crisp fall days

God, autumn is gorgeous here. It’s been a while since I’ve lived at ground level on a tree-lined street, and the riot of colours outside my window gives me no end of joy.

On Tuesday Sh. & I went to a meeting of the local Church of Craft, and participated in a collage relay – everyone brought craft supplies, decorated an index card, then passed it to the person on their left to add more decorations. When we were finished we took the card we had started home. It was fun. Besides us, there were five other people who had all been involved in this group for some time. They also hold weekly knitting circles, which we had meant to attend this past weekend, but didn’t. (It’s amazing how easy it is to just sit on your couch and do nothing instead of getting out and making friends. I mean, I don’t even have a TV, and still it takes conscious effort some days.) The card is very cute but since I don’t have a digital camera you get to see reconstituted agitprop instead.

In other news, the Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis documentary was pretty good, and worth watching. It’s opening over the next few weeks at cinemas across Canada, and will play another week in each city if it does well enough over its first weekend, so go see it, already. The Q&A was short, in part because the showing was staggered with a French language screening down the street with its own Q&A, making scheduling slightly tight. Two interesting points: Lewis apologized (to a Argentinian man who called him on it) for cutting a synopsis of Argentina’s history between presidents Juan Perón (the one married to Evita) and Carlos Menem; that is, the part where fascist CIA-backed military dictators racked up a staggering international debt and people first coined the word “disappeared” to describe what happened to opponents of the regime. He actually interviewed a former head official for a military dictator who talked about how pleased he was that Menem had finished the series of wholesale privatization he had begun. They wanted to keep the film concise, which I understand, but a one minute summary would have been nice. Lewis also pointed out that North Americans will simultaneously applaud populist expropriations in Argentina and vociferously condemn them at home. Obviously a strategy applicable to one context doesn’t necessarily work elsewhere, but it was a good reality check for a predominantly white middle-class audience. To quote Phil Oches, liberals are ten degrees to the left of centre at the best of times, and ten degrees to the right of centre when it affects them personally.