Easter gin

After a couple of days of craving the end of the week, email discussions with my beloved spouse (we have what I'm calling an asynchronous marriage these days) about the prospect of martinis, I scurried off to the local liquor emporium to peruse the gin section. They've cleverly placed it in front of a huge floor to ceiling window so that the light can twinkle through the beautiful coloured bottles. Liquor stores in Ontario have the sweeping lines, high ceilings, and reverent clientele of a new kind of cathedral these days. My breath was taken away by the glorious form of a bottle of Tanqueray No 10, and my return to equilibrium was slowed by the little promo card that advertised this product as the perfect Easter gin because of the bouquet of fresh botanicals. It'd be a lovely thing to get in my Easter basket indeed. Even better than a chocolate Jesus with very un-Ken-like anatomy, though, if I could have it all, I'd want both.

virtually nowhere at all

I've got everything else happening in my life right now, so why not a little irony as well? I've spent all day writing about how we can use virtual reality to conduct experiments to find out what culture really is, thinking that simulations of reality have to be the answer to everything because, well, they're not that different to the real thing, and humans are, in ways that we'd perhaps rather not have to confront, big collections of fairly dumb automatons put together in clever ways, and that if we can just become comfortable enough with treating images of ourselves as the same thing as our authentic selves then some thorny problems -- massively overused air travel for one -- become a bit less of a death knell for the planet. And then one short phone call punctures my digital revelry with the news that there's some kin on the other side of the planet who is feeling exhausted, alone, terrified of losing someone he loves, perhaps a bit beyond coping. I can't go be with him right now, so I send an email. Pathetic. If I could embrace this technology and go pop into his living room as a digital presence, phosphorescence trickling across the face of a screen, or even a three-dimensional hologram shimmering before him, would that offer any kind of succor? I see him reach out for a hug only to flail arms through incorporeal fake flesh. There is no substitute for the body.

Thunder and lightning

I don't venture out of the urban core of our little city much anymore. Whenever I do, I find myself becoming unavoidably ticked off by the differences in behaviour between the people who populate the sprawl and those who cling to our precious few blocks of civitas in the centre. It all seems so ridiculous, somehow. How can things change so much over the course of a few blocks of space? But then I remember that, not so very long ago, when I lived over there (seriously, just about 2 miles from here) I virtually never came into the core. Maybe once or twice a month to visit a nice restaurant or when my pangs of conscience about ordering every frigging book I own from Amazon caught up with me and I felt a duty to buy from our nice indie bookstore.

Today I drove out to the sprawl to pick up my daughter, who had an appointment there. We texted back and forth about my proposed pickup, as I explained to her that this would involve my walking home 2 miles from work, only to jump into the car, head back roughly 2 miles in almost the same direction so that she could hitch a ride home. Even though I promised her last night that I would do this for her, I wanted to make sure she got the irony.

I got home, through thunder and lightning, just in time to turn around and go back. It wasn't long before I was surrounded in impatient traffic, people driving utterly gigantic SUVs, weaving around the lesser lights to shave seconds off of the commute. When I got to the parking lot, having endured being honked at, cut off, swerved around to the extent that I felt like a little old 90 year old man behind the wheel, I climbed out of the car to stand beside the huge Mercedes SUV in the next spot. I felt like a dwarf. I couldn't wait to get back here, where most people walk when they can, where the roads are narrow, and only have 2 lanes for the most part, with at least one lane cluttered with plenty of parked cars, overhanging tree branches, and kids peeking out of driveways waiting to cross from one side to the other to visit friends. I know. I make it sound so idyllic here when I'm sure that much of it is just in my head. But still....now that I'm here, I hate to go there. When I was there, I never came here. So there must be something to this insulating boundary. I wish I understood more of it.

