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Memories, Randomly Accessed
(Note for those scrolling past: this post contains a gallery of snapshots from Tokyo in 2014. Click “read more” to view.)
A decade ago, nearly half a kilometer above the most populous metropolis in the world, a conversation began between a professor and student of English from two different worlds. The professor was Japanese, born and raised in Tokyo. He was treating his grandkids to a day atop the capital city, their faces eagerly leaning as far as they could towards the slanted glass that overlooked the concrete jungle. The student was Canadian, by citizenship it should be said; attachment to national identity already too nefarious a notion to adequately stomach. He was on a vacation and had come to the tower to spend a few hours photographing the vast steel lanes and their skyscraping endpoints, in light from above during the day and when lit from below at night.
“I do not teach grammar, I want to be clear about that,” the older man explained in a soft tone, “I teach literature.” How to read human beings and their complexity through discussions of their textual output.
The two chatted while the kids ran through people’s legs, mostly young couples, as the evening view transformed from ‘diurnal smog’ to ‘twilight neon’. They spoke about how students approached their studies and of their seriousness in attending to life’s challenges. The professor was empathetic and non-judgmental. He had been born after the big war and lived through the Japanese adoption of global (mostly American) culture. The influx of democracy and capitalism – of modernity and its customs – alien from the pre-war empire but only separated from it by “a few years”. He had watched his neighborhood’s wooden roofs subsumed by a growing encasement of metal, glass, and machinery. He did not own a vehicle, simply stepping outside and catching a train two minutes from his doorstep that took him straight to campus.
The student, a visitor, did little talking, choosing instead to ask questions. A lecture voluntarily attended and with great enthusiasm, in a classroom within the clouds.
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Syllables of Existence
Part of my job involves supporting the development of short to long-term health plans. Part of this exercise is advising on indicators – the measurable outcomes of each activity within the plan that will define the level of its success. The indicators that we usually see work on the lengthier time scales, most monitored on an annual basis. I was reading a particular granular plan recently and it got me thinking about the calculable components of my own labor. But not in relation to monthly or yearly goals – these are easy enough to quantify in projects, reports, meetings, etc. completed. Not even in relation to weekly segments, too short a timeline sometimes when you are in and out of the office in a relationship-based role, trying your best to build something larger.
Rather, it was what I produced on a daily basis that I started to think about. My contribution through emails, calls, in meetings, documents, and online logs. My movement through spaces – my apartment, the office, another’s home, walking along the street, traversing communities – what determinate things could I define through numeric figures? How could I sum up my presence?
Of course, I was not interested in finding actual numbers that I could use to define my output. I was after something more fundamental: the meaning I brought to my work (or job, labor, occupation, call it what you will) and my life. What is it that I produce that is of particular significance to those around me? What is it that I take to my friends and family that keeps them availed?
In search of this latent value, I unearthed a soft revelation. I have a feeling it is something many of us have in common.
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Weekly Picks – March 10, 2024
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Jean Gaumy/Magnum; Liao Pan/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images; Jennifer Doerr/NOAA SEFSC Galveston; Juan Bernabeu; Katie Martin; Associated Press.A curious case of blinded perceptions between peoples sharing culture across borders. A comment on banalities that have seeped into the collective soul via the microcosm of life’s architecture. The not so surprising fightback of independent bookstores in a digital world. White suburbia’s central role in a domestic industry of fear, manipulation, and persecution. A new hope for a species dwindled by human and climate suffocation. Finally, the plethora of ways that language and meaning are made.
This week’s collection:
- The Dragons Amid the Tigers
- A World Nobody Wants
- What Independent Bookshops Really Sell
- The Suburbs Made the War on Drugs in Their Own Image
- Scientists are throwing a sex party for giant conchs in Florida
- Cathedrals of Convention
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Formative Fires
Raining ash, a now common occurrence, settles on the hood of my vehicle. July 2023.
July 2023
Another summer and another long drive ahead. From BC’s Northern capital to its swarming metropolis via its paved blood vessels. It is a cool Saturday morning and I have the heater going and a light jacket on, despite knowing it will soon be above 30 C. Another hot day in a drought-stricken summer, driving around in a carbon belching sedan that burns prehistoric life. Luckily, I have some tunes to underscore the journey.
My iPod Touch, bought back in mid-2009 and still going strong, is plugged into the vehicle’s sound system. It carries 800 or so songs and has not been updated in a couple of years. An extended time capsule covering my high school days to my late twenties.
