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Such happy news, it had seemed quite the tragedy that The Windsor Symphony, long great devotion and concern of my mother Jane, and also the Capitol Theatre, a building and frontisworks that hankered for happy use, voila, in a sudden inspired move, two in one, the symphony will move there.
I like the $1.00 a year rent, (they owe still $60,000 from previous days, and must fund raise for it and strengthen the base somehow to keep musicians and all in the future) but what a fun place to do it from.
The happy folks of the Windsor Symphony Society, other classical music lovers, and people intrigued by that setting having such music and a fine dining restaurent (as planned) may all meet in extraordinary moments, right downtown.
And then stroll, some to the waterfront, others to the pubs, others for dessert.
I have no idea what the future will consist in, but it’s nice imagining it will have nights like that
With a little faith, hope and some generosity, wonders returned.
Tonight leaving work, deep dusk of an already fairly dark day, so that it was as good as night already, I gazed into the ravine just in case it might be the moment something was down there near the brook, and in the dark heard the cheep of a cardinal. I didn’t assume it was as I don’t take them for noctural, having had one blast my window repeatedly early every morning one late spring, but rounding behind the building the dark red cardinal indeed looped out of the trees twirled alongside and past me, and then made a point of zooming straight for as far as the eye could see, seeming like a cheery optimistic quip from my Dad.
Windsor Symphony’s new home, as magical as Old Man River sung by Robeson, or The Iraq National Symphony,
or – were it recorded, my Dad’s version. He played it a most passionate rollicking style, heaving back his head and launching arms out, on the old green piano thats at phog, just up the street from the Capitol.
Bamp! Di di did di diii
I’d just say please help make it happen, fact is I’d donate myself.
Such beautiful place
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The poems of the day and workweek, in extremely miscellaneous photography. But first, a poem. A pigeon poem
Outside Bathurst Station, the pigeons incorporating rain into their morning. e.
The pigeons and the bicyclists and the cats and cars all have so much work on their hands
the snow will come
THE 4400 DUFFERIN NEWS.
Today in time,
here in the lands of 4400 Dufferin bus stop,
admiring my work area, so great I’d take
anywhere from a 13% to a 27%
cut in pay to keep the connection
with the area, such a spectacular landscape.
0
The ravine’s outlay brook comes in from the city dump and wends under Dufferin north just up further than where it is the Allen. Cars still think they’re in the road race, dive across lanes. But whats around are animals birds and people coming to work or sign up for canadian health care or get tires and gas or shop for european food, or sushi, it’s a great area, the staff at some places are like family, fourth cousins or something, and I love all the Russian presence in the area.
It’s almost paradisic getting to spend all that time there. By way of working up the hills a ways in a warehouse. Just being part of it all. Well, tomorrow, it’s all going to fill in with snow. Up that way it’s probably already begun, our first real snow of the eyar
“eyar” old favorite typo
"No one under 75 allowed to view beyond this point"
Okay let’s speed up this newscast.
The most relevant news of the 4400 Dufferin area.
new boots bought two weeks ago honest eds already leak
home!
streams and the 401
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health and well being, safety,
winter bicycling has become
only partly safe,
as both bicyclist and pedestrian
i have to deal with downsview
and dupont st
neither are actually safe,
bathurst offers a lot of options,
and the east side has a rarely observant
car religion, imperious car culture,
bring a bazooka and a lattice throw of chains
and be safe happy and succeed -
extreme cold tho use bike as walker
over rumpled ice, or as throw weapon
for attacking cars – first thing is always
to be safe from cars and not knock over pedestrians
X
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Through the week, all the speedy
> writing and opinions and focus of mind at
> work generally is haywire in the
> treetops by Thursday
> night, the number of jarring new bits of
> news, the tripups in charging through the week, all
> the mental stiches and glitches and wondering of
> typos and wondering of forgetting some key thing; the
> weekend meltdown and suss out and reconstruct. The
> world moves fast but almost in constant
> opacity resembling slow
> motion.
