What We Have to Offer

August 28, 2012August 28, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 1 Comment

Much is made of the internet’s ability to connect us and just as much is made of its ability to rend us apart. The reality is that it’s a medium that allows for both. Time spent on the internet can be a morass of LOLcat reposts and click-games, but it can also be used for communication, organizing, and creativity.

The challenge for most of us is being aware of all its potential and the tools that are available to us, if we know where to look. One such tool is Amara (or, Universal Subtitles), which enables users to caption any video on the net for translation purposes, or for deaf and hard-of-hearing folks.

If you’re like me, videos come across my Facebook page and Twitter stream regularly. If I like one, I’ll repost it and keep it moving. If it’s something that’s particularly resonant, it can become a cultural touchstone, like this video:

There’s a closed captioning option available, but if you turn it on, you’ll notice that it’s mostly nonsense. Being able to crowd-source accurate captioning for such videos makes them accessible across language and hearing barriers, allowing that cultural transmission to continue.

I decided to try my hand at captioning Eliot Rausch’s beautiful video of Charlie Kaufman‘s words. When I went to Amara, I found the video, which already had Brazilian Portuguese subtitles created for it. My task was English captions for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. The site made it easy – the hardest part was trying to capture the punctuation of spoken language. If I didn’t achieve that adequately enough, another Amara user can edit my subtitles and improve them. (In an ideal world, the author would stop by and create a definitive version.) Here’s the video, with captions:

What I Have to Offer

It’s not just these small moments of resonance that need this treatment; there are also larger projects in the works. Amara is looking for volunteers to help translate or caption movies, news programs, and more. I like the idea of crowd-sourcing transcription and translation talent to help widen the pool of people able to access all the video goodness floating around the interwebs.

Sounds like time well-spent, Mr. Kaufman’s caveats about entertainment aside.

Food and Art

August 21, 2012August 22, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 2 Comments

I saw this article today and it got me thinking about all the cooking and gardening I’ve been doing. I have mixed feelings about the author’s point of view. It’s true that Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is still relevant (and not just for upper middle class, white, cisgendered women), but the food movement that’s happening now isn’t a retreat back into traditional gender roles. It’s coming out of a greater awareness of the health of the earth and its inhabitants.

I’m obviously going to have to ponder this more and write a longer post, but for now, here are my thoughts:

I’ve seen folks of all genders getting more involved in where their food comes from and how it’s preserved and processed;
Many of the younger folks that are getting involved are choosing farming and cooking as life paths, rather than getting bogged down by food-related tasks instead of making art;
Many artists do separate themselves (if they have that luxury) from daily tasks, though others find gardening or cooking a relaxing and contemplative activity that feeds their creativity.

Dog Social

August 14, 2012August 14, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 2 Comments

Having a dog in the city is an inherently social act. You don’t realize that until you suddenly start having conversations with folks around the neighbourhood that you’d never spoken to before, just because they like your dog. Going to the dog park leads to an acquaintance pool full of people you only know by their dog’s name. It’s something that helps me feel even more rooted in my neighbourhood.

Vancouver East Village and the neighbourhood business association there capitalized on this by hosting a pet social for neighbourhood folks and neighbourhood dog-related businesses. Full disclosure: I live on the edge of the next neighbourhood over, but I dropped by anyway. I’m glad I did, too, since I won the draw for a bag full of doggie goodies from Dog Country. I’m looking forward to picking it up later today.

I think events like this are smart. Neighbours get to connect with each other and local businesses, while dogs get to do what they love best – meet, greet, and play. (Best not to mention the rolling around on dubious patches of grass.)

While we were there, we also got to enjoy the beauty of Pandora Park’s community gardens. I’m lucky enough to have a back yard big and bright enough for vegetable beds, but a lot of urbanites don’t have that luxury and sign up for community garden patches, instead. They’re spreading across the city and it’s a wonderful way to enjoy gardening and grow your own food. I bet there’s as many connections being made in community gardens as there are in dog parks, too.

