Archive for February 2006

Feb 28 1986

Friday 28 February 1986

Good day. Not very much homework. I played UNO with Michelle.

Feb 27 1986

Thursday 27 February 1986

I was real tired today. I almost fell asleep today – in school!

Feb 26 1986

Wednesday 26 February 1986

Left school early. I cried at the funeral. Went in a limo! Went to bed at 12:00.1

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1. I was up late because of the wake, in which many people got drunk. My specific memory is being under the dinning room table and laughing hard at the stories being told by my grandfather’s old friend and one time neighbor, Dr. Felix, who’d also served as the family doctor to my aunts and uncles. I remember finding one story particularyly funny, and that one being the tale of my uncle’s hunting injury, when he’d been shot in the leg as a young man.

This was the first and last time I’d been in a limosine, driven to the funeral from the funeral home with my parents. The funeral itself was a strange affair – the church was packed (as my grandfather had been prominent) and there’d been more than one priest presiding, one of whom was a large man with a loud voice, and more than one person said, ‘he didn’t need a microphone’. When my other grandfather died in 1993, that funeral was a even stranger affair, as we all sat in a room off to the side of the usual … the pews reserved for people who weren’t members of the family, sequestered as we were. I’d have to turn my head to see the orations, look through the partitions in the wall. However, at this point, 7 years earlier, I sat in the pews next to my relatives in the Catholic church, and at the end, when they were wheeling the casket out and down the aisle, I let myself cry as the full weight of ‘I’ll never see him again’ hit me.

Feb 25 1986

Tuesday 25 February 1986

Same as Feb 24. Went to home. It snowed all day. He looks so good in that coffin.1

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1. I can see that I wrote this after the fact, filling in the events of Monday and Tuesday in the past tense. Thus, ‘same as Feb 24’ – we went to Weymouth, we went to the funeral home, my father taught me that relatives might want to shake my hand and say ‘mes sympathie’. I forget if he taught me what, if any, my response should be. The day before, the discussion around the kitchen table, my uncle talking about how my Grandfather had a loathing for funerals three days after a death, and how this was nonetheless what was going to take place.

At the funeral home that evening, it was kind of boring, kind of strange. My dead grandfather in the open casket to my left as I sat there and watched all the old people come to pay their respects. All very solemn and weird in the way that life’s rituals are weird when you’re a kid and you don’t quite get it. Around this time there was a drive with my Mom, I sitting in the passenger seat ‘up front’ and she saying the usual, ‘you can be happy he’s in a better place’ and perhaps this was the time, because we were talking about death, that I told her that sometimes I’m so curious about Heaven I can’t wait to get there, which she found a little alarming, of course. Now I have no interest in any of it whatsoever.

A year ago, I had this diary out and my sister found it and read some of it, finding it funny. At dinner that night my mother read from it and this day’s entry in particular made her laugh: ‘he looks so good in that coffin’. What I remember is looking at the still face of my grandfather, the mystery of death, and lightly touching his face to experience it in some way. But then I felt weird, because death=germs and all that, and I had a spell as a germophobe at around this time, during the mid-80s, so afterward, at my grandmother’s, I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d touched my grandfather and felt gross, because it felt shameful, and I washed my hands more than once. What I do remember was the coolness, and that lingering feeling of uncleanliness, and how I should have a more respectful feeling for my dead grandpa than simply feeling he was now gross.

Feb 24 1986

Monday 24 February 1986

Went to Weymouth1. Everybody was sad. That night we went to the Funeral home.

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1. Weymouth NS is where my grandparents lived.

Feb 23 1986

Sunday 23 February 1986

Good and bad. Pretty good at beginning and bad at end. Grandpa died today.1

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1. Some notes:

The Buddha was born in 2777 (according to my standardized chronology) and was 12 years old when Confucius was born in 2789. Confucius, it is said, ‘enjoyed putting ritual vases on the sacrifice table.’ (Wikipedia). This would have been in the 2790s. The Buddha left home to go on his journey of Enlightenment in 2806 at age 29, two years after Confucius began studying in 2804, as it is said, ‘At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning’. The Buddha attained Enlightenment in 2812 at age 35, and Confucius tells us that in the year 2819 he took his stand. The Buddha died in 2857 at 80 and two years later, Confucius writes, ‘At seventy, I follow all the desires of my heart without breaking any rule.’ Two years after that, in 2861 he died at age 72. Or perhaps he died at 71, before reaching his birthday that year.