> Through the week, the mind
> grapples onto all the
> overwelming billowing information and
> tries to place positional
> arguments on them, while trying to undo the
> relentless right
> wingization of everything, anything for money,
> usually for investors
> outside the country, openly looting
> Canada, and leaving it a
> wasteland, the megaquarry, the
> tarsands, northern mining, fracking
> Quebec, the doom of our oceans, always for
> fast big money, what will they do with that money
> with no planet? They’re like house
> flies.
> And into this comes this half
> baked recipe for yet
> another bullshit war. As if a war
> with Iran has any kind of
> possibilty of turning out well. This one
> among all others rolls
> home the possibly number one reality of
> war, tho it doesn’t always
> seem that way, but a war of the
> ‘first world’ countries against
> Iran and its network there more than
> any just isn’t about winning or
> losing or a result. It would amount to
> opening an all but permanent
> war with them. It would do no one any
> good. It’s still pretty
> hockeyfight the question of who actually starts a
> war. It’s whoever militarily
> throws one at the homeland of
> another people. And that would often be
> USA with what allies. How
> many Iranians would ever forgive
> America? or friccin Canada. To have some
> role in future politics in Iran, win? Come
> on. THE UNITED STATES OF THE MIDDLE
> EAST really
> doesn’t have much chance of succeeding.
> Hide a little war in one
> country or another but attacking the
> ones that are up and running, for oil, for
> hatred, for whatever reason, and the
> squibby statements from our Prime
> Minister about Iran being the most
> dangerous threat to peace, using exact
> squib used by some with Iraq. Like the
> official oblique supercilious stupid
> annnouncement.
> Watching the shutters come
> down on American influence in
> Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
> soon enough Libya, the idea of
> spending another trillion attacking Iran
> speaks of addiction. Another decade of chaotic
> nonsense.
> Meanwhile just how much of North
> America do the likes of Saudi Arabia and China own?
> How much have they
> bought? Losing sovereignty at home while
> spending money
> promulgating enemies is actually
> cataclysmically disastrous.
> Disastrous! Dangerous? Wreckless?
> Unintelligent???
> As this is always a very personal
> venue, I feel like easing my
> own personal relations with all
> the people of the world. The fact that
> I disapprove of traits and
> activities found absolutely everywhere in
> some portion, violent aggressive
> desultory greed
> for instance, or
> “other-negating power-behaviour” or meanness
> brutality and cruelty, hard
> mysogeny, wherever it occurs, abuse of extra
> vulnerable people, all those
> things which are found everywhere in some
> portion, every city and town
> somewhere, here there or everywhere,
> wherever it occurs. But I do feel, in
> self-guaging the frequently noted
> ‘western world opinionaire’ seeing
> everything ‘through a superior frame
> of the anglo remove’ – Realities for
> sure, but I personally feel lots of
> warmth for all the peoples of the
> world, an
> appreciation that I while I can look in and opine, I
> can’t in any vaguest sense govern, nor, insist,
> except to empathetically become
> them, construct myself as Tamil or
> Indonesian, Indian or
> American, Israelie or Saudi, and never
> in all that would piercing rocket
> fire, aerial
> bombardment, obviously, be part of the means of
> relating.
> There’s definitely no positive
> outcome to this deranged
> militarism, corporate looting of the
> earth&people whole, and really no
> hope for things going well that day,
> that way. Who are these
> people wanting to shoot up and rip up the
> earth and kill the
> oceans for fast temporary money? The
> right wing seems so
> intent on the destruction of the
> planet that you really have to
> wonder. What the fuck are
> they?
> For all vulnerable and imperilled
> people,
> John
> 
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More soon!