Yet another post about the garden

August 7, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 2 Comments

Holy thunderstorm, Batman! It’s hard to believe that just yesterday (and this morning, for that matter), it was sunny. I’m hoping things don’t get too exciting out there – my eggplant and most of my tomatoes are quite little and fragile at the moment. I think my beans could survive just about anything, though. The photos I’m sharing aren’t the best I’ve ever taken, but they show how things are coming along.

Tonight, I’m making kale pesto (inspired by Cher), with some leaves I took to thin out the almost scary growth it’s been having – amazing what a little sun will do for the garden. Tomorrow, I’m going to make a Swiss chard quiche, I think, since those leaves are in need of picking next. There are radishes that need picking, too, and I think I’m going to leave off making pesto with the leaves so that I can make some furikake instead. I made that for the first time last year and loved it. My cucumbers and zucchini are taking forever to grow and I’m afraid that I won’t get any this year. We won’t starve, though, because there’s a ridiculous amount of beans on the way (five varieties, as I keep mentioning), along with beets, carrots, onions, leeks and a few other things besides.

What have you been growing this year? What keeps getting your attention at the market? What are the recipes you can’t get enough of this summer?

The Progression of the Garden

July 31, 2012July 31, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 4 Comments

There’s nothing so interesting to me this summer as my vegetable garden. I’ve had some difficulties (mostly of the nocturnal animal variety), but overall I’m pretty pleased with it. I harvested tomatoes today, with more to come. There will be beans and cucumbers, kale, Swiss chard, beets, and radishes – perhaps even an eggplant or two. I’m going to try again with lettuces for September harvest and there’s late-planted garlic growing, which I’ll pull up in October, dry out, and sow for next year’s harvest.

In the meantime, I’ll keep taking photos, so you may have to endure one or two more of these posts before the summer’s through. I’d love to hear about what you’re growing, in backyards, windows, or balconies.

In the Swing of It

July 17, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 4 Comments

It’s truly summer here and I’m spending a lot of time fussing over the plants in my vegetable garden. That’s not all that there is to do, though. Summer’s a busy time around here.

For instance, while I’m typing away in my stuffy apartment (what am I thinking?), there’s a hyper-local honey tasting at Salt Tasting Room; folks are finding a spot for their blankets to watch a movie in Stanley Park (courtesy of Fresh Air Cinema); and elsewhere in the park, folks are settling in to watch a live presentation of The Music Man.

This week’s Main Street Farmer’s Market is featuring a pie contest as part of their Berry Festival and The Salty Tongue’s brought back their Long Table Supper series with a fruit-focused Pit for your Supper theme. If that’s not enough berry goodness for you, Gourmet Warehouse is tempting folks (well, me) by stocking Bernardin’s Home Canning Starter Kit. If you’re needing a canning primer, the Greater Vancouver Food Bank‘s Community Kitchen program is hosting a Safe Canning Basics demonstration. If you’re more of a grow-your-own sort, there’s Mid-Season Gardening workshop coming up, too. I think I may need a little help on both counts – I got a little carried away with the five(!) varieties of beans I planted and I think freezing all the extras would be a bit of a shame. I’m also trying to figure out what to plant in my newly freed up garden squares – ah, Square Foot Gardening, you really know how to keep a body hopping.

There’s tonnes more going on, with all the festivals, block parties, and outdoor events of the summer. I’m hoping to take in a goodly portion of them. But for now, I’m off to water my garden before it gets dark.

What’s happening in your neck of the woods this summer?

Oh Summer, Where Are You?

July 3, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 4 Comments

We’ve had a long wet stretch from late winter until, well, now. The forecast finally promises a stretch of sun, but I’ll believe it when I see it. The funny thing is that I’m a mild weather girl. Having been raised here, rain doesn’t bother me. But, since I’ve started vegetable gardening, I’ve found myself longing for some sunshine.

There are things growing in my garden and, truth be told, there are a lot of things germinating in my garden right now, too. The one good thing about this very late summer is that my procrastinating self has been able to stretch out the planting portion of the season to its limits. But, my tomato plants are sad and I’m feeling a little fear for the eggplant plants I finally put into the ground. I’m not worried about the zucchini. I suspect that it would over-produce in a nuclear winter (though I hope never to test that theory).

