Barnumville

Portraits of circus sideshow performers, by Matt Hoyle:

http://www.matthoyle.com/#/PORTFOLIO/BARNUMVILLE/

Above, The Mysterious Clawman.

Yes, Lobsters Suffer

If you've ever felt compassion when you walked past the lobster tank in the supermarket, there's good reason. From Discovery.com:

Ripping the legs off live crabs and crowding lobsters into seafood market tanks are just two of the many practices that may warrant reassessment, given two new studies that indicate crustaceans feel pain and stress.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that virtually all animals, including fish, shellfish and insects, can suffer.

...more...

Wing Chun Practice (詠春拳)

Geaser

Men's room, Island Foods, Toronto.

Raymond Chandler

There's an interesting profile of LA writer Raymond Chandler in the LA Weekly. I guess it's been 50 years since he died.

It’s hard to appreciate just how radical The Big Sleep seemed when it came out in 1939, how it disturbed critics with its portrayal of a world peopled by “moral defectives” (as one reviewer said), how it was a “study in depravity” (according to another), a story populated by pornographers and homosexual blackmailers, mobsters, corrupt cops and rich girls who posed nude in exchange for drugs, bad-seed daughters who killed for vengeful sport and gangsters who controlled politicians. The novel depicted a rapacious midcentury America, where getting and spending, hawking and hustling, corruption and greed and all the rotten little secrets beneath the brash, rude surface of the city signified the death of the Victorian-beau ideal. It’s important to remember that Chandler was as much an English-Victorian writer as a California-American one.

Among the things he liked about L.A. were cars. He loved to drive, loved the freedom encapsulated in the very word automobile. His big green Packard convertible was perfect for migrating to Big Bear for the summers and Palm Springs for the winter. Maybe it was why he moved more than three-dozen times in and around L.A. With an automobile, Chandler could. He embraced the new world of transience and mobility the way a duck takes to migrating, as if it were part of his genes. He liked screenwriters better than novelists: He felt they were more fun and less pretentious. Hollywood eventually beat him down, but he also had some good times when he worked there in the ’40s.

Chandler didn’t create a feel-good world in his books. He gave you permission to feel unhappy about the society you found yourself in. He witnessed the advent of television and mass advertising: Television had possibilities, he felt, though it bred such passivity that watching it was like being mired in the primeval ooze, while advertising was an elaborate scam, a waste of human intelligence, a conning of the public, an inherently dishonest activity guaranteed to make him hate any product being hawked. He didn’t much like the new post–World War II consumer culture either, or the fact that the all-tile bathroom had become the new standard of civilization. He particularly hated the idea of built-in obsolescence — a phrase, regrettably, that’s hardly even uttered anymore.

Toward the end of his life Chandler said, “The story of our time isn’t the story of war or the atomic bomb. It’s the story of an idealist married to a gangster and how their children and home life turn out.” He could be describing The Sopranos.

Me - 5th (or 6th) Grade

Just to be fair, I thought I would post the school picture of me from the same year as my brother's picture below. I'm guessing these pictures are from about 1972 - when we lived in Whittier for a year just before moving to the Mojave Desert. I was one funny looking kid!

Happy Birthday Sol!

Yesterday was my brother Sol's birthday, so what better time to post this picture of him from the 3rd or 4th grade? It must be a big brother thing, but it's funny how he still looks just like this when I see him in my dreams. Minus the paisley shirt of course. Now I'm looking for a good picture of my niece C.C. to post. It was her birthday on the 21st. Happy birthday you guys!

Prayer for Those Lost

Today, at the High Park castle, I "lost" Amado for 5 to 10 minutes. And it seemed like much longer than that.

For those who don't know, the castle at High Park is an amazing playground for kids. It's a huge wooden castle of mazes, ladders, bridges, slides, and lots of hidden spaces. Today was a beautiful day in Toronto (high 30sF!) and there were lots of kids at the castle.

I was at the top of a tube slide, and Amado went down. Usually he just gets up and goes around the corner to the place he can climb back up. When he does this, he is out of my sight for just a second, as he climbs up the various stairs and pathways to the top of the slide again.

