Black Dot Diary

Did you know the British Colum­bia gov­ern­ment is plan­ning to cut arts fund­ing by 50% this com­ing year, 90% in 2011, and 91%-94% the fol­low­ing year? It’s time to stand up for the arts. Bring your­self, a sign, a work of art, a musi­cal instru­ment or what­ever to the BC Leg­is­la­ture tomor­row and let the BC gov­ern­ment know what you really think about cuts to the arts. We should not be silent about this crit­i­cal issue for BC.

Please visit a great site www​.stop​b​carts​cuts​.ca who have worked fast to draw atten­tion to this impor­tant issue.

Hello every­one, I am so new to Word­press that I acci­den­tally “cut” a blog post that was gen­er­at­ing some inter­est: “Canada & BC Arts Cuts: Deep Insult, Shal­low Think­ing,” first posted on Octo­ber 10^th, 2009. I have to say there’s a strange les­son in cut­ting this blog — when you cut some­thing that is a unique cre­ation of an indi­vid­ual, you often can never get it back. You can’t unring a bell. Les­son learned for me. If only the Harper and Camp­bell gov­ern­ments would learn the same thing about cut­ting the arts. Their cuts have far more dire con­se­quences than the mere dele­tion of a blog. Below is my attempt to recre­ate what I had written:

Land & Sea Murals at Ogden Point Break­wa­ter, Vic­to­ria, British Colum­bia. Photo by Chris Holt Pho­tos, http://​www​.chrisholt​pho​tos​.com

I took a walk with my fam­ily on Thanks­giv­ing Day and, under a dra­mat­i­cally dark Octo­ber sky, saw for the first time the spec­tac­u­lar murals on the break­wa­ter at Ogden Point in Vic­to­ria, BC. With the addi­tion of the murals, the old grey break­wa­ter has become majes­tic. It doesn’t com­pete with its coastal back­drop but appears to emerge from it.

Four years ago an alien arrived in my liv­ing room. It was grey with big black eyes, scaly feet and feath­ers. It spoke Eng­lish and could bite, hard. It also said “I love you” and would run around the house scream­ing “Help” if it was time for a bath.

This alien is a 21-​year-​old African Grey Par­rot named Ben­nie. She came for a hol­i­day and never left. Since she arrived in our house, she has become a much-​loved mem­ber of our fam­ily. I could not imag­ine life with­out Ben, and that’s good because she could pos­si­bly live for another 45 years.

This morn­ing Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Lal­ib­erté boarded the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion and con­ducted a news con­fer­ence wear­ing his trade­mark red clown nose.

Lal­ib­erté made the two-​day jour­ney in a Russ­ian Soyuz craft along with Russ­ian cos­mo­naut Maxim Surayev and U.S. astro­naut Jef­frey Williams. The space sta­tion is 350 kilo­me­tres above the Earth.

I always wanted to go to space. I remem­ber watch­ing the TV as Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin made that first moon land­ing in 1969. I told every­one that I wanted to be an astro­naut with NASA. I never did reach my goal but some­times when I’m look­ing up at the stars, I imag­ine what it must be like to be out there gaz­ing back at the Earth as Aldrin and Arm­strong did 40 years ago.

True con­fes­sion: I once hated CBC Radio with a pas­sion. It seems almost un-​Canadian to say that, I know. My dis­like of our national broad­caster began when I was a kid on long car trips across British Colum­bia. Why, I won­dered, would any­one want to lis­ten to talk­ing on the radio instead of the lat­est music. Booooring.

When I became a cre­ative writ­ing stu­dent at the Uni­ver­sity of Vic­to­ria, I thought I should give the lofty CBC another try because so many of the writ­ers I admired swore by it. I tried for years. My dis­like was sealed again when a CBC com­men­ta­tor (maybe Peter Gzowski) vis­ited a chicken bar on the prairies and recorded the sounds of chick­ens being slaugh­tered so we city folks could appre­ci­ate where our meat comes from. I aban­doned CBC for years after that.