i once kept

i once kept this blog and i still think it's really wonderful
when i started it, no one did this - actually, turns out you can't make that little heart thing without things going wonky on the post. that's because those little sharp brackets are actually FOR something not just little text hearts. sharp bracket-3. that's what was supposed to be there.

but now we're just on the internet all the time trying to use text to describe everything and still struggling to make it work for feelings and stuff, ya know

i remember when i sent my first text. it was july 2005, to my friend smiley. and sarah was there, in the hotel room we shared all summer long before making an extra crazy very stupid nonstop drive from vancouver to london.

sarah died a year ago january 19 and i just still can't believe it. not sure i'll ever be able to.

FoodCycles

I wrote this article for an exciting new Toronto blog that should be up and running in the next few weeks. It's going to be a sort of farmer's almanac for the city - sounds good, no?

I decided to post it here as well, just in case there's someone still reading this.

This past summer my roommates and I took advantage of the large balcony off of my room in a house on Lansdowne Ave. and decided to experiment with a pretty significant potted garden. I put a hold on a copy of Gayla Trail’s You Grow, Girl at the library and patiently waited a long time for it to come in (Gayla Trail, resident gardening blogger extrordinaire is, not surprisingly, extremely popular amongst other Toronto Public Library users). I read the book back to front - because it was a good book – but also because I was terrified of screwing up the garden somehow. I don’t have much gardening experience under my belt and not being able to

coax bright orange flowers to come out of the

wrinkly nasturtium seeds I had bought at the Dufferin Grove Market seemed entirely possible. Fortunately, everything I planted eventually sprouted and lasted through the whole season bearing as they should, except for a few herbs and strawberry plants we picked up from the grocery store instead of growing from seed. In fact, bringing the balcony garden to life was so easy – and exciting – that it just made me lament. Oh, the things I would’ve planted if only I’d known!

Come mid-summer I was jonesing for some plants that required a little more of my attention so I decided to see if there were any WWOOFing-like volunteer opportunities available in Toronto where I could get my hands dirty and learn more about urban gardening. And that’s how I found out about FoodCycles! FoodCycles is a not-for-profit city farm on the outskirts ofDownsview Park, at the corner of Sheppard and Keele.Their mission is to create a space where Torontonians can come together to grow, learn about and get excited about food.

Successful initiatives with similar sounding intentions have been established in Toronto before; The Stop Community Food Centre started out as one of Canada’s first food banks and has grown into a large non-profit with a slew of interesting programs aimed at engaging their community around food, including an 8000 square-foot community garden at Earlscourt Park and a greenhouse at The Green Barn in the Artscape Wychwood Barns, not to mention the extensive network of community gardens connected through the TCGN.

But FoodCycles is a little different. It was started by a group of community gardeners in2007 unsatisfied with the newly implemented Green Bin program in GTA. It didn’t seem able to adequately provide compost necessary to maintain rich, healthy soil needed to support gardens in the city. So, they started out as a simple soil co-operative where people would have access to healthy, virile black soil, but became in inspired by Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Growing Power at a conference in 2008 and expanded their vision to play a larger role in the urban growers movement. They started out by building three greenhouses at the corner of Keele and Sheppard, setting up one as the ‘worm bank’, a large vermi-composting centre wherefood waste gets turned into healthy black soil chock full of worm castings, one of nature’s best fertilizers. This past summer in front of the greenhouses they planted a one-acre garden full of all varieties of fruits, herbs and vegetables. With this space, FoodCycles wants to ‘reach and teach’ people

in the city about growing good chemical free food and to provide employable skills and hands on training to youth in their community, not to mention nurturing urban agriculture in Toronto by improving access to healthy soil.

When I found them on the internet FoodCycles was right in the middle of harvest and eager for volunteers. Board member and project manager Sunny Lam enthusiastically greeted me by name as I rather cautiously (I was a little nervous, I have to admit) came in the back entrance of one of their greenhouses that first time. He introduced me to the garden coordinator Ashlee Cooper who set me up with a spade and some gloves and had me weeding some kind of chard within minutes of arriving. Because it was theirfirst season with the garden, there were huge amounts of fresh produce that needed homes, so us volunteers got sent home with a healthy amount of whatever we had been harvesting – for me that ended up being two kinds of radishes, dinosaur kale, huge and delicious heads of bok choy, cucumbers, basil, yum yum yum!

I managed to make it back to the farm three or four times before my harvest season ended a little early, something I was sad to see happen because I was having an AWESOME time with FoodCycles. Though the journey was a little long, it’s not hard to get there – the Keele bus leaves from Keele station frequently and will take you all the way to the corner of the park with not too much delay. I’m not entirely sure what they’ve got on the agenda for the coming growing season, though they’ve been keeping active during the winter having recently organized the Toronto screening of DIRT! the movie and running a composting seminaralongside Green Thumbs Growing Kids coming up on February 27.