Two-thousand four hundred and sixty five years later, in 5326, (otherwise known as 1986) my grandfather died at age 71, a man whose name is unknown to history, another blip in that great span of time between those ancients and ourselves. He is memory to me now, more legend than human to my cousins born after him, one of whom will be twenty this year. My grandfather was born to a lumberjack and housewife a few weeks into the events we now call World War I. At 31, (my present age) he saw my father for the first time, a baby born two weeks after Easter and two weeks before Hitler would shoot himself in a Berlin basement. Thirty years after that, I would be born, and now I’m at the age when I should be (according to this pattern) producing the fellow whose child will remember me twenty years after my death. If I were to die at my grandfather’s age, that would put this grandchild’s memory in the year 2066. But this pattern appears to be broken, since there’s no chance I’ll be having children anytime soon, and perhaps this also means I have more than 40 years left to live.

My father was in Moncton, my mother called him to tell him the news. I’d been playing with my Lego boat, my sister near me. She recieved the phone call and sat on the couch in the living room, and when she hung up told us that he’d passed away. My sister, crouching to my right, sprang up and ran to my mother and begain sobbing. I had a quiet and stunned reaction, yet joined the hug happening on the couch. The phone call to my father, away in some motel, and so to this day I don’t know how he reacted to the news his father had died. It’s also something I don’t feel it’s any of my business to find out.

It was a bit of surprise, since the week previous he’d been on the mend. The previous Thursday, when I went to the doctor’s regarding my pencil-wound, my mother and he had talked about how he’d been getting better, because the doctor was in fact my uncle. And yet fate intervened on this weekend in February, and a lifetime of smoking and drinking had worn out a body not destined to live to the Canadian life-expectancy of the time, which was 75. That’s what I remember thinking, as I’d recently learned about those statistics – that he’d died three years short of when ‘he was supposed to’, and yet that three year measure would only have been acurate had he made it to his next birthday that September. Had he made it to that birthday, he would have met his latest Grandchild born that August, a boy, a cousin to myself, the first son of my uncle, the third of my grandfather’s sons. At the news of my cousin’s birth I was happy since the responsibility of carrying on the family line no longer rested solely with me.

Feb 22 1986

Saturday 22 February 1986

Good day. Made catapult for “Missle Man”. Dad went to Moncton.

Feb 21 1986

Friday 21 February 1986

Fun day! A and S came. Had snowfall fight and played with computer.1

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1. A was my sister’s best friend, but S I don’t remember at all. Apparantly it snowed twenty years ago today, and the computer refered to was a Commodore 64, which I still have in the basement, and it still works to. I set it all up last in 2002 because I was working on a project that used it.

Feb 20 1986

Thursday 20 February 1986

Good day. School strike began. Had to wait a half hour at doc’s1.

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1. I went to the doctor’s with regard to my pencil wound. He said it was no big deal. By this time it was already dark with mark of the lead, he said it might stay that way, or something to that effect. He may of used hydrogen peroxide on it, but I don’t really remember. At age 11, a half-hour seemed like a long time.

Last month, I waited 45 minutes for my dentist appointment, watching Paul Martin give one of his pathetic campaign speeches. When I got home, I casually noticed the note I’d made on the calendar, which read ‘11.30’, and here I’d thought it’d been for 11. ‘That’s why I waited so long!’ I said to myself.

Feb 19 1986

Wednesday 19 February 1986

Good and bad. Michelle jammed a pencil in my arm.1 Just math for homework. Had fun playing with “Missile Man”.

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1. Michelle, my sister, was doing her math homework on the floor in the living room. I was bugging her and she got so angry with me she stabbed me in my left arm with her pencil. Well, she was trying to hit me and forgot she was holding a pencil, I guess we could say. It didn’t hurt so much but it was kind of shocking to see the pencil hanging from this wound, it’s lead tip embedded beneath the skin. She got into a world of trouble which I appreciated, since it was usually I who was in trouble.

To this day, I have a mark there, a little gray spot. It’s the only type of tattoo I ever received.

Feb 18 1986

Tuesday 18 February 1986

Good day. Not much homework, just math. Finally found sweatshirt that had lost. Finished last night’s homework this morning.

