Category Archives: Canada

Downtown Eastside Artist Opportunity

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Fearless City Logo

**please post and forward

Fearless City Mobile Call for Participants
Short-term contracts for Downtown Eastside Residents,

We are fast approaching Fearless City Mobile’s exciting upcoming project-
Parade of Lost Souls, on Saturday October 25th, and are looking for 10 people to bring the Mobile Souls and Digital Shrine to life.

The Parade of the Lost Souls is a Grandview-Woodland’s Community
Halloween event that celebrates the cycle of life & death, and
encourages us to face our fears in order to live life to its fullest.
It is a time and a place to share losses at one of the many shrines
and celebrate life and to enrich our community. It takes Place on
Saturday October 25th, beginning at Grandview Park at 6:30pm. A
parade/procession will snake throughout the commercial drive area,
beginning at the NE corner of the park at 7pm.

Mobile Souls is a montage of live streaming video of the Parade and
installations along the route, as well as ‘mms’ texts and digital cell
phone images from festival attendees, that will be sifted, VJ’d and
projected. The montage will be projected on a screen at the corner of
Kitchener and Commercial and animated by live shadow puppet performers.

Fearless City Mobile will also be supporting the Digital Shrine
installation in Grandview Park. The shrine consists of digital images,
text and video sent in by community members in advance, as well as
mms texts sent in throughout the event.

Parade of Lost Souls is produced by the Public Dreams Society. For
more information on the event you can visit www.publicdreams.org.

Fearless City Mobile is a project of the Fearless Media Cluster of the
DTES Community Arts Network. For more information visit
www.fearlesscity.ca.

———

We are looking for 10 people in total to fill the following positions.

You do not need to have any experience with the following equipment,
software, or technology to apply for this opportunity.
**** All technical
equipment will be provided by Fearless city Mobile:

a) 1x VJ Assistant (Mobile Souls): Assisting VJ Jesse Scott in sorting
through incoming live streamed mobile video, still images and text. Text
will be manipulated in Livetype and exported into Modul8, the software
that will mix the video, text and still images.

b) 1x VJ Assistant (Digital Shrine): Assisting VJ Suez Holland and
Cultural Curator Flick Harrison in sorting through incoming live streamed
still images and text. Text will be manipulated in Livetype and exported
into Modul8, the software that will mix the text and still images with the
video material that flick has collected prior to the event. Video will not
be live streamed to this station.

c) 4x Mobile Videographers: Shooting mobile video of the event and
live-streaming it to the Mobile Souls VJ Station via Livecast.
Videographers will be positioned throughout the parade.

d) 4x Mobile SMS/MMS Outreachers: Outreaching to Parade of Lost
Souls attendees and introducing them to the Mobile Souls cell phone
texting platform. Instructing attendees on how to text in their
thoughts,
reflections and comments about the event to a specified Mobile
Souls phone number. These texts will be downloaded by a sift tool to
the VJ Stations.

You are also required to offer to text peoples comments for them
on your own phone, and to demonstrate the process.

The responsibilities for this contract include:

1. Attending an orientation workshop on Wednesday October 22 from
1-6pm at the Lori Krill Co-op at 65 W. Cordova

2. Attending the event on Saturday October 25th from setup at
5:00pm until the event ends at 12am. Wearing Halloween Costumes is
encouraged.

3. Completing a participant feedback form.

The Artist Fee for each position is $200.00.

Please submit a short paragraph stating your interest in the
project and a position to amy at fearlessmedia.ca by Tuesday October 21
at 12noon.

Amy Kazymerchyk
Fearless City Mobile
DTES Community Arts Network.

I must warn you…

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dog

I must warn you that I’m going on about forty-five minutes of sleep since two days ago, have consumed nothing but caffeinated beverages, a turkey sandwich, two oranges and a bag of chocolate chip cookies today, and have another blog post to do over at Ayyyy before I crash, so this could get weird.
Oh yeah, and I worked on the election all day, as a polling clerk in a mobile poll. And it’s a full moon tonight, Hunter’s Moon, Blood Moon.
I was absolutely crushed not to be in charge of the polling place at the city jail, but oh well, you can’t have everything! How would you keep it fresh? Polling at two assisted-living communities and a women’s shelter were interesting enough to fill the day. It’s not every day you meet a fellow who was in the Normandy invasion (not the one in 1066, the later one, going in the other direction).
Not in the women’s shelter.

Operation Recuperation: the raincoaster situation

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I’m feeling better (well enough, in fact, to blog!) and thought I’d give my millions of devoted readers (both of you; did I mention I had two million readers? Well, two million people of whom one point seven came here looking for Beaver Shots and went away confused, which is something, anyway) some clue as to what I’ve been going through.

