Seemingly backwards?

The wonderful Schumacher used the phrase 'intermediate technology' to refine the distinction between tools which put the power into the producers of the tools and home made tools which perhaps don't offer the mechanical advantage necessary.

In the villages of old, imagined societies, not everyone did everything. You had a fletcher - putting the flights on arrows, a blacksmith - shoeing horses, a baker - baking the bread.

A local person was skilled and revered for their skill. That skill was passed down through families. It grew upon a natural aptitude as well as something in the blood.

So no one failed. The large boned blacksmith wasn't forced to use his large fingers to be clumsy with delicate feathers.

In today's societies we are somehow made addicted to self-sufficiency.

I recall an incident about 20 years ago when the sister of a friend of mine wanted her bicycle serviced and asked me to do this for her. I remember being very angry at her refusal to learn from me how to do it herself. I had become obsessed with the self-reliant, we must all do everything approach and this incident exposed my unease with it.

So the story of Mexican scribes using electric typewriters to compose bills, love letters or contracts seems refreshing.

In westernized Vancouver, obsessed with formal learning, of course this would combat the idea of an educated population.As Daniel Quinn points out in 'My Ishmael' and Ivan Illich says everywhere, a child knows everything they need by about 12 years old. The last six years just turn them into insatiable consumers. Consumers of goods and of 'training'.

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So the poor people who did not write would be sent to school in shame and pity.

Equality would be cited; you have to be equal Equally dependant on capitalist baubles and trinkets.

The electric typewriter scribes would be sent for 'upgrading', in shame and pity, to become obsessed with computers and be current or modern and keeping up with the times.

But why should everyone be able, read lonely and independent, enough to know how to do everything that the educational and capitalist society wants?

Could it be that capitalism needs everyone to do everything to sell more of everything?

The photographer used to be called in to take photographs, now everyone has to have a digital camera.

So instead of one camera per say 1000 people there are 500.

A true graphic designer or illustrator used to be a talented person who had a gift.

Now everyone with a computer and a silly amonut of money to buy Photoshop thinks they are talented instead of just tooled.

Every house in a street has its own lawnmower, electric drill and other assorted owned tools used so infrequently that sharing could reduce dependency by perhaps 100 to 1/

So the illiterate would swap their illiteracy for dependence on typewriter and computers.

The social interaction with the scribes would be gone.

The scribes would have no work.

But everyone would have imbibed the expectation to purchase expected tools and be so called self-sufficient.

Progress.
 

Expose Canada's perfidy, too - The Kingston Whig-Standard

The Kingston Whig-Standard, Canada

Further, Vancouver's rundown Downtown Eastside neighbourhood is being gentrified, and police intimidation of the homeless population is intensifying as the ...

Restoring a landmark, reviving a neighbourhood - Globe and Mail

Globe and Mail, Canada

VANCOUVER -- On a troubled block of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where bars cover doors and windows and drugs are injected openly, members of the ...