veganarky

The rise in (commercial) popularity of mixed martial arts style (blood) sports has been a s sporadic and peripheral interest for around a decade. In particular as I interchanged living in North America and Australia. I watched debates in Canada in the context of attempts to hold events there, and more-recently Australia. My reflections on masculinity, in particular crises of masculinity, is where this interest is mostly situated. This post is not necessarily a coalescing of thoughts, rather prompted by a recent Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event in Melbourne recently. It received signi…

My friend Sherbs time came to an end today, after living with breast cancer for a few years. This has struck me in myriad ways, some quite unexpected and at times a little overwhelming —irrespective that it was expected any day, after her move into hospice care a week or so ago. I am struggling a little with words, and some feel just wrong. For example, in trying to describe Sherbs’ wonderful smile — which light up rooms, what comes to mind is ‘infectious’… In part, an awareness of how I need to work on processing aspects of life (and death) has come to the fore a…

I was at a bar recently which had an arcade machine with a punching bag. It would display a score related to how hard it was hit. Over the course of a couple hours I watched different groups of people using it, three in particular. What I found of interest was how they performed masculinity with regard to their perceptions of themselves and their perceptions of others perceptions of themselves. In essence, they were acting in accordance with patriarchal biopolitics. What came to be of most interest was the second group, or more specifically an individual who parlayed with the machine on his ow…

ome time 2007 I changed the design of this website to incorporate the sunflower image that has become the symbol of veganarky, of what it means to me. The image is of one of a small number of similar sculptures of sunflowers in Front Street, Toronto, Ontario (I have made some minor modifications to saturation and hue, and to remove any background). I have now found some words to describe part of what the image represents for me. As a starting point, the sunflower is an almost a universal symbol for and of veganism. Prior to using this image, I had made a mashup of the green anarchy (sunflower)…