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I arrived to work and the radio to the news that also this morning
a 27 year old woman was killed by one of those halfsize orange schoolbuses. Just last week I saw one miles late run a red light while on cell phone oblivious and expressed regret that it was an instance I’d not hoisted the camera to movie mode; it would have made a comical video. But only visually; the insane maniacal driving styles up in that area range from zombie to rageaholic. Ive been intensely angered a good number of times. I’ve probably witnessed 600 cars run the red light at that crosswalk. (my morning and evening bus stop is at 4400 dufferin, just blow finch; most days I go up to finch for lunch, as much to get out of the building for half an hour
(half hour lunch break minimum 3 things come up while i’m at my soups. Stress!) and hazard crossing finch. There’s a good 20% of the cars blasting around doing so in an enraged state, or at least, with a criminal ethos to their driving, challenging, defying, forcing, pushing, (I’ve had at least half a dozen drive straight at me fast even with eye contact seeing their anger coming right at me and believe me, not only do i only cross on the walk signal up there, but i also do so like twitched cat quadruple checking every factor. 80% don’t signal, you have to follow through seeing what they’ll do while following through all the others, and be ready to run, to cross finch.
Thats the driving culture that killed the young woman today.
She had pressed the crosswalk button, was proceeding legally,
a man coming the other way had just passed by her and heard her get hit and watched the wheels go over her and sounded traumatized on the radio. All witnesses confirmed she had the right of way and the bus just came barrelling on.
I’ve been nearly hit 3 times, and some of the ones who at least displayed that they were going to come blasting right at me got cursed out and photographed once I’d doven to safety. It frightens me that others don’t cross with the same sense of terror about it. They actually think the cars will act normal. I’m not sure if it’s because they rarely walk there, or just go on faith in some talisman of their timings finding it all too stressful to look around I could see that: it would drive them nuts to cross as manically as i do. It goes way beyond paranoid. It’s assumption. I’ve watched a lot of traffic
you can’t presume good decisions or good will in that 20%, and you can also expect 80% to turn right on a red without pausing, which ahem, means a full moving car in the pedestrian’s cross – the pedestrians – and there’s a health centre there people have to go there to get there cards and stuff, and have to cross this gauntlet
of violent death. The police could pay their budget for january just on red light runners at 4400 dufferin. Instead they’ll have to spend a lot of time on that one bus driver whose killed a young woman this morning. The prison system’s doomful nihilism rarely seems a productive partner in the process. A fucked up bus driver overweight and unwell not exactly in luck – whole different kind of punishment than what would reflect his situation. The most ad hoc pin the tail on the donkey justice. I trust pretty much no part of the system. Pretty much advocates only, not system.
What would prevent this is not zeroing all retribution on that one bad driver, but the bad driving culture. I’ve been screaming about this for years and years. All the debates over bicycles versus cars versus transit versus pedestrians and – sidney crosby!!! Hockey is safer than bicycling driving taking transit or being a pedestrian
and if they didn’t have teflon robot equipment on and had no touch icing and the refs were at their discretion to call real infractions instead of all the sham manipulation calls I’m not saying hockey shouldn’t change, only that some sensible changes are necessary,
and while concussions and all injury are bad it’s just not up there with people being killed trying to cross the street, or somehow at all get around the city.
I’ve had instances where two red light runners kept me back
and when I then began to set out an even more deranged red light runner appeared over yore horizon barrellling in on me and I had to back off and once I finally got to start crossing the people coming out of 4400 dufferin also delayed by the red light runners put it to the floor to reach the inside northbound lane before I could get there, I’m not fuckin slow, a couple times I’ve had them full speed committed to a lane i was already entering – one only paused at last when a quick hop put me in good position for driver side window without getting hit and he slowed more astonished at the extra effort
and looked on galled while i photographed him and told him off
gradually realizing if he was to say a word in reply it would keep him blocking both other left turns behind him and soon enough the green light for the storm of cars waiting resume running reds north so off he went. Earlier this week a guy in a giant personal vehicle long after red but still a hundred feet away just wasn’t slowing so i leaned out but wouldn’t commit despite the full red blocking him.
Staring at him. This really pissed him off, but he stopped after all.
