It is great to see the Vancouver Foundation coming back to a regular schedule of grant making. Their 2010 deadlines have been announced here. First deadlines are for letters of inquiry for Arts & Culture, Education and Youth, Children & Families on February 10, 2010. Most the other programs have a deadline of July 23, 2010.

We owe Jeff Probst and Mark Burnett a huge vote of thanks for the way they have encapsulated the human condition, present in all echelons of society. How much of every day is taken up by office politics? A lot, not including the stress and verbal abuse agonized over after work. I think that is one of the reasons I work alone and it's also from artists that I learned to make mean and nasty remarks. I was so naive when I started making art, influenced by the community art practice of the sixties, my delusion, was that arts funding wasn't controlled by the same despotic nepotism that runs everything else. What looks like a free lunch, isn't really.

To be honest, I've been making these same criticisms for years, which is why I may not get a Canada Council grant again. For instance, another critic had his application summarily dismissed by a "success story" who was on the jury and it was rejected before the jury even started deliberation. To assume that politics, cliques or influence doesn't exist is to be extremely naive. It is not about art, it is about control of the money. Any criticism of the Canada Council is looked upon as a complete betrayal by the arts community. One does not question or argue with these people, if one wishes to have a career in the arts.

I think it's time for more disclosure, currently, artists are given no answers as to why they are turned down. The decisions are made in a secret consultation process by a "peer" jury that is never made public, chosen by undisclosed Council employees. I think that when a jury awards, the reasons for that decision should also be available so that other unsuccessful "peers" and the public can see why it was awarded. Is this so difficult? Every juror I have ever talked to has told me how much they learned from being on the jury.

1. Artists who have their applications turned down, should be entitled to commentary from each of the jurors on why their work failed to meet the jurors approval and

2. have the option of having their project listed on the Canada Council web site.

3. Jurors for each category should have their names listed on the Canada Council site and an archive of jurors lists should also be available.

so who are all the rest of us, "failure stories"? I see that the CC has beefed up its site somewhat since my original "bite the hand" posting, with a fine display of their "success stories". What we need now is an academic, who gets paid for this sort of thing, to dig into the archives and give us the total amounts these artists have been funded over the years to see who really is a "success story".

The site has also brought the media arts grants awards up to date, not so yet with the rest. We still don't have listings of past and present juries and their backgrounds or backgrounds of artists who have no search results.

I don't know how it has been for all of us failures, for myself, it was fortunate that my focus moved to the environment and the subject of garbage. And as this blog began as a result of the non funding of eco art to illustrate the destructive results of any incineration project, I will elucidate my "failure" as an artist. For two years (amongst the 6 I spent fighting for waste reduction in the GVRD) I was fighting the refuse derived fuel plant planned for the Strathcona neighbourhood by the engineers of Vancouver and the GVRD. They had already colluded to install the stinking, pollluting so called "waste to energy" garbage incinerator in Burnaby and now they wanted to squeeze unsorted garbage from North and West Vancouver in addition to our own, into toxic fuel pellets for burning in some other unfortunate community. If you think the Downtown Eastside is bad now can you imagine what it would be like with some facility like that next to the community gardens and garbage trucks gunning down into this area from all directions.

“I’m simply saying that life, uh… finds a way.”

   - Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park (1993)

I've been out of touch with the happenings of DES and today I thought I would catch up on the [Carnegie] newsletter. Now, I haven't read it in a couple of years, but it was like looking back in time. Same people patting each other on the back. Looks like a mutual admiration society to me.[...]I suppose there was some good to Ms. Prevost, but I never got to see it because I wasn't in the circle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtL8gTEuwvU

Ken talks about the growing popularity, and even demand for community green mapping

- Want to keep track of everyone’s medals? I did, and while I still haven’t found a good, free iPhone app for it, there is this perfect and elegant website.

- I wish we had a video copy of NBC’s feature on the Women’s Moguls. It literally amounted to “Look! We made Canada cry! Awesome!” Well, keep laughing, ’cause we got it back today!

- And awesome guy of the day is this guy and his carefully selected spot behind the CTV outdoors news desk on Robson;

'It's a black hole' moans one attendee at education session hosted by pending registrar of lobbyists.

