notes on scraps from a july vacation

Was cleaning my house and found pieces of a pad of paper used to scribble a setting whilst enroute to France to meet up with my family this past July. Since I re-read them, I thought there was no harm done in re-creating this snapshot of a moment away. Here's what I wrote.

PARIS 1: Aeroports de Paris presente 27 graphistes pour l'Europe (hanging above where I sat)

The setting: Terminal 3 at the Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris, France. Arrivals area. Silver industrial bench. Poster banners hanging displaying modern graphic art from various European artists including the large blue white and yellow one over the arrivals entrance designed by Belgian based Tersa Sdralevich. The mood is overly caffeinated after two soul-warming espressos and a nicoise salda at a nearby restaurant. The airport hums and bustles with tired travellers.

I had three hours to kill upon arrival at this terminal before Han deplaned from Vancouver. I didn't count on somehow misplacing my phone in the flight seat pocket so my first task ended up being an eyelash batting with Mourad the luggage clerk. Initially enamored with my Charlotte Rampling-esque French accent, he feigned helping me but as luck would have it, I realized quickly I was going to have to continue standing there to ensure someone was even bothering to checking the pocket for my much beloved (and high market value) blackberry curve. I wasn't into a simple chat session without results.

After much persuasion I had Mourad calling flight crew on their cell phones which did seem to provoke action on what I was learning was a fairly unmotivated group of people. I was pretty sure that if I left that desk someone could be crank calling Adam Beach and George Stroumbolopoulous next week. I'm not claiming to be Paris Hilton here but there was a little too much information contained in the device for me to walk away.

Just then a miracle occured. They found AND RETURNED the phone. AMAZING. I hugged by new best friend Mourad who asked only for me to call him and leave him a message in my overwhelmingly cute French accent. That was it. Welcome to France and thank you Pierre Trudeau.

I didn't leave him the message in the end. I figure he should've saved the flirting and tried to do his job initially, not just once I discovered he hadn't bothered asking in the first place. Oh well.

election

There's a hugely important Canadian election coming up. Its going to matter to my life and the life of arts in Canada. The Conservative cuts to arts funding has already hurt us into the future...

Naomi Klein spoke at a meeting organized by the arts community in Toronto last week. The meeting was quite successful, bringing forth some ideas an initiatives to unseat conservatives.

Visit www.departmentofculture.ca for more information.

Here's the transcript of what Klein had to say in a packed room on Queen Street.

Naomi Klein: A turn out like this means something, you know what, when your first meeting is packed up and its sold out to put it in theatre terms it means you have a hit on your hands. To put it in activist terms it means you are a movement moment, it means if you organize it they will come. It means you have good timing. That’s the moment we’re in right now. [applause]

And I want to thank the Department of Culture for existing and for opening the doors and letting all of us flood in. I also really wanted to be here tonight because my husband Avi Lewis was used as a expedient excuse to kill a very important program called PromArts which is what we’ve been hearing about tonight which sends writers and documentary film makers and feature film makers around the world to promote their work. And Avi’s name was invoked, he was described as a ‘general radical’ [alughter and applause]. Avi couldn’t be here tonight because he is covering the Republican National Convention [laughter] I think right now he’s listening to a speech by a woman who doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to chose even in the case of rape and believes that gas prices could lowered by next weekend if we drilled in Arctic National wildlife preserve. In other words, it’s the spiritual homeland of Stephen Harper. [applause] He sends his regrets, he says that he his sorry that he helped to kill a wonderful government program, [laughter] and he also said that he’d like to apologize to general radicals everywhere [laughter] because it’s really not fair to you that he be put in your league.

As you know, there was something really amazing about the way Avi’s name was used, about the way Gwynne Dyer’s name was used, about the way many artists names were used. It was overtly political. You know, what they said is, ‘we do not like your politics, so we’re cutting this program’. They didn’t even say ‘we don’t like the film you made about occupying factories in Argentina’ which is what he promoting, you know, fair enough, it was a communist film but … [laughter] … they didn’t even go that far it was just, you know, his politics. And then they made this really dishonest association with Al Jazeera, right ’scary Arab network’ where Avi is working now, even though the grant was issued in 2004 and Avi’s only been at Al Jazeera for six months. So this is the kind of dirty tactics that are being used, they really won’t stop at anything. Our argument is not with them, it is with the Canadian public. We need to expose these tactics and we need to talk directly to the people and make our case. [applause]

I just want to reiterate something that Susan Swann said, about this not being her country, this not being her Canada. I don’t think we want to engage in any unnecessary idealization of our perfect nation that never existed, because we know that that isn’t true. But there is something very real going on in this country, something very real that is at stake here, and if I could just talk a little bit personally; my family came to Canada in 1967 because my father didn’t want to fight in the Vietnam war. They came here as war resisters, they came here as draft dodgers, but they stayed because my mother liked the National Film Board and my father didn’t want to work for the American health care system. And this was explained to me as a kid, that we were staying in Canada, we left America because of the war but we were staying because here mommy could make films about feminism and the peace movement with Studio D at the National Film Board and in Canada you don’t have to… you don’t have to be rich to get sick, to get decent health care. Now all of this is under siege. The principle of universal health care, funding for the arts, and war resisters are being sent home by this government while embracing the tedious war on terror rhetoric in Afghanistan [applause] This isn’t the country that my family chose to come to, that my family came to by choice, and it’s starting to look a lot more that country on display in St. Paul during the Republican National Convention. This administration, the Harper government, they don’t actually want an economy that’s built on culture and innovation. what they want is a culture and economy that is built on taking the Alberta tar sands, boiling them, and turning it into a substance that will further boil our planet, that is their vision, it is that ugly. So when we think about the coalition that we want to build, we also have to be making powerful collations with environmental groups who are also determined to find ways to beat the Tories in this election. [applause]

To me what’s really exciting, is, when you build a coalition, it isn’t just about this group here, or that group there coming together with their agenda, it’s about what everyone brings to the table and I think it’s really exciting to the labour movement, to the environmental movement to think about what the arts community can bring to the table, to think about your skills, in film, in theatre, in design, in a way that can make politics truly transformative, truly exciting, because you guys know how to put on a hit. So let’s do it. [applause]