Julianna Yau’s blog

Last week, I attended the first Ignite Waterloo event, and was completely blown away. It was my first time attending any Ignite event, and I’m amazed by how well the format works — 5 minutes and 20 slides per presentation, and no notes! The most invigorating part of it was the sheer variety of presentations. Although I wasn’t interested in all of the presentations (maybe 2 or 3?), I was exposed to much more than I would have at any other event.

It was extremely refreshing to be in a wholly different group than the usual suspects. Because of the variety of topics, it wasn’t just people from the local geek community. I met Angela Pause, a freelance writer, and her friend (whose name escapes me, but I believe starts with an M), who used to be a scenic painter. I met Saravana Rajan, who works in the health industry and is doing some really cool consulting work to improve long-term care & monitoring of chronic diseases.

But, more importantly, I was overwhelmingly proved wrong in my earlier feeling that Waterloo lacks the coolness that I had formerly found in Toronto. It seems the vibe and richness has always been here, but took Ignite Waterloo to really bring to the surface and hit me over the head. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to an event anywhere with the electricity and excitement I felt at Ignite Waterloo. I can hardly wait for the next one!

I’ve been back from Tokyo for almost two weeks and am only now finding time to blog about it. During that trip, I finally came to terms with the fact that I’ve been overextending myself for too long. In the two months before the trip, I had been struggling with having downtime in which I wasn’t doing anything—even without watching movies as part of my own historical cultural education through film. But in Tokyo, it really hit home when I was spending half my time there sleeping.

Learning to not work all the time is a difficult thing. My main purpose for going to Tokyo was visiting the Theo Jansen exhibit. The exhibit was totally worth the flight to Tokyo, but after I visited the exhibit on my third day in the city, I was asking myself “now what?”.

The city was great, but I definitely didn’t experience it properly. Having been to Hong Kong for two full summers, Tokyo for me was like a cleaner, more polite version of Hong Kong. Travelling alone, most of my time was spent in quiet contemplation (apt for Tokyo, I suppose).

Akihabara was definitely my favourite tourist destination, and I was surprised by my ability to restrain from unnecessary purchases. Thanks to the internet, I was able to confirm that much of what I wanted was available in Canada and, surprisingly, at a similar price.

I was glad to have stayed in Ueno, as it was home to places like the Tokyo National Gallery and Tokyo Sculpture Museum. What was disapointing? The Tokyo Sculpture Museum is closed from April 1, 2009 until March 2013. 2013! I hadn’t anticipated the closure, and didn’t go to the museum until April 2, only to exchange looks of shock with a group of Japanese women who also wanted to visit the museum.

Photos and video from the Theo Jansen exhibit will follow. Here are my picks of my pics, and the full set of photos can be found on Flickr (Tokyo tag or by set).

Today, I finally visited the Children’s Museum of Waterloo with Adriana, my partner in 2Picas. Going through the museum, I felt like a kid again (and wished there were places that cool when I was younger).

Their exhibit, Andy Warhol’s Factory, was totally worth the price of admission. Although not all of the appropriated work was good, we were both amazed by Devorah Sperber‘s After Warhol, which is comprised of 698 spools of thread and viewed through an acrylic globe. Sperber’s thread spool works are superb examples of appropriation at its best, where the impact of the original works are integral to the new work, but the appropriating artist brings her own artistic brilliance to the recasting of the work.

What was absolutely awe inspiring were Warhol’s Details of Renaissance Paintings: Sandro Boticelli, Birth of Venus works. We only saw 5 of the 18 works, but both sank into the couches across from the display from the sheer impact of the silkscreens. The colour, detail and highlight variations showed obvious intention. I couldn’t get over how neither of us knew these works existed, and they are some of Warhol’s finest work.

After seeing Sperber and Warhol’s artwork, I’m dying to take a trip to Pitsburgh to visit the Warhol Museum. I also want to visit the Mattress Factory, a museum of contemporary art that I’ve started following on Twitter and is doing awesome things with social media tools like Brightkite.

Photos from our visit:

Today, I met with a fantastic woman who will be subletting my studio and had a somewhat startling realization that I’m finally doing what I want to be doing. During the meeting, we were sharing ideas for starting another artist building in the Waterloo Region, and I was saturating her with resources for commercial Realtors, people to contact and events she should attend. In a fleeting moment, I saw myself at work and understood why people see me as a bit of a networking nut. Somehow, my natural desire to help others, interest in everything and developed skill of storing resources in my brain’s RAM (BRAM?) have merged and the result is starting to feel a little bit magical.

During 2Picas‘ launch weekend, Adriana told me I would make a mint if I could ever teach other artists how to do as much as I do. The secret isn’t really big: I just have so much going on that even when I’m procrastinating, I’m still doing something. If I’m not sculpting, I’m working on 2Picas clients. If I’m not working on 2Picas clients, I’m putting in volunteer hours with Technology in the Arts or Globe Studios. Even my “down time” of movie-watching is a mini-project for me, as I’ve been casually studying movie remakes and getting my fill of the classics and must-see movies.

