Would You Trust This Face?

I got a call from Passport Canada the yesterday questioning the authority of my Driver's License Photo. To be fair, I can see how my dark hair and beard may look somewhat jihadish but it's a government issued document for god sakes. Earlier in the day they called my guarantor with what I assume was a similar line of questioning. The word of this mostly respected and almost entirely moral character (who will occasionally partake in highly immoral activities such as high-speed boat jousting during our annual fishing trip) was obviously not authoritative enough for Passport Canada, and so they had to call me and ask me if I had ever dared cover such a handsome face with an unruly beard.

"Yes," I told them, "there was a time when I was convinced that I wanted a hippie chick, and only a hippie chick. So I grew my beard and bathed a little less than was my previous custom. However realizing my folly (and the fact that I like women who smell good) I eventually shaved it off and have been far happier (and luckier) since." This answer seemed wholly satisfactory to the inquisitor and she promised I'd have my Passport in a few weeks. Grand Forks here I come!

Giving the Bank Shit, Again! (Happy Earth Day)

An email I sent to my bank today, having reached the end of my patience with the amount of advertising I receive with my monthly Visa bill.

This is just a note to let you know that although I have signed up for "paperless record keeping" I still receive a monthly bill for my Visa. Perhaps this is a legal requirement, but I must say that I object to the amount of advertising that comes with my monthly bill and the wastefulness of this unwanted annoyance.

This month's bill included a "Save on long distance..." sales letter, one of many such I have received since signing up for your Visa. I have never shown the tiniest bit of interest in an offer of this sort, and quite frankly, I never will, yet I continue to be pestered.

The other side of this page was blank and yet you included another piece of two-sided preprinted paper to tell me that someone from Lumby, BC and another person from Dartmouth, NS won some contest.

You could have published this information on the blank side of the page with the "Save on long distance" ad saving the printing costs, paper and ink that will now go into recycling without having had any effect on my motivation to purchase more things with my Visa. Better still you could have made use of the "Message Centre" in my online banking to make me aware of these things or published them in a online newsletter that I am free to sign up for or reject.

As far as I'm concerned, if someone signs up for "paperless record keeping" it is akin to putting a "no flyers" sign on one's mailbox. In other words: I do not want your advertising. If the law requires you send me a hard copy of my bill fine, but let that be all. I don't care about your Scotia Star network, most of those retailers don't exist in Manitoba anyways, and I don't care to join in any deals you are offering in conjunction with other companies. You're wasting paper and time with these pointless ads, and your are pissing off customers like myself with your thoughtlessness in the process, please stop.

Musical Thought

I’m reading a really interesting and well written article in The Walrus magazine right now about a classical musician and her (second) journey to Rwanda. She hauls around an electric keyboard and plays Bach and other classical music for various populations in Rwanda.

The author of the article at one point begins to expound on how music is a reflection of thought and can act as mirror to the ways in which we create and process meaning. By way of example she looks at the way African and Western music compare. Western music is based on resolution, it is structured like a story to create a narrative through melody and rhythm, that almost always resolves satisfactorily (or at least in keeping with the accepted scales and time signatures that define Western music.)

In contrast African music is not structured by way of resolution. It is more or less spontaneous and “organic.” There is no defined ending, no grand scheme, as one might expect in Western music. Similarly, the author postulates, our modes of thinking are structured differently.

She explores this further by taking the daily life of a woman in Kigali who pushes her bicycle up a mountain every day, rain or shine, to carry a load of goods. It is a Sisyphean task she can’t imagine enduring herself, and yet for the Rwandan woman it is a fact of daily life, and not measured in the same terms as it is in Western eyes.

I begin to understand that the reationship to time, to value, to purpose, to ourselves—Our basic existential tooling—is not a god-given inheritence but is, like music, a cultural construction. And this leaves me profoundly confused, dangling between two great fictions of existence: mine, in which there is no meaning without resolution, and hers, in which the idea of resolution has no meaning.

