I was sitting in the coffee shop this aft; I should say “hiding” in the coffee shop because the wireless where I work wasn’t agreeing with Suse liveCD in my laptop (the wifi at the library is superbogus crappy: you have to scroll down below the fold of a page of straight text and the authenticate through a form that sometimes works), and then I had to try *two* coffeshops to get a properly working connection and I was totally grumbling and posted a snarky comment to my twitter when I suddenly thought of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc . So now I’m thinking: is free/cheap  public wifi that’s available pretty much anywhere something that, in  Louis CK’s words: “the world’s owes us?”

I mean, here in the downtown, there’s  almost free, good wifi pretty-much within reach of wherever we might be. That’s actually pretty good. So, even if it doesn’t work once in a while, maybe I should stop griping. I don’t know.

After a Sunday afternoon lull sitting reading our books in JJ Bean’s on 14th & Main we were driving along past Main & Kingsway and I remarked to the wife: where did people hang out on Sundays in the winter when we were 20-somethings?

It occurred to us that there was almost nowhere to go: I remember once or twice going to the SoftRock Cafe and once going to the old Vienna tea house on Robson. K remembers going to Beanos. Ugh. I can’t deny I went there too. But it got me thinking.
I realize now that I spent a lot of time visiting friends. At their houses. And that reminded me of what people used to say: Vancouver was a very difficult place to break into the regular social life. There were no ubiquitous coffee shops. No hip hangouts. There were bars, a few nightclubs. And during the day there was Beanos. So almost everybody visited their friends at someone’s house and that meant that if you didn’t know anybody in town, you didn’t meet any locals. And if you didn’t like your friends, it was very hard to meet new ones.
(My perpective is limited, I know. I grew up with a very close set of friends who I still see. I realize now that we didn’t admit newcomers easily. Although I don’t think that was on purpose as much as it was a function of having known each other from such an early age. But that’s another story….)
I hate to admit it (because people are probably sick by now of hearing about the “before Expo/after Expo”story) but this *was* something that changed after Expo 86. For one thing, before Expo, very few places were open on Sunday. Certainly bars weren’t. Most stores weren’t. And I seem to recall that many many cafes were not either. That’s compounded by the fact that there weren’t many cafes in the first place.
I guess this is something we can be thankful for now that we have a grownup-like city. Traffic may be a constant hassle. Rent may be insanely expensive. But at least there’s somewhere to go and something to see on any given day. It sure wasn’t like this when I was growing up.

I have to admit: even though the Mother of all Funk Chords has been all over the web (posted in places as disparate as Slashdot and Virtual Dave…Real Blog), I still think it’s the coolest thing I ‘ve seen in ages.

It’s all done by this guy.

Saw something interesting the other day: A handful of folks gathered under the portico of Vancouver’s central library around an electrical outlet charging their electric bikes. That got me to thinking: nomads need electricity.

Now, of course, in this day and age we already know this. But I suspect most of us who are thinking of on-the-go electrical needs are thinking of electricity for devices (you know: laptops, phones, and so on). That’s certainly an important question. But E-bikes are becoming an important part of the transportation spectrum and they can’t bring them into coffee shops and libraries to get them charged. And, in addition, coffee shops aren’t exactly free electricity anyway. You have to buy something to sit there.

So, that brings me to the puzzle of finding free or near-free, outside public electricity access for E-bikes. Is there some kind of wiki/blog/list where somebody is keeping track of outdoor plugs? Is it in this Yahoo Group? It would seem to be a good idea to maintain a list somewhere. I’m not tapped into the e-bike community at all so I don’t know.

As an example: people are tracking power in airports and there’s plenty of public wifi lists (here’s one) so I suspect the e-bike community trades this info somehow.

Of Course, if the idea catches a public-buzz, then somebody will definitely try to commercialize it so I suppose one should be careful what one wishes for.

All the different themes on this site connect to an underground urban concept that, among other things, is call Urban Nomadology. Here are a (very) few places to start exploring the concepts of urban nomadism:

Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus is an amazing book. It connects the punk music explosion from late ’70’s Britain back to the situationists of Paris, the Dadaists, and much further back than that. This, from my perspective, is essential reading to understand the cultural component of Urban Nomadism here at the start of the 21st century.

 

Nomadology.com is an interesting introduction to the topic. Not a “linear” or narrative one though.

 

Of course, nomadism has no urban component in most people’s minds. When they hear “nomad” they usually think of Pastoral Nomadism , if anything. Mongolia presents a good example of pastoral nomadism. This U.S. Country Studies article might help. Although, there is, apparently, more to it.