Feb 17 1986

Monday 17 February 1986

Good day but lots of homework. At end of day terrible. I didn’t want to do it. Saw end of movie.1

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1. Didn’t want to do my homework, whatever that was. Probably math or French. Movie referred to was The Never Ending Story

Feb 16 1986

Sunday 16 February 1986

Went to see Grandpa in I.C.U. Every time I saw him sleeping z-z-z. Had good diner. Got home at 9 pm

Feb 15 1986

Saturday 15 February 1986

Made Lego boat. Named it “Missile Man” Had miny lauchment. We thought Grandpa might die that night.1 Made a spare on Bowling.2

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1.I built this boat out of Lego, wrote ‘Missile Man’ on a peice of paper, which I taped to it’s bow. I playfully held a launch with some lego bottle or something. I remember playing with this while Airwolf was on tv. During the time my mother got a phone call; one of the relatives in Kentville calling in with a report on my ill Grandfather’s condition.
2. I used to bowl on Saturday afternoons. I didn’t enjoy it too much, as waiting around for my turn I found boring.

Offensive Images

A reflection on offensive images in the news:

1st Week of February:
Islam, a religion as iconoclastic as early Judaism (golden calf) says: no pictures. Thus, representing the prophet is enough to inspire protests with regard to mediocre cartoons published four months ago.

2nd Week of February:
1. Photographs from Abu Ghriab, published two years ago, inspire outrage within the United States and the rest of the world. More photos from time of the first batch have been leaked to an Australian newspaper, likely to inspire more outrage. At the same time, a scandal brews in England due to the video (animated images) of soldiers beating Iraqis three years ago.

2. The actor in (what I consider to be offensive) ads for Alexander Keith’s is arrested for owning kiddie porn. Thus, he’s in legal trouble over our culture’s verboten images. Labatt’s, which owns Keith’s, announces they are pulling the ads, because they have suddenly been recontextualized in a way that makes them offensive … the taboo aura surrounding the kiddie porn pictures now influence the animated image of the actor stereotyping the Scottish as beligerent.

The Maze

In John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards the chapter ‘Life in a Box – Specialization and the Individual’ concerns itself with our Modern Selves, and he writes:

While our mythology suggests that society is like a tree with the ripening fruits of professional individualism growing think upon it, a more accurate image would show a maze of corridors, blocked by endless locked doors, each one leading in or out of a small cell. (p. 507)

This image has thoroughly permeated my conscious understanding of this civilization, so much so that I saw it reflected at work and brought it up in the essay I submitted to a magazine recently. Two weekends ago while channel surfing, I stopped when I saw a maze on the screen – the overhead shot from The Shining of the garden maze.

In a flash I saw that movie as a metaphor for our civilization. There’s the maze mentioned by Saul, and there’s the Hotel, shining psychic energy on the humans. The Hotel represents History, a looming structure, a legacy, built on the graves of people forgotten and ignored. The Hotel shines violence into the mind of The Man, who goes on a rampage and attacks women and children. Our civilization then is made up of violent minded men who excuse their actions by blaming History, saying, ‘its human nature’ or ‘its their fault because of something they did years ago (i.e. ‘Saddam gassed his people)’. The Buddhists would see a good example of Karma. Your actions past and present wear a new pattern into your life, so that it becomes your future action. And in The Shining, Nicholson is told he was always the caretaker, the photo at the end suggesting a karmic rebirth.

On February 8th’s The Colbert Report Alan Dershowitz suggested that we need to license cartoonists and comics, which I find reprehensible, but not that surprising coming from this apologist for American Empire. It’s clear enough that Dershowitz’s ethical compass has lost its magnetism. He was talking about these stupid cartoon protests. Dershowitz’s offensive comment was followed in turn for a commercial: ‘own the best horror movie of 2005; Saw II’.

Why would you want to? But of course, this all makes sense given how violent our society is: Dershowitz saying we need to license comics, he who has advocated the use of torture ‘in extreme situations’ and goes on to argue the neo-con idea that the war on terrorism will never end – that we’re living in the la-la-land of danger and violence and so no more trips to the candy store, no more right to say offensive things, no more release by making fun of assholes like him. And after this rosy vision of our civilization, where we’ve come after hundreds of years of trying to make life a good thing for all, and being told that we defeated Hitler so that we can all live in freedom and happiness, we can enjoy the freedom to purchase two-hours of fictionalized trauma to enjoy with our significant others, or worse yet, all by ourselves.