Judging from their website it looks like they’ve been busy though; they’ll be officially set up as a city CSA this summer and fall - can you get more local than that?!

Given what I saw this year, I expect it will be diverse and delicious, full of varieties of tomatoes, radishes, brassicas and edible nightshades. But even more exciting is that they are getting the ball rolling to be able to diversify the project by beginning to raise bees with a unique Toronto flavour thanks to the diversity in plants around the city and tilapia raised on plants grown at the farm, with all fish waste going back to the earth so nothing is wasted (!!). Last summer they were able to supply to great Toronto eateries, Calico and Hot Yam, with produce and I bet they’ll be adding more in the coming year.

If you want to get involved with FoodCycles or get on board through a CSA share you can find out information here and here. Hope to weed with you sometime soon!

Sparrows in Sweaters

Annette Messager

Oh, how I wish I get get to the Hayward Gallery in the Real London to see this exhibit.

freshly ground

i drank too much coffee this morning. shit.



i think my body my explode.


in the meantime, i sit here browsing. it's been like 45 minutes since i actually did any work


i have so many rich babies to sign up for music classes!


betsy walton

comm-unity

really incredible photography project by Richard Renaldi, "Touching Strangers".
he asks strangers to pose with each other, touching...in case the title didn't give it away.



there's a really striking sort of intimacy expressed through their discomfort that is so incredibly moving.



the post on in such a world where i found this is worth reading.

growing sprouts

akasha rabut

via booooooom, which is so good

les mots

andrea bowers

check this

manon de boer (has my secret namesake, but also) did this really fabulous john cage video piece that was at the kw institute during the berlin biennale that i feel nostalgic for and want to see again but cannot find. but i found that up there and it's a pretty wicked project. it reminded me of how i was talking about my dear friend leah yesterday who thinks so carefully about the words she uses thus sometimes coming at you with language that seems a little unusual, but almost consistently managing to say exactly what she means. the panoramic portraits project experiments with a new semantic relationship between the syntax of communication and pragmatics...maybe? it's definitely an interesting way to draw attention to potential that exists within a new framework of language that is combined with an important structural/visual component. useful for description. do we really want to get better at description though? maybe since the visual component allows for more interpretation within the way the language intends to be used, some mystery remains...hmm...

probably more important is how the internet is such an interesting venue for organization! ah! what a wealth of information about people; the bits they leave behind themselves, the stuff recorded by others, where it comes from, the relation to their physical existence in space, the removal from any necessary relationship to place. mapped together, is our internet presence the most accurate representation of us?

also, i updated this a little

my room has no heat

zachary rossman

found one reason to like the extreme cold weather here right now - sublimation. the sidewalks are way less wet and slippy thanks to this underrated endothermic phase transition.  

ps - my area of toronto was part of the 25% w/o power for the full 24 hours ending at 10 pm yesterday. it was chilly. 

"food as Barbie"

i went to the Ethnography Through Film festival at McGill a couple years ago with Leah and Gianna on the 'food production' night. i've talked a lot about the films we watched that night since then and i just just just found the one i thought was especially interesting, online. Our Daily Bread looks at food production in Europe using a soundtrack of massive machines that interrupt the food we eat on its way from seed/birth to our stomach and shots that mirror the best from films you'll probably recognize (i.e. the shot of the sunflower fields and that one above). the combination of which manages to humanize everything in the film except for the humans. 

it's a really, really good film. 

after we watched it, we got a warning from the moderator (or whatever we should call her...she was associated with the film history dept. at Concordia, I believe) about how gruesome the next film was. Le Sang des Betes is a doc about a slaughterhouse in France in 1949. fully scored and with jaunty narration, there's lots and lots of blood. 

honestly though, all the sterile shots of modern day slaughterhouses you see in Our Daily Bread are much more disturbing. 

for your viewing pleasure: Our Daily Bread, Le Sang des Betes 

don't go to cholera

a may-be-heart-breaking record of time

that ryan sent to me

also 

going baldessari

(those are 2)

and the apostrophe engine 

might be a good way to spend/waste some time before you get back to work

happy new year

i'm resolving to come up with a resolution before the end of january

haris epaminonda

songs for time!

!!!

can you beeee-lieve i've had a blog for almost a year!! well not really, but we're nearing the end of the year in which i started this blog. and it was certainly winter when i began. which makes me feel like representatively, a year. right?

so i am pretty excited about 2009. 

for one, i will get to use my camilla engman calendar! finally.

i didn't have a calendar last year. but for 2009, i have two. and they hang side by side on a little panel (i don't know what the panel conceals. isn't that funny? i just realized that now. and i can't check because i'm at my parents' house. later.), and they've been there for about a month.

the other calendar is art from cape dorset. it's really gorgeous and a totally appreciable size. seriously. the size definitely influenced my purchasing of it, one frivolous afternoon. 

