podcast

“There’s nothing to do in Windsor.”

Enter collective groan here.
If you don’t know why everyone is groaning collectively, you are one of the folks who needs to SHOW UP!

Show Up is the name of my new podcast (free internet radio show).
It only runs five minutes per episode. A pittance of attention needed to stay afloat in the slop of events being held in Windsor, Ontario.

I’m going to interview bands, artists, and doers in the community, and post them IMMEDIATELY after I do the interviews. Literally within minutes.
I have been using Audioboo.fm – an app for the iPhone that allows me to do the interview remotely and post it to my podcast feed instantaneously.

Awesome.

The reason I named the podcast Show Up is because it has become a new mantra of mine.
There are so many ways to show up, aside from physically BEING at an event (speaking series, live music show, theatre, city council meeting, community discussion, etc.). There are options online these daysfor participating, by blogging in support of an event, or at least taking an interest in an issue and actually providing feedback through comments on a blog, or e-mails. Sending snail mail to tell someone thank you for their efforts on a particular event you enjoyed, or giving positive reviews for a venue on Trip Advisor, or representing your opinion with your voice in some way are all ways of Showing Up.

I think that my new podcast aims to let people know what’s happening when they are unable to physically be there, even though they may have shown up in other ways (promotion, providing press, conducting radio interviews, or just spreading the word).

Can you think of other ways that people can SHOW UP to an event, movie screening, community discussion, art opening, without actually being there?

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I am dumbfounded. I’ll tell you why in a paragraph or two.

Listen, I will not pretend to know what is going on in Canadian politics. It is one of the priorities on my list.

Why? You may ask that for good reason. Well, I just like to know when someone is lying to me. I like being able to call “bullshit” when someone in the political spectrum , or someone speaking for one of those boobs, says something completely outrageous. I don’t like hearing things, and gobbling them up like a nice little consumer. I like to know the details.

For starters, our robotic, yet intelligent, Prime Minister of horse-puckey has made a move that I am FINALLY impressed with. He stated today that under the current definitions and rules around saying food in Canada is “Made in Canada” there are problems… As of right now, if 51% of the work being done to prepare food, and make it consumer-ready is done in Canada, companies are legally allowed to say Made in Canada. Which is a stretch, to say the least…I think we’ll all agree.

“Hey gringo, these bananas were grown in Canada…well, that’s not entirely true. You see, we grew them in South America and then they were juggled and handled and banged around vociferously in some shit-hole cannery plant in Ontario, so technically, they’re Canadian…right?”

No. I want to know where my food is grown, prepared, and “managed”.

Stephen Harper has made a promise, of sorts, to adjust this rule, so the definition is less clandestine and malleable to make sense to only those who work in the industry. Food must be grown and prepared fully in Canada to have the label Made in Canada. If it isn’t, it must say where the other “components” (a fruit salad mix, I guess?) are from.

I just love how Harper said something along the lines of, “It’s what Canadians want, so we have to provide it,” as if this dude gives one ounce of care what “Canadians want”. I digress. I must tip my cap to the man who I know to be intelligent and otherwise incompetent. He made good with me on this story.

And in other “news” The Globe and Mail has FINALLY decided to write about The North Pacific Garbage Patch! Holy geez! Someone at Phog told me that I would be happy that it was finally being covered. While reading the piece, I was floored, yet not surprised (we have a Conservative government) to read this admission from Diane Lake, a spokeswoman with the Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans. She “said that while the ministry is aware of the North Pacific Gyre, it is conducting no real research on the extent or effects of the plastic pollution.” Perfect. Nice work Diane. Nice to see you give a shit. You know, Canada has a border that kinda touches the Pacific Ocean. Hey wait! That’s one of the words in the North Pacific Garbage Patch! Come to think of it, we’re North too…but, we don’t really need to be studying this. You know, it’ll all go away, like climate change, and racism, and mental illness, and corporatocracy raping us from dusk till dawn…yeah, someone else is taking care of it, I’m sure.

Here’s a shortlist, from The Globe and Mail, of what Captain Moore has been finding: A trail of Taco Bell wrappers, Dolls and action figures, Umbrellas, Tarps, Bottles, Tofu containers(for those of you who think you’re saving the earth with tofu. Maybe we need to be writing letters to tofu companies asking them to consider new packaging?), Lego, Grocery bags, Foam coffee cups, Checkers, Furniture, Toothbrushes, Cigarette lighters, Syringes, Rubber ducks, Basketball shoes

See, this is exactly the kind of thing that should make backbones stiffen. It should make you, reading this, totally annoyed with the laissez faire attitude of people who are paid by us to work for us. These are the issues that will be affecting your family’s family’s family. But what can we do besides thinking globally and acting locally? I’m actually shocked that the fishing industry in the west hasn’t pulled a page from the Argentinian farmers’ handbook.

Get angry at this lack of interest in your job, your industry, and your culturally significant knowledge. Stop fishing until the Department of Fisheries and Oceans decides to look into stemming this abuse in the oceans, and possibly even going so far as to suggesting that maybe we are drowning in our own plastic…and that we should step back from it…sloooowly…with biiiiig steps.

I must also place this in here…as I was listening to Q on CBC with Jian Ghomeshi, I heard the guest talking about food, and mentioning our good friend Michael Pollan. It was “Montreal writer Taras Grescoe on the search for ethical seafood” talking about his new book, Bottomfeeder. I kind of want to read this now. The “Q on CBC” in the first sentence of this paragraph is a direct link to the podcast of this show. It was a GREAT interview, worth listening to…

I bit off more than I could chew. Now I want to get into the whole argument we had at Phog last night…about bananas, how we won’t be eating yellow ones in 5 years, and about the plague/waste of sandwich (Ziploc) bags.

Another time.

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Being at Phog all of the time, I am treated to conversations of people who know WAY more than I do. Often, these talks are lost on me. They occur in my periphery, and I am unable to recount any of the details.

On this night, some friends went to a Wild Game dinner night at Three: A Tasting Bar, a restaurant in Windsor, and ate some outrageous number of courses, and were mystified by how delectable it was.

Neil and Charles are both cooks. They know food. They talk food sometimes and people in the vicinity who are not cooks (which is almost no one) put up the invisible “not listening” curtain. But these guys speaking about food is like poetry in a language I don’t speak. I equate it to listening to mathematicians discussing physics or something. Wait, don’t physicists discuss physics? You get the idea.

This is a recording (they knew it was being recorded) of their talk about this meal, and others like it. It’s more like a podcast, but it’s totally worth a listen. Not being from Windsor, I would be emphatic about hearing a conversation between strangers in a strange city. It’s like a peek into the slow night at one of the more renowned music venues in Canada. Yes, you can hear my annoying laugh and intermittent banter throughout. Neil makes me laugh without trying. It might be his endearing lisp mixed with crumplingly sharp wit.

Neil and Charles discuss wild game and all things foody.

The first two minutes will be much louder than the remainder of the clip. This conversation took place at least a month ago…maybe two.

This link will not be working by June 12th, but if someone reads this after that time and wants to hear it, I will re-post it. It is being posted to an online location free for a month.

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