So, here’s an extremely brief Urban Nomad Primer:

Despite the prevalence of Situationists throughout the 20th century (as examined in the aforementioned Lipstick Traces), the idea that this is connected to a kind of nomadism is a reasonably new idea.  It’s, to me, the logical next phase of the Digital Cobbler concept. I think this embodies a kind of urban nomadism that is economic, cultural, and social.

 

However, it’s also important to acknowledge right away that this is an urban component of digital geography that may have eqivalents in the exurban and rural communities. Or, using the names used in Joel Kotkin’sThe New Geography the book, the blog, in the Nerdistans and Valhallas of North America. It may be the case that these different types of communities are all so much inter-twined and are consequences of the same digital geography to the extent that I can’t discuss the urban component without dealing with the others.

 

More about Urban Nomads in a while when I organize my readings and so on.

Okay. It should be obvious that nomads don’t need so much stuff. But I find that the “lose the clutter and set yourself free ”  or “organize the clutter (and still set yourself free)” kind of advice you can get is extremely uneven. And I come from a long line of packrats (and I’ve fathered another packrat but that’s another story) so I know something about trying to get rid of the clutter. 

Take the case of these two examples of set-yourself-free-and-lose-the-clutter guides: 

1. When Organizing isn’t Enough: SHED your stuff, change your life by Julie Morgentstern  is one of those execrable self-help books that takes 250 pages to say what could be said in one well-written 20 page pamphlet.

But, there is a kernel of usefulness here:

There’s three parts to the process: 1. SHED 2. Find your theme 3. Pick your point of Entry.

SHED means: Separate the treasures, Heave the trash, Embrace your identity Drive yourself forward. The first two parts are obvious, the third part is understandable (a bit more about that below). The fourth part is a bit rah-rah contrived but if that’s what works for some people, fine. 

What is interesting is that it the shedding isn’t necessarily of physical things. It can just as easily be things you do or think you have to do. And the “embrace your identity” part is to use this process to figure out what you are (or, more accurately, what you want to do ) so you know what it is you should shed (I think).

The Find your theme part is about finding the theme of the shedding so you have a focus for why you’re doing what you do. I’m not sure how this differs from the “embrace your identity” part but there you are. I’ll read a bit more and see if I can figure that out. The third phase (Pick your point of Entry) seems to be a kind of “name the moment” idea but I will read a bit more of that just to see if it goes anywhere useful. 

That said, there’s no way I can read this whole thing. Like I said, it’s 250 pages to say 20 pages worth. 

2. The second example of lose-the-clutter advice is the complete opposite of the first: smart, quick, brief, and inspiring. So, I won’t bother going on about it, just go read The Last Viridian Note  by Bruce Sterling. 

An awful lot of artists in the Vancouver Eastside Culture Crawl were producing an awful lot of art.

Beyond the obvious “culture high” one gets from wandering around and among so much creativity, I’m starting to wonder about a few things:

1.  Do most North American cities of 2.5million people have this size of art community? Or is this an example of Vancouver’s prodigious wealth in the “creative class”.  We tend to like to think we’re special, but maybe we’re kidding ourselves. I don’t know.  
    
2.  What’s the attraction of that artistic, studio-scene? Both K & I remarked about how attractive the artistic life seemed from this superficial level. That said, after a while, I started to wonder how many of these artists were really making a living from their art, how many have to have second jobs or alternate incomes to support themselves, and how many are essentially dilletantes who are using some other source of income to support their artistic lifestyles but don’t really have a chance of ever supporting themselves with this stuff. Furhter, there’s two kinds of people in this latter category: those who’s art isn’t commercial and who don’t feel inclined to change it to make it so (and there’s nothing wrong with that); and those who’s art is, let’s face it, not very good!
    
3. A studio (which seems necessarily to have to be in a fixed location) doesn’t seem very nomadic. Perhaps it’s not,  but there do seem to be people there who can and do create their art in various settings and use their studio for only particular parts of their process. 
    
4. There’s a whole ‘nuther thing about the artistic community being urban pioneers and making a place for a next wave of urban dwellers (who then make a place attractive to a third wave, and so on). The huge trap with this cycle (and one Vancouver is caught tight in) is that the second (and third) waves of urbanists cause real estate prices to go up and price the artists complete out of the district. In Vancouver this is hugely exacerbated by our crazy-high land prices which are just now beginning to subside (but not nearly enough for the average (starving) artist).