So why was I still startled that I’m doing what I love? Things moved extremely quickly last year, and with everything I was doing, I didn’t leave myself much time to step back and look at what I had accomplished. The only down time I have for thought is when I’m sculpting, and lately that’s resulted in more ideas for how I’m developing my sculptures rather than reflections on what I’ve done. I’ve just been forging forward, chasing dangling carrots and having a ton of fun getting there.

Because I’m also still doing some things that I don’t enjoy, it doesn’t quite feel like I’m where I want to be yet. And getting rid of some of those final ankle weights will be difficult. I’m constantly grateful for having wonderful, supportive friends who appreciate that I need to be a little reckless and more daring than usual right now. The people I’ve met through Twitter have also been both inspiring and supportive, reminding me both directly and through simply living and sharing their lives, that jumping is like skydiving: you just need to be prepared and have a parachute.

I’m not girly and emotional very often, but I’ve been missing Toronto wildly in the past few months.

I consider myself to be a Torontonian ex-pat. I grew up in Scarborough before it was absorbed by the Greater Toronto Area; when the Sky Dome was still called the Sky Dome and the CN Tower was still called the CN Tower; when the Eaton Centre was still home to Eaton’s, and Simpson’s was still in the Scarborough Town Centre.

About five years ago, I moved to Waterloo, lured by the availability of a desk job to fund my passions, and a cost of living which is a fraction of Toronto’s. And, although I can now comfortably call Waterloo “home”, I still look longingly at Toronto. In the past year, I’ve been there so often that some acquaintances assume I live there.

That’s not to say that Waterloo doesn’t have anything to offer. Instead of 401 Richmond, we have a more artist-centric centre with Globe Studios. OCAD and The Centre for Innovation Law & Theory host public lectures, but so does The Perimeter Institute (but, sadly, not free) and CIGI. Toronto has Adam & Eve Chocolatier and C’est What, but we have Vincenzo’s (which gets the best cheesecake I’ve ever had) and Wildcraft (absolutely heavenly mushroom fusilli, double-baked cheesecake, cheesecake lollipops, and the most respectable scotch/cognac/liqueur menu I’ve ever seen). CopyCamp was in Toronto, but CultureCamp will be birthed here. The spOtlight festival hosted by the Ontario Arts Council is being piloted in the Waterloo Region, and we have CAFKA and Cinematheque Waterloo; Toronto has TIFF and Nuit Blanche and its ongoing art scene.

But…somehow, the energy isn’t the same. The focus of the major institutions and cultural centres is different, as are the types of people feeding into and on them.

Grand River Transit is an absolute disgrace compared to the TTC, making it a chore to get around Kitchener-Waterloo without a car. And, despite the presence of the University of Waterloo, Laurier University, CIGI, The Perimeter Institute and RIM, we have no equivalent to The Centre for Social Innovation and certainly no critical mass to pull off something as awesome as #hohoto.

The Prosperity Council of the Waterloo Region and the stuff we’re doing at Globe Studios give me glimmers of hope that Waterloo might get shaken out of it’s sleepy-town mentality. But until that happens, I suspect I’ll still be spending many a weekend in the T-dot.

I’m still twitching from the painful nauseating lesson I learned today from what shall be my third and last attendance at a Cinematheque Waterloo screening. Although I’m still happy to have supported them with the purchase of an annual membership, they are now well-known enough to be attracting just the type of person I don’t want to have in a cinema with me.

Compared with my near-religious experience while watching Synecdoche, New York, this brought back all my misanthropic feelings and contempt for the inconsiderateness of others. Tonight’s audience had everything but a ringing cell phone—people talking through the live introduction, people arriving late, people [loudly] discussing the film during the film, someone wrestling with a shopping bag for a full minute, someone dropping their keys, and, of course, me hushing whoever was within a 3-seat radius.

The film, Jules et Jim, was passable, but overly long at a mere 105 minutes. After the war sequence, François Truffaut flexed his directoral muscles, then was simply trying too hard to be impressive. I quickly found myself uninterested in the story and unenchanted (sic) by the barrage of perspective shots which had no connection to the narrative. Oh, but wait! French New Wave is not supposed to be about narrative, non? Like with Hitchcock, I’m wholly unimpressed by experimentation for the sake of experimentation (especially when it was laughable or too little, too late).

And, to audiences, I say:

• I paid to see the movie, not to hear your commentary on it.
• You don’t need to remark aloud to your friend that the woman was wearing a watch on her ankle. We all saw it. Because we weren’t trying to have a conversation with our friends during the movie.
• I don’t care that you like the music.
• A movie is not the appropriate time to teach your kid about ships.
• Please don’t try to get that last little drop of soda out of your drink. I can’t hear the machine guns over your slurping.
• If your phone rings, turn it off. Do not simply answer the phone after your friend calls you for the second time.
• A movie with fast cuts, explosions and a sold-out theatre is not an appropriate venue to take your screaming infant.
• Opening a plastic bag of food you smuggled into the theatre is not less conspicuous if you do it slowly.