This speaks to the power of music to influence thought, much as it does the power of thought to influence music. I am interested in the idea that a lot of the obsessions and behaviors within our society are controlled by our culture, because we seem to place such a high value on what is inherent (and thus unchangeable) about our actions relative to what is produced by way of culture and perception. Stranger still is the possibility that revolution can really occur within art and music, and new ways of feeling and thinking are far more possible than I have realized before.

Incidentally: I was looking for a picture to go with this post and a shot of Carlos Santana came up. I immediately thought about his performance at Woodstock, which absolutely blew my mind the first time I saw it. It was so unbelievably inspired (and inspiring) to see this young group of musicians jamming out these amazing grooves (the drum solo by the kid who was 16 at the time is monumental). Talk about music that caused a revolution.

Bring Your Own Bag

Here's an article I submitted to the Free Press yesterday. Today's paper contains an article by Tom Ford on the very same subject in a very similar vein, so it seems unlikely that I will be able to collect any cash for this effort. Here it is anyways.


Although I own enough cloth shopping bags to match every outfit in my wardrobe and try to refuse plastic bags whenever they are offered—which in case you haven’t noticed is virtually every time you purchase something irregardless of quantity or size—I still have a massive cache of shopping bags, representing a wide range of retailers, under my sink. I can only swoon when I consider how many more reside in the broom closets of less fastidious people.

On April 2nd the Manitoba community of Leaf Rapids became the first in Canada to implement a radical remedy to the almost pathological way in which plastic bags are shoveled at shoppers by imposing an all out ban. Unsurprisingly, given our current penchant for environmental issues, this news has met with great interest across the country. It has even prompted the Canadian Plastics Industry Association to develop a damage-control strategy, as was evident in a recent letter published by one of its executives in Saturday’s Free Press.

The industry claims it is doing society a huge favour by providing us with so many “kitchen catchers.” If not for the zillions of light weight bags they so generously supply we’d be buying heavier gauge garbage bags which, according to their studies, will produce an even greater burden on the environment. Counter-intuitive as it sounds they actually claim that banning the wind-blown blights, which currently decorate the treetops of communities from coast to coast, will result in more plastic being sent to the dump.

Questionable industry-sponsored studies aside, this by-law is still highly contentious. The legality of imposing a ban of this sort on retailers, some lawyers have suggested, is beyond the jurisdiction of municipalities and would likely not survive a court challenge. In the context of Leaf Rapids a suit seems unlikely, especially given that the town of 500 received a donation of 5000 reusable bags from an Ontario manufacturer. But as larger communities look to enact similar legislation it becomes a very significant point.

Having government dictate how businesses can treat their patrons goes against the very nature of the free-market, and our freedom of choice. However, our compulsion to consume goes hand in hand with a sense that it is convenient, so the incentive for retailers to curtail the shopping-bag insanity simply do not exist. While environmental issues are gaining traction everywhere, retail is an industry where personal and courteous service are king. Offering a bag seems like a friendly gesture, whereas suggesting that one bring one’s own, no matter the good intentions, is offensive to many customers.

Waging war on the plastic bag pestilence that gnaws at this nation—trivial as it seems in comparison to a great many graver environmental concerns—is a worthwhile pursuit. Shopping bags swirling on the sidewalk are a powerful symbol of the obliviousness we show towards our wasteful and ecologically unsustainable patterns of consumption.

Drastic measures like banning plastic shopping bags help us question the wisdom of automatically plopping an already amply packaged item into another layer of plastic for the sake of convenience. If we had a few dozen less “kitchen catchers” on hand and actually ran out occasionally we might take time to consider how much trash our lifestyles produce. Perhaps, if there were fewer bags to carry all our purchases home, we might even be tempted to bring home less stuff.

Personally, I look forward to the day when I don’t have to say: “No thanks, I’ve got my own bag,” before the first item is even scanned, in order stay a clerk’s robotic impulse to bag.

The Babe

Just a little illustration I did with my stylus when I was in the mood to paint.