Category: Health & Security
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Kingston Pen: The Original Social Distancing
I was going to refer to incarceration as the “ultimate” social distancing. But it’s not. Death is the ultimate social distancing. Prison is purgatory, a reduced state between life and not life that, hopefully, ends in a return to some kind of normal. In the meantime, the Correctional Service of Canada battles Covid-19 outbreaks in… Read more
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Kent Monkman: Shame and Prejudice
EXHIBITION: Shame & Prejudice: A Story of Resilience by Kent Monkman 06 January – 08 April 2018 @ the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queens, Kingston, ON It’s interesting, artist Kent Monkman said. When he posts a new painting to social media the predictable response is around 500 likes. But this one, he said gesturing… Read more
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A Ride Home from Prison
I don’t have any time to waste on jail anymore ~ Stanley Bailey, newly-released former inmate Carlos Cervantes, a former inmate, says every ride home from prison is different. He picks up men released from life sentences after California reformed its three strikes law in 2012. Most of the men don’t have family or friends anymore;… Read more
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More Than Enough Refugee Blues to Go Around
Refugee Blues was published by writer and poet W.H. Auden in 1939, at the start of World War II. It’s safe to say not much has changed and, perhaps, it never will if war and hatred continue to be our modus operandi. The million dollar question is this: Are we doomed as humans to this destructive cycle of scapegoatism… Read more
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Capital Building: A View from Washington – Part 3
Click here for Capital Building: A View from Washington – Part 1 Click here for Capital Building: A View from Washington – Part 2 Not Set in Stone: Memorials for the Future The National Park Service (NPS), the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), and Van Alen Institute collaborated on Memorials for the Future, an international ideas competition that took place… Read more
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Capital Building: A View from Washington – Part 2
Click here for Capital Building: A View from Washington – Part 1 Having finally seen Washington, DC for myself this summer, it was great to connect with this presentation by Marcel Acosta, Executive Director of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), the Federal Planning Agency for America’s Capital. In it he discusses how the city came to be shaped,… Read more
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Food Hub: Wendy’s Country Market
Wendy Banks, Rick Trudeau and their daughter Leigha are sixth- and seventh-generation farmers on their family property in Lyndhurst, Ontario. Wendy and her siblings grew up steeped in the value of land and food, her father, Neil, believing that one day there would be a shortage of both. While his hands worked the soil in the present, he and his wife, Gail, amassed a thousand… Read more
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Displaced Words
I spy with my little eye a billboard I don’t understand. This inscription is “AP3851,” a remnant of Palestinian artist Emily Jacir’s recent installation ex libris (2010-2012) at Alexander and Bonin in Chelsea. The 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as al Nakba (Arabic for disaster, catastrophe, or cataclysm) ((http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/al-Nakba)) occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, as a result… Read more
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Walking Jane Jacobs’ Hood
This week, a walk around Jane Jacobs’ neighbourhood in Greenwich Village was my unfinished business and a Google maps walking tour my guide. Read more
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The Invisible Man and His Dog
I hadn’t thought about him for years, the old man with the three-legged dog. That summer I laid interlock and dug beds in my front yard I saw him regularly. He always walked north to south, across the bridge towards the general store, and back again. I mentally catalogued the possibilities of where he might live… Read more