I’d barely made it to the inside northbound lane when he’s hammerred his space ship exploding right through my pantlegs bursting through the red light from an already stopped for the red. That man was a rageaholic, but also a psychopath. big guy. fucking punch him in the head. I don’t know what I’ll do if one of these many assholes i have to interact with crossing does get out and come and try to attack and or destroy my camera. If I’m sure to lose the fight i’ll video him then lightly toss it into the ravine grasses sloping down to the gulley. he’ll know he doesn’t have a hope in hell of finding it
and once i’m up and about again i’ll have no trouble finding it with such a good sense of the terrain down there. On the other hand if he attacks and I win it will be me with so much splaining to do.
I’d expect maybe 60% would give as good a witness statement as they could. At first at least. If it went to court it’d get down to 1 or 2 who’d try to abscond.
As nicky used to say, there’s one in every crowd, someone who’d witness or just know who was telling the truth. All that protects me is facial expresssion appearance of size, and most of all, the always infuriated impatience of all the other drivers who don’t want an incident delaying them 7 seconds in their path.
For the billion in policing this city spends, yu’d think there’d be more than my efforts but thats pretty much it. Dufferin Finch and 4400 Dufferin would yield penalizable infractions in waves of sudden volume as steady as the lights change. 
So is it a surprise that the
soldiers and dental mafia of syria and the soldiers and commanders of egypt and the estimated 950,000 paid spies in north korea, and the Murdoch publishing empire and the Conservatives and Campaign Research are evil, heartless and uncaring too, Fake through and through, and all the bullshit commercials. Premonitory fate but like a windup toy, only a day or so ahead, no long range predictions. But if people act like that, that aggressive, that angry, what are they likely to do
with all the global situations?
Thats my question for the night.
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Previous images I believe did not reveal just how much rosehip bramble is in that area. The talk of replanting, gathering seeds, preserving some of it, When the sun comes you see that it has itself somehoww reforested that entire stretch. Other plants and trees are only doing so well, it’s on them, up through them, extending beyond them. 
I see no reason not suspect consciousness in plants. Specially with a plant that is part vine and part bramble, stringing out in every direction catching hold or curling on itself, billowing into its ever changing shape. (First seeing it I suspect the starlings had deposited the seeds there. Some plants do better by way of birds squirrels and raccoons.)
Life also changed paths for the gulley
today in the bright sunlight
Was the coppery brown scum clay melt or deep car part rust? Is this current foam natural runoff or detergent of some kind? What builds up from all the roadsalt coming down. I prefer to think of the rosehip.
I should also make note of the fact that others will have to take up the testing of the waters, there and everywhere else. I have no science background, no lab orientation, no mudboots, and cannot be going down there all the time on my way into work. If I had the energy, the equipment and the time, the wonders of what might be in that water. No less so than the largest rosehip forest in living memory is mine to process. Are there no harvesters seeing this free industry-for-a-winter – albeit along the side back entrance to a complex with an gas station and canadian tire. Who reads my blog? Certainly not local feral harvesters with science degrees and labs. But no any? No need even for contact info or finder’s fee, no need for art as healing medicine, no need for a computer, just the locale, general territory/ruffage, between the closed pool store and the candian tire with a tims and russian grocery. 4400 dufferin north bus stop from the 104, 117 or 105, at different times or in little packs. Shoals of buses. Most are 196′s that go right by. Heading north, when you get off the bus, to your right will be John Barlow’s Gulley, always with a cuppa all your questions asked about the city dump and illegal ravine ‘private company heavy waste disposal’
And it’s important to keep perspective, pursue the undramatic, view wide. All the while you’re looking in one place somewhere around the region a vastly larger emergency could be transpiring. Private contracting dumpany’s often dispose of their waste on the fly. A union worker doesn’t have to think about fast buck turnaround, just has to do it right and reliably. Private junk removal companies double in casual theft harvest what they can and dump the rest under cover of night. I’m often the one who chooses to contend with the garbage detail at the back – the excercize and fresh air is luxuriant – and not a week goes by where illegal dumpers haven’t loaded our back wall and/or bins with their crap. Often private companies rather than crazy individuals. A homeowner doesn’t drive around the back lots with 3 and a half broken toilets to throw out. We’ve had large old fashioned doors, gigantic bagged things that made me think a crime had been committed, furniture, weighty engine parts/ the gigantic bagged things I actually got the owner involved and all other coworkers for a serious debate on whether we should touch it or not. Evidence? Well, the call was to open it and see what it was, and it was just that lot of stuff had got scummy from the rain, while other parts were permanently heavy landfill of the once manufactured sort. Everyone had a good laugh at my expense, but not a one did not see my point.
