Welcome to Open Journal

This is a journal of communications, media and culture. As Neil Balan, fellow student and contributor once said, "Think of anything that mediates anything, and how, and that's what we're into."

Open was started by a couple of graduate students from Concordia University in Montreal as a place for friends and strangers to publish their work, to talk about work, and to build an architecture of dialogue in and around all of our closed texts. At Open and Touchbasic we continue to explore options provided by the open source software community in order to further develop our site and our ability to offer innovative connections. We publish letters, essays, short articles, stories, poems, photographs and webart. To submit your work email: risa AT open . touchbasic . com.

Think of this as polyvocal production, or as an interesting tool for developing writers. However you think of us, we're glad to have you!

So please feel free to add your ideas and questions to these texts as 'footnotes,' or to demonstrate your pleasure or dislike with karma votes, or to jump into the fray on Open forums.


> posted on 09.16.04 @ 12:24 PM CST [read more..] [No Footnotes]
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Pedestrian and Moto Methodologies

Today Professor Rae Staseson sent me a link to this website, Kidd of Speed , about long rides into the ghost town at Chernobyl. 'Elena' lives in Kiev, and rides her motorcycle, and tells histories with photos and her own sweetsad wit. I read her chapters about Chernobyl, and digging at WWII battlegrounds , and the Orange Revolution, and I thought this is what the Internet is for.
I also thought about a paper I had written last year about a Pedestrian methodology- about ways of moving up to and around a subject that build on the methods described by Meaghan Morris in Things to Do With Shopping Centers and Doreen Massey in A Global Sense of Place.
> posted on 04.03.05 @ 06:56 PM CST [read more..] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

Demonstration at the Lebanese Consulate- Syria out of Lebanon

> posted on 03.23.05 @ 09:21 AM CST [read more..] [Karma: 0 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

this is only speculation

Work has been most interesting these days. Alas I am not on the Iran file anymore. But I gotta say it is not looking pretty. I would not be surprised to see an Iranian �domestic resistance group� commit acts of sabotage at Iranian nuclear facilities if and when the negotiations with the EU and the US break down. Any acts by the US directly could wreck havoc in the state building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I will never rule out action by Israel. But hey, this is only speculation.

> posted on 03.23.05 @ 08:46 AM CST [read more..] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

There's a civil war going on and it's easy to forget.

The cascading light of the early morning sun awoke me with a start: I thought
I'd overslept my alarm, and lost in the confused chaos of an interrupted dream
it took me a few moments to realize where I was and why exactly it was I wanted
to get up early. Then, with the excitement with which a child awakes on
Christmas morning (and others on St. Patrick's), I walked outside my room, and
stopped with mouth agape at the massiveness of the Annapurna range spread before
my eyes. Nowhere else on earth matches the relief of this view: I stood a mere
thirty kilometers away, but in that distance, the land ruptures from 500 meters
to 8000, and for those not into metric, that's a 24,000 foot difference.

> posted on 03.23.05 @ 08:40 AM CST [read more..] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

In the Wake

Dudes,
I'll skip the preliminaries regarding the past few weeks since most of you
heard one way or another that I made it over to Sri Lanka. In short, an
epically long but idyllic train ride across the whole of India followed by a
quick flight over the Gulf of Mannar brought me towards the palm fringed
southern coast of the island for a few days of surfing amidst the backdrop of
tropical lowlands, shantytowns and buddhist temples. The beauty of the place
intoxicated me immediately and I decided that exploring the cultural and natural
beauty could keep me busy for several weeks. A transcendental early
morning surf upon arrival reacquainted me with mother Ocean, lost to me since I
left Seal Harbah. But enough of overly romanticized imagery which I've always
made too much of anyway, and I now realize is as inconsequential and impermanent as
the rest of life.

On 26 December at around 9 AM local time, the Eurasian and Austrailian
tectonic plates northwest of Sumatra ground past each other for a full seven
minutes, releasing a vibration that registered 9.0 on the Richter scale,
reportedly the fourth most powerful the earth has experienced since 1900. The
consequent displacement released a surge of energy radiating outward from its
source across thousands of kilometers of the Indian Ocean in an arc ranging from
Thailand to the Maldives.
> posted on 02.12.05 @ 10:06 AM CST [read more..] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

Stories from my mother's side.

Follow this Link ... StoriesFromMyMothersSide

A Christmas, Christmukkah, Chrismukkaramawanza story thing for my family and for the rest of you, dedicated to my sisters Megan and Brianna. I would love to see this as a book someday, something my Great Grandma could hold. Until then, it would be nice if you emailed this link to people who might like the story. I've kept working on it, I'll post the next draft of the text soon. Be Well, R.
> posted on 02.12.05 @ 09:51 AM CST [read more..] [Karma: 4 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

When the Backroom and the Boadroom Meet in the Living Room: Organizing "Transforming Spaces"

This paper was written from my reflections, or lessons learnt, from conference organizing. I'm not really sure what to do with it, or think of it, but I do think it's an interesting read.

Held November 21-23, 2003 in Montréal, Quebec, Transforming Spaces: Girlhood Agency and Power was the first national conference on girls and girlhoods. With the goal of increasing communication, collaboration and change in the social realm, this conference event sought to bring together girls, young women and women working in diverse fields. Whether individuals identified as grassroots activists, academics, artists, policy makers, educators, community practitioners, youth, or in multiple intersecting categories, this conference was intended to create a space for dialogue between these often disparate groups. Attended by approximately 265 people from around the world, over 135 workshops, papers and/or presentations were given that aimed to transform spaces while simultaneously building bridges and increasing cross-sectoral collaboration on issues pertinent to girls and girlhoods.