I'm trying to write a grant proposal about space and culture -- I only have a few days to get it done and I'm not sure I can do it, not sure I want to, not sure I could find the time to do the work even if it was funded -- and there's more irony here. The proposal is, more or less, about the question of how much the configuration of space -- just the very shape of where we live, walk, drive, and look -- how much all of that contributes to culture. How much of that is culture? I'm hesitating on the proposal because I know that I really haven't a clue what culture is. I know perception, vision, space, but nothing really about people. I can't even make successful small talk. Yet, at the same time, I've got this feeling in my bones that there's something important about all of this that I need to understand. There is something about the shape of things that makes us what we are. It's a part of what makes the core and sprawl so mutually antagonistic to one another. It's as obvious as the difference between thunder and lightning and, in just the same way, obvious that there isn't one without the other.

Leave no child inside

The best part of my groggy morning, penance after a long night of grading papers earned by blowing off all work for two solid days on the weekend, was stumbling across the latest issue of Orion and, within its pages, this wonderful article by Richard Louv. And of course, there's a book that I missed entirely but must now rush out and find.

Louv has put into words much that I wanted to say in my own feeble forthcoming efforts, but it is said here with such deep passion that I'll fall well short of the mark.

The main point: we must find ways to engage our children with nature. It begins in the backyard, the front doorstep, perhaps even the bedroom window, but it is an agenda that is every bit as vital to our future as alternative fuel sources, carbon sequestration, hybrid vehicles, Kyoto. Perhaps more so for, even if by some miracle we find a way to pull out all stops, slow or even reverse the trend towards a scorched lifeless planet, the next generation or the one after that will only truly take up the mantle of responsibility if they see value in doing so. Our generation has, for the most part, lost sight of that value, and that's why convincing anyone to change their behaviour in the slightest is such an uphill climb. It's hard to make the case that shutting off the lights, getting out of the car, eating locally, is going to make a difference to who lives and who doesn't. Ultimately, the case is there to be made, but the time between action and consequence is just too long for anyone to apprehend, and it's indubitably true that the actions of one person make little difference. So we fail. I fail. But if we didn't act for our future survival, but for the preservation of something we love every day, something that we wonder about and cherish, then perhaps the case would be easier to make. If we assumed our role as stewards of all this wonder, or, perhaps even better, recognized the need for us to back off and leave more of it alone, there might be a small chance of success.

The long comments attached to the article are worth reading through for a wealth of ideas, resources, readings, websites, and positive glowing enthusiasm for what is described as a 'movement'. Something else comes through, too -- a disdain, perhaps even something of a hatred, for technology. This is where I think I part ways with the deep eco-kids. It's no solution to take up our hammers and smash the machines. We'd never succeed, and, if we did, people would die in the hundreds of millions (though I know many think that's the only way). I'm investing a fair amount of time these days in trying to understand and apply many technologies that are designed to extend our reach, our command of space and time. If I didn't have a conviction that there were ways to co-opt this technology to achieve the aims described in this article, and many others like it, then I'd want to take up a hammer as well. Maybe we can't rip our kids away from televisions and computers, but if enough of us use our heads and raise our voices, we should be able to exert much more of our will on what appears on the little screens.

Putting Charlotte to bed

I've been home for a few days now, rattling around our strange old house by myself while my perfect wife and almost-perfect (well...some of them....) children continue to drive like maniacs around much of the eastern half of North America. Though I've been busy at work, thoughts of Charlotte keep drifting back into my mind. Thing is...I hate going to a new place and not liking it. I keep wondering, pollyanna fashion, whether I've done the place an injustice. I didn't go out to Charlotte's famous trolley suburb (the trolley, though it was mostly empty as far as I could see, still runs for free as it would have done early las century when it was built). I knew that I should have, but didn't really have the time for anything other than a quick jaunt out and back. But I should have done that. I did eventually find an area in the core where people lived -- the 'historic 4th ward' in one quadrant of the small area flanked by freeways that forms the core. According to some material I read, there was some effort being made to make condominiums in the few remaining old buildings, priced at from 1.5 to 3 million dollars. A couple of the office skyscrapers were, truthfully, nicely done. The Hearst tower, a sort of noveau art deco construction, was a nice contrast to the usual rhomboid of steel and glass. Most of all, one got the sense that people in Charlotte were really proud of where they lived, wanted to hear that you were having a good time, etc. When I was asked the question, I lied. "Yes, I'm having a good time," I'd say, wondering to my self how I'd answer if anyone asked me what I was doing: "well I've spent a fair lot of time catching up on movies and drinking far too much. When I'm not doing that, I'm out walking around trying to figure out whether there's anything to do here."