As happens each year at the turning of the seasons, when the sun looks at Vancouver and turns, in fact, away completely, tossing a heartless “see you in May” over its shoulder as it heads to California, the rains have set in and that means that the mold, the mildew, the emos and the creepy-crawlies are ascendant.

All of these, with the exception of emos (because I hate clove cigarettes) can, according to my doctor, be found in my lungs at the present time.

My lungs, in fact, look something like this:

The fungus Pilobolus fires off its sporangiophore using a water cannon or “squirt gun,” reaching accelerations that are among the fastest in nature.

Here we present a montage of high-speed video clips showing sporangiophore discharge in the fungus Pilobolus kleinii. The videos were obtained at camera frame rates of up to 250,000 fps. Each discharge is completed in less than 0.25 milliseconds; an eye blink takes 100 milliseconds, or 400 times longer! The music is Verdi’s Anvil Chorus.

For more information, click here.

Anvil Chorus and all.

Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention that yesterday, when I sat down to blog, I was bitten on the ass by an Aggressive House Spider. They don’t call them that for nothing, and that was the reason I ended up smearing toothpaste on my butt at two in the morning.

What? What? It draws the poison out.

Although the Co-op where I live has improved things somewhat in the last year, tacking a new roof on so the water hardly ever wells up through my carpet anymore and disposing of the large areas of ceiling which had rotted through and caved in on the second floor (it’s a four-story building) and even carting away some of the drywall in the lobby where the mildew had eaten through, things here cannot be said to be spore-free.

And my lungs, scarred by some mystery illness when I was a baby, have never been the best (every time I get a chest X-ray they look all concerned until I say “oh, is this about the scar tissue? Check the records”). And there is, as there always is, a flu/cold/virus of doom going around Vancouver which knocks everyone on their asses for a week or so.

And so.

Put all these things together and you get someone who’s been running a temperature for nearly three weeks, appears to be unable to fully digest food of any kind, has essentially no appetite, produces her own body weight in mucus every eighteen hours, and coughs like that guy…that guy at the theatre…that one everyone hated by fifteen minutes into the flick. If I ever get this money I’m owed, I’m trotting straight down to Canadian Tire and buying one of those combo heater/dehumidifiers/air filters, and there goes three hundred bucks but it’s worth it.

Which is why I’m staying home tonight instead of going out to a social activist/geek event three blocks from my house featuring free booze.

Yes. I said free booze.

That’s how sick I am.

Pic o’ the Day: Montreal Dairy Cows

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Okay, so this isn’t going to be the most SEO-pimped-out post I’ve ever made. Still, it’s an amazing pic and everyone should see it and hear the backstory from WalkingTurcotYards, backstory which is both poignant and amazing:

Between Two Windows

Faceless!

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Faceless on Facebook, faceless on Twitter, faceless on WordPress, on Gravatar, on OpenID (which, it must be said, I’ve never gotten to work anyway) in fact, faceless anywhere is a powerful statement, especially in an increasingly-overpopulated world where everyone wears their MySpace pruneface at all times, lest they be caught on CCTV looking humdrum.

Just ask Anonymous.

With that in mind, here’s your chance to make a powerful statement and reflect on the importance of cultural expression and how much a part of your life it is, whether you think of yourself as a cultural creative or not.

From NativeEarth.ca:

Faceless

It only took 2 days for our “Faceless” facebook group to reach close to 2000 members.

Here’s what it’s all about:

This is a roll call to all people who believe that Arts and Culture is a part of their lives and is important outside of the political spectrum. This is for artists, families, parents, friends, co-workers, relatives, enemies, neighbors, acquaintances, to all people who enjoy the arts and culture of this country and feel that it must be nurtured and cultivated. We need to send out a message to our politicians to let them know that there are more of us than they think and congruently that we are not going to vote for any person or party that plans to cut funding to arts and culture in the impending election. This is for all of us; people from all sides of the political landscape. This is not about what party you belong to, but how you feel about arts and culture in this country.

So on Monday September 15th (the first day of Parliament) we want you to do one thing. It’s very simple. It will only take a small amount of your time. About the same amount of time it will take to cast your vote for the candidate you feel best represents what you want.

This is it: We would like you to leave your profile picture blank for the day. Use your faceless profile picture as a symbol of the loss of identity Canadians will experience if funding to the arts is cut.

Be a catalyst for change and put your best face forward on election day, but on Monday September 15th leave it blank and send a message so that we can count how many people have joined the fight.

signed