PLEASE spread this baby around. It will come in handy on Monday night.
Eat NDP-led coalition, Steve!!!
Critical Mass Vancouver March 2011
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This month’s mass was gettin’ bigger, as the sun came out and the DST-change made it brighter. The weather was threatening as late as 4 pm in my neighbourhood but it ended up being a beautiful day.
First surprise of the Mass was the giant American film shoot occupying the Art Gallery square before us. What made it a little more surprising was that one of the ride veterans led the start of the ride through the film shoot – or so we thought. It looked like a good bit of fun and a political point well-made when we started passing right in front of the camera. But then he stopped, took two steps up the Art Gallery stairs, and the guy started explaining why we were going to occupy the gallery steps for 20 minutes until it was time to leave on the ride.
Uh-oh! I signed up to make a statement about bike culture over car culture, not to make a statement against Hollywood Film Productions. I make plenty of those every day, and while I like the idea of earning everyone on set an extra 20 minutes of pay while slowing down the Hollywood agenda by several nanoseconds, I had no clear reason to throw Critical Mass into a head-on, high-stakes confrontation with max-pressure location managers, whose chief activity all day is cajoling people to get the hell out of the way and let them get on with their work.
Flick’s Video Art at W2 – March 18
Well if my birthday wasn’t cool enough, I’m having a group show with Drop Out Video Arts at W2 on March 18!
I’ll be projecting the first aspect of a piece called DOARIP (Death of Analog, Rest in Pieces) involving Avatar and smashed televisions.
More to follow…
Here’s the website for Drop Out Video Arts
And the trailer for the show:
Cool Nairobi kids and their bike song
Instead of linking the horrible video of a guy driving through Critical Mass in Brazil,
Here’s a wicked counter-punch from the Wafalme kids in Nairobi.
Critical Mass February Vancouver
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I think I have frostbite in my little toes. But it was worth it to Critically Mass.
I also did an interview with Openfile.ca, a new online / local news service, about the question of whether critical mass is needed in the New World of Bike Lanes. I’ll post that when it’s written up.
The big question today was – what would become of the pseudo-counter-mass which was meant to draw riders off into the bike lanes, to celebrate them and avoid angering the Easily-Angered Car Gods?? Well, it looked like there wasn’t much of an issue – Jamie Ollivier was there, doing his thing, and the main Mass did ours.
Michael Geist – Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson
by Flick Harrison
Canada’s copyright battles are in a holding pattern while Canada stumbles through 3 successive minority governments in almost 7 years. It’s a hot potato that won’t be sorted until someone has a safe majority to risk the bruising online guerre-a-outrance that would inevitably ensue.
The Conservatives, now in power, really need their Guy-Fawkes blogaholics firmly-onside, in order to strangle every Liberal social program in its crib, and those people would be very leery of a DMCA-style bill in Canada… but that’s exactly what’s coming, whether the Conservatives or Liberals take power. Neither side can really admit that or even address it directly. The NDP is always wary of staking any new turf that suggests them once again to be bug-eyed communists in the opinion of the corporate press.
Here’s a good article by Michael Geist about the lawsuit against ISOhunt, which I didn’t know was proudly Canadian. ISOhunt launched a court action to get a ruling that their torrent-search site was operating within Canadian law (!), and the recording industry used the opportunity to launch their own suit for damages against ISOhunt.
Michael Geist – Liberal MP Dan McTeague Emerges As Unofficial CRIA Spokesperson.
“Were this nothing more than an MP getting the law wrong, it would not be particularly noteworthy. More important is that McTeague’s recent comments appear to be coming directly from CRIA. The Toronto Star letter to the editor includes quotes from two old posts on my blog (here and here). The visitor log for my site reveals that only one party accessed both posts in the period between February 14th (when the column first appeared) and February 21st (when the letter to the editor appeared). That party was CRIA, suggesting that the McTeague letter may largely be a cut and paste of materials supplied by CRIA lobbyists.”
A Canadian Perspective on Gloria’s Cause
In case there was any doubt that I really liked Dayna Hanson’s Gloria’s Cause, here’s proof how I was going on about it right after the show.
A snippet from Jessie Smith’s post-show interview with Flick Harrison at Vancouver, B.C.’s PuSh Festival.
Support Improvement Club, the film adaptation of Gloria’s Cause.
Fake car survey on Dunsmuir Viaduct?
[thought i put a note debunking this – but it seems to be missing. This turned out to be over-hasty in the heated debate over bike lanes – these guys, in a complicated way, WERE working for the city. Sorry for the overreaction]
The people who oppose bike lanes are doing a bit of a dirty tricks campaign… maybe.
These folks in the video were out claiming to be working for the city, acted a little shady when questioned, and yesterday were suggesting that “the city is thinking of getting rid of the bike lanes.”
Continue reading “Fake car survey on Dunsmuir Viaduct?”
January Critical Mass Vancouver
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PLEASE LINK HERE!
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PLEASE LINK HERE!
This week there’s been a debate on the Velolove email list in Vancouver about Critical Mass: should it be abandoned or radically altered now that we have a few bike lanes and a pro-bike council? The debate got me so riled I decided to go to Critical Mass for the first time in years, partly to re-assess my ideas about the event. I also wanted to show support for bike culture in general at a time when the haters are hating and they’ve taken over Toronto.
A basic medical ethic says: First, do no harm. In other words, don’t make things worse or it will be harder to make them better. A few folks think that Critical Mass does more harm than good, especially now that bike culture has invaded city hall.
I don’t think CM needs to stop just because we got a couple of bike lanes built in Vancouver. How many Vancouverites really understand how important CM, and other bike-advocacy clusters, really were in that process? The visibility of any interest group contributes to their political success, and cyclists are no exception. So if CM faded away, what would happen to everything cyclists have gained in this city? Do the powers behind the automotive industry and consumer culture in general just fold up their tents and admit defeat?
Would those same people argue that the car culture in Toronto will now sit back and enjoy their victory, stop agitating their base, etc, now that Rob Ford has declared the war on the car is over? Should the cyclists in TO just give up? No to both, of course; cars will keep trying to consume everything put into their gas tanks and cyclists will keep struggling for saner alternatives.
Is there any other activist camp that has a big public party once a month? CM is a vital and unique node, and it should continue.
I can assure you that after a super-fun, polite, and exciting tiny little ride (one person counted 28 riders at peak), I came away certain that Critical Mass can do no harm. We got one unfriendly honk versus dozens of friendly toot toots, lots of hollers, the group stayed very tight (it was small, after all) and corking was barely necessary.
Gloria’s Cause knocks me out at the Push Festival
GLORIA’S CAUSE
@ the Push Festival 2011
Gloria’s Cause is a knock-down drag-out fight between dance, movement, theatre, and rock, and the winner is We the People. If I had to help you get a grip on the show, I could call it a Rock Opera. Or I could say it’s as if Frank Zappa dosed the Tea Party with mushrooms, and then jammed with them on Jerry Springer.
There were at least two separate moments in the show when I was more moved than I’ve ever been by dance, and I mean an emotional arrest of the kind that happens seldom in a cynical viewer’s lifetime. Continue reading “Gloria’s Cause knocks me out at the Push Festival”