And yet, there is The Shining made 26 years ago, to show us our society. Our society where violence is causal while condemned with shallow words. Yet somehow our culture manages to create individuals like Gil Fronsdal (a Buddhist teacher) and John Ralston Saul; individuals not seemingly integrated into the violent aspects of our (North American) society. For that matter, there are people like Richard Simmons.

Somehow our culture manages to create criticism which tries to keep these forces of violence and madness in check. People like Dershowitz obviously don’t see the advantage of this. Licensed cartoonists would not be allowed to express the wildness of human imagination, nor would they be allowed to be critical. We need the outlet in our society to be offensive – it’s what’s keeps us from burning down embassies, and which strengthens our minds so that what we find offensive doesn’t inspire violence despite all the cultural signals which imply that is exactly what we should do.

More on the Maze in The Shinning

Feb 14 1986

Friday 14 February 1986

Valentines! Had fun at party. Movie was great!1 Didn’t see it all of it.2 I think I told D3 off.

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1.The movie (as previously mentioned) was The Never Ending Story which we watched on video as part of our Valentine’s day ‘party’ which meant time off of class and probably some sweets. I recall that The Never Ending Story excited both my imagination and touched me emotionally. At the time I had a total crush on the Princess, who I learned via Google is named Tami Stronach and is now a dancer in New York City. Now I look at her image from the time and see nothing more than a child, who was 2 years older than I was, and I find it strange to think I once imagined love based on this kid.
2. School ended before the movie did. We watched the rest at a later date.
3. D was the older brother of one of my classmates, who used to bully me. ‘Telling him off’ only meant that I stood up to him.

The Cartoons

Last week saw a lot of coverage in mainstream media about the protests over some stupid drawings. In the Saturday (11 Feb) Globe and Mail, the editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon argued that they weren’t showing them because they didn’t feel they added anything important to the story, while justifying the occasional photo of bombed bodies on Israeli buses. (In that case I’m thinking of a 2003 front page). He wrote:

‘As one cartoonist said earlier this week, this is not a matter of self-censorship. It is a question of editing. Every day we are faced with similar decisions, particularly in choosing photos. Do we show a naked woman? Do we show a dead baby? Do we show bodies blown apart by a suicide bomber or other samples of the carnage that come our way regularly? Most often the answer is we do not. Only when we feel an offensive photo is absolutely necessary to the understanding of the story do we loosen our restraints.’

This point makes no sense, given that a full understanding of protests about drawings should require that one see them for oneself. I could take the mainstream media’s self-righteousness seriously if this were not the age of the internet and Google. You want to see ’em, go ahead and see them. The same goes for pictures of naked women (naked men aren’t offensive?) dead babies, and carnage (orgish.com?). The media has used arguments of self-censorship and editing to draw us a picture of their own obsolesce.I’ve been wondering about how many people have actually seen the images on the net. As that’s part of what Goodreads is about, I almost sent the link a week ago but on the other hand, I didn’t want to be part of the game of offending people. I’ve been wishing this story would just go away like they always do. Remember two years ago when Mel Gibson was supposedly an anti-semite?

Yet I can relate to being offended by images. In 2002 John Paul II came to Toronto for the World Youth Day and I went and saw him give Mass, since I grew up a Catholic and had seen his photograph at my grandmother’s house for as long as I could remember, in addition to it being very popular in the area. There was a feeling of obligation, mixed with nostalgia I suppose. The night before the Mass, I went to an opening at Art System, the Ontario College of Art and Design student run gallery. Their show was about the Pope, and extended to Catholicism in general. As you can imagine, there were plenty of images of priests and popes sodomizing young boys. For one of the few times in my life, I was offended, but I knew where it was coming from (the rebellious young influenced by the scandals in the news) and having grown up in an open and tolerant society, felt no need to staple a placard to a stick and lead a protest, considering it was all just stupid and immature.

Now, one of the arguments with these Muhammed cartoons is that the editors of the newspaper should have known better. These Muslims are rioting and protesting because they feel insulted. I find it all kind of crazy that some people can get all upset over drawings, but as a visual artist I suppose I’m supposed to get all excited by the power of the medium and jump on the iconographic bandwagon, or get on the side of the cartoonists and talk about freedom of expression and denounce this iconoclasm. But I feel I have better things to do. The World has better things to do.

The editors of newspapers in North America would know better than to publish the images I saw from OCAD. They would be able to see how unfair they were. I’m not sure if that’s censorship, as much as it’s a respect for context. I can well imagine the images published elsewhere – in a show catalogue, in some article critiquing or analyzing the Church’s pederast scandals, in some art history book. The show didn’t warrant getting shut down by the cops, which still happens sometimes. There were no protests.