And, in conclusion, thank God for Zip.ca. Amen.

Now that the election is over and Harper’s arts funding cuts are on hold, I’m going to try again to step back for a while. I really need to focus on my sculpture, which has been simmering in the shadows for too long. I also have many things I’ve started or am contemplating to effect real change…some for everyone, some for myself. I must admit I’m a bit bored, disinterested and otherwise tired of getting stuck in loops of conversations about things (copyright, art, whatever) and either everyone preaching to the choir or talking at each other rather than with each other. Time to do and be.

I woke up this morning to a sense of dread when seeing the tweets waiting for me on my Blackberry. Last night, I had decided to go to bed rather than watching the election results, because I couldn’t do much about it by then anyway. And although that saved me from a night of worry, I spent most of today feeling slightly naueous because the Waterloo Region is now completely represented by the Conservatives. That means I’ll have to work much harder to ensure that the person and party elected to represent me will actually do so. And everyone who knows me knows I have nothing but time between my day job, sculpting, being my own agent, running one of the region’s arts newsletters and my copious amounts of volunteer work in the arts community.

So, in the interest of not seeing the glass as completely empty:

• At least the Conservatives only have a minority government
• At least I’m not the only one who isn’t comforted by the statement that “at least the Conservatives only have a minority government”
• At least the Conservatives’ attempt to slip arts budget cuts under the radar failed miserably and, instead, brought the issue to the forefront as an election issue.
• At least the fear of a majority Conservative government has resulted in a wave of strategic voting from all fronts.
• At least people are becoming more aware of how broken our electoral system is, and continuing to work against it.
• At least we don’t have to put up with quite as much campaigning as our neighbours down south.
• At least I still have art, chocolate and scotch.

This year, I have been more engaged with the political malström than ever before, thanks mainly to the Conservatives’ multiple hits to the arts sector.

And while I have blogged on various issues, met with two of the candidates in my riding (and didn’t hear back from the Green candidate), I am still unswayed from my opinion that there is no party which full represents me. Even at the candidate level, I am completely confident that I can be heard and understood by Cindy Jacobsen and that Andrew Telegdi would know exactly how to navigate through the political system. My unrest lies in my confidence for those two qualities not being with a single candidate.

I doubt I am alone in not being a partisan voter. I have talked to many people about how they plan on voting, and see two types of voters: die-hard supporters of a particular party vs. people who want to vote for the party which they see as the lesser of the evils. It feels like our political and representational system has become so broken that we now have political equivalents of religious tendencies, spanning from the evangelical to the church-goers to the agnostic to the atheists to the non-religious.

What the internet has made possible for this election is the push for strategic voting. Websites like Pair Vote, Anyone But Harper and Vote For Environment are doing what they can to prevent the Conservatives from winning a majority government, because Canada is not a Conservative party. The response to this has been split at every level, with some parties and some candidates supporting anti-Conservative voting, while some are aghast by the very thought of it.

What boggles my mind is why some parties feel that it is okay for them to run ads or have debate responses which are essentially “vote for me because I’m not the other party”, but also discourage us from voting strategically. Or why some of the people I’ve talked to are so religiously supportive of their party of choice that they would actually prefer another party win in their riding and/or win a majority government than “give their vote to any other party”. And while that isn’t an issue in all ridings, there are some where you would be giving your vote to another party by voting for yours.

Is all of this activity going to initiate another push for proprotional representation already in use by over 70 other countries, or for the preferential voting system used by Australia? I hope so. But I’m not holding my breath.

I’m feeling like I’m all over the place recently (probably because I am).

I heard back from Andrew Telegdi‘s office this week and we’re trying to arrange for a meeting soon. I’ve also contacted Cathy MacLellan for a meeting, but haven’t heard back yet. Along with Cindy Jacobsen (whom I’ve already met), they’re really the only candidates in my riding I’ll be trying to meet. I have no interest in wasting my time with the Conservative party, and I’m too busy to try to meet with the candidates for the other parties (which I doubt have a realistic chance at being elected).

You’ll probably mostly be seeing mini posts like this and bookmarks of other sources for the next week or so. I’m going to be very busy creating new sculptures, coordinating the upcoming events for Globe Studios and jump-starting an exciting new venture.

Other stuff happening:

The Writers Guild of Canada is organizing a pro-arts rally in front of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre at Front & John Street in Toronto on Wednesday, October 8 from 11:30am to 12:30pm. A PDF of the flyer can be found here.

The Department of Culture has also extended their Gone in 30 Seconds video contest deadline to 6pm on Oct 5th.