Rebecca D Reeve's Blog

As I’ve mentioned before, I have no cell phone.

My lack of cell phone mystifies a lot of people, and for good reason: 1/4 of under-30s now go cell-only. People I’m setting up interviews with can’t understand that I don’t have a mobile number to be reached at and I think this makes them a little suspicious.

Yesterday I was on a plane from Toronto to Montreal and was seated next to Leo, a Hasidic Jew from New York City. He was curious about my favorite movies as “his people don’t watch movies.” As the conversation progressed it somehow came out that I didn’t have a cell phone. He was absolutely shocked, he asked “How do you have fun?” He proceeded to pull out his new top of the line cell phone and BlackBerry Pearl to show off. This man also knew about craiglist.org, which added to my overall surprise about his tech savvy considering the movie ban. The surprise was compounded by the fact that I had been talking with a director at a teleco earlier that day and he hadn’t heard of craigslist which made me think maybe it was a generational thing. Meanwhile, Leo is giving me looks of “what, you think I’m stupid?” when I asked him if he knew about craigslist.

The “1/4 under-30s cell-only ” story talks about party lines. Does anyone reading this even know what a party line is? Not surprisingly (based on my prior post), my family operated on a party line for many years. The rules we had for talking over the party line - don’t talk about the neighbour’s kids, etc - are probably good rules to extend to today’s cell conversations.

This weekend I saw Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater at Place des Arts. It was an amazing show and if you’re ever able see one of their shows I recommend it highly. Alvin Ailey was born in Texas in 1931 and when he began creating dance he drew on the ‘blood memories’ of Texas, the blues, spirituals and gospels as inspiration.

There were three acts. The first set was a collaboration with Ailey and Duke Ellington from 1970 and was series of dances reflecting nature scenes where the dancers moved like birds and rivers, and somehow it was all very romantic. The second set was created by the current artistic director Judith Jamison and was a lighter, jazzier set that had a sense of humor and made us laugh out loud. The final set was created by Ailey in the 1960s and has a heavy political weight to it given its historical context. The spiritual and gospel songs were amazing and there was a lot of strong color and fabrics used, elements that had been absent from the first set where neutral leotards and single color backdrops were the order of the day.

Watching the dancers made me acutely aware of my own physical inadequacies, right down the poor posture I was holding while watching the show. Too bad I’m not in NYC or I could stop in for a pilates or beginner dance lessons.

After the show we stopped into a lounge with some sort of experimental jazz to meet up with a birthday crew. After finishing up at the lounge (and a certain someone inspired by the show/the music? performing twirls in the snowflakes at the top of the stairs) we were all hungry and the only open spot we could find at that time was a chain poutine joint. It was a strong close to such a cultured evening. HA

Canada came in at 15th place in the 2006 Gallup Worldwide Corruption Index, its image damaged by the Liberal Party sponsorship scandal.

There is a bright light though… our politicians (or their drivers) obey traffic signs.

Raymond Fisman, The Meyer Feldberg Associate Professor of Business at Columbia University, does work on corruption, financial markets and development. He recently created his own corruption index based on the number of parking tickets each country’s diplomats were racking up in the neighborhoods surrounding the UN building in NYC.

The worst offender was Kuwait, with an average of 250 tickets per year, per diplomat. Kuwait had more than double the next nearest offender, Egypt. There were 20 countries with no tickets, of which, Canada was a member. Fisman highlights Canada’s ticket-free status, as a ‘pround Canadian’, in an interview with Clive Thompson in a NYTimes Magazine “The Year in Ideas” online multimedia clip.

The diplomat parking problem has been effectively solved by the Bloomberg Administration when it negotiated a deal in which the licenses of diplomats with more than two violations were taken away.

“The ideal life: doing only things which are indispensable.”

Six pages of Susan Sontag’s journals were published in the NYTimes Magazine this weekend. Even an NYC intellectual had a soft spot for CA:

“In Calif., a stranger is a [potential] friend until he proves otherwise; in NY, a stranger is an enemy until he proves otherwise.”
Admittedly contemptuous:
“The only people who should interest themselves in an art (or several arts) are those who practice it — or have — or aspire to. The whole idea of an “audience” is wrong. The artist’s audience is his peers.”

What does this mean… about writing, blogging, peers, audiences, the blogosphere?

When asked how she felt about discovering 3/4s of the way through something that the writing was mediocre and inferior, she responds with, “I feel good and plow on to the end. I’m discharging the mediocre in myself. (My excremental image of my writing.) It’s there. I want to get rid of it. I can’t negate it by an act of will. (Or can I?) I can only allow it its voice, get it “out.” Then I can do something else.”

I must keep this in mind when writing the thesis. Moving on, so I can do something else.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/magazine/10sontag.html?pagewanted=1