Revolution

We live in exciting times.  It used to be a curse that.  You weren't supposed to tell children "May you live in exciting times", apparently living in boring times is...well probably more condusive to one's health and welfare.  But whether our parents and grandparents could have foreseen the moments and technologies of today that have created the exciting times that swarm our lives, they surely never would have guessed.

To offer you a crosscut section of the insanity of technology in my personal life.

My friends in Victoria are organizing themselves and doing an internet televised marathon.  They are raising money for a charity called Child's Play by having call-in guests, auctioning items both live and silent, and issuing challenges to their viewership.

Since they started on Friday, they are now halfway through their marathon, and have already raised 180 Thousand dollars.  180 thousand dollars, a sketch comedy troupe in Victoria that are operating with a bunch of laptops, small cameras, a boom mic, and a lot of heart and volunteers.

Child's play as a charity is about trying to raise money to donate toys, video games, and movies to sick children in hospitals around the world.  It partners with existing facilities and departments (Usually a hospitals own Child Quality of Life department) in order to facilitate donations of handheld video games, televisions, game consoles, lego blocks, puzzles, everything.  All in the name of the idea that a hospital is a pretty scary place for a child, and games help alleviate suffering.

I've been following Desert Bus for two years now, and it never ceases to amaze me the sheer incredible generosity of the world at large for a good cause.  Desert Bus is just one community driven arm of many branches in Child's Play that helps the charity kick off.  There are also huge charity dinners, galas, donation drives, you name it and gamers like myself have jumped on it in a frenzy.  At Pax, which I regularly attend, there is even a cookie brigade which sells cheap cookies for Child's Play donations. 

Ten years ago, something like this would've been near impossible.  Oh for sure there were the television marathons of the past, those 24 hour phone in and donate so on and so forths.  But now there's a community, you're not alone on your couch watching the tv.  There are websites and connections, twitter and emails, a chat room that runs too fast for most of us to read (and I read pretty damn fast).  People from all over the world have come together and are part of this one.  As us North American's go to sleep around 3 or 4 in the morning, Asian gamers and European gamers log in to pick up the slack.

The global community literally comes alive for events like this one (one of many), for a good cause.


The Child's Play Website Here
http://childsplaycharity.org/

Desert Bus for Hope, the Event Organized by Loading Ready Run in Victoria
http://desertbus.org/




On the flip side of technology, we are also witnessing a revolution on the ground.  I've written an Occupy blogpost that hasn't been published yet, but it's an ongoing sense of wonderment, and frankly is somewhat terrifying.

Images iconic are diffused across the internet, spread between friends and acquaintances about what they are seeing on the ground.  Innocent people (or not so innocent as your perspective may be) are being shot with tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, flashbangs.  All of this is captured, recorded, disseminated, distributed to the world entire.  Data is being stored and uploaded, filed away and shown.  Names are recorded, actions are witnessed, and half a world away some of us are seeing things in Oakland, New York, San Fransisco, Seattle, and Portland and commenting on them from London, or Edmonton, or Toronto. 

We are sharing the collective outrage, we have opinions, and thoughts, and we are WITNESSING it unfold, these events are now a part o our global consciousness.  They are unavoidable.  Technology has made us both strangers and peers of everyone else. 

Jack Layton's Letter to Canadians

Jack Layton's final letter to Canadians

Jack Layton Passed Away Today

A tragic day for Canada today.

Where many of me and my peers woke up this morning, sleeping off hangovers and fringe exhaustion, we were greeted by some truly saddening news.

Firing Back, "What Makes Art So Sacred?"

Yesterday some time, Kathryn Marshall fired back against the angry letters, emails and critical writing that we have been amassing on the internet against her widely disputed interview with Ezra Levant.  The link is posted below to her personal blog so you can read it for yourself.  Megan Dart pointed it out to me this morning, and I had a chance to read it, go grab a cup of tea and think on it.

Thoughts from 'Artists'

I always feel weird putting up posts or smart, insightful words my friends put up and know that the main categorization that I put them under is 'artist'.  The word 'artist' is something easy for the public to separate a sense of 'us' and 'them' from.  But in truth, I do fundamentally believe that everyone has artistic talent, everyone has a desire, and capability to express themselves artistically.  Which is not to detract from us who make a career out of it, some of us choose to do it professionally, whatever that means.

But in the interests of making 'artists' less faceless, less like French mimes, less like your high school Drama queen who waxed Shakespeare at you, less like that hippie chick you always see walking down the street with a sketchbook, artists are people, Canadians, in this case, who are interested in presenting ideas, truths, and stories to their audiences.  As wide and as varied as our nation is, we produce artists of ever walk, vocation, media, and message there is.  Here's some interesting snippets of responses since the Sun Media explosion.

Megan Dart on Taking The Fight to Sun News

Artist, Writer, Blogger and Social Media Guru Megan Dart took the time this morning to write a detailed post about what we can do as concerned Citizens about misleading and untruthful journalism that Sun News Network is perpetuating.

Check out her post here.
http://www.facebook.com/notes/megan-dart/seven-things-you-can-do-to-stick-it-to-sun-news/10150233563938865

If you don't have or don't like facebook, you can also find it here.
http://yegartsandpolitics.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/seventhings/

Also I got the video uploaded into youtube after a ripping job, apologies for the low quality but I didn't want to run more passes or spend more than half an hour on it today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRdHyxKZkTw

Sun News Network Attacks Artists

This has literally just made its way across my desk.  I'm in rehearsal right now composing on the fly while stage managing and now am having difficulty doing either until I write about this.