Author: MK

I’m always looking for “clues”. The clues are images, pieces of text, video, sound, et cetera, that help illuminate the themes in my thesis (that has to be delivered, come hell or high water, this December (the paper)/January (the performance)).

I unpacked my last box of books today (yes, I am slow at unpacking) and came across an old book of poetry I had nearly forgotten I had: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda. I must have purchased this book several years ago, certainly it hails from the time I lived in Toronto. Several pages had sticky notes on them, so I turned to one of the marked pages and immediately found a clue:

(from I Have Gone Marking)
Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion.
The way nets cannot hold water.

The voice and birds in the same short passage. It seems to be a very nice clue to keep at hand as I develop the themes of the voice and the Stenomask, and relate the practice of training the computer to other practices requiring high levels of devotion – in this case, falconry.

I also found another poem that describes (with eerie exactitude) how I feel about those dear to me in Canada whom I miss. The poem is called Here I Love You. I’ll leave it as a treat for you to find in your local library or bookshop.

How I wish I could teleport to Montréal for just one evening so I could take part in this, the latest community-building offering from Île Sans Fil. I’m so impressed with how far ISF has come in just two years, and honoured to have played a small role in some of it: developing awesome software that’s being implemented by other groups around the world; recently enrolling the 10,000th user of their free service; using their portal page for things that are interesting and useful (with lots more to come in that area); and having fun events like this pub crawl. You can bet I’ll be raising my glass to toast ISF on October 22, albeit from Edinburgh.
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GEEKS CAN PARTY TOO!!

Ile Sans Fil is now at 10,000 users! We’re celebrating.

So . . . we’re doing a call-out. Do you:

– spend *way* too much time being a rockstar (on garageband)?
– work for bandwidth?
– consider joining the online class action whenever your ipod flashes
“lowbat” but still drool over the nano?
– blog every cheese sandwich you eat?
– have RSI?

After two years of busting our chops, we’re ready to put down our
laptops, pringle’s antennas, and o’reilly books for one night. Come
party with us October 22 (this Saturday!) on our first annual PubCrawl.There
will be (much) beer, t-shirts and prizes.

Prizes are:
-Wifi TeliPhone with 6 months free service (long distance inc.)
-512 mb iPod shuffle from the Coop UQAM
-Accesories you never knew you needed from Toshiba
-a little something you may have heard of called the “iPod Nano”

http://pubcrawl.ilesansfil.org for more info
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Île Sans Fil a maintenant 10,000 usagers, c’est le temps de célébrer !

Nous faisons donc un appel à tous. Vous reconnaissez-vous dans l’un
des scénarios suivants ?

– Vous passez vos week-ends à jouer les Rock stars (avec GarageBand)?
– Vous songez à inscrire une connexion à Internet sur fibre optique à
votre liste de cadeaux de Noel?
– Vous bloguez sur tout ce qui bouge?
– Vous seriez prêt à vous remettre au Kraft Dinner pour acheter un iPod nano?
– Vous souffrez atrocement du syndrome du tunnel carpien ?

Après deux ans de dur labeur, nous laissons de côté nos laptops,
boîtes de Pringle’s faisant office d’antennes WiFi et nos livres
O’Reilly’s pour une soirée ! Venez faire le party avec nous le samedi
22 octobre prochain, à l’occasion de notre première tournée des bars
Île Sans Fil. De la bière pas chère, des T-Shirts à tirage limité et
de magnifiques prix vous y attendent.

Les prix seront :
– Un téléphone WiFi offert par Teliphone avec 6 mois de service
(incluant les interurbains)
– un iPod Shuffle 512 Mo de la Coop UQAM
– un iPod nano
– et des accessoires essentiels offerts par Toshiba

Pour plus d’informations, visitez la page de la Tournée ISF 2005 sur
notre site Web.
http://tournee.ilesansfil.org

So my old school chums at UQAM and I had this joke, that was probably funny only to us, where we would speak of our fabulous future art careers and rhyme off a list of cities that we’d travel to, and the cities would get smaller and smaller as the list wore on. We thought this was tremendously funny and would of course throw in our own home towns and other small places that we knew, alongside behemoths like New York and London.

The past month has looked something like this joke list, where I can’t seem to sit still and am traveling to cities big and small for business, pleasure, or a mixture of both. I am becoming really excellent at sniffing out not only Wi-Fi, but a socket for me to plug my laptop into, my battery charge nearly always precariously hovering near 0%. I now reflexively scam hotel toiletries (when I get to stay in a hotel or something hotel-like, which is not always the case. My current location is an anarchist squat in London, where they have some kind of open-clothing exchange that I might dig through, it looks like it has the same promise of your usual Value Village rack – a dozen or more bad pieces for each hidden gem sort of ratio).

Mir says I am one of the best scammers she knows, and I guess this is true. I prefer to think of it as finding loopholes and taking full advantage of free stuff. How else to I get to go to New York, London, Toronto, Houston, etc etc etc? You gotta take all that hotel shampoo, and not only buy as many duty free smokes as you can carry, but get all your non-smoking friends to do the same. If you’re a hardened partier you probably already know the one about drinking abandoned drinks at the bar. I try to steer clear of particularly old looking beers, but when it’s after last call, sometimes even that flat-looking Budweiser looks OK. (There’s a headache in your future if you venture here, but you’ll be a bit happier at the time and horrify/delight your friends).

If I can come up with good list of tips, maybe I will make a list. In the meantime, I’m off to see if there’s an unattended coffee pot around…

My photos are, as I note below, not so great, so this image is courtesy of Alex Morrice. If you are really interested, you can check out my flickr photostream to see my touristy snaps of Edinburgh. I’d recommend checking out Alex’s website for nicer photos.

It’s curious that I’m in the midst of writing a long essay about the tourist gaze (among other things), because I’ve landed smack in the middle of one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and therefore gawp and take snapshots like the awestruck tourist I always knew I could be (but was usually playing it too cool to allow myself to be). It’s slowly starting to sink in – I really do live in Edinburgh, this postcard-beautiful place that I can’t stop gaping at.

So while I write about the tourist and quote Aldous Huxley saying things like “A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator”, I gleefully hang about in my new city, spectating and not acting, taking generally bad digital photos and yelling “Look at that! …LOOK at that!” every time I catch a glimpse of an obvious jawdropper, like Edinburgh Castle (in the photo above).

It took a good couple of weeks to get over my “Look at that!” phase, and subsequently I became more absorbed in the details, which are what make cities interesting. At the moment I’m a bit fixed on the closes (note to North Americans: closes are like alleys). They help you get away from crowded main streets for one, and so mastery of them gives you that “I live here” feeling of satisfaction, but also they play host to a number of details that would make any flâneur smile – like very old brickwork, worn mossy steps, ornate signage, and, if you stand at the high street level of Advocate’s Close and look back, you’re rewarded with a nice view (though it’s hard to move around much in Edinburgh without being rewarded with a nice view).

I am finally getting settled into my wonderful new job, slowly unpacking my things into my flat, and getting the administrivia of life sorted (bank accounts, etc). It feels good to grasp at something resembling a life rhythm. It feels good to blog again.