In this case, the cartoons violate Islam’s prohibition against images, and especially the prohibition in depicting the Prophet. Worse, the arguments made against the images by Muslim spokespeople are that they stereotype Muslims as terrorists. The image by Claus Seidel seems aimed to offend by merely representing Muhammed, whereas the image by Erik Sorensen seems to be as juvenile and ignorant as the shit I saw that night at OCAD.

Further, I have a recent example of being offended by an image. And the image in question is that of an ad featuring Ann Coulter and Robert Novak, featured prominently next to the cartoons here. This webpage thus manages to offend not only Muslims, but secular liberals. And, when I ask myself, ‘why do they keep protesting?’ I’m reminded by Coulter, who recently referred to them as ‘ragheads’.

The best explanation for what’s happened over the past week (advanced by Rick Salutin and reported by Simon Tudiver in Maisonneuve’s Mediascout) is that Muslims are pissed off for always being stereotyped and caricatured as terrorists, from these stupid cartoons to Hollywood’s blockbusters. Tudivier’s headline, by the way, ‘Protesting the cartoon professor’ refers to Peter March, who posted the images on the door of his office at Saint Mary’s University. Peter March was a professor of mine in 1998. After Tudivier raises the Salutin article, he adds, ‘Had Professor March offered up such an idea, MediaScout would have applauded his contribution. We should be looking to our academics to elevate the debate, not debase it by merely inciting an angry mob.’ What’s unclear in the reportage about Prof. March was that he teaches philosophy, and I think it’s fair to suggest that, instead of merely trying to incite an angry mob (as he waded into a protest on campus last week), he was trying to engage in Socratic debate.

Which should help remind us that all of these easy explanations cheapen us all, and I’m going to go back to wishing the world had something better to talk about (like poverty, aids, hunger, global warming, etc). The way the religious keep hijacking the agenda of human betterment seems to me the best advertisement for agnostic secularism, which is why I’m rather happy to live in a Canada, where that’s pretty much the way it is, although we end watching the world’s news for entertainment rather than dealing with our own social agenda. A week ago I wanted to send out the link to the Colbert Report video below, under the headline, ‘why I’m glad I’m not American’ but truth be told, inasmuch as it critiques the American economy, it’s true here as well. This type of thing warrants a lot more discussion than drawings, or ‘turncoat politicians’. – Timothy

Feb 13 1986

Thursday 13 February 1986

Made decision for Valentine’s party. We were going to have a movie, The Never Ending Story.1


1. This was a class descison, regarding a school Valentine’s day party

Feb 12 1986

Wednesday 12 February 1986

Went to R’s on bus. Sliding again. Triple fun. L1 was there. You know something, she is real dumb, dumb, dumb.

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1.L was a girl in my sister’s class who lived near the hill that we were sledding on. The ‘dumb dumb dumb’ comment referred to her statement about a plane – one was flying overhead and we could hear it, and I looked for it, and she said, ‘it’s in the sky!’ I was too young to know the expression, ‘no shit…’ and so was amazed by her general thick headedness. I look back now and think I was probably being unfair and too mean.

Feb 11 1986

Tuesday 11 February 1986

Went to R’s. Went sliding at big hill. We had double fun.

Feb 10 1986

Monday 10 February 1986

Got new book, Crock. We had TV diners. Note – taste terrible.

Feb 9 1986

Sunday 09 February 1986

Went to see Grandpere. Real sick1. Dad went up to see him again. Moved him to I.C.U

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1. My grandfather had fallen ill and had been taken by ambulance to the Kentville hospital. We went to see him there.

8 February 1986

Saturday 08 February 1986

D. D. came over.1 Went sliding.2 Jumping on pond.3 Had tiny play.4 She slept over.

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1. D.D. was my sister’s friend.
2. Or sledding … our house at the time was built at the top of a gentle slope. During the day we slid into the brambles of the bushes. Later that evening, my Dad told me he’d been watching us and was glad to see that I instinctually covered my head with my arms. Why this was worth telling me I’m not sure.
3. We had a pond in the backyard which was frozen over. There were other times when we played a pathetic version of hockey on it, and times when I fell through the ice.
4. I remember nothing about this experiment in juvenile theatre.