I love looking at my vegetable beds, neatly marked off into square foot plots with wooden barbeque skewers and hemp twine (I’m rather proud of myself for repurposing those skewers). The flower beds are a challenge, sometimes, with the constant threat of morning glory, buttercup, snails and slugs. The vegetable garden, though, is easier to weed and brings out a love of orderliness I didn’t know I possessed. If only that would extend to the storage cupboards…

Nearly Summer

June 5, 2012June 5, 2012 ~ Teresa ~ 2 Comments

It’s my favourite season here in Vancouver and I’m looking forward to a spring and summer full of gardening, festivals, learning, and playing. We’ve had a rainy spring so far, but the sun’s expected soon and I’m hoping that the plants in my garden will start taking off.

What are you looking forward to in these warmer months? And did you catch the Transit of Venus today?

Photos from a Tiny Urban Desert

May 15, 2012May 4, 2014 ~ Teresa ~ 7 Comments

I rarely go to Canada Place. Most Vancouverites don’t. It’s a cruise ship terminal and convention centre, primarily. This weekend, though, I went there to attend the EPIC Expo, courtesy of Vancouver Farmers Market. It’s a sustainable living show and there were lots of interesting organizations and products there.

I had my camera with me, but didn’t take any photos of the show. Instead, once I’d worked my way through all of the booths, entering contests I was destined never to win, I wandered outside and took some photos around Canada Place. My primary response was to wonder why such places are designed so that they become tiny deserts, devoid of any of the natural features of the region they’re in. Vancouver is in rainforest territory, yet in Sunday’s sunny weather, Canada Place felt like Nevada, arid and hot. I was glad to escape back into the artificial forest conditions of downtown’s highrises, where it was cool and breezy.

Here are a few of the shots I took.

A Somewhat Peripatetic Post

April 24, 2012January 20, 2014 ~ Teresa ~ 6 Comments

Sometimes when I read, I want to lose myself in the prose, for the sentences to simply transmit themselves into the ideas or images they evoke, without the metadata of sentence construction and word choice simultaneously imposing itself on my consciousness. It might be more accurate to say that this is the least I ask as a reader, because bad prose shudders and stalls, making it impossible to enjoy. A greater pleasure comes from writing that makes me stop in wonder at the perfection of its construction and the clarity of its content.

Michael Chabon’s book of essays, Maps and Legends, has had that effect on me. His sentences are worth re-reading, both to analyze their content and their construction. What might seem contradictory (but should not) is that many of the essays in this collection defend genre, pulp, and graphic fiction. So-called popular fiction has been the subject of a vast reclamation project since at least the early ’90s. For feminists of my generation, a subscription to Bitch Magazine and weekly gatherings to pull literary and cinematic references from episodes of Buffy were legitimate exercises for our University educations.

Legitimacy in this arena has taken a more masculinist turn in recent years, with writers like Chabon and Jonathan Letham building wonderful coming-of-age novels from the bricks of their childhood reading and adventures. At the same time, the Twilight Saga has become emblematic of women’s forays into the field. It’s not surprising in an era in which grrl power has been supplanted by princess power, I suppose. What’s interesting to me in all of this is the way in which male adolescence and its relationship to genre fiction, comics, and pop culture have become the ground for retellings of the hero’s journey, while female adolescence in fiction has become grounded in bastardized versions of 19th Century courtship fiction. (Jane Austen is the subject of an almost slanderous misreading presently.)

So what happens when a new series of novels, featuring a young, female, and (complexly) heroic protagonist, becomes wildly popular? Critical acclaim, a blockbuster movie, and this.

I’m aware that Mr. Stein is a satirist, but I think it’s telling that his examples pit Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace against Justin Bieber and Disney castles. The Hunger Games novels don’t fit into our current conception of female adolescence, instead measuring up to the mythos around the male journey into adulthood. Under the guise of championing adult fiction, reactions like Stein’s seek to put female-centred literature back into its secondary, illegitimate status.

Though the prose doesn’t make me stop in wonder, Collins’ books allowed me to lose myself in the story and to appreciate her themes. I hope their popularity inspires more books exploring female adolescence in positive contexts, both within and without genre conventions. I’d also like to see stories from genderqueer and trans perspectives, too. All young people (and those of us who were once young) deserve to have their journeys traced.