Archive for the ‘The Haulout’ Category
Overcoming Obstacles
A look at the changing art of parkour
Posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 by David Rusak | 3 Comments
A practitioner examines the evolution of the urban sport/art/discipline called parkour
Pick the right time and day to approach the steps at the foot of Citadel Hill, Halifax’s central tourist site/fortress, and you will encounter a ragtag group of people behaving in a rather unusual way: balancing delicately on the railings, hanging off of the walls, leaping up over them from the sidewalk, and bantering on the hillside grass. If you are a casual passerby, you will most likely steer clear of this strange display. But if you have come to practice parkour, you will be greeted with hugs from everyone there.
Parkour, for those who have not yet heard of or seen it, is an urban lifestyle sport/art/discipline in which practitioners (called traceurs) train themselves to efficiently and gracefully climb, jump, vault, and crawl over whatever is in front of them. Not yet highly codified, it is often glossed as “the art of overcoming obstacles,” which allows for interpretations both literal and metaphorical. Parkour originated in the mid-’90s in France, but quickly caught on worldwide after videos of traceurs’ acrobatics began to circulate on YouTube soon after the site’s founding in 2005. The images that have come to characterize it for millions of viewers — shirtless men hurtling like renegade ninja from rooftop to rooftop, performing death-defying flips and high landings — belie a philosophical core that many practitioners hold dear: a focus on disciplined personal improvement, a rejection of showiness and competition, and a commitment to altruism and openness.
The Halifax traceurs are earnest followers of these values. Meets are always free to attend. Passers-by are given ample room to pass by, but whatever questions they have are answered with voracious enthusiasm and invitations to join. The more senior members encourage beginners to progress at their own pace, and take care to teach them strong fundamentals, like the basics of landing, to prevent injury. Flips and tricks are fun to try and in no way forbidden, but they’re seen as being risky and somewhat beside the central point; it doesn’t matter whether you’re working on a “lazy vault” or a “wall spin,” so long as you are moving, learning, and challenging yourself.
The group is populated by people of all ability levels and walks of life, with ages ranging from the teens to the sixties. Its members’ habit of hugging hellos and goodbyes is a local idiosyncrasy, but it seems a fitting practice for traceurs; like the whole activity of parkour, receiving welcoming hugs from mere acquaintances is a rewarding violation of some of the default boundaries of everyday urban life — boundaries which, on reflection, there is little excuse for us to consider ourselves bound by, except that everyone else seems to obey them. (more…)
Tags: freerunning, Halifax, parkour, toronto
Posted in The Haulout | 3 Comments
How Do You Like Me Now?
Like, retweet, and the hyper-simplification of online expression
Posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 by David Rusak | 4 Comments
In the course of our day-to-day lives, it can be easy to forget that, a mere couple of decades ago, most of us could not use computers to talk to people. Widespread internet access has since revolutionized communication and entertainment with astounding speed for an ever-expanding slice of the world’s population. Reactions to this kind of radical novelty generally fall into either of two camps: those who fear (or, occasionally, hope) that enveloping ourselves in new media environments will cause dramatic, unforeseen changes in our minds and lives; and those who picture us less as helpless recipients and more as autonomous users of a set of changing tools that we could pick up or put down as we please. As with most such polarized debates, there is truth to both ways of looking at it. The effects our social media have on us, and the ways we choose to use them, make up a feedback loop in which each influences the other. Services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube reshape our lives and minds, not by enslaving or coercing, but largely just by giving us what we want — and, in turn, shaping what we want.
The practice of “retweeting” — copying another person’s tweet, with attribution, prefaced by “RT” — arose organically out of the nascent Twitter community. By late 2009, this bit of etiquette had become so ubiquitous that it was formalized as a built-in function of the site, allowing users to retweet with a single mouse click, and also see how many times a given tweet had been repeated. Now, observe here an intriguing commenting behaviour, on a wholly different website, in which the users paste in a previous comment and put a number beside it to indicate how many times it’s been repeated. (more…)
Tags: communication, facebook, Like, Retweet, social media, Twitter, YouTube
Posted in The Haulout | 4 Comments
Revenge of the Sexy Nerds
The cult of Lady Gaga and the mainstreaming of outcast culture
Posted on Tuesday, July 13th, 2010 by Stacey May Fowles | 14 Comments
“Do you think I’m sexy?”