2 February 1986

Sunday 02 February 1986

Gunshow. Janitor was weird1. Played with Greg and Joey2. Went to store. Cashier said, ‘Cuse Me’.3 Went out for supper. Joey told funny stories.4

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1. I don’t recall exactly what was weird about the janitor, except that maybe he was annoyed to have all these people in the gym and kids like myself and the others playing Transformers on the steps when he needed to mop. But I’m bringing an adult understanding to the situation now. Or maybe he was retarded … that would have been something I’d have noted down, if it was a question of mental oddness. Take for example, note 3, where I write the cashier said ‘cuse me’.

2. Greg and Joey were two other kids who my sister and I would hang out with at gunshows. The odd thing about growing up this way was that we had friends in other parts of the province who we’d see every few months during these weekends. Greg was from Bible Hill, which is near Truro. Joey was from Syndey. Joey was the funniest person I knew, and he always taught me what the cool cartoons were that I should be watching. For example, because of him I started paying more attention to G.I. Joe and ninjas. I recall now that there was a ninja craze in the 1980s which I’d completely forgotten about.

3. We went to a corner store near the school where the gun show was being held. The situation was that the cashier was a little frazzled to have 5 near-ten-year-olds in her store, and as I recall the ‘cuse me’ came after one of us had paid or something, but she was all nervous thinking we were shop-lifting. In her accent, her ‘excuse me’ was heard as ‘kuse me’ (which is how I’d write it today). We all thought this was immensely funny and talked about it on the way back to the school, walking along the Dartmouth sidewalks bordered with snow.

4. As I said, Joey was the funniest kid I knew. On Sundays, after the show was over and the car was re-packed, we’d find some restaurant near the highway. I remember St. Huberts in this context, although I’m not sure if it was this particular weekend or another one. The kids would sit at their own table, where we would be entertained by Joey.

An open and reasonable society?

In the remarkable chapter Images of Immortality found within John Ralston Saul’s 1992 book Voltaire’s Bastards he says this while tracing the development of artist heroes:

When Romanticism began to flourish in the late 18th Century and the ego began to grow until it dominated public life, people abruptly found Raphael far too modest a fellow to have been the father of the perfect image. So they tended to fall into line with the description of the technical breakthroughs which had been provided by Vasari in his Lives of the Painters, written shortly after the actual events. In other words, they transferred the credit to an irresponsible, antisocial individualist, Michelangelo – a veritable caricature of the artist in the 20th Century. If we were ever able to create a reasonable, open society, Leonardo would no doubt cease appearing to us as an overwhelming, almost forbidding, giant and the credit would be switched to him.

Since that time, Marcel Duchamp (analytical, reasonable) has overtaken Picasso (irresponsible, antisocial individualist that he was) as the greatest artist of the 20th Century, and Leonardo has inspired one of the most read books in the history of the world. Although there is a ton of political evidence to the contrary, perhaps we are witnessing the transition toward a reasonable open society after all? Slowly the balance is shifting so that the President of the United States says ‘Americans are addicted to oil’ and these five words become a headline (as it did yesterday on the Drudgereport), representing as they do a significant shift toward reality from a man famously blinded by ideology.

This Leonardo angle comes by way of the Martin Kemp interview link herein, in which he also complains about art writing. After they talk about his Leonardo book, they get to talking about contemporary art, and Kemp says the following:

AFH: What do you think of all the writing generated by the art world?

MK: There is a lot of writing generated that is redundant. When I was a graduate student, I used to review exhibitions and I found that sitting on the train heading in to London to see the show, I would be writing the review before I arrived. At one point when I was working in Glasgow, I did a review for the Guardian of a nonexistent exhibition, which consisted of all the popular words and apparatus. It was a critical account that stood independently and I then dropped in a spurious artist in to the framework. You see a lot of writing like that allows the machinery to go on by just dropping a name into the mix along the way.

AFH: Do you think this kind of writing is destructive to art or artists?

MK: One thing that has happened very dramatically is that artists in the educational system have to produce more written work as part of their degrees. That has had an effect on artists and artistic production. I think many artists are automatically thinking about how the work will be written about when they are making it. It is not necessarily that they plan, but they can’t stop doing it. That hyper-sensitivity to the written word and what artists need to say about their own work, knowing they will be interviewed, often goes alongside a very self-consciousness about how work will look in reproduction, how it will be discussed, how artists need to justify their own work in the media. The issue is how to corral the artists and the critics into one arena that represents the work well.

