Winnipeg Folk Festival, Bird’s Hill Park, Saturday July 9. There isn’t much to report. It was a sunny windy day, 32 degrees, humidex in the 40’s. I stayed home, visited my parents, shopped, cut the grass because it wasn’t raining and I was mainly in the shade, and didn’t visit the Festival until after 8:00 PM. I didn’t go backstage. I saw that the entrance path across Snowberry Field had dried up at one end, where the asphalt ends as the trail emerges onto the field, but there was still a bog where the trail goes into trees again. There was a lot of mud and standing water on the path towards Shady Grove and the backstage.
By the time I left for the site, the forecast had shifted to include a chance of a severe thunderstorm. When I got home this morning, I checked the radar again. There were storms that seemed to form over the corner of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and North Dakota and track northeast over the lakes, missing Winnipeg and Bird’s Hill. So far Sunday has been hot, cloudy and windy but the rain has stayed away.
I spent my free time at the Bur Oak stage, reading and then went on shift at Site West. There was still standing water in spots around the Bluestem stage, but it had dried out a lot. There was mud in the record tent and the family tent.
I spent my shift around the Firefly Palace which is the nighttime use of the family entertainment stage. During the day there are games, including hula hoops, juggling with clubs and plates, frisbees, soccer balls etc. The Family area crew had stored gear under a tarp but the evening patrons had hula hoops and juggling articles and were using them. There were some steel pegs in the field to secure some log stumps. I don’t know the daytime use but the logs and spikes were hazards in the dark. Fence-jumpers, damages fences drunks, lost kids/parents (usually can’t navigate back from the port-a-potties in the dark. Lots of activity, not boring. One of the shows was music played by a VJ against a Bollywood film for a video dance party.
Didn’t hear any other music, had a good time.
WFF 2005 Friday
Friday July 8, 2005. Weather, site, a little music, mainly a rant about the way Festival management deals with the site.
WFF 2005 Thursday
Thursday July 7, 2005, Winnipeg Folk Festival. My report on weather, site, music and whatever else I want to blog about.
WFF 2005 – Showtime
The Winnipeg Folk Festival starts today. I am again a volunteer on the Site Security crew. I have gone to the orientation meeting and to the T-Shirt evening. I have my pass and my schedule.
The Festival has become a personal event, perhaps a ritual of summer for me and for the majority of fans. It is a multi-layered event, bringing people into contact for a few days. I have come to believe that the music has become subordinate to the event – there is certainly none of the silence and reverent focus on the performer and the music that is found in concert settings.
The weather appears to be very good, generally sunny and hot, although the forecast for today includes possible thundershowers.
The site is soggy. Southern Manitoba has been pounded by rain and heavy rain last Wednesday basically led to huge surface flooding in many areas, as the saturated ground refused to take and more, and drainages were overwhelmed. The Festival site in Bird’s Hill Park is high and dry, on a sandy esker but the silty clay topsoil that holds down the grass on the festival site has been saturated. In other years, I have seen it turn to gumbo after a half hour of rain, but dry in a day.
I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the line-up; I trust that I will be entertained, and I look forward to some moments of joy and insight.
Happy Now?
Yesterday, in a happy coincidence, I read an article in Spiked magazine and the entry on happiness in John Ralston’s Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion.
Saul argued that the meaning of happiness has slipped, and that in modern times we tend to look for the wrong kind of happiness in the wrong places. In Aristotle’s ethics, happiness meant human harmony, and ethical actions were actions that produced that kind of happiness. In modern liberal discourse, happiness means basic material comfort in a prosperous well-organized society. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that Americans had a natural right to pursuit of happiness, he meant the right to work for their own prosperity and to work collectively for that kind of society. When we say that politicians have a responsibility to promote happiness in that sense, we mean to promote laws and policies that promote a prosperous well-organized society.