Back at home, I've spent a couple of days with an installer from Santa Barbara. As I guided him from the university to the little apartment we'd rented for him, he asked "so, is there anything here?" I told him that, though we're a small town, we have two universities here so we're something of a cultural centre with plenty of theatre, a good symphony, lots of cinemas, fairly decent restaurants, etc. We're very proud of our new Uptown development with its rich mix of lofts, retail and walkability. It's tiny, but it probably couldn't be supported if it were larger. I told him all this earnestly, but then he asked "but no ocean? no mountains? What do you do?" Our hiking trails were nice, I told him, and there was a big lake one could drive to that was a bit more than an hour away. I could hear the lameness in my own voice, though.

So we compared notes a bit. I live in a small town with bland geography, decent levels of services, low crime, bearable real estate prices, good schools, and a modicum of interesting things to do. It's taken a long time for me to like it here (16 years) but now I kinda do. That said, if I had a decent chance to move to Vancouver, San Francisco, Melbourne, New York or even Halifax or Boston, I'd probably leap at it. It's ok here, but I know there are better places to be. In Santa Barbara, one can take off work early to go swimming, surfing, hiking in the Sierra Madres, but the price of a 2 bedroom shitbox backing onto a highway is about 3 times what we paid here for our 5 bedroom house in the city. The only people who live in Santa Barbara are retired luminaries from Los Angeles, faculty from the university (and these, apparently, just scrape by) and a few who were already there before prices hit the roof. So it's kind of an artificial place with spectacular geography, a very thin demographic, and, when you get right down to it, when you're not in the water or the hills, not as much to do as there is right here.

No place is perfect, but most places aren't even close to being what they could be. It's surprising how much of the time that's because of our artificial ability to move our bodies beyond walking speed.

Charlotte's Web

Ok, ok. I'd never want to live here, but I'm slowly discovering a little bit of charm in the place. What helped a lot was spending an extra couple of hours in bed this morning, so that I'm fully recovered from this awfully stupid early clock change scandal. Somehow, in March, I don't expect to be getting up before the sun. That's a late December thing. What also helped was a visit to the Mint Museum for Crafts and Design. I know. It doesn't sound like a good bet, does it? But they had a brilliant (and huge) exhibition of the glass work of Ann Wolff whose 'snowball' design from her days of slumming at Kosta Boda is something I have in my home and have always loved. Wolff taught me a lot about bowls. Ok, yeah, bowls. I'd never been much of a ceramics or pottery guy, but somehow seeing the designs instantiated in the most amazing glass made me get it. Bowls, in all their feminine concavity, contain little worlds. They cup space in a seemingly infinite variety of different ways. Bowls can hold rooms, ideas, moments, or entire alternative universes. I get it. Funny that it took so long (but nice to know that something I've had this kind of ambivalence for for almost a half century can bowl me over ...erm, sorry... in a single moment. It makes me feel almost young enough to be asked for ID. So Wolff, an extraordinary amount of sunshine and warmth, lots of good, crowded sidewalks (do lots of people take Monday off?) conspired to make me feel happy enough about this place to last for one more day before winging home to the snow, slush, and an extraordinary backup of work.

A good day at the conference, too. Lots of interesting basic questions that nobody has answers to that make me want to go back to the lab to get going on some new experiments. I feel like Mary Tyler Moore. If I had a hat, I'd throw it up in the air.

Ri-ra

Ok, you've gotta love an Irish pub that has extensive quotes from James Joyce on the cover of the menu and lists Guinness as an appetizer. At the end of my little love-in with the real black gold, the server brought me an application for some kind of frequent flyer card, saying that he could tell I must be a regular. Not quite sure what he meant, but I made it 'home' safe and sound.