But this time he didn't reappear. I waited a few seconds, then went down to look for him. He was nowhere to be found. I started searching everywhere--in the small crawl spaces of the castle only a three-year-old could fit in, around the back of the castle, in the hidden places. But he was nowhere.

I knew he could not have gotten far without me seeing him. He had to be in the castle somewhere. My head felt like it started to spin. He had to be there.

I started to rush around, searching all the places I had already looked twice, then three times. My vision felt like it was closing in on me, as I started to panic. But in my rational mind I knew he couldn't get away. He couldn't be lost. I thought about calling Wendy and asking her to drive down and help me look. I started looking at the other parents with pleading eyes, "Have you seen my son?" I could see that some of them were starting to realize what was going on. A Muslim woman looked at me with concern.

This felt like it went on for a long time, but it really just a few minutes. I went to the last place I hadn't looked, a smaller castle that is next to the main structure. Just then Amado came tearing around the corner, smiling, and saying "Daddy, Daddy!" He was covered in mud, but I was so happy to see him. I gave him a big, big hug, as my heart dropped from my throat or head or wherever it was, back to its place.

For a few minutes I had felt what must be every parent's worst nightmare, to lose one's child. And I thought of all those who have lost their children and are still looking for them to this day.

It's Complicated

The superstring theory of the universe postulates that in addition to the four dimensions of space-time (up-down, left-right, back-forth, plus time), there must be seven additional dimensions which have different characteristics than the four we are familiar with. Together, these 11 dimensions form a reality plane in the shape of a Calabi-Yau space (depicted above). Some of these dimensions may be time dimensions as well as spatial.

Yes, it's complicated, but that's where we all live.

The Music of Life

The way in which we can find our own place is to tune our instrument to the keynote of the chord to which we belong. Sound is the force which groups all things, from atoms to worlds. The chording vibration sounds in the innermost being of ourselves and can only be heard in silence. When we go into the inner chamber and shut the door to every sound that comes from the life without, then will the voice of God speak to our soul and we will know the keynote of our life.

--Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), The Music of Life

The Elegant Universe

Now reading: The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, by Brian Greene. This book is more mind-expanding than any psychedelic drug.

According to string theory, the universe is made up of tiny strings whose resonant patterns of vibration are the microscopic origin of particle masses and force changes. String theory also requires extra space dimensions that must be curled up to a very small size to be consistent with our never having seen them. But a tiny string can probe a tiny space. As a string moves about, oscillating as it travels, the geometrical form of the extra dimensions plays a critical role in determining resonant patterns of vibration. Because the patterns of string vibrations appear to us as the masses and charges of elemental particles, we conclude that these fundamental properties of the universe are determined, in large measure, by the geometrical size and shape of the extra dimensions. That's one of the most far-reaching insights of string theory.

Cornstalks and Crows

My Mom has a brilliant poem published in the latest issue of the literary journal, Persimmon Tree. I've reproduced the poem below, but please visit Persimmon Tree and read all the great writing there! http://www.persimmontree.org/

Cornstalks and Crows

Early in the morning in June
I walked out of our vacation adobe
Through a rabbit trail
Past the escusado
And stood with the toes of
My shoes just touching the
Edge of earth where it began
To crumble into the corn patch.
I began to blow into the plastic
Crow whistle I’d fished out of a
Kellogg’s Cornflake box.
I took a step back, blew air into the plastic whistle
My caws stretched over
the bent tassels and rustled
in the Green thicket until a crow, like magic,
Came from no where and landed
with a great black swoop just above my head
On the tallest corn plant.
And listened with glee as the crow answered back
and in one moment like a quickly descending storm
the air was black with the birds.
Blue wings glistening like a giant oil spill
That blotted out the rising sun
Until all I could see was black
And all I could hear was the riot
Of sound and the crushing of the entire field.

Farmers ran and swooped their flannel arms
but the crows had taken up residence as though they too
had sprouted from the earth.
I moved five steps back and watched as the entire
Crop was destroyed.