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A strange brown oily scum appeared exitting the gulley through the woods toward the reservoir, up along Dufferin approaching Finch. A couple of weeks back there was an oily viscous white foam. In the past as I’ve said, such frustration ensued trying to get anything done about it, and always the possibly true suggestion by one person that it could just be natural run off. So each new sighting of anything I wonder that as well.
After all self-doubt builds in a person if others don’t care. Perhaps it’s nothing.
The gulley is a pit of extra water that develops where they’ve built a tunnel for the brook to pass under Dufferin. It seems a fine structure from a time when people who built such things were quite proud of such things and would design it quite subtly and have much interesting thought in its constructing. The brook loops round the city dump and cuts through light ravine behind industrial lands and curves down to this point at 4400 Dufferin. Once through the tunnel, which I believe animals use as well, the gulley forms, sometimes deep, often shallow, except where it plunges. Then heads off into the woods to a vast bog-like area that above Finch is a lake. The network of streams and creeks would have been quite self-sustaining before all the roads. 
The water had been much higher earlier in the week, so maybe it reached parts of the soil that have these colourations. The oil from good clay?
Chances are it’s nothing and no one has to wonder why it’s there.
Or, as my mother says, “People will just have to learn.”
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Heavy duty lethal politics these days, the Conservatives oily agenda
A thing I find amazing with all of the debate of tarsands and pipelines (as well as fracking) is just where realism factors in. The framing of the debate is as if ideological. It may be justifiably be thought of spiritual and/or moral because it’s so fundamental, but it’s nonsense for it to be ideological, conservative versus ndp or republican versus science. Anyone who isn’t already invested in it would see it as the doomed pig it is .
Resources will be part of any kind of politic forever, fuel, energy. If the tarsands were a good idea, if the pipeline were a good idea, I’d be pleased enough but they’re just not.
The biggest most money centric corporations don’t go for bad ideas
as they frame it, but they don’t got for bad ideas this bad.
Weighing against the profitability of the whole tarsands pipelines
stretching of the oil industry are so many factors it’s hard to imagine any positive side to it.
Negatives:
1) As pure investment, the ultimate profit or less at the far end
of the utterly unpredictable clean up/civil suits auditting and
other litigation, this is lawyer porkpie way out of the comfort zone
of investors, some of whom may also be deterred by environmentalists
who are not so small in number any more.2) Trustworthiness: it’s an extremely ambitious greed goldmine,
tends to attract the wrong types. Siphoners. All that job creation
sliding things by and lobbying, and then they betray you.
Think of all the clever young people who could work their way in
to such a job and then 3 years later expose all their secrets.
The real conservatives out there ie conservative with their money
and discrete with their exposure, intensely reluctant to mire their millions in something so tippable.3) The actual environmental impact. After all it’s the government,
reasoning minds, that make the decisions based on the best for all.
Not in this case so far thats for sure. Tarsands is on the one hand
oil that is not ready; give it a million years; and on the other hand
is there and a part of that ecosystem. Since that project began
northern alberta goes up in flames all summer and the ice cap melts
and manitoba and parts of the northwest territories flood. All good?
Is it a write off? What are the costs? Texas and Alberta, good neighbours?