One of our local "Irish pubs" in Waterloo is called Molly Bloom's (every bit as pathetic as it looks, but it was a favourite place of my father's. In fact, we held his wake there. They have a sombrero -- I kid you not -- that used to be reserved for those coming to celebrate birthdays. At the end of the wake they gave it to us -- I'm guessing we gave them their biggest day of business ever -- and now it circulates around the family when we get together for parties) and so I went there one year to celebrate Bloomsday. It happened to fall on Father's Day. I took all my kids and told them that for a present I wanted each one of them to recite a paragraph of Ulysses. I don't think any of them followed through. When I told the server we were there for Bloomsday he told me he'd never heard of it. He asked around among the rest of the staff. The consensus response: "James who?". I should start some kind of local petition insisting that they either change their name or get real about Leopold.

And now, feeling a little ill (I think it was the fish) I shall take to my bed: "...yes I said yes I will Yes."

Further impressions of an unwell city

Ok, I might have been slightly hard on Charlotte in my last post. But only slightly. When the weekend is over, the people come back into the city to work. But they never appear on the street. At lunchtime, I looked out the window of the hotel and noticed that the streets were completely devoid of human presence, as usual. I ducked over to the underground shops beside the hotel to grab a sandwich and found a small cafe type place with a lineup about 30 customers long stretching out the door. So there are people here, but they don't go out in the sun, it seems. The parking lots that sat empty all weekend are now full, but I assume they will empty again at 5 pm.

On the positive side:

I found a nearby place to get kickass espresso. And it's not Starbucks. They even have a sign on the counter saying "Friends don't let friends visit Starbucks." Which made me vow on the spot to give them all my considerable caffeine custom for as long as I'm here (other than the free conference coffee which I'm duty bound to accept).

I found a street that has a fair number of restaurants on it, some of them even open on the weekend (but for shortened hours). So far, not very good food, but they've still got a couple more chances. So far, what I've eaten has been vastly overproportioned meals with not much taste and a strangely foreign, shipped-from-some-place-far-from-here kind of note to them -- lack of taste and texture, colour a bit too proper. I also had pizza with bits of tomato that came from a can. Not the tomato sauce, mind you, but the tomato itself.

Whoops, steering back into negativity.

The booze seems fine. Some nice Francis Coppola Diamond Claret that I drank at the Hilton and therefore paid as much for a glass of it as the bottle itself cost. A glass or two of Blue Moon which, in spite of its dodgy appearance, is a fine enough Belgian white (even if now owned by Coors-Molson). None of it made here. Some menus say "ask about our local brews" but, if you ask, it turns out that the local brews are brews made in remote places and then put in bottles attached to labels made some place far away but sporting local names.

Oh, and here's my favourite moment of the trip so far: I was out yesterday and, for the first time in at least 25 years, I was asked for ID. At first I thought it was a joke, or a server angling for a good tip, but on extensive questioning I'm pretty sure that she thought I might be under 21. I asked her how old she thought I was. She said 'probably early 30s'. When I told her I was 49, she spent an especially long time poring over my driver's license, trying to find the secret flaw in the forgery. There was a moment when it looked as though I wasn't going to get my glass of Newky Brown (you'd think all I'm doing here is drink, drink, drink. Well I'm not. It's more like work work drink drink work drink drink drink work drink drink drink drink drink....

The conference itself is interesting as hell, though the presentations seem to be variable in quality. This is clearly a conference designed for people who are interested in designing virtual reality systems rather than using them. Wrong place for me to be on a regular basis, but the right place for me to be right now. I'm in a steep learning phase on this stuff. Or at least I should say that I was, until I quit for the day about 20 minutes ago. Now it's time to go find that Irish Pub I spotted yesterday. I'm sure they'll be offering up some authentic Southern fare....

A city without people

I'm at a conference in Charlotte, NC. When I planned this trip, last November, I noticed that it coincided with March break, and so contemplated bringing the family with me. I'd never been here and, though it didn't seem to have much of a reputation as a recreation spot, I thought that it would at least be a break for everyone. Then I took a good look at an aerial photograph of Charlotte, and had some suspicions about what we might find here. The downtown core looked as though it was composed of more than 50% flat parking lots. Not a good sign. The rest of the core was made up of office buildings. So no family vacation.