And sometimes even with the power of the heaviest regret
Things cannot be made right.
Sometimes the need to create and to destroy are as tightly
Bound as the weave of feather on wing.

The cloud of crow sometimes unbidden
But too often hailed by us
On the intake of breath
Sometimes we choose disaster.


Cooper Gallegos's family had a one-room adobe house in a small Mexican village where she spent summers as a kid. Her poem, “Cornstalks and Crows,” is written from a memory of that time. She has been published in Looking Back; What It's Like to Love a Woman; Sisters Singing; and she has read her work on Central Coast Public Radio. She is currently writing a collection of inter-linked stories set in the 1970's Mojave Desert. When not writing she makes “found art” from rusted metal she scavenges from the middle of nowhere.

Phelan, California. Spring 1973

Mom and Me

It was so nice to be able to see my Mom in Santa Cruz last week. I miss all of you so much!

Hummingbird

I've been flying around North America like a little bird, but I'm back. Now where are the flowers?

Frida

When the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was a child, she used to fog a mirror with her breath and draw a doorway in the steam with her finger. Then she would stare at the doorway until she imagined herself going through it and travelling across a great plain until she came upon a dairy called "Pinzon." She would then enter a portal through the "o" in "Pinzon" sign and pass through it deep to the centre of the earth. There, she would meet with her imaginary friend, a little girl who was joyous and filled with life.

K'Naan

K'Naan is a local boy...well, as local as about 80% of the other Torontonians, which means he lives here, but comes from somewhere else. In his case, Somalia. I heard him interviewed on the radio the other day and thought he was surprisingly intelligent for a rapper (I know...my bias). He talked about the issue of pirates in the waters off Somalia, how it feels to carry the burden of stardom for the entire Somalia community in Canada, and how one makes adjustments to this country when coming from somewhere so far away.

I was impressed enough to buy his new album, Troubadour. It's really amazing -- hip-hop fused with Afro-pop and world beat. There's some really great moments when he raps in Swahili, which shows the reach of hip-hop culture around the world.

K'Naan is one bright young man. I would love it if his music could reach out and embrace you too.

Here's a good article about one of his recent shows.

A Blast from the Past!

Facebook is pretty amazing for finding old friends. Just today I caught up with an old friend from "Phelan High," Pam Elfgen. And, in case you can't tell, she obviously isn't somebody to be messed with!

Great to see you again Pam!

Man on a Wire

Well, Trouble the Water didn't win best documentary, but another interesting film did: Man on a Wire, which is about Philippe Petit who did crazy tightrope stunts in the 1970s, like this crossing between the towers of the World Trade Center. You can read more about it here at the Mexican Pictures blog of Raul Gutierrez.

In the Night Garden

Amado uses my blog more than I do (apparently), so I thought I would post his new favourite show here. It's "In the Night Garden." Like the Teletubbies, it's another show which, in Wendy's words, "...is obviously made by some English guys on acid."

Enjoy.

Little Man Nate

Wendy got us tickets to see the Toronto Raptors play the New York Knicks for my birthday (back in November). The game today was great, partly because the Raptors won, 111-100, and partly because we had a chance to see New York's diminutive guard (well, he's 5'8", which is small by NBA standards) Little Man Nate Robinson who's fresh off winning the slam dunk contest at the NBA All-Star game.

Little Man Nate is shorter than pretty much all the players, but he's built like the rapper 50 Cent and has a similar attitude. We even got to see him dunk on an alley-oop over Toronto's 7' center. The little man shot through the air like one of those dolls that attacks people in that horror movie (I am pretty sure only I know what I'm talking about here, but that's ok. Just imagine it.)

Trouble the Water

I don't plan on watching the Oscars. But I hope Trouble the Water, this documetnary about Katrina, wins something for the people left behind.

Thievery Corporation

New Music: Thievery Corporation is a fantastic Washington D.C.-based band that plays a powerful mix of conscious reggae, Afro-pop, and electronica music filled with revolutionary, dissident lyrics. Great stuff.