Lady Gaga, covered in fake blood, squeezed into a black bustier, poses this question in her best rock-arena growl. The Toronto audience, easily 15,000 strong, roars its positive response as she flips back her crayon-yellow hair and semi-pornographically writhes on the floor.
“I wasn’t very cool in high school, so sometimes I abuse this part. Do you think I’m sexy?”
This endearing admission, made to a crazed, capacity crowd at the Air Canada Centre, easily sums up why the cult of Gaga has risen to rapid glory. She is that awkward, misunderstood high-schooler all grown up, raising a big ol’ fuck-you middle finger to everyone who said, “No, you can’t because you’re too ugly/fat/stupid/uncool.” Submerged in the spectacle and decadence of her Monster Ball, she’s still very much that moody teen reject because, despite her all triumphs, she needs us to tell her we adore her. And when we do, she’s so genuinely in awe of the crowd’s frantic adulation. It seems like she has no idea how and why this all happened, how she went from bedbug bites in her New York apartment to God-like status in such a short period of time.
I’ve been trying to figure out “what Gaga means” for months now, using my decade-old Women’s Studies degree to try to decipher how her torn fishnets and Kermit-coat fit into this big, sugary mess we call pop culture. Yes, I love Lady Gaga, and it’s hard to write about something you love so much when you don’t really understand why you love it. An obscure music-snob at heart, I’ve already given my pedestrian Gaga-passion more deliberation than I’d like to admit. Hell, after eighteen straight viewings of the homoerotic, militaristic, sex-fighting BDSM homage that is the “Alejandro” video, I’ve actually developed entire sociological theories of dominance and submission based on her shoe choices. (more…)
Tags: Lady Gaga, mainstream, nerds, outcasts, pop culture
Posted in The Haulout | 14 Comments
Everything I Needed to Know About Religion I Learned in Tai Chi
In training martial arts, a student comes to understand faith through fealty to form
Posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 by David Rusak | 3 Comments
Although I have dabbled in a few since, Chen-style tai chi chuan is the martial art with which I had my formative experiences. Training in the evenings during high school not only gave me exercise and taught me coordination, but granted me some unexpected insight into the world of religion as well. In both realms, followers may seem to accept the received wisdom of their traditions with a strange credulity — but, I found, the point of the practice is in its form, not its content.
Chen is the originating school of tai chi, a centuries-old martial art frequently pictured in the West as a sort of Taoist geriatric health exercise. In this and many other traditional martial arts, a large chunk of the practice consists of learning and perfecting one or more forms — choreographed sequences of the discipline’s techniques, the details of which are carefully prescribed from start to finish. Tai chi forms are trained at a mostly slow, deliberate pace, intended to force the practitioner to take care in performing each movement correctly. Students learn the routine by following along behind teachers and senior students, who also pass on explanations for the parts of the form as well as general rules of movement. In these, my group tended to eschew esoteric talk of chi energy or yin and yang in favour of practical concerns: you need to sink your elbows or else your arm can easily be put in a lock (“Thusly!”); the curled position your fingers assume during Single Whip can be used to strike at a pressure point; et cetera.
I only noticed later what a charitable sort of exegesis this was: we always began with the natural assumption that a move was included in the traditional form for good reason, and proceeded from there to give explanations for it. Sometimes these would change or even contradict one another, but the general feeling was that a great wisdom lay behind the form, and so its moves could be effective in many applications. With the form, as with a holy book, we could find confirming interpretations wherever we sought them, and so each lesson redoubled my trust in the rules and motions I was learning. (more…)
Tags: faith, form, martial arts, religion, tai chi
Posted in The Haulout | 3 Comments
A Tale of Two Cities
Toronto and Johannesburg are both hosting major international events — but only one is doing it well
Posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 by Richard Poplak | 4 Comments
Courtesy of Matthew Littzen
Earlier this week, I found myself traversing two worlds — both of them familiar, both suddenly upside-down. For years, I’ve been commuting between Toronto and Johannesburg, which is not quite as bad as the 400 to Barrie during rush hour, but comes a near second. This week, both cities have been in the news, if for very different reasons. The fifa World Cup Finals and the G20 summit may at first glance seem entirely disparate, but both events have had a profound effect on the narratives of their respective cities. Those narratives, at least this week, are linked, and deserve a review.