Happiness has another meaning. Saul suggests that as Western society achieved the goals of prosperity and organization, “the word’s meaning declined into the pursuit of pleasure or an obscure sense of inner contentment”. He cites a comment attributed to the late French president Charles DeGaulle – “happiness is for idiots”. He unpacks this as describing the fact that the political and economic processes of Western society are losing their focus. Those processes should be aimed at maintaining prosperity and well-being, not contentment. People are coming to expect the rest of the world to make them feel good and blaming “society” and life for being uncertain, risky and messy.
Master & Commander
A comprehensive historical and literary review of the work of Patrick O’Brien – the Aubrey and Maturin novels in the New Criterion by Robert Messenger. O’Brien is one of my favourite writers. This review emphasizes some of the history. I like the novels in which Maturin has the chance to act on his interests as naturalist and explorer. That part of the series was captured in some scenes in the movie version of Master and Commander, The Far Side of the World (which are two separate books in the series, merged into one movie).
Pluralism, Dutch-Style
Last Sunday (June 26) I was listening to CBC One’s Sunday morning (radio) show, and I heard the lovely sound of Dutch accents, the accents of my stubborn parents, who shaped my contrarian tendencies. The Dutch accents belonged to interviewees in a documentary about the social conflicts that propelled the murderers of politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. There was more about Van Gogh, less about Fortuyn. Both had been critical of the way that immigrant communities – specifically immigrants from Morocco and Turkey – were relating to Dutch society. Neither was a conventional white European racist. Both were modernists, opposed to immigrants on secular questions. While Fortuyn is often described as a right-wing populist, he was a libertarian and his conflicts with Muslim immigrants were initially personal. He was gay, and he criticized the homophobia of the Moroccan imam Khalil el-Moumni. Van Gogh was a friend and supporter of Fortuyn, as well as the immigrant feminist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Both questioned the cultural values of Muslim fundamentalists, and Dutch immigration and social policy. Their central argument was that fundamentalists were exploiting Dutch tolerance to create a hostile and intolerant subculture.
Happy Birthday Jean Paul Sartre
Some of my web feeds are linking to articles about Jean Paul Sartre on what would have been his 100th birthday. The Online Edition of the Independent had one. The Boston Globe had another. Sartre gets a nod from Julian Baggini in the Sunday Herald, promoting David Hume for the BBC poll on the Greatest Philosopher. And Baggini has a Python quote: “David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel”. Which may be true, although Hume was pretty boring, for a Scot.
Infinite Cornucopia
The online edition of the New Criterion has an article by Roger Kimball appraising the work of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski. It emphasizes his critique of Marxism, as practical politics, ideology and philosophy, which has made him popular with American conservatives and some of the religious conservative intelligentsia. Much of the material about Kolakowski on the Internet in English emphasizes his critiques of Communist and liberal/modern ideas in support of religious and conservative ideology, which is a very shallow approach.
Kolakowski stated a proposition known as the Law of the Infinite Cornucopia. It is summarized in a Wikipedia entry which seems to have parasitically used by dozens of other Web “encyclopedias”. I haven’t found the book, article or speech with the original comment. The Wikipedia summay quoted here appears to have been taken from historian Timothy Garton Ash’s paraphrase, in an essay or review called “Neo-Pagan Poland” published in the New York Review of Books January 11, 1996:
…. for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it.
A historian’s application of this law might be that a plausible cause can be found for any given historical development. A biblical theologian’s application of this law might be that for any doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of biblical evidence to support it.
That’s an elegant statement of the capacity of human beings to rationalize to fortify an inituitive, emotional belief.
Atheism and Morals
The second of Alasdair MacIntyre’s lectures published in The Religious Significance of Atheism (I discussed the first lecture in my preceding entry, The Fate of Theism) was Atheism and Morals. His approach was to consider one of the key claims of theists, that without belief in God, morality collapses, expressed in Dostoyevsky’s saying that without God, everything is permitted.
His answer as an observer of life and history, is that morality exists independently of a religious belief system. While some of the atheists of the Victorian area led notoriously unconventional social lives, the majority were moral, principled, conventional, socially conservative. And on the other hand good Christians on both sides in World War II firebombed civilian cities. The repressive morality of the Victorian era was a secular morality of respectability and convention, justified and advanced by atheist utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Bentham, as much as by religious thinkers.