I have my coffee and everything is packed in the back. Time to head off. Initially, in silence. The daylight is barely present and the roads are quiet. Not too many giant metal prowlers – comically big pick-ups and SUVs, to the rest of you – out and about. It feels nice just starting off without any noise in a city that is usually bathed in it. I navigate past the bridge construction and make my way onto the main highway. The signs change from 70 to 100 and I am off. Cruise control set; time to hit play.
It is Paul Simon’s reworked “Can’t Run But”. I turn it up and settle in.
I can’t run but I can walk much faster than this,
Can’t run but.
A cooling system burns out in the Ukraine,
Trees and umbrellas protect us from the new rain,
Armies of engineers to analyze the soil,
The food we contemplate, the water that we boil.
July 2017
Over an hour on transit in with a suit and tie on, during a fairly busy morning, to make my way to downtown Vancouver. I am not a morning person, nor a suit person. Some people say suits are comfortable and/or that the formality they impress upon onlookers is worth the rigmarole of putting one on. Comfort is a moot point – my objections go beyond soft fabric on skin. Identity can be expressive or hidden and clothing only its most visible articulation. What one chooses to wear is then just a social dance, a jig of conformity or non-conformity with various in and out-groups. Suits, thus, associated with many things I choose to avoid. As for the onlookers, I wish I could care less.
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Weekly Picks – March 3, 2024
“His lips do not speak, and in the face of this muteness, I’m haunted. I fall static to my knees before the corpse of poetry.”
– Leopoldo María Panero
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Daniel Acker / Bloomberg / Getty Images; Mira Sucharov / The Walrus; Avo Walker / Truthout; Dagny Bock: Dust by the Reflecting Pool, 2022; Dan Marker-Moore; Hossein Fatemi/PanosA bookstore in its final days, memory incarnate. The voices of a gender, assured but unheard. The stark reality within all our horizons of a roofless existence. Propagandists who peddle moral fantasies. A diary of recycled narratives, waste, and sorting schemes. The beauty of dust’s movements on a global pallet. Preparations for science done in shadow as our lunar companion moves to conceal us from the Sun. And a poignant poem in the form of an editorial.
This week’s collection:
- Adeus aos Livros (Goodbye to Books)
- Silencing of the Girls
- I’ve Been Unhoused. It Could Happen to You. Let’s Stop Criminalizing It.
- The Academics Helping the Meat Industry Avoid Climate Scrutiny
- At the Recycling Centre
- The Cost of Our Debris
- How the Eclipse Will Change Solar Science Forever
Amira Hass tries to find the words:
- Gaza and Israel, a New Word Association Game
Further reading on the conflict from the past week:
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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On the Intimately Remote
The ghostly Coast Mountains and serene islands straddling Atlin Lake, the base of a makeshift ice rink. February 28, 2024.Here I am contemplating the next great vacation, a jaunt on some foreign land for an extended period of introspection via exploration. A quest to fill a lacuna in self-identity, not confirmed but understood, like the mechanisms behind forces of nature.
The break will have to be a long one. Three to four weeks. Leisure is an illusion; to delay the end of its fleeting nature one of the simple joys of a secure profession. The time is also as necessary as it is limited – parts unknown only discoverable when repeatedly sought, Rooms of Requirement hidden away in alleyways far from tourist meccas.
Fall seems like a good option, all factors considered. Perhaps a trip south of the equator to Chile, where herds of horses hurtle across lands as sacred to astronomers as they are to widows of crushed rebellions. Santiago to the Atacama to the Patagonian outlands. Tempting. But what about one of the Asian Tigers? South Korea, wrestling with deep binaries – cultural differences between men and women, young and old, urban and rural, or rich and poor, while traditional religions flourish amid heightened modernity – a microcosm of globalized struggles. Wait, I have it, Iceland! An isolated reprieve; a romantic outpost. Who could argue with its chilling volcanic landscapes or gorgeous vistas overlooking stellar phenomena?
I am also trying to find companions for the journey. Aside from not being alone with my thoughts for too long, I prefer the benefits (and can tolerate the drawbacks) of travelling in a (small) group. Conversing through novel experiences can enrich them greatly, personal thoughts and assumptions not always the best guides towards, or filters of, wisdom. We all need bouncing boards for our learning and amusement. Finding a group with a small circle is also tough; coordinating leaves and scheduling excursions a terrible foundation of administrative turmoil on which to launch collective adventures.
No matter where I end up travelling, it strikes me that I am always here, on the shore of the cosmic ocean. An inescapable beach with too many grains of sand to sift through. Trifling in the grand scheme of things yet immeasurable in its immensity. Human experience and construction a mere footnote to its natural wonders.