Let’s start with Toronto. On a recent Tuesday in June, I sat at a sushi restaurant in the downtown core, staring out at the long line of concrete and chain link barricades that suddenly dominated Wellington Street. I was reminded of Beirut, a city famously divided by such contrivances into segments, sectors, zones — “a house of many mansions,” as Kamil Salibi put it. The effect was profoundly disorienting, ameliorated only by the relative good repair of the surrounding skyscrapers. What struck me was how easy it is to fortify a city, to take command of it from above and afar, to wrest it from its citizenry as if they had no claim on it in the first place. Toronto, like Beirut, was now divided into security zones with varying degrees of access. All it took was the brute force of half a billion bucks — a pittance really, if you think of what it buys you: A major Western city, for a few days.
The twenty visiting luminaries and their vast entourages have accepted our invitation; in return, we owe them protection. Once every eight years, Canada gets to set the agenda at the G20 summit, and this is a not an insignificant forum. (Okay, perhaps it is. Such is the price of eating at the adults’ table.) Still, the price tag is a head scratcher, no matter how meticulously the government breaks it down. And as far as I’m concerned, money isn’t the worst of it. What, I can’t help wondering, is at stake here? (more…)
Tags: G20, G8, Johannesburg, toronto, World Cup
Posted in The Haulout | 4 Comments
Someday, Baby
After the parade, what it means to win the Stanley Cup
Posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 by Ellen Etchingham | Comment
Chicago is not an especially parade-happy city. Sure, Chicagoans like floats and chicks with batons, but not nearly so much as we like open streets upon which cars can be driven during all daylight hours. I can remember, vaguely, going to a couple of marching-intensive events as a child, but those might have been in the suburbs. Or in Iowa, for all I know. But I cannot remember seeing one single parade in downtown Chicago as an adult. I don’t think people would stand for that sort of thing, especially not on Michigan Avenue, especially not when we have shopping to do.
But last week, two million people came out to see the Blackhawks bring home the Stanley Cup. No floats or batons or elephants or anything extra, just a bunch of guys on a double-decker bus with their shiny new hardware, a few speeches and a little ceremony.
Two million people.
Not so very long ago the Hawks were lucky to get 10,000 Chicagoans to come out for them. Most nights, it was more like 5,000— 25 percent of the cavernous United Center’s capacity. People who are not from Chicago do not understand how bad it was for hockey there, even a few years ago. The rest of the hockey world looks at the city and thinks, “Hey, Original Six franchise, big sports town, can’t be all that bad.” Some people seem to have this idea that the Hawks were, like the Cubs, beloved losers.
No. (more…)
Tags: Chicago Blackhawks, hockey, Stanley Cup
Posted in The Haulout | No Comments
“The Walrus dominates National Magazine Awards”
See our thirty-three nominations for the 33rd NMAs
Posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 by The Walrus | Comment
The Walrus is proud to announce that it has received a leading thirty-three nominations in 2009′s National Magazine Awards. Our contributors were nominated across several categories, and included twenty-three written, seven visual, two integrated, and one special nomination. The winners will be announced at the 33rd annual National Magazine Awards gala on June 4, 2010 in Toronto.
The Walrus congratulates all of our nominated contributors, listed here. See for yourself why we’re so pleased by this news.