And thats just the tarsands. Tarzan’s big idea. The attendant pipeline
rips right through the continent and spreads all that risk through
The United States of America!? Multiple by about 9000 vectors the
civil suits, litigation, compound issues, endless claims, disasters
so regretable like a new orleans. If intensifying pollution were a
good idea and huge losses and liabilities were desirable, a reasonable
person would applaud the possibility of profit. Be rich on a destroyed planet4) and after all of the above, the real backbreaker: all it takes is
one election loss to end it. To kill it. Invest? It’s incredibly how weak the civilian populace is against giant multinationals. The whole thing can be blocked by the courts in countless jurisdictions.All that said, I’m glad the below proves some people agree
and feel sad for the guy who signed off for the 7 million.
But that isn’t the main issue involved, the main issue is shared by all.
If it was going to happen anyway take the 7 million?
I’m lucky never to be offered money for my opinions to change.
My opinions are just my opinions. The sacred opinion part of life.
Consider me ready to analyze the prospectus on it the day some corporation offers me 7 million not to oppose something.
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/life/First+Nations+pipeline+support+surprises+chiefs/5811196/story.html
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November 13, 2011: A reading dedicated to those not with us, from whichever way the presenters choose to take that. Solemn, goth, celebratory, warmly, seance/science, in the Smiling Buddha, on College St. Talk about a fun angle for a reading.
For all the while I’ve done poetry readings it’s always been a quiet tradition to comtemplate the spaces in the room, wondering where those whom could not be there might be, a spare seat at a table for 6 occupied by 3, an unseen bench along the side, standing, at the edge of the dance floor, or side by side, on stage.
Didn’t take an audience photo this one, nothing to analyze. Where might they be? Thinking of my cats, but I didn’t mention them.
Instead read all from Safe Telepathy, with the one addition of my father’s journal entry of his flight into Ankara, Turkey in 1954. I love reading that; his perfected grammar and punctuation, like a fine little brush for the brain, exacted text so good for the brain; the clarity.
From Safe Telepathy included a poem that involved Ed Fielding back when I first got to know him, 93 to 95 or so.
And the quotes of Althusser and Corso, which I remain pleased to have placed side by side all that time ago. Althusser says “Ideology is the representation of the imaginary relations of individuals to their real conditions of existence” and then Corso says: “On acid you see more of what isn’t there.” For me, those two quotes combined is probably the 1985-1995 contribution to the data of philosophy and political science
and the rest of my reading was spongy curls on the consciousness of consciousness theme, in a long room that was a buzzing hive of consciousness. And the people just kept arriving. Packed. Noisy at the back. Among the miracles, nash the slash stepped forth from the crowd to find me a lamp when it was too dark. Talk about safe telepathy.
That part of College St hangs onto that working class urban feel thats so hard to maintain. All the dark little trees and the unfathomable, where reality dwells.
Amazing to read having not sat down since arriving, still in jacket and at last to sit. But on stage. And everyone or some at least all looking at me expecting activity of some kind.
Nik Beat gave a much better than reading than mine a bit later. Look out, solid work coming down. Missed some of the other readings, sucking wind out on College St. So warm in that bar. The subsequent sets were to go super intense, but it’s imperceptible to mortal eyes, how it takes it out of me doing poetry readings, and all the depths of it. Joanne and I signed a book for the host, and it was out for a withering browed team meeting in front.
the sunday night cloak patio in november
the sunday night cloak in february
the sunday night cloak patio in april
Oxygen, in its greatest form, on the human planet
process, process, writing process
Writing is a value in itself, good for the heart and mind foundation, the heart and mind ~ writing is so good for you it almost is better than vegetables, the mind keeps us all alive, together, our minds
the glorious trees in the dark of november monday write and what is a sentence with a kestrel angrily flying off… (I’m just learning kestrel, and haven’t got a thing against them, they’re just so realistic, birds of all kinds) and birds of all kinds are overwelmingly talented poets, every bird we will ever see, and every tree writes, everything knows what has happened, consciousness and oxygen may be one. So very fortunate.
