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."