BC Women in Business Forum presented by TD Bank Financial Group

Sponsors: Title Sponsor: TD Bank Financial Group. Speaker Series Sponsors: KPMG, National Post, Xerox, Business in Vancouver
Location: Hycroft,1489 McRae Avenue, Vancouver
Date & Time: April 24, 2008 11 15 A.M. - 2 30 P.M.

Join us for our 3rd BC Women in Business Forum. Hear from accomplished women leaders as they share their career paths, how they overcame challenges and obstacles, and find out their personal lessons learned. Network with other women in business. This event is part of our Women in Leadership Speaker Series held across Canada. Free lunch and Free admission.

Panel:
Mary O’Callaghan, Senior Principal in KPMG’s Advisory Practice
Linda Zanette, District Vice President, TD Bank Financial Group
Martine Normand, VP Human Resources, Xerox
Debra Hoggan, President, Business Design Group
Moderated by: Margot Micallef, CEO of Vista Broadcasting

11:15 am - 12:00 pm Registration for Panel, Lunch and Networking
• Free catered Luncheon/Networking
12:00 pm - 1:15 pm Panel Presentation
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm Entrepreneurship Workshop, "So you want to be an entrepreneur" Presented by Heather Martin, Women's Enterprise Centre

Visit their site and register!

With the debate over the plausibility of global warming receding, the controversy over meeting our energy needs heats up. This has put the nuclear energy spin doctors into full swing. And they have done an impressive job in recruiting some high profile puppets to their cause. Among them are James Lovelock and BC's own Patrick Moore.James Lovelock is a well-respected environmentalist who proposed

This weekend was the first time I found myself on the receiving end of Facebook’s new and  more nuanced privacy settings. An old friend popped up in the Facebook sidebar, which rotates an assortment of different people in your friend list. On a whim, I clicked her picture, so I could catch up on her latest news.

Instead I found myself staring at a virtually blank screen showing only her minimal info: clearly, she’d put me on a list of friends who would only have access to her limited profile. I’d been demoted from friend to “friend”™.

This reminded me of an assignment I’d received in my ninth-grade Latin class, when I had to translate the following story:

A son brags to his father about all the friends he has, only to meet with skepticism. “You call these people are your friends,” the father says. “Let’s see if you’re right. Slaughter a goat, and put it in a sack. Then go to the house of one of your friends. Tell him you have killed a man, and you need his help disposing of the body.”

The son does as his father says, and arrives at the house of his first friend. He presents his bloody sack, and asks his friend to help him dispose of the (supposedly human) remains. The friend is horrified and sends him away.

The son repeats the scene at the home of his next friend, who also refuses to help. The son visits friend after friend, but none are willing to help him conceal his crime.

Finally he returns to his father, defeated, and explains that all of his friends have turned him away.

“I have only one friend,” the father says. “Go to his house, and explain that you are my son. Show him the sack, and ask if he will help you.”

Once again, the son does as his father says. This time, the father’s friend – a true friend – immediately offers his assistance in burying the evidence of the son’s supposed crime.

I can’t remember the Latin translation, but the lesson stuck with me: there’s a big difference between “friends” and friends.

You can take a few lessons from this story yourself: the futility of making your kids take Latin. The importance of actually looking inside any blood-covered sack before disposing of it.  The opportunity for a hit Facebook application called “Goat Bag”.

I won’t define friendship as the willingness to conspire in covering up a homicide, but there is undoubtedly a difference between friendship as it was classically understood and the click-here-to-accept notion of friendship that has become commonplace online.

Simply using the word “friend” to describe a network-to-network connection effectively cheapens the notion of friendship. And if you’ve heard those implicit air quotes in the way people sometimes use the word friend to describe a social network connection, you know how quickly the currency of friendship is getting devalued.

There’s a simple solution — one you see on a variety of networks. Instead of using the term friend — a term that should have real meaning and value — networks can use words like buddy, connection, or contact.

Meanwhile, it’s up to us users to remember what real friendship involves: Genuine conversation (not mutual monitoring of status updates). Trust (not just putting someone on a “trusted contacts” list). Providing support (and not just of the tech variety).

We all know what the word friend can mean — and what it means to have real friends in our lives. Let’s not get confused by the online appropriation of the word “friend” to describe whoever happens to be at the other end of a T1 line.