Ta-ta for now

I always knew this day would come (although considering my commitment towards the whole concept of commitment, I may end up reneging on the following), but I never looked forward to it:

People, I’m folding BumfOnline.

Of course, this should come as no surprise to almost anyone who reads this on a regular basis. My blogging has been sporadic for some time. Posts which used to come several times a day are now spaced out by a week or more. In fact, as of late I’ve started far more posts than I’ve actually gotten around to publish, and that annoys the hell out of me.

It’s not that I’ve stopped writing, or that I have no more interest in the outside world; to the contrary, I still am a voracious reader of blogs, newspapers and, most especially, books. To be sure, I’ve read more books in the past few months than I had in the previous few years.

Part of it is because I haven’t been working. Not full-time, anyways. I’ve had an opportunity during the last 6 months or so to take a deep look in side myself in order to discover what I truly want and need. However, when I began blogging, it seemed to be a stop-gap measure which allowed some creativity and interest while I slogged along in a job I neither loved nor appreciated. Now that I’ve moved on, I no longer crave the outlet I once cherished.

Another part of it is the echo-chamber mentality of the blogosphere, a phenomenon much-documented elsewhere. It’s not that I believe that blogs have no value much less that I recognize it as an accumulation of communities coming together to consensus on ideas. (That’s human nature, and blogging is simply a extension of that behavior, and thus this is nothing to be lamented.) My problem is that I don’t believe I’m adding anything productive to the conversation, at least since I’ve scaled back my blogging duties during the past year. I respect originality and I’m having trouble staying original, much less relevant.

Which leads me to the final reason: I have difficulty fitting in any certain category. This has been an issue for me all of my life, a person with many good friends but no real close ones, someone with a broad range of interests but no real passions for any one thing. Instead, my passion is for ideas of all kinds, my love for many people. It is because of this that my blog ranged from hockey to politics to philosophy to family to pop culture to religion to social issues to the frivolous activities of mankind. I could never settle on a theme, which was unfair to my audience, all of whom seemed to stop by for their own reasons. I couldn’t keep up, and it finally got to be too much.

As for now, I am not against helping out on group blogs if anyone asks (hint, hint Darcey), but I just don’t want to run my own blog for a while. It’s not going to get completely abandoned but I’ll just keep it going as a life-update for my friends and family.

I’m going to continue writing, just for myself. I’ve been sketching ideas for short stories and the like, and I now also keep a private journal which has absolutely no expectations whatsoever (Bumf recommends). I’m also expecting to start a new job in the near future, one which might just keep me interested and challenged enough so that I don’t have to fall back on blogging as a means to express myself. That’s the hope, anyway.

In summation, I just want to thank everyone who stopped by over the years. I believe that I did the best I could to entertain, to inform and to question, and I like to think that you knew that too. It meant a lot to me that you were there, even if you never revealed yourself.

Sometimes, all a person needs is a voice and the prospect that someone else is listening. All else is an extravagance.

Take care, dear reader, until we meet again.

The dignified silence

The last occasion Dr Vrbova saw her father was in Budapest, whither the family had fled because of the comparatively mild regime of Admiral Horthy. But Horthy was replaced by Hitler because he was not anti-semitic enough, and the subsequent regime grew much more murderous. The last time Dr Vrbova saw her father, he said to her, ‘You must forgive me that I have always made the wrong decisions, and brought you into danger. Your mother wanted us to emigrate, but I had too much trust in my fellow citizens…’ With dignified poignancy, Dr Vrbova, who was 17 when this happened, writes, ‘Somehow I knew that this was the last time I would see him.’ And it was.

Theodore Dalrymple on the callousness of decadent Western youth who revel in self-pity and narcissism, and who are completely ignorant of what it truly means to suffer.

The rise of New Urbanism

Are modern cities — and the modernist architecture it spawns — doomed to fail? Architect Leon Krier thinks so. And so do I.

Here’s the philosophy behind the New Urbanist movement:

Krier presents the first principle of architecture as a deduction from Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim that we can will as a universal law. You must, Krier says, “build in such a way that you and those dear to you will use your buildings, look at them, work in them, spend their holidays in them, and grow old in them with pleasure.” Krier suggests that modernists themselves follow this dictum—in private. Modernist vandals like Richard Rogers and Norman Foster—between them, responsible for some of the worst acts of destruction in our European cities—live in elegant old houses in charming locations, where artisanal styles, traditional materials, and humane scales dictate the architectural ambience. Instead of Bernard Mandeville’s famous principle of “private vices, public benefits,” it seems that they follow the law of private benefits, public vice—the private benefit of a charming location paid for by the public vice of tearing our cities apart. Rogers in particular is famous for creating buildings that have no relation to their surroundings, that cannot easily change their use, that are extremely expensive to maintain, and that destroy the character of their neighborhoods—buildings such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for which a great acreage of humane streets had to be cleared and which deliberately turns its back on the historic quarter of the Marais; or the Lloyd’s Building in London, a piece of polished kitchenware surmounted by a pile of junk, dropped in the city as if from a passing airplane.

Calgary, it must be said, is not a categorically ugly city, though it is not entirely charming either. It was built too fast over too short of a period of time, and thus its development of character has been doomed from the start. That’s nothing to be ashamed about — rapid growth can only be had due to enormous success, and Calgary has been a tremendous success economically and (dare I say it?) culturally.

While some effort has been made to produce neighbourhoods on the New Urbanist model — most notably Mackenzie Towne and Garrison Woods — it seems that it’s been too little, too late for most of this sprawling burg. It is a suburb city gone mad, with sprawling, completely unwalkable communities which require automotive transportation simply to go down to the corner store to purchase some milk. (If there such a corner store exists, that is.) No wonder people love their SUVs in this town — I would too if I were forced to spend two hours a day in my car.