Art Direction for a Single Magazine Article
“Alice in Borderland” by Charles Foran
Arts and Entertainment
“That Old Flame” by Don Gillmor
“The Secret” by Brett Grainger
Best New Magazine Writer
Carol Shaben (“Fly At Your Own Risk“)
Best Single Issue
October 2009
Business
“Turning the Page” by Noah Richler
Essays
“A Sorry State” by Mitch Miyagawa
“The Age of Breathing Underwater” by Chris Turner
Health and Medicine
“Cause and Effect” by Lynn Cunningham
“Global Impositioning Systems” by Alex Hutchinson
“Zero Sum” by Mary Rogan
Humour
“A Film For Would-Be Immigrants” by Pasha Malla
“Stephen Harper: A Short Biography” by Andrew Clark
“The Obstecritic” by Pasha Malla
Illustration
“Are We Safe Yet?” by Leif Parsons
“The True Sorrows of Calamity Jane” by Selena Wong
Investigative Reporting
“Fly At Your Own Risk” by Carol Shaben
Magazine Covers
Please Forgive Us (December 2009)
Personal Journalism
“Cause and Effect” by Lynn Cunningham
“Walking the Way” by Timothy Taylor
Politics and Public Interest
“An Inconvenient Talk” by Chris Turner
“Fly At Your Own Risk” by Carol Shaben
“Off the Rails” by Monte Paulsen
“The Future Has Begun” by Nora Underwood
Science, Technology, and the Environment
“An Inconvenient Talk” by Chris Turner
“Global Impositioning Systems” by Alex Hutchinson
“The Age of Breathing Underwater” by Chris Turner
Society
“The Most Hated Name in News” by Deborah Campbell
Spot Illustration
“An Arboreal History According to the Guild of St. Luke” by Lauchie Reid
“Extraordinary Canadians” by Graham Roumieu
“Schematic Diagrams for Proposed Objects” by Marc Bell
“Spiritual Citizenship” by Jason Logan
Travel
“Walking the Way” by Timothy Taylor
Tags: magazine awards, nominations
Posted in The Haulout | No Comments
Fear of a Hot Planet
An interview with environmentalist, educator, and author Bill McKibben
Posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 by Robert Parker | 2 Comments
On December 24, 1968, while orbiting the moon aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft, astronaut William Anders took one of history’s most famous photographs. As the ship rounded the grey, lifeless surface of our satellite, a pale blue-and-white dot appeared against the blackness of space; Anders picked up his camera and snapped its shutter. “Earthrise,” as the photo would come to be known, was the first widely published image of our planet taken from space. Never before had humanity seen such a view of our collective habitat.
But that planet no longer exists. In the forty-two years since “Earthrise” was taken, we have done so much damage to our home that, some say, we need a new name for it. Environmentalist, educator, and author Bill McKibben suggests “Eaarth,” which is the title of his new book. In 1989, McKibben published The End of Nature, a groundbreaking work in the study of climate change. More than a dozen books have followed, each with the unifying theme of coping with change. In 2007, he started the Step It Up program, which organized 1,400 simultaneous global warming demonstrations in all fifty US states. As a result of this action, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, then in the heat of their presidential campaigns, signed on to the group’s target of an 80 percent cut in carbon emissions by the year 2050.
In the wake of this success, McKibben helped launch 350.org, “an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis.” The group is founded on the notion that any level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration above 350 parts per million is dangerous for all life on the planet. This only sounds like an obscure point of reference until you learn that the number currently stands at around 390 PPM and rising.
Eaarth is about living on this new planet that we have created for ourselves, and trying, perhaps in vain, to return to the one seen in “Earthrise.” I recently interviewed McKibben at Random House’s offices in Toronto. (more…)
Overcoming Obstacles
Vladimir | Don’t worry man true spirit of this art will never die! there are a lot of us that don’t give a shit about money, commercial, and selling out YEARS and years and years of training ! we all invest tremendous amount of time to...
Dan Iaboni | Hey man… Someone who scans google (i guess) linked me to this article. If you are still in the Toronto area, come over to the MonkeyVault sometime and play, its on me!
Traverse Davies | Nice article. The group is still out training three times a week here in Halifax, and we are still not commercial. I think that if the commercial interests win, groups like Halifax Parkour will just stop calling what we do...
Return to No Fun City
Rob | The main problem with Vancouverites is that most of them have never left to experience life outside of Vancouver. This combined with the constant bombardment of how Vancouver is one of the top cities to live in the world leads to the...
Holly | Everyone’s experience in a place is particular. Particular to one’s income, life stage, proximity to family, tastes, personality, interests, and chance encounters that build or don’t build into friendships. These things...
hollyandholly | http://hollyandholly .com/2010/08/29/see- holly-its-not-us-and -it-is-us/
Family Ties
Janet Wilson | I have not seen the film, but did hear the CBC interview with the filmaker with Jian Gomeshi on Q. There are two things I have to offer to the discussion, one on the “family” side, one not. First, in the nature vs....