I was the conference coordinator of this event; a graduate student, a member of the coordinating committee, and employee of one of the core partners, POWER Camp National. I was involved in organizing this event and participated in multiple, often contentious ways. I have hesitations recording my reflections to paper. Not every person involved in the conference project is going to agree with my perceptions. Not every person is going to like the tensions I’ve highlighted, partially because I am articulating them to an external audience and partially because I am privileging some conflicts at the expense of others. But as scholars, conference organizing is something that we will most likely be involved in at some point in time in our careers. This paper is an attempt to capture my experiences of a year long organizing process, working primarily with academics and grassroots organizers. I’ve made mistakes, done some things well, and in documenting these processes, I do so in hope that others can learn about the gratifying yet complicated, sticky and political mess that organizing can become.
> posted on 12.15.04 @ 09:50 AM CST [read more..] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

reach out and touch

In the book of Chinese parables I was given so long ago I only remember it always being there,
there is one wide, red page where Panda bears sit around a table in heaven.
They help each other eat, laughing casually, with 3 foot long chopsticks.
While the panda bears in hell, sitting around the same table, with the same tools,
make a mess and go hungry, all trying to feed themselves.
> posted on 12.09.04 @ 06:05 PM CST [read more..] [Karma: 1 (+/-)] [1 Footnote]

summer is ending in patagonia

ecuador´s southern jungle has been overtaken by the banana
companies. for about 8 hours only banana trees and dirty
little banana towns roll by. my clothes were drenched from
the humidity and my own sweat, but the campesinos were out
hacking giant loads of bananas out of the tress, loading
them on to rickety trucks and taking them somewhere to be
sent all over the world. couldn´t help but be reminded of
marquez´magically real ruthless insidious gringo banana
company in hundred years of solitude as the dole and bonita
emblems popped up from time to time. arrival into peru
brings a change from putrid low hot jungle to dry arid hot
coastal desert, and they say not to buy soles on the
ecuadorian side as they are all falsos, this after I bought
20 dollars worth of suspiciously new currency from a nice
man on the bus. ah well theyll make great souvenirs.

> posted on 12.09.04 @ 04:21 PM CST [read more..] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

Me and the Mega corp.

Have you ever worked for a mega corporation? There is something that happens to your brain as you learn the manual and are drilled in the peppy but all-too serious collective rhetoric. It is simply how things are done, and everyone gets comfortable shuttling along following a plan from above. To survive the numbness of having the part of your brain that can see good ways of doing things made subserviant to a monstrously unchangeable system we started drinking heavily and rubbing up against each other at office parties. The hypocracy becomes apparent to those inside the company pretty quickly. But once you have a little invested in the job, and they have you believing you are valued, and that there will be legitimate opportunities for advance, you get defensive. The way it is done makes sense, the surfaces they show you are not artificial- they are, they have to be, real. In the end I was glad to be fired, and two years later the poor guy who had fired me was fired, and a year later I went back and the sweet guy who had hired both of us had been sacked as well. It took a while for me to shake the corporate brain frame, and then i was happy to no longer be selling my energy to a machine that would never see me.
> posted on 12.06.04 @ 01:43 PM CST [read more..] [Karma: 4 (+/-)] [2 Footnotes]

Back in Instanbul

Hope this finds all well:
The popular myth is that Asia begins on the other side of the Bosphorus, but
in reality its not until you reach the Central Anatolian platau that the
countryside and people around you start to become noticeably different, a hint
of the Orient. Anatolia- the Turkish heartland, a brutal landscape dominated by
strings of mountain ranges, decaying caravanserai that once sheltered the trade
routes to Iran, and every now and then the emergence of massive volcanoes whose
apparitions seem to float in suspension on the horizon. The people are hardier,
more religious and bear a more noticeable resemblence and to their Central Asian
ancestors than their bretherin in the west. Winter comes early here, and since I
bailed on the last week of my language course about two weeks ago the
temperatures in the east have been frigid and snowfall continual.

> posted on 12.06.04 @ 01:10 PM CST [read more..] [Karma: 4 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]

re: Globe and Mail Front Page Horror, Letters to the Editor

The Saturday edition from September 10 displayed a near full page photo of the results of events at Beslan in southern Russia; this Saturday's edition, October 2, offered a chain of letters both supporting and chastizing the lead page image from Friday of a young boy, dead in his father's arms in Iraq.

Following the assertion of one reader, looking at these images we may in fact lose a bit of our humanity. But we should not allow some imposed index of proper 'decency' to prevent and regulate their publication, as familiar and strange and difficult as they may be. Consenting that these images are de-humanizing is a sensible reaction; it is a reconciliation with the horror depicted. Refusing to provide and display these images is far more problematic in the context of the complicated and difficult series of events that falls under the banner of 'Iraq' .

Nakedness and death need to demand our pity, and need to be attended to by our privileged eyes.
I don't like the picture either, but I acknowledge it has a statement to make and a story to tell, which we, in complicity and criticism, need to negotiate and address in order to hear, feel, and see events that are both beyond and internal to our lives. To not look - to not behold the most minimum witness - is disgraceful and callous.

> posted on 10.05.04 @ 06:59 PM CST [read more..] [Karma: 2 (+/-)] [No Footnotes]