Worse still, the cookie-cutter homes and rigid zoning bylaws all but permanently assure that not one ounce of character and uniqueness can develop, which would be an even bigger disappointment if the residents ever took to leave their homes in order to engage their neighbours.

However, this does not stop at simple choice of architecture in new developments. His Worship the Mayor might deny that he is simply propagating the obtrusive modernist mentality today, but when he designs a new LRT line whose only purpose is to ferry workers to the downtown core, that is exactly what he is doing. Not that I disagree with the idea of rapid transit, and I’m not going to get off on the spectacular failure of the city administration to communicate with the afflicted communities during this planning stage. What concerns me more is that lack of priority given to connect various corporate and economic centres around the city. Instead of focusing on how to get every worker in the entire city to work in one area, the city should do more to encourage alternative corporate centres to develop.

In fact, without any help from the city at all, other corporate centres are popping up, including a growing tendency for companies to set up their offices at the airport and, more importantly, in the city’s southeast. The latter is the second-busiest district for workers in the city, yet His Worship the Mayor has acquiesced that those workers are far better off driving their cars or relying on the poorly managed transit system to get these people to work. Investing the $800 million presently being doled out for the West LRT — an system which is designed solely to encourage housing development in the western suburbs — takes away from investing in workers in an alternative commercial zone for another 10 years or more.

And don’t get me started on the lack of progress of the LRT line reaching the airport.

In truth, New Urbanism is (or ought to be) the way of the future: smaller town centres featuring organic growth in terms of architecture and space planning, adequate public transportation to the surrounding communities, and a quality of life which will prevail long after oil hits $200 a barrel.

Principles of representative democracy and the abuse thereof

I have been following as of late the goings on of Calgary City Council and their almost comical handling of the proposed West LRT route. Last week, I attended the extended hearings of the Planning, Land-use and Transportation committee regarding the route and was dismayed at the obvious disconnect between some of the aldermen and the residents of the communities through which the LRT is planned to run.

As was expected, the committee accepted the proposal from administration, leaving the final vote on the matter to be held by City Council at their next meeting on Monday. The city web site makes it seem like a simple procedure, that the administration is doing its job and that Council approves of their work.

The reality is far different. The communication on this project has been mangled from the start. Even though His Worship the Mayor has insisted that this project has been on the books since the Canadian Pacific railway had first looked over the surveyed maps of this unmolested prairie ground some 130 years ago, he had insisted that Council approve the budget for the line within a month of the last municipal election, an election which brought in 4 brand new alderman to office. And this was even before the finalized route was even revealed to the public.

Since then, the mayor has pushed to get the project underway come hell or high-water, regardless of the efforts of such groups as the Best West LRT, not to mention affected community associations and their counterparts across town.

The former is an especially interesting collaboration. More than simply concerned citizens, the Best West group involves architects, engineers and business people who have — on their own volition — designed an alternate route which would have less societal impact as well as a reasonable budget to boot.

Whether or not the alternate proposal was feasible, we’ll never know. A few aldermen, including John Mar and Joe Connelly, attempted to direct administration to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the Best West plan, but they were voted down. Alderman Gordon Lowe, who would believe that it was actually the Easter Bunny who died on the cross if it was asserted so by His Worship the Mayor and his administration, admonished the deniers on council by accusing them of “not trusting administration” to do their jobs. (Which gives cause to wonder if Alderman Lowe even understands his own job, that being a check on the city administration and ensuring that all reasonable complaints are given a voice.)

I wish this whole West LRT debacle was an aberration, but it is sadly a pattern of poor communication with the citizenry. Worse still, this is also one more in a long line of instances where His Worship the Mayor bullies his opponents to getting what he wants.

The problem, however, not only lies with the mayor; it lies with the basic structure of municipal government in itself. There is an absence of the division or separation of powers in city hall. Moreover, there is an absence of an official opposition whose role it is to criticize both government AND administration. Both of these features are vital to afford government the proper checks and balances necessary to prevent corruption and tyranny, as well as to keep a semblance of balance within the legislative procedure.

For example, while the provincial and federal legislatures in Canada both suffer from the division of powers common to American bicameral legislatures, they do have within their constitutions provisions for an official opposition which may or may not offer alternative or parallel proposals to legislation which may or may not benefit the government and its citizens.

It is very rare to hear a government minister accuse an opposition member of having a lack of trust of the administration, much less use that as a defense of a proposal developed by said administration. Elected officials are meant to act as stop-gaps on the administration, and must then be given reasonably free-reign in their formulation to alternative policy, or at least, rejection of the orthodox.

The city of Calgary, however, and most municipal governments across the dominion, rely on a simple council to make all the decisions together based solely off the information of the administration headed by the mayor. Aldermen have little to no outside resources on which to rely which would allow them to develop policy alternative to that of administration. This might be all well and good for small municipalities which have very few resources to begin with, but when you have a rich city with a large and diverse population, it makes little sense why the rules should limit members of city council so.

Sadly, His Worship the Mayor and Alderman Lowe, among others, do not seem to realize this. Or worse — they simply couldn’t care less.

The biggest hypocrisy in this entire scheme is that it could have been prevented. Instead of releasing funds for a line of the LRT immediately before the public was even consulted on the project, a project which will result in changes to entire communities for the next 50 years and beyond, Dave Bronconnier could have directed his administration to behave in a more open and honest manner, accepting alternative criticism like a man. When he threatens city council that delays in the project could cost $5 million a month, he does this because it was his decision to ram the project through. When he accuses various community and citizen groups of holding the city hostage with their complaints, it is because it was he who kidnapped the process to begin with.

And he has the gonads to insist on increased taxation powers? Why doesn’t he just get on with it and crown himself king so that we can throw away this whole stupid charade once and for all?