weekend update
I was hoping to do some writing on the weekend, but it ended up just being a whirlwind of activities and i didn’t get time. After friday’s critical mass, and spartacus fundraiser, saturday’s confrontation with the landlord and Electric Moon Bananas ride, and then sunday’s fundraising receipt-writing, the Little 100 bike race, and a tea-party, i was pretty tired. read on for extensive details.
friday: tenancy office, critical mass
So on friday, i was late for critical mass because i had to go to the residential tenancy office in burnaby. a couple years back, the gummint closed the vancouver office, leaving just the burnaby office for all of the vancouverites with fucked-up landlords (which is probably quite a few). the burnaby office claims to close at 4:30pm, but it seems that even if you get there at 3:45pm, they can’t help you in time to close….i have no idea why they don’t just say that they close at 3:45pm. Anyway, so it didn’t help at all…we were delayed until monday
after getting back to east van, i chilled with my roommates for a bit, at Cafe Deux Soleils. they have yummy food. and good beer from Storm Brewing (which is a microbrew up near commercial and hastings). After destressing for a bit, i decided to head out and try to catch critical mass.
For those who don’t know, Critical Mass is a monthly convergence of bicycles in cities around the world, to celebrate and promote non-fossil-fuel transportation alternatives. riders make an attempt to reclaim public space from the automobiles.
so i went to the anza club where the critical mass was supposed to end up this month, but only saw 5 bikes there. definitely an indicator that they hadn’t arrived yet. so i rode down the street to look for them. by following some police cars, i came upon a big lineup of idling cars…and two blocks later i found the critical mass going past on their bikes. we rode around and generally had a good time for about 20 minutes, waving graciously at all the cars who were honking at us. one SUV-driving guy decided to dangerously zoom around us at high speed while talking on a cell phone, and then proceeded to run a red light that was right in front of us. luckily no one was hurt, and we proceeded to ride around and eventually ended at the Anza Club.
friday continued: the Spartacus Books fundraiser
Spartacus was a radical non-profit bookstore run by a volunteer collective since the 70s. in the age of giant book megastores that sell mostly greeting cards and top-10 bestselling trash, spartacus was one of the few good places left to by good books…especially for those looking for anti-capitalist, pro-feminist, environmental, anti-racist perspectives. Unfortunately, it was burned to the ground in april of this year, along with the Blunt Brothers marijuana store (ironically). To get the place back up and running, there’s a fundraising campaign, and part of it was the event held on friday at the anza club
There were several bands performing, with a variety of styles. The headlining band was Submission Hold, but they didn’t go on stage until like 1am or something. i had a really good time chatting with all sorts of friends that i hadn’t seen for a few weeks (or months for some of them). there were some pedal-powered smoothies, as well as Storm beer. a band called “The Winks” was pretty interesting. sorta abstract artsy stuff. another band called “Dead by Dawn” was a collection of local radicals, starting with an open invitation for anyone to come and join their band regardless of skill level. I can appreciate what they were trying to do, but OH MY GOD, WHY did they have to go on and on and on for AN HOUR AND A HALF?? sorry for shouting, but i really think that was a mistake (especially from 11:30 to 1am) because they lost a lot of the crowd, and i was actually falling asleep. if they had played a reasonably sized set, it would have been fine.
I got a chance to chat with some people from the Work Less Party while i was there. they had a little table set up with some tshirts, etc. I like a lot of what they had to say, but i disagree with some of their analysis and strategy. Regardless of this, if i vote for anyone in the upcoming provincial election, then it’ll be for the Work Less Party.
One beef that i have with their policy is that a lot of people can’t choose to work less. So it seems to me that their solution is only a partial one, and it’s aimed at the middle class. the working poor can’t really just drop work, when many of them are already working multiple jobs and still don’t have enough to eat, etc. But i think there’s a lot to be said for getting the middle class to work less, as they suggest….i just wish they worked it in with an anti-capitalist analysis. oh well…can’t get it all. i’ll save my rant about the futility of parliamentary politics for another day ;)
jeez…all this and i’m still only on friday. I think i’m just gonna post this and start writing the rest of it. there are some new updates about the landlord thing, so a want to work those in too. More to come, soon :)
Ride hard, ride free