"Radio Retaliation is definitely a more overt political statement," says Rob Garza of Thievery Corporation. "There’s no excuse for not speaking out at this point, with the suspension of habeas corpus, outsourced torture, illegal wars of aggression, fuel, food, and economic crises. It’s hard to close your eyes and sleep while the world is burning around you. If you are an artist, this is the most essential time to speak up.” So that’s exactly what they do with their new album.

http://www.thieverycorporation.com/index.htm

Amado and Gigi

Amado's grandmother Gigi (Wendy's mom) stopped by the other day for storytime. I'm not sure who is reading to who here, but the book is Robert Munsch's "Up, Up, Down."

We read this book 100s of times everyday...no, 1000s of times. We all have it memorized, but we turn the pages anyway.

"Be careful. Don't climb."

Rio Yañez

Some great new Chicano art here: http://rioyanez.com/

Religion vs. Evolution

I admit, I've never really understood why God and evolution can't co-exist. And 99% of the Christians I know have no problem with Darwin or evolution. However, we would be horrified to see creationism taught in public schools.

Pew Research Center: Darwin Debated: Religion vs. Evolution

Happy Valentine's Day!

Some years it just doesn't turn out the way you think it's supposed to.

(You understand, I'm not talking about my Valentine's Day, right? I'm just saying. These things happen.)

Good Morning Toronto XXVIII

So You Think You Can Potty Dance?

Don't know what I am more offended at - the commercialization of kids, the commericialization of social media, the commericialization of hip-hop, or the fact that Amado likes this video!

What Is Marriage?

Save the Clothesline!

It seems absurb that people have to organize for their right to hang clothes on a line in their own yard, but that's the way it is in many North American communities. I remember I was astounded the first time I heard of clotheslines being outlawed, this was in about 1991 in the continent's first planned community, Columbia, Maryland.

Hanging your wash outside is basically free. The clothes smell great afterwards. It's environmentally sound. For many of us hanging clothes on a line brings back memories of our mothers and grandmothers doing the same thing.

Ban the clothesline? That's crazy-talk, man!

Read more here: "Is your clothesline illegal?" (LA Times)

Peaceful

I have a bad stomach flu (as does Wendy), and I just couldn't bear to see those huevos again. So here's a water lily. I hope it calms things down.

Que Huevos!

When I started Alma's Soulfood, I imagined it would be filled with pictures like this. But the way we use the web has changed. People no longer think blogs have to have a theme or be about anything. Now the only thing I would change about this are the flour tortillas. I prefer corn, but good ones are hard to get in Toronto.

Coop's Scoop

I love my Mom's art (with Irene as her co-creator and muse). You can see a photo collection of her creations here.

Amado and I took a look yesterday. He likes the spiral on pink the best. I like them all, but yesterday this "Desert Gal" (above) caught my eye.

Mi Amor

A cute picture of Wendy (my wife, for those who may not know) from a couple of days ago. If you want to see it later you had better download it. She will probably make me delete it when she sees it here. :-)

This morning in High Park

...don't worry, I got him before the wolves began to circle.

There's Probably a God.

Here's a version of our WonderCafe ad that ran in the Globe & Mail yesterday (full page!) inviting people to dialogue about the question of God. It's getting a lot of media coverage here in Canada because it plays off another highly publicized ad campaign by an atheist organization.

The original campaign comes from England -->

--> and was created by writer Ariane Sherine (above).

The point of the WonderCafe campaign is not to oppose the atheist's position, but to take their lead and invite people to dialogue about the existence of God and what believing in God really means. You can join the discussion on WonderCafe here.

Sicky

In real time....

Good Morning Toronto XXVII

Sunrise from our place at -16C.

Toronto in Real Time

(Well, from this morning actually.) This is our car outside of Amado's daycare, which is a couple of blocks from where we live. The snow looks worse when you actually have to drive around in it. And parking sucks, because, as you can see, almost all the parking spaces are piled with shovelled snow. And there's no sun.

I know, poor us.