And Now for Something Completely Different

Dear Guys,

I've been reading an alternative/tabloid paper in Vancouver, The Republic of East Vancouver, which unfailingly takes a critical look at current events and the Powers That Be. It dawned on me after a while that this is just as cliched and stereotyped an outlook as the conservative papers promote, ranging from the Globe and Mail in Canada to the National Review in the US. We're still operating on a spurious right-left dichotomy in political stances, spinning the complicated public issues into inadequate impressions, long after everybody knows better. Even the Green movement has gotten stereotypical.

How about some other stances? Or other papers? Or websites or blogs or email lists that look at things completely different?

I am preparing to launch a zine, even if print is dead, with the outlook that life may be a put-on, the Powers that Be may be irrelevant, we're all living in an undeclared anarchy, the real news is under-reported, or - and this is my favourite outlook - everybody alternates between being moronic and being delusional. It will be hard to tell, I guess, whether this is news or humour I'm serving up.

For a long time I wanted to call this zine Interesting Times, but now I think I'll call it Fool's Paradise. I've been putting off the first issue for a few years.

I wonder what sort of readership this will get? Or deserve?

Powers that Be

Last Saturday, Vancouver residents voted in a new mayor and city council. The last mayor and city council appear to have been complicit in some machinations involving public transit, the construction of the rapid-transit Canada Line, poor choices resulting in an increasing homeless population, and the Vancouver 2010 bid for the Olympics. Or perhaps there were entirely different reasons the former administration was voted out. The current mayor and city council are already being painted as visionary centre-left idealists. We have now to see how the new slate can perform, or how they are painted in the press.

The Art of Living

Welcome to the wonderful world of Garth Spencer, a guy still living in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. I plan to list my resume, archive my deathless prose, and decant my uffish thoughts here. Now you've been warned.