Thanks, but I’m an old hippie; I love everybody.
Which is a lot like loving nobody, but a little better.


- alex 2-14-2004 7:17 pm

see why we keep him around.
- bill 2-14-2004 7:22 pm

nice. v-day is the weirdest holiday. i scorn it whenever possible, but got really upset at my partner today for not doing anything at all. it's yet another example of how social pressures affect me. wish it weren't so. i finally admitted to myself at xmas this year that i really like giving and getting presents, even if it's part of the mass worship of consumerism.
- kiss machine 2-15-2004 2:52 am

I admire Alex's take on holidays -- seeing them as a challenge and rising to the occasion. But I get so angry at this mass emotional coercion. Christmas is the worst, but Valentine's is bad. The worst thing about this is not the feelings of dissatisfaction when we inevitably fail to achieve the prescribed emotional state on the prescribed date, but rather the implied denigration of our genuine, spontaneous feelings of love and goodwill that occur at non-scheduled intervals. The best way to combat Valentine's day blues is to remember to cherish the moment next time you and somebody else are feeling great together.
- sally mckay 2-15-2004 6:06 pm

thanks for reminding me about Toronto's Alex Wilson who worked passionately to remind us how tenuous our love affair with nature (and ourselves) really is...plant flowers, grow them and then give the blossoms to someone you love, xo.
rd
- rebecca 2-17-2004 3:47 am

Thanks to you, Rebecca. I had not been thinking about Alex Wilson much lately. There' s not a lot about him online, although The Culture of Nature was really pretty popular and influential. I did find this nice bit of writing from the days of Toronto's amalgamation, on an interesting website by Rick Bebout.

"The ultimate private space taken into the public world is the car. As Alex Wilson wrote in The Culture of Nature:

It's hard to imagine a technology that better discourages communal activity and an egalitarian experience of the non- human world. After all, the private car and the nuclear family have a parallel history. They are both founded on acts of exclusion. Within is radically different from without. The family and the car -- and the family car -- are bounded entities that discourage unregulated exchange.

Alex was talking about auto excursions into the "natural," non- human world. But the automobile is also firm defence against "communal activity and an egalitarian experience" of the all too human world of the city. To people in cars streets are not places, they're routes; the people out there aren't people but "pedestrians" always in the way, on a bad day maybe roadkill.

It's no surprise that the latest lightning rod for middle class angst over the dangers of downtown is squeegee kids. They rush in on that most sacred shell of privacy in public space, the car. They touch it, they get it wet; heaven knows where that filthy squeegee (or those hands!) have been.

Squeegee kids are urban contagion epitomized."