On the taxi ride in, I asked the friendly cabbie about crime -- the usual newbie question-- where can I walk late at night without fear of getting shot? Usually that's a question that gets laughed off. But this time, the answer I got was a long list of 'safe' streets and 'unsafe' ones. It was dark when I got to the hotel, so I decided to just stay put, slink up to the bar, hang out here.

Today, in daylight, I ventured out (but only after 4 hours of technical talks, I might add). But I needn't have bothered. Here, in the city, there are no people. There is no retail sector. There is nowhere to be. Nobody lives here. Charlotte, it turns out, is the second largest banking capital after NYC. And I guess that's what people do here. They bank. And then they rush out to the fringes in their cars. Walking the streets on a weekend was a bit like walking through an apocalyptic world. No people, as if they'd all been dispatched cleanly with a neutron bomb, leaving the nice, shiny buildings intact. With all the lights on 24 hours a day as far as I can tell.

There's a tiny fountain in front of the hotel. It's not much, just a flat ribbon of water gushing down about a meter of rocks. In fifteen minutes of sitting outside today, I saw two people from my conference taking painstaking photographs of the water. Curious, I went over to have a look. There isn't much to see. I guess they just couldn't find anything else to photograph.

How does this happen to cities? Who decides that they will be nothing more than stacks of offices with the occasional corporate chain restaurant interleaved so no-one starves (mind you, most of even the few restaurants in the city are closed for the weekend. No trade because there's nobody here). Who said this was ok?

It's going to be a long week. Luckily, it's an interesting conference. Luckily, there are lots of movies on my big wall-sized HDTV. Suspecting there'd be not much life here, I booked an upgraded room. Nice furnishings, marble, 6 kajillion thread count sheets on my big lonely kingbed. There's a strange whooshing sound that never ceases, and a slight vibration of the floor. We're all being kept on life support in here. This city has to strain a bit to keep anything alive inside its limits.

Carpunching

Just time for a quick rant today as I promised myself I'd go easy on screen time tonight.

It was cold here today. Very cold. Even though the unusual hue of my wife's face didn't escape my attention as she came back in the door from having walked the children to school, I decided to do the usual -- walk to work. My small concession to the elements was that I chose an alternate route that avoided my having to clamber up and down icy embankments to get through the parking lots and large divided roadways that separate my home from my office if I go by the shortest and most interesting route. Instead, the safer choice (or so I thought) was to take a slightly longer route that took me through vast tracts of connected parking lots (it astonishes me how a university campus can provide so little amenity for pedestrians) but included very few changes in altitude and all road crossings took place at stop signs or traffic lights rather than medians ridden with icy chunks of brown stuff spewed up from under the wheels of the semi-trailers hauling pallets of Doritos to the student eateries. Safer. Or so I thought.

The first road I have to cross is a rather nasty intersection with multiple flashing green lights, short changes, four lanes of traffic in each direction, a few interesting turn lanes and one-way streets thrown into the mix. I think people in cars stress out at this intersection because it's not quite conventional. That'd be the charitable interpretation of the carnage that takes place there. I've seen people stand and wait through two or three light changes, not daring to set foot on the pavement. I've seen bicyclists swept aside in the mad panic of harried morning commuters trying to squeeze in that last cellphone call while enroute to jobs they must hate, judging from the steely grimaces on their faces.

I have to cross both of these roadways to get to the nice path through the park that forms the middle of my route to work. On the opposite side of road that was my second crossing this morning, there's a right turn lane. So cars are turning right from the road facing me, and then crossing in front of me -- if you get my drift. There is always a lineup of cars waiting to turn, so the game seems to be that as many of these cars as possible pass in front of me before some poor sod has to step on the brake and wait for the 4 seconds it takes me to get safely across the lane and onto the curb. This morning, the last car to turn should have stopped. The driver sat warmly in his oil-sucking cocoon, nursing his coffee, avoiding eye contact. I chugged across the road leaving a long trail of condensing breath behind me in the frigid -38 degree air. I'm a big guy. There's no way he didn't see me. His front tire missed my big toe by less than 10 cm I'd say.