This leads me to post the Jerry Saltz article from the end of December, wherein he talks about being a critic. Personally my own experience with writing criticism slanted me toward thinking it wasn’t worth it. Better to let people make up their own minds about things. There’s a difference between criticism and publicity afterall, and no artist wants real criticism. Such genuine critique comes from someone like John Carey, where in the last link this is said about the art world: “Approved high art, Carey insists again and again, is too often simply a marker of class, education and wealth. ‘It assures you of your specialness. It inscribes you in the book of life, from which the nameless masses are excluded.’ Yet ‘the characteristics of popular or mass art that seem most objectionable to its high-art critics — violence, sensationalism, escapism, an obsession with romantic love — minister to human needs inherited from our remote ancestors over hundreds of thousands of years.'” It seems to me that in an increasingly open and reasonable society, professional artists would be derided for their unreasonable snobbish attitudes. But that’s just me.

Finally, a link to a Daily Show clip on Crooks and Liars. They offer two video feeds, one Windows and the other a Quicktime, but the quicktime one doesn’t work as a type this (maybe later?). The clip goes over the James Frey debacle, pointing out that while political lying is pooh-poohed, Oprah’s humiliation is that she ‘forced Americans to read, when they really didn’t have to’.

– Timothy

1 February 1986

Saturday 01 February 1986

Went to Halifax!1 Why exclamation mark – fun. I went with $102. Got for birthday.2 Bought robot dog and Grimlock3. Went to Mother Tucker’s for supper.4

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1. As I mentioned the day before, we packed the car to go to the gunshow. As I said, my dad was a gunsmith … he sold guns out of the house. I later learned that the RCMP would tell him every once and a while they’d picked up some thugs who were planning to break in and steal them all, which must have been incredibly stressful. But part of the business involved travelling around the Maritimes to spend a weekend in some school’s gymnasium or a Legion hall, behind tables covered with old bed-spreads, with handguns laid out in rows and wired through the trigger guard. Fat men would examine them carefully.

I would wander around looking at the other displays, and usually found myself admiring the Nazi daggers, which prompted me to read some history. I learned of how the daggers were ceremonial rewards and based on an even older Teutonic design.That was actually one of the things I most appreciated about gunshows, was seeing these historical artifacts. The fact that perhaps they were being bought by skin-heads was over my head at the time. I always saw them as collectible for their part in making the story real. So there were Nazi armbands, the sawstika flag, all that shit. When, in 1999, I saw the movie American Beauty, I could understand the sinister aspect of the father owning a Nazi artifact, but I could also see how perhaps he was being misunderstood. The fact that he was a muderous homophobe was what made him evil, not that he owned this thing … what was it a plate or something?

The Halifax gun show was actually held in a school gym in Dartmouth. We always stayed at the motels in Bedford. Going to the malls, especially the Mic Mac Mall, was always the highlight of the trip.

2. I obviously hadn’t mastered the structure of a sentence yet. Yes, I recieved $102 for my birthday, which is $2 more than what I got this year.

3. The robot dog was the Tomy Spotbot. I found two today on eBay and almost completed the circle by bidding on the mint one. So that I could go back in time and tell myself that I’d be buying another one in exactly 20 years. I decided the circle shouldn’t be drawn. Nevertheless I set it to watch. The thing is, although I think this robot is around, somewhere in the basement, I’m not sure.And so, due to memory and a lifetime of consumerist training, I think it’s a reasonable expenditure to buy another one so that it can sit on my shelf. I have until Friday to convince myself either way, for or against buying it again. Probably against. No point really.

I thought the Grimlock was the robot arm I bought once on the Feb Gunshow trip with birthday money, but Google corrected my memory. It turns out Grimlock was the Tyranasaurus Rex Transformer.

4. On Saturday Nights during the gunshow weekend, my parents would get together with other sellers and we’d go out for a big supper. This night we went to Mother Tucker’s. During my time in Halifax going to university, I only went back there once, and that was 9 years later, for my 20th birthday, 31 Jan 1995. I was on a date with a girl whose name I no longer recall, who brought me there saying you eat free on your birthday. So that’s what I did. Then they sang Happy Birthday to me, which was embrassing. Then we went to see Before Sunrise at the Park Lane cinemas on Spring Garden Rd. While at Mother Tucker’s at age 20, I remembered being there before, but didn’t have this 1986 diary handy to give me the context of it being almost exactly nine years later. I remember it seeming to be a little run down by then, the decade having made it’s mark.