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Weekly Picks – February 25, 2024
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Sarah O’Gorman / UPY2024; Mustafa Saeed / Noema Magazine; Lalo de Almeida / Folhapress / Panos / Redux; Realy Easy Star / Giuseppe Masci / Alamy; John Moore / Getty Images; María Jesús ContrerasSome standout articles sandwiched between visions from different timelines that share the same world. Plus a deep dive into the lobbyists and billionaires who have undermined one of the most exemplary public vaccination campaigns in humanity’s history.
The main montage, then. Stories from the streets from individuals who find themselves homeless, in a fight not to be pigeonholed as scapegoats. Radical new histories enabled by advancements in science. An argument against the child-laden life from the proselytizer’s of antinatalism. Dispatches from the poet politicians reshaping the Horn of Africa. And the invisible emissions seeping through legal loopholes to grey our future sky, one dying oil well at a time.
This week’s collection:
- A Life Without a Home: Voices from the tents, shelters, cars, motels and couches of America.
- Solar storms, ice cores and nuns’ teeth: the new science of history
- The Case Against Children: Among the antinatalists
- A Country Shaped By Poetry
- The Rising Cost of the Oil Industry’s Slow Death
- Winners of the 2024 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest
On the fight against a sane approach to cooperation on public health:
- The West Is Sabotaging a Global Pandemic Treaty
- Further reading:
- A podcast discussion on the topic:
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Vangelis and the Past Future of LA
The person runs, futility in motion. The water cascades down, each window and mortar wall a riverbed. The drains overflow with a mixture of muck, covering the cracked ground with black filth. It is the middle of night, but the darkness lies above and below. Here, at street level, the effulgence of neon signs blinds anyone who look anywhere but down.
They splash their way down the high street, screaming for help. People look up, notice the blaring red and blue illuminations, and look down again. There is an order to things, and this is no aberrance. The runner looks back and sees the flying lights nearing. They pivot into an alley and rush past dumpsters, lightly floating but tightly chained. The darkness has crept in here, but not enough to hide in; nothing can shroud those chased by the hunters of the sky.
The person slips and falls into a thick splatter. Tar! The ever-seeping liquid asphalt abundant below the crevasses. This city eats people. Those living in alcoves a little easier to pick clean from its stained edifices.
“Halt!” The car blares as it rounds the corner. “Replicant, halt!” It is almost over their broken body, breathing heavy as the fumes of the city begin to overwhelm them.
“I am no replicant!” The plea goes unheard. “I am a threat to no one!” They unstick themselves and stand up, a stark silhouette against a malicious glare.
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Weekly Picks – February 18, 2024
Credit (from left to right): Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images; Kelly Kline; Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist; Emily Altman / Current AffairsAn assortment from the first few days of the week this time, as I am away travelling.
A confirmation of the declining diversity in species globally, from the most authoritative study of its kind. Policing’s place in our conception of safety and society. An extraordinary look at dispossession and a system of ongoing colonization of Indigenous lands perpetuated by institutions of higher education in the US. Finally, the promises, ideologies, and foibles of the managerial class.
This week’s collection:
- The World Is Losing Migratory Species at Alarming Rates
- Illusions of Safety: On freedom from policing
- Misplaced Trust: Stolen Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system. Climate change is its legacy.
- Against Managerialism
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Journey
When this post is published, I will be in Los Angeles, having driven 800km South from Prince George and having caught a flight from Vancouver. One of many stops that I will be making over the course of this month. From the moderate chill of middle BC to the balmy sunshine of Southern California, before heading back to work up North to travel across frigid Yukon, to reach some of the most remote communities in Canada.
Boy, what a large carbon footprint I carry. I suspect no one, from the gaudiest campaigner to the most ardent activist, will quit travel entirely until we are forced by the climate itself to confine ourselves to little squares on the global grid. For now, no carbon emissions more egregious than any other, from the ones we produce directly to the ones we wear or consume. All the more important to recognize since we are having quite the ‘winter’. Though Prince George has had a couple of weeks at or below the -30 range, it has also been much warmer than usual. Not to localize large climate patterns, of course, only to point out the observable results of their compounding impacts. It is no longer strange seeing headlines about wildfires and drought as early as February.
And I am a contributor.
I share that as a grim caveat to a fond feeling I am reminded of on a sporadic basis. As a young adult attending post-secondary, I used to dream of living a life where I get to travel regularly. Not engage in tourism. Rather go from place to place as a learner and appreciator of the differences that define us and the similarities they disguise. I did not care where – you can find plenty that is foreign in familiar surroundings left unexplored – but I did not want to remain unmoved.