Fifteen minutes later, I arrived at a smaller intersection -- a simple stop sign on the small road that runs in a loop around my campus. I've always thought that all cars except for service vehicles should be banned from this road. University campuses are for walkers. Alas, the university administration feels differently, refusing to even put proper crosswalks on much of this road because it will impede traffic flow. But at least where I was crossing, I had a stop sign. I had the right of way. I took it. A car turned into me. The driver only failed to run me over because, even though I'm a big guy, I'm light on my feet when I have to be (such as when a car is about to squish those feet into something that would look a bit like proscuitto). So I punched the car hard enough to dent it. The driver stopped. I looked back. He drove off. I suspect he thought he had hit me. Good, I thought.

I spent the rest of my walk wondering how many of those cars scuttling around me, pushing me around, knocking me off balance, raising my blood pressure, were occupied by people who didn't have as far to go as I did. Then I had this sudden flash of recollection of something I read many years ago about cigarette smoking. Some pundit in, it must have been about 1980, wrote that the day would come when cigarette smoking would be a social stigma, not much different to cocaine or even heroin use. I laughed in 1980 but it's obvious he was not far off the mark. One could hope that the day will come when people sitting inside steel carapaces, exhausting the planet's air, not really going anywhere useful or even interesting would feel the same sting of accusation. But it's doubtful. We'll choke the life out of the entire planet before we'll give up our cars. Shouldn't be too much longer now in the grand scheme of things.

snowblindfulness

I'm having a great weekend so far. Friday was a snow day -- second in a row and unusual for our part of the country. As our caregiver found a way to make the schlep down the street to our house, I weighed my choices -- stay home for the day to try to work under the thundering hoofbeats of my children, or battle the elements on foot and make the 2 mile journey through ice, slush, and knee deep puddles to my office. It was a no-brainer.

One of the things I love about being outside in the post-storm environment is the way that it changes people's interactions. I passed about a dozen people on my way, and every single one of them made eye contact, exchanged a few words with me (sometimes much more than a few), smiled and carried on. It's too bad we can't always be this way with one another. If you think about it, there's really nothing more eery than walking past a stranger on the sidewalk, when it's just you and them, approaching one another both in full cognizance that two members of the same species, teeming with awareness, emotion, interest, ideas, pain are about to pass within touching distance of one another, yet both are hellbent to pretend that the other one doesn't exist...not even a blip on the radar. I do this too, but don't completely understand it.

On the way home from a blissfully quiet day of fooling around with fun ideas, I walked home. The weather had worsened quite a bit. The wind was pushing the snow almost horizontally, straight into my eyes. Through narrow slits, I could gauge my approximate direction and, if I looked straight down, I could see where my feet were landing, so keep to the sidewalk. After a minute of this, I was taken back to a mindfulness retreat I attended about 2 years ago. It was my first taste of walking meditation -- a form of mindfulness where one is supposed to free the mind of thinking, and wrap all attention around awareness of nothing more than the sensations emanating from movement. One walks very slowly, breathing synchronized with steps, zombie-fashion. After receiving instructions, and filled with skepticism that such an activity was even possible, I staked out a bit of private territory in a small room set up as a comfortable library, and began my walking. It went better than expected, but I'm such a beginner, my mind is a mess. Walking in that storm on Friday was a meditative experience. My attention was completely captured by the sensations of cold pricking snow. My feet were soaking wet because I have gaping holes in the only boots I own which afford any kind of traction on slippery surfaces. I had to slow my usual pace to be aware of the larger puddles, the clumps of treacherous ice in my path, the edges of curbs. Sensing what was happening, I let my mind go as far into my body as I could. It was delicious.

And then I began to feel the skin of my body extend outward into the world. Which was fine, except that it triggered a thought about mixed realities. And then I was back in my head, out of my body, and in the middle of the usual loneliness.