the camilla one i have had since at least september. but it's been just sitting looking exciting, yet perpetually and mournfully closed on my bookshelf. a couple of weeks ago (i think probably when i bought the other calendar. that was a mistake actually. a mistake. i brought lunch to work, because i really can't afford to be buying all that food at lunch, but i got hungry at 10 30 and had brought something to eat, so ate it. but then i had a half hour for lunch, and no food. forgot a book so i thought i'd just walk up roncesvalles. accidentally drop way too much cash on unnecessary additional calendar from Another Story Bookshop [but they give you POINTS! towards new books!!]), i decided it was reasonable to start displaying the beautiful painting for january. maybe i can find it. 

this is it! 

at least as far i as can remember. if i was at home, i'd be sure. but i'm not. 

for two, what's not to get excited about. a year to designate and commit and design and observe and something something something you'll mistake as profound. 

so, x's and o's brothers, friends and lovers! to time! 

hahaha 

toasts' are lame.

and often uncomfortable. 

always so goddamn sentimental. getting at me through the same angle as a standing ovation to make me burst into tears. 

keeping everyone warm

some

here's a bit of that article

"That said, what I find most exciting about what is going on right now - beyond just getting rid of Harper, which is exciting in and of itself - is that we have this opportunity to show what proportional representation (PR) would look like, because all of this talk that this is a coup is a joke.

What is being proposed by this coalition is much closer to representative democracy than what we have right now, which is a government that has [slightly more than] 35 per cent of the popular vote in a turnout that was historically low, of 59 per cent of Canadian voters, which means that even though the Tories won more seats they had fewer actual votes than in the last election.

I think it is really important to talk about democracy, about what it actually means in this period. In some ways I think it is even more important than talking about the policies, because our electoral system is broken. Because of the Tories' extraordinary opportunism and terrible calculation we now have an opportunity to see a better version of democracy and see more people represented in government.

To me the best case scenario that could come out of this is, one, you get the coalition, and, two, the NDP uses this moment to really launch a national discussion about why we need PR and that that becomes one of the things that comes out of this crisis.

Now, they don't have the mandate for that right now, but we could come out of this with a national referendum on proportional representation. People might actually like it, which would be really, really exciting."

more excitement

read this article by naomi klein for an actual informed opinion on what's happening with all of this (versus my emotions)

a note from our sponsors

in light of the exciting and rather unprecedented (only in the sense that who woulda thought any of those old guys would actually have the gall to make a move on the Conservative's sad minority government) rallying behind our, remember, parliamentary democracy up on the Hill in Ottawa, i invite you to watch this incredibly wicked documentary on Hugo Chavez & Venezuela called The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

to me it's like all of a sudden it seems that democracy here has managed to retain a shred of meaning despite the 8 year appropriation of the word by all nations, including this one, subscribing to the rhetoric surrounding the "war on terror". i'm wondering right now if the hijacking and subsequent attempts at redefintion of the term has moved people to forget that it has come along way since Plato. the brand of democracy we accede to, courtesy of Her Majesty (!!), is based on a document constructed in order to maintain a certain degree of fairness and representation in the supreme ruling of this country. which is where this very formal 'vote of non-confidence' procedure and possibility of a coalition government taking over the House is coming from. much to our surprise. or mine at least, because i'm fairly certain i've never even read the constitution. so sad. have you?

my roommate and watched a lot of news tonight, the best line was maybe Rex Murphy's nod to the 'separatists' being what holds together the propspective federal government.

though we are sort of not into this label for the Bloc. could we move on, please?

but seriously, this could be the smartest thing Gilles Duceppe ever does for Quebec; gaining the support and trust from Canadians still unnecessarily nervous about a separation that will likely never reach a number of yes-votes even close to the support garnered in 1995. all the while still maintaining the integrity of Quebec as a unique nation. maybe this is a unifying move!

and really. i cannot believe how Stephen Harper's slick move to get himself re-elected before people started getting really riled up about Obama being chosen as P.E. of the U.S and our own potential for 'change', is actually, actually and seriously, backfiring on him. eat that.

slow sunday snow storm

apparently a big one is coming.

i'm finding too much to share today! thus requiring this additional post. so here are some MORE AWESOME THINGS!!!



aoyama hina.

yes! go look at more.

still on paper & knives; remember when i wrote about ed pien? accidentally stumbled into an opening of his last weekend when my parents were visiting and wanted to go to the birch libralato. and there he was! and so many of the things i like. he looked graceful. that was nice.


and THIS!

eric eley

oui oui oui oui oui

i have a great deal of familiarity with the universal transverse mercator system

this is so awesome.
mario feese made 'air lines' using daily worldwide flight paths

chris harrison made this map of internet use & city-to-city connections

then they got put together at the ministry of type



you can buy a poster of mario feese's work. i think i would like one. i would stare at the delicate tip of chile and search for a faint outline of baffin island from my bed.

trees by mistake

claire sherman

this is okay. it is in progress and so is everything you might find there.
edit #3: yes, you may click that this. i'm all over the place.



hanna konola

postscript

you all liked this too, right?